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171 posts tagged philosophy
“We should guard negative liberty (freedom from interference, including harm) jealously because the ability to pursue our values, or to perfect our character in our own way, is essential to our sense of what it means to be a person. We should reject the notion that the individual’s happiness could be adequately provided by others. Consequently, the absence of harm/interference is not tantamount to the provision of well-being, but is the necessary condition for its achievement. As such, the absence of interference and paternalistic control is more valuable to an individual’s eudaimonia (happiness) than a well-being bestowed by others could ever be. It is true that political freedom doesn’t guarantee good moral sense; nor was it ever intended to. However, political freedom is valuable precisely because it is the only context in which the concept of morality makes sense. It is the only context in which people can make major choices for their lives and lifestyles.”
Read of the day: The Incoherence of Moral Bioenhancement | Issue 93 | Philosophy Now
..By contrast, an existentialist or a liberal like myself would argue that what makes it ‘so much easier’ to harm others than to benefit them is not technology but the global scale on which we now have to contemplate regulation of big business, the weakness of our current laws to punish harmful corporate greed in this relatively new global economy, and the reluctance of powerful individuals to choose human decency over profit. These are moral failings precisely because they are within our human power to control. Savulescu and Persson claim that we ‘naturally’ focus on the immediate future, and ‘can only’ empathise with our immediate circle of friends, and “our natural moral psychology does not provide us with the means to prevent” these moral failings. Existentialists call these kinds of naturalistic explanations or excuses ‘bad faith’. If they were true, and we really were incapable of doing otherwise, then these self-centered behaviors would cease to be moral issues. Essentially it would mean that there is no moral dimension to our lives and we were deluded to suppose there is.
But there is nothing natural or inevitable about our tendencies to myopic tribalism. With education, human beings can and do have empathy for others, and do take responsibility for the long-term effects of their actions. The ecological movement has formed a subculture where over-consumption and pollution are taboo, and it is attempting to re-educate the wider culture. Many people who have not been biochemically morally enhanced already make small but significant sacrifices every day in order to help others or to avoid harming them or the environment. As Savulescu and Persson themselves illustrate through their story of ‘the tragedy of the commons’, the only reason these morally responsible people do not make a more significant impact is that their selfless behaviour is not adopted by a sufficient number of others. Instead, as in their story, the majority continue to over-exploit the common resources. But this is a moral failing, and should be treated as blameworthy rather than as inevitable or ‘only natural’. Where the majority in a culture choose to treat the over-exploitation of resources as taboo (as opposed to ‘natural’ or even praiseworthy, as in our culture) it soon reaps the material benefits. Savulescu and Persson use the tragedy of the commons to say that it is irrational to behave responsibly unless we can trust a sufficient number of people to do the same; and since we can’t trust the majority of people to behave responsibly, they conclude that we can only make the majority behave morally by using ‘chemical moral enhancement’ as a supplement to education.
“Read of the day:
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“Descriptive philosophy is haunted not by incompleteness, but incoherence. How is it possible for there to be no fully correct way of looking at the world, yet some which are more correct than others? No capital ‘T’ truths, but many little ‘t’ truths, some of which are better than others? A double-standard creeps in through the back door. In place of absolute standards of reference and binary categorizations (ie: proven or disproven), there are many little standards of reference, each of which is full of micro-distinctions (ie: more true or less true). We can call this the objection of incoherence. The terms incoherence and incompleteness are drawn from Kurt Gödel, and his famous deconstruction, around the time of WWII, of David Hilbert and Bertrand Russel’s dream of an apodictic mathematics. Gödel used the formal language of mathematics to show that you can take two major approaches to the question of certainty. You can opt for incoherence or incompleteness, and the choice is yours.”
“We are led to believe that problems are given ready-made, and that they disappear in the responses or the solution … We are led to believe that the activity of thinking, along with truth and falsehood in relation to that activity, begins only with the search for solutions, that both of these concern only solutions. This belief probably has the same origin as the other postulates of the dogmatic image: puerile examples taken out of context and arbitrarily erected into models. According to this infantile prejudice, the master sets a problem, our task is to solve it, and the result is accredited true or false by a powerful authority. It is also a social prejudice with the visible interest of maintaining us in an infantile state, which calls upon us to solve problems that come from elsewhere, consoling or distracting us by telling us that we have won simply by being able to respond.”
“I once read that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I fundamentally disagree with this idea. I think that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of hope. We might keep making mistakes but the struggle gives us a sense of empathy and connectivity that we would not experience otherwise.”
“There has been a regrettable tendency of many scientists to claim that science is so powerful and all pervasive that in the not too distant future it will provide an explanation in principle for all phenomena in the world of nature, including man, even of human consciousness in all of its manifestations. [Karl] Popper has labeled this claim as promissory materialism, which is extravagant and unfulfillable.”
“A new, wide eyed and freshly minted vision surfaces: as a species we are just now in the process of being reborn. Insights abound, awareness rebounds, and shackles are being untangled, we might, if all goes well, be free. Free of our genetic heritage and free of our biological roots, free to soar into a promisingly magnificent future, the future of commingled information, of interweaved sensation, of co-opted dreams.”
Wildcat (via inthenoosphere)
Thanks for sharing this, re-quoting myself has a certain self reflective loop about it, a fractal.
“Rather, evolution experiences jumps in complexity (such as the emergence of a self-reflective universe, or noosphere). The complexification of human cultures, particularly language, facilitated a quickening of evolution in which cultural evolution occurs more rapidly than biological evolution.”
Humor in academy?
(via quantumaniac)
Science is enforced humility | Mike Taylor | Science | guardian.co.uk
What is the core, immutable quality of science? It’s not formal publication, it’s not peer review, it’s not properly citing sources. It’s not “the scientific method” (whatever that means). It’s not replicability. It’s not even Popperian falsificationism – the approach that admits we never exactly prove things, but only establish them as very likely by repeated failed attempts to disprove them. Underlying all those things is something more fundamental. Humility. Everyone knows it’s good to be able to admit when we’ve been wrong about something. We all like to see that quality in others. We all like to think that we possess it ourselves – although, needless to say, in our case it never comes up, because we don’t make mistakes. And there’s the rub. It goes very, very strongly against the grain for us to admit the possibility of error in our own work. That aversion is so strong that we need to take special measures to protect ourselves from it. If science was merely a matter of increasing the sum of human knowledge, it would be enough for us all to note our thoughts on blogs and move on. But science that we can build on needs to be right. That means that when we’re wrong – and we will be from time to time, unless we’re doing terribly unambitious work – our wrong results needs to be corrected. It’s because we’re not humble by nature – because we need to have humility formally imposed on us – that we need the scaffolding provided by all those things we mentioned at the start.
