Genes and Justice

Themes: Philosophy

Last night I went along to an interesting discussion at the Philo Agora philosophy discussion group in Glebe. The topic was the impact of research into behavioral genetics on sentencing in the criminal justice system.
Here’s the problem: if genetics can demonstrate a link between a certain genetic inheritance and particular kinds of criminal behavior, does this reduce a person’s moral responsibility for their actions? If so, should this diminished responsibility be taken into account when we sentence people for committing a crime?
On the one hand it seems fairly easy to produce examples where we appear to take moral responsibility into account when sentencing, i.e., children and the mentally ill. In both these cases we would be fairly happy to agree that lack of moral responsibility is tied to biological factors beyond the individual’s control.
What about this case (an actual study carried out in NZ):
People who experience abuse in childhood have a greater likelihood of becoming involved in criminal behavior as an adult. Of those who experience abuse as a child, those who have a genetic factor which produces a higher activity of a certain neurotransmitter in their brains were less likely to be involved in criminal behavior than those who had a low activity gene. It seems like a this genetic variant might give people a ‘resistance’ to certain effects of abuse.
Now before you start jumping up and down, I agree that, from what I understand of the study, its methodology seems about as trustworthy as a Nigerian offering free money.
However, if the link could be plausibly established, I’m not sure that we should have a problem with the idea of mitigating the sentence of someone from an abusive background with a low activity gene. That is, if we are happy drawing an analogy with a child or mentally ill offender…

Except that a pesky person might come along and point out that, surely all our actions could be plausibly traced back to some combination of biology and environment. If our concept of moral responsibility rests upon a notion of the undetermined willing subject, then none of us are morally responsible. At least, not in the sense that we deserve our punishment, i.e., that justice is retributive.

I think you are left with 3 possible responses:
1. Justice is not retributive – it is consequentialist. We ‘punish’ offenders in order to achieve ‘good’ outcomes for society. This is a terrifying conception of justice. The retribuitive conception of justice is precisely what limits the punishment to the crime. A consequentialist penal system might lock you away forever as punishment for jay-walking because it determines that your attitudes, actions, or biology are a threat to the greater good.

2. Human will is externally undetermined, studies that appear to suggest otherwise are deeply flawed. This requires some form of dualism between the sphere in which my will operates and ‘the observable world’ – ultimately, Kant’s solution. If the kind of indeterminacy necessary for this freedom existed in the observable world it would seem to render all kinds of knowledge impossible. We constantly rely upon the predictability of observable phenomena including each others’ behavior.

3. Human moral responsibility is concerned with the Will, but moral responsibility does not require that the Will be undetermined. What are we to do then, with our intuition that juveniles and the mentally ill are less morally responsible for their actions?

Of course, the answer is obvious to all right-thinking individuals…
The point is that this debate is now firmly in theological territory. The divorce of theology and public life renders BOTH theology and our public intellectual discourse absurd.

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Why we wrestle with Philosophers

Themes: Philosophy

The concluding section of McGrath’s critique of Heidegger reads like my own testimony in the study of Philosophy (except that he’s a better writer, and he’s got a doctorate).

The intuitive reader will have concluded that I am some kind of personalist, some kind of humanist, and some kind of Christian. This philosophical/theological orientation preceded my doctoral work on Heidegger; what I discovered in Heidegger only confirmed and allowed me to refine it. By ruthlessly attacking it, Heidegger continually reminds me of what, if anything, I still hold sacred. Christian reactionaries (Catholic and Protestant), antimodernists, conservatives, and fundamentalists have the opposite effect on me: rather than “building up” my faith, they leave me with less than I had before. Heidegger, on the other hand, awakens me to the urgency of an ever-present need to review, reappraise, repeat, or reject my deepest convictions. To what degree I am willing and able to own the philosophical and theological traditions that have governed my education, thinking, and spiritual life since I began to speak? By so violently overthrowing them Heidegger forces me to choose: Will I follow him or some other post-Christian prophet, or will I hold on to something that I deem too precious to surrender, something that perhaps has been misrepresented, and that I am not only willing to own but also ready to defend?
(McGrath, Heidegger, 125)

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Heidegger, Anticipation, and authentic Discipleship

Themes: Philosophy

To anticipate is to project oneself upon a possibility in such a way as to change one’s way of being in time.
(McGrath, Heidegger, 48)

Being-unto-death lives towards death, not calculating the day and the hour, predicting the moment so as to make necessary arrangements, but resolutely making death the meaning of life. To anticipate death is to will possibility over actuality. Since Dasein is nothing other than possibility, a being whose existence is ‘to be’ (in the futural sense), the anticipation of death is a willing of oneself as journey without destination, a being-toward-possibility without the closure of actuality. “Being-towards-death is the anticipation of a potentiality-for-Being of that entity whose kind of Being is anticipation itself” (Being and Time, 262). Living toward death is owning oneself as an unanswerable question.
(McGrath, Heidegger, 48)

“Being-towards-death is the anticipation of a potentiality-for-Being of that entity whose kind of Being is anticipation itself” – this sounds like it could be turned into a phenomenological description of Christian discipleship. For us, death surely is the meaning of life, the problem is, whose death?
By answering, ‘Christ’s’ we too quickly slip back into inauthenticity by evading death as our particular death and negation. But it is only in this form that it can be my death and thus my meaning. Yet Christ died for me, creating an anticipation of life through death, possibility beyond impossibility. How do I live towards a death that is both mine and someone else’s? How can it be a real death and thus give my being-towards-this-death a real meaning?
If this doesn’t work, what do we need to change in Heidegger’s phenomenology?

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Ethics and Friendship

Themes: Friends, Philosophy

I’ve been thinking a fair bit about friendship again lately. A good friend from College asked me to do a serious of talks for his Church’s Young Adults Weekend on the topic. That was last weekend, but I’ve decided to keep trying to work on the topic.
The more I think about it, the more fascinated I become.
There are a lot of different directions from which to approach the topic of friendship. (I’ve made a bit mind-map of everything I could work out – cool, hey?)
But this morning, I was trying to get my head around the ethical status of Friendship. How do we explain the intuitions we have about right and wrong in relation to friends?

Friendship is possibly the area in which our civil community is most in dialogue about the Enlightenment commitment to autonomy, and are most pressed to articulate the tension between the fundamental moral notion of commitment/obligation against the Enlightenment touchstone of individual freedom.
How do we maintain the autonomy/freedom of the individual alongside the intuition that friends have some sort of commitment/obligation toward each other?
I’m not sure that this tension arises so acutely in other forms of human relation. In other human relationships the nature of obligation can be more easily explained through reference to some form of contract or joint utility.
In Friendship though, the structure of our concept seems to dampen the value of any appeal to external obligation or utility. In fact, the more externally determined the Friendship relation becomes, the less likely we are to call it ‘true friendship’.
(It is probably the case however, that not all cultures have thought about Friendship in this way, the structure of the concept has shifted perceptibly in the course of recorded Western History).

Utilitarian moral theories, in particular, struggle to explain friendship – but I think classical virtue ethics might also have trouble (I haven’t thought about that enough yet).
Perhaps our modern notion of friendship has arisen in important ways through the influence of Kantian anthropology, and therefore some sort of Kantian ethic could provide the most fruitful way of seeking to outline the moral status of friendship relations.
It would be nice if the terminally unpopular Immanuel could score a few back…
On a little more reflection though, I think I’ll probably have to ditch Kantianism as well. Where’s the dynamism?

photo by EJP Photo

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Pyrrho the Sceptic

Themes: Philosophy

Pyrrho of Elis (4th – 3rd c. B.C.E.) was an ancient sceptical philosopher. He is known as the founder of a philosophical school named ‘Pyrrhonism’. As is often the case with these things, the actual Pyrrho may have had nothing to do with the actual Philosophical School. There is something deeply satisfying about this, considering his mythical antipathy towards certainty in knowledge.
At its simplest, Pyrrhonian scepticism appears to be an attempt to deal responsibly with a profoundly complex world. According to Sextus Empiricus, whose work has largely preserved our knowledge of Pyrrho,

When people search for something, the likely outcome is that either they find it or, not finding it, they accept that it cannot be found, or they continue to search. So also in the case of what is sought in philosophy, I think, some people have claimed to have found the truth, others have asserted that it cannot be apprehended, and others are still searching. Those who think that they have found it are the Dogmatists, properly so called, for example, the followers of Aristotle and Epicurus, the Stoics, and certain others. The followers of Clitomachus and Carneades, as well as other Academics, have asserted that it cannot be apprehended. The Skeptics [skeptikoi] continue to search. (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.1-3)

One of the truly admirable qualities of Greek philosophy was that any philosopher worth his salt was expected to embody his beliefs. For Pyrrho this meant a complete refusal to believe anything in particular. Following the general Greek tendency to think that sensory experiences are a bit fishy, he became famous for his ability to disbelieve whatever was right before his eyes.
Accordingly he got around,

avoiding nothing and taking no precautions, facing everything as it came, wagons, precipices, dogs, and entrusting nothing whatsoever to his sensations. But he was looked after by his disciples, who accompanied him. (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 9.62)

It seems his disciples weren’t quite as committed to his philosophy as he was. That’s often the trouble with disciples, bunch of degenerate hippies.
When Pyrrho was a younger chap, he was the disciple of one Anaxarchus (of whom we know virtually nothing other than that he had a disciple). This is how you do discipleship:

“And once, when Anaxarchus had fallen into a pond, he [Pyrrho] passed by without assisting him; and when some one blamed him for this, Anaxarchus himself praised his indifference and absence of all emotion.” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers)

And just because it’s funny…

And it is said that he carried his indifference so far that he even washed a pig. [Egad!] And once, when he was very angry about something connected with his sister (and her name was Philista), and some one took him up, he said, “The display of my indifference does not depend on a woman.” On another occasion, when he was driven back by a dog which was attacking him, he said to some one who blamed him for being discomposed, “That it was a difficult thing entirely to put off humanity; but that a man ought to strive with all his power to counteract circumstances with his actions if possible, and at all events with his reason.” They also tell a story that once, when some medicines of a consuming tendency, and some cutting and cautery was applied to him for some wound, that he never even contracted his brow. (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers)

At the core of sceptical philosophy lies the insight that any claim about truth either appears to rest on other claims, or to require that we accept it without reasons. The first situation seems to commit us to an infinite series of claims about truth, the second seems to put us in grave danger of being intellectually irresponsible (by just being gullible).
Diogenes Laertius summarises the ancient sceptical position,

XI. These Sceptics then deny the existence of any demonstration, of any test of truth, of any signs, or causes, or motion, or learning, and of anything as intrinsically or naturally good or bad. For every demonstration, say they, depends either on things which demonstrate themselves, or on principles which are indemonstrable. If on things which demonstrate themselves, then these things themselves require demonstration; and so on ad infinitum. If on principles which are indemonstrable, then, the very moment that either the sum total of these principles or even one single one of them, is incorrectly urged, the whole demonstration falls instantly to pieces. But if any one supposes, they add, that there are principles which require no demonstration, that man deceives himself strangely, not seeing that it is necessary for him in the first place to establish this point, that they contain their proof in themselves. For a man cannot prove that there are four elements, because there are four elements.
Besides, if particular proofs are denied in a complex demonstration, it must follow that the whole demonstration is also incorrect. Again, if we are to know that an argument is really a demonstrative proof, we must have a test of truth; and in order to establish a test, we require a demonstrative proof; and these two things must be devoid of every kind of certainty, since they bear reciprocally the one on the other.
How then is any one to arrive at certainty about obscure matters, if one is ignorant even how one ought to attempt to prove them? For what one is desirous to understand is not what the appearance of things is, but what their nature and essence is. (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers)

Now before you get all excitable and start jumping around yelling ‘Nein! Nein!’, you should probably know you are hardly the first person to think that this is a bit dodgy. Everyone, including (probably) Pyrrho’s Mum, has thought that were very serious questions how consistently this philosophical position can be held:

…in admonishing us to have no opinion, they [the skeptics] at the same time bid us to form an opinion, and in saying that men ought to make no statement they make a statement themselves: and though they require you to agree with no one, they command you to believe themselves. (Eus. Prep. Ev. 14.18, Gifford).

And more practically, you might walk into a wagon or off a cliff while your disciples aren’t watching.

It’s important to recognise that the form of truth to which Ancient Sceptics objected is what we would call a ‘realist’ understanding, namely, that a claim is true because (somehow) it corresponds to a real objective world.

Now clearly, if truth is restricted to matters pertaining to real existence, as contrasted with appearance, the same will apply [to related skeptical conceptions]. The notions involved, consistency and conflict, undecidability, isostheneia, epoché, ataraxia, since they are defined in terms of truth, will all relate, via truth to real existence rather than appearance. (Burnyeat, Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism, p. 121)

This saves the Ancient Sceptics from wooly inconsistency and makes them into forerunners of  ’anti-realist’ conceptions of truth.

What do you think about truth? Is it somehow related to what is in the world? How do you deal with uncertainty and mistakes? Do you have the courage of your convictions like Pyrrho?

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A Fork

Themes: On Language, Philosophy, Representation

Words are like cups or forks or jumbo jets or carpet. The ontology of language is not to be separated out from general ontology.
Theories of language have been betwitched by Platonic ontology.
The assumption that language is essentially about reference is just another manifestation of the Platonic ontological claim that the essence of a thing is found, not in itself, but in an independently existing Form.
We basically got over it in general ontology, but in popular versions of the philosophy of language we are still haunted by the Platonic ghost.
Words do not refer to things or anything.

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