Condemned to be free

How much of our lives and the things that happen to us are we responsible for? The common-sense answer would be that we are responsible only for those actions which we cause and intend to cause, but that we are not responsible for the things that happen to us, good or bad, that just happen to us. That is to say, where the causes was something other than us. For example, things caused by society, luck, accident, other people, or physics. And this common-sense answer is often taken as relinquishing us from responsibility for things like being drafted in a war, or being born into poverty, or indeed being born into wealth.  

But in Being and Nothingness, Sartre takes these ideas and arrives at a completely different and much more extreme conclusion. We are wholly responsible for ourselves, he argues, including even if we are drafted into a war. 

To make this argument, Sartre first has to argue that consciousness doesn't pick it's intended actions just based on what the facts cause it to pick, e.g. Bill is caused to get a drink because of the fact that he is thirsty.

Sartre argues that there could be no fact in the world that could motivate our conscious actions by itself. We would always need in addition goals, values and interpretations in order to have the intentions that lead to our deliberate actions. Put another way, for a cause (some fact in the world) to motivate an action it must be experienced as a cause. So for example, for Bill to be motivated to perform the action of getting a drink because of the cause 'thirst', he must first experience thirst as as a cause. He must have ideas about what one should do if they are thirsty. If he did not have the idea that when thirsty he should get a drink, on the other hand then thirstiness would cease to be a cause for him doing so.

So similarly, according to Sartre's thinking, even if Bill is stranded on a dessert island and is thirsty and can't get a drink, it's his responsibility, because it's he, not his thirst, that has motivated him to want a drink.

Sartre himself gives the example of war.

"If I am mobilized in a war, this war is my war... I deserve it first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by desertion; these ultimate possibles are those which must always be present for us when there is a question of envisaging a situation. For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it. ... If therefore I have preferred war to death or to dishonour, everything takes place as if I bore the entire responsibility for this war. of course others have declared it, and one might be tempted perhaps to consider me as a simple accomplice. But...it depended on me that for me and by me this war should not exist, and I have decided that it does exist... But in addition the war is mine because by the sole fact that it arises in a situation which I cause to be, and that I can discover it there only by engaging myself for or against it"

To be caused and to be motivated

There is an argument against free-will that goes like this: all actions are caused, and if it's caused it's determined and not a free choice. But, even if an action was not caused, it still wouldn't be a free choice, because if an action isn't caused by anything then it's random.

But there is a difference between a cause and a motive that is relevant for discussion of free-will.

People can be *caused* to experience something out of their control. For instance, if Ted is pushed out of a window, he is caused to hit the ground and be injured. Here we can say that it was determined that Ted got injured (it was determined by the fall).

But if one is 'motivated', instead, then the implication is that one is only encouraged towards an action, but might not take it up. With motivation, the future is open. For instance, if Bill is thirsty, he is motivated to go get a drink, or ask someone to bring him a drink. But his motivation alone does not guarantee that he'll do either of those things, he might pick staying thirsty.

So it's simply not the case that a free-will advocate is limited to only the options that actions are caused or random, there is a third category.

The determinist can only argue that the third category doesn't really exist--that motivation as so defined is a myth. For instance, they can say that Bill thinks he chooses to stay put rather than go get a drink to sate his thirst, but really circumstances mean that Bill would always make that 'choice' and not another.

Life without Drama

Personal dramas are created when the parties involved feel so sure that they're entitled to their negative interpretation of one another that actions such as cutting people off, breaking up, or being disrespectful, harsh or maybe even cruel, are warranted.

What is surprising though is that not much is actually needed to convince people they are entitled to their negative interpretation. People always feel they are, of course. But that's the point, they *feel* they are. Emotions become part of the decision. Frustration, anger, confusion, sadness, pride--it's not always an obvious emotion. But an emotion and a few bits of evidence are not sufficient to make an informed decision.

What the emotion does is fit with a particular interpretation of the evidence, and THEN cause that interpretation to become rigid (because emotions are hard to overturn). One is stopped from easily seeing *different* perspective (including more true perspectives)

Actually almost nothing warrants a negative interpretation. It's always good to err because you'll learn more being open to positive interpretations than the other way around. Negative interpretations are a bit of a full stop.

On maybe an implicit level the idea behind this process is that we sometimes should cut people off, break up, or be disrespectful, and being entitled to a negative interpretation tells us when to do this. So if we never let ourselves have negative interpretations we might end up 'being walked on' or harmed in some ways. But this way of thinking ignores how easy it is to get along with people if you try to. One can take up ideas like 'not taking things personally'.

We simply don't need to ever be disrespectful to people to not be victimised. We can not be victimised by our positive attitudes. And as for breaking up and cutting people off, this is something we should rarely ever do. People should be able to drift apart mutually if they so wish. But in general, relationships have a lot of knowledge to them, and we should only ever put a stop to them if absolutely necessary. Where 'absolutely necessary' here means 'when the other person has destroyed the relationship' and there is now nothing that could be done'. And where 'absolutely necessary' DOES NOT mean 'my negative interpretation tell me to end the relationship.'

A Life Without Deadlines

Deadlines serve a pretty important function: Some times, things need to be done by a certain time. But there is a dark side to deadlines, and that is self-coercion.

We all know that deadlines can be pressuring, stressful, boring, and even upsetting, but what all these problems come down to is that you are forcing yourself to do something. And not only is self-coercion unpleasant in the short term, but it's bad for you in the long run. There are two reasons for this. 

Firstly, if you don't want to do something, you might be right not to. You're rejection of doing something indicates you have a criticism of it, and you'll probably agree with the criticism if you understood it, after all, it's *your* criticism. But the self-coercer speaks to themselves in just the same way a coercive person speaks to their victim. 'You're just being lazy,' 'you're just being stupid', 'you're just weak'--anything but actually taking their wishes seriously. So the criticism gets pushed down and repressed. And it's not good to ignore a problem, because doing so also ignores the solutions that will help you!

The second reason is self-coercion breeds doubtle-think. You might want to meet the deadline in some regards--you want the promotion, you want the degree, you want the hot body by bikini season--but you also have problems with it that mean you don't want to do it. You're left with double-think. Worse still, your double-think can breed if you live a life of self-coercion. 

Maybe you want to meet this deadline because you want the promotion, but maybe you only want the promotion because of another instance of double-think. For example, say, you want a job that pays well to prove you're a worthy person, but you had also wanted to be a circus clown because it's nice to entertain people. 

Deadlines are one of the ways, along with all other kinds of self-coercion, to keep yourself tied up in knots, confused and distressed about the things you think you want, if you want them at all. 

THE SOLUTION 

Life without deadlines isn't really about throwing out egg timers and never satisfying a client. You can still do things by a certain time. The trick is, to do it by a certain time just because you want to. No coercion. No pain. And to get to that state, you need to do the opposite of what was said above. You need to do things you don't have criticisms of. And you need to get rid of double-think. Both of these things really come down to the same thing: you need to do what's fun for you. 

It's contrary to all the advice out there. People like to say about deadlines 'ah, well it's just life.' They advocate force as a means of being productive. But it's not really true. Ultimately, the most productive person is one who loves what they're doing. Such a person gets a thing done *before* the deadline. So however contrary it is to common advice, it's not exactly unintuitive. We know it works. The question is are you willing to do what you want, to get what you want?

ignorance is bliss, but the unexamined life is not worth living

Ignorance can be bliss. If you're seriously ill but don't know it, then you have all the bliss that comes with not being ill. The same is true if you're about to get fired but think you're being called in for a promotion. Or if you think you're a charming person but everyone hates you.

And indeed, if you're anything like me, you've once or twice avoided going to the doctors because you don't want to hear bad news. Or you've avoided exposing yourself to tough criticism because you don't want to know if you're doing something wrong. Or you've held a concerning looking letter in your hands a few moments longer than necessary because if you don't open it, it's a bit like there's been no bad news... right?

To will ignorance for the sake of bliss is a common enough thing. But what kind of person would choose that as their default? For most of us, these are some of our more shameful moments. We'd much prefer to be calm and pragmatic in the face of bad news. Why? For the very obvious reason that we have the problem even if we don't know we do, and the best thing to do with a problem is solve it. Simple.

OK, but it's hard to solve problems, and I like bliss.

Ignorance can be bliss, but being completely and desperately stumped on a troubling problem can be bliss. This is why you end up with people who devote their whole lives to science, maths, philosophy and so on--it's not because they're easy.

What makes you happy is reprogrammable. It depends on what ideas you have. So if ignorance can make you happy, and problem solving can make you happy, then there's nothing in it except what's better for you.

I think this would be a nice way to interpret 'the unexamined life is not worth living,' it's not worth living because there's no reason to prefer it to the examined one.

The Relevance of Scepticism

When a sceptic asked of your proposition 'ah, but what if you're a brain in a vat on Mars?' the appropriate response in almost all cases is simply this: 'so what?'

There's an unwritten. unspoken, often unthought clause to all our theories and propositions, and that is, that when we are arguing they are true or false--good or bad, we mean as theories or propositions to describe this world we live in, whatever this world is when looked at from above it: An illusion, part of a multi-verse full of other worlds with differing truths, or whatever else it could be.

To point out that there could be a scientist, looking over your brain as it thinks within its vat, who can see this extra context about your world that you don't know (a.k.a that you're imagining it), is in many ways the same kind of claim as saying that there's a God looking at you with the extra information that he created you and put your world into motion. It's the same in the following sense: that despite the fact that it is extra information that would change your perceptive on your theories and propositions, it doesn't really affect the quality of your theories and propositions given that you live in the world that you do, a.k.a one that almost entirely ignores this "extra information".

For this reason, let Moore say to the sceptic, "damnit, I have a hand!"* And let it be unsaid that he means 'at least in my world I do'


*'cause I see it' isn't really a good reason to believe you have hands in and of itself, but that's quite another matter

The Utilitarian Cost of Free Healthcare

Oregon Health Plan is state funded healthcare, and with euthanasia legal in the state, the local government are finding interesting ways of cutting from the budget in this time of financial crisis.

The OHP no longer covers medication that slows the growth of cancer, but they do offer euthanasia in its place. The reason: price. 

If you've ever learned about the five transplant patients of any other thought experiment that tried to test the claims of utilitarianism against our moral intuitions, you might have heard them be described as 'exaggerations', or 'extreme examples', but the reality of State funded healthcare, such as the OHP, or the NHS, is they do operate on some, occasionally quite distributing, utilitarian principles. They have to. As Dr Walter Shaffer of Oregon put it, "We can't do everything for everyone." There are always more patients than resources and choices have to be made. Value judgements have to be made about what helps the greatest number, and indeed what makes the greatest number happy (after all, why help a cancer patient that has low chance if you can help a cancer patient that has a high chance?)

In the UK euthanasia isn't yet legal, but there are back-door euthanasia programs like the Liverpool Care Pathway, an NHS program where those who are 'dying' can have their medication, food and water withdrawn, hastening the process of death. Professor Patrick Pullicino recently came forward with information about thousands of elderly patients killed on the NHS prematurely every year because they've been diagnosed as terminal.  Why are the elderly picked on? Well, even if they aren't actually dying, they soon will be, right? Why waste resources?

Most good people turn up their nose at the five transplant patients. To treat life as non-sacred for the benefit of others is a disguising idea. Even if the 'others' are a larger and preferable group. Yet in real life, are we OK with a bit of utilitarianism or what?

While a Libertarian, and some conservatives, would happily argue that there are private healthcare options that'd solve this problem, it's the supporters of State healthcare that strike up my curiosity. Is this the cost they happily pay for free health care for all most? 

What's good about doing a philosophy degree?

If you want to learn to be good at philosophy you need to come at it with two things. Firstly you need self-direction. You need to be curious. To have problems you're interested in. To be willing to think for yourself. Secondly you need to have a very good understanding of philosophy's traditions. You're only ever one of the latest people to learn something, and as that person, you're one of the least well informed.

Both are crucial, but it's easy to prefer one over the other.

It's common to find self-direction scary, and it's common, if you do have self-direction, to sometimes be so sure of your own thoughts that you underestimate the value of very thoroughly learning why traditions can show you up.But if you can learn to have both, the one keeps the other in its toes in just the right way.

For these reasons a philosophy degree CAN be the best thing to do. I say 'can' because it's so easy to screw up at it. You can screw it up by not doing a good combination of these two criteria.

Self-direction:

Firstly, it's not school. you're not told what to think. You're teacher is no longer a straight up authority, but just some guy who happens to really be familiar with the papers you're looking at for this philosophy problem. You can challenge him, you can challenge the papers, and you can challenge your fellow classmates. Better still, you're encouraged to do this.

And you get a lot of choice about what you're going to learn. From what university to pick (for instance, I like the University of Manchester because it's very cutting edge), to what units on the degree program, and THEN even what parts of the unit you're interested in (because you can choose which part to do your essay on and which part to bring up in your tutorials).

Traditions:

But it isn't exactly bespoke, as learning as an autodidact would be. It's more like going to the supermarket or ordering from a menu. But that's good, because that's where the second criterion comes in.

Once you know what problems you're most interested in, you'll get given a reading list on that subject, and it's this that turns out to be worth thousands of pounds, believe it or not. Very few people understand the arguments in philosophy well enough to recommend you a good reading list. Very few people have even heard of the philosophers you'll be looking at. The amount of knowledge and understanding of philosophy that goes into those reading lists is huge. But a reading list is nothing by itself, after all, they are actually online.    It's the fact that the entire university experience is dedicated to that reading list. Philosophy is hard, *and* full of  contexts and subtleties that are easy to miss. You don't just need the reading list, you need someone to help you understand the reading list and it's readings (which is what your lectures are for). And then, you need someone to work with to challenge the reading and the reading list (which is what your tutorials are for, in part).


Used right, philosophy degrees are a genius combination of what you need to be good at philosophy.

Define 'Define'?: Philosophers and definitions

We're all familiar with two reasons to define terms. One: because you're speaking to someone who doesn't know what the word means. And two: because you're speaking to somebody who misunderstood the particular meaning of the word you intended.

But philosophers purpose a third option, one that gives definitions a much bigger role than we might be used to in every day life. According to philosophy we define because our concepts are rough around the edges. That is, we want to talk about what a thing is and what it isn't, in absolute terms, but our concepts aren't well enough understood to do this. 'How can we make any real progress talking about justice if we actually don't understand what justice is and what it isn't yet?'

If you weren't used to philosophy and you peered in to take a look, all this back and forth about what free-will is and what it isn't, or if ethical statements express beliefs or commands, or if knowledge is justified true belief (or if that requires either amending or additional conditions), and everything else philosophers waffle on about, would all seem rather pointless. It's only not pointless when you understand how what they're talking about relates to real problems and solutions to those problems.

Philosophers have a specific definition of 'definitions' and that is: to analyse the necessary and sufficient conditions of a concept. So when philosophers define free-will, say, they aren't being pretentious, rather they're trying to formalise a concept of free-will that resists criticisms from determinists where other accounts of free-will have failed. And when Gettier wrote about 'justified true belief being necessary but not sufficient for knowledge', the implication wasn't some minor curiosity about words, but an error in our concept of 'knowledge' that could lead to re-evaluate our entire treatment of what we know given fallibility.

Real work is done with philosophers definitions.

What the philosophers have to be careful of, however, is getting too into definitions, and forgetting all the other ways we have to make progress in philosophy. Actually you can learn a lot about ideas like 'good' and 'bad' in ethics, even if you aren't really sure what 'good' and 'bad' exactly mean. It's good to bring up definitions if you notice a problem with one, or if you think one will solve the problem, but bringing one up to stop a conversation thread only ever stops potential progress.

Minimize Misunderstandings

Misunderstandings are common and impossible to completely eliminate, but we can understand some of the things that go into misunderstanding someone or something and, in that much, make a bit of progress minimising them.

The challenge is you don't know when its happened. If you *don't understand* then you know this and you can ask for clarification. But if you misunderstand you actually think you have understood. The skill at hand then really comes down to how to be good at understanding things.

Preconceptions - you'd be mistaken to think you can really get around having them, but being aware of your preconceptions is the first step to being open to having them be shown wrong.
Double checking - Once you have your theory on what you've just heard or read, ask if you've understood correctly. Simple, but overall good practice.
Putting passion to the side - there's nothing worse for creating misunderstand than a person who eagerly jumps in because they hear a buzz word or they think they see an error. Passionate disagreement can be a good thing, but know it's time and place.
Know your weak spots - are you not very well read? Do you often equivocate words? Are you not good with subtlety? Can you not hold long arguments in mind? Have fun finding your weak spots. You'll have them. What's better, to know them or not know them?  
What information don't you have? - this one is similar to preconceptions. Whatever argument, or whatever, you are facing has a context. It's solving a problem, it's a response to something, and so on. Be careful to keep track of this and know where you have a gap of information. 
The skill of analysis - knowing how to analysis arguments is a great way to ensure you understand them. There are several things involved here.  Comprehend the meaning of their language, discerning their meaning from other possible meanings. Prioritise the parts of their argument as they have. Gauge what kind of argument you've just gotten.