The Ties that Bind: The US and its Preferred Tyrant

Many groups in America have experienced an “Othering” while they have engaged in any sort of relationship within the U.S. Groups specifically placed outside of America’s embrace include almost all minorities and the poor. I will not go full anti-Trump administration and pretend it had not been occurring under ever administration since America’s birth. It feels that with even with the state of Puerto Rico will not go down as a new era in American policy. So many are still left without power and the death toll has creeped up close to 1,000 people.

I am here to discuss the U.S’s ongoing failures in Yemen and the bizarro state of America’s Middle East policies. Needless to say the many countries have dipped into the murky waters of the Middle East and left quite a mess. No administration has done “great.” The 2nd Bush administration held a lot of regard towards  the Saudi Arabian rulers despite the general belief that they fund terrorism throughout the Middle East. Their powerful influence in OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) has given them far too much leeway. As a consequence we arrive to modernity, wherein Saudi Arabia is going through a bit of a time itself. They have had the pleasure of avoiding the Trump administration’s travel ban and enjoyed a historically good relationship with the U.S. due to their oil producing status. Tensions have been exceedingly high between Saudi Arabia and Iran for decades and many have suffered.

Sadly, it is now the people of Yemen who suffer the most. Yemen is a smaller country that has more in common with Iran. The Saudi military decided to push for the return to the Sunni leadership and has been bombing in support of the Sunni rebels. And with Yemeni rebels’ minor military action resulting in more Saudi actions will lead to the death of an untold number – likely in the 100’s of thousands if not millions. Currently, the Saudis are blocking any incoming goods/services/people from entering Yemen……with U.S. support. The country has become an island surrounded by waters of people trying to help. None can breach it. Cholera is killing indiscriminately and starvation is claiming young and old lives daily.

Where does the U.S. sit in the scheme of this? We have emboldened Saudi Arabia to the point that they are convinced that this is the best course of action. Saudi Arabia’s enemy, Iran, has been ostracized for too long. The new administration has fluctuated between great disdain and promising to renege on the certification treaty between international powers and Iran. The new administration has ignored the humanitarian crisis that is ongoing. The new administration has even began to support the new young leader in Saudi Arabia who is consolidating more and more power daily.

Fear not. There is a Trump relationship so deeply embedded with a recent arms deal and sending of diplomatic wunderkind Jared Kushner to visit. One thing is for certain: Yemen needs leadership from a larger and better country than the once, at least mildly, helpful America. We prefer to embrace those with the oil than those with disease.

The Ought is Starting a Reading and Discussion Group

The goal of the group is to foster serious discussion of ideas with ethical elements (i.e., the types of ideas featured on the blog) with civility and open-mindedness.

The group is in pilot mode, so it may evolve, but here are some entry points for participation:

Reading Group

Every week or so (or whatever timeframe seems appropriate after we get up and running), we’ll post a link to a reading and try to get a discussion started. The reading could be an article from an academic journal, an essay from a magazine or news site (e.g., The Atlantic, Aeon, The New York Review of Books, The Stone), a blog post, or anything else that’s worth discussing. For now, we’ll pick the readings, but in the future, we may institute some kind of nomination and/or voting process.

General Discussion

This area is for discussing things that may or may not be related to a particular reading. It’s not a free-for-all. Discussion topics should be serious and related to ideas with ethical elements.

The Ought Blog Posts

We welcome discussion of blog posts from The Ought. Feel free to critique, suggest improvements, ask questions, seek clarification, or simply discuss the contents of any post appearing on the blog.

If there is enough interest down the road, we may start a book discussion group. We may also add other features, and we’ll probably solicit ideas and suggestions from you.

You must register before posting on the forum, but it’s free. Go here to sign up.

Don’t let us embarrass ourselves. We need participants for the group to be successful. Tell your friends.

Thomas Nagel on Moral Luck

The philosopher Thomas Nagel points out that for people to find a moral judgment fitting, whatever it is for which the person is judged must be under his control. If it turns out that he didn’t have control over the action, then we ordinarily think that morally judging him is inappropriate. “So a clear absence of control,” he says, “produced by involuntary movement, physical force, or ignorance of the circumstances, excuses what is done from moral judgment.”

This seems pretty uncontroversial, doesn’t it? You can’t be judged for what is not your fault.

The problem, according to Nagel, is that the degree to which we lack control is greater than we ordinarily recognize. It’s in this broad range of influences, over which we have no control, that Nagel identifies what he calls moral luck:

Where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called moral luck.

If we apply consistently the idea that moral judgment is appropriate only for things people control, Nagel argues, it leaves few moral judgments intact. “Ultimately,” he says, “nothing or almost nothing about what a person does seems to be under his control.”

Four Different Types of Moral Luck

Nagel distiguishes between four different types moral luck. They’re all influences that, because they’re beyond people’s control, should be morally irrelevant.

Luck in How Things Turn Out

These are cases in which moral judgments are affected by an action’s results when those results were beyond the person’s control. Nagel uses as an example a truck driver who accidentally runs over a child. If the driver is without fault, he will regret his role in the child’s death, but he won’t morally blame himself. But if he is the slightest bit negligent – by, for example, failing to have his brakes checked – and his negligence is a factor in the child’s death, then he will morally reproach himself for the death.

This is a case of moral luck because the driver would have to blame himself only slightly if there weren’t a situation in which he had to brake suddenly to avoid hitting a child. The driver’s degree of negligence is the same in both cases, but the moral assessment differs based on factors outside of the driver’s control – i.e., whether a child runs out in front of him.

Another example of luck in how things turn out is attempted murder. The intentions and motives behind an attempted murder can be exactly the same as those behind a successful one, but the penalty is, nonetheless, less severe. And the degree of culpability can depend on things outside of the committed murderer’s control, such as whether the victim was wearing a bullet-proof vest or whether a bird flew in the bullet’s path.

From the commonsense perspective that moral responsibility depends upon control, Nagel says, this seems absurd. “How is it possible to be more or less culpable depending on whether a child gets into the path of one’s car, or a bird into the path of one’s bullet?”

Constitutive Luck

One’s character traits are often the object of moral assessment. We blame people for being greedy, envious, cowardly, cold, or ungenerous, and we praise them for having the opposite traits. To some extent, Nagel allows, such character traits may be the product of earlier choices. And to some extent, the person may be able to modify his character traits.

But character traits are largely a product of genetic predispositions and environmental circumstances, both of which are beyond people’s control. “Yet,” Nagel says, “people are morally condemned for such qualities, and esteemed for others equally beyond the control of the will: they are assessed for what they are like.”

Luck in One’s Circumstances

How people are morally assessed often depends on the circumstances in which they find themselves, even though those circumstances are largely beyond their control. “It may be true of someone that in a dangerous situation he would behave in a cowardly or heroic fashion,” Nagel says, “but if the situation never arises, he will never have the chance to distinguish or disgrace himself in this way, and his moral record will be different.”

Nagel also gives a more provocative example. In Nazi Germany, he says, ordinary citizens had the opportunity to either be heroes and oppose the regime or to behave badly and support it (and even participate in its atrocities). Many of the citizens failed this moral test. But the test, Nagel argues, was one “to which the citizens of other countries were not subjected, with the result that even if they, or some of them, would have behaved as badly as the Germans in like circumstances, they simply did not and therefore are not similarly culpable.”

Those people who would have behaved as badly as the Germans who supported the Nazi regime but didn’t find themselves in such circumstances were morally lucky. What they did or didn’t do was due circumstances beyond their control.

Luck in How One is Determined by Antecedent Circumstances

This is essentially the problem of free will and moral responsibility. The extent to which the laws of nature and other circumstances that precedes one’s actions and choices (i.e., antecedent circumstances) seems to shrink the areas in which people are responsible for their actions. Nagel doesn’t expound upon this problem, but he does point out its connection to the other kinds of moral luck:

If one cannot be responsible for consequences of one’s acts due to factors beyond one’s control, or for antecedents of one’s acts that are properties of temperament no subject to one’s will, or for the circumstances that pose one’s moral choices, then how can one be responsible even for the stripped down acts of the will itself, if they are the product of antecedent circumstances outside of the will’s control?

Nagel’s Solution

Nagel doesn’t think there is a solution to the problem moral luck poses for moral responsibility and moral judgment. The problem arises because the influence of things not under our control causes our responsible selves to vanish, making those acts that are ordinarily the objects of moral judgment mere events. “Eventually nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self,” Nagel says, “and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised.”

The Three Levels of Ethics

It’s hard to come up with a definition of ethics that is both precise and satisfactory to everyone. But it helps to think about the levels at which ethical discussion and analysis take place.

Most concrete ethical issues involve questions about what we ought to do in a given situation. Underlying these questions are more abstract ones about right and wrong and good and bad more generally. And some discourse in moral philosophy is even more abstract.

Philosophers divide ethics into into three different levels, which range from the very abstract to the concrete: metaethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. Understanding these levels is a good step toward grasping the breadth of subject.

Metaethics

Metaethics is the most abstract and philosophical level of ethics. Where normative and applied ethics seek to determine what is moral, metaethics concerns itself with the nature of morality itself. It deals with the following types of questions:

• What does it mean when someone says something is “good” or “right”?
• What is moral value, and where does it come from?
• Is morality objective and universal, or is it relative to specific individuals or cultures?
• Do moral facts exists?

These and other metaethical questions are important, but if you’re trying to figure out if a particular action is right or wrong, you might never get there pondering them. On the other hand, questions like Why be ethical? or Why do the right thing? are metaethical questions that are important for anyone interested in ethics. And they’re not so easy to answer.

Normative Ethics

Normative Ethics is concerned with the appropriate standards for right and wrong behavior. Normative ethical theories establish prescriptions – whether by foundational principles or good character traits – for how one ought to act or live. The following are prominent normative ethical approaches:

• Virtue Ethics focuses on a person’s moral character. Virtue ethicists say we ought to develop virtuous characteristics – such as generosity, courage, and compassion – and exhibit virtuous behavior. This is different from other normative theories that propose more precise principles and rules for conduct.
• Deontological theories emphasize one’s moral duties and obligations. They focus on the act itself, as either intrinsically good or bad, regardless of its consequences.
• Consequentialist theories determine whether something is right or wrong by looking at its consequences. The ethical thing to do is that which has the best  consequences (i.e., results in the most benefit, happiness, good, etc.) among the alternatives.

Applied Ethics

Applied ethics consists of the analysis of specific moral issues that arise in public or private life. Whereas normative ethics attempts to develop general standards for morality, applied ethics is concerned with specific moral controversies. Abortion, stem cell research, environmental concerns, and the appropriate treatment of animals are all applied ethics issues.

Applied ethics can use normative ethical theories, principles or rules derived from such theories, or analogical reasoning (which analyzes moral issues by drawing analogies between alike cases). Context-specific norms or expectations, such as those characterizing a particular profession (e.g., medicine or journalism), arrangement (e.g., an agreement between two parties), or relationship (e.g., the parent-child relationship) are also relevant to applied ethical analysis.

Bioethics, business ethics, legal ethics, environmental ethics, and media ethics are all applied ethics fields.

The different levels of ethics can overlap and inform one another. Normative theories, for instance, are based on metaethical assumptions (or even explicit metaethical propositions), such as the existence or non-existence of objective and universal notions of right and wrong. And, as noted above, applied ethics can draw on normative theories to resolve moral disputes. Metaethical perspectives can also drip into applied ethical analysis. A moral relativist, for example, may contend that a practice deemed egregious by his own culture’s standards is truly morally permissible, or even obligatory, in the culture in which it occurs.

Despite the overlap between the three levels, distinguishing between them is useful for clarifying one’s own views and analyzing those of others.

 

Three of the Best Podcasts About Ethics

Anyone can start a podcast, so you can run into everything from the conspiracist muttering into his cousin’s microphone to Barack Obama’s speechwriter talking about politics. The topics are endless, and the quality is variable, but there’s something for everyone.

If you’re looking for podcasts that seriously grapple with ideas in ethics and morality, then here are three of the best ones out there.

• Very Bad Wizards

  This one is brought to you by Tamler Sommers, a philosopher at the University of Houston, and Dave Pizarro, a social psychologist at Cornell who studies morality. Of the three podcasts listed here, this one is the most entertaining, and maybe even the most informative. Tamler and Dave are funny, and irreverent at times, but they also have nuanced conversations. Each episode revolves around an article or two in moral philosophy or moral psychology. There’s an occasional guest, but typically it’s just the two of them disagreeing with each other.

• Waking Up

  If you like longform interviews with scholarly people, then you’ll like Waking Up, a podcast by the neuroscientist and independent scholar Sam Harris. While the topics aren’t confined to ethics, there is almost always an ethical component to the discussion. It’s clear that Sam likes examining ethical issues. He even wrote a book called The Moral Landscape, where he argues that the is-ought gap and the naturalistic fallacy need not worry anyone because science can answer questions about morality. I’m not convinced, but Sam’s book is still worth reading, and his podcast is worth listening to. He’s thoughtful and systematic when approaching ideas, and you can learn a lot from him and his guests.

• The Partially Examined Life

  The Partially Examined Life is a podcast “by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it.” Mark Linsenmayer, Seth Paskin, and Wes Alwan all went to graduate school in philosophy but called it quits before finishing their PhDs. Now they, along with Mark’s brother-in-law Dylan Casey, philosophize on their podcast. The show covers philosophy broadly, but a good bit of the episodes are devoted to moral philosophy. In each episode, the guys have an informal but serious discussion of a philosophical text, sometimes with a guest. You can follow along and learn without reading the text, but you’ll get much more out of the episodes if you do the reading, which they link to in the show notes, beforehand.

These podcasters aren’t unknown to each other. Tamler appeared on The Partially Examined Life to discuss free will and moral responsibility, and he frequently jokes about needing to surpass them in the iTunes rankings. Dave announced that he’ll be joining them soon. Sam has thrice been on Very Bad Wizards, and Tamler and Dave were very recently Sam’s guest on Waking Up.

All three of the podcasts have been running for several years, so there are plenty of places to jump in. Take a break from Radiolab and This American Life and check them out.

The Unseemliness of Saintliness

There’s a psychological process called ethical fading that Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrusel talk about in their business ethics book Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do about It. Basically, when we make decisions, the ethical implications can fade from the decision criteria, allowing us to violate our own moral convictions without even realizing it. No one is immune to this phenomenon, not even you.

The good news is there are simple strategies – of the behavioral economics stripe – that can keep the moral dimensions of decisions from disappearing into the dark. For instance, publicly pre-committing to an ethical action, or pre-committing to an ethical action and sharing it with an unbiased and ethical person, makes people more likely to follow through with an ethical action in the future. There are also ways to ensure that abstract ethical values are salient during the decision process. These include imagining whether you’d be comfortable telling your mom about the decision, or thinking about your eulogy and what you’d want to be written about the values and principles you lived by.

We can, in effect, nudge ourselves toward morality.

It’s not hard to argue that battling meta-moral defects like ethical fading is a good thing. For Bazerman and Tenbrusel’s target – the business and organizational context, where misconduct tends to flourish – this seems self-evident. What is difficult, however, is figuring out how hard and how often we ought to battle our default psychology in the name of morality. Should we inject ethics into every decision we make and every action we take, or is there a limit to how morally good we want to be?

Bazerman and Tenbrusel don’t advocate taking on our psycho-ethical inadequacies at every turn, nor do they suggest that it’s even possible, but it’s still an interesting question whether as much moral goodness as possible is a good thing – whether we should, if we could, hack our psychology all the way to moral perfection. Whether we would want to be moral saints.

Moral Sainthood

Benjamin Franklin embarked on a systematic quest for moral perfection, which he described in his autobiography. He failed but wrote that he became a “better and happier man” than he otherwise would have been. His desire to be morally perfect, he said, was like “those who aim at perfect writing by imitating the engraved copies, tho’ they never reach the wished-for excellence of those copies, their hand is mended by the endeavor, and tolerable, while it continues fair and legible.” In other words, moral perfection is probably unattainable, but it’s nonetheless worth striving for.

George Orwell disagreed. In his essay on Gandhi, he wrote of his “aesthetic distaste” for the man’s saintliness, and he argued that sainthood is incompatible with what it means to be human:

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

It isn’t just that the average human is simply a failed saint who snubs the ideal of sainthood because it’s too hard to achieve. “Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints,” Orwell said, “and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.”

The philosopher Susan Wolf was equally unimpressed with the moral saint. In her 1982 article “Moral Saints,” she argued that moral perfection isn’t “a model of personal well-being toward which it would be particularly rational or good or desirable for a human being to strive.”

There are two possible models of the moral saint, Wolf said. The Loving Saint is motivated solely by the wellbeing of others. Where most people derive a significant portion of their wellbeing from the ordinary joys of life – material comforts, fulfilling activities, love, companionship, etc. – the moral saint’s happiness genuinely lies “in the happiness of others, and so he would devote himself to others gladly, and with a whole and open heart.” The Rational Saint, on the other hand, is as tempted as the non-saint by the ordinary constituents of happiness, but she denies herself life’s pleasures out of moral duty. Broader moral concerns make her sacrifice her own interests to the interests of others.

Though the motivations of these types of saints differ, the difference would have little effect on the saints’ ultimate commitment – being as morally good and treating others as justly and kindly as possible. The moral saint, no matter which type, “will have the standard moral virtues to a non-standard degree.” The problem with moral perfection, according to Wolf, is that it conflicts with our ideals of personal excellence and wellbeing:

For the moral virtues, given that they are, by hypothesis, all present in the same individual, and to an extreme degree, are apt to crowd out the nonmoral virtues, as well as many of the interests and personal characteristics that we generally think contribute to a healthy, well-rounded, richly developed character.

If the moral saint spends his days pursuing nothing but moral goals, Wolf argued, then he has no time to pursue other worthwhile goals and interests. He’s not reading novels, playing music, or participating in athletics. There are also nonmoral characteristics that people value – a cynical or sarcastic wit, or sense of humor that appreciates one – that would be incongruent with sainthood. A moral saint, Wolf said, would oppose such characteristics because they require a mindset of resignation and cynicism about the darker aspects of the world. The morally perfect person “should try to look for the best in people, give them the benefit of the doubt as long as possible, try to improve regrettable situations as long as there is any hope of success.”

Nor could the moral saint take an interest in things like gourmet cooking, high fashion, or interior design. If there is a justification for such activities, Wolf said, “it is one which rests on the decision not to justify every activity against morally beneficial alternatives, and this is a decision a moral saint will never make.”

Our ideals of excellence, Wolf said, contain a mixture of moral and nonmoral virtues. We want our models to be morally good – but “not just morally good, but talented or accomplished or attractive in nonmoral ways as well”:

We may make ideals out of athletes, scholars, artists – more frivolously out of cowboys, private eyes, and rock stars. We may strive for Katharine Hepburn’s grace, Paul Newman’s “cool”; we are attracted to the high-spirited passionate nature of Natasha Rostov; we admire the keen perceptiveness of Lambert Strether. Though there is certainly nothing immoral about the ideal characters or traits I have in mind, they cannot be superimposed upon the ideal of the moral saint. For although it is a part of many of these ideals that the characters set high, and not merely acceptable, moral standards for themselves, it is also essential to their power and attractiveness that the moral strengths go, so to speak, alongside of specific, independently admirable, nonmoral ground projects and dominant personal traits.

According to Wolf, although we include moral virtues in our ideals of personal excellence, we look in our models of moral excellence for people whose moral virtues occur alongside interests or traits of lower moral salience – “there seems to be a limit to how much morality we can stand.”

And, to be sure, it’s not just that we value well-roundedness and can’t stand saints’ singular commitment to morality. We don’t usually object to those who are passionately committed, above all else, to become, say, Olympic athletes or accomplished musicians. Such people might decide that their commitment to these goals are strong enough to be worth sacrificing other things that life might have to offer. Desiring to be a moral saint is different, however:

The desire to be as morally good as possible is apt to have the character not just of a stronger, but of a higher desire, which does not merely successfully compete with one’s other desires but which rather subsumes or demotes them. The sacrifice of other interests for the interest in morality, then, will have the character, not of a choice, but of an imperative.

There is something odd, Wolf continued, about morality or moral goodness being the object of a dominant passion. When the Loving Saint happily gives up life’s pleasures in the name of morality, it’s striking not because of how much he loves morality, but because of how little he seems to love life’s nonmoral pleasures. “One thinks that, if he can give these up so easily, he does not know what it is to truly love them,” Wolf wrote. The Rational Saint might desire what life offers in a way that the Loving Saint cannot, but in denying himself these pleasures out of moral duty, his position is equally disturbing – one reckons that he has “a pathological fear of damnation, perhaps, or an extreme form of self-hatred that interferes with his ability to enjoy the enjoyable life.”

Like Orwell, Wolf confronted the possibility that we are put off by models of moral saints because they highlight our own weaknesses and because sainthood would require us to sacrifice things we enjoy. She granted that our being unattracted to the requirements of sainthood is not, in itself, sufficient for condemning the ideal, but some of the qualities that the moral saint lacks are good qualities, ones that we find desirable, ones that we ought to like. And this, she said, provides us with reasons to discourage moral sainthood as an ideal:

In advocating the development of these varieties of excellence, we advocate nonmoral reasons for acting, and in thinking that it is good for a person to strive for an ideal that gives a substantial role to the interests and values that correspond to these virtues, we implicitly acknowledge the goodness of ideals incompatible with that of the moral saint.

So, Wolf agreed with Orwell that people don’t, and shouldn’t, strive to be moral saints – not because sainthood is incompatible with being human, however, but because it is incompatible with being an excellent one. And although Ben Franklin endorsed the pursuit of moral perfection, his life story seems perfectly harmonious with Wolf’s view: he may have failed to become morally perfect, but he succeeded in achieving personal excellence.

If moral sainthood is not a model of personal excellence and well-being toward which we should aspire, then maybe the psychological constraints on our morality aren’t defects at all. Maybe we need them to attain and enjoy the nonmoral goods in life. Sometimes it might be good to just let the ethics fade. The big question is, when?

Five Scientific Theories That Tell Us Why Things Are Funny

For some scholars, the study of humor is no laughing matter

If you’re an ordinary adult, you laugh around 20 times a day. And you probably haven’t given much thought to why the things you laugh at are funny. In fact, you might even think that analyzing humor is the best way to destroy it.

That’s what E.B. White thought. He said, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

He was correct in at least one those claims. Some scientists are interested in what makes things funny, and they’ve developed some pretty sophisticated explanations. Here are five of the major scientific theories of humor. Read with caution, as this article could kill your sense of humor.

The Relief Theory

The relief theory says that humor and laughter work as a pressure valve for releasing excess or unnecessary energy. Sigmund Freud was a proponent of the relief theory. He believed laughter is the release of either psychic energy that is normally used, in typical Freudian fashion, to repress feelings or psychic or emotional energy that was summoned in response to a stimulus but was then determined to be unnecessary.

The Arousal Theory

The arousal theory rejects the relief theory’s idea that humor involves the release of excess or unnecessary energy. Instead, it builds on the idea that the right level of physiological arousal causes subjective pleasure. Low levels of arousal are not enough to induce pleasure, and too high of levels are unpleasant. But there is a sweet spot that people enjoy. People laugh, according to the theory, when they are aroused to the point of discomfort (a joke setup) and then something (a punchline) causes their arousal level to suddenly drop into the sweet spot.

The Superiority Theory

The superiority theory says that aggression is at the core of all humor. Early theorists claimed humor was intertwined with actual aggression, but Charles Gruner, a contemporary advocate of the perspective, says humor is not real aggression. Rather, it’s a playful form of it rooted in an evolutionary context of competition. People find humor in others’ plights, when they assert their superiority over others, or when they simply outwit someone else, he says.

The Incongruity Theory

The incongruity theory is probably the most popular theory of humor today. It says the perception some sort of incongruity is necessary for thinking something is humorous. People laugh, for instance, when they experience something that’s surprising, atypical, or a violation or departure from the way they think things should be. Consider this joke about two fish in a tank. One says to the other, “You man the guns. I’ll drive.” We expect the fish to be in a fish tank, so their being in a combat vehicle is slightly humorous.

One shortcoming of incongruity theory is that incongruity alone isn’t enough to explain humor. A fish driving a tank may be funny because its incongruous, but some incongruous things aren’t funny, such as tragic accidents.

The Benign Violation Theory

The benign violation theory is the newest theory out there. It incorporates elements from some of the other theories, particularly incongruity and superiority, into one unifying one. It says people laugh when three things happen. First, there must be a violation of some norm or sense of how the world ought to be. Second, the person must judge the violation as playful, non-serious, or non-threatening. Third, the judgment that something is a violation and that it’s benign must occur simultaneously.

To get a better grasp of benign violation theory, think about malapropisms. They violate our linguistic norms, but they are not threatening. And they are almost always funny. Now think about sexist jokes. They violate our norms of gender equality, and they are probably funniest to sexists because sexists are most likely to see the violation as benign.

Now that you know some of the most famous theories of humor, keep them to yourself. Don’t be the buzzkill explaining the joke.

Labor: A Dab Will Do Ya

Many attribute countries’ falls to a purposeful and scheming series of methods by individual actors. America, as it is today, has doomed itself. It would be easy to procure an easy argument by blaming trends on the baby boomers or the millennials (it isn’t them). Instead, I will blame Marx. I know. Let me explain.

A large portion of my thought here is rooted in Hannah Arendt’s text, “On Revolution.” Arendt talks about “the Social Problem” or poverty as being the leading cause for the French Revolution’s failure. America, on the other hand, had plenty of resources. As a result, the “needs” of the French people superseded their “wants”. These needs include the essentials in life: food, shelter and clothing. All derivatives of Labor or Marxian philosophy’s most pressing concern. Arendt believes that Marx’s focus on Labor was misguided because he only saw it as a historical element rather than a political one. His revolutionary thought did not wander into the dangers of Labor and need becoming political forces. Once the shift happened, it was too late. Quoting Robespierre, Arendt describes how they had come to a moment when a revolution could have led to a great “new” but instead France stayed the course for a new despotic leader in Napoleon.

Arendt saw America’s revolution as one that was nourished by plenty. America was not stretched thin for resources. Labor, as a political event, did not make its way into a political foray. Instead, the idea of freedom and nation building reigned. Clearly, not for the slaves who suffered shortages and plights abound but the “founding fathers” persisted. They succeeded where France fell short – a new and unique nation was born.

Today, how can we discuss the state of America without reintroducing Labor into the political front? The assault against people’s very basic needs is waged by modern political tyrants. Souls who only know wealth and never seem to have concerns about accessing America’s “milk and honey” are also the ones creating the assault against the basic needs of other Americans. Political operatives from the lowest valley to the highest echelon of America are seeking to take advantage of the massive wealth and power disparities to further garnish themselves. The Affordable Care Act doesn’t have a single sleep filled night since its incarnation. Anyone who has received government assistance for food or shelter has rarely escaped the stigmatization of having anything provided to them. Marx would cry for a revolution to normalize this instead of maintaining its heightened ostracization. Too late, Karl.

As a result of Labor being placed outside of the political spectrum, right’s language has faltered to keep up with it. French people bled, withered away, and died because of their “needs” not being met. Today that very thing is happening in America but instead of shame at not helping people live, the suffering is greeted with “I don’t believe that is a fundamental right.” France meets many of its people to insure that they can survive yet politicians in the Democratic and Republican world say “That is too big.” They don’t challenge because they find solace in their needs being met.

It is clear we stand at a precipice. I wish I could believe that we are not set to go reeling over the edge. But, it is hard to be optimistic when so many struggle to just survive. Volatility feels like what many American’s cradle and they cannot put it down. The American Way is so afraid of exercising a control and clear-mind that we only have one way to go: down.

The Needle and the Plug: Is There a Difference Between Killing and Letting Die?

Many people believe there is a significant difference between withdrawing life-sustaining treatment and letting a terminally ill patient die (passive euthanasia) and actively causing a terminal patient’s death by, for instance, delivering a lethal injection (active euthanasia).

Even the American Medical Association (AMA) endorses the distinction. The AMA’s code of medical ethics states that a patient with decision-making capacity “has the right to decline any medical intervention or ask that an intervention be stopped, even when that decision is expected to lead to his or her death and regardless of whether or not the individual is terminally ill.” If a patient doesn’t have decision-making capacity, her surrogate decision maker may, in accordance with her wishes, decline the initiation of life-sustaining treatment or have such treatment stopped if it has already been started.

Active measures to end a patient’s life, however, are forbidden by the code. It says that doctors engaging in active euthanasia “would ultimately cause more harm than good” and that the practice is “fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.” Another strike against active euthanasia, according to the AMA, is that it “could readily be extended to incompetent and other vulnerable populations” (a rather odd concern given that it could be guarded against by limiting it to when it’s truly voluntary, as is the case for passive euthanasia).

But is active euthanasia morally worse than passive euthanasia if the goal for each is to relieve the patient’s suffering? In his classic 1975 article “Active and Passive Euthanasia,” published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the philosopher James Rachels argued that it isn’t.

In fact, Rachels contended, active euthanasia can be more humane than passive euthanasia. To demonstrate his point, he used the case of a man dying of incurable throat cancer. Even with continued treatment, the man’s going to die eventually. But he’s in excruciating pain, which can’t be successfully relieved, so he doesn’t want the treatment to keep him alive any longer. If he asks the doctor to end treatment, and the doctor obliges, the doctor’s withholding treatment would seem compassionate because the patient is suffering, his disease can’t be cured, and extending his suffering unnecessarily would be wrong.

However, as Rachels pointed out, if treatment were simply withdrawn, it would take longer for the man to die and he would suffer more than he would if he were actively killed by a lethal injection. “This fact,” Rachels argued, “provides strong reason for thinking that, once the initial decision not to prolong his agony has been made active euthanasia is actually preferable to passive euthanasia, rather than the reverse.” Claiming otherwise, he said, “is to endorse the option that leads to more suffering rather than less, and is contrary to the humanitarian impulse that prompts the decision not prolong his life in the first place.”

Rachels also attacked the common belief that killing in itself is morally worse than letting die. He presented two cases that are exactly alike except one involves killing someone and the other involves letting someone die:

In the first, Smith stands to gain a large inheritance if anything should happen to his six-year-old cousin. One evening while the child is taking his bath, Smith sneaks into the bathroom and drowns the child, and then arranges things so that it will look like an accident.

In the second, Jones also stands to gain if anything should happen to his six-year-old cousin. Like Smith, Jones sneaks in planning to drown the child 4 in his bath. However, just as he enters the bathroom Jones sees the child slip and hit his head, and fall face down in the water. Jones is delighted; he stands by, ready to push the child’s head back under if it is necessary, but it is not necessary. With only a little thrashing about, the child drowns all by himself, “accidentally,” as Jones watches and does nothing.

Rachels argued there is no morally relevant difference between the two cases. “In the first place,” he said, “both men acted from the same motive, personal gain, and both had exactly the same end in view when they acted.”

As for arguments that the Smith and Jones cases are different from cases of euthanasia because they involve nefarious motives and obviously objectionable actions, Rachels said that the point is the same in euthanasia cases – the difference between killing and letting die is not a difference along which moral lines can be drawn:

If a doctor lets a patient die, for humane reasons, he is in the same moral position as if he had given the patient a lethal injection for humane reasons. If his decision was wrong—if, for example, the patient’s illness was in fact curable—the decision would be equally regrettable no matter which method was used to carry it out. And if the doctor’s decision was the right one, the method used is not in itself important.

So, what about arguments declaring that the difference between active and passive euthanasia is that in passive euthanasia the doctor doesn’t do anything to bring about the patient’s death?

It’s incorrect, Rachels argued, to say that in passive euthanasia the doctor doesn’t do anything to bring about the patient’s death. The doctor “does one thing that is very important: he lets the patient die.” Rachels granted that letting someone die is different from other actions in that it’s a kind action that is performed by way of not performing certain other actions, but he maintained that it is nonetheless a type of action.

“The decision to let a patient die,” he said, “is subject is subject to moral appraisal in the same way that a decision to kill him would be subject to moral appraisal: it may be assessed as wise or unwise, compassionate or sadistic, right of wrong.” And if a doctor deliberately let a patient die who had an easily curably disease, the doctor would be just as blameworthy for what he’d done as he would be for needlessly killing a patient.

It’s hard to argue that Rachels was wrong. In cases of both active and passive euthanasia, the motive, to relieve a terminally ill patient’s suffering, and the result, are the same. The method by which the result is brought doesn’t seem to matter. Though Rachels thought there was no morally relevant distinction between active and passive euthanasia, he never went so far as to say explicitly that to let someone die is to kill her.

The medical ethicist Dan Brock, on the other hand, argued just that with this case in his 1992 article “Voluntary Active Euthanasia,” published in the Hastings Center Report:

Consider the case of a patient terminally ill with ALS disease. She is completely respirator dependent with no hope of ever being weaned. She is unquestionably competent but finds her condition intolerable and persistently requests to be removed from the respirator and allowed to die. Most people and physicians would agree that the patient’s physician should respect the patient’s wishes and remove her from the respirator, though this will certainly cause the patient’s death. The common understanding is that the physician thereby allows the patient to die. But is that correct?

Suppose the patient has a greedy and hostile son who mistakenly believes that his mother will never decide to stop her life-sustaining treatment and that even if she did her physician would not remove her from the respirator. Afraid that his inheritance will be dissipated by a long and expensive hospitalization, he enters his mother’s room while she is sedated, extubates her, and she dies. Shortly thereafter the medical staff discovers what he has done and confronts the son. He replies, “I didn’t kill her, I merely allowed her to die. It was her ALS disease that caused her death.” I think this would rightly be dismissed as transparent sophistry-the son went into his mother’s room and deliberately killed her. But, of course, the son performed just the same physical actions, did just the same thing, that the physician would have done. If that is so, then doesn’t the physician also kill the patient when he extubates her?

Brock noted the important moral differences between the doctor’s behavior and that of the son: the doctor acted with the woman’s consent and the son didn’t; the doctor had good motives and the son didn’t; and the doctor occupied a role in which he was authorized to fulfill the woman’s wishes and the son didn’t.

So, the doctor’s act was justified, and the son’s act wasn’t. Yet in both cases, the woman is killed.

Whether you agree with Rachels and Brock or not, you have to admit that the conceptual and moral distinctions between active and passive euthanasia aren’t very sharp. In cases in which passive euthanasia is justified, it’s hard to come up with good reasons why active euthanasia is not also justified – whether compassion is delivered through a needle or the pulling of a plug doesn’t matter all that much.

John Christman’s Content-Neutral Version of Positive Liberty

This is a post is a follow-up to a previous post discussing Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between positive and negative liberty.

In his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin warned that the logic of positive liberty could lead to authoritarian corruption. Deemed the “inversion thesis” by George Crowder, Berlin’s argument was that by purporting to be more consistent with liberty than an individual’s actual wishes, the notion of positive liberty can be used to justify coercion against individual’s expressed wishes, thereby inverting the concept of liberty into its very opposite.

In “Liberalism and Individual Positive Freedom,” philosopher John Christman attempts a positive conception of freedom that is not subject to the dangers that concerned Berlin.

Whereas Berlin emphasized the historical notions of positive liberty that opened the door for coercion because the coerced desires or actions supposedly conformed with reason more so than the individual’s own, Christman argues that positive liberty need not rely on such strict conditions. It is not the content of the individual’s desires, he argues, but the procedures by which his desires are formed that constitute positive liberty. According to Christman, a person P is positively free with regard to some desire D if:

1. P was in a position to reflect upon the processes involved in the development of D;

2. P did not resist the development of D when attending to this process of development, or P would not have resisted that development had P attended to the process;

3. The lack of resistance to the development of D did not take place (or would not have) under the influence of factors that inhibit self-reflection (unless exposure to such factors was autonomously chosen, in which case that choice had to be made without such factors); and

4. The judgments involved in this self-reflection, plus the desire set that results, are minimally rational for P.

Christman spends quite a bit of time elaborating on the fourth condition and its requirement of minimal rationality. Traditional accounts of positive liberty, he argues, are laden with declarations connecting “true” liberty with the demands of reason. The question, he maintains, is to what extent must the judgments involved in the self-reflection demanded by positive liberty be rational, or in what sense must they be rational?

The criteria for rationality vary, he notes, and they can range from the requirement of consistency between beliefs and desires, to requiring the choice of the most effective means to achieve one’s ends, to having sufficient evidence for the beliefs upon which one’s desires depend. All accounts of rationality, however, can be put into one of two categories: “internalist” or “subjective” accounts and “externalist” or “objective accounts.”

For an internalist account, the criterion by which an action is considered rational is dependent only on those beliefs and desires that are “internal” to the person. The relation of those beliefs and desires to the external world (i.e., their accuracy) is not considered. It is usually demanded, Christman maintains, that the internal beliefs (upon which the conditional desires are based) are consistent and the desires are consistent.

By contrast, the externalist account of rationality requires that the person have adequate objective evidence to justify his beliefs, and that his desires be based on these beliefs. An even more stringent version of the externalist condition is one that requires the person to conform his desires to the correct values as well as to factual external evidence.

Christman summarizes the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of rationality in the following way: “the internalist would only demand that a person acts for reasons (perhaps ones which meet some requirement of consistency), while the externalist demands that the free agent must act in accordance with reason, where that includes knowledge of the truth, both about the world as well as morality.”

Christman defends the minimal, internalist account of rationality for the development of the desires of a positively free, autonomous person. This means that individuals whose actions are based on inconsistent beliefs or inconsistent desires are positively unfree. Christman does note that probably no one has completely consistent beliefs and desires, so the requirement is actually that there be a lack of manifest inconsistencies. He doesn’t offer a point at which beliefs or desires should be considered manifestly inconsistent, but I suppose a line could be drawn, at least in theory. There is no requirement, however, that the beliefs in question fit the external (objective) facts, and there is, similarly, no requirement that the brute desires be appraised on the basis of their rationality.

This conception of positive liberty, Christman argues, answers Berlin’s critique that proponents of positive liberty can justify interference with others’ actions by claiming the coercion is consistent with liberty. No one, he argues, will be in an epistemic position to justify interference on the basis of failed rationality of the internalist type. To do so, the interferer would have to know more than the agent about the internal structure of the agent’s desires and beliefs, and judge them to be inconsistent. Chirstman thinks this is practically impossible.

Christman even argues that requiring an external evidence condition for one’s beliefs would only allow for interference in a narrow range of cases. The cases would include, for instance, those in which the interferer has access to more factual information than the agent and where the information is indisputable and the agent had reasonable access to it. Interfering with an agent’s actions under such circumstances is justifiable, Christman says, because “to act unwittingly is not to act freely. And if I interfere with your unwitting actions I do not disrupt your self-government in any meaningful way.” Further, he continues, “most writers in the liberal tradition accept this as neither paradoxical nor pernicious.”

If these less stringent conditions of positive freedom are accepted, and the notion that freedom requires adherence to the correct values is rejected, then what results is a content-neutral, autonomy-based conception of positive freedom. Christman defends this content-neutral conception as follows:

There are good theoretical reasons for a content neutral conception. For any desire, no matter how evil, self-sacrificing, or slavish it might be, we can imagine cases where, given the conditions faced, an agent would have good reason to have such a desire. That is, there may be many cases where I freely pursue a strategy of action that involves constraining my choices and manipulating my values. But if this is part of an autonomous pursuit of a goal, it is implausible to claim that the resulting actions or values do not reflect my autonomy. So since we can imagine any such preference as being autonomously formed, given a fantastic enough situation, then it cannot be the content of the preference that determines its autonomy. It is always the origin of desires that matters in judgments about autonomy.

On this view, Christman argues, as long as an individual’s desires and values are generated in accordance with the procedural conditions of autonomous preference formation, then the actions that stem from them will be positively free, regardless of the content of those desires and values.

This post was adapted from my bioethics master’s thesis: “The Moral Significance of Non-Autonomous Refusals of Medical Treatment.”