I thought I was done wittering on about Brian Thompson, the late CEO of United Healthcare, but here we are. His name lingers like the corporate perfume of systemic rot—an enduring testament to how we’ve elevated unethical behaviour into performance art. It got me thinking: what if we brought back a bit of old-school accountability? In Ancient Rome, outlaws lost their citizenship, legal protections, and status as people. That’s right—booted out of polite society. Meanwhile, we’ve done the opposite: we hand out golden parachutes and slap their faces on business magazine covers.
To some, Brian Thompson was a good man – apart from the insider trading, of course. He was successful, a nice guy, funny, and had a good family, and a few million-dollar homes. What else could you ask for? But his success came in the way of blood money. It seems we need fewer people who think like this, not more.
Then I recalled The Purge franchise. And sure, The Purge is a dystopian fantasy, but let’s up the stakes. Picture this: bounties on corporate villains. Not literal carnage, of course—let’s leave that for the big screen—but the return of real consequences. Instead of allowing their PR teams to smooth it all over with buzzwords and philanthropy crumbs, what if we made it socially unacceptable to be a snake in a suit? What if moral suasion—the lost art of persuading someone to do right because it’s, you know, right—actually came back into fashion?
Nietzsche nailed it ages ago. We’ve got two moral codes: one for people and one for money. And guess which one wins every time? All it takes is enough cash and the right rhetoric, and suddenly, everyone forgets who’s really getting fleeced. This is the banality of evil in its purest form: not grand acts of villainy but a shrugging normalisation of corruption. We don’t even consider it corruption. We see it as business as usual. We support and work for these businesses.
The tragedy is that we’ve become so desensitised to it that we are adept at ignoring the stench of moral failure that even calling it out feels quaint. But it’s not hopeless. Some of us still notice. Some of us still care. The real question is, how long can we keep tolerating this farce before we remember that morality isn’t just for the powerless?
Meantime, I just imagine these grubbers being stripped of power and protection, running scared from the likes of Luigi Mangioni.
The topic of this video touches upon my insufficiency of language thesis. Tim Maudlin defends language realism but only to the extent that ‘we can use it to describe the world and that some of those descriptions are true’.
Video: Does Language Describe Reality? (IAI)
The challenge, then, is determining which descriptions are true. I’ve discussed a couple of my positions on this.
The Truth About Truth
Firstly, we can only perceive what is true as we have no access to absolute truth. The best we can achieve is an asymptotic function approaching truth, a notion that resonates with Hilary Putnam’s concept of internal realism (pdf). Putnam argues that truth is not a matter of correspondence with a mind-independent reality but is instead tied to our conceptual schemes. This means that what we consider “true” is always shaped by the language and concepts we use, making our understanding inherently partial and context-dependent. Even then, we have no way to determine how close to truth our perception is. It just has to feel true—an idea that aligns with Putnam’s pragmatic conception of truth, where truth is something that emerges from our practices and inquiries, rather than being a fixed point we can definitively reach. In terms of physics, this underlying reality may be relatively more stable than abstract concepts, which are ephemeral and shifting sands.
The Rhetoric of Truth
Secondly, given that we have no access to objective truth, we can only expect subjective or relative truths. This brings us to Putnam’s critique of the metaphysicalcorrespondence theory of truth. According to Putnam, the idea that language can perfectly correspond to an external reality is flawed. Instead, truth is what can be justified within a particular conceptual framework, making all truth somewhat relative. This leaves us open to rhetoric—the more convincing argument wins, regardless of whether it reflects an objective reality. In fact, as Putnam’s ideas suggest, the most persuasive argument might favour an incorrect position simply because it resonates more with our internal conceptual schemes, not because it corresponds to an external truth. This has happened many times historically—or has it?
Conclusion: Language, Truth, and the Influence of Rhetoric
Putnam’s work reminds us that language is deeply connected to our understanding of the world, but it is also limited by the conceptual frameworks within which it operates. While language helps us navigate and describe the world, it cannot provide us with direct access to objective truth. Instead, it gives us tools to construct truths that are internally coherent and pragmatically useful, though always subject to change and reinterpretation. As we engage with rhetoric and persuasion, we must remain aware that the truths we accept are often those that best fit our current conceptual schemes, not necessarily those that best correspond to an elusive objective reality.
It’s July. The season of independence in the United States. Independence from the overt tyranny of Britain, but not from the tacit tyranny of their government—the government purported to be ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people‘ per Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address. As their Constitution reads, ‘We the People‘. Governments may be of the people and by the people, but governments are an emergent phenomenon as happens when oxygen and hydrogen combine just so and create water. Two gases combine to create a new substance—water. Some forget that, like water, government are a distinct element to the people that constitute it. Some think it resembles them. It doesn’t. It’s Hobbes’ Leviathan—or a Jabberwok.
In preparation for the traditional Summer season, I took to reading Derrida’s 1976 essay, Declarations of Independence. It was interesting, but I was hoping to get more from it. I decided to deconstruct the opening paragraph—the preamble—of the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Deconstructing Binary Oppositions
Self-Evident vs. Non-Self-Evident
The Declaration boldly asserts that ‘these truths’ are ‘self-evident’,’ a claim that is nothing more than a rhetorical trick. By presenting these ideas as self-evident, the authors seek to place them beyond questioning, discouraging dissent and critical examination. In reality, these ‘truths’ are far from universal; they are the product of a specific cultural and historical context, shaped by the interests and perspectives of the privileged few who drafted the document.
Interrogating Assumptions and Hierarchies The Declaration of Independence asserts that certain truths are ‘self-evident’, implying that these truths are so obvious that they require no further justification. However, the concept of self-evidence itself is far from universally accepted. It is deeply embedded in the philosophical tradition of Enlightenment rationalism, which holds that reason and logic can reveal fundamental truths about the world.
Critique of Rationalism: Critics of Enlightenment rationalism, including existentialists like Friedrich Nietzsche and phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger, argue that what is considered self-evident is often culturally and historically contingent. Nietzsche, for example, contended that what we take as ‘truth’ is a product of our perspective and historical context, not an absolute given (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil).
Cultural and Philosophical Contingency
Cultural Relativity: Different cultures and philosophical traditions may not find the same truths to be self-evident. For instance, the concept of individual rights as self-evident truths is a product of Western liberal thought and may not hold the same self-evident status in other cultural frameworks. In many Eastern philosophies, the focus is more on community and harmony rather than individual rights.
Subjectivity of Self-Evidence: The term ‘self-evident’ implies an inherent, unquestionable truth, yet what one group or culture finds self-evident, another may not. This variability reveals the instability and subjectivity of the claim. For example, in traditional Confucian societies, the emphasis is placed on hierarchy and duty rather than equality and individual rights, demonstrating a different set of ‘self-evident’ truths.
Social Construction: Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and knowledge further deconstructs the notion of objective truth. Foucault argues that what is accepted as truth is produced by power relations within society. Truths are constructed through discourses that serve the interests of particular social groups, rather than being objective or self-evident (Foucault, Discipline and Punish).
Created Equal vs. Not Created Equal
The Declaration’s claim that ‘all men are created equal’ is a blatant falsehood, a manipulative promise designed to appease the masses whilst maintaining the status quo. The glaring contradictions of slavery and gender inequality expose the hollowness of this assertion. Equality, as presented here, is nothing more than an ideological construct, a tool for those in power to maintain their dominance while paying lip service to the ideals of justice and fairness.
Creator vs. No Creator
The Declaration refers to a ‘Creator’ who endows individuals with rights, grounding its claims in a divine or natural law. This invokes a theistic worldview where moral and legal principles are derived from a higher power. However, Derrida challenges this by showing that the concept of a creator is a cultural and philosophical construct, not a universal truth.
The presence of the creator in the text serves to legitimise the rights it declares. However, this legitimacy is contingent on accepting the cultural narrative of a creator. Secular and non-theistic perspectives are marginalised by this assertion, revealing the ideological biases inherent in the Declaration. The authority of the declaration is thus shown to be dependent on particular beliefs, rather than an objective reality.
Unalienable vs. Alienable
The notion of ‘unalienable Rights’ is another empty promise, a rhetorical flourish designed to inspire loyalty and obedience. In practice, these supposedly inherent and inviolable rights are regularly violated and denied, particularly to those on the margins of society. The Declaration’s lofty language of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ rings hollow in the face of systemic oppression and injustice. These rights are not unalienable; they are contingent upon the whims of those in power.
Conclusion
Through this deconstruction, we expose the Declaration of Independence for what it truly is: a masterful work of propaganda, filled with false promises and manipulative rhetoric. The document’s purported truths and self-evident principles are revealed as arbitrary constructs, designed to serve the interests of the powerful while placating the masses with empty platitudes.
As some celebrate this 4th of July, let us not be fooled by the high-minded language and lofty ideals of our founding documents. Instead, let us recognise them for what they are: tools of control and manipulation, employed by those who seek to maintain their grip on power. Only by constantly questioning and deconstructing these texts can we hope to expose the truth behind the facade and work towards a more genuine understanding of freedom and equality.
References
Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
I’ve been reengaging with philosophy, though my positions haven’t changed recently. My last change was to shift from being a qualified material realist to a qualified idealist in the shape of Analytic Idealism. In most matters I can think of, I am an anti-realist, which is to say concepts like truth and morality are not objective; rather they are mind-dependent.
I’ve long been on record of taking the stance that Capital-T Truth, moral truths, are derived rhetorically. There is no underlying Truth, only what we are aggregately convinced of, by whatever route we’ve taken. As a moral non-cognitivist, I am convinced that morality is derived through emotion and expressed or prescribed after a quick stop through logic gates. Again, there is nothing objective about morality.
Truth and morality are subjective and relative constructs. They resonate with us emotionally, so we adopt them.
Were I a theist — more particularly a monotheist —, I might be inclined to be emotionally invested in some Divine Command theory, where I believe that some god may have dictated these moral truths. Of course, this begs the question of how these so-called “Truths” were conveyed from some spirit world to this mundane world. I have no such conflict.
But let’s ask how an atheist might believe in moral realism. Perhaps, they might adopt a Naturalistic stance: we have some natural intuition or in-built moral mechanism that is not mind-dependent or socially determined. I am not a naturalist and I don’t take a universalist approach to the world, so this doesn’t resonate with me. I can agree that we have an in-built sense of fairness, and this might become a basis for some aspects of morality, but this is still triggered by an emotional response that is mind-dependent.
Another curious thing for me is why non-human animals cannot commit immoral acts. Isn’t this enough to diminish some moral universal? In the end, they are an extension of language by some definition. No language, not even a semblance of morality.
Anyway, there’s nothing new here. I just felt like creating a philosophical post as I’ve been so distracted by my health and writing.
I am trying to avoid commenting on the recent SCOTUS decision and how it is symptomatic of how the United States remains a failed state—at least a zombie state—, so this preamble should suffice for now.
I was chatting politics into the wee hours with my son, who’s been on this earth for almost 25 years now. I consider myself to be on the left of traditional political scales. He considers himself to be on the right, but he’s trying to make sense of the scales and dimensions. He had two questions: First, ‘What are the crucial dimensions and positions that define left and right?’ Second, ‘Where do Liberals fit into the equation?’
Knowing me, he wanted to provide some context and confer with me his knowledge that would also serve to frame and anchor the conversation. A key point was to have clarified the adopted nomenclature and positioning on a theoretical map.
We started with the origins of the left-right distinction, which was barely a valid dichotomy even as it was coined in France. There was no duolith. Those on the left or right had features in common but taken holistically, this was a reductionist categorisation, as tends to happen. Exacerbating this, as it does today, still, the politicians with voices remained to the right of the unvoices masses.
He asked about the difference between freedom and liberty because his sources differentiate the two. Whilst connotation and nuance may enter the picture, etymologically speaking, freedom is a native English word whilst liberty is French via Latin. Connotatively, freedom is an absolute measure whilst liberty is granted within a political framework. Positive and negative liberties aside, liberty is an attenuator. It restricts freedom even if it allows most of the signal through. Effectively, liberty is permission by the state to act in certain ways.
By the end of the conversation, he was framing the key difference around notions of national identity and nationalism—I versus we. I shared my thoughts on the construction of identity, thus making for a poor foundation, though we both agreed that national narratives have been the impetus for much activity. (I am reluctant to insert the word progress here.)
After our conversation, I began researching dimensions established or otherwise proposed by political science. This led me to a place I found interesting—the distinction between radical, progressive, conservative, and reactionary positions. For some reason, this never really occurred to me.
I’m not sure one can employ these terms in general discussion without definition and qualification, but I feel they are useful in their own right. Typically, I view the political landscape—at the highest level and with a US-bent—as Left (communists, socialists, anarchists, progressives) and Right (conservatives, liberals, and fascists). I also know that this is imprecise, but maps always are.
This new vocabulary helps by distilling the map to this—ordered differently:
Right
Conservative
Reactionary
Left
Progressive
Radical
Conservative
Conservatives want to maintain the status quo. This is interesting usage adoption. Fundamentally, advocates of this view want to promote and to preserve traditional social institutions and practices. In Western culture, conservatives seek to preserve a range of institutions such as organized religion, parliamentary government, and property rights. Conservatives tend to favour institutions and practices that guarantee stability and evolved gradually. Adherents of conservatism often oppose progressivism and seek a return to traditional values
In Western culture, conservatives seek to preserve a range of institutions such as organized religion, parliamentary government, and property rights.
My first thoughts when I hear the term are a harkening back to the old ways—the Ozzie and Harriott mythos, white picket fences, Mom and apple pie. But this is different. Effectively, rather than reaching back, it wants to preserve the current moment in time. Where it gets more nebulous, I think, is that some people include nostalgia in the now. Duratively, perhaps a person might remember some aspect of their childhood. Though this has been lost by now, they imagine it as part of their identity. This can also extend further back as they wish some other historical aspects can be cherry-picked. Perhaps the white conservative wishes to be able to subjugate women as was the practice in the 1950s of America, but to not conserve high union participation and high marginal tax rates, as affronts to freedom (or whatever). This ends up being an exercise in selective memory and revisionist history-making.
This needs to be distinguished from a so-called traditional conservativism in the tradition of Burke or Hobbes, who want to conserve some sense of fundamental morality they feel derives from nature.
Reactionary
Reactionaries oppose whatever is in effect at the moment—the petulant toddler—but with a twist. Like the conservatives, there is a conservation effort but rather than a focus on the status quo, the focus is on status quo ante, which is a return to the old ways, tried and true.
Progressive
Progressives support social reform. Ostensibly, they don’t oppose tradition, but they feel that old structures need to be reimagined and reinterpreted in face of social and technological change. An underlying metanarrative is the notion of progress. I am not going to comment on progressivism generally and the nuances evident in the American flavour of it.
During the 20th century, radical politicians took power in many countries across the world. Such radical leaders included Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in Russia, Mao Zedong in China, Adolf Hitler in Germany, as well as more mainstream radicals such as Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. Of course, Donald Trump is a more recent example in the United States.
Summary
To me, these terms operate on a gravity to now. Conservatives are heavily anchored in the familiar and seek stability. Then they see factors in the past that they imagine will also serve this purpose, so they wish to incorporate these and carry them forward. Conservatives are not unaware of the need for change, they just want to not create waves in the process.
Likewise, although placing a heavier weight on the past than even conservatives, reactionaries are not fundamentally opposed to retaining what is working currently. The term working is subjective and perspectival, so they may wish to retain something that works for them at the expense of others. This is a challenge for conservatism as well. Just because racial segregation seemed to work for an equivalent person in the past doesn’t mean it worked well for the excluded.
Like reactionaries, progressives aren’t afraid of keeping a foot in the present—and there may be plenty of lessons to learn from the past—, but they feel that given the change in the underlying terrain, some refactoring is in order.
And then there are the radicals. I suppose that radicals have different motivators, but in essence, they feel that the current implementation is substantially broken, and it needs more than a few small tweaks and a fresh coat of paint. These people are renovating rather than redecorating. They may even want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Some may wish to keep the baby.
As for me, I usually place myself in the Progressive camp, but under the definition, I am more of a radical. The system is broken. We don’t just need to delete it, we need to install a new one.
Thomas Jefferson said that the United States should rewrite the Constitution every 19 years. Why 19 years? Who knows? Given the intransigence in American politics, this would have been a disaster. And given the powers that be, the debate would be over which parts to conserve and which to progress. Being the cynic that I am, my guess is that it would devolve to worse than we have now.
DISCLAIMER: For the record, I don’t endorse the placement of the political ideologies on the horseshoe image, but I find it interesting and it grabbed my attention. I hope it grabbed yours, too.
At the beginning, of course. As I’ve embarked on this anti-agency (working title) endeavour, I am uncovering people and ideas previously unknown. In a way, this is good because people have been here before. In another way, I am left wondering what’s left unsaid.
For one thing, some of these people are highly credentialled scholars, more well-read with substantial head starts. And intelligent, qualified experts stake out their own respective turf. The more I read, the more I see the path has already been cut. Untamed areas still exist—at least for now. My goal from the start is to ignore the larger pseudo-problem anyway, so let them have their territory.
As I see it, my obstacle is one of rhetoric. My foundation is hardly a crowd-pleaser.
This isn’t going to be attractive to the warm and fuzzy crowd, and it comes across as a pretentious elitist and condescending irrespective of the validity of the observation. And people don’t like to be told that their baby is ugly—let alone themselves.
Ostensibly, my claim is that humans are veritable automatons too dim to be bounded to any moral code. We’re all just pawns, and any semblance of autonomy is either an illusion or not materially significant.
You are 0.00001% responsible for your actions, so you deserve 100% of the blame or credit
You are 0.00001% responsible for your actions, so you deserve 100% of the blame or credit. Maybe this has no legs and will go nowhere. Time will tell. Meantime, I need to focus on the rhetoric and packaging and position it like a Trojan horse.
I don’t believe that humans have the agency presumed they have, so I’d like to set out to prove it—at least rhetorically. In the ages-old battle between free will and determinism, I’ve tended to lean toward the determinism camp, but there is something keeping me from gaining full membership. I feel that proving hard determinism may be too hard a nut to crack, so I am aiming at just the agency aspect.
There are two major themes in my thinking.
Humans have no material agency
Power structures require the presumption of agency
Although this concept has been rattling around my brain cage for a while and I still have a ways to go, I feel it will be helpful to sketch out my ideas. I feel inspired by people like Robert Sapolsky and Daniel Dennett. And I feel I can draw insights into counter-arguments from people like Jonathan Haidt, Joshua Greene, and even Steven Pinker. I feel that my experience in behavioural economics may be useful for additional context—people like Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler, and Dan Ariely. But I feel disheartened when it appears that Galen Strawson and his father before him, Peter Strawson, people much more connected and elevated in the field have been treading the same territory for decades — over half a century — ahead of me, thankfully beating a path but not necessarily making much headway. Perhaps I can build upon that foundation if not substantially at least perceptibly. Of course, the seminal work by Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty.
We may act as we will, but we cannot will as we will.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Besides the aforementioned, a correspondent has suggested other source references. He shares: Physics, including quantum mechanics, is fully Lagrangian. According to Stanford’s Leonard Susskind, Lagrange derived his formalism from the principle of ‘Least Action’. Jean Buridan’s principle of ‘Equipoise’ renders a Lagrangian model of the world perfectly deterministic. So, the physical domain is not probabilistic; and all indeterminacy is actually epistemic indeterminability. He also suggets Thomas Hobbes’ “De Corpore”.
About my second point, my corresponent agrees:
I think your “meta” is right. We feel that we are “free agents”, and we don’t know to what to attribute our feeling that we freely choose; so we imagine that we have “free will”. In my view it also doesn’t exist – we really are, as Sapolsky describes, zombie robots – we just don’t (and cannot) know it. Free will is thus a mere (but compelling) illusion on both individual and emergent scales. And yes again: all of morality, jurisprudence, etc., depends on it.
Unattributed Correspondant
My correspondent is a professional philosopher who shall remain anonymous until such time as he agrees, if ever, to make his identity known. I am quiet aware that some of my ideas are contentious and polemic. Not everyone wishes to be mired in controversy.
Humans Have No Material Agency
Humans have little to no agency. This is the point I am making in my Testudineous Agency post. From what I know until now, this likely qualifies as soft determinism, but this might shift as I acquire new nomenclature and taxonomic distinction. I’ve discovered this taxonomy of free will positions, though I am not well enough versed to comment on its accuracy or completeness. For now, it seems like a decent working model to serve as a starting point, but I am fully cognizant of possible Dunning-Kruger factors.
A Taxonomy of Free Will Positions
In essence, hard determinism says that the world is not probabilistic. Some event triggered the universe as we know it, and it will unfold according to the laws of physics whether or not we understand them. A weaker form, soft determinism, allows for some probability and trivial ‘agency’. I feel that Dennett supports soft determinism. I feel that because we, as ‘individuals’, are a confluence of multitudinous factors, we have little agency (interpreted as responsibility). More on this later.
Power structures require the presumption of agency
To be honest, the free will debate is only interesting to me in context. To me the context is power. The ‘meta’ of this is that society (and human ‘nature’) seem to need this accountability and culpability, but it doesn’t actually exist, so it is created as a social construct and enforced in a Foucauldian power relationship through government through jurisprudence mechanisms.
This is the part of the debate I haven’t heard much about. Sapolsky did write in Behave, chapter 20X, that criminal justice systems need to be reformed to account for diminished agency, and I’ll need to return to that to better comprehend his position and assertion.
The rest of the story
As a handy reference, these are the authors and books I’ve encountered to date and in no particular order:
I’ve got a lot of essays and lecture notes not referenced plus general content from Reddit, Medium and other blogs sources, YouTube, podcasts, and so on. I probably should have documented some Classical philosophers, but I don’t generally find their argumentation compelling, though I might add them later.
The aim of this post is just to capture my intent—if it is indeed my intent. Oh, the questions and implications of a lack of agency. Please stand by.
In chapter 71, Ultimate Responsibility, in Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, author and philosopher, Daniel Dennett presents a counterargument to the notion that an agent, a person, is not absolutely responsible for their actions. He questions some premises in the ‘the way you are’ line of argumentation, but I question some of his questions.
Here is a nice clear version of what some thinkers take to be the decisive argument. It is due in this form to the philosopher Galen Strawson (2010): 1. You do what you do, in any given situation, because of the way you are. 2. So in order to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain crucial mental respects. 3. But you cannot be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all. 4. So you cannot be ultimately responsible for what you do.
Dennett, Daniel C.. Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking (p. 395). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Dennett continues.
The first premise is undeniable: “the way you are” is meant to include your total state at the time, however you got into it. Whatever state it is, your action flows from it non-miraculously.
Dennett and I are in agreement with Strawson. There is not much to see here. It’s akin to saying the now is the result of all past events until now. This is “the way you are”.
The second premise observes that you couldn’t be “ultimately” responsible for what you do unless you were “ultimately” responsible for getting yourself into that state—at least in some regards.
This second premise asserts that one cannot be responsible for any action that one had no part in performing. Two scenarios come immediately to mind.
First, you are not responsible for being born. As Heidegger notes, we are all thrown into this world. We have no say in when or where—what country or family—or what circumstances.
Second, if one is hypnotised or otherwise incapacitated, and then involved in a crime, one is merely a cog and not an agent, so not responsible in any material sense.
But according to step (3) this is impossible.
Whilst Dennett fixates on the absolute aspect of the assertion, I’d like to be more charitable and suggest that we still end up with a sorites paradox. Dennett will return to this one, and so shall I.
So step (4), the conclusion, does seem to follow logically. Several thinkers have found this argument decisive and important. But is it really?
As Dennett invalidates step (3), he insists that the conclusion is also invalid. He asserts that the notion of absolute responsibility is a red herring, and I argue that Dennett doesn’t get us much further, perhaps redirecting us with a pink herring.
I’ve created an image with tortoises to make my point. There are actually two points I wish to make. The first point is to determine where the responsibility is inherited. This point is meant to articulate that the world can not be strictly deterministic and yet one can still not have significant agency. The second point is that culpability is asserted as a need, and acceptance of this assertion is the problem.
Testuditude
The image depicts an evolution of an agent, with time progressing from left to right. The tortoise on the right is a product of each of the recursive tortoises to its left. The image means to convey that each subsequent tortoise is a genetic and social and social product of each tortoise prior. Of course, this is obviously simplified, because tortoises require pairs, so feel free to imagine each precedent tortoise to represent a pair or feel free to add that level of diagrammatic complexity.
This is not meant to distinguish between nature and nurture. Instead, the claim is that one is a product of both of these. Moreover, as genetic, epigenetic, and mimetic influences are transmitted in family units, they also occur through social interaction and the environment, as represented by the orange and green tortoises.
…if one is a product of genetic and mimetic forces, how much agency remains for culpability?
The point here is that if one is a product of genetic and mimetic forces, how much agency remains for culpability? Each person is an emergent unit—autonomous, yes, and yet highly programmed.
If I programme a boobytrap to kill or maim any intruder, the boobytrap has no agency. I assert further, that the maker of that boobytrap has no more responsibility than the killing device.
The old hand grenade wired to a doorknob boobytrap trick
But who do we blame? you ask, and that’s precisely the problem. Asking questions doesn’t presume answers. This is a logical fallacy and cognitive bias. This heuristic leaves us with faulty jurisprudence systems. Humans seem hardwired, as it were, to blame. Humans need to believe in the notion of free will because they need to blame because they need to punish because vengeance is part of human nature to the extent there is human nature. There seems to be a propensity to frame everything as a causal relationship. Dennett calls this the Intentional stance. To borrow a from Dennett…
This instinctual response is the source in evolution of the invention of all the invisible elves, goblins, leprechauns, fairies, ogres, and gods that eventually evolve into God, the ultimate invisible intentional system.
Dennett, Daniel C.. Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking (p. 374). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Fire Trap in Home Alone
Sins of the Fathers (and Mothers)
Let’s wrap this up with a sorites paradox. As I’ve already said, I agree with Dennett that the absolute aspect is unnecessary and undesired. The question remains how much agency™ does a person have once we account for the other factors? Is it closer to 90 per cent or 10 per cent? Apart from this, what is the threshold for culpability? Legal systems already have arbitrary (if not capricious) thresholds for this, whether mental capacity or age, which basically distils back to the realm of capacity.
I have no basis to even venture a guess, but that’s never stopped me before. I’d argue that the agency is closer to zero than to one hundred per cent of the total, and I’d propose that 70 per cent feels like a reasonable threshold.
I could have sworn I’d posted a position on this after I read Robert Sapolsky’s Behave. Perhaps it’s never made it out of drafts.
In closing, I don’t think we need to settle the question of determinism versus free will to recognise that even without strict determinism, personal agency is still severely limited, and yet as our political systems presume a level of rationality that is not apparent, so do legal systems presume a level of agency not present.
Would human extinction be a good thing for the good of the planet? We’re all familiar with the concept of the greater good, but what is the domain of the greater? We presume it to be the domain of all humans or at least our chosen in-group. But if we dilate the aperture, we might encircle the entire biosphere. In my experience, humans rarely extend the circle beyond themselves and barely even do that, opting to extend it to their race or tribe. Whilst some humans are not as self-centred as some narcissists and sociopaths, the radius doesn’t go too far.
Is one a misanthrope if one considers the greater good to be the earth devoid of the human virus? Perhaps, yes, if stated in those terms. But if one calculates that humans do more harm than good, doesn’t the cost-benefit calculus indicate that fewer people or no people would be better for the earth. I’ve long been fond of the late George Carlin’s routine where he proses that we don’t have to save Earth; the earth will remain long after humans no longer inhabit it. It’s been said that 99.9% of species that ever occupied the earth as no longer extant. Humans are past the mean duration of a species. Perhaps it’s time to move on.
I started to write this post some time ago after having had a discussion on antinatalism. Rather, I defended anti-natalism in the course of a conversation on the inherited notion that humans as sacred.
I supposed I am not a strict antinatalist, but neither do I feel that life is somehow sacred. Mine, of course, but except that. Just kidding. If you are reading, yours is, too. Just kidding, not you either. Interestingly, this ties into the post on the narrative gravity of the self.
As I write this in a world with a population of almost 8 billion people dominated by a handful and no picnic for that lot either, there are likely enough people already. I do feel that even if population trends continue upward—given offsetting depopulation trends in some regions—, humans will cap out at around 10 billion anyway. Perhaps in a Malthusian manner, but I am thinking in terms of deer herds and population limiting factors as expressed by equations like Xn-1 = rxn(1-xn).
Life does appear to have at least common characteristics and perhaps only one: the need to procreate. The second is the need to live, but that can probably be reduced to the need to live long enough to procreate. This is core to Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene theory. I like Robert Sapolsky’s treatment of the subject in Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
The concept of ‘sacred‘ is a religious vestige. I’m not sure why this needed to be codified, but religious dogma seems to capture the notion ‘thou shalt not kill’, as if it needed to be said. I won’t spend any time on the hypocrisy of the many people who espouse this edict.
Except for that motherfucker right there!
It may be a valid position to consider me a misanthrope, but that’s probably overstated, but I’m generally not a fanboy. I guess what bothers me most is the hype and self-promotion. I don’t find it to be particularly inconsistent to see the small positive aspects humans bring and still consider them to be parasitic. This is a compositional challenge–a dimensional consideration that moves away from binary-trending heuristics, the age-old right and wrong, good and bad, good and evil, and on and on.
As with geocentrism, we put ourselves at the centre because this is how we experience life—inside out. All else seems to extend from this model, except there is no centre. It’s just our perspective. I experience life the same way. I’m no exception. Nonetheless, I don’t seem to need to cling to this central notion—this notion of centrality.
When all is said and done—when the last human has made their exit, there will be no epilogue or postscript, afterword, or coda. Humanity is a story in need of a narrator. The ongoing codicil will cease, and to copy-paste the high art of Monty Python’s parrot sketch:
E’s not pinin’! ‘E’s passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! ‘E’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! ‘E’s a stiff! Bereft of life, ‘e rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘im to the perch ‘e’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Is metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘E’s off the twig! ‘E’s kicked the bucket, ‘e’s shuffled off ‘is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!
Being critical of freedom, liberty, and autonomy is likely to make one the subject of scorn and derision. Most people tend to feel these things are self-evident attributes and goals, but they are all simply rhetorical functions. I was reading a passage in Mills’ On Liberty, where he posits
That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant … Over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
It should come as no surprise that I question a position adopted by the Enlightenment Age. These geezers posited that many things were self-evident, but all of this is self-serving magical thinking, and there is no reason to have truck with any of it. These are all normative claims being dressed as positive, non-normative, ones, hoping to skirt scrutiny by employing a position of self-evidence.
I am generally critical of any notions of identity and self from the start, so affixing some attribute of power to it seems just silly.
It seems that I again am distilling this notion to a power equation. As a person, I want to claim power, if anything, over my self however that might be defined. And though, I would like this, too, it is nothing more than some emotional reaction.
Without delving into the depths of autonomy quite yet, on a proverbial desert island—as necessarily the case with any social constructs, where these notions are meaningless without a social context—adding a second person creates friction. Person A seemed to have full autonomy on this island—notwithstanding the other life forms on this island that are somehow never granted autonomy—now has had this autonomy reduced by the presence of Person B.
Firstly, Person A may have claimed this island to be their own. Given this, Person B is infringing on this autonomous decision, having arrived sequentially. Is Person B tresspassing? Does their presence harm Person B, be limiting their autonomy however slightly?
Mills’ concept is one of no harm: one is free to do what one chooses as so long as it doesn’t harm another. Accordingly, it says one is free to harm one’s self—essentially treating the self, the corpus, as personal property. Just as one could damage a piece of personal furniture, one could damage themself. I am not sure if Mills intend this to extend to suicide, but that’s not an important distinction here, so I’ll move on.
Let’s return to Person A on the island—only Person A is a woman and Person B is a fetus. What rights and autonomy does Person B now possess? For some, it has full autonomy; full personhood. Still, Person B is ostensibly trespassing, so does this autonomy even matter if it exists?
If you are Person X and own a house, and I, as Person Y, enter into it, how does this differ from A and B? Can you justify disallowing Person Y from exercising autonomy whilst supporting Person B? I don’t want to make this about abortion, so I’ll keep stop here.
Philosophics 