The benefit of empirical data in relation to moral reasoning

After some consideration about the recent interest in experimental philosophy, I must state some charitable features of the role of psychological data:

1. (perceived) Asymmetries: Moral theorising is often percieved and practised as an a priori excercise. A utilitarian may say that moral decisions may be made on the basis of the amount of welfare or gain or investment into one’s own ends ( which include, inter alia, happiness); but this kind of view may be too simplistic. Why?

If we were to accept a few propositions a priori we may asses moral situations with these generic principles, this seems obvious. If we consider utility as our moral desiderata, we may say that some moral situations are parallel; such as whether to forsee the death of a minority to save a majority, or to perform animal testing. We may find, through empirical studies that what moral situations are a priori (through these normative ethical principles) symmetrical are in fact, perceived as asymmetrical. To follow up on this thought, consider the Knobe effect.

The conclusion of these kinds of studies is not to say something simple like, there is empirical data to refute a normative thesis (this never will work), but it is simply not as easy to apprehend moral situations viz moral principles without considering the influence of our background psychological dispositions (c.f. priming studies [Doris 2003 et. al])

2. The Kantian appeal: This argument comes straight from my dissertation, which in itself is more or less an argument from Kant. Kant believed that human anthropology assists us in knowing about human beings. We know about human nature in various ways; through the people we meet in our lives; through media, like television, film, literature; and through empirical and ethnographic study of others. Sociological and anthropological data can tell us about the ways in which human beings do in fact behave, my favourite examples for this kind of thing is Goffman in the Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, where he spend some time analysing hotel staff in the Shetland isles.

The crux of Kant’s point was that given a moral system (in his case that was his deontology, but we don’t need to commit to any moral system for this line of argument), we still need empirical knowledge of people so as to know how to apply it. Consider the platitude of do not lie, we might be able to manipulate a social situation so as not to lie, but not to tell the truth, or not to bring the offending issue at hand, or non-participation in any situation where you may be brought to lie. Knowing how to apply moral principles is not enough to help us as agents, having the know-how and practical wisdom of the conduct of human beings would help as well.

Michael

Fuck fuck shit Kelly Clarkson (on the recent interest in offensive language)

A note about the title

Okay, two notes here. The first ‘Kelly Clarkson’ remark is a reference to The 40 year old virgin (in the male chest waxing scene, as it was said as an expletive). The second thing was that I decidedly did not put any racist or homophobic language in the title, as I thought the title might be too offputting for readers to actually read the article (so I’m putting in this video instead to highlight what my piece today is about):

A list of gaffes

I have found a lot of interest in offensive language and gestures, the notion of offense and political correctness lately. Here’s a list of stories I’ve found:

1. Prince Harry’s use of the word Paki (yeah I said it!)
2. Prince Charles’ use of the word Sooty as a noun for a friend
3. Carol Thatcher (Journalist, Broadcaster and daughter of former PM) and her offstage use of the word golliwog
4. Miley Cyrus’ slant-eyed gesture
5. Jeremy Clarkson being himself, see also this, and also this

I can find more if I really wanted to, oh yes, there is the all-famous Christian Bale incident, where the BBC had broadcast it uncensored.

Clearly, all of these incidents have unique features to them (Miley Cyrus, for instance, has a desire to want to be contraversial (such as wearing that Iron Maiden shirt the other day; Jeremy Clarkson is just being Jeremy Clarkson, and the Royals and Thatcher seem to represent an upper class of the political elite (at least, of their families, anyway.

Howeverr, there is a general moral panic about offensiveness and political correctness. Anyone Tsar or Romanov in broadcasting and media should be shitting themselves, cos the villagers could be burning their homes any time now. Question is, why is it happening now? I think it’s the economy, this seems to be a referred pain of social ills, like in the film Children of Men, when the extinction of humanity reminds the British about the ills of….terrorism and illegal immigration?

Antisophie (source material provided by Michael)

Same matter, different subject

Crime, how do we study it?

There are many different ways to look at crime. The most conventional way it would seem to me is to look at it as a human and social behaviour. There are many perspectives on crime, and that there are perspectives on crime reflects the way we construe our subject manner. We might say for instance:

1. Crime is a social construction (constructivist)
1*. (therefore, there is no such thing as crime)

2. Crime is a natural phenomenon, we shall see it as while inevitable, there should be a rate to define a healthy rate of crime (positivist)
2*. Crime, or evil is a necessary pervailance in the immanent world (a religious-leaning viewpoint)

3. Crime is a situational behaviour established by a series of circumstances to dispose one to deviant action (generic psychological)

4. Crime is a situational occurence established by a system or social organisation which oppresses people to commit crime (Holist)

There are so many different ways to cut a phenomenon such as crime, here are some distinctions:

1. Focus on the individual vs. Focus on society or groups as a whole
2. Focus on the agent’s preferential and motivational set/Focus on causal factors
3. Focus on quantification of recorded occurences/Focus on speculative insights to which fit best to explain data
4. Focus on a scientifically validated measure or dataset, and establish as tight a methodology as one can/Focus on instituting change

Note that these distinctions are not mutually exclusive.

There has been recent talk as to the establishment of teaching sexology as a subject in universities. While a similar point is to be made about crime, there is an established ‘criminology’ that is taught in many universities (how it is organised often, is as  a collaboration of law scholars, social scientists and sometimes psychologists).

I may pose a similar question: how do we understand sex? There can be many ways to understand sex, how we determine this question leads to what kinds of answers we have. Is sex a natural phenomenon wherewhich we may address issues of medicine? Is sex a social issue, that represents at its most fundamental, the power relations between men and women, the complexitity of social identity (sexuality), and the relation with other important social notions (criminality, deviance, education, class, work).

Sex and criminality bring up many issues: the notion of paedophilia, for instance has a question-begging notion of childhood. A study like Philippe Aries and many others shows how our attitude towards the pre-pubescent and pubescent has changed over the past few centuries with industrialisation. Some criminalised sexual behaviours can reflect social attitudes, why is it criminal to put out a cigarette on one’s partner if they both want it [there are many documented stories like this]?

Legal issues can come up; age of consent is an obvious one, borderline cases, what about sex and legislation on an international level; where homosexuality is a corporal punishable offence at one sovereignty and acceptable at another. What about the plight of those who are between cultural identities and yet torn apart by them by virtue of their sexual identity (transexuals in Iran; the double discrimination of homosexual Israelis; the custom of forced marriage in British Pakistani communities).

Biological issues: does it make sense to classify between sexes of male and female? If sexual intercourse is a notion held by other species, is sexuality a workable notion? Can we for instance, use the insights of observing animal sexual behaviour as to understanding our own? Are we sufficiently genetically comparable?

Education: how do we properly teach sexuality in the classroom? How do we teach sexuality to children as parents and adults?

Normative: is it ethical to study sexual behaviour? What are the provisions required for ‘ethical’ study? Does the ‘is’ of animal sexual behaviour entail the ‘ought’ of sexual behaviour genera? (the answer is no).

To speak of a ’sexology’ is a bit of a misnomer in some respects. While there are many insights to be made as the biological scientist, the social psychologist, the clinical psychologist, the sociologist, the philosopher, or even the educator; those issues of sex often presuppose or come to bear upon wider issues of those subjects. To have a ’sexology’ would be at worst a failed understanding of the underlying issues which lie far beyond sex itself, or at best, an understanding simultaneously of many many disciplines at little depth or only one subject at much depth. There are some subjects that, while are importantly interdisciplinary, are not subjects suis generis, that is, without some failure or exclusion of one discourse.

This is not fair to say that some interdisciplinary efforts are irrelevant.

Many subjects in the mathematical sciences often have specialists who are non-mathematicians. Calculus as applied to the many aspects of chemistry, or the subject that has now come to be known as computer science; are noble species of wider genera subjects.

There is a sense of question-begging to which I have decidedly not answered, as to how to understand crime, or sexuality. While we may be conciliartory between the biologist interested in evolution, or the law scholar who is also an amateur marxist; we find not necessarily competing theses, but rather; competing ideologies and methods. To group them as one exclusive category excludes the manifold within each subject matter.

Destre

Reading Foucault: Some observations

Reading Foucault is difficult; but one questions how it is that Foucault shall be read: for this question determines the latterly question: how shall Foucault be judged?

It is, despite my confidence about social theory, a whole minefield, of which I admit nothing interesting I can say about Foucault; comparatively however, the observations can be made:

1. It is strangely familiar to read Foucault, not in the writing style, nor even in the context; but in the conclusions made.

2. This is for a few reasons: Foucault’s terminology and work has been dispersed even if not by name unto many subjects: literary studies, social sciences, the humanities, (continental) philosophy..

3. There is a strange parallel to be made between Goffman (of whom I know a little bit more about) and Foucault:

i. Both seem to have interests in control mechanisms
ii. Both have ‘campaigning’ elements to them
iii. Both leer into the more morbid and dark and ‘outside’ (to use Goffmanian terminology) subjects of social relations and social structure; stigma, homosexuality, the ‘total institution’.

4. This parallel isvery unsubtle and there are many complexities to Foucault that I am not acknowledging.Very much, it is to say that Foucault’s work took place in the intellectually isolated environment of France, where little outside of it came through (except, of course, for the real ‘titans’ of the past – Freud, Marx, Hegel etc.)

5. It is interesting to read Foucault as a historian for two reasons:

i. If we understand Foucault as a historian, it sets a prospect for the kind of thing history can be: social commentary of the past to understand the present and future. I hold this wider perspective of our social and natural history to be ‘history par excellance’.
ii. Seeing Foucault as making a statement about our understanding as a result of, or in context of, past social beliefs/attitudes and institutional build makes Foucault look very favourable (much more so, than if we were to consider him a ’social theorist’, or ‘philosopher’).

Michael

“Noughties”

Noughties?

Anyone who is under 35, or, who hardly engages in the drudgeries of celebrity culture and the ultramodern world of bloggospheres, heat magazine (my perennial enemy), and other such nonsenseries, may not have come across the phrase, or expression “noughties”.

Noughties is a parody of a term, it is a bricolage (breaking up of words and fusion of a new concept), and as such, it fulfills two aspects of the postmodern social condition. Noughties is a pun on ‘Nineties’, but ‘nought’ referring to 00s. To refer to something as xx-ties is a late 20thC convention; noughties represents the continuation of this concept, but demonstrating the ineptitude of actually having a xx-ties about a ‘nought’ . As such, it is an empty, redundant term, much like the emptiness and redundance of normal social interactions in this bleak, plastic, social world; and it is a sad remnant of a generation of people who had lived and enjoyed the late 20thC.

What defines the noughties?

What defines the age of today? In a lot of ways, it seems to be a continuation of the nineties; in a way, it seems to be a self-aware parody of the past; celebrating era like the 1970’s, 1980’s, as if they were characterised only by its music, and its attire. Overshadowing the historical events like the cold war, vietnam, or Thatcherism.

I was with Michael at a talk a week or so ago, by a philosopher named Morgan; talking on the issue of Seduction. There was a passing comment where Morgan said “I’m a noughties man, I meet girls on the internet…”. I thought then, what is it that consists when we say someone is encapusulated by a period of time; there used to be a phrase “it’s the nineties”, which denoted that it was a positive time for change, in terms of ecology and our attitudes towards society and nature. Now, the noughties seems to be a time of self-indulgence and cynicism. The noughties seems to be an age where men are obsessed by appearance (metrosexual), ambivalent about social issues, but only providing lip service to causes (slacktivism – an actual word, I looked it up).

What defines us today? I suppose it is that we care so little about things; where doctors and teachers care not for their duties, but league tables; where academic funding bodies care about reputation and bureaucracy; where help is as long as the money notes from whence it came.

Someone once said “It is not an enlightened age, but it is the age of enlightenment“; what a sad day when not even that is true…

Sapere Aude…

Antisophie

Protected: Reasons I like Stephen Fry…(On cultural archetypes)

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Lars Ulrich (interview): Ideology, authenticity, genre

Very interesting stuff. Shame about their two albums in 1996…but that’s another story!

M

Against ‘Pro-ana’ groups

Preamble

Destre posed a challenge to myself and Sinistre; we want to articulate between us a point of contention on the issue of pro-ana and pro-mia groups; the issues raised here can apply to other notions; particularly the circulation of terrorist websites, or, promoting the idea of pro-paedophile values (which was a problem during the late 20thC). Sometimes we find the same questions coming up in new ways. The recent phenomenon of the ‘pro-ana’ (and later pro-mia) movement is one such expression of these age old issues.

Ana and mia on the net

Pro-ana, and pro-mia sites are websites that promote eating disorders. The referring terms of ‘ana’ and ‘mia’ are to give human-sounding (and female) names, a personal face to this those conditions of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and, to some extent, EDNOS cases (eating disorders not otherwise specified). Sufferers of eating disorders are allowed to come together and give tips on how to be thin, and perpetuate the norm that thin is beautiful.

Reclassification

One of the ideas associated with pro-ana and pro-mia groups is that ‘anorexia’ and ‘bulimia’ should not be seen as medical categories; which, following the good company of Foucault, Goffman, and the interactionist tradition ensures a pretty unhelpful life for those who are engaging in these behaviours; they are fundamentally loaded terms, and are negative from the start; much like terms used to denote sexual assault.

Recoding ‘anorexia’ to ‘ana’, and ‘bulimia’ to ‘mia’ shifts from medical condition to lifestyle choice.

Motivations to condemn ‘ana’ and ‘mia’

1. These groups provide information and techniques to infom people of more aggressive behaviours for anorexia and bulimia. Teaching people, as such, how to lose weight as fast as possible; or how to hide it and general ‘do’s and dont’s’.
2. These groups glorify thinness. Perpetuating the very thing in culture that not only aggrivates this issue, they promote the norm that harms them.
3. With the exception of some countries making initiatives (France on the fashion industry, other countries banning certain internet sites); the internet is not policed; anyone with a curiosity can learn about it, and further, foster attitudes of those tendencies; where a more policed environment like the community of peoples in real life, may curb those who may be slightly inclined away. Anyone, particularly the very young, may be able to find these groups with ease.
4. These groups do not foster the attitude of avoiding these behaviours, but either pose ambivalence or promotion of it.

Sinistre*

Dimensions of the masculine: quasi methodological considerations

Preamble

Magister Michael commissioned me to write this article, because he thought it a bit insincere for Sinistre or himself to do it; and Destre is out of the count for now. Sinistre, and to a lesser extent, Michael, are very interested in those corners, those pockets of the world that we have where deviance and difference exists.

The worlds that people have where they express themselves differently, or they see the world in a different way, where those who are not familiar with such difference, or are part of the mainstream in virtue of lack of familiarity, shun.

Masculinity

I suppose it is Sinistre’s social science background that enables the possibility of his knowledge of such weird things in the world. Those obscurities that we don’t accostum ourselves with, like the Israeli psytrance scene, or real girl dolls (a post on that should be coming up in the near future).

I want to pose some social phenomena to you, and then, put forward a polemical. I shall grant through these considerations, that we may take masculinity o be a very complex and multiply realised concept. That is, we may find expression of this thing called masculinity, and find it having different places in our lives; but does that tell us that we are the same, or different, as social units? It is this question to which I define the two poles.

So, with that aside, let us now begin.

Sexuality

Sinistre likes to understand the corners and facets of the world that people do ot often see, the things that are hardly acknowledge in the world. Consider the phenomenon of male rape. Male rape may occur through a variety of setting, statistically it is consistently a proportionately low frequeny. This tells us that it is hardly reported, but not that it hardly happens. To the latter question, we can only speculate, or refine our methodological tools (consider the British Crime Survey against ‘Official statistics’).

Consider how, for instance, the male archetype denotes verility and and dominance, it is surely consistent, nay, logically contrapositive, to say that his would conversely mean that the violation of a man would be intimate and deeply shameful. The point to be made here, is that crimes affect all. The objects of our analysis should not, therefore, be based on the previous objects of analysis, and, consequently, their objects, if and only if we have any suspicion that they give us anything less than apodictic certainty.

Body image

Men have body image issues too. People talk a lot of the feminine archetype that is being projected to the world of thin beign beautiful; men have normative expectations upon appearance as well. Consider, for instance, the coining of the term ‘metrosexual’; or Michael’s previous post about his wolverine action figure.

Michael told me how most of his action figures were male; and furthermore, they all had overly defined abs, torsos, arms and legs. Even more so than even some of the best athletes, and boxers. Even martial artists and weightlifters look flabby (especially the latter!); so, an action figure that, in a neutral position looks like a steroid cramp? That’s pretty normative to me.

Men have worries of being attractive, being accepted, being embraced. Men can disregard their bodies and sexual identities for the prospect of tenderness that they never find; men subject themselves to objectification and accept the norms of scrutiny that judge them. Not all men, granted. But the point here is a methodological one; what is our unit of analysis?

The place of emotions

Men are not allowed to cry, except in football games, rememberance masses, the film The Great Escape, and maybe, the funeral of their loved ones (but only certain ones). This is, clearly an overdone and possibly offensively absurd view. Nevertheless, there is asymmetry about the appropriateness of expressing emotion. This isn’t a gender issue to be as simple as ‘women talk about their feelings, men perform activities together’; this is one about the definition of the situation.

The boundaries of a relationship are set by the agents who play it. My relationship with Michael is that I can tell him everything and I trust him with my life; but Michael could never do the same, for him, all such relations of care and compassion are only one way, Michael is very detached from me, compared to say, his closeness with Sinistre and Destre (the original Areopagites).

By contrast, the appropriateness of the expression of laughter may be more appropriate among my girlfriends, where with the Areopagites (except sinistre), everything is very serious and intellectual.

Individuality

To be an individual is a criterion of authenticity for many youth cultures; not so, I state; to be an individual, or to define practical identity, is a universally important social construct. Perhaps this is the spaner in the works; social criteria is not a good metric for social analysis. So then, we are back to square one. What is an appropriate looking glass into ourselves as a human community?

Antisophie

Conceptual vocabulary

I will define conceptual vocabulary as follows:

Those concepts, terms, ideas, or what-have-you that form the content of our thoughts, construct those porositions by which we express thought, and thus, those concepts by which we tacitly view the world

What is a candidate for a concept in our vocabulary?

1. Gravity: we are taught, as children in school of this very odd metaphysical thing called ‘gravity’; oh, but why is it odd? You may ask. It’s odd because it is taught in us in a very dogmatic way; Very few of us come to examine the mechanics beneath our reality, but merely assume that there is some established body out there that explains it. For example; we can talk about  how relativity acknowledge the speed of light (299 792 458 m/s, but we just take it for granted of the scientific authority that such truths about physical reality our our best knowledge.

2. Classical Logic (in particular, the law of Modus Tollens): Modus Tollens is a very primitive rule of everyday inference; it is almost a practical syllogism (in practical reasoning, and is hard to go about life without. Things like noncontradiction, or law of excluded middle evoke various logical and metaphysical issues, but let us consider this as an oddity for now (e.g. debates between intuitionalism vs. classical logic etc.). Modus Tollens, unlike gravity, is perhaps something primitive about human reasoning; I dare say perhaps it is an evolutionary thing. Which leads me to my next point….

3. Evolution: The whole Kansas situation over the past few years, and creationists in general over the past century have aggrivated this point, rather than helped elaborate it. Evolution is something we are taught about the natural world; it is one of those most taken-for-granted things in our education, that people too easily misunderstand it. If we consider the notion of natural selection, by mere chance, establishing those mechanisms that form things such as our basic physiology, and, as some (Damasio), argue, our psychologies {More on that another time..}, it is astounding how it blows away the notion of telos; but because people have such strong feelings for the issue, strong feelings overcome the subtle details of the Darwinian story so much that they talk of evolution in this bastardised way, or such that evolution just looks like telos! (I have heard the latter expression among Christian Neuroscientists, and it disturbs me deeply. Evolution is so ingrained in our education in the world today, that it has almost become a folk concept.

I have a friend, for instance, who tries to explain away sexual behaviour as some construct of evolution, or rather, under my analysis, I see her as saying sexual conduct is natural because it is an evolutionary construct; therefore, if sexual desire is endemic of our nature as homo sapiens, then it is permissable. Obviously this breaks every metaethical rule in the book; namely, she invokes ‘is implies ought’. The point is, that the notion of evolution, whether accurate or not to the proper scientific story, is part of our conceptual vocabulary; those putative concepts that we use in our everyday conversation. Let me now consider a more documented example

4. During the days of Christian antiquity; we referred to a thing called ’sloth’, which refers to a thing which we may now refer to as laziness, or accidie. But we may even class it in the same set of things as what may be in the realm of mental illness; or, what we as philosophers may call uncontroversial cases whereby our practical deliberation process is changed. Charles Taylor, in “A Secular Age” refers to how the ‘magic’ of life is being reduced away slowly, as the scientific story unwinds to inform us more about our reality. Taylor, himself doesn’t advocate this ‘reduction’ account of the secularisation (why exactly he does this is unclear…he says it is overly simplistic, but his alternative account I have yet to understand).

The specific case he gives, and it is hardly original, is a story that most of you have heard today. Depression. People these days (analogously to my friend who talks about evolution), accept that depression (how we may define that I leave that purposely open), is a  chemical imbalance; instead of being the condition of Adam’s sin into all of his children, of the recognition of our inferiority to God, or those reasons that we make for our own sense of despair; it is a chemical imbalance. This idea is imbued into our culture, and it removes the responsibility and sense of agency that we have. This idea that mental illness is not a problem or aspect of one’s character, or even that there is such a concept of ‘mental illness’ such that it affects our moral character and moral status (that is, the motivational status of action). The concept of mental illness is imbured in the conceptual vocabularies of many.

Caveat

I have purposely given an ambiguous conception of ‘conceptual vocabulary’; there are various strata. At the hilt, is the transcendental realm, whereby we have the most fundamental concepts to which we are not educated, but either they are a priori, or necessary rational postulates.

The shifting concepts

There is no doubt that the concepts in our vocabulary change, or rather, some things do, while the transcendental ones may stay the same. We may ask some important questions about this change in vocabulary; we may change our conception of mass (the standard Newtonian-Einstein story); we may eliminate folk concepts; we may change the moral and social status of persons (with mental illness); and we may, just may, change the place in the world that we percieve ourselves to have (the Copernican revolution, Darwin). Let me then ask these questions:

1. What causes the change in our vocabulary? Is it sociological? Is it in virtue of the progress of science, or the process of culture? A sub question; what is the proper analysis of the progress of science; is it sociology (history of science); or philosophy (philosophy of science)?

2. What is the normative status of our concepts? This may be asked in two parts; firstly, the political and social significance of certain ideas; do we, with gravity, for instance, maintain the prejudices of normal science and thus resist the progress of revolutionary science, and in doing so, we are to hinder the paradigm shift; and also agitate the questions of the rationality of paradigm shifts (namely, when is it appropriate to move from one to another paradigm?)  The second question is this: are we legitimate to hold these concepts as true in our vocabulary? This asks two further questions; one: what does it mean for a concept to be true? (and what is truth?), and secondly: what justifies maintaining a concept as part of the furniture of our beliefs? (questions about pragmatism and realism come to mind; for example; is it legitimate to believe in numbers? even if they are false things?)

These are all difficult questions.

Michael (and Destre)