Kicking

Kicking

A man (in a green pullover) by the bus stop is watching his two children playing on the grass some twenty yards away; and I watch all three. My mind wanders.

"Robbie! No kicking!", and the slight, weary, lift in his voice suggests that this is not the first time he has said those words.

I look more carefully at the children; the boy, a sturdy four-year-old, the girl considerably taller and perhaps six. The check seems to work. "Skilfully done Mr. Man-in-green." 

My mind wanders again. What a lot a child has to learn, about bullying, about getting your way, about consequences and avoiding consequences. What a lot of civilising goes into parenting; the making of a citizen. I am reminded of the books and offprints on Freud, Psychology and World Order that Father left us; his legacy, our inheritance [1,2]. Is selfishness primary? Is aggressiveness? Is conscience inherent, or acquired as vestigial traces of early training from childhood or even infancy? Is 'God' indeed little more than 'our father in heaven' writ large?

Robbie might wonder what is wrong with kicking; his sister usually gives way. Of course, he may get a walloping from his dad, or smouldering resentment from his sister. He may conclude that, all-in-all, kicking is counter productive. Or he may conclude that it is best not done in public.

Britain spent 180 years 'kicking' weaker countries into submission, till 1956, when, with the French and Israelis, Britain thought it could recapture the Suez Canal from the Egyptians. By the end of November 1956 these allies found that they had won the war but had alienated all the world (except for Adenauer [3]). They withdrew, humiliated. In April 1975 the USA had to accept their humiliating retreat from Vietnam, and again in August 2021 their retreat (with their allies) from Afghanistan. 

Perhaps 2023 will see the humiliating retreat of Putin and his Wagner allies from Ukraine. But he need not be too embarrassed; we can see this as an integral part of growing up; we might even say "Join the club". Anyway, his wasn't a war. (It is amusing to note that, in 1956, Prime Minister Eden apparently said "We [are not] at war with Egypt now.[…] There has not been a declaration of war by us. We are in an armed conflict." [3]).

Reference:

[1] West, Ranyard (1942) "Conscience and Society", Methuen & Co., London.

[2] West, Ranyard (1945) "Psychology and World Order", Pelican, Harmondsworth, London.

[3]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis 

 Please address comment to cawstein@gmail.com

Moral Choice: biology, philosophy or religion?

"Morality is best seen as a question of human biology, rather than one of philosophy; least of all one of religion."

Thomas Nagel raised an interesting question in the London Review of Books (3rd June 2021): how do we make moral choices. How do we reconcile ‘gut feelings’ with moral precepts, if they conflict? I do not think there is a real problem here, as I shall try to explain, though there are plenty of hypothetical problems. 

Nagel transfers to morality the concept of reflective equilibrium that John Rawls developed for the field of justice; a reflective equilibrium is the end-product of a reflective re-adjustment of one’s moral thoughts achieved by testing general principles against considered judgements about particular cases. The method itself could be called reflective equilibration (or simply reflection); it presumably involves successively tweaking the weightings given to the various relevant thoughts that come into one’s head until they cohere  into a consistent conclusion; one that is optimally concordant, or minimally discordant. It works if both the general principles and the particular judgements can be revised (tweaked). 

 

But Nagel’s main problem arises when there is a difference in kind between the various moral thoughts that have to be reconciled. He has been struggling for 40 years to reconcile two kinds of moral input. Some appear to come into the mind as rigid, clear-cut, laws telling us what is right, or wrong, (do not kill innocent people, do not tell lies); these he calls deontological. (They seem to be very like Kant’s categorical imperatives.)  Others actions, themselves neutral, have to be judged by their consequences as good or bad; these he calls consequential. A familiar form of consequentialism is Bentham’s Utilitarianism, seeking “the greatest good of the greatest number.” (See the very clear article on the Stanford Philosophy site: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/.)  

Nagel struggles a bit to define in general terms these two basic kinds of moral thought that present themselves to the conscious brain. He is not sure whence these intuitions come, and seems to be a little in awe of rules-based deontological morality; are these moral instructions hard-wired in our biology, or were we brain-washed by our parents? (To believe that one’s duties come direct from God does not solve the problem, except in so much as, by giving it a name, it allows the ‘religious believers’ to stop thinking about that particular problem.) Nagel is concerned to be even-handed between the two types of moral intuition but he is also concerned to allow morality to evolve, and admits that the rules-based thoughts offer more resistance to change than the ad hoc, utilitarian, type. Take homosexuality, for example; some people cannot overcome their instinctive taboo, but society as a whole is shifting its position. 

Some people are more inclined to be deontological; others to be consequential. I confess to being a deontologist, though an atheist; I don’t seem to mind too much if the rule is silly, or wrong, but I like to obey the rule nevertheless. For Nagel, the problem becomes: how can one do a reflective equilibration when some of the arguments are stubbornly inflexible? All the bending must be done by the consequential calculations.

And what about other people; must we equilibrate their intuitions also? Nagel concedes the problem but does not answer it:  “In some sense the moral point of view requires putting oneself in everyone else’s shoes…. The question" (he says) "is: how?” 

I deal with some of these issues in my recent book (West, I.C. (2019) “God for Atheists”, AuthorHouse, Bloomington.), though my conclusions are simpler than Nagel’s. Morality (I maintain) comes from the reflective equilibration, not of one mind only, but of all minds (or an adequate sample of minds). How is that done?.  Simply by asking questions, I suggest, and listening to the answers.

I described (in 2011) what I called at the time a “Philosophical Summing Junction”, roughly as follows: 

“We spent a happy hour or so, tossing around the question of who to save in the event of nuclear war; not because we anticipated needing a plan of action, but because Dr.X had challenged the claim that philosophy can clarify the mind and solve problems. I attempted to draw the exchange to a close by suggesting that in our 60 minutes of vigorous thought and discussion we had produced between us an almost complete answer to the question of how to proceed. Dr. X said he scored it "philosophy nil, chaos 100". So I tried to explain my contention again, at greater length.” (See https://occidentis.blogspot.com/2011/09/philosophical-summing-junction.html) 

I see the human mind as capable of liking to follow rules (on some occasions), of liking to save one's own daughter before that of someone else, liking to save the lives of strangers, even of dumb animals, baulking at the killing of innocents. I suspect that most people do not really mind if their actions are right or wrong in any philosophical sense, as long as they feel right. Furthermore, they like to be judged by people who come to the same conclusions as they do on these matters, people who know what is right, defined in this way.

I think this is the basis of the ‘Michael Sandel roadshow’. He steps onto the stage and asks a question, then takes comments from the audience for an hour. I think he has the correct approach to morality. 

In summary:  "Morality is best seen as a question of human biology, rather than one of philosophy; least of all one of religion."

God: non-existent but important

God for Atheists.

Dear X,

I find it frustrating to hear you expound yet again your problems with Faith and Doubt and to be unable to comment. So here I try to begin a dialogue. My challenge to you is to see how far down the page you are willing to read. For, as you have nurtured your doubt for so long, I suspect you ‘need’ it and will not welcome a re-thinking of your position. 

I want to expound a view of God which I do not claim is unique to me, but which I have not heard expounded by anyone else, except in parts. My thesis could be called “God for atheists”; the title of my recent book (***). I suppose I started writing it as an apology to my children for my not being as dismissive as they of the whole religious business. But that was more than 20 years ago.

So I am talking first to 'atheists' to say “Not so fast! Do not dismiss this whole bundle of ideas, hopes, and myths, which has loomed so large in the history of mankind since the beginning of thought itself. You may be 'throwing the baby out with the bath water'!” 

But secondly (and this is the more difficult part), I am talking to those who do 'believe in God', and who practice religion. I wish to ask, with sufficient humility and politeness, could it be that you are misunderstanding the nature of God, asking perhaps the wrong questions, accepting too literally the answers provided by previous generations. 

The logic of my argument can be stated succinctly, though to convince an audience embedded in a different world of ideas my exposition would need space; space to introduce ideas gradually, with repetition and illustration. The following is only the bald logic of my argument.

[1]  God surely does not exist. If he did, he would resemble everything else, and we would face the 'regression problem' of who ‘created’ God.

[2]  What, in any case, is existence? We do not know any thing that does not exist. Every THING we know has mass, extension, and duration. It is difficult (nigh impossible) to talk of types of non-existent reality. Take a knotted string; the string exists, but what about the knot? It contributes no extra weight. Yet different observers can view it objectively. We hesitate to say that it does not exist. Take pi, or infinity, or guilt; they certainly do not exist in the way that stone does, or magnetism.

[3]  So there can ‘be' things that do not exist, and they can be discussed objectively, and have meaning; like a unicorn; like patriotism.

[4]  ‘God’ for Newton was the total mass of the universe; for Einstein perhaps the total energy of the universe. It is fairly easy to go along with such definitions even if we do not understand them, but it is quite clear that such concepts of God lack all the human features that made God feared, obeyed, loved, and indeed worshipped. Man has clearly made God in his own image, for God commands, judges, and forgives. 

[5]  Let us make it quite clear that we are now talking about a third and altogether different concept, a Humane God; not the God of Magic (which is incredible), nor the God of Physics (which for most of us is incomprehensible, and in any case does not care sufficiently about us personally). We make this clear to get Richard Dawkins off our backs. 

[6]  Many people, perhaps most, will acknowledge a sense of right and wrong, contrition, a hope for forgiveness, and gratitude. There is (objectively) a cloud of ideas in the collective heads of mankind which we have projected onto the God of Magic. Like the image of a man behind the mirror, it is meaningful, can be discussed objectively, but does not exist; at least not there – behind the mirror. 

[7]  Yet the cloudy 'Humane God' is terribly important for man as a thinking, social, animal; it is needed as the foundation for morals. 

[8]  If you ask yourself, “Who says abortion is wrong?”, or “To whom can I turn for forgiveness?” the answer emerges very clearly that our 'Humane God' resides in the heads of our fellow men. “Whenever two or three of you come together in my name, I am there with you.”  See, for example, the Quakers, who conduct all their business “in the presence of God”.

[9]  How much better is it to have a concept of God that can be easily accessed for advice, and love, and that cannot be doubted, compared with a magical God who spins matter out of nothing, who raises souls (and even bodies) from the dead, but who covers thousands of innocent believers in mountains of mud, and who in any case we cannot believe in? 

(*** “God for atheists” (2019) by Ian West, ISBN-13 : ‎978-1728393995; available online from Amazon, Blackwells, Biblio, or any good bookshop, or direct from the author. )

Yours sincerely, Ian West