thomas hobbes

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/opinion/25friedman.html
"Paging Uncle Sam"
by Thomas Friedman
February 25, 2009
The New York Times

In a way, you can almost look at the history of the 20th century as an argument for Hobbes' views - when there were a lot of nations with power, we had great power politics, and that gave us two world wars. When you had two, we didn't have major wars, but that's mainly because of MAD, and we nearly all died. And since the fall of the USSR, we've had twenty years of peace and prosperity nearly the world over.

a brief manifesto

Philosophers often try to answer ethical questions like, "Are you obligated to flip the switch?" "Is abortion permissible, given..." "How important is it to keep your promises?" I do not want to write about these topics, not exactly. I'd rather discuss questions like, how would it change your life if you found out you were going to die in a month? What would you do differently? What does this reveal about the way you've been living your life, and the order of your soul? What does this mean for those of us who haven't yet realized that death is, indeed, coming for us to?

I would rather write about what happens when one's central goals become impossible to achieve - whether it's failing out of a chosen career (professional academic, concert pianist, whatever), or losing your love (whether it's death or maybe the fact that they were just never that into you), or a legislative battle, or whatever. I want to write about the lingering possibility of failure that hovers over all our projects, and what it is to live with that.

(on a similar note, I want to write about what it means for us that we may, indeed, never really have that good an understanding of the people around us - or even ourselves - what it means that we may be drastically wrong about these things).

I want to write about how to both agree and disagree with another, what an honorable enemy might be, the difference between treating others as mere means, and as ends in themselves, and the various distortions and misconceptions this distinction has been subject to.

that's all for now.

critiquing concepts

I'm trying to figure out how we critique concepts; as near as I can tell, there isn't a unitary answer (maybe: they are untrue to reality?)

One case is I think exemplified by the article "The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility." Clearly, what's up with the argument presented is that this concept of "ultimate moral responsibility" has some funkiness in it. What's going on - what is the cause of what, who did what, etc - whatever we say about "ultimate moral responsibility," these things won't get touched. What we need to do, then, is set that concept aside, and ask ourselves: knowing the facts, and knowing our purposes, what concept of moral responsibility do we need? This is a kind of move I like to make a lot - step back from the argument, then ask what concept we need, given our aims, rather than just asking whether the concept applies or not. (this paragraph could use some conceptual sharpening).

Another, different case is that of racism (and similar matters). In this case, a person (or indeed anything - the point goes beyond interpersonal interaction) is identified as having one trait (e.g. A), and our concepts lead us to infer that this person is also X, Y, and Z (stupid, lazy. and immune to pain). But if we were to pay closer attention to the individual instance - if we were to see what's in front of our faces - we'd realize that this person, while A, is not X or Y. The bias study cited at the end of this post demonstrates this point pretty interestingly.

(I am less confident about what follows)

The troublesome cases seem to come in when having and using (or whatever) the concept shapes the experience / reality. (It strikes me that I want to finish Haslanger's paper "But Mom, Crop-Tops Are Cute!"). This can happen in a lot of different ways. For example (this is not meant to be an exhaustive list), having a concept can more or less cause me to see things differently. If I am expert at big cats, and a puma bounds through the room, I might see a puma, while you just see a large cat.

The trouble seems to set in when we have different concepts that can't really be integrated (in contrast, it doesn't impugn the concept "large cat" to know what a puma is). I don't know of good cases like this.

It also strikes me that when it is a case of having a concept cause you to have different sorts of experiences, we can ask "what sort of life would we like to lead," whereas this is more difficult when the concepts "alter reality" in... ? way.

CITATIONS

"The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility"
by Galen Strawson
in Ethical Theory: An Anthology
ed. Russ Shafer-Landau
2007
Blackwell Publishing


"Researchers Try to Cure Racism"
by Brandon Keim
January 20, 2009
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/racetraining.html