A Bear - Poles Apart

January 12, 2017 / Congau

Who Are You?

Before you answer that question, I must warn you that I may not accept your answer. There is a strange presumption that anyone can choose their own identity and that they always are what they think they are. Though it is of course true that people have a better access to their own self than anyone from outside, they may still be completely wrong in their self-perception.

Just like it is possible to give a description of the identity of inanimate objects, one must be allowed to search for an objective classification of human beings. So when investigating yourself, you cannot rely solely on your feelings, but have to make an effort to search objectively for what is essential about you. Even if you feel like a duck, you are probably not a duck.

Every person is a unique individual, but every individual can also be categorized. From birth we had a set of potentials; it was large, but it was not unlimited. That means that everyone cannot become just anything, but in that very limitedness our fundamental uniqueness is to be traced. If anyone could choose freely, there would be no basic personality.

Your actual current self is a realization of one potentiality. That was also not really chosen because it is the total result of a process which you could only partially and occasionally control. The circumstances of your birth and upbringing and accidental occurrences in your path have led you into a certain actuality, and that is you.

This you is an objective fact which it may be easier for you to recognize than for anyone else since you are closer to yourself than anyone else is, but you may still go wrong when trying to identify it. Still, go ahead and try: Who are you?

January 11, 2017 / Congau

The Means to an Unknown End

”The end justifies the means”, that may perhaps be true, but as a slogan it is useless, terrifying and extremely dangerous. It is clear that sacrifices must be made on the way toward any destination, that cakes must be eaten and eggs broken, but if that golden omelette cannot be produced, and it cannot, there is no substitute for the irreparable debris.

That is the problem for those social reformers who turn their conviction into ruthless war. Whatever utopia it is they want to achieve, it will never be obtained, not only because perfection is impossible, but because human affairs are unpredictable.

When myriads of forces are involved, when legions are fighting for or against any number of contradictory goals, the outcome is bound to be very different from what anyone could envision. No matter what wonderful aim a Lenin or a Mao may have contemplated, the result would have to look very different.

Not only utopias are beyond reach, no political goal can be attained exactly according to plan. Maybe the end would have justified certain extreme measures if it could be reached, but it cannot. The damage done and the people killed, what has happened can never be undone and it all has to be accounted for when the end result is assessed.

The relationship between ends and means can only be seen in retrospect – when it is too late. Only then will we know if the means were justified, and they probably were not.

As a rule for action, the means can only be justified when the end is very simple and predictable.

January 10, 2017 / Congau

Right Action

Can wrong actions be excused and accepted if the outcome is for the greater good of the society?

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/philosophical-questions-about-society-that-will-make-you-think.html

If an outcome of an action is for the greater good of the society, it may automatically be considered a right action. In that case it would be a contradiction of terms to suggest that a wrong action can have a good outcome. Can there possibly be another way to decide whether an action is right or wrong?

Some say that an action may be good in itself, but then what is the measure of its goodness? If telling the truth is good, why is it so? It is because truthfulness is good for social relations, that is, it has a good outcome for society.

But it may happen that actions which are usually likely to produce bad results, on occasions can have good effects. If the agent did not intend the favorable outcome or if he was just lucky there is no reason to praise him for his action and it must still be deemed wrong in spite of the good result. But when he intended the action, knew what he was doing and achieved the expected good result, then the action was praiseworthy and good.

However, one important note must be made. By outcome I don’t just mean the final result. Everything that happens in the process must also be counted toward the outcome. Even if killing unproductive elements benefits the national economy, that can never add up to a favorable net result in moral terms.

But an intended, well calculated action that has a beneficiary total outcome for society, one that even you can agree with, can never be wrong.

January 9, 2017 / Congau

Stealing Is Not Always Wrong

Is stealing ethical, if carried out in order to feed a starving family?

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/philosophical-questions-about-society-that-will-make-you-think.html

Ethics should not be a list of unexplained principles. For every single act one should be able to state why it is right or wrong. The principles are only there to facilitate a quicker explanation by pointing out that cases that look similar may indeed have a similar moral value. But also they may not. Stealing may not be just stealing.

It is probably useful to ask oneself that very basic question: Why be ethical at all? And the answer should be: Because you don’t want to be the cause of other people’s suffering. It all goes back to that and all principles should be derived from that.

Now the principle against stealing has of course the same origin. Theft causes suffering for the person who loses his property. But if there is a case when not stealing causes more suffering than stealing, the principle loses its purpose.

A moral principle is a dangerous thing if it makes us go morally blind. It is possible to commit terrible acts by sticking to rules that were meant to do good in another context.

It would indeed be an act of extreme cruelty to let a family die of starvation if access to food, even stolen food, was ready at hand, but a fanatic adherence to principle may in fact produce such perverted results. If it is then admitted that strict rules cannot regulate moral conduct, one may realize that even less radical moral dilemmas must be treated as unique cases.

Sometimes it’s necessary to steal if we are to behave ethically.

January 8, 2017 / Congau

Art Is the Meaning of Life

In a sense it is. Art is an expression of what makes life worth living. It makes us human.

Art is not useful and that makes it meaningful. What is useful, what we really need, is only that which sustains life. We need to eat and we need to work to earn money for food, clothing and shelter. Other than that we don’t need anything; our animal existence is satisfied. But if life is just about sustaining life, we live in a meaningless circle, and art is the way out of this trap.

Human beings can create, they can make something out of sheer ideas and thereby step out of the pattern of repetitive instinct, that is, they can make art. They can also enjoy art, finding pleasure in pictures and music and words – the kind of enjoyment that goes beyond the unreflected satisfaction of animal appetites.

Whatever makes life meaningful for anyone has a share in this artistic quality. The enjoyment of friendly company is an exchange of ideas on whatever level. Work is enjoyable if it involves a certain amount of creativity. Sports and simple entertainment is a way out of tedious repetition, so even that takes part in this.

But art itself is the purest way to express what is meaningful, because it is not tainted by other considerations. Art is only for art’s sake. There is no contaminated usefulness in pure art; it is not compromised by the need for repetitive self-preservation or the wish to achieve something else. Art is an end in itself and only such a thing can make life meaningful.

January 7, 2017 / Congau

Ideological Scarcity

Mainstream politics shuns ideology. It wants a stable normality without strong believes where everyone goes about their private business without challenging the structures of society. In short, they want politics without politics.

Some countries have come closer to this ideal than others. Germany is governed by a grand coalition effectively pushing the ideological opposition out to the fringes making them sound like radicals that are not to be taken seriously.

There is something to be said for this quiet condition in a big prosperous country, after all many people have no interest in politics at all and prefer to be left alone in their private lives. But the lack of ideology is also an ideology and therefore it is unsurprising if countries that are not comfortably included in benevolent Merkelism seek to formulate another one.

In Poland for example a sharp ideological conflict has broken out. It is condemned as a breach with so-called European values, but in a way it is a reaction to the non-ideological ideology of the EU. Institutions sometimes have to be broken to open up for a real alternative.

The ideologies are not dead, as some have claimed, and it could also never happen because any conception of society is itself an ideology and also because there will always be a certain reaction to whatever ideology is dominant.

But of course in certain times and places the ideological competition is less pronounced and when they are hidden it may look as if they have disappeared. The absence of quarrel and strife may be a good thing in itself, but it’s a pity that it dulls the social consciousness.

January 6, 2017 / Congau

Historical Reparations

There can be no compensation for historical injustice, for there is no such thing as collective guilt and also no collective pain. The descendants are not guilty of the atrocities of their ancestors, and if the fathers have suffered, nothing will be relieved by the prosperity of later generations. And how far back in history should we go to make such imaginary corrections? We are all descendants of both victims and offenders and the tribunal of history is endless.

It is about money; dirty money whose source can never be traced. How can money ever relieve pain, let alone pain that was suffered by victims who are no longer alive? There is something undignified about wanting to change your grandfather’s suffering into hard cash. Isn’t it greed in the name of justice?

But maybe it is only about money and there is no reference to ethics at all. The descendants are then to be given back the money they now would have had if their ancestors had not been robbed. To try to make such an estimate would be both impossible and absurd. We can never know what might have happened if history had been different.

If it is meant to be a compensation for mere legal breaches in the past, these may not be found because those terrible things that happened may have been legal in the past. If slavery was legal, it cannot be legally compensated.

No, it is of course an ethical argument, but by confusing it with law and money the ethical dimension is tainted. Victims should be remembered, not capitalized on.

January 5, 2017 / Congau

State Oppression

The purpose of the state is justice. It is the only purpose. Whether that means a strong or a weak state involvement in the economy and law-enforcement is a matter of ideological disagreement, but whatever level of engagement one prefers, one must argue that that level is the best way to secure justice. In cases where justice is irrelevant, there simply is no reason why the state should be engaged at all.

But the state, once established, becomes an organism that takes on a purpose of its own. It needs to preserve itself and so develops instruments of power. The military is the most obvious example of how a power structure may become self-fulfilling and start exercising power for its own sake, but there are many more innocent examples. In any official position it is tempting to let the rules of procedure become laws of nature and press everything into formal rubrics. That is bureaucracy; the state enjoying its own self-fulfillment. Then all pretence of justice disappears and we see oppression in its purest form

Rules are always somewhat oppressive in that they are restrictions on freedom, but they may be justified by their purpose. The conservative dictum that “The best government is that which governs least” is mistaken in that it fails to distinguish between valid and invalid aims of government, but it is right in pointing out the oppressive force of government.

Oppression is never more bitterly felt than when it serves no external purpose, that is, when it is meaningless.

January 4, 2017 / Congau

The Trend

It is a stream that flows through us all. It tells us how things are to be today, what we are to wear and even what to say and think. The Trend is a mighty but blurry force, difficult to trace and hard to disobey.

Sometimes we recognize it and understand what it does to us; then it is quite harmless. We may follow the general clothing fashion of today simply to avoid drawing too much attention to ourselves. We don’t believe in it, but just do it out of convenience.

But often we are actually convinced that we are doing what is right for us and acting on personal choice. This year’s fashion is beautiful, we think and we hardly remember what we liked last year. That is scary. And it is not even a propaganda trick of some totalitarian government exercising thought control; we do it to ourselves. That is even scarier.

The Trend comes from nowhere. No one consciously initiates it and its direction is unpredictable. It seems to be like a force of nature, like the weather or an earthquake, and it is perceived to be as inevitable and unquestionable. It just has to be that way, we think. It is right. It is natural.

We laugh at pictures from the past. How could they wear something like that? How could they think such a thing? We now know the answer. We now know what is right. We know it until we know something else.

January 3, 2017 / Congau

Ethical Responsibility

We are responsible for everything, for anyone and all the time. You are always your brother’s keeper. The drowning man, who you refuse to help, is your heavy guilt, but any other needy person on this earth is also an item on your conscience. There is no limit to what we could have done and should have done to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings.

Ethics cannot be an enclosed system of rules which you can slavishly follow and think that you will automatically be freed from guilt. None of us does enough and we can always do more. You cannot refuse to help that drowning person you pass on your way claiming that he is outside of your jurisdiction and that the law doesn’t require you to sacrifice your dry clothes. You could have helped and therefore you should have helped.

But what could we not have done? A drowning person somewhere far away in Africa may also have been rescued if we had taken precautions. We know that people are hungry and cold and suffer abuse, but we don’t do anything. Every one of us is responsible and guilty of neglect. Of course we are not supermen and even with our best efforts we could not reach far, but we could all have reached farther than we do. We cannot hide behind formal responsibility for moral responsibility knows no boundaries.

You may say that we are more to blame for neglecting to aid someone who is directly before our eyes. Maybe, but distance and inconvenience don’t acquit us.

Human laws have to draw lines and define areas of responsibility, or else it wouldn’t be possible to judge the conduct of the members of society. But those boundaries are in fact artificial and serve an organizational purpose. There is no real limit to responsibility and you could always strain your effort even further.

This does sound like a frightening demand, and in a way it is, but on the other hand, since the requirements are not clearly defined, they are also open and relaxed. All one can say is: Do your best.

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