Introduction: Weekly Journal Entries on Philosophy/Literature

I've decided to post up on here a few journal entries I write every week for a literature/philosophy class on Contemporary Theory. They are usually relatively disjointed, however I think it's important to resurrect this blog a little and since I've been so occupied with classes, I might as well put my own work for these classes online.

The first discusses extracts from Judith Butler and Genevieve Lloyd's "Man of Reason" (which I am in the midst of reading at the moment) on Hegel's famous "Lord and Bondsman" theory.

Judith Butler and Genevieve Lloyd on Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage”

On the difference between eternal sleep and death

"... by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished - to die: to sleep - " 

From Hamlet's soliloquy, "To be or not to be", Act 3, Scene 1, Hamlet(Second Quarto)

I watched "Star Trek; Into Darkness" the other day, and one of the concepts intrigued me. Bear with me if you haven't seen it; this post may make a little more sense if you have, but not much.
Khan and his crewmates are sent to sleep in their little incubators at the end of the movie; near the end, when someone asks Spock if he killed Khan's crew (assuming he'd sent the missiles to Khan's ship with the crew in them) he tells them something like "I would never do something so heartless" and this is folowed by a shot of the crewmates, still in cryo-sleep.

I just thought it was interesting that the idea of keeping someone in an eternal sleep/coma is more humane, more comforting than the idea of putting someone to death. Spock didn't blow up the crew but would it really have made a difference if he had? I suppose the difference is that there is a potential for the crew to wake up; they are not dead, they are still alive. 

But the end of the movie makes it pretty clear that noone has any intention of ever waking any of Khan's crew up. They are stored away.

So why is there such a big moral difference between killing them and keeping them in an eternal coma? There is some degree of debate about what being in a catatonic state means in terms of whether the person is still 'awake' in their own heads, able to think and imagine and remember but not perceive the outside world. If this is the assumption, then I suppose there is a kindness in keeping the crew members in their 'eternal sleep'. 

But being in a coma isn't the same as being asleep, and therefore isn't there the implication that they are not 'awake' at all but fully dead to the world/vegetative? And if this is the case, would keeping someone eternally in this state still be morally superior to killing them?

This is obviously a big argument re; euthanasia and comas and switching off machines. But there is a difference in that the crew in Star Trek are intentionally kept in this 'state' but can be awoken from it at any time. Despite the fact that this will probably never happen, does that mean it's still better than being dead? It's all about contingency; if you could choose to be kept eternally 'asleep' or just killed, you might choose to sleep as there would still be the slim possibility that you might one day be awoken and organisms cling to life with every chance they get.
(there's a parallel with cryonics here, in which people are frozen at vast costs in the hope that future technology will be able to 'resurrect' them, although the variables in that situation are different, relying on future advancements rather than random chance/human curiosity or need)

Is eternal sleep morally superior to death? If you could choose between them, between eternal sleep and death, which would you choose? It shouldn't really matter as they are essentially the same thing, although there is a certain promise to the idea of 'sleep', the lack of finality and the potential(however improbable) for a return to awakeness that might lead people to choose eternal sleep. 

Still though, if beings are kept in comas rather than being killed, this isn't morally superior in any real way unless there is the intention of waking them up in the future. Otherwise they are dead to the world either way.

On the 'sublime', or 19th century concepts of pain and pleasure

(Since I no longer have much time to collect and collate stuff into blog posts, this is a sort of fragmentary post.)

"Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer, are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures...which the liveliest imagination...could enjoy."

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757

Let's talk about this idea briefly. This is the idea that the concept of pain is stronger than the concept of pleasure and has a stronger effect on our emotions and imagination. Here we assume the author discusses emotional pain and not physical pain, although he talks about 'danger' quite freely in the same context. Pain may be much more familiar to us because we get hurt all the time; it is a physical response linked very closely to an emotional feeling of 'torment'. So when we describe strong emotions of pain or heartbreak, we say 'it hurts' as in, the emotional pain is so strong it feels physical. Happiness is, like pain, intangible. We experience physical pleasure but happiness is very much an emotional response rather than a physical one.
I need to do more research into this 19th century viewpoint about emotion and torment. Reacting instinctively to it, though, I'd say as a person brought up in the 21st century I'm inclined to disagree with it. We can feel happiness just as acutely as pain, and sometimes it feels like happiness is the more strong because a rush of true happiness is rarer than a stab of pain.

The article(note the date; this is an 18th century perception of the Romantic idea of the 'sublime)  also mentions that fear is most acute when the thing is obscure:

To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary.

 This is perhaps true when we think about how we are more frightened in the dark; night seems to be a darker and more mysterious, perhaps even more frightening time. If you're thinking this is ridiculous in our modern age, consider how much scarier it is travelling home alone in the dark than in the daytime. This certainly also applies when we consider famous and very effective 20th century black-and-white horror movies where the villian appears only as a shadow over the wall or going up the stairs. We never see the monster and therefore are more afraid for it, perhaps because our own imagination creates something much more frightening than anything that could be onscreen(it is true that we know best what we're scared of, so maybe this is why the fear of the unseen works so well; we fill in the space with our worst fears, and when the thing becomes known or visible or tangible we are no longer so afraid).

The article is very interesting; there's also views on the concept of death which I want to discuss at a later date.

On the meaning of control in Stalinist Russia

Here is an essay I wrote a year ago on the nature of control and power in Stalinist Russia. I booked at George Orwell's famous novel 1984 as a basis for establishing the meaning of control in the political climate.

The essay is a few thousand words long, so I will probably shorten it in the near future to provide a more concise, blog-friendly version of my argument. I also haven't looked at it in a year, so please be forgiving; as a 16 year old this was my first lengthy essay and the first essay whereby I conducted independent research and wrote the whole thing on my own. Since I wrote it in the space of a week and a half my research wasn't extensive, so some of the opinions are simplified.

The meaning and level of control in Stalinist Russia

To look into control in Stalinist Russia, the meaning of total and complete control must first be established. The political novel 1984 by George Orwell depicts a society in which controlling the ideas and thoughts of the people is more important than a physical repression of the opposition. Following this theory, if the thoughts of an entire population are controlled completely, then absolute control exists. If we take this as the definition of ultimate authority then it cannot exist, even in a repressive regime such as that of Stalin. However 1984 very effectively portrays a realistic society in which the people accept everything without doubt or question. 1984 suggests that it is more important for the ideas of a regime to be maintained than a single individual’s power. Therefore the question the political novel raises is about the possibility of complete control over a population, not in the hands of an individual but an ideology, as Party member O’Brien reveals whilst torturing Winston:

On casting blame

There is a story in the New Testament. 

It involves a woman who has committed adultery, about to be stoned to death by a large crowd. She is backed up against the hard, sun-baked wall; the crowd gather around her, loud and swarming. Red dust dances in the air, whipped up by their frenzy. Dusty stones are clutched in hundreds of calloused hands. The crowd asks Jesus what they should do with the woman, for in the Bible it says that a woman who commits adultery should be stoned with death.

We all know of the answer. 

“Let him who is without sin among you be the first to  throw a stone at her.”

Julian Baggini in Should You Judge this Book by its Cover? takes a look at this famous saying and examines its meaning in a modern context.

We usually take this story as a wise fable on the immorality of casting blame on others when we ourselves know what it's like to have been in the wrong. Essentially it says; don't judge others. 
But as Baggini points out, we can't take this saying too literally. Just because none of us are free of 'sin' doesn't mean we should allow people who have commited crimes to go free. There has to be a certain level of judgement. We cannot simply put everyone on the same level, and say that judges shouldn't be allowed to give people sentences because they're not exactly saints themselves. 
If we did follow this story to the latter, we'd be in a society where people are never blamed or judged for the things they do, because everyone's done something.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons we have laws; if noone can be trusted to judge others, if everyone is one and the same because everyone has done something bad at least once, then not a single person can pass judgement on other people. Not a single person can say who should die and who should be imprisoned and who should be pardoned. But the law is blameless, and judges everyone equally. It sets out the lines in the sand. But does this go against the original Bible story? The crowd asks Jesus if the woman should be stoned because in the Old Testament Moses commanded in the law that adulterers should be stoned to death in punishment. 

So how should we reinterpret this famous saying? 
In our current world we do believe that some should have the powers to judge others, to cast blame. Judges, policemen, politicians and law makers. Juries; randomly chosen people who make a decision on whether another person should be blamed for their sin.
What this story teaches us, then, today, is not about punishment but about the wrongness of superfluous blame; the importance of treating others fairly because we all make mistakes and we all do stupid things. 
But then this leads to another question, about what it means to 'treat someone fairly'. What should the definition of fair be? When is enough punishment enough? And should we be considering other methods to rehabilitate those who have done wrong rather than straight-out damning or forgiving them?(Consider the death penalty, China's "reeducation through labour" program, therapy, rehab)
I'll talk about that another day. This Bible story is at least interesting as a concept, and also as a thought experiment on how we interpret different sayings and how these interpretations change(or not.)

On drugs and morality, or the merits of 'bioenhancement'

So say there's a new drug. It's a pill, red and shiny and ever so pretty.

Say it has the potential to influence the morality of a person.

What could we do with this clever little pill?
We could use it on criminals who have less capacity for sympathy than the regular human being. We could give them the drug so they feel less inclined to put a bullet through someone's head just to watch them bleed.
Or on a smaller level, we could give it to test cheaters, so they would recognise the unfairness of cheating.
Is this a good idea?
Is it fair to try and influence people's morality, changing their behaviour so they are more inclined to do good?

I was inspired to think about this by an article from Philosophy Now, entitled "The Incoherence of Moral Bioenhancement". It is a response to another, earlier article which is available online entitled simply "Moral Enhancement". I read both the response article, which argues strongly against using moral bioenhancement, and the original. 

If we say drugs can 'fix' people, this sets a dangerous idea in motion. The idea is that a person might need drugs to fix themselves from a predisposed condition that makes them less moral than others. In other words, it's completely against the concept of changing for the better (musical distraction here). 
This idea that an action is not your fault because, oh whoops, it's in your genes, is already out there though not quite established.
But what we currently know about behaviour and the 'nature vs. nurture' argument is that this is not necessarily true; behaviour is influence both by your genes and your environment which influences how a gene is expressed.
And even if we say, okay yes this person is naturally disposed to be a miser and waste energy and leave the tap running does that mean he will be? Surely there are people in the world who have anger issues or other traits that they have learned to control.
Having a drug to fix a person will make people's beliefs much more narrow; instead of trying to keep their issues under control, they can blame their genes and society as a whole for the harm they have done and pop a few pills instead of doing a bit of actual soul-searching and saying maybe I have the power to change myself. 
This idea of dependency on outside forces to change your own behaviour certainly is, if we think about it, relatively common. Consider the huge number of celebrities who go to drug and alcohol rehab every year, after having a 'relapse of judgement'. They need 'help'; they can't possibly do it on their own, can they? They need therapists and soothsayers and motivators.

Well, that's what the article argues anyway. But there are many other things to take into account, namely the moral ambiguity of influencing other's behaviour through drugs. 
The article makes an important point about free choice. 
What does good will mean? 
Essentially if people choose to go out of their way and make people's lives better, they exercise goodwill.
(They also get that warm fuzzy feeling inside.)
But if we accept this, then there's an immediate problem with the morality pill. If people are influenced to do good because they are taking the drug, surely their free choice has been taken away. 
Just because they are giving to charity/handing out money, it does not mean they are exercising goodwill.
The point of goodwill is that you accept it is something not normally done, you accept that you are doing it not because you feel an obligation to do it(i.e. you are a bad person if you don't) but because you can better another person's life. 
We have to ask ourselves; do we really want a world where people feel obliged and influenced to do good for others, as opposed to making a conscious decision to go out of their way to improve another person's life out of the goodness of their heart?
Free hugs everywhere but not a good intention in sight.

Naturally these drugs don't really exist yet; we're not talking about drugs used to calm down schizophrenics here, more the hypothetical possibility of drugs that can physically influence a person's morality. 

Certainly this is an interesting issue, and I don't study philosophy so anyone who does and is reading this probably thinks I'm an idiot. I have barely begun to scratch the surface on this issue I read a thought experiment once which dealt with a similar theme; it was a machine through which criminals could choose to go that would make them disgusted by what they had done. The thought experiment is discussed in the wonderful book "The pig that wants to be eaten" by Julian Baggini which deals with all sorts of thought experiments and is simple enough for, well, me to understand. 

Although we are still very far from developing such a drug, (though we do have drugs today that we could easily compare to it), the question of whether using such a drug is beneficial to mankind and the morality of using such a drug is still very much up in the air.