What's Going on with the Assisted Dying Bill?

Yesterday I went to my very first proper protest. Proper in the sense that it wasn't an art installation, but a good old fashioned placard-holding and slogan shouting event. Actually I'd gone in many ways sceptical, assuming protests did nothing very useful. I was there more to support my colleagues than my cause. As usual I found myself to be wrong.

Lord Falconer's Assisted Dying Bill had it's second reading in the House of Lords in what would become quite an intense day. 10 hours of debate. 130 peers requested to speak. And there we were outside, fenced off from the pro-side--protesting by our side in logistics alone. (Yes, I was against the Bill)

The pro-side were interesting because it was made up of a lot more people my age, I'd guess students more interested in it as an academic issue. So they thinned out pretty early, while we stayed strong all day. But the thinning out meant I could quite easily hop the fence, so to speak, and go see about giving some leaflets to the opposition.

The reasons the pro-side were there were all admirable. They had known people who had suffered immensely and were deprived the choice to die, and they cared enough to do something about it. Or they were simply, and rightfully, aware of the importance of fighting for autonomy of choice, and dignity in dying. Of course I knew this before meeting them, but it was still very moving to meet them.

They had less idea why I was there. Actually, they had no idea.

This of course is often framed as a religious issue, and indeed there is a strong religious presence on the anti-side. It's also very much a disability issue, with both sides of the debate having a strong call to certain disabled people. Those afraid that as a disabled person they represent a very vulnerable group in society for abuse of the law, if the law were to change. And those afraid that as a disabled person they represent a group of people who need that choice for themselves.

So as an atheist, libertarian (ish) able bodied person, it seemed a little like I'd accidentally picked up the wrong placard.

And in a sense I had. Because as an atheist, libertarian (ish) and the many other relevant things I am, I'd have liked to be protesting on the other side.

You see, while in principle I don't have anything against people having a right to choose, my stance is that our culture is not ready yet. We will abuse the law, just as other countries have, and just as we abuse the system as it currently stands. And while I have great sympathy for those who are suffering and want to die and should have that right, it sadly doesn't justify the wrongful loss of lives that will come from it.

And this is what this debate really come down to: will it be abused?

There is too much support for the bill for either the Christian or disabled person perceptive to be relevant to whether or not it gets passed. That's the reality, and why we started the day expecting a vote.

However, during the House of Lord's debate, there was a surprising amount of mind changing. This is where naive me realised that protesting, as well as the many other things that happen in the lead up, are all important ways of focusing an issue on certain key arguments over other arguments.  The ignorant, negative interpretations get blown away, and the more important things shine through. This is what happened yesterday in the House of Lords; minds were being changed as more of them become aware of the risk of abuse. As such, in the end there was a shock no vote.

Of course it remains popular with the public, and this is because, I believe, these criticism haven't properly spread out yet. When/if it does, I am optimistic it will change a great many peoples minds

Pessimism about choices

Pessimism about choices can be a very destructive thing, often causing people to get trapped in an area of their lives, be it work, school, relationships, or whatever else. 

What the phenomena feels like is something like this: for some reason the world around you is broken, such that you know how you'd like it to be (i), but you also know that for X, Y and Z reasons it will never be like that, and so to avoid the worse case scenario (ii), you must accept a painful middle group (iii). 

(i) how you want it to be.
(ii) the thing to avoid
(iii) the painful middle ground that lets you avoid (ii)

For example: a person who feels trapped in a bad job (iii) might know they want to do some fun thing with their life instead, like be an artist (i), but not seeing how that'll be possible for them, accept (iii) as a way of avoiding the unpleasantness of having no financial security and maybe even risking homelessness (ii). 

(i) doing something fun for work.
(ii) no financial security
(iii) trapped in a bad job to avoid (ii)

The trouble is this way of thinking about it is biased towards pessimism. The three options are coloured: 'can' or 'can't'. (i) is 'can't' because of these X, Y and Z reasons. (ii) Is 'can't' because it's so terrible that it has to be avoided. And (iii) is the only 'can'. All the pressure is then naturally on accepting (iii) simply because it's being presented as the only option. 


But not everyone who faces this kind of 'bad job' situation falls into the pessimism trap. There is another more pragmatic and optimistic mindset to be had.

It looks something like this: you want to make a choice between two options, (a) staying in your bad job for financial security or (b) doing X thing you find fun for financial security. You see that you prefer option (a), but the problem is you only know how to make option (b) happen.

(a) staying in your bad job for financial security
(b) doing X thing you find fun for financial security.

This creates an unsolved situation in which one is tasked with getting their knowledge of creating (b) on par with their knowledge of creating (a). And it only has to be 'on par', not 'better than', because knowledge level is the only advantage (a) holds over (b).

We can see here that although the rationale has been changed only slightly, we are now under a very different pressure than before. Rather than the pressure to accept (iii), we have the pressure to learn more and accept (a)/(i). What has changed?

The first change is in how (ii) is handled. Both (a) and (b) are assumed to resolve the problem that only (iii) is assumed to solve previously. This is a mistake in how the pessimist presents the three options. This is important because it removes all appeal to (iii)/(b). When looking at (a) and (b) it is immediately obvious that (b) has no advantage over (a), while when looking at (i), (ii) and (iii) it falsely appears as if (iii) is some kind of 'golden mean'.

The second change is that, free from the mess of thinking there might be a sense in which (b)/(iii) is better than (a)/(i), one can focus solely on the real problem. The problem is not one of preference and compromise, but one of information, namely how to get more on it (a)/(i). 

Why it's hard to think for yourself

Why is it so hard to think for yourself? Some might say it's laziness, or attribute it vaguely to a lack of appropriate education. But I think the pressure not to is more of a social concern.

To shed some light on why it is so hard to think for yourself, it is worth asking a different question: why do other people want you to think like them?

People want you to adopt their perceptive because it makes them feel more comfortable and secure. Their reasons are selfish. For some people, what's at stake is their sense of "good-person-hood". These people have beliefs that make it easy for them to feel like a good person, and by challenging them, you are making them feel personally challenged.

Other people just want to be seen as authorities. When they say something it's to be trusted. It's not necessarily out of power hungriness, though it can be, it may just be that they need to trust what they say, and questioning it to them is equal to 'self-doubt'--an unpleasant feeling of unworthiness or uncertainty to act. Therefore, they take it personally if you 'shake the boat'.

It's difficult to work and live with such people, but such people are not rare. Of course, with enough inner reserve, one can treat these social problem as exactly that, problems--as a thing that can be solved (there are other ways to make such people feel comfortable and secure without risking your integrity. And completely irrational people can be ignored). But how many people have this inner reserve? It is not laziness that is the issue, then, I don't think, not predominantly, rather I think it's a matter of guilt and/or not wanting to burn bridges with people.

The challenge at hand, namely dealing with these social problems, requires a good deal of intellectual confidence, something that is culturally not encouraged. The difficulty with thinking for yourself is that you can't very easily take a half measure. If you think for yourself, but in conflicts you pretend not to and play along with someone else's world-view  you'll be miserable. However, if you are going to try and fight your corner and live by your principles, you have to have more integrity than the average person does.

Of course, in having this integrity, it all becomes easier. You commit to finding ways of dealing with people in conflicts so you don't hurt them and feel guilty, if feeling guilty is a problem for you. Or you learn to dislike the idea of having friends who wouldn't bully you for living according to your own values.

He-man, she-woman: how to think about the feminist debate.

When feminism comes up, you frequently hear reasonable, open-minded people suddenly burst into little snippets of aggressive language. "Who gives a f**k what feminists think?"  "Feminists are man-haters and unhygienic." "Feminists drive me bat-shit insane." "Feminists are just ugly little women with big round owl glasses and too much orange lipstick" (Taken from real people).

Of course, the reality is, Feminism is an umbrella term for many different movements and ideologies centred around the issue of equal social rights for women. 'How' and 'why' differ between the schools of thought, as do theories on what the differences between men and women are, and whether or not politics, economics or media are relevant to the debate. Particularly in terms of whether we should be politically active in stopping things, or work through improving cultural ideas.

This actually makes feminism a little hard to stereotype. For every Gail Dines, there's a Joss Whedon. For every Gloria Steinem, there's a Shira Tarrant. Nevertheless a highly unflattering stereotype does prevail. And like many images that prevail in the social subconscious, one has to ask where it really comes from and how many people have actually thought it through.

Certainly in my own experience, I had a very negative view of feminism, which I somewhat thought through in that I then met some feminists who I found to have an unpleasant world-view that they were quite forceful in presenting to me. But this wasn't really 'thinking it through'. I had a presupposition, and then found confirmation for this presupposition. Any good epistomologist will tell you that one can always come by confirmations for presuppositions. In this case my specific mistakes were that a) my presupposition coloured my interpretation of these feminists b) it created a sense that I'd given more investigation than I had (I'd still only met a handful of feminists and never read on the subject) and c) it caused me to skew the relevance of 'the evidence'. Truth is you'll always be able to find people who seem naive and ignorant, but are forceful/anti-rational about their position, no matter what movement we're discussing. Including all the good beliefs you and I both hold, reader.

I would take a guess that these anti-feminists memes have their roots in sexism, even if the people who now hold them aren't particular sexist. By 'sexism' I here mean, old fashioned, non-subtle sexism. 'Women shouldn't work', 'women should be feminine', 'women should know their place' type sexism. I can't do much to argue this point, since memes are so hard to trace, but this would seem to fit. It would fit with both the historical facts of feminism and also what the memes imply. These slogans of feminist-hatred tend to: assume the hypothetical feminism is a woman, criticise her for not looking feminine, and treat her position as one aggressive towards the male interest.

When I thought back to where my anti-feminism presupposition came from, I eventually remembered. I'd overheard two people mocking feminists in my church kitchen as a child. I'd learnt from that conversation both what the word meant and how to think about it. It was the presupposition I carried with me from then on.

All this said, there are some common feminist ideas that seem misguided (there are also plenty that most people think are misguided, but I personally believe, after looking at the issue, are on-point). One is signified by the picture above. Does the feminism underestimate how pervasive and dangerous many gender memes are, for BOTH men or women? Does there need to be more of a focus on making gender memes truly a choice, and not a pressure or a trap?

The He-Man thing is a little silly, since we consider those two cultural icons in terms of the effect they seem to have had. There is a problem of more and more young girls becoming anorexic. There isn't a problem of young boys trying to look muscle-y.  But there is a problem with: male aggression, men attaching a sense of self-worth to being strong, feeling pressured to not have personal problems, and pressure to be dominant and get people to comply with them.

The real crux of this thing is that there's no room for one side to lack empathy with the other if progress is to be made.

Take the example of dating, where everyone loses by the same bad ideas. For instance, there are schools of pick up artistry that speak of women as guided by these irrationalities that need her to be controlled and dominated in certain ways, which are available to learn through a formula. You first get through her 'bitch shield', then you use playful insults and other techniques for her to develop this dependence on your approval and attraction, such that when you go for the 'close' she won't reject you. Now, unfortunately I can't take for granted that this is obviously not very nice for anyone, because it plays into quite common ideas and fears people have about courting. Some girls really do need to be played in this way to consent to sex, and that's unfortunate for her as it doesn't give her much control over her own happiness and pleasure in that area. But should we take advantage of such peoples insecurities for our own ends, or is that fairly mean-spirited? And how common are such girls? Well, truthfully it's a small group, and constantly stinking as sex attitudes improve. This view mostly just works against the majority of women who feel bullied by non-consented to sexual domination, and wish to communicate to the opposite sex as the regular people that they in fact are.

And the often over looked victim here are the men, who are force fed this cynical view of the world where there aren't good women they can go out, meet, have a fun interaction with, and it lead to a sexual attraction. That the odds are so stacked against them they have to behave as to hack women to get sex. The fact that it also won't work except in specific cases, will also disadvantage such men from having enjoyable dating experiences.

Of course, no one can get into these more specific and important ideas to have interesting and meaningful discussions about them so long as anything that sounds a bit feminism invokes a huge meta conversation where feminists will be unfairly stereotyped and talked about in hideously personal ways, from the very people who might be able to offer more insight into male-disadvantages.  

The poverty of 'altruism' and 'selfishness'

In ethics we talk of the difference between 'selfishness' and 'altruism', and although it is frequently acknowledged that these terms are very elusive, we are to a great extent dependent on them for moral discussion.


On the surface of it, a straightforward reading of the dictionary has the case set out plainly.  

self·ish adjective \ˈsel-fish\: having or showing concern only for yourself and not for the needs or feelings of other people  

al·tru·ism  noun \ˈal-trü-ˌi-zəm\ : feelings and behaviour that show a desire to help other people and a lack of selfishness

However, there's a sense in which these definitions can only be read plainly if we were discussing, say, animal subjects--subjects which have a clearly defined 'self' to which they can clearly be concerned with benefiting or not within a given activity. Animals have this as they are strictly programmed by evolution. They have a 'self' (using the term loosely) amounting to a biological entity looking to survive and replicate, as a biological entity. This sets out clear boundaries in which activities such as eating when hungry or finding shelter are self-preserving, while activities such as grooming another or helping another eat when they are hungry are other-orientated.

Humans are a different kind of creature, we are programmed by evolution only in a weak sense, and we are in a much stricter sense programmed by values. We have selves that are mental, which exist in self-selected ideas, and as such are malleable. We can learn, we can develop preferences, and we can change our minds. What is at one point unselfish can become selfish merely by shifts in our ideas. And therefore, there's a sense in which we can never become less selfish in the pursuit of altruism. If a person is motivated by 'wanting to win the football match' this notion may entail 'wanting to motivate the team', 'wanting to play your best', or 'wanting to give the crowd a good time.' Each action can be interpreted fairly as both selfish and altruistic. Although each can be seen in a sense as generous, they are not idly or purposelessly giving, they serve some desire of the self. This veil of selfishness to our actions continues to apply to most human intentions, even charity.

The lines between altruism and selfishness are blurred by our existence through the mental in which 'us' and 'the outside world' can be intimately intertwined by values. In the extreme, selfishness can manifest itself in form of dying for a cause or a loved one.

Under an Objectivist perceptive, this renders talk of altruism redundant, with altruism standing out only in instances in which coercive pressures precede generosity. But it is not evident that, if this be so, by the same token talk of 'selfishness' shouldn't becomes obsolete. If we find ourselves in a situation where one can say 'I changed my mind drastically from being selfish to being selfish', the term is hardly descriptive.  

But of course, all of this misses the point. Practically speaking when people speak of 'selfishness' being good or bad, or 'altruism' being good or bad, they're really being used as umbrella terms for some handy rules of thumb to help guide us in selecting and reviewing our values.

selfishness is good entails ideas like:                   selfishness is bad entails ideas like:

it's al-right to enjoy yourself                                       consider long term consequences
your property is your own                                          the world is better when you don't hinder others
great innovation follows doing you own thing                      

altruism is good entails ideas like:                        altruism is bad entails ideas like:

human life is valuable                                                  your life is as worthy as another's
generosity enriches the soul                                         you needn't become a willing slave to others


But the terms offer nothing more comprehensive, and certainly can't profit us in a one verse the other framework.

To decide between values we require much more sophisticated ideas to guide us.

Why you should make improbable claims.

There is a sense in which the title of this entry may seem misleading. If 'improbable' is read in a certain way, the assumption will be that my intention is to encourage theories that are bizarre relative to what would be a more practical conclusion given our best (by which I mean most successfully tested) theories. A concrete example of a 'bizarre' or improbable theory of this sort would be something like this:

Light speed is relative to human imagination. Much like pixie dust in Neverland, the human subject has to believe and then it will behave how they want it to. 

This theory is clearly 'bizarre' or improbable. It makes claims about light, and the power of the human mind to directly interfere with the laws of nature, which are contrary to our best knowledge in science. More precisely there's an arbitrariness or variability to it. Why does the ritual require 'believing' as a control mechanism and not say a song, or a dance. Or why indeed this theory at all and not another theory of light, say that: human can't control light speed because it's the work of the gods. Not working within the confines of epistemology opens the door for theories as fiction or nonsense.

So I'd clearly have my work cut out for me if this was at all the reading I intended. Which it was, but only so I could turn it all around and show that there is another reading, which makes a lot of sense.

'Probable' has two meanings in ordinary language, at least two proper meanings (it may also be misused in certain ways).

(i) The first is the one we have seen above, a soft meaning. We may find this kind of 'probable' in sentences like 'I'm probably going to the party Saturday' or 'probable she forgot'. What it means in this usage is that we are not sure either way, but theory A (going to the party, or 'she' forgetting) has tested better than theory B (not going to the party, 'she' not forgetting). So going back to the world of science, we might describe Einstein's theory as much more probable than Newton's.

(ii) The second meaning is stricter. Here 'probable' refers to the probability calculus.

A common mistake is when (ii) will be assumed to show (i). That is, if the probability calculus is high, then it's our best/most tested theory, and vice versa.

Consider the prevalence of this view. We see it in our every day lives when we flick (or more accurately scroll) through a popular magazine and read about topics claiming things like 'studies have found blonds really do have more fun', where surveys and statistics are used to establish generalisations.

We also see it in the supposed solution to the problem of induction. Induction attempts to show a proposition true for having a pattern of occurrence. The problem is, the future doesn't always resemble the past. By making the mistake, however, that (ii) implies (i), philosophers have argued that we should believe propositions reached through inductive logic not because they're guaranteed, but because they're probable. So for example, if the proposition P was that the sun will rise tomorrow, and our induction was that it has always risen previously, it is thought that we can accept P because it scores highly with probability calculus.

So what's the problem with equating (i) and (ii)?

The problem is the rule 'obtain high probabilities!' (ii) puts a premium on ad hoc hypotheses. Put simply, (ii) is mostly likely to wield high results the less information it actually has to work with, which far from leading to (i) is actually at odds with it, as (i) has it that our best theory is the one that has been successfully tested the *most*.

You can make 'the sun will rise tomorrow' less and less probable according to (ii), just by adding more information: That the sun will burn out, that weather conditions can hid sun rises, or the plenitude of distastes that can occur such as supernovas and meteoroids. In doing this the (ii) would go down, even though we could speak more expertly on (i).





 

How to live well

While some people just drift through life, others are driven towards certain belief systems and attitudes aimed at taking control of how good or bad their life turns out to be. This is a very good and important thing to do in principle for the obvious reason that it's empowering. The alternative would be to hand over your future happiness to lady luck.

The trap one can fall into, however, is having too rigid an idea of what one must do to live well.

It happens all too often that a person gets so convinced of a particular approach that they actually completely miss that they're miserable and not getting any closer (or as close as they could have gotten) to where they'd like to be. Some people identify the wrong thing they want and live towards that goal. Such people may suffer from the pains of forcing themselves towards a goal, and feelings of disappointment/loss when they get there and realise they're still not happy. Other people try to live the best life by having generally the 'right idea' about things like career, love, friendship and so on. Such people can suffer because their ideas are so set for them that they miss out on good stuff that aren't covered by their philosophies. Or because it can be hard to expose these more detailed philosophies to rigorous criticism, because you have to make time to do so.

The weird thing is, if you look at people who get life right, often they're more like drifters than planners or deciders. It seems to me that the difference between an aimless drifter and a purposeful drifter is exactly the life lesson that these planners and deciders miss out on. And it's a matter of methodology.

Purposeful drifters have error correcting criteria for the things they do in their lives, while aimless drifters tend to be more inductivist. They achieve happiness by repeating the things that have worked for them in the past, but perhaps at the cost of re-living a lot of the same problems again and again.

Some examples of purposeful drifting might be to have a criterion such as 'does doing what I'm doing make me feel happier or not?' This works by having a theory, i.e. happiness, that identifies progress towards good living or not. This works well because it allows for a standard by which to criticise what you're doing, but in fact involves very little in the way of presumptions (the problem had by the 'planners and deciders'). It also focuses narrowly on what information you actually have, i.e. your feelings about a thing right now, and doesn't delve into information you don't have such as what you'll want in the future.

Or, for another example, one can have a rule of thumb of doing something every time their life gets comfortable to shake things up. If one felt like their job wasn't challenging any more, but weren't sure what else to do, quitting forces one to try out new conjectures and gather new information. All of this again is good for error correction. This approach in particular works a lot like natural selection, since you add selection pressures to your current ideas by virtue of making things less comfortable for yourself.

'Planners and deciders' have the right idea in trying to use knowledge creation to make their lives better. That is to say, they identify possible problems and come up with possible solutions. But their problem seems to be that their approach doesn't lead to much new knowledge being created--it is set up to be biased towards their first theory, whether that be their first theory on how to approach career/love-life/whatever or their first idea on what their goals are. Similarly the 'aimless drifter' creates no improved knowledge on how to live because they 'let what is, be'. But between the two appears to be a golden mean of drifting, but with error correcting/knowledge creating mechanisms in place to improve ones situation and engage with better and better thing in life. This seems to be the approach that is needed if one wants to live well.