Capital in the Twenty-First Century

There are books that everybody knows, that everybody talks about, and that hardly nobody has read. Such a book is Capital by Karl Marx, or, as the full title is, Capital: Critique of Political Economy. This month it is 150 years ago that the book was published. To be exactly, it was on 24 September 1867 in Berlin. Since then it has been reprinted many times, till the day of today, Also two volumes have been added, which came out after Marx’s death and have been prepared by Friedrich Engels from notes left by Marx. Here, in my study, I have these three volumes in the original German version. I have bought the books on 22 November 1969, and, indeed, I haven’t read them. Or hardly, for I started to read volume 1, but about at page 250 I stopped. Why? I don’t remember, but maybe I found it too boring or the book was simply too thick. It didn’t have priority and as a student in sociology I had many other books to read, too. But I found Marx’s work as such interesting. That was not the problem and I have read many other works by him (and Engels) as well, which I read till the end, as I usually do when I buy a book.

Since I didn’t read most of the three volumes of Capital, I can’t write about it from first-hand knowledge, so I’ll keep silent about it. Anyway, for long it has been considered a revolutionary and also dangerous work that undermined the existing capitalist society. Much of Marx’s Capital relies on the work by the British capitalist economist David Ricardo (1772-1823), but Marx used Ricardo’s tools for a revolutionary interpretation of society. However, wasn’t it Marx himself who said “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”? (Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach) But Marx was more an interpreter than an organizer, although just his interpretations show how relevant theory can be for social change.

What was it that Marx wanted to have changed? Let’s look at the also famous Communist Manifesto, published by Marx and Engels in 1848 in London. I have read this little book several times. Somewhere halfway we find a list of ten measures for the advancement of the position of the “proletariat”. Maybe these measures were revolutionary in Marx’s time, but now most of them have been realized, although some are still not acceptable.

Here are some measures proposed in the Manifesto. Measure 2 wants to introduce a “heavy progressive or graduated income tax”. When Marx and Engels wrote this, no country had an income tax, but during the First World War (1914-1918) many European countries introduced such a tax and since then it is seen as just and correct. About 1980 in the Netherlands the highest tax bracket was as high as 72%! (now it is 52%, still a figure Marx wouldn’t have dreamed of) Measure 3 says “Abolition of all rights of inheritance”. In my country inheritance rights are undisputed, but inheritances in the second degree and further are heavily taxed. Measure 6 says “Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State” and nowadays we see a big influence of the state on both. A last example: Measure 10 wants “Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.”. Also this demand has already been realized to a great extent if not fully in Europe and most countries elsewhere in the world (the abolition of child labour already in 1874 in the Netherlands).

More such measures have been proposed in other works by Marx and on meetings inspired by Marx’s ideas and ideas prevailing in the socialist movement of his days. Then they were revolutionary, now most people think that it is a shame if they haven’t been realized.

Al this happened under the influence of one of the most important books ever written: Capital by Karl Marx. But times change and ideas become practice or simply fade away because better or other ideas pop up. And that’s also why we can now put Capital in the library of history. However, this doesn’t mean that the book isn’t worth being read any longer. Books that are no longer relevant in the current situation, still can be stimulating. Therefore I should yet have to read it, if it had enough priority for me (but, alas, it hasn’t). However, a book that has become history and has made history can have so much prestige that other authors decide to use its title. It’s what the French economist Thomas Piketty did. Almost 150 years after Marx’s critique on the capitalist society Piketty wrote another revolutionary though not dangerous book on the same theme and borrowed the title: Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Will it be as influential?

Moral dilemmas in real life

Cases like the trolley problem are much discussed in philosophy. The idea behind studying cases is that it helps gain insight into complex problems, especially when experimentally testing can’t be done for practical or ethical reasons. So the trolley problem helps us gain insight into moral dilemmas. Instead of having professional philosophers discuss such cases, we can also put them to test persons or to the man in the street. For instance, a philosophical experiment on the trolley case showed that 10% of the testees were prepared to push the fat man onto the track in order to save the five people.

However, the value of such theoretical discussions for real life situations is a bit dubious. Of course, it helps to be prepared for what happens in practice and it is useful that judges and others who have to judge what people did in real life situations have a moral schooling. Nonetheless, the study of theoretical cases is not more than a help. Will you really think about the moral rules you learned, if you have a only a moment to decide what to do when confronted with a dilemma of the trolley problem type? Moreover, situations are seldom as black and white as suggested in the trolley case. You see a driverless, runaway trolley heading for a group of five people on the track, but if you turn a switch and redirect the trolley, it will head for a workman on the other track. But probably you’ll not be sure that the five or the single workman will die when hit by the trolley. Often, people are “only” seriously hurt when touched by a train but not killed. Furthermore, you can try to warn the five or the single workman. So, it’s not unlikely that you’ll turn the switch in order to save lives and that you’ll shout at the workman: “Look out! A trolley is heading for you!” You hope that the workman can jump aside or let himself fall between the rails, so that the trolley literally will run over the workman but without touching him. As we see here, philosophical problems are often not the copy of real life problems. That’s what Camus knew when he preferred his mother to the movement for the independence of Algeria (see last week). Besides that, what you’ll say when asked what to do in the trolley case may also depend on the wording used like whether the man you have to push onto the track is described as “a fat man” or “a big, heavy stranger”; whether he or the others involved are persons you know, whether or not they belong to a despised minority, and so on. There are also all kinds of other reasons that may determine what you’ll do, like your emotional resistance that you yourself have to act in order to kill an innocent single workman even if it will save five other persons.

Many moral dilemmas as they are discussed in philosophy leave out such practical circumstances and in the end they never lose the feeling of being ivory tower problems, how realistic they may be. Emotionally and otherwise it is different whether it is your mother that might be hit by a bomb in a real civil war or whether you discuss it in a philosophy class when no civil war is waging. Philosophical problems often get a different taste in real life and certainly they don’t have the drama of real life as this occurrence shows:

“On 7 January 2015 Corrine Rey, a cartoonist at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo ... returned from picking up her daughter from kindergarten. She was confronted by two French Jihadist gunmen, who threatened to shoot her daughter unless she keyed in the entry code at the door for the magazine. She did; and the gunmen entered to murder twelve people, including two policemen, as well as shooting eleven others. ..

Should Corrine Rey have been willing to sacrifice her daughter”, so the quote continues, “and herself rather than allow obvious murderers to enter the magazine and possibly kill everyone? Can a mother be blamed for only thinking of protecting her child?”

Kelly L. Ross, who made the website that I just quoted, says that the mother should not have been put in that position and that the safety measures should have been better, but I think that that’s not the problem. Life is such that not everything can be foreseen. In retrospection everything could have been done better, but for good or bad reasons the right measures are often not taken. That’s life and that’s the situation in which we have to take our decisions. Life is not an armchair.

Source: Kelly L. Ross, Some Moral Dilemmas”, on http://www.friesian.com/valley/dilemmas.htm

The trolley problem (2)

The trolley problem is one of the most discussed cases in analytical philosophy. Readers who find its description in my last blog too vague or are not good in visualizing written texts can watch this only 97 seconds lasting video that explains what it is about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOpf6KcWYyw

There are several versions of the case and last week I discussed the “tunnel version” in which the five cannot escape because they are in a tunnel. Your only choice is either turning the switch and lead the trolley to another track where a man is walking or doing nothing. However, there are alternative versions in which you perform another action instead of turning a switch in order to save the five people. All involve different, though related, ethical problems. The most treated version is one in which you can push a fat man onto the track, so that the trolley will be stopped, but the fat man will be killed. People may think: Be a hero and jump yourself onto the track. However, because you are as meagre as I am, you will simply be knocked down by the trolley or it will push you aside. Therefore the only options are pushing the fat man onto the track or doing nothing.

Most people judge that it is allowed to turn the switch to save the five but not to push the fat man onto the track, even though in both versions one person is killed and five persons are saved. Philosophers have written a lot about why this is so (and also most philosophers think that it is not allowed to push the fat man), but here I have to bypass their reasons pro and con. The essence is that sacrificing the fat man is a means to save the five, while sacrificing the single walker on the track is a side-effect of turning the switch (while the latter action is the means). In terms of my last blog we can also say that killing the fat man is done, while killing the single walker is enabled (actually I should say: that the single walker is killed is enabled).

For a non-philosopher cases like the trolley problem (if not its more complicated versions) may look weird. You might think that cases are the playthings of philosophers. This can be so, indeed, but these toys have often serious meanings. By analyzing the trolley problem it becomes clear that it is important to distinguish between means and side effects. But the case also exemplifies the question whether we are allowed to do the lesser evil in order to get the bigger good. To answer such questions is not always easy. Therefore it makes sense to rack your brains on simple cases, which in the end appear to be not simple at all. Here are some practical examples that are actually trolley-like problems:

- Many will say that in a war it is allowed to bomb a munitions factory of the enemy. But what if the factory is situated near a residential quarter? For the factory will explode and it will kill many civilians. What if only a few civilians are likely to be killed by the explosion? What if we need to drop hundred bombs for destroying the factory and it is sure that about ten bombs will not fall on the factory but will directly kill civilians living near the factory?

- Stalin and his co-communists thought that it was allowed to kill the “kulaks” for the bigger good of communism. It’s an extreme case of what often happens.

- Is it allowed to demolish the house of an old woman if we destroy her happiness – because she has lived there her whole life – since we want to build a road there, even if this woman is compensated in all ways possible?

- Sartre tells somewhere that an ex-student of his asked him for advice: He wants to join the Free French forces in order to fight against the Nazis. However, then he must leave his mother alone in difficult circumstances, while it might also get her into trouble with the Germans.

Big and small problems are often kinds of trolley problems. The existentialist philosopher Albert Camus dealt with trolley-like problems in his work. His standpoints in such questions made him controversial, so Sarah Bakewell, also because it made that he didn’t support the rebels in the fight for independence of Algeria in the 1950s (Camus was from Algeria). But when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, he explained in an interview: “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” Philosophy is as practical as philosophy can be.

Sources

- Bakewell, Sarah, The existentialist café. London: Vintage, 2016; pp. 7-8, 246.

- Kamm, F.M., The trolley problem mysteries. With commentaries by Judith Jarvis Thomson, Thomas Hurka, Shelly Kagan. Edited and introduced by Eric Rakowski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

The trolley problem

The tripartite distinction between doing, allowing and enabling harm, which I discussed in my last blog, can put many philosophical and daily problems in another light, for example the well-known trolley problem. Although the trolley problem is often discussed as a pure philosophical problem, there are many practical versions, like those treated by Dostoevsky and Sartre. Here I’ll focus on a philosophical version of the case, called Bystander: A driverless, runaway trolley on a railway is heading for a tunnel, in which it will kill five people, if nothing stops it. A bystander can save their lives by turning a switch and redirecting the trolley on to another track. However, there is a man walking on that track that will then be killed instead of the five.

There are also other versions of the philosophical trolley problem, for example that there is a driver on the trolley who can turn the switch; that a bystander can stop the trolley by pushing a fat man on the track; etc. But this simple version will do in order to show my point.

Judith Jarvis Thomson discusses the following principle that can guide the decision whether or not to turn the switch: “Though (1) killing five is worse than killing one, (2) killing one is worse than letting five die”.

The principle seems reasonable and moreover it is typical for the debate on the trolley problem, where actually every participant agrees that:

(I) the bipartite distinction between doing and allowing harm applies;

(II) turning the switch so that the single walker dies is an act of killing that the bystander does.

I start with assumption II. I have my doubts that turning the switch so that the single walker dies is an act of killing. Of course, it is so that the single walker is killed, if the bystander turns the switch, and it is also the case that killing is a matter of degree, ranging from killing by accident to outright murder. Nevertheless, if we say that the bystander kills the single walker by turning the switch, to me it sounds somewhat odd. It is as if the bystander has the intention to kill the single walker in order to save the five. However, the bystander doesn’t have this intention at all. He merely wants to save the five people. If he could save the single walker as well, he would be very happy. Moreover it is not the bystander who kills the single walker but it is the trolley that does. I think that there is more to say for it that the person who made that the trolley started moving or could move in the direction of the switch is responsible for the killing of either the five or of the single walker. If someone would be punished for the death of one or five persons respectively, it would be him.

Be that as it may, let me examine what the bystander does. The bystander has the intention to save the lives of the five persons on the track. The bystander thinks that he can save these five lives only by turning the switch. Therefore he turns the switch and the five persons are saved. However, the single walker is killed as an unintended consequence of this action. Should we say then nevertheless that the bystander kills the single walker? For, hadn’t the bystander turned the switch, the single walker hadn’t died. It looks the same as if the bystander had killed some by accident.

In order to solve this problem we must look at assumption I. The reason why we say that the bystander kills the single walker is that this assumption gives us only the possibilities to say either that the bystander does something (turning the switch) and then it follows that he kills the single walker; or that the bystander allows something to happen (the switch leave as it is) but then the single walker survives and the five people die. Since the bystander turned the switch, we must say that he killed the single walker. However, as we have seen in my blog last week, the bipartite distinction between doing and allowing harm is not correct and must be replaced by the tripartite distinction between doing, allowing and enabling harm. And if we do so, then we need no longer to say that the bystander killed the single walker, but that by turning the switch he enabled that the single walker was killed (namely by the trolley).

I think that introducing the category of enabling in the debate will put the trolley problem in a new light and maybe it will make that much reasoning on the theme must be revised. One thing that might be changed is the principle quoted above. I think that it’s true that (1) killing five is worse than killing one. It may also be arguabel that (2) killing one is worse than letting five die. However, now we should add a lemma like (3) letting five die is worse than enabling one being killed – assuming that it is possible to defend this view (which I am not yet sure of, since it depends a lot on the conditions that occur).

Reference: Judith Jarvis Thomson, “Kamm on the Trolley Problems”, in F.M. Kamm et al. The Trolley Problem. Mysteries. Oxford, etc.: Oxford University Press, 2016; pp. 113-134 (quotation on p. 114).