Ethics: Lectures for Third Week Summer 2011

LECTURE ON THEFT, ZINN AND THE CORPORATION

Theft is a difficult issue, one that has particular implications today. First we will examine the context and history of theft, and then use the Ethical concepts we have studied as lenses

The notion of ‘property’ is bound up with European and Western identity, often seen as a principle of politics particular to Europe or fully realized in full within European historical development. We can easily see, however, that the origins of property, like most human cultures, has its origins in ape social behavior. While Europe has developed cultures of property that are highly sophisticated, these stem from cultural borrowings as much as they do from within Europe itself. Consider Islamic cultures of borrowing with interest, writing and cashing checks, etc.

Turning to ape behavior to see precedents, we can clearly identify with apes both in focusing on and becoming possessive of objects and forgetting this possession and its objects. Consider that an ape will become attached to a banana, fight against other apes that try to take the banana, and then, upon seeing a better banana, the ape will abandon the first and ignore whether or not the first falls into other hands. We can see that the ape can come to possess as ‘mine not yours’, and come to forget this possessing (‘neither mine nor yours’). This is parallel with self-other distinctions already discussed, as with the child psychology that says in the beginning there is neither and both must arise together in tension (codependent arising of Jainism and Buddhism).

There is also evidence that apes can not only fall into a ‘mine vs. everyone’ relation of possession (of objects), but apes can also recognize other apes as possessing objects themselves (selfish as other). Consider the case (from an old Anthropology class of mine) of the female chimpanzee ignoring another male chimpanzee trying to give her a banana for sex, and how the female only snatches the banana for herself when the male ape gets bored and goes out of sight so that there is no expected reciprocity. We should be cautious of the sexism here (females ‘push bananas’ at males too), but also marvel in how familiar this behavior is to humanity (next week, we will see that apes know lying too).

Humans, of course, have taken these impulses and instincts and complexified them with many inter-competing cultures, cultures that are actually capable of stealing from each other as much as they can describe and criminalize stealing themselves! While there are many intellectuals who have defended the view that while trade is universal only the West developed ‘capital’, I am critical of this view (interestingly enough, the one to coin this specialized term was the great opponent of Capitalism, Karl Marx). We have yet to do justice to intercultural borrowings, and ‘The West’ is very proud of its economics today. Is ‘capital’ a new device, particular to Western thought? I think that a study of Islam passing to Europe shows this can only be a partial truth, but we get a better view if we turn back the clock to the origin of the device known as MONEY, capital being one of its distant yet certain relatives.

Where does money come from? Why does it exist? What relationship does money have to theft, and is this different from the relationship between theft and any other object?

Money is a very interesting and unique device. Before wood pulp paper bank notes, the Sumerians and Babylonians get the credit for coining money first, the government controlling the pressing process of coinage. Today, we use Chinese style paper bank notes, backed by the government, just like in China after 500 CE or so. Wood block printing and the block printing press are other devices of Chinese origin that are crucial to this process. These two stages suggest that ‘capital’, though it may have been developed to its extent today in Europe and increasingly in American privatizing economics, cannot possibly have been a ‘inwardly European’ device of the ‘Western mind’. Other cultures of mind have had no problem inventing and using devices that are the ancestors of modern day capital.

But, WHY MONEY?

Before money, people of course possessed many things and traded them between individuals and groups. This trade was always barter, swapping one sort of thing for another sort of thing without the device of money as swapping medium. As people settled into city states, practices of borrowing and lending became stabilized. The first money was likely tokens indicating amounts of stuff borrowed from the ruler or other wealthy individuals.

The culture which includes the device of money has advantages over the culture of mere barter. Money as a device is very simple, simple the ways that numbers are simple for much the same purpose. Money is good (and bad) because it is very easy to gather/amass and divide/distribute, much more than any other object or substance.

Consider the salmon fisher in a village. She goes down to the water, and scores 20 large salmon. This is far more than she can eat, but she can trade salmon for other things that she needs in the barter culture. However, salmon does not keep for long, even if one knows how to salt and preserve it. What happens if she goes to the market and not many people want or need salmon that day? What if she has enough salmon to get what she wants, but there are not enough people who need salmon to trade with her for what she wants? In a culture where the salmon can be sold for money, you can keep the money for thirty years (even with inflation and other problems, deterioration of coins, etc) but no one can keep salmon for thirty years, even with freezers! In this way, money is much easier to amass and to keep than salmon.

In the same way, money is easier to divide than salmon. Let us say our fisher comes to market with 20 large salmon, and wants to trade for a basket. I, the basket maker, tell her that one third of a salmon is worth one basket, but I want the front half of the salmon. What happens if she wants to leave the salmon uncut, or if she needs four fifths of a salmon later for someone else? What if she wants to keep all the fish heads for herself? Money has no features to it other than quantity, even though the pictures are often very pretty. Fifty dollars is just fifty things, nothing less, so there is no problem with changing it to two twenties and a ten. You cannot make a whole salmon again from twenty salmon heads! In this way, money is much easier to divide and distribute than salmon. If we consider the bustle of a crowded market, it becomes clear why money would be such a useful (and thus abusive) device, and how its invention allowed for the modern merchants and bankers of today. Consider the trillion dollar bailout today, how this is very abstract yet very real for many people. Luck for us we do not need to bail out banks with truckloads of salmon!

There are, however, two great disadvantages to the culture of money use:
First, theft, like trade, becomes easier! In fact, money not only creates and supports many types of legal economics, it simultaneously creates and supports many types of illegal economics like paying money for sex or drugs (Derrida and the signature).

Second, the desire for money becomes quite intense. Considering that money, sex and cocaine have been shown to light up similar areas of the human brain, money to barter is like cocaine to chewing coca leaves. Since money can be traded for anything, even ironically illegal things, the draw towards money becomes the draw towards any and everything desired. In this sense, the desire for money is far more intense than the desire for salmon because money can buy salmon, or remain money, or buy anything else if one ceases wanting salmon. Just as having salmon means that the possibility of eating salmon is now practically guaranteed, having money means the possibility of satisfying any desire whatsoever is guaranteed. This ultimately means that there is far more reason to steal money than there is to steal salmon, strange considering that you can eat salmon and live off of it alone!

In terms of world politics, which includes the Zinn reading I gave you, stealing and money are central issues of identity. Communism and Capitalism are divided on the issue of money, even as Communists print government money and Capitalists organize socialist programs (public education like BCC, social welfare, public roads and institutions). The question is: do you trust the government or the corporations more with your money and economics (an instance of the one/many problem again)? America has shown that there are great advantages to privatization, letting corporations control economics rather than the centralized government. Unfortunately, this does not do away with problems of authority and corruption (consider that PG&E is still in charge of California’s power, a pretty plum, in spite of being convicted of stealing from Californians en masse). Truth be told, both America and the Soviet Union told third world countries that they would not steal from them or enslave them like their other surely would, only to both be guilty of similar forms of corrupt authoritarianism.

A great book to read on all of this is John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He actually came to BCC last semester for a reading, but I had my other job. As Perkins says so perfectly, in American foreign relations we try to get people in debt to us because that binds everyone to our economy and our desires. I know firsthand from UCB Hass Business School students that indebting the poor here in America and poor third world countries is an open practice, spoken of openly in instruction. The financial crisis today was clearly caused by irresponsible and predatory lending. Our newspapers never speak of these things, but a piece on NPR my friend gave to me will tell you just as clearly and honestly an economics professor at Hass. CREDIT is itself like money, a device that has its advantages but also its disadvantages, especially for the disadvantaged. If our economy falls far from where it is today, it could very well be due to the disadvantages of credit and capital that we have stalled and distanced from ourselves for the time being as a privileged and advantaged culture. The point is: money helps the advantaged steal from the disadvantaged, even as it helps the disadvantaged gain advantage! This is why Americans are relatively wealthy yet there is an increasing gap between rich and poor here as well as in the third world. While the ‘American way’ sometimes allows the poor to get rich, it also very much allows the rich to get much richer and there is only so much in the pot.

Of course, the rich are also more encouraged than ever to steal from the rich as well as from the poor. Consider in 1996 CIA convicted of manipulating business to favor Americans over Australians. Neither Australians nor Americans can recall this, due to lack of media coverage in both locations. Since America and Australia are both wealthy Capitalist countries, you are only doing the system disservice by making such a scandal public.

Now that we have briefly examined the history of money and advantage, we have set the stage to ask the question of theft. The Ethical question we must ask is: Is theft ever justified?
We can use our Ethical concepts we have studied to give various answers to this question. While I will not say that there is a certain answer here, we can see that there are many ways of answering the question but each has its problems. This is how we know we are investigating the question in matters of real life and not in an ideal construct.

Principle
Kant, of course, would give the first and most positive answer to this question: NO, theft of property is NEVER justified. Notice that Kant, living in the German Enlightenment of the 1700s, is very proud of the culture of property and considers the possession of property to be an entirely reasonable and principled act. This is questionable when we trace its roots all the way back to chimpanzee behavior, of course.

This answer has the obvious advantage of never getting one involved in most questions of stealing, but there remain issues. What if one’s society is stealing from another, and legally one has become wealthy within the stealing society? While we could imagine that one is ignorant of the ongoing theft and therefore not DIRECTLY guilty of theft, one is INDIRECTLY guilty. Societies, especially America, store their wealth in the pockets of the wealthy. America stores its wealth in its millionaires and billionaires primarily, and encourages these individuals economically to siphon money from other economies and put it in their pockets because this is the central way that America gets wealthier. Thus, while one may hold fast to the principle of ‘I shall not steal’, one could be complicit in groups and cultures that are engaged in theft that benefits the individual and the individual actively supports (even in the absence of conscious consent).

Virtue & Consequence
According to the concept of ethical virtue, theft is fully justified as long as the individual is virtuous or becomes virtuous through the act of theft. In a very similar way, Utilitarians and Consequentialists would argue that theft is justified if in the long term it results in good and justice, much happiness and prevention of harm. Seems impossible? Robin Hood is the perfect example for consideration. If I rob the evil rich people and give to poor people who are starving (i.e. if we construct an example in which many would agree), many would say that I am virtuous and that I have acted for the best ends in the long view. I may be hanged for the crimes, but my actions benefit others and can be argued to benefit my own character (though this is debatable).

Balance
The concept of balance draws our attention not only to the duality of stealing and not stealing but also to the duality of possessing and forgetting about possession, grasping and letting go. There is a great passage of the Dao that says, ‘if you want to be free from robbers, do not store up treasure in your house’. If one stores up wealth, one brings theft to one’s doorstep. If one stores up wealth and becomes attached to it, one brings fear of theft to one’s mind (a Zen koan theme is calling intention in the mind a thief, that the grasping of desire in the mind is the real thief). If you do not worry about money, not only do you not have to worry about stealing from others, you do not worry about others stealing from you, no matter how much one has!

Also, consider that if one steals and gets away with it, this makes the compulsion for stealing stronger. One continues to steal, and then gets caught. Getting away with stealing can be a major cause of getting caught stealing, a paradox similar to the bad example attack on Utilitarianism (in this case, ‘good’ examples can lead to bad just as bad examples can lead to good).

One problem with using balance here: should we think that we can do bad as long as we balance it out with good? If we give to charity every time we steal, does this balance things for our own merit or for the shared situation?

Drive and Self Interest
At first, it seems that this concept would tell us, ‘steal to your heart’s content’. This may prove harder than it sounds. Is it in one’s self interest to steal from everyone? Not if everyone has large sticks and helmets haven’t been invented yet. Unfortunately, this concept is best for understanding the international situation and the reading I gave you from Zinn. America today feels that it must indebt the third world to itself to strengthen its capitalist way of life, as it did during the Cold War. Supporters of the Vietnam war as well as the ‘War on Terrorism’ today say openly on the News that we need to ‘defend America’s interests’. Thought the word ‘economic’ is left off the front of ‘interests’ here, this is essentially what is being argued. America is a very fine omelet (a money credit omelet, if you will), and this means eggs need to be stolen from the hen house. Perkins’ book gives us excellent insight into its mechanisms.

Perspective and Intersubjectivity
To repeat what was said at the beginning, we have all had the experience of stealing and having things stolen. Hopefully there is something that moves us towards wisdom in not stealing even though theft seems an inevitable and in fact integral part of our world. Aside from the ‘Golden Rule’, there is likely no other constant source of deterrence from theft considering that the government that prints the money and prosecutes the theft also in some circumstances supports theft between its citizens and steals from other governments in the name of life.

To further show the mechanisms and complexity of theft in the modern world, there is no better nor more relevant documentary than ‘The Corporation’. In it, we learn that corporations are considered artificial persons, and since they put profit before all other concerns, they behave much like sharks and sociopaths.


LECTURE ON LIES AND PROPAGANDA

Individuals and groups manipulate the truth to serve their own ends, in a conscious/unconscious way that often resembles denial. Speech means that we can tell the truth or tell lies. This has been an issue for humans before they were even human, like theft and violence.

Apes and Lying:
In one of the most fascinating stories of ape behavior I have heard, researchers documented that a young male baboon made the mistake of trying to force himself sexually on a high ranking female baboon of his tribe. When the female screeched, the rest of the tribe began chasing the young male along the ground floor. Suddenly, the young male turned and gave the call for leopard. The chasers dashed up into the trees and out of sight, while the young male stood, watching them leave, on the ground in no danger from any leopard. The researchers concluded that they had witnessed and documented an ape lying to save his own skin. Thus, we can assume, humans have been lying since before they were human.

Children and Lying:
Interestingly, we believe in lying to children as a matter of raising them. Children before the age of seven are quite incapable of telling the difference between fiction and reality or understanding sarcasm. This is why young children believe in Santa and wonder where Thomas the Train Engine lives.

There are two amusing stories I have on this. One of my students in a response paper wrote that as a young girl she had a pet goldfish and accidentally killed the fish by cleaning its bowl with hand soap. When she saw her fish was dead her mother, who did not want to torture the young girl with the truth, told her that the cat had walked by and the fish had a heart attack. Notice the utilitarianism here, and that Kant would be mortified. Secondly, there was a news story last year about a boy in Thailand who was stuck on the roof of a tall building, and he would not climb into the arms of the police who ascended a ladder to rescue him. One of the police dressed up in a Spiderman costume, and the boy threw open his arms and leapt into the waiting embrace of Spiderman, who carried him down to a cheering crowd.

Children believe in superheroes and villains. One would like to think that the use of heroes and myths ends with childhood, but the literature on propaganda tells us that all civilizations make myths that glorify themselves and demonize their enemies, both internal and external. Because children are raised with these myths, they often do not think to question them even when they are quite past the age of seven.

Consider the use of superheroes in comics, fighting criminals at home and enemies of America.
Watchmen is a good look at some of these dynamics. Consider that Iron Man was originally from Korea, then the recent movie puts him in the middle east. We still use superheroes to stand for “truth, justice and the American way”, but we have subtler ways. I think you can look at Iron Man and the new Batman movie and see distortions that we not only pass on to kids and teenagers but the adults in the audience as well.

City States and Rock Edicts:
The Assyrians were masters of propaganda, and they were one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. Most of their conquest was through trade, though they invented all of the siege weapons used through the European middle ages. Rock edicts, tall carvings in cliffs and on monuments, declared glorious meanings for the common people to consume. Interestingly, the common people could not read, and someone who could read and pass the messages to others was called “one who makes the stones speak”. Just like a modern textbook, the human authors are lost and the media simply speaks for itself.

Here we come to the old and the new style of propaganda. The old propaganda model is simple, and it is still in use particularly by traditional and communist countries: We are the King/State, we tell you what you need to know, namely that we look after you and our enemies are evil. WE are the great multicultural empire that looks after everyone (Assyrian did not denote a race, but a citizen of the empire), but our enemies will oppress you and kill you for no good reason. Very little has changed over several thousand years.

The new propaganda is even more effective, and strangely it does not call itself propaganda at all. In China today, the communist government says openly that they use propaganda to educate the people, and the same was admitted in the United States and Britain until just this last century. The government tells you “brush your teeth, it is good for you” and this is acknowledged as a message coming from authorities telling you what you should know and do. Chomsky, who we will study today, is quite clear on this point, as is Bernays. Propaganda only recently became something evil, something that the enemy does.

I am going to focus on American propaganda from WWI through the Cold War, and then talk about Chomsky’s theories on propaganda models and the American media’s role in American empire and economics.

Hegel tells us when we haven’t looked into an issue, perspectives are polarized. Here in America, similarly in Britain, it is thought that we are free and love democracy, but other cultures (especially the Germans in WWI and II, the Russians in the Cold War, and Islamic extremists) are not civilized but rather lie as much as they can because ‘they hate our freedom’.

We have failed to have a real discussion about censorship and bias in America. This means ‘THEY’ are simply biased and put forth propaganda, and WE would never do something like that. This is not only the basic human frame as before, but Americans and British got set in this in a particular way through WWI and II. In WWI, propaganda became something the Germans do, not the Belgians, British or Americans. In WWII, the Germans and Japanese do propaganda, and in the cold war the Russians. The British and Americans, however, would never do ‘propaganda’ by name, as they are the champions of liberty, democracy and freedom from tyranny (even as Britain and then America plundered and sought empire in the same way that the Germans, Russians did). Today, this is ‘Islam and the West’ where we have unbiased journalism while they simply put forward obvious propaganda (watch ‘Control Room’ for the best of this).

What we need? We need to see how people censor and authority is abusive in comparison, and this is what is never done. Rather than hear one line of Chinese media through ours and say “Propaganda!” we need to compare censorship operation by the government in both places and see the complex similarities and differences. I am going to show human overall consistencies while describing the particular way that Americans are involved in the inscription of messages and ideology in our society. That way, we get beyond the strange complex of saying that in America there is no propaganda while living in an America that knows how to sell and spin professionally better than anyone ever has.

WWI (the British/Americans vs. the Germans)
The Germans invade Belgium, and the British make up all sorts of things. The Germans become the evil Hun, and the Belgians the poor victim, even though they had just gotten bad world press by systematically killing 10 million Africans in the Congo.

The British run propaganda in America to get us into the war, and teach us the techniques of British style empire and propaganda. You set up ‘free’ reporters to say your messages, rather than do the old way like Germany and Russia with a Ministry of Propaganda.
Thus, after the horrors of WWI, ‘propaganda’ became a bad word in Britain and America.
Since then, we do not do propaganda at all. We do ‘education’, ‘information’, ‘public relations’, ‘human relations’, and in time of war we may engage in psychological warfare, but we never do ‘propaganda’.

Propaganda is not an evil conspiracy. Consider great example of guy who did ‘Birth of a Nation’, KKK film, being jailed for 10 years for his next movie showing British and Natives committing war crimes against Americans.

Basically, the British and Americans lied as much as possible about German atrocities, the French and British took most of what Germany had after WWI, the Germans fell even lower in the 20s with the market crash, and they came back as the Nazis, NOW as bad as the British and Americans had led others to believe.

Consider that Irish newspapers in NY were shut down for telling people that the British have been evil in Ireland, Scotland, India, Africa, all while calling themselves the defenders of democracy and freedom. At this time, government censorship during time of war was unquestioned (story about Pentagon lifting ban on coffins today).

Bernays book Propaganda:
Chomsky says that Bernays was one of the first propaganda specialists in America and he is quite open about praising the use of propaganda. Bernays says, during WWI, that it is remarkable that the moment America propaganda explodes (advertising, PR), becomes a necessary tool of corporations, it becomes ‘evil’ in name. PR went from being Barnum and Bailey to every corporation running spin and ad campaigns. Bernays invented the committee of Doctors who tell you to eat eggs and bacon for a ‘hearty’ breakfast, saying old way is ‘Eat Bacon!’, new way: ‘Drs say, ‘Eat bacon’’. This is ‘free expert’ style of propaganda.

In 1938, writing his book, Bernays says that half the front page of NYT is identifiably propaganda, stories planted by interested parties. He says the NAACP is a great PR group, and show a strong hand holding their annual conference in Atlanta. He got out of cigarette ads in the 40s, tabloids having picked up on the health risks. It wasn’t till the 1970s that major media carried the story at all. 1953 Bernays helped United Fruit convince everyone that Guatemala was a communist threat, so the US overthrew the elected leader with a CIA coup and we supported dictatorship there for cheap labor to supply Americans with cheaper fruit.

Nazis and WWII:
Hitler says: We did not have as good propaganda as the British and Americans, but next time will be different. Nazi TV, engineering goes to American, America rises above Britain in wake of WWII. During WWII, the Americans and British praised Stalin and his Red Army as they all fought the Nazis. Then, as soon as the war was over, the British led the Americans in the Cold War anti-communism campaign. This is where stuff gets REALLY INTERESTING: US vs. Soviet Union. Both say, ‘THEY do all of this, so WE HAVE TO’, in the official channels, but the story for the masses is: only THEY would do that.

COLD WAR
The following material is drawn largely from the book The Cultural Cold War by Saunders.
Post WWII, the French and Russians had largely convinced everyone that America has no culture, only cheap commercialism, and America talks a lot about Freedom, but look at how they treat black people. US and Soviets started ‘Congresses’, (Soviets for World Peace, US for Cultural Freedom). It is now know that these were the two big umbrella groups for a lot of fronts for propaganda campaigns. These groups used historians, scientists, poets, artists, philosophers, professors, you name it, to give the impression that individuals were lining up against ‘the evil’ of the other. The US wanted to fight the ‘French Flu’ and push European intellectuals away from Marxism as liberation towards free market capitalism as liberation. Ex: US intellectual goes to Paris, gives a talk about the ‘Negro’s progress in America’. Then when he is heckled (“possibly by communists”), brings out black band to do jazz all night.

US used CIA and many fronts to tour black performers through Europe, increase publication of certain books (Camus, not Sartre example, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, introductions written to spin Animal Farm and 1984 by Orwell, who hated both). The idea was to promote the NONCOMMUNIST LEFT. (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty not studied in America, as they boycotted Congress of Cultural Freedom invitations due to US treatment of Black people).

The US had spent $34 million on this by 1950 (also, wealthiest country at this point, passing Britain in financing the rebuilding of Britain, Germany and France). The money quadrupled in rate of expense after 1950, as China became the world’s largest communist country. The CIA set up French literature reviews, toured the Boston symphony orchestra, approached wealthy individuals about setting up art collections that praise US art and European art that honors the US.

Pollock and others (though communists) praised and toured through Europe to show that American has genius painters after all. Agent as director stockpiled abstract minimalist art at the NY Moma (Contemporary Chinese art exhibit in Berkeley today). The Ford and Rockefeller foundations remain serious fronts for money dispensed in America to artists, writers and performers who do work that promotes America even as it is avant-garde art.

At home, Billy Graham got money knowingly from intelligence, toured America telling Christians that ‘Communism is masterminded by Satan’, never mind that the first communes were French Christian communes. John Wayne and Ronald Reagan were promoted as Soldier/Cowboys, both spied for the FBI against communism at home for the house of un-American activities committee of McCarthy. Disney and Warner brothers made cartoons for the US in WWII, then denounced their writers and animators as communists when they went on strike. Disney spied for the FBI, testified for HUAC, while he was doing illegal things to his workers like sending strike breakers to beat people up and the FBI looked the other way.

In films, token black people began appearing well before the civil rights movement. Documents of agents who worked with studios on scripts say, ‘took out a drunk, added a black person’. One of the best examples is a black golfer and caddy added into the background of a scene on a golf course, at a time when white Catholics and Jews had a rough time getting into golf clubs. Consider that the civil rights movement was partly started by seeing token black people in the cinema, like the golfer and caddy, and wondering aloud why this could not become a real lived reality. Both US and Soviets fought over who liberates and who oppresses. In 1956, the ‘Melting Pot’ became a slogan for the US. We can see that many Russian films and Korean propaganda posters deplore the evils that America has done to black people as a simple tactic.

Today, if your movie has anything to do with police or military, they will give you heavy support as long as they go over the script and ok it. Six media owner companies means each needs a cushy relationship with both cops and military. That means: America is well aware of the streamlined view of America put out all over the world in TV and Movies. They are the BEST form of propaganda. There are consulting firms who specialize in getting your script ready for police and military approval, so that you do not get charged extra by the official government representatives who review the scripts for a fee.

Meanwhile, stories pepper the news about how “Iran censors movies” and “China might be censoring the internet”. No further detail is drawn. This is the British/American style: THEY simply censor, without any comparison of us and them. THEY censor (so, we don’t?). Recently the media corporations agreed with the government not to show footage of coffins coming home from the war. Is there ever a need for a conspiracy when power works the way it always has?

Chomsky and Herman’s MANUFACTURING CONSENT:
There is no better book on American propaganda and the stories both promoted and ignored by the American media. The book argues that the mass-media protects the interest of the wealthy and powerful individuals and institutions in America by promoting particular views and filtering out others. This process involves the ownership of media groups, the reliance of media on the government for information and support, the reliance of media on advertising revenue, flak heaped upon dissident views (particularly socialist views and those critical of business interests).


LECTURE ON VIOLENCE AND GROSSMAN

Apes & Violence
Monkeys and apes are some of the only creatures that can rotate their shoulders as we can.
This means that they, like us, are the only creatures that can throw things and club things.

There are three major groups of apes, Gorillas, Orangutans and Chimpanzees. Gorillas kill kids, but they don’t rape. Orangutans never kill kids, but they rape all the time. Our direct ancestor is the Chimpanzee, which comes in two major sub-species. Bonobo Chimps, the smaller group, are quite non-violent and solve all social issues with sex. The main group of Chimps, our direct relatives, do all the kinds of violence known to human kind. Once again, like every ethical issue we examine, the issue is older than humanity.

Early Civilization & Violence
Violence, like sex, was a part of life since childhood in the beginning. As Grossman says, in Victorian England sex became something shameful and best kept out of sight, and similarly with the butcher and refrigeration violence became something out of sight. Consider David Foster Wallace’s FX Porn article about T2 and Jurassic park. Sex and killing are specialized spectacles, quite unrealistic and pieced together with bad dialogue. Interestingly, serial killers and aggressive personality types often start and practice by killing animals, which used to be something everyone had to do. These are disassociating fantasies.

In the ancient world cosmology picture of the world, sacrifice and dismemberment play a major part in the creation of the world. To eat, one must kill livestock. Similarly, sacrifice was seen as giving food/thanks back in balance and exchange. The cosmos was thought of as a great sacrifice in which the All is carved up for everyone’s use and consumption. Thus, one should carve up animals and humans and give them back to be fair.

Consider the scepter of the king. Often in early cultural art we see the king holding a stick that symbolizes his authority. It has been suggested that this is the king as judge, jury and executioner. If you do something stupid, you get hit with the stick. How hard you get hit depends on what you did. The Egyptian Pharaohs have crossing stick and hook, ‘rod and staff’ from the psalm, in crossed arms, signifying that the king has power over life and death, which cross over into one another (like any pair of opposites).

Society became complexified and highly specialized. We now have specialized individuals who kill animals, who cook meat, who order acts of aggression, and who carry out the orders. As Grossman says, this specialization has made violence unnatural and fantastic, like sex.

Consider now that the US spends more on War than anyone has ever in all of world history. Objective ‘science’ is a myth in so far as the US Military has been one of the biggest supporters and funders of science (physics, mathematics, psychology) so far. Addicted To War says: over 50% of budget and taxes go to US Military.


LT. COL. GROSSMAN’S ON KILLING

The book is written in 1995, and Grossman says that there has never been a book on killing or dealing with killing from the individual perspective until this time. As an officer and psychologist of the US Marine Corps, Grossman tells us many things that are surprising but trustworthy about the capability of individuals and groups to be violent.

The overall message of the book I find to be quite positive. We all have violent thoughts, but very few humans will be violent, no matter what culture or ethnicity or gender. Normally, there is a safety catch in the human mind that prevents us from being violent (notice the gun metaphor, useful for teaching troops). However, in certain situations with particular factors, most everyone becomes capable of violence. 2% of the population have an aggressive personality, potentially psychosis (these individuals are often, Grossman says, drafted into the hardcore units, the marine spearhead squads dropped behind enemy lines or the frontal advance groups). Regardless of whether one is of the 98% or the aggressive 2%, violence is a kick at first but then psychological problems set in that are difficult for the individual.

The overall message is: though human beings are constantly getting themselves into violent situations, there are no human beings who find violence easy or simply justifiable. They pose this way to seem tough, but as Grossman says violence is about impressing the enemy and making them submit much more than it is about the killing. The killing is always in the service of something else, such as staying alive. Grossman, as a psychologist, is convinced that post traumatic stress disorder is natural and most will carry it silently their whole lives, afraid of what others will say or say about them if they question the things they did for the highest ideals.

In my terms: there is a balance that is quite brutal in the head. We can pretend like others don’t matter to us, but only for awhile. Grossman says: the one who takes life cheapens his own, in his own head, and argues this point well.

Non-firing Rates:
Grossman starts off from a very military pragmatic point of view. He argues that we have every reason to believe that most humans who have been involved with war have not tried to kill anyone the whole time. He notes studies that say that WWI and II troops would routinely fire over the heads of the enemy. He says that he and others examined these studies and the military celebrated a 95% firing rate in Vietnam, although he later tells us the factors that make this seem much better for the military than it really was. There were 50,000 rounds per US kill in Vietnam.

Grossman argues that, in all cultures and times, the majority of soldiers were posturing in war, doing everything to make the enemy back down, cease fighting and submit. Before guerilla war became the norm, this is the beating of the drums and the war chants, the clashing of shields. Grossman says we see nonlethal fighting with one’s own species in piranhas, rattlers, and the whole animal kingdom. Alexander the great only lost 700 men the whole 20 years of war.
This is quite similar to Hegel’s idea of the master/slave, reversed: submittal is primary.

American media is quite gifted with the myth of the easy kill, for both the hero and villain. Ex: Schwarzenegger’s Commando (“I let him go”) and O Dog from Menace to Society watching tape. This myth, like the propaganda last week, is a cultural conspiracy, a conspiracy of silence according to Grossman. It’s not what it says that’s the lie, but what remains unsaid.

What this myth conceals: there are far greater chance of being a psychological casualty of conflict then there are of being killed or wounded. 60 days of continuous combat without rest means 98% rate of psychological casualties (why we keep ‘green zones’ and distance to target).

But: is this killing or being subjected to combat? Grossman argues that Britain and Germany bombed each other’s cities in WWII, the first massive bombardments of history (now our specialty, setting the bar in Vietnam, then Gulf War, now War in Iraq). The theory was that the civilian population would go into traumatic shell shock, that everyone would be quickly converted to psychological casualties, but this turned out surprisingly to not be the case.

It turns out that, unless one feels that one has done something to warrant being killed, one bunkers down and does not suffer post traumatic stress disorder. Depression sets in, but not PTSD. Prison guards in the cities DO suffer from PTSD during bombings, but NOT the POWS! This shows us the balance of self and other in the head. One compulsively sets the world up as THIS perspective vs. OTHERS, and one sets the others up as one sets up the self in the head. This means that when one knows that the other will feel JUSTIFIED in killing, one becomes conflicted with oneself. Consider that recon patrols behind enemy lines don’t suffer PTSD like hard core (2%) marine spearhead units that are dropped behind lines to sew death and confusion. If one is in the enemies home turf, but not killing, one does not feel like the justifiably killable target that one does if one is killing the enemy. Consider that killing someone in their home is much more traumatic and justifiable than killing someone in their home.

So: What factors increase or decrease the justification and the enabling of violence?
This is what Grossman and the US Military have been studying intensely. Grossman tells us many surprising things openly that are done to help US troops kill easier with less consequence.

Absolution by Distance:
Killing with a knife is much harder than killing with a 20 foot pike, and killing with an automatic weapon is far easier because one does not feel the other’s body at all (propaganda value of showing the enemy with fixed bayonets). Medium to long range is the easiest kill. The farther away, the less PTSD. The more equipment mediating the kill, the easier it is. Bomber pilots feel little to no PTSD. Grossman says ‘Nintendo Warfare’ in first Gulf War is intentional use of night vision goggles and TV screens in tanks, which lessens the PTSD (one would think the purpose was to take the enemy in the dark, but not so).

The less one sees eyes and faces, the easier it is to kill. This is why the executioner is hooded along with the executed. Both lessen the feeling of PTSD for the executioner. Apes and humans have an impulse to attack when the other turns and runs. This is why if one is caught or kidnapped, one always looks the captor in the eyes as much as possible, take off the helmet or hat (or hood), why military are taught to kill with a kidney strike from behind.

Intolerance and Racism are used actively as distancing mechanisms, making it easier to kill. The less one’s enemy is like oneself, the easier it is to justify killing. This is why it is fundamental to say the other ‘does not share one’s values’. This is THE WEST, earlier the EUROPEAN RACE.

Absolution by Authority:
Officers are separated from killing. The officer orders the aggression, the troops carry it out. The officer can feel distanced from the act because they themselves did not kill or see the kill, and the troops can feel distance because they did not decide to kill or order the kill.
Interestingly, the farther the authority is away from the troops, the less the authority is effective, BUT the farther away the authority the easier it is to do the ordering.

Group Absolution:
The more one is firing into the brush with many others, the more one is unsure that one is killing a particular target oneself. In firing squads, often only one person has a bullet, and the others have blanks and are told this to ease the actions. In defending the home (being amongst one’s group and the group turf) one feels justified in killing in a way that is reversed when one is on enemy soil, as mentioned.

Stages of Killing
1) Combat High, exhilaration, esp. medium to long range
2) Remorse (move from positive to swing negative)
3) Rationalization

Both soldiers and gang members find themselves having nightmares where those who have been killed come back to haunt them and ask why. It is as if killing a being does not kill the presence, that the negated presence comes back. This is likely why people believed in evil ghosts for so long across all cultures. One feels one is still indebted to beings long gone if one was involved in their disappearance. (ex: ghost of Jacob Marley, the telltale heart of Poe)

Grossman notes that for HR Bush, Gulf War surge in popularity and then fall in end show social process of these stages as well as individual (and now this fits W Bush in Iraq war as well).


LECTURE ON THE ENVIRONMENT AND CARSON

Reading: Silent Spring and Selections on Environmental concepts

In the earliest cultures, humans and animals were understood to share a world together as very much equals. As humanity began domesticating livestock, humans are increasingly understood to be above all animals, the god-like animal. Adam in the Bible is namer and master of all.
At same time, world as balance with humans (like Leviathan and Behemoth). We have done so well as a species that we have become quite unbalanced with nature. While many cultures have spoken of being in balance (Egyptian Wisdom for instance), it was only with the growth of mechanization and technology that Islamic scholars first wrote consciously of the impact that humans had systematically on the environment. This makes sense, as Europe got its machines and chemistry from Islamic civilization.

As we see in The Corporation, in the 1940s and 1950s, just as US became the wealthiest nation, petroleum products were used to make huge varieties of products. Wood and metal gave way to plastic. Remember that it is not ‘the oil stupid’ as far as just gasoline. All our life is permeated with petroleum products and synthetic chemicals. Monsanto and DuPont are the big giants.
What has happened: we are in a culture that can give us immediate things according to our intentions, but such that we ignore the long and complicated process of nature. Nature can sift things out, but not as fast as we can synthesize just what we want while externalizing the unneeded and then ignoring it until it snowballs up into our face. Cancer rates, birth defect rates, and other problems are evidence of the environmental impact.

Add on top of externalization the competition between corporations in a culture that ignores the consequences and people are racing to screw things up and put money in their own pocket before someone else does. This imbalance creates further imbalances. Modern plantations and corporate farms have created surges in pests, and then we spray tons of pesticide to kill the swarms of pests, and then the pests resurge because all of the other pests were killed, and the cycle grows steadily out of control. As silent spring suggests, we need human rights to not be poisoned. While many thought DDT ban was point of book, actually Carson calls for rights. Consider differences in infant mortality rates and who lives in the inner city.

Environmental Issues (from the Blackwell Environmental Reader):
Wilderness: We have seen that this is an interesting issue for utilitarianism. Does one consider best use in the long term to be using everything, or do we leave things unused for long term?
Sustainability: Nature and economy must both be preserved, or both will collapse.
Environmental Justice: Who gets benefits and who gets harm of processes in the culture? One fifth of world consumes four fifths of resources. Some, like Rev. Chaviz Jr., argue for the concept of Environmental racism, that pollution and cleaning products affect those who are ostracized in the worst areas of town far more than others. The horrifying infant mortality rate among American black people, twice that of white Americans, is evidence of this.

Ethics: Midterm Review

The Midterm Exam will consist of 20 multiple choice questions, three short answer questions covering central concepts, and an essay.

Principle, Moral & Law: Kant
Kant is a positivist with regard to principle, morals and laws. Kant believes that reason should rule over desire (like the early cosmology above) and principles that are figured out by reason should always be followed regardless of the consequences (note that the opposite position can be found in the Utilitarian/consequentialist position below). Kant believes that one starts with good will (good in itself without question) and reasoned principles follow, and one should use this good beginning regardless of what consequences follow (though he says this naturally aims at and leads to good consequences even if this is secondary). Kant calls this “the categorical imperative” and “unconditional universal law”. The example of this is the guy with the knife who asks you “Where did your friend go?”, to whom one should not lie regardless of how easy a good end can come from lying. One must “Do one’s Duty” even if one goes down with the ship.

Virtue & Merit: Aristotle
Virtue is like principle in being a good beginning, but it is also a state or end to obtain. Also, virtue can be individual in a way that principle is collective and for the group. The idea is that one gains virtue, merit or “goodness”, and one can then use this ability/capacity to do good. A virtue-ethicist believes that becoming good or virtuous is more important than following principles or simply having good consequences. One should be virtuous even if it means breaking principles or bad results in a particular situation. The upside of this is a virtue centered ethic is not slave to principle or always seeking the best consequences. The downside is that one could believe that oneself or one’s group is “the virtuous” and ignore principles and consequences to the degree that it becomes a problem for oneself or others.

Consequence, Utility & End: Mill
Consequentialism or Utilitarianism argues that one should focus completely on the ends or results to determine if an act or person is good or bad. Specifically, one should try to maximize pleasure/happiness and minimize pain/suffering for everyone, taking a long view (not a short, 15 minute view). Epicurus was an early Greek consequentialist, and he is followed by the Utilitarian school of Bentham and Mill. While Bentham leaned towards the positive side of the ‘pleasure principle’, maximizing happiness, Mill leaned towards the negative, minimizing harm. Mill is the best known, and has had an important impact on modern thought and theory of law.
Mill’s Utilitarianism is opposite yet similar in many ways to Kant. Both see their side as fundamental and the other side as a secondary consequence. Kant says always follow principle and you will likely be happy, and Mill says always try for happiness and you will likely be principled. Both see their own primary focus as good in itself without the possibility of proof or question.
Attacks on Utilitarianism include: Paradox of the bad as good example, Marx’s guess who gets to use who for whose happiness (the rich and elite), Happiness as unobtainable ideal, Environmental challenge to using the world for human purposes.

Balance & The Mean: Egyptian Wisdom & Confucius
Meaning and value work through pairs of opposites (good/evil, open/closed, individual/collective). A reoccurring theme of the world’s wisdom is that seeking the mean or middle between opposites is better than clinging to either side of an opposition. We can see some beautiful examples of this thinking in the Egyptian wisdom and Confucius passages. In the Egyptian wisdom, moderation of eating and drinking, luxury, and balancing one’s own interest with others are the clearest examples. Confucius offers particularly insightful sayings that call for a balance of one’s self with others for the cultivation of self and society.

Self Interest, Self Esteem and Drive: Nietzsche & Rand
Self is very much an end, though like Mill it can be phrased as a principle (focus on the ends).
While early ethics (in accord with ancient cosmology above) focused on the collective good, modern society has taken a turn towards the individual good. These two have always been complimentary, but devices and media have allowed us to be more enabled as individuals than ever before. Nietzsche and Rand both focus on individual achievement as the central end of life, but they are completely different as far as trusting judgment and truth. Nietzsche trusts no truth at all, calling all collectivism “slave morality” and performing his own misogyny as “Philosophy is always the personal confession of the author”. Rand believes her opinions to be objective, and calls her school the “Objectivists”. Rand’s idea of believing in yourself was repackaged as “self esteem” in the 1980s. While it is important to have self esteem, problems can arise when one trusts one’s own judgment and rejects all opposing judgments entirely.

Perspective & Intersubjectivity: Heraclitus & Zhuang Zi
A balance between thinking our views are completely right or wrong, truth or illusion, is the concept of perspective. The “objective” is very much the intersubjective, the similarity and difference of a group of subjective perspectives. Heraclitus and Chuang Tzu are both excellent thinkers to read to get good examples of this sort of thought. Both use perspectives of animals to show that collective human opinion is just that (pigs sleep in mud, birds sleep in trees). The concept of perspective is good for showing us that all views count, but they are also each limited and capable of progress and expansion.

How to Write a Philosophy Essay

To write a focused paper that argues for a particular point of view, we must pick an issue and take a position on that issue. While we could invent an issue and position out of the blue, if we pick an issue already discussed it is easier to stay focused and relevant to the subject matter.

Let us say that a thinker or school of thought has taken a position on an issue, and we want to argue for or against this position. Let us assume that there are rival thinkers with opposite positions on the issue. Let us call the first position A, and the opposite position B. While A and B can agree on any unlimited number of points, they must disagree on at least one point. To begin an essay, we briefly state the two positions before we take a position ourselves.

Example 1: Kant argues that morality is anchored in good beginnings (intent, morals, duty) Mill argues that morality is anchored in good ends (happiness, utility, consequences). Both Kant and Mill believe one should use rules and act for the good of society, but Kant believes that one should never break rules while Mill believes rules only serve as tools to achieve good consequences.

Example 2: Mencius argues that human nature is essentially good, while Hsun Zi argues that human nature is essentially evil. Both agree that society is necessary for self improvement, but Mencius argues that society is rooted in human nature while Hsun Zi argues that society is corrective to human nature.

Example 3: Hindus argue that the self/mind/soul is eternal, while Buddhists argue that the self/mind/soul is temporary/mortal. Both agree that karma determines rebirth, but Hindus argue that we always retain our particular individual self while Buddhists argue that extinction of the self and identity with the whole can be achieved through effort and practice.

Now that we have stated the issue and the two opposite positions, we can take a position or stand on it ourselves. There are five possible positions to take between positions A and B.

The first position is ‘All A, no B’. This is an ‘all and none’,‘absolute’, ‘categorical’, or ‘black and white’ position.

The second position is ‘Mostly A, but also some B’. This is a ‘some and some not’, relative, ‘grey’ or ‘grey area’ position, yet it still gives dominance to one side versus the other.

The third position is ‘Some A and also some B’. This is a ‘some/some not’, relative and ‘grey area’ position that gives dominance to neither side.

The fourth position is ‘Mostly B and also some A’. It is the second position, but favors B.

The fifth position is ‘All B, no A’. This is the first position, but entirely for B.

If we examine the issue and find ourselves agreeing with position A, we need only consider the first three. We must choose one of the three based on how much we agree or disagree with the opposite position B. In a debate with an answering opponent, we must also judge based on how effectively and in what position our opponent will argue for B.

If we believe that there is no argument or evidence for B, we can argue ‘All A, no B’. The advantage is that this is the most forceful and least conceding position to take. The disadvantage is that any effective argument for any B, even some little B, makes this position seem ignorant and overly generalizing.

Ex: “Mill is entirely correct. Rules, morals and laws exist simply for the good of humanity.”

If we believe that there is some argument or evidence for B, but there is more argument and evidence for A, we can argue ‘Mostly A but also some B’. The advantage is that any argument for B can be incorporated into our argument and the position still maintained. The disadvantage is that we must concede from the start to ‘some B’, which gives the opponent a foothold. We are still putting our money on A, but we are hedging our bets.

Ex: “I side with Mill, but Kant also has a point. While rules, morals and laws exist for the good of humanity, it is also true that they must be upheld in many situations where there will be bad consequences.”

If we believe that there is equal argument and evidence for A and B, we can argue ‘Some A and also some B’. The advantage of being on both sides is that any argument or evidence can be incorporated into our argument. The disadvantage is that this does not forcefully argue for any particular position, and our opponent can argue we are not taking a stand on the issue. The counter to this is we are taking all sides and viewing the issue as a whole.

Ex: “Kant and Mill are two sides of the same coin. We should equally uphold rules, morals and laws while also questioning their effectiveness when we repeatedly fail to achieve good ends.”

To write an effective essay, pick an issue from the material and argue for one side ‘all and none’ (position 1), for one side ‘some and some not’ (position 2) or both sides equally (position 3).

Remember to use examples from the lectures, reading and your life experience, but also remember to focus on developing your own thought and argument rather than taking time and space repeating what has already been argued and written by others.

The goal of the paper is not to simply take a position, but to take a position effectively. If you take positions 1 or 2, demonstrate why your are taking position A over B. If you take position 3, argue why neither A nor B is sufficient without its complimentary opposite.

Ethics: Lectures for Second Week Summer 2011

Lecture on Balance: Egyptian Wisdom & Confucius

In studying balance as an Ethical concept, we will look at Ma’at in the wisdom of ancient Egypt, the doctrine of the middle way in the teachings of the Buddha of India and Aristotle of ancient Greece, and then finish with the Analects of Confucius, one of the great ancient world Ethics texts and a masterwork on the balance of concern for the self and others.

Ma’at and the Wisdom of Ancient Egypt
The idea of balance was identified with the Goddess Ma’at in the early periods of Egyptian history, but just like the sun became the abstract principle of life and the universe Ma’at became the abstract conception of the balance of opposites.
In the Egyptian wisdom quotes, one of my favorite examples of early city-state texts, we can see that the Egyptians were concerned not only with the balance of good and evil that exist in particular desirable things but also in the ethical virtue of the balance of concern for oneself and for others. As many tribes gathered into the earliest city-states and empires, people saw more and more of human behavior and became concerned with balancing excess and lack. People saw that some had much to eat, much money, much power, and others had none. They saw that excess can hurt the individual and society as much as deficiency, power and riches as much as oppression and poverty. In Egypt and many societies that followed, including India, Greece and China, we can see a concern with balance and avoiding both excess and deficiency being praised as wise and ethical.
In the Egyptian texts (as well as Confucius) we can see a heart centered theory of the human being that ties into this concept of balance and wisdom. The heart was thought to be the center of the human being, as ancient people soon learned that the heart is the center of the vessels that branch throughout the body and which are crucial to its health and nourishment. The Egyptians thought that if one was unkind to others it would choke the breath and blood from the heart and hurt one’s physical as well as mental health (remember that in ancient cosmology, physics was identical with psychology and spirituality). Consider that we still wear the wedding ring on the finger next to the pinky, which has a large vein in it and was thought to control love and lust by the ancient Egyptians (the Greeks and Romans picked up much medicine and physiology from the Egyptians, and we keep this custom today). The ancient Israelites, in contrast, had their wives wear a ring on the index finger to keep her from casting spells while pointing.
In the Egyptian wisdom literature, the “heart-guided-individual” (very similar to the language and theories of Confucius) put wisdom over desire, mind over the body, and thus had self-control and the full powers and potential of the human individual. This was seen as putting oneself in-line with the cosmos, as Being, the one eternal way, is the source and guide of the many individual mortal beings.
Read the ancient Egyptian wisdom quotes with this in mind (particularly p. 7, 10, 17, 20, 21, 22, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 44, and 46).

The Buddha and The Middle Way
The Buddha (550 BCE), the founder of one of the largest systems of thought in history, taught moderation between extremes as a fundamental doctrine. Known as “The Middle Way” in both Buddhism and Confucianism, this teaching is quite similar to the ancient Egyptian conception of Ma’at. According to the story of the Buddha’s life he tried extreme practices in the jungle to rid himself of attachment and desire and gain unity of mind and enlightenment as many were doing in his time and still do today, but he found that extreme self denial brought self hatred. Moderation became a core part of the Buddha’s later enlightenment and teaching. Rather than try to rid the self of selfhood or desire, release is found in the moderation between seeking and denying, neither running toward nor away from the self or desirable things. Thus, Buddhist conceptions of ethics often center of moderation between extremes, neither going completely without desirable things nor completely indulging in them.

Aristotle and The Doctrine of The Mean
Aristotle (350 BCE) argues for a very similar concept of moderation in his texts on ethics and health. He associates each virtue with two vices, one more extreme than virtue and the other too deficient. Thus, one should not be afraid of money or family or war but neither should one be a glutton for these things either. He argues that too much drinking and athletics can destroy the body, but no drinking or athletics can make the body and mind weak and deficient.

Confucius and the Golden Rule
Confucius (550 BCE – 480 BCE) was one of the great ethical geniuses of the ancient world. It is worth noting that in Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism we find Jesus, Buddha and Confucius telling us to press ourselves to identify with others, to see things through their eyes and treat them as we wish to be treated. All three were identified with the central gods of the heavens in each tradition. No matter how religious or non-religious one is, this shows us that humans consider love and wisdom to be quite divine and the supreme goal of individual life and activity.

The Golden Rule:
Jesus and Confucius both say almost the same “Golden Rule”: treat others the way one wants to be treated. Sometimes scholars say that Confucius rather says the negative “Silver Rule”: DON’T treat others the way one DOESN’T want to be treated. It is easy to see that these are two sides of the same rule, quite the same but slightly different. We will see almost the same dual sided rule shared between Bentham and Mill next week as we study consequentialism/utilitarianism. Bentham argued that one should act in a way to bring about the maximum happiness, and Mill argued (taking his ethics from Bentham) that one should act in a way to bring about the minimum pain. Consider that communism often idealizes the positive side of each rule (provides structure but little room for choice) and capitalism often idealizes the negative side of each rule (room for choice but provides little structure). Many scholars have noted that American law is quite influenced by Mill, and follows his idea of erring on the side of doing little harm rather than Bentham. Consider that communist countries often put their former rulers on trial for crimes against the people when things go wrong (except for the top cult-figures), while capitalist countries rarely send their rulers to jail even when crimes could be punishable in court (there are severe problems with both methods, of course).

Heart over Ritual, Intention over Action:
Confucius and Confucianism are often identified with ritual and tradition, such as the father ruling over the household. In many places in the Analects, however, Confucius is quite clear that although ritual and tradition are essential for the cultivation of the individual and the maintenance of society, they are secondary to love and having the right intentions. This can be seen as an extension of ancient cosmology placing mind over body. In courts of law today, and individual is only guilty if they intentionally performed an action. Confucius tells us that action and tradition without the right intention and emotion are the worst things imaginable. One would think that if the two elements of an act are the right intention and right action, having the right action would be half good, but this is wrong according to Confucius. He even argues that if a ruler is corrupt, one should overthrow the state and put a proper ruler in place. Strangely, the Analects became the core text of the Confucian state in China which was quite conservative of traditional structures.

Nothing is Perfect, but Everything is Good:
Another beautiful idea that is central to Confucius’ teachings is “Perfection is nowhere, but good is always at hand”. Confucius says several times that he is not perfect, and that he has never met a perfect person (or even, in some passages, an excellent person), but he tells us that we all share the same virtues and vices and we can learn to be good by listening to the lowest of people (just like the first passage of the Egyptian wisdom , which tells us that “Wisdom can be found even among the maidens at the grindstone”). He even says that Yao and Shun, the two legendary emperors and ancestors of China, could not obtain perfection, so how could we? The best quote on this is Analects 7.22:
“Put me in the company of any two people at random – they will invariably have something to teach me…I can take their qualities as a model and their vices as a warning.”

Examine Oneself:
The last ethical point to consider while reading through the Analects is Confucius’ emphasis on modesty and examining the self for fault before one finds fault with others. This certainly fits snuggly with the quote just mentioned. Confucius praises individuals who question themselves rather than others and who display modesty rather than pride. Confucius displays these virtues with regards to himself many times in the Analects. Consider 1.16, “Don’t worry if people don’t recognize your merits; worry that you may not recognize theirs”. Consider 4.17, “When you see a worthy man, seek to emulate him; when you see an unworthy man, examine yourself”.

In reading the Analects, pay particular attention to the following passages in light of the above:
1.10, 1.14-16,
2.12-15, 2.17,
3.13, 3.26,
4.6, 4.7, 4.10, 4.11, 4.14, 4.17,
5.5, 5.12, 5.13, 5.18, 5.27,
6.15, 6.17, 6.18, 6.20, 6.29,
7.7, 7.22,
9.8, 9.17, 9.26,
11.17,
12.22,
13.24,
14.22, 14.29,
15.21, 15.23, 15.24, 15.36, 15.39


LECTURE ON DRIVE AND DESIRE: NIETZSCHE VS RAND

Last time talked about Mill, Utilitarianism and looking at the Ends of acts rather than beginnings.
So far, we have been concerned with collectivist, not individualist ethical concepts. This time we talk about drive, desire and self interest, reading Nietzsche but also looking at a thinker important in American thought who takes this sort of thinking in an entirely different direction, Ayn Rand. With modern times and increasing technology that enables the individual comes new individualistic thinking and criticism of more collectivist traditional thought.

While Nietzsche and Rand both believe the individual should try to create something in the name of the self, Nietzsche says this is because no one is simply right while Rand says that she and her school of thought, Objectivism, are simply right. Myself, love Nietzsche, hate Rand. Both are critical for looking at modernized society.

There are many positive and negative things about individualism over collectivism. When individualism is a problem we call it ‘selfish’ to label it bad, but our society sees more than just evils in individualism and self-centeredness. As society has become modernized, it is up to the individual to regulate themselves and keep themselves in line. Foucault is the big thinker on this point (who was very influenced by Nietzsche). This means that individualism is just as much praised, as ‘self-starting’, ‘self-reliant’, that one should have ‘self-esteem’ (this is the repackaged ideas of Rand by Brandon, as it is scorned as ‘selfish’. There are many ways today that individuals are more enabled to be individuals than ever before, and it is very bound up with America being both the best and the worst so far in many things that civilizations have been doing from the beginning.

While America is very individualistic as a culture, with positive and negative aspects, it is important to recognize that ‘Western’ white European people are not individualistic by culture starting with the Greeks. This is unfortunately how it is often presented, that Greece was a very ‘human’ and ‘individualist’ place, and that’s why the West is so the West vs. all other cultures. As you know, I am a big fan of saying that the West is a bunch of enabled, wealthy HUMAN BEINGS, and so when they get ‘humanist’ they are actually getting stuff and culture.
When we look at Japanese teenagers in Tokyo and Kyoto, we can see profound individualism (like in the rising ‘Street Culture’ and Art that is shared the world over today beyond cultural differences).

Good evidence for this can be seen in a recent experiment where rural African children were given laptops and the researchers were surprised when the results showed that there was no lag time of any length in the learning compared to American urban children. The researchers all assumed that individualistic-culture raised children would be able to master laptops faster.

Thus, the Greeks and the Renaissance were ‘humanism’ rising, but only because there were surges of wealth and culture, just like in Baghdad 1000 years ago and in China before that. One should expect to see rises, not simple ‘achievements’ of freedom of thought, diversity of opinions, inventions and innovations, etc whenever a city or area becomes enabled. Americans, because of the last 150 years and due to geographic positioning, have become far more enabled and innovating than other areas of the world but we should not fool ourselves in thinking that we are the good culture that owns this, either genetically (by ethnicity) or socially (by form of politics, religion, or science).

In the context of ancient cosmology, individualism and self interest are typically BAD.
Consider that the big ONE is more important and ranks all of the little branches. Many has been characterized as bad and One as good on both an individual and social level. With modern individualist thinking and development, diversity becomes a good thing, both for the individual (post modern conceptions and novels, movies etc) and for the social (multiculturalism, in America called “the melting pot”).

Consider a tree. The more the branches, the larger the trunk has to be to support them, and the larger the trunk, the more branches are needed to feed the tree. Individuality and community are mutually supportive. While traditional society favors the collective and modern society prizes the individual, both can help each other in balance.

While individualism can be too extreme (for me, Rand is just this in particular ways, such as calling her group ‘Objective’ with a capital ‘O’ for praising selfishness) we are now waking to new levels of seeing how the individual can support the group and the group support the individual. This makes individualism and emphasis on drive, the self, and survival forces of GOOD (regardless of what one thinks of Nietzsche or Rand) and thus important for our Ethics even though Ethics has largely ignored individualism to concentrate on the collectivists dueling back and forth (most famously Kant and Mill, both of whom Nietzsche hated).


NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

Nietzsche is often called the first modern thinker. In fact, depending on whether you say we live in modern or post-modern times, he is called the first modern OR post-modern thinker. He is without doubt one of the most influential philosophers of modern Europe, and most skeptical thought is now deeply in his debt.

Nietzsche came from a long line of protestant Lutheran preachers. Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s father died when he was very little, and though his family sent the boy to school to become a preacher and theologian (like Hegel, Heidegger and many other German thinkers) Nietzsche rebelled and turned to philosophy.

German Pessimism and Schopenhauer:
Just before Nietzsche’s birth, Germany had been going through a great period of pessimism. Just like in China, Egypt, Greece and everywhere, human thought flourishes in the period after tragedy and warring states because people are forced to turn against old conceptions and institutions and ask hard questions that become very popular in these sorts of times.
German princes came together to crush the popular people’s movements for individual rights, and there was a great turning away from the German reason of Kant towards the German will of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Since reason failed in the world, the world is not a reasonable place but a tough place in which it is hard to push for what one sees as beautiful and true.
Marx wrote in this time, for this crowd.

Schopenhauer is deeply influenced by Buddhism and Indian thought, in a very pessimistic way.
He uses the image of a ship bobbing on the water, just hanging on in a watery, stormy ocean of a world. Rather than believe in a reason beyond, having the stomach to see the harsh reality of the situation became a value, a value that skeptical thought has retained.

German pessimism, including its famous thinkers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, flourished in two more recent periods of pessimism: WWI for Europe and Vietnam for America. In fact, Nietzsche was the original guy who said ‘my home country is stupid and think they are awesome’, bashing Germany and all things German quite openly, for which he has been honored as not only individualistic but incredibly courageous. Thus European thought following WWI and American culture following the 60’s (Berkeley a key player in this) found deep meaning in calling their society and ‘the system’ a bunch of chumps.

Nietzsche vs. Morality:
The text I gave you to read is ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, in which Nietzsche asks us to look at humanity critically and see that following the rules (like Kant) or ‘the greater good’ (like Mill) is for sheep. The individual rises above the masses and sees things in a new way. Nietzsche came up with these ideas reading Kant and Mill, reacting against their overall goods for everyone evenly. For Nietzsche, inequality are the beautiful mountain ranges to climb and conquer.

Nietzsche was a staunch individualist, believing that ANY group morality is a slave morality, and he called Christianity, Scientific ‘Objectivity’, German Nationalism and German Racism (very much centered in Anti-Semitism) out on this vocally. Again, he is seen as a hero by many for this. Consider: “When we create the master race, we will have to mix in a lot of Jews to get their good qualities”, a joke considering that Nietzsche would never advise creating a master race of equals but rather loves the individual who stands above the race as a herd.

It was a shame that Nietzsche was censored and used by the Nazis to support their ideas of the beautiful rising German will of the master race, taking Nietzsche’s individualism and twisting it into a racial and social doctrine. Nietzsche intended his words for individualists, as he says over and over again. In this, they famously used his concept of the Superman (and yes, Nietzsche is the first person on record to use this phrase, the UBERMENCH) to mean not the artist or visionary who creates but the German race.

Nietzsche vs. Nihilism:
While many would say ‘Nietzsche believes in nothing, then”, this would not be true. Nietzsche was just as vocal about believing in something as he was about not believing the herd mentality. Nietzsche saw himself as a new sort of thinker who would be followed and imitated by many. Because of this, he warns over and over again NOT to make his thought into a school or a system. However, he did not believe like Schopenhauer that one could believe or not and it makes little difference. Nietzsche believed that the whole worth of the individual is that, in the face of nothing being absolutely true, staring into the void of being, you create something and stand for something in a beautiful way, creating your own meaning in life. He was very critical of ‘Nihilism’, believing in nothing, thought this is just what his critics, religious and not, have called him.

Nietzsche believes in Heraclitus and Hegel’s Becoming between Being and Nothing. He avoids believing in eternal positives, but also believing in nothing whatsoever. It is the overturning of the old into the new by the true individual who wills something created beyond themselves and the world that stands in the face of Nihilism that Nietzsche sees as modernity’s greatest threat. He sees a world where everyone sits on their couch, believes in nothing but is afraid to contradict the state or church and do SOMETHING other than sit there.

Thus, Nietzsche relentlessly bashes reason and judgment in himself and in others, but he believes that you must have the courage to create as a contradictory and mortal being.

Nietzsche’s bashing of women: An Interesting Example of Nietzsche’s Skeptical Individualism
One of the most beautiful and deep parts of Nietzsche’s writings is his turn in Human, All Too Human from bashing Kant and others for believing in objective truth to say ‘here are some of my truths’ and without warning start bashing women repeatedly including the famous “When you go to woman, do not forget your whip”. The beauty of this philosophical performance, what inspires Bataille and Derrida, is that Nietzsche here is showing you both sides of himself at once. Unlike Kant or Mill who are writing like they can be consistent and not contradict themselves in the building or seeing of the truth, Nietzsche knows the truth is psychological and complex, and that beauty comes from tension and pain. Thus, even in his bashing he knows he is a human being and flawed. This has had an amazing impact on Art and Literature (particularly since Bataille and his open obscenity in following Nietzsche).

Passages of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil:
N starts off with asking, why do we want or suppose we can simply get truth? Philosophy seems like it has barely even gotten started. Asking this question is perhaps the greatest risk: nihilism can result from q of ‘truth’.
Read BGE (2)
Faith in opposite values: categorical Ts and Fs, such that we can fully know.
Notice ‘frog perspective’, maybe same as frog in well of CT.
Read (3), selection. Instinct to simplify things in ‘truth’ but complex
Read (4), ending. “philosophy beyond good & evil”, this is first time title in the book.
Read (5) start and selection. Philosophers as naïve, trusting so far, critique of Kant. Why?
Read (6), middle. Naïve, because ALL DRIVES can pose as ‘truth’ or ‘good’.
Read (16) start: Notice beyond even Schopenhauer here. Thinking conceals itself such that we cannot be simply certain of it any way. (Notice lead to Freud here)
In 17, speaks more of the deceptive power of language to simplify things for us and shape our world. He mentions resemblance of Indian, Greek and German philosophy, says it is clearly explained by language- fits with growing German- our picture.
Why is language deceptive? How does grammar lie? Read (24), start and end.
Language, and science, have to simplify the world by making strict oppositions out of what is actually subtleties of gradation. Language, philosophy and science make things black and white, but things are actually shades of grey between ideals and extremes.
Nietzsche says that truth is alive, and doesn’t need such simple and artificial scaffolding as our beliefs or our knowing we are right. We should enjoy being wrong.
Read (25) start: Truth needs no protectors- or categorical certainties.

Says falsehood is the surest fact, continually in all truth and discovery.
Read (34), middle to end. Philosophers need to suspect the certainties they have taken for granted, and grammar plays a serious part in the simplifying deception, he says even poison against life. (Note: Hegel’s judgment is the one sided acid).
Also Great: (78), (94) (126)


AYN RAND (1905-1982)

As said, I like Nietzsche’s individualism much more than Rand. I believe Nietzsche takes his individualism too far, to the point that he values it above collective truth where I would rather have a balance of individual and collective goods, both being equally enjoyable and profitable for human beings. Ayn Rand, however, takes what is beautiful in Nietzsche and rams it straight into the ground like the head of an ostrich.

For starters, to give fair warning, Ayn Rand believes that all Philosophers have simply been too stupid to see that reality is right in front of our eyes, that we see real objects, and there are times (MOST of the time for her and her Objectivist followers) when we are just right and others are just wrong and we should simply say so. While this can come in a good form as ‘self esteem’, it is easy to see why philosophy people bash her writings, say that she has never read any philosophy and since she now proposes to simply answer all of the deepest questions correctly with simple and obvious answers she has no idea what philosophy actually is. It is pointed out that she is very popular with individualist people who have never studied philosophy but not with philosophy students. This charge can be quite elitist, but in my opinion it is somewhat justified. What would Nietzsche think of common American people who have not studied great works but come together as ‘Objectivists’ in groups to say over and over again that they are objectively right and everyone who disagrees is simply wrong? He would say that they are hardly enabled individuals, but rather a herd suffering herd delusions of objectivity, like Kant but far less educated.

On the other hand, Ayn Rand is very much a popular, common person’s American Realist philosopher. American Realists, who actually come from Scottish realism, believe in the positivist position (reality is real, self is real, we perceive real objects for real, and one can simply judge things to be true or false, for real) and believe that philosophy, even the positivists like Kant and Aristotle, have been led astray by skepticism and compromised their positions. The problem for philosophy professionals is that, unlike the realists, Rand believes that she is simply right and there are no problems and the rest of philosophy is meaningless, which is a position that even hardcore American realists cannot support.

Rand’s life and Pro-Capitalism, Objectivism Stance:
Ayn Rand is big in America because she defected from Soviet Russia and embraced America as Objectively right. This is why she has reading rooms dedicated to her in Marine academies and other hard core pro-American institutions. She is anti-collectivist like Nietzsche, but thinks that the Soviet Union is simply wrong and collectivist while America is simply right and individualist.

Ayn Rand believes in the value of Selfishness, termed better by Brandon as ‘self esteem’.
You may remember it: it has become a Neo-Con staple and artifact of the 80s.
Argue against Freedman’s (free market) argument that selflessness is an ideal never obtained, so we are based in the self and selfishness as anchor. Each is an extreme, and balance is best.

Think of how Nietzsche would weep at the end of Atlas Shrugged, after the collectivists have ruined society, Rand has her hero trace a dollar sign over the ruins. Praise of selfishness and the all-mighty dollar in a neo-con fashion are the truth that will lift society back up for Rand.
For Nietzsche, belief in the dollar or America is a sheep-like fiction for killing your individuality, not supporting it or lifting society up as a whole.

My Three Moments of Hating Ayn Rand:
End of her speech to Marine graduating class of 1975: ‘and that’s why my philosophy is the only true philosophy’…

Her ejection of Nathaniel Brandon, the ‘King of Self Esteem’, from her Objectivist school after she found out he was two timing her with a model (thought this seems selfish, just not for Rand).

Her attempted cover-up of her lung cancer (from which she died) because she had been very vocal about how doctors who said cigarettes cause cancer are simply wrong and she ‘knew it objectively’.

The Moral of the Story:
You should stand for yourself, and have self esteem, but do not let it blind you into going on and on about how you are right such that you are not critical of your views or the views of those who agree with you (in a school or otherwise). As Hegel says, it is fine that each individual believes themselves at first to be simply the positive truth, but it is important to be critical of oneself in order to develop the self. Doing things for the self and others should be mutually supportive, in balance.

There is decent evidence from biology that human beings are designed to balance self and other interest, and that selfishness kills the individual and isolates them from the supports of society. Angry and judgmental people naturally isolate themselves and have shorter life spans.
Having a pet increases your life span, so caring for others is good for your individual self.
As we will see in Violence week, Lt. Grossman tells us that people will stand up in fire for random strangers in particular situations entirely independent of personality.
Thus, self interest is important for ethics and balance, but not as the sole anchor in the way that Kant and Mill try to make principle or ends the sole point of action.


LECTURE ON PERSPECTIVE:
HERACLITUS, ZHUANG ZI & HEGEL

Perspective is not simply individual, but social. We share reality in so far as we share perspective. This means that we should not only try to see as many perspectives or as much perspective as we can, but also resisting the tendency to accept one’s own perspective as reality or the whole truth. Truth is in each and every perspective, but it is also always beyond and outside of each and every perspective. Focusing on the concept of perspective forces us to affirm our views as truths but also deny our views as the Truth (with a capital T).

Two of the greatest ancient thinkers on perspective are Heraclitus from ancient Greece and Zhuang Zi from ancient China. To consider perspective as an ethical concept we will be looking at the strikingly similar things that these two ancient thinkers say and then end with some insights of the German philosopher Hegel and discoveries of modern psychology.


HERACLITUS:

Heraclitus’ most famous idea is a memorable image: you can never step in the same river twice. Just as a river is always flowing and changing, so is reality always flowing and changing, such that nothing stays exactly the same for any two moments. You step in a river, then step out, then step back in the same river, but it is no longer ‘the same river’. Heraclitus says this is also true of himself.

According to one source, Heraclitus was a king who abandoned the title to become a philosopher. This has been identified as a close resemblance to the story of the Buddha in India, and some scholars have argued that Heraclitus was in fact the Buddha from India while others have argued that the Buddha was in fact Heraclitus from Greece. Both thinkers were mythologized as a king who left powerful king position and became a sage, and both believe in the enlightening sun rising above the watery chaos of reality and human perception, but it is quite likely the two were not the same individual.

Heraclitus is a very skeptical thinker. This does not mean he saw all things as negative. He was convinced that wisdom and inquiring within show us that all is one big cosmic fire, and things that unify the community and the individual bring wholeness and true happiness. However, he believed that humans are often foolish and let their minds divide themselves from the whole and from each other such that their understandings are disjointed and ignorant.

This is very typical thinking of skeptics the world over. A positivist would say that there are specific truths that are certain and must be separated from the uncertain, specific goods that must be separated from the evil. A skeptic would say, like Heraclitus and the Daoists from China, that the truth and the good is the whole and the great One, and the tendency of the mind to divide the good and the true from the rest is the opposite of true understanding and wisdom.

Heraclitus was not a fan of experts and specialists, and he ridiculed the cultural leaders of his time. He says that the common people are completely asleep, but far more dangerous are the experts who have a small piece of the puzzle and say that they know the entire truth. He calls the poets (Hesiod and Homer) and the Pythagoreans frauds, and says that there are no permanent truths or laws other than the constant formation of watery chaos by the sun and cosmic fire.

Notice that this does not question the set up of the cosmos as we have studied it everywhere (and what the Persians gave to the Eastern Greek city states). Many often ask, “Why, then, should I listen to Heraclitus, since he is simply an expert?”. Heraclitus replies as most skeptics do: don’t take my word for it, but look into the world and within yourself and you will find that it is true.
This is a psychological skepticism that is criticizing the human ability to know particular things as permanent that are able to be separated from the One and All (the cosmic fire). Only the All is permanent. All the other things are wandering temporal forms. The many beings arise from the energy of Being, and then they fall back into the fire and disappear. The cosmos resembles the chaos yet order of the human community centered on authority by spoken word. The LOGOS, the word/plan/order/command, is the formative force in the cosmos, the force of fire and light in the watery chaotic world. The cosmic fire speaks with its ever-present Logos (fire over air) and this brings about the firmament in the chaos (the earth rising out of the water). This process, however, does not bring about eternal or stable beings, but chains of beings that are in flux and interdependent.

This goes also for laws, which Heraclitus says have to be defended as if they were city walls. This is sometimes read that Heraclitus thought human law was important and had to be defended, which he did, but in fact he is also telling us that human laws are impermanent like walls made out of earth. They may seem eternal and permanent, but as any former citizen or city of the Persian empire knows, empires fall and impressive city states are overthrown and change hands. The eternal word of the fire forever forms the cosmos, but human speech and walls are temporary, and therefore take force and effort to maintain. As a skeptic, Heraclitus believes that the divisions made by the mind are mortal, not eternal, like the human body. Our knowledge and laws are impermanent like mounds of dirt.

Heraclitus was one of the most famous thinkers of the Greek and Roman world. He was a big influence on Plato, though Plato is very much opposed to his thinking as we will see next week. Both Heraclitus and Plato were big influences on Christianity which initially flourished not in Israel but in Greece and Syria. If a primal speaking of the Word or Logos sounds familiar, Heraclitus was a central influence on the Greek and Roman stoics, and the author of the Gospel of John was almost certainly a Greek stoic writing in Roman times. The opening of the Gospel of John famously reads: the Logos/Word/Order was with God (Fire/Cosmos), and God spoke (“let there be light”) and light was separated from darkness.

It was only in the late 1700s and 1800s that German scholars rediscovered the presocratics and gave them attention and study. Before this time, Greek Philosophy was considered to have originated with Socrates (hence, “presocratics”) and most scholars were only versed in the surviving writings of Plato and Aristotle. Schleiermacher, one of the most famous and central protestant theologians and an opponent of Hegel, was a major force in bringing popularity to Heraclitus and a major translator of Plato. The philosopher Hegel, who we will study later, saw Heraclitus as a skeptic who is put in balance with Plato and other positivists by the course of history itself. Nietzsche, the great skeptical philosopher who we will also study, wrote that he felt closer to Heraclitus than any other thinker. Nietzsche believed, like Heraclitus, that we are proud of our learning and achievement but we are in fact little better than apes.

We are going to go through the fragments according to themes, that show how Heraclitus sees the individual within the cosmos.

(1): The word from which all things follow (Fire-air(spirits)-earth(firm) in water.
Criticism of the experts and knowledge holders, who try for separate essences.
(92, 97, 98, 119, 121, 125)
Criticism of the commoners, asleep and isolated in otherness, (94)
(2): Listen to the great word and all is one, beyond experts and common
(5, 6) Many say they know (certain) but can’t speak and listen (give and take)
(7) Seek the unknown- Knowledge is a blockage (18,19- wisdom beyond- wisdom lit)
(10) Things keep their secrets- unknown in all things
Fire as all things (20, 21, 22, 26, 27, 28)
(25) Air-Fire, Water-Earth (with fragment of souls smell- smoke by both)
Contending tensions/powers set all things (24, 25, 29, 31)
Hot cold and wet dry (39, 40)
Dry soul good, Wet soul pleasured, bad (72)
War is father of all, thus harmonies (46, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61)
(41) River twice, (81) I am and am not like the river (unknown)
(52, 53) Everything has qualities by perspective (relativity)
(71) No depth to soul- explored forever, (80) inquire within
(130) Silence- Healing (Note the parallels with Buddhism out of Jainism)


ZHUANG ZI

Zhuang Zi, the second patriarch of Daoism, lived from 370 to 301 BCE and worked as a manager in a lacquer warehouse, a large ‘factory’ for making vases, bowls and general wood products (like bento boxes). Other than this, we know little of his life other than his work. Daoist tradition holds that Zhuang Zi wrote the ‘inner chapters’ of his work, and that the anecdotes about him and other stories were added by his disciples, the early proto-Daoists.

In several places, we see the idea of perspective which we encountered in Heraclitus. Mao Quiang and Lady Li were famous beautiful women, but fish, birds and deer were frightened by them. Heraclitus said that all human beauty and achievement is nothing but apes to the gods as apes are only apes to us. Who knows what is beautiful, humans, birds, fish, or deer? Which of them knows what tastes good?

Another great passage is the Peng bird who migrates for the Winter, an act which the dove and the cicada (a large insect) find ridiculous. They have no frame of reference to understand such an act. This suggests that the wisdom of Daoism will sound ridiculous and foolish to those who are not experienced and wise. We read in the text "Truth sounds like its opposite!", just as Heraclitus said "The way forward is the way back".

In the Chapter, The Secret of Caring for Life, we meet Cook Ting and his famous butcher’s knife. Cook Ting tells his master that his blade never goes dull, for he can always find the hidden spaces in things, and then his blade goes right through. This is very much like the reasoning of the wise mind, that can use reason to chop anything up easily and naturally, without striking up against anything in opposition.

Notice that Confucius appears many times in the Zhuang Zi, used to argue AGAINST his own position and in favor of a Daoist position. Many times Confucius says that his own way is inferior to the Daoist way. Clearly, these are texts written by Daoists who appreciate the good in Confucianism but think their own school to be superior. For example, page 65, in the chapter ‘The Sign of Virtue Complete’, Confucius says of Wang T’ai, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall, Ch’u and Yueh (two warring kingdoms in China). But if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one.” I still use this contradiction of one and many to this day. It shows you much about how people make judgments and arguments.


HEGEL AND THE MASTER/SLAVE RELATIONSHIP

Hegel, a German philosopher who lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s, believed that the history of the world and the process of thought in history and the individual was an evolution of perspective that works from opposite sides to bring itself to greater completion. One of the most famous parts of his Phenomenology of Spirit, a history of the evolution of thought, is the Master/Slave dialectic. This concept became very important for anti-sexism (like the feminist De Beauvoir), anti-racism (like Franz Fanon and Angela Davis) and anti-class thinkers (like Hegel’s student Karl Marx). These will be the last three topics for this class, the “Big Three” in universities since the sixties.

Hegel argues that as the self or identity (like a nation) comes into the world, it cannot understand how there can be others like itself that are not itself and so it tries to fight and kill its others. Then the self figures out that it does not have to kill its others and that it is more productive to enslave them (consider that the most selfish individual would tell everyone else “You are wrong” but the slightly smarter but still selfish individual would tell everyone else “That is just what I have been saying”, neither capable of tolerating opinions other than their own).

At first, the master is in the superior position. However, over time, the slave comes to do everything for the master and thus learns through experience while the master grows lazy and ignorant. The slave comes to realize that he can do things he never thought of for someone or something else, comes to grasp subjectivity and perspective, and thus overturns the master and becomes the greater and more highly developed master.

INSIGHTS OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY:
INTERNAL/EXTERNAL ATTRIBUTION & THE HOSTILE MEDIA EFFECT

Modern Psychology has learned much from experiments in recent years about how individuals tend to interpret reality. This teaches us many things about perspective that extend and develop what Heraclitus, Zhuang Zi and Hegel had to say.

Internal vs. External Attribution:
Many experiments have confirmed what is often called the actor/observer bias or internal vs. external attribution. If an individual succeeds at a task, they often attribute the success to themselves or the group to which they belong (internal attribution – “I/We are really good at that”). If an individual fails at a task, they often attribute the failure to the situation (external attribution – “It was because of that thing”). However, if the same individual watches another (especially someone disliked or ‘other’ to the individual) succeed at a task, they often attribute the success to the situation (external attribution – “They just got lucky”, or “It was easier that time”), and when they watch another fail at a task, they often attribute the failure to the other person or the group to which they belong (internal attribution – “That shows they are stupid”).

Notice the complete reversal and the contradiction of opposite perspectives given the same evidence. The attribution and perspective is one way or the complete opposite depending on who does the task and whether or not they succeed.


The Hostile Media Effect:
Other experiments have confirmed that both sides of an issue view media coverage and moderation (judges, referees) as hostile to their side. For example, liberals are angry that the media is conservative, and conservatives are angry that the media is liberal. One study at Stanford showed American media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to pro-Israeli students and pro-Palestinian students, and both sides said the coverage was clearly biased in favor of the other side. Another study had students from Princeton and Dartmouth (a big East Coast rivalry) view a Princeton vs. Dartmouth football game, and each group saw more illegal moves on the other side and each said that the referees missed more of these for the other side.

If we consider perspective, anyone in the middle of an issue is to the opposite side of anyone on the edges. I have a card I like that shows children on a see-saw with one standing on the middle, and it reads “I know I am being fair when both sides accuse me of unfairness”. Unfortunately, this is often true in the world of competing and opposite perspectives.

Ethics: Lectures for First Week Summer 2011

Lecture on Aristotle & Virtue, Kant & Morals


Basics of Ancient World Cosmology:

Before getting into Aristotle and his understanding of the virtuous person, it is important to understand the world view of the ancient world. Many ancient cultures (including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, and even the Hawaiians) have a very similar cosmology. Cosmology is the term used to cover the ancient study of the world, which included physics, psychology, biology, medicine, philosophy, religion and most areas of study all together as a single study by the educated and the wise.

The world was thought to be like a big person (making the individual person a microcosm or mini-cosmos within the larger cosmos or world). The elements, including fire, air, earth and water stacked from lightest on the top (fire and air) to heaviest on the bottom (earth and water). This was not only observed in nature (star fire above, winds next, then earth above water) but also in humans (the mind is fire and visions of light, which heats and activates the breath in speech like orders and commands, and the water in the lower regions and functions of the body which often was identified with chaos). Order and reason were identified with the higher elements (fire and air, mind and breath) and chaos and desire were identified with the lower elements (earth and water, flesh and fluid). When the stack of elements is in order the cosmos and the individual are in order, and when the stack of elements are out of order the cosmos and individual are out of order. The higher elements were believed to be eternal just as the cosmos itself and Being are eternal, and the lower elements were believed to be temporary like the individuals and beings are temporary.

One can find in religion and philosophy in ancient cultures (including Christianity, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy, Greek Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy) the same message repeated again and again: reason and the mind must be placed above and in charge of desire and the body. The eternal way of things is to be placed above the temporary ways and wants. This gains the individual wisdom, reason and insight into the workings of the cosmos. When the lower elements are in charge, there is ignorance and destruction. This framework is important for understanding each individual system of ancient thought as well as their overall similarities and differences.


Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

Plato’s student and the tutor of Alexander the Great and Ptolemy, Aristotle is one of the most famous and influential of Greek philosophers. He was primarily interested in biology and speciation, but his works on the soul (mind, self), Logic, Ethics and politics became more important than his works on the animal kingdom. He was a central influence on the origins of Christianity, Islamic thought and European thought in the middle ages. While he is sometimes called the first scientist and the first logician, his views on these subjects expanded ancient world cosmology and were not the birth of these subjects. Aristotle has been claimed by the West as a founder, but the Islamic world also considers him one of their own and he is depicted in different ways depending on who does the illustrating (see the beautiful Islamic image in the Wikipedia article that portrays him as a very dark skinned holy sage for an interesting counter to Renaissance paintings).

Aristotle’s conception of virtue and human purpose is entirely in line with ancient world cosmology. He believes that everything has a single purpose for which it is intended. It is as if the cosmos, Being itself, is a big mind that creates things for particular uses, and individual beings thrive if they are serving their purposes (ergon in the Greek, or “work”, “job”). We are reasonable to the degree that we see the purposes of things, serve our own natural purpose and use things in accord with their natural purposes. This is known as the teleological view, as the study of purpose is called teleology. Notice that teleology is very big with more traditional people today (including evangelical Christians) but modern Philosophy and Science have broken from this view and find it quite antiquated.

For Aristotle, having oneself in the proper stack and order is being in accord with one’s nature, and this means putting theory and soul/intellect on top and putting each lower element of our minds and bodies in the service of the highest part of the mind, the intellect, which corresponds to the highest good of the cosmos itself. Just as the intellect should be pursued because it is the best and highest part, the good itself should be pursued simply in itself and for no other purpose. This is similar to Kant and Moral theory, but absolutely at odds with Mill and consequentialism which believe that good is the end of things but would not say that intellect should be pursued in itself without regards to the consequences and practical ends. Aristotle does believe that the human individual will naturally flourish and be happy if they are stacked up right and in accord with the human purpose of intellectual activity, but this is secondary and the byproduct of serving ones purpose.

Similarly, in matters of politics, Aristotle believes that the city is not primarily a living arrangement but rather for producing the elite and the virtuous. Thus, the city is not for making people happy but having each individual do their natural job. Just like his teacher Plato argues in his Republic, Aristotle argues that each person must have one thing they do best and it is therefore best for them to do that thing and that one thing only. Unfortunately, both Plato and Aristotle argued that slaves and peasants are meant to serve the aristocracy and women are clearly meant to serve men (Mill will strongly criticize these views, one of the first and few outspoken critics of the subjugation of slaves and women).

Consider the example of lying. The moralist would say that lying is wrong in and of itself, like Kant argues that lying goes against our reason by categorical necessity. The consequentialist would say that lying has bad consequences and results in pain and unhappiness. The virtue theorist, however, would argue that the purpose of the mind and human being is truth in and of itself and so lying is not in accord with human nature (or rather, righteous and proper human nature).


Modern Virtue Theory

While Aristotle’s virtue ethics and teleological theory were popular in the middle ages in Europe, there was a decline during the 1700s and 1800s as science rose to prominence and questioned teleology. Kant’s laws and Mill’s consequences became the dueling positions of ethics. Recently, however, there has been a revival of virtue theory that rose along with increasing individualism and criticism of positivistic conceptions of science. If we become critical of the idea that there are simple laws that can be known, it opens a space for a return to the idea of the virtuous person beyond airtight moral laws or the complete calculation of consequences.

However, if we do not believe that things have simple and singular purposes just as we have grown critical of laws and calculation, virtue ethics has a problem: what virtues should the virtuous person have? Often these virtues are mental: intellect, wisdom, reason, and understanding. This has been neglectful of the physical body (the home of the physical brain, of course). Another issue that has come to light is the interpersonal aspect of virtue. Virtue has typically been described as personal, but the individual is naturally social (curiously Aristotle argues this when justifying his political views of the city and its proper organization). Confucius, one of the great moral geniuses of the world, has a very interpersonal view of ethics and thus we will consider his views next under the concept of balance (such as the balance of self and other).


As a final note, consider Jain (the ancient Indian forerunner of Buddhism) anti-merit theory:

In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma can be positive (merit and blessing) or negative (demerit and sin). Thus, karma can either help you up or drag you down. For Jains, karma is ALWAYS NEGATIVE, always weight that keeps you down, always division or blockage between you and the ALL. Thus, one tries best to avoid accumulating karma and to destroy the karma one has already accumulated. Jains are famous for their doctrine of the negativity of karma and the radical nonviolence that follows from this principle. Jains wear masks to prevent insects from flying in their mouths, sweep the ground to avoid killing insects (even though the killing would be unintentional, it would still be an accumulation of karma), influenced other Indian thought in promoting vegetarianism, and even don’t eat root vegetables as it kills (up-roots) the whole plant rather than that plucked from the plant. Thus, any accumulation of virtue or merit is distinguishing and distancing oneself from the whole. Sharing much with ancient cosmology and Aristotle, Jains would argue that the purpose of the individual is to join the whole without distinction and therefore we should work to LOSE merit and karma, not gain it. Kant, Principles and
Morals

Kant (1724-1804) was the European philosopher who argued for always following morals and laws universally. His position is opposed by Mill, who believed that morals are only in the service of getting good consequences. This is one of the biggest oppositions of perspectives in ethics. Should we create morals and laws and always stick to them, or should we do whatever results in the best consequences?

As Europe rose in the 1600s and 1700s, science had begun discovering many new truths about the world. This created an opposition between rationalists who believed that the world has absolute laws that we can know certainly by reason and empiricists who believed that we can only assume what we know and that the rules our reason finds could be wrong. One of the most famous empiricists was Hume, who argued that one can only assume that one billiard ball causes the other billiard ball to move.

Kant was "awoken from his dogmatic slumbers" by Hume. Kant wanted to balance empiricism with rationalism, but he comes down on the rationalist side. In all knowledge, including ethics, Kant believed we must use our reason to figure out the universal laws of our rational and ordered universe. Notice that Kant, as a rationalist, trusts that the world and the mind are reasonable and that there are universal laws out there for us to grasp.

The central example we will consider is the moral "Do Not Lie". Kant believed that one should never lie, and our reason can show us this with certainty. He argued that one is seeking unconditional and universal laws in ethics (as well as every area of human knowledge), which Kant also calls categorical imperatives, and so one should only act in a way that one could expect everyone to always act everywhere at any time. If everyone lied all the time, then society would collapse. Therefore, Kant argued, it is one's duty to not lie and hold to this moral and law.

Consider the "guy with the butcher knife" thought experiment. Let us say you are at home, and the doorbell rings. You answer it, and your friend runs in looking afraid. A minute later the doorbell rings again, you answer it, and a scary guy with a butcher knife asks you where your friend is. Kant would allow one to shut the door and say nothing, but Kant would argue that it is wrong to lie to the scary guy and say you don't know or that your friend took off down the street the other way. Even though we can assume that if you lie it would improve your friend's chances of living, Kant would argue that this would be wrong. We can contrast this with the position of Mill and utilitarianism, which would argue that in some circumstances the lie is the lesser of two evils and one should behave in accord with the ends of ones actions rather than stick rigidly to morals and laws.

An interesting issue here is that rationalists and positivists like Kant believe that one should anchor ethics in good beginnings while empiricists and skeptics believe one should anchor ethics in good ends. Kant believes that one must start with good intentions and principles no matter the consequences, while Mill believes that one should aim at the best consequences no matter the principles or intentions one has. As usual, both sides agree that one should have good intentions, principles and consequences, but they come down on opposite sides when arguing for what is really the essence or importance of the matter.

We will come to Mill's position in the coming weeks. Another contrary position to both Kant and Mill is Nietzsche, who we will also hear from soon. Nietzsche does not trust human reason, so he trusts neither Kant nor Mill. Nietzsche argues that people who believe they know the true morals and people who say they know what led to the best consequences for everyone are capable of deceiving themselves and thinking they know what is best for everyone.




Lecture on Mill and Utilitarianism


The last class focused on ethical concepts that focus on the beginning or cause of an action rather than the end or consequence (with the possible exception of balance, which suggests a medium of the two). Today, we focus on consequentialism and its foremost school, Utilitarianism. Thus, I had you read the first two chapters of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism. In this work, Mill argues that we should always look at our actions and ask if the consequences are ethical (do good/make people happy and reduce harm/pain). He specifically mentions Kant as wrong about principle and mentions virtue ethics as well, claiming that these two conceptions ignore how we use principle and virtue for happiness and reduction of harm by taking each as a good in itself out of context.

Mill notes: if you call it Utilitarianism, people think it is dry and boring.
If you call it Principle of Happiness or Pleasure first, people think its decadent.
This is why people called Epicurus decadent.


Brief Tradition of Consequentialism
(included in Mill’s own text)

Epicurus (340-270 BCE)
Greek philosopher who believed that happiness was the most important thing, and all virtues, purposes and ends are subordinate to it. From him we get the word ‘Epicurean’ as in ‘Gourmet’, one who appreciates the finer more pleasant tastes of things. As Mill notes, Epicurus was attacked as a glutton in his time, but he actually had a taste for thought, civilization, and what Mill calls the ‘higher virtues’, mental pleasures in giving to others rather than physical selfish pleasures of drinking every night. Mill argues that Epicurus took the long view just as he did, so his opponents are wrong to call happy principle people “swine”.

Jeremy Bentham (1750-1830 CE)
The first to come up with Utilitarianism, but Mill gave it the name.
Bentham believed in max happiness, while Mill complimented this with min pain.
Bentham also believed that simple and common pleasures are just as good as sophisticated, saying the common plays are just as good as fine opera.
Mill rejected this, believing that fine society was of a higher happiness than common culture, as mental pleasure is superior to physical, as selfless pleasures (giving to others) makes one happier than selfish pleasures (receiving from others).

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873 CE)
Born in London, Mill was influenced by Ancient Greek, French, and liberal thought.
His father wrote a history of India, and Mill was for a time involved with his father in the British East India company, the corporation that helped Britain maintain their hold over India. Mill’s family was friends with the Bentham family, from whom Mill took up his consequentialist, ‘happy principle’ thought. However, it was Mill who found the name ‘utilitarian’ in a Christian text talking about how evil it was to fall into it rather than believe in the principle as good, and he added the name and developed the thinking, becoming its famous spokesman.

Mill is a central thinker in Logic, Economics and Ethics.
His liberal social thought is his most famous. He argued for equal rights for all, the end to the subjugation of women and slavery.


Mill’s text: Utilitarianism

Mill’s harm principle as the principle to end principles, putting all focus on harmful consequences. This is not simply ease or expediency in limited personal vision, but the long view over time of what makes people happy and saves them from pain.

Notice: Mill completely agrees with Kant, we need a test for principles and an overall principle to serve as this text. For Kant, this test is ‘can it always be followed?’, while for Mill the test is ‘does following the principle make people happy as a consequence?’.
Both come up with a supreme principle.
Thus, for Kant, one should never lie because the principle is most important as beginning or all good action, while for Mill, one should never lie as long as this has good consequences because this is the most important as end of all good action.

Kant says: Always follow principle, and you will likely be happy.
Mill says: Always follow happiness (self and others), and you will likely be principled.

Both also come up with a pure ‘good in itself’: Kant’s is intention (the good-in-itself beginning of an act) and Mill’s is happiness (the good-in-itself end of an act). Both say that it is impossible to argue for this good-in-itself, but it simply shows itself in us.

We can see two sides to the Utilitarian Principle, maximizing positive and minimizing negative. Bentham says: Always act to maximize happiness. Mill agrees, but says the MOST important thing is to minimize the negative (at least, this is what scholars concur in reading his writings and comparing them to Bentham’s today). Thus, we see the whole principle is ‘max happy and min pain’, but one can lean either way on it. There are times when maximum happiness can cause much pain (majority over the minority, which Mill speaks about vs. Bentham), and there are times when minimum pain hurts maximum happiness (overprotective parenting, insurance issues, have to break some eggs etc).

Mill admits that there will be continuous problems whichever way we use the principle, but we are evolving in a positive direction slowly and we should stick to the Utilitarian view even when there are problems if we truly (and he thinks we do) desire good consequences basically as human beings.

Attacks on Utilitarianism:
Mill addresses many of these directly in the text.

Interesting Paradox/Problem for Utilitarianism: the Good of the Bad as Example
Mill notes this, as do other modern writers on Utilitarianism noting as Mill does that this is a common attack against the Utilitarian principle as ethical conception/system.
COMPARE: PBS documentaries all the time on slavery and the US overcoming slavery as freedom and our view as Americans of the type of place South Africa is.
COMPARE: Prosecuting Attorney arguing that someone is a habitual criminal so latest normal behavior is prime for relapse vs. Defense Attorney pointing at the same evidence as reform and pulling one’s life together as normal from bad upbringing and environment.
Dennett uses three mile island as ex: this caused good nuclear standards to follow, so we could say as a utilitarian that the catastrophe was just as good as people simply coming up with the standards without the disaster.
Consider that we love villains who go from good to bad and heroes who go from bad to good. We can very easily see bad as good and good as bad.

The attack on Utilitarianism says that it is prone to confusing bad with good especially compared to systems of principles or rights that are given, not based on their consequences

Marx attacks Utilitarianism with a common argument today: guess who are the ones to tell you what is useful or makes us happy? Yes: the upper class, who use the lower class as labor. Obviously, it is the task master or overseer and not the worker who gets to say who is useful in their place and how happy the system is overall.
Mill in fact approves of war to advance civilization, and he approves of colonialism as improving the uncivilized. Marx and us could criticize him for this short sightedness.
HOWEVER, Mill was a champion against the enslavement of Black people and the second class status of women. He was an early champion of both, so this is mixed.
He writes, in 1850 on ‘The Negro Question’ words I love:
“It is curious, withal, that the earliest known civilization was, we have the strongest reason to believe, a negro civilization. The original Egyptians are inferred, from the evidence of their sculptures, to have been a negro race: it was from negroes, therefore, that the Greeks learnt their first lessons in civilization; and to the records and traditions of these negroes did the Greek Philosophers to the very end of their career resort (I do not say with much fruit) as a treasury of mysterious wisdom.”

Defense against anti-environment challenge:
Many could say that ‘use’ and ‘happy’ can easily lead to how we abuse the environment.
More relevant today, Mill loved deep forests and argued that wilderness was necessary in the long view of use and happiness. We will read on wilderness for environmental week. This poses us an interesting question: when utilitarianism asks us to take the long view, how long a view can we take? If we pollute the earth and ignore it for hundreds of years, our long view can still be too short.