Month: August 2011

On the Misuse of ‘Theology’

This is an addendum to my  post On the Misuse of Religious Language.

In that left-wing rag, the NYT, we find:

“When you buy gold you’re saying nothing is going to work and everything is going to stay ridiculous,” said Mackin Pulsifer, vice chairman and chief investment officer of Fiduciary Trust International in New York. “There is a fair cohort who believes this in a theological sense, but I believe it’s unreasonable given the history of the United States.”

So to believe something 'in a theological sense' is to believe it unreasonably.  It follows that liberals have plenty of 'theological' beliefs.  In the 'theology' of a liberal theology can be dismissed unread as irrational.

Hylomorphic Ontological Analysis and the Puzzle of Prime Matter

Recent posts have discussed  hylomorphic dualism in the philosophy of mind. It is a serious contender in the arena of competing positions — unlike say, eliminative materialism, which is not. (If you think I'm just gassing off about EM, read the entries in the eponymous category.) But now I want to take a step back from the special topic of the mind-body problem to the more general theme of hylomorphic ontological analysis as such.  In this post I examine some ideas in John Haldane's "A Return to Form in the Philosophy of Mind" in Form and Matter: Themes in Contemporary Metaphysics, ed. David S. Oderberg, Blackwell, 1999, pp. 40-64. But first some background.

In the 20th century Anglosphere, most philosophical analysis has been conceptual and linguistic. Moore and Russell were major practitioners. Decidedly less popular has been phenomenological analysis. Think Husserl. And least popular has been ontological analysis. The Iowa School (Gustav Bergmann and Co.) and Thomism are  the two major representatives of it. Ontological analysis takes as its object the (mind-independently) existent. It operates on the assumption that ordinary particulars have ontological constituents, and it tries to specify what these constituents are. These constituents are of course not spatial parts and they 'lie deeper' (whatever exactly this means) than the targets of chemical and physical analysis. They are items like these: universals, tropes, non-relational ties, Castaneda's ontological operators, Armstrong's thin particulars, Bergmann's bare particulars, and others besides.

2. Hylomorphic analysis is one type of ontological analysis. One analyzes meso-particulars such as a statue or a horse into form (morphe) and matter (hyle) among other constituents. These constituents are sometimes called principles, using the word in an old-fashioned way. Thus one speaks of the principium individuationis, the principle of individuation, or of the soul as life principle. The principle of individuation is not a statement or proposition but a real factor 'in' things that accounts for their numerical difference.

3. What motivates the hylomorphic approach? John Haldane has something interesting to say on this point:

. . . a condition of there being something for thought to take hold of is that the something has structure. Equivalently, a condition of there being thought is that there be relevant structuring principles (sortal and characterizing concepts plus logical constants.)

So we arrive at hylomorphic analysis. Every particular may be understood in terms of the instantiation of a formal principle. Its form makes it to be the kind of thing it is, providing its definitive structure, its characteristic powers and liabilities, and so on. However, since, ex hypothesi, things of the same specific sort have formally identical principles there arises the question of numerical difference. The analysis is completed by introducing the idea of matter as that which is structured and is the basis of numerical individuation within species. (49-50)

The motivation for hylomorphism is something like this. Thinking, in virtue of its intentionality, refers beyond itself to what it is not, namely, to 'objective' things and states of affairs. Whether thinking succeeds in referring beyond itself to things that exist independently of thought is of course a further question; but it is clear that thinking and indeed all forms of intentionality purport so to refer. For example, my perceiving of a distant mountain purports to reveal a physical object that exists whether I or anyone perceives it. This purport is part of the very sense of outer perception. Borrowing a line from the neglected German philosopher Wolfgang Cramer, outer perceiving is of objects as non-objects. The meaning, I hope, is clear: in outer perceiving the object is intended as more than a mere intentional object or accusative of awareness; it is intended as precisely something that exists as a non-object, as something that exists in itself, apart from the consciousness that posits it as existing in itself.

Now if one, setting aside skeptical worries, simply assumes that thought sometimes makes contact with reality, then one can ask: what must real things be like if thought is to be able to make contact with them? What must these things be like if it is to be possible for thought to "take hold of" them as Haldane puts it? The answer is that these mind-independent things must be conformable to our thought, and our thought to them. There must be some sort of isomorphism between thought and thing. Since we cannot grasp anything unstructured, reality must have structure. So there have to be principles of form and organization in things. But these formative principles must form something or determine something which, in itself, is at least relatively formless or indeterminate. There must be something which, in itself is (relatively) formless, is susceptible of being informed, or receptive of formation. In this way matter comes into the picture.

4. But now let's consider some puzzles. The proximate matter of a chair consists of its legs, seat, back. But this proximate matter itself has form. A leg, for example, has a shape and thus a form. (Form is not identical to shape, since there are forms that are not shapes; but shapes are forms.) Suppose the leg has the geometrical form of a cylinder. (Of course it will have other forms as well, the forms of smoothness and brownness, say.) The cylindrical form is the form of some matter. The matter of this cylindrical form is wood, say. But a piece of wood is a composite entity the parts of which have form and matter. For example, the complex carbohydrate cellulose is found in wood. It has a form and a proximate matter. But cellulose is made of beta-glucose molecules. Molecules are made of atoms, atoms of subatomic particles like electrons, and these of quarks, and so it goes.

The idea is that hylomorphic analysis is iterable. The iteration has a lower limit in prime or primordial or ultimate matter (materia prima.). Ultimate matter, precisley because it is ultimate, has no form of its own. As Haldane describes it, it is "stuff of no kind." (50)

Now one puzzle is this. Prime matter is not nothing. If it were nothing, then there would be no proximate matter either. Consider the lowest level of proximate matter. Consider a particle whose matter is prime matter. If prime matter is nothing at all, then this smallest particle could not exist, (since it is built up out of its components and one of them does not exist), and nothing having it as a component could exist. So prime matter is not nothing. But it is not something either. For if it were something it would have form or structure or organization. Obviously nothing can exist that is not definite and determinate. If you say the indeterminate, the apeiron, exists, WHAT are you saying exists? WHAT are you talking about? There has to be a whatness, a form, for it to be intelligible to say that something exists. 'X exists' says nothing. Recall the isomorphism between thought and reality that is part of the motivation for hylomorphic analysis. Something bare of determinateness is unthinkable and hence nonexistent.

We are driven to the conclusion that prime matter is not nothing and also not something. This certainly looks like a contradiction. But it is a contradiction apparently forced upon us if we embrace hylomorphic ontological analysis. For this analysis is iterable. One cannot stop shy of primate matter, for if there is no ultimate matter then there is no proximate matter either.

To avoid the contradiction one might say that prime matter, though not something actual is not nothing in that it is pure potency: the pure potentiality to receive forms is essentially the way Haldane puts it. (50) Does this help? Not much. What exactly is the difference between a pure potentiality to receive any form and nothing at all? Something that is not F or G or H, etc. but is receptive to these forms has no determinate nature. Without a determinate nature, how can it be anything at all?

5. Furthermore, a pure potency cannot be an ontological building block out of which to construct something actual. So should we say that prime matter is a mere abstraction? But then forms free of matter would also be mere abstractions. How can a substance be built up out of abstractions?

This second  problem concerns the status of the so-called 'principles' form and matter.  They don't have an independent existence, else they would be substances in their own right.  Is their status then merely mental?  That can't be right either since a hylomorph (a hylomorphic compound) cannot  be compounded of  components whose status is merely mental.  Why not?  Well, the typical hylomorph enjoys extramental existence, and it is difficult to see how such a thing could be built up out of constituents whose status was wholly intramental.

Richard Pipes on the Threat of Militant Islam

Excerpt:

Mr. Pipes thinks the main challenge for America today is militant Islam. "This is difficult to fight with because it is not a direct threat. A direct threat you can stand up to. It is also different because you are dealing with fanatics," he points out. 

"The communists were not fanatics. They were vicious people, but you could reason with them . . . and when the going got tough, they retreated." For instance, he says, "You had the Cuban missile crisis: Castro wanted the Russians to actually launch a nuclear attack on the United States, and he said 'OK, Cuba will be destroyed but socialism will triumph in the world.' And Khrushchev said no, nothing doing."

The communists "were never suicidal," either, Mr. Pipes adds, "and the ordinary Russians . . . they wanted to live. So this is a different danger. It's not as bad as the communist danger was because they don't [control] the arsenals of power, of military power. But they are fanatical, and they are irrational. We have to stand up to them and not be frightened of them. But we may be in for decades of the Muslim threat."

Second Thoughts: A Philosophy Blog

Readers who have stuck with me over the years will remember commenter 'Spur' whose comments were the best I received at the old Powerblogs site.  Safely ensconced in an academic position, he now enters the blogosphere under his real name, Stephen Puryear.  His weblog is entitled Second Thoughts.

I recently reposted from the old blog Hume's Fork and Leibniz's Fork which is in part a response to 'Spur.' His counter-response is here.

Three Dualisms: Simple, Compound, and Hylomorphic

This post continues my critique of hylomorphic dualism in the philosophy of mind. (See Hylomorphism category.) I will argue that hylomorphic dualism inherits one of the difficulties of compound substance dualism. But to understand the latter, we need to contrast it with simple or pure substance dualism. By 'substance' I mean primary substance, prote ousia in roughly Aristotle's sense. (But I hope to avoid exegetical bickering.) S is a primary substance if and only if S is broadly logically capable of independent existence.

A Note on Political Rhetoric

Is the Social Security system a Ponzi scheme?  Many conservatives so label it.  But obviously it is not a Ponzi scheme.  The intent behind such schemes is fraud.  Not so with the SS system.  If your point is that the SS system as currently configured is unsustainable in the long run, and is to that extent like a Ponzi scheme, then say that.  You will then be saying something that, in my opinion, is true.  But don't say something that is literally and obviously false if you expect to convince fair-minded people.

You may accuse me of not understanding the purpose of political rhetoric.  "The purpose is not to convince thoughtful and fair-minded people; the purpose is to fire up the lazy and largely thoughtless masses.  The purpose is to 'energize the base.'  You naively think that others share your abhorrence of loose and irresponsible talk.  They don't."

Negative Existentials and the Causal Theory of Reference: Notes on Donnellan

Causal theories of reference strike me as hopeless.  Let's see how they fare with the problem of negative existentials.

There are clear cases in which 'exist(s)' functions as a second-level predicate, a predicate of properties or concepts or propositional functions or cognate items, and not as a predicate of individuals. The   affirmative general existential 'Horses exist,' for example, can be understood as making an instantiation claim: 'The concept horse is instantiated.' Accordingly, the sentence does not predicate existence of individual horses; it predicates instantiation of the concept horse.

This sort of analysis is well-nigh mandatory in the case of negative general existentials such as 'Flying horses do not exist.' Here we have a true sentence that cannot possibly be about flying horses for the simple reason that there aren't any. (One can make a move into Meinong's jungle here, but there are good reasons for not going there.) On a reasonable parsing it is about the concept flying horse, and says of this concept that it has no instances.

The same analysis works for negative singular existentials like 'Pegasus does not exist.' Pace Meinong, everything exists. So, given the truth of 'Pegasus does not exist,' 'Pegasus' cannot be taken as naming Pegasus. Since 'Pegasus' has meaning, contributing as it does to the meaning of the true sentence, 'Pegasus does not exist,' and since 'Pegasus' lacks a referent, a natural conclusion to draw is that  the meaning of 'Pegasus' is not exhausted by its reference: it has a sense whether or not it has a referent. So, along Russellian lines, we may analyze 'Pegasus does not exist' as, 'It is not the case that there exists an x such that x is the winged horse of Greek mythology.'   Or we can take a page from Quine and say that nothing pegasizes. What we have done in effect is to treat the singular term 'Pegasus' as a   predicate and read the sentence as a denial that this predicate applies to anything.

In this way the paradox attaching to singular negative existentials is removed. But the Russell-Quine analysis is based on the assumption that names are definite descriptions in disguise (Russell) or else transformable into predicates (Quine). But how does one deal with the problem of negative existentials if one denies the Russell-Quine approach to proper names, holding instead that they refer directly to their nominata, and not via the sense of a definite description or Searlean disjunction of definite descriptions?

Keith Donnellan tackles this problem in "Speaking of Nothing" (reprinted in S. P. Schwarz, ed., Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds, Cornell UP, 1977, pp. 216-244).

Consider 'Santa Claus does not exist.' What does a child come to learn when he learns this truth? He does not learn, as a Russellian would have it, that nothing in reality answers to (satisfies) a certain
description; what he learns is that the historical chain leading back from his use of 'Santa Claus' ends in a 'block':

     When the historical explanation of the use of a name (with the
     intention to refer) ends in this way with events that preclude any
     referent being identified, I will call it a "block" in the history.
     In this [Santa Claus] example, the block is the introduction of the
     name into the child's speech via a fiction told to him as reality
     by his parents. (237)

Having defined 'block,' Donnellan supplies a rule for negative existence statements, a rule which he says does not purport to supply the meaning of negative existentials but their truth-conditions:

     If N is a proper name that has been used in predicative statements
     with the intention to refer to some individual, then 'N does not
     exist' is true if and only if the history of those uses ends in a
     block. (239)

'God' would appear to satisfy the antecedent of this conditional, so Donnellan's theory implies that 'God does not exist' is true if and  only if the history of the uses of 'God' ends in a block.

There is something wrong with this theory. If 'God does not exist' is true, then we may ask: what makes it true? What is the truthmaker of this truth? The most natural answer is that extralinguistic reality   makes it true, more precisely, the fact that reality contains nothing that could be referred to as God. There is nothing linguistic about this truthmaker. Of course, if 'God does not exist' is true, then 'God' does not refer to anything, and if 'God' does not refer to anything then the sentence 'God does not exist' is true. But the wholly nonlinguistic fact of God's nonexistence is not identical to the partially linguistic fact of 'God''s not referring to anything.  Why not? Consider the following modal argument:

   1. God's nonexistence, if it obtains, obtains in every possible world.
   2. The fact of 'God''s not referring to anything obtains in only some
   possible worlds. (Because the English language exists in only some
   worlds.)
   Therefore
   3. The two facts are distinct.

The argument just given assumes in its initial premise Anselm's Insight: if God exists, then he necessarily exists, and if he does not, then he is impossible. But I don't need this assumption. I can
argue as follows:

   5. God's nonexistence, if it obtains, obtains in some possible worlds.
   6. Among these possible worlds, some are worlds in which English does
   not exist.
   Therefore
   7. There is at least one world in which neither God nor the English
   language exists, which implies that God's nonexistence in that world
   cannot have as truthmaker any fact involving the name 'God.'

Let me put it another way. If 'God does not exist' is true, then the same fact can be expressed in German: 'Gott existiert nicht.' This is one fact expressible in two different languages. But the fact of
 'God''s not referring to anything is a different fact from the fact of 'Gott''s not referring to anything. The facts are different because they involve different word-types. Therefore, neither fact can be
 identical to the fact of God's nonexistence.

Since the two facts are different, the wholly nonlinguistic fact of God's nonexistence cannot have as a truth-condition the partially linguistic fact of the history of uses of 'God' ending in a block, contrary to what Donnellan says. If one assertively utters 'God does not exist,' and if what one says is true, then extralingustic reality must be a certain way: it must be godless. This godlessness of reality, if it indeed obtains, cannot be tied to the existence of any contingent language like English.

Note that the descriptivist need not fall into Donnellan's trap. When he assertively utters 'God does not exist' he says in effect that all or most of the properties associated with the use of 'God' — such
properties as omniscience, etc. — are not instantiated: nothing in extralinguistic reality has them. Since these properties can be viewed as having an objective, extralinguistic existence, the descriptivist needn't tie the existence/nonexistence of God to the existence of any contingent language.

Pushing Outwards Toward the Limits of Mystery

Flannery O'Connor, "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction" in Mystery and Manners (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 40-42:

All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality. Since the eighteenth century, the popular spirit of each succeeding age has tended more and more to the view that the ills and mysteries of life will eventually fall before the scientific advances of man, a belief that is still going strong though this is the first generation to face total extinction because of these advances.  If the novelist is in tune with this spirit, if he believes that actions are predetermined by psychic make-up or the economic situation or some other determinable factor, then he will be concerned above all with an accurate reproduction of the things that most immediately concern man, with the natural forces that he feels control his destiny.  Such a writer may produce a great tragic naturalism, for by his responsibility to the things he sees, he may transcend the limitations of his narrow vision.

On the other hand, if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself.  His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward towards the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted.  Such a writer will be interested in what we don't understand rather than in what we do.  He will be interested in possibility rather than in probability.  He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves — whether they know very clearly what it is they act upon or not.  To the modern mind, this kind of character, and his creator, are typical Don Quixotes, tilting at what is not there.

I was struck by this passage because in philosophy too there is a similar distinction.  There are those philosophical speleologists who are content to describe and explain the furnishings of Plato's Cave seemingly oblivious to its being a cave, and there are those who are always pushing their own limits outward towards the limits of mystery. For the latter, philosophy's technical minutiae are meaningless unless in the service of a transcending vision. 

Singular Meaning

Edward Ockham of Beyond Necessity is back from his Turkish holiday and reports that, besides lazing on the beach at Bodrum, he

. . . spent some time thinking about singular concepts. Do you accept singular meaning? Either you hold that a proper name has a meaning, or not (Aquinas held that it does not, by the way). If it does, then what is it that we understand when we understand the meaning of a proper name? The scholastics held that there was a sort of equivalence between meaning and signifying ("unumquodque, sicut contingit intelligere, contingit et significare"). What I signify, when I use a term in the context of a proposition, is precisely what another person understands, when he grasps that proposition that I have expressed.

Do I accept singular meaning?  That depends on what we mean by 'meaning' and by 'singular.'  Let's see if we can iron out our terminology.

1. Without taking 'sense' and 'reference' in exactly the way Frege intended them to be taken, I would say that 'meaning' is ambiguous as between sense and reference.  Unfortunately, Edward seems to be using 'meaning' to mean 'sense.'  Of course, he is free to do that.

2. Edward also uses the word 'signify.'  I should like him to explain exactly  how he is using this word.  Is the signification of a proper name the same as what I am calling its sense? Or is the signification of a proper name its  referent? Or neither? Or both?

3.  Suppose I assertively utter a token of 'Peter is tired' in the presence of both Peter and Edward.   My assertion is intended to convey a fact about Peter to Edward.  The latter grasps (understands) the proposition I express by my assertive tokening of the sentence in question.  And of course I understand the same proposition.  What I signify — 'express' as I would put it — by my use of 'Peter' is what Edward understands when he grasps the proposition I express. 

4.  Now the issue seems to be this.  Is the meaning or signification or sense  I express, and that I understand,  when I say 'Peter'  a singular meaning?  More precisely: is it an irreducibly singular meaning, one that cannot be understood as logically constructed from general concepts such as man, philosopher, smoker?

5. I say No!   I don't deny that 'Peter' has a sense.  It has a sense and a referent, unlike 'Vulcan' which has a sense but no referent.  But the sense of 'Peter' is not singular but general.  So, to answer Edward's question, I do not accept singular meaning.

Corollary: the haecceity of Peter – Peterity to give it a name — cannot be grasped.  All thinking is general: no thinking can penetrate to the very haecceity and ipseity of the thing thought about.  One cannot think about a particular except  as an instance of multiply exemplifiable concepts/properties.  This is 'on all fours' with my earlier claim that there are no singular or individual concepts.  The individual qua individual is conceptually ineffable.  So if we know singulars (individuals) at all, we do not know them by conceptualization.

If Edward disagrees with this he must tell us exactly why.  He should also tell us exactly how he is using 'proposition' since that is another potential bone of contention.  Is he a Fregean, a Russellian, or a Geachian when it comes to propositions?  Or none of those?

Of Ether, Lead, and Misattribution

Those of us who pursue the ethereal should never forget that it is blood, iron, and lead that secure the spaces of tranquillity wherein we flourish.

I found the following in a gun forum:  “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” It was attributed to George Orwell.

I don't know whether Orwell wrote those exact words.  I rather doubt that he did.  But he did write, in Notes on Nationalism, "Those who 'abjure' violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf."  The thought is essentially the same, and a good and true thought it is.

Pacifism is for angels.  But we are mixed and mixed-up beings, half animal, half angel.

You should never trust any unsourced attribution you find on the Internet .

The following beautiful  line of Henry David Thoreau is routinely misquoted:

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Again and again, people who cannot read what is on the page substitute 'wilderness' for 'wildness.' People see what they want to see, or expect to see. Here is an example of double butchery I found recently:

In wilderness is the preservation of Mankind.

(Warren Macdonald, A Test of Will, Greystone Books, 2004, p. 145.) 

On Temptation and the Perfection of Jesus

Joshua Orsak e-mails: 
Your recent posts on temptation got me thinking (again) about a problem I've wrestled with a long time. I'm a Christian minister and I've long thought about a tension between Jesus Christ's focus on intentions and sin in the internal life of man and the Christian conviction summed up in Hebrews 4:15 that Jesus was tempted in all the ways that we are but did not sin. I accept Jesus' injunction against (for instance) lusting after a person in one's heart and being angry at a person as sinful mental states or attitudes. I know from many of your past posts that you, too, are sympathetic with such a view. I believe that attitudes and intentions can be sinful as well as actions, and no doubt I get that from my Christianity.
 
But it seems to me that to be tempted is at least in part to (for instance) 'lust after a woman in your heart'. To be angry at someone is to be tempted to act against them. To be attracted to a woman and think about (say) cheating on my wife is to be tempted to cheat. But isn't that lusting after her in my heart? This creates a problem with the view that Jesus was sinless and indeed has often made me question that particular doctrine. How could Jesus be tempted 'in all ways' that we are and yet not sin, since it seems that to be tempted is to adopt, if only for a moment, the attitudes he labels as sinful? I've never come up with a satisfactory answer to this question, so I was wondering what you might think of it.
I had actually never thought of this.  The problem seems genuine and worth discussing for anyone who takes Christian orthodoxy seriously.  To throw the problem into sharp relief, I will formulate it as an inconsistent pentad:
 
1. Being fully human, Jesus was subject to every manner of temptation and was actually tempted.
2. To be tempted to do X is to harbor the thought of doing X.
3. Thoughts are morally evaluable: there are such things as evil (sinful) thoughts.
4.  If a person habitually harbors evil (sinful) thoughts,  then the person is sinful.
5. Being fully divine, Jesus was wholly sinless.
 
This quintet of propositions is logically inconsistent as is obvious from the fact that if  the first four are true, then the fifth must be false.
 
To solve the problem we must reject one of the pentad's limbs.  (1) and (5) are clear commitments of orthodox Christian theology and so cannot be abandoned by anyone who wishes to remain orthodox.  (3) has a NT basis, and so it cannot be abandoned either.  But (2) and (4) are rejectable.
 
As for (2), I can be tempted to do something like cheating my inexperienced customers without harboring the thought of doing so: I might just have the thought but then suppress it or dismiss it.
 
As for (4), even if  a married person dwells on the sinful thought of a trip to Las Vegas (where, we are told, "what happens there, stays there") to hook up (in the contemporary sexual sense) with an old flame, that by itself does not make the person a sinful person.  To be a sinful person one must habitually sin in thought, word, or deed.  Going on a drunk or two does not make one a drunkard; lying a few times does not make one a liar, etc. 
 
Note that (2) and (4) are necessary to derive a contradiction.  The problem can thus be solved by rejecting one or both of these propositions.  Rejecting (2) suffices to solve the problem.
 
In sum, Jesus' being tempted and his being perfectly sinless are consistent because, while Jesus had tempting thoughts, he did not entertain them with hospitality but rejected them.  "Get behind me, Satan, etc."
 

Britain and the Barbarians

Commentary by Theodore Dalrymple.  You may have noticed that liberals have a exasperatingly lenient and casual attitude toward criminal behavior:

A single example will suffice, but one among many. A woman got into an argument with someone in a supermarket. She called her boyfriend, a violent habitual criminal, "to come and sort him out." The boyfriend was already on bail on another charge and wore an electronic tag because of another conviction. [. . .]  The boyfriend arrived in the supermarket and struck a man a heavy blow to the head. He fell to the ground and died of his head injury. When told that he had got the "wrong" man, the assailant said he would have attacked the "right" one had he not been restrained. He was sentenced to serve not more than 30 months in prison. Since punishments must be in proportion to the seriousness of the crime, a sentence like this exerts tremendous downward pressure on sentences for lesser, but still serious, crimes. 

So several things need to be done, among them the reform and even dismantlement of the educational and social-security systems, the liberalization of the labor laws, and the much firmer repression of crime.

The sentence I bolded is very important. This is why a ban on the death penalty is very foolish besides being morally obtuse.  But there is no common sense on the Left, so much so that contemporary liberalism is arguably more of a mental aberration than a cogent  position on social and political questions.

Bonum Progressionis and the Value of One’s Life

The value of a whole is not determined merely by the values of the parts of the whole; the order of the parts also plays a role in determining the value of the whole.  One of several order principles governing the value of a whole is the bonum progressionis.  Glossing Franz Brentano, R. M. Chisholm (Brentano and Intrinsic Value, Cambridge, 1986, p. 71) writes:

The principle of the 'bonum progressionis' or the 'malum regressus' might be put by saying: 'If A is a situation in which a certain amount of value x is increased to a larger amount y, and if B is like A except that in B there is a decrease from the larger amount of value y to the smaller amount x, then A is preferable to B.'  Thus Brentano writes: "Let us think of a process which goes from good to bad or from a great good to a lesser good;then compare it to one which goes in the opposite direction.  The latter shows itself as the one to be preferred.  This holds even if the sum of the goods in the one process is equal to that in the other.  And our preference in this case is one that we experience as being correct." (Foundation, pp. 196-197) (In comparing the two processes, A and B, we must assume that each is the mirror image of the other.  Hence the one should not include any pleasures of anticipation unless the other includes a coresponding pleasure of recollection.)The bonum progressionis, then, would be a good situation corresponding to A, in our formulation above, and the malum regressus would be a bad situation corresponding to B.

Now let's see if we can apply this insight of Brentano to the question of the value of one's life.   A human life can be thought of as a whole the parts of which are its periods or phases.  It seems obvious that the value of the whole will depend on the values of the parts. 

But order comes into it as well.  Suppose lives L1 and L2 are such that the sums of the values of their constituent phases (however you care to individuate them) are  the same quantity of value, however this may be measured.  (There is also the serious question, which I set aside, of whether it even makes sense to speak of an objective measure of the value of a human life.) But whereas L1 begins well in childhood and adolescence but then deteriorates in quality, L2 begins poorly in childhood and adolescence and  gets better. 

If Brentano's bonum progressionis principle applies here, and I would say it does, then L2 is a more valuable life than L1 despite the fact that the sums of the values of their constituent phases are equal in value.  So we can say that the value of a life is more than the sum of the values of its parts when the life is ascending in value, but less than the sum of the values of its parts when the life is descending in value.

This may shed some light on why some people in old age (which I define as beginning at age 60), feel their lives to be not very valuable or satisfying while others in the same age cohort from similar backgrounds find their lives to be valuable and satisfying despite the obvious limitations that old age imposes.

The above analysis of course only scratches the surface.  Another thing to consider is that what is real and important to us is primarily what is real and important now.  The memories of past satisfactions are no match for the perceptions of present miseries.  So if the whole of one's life up to the present has been excellent while the present is miserable, the balance of good over evil cuts little or no ice.  But to explore this further is for another time. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs of Color

Here is a sampling, starting with the determinable and proceeding to some determinates:

Donovan and Joan Baez, Colors
Ry Cooder, Yellow Roses.  A beautiful song. Give it a chance.
Bobby Darin, 18 Yellow Roses.  Never could understand why this tune is almost never played on the oldies stations.
Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze.  For all you benighted qualia deniers out there.
Thelonious Monk, Blue Monk
Jimi Hendrix, Red House
Cream, White Room.  You say this is not a song of color?  What, is white not a color?
Los Bravos, Black is Black
Procol Harum, A Whiter Shade of Pale
Joan Baez, The Green, Green Grass of Home