It’s derogatively called the nanny state. Some, especially conservatives, detest the idea that the state should try to influence the behavior of its citizens by making it more difficult for them to engage in unhealthy practices. They are grown-ups, they say, and no one should tell them what is better for them; they know that themselves.
Well, let’s suppose they do, leaving aside the problem of false consciousness for a moment, do people always act according to what they think is best for them? Of course not. We often do things that we know are bad for us, don’t we? We eat too much and drink too much, smoke and do drugs, just to mention some health-related addictions. It’s not like we are in disagreement with the medical authorities about good and bad, but our action contradicts our knowledge. Addicts fight to get out of their bad habits and wish they were free. Why would it be wrong for the state to do its share to help them to be free?
The most typical way of doing this is to make unhealthy products artificially expensive, and even banning certain commodities wouldn’t necessarily be inconsistent with an idea of freedom.
Sure, making consumption more difficult for the abusers would impede the freedom of the moderate users, and that’s a legitimate concern, but the small freedom a controlled drinker or drug user enjoys hardly makes up for the slavery of an addict.
This is not to advocate any particular policy but only to say that a high degree of state involvement is not in principle contradictory to freedom. What may sometimes be the practical outcome is another concern. A total ban on alcohol, for example, could give freedom to potential alcoholics, but have an overall bad effect on society.
There will have to be a complicated balancing of practical measures. The road to freedom is not reducible to simple principles.
All theories fail, and all practice succeed; no theory works as it’s supposed to, but practice always works.
These assertions are true in a sense, but they inform us about nothing since they render conclusions that are inherent in the concepts and therefore, they are in fact tautologies.
A theory is a construction made for a plastic environment where all premises and influencing factors are known. Reality, on the other hand, consists of many intercepting factors and although the theory strives to take them into account, they can never be fully known. That’s the nature of both theory and practice; they are not supposed to fit one another perfectly and so it’s hard to call a theory a failure if it was never meant to succeed.
Rather, a theory is successful if it logically predicts the outcome based on the known premises and even more so if it is able to incorporate a large number of possible contingencies.
Practice always works; that’s an even less informative assertion. It merely states that whatever exists is working in some way or else it wouldn’t exist. It can’t be used as an argument in favor of letting the world take care of itself without the interference of theories, since the conclusion would already be a part of the definition.
Even if something is proven to work by virtue of its existence, it doesn’t mean that it can’t work better or that it contains no disadvantages. The world, at least the part of it that humans are responsible for, is indeed very imperfect. It somehow works, yes, but there’s certainly room for improvement.
There is no other way to aim at improvement than to have a theory of how it might happen. Imperfection is already included in the theory and with that in mind we may be more tolerant of what really counts as a failure.
A sound theory never fails. If all the premises involved are true and the deductions are logically carried out, the conclusion will necessarily come true even when you test it in practice.
The sticking point here, however, is in the phrase “all premises involved” and the problem with theories is that very often it’s impossible to include all premises that might be involved in a practical conclusion. That’s why the only real test of the validity of a theory can be done in a laboratory where the number of premises can be clinically limited. If X + Y = A is always true it will also be true in a laboratory if you can prevent Z or any other variable to be added to the equation. In real life that’s impossible. You can never keep every contingency away or predict all occurrences that may intervene.
But let’s say you could. Let’s say you could identify all the atoms in the atmosphere that makes up a certain weather condition. Then if you had a super complex (computerized) theory of how atoms move, and that theory was true, you could predict the weather 100%. Of course, such an immense computer system would be impossible, but it is imaginable because the number of atoms involved is not actually infinite.
Contrast that to the prediction of social and political events. Here the number of possibly relevant factors is literally infinite. Not even an imaginable supercomputer could conceivably capture them all because the cause of the events is not limited to physics but extend to that odd thing called human psychology, including will, emotions, personalities etc. and you never know which features may come together in such a gigantic clash.
The problem is not so much that humans are fallible, but that they defy the exact generalities that are necessary to make up a neat set of premises.
Philosophy is the search for truth, but not only “a” truth. It’s the search for “the” Truth, the one absolute objective Truth. If you think otherwise you reduce it to a game; a sophist pastime meant to amuse and confuse, maybe an exercise in thinking, maybe a teaching of prudence and awareness, but not philosophy.
Sure, you can never prove this truth and you can’t even achieve certainty for yourself that truth has been reached. You don’t know and you never will know, but that’s not to say that the truth isn’t out there. If it wasn’t, there would be no point in struggling.
Fair enough, science pursues a physical truth which obviously is more tangible. You can take your visible evidence and show it to another person and he just has to believe his eyes. But even in science there is no absolute evidence. Old “evidence” is frequently discarded, and new theories emerge, and nothing could ever convince the most ardent skeptic. Still, I for one think it’s the Truth that the earth is round just as I am quite convinced that certain ethical theories express the truth.
Science deals with physical evidence and that makes it easier to convince other people and yourself of your beliefs. But that’s the only difference between natural science and the humanities in this regard, and it’s not something absolute.
All the humanities, except philosophy (and theology), concern themselves with some sort of physical facts that produce semi-physical evidence (e.g. psychological experiments, sociological observations). Only philosophy is removed from the world of experience and deals with pure thought (metaphysics being the purest form of philosophy). Of course, the evidence will be more elusive in such a realm but that’s not to say that evidence is not being sought and that there isn’t an ultimate truth that the philosopher is seeking.
For me philosophy is at the extreme end of a continuum, with natural science at the other end, where the determining factor is the purity of thought. Philosophy is the science of pure thought.
Everyone has the right to have an opinion. That’s why we let them talk incessantly while we pretend to be listening. As soon as they have finished it’s our turn to get going on our favorite subject making sure we don’t disagree with the previous speaker by not touching on anything he said. In that way we secure harmony by skillfully talking past each other and avoid confrontation by never meeting.
Everyone has the right to have an opinion. We have learned about free speech, so we let them speak. We are so tolerant that we don’t care what they say anyway. And what is more, they don’t care either. They are all too happy to listen to their own voice, so they grab the chance to talk about anything they have never thought about before. Why should we tolerate them?
Everyone has the right to have an opinion, I agree, provided they have an opinion. I would listen to any well thought out point of view, but the freedom of speech doesn’t obligate me to listen to noise.
Am I being arrogant? Well, I really don’t want to accuse anyone of talking nonsense and I rather hope they would realize that themselves. The problem is that we invite the nonsense by not only allowing everyone to speak but encouraging them to do so whether they have anything to say or not. In the name of democracy innocent citizens are seen on television being cornered by reporters and getting a microphone thrust into their month. They seem happy to be asked as if they had just been given respect and importance. But we don’t respect people by making them express an opinion they don’t have, any more than it would be respectful to make them act as chimpanzees in a zoo.
Everyone has the right NOT to have an opinion.
Advertising is not rational – we all know that. The aim is not to convince us that a certain product is the best, but to make its existence as present in our mind as possible and thereby make it more likely that we will buy. We accept that since it’s not really all that important what kind of detergent we use or what drink we grab on a hot day. We are manipulated, most people know it and don’t care.
Does it never matter what we choose, then? Apparently not. Society and the economy are content to observe the smooth floating of money, goods and services. Quality is not an objective standard anyway but is entirely up to the judgment of the trusted consumer, or as it is expressed on festive occasions: We, the people.
No wonder it’s a short leap from capitalism to democracy: It’s all about the people’s choice… and the choice doesn’t matter.
Wait a minute, did something go wrong here? Well, we just observed that advertising isn’t rational and consequently not the choice of product either and if this can be transferred to the political realm, the conclusion will be the same there.
Political advertising is a fact in the greatest democracies and the same principles and techniques are used in this kind of marketing. The goal is to influence the feelings by the mere presence of the candidates and not to bring about a rational choice.
But if we find that acceptable when buying soda pop, it doesn’t sound quite in harmony with what we thought we had learned about democracy. Manipulating the voters ought to be regarded as a great sin in a democracy, since the true will of the people is being asked for. Still advertising, which is commonly known as manipulation, is openly accepted.
Don’t you think it’s a problem that billionaires are trying to buy the election?
Complete evil is a literary fiction. The crook who openly calls himself a crook and has no justification for his own actions other than his own crookedness, is an unrealistic invention. It may sometimes look like it to us when observing some of the most incredibly villainous deeds that historical characters have been capable of performing but looking more carefully into their motives would exclude total wickedness.
Hitler, for example, maybe the most evil individual history has produced, did believe that the world would be a better place without Jews, and so at least he pursued his own distorted notion of the good, and wishing to do good can’t be evil.
To find instances of utter evil we must turn to fiction, and those characters rather appear to be extracted from a cartoon. “The Joker” as he is portrayed in the Batman movies could never exist. He “just wants to see the world burn” without any reason or justification and any attempt at psychologically explaining such a conduct would be a waste of time.
If anyone were to come anywhere close to such an attitude in real life, they would probably refer to the state of the world and claim that their activities were consistent with what was happening anyway. Or more likely, they would originally be a part of some greater movement that would stop at nothing to reach whatever goal they had. On the way they would find sadistic satisfaction, which is of course an evil, but they would always retain the original goal as a justification to resort to.
A completely evil person would be one who didn’t have any cause, would never try to justify himself and in fact thought himself evil. Such a person would not have a human nature and a human psychology and could therefore not exist.
Historical facts are slippery. It is not always the magnitude of the events that make them stick to the collective memory, not the incontestable evidence and not even the nearness in time.
Everyone has heard about the sinking of the Titanic which over a hundred years ago cost maybe 1500 lives. That was bad of course, but what was so special about it that it deserves to remain fresh in the memory even today? There have been many much greater accidents since then that are totally forgotten.
Who has heard about the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after World War II? 12 to 15 million ethnic Germans were driven out of former German territory in what had become the Soviet Union and Poland and from other eastern countries. It happened under miserable conditions, people being packed into railway cars for days, and exposed to hunger, cold, violence and rape. As many as 2 or 3 million may have perished on the way.
Why isn’t this general knowledge? It’s not like it’s a secret, for how could such a massive fact be hidden, (Look it up on Wikipedia, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%931950) but it just doesn’t matter that the information is readily available, for it doesn’t sink into the collective consciousness until it has been popularized by the invisible hand of the historical marketplace.
The Germans were of course the villains after the war and popular opinion can’t handle nuances. The bad guys must be remembered as bad only and the Germans were guilty, right? Yes, of course they were guilty, especially the women and the children…
Now that you know this story, how will this information affect you? Very little, probably. Just being given a piece of fact will not edge it to your mind, and if it’s not repeated over and over again, it will not become a vivid reality to you.
But you will continue to mourn the Titanic.
A Bear - Poles Apart 