Man, Covid-19 and Nature

What surprises me again and again is that so many smart people, who should have known better, think that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 [= coronavirus disease 2019] is man-made and that it is intentionally spread by man. Recently yet I heard the statement: Because the coronavirus has spread all over the world, it must be so that it has been made by man. Without any further explanation. Besides that this statement as such is a clear case of false reasoning (see my blog False reasoning in Covid-19 times (and not only then) ), also its contents is surprising: As if it isn’t so that pandemics are of all times. A simple Internet search will give you a long list of pandemics that have plagued man through the ages. Let me pick some from a list in the Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic#Notable_outbreaks):
- Plague of Justinian (541-750 AD). The first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague started in Egypt and reached Constantinople the following spring, killing … 10,000 a day at its height, and perhaps 40% of the city's inhabitants. Altogether the plague killed a quarter to half the human population of the known world. It halved Europe’s population between 550 AD and 700 AD
- Black Death (1331-1353), causing 75-200 million of deaths worldwide. Starting in Asia, the disease reached the Mediterranean and western Europe in 1348 and killed an estimated 20-30 million Europeans in six years; a third of the total population, and up to a half in the worst-affected urban areas. It was the first of a cycle of European plague epidemics that continued until the 18th century. There were more than 100 plague epidemics in Europe during this period.
- Third plague pandemic (1855). Starting in China, it spread into India, where 10 million people died. It reached also North America and, today, sporadic cases of plague still occur in the western United States.
- And not to forget: The Spanish flu pandemic that begun in 1918 in the USA (despite its name) and was “brought” by American troops fighting in the First World War to Europe. This flu infected 500 million people around the world, killing 20-100 million, especially young adults.
These are only a few examples of the many pandemics that have scourged humanity. Each pandemic had its own characteristics, but they have at least one characteristic in common: They had all a natural cause. And why would it now be different, also because there are good explanations about the natural origin of Covid-19? (see note below)
This being said, one wonders why so many people think that the coronavirus has been intentionally made and spread by man. Although it is mere speculation what I am going to say now (in the sense that I think that I cannot base my view on scientific investigations), I guess that one major reason is the alienation of man from nature. Most men today live in a civilized environment. Here I mean “civilized” as distinguished from natural. Everything around man is apparently man-made. Currently more than half of the world population lives in urban areas where most what you see has been artificially been made by men. This makes that more than ever before man is dependent on man and not so much on nature. Moreover, when people these days think of viruses, they don’t think of some nasty disease. No, what they think of are the viruses in their computers, and one thing that computer viruses have in common is that they are man-made and that they are intentionally spread by evil people. Isn’t it strange then that many people tend to think that also the coronavirus must have been made and spread by evil men? In these days and age many men are that way estranged from nature that they cannot imagine that it is nature – like in older days – that is responsible (in a neutral, causal sense) for the origin and spread of the germs of a disease. It’s true that also in the past there were all kinds of “explanations” for calamities that scourged man (for instance that they were punishments from God). However, in these days that man has become less and less dependent on nature and has become more and more civilized, in the sense that man has become increasingly dependent on what has been made by man, and in these days that men live farther away from nature than ever before, it seems almost obvious that everything that happens to man must be man-made and man-caused, including a nasty disease like Covid-19. But even though man is a civilized being through and through, man is and remains a natural being in the first place: A being made of natural stuff, “constructed” by nature from natural materials. Man is a civilized animal. And that’s why man will always be prone to what nature has in store for us, including a nasty virus like SARS-CoV-2, popular known as the coronavirus. 

Note
See for example https://globalhealthnewswire.com/viruses-vaccines/2020/03/17/the-covid-19-coronavirus-epidemic-has-a-natural-origin-scientists-say

Are you happier when you are rich?

Can money make you happy? A common saying says that it doesn’t. Nevertheless, it’s nice to have some, and not only a little bit but enough to satisfy your basic needs and a little bit more. It makes you happy, if you haven’t only enough to eat and have a decent house, but also if you can – depending on your personal preferences – go to concerts, travel abroad, buy a lot of books etc. In this sense money makes you happy, for you need money in order to be able to do such things. Indeed, as Daniel Kahneman tells us in his Thinking, Fast and Slow: “An analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 Americans,” definitively makes clear “that being poor makes one miserable, and that being rich may enhance one’s life-satisfaction”, although at a certain level of income your feeling of well-being levels off. But below that level, money will certainly make you happier.
This seems in line with what Richard Easterlin discovered. Easterlin, who is considered to be the first happiness economist, studied in the 1970s the relation between economic welfare and standard of living. His results were:
1) Within a society, rich people tend to be much happier than poor people.
Then you would think that people in rich countries are happier than those in poor countries. Not true, so Easterlin, for he also discovered that
2) rich societies tend not to be happier than poor societies (or not by much).
And also, which is actually a variation on the just mentioned levelling off thesis:
3) As countries get richer, they do not get happier.
Since these three points together seem contradictory, they are called the Easterlin Paradox.
Actually it is so, according to Easterlin, that happiness – certainly economic happiness – is relative and your feeling of (economic) happiness is related to what people around you have. So, if you become richer but everybody around you as well, your position in relation to those around you doesn’t change and so your feeling of happiness remains the same (compare also point 3 above). Or (I took this example from Geoff Riley): Faced with this choice what would you rather have: You get £5,000 and a friend gets £3,000 or you get £10,000 and a friend gets £15,000? You feel happier in the first case, so Easterlin.
Since Easterlin published his study in 1974, many other researchers have discussed the thesis and also many presented results that seem to refute the paradox. Nevertheless, yet in 2017 Easterlin maintained his original view and stated (quoted from Agarwal; see sources below) “that the ‘long-term trends in growth rates of happiness and real GDP per capita are not significantly positively related.’ He believes that the criticism towards the Easterlin Paradox is misguided and detractors ‘omit available data, overlook problems of data comparability, err in the measurement of economic growth, or, most importantly, fail to focus on long-term rather than short-term growth rates.’ ”
So far so good, and here I cannot judge who is right and who isn’t. The Easterlin paradox sounds interesting and there can be some truth in it. Nevertheless, I have some questions. Point 1 of the paradox says that within a society rich people tend to be much happier than poor people, while point 2 says that rich societies tend not to be happier than poor societies (or not by much). Then I would conclude that each country is more or less as happy as each other country, and if you live in a poor country you don’t need to compare your happiness with the happiness of the rich in the rich countries: an average happy person in a poor country is as happy as an average happy person in a rich country; there is no need to feel miserable because the average happy person in the rich country is, for instance, ten times or even 25 times richer than you in the poor country. Only the relative happiness counts, and average happiness is the same everywhere in the world in every country (and the same so for those 10, 20, 30 … % below or above the average happiness; etc.).
I have my doubts. Take for instance the ranking of happiness by country in the World Happiness Report 2019, Figure 2.7. In the first place you can see there that countries do differ in the degree of happiness and also that on average the richer countries are happier than the poor countries. The ranking gives the results of 156 countries and the top happiest countries in the world are Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and the Netherlands (which belong to the richest countries in the world), and at the other end you find Rwanda, Tanzania, Afghanistan, Central African Republic and South Sudan (which are among the poorest countries). And why would all those economic migrants try to come to Europe and North America, if they would be happy where they live? I guess that on average people are happier if they are richer (even if this may level off above a certain income level) and that your feeling of (un)happiness is not limited by international borders.

 Sources
- Agarwal, Prateek, “The Easterlin Paradox”, https://www.intelligenteconomist.com/easterlin-paradox/
- Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin Books, 2012; pp. 396-397
- Riley, Geoff, “Q&A: What is the Easterlin Paradox?”, https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/qa-what-is-the-easterlin-paradox. 1st April 2009
- World Happiness Report: John F. Helliwell, Haifang Huang, Shun Wang, Chapter 2: Changing World Happiness, https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/changing-world-happiness/ (20 March 2019)

Meaning

In my last blog I referred to my distinction meaning 1 / meaning 0 which I had used in older blogs. However, now I realize that I have never well explained here this important distinction. Therefore, let me do this now.
Let me repeat Stoutland’s example of the person who nods her head, used last week. We can take this movement sometimes as just physical (the person nods because she is falling asleep) and sometimes as an action (the person greets someone). But why is it sometimes just physical and sometimes an action? This becomes clear when we ask the person why she nodded. If she says, for instance, that she wanted to greet a friend, we call it an action. But if she nodded while falling asleep, she cannot give a reason for it: the nodding movement happened to her. We can say it also this way: the nodding of greeting, unlike the nodding of falling asleep, has a meaning for the agent.
However, the idea that physical data, unlike mental data, don’t have a meaning cannot be upheld. Like for instance Mary Hesse showed, every empirical assertion, also pure descriptions of observations, contain interpretations ‘in terms of some general view of the world or other ... There are no stable observational descriptions, whether of sense data, or protocol sentences, or “ordinary language”, in which the empirical reference of science can be directly captured’. It is true also for natural science that ‘what counts as facts are constituted by what the theory says about their interrelations with one another. … [M]eanings in natural science are determined by theory’ (Hesse 1980, 172-173). So both natural data, like the nodding of a person falling asleep, and mental phenomena, like the nodding of greeting, have a meaning. They don’t differ in this respect. However, Hesse neglects here that there really is a difference between the meanings we give to physical (natural) phenomena and those we give to mental phenomena: Mental phenomena are given meaning by the agent him or herself; physical phenomena get their meanings from us from the outside. Both the agent and the onlooker from the outside, like a scientist, interpret what an agent does. But as Anthony Giddens made clear, the (scientific) interpretation from the outside is double: the onlooker has to reckon with both with the way s/he sees what the agent does and with the way the agent him or herself sees it. This made Habermas distinguish two levels of meaning: level 1 and level 0. Level 1 is the level all sciences – and onlookers from the outside in general – are faced with when interpreting their objects. Moreover, there is a level 0 that is characteristic for those sciences that study objects that has been given a meaning by the people themselves, such as a nodding that the agent sees as a greeting (Habermas 1982, 162-163). This insight made me distinguish two kinds of meaning: meaning 1 and meaning 0. Meaning 1 is the meaning used on level 1. It is the meaning a scientist gives to an object, either physical or social in character. It refers to the theoretical interpretation of reality by the scientist in a scientific theory. Meaning 0 is the meaning on the underlying level 0. It refers to the meaning the people themselves who make up social reality give to their own reality, experiences and doings. It refers to the interpretation of their own lived reality. The existence of this double meaning from the scientist’s perspective does not imply, however, that the interpretation of reality by the people themselves is different in character from the theoretical interpretation of it by the scientist. It says only that the interpretations of the social reality by the agents themselves are single and that those by the scientist are double.
Since the matter is complicated, I want to illustrate the difference between both kinds of meaning yet with the help of the example of studying grammar as grammarians do. As native speakers of a language, we have in our heads a (usually implicit) knowledge of what are correct and incorrect sentences, forms, etc. in our language. We can call this our ‘implicit grammar’. Grammarians try to make this knowledge explicit and to systemise it. The ‘explicit grammar’ so made seems to be a reflection of our implicit grammar. In a certain sense it is but there are differences. The explicit grammar has been formulated in terms and rules native speakers will never use as such. For example, such a grammar distinguishes between substantives and adjectives and it indicates when inversion is applied, things native speakers usually are not aware of when they speak. And though it is correct to say that the explicit grammar is a reflection of the implicit one, the reverse is not true. If a native speaker no longer keeps to the current grammar and more native speakers begin to speak in the same deviant way, after some time we no longer say that these speakers make grammatical mistakes but that the language has been changed. If, on the other hand, the explicit grammar does not correctly reflect the implicit grammar, the language of the native speakers does not change, even if the grammarians maintain that they have described it correctly. If the native speaker does not want to conform to the rules of the explicit grammar, then the latter just describes the implicit grammar in a wrong way and it must be adapted. The language as spoken by the people themselves, so the implicit grammar, is the reality that patterns the explicit grammar. In the same way we can say: The way agents see their actions is the reality that patterns the way onlookers must conceive these actions.
The upshot is that interpretations from the outside, including scientific interpretations, always depend on the agent’s interpretations if we want to investigate what people do. If we don’t see this, in the end scientific explanations of what people do cannot be more than physical and chemical explanations of material stuff labelled “man” or “society”. 

Sources
- Giddens, Anthony, Studies in social and political theory, London: Hutchinson of London, 1977.
- Habermas, Jürgen, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Band I, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982.
- Hesse, Mary, Revolutions and reconstructions in the philosophy of science, Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980.
Weg, Henk bij de, “The commonsense conception and its relation to philosophy”, Philosophical Explorations, 2001/1, pp. 17-30.

What is an action?

If “in fact … the most essential part of the person is constituted by her actions”, as I maintained, with Korsgaard, in my last blog, what then is an action? When do we say that what constitutes us is not just a movement of our limbs, so a piece of behaviour, but something that we do? In order to make this clear I must first explain in what respect a simple bodily movement is different from an action. Now it is so that in my last blog I mentioned the characteristics of an action: It is guided by perception; it is guided by an intention; and the action is attributable to you. However, this needs further explanation, for isn’t it so that also behaviour is guided by a kind of experience in the sense that most behaviour not just happens but that it is a reaction to what happens to the behaving body or to what happens in its environment? And isn’t it so that often behaviour has a purpose and that it can – no must – be ascribed to a body for how else can we say that a body performs a piece of behaviour?
In order to make clear what the difference between an action and a piece of behaviour is, I take an extreme example. It’s extreme in the sense that the behaviour involved is not guided by a perception, anyhow, and that it has no apparent aim. I got this example from Frederick Stoutland (1976). We see a man nodding his head. Why does he nod? The simplest way to know is to ask him. If the man intentionally nodded his head, for example because he was greeting someone, he can tell you. However, if he nodded his head unknowingly, for example because he was falling asleep, he cannot give you a reason. In the first case we say that he performed an action and in the second case we say that what he did happened to him. But, alternatively, we can also say that in the first case the action had an intention for the man: The greeting is a greeting because the nodding man himself sees it as a greeting. However, if he nods his head when he is falling asleep, the nodding has not an intention for him. His head just moved and not more than that. In other words, in the first case the man who nodded can give it a sense, while he cannot when he nods while he is falling asleep. Only if the performer of a deed him or herself can give a sense to what s/he does, s/he performs an action; if s/he cannot, it is behaviour.
The distinction action-behaviour just described looks rather Cartesian, but in my PhD thesis I have explained that it isn’t. Here I want to ignore this problem. (You can also find some further explanation in my blog “Two levels of reality” and in other blogs (enter “meaning 1” or “meaning 0” in the search engine of my blog)). Here I want to concentrate on the significance of the distinction for the present problem. It’s true that there are pieces of behaviour that are guided by a perception and by an intention and that are – of course – performed by someone. For example (an example by Davidson), you come home at night and turn the light on and by doing so you warn a thief in another room of your house. Even though warning the thief is what you did by an intentional action (turning the light on) it’s not what you intentionally did, so it’s not your action (usually we call it a consequence of your action turning the light on). Only your doings that you yourself can give a sense (in the way described above) constitute you as a person. Doings that are merely pieces of behaviour and cannot be interpreted in this way do not constitute you as a person or contribute to your further development as a person (which doesn’t mean, of course, that they are not important for you (they can contribute to your animalistic side, for instance). I act so I am, because I can tell what I do.

Sources
- Davidson, Donald, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes”, in: Essays on actions and events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980; pp. 3-20.
- Stoutland, Frederick, “The causal theory of action”, in: Juha Manninen and Raimo Tuomela (eds.), Essays on explanation and understanding. Dordrecht: Reidel,1976; pp. 271‑304.
- Weg, Henk bij de, De betekenis van zin voor het begrijpen van handelingen. Kampen: Kok Agora, 1996; chapter IV.