Practical nonviolence

Nonviolence can be supported for many reasons. Some people mention religious reasons for it, other people support it on other spiritual grounds. Again other people have more down to earth arguments and see it as a mere ethical principle. I belong to this group. However, I think that for most people nonviolence has no relation with idealistic motives. They hate to hurt and being hurt, not to speak of killing. They hate the material destruction caused by violence. They see that violence breeds violence. And it happens also case that organisers of social movements who are basically prepared to use violence see that they can attract more supporters for their cause if they stay nonviolent. In other words, a nonviolent attitude can also be practical.The practical attitude to nonviolence is by far the one most found. Many people support (and will support) nonviolence for practical reasons only and not because they believe in the idea of nonviolence as such. People who support nonviolence on religious, spiritual or ethical grounds sometimes say: this is not real nonviolence. A nonviolent attitude must according to them be idealistic in some way. But is it really important why people are nonviolent? As for this, I am a realist: for me nonviolence is also nonviolence if it is not principled, as long you behave in this way.

Photoshopped

“If an image is too beautiful to be true, they think that it is likely that it has been constructed” (Carel De Keyser, Belgian photographer).
Making photos is very popular today. With a digital camera it has become very simple to make them, to print them, to upload them to your computer and to change them. Everybody can “photoshop” a picture and many people do in order to make them better. Because photoshopping with a computer is a modern invention, many people think that an image that is beautiful today cannot be beautiful as such but that it has been made beautiful. A beautiful image has been constructed, they think, which has the connotation that because it has been constructed there is something wrong with it. It cannot be beautiful any longer.
What many people do not realize is that constructing photos has been done as long as photography exists. The difference with photoshopping is, however, that in the days that digital photography did not yet exist, changing and adapting photos was a complicated and often time consuming process that had to be done in a darkroom. It required much experience to do it that way that it couldn’t be seen that the photo had been changed. Often, nobody cared about changing photos, sometimes it lead to passionate discussions. Was the famous photo of Robert Cappa of a dying soldier in the Spanish Civil War a construction or was it real? And who doesn’t know the photo of Lenin making a speech with Trotsky on his side, where Trotsky has been removed in a later version? As for photoshopping, there is nothing new under the sun.
Even more, constructing pictures is of all ages. Some time ago I visited the Mauritshuis Art Museum in The Hague, which is well-known for its collection of Dutch Masters. There was an exposition of city views painted by Dutch Masters with an extensive explanation about each painting. And there they told how most paintings had been “photoshopped”, to use a modern word! The city views were not exactly real, but trees had been added or removed, buildings had been put on other places around a square, and many other “tricks” of that kind had been applied in order to make the painting looking better. But who cares? Isn’t it so that these paintings are judged because the way they have been painted and because of their artistic quality and not because they do not represent a real situation, even when they represent city views? And why should it be different for photos, “even” if they have been photoshopped?
And besides that, does it make the painting worthless that Rembrandt has photoshopped himself on the “Night Watch”?

On travelling (5)

Sometimes a holiday is full of experiences. You travel from one place to another, see a lot of monuments, museums and other interesting things and places, and actually when you are back home you need another holiday to come to rest. In other holidays nothing happens, by way of speaking. It is true, you are travelling around from hotel to hotel or from camping site to camping site, but in fact that is all you do. Or maybe it isn’t. You look around while moving in your car, you enjoy the landscapes and you see new geographical surroundings and you meet new people. Maybe there is a museum or a place of historical interest you visit here and there but on most days you do nothing else than moving around. There are no sites you have to visit. You visit the places you visit simply because they are there, and just that is what makes your travelling interesting. In other words, your travel is relaxed. And aren’t actually these travels your best travels?

Free will and a cup of coffee

Recently, Lawrence Williams and John A. Bargh showed that holding a warm cup of coffee makes you have more positive attitudes towards a stranger than when you hold a cup of ice coffee. In another experiment it came out that people who held a cold pad in their hands were more selfish than people holding a warm pad. If these results can be substantiated in other experiments, then the conclusion must be that our physical environment has an important influence upon what we want and wish. But if the temperature of a cup of coffee can influence what we do, what does remain then of the free will? Maybe it is that we must first decide whether we want to have our coffee hot or cold before we take a decision, but not while drinking another cup of coffee.

“By accident” and “by mistake”

In his “A plea for excuses”, J.L. Austin makes a distinction between “by accident" and “by mistake”. However, he does not elaborate this distinction and the only clear difference between mistake and accident that he makes in this article is this: “In an accident something befalls: by mistake you take the wrong one [i.e. wrong decision-btw]”. Nonetheless, it can also happen that a mistake results in an accident. J.A.C. Coady expresses the distinction by saying that a mistake is something that happens in your thought process or perceptions, while an accident happens because something went wrong in the outside world.
At first sight this distinction seems to be clear. However, if we dig deeper, “mistake” and “accident” appear to be more like shades of the same: some cases are clear mistakes and some cases are clear accidents and there is much in between. Actually this is expressed by Austin himself, when he writes: “If a mistake results in an accident, it will not do to ask whether ‘it’ was an accident or a mistake, or to demand some briefer description of ‘it’ ”. But why not? If a traffic accident is clearly the consequence of a miscalculation of one of the drivers, and we should see it only as an accident, why then ask the question of responsibility?
A building collapses by a miscalculation of the architect. Why do we call it an accident? Shouldn’t we call it a mistake? In a certain sense it is both.
I saw something black in the reed: “Look, a moorhen”. But when it came out I said: “I made a mistake, it is a coot”. Do we call it only a mistake and not an accident, because it does not have serious consequences?
I shoot at the bull’s eye and I miss. Is it an accident or a mistake? And makes the answer any difference, whether I am a beginner or a professional bowman?
By mistake, for example a slip of the tongue, I gave the wrong answer in the quiz, for I thought that I knew better, and I won the first prize. Is it an accident or is it a mistake that I won the first prize and I shouldn’t I have received it?
The upshot is that sometimes the distinction looks clear, and in his article Austin treats the mistake-accident distinction mainly like that. But often things aren’t that way, with all the consequences for the question of responsibility.

“If you start a man killing, you cannot turn him off like a machine”

Guy Chapman told somewhere in his memoir of the First World War about an officer who looked at the enemy and then said to the sergeant next to him: “I surrender”. The sergeant took his rifle and shot the officer straight through his head. Another soldier who saw it asked Chapman what to do. He answered: “What can you do? If you start a man killing, you cannot turn him off like a machine”.
This story tells much about what people can become and then do in extreme circumstances, when they have been brought there by other people. But are the scene and the end of it not an extreme reflection of what on a “lower level” happens in daily life? Through the years we learn a lot from other people, our parents, our teachers, the people around us, about how to behave. These are rather basic things like keeping right on a road, that it is not allowed to steal and what other rules we have to follow, what tastes we have, and so on. But what we learn can also be on the level of prejudices. Some men do not like people with a certain religion, people from a certain neighbourhood, people who are black, people who are white, people who are gay, people who are from a certain country, and so on. All these things are considered “normal” in a certain sense. Our habits are difficult to change, once we have interiorized them. When I am in a country where the traffic keeps left, in the beginning it is almost impossible for me not to look to the left instead of first to the right, when I cross a street. It is an automatism. And when I drive on the left, I feel unhappy. So it is also with many of our prejudices. Once we have them, it is difficult to change them, even when we are aware that they are prejudices and when we want to get rid of them. We cannot change our beliefs at will. Seen that way, what Chapman describes is only an extreme case of what happens in daily life, indeed. Nonetheless, this is no excuse. For although it is true that we cannot turn ourselves or other people off like machines, the quotation implies also that we are no machines. It is so that we cannot learn from one moment to the next to keep to the left, once we have been taught to keep to the right. However, it is a fact that we can learn it and after a shorter or longer time we can behave as if the new situation is normal to us. And it is the same for all the other things we do. We can change our habits and beliefs, even though it can be a long process. Therefore, it can be no excuse that we are what we have become and that’s it. Although we cannot turn other people or ourselves off like a machine, they and we can change. And that’s why Chapman was right and not right at the same time.

Supporting civic nonviolent movements

Recent studies have shown that civic nonviolent movements are by far more effective in bringing democratic changes in autocratically and dictatorially governed countries than movements that use violence do. Nonviolent movements are not only more effective than movements that use violence, but they bring also bigger democratic changes than more or less violent movements do. In spite of this, politicians in democratic countries that want to support democratic changes in not democratically governed countries ignore these facts and they are hardly prepared to support civic nonviolent movements otherwise than with words. They see nonviolence as “soft”. But as Adrian Karatnycky and Peter Ackerman put it “Given the significance of the civic factor in dozens of recent transitions from dictatorship, it is surprising how small a proportion of international donor assistance is targeted to this sector” (in “How Freedom Is Won: From Civic Resistance to Durable Democracy”, The International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, vol. 7-3 (June 2005) ). For what is soft about supporting what is successful at the cost of supporting what is less successful? To give only one example, rather than bombing Serbia the NATO had had to support Otpor, the nonviolent movement that brought Milošević down.

What's wrong with science?

Weinberg, Nichols & Stich have shown in an article that epistemic intuitions are not as objective as they once were supposed to be. Epistemic intuitions are not universal but differ according to culture and even within a culture according to the social group. Experiments show that conclusions may be different when they have been drawn by people with different backgrounds. Now it is so that most scientific activity is done by people belonging to the highest SES group (SES=social economic status), and till not so long ago all scientists were mainly men in the highest SES groups in western countries. This would not be a problem if science would lead to objective, universally valid conclusions, but it seems to be worrying that it has come out now that many scientific conclusions are not as universal as they were supposed to be. Actually, science is no more than a view on the world by people belonging to a certain cultural group. As the authors formulate it, “if we are right about epistemic intuitions, then ... [it] would entail that the epistemic norms for the rich are quite different from the epistemic norms appropriate for the poor... And that we take to be quite a preposterous result” (in: Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental philosophy, Oxford etc.: OUP, 2008; p. 35).
But is it really so preposterous and worrying? Maybe it is naive to think that it would be different. Besides that many people have always said so (but most scientists and scholars did not listen to them, certainly not those who belonged and belong to the “main stream”), actually it is rather human that the result found by Weinberg et.al. is right. Probably it would be preposterous and worrying if it would not be the case. For science is as human as any other affair that people do, and also the intuitions involved in science are as human as human can be. There is no reason to suppose that intuitions that look to be universal are fundamental exceptions. Science is founded on norms, albeit scientific norms, and as norms they can have no objective value and they can have different interpretations for different people, with the result that it is basically a local affaire (local in the sense of limited to a culture, SES group, or the like). But is this a threat to science? I think it is not. That scientific conclusions are different for different groups simply shows that they are intersubjective at most. Science is, as Karl-Otto Apel has shown already 30 years ago, not a matter of developing a theory that explains a fact or phenomenon as such. Science explains always for a certain subject of knowledge, and if its results are different depending on the different cultural, SES or other background of the explaining person or persons, one must not be surprised. If one would, it would mean that one does not give the “explains for a certain subject of knowledge” any sense. Even when one accepts this relativity of science, it still describes the facts and explains them in a certain way. But is it not what science has always done?

Arcadia

Actually I wanted to write here about Arcadia, where I have been a few weeks ago. Arcadia symbolizes the simple, happy life without sorrows. A world where one does not need to think about the future because the future will be happy, too. A world of shepherds and shepherdesses who find all the needs for life, all food and shelter, around them in a beautiful landscape. A world without sufferance and without suppression. You find this world especially depicted in pieces of art in the 17th and 18th centuries.
With these thoughts in my mind I passed the border of Arcadia on the Peloponnesos in Greece. However, what is the reality of Arcadia? It was a bit a disappointment, for I did not see shepherds and shepherdesses; I did not see even any sheep at all. In fact, the region was not fundamentally different from the others region on the Peloponnesos. I did not have the idea to be in paradise, although the landscape was beautiful, indeed.
But maybe Arcadia is something only in our mind. In the end we all want a better world and Arcadia is a symbol of such a world. It is another word for paradise, but then a bit more worldly. People have to work there, it is true, for being shepherds (or whatever that may be) they have a profession. People in Arcadia may have a ruler, a king. But ruling Arcadia is in fact a simple affair, a bit like Marx’s communist state. The conflicts of interest have been replaced by a simple kind of administration in the sense that it is a managing of practical relatively uncomplicated affairs. And what is essential, there is no discrimination and no exclusion.
Of course, I do not think that somewhere in the world such an Arcadia exists or could exist, but what I might expect is that people try in some way to build up a kind of Arcadia in the sense of a society where some of its minimal requirements have been fulfilled. Then we see Arcadia as a striving for a better world. However, after the recent elections for the parliament of the European Union, the Prime Minister of my country felt the need to say: My party will not cooperate with a party that excludes people. I think that this simple statement says a lot about the world we live in. It shows that exclusion happens but also that it is not something individual. It is not in the sense of “I do not like him or her” or “I do not like them”. It has an organisational base, for you find it back in what a certain political party stands for. It is a kind of “We do not like them”. Even more, the leader of the party that the Prime Minister was pointing to has said what kind of people he means with “them”: Muslims. This shows that we are not only far away from Arcadia, but that people do not want Arcadia. Or rather, they want it on their own conditions, which makes Arcadia implicitly impossible.
Once a got a letter from a new pen friend in an African country south of the Sahara. She wrote that she is a Muslim, but she added: “Nous ne sommes pas comme ça” (“We are not like that”), meaning that the Muslims in her country are not fanatic propagators of their religion, but that they simply want to practice their religion, without conflicts, in all peace, allowing other people to practice their own religions. Like the statement of the Prime Minister of my country, also the sentence “We are not like that” says a lot, for it implies: Do not put everything in one box; behind the same name you find big differences, and the Islam has many nuances. The remark of my new pen friend was not directed at me, however, for we had not yet talked about religion. But she knew how many people in the West think about the Islam, and she wanted to say beforehand that the word Islam covers a wide world of different ideas and interpretations. It is true, I think, but what I am afraid that those who want to exclude Muslims because of their religion apparently do not want to see this and to believe this. But isn’t it still so that we have to judge people because of what they do as an individual and not because of what they are or are supposed to be, so for the simple reason that they belong to a certain category? The opposite is the foundation of all exclusion and discrimination and the negation of Arcadia. And that’s what I actually wrote about.

A visit to Nestor

When Telemachos arrived in Pylos, he was, as Homeros told us, warmly welcomed by Nestor, the king of the region and a companion-in-arms of his father Odysseus, when the Greek tried to conquer Troja. He took part in the sacrificial ceremony that was just taking place on the beach, was then led to the palace and was received there as an honoured guest. Not many years thereafter, but probably after the death of Nestor, the palace was destroyed and the place where it was had been forgotten, until it had been found back again in the 20th century. Now people are walking around there, looking curiously how a king lived more than 3000 years ago, seeing that the palace was exactly as described by Homeros, and thinking about how the son of Odysseus had been walking around there. The walls of the palace have gone but the ground plan is still very well visible.
I enter the building and after a few rooms I arrive in the throne room. The place of the throne is still easily to indicate. Another room appears to have been a bath room. The bath tub is still there. Is it here that Polykaste, the daughter of Neros, has bathed Telemachos?I am feeling the centuries that had passed, and also not yet...

On waiting

Sometimes I take photos that show aspects of our daily life. One such an aspect is waiting. Waiting is something that everybody has to do now and then, and it is an “activity” that many people do not like, especially not in our modern society where everything must be efficient and where waiting time is seen as lost time. However, waiting is not simply doing nothing, being inactive. Waiting has a purpose. It is doing nothing in view of something else, and seen in this way it is a kind of activity, an inactive being active. We can express it also this way: waiting is waiting for, it is awaiting, and in this sense it is expecting.
A good example of waiting is, I think, waiting for a ferry. We arrive at the place where the ferry leaves, and we wait until it has arrived from the other side of the river or sea, and until the time has come that we are allowed to go on the boat. If we like, we can fill the time by eating, reading or who knows what, and many people do. A telephonist of an organisation who does not get many calls often gets administrative tasks to do for filling the time of waiting till the next call comes.
However, once I made a photo of a waiting scene and I realized that this waiting was different. The waiting scene grasped by the picture was actually not a waiting for, an awaiting, so it seemed to me, but the waiting in the picture had a purpose of its own. The picture showed a scene of groups of men and women in front of a church waiting until the service would have ended and the procession would leave the building (see photo). These men and women did not enter the church for taking part in the service. When I was looking at the photo, I suddenly realized why they didn’t, although it would have been quite well possible that they would enter and although some other people that arrived meanwhile did. For what these people really did was not waiting for the procession, (although they joined it when it left the church). In fact their waiting was a kind of social gathering. Talking with the other men or women in front of the church was apparently more important than the procession they were waiting for. Some people even arrived rather early. Why? Probably in order to wait longer! That is, in order to have more time to talk with the other men or women present. Waiting (so talking with the other men) was the purpose of going there, not being in time for the procession. And then the procession left the church and the waiting people joined. The social gathering had entered a new phase.
Waiting is something that everybody has to do now and then and usually we do not like it. If so, we often look for activities to fill up the waiting time and making it more useful. However, not all waiting is the same and sometimes the filling of the waiting is the waiting itself. Then it can be so that we look forward for it and that we wait for it.

Good and bad actions (3)

In the example in my last blog I saved a person who had felt into a canal. What I did not know then was that this person had the intention to perform a bomb attack, which he really did later. I wondered how we had to judge my action in view of what the saved person did later and that I did not know about his plans.
But let me go one step further. Suppose that I had known about the intention of the person that I saved. So, when I saved him, I knew that the man in the water had the intention to perform a bomb attack. Makes this any difference for the judgement of my action (supposing that the person saved really did perform his intended action later)? In view of the supposition that was the starting point of my discussion that saving a man’s life is intrinsically good, can we still say then that saving this man’s life was intrinsically good?
I can make my example more complex. I can vary it this way, for instance, that the person saved had the intention indicated but then did not execute this intention, for example because he was stopped or because he changed his mind. Do these variations (and there are certainly more) make any difference for the way we judge the action of saving a man’s life?
We can infer several things from such a discussion. Or rather, infer is not the right word, for I do not think that we can say: “This is true. We must say that some actions can be intrinsically good or bad”. But what we can infer is that what is true at first sight can be more complicated at second sight, for things may have different interpretations from different perspectives. Actually everybody knows this and actually is a platitude. But in practice it happens so often that people say: “This is absolutely true and it is stupid not to see it”, and they behave that way, they abuse other people who have different ideas, they kill people or wage war in the name of their eternal and absolute truths, or whatever they do in the name of the absolutly right. Or they say “What stupid things do you say”, and they react in the way just said, not seeing the complexities behind a seemingly stupid remark.
One question raised by my last blogs is this one: Can we call an action (intrinsically) good before we perform it (on really good and well-founded grounds), while looking backwards we would call it bad, or at least would tend to call it bad? Take again the case of the saving a future bomb attacker. Can we say then that it was intrinsically good what I did at the moment that I saved his life, but that it was a bad action at the moment I look at it after the bomb attacker has thrown his bomb? And what do we mean then by saying that this action was good or bad? Can the words “good” and “bad” have different meanings when we label an action before it took place and after it has taken place? In other words, things are not always as they look like, even if they look like what they are.

Good and bad actions (2)

An action need not to be intrinsically good or bad. It can also be neutral. Moreover, an action can be good from one aspect and bad from another aspects. Such actions are not intrinsically good or bad.
However, I think that it is possible that in the abstract all aspects of an action are good and if we consider it outside its context we would say that it is good under any aspect. Saving a person’s life is such an action, I think. We tend to call such an action intrinsically good.
But how is it if we take a real action? Let us say that we had the intention to save a person’s life and we succeeded. The person had fell into a canal. He could not swim and he would certainly have been drowned, if I hadn’t saved him. This action of mine looks intrinsically good. But what if the person had the intention to perform a bomb attack, which I did not know, and because he has been saved by me, he could and did perform this act, with the consequence that many innocent people have been killed. Was my action of saving the future bomb attacker then still (intrinsically) good?

Good actions and bad actions

Can an action be good or bad as such or are there no intrinsically good and bad actions? And if we want to judge an action, do we have to judge it because of the intention of the action or because of the results?
Let us say that someone wants to do an action that has an intrinsically good intention, like saving a person. However, the action failed and the person was not saved. Must we call this action then good or bad?This shows that the goodness of an action has at least two aspects: intentional goodness and technical goodness (or the way it is performed). And maybe there are more. But if all aspects are positive (‘good’), does that imply that the action is intrinsically good?

On travelling (4)

Sometimes I think: it should be possible to skip the phase of going to travel. Sometimes I think: it should be possible to skip the phase of returning to daily life. Travelling as a way of existing. Or is it so that just the preparation and the return are intrinsic parts of travelling making travelling what it is?

No responsibility for what one did?

President Obama of the USA decided that the torturers of Guantanamo would not be prosecuted for their acts, because they were ordered to do what they did. According to him not they but his predecessor, so former president Bush, was responsible for the torture. But is that really so? I mean, of course, president Bush was responsible for it, but does this imply that the torturers do not have a responsibility of their own for which they can be called to account, and for which they need to be called to account in case of a criminal act like torture?
The case makes me think of a famous study by Stanley Milgram, which I also mentioned in my blog of August 11, 2008, titled “No news”. As Milgram has shown in his famous study Obedience to Authority some people tend to think: “If this person with authority tells me that I can do it, it must be okay”, and then they simply execute what they are ordered to do, even when they know or could have known that what they do is not good, cruel or illegal, and should be despised, and even when they have the opportunity to say “No, I do not do it; I refuse to do it”.
In normal life it is accepted that subordinates follow the orders of the persons above them and then it is so that they above are held responsible for the acts of their subordinates. However, there is a limit and that is when these acts are illegal if not criminal. Then the subordinates have to say “No, I don’t do that”, even if they risk to lose their jobs. Obedience to authority is no excuse. There are even armies that go that far that orders must be refused if these orders require to do criminal or illegal acts. And why should there be an exception for the torturers of Guantanamo? Isn’t it so that in the end every person is responsible for his or her own acts? What would the world become if we would allow that obedience to authority is accepted as an excuse under any circumstance? That would lead to legalized criminality in the end. Only when one accepts that there are limits to obedience to authority, that these limits are there where criminality and illegality begins, and that each person is responsible for his or her own actions anyway, it is fundamentally possible to remove criminal and despicable acts like torture from the world. If we would accept that the executors of criminal acts can hide themselves behind the fact that they have no responsibility for the orders they take and that they simply have to execute them, whatever that order is, how can we expect then that these criminal and despicable acts can be and will be removed from the world?

The measurability of responsibility

The idea that there is a gliding scale of responsibility supposes implicitly that it is clear how to ascribe responsibility and in what degree. Remember that we are still talking about responsibility for the side effects of an action or, as in my last blog, about my responsibility for what another person did in reaction to an action of mine. Now, if it would be the case that someone acted and there is a clear idea of responsibility in the sense mentioned, then it would be fundamentally possible to know after a thorough research whether an agent was responsible for an action and how much, maybe even as exactly as for say 20, 37 or 69 per cent. However, when we look in the philosophical literature the actual view is far from that. Or look around yourself and you’ll see that people disagree in their judgments about the degree of responsibility of an agent for his or her acts, a fact that has been confirmed by recent research. When we compare people in different cultures, the differences in judgment will certainly be bigger. The upshot is that responsibility exists and that we can say a lot about it but in practice we are far from being able to give it a clear interpretation.

Responsibility for what one doesn’t do

In my blog last week I concluded that I cannot be held for responsible for a consequence of an action of mine if this consequence was an action done by another person, say A. The example was a thief that dropped my vase when he noticed that I came home, while I did not know that there was a thief in my house. In this case it is clear that I am not responsible. But does this mean that I am never responsible for what another person does? I think that we cannot give a general answer to this question but at least we can distinguish several cases:
a) I hadn’t foreseen the action by A and I couldn’t have foreseen it.
b) I hadn’t foreseen the action by A but reasonably I should have foreseen it.
c) I had foreseen the action by A, but A acted on his or her own initiative.
d) I had asked, ordered, forced …. A to do the action.
I shall not give examples and discuss this in detail, but I think that we can say that responsibility is a position on a gliding scale. a-d indicate a few positions on this scale from not responsible at all to very responsible. These positions can be further refined (especially d); intermediate positions can be added.
The upshot of all this is, and in fact we knew this already from daily life, that one can even be responsible for what one hasn’t done in person.

Responsibility and how we describe what we do (2)

Let us take another time Davidson’s example in my last week’s blog, which I have extended a bit: I come home, I flip the switch, turn on the light, and illuminate the room. Unbeknownst to me I alert also a thief in my house to the fact that I am home. However, the thief hadn’t expected me to come home yet, was scared stiff, and unintentionally dropped the vase that he had in his hands. Now we can describe what I did at least in these ways:
- I illuminated the room.
- I alerted the thief.
But can we describe what I did as that I made that the thief dropped the vase? I think this is a difficult question. However, I tend to say “no”. Why not? Because it was the thief that dropped the vase. It was not I who did it. The thief could have done many things: putting the vase back on the table and taking his gun; or fleeing with the vase through the backdoor; or walking to me and saying that he was a policeman and that he had seen a thief indoors and that he had saved the vase; or who knows what. It was up to the thief what would happen, intentionally or unintentionally (or a combination of both: dropping the vase because he was scared and fleeing through the backdoor, for instance). This is different from what is described in the two other descriptions. In the first case it is clear that it was I who illuminated the room. Who else? I flip the switch already as long as I live in this house and always the room becomes illuminated then.
Also in the second case I think that the description is unproblematic. If the thief hadn’t noticed that the room became illuminated, he wouldn’t have been alerted, but the fact is that he did and normally it is so that a thief becomes alerted in such a situation. It was a direct consequence of an action that was done by me.
The case of me making that the thief dropped the vase is a bit like the soldier’s fighting in the First World War that contributed to the development of plastic surgery (see last week). If the soldier (and no other soldier) had not fought then this development would have been much slower, but actually he had no influence on it. There we concluded that the soldier was not responsible for the faster development of plastic surgery, because we could not redescribe his actions in the war that way. This is also true for the fact that the thief dropped my vase. How about the two other cases? Following the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy I want to distinguish at least two different senses of moral responsibility: responsibility in the accountability sense and in the attributability sense. In the second sense an agent is responsible for an action if it can be attributed to him or her in the sense that he or she did it without having explicitly the intention to do it. If the latter is the case, we can hold the agent responsible or accountable for the action and then we talk of responsibility in the accountability sense. Now we can say, I think, that I am responsible in the accountability sense for having illuminated the room and responsible in the attributability sense for having alerted the thief. So in the case that what we have done is a side effect of what we intended to do our responsibility is a responsibility in the attributability sense. But in the case of making that the thief dropped the vase I am not responsible at all, because the fact that the thief dropped the vase was not something that I did. Maybe it was a consequence of what I did but then one done be someone else, in reaction to what I did, just as in my last week’s blog.

Responsibility and how we describe what we do

In my recent blogs I made a distinction between an action as intended and the side effects of an action, as is done by many philosophers. Often we talk also of the unintended consequences of an action, when we mean its side effects, which is usually distinguished from the intended consequences of this action. That unintended consequences of actions can be seen as side effects does not need to make them less important than the intended main effects. For instance, a side effect of an industry can be that it causes serious damage to the environment and this can be a reason to close down this industry.
Another way of making a distinction between the different effects of an action is talking of actions under different descriptions, an idea introduced by Elisabeth Anscombe. Instead of using the example used by Anscombe, I prefer to take one by Davidson, which I have slightly adapted (Donald Davidson, Essays on actions and events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980; pp. 4-5). Let us say, there is a thief in my house, and the thief knows that, when I come home, I’ll turn the light on and that he will be warned then. Now I come home, I flip the switch, turn on the light, and illuminate the room. Unbeknownst to me I alert also the thief to the fact that I am home. Now we can describe what I did, according to Davidson, in different ways. For example, we can describe what I did by saying that I illuminated the room.
However, we can also say that I alerted the thief, which is a side effect of the action described as illuminating the room.I think that it is right that in many cases we can say that describing an action in different ways is a way of taking account of its side effects and of making clear that an actor is responsible for the side effects in some way. However, not all side effects can be taken account of by redescribing what is done. Take for instance the example in my last blog: a side effect of the First World War was contributing to the development of plastic surgery. Or, in case one finds “First World War” too vague as a description of an action, one can say that the fighting of a soldier in this war contributed to the development of plastic surgery. Can we now say that one description of what the soldier did is fighting and another description is contributing to the development of plastic surgery? I think this is weird. What is then the difference with Davidson’s example? I think it is this. I think that one can defend (which I’ll not do her) that in a certain sense I am responsible for having alerted the thief, but that it is impossible to defend the thesis that the soldier (or “The First World War” whatever that may be) can be held responsible for having contributed to the development of plastic surgery. This contribution is a pure side effect by way of speaking.

Bad actions, good effects

Is a bad action less bad if it has positive side effects? Say, I am a pacifist and I am absolutely against war. So I judge war is bad. As a consequence, for me the First World War was bad. However, this war stimulated medical surgery very much, and especially it stimulated plastic surgery. Is my opinion that the First World War was bad then a reason for me to be against plastic surgery in any form and for any purpose, for example operating people whose faces have been injured in an accident? Or is it a reason to change my opinion and to say: In the end the First World War wasn’t so bad at all? Or even more: In the end wars are not so bad at all?

Responsibility and the levels of meaning

Once I made a distinction between meaning 1 and meaning 0. With the former I indicated the meaning a scientist gives to an object, either physical or social in character. It is the scientist’s theoretical interpretation of reality. With meaning 0 I indicated the meaning the people who make up social reality give to the social reality or to parts of it themselves. It is their interpretation of their own lived reality. If we take now my distinction between objective and subjective responsibility of my last week’s blog we can say that objective responsibility is responsibility in the sense of the meaning 1 of the concept of responsibility. Looked from a distance, from the viewpoint of a not involved scientist (not involved in what the responsibility is about), there seems to be no reason why the negative side effects of an action should be judged differently than the positive side effects. We can also say that from a third person’s point of view objective responsibility is responsibility on the level of meaning 1.
However, the reality as experienced by the participants is often different. Social reality is often not as simple as one would like to have it from a mathematical or mechanical point of view. Here I do not talk about why negative and positive side effects of intentional actions are judged differently. It is a fact that participants in social life do judge them differently. Their interpretations of the world around them take place in a way that is meaningful for them, consciously or unconsciously. That there are subjective interpretations of the world makes that there is also subjective responsibility, so responsibility in the sense of meaning 0. From a subjective point of view it needs not to be so that objectively the same kinds of effects lead to the same kinds of responsibility. Formulated in another way, from a first person’s point of view there is a subjective responsibility under the level of objective reality where the third person judges responsibility, i.e. on the level of meaning 0.

Objective and subjective responsibility

Given what I said in my last two blogs I think that we can distinguish two kinds of responsibility: objective and subjective responsibility. We do what we do, and we are the authors of what we do; not somebody else is. Therefore, in the end, only we are responsible that our actions have taken place. I want to call this kind of responsibility objective. However, that we are objectively responsible for our actions does not imply that we are also held responsible by other people for what we did. It is not necessarily so that we are made accountable or liable for the actions that were objectively our responsibility. Only when this is done, we are responsible in the subjective sense.
There are many reasons why we are not held subjectively responsible for what we did. One reason may be that our actions are simply ignored by other people. Another reason may be that everybody knows that we are the authors of certain actions but the idea of accountability or liability simply does not apply. What we did is just a normal action, like taking the train to Utrecht, and there is no reason to discuss it in terms of responsibility. Another reason that we are not made liable for what we did is that we were forced to do our action so that not we but the person who forced us to do what we did is made liable for our actions. And so there are other reasons for not being held responsible.In view of this distinction we can say now that we are objectively responsible both for the positive side effects and the negative side effects of our intentional actions, but we are subjectively responsible only for the latter.

Being responsible depends on what one does

In my last blog, I showed that people judge the negative side effects of intentional actions and their positive side effects not in the same way. While people are held responsible for negative side effects of what they do, they often aren’t for the positive side effects. This difference has deep consequences, I think, for our idea of moral responsibility, but also for our idea of doing something intentionally, albeit maybe not directly for doing something with an intention. For it means that fundamentally moral responsibility is not only dependent on the fact that we do it but also on the contents of what we do. Moral responsibility seems not to be simply a consequence of the fact that we are the agents of what we are doing but also of the way our doing hits other people, namely negatively or positively, at least as far as it concerns the side effects of what we do. Apparently our moral responsibility is bigger in case when we hurt than in case we do good, and we need to avoid of doing something bad, although, on the other hand, we are not necessarily required to do something good. Moral responsibility seems to be something asymmetrical.
Mutatis mutandis the same can be said of the idea of intentionally. Apparently side effects of actions are considered to be intentional or not dependent on whether they are seen as bad or as good. The positive side effects of what we do are not necessarily intentional, although its negative side effects always are. At least, that seems to be so if we look at the subjective side of how people judge the effects of what agents do.

Praising the one who deserves it

In my last blog, I doubted whether still something new is said in the field of the philosophy of action after so many years of discussion. I think that for most publications my statement is true. However, sometimes it seems to happen that a new flower blooms in this field. Is it surprising that this flower was brought there from the garden of experimental philosophy? Take this. Someone does an action, say A establishes a company. The company has detrimental side effects on the environment. Another person, B, establishes also a company and this company has positive side effects on the environment. Both A and B care only for the profitability of their companies and both know about the side effects, but they are not interested in them. Then it is so, as Joshua Knobe found out, that usually people say that A hurt the environment intentionally, while they do not say that B helped the environment intentionally. Why this difference? For in both cases the actors had the same moral attitude towards the side effects and one could say that the side effects were symmetrical. If this is so and if it is also so that the person who is blamed for the negative side effects of his or her actions is rightly done so, then I must conclude that on the other hand often people do not receive the appreciation they deserve for what they do well. But must I really be praised for something that I have done intentionally from the philosophical point of view but that I had no intention to do?

A comment on action philosophy

Sometimes it is said: everything that is written now in philosophy is not more than a comment on Kant. Is it true? I doubt it. Take for example this: what did Kant write on the philosophy of action? If the philosophy of action was merely a comment on Kant, and every piece of writing in the field of analytical philosophy would be, would it have then any sense to make a distinction between continental philosophy and analytical philosophy? For then analytical philosophy could also be classified as a kind of continental philosophy. If the present philosophy of action could be classified as a “comment on” at all, I would classify it as a comment on Aristotle. For wasn’t it Aristotle who has laid the foundation of action theory?
There is much to be said for the idea that action philosophers are annotators of Aristotle. Take for example the late brilliant philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright. His Explanation and Understanding has been a philosophical master piece, but the foundation of this book consisted of Aristotelian concepts and ideas and from that point of view you can call this work an annotation of Aristotle. You can also see my own work so, although in an indirect way, in case you classify it as a comment on von Wright. But have such classifications sense? For why do we distinguish then, for example, between an Aristotelian approach and a Humean approach in the philosophy of action?
This being said, I think that there is some truth in it that the present philosophy of action is a comment on something else, albeit not simply on Kant or Aristotle. For if I read “new” work in the present philosophy of action, then I think often: “Hasn’t the author read the classics? What he or she says has already been said some time ago although it is presented as something new.”Today, actually hardly anything new is presented in this field of philosophy. And if it is new, it contains only some new applications to new areas. In this way, one can say that most new work in the field of action philosophy has nothing new but it is merely a comment on what has already been written before. Indeed, it is difficult to write a book or an article here that is more than a collection of footnotes or an elaboration of details in a discussion that has been going on for already so many years.

On torture

“The putting men to the rack is a dangerous invention, and seems to be rather a trial of patience than of truth. Both he who has the fortitude to endure it conceals the truth, and he who has not: for why should pain sooner make me confess what really is, than force me to say what is not? And, on the contrary, if he who is not guilty of that whereof he is accused, has the courage to undergo those torments, why should not he who is guilty have the same, so fair a reward as life being in his prospect?” (Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Essays, II-5)
Through the ages people who had been accused of a crime have often been tortured in order to make them confess; or people were tortured in order to make them tell secrets which they might know. Montaigne, who has been a judge in Bordeaux, knew everything about it, but he was clearly against this practice. It was ineffective and he had an aversion to it.
One might think that in the Western countries, which consider themselves enlightened and civilized, this cruel practice, which is against all values they defend, might have gone. However, nothing less is true. Even today, the country that says to stand for the highest values of humanity and democracy seems to think not be able to do without this cruelty, and in order to avoid the application of its own high judicial standards on its own soil, the practice of torturing was done outside its borders in an odd corner of the world: Guantanamo, approved by its highest representative: the president.
However, happily the times do change sometimes. It is true, the expectations of what the new president will bring about are so high, that it will be difficult for him to meet them. But one thing is clear: he takes the values where his country stands for seriously and his first step in office was to start the procedure to close Guantanamo. I do not know whether president Obama has heard of Montaigne and whether he knows what Montaigne has written on torture, but there is one thing he surely knows: torture is not only against all values of humanity, but you simply do not do it for it is a humiliation of yourself and all values you stand for, even if it would be effective and Montaigne was wrong as for this.

The influence of books

Books can have much influence on life, culture and politics, and who knows what more. The influence of religious books is very well known. Or take the influence of the philosophical works by Plato, Aristotle and Descartes, works of science by Newton or Darwin. And so I can go on. The row is endless, and most people can mention a few, or when we mention a title they say “Oh yes, of course”. Yet sometimes a book has been very influential and hardly anybody has heard of it or of the author. Such a work is the Discourse on voluntary servitude by Étienne de La Boétie (1530-1563). Only when you ask people in France, there will be a good chance that they know the man and his booklet. Especially since a few years, in France the interest in La Boétie is growing, and when I was in a bookshop in Lille not so long ago, I counted there even four different editions next to one another. But also in France many people do not know about the important influence of the Discourse on popular resistance everywhere in the world, especially on nonviolent resistance.
When exactly the booklet (it has only about 50 pages) has been written not sure. It must have been in or just before 1548, and later La Boétie seems to have made yet some changes in it. In essence it defends the thesis that a ruler can only rule, because his objects are prepared to obey him. Moreover, La Boétie describes the mechanisms how the ruler can make that the subjects are prepared to obey.
After his premature death at the age of only 32, the book was picked up by the Protestants during the religious civil wars in France, where they used it for justifying their struggle against the French roman-catholic kings. When these wars had come to an end and France had been pacified, the Discourse was almost forgotten, although now and then we see that it came back from the depth of obscurity. The influence on Rousseau’s thinking is striking, for example.
The first real reappearance took place in the French Revolution, when it was quoted by several revolutionaries. And since the publication of a new edition by Lamennais in the midst of the 19th century, the advance of the Discourse could not be stopped anymore. Since then every ten years at least one new French edition has seen the light, not counting the editions in other languages. And the book has not only been re-edited and translated again and again, it got also a clear influence on outstanding revolutionaries and activists. In America it has been read and used by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the author of the “On civil disobedience”. The most important line of influence starts with Lev N. Tolstoy, who has written not only great novels but who was also an important thinker in the field of nonviolence, especially in his later years. It was by him that Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi learned about the Discourse. Passages of LaBoétian thinking can be easily found back in his Hind Swaraj. And via Gandhi this thinking found its way in the world.
This blog is not the place to write an essay of the road of this influence, but I just want to mention the influence via Gandhi on American nonviolent activists, including Martin Luther King. Via the thought of the German revolutionary Landauer the Dutch peace activist Bart de Ligt came into touch with the Discourse, and then it influenced the peace movement in the Netherlands and other countries. Another road is the work of the American political scientist Gene Sharp, whose books have had an important influence on all major nonviolent resistance movements and uprisings of the present history, for example in Burma, Serbia, Georgia and the Ukraine.
This is only one instance of a book that has become very influential. As said in the beginning, there have been many influential books, and there’ll also be many more in future. But the most surprising thing is how a book can be so influential and hardly anybody knows the book and its author.

Beginning and end (3)

We can go back on our road but not back in time. When we go back on a road, we go forward in time, even if this road is a circular road.
Even when we look back in time, we actually go forward in time. From this perspective, there is no past. There is only a future. What is done cannot be undone, even if we repair it.

Beginning and end (2)

One can make a road in the middle of nowhere but not a time slice. For wouldn’t that be like a present without a past and a future? Or what is the same: One can plan to make a road and then one can make a road, but from the time perspective, planning and making are part of the same process.

Beginning and end

When a new year begins, does that mean that the old one has ended? Or is a year like a life: one can make a new start, but the past continues to live in the future?

Philosophical books

When the end of the year comes near, people evaluate the past year. When you read this, it will already be 2009, but when I write this, we still have a few days left of 2008, so for me it is also the right time to look back. Usually, the end of a year is not the time that I take stock of the past. I think that there are better moments for it. But there is one exception: I always write down the books that I have read and at the end of the year I count how many that were during the past twelve months. On the average, it is for me one book in a week, so about 50 in a year. I know that there are many people who read more, but my “excuse” is that I have other things to do than breaking reading records and moreover that the books that I read are usually long or difficult in the sense that they need much concentration.
What books did I read? Mainly, and that is not surprising in the light of my fields of interest, history (the long books) and philosophy (the difficult books). In the category history, many books have something to do with the First World War. People who know my main website will not be surprised. In the category philosophy you find books about subjects like the free will, violence and nonviolence, Hannah Arendt, and books about Michel de Montaigne. People reading my blogs will not be surprised either.
As for Montaigne, his Essays are not on the list of the past year, for I read them already some time ago. But, it is true, I am rereading them at the moment. What you find in the list now are books about Montaigne and his essays. Actually these books are more about the essays than about the man who has written them, in sofar you can separate that, of course. For Montaigne and his Essays are not two separate things. Montaigne is his essays. He wrote about his life, about his thoughts and thinking, about his society.
Here, I have already written several times about Montaigne and his Essays. They impressed me, since I have written them for the first time. No wonder, the man was far ahead of his time and of many of his contempories. He was moderate and he was a mediator in an age full of conflicts and wars. He discusses all aspects of life. Written 400 years ago, the Essays are still modern and they make you think, not only about the past, his past, but about the present, our present. And that is what makes the essays of Montaigne so interesting and that is what makes that there have been written so many books about the essays: Reading Montaigne’s Essays is not only reading a book, it is thinking a book, it is thinking with Montaigne. His Essays are as a philosophical book needs to be.

Making peace

When the end of the year comes by, people tend to look back. And they talk about peace. Especially then they do and especially politicians and leaders do. Why just they? And what do they bring? In the First World War, in 1914 during the first Christmas of this war, the soldiers wanted a truce, but the generals forbade it. However, on many places along the Western Front the soldiers stopped fighting and spontaneously fraternized with the “enemy” and celebrated Christmas with them. The generals and political leaders were afraid of peace, the soldiers weren’t. A truce and fraternization might have meant the end of the war.
This made me think of something that I have written many years ago in my philosophical diary, which I used for writing down casual remarks and ideas. It was a kind of blog avant la lettre, for blogs did not yet exist. To be exact, it was on September 9, 1988 that I wrote: “Peace is not something to be left to statesman”. In fact, it is not a very original statement. Most likely it weren’t my even own words that popped up in my mind. However, I am afraid that nothing has changed in the world since Christmas 1914 and also not since I noted this statement twenty years ago. Of course, much has changed in the world, but none of these changes have made this self-quotation false. For didn’t the fall of the Berlin Wall a year after I had written this, and didn’t all the developments that made this fall possible and that took place in those days confirm the truth of these words? For wasn’t the fall of Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War mainly the work of the long lasting silent (and often not so silent) nonviolent resistance of the common people in extended parts of Europe who simply didn’t agree with the policy of their leaders who were supposed to be statesman (but often weren’t)? And hasn’t laid this, what I have called elsewhere “underground resistance” (which actually is Václav Havel’s “living in truth”), the foundation for what seems to have become the start of a long lasting peace between most European nations and peoples?

Success ?!

Having finished an article, a book or a photo is one thing, being successful with it is something different. My joy of having completed a difficult piece of creativity was immediately followed by feelings of what might other people think about what I made, as I wrote in a blog lately. However, these are two different things. First there is a feeling, a kind of emotion. It is a mixture of joy followed by emptiness. The joy of “I have done it!”. And then, suddenly there is a hole within me. The feeling of nothing having to do.
When these feelings have fade away, questions pop up relating to the world around me, questions about success: Did I really do a good job? What might other people think about it? Do they even find it worth the effort to think about it? And when the joy and emptiness have gone, and the emptiness has been filled with new tasks, the question of success comes more and more to the fore: How has my creativity been received? Was I really so creative, as I had thought at first? However, success is not something absolute. Success is relative. Everybody defines his or her success in view of his or her relevant activities and what relevant others think about it. Seen that way, success is subjective. And is it really possible that success is objective? Success changes on the gulfs of the developments of history. Each generation has to interpret history anew. And what or who has been forgotten once can become a centre of attention later. And what or who was once considered an example of success, can fall into oblivion, while another star of success rises again. And so it may also happen with our pieces of creativity, if it does not sink into oblivion from the start. Is that why we are doing it for?

Visiting Florence

In one of his essays in his book about Montaigne, Philippe Desan writes how the library forms for many authors a way to accumulate knowledge and to organize it, while one can stay on the place where one is. It is a guide to the world. But for Montaigne his library is in the end not more than a starting place for all his voyages. Montaigne has travelled a lot. In France, of course, but also in Germany and from there to Italy. His diary of this journey is famous.
For me it is also often the case that my travels start in a library, be it my own library, be it in a university library or now also in the library of the Internet. I use these libraries as a start for the travels in my mind (as the readers of my blogs may already have noticed) or for my physical travels in Europe or sometimes in Japan. For my mental travels, books give me the guidelines that lead my thoughts. For my physical travels, they give me an impression where it might be interesting and where I should go, and how to organize it.When Montaigne travelled, he gave more attention to the people he met than to the landscapes he passed. Although landscapes are important when choosing my destinations and travelling around, I cannot help to look at people, too, and at their relics. I suppose it is my sociological past. And there is also another similarity between Montaigne and me. In his travel diary, Montaigne has written hardly any word about his visits to Florence. It is as if he has seen hardly anything of the beautiful art there, which was there also already in his time. Anyway, it did not impress him enough in order to write about it. I make always a photographic diary of my travels, and I have photos of nearly all bigger and smaller towns that I visited. But in Florence I took no picture at all.

Finished !

The joy of having finished an article, a book, a complicated photo! And then the feeling of emptiness of having nothing to do (as long as it lasts). And also the fear, for is there really anyone interested in my creativity? Is it really so good as I think? Will the reactions not be negative, or even worse, will my work not be ignored? As if it had fallen in a pit and nobody knows.

The price of freedom

When Eve and Adam ate from the apple in Paradise, they learned what freedom was but also what its limits are. In Paradise Eve and Adam were happy (I suppose), but not free. They could get everything they needed, but just for that reason they couldn’t choose. They simply got what they needed. However, there was one exception: the apple tree. When, urged by the snake, Eve picked an apple and ate from it, she made a substantial choice, and by doing this, she learned what it is to be free. And when Adam ate also a part of the apple, he had the same experience. But the consequence was that they were chased away from Paradise, and in this way Eve and Adam learned also what the limits are of being free and that freedom has a price.

On freedom and determination (2)

In my last blog, I distinguished two types of freedom: freedom as opposed to being limited and freedom as opposed to being determined. I want to call them external freedom and fundamental freedom. But is this all that we can say about it on the conceptual level? If we are fundamentally determined, I would say that we are externally determined as well (but is that really so?). But if we are fundamentally free, is our freedom then only limited by our external restrictions? From the point of view of action theory, this seems very unlikely. Action theory asks for the factors that makes that we act the way we do: for what reasons we make our choices or quasi-choices (I speak of quasi-choices, because I want to keep it open here, whether our choices are really our choices or whether we are fundamentally determined). Following the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright, we can call these factors external, and then we are thinking of institutionalised practices, an order to do something (in an army, by a policeman), external circumstances that happen to take place (rain, a falling tree, and so on), and the like. But there are also factors that we can call internal, and then we can think of our motives, desires and intentions to do something. Actually, these internal factors are often not the consequences of our independent deliberations, but are in many cases steered by our psychological constitution, education, casual experiences and other inner determinants, which usually limit our free choice of them in some degree. In other words, our being free or being restricted is not only outside us (external freedom) but also within us (internal freedom). However, as von Wright remarked with right, the external and internal factors need not always to be separable in the individual case. It is quite well possible that some external factors have become internalised and that they influence our internal degree of freedom, just as our individual desires and intentions do.

On freedom and determination

I received several reactions on my blog “Freedom to act”, not only here, but also on another website where I publish my blogs. Some people said that freedom is not something absolute but that it is the feeling of the limitations of the possibility to choose. If we realize this, then we can be free within our limits. Such limits may be our financial means, our physical restrictions, the need to be considerate of other people and their freedom, and so on. I must admit that I started to write this blog about freedom as a kind of brainstorming for myself, not with the idea to write something original. In view of the reactions it was a good choice. Moreover, it helped me to distinguish between two kinds of freedom: freedom to act the way I would like as far it is possible in view of existing external limits, and freedom in the sense of: Are my choices really my own choices (given their limits) or are my choices determined in some way? When we think of the latter meaning of freedom, we come back to a question that I discussed some time ago: to what extent am I responsible for my actions? If we give freedom the first meaning, then, for instance, someone has the freedom to come to my house, if he likes, and to shoot me down (a reader gave me this example). That is his freedom, indeed, if he prefers to do that (I would certainly advice him not to do it, but it is his freedom to ignore my advice). But is the potential shooter also free to shoot me down in view of the second meaning of freedom? In other words, is he responsible for this action because it was his own choice or was he already in some way determined to do it and he couldn’t help? Suppose that the whole future development of the world and everything in it, in all its details, was already fixed when the big bang took place. Is this person then still free to shoot me down or is it a consequence of the laws of nature that he does? Happily, the person concerned told me also that he has no intention to execute the plan because of his moral objections, but does that make any difference when it has been determined by or during the big bang what will go on in the world from then on and for all eternity?
Here is yet a quote from the same reaction: “How many words does it take to make a difference to the way things are?” Maybe it has no sense to talk about it, for if we the world is determined, we simply do, because we have to, including doing this discussion about freedom.But is the world determined? I have no idea. As it was said in another reaction: “The free will problem might be the toughest philosophical problem”. I wonder whether until now any discussion has brought us much nearer to an answer. Our freedom is limited, that’s clear, but is our freedom determined? And to what extent? Wholly or partially? It is important to know this if we want to know whether we are responsible for our actions.

Who chooses?

What makes that I choose this and not that? Is it I who makes the choices or is there something in me that makes the choices for me? For example, a Cartesian homunculus? If it is I who makes the choices, who or what is this I? Alternatively, if there is a kind of homunculus in me that makes the choices for me, can I say then that I do not like the choice and refuse to execute it? Or am I forced in some way to execute it? In the first case there can be no homunculus that chooses for me, for in the end it is I who makes the choices. In the second case, I seem to be determined to follow the choices laid upon me, but what is then the difference between me and the homunculus? It is weird that there would be something in me that decides in my place, but sometimes I have the feeling that I do things that I do not want to do but that I am forced to do for an unclear reason like a puppet on a string.

Freedom to act

When am I free? I mean, when am I free to act, not only here and now but fundamentally? Let us say that I want to take the train to Utrecht but I do not have the money for it and I know that I’ll be stopped if I want to go into the train without a ticket. Does this mean that I am fundamentally not free to act? For everybody has wishes that he or she cannot realise. Must we say then that nobody is fundamentally free to act?On the other hand, let us suppose that I can do everything I want to do. Does that mean that I am fundamentally free to act? Isn’t it so that I am steered then by my wants? I mean, I want to do something and I can do it. Nobody will stop me. But what determines what I want to do and what determines the choice between wants that cannot be realised at the same time? Isn’t it so that having to choose involves limits of freedom? So, either I am limited because I have no choice but I simply follow the want that pop ups in me for some reason, or I am limited because I have to choose and can follow only some wants. Or is the freedom in the choice, even if this choice is limited? However, can a person be fundamentally free?

On translations

Sometimes I think that a translation gives me a text that has nothing in common with the original. For instance, for me Habermas in German and Habermas in English are two different philosophers. What would Habermas’s philosophy be like, if we would translate his works into Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Silozi? I mean into languages that have, unlike English and German, not any relation with German at all besides that they function as ways for expressing the contents of the mind? Could we in those languages still understand what it is all about?

Allowing and responsibility

The distinction between doing and allowing that I mentioned in my last blog applies also to the question of the limits of responsibility. To be more exact, doing refers to acting oneself, allowing refers to not preventing that another person performs an action or that something happens, especially if one considers the action of the other person as wrong or what happens as harmful. Here I am interested only in allowing other person’s actions, not in happenings.
Then, in what cases is it so that one is morally required not to allow what another person does, because one thinks that the other person’s action is wrong? I think, but I am not sure, that it is hardly possible to make general rules for solving this problem and that one must decide from case to case. At least two things are important, I guess. When we have been in the position that we allowed someone to perform a wrong action, although we could have prevented the action, I think that we have a certain responsibility anyway. But how much? In the end, allowing is a very wide concept. Whether we allow someone to perform a wrong action depends for example on the risks we have to take in order to prevent it, or what the social or legal rules say about such cases. Not intervening can be a matter of cowardice or not being interested but it is also possible that by intervening we risk our life. And in each case it is possible to speak of allowing, if one gives it a wide meaning. In the first examples, I would say that a person that did not intervene is also guilty in a certain sense of the wrong action, for this person had, what I would call, a “reasonable” possibility to intervene, at least in a certain degree, even though he did not do it. In the last example, I wouldn’t talk of guilt in any sense, for in most cases it is not reasonable to risk one life (or being hurt) in order to prevent a wrong action. But there is much room for interpretation and judgement here, and much depends on the concrete situation.A second factor that may have an influence on collective responsibility is whether and how much a wrong action by another person is advantageous to you. If it brings you an advantage, it increases also the need for indemnity for the victims of the wrong action if you have a certain collective responsibility for the action concerned, for example, although you were not personally involved in the action concerned.

Doing and allowing

Arendt defended, as we have seen, that a person can be guilty only of something he or she has actually done. So, a person can be held individually responsible for his or her own action. However, as Arendt also defended, we can have a collective responsibility for what we haven’t done, but what has been done by a member of our group. This difference between guilt (individual responsibility) and collective responsibility is useful, but in some ways and in practice it is often difficult to apply. On the one hand, how can we be held (collectively) responsible for something if we could have no influence at all on what other persons of our group did? It is a hot question as examples in politics show (the holocaust, Srebrenica). On the other hand, not having done an action does not automatically mean that we cannot be guilty of what happened. As far as I know, Arendt does not distinguish between doing and allowing. Most philosophers (including me) consider allowing also as an action. Then we can be guilty because of a wrong action that another person does, even if we did not take part in it. However, this guilt does not refer to the fact that the other person did something bad, but to the fact that we were in the situation that we could have prevented it: we can be guilty because we allowed what the another person did (on condition that we could do something in order to prevent it and that it was reasonable that we did; otherwise we cannot speak of allowance) and because allowing is also an action.

Power and the people

With the help of Hannah Arendt it is not difficult to see why nonviolent action can be so effective, for she wrote: “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together” (italics mine). Nonviolent action can be effective, because it is based on the concerted action of as many people as possible. But at the end of the quotation we see already also a weak point in nonviolent action, if not the weak point. This point becomes even clearer, when we read what Arendt writes next: “The moment the group, from which the power originated to begin with …, disappears, [power] vanishes” (Hannah Arendt, On violence, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, enz., 1970; p. 44). Actually, when writing this passage, Arendt referred to the power of one man and how it is based on his supporting group. As we have seen last week, this characterization of power is fundamentally LaBoétian. Defining power this way is very exceptional among political scientists, who usually define it as something like the possibility to impose one’s will. However, it provides much insight in how power works. It makes clear, for example, that it is not enough to mobilize people in order to bring down an usurper. It is also necessary to keep the people mobilized or to keep them ready to be quickly mobilized in some way. This is one of the most difficult problems of nonviolent action, and not only of this type of action. For most people watch rather a football match on TV than step into the street for a demonstration. And every ruler knows.

On voluntary servitude

On August 25, I wrote in my blog that “it is easier to follow the stream that carries us along rather than take a moment for a break. It is easier to let other people think for us. It is easier not to oppose even if it might be wrong to give in”. Then I was thinking of our intellectual creativity and originality, our mental independence. However, one can give it also a political meaning. More than 400 years ago Étienne de La Boétie wrote a booklet with the title The discourse of voluntary servitude. In this treatise, which he wrote when he was still very young, he defended the thesis that we behave like the slaves of our rulers. La Boétie wondered how it is possible that so many people endure the whims and oppression of a tyrant and that hardly anybody opposes. La Boétie mentioned many reasons why people just do what the ruler desires, but in the end it is because of this: it is simply easier not to oppose and to behave oneself voluntarily like a slave. In short, the easiest way is to obey and to live in voluntary servitude.One can call this a naive idea, a too simple analysis of power, and in some respects it is, although one must see it in the context of his time (La Boétie implicitly criticised Machiavelli, for example). However, the idea is not as naive as one might think. Through the ages it has attracted many persons, and among them were not the most insignificant ones, like Rousseau. And since the rediscovery of the treatise in the 19th century, its central idea has been very influential and cannot be ignored any longer, unless one wants to say that leaders like Mohandas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. have brought about nothing. For they have been demonstrably influenced by the idea of La Boétie, and they showed how important it can be to go against the stream and not to obey if the circumstances require.

On collective responsibility

In my blog last week, I talked about “collective responsibility”. Seen from the first person point of view, it refers to feeling myself responsible for what a person that I have a relation to has done, for instance for what a person of my group has done. Collective responsibility can also work in the other direction in the sense that I am held responsible by other persons for an action done by a person that I have a relation to. This can be quite problematic, for am I really responsible for an action done by a person that I don’t know but that happens to be a member of my group? An action that I even reject? Or take this. Often it is so that, for example when I am abroad and I do something good, people praise me, Henk. But when I do something bad, they say “that stupid Dutchman” instead of “that stupid Henk”. Can all the other Dutchmen really be blamed for what I did wrong?

Feeling guilt for what one hasn’t done

“There is such a thing as responsibility for things one has not done; one can be held liable for them. But there is no such thing as being or feeling guilty for things that happened without oneself actively participating in them” (Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, Schocken Books, New York, 2003; p. 147).Sometimes a person we know did something bad, or a person of our group did something bad, and we did nothing to stop him or her doing it, even when we might have known that it would happen. Then we can feel guilty of the act. However, as Arendt explains, this is not right. For if you declare yourself guilty of something you didn’t personally, in the end everybody is guilty and that means that nobody is. Guilt is something personal for a personal act that one has done. It singles out, as Arendt says. However, this does not mean that we never have anything to do with what another person does. There is also a thing like responsibility, and actually that is what we mean in such cases. In order to distinguish this kind of responsibility from the responsibility for one’s own acts, one might call it “collective responsibility”, as Arendt does. Collective responsibility does not arise by being present on the place of the act but by having a relation to the actor. Being present when the act happens as such is not important. One knows the actor or belongs to the group of the actor, and it is this relation that is the reason that one is held responsible for the act or that one holds oneself responsible for it. However, one problem, which Arendt discusses only superficially, is when does one have a relation to a person and when not? It is true, some cases are clear, like in the case of an explicite group membership. Then one can escape possible collective responsibility only by leaving the group (a possibility that Arendt does discuss). But isn’t then there a kind of collective responsibility that goes back to the time that one still was a member of the group? And, on the other hand, aren’t we all citizens of the world in this time of globalisation? So, what are the limits of collective responsibility?

Voyage to Nagasaki

It is not philosophical, but if you want to read the story of my voyage to Nagasaki go then to http://home.kpn.nl/wegweeda/Nagasaki.htm

Philosophy and empirical research

Basically, philosophy investigates themes that cannot be investigated empirically, like themes in the field of ethics, methodology, ontology, politics, and so on. However, I do not think that this means that empiricism has to be avoided. Not only is it so that philosophy formulates the foundations of empirical research (like in methodology) but the use of empirical findings in philosophical discussions can also improve these discussions. Nevertheless, it often happens that philosophers ignore empirical results, sometimes with weird consequences. Take for example the discussion in analytical philosophy about personal identity. The mainstream view in this discussion is the so-called “psychological view”, which states that personal identity is merely a psychological characteristic of man, not a bodily characteristic or a mixture of both. It is as if we still live in the days of Descartes and Locke and as if psychological research and other empirical research haven’t shown that there is a narrow relation between mind and body. However, these research findings do not play any role at all in the discussion. The psychological view is simply proved by means of thought experiments. As such, I have nothing against thought experiments. They can be useful when real experiments are not possible, but they cannot replace real experiments. And what is evident for one philosopher needs not to be so for another philosopher. In the case of personal identity, the psychological view is generally “proved” with the help of thought experiments like this: The brain of person A is transplanted into the body of person B. Or, alternatively, person A is teletransported (like a telephone call, by way of speaking) to another part of the world or to another planet, while the body that is left behind is not destroyed. Or what kind of thought experiment one succeeds to devise. The problem in these cases is, however, that what needs to be proved is in fact already being supposed: that brain and body can be separated without fundamental consequences for the former (or for the mind) or the latter. And just this contradicts the findings of empirical research. However, as said, these findings are simply ignored by the defendants of the psychological view. It is simply taken as true that body and brain can be separated. But with the help of a false thesis everything can be proved, including a false conclusion. And that’s why the results of empirical research cannot be disregarded in a philosophical discussion, in case they exist.

Some thoughts about a quotation from Martha Nussbaum

“We should not take the absence of the word to be equivalent to the absence of thought” (Martha C. Nussbaum)
Once I wrote down this quotation from Martha Nussbaum but I do not know anymore where I can find it back in one of her books. Therefore, I do not know in what context she said this. However, when I read it again a few days ago, it raised immediately some thoughts within me, for since a long time already I am interested in language and its philosophical and psychological significance and I cannot remain neutral when I see an expression related to language.For many people, the content of this quotation is obvious: why shouldn’t we be able to think without using language? On the other hand, it has been thought for some time by outstanding philosophers that thinking and language are two sides of the same coin: there is no thinking without language and language implies already some way of thinking. As for the first side of the coin, I think that nobody today will deny that what an artist, a painter, a sculptor, a photographer etc. does is a way of thinking without words; that it is a kind of thinking with colour, forms, light or what means the artist uses. What the artist shows is the expression of his or her thinking in a non-linguistic way. As for the second side of the coin, once some scientists thought, to give an example, that using a word told us something about how we thought the world around us looks like. In the meantime, this view has become obsolete in the sense that there appears to be no one-one relation between a language and how the native speaker of this language sees the world. It would indeed be very odd if there was. It would be difficult to fit in new things in an existing language and world view, for example. It would make us too static when something new happened to us. It would also learning a new language with its own categories even more difficult than it already is. Despite such objections, I think that this thesis cannot be completely rejected. And here I defend a minority view. For although it is not so that our native language determines how we see the world, it does give us a first classification scheme, I think. Actually, our language is nothing else than the linguistic expression of our cognitive schema in the sense of Schank and Abelson. However, it is nothing more than that. It is a first guide for dividing the world in categories. But it is as with seeing colours: if we do not have a word for a certain shade of a colour, it does not mean that we do not and cannot see that colour. Under normal circumstances, we can already immediately give a preliminary description of that shade of colour, like reddish yellow, bluish green, and the like, until we have found a better word for it and until we have improved our classification of colour or what it is what we see and what we talk about.

The habit of thoughtlessness

“[D]on’t we all know how relatively easy it has always been to lose at least the habit, if not the faculty of thinking? Nothing more is needed than to live in constant distraction and never leave the company of others.” (Hannah Arendt, The life of the mind, Two p. 80)Thinking, for instance considering what to write in this blog, seems a very natural activity for man. Isn’t it so that we always think automatically? In a certain sense it is true but most of what we call thinking is following the stream of what we already do: The habit of taking care that our daily life runs smooth; reacting on the stimuli that come to us. But if we intentionally want to consider what to do, if we want to deviate from our daily routine, follow new roads, be creative and so on; in short, if we want to stop the stream of automatic thought, we must isolate ourselves from the world around us, from the world that contains so much that can distract us. However, it is easier to follow the stream that carries us along rather than take a moment for a break. It is easier to let other people think for us. It is easier not to oppose even if it might be wrong to give in. Being creative and original, being independent is not the easiest way. Is that the reason that many people have given it up already so long ago?

Time as distance

According to Hannah Arendt, Henri Bergson first discovered that all words referring to time are words borrowed from spatial language. As Arendt quotes Bergson: “If we want to reflect on time, it is space that responds … [D]uration is always expressed as extension” (The life of the mind, Two p. 13). Or, as Arendt adds: “[W]e can measure time only by measuring spatial distances. Even the common distinction between spatial juxtaposition and temporal succession presupposes an extended space through which the succession must occur” (ibid.).
What Arendt quotes here about what Bergson discovered is exactly in line with a personal experience that I apply several times a week. As readers of my blogs may have noticed, running is one of my favourite sports. However, unlike many other runners, I have no particular routes where I make my runs. I run usually in the wood behind my house and I simply go with the idea to run, say, 45 minutes, choosing the paths during the run as my mood is and according to what I see. However, how long is 45 minutes? Already after less than 10 minutes, I have no idea anymore, how long ago it was that I left home. I experience this phenomenon even more when I do not run in my familiar wood but on an unknown road somewhere abroad, when I am on holiday. The solution I have found is this (and I do not suppose that it is unique): I know every path, every corner, every tree by way of speaking, in “my” wood. After all those years that I come there, I know also how much time it takes about to arrive at certain points on my runs there in the wood. Therefore, in a Bergsonian way, I simply translate my running time into distance and use the paths and places that I pass as marking points in order to guess how long I am already on the way, checking now and then on my watch (usually not before I am halfway) whether my guesses are right. This experience has made me realize already before I knew about Bergson’s time analysis that time as such cannot be measured and that it has to be translated into distance.

No news

When I wrote my blog on “the devil in our mind” two weeks ago, I was impressed by my recent experiences in Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Auschwitz and I wondered how people come that far that they do such cruel acts. The actual problem is not, I think, that there are people that deliberately are prepared to kill people. I mean, that is a problem, of course, but the real problem is that, although most men do not want to kill, they are prepared to do it if a “person with authority” demands it, as Stanley Milgram has shown in his famous study Obedience to Authority. Some people think “If that person tells me that I can do it, it must be okay”. In other cases, people know that what they do is not good, but they are in such a situation that they do not see a real possibility to avoid cruel or despised acts, unless they risk their lives. What I think is that if we have come that far, that people are in such a situation, something has gone wrong already long ago, and that the phase that violence can be prevented has already past. There are many reasons why it can come so far, but one reason is that preventive measures are often considered “soft”, which is the same as “not realistic”. War and violence are presented on the first pages of newspapers and stressed in the TV news and everybody knows about it, but who knows for example about the preventive actions of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) (www.osce.org)? Things that do not happen are not seen as news. However often this news is more important than the news of what did happen.

On friendship

Many people have tried to express the essence of friendship, but I think that nobody did it as well as Montaigne, when he thought of Étienne de La Boétie, his friend who had died several years before: “Parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi” (Because it was he, because it was I). Friendship with a person is something that we do not have with hidden thoughts in the mind, it is not something we have for trying to get something else. Somebody is a friend for us and we are a friend for that person simply because of who that person is, his or her good sides, his or her bad sides. And that is what Montaigne expressed.