Henry Imler November 8th, 2006

This post is an attempt to flesh out Edward Said’s postcolonial theory of Orientalism:”(When set off in italics, the term “Orientalism” will refer to the book by Said, when merely capitalized; it will refer to Said’s theory.)”:. It has drawn from Said’s best-known work, Orientalism and incorporated several articles written in response to or are reviews of the work. These articles included “Orientalism Reconsidered” by Edward Said, and “Review of Books: Orientalism” by C. Earnest Dawn. These articles were utilized to help add clarity to a complex theory.

The four central claims of Orientalism are as follows. First, while Orientalism presents itself as an objective field of study, it was used to justify the political domination of the East by the West. Secondly, Orientalism was actually more about defining itself through the mirror of the East than it was about objectively studying it :”(The very terms “East” and “West” are rejected by Said as valid descriptions; however, they will be used as terms of convenience for the purposes of this paper.)”:. Third, points one and two are produced and reinforced by viewing the Orient as a homogenous group. This essentialist thinking was a false way of viewing people groups and their culture. Said also rejects the validity of the terms Orient and Occident, but employs them because this is how the argument has been framed by the Orientalists:”(Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Cultural Critique, No. 1, 1985, p. 90. )”:. Lastly, the Orientalist scholars are the product of the system they come from. Due to this, they cannot help but to misrepresent the “Other.” Therefore, what is needed is for the subaltern to speak for itself. Continue Reading »

• Ethics , Foucault , Graduate Papers , Political Philosophy , Postcolonialism , Reading Reviews , Science
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Henry Imler October 11th, 2006

A polemicist is someone “who argues in opposition to others.” Try to think of the opposing talking heads one sees so much on quasi-news programs. These people are in such direct opposition to each other that they become entrenched. They do not fight for truth for its own sake, but for their view.

“The polemicist , on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.”

• Ethics , Foucault , Political Philosophy , Postcolonialism
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Henry Imler September 20th, 2006

This paper will seek to explore the relationship between those in power that abuse it, otherwise known as the oppressors, and those that were the recipients of that abuse of power, affectionately known as the oppressed. More specifically, this paper will look first at a particular case of this relationship, the case of the bombing of Hiroshima by the American military with an atomic bomb. Then it will look at a wide-scale nuclear war in general. Three main sources were used in this limited inquiry; John Hersey’s Hiroshima, Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth, and lastly the academic paper Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities by Albert Bandura. The grid of oppression will be looked at as it applies to the case, incorporating elements from Hiroshima and The Fate of the Earth. The grid of oppression is a collection of five ways that oppression can work according to Marion Young in Justice and the Politics of Difference. They include exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, violence, and environmental injustice. Finally, the cases will be examined in light of the social cognitive theory put forth by Bandura. While the bombing and aftermath of Hiroshima was not a clear-cut example of postcolonial strife, there are elements that pervade the reading. The Fate of the Earth details the consequences would be if the powers left over from the postcolonial world ever took the step and started a nuclear holocaust. |inline

• Ethics , Graduate Papers , Political Philosophy , Postcolonialism , Reading Reviews
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Henry Imler September 18th, 2006

The following are my notes from a paper entitled: Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities (Link to PDF) by Albert Bandura.

Thesis:

“Moral disengagement may center on the cognitive restructuring of inhumane conduct into a benign or worthy one by:”

• (false) moral justification
• sanitizing language
• advantageous comparision
• disavowal of a sense of personal agency by ¹diffusion of responcibility or ²displacement of responcibility
• disreguarding or minimizing the injurous effects of one’s actions
• attribution of blame to, and dehumanization of those who were victimized.

The structure of inhumanites is a “supportive network of legitimate enterprises run by otherwise considerate people.”

Given the many mechanisms for disengaging moral control, civilized life requires, in addition to human personal standards, safeguards build into social systems that uphold compassionate behavior and renouce cruelty.

• Ethics , Notes , Postcolonialism , Reading Reviews
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Henry Imler August 30th, 2006

I must have missed page 113 in Postcolonialism, A Very Short Introduction. It outlines the grander scheme (directly quoted with bouts of paraphrasing):

1. P/C stands for the right to basic amenities - security, sanitation, health care, food, and education - for all peoples of the earth, young, adult, and ages; women and men.
2. Resists all forms of exploitation (to humans and to the environment)
3. Politically speaking, P/C seeks to assert the right of autonomous self-government of those who still find themselves in a situation of being controlled politically and administratively by a foreign power.
4. Once this independence is achieved, the nationalism that founded the state is transformed and is not used against the minorities and seeks to establish minority rights, women’s rights, and cultural rights, within a broad framework democratic egalitarianism that refuses to impose alienating western ways of thinking on tricontinental societies.
5. While encouraging personal authenticity of sincerity and altruism, it questions attempts to return to a national or cultural ‘authenticity’ which P/C regards as largely constructed for dubious political purposes.
6. It considers the most productive forms of http://unsoundargument.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=115thought that that interact feely across disciplines and cultures in constructive dialouges that undo the hierarchies of power.

Some thoughts on these points:

I don’t know anyone that would deny 1) in the West to others at present. The question of how to get that to people is the question for westerners. I think that most in the West don’t want 2). The historical question is another matter. That is one of the horrible legacies of the West. It is what got us into this mess. However, there are bad eggs dispersed through the world. The love of money does lead to evil. You find that in all economic systems. It has not been the solely the bane in the West. The first two I understand and I think that there is a lot of work to be done so that there is no more exploitation and rights are enforced.

Now it gets interesting, for me at least. Take number three and especially number four. How can one “refuse to impose alienating western ways of thinking” is they are going to make sure that the state is set up with a system of rights for everyone within a democratic egalitarianism framework? Is not a system of rights for everyone within a democratic egalitarianism framework the very hallmark of the West?

All in all, while I recognize the problem, what Young outlines on page 113 seems to be a cut and paste of Western values that Young likes (or that the P/C likes). I am not sure how that is much different from other models of Western intervention… when presented from the “other.” On the other hand, Young says that all he presents is directly from the “other”, the oppressed, and the people that are in the vacuum of postcolonization. I am with him on the problem. I am still unsure where to do from there. But, alas, I am only a few days removed from first contact. I’ll have my thoughts from class up later.

• Ethics , Political Philosophy , Postcolonialism , Religion
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Henry Imler August 30th, 2006

In my Postcolonial Comparative Religion class we had to write a maximum two page response of our impressions of the book along with questions that arose durring the reading. I could seriously write ten fold about what I read in Postcolonialism, A very Short Introduction by R.J.C. Young. So that is shy this is so short and underdeveloped.

This week’s reading was my first taste of the postcolonial. As a westerner, on top of that, as a white male westerner, the issues brought up have not affected me. Since they don’t affect me, I have not thought on them. In reading the work a swirl of issues flooded around me. Many of them centered on basic assumptions about things, the others flowed from the outworking of those assumptions. Like the book suggests, they are hard to put in an eloquently structured form. Here are some of them. |inline

• Ethics , Personal , Political Philosophy , Postcolonialism
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Henry Imler May 27th, 2006

In an earlier post, I talked about Cushing’s paper, Against Humanism that argued successfully against Humanism in the following two formulations:

Primary Speciesism :

All and only (innocent ) humans are moral persons

Necessary Agency for Personhood (NAP) :

One is not entitled to the kind of moral consideration that persons receive without the capacity for moral agency.

Primary Speciesism is obviously wrong. Cushing points this out when he brings up the case of an alien with abilities identical to ours. Another way to look at this is to imagine a great ape drinking an elixir that develops his cognitive abilities to match those of an adult human, a Dr Zaius:”Planet of the Apes Character List(Dr Zaius)”:http://www.movieprop.com/tvandmovie/PlanetoftheApes/character1.htm if you will. These beings would obviously be persons and therefore would have rights to life. There is nothing on a genetic basis that gives us moral worth. Strict Speciesism is easily thrown out the window with other prejudices such as racism and sexism. So far, I agree completely with Cushing.

However, when it comes to NAP, I think Cushing has a good point. If one holds to NAP, then they are forced to disallow for the moral worth of babies and the retarded. They would be on the same plane as animals because of their reasoning abilities. The notion that human babies have the same moral worth as cats is frightening, to say the least. I think one can modify the approach so that one is not lead into a indefensible position that Cushing lists.

As a Christian, I am tempted to use the easy out of the soul requirement for personhood. Under this view, whoever has a soul is a person (being with moral worth). However, this is empirically impractical, even it if is true. Who around here carries a mark designating if they have a soul? The Christian would reply that the Bible sets forth the beings that have souls. What about beings that the Bible is silent about? Say we encounter aliens. The Bible is silent on the status of their souls. How do we go about determining their moral worth? Christians maintain that the soul leaves the body. What about the people that have nearly died and come back? Did they lose their moral worth while they were seemingly dead? Then there is the animal issue. Christians maintain that animals do not have souls. What if animals are found to have the ability to be rational and communicate? Can we still sanction their wholesale destruction at a whim? If they have no soul and therefore no moral worth, then we can. On the other hand, what if God has imbued the higher animals with souls and did not tell us, since the Bible was written to our situation? Since there is no empirical way to measure the soul, this gets very messy, very quickly.

What if one were to only use a future of value requirement as a starting point in the search for personhood?

The reasoning would be as follows:

1. A future has value if the subject will have the ability to make moral determinations.
2. X, in its future will have the ability to make moral determinations.
3. C1. Therefore, X’s future has value.

1. Subjects with valuable futures are personsO.
2. X’s future is valuable.
3. C2. Therefore, X is personO.

1. PersonsO have a right to life.
2. X is a personO.
3. C3. Therefore, X has a right to life.

While for most cases, I would prefer that approach, as it gets around most of his complaints and provides a way to develop a class of beings with moral worth, it has some limitations that are very disheartening. What about beings that had the ability to make moral determinations, but now are unable to and will never again be able to? An real-world example of this would be a person who has Alzheimer’s. Also, what about those humans who can never make moral determinations, such as the severely retarded? Under the above approach, those individuals would not have a claim to life. I am not prepared to make such a determination; my intuitions are too strong otherwise.

I want to build a personhood and ethical theory that uses the above principles, allows for the moral worth of the past-persons and person-like beings. The ethical side of the theory would use my formulation of ethical relativity:”The Unsound Argument(Real Ethical Relativity)”:http://unsoundargument.com/ethics/real-ethical-relativity, which is nothing like ethical relativism, but instead uses consequentialism to resolve conflicts within a deontological framework.

So far, I can come up with the following personhood categories:

• Persons
• Entities that are below Persons
  • Past-Persons - beings that used to be persons, but are not currently persons.
  • Proto-persons - Entities, that if allowed to develop naturally, will develop into persons
  • Person-like Entities- Entities that have some of the qualities of a person, but not enough to qualify as a person and via natural development will not develop into a person.
  • Non-Persons - Entities that are neither proto-persons, not person-like
• Hyper-persons -Entities that are above Persons
  • Entities that have more qualities than persons and therefore have more moral worth
  • Purely hypothetical
  • God
  • Other Supernatural Beings
  • More advanced life forms, such as Star Trek’s Q.

I want to incorporate all of these classes into the personhood/ethical theory, but I don’t know how to deal with person-like entities. I might be able to solve the animal and severely retarded issues by introducing a clause that the more like a person one becomes, the more of a right to life they receive, a sort of graded personhood. All of this is still unclear where the lines of rights to life are and might seem very arbitrary. Perhaps all beings that are alive have a right to life and when conflicts arise, the beings with the higher moral worth win out over the less ones, ala ethical relativity’s consequences. More thought is needed.

• Ethics , Personhood
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Henry Imler May 15th, 2006

Paper: Altruism, Teleology and God
Author: Alexandar R. Pruss

Summary

Because unlimited altruism is not biologically beneficial and yet humans see it as a desirable trait, there must be a non-scientific explanation for this. The best non-scientific explanation is that a god designed humans to be altruistic.

Part I will deal with the types of Teleology and the introduction of Altruism. Part II will deal with the application of Altruism to the types of Teleology.

Introduction

Pruss begins his paper by discussing a few of the arguments for the existence of God. First up is the ontological argument. It uses pure reason. An example of this is St. Anselm in the Proslogium.

Next up are the argument’s that use empirical observations. They are usually in the following structure:(quoted, but slightly paraphrased)

Common Empirical Arguments for God

1. There is a general fact about reality that cannot be explained in natural (i.e. non-supernatural) terms.
2. One argues that either the best or the only explanation includes the existence of God.
3. :. God exists.

Pruss goes on to say that there are two sorts of arguments from empirical observations, Cosmological arguments and Teleological arguments.

The Cosmological Arguments

Cosmological arguments are what he calls “prima facie value-neutral“, a mere fact, such as “there is order in the universe.”

Example: The Kalam cosmological argument:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. :. the universe must have a cause.

The nice thing about Cosmological arguments are that they lie outside the realm of science. As Pruss puts it, “science is unable to address the question, since scientific explanations are in terms of the activities of contingent beings. The draw back is, are there even answers to such questions?

The Teleological Argument

The opposite side of the coin are arguments from values, such as, “the universe is beautiful“. These design arguments are called Teleological arguments. Pruss notes that usually these arguments are in competition with science and other philosophical explanations to provide explanations. An example of this is “the constants in nature are fine-tuned for the existence of life.” Perhaps the most famous is Paley’s arguments about design in animals. He said that since limbs and other parts of animals serve specific functions, they must have had a designer.

The drawback to this approach is that science may one day explain the features without the aid of a supernatural designer. Paley’s arguments were stripped of their forcefulness by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Evolution explained in natural terms how life could have an appearance of design without there actually being a designer.

So to speak, evolution filled in the gaps that Paley’s God sat in. Alas there was no room in the argument for God anymore. This is where we get the term God-of-the-Gaps. Any argument that uses science’s inability to explain phenomena is called a God-of-the-Gaps argument. Thing is, science keeps figuring out all of it’s problems. This has proved to be rather embarrassing to theists over the years. In addition, in answer to the fine-tuning argument is that if it existed any other way, we would not be here to observe it. This is called the anthropoid principle.

Principled Cosmological/Teleological Arguments

Beyond arguments that rely on holes in science, there are what Pruss calls Principled Teleological Arguments. They are arguments that attempt to explain phenomena that are outside the realm of science. Science can only deal with “hows“, it does not concern itself with “whys” . Well, not after we stopped using Aristotle’s scientific approach to nature. For instance, when confronted with a rainbow, science can tell you how the image is created in your mind, detailing the process of refraction and image collection by the mind. What it cannot do it tell us why it is a beautiful sight. In order to show something is a principled argument, one needs to show how science cannot explain the phenomena and then provide the alternate explanation. Pruss says that it needs to be noted that there are other competing explanations, but these will be from theology or philosophy, not from science.

The Idea of Altruism

Pruss notes that humans exhibit altruism. He defines altruism as doing things for others without expecting to be repaid. He brings up three arguments to back this claim against those of the cynics that believe that all actions that seem altruistic have an ulterior motive. The first conjures up a stranger asking you for the time of day. Secondly, he brings up a study by Monroe, Barton, and Klingemann that details the motives of gentile holocaust rescuers and how they were not attached to selfish reasons. His last argument appeals to the rationality of altruism. Pruss maintains that an important step in the moral development of humans is to realize the unity of mankind. I am no different from you or her. We all have the same moral worth. Therefore, doing a good to you is like doing a good to myself.

Altruism: Doing something for another without thinking to be repaid.

Pruss then argues that Altuism is a trait of the human species that cannot have been a result of evolutionary mechanisms since there is no competitive advantage for the altuist, only the recipient of the altruism. So far this is only a God-of-the-Gaps argument. It only rules out Natural Selection as a cause of altuism. It does not eliminate other naturalistic explanations.

Part II of this notes serries will cover the application of the above notion of Altuism with the two types of teleological arguments from above.

• Christianity , Ethics , Notes , The Existance of God
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Henry Imler April 26th, 2006

Simon Cushing argues against Speciesism in his paper �Against �Humanism�: Speciesism, Personhood, and Preference.� He uses Peter Singer’s definition of Speciesism :

Speciesism…is a prejudice or attitude of bias toward the interests of one�s own species and against those of members of another species.

Speciesism is often called “Humanism“, which of course is Speciesism by the human race. Cushing uses two formulations of Speciesism, a strong and a weak:

Strong Formulation :

All and only (innocent ) humans are moral persons

Weak Formulation :

The personhood of a being should hinge (wholly or in part) on its membership in a particular species or group of species.

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• Ethics , Notes , Personhood
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Henry Imler April 26th, 2006

In an earlier post, I asserted that since humans are animals, they have a certain minimum level of responsibility to the environment:”The Unsound Argument(Humans and the Environment, Part I)”:http://unsoundargument.com/ethics/humans-and-the-environment-a-minimum-level-of-responsibility. If push comes to shove, humans must at least maintain their environment at survival levels. However, humans are not merely animals, they are also persons. Not only are they persons in the objective sense, but are persons in the subjective sense, i.e. moral agents.

I don’t have all of this worked out yet, but I want to posit that with increasing levels of personhood, there comes an increasing level of responsibility to the environment. At one level (animal) there is a responsibility to survive and that overrides all other responsibilities. At another there is moral agents and that they are responsible to how they treat other beings and their environment and at another level there is an awareness of nature and its beauty and that for its sake moral agents that are aware of it have the duty to protect that beauty.

I know how to build the bridge from self-survival to species-survival to all other species-survival, but I am not sure how to build towards the environment for its own sake. I think I am there but I am not sure how to put it into words. I will need to sketch out levels of personhood and match them with the levels of responsibility. So actually this paper will need a strong, developed view of personhood.

• Ethics , Personhood
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