The Moral Limit: Are We Really Capable Of Anything?

In my last Blog I looked at some of the atrocious acts humans commit - violence, rape, murder and paedophilia, to name but a few - and I asked whether we humans are capable of committing those unspeakable crimes for which we vilify others. The answer to the question is, of course we are. Here's how we can know.

The best way to tackle such a question philosophically is start with an extreme case that evinces the point you want to make, and then lessen the extremity until your argument is demonstrated at a more reasonable level.

Let's start with the following extreme situation to show that all humans are potential child-abusers. If you were compelled under duress to choose between A) Abusing a child yourself for 10 minutes or B) Witnessing a million people abuse a million children for 30 minutes then torturing them with red hot pokers and killing them, I'm pretty sure under those conditions that just about everyone would increase their chances of choosing to abuse a child for 10 minutes.

That extreme scenario demonstrates that everyone 'could' be a child-abuser under 'some' conditions. But clearly that situation is not an ordinary circumstance - and mostly we like to consider only what we feel to be in the realms of the norm and the realistic. This is fair enough, except for one potential problem; life is full of vagaries, and there are plenty of potential emotional tipping points dotted about, not just in extreme scenarios, but in everyday life too, making it very hard to say what is realistic in any ‘one size fits all’ model. The problem is, when asking what we humans are capable of, we find the question is the wrong question to ask if it is left in isolation from context-dependent behaviour-altering scenarios. Even the mildest humans can be incited to lose their temper or become violent when pushed too far - like, say, if they felt threatened, or saw harm being done to their family (we've all seen how people change beyond recognition when confronted with a burglar in their house) - and similarly, if any of us found ourselves fighting for our lives in a Middle Eastern civil war or an African genocide, then I don't think it's unreasonable to say that all humans are capable of murder, despite all having different tipping points.

Moral capability leads to circularity

Yet although this paints a clear picture of how life can get its teeth into our varying psychological and emotional states with the slings and arrows of human experience, the importance of the discussion is usually based on the challenge of having it framed in terms of what is realistic, and what is probable for the majority of people under fairly standard day-to-day conditions. The trouble is, that tends to lead us into circular reasoning. Circular reasoning says that A is true because B is true; and B is true because A is true. When trying to assess what is probable for the majority of people, we find that most humans are not realistically capable of unspeakable acts, but what belongs within the realms of the realistic is contingent on the varying duress and psychological pressures that life throws up, which immediately changes what is realistic. In the above consideration we are seeing that John is capable of duress-induced murder only because duress induced him to murder. That is the circularity - most of us are not capable of unspeakable acts so long as we do not find ourselves in conditions that engender the need for unspeakable acts, which doesn’t really tell us much other than that humans are capable of what humans are capable of.

Moreover, even without the above circularity it is hard to pin down moral feelings and moral behaviour to simple considerations, because there are two ways that these things are changing all the time. One is that a perceived immoral act can be committed due to a change in feeling about whether that act is moral or not; and the other is that a perceived immoral act can be committed due to a change in the person committing the act. In early Roman times a young man might not have felt much guilt about wanting to marry and have sex with a 12 year old girl, whereas nowadays he'd be accused of being a sex-fiend. That's a change of perception about the act itself - it was once widely permissible, it no longer is. On the other hand, a young mother (let's call her Jenny) might be a long way from killing her boyfriend in the general day to day sense, but one day if she caught him trying to rape her daughter she might bludgeon him to death with a rolling pin. In this case that's a change in the person's state of psychological duress with regard to her capability of committing murder or manslaughter, not a change of view in the permissibility of murder with a rolling pin. We might have more sympathy with a mother who killed her daughter's attacker with a rolling pin than someone who did it for fun, but that's an issue of mitigation and leniency; it is not a change of view about death-by-rolling pin. 

What we're saying here is that if one day in the distant future humans evolve a culture in which murdering sexual offenders is endorsed then feelings about the wrongness of murdering a would-be rapist with a rolling pin would diminish (that is, change in feeling about whether an act is moral or not). We are also saying that Jenny is a potential murderer, but that potentiality only turns to actuality when she is pushed beyond a limit far in excess of her ordinary day to day life (that is, change in the person committing the act).

John Milton, in his Areopagitica, brilliantly sums up the notion that we are all potential murderers, thieves and violent people waiting to happen, whereby we could all find ourselves in situations that test us or change us beyond what we can imagine. He says:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for.”

You may be more familiar with this wisdom in its other appearance as the maxim 'Virtue untested is no virtue at all'.  What is being implied by Milton is something quite acutely perceptive – it is fairly easy for most people to behave quite decently when they are under no pressure, or when fear of the law curbs their instincts for misbehaving – but it is much harder, and much more commendable, when a man or woman faces the toughest challenges yet still comes away exhibiting goodness and kindness. I'm with Milton here; without the illusion that we are really quite decent, without the thin 'social contract' fibril keeping us just about united in our aims, and without ever being subjected to external pressures strong enough to significantly change our behaviour for the worst, I think we would be doing many more bad things than we currently do. Moreover, we know from the psychological experiments of Zimbardo and Millgram how reprehensible people can be when put in conditions that allow them freedom to treat others beyond what they would do in normal society. 

And taking it even further, when things are highly extreme they can end up changing history forever. For example, Adolf Hitler, who, by comparison to any decent standard, was stupid in extremity, and highly unmindful of the qualities that knit humanity together, was able to dominate a great intelligent nation like the Germans. The main influence he seemed to wield as a control mechanism was that of absolute certainty (manifested with the likes of Himmler, Goering and Goebbels in things like Lebensborn, National Socialism and the SS temples). Absolutism combined with power brought a sense of pseudo-Wagnerian Germanic certainty that had the power to predominate a generation of people, who, in many cases probably would have been ordinary citizens in another life.

Even Martin Heidegger - one of the best philosophers of the 20th century - was a supporter of Adolf Hitler, which goes to show what the thrall of authority and disconsolation can do even to highly intelligent minds. Heidegger had plenty to say about original freedom with regard to the extreme opposites of chaos and law, and the subjection of chaos to a form to a particular "mastery which enables the primal wilderness of chaos and the primordiality of law to advance under the same yoke" - which, as we now know with hindsight was a very virulent National Socialism under Hitler to which he was attracted for a time. Nazi Germany proved to be, among many things, a nasty national social experiment that produced an animalistic brutality, cruelty, and eradication of human life - a kind of nationwide Millgram test where obedience took primacy over human rights and moral accountability.

Nazi Germany may be an anomalous example, but it shows us the kind of extremes we're talking about when situations take a dramatic turn - be they in war, religious groups or extreme politics. As much as it upsets the sensibilities of those who like the extreme moral propositions of good and evil as polar opposites, and those who view people as off-the-peg typology fodder that sit rigidly on that spectrum, these binary simplicities merely portray a skewed interpretation of what humankind is capable of when she "sallies out and sees her adversary". There were officers in Nazi concentration camps who were good husbands, fathers, and friends - and nobody who knew them under those conditions could have conceived of what they got up to as a result of obedience to authority. Similarly, there have been many seemingly dedicated, kind, committed husbands, wives, boyfriends and girlfriends who have shocked those around them (and themselves) by acting in ways they wouldn’t have thought possible had they not sallied out and seen their adversaries in the shape of temptation and external pressures.

We see occurrences of this character variance in everyday life too. I know a man who, for most of the week, is a placid and inoffensive kind of chap, but who on match day puts on his tribal outfit (otherwise known as a football shirt) and turns into (by his own admission) an abuse-chanting, sanguinary gang member. He tells me that on match day he is "fuelled by hatred and aggression - which feels great, and is a real adrenaline rush".

I notice too how this effect occurs in the difference between being a pedestrian on the street and being a driver in the car. Most drivers know this too. When you accidently step in someone's way in the street or in a shopping mall (or they you), usually you are both apologetic as you try to be as unobtrusive as possible. But when someone cuts you up in a car (which in most cases is accidental, or due to low confidence behind the wheel or poor concentration) our adrenaline levels rise and we become agitated, and, in the case of some, the horn is beeped aggressively.

These are less extreme versions of our application of Milton's quote to murder, etc - but let's not forget, even road rage can lead to murder. I think the commonality between examples like road rage and football tribalism is the impersonal nature of the acts - we are at our worst when dehumanisation occurs, and we can strip people of their individuality and not have to consider them as people with feelings, weaknesses, insecurities and limitations (Nazi Germany is a wider example of this). When someone cuts you up on the road you rarely get to see the psychology of the person behind the wheel; when football fans are chanting vitriolic abuse at a sea of rival supporters they rarely get to engage with the individuals in their normal weekly life - people with whom they'd have much in common, and in terms of human emotions, people with whom they'd have just about everything in common.

So I would say the extent to which we are capable of gross and heinous things depends on a few factors - the psychological duress, the emotional instability, the fear, the vulnerability, the extremities of the situation, the ability to control a desire, the power afforded to us, our perception of what we can get away with, and maybe even the extent to which we are readily able to dehumanise others.

Important: the question in reverse

Here's another thing to consider. We ask whether we are all capable of those heinous crimes for which we love to vilify others - but the question should also be asked in reverse; could those 'despicable' people that we love to vilify actually have been ordinary, morally decent citizens if they'd have been born under different circumstances? I think the answer is yes, they could. I remember seeing a documentary about notorious child killer Myra Hindley's background prior to her meeting fellow killer Ian Brady. The psychologist who looked extensively at her upbringing, and the life choices she made, said (quite rightly in my view) that regarding many other alternative conditions under which she didn't meet Ian Brady she would have led a fairly normal, uncontroversial life. I feel pretty sure that the same can be said for the 20th century monsters often proffered as the epitome of evil - Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot - if they had been taken from the cot when they were babies and given to loving parents in rural Staffordshire they probably would have grown up to be pretty decent fellows, leading fairly ordinary lives. Equally, there are, no doubt, many people living in the UK right now who would have caused a death toll as high as Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot had they have had any dictatorial power in a country full of people able to be exploited and dehumanised.

As much as all the above is true, I would suggest that in spite our evolutionary legacy, and the fact that we are all potential unspeakable criminals given the wrong circumstances, I think in all probability we are 'not' all realistically (and I do stress 'realistically') capable of unspeakable crimes, where 'realistic' means having a reasonable probability of avoiding the kind of situations in which these things become conducive. That is to say, most of us do have the ability to resist wickedness and depravity, even though I think it lurks dormantly in us all. The big challenge for those who can resist doing despicable things is, as ever, in facing up to how they react to people who haven't been able to. I suppose given the acknowledgement that any of us could be involved in despicable things in the wrong kind of circumstances, we have seen ample reason to prefer kindness, understanding, mercy, love and grace, and not choose to dehumanise those who are not in the same boat as us.

Internal moral inconsistency

The other thing to consider is that humans are morally inconsistent. I remember hearing about a local traveller in my area who frequently beat his wife and had several affairs too. One day when his son smoked some dope he went mad and accused him of putting a slur on the family name. To most people, the wife-beating and the infidelity constitute worse immoralities than smoking a bit of dope - but clearly not in this man's case. I think we see this frequently in human beings - due to upbringing, mental ability and experiences, we find that just about everyone has a sense of right and good over wrong and bad, but they often differ in the particular values they hold dear or the strength of feeling regarding varying matters. We find people who strike us as generally unkind and uncaring, but who adopt a work ethic we find admirable. There are men who make wholly honest shopkeepers but wholly dishonest husbands. Even bloodthirsty tyrants will scoff at discourtesy or bad manners when in formal capacities, or get sentimental about twee things that would have no effect on us.

Our values and ethics seem to be dependent on upbringing and personal experiences, and given that these things differ from person to person, it is not surprising that values and ethics differ too. Consider too that humans are idiosyncratic, and that history is full of things that were considered morally good at the time that we now consider to be morally bad. There are principally two ways that a human will differ from you in values and ethics - one is that they come from another culture, and the other is that they come from another era. A woman from England in 1066 might be as culturally and ethically different from a present day Englishman as a present day woman from Tanzania or Sri Lanka.

Of all the people who have ever lived, each one has a particular vision of how our world 'ought' to work, and many others both from different cultures and different historical eras find those 'oughts' quite absurd or inconsistent. But here's the real shocker; given the gross acts we've seen in history, it's a perturbing thought that just about everyone is striving for some kind of goodness or template or ideal concerning how they think things would be best. It seems to me that very few people actually do bad for bad's sake - even the twisted visions like Hitler's ideas about Aryan white supremacy and Mao Zedong's 'leap' towards modernisation and industrialisation amount to a deranged goal for their version of a better kind of world, with scant regard to the lives considered expendable. No doubt in cases like Stalin's quasi-Marxist/Leninist ideology and Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist methods for controlling Iraq, their tyranny is more about taking advantage of power and being corrupted by it - but I think if we focus on the general man on the street, I would say most are striving for some kind of goodness, it's just the case that personal circumstances condition the success or failure of that goal. Everyone has an idea about justice - but views differ on what justice is in the cases of the particular.

I think this is the interesting distinction that puts human progression on a knife edge; on the one hand we have a shared desire for progression, but one that contains differences of opinion regarding the particulars. And yet on the other hand people's life circumstances really are unpredictable, which means that we cannot be complacent in forming pictures of people. Are most of us capable of atrocious things? You bet we are - it's just that thankfully most people never find themselves in the kind of situations in which they could do their worst.

 

This Really Will Get You Thinking.....

Here's a good one for debate - this is a very interesting issue that I posed a few days ago in the following way:

I've never had any interest in the Lostprophets, nor any familiarity with their music, but after seeing on BBC News yesterday that the Lostprophets' frontman Ian Watkins has pled guilty to child sex offences, I was wondering what effect would it have on your perception/enjoyment of the music if you learned that your favourite band/artist had committed some of the worst child-sex crimes on record?

Technically it wouldn't change the quality of the music they'd produced (although one might read the lyrics with a new darkness), but how do you think you'd react to, say, Radiohead's albums if it turned out to be Thom Yorke, or David Bowie's albums if it turned out to be him, or Pink Floyd's if it turned out to be Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour, or The Beatles if it turned out to be Paul McCartney? (replace any of those with *your* favourites). Would it ruin the albums for you, or could you find a way to conceptually separate the quality of the music you've always loved from the horrible sex offences of the person writing the songs?

I submitted this question in my Mensa group, in a science-theology group, in a music group, in two philosophy groups, and on a debating café-style forum. This response was my favourite - from a lady called Daphne Richards:

"A human being doesn't stop or start being a human being, no matter what they do. A piece of music is, at best, an expression of something the artist was feeling at the time; not an accurate representation of their whole character and life. Can a rapist not fall in love? And write a beautiful song about it? Sure they can."

Yes, there's a profoundly accurate observation there - just as a piece of music is an expression of something the artist was feeling at the time, and not an accurate representation of their whole character and life - it is also the case that our sins are predominantly a product of what we were feeling at the time, with many underlying causes, and they too are not the whole representation of what it means to be human. It is important to note that in all likelihood we are all capable of reprehensible acts as well as very noble deeds - and in being human we all are tapping into something deep, mysterious, and far grander than ourselves.

Whether such sex offences ought to cause one to sever any emotional and artistic ties to their favourite musicians I cannot say, that's up to you (the responses to this were mixed). But I find it a frightfully good question, because it causes one to ponder all sorts of other uncomfortable questions about ourselves;

What is our cut-off point for sins of the artist that no longer remain palatable?

How easily can we conceptually and emotionally separate the wrongs of the artist from the things they produce?

Is beauty or brilliance diminished by the sins of the composer?

Are we all capable of the very worst indictments to which we subject others so objectively?

Do we find it too easy to forgive ourselves and too hard to forgive others?

Yes, frightfully good questions indeed. My own personal feeling is that finding out our favourite artist committed some of the worst child-sex crimes on record couldn't help but cause us to feel differently about those albums we've loved for so long. I can't deny that I probably would never listen to Dark Side Of The Moon, Highway 61 Revisited or Astral Weeks with the same feelings ever again if the above indictments crawled out of the woodwork onto any of those artists - but then even in the past twenty five years I don't suppose I've ever listened to those albums (or any for that matter) with the same feelings on consecutive occasions.

Feeling differently about the albums need not mean eradicating them from future consideration, or removing them from our record collection - but equally there is enough decent music out there still to choose from if we did decide that we no longer wanted to listen to them in light of what we'd found out (or put money in the pockets of the artists through further CD sales).

I could, I think, continue to appreciate those great works for the qualities they imbue, but I would hope that rather than looking to dismissively excoriate the artist, I would be moved to look even more deeply into a human condition that places my favourite artists alongside those we so easily dismiss as reprehensible fiends that seem beyond the pale. I would also (I hope) be moved to recognise that human beings - those we like, those we hate, and those in between - are a medley of complex components, each demonstrating a patchwork of good and bad qualities - with some of those components very disturbing and some very stupendous, all going on in individual human minds.

A friend called Jacqui in the café-style forum raised a good point about people like Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his 13 year old cousin - because it must be remembered that people's attitudes to it then were a lot different than they are now. Many fewer people would have had such a problem with it back in the 1950s (although even then there was uproar) - much less so in, say, 7th century Arabia or in early Roman times when 12-14 was thought to be a good age for marriage for a girl as they took menstruation to be a sign that they were ripe for fertility.

Attitudes to paedophilia are changing all the time - and I wonder if in becoming much more mindful of tackling paedophilia we are actually in danger of going too far the other way. While I'm sure no one will want to resist the goal of doing all we can to expose paedophilia, protect victims and potential future victims, bring the culprits to justice, and put every measure in place to see an end to it, it is evident to me that there's a heavy price to pay too.

As a result of this increased effort to tackle paedophilia we've created a fear culture that robs us of something special - our ability to feel comfortable around children. I've heard countless stories of men being very anxious about having their photo taken with young nieces or nephews at family parties for fear that someone will think one of the child's hands looks to be deceptively near his crotch; I've heard that many teachers are terrified of getting too close or involved with their pupils and being accused of over-stepping the boundaries (even a hug is out of the question now); I've heard that department stores are finding it harder than ever to get volunteers for a Santa Clause in their shop at Christmas because they fear the ramifications of having children on their knee.

People are afraid; afraid of being photographed in the wrong way, afraid of seeing images of children, afraid of sharing pictures of their children on to friends on social networking sites, afraid of tactility, afraid of getting too close, afraid of being caught looking at children or young teenagers in the wrong way, and probably in many cases afraid of the obsession with these things.

Have we gone too far the other way in creating a fear culture that makes us uncomfortable around children because we're always wondering what people think or what's going to appear online the next way? Or has our increased mindfulness been a case of the right balance being struck, and a necessary correlative of the human desire to come down hard on the association between sex and children?

I suppose my intuitive feeling is that in a world in which too may sex crimes have for centuries gone unchallenged, unpunished and often unreported, it is good that people are galvanised towards seeing that change. But in the process we are going to become (and are already becoming) more dystopian as we surveil, scrutinise, monitor and record with the kind of nanny-statism once predicted in the likes of Nineteen Eighty Four. If our more prescient twentieth century writers (like Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Anthony Burgess) foresaw one key thing, it was that we shouldn’t enforce moral probity from the top down - it has to come from the bottom up. That is to say, real moral progress is laissez faire progress where humans feel value, self-worth and kinship, rather than a command economy top-down progress that looks to catalyse change by relying on a totalitarian hegemony.

Moreover, we've seen with in the works of Huxley, Orwell and Burgess (and others) that a State hegemony exercised solely for the good of its citizens may be the most repressive and reprehensible of all, because fallen men and women can never hope to rule as if they are gods. As history has so often shown, a tyranny that attempts to rule as though it is Divine in stature will often turn out to be more reprehensible than the 'fiends' it hopes to make good.  Those great works like Nineteen Eighty Four, Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange show (among other things) that our peregrinations can become nightmares if journeys are unhealthily conflated with destinations. Thus, it helps, I think, to develop a studied detachment from this world’s obsessively vaunted goals and try to embody as much human grace and kindness in our pursuits.

Here's why. I wonder if people's biggest fear, regarding the really unspeakable crimes, is, perhaps like all crimes (violence, theft, murder), that just about everyone is capable of them under certain circumstances. Could that be true, or is it a supposition that goes too far, I wonder? We outwardly repudiate what we fear, and we condemn those who do things we outwardly repudiate, which may mean we are only condemning what we fear about ourselves when we look deep within the self. Consequently, is our big collective fear and condemnation not actually just a vilification of others, but in fact a mirror that reflects back our own spectre of darkness and immoral capabilities? And do most of us even have the courage to ask such a question of ourselves?

Perhaps it also must be considered that humans are very good at hating - we humans have always had people to hate - rival tribes, adherents of other religions, people of a lower classes, people we can exploit, people with different colour skin, people with a different nationality, people out of work, people of a different sexual persuasion - the list goes on. What's clear now as we in the West become ever-more civilised, is that we are running out of people to hate, condemn, vilify and dehumanise - and sex offenders have become the easiest left to direct those feelings towards.

Let's not pretend that sex-crimes are not abhorrent - of course they are - and we should do all we can to stop them. But let's at least open ourselves up to the consideration that if we find ourselves too easily looking to hate, condemn, vilify and dehumanise people, and that those expressions might be because of our own fears about what we might be capable of when pushed to limits beyond what we are used to, then these expressions and feelings will do us no good in the end. If we are to confront the things talked about above while paying ample regard to what it actually means to be human, I think we are going to have to say that most of us are capable of great things and terrible things - and that it is only in realising this fact that we can see the potential 'unspeakable criminal' in ourselves and see the vulnerable, flawed, insecure human being that lurks beneath the exterior of the 'unspeakable criminal'. If we accomplish this, we have the best chance allowing kindness, grace, love, mercy and compassion to be a prevailing force in our treatment of others.

That's about as much as I want to say on the issues raised above - excepting one issue. A moment ago I asked whether we humans are capable of those unspeakable crimes for which we vilify others. In my next Blog I'm going to give more extensive consideration to that question.

* Picture courtesy of bbc.co.uk

Does Internet Porn Reduce Rape?

In my last Blog entry I looked at the efficacy of child-sex doll laws, and various associative connotations. I said that there are two important factors in that equation - one of moral preference and one of efficiency. Efficiency asks whether or not the introduction of child sex-dolls would reduce sexual acts on children, and moral preference asks whether we'd desire the dolls even if it did turn out that they reduce those acts. I concluded that the dolls should still be discontinued irrespective of what other ancillary benefits they might confer.

That leads me to this Blog topic - because I remember in a similar vein some studies done on the possible relationship between watching porn on the Internet and rape reduction - conducted by the likes of Todd Kendall, Melinda Moyer, Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, and analysis of the analysis from Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner in Freakonomics. Apparently it looks as though rape reduction might have some causal link to increased pornography viewing on the Internet. The first thing found in the American research is that States that adopted the Internet most quickly saw the biggest declines in rape. Apparently States with the most Internet access saw as much as a 27% drop in reported rapes. Given that the Internet occurred in different States at different times, it does provide a pretty neat large-scale social experiment, appearing to show a State reduction in rape commensurate with the introduction of the Internet.

Of course, I say 'appearing to', because it's not conclusive - there may be other factors. Even if the Internet reduces rape, that doesn't mean that Internet pornography reduces rape. Hence, the question of whether other crimes like murder and burglary saw a reduction too is important (and apparently they did not) - which gives indication that it wasn't simply people looking at EBay and Rateyourmusic instead of committing crimes - it was likely that people were satisfying their sexual desire online, and as a result, not needing to go out and rape. It's still not conclusive, of course - even after that - maybe increased Internet use on dating sites and social networking forums helped match up people together, thus lessening some former perpetrators' need to rape. But the reports say the biggest resultant impact has been on teenagers, who are probably statistically the people least likely to be looking for a serious relationship online.

It is well known in economics that when you lower the price of product Y that is a replacement for product X the quantity of X should fall (take video tapes, and their replacement, DVDs as a good example). It is not proven that Internet use is a replacement for rape, but it seems that the evidence gives good exhibition to the possibility. For those who are sceptical, your job would be to think up other variables that might be driving the reduction in rape and the increased Internet usage. For those who are convinced that reduction in rape and increased Internet porn are causally related, your job would be to think of other sets of variable data that might support the conclusion. At the moment, unless I hear hypotheses to the contrary, the proposition that Internet porn has contributed to a reduction in rape seems quite plausible.

Finally though, to reiterate a point from last time; even if it's true that watching Internet porn reduces rape, that's not to say that Internet porn is a good thing - it's just a less bad thing than rape. And it remains a positive endeavour if we try to help people to get away from pornography and into things more edifying and fulfilling.

A Truly Shocking Product: Debating The Controversy

In a week in which Google and Microsoft have consented to crack down on child porn searches, I've been getting involved in my own little 'paedophilia' debate, after I was shocked the other day to see a petition page linked through Facebook which was calling for the banning of child-size sex dolls. I wasn't shocked that people were petitioning for the discontinuation of these revolting things - I was shocked that such things exist in the first place.

We all know that adult-sized sex dolls exist, presumably to satisfy adults who can't get sex with real people, but I was horrified to learn that child versions of these dolls had been manufactured, particularly given our fairly widespread abhorrence towards paedophilia. Now, despite an interesting debate about them that emerged on a philosophy forum to which I contribute, I think it's fairly obvious that these dolls (and any form of CGI child simulations that could be produced) should be discontinued as quickly as possible. I'm fully seized of the problems with banning things, and between often tenuously attributed causal factors related to simulation and the real thing - but if the human goal is to see the relationship between sex and children terminated as soon as possible, then things like this shouldn't even be entertained, and there should be severe punitive strategies in place for those manufactures, wholesalers and dealers caught in contravention.

For some, though, this issue wasn't quite so clear cut. There has in the past been interesting debates about whether legally designed CGI child sex simulations would help make real children safer from paedophiles - and this was posited on the philosophy board as a potential thorn in my side. But my response was that even if it turned out that CGI child sex simulations did diminish the desire for real sex with children, I think there are better ways to address the issue, and it's the wrong way to tackle the problem. After all, it might be the case that watching porn reduces rape more than reading literature does, but that's not an argument that watching porn is better for you than reading literature. It might be the case that playing violent video games does more to decrease violent crime than giving to charity does, but that's not an argument that playing violent video games is better for you than giving to charity.  What's better is if we try to help people to get away from pornography and violent video games and into things more edifying and fulfilling.

Similarly, even if CGI child sex simulations do diminish the desire for real sex with children, it's much better if we help diminish paedophiles' desire for real sex with children by more edifying and fulfilling means (or punitive means when required), which involves confronting the problem. To me, this issue boils down to two things; the world in which we wish to live, and our realistic ability to make changes to bring about that world. Just about everyone wishes to live in a world in which the association between sex and children is terminated as soon as possible, and it is potentially easily in our power to do something about the demise of these products, so I think we should.

Here is a summary of the rest of my contributions to the debate.

Two things cause our moral views to alter - one is a change in emotional response (what one might call a 'moral shift'), and the other is a change in knowledge. Both are naturally bootstrapped by rational consideration, but they are different things. Sometimes we develop our emotional responses without much emphasis in changes in knowledge, such as when we start to see that we need to treat women, homosexuals and ethnic minorities better, and other times a change in knowledge is the driving force rather than a change of emotional response, such as when we stop witch-hunting*.

To see why the latter is a change in knowledge, not an emotional response - consider that King James and his religious cohorts used to think witches should be put to death. We don't believe in witches anymore - but if we still did I'm sure our emotional responses wouldn't be much different now to what they were then - I can't imagine we'd want to keep alive people we thought could be in league with the dark forces and cast evil supernatural spells on us. If we thought such people existed, I'm sure we'd want them put to death for our own safety.

Given the foregoing, it's clear that the reason we in the Western world don't look to kill witches anymore is not that we've become more lenient or temperate towards the concept of a witch dabbling in dark forces to our detriment - it's because we now don’t think that there are such things as witches who can cast supernatural spells on us. Our differences of opinion are mostly to do with different knowledge, making us more informed, not primarily improved morality regarding witch-killing. 

The corollary of what I've said is, I think, quite sobering, because it suggests that if you or I were envoys of King James, we too might well be fully behind the decision to put to death women we thought were witches colluding with the dark forces.  I think that is a very interesting thought to bring to the table in a modern age. How often we modern commentators sit from behind our computer screen reproaching the 'barbaric' folk of yesteryear. Yes it's true in many cases they were barbaric, at least compared to modern standards - but it does call for increased humility, I think - for what we have is the fortuity of circumstance in being opportunely born in an age in which we 'can' look back with admonition.

A similar case can be made for human attitudes to homosexuality and skin colour, which have changed drastically, even in my lifetime. Shifts in views on homosexuality and racial prejudices are a combination of changes in emotional response and changes in knowledge - inasmuch as genomic studies have shown us that homosexual inclination is not 'unnatural' as was once thought, and race is a humanly-constructed concept that bears no relation to similarity or diversity in the genetic populations (generally speaking, there is more genetic diversity between a man in Nigeria and a man in Kenya than there is between a man in Nigeria and a man in Belgium, Holland or Spain.  This alone shows the absurdity and man-made wickedness of racism). With this change in knowledge we've seen different emotional responses operating conterminously alongside, with each mutually complementing the other.

That leads to a question - it's a disconcerting one that most won't want to consider, but faithfulness to open enquiry tells us we have to ask it; if the past has taught us that in the case of witch-hunts or homosexual prejudice we are always open to the possibility of a change from the consensual opinion, how can we confidently trust in the morals we currently hold as near-sacrosanct? In other words, in the case of the above, just because most of us thinks paedophilia is wrong, how can we be sure we always will - after all, our ancestors probably never would have imagined that one day their descendents would have stopped killing witches and been so tolerant towards homosexuals, so who's to say or future descendents might not have a more relaxed attitude towards paedophilia?  That is to say, when it comes to paedophiles, sex dolls, and the future - who knows how things will change? - because we don't only have to consider the emotional responses we may not yet have conceived, we have to consider what we might know in the future that we don't know at present.

It's true that the above considerations do prove the point that majority opinion isn't always a good metric, and that widely held beliefs can turn out to need serious revision. But if what were once thought to be justifiable views could turn out to be seen by modern humans as having been so misjudged and unkind in their extremity, by what metric can we defend our presently held consensus views against forthcoming revision or future supersession?

Here's a suggested answer. I think we humans do have something beyond mere consensus-value - we have the ability to assess a wide range of variable precepts; past precepts (through a retrospective analysis), current precepts (through present-tense analysis), and future precepts (through our creative intellect and our ability to forecast what moral precepts our future descendants might adopt). One thing human beings are doing as a whole is gradually progressing - in fact, the human brain is primed to favour good over bad, and as such, our natural tendency is to continually try to improve things. Hence, through a lens of retrospection, a lens of present-tense analysis, and a lens of forecasting we are able to discern whether a consensus is pervasive because we have yet to develop our thinking or whether a consensus is pervasive because it justifiably yields to reason and evidence-based rationality.

Take the cases of homosexuality and child sex dolls as a good example for juxtaposition. When humans were against homosexuality, their prejudices superseded their ability to realise that sexual orientation is natural and no grounds for prejudice (same as gender or skin colour). Hence, arguments for homosexual rights and equal treatment yield to reason and evidence-based rationality. Humans are against paedophillic acts not just because they don't want paedophiles to satisfy their desires but because they know that a child hasn't the physiological development to be sexually active, and because we know it damages them in later life as well as infringes on their volition - so arguments for paedophiles' sexual rights and ability to satisfy those desires does not yield to reason and evidence-based rationality.

Given the foregoing examples, I think it's justifiable to argue that our ability to deal with the three variable precepts (past, present and future) demonstrates our ability to have confidence in many of widely established views about morality. That is why I think we in the developed world have justifiably culturally evolved to associate the act of sex as being inextricable from age of volition, mature consent and accountability - and it is on those grounds that we can demand the discontinuation of the link between children and sex.

Lastly, and this is essential - it is important that we don't get caught out with demands for objectivity - we just don't have it. Our desire for the discontinuation of the link between children and sex is a strong desire based on what we feel is right - it cannot stand up on its own separate from evidential justification and rational enquiry.

I, like most people, *do* want these child sex dolls banned. But the trouble I have is that I'm not sure I can justify the desire for a ban above my own intersubjectivity - because I can see no reason why one could justifiably call for the banning of sex dolls (because we don’t like real child sex) and not a banning of those video games in which the participants beat up and kill as many people as they can (because I don't like real violence).  Somehow I feel stronger about banning the dolls than I do the video games - when in both cases I'm really objecting to the same thing - I don't want to allow a simulated reality on the basis that I don't like what that reality represents in real life. This does indicate that morality is in some part a matter of taste, as well as being an evidence-based conclusion, and a personal feeling about how I want the world to be.

It's trickier than many will have you believe - for I can think of a good reason to ban the dolls based on how I want the world to be, but I can't justify it without justifying the banning of video games in which players get to play out their fantasy of becoming mindless thugs, as both are really an objection to a similar thing - my feeling of revulsion. But if I go that far - where next? Do I have to call for a ban on anything that is contrary to how I want the world to be? Surely not, because that might stretch to ultra-violent films, or tasteless art, or infidelity. So the indication is it's not very easy to proficiently justify banning these dolls without banning all the things I find to be undesirable, unless we admit that it's a matter of perceived scale and severity, and that the scale and severity in question are perceptions based on my subjective viewpoints, my tastes, and my convictions about how I want the world to be.

* There is a third factor - the material ability to act on our desires to be morally charitable (like developing the technology, capital and politics to be able to help people from developing nations out of poverty), but that's not central to our aims here.

Fix The Bad, Don't Throw Out The Good

To the blockheads who are calling for the abolition of private education as a result of John Major's comment that "The dominance of a private-school educated elite and well-heeled middle class in the “upper echelons” of public life in Britain is “truly shocking” - I have a few more policies I'd be willing to suggest they might like to advocate:

1) We could introduce a road-damaging policy whereby we wreck all the decent motorways and force everyone to drive on congested, single lane A and B roads.

2) We could introduce a travel-shafting policy whereby we close down our best railway links and get everyone back on the manky Victorian railway lines.

3) We could introduce an abrogation of technology-increase and insist everyone with memory sticks and mobile phones reverts back to floppy disks and phones that feel like a brick.

4) We could eliminate all the 'back to work' schemes designed to help the unemployed get back into the employment market, and leave those out of work to rot on the dole.

The calls for the abolition of private education aren't any less silly than the above polices I made up. No, what's needed is better State schools not fewer high quality private schools. Good education reform does not involve chopping down the good trees we have - it involves irrigating the dry soil and putting some life back into the barren land.

* Photo courtesy of oxford.university.press

Obamacare - It's A Piece Of Cake

On the recent furore surrounding Obamacare; I'll try to summarise what I see with an analogy, where the people around the table are American citizens.

Obama's opponents see a group of 7 friends sitting at a table with a big cake they are about to share. They accuse Obama of saying that he's going to invite 4 other friends around to share the cake while at the same time promising that the 7 people's share of the cake won't be any smaller. Obama is saying that the USA is a country of 10 or 11 people eating a cake and only 8 or 9 are paying for it, and thus he wants the other 2 to chip in.

Both sides seem to be lacking two vital things; 1) The solution of making the cake bigger, and how to do it. And 2) The fact that there is more than one type of cake, and by inviting friends over you might have to change from a cake you like to one you don't. Moreover, it would be more fruitful for some of the critics (on both sides) if they learned the difference between health care and health insurance*.

One thing's for sure - every time I look at health care systems in America, I think of the National Health Service in the UK and count my blessings.

* Those who had a healthcare plan and voted for Obama again probably thought those who were the most recent to sign up would get whichever leftover options were available.

** Photo courtesy of www.nydailynews.com 

A Very Simple Error By Researchers That Should Know Better

The LSE (the London School of Economics) recently published a drastically flawed report on Labour's spending from 1997 to 2010 entitled Did Labour's social policy programme work?.  Their conclusion is that it did work - and they proffer several examples of why this is the case (a conclusion supported by The Guardian's Polly Toynbee in this article). Now I fully expect Polly Toynbee to be getting things like this wrong - she is very prone to this - but the drastic flaw that underlies the report is not something one should expect from the researchers at the LSE.

Here’s what's wrong with it (and I had to read it twice to make sure I hadn't missed it somewhere in the text - but I hadn't) - in asking whether Labour's spending from 1997 to 2010 'worked' it fails to mention what should be the most important part of the inquiry - what it actually means to say spending 'worked'. Reading between the lines, all the report says is that Labour spent more on X, Y and Z, and as a consequence had more of X, Y and Z.  Well 'No kidding!' Sherlock! - but that doesn't tell us whether the spending worked, and it is certainly no justification for claiming that the period from 1997-2010 was successful spending by Labour.

The way to measure whether spending has brought about value for money is by what is called ‘consumer surplus’ - which is the amount spent against the perceived value of the thing purchased. Suppose that tomorrow Pete gives Ted £75 and tells him to buy something on which he thinks Pete would have willingly spent the money. With the £75 Ted spends all the money on a portable DVD player. If Pete would have paid £100 for the portable DVD player and he actually paid £75 (via Ted) then the consumer surplus is £25. When a consumer has £25 consumer surplus that means £25 of consumer surplus has been contributed to society, and the spending has therefore 'worked'. If Pete would only have paid £30 for the £75 portable DVD player then Ted's spending hasn't 'worked' for Pete.

To apply that to government spending and taxpayers' benefits; the more the societal consumer surplus the more the Labour government's increased spending has 'worked'. It's true the Labour government spent a lot on education, health, transport, home affairs, and so on, but the spending could only be deemed to be successful if what was spent on these things was less than, or at the very least equal to, what would have been spent by consumers.  In the same way that I asked whether Pete had consumer surplus on the portable DVD player transaction, the LSE researchers should not even begin to assess whether Labour's spending 'worked' without asking the most important question of whether the taxpayers had consumer surplus on the Labour spending.

In other words, it just won't do to ask whether Labour's spending provided increased education, health, transport and home affairs benefits - the only important thing is whether the spending provided a level of improvement that would have been optimally chosen by the taxpayers, or whether they'd have been better off with lower spending and more money in their pockets.

Let's return to Pete's situation to show how silly the inquiry is without considering consumer surplus; if I take £150 out of Pete's bank account, and buy him a portable DVD player on Amazon for which he would have only paid £100, then the spending hasn't worked for him. It would be ridiculous of me to then publish an article saying my spending had 'worked' for Pete because he increased his expenditure on Amazon and got a brand new portable DVD player in return. That's what the LSE have done - it's an error one wouldn't expect from them. Instead of asking whether the 'beneficiaries' would have willingly paid for the things on which Labour spent all that extra money the LSE asked what Labour wanted the taxpayers to get from government spending, and then concluded that because Labour wanted them to get the extra expenditure on education, health, transport, home affairs, then that spending must have worked. That is the kind of inquiry that is beyond ineffectual.

Two further things. In the first place, I actually think a lot of Labour's spending between 1997 and 2010 was wasteful - too much of it went to costly PFI groups, over-expensive consultants and general profligacy, and not enough of it went on the front line services.  And in the second place, it seems clear to me that the enquiry to work out whether the taxpayers attained an overall surplus on Labour's spending is an all-but-impossible pursuit - given the level of, and presumably largely differing, opinion needed to be solicited, and then measured up against actual costs and benefits of the spending in every area - no research group would ever get a handle on such a complex nexus.

So in all probability, even if the LSE had sought to include the very essential 'consumer surplus' factors on which the inquiry should have hinged, they would have found that such an enquiry was too complex to elicit even near-precise conclusions, which renders their research project "Did Labour's social policy programme work?" ineffectual and inadequate to the task.

Cult Escapology

Here's a link to an interesting article on the science, research and technology news website phys.org.

 

Quote: "Sociologists have known for a long time that groups tend to come together when they face adversity," said social psychologist Stephen Benard, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at IU Bloomington. "What our research highlights is that there is a downside to our tendency to stick together when things are tough—powerful group members can exploit that tendency to distract us from competing with them."

Of course, one can't help but notice that a lot of this is going on in religious cults and creationist groups - the charisma and persuasiveness of the leaders (figures like Ken Ham who make accusations of heresy, and threaten Hell and Hamnation to defectors) engenders pliant, lionising and sycophantic behavioural tendencies in the flock, and in doing so it suffocates their enthusiasm to be critical or to put forward competing ideas. It is likely that the kind of phenomenon described in the article is the same kind of emotional mechanism that turns people into Hamnation-fearing chattel who've been divested of valuable intellectual, critical and emotional resources.

The kind of manipulation and misinformation of which the likes of Ken Ham are purveyors is incompatible with the intellectual, critical and emotional progression to which a great many humans are dedicated. The more that can be done to expose, counter and challenge these Ham-fisted dogmas, the more we will do to help those ensnared by that way of life to find a way out.

100th Blog Post Special!

We’ve reached a milestone – this is my 100^th Philosophical Muser Blog post  – so I thought I’d share a few statistics with my readers (all of whom I thank most sincerely for following me here in the backwaters of Blogosphere).

As many will know, we’ve covered a huge range of subjects and issues together in the first 100 Blog posts, and there’s plenty more to come. Here are some facts and stats for anyone who is interested: The Philosophical Muser Blog began on the 24^th July last year, which means that in reaching 100 entries I’ve averaged one Blog post every 4.5 days for 15 months.

Three other stats:

1) The Blog with the most *likes* is The Potentially Unsolvable Enigma of Life & Love, which, at last count, generated 502 likes.

2) The most-viewed Blog posts are as follows:

1) The Economics of an 'All You Can Eat' Buffet

2) Freakonomics Exhumed: Making Decisions By Tossing A Coin

3) Off Your Trolley: Re-Examining A Famous Ethical Dilemma

4) Why The World Is Not Overpopulated

5) The Mathematical Bias Theory: Why There Probably ‘IS’ a God

6) Letter To My Unborn Child

7) What Would Happen If We Rewound Evolution?

8) The Best Theoretical Idea In The World

9) Let’s Stop Being So Tentative When It Comes To Islam

10) The Potentially Unsolvable Enigma Of Love & Life

And lastly....

3) The countries with the most viewers of the Blog are as follows:

1) United States

2) United Kingdom

3) Russia

4) Australia

5) Canada

6) Germany

7) France

8) Malaysia

9) South Africa

10) Indonesia

Other moderate size hitters include places as diverse as Israel, India, Jordan, UAE, Turkey, Austria, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, Portugal, Honk Kong and Taiwan.

There have probably been a lot of new readers as the Blog has continued to run. To revisit some old posts or to look back to how it all began, this Philosophical Muser Magazine format is an excellent way to view the Blog in its entirety.

Thanks again for reading, and for all your continued support.

Best Wishes

James Knight (The Philosophical Muser)

Thanks Society - I Owe You One!

I’ve just seen this quote from Warren Buffett….

"I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned. When you're treated enormously well by this market system, society has a big claim on that."

My impression of Warren Buffett is that there is much to like about him. But his argument here, while containing a commendable ethos, isn't compelling. His argument amounts to this; "Without the existence of people in society I wouldn't be wealthy, therefore society has a big claim on my wealth". What he's perhaps overlooking (or underestimating) is that people in society have already gained from his wealth - so such a debt on those grounds is misjudged. When I buy my shopping at the supermarket, the store gains profit from the money I spend, but I gain the goods to consume. I get plenty for my money - in fact, if the gains were of lower value to me than the value of the money, I wouldn't have bought the goods. So it would be absurd if the Supermarket wrote to me the next day saying they owed me something because I'd helped contribute to their profits. Why don't I owe them something for their contributing to my consumption?

Generally speaking one doesn't automatically owe people something just because one benefits from an activity, even if the benefits wouldn't occur without the existence of the thing. I drive a Subaru - but one wouldn't say "Without the existence of Subaru I wouldn't drive a Subaru car therefore Subaru has a claim on my driving experience". If a neighbour plays an album loud that I happen to enjoy listening to, or cooks a BBQ that brings a pleasant smell wafting over the fence, I don't owe him anything. So generally speaking, I don't think a culture in which people are always talking about what they are owed is a healthy culture - it breeds not magnanimity, generosity and kindness, but awkwardness and resentful compulsion, which is never as good. I think a better way of saying what Warren Buffet said would be to say:

"I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I've earned. When you're treated enormously well by this market system, it is good to give something back by way of generosity, magnanimity and kindness"

This transfers the emphasis away from thoughts of 'having' to pay back, into thoughts of 'wanting' to pay back. You can feel you have to pay something back without locating the benefits of wanting to pay something back, but you can't so easily feel you want to pay something back without that want being attached to the intrinsic benefits of good intentions. It's a positive circularity; to want to do good is to have noble intentions, and to have noble intentions is to want to do good.