Wittgenstein's 'notorious paragraph' on Godel

The gulf between the Russell of Principia and Godel, Tarski, Turning etc. turned upon new ideas regarding the 'effective axiomitization' or effective generation of formal systems whose theorems were recursively enumerable. On the one hand there would be the set of all true statements in a field which would be consistent and complete. Sadly, this 'true Arithmetic' would not be 'first order'. There would be a 'Godel sentence' which was self-referential in that formal language and thus independent of it. No standard natural number would have the property to make the Godel sentence true. Of course, there could be a non-standard model but in that case we would be mixing up apples and oranges. 

For Russell, I suppose, Godel's result looks like a semantic paradox. From Godel's point of view, Russell simply hadn't developed his theory well enough. Perhaps if Russell had continued to work in Mathematical logic he and Godel could have had a very productive dialogue. Not so Wittgenstein. His notorious paragraph on Godel's theorem runs as follows 

 I imagine someone asking my advice; he says: “I have constructed a proposition (I will use ‘P’ to designate it) in Russell’s symbolism, and by means of certain definitions and transformations it can be so interpreted that it says ‘P is not provable in Russell’s system’. Must I not say that this proposition on the one hand is true, and on the other hand is unprovable?

No. You say Godel's proposition is true and has been proved in Russell's or Peano's system or any other first order system consistent with either. There are propositions about things which can be constructed but which can't be proven to be true or false in a particular system. In other words, there is a way to show 'within' a first-order system that it has its limits. But showing there is a limit does not necessarily involve crossing that limit.  

 Of course, a crazy person may 'interpret' any proposition to mean 'cats are dogs'.  An interpretation- i.e. the assignment of meanings to symbols in a formal language- may be utterly arbitrary. If it assigns the value 'True' to a sentence or a theory, it is a model of that sentence or theory. But only models which serve some useful purpose are worthy of attention. 

For suppose it were false; then it is true that it is provable.

Supposing a thing to be false does not make it 'provable'. Sherlock Holmes never said 'It is false to claim there is any such person as Professor Moriarty. This proves he and he alone is guilty of this murder.'  

And that surely cannot be! And if it is proved, then it is proved that is not provable. Thus it can only be true, but unprovable.”

It is true that Professor Moriarty exists. But this does not mean it is unprovable that he killed so and so.  

Just as we ask, “‘Provable’ in what system?”, so we must also ask, “‘true’ in what system?” ‘True in Russell’s system’ means, as was said: proved in Russell’s system; and ‘false in Russell’s system’ means: the opposite has been proved in Russell’s system.

Godel's claim is proved in PM. Though it refers to what is unprovable it is not itself unprovable. Similarly, though I may talk about my cat, I am not myself a cat.  

– Now what does your “suppose it is false” mean? In the Russell sense it means ‘suppose the opposite is proved in Russell’s system’; if that is your assumption you will now presumably give up the interpretation that it is unprovable.

No. We are keeping the 'interpretation' by which propositions in PM are proved and extending it to a proposition about what is unprovable in PM. But that proposition is not itself unprovable for the same reason that people who talk about their cats are not themselves cats.  

And by ‘this interpretation’ I understand the translation into this English sentence. – If you assume that the proposition is provable in Russell’s system, that means it is true in the Russell sense, and the interpretation “P is not provable” again has to be given up.[…]

No. Godel's claim is provable. What is unprovable is something Godel constructed for that purpose. If I prove a particular truth about my cat only a crazy person would interpret my words or actions as a confession that I myself am a cat. 

 Back in 2000, Floyd and Putnam claimed that Wittgenstein’s argumentation is based on Gödel’s assumption of ω-consistency- which obtains if a collection of sentences is  syntactically) consistent (that is, does not prove a contradiction) and avoids proving certain infinite combinations of sentences that are intuitively contradictory.

This assumption is irrelevant. Wittgenstein simply confused a number constructed by Godel with a proof which refers to it as unprovable in PM. 

Timm Lampert writes 

'According to Floyd and Putnam this claim is grounded in Wittgenstein’s acceptance of Gödel’s mathematical proof showing that PM must be ω-inconsistent, if ¬P is provable. From this it follows that the predicates ‘NaturalNo(x)’ and ‘Proof(x,t)’ occurring in P cannot be interpreted as ‘x is a natural number’ and ‘x is the number of a proof of the formula with the number t’ because one has to allow for non-standard interpretations of the variable’s values being other than numbers.'

Why? Either 'recursive enumeration' is allowed in PM or it isn't. If it is then whatever 'interpretation' of PM yields the proofs it itself gives us can be extended to Godel's claim. It is certainly true that any lunatic can interpret anything at all as a command to stab bystanders. But does this 'non-standard interpretation mean that Doctors can't prove, on the basis of medical evidence, the fellow should be put in a padded cell?  

Floyd/Putnam write

'That the Gödel theorem shows that (1) there is a well-defined notion of "mathematical truth" applicable to every formula of PM; and (2) that, if PM is consistent, then some "mathematical truths" in that sense are undecidable in PM, is not a mathematical result but a metaphysical claim.'

 No. It is either a piece of mathematics not reliant on any interpretation or, ad captum vulgi, a claim about the canonical interpretation actually used for PM not some crazy interpretation whereby every formula in it is an instruction from God to start stabbing people. 

But that if P is provable in PM then PM is inconsistent

because adding an axiom which would make a formal system for arithmetic complete would make it inconsistent.  

and if ¬P is provable in PM then PM is ω-inconsistent is precisely the mathematical claim that Gödel proved.

What Wittgenstein is criticizing is the philosophical naivete involved in confusing the two, or thinking that the former follows from the latter.

 The first result is about recursive enumerability. For a finitary first order language, it exists precisely because of incompleteness. After all, what is finite is likely to have limits and there may be 'internal' ways to show those limits exist even if it is impossible to cross them. We know we won't live forever even though nobody has returned from the dead to explain the exact nature of a limit we will all meet with soon enough. 

But not because Wittgenstein wants simply to deny the metaphysical claim; rather, he wants us to see how little sense we have succeeded in giving it.

 This interpretation is joined by the claim that Wittgenstein’s “aim is not to refute the Gödel theorem”, “for nothing in that proof turns on any such translation into ordinary language”. According to Floyd and Putnam Wittgenstein himself is just stating what Gödel holds if the latter insists that his proof is independent of any interpretation and rests on consistency assumptions. 

Why bother giving a proof if the manner in which it will be interpreted is 'independent' rather than in conformity with what went before? Russell's own interpretation of PM is the one Godel is using (though one can equally say he is just doing math without any interpretation). His cleverness was in constructing a number and showing that its truth or falsity is unprovable in PM. But his proposition which was about that number, wasn't itself that number under any interpretation of PM consistent with the proofs it itself provides. 

The claim is simply this: if one assumes (and, a fortiori if one actually finds out) that ¬P is provable in Russell's system one should (or, as Wittgenstein actually writes, one "will now presumably") give up the "translation" of P by the English sentence 'P is not provable'.

One could do so with a non-standard model or at the price of rejecting consistency in favor of completeness.  

To see that Wittgenstein is on to something here, let us imagine that a proof of ¬P has actually been discovered.

Proofs can be wrong or else can show that there is some flaw in the axiom system because an absurdity has been proven.  

Assume, for the time being, that Russell's system (henceforth PM) has not actually turned out to be inconsistent, however. Then, by the first Incompleteness Theorem, we know that PM is ω-inconsistent. But what does ω-incon consistency show? ω-inconsistency shows that a system has no model in which the predicate we have been interpreting as 'x is a natural number' possesses an extension that is isomorphic to the natural numbers

So, one could have a non-standard model. But then 'interpretation' has changed. We are on a slippery slope to just arbitrarily reading anything into anything else. I suppose, a certain sort of fatalist might come to the conclusion that 'Language speaks us' and that free will, or consciousness, is just an illusion. What is objective is actually subjective and what is normative is actually alethic and vice versa. I suppose this sort of paranoid ideation appeals to eggheads who feel the world is doomed to go in the wrong direction because people are listening to false prophets. Anyway, Godel believed in God. Thus, he must be one of the bad guys. 

Bertrand Russell on why cats are dogs

In 1912, Bertrand Russell made several claims in his 'Problems of Philosophy'.

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Knowledge does not have to be certain so as to be knowledge. This is not to say that one can't say that you are more certain of somethings that you know than of others.  Similarly, a cat does not have to be a dog to be a cat though, no doubt, thanks to co-evolution with our species, cats and dogs have some traits in common- e.g. being able to play with children- while specific cats may show behavior which we normally associate with dogs. 

When we apply a predicate to a thing, the thing does not change. What changes is how it is viewed with respect to other things. If a particular cat has more dog like traits than is usual or if a particular proposition is known with greater certainty, then it may be preferred for some particular purpose. But it is not the case that a cat has become a dog or that Knowledge has turned into Certainty. 

Russell firmly believed that anything implied by a true elementary proposition is true. If a given set of axioms generate a contradiction at least one of the axioms must be false. The problem here is that the 'intension' of even an elementary proposition (or what we believe is such) can have a different 'extension' as the knowledge base or context changes. I suppose propositions about cats and dogs aren't 'elementary'. Still there may be some more elementary propositions underlying 'my cat is dog-like' and, unless great care is taken or you have a highly ramified type theory, at some point you could get a contradictory statement like 'my cat is a cat because it is a dog.' 

This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked.

It is like the question 'why must cats be dogs in order to be cats?' It isn't difficult. It is nonsense.  

Berkeley [shows] that the existence of matter is capable of being denied without absurdity,

just as it isn't absurd to say that one's cat is as loyal and devoted as a dog. Also, it bites the postman. On the other hand, though the claim is not absurd, it is absurd to think that other people want to hear about your cat or your thoughts regarding the existence of matter. True, there may be a small number of cat-fanciers or philosophers who do get very excited over such claims. But they don't greatly matter. 

and that if there are any things that exist independently of us they cannot be the immediate objects of our sensations.

Why not? A rock exists independently of us. We may trip over that rock. The sensation won't be pleasant.  

‘I think, therefore I am’ says rather more than is strictly certain.

It says nothing. It is said. 

It might seem as though we were quite sure of being the same person today as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense.

'being the same' is a predicate just like 'dog-like'. For some purposes it may be true.  

But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table,

only in the sense that the cat that is a dog is difficult to find. 'Real' is a predicate applied to an object. It does not change the object nor does any entity correspond to a name formed by joining the predicate with the object. This may not be obvious. After all, we may speak of 'the real Mona Lisa'. Surely it exists? The answer is no. There is the Mona Lisa. There are copies of the Mona Lisa. Suppose there is an art expert who has been called in to authenticate the painting. He says 'this is it'. He may amplify his statement by saying 'this is the real, hundred percent authentic, item'. But there is not 'authentic Mona Lisa' which is different from the Mona Lisa. True, a poet may say 'the true Mona Lisa is not the painting hanging in the Louvre. It is the memory of mother's smile we will carry with us to our death'. But the poet isn't speaking of the Mona Lisa. He is praising Mummy due to she is so nice.  

and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.

Because the Real Self may be memory of mother's smile which is the true Mona Lisa of the Human Spirit. 

All knowledge must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs,

Where do instincts come from? Presumably, the answer has to do with evolution by natural selection. But no body of knowledge that we have heard of has been 'built upon instinctive beliefs'. The reverse is the case. Careful observation and ratiocination have given rise to knowledge systems.  

and if these are rejected, nothing is left.

If you reject your instinct not to take up residence at the bottom of the sea, you will die.  

We cannot have reason to reject a belief except on the ground of some other belief.

Nonsense! I reject the beliefs of lunatics even though I don't know what those beliefs are.  

Do any number of cases of a law being fulfilled in the past afford evidence that it will be fulfilled in the future?

No. That's why Sherlock Holmes could not solve the mystery of my missing TV remote. Evidence regarding it did not exist back when he was alive.  

If not, it becomes plain that we have no ground whatever for expecting the sun to rise tomorrow,

Expectations are based on induction and observation. We expect the planet to continue to go around the Sun. Hopefully, our astronomers will notify us if the Sun shows signs of packing its bags and moving to a nicer part of the Galaxy. 

or for expecting the bread we shall eat at our next meal not to poison us, or for any of the other scarcely conscious expectations that control our daily lives.

Our grounds for having expectations is that they are useful to us. It isn't useful to expect not to be poisoned unless there is evidence that somebody is out to get you or that some sort of serial killer is on the loose.  

The inductive principle is incapable of being proved by an appeal to experience.

But we can see if it held in the past. Another approach- that of the intuitionist Brouwer- would be to use 'bar induction'. Essentially this aims to prove the existence of properties of  infinite sequence by inductively reducing them to finite lists. This could be called 'upward hereditary'. Put simply, there can be a consistent axiom system in which propositions about the future can be proved. It is a different matter that there may be no 'absolute' or even 'natural' proof of anything at all. 

Experience might conceivably confirm the inductive principle as regards the cases that have been already examined; but as regards unexamined cases, it is the inductive principle alone that can justify any inference from what has been examined to what has not been examined.

But this could be an argument for Brouwer's 'creating subject'! In any case, no justification is non-arbitrary.  

When we see what looks like our best friend approaching us, we have no reason to suppose that his body is not inhabited by the mind of our worst enemy or of some total stranger.

We have no reason to believe we have a best friend. Not in my case. Beyonce really is my bffl. Someday soon she will drop by and braid my hair and ask me to dish about my complicated, on-off, relationship with the photocopier.  

Knowledge as to what is intrinsically of value is a priori in the same sense in which logic is a priori, namely in the sense that the truth of such knowledge can be neither proved nor disproved by experience.

Nor can it be gained save at the expense of much burning of the midnight oil and years of study at Collidge.  

There is no reasoning which, starting from some simpler self-evident principle, leads us to the principle of induction as its conclusion.

There is no 'self-evident' principle. We trust others with expert knowledge and years of lived experience to formulate such principles and impart them to us in a lucid manner. 

All a priori knowledge deals exclusively with the relations of universals.

But the knower is an individual. Knowledge is relation between an individual and a proposition. If a priori knowledge exists it must still involve a relationship between an individual and a proposition. Some propositions may be said to relate to universals- i.e. qualities shared in common by particular things. But these may be deceptive.  

Logical principles are known to us, and cannot be themselves proved by experience, since all proof presupposes them.

What we know is that our 'logical principles' are faulty. Moreover, unless there is such a thing as what Godel called an 'absolute proof', then all proofs are more or less arbitrary. 

Our immediate knowledge of truths may be called intuitive knowledge, and the truths so known may be called self-evident truths.

Why not just say we have intuitions? Some turn out to be very very wrong.  Truth is a predicate we apply to objects. I suppose you may say the things we have faith in are things we consider true. But faith is founded on a mystery, not on anything self-evident. The plain fact is, like doubting Thomas, even if I had sat at the feet of the Lord and witnessed the Resurrection, I would not consider the truths of Religion to be 'self-evident'. I know in my heart that I am a lazy sod. I would look for some excuse to continue a swinish existence. But, God may give me the gift of Faith. Why He would want to must remain a mystery.

All our knowledge of truths depends upon our intuitive knowledge.

Knowledge may be distinguished on the basis of greater or lesser truth, or sweetness, or bitterness, or utility. But this does not mean any piece of knowledge is itself truth or niceness or sweetness or utility. The cat which I consider dog-like is still a cat.  

It is felt by many that a belief for which no reason can be given is an unreasonable belief.

No. An unreasonable belief is one it is harmful to have. If the thing is useful, you have reason enough to stick to it.  

In the main, this view is just... But let us imagine some insistent Socrates, who, whatever reason we give him, continues to demand a reason for the reason.

We retaliate by demanding a reason we should provide that reason.  

We must sooner or later, and probably before very long, be driven to a point where we cannot find any further reason, and where it becomes almost certain that no further reason is even theoretically discoverable.

No. Suppose this 'Socrates' is Peter Drucker (the management guru). He asks- 'what is the reason you are doing such and such?' We give the reply 'to make a profit'. He asks 'why do you want to make a profit'. Eventually, we say 'look, if we don't make a profit, the owners of the company will sack us. No one will hire us. We will starve.' At this point it occurs to us that the owners of the company are the shareholders. We must put aside our internal squabbles and work as a team to increase shareholder value. But this gives us a reason to look at markets from a broader perspective. We begin to see opportunities where previously we saw threats or impediments. Drucker has more than earned the fee we paid him for acting as our Socrates.  

Starting with the common beliefs of daily life, we can be driven back from point to point, until we come to some general principle, which seems luminously evident, and is not itself capable of being deduced from anything more evident.

Is this what Russell or other mathematicians actually did? No. The looked at beliefs common in a highly specialized field. Often, as in Russell's case, their hard work caused them- and everybody else- to realize that the belief that motivated them was false. But this was useful.  

I am absolutely certain that half a minute ago I was sitting in the same chair in which I am sitting now.

This may be a confabulation. I suppose what Russell meant was 'I'm certain I'm not drunk, mentally impaired or under the control of a hypnotist. My memory is very reliable. Of that I am certain.' However this certainty would not be irrefragable. If video evidence were produced showing that Russell, in an unconscious state, was placed in the chair just ten seconds ago, his certainty would disappear. 

Russell's mistake is to think that being certain of something is the same as certainty regarding that something. I am certain my cat is just as devoted and loyal as any dog. Indeed, I may feel it possesses more of any canine attribute than your Fido. But my cat is certainly not a dog.  

Going backward over the day, I find things of which I am quite certain, other things of which I am almost certain, other things of which I can become certain by thought and by calling up attendant circumstances, and some things of which I am by no means certain.

But this certainty is open to refutation.  

One important point about self-evidence is made clear by the case of memory, and that is, that self-evidence has degrees: it is not a quality which is simply present or absent, but a quality which may be more or less present, in gradations ranging from absolute certainty down to an almost imperceptible faintness.

This is true of any predicate even the existential predicate. My cat does not actually exist. But such a creature could exist. Indeed, at this very moment, it may be that a dear friend has just died and left directions that her cat belongs to me. Thus, I could already have a cat. However my fire-breathing dragon can't exist because, as is well known, dragons only belong to ladies with blonde hair and ample bosoms. Once again we see how institutionalized racism in Sunak's Britain is blighting the lives of bleck peeps. 

Truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements:

the are predicates, not properties. Following Frege, we say a predicate is a 'verbal phrase' or general term. A property is the 'intension' of a predicate. What is said about a belief or statement is not itself an 'intension' unless it is a 'nominalization' in which case it has an independent existence. Russell disagreed with Frege- who thought there was some separate 'correlate' in such cases- and thus, for him, to say 'x is true' means x is a truth. The problem here is the intensional fallacy. As our knowledge base changes, x may itself change. Liebniz's law of identity ceases to apply. Thus the truth of a truth may be that it is a lie. Indeed, it isn't even itself!  

hence a world of mere matter, since it would contain no beliefs or statements,

men are matter. Speech and the making of statements are material things.  

would also contain no truth or falsehood.

Speech and statements utilize predicates. But predicates are not properties save in the sense that if the universe is finite then a property is a n-ary predicate. My point is that the intension of epistemic things changes. It may be that everything knowable is finite and 'at the end of mathematical time' there is just one big n-ary predicate by which all things which can be made the subject of a logical calculus have properties such that no intensional fallacies arise 

When we speak of philosophy as a criticism of knowledge, it is necessary to impose a certain limitation. If we adopt the attitude of the complete sceptic, placing ourselves wholly outside all knowledge, and asking, from this outside position, to be compelled to return within the circle of knowledge, we are demanding what is impossible, and our scepticism can never be refuted.

Why not be a pragmatic sceptic? Doubt all things but do what you find useful. 

For all refutation must begin with some piece of knowledge which the disputants share; from blank doubt, no argument can begin.

But utility would still exist. In any case, better than 'argument' is 'mimetics'. We do what smart peeps are doing. We ignore their claim to be working selflessly for the betterment of the species.  

Hence the criticism of knowledge which philosophy employs must not be of this destructive kind, if any result is to be achieved. Against this absolute scepticism, no logical argument can be advanced. But it is not difficult to see that scepticism of this kind is unreasonable.

It is useful enough. A lot of smart and successful people decided that 'love of knowledge' wasn't itself knowledge. They dropped philosophy in favor of doing something useful. Alexander was Aristotle's pupil. But that isn't why Alexandria is named after him.  

Descartes’s ‘methodical doubt,’ with which modern philosophy began, is not of this kind, but is rather the kind of criticism which we are asserting to be the essence of philosophy. His ‘methodical doubt’ consisted in doubting whatever seemed doubtful; in pausing, with each apparent piece of knowledge, to ask himself whether, on reflection, he could feel certain that he really knew it. This is the kind of criticism which constitutes philosophy.

People felt what Descartes was doing was useful. After all, like Russell, he was a mathematician.  

It is a remarkable fact that Philosophy- which lost prestige when Darwin toppled Aristotelian telos- not to mention what I can only call Mysticism, suddenly gained great salience at the end of the Nineteenth century. Russell and Brouwer and Einstein reversed Plato's dictum that philosophy involves the study of mathematics. Suddenly, it was the mathematicians, and the mathematical physicists, who were rediscovering metaphysics and making it meaningful. Perhaps that was a false dawn. Only pragmatism could triumph because, as the masses gained political power, only what was useful would attract the best minds and thus burgeon. 

If our dreams, night after night, were as coherent one with another as our days, we should hardly know whether to believe the dreams or the waking life.

Many people don't remember their dreams. It may be that some people dream coherently. Indeed, some scientists claim to have found the solution to difficult problems in their dreams. Freud, at around this time, was suggesting that dreams were a 'royal road' into the unconscious. Perhaps 'neuroses' could be cured by talking to a therapist about your dreams. What is certain is this created a lucrative profession.  

As it is, the test of coherence condemns the dreams and confirms the waking life.

Only utility matters. If I had nice dreams about dragons I could have made a lot of money- like the guy who wrote 'Game of Thrones'.  

But this test, though it increases probability where it is successful, never gives absolute certainty, unless there is certainty already at some point in the coherent system.

That certainty would be arbitrary. I suppose Russell, the logicist, and Godel, the Platonist, sought, in their different ways, for an 'absolute proof'. For Brouwer, perhaps a 'creating subject' was good enough. Everything useful might have good enough 'univalent foundations' but an existential utilitarianism our species may never shake off till scarcity ends or we become 'as Gods'. The Biblical reference is to those who serve on juries. If you are not called on to do so, then 'judge not lest ye be judged'. What is certain, for most of us, is that if we were judged on our deserts, we wouldn't escape whipping. 

Russell, however, was an optimist. Human judgment could be perfected because Humanity was perfectible. But perfect justice would be a property of a Paradise on Earth. Mathematical logic would play a part in bringing about this Utopia.

This, at any rate, was what he wrote just before the Great War

The problems of the continuum are closely connected with the problems of the infinite and their solution is effected by the same means.

Russell met  Godel around the time the negation of CH was inconsistent with ZF (or ZFC equivalent set theories) and Cohen showed it was independent.  Interestingly, both Godel, a Platonist, and Cohen, a formalist, thought CH was false. On the other hand Godel's 'fundamental theorem' (which implies that CH holds for constructible sets) was motivated by Russell's axiom's of reducibility. Godel wrote 'I should also like to mention that the fundamental theorem constitutes the corrected core of the so-called Russellian axiom of reducibility. After all, as was mentioned a while ago, Russell had previously given a construction similar to that of the Mα, but had restricted himself to finite orders. His axiom of reducibility then says that the orders of the sets of every type are bounded by a fixed finite number. He was evidently far from being able to prove that. But it now turns out that if the construction of the orders is continued into the transfinite, the existence of certain transfinite bounds actually becomes provable. That is the content of the fundamental theorem.' Interestingly, Godel considered the early Russell to be a Platonist on the basis of his remark that Logic was in the world like zoology. Did this meant there is a pure and perfect 'not' up in Heaven? Russell attributed this view to Godel. It seems even the disputes of the Logicians can only be resolved at the Court of the Almighty!

The paradoxes of Zeno the Eleatic and the difficulties in the analysis of space, of time, and of motion, are all completely explained by means of the modern theory of continuity. This is because a non-contradictory theory has been found, according to which the continuum is composed of an infinity of distinct elements; and this formerly appeared impossible. The elements cannot all be reached by continual dichotomy; but it does not follow that these elements do not exist.

The problem here is that the continuum hypothesis (CH) hasn't been proved and thus existence proofs which rely on the Axiom of Choice may not actually mean anything. Indeed, its use in specific fields- e.g. Mathematical Econ- may cause hypertrophying intensional fallacies. Social Choice theory, which is as bien pensant as Russell himself, consists of nothing but proofs that all cats are dogs who are also Dictators. To paraphrase Chesterton, proving God doesn't exist opens the door to proving everything is the cat which is the dog which is secretly controlling your mind. 

Roland Fryer on Campus anti-semitism

Roland Fryer writes in the WSJ- 

Anti-Israel Protests and the ‘Signaling’ Problem
The economic theory that explains the powerlessness and confusion of university administrators.

University administrators get more power if confusion and factionalism prevails on the campus. If everybody has a grievance against everybody else, it makes sense to have a large class of administrators who get paid to appear to be interested in that nonsense.  

The anti-Israel protests on college campuses present a puzzle for observers of academic norms and mores.

Not really. There has been a big 'Boycott, Disinvest, Sanction' movement since 2005. It was bound to seize this opportunity to regroup and gain funding. Previously, it had been unsuccessful because Israel is a knowledge economy. We hurt ourselves by boycotting them. By contrast, Palestinians seem to have produced little of academic value though there are plenty of excellent Palestinian Doctors and Engineers and so forth. 

Today, even relatively minor linguistic infractions, like the failure to use someone’s preferred pronouns, are categorized as abuse at many elite institutions, some of which even define potentially offensive speech as “violence.”

This has caused a backlash. Vivek Ramaswamy was able to parley a book attacking 'Wokeism' into a Presidential bid. But Obama had already warned against it and the film 'Undercover Brother 2' had suggested the toxic thing was actually created by 'the Man' to 'divide and rule' the ghetto.  

One need not even speak to run afoul of campus speech codes; I recently participated in a training in which we were warned of the consequences of remaining silent if we heard someone “misgender” someone else.

We are pleased to hear that eggheads are being bullied and humiliated by stupid administrators.  

Definitions of “harmful” speech have become so capacious that one assumes they include antisemitism.

Though Jews are the most ardent attackers of Israel.  

In some cases, they surely do: A university wouldn’t take a hands-off approach to a student or faculty member who expressed prejudice against Jews in the manner of Archie Bunker or the Charlottesville marchers.

Unless Archie could claim Jewish heritage.  

Yet that’s what many of them have done when faced with protesters’ speech that is offensive to Jews, even when it crosses the line into threats, intimidation and harassment.

Jews are smart. Bully them and they will go elsewhere to do smart things. This is good news for Israel.  A knowledge economy needs more and more smart people. Indians can be brought in to do the menial jobs. 

At a December congressional hearing, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT struggled to answer when Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violates the schools’ “code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment.”

To be fair, Presidents of Ivy League Schools tend to struggle with tying their own shoe-laces.  

Two of the presidents lost their jobs, but the central question remains unresolved: How could it be that the university is zealous about policing pronouns but blasé about the advocacy of hateful violence?

People who advocate hateful violence might kill you or firebomb your house. Pick on the weak. Obviously, sooner or later, they will turn on you and accuse you of subjecting them to epistemic rape. Better still, stop speaking English. Invent your own language.  

For someone who prides himself on adherence to fact, reason and rationality, trying to follow the logic of university decision-making over the past five years has been a mind-bending experience.

Why just the last five years? Political Correctness has been around for ages. Phillip Roth's 'the human stain' came out in 2000. A professor of African American heritage is accused of racism because he uses the word 'spook' to mean students who don't show up for class. Are they ghosts? It turns out the student in question was black. The joke here is that for older people 'spook' meant White- especially a white Jazz musician. I suppose one might say that Edward Said- who was Palestinian- contributed to the rise of 'grievance studies' and the notion that those in authority had absorbed a racist or colonialist epistemology and thus should be investigated by the thought police.  

But universities are also political entities, where competing interests vie for influence over the function and purpose of the institution.

Grievance Studies can create administrative jobs for those with credentials in it. Why be an ill-paid Teaching Assistant or struggle for tenure on a pittance when you can be a well-paid administrator?  

In the case of the protests, two competing interests have made themselves heard most loudly: students and faculty who are hostile to Israel

both may have more precarious finances than the administrators 

and alumni donors who see the protests as antisemitic.

Because that is what they are. I'm not against Jews but I don't want to compete with them in a knowledge based field. On the other hand, I bet I can fart louder and longer than the best of them. Martha Nussbaum, I'm looking at you.  

Caught between them are administrators, who must figure out how to balance these interests without entirely losing the faith of either group.

Nobody has any faith in administrators. They win by showing themselves to be useless because, obviously, the solution to the problem of useless administrators is hiring more administrators.  

This dynamic can be explained by economic theory.

It was explained by C. Northcote Parkinson.  

In the early 1970s, economist Michael Spence introduced the concept of signaling, which has since become one of the foundations of information economics and earned Mr. Spence the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Signals are of two types- 'cheap talk' gives rise to 'pooling equilibria', 'costly signals' give rise to 'separating equilibria'. In Universities, more especially STEM subjects, brainy and hard working people have a trait which it is very costly for ordinary people to duplicate. There is a wide gulf between Terence Tao and me. But, I can fart louder and longer than Tao and can be much more vocal in demanding compulsory gender reassignment surgery, free at the point of delivery, for Nicaraguan goats. The other thing is that most academics initially show promise but then fizzle out. Moreover, their research program may turn out to be stupid and useless. It is helpful for them to be able to reinvent themselves as moral entrepreneurs or activists of some description.  

This seminal concept helps explain how individuals and organizations communicate their attributes or intentions in situations of information asymmetry.

This is irrelevant in the case of Universities. People can easily check and see what sort of expected earnings bump they receive by studying different subjects at different Colleges. Since Universities need revenue they are bound to run some shitty courses for thickos like me. There is an element of 'cross-subsidization'.  

The best-known application is the job market. Employers and potential employees face a situation in which applicants have more information about their productivity than the employer,

No. You know less about whether you can be a good lawyer or accountant than the guy whose job it is to recruit lawyers and accountants. A good HR department screens out the lazy and the stupid unless laziness and stupidity are what the job requires.  Signals don't matter- they are easy to fake. Screening is what is important. Try to find traits which correlate with good outcomes which the candidate won't be aware off. I went for an interview with Arthur Anderson. The interviewer was very friendly. I thought he liked me and started babbling. At the end of the interview, he explained to me that I had revealed I was lazy, hated office work, and was as stupid as shit. It is difficult to disguise your true nature if the other guy has vast experience of 'screening'. 

since the employer can’t directly observe those qualities before hiring.

The candidate tries to fool the employer but he can hire good screeners. Still, if you have amazing social and educational qualifications, the employer may feel obliged to give you a chance. After all, there are always places you can park a posh but lazy fellow.  

To overcome this asymmetry, job seekers engage in signaling—taking actions that can credibly convey information about their abilities. Such signals include everything from educational credentials to the way the applicant dresses for an interview.

But the employer can find traits which correlate with success which the candidate is unaware off. True, he may take special coaching classes to fake those traits. But that itself is a desirable quality. The guy who is faking it to make it might actually make it by becoming the very thing he is trying to fake.  

When I encountered Mr. Spence’s model in graduate school,

I encountered it in my third year at the LSE in 1981.  

I was mesmerized. My doctoral dissertation extended his work to understand underinvestment in education in some black communities.

One may also speak of overinvestment in guns and drugs. True, you may end up getting shot but there is also a chance that you will spend your twenties and early thirties in jail. This may correlate to higher longevity and even educational attainment.  

The basic economics also seem applicable to what’s going on now on college campuses.

No. What is happening has to do with poor screening. Universities don't have an incentive to weed out useless Research Programs and to get rid of kids incapable of any greater cognitive effort than is required to say 'dicks cause RAPE! Ban dicks immediately!'

I must admit, if I had been a student in Hitler's Germany I would have wanted 'Jewish science' to be banned. Why struggle to understand Einstein when you can get a degree in Aryanism instead?  

The key idea is that the protests present university administrations with a two-audience signaling quandary: Behaviors that appease students may anger alumni, and vice versa.

Most students would benefit by getting rid of 'activists'. But why stop there? Get rid of administrators as well. They don't add value. 

The real problem here is that if Universities screen out the stupid and the useless, then they would also be expected to 'screen in' talent. But that's what private enterprise does! Wealthy alumni may prefer Universities to produce some people who can be trained to be productive but who are not so skilled that they can set up as competitors. Education is about neoteny- it infantilizes. But the child understands it is helpless and thus is malleable. The advantage of having a lot of gesture politics on the campus, is that kids instinctively become sycophantic and unwilling to think for themselves. These are important work skills.  

Like a job applicant’s potential productivity, university administrators’ political preferences are hidden from students and alumni,

They may engage in preference falsification or seek to give a misleading impression in order to enjoy a quiet life.  

but they may signal them in various ways. They may choose a liberal commencement speaker rather than a conservative one, they may create programs that emphasize “inclusiveness,” and so on.

Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity means creating academic programs where you can get a PhD in QMT by finger painting using your own feces 

Students and alumni observe these strategic disclosures of preference, and each group decides whether to accept the decision or agitate against it.

No. Students and alumni become agitators if there is some reputational, assortative, or other careerist benefit. BDS was and is well financed. It has its own citation cartels and social and careerist networks. Currently, it appears that an old rift within the American Jewish community has re-opened. Some Jews want to reverse America's commitment to Israel. The problem here is that Israel may benefit by going it alone- trading arms with whom it pleases. Moreover, without Israel, America has no friends in the region. Israel can do a deal with the Eurasian power bloc headed by China though the latter currently seems to be benefitting from its long standing ties with Hamas. But how long will the Sunni Ikhwan be content to sacrifice Arab lives for the greater glory of Iran? What if some new variant of the Islamic State appears? Already there have been deadly attacks inside Iran itself. 

University administrators whose preferences align most closely with their alumni will ignore the students and simply do what they think is best, as the University of Florida’s president did when he banned encampments and declared that the school is “not a daycare.” Those whose views align with the protesting students will do the opposite.

They may try to do so. The problem is that most of their assets are illiquid and so, at the margin, it is alumni donations which keep the lights on. Columbia's President was previously head of the LSE. She took a very strong line against the Unions and appears to be following the same tough line in her new post. But the political climate in Biden's America is very different from that of Brexit Britain.  

But most top administrators don’t have such strong preferences. They will engage in a high-wire act of trying to appease both students and alumni.

Administrators are fond of inaction. Hopefully, problems will go away by themselves. 

If students decide “safety first” is the most important initiative on campus,

trouble-makers should be arrested. Sooner or later, non-students will invade the campuses and nobody will be safe. 

administrators—even if they disagree—will adopt stances consistent with that and hope the alumni don’t revolt too much.

Why would the alumni object to campuses being safe?  

If a few months later students set up encampments and chant anti-Israel slogans,

either administrators enforce the law or they cease to be relevant. The same people shouting 'boo to Netanyahu' may demand the President resigns or undergoes gender reassignment surgery every Tuesday.  

then administrators will also adopt stances consistent with that and, again, hope the alumni don’t complain too much.

Why should administrators not try to make their Institutions more productive and better fit for purpose?  

The congressional hearings revealed that this signaling strategy was at work.

No. They revealed that the Presidents didn't know the law and were confused as to what their duty of care actually involved.  

The three presidents would risk alienating students if they disavowed anti-Israel slogans and alumni

the protesting students were already alienated. They thought BDS should have been implemented twenty years previously.  

if they endorsed them. So they offered lawyered-up equivocations that signaled confusion and weakness.

'Lawyered-up' is the mot juste. They simply didn't know the law and the legal advise they had received was incoherent, not to say nonsensical.  

Economic theory can explain why the situation on so many campuses has spiraled out of control and why no interested party—neither students nor donors nor seemingly anybody else—has anything good to say about how administrators are handling the protests.

No. Economic theory says that those with more money and greater numbers should pay to enforce the law against a small group of nutters. Why has this not happened? One answer is Timur Kuran's 'preference falsification'. The other is straightforward 'incentive incompatibility'. The problem with having more and more useless administrators is that less and less that is useful can get done.  

But economics can’t address the more essential issue at play, which is moral

No. It is just incentive incompatibility. Maybe Columbia's President- because of her previous reputation for toughness- can benefit by taking a hard line. But we can't be sure that she won't be made the scapegoat and sent back to Britain with her tail between her legs.  

Elite universities decided years ago that they would adopt a basic principle: Any speech act that attacks, questions or even declines to affirm the self-understood identity of another constitutes harm worthy of punishment.

Why did the do so? I think at least part of the answer has to do with Edward Said who showed that you don't have to teach the boring shite you are paid to teach. You can just gas on about any bee in your own bonnet. Your students too welcome the opportunity to gain sheepskins in Grievance Studies without ever having to engage with anything cognitively complex. I'd love to get a PhD in Algebraic Topology by showing that dicks cause RAPE! Ban them immediately!  

I may not like that principle, but it’s now a fait accompli. And if you’re going to punish one person who violates it, you have to punish everyone who violates it.

Nonsense! Pick only on the weak. Don't punish a guy whose pals in Hamas might firebomb your house.  

To permit attacks on one identity group

like the US war on terror which killed or displaced tens of millions of Muslims 

while prohibiting attacks on others is worse than hypocrisy—it is profoundly immoral.

Hypocrisy is immoral. I am losing respect for Fryer  as I read this article. Still, I suppose it is in his interest to signal the sort of extreme stupidity which gets rewarded with a Nobel.  

If administrators had the courage of their stated convictions,

they would not be administrators or else their Institutions would have become vastly more productive.  

if they had principles rather than merely gestures meant to signal their status as good liberals,

gesture politics replaced the real thing because, it turned out, politics tends to be about- as Obama said- doing stupid shit.  

the most egregious antisemitism on campus would have been stopped before it could snowball.

That is the intention behind the 'Antisemitism awareness Act' which may not pass in the Senate or else be considered merely 'advisory'. The problem with antisemitism is that the workaround has been to say 'I'm against Zionism'. Alternatively, as Tucker Carlson says, you could insist that the New Testament would fall foul of any law which equates anti-Zionism with an illegal type of hate speech. 

My own feeling is that we, in the West, feel that if we are no longer slaughtering Muslims all over the place, Israel should not be allowed to do so even if it acts in self-defense. On the other hand, the US has been trying to push Israel back to its pre-1967 borders since the days of Nixon and the Rodgers Plan. What is as yet unknown is if Israel can 'go it alone'. My own feeling is that Arab leaders, sooner or later, will push back against Hamas and the Brotherhood. Alternatively, we may see a resurgence of Sunni terrorism as a counterweight to that which is sponsored by Iran. Meanwhile, the question facing Universities is how to deliver better value for money. You can't string along Teaching Assistants forever. There must be some other way to defeat 'Baumol Cost Disease'. The obvious answer is to streamline administration and defund failed Research Programs. So long as the current protests distract attention from this, the administrators are safe. But voters may be losing patience. Why not curb the nuisance posed by crazy activists? Why wait till China has overtaken us to reform our Higher Education system? 

Earl Russell's strange speech

Conrad, the son of Bertrand Russell, came to suffer from mental illness in his later life. He made what was perhaps the strangest speech ever heard in the House of Lords.  

Earl RUSSELL

My Lords, I rise to raise the question of penal law and lawbreakers as such, and to question whether modern society is wise to speak in terms of law breakers at all. A modern nation looks after everybody and never punishes them. If it has a police force at all, the police force is the Salvation Army. and gives a hungry or thirsty people cups of tea. If a man takes diamonds from a shop in Hatton Garden you simply give him another bag of diamonds to take with him. I am not joking. Such is the proper social order for modern Western Europe, and all prisons ought to be abolished throughout its territories. Of course, the Soviet Union and the United States could include themselves in these reforms, too. Kindness and helping people is better than punitiveness and punishing them, and a constructive endeavour is better than a destructive spirit. If anybody is in need, you help him; you do not punish him. Putting children into care, and other forms of spiritual disinheritance ought to be stopped. Borstal ought to be stopped. And the workings of the Mental Health Act which empowers seizure of people by the police when they are acting in a way likely to be harmful to themselves or others, ought to be looked into.

What are you?—soulless robots? Schoolmasters who are harsh with schoolboys, who later as a result burn down the school house, ought to be more human. Schoolboys in any case are at present treated with an indescribable severity which crushes their spirits and leaves them unnourished. The police ought to be totally prevented from ever molesting young people at all or ever putting them into gaols and raping them and putting them into brothels, or sending them out to serve other people sexually against their wills. The spirit ought to be left free and chaining it has injured the creative 276power of the nation. The young unemployed ought not in any way to have become separate from governmental power but ought to have been given enough to live on out of the national wealth to look after themselves and never ask themselves even to think of working while there is no work to be had.

Trade union thinking on this subject is wrong. Leisure is the point and working is wrong, being in any case the curse visited by God upon Adam, and not blessed. Upper classes are right, and should be restored to vogue and favour more than is the present custom to do. Automation in the factories, with universal leisure for all, and a standing wage sufficient to provide life without working ought to be supplied for all, so that everybody becomes a leisured aristocrat. Aristocrats are Marxist. The Lord Chancellor holds the Order of Lenin. The fulfilment of industrial life is Tonga and the South Sea Islands, and not the satanic mills at all. Shops ought to supply goods without payment, the funds to pay for the goods being supplied by the State, so that all motive for stealing vanishes. And, in a completely reorganised modern society, Women's Lib. would be realised by girls being given a house of their own at the age of 12, with three-quarters of the wealth of the State being given to the girls in houses of their own to support them; so that marriage would be abolished and a girl could have as many husbands as she liked; she would, of course, be free to choose only one, should she choose to do so. The men receive the remaining quarter of the national wealth to support them, and can, if they like, live in communal huts.

The full prospects of industrial civilisation ought to he realised: it is a boon, it should be called a boon, it should be used as a boon. The free spirit in school should be preserved, so that Sir Isaac Newton returns to us. Sweden and France have modernised themselves; all other nations in Europe, including Britain, should follow their example. A nation with industrial power should use it for benefit. There are other points in which a modernising nation modernising itself could improve its administration. For instance, lunatics could he looked after individually, and it could be found out what is missing from them, and the world which is missing from them could be 277restored. The madness of the Cold War could also be removed by the whole human race, since it is quite evident that neither Communist not American exists, but only persons. What makes it abundantly clear is the saying of "little Audrey", who laughed and laughed because she knew that only God could make a tree. Mr. Brezhnev and Mr. Carter are really the same person: one lunatic certifiable, or, in American terms, one nation, indivisible, with prisonment and lunacy for all.

In a word, the entire human race can banish the Cold War, with one word, by simply saying: "You don't exist." This fact ought to be recognised in practice, with logical recognition by the statement concerned, so that the aims of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament can be realised, and there can be disarmament throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Insight into the truth of this statement must be acknowledged, so that logic may take hold of the mind.

The CIA should be banished from Western Europe, and Euro-communism should be substituted for the present bosses of the Common Market as the prevailing social and economic system in Europe. The Portuguese Revolution should be defended and emulated throughout Western Europe. President Carter should be brought to a full halt in his "Fulton Speech" programme for Europe, in which he mentioned Paris, Rome and Lisbon by name. There should be revolutions throughout Latin America, in accordance with the wish of His Holiness the Pope; and the CIA should be driven out from every nation of Latin America. The original Indian nation should be restored to sovereignty. It goes without saying that all prisoners throughout all these areas would be released and are released from prison and are no longer whipped and tortured.

Since the so-called Protestants who govern Britain, or claim to govern her, are spiritless papal bum-boys, if they cannot take charge of themselves and find the spirit, the confidence, the power to decide to remove British arms and all Protestants from Ulster, they should forthwith find the said confidence and power to remove them. There is no point in what calls itself the British Protestant Authority remaining a spiritless limbo any longer. All soldiers and police throughout the Northern Hemisphere should disappear. They and their functions are no longer necessary and are out of date.

Such is the future which the human race requires and desires. It is very silly to ask every generation to moderate itself and palliate with old institutions and old fogeys when what is needed is modernisation. The plea that the Establishment should he preserved is the plea that the old ogres should be allowed to gobble up the younger generation. You may preserve the Establishment, but only if you introduce new institutions when they are needed. The modernisation of British Railways is a case in point. The total abolition of law and order is needed, and the police turn into the Salvation Army, as already observed, and always help people. There are no prisons or punishments.

These points are the chief requirements for the future of the human race. They should be realised briskly and with discipline. It can be noted in conclusion that, since the police and bourgeois bosses are and have been anti-aristocratical, this House is indisputably Marxist, and inherits the banner of the Red Army of the Soviet Union.

The habit of arresting young people and raping them in gaol is part of the plot which is designed to destroy the human race by making it subserve dead spirits instead of live ones; it is a craven fear of nature, arguing a mind and spirit cringingly afraid, unalive, and not itself. No wonder that, in these circumstances, the best and most creative products and political movements have not proceeded out of Europe, hut out of Africa where these practices do not prevail. Europe has been slighting herself; she has not been giving of her best to herself or to humanity. Forward the creative spirit! Leave people as nature made them, not indoor products of ersatz suffocation. And have the courage to do so. It is noteworthy that Tommy Atkins has lost every war he has fought in for the past 25 years by reason of these spiritual attritions; and that the United States and the CIA lost the war in Vietnam because they were spiritually subservient to death for these reasons.

The Ancient Greeks fought naked: they did not have solitary confinement 279cells; not in the sense that we do so today, although the captives from the Athenian expedition to Syracuse were subjected to extreme hard labour in slave conditions. Naked bathing on beaches or in rivers ought to be universal. What is right is right. If, for reasons of present law or custom, or inward spiritual slavery, people do not reach these standards, it does not mean that they ought not to reach them. And is it not better to defend the city before it is fallen? Better than to arrive too late, and defend only what would have been, if it had not already gone? But the fact is that all oppressions can always be overthrown, and that it is never too late to overthrow them. After the oppression has declared itself, its harms to mankind are known: it is then easy to reprove them, and, hapless in its revealed injury to mankind, it is powerless to defend itself against the accusation of its guilt, and has to yield. It is helpless: the accused prisoner at the bar; hammerblow upon hammerblow of accusation and reproof can be hammered into it, and, like a fallen boxer, it cannot get up to defend itself—

Interestingly, at about this time, Welfare Economics of the Sen-tentious sort now in vogue was making a similar claim to the mentally disturbed nobleman.

To paraphrase Vivian Walsh, a Society is not free unless every individual in it can 'walk away from humanly intolerable' transactions. Thus, nobody would be required to work for a living or to go to jail just because they raped and decapitated a baby. 

Walsh says that Sen's social choice theory requires the provision to everybody of the means of being completely free of any resource constraint- including, though he does not admit this, the constraints placed on convicts in jails. 

How could this be done? Following Bulwer Lytton, we can imagine a world in which everybody has possession of a bomb able to blow up the Earth. No one would dare refuse any such person any thing. Equally, none would have to pay taxes or go to prison unless they felt like it. Such a world would be short-lived. Sooner or later a guy who is about to die of natural causes may decide that if he can't live, no one else should be allowed to. 

It seems that the old fashioned 'utilitarians' coeval with the great Earl, whose successor was one of the first peers to join the Labor Party, were aware that if Liberty was contingent upon making everyone equally powerful and wealthy, then there would be no Society. Sadly, there are certain differences which exist between men and women. It is unfair that only women can give birth. It is unfair that some people are smart, thrifty, and able to get ahead in life. Biology, like Economics, is unfair. Rationality for humans must mean reasoning in a manner which accepts the fact that Nature is indifferent to what we value. 

Sen's notion of Rationality is as crazy as the views of the third Earl Russell- 

The crazy Earl's speech was rational from Sen's point of view. It was irrational from the point of view of the House of Lord's public function which is that of subjecting Government policy to scrutiny and criticism not of some theological or utopian kind but under the rubric of the intelligent pursuit of the Nation's interests. No doubt, it would be nice if the Government could abolish death and disease and insanity. It would be wonderful if everybody could have the super-powers depicted in Comic books. But Human rationality must concern itself with constrained 'regret minimization' or, if all possible future states of the world are known as is their probability, expected utility maximization.

Suppose you meet an old friend who is boasting about the many lives saved by his son, the leading surgeon. You may say 'not till everybody's life has been saved can we praise a Doctor for saving one or two lives here and there.' I suppose, if you happen to be a Bishop you will be understood as warning against hubris and the sin of vanity. Only God truly saves anyone. Doctors should not get too big headed otherwise they will burn in Hell. This is a type of rationality- it is theological- but it is not economic rationality. The plain fact is, we should praise and reward skilled surgeons. What they do is useful. Pretending that nobody can be helped till everybody is helped is foolish. 

Sen's silly positional views of Justice

Suppose a bunch of us start talking about niceness. We agree that it is nice to be nice. I mention that cats are nice. You say dogs are nice. Should we then speak of niceness as the dog which is a nice cat? Perhaps. By doing so we are signaling that the discussion is puerile or has attracted very emotionally damaged and mentally retarded people. By babbling nonsense we are proving we are very nice. 

Something similar happened to Social Choice theory because, unlike Welfare Econ (which is just a branch of Public Finance) it was stupid and useless. Thus it morphed into saying 'Welfare is nice but Democracy is nice so Welfare is Democracy as Freedom as the cat which is a nice dog within a context of diversity, inclusivity and everybody having gender reassignment surgery every Tuesday such that public discourse becomes foundational to a nicer type of Justice. 

This ignores the fact that there are different types of Justice each of which has a different way of deciding what is the objective truth. Thus, for Criminal Justice, DNA evidence may prove that the man who raped and killed the child was Smith. However, Racial Justice or Social Justice might require us to acquit Smith because objectively speaking he is of the right race or class. One might say, 'subjectively Smith is a rapist but, objectively, because of his class or racial origin, he is incapable of rape or murder. The truth is, the three year old child he raped and killed was a bourgeois saboteur.'

In “POSITIONAL VIEWS” AS THE CORNERSTONE OF SEN’S IDEA OF JUSTICE  Antoinette Baujard & Muriel Gilardone write-

 define a positional view as an individual judgment towards any social state, considering objectively the context from which she or he is able to assess this social state.

Since the only 'context' from which a 'social state' is assessed is that of the subject's mind, it follows that a positional view is merely a subjective view.  The rapist and murderer may feel that Criminal Justice is the wrong type of justice to apply to a person in his position. Social Justice, which emphasizes his poverty and lack of life-chances, requires that he be exonerated and put in charge of an orphanage where he can rape and murder plenty more children. 

Our line of argument is therefore: consider positional view as the cornerstone of Sen’s idea of justice

i.e. Sen's idea of justice is subjective. 

as if it were a material , and show how Sen’s idea is built from there:

his idea is based on his bigotry 

this reading is likely to highlight how and why this is not a material in the sense that formal welfarism would require.

Objective welfarism would seek to identify an objective function to be maximized or (in the case of global opportunity cost) minimized. This could be done in a rough and ready fashion and may be quite useful in solving collective action problems. 

Obviously, we could ignore the opinions or interests of those we don't like by saying 'they are in no position to know what's good for them or the rest of Society.' 

 This choice is corroborated by the consideration of Sen’s earlier philosophical work. The positional interpretation of viewer relativity goes back to the beginning of the eighties. Sen (1982, 1983, and more extensively 1993) claims that the identification of the viewer’s position does matter for the evaluation of social states rather than her mere utilities or preferences.

His position in Society is already reflected in 'utilities' or 'preferences'.  Nothing further is needed save if we want to punish him because we don't like him or reward him because he shares some particular trait with us. 

In the welfarist framework, social states are assessed on the basis of given individual preferences only, with the assumptions that they are reliable and fixed.

No. The assumption is that behavior reveals preferences. 

Sen questions these strong assumptions, because individual preferences, and more broadly individual views, depend on the viewer’s position for several reasons.

No. Some views or preferences may be contingent in the manner suggested. Others aren't.  

First, the difference of view between two persons may be explained by their difference of position in the social state considered.

It may be explained by saying one has shit for brains while the other is a freakin' genius. But this is irrelevant.  

Sen illustrates this fact by the following image: if one person looks at the moon from Earth and the other from space, they may assess the size of the moon differently or similarly, relative to the size of the sun, and their observation shall consequently be considered as position-dependent (Sen 1993: 128).

But we don't actually do any such thing. Currently, there are some people in space and a lot more here on Earth. But anyone 'assessing' the size of the moon either in space or down here is getting pretty much the same answer. BTW a kid or a cretin gawking at the moon aint assessing shit.  

Second, the viewer’s position may evolve which might change her view on the social state. For instance, if the second person travels from space to Earth, her evaluation of the relative size of the moon and the sun will automatically change.

Fuck off! Neil Armstrong didn't say 'guys! I just discovered that the size of the moon changes depending upon where I'm positioned in the solar system.' He'd have been laughed at if he did so.  

Third, Sen underlines the fact that “[t]he person is not free to choose the position from which he should evaluate the states” (1983: 123, underlined by us).

Yes he is, unless some guy is torturing him and forcing him to evaluate states from a very undignified and painful position.  

Hence, her view is dependent upon such position, and there is nothing we can do about this.

there is nothing useful these two ladies can do.  

Consequently, for a given individual view regarding a specific social state, the position from which it is expressed cannot be neutral, insofar as the view depends upon that particular position.

Sez who? I may say, 'You can't tell me Sen doesn't eat dog turds because you have never spent even a single hour being me.' I may go further. I may accuse you of being biased because you personally profit by selling dog turds to Sen. This does not alter the fact that the 'neutral' view is that Sen doesn't eat dog turds. Somebody would have noticed if he did.  

Sen insists that his positional interpretation of a person’s views is not fundamentally due to a lack of “ability to imagine what it would be like to evaluate the state from a different position” (1982: 37).

because it is fundamentally due to his being as stupid as shit.  

Indeed, the concept of positional views is precisely thought to facilitate such ability,

but only in so far as that ability is the ability to thrive on a diet of dog turds 

against the standard idea in the economic literature that since “individuals are really individuals, each an autonomous end in himself […] they must be somewhat mysterious and inaccessible to each other” (Arrow 1973: 263)17.

Because in an Arrow-Debreu world there would be no language.  

But the fundamental idea is to understand what makes a social state more or less desirable from a person’s point of view because “one of the positions in that state is peculiarly [her] own” (1982: 37).

Fuck off! We can easily imagine a highly desirable social state in which we ourselves would not exist. You might say 'but you'd like it better if you could exist in that world' But the answer is 'maybe, maybe not. It depends.' 

Hence the viewer should be personally involved in the characterization of his own position.

Why do we refer to a guy whose head has been chopped off as the victim of a crime? How do we know the fellow isn't delighted with the outcome? Not till dead people can personally testify that their welfare has decreased because they were killed should murder be considered a crime.  

In other words, he should participate to the identification of the positional parameters

e.g. being in a coffin six feet underground 

that influence his view in a way that remove the idea of a pure subjective and person-dependent view. Positional parameters are, for Sen, a question of “any general, particularly non-mental, condition that may both influence observation, and that can systematically apply to different observers and observations” (Sen 2009: 158).

see above 

In order to characterize a position, it is thus required to highlight the conditions “that (1) may influence observation, and (2) can apply to different persons” (Sen 1993: 127). For instance, “being myopic or color-blind or having normal eyesight; knowing or not knowing a specific language; having or not having knowledge of particular concepts; being able or not able to count” may be such conditions or positional parameters.

but so could being or not being dead or being or not being me. If you were me you would understand that not only does Sen eat only dog-turds but also the Universe should be shifted a few feet to the left to improve its feng shui.  

Sen's idea of justice is that Rawls's theory was naughty and should be sent to bed without its supper. This was because Sen was in the position of having no idea of justice but a great love for talking meaningless shite. 

Our paper offers a novel reading of Sen’s idea of justice, beyond the standard prisms imposed by theories of justice – resting on external normative criteria

like guilt or innocence 

– and formal welfarism –

which is interested in raising welfare rather than talking endless bollocks 

involving the definition of individual welfare and its aggregation.

putting money values to things can be helpful. Courts have to do so to award damages. 

Instead we take seriously Sen’s emphasis on personal agency

which is irrelevant for both Justice and Welfare.  

and focus on his original contribution to the issue of objectivity.

He says subjectivity is actually objectivity 

Firstly, we demonstrate that Sen’s idea of justice, with at its core “positional views”, is more respectful of persons’ agency than would be a theory based on individual preference or capability.

But we don't require such respect of our agency when it comes to Justice or our Welfare. You may say, the police should give you a chance to beat up your rapist rather than take it upon themselves to kick his fucking head in. Equally, you may think it rude of a surgeon not to offer you a turn with the scalpel when operating on you. But, in both these cases, you would be considered a fucking lunatic.  

Secondly, we argue that Sen’s conception of objectivity considers that both information and sentiments are relative to a position.

Because Sen confuses subjectivity, which may be position dependent, with objectivity.  

Such an alternative approach to subjectivity allows the formation of more impartial views through collective deliberation and a better consideration of justice by agents themselves.

No. It merely allows the talking of endless bollocks and the pretense that we must consult impartial spectators from Patagonia or Pluto. 

 We now want to show that another mistake would be to miss Sen’s departure from the standard preferentialist framework and continue to understand people’s voices as individual preferences.

A voice is something people prefer to lend to some things not others.  

The focus on preferences raises many problems for welfare studies,

No. There are only pseudo problems arising out of stupidity.  

and even more for democratic issues, as included in the general criticism of welfarism introduced by Sen.

A criticism which fails because it is stupid.  

The legitimacy of Sen’s positional approach is based on

stupidity 

the defense of persons’ agency and relative values (Sen 1982)

both are fully reflected in preferences 

against a certain tendency of consequentialism,

which does not exist 

often associated to welfarism in normative economics.

by shitheads. 

This may appear paradoxical since welfarism is generally defended on the grounds that favoring individual utility exclusively and above all else amounts to respecting individuals’ sovereignty.

Nonsense! Welfare is independent of 'sovereignty'. We can be concerned with the welfare of a lunatic in a padded cell. On the other hand if you say welfare means sovereignty which means training senior citizens in sodomy then you can write a paper about how welfarism falls short of a conception of sovereignty based on elderly dudes ass fucking.  

In Arrow’s welfarist framework (1963), such an approach is translated by the condition that each individual is free to have a definite ordering of all conceivable states, in terms of their desirability to him according to a wide range of values.

No. In Arrow's framework, nobody is free not to have any such thing nor to tell the fucking Social Choice rule to go fuck itself.  

Nevertheless, Arrow concludes that “the doctrine of the voters’ sovereignty

 a voter is not a sovereign 

is incompatible with that of collective rationality” (1963:60),

not to mention the fact that a voter is not a fucking sovereign 

i.e. with a social decision that would respect each individual ordering.

unless they decide to respect them by not respecting them at all. 

In this sense, he shows one possible way to be respectful of individuals’ sovereignty

by tenderly supporting them in imparting skills in sodomy to senior citizens.  

is to return to standard individualistic assumptions, according to which individuals’ orderings do not reflect individuals’ values regarding social states but his utilities in each social state – i.e. “his own consumption-leisure-saving situations” (Arrow 1963: 61).

which are epistemic. Thus an intensional fallacy arises- i.e. nothing is well ordered. Social Choice is an impossible project save for  

Sen applies the opposite reasoning, arguing that within welfarist consequentialism, the person is likely to lose her sovereignty,

the person has none under welfarism. That is why lunatics can be incarcerated for their own good.  

insofar as an external evaluator restricts any individual view to “a special case of consequence-based evaluation in which the outcome morality is evaluator-neutral”

in other words, we don't evaluate the outcome with reference to the degree to which it promotes or retards training in sodomy for senior citizens which is the only true measure of popular sovereignty within a framework of diversity, inclusivity and elderly peeps fucking each other in the ass.  

As a result, there is no room for deontology that Sen defines as wanting “not to maltreat others, in dealing with them (e.g. by violating their rights,

failing to facilitate their life-chances with respect to imparting training in sodomy for senior citizens while remaining mindful of the Palestinians occupying Gazza's football strip 

breaking his promises, etc.)” (1982: 23). Nor there is room for autonomy, including “the desires, projects, commitments

sodomy workshops for senior citizens 

and personal ties of the individual agent” (Sen 1982: 23), except if it directly affects his personal well-being.

Sen came from a shitty part of the world which was pursuing shitty economic policies. He thought Social Choice theory should tell stupid lies about how maybe Cuba was actually much richer than America and Bangladesh, in 1974, was fucking paradise.  

In contrast, Sen states that “[a]gency encompasses all the goals a person has reasons to adopt,

No. Agency is about a sense of one's own power to act and the feeling of being in control. It has nothing to do with a theological goal like gaining God's grace and thus getting to the Good Place. Equally one may want all welfare economists to devote themselves to tenderly imparting training in sodomy to senior citizens without oneself having to do anything to bring this about.  

which can inter alia include goals other than the advancement of his or her own well-being” (Sen 2009: 287).

No. Any action can be seen as aiming to advance the agent's well being. 

Sen (2009: 281, italics are ours) considers that: […] the informational inputs in a social choice exercise in the form of individual rankings can also be interpreted in ways other than as utility rankings or happiness orderings. […] 

No. Because of the intensional fallacy they can't be seen as any type of ranking or ordering at all.  

the nature of the debate on the consistency of social choice systems can be – and has been – moved to a broader arena through reinterpreting the variables incorporated in the mathematical model underlying social choice systems […]

Sadly, there is no fucking math underlying it. Preferences are epistemic. They change as the knowledge base changes. This means the 'intension' that is Preference has no well defined extension. This is the intensional fallacy.  

and indeed voice is a very different – and in many ways a more versatile – idea than the concept of happiness.

People want to be happy. They don't want to hear voices.  

Sen challenges the standard and narrow approach to “individual voices” in social choice theory, drawing important lessons from famous results (Arrow 1963, Sen 1970). He particularly questions Arrow’s assumption that social choice theory relies on orderings of individuals considered separately, without any interpersonal comparisons or social interactions.

There are no orderings. To assume otherwise is to commit the intensional fallacy.  

For instance, as soon as equity is a concern,

or the fact that some peeps belong to the right Race or Religion while others are scum 

the problem is not anymore the consistency of the voting rule, but the fact that “we are in the wrong territory by concentrating only [on] individual preference orderings” (Sen 2014: 39) 13.

More particularly because there are no fucking preference orderings.  

If we add the concern for minority rights

or killing kaffirs 

and liberty,

or instructing senior citizens in sodomy so as to achieve popular sovereignty for penguins 

Sen interprets the result of “the impossibility of the Paretian liberal” (Sen 1970) as highlighting the crucial dependence of democratic social choices on the formation of tolerant values (Sen 2009: 337).

Sen came from East Bengal. Democratic social choice there involved killing or chasing away kaffirs.  No democracy has come into existence without some degree of religious or other type of intolerance. A 'Paretian Liberal' is a Liberal- i.e. one who thinks very few decisions should be made collectively. Pareto optimality just means that there are no more bilateral trades to be made. It does not mean stupid shit Arrow pulled out of his arse. 

This necessarily involves social interactions with a more comprehensive approach of person’s voices and situations.

No. It involves talking stupid shite. It's not as though these nutters spend their time talking to Trump supporters.  

Sen’s criticism of the standard welfarist interpretation of the informational inputs of social choice exercises may also be related to his view on behavioral approaches.

Sen's own behavior was bad. He didn't help the poor. He ran off with his best friend's wife. Naturally, he didn't want to b judged on his behaviour.  

Sen (1973) argues that behavior is an extremely limited source of information,

it is the only source of information on actual behavior- i.e. what people actually do as opposed to stuff they talk about doing.  

so that the revealed preference theory is not easy to justify in terms of the methodological requirements of our discipline.

It was useful enough. People do need to estimate demand curves and work out elasticities and so forth.  

To him, the thrust in this theory has undermined “thinking as a method of self-knowledge and talking as a method of knowing about others” (1973: 258).

How? Economists get paid to estimate elasticities and so forth. They, like everybody else, is welcome to think and talk and wank.  

In contrast, the concept of “positional view” opens a path to both introspective and public reasoning.

by telling stupid lies or just wasting everybody's time with woke, virtue-signaling, bollocks.  

Like Peter (2012) has underlined, appeals to external authority has become problematic in economics and, more generally in political theory.

In which case people should stop pretending Arrow's theorem or 'Paretian Liberal' means shit. 

One important issue with formal welfarism is indeed linked to the empowerment of an external authority.

Professors like Sen or Rawls or Arrow are external authorities

An external person, should she be a philosopher, an expert or a policy maker (let us call them expert for the sake of simplicity), decides upon the proper material and the proper aggregation properties; equivalently, experts may decide upon the axioms, i.e. the desired properties, characterizing the representative aggregation, and the theory of justice associated with the chosen material. These decisions mechanically translate into policy proposals, without being debated by the persons concerned by the implementation of the policy.

Why not? They could be debated. The external authority is welcome to look at those debates. In practice, the Bench may look at parliamentary debates to determine the intention of a piece of legislation. The Judge is an external authority. 

That the experts intend to favor these individuals’ welfare by doing so is not questionable. What Sen forcefully denounces is that this top-down process may conflict with the persons’ agency .

In which case that person may have an action in law against such usurpation. Thus if you officiously come and wipe my bum for me, I can charge you with indecent assault. Your argument that you were concerned with my welfare fails because I am perfectly able to wipe my own bum.  

Thus, a necessary condition to reestablish persons’ agency is primarily to preclude welfarism, and to let agents choose the kind of evaluation they want to bring into the collective process of decision.

No. Re-establishing agency requires removing impediments on their freedom of action- e.g. being in jail. Precluding 'welfarism' doesn't do shit.  

Sen however offers a way around this moral problem

which does not exist 

without giving up normative reasoning, which explains he stays close to social choice theory. In our view, what Sen keeps exploring from Arrow’s (1963) seminal program are two general ideas: 1) that the diverse individual values or views are the essential basis for a democratic theory

though this simply isn't true. Chichilniksky showed that Preference and Endowment diversity must meet a Goldilocks condition for Markets or Democracy to work. But this is fucking obvious. 

Empires- like the British Raj- can be very diverse. The transition to Democracy, however, is likely to involve ethnic cleansing. That's what happened in India during Sen's boyhood. 

and 2) that the comparison of social states is the means to express such views.

the comparison of imaginary states- maybe. Social states are difficult to fully specify or acquire information about. 

But, in Sen’s idea of justice, these two general ideas are translated in a way that is far less mechanist and easy to grasp than in social choice theory.

Sen gives an argument for labelling as 'Just' any fucking arbitrary action by policy makers while labelling as 'unjust' any proper, diligent, juristic procedure.   

 According to our reading, Sen distinguishes three kinds of inappropriate positional views on justice.

Sen doesn't get that there are different kinds of Justice- e.g. Criminal Justice, Distributive Justice, Nazi Justice, scolding Judges for not tenderly imparting skill in sodomy to senior citizens while pretending to be a penguin, farting vigorously and running away, etc.  

A first kind is what Sen calls “objective illusions” (Sen 1993: 132) or “positional illusions” (Sen 2009: 166) that Sen attributes to the narrow informational bases available in the considered position.

These don't exist because no subject in any fucking position can't also have a big enough information base. 

Another kind is “adaptive preferences” that Sen has sometimes used in the context of gender inequality and poverty evaluations, to highlight the social conditioning of individual views (see Gilardone 2009).

Again, these don't exist. If everybody can have Muth rational expectations fuck would they bother with adaptive preferences for?  

This second kind is due to the narrowness of perspectives and expectations, given social circumstances, from the considered position.

Sen was repeating in his own addled fashion the old chestnut about how darkies are actually happier plucking cotton and eating water-melon on Massa's plantation.  

The resultant adjustment of claims and desires represents an obstacle for dealing with persistent inequalities or poverty.

No. The obstacle is not having enough money.  

A third kind of inappropriate view is parochialism. Parochialism amounts to under-scrutinized local values, fixed beliefs and specific practices. Parochial views are strictly dependent upon the traditions and culture of the small community one belongs to.

These worthless cunts belong to a very small, very ignorant, very parochial community. Let them continue to eat each other's shit.  

As a result, if public reasoning is confined to the perspectives and understandings of the local community only, it might not help to overcome shared prejudices or cultural biases.

That is the only way it would do so. If 'public reasoning' relies on foreign or otherwise exogenous arguments, all that has happened is that there is a prejudice against what is indigenous or endogenous. You get Sen-tentious self-hating Hindus.  

All these views are inappropriate to ground a collective view on justice, but also to represent well one’s values and interests.

A typically bombastic ipse dixit pronouncement which is meaningless when it is not mischievous.  

A crucial stake of public reasoning is thus the possibility for individuals to reflect or reason on their own positional views.

It is always possible for sentient beings to reflect or reason on their views. But this has nothing to do with 'position'. Cats perceive mirror images of themselves differently from apes like us. But, cats growing up around mirrors soon learn to ignore the fictitious 'invasive' cats they keep glimpsing. In other words, if it is useful to overcome 'positional' illusions', that is what tends to happen if this adds survival value.  

We already justified the focus on “positional views” with the importance of reflexivity on one’s own position and some understanding that it could be different.

But this happens without 'public discussion'- e.g. among cats.  

Communicating one’s view is the means to check whether the proposed claims and the arguments supporting them are publicly defensible and resistant to a trans-positional examination.

No. There is no necessary relationship of this sort. There can be complementary perceptual or 'marking services' - e.g. a hunter can see somethings better than his dog but the dogs sense of smell means that the dog can sense some other things better than the hunter. This is a case of symbiosis. Speaking generally, there are mimetic effects such that an 'objective' view is adopted thanks to signals from other sentient beings absent any type of discussion or verbal activity. 

In other words, the submission of positional views to public reasoning allows both reflexivity and mutual understanding, providing the informational basis available in each position is revealed.

No. Even in the case of highly mathematical information, 'reflexivity and mutual understanding' may be wholly absent even though there is observational or behavioral equivalence. This is like the 'matam'/vigyaan or doctrine/science distinction in Hindusm.  

The confrontation with others’ positional views is a means both to move toward more transpositional views and to improve their agency.

Or it is a dialogue of the deaf. Still if one bunch of guys have better outcomes, there may be a Tardean mimetic effect such that behavior is the same though doctrines or dogmas remain very different and there is no mutual communication or dialogue.  

This last point is rather implicit in Sen’s idea of justice.

He has no idea of justice. He just gasses on about how we should never adopt any operationalizable principle but just go on deafly discussing stuff while waiting to hear from impartial spectators in Patagonia or on Pluto.  

But since such confrontation may help to remove positional illusion, it can be said that the search for greater transpositionality and the pursuit of greater individual agency are intimately connected.

Only in the sense that the search for greater farts and the pursuit of greater individual agency to achieve rocket propulsion by lighting those farts are intimately connected.  

In this sense, a sphere of deliberation is needed for competing lines of reasoning, diverse experiences, information and knowledge to be exposed and discussed.

It is a useless sphere featuring useless shitheads like Sen.  

According to our reading, Sen’s idea of public reasoning aims at broadening information available from every position, and not from the position of a so-called social evaluator.

In which case, why pay the 'social evaluator'? Also why not invite the cat to express its views?  

The access of information to each individual as well as interpersonal comprehension are therefore central issues to be addressed by a theory of justice.

No. They are addressed by common sense regarding how actual people change their behavior to improve outcomes for themselves. This has to do with mimetics reinforced by improved outcomes not endless discussion.  

Both shall reveal crucial for the identification of inappropriate views, and as a result for favoring their evolution. While the three kinds of inappropriate views that we had identified – objective illusions, adaptive preferences and parochialism – rely on distinct positional bias, it can be argued that they are sometimes closely related. For instance, “the apparent cogency of parochial values often turns on the lack of knowledge of what has proved feasible in the experiences of other people”

No. Cogency is a function of 'harmonious construction'. Some can do it. Some can't. But what makes parochial values prevail or fail is the success or failure of 'bourgeois strategies' arising out of the uncorrelated asymmetries underlying 'oikeiosis'. One may reject parochial values and mimic the values of the metropolitan culture so as to enjoy better outcomes. This happens whether or not there is 'public discussion'.  

 In other words, parochialism may support positional illusions or adaptive preferences.

Sen occupies a particular- useless but well remunerated- position. His preferences are 'adaptive' in the sense that he changes what he says minimally so as to continue to be well rewarded. But he is a useless shithead.  

Public discussion would therefore benefit from including the views of people from other communities in order to identify the positional bias as extensively as possible.

No. Public discussion benefits from being brief and from screening out nutters or fools or virtue signaling cunts from distant countries.  

Sen (2009: 123-152) introduces the concept of “open impartiality” to insist on the fact that the discussion should not be confined to persons who are entitled to make collective choices or engaged in social evaluation because they belong to the polity for two main reasons.

America could quickly destroy itself by letting China make its decisions for it. The main reason Sen advocates this sort of stupidity is because he has shit for brains. He doesn't just hate his native Hinduism. He also hates the America where he has done well for himself. 

The perspective for those “inside” may firstly be enlightened by distant views on local understandings. Secondly, outsiders might “bear some of the consequences of decisions taken in that particular polity” (Sen 2009: 134) and this information may change insiders’ views on their own decisions.

If that information was relevant, the 'insiders' would have paid to gain it anyway or else would have suffered a loss of some kind such that their menu of choice got restricted.  

In other words, open public reasoning opens up two important ways for changing positional views in transpositional ones providing mutual comprehension is made possible: 1) enlightenment, and 2) a greater sense of neighborhood.

Or being invaded and enslaved. Your new neighbors may have good reasons to value raping you regularly in between robbing you.  

To reach the condition of mutual comprehension and reduce the felt distance between individuals who may have the most difficulties to understand each other, one key may be to inform as much as possible on the differential of positional parameters between persons.

The raped should learn to empathize with their rapists. Also, they should chop off their own arms and shove those arms up their assholes. Then we could all have a nice public discussion about the various ideas of poetic Justice applicable to Sen-tentious cretins.