Boxing and the peace movement

Recently the most important Dutch peace movement IKV Pax Christi held its yearly Peace Week. In order to attract new young people as peace activists a short video has been published on the Internet with a leading role for Jan Pronk, president of IKV and a former Dutch cabinet minister who performed also several high functions for the United Nations. In this video we see Pronk entering the training room of his wrestling school in a boxing outfit. He looks around and sees only an old man there, hardly able to do his exercises. Apparently it is not the right opponent for him. Pronk walks a bit around and starts with his boxing workout. While doing that he is a bit daydreaming about how he beats an opponent in a wrestling match. Then he wakes up again and he sees the old man playing chess with another old man instead of doing his workout. Next we see a poster with the text: “Wanted: A New Generation of Peace Fighters”. The video ends with a call to come to the Night of Peace. (http://www.nachtvandevrede.nl/ ; the website is in Dutch).
This video is not the only instance that the Dutch peace movement links fighting for peace to fighting sports. In the Night of Peace just mentioned Jan Pronk passed over his task as peace fighter to a new generation in a boxing ring, which was the central stage of the evening. Moreover, the Dutch peace organisation “People Building Peace” appointed a kickboxing promoter as its “peace ambassador”.
Here I do not want to talk about boxing and kickboxing as such. However, my problem of linking peace to these sports is this. The purpose of boxing and kickboxing is to beat your opponent by hitting and hurting him and if possible to knock him down. Your opponent has the right to do the same with you in order to win. In other words, it is a mini-war. What has this all to do with peace? Another website where I also found the video says that the peace movement is looking for people that can build bridges, and that is what in fact peace is: building bridges in order to bring people together. However, what this video suggests is that peace activists must be persons prepared to knock down (at least mentally) people that do not agree with his concept of peace and peace proposals. A peace maker, so it implies, is a person who wins by beating the person who does not agree. But what then is the difference between bringing peace and fighting a war, even if it is a war for a just cause (whatever that may be)? But peace is not a situation where someone who thinks that he is right can take this right at the cost of the opponent. Peace is a situation where people try to come to common solutions, not by fighting but by a process of negotiating where both parties give and take. And a peace activist has to be a mediator in this process. How far has a peace organisation gone from reality if it does not see that suggesting a relation with boxing and kickboxing undermines this idea.

The development of man and the capacity to act

A few days ago it was in the news that a new ancestor of man has been found, which has been baptized Ardipithecus ramidus. Actually she has been found already in 1994 (in Ethiopia), but it takes always time to analyze and interpret a new find. This Ardipithecus ramidus lived about one million years before our famous ancestor “Lucy”, so about 4.4 million years ago, and she had physical traits that were already typically human rather than apelike. What for philosophers is more interesting, of course, is not which physical capacities this ancestor had but her mental capacities. Could she think as we do? Of course not, but had her thinking already something typical human? And could she act? Surely, she could behave but could she develop already some typical human intentions? In my blog last week I proposed the idea that the difference between behaviour and action is a sliding scale. From that point of view it is likely that the doings of the Ardipithecus ramidus were not merely bodily movements but had already some actionlike traits.
A couple of million years later we see that man makes and uses stone tools. I do not remember when it was. Maybe Lucy already did, maybe it was a couple of hundreds of thousands or a million years later, but already very long ago man made intentionally stone tools. That this man did not simple pick up a stone and used it can be seen from the fact that he went already to places where the stones he needed were found and brought them from there to where he used the tools, a distance of often several kilometres. In short: these ancestors of ours planned what they did.
I think that it is reasonable to guess that man did not have intentions in our sense, so did not take actions in our sense, before she used a language. When did language develop? By chance I have just finished reading a book about the origin of language in man. It defends the theory that it must have been between 200.000 and 50.000 years ago, which is about between the appearance of homo sapiens (modern man) on earth and the famous cave paintings of Lascaux and elsewhere in the world. Moreover, it is likely that the language capacities of man and with it the capacity to execute fully intentional actions developed gradually. In the first homo sapiens the capacity to act intentionally was less well developed than in his descendant that discovered agriculture some 15,000 till 10,000 years ago. Seen it this way, it is likely that these capacities still develop.
What does this mean for action theory? Behaviour and action can be placed on a sliding scale, as we have seen, and the scale can be used for classifying what we do as more actionlike or more like behaviour. In this way, the classification of behaviour and action is synchronic. However, in view of the development of man it must also be possible to classify behaviour and action diachronically: We compare the doings of present man with the doings of our ancestors by placing them somewhere on the sliding scale. By diachronically comparing actions and behaviour of man in this way, we can get insight in human development. Then it is not unlikely that we come to the conclusion that much which is now classified as an action has no equivalent in the past and must necessarily have been more like behaviour (and so necessarily less intentional). Conversely, this may also true for the doings of man in future.

The relativity of action

Definitions of what an action is are often absolute in the sense that they strictly separate actions from other kinds of doing: A doing is an action or it isn’t. My own definition of action in my dissertation is no exception. I called a doing guided by an intention an action; if it doesn’t have an intention, it is an instance of behaviour. Using intention as criterion for distinguishing action from non-action is quite common among action philosophers. However, other perspectives are possible. Jonathan Dancy distinguishes an action from a mere bodily movement when there is a reason behind what the agent does. Berent Enç distinguishes what one does in a deliberative way from what one does automatically. Deliberation involves weighing the pros and cons of what the agent might do and determines the agent’s purposes, beliefs, desires and intentions. However, in all these cases there is a clear distinction between two types of doing.
The dichotomy has been relativized somewhat by an idea put forward by G.E.M. Anscombe that says that actions can be described in different ways and that we have different actions depending upon the description chosen. This idea that has been developed by Donald Davidson. However, even then the dichotomy between action and non-action still remains.
This is different in Christine Korsgaard’s description of action in her recently published Self-Constitution (pp. 97-98). Korsgaard defines action as “an intentional movement … guided by a representation or conception … of [the] environment”. Also in this definition intention is substantial for making a movement an action. However, as Korsgaard explains, there is no “hard and fast line in nature between action and other forms of intentionally describable responses because there is not a hard and fast line in nature between mere reaction and perceptual representation”. There is a sliding scale between how plants react to their environment (non-action), how animals do and how man does when s/he acts. Also the doings of man are on a sliding scale from mere behaviour on the one end till action on the other end. In fact, Korsgaard had anticipated this explanation already in her definition for actually it runs: “Action is an intentional movement of an animal ... guided by a representation or conception that the animal forms of his environment”.
But if it is so that there is a sliding scale between action and mere behaviour and if this distinction is relative then it is also so that our responsibility for what we do must be on a sliding scale and be relative. Then our responsibility for what we do is rarely hundred percent or zero but in many cases it is somewhere in between. In fact this is often acknowledged, for example in trials. There it can happen that the perpetrator of a criminal act is declared to have been in a state of diminished responsibility for what s/he did, which means that the act had not been fully deliberate but that the perpetrator had been partially guided by bodily urges that s/he had not under control. However, as Korsgaard adds, “[t]here are many cases in which we need a hard and fast concept for the purposes of philosophical understanding and indeed for ethical and political life...”. But does it really contribute to our understanding and our ethical and political life if a distinction is based on a distorted view of the world?

Being praised for what you do

Some time ago I wrote about the side effects of actions and how we evaluate them. Side effects of actions are one of those intriguing issues of the philosophy of action: We can say a lot about them, but it is difficult to reach a definite conclusion. One problem is, as I discussed: Are we (or to what extent are we) the doers of these side effects if we could not foresee them when we acted? Are we then responsible for them or are we not, or are we partially responsible? And how about the side effects that we did foresee but that we had rather avoided? But maybe we thought: “Okay, this effect is less important than our actual action”. Or we just do not care. Of course, side effects can also be positive. One of the remarkable things is, as we have seen, that we are blamed for the negative side effects of our actions but not praised for the positive ones (see my blogs of February 23, 2009, and later).
Side effects of actions cannot be avoided. Moreover, even when we consider in advance thoroughly what we are going to do, we can foresee only a few consequences of our actions. And among those we do foresee there are often some that we do not desire to happen. The world is too complicated to be able to bring about only what we like. The only “solution” would be doing nothing, and even that is a doing from the point of view of many philosophers.
More than two years ago I started to write my philosophical blogs. Frankly speaking, I did not write them for the readers; I wrote them for myself. But what I had not thought about so much, but what I could have foreseen, of course, is that some people reacted. Even more, I got a group of readers. I do not want to say that it changed my blogs a lot, but in the end, when writing, you take attention to it that you are read and it influences what you are writing, despite that you still write for yourself. And so it happened to me, too.
I think that I can consider having a group of readers as a positive side effect of my writing my blogs, for my main purpose was stimulating my thinking and ordering my thoughts in a less formal way then when you write an article. Writing blogs is excellent for that, and I would have continued writing blogs, also when I would not be read and when I would never receive a reaction. What I did not expect, however, was being praised for my blogs. Hadn’t I written myself that people are blamed for negative side effects of what they do but that they are not praised for positive side effects? However, often it happens that theories are falsified and must be revised.
Now the theory that people are not praised for the positive side effects of what they do has been falsified by at least one instance, for the unexpected thing happened. My blog is not only read by other people, but I am even praised for it. A few days ago I received a message that my readers have submitted and voted for my blog at The Daily Reviewer with the consequence that my blog is in their top 100 philosophy blogs (see the reaction to my blog “What are we voting for?”, published two weeks ago). And I got even an award for it. Therefore, I want to thank from the depth of my heart all those readers who voted for me and brought me in the top 100 philosophy blogs! Thank you very much. It is very nice of all of you.
Of course, I want to try to continue writing blogs of the same quality. I’ll do my best for it, although I cannot promise anything. Sometimes it happened that I had written a blog and later I thought: no, it was not worth publishing it. The only excuse that I have for it is that I definitely want to publish a blog every Monday, unless I have an airtight excuse for not doing it. Then it can happen sometimes that inspiration fails. But now I have a second goal when writing my blogs: not only writing for myself but, as human as human is, trying to reach the top of the list of 100. Who knows, maybe I’ll succeed, maybe not. It is not only in my hands but also in the hands of my readers and maybe in other hands, too. But if I succeed, and if I reach the top, one thing is sure: I can no longer say that it is a side effect of my action of writing blogs.

Every citizen a criminal

The European Union has decided that finger prints have to be taken of every person who wants to have a passport for travelling abroad, a measure that will also be executed by the Netherlands. The reason seems to be that in this way it becomes easier to attack crime. But is it really effective? I doubt it and my opinion has been reinforced by a recent Dutch report that says that placing surveillance cameras in public areas is not very effective, with a few exceptions, like placing them in public garages. And for me there is no fundamental difference between placing cameras in public places, taking finger prints when you want to have a passport, asking your DNA for the simple reason that you happen to live in an area where a murder has taken place, and so on. The essence of all these measures is: they make you a potential criminal while there is not any suspicion on you for any crime. Even more, you are considered to be a potential perpetrator, even when there hasn’t taken place any crime at all. In short, it is Big Brother.Politicians talk about trust and that people must invest more in community relations in order to get a friendlier, less criminal society. But how can they expect that people trust each other, if these politicians do not trust us? And when they do not support programs that invest in personal relations on the community level themselves and in the civil society, but when they see in every citizen a criminal in the making?

What are we voting for?

Voting in democracies is supposed to be a procedure in which we show which candidate or party represents best our interest. But is that really so? Most people do not read all the programs that the parties have written and that the candidates stand for. They see the candidates in TV broadcasts and they read the political news in the newspapers. Maybe they go even to a political meeting or they happen to meet a candidate somewhere in their town or village during a campaign. In such a way voters seem to build up their opinions and to decide for whom to vote. Anyway, that is the theory. But is that really so? In fact, most people do not vote after a rational weighing of programs and standpoints, but they follow their personal traditions and feelings. It is not a bad strategy. Following your personal tradition, means that you follow where you have always stand for. And as for following your feelings, psychologists have found out that in complex situations it is almost impossible for man to make rational calculations what to do. Then following your feelings will often lead to an acceptable result. And from that point of view it is second best to a rational decision. But what does it mean following your feelings? One would expect that in case of voting it would be a kind of emotional tentative weighing of candidates and parties on ground of what they have done and said in the past and what they promise to do. In fact this kind of weighing appears to be of secondary importance. What comes first is not what a candidate said or says, promised or promises to do and really did or does. What is of primary importance is what he or she looks like. In one word it is his or her face. Whether the candidate looks competent not whether he or she is competent seems to be most important for being elected, even more important than whether a candidate is judged honest or charismatic. And then we do not yet speak of what this competence stands for; what it is about. However, a candidate that looks competent does not need to be competent. He or she can or cannot be competent despite the appearance. But in these days this is what candidates and their parties anticipate in the campaign to come. They make use of stylists and other people who work on how they look and not on what they are. Therefore it is actually so that we do not vote for the most competent candidate in the sense of the person that is most likely to represent our interests well, but we vote for the best stylists and other people who make up the appearance of the candidate. Actually it is what many people know but they follow their feelings and vote for the face.

Reading a book makes me quiet

Somewhere on a website on the Internet I have a photo of my study. What you see there is a room full of books. Since I have uploaded the photo there, I have received many reactions, all positive, for example: “I think this is my favourite room in the entire world”, “This is my dream”, “That's my goal!”, or “As close to paradise as one can get!”. I have “collected” these books already since a long time. Like those who have sent me their reactions, I like reading and I like having books around me. It is handy, when I am writing a blog, an article or occasionally a book, and what is more important, books make me feel at ease. All these books around me give me the right feeling, when I am there, working or doing something else.
But for me books are not a kind of wall paper that has to bring me in the right mood. Books have contents; they are about something. They say something and they are reflections of the minds of their authors, and often a lot more. That’s why I like reading them and want to have them around me. If that weren’t so, I guess that good photos and other decorations would do, too. Books have an intellectual function and because they are the reflections of other minds, they help me to develop my own mind. They give me an indirect way to talk with their authors and to talk with other authors who have read and who discuss the books that I have read. And they stimulate me to read other books.

However, books have also another function for me. When I come home after a tiring day, or when I have been working hard in my study (while writing myself), I can have a tense feeling. Some people go to bed then, but for me that doesn’t help. For me, other ways of coping with it are better. One way is doing physical activity. It certainly helps. But what also helps always for me is taking a book, and then rather not an easy one, but something like philosophy, for example, about a difficult theme which asks for concentration. The only thing that is necessary that it can distract me from what I did before I took the book in my hands. And then I become gradually relaxed again and forget what I did before. Therefore, it is something I always do and I can count the days that I did not read at least some pages in a book. For reading a book is relaxing for me and it makes me quiet.

Shadows passing by

Sometimes a photo can say more than books full of philosophical theories or a whole library of novels. It is true, philosophical books and literary works can tell a lot about the exact circumstances man or an individual person lives in and they can give extensive analyses. Besides that, they can describe or discuss details in a way photos cannot do. But isn’t it so that a photo can summarize a feeling, an idea in a way that words can never do? Take this photo here. Doesn’t it say a lot about the society we live in, in a way that anything written can never express? That in the end we are individuals while other human beings are passing by like shadows, maybe with the exception of a single person who is near to us? On the other hand, a photo, also this one, can lead to many interpretations and nobody knows which one is the right one.

The garden of Linnaeus

In a certain sense the world around us has an objective existence. I mean, the world as such is there and would exist as it is, even if we human beings would not be a part of it and would not exist at all. Plants and animals would live, procreate themselves and die as they do now without us being there. Animal species would come and go. Mountains would rise and disappear. Volcanoes would still throw ashes in the air. Rivers would fill the seas and the water would come back on the land as rain.
On the other hand, for us human beings the world around us cannot be objective in that sense. We cannot see the world as such but we must see what we see always as something special. We divide what we see in animals and things. Animals are birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, fishes. Mammals are dogs, cats, lions and elephants. And so on. That we classify the world around us is not only so for animals but for everything we see around us. It is true that sometimes our distinctions are vague, maybe confusing, and it also happens that later we find it better to change them. Then also our world changes. Sometimes a bit, sometimes a lot. Perhaps it was a small change that mammals appeared not to be fishes but mammals. A big change was that the earth appeared not to be the centre of the world but a planet that circles around the sun instead of the other way around. Because for us the world around us is never as such but always in a certain way, namely the way we have classified it, the world is subjective for us. And because it is we, human beings, who classify the world, the world is in this sense a man made construction.
One person who has much contributed to our world view and has made a construction of the living world is Carolus Linnaeus. It is also he who “moved” whales from the realm of fishes to the realm of mammals. After 250 years his classification is still in use, although it has been improved here and there. Especially Linnaeus’ classification of plants is well-known and if we talk about Linnaeus it is the first thing that comes into our thoughts. Is it not wonderful then to walk in the Linnéträdgården, the “Garden of Linnaeus” in Uppsala in Sweden, where he worked and studied plants, because it is a place where has been worked on the construction of our world?

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.