December 2010 – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

Potentiality, Abortion, Contraception

This interesting missive just over the transom. My responses in blue.

I have been pondering your application of the Potentiality Principle to the question of abortion. It is undoubtedly the case that a one year old child has the potential to become an adult possessing rights-conferring properties. It is also undoubtedly the case, for much the same reasons, that a foetus in the third trimester of pregnancy possesses that same potential. However, as we move back along the chain of causality from childhood to birth to pregnancy and before, at some point we no longer have a potential person.

I agree that at some point we no longer have a potential person. Neither a sperm cell by itself, nor an unfertilized egg cell by itself, nor the unjoined pair of the two is a potential person. See 'Probative Overkill' Objections to the Potentiality Principle. This post refutes the notion that one committed to the Potentiality Principle is also committed to the notion that spermatazoa and unfertilized ova and various set-theoretical constructions of same are also potential persons.

Continue reading “Potentiality, Abortion, Contraception”

Life-Death Asymmetry: An Aporetic Triad

Let us consider a person whose life is going well, and who has a reasonable expectation that it will continue to go well in the near term at least. For such a person

1. A longer being-alive is better than a shorter being-alive.

2. A longer being-dead is not worse than a shorter being-dead. (Equivalently: A shorter being-dead is not better than a longer being-dead.

3. If a longer being F is better than a shorter being F, then a shorter being non-F is better than a longer being non-F.

I claim that each limb of the triad has a strong claim on our acceptance. And yet they cannot all be true: (1) and (3) taken together entail the negation of (2). Indeed, the conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one. To solve the problem, then, one of the limbs must be rejected. But which one? Each is exceedingly plausible.

Consider (1). Surely a longer life is better than a shorter one assuming that (i) one's life is on balance good, and (ii) one has a reasonable expectation that the future will be like the past at least for the near future. Suppose you are young, healthy, and happy. It is obvious that five more years of youth, health, and happiness is better than dying tomorrow. (In these discussions, unless otherwise stated, the assumption is the Epicurean one that that bodily death is annihilation of the self or person — an assumption that is by no means obvous.)

From discussions with Peter Lupu, I gather that he would grant (1) even without the two assumptions. He digs being alive and consciousness whether or not the contents of his life/consciousness are good or evil: just being alive/conscious is for him a good thing. My life affirmation doesn't go quite that far. Whereas his life affirmation is unconditional, mine is conditional upon the contents of my experience.

Now consider (2). John Lennon has been dead for 30 years. Is it worse for him now than it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago? Does it get worse year by year? I mean for him alone, not for Yoko Ono or anyone else. Intuitively, no. Ceteris paribus, the longer we live the better; but it is not the case that the longer we are dead, the worse. (Note that the second independent clause needs no ceteris paribus qualification.)

John F. Kennedy has been dead longer than Richard M. Nixon. But Kennedy is no worse off than Nixon in precise point of being dead. (2), then, seems intuitively evident.

As for (3), it too seems intuitively evident. If being respected (treated fairly, loved, provided with food, etc.) for a longer time is better than being respected (treated fairly, etc.) for a shorter time — and surely it is — then being disrespected (treated unfairly, etc.) for a shorter time is better than being disrespected for a longer time. And so if being-alive longer is better than being-alive shorter, then being non-alive shorter is better than being non-alive longer — in contradiction to (2).

One solution would be to reject (2), not by affirming its negation, but by maintaining that neither it nor its negation are either true or false. If there is no subject of being dead, as presumably there is not assuming that death is anihilation, then one cannot answer the question whether it is worse to be dead for a longer time than for a shorter.

Again we are brought back to the 'problem of the subject.'

Being Dead and Being Nonexistent, or: How to Cease to Exist without Dying

In general, being dead and being nonexistent are not the same 'property' for an obvious reason: only that which was once alive can properly be said to be dead, and not everything was once alive. Nevertheless, it might be thought that, for living things, to be is to be alive, and not to be is to be dead. But I think this Aristotelian view can be shown to be mistaken.

1. A human person cannot become dead except by dying.

2. But a human person can become nonexistent without dying in at least four ways.

2a. The first way is by entering into irreversible coma. Given that consciousness is an essential attribute of persons, a person who enters into irreversible coma ceases to exist. But the person's body remains alive. Therefore, a human person can cease to exist without dying.

2b. The second way is by fission. Suppose one human person A enters a Person Splitter and exits two physically and behaviorally and psychologically indiscernible persons, B and C. B is not C. So A is not B and A is not C. What happened to A? A ceased to exist. But A didn't die. Far from the life in A ceasing, the life in A doubled! So human person A became nonexistent without dying.

2c. The third way is by fusion. Two dudes enter the Person Splicer from the east and exit to the west one dude. The entrants have ceased to exist without dying.

2d. The fourth way is theological. Everything other than God depends on God for its very existence at every moment of its existence. If God were to 'pull the plug' ontologically speaking on the entire universe of contingent beings, then at that instant all human persons would cease to exist without dying. They would not suffer the process or the event of dying but would enter nonexistence nonetheless. Because they had not died, they could not be properly said to be dead.

Therefore, pace the Peripatetic,

3. Being dead and being nonexistent are not the same — not even for living things.

(Time consumed in composing this post: 40 minutes. )

Death: Distinctions, Terminology, Questions

To think clearly about death we need to draw some distinctions, fix some terminology, and catalog the various questions that can arise. Herewith, a modest contribution to that end.

1. Process, event, state. There is first of all the process of dying and that in which it culminates, the event of dying. Both are distinct from the 'state' of being dead. The inverted commas signal that there is a question whether there is such a state. A state is a state of something which is 'in' the state. Call it the subject of the state. But if bodily death is annihilation of the self, then it is arguable (though not self-evident) that there is no subject of the state of being dead, and hence no such state. And if there is no such state, then it cannot be rationally feared.

The process of dying can be so short as to be indistinguishable from the event of dying, but no one can be in the 'state' who has not suffered the event. You cannot become dead except by dying.

2. All three (process, event, state) can be objects of fear. But it does not follow that each is an object of rational fear. It is clearly sometimes rational to fear the process of dying. But it is a further question whether it is ever rational to fear the 'state' of being dead.

3. Fear is an intentional state whose object is a future harm, evil, or 'bad.' Process/event and state are rationally feared only they are indeed evils. So the axiological questions are logically prior to the empirical-psychological question of fear and the normative-psychological question of the rationality of fear.

4. Ontological questions would seem to be logically prior to the axiological questions. Whether death is good, bad, or neutral depends on what it is. For example, the 'state' of being dead cannot be evil unless there is such a state. A state is a state of something. But if death is annihilation, then there is no subject after death which seems to imply that there is no state of being dead. If so, it cannot be an evil state. And if being dead is not an evil state, then it cannot be rationally feared.

5. This raises the question whether bodily death is indeed annihilation of the self.

6. And what exactly is it for an animal to die? One will be tempted to say that x dies at time t iff x ceases being alive at t. But an animal that enters suspended animation at t ceases to be alive at t without dying! Or suppose a living thing A splits into two living things B and C. Since B and C are numerically distinct, neither can be identical to A. So A ceases to exist at the time of fission. Ceasing to exist, A ceases to be alive. But one hesitates to say that A is dead. Similarly with fusion.

Defining 'dies' is not easy. See Fred Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper (Oxford 1992, ch. 4).

7. Mortality. In addition to the question whether being dead is evil and the question whether dying (process or event) is evil, there is also the question whether it is evil to be subject to death. This is a question about the axiological status of mortality: is being mortal good, bad, or neutral? If mortality is evil, then, given that we are mortal, we cannot fear it, fear being future-oriented, but we can, for want of a better word, bemoan it. And so the question arises whether it it rational to bemoan our mortality. Is mortality perhaps a punishment for something, for Original Sin perhaps?

But we need to think more carefully about what it is to be mortal. First of all, only things that are alive or once were alive can be properly said to be mortal. My car is not mortal even if it 'dies.' It is also worth noting that being mortal is consistent both with being alive and with being dead. My dead ancestors have realized their mortality; I have yet to realize mine. But my mother did not cease being mortal by dying. (Or did she? If she is now nothing, how can she have any property including the property of being mortal?) For a living thing to be mortal is for it to be subject to death. But this phrase has at least two senses, one weak the other strong.

WEAK sense: X is mortal =df x is able to die, liable to die, has the potential to die. Mortality as posse mori.

STRONG sense: X is mortal =df X has to die, is subject to the necessity of dying, cannot evade death by any action of its own, is going to die, will die in the normal course of events. Mortality as necessitas moriendi.

Correspondingly, there are strong and weak senses of 'immortal':

STRONG sense: X is immortal =df x is not able to die.

WEAK sense: X is immortal =df x is able to die, but is kept alive forever by a factor distinct from x.

For example, in Christian theology God is strongly immortal: he cannot die, so 'deicide' is not an option for him. The immortal souls of humans, however, are weakly immortal, not immortal by 'own-power' but by 'other-power.' Prelapsarian Adam was weakly, not strongly, mortal whereas postlapsarian Adam and his descendants are strongly, not weakly, mortal.

Christian theology aside, we are strongly mortal: we are subject to the necessity of dying whether this necessity be nomological or a metaphysical. Is our mortal condition evil? Or is mortality perhaps a condition of life's having meaning and value?

8. Mortality and Brevity. Related question: Is the brevity of life a condition of its meaningfulness, as many maintain? Mortality is not the same as brevity because (i) one could be mortal in the weak sense even if one lived forever and (ii) a short life is consistent with the necessity of dying.

9. Why is sooner worse than later? So far we have distinguished the following questions: Is dying (whether process or event) evil? Is being dead evil? Is being subject to death evil? Is the brevity of life evil? But there is also the question why, if dying is evil, dying sooner is worse than dying later. Intuitively, dying at 20 is worse than dying at 60 ceteris paribus. But why? Because the one who dies at 20 'misses out on more' than the one who dies at 60? But how can the one who dies at 20 miss out on anything if death is annihilation? The dead cannot be deprived of their future because they are not there to be deprived of anything.

Anti-Tobacco Hysteria

Here is the latest example of the lunatic Left's misplaced moral enthusiasm.

The Epicurean Death Argument and Nihilism

A reader suggests that the "Epicurean argument leads to nihilism. Why live if death is not an evil to you? (assuming there is no one to grieve you)."

In Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus makes the point that death is ". . . of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist. It is therefore nothing either to the living or the dead since it is not present to the living, and the dead no longer are." (125)

If this is the Epicurean argument, then I do not see how it leads to nihilism, if 'leads to' means 'entails' and if nihilism is the view that life is not worth the trouble. The Epicurean point is not that death is good but that it is axiologically neutral: neither good nor bad. This follows from his assumption that ". . . all good and evil lie in sensation and sensation ends with death." If being dead were good, then I think one could reasonably infer nihilism. For if being dead were good, then being alive would be either bad or neutral, both of which are forms of nihilism.

But the Epicurean view is that being dead is value-neutral whence it follows that being alive is either good or bad, and only one of these is nihilism. Therefore, the Epicurean position does not entail nihilism.

It is worth noting that the historical Epicurus had a therapeutic end in view: he wanted to relieve us of our fear of death. This soteriological motive is at the back of his claim that death is nothing to us. Because it is nothing to us, we have nothing to fear from it. So if you accused him of nihilism he would probably respond with au contraire or rather the Greek equivalent. He would probably say that his purpose is a life-affirming one. His aim is to make men happy by removing from them the fear of death.

To clear Epicurus of the charge of nihilism is of course not to pronounce his position probative.

The Evil of Death and the Rationality of Fearing It

Is death an evil? Even if it is an evil to the people other than me who love me, or in some way profit from my life, is it an evil to me? A few days ago, defying Philip Larkin, I took the Epicurean position that death cannot be an evil for me and so it cannot be rational for me to fear my being dead: any fear of death is a result of muddled thinking, something the philosopher cannot tolerate, however things may stand with the poet. But I was a bit quick in that post and none of this is all that clear. A re-think is in order. Death remains, after millenia, the muse of philosophy.

My earlier reasoning was along the following Epicurean-Lucretian lines. (Obviously, I am not engaged in a project of exegesis; what exactly these gentlemen meant is not my concern. I'll leave scholarship to the scholars and history to the historians.)

1. Either bodily death is the annihilation of the self or it is not.
2. If death is annihilation, then after the moment of dying there is no self in existence, either conscious or unconscious, to have or lack anything.
3. If there is no self after death, then no evil can befall the self post mortem.
4. If no evil can befall the self post mortem, then it is not rational to fear post mortem evils.
5. If, on the other hand, death is not annihilation, then one cannot rationally fear the state of nonbeing for the simple reason that one will not be in that 'state.'
Therefore
6. It is not rational to fear being dead.

The argument is valid, but are the premises true? (1) is an instance of the the Law of Excluded Middle. (2) seems obviously true: if bodily death is annihilation of the self, then (i) the self ceases to exist at the moment of death, and (ii) what does not exist cannot have or lack anything, whether properties or relations or experiences or parts or possessions. (ii) is not perfectly obvious because I have heard it argued that after death one continues as a Meinongian nonexistent object — a bizarre notion that I reject, but that deserves a separate post for its exfoliation and critique.

Premise (3), however, seems vulnerable to counterexample. Suppose the executor of a will ignores the decedent's wishes. He wanted his loot to go to Catholic Charities, but the executor, just having read Bukowski, plays it on the horses at Santa Anita. Intuitively, that amounts to a wrong to the decedent. The decedent suffers (in the sense of undergoes) an evil despite not suffering (in the sense of experiencing) an evil. And this despite the fact, assuming it to be one, that the decedent no longer exists. But if so, then (3) is false. It seems that a person who no longer exists can be the subject of wrongs and harms no less than a person who now exists. Additional examples like this are easily constructed.

But not only can dead persons have bad things done to them, they can also be deprived of good things. Suppose a 20 year old with a bright future dies suddenly in a car crash. In most though not all cases of this sort the decedent is deprived of a great deal of positive intrinsic value he would have enjoyed had he not met an untimely end. Or at least that is what we are strongly inclined to say. Few would argue that in cases like this there is no loss to the person who dies. Being dead at a young age is an evil, and indeed an evil for the person who dies, even though the person who dies cannot experience the evil of being dead because he no longer exists.

So we need to make a distinction between evils that befall a person and are experienceable by the person they befall, and evils that befall a person that are not experienceable by the person they befall. This distinction gives us the resources to resist the Epicurean-Lucretian thesis that death is not an evil for the one who dies. We can grant to Epicurus & Co. that the evil of being dead cannot be experienced as evil without granting that being dead is not an evil. We can grant to Epicurus et al. that, on the assumption that death is annihilation, being dead cannot be experienced and so cannot be rationally feared; but refuse to grant to them that dying and being dead are not great evils.

In this way, premise (3) of the above argument can be resisted. Unfortunately, what I have just said in support of the rejection of (3) introduces its own puzzles. Here is one.

My death at time t is supposed to deprive me of the positive intrinsic value that I would have enjoyed had I lived beyond t. Thus I am a subject of an evil at times at which I do not exist. This is puzzling. When I exist I am of course not subject to the evil of death. But when I do not exist I am not anything, and so how can I be subject to goods or evils? How can my being dead be an evil for me if I don't exist at the times at which I am supposed to be the subject of the evil?

We will have to think about this some more.

The Day Bukowski Discovered John Fante

Through Charles Bukowski I discovered John Fante who I am now reading (Ask the Dust, Black Sparrow, 2000, originally published in 1939) and reading about (Stephen Cooper, Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante, North Point Press, 2000). Here is Bukowski's preface to the Black Sparrow edition of Ask the Dust in which Buk recounts the day he stumbled upon Fante in the L. A. Public Library.

Both lived in and wrote about Los Angeles, which explains part of my interest in both. And then there is the Catholic connection, stronger in Fante than in Bukowski, and the Italian resonance in Fante. Ten years before Kerouac broke into print, Fante's writing had that mad, onrushing, intoxicated Kerouac quality as witness the following passage three pages into Ask the Dust:

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.

A day and another day and the day before, and the library with the big boys in the shelves, old Dreiser, old Mencken, all the boys down there, and I went to see them, Hya Dreiser, Hya Mencken, Hya, hya,; there's a place for me, too and it begins with B., in the B shelf, Arturo Bandini, make way for Arturo Bandini, his slot for his book, and I sat at the table and just looked at the place where my book would be, right there close to Arnold Bennett, but I'd be there to sort of bolster up the B's, old Arturo Bandini, one of the boys, until some girl came along, some scent of perfume through the fiction room, some click of high heels to break up the monotony of my fame. Gala day, gala dream!

Is a Fascist a Fascist When Pulling Up His Pants?

George Orwell's humanity is on display in the following passage from "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943), reprinted in A Collection of Essays (Harvest, 1981), pp. 193-194:

     Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the
     Fascists in the trenches outside Huesca. Their line and ours here
     lay three hundred yards apart, at which range our aged rifles would
     not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred
     yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a
     shot at someone through a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the
     ground between was a flat beet field with no cover except a few
     ditches, and it was necessary to go out while it was still-dark and
     return soon after dawn, before the light became too good. This time
     no Fascists appeared, and we stayed too long and were caught by the
     dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were two hundred yards of
     flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still
     trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an
     uproar and a blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our
     aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment, a man presumably
     carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran
     along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and
     was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained
     from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely
     to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was
     thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the
     Fascists had their attention fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did
     not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had
     come here to shoot at âFascistsâ; but a man who is holding up his
     trousers isn't a Fascist, he is visibly a fellow-creature,
     similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him.

Isn't there a scene in Homage to Catalonia in which the same or a similar fascist is caught with his pants down at the latrine when all hell breaks loose? In death and as in defecation, all distinctions dissolve to reveal us as indigent mortals made of dust and about to return to dust.

Abortion, the Potentiality Principle, the Species Principle, and the Species Potentiality Principle

A reader comments:

In an earlier post, Why We Should Accept the Potentiality Principle (24 October 2009), you suggest that we should apply the potentiality principle — All potential persons have a right to life — to the unborn to be consistent, as we already apply it to children. What troubles me is this: how do you say that we value children primarily for their potentiality without disenfranchising people who are permanently stuck with childlike capacities? Shall we bite the bullet and say these people are not to be valued or at least valued much, much less? Or will we squirm out of the dilemma by throwing in some ad hoc principle, say membership in the human family, to save our bacon? Maybe the best move for avoiding the repugnant conclusion is to make the unassailable religious retreat to the conclusion that all human beings will not reach their actuality in this life but the next. However, I’m not sure how that could be used to ground a theory of the wrongness of killing. None of these options seems incredibly promising to me. What say you?

Here, in summary, is the argument I gave:

1. We ascribe the right to life to neonates and young children on the basis of their potentialities.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between neonates and young children and fetuses.
3. Principles — in this case PP — should be applied consistently to all like cases.
Therefore
4. We should ascribe the right to life to fetuses on the basis of their potentialities.

What I was arguing was that we already do accept PP and that we ought to be consistent in its application. To refuse to apply PP to the pre-natal cases is to fail to apply the principle consistently.

I concede to the reader that there are severely damaged fetuses and infants the termination of which would be considered immoral, and that such cases are not covered by the principle (PP) according to which all potential persons have a right to life in virtue of the potential of genetically human individuals to develop in the normal course of events into beings that actually possess such rights-conferring properties as rationality. The severely retarded fetuses and infants (as well as irreversibly comatose adults) lack even the potentiality to function as descriptive persons. But note that if PP is one source of the right to life, it doesn't follow that it is the only source. If all potential persons have the right to life it doesn't follow that only potential persons have the right to life.

So, to improve my earlier argument, I will now substitute for (1)

1*. We ascribe the right to life to neonates and young children on the basis of their potentialities, though not only on that basis.

So we should explore the option that the right to life has multiple sources. Perhaps it has a dual source: in PP but also in the Species Principle (SP) according to which whatever is genetically human has the right to life just in virtue of being genetically human. Equivalently, what SP says is that every member of the species homo sapiens, qua member, has the right to life of any member, and therefore every member falls within the purview of the prohibition against homicide.

Subscription to SP would solve the reader's problem, for then a severely damaged infant would have a right to life just in virtue of being genetically human regardless of its potential for development. Some will object that SP is involved in species chauvinism or 'speciesism,' the abitrary and therefore illicit privileging of the species one happens to belong to over other species. The objection might proceed along the following lines. "It is easy to conceive of an extraterrestrial possessing all of the capacities (for self-awareness, moral choice, rationality, etc) that we regard in ourselves as constituting descriptive personhood. Surely we would not want to exclude them from the prohibition against killing the innocent just because they are not made of human genetic material." To deal with this objection, a Modified Species Principle could be adopted:

MSP: Every member of an intelligent species, just insofar as it is a member of that species, has a right to life and therefore falls within the purview of the prohibition against the killing of innocents.

The two principles working in tandem would seem to explain most of our moral intuitions in this matter. And now it occurs to me that PP and MSP can be wedded in one comprehensive principle, which we can call the Species Potentiality Principle:

SPP: Every member of any biological species whose normal members are actual or potential descriptive persons, just insofar as it is a member of that species, possesses a right to life and therefore falls within the purview of the prohibition against the killing of innocents.

Note that I didn't bring any religious notions into this discussion. It is a bad mistake to suppose that opposition to the moral acceptability of abortion can only be religiously motivated. And if our aim is to persuade secularists, then of course we cannot invoke religious doctrines.

REFERENCE: Philip E. Devine, The Ethics of Homicide (Cornell UP, 1978).

Speech and Guns

How should we deal with offensive speech? As a first resort, with more speech, better, truer, more responsible speech. Censorship cannot be ruled out, but it must be a last resort. We should respond similarly to the misuse of firearms. Banning firearms is no solution since (i) bans have no effect on criminals who, in virtue of being criminals, have no respect for law, and (ii) bans violate the liberty of the law-abiding. To punish the law-abiding while failing vigorously to pursue scofflaws is the way of the contemporary liberal. The problem is not guns, but guns in criminal hands. Ted Kennedy's car has killed more people than my gun. The solution, or part of it, is guns in law-abiding hands.

Would an armed citizen in the vicinity of the Virginia Polytechnic shooter have been able to reduce his carnage? It is likely. Don't ask me how likely. Of course, there is the chance that an armed citizen in the confusion of the moment would have made things worse. Who knows?

But if you value liberty then you will be willing to take the risk. As I understand it, the Commonwealth of Virginia already has a concealed carry law. Now if you trust a citizen to carry a concelaed weapon off campus, why not trust him to carry it on campus? After all, on campus there is far less likelihood of a situation arising where the weapon would be needed. Conservatives place a high value on self-reliance, individual liberty, and individual responsibility. Valuing self-reliance and liberty, a conservative will oppose any attempt to limit his self-reliance by infringing his right to defend himself, a right from which one may infer the right to own a handgun. (As I argue elsewhere; see the category Alcohol,Tobacco and Firearms.) And appreciating as he does the reality and importance of individual responsibility, he will oppose liberal efforts to blame guns for the crimes committed by people using guns.

Nothing I have written will convince a committed liberal. (As I have argued elsewhere, the differences are rooted in value-differences that cannot be rationally adjudicated.) But my intention is not to try to enlighten the terminally benighted; my intention is to clarify the issue.

Persuasion and agreement are well-nigh impossible to attain; clarification, however, is a goal well within reach.

Don Colacho’s Aphorisms

If you value aphorisms, do not miss these specimens from a master. Example:

Poetry rescues things by reconciling matter and spirit in the metaphor.

Permit me a quibble. There are poets who eschew metaphor in favor of metonymy, Bukowski, for example. If you protest that he is not a 'real poet,' I won't put up much of a fight.