Blog Archives

A Small Philosophy Gift for the Holidays

12/25/2015

♫ I'm dreaming of a.....place in Scotland. ♫

I've got my nose to the grindstone over this holiday season, trying to finish a (nearly polished) draft of my next novel before a short trip to Scotland. So, I've decided to put this blog on pause for a couple of weeks rather than distract myself with having to shift gears to consider the next few thought experiments. And there you have it; my gift to you is this pause! : )

Don't worry, I'll be back in mid-January with more distractions for you, but I thought I'd leave you with a small distraction that occupied me this week.

In 2008, the Institute for Art and Ideas began putting on a philosophy and music festival each summer in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. It's called How the Light Gets In, and the organisers just held a contest for two free tickets to the 2016 festival. The contest required you to watch their 2015 Highlights Video and then solve this riddle:

"Take all the worlds, decide how many, then decimate (with Austrian logic). What remains?"

The answer, which I and many others uncovered, but only after several hints were given, is derived in the following way:

From Shakespeare, "all the world's a stage."
From the 2015 highlights video, there will be 12 stages at next year's festival
Put a decimal in 12 to get 1.2
Proposition 1.2 from Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgentstein in his most famous work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is this: "1.2 The world divides into facts."

So the answer is "facts", which I did guess, but not in time to win the competition. Boo! That was very sad for me, and the disappointment topped off hours and hours of pain reading about Gödel number theories, the many obscure word games in Gödel, Escher, Bach, the laissez-faire Austrian school of economics (don't go there!), and eventually the entire text of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I'd have been better off just spending the money to buy myself a ticket to the festival (which I will probably do now), but I did uncover a few good nuggets I thought I'd share in this quick post.

First, in the introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, his mentor, and fellow co-founder of the analytical school of philosophy, Bertrand Russell, explained Wittgenstein's view of philosophy in a most depressing way. Russell said:

The right method of teaching philosophy, he says, would be to confine oneself to propositions of the sciences, stated with all possible clearness and exactness, leaving philosophical assertions to the learner, and proving to him, whenever he made them, that they are meaningless.

The annoyance of this Socratic destruction of the field is yet another great justification for why I titled my review of him: Wittgenstein's Crime: Attempted Murder of Philosophy. I agree that the facts of science are important to know, and that assertions about the unknowable is meaningless, but philosophy is more than this and there are much better ways of teaching the subject too.

Apparently, the people behind the How the Light Gets In festival think so as well. The Wales Arts Review conducted an interview with the director of this festival, which I really enjoyed and exactly expresses the feelings I have about another way of viewing philosophy. Here's an excerpt:

----------------------------------------
Do you think the festival is affecting the way philosophy is viewed?
Before we began, the predominant impression of philosophy was the Monty Python football sketch. And that’s because philosophers are totally laughable. Why would you ask a philosopher anything as he can’t even manage to kick a football? And that was the perception of philosophy; that it was a pointless academic game that didn’t really have any bearing on anybody else and was not very interesting and you couldn’t follow it in the first place. But the initial idea was that we could return it to what it was meant to be.

We’re all philosophers and we’re all alive and we’re trying to work out what it is to be alive and it doesn’t matter who we are, everybody faces that problem and that question and they try and answer it in their own way and they struggle with it in their own way. Everyone is engaged in those questions and it’s a rather bizarre characteristic of British life that somehow talking about big ideas and philosophy is not done. It’s almost frowned upon. We’ll leave it to Parisian taxi drivers but it’s not something that’s done here.
----------------------------------------

Bravo. That's the kind of philosophising I hope I'm doing here, and hope you enjoy following along with. So that's the actual gift from philosophy this season—an agreement that this doesn't have to be hard, and it should absolutely be relevant. Here's to a new year filled with trying to work out what it is to be alive so that each and every time someone says "Happy holidays" or "Happy new year" (or Happy birthday for that matter), we'll all know a little better what that really means.

Happy holidays!

0 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 37: Nature the Artist

12/18/2015

1 Comment

What is art?

Before this week's thought experiment send us off to explore this enormous question, I thought it might be helpful to read a few basic definitions. Querying Google today gave me:

Art - (noun) the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

Over on the wikipedia entry for art, we see:

Art is a diverse range of human activities and the products of those activities, usually involving imaginative or technical skill.

These broad generalisations sound simple enough, but among philosophers, artists, and critics throughout history, there have been many details to quibble over concerning this subject. After a day spent reading widely-varying thoughts on the definition of art, perhaps the one that makes the most sense came from Theodor Adorno who claimed in 1969:

It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident.

Let's take a look at the thought experiment now though, and then try to decide what might be evident to an evolutionary philosopher.

---------------------------------------------------
Daphne Stone could not decide what to do with her favourite exhibit. As curator of the art gallery, she had always adored an untitled piece by Henry Moore, only posthumously discovered. She admired the combination of its sensuous contours and geometric balance, which together captured the mathematical and spiritual aspects of nature.
At least, that's what she thought up until last week, when it was revealed that it wasn't a Moore at all. Worse, it wasn't shaped by human hand but by wind and rain. Moore had bought the stone to work on, only to conclude that he couldn't improve on nature. But when it was found, everyone assumed that Moore must have carved it.
Stone was stunned by the discovery and her immediate reaction was to remove the 'work' from display. But then she realised that this revelation had not changed the stone itself, which still had the qualities she had admired. Why should her new knowledge of how the stone came to be change her opinion of what it is now, in itself?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 109.
---------------------------------------------------

Artistic stone?

Stone and artist?

On my Philosophy 101 page, I note that aesthetics is one of the six accepted branches of philosophy. It's the branch that deals with "the nature of beauty, art, taste, and the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste."

Seeing this, one would assume that philosophers must have something profound to say about this thought experiment, but they have actually had quite a thin and terrible track record. At least among the 60 major philosophers I profiled in my series on the Survival of the Fittest Philosophers. During all those posts, I found:

Plato only listed a threefold division of philosophy: metaphysics, ethics, and physics.
Muhammad decreed a prohibition against creating images of sentient living beings, which is particularly strictly observed with respect to God and the Prophet. Islamic religious art is focused only on words.
Descartes doesn't mention aesthetics in his view of the nature of philosophy. He thought: Philosophy is like a tree, of which Metaphysics is the root, Physics the trunk, and all the other sciences the branches that grow out of this trunk. By the science of Morals, I understand the highest and most perfect, which, presupposing an entire knowledge of the other sciences, is the last degree of wisdom.
Rousseau actively disparaged the field. He thought: The arts and sciences have not been beneficial to humankind, because they arose not from authentic human needs but rather as a result of pride and vanity. Moreover, the opportunities they create for idleness and luxury have contributed to the corruption of man.
Kant marked a slight change in this with his Critique of Judgment, which investigated aesthetics and teleology, but his view was quite clinical. Kant divided the feeling of the sublime into two distinct modes - the mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime. The mathematical sublime is situated in the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or that appear absolutely great. This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In the dynamical sublime, there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.
With Schopenhauer, we got a very dour purpose for art. He thought: A temporary way to escape the pain of life is through aesthetic contemplation since art diverts the spectator's attention from the grave everyday world and lifts him or her into a world that consists of mere play of images. This is the next best way, short of not willing at all, which is the best way.
Even Sartre, an extremely successful novelist and playwright, was not immune to dismissing art. Originally, Sartre believed that our ideas are the product of experiences of real-life situations, and novels and plays can well describe such fundamental experiences, having equal value to discursive essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories such as existentialism. Later, Sartre concluded that literature functioned ultimately as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world, and thus turned down a Nobel Prize for literature.
Many philosophers wrote works of art to illustrate their beliefs—Plato's Republic, Erasmus' In Praise of Folly, Bacon's New Atlantis, Voltaire's Candide, Rousseau's Emile, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Sartre's No Exit and Nausea, Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, de Beauvoir's All Men Are Mortal. But only Ayn Rand seemed totally at ease with the role of art in her work (although her credibility as a philosopher is much less comfortably assured). Rand's aesthetics defined art as a "selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments.” According to Rand, art allows philosophical concepts to be presented in a concrete form that can be easily grasped, thereby fulfilling a need of human consciousness.

I suppose this is to be expected from a field that rewards logic above emotion and draws people to it whose personalities are dominated by reason. Aristotle, who was known as "The Philosopher" for almost 2000 years, thought that the universal elements of beauty were order, symmetry, and definiteness. Logical, logical, and logical.

From the late 17th to the early 20th century, Western aesthetics continued on this rational path as it "underwent a slow revolution into what is often called modernism." Artists began to emphasise beauty as the key component of art and the more analytic theorists among them tried to reduce beauty to some list of attributes. Famed painter and social critic William Hogarth, for example, thought that beauty consisted of:

fitness of the parts to some design;
variety in as many ways as possible;
uniformity, regularity or symmetry, which is only beautiful when it helps to preserve the character of fitness;
simplicity or distinctness, which gives pleasure not in itself, but through its enabling the eye to enjoy variety with ease;
intricacy, which provides employment for our active energies, leading the eye on "a wanton kind of chase"; and
quantity or magnitude, which draws our attention and produces admiration and awe.

None of these logical or objective definitions of art and beauty so far would have considered the stone in this week's thought experiment to properly be art. It was only during the first half of the twentieth century that a significant shift to a more relaxed aesthetic theory would have allowed that. At the end of the First World War, Dadaists came on the scene who "believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expressions that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality." Found object art is perfectly illustrative of this belief, and Marcel Duchamp is thought "to have perfected the concept when he made a series of ready-mades, consisting of completely unaltered everyday objects selected by Duchamp and designated as art. The most famous example is Fountain (1917), a standard urinal purchased from a hardware store and displayed on a pedestal, resting on its side."

Duchamp once proposed that art is any activity of any kind—it is everything. So for him, there would be no question of whether the stone in this thought experiment would be art. I tend to agree with a contemporary critic though who stated that "Dada philosophy is the sickest, most paralysing, and most destructive thing that has ever originated from the brain of man." Duchamp's stance reminds me of the old adage, if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. And so it is only the people with no definition for art who fall for Duchamp.

But perhaps no definition for art is possible. Another approach "is to say that art is basically a sociological category, that whatever art schools and museums and artists define as art is considered art regardless of formal definitions." This is known as the "institutional definition of art." But can we really listen to art authorities? Who gets to choose who gets to decide?

As influential critics Wimsatt and Beardsley wrote in their highly influential 1954 essay The Intentional Fallacy: "the design or intention of the artist is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of art." This basis for postmodern frameworks places the reader's interpretation ahead of any authorial intent. It makes the reader or consumer of the art the only authority on its meaning. Of course, to finish off the confusion, Wimsatt and Beardsley wrote another essay called The Affective Fallacy, which discounted the viewer's personal/emotional reaction as a valid means of analysing art too.

So what are we left with? Definitions for art and aesthetics have swung wildly from rigid, numbered rules, to absolutely no rules at all. Postmoderns don't listen to artists or their audience for any judgements. In my post What is Beautiful is What is Good, I described this confusing state of affairs thusly:

The longstanding and pervasive view that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" seems to suggest that aesthetics isn't objective, that aesthetics is a subjective field filled with personal judgments from sensitive souls inside a landscape of cultural relativism. When you travel around the world or look at the development of art through history, you see very different representations of beauty: Vogue's rail thin models, Gauguin's plump Polynesians, Japanese Zen gardens, Jackson Pollock's paint drippings, a delicate rose, a powerful stallion, a touching novel, an elegant spreadsheet. (Or am I the only one who has ever exclaimed, "That's beautiful!" during an annual budget meeting?) The obvious question arises - how can these beautiful things have anything in common?

In my own philosophical writings on aesthetics, however, I offered the following answer (starting from my definition of good that arises from nature):

What promotes the long-term survival of life? Knowledge. Health. Progress. Stability. Exploration. Efficiency. Brightness. Abundance. Comfort. Security. Fecundity. Clarity. These are beautiful and good. What threatens the long-term survival of life? Ignorance. Disease. Stagnation. Conflict. Chaos. Isolation. Waste. Darkness. Scarcity. Discomfort. Vulnerability. Barrenness. Obscurity. These are ugly and bad. Objects have many qualities. Depending on the context, focus, and cognitive appraisal of the observer, objects can be either beautiful or ugly. This is why the idea of beauty is objective to general reality, but the beauty of an object is subjective to the specific observer.

Science is the root method of gathering knowledge. Engineering is knowledge applied to the physical world. Business is knowledge applied to the economic world. Politics is knowledge applied to the realm of government. Medicine is knowledge applied to the body. Art is knowledge applied to the emotions. Science finds knowledge. Art uses knowledge to inspire. (It can also inspire scientists.) Art causes emotional responses so it often draws emotional people to it, but great art is created by rational processes, filled with knowledge, fueled by emotion, and executed with skill. Bad art is blind emotion that purports falsehoods for truth.

After doing my research for this post, I would add the following addenda to these thoughts now. I agree with those who believe that "if the skill of a creator is used for a functional object, that is considered a craft rather than art" (though this is disputed by many Contemporary Craft thinkers). Likewise, "if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way it may be considered design instead of art" (although these may be defended as art forms or called applied art). I find these to be useful distinctions, though I'm sure they are not always easy to apply.

As far as applying all of this to the thought experiment at hand, I would judge the untouched stone as art, but only a very weak piece of art. It's not a functional object useful for another purpose. It was a found object, selected by two humans (the sculptor and the curator) whose eye for beauty is well trained, but their full creative skills have not been put to much use. I imagine the smooth patterns of erosion hewn from such a solid piece of material would put me in touch with Kant's definition of the sublime, and inspire me to think a little more about the long-term impact I have on this world, but probably less so than any observant walk in nature would do for me.

What do you think? You probably wish you'd gone on that inspiring walk rather than read through such nitpicking. I feel like such a boring philosopher.

1 Comment

Thought Experiment 37: Nature the Artist

12/14/2015

2 Comments

I chose the picture of this rock just for you.

Ah, now here's a gentle thought experiment. After a few weeks mired in posts on justice and suicide bombs, it'll be great to spend some time thinking about art and aesthetics.

---------------------------------------------------
Daphne Stone could not decide what to do with her favourite exhibit. As curator of the art gallery, she had always adored an untitled piece by Henry Moore, only posthumously discovered. She admired the combination of its sensuous contours and geometric balance, which together captured the mathematical and spiritual aspects of nature.
At least, that's what she thought up until last week, when it was revealed that it wasn't a Moore at all. Worse, it wasn't shaped by human hand but by wind and rain. Moore had bought the stone to work on, only to conclude that he couldn't improve on nature. But when it was found, everyone assumed that Moore must have carved it.
Stone was stunned by the discovery and her immediate reaction was to remove the 'work' from display. But then she realised that this revelation had not changed the stone itself, which still had the qualities she had admired. Why should her new knowledge of how the stone came to be change her opinion of what it is now, in itself?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 109.
---------------------------------------------------

So what do you think? Has this work of art changed? For the better or worse? And is it still art? I'll be back on Friday to have my say.

2 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 36: Pre-emptive Justice

12/11/2015

0 Comments

FBI headquarters - I worked here from 2006-2010.

Lest you try to pre-empt my response to this week's thought experiment, let's jump right into it.

---------------------------------------------------
Damn liberals. Chief Inspector Andrews had worked miracles in this city. Murders down 90 per cent. Robberies down 80 per cent. Street crime down 85 per cent. Car theft down 70 per cent. But now she was in the dock and all that good work in jeopardy.
   Her police authority was the first in the country to implement the newly legalised pre-emptive justice programme. Advances in computing and AI now made it possible to predict who would commit what sort of crime in the near future. People could be tested for all sorts of reasons: as part of a random programme or on the basis of a specific suspicion. If there were found to be future criminals, then they would be arrested and punished in advance.
   Andrews did not think the scheme draconian. In fact, because no crime had been committed at the time of the arrest, sentences were much more lenient. A future murderer would go on an intense program designed to make sure they didn't go on and kill and would only be released when tests showed they wouldn't. Often that meant detention of less than a year. Had they been left to actually commit the crime, they would have been looking at life imprisonment and, more importantly, a person would be dead.
   But still these damn liberals protested that you can't lock someone up for something they didn't do. Andrews grimaced, and wondered how many she could pull in for testing...

Sources: Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg (2002); 'The Minority Report' by Philip K. Dick, republished in Minority Report: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick (Gollancz, 2000).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 106.
---------------------------------------------------

First off, I feel compelled to say that I don't think this sentence could ever be true:

"Advances in computing and AI now made it possible to predict who would commit what sort of crime in the near future."

I'm a philosophical compatibilist who believes in human free will, and as I wrote in my Response to Thought Experiment 9: Bigger Brother, the observer effect alone would be enough to alter any predictions of people's future behaviour. From an evolutionary perspective, we have inherited psychological needs to avoid being too predictable so that predators, cheaters, or rivals cannot take easy advantage of us. So telling someone they are going to commit a particular crime would almost certainly stop them from committing that specific infraction. Going any further with a pre-emptive justice program like the one described here seems highly unlikely to ever be justifiable.

However, as I've noted several times with these posts, this is a thought experiment and the rules of these philosophy games state that we must take any assumptions as they are and try our best to deal with the situation. So, let's say we really can predict future crimes. Where would that take us?

According to criminological theory, there are four different goals one can have for punishments in a criminal justice system: retribution, restoration, rehabilitation, and incapacitation. As I wrote in my thoughts on justice, I believe these goals are best pursued in the following way for the following reasons:

Since justice is a public good, its provider - the government - must have a monopoly on force. Progress is maximized in the long term when there is freedom from oppression and maximum participation (i.e. a minimization of criminals who in essence defect from society). In a cooperative society concerned with the long-term survival of the species, which understands the workings of evolution and therefore insists on tit for tat justice and never allowing cheaters to win, the various means of punishment should be doled out as necessary and appropriate in an escalating order of: restoration, rehabilitation, and finally incapacitation as a last resort. The focus of these punishments is the education of the criminal and the deterrence of future offenses by the populace. Seeking retribution gives way to short-term emotions of vengeance that were useful in nature before the public good of justice was provided for by the state. Now, the emotions of the victim of a crime must not be allowed to override the use of reason to create justice and stability for the long term.

In the case of this thought experiment, the crime hasn't been committed yet, so achieving the goal of restoration isn't possible. As a reminder, Chief Inspector Andrews argued for her pre-emptive justice program by saying, "A future murderer would go on an intense program designed to make sure they didn't go on and kill and would only be released when tests showed they wouldn't. Often that meant detention of less than a year." So the next goal of rehabilitation is being attempted, but from the brief description provided, the pre-emptive program seems to be using an unnecessary escalation to incapacitation. (As an aside, I would have liked to have used the term habilitation in this case since they haven't technically strayed yet, but that word is already taken.) I would therefore agree with the liberals that this pre-emptive program as it stands is an injustice that shouldn't be accepted, no matter how effective the results.

In fact, such a heavy-handed prevention program is likely to backfire. "The crime waves of the 1970s and '80s pushed [U.S.] police departments toward prevention strategies — broken-window patrols, more officer visibility in high-crime areas, stop-and-frisk — and solving crimes became secondary." As a result, "the national 'clearance rate' for homicide today is 64.1 percent. Fifty years ago, it was more than 90 percent....Detroit is an extreme case. When the city was on the verge of bankruptcy a couple of years ago, the murder clearance rate was flirting with single digits....Criminologists estimate that at least 200,000 murders have gone unsolved since the 1960s, leaving family and friends to wait and wonder."

Could better pre-emptive programs be put in its place? Sure. We already do this. We know some predictive factors for committing crimes and we have social programs aimed at (re)habilitating potential offenders. One could argue that education or after-school programs are aimed at this goal. A much clearer example, however, is the Office of Neighbourhood Safety in Richmond, California. From its own website:

"The ONS is responsible for directing gun violence prevention and intervention initiatives that foster greater community well-being and public safety. ONS Street Outreach staff reach out to those most likely to be involved in gun violence, those most resistant to change and chronically unresponsive to help. The Office of Neighborhood Safety helps to provide their stakeholders with credible, customized and responsive opportunities that represent a real alternative to street violence and criminal activity."

Exactly how they go about their mission is quite extraordinary. As this report describes it, ONS is "a city program that takes some unusual steps to prevent gun violence: building close relationships with some of Richmond's most dangerous young men, helping them find jobs and counseling them at City Hall. But there’s another step that raises some eyebrows: Over an 18-month period, if the men demonstrate better behavior, ONS offers them up to $1,000 a month in cash, plus opportunities to travel beyond Richmond. ... To qualify for the stipend, ONS fellows must draw up a 'life map', setting goals for the future. After six months in the program, they can receive up to $1,000 a month if they prove they are working toward those goals. If they start slipping back to bad behavior, they get nothing."

Does this work? "Since ONS’ launch seven years ago, Richmond has experienced a two-thirds drop in homicides. ... Of the 68 at-risk males who have entered the program, 64 are still alive. Richmond officials and criminal experts say that multiple factors have helped reduce the city’s gun violence...but they agree that incentive-based outreach has achieved what decades of heavy-handed law enforcement did not. ... Richmond understands that violence is not just evil acts by evil people. There is a culture of violence that descends on a community and the only way to really bring the rates down is if you change that culture.”

When the goals are clear, the path becomes easier. Inspector Andrews could learn from this example, and so could the rest of American Law Enforcement.

0 Comments

Thought Experiment 36: Pre-emptive Justice

12/7/2015

2 Comments

Tom Cruise can read your mind.

I already know what you're going to say, but let's go through this week's thought experiment anyway.

---------------------------------------------------
Damn liberals. Chief Inspector Andrews had worked miracles in this city. Murders down 90 per cent. Robberies down 80 per cent. Street crime down 85 per cent. Car theft down 70 per cent. But now she was in the dock and all that good work in jeopardy.
   Her police authority was the first in the country to implement the newly legalised pre-emptive justice programme. Advances in computing and AI now made it possible to predict who would commit what sort of crime in the near future. People could be tested for all sorts of reasons: as part of a random programme or on the basis of a specific suspicion. If there were found to be future criminals, then they would be arrested and punished in advance.
   Andrews did not think the scheme draconian. In fact, because no crime had been committed at the time of the arrest, sentences were much more lenient. A future murderer would go on an intense program designed to make sure they didn't go on and kill and would only be released when tests showed they wouldn't. Often that meant detention of less than a year. Had they been left to actually commit the crime, they would have been looking at life imprisonment and, more importantly, a person would be dead.
   But still these damn liberals protested that you can't lock someone up for something they didn't do. Andrews grimaced, and wondered how many she could pull in for testing...

Sources: Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg (2002); 'The Minority Report' by Philip K. Dick, republished in Minority Report: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick (Gollancz, 2000).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 106.
---------------------------------------------------

What do you think? Can you pre-empt my post on Friday when I discuss my answer to this?

2 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 35: Last Resort

12/4/2015

0 Comments

Suicide attacks have become an epidemic of the 21st Century.

When I posted this week's thought experiment on Monday, the repercussions from the November 2015 Paris attacks were still fresh on my mind. In the four days since then, the San Bernardino shooting took place, which has started to look more and more like another terrorist attack. Whether or not either of these events are technically considered suicide attacks is a matter of debated definitions—some researchers consider suicide terrorism "violent actions perpetrated by people who are aware that the odds they will return alive are close to zero," while others exclude high risk attacks where the odds of survival are only "close to zero" and only count attacks where "the perpetrator’s ensured death is a precondition for the success of his mission." Either way you define it, suicide attacks do have a long history, but they were mostly confined to infrequent military uses until 1981. "While there were few if any successful suicide attacks anywhere in the world from the end of World War II until 1980, between 1981 and June 2015, a total of 4,620 suicide attacks occurred in over 40 countries, killing over 45,000 people."** As you can see in the chart above, the occurrence of these attacks has accelerated dramatically since the year 2000. Let's keep all this in mind as we read through this week's thought experiment.

---------------------------------------------------
Winston loved his country. It hurt him deeply to see its people oppressed by the Nazi occupiers. But after the German defeat of the British army in the slaughter of Dunkirk, and America's decision to stay out of the war, it was only a matter of time before Britain became part of the Third Reich.
Now the situation looked hopeless. Hitler faced no international opposition and the British resistance was ill equipped and weak. Many, like Winston, had come to the conclusion that there was no way they could defeat the Germans. But by being a constant source of irritation and forcing them to divert precious resources to crushing the uprising, it was hoped that, sooner or later, Hitler would realise that occupying Britain was more trouble than it was worth and would withdraw.
Winston was far from convinced the plan would work, but it was their last resort. The major problem, however, was that it was so difficult to strike in ways which would cause the regime serious problems. That is why they had reluctantly agreed that the only effective and reliable method was for resistance fighters to turn themselves into human bombs, so that their own sacrifices caused the maximum disruption and terror. They were all prepared to die for Britain. They just wanted to make sure their deaths made a difference.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 103.
---------------------------------------------------

Even though Hitler's forces are universally accepted as a justifiably evil target, it's pretty easy to dismiss the rationale for these suicide attacks. Such tactics require an infinite end to a finite life that is full of options and value, so you had better be 100% certain of the need for it if suicide attacks are ever going to be justified. Without that kind of certainty, the individual bombers' lives are lost *and* their example shows the rest of the people on your side that you do not value life sufficiently. This thought experiment, however, is rife with statements of uncertain truth value:

"it was only a matter of time before Britain became part of the Third Reich"
"there was no way they could defeat the Germans"
"it was hoped that Hitler would realise occupying Britain was more trouble than it was worth"
"Winston was far from convinced the plan would work"
"the only effective and reliable method was to turn themselves into human bombs"
"so that their own sacrifices caused the maximum disruption and terror"

Each of these propositions are highly questionable, so the (capitalised) Last Resort option really cannot be justified in Winston's case. I think that's quite clear. But can suicide attacks ever be justified?

As I have written many times, my universal definition of good is "that which enables the long-term survival of life." Given this, I do find it possible to invent a scenario where some group is hell-bent on achieving a short-sighted, evil goal, and we have terminally ill people fighting against them who decide a suicide attack is their best means of doing good with the little time they have left in the world. As I said, I find it *possible* to invent a scenario such as this, but in real life I've never actually seen a justified suicide attack, and I don't think it's likely I ever will. The certainty required to choose such a drastic measure over every other option just isn't realistic given that our knowledge can only ever be probabilistic; everything can be doubted to some small degree. And as David Hume said: A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. So suicide attacks are surely unwise.

So why are they happening? And with more frequent occurrence? One factor is clearly the introduction of religious thinking into the equation, where the "leaps of faith" required of all religions enable the leaps to certainty required for suicide attacks. But there have been religions and poor logic skills in human societies for thousands of years so that doesn't explain everything.

Looking at the research on personal, non-attacking suicides, epidemiological studies generally show "a relationship between suicide or suicidal behaviors and socio-economic disadvantage, including limited educational achievement, homelessness, unemployment, economic dependence, and contact with the police or justice system." Then there is the fact that between 1981 and 2006, "ninety per cent of [suicide] attacks occurred in Iraq, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Sri Lanka." These are some of the poorest, most broken states in the world, all with intractable fighting over religion. Here is where the recipe for suicide attacks is complete. But there are other poor nations that have religious disagreements, particularly in Africa. So why are suicide attacks overwhelmingly confined to a handful of middle eastern and south asian countries?

Because our philosophies shape our actions and our words matter to our beliefs. Islamist supporters often call a suicide attack Istishhad, which is "often translated as 'martyrdom operation', and the suicide attacker shahid, literally 'witness' and usually translated as 'martyr'. The idea being that the attacker died in order to testify his faith in God, for example while waging jihad bis saif (jihad by the sword). The term 'suicide' is never used because Islam has strong strictures against taking one's own life."

Adding all of these influences up—poor logic, poor countries, poor word choices—we can finally make some sense of the chart at the top of this article. The first big spike in the graph of people killed was the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers. This enormous spectacle was shown all over the world and took root in the hearts of people susceptible to committing more suicide attacks. A Werther effect of copycat suicides spread like a contagion and the clashes that followed as a response to 9/11 have resulted in more vehement religious disagreements, more homelessness, poverty, and military/police interactions, and more verbal denials that responses to these problems have been catastrophically inappropriate. I'm not sure what the cure for this disease will be, but lets hope it comes soon. There's really no place in the world for suicide attacks.

----------------------------
** It should also be pointed out that this 30-year total of worldwide deaths from suicide attacks is less than the number of automobile deaths that occur in the U.S. each year for most of the last 50 years. So what should be the bigger problem to address?

0 Comments

A Small Philosophy Gift for the Holidays

Response to Thought Experiment 37: Nature the Artist

Thought Experiment 37: Nature the Artist

Response to Thought Experiment 36: Pre-emptive Justice

Thought Experiment 36: Pre-emptive Justice

Response to Thought Experiment 35: Last Resort

Subscribe to Help Shape This Evolution

Blog Philosophy

Archives