The Sovereign in War — It is clear from Hobbes’ writing that he did not consider it necessary for the sovereign to be a world-sovereign, and as such war could be a feature of the sovereign’s command. Hobbes specifies for instance that the sovereign can appoint ministers for special administration in war, and also that if the sovereign is captured in war that the commonwealth cannot independently capitulate. It is necessary to show, therefore, that reason continues to obligate one to obey in warfare between civil societies. I contend that situations can arise with significant frequency during war wherein this obligation is at best on unsure ground.

One cannot rationally cede to the sovereign one’s own life or complete physical liberty, given that the purpose of covenanting to institute a sovereign is the preservation and furtherance of one’s pursuits through the achievement of basic security of life (or preservation of one’s life, depending on how one reads Hobbes).

Simultaneously, in a war between commonwealths, a minister of the sovereign (or the sovereign himself) may order a soldier (or group of soldiers) into a situation which they are unlikely to survive. For instance, a small group of soldiers might be ordered to cover the retreat of the larger force, to mount a dangerous frontal assault while the rest of the force flanks, or to lead an assault against an emplacement. It could hardly be said that the first allied soldiers to set foot on the beaches of Normandyhad a good chance of survival. It is also plausible that in a smaller number of circumstances a minister of the sovereign would order a soldier (or soldiers) into a situation in which death would be virtually certain, and that this too would be a normal feature of warfare.[1] If the reason which obligates one to obey the sovereign is that by obeying the sovereign one’s life is preserved or secured, it seems that under these circumstances predictable to the commonwealth and sovereignty that this reason no longer applies; therefore, there may be (significant) situations in which one is not obligated to obey the sovereign.

Hobbes would presumably reply that a war of all against one instigated by the sovereign against a deserter is worse than a war against one hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand enemy soldiers. This begins to sound less plausible, however, if one considers the immediate risk to one’s life involved in jumping out of a trench into a wall of artillery, machine-gun fire, and nerve gas.[2] Still, let us suppose that (by some carefully derived statistic) the danger to one’s life (from the Sovereign) is greater than the danger involved in leaping from the trench. What I suggest is that there is a threshold of danger to one’s life where the precise level of danger compared to other levels of danger ceases to matter. With security of life as the primary reason for which one obeys the sovereign, there is a certain point at which the degree of danger posed makes life so uncertain that no greater degree of danger makes one’s life less certain, because one’s life is thoroughly uncertain. So, if one leaps from the trench toward an enemy’s emplacement, one’s life is completely uncertain, no less so than if the sovereign instigates a war of all against one. If one is forced to choose between these two options, then, one has no reason to choose one over the other, and consequently is not obligated by reason to obey the sovereign.

However, Hobbes hypothetically replies – The power of the sovereign is such he may not only render one’s life completely uncertain, but may render one’s death certain. Now one is obligated to leap over the trench, because one cannot rationally accede to one’s certain death, in as much as life is the prerequisite for the pursuit of one’s appetites.

So one must leap the trench despite the high likelihood of death; however, it remains to be seen whether one must accept certain death in warfare on the order of the sovereign (for instance, to throw oneself on a grenade). If it is only highly likely that the sovereign will (successfully) kill a soldier who refuses such an order, then the certainty of death presumably trumps the order, such that one is not obligated by reason to obey it. On the other hand, if (because of the omnipotence of the sovereign) either option (obey or not obeying) means certain death, then one is again at an impasse. Reason cannot recommend one over the other, and so reason does not obligate one to obey the order.

Now, if the sovereign wishes to obligate the soldier to obey, the sovereign must determine some appetite or desire of the soldier to interfere with the fulfillment of, one which is not dependent on the soldier remaining alive, and which is moreover sufficiently desired to outweigh all other appetites which might be fulfilled by the soldier remaining alive. The only option is for the sovereign to take hostages from the soldier’s family and friends, and to punish the soldier by killing or grievously harming them. Self-sacrifice is consistent with Hobbes’ picture of human nature.[3] One could through empathy take the ends of another as one’s own and still participate in the war of all against all, because one would still act to fulfill the other person’s appetites and react in fear of that person being harmed; furthermore, one would still not have any basis on which to trust the person for whom one is acting empathetically, and that person would have no guarantee that one would continue to act on their behalf. What Hobbes picture of the war of all against all cannot accommodate, however, is reliable self-sacrifice, and it is reliable self-sacrifice that is necessary for a system of hostages to be effective. [4] The monarch, in order to make use of hostages, would have to assume that people could count on each other to act on one another’s behalf, and in effect would himself trust the soldier to act self-sacrificially. If human beings can indeed rely on each other to sacrifice their own lives and interests for bonds of affection, or even ideology, then there is no reason to institute a sovereign to whom one owes absolute obeisance. To be sure, there would still be some strife, danger and privation in the state of nature, but the same is true under a sovereign to whom one owes absolute obeisance; the state of nature would not be absolutely intolerable such that anything else would be preferable.

We see then that Hobbes’ picture of the commonwealth includes the possibility of war, and that situations could arise in war where a member of the commonwealth would no longer be obligated by reason to obey the orders of the sovereign. The one form of recourse (the taking of hostages) by the sovereign to maintain authority is unavailable to Hobbes, because it is not consistent with the grounds on which one is obligated by reason to establish a sovereign.

Postamble — While I am obviously willing to accept that my argument is flawed on numerous grounds, there is one flaw that came to my attention even as I was writing it. This flaw is my total lack of first-hand familiarity with warfare, never having myself  landed at Normandy, jumped a trench, or participated in a diversionary charge. Though these are empirical claims, I presuppose without direct evidence (other than a sketchy familiarity with historical forms of warfare) the degree of danger involved in these actions. Moreover, though I “argue” briefly for it, in essence I presuppose that situations where a commander orders a soldier to (virtually) certain death are plausible; in point of fact, I do not know this, and by “suppose it to be plausible,” mean simply that I need it to be true for the purposes of my argument. Nonetheless, I think this a “plausible” challenge to applicability to the Sovereign’s authority-in-all-relevant-situations.

-J. Judd

Pre-script — I wrote the following for my graduate school applications this autumn (drawn partially from some undergraduate papers I’d already written on Nagel). It’s a little on the long side for a blog-post, but if you’d like to read it, well here it is. Many thanks to the patient and astute soul who looked over several drafts (of varying cogency), if you happen across this.

I. Introduction

In his well-known essay “Moral Luck”[1] Thomas Nagel expounds on an apparent paradox raised by Bernard Williams:[2] that much of our, and our actions’, moral worthiness is a product of sheer luck, rather than of choice or agential virtue. He orders the ways in which our moral worthiness is affected by luck into three main categories, as well as a fourth involving causal determinism. The first is one’s circumstance, or the opportunities that arise for one to take actions of moral significance; the second is the result of one’s action, how well or badly one’s projects turn out; the third is one’s constitution, the formation of one’s character by events outside of one’s control. The problem is that the inability to control our morally evaluable traits and actions illegitimates, prima facie, many if not all of our moral judgments regarding persons and their behavior, since it is insensible to hold one blameworthy for something over which one has no control. It is with the central three categories that I will be concerned; while a complete mechanistic determinism is intuitively plausible, it remains a matter of debate; on the other hand, it is simple fact that one does not have full control over one’s own person, circumstances and success or failure.

Nagel’s essay suffers from two overarching difficulties. Firstly, it relies heavily on the assumption that readers will share Nagel’s moral intuitions, both generally and regarding the specific examples he lays out; these intuitive beliefs are neither defended, nor explicitly identified as his own. Secondly, Nagel does not closely examine his intuitions to determine their exact object and nature, defining them by example if at all, and often using interchangeably a variety of terms including “moral assessment” and “hold responsible.” After briefly summarizing Nagel’s argument in Section II, in Section III I will examine and categorize the sorts of attitudes and imperatives which come under the umbrella of “moral assessment” and “responsibility.” Having rendered a more detailed account of our possible moral intuitions, in Section IV I will apply this account to the sorts of situations that Nagel believes are problematized by moral luck. I will thereby show that when our distinct moral intuitions about a situation are not oversimplified into a single judgment, often for the purposes of justifying retribution, the “paradox” evaporates.

In Section V, I will examine whether the solution I propose responds to the problem as Nagel conceived of it. My solution may require an abandonment of some part of Nagel’s framework, leaving both theoretical and practical questions about how this parting from his, and perhaps from our own, intuitions is to be accomplished.

II. Nagel’s “Moral Luck” in Summary

Nagel begins with a quotation from Kant: “If there remained only the good will (not as a mere wish but as the summoning of all the means in our power), it would sparkle like a jewel in its own right, as something that had its full worth in itself. Usefulness or fruitfulness can neither diminish nor augment this worth.”[3] Though this is precisely the notion that Nagel will problematize by introducing luck into the moral arena in apparently salient ways, he agrees that “Prior to reflection it is intuitively plausible that people cannot be assessed for what is not their fault, or for what is due to factors beyond their control.”[4] This claim is best understood not just as a statement regarding Nagel’s own viewpoints, or even, only, as a supposition that “we-in-general” see moral events in such a way (which I do also take him to mean), but also as a point of demarcation for the conversation: all that follows hinges upon the asserted “plausible intuitiveness” of the belief that one must be able to control those attributes and actions for which one is morally assessed. If the intuitive appeal is wholly lost on the reader, the remainder of Nagel’s paper will be nothing other than a hypothetical brainteaser.

This intuition that luck should not affect one’s moral worth can be elicited by example: If one were, in making tea for a friend, to accidentally spill boiling water on him, it would be very peculiar for him to find one morally blameworthy; it is unlikely that the person spilled upon would change his opinion of the other’s moral worth based on the incident. On the other hand, it would be very understandable that if one were to hurl boiling water at another, this act should affect one’s moral standing; this is, on the face of it, because assault with hot water is indicative of deliberate harm, whereas the dropping of tea is indicative of, if anything, (foiled) kindness.

Take, for a second example of the same intuition at work, a child with antisocial and violent tendencies caught in the act of harming a family pet. If it is clear that he would have done serious harm, and that the only thing saving the animal was the intervention of a parent, it seems unlikely that the parent would react by saying, “Well no serious harm done. That’s fine.” It is more likely that the parent would have a sense of moral horror coupled with a strong sense that their child must be morally re-educated if possible.

So it is reasonable to generalize that intent, or “will,” has a significant effect on our moral evaluation of other persons and their actions, regardless of how those actions turn out. Nonetheless, Nagel provides examples to the opposite effect, suggesting that circumstances out of one’s control can indeed change or determine the moral worth of one’s character or behavior. “There is a morally significant difference,” holds Nagel, “between rescuing someone from a burning building and dropping him from a twelfth-storey window while trying to rescue him.”[5] Nagel does not elaborate on what that difference might be; it is imaginable, however, that the person involved in this example would indeed receive different moral attention from others based on these outcomes. If he successfully rescued someone from a burning building, his courage would likely be praised; there would be profuse thanks and congratulations on his possession of such a superior character that he was willing to risk his own life to save that of a stranger. If, however, he dropped somebody while trying to save them, it is much more likely that he would not receive praise to the credit of his character, nor would his action be commended, because he would not have completed the commendable action. It is even plausible that he would be considered for removal from the fire brigade. This is an example from the category of actions the moral value of which changes because of the way they turn out, because of their results, one of Nagel’s central three kinds of moral luck. Also in this category is Nagel’s example involving negligent vehicular homicide: many people drive recklessly and might injure a pedestrian as a result, but by luck many of them avoid doing so because there was nobody crossing at the intersection they sped through; some negligent drivers do, however, strike pedestrians, and the usual assessment of those individuals is rarely, “Oh well. Bad luck.”

Of course, some actions reflect an obviously ill intent. Yet, it is only by a certain set of circumstances, another core variety of moral luck, that this intent is awakened and results in morally evaluable action. Observes Nagel, “What we do is also limited by the opportunities and choices with which we are faced, and these are largely determined by factors beyond our control.

Someone who was an officer in a concentration camp might have led a quiet and harmless life if the Nazis had never come to power in Germany.”[6] The flip side of this is that living among us could be a tremendous number of persons who, had they lived in Germany when the Nazis came to power, would themselves have been officers or obedient soldiers in concentration camps. The famous obedience experiments by Stanley Milgram seem to suggest just this – that many people would do as told by an authority figure, even if it violated their deep moral convictions. Nonetheless, we do not excuse the actions of Nazi soldiers, nor certainly do we alter our moral evaluations of those actions, on this basis. Sending thousands of helpless persons to their deaths in no less repugnant for the fact it might have been our friends or ourselves doing the deed – though this may be a cause for even greater horror.

The third major way in which luck can impact moral affairs, as presented by Nagel, is the constitution of moral actors. There are many factors that influence the sort of moral agent we become. It is necessarily a mixture of personal choice, genetic pre-disposition and experience that determines both the moral outlooks of agents as well as their pre-reflective behavioral inclinations. For example, most persons do not have the inclinations of serial killers; yet we have no trouble condemning these individuals’ actions and the vices from which those actions flow as if the killers had consciously chosen their own character. We do not hesitate to respond that the actions of Jeffrey Dahmer were morally reprehensible; indeed, we might hold that having these urges at all is the essence of an evil character. Nagel reminds us, “we are morally condemned for such qualities, and esteemed for others equally beyond the control of the will.”[7] At the same time, we praise as virtuous those whose first thought is of the well-being of others, and we are appalled if such good people come to bad ends – but why should they reap praise or benefit from a constitution which comes naturally to them? We appear to be stuck with two sets of equally resonant intuitions, and they are often mutually contradictory.

Nagel also introduces the problem of causal determinism; yet it is less independently pressing a difficulty for two reasons. Firstly, debate remains as to whether the causal determinist account of being is an accurate one. The universe may not operate according to the clean and simplified mechanistic principles of high-school physics, with instead, subatomic particles passing from points A to C without ever passing through B, and other such confusions. The more general three moral effects of luck outlined above, however, reflect definite facts of the world. Secondly, our person, our success and the moral circumstances to which they apply, when taken all together in every case already include all possible determinants of our moral action; therefore, adding that “everything is pre-determined” adds nothing substantive to the outlook, and if we can make space for moral evaluation in the shadow of Nagel’s three categories we will have done the same for the mechanistic universe of causal determinism.

III. Varieties of Evaluation and Responsibility

I shall detour now from Nagel’s argument with the promise of a return. As mentioned in Section I, Nagel is not specific as to what he means by “assessment” or “responsibility.” This vagueness prevents him from giving a detailed account of what intuitions, exactly, become infeasible in each example he gives. There are a variety of ways in which we assess a moral situation or “hold responsible” an agent; each of these constitutes a distinct intuition, and having given a general catalogue of these (III-A – F), I will continue in Section IV to show that moral luck only becomes problematic when the picture is oversimplified, particularly in order to justify punishment.

III-A. Condemnation or Praise of an Action

We may say of any given action that it was right or wrong. If I kill somebody after being handed the wrong change, this is a morally wrong action: the action is of a sufficiently terrible quality that it ought not to be done. On the other hand, if somebody becomes stranded at a train station because they are a dollar short of the train-fare, it is plausibly a moral right to provide them with the dollar for the fare. Sometimes moral theories disagree about whether a specific action is right or wrong. For a strict utilitarian, if the person I shot for giving me the wrong change would have become the orchestrator of a genocide this action might have been a good one (unless somebody who died in that genocide would otherwise have gone on to perpetrate some even worse crime, and so forth), whereas in the context of an absolute moral theory the action of killing somebody would always be wrong; nevertheless, both theories agree that there is an evaluation to be made of the action.

Some actions and events are neither right nor wrong, despite being either wonderful or terrible, because they simply are. There is no point in referring to a destructive tornado as “wrong,” because no conscious being resolved to unleash rather than contain the tornado based on the harm it would do to the neighborhood; there was no resolution, no decision to be assessed as correct or incorrect, upon a certain action. Similarly, an attack by a dog on a child is tragic, but we do not consider the attack either right or wrong, because the dog is not an agent capable of specifically resolving upon its actions in light of determinations of rightness or wrongness; however, if the dog’s human owners knew that it was dangerously aggressive then it was wrong that the dog was left outside where it could harm somebody, as the owners are agents whose actions can be resolved upon by the determinations “right” and “wrong.” The criterion, then, for applying these terms is that there is an agent capable of considering them in application to his decision.

Again, there is nothing that prevents us from describing an action that is neither right nor wrong as “better” or “worse.” Without speaking of “right” or “wrong” we may reasonably say, “it would have been better, vastly better, had there been no tornado.” Even where there is no agent, we may still make evaluations of good and bad in this sense.

III-B. Condemnation of a Vice, Praise of a Virtue

Depending on the situation, we may praise somebody’s virtue or condemn their vice. For instance, John Wayne Gacy was a vicious person in that he was so constituted to derive satisfaction from harming others; medieval popes were vicious in their lack of compassion for the peasants they tithed in order to fund their own decadent practices. On the other hand, we might praise volunteer firefighters for their courage or philanthropists for their caring disposition.

As to why we should consider the assessment of a person’s virtue separate from that of their action, the most obvious reason is that one poor choice does not make a devil. Occasionally a generally decent person may do something that is clearly and altogether morally wrong, but it would be peculiar to think that this renders the person clearly and altogether vicious. Of course, this one-time wrong may be motivated by a usually suppressed vice; persons are morally complex, and may possess both significant vices and virtues, but we cannot make these evaluations without first morally separating the person from his actions.

There are also cases in which a person manages to do the right thing for not only wrong, but reprehensible, reasons. One plausible example of this is the character Dexter from the Showtime drama of the same name. Dexter is a serial killer who hunts other killers, specifically those who have been acquitted of murder and will kill again; he does so in order to fulfill an immoral desire to harm others. Arguably, he is doing good, preventing these people from harming other innocent individuals in situations where the legal system has failed to do so; certainly from a utilitarian perspective, and perhaps other less formalized moral outlooks, he is maximizing positive outcomes by preventing additional suffering. Still, he is motivated not by compassion for the individuals whose injury he prevents, or an abstract sense of justice, but by an intense and compulsive desire to inflict suffering and death on helpless persons in, as another character describes it, “some kind of sick ritual.”[8] We might, therefore, conclude that while on some moral schemes Dexter’s actions are morally approvable in themselves, he is nonetheless a vicious individual, and that his character is not worthy of moral praise.[9]

III-C. An Individual’s Being as Efficient Cause for Good or Bad

In a complete description of some action under moral evaluation, we may also give a non-moral account of the action, an account of the goodness or badness, though not the rightness or wrongness, of a person’s existence. We may say, for instance, that it would have been better if Ted Bundy had never existed. This is an evaluation wholly of the good and the bad, and is an extension of the above examples involving a tornado. It does not preclude an evaluation of Ted Bundy as vicious, nor of his actions as wrong; it is simply additional description.

An evaluation comparable to, but more moderate than, one about the value of one’s existence-at-all would be of one’s existence-as-such. This is a spectrum wherein a very significant difference in a person’s existence-as-such is required for a good outcome and consequently the necessary change to that person’s existence-as-such is equivalent to the superiority of his non-existence. He would be so different as to no longer plausibly be the same person. Again, such assessments do not reduce persons to lumps of matter; they can occur alongside evaluations concerning right or wrong action.

III-D. Requisite Guilt or Pride

We often have an intuition that persons should feel guilt for moral failings, be these failings vices or vicious actions. For example, most of us would agree that the battery of a child or a desire to torment zoo animals is a fair basis for the experience of guilt. As an analogue, we might think if someone performs a morally admirable action that they should take pride in it, and perhaps even think that there is something deficient in them if they are totally unable to do so.

Guilt should be separated from simple emotional flagellation; as Greenspan points out in his paper “Virtue and Guilt,” “it is not enough [to satisfy our expectation of remorse] that somebody be made to feel terrible simply because of an intensely vocal reproach by others;” moreover, “we would not be assessing him negatively for [wrong action] in emotional terms, but…insisting that he so assess himself.”[10] Along similar lines, holds William Neblett, “Where, and to what degree, we feel guilt identifies for us…what we really feel about the various matters of morality.”[11] Greenspan’s and Neblett’s comments suggest that guilt, and its corollary, moral pride, are either constitutive, or directly reflective, of our ability to appreciate the moral sense and gravity of our actions and person. In this sense, it is a virtue to feel the appropriate assessive sentiment for our morally significant resolutions and character traits. It is a vice, or at least the absence of a virtue, if we are unable to do so.

III-E.  Punishment or Reward

Another intuition we often have regarding actions and characters of moral note is that the wicked should suffer while the noble flourish. What is interesting about this set of intuitions is that it suggests that inflicting suffering upon others is not only sometimes acceptable, but morally required. On some moral theories, it is acceptable to harm others to promote a greater good, but in such cases the harm is only a practical measure intended to achieve a good distinct from it, whereas in cases of moral punishment the harm done is seen as right in itself. As summed up neatly in Arbetman and O’Brien’s Street Law, our society administers legal penalties for four reasons: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation and rehabilitation.[12] Of course, we may punish persons for more than one of these purposes, but only retribution involves an intuition that it is inherently right to harm somebody.

I suggest now that there is no particular rational foundation for our intuitions in favor of punishment and reward. After all, the “just” punishment for a given crime seems to follow more closely the current system of legal efficiencies than anything else; to a person in another culture or another time, it would seem perfectly just to partially dismember a thief as it would to us now to incarcerate them, and it is not clear that there is any particular rule governing either of these intuitions to keep the degree of suffering comparable. Whether or not we generally accept the intuition that the vicious should be made to suffer while the virtuous be allowed or helped to thrive, we should accept that there is no special justice that correlates rationally a certain punishment with a certain act, and moreover that “choice” has nothing at all to do with the perceived justice of the punishment; we insist on punishing criminals out of a sense of anger and hatred (be it a virtue or not to hate the vicious) and reward the virtuous for our private or public gratitude (or sometimes grudgingly from a sense of quasi-formal obligation). Any attempt to elevate our actions with the language of justice and responsibility is only conceptually retrospective.

III-F. Owing & Reparations

Owing is notable as it can arise from non-moral as well as morally significant action, whereas the moral assessment of character or action, as well as the impulses to guilt and retributive justice, only occurs with regard to morally significant situations. For instance, one could come to owe somebody $500,000 either for a mortgage on a house, or as a result of a DUI incident in which one struck him head on and sped away. While this DUI incident would be morally condemnable, the offender does not owe the victim specifically because the offender acted in a way that was morally wrong, but specifically because he has resolved upon an action which took something from the victim. Whether the action in which a debt originates is of a dubious moral quality, the point of the recompense is to restore or keep fairness. If I strike a person while driving drunk, I will not owe him $500,000 dollars because I am a vicious or a callous person, though this may have been the efficient cause, but because he will have significant medical bills to cover and may lead a permanently impoverished life. Genuine owing has this characteristic of being a transactional means of maintaining fairness.

There are situations in which we might speak of “owing” in a sense that is not so transactional. For instance, if a driver strikes and kills somebody’s child, he might owe them an apology.[13]^,[14] An apology, however, is not so much owed in the true sense, as it is morally laudable or required depending on the circumstances, primarily the effect that it will have on the parents in question, which could vary widely. It is the driver who must do this not because he owns his action, irrespective of whether there is a sense in which he does, but because there is no point in anybody else doing so, as nobody else could provide an intuitively appropriate object for the parents’ sentiments. It is also worth noting that the parents would likely receive many expressions of regret from friends and family; one does not have to own an action in order to feel and express deep regret for it.

Similarly, there may be cases in which retribution masquerades as owing. If the parents in the situation described above replied to an apology by claiming that the driver did not owe them a display of remorse but his own mortal screams, this should be classed as an intuition toward punishment, for it lacks the transactional quality of true owing.

IV. A Closer Look at Nagel’s Examples

Having examined several separate intuitions which contribute to our moral judgments, we may now apply these parameters of assessment to the examples given by Nagel, and in doing so we will discover that when our various moral judgments are not conflated into a single intuition, moral luck is no longer the dire problem that it first appears.

IV-A. Luck of Circumstances

Nagel’s most striking case-study for morally unlucky circumstances is that of the ordinary citizen in Nazi Germany, who “had a great opportunity to behave heroically, [as well as] an opportunity to behave badly.”[15] Nagel correctly concludes that “Most of them behaved very badly.”[16] The problem for Nagel is that while the members of most other countries were put to no such test, “we judge people for what they actually do…not just for what they would have done had circumstances been different.”[17]

Let us begin with a moral assessment of the action involved: the support of a fascist regime responsible for the twentieth century’s most well-known genocide, as well as the instigation of World War II. Assuming that we properly find such a series of actions reprehensible there is nothing in the poor luck of the German citizen that prevents us from making this judgment. It is bad that this happened, and moreover, as the actions that brought it about were made by conscious beings, these actions were wrongly resolved upon.

The difficulty begins when we inquire as to how we should morally assess these persons themselves. It is clear that the reluctance to work against such a malicious regime as the Third Reich constitutes a vice; all these persons who, as Nagel puts it, behaved badly were of sufficiently flawed moral character to allow atrocities to be perpetrated by their own government, rather than risk their lives and livelihoods. That they, and not the citizens of the United States or Britain, were put to this test in WWII does not negate the vice – however, it would be nothing less than dishonest to suppose that such a difference in circumstances signifies the absence of this vice in the citizens of the Allied powers. If the majority of Germans living through World War II and the rise of the Nazi Party were indifferent, cowardly, or taken in, there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that most Americans are not likewise indifferent, cowardly or gullible. Let the morally average individual in any country ask himself whether he would risk opposition to a regime that could with impunity have him shot to death, hung from a lamp-post, or quietly taken away in the night. Then let him judge whether he is of a higher moral character than the citizens of the Third Reich. None of this makes the average German citizen less vicious; he possesses exactly the same vice the rest of the world was lucky enough to hide.

There is, moreover, room for the Germans who stood by during the Holocaust to experience some form of self-reproach, for they ought to recognize their very being as the efficient cause of human suffering; it is no small burden to realize that the world might have been better if one had never existed. A measure of guilt, also, is appropriate for it constitutes the intuitively salient recognition that one’s action was wrong; perhaps it is the last signifier of a hidden virtue.

There is the conviction that the communities affected by Nazi Germany’s collective action, or perhaps the world-community in general, were owed an apology by the German state, whereas they were not owed an apology by Canada, because the citizens of Canada did not support a genocide in the 1940s. The importance of such an apology is not as a literal case of owing (as discussed above); rather, the apology is significant in that it reassures the world that Germany does not support the policies of the Third Reich. It indicates that members of the state, and of that generation of Germans, have reflected with appropriate guilt to signify genuine regret; in this sense, it is as much a way for them to show their own virtue as to “give something” to the victims.

What we take from this example, then, is the importance of separating judgments of persons’ vices from the judgments of the actions flowing from them, as well as judgments about the simple goodness or badness of persons’ existences. By making such separations, we can analyze the situation in sufficient detail to generate a series of distinct and therefore non-paradoxical moral assessments. We do not, contrary to Nagel’s position, have to evaluate persons themselves as vicious or virtuous in light of their actual actions, because these are the objects of different intuitions.

IV-B. Lucky & Unlucky Results

Nagel discusses a number of situations in which we are inclined to adjust our moral assessment of a person, or to hold him differently responsible, based on the success or failure of some action. There are situations in which an otherwise laudable intention turns out poorly, as does that of the fireman who accidentally drops somebody many stories, or the parent who forgets to turn off the water while an infant sits in the bathtub. It is a curious intuition that one should be assessed in a morally negative way for either of these outcomes, one that may not be universally shared.[18] Perhaps it was one to which Nagel himself could not fully assent as he writes, “if the baby had drowned, one has done something awful, whereas if it has not one has merely been careless.”[19] It is notable that, while Nagel claims in regard to his firefighter that such a difference is “morally significant,” here he shies away from moral language, describing the potential result as “awful.” It is also interesting that he adds “merely” to “careless,” as in this case there is nothing “mere” about the failure of attention.

A detailed analysis of Nagel’s situation involving the infant should begin with the observation that while, in the event of the baby’s drowning the outcome would indeed be awful, it cannot be meaningfully described as a right or wrong action, because there was no decision attributable specifically to it: the parent did not resolve, correctly or incorrectly, to let the baby drown. As far as the moral character of the parent is concerned, there is no basis, at least given the sparse details of the situation, on which to describe them as vicious or malicious. Of course, it is possible that a vice did contribute to the parent’s inattention, or that they made a certain resolution which led indirectly to the baby drowning. They might not have cared especially for the child, and as such resolved to turn the television up even though it could drown out any sounds of distress made by the infant; this is one way in which a vice might have resulted in a wrong action and the infant’s drowning. These possibilities may explain why we feel some intuition to condemn the parent. Nevertheless, if it was sheer accident, a one-time and deeply unlucky lapse of attention, however awful the outcome it cannot be considered a morally wrong action, nor does a morally negative assessment of the parent follow.

The case of the fireman is comparable; while it is true that he has not completed the morally laudable action of rescuing somebody, and so we cannot praise him for that right action, it is still morally praiseworthy to attempt to help someone if one believes it to be within the scope of one’s abilities.[20] The primary reason not to do so would be to avoid reminding this fireman of the rescue-victim’s death, since his being is, not withstanding rightness or wrongness of action, the efficient cause of that person’s demise.

In either of these examples, it is insensible for the person to feel moral guilt (though intense regret would be understandable), because they made no moral error which they must then recognize as a wrong resolution. Likewise, it is hard to reason any sort of genuine owing or retributive justice as morally advisable, though it might be highly therapeutic for the firefighter to apologize and receive forgiveness.

There are other situations in which explicit vice or wrong action only sometimes results in some greater harm. Nagel’s example involving a negligent driver (the trucker who fails to check his brakes) striking a child is an apt one. Contrary to our pre-reflective intuitions, however, the actual striking of the child should not be considered a wrong (or right) action, as it was not specifically resolved upon; telling the trucker that one should not try to run over children would have had no bearing upon his decision to not get his brakes checked. On the other hand, pointing out to him that failing to check his brakes could result in serious harm to himself or somebody else would have borne significantly upon his decision to check or not check his brakes; therefore, while striking the child was an awful event of which he was the efficient cause, it was the failure to inspect his vehicle[21] that constituted the moral wrong.

This brings us, of course, to Nagel’s paradox: there are many drivers who make a similar moral failure, but we judge only the one who actually commits vehicular manslaughter. This may have something to do with the fact that we do not know who has and has not given their vehicle proper attention until their negligence results in harm; we cannot point to and judge every truck-driver who gives sub-par care to his profession. If this were the case, there is no doubt that we would hold such persons in moral contempt, considering them the vicious perpetrators of wrong action.

This leaves us, still, with the issue of retributive justice; we can imagine feeling it just to punish the trucker who does strike somebody, while only holding in contempt those who may strike somebody. If anything, this suggests the intellectual vacuity and the caprice of retribution as a moral practice. Perhaps what occurs is that in the public consciousness the very existence of the unlucky negligent trucker becomes inextricably linked with the image of a mangled child’s body, that his existence appears monstrous in some primitively poetic sense, and this justifies the exaction of vengeance – It is the ritual burning of an effigy, made palatable to modern eyes by a distancing institutionalization. This I contend is closer to the actual thought-process involved in justifying punishment, and it is no more or less rational with the effect of moral luck than without. If we place aside as an intuition all-its-own the concept of just punishment, this vastly simplifies discussions of moral responsibility: We do not feel so compelled to evaluate the unlucky negligent driver differently from the lucky one if it is not pressing on us to “justify” our retribution.

It remains that we might feel it just if a negligent driver causes another to incur medical bills that the negligent driver repay the cost of those, possibly along with “pain and suffering.” This is a case of genuine transactional owing intended to restore the balance of fairness as much as is possible in any society: the negligent driver gained certain perceived advantages (extra time while speeding, for instance) at the expense of the victim. Perhaps, though, it would be more fair, and a better restoration of balance, if all negligent drivers apprehended, whether or not they harmed somebody, were required to pay into a fund to support those injured in cases of vehicular negligence. When looked at in this larger scope, such owing is not a matter of the driver’s moral ownership of his actions, but an effort to guard against the extreme imbalances of fairness that occur – albeit within the framework of a society regulated by concepts of ownership and monetary valuation.

Touching in brief upon a third sort of result-themed moral luck – What of the individual who intends to commit a wrong action but whose efforts are interrupted? – Nagel describes a situation in which an assassin’s bullet is intercepted by a bird such that he becomes only an attempted murderer, rather than a full-fledged killer. To reiterate the above point, if we put aside the intuitions to retributive justice as non-rational if not altogether irrational, the issue becomes much clearer. The attempted assassin is guilty of the same vice as the successful one. While he does not complete the morally wrong action of murder, he does commit the wrong action of attempting murder, and it is not clear that one of these is less morally reprehensible than the other, though the former may be more awful.[22]

IV-C. Lucky & Unlucky Constitution

The additional problem of lucky and unlucky moral constitution could also have been brought up in some of Nagel’s examples concerning the results or circumstances of action; it might be said that the persons apathetic to the risks of vehicular negligence, or those who stood by while the Nazis gathered and kept power, had the poor luck to be constituted as less than fully moral individuals. It certainly must be easier for some persons to act bravely, or act caringly, than for others. After all, one’s morally significant inclinations, just like any other element of one’s person, come to one largely from a combination of genetic predisposition and experience; there is no reason to think that nature would make a special exception in this regard.

Nagel reminds the reader, “People are morally condemned for such qualities, and esteemed for others equally beyond control of the will. They are assessed for what they are like…but it makes no sense to condemn oneself or anybody else for a quality which is not in control of the will.”[23] Here, as throughout Nagel’s paper, terms such as “condemn” and “assess” are used rather vaguely, and could refer to anything from verbal criticism or implicit dislike to institutionalized punishment. It is necessary, once again, to more carefully apply to this conundrum the possible ways in which we can morally assess and hold responsible a person.

Beginning with the issue of vice, it is tautological that one is who one is – regardless of one’s degree of choice in the matter. I am short, bookish, and quiet, quite irrespective of whether I sat down at some point and said, “Well, I have decided that I shall grow up to be short, bookish, and quiet.” That I had little choice in the matter does not mean it would not have been better, at least in some circumstances, to become tall, bookish, and gregarious. If this had been the case, on the very rare occasion that a top bookshelf exceeded my reach, I would not be at all shy about asking somebody even taller to reach it for me. By analogy, the naturally envious person is of a jealous character regardless of whether he ever chose this trait; it is simply the fact of the matter, as is the viciousness of this quality on at least certain formulations of the good.

Nagel complicates this situation further by pointing out that, “He can be morally condemned as envious even if he congratulates [others] cordially and does nothing to denigrate or spoil their success.”[24] This intuition is by no means peculiar to Nagel, and also comes up in Thomas Hill’s “Social Snobbery and Human Dignity,”[25] wherein Hill argues that snobbery is a vice whether or not it is expressed. While decorous behavior complicates our assessment of the person in question as vicious, it does not force us to deny that they possess the vice of envy; it does show that they possess another virtue – perhaps that of self-control, or of interpersonal kindness – additionally. As far as guilt is concerned, if we take it to be an intuitively felt knowledge of one’s own defects, it may be appropriate for this person to feel guilt or some more generic self-reproach in regard to his envy, but at the same time it is appropriate for him to feel a degree of pride as the intuitive apprehension of the virtues that allow him to overmaster this vice. The questions remains – Is he then a good or a bad, a virtuous or a vicious person? Perhaps, though, this is not a fruitful question to begin with; it is rather like asking whether a sheet of paper colored with green and blue pencils is “really green or really blue,” when it is neither green nor blue but aquamarine. The moral character of the individual in question, as with most if not all other persons, is a unique mixture of distinct good and bad patterns, reducible to neither. The truth of the matter simply cannot be captured by such an oversimplified question.

Of course, some individuals, whatever hidden complexities they may possess, are not successful, or even interested, in overmastering their vices, and consequently do awful things that we are very much inclined to assess as wrong actions. Now, it is very clear that these actions themselves are bad regardless of whether the person was pre-inclined to them, and that this person is at least the efficient cause of them; equally, it is appropriate for the person to feel guilt in the form of moral reproach toward his being, as indeed it is appropriate for his being to inspire moral reproach in onlookers. It is bad, for instance, for a serial killer to commit murder regardless of whether he feels strongly compelled to do so, an inclination with which most of us do not have to contend. Moreover, it is a wrong action, because the killer resolves consciously upon it with the understanding that it is deeply harmful. We may say of the killer that he is vicious in his intense desire to torment other persons, and he does not possess sufficient redeeming virtues to prevent him from committing murder. So, while perhaps he has some dormant and withered complexities of character, he is mostly vicious; at the risk of sounding flip, some aquamarine is likewise considerably more green than blue, such that it is for all intents and purposes green. If the killer feels no guilt, we may identify this as an additional vice, or at least the absence of even a shred of reflective virtue; if he makes no apology, he denies the grieving families a chance to purge themselves of the experience through forgiveness or refusal.

Despite the influence of moral luck upon these situations – those of the secretly envious and the vicious killer – we are able to give a full moral accounting of the situation in line with most of our intuitions, provided that we do not conflate these intuitions into a single vague “condemnation.” The remaining item unaddressed is that of retributive justice; as before, I hold that the limited role of choice in the matter has no bearing upon the justification of punishment; such justifications do not reflect the true phenomenology of our inclination to retribution, and we may inflict whatever “poetic” justice we will on a monstrously vicious killer. However it is he came to be that way, that is his character, and there is no less justification with the influence of moral luck than without, for there was none to begin with.

V. Conclusions

Though the approach employed above to analyzing apparent situations of moral luck may steer us around Nagel’s paradoxical conclusions, it is possible that Nagel himself would reject it on alternate grounds – that it lacks some quality of a genuine moral theory. Nagel writes of a similarly assessive, or description-driven approach, “the self which acts and is the object of moral judgment is threatened with dissolution by the absorption of its acts and impulses into the class of events…we [mean to be] judging him, rather than his existence or characteristics.”[26] He concludes that “the problem of moral luck cannot be understood without an internal conception of agency…I do not have such an account.”[27] Is it possible, then, that I have simply missed Nagel’s point?

It is dubious to me that there is such a self beyond one’s “existence or characteristics.” After all, absent these it is unclear what would constitute the unique self. Nonetheless, the full case in favor of a materially objective conception of self would constitute an entire further project. May it suffice for the moment that I merely suggest we divorce our moral evaluations from such an abstract self; in the analyses I have given of morally interesting situations, a descriptive morality has proven effective at generating intuitive and nuanced accounts of the situation’s moral status. It may be that the problem of moral luck is incomprehensible without what Nagel calls the “internal conception of agency.” Perhaps, though, by removing such conceptions from the discussion we are able to clarify the issue such that there is no longer a problem at all.

A full account of our inclination to retributive justice would likewise constitute an additional project in moral psychology. If, however, the account of just punishment that I have given is roughly accurate, then it is less necessary to uphold the vision of an independent, abstract moral agent to judge for the purpose of justifying retribution. With these issues aside, it is no longer the case that the absence of choice illegitimates our moral evaluations. The moral evaluations remaining to us (such as those of a person’s action or vice) describe the world as it is, or as we believe it to be in a moral sense, and they do not depend on any preceding choices for their truth.

Distancing from moral evaluations our intuitions about abstract agency and retribution may prove a psychologically difficult movement. If, however, by pressing against these intuitions we arrive at a more coherent, perhaps more true, account of morally significant situations, it will be well worth it. Questions remain – among them, how is it that we can adjust our own pre-rational intuitions? Can we genuinely claim to believe something that is contrary to our present intuitions? Perhaps we must morally re-educate, even retrain, ourselves in order make our intuitions resonant with an alternate approach. The descriptive account I have given leaves hardly fewer loose ends than does Nagel’s paradox, but I suggest that it is nonetheless a step in the right direction.

Necrophilia: A Victimless Crime? – It certainly appears so; after all, the death of the person, if not equivalent to, is at least closely linked with the fact that the person is no longer associated with his body. For one, I would be (hypothetically) insulted if somebody confused me with my corpse. More seriously, if we identify an individual with his corpse, we are faced with questions about the stage of decomposition at which it is no longer appropriate to make this identification. Poetical suggestions aside, it does not seem meaningful to identify a person with the soil that was derived from his body; the line is blurred. On the other hand, there is a specific moment at which there is no longer a conscious being inhabiting the flesh in question, and this provides both a clearer and more plausible point for us to change our identification.

With this in mind, there is no reason to think that the lately deceased is being directly harmed by the lascivious use of his corpse. It is no more sensible to look upon necrophilia as a sexual violation of some actual person, than it is to evaluate the use of a sex doll in this respect. Tangentially, in cases where sex dolls are manufactured from petroleum products, they are in effect derived from the corpses of millions of long-dead microorganisms; nobody, as yet, has been described as fornicating with prehistoric algae.

Effect on the Living – Humans, however, are not algae, and the targets of necrophiliacs have not been dead for many millions of years. Though thoroughly deceased, the deceased may be, their friends and family are not, and tend to harbor a certain interest in the status of their loved one’s body. The nature of this interest seems primarily ritual, and though often dictated by religious precepts, is also highly personal. At a wake, for instance, one may look at the person, who is made to appear one last time as they did in life, in order to form a lasting impression for oneself of the deceased in a state of peace and tranquility; for many, such rituals can be profoundly comforting. Likewise, a burial may treat the body of the deceased with respect beyond what we normally accord to lifeless matter, because we lay not just the body, but our attitudes toward the person, to rest with it. None of this hinges on a belief that the person can still be literally identified with the body; these are ritual and symbolic practices.

It is imaginable, then, that we would morally condemn a practicing necrophiliac for his actions should they prevent the survivors from ritually expressing or purging their grief. Whether the body is in some way damaged prior to a wake or exhumed after burial, it could be not only viscerally unpleasant to find out about, but emotionally damaging to persons trying to lay both the physical body, and their memory of the dead, to rest. This is not, however, a choice argument against the practice of necrophilia, because it means merely that persons engaging in the necrophilia should scrupulously avoid detection, not that they should refrain from it all together – the morally significant harm to the relatives of the deceased is incidental to the act, and therefore does not make necrophilia wrong in itself.

What I did not bequeath… – It is probable that the majority of persons would object to having their corpse used sexually, and while they may not be around to complain about it, there are other situations in which we respect the wishes of the dead for legal reasons, and it is plausible that these laws are based on moral notions about one’s right to determine the fate of one’s property after death. It is not immediately clear why, if we should respect the wishes of the deceased regarding his big screen television, we should not likewise respect his wishes about his body. Indeed, we do extend this respect by requiring consent for one’s organs to be donated to medicine or research.

Perhaps, however, the moral significance of the deceased’s will is not so straightforward. Persons tend to bequeath artifacts to specific individuals with the idea that the object both be enjoyed and serve as a personally selected reminder. If it turned out an individual to whom some artifact was left had only pretended to care about the deceased for some reason or another, and this was discovered, this might significantly decrease our perception of the moral (if not legal) import of the bequeathal. Therefore, in some situations, the moral significance of the dead’s wishes is dependent on the correctness of his beliefs. Taking into account that many persons who have specific intentions for the preparation of their corpse have those intentions because of religious beliefs about the afterlife, an atheist necrophiliac might not in fact have a convincing reason to refrain. After all, the only reason for an atheist to refrain from taking an action on the basis of religious urging would be avoid making someone uncomfortable, and there is no possibility of making the dead uncomfortable. If the sole reason to leave a corpse undisturbed is to preserve it for the rapture, and one is quite certain there is to be no rapture, then there is no reason to leave the corpse undisturbed. Similarly, if the deceased leaves specific instructions as to the preparation of his corpse intended to have a specific effect on those who survive him, as discussed above, this would leave the necrophiliac with the option of going about his business in some manner that does not interfere with that plan.

One problem, of course, is that the necrophiliac may be unable to determine the intent of the deceased. He cannot know if the dead chose a wake and burial because they were Catholic, because they wished their friends a last chance to bid farewell, or simply because that’s what the deceased wanted in and of itself. In the last case, where there is no specific reason for the corpse to be prepared just so, then there is no religious reasoning for the necrophiliac to dismiss; if he cannot dismiss the reasoning of the dead (because there is none), does then he not have the moral freedom to do as he will? If this is the case, then the necrophiliac must consider that the Catholic individual might also simply wish to have his body undisturbed, distinct from his religious beliefs. Ought the necrophiliac simply “humor” the deceased? The question hinges, I suppose, on whether the one thinks that there is a value to humoring the whims and desires of others, outside of the emotional reactions of those persons, a question sometimes answered with reference to the specific nature of those whims and the cost of humoring them.

Virtue Necrophilia – If a moral evaluation of the necrophilic act is more slippery than first expected, perhaps it would be more fruitful to evaluate the necrophiliac himself. What are his reasons for engaging in, or desiring to engage in, necrophilia? Imaginably, there would be a basic division between two groups: those who are attracted to corpses as one is usually attracted to certain hair-colors or facial structures, and those who are psychologically attracted to the helplessness of the corpse; although there is no person associated with the body, the attraction of the latter seems to inhere in imagining that that there is. With this in mind, it is plausible that at least some necrophiliacs possess or pursue this desire specifically because they wish to sexually violate another person; such a desire would very plausibly constitute a moral vice. As regards those who merely “like corpses,” however, I am hard pressed to determine a vice. It might be that they would be better fulfilled if they redirected their attractions to a more responsive group of bodies, but this is a personal and not a moral consideration. Moreover, while it might be morally problematic, albeit for reasons incidental to the necrophilia, to disturb ritually prepared corpses, I cannot see any moral reason why they should not do as they will with a corpse should it become available in otherwise morally acceptable circumstances.

Post-script –To be entirely clear, I do not have a personal, vested interest in this issue. I find the idea fairly repulsive; then again, I also find shaking hands fairly (if less) repulsive, but not morally so. I simply think that the ethics of necrophilia can make for an interesting discussion, one often overlooked for a variety of tasteful reasons.

For a thorough change of subject, I recently wrote an essay on Nagel’s famous “Moral Luck.” I used it for my graduate school application, and it is slightly long, but when I get a chance I think I will pare it down a little for a post here.

No, YOU ARE. Wait, how do you mean? — The foremost problem with characterizing someone’s viewpoint or action as immature is that the person being maligned is very liable to have no idea what you object to in their behavior or expression.

Let’s take a for instance: A young man named Roland likes to sit in his parents’ basement, lounging in a Che Guevara with his grateful dead album and stash of weed, mumbling about “living the revolution.” Along comes Alexander, who says to Roland, “You’re horribly immature.” Roland might quite legitimately wonder whether Alexander thought that (A) he, Roland, should clean up and find a decent 9-5 Job, or whether Alexander was suggesting that (B) he should actually go out and do something to encourage a spontaneous uprising of the proletariat. Perhaps (C), Alexander was merely suggesting that should Roland get his own apartment in which to live the revolution. Now, it is likely that any real-life Alexander would have been considerably more verbose than I made him out to be a few sentences ago. He might have said (A), “Quit living like a disgruntled teenager, buy a pair of trousers and a shirt, and go interview for a job at staples,” or (B), “Why don’t you stop this Childish impotent, protest and join a guerilla troupe of Nepalese Maoists?” or maybe (C), “Dude, Roland, you’re making your folks’ basement smell like ass, and it’s probably time for you to get your own place.”

Notice that each of these options requires further elaboration upon what is meant by “immature” — And these are only Alexander’s conclusions as presented to Roland. Each should also include a persuasive argument as to why Roland’s personal revolution isn’t a very good use of his time, or of his parents’ basement (Also notice that when actually used in an argument, the accusation of immaturity is probably more subtle than “You’re immature.”). The point here is that immaturity isn’t a very good shorthand for some critique that you are trying to deliver of another person, because we collectively have any number of possible meanings for it, and the person being critiqued won’t necessarily know which to respond to, and will be accordingly unable to weigh your reasons against his or her own.

For a more “philosophical” example, It’s not uncommon to hear, an existentialist describing Kantianism as an immature take on morality — that it’s the sort of “simple” instructions small children need to guide their behavior, whereas adults can make their own decisions. Similarly, a Kantian might be heard complaining that the existentialists are like a bunch of children, immature enough to actually believe that they are able to determine the correct course action only by reflection upon their own desires. So, if you think my approach to decision making is too immature, I think it would be perfectly reasonable to ask whether you think my approach is too individualistic, or too dependent on external authority. Once you have clarified for me, and I understand the force (or weakness) of your reasons, the maturity or immaturity of my standpoint doesn’t seem to be what’s at issue anyway. So, why make critical use of a vague concept, when you could simply present your reasons clearly?

Tadpoles are so immature – So far, I have shown that an accusation of immaturity is problematic because it is vague, because it can be used in a number of different ways, and consequently it is possible that the person you are criticizing will not know what you mean. Of course, the fact that we do not have universal agreement on what “maturity” is does not mean that there isn’t a right answer. There may be a variety of different opinions about the effect of carbon emissions on the environment, or about the best way to avoid nuclear warfare. This does not mean that there is no correct answer. What I intend to show, now, is that there is no fact of the matter as regards maturity on which we can come to an agreement. Or rather, we might happen all to agree, but it would still be a basically empty concept.

How is it that one knows if one is not “acting one’s age”? Is it just because that’s not how (for instance) a thirty year-old acts? But If a thirty year-old is not acting his age, then “one’s age” is not, in fact, necessarily how a thirty year-old acts. A More nuanced approach to defining maturity might be to say that, in a specific society, one’s role changes according to one’s age, as various ages equip  one with various capabilities, and in failing to accept those roles one fails to support his society. One is immature when one fails to advance to the new role that he becomes capable of performing at a certain point in his life. I think the problem with using this sort of “immaturity” as a standard in any argument or critique is that it fails to evaluate the society by whose standards the individual in question is immature. There might be cases in which, given the society, it would be a good thing to be immature. For example, in ancient Sparta, part of becoming an adult male involved a ritual wherein the adolescent was expected to ambush and murder a helot as practice for combat, and as a way of terrorizing the helots (who were Sparta’s agricultural slave-class). Granted, this is an extreme example, but it demonstrates that in some cases maturity according to societal norms may not be morally commendable, which seems to defeat the purpose of using maturity as a standard at all.

In general, the problem is that the use of immaturity as an argumentative theme is an instance of the is-ought fallacy, the logical error wherein one observes a trend actually occurring (for example, the gainful employment of young people in retail) and decides that this must be the right state of things for no other reason than its being the state of things. So, when we say that Roland-the-weed-enthusiast is an immature person, we mean it entirely differently than when we say that a tadpole is an immature frog. When discussing frogs, what we mean is that the tadpole in question is at a certain point in its physical development, and that it will most likely continue to develop physically in certain ways, barring any unusual mutations; this is a descriptive and predictive assessment of the tadpole, not a normative one. That is to say, if the tadpole mutates in an unexpected way, we conclude that our prediction was incorrect; we do not consider it a moral failing of the tadpole if it develops un-webbed feet. On the other hand, if we observe that a person acts more or less the same at thirty-five as they did at five,  this does not cause us to recant any prediction, because in this case our statement would be normative, rather than descriptive or predictive. Whereas the maturity of a tadpole deals descriptively, with an anticipated line of progression, the maturity of a human being is a moral assessment which claims to reference a definite line of progression without examining any of the reasons for or against the individual’s behavior or beliefs, and which assumes not just the accuracy of the description, but it’s normative value.

Im/maturity as a predictor — I have been dealing primarily with arguments of the form “Your beliefs or actions are immature, and if you thought or acted more like I do, you would be more mature, which would be better.” There is another subgenre of maturity-related arguments of the form “You only think that now. You will think differently in the future.” Once, when caught in a brief discussion with a middle-aged man at a concert, I mentioned that I was interested in studying ethics, in reply to which he put his hand on my shoulder and said “No such thing, kid,” before walking away; it was all very dramatic, and presumably the long version of what he was saying was, “You have these ideals now, but when you grow up you’ll realize that they’re empty, and will suffer a period of disappointment, before coming grips with reality and moving on.” Now, let’s assume that at this moment in time, I believe that in some sense there “are” ethics, and that one ethical principal is that it’s wrong to beat up octogenarians and steal their valuables. Perhaps, twenty years from now, the world will have dissolved into violent, desperate anarchy and ethical considerations will have become a thing of the past, as a result of which I will have no qualms with manhandling the elderly. This does not show that it is better to have a worldview without ethics than one including ethics; I can see no reason why this would be an evolution,  rather than a devolution of my worldview. Depending on the approach to ethics your are subscribing to, it doesn’t even demonstrate that there’s no such thing as ethics, only that people may become ignorant of them.

In general, even if a prediction about a change in one’s behavior or worldview, based on the normal changes experienced by others of the same age, is accurate, that doesn’t prove that maturity of this sort if better. After all, as people age they tend to become less physically robust; it does not follow from this that physical decline is desirable just because it comes after relative physical prowess. Likewise, when fruit ripens it attains a desirable level of sweetness, and then becomes rotten. Perhaps, after a certain degree of progression (if we could indeed determine a usual progression of moral thinking over most persons’ lives) one ceases to mature ideologically in a good way, and instead begins to develop decrepit or rotten beliefs. Of course, this is inane. The development of one’s beliefs need not always be positive up to a certain age any more than it must become negative after a certain age — what is important is the content of a belief, not which  beliefs proceeded or will follow it. For instance, Hitler once found anti-Semitism abhorrent on religious grounds, but in particular following his experience of “the harsh realities of war” eventually became one of the most atrocious and notorious anti-Semites in history. In light of this, it hardly seems appropriate to laud a belief simply because it is held subsequently to another one. It also strikes me, perhaps incidentally, that many of the variations on “One day you’ll grow up and think like I do” argument  are infused with a peculiar bitterness and sense of resignment, which hardly encourage one to accept them as guidelines in place of ideals derived from critical thought.

Conclusions? — In general, the accusation of “immaturity” (or its variants of childishness, etc.) lacks any real content. It is simply a strategy (though one I think used more by intuition and less by calculated trickery) to achieve two aims. The first is to criticize the viewpoint or action of another without actually engaging their reasons or supplying any reasons of one’s own; the second is, especially in a discussion for which there is an audience, to compare the other party unfavorably to a crying baby (or what have you). In this way, some existentialists compare Kantians to children needing guidance, while some Kantians compare existentialists to petulant adolescents, and I compare both to toddlers, reduced to name-calling, unable to muster anything like a mature, cogent argument. Of course, all I’m doing is describing by comparison the way that I feel about this sort of argumentation between Kantians and existentialists, or at best making an oversimplified analogy, and such an expression of my feelings does not constitute an argument against the validity of these arguments (which, conversely, the above essays does).

So, why did I bother writing about this? Well apart from the personal enjoyment I derived, my hope is that if you were planning on using an argument based on the concept of maturity, that you reconsider, and that if one such argument is levied against you in the future, that you be aware of its deficiency. I will leave you with a final observation, in keeping with what I have written so far. In general, if an individual is doing something genuinely objectionable, something against which a reasonable person could muster independent criticism, then if the only objection one can offer is the action’s immaturity, this is in itself a considerable problem. For instance, if I were given to driving past assisted-living homes, shouting out of my car window (with the accompaniment of obscenities) that the elderly should all be euthanized, and if you thought the real problem was the level of maturity expressed in my action, then this would constitute a good reason to re-examine your own moral priorities.

- J. Judd

I suppose it is possible that some enthusiasts of sad art are simply sadists. They delight in the fictional suffering that they are bound from inflicting on real human beings. Another, not dissimilar hypothesis is that we enjoy a sense of superiority over the suffering in said artworks. As sung by the dark cabaret group Circus Contraption of a witch-burning, “Oh, but it gives me such glee/ I’m so glad it’s her and not me.” It strikes me, however, that this is not at all my reaction to sad art, and I’d venture to say that it does not reflect most other persons’ reactions either. At any rate, these particular responses miss the crux of the question I have posed, for there is nothing particularly remarkable about enjoying something that, in fact, makes us feel good about the world or ourselves. Accordingly, I will narrow the focus of my quandary — Why do we like art that makes us experience sadness?

Catharsis — Though Plato’s Socrates deals in his Republic with the issue of immoral art, it was Aristotle (as far as I am aware) who first dealt explicitly with the way in which sad art, specifically tragic theatre, affects us. In his Poetics, Aristotle gives numerous criteria for a good tragedy: its length, the extent of its complexity, its focus on plot rather than character, the presence of a tragic flaw in the protagonist, etc. He believes that the effect all this should have on the viewer, if done properly, is that of catharsis, a term having its roots in the medical practice of drawing out a poison. To achieve catharsis is to purge oneself of pity and fear by bringing them to a climax. In colloquial terms, it is very much like getting various “negative” emotions out of one’s system. On this interpretation of catharsis, we have a certain degree of sadness that we carry with us on a daily basis; the world is full of fodder for it: war, disease, our own mortality and personal failings. After a fashion, by experiencing tragic art, we use up our capacity for sadness all at once and are temporarily purged of it.

Perhaps this is true, though this particular formulation of catharsis has generally seemed to me a little contrived, being premised on the notion that we can “run out” of a particular emotion. There are some situations though, in which the depth of our sadness may not be such that it can be purged through a brief intensification, as with the ending of a cherished friendship, for instance. In some cases, such as the death of a loved one, it might even seem morally wrong to even attempt a purgation of our grief. Yet, in situations such as these, we may still be attracted to sad art, perhaps even more so than ever. Now, it is possible that it is only a sort of desperation that prompts us: we know that we cannot purge ourselves of our sadness, but we must try. I would like to suggest an alternate sort of catharsis, however, not predicated in the eradication of certain emotions. Perhaps, indeed, it is not that art ends our sorrow, when we are sorrowful, but that it beautifies and ennobles that sorrow. In a sense we are purged of our previous sadness, for it is transformed through our experience of art. We begin to accept our emotional experience not as something to be gotten rid of, but as a part of ourselves, indeed a very worthwhile one. Another way of looking at catharsis of this sort, is that we are purged not of our sadness, but our feelings about our sadness: We cease to despair over our despair. This goes some way to explaining why we sometimes prefer art depicting a sadness like to our own in kind (both in tenor and cause), for we desire to have our specific sadness made beautiful.

On this account of catharsis, we might also think of sad art as a sympathetic voice. Even as we feel with it, it feels with us, and by the understanding embodied in it, and the beauty, it removes any shame we might have about our present disposition. And perhaps, we may confide in art what we can confide in no other person, and if we choose properly, its comfort is perfect, without any flaw or hesitation that is not necessary to reflect a thorough understanding of why we chose it. Then again, is this an anti-social interpretation, one lacking in humanity? That is a possibility, though we each have our own degree of comfort with other persons, at certain times, and it may be premature to impeach the humanity of another on this basis.

Sadness for the happy? — Up until now I have been enumerating reasons we might desire to engage with sad art when we ourselves are sad, in some measure or another. Are there reasons we might pursue art that makes us experience sadness even when we are (for all intents and purposes) entirely content?

Perhaps catharsis, of any of the kinds described above, is a desirable sensation even when we are happy. We make ourselves feel sadness through tragic art in order to experience that shift in consciousness, either when we are suddenly purged, or when something in us, something previously regarded with horror, unfolds into something exquisite. It may be that, in seeking such catharsis even when we do not require its curative powers, we seek a more radical change in ourselves. Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil that, “The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.” Maybe what we are searching for, be it enduring or temporary, is an overcoming of the self, and by “rechristening” our sadness (or potential sadness) with beauty, even more so if it is a sadness we have consciously and intentionally awoken — we thereby transcend ourselves, and more specifically, our previous moralizations of emotions we had considered “good” or “bad.”

Emotion as non-spatial sensation — Without disavowing the suggestions I have already made, I would like to offer another solution, one which not only requires no previous sadness on our part, but understands the sadness in an artwork as desirable in itself rather than instrumental to either catharsis or self-overcoming. If we take emotion as an aesthetic object in itself, rather than (or in addition to) something accompanying aesthetic experience, we may arrive at such an understanding.

Perhaps such an account is counter-intuitive, for we tend to designate sensory stimuli (the content of our sight, hearing, etc.) as the material of aesthetic experience, and we tend to separate these things from our “inward feelings” (of joy, misery, affection, nostalgia and so forth). At any rate, before thinking about the basic nature of our sensations and emotions, this was how I thought of it. I begin by asking — what cause do we have for thinking of sensory stimulation as different in kind from emotion? I think it is for these two reasons: first that sensory stimuli seem to provide us with objective information about the world, whereas emotions consists in subjective assessments; second, though a corollary, sensations occur in space, whereas emotions occur within our mind, which does not share a spatial arrangement with the rest of the world.

In regard to the first, that our eyesight informs us of a bus’s actual redness, whereas our present emotional disposition concerns only, for example, our resentment of a slight (and this is less objective); it would be a mistake to consider the redness of a bus its “actual” redness, and equally a mistake to consider the sensation of our resentment a “subjective” experience. Rather, there is no redness apart from the redness we see, and once we properly understand what “redness” is, we know that the our sensation of the color red is a sign of the power of some given material to reflect back certain wavelengths of light. What inheres objectively in the matter we perceive are sets of powers, and our sensations give us insight into those powers, but the way in which we perceive objects should not be mistaken for the “actual visual nature” of those objects, for there are many ways of gathering information about a thing‘s material powers, many of which do not resemble our eyesight in the least (for instance, we could use a machine to test the reflectivity of a surface for certain wavelengths and then represent in number). Considering the nature of our aforementioned resentment (or whatever other emotion), it would also be wrong to hold that the information conveyed by that emotion is non-objective simply because it is inward; rather, our sensation of resentment conveys to our conscious mind the fact that we do truly resent a comment or action. Or, if it is a mistake to disjoin our feeling an emotion from the fact of our having a disposition, we may examine the machinery of our thought more closely, and determine that our experiencing a certain emotion is but a sign of a certain brain-state.

Regarding the second objection, that sensory stimuli have a spatial component which emotions lack, and that this spatial component is what makes them aesthetically appreciable, I believe that it can be overcome by simple counter-example. There are all sort of sensations which do not have relevant spatial content, in particular when isolated for their aesthetic qualities. Consider beautiful music (for one example of beautiful sound, listen to Vivaldi’s “Ah Ch’infelice Sempre“): while we may describe some notes as high and others low, we mean this by way of symbol or metaphor; we do not mean that these notes are actually higher and lower in physical space, just as we do not mean that emotional “highs and lows” are actually spatially located. It is also true that our hearing can be used to determine the source of a sound, but this is not the way we are using our hearing when listening to most music. Likewise, the point in space from which a sound (or piece of music) originates determines the way it sounds to us, but the causal mechanisms of emotion have no less a spatial point of origin (somewhere deep in the brain) than does Vivaldi’s “Ah Ch’infelice Sempre” (at present, my headphones). The aesthetic qualities of music are temporal, unfolding in time, but not in space, and what I suggest is that emotions function similarly, developing themes, variations and crescendos of varying tempo and intensity. In this respect, emotions are aesthetically appreciable, non-spatial sensations.

We have arrived, then, at the point of considering emotions aesthetically appreciable, yet it remains to be answered why we would prefer, at least some of the time, the aesthetic qualities of sadness to those of happiness. I put forward for consideration, as I have hinted above, that the question is based in too simple a conception of feeling wherein certain emotions are good, or “positive,” while others are bad, or “negative.” To these understandings of the nature of emotion, I ask, “good for what?” and “bad for what?” After all, there are many things in the world which perform one function excellently but fail utterly in another. Beautiful glassware, for instance, can catch the sun, or reflect and absorb the hues of the evening, but cannot form the foundation for a house nearly so well as granite blocks (which, incidentally, also can absorb tints of light in a variety of aesthetically interesting ways). What I mean by this analogy, is that sorrow and other comparable emotions have aesthetic quality, just as happiness does, but that just as exquisite glassware cannot form the foundation of a home, sorrow cannot be the basis of a life well-lived. Therefore, when we desire sorrow for its particular aesthetic quality, we look to art, for there it can occur, and subsequently be quieted (or ennobled), as we need it to be in order to function as human beings. On this account, we do not look to art to purge ourselves of our sadness in any sense, but look to it for our fill of beautifully-composed sadness.

The Obligatory Evolutionary Psychology, from the Armchair — As a curious beings, we might now ask ourselves, why would we have evolved to find a certain aesthetic pleasure in sadness, even to the point of seeking it out or creating it? This is a question I am not even remotely qualified to answer. I did, however, read recently an NYT article on the evolutionary role of sadness and depression about the theory that sadness makes us focus more heavily on a particular problem, prompting us to solve it. Perhaps we have evolved to become disconsolate with overly-constant happiness, because contentment leads to stasis, while humans with a slight penchant toward melancholy acted more innovatively, and so reproduced more effectively. This is one of various conjectures for which I have not a shred of evidence.

What I found more interesting in the article was the idea that sadness, or depressed mood, can heighten not only our rational apparati, but also our senses. For one final suggestion on this post’s overarching subject-matter, maybe part of the reason that we like sad art is that the emotions it awakens in us makes us more aware of the independently beautiful qualities of the artwork, very much as rain intensifies the color of stones and lichens.

- J. Judd

Position Paper: Unconditional Love is not Possible – I define unconditional love as a particular attitude or combination of emotional sensations held toward some (usually another) individual person, an attitude which is not dependent upon the definite material properties through which that person exists in the world. I specify person, because as much as we protest that we love our job, our ice-cream, or our yoga mat, I have yet to hear anyone purport to love these sorts of things unconditionally; it is a disposition generally reserved for other human beings and (maybe) pets. I also decline any attempt to define specifically what that attitude consists in, because, one, I believe that to be an extremely difficult question, perhaps one whose answers differs from person to person, and two, I don’t think it actually bears on the arguments that I intended to make.

Let us start from the premise that human cognition involves, necessarily, the conceptual arrangement of physical stimuli. Allow me to make this less opaque: There are certain classes of objects in the world which we class for reasons including the utilities arising from their physical properties. For example, we identify most sets of four walls and a roof as a houses, because their composition allows us to live, eat and rest in them. Likewise, we have certain criteria for what physical qualities an object must have in order to qualify as a wall or as a roof. We identify objects separated by space as participants in the same concept (wallhood, etc.) based upon certain essential qualities. I suggest that, likewise, we identify temporally separate objects as “the same thing” based upon their essential qualities. In this spirit, while I notice that the wind outside has pulled the last remaining leaves from a tree, I still identify the tree as “the oak across the street,” because the specific features which define it as such have remained constant. If however, my neighbor cut down the tree, made it into a charming dining room table and invited me to dinner, it would be taken as a (minimally) amusing witticism if I pointed to the table and said “Look, it’s the oak from across the street,” but it is certainly not a statement of fact, because the essential features of being “an oak tree” and being “across the street” no longer apply.

Where I’m heading with this is that we identify our friends and love ones (and everyone else) over time in the same manner. When I shaved my head after a period of long & unwieldy hair growth, my father made a joke in exclaiming, “You aren’t my son!”. Of course, this was indeed a joke, because we normally don’t consider (Sampson & various vainglorious subcultural movements aside) hair-length an essential part of our, or others’, identity. If on the other hand, I had risen from the grave and was staggering about town in search of brains, I would very much expect my father to exclaim in all seriousness, “You’re not my son!”; in fact, I hope he would, as I consider it an essential part of my identify that I generally refrain from feasting on the brains of the innocent to replenish my life-force. Don’t you?

Keeping the above silliness in mind,  the reason that unconditional love is not possible is that, because love is an attitude held toward a person, and a person’s identity is based on their definite material qualities, and if every one of their essential characteristics is lost, we might very well consider them a truly different person, albeit the same temporally contiguous organism: There is no person to love absent the conditions of a person’s physically expressed being. In short, identity is conditional, and as an attitude toward a particular identity, so must all love be. It might be that someone attaches their love of a person to a part of that person’s identity that is highly unlikely to change, or which is part of their past and beyond change, but this is still conditional love.

Rebuttal: Unconditional Love is Possible. — I will consider two possible responses to the above argument. The first is that its premise regarding the nature of human cognition is flawed. It assumes that the identities we conceptualize based on the material properties of those we love are consistently both accurate and up to date. In fact, our ideas about others persons and objects in the world often poorly reflect changes in their being. Let’s take a standard example: it’s not uncommon to hear parents in their eighties or nineties referring to their fifty or sixty year-old children as their “babies.” And remember — You only have one chance to make a first impression. The point here is that we can feel love aroused in us by an individual regardless of whether they currently possess the qualities by which we happen to identify them. It may be conditional on our concept of that person’s identity, but it is not conditional on that the continuation of that person’s actual qualities.

Another, albeit less pressing, problem with the “no-such-thing-as” position I took is its assumption that love is an attitude held toward another individual and his or her identity. It may be that love is rather a power of the other individual to arouse in us certain feelings, rather than something of our own directed to them. We may combine this reconceptualization with the above observation that the identities by which we recognize others may not reflect them particularly well, and so the arousal of our love is not conditional upon their objective behavior and appearance.

But is that sort of love worth much? — Well, to whom? I’ll focus on the value of unconditional love to person who receives it. It seems unlikely to me that a person cognizant of changes in their personality, as well as of the failure by the person claiming to love them to recognize those changes, would take much heart in that sort of affection. Indeed, there is a sense in which, from the point of view of “the beloved” they are not loved at all. What comfort could one possibly take in the love of another if, for example, that love was based (partly) on the belief that one had created something of great beauty, but in fact it had been wholly plagiarized? Perhaps some part of us would be glad to receive any affection at all, however, in as much as what is nice about love is the fact that another places value in our individual being, some degree of nagging doubt of such love’s value might well persist, if they love a being they only imagine to be ours.

Of Missing the Point — But let’s look again at the sort of “unconditional love” we have just been discussing, one which is unconditional in that it does not depend on the essential condition of the beloved. It could hardly be said that this is what is meant by those who profess to love another unconditionally. How many romance films or books have included the line, “Yes Rorty, I will love you forever and ever, and when you have a midlife crisis and become someone I couldn’t possibly love, I will pretend it didn’t happen.” Touching, no?

As I reflect on my previous arguments, however, I begin to suspect that, from the best of cynical intentions, I missed the point in a much broader way, and set up a simply inane account of what unconditional is, a straw man which I could very easily tear down, grind to meal, or burn. I started out by defining unconditional love as love that is not conditional upon the persistence of the beloved’s essential (or inessential) qualities. Now, it may well be that some people really do mean, when they give a declaration of unconditional love, that they will love that person no matter what that person does or becomes. I maintain that this is nonsense, in that they could not love that person under such conditions, because with sufficient change that same person would no longer exist per se, and that if they continued to love that person’s future selves, such love would be of little value to the beloved. Another question along similar lines, which might be posed to the person professing unconditional love, is whether it is conditional upon essential changes in his or her own person, and comparable set of criticisms arises.

I suggest, though, that another meaning of “unconditional love” can be expressed as follows: To declare unconditional love, very cognizantly of the role essential attributes play in our identities, is to declare that “I (Insert name) love you for your essential qualities, and not conditionally upon any qualities without which you would still be you.” This is basically to say that, I love you, with a proper understanding of what “you” means. That is to say, for example, that if the essential qualities of the unconditionally-beloved are wit, kindness and an what-have-you, that the unconditional lover would not cease to love them based on their bank account or graduation to a less robust and youthful appearance (or course, it is possible that some other individuals’ identities may be bound up with these very features). On this account, a declaration of unconditional love is not a declaration of the predictive sort (for the person declaring makes no necessary knowledge-claim that the essential attributes of the beloved will persist beyond the moment). It is, rather, a declaration of the nature of the affection as it currently stands, that it is based upon what the lover takes to be the essential attributes of the beloved, rather than on the beloved’s expensive presents (Sports cars and solid gold thrones) to the lover. This strikes me as a perfectly reasonable sort of declaration to make, and one of significant value to the beloved, provided both lover and beloved share a similar conception of the beloved’s essential qualities.

- J. Judd

http://open.salon.com/blog/deborah_young/2010/01/12/overpopulation_have_a_baby_have_two

The gist is this: there is no overpopulation problem, certainly no crisis. There have been population “scares” in the past, yet the predicted apocalyptic shortages never occurred. Of course, just because so far population hasn’t reached it’s disasterous zenith, this does not follow that it won’t. The author of the article in question, however, holds that because humans beings are creative, adaptive and (relatively) intelligent animals, we will figure things out and deal with the problem as it comes; she writes, “We don’t live in a finite world; for every problem there are always several solutions…”

In any at all strict sense, it is simply false to say that we don’t like in a finite world. In point of fact, we live on a miniscule blue and green sphere moving through the vast emptiness of space. We do have resources that are finite, such as water, of which every human must consume a minimal quantity for survival. The occasional comet or volcanic eruption aside, we are not getting a whole lot more of it on our planet‘s surface. So, if population does increase, we will eventually run out of it. It might take a long time, but we will. She also cites a statistic that there are 1500 acres of land per person given earth’s current human population. If we continue to reproduce without regard to the consequences, there won’t be.

Generally, there is a finite amount of  matter that constitutes the planet Earth, and we have yet to find another planet that can definitely support life; certainly, no planet within even several years travel could support us as is. It strikes me as tremendous hubris to suppose that technology will be able to get us through whatever bind we get ourselves into, even more so that the technology will arrive in time. And indeed, even if there are several solutions, we don’t know whether any of them will be at all desirable — being an alternative to extinction doesn’t strike me as necessarily equivalent with “a good outcome.” But let’s examine the basic claim that human creativity can solve any problem. It is incorrect; we are able to solve many problems, but if we could solve all & any (in a timely fashion), then why have countless persons died of disease? In no small part, the answer to this question is that people didn’t know about viruses and bacteria during the black plague. Sure, we figured it out eventually, but in the meantime millions upon millions of humans died horribly. I can see few propositions more absurd than the notion that we will be able to deal appropriately with any problem facing us through technology. We’ve clever creatures, some of us brilliant, but that’s no reason to ignore a much simpler answer than the vague hope of presently unknown technology — make fewer babies.

I’m not suggesting that limiting population growth will solve all the world’s problems. I’m not suggesting that the reason people are dying of hunger and thirst presently is because of population — Only that, if we wait too long to act (and I don’t claim the expertise to be able to pinpoint that timeframe), these will become the reasons that we are dying. I am also not suggesting that the government control citizens’ reproduction, that it imprison parents and mandate abortions, nor that parents should practice infanticide — Just that as the only technological species on this planet, or in the presently known galaxy, we should exercise a modicum of reflective self-restraint.

- J. Judd

http://www.harvard.com/bookmachine/

This is also a way of bringing up the book that I just bought and have begun reading. If you were half as fascinated as I was by the questions of argumentative method brought up in my earlier posting, I would suggest reading this book, titled The Art of Controversy and Other Posthumous Papers, selected and translated by T. Bailey Saunders. Its eponymous essay “The Art of Controversy” is a fairly detailed description of various rhetorical tactics.

- J. Judd