End of the Corona Crisis

Sooner or later the corona crisis will come to an end. A photographic impression how it will happen.

“A man is a wolf to another man”?

Thomas Hobbes’s main work Leviathan is a book about the state. Part II of the book, titled “Of Commonwealth” discusses the elements, characteristics etc. of the state as such; Part III (“Of Christian Commonwealth”) discusses the Christian state and Part IV discusses the “Kingdom of Darkness”. But here I am not interested in the state, but I am interested in Man, and that’s what the first part of the book is about. (I write Man with a capital in order to indicate that I mean the human being and not only the male version).

In order to understand Hobbes’s portrayal of Man, one must know that he wrote Leviathan in a period of civil war. The book was published in 1651, the year that the English Civil War ended. Two years before, for the first time in history an English king had been executed. Did these circumstances make Hobbes’s portrayal of Man so negative? He didn’t use the expression “A man is a wolf to another man” in the Leviathan (but in his De Cive — by the way, the saying is not from Hobbes, but it is an old Latin proverb —), but this expression fully shows the way Hobbes thinks about Man, if you interpret its meaning this way that basically Man is cruel to other Men and that Man thinks only and only of himself (or herself, of course, but for Hobbes Man is only a masculine being). This is a bit strange, for actually a wolf is a social animal.

So for Hobbes Man is quite an egoist being. He is there only for himself, and maybe with the exception of his family, he doesn’t care about others. Man is also a materialistic being. “Higher values” don’t count. I can give here only some illustrations, but for Hobbes, love is a desire of the flesh, or friendliness at most. Religion is a kind of fear for an invisible power. Happiness is a continuing desire of going from one object to another, and once you have it, you use it get the next one. As if there isn’t more in it.

But alas, Man’s fellow Men are of the same kind. The result is that Man is continuously at war with his fellow Men; maybe not always in practice, but the possibility of war is the background of everything Man does in relation to other Men. This situation can be solved only in one way, so Hobbes: An agreement between all Men to appoint or choose a kind of higher authority, the Sovereign or otherwise a kind of sovereign council that rules society. But I’ll not talk about this, for then I am in the field of politics.

There are certainly many people who agree with Hobbes’s view of Man: Man need to be tamed and for this we need a dictator, a strong man. Otherwise society will be a mess, they think. However, I think that such a view of Man is completely at odds with reality. As I have expounded in my blog on shared intentions two weeks ago (http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2020/06/shared-intentions.html), Man came to be different from the other primates and from the other animals in general just by becoming less egoist than those fellow animals. Man’s fellow animals could cooperate, indeed. Anyway, primates like chimpanzees could (and can) and wolves could (and can). However, they cooperate from egoist motives, as we have seen in this blog two weeks ago. Man, on the other hand, doesn’t have only egoistic intentions when cooperating with others, but Man has also intentions that s/he shares with others. Philosophers and psychologists still disagree what this sharing involves, but one thing is clear: In one way or another Man can and does share intentions with others. Moreover, Man doesn’t only share intentions with others, — which manifests itself, for instance in the way Men make plans; have you ever seen animals that come together and make plans? — but s/he also cares for others, and then I mean others who don’t belong to her or his family. Man is a sharing if not caring individual. An individual, indeed, for Man is often egoist. However, Man is not only an egoist; egoism is only one of his/her characteristics. Man is social at heart. Man is a sharing and caring individual. Don’t you believe it? I’ll give you a simple illustration. You are walking in a street. A woman passes you. Then you see that her purse falls on the ground. What do you do? I agree that not all people will do so, but I guess that you pick it up, and you call: “Madam, madam! You have lost your purse!” And you give it back. And if she doesn’t hear you, you’ll run after her and stop her. You’ll do it, although she is a stranger for you; although you’ll never see her again in your life; and although nobody will know that it was you who picked up the purse. A man is a wolf to another man?

False reasoning in Covid-19 times

Leviathan swimming in the Rhine near Utrecht.

False reasoning often happens. I think that it is as old as humanity. It’s true, often it can be difficult to develop a correct argumentation, and I am afraid that I, too, am sometimes guilty of using incorrect reasonings. Being a philosopher I should have developed a professional immunity against false reasoning, but alas, a man is human and makes mistakes that are human. Philosophers are no exception. In fact, it is not strange that people fail to see through complicated reasonings that are even difficult to understand for philosophers. However, people also often fail to see through reasonings that are transparent and that have been rejected as false already since long ago and in many books. Apparently, correct reasoning is quite a job and one has to learn it.

I became again aware of all this, when I started to read one of the most famous books of modern philosophy: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. Although this book is especially known because Hobbes presents here his political theory, its first part is devoted to man and also to the way man reasons. Everybody should read this part of the book, for you can learn a lot of it that is useful in daily life. Don’t be afraid that the text is difficult to understand, for the book is clearly written and very readable, especially when you take a modern edition. In this blog I cannot give more than an impression of what you find there, so I just pick out a fragment that I find striking in the light of the present corona crisis. In my last blog I promised to write again on other themes, but I cannot help that it stays in my mind.

Since I am reading a Dutch paper edition, I have quoted for this blog from the online text of the Renascence edition. It gives the original text, which may be a bit difficult for some readers, but, as said, modern editions are very well readable. The fragment I have chosen is from Part I, chapter 11 (https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/748/leviathan.pdf, pp. 90-91):

“Ignorance of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to the causes immediate and instrumental: for these are all the causes they perceive. And hence it comes to pass that in all places men that are grieved with payments to the public discharge their anger upon the publicans, that is to say, farmers, collectors, and other officers of the public revenue, and adhere to such as find fault with the public government; and thereby, when they have engaged themselves beyond hope of justification, fall also upon the supreme authority, for fear of punishment, or shame of receiving pardon. Ignorance of natural causes disposeth a man to credulity, so as to believe many times impassibilities: for such know nothing to the contrary, but that they may be true, being unable to detect the impossibility. And credulity, because men love to be hearkened unto in company, disposeth them to lying: so that ignorance itself, without malice, is able to make a man both to believe lies and tell them, and sometimes also to invent them.”

What the first part of the quotation says, for instance, is that the messenger is blamed for the contents of the message, even when he has nothing to do with it. We see this also sometimes in these days that the coronavirus rules the world. A virus has spread from Wuhan in China all over the world. No matter how it came there, once it existed and spread, there was only one thing to do: Try to stop it. Therefore, in most countries the government ordered a lockdown or a semi-lockdown. At first, most people agreed, but already soon people began to grumble. Many complained not about the effectiveness of the measures and were asking whether the governments had taken the right measures, but more and more people began (and begin) to say: Why does the government do all this to us? Hasn’t the virus already gone back somewhat? Haven’t we correctly followed the restrictions imposed on us? As if it is the government that has spread the disease and as if it is the government that has made people ill. It’s true, governments often make mistakes or deceive people, but the disease is not spread by governments but by a virus. For instance, on a press conference by the Dutch Prime Minister, this question was asked: “Mr. Rutte, already for some weeks you see that the Dutch behave very well and maintain the corona restrictions. Nevertheless, the Dutch government extends the term of the restrictions with another three weeks. How can the latter be reconciled with the former?” Implicitly in this question the Dutch government is hold responsible for the necessity of the restrictions, while actually it is the spread of the virus that makes the restrictions inevitable.

In the second part of the quotation, Hobbes says: Ignorance of the facts makes that people tend to believe all kinds of impossible things that cannot be true. Take for example so-called conspiracy theories, which I have discussed in a blog some time ago (http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2020/03/conspiracy-theories.html). Many people don’t know or don’t understand where viruses come from. So, even if scientists say that the origin of the corona virus – or what else we are talking about –  is natural, many people don’t understand what this involves. Therefore, they invent their own explanations. In the past, people often thought that a disease was the scourge of God. Nowadays conspiracy theories have taken its place.

Old books and less old books contain a lot of wisdom, but what is this wisdom worth if we ignore it? 

Shared intentions

Musica Temprana in Vredenburg/Tivoli, 15 December 2019

Now that the lockdown gradually is lifted in many countries, maybe it is time to write in my blogs about something else than about themes related to the corona pandemic, as I have done during the past weeks. Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore it so long as the world hasn’t returned to normality, or maybe to a “new normality”, as some say, thinking that the world will never be again as it was before. Therefore I want to talk about a phenomenon that is wider, although it has made all these measures against the coronavirus possible: shared intentionality.

As Michael Tomasello upholds in his Origins of Human Communication and in other works, the main behavioural characteristic that makes men different from all other living beings on earth, including their nearest relatives the apes, is the phenomenon of shared intentionality. As such the idea of shared intentionality is not thought out by Tomasello, but it has already been used by philosophers before him, albeit often in different wordings, like David Hume, or recently Raimo Tuomela, Margaret Gilbert and Michael E. Bratman. The latter says about it, for instance: “a shared intention is not an attitude in the mind of some superagent consisting literally of some fusion of … two agents. There is no single mind which is the fusion of your mind and mine. … [N]or should we assume that shared intentions are always grounded in prior promises. My conjecture is that we should, instead, understand shared intention … as a state of affairs consisting primarily of appropriate attitudes of each individual participant and their interrelations.” (p. 111) In this way, it “helps coordinate our planning; and it can structure relevant bargaining. And it does all this in ways to track [our common goal]. Thus does our shared intention help to organize and to unify our intentional agency in ways to some extent analogous to the ways in which the intentions of an individual organize and unify her individual agency over time.” (p. 112).

The end of this quotation is a bit confusing, for shared intention is not combined individual intentions but it is a phenomenon of its own, which Bratman certainly will endorse. In order to explain the difference between a combination of purely individual intentions and a shared intention, I’ll use an example discussed by Tomasello somewhere in his book, which I have adapted and extended.

Apes, like chimpanzees, don’t have shared intentions but they can combine individual intentions, so Tomasello. Let’s assume that a group of chimpanzees is hungry and goes out hunting. They see a prey and one chimp, the leader, starts to pursue the prey. When the prey flees to the right, one or a few chimps go to the right in order to stop it. When then it flees to the left, another chimp goes to the left, and in order to prevent that the prey may escape in a forward direction, a few chimps try to close this escape route. But each chimp basically reacts as the situation is. Once the prey has been caught, each chimpanzee takes as much of it as it can get, and if some chimps come too late, then sorry for them. If a chimp gives a part to such a latecomer, it is only in order to prevent that this latecomer will rob his piece of the meal from his hands.

How differently a hunting party is organized by men. Before the hunt begins, there is a meeting and the hunters agree who will be the drivers and who will shoot. Among the drivers it is determined who will go to the right and who will go to the left and who will close the front escape route. And so they act when a prey is discovered. After the hunt the preys are brought together and divided, each participant getting a fair share. A part of it is kept apart for those who’ll come later and maybe also a piece for John who couldn’t participate because he was ill.

These two cases clearly show what the difference is between combined individual intentions and a shared intention. The chimps know what the other chimps will do, they understand their intentions and in this way they cooperate with others and perform their actions in order to fulfil their individual wishes to get a piece of meat. But in the end everybody decides for and cares for him or herself. How different it is with man. Of course, man often behaves individualistically and egoistically but fundamentally they can share their intentions and take care of others, also if the others are not present, but do belong to the group.

Now that I have come so far, I cannot help to return to the problem of the corona crisis that determines so much our intentions these days. My blog last week started with the question “Should we sacrifice individual freedom for the benefit of the population health?”. My answer to this question was “yes”. However, I can give this answer only, if I know what a shared intention is and if I can have shared intentions. Even more, I can ask this question only if I can have shared intentions. But to quote Tomasello, although apes “have human-like skills for understanding individual intentionality, they do not have human-like skills and motivations of shared intentionality.” (p. 181) The upshot is, while men can organize a lockdown, apes cannot.

Sources

- Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008

- Michael E. Bratman, “Shared Intention”, in Faces of Intention. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999; pp. 109-129.

The prevention paradox

“Should we sacrifice individual freedom for the benefit of the population health? Or should we simply help those who really need it? These are questions that health authorities in all countries struggle with.” These are the first sentences of an article that I came across on the Internet. Today, in a time that the coronavirus rules the world, these questions are extremely relevant. For were all these measures to stop the new virus really necessary? Many countries were locked down in order to bring this new virus to a halt, and although the figures are much higher than in case of a flu pandemic, often the number of victims was much less than initially expected. It looks like a paradox, a prevention paradox: Steps were taken to prevent a calamity that didn’t occur. However, as the Wikipedia explains, this is not a paradox but an example of a self-defeating prophecy. Nevertheless, a prevention paradox does exist and it is also relevant in the corona crisis.

The term prevention paradox was coined in an article in 1981 by the epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose. It is based on the dilemma which strategy to choose in case of a widespread disease: an individual approach or a population approach. Take these examples, which I quote from the World Medical Card website (see Sources below), but which are also often mentioned on other relevant websites:

- An American study found that most alcohol-related harm and injuries occurs among individuals who are not alcoholic and have alcohol consumption habits which are considered normal and not harmful.

- The risk of giving birth to children with Downs syndrome is much higher among women over 40 years of age than among younger women. However, only 13% of children with downs are born from mothers over 40, and 51% of children with downs syndrome are born from mothers under the age of 30, who have the lowest risk.

- Although individuals who are overweight and who do not exercise, are at relatively higher risks of dying from coronary heart disease, there are in absolute quantities far more deaths from this disease among individuals who are not overweight and who have led a life with normal healthy levels of physical activity.

The paradox is then that while the majority of the population has a low risk of a certain disease and a minority has a high risk, the absolute numbers of people who get the disease is much bigger among the low risk group than among the high risk group; therefore prevention measures that concentrate on the low risk group are more effective than measures that concentrate on the high risk group. Of course, nobody wants to say that you must not help people who are hit by a disease, but if your financial or other sources are limited, from a cost-effective point of view it is often better to invest them in prevention than in treatment, or, in other words, it can be more advantageous to invest your means in the low risk group than in the high risk group, since it saves more lives.

This conclusion makes the prevention paradox also relevant for the corona crisis. Again and again you hear: Why all these measures that hit me who is healthy and doesn’t belong to the high risk group? Why then a lockdown that restricts my freedom? In view of the prevention paradox the answer is clear: It is because general restrictions save more lives than individual treatments of corona patients, certainly if the big number of patients would make that the health system breaks down. Moreover, in the end, the economy as a whole may be better well off as well. To quote an example of the Encyclopedia of Public Health “The widespread wearing of seat-belts has produced benefits to many societies but little benefit to most individuals.” Nonetheless, we all profit.

P.S. On the question whether a general lockdown is allowed, if it restricts individual freedom, of course, also my blog on the trolley problem is relevant (http://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-trolley-problem-and-corona-virus.html )

Sources

- “Prevention paradox”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevention_paradox

- “The prevention paradox”, World Medical Card, https://www.wmc-card.com/us/the-preventive-paradox/

- “Prevention Paradox”, Encyclopedia of Public Health, https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4020-5614-7_2758