Tag Archives: ethics

Ethics Philosophy Socrates Virtue

Virtue / Ethics / Socrates…

July 17, 2011 – 9:21 pm

I feel a bit like a time-traveller.  I’m slowly being sucked in to the lives, relationships, and thoughts of the ancient Athenians who surrounded Socrates.  My imagination wanders off to wonder what really happened back then, thinking about Antyllus’ true motives for prosecuting Socrates, or the role that the eccentric miscreant, Alcibiades, played in shaping the hearts and minds of the socratic-philosophers who knew him.  Of course, most of my thoughts are simply an outpouring of imagination from a mind deprived of stimulation.  What’s fuelling these thoughts are my summer project: to read and re-read the works of Plato.

Originally, I had planned to write a post after every dialogue I had read, but after more consideration, I plan to write a little bit after every few dialogues… I have no set formula in mind and just plan to write my thoughts as a raw exercise of my mind and as a record of my thinking which is only bound to change.

‘Euthyphro’ was the first dialogue I decided to read, I left it with mixed feelings.  On one hand I believe that it accurately portrayed the character of Socrates, but I couldn’t help but take away from this that the portrayal was made by an outsider.  ‘Euthyphro’ seemed to border on a defence of Socrates and at the same time is almost an exposition as to why Socrates was being indicted.  It is as if Plato was trying to sway public opinion by showing that Socrates does come off as a bit of jerk and an atheist, but really, if you look closely, he just asking some tough questions that lead inevitably in that direction.  I am left with the question: was this an attempt by Plato to gain favour with other Socratics?  There seems to be a tradition of dialogues being written in defence of Socrates’ behaviour, as seen in ‘Alcibiades’ by Aeschines of Sphettus, and others.  Contained in ‘Euthyphro’ is something known as the “Ethyphro Dillema”, found at 10a: “Is the pious being loved by the Gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the Gods?”.  I think Socrates presents this question in an ironical way… in order to demonstrate the issues with the concept of piety… It’s almost like asking: do cows find grass tasty because it is tasty, or do we infer that it’s tasty because cows consume it? … It leads me to think that in both instances there is another, better explanation.

Putting ‘Euthyphro’ aside, I took up ‘Apology’ next.  This one is always hard for me to read, not because I am an obsessive Socratic, but rather because usually get a little teary-eyed thinking about what’s actually going on during this dialogue.  To imagine a frail, 70 year old man being put on trial in a true democratic state, having to explain his life and his actions and hope for mercy… the imagery is as depressing as it gets… especially knowing the man on trial is someone who devoted his life to a unique idea of virtue and who only wanted to help.  There is one moment in Socrates sentencing that struck me: the point where he asks that rather than be sentenced to death he be sentenced to live the rest of his life being fed in the Prytaneum.  Often people consider this an act of suicide, but I felt it was the point at which Socrates became a philosopher- it was the point at which he publicly made a claim to know something, and I think that his request was befitting, and was an infinitesimal request compared to the debt Athens owed him.

Finally, I ended with ‘Crito’, the dialogue that takes place just before Socrates’ execution.  This was the most frustrating of dialogues, and requires the most meditation.  Critobulus is trying to save Socrates by paying off his guards in order to escape in the night- Socrates refuses his offer, using the argument that given his enjoyment of the benefits of the state… he had an obligation to accept the state’s punishment.  What frustrates me about this dialogue is the one dimensionality of Socrates’ argument… He fails to question the legitimacy of the government itself, never asking the question whether or not this was the same government that provided him benefits or another, altogether damaged by the oligarchy of the thirty tyrants.  There are many other chains of thought one can take to attack his argument, but none appear in the dialogue at all.  My conclusion is that the dialogue was written to take the sting out of the actual fact that Socrates was in effect choosing suicide over all other options.  I think there is evidence to support this conclusion when Socrates asks Critobulus if his benefactors would help to raise his children if he left them in Athens but moved to Thessaly at about 54a… It was a criticism of his benefactors and I think this points to something deeper— the reality that Socrates struggled through most of his life pursuing a philosophical life, only to witness his friends helping him when their pride and place in Athens were at a state of dispute or were about to be cast in a negative light.  There was no doubt that Socrates loved Athens, and that love meant more to him than anything else… Disillusioned with his state, his friends, and his supporters he volitionally chose to die. Plato was merely attempting to soften the blow with what he could extrapolate from what he knew of Socrates’ last days.  I think that ‘Crito’ was perhaps a turning point for Plato, because I believe, compared to the previous dialogues, this is the first one that contained a great deal of conjecture and, in my opinion, proved to be an attempt to rectify Socrates’ action with his philosophy.  Even if ‘Crito’ was a word for word recreation of an actual discussion, I still believe disillusionment was there in Socrates— and that he chose to die.  I do believe there is much more to be taken from this dialogue, there is a lot of symbolism– like the ship traveling to Delos as blessed by an apolloinian priest– and perhaps in my next reading of this dialogue I will be able to spend more time with it.

The day after reading the three dialogues I had an epiphinal moment that I can barely capture in words… I briefly grasped what it meant to follow a ‘Socratic’ path of virtue.  There was a distinct point in my reflection where I seemed to grasp Socrates’ project… the sheer magnitude and importance of virtue over everything else… the understanding of virtue as action and the major implications of that– I was stunned.  As someone who cares a great deal about ethics and human character I can now see the universality of virtue that goes beyond the ethical… And also how later writers like Plato and Aristotle were simply trying to interweave and rectify the power of this idea with their own projects. In Plato’s case it was his Pseudo-Pythagorean idealism, and for Aristotle it was the coalescence of virtue with the idea of human character.  What becomes clear is that the only truly universal idea in philosophy is the idea that action is not just translatable in to the language of virtue, but is virtue, and that virtue can be examined, understood, even anticipated… The ideas go much deeper, but that experience, as lame as it may sound, was profound after some reflection.  The issue is it seems impossible to escape the pitfalls of Plato, Aristotle, and others… no matter how hard you try.

I want to postface this with the reminder that these are just my musings, they are bound to change (especially as I get deeper into ancient philosophy).  One thing that always strikes me about Plato’s writing is his use of equine-imagery… It’s something you can’t really avoid or ignore when reading many of his works it seems.

I will be back again with my thoughts on the next few dialogues in my list as soon as time permits.

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Ethics

Entelecheia, Potentiality, and Nuclear Energy

March 20, 2011 – 1:07 pm

The past few months for me have been marked by a bad bout of writers’ block. Ethics, as always, dominates my thoughts— and in attempt to clear the miscarriages of my mind, I feel compelled to jot down a few timely thoughts on reaching ‘human potential’.

AristotleAristotle wrote on concepts of potentiality and actuality, or ‘dunamis‘ and ‘entelecheia‘ respectively. Aristotle’s conceptions and understanding of these processes and states of being are, in the peripatetic tradition, well thought out and follow a logical course of development that works to unravel difficult ontological problems. The idea of a human ‘actuality’, or ‘enetelecheia’, has been a topic that has interested me for quite some time, and is, in my opinion, the most fundamental part of any enquiry in to ‘character’ or ‘ethos‘. Aristotle argued that a human’s entelecheia (which some argue is interchangeable with the concept of energeia) was in seen in achieving a state of eudaimonia, or human-flourishing… as academic, Martha Nussbaum describes the concept:

“To flourish is to live a complete good life, lacking in nothing that would make that life better or more complete. That’s Aristotle’s basic notion, and the things that are constituent parts of a person’s eudaimonia are just those things without which life would not be complete, the most important things or activities in the life.”. (source)

This brings me to what motivated me to write this– the recent tragedies in Japan. The devastating earthquake that caused a ravaging tsunami has clearly worked against this process of striving towards reaching potential.  But ironically, in this destruction we are given a fleeting glimpse in to the potentiality of the human species through the ways we work towards overcoming hopelessness and despair, and in how we help others in their time of need.

Unfortunately, a third tragedy is brewing with the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, which currently hangs in the balance between being a major disaster and an Earth shattering nuclear catastrophe. But, in perhaps an incongruous way, the object that threatens the destruction of the ways of life for many, the nuclear reactor, has also been a device that has fuelled the dunamis of the people of the region.

Regrettably, upon witnessing this disaster, people around the world have been stricken with fear of nuclear energy— some fears perhaps justifiable (in terms of poorly designed plants, or plants that have been in operation outside their life-cycle), but others are tragically irrational. Nuclear energy is, for better or for worse, the cleanest energy source and most productive of energy sources currently under the control of humankind… to think that nuclear energy needs to go away is naïve and misguided.

Dai-Ichi DisasterThe lives of the Japanese people living in the region of Fukushima prefecture and beyond have been spent in the shadow of the Dai-Ichi plant… people were born and nourished by the electricity the plant generated, with their entelecheia carved and shaped by the same fuel rods that now threaten disaster.  It is a difficult and tragic situation, perhaps one that could have been minimized through prudential and forward-thinking actions by TEPCO.  In their defense, they came to decisions based on many constraints and economic compromises, and like any group of people working on a singular task, are prone to make mistakes. By no means do I wish to excuse them, but I believe it is only right to take the effort and understand the events, decisions, and limitations involved in the life of the Dai-Ichi plant– and do so with an application of ethics.

With entelecheia in mind, it seems clear that we cannot merely abandon nuclear energy based on rare tragedies.  Disaster is not a convention of a nuclear plant, but is rather a reflection of the state of the dunamis of the human species. We are in a process of reaching our actualized potentiality and in the process we will stumble and make mistakes, but ultimately I believe we will succeed if we strive forward with the right combination of virtue… especially with the right kind of courage. We, as a species, will never be perfect… after all, we are mere mortals, but there is still an opportunity for us– and that is in our efforts in working towards realizing our entelecheia.

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Ethics

Some of my thoughts on ethics …

November 20, 2010 – 11:45 pm

It’s a mistake to emphasize the ‘moral’ denotation to the word ‘ethos’– ethics is derived from its other denotation: ‘character’– this meaning is what binds the ‘philosophies of value’ (ethics, aesthetics, politics) together as illustrated by Aristotle’s statements on Polygnotus… when you read ‘ethos’ as ‘moral’ you polarize ethics in the worst of ways– destroying character. Character is a distinguishing feature of a species or genus, it’s the aggregate of the distinctive features of any thing… this is what ethics grasps at, and, concomitantly, answering the question of ethos results in ethical philosophy.

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Criticism Ethics

Monozukuri, Kaizen, Karakuri Ningyo. Why Roboethics is Really Psychoanalysis…

September 30, 2010 – 2:24 pm

Maria, as imagined in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis".

The concept of “anthropomorphized robots” has pervaded Western consciousness since Fritz Lang’s momentous film, “Metropolis“.  The robot in Lang’s masterpiece, Maria, instantiates her Leninist-like program in order to destroy the aristocratic class for the benefit of the proletariat. Radical political sentiments aside, Maria represented a hardened human desire– a leviathan like culmination of hopes, desires, and technical skills– a menacing essence meant to bring justice to the classes of the technically-abled and exploited.  Maria took the form of a female human-being, but she could have easily have been designed after the likes of a more menacing and efficient murderous-animal… but this distinction, her embodiment as being human-like, is central and directly related to our own cognitive capacities to empathize.  Our tendency to empathize with the anthropomorphic is really what sits at the core of our understanding of “roboethics”… a tendency that has a long and storied history going back to at least 17th century Japan– a country, that by no coincidence, is at the fore of the robotic-revolution.

Japan, given both its seclusion and rich history, has been the progenitor of a great number of theoretical and practical philosophies; two such noteworthy philosophies are “monozukuri“, the process of creating things, and “kaizen“, continuous improvement.  Although they may appear to be obscure foreign ideals from antiquity, both philosophies are in service and still the focus of study.  Japan’s transformation from a post-feudal agrarian society, to an economic and manufacturing powerhouse was largely driven by kaizen and monozukuri principles– for example, the Toyota Production System, which revolutionized the car-manufacturing process, through concepts such as “just-in-time” inventory, was founded within the traditions of kaizen and monozukuri.  These manufacturing philosophies developed at a time of great social change in Japan, when new ideas and new peoples were beginning to make contact with the island-nation.  Japan, following a historically predictable pattern, began to adapt innovations from the enlightenment such as mechanically driven objects, with the same monozukuri craftsmanship-ethos that had existed for centuries.  The resultant product of this fusion of ideas were perhaps Japan’s first robot: “karakuri ningyo” or the mechanical doll.

These dolls became a popular product in Japan due to both the craftsmanship that went in to their production, but also due to Japan’s history and culture of doll collection— the most typical use for a mechanical doll was in the serving of tea.

A typical Tea Serving Mechanical Doll dating to the Edo period

At a little less than a foot-high, these tiny mechanical devices were designed to look similar to “hinamatsuri ningyo” or  ‘Girls Day’ dolls.  ‘Girls Day’ dolls were modeled after a traditional Japanese court, and they originated from ancient animistic practices devised to encapsulate ‘bad-spirits’ in inanimate, human-like objects so that they may be flushed out of existence by being thrown in to the local river.  The ‘Girls Day’ dolls are highly regarded, and are to this day, laid out for display once a year.

Girls enjoying Hinamatsuri Dolls on 'Girls Day'

Japan has been dominated by an animistic belief system since prehistoric times which has developed in to what is known today as ‘Shintosim’.  Shintoism is not so much a religion, but a cultural, and historical system that espouses one core belief: that everything has a “kami” or spirit.  This applies to everything from ‘Girls‘ Day‘ dolls to  mechanical dolls, to robotics.  This belief is so pervasive that when, for example, a mechanical doll broke, the owners would feel remorse and hold funeral processions for their beloved servants.

Feeling sentiment for objects is hardly a Japanese phenomenon, it’s a common trait of human culture to anthropomorphize things.  Our natural tendency to anthropomorphize allows us to intuitively and naturally connect with objects on an emotional (and comprehensible) level through the projection of one’s personality into the thing.  This tendency seems to be closely connected to, or perhaps a byproduct of our abilities to empathize.  Human beings are capable of empathizing with one another, and even with nonhuman animals— in evolutionary theory, the ability to empathize has served an advantage that has been reinforced through group selection over time, through perhaps an increase in hunting ability, or increased chances in group survival.

Our feelings towards robots and other anthropomorphized machines, such as the mechanical doll, are more a question of psychoanalysis– the question should not be centred around how we should treat robots, but rather why we create emotional attachments to them– making this an ethically prudential question, rather than something requiring a morally-universal insight.  Plato, Aquinas, and Kant all shared similar moral theories surrounding the human treatment of nonhuman animals that seems pertinent given the prudential nature of the robot moral problem.  For these philosophers, the treatment of non-human animals was wrong in the way it tends to harden one’s heart towards fellow humans.  For example, it would be sensible for us to be suspicious of a person who uses robots for sexual gratification through the use of abuse or degradation– not because there is anything inherently wrong with treating a robot in this regard, but because of how this person may feel or treat fellow human beings as a result of his or her fetish.  Moral Psychologists and psychoanalysts would be in the best position to test Plato, Aquinas, and Kant’s assertions in a scientific and controlled way— there is a possibility that “the human heart” doesn’t harden at all, and that the maltreatment of robots could be beneficial to the often stressed human psyche.

The dream of thinking-machines is really, currently, just a dream.  Until we can unravel the mysteries of the human-mind, we may not be capable of even recognizing a nonhuman intelligence— applying Wittgenstein’s theories,

Philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein

we could never be in agreement on the level of the ‘form of life’ of a robot, making communication (and understanding) an impossibility. If we are able to understand what human intelligence is, are able to disprove Wittgenstein, and overcome all the other great barriers preventing humanity from creating an artificial but intelligent being, speaking of other-regarding roboethics is merely a futile exercise in academic fancy.

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