Bollettino

Les idées expérimentales, comme nous le verrons plus tard, peuvent naître
soit à propos d'un fait observé par hasard, soit à la suite d'une tentative expérimentale,soit comme corollaires d'une théorie admise. Ce qu'il faut seulement noter pour le moment, c'est que l'idée expérimentale n'est point arbitraire ni purement imaginaire ; elle doit avoir toujours un point d'appui dans la réalité observée, c'est-à-dire dans la nature. L'hypothèse expérimentale, en un mot, doit toujours être fondée sur une observation antérieure. – Claude Bernard

LI has been pondering various ways of approaching the multitudinous subject of the thought experiment, soi disant. We have gotten some mail on this topic. The mail was puzzled – as in, what the hell is our point? So before we trace the geneology back to Socrates (both as mythmaker and myth), and make the usual grand historical tour in a paragraph, perhaps we should hatch an argument out of a diffuse discontent.

Okay. Fair enough. What is the problem, then, with thought experiments?

Here it is: the problem is that thought experiments often seem more like experimental designs than experiments. When Popperians (of the Karl, not the Mary, persuasion) talk of conjecture and refutation, or when Bernard talks of observation, or when we use that experiment on circadian rhythm that we pointed to in our last post, all are trying to indicate that experiment has a middle, material term. That material term – the content of the experimental process itself – is such that it creates a distinct point of reference different from the experimental design. I might say to myself, say, what are the circadian rhythms of human beings like? And I might then devise a way of denying human beings sunlight as a clever way of extracting those rhythms. But until I have done the work of actually plunging the human beings into darkened chambers or subterranean caverns, I haven’t performed the experiment. Whereas performance and experimental design seem to collapse together when, for instance, I want to make the argument that artificial intelligence is impossible to prove, and I come up with a story about a machine, an input of Chinese symbols, a person within the machine, and an output of English words.

My argument, then, is that a thought experiment lacks a performative dimension. And that depends, in turn, on the idea that thought doesn’t perform. I don’t like that supposition, but for the moment, this is the side I’m taking. Until I wiggle out of it.

Now, defenders of the thought experiment often use early ‘thought experiments in science and philosophy to make the point that there has always been something “like” the thought experiment. What they don’t do is ask what these early “thought experiments” were called by their creators. LI suspects that the conjunction of thought and experiment, as a lexical event is part of the prestige accrued by the experiment during the nineteenth century. When Zola, reading Bernard, decides to apply Bernard’s “experimental method” to writing – when he writes the “Roman experimentale” – we are crossing a threshold. It is about that same time that Mach coins the term “Gedanken-experiment.”

Before that moment, there were riddles, problems, demonstrations, etc. etc. Take the the Molyneux problem. When Locke considers it in the Essay on Human Understanding, he doesn’t compare it to an experiment – although Locke was very familiar with experiments, of course. The end of the seventeenth century was a veritable Island of Laputa, filled with experiments and projects.

This is Locke:
“So that from that which is truly variety of shadow or colour, collecting the figure, it makes it pass for a mark of figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex figure and an uniform colour; when the idea we receive from thence is only a plane variously coloured, as is evident in painting. To which purpose I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr. Molyneux, which he was pleased to send me in a letter some months since; and it is this:- "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and the other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man be made to see: quaere, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish and tell which is the globe, which the cube?" To which the acute and judicious proposer answers, "Not. For, though he has obtained the experience of how a globe, how a cube affects his touch, yet he has not yet obtained the experience, that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so; or that a protuberant angle in the cube, that pressed his hand unequally, shall appear to his eye as it does in the cube."- I agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this problem; and am of opinion that the blind man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference of their figures felt. This I have set down, and leave with my reader, as an occasion for him to consider how much he may be beholden to experience, improvement, and acquired notions, where he thinks he had not the least use of, or help from them. And the rather, because this observing gentleman further adds, that "having, upon the occasion of my book, proposed this to divers very ingenious men, he hardly ever met with one that at first gave the answer to it which he thinks true, till by hearing his reasons they were convinced.”

This has all the hallmarks of the kind of thought experiments that analytic philosophers go nuts over – in fact, one of those t-e’s, Frank Jackson’s Mary in the black and white room, is a variant. Molyneux was a mathematician, and the terms in which he couches his “problem”, the style, is a peculiar blend of mathematics and casuistry. Molyneux seems convinced that the answer to his problem lies in the reasons he gives for answering the problem. That bears a relationship to experiment, insofar as experimenters have reasons, but those reasons are hypotheses which, at least in the Baconian tradition, are put to some kind of test. That test is the performative dimension. Is the giving of reasons – is argument – the same thing as a test?

The grooviness of the Molyneux problem is that it did achieve performance – that is, there were operations on aveugles de naissance during the 18th century. One of Diderot’s most famous essays, Lettre sur les aveugles, is on just such an operation.

LI should note one amusing result of this notion of performativity. From the perspective of the history of the experimental method, the Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment has a unique place. The experimental design is such that its performance as an experiment would destroy its result as an experiment. Because we have learned to look at these things in terms of observation, we have ignored the performative dimension in which observation is embedded -- we have ignored, in other words, how experiments function. But if we restore the performative dimension to its place in a theory of experiment, then the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment -- and others of its kind meant to show the peculiar qualities of quantum mechanics -- should provide us with limit cases in which the form of experiment generates its own negation qua experiment. This is to be distinguished from thought experiments that are merely physically impossible, or that involve entities like possible worlds. The Schroedinger's cat thought experiment implies a contradiction in the very structure of the experimental method.

And that is all LI will say about that topic -- we've noticed that the amount of bs generated by a lay person speaking of quantum physics is in direct proportion to said lay person's ignorance. This could certainly be, if not a law, at least a rule of thumb.

Bollettino

LI has always been extremely skeptical of the role of thought experiments in philosophy. Or – we have been skeptical that they are experiments. They are many things – imaginary experimental designs; fantasies; myths; and arguments; We’ve been pondering our issue with them since reading a post in Crooked Timber last week. The post responded to another post, one by Brian Leiter, about what is dead and living – in other words, what is faddish and what is uncool – in philosophy. The CT person took the opportunity to sound off about the Twin Earth “thought experiment” – and we thought, hmm, we’ve wanted to say something about the bogusness of thought experiments for some time.

So we went and looked up some of the literature. Since we are going to do this over the next couple of posts – and since our emphasis is going to be, at first, on the experiment part of the thought experiment – we’d like to point to a few links.

Here’s an article, from the Winter 2003 issue of the Journal for General Philosophy
of Science that makes some salient comments on the limits of thought experiments in philosophy and in science.



There’s a famous argument by an Einstein scholar, John D. Norton, that thought experiments are arguments. A paper in which he develops this thesis is here.

Here’s a criticism of thought experiments in moral reasoning –especially Parfit’s moral reasoning – by Jerry Goodenough here .

To understand the difference between the design of an experiment and the experiment, we’d like to instance one experiment that bears some similarities with the kind of human experiments that epistemologists and personal identity people like to make.

In the 1960s, there were several experiments on people that seemed to show that humans have a 25 hour circadian rhythm. These experiments involved plunging people into sunlight deficient environments – deep in caves and such.

In 1999, a team at Harvard, led by Howard Czeisler, went over the data from these experiments. And they went over the experiments themselves. This is from the little Harvard news story:



“The experiments suffered from a serious flaw, however. Subjects were allowed to turn on lights, even if they were tucked away in caves or windowless labs. Several years ago, Czeisler and his colleagues discovered that ordinary room light can reset the pacemaker.
To avoid the resetting effects of room light and other cues, Czeisler, professor of medicine; Duffy, research fellow in medicine; and Dijk, assistant professor of medicine; and their colleagues tightly controlled their subjects' environment. For about a month, the 24 subjects—11 young men (mean age 24) and 13 older men and women (mean age 67)—were exposed only to very low levels of light, about one tenth that of ordinary room light. To prevent the pattern of light exposure from affecting the subjects' internal clocks, lights were turned on at progressively earlier or progressively later times of the day, essentially creating 20-hour or 28-hour days.
"The point was to decouple extrinsic cues from the internal pacemaker," says Czeisler. Despite the decoupling, body temperature, cortisol, and melatonin levels cycled on an average of every 24.18 hours. And they did so consistently among all subjects, showing the circadian pacemaker is as tightly controlled in humans as in other animals.”

The moral LI draws out of this is that experimentation does not proceed without observation, except the way a drunk proceeds on an icy road on a windy 3 a.m. It is an old, Victorian moral, such as William Whewell might be happy to adumbrate – but it is nevertheless true enough to make one ask oneself: how is a thought experiment an experiment?

Bollettino

The appearance and expansion of Vampirism in the Democratic Party can be explained by: premature burials following cataleptic phenomena or highly contagious epidemics; folk beliefs and superstitions regarding the spitefulness of the dead; revenge of excommunicated persons; deaths by suicide for which villagers believed themselves responsible; the 'miraculous' preservation of bodies buried in places entirely without air, or in arsenic-rich soil; schizophrenics who fear being confined and become senseless; and porphyria, a hereditary blood disease frequently found in Transylvania...which causes cutaneous anomalies, dental malformations and creates a desire for blood – quote, oh so slightly changed, from “Deadly Fears: Dom Augustin Calmet's Vampires and the Rule Over Death” by Marie-Hélène Huet, Eighteenth-Century Life 21.2 (1997) 222-232

Is the reign of the vampire over? Kerry’s choice of Edwards as his v.p., instead of Gephardt, is a heartening sign. Is it the dawn, or is it some false resolution that, by clever cinematic manipulations, will keep us all in suspense? The idea of Gephardt did leave LI rather sick with dread. One feared the revenge of excommunicated persons; one feared the miraculous preservation of a political body that has led the Democrats to ten years of unparalleled defeat, and that erected itself, on embalming fluid and the most ancient of union bosses, to make various hideous attempts spread the reign of darkness and defeat over the party once again this spring.

Kerry has more than a touch of the vampire himself, and surely there was a struggle in his soul before he was able to chose the light – that is, Edwards. Vampiric Dems have a bond with each other – a bond of empty rhetoric, a bond of spurious virtue – that pulls them together, in a sort of cell. If any man symbolized this cell, it was Gephart; if any act symbolized the complete bankruptcy of the cell, it was the compact with Bush to attack Iraq. Gephart not only made the Iraq war politically possible for Bush, he helped manage the Democratic rout in 2002, gaining zero political credit for handing American security over to the fantasies of D.C.’s best and brightest. John Nichols, in the Nation, pretty much summed up the undead Gephardt:


“The collapse of Richard Gephardt's leadership of the House Democratic Caucus did not occur on November 5, when the party lost seats in an election where history and economic trends suggested that it should have gained them. That result was simply a confirmation of the crisis that had been evident for more than a year. From the first days of George W. Bush's selected-not-elected presidency, it was clear that Gephardt was unprepared to serve as the leader of Congressional opposition to a Republican president. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he simply stopped trying. That doomed Democratic chances of taking over the House in 2002, as Gephardt failed to define an opposition agenda and took positions out of sync with his own caucus.

That was never more evident than on October 10 when, after Gephardt helped craft the resolution authorizing Bush to launch a unilateral attack on Iraq, the majority of House Democrats voted against the plan. In surprising result, 126 House Democrats opposed it with only 81 joining their leader Gephardt in supporting it.”

Edwards, who is not part of the Democratic vampire cell, is an excellent choice. It is what we were hoping for. Kerry, who is being held back, as a presidential candidate, by his extreme tediousness – he seems to model his oratory on Polonius’ – needs a person who can actually order eggs over easy and bacon without telling the waitress how historically important eggs and bacon are, and how he has always been for eggs and bacon in spite of voting against eggs and bacon, which was really a vote for eggs and bacon when looked at from a more elevated eggish point of view.

Bollettino

One of LI’s brothers has always been pretty core pacifist. So we were surprised, talking with him a few days ago, when he said he didn’t understand why they were trying Saddam. “Why din’t they just kill him when they captured him?”

An interesting idea. LI is generally opposed to the death penalty. When the Marquis de Sade was briefly made a judge during the French Revolution, he distinguished himself by opposing all death sentences. This was entirely consonant with Sade’s philosophy, which held that since the state institutionalized joylessness, there could be no pleasure in a state sponsored killing. The Sadeian moralist approves of private homicides because they are pleasurable to the murderer, but disapproves strongly of those killings that result from duty, because – and on this Sade agrees with Kant – it isn’t.

Sade’s too-cruel-to-be-kindness obviously lost the ideological battle during the revolution. New regimes, as de Maistre and Michel Foucault knew, must plant themselves on the murdered corpses of old regimes. Freud might have been wrong, historically, about the primal horde, but he was right to sense that the legitimacy of power depends on the crucial transgression of that moral imperative: thou shalt not kill. The question is, what serves that purpose best – the predetermined trial and execution, or the more summary butchery.

Take the case of the Romanovs. Much cold war weeping was shed over their squalid fates. This weeping had the political motivation of hanging a mark of illegitimacy around the Soviets. It had the more practical effect of disguising the Romanov reign of crime: the massacres of 1905 and the criminal prosecution of the war, for example. If any pair of monarchs deserved the guillotine, it was this terrible twosome. It was telling and typical that one of the books discovered upon Alexandria’s bedroom table after she was shot was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – no doubt this was not her first reading. In her husband’s diary, he records turning to it for solace in the first weeks after his deposing.

Trotsky, apparently, pushed for a trial for the Romanovs, to be broadcast over the radio. Yes, that is right, Trotsky is the godfather of Courtroom TV, Cops, and Judge Judy.

However, as the White Counter-revolution mounted a real threat to the Bolsheviks, the fate of the Romanovs came together out of improvisation, haste, and incompetence.
For all of Trotsky’s attempt to find parallels between the French Revolution and the 1918 revolution, the end of the Romanov family was more like the archly villainous path to power forged by Shakespeare’s Richard III than the people’s theatre he envisioned.

Here’s the account from the regicide who managed the butchery:

“In April of 1918, the family and some of their entourage were moved from Siberia to Ekaterinburg in the Ural mountains. On July 17, after midnight, the family was woken up and led to a basement room along with four aides. Aleksei and Alexandra were given chairs. A group of armed men entered the room, and a local commander announced that, by order of the regional soviet committee, they were all to be shot.

Yakov Yurovsky, the commander, later wrote: "The others then made a few incoherent exclamations.... Then the shooting started." The tsar was killed instantly by the first bullet; Alexandra died next. The rest were shot in the following two or three minutes. Aleksei and three of his sisters were not killed instantly and "had to be shot again." The last daughter was still not dead after the second round of bullets. "When they tried to finish off one of the girls with bayonets, the bayonet could not pierce the corset. Thanks to all this, the entire procedure ... took around 20 minutes."
Apparently, Yurovsky never got over that night. He had the further misfortune of having to supervise the disposal of the bodies himself. The daughters, it turned out, had sewn diamonds into their corsets and had little lockets with Rasputin’s picture around their necks.



Here’s what Trotsky said about Nicholas:

"He did not know how to wish: that was his chief trait of character," says a reactionary French historian of Louis. Those words might have been written of Nicholas: neither of them knew how to wish, but both knew how to not wish. But what really could be "wished" by the last representatives of a hopelessly lost historic cause? " Usually he listened, smiled, and rarely decided upon anything. His first word was usually No.” Of whom is that written? Again of Capet. But if this is so, the manners of Nicholas were an absolute plagiarism. They both go toward the abyss "with the crown pushed down over their eyes.” But would it after all be easier to go to an abyss, which you cannot escape anyway, with your eyes open? What difference would it have made, as a matter of fact, if they had pushed the crown way back on their heads?”

Trotsky’s point is that Russian history had reached a juncture in which the impossibility of cazrist governance was structural, not personal.

In 1998, Yeltsin supervised a farcical ceremony commemorating the reburial of the royal corpses, and wept tears that were some combination of crocodile and vodka before getting back to the serious business of pilfering Russia and massacring Chechnyians.

If there is a lesson in this tale of blood and kitsch, it is that the primal horde best take care to murder the father openly, and with ceremony. The Soviets managed to make a regicide that would have won the hearty approval of Oliver Cromwell into a matter of shame.

One wonders where the balance of shame will be in the trial of Hussein. It is bad news that the IGC, in one of its last paroxysms of bad policy, left the direction of the trial to Ahmed Chalabi’s nephew. The NYT reports that the Bush administration views the trial as a possible model for developing some other than international system of jurisprudence to try crimes against humanity. In the typical hamhanded fashion of the CPA, Hussein is being charged with the crime of invading Kuwait, but not Iran, thereby sending the message that if you are going to wage a war of disastrous aggression and kill 500,000 people, be sure to buy your arms from approved Western dealers.

It is the Kuwait charge that makes us think that the trial of Saddam is supposed to be doubly legitimizing. But there is an inherent contradiction between the needs of the Americans to once again point to Kuwait and the need of the Iraqis for a universal condemnation of the total sum of Hussein’s acts. Given the intransigence of the Kuwaitis and the Saudis, lately, about the war reparations they want to extract from the current government, we think that this might be yet another major CPA misjudgment. Out of such cultural clashes grow the armed variety.

Bollettino

The last issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy contained a number of articles about democratic theory and pragmatism. John Dryzek, who has written extensively about what he calls, after Habermas, the ‘deliberative public’ – of which such things as the blogosphere would be subsets – poses an interesting question in his article, Pragmatism and Democracy:


“On one interpretation of pragmatism, which can appeal to Dewey as well as to Peirce, the idea would be to make the public as it confronts social problems much more like a scientific community in terms of its commitment to the pursuit of truth. The real world of politics does of course feature plenty in the way of partisanship, inequality, self-interest, ideology, strategizing, deceit, and the raw exercise of power. So would a pragmatist program for public deliberation have to involve an attack on these pervasive yet deeply problematic aspects of politics?”

Dryzek’s article is couched as a reply to another article in the journal by Cheryl Misak, who “believes that truth in the sense of indefeasible collective judgments is a proper aspiration in politics, such that there are right answers if only we deliberate long enough and well enough about a particular problem.”

Dryzek has a deep objection to this way of thinking:

“Without the preparedness to give up a belief in the face of decisive counterarguments, Misak says we will get "the degradation of belief to mere opinion." But in politics, opinion is not mere. What we mean by "public opinion" can be more or less distorted, more or less defensible. But do we really want to convert "public opinion" into "public belief"? The problem is that under any realistic time constraints, opinion cannot be eliminated. But even without such constraints, there would, as Hannah Arendt (1958) has argued, be something very peculiar about a politics that sought to exchange opinion for truth. Implicit in a situation where moral truth is sought is an incipient danger of the eventual silencing of the differing opinions that are the very grist of politics, especially if, as Misak puts it, "disagreement implies a mistake on somebody's part." A pragmatic defense against silencing here would be that all individuals should accept that they are as likely to be in error as their opponent in an argument. But opinions are not like truth claims in science, and here the pragmatist's view of continuity between science and democratic politics starts to look suspect. Opinions differ in large part because experiences and thus identities differ, and experiences may never be fully accessible to those who have not shared them. Such a view can find support in Rorty's pluralistic interpretation of pragmatism, which highlights linguistically-constituted variety. Asking an identity to be provisional and capable of being discarded if an argument is lost means the identity is not a core part of being—it is not an identity at all.”

LI thinks that Dryzek instinct is correct, here, but his analysis is deficient. His instinct is that opinion must be defended against the old Platonic ideal of the Republic. However screwed up Popper’s analysis of Hegel and Marx is, Popper was right to see a common thread in all political theories that seek to create a polity that emulates some kind of scientific, or truth-centric, ideal. Silencing the false, under this perspective, is the very goal of the policy maker. Dryzek is also right, to an extent, to see that the problem with this goal is that it conflicts with identity – with the heterogenous array of positions over social space. The social is the anti-universal, to put it in the briefest possible space. But his analysis falls short when it comes to living fact of identity, insofar as he emphasizes identity as a given, rather than as a struggle over time. In this way he makes identity into an untouchable – it becomes a Disneyland of difference. This, we think, expresses the deep desire of a certain form of East Coast liberalism, which is the latest stage in an ideology that goes back in American history to the early nineteenth century, and the establishment of a certain sense of decorum as a means by which the elite preserved their status positions both economically and culturally. This liberalism has a horror of depth, because depth is where the struggle goes on. Although we don’t, in the end, think Melville was fair to Emerson, we think that he sensed, in the Emerson of cliché, something of this same horror, and this same ossificiation of the plural. Here is a passage from one of the great letters:


“I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr Emerson. I had heard of him as full of transcendentalisms, myths & oracular gibberish; I had only glanced at a book of his once in Putnam's store -- that was all I knew of him, till I heard him lecture. -- To my surprise, I found him quite intelligible, tho' to say truth, they told me that that night he was unusually plain. -- Now, there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctuly perceptible. This I see in Mr Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool; -- then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. -- I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plumet that will. I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now -- but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.”

Bollettino

My friend S., who turned me on to Complex Adaptive Systems theory, is presently bringing to a close her magnum opus and dissertation in one last pageheavy burst of scribbling. Although I know she will never read these words – S. has better things to do than look at the sad evidences of my graphomania – still, I dedicate this post to her.

Salut, S.!!!

In the last post, LI laid out the problems, as we see them, with consequences, and consequently with consequentialism. If you will remember, we wrote that the problem, as we saw it, started with counting over the consequences of actions. This is the robust, quantitative approach to the problem, approved of by all analytic philosophers. We further said that the problem had a superficial aspect – that of giving good reasons for containing consequences – and a deeper, structural aspect – that of giving an account of actions such that consequences are considered a necessary effect of actions.

The example we gave, here, to illustrate what we meant by the containment problem derives from Morehead’s book on the Gallipoli campaign. In that book, we are told that Churchill, on August 3, 1914, decided to impound two Turkish battleships that were being built in British shipyards. We traced a plausible chain of consequences from this action to the events of October, 1914, when the Allies delivered an ultimatum to the Turks, which was refused. That refusal effectively aligned the Turks with the Germans.

Our chain included some peculiar items. For instance, the Germans supplied the Turks with two ships and crews immediately after Churchill announced his decision. Was this really a consequence of Churchill’s decision? Isn’t it possible that the Germans would have acted in the same way even if Churchill hadn’t made this decision? And finally, a question that always pops up in these kinds of discussions, how could Churchill know that the Germans would act as they did once he had acted as he did?

I’m afraid we haven’t done with the superficial problem of containment. As is hinted at by my last question, we like to divide consequences into intended and unintended. This division implies that there exists some rough means that justifies attaching the two labels to consequences of, at times, the same act.

I am not going to claim that the label has no usefulness in certain situations. But there is a limit to its meaningfulness. Take, for instance, our second question. The Germans “saw” what Churchill did. Social action is rarely such that it occurs only between a Crusoe agent and some indigenous Friday singelton. Rather, the social matrix within which actions occur is such that the consequences of the action, insofar as those consequences are attendant upon the perception of the action, can ramify rapidly. The social agent knows this – in fact, we often consider that, in certain situations, part of his responsibility is communicative. Every lovers quarrel eventually hinges on such things. In Churchill’s case, he certainly knew that the Germans were perceiving his act. Their subsequent actions in response to that act, then, must be prefigured in the motives for the act, to some degree. That prefiguring is, largely, guesswork. The intention that an act have a certain consequence, which seems so clear, gets muddier as we seek to embed the action in the social matrix. The edge between intention and the unintended is not, really, a clear and distinct thing at all times. And, in principle, this lack of clarity is possible for any act. Intentions can always be argued about. Although there “must have been a mistake,” Joseph K. can be arrested at any time, because no Joseph K. can ever give an account of his actions such that we know precisely the limits of his intention.

The moral fact that the containment of consequences is indeterminable forms the basis for one of the principle themes of the mystic. When Blake says that the hot needle that pokes out the eye of the songbird darkens the stars, he is merely alluding to the infinite ramification of consequences that, in a drier tone, is considered by Donald Davidson in the Essays on Actions and Events. When Jesus of Nazareth claims that God knows even the fall of the smallest sparrow, he is saying either: a, that all events in one unified throb surge up against the divine, or, b., that all events are distributed to their place and function by the infinitely fine consciousness of our Heavenly Father.

Counting consequences, a dry topic for analytic philosophers to rattle about in their small journals, is also the cry of the messiahs and the lyric poets. LI might be a dry rattler, but at least this topic puts us in good company.

Next post – or some post next week – we will return to the deeper structural problems, and try to show how the original, petty stimulus for this wildly expanding topic – Hitchens supposition that he can strip consequences from acts as he goes backwards to make pronouncements about the moral/political errors of Michael Moore – shows that Hitchens has abandoned one view of history, that of struggle, associated with Marxism, for a very vulgar Whig view. And, in so showing, points out certain questions about democracy itself. Fun, fun, fun.

Bollettino

My friend T. wants to know why I keep going on and on about Christopher Hitchens, who he thinks is an unworthy Moby Dick to my Ahab.

Well -- I happen to think that Hitchens is a writer. As opposed to the usual buffoon. That's about it, for a reason. Reason not the obsession -- if the sun itself reached out a hand and struck me on my face, I would strike back -- to answer in the most Ahab-like way.

But also, also ... this isn't heading towards a tit for tat thing about C.H. I'm after an even bigger whale -- how we argue about politics.

Now, to continue. Let me take off the Ahab mask and put on the T.A. mask.

No moral theory can ground itself absolutely on consequences, since there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about a consequence; no moral theory can entirely ignore consequences, since absolutely separating moral categories from actions is like absolutely separating words from meaning.

Kant, who comes closest to the absolute anti-consequentialist position, summed that position up in the phrase, “the moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expected from it, nor in any principle of action which requires to borrow its motive from this expected effect.” However, in order to make this proposition plausible, Kant trumps consequences with a notion of the universal that encodes a timeless schema of consequences. The famous example of the lie is the place where Kant makes his stand:

“The shortest way, however, and an unerring one, to discover the answer to this question whether a lying promise is consistent with duty, is to ask myself, "Should I be content that my maxim (to extricate myself from difficulty by a false promise) should hold good as a universal law, for myself as well as for others? and should I be able to say to myself, "Every one may make a deceitful promise when he finds himself in a difficulty from which he cannot otherwise extricate himself?" Then I presently become aware that while I can will the lie, I can by no means will that lying should be a universal law. For with such a law there would be no promises at all, since it would be in vain to allege my intention in regard to my future actions to those who would not believe this allegation, or if they over hastily did so would pay me back in my own coin. Hence my maxim, as soon as it should be made a universal law, would necessarily destroy itself. “

The idea that one’s act “should be a universal law” is a long, pious way around consequences, but it amounts to elevating a model taken from a particular realm of consequence – the model developed in law from precedent – and purifying it of the contingent character of consequence to reach its logical core.

In our own view, there are other problems with consequences from a moral view that lie in the nature of social action itself. The problem is: how are we supposed to “count over” consequences, as the analytic philosophers would put it?

This is a technical problem that goes back, historically, to the Stoic protest against Aristotelian logic, and the connection of paradox to ethics (which is rather puzzling to the modern sensibility – that is why Cicero’s Paradoxes is such a weird text to read). At the beginning of the twentieth century, as it became evident that logic could be completely redone and its power extended by using Cantor’s set theory, the stage was set for rediscovering the force of the scattered ethical insights of the Stoics. Deleuze, in the Logique du sens, realized this in the sixties. It is still LI’s favorite among Deleuze’s books.

The technical problem has a superficial aspect and a deep, structural essence. The superficial aspect is: how to count consequences. Here is an example, from Alan Moorehead’s book, Gallipoli. On August 3, 1914, Winston Churchill informed the Turkish government that the two battleships that the Turks had ordered from the British, which were so close to the point of completion that the Turks had already sent crews to England, were being impounded. As Europe teetered on the brink of war, Churchill was afraid of the use the Turks could make of those battleships. However, Turkey was allied neither with the British nor the Germans.

On of the consequences of that act was that the Germans had a chance to move in with two of their own battleships, which they ‘ceded’ – along with the crews – to the Turks. One of the commanders of one of those ships then took it upon himself, unilaterally, to put a blockade across the Bosphorus, thus preventing Russian ships from supplying Russia with grain, armaments, and other stuffs. In consequence, the government of Turkey had to either identify with that act or renege on it. In consequence of being forced to choose, the Turks chose to identify with the act, and so allied themselves, in Allied eyes, and then officially, with the Axis.

How many of these ‘consequences” are really the consequence of Winston Churchill’s act? The superficial problem, here, is that, depending on how one construes the world, it is difficult to disinter all the consequences of any act – as difficult as it is to pick out snowflakes from an avalanche. Nevertheless, we do it all the time – in trials, in domestic life, at work. We use conventions, and we think in terms of short ranges of time, etc. Yet no sane person, looking back over his life, trusts those conventions absolutely. We all feel like there are consequences of certain things we’ve done or had done to us that we didn’t understand at the time. We all think effects are, in reality, very hard to peg to a timeline.

So much for the superficial counting over of consequences. In the next post, I want to approach the deeper problem – which is the problem of complexity itself. But I thought I’d end this post with a translation, from the French, of a couple of grafs from Cicero’s third paradox, Les fautes ont toutes la même valeur, comme les bonnes actions – “Faults all have the same value, just like good actions” – to show that the Stoics were alive to the quantitative problem in ethics. They were interested in what we now call the problem of the continuous and the discrete:

The thing is without gravity, they say. But the culpability (culpa) is great; for the faults (peccata) ought to be evaluated not according to events, but according to the defaults (vitiis) of the persons. What makes for the commission of a fault can be more or less important: however one approaches the problem, the committed fault is one. That a pilot navigates a shipload of gold or straw into a shipwreck makes for a large enough difference between the facts, but none in the incompetence of the pilot. That someone violently mistreats a plebian woman: our emotional response to this is much less than if someone struck a woman from a respectable and noble family, but the agent has not less committed a fault, since to commit a fault reduces, essentially, to going over a limit (transire lineas): when one takes a step across it, the fault is established; it doesn’t matter how far one then advances in the fault, nothing contributes more to aggravate the transgressed interdiction. It isn’t permitted to anyone, certainly, to commit a fault (peccare). Thus, what isn’t permitted holds itself in a single block (in hoc uno), if it is proven that it isn’t permitted. If the interdiction cannot exist in terms of more or less gravity, or greater or lesser – since, if the interdiction has been pronounced, the fault (peccatum) resides in the fact that it is always one and identical – then it is necessary that the faults issuing from that interdiction must be equal (aequalia) to it.”

I’d urge anyone interested to read Cicero’s crazy little treatise, which is pretty short.