Welcome to the world of human contradiction!

Kevin Spacey at Georgetown

Keeping markets in their proper place... Moray reinvigorating public discourse

Economics should be seen as a sub-field, as a branch of moral and political philosophy.

What's missing is engaging with big ethical questions. Questions about the right way of valuing goods and social practices. So... Why do we shrink from this?

Morally invigorate the terms of public discourse. To overcome the bad habit of outsourcing our moral judgements to markets what we need is a politics of mutual respect that engages with competing views, including competing moral and even spiritual conceptions.

 

Michael Sandel - Are There Things Money Shouldn't Be Able To Buy?

Ethics of the Fathers

Ethics of the Fathers contains timeless wisdom. It is a collection of ethics, honesty, and advice.

Ethics of the Fathers: os textos

Referido na palestra dada por Aaron Ahuvia no Fórum do Futuro, Porto 2015

Freedom does not exist. It's either determinism or randomness.

The Rise of the Data Religion



"The word 'freedom' simply has no meaning in the life sciences of today."

"If an organism is just a collection of algorithms, and these algorithms are not free in any sense, this means that, at least potentially, an external system, an external entity, can understand me perfectly. It just needs to understand all the algorithms that come together to build this machine, this structure."

"Feelings are just biochemical algorithms calculating, either of two things: probabilities of survival and probabilities of reproduction. That's it."

"Sexual feelings are biochemical algorithms."

"The algorithms of your feelings have succeeded, for millions of years, to pass the most rigorous tests of natural selection."

"Liberalism is listening to your feelings. Going with your heart. It was a practical guidance. It was not just a theory. Now, we move to the next stage, where people say, 'don't listen to your feelings, what do they know?' Listen to Google, listen to Amazon or to Facebook or whatever. They understand how you feel, better than you know how you feel, because they have much more information and they have much better algorithms than what natural selection gave you. They have information, not only about your emails and your books and so forth."

"Does life really mean nothing more than just information processing? What about consciousness?"

"Maybe the life sciences have got it wrong. Maybe the humans and other animals are not reducible to algorithms. however, in historical terms it's not as important as you might think, because a religion or ideology does not have to be correct in what it says, in order to take over the world. We have many cases, previously in history, where religions and ideologies, which said, what we think today, to be completely erroneous things about the world, nevertheless managed to take it over. In scientific terms the story, for example, that Christianity tells about the world [...] it's not true. It's simply not true. At least according to science. But this did not prevent Christianity from taking over most of the world. So you don't need the truth to take over the world. Similarly with these new data religions, maybe, they're based on a misunderstanding of life, but this will not necessarily prevent them from taking over the world."

"For me, the most beautiful tension and connection is between biology and computer science. Very often, when people think about the ideas I raised in the last part of the lecture, they give all the importance to the advances in computer science, to our ability to create better and better algorithms and computer programs. But in my eyes the real revolution is actually from the life sciences. The really big revolution is when the life sciences are telling us that animals are basically biochemical algorithms. If they didn't tell us this, then you can have all the advances you want in computer science, it won't impinge on humanity. You will still have humans which is something completely different and all the advances in robotics and computers... ok, we'll have better computers, we'll have better robots, but it won't really make much of a difference to us. When it becomes really amazing and really frightening is, that once you realize (and this is a contribution of the life sciences) that humans actually work in the same way, then you can make the connections and this is the really frightening stuff. This is also why I think, more and more companies like Google, that started simply in the computer business, are moving more and more to the biotechnology business, and then the two industries are merging into one. The most fundamental idea in this respect comes from the life sciences, which says: organisms are algorithms. This is the most important insight of our age, and also the most important question, because we don't have any proof of it. Currently it's just dogma. We don't have any explanation of how any kind of algorithm can create subjective experiences. Indeed in the field of computers, we're not even close to creating subjective experiences in computers. It's just the dogma, the people say: yes, it's the same. To give another historical reference, back in the 19th Century, when they tried to understand humans and the human mind and the human soul or whatever you like to call it, one of the main theories was that humans were not algorithms, humans were steam engines. This is the basic metaphor that standed (?) the basis of Freudian psychology. Humans usually tried to explain themselves in terms of the most sophisticated technology of the day. In 1900 the most sophisticated machine, the most sophisticated technology which was the basis for all economy, was the steam engine. Even today, when we want to unload our angst, we pick up the telephone and we release some steam. The idea is that the human being is built like a steam engine, it has all these pressures inside, and if you block it here it goes there. And much of Freudian psychology is built on this. [...] Now we say human beings are not like steam engines, they are like computers. But at present, at least, this is just a dogma. We don't have the hard facts to actually prove it."

Na fase das perguntas e respostas, é muito interessante a reflexão que YH faz acerca de quando se terá iniciado o patriarcado [+/- ao minuto 1:00:00]. Apesar de fisicamente inferiores aos homens, as mulheres sempre tiveram melhores competências sociais. Não se compreende, então, por que razão o patriarcado se impôs. Isto fez-me lembrar uma das histórias do livro SUM, de David Eagleman, acerca de uma deusa, tão compassiva, tão compassiva, que não se conseguia decidir sobre quem enviar para o inferno.

E a propósito de questões levantadas na parte final das Q&A, lembrei-me desta palestra.

A Vida Examinada

"The responsible being is the one who thinks they've never been responsible enough. They've never taken care enough of the other. The other is so in excess of anything you can understand or grasp or reduce. This in itself creates an ethical relatedness. A relation without relation. Because you don't know, you can't presume to know or grasp the other. The minute you think you know the other, you're ready to kill them. You think: 'Oh, they're doing this or this, they're the axis of evil, let's drop some bombs.' But, if you don't know, if you don't understand this alterity, it's 'so' other that you can't violate it with your sense of understanding. Then you'll have to let it live, in a sense."
Avital Ronell

Ser altruísta é mau?

Ayn Rand - Why Altruism is Evil 

"Humans must learn to care for fatal substances [nuclear stuff, por exemplo] that will outlast them and their descendants beyond any meaningful limit of self-interest. What we need is an ethics of the other, an ethics based on proximity of the stranger."
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects]

Can Science Tell Us Right From Wrong?

Diz Simon Blackburn:
I also agree that our values can be tempered by science. I think, for example, that the further understanding, for example, of the similarities between the male brain and the female brain march alongside other cultural causes to assist in the equality of women and I hope it very much does so. I think that measurements of identity of intelligence, identity of skill, identity of other cognitive functions will be scientific measurements. They could also insist in breaking down racial barriers and in breaking down gender barriers. So, of course, science can inform our values and should inform our values, and I think we all put our hands up to that.

As to whether you need nothing but science, which I think was the first message we heard, I think I'm afraid I don't agree with Sam (Harris) about that. And neither do the other three speakers we've heard so far. And the reason, I think it's an important reason, it's philosophical, I'll just spend a couple of minutes saying why I think it so.

Virtually all philosophies of mind recognize two different kinds of mental state. There are mental states whose business is to reflect the world as it is, to represent the world to, in other words, inform you about the environment in which you are to act. Those go by the name of beliefs. For if a belief is sufficiently certain and sufficiently well tested you might call it knowledge. So there are beliefs about the world, knowledge about the world, and their business is to reflect the world as it is.

But then there are mental states like desires or intentions, or concerns. Now they have a slightly different, the usual metaphor that philosophers use is 'direction of fit'. They're the things that you care about. And their function is to motivate you to get the world to conform to the content of the desire. If you desire to go to the fridge and get a beer, your business is to, you're set, you're poised, you're disposed to change the world so that first of all you will become nearer to the fridge than you were and secondly that you get a beer. That's changing the world. And the function of the desire is to change the world to conform to whatever is the content of the desire.

Now, many, many moral philosophers, myself included, put values on the 'desire' side of those mental states. The job of values is to orientate you towards the world, to orientate the way you behave, to, as it were, to reflect what you care about, what you desire. It's not just what you desire, it's what you're concerned about in much more important ways. A value is like a desire that you are prepared to make public, that you want coordination on, that you're prepared to insist upon from other people. At it's limit it will define things that you think you must do, not just things you want to do and things that other people must do in relationship to you. So, those are values.

So it's going to be inevitable that there's a gap between fact and value because your two mental states, the ones that represent the way of the world and the ones that motivate you to act in the world as you understand it to be, have this different function.

So, it's one thing to know the world and what the world is like, and it's another thing to care about it in any particular way.

Now Sam [Harris] said that you could just chuck away all the writings of moral philosophers because science had discovered that ethics is about promoting welfare and avoiding suffering. Well, I don't know which science discovered that. It was certainly a major theme of Aristotle, it was a major theme of the Buddha, it's a major theme of Christianity, it's a major theme of any moral philosopher that's ever lived.

Where the moral philosophers find the going difficulty is in having an adequate conception of human flourishing, so let me give you a couple of examples. Some people think that flourishing is just a matter of contented, happy kind of dreamlike mental states. A bit like after you take a spliff or two or you got that beer out of the fridge. This was the target of, for example, 'Brave New World' by Aldous Huxley. He created, he wrote about a world of, sort of, zombies. Happy zombies kept in a kind of dreamlike contented state by a combination of drugs and lies. Another way you can be happy, you can flourish, is by living in a fool's paradise. By turning your face away from the things that might make you unhappy or just be an ignorant of them. So you can take two people in identical apparent mental states. Each of them believes they're living the American dream but one of them is in a complete illusion. He believes that his wife loves him and that his children love him and that the job is going well and that his colleagues respect him, and none of that is true. He's living in a fool's paradise, and according to Aristotle and many moral philosophers following him, that man is not flourishing because he is living under an illusion. However happy he may say he is, however happy he might appear to be by some neurological measure, since it's not a life of achievement and of real truth and attainment to a way of being in the actual world, he's living in a fool's paradise.

Again, other people have had conceptions of flourishing which included suppressing desires rather than satisfying them. The Buddha did this. Stoicism does this. The idea is that you can easily become a kind of utility gobbler, a utility monster. You want to gobble up experiences, you want to gobble up goods. You want to buy bigger houses, you want to satisfy more and more desires, and that that isn't a flourishing way of life, even if you managed to satisfy them. The real life consists in self mastery and wisdom and understanding that a desire satisfaction doesn't necessarily bring the most flourishing kind of life.

Now all those are moral ideas which throw around the conception of well-being and problematize it. Sam [Harris] thinks we can do without all that. That you can go to a scientist and say, was Buddha right about flourishing? I don't think you can. I think you have to work out for yourself what you care about in your life and the way you care to live it. And, actually, the same comes when it is a question of the utility of others. Peter  [Singer] talks about the expanding circles of reason by itself. Means that you, as it were expand from being concerned just for yourself and for your family, to be concerned for more and  more and more sentient things until, eventually, you become a servant of the world. Giving away all your money to other people and so forth.

I don't think reason tells you such thing. I think it's an excellent thing if you expand your sentiments and I very much hope, as it were, that we all do become more charitable. But I don't think that you are under any obligation to become a servant of the world. And one of the hardest things in ethics is to decide in how to prioritize your own well-being the well-being of your family, the well-being of those to whom you owe debts of gratitude, your loyalty to particular groups amongst whom you live, versus a more impersonal duty to those who lie outside that immediate circle. I think prioritizing one over the other is a very hard decision many of us have to make. All of us have to make. Every time you take your children on holiday, you could be saving three children in Africa, their death or their eyesight or whatever. And yet people do go on taking their children on holiday. And I'm glad they do. I think that they have to.

So, prioritizing these things is very hard, it's very difficult, it's not solved just by saying, oh it would be awful if everybody was be miserable and it would be wonderful if everyone was happy. You can't live simply with that as a guide. It's no guide at all. So I'm afraid ethics is and remains a very difficult subject, and it's a complete illusion to suppose that science will give us all the answers.

Nós, cá na Terra.

Depois de ter corrido vários blogs e de ter entrado nesta problemática desencadeada pelas palavras do Papa, ocorre-me o seguinte:
O que acham da ideia da Mãe Natureza nos ter dotado do orgasmo para garantir a sobrevivência da espécie? Aliciante, não? Não sei. Terá sido assim? Há-de haver para aí seres que se reproduzem sem precisar disso. Estarão "programados" geneticamente para isso, pois não têm cérebro para decidir que não querem reproduzir-se e querem é gozar a vida!! Se calhar esta coisa de achar que a sobrevivência das espécies é algo fundamental é apenas fruto de cérebros pensantes e imaginativos. Num contexto universal se calhar não tem relevância nenhuma. Será apenas um acaso. Um acaso que uns acharão belo e que outros necessitarão de uma explicação investigada ou contada como se de uma história se tratasse.
E depois há, ainda, a inexplicável "química" da atracção!
Eu até sou capaz de compreender que haja gente que tenha decidido optar pela abstinência sexual, pelo celibato. Cada um é como é. No contexto da realidade dessas pessoas o preservativo não faz qualquer sentido. Também não faz sentido a paixão carnal, a atracção física (química?), pois o rumo que resolveram dar às suas vidas valoriza a outras questões, no seu entender, de maior elevação. Tudo bem. Nada contra. O que eu não consigo compreender é que se sintam impelidos a aconselhar outras a seguir o seu exemplo quando os contextos são totalmente diferentes.