Saturday, February 08, 2020
A Saint Called 'Fortunate'
Today is the memorial of St. Josephine Bakhita. She was born in the Sudan in the late nineteenth century, but around the age of seven or so was kidnapped by slave traders. We do not know her name before that time because after several years of hard slavery, she herself could not remember it. The slave traders had given her the nickname, Bakhita, which means something like 'Lucky' or 'Fortunate'. She was bought by the Italian Vice Consul, who eventually had to flee the country due to a revolution, which brought her to Italy. They had Bakhita stay at the convent of the Canossian Sisters until they could make some arrangements, but when they tried to reclaim her, she refused to leave. The case went to court, but the court ruled for her: slavery was illegal in Italy, and although it had been common in the Sudan, strictly speaking it had been illegal there, too, so she was free. Bakhita chose to stay with the Canossians; she was baptized and took the name Josephine Margaret Fortunata, and was eventually assigned to the convent at Schio, just north of Vicenza. She was their cook and porter for several decades, where the convent was located. She died on February 8, 1947. The Italian locals took up her canonization cause almost immediately, and she was eventually canonized in 2000.
Friday, February 07, 2020
Ethics and Reasoning II (Mill)
As noted before, there are many different kinds of utilitarianism that we could have. All forms of utilitarianism are based on some version of the principle of utility, which holds that things are good insofar as they contribute to happiness and bad insofar as they detract from happiness. The principle of utility is often called the Greatest Happiness Principle, because of its slogan form: Greatest happiness for the greatest number. This is a handy formula, because it helps us think more clearly about the different kinds of utilitarianism you can have, by asking questions about the parts of this slogan:
Greatest happiness for the greatest number
(1) What is happiness?
Greatest happiness for the greatest number
(2) Greatest number of what?
Greatest happiness for the greatest number
(3) What has to be considered in determining greatness of happiness?
To which we can add a fourth question about the whole thing:
(4) To what do we apply this principle?
We are discussing classical utilitarianism, and all classical utilitarianisms, of whatever form, accept the same theory of happiness: Happiness is pleasure without pain (to the extent that is possible), and that's it. If you propose a different theory of happiness (say, that happiness is pleasure without pain in a sociable life with close friends), you get a different version of utilitarianism. We could also change utilitarianism by changing whose happiness we count. In practice, though, most of the reasons why people are attracted to utilitarianism are also reasons not to restrict whose happiness counts. After all, if happiness is what matters for ethics, why would some happiness not be counted? It's still happiness. So, overwhelmingly, the most common answer to (2) is that we are counting anything and everything that can feel happiness. So we can build a table to give our results so far.
If we think about Bentham, when Bentham is determining greatness of happiness, he considers only quantitative measures; and he applies these to decisions or actions, whether as an individual or as a matter of law, although in fact he never lumps these together but always treats calculations about decisions for oneself as different things from calculations about decisions for society. So we can put him on the table:
Not all classical utilitarians give the same answers as Bentham for (3) and (4), however. This brings us to John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who gives different answers for both. And to understand how Mill diverges from Bentham, and more importantly, why, we need to know something about Mill's life as a utilitarian. Unlike most classical utilitarians, Mill was raised as a classical utilitarian, indeed as Benthamite, and what he learned both made him appreciate Bentham (who remains throughout his life as one of his major influences) and think that Bentham's approach was inadequate.
James Mill, John Stuart Mill's father, while not commonly read today, was an important utilitarian and contemporary of Bentham. Like other utilitarians of a Benthamite stripe, he was actively interested in reform, and that included reform of education; he attempted to work out a course of education for the young John. John Stuart Mill began studying Ancient Greek and arithmetic at the age of three, and as he grew older, he began, on his own, to read a large amount of history. At the age of eight, he began Latin, and shortly afterward geometry and algebra and then a bit later differential calculus, although his education in the last was at the time inadequate for any serious understanding. He developed a taste for reading about the sciences (although he would later regret that his interest in the sciences at this age only went so far as reading about experiments and not actually doing them). At the age of twelve, his father started him on logic. His father also paid a great deal of attention to elocution -- important for oratory, which James Mill seems to have thought particularly important due to its political relevance -- but John Stuart Mill makes a comment on this in his Autobiography I think can be taken to sum up much of how James Mill approached teaching (Chapter 1): "A defect running through his otherwise admirable modes of instruction, as it did through all his modes of thought, was that of trusting too much to the intelligibleness of the abstract, when not embodied in the concrete." At the age of thirteen, John Stuart Mill began studying economics. This would serve him well when he was sent to France at the age of fourteen, at which time he interacted with a number of important economists of the day. After he returned from France, he would study Roman law under John Austin, the noted jurist. And at the same time, Mill, who had grown up in a Benthamite household, actually read Bentham. And it was a landmark in his life. As he would put it (Autobiography, Chapter 3):
Mill would himself become very active in utilitarianism understood not merely as a philosophy but as a movement of practical reform. In this work of active reform, he thought, he could find true happiness. But in 1826, all of this shifted. He was feeling a bit down, and while feeling this way, asked himself whether he would actually be happy if all of his reforming activities succeeded, and realized that he would not be. This was devastating. He had been so enthusiastic for reform because the ends had seemed so worthwhile, as contributing something to enduring happiness, and coming to the realization that he could no longer think of the ends of his activism as sources of happiness, his motivation to pursue them collapsed. It's not that he had a crisis of faith in the principle of utility; he still recognized the things for which he was working as good, in the abstract. What he could not do is feel that there was any point in working toward them. The depression seemed to grow worse with time, probably in part because Mill was so isolated in his melancholy, since he did not think he could make his father or any of his friends understand his problem. The problem seemed clear to Mill himself, however: his education, thorough as it seemed, had failed him because nothing in it had cultivated in him feelings that were likely to endure in the face of all the logic and analysis with which his education had been abundantly supplied. Utilitarianism was right -- but his utilitarian education had eaten away at what made it practically possible to be a utilitarian.
Mill managed to force himself to keep up his utilitarian activities, partly by deliberately trying not to think about happiness at all. But he also began to consider this problem of how one cultivates feelings. He tried a number of things, and in 1828 began reading the poetry of William Wordsworth. It would be another landmark in his life, as well as one in the history of utilitarianism, because in reading Wordsworth he found a glimmer of something that would provide a solution.
William Wordsworth was a Romantic poet; feelings and passions were important in Romanticism, and Romantics like Wordsworth gave an extraordinary amount of thought to the influence of feelings on science, religion, politics, and, in short, all the aspects of human life. And for Wordsworth, poetry did not exist simply to express the poet's feelings, but to communicate to others those feelings that go with what might be called the 'fit' between the mind and world, which plays a significant role in our motivations. If Mill's reaction is any test, Wordsworth was successful in this. As Mill says in his Autobiography (Chapter 5):
To use one of his examples, it became clear to him that the feeling of the beauty of the clouds at sunset is something that can go with knowing that clouds are masses of water vapor acting according to physical laws. This would lead to a reconsideration of much of his view of the world, and we find the impact of this in his 1838 essay, "Bentham", which has high praise for aspects of Bentham's utilitarianism, but also some rather severe criticism. Mill's criticism covers a number of features of Bentham's philosophy, but the part that is of particular value for our purposes is a criticism that he thinks applies not merely to Bentham but also to many others:
Mill uses the example of the Roman hero Brutus. Brutus's sons were implicated in a conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Republic and, as it happens, Brutus was the judge when their case came up. He heard it, and as the evidence of their guilt was quite clear, he sentenced them to death. The action was right, if we consider just how much happiness depended on the freedom of the Roman citizens; it was even admirable, in that it showed a patriotism and devotion to the public good on a heroic scale. But nobody can look at such an action and find it sympathetic or loveable. It seems inhuman for a father to condemn his sons to death. It was in some way the right thing to do, but also in some way a bad thing to do. Suppose, Mill goes on, the younger brother had been involved in the conspiracy solely out of affection for the older brother. What he did was neither right nor admirable, but nonetheless loveable; it is something with which one could sympathize. It was wrong, but it was not wholly bad.
One of the major points made in the essay on Bentham is that human beings are not indivisible agents with singular motivations. We have a rich, complex, multifaceted moral psychology. And human happiness depends on fulfilling this complex human nature. Internal consequences are at least as important as external consequences. While there are differing views on the subject, I think this is the major concern which will drive Mill's deviations from Bentham. Suppose you could get immense pleasure from eating a special kind of chocolate cake. Obviously, this can contribute a great deal to your happiness, understood as pleasure without pain. But if you had this cake, would it actually suffice to make you happy? Here's a reason to think it couldn't: you aren't a cake-eating machine. Eating cake is nice, but you have a much wider range of needs than eating cake can actually satisfy. Make the pleasure of eating the cake ever so great, it will not satisfy your sense of honor, it will not satisfy your need for friends, it will not satisfy your love of action and your desire to overcome challenges, it will not satisfy your love of beauty. It's just cake. Very good cake, to be sure, but just cake. Conversation with friends, on the other hand, may not give you pleasures as vast as our hypothetical chocolate cake, but it will no doubt give you pleasure that contributes to more of who you are as a human being.
Something like this line of thought, at least, gets us to where we find Mill in his most famous and influential discussion, Utilitarianism, first published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and then published as a book in 1863. Quantity of pleasure is not enough. One must also consider quality of pleasure. As he says in what is perhaps his most famous comment (Chapter 2):
When we are comparing two pleasures in equal quantity, it can nonetheless happen that all or almost all who can appreciate both pleasures will nonetheless still treat one of them as more desirable or valuable and, indeed, as so much more valuable that, however much you increased the quantity of the other pleasure, they still would not give up this pleasure. In that case, the preferred pleasure is superior in quality; it is the higher pleasure. It might be lower than some other pleasure, but it is the more valuable in this comparison. However much pleasure a pig may have, it is a pig's pleasure; a human being has a richer set of needs and desires than a pig could ever have, and the pleasures of a pig will not do a good job satisfying them. Socrates has cultivated himself so that he is capable of a richer experience of life than any fool; no matter how happy the fool is, a fool's happiness will not be rich enough to satisfy a Socrates.
Benthamites at the time, and more than a few people since, thought this a weird hybridization of Bentham's pure theory with Romanticism. And many thought that it simply gives away the store -- many people think it takes away the attraction of being a utilitarian. But from what we have seen, of course, Mill likely thinks his own experience proves that you need something like this if you take seriously the idea that the moral life is not just an abstract scheme but something to be lived by actual human beings.
There are some obscurities in how we are supposed to unite our measurements of quantity with our judgments of quality. But there is no question that it is a significant change. Once we add quality to the mix, neither the felicific calculus nor the repudiation of asceticism can work the way Bentham thinks they should. Simply calculating with quantities of pleasures and pains will now only get you the right answer if the pleasures and pains do not differ much in terms of quality. In addition, the introduction of quality means that it might now be reasonable for us deliberately to take less pleasure in order to get better pleasure. It shifts the entire approach and gives us a new kind of utilitarianism:
Mill will also end up differing with Bentham on the application of the principle of utility, largely, I think, because introducing quality into the assessment requires us to use the principle more flexibly than Bentham would have countenanced. But this is a complicated enough matter that it will need its own future post.
Greatest happiness for the greatest number
(1) What is happiness?
Greatest happiness for the greatest number
(2) Greatest number of what?
Greatest happiness for the greatest number
(3) What has to be considered in determining greatness of happiness?
To which we can add a fourth question about the whole thing:
(4) To what do we apply this principle?
We are discussing classical utilitarianism, and all classical utilitarianisms, of whatever form, accept the same theory of happiness: Happiness is pleasure without pain (to the extent that is possible), and that's it. If you propose a different theory of happiness (say, that happiness is pleasure without pain in a sociable life with close friends), you get a different version of utilitarianism. We could also change utilitarianism by changing whose happiness we count. In practice, though, most of the reasons why people are attracted to utilitarianism are also reasons not to restrict whose happiness counts. After all, if happiness is what matters for ethics, why would some happiness not be counted? It's still happiness. So, overwhelmingly, the most common answer to (2) is that we are counting anything and everything that can feel happiness. So we can build a table to give our results so far.
| (1) happiness | (2) for the greatest number of | (3) by looking at | (4) applying this to | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All classical utilitarians, by definition | pleasure without pain | |||
| Virtually all classical utilitarians, in practice | pleasure without pain | anything that can experience happiness |
If we think about Bentham, when Bentham is determining greatness of happiness, he considers only quantitative measures; and he applies these to decisions or actions, whether as an individual or as a matter of law, although in fact he never lumps these together but always treats calculations about decisions for oneself as different things from calculations about decisions for society. So we can put him on the table:
| (1) happiness | (2) for the greatest number of | (3) by looking at | (4) applying this to | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All classical utilitarians, by definition | pleasure without pain | |||
| Virtually all classical utilitarians, in practice | pleasure without pain | anything that can experience happiness | ||
| Bentham | pleasure without pain | anything that can experience happiness | quantity (intensity, duration, etc.) | (1) decisions or actions for oneself; (2) laws |
Not all classical utilitarians give the same answers as Bentham for (3) and (4), however. This brings us to John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who gives different answers for both. And to understand how Mill diverges from Bentham, and more importantly, why, we need to know something about Mill's life as a utilitarian. Unlike most classical utilitarians, Mill was raised as a classical utilitarian, indeed as Benthamite, and what he learned both made him appreciate Bentham (who remains throughout his life as one of his major influences) and think that Bentham's approach was inadequate.
Public Domain, Link
James Mill, John Stuart Mill's father, while not commonly read today, was an important utilitarian and contemporary of Bentham. Like other utilitarians of a Benthamite stripe, he was actively interested in reform, and that included reform of education; he attempted to work out a course of education for the young John. John Stuart Mill began studying Ancient Greek and arithmetic at the age of three, and as he grew older, he began, on his own, to read a large amount of history. At the age of eight, he began Latin, and shortly afterward geometry and algebra and then a bit later differential calculus, although his education in the last was at the time inadequate for any serious understanding. He developed a taste for reading about the sciences (although he would later regret that his interest in the sciences at this age only went so far as reading about experiments and not actually doing them). At the age of twelve, his father started him on logic. His father also paid a great deal of attention to elocution -- important for oratory, which James Mill seems to have thought particularly important due to its political relevance -- but John Stuart Mill makes a comment on this in his Autobiography I think can be taken to sum up much of how James Mill approached teaching (Chapter 1): "A defect running through his otherwise admirable modes of instruction, as it did through all his modes of thought, was that of trusting too much to the intelligibleness of the abstract, when not embodied in the concrete." At the age of thirteen, John Stuart Mill began studying economics. This would serve him well when he was sent to France at the age of fourteen, at which time he interacted with a number of important economists of the day. After he returned from France, he would study Roman law under John Austin, the noted jurist. And at the same time, Mill, who had grown up in a Benthamite household, actually read Bentham. And it was a landmark in his life. As he would put it (Autobiography, Chapter 3):
My previous education had been, in a certain sense, already a course of Benthamism. The Benthamic standard of "the greatest happiness" was that which I had always been taught to apply; I was even familiar with an abstract discussion of it, forming an episode in an unpublished dialogue on Government, written by my father on the Platonic model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me with all the force of novelty. What thus impressed me was the chapter in which Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning in morals and legislation, deduced from phrases like "law of nature," "right reason," "the moral sense," "natural rectitude," and the like, and characterized them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its sentiments upon others under cover of sounding expressions which convey no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as its own reason. It had not struck me before, that Bentham's principle put an end to all this. The feeling rushed upon me, that all previous moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement of a new era in thought. This impression was strengthened by the manner in which Bentham put into scientific form the application of the happiness principle to the morality of actions, by analysing the various classes and orders of their consequences....The "principle of utility," understood as Bentham understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through these three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my conceptions of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life. And I had a grand conception laid before me of changes to be effected in the condition of mankind through that doctrine.
Mill would himself become very active in utilitarianism understood not merely as a philosophy but as a movement of practical reform. In this work of active reform, he thought, he could find true happiness. But in 1826, all of this shifted. He was feeling a bit down, and while feeling this way, asked himself whether he would actually be happy if all of his reforming activities succeeded, and realized that he would not be. This was devastating. He had been so enthusiastic for reform because the ends had seemed so worthwhile, as contributing something to enduring happiness, and coming to the realization that he could no longer think of the ends of his activism as sources of happiness, his motivation to pursue them collapsed. It's not that he had a crisis of faith in the principle of utility; he still recognized the things for which he was working as good, in the abstract. What he could not do is feel that there was any point in working toward them. The depression seemed to grow worse with time, probably in part because Mill was so isolated in his melancholy, since he did not think he could make his father or any of his friends understand his problem. The problem seemed clear to Mill himself, however: his education, thorough as it seemed, had failed him because nothing in it had cultivated in him feelings that were likely to endure in the face of all the logic and analysis with which his education had been abundantly supplied. Utilitarianism was right -- but his utilitarian education had eaten away at what made it practically possible to be a utilitarian.
Mill managed to force himself to keep up his utilitarian activities, partly by deliberately trying not to think about happiness at all. But he also began to consider this problem of how one cultivates feelings. He tried a number of things, and in 1828 began reading the poetry of William Wordsworth. It would be another landmark in his life, as well as one in the history of utilitarianism, because in reading Wordsworth he found a glimmer of something that would provide a solution.
William Wordsworth was a Romantic poet; feelings and passions were important in Romanticism, and Romantics like Wordsworth gave an extraordinary amount of thought to the influence of feelings on science, religion, politics, and, in short, all the aspects of human life. And for Wordsworth, poetry did not exist simply to express the poet's feelings, but to communicate to others those feelings that go with what might be called the 'fit' between the mind and world, which plays a significant role in our motivations. If Mill's reaction is any test, Wordsworth was successful in this. As Mill says in his Autobiography (Chapter 5):
What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence....I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis.
To use one of his examples, it became clear to him that the feeling of the beauty of the clouds at sunset is something that can go with knowing that clouds are masses of water vapor acting according to physical laws. This would lead to a reconsideration of much of his view of the world, and we find the impact of this in his 1838 essay, "Bentham", which has high praise for aspects of Bentham's utilitarianism, but also some rather severe criticism. Mill's criticism covers a number of features of Bentham's philosophy, but the part that is of particular value for our purposes is a criticism that he thinks applies not merely to Bentham but also to many others:
This error, or rather one-sidedness, belongs to him not as a utilitarian, but as a moralist by profession, and in common with almost all professed moralists, whether religious or philosophical: it is that of treating the moral view of actions and characters, which is unquestionably the first and most important mode of looking at them, as if it were the sole one: whereas it is only one of three, by all of which our sentiments towards the human being may be, ought to be, and without entirely crushing our own nature cannot but be, materially influenced. Every human action has three aspects: its moral aspect, or that of its right and wrong; its æsthetic aspect, or that of its beauty; its sympathetic aspect, or that of its loveableness. The first addresses itself to our reason and conscience; the second to our imagination; the third to our human fellow-feeling. According to the first, we approve or disapprove; according to the second, we admire or despise; according to the third, we love, pity, or dislike.
Mill uses the example of the Roman hero Brutus. Brutus's sons were implicated in a conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Republic and, as it happens, Brutus was the judge when their case came up. He heard it, and as the evidence of their guilt was quite clear, he sentenced them to death. The action was right, if we consider just how much happiness depended on the freedom of the Roman citizens; it was even admirable, in that it showed a patriotism and devotion to the public good on a heroic scale. But nobody can look at such an action and find it sympathetic or loveable. It seems inhuman for a father to condemn his sons to death. It was in some way the right thing to do, but also in some way a bad thing to do. Suppose, Mill goes on, the younger brother had been involved in the conspiracy solely out of affection for the older brother. What he did was neither right nor admirable, but nonetheless loveable; it is something with which one could sympathize. It was wrong, but it was not wholly bad.
One of the major points made in the essay on Bentham is that human beings are not indivisible agents with singular motivations. We have a rich, complex, multifaceted moral psychology. And human happiness depends on fulfilling this complex human nature. Internal consequences are at least as important as external consequences. While there are differing views on the subject, I think this is the major concern which will drive Mill's deviations from Bentham. Suppose you could get immense pleasure from eating a special kind of chocolate cake. Obviously, this can contribute a great deal to your happiness, understood as pleasure without pain. But if you had this cake, would it actually suffice to make you happy? Here's a reason to think it couldn't: you aren't a cake-eating machine. Eating cake is nice, but you have a much wider range of needs than eating cake can actually satisfy. Make the pleasure of eating the cake ever so great, it will not satisfy your sense of honor, it will not satisfy your need for friends, it will not satisfy your love of action and your desire to overcome challenges, it will not satisfy your love of beauty. It's just cake. Very good cake, to be sure, but just cake. Conversation with friends, on the other hand, may not give you pleasures as vast as our hypothetical chocolate cake, but it will no doubt give you pleasure that contributes to more of who you are as a human being.
Something like this line of thought, at least, gets us to where we find Mill in his most famous and influential discussion, Utilitarianism, first published in Fraser's Magazine in 1861 and then published as a book in 1863. Quantity of pleasure is not enough. One must also consider quality of pleasure. As he says in what is perhaps his most famous comment (Chapter 2):
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, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
When we are comparing two pleasures in equal quantity, it can nonetheless happen that all or almost all who can appreciate both pleasures will nonetheless still treat one of them as more desirable or valuable and, indeed, as so much more valuable that, however much you increased the quantity of the other pleasure, they still would not give up this pleasure. In that case, the preferred pleasure is superior in quality; it is the higher pleasure. It might be lower than some other pleasure, but it is the more valuable in this comparison. However much pleasure a pig may have, it is a pig's pleasure; a human being has a richer set of needs and desires than a pig could ever have, and the pleasures of a pig will not do a good job satisfying them. Socrates has cultivated himself so that he is capable of a richer experience of life than any fool; no matter how happy the fool is, a fool's happiness will not be rich enough to satisfy a Socrates.
Benthamites at the time, and more than a few people since, thought this a weird hybridization of Bentham's pure theory with Romanticism. And many thought that it simply gives away the store -- many people think it takes away the attraction of being a utilitarian. But from what we have seen, of course, Mill likely thinks his own experience proves that you need something like this if you take seriously the idea that the moral life is not just an abstract scheme but something to be lived by actual human beings.
There are some obscurities in how we are supposed to unite our measurements of quantity with our judgments of quality. But there is no question that it is a significant change. Once we add quality to the mix, neither the felicific calculus nor the repudiation of asceticism can work the way Bentham thinks they should. Simply calculating with quantities of pleasures and pains will now only get you the right answer if the pleasures and pains do not differ much in terms of quality. In addition, the introduction of quality means that it might now be reasonable for us deliberately to take less pleasure in order to get better pleasure. It shifts the entire approach and gives us a new kind of utilitarianism:
| (1) happiness | (2) for the greatest number of | (3) by looking at | (4) applying this to | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All classical utilitarians, by definition | pleasure without pain | |||
| Virtually all classical utilitarians, in practice | pleasure without pain | anything that can experience happiness | ||
| Bentham | pleasure without pain | anything that can experience happiness | quantity | (1) decisions or actions for oneself; (2) laws |
| Mill | pleasure without pain | anything that can experience happiness | quantity and quality |
Mill will also end up differing with Bentham on the application of the principle of utility, largely, I think, because introducing quality into the assessment requires us to use the principle more flexibly than Bentham would have countenanced. But this is a complicated enough matter that it will need its own future post.
Thursday, February 06, 2020
The Button
One of my students recently pointed out to me this jokey version of the ethical scenario that is depicted in Richard Matheson's "Button, Button", and that is found in a particularly famous form in the radio episode, "The Chinaman Button" (which I've talked about before).
Sacred to All the Young and the Unborn
In February
by Alice Meynell
Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn,
Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers,
And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers.
A poet's face asleep is this grey morn.
Now in the midst of the old world forlorn
A mystic child is set in these still hours.
I keep this time, even before the flowers,
Sacred to all the young and the unborn;
To all the miles and miles of unsprung wheat,
And to the Spring waiting beyond the portal,
And to the future of my own young art,
And, among all these things, to you, my sweet,
My friend, to your calm face and the immortal
Child tarrying all your life-time in your heart.
Wednesday, February 05, 2020
Three Poem Drafts
Divine Law
Who makes a law is guiding to an end,
to set to act an order and a way,
as general will seek a winning day,
as statesman rule for peace of friend to friend,
but He who is on high does all his deeds
for Him Himself, their end, the God who draws
existence, life, and love and thus all laws,
for glory never touched by wants or needs,
as when to Moses gave He laws on stone,
a providence to be expressed by act
and life that preached that He is God alone.
Thus laws that God has given from His throne
turn human heart to God and form as fact
a pattern making us His very own.
Harmonia
In governance alone opposing things
in harmony and unity are bound.
All regulation 'round an end must ring;
where opposites unite a mind is found.
This world a cosmos makes, and formed as one
draws many different things into a whole;
opposing things do not to chaos run
but act, each in its place, as if by goal.
A plan by human thought takes pro and con
and gives to each its weight; when interests war
it finds a place for each and guides them home:
just so, beyond all chance an order dawns
by providential mind that holds in store
the aims from which the world does never roam.
Easy
Baby, lift your wings if you want to fly,
no holding back, you can travel the sky;
get out and try what you've wanted to try;
I'll just make it easy.
If you want to climb, and no matter how high,
if you want to dive, I won't even ask why,
just say the word, there's no need to be shy;
I will make it easy.
Sometimes you miss the chance
to take part in the dance;
sometimes your dream
is not what it seemed;
you may try to smile
and be a good sport,
but don't hide your light
or sell yourself short;
sometimes all you need
is some loving support.
Baby, life goes fast and one day we'll die;
but this is your fate, and I tell you no lie:
you'll shine like a star 'cause I'll be your guy,
and I will make it easy.
Who makes a law is guiding to an end,
to set to act an order and a way,
as general will seek a winning day,
as statesman rule for peace of friend to friend,
but He who is on high does all his deeds
for Him Himself, their end, the God who draws
existence, life, and love and thus all laws,
for glory never touched by wants or needs,
as when to Moses gave He laws on stone,
a providence to be expressed by act
and life that preached that He is God alone.
Thus laws that God has given from His throne
turn human heart to God and form as fact
a pattern making us His very own.
Harmonia
In governance alone opposing things
in harmony and unity are bound.
All regulation 'round an end must ring;
where opposites unite a mind is found.
This world a cosmos makes, and formed as one
draws many different things into a whole;
opposing things do not to chaos run
but act, each in its place, as if by goal.
A plan by human thought takes pro and con
and gives to each its weight; when interests war
it finds a place for each and guides them home:
just so, beyond all chance an order dawns
by providential mind that holds in store
the aims from which the world does never roam.
Easy
Baby, lift your wings if you want to fly,
no holding back, you can travel the sky;
get out and try what you've wanted to try;
I'll just make it easy.
If you want to climb, and no matter how high,
if you want to dive, I won't even ask why,
just say the word, there's no need to be shy;
I will make it easy.
Sometimes you miss the chance
to take part in the dance;
sometimes your dream
is not what it seemed;
you may try to smile
and be a good sport,
but don't hide your light
or sell yourself short;
sometimes all you need
is some loving support.
Baby, life goes fast and one day we'll die;
but this is your fate, and I tell you no lie:
you'll shine like a star 'cause I'll be your guy,
and I will make it easy.
Tuesday, February 04, 2020
George Steiner (1929-2020)
George Steiner died on February 3 at the age of 90. Born in 1929 in Paris to Viennese Jews who had fled to France to escape antisemitism; they fled to New York in 1940, and with good timing, because the Nazis invaded France shortly after they left. After a number of academic positions, he eventually began to teach at the University of Geneva, where he stayed until retirement. Most of his writing is in comparative literature, cultural criticism, or philosophy of literature. From his work, Real Presences (The University of Chicago Press [Chicago: 1989] p. 145):
No serious writer, composer, painter has ever doubted, even in moments of strategic aestheticism, that his work bears on good and evil, on the enhancement or diminution of the sum of humanity in man and the city. To imagine originally, to shape into significant expression, is to test in depth those potentialities of understanding and of conduct ("thrones, dominions, powers" as the rhetoric and architecture of the baroque have it) which are the life-substance of the ethical. A message is being sent; to a purpose. The style, the explicit figurations of that message may be perverse, they may intend the subjugation, even the ruin of the recipient. They may claim for themselves, as in Sade, as in the black paintings of Goya, as in the death-dance of Artaud, the sombre licence of the suicidal. But their pertinence to questions and consequences of an ethical order is the more palpable. Only trash, only kitsch and artefacts, texts, music, which are produced solely for momentary or propagandistic ends do, indeed transcend (transgress) morality. Theirs is the pornography of insignificance.
Monday, February 03, 2020
Evening Note for Monday, February 3
Thought for the Evening: The Good Place
The Good Place was a comedy TV show produced by Michael Shur, and just had its finale recently. It was a philosophy teacher's dream, since the show was heavily laced with philosophical ethics -- real philosophical ethics, which is sometimes more than you get when a show does 'philosophy'. It had a hilarious episode on trolley problems (Season 2, Episode 6), for instance, repeated references throughout to Scanlon's book, What We Owe to Each Other, and lots of Kant and Aristotle jokes. The show had philosophers as consultants, Patrician Hieronymi (of UCLA) and Todd May (of Clemson), both of whom have cameos in the finale. (When I was watching the scene with Hieronymi, I thought, "I've seen that actress somewhere; what is she in?")
The basic conceit with which we start is that Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) finds herself in the Good Place, in the neighborhood designed by the architect Michael (Ted Danson) and run by the artificial intelligence Janet (D'Arcy Carden) and realizes immediately that they have made a mistake; she gets help from Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil), and Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto) and zaniness ensues. But the situation shifts dramatically many times during the whole series; one of the notable features of the show, and one that gives it a feeling of substantiveness other shows often lack, is that it will take an idea that most series would have spent at least several episodes on and burn through it in a single episode, perhaps even less. There is a lot that happens in the relatively short episodes of this relatively short series. The comedy is good, the casting and acting are great. It's good television.
Occasionally it borders on profound. One that's always stuck with me is Michael's musing on frozen yogurt in Season 1 that human beings will take something good and make it a little bit worse so we can have more of it, which I think manages to be funny, true, and illuminating of a lot of human life. It is fairly insightful about the difference between people who recognize their failings and people who don't. It almost, almost reaches a truth that would have been worth a television show: Human beings achieve their most important things cooperatively -- build societies, fly to the moon, change the world, what have you -- so why do we keep assuming that we can live the moral life alone? It never quite pulls this together, usually opting instead for a generic 'friends are what it's all about' theme, although sometimes it comes very close, as with the title of one its episodes, "Help is Other People", or the occasional hint that what we really owe to each other is a little bit of reasonable support.
Ultimately, however, I think the show flounders a bit, considered in terms of the ethics with which it interacts. The reason is not, as one review would have it, a failure to grapple with capitalism. Rather, it's that The Good Place had no real conception of goodness. I think this is a rather common problem, actually; we want to be good people living the good life, but this requires more attention to what goodness actually is than most people ever give it. And the show never really goes beyond this. Most of what counts as good throughout the series is trivial; indeed, if it weren't for a real recognition of friendship as a major good of human life, it would all be trivial. Despite the excellent joke of the motto of the neighborhood in Season 1 being the vague and lackluster "Everything is fine", it never actually gets beyond "Everything is fine." The committee running the Good Place, we eventually find, is a bunch of very ineffective activists, and indeed, the best the series manages in showing a 'good person' is to show a generic activist. I've met a lot of activists in my life; activists are not any more likely to be good people than anyone else, and activism itself is very much not the good life, however necessary it might be as a means to an end occasionally. But this conflation of means and ends is not surprising, following as it does from the fact that the show treats being good as nothing more substantive than being likable, nonthreatening, and willing to try to be good; the good life is a hedonic life of getting along hedonically and usefully helping each other out in ways that make us progress by becoming better able to get along and help each other out. It is a world in which goodness has no sublimity, no infinity, no authority, and no unbearable radiance. It's just fine.
This is seen very clear as we approach the end, I think. We meet Hypatia of Alexandria (Lisa Kudrow) -- actually just writing that Hypatia of Alexandria was played by Lisa Kudrow tells you most of the joke. The show does not do justice to Hypatia; we don't know Hypatia's particular ethical views, but we know generically what they would have been like, because she was a well-respected Neoplatonist, and we know the kinds of things that Neoplatonists would have taught: the superiority of the mental over the physical, the superiority of the intellect over the senses, the absolute superiority of the Good over goods. But the show has no space for such a view; mental and physical pleasures are treated as on a level, sensible goods are all that are shown, and all good is finite. The show is intelligently written enough that it shows a recognition that a hedonic life of getting along and helping each other out is a life that will certainly run out of good. This is not a minor recognition. But there is no other kind of good that it recognizes. All good being finite, eventually you'll be done with it. And in a world with no infinite good, the closest you can come to recognize anything beyond this running-down kind of life is just to recognize that at some point the final good you can have is just to bring it all to an end. The show buys into the canard that mortality gives life meaning; it also fails to be very convincing about it, because it can't help but repeatedly show, by the very nature of its premise and its structure, that our mortality is only given meaning by our life. But even having supposed that life goes on after death, the only life it shows is one with good that runs out.
Various Links of Interest
* Maureen Johnson, Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village
* Kyle Williams, Happiness, Virtue, and the Bastard Science
* Daniel Burns, The Classical Alternative to Liberal Theory, at "Public Discourse"
* Alex Pruss has video versions of his 2019 Wilde Lectures in Natural Theology
* Liz Tracey looks at Avicenna's contribution to medicine
* Jon Baskin, On the Hatred of Literature, and Friends Like These
* Valerie Stivers, Cooking with Zora Neale Hurston
* Nina Papathanasopoulou, Black Classicisms in the Visual Arts
* Alice Maz, Playing to Win, is a very interesting discussion of the economies of gameworlds.
* Frank Furedi, Butchers vs. Academics, looks at one aspect of the class issues involved in Brexit debates.
* Clare Carlisle, The philosophy of George Eliot. Carlisle primarily focuses on the Spinozistic side, but there are other sides to George Eliot's philosophical engagements, too, including Feuerbach and Comte and Lewes himself.
* Timothy B. Noone, Augustine on Words, Signs, Thoughts, and Things in De Magistro
* Scott Meikle, The Switch from Agency to Causation in Marx
* Kathleen Stock, Sticks, stones, and lawsuits and Helen Joyce, Speaking up for female eunuchs, on the current disputes over transgender politics in British feminism.
* Gillian Dooley on Iris Murdoch's philosophy of fiction
Currently Reading
Amos Tutuola, The Palm Wine Drinkard
Christopher Tolkien, ed., Sauron Defeated
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Good Place was a comedy TV show produced by Michael Shur, and just had its finale recently. It was a philosophy teacher's dream, since the show was heavily laced with philosophical ethics -- real philosophical ethics, which is sometimes more than you get when a show does 'philosophy'. It had a hilarious episode on trolley problems (Season 2, Episode 6), for instance, repeated references throughout to Scanlon's book, What We Owe to Each Other, and lots of Kant and Aristotle jokes. The show had philosophers as consultants, Patrician Hieronymi (of UCLA) and Todd May (of Clemson), both of whom have cameos in the finale. (When I was watching the scene with Hieronymi, I thought, "I've seen that actress somewhere; what is she in?")
The basic conceit with which we start is that Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) finds herself in the Good Place, in the neighborhood designed by the architect Michael (Ted Danson) and run by the artificial intelligence Janet (D'Arcy Carden) and realizes immediately that they have made a mistake; she gets help from Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), Tahani Al-Jamil (Jameela Jamil), and Jason Mendoza (Manny Jacinto) and zaniness ensues. But the situation shifts dramatically many times during the whole series; one of the notable features of the show, and one that gives it a feeling of substantiveness other shows often lack, is that it will take an idea that most series would have spent at least several episodes on and burn through it in a single episode, perhaps even less. There is a lot that happens in the relatively short episodes of this relatively short series. The comedy is good, the casting and acting are great. It's good television.
Occasionally it borders on profound. One that's always stuck with me is Michael's musing on frozen yogurt in Season 1 that human beings will take something good and make it a little bit worse so we can have more of it, which I think manages to be funny, true, and illuminating of a lot of human life. It is fairly insightful about the difference between people who recognize their failings and people who don't. It almost, almost reaches a truth that would have been worth a television show: Human beings achieve their most important things cooperatively -- build societies, fly to the moon, change the world, what have you -- so why do we keep assuming that we can live the moral life alone? It never quite pulls this together, usually opting instead for a generic 'friends are what it's all about' theme, although sometimes it comes very close, as with the title of one its episodes, "Help is Other People", or the occasional hint that what we really owe to each other is a little bit of reasonable support.
Ultimately, however, I think the show flounders a bit, considered in terms of the ethics with which it interacts. The reason is not, as one review would have it, a failure to grapple with capitalism. Rather, it's that The Good Place had no real conception of goodness. I think this is a rather common problem, actually; we want to be good people living the good life, but this requires more attention to what goodness actually is than most people ever give it. And the show never really goes beyond this. Most of what counts as good throughout the series is trivial; indeed, if it weren't for a real recognition of friendship as a major good of human life, it would all be trivial. Despite the excellent joke of the motto of the neighborhood in Season 1 being the vague and lackluster "Everything is fine", it never actually gets beyond "Everything is fine." The committee running the Good Place, we eventually find, is a bunch of very ineffective activists, and indeed, the best the series manages in showing a 'good person' is to show a generic activist. I've met a lot of activists in my life; activists are not any more likely to be good people than anyone else, and activism itself is very much not the good life, however necessary it might be as a means to an end occasionally. But this conflation of means and ends is not surprising, following as it does from the fact that the show treats being good as nothing more substantive than being likable, nonthreatening, and willing to try to be good; the good life is a hedonic life of getting along hedonically and usefully helping each other out in ways that make us progress by becoming better able to get along and help each other out. It is a world in which goodness has no sublimity, no infinity, no authority, and no unbearable radiance. It's just fine.
This is seen very clear as we approach the end, I think. We meet Hypatia of Alexandria (Lisa Kudrow) -- actually just writing that Hypatia of Alexandria was played by Lisa Kudrow tells you most of the joke. The show does not do justice to Hypatia; we don't know Hypatia's particular ethical views, but we know generically what they would have been like, because she was a well-respected Neoplatonist, and we know the kinds of things that Neoplatonists would have taught: the superiority of the mental over the physical, the superiority of the intellect over the senses, the absolute superiority of the Good over goods. But the show has no space for such a view; mental and physical pleasures are treated as on a level, sensible goods are all that are shown, and all good is finite. The show is intelligently written enough that it shows a recognition that a hedonic life of getting along and helping each other out is a life that will certainly run out of good. This is not a minor recognition. But there is no other kind of good that it recognizes. All good being finite, eventually you'll be done with it. And in a world with no infinite good, the closest you can come to recognize anything beyond this running-down kind of life is just to recognize that at some point the final good you can have is just to bring it all to an end. The show buys into the canard that mortality gives life meaning; it also fails to be very convincing about it, because it can't help but repeatedly show, by the very nature of its premise and its structure, that our mortality is only given meaning by our life. But even having supposed that life goes on after death, the only life it shows is one with good that runs out.
Various Links of Interest
* Maureen Johnson, Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village
* Kyle Williams, Happiness, Virtue, and the Bastard Science
* Daniel Burns, The Classical Alternative to Liberal Theory, at "Public Discourse"
* Alex Pruss has video versions of his 2019 Wilde Lectures in Natural Theology
* Liz Tracey looks at Avicenna's contribution to medicine
* Jon Baskin, On the Hatred of Literature, and Friends Like These
* Valerie Stivers, Cooking with Zora Neale Hurston
* Nina Papathanasopoulou, Black Classicisms in the Visual Arts
* Alice Maz, Playing to Win, is a very interesting discussion of the economies of gameworlds.
* Frank Furedi, Butchers vs. Academics, looks at one aspect of the class issues involved in Brexit debates.
* Clare Carlisle, The philosophy of George Eliot. Carlisle primarily focuses on the Spinozistic side, but there are other sides to George Eliot's philosophical engagements, too, including Feuerbach and Comte and Lewes himself.
* Timothy B. Noone, Augustine on Words, Signs, Thoughts, and Things in De Magistro
* Scott Meikle, The Switch from Agency to Causation in Marx
* Kathleen Stock, Sticks, stones, and lawsuits and Helen Joyce, Speaking up for female eunuchs, on the current disputes over transgender politics in British feminism.
* Gillian Dooley on Iris Murdoch's philosophy of fiction
Currently Reading
Amos Tutuola, The Palm Wine Drinkard
Christopher Tolkien, ed., Sauron Defeated
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
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