#partly because critical role but also there's about 4 other things that are contributing to my general wildness at this moment | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bluewatsons · 5 years

Text

Thomas Douglas, The dual-use problem, scientific isolationism and the division of moral labour, 32 Monash Bioeth Rev 86 (2014)

Abstract

The dual-use problem is an ethical quandary sometimes faced by scientists and others in a position to influence the creation or dissemination of scientific knowledge. It arises when (i) an agent is considering whether to pursue some project likely to result in the creation or dissemination of scientific knowledge, (ii) that knowledge could be used in both morally desirable and morally undesirable ways, and (iii) the risk of undesirable use is sufficiently high that it is not clear that the agent may permissibly pursue the project or policy. Agents said to be faced with dual-use problems have frequently responded by appealing to a view that I call scientific isolationism. This is, roughly, the view that scientific decisions may be made without morally appraising the likely uses of the scientific knowledge whose production or dissemination is at stake. I consider whether scientific isolationism can be justified in a form that would indeed provide a way out of dual-use problems. I first argue for a presumption against a strong form of isolationism, and then examine four arguments that might be thought to override this presumption. The most promising of these arguments appeals to the idea of a division of moral labour, but I argue that even this argument can sustain at most a highly attenuated form of scientific isolationism and that this variant of isolationism has little practical import for discussions of the dual-use problem.

The dual-use problem

Some nuclear physicists working in the first half of last century found themselves confronted with an ethical quandary. As they saw it, there were good reasons to seek the knowledge that they sought: not only was there a case for regarding that knowledge as valuable in itself, it was also plausible that the knowledge would have desirable applications, for example, in deterring warfare. However, there were reasons to refrain from seeking this knowledge too, since there was a risk that it would be misused, for example in unjustified nuclear attacks. Some physicists were sufficiently concerned about the risk of misuse that they were uncertain whether they ought to continue with their scientific work. There is, for example, evidence that several participants and potential participants in the Manhattan Project—the United States effort which lead to the development of the atomic bomb—were sufficiently concerned about the risk of misuse that they were ambivalent about whether they ought to be participating in the project.1

These physicists took themselves to be confronted with a quandary that has recently become known as the dual-use problem.2 We can understand this as the quandary arising whenever

An agent faces a choice whether to pursue P, where P is a policy or project such that pursuing P is likely to result in (i) the creation of new scientific knowledge, or (ii) the wider dissemination of existing scientific knowledge, and

The knowledge whose creation or dissemination is at stake could be used in both morally desirable and morally undesirable ways, and

The risk that this knowledge will be misused (that is, used in morally undesirable ways) is sufficiently serious that it is unclear whether the agent is morally permitted to pursue P.3

Note that although this formulation of the dual-use problem, like many other formulations in the literature, explicitly refers only to two conflicting values—morally desirable uses of knowledge, and morally undesirable uses—other considerations could potentially contribute to the problem. Whether the risk of misuse is sufficiently high that it is unclear whether the agent should pursue P may depend not only on how the risk of misuse compares to the prospect of morally desirable uses, but also, for example, on whether the knowledge will be valuable in itself, on whether the agent has made commitments to or not to pursue P, and various other factors.4

Some further brief clarifications may be helpful. First, the dual-use problem can, on the above formulation, arise both in relation to the creation of new scientific knowledge and the dissemination of existing scientific knowledge. Second, although this problem is often exemplified by reference to decisions faced by individual scientists, on the above formulation it can also arise for other individual agents (for example, science policymakers and journal editors) and, and, assuming collective agency is possible, for collectives (perhaps including the scientific community, national governments and society-at-large). Note also that the choice faced by the agent could be a choice about a particular project (for example, a particular scientific study) or about a general policy (for example, a choice about whether to require censorship of scientific journals or ‘classification’ of certain scientific information). The dual-use problem can thus arise at multiple levels.

It can also arise in otherwise very different areas of intellectual inquiry. The classic examples of the dual-use problem come from early and mid-twentieth century nuclear physics. However, recent ethical discussion of the dilemma has focused on the life sciences. It has been suggested that some research in molecular biology poses dual-use problems because the knowledge it produces could be used to create human pathogens or other biological agents whose intentional or negligent release into the environment would have devastating consequences. Discussion of this concern was triggered in part by developments in genome synthesis which have been taken to hold out the prospect of creating ‘designer’ pathogens or recreating historical pathogens, such as the smallpox virus or the 1918 Spanish Influenza virus, to which most people are no longer likely to be immune.5 Discussion has been stimulated further by two studies which resulted in the creation of variants of the H5N1 influenza virus that were transmissible by air between ferrets (and thus, perhaps, between humans).6

Neuroscience is another scientific area in which dual-use problems have been thought to arise (Dando 2005, 2011; Marks 2010). For example, rapid development recently in neuroimaging—particularly in functional magnetic resonance imaging—has provided new research tools for neuroscientists, and new diagnostic and prognostic tools for clinicians. But it is possible that new imaging technologies will also have applications in lie-detection. There are thus concerns that they might be used to violate privacy, perhaps as an aid to unethical interrogation practices (Wolpe et al. 2010). Neuroscientists are also beginning to understand the neural bases of various human behaviours. For example, there has been a flurry or work recently on the role of the hormone and neurotransmitter oxytocin in facilitating trust and other so-called ‘pro-social’ behaviours (e.g., Kosfeld et al. 2005; Baumgartner et al. 2008; De Dreu et al. 2011), and it has been suggested that this work could be misused, for example, by those who wish to covertly manipulate the behaviour of others (Dando 2011).

Scientific isolationism

An agent who takes herself to be faced with a dual-use problem, or who is reasonably thought to by others to face one, plausibly bears a deliberative burden. She may not simply ignore the putative problem; she must address it in some way.

There are two obvious ways in which she might discharge this burden. First, she might attempt to resolve the problem by conducting what I will call a use assessment. This would involve determining the likely uses of the knowledge at stake and then determining, partly on the basis of this assessment, whether she is morally permitted to proceed. Second, she might attempt to escape the problem. That is, she may attempt to change her circumstances such that the problem no longer arises. For example, it may sometimes be possible to escape a dual-use problem by developing some new means for preventing the misuse of the knowledge whose creation or dissemination is at stake without thereby foregoing desirable uses of the knowledge. Concerns about the misuse of scientific knowledge may then no longer provide any reason to refrain from pursuing P.

Historically, however, many agents who have been confronted with dual-use problems have neither sought to resolve them, nor to escape them, nor indeed to discharge the putative deliberative obligation in any other way. Instead, they have sought to deny that any such obligation exists, maintaining that they may continue to promote scientific knowledge without resolving or escaping the problem. Often this claim is made rather obliquely. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan project who himself expressed ambivalence about his work said, in attempting to justify it, “[i]t is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success”.7 This is ostensibly a purely descriptive claim. But given that it was intended partly to diffuse moral criticism, it is clearly meant to imply that scientists should or at least may permissibly ‘go ahead’ and argue about it later.

In other cases agents confronted with dual-use problems have come closer to flatly denying that they are under any obligation to assess the likely uses of the scientific knowledge whose creation or dissemination is at stake. Some, for instance, have sought to draw a clear distinction between science and technology, or between research and development, maintaining that questions about morally desirable and undesirable applications become relevant only in the realm of development or technology. For example, in response to the publication of a story about cruise missile technology in the science section of Time, the Nobel Laureate Roger Guillemin stated that “[w]hat is going on there [cruise missile development] is not science but technology and engineering…. The use, including misuse or ill use, of… knowledge is the realm of politicians, engineers and technologists”.8 Guillemin can plausibly be interpreted as claiming here that only in the realm of technology need one appraise the uses of scientific knowledge. The implication is that in science, use assessments can be eschewed; choices about which scientific project(s) if any to pursue or promote may be made purely on the basis of scientific considerations, for example, whether a given piece of knowledge is intrinsically or theoretically interesting.9 I will refer to this view as scientific isolationism,since it holds that decisions about the direction of science can be made in isolation from certain moral, nonscientific considerations.

If scientific isolationism is correct, then an agent reasonably supposed to be faced with a dual-use problem can simply deny that she needs to address that putative problem, since she is permitted to ignore the likely applications of a piece of knowledge in deciding whether to contribute to its production or dissemination. She is thus permitted to ignore the very factor—risk of morally undesirable uses—that is thought to generate the problem. The thought would presumably be either that how scientific knowledge will be used has no bearing on the moral permissibility of the agent’s actions, so that there is no real problem at all, or that it is has a bearing, but one that the agent is morally permitted to ignore in her deliberations.

Scientific isolationism has implications that extend beyond debates regarding the dual-use problem and the misuse of science. Indeed, the view has perhaps most frequently been invoked not in defence of science that may be used in morally undesirable ways, but in defence of science deemed to have no plausible morally desirable uses. Marie Curie famously reminded an audience at Vassar College that

We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.10

Curie is here invoking a variant of scientific isolationism to defend the pursuit of basic science that will not clearly yield any social benefit.

In what follows, however, I will focus on the implications of scientific isolationism for scientific work that is amenable to misuse. I will consider whether it is possible to defend a form of scientific isolationism that does indeed allow agents putatively faced with dual-use problems to eschew any appraisal of the likely uses of the scientific knowledge at stake.

Clarifications

Before proceeding to the argument proper, however, it will be necessary to offer some further preliminary remarks on scientific isolationism.

First, scientific isolationism should be distinguished from a different view with which it is frequently coupled. This is view that the state, and others outside the scientific community, ought to leave those within it a wide domain of freedom in selecting their scientific aims, and their means to achieving them (see, e.g., Bush 1945, pp. 234–235). Let us call this view scientific libertarianism.11 Scientific isolationism and scientific libertarianism are frequently defended together. For example, in his classic discussion, Bush (1945) moves directly from the claim that “[w]e must remove the rigid controls which we have had to impose [during World War Two], and recover freedom of inquiry”, an expression of scientific libertarianism, to the claim that “[s]cientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown”, arguably an expression of scientific isolationism (1945: 235). Indeed, the two views can plausibly be regarded as two aspects of the same, broader model of the relationship between science and society—a model that is often associated with the Enlightenment.12 According to this model, science should be autonomous from the rest of society. One statement of the view has it that “the only scientific citizens are scientists themselves” and that “for science to engage in the production of properly scientific knowledge it must live in a ‘free state’ and in a domain apart from the rest of society” (Elam and Bertilson 2002, p. 133). We could perhaps aptly characterise this model as the conjunction of scientific libertarianism—which asserts that science should be granted political autonomy from the rest of society—and scientific isolationism—which grants it a kind of moral autonomy.

Nevertheless, scientific libertarianism and scientific isolationism are distinct views, and they have different implications for dual-use problems. Scientific libertarianism might be drawn upon to resolve certain dual-use problems. Consider a case where a government is deciding whether to institute state censorship of scientific publications in a sensitive area, such as synthetic biology, and is reasonably deemed to be faced with a dual-use problem. Perhaps the government can resolve this putative problem by appealing to scientific libertarianism. If that view is correct, then clearly state censorship would be unjustified. However, though scientific libertarianism may allow agents to resolve dual-use problems in some circumstances, it will not enable the resolution of all such problems. Suppose that an individual scientist is considering whether to disseminate some item of scientific knowledge, free from any legal impediment to doing so, and takes herself to be faced with a dual-use problem. Here, scientific libertarianism will provide no guidance, for there is no question of constraining scientific freedom in this case; the issue what the scientist should do given the freedom she has been granted.

So scientific libertarianism does not allow us to resolve all dual-use problems. Scientific isolationism does, however, potentially provide a way out of all dual-use problems, for it denies that the consideration that generates such problems—the risk that scientific knowledge will be misused—needs to be considered.

But is scientific isolationism itself justified? In what follows I subject the view to critical scrutiny. I take as my initial target the following, rather strong variant of scientific isolationism:

Full Isolationism. For any policy or project P, moral agents considering whether to pursue P are not morally required to assess the likely uses of the scientific knowledge at stake (that is, the knowledge whose creation or dissemination is likely to be affected by the agent’s choice whether to pursue P).

This variant of isolationism is strong in two respects. First, it deems that agents may always permissibly ignore the use of the knowledge they produce. Second, Full Isolationism applies to all agents, regardless of their institutional role. For example, it applies to scientists, university administrators, government executives, and members of the general public. It also applies to both individual and collective agents, assuming that there are collective agents. Thus, it may apply to science funders, universities and governments.

It might seem uncharitable to take, as my target, such a strong version of scientific isolationism. However, I begin with this strong variant not because I wish to exclude weaker, and perhaps more plausible, variants; indeed I will turn to consider weaker variants of scientific isolationism in Sects. 6, 7 and 8. Rather, I begin with this strong variant because this will enable me to approach the assessment of scientific isolationism in a systematic way. My assessment proceeds in three steps. First, I set up a presumption against Full Isolationism. Second, I consider two arguments that might be thought to override this presumption and thus justify Full Isolationism. I argue that both fail. Finally, I consider whether it might be possible to defend a weaker version of scientific isolationism that can nevertheless do the work that has been asked of stronger versions. The aim of the subsequent discussion is thus not only (and indeed is not primarily) to assess Full Isolationism, but also to determine whether it is possible to defend any version of scientific isolationism that will allow those faced with putative dual-use problems to deny an obligation to resolve or escape those problems. I believe that this aim is one that is worth pursuing even if Full Isolationism is implausible. It would, after all, be quite consistent to hold that Full Isolationism is implausible while also suspecting that it might contain a kernel of truth, and perhaps a kernel that will be helpful to those faced with dual-use problems.

The presumption against Full Isolationism

The argument for a presumption against Full Isolationism begins from a parallel between science and other domains. Outside of the realm of science, we generally think that, when an agent is deciding whether to facilitate the production or dissemination of a tool that is amenable to both morally desirable and undesirable uses, that agent should take into account its likely uses.

Consider the case of arms manufacturers. Most would judge that, in deciding whether to produce certain kinds of weapons, or to sell them to certain kinds of customer, arms manufacturers should consider the risk of misuse. Similarly, most would judge that in deciding whether to permit or support the production and sales of such arms, governments should take the possible misuse of those weapons into account.

It might be thought that weapons are a special case because they are so clearly amenable to misuse. But note that we would probably take a similar view about items whose potential for misuse is less obvious. For example, we would think that risk of misuse ought to be taken into account by those who manufacture and sell components that could be used to produce weapons, but which are primarily used for morally desirable or neutral purposes. And we would think that governments should consider risk of misuse in deciding how to regulate the production and sale of such components.

Similarly, consider those who manufacture and sell chemicals with legitimate uses (such as household cleaning agents) but which can also be used to manufacture unsafe and illicit drugs. Again, most would think that, in considering whether to manufacture such chemicals, and whether to sell them to certain kinds of customer, the manufacturers ought to consider the risk of misuse. Similarly, we would think that the government should take the risk of misuse into account in deciding whether and how to regulate the production and sale of such chemicals.

More generally, when tools are amenable to both morally desirable and undesirable uses, we generally judge that their likely uses should, at least in some cases, be taken into account when decisions that affect the creation or dissemination of those tools are made. We think that some rudimentary form of use assessment should be conducted. This, I suggest, creates a presumption in favour of the parallel view regarding scientific knowledge which is, after all, also a tool amenable to both morally desirable and undesirable uses.

It is true that those who produce tools amenable to both good and bad uses sometimes seek to deny any obligation to perform a use assessment. For example, arms manufacturers may claim that they need not consider the possible uses (including misuse) of the arms they produce and sell because they are not directly responsible for the misuse of those arms. Nor do they intend the arms to be misused.13 Such appeals are, however, widely regarded as unpersuasive. The facts that arms manufacturers do not intend misuse, and are not directly responsible for it, may somewhat weaken their obligation to conduct use assessments. But most of us nevertheless think that, at least in some cases, such an obligation is present.

The noninstrumental value of knowledge

I have been arguing for a presumption against Full Isolationism. In this section and the next I consider two arguments for Full Isolationism that might be thought to override this presumption.

The first of these arguments appeals to the view that scientific knowledge has noninstrumental value—value that does not derive from its tendency to produce other things of value. This view has frequently been invoked by those who wish to defend their participation in the production or dissemination of knowledge that is prone to misuse (Glover 1999, p. 102), and one can see how it might function in a defence of Full Isolationism. The thought could be that pursuing a project or policy P that is likely to result in the creation or dissemination of scientific knowledge is morally permissible just in case the scientific knowledge at stake has (a sufficient degree of) noninstrumental value, so there is no need for those deciding whether to promote the creation or dissemination of knowledge to consider what instrumental value or disvalue it might have in virtue of the ways in which it will be used. Consideration of instrumental value would be superfluous. Indeed, it might be worse than superfluous; it might potentially distract those considering whether to pursue P from the more important matter of determining the likely noninstrumental value of the scientific knowledge at stake.

This argument depends on two claims. First, that knowledge is (or at least can be) noninstrumentally valuable. And second, that the noninstrumental value of a piece of knowledge is the sole determinant of whether it would be justified to pursue a project or policy likely to result in the creation or dissemination of scientific knowledge. But note that the second of these claims does not follow from the first. One could hold that knowledge is noninstrumentally valuable, but that its instrumental value is also relevant to decisions regarding whether to pursue P. Indeed, if knowledge has both instrumental and noninstrumental value, the natural position to hold would be that both types of value bear on such decisions. The view that instrumental value is irrelevant would be plausible only if the noninstrumental value of knowledge were a trump value, one that always over-rides the sorts of value or disvalue attached to good or bad applications of that knowledge—or at least a value that will have overriding force in all but extra-ordinary circumstances. But it is not clear why is should be so. Indeed, accepting that the noninstrumental value of knowledge is a trump value would have implausible implications. It would arguably imply, for example, that compared to the status quo, vastly greater resources should be expended on supporting science, and vastly fewer on other projects. Healthcare, education, social security, defence and so on should be supported only insofar as they are conducive to scientific progress.

Uncertainty

A second argument for Full Isolationism would appeal to the uncertainty that will afflict any attempt to conduct what I earlier called ‘use assessments’—that is, attempts to determine the likely applications of the scientific knowledge whose creation or dissemination is likely to be affected by the decision whether to pursue P, and a determination, partly on the basis of this assessment, of whether it is morally permissible to pursue P. This uncertainty could stem from at least two sources. First, there is the problem that it will often be unclear in advance what knowledge will be created or disseminated through pursuit of P.14 Thus, suppose that an individual scientist is considering whether to pursue some project investigating x. It will presumably be somewhat predictable that this project could yield knowledge concerning x. But the content of that knowledge will generally not be clear in advance. If it were, there would be no need to pursue the knowledge. Similarly, it may be quite likely that the project will in fact yield knowledge about some other topic, y. Thus, when a scientist is faced with a question about whether to seek to produce knowledge of a certain kind, there will typically be uncertainty about what knowledge will actually be produced. (The same kind of uncertainty will not exist, or not to the same degree, in relation to the dissemination of existing knowledge.) Second, there will typically be uncertainty about how a given item of knowledge will be used. The possible applications of a given item of knowledge will often be unclear, and highly dependent on unpredictable contextual factors (such as which people acquire the knowledge).15

We can distinguish two different ways in which these concerns about uncertainty might figure in an argument for Full Isolationism. First, they might be invoked in support of the claim that attempting to determine the uses of scientific knowledge is always futile.16 It never has any predictive value regarding how the knowledge that would in fact be created or disseminated due to pursuit of P would in fact be used. Second, they might be invoked in support of the claim that the costs of attempting to engage in such use assessments outweigh the benefits.

The first of these arguments seems difficult to sustain. Suppose scientists are considering whether to disseminate some piece of knowledge from, say, nuclear physics or synthetic biology. Suppose further that there is a clear mechanism via which the scientific knowledge might be used to produce weapons as well as clear evidence that some individuals or groups are interested in producing and using such weapons for the purposes of terrorism. We would, I think, be inclined to judge that the scientific knowledge in question is, ceteris paribus, more likely to be used for terrorist purposes than knowledge in relation to which we know of no similar mechanisms and motivations. It would be implausible to suggest that information about these mechanisms and motivations has no predictive value.17

At this point, a defender of Full Isolationism might retreat to the second of the two arguments mentioned above. She might concede that concerns regarding uncertainty do not render use assessments entirely futile, but claim that they do substantially diminish the payoffs from attempting to make such assessments, and substantially enough that the costs of making the assessments outweigh the benefits. This supporter of Full Isolationism might note that attempts to conduct use assessments are likely to come at considerable cost; to make these assessments well, it is likely that significant time, effort, expertise and financial resources would be required—all resources that could otherwise be devoted to other worthwhile activities. And if those use assessments would in any case be plagued by substantial uncertainty, the costs of conducting them might outweigh the benefits.

Concerns about the costliness of use assessments are likely to be particularly serious in the case of individual scientists. If individual scientists were to conduct use assessments in relation to each experiment they undertook or paper that they published, this would be highly burdensome and would significantly reduce the time available for doing scientific work. Note, however, that this concern could be significantly mitigated by outsourcing much of the necessary work to external agencies. One can imagine a situation in which scientists could consult an agency whose sole role was to provide specialist advice on how various types of scientific knowledge are likely to be used, as well, perhaps, as evaluations of how these different uses bear, morally, on the scientist. Individual scientists would then be left only with the tasks of predicting what knowledge their work might produce and deciding whether to rely on the assessments of the specialist agency. This agency could also provide assessments to policymakers, journal editors and other individual and collective agents in a position to influence the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge.18

Note also that rejecting Full Isolationism does not commit one to the view that use assessments must be formed on the basis of explicit calculation and reasoning. Rejecting Full Isolationism entails accepting that use assessments should sometimes be made, but this is consistent with believing that those assessments could be made on the basis of simple heuristics (e.g. ‘research with obvious applications in warfare is, other things being equal, more likely to be used for military purposes than other research’) or even intuition, and if decisions were made in these ways it is not clear that they would be associated with substantial costs.

I have been presenting some grounds for doubting that (1) making use assessments in relation to scientific knowledge is futile, and (2) the costs of making such estimates are outweighed by the benefits. There is, moreover, some reason to suppose that these doubts are decisive. This can be seen by returning to the analogy between scientific knowledge and other tools amenable to both morally desirable and undesirable uses. The arguments concerning uncertainty that I offered above would, it seems to me, apply with equal force to certain other instances in which one agent contributes to the production or dissemination of a tool amenable to both good and bad uses. Suppose the government is considering whether to allow arms manufacturers within its jurisdiction to sell weapons to rebels in a country currently in the midst of a civil war. The complexities that typify such conflicts will likely introduce a high degree of uncertainty regarding how any weapons sold might be used, particularly if, as it seems we should, we take long term uses into account. Nevertheless, few would argue that, in such a situation, the government could plausibly ignore the likely uses of the arms whose sale is in question. We would not think, in such a situation, that uncertainty is sufficiently great so as to make use assessments futile, and moreover we would likely assume there to be ways of making such assessments such that their benefits will outweigh their costs. It is not obvious that the degree of uncertainty involved in use assessments in relation to scientific knowledge are substantially greater than those involved in this case—particularly if we limit ourselves to the applied sciences, where uncertainty regarding potential applications is arguably lessened. Thus, our intuition that uncertainty does not provide a decisive ground for eschewing use assessments in the arms sale case plausibly provides some evidence for the view that it does not constitute a decisive ground in the scientific knowledge case either.19

Weakening scientific isolationism

I have argued that there should be a presumption against Full Isolationism, and I have been unable to identify any argument capable of overriding that presumption. But I now want to consider whether it might be possible to salvage some kernel of truth from scientific isolationism. Consider the following, weaker variant of the principle:

Restricted Isolationism. For any policy or project P, individual researchers and research groups considering whether to pursue P are not morally required to morally appraise the likely uses of the scientific knowledge at stake.

This principle differs from Full Isolationism in that it applies only to individual researchers and individual research groups. It does not apply, for example, to the scientific community as a whole, to governments, or to humanity as a whole. One might think that Oppenheimer, Guillemin, Curie, and other scientists who have asserted similar views, had no stronger variant of scientific isolationism in mind than Restricted Isolationism, for they do not explicitly include governments or other institutions within the scope of their comments. Moreover, restricting the scope of scientific isolationism in this way arguably renders it more plausible. It allows us to avail ourselves of at least two arguments that were not previously available.

Lack of influence

The first of these arguments maintains that individual scientists and research institutions need not engage in use assessments because any action based on such assessments would be futile: individual scientists and research institutions cannot significantly alter the rate of knowledge production or dissemination. If one scientist or institution decides to abstain from producing or disseminating some piece of scientific knowledge because of the risk of misuse, this same knowledge will shortly be produced or disseminated by someone else.20

This argument depends on empirical claims that I am not qualified to answer; claims regarding the effect of scientists’ actions. Nevertheless, I wish to raise three doubts about the argument.

First, there is some anecdotal evidence that individual scientists can sometimes have a significant effect on the rate of scientific progress. Consider the case of recent research by Ron Fouchier and Yoshihiro Kawaoka’s groups demonstrating that the H5N1 virus can be rendered transmissible by air between ferrets.21 Following significant debate over whether papers based on these studies should be published in full, both researchers and a number of others agreed, in January 2012, to halt, for 60 days, “any research involving highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 viruses leading to the generation of viruses that are more transmissible in mammals” (Fouchier et al. 2012, p. 443). This voluntary moratorium in fact lasted a year (Fouchier et al. 2013). Since the moratorium was voluntary, any of the scientists who agreed to it could have defected from it at any time. In this context, the fact that each scientist chose to hold to the moratorium delayed research in this area by up to a year.22 Delays of this order or magnitude—months to years—could plausibly be sufficient for the development of new regulations or defensive strategies that would mitigate the risk that a piece of knowledge would be misused.

Second, it is possible that even very slight delays in the production or dissemination of knowledge could have very significant cumulative effects in the longer term. Since later discoveries build on earlier ones, it seems possible that a small delay in one area of research will have large knock on effects, leading to many more delays in other areas of research. If all of these are areas of research are prone to misuse, then the overall delaying effect on risk of misuse may be significant.

Third, even if individual scientists cannot significantly affect the rate at which scientific knowledge is produced and disseminated, they may still be morally required to conduct use assessments. This is because individual scientists may have reason to ensure that they do not become part of a collective that wrongfully enables the misuse of scientific knowledge, even if their own individual contribution to such misuse would be insignificant. Compare the ethics of contributing to climate change. It is sometimes said that the individual consumption decisions of individual people do not significantly contribute to climate change. However, even if this is so, many would argue that individuals have reasons to consider their carbon footprint, and to make consumption decisions that reduce it. A plausible explanation for this is that in making consumption decisions with a high carbon footprint, an individual becomes part of a collective which together wrongfully produces climate change.23 Arguably, individuals have a reason not to become a part of collective wrongdoing in this way. Similar reasoning might be applied to dual-use cases. Suppose an individual scientist creates knowledge about how to render the H5N1 virus air-transmissible that is highly liable to misuse. However, suppose that this individual scientist’s work does not significantly contribute to this risk. Still, by creating this knowledge, the scientist might become part of a collective (say, the group of scientists working on means for creating air-transmissible H5N1) that does substantially contribute to this risk. Each individual scientist might be obliged conduct a use assessment to ensure that they do not become part of collective wrongdoing in this way.

The division of moral labor

I have suggested that the first argument for Restricted Isolationism faces three problems. I think there is, though, a more promising argument for Restricted Isolationism. This argument appeals to the idea of an efficient division of moral labour; the idea that we can sometimes achieve moral goals more efficiently by assigning different moral responsibilities to different people or institutions rather than assigning all individuals the same responsibilities. In the context of the dual-use problem, the idea would be that we can most efficiently ensure that science serves the public good by assigning responsibility for conducting use assessments to governments, expert bodies or other institutions, leaving scientists free to pursue scientific goals with the regulatory frameworks set by these other agents and institutions.

The basic idea of the division of moral labour is familiar in political philosophy from the work of John Rawls, who argues that we should accept a division of moral labour in which only institutions (or more precisely the subset of institutions that he refers to as ‘the basic structure’) should be assigned responsibility for realising distributive justice. Rawls (1993, pp. 268–269) spells out the idea as follows:

what we look for is an institutional division of labor between the basic structure and the rules applying directly to individuals and associations and to be followed by them in particular transactions. If this division of labor can be established, individuals and associations are then left free to advance their ends more effectively within the framework of the basic structure, secure in the knowledge that elsewhere in the social system the necessary corrections to preserve background justice are being made.24

The idea of a division of moral labour is also arguably a part of common sense moral thinking regarding a number of spheres of human activity. For example, it is a part of common sense thinking about law and medicine. It is standardly thought that lawyers operating in an adversarial legal system ought ordinarily to act in the interests of their own clients, setting aside the interests of those with whom their client is in dispute, leaving those who maintain and uphold legal institutions to ensure that the adversarial system generally yields just verdicts. Similarly, according to a widely held view of medical ethics, a doctor ought to act in the best interests of the patient she is currently treating, while institutions of healthcare resource allocation ought to constrain the treatments open to doctors in order to ensure that healthcare resources are allocated fairly and efficiently.

The division of moral labour is also arguably a feature of common sense thinking about capitalism. Economic agents in capitalist societies often inflict significant harms on one another through their competitive practices. Consider the case of a shopkeeper who drops his prices in order to force a new competitor out of his market. This action may cause significant harm to the new competitor—the sort of harm that, outside the context of capitalism, we might expect to be given significant consideration in deliberation. However, some would argue that, within capitalist systems, economic agents are morally permitted to engage in practices like aggressive price competition without considering the harm that this might cause to others. They are permitted to do this, it might be argued, because, although individual actions performed within a capitalist system may cause net harm, the system that allows individual economic agents to ignore market-based harms while a central government regulates the market to serve the common good is the economic system that, as a matter of fact, most efficiently serves the common good.

A similar argument could be offered for Restricted Isolationism. It could be argued that researchers should be free to pursue scientific objectives regardless of how the resulting knowledge will be used, because the scientific ethos that allows such aggressive pursuit of the truth within external regulatory constraints is the system of knowledge production that most efficiently serves the common good. There are at least three reasons to suppose that such a division of moral labour might be highly efficient. First, it would help to avoid the duplication of moral labour that would occur if both individual scientists and those who regulate them were to conduct use assessments in relation to the same scientific activities. Second, it would allow for responsibilities to be assigned to those best placed to discharge them. For example, responsibility for assessing the scientific merit of research could be assigned to scientists who are highly qualified to make such assessments, while responsibilities for conducting use assessments could be assigned to agencies that possess a mixture of scientific, security and ethical expertise. Third, centralisation of use assessments might allow for substantial economies of scale. For example, the institutions assigned responsibility for conducting use assessments may be able to conduct those assessments in relation to general kinds of scientific research thus obviating the need for use assessments to be conducted in relation to individual projects.

I have been suggesting that the idea of a division of moral labour is a widely accepted one. We have also now seen that there are reasons to think that a division of labour that assigns responsibility for conducting use assessments to regulatory institutions rather than individual scientists would aid efficiency. Nevertheless, I doubt that an appeal to the division of moral labour can sustain even the restricted version of scientific isolationism currently under consideration.

There are two difficulties. First, the division of moral labour argument that I have been outlining specifies an ideal. It specifies an ideal distribution of moral labour across agents and institutions—a distribution that would allow for maximal efficiency in the realisation of (certain) moral objectives. But realising this ideal requires collective action. It requires that both scientists and regulators play their part—both fulfil the responsibilities assigned to them. Suppose that one party does not play its part. For example, suppose that regulators do not regulate science so as to ensure that it serves the public good. Then it is not clear that the other group should fulfil only those responsibilities that it would be fulfil in an ideal division of moral labour, for there is no longer any hope that the ideal will be realised. For example, if regulators are not fulfilling their responsibilities, then there is no longer any hope of distributing moral labour so as to realise the economies of scale that would attached to a centralised use-assessment process. Nor is there any possibility of distributing moral labour such that use assessments are performed by those best qualified to perform them, since those bodies are, we are assuming, not fulfilling their responsibilities.

These thoughts are relevant since it is plausible that scientific governance bodies are not currently conducting the use assessments that they would conduct in a maximally efficient division of moral labour. Some steps have been taken in recent years to introduce a form of centralised use assessment for certain kinds of scientific research, particularly in relation to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. For example, the United States’ National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has taken on an advisory role in relation to the publication of microbiological research deemed to be at risk of misuse. However, for many potential dual-use problems, there is no provision for use assessments to be made by the institutions of scientific governance. For instance, though most developed jurisdictions operate comprehensive systems for the ethical oversight of human subject research, the institutions which carry out ethical review (for example, Institutional Review Boards and Research Ethics Committees) are not generally instructed to consider the risk that knowledge produced by scientific research will be misused. Their focus is on the means by which the scientific work will be conducted. Moreover, research that does not involve human subjects is not typically subjected to ethical review, though it may, of course, pose dual-use problems. Similarly, though many research funders take into account the likely desirable uses of scientific knowledge when making decisions about which scientific projects to fund, most do not consider the risk that the knowledge will be used in undesirable ways.25 These gaps in existing institutional arrangements for preventing the misuse of scientific knowledge might lead one to conclude that, even if the optimally efficient division of moral labour would have use assessments conducted by governance bodies rather than individual scientists, this is a division of labour that scientists cannot currently realise, since governance bodies are not playing their part.26

A second difficulty is that it is doubtful whether the optimally efficient division of labour would lead leave scientists with no obligation to conduct use assessments. Compare two possible divisions of moral labour. In the first, scientists need not ever conduct use assessments in relation to their work. Institutions of scientific governance are the only bodies assigned responsibility for conducting use assessments. In the second division of labour, most use assessments are conducted by governance bodies, but individual scientists and research groups must conduct at least cursory use assessments in certain cases—cases where there is a clear and severe risk that the scientific knowledge they plan to produce or disseminate will be used in highly undesirable ways, and this despite the optimal preventative policies having been adopted by governance bodies. It is difficult to see how this latter division of moral labour could be less efficient than the former. For the responsibilities placed on scientists and research groups in the latter division of labour would not, overall, be burdensome—only a cursory use assessment is required, and it will be required only in rare cases—yet it is plausible that the latter division of moral labour could prevent some seriously undesirable uses of scientific knowledge. Compared to the second, more qualified, division of labour, the first, more extreme division might seem to leave society dangerously exposed to the misuse of science for the sake of a minor reduction of the deliberative burdens on scientists.

These thoughts suggest that, at the very most, the idea of the division of moral labour will support an even further weakened version of scientific isolationism according to which in the majority of cases, scientists faced with choices about whether to promote the creation or dissemination of scientific knowledge need not consider how the resulting knowledge is likely to be misused, but according to which in rare cases—for example, where there is a clear and severe risk of misuse—at least a cursory use assessment must be performed.

Notice, however, that this further-weakened version of scientific isolationism will be of little use to those who wish to invoke scientific isolationism in order to avoid an obligation to resolve dual-use problems. This is because most agree that dual-use problems normally only arise in cases were there is a clear and severe risk of a highly undesirable use of knowledge. It is normally thought that only in these cases is there a serious question about whether it would be permissible to pursue a project or policy that can be expected to result in the creation or dissemination of that knowledge. But these are precisely the cases in which the present, further-weakened version of scientific isolationism will provide no means of escape. For this version of scientific isolationism accepts that, in these circumstances, scientists ought to conduct use assessments.

Conclusion

Not having been able to identify any good argument for either Full or Restricted Isolationism, I tentatively conclude that we should accept neither. I think we should accept, that is, that there are cases in which agents reasonably thought to be faced with dual-use problems—including individual scientists—should morally appraise the likely uses of the scientific knowledge at stake. The most we can salvage from scientific isolationism is, I think, the idea, suggested by the division of moral labour argument, that individual researchers and research groups may permissibly eschew any moral appraisal of the likely uses of the knowledge they produce or disseminate in most cases. However, as we have seen, this variant of scientific isolationism has little dialectic force as a means of avoiding the need to resolve dual-use problems. Moreover, the argument for this view relies on the assumption that governance bodies are playing their part in the realisation of the optimally efficient division of moral labour, and this could be questioned.

Footnotes

See, for discussion, Glover (1999, pp. 92–93), Bostrom (2007), and Lakoff (1980).

The quandary is also sometimes known as the dual-use dilemma, but I prefer dual-use problem since it is not clear that there is a genuine moral dilemma—in the sense of a choice structure in which the agent cannot but act wrongly—in these cases. I present the dual-use problem here as a problem that arises in relation to the creation or dissemination of scientific knowledge, but others have also used the term to refer to the analogous quandary that can arise in the creation or dissemination of technologies. Note that the term ‘dual-use’ has also been used, in a different, non-normative sense, to refer to the fact that knowledge or technologies developed for military purposes may have unforeseen civilian benefits. See, for an example of this usage, King (2005). For discussion of the term, see Selgelid (2013).

I take the seriousness of the risk of misuse to be a function of both the moral undesirability of the use and the likelihood with which the use will occur.

For discussion of a number of other values that could be relevant to dual-use problems, see Buchanan and Kelley (2011).

For examples of scientific developments that have driven this discussion, see Jackson et al. (2001), who report the accidental creation of a vaccine-resistent and highly lethal strain of the mousepox virus; Cello et al. (2002), who report the synthesis of a complete poliovirus genome using chemicals purchased over the internet, and based on genomic information also freely available on the net; and Tumpey et al. (2005), who report the re-creation, also through synthetic techniques, of the 1918 Spanish influenza virus.

For concise summaries of the studies and ensuing debate, see Evans (2013) and Vogel (2014).

Quoted in Jungk (1970, p. 266).

Roger Guillemin, in a letter to the editor, Time (September 3, 1979), p. 5. Quoted in Lakoff (1980, p. 101). See, for discussion, Glover (1999, p. 102).

See, for discussion, Daniels (1967).

Marie Curie in a Lecture at Vassar College, May 14, 1921. Quoted in Bostrom (2007, p. 145). Note that Curie’s claim here is in fact significantly stronger than scientific isolationism, as I defined that view above. She claims not social utility may be ignored, but that it ‘must’. However, since must implies may, we can take her to be implicitly also defending scientific isolationism as well.

In Hohfeldian terms, scientific libertarianism ascribes to members of the scientific community a moral claim-right to freedom from external interference in their scientific decision-making. Scientific isolationism, by contrast, assigns scientists (and others) a moral permission; a permission to eschew any moral appraisal of the likely uses of scientific knowledge.

This is the term given to it by Bostrom (2007). Arguably this conception of science gained the ascendancy much later than the Enlightenment. It has been argued that, in the US, it came to the fore only in the 1870s. See, for discussion, Daniels (1967).

Arms manufacturers could appeal here to the Doctrine of Double Effect. For a discussion of double-effect reasoning in relation to the dual-use problem, see Uniacke (2013).

See, for a classic statement of this view, Bush (1945, p. 241).

There may also be moral uncertainty. Even if we could fully specify a likely use of the knowledge, there might be uncertainty about its moral (un)desirability, and about how its moral (un)desirability bears on the moral permissibility of pursuing P. I leave aside moral uncertainty here, since it is not normally thought a sufficient ground for eschewing deliberation in the face of putative moral quandaries. But see Briggle (2014) for a detailed discussion of the ways in which moral uncertainty has been neglected in recent discussions of the social impacts of science.

Microbiologist Vincent Racaniello defended this view forcefully in a debate over the recent H5N1 ferret studies, claiming that “[f]or much of science you can't do a risk–benefit analysis. If you think you can, you're wrong” (Quoted in Roos 2012). Michael Polanyi (2000, p. 9) puts the point more generally, holding that “the aspiration of guiding the progress of science into socially beneficent channels [is] impossible and nonsensical”, and then (p. 10): “You can kill or mutilate the advance of science, you cannot shape it. For it can advance only by essentially unpredictable steps, pursuing problems of its own, and the practical benefits of these advances will be incidental and hence doubly unpredictable”.

It might be argued that, in order for a piece of scientific knowledge to have such clear military applications, it would have to be the result of highly applied scientific work, and by the time the science on a given topic has proceeded to such an applied stage, there may seem to be little hope of preventing further scientific progress on the topic in question; the field may already have acquired significant momentum. Thus, those in a position to support or impede scientific work may be faced with a variant of the Collingridge dilemma (see Collingridge 1980): either they act before the scientific work has reached an applied stage, in which case they may be able to influence whether further scientific knowledge is produced, but they have no predictive ability, or they act at an applied stage, where they have some predictive ability, but no ability to influence the production of scientific knowledge. However, it seems to me doubtful that there are many cases in which nothing can be done to hold back the production of a piece of scientific knowledge. See Sect. 7 below for some considerations in support of these doubts.

The US National Science Foundation’s ‘Science of Science and Innovation Programme’ is an example of a recent attempt to develop expert advice on the likely social effects of science. For a critical discussion, see Briggle (2014).

For a similar argument, see Bostrom (2007).

See, for example, Vandermolen (2006). For discussion, see Bostrom (2007, p. 11).

See, for discussion, Evans (2013) and Vogel (2014).

Similar points hold in relation to the moratorium on recombinant DNA research agreed by a large group of American molecular biologists in mid-1974. This moratorium lasted until the now-famous Asilomar Conference, which took place in February 1925 and resulted in a broad-based agreement on guidelines regarding the conditions under which recombinant DNA research ought to proceed—guidelines which were themselves widely respected. For a brief overview of this case, see Berg (2008).

For a sophisticated treatment of this approach to climate change and other similar problems, see Kutz (2007).

For subsequent influential discussions of the division of moral labour in political philosophy, see Nagel (1995), Murphy (1999) and Scheffler (2005).

Though a number of United Kingdom funding bodies did recently take steps in the direction of taking risk of misuse of knowledge into account. These funding bodies now require grant applicants to declare the risks of misuse associated with their proposed work. See BBSRC et al. (2005).

An analogue of this argument might be fairly widely accepted in relation to capitalism. I mentioned above a common sense division of moral labour view according to which individual economic agents should pursue their own self-interest in their economic transactions, while governance bodies ensure that market system serves the public good. However, there are certain areas in which governance bodies are plausibly failing to fulfil the responsibilities that they would be assigned in this division of moral labour. For example, governance bodies are arguably not effectively protecting the environment and animals against harm from capitalism, and for this reason, many would argue that, even if in an ideal capitalist system individual agents would not need to consider the effects of their economic transactions on the environment and animals, in actual economic systems, they are required to do so.

References

Baumgartner T, Heinrichs M, Vonlanthen A, Fischbacher U, Fehr E. Oxytocin shapes the neural circuitry of trust and trust adaptation in humans. Neuron. 2008;58:639–650. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2008.04.009. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

BBSRC, MRC and Wellcome Trust (2005). Managing risks of misuse associated with grant funding activities: BBSRC, MRC and Wellcome trust statement. http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/Policy/Policy-and-position-statements/wtx026594.htm. Accessed 12 Sep 2014.

Berg P. Meetings that changed the world: Asilomar 1975: DNA modification secured. Nature. 2008;455(7211):290–291. doi: 10.1038/455290a. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Bostrom, N. 2007. Technological revolutions: Ethics and policy in the dark. In Nanoscale: Issues and perspectives for the nano century, ed. N. M. de S. Cameron, and M. E. Mitchell, 129–152. New Jersey: John Wiley.

Briggle AR. Opening the black box: The social outcomes of scientific research. Social Epistemology. 2014;28(2):153–166. doi: 10.1080/02691728.2013.782584. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Buchanan A, Kelley MC. Biodefence and the production of knowledge: Rethinking the problem. Journal of Medical Ethics. 2011;39:195–204. doi: 10.1136/medethics-2011-100387. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Bush V. Science: The endless Frontier. Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (1903-) 1945;48(3):231–264. doi: 10.2307/3625196. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Cello J, Paul AV, Wimmer E. Chemical synthesis of poliovirus cDNA: Generation of infectious virus in the absence of natural template. Science. 2002;297:1016–1018. doi: 10.1126/science.1072266.[PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Collingridge D. The Social Control of Technology. New York: St Martin; 1980. [Google Scholar]

Dando, M. 2005. The malign misuse of neuroscience. (In Disarmament Forum, pp. 18–24. http://www.unidir.org/files/publications/pdfs/science-technology-and-the-cbw-regimes-en-338.pdf. Accessed 12 Sep 2014.

Dando, M. 2011. Advances in neuroscience and the biological and toxin weapons convention. Biotechnology Research International, Article ID 973851, 1–9. [PMC free article] [PubMed]

Daniels GH. The pure-science ideal and democratic culture. Science. 1967;156:1699–1705. doi: 10.1126/science.156.3783.1699. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

De Dreu CKW, Greer LL, Van Kleef GA, Shalvi S, Handgraaf MJJ. Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2011;108:1262–1266. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1015316108. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Elam, M., and Bertilson, M. (2002). Consuming, engaging and confronting science: The emerging dimensions of scientific citizenship. In P. Healey ed., STAGE (HPSE‐CT2001‐50003) Final Report, 121–158. http://curis.ku.dk/ws/files/34380488/STAGE_Final_Report.pdf. Accessed 12 Sep 2014.

Evans NG. Great expectations—ethics, avian flu and the value of progress. Journal of Medical Ethics. 2013;39:209–213. doi: 10.1136/medethics-2012-100712. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Fouchier RAM, García-Sastre A, Kawaoka Y. Pause on avian flu transmission studies. Nature. 2012;481:443. doi: 10.1038/481443a. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Fouchier, R.A.M., García-Sastre, A., Kawaoka, Y., and 37 co-authors. 2013. H5N1 virus: Transmission studies resume for avian flu. Nature 493:609–609. [PubMed]

Glover J. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. London: Jonathan Cape; 1999.[Google Scholar]

Jackson RJ, Ramsay AJ, Christensen CD, Beaton S, Hall DF, Ramshaw IA. Expression of mouse interleukin-4 by a recombinant ectromelia virus suppresses cytolytic lymphocyte responses and overcomes genetic resistance to mousepox. Journal of Virology. 2001;75(3):1205–1210. doi: 10.1128/JVI.75.3.1205-1210.2001. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Jungk, R. 1970. Brighter than a thousand suns: A personal history of the atomic scientists, 1st American Ed edition. New York: Harcourt.

King NB. The ethics of biodefense. Bioethics. 2005;19(4):432–446. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8519.2005.00454.x. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Kosfeld M, Heinrichs M, Zak PJ, Fischbacher U, Fehr E. Oxytocin increases trust in humans. Nature. 2005;435:673–676. doi: 10.1038/nature03701. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Kutz C. Complicity: Ethics and law for a collective age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2007. [Google Scholar]

Lakoff SA. Moral responsibility and the ‘Galilean imperative’ Ethics. 1980;91(1):100–116. doi: 10.1086/292206. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Marks JH. A neuroskeptic’s guide to neuroethics and national security. AJOB Neuroscience. 2010;1:4–12. doi: 10.1080/21507741003699256. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Murphy LB. Institutions and the demands of justice. Philosophy & Public Affairs. 1999;27:251–291. doi: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.1998.tb00071.x. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Nagel T. Equality and partiality. New York: Oxford University Press; 1995. [Google Scholar]

Polanyi, M. (2000, originally published 1962). The republic of science: Its political and economic theory. Minerva 38(1):1–21.

Rawls J. Political liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press; 1993. [Google Scholar]

Roos, R. (2012). Live debate airs major divisions in H5N1 research battle. CIDRAP News. http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/avianflu/news/feb0312webinar-jw.html. Accessed 12 Sep 2014.

Scheffler S. Egalitarian liberalism as moral pluralism. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary. 2005;79:229–253. doi: 10.1111/j.0309-7013.2005.00134.x. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Selgelid, M. J. (2013). Dual-use research. In International encyclopedia of ethics, ed. H. LaFollete. Wiley-Blackwell.

Tumpey TM, Basler CF, Aguilar PV, Zeng H, Solorzano A, Swayne DE, Cox NJ, Katz JM, Taubenberger JK, Palese P, et al. Characterization of the reconstructed 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic virus. Science. 2005;310:77–80. doi: 10.1126/science.1119392. [PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Uniacke S. The doctrine of double effect and the ethics of dual use. In: Rappert B, Selgelid MJ, editors. On the dual uses of science and ethics. Canberra: The Australian National University; 2013. pp. 153–163. [Google Scholar]

Vandermolen TD. Molecular nanotechnology and national security. Air & Space Power Journal. 2006;20(3):96–106. [Google Scholar]

Vogel KM. Expert knowledge in intelligence assessments: Bird flu and bioterrorism. International Security. 2014;38:39–71. doi: 10.1162/ISEC_a_00150. [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

Wolpe PR, Foster KR, Langleben DD. Emerging neurotechnologies for lie-detection: Promises and perils. The American Journal of Bioethics. 2010;10:40–48. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2010.519238.[PubMed] [CrossRef] [Google Scholar]

#academic freedom #division of moral labor #dual-use problem #nuclear physics #scientific isolationaism #synthetic biology #value of knowledge #uncertainty #ethics

1 note · View note

tolkien-fandom-history · 6 years

Text

Interview with Angela P. Nicholas--author of "Aragorn: J.R.R. Tolkien's Undervalued Hero"

We were very excited to have the opportunity to interview author Angela P. Nicholas. Her book "Aragorn: J.R.R. Tolkien's Undervalued Hero" is an extremely detailed, in depth examination of Tolkien's Aragorn--his life, his relationships, his achievements, his skills, and his personality. It is a very worthwhile addition to any Tolkien library. She has some fascinating insights into Aragorn, book vs movie representations of the character, thoughts on the upcoming Amazon series and fan fiction as part of the Tolkien fandom. Hope you enjoy reading it!

1. How did you first become interested in Tolkien?

Answer:

Although The Lord of the Rings was very much in fashion during my student days in the late sixties and early seventies I wasn't interested in it at that stage – probably because I didn't tend to follow fashions! It was not until a few years later, in 1973, that a friend persuaded me to read it. He stressed that it would be a good idea to read The Hobbit first and promised me that I was "in for a treat". I was hooked immediately and when I got together with my future husband soon afterwards I wasted no time in introducing him to Tolkien's works as well! I re-read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings several times during the seventies and bought The Silmarillion as soon as it was published in 1977. Further readings have followed since, especially while working on Aragorn, extending to Unfinished Tales, the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth and Tolkien's Letters as well.*

2. Aside from reading the books, have you had any other immersion in the Tolkien fandom? Online, through societies, other venues?

Answer:

My Tolkien-related activities include membership of the Tolkien Society since 2005, leading to attendance at Oxonmoot (most years) plus a number of AGMs, the occasional seminar and the event in Loughborough in 2012. I've contributed several articles to Amon Hen and also gave a talk about Aragorn at Oxonmoot a few years ago. In addition I attend meetings of my local smial (Southfarthing) which is actually a Tolkien Reading Group.

3. There are so many richly written, deeply compelling characters in Tolkien. How did you decide to focus on Aragorn?

Answer:

There wasn't really any decision to make, as right from the start I found Aragorn the most complex and appealing character in the book. Every time I re-read The Lord of the Rings - including delving into the Appendices - I found new depths to his character and significance.

4. What prompted you to write this book? How did the impetus to write about him, in such rich detail, come about?

Answer:

The actual impetus came from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. Although I enjoyed his portrayal of Aragorn in some ways, it was clear that there were significant differences between the film and book versions of the character. For my own satisfaction I decided to re-discover Tolkien's Aragorn by studying all the Middle-earth writings and making detailed notes on anything of interest. I did not, at that stage, see myself actually writing a book.

5. Did you initially plan such an exhaustive and detailed study of this character, when you first decided to write the book?

Answer:

No, I didn't envisage anything so detailed. It just got out of hand: the more notes I made the more ideas I had and the thing just grew exponentially!

6. The title makes use of the word ‘undervalued’—how do you define that in terms of Aragorn and how did you come to associate that word with him?

Answer:

While studying Aragorn it became clear to me that his role in the story is a lot more significant than is immediately apparent. This is partly because the book is “hobbito-centric”, to use Tolkien's own word [see end of Letter 181 in The Letters of J R R Tolkien edited by Humphrey Carpenter], so is largely written from the hobbit viewpoint. For this reason Aragorn's ancestry and earlier life are only described in the Appendices, which not everyone reads. Thus his deeds - and their significance - are often overlooked, causing him and his role to be undervalued. Chapter 1.5 of my book in particular aims to address this problem by concentrating on the story of The Lord of the Rings from Aragorn's point of view. He does many crucial things behind the scenes, for example: the lengthy search for Gollum; standing in for Gandalf as shown by the secret vigil he conducts over Frodo during the months before the latter's departure from the Shire; and - the most significant achievement - confronting Sauron in the Palantír of Orthanc thus implying that he himself has the Ring and so diverting Sauron's attention away from Frodo.

7. If you were to consider writing a similar book about another character from Tolkien’s legendarium who would you choose to focus on?

Answer:

I find Finrod Felagund, Galadriel and Elrond interesting, especially in the light of their impact on Aragorn and his ancestry. Among the hobbits, Merry Brandybuck is rather appealing. However I have to say that I am not planning to do another book on this scale!

8. What were your thoughts on the portrayal of Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies?

Answer:

Given “book” Aragorn's lengthy struggle to regain the kingships of Arnor and Gondor and to be deemed worthy of marrying his beloved Arwen, it was extremely disappointing to be presented with the image of “Aragorn the reluctant king” who breaks off his engagement so Arwen can sail west.

In general I felt there was too much emphasis on Aragorn as a fighter, along with almost total neglect of his formidable healing skills, impressive foresight and knowledge of history and lore.

Another great disappointment was the omission of the challenge to Sauron in the Orthanc Stone. Yes, this incident was included in the extended version of The Return of the King, but it appeared in the wrong place and also gave the impression that Aragorn lost the confrontation. (The credit for seeing the enemy's plans in the Stone was actually given to Pippin!)

In addition I found the beheading of the Mouth of Sauron particularly disturbing.

9. Did you find Viggo Mortensen believable and appealing as Aragorn?

Answer:

In spite of my answer to the previous question I liked Viggo Mortensen's performance. He did actually look something like my image of Aragorn and he seemed to capture the sadness, remoteness, physical courage and protectiveness I associate with the character. Basically I thought that Mortensen did very well with the part he was given to play - but the part was not that of Tolkien's Aragorn!

10. Amazon has bought the rights to the appendices of the Lord of the Rings and is planning a 5 part series. Rumor has it that the first season will focus on young Aragorn. What do you hope to see in this adaptation and are there any particular incidents/scenes/events that you think merit particular attention or inclusion?

Answer: The following seem to me to be important:

- Putting Aragorn's early life in the context of “Estel”, the Hope of the Dúnedain, who has been prophesied to be the one who will atone for Isildur's failure to destroy the Ring, and who will restore the kingship of Men.

- Some emphasis on his family members: Ivorwen, Dírhael, Gilraen, the death of Arathorn, subsequent fostering by Elrond, and training by Elladan and Elrohir. Some indication of the close relationship with his foster-father would be good: Elrond loved Aragorn as much as his own children but this was not made apparent in the Peter Jackson films.

- The scene when Elrond tells the 20-year-old Aragorn his true identity.

- First meeting with Arwen

- Friendship with Gandalf from age 25 onward

- Betrothal to Arwen, and Galadriel's involvement: he was 49 by this time, so that may not be considered part of his early life (though 49 would be young for one of the Dúnedain!)

- Perhaps some reference to the events of The Hobbit in 2941-2 when we know that 10/11-year-old Aragorn was living in Rivendell.

11. What do you find most inspiring about Tolkien’s world?

Answer:

The depiction of such a complete and seemingly realistic world, and the fact that one can pick up extra hidden depths in both story and characters on each re-reading. There is always something else to discover or a new interpretation of a familiar passage.

12. Are you involved in any more projects involving Tolkien?

Answer:

Not at the moment. I have one or two ideas for possible short articles.

13. What advice would you give to those first encountering Tolkien’s work and wanting to learn more about Middle-earth and its inhabitants?

Answer:

Speaking from my own experience I would say: Read The Hobbit first then The Lord of the Rings several times, including the Appendices, before delving into other works: The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The History of Middle-earth and Tolkien's Letters, plus critical works, etc. - and of course online sources which were not available when I first became interested in Tolkien.

14. In the preface to your book you mention discovering the online Tolkien fanfiction community—what are your thoughts on Tolkien fanfiction? What time frame was this and did you join the fanfiction community at that time?

Answer:

I started writing fanfiction during 2003 and continued doing it until about 2007 which was when I made the decision to write a serious work about Aragorn. One piece of fanfiction appeared in Amon Hen, and the rest on a couple of websites which I think no longer exist.

My main thought about fanfiction is that it was this which started me off writing. It was very much an experiment as my last attempts at creative writing dated back to my school English lessons in the 1960s! Without trying the fanfiction first I don't think I would ever have got round to writing articles for Amon Hen, let alone my book.

15. Did encountering fanfiction or even writing it have an effect on your thoughts on Aragorn and the salient points of his character that truly defined him?

Answer:

Yes - because the chief aim of the fanfiction (mine and, I suspect, that of other fanfiction writers) was to fill in the gaps in Aragorn's story. I scoured the text for possible motives and feelings of the people I was writing about. My fanfiction was always based on the “book” version of the story and characters (never on the film version). I did sometimes use invented characters but only to add detail and interest to the story. For exampIe this approach was used when writing about Aragorn's Rangers and when describing his interactions with the inhabitants of Bree. Some stories were actually based on invented characters, in order to try and see Aragorn through the eyes of others. This probably helped me when writing the “Relationship” chapters [see next question.]

16. One aspect of your book that to me is truly unique is Part 2, where you study and interpret his interactions and relationships with the other races and individuals he encounters in Middle-earth. What made you decide to pursue this format?

Answer:

It just seemed the most logical approach. I couldn't study Aragorn's relationships properly without also studying the other half of each different relationship. There was so much to be revealed about both parties in these studies, many of which were based around families and generations (such as in Rohan, and Gondor, and in the Rivendell and Lothlórien communities).

17. Aragorn as a character brings together elements and bloodlines from the First Age into the Fourth Age—you outline these genealogies and relationships quite thoroughly in your book. How do you think this knowledge of his genealogy affected him in his transition from youth to Ranger to King? Is there a character from the earlier Ages that you think had a more significant impact on him or that he resembles the most in character?

Answer: Aragorn would presumably have learnt about these people as a child during his history lessons, but would not have connected them specifically with himself until he was made aware of his true identity at the age of 20.

Elendil, Isildur and Anárion stand out as the obvious significant ancestors whom Aragorn would have striven to emulate - plus, in the case of Isildur, also to atone for his failure to destroy the Ring.

Other ancestors who may well have inspired admiration and/or gratitude in Aragorn include:

- Elendur the self-sacrificing eldest son of Isildur. A passage in Unfinished Tales refers to Elrond seeing a huge similarity between Elendur and Aragorn, both physically and in character. [See footnote 26 at the end of The Disaster of the Gladden Fields.]

- Amandil, the father of Elendil, who advised his son to gather his family and possessions in secret and plan an escape from Númenor in the event of a disaster, before himself courageously setting out for the Undying Lands to plead for mercy for the Númenóreans. He was never heard of again, but the Númenórean race was saved due to Elendil's successful escape to Middle-earth after following his father's instructions.

- Tar-Elendil the 4th King of Númenor and his daughter Silmarien. The royal line of Númenor and its heirlooms only survived via this female line.

- Tar-Palantir the penultimate King of Númenor who resisted the influence of Sauron and tried to turn the Númenóreans back to friendship with the Eldar.

Another notable ancestor for a different reason was Arvedui, the last King of the North Kingdom, who tried to claim the throne of Gondor as well but was rejected and ended up losing both kingdoms before fleeing to the frozen north where he died in a shipwreck. Aragorn must have regarded his own mission to reunite the two kingdoms just over 1,000 years later with some apprehension.

Ar-Pharazôn would clearly have served as a dire warning!

I wonder if Aragorn felt any unease about his namesake, Aragorn I, being killed by wolves!

A comment in Appendix AI(i) of The Lord of the Rings states that the Númenóreans came to resent the choice of Elros to be mortal, thus triggering their yearning for immortality and their subsequent downfall. Did Aragorn ever resent his ancestor's choice? Personally I think he would have had the knowledge and wisdom to understand Ilúvatar's purpose in reuniting the immortal line of Elrond with the mortal line of Elros (through the marriage of Arwen and Aragorn) in order to strengthen the royal line prior to the departure of the Elves and the beginning of the Age of Men.

18. What are your thoughts on the original premise that Aragorn was Trotter, a hobbit?

Answer:

Eeek! The grinning and the wooden shoes! I don't think that the book could possibly have had the same impact, depth and sense of history if the main characters had all been hobbits. I seem to remember that the name “Trotter” still survived for a while after he became a man. “Strider” sounds much better. I'm so glad Tolkien didn't pursue the original idea.

19. Do you have any advice for budding Tolkien acolytes and scholars who are first delving into the legendarium?

Answer:

Read and re-read, record thoughts, ideas, passages worth quoting. Read what JRRT wrote and what others have written. This worked for me, over a very long period - more by accident than design.

*this answer is the same as Angela's answer in the Luna Press interview with her as it has not changed! Take a look at that article for more information on Angela and her book. https://www.lunapresspublishing.com/single-post/2017/09/04/Aragorn---A-Companion-Book

Interviewed by @maedhrosrussandol

July 14th 2018

45 notes · View notes

protytwo · 6 years

Text

You Too Can Join an APA by Jay Zilber

They've been around for over a hundred years, long before organized comics fans (or science-fiction fans) were around to adopt them. So it's a little odd that amateur press associations—apas for short—are still so little known. They survive to this day almost solely on the strength of word-of-mouth publicity, for in all this time there have been few serious attempts to bring this unique form of communication to the attention of mainstream fandom.

Apas have always had a difficult time getting publicity, partly because they are, indeed, so little known. They're not commercial endeavors, so they are never advertised. And though some apas may get an occasional short plug in a fanzine column here or there, these plugs don't tend to generate much interest because apas just can't be explained in a kernel of information 25 words or less. Apas can fulfill different purposes for different people, and at least seven definitions come to mind:

1. Apas are limited-circulation fanzines; in order to receive a copy, one must also be an active contributor to the apa.

2. Apas are the next-best thing to a comics convention, a fannish social get-together on paper.

3. Apas are the underground fan press, free of the "commercial" restraints and limitations of mainstream, high-circulation slick fanzines.

4. Apas are a system of centralizing correspondence which makes it possible to keep in touch with a large number of other fans at the same time.

5. Apas are an outlet for creativity and self-indulgence. They are an invaluable learning tool, through which one can develop writing, drawing and editing skills. They provide built-in feedback and constructive criticism on such creative endeavors.

6. Apas are where the old, tired fans go as an alternative to total gafiation.* And often, they are where the old, tired pros go for relaxation from their professional writing.

7. Apas defy clear-cut categorization in technical terms. Communication studies break down all media into two categories: mass media and interpersonal media. A mass medium—such as television, film, books, or this magazine—is a one-way system in which the Communicator sends a message to a group of Receivers, a large mass audience. If that audience wishes to relay their comments or reactions about this article to its author, they're met with various obstacles; they usually can't go back through the original medium and write their own article (or publish their own magazine) in order to make their reaction known. The obstacles are not insurmountable—hence, letters columns—but the original Communicator can get no direct or immediate feedback from his mass audience. That would require the use of a two-way system, an interpersonal medium (such as the telephone or, in the case of face-to-face dialogue, air), with which both parties have the opportunity to be both Communicators and Receivers in turn.

INSIDE THE APA

Obviously, there are many reasons for the appeal of apas; each member has his or her own individual attraction for being an active "apan," and the contents of an apa mailing is a mixed bag that reflects this diversity. CAPA-alpha was the first—and still one of the best—comics apas, and any recent mailing of CAPA-alpha showcases the full spectrum of what apas are all about:

Some members of CAPA-alpha (abbreviated K-a for esoteric reasons) are accomplished fan artists; they contribute superb illustrations and clever graphics, including a good deal of spectacular work that gives new life to the downtrodden "ditto" medium, imaginatively taking advantage of the so-called limitations of spirit duplicating. Other members are still learning the techniques of the craft; their inexperience betrays their enthusiasm and their work pales in comparison.

There is considerable discussion in K-a of all aspects of comics and comics fandom: behind-the-scenes news, reviews, indexes, speculations and such. Much of this discussion is insightful and well-informed, and some of it is insubstantial and short-sighted at best.

But comics are only a starting point—the discussion and commentary naturally spills over into related areas of science fiction, movies, television and home video recording, personal computers, and all areas of popular arts and culture. Personal trials, traumas and tribulations are also given much attention; some members use K-a as a sort of diary in order to sort out their thoughts and feelings about current events in their lives, and their hopes for the future.

Occasionally, there is original fiction or comic strips that range from brilliant on down. A good deal of purely self-indulgent or experimental material is run through the apa, for, should a member want to try out some new creative ideas, there may be nowhere else to put it on display. While self-indulgence is not necessarily encouraged, it is certainly tolerated for the most part—at least until someone's material becomes completely unintelligible and he is no longer communicating but talking to himself.

For some, the bylaws and politics of K-a itself take an overwhelming prominence in their apazines, and new meaning is given to the concept, "the medium is the message."

There is fannish news, rumor and gossip, there are special group projects and collaborative one-shots, there are comics convention reports that alternate between truthful accounting of fact and wildly exaggerated nonsense. There are in-jokes of the sort that simply aren't the least bit funny outside of the apa's membership (and even among the membership they aren't funny except at four in the morning).

This is the stuff that apas are made of—all this and more. There is no pay or compensation except in terms of personal fulfillment. Apas reflect every stage of fannishness, from the wide-eyed neophyte to the burnt-out gafiate. Apas are networks of communication and life-long friendships that never have developed in any other way. They are an integral part of the universe of fandom… but to truly understand the attraction of belonging to an apa, one must experience it first-hand.

The mechanics of apas are fairly simple, though they may at first seem confusing to the uninitiated. Since each apa has slightly different policies, I will continue to use CAPA-alpha as a useful prototype.

In order to join K-a, a would-be member starts by sending an initial fee of $3.00 to the current Central Mailer. Some apas require new members to be sponsored or voted into membership; this is not the case with K-a, but full membership still does not come right away. As a matter of practical logistics, K-a has a size limit of 40 members and presently has a modest waitlist. A new would-be member is sent a sample copy of the current K-a mailing and his name is placed at the bottom of the waitlist. Membership turnover may be slow; it may be several months, possibly a year or more, before a slot opens up for him. In the meantime, waitlisters may contribute to the apa as though they were already members, but can only purchase copies of mailings when they are at least three months old—and then, only if sufficient extra copies remain available.

At length, the patient waitlister is invited to join the apa. In order to attain membership, he must now produce an apazine; K-a requires that members contribute at least four pages of original material to every third mailing. (This is the minimum required activity, or "minac," to use the inside jargon; of course, one may contribute more often and in greater volume, as in fact most CAPA-alphans do.) The new member is responsible for printing his apazine, or arranging for its printing; he must deliver 50 collated and stapled copies of his zine to the Central Mailer by the stated deadline (usually the first day of each month) and keep his postage account in the black. If he fails to meet minac, copycount, finances or deadline, he risks being dropped from membership, though extensions are sometimes granted under extraordinary circumstances.

The Central Mailer is elected annually; he is a member of K-a who, in return for only the real or imagined glamor or ego-boosting the post has to offer, has opted to take on the tremendous responsibility of seeing that the mechanics of the apa remain well-oiled and that the mailings come out on time. He manages the apa's business and finances; he organizes the apazines as they arrive in the mail from the 40-odd members and waitlisters around the country, collates their stacks of apazines into 50 identical volumes that contain one copy of each zine, publishes the apa's Official Organ, and mails the bound copies of the mailing to the entire membership.

All this is much more work than can be suggested in the time it takes to describe it, and it's why most apas have a membership size limit; otherwise, the work of managing K-a would increase to the point where it would have to be a salaried full-time job.

After its long, torturous trek through the Postal Service, the member finally receives his copy of the mailing and reads it with all due enthusiasm. Perhaps he jots down some notes as he reacts to someone else's comments that he wants to discuss in his next apazine. The cycle continues every month, as it has with only one interruption since K-a's first mailing in October, 1964.

WHERE IT ALL STARTED

Actually, the concept of the amateur press association goes as far back as the late 19th Century—long before comics or SF fandom existed—with the formation of the National Amateur Press Association (NAPA) and other "mundane" amateur journalism spas. NAPA was founded in 1876 and was originally seen as a sort of training ground for professional journalists. Indeed, many early amateurs did "graduate" to become professionals, and the Association saw this as the most defensible role for NAPA.

At the outset, the inner workings of the original apa were worlds away from the present-day fannish version. In this early concept of NAPA, members were loosely organized by a constitution drawn up at a national NAPA convention, but the gist of it was that members were simply instructed to send copies of their amateur journals and publications to one another.

NAPA only began to evolve into the more modern concept of apas because of the lack of cooperation from the United States Post Office. NAPA's organizers had tried to get their individual amateur journals declared eligible for Second Class mailing privileges without success. As an alternative, they established a centralized mailing bureau; any interested publisher could send their journals to the bureau manager, who would in turn distribute them in bundles to the Association members. Some took advantage of this service, while others continued as before to send their publications directly to one another. As a result, these "private" mailings were not always fully distributed to the entire membership, and only the most active members could expect to receive both the privately-mailed, limited-circulation magazines and the centrally-distributed bundles. NAPA did not even actually require members to publish anything at all, so that an interested but inactive member might receive only the bundles.

This separation of active and non-active members brought about a bizarre class separation of amateur publishers. NAPA also encountered a number of other problems during its formative years; its members rarely used their journals to communicate with one another, and many would-be publishers experienced difficulty in purchasing or gaining access to a handset letterpress, the most commonly-accepted method for printing member-journals at the time. It was this stumbling block that made it impossible to establish a "minac" requirement that all members be active publishers. Yet the notion of a new kind of apa persisted, an apa in which every member was a participant.

Oddly enough, the link between mundane and fannish Amateur Press Associations was provided by no less a personage than H.P. Lovecraft himself. Lovecraft became involved in amateur journalism as a youth, and joined one of NAPA's rivals, the United Amateur Press Association (UAPA) in 1914, and then NAPA itself three years later (for both of which he served several terms as president). SF (then-)fan Donald Wollheim learned of the mundane apas through Lovecraft in the mid-1930s, shortly before Lovecraft's untimely death in 1937. By most recountings, Wollheim saw apas as a useful solution to the problem of keeping up with fanzine trading and a method of reducing postage as well, and promptly joined the National and United Apas. With help from some of the other major SF fans of the time, he then founded FAPA, the Fantasy Amateur Press Association. July 1937 saw the first tiny, 42-page bundle of fanzines, still bearing little resemblance to any modern-day apa. But it was only three months later, in FAPA's second mailing, that two of its members introduced what later became the life-blood of contemporary apas: mailing comments.

Quite simply, mailing comments are the inclusion in members' apazines of comments on the previous mailing. It was the solution to the noted lack of communication within mundane apas; prior to the mailing comments in FAPA, discussion of topics raised in one another's publications was almost nonexistent. Mailing comments provided a sense of continuity from mailing to mailing, and brought about a degree of group spirit and camaraderie among members never before conceived. More than merely exchanging fanzines, apa members now exchanged ideas; rather than just absorbing information, they were now encouraged to think about and react to what their fellow members had to say.

Additionally, FAPA promoted the notion of substance over style; inexpensively mimeographed or spirit-duplicated contributions were not discouraged but actually taken for granted to be the most sensible printing method for a low-circulation apazine, and this made it practical and affordable for every member to contribute. Unique, innovative and successful in everything it set out to achieve, FAPA became the model for most of its followers and imitators in SF fandom, and eventually for its second cousin, comics fandom.

*Gafiation (n), a common fannish buzzword from the root "gafia," an acronym for "Getting Away From It All."

Mark Evanier contributed the left cover to Capa-Alpha's 200th mailing, while in 1971, Wendy Fletcher was an active apa fan. She now concentrates on Elfquest as Wendy Pini.

A young Frank Miller contributed to apas and this sample page shows, even then, a sense of design and drama that has since matured into some the finest comics work done today.

NOTE: This article was first published in the March 1983 Comics Scene magazine. Comics APAs were very big back in the Seventies and Eighties. These days, surviving APAs are very unlikely to have a full membership and there isn’t any waiting period before a fan is invited to participate and join the membership roster.

#apa #comic book fandom #jay zilber

4 notes · View notes

utopianparadoxist · 7 years

Note

Do you think that Rose and Kanaya were originally going to be moirails, and that their being girlfriends was OOC and detrimental to their characters? Generally, what do you think of rosemary?

Well, it’s @rosemarymonth and I’ve wanted to talk about Rosemary and why I think the canon gets WAY too little credit with regards to their execution for ages so I may as well do it now.

Keep in mind, of course, that I am a dude and in no way want any wlw to feel I’m shutting down critiques of Homestuck’s flaws in this regard. I think that’s perfectly valid, this is just my reading. I’ll be interested in seeing what people have to say.

I don’t get to talk about Rosemary enough anyway, so I’ll also take you up on it and go over why I love Rosemary and why I think readings that they were “meant to be moirails” and “go ooc” is straight up just misreading the text, because the comic is actually pretty clear in broadcasting its intent.

The thing to keep in mind is that Homestuck’s entire plot follows one consistent rule: The message of AURYN from The Neverending Story, “Do what you will.”

The events in Homestuck that actually happen are by design the sum product of the wills of the entire cast, and how well characters express their wills on reality directly correlates to how “powerful” they are.

Caliborn is the villain because Lord English violates EVERYONE’s agency by confining them all to the plot of Homestuck/his Alpha Timeline. Within the confines of those prescribed paths, however, reality always defaults to fulfilling the wishes of all characters involved, or resolving the tension between them.

What this means PRACTICALLY is that almost every event that happens in the story, no matter how ridiculous….

is, on some level, foreshadowed by the desires of the characters, just as Arquius’ heroic sacrifice and absorption into LE is foreshadowed by the desires of both him and Caliborn:

Oh, and speaking about Caliborn wanting to be bros with Dirk and allowing him to die as if going to sleep:

All this in mind, let’s focus on Rose and Kanaya. No, I don’t get the impression they were ever going to be moirails. I’m not sure when Hussie decided on Rosemary, but I get the impression it was early, at least by the time Kanaya was introduced.

Why? Let’s take stock of both girls’ desires and conflicts throughout Act 5.

Kanaya’s early characterization revolved around A) A tendency to gravitate and pacify take-charge, forward individuals,

and B) A profound dissatisfaction with that role.

That’s what burned her out so hard when she was interested in Vriska. So I’m not sure why one would assume that actually, Kanaya’s True Destiny was to fall into… the exact same arrangement with Rose once again, despite expressly avoiding it. That doesn’t seem like good storytelling to me.

Especially since Rose is, from the very beginning, posited as an idealistic escape from that solitude for Kanaya. Kanaya is the receiver of Rose’s prophetic text—one of her earliest big contributions as a Seer of Light– and it makes a tremendous impact on her.

That impact is partly manifested as an out and out romantic fantasy about Rose, who Kanaya idealizes as the legendary leader of her session.

Kanaya’s fantasies about Rose in this regard play heavily into her attempted courtship through the Flighty Broads and their Snarky Horseshitometer sequence—and it is romantic courtship.

Kanaya makes that clear in the mission-critical text document where she positions herself as an antagonistic suitor to John, and that document is first referenced in… oh, mid-Act 4.

So Kanaya’s romantic interest suffuses the narrative from pretty early on. What about Rose?

Let’s talk about romance aesthetics. Pretty much every endgame ship in Homestuck is couched in a distinctive brand of romantic connotation. For example, Dave and Karkat are linked to anime romance cliches, with Dave as shonen hero and Karkat as heroine.

Jade and Davepeta are linked by a mutual indulgence in furry identity. Vriska and Terezi get the “Home Sweet Home” connotation of The Wizard of Oz, and Dirk and Jake have the undying devotion and mutual passion implied by their link to The Princess Bride.

Rose is once described as a reserved girl “enamored by what dwelt in shadow”. This is a facet of her characterization that’s present from moment 1, what with her interest in the Horrorterrors. Another obvious place to go is Mom, and by association Roxy–both of whom certainly “dwell in shadow” as Void players.

And then, of course, we have Kanaya:

Vampires are traditionally associated with hiding in darkness, away from the Light. And Kanaya describes her rainbow drinker fantasy in exactly those terms. So this aesthetic link between them is established pretty damn early, too.

Of course, Kanaya is not a traditional vampire. I’m far from the first to point out that Rainbow Drinkers most strongly resemble the hyper-romanticized, shine-in-the-light vampires of Twilight, one of the most popular romance series for teen girls of the 2000′s.

Taking that incredibly popular aesthetic and using it as a wrapper for the love story of two girls is instantly compelling. What’s genius is that this is a cocktail of imagery that has natural appeal for Rose as a person, because while it’s true that she’s interested in the darkness that surrounds her, it’s clear that Rose spends her narrative seeking the truth and the meaningful.

In other words, even when she’s enmeshed in darkness, what Rose wants is…

The Light. She may not have taken an interest in Meyer’s prose or Edward’s surly patriarchal authority, but all else being equal? Rose was all but made for a story with imagery like Twilight’s. That in and of itself would be evocative and romantic enough, but it goes deeper.

Because Rose’s relationship with Kanaya is deeply interwoven with her relationship to the reality of Homestuck, a conflict that Kanaya directly helps her solve. Perhaps fittingly, given that Kanaya is a Sylph implied to be “Made of Space”, and so innately linked to the Setting of the story through her Aspect.

This conflict between Rose and the Setting of Homestuck is, in my view, nothing less than the main thrust of Rose’s character arc, so it’ll take a little bit to unpack. Let’s dig in.

Rose gets too little credit. She is the first of the main cast to really learn about Lord English, and the unfathomable, canon-defining threat he poses to the cast.

But even before she learns about him in name, she spends pretty much her entire arc resisting and fighting against his machinations, subtly perceiving something deeply wrong in the story from its very beginning.

In this, Rose strikes a compelling counterpoint to her partner TT, Dirk Strider. Because If Dirk’s character arc revolves around his belief that he himself is inherently evil, then it’s fair to say Rose’s main conflict is a belief that the world itself is inherently evil.

Or at the very least, incomprehensible and meaningless. Random and empty of logic or reason. And borderline antagonistic to her and her friends, as though reality itself is an unfortunate occurence.

In other words, Rose’s experience of reality is deeply colored by Void, the aspect of the unimportant, meaningless, irrelevant, and most importantly: incomprehensible.

Just as Dave’s sense of self is broken by his abusive upbringing from a Prince of Heart, so too Rose’s sense of reality is shaped by her codependent relationship with her Mom, a guardian whose actions she can neither understand nor predict.

As a Seer of Light, Rose is drawn towards trying to understand the truth, and in particular the inner truths and meanings behind the minds of others. At the core of her being, Rose is a person who desperately desires to know and understand.

Consider how frustrating this must make Mom’s erratic and dysfunctional behavior to her–there’s no rhyme or reason behind her mother’s actions, influenced as they are by her depression, loneliness, and alcoholism. There’s just apparent randomness from the person who defines her entire life–in essence, the God of her household.

Add in Roxy’s tendency toward passive-aggressive behavior–which Rose definitely perceives from her Mom, whether it was intentionally directed at her or not–and it’s unsurprising that Rose quickly begins to view reality as not just nonsensical and arbitrary, but outright antagonistic.

Rose’s inherently defiant worldview is only intensified by Sburb. Not only does Mom continue being aloof and indecipherable, but Rose discovers that fate has apparently already decreed that she and her friends are doomed to failure and death. To Rose this is more than unacceptable: It’s infuriating.

Throughout Act 5, characters often comment on how Rose’s obsession with subverting Sburb leads her to becoming withdrawn, self-serious, and distant from her relationships. She also attempts to assume responsibility for herself and everyone around her, culminating in the suicide mission she tries to take on alone.

All of this is accompanied by her tearing her Land apart, as she foregoes its “childish” path in favor of something she perceives as more mature and adult. Most blatantly of all, Rose flirts with emulating her Mom in her most obviously adult activity: indulging alcohol. Rose is, in essence, trying to be an adult. Forcing herself to grow up too fast.

By the way? Withdrawing emotions, carefully managing the feelings of others, attempting to assume outsize responsibility for their households and attempting to take care of their guardians are all behavioral hallmarks of kids who grow up in codependent households.

Fast-forward to the aftermath of Cascade, when Rose achieves God Tier and comes face to face with Kanaya for the first time. It’s notable that achieving God Tier is the first moment that Rose is given any indication whatsoever that the plight she shared with her friends was not just random, pointless doom.

It is instead a lucky break. Or a suggestion of greater meaning. In essence, it’s the first time Rose is given really any reason to see reality as anything but the chaotic, nonsensical burden she’s experienced it as so far.

The revelation is accompanied by Kanaya’s sudden phosphorescence, which Rose describes as “inexplicable”–a word usually associated with frustration for her. Here, however, it comes as a happy surprise. Here, Rose is seeing through the incomprehensible Void of her reality to perceive Light for the first time.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the moment is paired with Rose’s first romantic overture toward Kanaya.

Especially since the trend continues. As Rose grows more confident reality not necessarily ALWAYS being a hellish, meaningless landscape of random and pointless suffering, she also grows more playful and willing to be sincere. She grows to trust the Light she was once so suspicious of, asks Kanaya out on dates, and comments on things she enjoys about her without insincerity.

But she remains traumatized and conflicted about her relationship to both her Mom and the world, and takes up Mom’s alcoholism as a way to try to understand the former and ignore the latter.

This comes between her and Kanaya, since Kanaya relies on Rose to help her figure out HER role in the world, and to figure out how to achieve the revival of her species.

It’s worth mentioning that alcohol abuse, for both Rose and Roxy, is extremely Void-coded. It leads Rose to prioritize the pointless, ridiculous, unimportant and non-existent.

Void is also deeply tied to all things physical, as opposed to Light’s link to ideas and the imaginary. And Rose’s lack of guidance is a factor in making Kanaya succumb to her own addiction to Blood.

Here, Kanaya ends up valuing the desires of her physical form as a Rainbow Drinker over the more idealistic goal of the revival of her species, or even her relationship with Rose. As such, the two girls’ problems are marked as the same problem, even as they drive them further apart from one another.

And we see where their disunity and lack of direction takes them Pre-Retcon: It renders both of them less effective, and thus less important to the plot. It also leads them to misfortune. Rose’s inability to connect with and help, or even be helped by Kanaya, leads directly to tragedy in her relationship to the world.

Good thing there’s a flip side.

In the retcon timeline, Rose and Kanaya work stuff out. Rose gets past her alcohol addiction and directly credits Kanaya’s aid for it. Kanaya resists the pull of literal blood as she takes Karkat to Echidna and engages in an intellectual discussion about his relationship to his Aspect and the future of Troll-kind.

Rose reconciles with her Mom completely through Roxy, finding meaning where she could only speculate before. And with her increased ability to sort truth from lie, important from unimportant, and meaningful from irrelevant…

She resolves the tension between herself and the “demands” of Sburb, openly voicing her ambivalence to the very concept of her Personal Quest. In so doing, she illuminates an important truth to both the cast and the audience: that Sburb’s prescribed path to self-actualization is not particularly important, and certainly not strictly necessary.

Inner truth, understanding, good fortune, foresight, and happiness–Rose never needed to comply with some videogame’s 12-step program for self-satisfaction to get any of that, and neither do we. Light can arise anywhere, as long as you have the patience to look for it and people who love you at your side.

Hope this helps you see what I see, anon. Rose and Kanaya’s story is one worth cherishing, and I haven’t even come close to saying all I think there is to say about it, if you can believe that! But its a start.

Happy rosemary month, happy Halloween, and as always

Keep rising! ;)

[Patreon] [Hiveswap Discord]

#Rosemary #Rosemary month #Rose Lalonde #Kanaya Maryam #Homestuck #MSPA #My MSPA Analysis #Seer of Light #Anonymous #Sylph of Space #long post

457 notes · View notes

shadowscatnip · 7 years

Quote

Some texts critique bisexual marginalisation, although their primary remit is not bisexuality. For example, ‘People who have sex with both genders often find themselves under great pressure to “be one thing or the other” ’ (Gagnon & Simon, 1973, p. 273). These and later texts include some discussion of the stigmatisation of bisexuals among lesbians, and in some cases gay men, often linked with broader critiques of gay and lesbian identity politics. ... for example Altman suggests that ‘The repression of polymorphous perversity in Western societies has two major components: the removal of the erotic from all areas of life other than the explicitly sexual, and the denial of our inherent bisexuality’ (1993 [1971], p. 90). An important intervention is provided by Phelan (2001), who posits the normalisation of lesbians and gay men as being predicated on the demonisation of bisexuals and transgender people. A few authors also frame queer as bisexual-inclusive, for example Sinfield remarks that ‘Bisexuals became more assertive at about the same time as, and partly through, the Queer movement’ (1998, p. 9). Overall, the existence of bisexual-inclusive texts demonstrates that bisexual invisibility and marginalisation were by no means the only trend apparent in the 1970–2015 period. The way that bisexuality is addressed by sexuality studies appears overall to be contested and uneven. Why does a field such as sexuality studies develop in such an uneven way, with certain subjectivities being more represented than others? One explanation can be found in the work of bisexual scholars who claim that the social invisibility of bisexuality and bisexual people constitutes an aspect of biphobia. ... It appears that biphobia may have affected the development of sexualities social science. As the seminal work by Yoshino (2000) demonstrates, lesbians, gays and heterosexuals have an epistemic interest in overlooking bisexuality, in order to maintain stable heterosexual/homosexual binaries and gender binaries as an ontological basis for erotic relations, also reinscribing mononormativity (the notion that people have unidirectional desires). It would be naïve to imagine that social scientists are immune to broader forces such as biphobia, mononormativity and heterosexism. Both generic sexualities and lesbian and gay-focused texts produced in the 1975–2015 period are profoundly shaped by forces associated with heterosexism, either directly, or through the resistances developed to it. A minority of the analysed texts reinscribe heterosexism as a social structuring force. In others, there are moves to de-stigmatise homosexuality, but heterosexuality remains the normative imperative. Homophobia and heterosexism also structured the experiences of early authors working in the area of non-heterosexualities. ... Early authors observed that: ‘it is probably true that individuals are often forced into exclusive homosexuality because of both the way in which society brands those who deny its roles and the penalties meted out to those who are unwilling to accept them’ (Altman, 1973, p. 83). The impact of heterosexism and homophobia is intertwined with the gender binarism which is endemic in earlier sexuality studies and with mononormativity. Lesbian and gay claims to normalcy and social assimilation rest partially on the adoption of the monogamous relationships which are a normative component of heterosexualities. While some bisexuals are monogamous or celibate, others are not, rendering them outside of logics of appropriateness and therefore subject to discrimination. The trajectories of the different identity-based communities will also have affected the ways that sexuality studies included, or excluded, bisexuality. Jeffrey Weeks argues that: Some of the work cited in fact shows that a bisexual identity has emerged relatively recently, and by no means all bisexually active people adhere to it, so surely it is hardly surprising that the literature is sparser than on gay identity. Distinctive bisexual identities, like what we now mean by trans identities, developed more slowly than post GLF lesbian and gay identities. This doesn’t mean bisexuality or transgender didn’t exist, obviously, but that there might be a distinctive bi or trans agenda does seem to me a later development – the 1980s and 1990s. I think a crucial moment was the AIDS crisis. (Personal communication, January 4, 2016) Here, it is evident that key social issues such as HIV/AIDS shaped the development of sexualities studies. Broader political forces also played a part, so that bisexuality could perhaps have been positioned as irrelevant. Davina Cooper argues that ‘My book, for instance, was a study of lesbian and gay activism because this was how dissident sexual politics in local government was framed at the time’ (personal communication, January 10, 2016), and in a later communication she clarified that ‘I wouldn’t say bisexuality was irrelevant. More that the municipal struggles at the time were being fought on other fronts – mainly against the Christian Right’ (March 3, 2016). ...’ (Jeffrey Weeks, personal communication, January 4, 2016). The marginalisation and under-representation of bisexuality in the sexualities literature can also be explained by looking at issues of categorisation. In the 1960s and 1970s, authors such as Ken Plummer were in the early stages of the formulation of terms, and ‘it is unclear whether ultimately bisexuality related to gender or sexuality or both [in the 1960s]’. Semantics play a part: pioneering authors such as Altman discuss homosexual behaviours (which both gay/lesbian individuals and bisexual individuals can take part in) and then demonstrate a definitional slide by which homosexual behaviours become related to homosexual identities in such a way as to elide bisexual identities. Plummer explains that ‘People who have sexual partners of the same and opposite gender during their lives seem to represent a serious intellectual and scientific problem for those trying to understand human sexual conduct’ (1975, p. 259). This ‘problem’ appears to be contained in a number of ways, notably the reinvention and/or reinscription of sexual identity binaried ontological positions. In early contributions, there is an identification of the challenges that bisexuality poses to rigid sexual identity categorisation, but an inability to move into a structural critique of heterosexism and gender binarism. This difficulty may be due to the nascent nature of sexuality studies, rather than biphobia or bisexual marginalisation per se. One of the key debates concerning identity politics was already apparent in the 1970s but remains pertinent: categories are arguably important for identity politics, but at the same time, constrain subjectivities. There are some signs that sexual identities may be becoming less important among bisexual men in the US and UK. However, we believe that assertions that prejudice against bisexuals is lessening are flawed, given the extent of discrimination faced by those who express same-sex desires. The literature search conducted for this article indicates that bisexuality has been invisible, under-represented and marginalised in a number of different ways within sexuality studies in the period between 1970 and 2015. First, the early period of scholarship on sexuality by social scientists in the 1970s tended to focus on redressing heterosexism, sometimes by centring gay men. Second, the period of the 1980s saw the development of lesbian-feminist analyses of sexuality, which theorised same-sex desire between women as a practice of resistance to the axes of heteronormativity and patriarchy. In both of these modes of analysis, bisexual identities and subjectivities were unaccounted for due to bisexuality falling between the political orientations of these bodies of work. During the 1990s, queer theory deconstructed sexual categories and, where bisexuality was addressed, it was often positioned within a framework of transgression alongside other normatively identified practices. Given that bisexuality raises important critical questions about the intersections of sexuality and gender, and the epistemologies of these categories, we find it is surprising that little attention has been given to bisexual sexualities within sexualities social sciences. ... Bisexuality is often positioned as a cultural practice – a ‘lifestyle choice’ – rather than a sexual ‘orientation’ that falls under the rubric of structural analyses of discrimination. ... It seems overall that bisexuality has not been taken seriously within the social sciences, raising questions about the ways in which issues are framed as worthy of scholarly concern, and the impact that academic work may have on social discourses concerning sexualities. The invisibility of bisexuality and the discursive marginalisation of bisexuals negatively affects their wellbeing, and we argue that scholarly representation of bisexuality may be a normative issue, as well as one of rigour.

Is bisexuality invisible? A review of sexualities scholarship 1970–2015

#bisexuality #biphobia #sociology #queer studies #bisexual erasure #long post #aids mention #is that a thing I need to tag?#better safe than sorry I guess

1 note · View note

organisationalbehaviour · 7 years

Text

Internal discussion about diversity at Google

A software engineer's perspective against Google's diversity initiatives is reported below. I have decided to publish this document because it is well articulated and the topic is a top leaders’ priority, but I don’t agree with the author's ideas because:

positive action should not always be understood as reverse discrimination;

generalisations about men’s and women’s different behaviours and preferences are not supported by evidence, despite the author’s call for a more fact-based discussion; and

I will always stand for diversity and inclusion.

The text of the post is reproduced in full below, with some minor formatting modifications. Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted.

I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don't endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’ have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem. Psychological safety is built on mutual respect and acceptance, but unfortunately our culture of shaming and misrepresentation is disrespectful and unaccepting of anyone outside its echo chamber. Despite what the public response seems to have been, I’ve gotten many personal messages from fellow Googlers expressing their gratitude for bringing up these very important issues which they agree with but would never have the courage to say or defend because of our shaming culture and the possibility of being fired. This needs to change Google’s political bias has equated the freedom from offense with psychological safety, but shaming into silence is the antithesis of psychological safety

This silencing has created an ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be honestly discussed.

The lack of discussion fosters the most extreme and authoritarian elements of this ideology.

Extreme: all disparities in representation are due to oppression

Authoritarian: we should discriminate to correct for this oppression

Differences in distributions of traits between men and women may in part explain why we don’t have 50% representation of women in tech and leadership. Discrimination to reach equal representation is unfair, divisive, and bad for business.

People generally have good intentions, but we all have biases which are invisible to us. Thankfully, open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document.[2] Google has several biases and honest discussion about these biases is being silenced by the dominant ideology. What follows is by no means the complete story, but it's a perspective that desperately needs to be told at Google.

At Google, we talk so much about unconscious bias as it applies to race and gender, but we rarely discuss our moral biases. Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases. Considering that the overwhelming majority of the social sciences, media, and Google lean left, we should critically examine these prejudices.

Compassion for the weak

Disparities are due to injustices

Humans are inherently cooperative

Change is good (unstable)

Open

Idealist

Right Biases

Respect for the strong/authority

Disparities are natural and just

Humans are inherently competitive

Change is dangerous (stable)

Closed

Pragmatic

Neither side is 100% correct and both viewpoints are necessary for a functioning society or, in this case, company. A company too far to the right may be slow to react, overly hierarchical, and untrusting of others. In contrast, a company too far to the left will constantly be changing (deprecating much loved services), over diversify its interests (ignoring or being ashamed of its core business), and overly trust its employees and competitors.

Only facts and reason can shed light on these biases, but when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Google's left bias has created a politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence. This silence removes any checks against encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies. For the rest of this document, I'll concentrate on the extreme stance that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and the authoritarian element that's required to actually discriminate to create equal representation.

At Google, we're regularly told that implicit (unconscious) and explicit biases are holding women back in tech and leadership. Of course, men and women experience bias, tech, and the workplace differently and we should be cognizant of this, but it's far from the whole story.

On average, men and women biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren't just socially constructed because:

They're universal across human cultures

They often have clear biological causes and links to prenatal testosterone

Biological males that were castrated at birth and raised as females often still identify and act like males

The underlying traits are highly heritable

They're exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective

Note, I'm not saying that all men differ from women in the following ways or that these differences are “just”. I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership. Many of these differences are small and there's significant overlap between men and women, so you can't say anything about an individual given these population level distributions.

Women, on average, have more:

Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).

These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.

Extraversion expressed as gregariousness rather than assertiveness. Also, higher agreeableness.

This leads to women generally having a harder time negotiating salary, asking for raises, speaking up, and leading. Note that these are just average differences and there’s overlap between men and women, but this is seen solely as a women’s issue. This leads to exclusory programs like Stretch and swaths of men without support.

Neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance).This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.

Note that contrary to what a social constructionist would argue, research suggests that “greater nation-level gender equality leads to psychological dissimilarity in men’s and women’s personality traits.” Because as “society becomes more prosperous and more egalitarian, innate dispositional differences between men and women have more space to develop and the gap that exists between men and women in their personality becomes wider.” We need to stop assuming that gender gaps imply sexism.

We always ask why we don’t see women in top leadership positions, but we never ask why we see so many men in these jobs. These positions often require long, stressful hours that may not be worth it if you want a balanced and fulfilling life.

Status is the primary metric that men are judged on[4], pushing many men into these higher paying, less satisfying jobs for the status that they entail. Note, the same forces that lead men into high pay/high stress jobs in tech and leadership cause men to take undesirable and dangerous jobs like coal mining, garbage collection, and firefighting, and suffer 93% of work-related deaths.

Below I’ll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women’s representation in tech and without resorting to discrimination. Google is already making strides in many of these areas, but I think it’s still instructive to list them:

Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things

We can make software engineering more people-oriented with pair programming and more collaboration. Unfortunately, there may be limits to how people-oriented certain roles and Google can be and we shouldn’t deceive ourselves or students into thinking otherwise (some of our programs to get female students into coding might be doing this).

Women on average are more cooperative

Allow those exhibiting cooperative behavior to thrive. Recent updates to Perf may be doing this to an extent, but maybe thereâ€™s more we can do. This doesn’t mean that we should remove all competitiveness from Google. Competitiveness and self reliance can be valuable traits and we shouldn’t necessarily disadvantage those that have them, like what’s been done in education. Women on average are more prone to anxiety. Make tech and leadership less stressful. Google already partly does this with its many stress reduction courses and benefits.

Women on average look for more work-life balance while men have a higher drive for status on average

Unfortunately, as long as tech and leadership remain high status, lucrative careers, men may disproportionately want to be in them. Allowing and truly endorsing (as part of our culture) part time work though can keep more women in tech.

The male gender role is currently inflexible

Feminism has made great progress in freeing women from the female gender role, but men are still very much tied to the male gender role. If we, as a society, allow men to be more â€œfeminine,â€ then the gender gap will shrink, although probably because men will leave tech and leadership for traditionally feminine roles.

Philosophically, I don’t think we should do arbitrary social engineering of tech just to make it appealing to equal portions of both men and women. For each of these changes, we need principles reasons for why it helps Google; that is, we should be optimizing for Google - with Google’s diversity being a component of that. For example currently those trying to work extra hours or take extra stress will inevitably get ahead and if we try to change that too much, it may have disastrous consequences. Also, when considering the costs and benefits, we should keep in mind that Google’s funding is finite so its allocation is more zero-sum than is generally acknowledged.

I strongly believe in gender and racial diversity, and I think we should strive for more. However, to achieve a more equal gender and race representation, Google has created several discriminatory practices:

Programs, mentoring, and classes only for people with a certain gender or race [5]

A high priority queue and special treatment for â€œdiversityâ€ candidates

Hiring practices which can effectively lower the bar for â€œdiversityâ€ candidates by decreasing the false negative rate

Reconsidering any set of people if it’s not “diverse” enough, but not showing that same scrutiny in the reverse direction (clear confirmation bias)

Setting org level OKRs for increased representation which can incentivize illegal discrimination [6]

These practices are based on false assumptions generated by our biases and can actually increase race and gender tensions. We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology[7] that can irreparably harm Google.

We all have biases and use motivated reasoning to dismiss ideas that run counter to our internal values. Just as some on the Right deny science that runs counter to the “God > humans > environment” hierarchy (e.g., evolution and climate change) the Left tends to deny science concerning biological differences between people (e.g., IQ[8] and sex differences). Thankfully, climate scientists and evolutionary biologists generally aren’t on the right. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of humanities and social scientists learn left (about 95%), which creates enormous confirmation bias, changes what’s being studied, and maintains myths like social constructionism and the gender wage gap[9]. Google’s left leaning makes us blind to this bias and uncritical of its results, which we’re using to justify highly politicized programs.

In addition to the Left's affinity for those it sees as weak, humans are generally biased towards protecting females. As mentioned before, this likely evolved because males are biologically disposable and because women are generally more cooperative and areeable than men. We have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue [sic] affecting men, he's labelled as a misogynist and whiner[10]. Nearly every difference between men and women is interpreted as a form of women’s oppression. As with many things in life, gender differences are often a case of “grass being greener on the other side”; unfortunately, taxpayer and Google money is spent to water only one side of the lawn.

The same compassion for those seen as weak creates political correctness[11], which constrains discourse and is complacent to the extremely sensitive PC-authoritarians that use violence and shaming to advance their cause. While Google hasn’t harbored the violent leftists protests that we’re seeing at universities, the frequent shaming in TGIF and in our culture has created the same silence, psychologically unsafe environment.

Suggestions

I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying that diversity is bad, that Google or society is 100% fair, that we shouldn’t try to correct for existing biases, or that minorities have the same experience of those in the majority. My larger point is that we have an intolerance for ideas and evidence that don’t fit a certain ideology. I’m also not saying that we should restrict people to certain gender roles; I’m advocating for quite the opposite: treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group (tribalism).

My concrete suggestions are to:

De-moralize diversity.

As soon as we start to moralize an issue, we stop thinking about it in terms of costs and benefits, dismiss anyone that disagrees as immoral, and harshly punish those we see as villains to protect the “victims.”

Stop alienating conservatives.

Viewpoint diversity is arguably the most important type of diversity and political orientation is one of the most fundamental and significant ways in which people view things differently.

In highly progressive environments, conservatives are a minority that feel like they need to stay in the closet to avoid open hostility. We should empower those with different ideologies to be able to express themselves.

Alienating conservatives is both non-inclusive and generally bad business because conservatives tend to be higher in conscientiousness, which is require for much of the drudgery and maintenance work characteristic of a mature company.

Confront Google’s biases.

I’ve mostly concentrated on how our biases cloud our thinking about diversity and inclusion, but our moral biases are farther reaching than that.

I would start by breaking down Googlegeist scores by political orientation and personality to give a fuller picture into how our biases are affecting our culture.

Stop restricting programs and classes to certain genders or races.

These discriminatory practices are both unfair and divisive. Instead focus on some of the non-discriminatory practices I outlined.

Have an open and honest discussion about the costs and benefits of our diversity programs.

Discriminating just to increase the representation of women in tech is as misguided and biased as mandating increases for women’s representation in the homeless, work-related and violent deaths, prisons, and school dropouts.

There’s currently very little transparency into the extend of our diversity programs which keeps it immune to criticism from those outside its ideological echo chamber.

These programs are highly politicized which further alienates non-progressives.

I realize that some of our programs may be precautions against government accusations of discrimination, but that can easily backfire since they incentivize illegal discrimination.

Focus on psychological safety, not just race/gender diversity.

We should focus on psychological safety, which has shown positive effects and should (hopefully) not lead to unfair discrimination.

We need psychological safety and shared values to gain the benefits of diversity

Having representative viewpoints is important for those designing and testing our products, but the benefits are less clear for those more removed from UX.

De-emphasize empathy.

Iâ€™ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy - feeling another’s pain - causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.

Prioritize intention.

Our focus on microaggressions and other unintentional transgressions increases our sensitivity, which is not universally positive: sensitivity increases both our tendency to take offense and our self censorship, leading to authoritarian policies. Speaking up without the fear of being harshly judged is central to psychological safety, but these practices can remove that safety by judging unintentional transgressions.

Microaggression training incorrectly and dangerously equates speech with violence and isn’t backed by evidence.

Be open about the science of human nature.

Once we acknowledge that not all differences are socially constructed or due to discrimination, we open our eyes to a more accurate view of the human condition which is necessary if we actually want to solve problems.

Reconsider making Unconscious Bias training mandatory for promo committees.

We haven’t been able to measure any effect of our Unconscious Bias training and it has the potential for overcorrecting or backlash, especially if made mandatory.

Some of the suggested methods of the current training (v2.3) are likely useful, but the political bias of the presentation is clear from the factual inaccuracies and the examples shown.

Spend more time on the many other types of biases besides stereotypes. Stereotypes are much more accurate and responsive to new information than the training suggests (I’m not advocating for using stereotypes, I [sic] just pointing out the factual inaccuracy of what’s said in the training).

[1] This document is mostly written from the perspective of Googleâ€™s Mountain View campus, I can’t speak about other offices or countries.

[2] Of course, I may be biased and only see evidence that supports my viewpoint. In terms of political biases, I consider myself a classical liberal and strongly value individualism and reason. I’d be very happy to discuss any of the document further and provide more citations.

[3] Throughout the document, by “tech”, I mostly mean software engineering.

[4] For heterosexual romantic relationships, men are more strongly judged by status and women by beauty. Again, this has biological origins and is culturally universal.

[5] Stretch, BOLD, CSSI, Engineering Practicum (to an extent), and several other Google funded internal and external programs are for people with a certain gender or race.

[6] Instead set Googlegeist OKRs, potentially for certain demographics. We can increase representation at an org level by either making it a better environment for certain groups (which would be seen in survey scores) or discriminating based on a protected status (which is illegal and I’ve seen it done). Increased representation OKRs can incentivize the latter and create zero-sum struggles between orgs.

[7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasnâ€™t going to overthrow their â€œcapitalist oppressors,â€ the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”

[8] Ironically, IQ tests were initially championed by the Left when meritocracy meant helping the victims of the aristocracy.

[9] Yes, in a national aggregate, women have lower salaries than men for a variety of reasons. For the same work though, women get paid just as much as men. Considering women spend more money than men and that salary represents how much the employees sacrifices (e.g. more hours, stress, and danger), we really need to rethink our stereotypes around power.

[10] “The traditionalist system of gender does not deal well with the idea of men needing support. Men are expected to be strong, to not complain, and to deal with problems on their own. Men’s problems are more often seen as personal failings rather than victimhood,, due to our gendered idea of agency. This discourages men from bringing attention to their issues (whether individual or group-wide issues), for fear of being seen as whiners, complainers, or weak.”

[11] Political correctness is defined as “the avoidance of forms of expression or action that are perceived to exclude, marginalize, or insult groups of people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against,” which makes it clear why it’s a phenomenon of the Left and a tool of authoritarians.

Google's new Vice President of Diversity, Integrity & Governance, Danielle Brown, issued the following statement in response to the internal employee memo:

Googlers,

I'm Danielle, Google's brand new VP of Diversity, Integrity & Governance. I started just a couple of weeks ago, and I had hoped to take another week or so to get the lay of the land before introducing myself to you all. But given the heated debate we've seen over the past few days, I feel compelled to say a few words.

Many of you have read an internal document shared by someone in our engineering organization, expressing views on the natural abilities and characteristics of different genders, as well as whether one can speak freely of these things at Google. And like many of you, I found that it advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. I'm not going to link to it here as it's not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes or encourages.

Diversity and inclusion are a fundamental part of our values and the culture we continue to cultivate. We are unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success as a company, and we'll continue to stand for that and be committed to it for the long haul. As Ari Balogh said in his internal G+ post, “Building an open, inclusive environment is core to who we are, and the right thing to do. 'Nuff said. ”

Google has taken a strong stand on this issue, by releasing its demographic data and creating a company wide OKR on diversity and inclusion. Strong stands elicit strong reactions. Changing a culture is hard, and it's often uncomfortable. But I firmly believe Google is doing the right thing, and that's why I took this job.

Part of building an open, inclusive environment means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies, and anti-discrimination laws.

I've been in the industry for a long time, and I can tell you that I've never worked at a company that has so many platforms for employees to express themselves - TGIF, Memegen, internal G+, thousands of discussion groups. I know this conversation doesn't end with my email today. I look forward to continuing to hear your thoughts as I settle in and meet with Googlers across the company.

Thanks,

Danielle

#diversity #google

0 notes

hermanwatts · 4 years

Text

Sensor Sweep: Antiheroes, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Dreadstar

Popular Culture (Adam Lane Smith): Much has been made about the oft-lamented shift from Hero to Antihero and the modern obsession with romanticizing evil. Most frequently, I’ve heard this complaint directed at modern western media’s fixation on selecting one unyielding human trash fire after another as every main character. There’s a reason modern book sales and movie sales are struggling. To understand the shift over the last hundred years of stories and main characters, one must understand the cultural environments and the mental aspects at play, particularly attachment formation and its impact on society.

Writing (Rawle Nyanzi): With every passing day, it seems that global pop culture disappoints us more. Classic franchises are vandalized into self-parodies to “modernize” them, creative talent increasingly treats fandoms as the enemy, and geek-oriented media champion the intimidation and silencing of creatives who don’t toe a very particular ideological line. The Pulp Mindset is not a book on how to make millions with one simple trick. It is not a book about gaming Amazon’s ever-changing algorithm. It is a book about having the right mentality for storytelling.

Hugo Awards (Dark Herald): This years Hugos went so far beneath my radar I didn’t know they had happened. I think we have finally reached the point where a Hugo Award is actually damaging to an author’s reputation. Certainly, no one who loves Science Fiction will want to buy a book with the words Hugo Award winner on the cover. As you may know by now. George R.R. Martin hosted the 2020 Hugo Awards and he was apparently too old to be Woke.

Fiction (DMR Books): Now I don’t have to wait six months to release my collection! Necromancy in Nilztiria will be available in next month, and the cover illustration (which you can see to the left) is based upon “A Twisted Branch of Yggdrasil.” In this tale, the Norseman Hrolfgar and the Atlantean Deltor have been drawn through the labyrinths of time and space to the world of Nilztiria by a sorceress, who commands them to slay her enemy, Xaarxool the Necromancer. But as you can see this is no easy task, for Xaarxool has giant skeletons to defend him.

Fiction (Marzaat): Like most critics, he regards Sturgeon’s supreme strength as characterization. Sturgeon was allegedly good at seeing the cruelty behind civilization and the ways “conventional morality” (supposedly Sturgeon distinguished that from “fundamental ethical systems”) created anxieties and phobias hence some of his horror stories like “Bianca’s Hands”). Stableford contends Sturgeon never was onboard with John W. Campbell’s enthusiasm for science and technology. He suggests that Sturgeon’s “Killdozer!”, with its bulldozer under the control of a hostile alien force, is a hostile metaphor for that enthusiasm.

Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): Much credit should go author and editor Richard Paolinelli for all the work he has done in the Planetary Anthology series. After Superversive Press shuttered it looked unlikely that the project would ever be completed and was destined to be a what-if, but not only has Tuscany Bay released more volumes than Superversive did (and next month will have re-released all of Superversive’s old volumes), it has also carried the project into a whole new medium. That would be into the burgeoning audio book world.

History (Jon Mollison): The pre-history of the Americas is a true dark age – a time of great uncertainty and filled with mysteries for which we may never have solutions. The most basic of these, who was the first to arrive, remains shrouded in conflicting narratives and contradictory evidence provided by scattered and controversial archaeology sites. The question assumes the Bering Straits Theory is the only one that holds water. A rather sizable assumption given the dearth of evidence. And the possible explanation lies in the stone-age sailing ship piloted by Thor Heyerdahl.

Dragon Awards (Dragoncon): In this three-part series, past Dragon Award recipients talk about their award-winning novels and their Dragon Awards experience. During this time, nothing provides a better escape from the world than diving into the pages of a Dragon Award winning novel. The Dragon Awards, launched in 2016 in tandem with Dragon Con’s 30th anniversary, allows readers, writers, publishers, and editors a way to recognize excellence in all things Science Fiction and Fantasy. These Awards are by the fans, for the fans, and are a chance to reward those who have made real contributions to SF, books, games, comics, and media.

Cinema (Other Master Cylinder): John Saxon was born Carmine Orrico in Brooklyn, the first child of Antonio and Anna Orrico. His mother was born in Caserta, a small city near Naples in Italy. There’s some confusion about John’s age, partly due to his fiddling’ of the dates for his first contract. “I was born on August 5, 1936. Many have it wrong because I made myself a year older to get a Universal contract at the start. If I had been younger it wouldn’t have worked.”

Review (George Kelly): The 9th book in the Harry Dresden series features Dresden in a desperate quest to clear his vampire brother, Thomas, from a cunning plot by powerful Magical Interests. Harry Dresden, professional Wizard and Private Investigator for the City of Chicago, grew up an orphan. His upbringing included a lot of physical and mental abuse which explains his taciturn disposition.

Comic Books (Totally Epic): Finally! After 3400 pages of Epic Illustrated, we’ve (that is, I) have finally arrived at the first thing published by Epic Comics! Er, or, rather not, because first we’re doing Marvel Graphic Novel #3, Dreadstar. I mean, I kinda have to, because it bridges the story started in Epic Illustrated and The Price (over at Eclipse) and the Dreadstar series proper.

Fiction (Amatopia): I’m three-quarters through The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons–sequel to Hyperion and book 2 in the 4 book Hyperion Cantos series–and I can’t stop singing these books’ praises. I think so far I’ve convinced over ten people to give Hyperion a shot. It has been a long time since I’ve found a novel or series that has engrossed me to this degree, particularly a sci-fi novel.

Fiction & RPG (The Other Side): Over the last couple of years, I have been on a quest to find and read all the Raven books by “Richard Kirk” who was, in reality, the pen name of authors Angus Wells and Robert Holdstock. Both wrote Book 1 and then they alternated with Wells on Books 3 and 5 and Holdstock on Books 2 and 4. The story is one that is simple, but close to many FRP gamers. Raven wants to kill Karl Ir Donwayne. How is going to do that? Well, they need to Skull of Quez to appease this ruler to get to Donwayne.

Review (Rough Edges): The Digest Enthusiast, Book Twelve – Richard Krauss, ed. Interviews

Tony Gleeson (Fantastic, Amazing Science Fiction, Mike Shayne, Personal Crimes).

John Shirley (Weirdbook, Fantastic, The Crow, Constantine, Wetbones).

Games (25 Years Later): From the very beginning, you are made readily aware of not only the stakes but the epicness of the tale at the heart of Darksiders. The tale I speak of is at first set in modern-day Earth, and you take up the role of War, one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who finds himself in our realm in the midst of a battle between Heaven and Hell. This is where Darksiders gives us a taste of War’s power before stripping it all away when he is killed during the battle. After War’s demise, he is brought in front of the Charred Council, where the blame of the apocalyptic events is placed squarely on his shoulders.

Pulp Fiction (DMR Books): The story starts in the “author as ghostwriter” conceit, as was the fashion of the time ever since its popularisation by Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Sword and Planet tales, and indeed utilised by Merritt himself in other stories such as The Moon Pool. So ubiquitous is this method of acclimatising the reader to tales of death-defying derring-do, it almost lulls the reader into a false sense of security – that this adventure will be just another ripping yarn, good for the mental exercise, but could safely be put down after reading.

RPG (Black Gate): Getting into Conan 2d20, for the casual gamer, or for the merely curious, demands a fair amount of cognitive load. This is because, I believe, the system is so innovative — and those innovations are precisely what makes this a Conan game. I have encountered many anecdotes of gamers and consumers gleefully obtaining this gorgeous hardcover tome (or PDF), riffling through it, saying, “Huh?” then setting it aside with a “Sorry, not for me, but the art is pretty, and this still makes a good resource.” adventures, the pandemic hit, and these two players weren’t interested in online play.

RPG (Silver Key): Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s all about execution. The title of the post should speak for itself, but a little context. Heard on the intranets recently… “Gary Gygax ripped off Dave Arneson! Dave is D&D’s true creator!” My response: Horse shit. Ideas are like a@#$holes. We’ve all got one, and most stink. I can sit here in the calm quiet of my living room and fire off a dozen. “Weight loss app.” “Online mentoring program for pediatricians.” “Telehealth scheduling interface.” “Dying Earth role-playing game.”

Comic Books (Bleeding Cool): Sylvian Runberg writes: “When I was offered to do an adaptation of Conan, I was immediately thrilled, and for several reasons. The first is that this character was a part of my childhood, especially with the comics drawn by John Buscema and obviously the film with Arnold Scharwzenegger. But the second, and maybe the most important reason, is Patrice Louinet, one of the worldwide best specialist of Robert E. Howard, who could advise us during the making of this adaptation, offered me the possibility to discover an another Conan from the one I had in mind from this childhood, a more complex character living in a more complex world, even if we’re still talking about fantasy, magic spells, epic adventures and monsters.

T.V. (Dark Worlds Quarterly): In 1982, Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian was brought to the big screen in a film featuring Arnold Schwartzenegger. The success of Conan the Barbarian spawned a plethora of bad Sword & Sorcery films (including Conan sequels). I will make no comment on those films here but state none was better than average and most were far below the worst of the Ray Harryhausen’s classics. Until 1999’s The Thirteenth Warrior I can’t think of a post-Conan film of a heroic fantasy of any real interest. Since the release of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Fantasy films have been experienceing another renaissance.

Tolkien (The Wert Zone): The Hugo Awards are the premier awards for science fiction and fantasy literature, first given out in 1953 and every year since 1955. One of the more interesting mysteries of the award is that J.R.R. Tolkien, widely regarded as the most prominent fantasy author of the 20th Century, was never given one despite being eligible on multiple occasions.

Science Fiction (Fantasy Literature): This collection of nine short stories, novelettes and novellas originally appeared in hardcover form in 1952, from the publisher Pelligrini & Cudahy, and sold for $3.50. By the time my edition came out, the Berkley Medallion paperback from 1963, with another wonderfully abstract/Surrealist cover by the great Richard Powers, the cover price had dropped to 50 cents but the number of stories in the collection had been reduced to seven. Missing were the novelettes “Vault of the Beast,” from the Aug. ’40 ASF, and “Heir Unapparent,” from that same magazine’s June ’45 issue.

RPG (Grognardia): I bought Mörk Borg solely because of its physical characteristics. A local friend of mine raved about it months ago and then, while perusing Free League’s website recently, I caught a glimpse of it in all its lurid glory. I was so intrigued by its bright yellow cover and black, white, and red artwork that I ordered a copy and anxiously awaited its arrival. I was not disappointed when it appeared at last: the 96-page A5 book is sturdy and well-made, like so many European RPG books these days. Most of the paper in the book has a satin finish, but its last section, presenting an introductory adventure, has a rough, natural feel to it.

Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): Today, July 24, is the birthday of John D. MacDonald (1916-1986). MacDonald wrote for the pulps and transitioned to paperbacks when the pulps died. (I wish someone would collect all his science fiction.) For today’s birthday post, I want to look at One Monday We Killed Them All. Dwight McAran beat a girl to death and went to prison for it. He’s about to get out. Dwight is Fenn Hillyer’s brother-in-law. Fenn is a cop. They don’t get along.

Sensor Sweep: Antiheroes, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Dreadstar published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

0 notes

anxietycounse · 4 years

Text

Episode #07 Defensiveness

De-De-Defense!

This episode is all about defense. It is football season, what can I say? I was in a mood for a cheer. In this episode, we are talking all about defensiveness. Getting in the cycle of the blame game is a common problem for many of us. Defensiveness is another one of The 4 Horsemen that we have been talking about.

Defensiveness may often follow criticism or contribute to criticism or contempt. Sometimes defensiveness follows a complaint, which with what we have been talking about is healthy and normal. Finding ways to blame our partners instead of taking ownership of our own mistakes or misunderstandings can quickly escalate normal conflict to something unhealthy and damaging to our relationships. This is a common one.

Blame the Chicken!

In mine and Jake's relationship, we have both engaged in defensiveness. Jake will tell you that this is one of the Horsemen that he really struggles with the most. We have gotten so much better, both of us, which is nice. We bring in a lot of humor and both try to take a lot more ownership. Sometimes it is hard.

Many of us, it is hard to get in the blame-game. We aren’t trying to intentionally blame our spouse or make them feel badly, but making our own mistakes makes us feel so badly that our initial response is to blame the other person. Or blame something else. There are some things we can do about this.

Early on in our relationship, if I had a problem with something or someone and I was trying to express this to Jake, I would sometimes be met with him saying, “ Well you experienced that because you were expecting that, or you were looking for it.” It was kinda putting the blame back on me and chances are I would follow up with criticism or stonewalling (LOL). Don’t get me wrong, I played a part in what happened after that for sure!

Now, we are so much better at this. Recently, Jake and I must work on now is figuring out a routine with eating. That may seem really minor, but I am someone who could really eat out every night of the week, and partly because my mom is a really good cook and my dad is a CPA who works really long hours and when my brother and I got older and we were very busy with sports and social events and all that there was no one at home to eat dinner. Something that my mom took a lot of time to prepare and so she wouldn’t really do it, or we would have something simple or we would eat out a lot. I completely understand now why that is.

I also like eating out a lot because I am an introvert and I can enjoy the ambience and a nice atmosphere to enjoy my food. I take work with me, so it is like killing two birds with one stone. I know that that isn’t the most mindful thing to do. My dietician friends are like cringing at that.

You can imagine that this could cause a bit of a conflict in our relationship because the values of how we spend money. I can completely understand, so I have made some effort to cook more. I enjoy cooking. With Jake’s work schedule, working nights, we don’t always eat together. If we eat together, we are at different meals of the day. He is having breakfast when I am having dinner.

We don’t have kids, and I am not huge on leftovers, so cooking for one is a bit much. I can do leftovers maybe once, depending on what it is I can do a couple times but there isn’t much. We have some different values when it comes to this. This is something that can end up being a bit difficult and we try to navigate it with some better conversations.

The other day, Jake tends to make the same thing, or a variation of it for lunch that he takes to work with him every day. So, I was thinking in advance I put some chicken in the fridge to thaw for him to be able to cook it when he was ready for it. I failed to communicate this to him that I put it in the fridge to thaw for him. So, he just assumed that it was something that I was preparing for the next day. So overnight he prepared his own thing, and the next day I was like why didn’t you use that chicken, and he was like "I thought it was yours" and I had to pause and say “Oh, I guess you can’t read my mind huh.” Or something like that.

We were able to laugh about that, so I will use that chicken for something else, don’t you worry! Back in the day that may have been something I would have gotten defensive about. We have had some successes here lately, so that is great!

What is my part in the blame game?

I talk about defensiveness a lot with my clients. As you can imagine, blame can be a big part in relationships. Sometimes it really gets into this sense of fairness. So, what I see a lot with my clients is, why should I do this if they don’t do this. Or, I tried this, and it didn’t work. So, sometimes out of fairness or we have partners who engage in blame towards us, it can be difficult to be the person who takes responsibility or softens the conversations or uses a complaint instead of a criticism.

Once we receive or feel like we are receiving blame it can be easy to reciprocate that. I am often talking to my clients about validating how that felt for them. None of these things felt good, of course. Validating that, but also asking what we can do differently. If we could go back to that conversation, what could you have done differently instead. If there is blame, ask the client, like what I did with the chicken, were you communicating your needs to your partner? Were they aware of this? I think some of the solution to this is taking some of the responsibility even if it is just some role in the conflict. In my case, I took responsibility that I didn’t communicate with Jake that I had intentionally thawed out that chicken for him. That was my part.

There may be other types of conflict that someone who knew their partner needed to call someone to make a medical appointment that day and knowing that the partner may have had a really busy day at work and the partner didn’t get to it. It could be easy to blame that partner. Or when the partner gets home and ask them did you make that call and they responded in a defensive manner, like I was busy at work and forgot, you knew I was going to be why didn’t you make an appointment for me. Maybe taking some ownership that you did know that your partner was going to be busy at work.

The other part is understanding your partner's needs. That is where we can come in a practice our flexibility and think in advance about these things. How can we come alongside our partners and support them in these areas?

Be creative, rescript it!

I want us to look at some of the perpetual areas of conflict in your relationship. How have I been defensive? How has my partner been defensive? Are either of you quick to blame the other or not accept your responsibility. Go back over an old conversation where there was defensiveness, either yours or your partners, and see if you can rescript it. Take ownership of your response. Just be creative, what could I have said differently. How could I have softened this for my partner, what is a way I could have come alongside my partner. And try that next time.

Change begins with you, and even if you are not the one who struggles with defensiveness, what are the areas of conflict that you can take ownership of?

http://traffic.libsyn.com/betterwifebetterlife/BWBL_-_Episode_7_-_112819_4.38_PM.mp3

Help in the meantime:

YouTube channel BWBL playlist

Our blog

Gottman Institute Blog

Resources:

https://harmonytherapygroup.com/betterwifebetterlife/

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1483349643

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVjB28_SImBcpz3kFNulsgQ/featured?view_as=subscriber

Currently Serving:

Katy, Tx

Ashburn, VA

Our Social Media

FACEBOOK

YOUTUBE

INSTAGRAM

TWITTER

VIMEO

Step 1 of 5

20%

Name*

Email*

Preferred Location*

Phone

Message

CAPTCHA

Comments

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

//<![CDATA[ jQuery(document).bind('gform_post_render', function(event, formId, currentPage){if(formId == 3) {jQuery('#input_3_3').mask('(999) 999-9999').bind('keypress', function(e){if(e.which == 13){jQuery(this).blur();} } );} } );jQuery(document).bind('gform_post_conditional_logic', function(event, formId, fields, isInit){} ); //]]>//<![CDATA[ jQuery(document).ready(function(){jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [3, 1]) } ); //]]>

The post Episode #07 Defensiveness appeared first on Harmony Therapy Group.

from https://harmonytherapygroup.com/defensiveness-2/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=defensiveness-2 from https://harmonytherapygroup.blogspot.com/2020/03/episode-07-defensiveness.html

0 notes

mastcomm · 4 years

Text

How Kobe Bryant Helped the N.B.A. Conquer the World

During his two-decade N.B.A. career, Kobe Bryant evolved into far more than an exceptional basketball player. Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash on Sunday near Los Angeles, became a crucial conduit for the league as it moved swiftly to expand its empire into an international enterprise.

Raised in Italy for seven years of his childhood, Bryant was fluent in Italian and was an ideal draw for a league that, ever since David Stern took over as commissioner in 1984, had seen basketball as a global game. Bryant’s stature as an international celebrity, honed by both the N.B.A. and Nike, crystallized during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. There, Bryant was swarmed by other athletes asking for autographs and photographs on the infield of the Olympic stadium with a man who was considered one of the world’s greatest basketball players.

It was fitting, then, that on Sunday, the tributes to Bryant poured in from across the globe.

Luca Vecchi, the mayor of Reggio Emilia — one of the Italian cities where the Bryants had lived — posted a message on Facebook in tribute to the star. “Kobe Bryant grew up here and for us all he was from Reggio Emilia,” he wrote. “He left us today. A basketball legend whom our whole city will remember forever with affection and gratitude.”

When Bryant entered the N.B.A. in 1996, his experience of growing up partly abroad was a rarity in the league. This was the era before the stars Yao Ming of China and Dirk Nowitzki of Germany had made their marks. But Bryant’s rise also coincided with the introduction of critical new technology, Adam Silver, Stern’s successor as league commissioner, said in an interview on Monday. The N.B.A. was just beginning to capitalize on the power of digital video and to beam its games into the homes of budding fans around the world. Today, foreign-born stars like Giannis Antetokounmpo and Joel Embiid are rapidly becoming the norm.

“Kobe came of age almost at the exact moment that we became a digital league. I believe we launched NBA.com the year before Kobe came into the league,” Silver said. “And Kobe embraced all things digital. In China, he realized he could be virtually present around the world by providing content to websites. He saw an opportunity to make himself universal.”

As the N.B.A. was desperate for a new face to represent a diversifying league without Michael Jordan in his prime, Bryant did more than any other American player to fill that void. Silver referred to Bryant as “the most traveled player of his era.” Bryant even teased the idea of playing professionally in Italy during the 2011 N.B.A. lockout. His father, Joe Bryant, played professional basketball there after an eight-year N.B.A. career.

“Italy is my home,” Bryant once told an Italian-language sports outlet, Gazzetta dello Sport. “It’s where my dream of playing in the N.B.A. started. This is where I learned the fundamentals.”

Shooting, passing, and moving without the ball, he added, were all “things that when I came back to America the players my age didn’t know how to do because they were only thinking about jumping and dunking.”

Stern, who died Jan. 1, made foreign expansion a core goal of the league and studied proposals to place teams in Europe. Bryant readily accepted his role as an ambassador for basketball, for both the league’s interests and his own. He played on two Olympic teams, winning gold medals in 2008 and 2012. In 2018, Bryant was named, along with Yao, as a global ambassador for last year’s FIBA Basketball World Cup.

“Stern’s vision was always to make the N.B.A. a global sport, and certainly, he was a commissioner who embraced that,” said Michael Veley, a professor of sport management at Syracuse University. “But he needed players to also buy into that. It started with the Olympic team — ‘The Dream Team’ — but after some of the superstars like Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan, the baton had to be passed on to other people who not only were going to be great players, but were going to represent the sport and talk about it on an international stage.”

Matteo Zuretti, the head of international relations for the N.B.A. players’ union, said in an interview that Bryant’s dominant play alone had helped the league encourage more foreigners to take up the sport. Embiid, who was drafted to the N.B.A. from Cameroon in 2014, wrote in a Twitter post following Bryant’s death that he had started to play basketball because of Bryant after watching the 2010 N.B.A. finals. “I had never watched ball before that and that finals was the turning point of my life,” he wrote.

“When you are an international player and you stay up till 4 a.m. to watch your idol play, you develop a special connection,” Zuretti said in a phone call from Italy. “Kobe had been super relevant for people in Los Angeles. But for a generation of international players, he was the winner and idol.”

But nowhere abroad was Bryant’s impact as prevalent as in East Asia, particularly China, where Bryant, one of Nike’s top personalities, routinely had the highest sales of shoes and jerseys. Amplifying the reach of Bryant and the league in the country was the fact that Yao happened to join the Houston Rockets in 2002, right as Bryant was hitting the peak of his superstardom following his third N.B.A. championship.

“Kobe saw how big the N.B.A. was becoming in China,” Silver said. “I think Kobe recognized that he was a product of his time.”

By then, Bryant had already become a frequent visitor to the country for basketball camps and promotional stops. He stayed popular in China through commercials, like one for Sprite in 2011 with the Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou. After Stephen Curry, the star of the Golden State Warriors, unseated Bryant in Chinese jersey sales in 2017, Rick Welts, a Warriors team executive, told USA Today that Curry had done it using the “Kobe Bryant playbook.”

Nike accelerated its expansion in the Chinese market in the 2000s, and Bryant became its most visible face when he started a partnership with the company in 2003. China has been Nike’s biggest market outside of the United States for several years.

Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, released a statement on Twitter on Monday that nodded to Bryant’s reach in China. “Saddened by the tragic loss of #KobeBryant,” he said. “An inspiration for many and a legend of his generation, he will always be remembered for his contribution to the world of sport and to #ChinaUS people-to-people exchanges. My deepest condolences to his family and other victims.”

The statement was notable beyond illustrating Bryant’s stature, as relations have been strained between the N.B.A. and China for months. In October a Rockets executive expressed support on social media for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. After decades of the N.B.A. conducting outreach to China and courting fans (with an assist from Bryant), the Chinese state broadcasting channel pulled the league’s games. Relations have yet to formally thaw.

Bryant was also popular in the Philippines, where he made several visits. Basketball is followed with an almost religious fervor there, dating back to the late 1800s. On Monday, a reporter for ESPN posted a photo on Twitter showing a famed basketball court in Manila, known as “The Tenement,” being painted over with an image of Bryant and his daughter Gianna, who also died in the crash. In the city of Valenzuela, just hours before Bryant’s death, a Kobe Bryant-inspired basketball court was inaugurated called “House of Kobe,” and it has become a memorial site for Bryant filled with flowers and notes from fans.

Silver said there was “something very universal” about Bryant. It may have been his willingness to embrace technology and his European background, but there was also Bryant’s relentless competitiveness.

Silver recalled an interaction between the Dallas Mavericks star Luka Doncic and Bryant in December at Staples Center. Doncic was about to inbound the ball, and Bryant, sitting courtside, was trash-talking him. After the game, Doncic told reporters that he had been surprised to hear that Bryant was doing so in his native language of Slovenian.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/how-kobe-bryant-helped-the-n-b-a-conquer-the-world/

#Sport

0 notes

bluewatsons · 5 years

Text

N.E. Simmonds, Constitutional Rights, Civility and Artifice, 78 Cambridge L J 175 (2019)

Abstract

The value of civility is grounded upon acceptance of the legitimacy of moral disagreement and the need for mutual respect and cooperation in the face of such disagreement. The distinction between rights and goods plays a fundamental role in the form of civility espoused by liberal society. Current models of constitutional rights and proportionality, in a variety of ways, erode that distinction and thereby place the liberal model of civility in jeopardy.

I. After Eden

A tradition of political thought that stretches back to Plato and Aristotle views the institutions of the political community as serving to foster excellent lives for human beings. Law plays an important part in this picture: it helps to inculcate habits of virtue; it helps to protect the virtuous from the predations of the wicked; and it helps to sustain other institutions (such as property, the market and the family) which themselves foster excellence and encourage virtuous habits. But law does none of these things alone. For this tradition, law is only one part of a more complex fabric of practices and institutions with its centre in a single set of values. Those values permeate the whole and provide the unity that makes political association possible.

From the early modern period, and partly in response to the Wars of Religion, a different way of thinking about politics starts to predominate. For a variety of reasons, some not fundamentally incompatible with the first tradition, this approach tries provisionally to set on one side ultimate questions about the nature of human perfection and to provide a framework of entitlements within which individuals can choose and pursue their own conceptions of a good life. Within this way of thinking law becomes utterly central, since it is law that has the task of establishing the relevant entitlements. Reflecting the centrality of law, juridical concepts (such as justice and rights) come to dominate the public discourse. An older language, of virtue and the common good, comes to be unduly neglected.

Although many think of these two traditions of thought as radically opposed, wiser souls view them as mutually enriching strands of thought. Both must play a part in any sound form of liberal democratic politics. Ideas of justice and rights are not self-sustaining: they become productive of illusions when they are isolated from a broader concern with human flourishing. At the same time, the distinct features of the juridical realm must be sustained if freedom is to be preserved. Rights must not be made conditional upon their virtuous exercise, nor dissolved into a goal-oriented focus upon the attainment of desirable states of affairs. In particular, the rule-based character of law must be respected. A polity that in this way respects the integrity of law thereby establishes a form of civic friendship for a world where justice is always contested.

Michael Walzer has described liberalism as an “art of separation”.1 It separates private life from public life; church from state; the family from the economy; the state from civil society; adjudication from legislation; and so forth. Each of these separable spheres derives its character from the distinct values towards which it is oriented. The pre-liberal view assumed a single right ordering of conduct directly informing every aspect of social and political life. Merchant, prince and peasant were to act upon a shared idea of Christian virtue, grounded in the teachings of the Church. The social order was conceived of “as a highly articulated organism of members contributing in their different degrees to a spiritual purpose”.2 But liberals came to understand that, while any tolerable political community must rest upon shared values, those public values are to some extent separable from many of the concerns which centrally inform the private lives of citizens. The need for virtue cannot be confined to the private realm, for there are distinct public virtues which ground mutually respectful interaction, along with political and mercantile probity. Such public virtues facilitate the peaceful pursuit of diverse private goals. But, being expressive of full mutual recognition and civic friendship, they also, in themselves, constitute a centrally important aspect of a flourishing life.

The various separations cherished by the liberal are not given by abstract reason but result from a mixture of accident and artifice. They require an “artificial reason” of the kind that Sir Edward Coke ascribed to the law. Indeed, the taught traditions of the law have often played a large part in maintaining the stability of the relevant distinctions. But, for this very reason (and given the centrality of law to modern liberal society), an erosion of such distinctions within the law itself could have particularly far-reaching consequences.

To describe something as “artificial” was once to say that the thing in question is a potentially admirable work of human ingenuity, manifesting the relationship between human freedom and the divine plan, and adding thereby to the glory of God's creation. It in this light that we must understand Coke's idea of the law's “artificial reason”.3 For natural reason is, on its own, insufficient to resolve our problems. Reason reveals to us the need for mutually respectful cooperation, and for the conduct of our lives in friendship with others. But it does not offer us a blueprint for our lives together. We disagree about justice; and, on any sound understanding, the prescriptions of justice are plural and potentially competing. In consequence of this, we must devise our own solutions, even though our solutions will still be constrained by circumstance and answerable to very general requirements of reason.

Today, however, to say that something is “artificial” is to say that it is fake, or lacking in real value.4 We contrast “artifice” with such things as authenticity and sincerity. Reflecting that outlook, many people today think that the law should directly reproduce the latitude and accessibility of popular discourse: a modern analogue of the “natural reason” favoured by King James in his famous debate with Coke. They would see only exclusivity and elitism in an “artificial reason” that must be “gotten by long study”. And, to those who take that view, the introduction of “human rights” to the law seems beneficially to disrupt the hard carapace of traditional legal thought, creating a conduit through which fundamental values, expressed in a currently familiar idiom, can enter the courtroom in a relatively unmediated form. Because the firm rules and clear watersheds, which are aspired to by the taught tradition of law, often fail accurately to trace the fluid contours of our ordinary concerns, those rules come to be regarded as regrettable obstacles (“artificial” in the pejorative sense) to the pursuit of what truly matters. A form of legal thought which balances values one against another comes to seem both more transparent and more focused upon the important issues. The boundary between juridical reason and social policy becomes blurred.5 Coke's talk of “artificial reason” begins to seem no more than a smokescreen wrapped around sectional interest.

The separations of liberal thought and practice have long been subjected to hostile scrutiny. Typically, in this genre, the various dichotomies are revealed to be products of historical contingency and are then attacked as having damaging and distortive consequences. Thus market freedoms can be portrayed as serving only to obscure the realities of domination and exploitation; the family can be painted, in sombre tones, as a realm of domestic tyranny and a source of distributive injustice; the private associations of civil society (such as churches and independent educational institutions) can be viewed as pernicious barriers to moral uniformity; the principled consistency of legal doctrine can be viewed as merely an illusory heaven of equal rights disguising material inequality. The critiques derive much of their power from the implied contrast with an imagined community, free from liberal separations, where the embeddedness of institutions within a uniform ethical fabric erases the harsh dichotomies of modernity. The critics tacitly lament the passing of a world of wholeness that supposedly preceded the division and fragmentation of the present; or they bemoan the unattainability of some such state, given our current situation on Dover Beach.

Dreams of all-encompassing unity are not restricted to the critics of liberalism. For, in lending great prominence to the idea of rights, and in appearing to suggest that the realm of rights can be entirely self-sustaining, the public discourse of liberalism can itself become a source of such illusions. We traverse a landscape where mirages are frequent. Evanescent glimpses and faint suggestions are taken for evident indicators. Can we not find our way to the well-watered land of perfect justice and moral unanimity? Does the virtually universal endorsement of the idea of human rights not point to that land as just over the horizon?6 Is the path not already clear and open to us, provided that we are not discouraged by the voices of scepticism?

In this way, constitutional arrangements that were adopted, after the Second World War, to prevent a recurrence of totalitarian horror, come to be viewed as signposts to a future transformed, not simply by the absence of abhorrent evil, but by the positive realisation of perfect justice. To construe such constitutional provisions as merely extreme backstop defences against the worst atrocities is, from this perspective, to neglect their potential for effecting an all-encompassing transformation.

Reflective liberals of conservative disposition are unlikely to be seduced. They see abstract talk of justice and rights as failing to provide us with sufficiently determinate guidance. A high degree of convergence in the identification of truly gross injustice does not guarantee similar convergence in our opinions concerning perfect justice. Universal agreement upon general formulae (whether framed in terms of human rights, or freedom, or equality) is likely to fracture and disintegrate when the formulae must be unpacked and applied. Standards of justice are plural and permanently open to dispute. Public acceptance of that fact grounds the core political value of civility. Those who deny this, and believe themselves to be in possession of the whole and incontestable truth concerning justice, seem to misunderstand the human condition quite fundamentally. The pursuit of perfect justice seems more likely to destroy civility than to foster any values that might transcend it.

An elegiac strand of thought is fundamental to the cultural outlook of liberal conservatives: they find it natural to consider the most shimmering ideals to be illusory or irretrievably lost to us. Theirs is a politics of imperfection, grounded in a deep appreciation of the ease with which dreams can become nightmares. Purely celebratory or aspirational versions of liberalism (from which the elegiac motif and its associated scepticism are absent) become prominent from time to time. Mistakenly construing the dominant juridical discourse as embodying a self-sufficient vision of human community, rather than as one aspect of a complex web of dependencies and distinctions, these approaches quickly degenerate into vulgar sloganising. They postulate all-encompassing political goals which possess a wide appeal only to the extent that their content remains unspecified (here the language of freedom, equality and human rights is especially popular). The supposedly happy conditions, which are vaguely envisaged by such language, are to be secured by the technical management of the state. This requires ever-increasing levels of intervention in the various aspects of social life which make up the liberal polity, thereby eroding the key separations (including the separation between state and civil society) upon which liberalism depends.

Technocratic management of this sort in turn requires an appearance of commensurability to be imposed upon the diverse forms of value composing our moral and juridical life. For, without such a semblance of commensurability (if the relevant values are not to lose their distinct identities, a semblance is all it can be), technocratic decisions are revealed as groundless exercises of power.7 This misleading veneer of commensurability implies that demonstrably correct solutions are available to resolve core political issues, and that those who oppose such solutions are the enemies of justice: an erosion of civility is the inevitable result. The pretence of commensurability also obscures the diversity of forms that moral values typically exhibit and that a fully human life will encompass. For example, an adequately rich moral life will incorporate values that must be honoured or respected along with, but by contrast with, those that must be promoted or advanced; some values provide goals, while others constitute constraints upon the pursuit of goals. Within the outlook of technocracy, on the other hand, all values are to be “optimised”.8

The wise liberal, sadly acknowledging that we are by nature fallen creatures who cannot return to Eden, finds a sense of loss to be entirely appropriate. This sadness must not divert us from the task of making the best of things, nor should it lead us to neglect or underrate such valuable practices as we already possess. We should not imagine that diverse values can, without losing their character, be stirred into a common pot. The imposition of a technocratic framework upon our values is not the replacement of unstructured intuition by articulate reason. Nor is it a successful convergence upon a common agenda that will lead to a promised land. Rather, it is a failure to understand the nature of our own cultural and political heritage. When reflectively understood, that inheritance (marked though it may be by the fact of human imperfection and the unavoidable reality of moral disagreement) embodies a unity that transcends mere uniformity.

As Milton makes clear in the closing lines of Paradise Lost, when we look back on Eden we are right to drop “some natural tears”. But it is also right that we should “wipe them soon”. For it is the loss of Eden that makes us fully human, and our humanity is not to be regretted. Bearing the burden of our humanity, but also cherishing that humanity, we must “hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow” make our way through the world that lies before us. No single path is pre-ordained for us by reason, and no heavenly destination is secure. Our journey is not a march to some distant horizon where all that matters is the destination. It is a slow forging of bonds between the wanderers (bonds which are inseparable from memory, and attachment to the things that have been). The required posture of self-reliance, realistic hope, mutual supportiveness and fortitude in the face of adversity confers on us our most ennobling aspect.

To say that we must make our own way is not to say that our course is arbitrary. Nor is it to suggest that our course can be pursued only in a spirit of post-modernist “irony”. The ways that we might follow are the product of some broad prescriptions of reason, but those prescriptions require us to establish the institutions of civility, and such institutions can take a variety of different forms. A concrete version of civility emerges through a mixture of practice, experience, local allegiance and reflective dialogue. The separations upon which liberalism relies are indeed (as the critics have noticed) historical products rather than direct dispositions of reason. They are established as we go along, slowly woven into the texture of our lives, and found to be habitable before they become features of a philosophical understanding. Not everything of value needs to be an unmediated expression of natural reason: custom, shared attachment and habituation will always play a large part. The somewhat accidental inception of our practices will generally long precede our reflective understanding of their significance. But the attainment of that understanding does not convert our civil and political practices into mere applications of abstract principle. Indeed, they are to a large extent the groundwork of such principles, in detachment from which the principles themselves cannot be grasped or applied. We are the heirs of a complex history, and such spiritual depth as we possess is ours only in consequence of that history.

II. Rights and Goods

One of the key distinctions for the liberal “art of separation” is that between the realm of rights, on the one hand, and the realm of goods more generally, on the other. The separation is necessary if individuals are to enjoy a sphere within which their will can be decisive; without such a sphere, liberty cannot be a reality. Consequently, rights, once conferred by law or publicly acknowledged, must give to the individual a secure domain wherein the majority's view of what is desirable no longer prevails. As John Rawls points out, we think of justice as requiring rights that are not subject to “the calculus of social interests”.9 For that to be possible, not all social interests or values can be treated as rights. There must be a difference between rights and those various things which are good and to be pursued by governments and individuals.

The difference is manifested in the differing logics that rights and goods obey. Rights are to be carefully delineated, acknowledged and respected. They have bounds which should not be violated. Rights offer each of us a domain of options which enjoy a significant degree of independence from the will of others.10 This is why the boundaries of a right must, so far as possible, be identifiable in advance of particular situations where the right must be invoked and relied upon.

The boundaries of a right are important, even though they may seem on occasion to be artificial disruptions of the continuities of natural reason. Moral issues, taken in the round, are usually too complicated and multi-faceted to admit of reduction to simple watershed rules. To recognise rights is to ascribe decisive significance to what may seem only a narrow aspect of the moral situation. For this reason, those who emphasise the importance of rights can sometimes appear to be blind to the complexity of the moral issues that we confront. An insistence on rights as overriding can strike us as dogmatic. And those who dream of Eden may feel convinced that we can find a more sensible and moderate way of accommodating rights within our polity. Here is the seed of error.

By contrast with rights, which should not be violated, goods are to be pursued but must consequently be weighed and balanced against each other. Within the discourse of goods all relevant considerations seem to be easily accommodated, making this approach appear to be considerably more flexible, and open to the complexity of human affairs, than is the discourse of rights. But this flexibility in acknowledging various aspects of the moral situation is then combined with an opaque strategy for relating those aspects one to another: we are simply told that they must be “balanced”. In seeking to understand this form of reasoning, it proves remarkably difficult to penetrate beyond the metaphors of “weight” and “balancing”.

Amongst other separations, liberalism requires respect for the differences between two distinct forms of discourse: one where, unavoidably, we weigh and balance goods, and another where we acknowledge and respect rights. The boundary between these domains, and the notion of an individual right itself, are not things directly given by reason, but something that an emergent liberalism distils from an older discourse of right ordering.11 At the same time the ideas in question are not arbitrary, but responsive to the needs of social creatures. Established and policed by the rule of law, rights are possible only as a result of the governance of rules (the rule of law being fundamentally the governance of rules). This is not to deny the possibility of moral rights apart from law. But our sense of the overriding importance of rights, and therefore of moral rights, is always dependent upon our familiarity with the idea of respect for rules as something apart from the weighing and balancing of goods. The most eloquent expression of what is involved in such respect is to be found in the traditions of law. Moral rights grow and have their being only under the aegis of the law. As Maitland pointed out, “nothing that we can do will ever deprive the word ‘rights’ of its legal savour”.12

The logic of rights is quite different from the logic of values more generally. In asserting that I have a right to act in a certain way, or a right to some performance on your part, I do both more and less than claim that the action in question would be good and valuable. I do less than this because we may have rights to perform actions that are without value and perhaps even highly undesirable. To some extent this is a consequence of the liberal's emphasis upon the value of free choice: freedom to choose must often include freedom to choose badly. But it is also a consequence of the liberal's commitment to governance by general rules rather than ad hoc decision-making. Governing rules need to be workably clear and simple, and will therefore often fail to exclude from the scope of their protection activities that have little or no value. Practical requirements here reinforce liberal values.

In claiming a right I also do more than claim that my action is valuable. For valuable things must be weighed against other valuable things with which they can clash and compete. The logic of rights is different. Rights possess peremptory force. They bring an end to weighing and balancing. The question is not one of how my interests are balanced against yours, but of whether I am within or without the scope of my rights. The boundary of a right is uniquely important. The special force of rights is precisely their resistance to balancing. As Bernard Williams puts it: “If people have a right to something, then someone does wrong who denies it to them.” Rights do not, Williams observes: “signal goods and opportunities which … should be provided if it is possible.”13

This peremptory force is clearest of all in the case of legal rights. If I demonstrate to the judge that I have a legal right to plant tall trees along the perimeter of my land, depriving your land of light, we do not expect the judge to say: “I accept that you have such a right and I will certainly take account of it when I decide whether you should be allowed to plant the trees.” Once the right is demonstrated, the question at issue is conclusively resolved. When rights relate to the right-holder's own action, they are conclusive of the permissibility of that action.14 And when they relate to the action of another, they are conclusive of the duty to perform that action. Rights on this model are best framed, not as rights to states of affairs, but as rights to the performance of actions (including, when the right is so defined, actions that secure the existence of a certain state of affairs).

The peremptory force of rights is grounded in the fact that law is primarily a body of rules. Rules, as Dworkin points out, apply in an “all or nothing fashion”: if the rule is both valid and applicable it dictates the outcome in the case.15 A rule is not a reason for deciding the case one way which must then be balanced against other conflicting reasons. Collective judgments of good and bad are of course likely to underlie the community's decision to confer this or that right. But, once conferred, rights can be exercised as the right-holder chooses.16 We expect the liberal polity to respect the integrity of rules, and we entrust a special responsibility for this to the guardians of artificial reason: lawyers, judges and legal scholars.

The rule of law, understood in terms of Lon Fuller's eight requirements,17 and the existence of rights, are in this way intimately interconnected. To the extent that the rule of law is observed, the law as a whole becomes a complex system of rights and duties possessing peremptory force. And to the extent that I am governed in accordance with published, prospective rules, compliant with the eight requirements, I will enjoy a degree of freedom as independence from the power of others which can be enjoyed in no other way.18 For this reason, rules form the core of legal doctrine, and juristic craftsmanship embodies the aspiration of making the rules as clear, and as straightforwardly applicable, as possible. Although legal reason is always structured and informed by considerations of justice and the common good, proficient lawyers strive to make legal doctrine rule-like, so far as possible. They tend to regard vague formulations and balancing formulae as at best placeholders that must in due course be replaced by clear rules, when the accumulation of wisdom and experience makes the formulation of such rules possible. As Neil MacCormick put it: “Rival positions of principle, or rival views of the contextually appropriate balance or priority of principles, press towards settling rules that state a determinate position focused on determinate types of situation.”19

Being the product of rules, rights that possess peremptory force are assumed to form an internally consistent scheme. Legal systems have intellectual practices that go some way towards maintaining this consistency. Thus we treat the later enactment as modifying the earlier enactment; the more specific rule as derogating from the more general rule. And, when rules appear to conflict in a way that is recalcitrant to these techniques, we strive to interpret each rule in a way that removes the conflict. By contrast with this, when rights are construed as “optimisation requirements” (as Robert Alexy construes constitutional rights, in his enormously influential work on this subject20) conflicts between rights can be allowed to proliferate and must then be resolved by “balancing” the relevant values in individual cases.

The proposal that we think of rights as optimisation requirements to be balanced against each other, and against other considerations, may seem attractive. After all, when rights are given peremptory force, the precise location of the boundary of each right comes to be critically important (since the question to be addressed always concerns the scope of the right). But natural human concerns often fail to reflect the discontinuities established by rights, such discontinuities being the product of artifice. Our concerns tend to flow into one another, or to be marked by differences of degree rather than kind, making a focus upon clear boundaries seem misguided. Furthermore, however important rights may be, they are not absolute and are not the only things that we care about.21 We care about many different things and sometimes we are forced to choose. So why not acknowledge this situation more clearly, by thinking of rights as factors to be weighed in a balance rather than as possessing peremptory force? Why concern ourselves with the precise (and, therefore, somewhat artificial) boundary of each right, when we could treat each right as simply flagging up an area of concern that may have quite vague and indeterminate limits? Why not think of the political community as an undifferentiated field of competing values, governed by natural reason, rather than as an assemblage of distinct practices each with its own internal logic? Do the artificial distinctions that we have inherited really matter? Can a deeper moral unity not be achieved if those distinctions are abandoned?

In the face of such proposals, one who insists upon a particular usage (e.g. one who insists that rights must possess peremptory force) can appear to be merely dogmatic, as if they are simply invoking our ordinary usage and seeking to render that usage static and invulnerable to the flexibility of dialogue. The outright rejection of such dogmatism can seem sensible.

An understanding of the nature of rights, however, should never be detached from the broader political and juridical philosophy which gives to such an understanding its point. My aim, therefore, is not dogmatically to assert and cling to a traditional meaning, as if meanings are set in stone. Rather, the aim is to deepen our grasp of distinctions that have, in the past, been respected and embodied in our practice, and to give some indication of why those distinctions matter. This is not an exercise in dogmatic lexicography, but a contribution to the liberal art of separation.

III. Moral Rights

Of course, as I have already acknowledged, we may speak of moral rights as well as legal rights. Indeed, the centrality of law to the liberal vision of political community causes juridical notions, such as “justice” and “rights”, to become dominant within public discourse. But here we find a dangerous dynamic within liberal society. For the emphasis upon the importance of rights within a liberal political community creates a popular culture wherein the language of rights can come to colonise every aspect of the moral discourse. To refuse to express a moral concern as a matter of “rights” is now regarded as failing to take that moral concern seriously. Older moral concepts, such as “virtue” and “the common good”, have an antiquated sound for modern ears. They are very little understood and may even have a vaguely troubling resonance for many. We find ourselves asking whether an emphasis on virtue might not be incompatible with the liberal's celebration of personal freedom. Or we ask whether an emphasis on the common good might not endanger individual interests that compete with the common good.

The delicate ecology of our inherited moral discourse is thus placed at risk by the steadily burgeoning discourse of rights. This is most certainly regrettable. For, apart from the other losses that the development entails, when all moral concerns are expressed as involving “rights”, we lose any sense of the precise way in which rights possess a special moral force. Rights come to be thought of as simply important interests that are to be balanced against other interests. The exact bounds of a right cease to be of real importance, since the right is fundamentally a factor to be weighed in a balance rather than a clearly defined domain of enforceable entitlement. Or, worse still, an assertion of “rights” is thought of as simply a demand, indicative of strength of feeling but nothing more. A corrosive moral subjectivism here goes hand in hand with a public encouragement of intransigence.

The neglect of, or misunderstanding of, such concepts as “virtue” and “the common good” is equally lamentable. For liberal democracy depends upon the virtue of its citizens: in particular the virtues of tolerance, mutual civility and respect for the inherited practices that constitute the polity. The proper functioning of political institutions is seamlessly connected to the common courtesies that inform daily intercourse. A declining emphasis upon the virtue of citizens suggests a belief that politics is exclusively a struggle concerning the use of governmental power, rather than a matter which centres upon civil relations obtaining between citizens.22 But liberal democracy is unlikely to survive the emergence of a culture where citizens accept no need for personal virtue, no requirement of common civility, and expect all problems to be resolved by technocratic solutions.

Similarly, the common good is not some sort of aggregate which can sensibly be contrasted with individual rights. It is not something that can be measured by economic indicators or by surveys of self-reported well-being. It is not the fruit of technocratic intervention. It is, at its core, an orderly structure of rights and practices grounded in the virtue of citizens. It must be oriented towards justice, but in a manner that acknowledges the contested nature of perfect justice and is therefore respectful of established laws. The common good is not the complete good for individuals, but nor is it merely an instrumentally important necessity. As an expression of civic friendship, it is an essential constituent of individual flourishing: a constituent which can only be realised in common. It is the form of friendship obtaining between citizens who are independent yet mutually supportive. Our lives would be impoverished, and not simply impeded, without it.

Misunderstanding these things, we are in danger of losing our path. To possess a distinct role within moral discourse, rights must possess a peremptory force analogous to that of legal rights. They must be treated as conclusive of the issues that they govern. A liberal society requires legal rights (primarily the rights conferred by ordinary laws) that are not optimisation requirements but peremptory constraints upon such requirements. Such an understanding of the nature and status of legal rights is threatened when our seemingly most prominent and important rights, namely constitutional rights, lack peremptory force. Rights must be insulated from the calculus of social interests: they must not become factors within that calculus. Such rights depend upon the art of separation. And respect for the relevant separation is an expression of civic friendship.

The profligate invocation of moral “rights” erodes significant distinctions and undermines mutual civility. Imbibing the general sense of rights as urgent and overriding, while ignoring its juridical substance, the insistence upon framing virtually every moral issue as one concerning “rights” simply spawns an unwillingness to moderate demands or to concede the possibility of error. When every important interest comes to be spoken of as a right, the distinct logic of rights is obscured. In this way, the more celebratory and strident understandings of liberal values become the enemies of liberalism, destroying the political fabric that nurtured them. Haunted by a dream of moral wholeness, we too easily fall prey to an empty sloganising which obliterates the established allegiances upon which civility depends. Setting our gaze upon remote horizons, we neglect the value of our familiar inheritance.23 We allow the liberal “art of separation” to dissolve in a toxic monoculture of asserted but illusory rights.

IV. Constitutional Rights

After 1945, it was considered desirable to do something to prevent a recurrence of regimes resembling the Third Reich. Constitutional rights seemed to be part of the answer, and both the German Basic Law and the European Convention on Human Rights included a catalogue of such constitutional rights, drafted very much with the Third Reich in mind. The rights were not limited to the traditional civil and political liberties (the kind of rights that are thought to bolster the functioning of democracy). Nor were they framed, for the most part, by reference to permitted or required actions. Rather, they sought to identify certain fundamental human interests which were to be insulated from the most extreme hazards of legislative and governmental supremacy. This was a new turn in our politics and it posed some very new questions.

The solution was found in defining rights very broadly but making the majority of such rights subject to limitation by reference to certain specified legitimate state objectives. The various possible bases for limiting rights are themselves framed broadly, so that they include practically all of the relevant considerations upon which any government could legitimately act. Given the historical context in which these documents emerged, one might well have expected that they would be construed as aiming to prevent only the most gross injustices; and, given their drafting, one might have assumed that this was to be achieved by restricting governments and legislatures to actions genuinely motivated by a concern for legitimate state objectives (thereby ruling out such things as the evident persecution of particular ethnic or religious groups).

Instead of adopting such a reading, the courts concluded that the rights in question were to be applied only via a doctrine of “proportionality”. Under this doctrine, the encroachment upon the right must not only be strictly necessary to the advancement of a relevant governmental objective, but the latter advancement must also be sufficiently important to justify the particular encroachment involved. The approach immerses the courts in the task of weighing and balancing what are acknowledged to be entirely legitimate state objectives; and the core question to be addressed concerns, not the sincerity of the legislature's ostensible purpose, but the soundness of the value judgments upon which their legislative decision rests. This model has been adopted in many jurisdictions around the world. The German Constitutional Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the Israeli Supreme Court, and the Canadian Supreme Court have all become highly influential exponents of what has been described as the “global model” of constitutional rights.24

That description is not intended to suggest that all of these regimes are fundamentally the same, but that they do have some important and distinctive features in common. The description may also seem appropriate for a further reason. The interpretation of rights in both the German Basic Law and the European Convention on Human Rights (and in constitutional documents from a number of other regimes) reflects the general way in which rights are framed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are, for the most part, framed and interpreted as protecting fundamental interests of the right-holder rather than by reference to specific actions (permissible actions of the right-holder or required actions of a correlative duty-bearer).25 And this common feature may suggest, as an ultimate guiding possibility, a monistic understanding of the relationship between international and domestic law, with the entire global structure centring upon human rights.

While it has its critics, the global model of constitutional rights also has many enthusiastic admirers. The reasons for the popularity of this model are not far to seek, even if we set on one side its suggestion of being a step on the way towards a rights-based global legal order. For it mirrors closely the popular culture of rights mentioned earlier, where rights come to be thought of as simply weighty interests that feature in a process of weighing and balancing. The popular discourse of rights, having developed in the shadow of the law, now threatens to become a parasite which fully colonises its host.

V. An Illusory Distinction?

My argument depends upon a contrast between the domain of rights and rules (on the one hand) and the domain of goods and balancing (on the other). But it might be suggested that the contrast is overdrawn. For, in the first place, some rules are framed in terms which require balancing: the most obvious example being rules that employ concepts such as “reasonableness”. However, given the task of interpreting and applying such rules, lawyers have often tended to develop, through precedent, subsidiary rules that unpack and concretise the requirements of “reasonableness”. This tendency (which some will consider undesirable) illustrates the way in which legal thought is normally guided by the orienting idea of law as a system of rules: lawyers have traditionally, and rightly, resisted the idea of official discretion unrestricted by rules and have seen it as part of their responsibility to develop and articulate the law in the form of rules.

Robert Alexy envisages something similar happening, in the long term, in relation to the balancing of rights against governmental objectives, under his “Law of Competing Principles”. This law states, in Alexy's formulation, that “The circumstances under which one principle takes precedence over another constitute the conditions of a rule which has the same legal consequences as the principle taking precedence”.26 The suggestion is that, through the steady accumulation of judicial decisions on the applicability of constitutional rights, a body of rules will slowly emerge. Those rules would in turn give rise to rights possessing genuine peremptory force.

Even if Alexy was correct about this, we could scarcely rest easy with a deferral of secure rights into the indefinite, and probably quite remote, future. Nor are the current indications especially encouraging. Decisions on proportionality are often closely focused upon the specific facts of individual cases. Indeed, the proportionality doctrine does not seem to embody or encourage a sense of the lawyerly responsibility to develop and articulate workable rules for the guidance of future decisions. Judges cannot, of course, justify decisions by reference to non-universalisable features of the case (such as the date on which it was decided) since a requirement of universalisability is inherent in the very idea of justification. But they can justify their decisions by reference to complex assemblages of universalisable features, so that no workable rule which is likely to apply in future cases will emerge. And there are good reasons for expecting judges to adopt that course of action. For, if they allow binding subsidiary rules to develop, they will be abrogating for the future the very considerable political power that the balancing model gives them. Are we to ignore the possibility that judges may not wish to lay the shackles of law back on their own limbs, having once tasted the pleasures of political power without political responsibility?

In the light of these considerations it would be foolish to dismiss the worries that many commentators have about the largely discretionary character of constitutional rights decisions under the doctrine of proportionality. The fact that legal scholars might hope, in due course, to distil some rules from a long course of discretionary judicial decisions is no substitute for the judges feeling a responsibility to articulate such rules, and adhere to them, in the first place. Yet we find that enthusiastic admirers of the proportionality approach, far from urging judges to undertake such a responsibility, are inclined to be critical of the search for “very sharp, categorical distinctions” and “rigid and unbending rules”.27

It might be alleged that my picture of legal reasoning as rule-application is itself flawed. For rules are frequently modified in the course of application, and this is frequently done in the application of deeper legal principles. While rules apply in an “all or nothing fashion”, theorists such as Dworkin speak of the law as involving “principles” in addition to rules: principles have a dimension of weight and are to be weighed against each other. Furthermore, Alexy analogises constitutional rights to principles in other areas of law such as private law, viewing them both as “optimisation requirements”. So, from this point of view (it might be argued), the contrast between ordinary legal doctrinal thought and the balancing process established by the global model of rights is much less substantial than I am suggesting.

But, in private law, principles are not best understood as serving interests or states of affairs that are describable independently of the principles. The principle that “no man shall profit from his own wrong” does not aim at any situation other than the one that consists in people not profiting from their own wrongs. The principle that “contractual rights must be exercised in good faith” governs the standards obtaining within the contractual relationship, but it does not aim to advance any independently identifiable state of affairs that is likely to flow from that principle-defined relationship. The principle volenti non fit injuria aims to specify what will and will not count as a legal injury, but does not aim thereby to advance some situation that could be defined in terms not involving the ideas of “injury” and “consent”. We may loosely speak of the judge in the private law context as “balancing” such principles one against another. But a more enlightening picture would be one of the judge or jurist seeking to frame rules that are appropriately respectful of the relevant principles. Even when the rules seek to advance certain goals in an instrumental fashion, the content of the rules will often be shaped by principles (perhaps by a plurality of partially competing principles) which are to be honoured and respected rather than advanced. The language of “optimisation” obscures this important difference.28 Here we see the imposition of a technocratic language upon juridical practices informed by more traditional moral conceptions.

It should be added that principles in private law are themselves extrapolated and generalised from the existing legal rules. They serve to give greater determinacy to the legal rules by ensuring that the interpretation and application of individual rules is informed and controlled by the system of laws as a whole. The articulation of principles proceeds on the basis of an assumption that, to enjoy legitimacy, the legal rules must be aimed at implementing some coherent conception of justice and the common good. Constitutional rights, by contrast, need have no organic connection with the existing legal rules.29 They are introduced by enactment and their point is not to stabilise the interpretation of rules but to measure those rules against an independent standard. Alexy's analysis of constitutional rights and legal principles as both being “optimisation requirements” is therefore inherently misleading.

VI. Justice and Mutual Civility

Because constitutional rights are now required to be balanced against legitimate governmental objectives, their precise bounds are given less importance. The scope of the rights tends to spread until practically the whole law is entangled with issues of constitutional or human rights. This is especially true of those jurisdictions where the relevant catalogue of rights includes a general right to liberty. The tendency is greatly augmented by doctrines of “horizontal application”. The phenomenon may be referred to as “the radiating effect” of rights.

These very extensive rights now lack peremptory force: they settle nothing but are simply important considerations to be taken into account in a balancing process. We may well wonder whether anything is left here of the idea of “a right”. The distinct logic of rights decomposes into the general balancing of values one against another.

Thus the editors of a recent volume of essays on the subject tell us that rights have now been “overtaken” by the idea of proportionality.30 One critical commentator has perceptively suggested that the entire catalogue of constitutional rights might be replaced by a simple provision to the effect that the law must observe the principle of proportionality.31 And one very enthusiastic advocate of the current law tells us that we need to “abandon the idea that rights hold a special normative force” and should adjust our expectations concerning rights.32

This is not simply a matter of constitutional rights falling short of the ideal we might have hoped for. If that were the case we might well say that they are not perfect, but they are better than nothing and we cannot see a way to improve them. The radiating effect of rights, and the doctrine of horizontal application, mean that practically the entire law comes to be subject to the proportionality test. So it is not just that we have got only part of what we might have wanted: constitutional rights but without the peremptory force of ordinary legal rights. We have in principle subjected all legal rights to a test of weighing and balancing against other values, thereby abandoning the distinctive logic of legal rights.

And here the heart of the problem may become clearly visible. The idea of “proportionality” is now standardly construed in a technocratic fashion that implies some form of commensurability (even if it is only the largely empty form of comparing degrees of seriousness of encroachment upon the relevant values). This is especially so when rights are thought of as “optimisation requirements”. But, if we set on one side the technocratic outlook that is suggested by such talk of proportionality, it might be said (as Aristotle might say) that proportionality is justice: a law which perfectly acknowledges all relevant interests and considerations, and exhibits respect for them in an appropriate way, is a perfectly just law.33 Is the core idea underlying the new law of constitutional rights simply the idea of justice? A constitutional doctrine that allows the judges to strike down laws (or require the amendment of laws) whenever they consider them to be unjust seems to be an experiment fraught with danger. For we disagree about justice. To say this is not at all to espouse a non-cognitivist position which says that there is no truth concerning justice. It is simply to say that arguments concerning justice are not algorithms; and, even if there is a truth, reasonable people will disagree about what the truth may be. This is not a contentious claim but a trite one. It is vital that we understand this, for it is the basis of the mutual civility upon which any liberal society must be built.

If we are to have rights, we need a shared set of rules. We need, as Finnis puts it, a shared plan for the common good.34 A liberal society will favour a plan that establishes clear rules and avoids the conferment of extensive discretionary powers upon public officials (including judges). Hence the efforts of legislators, judges and jurists to articulate law in the form of a system of rules.35 And, failing a degree of unanimity which is highly unlikely in a modern liberal society, some of those shared rules will be regarded by many as less than perfectly just. Mutual civility, grounded in a wise acceptance of reasonable disagreement concerning justice, then requires compliance with rules even though we may consider them unjust. Our compliance with the law is the primary expression of our civility or civic friendship.36

Mutual civility, and the requirement that the laws must be obeyed even when we consider them to be unjust, together rest upon the thought that my own views concerning justice may be mistaken. This thought in turn rests upon an idea of moral truth, for if there is no possibility of truth (if, for example, moral judgments are simple expressions of feeling without cognitive content) there can be no possibility of mistake. At the same time, the acknowledged possibility of error is an acknowledgement that moral arguments are not algorithms but depend upon an irreducible element of individual judgment that will vary from one person to another. By contrast with this, an entrenchment of proportionality doctrine at the heart of our law seems to imply a more technocratic view within which the systematic application of a prescribed analysis yields conclusions that do not admit of reasonable dispute. The falsehood thereby placed at the heart of our legal and political culture means that we build upon insecure foundations, permanently open to excoriating critique.

One thing that mutual civility does not require is compliance with enacted rules that are themselves a clear breach of mutual civility: rules which are so grossly unjust that no reasonable person could possibly consider them to be just; rules that could not plausibly be claimed to be good faith, albeit misguided, attempts to articulate the requirements of justice. This is perhaps the idea behind Gustav Radbruch's proposal that truly grossly unjust enactments should not be regarded as law at all.37 Like the drafters of the German Basic Law and the European Convention on Human Rights, he had in mind the experience of the Third Reich. Radbruch viewed his formula as a proposal for extreme situations going well beyond the disagreements of ordinary democratic politics. He particularly emphasised the need for compliance (by judges as well as citizens) with rules that are considered to be unjust, though not grossly so.

Legal rights enjoy peremptory force in virtue of mutual civility. They should not be equated with the “absolute” rights of the natural law tradition. Mutual civility finds expression in many ways, but one of them is the rule-based character of laws and the willingness of all citizens (judges included) to respect that character. An understanding of, and respect for, the rule-based character of law should be central to any decisions regarding the law-making effect of a statute, or a constitutional document: for how can one determine the law-making effect of such a document without considering the essential nature of law?38

One of Radbruch's contemporary defenders is Robert Alexy, who is also the author of by far the most influential monograph on rights in the German Basic Law, a monograph that has exerted a huge influence upon the global model of rights more generally.39Yet, in spite of his defence of Radbruch, Alexy seems to forget a large part of Radbruch's message when he turns to the subject of constitutional rights. For Alexy argues that, in applying proportionality doctrine, no weight is to be attached to the fact that the allegedly offending enactment has indeed been published as a law by the proper law-making authority. To give the mere positivity of the law any weight in this context would, in Alexy's view, negate the priority of the Constitution over ordinary parliamentary legislation.40

Alexy's view is clearly question-begging, since it simply assumes that the proportionality doctrine, unmodified by any distinct concern for the need for certainty in law, is an appropriate test of constitutionality. Yet that is the very question in issue. Sound or not, Alexy's argument is influential and shows us the way the wind has been blowing, for a very long time.

Judges have been faced with the task of interpreting and applying constitutional documents which appear to create constitutional rights with one hand and then abrogate them with the other. This situation is perhaps regrettable. The documents might have been construed differently, as requiring genuine pursuit of legitimate state objectives rather than as inviting a judicial assessment of competing values.41 Possibly, the relevant documents should have been drafted along different lines so as to facilitate the courts in giving constitutional rights hard edges and peremptory force. More probably, the idea of judicially enforced constitutional rights, framed by reference to fundamental protected interests, is attractive in the abstract but proves to be flawed when we consider the problems surrounding its implementation. The current situation, however, is unlikely to be reversed. So what should the judges now do? How should the judges interpret the various constitutional documents that gave rise to the global model of constitutional rights? My principal aim in this essay is to offer an analysis of the current situation and its illusions, not to prescribe solutions. But I might justly be criticised if I were to say nothing whatever about possible strategies for ameliorating that situation. The remarks which follow are therefore sketchy and speculative in intent.

One thing that judges might try would be to arrest the radiating effect of rights and give each right (and, consequently, the proportionality test) a narrowly limited domain. This would avoid the destabilising effects that constitutional rights can at present have upon practically the entire body of laws. Since we disagree about justice, a great many laws can (not wholly unreasonably) be challenged as unjust; and such challenges can always be framed as arguments about proportionality, provided that some of the interests encroached upon can be brought within the scope of a constitutional right. Attempts to restrict the scope of rights will, of course, face serious problems. But the problems may not be insuperable, and some attempt in this direction should be made.

Alternatively, or additionally, judges might try to develop, through their decisions on proportionality, a clear body of rules (reflecting Alexy's “Law of Competing Principles”) and not simply very general balancing guidelines. Judges might in this way acknowledge their duty of fidelity to the idea of law, understood as a system of rules and rights (both constitutional rights and ordinary legal rights) with peremptory force. They would contribute to the maintenance of a legal tradition within which determinate rules and doctrines are central: what Finnis has described as “the vast legal effort to render the law … relatively impervious to discretionary assessments of competing values”.42 The development of such rules, however, will inevitably be the slow growth of time if it occurs at all; and, while time passes, the judges may become increasingly accustomed to, and comfortable with, their new and more free-wheeling role. As explained above, judges could easily avoid creating such rules and might well be expected to cling tenaciously to the power that they enjoy in the absence of such rules.

Finally, and particularly if (as is quite likely) the above strategies prove to be too difficult to implement, judges might replace the proportionality test with what might loosely be thought of as a test of gross disproportionality or (perhaps better) gross injustice.43 In other words the question should not be “is this law unjust?” but “is this law so grossly unjust that no reasonable person could consider it to be just?”. This test should be construed as resembling the formula proposed by Gustav Radbruch, as his own proposal for avoiding a repetition of the horrors of the Third Reich. And, in the case of the German Basic Law and the European Convention on Human Rights, it would come closer than the present doctrine to capturing the original aims of the drafters, those aims being the prevention of a recurrence of abhorrent evil, and not the conferment on judges of a perfectly general power to review the justice of the laws. Radbruch's formula contemplated situations in extremis. It is unavoidably vague, but an objection grounded upon vagueness can scarcely lie in the mouths of those who advocate the doctrine of proportionality, which is no less vague and (in not being limited to extreme situations) of far wider scope and with far wider implications.

The virtues of a test of gross injustice, by comparison with the present law, are twofold. In the first place, it confines the impact of vague balancing tests to the extreme margin, leaving a broad swathe of ordinary political contexts where the rights conferred by statute or common law can enjoy genuine peremptory force without the constant risk of being overturned in a constitutional challenge. There can always be extreme situations where we are forced to choose between core values even though some of those core values may be of a kind that cannot without loss be integrated in a balancing or optimising framework. But, if the distinctive character of such values is to be preserved, one must try to ensure that the approach that is forced upon us in extremis does not become a feature of the value's diurnal role. Rights which possess peremptory force, but which may have to be set aside in situations of extremity, are not thereby reduced to optimisation requirements, or interests to be weighed in a general calculus of considerations.

Second, and very importantly, a doctrine along the lines of Radbruch's formula could represent a public articulation and endorsement of the value of mutual civility, rather than (as at present, under an unmodified proportionality test) a violation of mutual civility in the name of a supposedly perfect justice.

Some view me as pushing at an open door. I have been told by colleagues that a concern for truly gross injustice is what we have at present. Those who adopt this interpretation of the doctrine see the courts as already exercising the necessary severe self-restraint in applying the test of proportionality. I must confess that I do not share their understanding of current events or current doctrine. It is true that, in the law of the European Convention on Human Rights there has been talk of a certain “margin of appreciation”. But this is normally linked to claims concerning the need for local communities to judge their own needs and circumstances if perfect justice is to be achieved. I see no acknowledgement here of the demands of mutual civility, or of the fact that mutual civility demands a willingness to comply with (and to enforce) laws that some will, not unreasonably, consider to be unjust.

Others appear to be rightly concerned about the capacity of proportionality doctrine greatly to enlarge the power of the judges.44 Thus Kai Moller proposes a test of “reasonableness” as opposed to “correctness”.45 But proposals of this sort, by working within the general framework of proportionality doctrine, appear to rest upon an endorsement of the idea that rights are optimisation requirements rather than peremptory constraints. They may seek to check the dangerous growth of judicial power, but they nevertheless do so within an intellectual framework that is in danger of obliterating the distinctive character of rights. The approach that I am advocating, by contrast, wholly rejects the idea that rights are optimisation requirements, while acknowledging that the binding force of rights is dependent upon a degree of mutual civility being respected and maintained. Outside of extreme situations of truly gross injustice, ordinary legal rights can then continue to enjoy peremptory force. Constitutional rights should be understood as providing a framework of positive law within which the issue of gross injustice can be addressed.

There are those who will say that evil must be nipped in the bud, and that this requires the courts to intervene as soon as the law appears to depart from justice: one cannot afford to wait for the evil to reach a truly gross level. But those who argue this way allow the fear of evil to become an evil in itself. They abandon the attainable virtue of mutual civility in pursuit of an ideal that fails to acknowledge the broad scope of reasonable disagreement. We do not inhabit the Garden of Eden, but a fallen world where we disagree. Nor do we seek eventually to find our way back to Eden. Rather, we willingly accept the burden of our humanity, and seek to make our habitation in full acknowledgement of our limitations. We aim to establish and strengthen the bonds of friendship within a world where individual reason is an imperfect guide. These are the basic facts of the human condition which require from us the virtue of mutual civility, and which make that value of greater relevance than perfect justice.

We should be careful not to place at the heart of our law and politics an institutional violation of mutual civility, whereby those with power (in this case, the judges) are willing to employ that power to overturn the reasonable, even if somewhat misguided, judgments of their fellow citizens. For, if we do that, how can civil compliance be expected of our citizens? What value can the judges invoke, as a basis for the binding force of their own (frequently contestable) decisions, when those decisions appear to deny the possibility of reasonable disagreement concerning justice?

If laws are disobeyed (whether by citizens or judges) on the grounds of their injustice (as opposed to gross injustice of a kind that violates mutual civility) this must be as a well-judged act of civil disobedience designed to draw attention to the law and combined with a willingness to accept the resulting punishment, or other consequences (resignation being the appropriate course of action for judges), as entirely legitimate. Civil disobedience can in this way be fully compatible with, and even serve to reinforce, the value of mutual civility.

The institutions which embody and express mutual civility are a product of artifice, informed by time and experience. Consequently, there is no blueprint for liberal democracy, and certainly not one that can be arrived at by pure theoretical reflection. For this reason I do not offer a set of detailed prescriptions, but merely some suggestions concerning the way in which our present unhappy situation might be ameliorated. Nevertheless there are certain aspirations which should shape the character of a liberal democracy. If I had to identify some of those aspirations I would say that they include (1) the rule of law, understood in a relatively austere way as governance by rigorously enforced rules compliant with Lon Fuller's eight requirements; (2) secure rights with peremptory force (itself a consequence of the rule of law understood in that austere sense); and (3) the practices of mutual civility, understood as requiring, amongst other things, respect for and compliance with established laws which we may consider to be of imperfect justice. All of these aspirations, it seems to me, are endangered by the currently influential model of constitutional rights.

Footnotes

1 Walzer, M., “Liberalism and the Art of Separation” (1984) 12 Pol.Theory 315CrossRef | Google Scholar.

2 Tawney, R.H., quoted in Rogan, T., The Moral Economists (Princeton and Oxford 2017), 47Google Scholar.

3 Prohibitions del Roy (1607) 12 Co.Rep. 64, 77 E.R. 1342, [1607] EWHC K.B. J23.

4 See Rawls, J., Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, MA 2000), 52Google Scholar.

5 A blurring which is encouraged by the most influential theories of law. See note 38 below.

6 See Moyn, S., The Last Utopia (Cambridge, MA 2012)Google Scholar.

7 Such a semblance of commensurability may consist in no more than a formally structured requirement that one should assess the “importance” of different values, or the “seriousness” of various possible encroachments upon such values. This is a characteristic feature of the doctrine of proportionality which now forms an integral part of the law of constitutional rights.

8 Alexy, R., A Theory of Constitutional Rights, translated by Rivers, J. (Oxford 2002)Google Scholar. Reliance upon the language of “optimisation” (or similar language) need not involve a direct denial of the diversity of forms of value. Rather, the language can be deployed in such a way as simply to abstract from the relevant differences. But such abstraction is itself an implicit denial of the importance of those distinctions.

9 Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice, revised ed. (Oxford 1999), 4Google Scholar.

10 See Simmonds, N., Law as a Moral Idea (Oxford 2007), 104–09Google Scholar.

11 The history and significance of this emergence is much disputed. See Brett, A., Liberty, Right and Nature (Cambridge 2003)Google Scholar; Tuck, R., Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge 1981)Google Scholar; Tierney, B., The Idea of Natural Rights (Grand Rapids, MI 1997)Google Scholar; Strauss, L., Natural Right and History (Chicago 1953)Google Scholar.

12 Maitland, F.W., A Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality (Indianapolis 2000), 90Google Scholar.

13 Williams, B., In the Beginning Was the Deed (Princeton 2005), 64Google Scholar. We might wish to correct Williams's formulation in one respect. Rather than saying that one who denies a right to the right-holder “does wrong”, it would perhaps be better to say that the right-holder “is wronged” when their right is denied to them. Both formulations make it clear that a right is not simply a good to be optimised. But the latter formulation is compatible with the view that there may be situations where the violation of a right is justifiable, in spite of being a wrong to the individual concerned. This helps to distinguish rights with peremptory force from the absolute rights of the natural law tradition. There is a further respect in which legal rights possess peremptory force without being absolute: their binding force is dependent upon their basis in mutual civility. See note 21 below.

14 Here I ignore certain complexities. For example, rights hold against other juridical persons. Thus I may have a right as against my neighbour but not in relation to some governing authority that requires planning permission for the planting of tall trees. Furthermore, rights can be Hohfeldian powers or immunities rather than claim-rights or liberties. Like claim-rights and liberties, powers and immunities are peremptory with respect to the issues that they govern. None of this affects the general point being made in the text.

15 Dworkin, R., Taking Rights Seriously (London 1977)Google Scholar, ch. 2.

16 Hence the French doctrine of “abuse of rights” has sometimes been regarded as an illiberal subversion of the entire notion of a right: see Lawson, F.H., Negligence in the Civil Law (Oxford 1950)Google Scholar. But see MacLeod, A.J., Property and Practical Reason(Cambridge 2015)CrossRef | Google Scholar, chs. 6, 7.

17 Fuller, L., The Morality of Law, revised ed. (New Haven 1969)Google Scholar, ch. 2.

18 See Simmonds, N., “Law as an Idea We Live By” in Duke, G. and George, R. (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Jurisprudence (Cambridge 2017)Google Scholar; Simmonds, Law as a Moral Idea.

19 MacCormick, N., Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory, 2nd ed. (Oxford 1994)CrossRef | Google Scholar, xi.

20 Alexy, A Theory of Constitutional Rights, p. 54.

21 As will become clear later in this essay, legal rights with peremptory force should not be equated with the absolute rights of the natural law tradition (rights which must in no circumstances be encroached upon). Theocentric natural law positions can argue that the future of the world is God's responsibility, while man's responsibility is one of obedience to God's law. But, in the absence of a belief in divine providence, a belief in absolute rights can seem puzzlingly fanatical. Legal rights are not absolute but bind in virtue of the value of mutual civility. When mutual civility genuinely breaks down, or the limits of mutual civility are exceeded, legal rights lose their peremptory force. See also note 13 above.

22 Jeremy Waldron has recently remarked upon the “drastically unmediated proximity” that obtains between individuals when they ascribe only instrumental importance to existing political structures. See Waldron, J., Political Political Theory (Cambridge, Mass.,2016), 15CrossRef | Google Scholar. We might think of this “unmediated proximity” as the absence of mutual civility.

23 See Simmonds, N., “The Bondwoman's Son and the Beautiful Soul” (2013) 58 Am.J.Juris. 111CrossRef | Google Scholar.

24 Moller, K., The Global Model of Constitutional Rights (Oxford 2012)CrossRef | Google Scholar.

25 This is reflected in the idea that even those rights which might seem to impose only negative duties nevertheless require states to take positive steps to protect the relevant interests. Amartya Sen argues that, when rights are conceived of as defining or restricting permissible actions (rather than in terms of desirable outcomes), the rights conferred must nevertheless be selected by reference to their probable outcomes and are therefore parasitic upon the identification of desirable outcomes: Sen, A., The Idea of Justice(London 2009)Google Scholar, ch. 14. Even if this is true (which I doubt) it does not alter the fact that rights defined by reference to permissible and impermissible actions (or choices) can be given peremptory force, while the ascription of such force to rights defined by reference to outcomes is likely to be very problematic.

26 Alexy, A Theory of Constitutional Rights, p. 54.

27 Beatty, D.M., The Ultimate Rule of Law (Oxford 2004), 41CrossRef | Google Scholar. It must be conceded that the US Supreme Court (Beatty's example of a rule-based approach) has not been very successful in articulating and adhering to such rules.

28 See note 8 above.

29 The likelihood of any such organic connection is considerably reduced by the fact that the bulk of ordinary legal rights are rights to specific actions: liberties to perform actions, or claim-rights to the performance of such actions by determinate others. Constitutional rights, by contrast, tend to be rights to independently describable states of affairs, or to the performance of an indeterminate range of actions by indeterminate others. I include some further remarks on this (and other related matters) in “Constitutional Rights and the Rule of Law” (2016) Analisi e Diritto 251.

30 Huscroft, G., Miller, B. and Webber, G. (eds.), Proportionality and the Rule of Law (Cambridge 2012)Google Scholar, 1.

31 Webber, G., The Negotiable Constitution (Cambridge 2009), 4CrossRef | Google Scholar.

32 Moller, The Global Model of Constitutional Rights, pp. 73, 5n.

33 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book V.

34 See Finnis, J., Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd ed. (Oxford 2011)Google Scholar; Finnis, J., Collected Essays, Volume 4: Philosophy of Law (Oxford 2011), 12CrossRef | Google Scholar.

35 As noted by MacCormick, Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory; and Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights.

36 “(I)n complex societies, law is the only medium in which it is possible reliably to establish morally obligated relationships of mutual respect even among strangers.” Habermas, J., Between Facts and Norms, translated by Rehg, W. (Cambridge 1996), 460CrossRef| Google Scholar.

37 For the best defence of Radbruch's position, see Alexy, R., The Argument from Injustice (Oxford 2003)Google Scholar.

38 In this essay, in the interests of simplicity, I try to avoid becoming entangled in the philosophical debate surrounding law's nature. It is, however, worth making a few remarks by way of clarification. In recent decades legal education has been influenced by a theory which claims that the interpretation and application of texts such as statutes and constitutions, beyond their “core of settled meaning”, involves open-ended policy choices. The approach rests upon a denial of the reflexive character of law (i.e. the need for doctrinal legal thought to be guided by reflection upon the idea of law). That denial, however, is misguided (as I have endeavoured to demonstrate in some of my other writings). A judge seeking to give effect to a statute or constitution must ask what the law-making effect of that document might be, and this necessitates reflection upon the nature of law. General policy considerations, if unconnected to the essential nature of law, are not, in themselves, pertinent in this context. On the other hand, the maintenance of law's peremptory force, and the avoidance of its collapse into a system of official (judicial) discretion, is of central importance. The judge's duty of fidelity to the idea of law (which is one manifestation of the duty of mutual civility incumbent upon every citizen) therefore requires the judge to seek an interpretation of constitutional rights that preserves, so far as possible, the peremptory and rule-centred character of law.

39 Alexy, A Theory of Constitutional Rights.

40 Alexy, R., “Comments and Responses” in Klatt, M. (ed.), Institutionalized Reason: The Jurisprudence of Robert Alexy (Oxford 2012), 331Google Scholar.

41 Such an interpretation is in many ways the most natural one to adopt. While undoubtedly creating problems of its own, it does at least focus judicial attention upon the issue of outright evil, and acknowledges the moral priority of mutual civility over this or that contestable idea of perfect justice.

42 Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, p. 319.

43 The term “gross disproportionality”, although I have employed it elsewhere, is less than ideal since it appears to imply a continued reliance upon the proportionality approach as conceived in the current doctrine, with the latter's implicit suggestion of some form of commensurability or monotonic comparison. For this reason, the term “gross injustice” is preferable.

44 Meanwhile, many celebrate and seek to extend that power by invoking the image of a “dialogue” between the courts and the legislature. The image gains plausibility from the fact that adjudicative reasoning should properly be guided by an assumption that the established rules serve some coherent conception of justice. This is a feature of adjudicative reason that Dworkin has chosen to describe in terms of “collaboration” and “partnership”: see Dworkin, R., Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA 2011), 136Google Scholar. But (as was pointed out above) it is the object of constitutional rights to provide a point of critical leverage upon established rules, not to explicate the conception of justice implicit within such rules. In this context, courts function as the critical censors of the legislature, not as their dialogic partners in a common project.

45 Moller, The Global Model of Constitutional Rights, ch. 5.

#law #civility #custom #artifice #narrative #constitutional rights #civil rights #constitutional law #communication #politics #rule of law #moral rights #justice #liberalism #free expression #liberal society #norms

0 notes