The evolution of philosophers

Thank you, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

God and zombies: the mental life of philosophers

More Intelligent Life reports on a recent survey of the beliefs and working patterns of modern working philosophers:

Of the three topics that Immanuel Kant once said were the proper subjects of metaphysics – namely God, freedom and immortality – the survey covers only the first two, perhaps because these days life is too short to bother with immortality. Free will gets a thumbs-up: only 12% of philosophers think that people’s lives are predestined. But God gets the thumbs-down: nearly three-quarters accept or lean towards atheism. This is only to be expected. Even in America, which is unusually religious for a rich country, the top echelons of those who think for a living tend to be unbelievers. A survey of the members of America’s elite National Academy of Sciences in 1998 found that only 7% believed in God.

A quarter of a century ago, such a survey would have had plenty of questions about language, but now there are only three (out of 30). Analytical philosophy has shifted its attention from language to the mind, which is why there is a question about zombies – though nothing about ghouls, demons or vampires. By a “zombie”, today’s philosophers mean a hypothetical being who is physically indistinguishable from a normal person but is not conscious. Philosophers argue about whether or not such a creature could exist in theory, and on the whole they are pretty undecided about it. A small majority endorse “physicalism” about the mind, which is the theory that all mental states are in fact physical states. Many of the pioneers of the 20th-century version of this view hailed from Australia, which led one philosophical wag to surmise that Australia is the only country in which it is true.

Today in historical perspective

Alain Badiou, French philosopher

From Alain Badiou’s article in Le Monde in translation:

So what can the principle and the name of a genuine orientation be today? I propose that we call it, faithfully to the history of the politics of emancipation, the communist hypothesis. Let us note in passing that our critics want to scrap the word ‘communism’ under the pretext that an experience with state communism, which lasted seventy years, failed tragically. What a joke! When it’s a question of overthrowing the domination of the rich and the inheritance of power, which have lasted millennia, their objections rest on seventy years of stumbling steps, violence and impasses! Truth be told, the communist idea has only traversed an infinitesimal portion of the time of its verification, of its effectuation. What is this hypothesis? It can be summed up in three axioms.

First, the idea of equality. The prevalent pessimistic idea, which once again dominates our time, is that human nature is destined to inequality; that it’s of course a shame that this is so, but that once we’ve shed a few tears about this, it is crucial to grasp this and accept it. To this view, the communist idea responds not exactly with the proposal of equality as a programme – let us realize the deep-seated equality immanent to human nature – but by declaring that the egalitarian principle allows us to distinguish, in every collective action, that which is in keeping with the communist hypothesis, and therefore possesses a real value, from that which contradicts it, and thus throws us back to an animal vision of humanity.

Then we have the conviction that the existence of a separate coercive state is not necessary. This is the thesis, shared by anarchists and communists, of the withering-away of the state. There have existed societies without the state, and it is rational to postulate that there may be others in the future. But above all, it is possible to organize popular political action without subordinating it to the idea of power, representation within the state, elections, etc. The liberating constraint of organized action can be exercised outside the state. There are many examples of this, including recent ones: the unexpected power of the movement of December 1995 delayed by several years anti-popular measures on pensions. The militant action of undocumented workers did not stop a host of despicable laws, but it has made it possible for these workers to be recognized as a part of our collective and political life.

A final axiom: the organization of work does not imply its division, the specialization of tasks, and in particular the oppressive differentiation between intellectual and manual labour. It is necessary and possible to aim for the essential polymorphousness of human labour. This is the material basis of the disappearance of classes and social hierarchies. These three principles do not constitute a programme; they are maxims of orientation, which anyone can use as a yardstick to evaluate what he or she says and does, personally or collectively, in its relation to the communist hypothesis.

The communist hypothesis has known two great stages, and I propose that we’re entering into a third phase of its existence. The communist hypothesis established itself on a vast scale between the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune (1871). The dominant themes then were those of the workers’ movement and insurrection. Then there was a long interval, lasting almost forty years (from 1871 to 1905), which corresponds to the apex of European imperialism and the systematic plunder of numerous regions of the planet. The sequence that goes from 1905 to 1976 (Cultural Revolution in China) is the second sequence of the effectuation of the communist hypothesis. Its dominant theme is the theme of the party, accompanied by its main (and unquestionable) slogan: discipline is the only weapon of those who have nothing. From 1976 to today, there is a second period of reactive stabilization, a period in which we still live, during which we have witnessed the collapse of the single-party socialist dictatorships created in the second sequence.

The Idea of Justice: sans absolutes

From Literary Review:

In Sen’s view, a smarter world is sure to be a better world. Unlike some rationalists in the past, however, he does not think we need a conception of an ideal world in order to improve the one we live in. One of the recurring themes of The Idea of Justice is to contest the assumption that a theory of ideal justice is either necessary or desirable. Much of the book is a critique of the work of the late twentieth-century American liberal philosopher John Rawls. While Rawls’s work has shaped academic discussion for over thirty years, it has had a negligible impact on political practice, and one of the reasons may be that his theory leaves so little room for politics. For Rawls, justice is a unique set of principles that reasonable people would choose from an imaginary initial position that ensures impartiality. Once these principles have been chosen all that remains is to set the right institutions in place. Conflicts about the scope of basic liberties and the distribution of resources will then be settled by applying the theory, which is a legal rather than political process.

It is a far-fetched view of how any society could operate, but Sen’s objection is not to the lack of realism in Rawls’s theory. It is the very idea of perfect justice that he questions. The reasons why society may be unjust are many and various; there is no reason to think that there is a set of just principles that everybody will accept. A just society will accord its members a range of basic liberties but also the capabilities needed to make use of them – in Isaiah Berlin’s terminology, it will protect both negative and positive freedoms. Clearly, however, reasonable people will at times disagree as to which of these freedoms are most important. Again, though Sen argues strongly that justice should have a global reach, he knows that people will reasonably disagree about how wide the scope of particular requirements of justice should be. So, rather than opting for what he calls ‘transcendental institutionalism’ – the attempt to design an ideally just framework for society – Sen urges a comparative approach, which recognises the plural demands of justice while maintaining the struggle for a less unjust world.

In showing why those who pursue justice do not need an ideal of a perfectly just society, only a view about what would make the world a more just place, The Idea of Justice deserves to be acclaimed as a major advance in contemporary thinking. If the book succeeds in debunking rationalistic philosophies that claim to formulate principles of justice that everyone must accept, it still asks a great deal of reason – more, in fact, than reason can give. It is one thing to accept that the demands of justice are plural, another to recognise that they can be rivals – and not only in the sense that they must be ranked on a scale of comparative urgency because they cannot all be realised at the same time. In actual conflicts justice and injustice are not always as distinct and opposed as they seem in the seminar room. Quite often they are closely intertwined, sometimes in morally horrendous ways.