Dear Theo,
Taverymuch for another storming Commensal. Enclosed is a contribution for the next one, printed in the largest, clearest NLQ font that my humble little printer can manage. I trust your scanner can digest this with relative ease. This covering letter however is printed in draft mode which takes half the time and uses half the ink. Would it be OK to print subsequent contributions in this mode or will your scanner object ? Keep up the excellent labours.
Count Dave Of Transylvania (C88, pp. 4-5) : Wow ! A whole 2 pages just pour moi ! I'm touched ! ... and please, call me Rick.
You say that "relativists say that what is considered morally right IS morally right and therefore that moral values vary from society to society. If this is true then I hereby disassociate myself from this bunch of barking weirdoes because my whole point was that there is NO actual right and wrong, there are only individual opinions interacting to form an approximate consensus within any given society, and the fact that "moral values vary from society to society" is observable rather than extrapolated from a meaningless premise.
I think perhaps in my haste to make my own point about morality being a social construct I may've possibly overlooked the subtle irony of your vampire analogy to some extent and I do agree that intelligence is no criterion for granting moral rights within one’s own belief system. However I don't agree at all with your alternative criterion, namely autonomy. After all a bacterium is totally autonomous and a human slave is totally not. You seem to be advocating slavery and deriding hygiene. Although my suggested criterion of social participation may create the dilemma of where to position the boundaries of society, I believe this dilemma to be more resolvable than its originator ie. who has the greater right to life.
History has judged the Nazis to be "wrong" in massacring millions of Jews because now the consensus is that all humans belong to the same society but at the time the Nazis believed that the Jews were not a part of their own society but a parasitic infestation to be exterminated. I'm not trying to defend Nazi ideology but I do think there is more to be gained from understanding the reasons behind even the most abhorrent behaviour than there is by simply dismissing it as evil.
And as for the art / engineering question, let us first re-centre on my original point. I believe that humans are more important than all other life forms because I am human. Many people seem to agree that humans are more important but find it necessary to concoct meaningless excuses for their prejudice such as sentience or self-awareness or divine right. And now we have a new excuse ... art! We are not the only animals which make things, but this is not in dispute. The question is therefore whether or not there is something very fundamentally unique about art as opposed to engineering that puts us on a whole different evolutionary level to all other animals. Dave says that non-art is merely functional, it either works or it doesn’t. Whereas art is evaluated subjectively and can therefore be good in one person’s eyes and bad in another’s. But if this were the case wouldn't everyone drive the same car ? Cars are engineered, their purpose is functional and yet they are clearly evaluated subjectively. Each person has their own evaluation criteria. Likewise each female bird has her own subjective ideas about good and bad nests. What it comes down to is that nothing is ever evaluated objectively. And as for the idea that engineering is different from art in that it's functional; that implies that art has no function and if that were true then why does it exist? Its function is to stimulate thought and conversation. Of course that’s just one of my many subjective opinions which I also use to evaluate cars, bridges, word processors and all other human creations.
Philip Lloyd Lewis (C88, p. 6) : Yes, I am indeed confusing objective truth with objective reality, and I now think I understand the distinction but let me just check. There is an objective reality in which God may or may not exist but we can never know for certain. And 5 billion subjective realities in which God does definitely either exist or not according to the opinion of the individual. The statement "God exists" is always subjectively true because God does exist in 3 or 4 billion different subjective realities and the opposite is also subjectively true because of the 1 or 2 billion subjective realities in which God definitely doesn't exist. However the statement "God exists" is never objectively true (or false) because it is always made subjectively. Only an objective statement can contain objective truth and there are no objective statements so there is no objective truth but there is objective reality in which we are independently subjectively agreed that I do objectively exist. That’s reassuring.
(C88, p. 7, para 5) : What makes you think that "objective reality is one and indivisible"? Surely its indivisibility is just your subjective opinion.
Theo Todman (C88, p. 7) : At the risk of sounding pedantic I'd prefer to say that scientific theories are subject to "improvement" rather than "correction" as the assumption that they will ever be totally correct is as mistaken as the assumption that they are already. But I do agree that there is value in trying to approximate our subjective realities to the objective even if only for the sake of social unity.
(Science And Pseudo-Science; C88, pp. 8-11) : I think it’s true that science often crosses the boundary into pseudo-science by claiming proof of unprovable theories and it’s always worth remembering that nothing is absolutely true anyway, but I'd like to add an observation of my own to the discussion. Ironically, a significant failing of science is the very dedication and expertise of its exponents. Dogmas are bound to develop due to the awe in which great scientists of the past are rightly perceived. For example, who am I to suggest that Einstein made a mistake in his theory of relativity? To suggest such a thing would be to claim that I'm smarter than he was. Its all very well to criticise dogmatism in science, but realistically how can it ever be eliminated?
(Bertrand Russell; C88, p. 10) : If there is no absolute motion then how do you explain centrifugal force? Surely the rotational speed of an object is calculable by measuring the centrifugal force it generates? And that rotational speed is not relative to anything. If rotational speed can be absolute then why not linear speed?
E. Ron Kermode (C88 p. 12-14) : Yeah, I suppose I can see how someone could believe that they have a right to medical care based on the amount of tax they've paid. This is a valid point but personally I take the view that my income is my income after tax. As I have no control over how much tax I pay or how public money is spent all I can do is hope that our elected representatives are acting in the overall best interests of society. That may sound rather naively complacent and pathetically submissive but it does allow me to appreciate what society provides instead of futilely demanding that it provide more.
Suicide may not be a criminal offence, but that's only because it's unpunishable. The anti-voluntary-euthanasia argument is that suicides shouldn't happen and if making it illegal to commit suicide would stop suicides from happening then we should make it illegal. However someone who's trying to kill themselves clearly isn't going to be deterred by a possible prison sentence, so all we can do is make it illegal to assist someone else in ending their life. Having said that, though, I do agree with you completely. A life of suffering is indeed a fate worse than death.
There is a major difference between a yard full of coal and the entire history of a species. A yard full of coal is only three dimensional and you are able to move and see in all three of those dimensions. The history of the human race is however very four dimensional, so unless you can go back in time, you have almost nothing to base any estimation on. And anyway, who's to say there wasn't a flood? Or even two or three? Or five hundred? Do you see my point?
Nice idea about page references. A convention I think we all should adopt.
Michael Nisbet (C88, p. 16) : "Belief" and "delusion" are indeed interchangeable terms for the same set, ie. delusions, which being a sub-set of beliefs can be referred to by either title. I see no contradiction.
You also pose the question (if only rhetorically) "How do I know that I'm not a bat dreaming that I'm a human?", to which I would say that you don't. You could quite possibly be a sleeping bat and I don't see why that should be any less likely statistically than the equally one-in-several-million possibility that you really are human. So are we complacent in assuming that we're not bats? If we are then this implies that we can in some way prepare for that moment when we awake and realise that those five years at university spent studying structural engineering were a complete waste of time and we should have been studying airborne moth hunting and echo location instead. Well this is clearly taking the boy scout motto of "be prepared" substantially too far but acknowledging the possibility is, I think, not without value because a person who is too convinced that he's definitely human will be totally unprepared psychologically for that moment of waking, should it ever occur. Personally I believe that I'm human but I also believe that I'm as well prepared as I can be for the unlikely eventuality that I'm not.
Theo (C88, p. 23-24) : Another fragment of quantum physics from a BBC2 documentary to add the super-photon debate ... Stephen Hawking reckons super-photons are a spontaneous random occurrence which enables black-holes to "leak". He also says that others have named this "Hawking Radiation" but he himself would prefer it to be called something else. I suspect that my earlier reference was to a physicist trying (and apparently succeeding) to prove Hawking’s theory.
Although I agree with you that inflicting flagrantly unnecessary suffering on sentient non-human beings is obnoxious, imagine that I didn't agree. You claim you can rationally justify your opinion but so far your rational argument seems to be "well it’s obvious". To you and me it is, but not to everyone. I can and have made a rational argument against undermining one’s own society but you are only able to fall back on emotional ideas of empathy and hypothetical situations, which our animal torturer could simply dismiss as a figment of your imagination. I wish you were right. I wish there was an argument I could use to convince sports hunters that what they are doing is wrong but unfortunately it isn't wrong, its just that I don't like it and why should my opinion be more important than theirs?
I don’t see any reason why young children shouldn't be able to understand reflective surfaces when adult members of other species cannot. After all young children do have a unique ability to assimilate language. Understanding is about intelligence rather than experience or education. Age matters little.
Anthony Owens (C88, p. 27) : The phrase "something is happening" is neither subjective nor objective. It is non-specific and therefore cannot be categorised without appreciating its wider context. This does however beg the question, is there a conceptual "ether" between Philip’s two tiers of reality? And if so have we lost anything more important in it?
Theo (C88, p. 27) : Why does everyone always assume gods are infallible? I'm no expert on Hindu deities but if they're anything like those of Greek mythology then Mr Ramanujan could well've been correct.
Alan Carr (C88, pp. 30-31) : Science doesn't ignore the soul. Science breaks all of reality down into little chunks and then assigns different people to study each piece. Obviously most sciences ignore the soul because all sciences ignore almost everything. The science that studies the soul is called psychology and studies nothing else. As for religion ignoring the body, I would say that the whole notion of religion is a modern construct. To ancient Jews for example Judaism wasn't their "religion" it was simply the sum total of their understanding of reality. It is only now that the cultures of the world are intermingling that we need a collective name for all belief systems other than our own. I see the word "religion" is simply meaning "ancient belief system" and inevitably these are going to vary in what they do and do not contain.
The standard is NOT "low", debating and philosophy are inseparable, and if you want to "read, digest, learn and move on" I suggest you get a book. Vive la P.D.G. !
Rick Street
I suspect that the only moral absolutes are those needed to maintain any meaningful society; but even granted that there are no such absolutes, there is such a thing as consistency, as I’ve said before. Maybe a conviction of the rightness of consistency is one of the moral absolutes. If a person accepts the need to be consistent in moral judgement, then a meaningful moral discussion can take place. For instance, the Nazis didn’t consider it right for other countries to oppress German minorities (indeed, this was their main pretext for declaring war on their neighbours) so they were being inconsistent in using self-determination as an excuse for oppressing their own minorities, such as the Jews. Of course, then they had to invent silly racial theories to the effect that the Jews weren’t really human. This leads to another area where moral judgements are open to criticism, where they depend on alleged matters of fact. If there were valid reasons for concluding that the Jews were sub-human, or non-human, these reasons would have to account for why the Jews were genetically so similar to humans and why they were over-represented in the arts & professions; and "world conspiracies" are rather feeble reasons for this since many of us are willing to concede (as ought the Nazis) that the Jews have been noted for turning out the occasional competent scientist or musician, as judged by the impartial observer.
There is an interesting article entitled "‘Is’, ‘Ought’ and the Voluntaristic Fallacy" in this quarter’s Philosophy, in which Oswald Hanfling tries to argue against Hume and his modern disciples who hold that no statement of fact entails a statement of value, and therefore - allegedly going beyond Hume - that all moral values are matters of choice rather than being part of ‘the given’ (belief in which proposition he dubs the Voluntaristic Fallacy). I think he’s wrong on all of this, in that his arguments are muddled, but more on that next time, I hope.
I think you’re way off the scent with suggesting that the function of art is to stimulate thought and conversation ! It may be so for art critics, but doesn’t most good art simply give pleasure ? The high treble in Allegri’s Miserere is more likely to stimulate an ecstatic tingle than a thought. I would suggest that the reason scientists, or at least physicists, are unassailable by the general public is less to do with the awe in which they are held than because of the inaccessibility of the subject matter. After all, Aristotle was held in about as much awe as the Bible, but was overthrown by Galileo & Newton, as was Newton himself (though not to the same degree) by Einstein. This had nothing to do with one being cleverer than the other - Newton is still held by many to be the greatest scientist that ever lived (and one of the top three mathematicians, along with Archimedes and Gauss, as well). It is just that science is a difficult subject that takes people a lot cleverer than you and I a long time to get to grips with, let alone do ground-breaking creative work in. The main reason for most of us to be dubious about taking issue with Einstein is that, most likely, we’d be wrong. Maybe, as you suggest, nothing is absolutely true; but, in mathematical physics at least, there are rather a lot of ways of being absolutely wrong, as anyone who’s had exam questions marked will know !
The difference between linear motion and rotation is that the latter always involves acceleration, as I said, whereas the former does not. Unaccelerated motion is relative, accelerated motion is absolute. Otherwise, I agree with you.
I think your attitude to tax revenues is a healthy one. I’ve listened enough to right wing Americans ranting on about their "tax dollars" being wasted on no-goods (usually equated to single mothers and unemployed non-whites). Interestingly, the October 1997 edition of Philosophy has an article entitled "Equality and Desert" by one Louis Pojman - Professor of Philosophy at the US Military Academy at West Point - a likely position if ever there was one, akin to "spiritual advisor to the Spice Girls" in my view. I feel another competition brewing ! To be fair to Professor Pojman, I haven’t read his article yet, but I did notice that "tax dollars" featured in it as expected.
I didn’t understand what you were on about with respect to beliefs and delusions. You seem to be saying, though maybe not meaning, that all beliefs are delusions. Also, do you really think it’s just as likely that you’re a sleeping bat than that you’re a human ? We seem to be back to the same old contention that, just because everything is to some degree doubtful, therefore everything is equally doubtful, or credible for that matter. I can think of a few propositions less doubtful than that one, but I won’t bore you with them all now.
I didn’t watch much of the Hawking series. What I did see seemed very simplistic and confused (not Hawking’s fault, I would imagine). I’d thought that Hawking Radiation proceeded as follows. Particle / anti-particle pairs spontaneously arise in the quantum vacuum surrounding the black hole as they do everywhere else in the universe. Because of the extreme gradient of the gravitational field in the proximity of a black hole, a negative energy particle gets drawn into the black hole while the positive energy particle escapes, thereby looking as though it has been emitted. Or so says Chapter Seven of BHT. Nothing about super-photons that I remember.
Incidentally, I’ve volunteered for the job of SIG Sec for Physics SIG. Anybody else a member ? Some of the discussions above sound like useful material for PhySIG.
A good point about fallible gods & goddesses. However, I’d suggest that part of the grammar of claims to revelation is that the revelation itself be in some sense true.
Thanks for the vote of confidence in PDG ! I do, though, think we have a duty not to make life unnecessarily difficult for our readership.
Theo