More's Utopia

I just skimmed through Thomas More's Utopia. It's better than I remembered, and has a lot of similarity to his friend Erasmus's In Praise of Folly. Here are some observations.

1. At the start and the end of Raphael's description of Utopia, the narrator says that what he is most dubious about is the abolition of private property. At the end, he says that the reason is that it deprives a state of magnificence.

2. The essence of Utopia is not really communism, but the restriction on what can be consumed. Since, for example, everybody wears simple clothing of one pattern and color, nobody is tempted to steal anybody else's clothing or to take too much for himself from the warehouse. It follows that what goods are permitted are in overabundance and nobody wants to steal. One assumption is that if luxuries were not produced, wealth would be great enough for an overabundance of necessities even if everyone worked only six hours a day.

3. Utopia is a reformed monastery, with monks who marry and devote themselves to happiness and self-cultivation rather than prayer and worship.

4. The Republic starts with the City of Pigs, which Socrates says is ideal, but Glaucon complains that they have no luxuries there. Utopia is the City of Pigs fleshed out (no pun intended). The Republic's second city, the Callipolis (Beautiful City) has luxuries, but is a feverish, diseased city.

5. Utopia, like the City of Pigs but unlike the Callipolis, has no Guardian class. The philosophers are not kings there. It is a democracy. In a sense, everybody is a philosopher, though.

6. Gallipoli was called Callipolis in ancient times.

7. In Book II More makes the argument that if the natives are underutilizing a country it is just to drive them out to make better use of the land.

The Philosopher King

I just read Allan Bloom's "Response to Hall" Political Theory, Vol. 5, No. 3, (Aug., 1977), pp. 315-330 http://www.jstor.org/stable/190644 . It's a great article which expands on his introductory essay in his translation Plato's Republic. Here is the main argument:

Socrates never precisely shows Glaucon that justice as Glaucon conceives it is good. Rather, in the course of founding a city and, thus, learning the nature of justice, Socrates introduces, as a political necessity, the philosophers. Glaucon learns that to be a ruler in the city he has founded he must be a philosopher. Then, when he is shown what philosophy is, he learns that it is the best life and is essentially independent of political life. From the point of view of philosophy-which Glaucon had not considered and, thus, had not considered as a good thing-the city looks like a cave or a prison.

I perhaps should write up a different argument, extending Bloom's: that Plato is showing not only that thinking is the highest activity rather than doing, but that philosophers become ridiculous when they become kings. The philosopher-king is *not* really the ideal, since the ideal state he comes up with is silly.

Charity Giving by Prominent American Liberal Politicians

This American Spectator article, "Liberal Scrooges" by Peter Schweitzer, is amazing. It relates the tiny amounts that Obama, Ted Kennedy, Kerry, Andrew Cuomo, Gore, Reich, Jesse Jackson, and Franklin Roosevelt gave to charity, and the much larger fractions of income by Reagan, both Bushes, and Cheney (though the emphasis is on the liberals).

Apodictic versus Apodeitic

Apodictic (αποδεικτικος, meaning "capable of demonstration"), is a logical term, applied to judgments which are necessarily true, as of mathematical conclusions. Apodicticity is the corresponding abstract noun, referring to logical certainty. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apodictic

Apodeitic: Good without reference to purpose. Rules of skill. Counsels of prudence. dsc.dixie.edu/owl/syllabi/Ph3510PPT/kant.ppt

Deriving Utilitarianism from First Principles

(revised May 14, May 16, June 2, in light of the objection that the argument doesn't have several people's small gains justifying one person's big loss; that characteristics shouldn't matter)

I heard Professor Terence Irwin talk on 'Prudence, morality, and the importance of persons: a dilemma for Sidgwick' yesterday. He said that Sidgwick does a poor job of moving from his two axioms to utilitarianism, which is correct. Even the axioms aren't spelled out very clearly, it seems. Here's a fix-up.

Axiom A1. Pareto Improvements Are Good. If you can make one person better off without hurting anybody else, do it.

Axiom A2. Impartiality. Whether a change in welfare is good or bad shouldn't depend on the identity of the particular person affected or any personal characteristics. more precisely, whether an action that changes welfare by amount A affects person i instead of person j does not affect the action's moral goodness.

Result R1. By A1, if Jones can take an action that increases his welfare by 800 utils, he should do it.

Result R2. Suppose Jones can either do nothing or take the trio of actions T1:
Action X reduces Jones's welfare by 2000 utils.
Action Y1 increases Jones's welfare by 700 utils.
Action Z1 increases Jones's welfare by 500 utils.

By R1, Jones should take the trio of actions T1.

Result R3. Suppose Jones can either do nothing or take the trio of actions T2:
Action X reduces Jones's welfare by 2000 utils.
Action Y2 increases Smith's welfare by 700 utils.
Action Z2 increases Lee's welfare by 500 utils.

By A2 and R2, Jones should take this trio of actions T2.

Result R4. R3 would remain true for any trio of numbers (a,b,c) such that a is less than b+c. Thus, we have utilitarianism.

A possible flaw: Trio T1 has the same identity label for both actions, whereas Trio T2 has a different identity label for each action. Does A2 really require them to be treated in the same way?

Axiom 2 is different from saying that welfare pairs (2,3) and (3,2) are equivalent, and stronger. Even if (2,3) and (3,2) are equivalent, that does not imply that (3,3) and (2,4) are equivalent. Using Axiom 2, though, if start by saying (2,3) and (3,2) are equivalent, then the actions of "give 1 to person 1" and "give 1 to person 2" are equivalent, so we do get the implication that (3,3) and (2,4) are equivalent. Probably we can derive that (x,y) and (y,x) are equivalent too, from Axiom 2, though I don't see how immediately.

Now that I think about it, Axiom 2 is not so different from the contractarian axiom that if a person is willing to accept a gamble, then he should not complain if he is the loser. A contractarian introduces probability, though, and so needs expected utility perhaps-- or at least some comment on what happens to non-expected-utility maximizers.

Aquinas as Utilitarian. Happiness is the end. Summa Theologica 2-1 q.90 article 2: "Whether the law is always something directed to the common good?":

Now the first principle in practical matters, which are the object of the practical reason, is the last end: and the last end of human life is bliss or happiness, as stated above (Q[2], A[7]; Q[3], A[1]). Consequently the law must needs regard principally the relationship to happiness. Moreover, since every part is ordained to the whole, as imperfect to perfect; and since one man is a part of the perfect community, the law must needs regard properly the relationship to universal happiness. Wherefore the Philosopher, in the above definition of legal matters mentions both happiness and the body politic: for he says (Ethic. v, 1) that we call those legal matters "just, which are adapted to produce and preserve happiness and its parts for the body politic": since the state is a perfect community, as he says in Polit. i, 1.

Metaphysics

What do you get if you castrate a man, feed him estrogen, and stuff him into a dress?

---A fat, castrated, man in a dress.

Naturalism

I've started reading the just-published book, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, of John Lennox, whom I met at St. Ebbe's. It's good. I think I see the essence of the philosophical position of Naturalism now,Click here to read more

from page 29:

[T]here is nothing but nature. It is a closed system of cause and effect. ...There is no `outside'.

The notion is tricky because naturalism does not, I think, exactly mean that magic and gods do not exist. There is no essential difference between a witch who mixes a love potion and a scientist who mixes a cough remedy except that the love potion doesn't work. Both mixers intend to repeat an objective formula to generate predictable results, and both have obtained their formula rationally, by accepting authority, using observation, or plausible theorizing. In the same way, whether we call the force that makes things pull at each other the force Gravity or the god Gravity makes no difference.

I would be hard put to say whether primitive peoples believe in naturalism or not. Their gods and demons are close to being explanations--- but on the other hand, they are believed to be fairly mysterious explanations. I suppose the key is whether the savages think that if they only had time, they'd be able to come up with a comprehensive explanation that included explaining the gods.

I was going to say that Thomas Aquinas thought he had such a comprehensive explanation (a summa theologica), but he didn't. He clearly distinguished between what could be known by reason and what needed to be learned by revelation, and he recognized that revelation did not include all the mysteries we'd like to know about God.

Thus, a naturalistic god is one that can be fully understood by humans-- at least understood as well as we understand, say, lions. He is a god that is in the same order of nature as man. The Greek gods of myth are like that, and the Norse gods, but lurking behind them is the truly supernatural--- the Mysteries, the Forms, the Norns, Erda.