There’s stuff everywhere.

Stuff that is a cruel joke:

The 5th International! has been declared at long last by…Hugo Chavez. This will unite the forces of revolutionary socialism world-wide. In Chavez’s view, of course, the forces of revolutionary socialism include…Mugabe. And Ahmadinejad. And the Chinese Communist Party. And…wait, what?

Thing is, I could sort of understand these sort of vile endorsements before – though I’m not too motivated to insist on a charitable reading of Chavez’s words, such a reading was available: he’s kissing ass because he wants/needs international allies. He wants a bit more security against threats from the US and its allies. It’s not what you’d expect of an ‘internationalist’ in the genuine sense but then, why would we expect such things from Chavez? The point is, it’s entirely standard and expected from a government. It’s exactly what every other government does.

But actually proclaiming a Socialist International, and then sending your people to receive ideological training in China, is…well, a cruel joke.

Stuff that is also a cruel joke:

Pardoning turkeys. So there’s a special day on which millions of turkeys are to be killed and ritually eaten. You get one or two of these turkeys and, with great publicity, and great fanfare, decline to kill them. This provokes hearty laughter. After all, you can’t spell slaughter, without laughter!

Stuff that is hardly even funny anymore:

In Nepal, there has been a grand religious festival of death, in which a few hundred thousand animals of various sorts have been killed by pious God-fearing folks from all over the country and beyond.

Quote: “I slaughtered around 20 buffalo in 2004. This time I managed to behead about 70. I wish the sacrifice has not ended.”

And: “I do it for spiritual satisfaction.”

Note: roughly the same number of animals have been slaughtered in the world for food since you started reading this post. With the precision of ‘roughly’ tied to how fast a reader you are.

Question: is it more disturbing that people do this sort of thing for spiritual satisfaction, or that they do it with complete casual indifference?

More Cruel Jokes:

You remember the world’s biggest war? Yeah, still going on. Currently some people are expressing concern that the peace-keepers are actually keeping war, and troops sent to protect civilians are actually protecting people who are massacring civilians. The Congolese government has said “That’s really what we can call an exaggeration”. Well then. Thanks for that.

In fact, it looks suspiciously like the actual international response is largely a series of actions to prop up and support the government, and take no action against the companies funding violence for resource access, surrounded by high-pitched humanitarian trills and whistles.

And Thanksgiving, which itself is a somewhat cruel joke. We exterminated you, but there was a brief period of amiability early on! Let’s celebrate that!

What lesson can we draw from all this? From the jovial celebrations, ironic mercy, grand revolutionary pronouncements, grand humanitarian pronouncements, and perhaps most of all from the ’spiritual satisfaction’ – what they seem to illustrate is that humans have a striking ability to take violence and cruelty and destruction and give it pretty much every positive emotional spin you can think of.

I sort of feel like the ‘what would a vegan world look like?‘ topic deserves a couple more posts, although this one continues to duck the central and thorny (and sticky – like a thornbush covered in treacle) questions, and instead deals with certain concerns that often come up in this sort of context.

One recurrent question goes as follows:

“If we all became vegatarian/vegan what would happen to all the existing domestic cows, sheep and pigs etc? Would a truly vegan society mean the extinction of domestic cattle and sheep and pigs?  What happens while they all die off?”

The other question is:

“What about places where there are ‘indigionous’ people such as Inuit who  do not have the weather to grow sufficient vegatables?  How much will we have to ride roughshod over peoples’ culture to do this?”

Now, I think in both these cases, there is a reasonable and very difficult question of means, and relatively simple question of ends.

The question of ends in the first case is – do we aim at the extinction of the domesticated cattle, pig, etc. sub-species? And to this I think the question is fairly straightforwardly ‘yes’ – we don’t aim at that for its own sake but if, as is quite possible, it would be the consequence of veganism, we’re fine with that. Sub-species in themselves aren’t particularly important, and don’t have moral rights that way that individuals like you do.

And similarly, in the second case, there is the question – are we happy to cause an irrevocable and radical change in hunter-gatherers’ cultures, essentially amounting to the disappearance of the older cultures? Again, I would say ‘yes’, because cultures are not in themselves morally significant things.

Partly, this view is a product of my view about what, factually, cultures and species are – namely, that they are inherently changing, relative aggregations, without a stable essence. Cultures are always changing – certainly, hunter-gatherer cultures are changing, and have changed radically simply by contact with industrial societies (after all, something done deliberately, in awareness of alternatives, is culturally different from something done from necessity). There is no such thing really as ‘Ontario culture’ or ‘Inuit culture’ – or if there is, it’s not the same now as what it was a decade ago. So I’m not even sure it makes sense to want to ‘preserve’ particular cultures for their own sake.

The same actually applies to species, although it’s perhaps less widely recognised. If you looked at the last 10 million years, and the various hominids (human-like animals) that have existed, there are certainly changes, gradations, variations, and these could be used to divide those animals up into distinct species and sub-species. But there are no lines written into the animals themselves, and we could choose different schemes of division if we thought one was more convenient than another.

But partly, I suppose, it’s just a sort of general feeling about moral value: moral value comes ultimately from things that can care about their own lives, and this means it comes from individuals, not from abstractions. The sub-species ‘domesticated pig’ doesn’t mind what we do to it, it doesn’t mind anything.

Of course that doesn’t mean species and cultures are entirely worthless, any more than life-support machines, beautiful paintings, or beloved childhood toys are worthless. It still makes sense to want to preserve them in general, where that’s possible – it still makes sense, for instance, for people to spend their lives transcibing details of languages spoken only by 50 people in Papua New Guinea, before those languages disappear altogether. But it’s not worth violating the rights of individuals of those species or cultures to preserve the abstraction – it would be wrong to, say, preserve said language by demanding that members of that tribe be imprisoned if they speak English or any other language.

Of course, as I said, the question of means – of how we deal with this sort of thing in practice – is still difficult.

What this demands, in the species case, is that we have some idea of how to care for an enormous population of more-or-less entirely dependent beings, in the interval before their population crashes from us not reproducing them.Of course, if the transition to veganism were slow enough, this wouldn’t necessarily arise – the numbers of farm animals would decrease step-by-step as fewer were economically desired. But let’s consider the hard case.

The problem is, we don’t really have a good model of how to do this even with humans, as is indicated by the number of children who need adoption – not even counting the pets who are ’surplus’ to what people want. Our general model of how to care for the vulnerable and dependent isn’t adapted for the task of dealing with large numbers of ‘orphaned’ dependents.

Similarly, in the cultures case, what we need is a model of how a culture can be deliberately but harmoniously changed, neither from outside or from inside but by both, in a way that can do away with the violent parts without leaving people isolated, alienated, and deprived of the sense of meaning and community that cultures function to provide. And again, how do we do that? Because we will need to work this out, to change both pre-industrial and industrial cultures in loads of ways – to deal with issues of sex, pollution, militarism, and a hundred other things. But we don’t have, as far as I can see, a good model – we have the very partial ways it has happened, with the various degrees of anomie and social dislocation that have resulted.

(On the particular issue of not being able to grow enough vegetables in a given place – sure, but since IIRC we’ve recently passed the 50%-urban mark, most of the people in the world live somewhere where they can’t grow enough food locally and need to have it imported. Though this obviously presents its own issues, it’s not a problem specific to this topic so I’ll focus on the worries over ‘culture’)

So I don’t think I can give, in the abstract, a really good answer to either question. But I think they can be chopped in half so that the one half, which rested on the idea of preserving species and cultures for their own sake, can be dealt with, leaving the other half as a practical problem which, though difficult, pose only the same basic questions – how to care for dependents, how to consciously alter cultures – that we lack, but desperately need, answers to for many other reasons.

Reader Mute Fox, from withwhatartthoudiscontented, said a while back:

“I am merely curious to know how you envision a free human society…interacting on equal terms with other species, all the time. I am not saying it couldn’t be done…I just wonder what you think that would look like.”

After a perhaps-unconscionable delay I figured I should try to say something about this. It’s hard to know where to start, especially because so much of the answer to this question is bound up with environmental questions about our relationship to the overall biosphere. There’s also the equally tricky question of which animals we’re talking about, and how they differ – to avoid that I’m talking primarily about mammals here.

But I think the best way I can think of the come at the question is from the idea of paradigms. By ‘paradigm’ I mean a sort of guiding thought that informs and determines how we relate to a particular thing – less specific or rigid than a rule, and one step more practical than a philosophical truth.

For example, at the moment, the primary paradigm by which human societies relate to animals (strictly, ‘nonhuman animals’ but I’m going to go for brevity here) is that animals are property. This is related to the philosophical claim that animals possess only ‘extrinsic’ or ‘instrumental’ value – that is, whereas humans are morally valuable and important intrinsically, animals are valuable insofar as they are valuable to someone else.

As I said, the paradigm is one step more practical, more concrete and specific, than this principle. It’s that claim – that animals have only extrinsic value – refracted into various sorts of definite relationships: animals which are positively valuable will become a resource to be owned, increased, and consumed, as food or clothing or work or information, while animals which are negatively valued will become pests, vermin, or ‘beasts’, and the target of extermination attempts, just like the dirt on our floor.

Obviously, part of my goal would be to do away with this paradigm. But what to replace it with? That will at least be the first step from a philosophical principle like ‘animals have rights’ to a concrete social vision.

One obviously inappropriate paradigm is something like ‘citizen’ or ‘fellow’, which is (in theory) how we’re meant to morally relate to other adult humans. The reason this isn’t appropriate is, in essence, that we can’t communicate with animals in the appropriate way – they can’t speak up in our discussions, they can’t understand and accept the rights and responsibilities that society might bestow on them, etc. Of course, nobody has ever suggested that we should apply a paradigm like that to animals, and I mention because sometimes people arguing against animal rights talk as if that were the only alternative.

I think there are at least two other alternatives, that we already apply to a certain extent when dealing with humans, and that I think would be the right ones to apply with different groups of animals.

The first is something like ‘infant’ or ‘ward’: essentially, a being which has intrinsic moral value, but which needs to be under the power of someone else, who thereby acquires both the right to control it and its environments, and the responsibility to do so in a way that secures its welfare. This is currently how we treat children, and to varying extents adults with certain mental disabilities.

This seems to me to be roughly how we should think about animals who are individually dependent on us – i.e. domesticated animals, which have been made incapable of living ‘in the wild’. That means the particular institutions and ways of relating that we’ve built up around care for children and certain mentally disabled people are the best model for caring for animals.

We already have something half-way there, in the peculiar institutions surrounding pet ownership – but that it’s only half-way, is indicated by the word ‘ownership’ there. Would we breed specially designed children with striking cute deformities? Would we sell them to people as birthday presents?

(Of course, I don’t think our institutions and practices around childhood and disability are ideal, nor that they have no element of the ownership paradigm – but they certainly have less of it than pets, who in turn have less than food animals)

This, of course, rules out most of our use of animals immediately. It’s inconsistent with meat, leather, fur, vivisection, milk, eggs, hunting, and fighting. It might nevertheless be consistent with certain of our current practices, in their best versions – I’ve already mentioned pets, but you could also look at the best-run zoos and safari parks. Obviously there are lots more details to consider but I’ll leave that there.

The other paradigm, which I think is appropriate to apply to wild animals, is something like ‘peaceful foreign nation’. What I think is distinctive here is that this paradigm is heavily skewed towards negative duties rather than positive duties. The whole point of dividing society into nations is that the people or government or supreme soviet of one nation is obligated to refrain from killing members of another nation, but not obligated to keep them alive by providing healthcare or unemployment benefits, or to maintain order in that other nation.

Now, I actually think that it’s a mistake to apply this ‘foreign nation’ paradigm to divide humans up into nations. And plenty of people accept it as the basic story, but add an extra layer of humanitarian concern that goes beyond it. I’m not trying to say anything about any of that.

I’m just saying that we have a way of thinking, and (to a limited extent) sorts of practices, organised around the idea of a group of beings with intrinsic value but who are running their own shit and thus don’t need anything from us except to leave them alone.

The reason why this would be appropriate for wild animals is that we’re just not able to positively intervene to solve their problems. Or rather, if we did, we’d fuck up the ecosystem and everything would be even worse.

So I don’t think I’ve answered the original question sufficiently. But hopefully I’ve taken one or two steps towards it.

Take the philosophical principle that animals (here meaning mammals and similar things, not necessarily every sort of animal down to jellyfish) have intrinsic value: react it with two basic facts, namely that a load of animals have no prospect of living outside of human care, and that humans have no prospect of making overall positive interventions in the lives of the rest.

The result is a guiding principle to treat the former group of animals as a large population of very odd permanent children, and to treat the rest as a sort of vast alien population who mainly need to be left alone.

This is relatively simple to apply as long as ‘animals we can leave alone’ and ‘animals we have to interact with’ remain separate groups. But it gets really hard on the boundaries – when there are animals just living there around us in our homes and cities, and when we need to go into ‘the wild’ to get food, energy, etc. At this point there’s a sort of contradiction – and how to mediate the demands of the two paradigms becomes a vexing question.

So, um, are 1200 words wortwhile if they serve to turn a vague problem into a more precise problem?

Third post of fairly heavy philosophy. Will try to balance it soon with some political polemic and possibly a post on the philosophy of cuteness.

In my last post, I tried to explain why I think that empathetic ways of thinking of other conscious persons, and their conscious lives, is not just a different feeling or motive added on to non-empathetic ways of thinking, but is cognitively different, i.e. a completely different sort of belief.

I’m really not sure how far I managed to do that, since thinking about how we think, and especially thinking about how we think about thinking, is hard. But in summary: in non-empathetic thinking, the object of our thought in the other person, while in empathetic thought, our object is actually the object of their thought.

E.g. if person X is frightened of thing Y, then my coming to believe this involves a thought directed onto Y, not onto X. Just as ‘I’ am present in the thought, but not as an object, so X is not present as an object, but as a viewpoint, a perspective on the world.

Anyway, rather than spilling any more words I’m going to assume that if people still have no idea what I’m talking about they’ll tell me.

What I want to talk about now is why, given that empathy and all the forms of non-empathy are different cognitions, one is true and one is false. None of these arguments is entirely knock-down, because the whole debate is so loose you’ll always have room to dodge any point. But to me they make a lot of sense.

(I’m going to call the non-empathy umbrella ‘objectification’ because it involves a mental object, and because the word has conveniently negative connotations, and because I think it’s obviously a prerequisite for the sort of things usually called ‘objectification’.)

(I like the idea of a non-empathy umbrella too – empathy for other people is like rain, i.e. messy and inconvenient but also pervasive and vital for life).

Ok, right, so. Two reasons why empathy is true and objectification is false.

Firstly: to treat a person’s thoughts as properties of an object involves significantly changing their content, away from the content they have as thought by the other person. When they think some thought, they themselves are the subject, i.e. the ‘general limit of the world’, and not some object in it – just like the eye is not visible in the visual field, but has a different sort of presence there. So by objectifying them, you adjust how the thought in question is constructed.

But the point of truth is to adhere as closely as possible to the thing being thought about – any change in how it’s represented from how it really is, makes something less true. Hence empathy, which avoids this change, is truer than objectification.

Secondly, note that objectification isn’t quite complete as I’ve described it above. I would argue that in order to represent the other person as having a mental state at all, it needs to actually construct that mental state, make a sort of simulacrum. I can’t think of a better way to make this argument than to poste verbatim from the aforesaid conference paper. If you’re willing to take my word for it, you can skip the 400 blue words.

The argument begins with the premise that behaviourism is false – a 2^nd-order thought is not a thought about behavioural inputs and outputs. Moreover, I will assume that it is because we each have a mental life, that we are able to think about the mental lives of others. To use the very simple example of colour vision: I know that, and how, you seeing ‘blueness’ goes beyond a mere behavioural disposition (setting aside how sure I can be that you are seeing ‘blueness’), and I know this because I myself have seen blueness and know what it looks like.

Now to these broadly anti-behaviourist premises I will add one that I think is pretty much analytic: for a mental state to be about something, it must contain within itself sufficient ‘resources’ to identify its object, and distinguish it from other possible objects. Otherwise, in virtue of what would it have that object and not another?

Putting these together tells us that a 2^nd-order mental state must contain sufficient ‘resources’ to identify the mental states of another person, as opposed to their behavioural dispositions. But what is it that enables this identification? We gave the answer just a moment ago – it is our own mental experiences that we draw on (or extrapolate from).

So in some form that content, our own experience, is a part of any 2^nd-order thought. But in what form? It seems there are two options. Either a) it is present as a 1^st-order token of the relevant type, or b) it is present as a further 2^nd-order thought about my past experiences, e.g. “they are feeling now how I was feeling last Friday morning”.

Option b) may well be correct much of the time, but it cannot always be true, and cannot be the primary analysis of 2^nd-order thought. Why? Because it is itself 2^nd-order – so we must ask how it can refer to my past experiences, and not my past behaviours. If we stick with it, it will just lead us to an infinite regress.

So in the primary case, we must conclude that option a) is correct: a 2^nd-order thought about a thought of type T, must contain as one component a 1^st-order thought of type T. My primary understanding of ‘X is angry’ contains a token of anger; my primary understanding of ‘X believes that P’ contains a token of ‘P’.

So just to be cognitively adequate at all, thoughts about other people have to take the first step towards empathy. But in objectified thoughts, these ‘re-creations’ of the other person’s mental state are ’suppressed’, in the sense that they are held before the mind but not allowed to have any of their natural affective or motivational effect – a re-creation of sadness doesn’t make you sad, a re-creation of desire doesn’t get you to try and satisfy it (as it would do in the case of empathy).

Now, this is the same sort of process that we perform on things like fictions and fantasies – we formulate the idea that we’re trapped somewhere with a murderous predatory alien that wants to destroy our skull with the second mouth that’s on the rod that comes out of its mouth, but we avoid barricading the doors and loading a gun. We keep the thoughts ‘in a box’ because they’re not real.

So, the second argument is this: that objectification involves treating the other person’s thoughts (which we have recreated) the same way we treat imaginary thoughts, the same way we treat the doings and thoughts of characters in books. To not empathise, in short, is to implicitly suppose that the consciousness of others is not really real, but is more like a fun story to imagine.

But that’s not true, is it?

I think if I were presented with these arguments just out of nowhere they wouldn’t convince me: I’d be inclined to suggest that, well, neither is true, neither is false, they’re just different emotional attitudes to take.

Which is why I consider it so important that empathy and objectification are different cognitions: that is, they are different things-that-can-be-true, and this means they are in conflict. Cognition is where we make choices between alternative ways of thinking, and call the ones we should prefer ‘true’ and the other ones ‘false’.

If empathy and objectification are cognitively different then one is true and the other false, because they can’t both be accepted as equal. The considerations I’ve tried to present here – that objectification involves 1) representations that are less similar to what is represented, and 2) treating other people’s minds like fictional objects, interesting and useful to think about but not actually real – are meant to tip the balance and give us good reason to think that it’s empathy which is true, and not objectification.

The consequence of which is, that anyone who fails to act for the benefit of others where possible, and willingly inflicts unnecessary suffering and destruction on them, is not just wicked, but irrational, and the victim of a factual delusion.

In my last post I tried to lay out the ground for my approach to meta-ethics, that is to investigating what is involved in moral claims being true or false. Today I’m going to try to put flesh on those bones by developing an account of how it is that we think about other people and their experiences, on which empathy is rationally required, and people who behave like psychopaths are rationally defective – victims, so to speak, of a delusion, just as much as any other psychotic.

So I should with some setting-up. Firstly, I want to say what I think the intuitive assumption is, the picture that I want to argue against (or at least provide an alternative to). The view can be summed up I think in two theses:

1) Thoughts about other people’s experiences have separate cognitive, affective, and motivational components, and;

2) People with different affective and motivational components can still share the same cognitive components.

That is, if malicious person A and compassionate person B both observe person C in distress, they can share the exact same cognition – namely, awareness of the fact ‘that person C is in distress’. They differ simply in that A adds to this a layer of enjoyment and a motivation to keep watching that distress, while B adds a different affective component (they are distressed themselves) and a different motivation (to relieve C’s distress).

What this picture implies is that at the level of cognition, there is no difference between A and B – and so neither can be called right or wrong. They differ only in the further steps they take after becoming aware of this fact. What I want to argue is that for these affective and motivational components to differ as they do, A and B must also have different cognitions, i.e. they believe different facts.

How does this work? My essential claim is this: that A is thinking of a certain object, which they understand and predict by running through a series of thoughts, treated as fantasy-thoughts, while B is thinking of a viewpoint embedded in a body, from which the world appears a certain way.

But obviously this requires more ground-laying. We will need a quick discussion of thought in general, and what it involves, before we can talk about particular classes of thoughts. So I’m going to try to run through some points about thought in general. Obviously on such a topic it’s impossible to avoid being in certain respects controversial, but I’m trying to largely go along with philosophical consensus and common-sense.

So the first point is about the idea of an ‘object’, and the corresponding term ’subject’. The basic idea is that most thoughts take the form of being ‘directed onto’ something, being ‘about’ something, the object, while also being thought ‘by’ something else, the subject, and that in the thought, we are conscious of both the gap between these two, and of the connection between them that the thought itself establishes.

So for instance I focus my attention on the empty cup of tea in front of me. My mind is directed onto the cup – it is my object. ‘I’ am the subject of this thought, and in looking at the cup I have the sense of being distinct from it – it is not me. Yet at the same time I am aware that by being able to see it, I am in some way connected to it (different philosophical accounts of perception try in various ways to integrate the element of separation and the element of connection in such states).

Now, a key point here, which has been insisted on by a great number of philosophers, is that ‘I’ the subject am ‘present’ in all these mental states (that is, in having them, I am conscious of myself) but not as an object. I’m not constantly thinking about myself, but I am constantly aware of myself – this sort of awareness is sometimes called ‘pre-reflective’, i.e. I don’t need to actively reflect on myself to have it. In particular, when I am aware of many different objects at once (which is pretty much all the time – consciousness is usually complex) I’m pre-reflectively aware of myself as what connects all these different objects that I am simultaneously aware of.

One very nice metaphor, which I think comes mainly from Wittgenstein, is that of the subject as being like the eye. I can see my visual field – but I can’t see my eye. Nevertheless, I am aware of my eye whenever I am seeing things – but not as a visible thing, as the limit and basis of the visual field. Similarly I am aware of myself whenever I am conscious, but not as an object, as the limit and basis of all my awareness of objects.

And one noteworthy point here is that this means that a certain connection exists between statements about myself and statements about the world and it’s objects. For instance, for me to say “I am disgusted” is connected in this way to saying “things are disgusting”; “I believe that P is true” is connected with “P is true” (imagine if someone said “it will rain soon but I believe it won’t rain for a long time” – they have contradicted themselves, but not in the normal logical way). “I am pleased” is connected with “things are good”. This link is not quite that of strict synonymy, but it is noteworthy nevertheless.

Almost there.

I’m aware of any given object in many different ways – I can see this cup now, see it tomorrow, smell it, see it from the other side, see it from far away, see it with hateful eyes, see it with scientific precision, see it as enormous relative to a cockroach or see it as tiny relative to this building. But the cup doesn’t change – what changes is ‘me’, and the way that I am aware of it. This, we can express by talking of viewpoints. We see the cup from different viewpoints, and we end up with a range of thoughts about it, each qualified by the viewpoint it comes from. But because we’re rational thinkers, we try to synthesise these different views, to explain how the same object seems different when viewed in these different ways. We see, for example, that the laws of geometry, and certain assumptions about space and movement, can make sense of why it has different apparent shapes and sizes when seen from different angles and distances. That’s easy. More difficult is to do the same with, say, emotional viewpoints – why does an event seem unfair when looked at in one way, fair in another, shocking from one perspective, or obvious, threatening, indifferent from others? We don’t know exactly, but we try to find out – and in order to find out, we must take each viewpoint we get as a valid datum. That is, we must be like scientists trying to find a theory that explains all the data, and not simply ignore those data which we don’t want to have to integrate.

One part of this process is that when we find that a good overall viewpoint differs from a specific one, and can explain why that specific one differs, we suppress that specific thought, we try to not let it affect us. If something looks unfair from our overall understanding, but good from one particular viewpoint, we try to suppress that perception of it as good, and not act on it. But this is only ever a discriminating kind of suppression – we can only perform it on particular thoughts if we have good reason to think they are mistaken.

What we cannot do standardly is to just suppress a load of thoughts because we want to. We can’t, if we want to be rational, just take everything we know about some topic, and then ignore it. That’s the paradigm of irrationality. But when can we do this, when can we suppress thoughts indiscriminately? When they are part of a fantasy: when we are watching a film, or imagining a remote hypothetical event, or picturing what it would be like to visit Mauritania. In these cases it is the mark of rationality to avoid acting on the motivations that these thoughts generate – e.g. when watching a scary film we do not rush to get our gun, or run screaming from the theatre, or call 999. And note, this reflects the fact that these fantasy thoughts are not integrated with other thoughts at all – because they are not perspectives on the world of objects, but rather on non-existent objects, like Frodo Baggins or my guide to Mauritania.

So.

So my claim is that person B, the compassionate one, sees C in distress and cognises this fact as something like: the world appears horrendous and distressing from “C’s perspective” – and the idea of “C” is derived from the idea of “C’s perspective”, not vice versa. That is, B looks at this body screaming and weeping, and processes this as revealing an aspect of the world, and the viewpoint from which it appears with that aspect.

Person A, on the other hand, processes this quite differently: they process person C as an object, as a thing among other things in the world, and not as a viewpoint on the world – note that neither B nor C thinks of C in this way. One consequence of this difference is that the ‘connection’ between thoughts about C and thoughts about the world is preserved for B, but not for A. For C, the thought “I am pleased” is closely connected with the thought “things are good” – and for B, the thought “C is pleased” is also closely connected with the thought “things are good”. Equally, of course, “C is distressed” is closely connected with “things are bad” – and so B is made to themselves feel bad, and motivated to end C’s distress. Whereas for A, “C is distressed” has no connection at all with “things are bad”. Instead, it’s just a fact about this one particular person, C, this particular object. This means that A need not have any particular feelings about it, or motivations. In this case, of course, A is motivated, and is motivated maliciously – they feel good that “C is distressed”, for whatever specific psychological reasons. But it is their ‘objectification’ of C that gives space for their particular feelings and desires to operate.

But none of the rest of this is just a matter of ‘emotions’ or how we happen to feel – the connection between “I am pleased” and “things are good”, or between “I am in danger” and “things are dangerous”, or between “I believe that P is true” and “P is true”, is not just a matter of feelings – it is a basic part of how our cognition works. Or at least, to say that it is so, is a position just as plausible, and probably far more historically supported, than to deny that it is so.

Finally though, we might ask – if person A regards person C as an object, and not as a viewpoint, how do they even make sense of person C’s being conscious and having thoughts? This, I think, we must look at by analogy with what I said about fantasy thoughts. Person A must somehow formulate the idea of distress if they are to recognise what distress is (and see person C as more than just a doll designed to make noises). But they then don’t let that idea of distress upset them – they suppress it, but not because they think it’s unreasonable (after all, they know that C has good reason to be distressed). And this is what we do with fantasy-thoughts – that is, with thoughts that we regard as perspectives on unreal objects, and not on the world itself.

This post is far too long, but hopefully those who have struggled through so far have some idea of what I’m trying to get across.

Note, I haven’t yet tried to show that one or the other of these ways of thinking is correct or incorrect – merely that they are different, and that this difference is cognitive, making use of the most basic forms of cognition we have (subject, object, world, perspective, reality, etc.) Next post, hopefully, will give some reasons for considering empathy rational and objectification irrational.

Last post I mentioned being away for the period around the weekend – I was at a philosophy conference and got back yesterday. The paper I was presenting was on meta-ethics, and in particular the topic of how moral claims might be objectively valid.

I won’t paste the whole thing up here, and I may not even put a whole summary up here (though if not I’ll try to complete it in other posts). But since it’s a topic I find abidingly interesting, and that has on occasion come up in discussions, I did want to open up some sense of what I’m about.

My starting assumption is that the content of any correct moral system is, boiled down, caring for others in the same way we naturally (though not inevitably) care for ourselves. The basic idea is to look out for the intersts of others as we do for our own, and in particular to refrain from harming them, just as we would try to avoid harm to ourselves.

I certainly don’t think all moral systems ever have fitted this pattern – many have substantial alien parts (purity, obedience, and group loyalty are three prominent values that seem opposed) – though it’s rare to see one that doesn’t incorporate this element among others. But that’s fine – they’re just wrong!

Now, what’s striking is that this sort of care-for-another isn’t restricted to what we would call ‘morality’ – it’s also something that often occurs spontaneously, when we simply learn about or consider other people, and of course something that occurs much more reliably in many sorts of inter-personal relationships.

On the other hand, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we know that someone is being hurt by our actions, and just don’t care. Sometimes, moreover, we perform that action because it hurts someone, because we are motivated to see them unhappy.

How do these phenomena differ from the moral? One difference is that they usually have more of a ‘feel’ to them – we empathise in a way that makes us cry or smile and which generally seems ‘emotional’. But this isn’t actually always the case. Often in relationships, we act to care for someone but don’t ‘feel like it’. We can act as though we empathised, but without actually going through the experience of empathy – not necessarily out of ‘duty’ (in the sense of something ‘moral’) but becaue we value the relationship – we value it, and this motivates us in a constant way, regardless of the temporary variations in our emotions.

So that’s not the difference. The difference, rather, seems to be their particularity – it applies to some people, at some times, but not to everyone. Whereas morality is something that’s supposed to apply universally (at least, might be thought – and I happen to think it does). Relatedly, morality is necessary – we don’t just happen to value some particular thing or person, but we must; it is in some sense obligatory (one might almost say ‘categorical‘).

What we have, then, is two ways of thinking about/relating to other people (I’m lumping indifference, malice, and anything else other than empathy under one heading, for the sake of brevity). And we have the demands of morality, which seem to say: privilege one of these ways of thinking (empathy), and always act as you would if you were relating to them in this way.

And now we wonder, what validates this moral demand? I mean, we are surrounded by people telling us how to act, how to think, how to feel, what to be attracted to, what to be contemptuous of, what to find funny. What’s so special about this claim for universalised empathy?

Well, it might be that some external force somehow ‘backs it up’: God, or the self-subsistent ethical Principles off in Platonic heaven, or even something like ‘evolutionary imperatives’ that didn’t look like it would go in for this kind of activity. But this, if you’ll let me assert major conclusions without further discussion, doesn’t work. Either that backer-up doesn’t actually justify anything, or we have no reason to think it exists.

Another way, though, would be to say that there’s something simply confused or incorrect about any way of relating to other people other than empathy. That is, morality doesn’t give us any real ‘new facts’, it is just the codified expression of what actually follows from the existence of other people – which we habitually forget, lapsing into a false way of thinking. That is, just to say that “person X is miserable” is already to say “how unfortunate, we should do something to cheer them up”, and just to say that “doing action X would leave three people dead” is already to say “action X is terrifying, let’s avoid it at all costs”.

This would be remarkably convenient were it true, but it doesn’t look true, does it? In particular, it looks as though people can quite easily know that X is miserable and care not one whit. The existence of psychopaths is the extreme form of this apparent counter-example. Psychopaths are, after all, apparently devoid of empathy, or concern for morality, but apparently ‘rational’.

So the task that I’ve been taking a stab at is trying to undermine this last claim – that psychopaths are perfectly rational. This involves analysing, and criticising, the way that we habitually think about other people, and in particular trying to show that what looks like a correct factual awareness of some other person (without empathy) is actually something else – a sort of simulacrum, a fake mental construct that’s useful for predicting people’s behaviour but which is actually deeply confused and distorted when properly dissected.

After all, there are lots of ways of thinking we habitually use that don’t actually make sense if we take them as really true. We think of geography in terms of an upright two-dimensional plane marked with blocks of solid colour – but not only is this false if taken literally, it’s not even really coherent – because a two-dimensional plane can’t exist in physical reality as a thing. Everything which exists (and certainly such solid items as continents and islands) are three-dimensional.

Indeed, most of the things we encounter every day are to some extent ‘falsified’ in our thoughts about them (objects are made ’solid’ and not empty space peppered with occasional atoms, the earth’s surface is treated as flat, etc.) for the simple reason that this is convenient. And suppressing empathy, finding ways to know who’s suffering without ourselves being distressed, etc., is obviously convenient, if we want to be able to have any emotional stability at all, and not just sit on the floor simultaneously laughing for joy and weeping with grief all the time.

What matters in cases like this is that when it makes a difference to our actions, we ‘remember’ that the image we’re using is false and act in accordance with the correct image. I consult a map and find that my desired journey is marked as a 5-centimetre line upwards – but I don’t then jump 5 centimetres in the air, but walk however many kilometres North.

So it might be that our everyday way of relating to other people  – that which diverges from empathy – is actually like that map. ‘Immorality’, then, would amount to something like jumping 5 centimetres in the air: acting as though a convenient way of thinking was a correct way of thinking. And there’s nothing in the least ’subjective’ or ‘relative’ about that.

Of course I haven’t yet said why the non-empathising view is conceptually confused. I’ve held back both because I want to limit length of post, and because it gets somewhat technical. So I’ll round off here, having just explained where my efforts on this topic are being directed and what my plan is, with a query – does this sound interesting to readers? Are people interested in the more substantive part of how the argument runs? What difficulties would you anticipate, or objections might be urged?

Ok, so I’m sorry I’ve not been able to blog the last few days, especially since telling a commenter I would answer their question in a post. Especially because I will now almost certainly not be able to post until next Wednesday or Thursday, being away on an adventure with other cleromancers, tossing bones and practicing our readings.

Until then, strive to emulate the gopher tortoise:

This is a lazy post, in fact a year-old repost from before I started this blog, that I thought readers might find interesting. It’s explictly a moralistic sort of piece, not a political analysis (no war but the class war! etc).

To listen to most endorsements of remembrance day, and to most poppy-related appeals for money, one would be forgiven for thinking that the job of a soldier was to die. It is not: the job of a soldier is to kill people. Those people fall into approximately two categories: firstly, civilians, and secondly, other soldiers. The number of dictators, politicians, generals, etc. who are killed by soldiers is negligible.

It’s true that courage was not uncommon among the armed forces, and that many (though probably well under half) of the last century’s fallen soldiers were fighting for something better than what they were fighting against; it’s also true that most responsibility the blame for the horrors of war lies with high-level decision-makers – and the average soldier is usually in a situation of very limited freedom. But people are always free and people who kill are responsible for deaths, even if others bear equal or greater responsibility. Consequently it seems ridiculous to look on soldiers with an attitude only of praise, and not utter a word of blame or condemnation. That condemnation should be limited by the very limited perspective, the limited power, the limited opportunities, of average soldiers – but it cannot be simply dropped altogether.

Of course there is huge variation among individual soldiers, ranging from the truly discriminate soldier who shoots only those shooting them, and fights only for good causes, down to those who participate in irregular massacres – to deny this variation would remove the whole point of speaking of freedom. What is wrong is to ignore the whole issue, for this imputes to them a uniform purity.

To put it another way, there is a dilemma. One option is to give respect to all war veterans, all war casualties. That includes those who killed our brave soldiers, and those who drove back the other side, gained control of a town, and so enabled the shooting of political enemies, hostages, or racial “enemies”. Yet to give respect and thanks to all these people who sacrificed their lives, and to put a full stop there, would seem to mean ignoring, perhaps even “forgetting” that they participated in, enabled, fought for, crimes against humanity.

The other option would be to select only those who died fighting for “freedom”. The problems with this are, firstly, that all armies kill innocent people, certainly a huge number in both World Wars, and secondly, that it too ignores a legitimate facet of the issue – that the young German, Italian, Japanese, etc. men and women who fought were also brave, willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for a higher goal, and also left behind families and friends, whose grief and loss is not annulled by the goals of their nations’ leaders.

Absolutising one aspect – respect and compassion for those who died and their loved ones – and attempting to ignore the dissonant aspect – condemnation of their crimes – forces us, here as always, to draw arbitrary lines between real grief and wrong grief, between wicked armies and saintly armies.

In comments to this piece, some interesting discussions emerged. I was told that

“British soldiers died defending their way of life…Italian and German soldiers, on the other hand, made no such sacrifice for us. That’s why we don’t remember them…Remembrance is a small expression of gratitude to the millions who died specifically defending the culture and way of life that we abuse nowadays.”

To which I had replied

“I’m suspicious of all this talk of defending a ‘way of life’. Were British soldiers fighting for particular types of food or music? Were they fighting for specific constitutional arrangements? Were they fighting for a society that still discriminated against women and criminalised homosexuality? Were they fighting to maintain the empire? Were they fighting for ‘king and country’? It all seems like projecting a nebulous ideal onto people who, primarily, were fighting because the law told them they had to and society told them they should – the same reason the german and italian soldiers fought.”

I was also told that “They were fighting for the survival of the british nation. Had they not fought Germany and instead let the Germans invade, then millions of British civilians would have been killed.”

To which (apart from the fact that I’ve never yet heard a remembrance service say “the generals and politicians responsible for the 1st World War and others should all be hanged, the whole thing was a farce and a waste – it’s specifically WWII that we’re commemorating here.”) I had replied:

“I agree that I explicitly said that yes, soldiers’ sacrifice to defeat Nazism should be remembered. My point was that their “sacrifice” of other people, which helped one nation to dominate another and was part of a national engine of propaganda and censorship should ALSO be remembered, rather than completely ignored.”

Hmm. I felt I should post something but I don’t really have the energy. That’s been true for the last weeks now, which is why my frequency of posting has declined relative to the previous months. This is likely to continue for a while yet, but hopefully posts will turn up every now and again.

I particularly felt like I should have posted for at least one of: Halloween, Guy Fawkes’ day, the anniversary of the October Revolution, and Remembrance Day. Maybe I will. But probably you will just have to decide for yourselves what to think. Actually that said I recall writing something about remembrance day last year at a previous location so I may paste that up.

In the meantime, why don’t I share some of the search terms by which people have found this blog?

In the last month, I’ve been found by fully 30 people searching “take over the world”, for whom I regret having no useful advice.

I’ve also got a dozen or so people searching “octopus skeleton pictures”, for whom I regret that nobody will ever grant them what they desire.

Perhaps more worryingly, several people have come here through searching “octopus sex”. O_O

They were joined by a single individual looking for “cross species sex youtubes”. *sigh*

There have also been half a dozen or so people with search terms such as “black man controls white man’s wife” and “arabs in control of white women”.

But perhaps the oddest fetish that I seem to have attracted attention from is “incomprehensible bdsm stories”. I can understand why someone might want bdsm stories, but incomprehensible ones? It sounds like needlessly putting yourself through tiring, difficult, and even painful ordeals just for the sa- ah.

Search terms less unsettling than just odd include:

“ugly fox”, “suspicious mongoose”, “how does capitalism exploit Znet”, “christmas thoughts”, and “naked complex” (better than naked simple, I imagine).

But probably the most worrying of all is – well, I’ve posted about the star-nosed mole, and some people find me by searching for that. And I’ve also posted about the naked mole rat, and some people find me by searching for that.

But just yesterday I noticed in my blog stats: “star nosed mole rat”.

To whoever is researching this possibility – combining the only eusocial mammal with the fastest-eating mammal – I beg you, reconsider. The possible consequences don’t bear thinking about.

It occurred to me in a recent conversation that although I consider myself an environmentalist (whatever that means), and although I am abidingly fascinated by life and its various forms, and committed to the idea of ‘respecting’ a fairly large class of them, I’m not really comfortable talking about ‘nature’, or putting points in terms of ‘nature’ or ‘the natural world’.

You and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals.

In fact, I don’t think I believe that such an entity exists.

Let me put it like this: the way the word ‘nature’ is often used, it seems to be supposed that visiting a Caribbean coral reef and swimming with dolphins, visiting a Tibetan mountain to photograph eagles, and and camping in a pine forest in Norway, are all ways of having contact with ‘nature’.

This almost suggests, though, that when I get to the eagles, I in some sense am more familiar with them because I met the dolphins, and when I am in the forest I’m closer to it because of being in the mountains. That is, it suggests that there’s something in common between the three.

But there isn’t – the coral reefs are as foreign to the mountains as they are to the heart of London. Dolphins have as little in common with eagles as they do with humans. When I turn up in the forest and disturb some bear, it will not care in the slightest that I am on good terms with the frogs of Indonesia.

All that is common is something negative: they are areas that are not heavily populated with humans. Note, it’s not even that they’re therefore populated with lots of other species – because 1) there’s no definition of ‘populated’ that puts coral reefs in the same league as mountains, and 2) cities, the paradigms of human settlement, probably contain more non-human animals than many remote ‘wild places’.

So the word ‘natural’ means something like ‘alien’ or ‘foreign’: it’s not something that applies to things themselves, but rather characterises our relation to them. Things are different from what I’m familiar with – and this I designate by calling them things like ‘foreign’ (when I’m focusing on nationality) or ‘nature’ (when I’m focusing on species).

And this is perfectly appropriate in definite contexts. For instance, in considering global warming, we need to distinguish between human industry and the rest of the biosphere, because there’s a big causal difference in what role they’re playing.

But we can apply the same concept in other ways. In regard to global warming, any outside observer could quite appropriately regard it as a breakdown, a short-circuit, in ‘earthly nature’. Factories are, ultimately, as natural as domestication, self-cleaning, and care for young. They are something one species of organism produces when its natural tendencies reach a certain point.

Going in the other direction, when a monkey discovers that you can get good food by sticking grass stalks into a termite mound, that represents a ‘triumph over nature’ as much as when humans discover fire or build a bridge – with ‘nature’ including the termites, and the grass, but not the monkey. Perhaps we could even include a shrew surviving one more day of frantically searching for food in a dangerous world. After all, distinguishing oneself from the world as a separate and potentially opposed force confronting it – that’s pretty much what ‘life’ does.

But then you get this idea that speaking of ‘nature’ is speaking of a real thing – a sort of collective identity possessed by all and only those beings and places remote from humans. If they knew we were doing it, I imagine sardines would be very surprised at our lumping them in a group with elephants, whom they can barely imagine, let alone recognise a similar to.

But look here: we have a name for that: outgroup homogenisation. “We” are all individuals, and the differences between us and between our different cultures and groupings are profound, often amounting to essential oppositions – the eternal feminine against the eternal masculine, etc. But “they” are all basically minor variations on a common theme.

After all, “they are animals”. What a sentence! Why not say the same about moles, whales, humans, bacteria, fungi, snakes, plankton, and octopuses – “they are non-fliers”, said in a tone of explaining something fundamental, conveying the basic fact about them. Or rather, about us. For you and I, after all, are indeed non-fliers.

In short, there does not exist an entity called ‘nature’, nor ‘the natural world’. There is only a schema of opposition, of drawing a division between the sentient agent (individual or collective) and the passive forces it confronts. And that schema can be applied in pretty much whatever way we want. There’s no point in us defending ‘nature’ from ‘humanity’; only in seeking to defending each other from assorted megalomaniacs and anti-social narcissists.