Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

xp to NV: yeah; my impression of the "state of the art" today is that no one really gets why rationality itself should be the ground of morality & so neo-Kantians like Korsgaard are working on grounding morality on autonomy, which Kant mentions in accord with the categorical imperative ("treat people as ends not means to ends") but whose connection in the texts is not especially.

what i'm getting at seems to relate to your idea that states can't be "moral" in themselves. i agree to the point where i wd argue that systems of economic organisation aren't "moral" and that an individual's political beliefs have to be founded on something other than morality.

xp to iatee: not sure what you mean by "the morality of the bigger system itself is far more important" but I think we're just failing to communicate properly a bit here.

ok, NV: the hard thing for me is to see where an individual's beliefs about what she ought to do are "political" & where they are "moral".

a big part of the problem is that we can probably agree on a very broad deontological morality that is pragmatically true for the vast majority of people. eg. it is wrong to kill another human being (except in defence of yourself or a third party). as soon as i apply that kind of ethics to the political sphere, i get into a hugely difficult argument about how my actions contribute to the state, whether states' actions contribute to killing people, what would be the best kind of state to avoid killing people etc.

the sheer multiplication of individual contributions to the functioning of a state makes an uncomputable system of consequences based on individuals' ethical choices, it seems?

and i'd argue that the same near-chaotic system works to exclude utilitarian moral decisions too.

Wondering why utilitarianism is out of the equation here, and if you're similarly down on other forms of consequentialism eg Rawls' theory of justice. Deontology is a non starter imo.

xp to euler

xp to NV: yeah, those are in particular problems of representative democracy, since my main political act in such a system is my vote for/against people who will make the decisions of the state.

your main political act in a representative democracy needn't be your vote tho. you could have a moral imperative to become actively involved in a party for example.

xp to ledge: I accept the usual objections to utilitarianism, but more importantly I think it distorts what we're doing when we reason morally into a type of calculation, which closes off lots of considerations that ought to be part of moral deliberation: what particular people mean to us, for instance.

xp to NV: sure, you could choose to become a representative yourself. I've been thinking a lot about that recently, kinda thinking we all here should run for office (no idea how reasonable that is to do in the UK; in the USA it's totally doable)

xp to iatee: not sure what you mean by "the morality of the bigger system itself is far more important" but I think we're just failing to communicate properly a bit here.

even given the constraints I gave earlier (we start ot w/ "let's assume political-economic system x"), if we put 'the welfare state' in a glass box, look at it and conclude 'this is a morally good thing' and then put 'lower taxes' in a glass box, look at it, conclude 'this is a morally good thing' - well, I'm not sure what the usefulness of that exercise was. they don't operate in glass boxes, they operate as parts of the same system.

bigger picture: I don't think you can analyze an economic object that operates in a utilitarian system from a non-economic, non-utilitarian POV. non-utilitarian economic systems and economic logic exists. in theory and in history and in the world today. but 'the welfare state' as we understand it, and as matters to america in 2011 can't exist without that framework.

so if you're gonna say 'okay, I'm gonna accept utilitarian ethics as a framework for how the economic world operates because it's pretty hard to build a comparably sophisticated model - *however* - after accepting that, I'd like to make future decisions using 'ethical system XYZ'.

sure, then you can pick your overarching (utilitarian...) political-economic logic based on 'ethical system XYZ' and if that includes some sort of welfare state, then you can manage cost-benefit decisions of that welfare state using 'ethical system XYZ'. I think there is some room for that...

I've got a question I wanna throw at you guys. It's a rhetoric question. There's this rhetoric move where you are explaining why somebody did something bad. For example, "he killed that woman bc of his deprivation + impoverishment" or, "they flew the planes into the twin towers bc of united states support for israel and military bases in saudi arabia" or "they conduct terror attacks because of settlements in the western bank." You've probably heard many examples of this - basically a cause is assigned to a particular condemned action. Now when you use this trope, you tend to say (to disavow condoning the action): "I'm not justifying [attack/murder/whatever], I'm just explaining the context for it. But the distinction between contextualization and justified has never been properly unpacked for me. In a real rhetorical sense, what is the difference between a justification and a contextualization? Doesn't context provide justification?

Which is to say: If X caused Y (which is the contextualization assertion) how can you simultaneously assert that Y is independently worthy of condemnation and also that X is a cause for it? If X caused Y, then X is entirely to blame. Y is just the consequence. Justification is inherently packed in. Now you could argue that X provides a space for Y to occur in, but that Y is independently caused. But lots of things provide spaces for other things to happen in and you wouldn't say that have any culpability at all in those things happening. For instance, packed subways can give cover for perverts to rub themselves on victims, but packed subways have no culpability for that action. If you said, "let's understand why this person was victimized -- it was because the subways were allowed to become packed," people would rightly protest because we understand that action Y has to be individually fueled and context X cannot explain it. However with this hot topic political discussions, we do talk in this way. We simultaneously try to assert that X can explain Y, but that Y is also at fault on its own merits. How do we reconcile this (apparent?) rhetorical paradox?

depends on who's making the rhetorical move - at its basest, this argument totally is "X caused Y" and the "i'm not justifying" is made in bad faith. but i think most people don't believe in a hard causality of human action. in that case, the argument is closer to "without X, no Y, but X is not sufficient cause" i.e. the arguer is suggesting that altho moral culpability resides in the perpetrators of Y that culpability is diminished, not disappeared, by event X. and this applies in lots of legal areas i think, when we talk about "mitigating circumstances". those circumstances tend not to excuse a crime but to diminish the severity of punishment because they claim a partiallly causal trigger.

(in yr subway argument nobody sensibly wd claim that conditions which allowed the crime to take place where also partially causative)

(incidentally i think i do believe in hard causality but i have no choice)

It's interesting bc the claim X caused Y is never accompanied by the explicit claim that Y's culpability is diminished, and in fact I will often see that rhetorical move made w/ the simultaneous claim that Y's culpability is in no way diminished, which, I think you're agreeing, is paradoxical.

My philo friend I'm talking to says that the question is the divisibility of explicability and excusability and is inherent in the question of PSR. So for Spinoza where you could reconstruct everything if you understood all the causes, there is no divisibility at all between them but for, say, Kant where there's a moment of choice, that can divide them in that moment.

causality is tricky here- I don't get that it's a X caused Y claim exactly, it seems more like it's a "without which, not" claim, a counterfactual move: if the US didn't have a military presence in Saudia Arabia, then the militants wouldn't have been so pissed off and risen up in anger about this, etc. What is hard is that all the agents in the scenario that we do live in are in the world where there was an X, so talking about those actors but subtracting the supposedly necessary but insufficient factor forces us to mutate our agents into a-US-that-didn't-militarize and Saudi-youth-who-weren't-pissed-off etc. and we don't have those ready to hand

But here we would need to unpack what we mean by cause anyway. You could talk about material, formal, final and efficient causes ala Aristotle if you wanted to get technical about it. The "guilty party" is the efficient cause, and the people bringing up the backstory are selling a retributive story about preceding events as the final cause, from which it sounds like you just demur.

To be clear, I'm not really making a claim about whether a final cause can be held responsible or not. I'm just asking whether it's paradoxical to both evoke the final cause and assert that that has no affect on the actor's culpability here and now. For example, isn't it paradoxical to say that 1. US actions in Saudi Arabia caused Osama Bin Ladin's attack on the World Trade Center and 2. OSL is entirely culpable for those actions?

I guess the trouble is that the word "entirely" would suggest that causality could inhere in a way that, in Aristotle's account, it can't, because lots of different conditions have to be met in order for an action to be able to occur, and nobody could be "entirely" responsible for the state of affairs in which one thing causes another in such a way, so the splitting of responsibility between the material or substantial conditions and the efficient conditions is such that "entirely" isn't going to be technically possible within the frame of this theory- maybe accounts of causality that grow out of a physics of matter or claims about action just aren't helpful if you're going to talk about "responsibility" in an ethical register rather than "causal"? I'm no Aristotle expert here, by the way, just a fan. As far as ethics goes, you can be responsible enough, but "entirely" loses some force when it really is short hard for "responsible enough to be described as the primary/principal actor or agent".

I think there is a difference between motivation and justification. We could take a hypothetical situation where 4 people, A,B,C, and D, are all starving. A goes to his kitchen and makes a sandwich, B sells his labour and buys a sandwich, C steals a sandwich, and D kills someone and takes their sandwich. In all cases are entitled to say, when asked to explain their actions, that 'they were starving'. But their levels of justification is different. And I think we would tend to think C was more justified than, say, E, who stole a sandwich from B just because he wanted to watch B starve. So here the 'X' stays the same but the 'Y' that results is different.

It's the formulation X caused Y that causes the problem. Hunger didn't 'cause' D to kill someone, but it motivated the act. Israel and the USA didn't 'cause' the 9-11 hijackers to do what they did, but they seem to have motivated their actions. So Y can be worthy of condemnation, and be motivated by X, without the strict x causes y formulation. Assuming we believe that what motivates an act goes some way towards justifying it then people are entitled to use background information to alter the justifiability of an action.

In fact, to use the 9-11 example, we can imagine motivations which radically alter the justifiability of the act. So in the X caused Y formulation, the nature of X shifts the nature of the act. To jump into irritating hypothetical mode: If Bin Ladin had a nuclear weapon in NY, and threatened to detonate it if the attackers did not carry out their mission (and, for some reason, they had good reason to trust him), then you might conceivably consider the attacks to be moral. If the situation in X caused Y is a women killing her husband, then it makes a great deal of difference if she did it for his life insurance or to protect herself from her husbands violent rages. The action could still be wrong (i.e. if her husband lost his job and started drinking and she irrationally assumed that she was under threat because of greater spousal violence amongst alcoholics. X) but the nature of X does alter the moral nature of Y.

Basically, I could be one of those people who might say that people attack Israel because of the occupied territories (not to have a political discussion, and It's oversimplified), but I wouldn't like someone to say that the occupation 'explains' the attacks on Israel, nor that it justifies the attacks, but I could say that the occupation motivates the attacks.

I'm sure plenty of people do say X caused Y (no idea how much they mean it), but as far as agents go, I think 'X motivates Y' makes much more sense and clears some of this up.

Assuming I understand the problem at all, and I'm not sure I do.

trying to think of a situation where the X in this is really taken to be THE cause of Y rather than one of many causal factors of Y, but i dont think that is ever the case in these constructions

the other kinda tricksy thing here is that by getting into distinctions re:contextualization vs justification, we are stepping outside of str8 formal logic so that sort of question of rhetoric is a lot harder to engage i guess

also i have a O_O level sinus headache so i make no claims to making any sort of sense at all here so

xpost

at the risk of sinking myself further there also seems to be a missing intermediary step, sort of a X caused Y caused Z, where X is a situation, Y is a mental/physical state, Z is an action taken because of/thanks to that mental/physical state - in which case there could be other Y's (just to use 9/11 other Y's could be things as lofty as choice of faith and as pedestrian as able-bodied or capable of getting to NYC on said date) and X could be more truly causal in the intended way w/o the messy distinction between justified/contextual.

oh man i just reread that and confused myself, fucking cold medicine man

Haha, sleeping pills and alcohol for me. I would definitely watch a TV show where famous philosophers debate issues under various levels and kinds of intoxication. There could be a random drug machine, the audience could vote on who it gets administered to, etc. Would be cool.

could we say that context provides partial justification? I think several posters allude to that above.

like maybe rhetorically they're not treating the cause as a strictly binary proposition (all or nothing) but suggesting that it's just a factor among many. or am I missing the point here? (it's been a long day!)

maybe accounts of causality that grow out of a physics of matter or claims about action just aren't helpful if you're going to talk about "responsibility" in an ethical register rather than "causal"?

i think this is key here. a physical model of causality as related to human actions wd be based at a molecular level, i.e. the concept of causality in science is not the same as the concept of causality in ethics even tho they're often used in a fuzzy, interchangeable way. one is part of the debate re. determinism, and yet i don't feel that anybody making the assertion "action Y was caused by situation X" is ever really making the claim that the actors had no choice.

yeah I think that's right. and it's a good thing we don't treat ethics like physics, too.

yeah i dont think its ever intended as a binary proposition but the statement is formed that way - i guess that the question is whether simply stating it that way implies justification in some way? but if the construction was different, ie something value-loaded like "he killed that woman because he was evil" i dont think there would be any idea that somehow the speaker was implying that evil was a justifying stance, so idk

xposts

it's a good thing we don't treat ethics like physics, too

well for one thing that's why utilitarian arguments suck, yes.

like i said upthread, i think some people genuinely want to imply that there is a physics type causation between political action and political reaction but the nicest thing we could say about people making that kind of argument is that they are at best a bit naive and muddled

take them to out behind the shed

utilitarianism is srsly the dumbest of all the ethical philosophical attempts, i got some angry red penning for a paper on utilitarianism basically along the lines of "maybe you should be less sure that you are so much smarter than J.S. Mill." but fuck that, I am.

i can see some value in utilitarianism as a critique of deontology but as an ethical system in its own right it's mostly pitiful

really tho i believe they both prove off the back of each other that ethics is a system for describing what people shd have done after they've done something else

pity that the entire field of economics is underpinned by it

i have issues with economics as a field too

i think the person we really need to talk to is captain lorax

really difficult to say OBL is the final cause of 9/11 when according to the latest smearograms bush brought down the towers

if anyone can explain this to me I would be very interested in understanding it:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/11/conditional-close-election-markets.html

about habermas on eurozone: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=939

Moishe Postone has been blowing my mind lately: http://platypus1917.home.comcast.net/~platypus1917/postonemoishe_historyhelplessness.pdf

The disastrous nature of the war and, more generally, of the Bush administration should not obscure that in both cases progressives found themselves faced with what should have been viewed as a dilemma—a conflict between an aggressive global imperial power and a deeply reactionary counterglobalization movement in one case, and a brutal fas- cistic regime in the other. Yet in neither case were there many attempts to prob- lematize this dilemma or to try to analyze this configuration with an eye toward the possibility of formulating what has become exceedingly difficult in the world today — a critique with emancipatory intent. This would have required developing a form of internationalism that broke with the dualisms of a Cold War framework that all too frequently legitimated (as “anti-imperialist”) states whose structures and policies were no more emancipatory than those of many authoritarian and repressive regimes supported by the American government.

Instead of breaking with such dualisms, however, many who opposed Ameri- can policies have had recourse to precisely such inadequate and anachronistic “anti-imperialist” conceptual frameworks and political stances...

Let me elaborate by first turning briefly to the ways in which many liberals and progressives responded to the attack of September 11. The most general argument made was that the action, as horrible as it may have been, had to be understood as a reaction to American policies, especially in the Middle East.1 While it is the case that terrorist violence should be understood as political (and not simply as an irrational act), the understanding of the politics of violence expressed by such arguments is, nevertheless, utterly inadequate. Such violence is understood as a reaction of the insulted, injured, and downtrodden, not as an action. While the violence itself is not necessarily affirmed, the politics of the specific form of vio- lence committed are rarely interrogated. Instead, the violence is explained (and at times implicitly justified) as a response. Within this schema, there is only one actor in the world: the United States.

Critiquing the left w/ Marxism is like a dream come true.

http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/how-does-the-subaltern-speak/

long response by marxist/postcolonialist chris taylor http://clrjames.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/not-even-marxist-on-vivek-chibbers.html

counter-response by chris heideman http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1297-not-even-marxist-paul-m-heideman-examines-chris-taylor-s-critique-of-vivek-chibber (complete w/ counter-counter response from taylor in comments)

so i'm no expert on these matters, but Chibber seems a bit vacuous?

I am endorsing the view that there are some common interests and needs that people have across cultures. There are some aspects of our human nature that are not culturally constructed: they are shaped by culture, but not created by it. My view is that even though there are enormous cultural differences between people in the East and the West, there’s also a core set of concerns that people have in common, whether they’re born in Egypt, or India, or Manchester, or New York. These aren’t many, but we can enumerate at least two or three of them: there’s a concern for your physical wellbeing; there’s probably a concern for a degree of autonomy and self-determination; there’s a concern for those practices that directly pertain to your welfare. This isn’t much, but you’d be amazed how far it gets you in explaining really important historical transformations.

why do we have to keep fighting this fight? why does marxism need to be "universal" (or have universal application) to be useful/valid/etc?

I had a professor at NYU explain in class once that we can't judge or condemn cultures that practice clitoridectomies bc eurocentrism.

i say go ahead and judge but it's that prof's need to claim some "universal" ground (even if it be relativism) that leads him to say such absurd things. judge and be judged!

idk what to tell u. i don't think he's vacuous and i think this is an important debate to have (esp bc, as he notes at the end of the interview, post-colonialism isn't going away anytime soon). it's partially about staking out the meaning of liberalism in 2013, and the parameters of what it is trying to do. i think they're trying to do very different things, and mai nafka minnah? lead to numerous different results -- cf adbusters thread for some examples?