Time spent thinking

My morning starts with time spent thinking. I just listed how many things are on my mind. I started with the BBC drama I watched last evening, "Stolen" about trafficked children from Africa, Russia, Viet Nam and other relatively poor countries. One thing that one of the traffickers said that stuck in my mind was, "we are just supplying a demand." The demand is for cheap labor. That chimed in with something from St Paul, "Before there was a law there was no offence". Whether it is sweat shops in the East End making cheap clothes or sandwiches for London's lunches there are undoubtedly people working for less than the legal minimum wage and many are illegal immigrants and perhaps children. It didn't just start with the minimum wage legislation, but the legislation has revealed how offensive it is.

I have also begun reading CS Lewis' Reflections on the Psalms. He was taking his psalms from the Book of Common Prayer, which translation would be regarded as inaccurate by modern scholars. Nevertheless he has trouble with them, particularly the passages where the psalmist heaps down trouble on his enemies. Having seen the film about the traffickers I have similar feelings about them. I assume that as they are my enemies they are God's enemies too. But I need to put that in context. Are they just businessmen fulfilling a need - the real villains being the consumers; those who use young children as personal slaves and even worse as sex-slaves? Juxtapositioned in my mind is another TV series: The world's strictest parents, in which unruly British teenagers are sent to live with very strict (often Christian) parents, usually in America, and are miraculously tamed in a week. But what often comes out is a deprived child. Last night the girl had a dad with kidney failure who had had three transplants, one from her mother, and the boy who had fathered an illegitimate child had no father-figure at all in his family to be a role model. To understand all is to forgive all. Lewis reminds us that God is not willing that anyone should perish but that all should turn from their wicked ways and live.

I have also been struggling with John's Gospel in that there are so many, probably legitimate, interpretations of the text. Perhaps it was meant to be so. I am using it for devotional readings every day and I am not seeking to provide a comprehensive authoritarian commentary. One thought a day is enough. Our Pastor has started a study in Ecclesiastes on Sunday evenings. I have always loved the book, because it reminds me of my days at University when I tried to find the meaning of life outside of God. I could get no further than 42 (see Hitchhikers Guide).

I then begin to think about stereotypy and immunoglobulin genes in CLL. So much of prognosis in CLL seems to be fore-ordained, being determined by the particular structure of the immunoglobulin gene that powers the tumor line, but as in life events happen and nothing is predictable. To bias our thoughts too much towards 'nurture' or 'nature' is an error. Even identical twins differ at 70 years of age.

The le Carre book I am reading is set in Berlin in the 1970s. Bader-Meinhoff, anarchy, protests, free-love - it all seems so distant now and I never had any sympathy for it. But the need to get out on the street is born of frustration that the politicians are not listening. In the sixties at University, I remember making a speech at the Debating society which bewailed the fact the the 'young leader' that everybody was raving about, Jack Kennedy, was in fact 4 years older than my father. Which brought me to this poem that had it's genesis then though it has been much altered:

Order 451

When the last, time-slipping clock sticks fast,
ratchet-locked and still, and the last rage
rumbles past and yet no screams decry
the cloistered boxing into cocooned cage;

when the sodium painted sky seeps clean
into clear black night and even fairy lights fail;
when the hot, whispered breath is cordoned so tight,
stifled and silenced, blanketed and frail;

when the cold creeps to cover the fire’s faintest spark
and the dark is oppressive, but curbed and defined;
when danger is confined and the limits are quite safe
and they tell us and sell us it’s best left behind;

will you dare to dance lightly on fences and tracks,
face dragons and princes and prisons and pens,
and clamber over palisades and balustrades and pounds
and rip out the restrictions and the rules we need to cleanse?

Anyway that is why I need to settle down for half an hour in the mornings and think.

It's not fair!

What is fair? Does fairness matter?

"It's not fair!" is a common cry of children. "Life isn't fair." is a common adult rejoinder.

John Rawls was an American moral philosopher who died in 2002. Much of his thinking has been adopted by modern Western democracies. Rawls imagines that were we to design a society from scratch, we would build in a social contract. He considers that the basis of justice is to restore some of the fairness that nature and previous experience have omitted.

Rawls begins with the principle of liberty; establishing equal basic liberties for all citizens. 'Basic' liberty entails the freedoms of conscience, association, and expression as well as democratic rights; Rawls also includes a right to own personal property.

Rawls argues for a second principle of equality. To guarantee that liberties represent meaningful options for all in society he proposes distributive justice. Formal guarantees of political voice and freedom of assembly are of little real value to the desperately poor and marginalized in society. However, demanding that everyone have exactly the same effective opportunities in life would almost certainly offend the very liberties that are supposedly being equalized. Nevertheless, for our liberties to matter, wherever one ends up in society, one wants life to be worth living, with enough effective freedom to pursue personal goals. Thus Rawls affirms a two-part second principle comprising Fair Equality of Opportunity and the famous (and controversial) difference principle. This second principle ensures that those with comparable talents and motivation face roughly similar life chances and that inequalities in society work to the benefit of the least advantaged.

In order to construct society as a thought experiment, Rawls proposed a 'veil of ignorance'. In other words he proposed that philosophers in designing society should not know where they would end up. The should assume that they might end up at the bottom and be as content with their design

One early way of ordering society was the feudal. Aristocrats, my virtue of birth are as a gift from the king could do pretty well what they liked while the peasants did what they were told. Very few societies operate on such principles today and most that do are almost universally condemned. A semblance of this former state exists where there are still monarchies, but in real life these are really an example of pageantry and a device to stop politicians getting too powerful.

A second way was the libertarian, exemplified by the American wild west and in a modified way still preferred by some of my readers. The problem with this is that upbringing and background still confers an unfair advantage to those who are the winners, even if the law is sufficient and enforced sufficiently to deter crooks and confidence tricksters.

Many espouse a meritocracy. But even here wealth and schooling confer an unfair advantage on some. As someone who rose to the top without any of these advantages, I remember resenting those who advanced more rapidly than I by virtue of their public school accents, straight teeth and Oxbridge contacts. My children had their teeth straightened, their accents adjusted to RP and at least one of them went to Oxford. These things can be corrected of course. Orthodontics is now available to all via the NHS, pains are being taken to make allowances at Oxbridge admissions for people without the benefit of a private education and resistance to regional accents is fading. More could be done to level the playing field, though it is hard to stop rich parents buying privilege for their children.

I have always felt that credit should be given to those who by dint of hard work and application made their way to the top except that I have not made sufficient allowance for the birth order effect. Seventy per cent of Harvard students are the first-born in their families. I was the first-born in mine. Although you might credit me for raising myself above my roots, there can be no merit in being born first.

Rawls therefore proposes a fourth solution: a society based on meritocracy where social manipulation aids the least gifted - social housing, nursery education, free health care etc with higher taxes for the rich. The problem with this is that the rich will just move elsewhere, where the taxes are lower. The trick is to make the standard of living such that even though the taxes are high they are better off staying put. Then you have the problem of immigration, much of which will be illegal.

The trouble with life is it's just not fair. But that is also its challenge.

Is it always wrong to lie?

Is it ever right to tell a lie?

Utilitarians will say Yes, to avoid a bad consequence; Kantians will say, No, truth telling is a categorical imperative. The hard test of the Kantian position is when your friend asks you to hide him because a murderer is chasing him. When the murderer knocks on your door and asks whether your friend is there, should you tell the truth? Utilitarians would say no, the consequence of truth telling would make you complicit in the murder; Kantians would say telling the the truth is sacrosanct since if you become a liar, you are morally compromised. They would recommend a misleading evasion. "I have no idea where my friend is at the moment," would be true since he might be in a closet or under the bed, but also misleading since he is in your apartment. Bill Clinton was a master of the misleading evasion since as a lawyer he was bound to tell the truth. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

Some might say that Jesus was a Kantian. "Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar?" "Show me a penny." "Whose figure and inscription is that?" "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's"

I would take neither view since the utilitarian position is impossibly compromised by unnatural consequences - Cock fighting rather than opera should be supported from public funds; but the Kantian position does not reflect the real world. We must be aware of the consequences of our actions and not take a Jesuitical position of willing one consequence yet not being brave enough to let our conscience be pricked.

If we lived in a perfect world there would be no murderer at your door and you could tell the truth with impunity. But we live in a fallen world where not everyone buys into the concept of truth telling. Murderers have forfeited the right to be told the truth, just as the Gestapo had in World War II. Clinton told the truth yet he told a moral lie and his motive was to save his skin. Corrie Ten Boom, who hid Jews in Holland told lies yet her motive was to save the lives of others from a tyrannical regime. Who was in the right? Would a misleading evasion have made her lie more moral? By no means! Because her lie was a] putting herself at great risk (she eventually was sent to a Concentration Camp) and b] motivated to save others, it was of great moral value. To be branded a liar by the Gestapo is a badge of honor.

Bentham v Kant. Moral philosophy part 2

I am enjoying the course on moral philosophy being broadcast by the BBC and led by Michael Sandel.

Yesterday he contrasted the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham with the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant.

Bentham believed in the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In many ways many of us would go along with that until it comes to the hard questions.

One example: a trolley bus is careering down a hill out of control. The brakes have failed and five workers on the tracks below are bound to be killed. But there is a siding to the right with only one worker on it. The driver can still steer. Should he steer to the right and kill one to save the five? Most people take this choice, but when the same question is put in a way that involves a direct act of murder most would hold back.

There are 5 patients waiting for a transplant. Two need kidneys, one a liver, one a heart/lung and the fifth a pancreas. There are no donors and they are all going to die. But in the next room a fit young man with the right blood group has come in for a check-up. He is taking an afternoon nap. The surgeon has a bright idea, "I could nip in and take the required organs from him. True I would lose one life, but I would save five."

There would be no support for this action - even from the relatives of the potential recipients.

Kant saw the flaws in utilitarianism and propounded his own ideas. Human dignity trumps mere numbers. He talked about categorical imperatives, principles that are intrinsically valid, good in and of themselves. One of these imperatives is the idea of human rights or human dignity.

But it is easy to put hard cases to the committed Kantian. For example torture would be absolutely forbidden according to Kant. But supposing there is a bomb on a plane which will explode and kill 500 people. The man who put the bomb on the plane has been caught but refuses to tell where it is. Does anybody believe it would be wrong to waterboard the bomber to save the lives of the 500? Kantians do. Politicians avoid the question by calling the idea hypothetical, saying that such situations don't occur in real life. But they do.

A recent German case illustrates the dilemma. A young child was kidnapped. The kidnapper was caught and the ransom retrieved, but he refused to say where the child was. The police chief threatened him with torture and he caved in and gave the location of the child. He admitted that he had killed the child shortly after the kidnapping. He was prosecuted for murder and received a life sentence. But, and here's the rub, the police chief was prosecuted for violating the kidnapper's human rights. You or I might think that the murderer had forfeited his human rights in this case, but under the German Constitution, the rights of all its citizens are sacrosanct.

I believe that after the Third Reich so violated the human rights of 6 million Jews, the German conscience so pricked that they felt it necessary to incorporate this principle of their favorite philosopher in law. So many European countries were complicit in the persecution of Jewry that they raised no objection to this guiding principle throughout Europe and the last Labour government in the UK incorporated the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law.

In the UK we have managed without a written constitution for thousands of years and the German experience shows the wisdom of that. The sorts of dilemmas that Sandel has highlighted demonstrate the futility of laying down absolute principles. In the 2000+ years since Socrates the greatest minds have disagreed about these questions of moral philosophy - how are we supposed to resolve them? Each case must be judged on its merits. Sometime the law is an ass and a wise judge will recognize that.

One of Kant's categorical imperatives concerns lying which he says is always wrong. So you have a RAF pilot hidden in your hayloft. The Gestapo calls and asks you if you have seen one and Kant would say you have to betray the pilot because it is wrong to lie. I would say that the Gestapo officer has forfeited his right to be told the truth.

The same applies to imprisoned murderers who have been denied the right to vote in general elections. By their actions they have forfeited some of their human rights. Not according to the European Court which holds the UK is in contempt for its policy.