Never Again

In Dachau concentration camp, there is a plaque that reads 'Never Again'.

After a few hours in that place, hearing the stores I heard, seeing the things that I saw, imagining the things that I imagined, I read that plaque. I read it, and I said 'Yes, Never Again!'

But what was I saying?

Based on the evidence available, I believe that this will never happen again
No, I was not saying this; similar things have happened since, and might well happen again.

Please God / Fate, never let this happen again!
In some sense, I was saying this. But not just this. For I believe that I can influence what happens, and it would seem strange to say 'God, don't let this happen, but if you do let it happen, then it's not my problem'.

I will do what I can to never let this happen again!
This is more like it. But what is 'this'? I am not saying 'I will do what I can to stop a re-emergence of concentration camps in Dachau, but other types of large scale suffering don't bother me'

I will do what I can to never let large scale human suffering happen again!
Yes, this is what I was saying! And to elaborate, I will do this even at significant personal cost. For I am not saying, 'I will do what I can to stop anything like this happening again, unless I am too busy with my own concerns'

I will do what I can to never let large scale human suffering happen again, even if doing this involves significant personal sacrifices
Yes. But then I think about what is happening in the world.

I could just ignore it, pretend it isn't going on. Or I could resign myself to it, saying, 'Oh dear, again'. No. I should remember what I have said.

'Never again'

Beating the blur

I am on a train moving at enormous speed through a densely decorated landscape. Glancing through the window, I can see nothing but a muddy blur. Concentrating hard, I can bring objects into focus by twisting my head back to the left, tracking the outside world as it rushes past. But that is possible just for a moment, and yields but a morsel.

No wonder then, that after an hour or so of diligent attempts to mind my surroundings, I am inclined to sit back, close my eyes and drift off into indifference.

Only, it bothers me that I don't know what is going on. I feel like I ought to play a role in directing the train. But oh the effort of keeping up with things! And how to decide how much detail to record!

A new approach to politics?

My take on one theme in Cameron's hour long speech to the Tory conference:

Political apathy, Mr Cameron observes, is rife amongst British voters. A prominent cause of this, he continues, is the dismal level of public respect for politicians. Politics is seen as a dirty business, populated with career-focused individuals continually making empty promises, orating vacuous principles and introducing pointless schemes that are more gimmick than policy.
But wait, vote Conservative, and you can banish all that to the past! Such maladies are ‘old politics’, belonging to the realm of Gordon Brown and (not so) New Labour. Here in Bournemouth, things are different.
For a start, there is the charming friendship of David Cameron and William Hague. As Cameron lovingly states, ‘some people say that there is no such thing as friendship in politics but I can tell you… that there is no better friend.. than William Hague’ (camera focuses on Hague, who looks genuinely delighted).
Throughout course of his speech, Cameron made a whole raft of pledges about the new type of political practice that he and the party would be undertaking. Most important is this: the Conservatives will be staying true to their traditional values and they will be applying these values to the central problems facing modern Britain, adapting their methods to the rapidly changing technological context.
More specifically, Tory promises will be sincere, and they policy effective. Their motivations will be transparent and it will not include pandering to the whims of swing voters.
The days of party-political bickering (at least from the Conservative side) will be over. Where Cameron criticises Labour in his speech, he makes a point of doing so for a specific reason: ‘If we don’t understand why Labour are failing we won’t succeed ourselves’. Labour, in the world depicted, are decent guys trying to do good things but failing because of policy areas (and thus, implicitly, incompetence).
From one angle, this approach is exciting. Cameron is pledging to revamp politics into something new, fresh and meaningful. He gives us an inspiring vision of the politician. We must no longer see the men in suits as dishonest and sleazy but as noble individuals dedicated to public service. As his speech draws to a close, he rallies his party with these words ‘And do you know the greatest service that this party can do to our public today, it is to get out and fight for what we believe in and the changes we want to make’.
The dream is not without appeal, but scepticism will have the last paragraph here. For in declaring his allegiance to a new politics, Cameron runs the risk of being a paradigm example of the old. If the Tory approach lacks the virtues Cameron promises, then those promises will have been broken. Worse still, they will look like a cynical attempt to woo the swing voter.

Selection Mistakes

A sentence in which 'concepts are put together in impossible ways', but are otherwise grammatical.

Examples (from Hodges):
i) The pianist then played a red hat topped with geraniums and wisdom.
ii) He ate a slice of boredom.

Challenge: compose a short dialogue in which every sentence contains a selection mistake.

I find it surprisingly difficult, and note that there seem to be two main types of mistake:
i) combining things from the mental realm with things from the physical realm (John accidently sat on his good intentions) - when read literally, these statements seem to contain logical errors
ii) making ridiculous combinations of things from the same realm (John filled up the balloon with Wales) which are logically possible, but not all that likely

High culture procrastination

(1). Edge asks some of the world's most interesting scientists and intellectuals what they are optimistic about.

(2). See the helping professions in a different light at Overcoming Bias. (Also, see how GPs deceitfully use placebos.)

Also on Overcoming Bias, an intriguing discussion about the function of the legal system in society.


(3). Better than Borat: Bruno interviews a gay-converting American pastor.

The Nigeria Factor

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has a good blog post about corruption in Nigeria. There is more of the same in a sample chapter of the book that Cowen excerpts from.

Thomas Pogge on global justice

Pogge is a political philosopher at Columbia. Here are some excerpts from an interview with him.

On the incentives for tyranny in developing countries:

The global economic order as we now have it consists of a very large set of rules. By analyzing severe poverty and premature deaths both institutionally and on the global level, we can trace back their overall incidence to the relevant institutional rules, such as the evolving system of amazingly detailed treaties and conventions structuring the world economy, regulating trade (WTO), investments, loans, patents, copyrights, trademarks, double taxation, labor standards, environmental protection, and much else. Responsibility for these rules lies primarily with the governments of the more powerful countries which, in international negotiations, enjoy a huge advantage in bargaining power and expertise. Their negotiators have succeeded, again and again, in shaping the rules in the interest of the governments, corporations and citizens of the rich countries. In many cases, rules so shaped foreseeably inflict great harms upon the global poor — harms that one can estimate at least in general statistical terms. Seeing that our wealthy countries are at least approximately democratic, we citizens certainly share responsibility for the rules our governments negotiate in our name and for the human cost these rules impose around the world. But there are also less obvious rules that have a tremendous negative effect on living conditions in the poor countries. Take the international resource and borrowing privileges, which allow any person or group holding effective power in a developing country to sell the resources of the country or to borrow in its name, irrespective of whether that person or group has any kind of democratic legitimacy. (I skip here two further, complementary privileges related to arms and treaties: Any person or group holding effective power in a developing country is recognized as entitled to purchase weapons – most often used for domestic repression – and as entitled to sign treaties in the name of the whole country.) These privileges are very convenient for the rich countries who can buy resources from anybody who happens to exercise power in a country. However, they are devastating for the populations of the developing countries because they make it possible for oppressive and unrepresentative rulers to entrench themselves with arms and soldiers they buy with money they borrow abroad or get from resource sales. These privileges also provide incentives for potential strongmen in these countries to take power by force. Their existence explains to a large extent why there are so many civil wars and coups d’état in the developing countries, in particular in Africa. This is an example of how the international order, largely upheld by the rich countries, aggravates oppression and poverty in the poor countries. Therefore, we should not only think about how states ought to behave in their interactions with one another. We should also consider the framework of global rules and what effects this framework has on phenomena such as poverty.

On globalization:

The proponents of globalization are right that sweatshop wages are better than no wages at all, and the opponents of globalization, too, are right that a world so rich in aggregate must not be organized to provide sweatshop work (or worse: prostitution, mining, carpet manufacture — so often forced upon children and teenagers) as the best option available to many. In general, it is a mistake, I think, to make globalization the key issue. Massive and severe poverty can persist (and has persisted) without globalization, and the eradication of such poverty is perfectly compatible with globalization. Over the period since the end of the Cold War, our governments have again and again, for the sake of small gains, shaped and reshaped the rules of the world economy to the disadvantage of the global poor. They force poor countries to open their markets while sheltering their own markets from cheap agricultural and textile imports. They sell weapons to the most barbarous tyrants and rebel movements. They have used their increased power after the collapse of the Soviet empire to renegotiate the sharing of seabed resources out of the Law of the Seas Treaty. They have dramatically lowered their official development assistance from 0.33 percent of their aggregate GNP down to 0.22 percent in less than a decade — even while the end of the Cold War is presenting them with a 1.9-percent peace dividend. None of this is an integral part of globalization as such. It is part of one particular and especially brutal path of globalization which our governments, ruthlessly exploiting our superior bargaining power, are choosing to impose. These governments are acting in our name, and perhaps even in our best interest, in a narrow sense of this phrase. But their strategy has the foreseeable result that global economic growth is not improving the condition of the global poor. Headcounts for severe poverty (1,100 million) and malnutrition (831 million) are stagnant — despite a grandiose promise at the 1996 Rome World Food Summit to halve these figures within 19 years, a promise that has since been dramatically diluted in the formulation of the first Millennium Development Goal. And one third of all human deaths, some 18 million annually, are still due to poverty-related causes. This was and is avoidable, and cheaply so: One percent of aggregate income in the rich countries (containing under 1,000 million people) is equivalent to over 50 percent of aggregate income of the poorest half of humankind (about 3,250 million people).

The more you love animals, the more of them you should eat

Summary of the argument:
1. Many consequentialists advocate veganism because they think farming practices are overly harmful to animals.
2. Millions of humans live in poverty or in war zones and believe their lives to be worth living: if they didn’t believe this, they would commit suicide.
3. Conditions in free-range farms are no worse than conditions in places stricken by poverty and war. Conditions in factory farms might also be no worse.
4. So the lives of animals in some farms are worth living.
5. So the consequentialist ideal should actually be one of the following:
(i) Eat as much meat as possible to fund the lives as maximally many animals.
(ii) Remain vegan, but only because rearing animals is more expensive than growing crops. The money saved can be used for human welfare, or for animal welfare projects independent of meat production.

Read the extended argument

Is democracy really paradoxical?

Richard Wolheim though that a paradoxical aspect of democracy was that the voting process forceda minority-voter into having inconsistent beliefs with respect to the policies he was voting for:

“Let us imagine a citizen who feeds his choice for, say, A, into the democratic machine. On the present interpretation, he is to be regarded as thereby expressing his opinion that A ought to be enacted. And now let us further suppose that the machine into which this and other choices have been fed comes up with its own choice, and its choice is for B. How can the citizen accept the machine’s choice, which involves his thinking that B ought to be enacted when, as we already know, he is of the declared opinion, that A ought to be enacted? […] For if a man expresses a choice for A and the machine expresses a choice for B, then the man, if he is to be a sound democratic, seems to be committed to the belief that A ought to be the case and to the belief that B ought to be the case. […] If this is so, then the difficulty that I have described would seem to constitute a paradox in the very heart of democracy.”

Tentative solutions to the paradox of democracy focus on semantic issues surrounding the use of the word 'ought.' For instance, the idea that because both 'oughts' are derived from different principles, they do not actually contradict each other. Such ideas are unsatisfactory, because, as in this case, they require us to abandon some common-sense beliefs about rationality, consistency, and moral deliberation. For a full list of such attempts, including Wollheim's, see: http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com/Article/What-is-Wollheim-s-paradox--How-is-it-to-be-resolved-/5

A different approach to this paradox has been to question whether it really is a paradox. What is needed is an account of a voter's beliefs which is both (a) rational, (involving no contradictions) and (b) plausible. An account can be given which is rather a lot simpler than any solution so far, and that is to deny that there is an inconsistency in the voter's beliefs by denying that a voter believes that the policy he votes for ought necessarily to be enacted. As well as restoring consistency to the belief-set, there is a great deal of intuitive plausibility in the idea that a voter believes that. For if we has assumed that he is a democrat, and in that we mean that he accepts the majoritarian principle, he surely cannot rationally believe that 'the policy I vote for ought necessarily be enacted' for this belief is totalitarian, and contradicts the democratic principle.

In fact, when we go to the voting booth, we find ourselves in precisely this situation: we want the policy we vote for to be enacted (given that we think it is the best policy, and we want the best policy to be enacted) but we accept that it shouldn't necessarily be enacted, even if it is the best policy. Why we hold such a belief throws back to the problem of political obligation; i.e. there is a trade-off between accepting the enactment of a worse policy because to refuse to accept it (within moral limits) could threaten the basis of democracy, or, at least, would not be democratic behaviour. This reflects hte compromise one accepts when consenting to a collective decision-making process.

From this analysis, it seems clear that there is no paradox to deal with. A paradox is a set of obviously true axioms which lead to something apparently false, such as a contradiction. In Wollheim's case, the belief that democracy was paradoxical was driven my a false attribution of beliefs to the voter.

Although this theory needs some clarification/elaboration, I believe it puts this problem to rest for good. There is no semantical tinkering necessary, since the problem itself is a pseudo-problem.