Contra Ivan

I'm still catching up on From Wine to Water, but I thought this post was worth commenting on. Ivan argues that, in spite of the obvious fact that two contradictory statements cannot be true, our day-to-day thoughts contradict themselves all the time. As an example, he describes a person who eats meat because it tastes good but also believes that killing animals is morally wrong. I enjoyed reading the post, but I don't think Ivan is correct here for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the actual contradiction he teases out is not entirely accurate.

...to get an out-and-out contradiction, we need to do a bit more work, and probably to draw upon other things we believe to be true. For example, we might believe that 3) we will eat animals since they are delicious, and 4) we will not do things that are terrible. The explicit contradiction now emerges: We will not do things that are terrible, such as hurting animals. And we will hurt animals to eat them, since they are delicious. We both will and will not do something terrible. P and not-P.

What Ivan meant here with point (4) - and, Ivan, please correct me if I'm wrong - sounds more like 4b) we should not do things that are terrible. There's no contradiction between "we will eat meat because it is delicious" and "we shouldn't eat meat because of the cruelty involved".

Another possibility is that Ivan meant 4c) we do not do things that are terrible. This seems closer to the way most people think, since after all it's very hard for anybody to accept that they do terrible things. But there's no necessary contradiction between "we do not do things that are terrible" and "hurting animals to eat them is terrible"! We might imagine a point 5) if we do not eat this meat, somebody else will, or a point 6) eating this meat helps the farmers and abattoir workers feed their own families. Neither of these points are particularly good arguments, but that is not particularly relevant*. To the extent that meat-eaters usually think their meat-eating out, it's highly likely that hey avoid a contradiction by the use of some such rationalization.

Most importantly, though, I want to question Ivan's implicit assumption that most people do think out their practices in this way. Since there's no immediate and obvious contradiction in "hurting animals is wrong, but I still eat meat", the law of non-contradiction does not apply**. In the absence of a serious philosophical inquiry into your own justification for meat-eating, your justification is far too vague to contradict or be contradicted by anything!

Unlike Ivan, I think that people usually do obey the law of non-contradiction in their own thought. You can see this if you argue against, say, somebody who eats meat. If you point out an apparent contradiction, as Ivan did in his post, they will invariably argue against you or come up with an alternate rationalization for eating meat (assuming they don't change their mind). What they will not do is shrug their shoulders and calmly accept the contradiction. Ivan is wrong to argue that human cognition does not obey the law of non-contradiction, but he's not all wrong. Human action, of course, breaks the law of non-contradiction all the time - and that's why we need philosophy.

---

* Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian who believes that eating meat is ethically wrong.

** If there is an "immediate and obvious" contradiction here, then there is also a similar contradiction in this example: "I wish to go to the post office, which lies due south from my apartment, but in order to get to the door of my apartment I first have to take five steps north."

The Ghost Of IOZ

As a rule, the most unseemly thing about any presidential candidate is his desire to be president. How is it that making zillions in private equity isn't enough? How was it that the ruling over an entire American state did not quench your thirst for power? What insatiable impulse drives your dark ambition to reign over the richest nation on earth? Surely the person put in charge of the sentient drone army should not display a naked desperation for dominance. Surely the answer to this yearning for power isn’t nomination but therapy.

So speaks Kerry Howley over at Slate (oddly enough, in the XXFactor section, misogynistically subtitled "what women really think"). If that first paragraph didn't raise the hairs on the nape of your neck, then perhaps the rest will: Howley writes an impassioned plea to vote for an unpopular third-party Marxist candidate who, even if she were to receive enough votes, would be too young to serve as President anyway. It is the best US election commentary I have read this year, and certainly the best article on Slate ever.

Gettier Cases: You Don't Know That

Can we imagine a case where you believe something, you're right, and you've got good reason to believe it - and yet you don't know that thing? We certainly can. Let's say you're a teacher at a high school, and the principal drives a very conspicuous car: a pink Ferrari. You show up to work one morning and see the pink Ferrari in the car park. In the staff room, another teacher asks you whether the principal's at work today.

"Yes," you say. "I saw his car."

As it happens, the principal is at work - but the pink Ferrari in the car park is, by pure chance, not his car but somebody else's. Did you know that the principal was at work?

By any reasonable standard, seeing an identical car to his in the car park would constitute good reason for your belief. And he is at work, after all! But intuitively, we don't want to say that you knew it.

Here's one reason why. If you had been informed that the pink Ferrari was not the principal's car - perhaps the other teacher replies "yes, I saw the car too, but it has a slightly different numberplate" - you would have changed your mind. In order to know something, it seems like there ought to be no true piece of information out there that, if you knew it, would make you decide you were wrong.

This kind of case is called a Gettier case after the first person to formulate one, Edmund Gettier. The general principle is to propose a situation where you have a true belief, but your justification for believing it happens by sheer chance to be wrong. Gettier cases pose serious problems for people who think knowledge is "justified true belief". Can a better definition of knowledge be found? Can the JTB definition of knowledge be altered to accommodate the Gettier cases? There's no consensus in philosophy right now, but I'll outline some competing theories next post.

An Ode To The Expendables 2

After a month-long hiatus, this is what I bring you: a paean to the sequel of an action film that well deserves the dubious title 'action film'. Indeed, all other elements of the film - plot, character development, the thematic heft - exist only to tie together a series of more and more ridiculous action scenes. Of course I am talking about The Expendables and its sequel, The Expendables 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Interesting Dan, over at Shittin' Diamonds, is convinced that the sequel has against all odds turned out to be good.

"The Expendables was an attempt at making an eighties action flick in 2010, and it sucked because it was a 2010 action flick with eighties action stars in it. The Expendables 2 doesn’t succeed because it puts more 80s action heroes on the screen, although its producers seem to think that’s the answer. (By the way, Arnie’s not fun any more, and Chuck Norris saying a Chuck Norris Fact isn’t actually that funny)."

Want to know why The Expendables 2 does succeed? Read the rest of the article here.

I'm Not Saying We Wouldn't Get Our Hair Mussed

At Balloon Juice, Bernard Finel writes on the increasingly likely prospect of war with Iran:

There has been some debate in strategic studies circles about whether this represented a warning against war or whether it was an effort to diminish expectations of catastrophic consequences in order to justify an attack on Iran. It sounds bad—war on “multiple fronts,” “hundreds of rockets and missiles”—but when you get right down to it, a month of conflict and 500 deaths could easily be seen as a small price to pay to end Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

 Finel quotes Israeli defense minister Matan Vilnai:

Vilnai said the government has prepared for the possibility of hundreds of rockets and missiles falling on Israeli population centers each day, with the expectation of 500 deaths.
“It could be that there will be fewer fatalities, but it could be there will be more. That is the scenario that we are preparing for according to the best experts,” he said. “The assessments are for a war that will last 30 days on a number of fronts.”

Five hundred deaths could easily - easily! - be seen as a small price to pay. Five hundred Israeli deaths, of course, using Matan Vilnai's estimate. There's no need to think about the Iranian casualties, or the victims of hundreds of Israeli rockets and missiles. No, the price of ending Iran's possible nuclear ambitions is five hundred deaths, more or less, depending on the breaks. What other deaths could matter?

Seth Sentry

Here's some great Australian hip-hop for a change - Seth Sentry's track Warm Winter. It's political:

So we came home, handshakes and ticket tape parades
Ace of spades swinging from a rope, 'hip hooray for the saviours'
We didn't even notice the changes, a disease born more contagious than AIDS is
Yeah, paranoia had changed us, the fear made us insane, afraid of our neighbours
The mere delay of a train was taken as strange
And every brown paper bag was an Al-Qaida attack
And every street corner had an armed Marine on it
Peacekeepers here to keep the peace that we wanted
They took the streets from us, our own leaders
Who the fuck would invade a country for no reason? Oh Jesus.

Not particularly subtle though.

Can't You Follow Instructions?

A few days ago I saw a dump truck full of rubble and twisted metal bars inching its way up a small street. Two men in construction gear were involved: one driving the truck, and the other walking in front making sure the way was clear. A few cyclists were heading up the street in the other direction, and as they approached, the man in front of the truck held up his hand and told them in an authoritative voice to go past on the footpath.

The cyclists gave him funny looks. There was plenty of space either side of the truck, after all, and due to the very heavy load it was moving too slowly to be dangerous. Ignoring the red-faced man, they rolled past the truck with a bike-width of clearance on either side.

"What's the matter with you?" cried the driver, incensed. "Can't you follow instructions?"

The cyclists were certainly capable of following instructions, but they were also capable of thinking and assessing risk for themselves. More importantly, they were capable of ignoring pointless and toothless instructions. If there wasn't enough room to pass safely next to the truck, they probably would have jumped onto the footpath.

This is what I mean when I say that anarchism is a thoroughly practical philosophy: quite apart from the question of whether obeying the driver's commands would have been sensible, there's the question of where the driver gets the right to issue any commands at all.

Nietzsche was right about this, at least - following orders does not come naturally, and anybody who finds it second nature to do so has probably been beaten or bullied into it. It's easy (and fun!) to scoff at adolescent rebellion, but beneath the tantrums and petty narcissism is the basic and praiseworthy human instinct to make our own decisions. Smothering this instinct is very difficult, but fortunately we have a similarly powerful drive to make decisions for other people. This is the primary purpose of almost every educational institution, workplace or prison - to mould its inmates into the kind of people who follow instructions.

We've gotten very, very good at it: a long time ago, you needed a constant threat of physical force, made real by reminders like public executions and torture. Now you can do it with a relatively small number of policemen and an array of cameras. The cameras don't even need to all work! The law is ever-present, omniscient, and possessed with a superhuman ability to collate and understand the information it gathers. Disobey legal-sounding orders, and you'll be found out and punished, so in general we obey.

It's good to know that we're capable of not following instructions, though - up to a point. If the man walking in front of the truck had been a policeman, after all, I doubt any of the cyclists would have stayed on the road.