Thursday, July 27, 2006

Moral Investigations - 3.0. Demarcating morality.

This is a lazy, playful post. It's way too early to be too precise, so we are going to play around and see what we come up with.

One important thing when you're dealing with morality, or anything, really, is to try and demarcate it so that you can easily define it from everything else. So what is a moral situation, or a potentially moral situation? Let's take a few examples:

1) A kid is drowning in a pool.
2) Your family asks you if you could babysit.
3) One nation is insulted by another and invades it.
4) In a demonstration you see a person picking up cobblestones to throw.
5) You get up in the morning and go downstairs to make a pot of coffee. No-one else is awake.

What are the differences in them? Let's assume that you are the main actor, or that you "see" all these things in one way or another. We're not now concerned with what the right thing is: but if there is a right or wrong thing in any of these examples. I sort of believe that there is.

The old Marxist philosopher George Lucasz talked a lot of the ethico-political. I am not sure if he would agree with the turn I am taking here, but I would like to say this: all our relations with other people and the institutions that affect them are moral, or more appropriately ethico-political. Why do I say that? Well, it's because we really can drag out disproportionate pairs arguments here. We can make value judgements, be they purely emotive (ie, you just express how you feel rather than how it is, or how you believe it is) or otherwise, and clearly see a difference between, say, getting up every day to work out petitions, go out to complain, organize people and do everything humanely possible to lessen the effects of war and completely blindly cheering on it because those bastards aren't people anyway.

Another argument that I have for the existance of the ethico-political realm that includes all humans is how we can transform people into non-humans. That is, how propaganda can tell us that some people aren't really people at all and thus allow us to do whatever we like to them. This is how torturers work, I understand. You might be able to chalk it up to the infinite human value so prevalent in the Western world, but it seems to be a relatively universal thing for every culture. There might also not be a clear-cut definition of what a human is. Thus the abortion and euthanasia debate. I mean, I am pro-abortion and pro-voluntary and non-voluntary (not in-voluntary, ie the difference between someone permanently vegetabilized and who can't ask for help to death and someone who doesn't want to) euthanasia. But that's another thing.

Now. Can we have moral connections to animals? I believe we can. Again, disproportionate pairs. None of us like the idea of people who can't take care of their pets: it does upset us and raise our moral indignation. Just come up with whatever two totally disproportionate pairs and you will see the intense similarities between that and our moral interaction with humans. Because that is what I think is important here: moral interaction. It doesn't matter if people can't be moral agents back to us (that totally violates our intuitions: it would mean that it has no moral value to help an incapacitated child who can't speak but can clearly feel and suffer) but it does matter that morality is a social connection and always wound up in our interaction, even if it is second hand, to others. Remember again: we are not saying anything about what right and wrong is, merely where it can be found.

So this brings us to the inanimate, the unseen and the unfeeling. Do we have moral obligations not to crush tiny, tiny beings? Should we do what some devout Eastern monks do and carefully, carefully brush aside the tiny creatures that they'd otherwise step on? (interesting sidenote: these people actually, if I understand it right, "upgrade" bugs and other beings to give them the moral status of a person).

I think what we must say is this: to some extent we really do. Morality is a continuum, though. There's not a sharp divide between "good" or "bad" people but "merely" degrees. Perhaps those Eastern monks really have a wider moral sphere than we do. (Or perhaps they don't considering that they might do it because they think that those bugs are actually people, thus not having a wider circle any more than a person who lives today in a larger community has a great one from someone who lived in a much smaller one).

So what about plants? Or rocks? What about Nature and Mother Earth? What about the Baltic?

I don't think we can have a direct moral obligation to these things. They can't feel in the sense that seem to be important to be included in the /direct/ moral sphere. Of course they are important in a moral sense considering all the creatures that need those. If there was a rainforest somewhere that had no animals, no bearing on the oxygen that has an effect on the world, etc, then it wouldn't matter if we chopped it all down. I mean, sure, it's a biological impossibility but this is just a possible world scenario.

What about time, then? People who aren't born, and people who are now dead. Are they included in our moral feeling at all? For reasons that I think have to do with our own fear of being forgotten (remember that we are relying on a third person subject as a "viewer" when we make moral value judgements) but that doesn't make it unreasonable, or any more so than other moral feelings. I think that in the end we have strong moral feelings to the people who have gone before us and that should be included in the indirect sphere, like the Baltic Sea, of our morality. They are dead, gone, finito. They won't come again. But to us, it feels right to cherish them and keep something of them alive. We could "will it to a universal law" because we want people to be good to us when we die. I don't know if this is cheating in any way, but it seems reasonable to me.

People who aren't born yet I think are easier to handle. Let's create a principle and then set out to prove our hypothesis: the principle of no distinguished place in time. That is: the ends cannot justify the means (alltogether: disproportionate pairs again) and we cannot justify destructive behaviour now, as many do, for some grand goal ahead. Though noble, history should teach us how well that usually works out. And also, when viewed realistically and weighed against the misery of the present the goal will shrink to more humble proportions. Of course, an idealist like me is not happy with just that: but I think it is an important lesson to avoid much misery. If then, there are no privilieged places we can consider our children, their children, etc, as somehow involved in our moral sense. Now, you might say that we need people to actually be there for us to be able to be able to make clear moral actions that have something to do with them.

But... do we? Sure, there are all the problems of induction, the problems of not knowing and so on. But we're not interested in that. We're interested in the fact that even though we might never see the people we affect, we would still say we can affect them with the morality of our actions. Compare the actions of a king who starts a war that ravages two people, or a man who organizes a rescue operation of slaves in North America before the Civil War that he never deals with directly for fear of being found out. Future generations, and the people we never meet even though our actions affect them also have emotions, and they can be hurt somehow like the dead cannot. It's just not now, but that doesn't matter.

But, you say, we cannot see what will come of our actions. We cannot know what will happen: the butterfly effect, etc. That's true: most of the time. So we have to opt for most likely scenarios when there seems to be a clear moral 'radius'. Ie, if we throw a banana peel on the street that might obviously affect someone. If we buy fair trade brands, that will affect someone. And we can be pretty sure of that. Not -certain-, but relatively sure.

So our moral sphere is quite wide. All our interaction seems to be filled with value if we look at it.

I am going to write some more about Kant and Sartre and how they come out of this when I have the time and feel like boring you guys more with this. Until then, taa!

Thursday, July 20, 2006

Why I am a Socialist.

The world, as we know it, is not what is actually there. A table is a mass of atoms with just.. space inbetween. A personality changes from situation to situation. The most common prejudices have their basis in odd historical and social relations.

This is an emotional post, and not just purely a philosophical one. Because there is a great deal of conviction there, a great deal of idealism and emotion.

I grew up poor, and I will probably die poor. I've seen how the speculation of a few capitalists can completely ruin people and all the difficulties created by wage slaving, even under the State.

In the world today we wear clothing sown by Indian children, locked into sweatshops 16 hours a day. Multimillion companies move through the periphery of the world with practical scythes as they sell medicine at a price too high for the poor to ever purchase. People who did nothing wrong get blown to pieces by the agents of imperialism: the armed fist of capitalism.

Most of the world is in bondage as are all of we. And yet, yet people refuse to do anything! They vote liberal even as they feel solidarity for their fellow man! They complain over giving to others when they themselves gives the lions share of what they create to a capitalist! They believe in the working class: yet they would rather not involve themselves. They criticize the parties, yet don't lift a finger.

The world as it is is a shitty, shitty place. Marx writes in one place in Das Kapital that every less advanced capital state can in the more advanced ones see it's future. The most advanced one, the United States of America is a great temple to the gods of profit. It murders, terrorizes and spreads the entire world with it's bases, it's chains and it's propaganda.

Even if it is just me who feel this burning emotion that fluctuates between hatred, violent anger and blackest despair I'll be damned if I let that get me down. The only thing to do is to advance: one day the system will collapse, one day the Kondatriev cycle will come to it's end. Then is our chance: perhaps there will be a brave, new world. But I feel so obligated to do something for people who's suffering is almost palpable, and the smiling, ludicrous aristocrats of the world today who say that we have only ourselves to blame: if only we wouldn't organize! If only we would let capitalism have it's way...

Every day we see unattainable goal that rips holes in ourselves on TV, in the radio, everywhere. Humanity is maimed in that we are induced to believe that all the little laurels and baubles of the ruling class are actually important and that those who do not have it are less worthy. We buy ourselves new bodies, new items, new things... all in the search for ourselves.

Action is just taking a step. It's showing to a meeting. It's speaking up. It's reading. It's confrontation. It's synthesis.

Det enda monument som passar var tid / ar socialismen, hardad i strid.

Klasskampen ar inte slut bara for att den inte utkampas aktivt. Den kommer dyka upp igen och igen, och en dag kanske kommer vi att faktiskt vinna. For det handlar om att dana en helt ny varld, dar folk faktiskt inte behover svalta och do for att andra ska kunna bara fina skor eller ett diamanthalsband. Borgarna har erovrat varlden och forslavat varje folk: nu ar det fan dags att ta det ater igen.

Manniskans fjattrande ar djupare an nagon av oss kan forsta pa ytan. De forbannade javla borgarna har snackat sig varma om frihet, ett ord som inte betyder nagonting langre. Den enda friheten vi nagonsin behover ar den materiella friheten som stracker sag ifran den propaganda som berattar for oss hur vi bor vara och hur vi bor tanka, och den friheten som garanterar att vi inte ar tralar.

Jag ar sa javla arg hela tiden, men det blandas med djup depression och stunder av perfekt klarhet nar jag finner nagonting. Nar jag kommer hem ska vi javlar sla borgarna pa tasken och avancera. En annan varld -ar- mojlig. Vi -kan- inte leva sa har for evigt.

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

The Pirate Party.

This is a post about piracy, or rather, about the pirate party of Sweden. Several of my friends belong to it for one reason and another and after reflecting over their aims: to stop surveillance of all citizens and to severely reduce copyright I have come to a few understandings.

I sympathize a great deal with the pirate party. I don't want to be put under surveillance, but it is not a new thing, it's been going on for a while. The Social Democrats began to register Communists during the Second World War, or even before. You see, the reason why this happened is because that the "furies of private property" are awakened by various radical leftist groups, you can see it in history time and time again. The burgeoise, that is, the capitalists who own the means of production (factories, offices, the person who reads this most likely) cannot survive without revolutionising the means of production constantly.

That is, because they are all driven by competition that kills the weaker (the holy principle that all burgeoise economists from Smith and forward raise to the skies as the saviour of mankind), and so they must constantly bring forth new ways to create. And the faster they build up, the faster they revolutionize... the world of today can hardly be comprehended by still-living members of the older generation.

Computers have been driven forward by capitalism and when they were found to be useful, they were created faster and stronger in an ever-increasing line. Now most everyone in the center possesses one. And with that, we come to the irony of history that they have to protect their private property against the wishes of the majority. You and I want to download music, books, etc. Computers, for many of us, have become extensions of ourselves. They allow freedom and instant connection all around the world with just a press of a button.

So now we find ourselves with two interesting parallels. The opposition of a property-less majority (when we speak of property that is at all meaningful we speak of owning property that can produce) to a property-owning minority that has it's fingers deep in the self-professed Social Democratic state. With the threat of a lack of profit, they rally to instantly punish and lash out at the people who dare to fight for their own class interests. Because that is what this is. The scenario stings in our eyes: class struggle returns in the guise of information and things that cost a tiny, tiny bit in electricity charges and that can be divided for all, however much they like. But it doesn't just stop there. No, the burgeoise also wants to keep their bizarre copyrights of medication that each year harvests millions of lives in the periphery as they do not allow governments or groups like Amnesty International or the Red Cross to simply copy the medication that could easily cure people dying of diseases that are not even remotely threatening in the economic center of today.

Young artists delight in being able to spread something they create not because they want to get rich (seriously, becoming a musician because you want to get rich is like becoming a philosopher because you want to get a job) but because they are driven to create. Their interests, however, are oftenly perverted by the humongous movie, publishing and music industry that conforms everything that it can get it's own hands on. (An interesting piece of evidence is Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, a clever and interesting movie outside the Hollywood spectrum. When the director confronted the Hollywood bigshots about his success and the possibility to give more leeway in making movies to the mainstream they shot it down immediately).

In truth, what is produced belongs to everyone. With finite assets this can become a problem, and I recognize that, but the thing is: Digital media is not finite in the same way at all! The cost of copying is minimal, it is fast (the irony that it is the capitalists which have given us the ability, and them who continously clash against themselves with faster computers, connections and better CD:s is overwhelming, but typical of blind capitalism) and it can give a lot of ease, pleasure and education to the great mass of people who cannot afford to see every new movie, who cannot get to all the artists they want and so on. And the old arguments of declining profits and so on don't really function, as our erudite pirates have shown us. It hurts the big businesses but there seem to be no real empirical evidence for the smaller.

In the end, my buccaneer friends, your cause is ours. Our cause is yours. File-copying is merely the most apparent flank in a greater struggle between the great mass of people against the small, rich elite. Without complaining: people often believe that they are in situations that have never been before. This is not so. History tends to repeat itself, or at least, give us strong senses of deja vu. If you're truly interested in your integrity, in your interests and actually changing something on a deep level you should realize that you should connect yourself to the Left. A party is merely an organized vehicle for class confrontation and for victory, and I support the Pirate Party in that, but when all is said and done there is much more to fight for than just copyright.

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Moral Investigations - 2.0

After having read over my last post and become increasingly disappointed with the deep problems that seems to beset every part of it, I am going to try and restate a few things. Perhaps add something, perhaps change something else. Anyway, we'll see how it goes.

First of all, what is lying behind these moral feelings? It's the question that constantly haunted me in the last post. This time, we are going to have to try to say something a little more substantial about it.

First of all. What must morality be? Well, it cannot be anything supranatural or handed down to us by some being somewhere. The reason why this is so is because a) there is no such being in the world, b) if there was such a being it would give us better knowledge of the good and lastly: c) such a thing would NOT be called morality at all. The fact that someone tells us that so and so is right, and so and so is forbidden is hardly what we talk about when we talk about morality. Perhaps some form of emotivism or even naturalism would say that this was so, but it hardly resonates with our moral intuitions. After all, that we do what someone tells us to do, is not quite what we consider right.

Second of all, we have to have some theory of what morality is good for. Personally, it seems that the fact that we are herd animals begins to give us some indication of where we should look. One of my concerns is that we are going to have to end up with a naturalist theory (ie, a theory which indicates that what is good or bad is really some easily identified state, such as pleasure or pain) just out of these premises. However, I am not sure that this is the case. After all, what kind of thing is the social organization that all humans gravitate towards? It can hardly be called only, say, the medieval feudal organization, the 20th century Christian family model or anything else. It is all these things, yet more. That might be what morality is like.

Now, thirdly. Morality must deal with people or moral agents in one sense or the other. I am not going to say that this is necessarily humans, but I think they are at the very least the most likely group. I have written some on this before, and it has very much to do with a belief that we can only measure things, and thus give things some meaning, by comparisons. Ie, something can be judged to be bad, good, etc because we can compare people, situations and so on.

Perhaps David Hume was on the right track. He (who Kant calls "that acute man") worked out a relatively good theory of virtues. Virtues give us the addest strength of saddling our morality firmly in our social relations, just like with our third premise above. It helps us to also make it firmly material as per premise one and two. It also begins to swing a great deal with the culture, which sets us in the well-known fact of different moral beliefs throughout peoples and history.

A virtue is something that is good for the community as a whole, perhaps judged by the illusive third person subject that I mentioned quite a bit in the first post.

Indeed, what does a pseudo-Humean theory of virtue give us? Basically, Hume thought that we see some virtues that tend to be for the good of population as a whole (I believe we might even say that we again find our "scaled-down" theory of third person spectator in this). This would allow us to understand that different virtues that are good for different societies, groups and actually - classes. Our actions, ie, our utilization of our virtues, can be seen as good or bad from different perspectives that we must see in political theories of what is good for society. Communists like me, for example, would not consider loyalty to your boss to be a good thing. Loyalty to other proletarians is a good thing, illoyality a bad thing.

We thus find some kind of motivation: the veritable pat on the back that you might feel mentally or actually, as well as the motivation of doing what you believe is good. All people want the good.

Virtues, however, cannot be mere platonic entities (and I think tropes that allow us grades are far more appropriate here as in other metaphysics anyway) but are actually exercised. We exercise our loyalty, our duty (Kantian intuitions on morality) through our virtues (or the other way around), just like whatever virtues, like, say, graciousness that will create happiness or satisfy preferences (utilitarian intuitions) and so on. Ie, the primary moral-ontological form is the virtue, not the rule.

From this, we can perhaps work out an ethico-political schema on the virtues and vices that are appropriate, why the virtues and vices that are considered as such exist as they do in this or that time and which ones are actually the right ones - for our society. I say the last part because I believe that different virtues have different strengths for different times. It is probably so that some loyalties, like national ones, are bad: but they are no less virtues for that. They are simply virtues based on faulty assumptions. But to get back to my first point; the virtues of the medieval farmer might not be the virtues of the modern student.

I am going to make a stop here and consider before I move onwards in 3. Comments are always gratefully received, but this is an investigation in process: not a complete dogma.
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