Inner vs. Outer justifications

Arguments in ethics often wind up comparing ends and means. What makes an act good? Is it the intent behind that act? Or is it the ends that it achieves? What happens if an act bears good intent but ultimately culminates in bad results? Or if an act bore bad intent but somehow ended up having good ends? It is puzzling to many people, whose answers often border on schizophrenic when asked the same question in different ways.

I believe that it depends on what we see as justifications for something being right. I classify justifications into outer justifications, where an act's inherent goodness depends on social norms and judgments, and inner justifications, where acts have their goodness based within one's self. Why is this so?

When an act is based on social judgment or norms, it is only reasonable that an act's rightness be reliant on the ends it achieve, since these are exactly what affects society and people around you. It doesn't matter  to society if you tried to help remove a hazard when you cut down that rotting tree if it ultimately killed the neighbour's kid or crashed your friend's car. You are still wrong to the eyes of society, from the eyes of other people. They will not stop and say "hey, come on, I know you didn't mean it when you killed my son." So, if you take society and norms (what used to be known to me as external truth) to be the yardstick for morality, ends will be what define your act's morality.

But, if you look inwards for moral justifications, an act's rightness depends on what you think is reasonable and moral. Intent will thus matter more if you truly bear conviction in your acts. Even if you killed someone by some sick twist of fate while trying to save that person, you know that you were right in your act because you had no intent to kill him. If you take your own moral standards and reason to be the measure of morality, intent will matter more to you.

How do we decide which is more important then? I think a system of integrating these two into one coherent narrative is needed, because both matter in decision-making and leading a moral life. But the problem is how people with different dispositions find solace in either of these two narratives. Those who seek affirmation from society and those who seek affirmation within themselves will react differently to the end/intent debate.

More of morality in the next post, which will probably talk about abstract and practical moral reasoning.

Ikiru - To Live (1952)

The film Ikiru by Kurosawa Akira is undoubtedly one of the best films I have ever watched that touched upon the themes of death, meaning and the encroachment of the bureaucracy on the human condition. I strongly recommend this film to anyone even slightly interested in existentialist themes.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The Protagonist, Watanabe Kanji, is a faceless minor bureaucrat in the Public Affairs division of the local government. He has spent the past 30 years working the same job, but as the narrator puts it:

"He is just wasting his time without really living his life. In other words, he's not really alive at all."

His family consists of him, his son and his daughter-in-law. The son and his wife does not really seem to value Kanji at all. They talk about using his pension and savings to buy a house for their own enjoyment. They say that "if he refuses to give us the money we'll just move out anyway!" The absolute value of Kanji as an end-in-itself, a human worth treating equally, is eroded; what is left is a commoditized Kanji, one that only has relative value because he is valuable as a means. A means for the son to satisfy his own desires and ends. Kanji's life was spent locked in the bureaucracy; even when his son was having an operation, he couldn't be with him until the end because "he had some things to do", again showing the trappings of work and bureaucracy. This notion of utilitarian commoditization within the bureaucracy will come back later in the story as well.

Upon his realization that he was afflicted with cancer, he immediately realizes, unlike poor Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy's novella, that death was unto him like a spectre. He withdraws 50000 yen (a substantial amount in post-war Japan, I presume) with an intent to spend it, an act of reaffirmation of his life. Yet it hits him that he has absolutely no idea how to spend it, since his whole life was spent mired in work. He meets a writer in the bar who tells him (and later shows as well) that pleasures and indulgences are the only ways to tear himself away from the suffocation of work. Here the themes of life and meaning surface again. How should we live our lives? This question was not answered by pleasures in Kanji's view.

He meets a subordinate from his department outside who was looking for him to sign her resignation letter. She struck him immediately; she represents to him everything that he is not. Happiness, fulfilment and like he says later on: "You are just so full... of life." He desires to live truly like he sees her to be doing, and he finds out she quit the bureaucracy to work at a toy factory. "Making toys makes me feel like I am playing with all the children of Japan."

He then realizes that he had been doing it wrong: it was too late to change his own life, but perhaps he could still change the lives of others. He then remembered a project that the Womens' Committee had tried to propose but was truncated in the perverse loop within the bureaucracy. Public Affairs says it is the Engineering Department's Job, who says it's the Parks department's job and so on.

He tries his best to advocate for the project, and finally the project is done: A toxic cesspit was cleared to make way for a childrens' playground. He dies contented in the playground when internal hemorrhaging kills him.

It seems like a happy ending now, but the last part was acted out at his funeral, and his death tale told through the mouthpieces of the various co-workers in the bureaucracy. In the face of his family and relatives, the Mayor concludes in a cynical tone that Kanji's role in the park project was minimal, that it was all due to the auspice of himself and the Park / Engineering Department. The yes-men nod in agreement. What else can they say? They begin to fight over who's to bear credit for the park, forgetting or deceiving themselves that Kanji had little to no influence in the playground even though he was the one who fought through the bureaucratic inefficiency. Indeed, one man even proclaims, proudly, that "Kanji was from the start a Public Affairs man. How DARE he try to build a park. He's ignoring the bureaucratic demarcations!"

Yet, for all their self-righteousness, they were unable to look the women in their eyes when the Womens' Committee members cried at his funeral. I felt utmost pity for this man. For everyone has misunderstood him. His aim was not to fulfill some self-pleasing goal, but rather for the good of the act itself. He found the one thing in life that was not thrown upon him by a meaningless body and instinctively sought to act it out, his curtain-closer in life.Yet his achievement was buried, overwhelmed by the bureaucracy's need for self-affirmation. To make itself feel useful. But to think along that line will be to defeat the purpose, isn't it. Regardless of its ends, his act was self-justified.

In the face of his act, such bickering seem meaningless, pointless. Indeed, in the face of death itself such acts will bear no meaning. His act will shine on its own, one that bears absolute value. Those who only see relative value in his act are misguided, fooled by the illusion that bureaucracy can direct them to any meaning at all.

They embody cowardice. They refuse to break away from the bureaucracy because that's all they have ever known. Perhaps they too need to face death to see the temporality of their lives. So that they may truly live.

There is so much to say about this film, but perhaps the best way will be for you to watch it.

Contingency

Some thoughts after reading A Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche...
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Good and evil are mere placeholders that are objectively true in definition: they are propositions logically dependent on each other - what is good is not evil, and what is evil is not good. The definition of good and evil are thus immutable in that they simply denote a relation between acts on a scale from good to evil. This is simple enough to grasp, but the problem comes after.

"What is good?" "What is evil?" The content which occupies the placeholders of good and evil, that which gives any sense at all to the term "good" and "evil", are not located at all in any "external realm" where we can find objective truths about morality. We do not need to posit an unchanging immutable moral truth to talk about morality meaningfully. Rather, I believe that moral "facts" are located within a social and historical contingency. It is not any supernatural entity or objective truth that bestows upon good and evil their meanings, but rather the power structures, the interactions and relationships within the society, of the day which in turn decides the social norms. A society's zeitgeist, the collective feelings towards an act, decides whether it is good or evil.

Yet, "Killing is Wrong!" seems so attractive as an objectively "true" moral statement, doesn't it? I believe this does not mean that killing is an absolute evil. After all, killing was part and parcel of almost every civilization before the modern times. It is wrong now because we are evaluating acts from the vantage point of our moral paradigm. In a society where eating excessively is wrong, any act of binge-eating will seem intuitively wrong as well.

This does not mean we slip into relativism at all. Because these "facts" are essentially social norms and paradigms into which we are born, we take these "facts" as though they are true. They are given the aura and appearance of Truth, though I think the term "social truth" is more apt. That is, these facts are "real" and socially true within any social paradigm. We can argue about morality as though there exist moral "facts". In the grand picture, however, morality is ultimately socially contingent.

confusion strikes the post-modern believer.

Touching poststructural/postmodern philosophy has immediately messed up my thoughts. As suspected, much of existing literature posit some form of nihilism and helplessness due to the social forces we are inevitably embroiled in.

But I believe that truth nevertheless exists, even if we cannot immediately gain a grasp on it. Without a central notion of truth within knowledge, no knowledge can be reliably generated and the whole enterprise collapses. But to work out that truth I think we need to look not only into individual thoughts and intentions but also understand society's role in shaping those intentions, which means getting into the nasty mess of power relations and institutional roles. Morality as such cannot be excluded from politics or vice-versa. For other branches of philosophy such as philosophy of mind or language it may be easier to isolate the body of knowledge from social influences, but ethics, being knowledge for acting in public, definitely has to encompass some form of explanation for social forces.

Working out the foundations of a theory is harder than I had imagined. I had imagined working out a concept and then steadily working upwards, but it seems I am marooned even before I can hardly grasp the metaphysical implications of such concepts. hrmmmmmm.

Power Structures

It seems to me strange that an entire chapter of contemporary philosophy along the lines of Gramsci and Foucault are completely left out in understanding an epistemology of morality and political theories. In my opinion it is something worth pursuing especially in light of the modern era where discourse between government and people grow ever more vital. Of course, this is not to say or imply anything insiduous like governments controlling us or whatnot (it may be a side-effect) but rather that power structures within society  can influence and have an impact on our individual thought processes which are more susceptible to suggestions that we will like to think.

With the dawn of social media people are all the more easier to influence, yet all the more critical of coercion, and we must critically analyze how power structures within society augment the individual thought process in epistemology of morality and political thought. Beyond that, how relevant are power structures, not evil in themselves but rather inherent in society, in constructing intersubjectivity? There are many exciting prospects for research, and hopefully I'll be able to know more about them (and maybe why it isn't pursued as often as I imagined) once I get to university!

excited.

Conflating the Notion of Truth.

Reading a few articles on the Internet led me to re-think a few of my notions regarding Truth.

What is truth? Is there one, many or none? Truth is an important facet in many theories, because it is arguably the steadiest foundation for any argument. But is there only one kind of Truth? I believe that this is sorely mistaken. I believe that there are many kinds of truths, each true but each requiring a different theory to substantiate them. For example, "Killing is wrong" is arguably true. "Pluto revolves around the Sun" is true. "1 + 1 = 2" is true. But are they necessarily the same kind of truth? By conflating notions about Truth we tie ourselves down with unnecessary problems of definition.

Now, the case that there can be no truths is problematic. There is at least one form of truth that common sense tells us exist, which are natural, physical truths. The enterprise of Science reasonably imparts to us the knowledge that there can be some form of truth that exists within and beyond our perceptions, physical facts that are simply there even if we are not there to project our mental states onto them. For example, we know that Pluto revolves around the Sun, and this fact holds reasonably true even without constantly keeping an eye on Pluto to see if it decides to go rogue. Through observation, empirical deductions and the scientific method we can arrive at some form of truth, the truth of physical facts. This form of truth can be said to bear correspondence to Nature in so far as it is properly scientifically proven.

Another form of truth can be found in Mathematics. For at least one school of thought in Mathematics, there is the belief that "1+1=2" is true because mathematical entities exist to which "1+1=2" correlates to, i.e. the concept of "1" "+" and "2" exists so that we can bear correspondence to it. In this case, Mathematics can be said to be similar to the aims of Science, although in a much purer logical form which assures certainty.

Now, you might say this obviously means that Truth is purely by correspondence; since all naturalistic studies imply that, it must be so. But I argue that this is not the case in ethics. For ethics, what defines Good? There must be something "real" we can talk about, something above our subjective intuitions, such that we can actually argue about whether moral truths exist at all. The recent trend of postmodernist delusions that there is no objective truth can easily be torn down if we posit Prof. Simon Blackburn's challenge: how can any situation have different moral outcomes without a change in the situation itself? In every scenario, there must be a right way of going by moral acts, even if this is not immediately made clear. We only need to clarify the situation and find the fundamental structure of that scenario so that we can engage in analysis.

However, this does not mean that there exists an immutable, non-malleable truth within ethics. If so, then there cannot possibly be any case that morality can evolve. Civil rights and later moral standards in the 19th and 20th century cannot possibly come about if moral truth is unchangeable. Therefore, I argue that these are in fact social truths, truths that are socially contingent, formed out of an unknowing inter-subjective web that pervades society at any one time. These are formed out of sentiment and emotive factors, much like what Hume had said, but this cannot be reduced to a mere "yuk" factor. It is not a mere subjective emotion, but rather the zeitgeist of the dominant social norms.
To that end, there must be at least two forms of truth, one as I mentioned in the first paragraph, and the second of which is a type of coherence within society which gives rise to social truths such as ethical truths.

This is a very rough sketch of my thoughts; hopefully I can expand on this sometime soon.

binary illusions

One problem that I've noticed around the world, in so many arguments, is the tendency for ideas to be readily classified into binary oppositions. Now, in philosophy and the academic circle it is not so obvious since most works are subject to steady critiques. But in the public sphere and much of the common-thinking world, there are many examples of such binaries, that is, the tendency for things to be categorized as either this or that.

There seem to be no middle ground for many of these examples. People are predominantly either Republican or Democrat, Opposition or PAP (Singapore's ruling party), Sexist or Feminist, Pro-nature or Pro-nurture, Pro-life or Pro-choice. The list goes on.

Now, this is not a problem in itself. Such categorizations provide useful summaries of what proponents/opponents in a strand of debate argue about. It provides a generalization.

But the problem arises when the common populace, often unwilling/unable to understand the details of arguments, begin to start generalizing from generalizations. You can see where that might lead.

As a result, we have people who support a cause without knowing what it actually entails. We have parents supporting the ban of violent games because they are well, violent. All these without actually knowing anything at all about the game. A argument position (i.e. Liberalism) is a mere placeholder for a whole bunch of concepts. What we need is the Tractatus notion of concept -clarification. We must understand the basic propositions that make up the position by breaking it down and thinking it through, instead of taking the argued position for granted as a basic proposition by refusing to analyze it thoroughly.

Once we decide not to break down the argued position and instead begin to cherry-pick only the idea which we can grasp easily, we make it a less-than-holistic proposition. We dumb down the position. Republicans are suddenly all Christ-obsessed Conservatives. In Singapore, all Chinese are suddenly all rude and loud. All foreigners are smart and rich. The over-generalizations goes on.

Therein we have a conundrum: people who misconstrue what the position in an argument actually entail, and as such, pointless and stupid confusion ensues. We have people who do not understand the argument thinking that they do. This may not sound bad until you realize many of these folks are the same folks making decisions for us!

We must dispel these binary illusions. There are never only two sides to an argument. Before jumping to any debate. READ UP. Don't give yourself the chance to fall into these binary categories and delude yourself. Also, what many don't understand is that there can be space for synthesis, if only people took the time to come together and clarify their concepts, rationally pit them against each other, instead of ad hominem insults and tricks like poisoning the well.

There can be so much possibility in advancing knowledge if everyone practiced intellectual humility instead of making dogmatic claims. Knowledge can only progress when we think together because one man is only so much.

 I propose dialectics and conceptual analysis as my tools of choice, but I am always open to suggestions. Only then can we progress, no?