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Immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration authorized the NSA to monitor secretly any American’s phone calls without first obtaining a court order. After the New York Times broke the news of this in 2005, the President admitted the fact on television and called wiretapping “crucial to our national security”.* The federal government would claim this prerogative for another ten years, when Section 215 of the Patriot Act was amended to forbid phone data collection without the approval of a court order.** Whether or not a democratic government should surveil its citizens, the ethical ramifications of state surveillance extend farther than this question. The people must question why the government surveils them and how it uses the information it gathers.

The Dark Knight (2008) was released during this period. Congress was reviewing the government’s authority to continue its current surveillance program. Meanwhile, it was granting the NSA more privileges (note that this is five years before Edward Snowden leaked classified NSA information). In the above scene (1:54:25)***, Bruce Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale) uses wiretapping technology of his company’s own design in order to locate the Joker. Although it uses sound to construct a map of everyone’s location in Gotham (instead of storing call records), it too works by eavesdropping on private conversations. Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) immediately voices his ethical objections, but Wayne insists, insinuating that it will only be used once. Although never so explicitly stated, Wayne’s argument appears to be “extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures”. The fact remains it is an illegal act perpetrated in secret. Therefore, we must weigh Fox’s initial concerns.

*Footage included in PBS Frontline’s United States of Secrets. 2014 documentary film.

**http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/06/02/patriot-act-usa-freedom-act-senate-vote/28345747/

***The above clip is taken from The Dark Knight (2008) and is shared for educational purposes only.

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Synecdoche, New York (2008) uses the literary device of a play-within-a-film (similar to a play-within-a-play, or a story-within-a-story). Another term for this is mise-en-abyme. It does not, however, include any examples of its titular literary device, synecdoche. Synecdoche is a figure of speech by which a part of something refers to the whole, or vice versa. Examples of synecdoche include “wheels” for “car”, or “The White House”, collectively for the President, the Cabinet, the Press Secretary, etc. The play’s (and film’s) pretension to subsume & reproduce all of human existence erodes the familiar boundaries between things, and the boundary between reality & fiction, required for re-presentation--which is a curious feat for a story that calls attention to its own contrivance. The story undermines the individuality of its characters by populating itself with copies of characters and by substituting the copy of one character for the copy of another. Ultimately, this is (meta)commentary on the inauthenticity of unique personal existence, since no character is the real person. It even strips personal suffering of any sense of ownership or meaning.

What the film does contain plenty of are play-on-words, including the film’s title (Synecdoche sounds like the real city of Schenectady, New York). As in the clip above (24:39), this word play often takes the form of homophones (psychosis & sycosis), or near-homophones (neurologist & urologist). Homophones are words, which, regardless of spelling, sound the same as each other.

*The above clip is taken from Synecdoche, New York (2008), and is shared for educational purposes only.

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Pleasure & Egoism

Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing….A new Hedonism—that is what our century wants.1

No one endorses pleasure as eloquently as Lord Henry Wotton. But, just as many of Henry’s acquaintances despise his views in The Picture of Dorian Gray, many moral philosophers disagree with the principles of hedonism. Opponents object that not all pleasure is valuable. Aestheticians such as John Ruskin might argue that taking pleasure in the “wrong” things shows “bad taste”2. Others, fearful that pulling the legs off grasshoppers might rank in utility with helping old ladies through crosswalks, insist that the value of a pleasure is dependent on the quality of that pleasure. Still others think it’s important to consider the quantity of that pleasure. Pulling the legs off grasshoppers might put a devilish grin on the face of a sadist, but it sure doesn’t put a skip in the step of all those grasshoppers. It’s also possible to want too much or have too much of a good thing, but most forms of hedonism acknowledge the importance of restraint. Although they base morality on pleasure, they don’t condone following every whim.

Opponents also object that other things have moral value besides pleasure. Robert Nozick used a thought experiment to demonstrate that the pleasure experienced in virtual reality would be less valuable than similar pleasure from real life experiences. Although it argues pleasure is dependent on other values (namely, authenticity), this experiment still attributes value to pleasure3.

Henry, however, asserts “[p]leasure is the only thing worth having a theory about”. He has a point. After all, what’s the use of doing good if it doesn’t make us feel good? It’s also hard to determine the rightness or wrongness of an action without measuring the pain or pleasure that results from it. Henry follows up this aphorism with another: “[w]hen we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy”. It appears Henry is saying that, while happiness promotes moral behavior, it doesn’t work the other way around. In fact, he uses “good” in two different senses. The latter means behaving according to conventional morality, which Henry firmly rejects. “Ah! But what do you mean by good?” we, like Basil, would like to know. “To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self”4.

Henry founds his pleasure principle upon egoism, an ethical position that values self-interest. The way Dorian destroys Sibyl’s feelings is villainous but, had she not been overwhelmed by grief, Dorian might have done her a favor by sparing her a loveless marriage. Taken in by Henry’s dismal opinion of monogamy, Dorian misunderstands love, or mistakes the love one feels for a currently charting single for the love of a person. I’ve elsewhere argued that love has no intrinsic moral value (#rosita), but the pleasure that results from love very well may. A superior pleasure may have been lost on Dorian, whom remains ignorant of love and its potential for creating happiness. Egoism defends an individual’s right to look out for number one, but it doesn’t claim that individuals always know what’s really in their best interests.

1(p 32) Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. William Collins Sons & Co Ltd (Harper Perennial Modern Classics). Print.

2(p 202) Ruskin, John. Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul and Gaiger, Jason, eds. “from Modern Painters”. Art in Theory: 1815 – 1900. Print.

3“Hedonism”. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed 26 August 2017.

4(p 69) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde.

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Survival, Eudaimonia, Supererogation and Duty

Is there an absolute value to survival? In other words, is staying alive the right thing to do, in all situations? Maybe not. If you knew that you’d spend the rest of your life in unbearable & unending pain, unable to enjoy any of the things you love, you might feel that you need more of a reason to stay alive. The Ancient Greeks had a word to describe a life worth living, and that word is eudaimonia. Moral philosophers like Julian Baggini prefer the term flourishing1, which literally means flowering. You can probably imagine what it feels like to burst with life, and how different that feels from merely surviving. Flourishing is a good translation, because it also means growing, and because Aristotle believed one achieves eudaimonia through commitment to personal growth2.

If how you live matters, perhaps what you live for is more important than life itself. This view is shared by Charles Verharen of Howard University. “The fact that survival is the pre-condition for all other values does not mean that survival of self is the most important value. Revered figures like Socrates, Christ, Gandhi and King sacrificed their lives for the sake of duty, love and freedom—and the survival of other members of their communities”3. The problem with his example is that those guys didn’t just do what was expected of them, they did a whole lot more. Going above & beyond the call of duty is what’s called supererogation (Ethics has words for everything). Neither did any of those men choose death. King & Gandhi were assassinated. Socrates & Jesus were executed. These latter two would have had to abrogate their duties (at least their perceived duties) in order to survive. A choice between survival and doing what’s right is really no choice at all. In fact, we could say they chose duty without choosing to live or die. Another way of saying this is that their dedication to their duty was consistent with their will to survive.

Gabriel Stokes chose not to follow the example set by his religion’s founder; he chose survival over sacrfice. Does that mean he did wrong? If he made the wrong choice, it means it was his duty to protect his congregation, no matter the cost. Most jobs only require you to help someone so long as it doesn’t endanger your own safety.  We’re not talking about the Secret Service. Is being a priest different than any other job? If Gabriel’s duty has limits, then doing more may be exceptional, but not expected. What makes a supererogatory act unique is that you can’t blame someone for not doing it.

1as is used in The Ethics Toolkit.

2This usage of eudaimonia is discussed in CrashCourse’s “Aristotle & Virtue Theory”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrvtOWEXDIQ.

3Verharen, Charles, et al. “Introducing Survival Ethics Theory Into Engineering Education and Practice”. Web. <http://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/survival-ethics-theory-verharen-excerpt-04-27-12.pdf>

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Revenge, Justice and Proportion

English Renaissance tragedies were largely preoccupied with revenge, and the downfall of revengers. One takeaway from Romeo and Juliet is the conviction that private citizens shouldn’t practice retributive justice; if families keep duking it out amongst themselves (1) it will only dispose them to further treachery and (2) soon there won’t be anyone left. Punishment for the Montagues & Capulets means losing their greatest assets: their children (talk about it coming back to bite you in the assets). Renaissance tragedy is big on the idea of comeuppance, so usually the justice revengers dish out is rebounded upon them. Because it’s a worse fate to see the ones you love suffer, the innocent must die in these stories.

In his analysis of revenge tragedies from this period, Michael Neill explains that “the centralizing ambitions of the Tudor monarchy led to an insistence upon the state’s absolute monopoly of justice”1, which included the right to revenge the murder of family members. The very fact that these plays were morbidly fascinated with revengers, even elevating their deaths to the level of such spectacles as the Passion of Christ, shows that English society, in its heart, resisted surrendering the power of revenge over to government. We ought not to assume that retributive justice is naturally placed in its hands, when evidence suggests that the source of this belief is the ideology of the very government that claimed revenge for its own.

It also reveals the once widespread belief that revenge is a legitimate form of justice, no matter who performs it. While it makes good sense for an impartial authority to punish wrongs, distinctions between the natures of revenge & justice are often tedious. After all, both demand fairness, and where they chiefly differ is how this is best achieved. As Neill writes, “[t]he hunger for payback […] rests on deeply felt principles of natural reciprocity which reflect the need to preserve a prescribed equilibrium in the order of things; and it is on this ideal of balance that the vexed relationship between revenge and justice can be seen to turn”2. One assumption is that revenge is always motivated by the desire to do harm, rather than restore balance. However, the morality of legally ordained punishments is just as suspect if those punishments have unvirtuous motivations.

Revenge is also condemned on the presupposition that it violates proportion, which is the sense that punishments should fit crimes. If you’re having trouble defending Abraham’s actions, he doesn’t give you much reason to. He tells Rick the manner of his revenge was not what he “had to” do but what he “wanted to do” (Chapter Ten). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Abraham’s feeling that his retaliation made him “no better than the ones [he] killed” (ibid) mimics the irony Neill identifies in revenge tragedy, which is that when a revenger creates balance, it means becoming the kind of person s/he wants to destroy3. One can easily hear a consequentialist appeal to this irony, or to another. Because they were horrified with what he’d done, Abraham’s family left, which put them in harm’s way and precipitated their deaths. Thus, Abraham’s vengeance, meant to defend the honor of his ex-wife & daughter, caused their deaths. In our society, we regard crimes against children (especially sexual crimes) so heinous that many might think a proportional response, no matter how heavy, is never enough. Abraham thinks of his daughter as both he & Rick are reeling from the previous night, when strangers attempted to rape Carl. One must wonder if the chiding voice of the consequentialist sounds flat, because it fails to empathize with Abraham’s (perhaps righteous) indignation.

1Neill, Michael. Bushnell, Rebecca, ed. “English Revenge Tragedy”. A Companion to Tragedy, pp 328 – 329.

2ibid, 337.

3ibid, 337.

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In the above scene, Gerd Wiesler sits across from a well-known actress, Christa-Maria Sieland. Wiesler leads her to believe he’s a fan of hers, and that he understands the “real” her. As an officer of the Stasi (the East German secret police), he has been surveilling an apartment that she shares with her boyfriend. Therefore, there is another, hidden meaning to his words when he tells her “I’m your audience”.

Wiesler breaches protocol to speak to Sieland, but does so because he questions whether his surveillance operation truly serves state security. Unlike depictions of impersonal domestic spies in Nineteen Eighty-Four and many dystopian narratives, Wiesler identifies with his subjects. His look into their lives causes a simultaneous inward reflection. The strong political message of the film does not reside alone in its depiction of a government that regarded the free will of its people as contrary to national interest. Neither is that message confined to the human costs. It’s also present in Wiesler’s pangs of conscience, which convinces audiences that surveillance, or any disciplinary measure, must not give governments the ability to exercise their power unchecked.

*The above image is taken from The Lives of Others (2006), and is used solely for educational purposes.

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Surveillance state

By the first chapter of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Winston Smith is confronted with two reinforcements of self-discipline: (1) posters of Big Brother, which read “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”; and (2) telescreens, two-way televisions whose description closely resembles panoptic surveillance:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.1

By the year 1984, the UK had not been subsumed into a superstate composed of former nations within North & South America, Australia, and the British Isles. Neither had it in 2006, but that year the BBC reported that there was one CCTV camera for every fourteen people in Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland)2. The surveillance state had arrived.

By then, facial recognition software was already used for such practical purposes as security access (your face is like a key to the door, which eliminates the need for carrying an actual key)3. Writing in 2003, freelance journalist Mitchell Gray predicts

[t]he next step in facial recognition is to connect the systems to digital surveillance cameras, which can then be used to monitor spaces for the presence of individuals whose digital images are stored in databases. Images of those present in the spaces under watch can also be recorded and subsequently paired with identities.4

By 2014 the FBI was using such a database, and had already filled it with 51 million photographs (the report was unclear how many of those photographs represented different people)5. According to the same report, the FBI is not supposed to collect photos from social media.

Critics fear that increased surveillance threatens privacy, and that it appears to provide objective coverage of an incident, when it fact video can’t contain some contextual information important to understanding why an incident occurs. They worry it could even lead to less individual reports of crime. After all, if you assume others see the same activity you see, why bother telling them?

Alongside facial recognition is another type of software which detects microexpressions, involuntary facial movements which supposedly give away our true feelings. Orwell’s telescreens anticipate this technology, which point like video cameras into private homes, allowing the Thought Police to analyze individuals’ levels of optimism and, thus, loyalty. As Gray writes, there was a simple method for Smith to disguise his thoughts: compose his expression.

Even Winston Smith, the ill-fated protagonist in Orwell’s hypersurveillant Nineteen Eighty-Four, could protect himself from the penetrating gaze of Big Brother’s omnipresent telescreens by maintaining a neutral expression, not allowing his face to hint at signs of inner turmoil and rebellion. This option may no longer be possible, because the face gives clues to our thoughts regardless of how well we discipline our features.6

The obvious similarities between these trends in video surveillance, and the technology envisioned in Nineteen Eighty-Four, prompt us to ask whether we should share Orwell’s fears. Since the technology is similar, should we expect the effects of its use to be similar to what we read in the novel? Moreover, is Orwell right condemn the use of such technology because it collapses public & private spaces, as under totalitarianism? Foucauldian critique at least helps us understand how power can be exerted through this disciplinary mechanism. It’s up to us to consider what values that power promotes. Then we may reflect differently on what Clive Morris and Gary Armstrong (quoted by Gray) identify as a form of power created by surveillance. This form

is not meant to punish or deter, but to ‘abolish the potential for deviance.’ This requires an internalisation of the power of surveillance that transforms those under its gaze. Understanding this third type of power begins with Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century disciplinary concept of the panopticon7.

1http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

2http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6108496.stm

3http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles1(3)/facial.pdf, pp 2 - 3.

4ibid, p 3.

5http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/16/technology/security/fbi-facial-recognition/

6https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/3343/3305 (p 11 of the PDF).

7ibid, p 7.

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Left: An actual working prison based on Bentham’s design, the Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois.

Right: Even the “prison” in Minority Report (2002) resembles a panopticon. In the story, the near-elimination of premeditated murder is owed not just to arrests, but to the fear of arrest. This kind of internalized discipline, accomplished by surveillance, is what Foucault describes as a more efficient exercise of power.

Jeremy Bentham (1748 - 1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873) are considered the founding fathers of Utilitarianism. This ethical theory considers how many people will be affected by an action, while also considering which action will produce favorable consequences for the majority of those people. This is often summarized as the “greatest good for the greatest number”. Bentham applied his ethics to social reform. He created a new prison design, called a Panopticon, which could be run more economically, and would use prisoners as a labor source, thus making them useful to society.

Foucault saw connections between the development of hospitals in the 17th & 18th centuries, the concept of the Panopticon, and disciplinary mechanisms in the 18th & 19th centuries. In Discipline and Punish (1975), he explained

[...] the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.*

As becomes clear from diagrams of the Panopticon, all prison cells face a central point of observation. Each prisoner is exposed to the observer, but the observer is invisible to all prisoners. Afraid that any impermissible behavior will be detected and punished, the prisoners correct their own behavior--in effect, they monitor themselves. Foucault argued that this panoptic model of surveillance restructured other institutions, including hospitals, factories and schools. He further argued that its form is reflected in social behavior. For example, the government of Revolutionary France encouraged individuals to surveil each other to prevent counter-revolution (ibid).

*http://dm.ncl.ac.uk/courseblog/files/2011/03/michel-foucault-panopticism.pdf

**The first image (left) is attributed to Doug DuBois and Jim Goldberg, and is taken from https://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/foucault-and-social-media-life-in-a-virtual-panopticon/. The second image is taken from Minority Report (2002). Both images have been used solely for educational purposes.

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Foucault & folly

Michel Foucault borrowed Nietzsche’s genealogical method to revise the history of mental health. In Madness and Civilization (1961 and 1964) and The Birth of the Clinic (1963)1, he outlines the evolution of early asylums such as St Mary of Bethlehem (infamously known as Bedlam) in London, and several institutions in Paris, including the Hôpital Général. Rather than practice medicine, the purpose of these institutions was to relocate the homeless and the unemployed poor, identifying “mendicancy [begging] and idleness as the source of all disorders”2. These disorders of society included economic depression, crime, political agitation, public nuisance and immoral conduct. Foucault argues that unemployment was reinterpreted as a moral problem3. By organizing the lives & occupations of inmates, the asylum became a place where morality could be “administered like trade or economy”4.

Later, such institutions expanded their roles to accommodate those with mental disorders. Under the supervision of physicians Philippe Pinel and Daniel Hack Tuke, personal guilt was instilled into inmates, intended to foster an awareness that they were “free and responsible subject[s]”5, in control of their actions, and able to restore themselves to sanity.  Inmates were held responsible for their own illnesses. For Foucault, this created a unique power dynamic, in which irrationality was contained within an institution of rationality, and perpetually condemned. Madness was afterwards “imprisoned in a moral world”6.

Foucault challenges the history of psychiatry as a history of progress, instead writing a history of the progress of power. At first, rationality simply defined a circle around itself, excluding anything that didn’t meet its criteria. As Julian Baggini & Peter S Fosl write, “through the concept of ‘madness’, seventeenth and eighteenth-century social formations laying claim to ‘rationality’ excluded those who didn’t fit into them”7. People were institutionalized when they weren’t considered useful to society. As these institutions evolved, the people in them were taught to become useful members of society through self-discipline. Pinel’s system introduced a way for irrationality to discipline itself.

1Clinic is better translated asylum, as it has been in Rabinov, Paul. The Foucault Reader. The French word for madness, folie, entered into Middle English as folly.

2ibid, p 129.

3ibid, pp 136 - 137

4ibid, p 138.

5ibid, p 146.

6ibid, p 158.

7Baggini and Fosl. The Philosopher’s Toolkit, p 183.

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Good genes

Since Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), the concept of genealogy has been used to understand how ideologies have come into existence. The analogy of a gene is fitting; genes are like codes, which give cells directions for how to build your body, and they outlast your body when they get passed on through your descendants. To paraphrase Susan Blackmore, the real winners in natural selection are genes1. In a similar way, it’s reckoned, patterns of information live on as long as they’re copied (or shared) person to person. Memes are thought to operate in this fashion. A common type of meme, a joke, has a formula. A joke gets told to another person. If it’s a good joke, maybe that person will share it with yet another person. Each time, it could be told exactly the same, or it could be changed2. Also like genes, memes or ideas exist amidst a host of other kinds of information. Nietzsche argued that the dominant moral system of his society (Christianity) had its own genealogy. It developed out of a greater set of possible moral codes, and could have developed any number of ways. In an alternate universe, Christianity could have based its morality on which end of an egg should be eaten first (to reference Gulliver’s Travels). However, Nietzsche set out to demonstrate that morality, or any dominant ideology, comes about by violent means. It survives when ideologues force their ideas on others, and eliminate the competition. The analogy ends here. Genes aren’t aggressive, people are.

1Blackmore, Susan. Consciousness, p 209.

2ibid, pp 230 - 231.

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An analogy is a comparison drawn between two things, so that the meaning of one can supply meaning for the other. The comparison works if the similarities shared between these two things are obviously or supposedly true. If one thing is similar to another in some ways, I could argue that they’re similar in other, less obvious ways. If I did this, I’d be making an analogical argument. Arguments that rely on analogy are different from arguments that rely on deduction. Deduction works by substituting two things that are identical in some way. Notice I said substituting, not likening. So-called “redneck” jokes are essentially deductive arguments. “If you go to a family reunion to meet women, you might be a redneck”. The “truth” of this argument supposes that dating inside one’s own gene pool is a condition of deserving this epithet. Dates family members = “redneck”. If Jim Bob dates family members, then you can substitute Jim Bob for the condition within the equation. He = “redneck”. Again, he is, not he is like. Analogies, on the other hand, liken two things. Shakespeare didn’t mean that the recipient of Sonnet 18 is a summer’s day. Thou art not literally a period of time when part of the Earth’s surface, in a hemisphere tilted towards the Sun, is illuminated by the Sun’s rays. You are like a summer’s day because you too are “lovely” and “temperate”. Using analogy, a sound argument might conclude that you also make life more enjoyable. An unsound argument might conclude that I can protect myself from you with sunscreen. Arguments may also fail if they rely on poor analogies. Such an argument is called a false analogy, which is a type of informal fallacy.

In the above clip, comedian Dave Chappelle establishes an analogy between the way a woman may choose to dress and the uniform of a police officer. Police officers, so uniformed, do not object when people ask them to enforce the law. His argument concludes that a woman, dressed like a prostitute, should not object when treated as one. The argument presupposes that clothing expresses one’s profession, or willingness to perform acts associated with that profession.

Your assignment is to argue how strong or weak of an analogy this is. Explain your reasoning. In other words, be very clear about why you think you’re correct.

*The above clip is taken from Dave Chappelle: Killin’ Them Softly (2000), and is used solely for educational purposes.

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Desert and Time Travel

Maybe you’ve heard the mnemonic “dessert is spelled with two Ss, because you want more of it”. The kind of desert I talk about here is pronounced the same, but spelled like the other one—the one that wants more rain. When talking about criminals receiving prison sentences, or unscrupulous people having bad things happen to them, it used to be more common to hear someone say those people got their “just deserts”. Desert is what one deserves, and you only want more of it if you did something nice. Another term commonly used in its place is merit. Desert rests on the idea that justice means fairness or balance. In this view, punishment is meant to compensate for wrong-doing. It seems logical then that punishment should follow a crime, not precede it. But consider another kind of desert. Say I buy something online, and it will be delivered to me a few days later. Could I really refuse to pay for it in advance? The online merchant deserves my money even though I don’t have my order yet. This arrangement, however, is also practical. Most of the time it’s harder for the merchant to disprove I didn’t get my stuff than for me to prove the merchant took my money, and that I deserve a refund. This is a case where one party is compensated for something it will deserve.

Does the same apply to punishment? Let’s take two scenarios. In the first scenario, a man threatens to assassinate a political leader (and you can assume that the political leader is benevolent, non-tyrannical, kisses lots of babies, &c). The authorities aren’t going to wait until the man has carried out his plan before regarding him as a criminal. Our man is successfully apprehended before he can commit the crime. The only difference between him and another man, who never plans to kill anyone, is intent. However, the law prohibits planning murder as well as carrying it out. In this scenario, the man has committed a crime, and is punished afterwards. In the second scenario, a man plans his crime in his head, but the police are able to see into the future and know that he will assassinate the political leader. They can prevent him, certainly. But does he deserve to be punished in advance?

In Minority Report (2002), the law says people do deserve to be punished in advance of their crimes. This is made possible by “precogs”, two men and one woman all with birth defects that give them the ability to foresee homicides. The three of them are essential to the “Precrime” division of law enforcement. Precrime relies on the assumption that if someone will deserve punishment, then they do deserve punishment. John Anderton (Tom Cruise) illustrates this point by rolling a ball off the desk which Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) catches in mid air. “The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn’t change the fact that it was going to happen”, he tells him (23:20) 1. Like with my online shopping example, desert can work both ways. I pay money to a merchant, I deserve my stuff. Or, I get my stuff, the merchant deserves my money. In a sense, one “causes” the other. The merchant is also entitled to my money, which means it has a legal right to my money. Punishments are not about entitlement, otherwise pre-punishing me for a crime would give me the right to commit that crime. If that were the case, I could argue that preventing me from committing the crime is illegal. In addition, crimes cause punishments, but punishments shouldn’t cause crimes.

Pre-punishment only works if it follows causally from the crime. How is this possible? One answer is time travel. Causality is the principle that any effect has to have something in its past cause it, like “A causes B which causes C”. A causal loop obeys this rule, but it loops: “A causes B causes C which causes A” and causes the whole thing to repeat. The theoretical existence of any causal loop presupposes that the future is written—it’s there before we even get to it. Take this scenario: you’re eating your Corn Flakes when someone whom looks a lot like you, but a bit older, appears out of thin air. This person is you, and tells you you must look for a time machine. You do just that: you find the time machine, enter it, it sends you back to when you were younger, still eating Corn Flakes, and you deliver the same message. This is an example of a “closed” causal loop: it occurs infinitely. You could object, as many do, that there has to be some version of this story in which you aren’t visited by yourself but you do enter the time machine, which sets the loop in motion. This objection demands that there be a first cause to any causal sequence—even a loop such as this that keeps going around & around. However, if causal loops are possible, it’s possible for people to be punished for crimes they later commit, and for the punishment to still follow causally from the crime. But wait, there’s another problem. Someone commits a crime at point C, at point D the criminal travels back in time to point A, and at point B a judge punishes the criminal. The problem is, for this loopy scenario to work, the crime still has to happen and the criminal must be allowed to commit the crime infinitely. There’s something deeply wrong with a system of justice which allows crimes. Unfortunately, this scenario still doesn’t put to rest our doubt that the punishment causes the crime as much as the crime causes the punishment.

Closed causal loops are just one of many theories that make time travel possible. So far, we can’t know that someone will one day commit a certain crime. But if we could, would we regard the person in the present the same as the person in the future (the one who will commit the crime)? Say you’re brought to trial because the court knows you will, one day, for certain, commit a crime. However, the person you are today finds the thought of that crime totally abhorrent. Could the prosecutor argue that you deserve punishment because you will want to commit that crime later on? Could you object and say that the crime will be committed by a different mind?

This raises the issue of personal identity. In a causal loop, it’s possible for a me, a time traveler, to meet myself. The question is: who’s the real me? American philosopher David Lewis suggests that they’re both me, and that the mind of my past self and the mind of my future self are simply at different stages2. The issue of personal identity is also a problem if we move from causal loops to alternate universes. If I could know the future, and prevent it, that future would no longer be “the” future in my timeline, but only in an alternate universe. If there are two timelines at this point, how can you punish me in the current timeline (Me A) for something the other me does in the alternate timeline (Me B)? Are they the same person?

Minority Report has jet packs, newspapers with moving images, retinal-scanning robots, but sadly, no time travel. It’s really no surprise that all the precogs see is a possible future, and the story cautions us that, just as precrime is science fiction, the ethics of preventive punishment is speculative. Making assumptions based on people’s identities or their pasts doesn’t prove they will commit crimes in the future, and we should be careful to remember that.

1Minority Report. Dir Steven Spielberg. 2002. Film.

2http://www.iep.utm.edu/timetrav/#H5

I also found these sites very helpful:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel/#CauLoo

http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-ethics-of-pre-punishment-part-three.html

[englishoneeleven]

Substituted Judgment

There’s another concept in medical ethics known as substituted judgment or substitute decision-making. It refers to situations when patients can’t make decisions for themselves (or their decision-making capacity is greatly diminished), and decisions about their medical care need to made by someone else. Basically, this concept means that decision-makers, or surrogates, are supposed to make the decisions that the patients would, if they could. Regardless of the actual decisions being made, there’s a crucial difference (ethically) between surrogates doing what they think’s best and doing what patients want. If you were going to use this concept to justify your answer, you might argue that saving Carl or letting him die is ethical only if doing either respects his autonomy. You would then, of course, need to defend Carl’s autonomy against the claim that his parents, Rick & Lori, have authority over his decisions.

For more, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/advance-directives/.

[englishoneeleven]

Love & Amoralism

Being in love with someone and treating that person right go hand in hand. But what if you don’t love that person anymore? And what if you do love someone else? I’m thankful that another writer1 has approached break-ups from a moral angle. The strategy he uses is to assess the utility of rebounds: how can lining up a new relationship produce the most happiness for all interested parties. Utility is a clever solution, but treating love (even the termination of love) as a math problem just feels, well, unromantic. It’s as if the writer suggests that we should strategize how to feel about someone based on possible moral outcomes. This approach makes me feel like love is a pile of aluminum cans that is weighed and then checked against the going-price for aluminum that day. (Romantic) love is passionate, and reckless, and aluminum cans aren’t.

This is not to say ethics has no bearing on love. The fact that, in the following post, I’ve tried to find a moral justification for love shows that I must think, on some level, love is subject to morality. Else, I might believe “all’s fair in love and war”. If this statement is true, then either love, as an end, is so good that it permits any means to it, or any act in the service of love has no moral distinction—which is as good as saying it has no moral definition. I hardly think love legitimizes any action whatsoever (see #governor), but I will consider whether love is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral.

The characters of The Walking Dead find themselves in a world of perpetual strife—a world in which, it would seem, love becomes one of the few things left to live for. Moral philosophers of the past have taught us that the purpose of upright conduct is not just to deny ourselves pleasure, and not just to avoid divine retribution, it’s to live better lives filled with true happiness and more peace. Romantic love may not be a condition for happiness, but it’s something that makes us happy, so surely ethics would be concerned with romantic love.

One of the hard parts about breaking up is figuring out how much consideration we owe our exes, and for how long—especially if the desire for them is gone. Should we be friends? Should I start dating right away?—those kinds of questions. To be fair, this is what the writer I mentioned above wonders. Does it even make sense to say I have an obligation to someone now simply because I did in the past? Deontology is about moral duty: we are duty-bound to obey certain principles; or, we are duty-bound to serve certain interests, such as the allegiance a citizen owes to his/her country. There’s a famous line written by the Ancient Roman poet Horace which goes “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”, which basically translates to “sweet & seemly it is, for fatherland one should die” or, simply, “it’s honorable to die for your country”. As Dr Santanu Das shares from his study of WWI literature, this line appeared in many pro-war poems written while Britain mobilized against the Central Powers2. Late in the war, an English soldier named Wilfred Owen denounced the falsity of this phrase in one of the most famous anti-war poems ever written3. Owen’s poem dismantles a moral principle by describing in graphic detail the unenviable fate of a fallen soldier. Similarly, opponents of duty-based ethics think it’s more important to consider the consequences of morally-guided actions than the principles behind them. Nonetheless, we often feel we have a certain obligation to people we love—and to those with whom we fall in love (it seems that love and war are going to be constant themes in this post). It’s those people’s happiness that we should consider first. In contrast, utilitarian ethics asserts that we should always consider the greater good. Just imagine promising your boyfriend/girlfriend/partner/spouse that you’ll always consider his/her happiness…equally to everyone else’s. It would seem to make sense that if I feel obligated to someone because of my love for her, that that love has moral value.

Philosophy has a hard time justifying love—an even harder time than justifying war. Philosophy demands answers, which is why we would find it necessary to “justify” love, and not just relax and enjoy it. Bennett Helm has a wonderful summary of the most recent contributions to the philosophical discourse of love4. In it, he collects opinions about why it’s good to love, in general, and why it’s good to love a particular person. This latter justification prompts a few questions:

What, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this particular person?

What, if anything, justifies my coming to love this particular person rather than someone else?

What, if anything, justifies my continuing to love this particular person given the changes—both in him and me and in the overall circumstances—that have occurred since I began loving him? 5

While the first question asks why a particular person deserves to be loved, the second question asks what makes that person special. We might say that a person contains objective traits, which deserve our love, but there’s no clear reason why we should love those traits in one person versus another. For example, if freckles are objectively valuable, my love for you is justified if you have freckles, but why love you instead of someone else who also has freckles? Of course, this is just an example. No one’s suggesting that love should aim for anything as superficial as freckles (despite how cute they look on you). The third question then asks why stay with a particular person, especially if you meet someone new with more freckles. One way to answer Questions 2 & 3 is to borrow an idea from Immanuel Kant (considered the father of deontology). Kant’s idea is that human beings, by virtue of being rational creatures, are “ends in themselves”. This means I shouldn’t use you as a means for my own ends, if doing so limits your freedom. I should value you as an end in yourself. So, I shouldn’t use you to get to your money or just stare at your freckles. The problem is this still doesn’t answer why I need you, when really all I want is money & freckles.

Enough about freckles. Obviously, not all kinds of value are moral value. Although plenty have argued that beauty has a moral function, loving truth or beauty is not quite the same as loving a person. And, as I’ve explained above, it’s difficult to say with any certainty that there are good reasons to be in love, although there are plenty of things that can cause us to love this or that person. Perhaps the most accurate cliché is “the heart wants what the heart wants”. If love has no moral justification, it’s hardly possible to justify an act on the grounds that it serves love (again, “justified” means it’s moral). Acts must be judged by different standards.

So far I’ve been referring to love as the act of feeling love for someone (which is part of an emotional state), but I want to differentiate it from other types of actions, namely those that exist outside my mind. But, because it is an action, I could still say that, in principle, it’s good to feel love for someone, and then wonder whether that’s true because love is moral, or because loving someone has good consequences. The problem with that is love doesn’t actually make me do anything. By no means are they easy to extricate, but the way we feel about someone and other ways we act towards them are different things. An action, such as the decision to break up or stay with someone, may be influenced by a feeling, but the rightness or wrongness of an action doesn’t make the feeling right or wrong. In most conceivable cases, affecting someone’s moral welfare is not the reason we fall in love, just as when we fall out of love with people, it’s not done intentionally to harm them. A wrong may be done to a person, by making that person feel sad, but if the alternatives are just as bad, or worse, the wrong is unavoidable. Such wrongs are “excused”. From another perspective, breaking up could be the right thing to do, but still have unavoidably bad consequences.

Earlier I wondered whether love, if it caused me to do right by someone, is moral. I’ve rejected that hypothesis. Right or wrong consequences don’t have to follow from right or wrong feelings. Couched within that hypothesis was also the idea that love might act as a moral guide, like conscience. This can’t be the case. For one, we wouldn’t expect our moral reasoning to “disappear” just because we don’t feel it anymore. I also demonstrated that there’s no strong reason why loving a particular person is justified, or that feeling love is any more or less moral than feeling gassy (both of them have causes, certainly, but no good “reason” why I should feel that way). All this leads me to conclude that love is amoral, which means it “stands outside morality”6. This is, for me, a more satisfying conclusion. Love feels good, and is good, which is different than being right. I would hate to qualify my love by the same standards I qualify recycling. We can quite rationally feel a sense of duty towards our love, without it being moral duty, and this may dispose us to serve a particular person’s interest. This interest still fits within an ethical framework, and is measurable against the interests of others. Choosing to serve the well-being of your beloved is proper in many situations, but sometimes the greater good is truly more important. Doesn’t mean I don’t love you, babe.

Finally, I turn to our real question: was it ethical for Abraham to pursue Holly while he was with Rosita? Let’s pretend we want to break up with someone, because we love someone new. We’ll take our cue from the rebound writer. If we are primarily concerned with consequences, we might be required to weigh the increase in our happiness against the decrease (we’re going to proudly assume the other person will be crushed, not relieved) in the soon-to-be-ex’s happiness. What then? If we weren’t going to create more happiness overall, could we ever rightfully leave the person?

While writing this I considered whether it’s wrong to break up with someone in the context of a survival situation, and decided no. Why? Because, most likely, the circumstances are out of your control. If sad feelings coincide with other terrible events, it’s just an unfortunate coincidence. Therefore, it would have been ethical for Abraham to leave Rosita, if she hadn’t beat him to it. Still, it does matter how you break up with someone, and the fact that there are so many differing theories about the best way to break up—face to face, via text, in public, in private—shows that it’s not so clear-cut. Again, how we treat people and how we feel about them are different things. It’s important to understand that people are affected by your actions in different ways depending on the unique emotional bonds that exist between you. It’s also important to understand that people respond to emotional stress differently, and that this can affect their readiness to deal with other difficulties. If it’s not a survival situation, context does matter, and it can be disrespectful to break up with someone at an inopportune moment—it’s not very tactful to announce to your girlfriend’s whole family that you’re breaking up with her, while at her grandmother’s funeral.

We may feel certain duties towards those we love, but not all the duties we have to others are contingent on our feelings for them. Despite that Abraham never truly loved her, Rosita deserved to be treated with decency. There was no reason he couldn’t have broken up with her before pursuing a relationship with Holly. And Abraham’s love for Holly didn’t excuse lying to Rosita or cheating on her.

Unlike previous posts, in which I supply you ammunition to defend your own view, here I’ve answered my own question. However, in the course of explaining my reasoning, I’ve outlined ways in which love may or may not have moral value. I’ve also suggested that the effect of a break-up (someone feels bad) can be wrong or bad, and that these are different concepts. Although outside the scope of my argument, I’ve left out other aspects of Abraham & Rosita’s relationship, which may help you decide how would you answer the question.

1https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/angst/201106/break-ethics-0

2https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/videos/wilfred-owen-dulce-et-decorum-est

3“Dulce Et Decorum Est”. Read here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est

4“Love”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. Accessed 8/5/17. <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/#6>

5ibid.

6Baggini & Fosl. The Ethics Toolkit, p 207.

[englishoneeleven]

Commission vs Omission

To Abraham, Tobin deserves blame for making no attempt to save Holly. Holly definitely feels Tobin deserves blame. Later, Tobin himself thinks he made the wrong call. Two ethical concepts, commission and omission, will help us decide just how blameworthy Tobin is—or could have been. Commission refers to committing a crime or error, while omission refers to failing to prevent a crime or allowing a mishap without directly causing it. In other words, commission is what someone does, and omission is what someone doesn’t do (or omits), but perhaps should have done. Those that argue that omission is unethical could appeal to the consequences of someone’s (in)action, but they could also appeal to the person’s intent. Consider the following two scenarios. In Scenario A, Tobin & Holly are all alone when out of nowhere a zombie attacks Holly. It’s possible that Tobin could rescue her, but, not wanting to put himself in harm’s way, he chooses to run. In Scenario B, Tobin has been secretly plotting to murder Holly. Just as in the previous scenario, a zombie suddenly attacks her. It’s possible that Tobin could rescue Holly, but he seizes the opportunity and watches her die. In both scenarios, Tobin did nothing to save Holly. Should he be judged the same in both scenarios? Since the consequences are the same, your answer would depend on whether you think Tobin’s intent matters. Virtually, Tobin is as culpable of Holly’s death in Scenario B as if he had physically murdered her himself.  The actual event is similar to Scenario A; Tobin doesn’t want Holly to die, he just doesn’t try to prevent it. The question before us, “would Tobin have been culpable for her death?” describes a hypothetical situation, but it’s still important to consider. Don’t forget, if Abraham hadn’t been present, things may have ended tragically for Holly.

Reference:

The Ethics Toolkit, pp 114 – 116.

[englishoneeleven]

Absolutism vs Relativism

Julian Baggini, co-author of The Ethics Toolkit, proposes in his article “Eating Humans”1 that many people react negatively to the subject of cannibalism because it forces us to recognize that meat comes from animals that were once alive. This “reality of meat”2 is much easier for us to ignore when we don’t see how our food gets to us.

Think of cannibalism, however, and the link between living bodies and meat becomes all too evident. You just can’t get rid of the thought that what is being eaten was once part of a living person. I’m not suggesting that if we were more attuned to the reality of meat we would be sanguine about cannibalism. We might, however, feel less visceral disgust for it.3

We might find the ethics of cannibalism more palatable if we can “stomach” its concept (hopefully you haven’t stopped reading because you believe bad puns are immoral). Baggini adds that people become accepting of cannibalism in the context of survival situations. Although the Donner Party never had to contend with zombies, it’s fair to say that the lives of the characters of The Walking Dead are similarly jeopardized by hunger.

One could, of course, argue that cannibalism is always unethical. In this case, one is likely to hold that morality is absolute, or that, by its nature, morality is always the same. If we believe an act is unethical in certain contexts, but ethical in others, we adopt a position of moral relativism. This concept is distinct from cultural relativism, which is the idea that a society, and the individuals within it, should be judged “by its own standards”4. The two concepts converge when one considers the morality of certain culturally-established practices. To evaluate a society’s standards, it’s important to be aware of what’s objectively true in that society (or group). Since none of the other groups Rick’s people have encountered thus far have practiced cannibalism, we should consider if the same conditions exist for Rick’s & Chris’s groups. It’s plausible that Chris’s group really did have no other option than use humans as food, if only because they were too few in number to compete with other scavenging parties. Fewer numbers would also make it more difficult for them to explore as much terrain as a larger group, or safely divide their forces. Privileged with other, better options, a larger group like Rick’s may rightly decide for itself that cannibalism is unethical. If no other options exist for Chris’s group, judging both groups by the same moral criteria is problematic.

It may be even harder to settle how two societies should coexist when the ethics of one threatens the other. If the hunters aren’t wrong for practicing cannibalism, destroying them isn’t justifiable punishment. Alternatively, the justification might be to prevent any further harassment—a “the best defense is a good offense” approach. Chris’s own mouth condemns him when he tells Rick he won’t be convinced to leave them alone (Chapter Eleven). Retribution for Dale is another possible justification, unless the response of Rick, Andrea, Abraham and Michonne lacked proportion (see #murder). But before deciding which reason for murder is best, we should wonder whether all other options besides murder have been exhausted. Although bad blood between the groups would certainly make this difficult, integrating the two doesn’t seem impossible. It’s not as if Chris’s group has refused to change their diet, if they could. If violence was in fact the answer, one must say how Rick could “know” it was necessary. What was truly sinister about Chris’s group was how they enjoyed terrorizing Rick’s group. A relativist could just as strongly object to this behavior, on the grounds that it serves no good purpose, and utterly lacks sympathy, a quality still valued within their group.

1https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/eating-humans-cannibalism/. Accessed 7/28/17.

2ibid.

3ibid.

4Giddens, Anthony, et al. Essentials of Sociology. 4th e. p 51.