I started on the article from Psyche/Aeon. Probably ought not have, but there seemed some things to learn.
A sense of humour – even a dark one – is a moral virtue
Every moral theory offers an answer to this question, but one in particular centres the question of what a good person is (rather than what a right action is). This theory is virtue ethics. Virtue ethics works like this: moral goodness is an attribute of character. When you say something is morally good, you are saying, presupposing, implying or entailing that someone is morally good. When you say it is good to give money to homeless people, you are saying that the kind of person who gives money to the homeless is likely to be a good person. People can develop good traits just by doing the kind of stuff that good people would do. Think of it as moral practice, just like practising any other skill.
So when we ask ‘What is a good person?’ the answer from virtue ethics is: a person who possesses character traits that make them admirable or that contribute to flourishing (or both).
The idea that good people are made of good character traits goes back to ancient Greece. Aristotle argued that good character traits are always in the middle between two bad extremes. For example, courage is the golden mean between cowardice (fearing too much, or too many things) and foolhardiness (fearing too little, or too few things). Virtues enable us to aim at the golden mean across situations by helping us govern our emotions. Courage, for instance, will temper your fear when it is excessive, and boost it when it’s deficient. In this way, you will end up calmly confronting your boss about your meagre salary without resorting to threats or name-calling (no matter how richly they deserve it). Your coworkers – and perhaps even your boss – may admire your nerves of steel, and you might even get the raise, which would contribute to your flourishing.
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A sense of humour is virtuous because it helps people govern and express the emotions of contempt, trust, amusement and hope. And these emotions answer to the universal flourishing-related needs of criticism, connection, coping and capability. All in all, a sense of humour is a virtue – and hence makes you a better person. In particular, it is an executive virtue like courage (and patience and self-control) because, through its regulation of emotion, it helps people to more effectively exercise both individual and collective agency. This does make humour a bit dangerous, like the other executive virtues. A courageous foe is more formidable than a cowardly one. Just so, a foe who wields humour to evil ends is more formidable than a humourless foe. But, just as we would not wish to live in a world full of feckless cowards, so we should not wish to live in a world full of humourless dullards or obnoxious buffoons. Better to foster potentially dangerous executive virtues like courage and a sense of humour than to try to extinguish their fire and light – even if that comes at the risk of being burnt.
I lost my sense of humor once. Depression does that. Think on that, please. The essay makes other good points, but these are the one I want to emphasize. One thing I would add: a sense of humor shows a balance towards the world. Donald J. Trump has no sense of humor.
My PO added a new question to his use inquiry about my sex life - he asked if I was getting exercise and getting out. I think he might be getting a slight glimmer that my life is quiet and solitary. Oddly enough, in the old days I felt more and more removed from my friends and family and this did increase my feeling of not belonging. I do not have this feeling now. Even though, I did as much as possible to make everyone hate me. Which is why I read, and suggest for reading, How a feeling that you belong could protect your mental health:
One of the most basic emotional needs is the need to belong. When people are asked about important parts of their identity, they often note the groups they belong to: their company, their church, the fanbase of their favourite sports team, and so on. Belonging is characterised by feeling that you are welcomed, seen and appreciated as part of a social group. This feeling may be based on values, customs or activities that you share with members of a group, and it can provide a sense of meaning and purpose. A lack of belonging is not the same thing as loneliness, which is a feeling that you lack the amount of social interaction that you desire. Someone who is not lonely – perhaps they have a close and fulfilling relationship with a sibling, for instance – might still feel as if they don’t belong in their workplace, their neighbourhood, or another social context.
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In a world with so many divisions, belonging is worth pursuing – but it can take time to build. If you’re looking to increase your own feelings of belonging, you might start by seeking volunteer opportunities that pique your interest, or opportunities to connect with local people who understand and appreciate your culture. Making an effort to support the belonging of others could also help you feel more connected to a social group or network. Intentional everyday interactions, such as asking coworkers for their input or inviting a neighbour to a backyard cookout, are small but potentially effective ways of doing this. Even brief interactions with members of our communities could help foster the feelings of belonging that too many of us are going without.
Nowadays, I know my friends wanted to be friends. My depression deceived me. The government wants me to be kept segregated, watched, but that does not bother me. I have my connections that I want, and I know they want me. I call that belonging.
How to think about truth In a world of disagreement, what should you believe? These ideas will help you take a philosophically informed perspective is too long, too much on point to easily digest. Thing is, in this day of disinformation and misinformation, we need to think more about how to think about the truth. Maybe I have been reading philosophy too long not to think about such things. Even before I first read David Hume or William James or Friedrich Nietzsche, I was not a trusting person and I had enough exposure to science to know to test my ideas. Could it be our education systems today are less than they were 40 - 50 years ago?
Here is a commonsensical idea: true claims tell us what the world is like. This idea may be represented differently in different languages such as English and Akan but, however it is articulated, it seems to be a bedrock truth about truth. When we consider this idea, our philosophical impulses may lead us to ask metaphysical questions like ‘What is a claim?’ ‘What is the world?’ and ‘What is it for a claim to tell us what the world is like?’ However, deflationists insist that we don’t really need to ask these questions to have a perfectly serviceable understanding of truth. We can express commonsensical ideas about truth in plain, simple language, so they are ready to use right out of the box.
Why making if-then connections might be the key to consciousness interests me because it sounded like it might touch on the theme I dreamed up years ago for "The Psychotic Ape." Another story still looking for a home. There is not an article, but a BBC video on the other side of that link, and this blurb:
So when and why did consciousness spring from the tree of life? This brief explainer from BBC Reel outlines one groundbreaking new theory from Eva Jablonka at Tel Aviv University and Simona Ginsburg at the Open University of Israel. Centred on a concept called ‘unlimited associative learning’ – the ability to link events and outcomes, and change behaviours accordingly – their theory proposes that the advent of consciousness some 500 million years ago gave way to an evolutionary ‘arms race’ in sophisticated thinking.
Maybe I do have something.
They’re playing our song! The philosophical puzzle of cover songs - the answer is technology.
Moral mathematics employs numbers and equations to represent relations between human lives, obligations and constraints. Some might find this objectionable. The philosopher Bernard Williams once wrote that moral mathematics ‘will have something to say even on the difference between massacring 7 million, and massacring 7 million and one.’ Williams expresses the common sentiment that moral mathematics ignores what is truly important about morality: concern for human life, people’s characters, their actions, and their relationships with each other. However, this does not mean mathematical reasoning has no role in ethics. Ethical theories judge whether an act is morally better or worse than another act. But they also judge by how much one act is better or worse than another. Morality cannot be reduced to mere numbers, but, as we shall see, without moral mathematics, ethics is stunted.
In this essay, I will discuss various ways in which moral mathematics can be used to tackle questions and problems in ethics, concentrating primarily on the relationship between morality, probability and uncertainty. Moral mathematics has limitations, and I discuss decision-making concerning the very far future as a demonstrative case study for its circumscribed applicability.
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Moral mathematics, then, must be sensitive to circumstances and tolerant of errors grounded in uncertainty, such as Beth’s potentially excessive, but justifiable, use of force. The application of moral mathematics, and indeed of all moral decision-making, is always clouded by uncertainty. As Bertrand Russell wrote in his History of Western Philosophy (1945): ‘Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales.’
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Many believe that morality is objective. For this reason, moral mathematics often employs expected value theory, in which the moral utilities of outcomes are objective. Moral value, in the simplest terms, is how objectively morally good or bad an act is. Suppose the millionaires Alice and Bob consider donating £1 million each to either saving the rainforest in the Amazon basin or to reducing global poverty. Expected value theory recommends choosing the option with the highest objective expected moral utility. Which charity has a higher objective expected moral utility is difficult to determine. But, once determined, Alice and Bob should both donate to it. One of the two options is simply morally better.
Expected utility theory, like expected value theory, is a powerful moral mathematical tool for responding to uncertainty. But both theories risk being misapplied due to their reliance on probabilities. Humans are notoriously bad at probabilistic reasoning. There is a tiny probability of winning certain lotteries or of dying in a shark attack, estimated at approximately 1 in a few millions. Yet we tend to overestimate the probabilities of such rare events, because our perception of their probabilities is distorted by things like wishful thinking and fear. We tend to overestimate the probability of very good and very bad things happening.
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oral mathematics forces precision and clarity. It allows us to better understand the moral commitments of our ethical theories, and identify the sources of disagreement between them. And it helps us draw conclusions from our ethical assumptions, unifying and quantifying diverse arguments and principles of morality, thus discovering the principles embedded in our moral conceptions.
Notwithstanding the power of mathematics, we must not forget its limitations when applied to moral issues. Ludwig Wittgenstein once argued that confusion arises when we become bewitched by a picture. It is easy to be seduced by compelling numbers that misrepresent reality. Some may think this is a good reason to keep morality and mathematics apart. But I think this tension is ultimately a virtue, rather than a vice. It remains a task of moral philosophy to meld these two fields together. Perhaps, as John Rawls put it in his book A Theory of Justice (1971), ‘if we can find an accurate account of our moral conceptions, then questions of meaning and justification may prove much easier to answer.’
There is math, there are more details, but the idea gets across of how and how not use math. In the end, math does not relieve us of the need for thinking about our actions.
I get the book review newsletter from The Brisbane Times. I recommend it.
Iran was in the news this morning, Iranian prosecutor says morality police have been shut down is also from The Brisbane Times.
BookBrowse published BookBrowse Best Books of 2022. Not that I will have time to get caught up on them any time soon.
I do subscribe to the Times Literary Supplement. From there I read the following: From forager to banker Surveying mankind’s rapid evolution (a fun, romping review of the rise of humanity), and Know them by their clients The rise of ruthless legal megafirms (less fun, not so much a romp, but a trenchant - and I think spot on - analysis of Big Law, which has nothing to do with small-time, small town, lawyering.)
Another newsletter comes from Public Books. I clicked on the link for “The Last Samurai,” Unread by Lee Konstantinou because I thought it had something to do with the Tom Cruise movie. It does not.
My new book, The Last Samurai Reread should probably be called The Last Samurai Unread. After all, Helen DeWitt’s debut novel, The Last Samurai, which was published more than twenty years ago, has yet to be read for the first time by many readers, including many literary critics. When I mentioned I was writing about the novel, I found myself forced to explain, on more than one occasion, that the book has nothing to do with the 2003 Tom Cruise film of the same name. No actual samurai appear in DeWitt’s novel. Mostly set in London in the 1980s and 1990s, but global in the geographic and linguistic range of its imagination, the novel follows the story of a brilliant and eccentric former classics scholar, Sibylla Newman, an American, who lives in poverty and tries to raise her son, Ludo, by herself. She refuses to introduce the boy to his father, a vapid and thoughtless travel writer with whom she had a one-night stand, and she refuses to return to her family in the United States. The boy is brilliant. He reads Homer in the original at age nine and learns advanced mathematics by reading Schaum’s Outline Series on Laplace transforms and Fourier analysis. Only one Japanese character appears in the book, an avant-garde pianist. The main samurai mentioned are characters in Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1954 film Seven Samurai.
Sibylla regards the film as a masterpiece and watches it again and again on a VHS tape. One day, she reads a newspaper article that suggests that “in the absence of a benevolent male, the single mother faces an uphill battle in raising her son. It is essential that she provide the boy with male role models—neighbours, or uncles, or friends of the family, to share their interests and hobbies.”1 And she decides, “Well, if L needs a role model let him watch Seven Samurai & he will have 8.” Eight role models: the film’s six samurai, one man who poses as a samurai, and one brave farmer who recruits them. The choice of Seven Samurai seems at first arbitrary and half serious, an attempt by Sibylla to rationalize not introducing Ludo to his father. Yet with each viewing, each attempt to explain the choice of Kurosawa, the conceit takes on greater weight. The film becomes a rich metaphorical resource for Sibylla and for Ludo—and for the novel.
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The boy’s quest is, in a sense, quixotic, doomed to fail in advance, yet in his determined refusal to settle for a bad father we can see the core dialectic of The Last Samurai. One must, the book suggests, face reality honestly but never submit to that reality. We must judge what exists, what is given, what we unthinkingly take as natural or necessary or conventional by the most stringent standards of analysis—not by the standard of what exists but by the standard of what might become possible in a better, more rational world. When we marry our wildest desires to the highest standards, we thereby test our reality.
A good reality will parry the blow.
Never heard of this novel, now I want to read it. That's a good review.
It is 5:40, and enough reading. I will end with this last comment, Donald J. Trump has proven himself too dangerous to be left alone. Now the whiny, cry-baby wants to rescind the Constitution. The man knows no honor, no decency, no honesty.
Trump calls for the termination of the Constitution in Truth Social post
The country, the Republicans, need to more like this:
Top House Intel Republican condemns Trump’s calls to suspend Constitution over 2020 election
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