A Reason to be Cheerful

As high-minded as I try to be when it comes to politics I can’t see Boris’s win – and the Conservative resurgence it indicates – as anything other than lamentable. He has given me little reason to consider him personally as a disaster for London and what I find his political leanings, gleaned from the tidbits he has thrown us over the years, as distasteful. On the issues I care about – inequality, education and transport – he has few thought-through policies. This is also a man who has espoused little or no real interest in social justice.

I found the election itself depressing too: not just the bickering over too-few powers but even the onerous business of putting an ‘X’ on a ballot paper. Whilst a Kantian shouldn’t be swayed by empirical reasoning, the ballot papers showed up how dreadful is our electoral system. The Northern Assembly elections have a clear STV system with multi-member constituencies. Stood there wondering where to put my second ‘X’ I realised what a falsehood the second preference system actually is: a majoritarian system with a nominal element of choice tacked on, my vote was going to be a vote for Ken whatever happened. I couldn’t for the life of me see why the Government wouldn’t let me rank the candidates in order of preference.

There is, however, one reason to be cheerful: a pluralistic society requires a plural, diverse system of governance. We now have a different party in power to the one at Westminster in London and in Scotland. Voters are beginning to take a more sophisticated approach to defining their political context. It demonstrates the importance of granting a greater degree of local autonomy than is currently the case.

I’m also secretly hoping that Bojo the Bozo does something bloody stupid like replace bendy buses with hot air balloons or release bears onto the streets to reduce crime. Then hopefully the Tories will never get in.

Biofuels v Food

The logical connective “or” doesn’t translate well in English. You can have an inclusive disjunction or an inclusive injunction. The previous sentence is an example of an exclusive disjunction. The debate over biofuels is a case where policymakers are trying to figure out whether it is an inclusive or exclusive disjunction: is it possible to have biofuels and affordable food (inclusive) or is it one or the other (exclusive). Unfortunately, the debate – like virtually every other arena of environmental policy – is dogged by information asymmetries. How nice it would be to have a “view from nowhere” and get through these riddles.

Biofuels are any fuels derived from natural sources. Obviously oil is actually a biofuel, but the “biofuels” under consideration typically come from grains, soya or sugar cane (and others). Lord Stern has argued that the use of grain-based biofuels are “very worrying” because they compete with food. Many have been talking about this for years - not, interestingly, many environmental groups who as recently as 2004 were championing biofuel. Lo and behold, this year has seen a troubling correlation between rocketing food prices (see graph from The Economist) and the rise of biofuels.

If we are good critical thinkers, then we should be careful here: correlation doesn’t demonstrate a causal connection. Bad harvests and export restrictions as well as increasing demand (the global population continues to increase) are likely to have boosted food prices. But the obvious promotion, through subsidies and tax incentives, of land-use towards biofuel production – as well as the intensive use of limited water resources – has clearly had some impact upon the supply of food, particularly crops that are staple diets for developing countries. Britain and Japan have been the most vocal, whereas others have either denied any strong link or blamed others.

One depressing response has been for the US to champion second generation biofuels that would come from waste products like wood or straw to produce cellulosic ethanol, which wouldn’t compete with food. The same paradigm of thinking was behind that Pacific alliance, aimed at fostering new technologies to combat climate change rather than the more fundamental task of pricing carbon.

If there is a partial link between the aggressive promotion of biofuels by developed countries and the soaring food prices, it demonstrates something significant: the West is still happy to maintain its current style of living at the expense of others. The biggest champion of biofuels has been the USA, which has opted to promote biofuels rather than, say, restructuring transport habits and infrastructure.

Let’s just apply a crude Kantian approach to this situation: what if everyone did that? There are several websites that aptly demonstrate this neat thought experiment.

http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumerconsequences/
http://www.google.co.uk/carbonfootprint/

I recall reading a report published by the New Economics Foundation (if anyone can find me the reference – please email!), which suggested that for everyone in the world to enjoy an equal standard of living, we would have to be constrained to the standard of living in the early 1960s. In 1961, only three out of ten UK households had the use of a car but by 1998 seven out of ten households had the use of a car. Only 2 per cent of households had the use of two or more cars – by 1998 the figure was 28 per cent. The average size of a UK household in 2001 was 2.36 – down from 3.7 in 1961.

Regardless of one’s own self-interest, there is a compelling moral imperative to change how we live our lives. It shouldn’t matter with “biofuels or food” is an inclusive or exclusive disjunctive. Our current lifestyle treats others merely as a means to an end and not ends in themselves. Many debates surrounding policy choices and the environment seem to be built upon the assumption that the developed world should experience be no utility loses when finding a solution. This approach, however, is profoundly immoral.

Who would Kant Vote for on 1st May?

I actually don’t really know the answer to this one. Kant was a fairly conservative sort and might have been tempted over for the guffawing beanbag that is Boris Johnson. What I thought I’d do is look at how Kantian the three main contenders are. I’ve also drawn up a tiny Kantian manifesto for London (post to follow).

Ken claims that his priorities are transport, crime, housing, the environment and community relations. Tackling climate change seems pretty important thing for the Kantian because it is a perfect example of treating others as merely a means to an end. He has also made it fairly clear that he wants to make sure that the most disadvantaged get the best deal out of London’s rising prosperity. However, he has been more than a little deceitful.

Boris seems to have very similar policies, truth be told. He does have a partially retributive policy for anti-social behaviour on the part of youngsters with fee Oyster cards.

Brian Paddick is fairly strong on environmental policy. Importantly he is against authoritarian policing – like the 42-days detention and ID cards.

But other than that – fairly dull and no real candidate I can single out. One thing is in Brian Paddicks favour, however – his commitment to greater powers for London and his party’s commitment to greater decentralisation.

London is big enough and rich enough to be its own city-state, yet the London Mayor has virtually no powers for Londoners to define their political-economic context. But even if it weren’t the principle is morally compelling. No, for me, for any of these candidates to truly stand out they would have to be committed to a City Charter declaring home rule for London.

As my vote can’t go to a London Home Rule Party I’m going to have to fudge it. Oh well.

Words, after speech, reach into silence

As one does when money is a little short on a Saturday evening, I ordered a takeaway and – after Doctor Who you understand – sat down to re-read some Eliot. I was moved in particular by the Four Quartets and Eliot’s understanding of time. He was an avowed Christian by this point, but there is still a healthy dose of Yeats-style mysticism.

“…the still point of the turning world” and later, “Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or much reach / The stillness…” and towards the end, “un-being and being.” By “the still point of the turning world” Eliot means the axle of a wheel, but the later concern with “un-being and being” suggest to me a worry of some philosophers about the nature of time and ontology. The B-theory of time characterises it as tenseless ordering of events, where past, present and future are all equal. Indeed, the poems begin with an epigraph from Heraclitus, whose argument with Parmenides is one of the earliest disagreements over how to characterise time. The poems concern the relationship of the individual to the eternal and the link between one’s “being” and the axle of a spinning wheel captures the ontology the B-Theorist might be trying to articulate.

A way of thinking about one B-Theory perspective is to consider pterodactyls, the cup of tea you’re drinking and mankind’s intergalactic empire as all existing. Sat at home my workplace exists it just doesn’t exist here with me. Similarly, the diplodocus and Martian Colony V all exist just not here with me. There’s a lovely part in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, ‘Watchmaker’, where Dr Manhattan comes close to this sort of understanding.

The reason I decided to post this here is because this links up with something I discussed on one of my NS posts. Kant thought that belief in God provided one with existential sustenance for the moral project of one’s life. I argued that the Nietzschean (and somewhat Eastern, not that I want to be accused of Orientalism) concept of eternal recurrence provided better sustenance.

Kant wanted a non-organised religion of reason to help nurture the idea of God as moral sustenance. What stumbling upon Eliot’s Four Quartets suggests to me is the need for something like what Richard Rorty and Dorothy Allison have suggested: a “secular” religion shaped by literature, where theology has been replaced by literary criticism and his own particular understanding of philosophy (I’m not sure about that, however).

I know what I’m grasping for to aid me in the moral project of my life: something that lies between the Religious Society of Friends and Ethical Culture societies on one hand and literary-philosophical societies and book groups on the other. Anyone?

Good Samaritan

A quick post. The Metro reports that drivers drove around the dying body of a cyclist, with one motorist driving over and breaking the cyclist’s legs. He was knocked down by joydrivers.

In many parts of the world there are Good Samaritan laws – indeed the last episode of Seinfeld is based on just such as law. These come in two types: one law which protects life-savers from compensation claims, the second which legally compels individuals to help in accidents if they are reasonably able to. Germany also requires all drivers to be qualified first aiders.

A Kantian might have problems with the legal compulsion, because that might be constraining an individual’s moral autonomy. However, the German laws are specifically related to road users, which might not be considered such a constraint.

I don’t know… maybe this is where my Kantianism fails and my baser, moral sentimentalist emerges. A Good Samaritan Law for the UK!

CCF and Non-Violence

Gordon Brown wants to have more CCFs in state schools. Predominantly, CCF – that’s Combined Cadet Force, where public school boys learn how to short one another - is concentrated in independent schools. Brown thinks (well, his ex-Tory researcher) that this will improve the public image of the armed forces.

I know most pacifists would be against the militarization of childhood. When I first started teaching I was very much against my school’s CCF, which is compulsory for one of the year groups. One boy pointed out in a history lesson that compulsory CCF wasn’t too far removed from the sorts of things militarised Japan and Germany did with their youth.

Kantian pacifism emerged from the kingdom of ends: belligerent violence or coercion seems the worst case of constraining the moral autonomy of others. I said in an earlier post that I think this rules out the death penalty and clearly rules out any use of violence for personal gain: colonialism and imperialism are big no-nos. We might call this non-aggression: one should not seek to further their own ends through violence or coercion. The first conclusion it might be useful to draw is that the Kantian should commit herself to an education in non-aggression, cultivating and promoting self-control and non-violent attitudes and behaviour. However, does that mean that an individual should not use defensive force against an unjust immediate threat? If self-defence of this kind is permissible does that underwrite a collective right to self-defence?

Doctor Who last week had an interesting case of self-defence:

The Adipose are an alien race composed entirely of fat that would seed other life forms and gestate and develop within them by converting their host’s fatty tissue into their own bodily mass. If necessary, the incubating Adipose can perform an “emergency birth” and convert the whole of their host into their own bodily mass, thus terminating the life of the host.

The Adipose young in this case are not culpable in the threat they pose. Yet it seems to be the case that the host in question has a right to self-defence to destroy the Adipose because the immediate threat against them is unjust in the sense that the “birth” of the Adipose would eliminate their own moral autonomy (i.e. it would kill them).

However, perhaps this is a too clear-cut case to be helpful. What do we mean by “threat” and what do we mean by “immediate”? The Kantian approach gives us a decision procedure to determine what we mean by “unjust” but has problems of its own: can Kantian ethics really permit killing? By justice, Kant means a duty or right that is enforceable. Murder is an injustice because it violates the autonomy of another and therefore is a duty (not-murdering) that is enforceable. I do think one also has a duty to oneself with regards to self-preservation. A test Kant gives us to work out whether we do have such a duty is to see if we can conceive of a possible world in which everybody did that? If we can’t then our “duty” is improperly constructed. If we can conceive of this possible world but see it is a perverted world where we would be unable to pursue our own ends, then it is an improperly constructed duty. Duties arrived at via the former test are perfect duties and duties arrived at via the former test are imperfect duties.

Self-preservation is a negative duty – that is, it doesn’t define something we should produce but constrains our activities in some way. But is it a perfect duty or an imperfect duty? It is one of those awkward duties. Kant puts it as a subjective end as, “there is much in the world that is higher than life… It is far better to sacrifice life than to forfeit morality. It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary that, so long as we live, we do so honourably…” Therefore the duty to self-preservation can be defeated by perfect duties (that is, the duty not to commit murder).

Now fighting is the exchange of physical force between individuals with the intention of coercing the opposition to refrain from a certain action or behave in a certain way. At first glance, the Kantian has to rule this out. We certainly have to rule out any sort of fighting where the goal is the destruction of another autonomous individual. Buddhist monks, for instance, are permitted to defend themselves but are forbidden from killing in the pursuit of self-defence.

There are, however, countless examples where our enforcing duties such as “do not kill” (which we have a duty to do to uphold justice) would conflict with just such a duty. A 9/11-style incident would require us to shoot down aircraft with innocents on board. Or, suppose we were under attack by suicide warriors who had been brainwashed by some sadistic ruler to attack us and the only way to prevent the warrior attacking us was to kill her.

I think the answer to this problem takes us in the direction of certain Eastern martial arts, where fighting is a means of self-defence and mental training (so that one cultivates a non-aggressive attitude). Usually a given tradition is united with a system of morality. Typical elements to these fighting styles are non-belligerence and a minimum use of force. Some martial arts are purely defensive, using their opponents force against them. A warrior who is sufficiently trained is able to avoid harm to both the opponent and herself, and always turning down the violence that is offered. Such restrictions would drastically alter a national armed force, changing military technology and techniques. Unfortunately, such an approach would probably render a country only able to defend itself and wholly unable to persecute wars abroad. It would also rule out most forms of direct intervention, for instance in Darfur.

Returning to the original point, should children be force to join in CCF? Certainly not. Do citizens have a duty to learn the techniques of self-defence? Perhaps. I might need to give this one more thought.

Gaita on Torture

There's a very good podcast on Philosophy Bites with Raymond Gaita, who quite movingly expresses his moral disgust when confronted by the idea of torture. There is also a slight discussion of Kant. His basic pitch is that torture is just one of those things that should never be an option, a bit like deciding to re-enslave the black population. He also points out that it is a serious affront to suggest that the international conventions against torture are out-of-date, since they emerged from the some of the bloodiest times in human history. Give it a listen...