There was once a beggar in Nishapur who approached a wealthy merchant and asked for money with which to buy bread. The Merchant said 'You are able-bodied. I will give you a pack-load of merchandise which you can take to the bazaar and sell profitably.' The beggar agreed, After walking around a corner, he decided to look and see what the merchandise consisted of. Sadly it consisted of just some mishappen stones or rocks. The beggar was furious. He dumped the rocks and ran to confront the merchant who had sent him on a fool's errand. The merchant said 'those rocks are of jade- a commodity greatly valued by the Chinese. I happen to know that some Chinese merchants have arrived at the bazaar. They would have paid you a fortune.'
The point of this story is that different people value different things. However, there is always some way in which different values become commensurable. That process is the transaction. Why a thing is valued does not greatly matter. What is important is to find someone who values what you have to offer more highly than you do yourself.
Isaiah Berlin, in a letter to Lord Bhikku Parekh, took a different view-
Something, in my view, is a human value when the intentions or motives of those who pursue them are intelligible to other human beings, at least in principle;
The Persian does not need to know why jade is valuable to the Chinese. What matters is the price they will pay for it.
when others can understand that, in similar circumstances, if the same possibilities were open, they can conceive themselves as pursuing the ends in question without ceasing to be the kind of persons that they are, with, in a wide sense, the kind of outlook that they have.
The beggar needs to get into the habit of doing business rather than demanding hand-outs. His ethos needs to change. Transactions can alter our ethos. Tijarat (commerce) can be the foundation (Imarat) of both the character of the individual and the opulence of the State. Nishapur was a 'work-fare' Utopia. Charity had the purpose of raising the poor to a level where they could themselves do charity.
But Nishapur's values weren't 'universal' or 'prescriptive'. The beggar replies 'I don't value wealth gained by what you call honest industry or enterprise. I value charity given and received in the name of the All Compassionate. Give me a coin sufficient to buy me my daily bread. I want nothing to do with some stone which the infidels prize for some superstitious or idolatrous reason'.
I suppose, after the Mongol invasion, the people of Nishapur saw that the rational pursuit of wealth might attract predators. Better to be a Sufi content to live on alms while praying and meditating in a kanqah.
Something like that. All this is somewhat Humean,
No it isn't. Hume is for Utility but is agnostic as to what produces it or how it may be autonomously determined.
but it is roughly what I believe, although I am sure I haven’t got it quite right or been entirely clear. Murdering all men in sight is not something which I could conceive of being an end to which I am committed;
If Berlin were a soldier behind enemy lines, it might be.
but, given the kind of circumstances in which the berserk murderer was in fact placed, unless I myself am deranged, I must think him to be so.
No. It doesn't matter why a Saudi psychiatrist just killed a lot of people in Germany. A Court may be obliged to pronounce on his sanity. We are not. The authorities understand that they need to find ways of protecting Christmas or New Year's Eve crowds from motorists who, for whatever reason, want to mow down as many people as they can.
All these things rest on a kind of analogy – Denkexperiment – without which no communication is ultimately possible –
Nonsense! Communication depends only on the ability of one party to emit a signal which another party can differentiate from 'noise'. It is not even necessary to understand the symbol let alone the mental state or intention of the agent who sent it. Signal extraction is informative and sufficient to establish communication even if comprehension is yet far to seek.
that is the social context, of which you speak, in which these things must operate.
Nobody knows their own social context or else is severely misguided in that respect. It occurs to me that, absurd as this may seem, I may not actually be seen by those around me as a future Miss Teen Tamil Nadu. This is because my social context is one where many people may wrongly identify me as a native of Andhra Pradesh.
Herbert Hart’s minimum content of natural law is relevant to this: unless those rules and values operate without which a society cannot survive, the very notion of the pursuit of values, their objective or subjective status, etc., become unintelligible.
Nonsense! The fact is nothing ceases to be 'intelligible' to a Society on the brink of extinction. It's just that a thing being intelligible doesn't mean it is accessible. It is intelligible to me that my coltish pulchritude is such as qualifies me for the title 'Miss Teen Tamil Nadu'. I fully understand that I will be showered with offers from movie producers and modelling agencies the moment I gain that valuable accolade. Yet, the thing is not accessible to me because, sadly, there is intense anti-Brahmin bigotry in Tamil Nadu. This does not mean that I can neglect posting selfies on Instagram. Beauty such as mine, imposes an arduous duty to make itself known and spread joy and wonderment amongst the less favoured.
If this is a kind of subjectivism, then I am guilty of it,
It is stupidity
but it seems to me objective enough against real egocentricity, subjectivism, etc. My preferences about treating men are binding on others because I must take them to be the kind of persons whose relationships to me and to others are of a kind that they could not be unless such preferences were binding.
So, if my wife refrains from killing me, I must take it to be the case that she has a binding preference not to do so even if I see from her browser history that she spends a lot of time Googling 'how to kill husband and get away with it.' Also she has bought cyanide off the dark web.
Maybe the fact that I lost all my money but still have a life insurance policy is germane even though Isaiah Berlin might disagree.
If they are different from this, then, according to the degree of difference, the ‘preferences’ are less binding – diminished responsibility, etc.
So, if I am not awarded the title of Miss Teen Tamil Nadu, I can say 'this is not intelligible to me. The judges must be animals of some type unable to appreciate my pouting pulchritude.'
If it can be shown that beliefs and acts do not follow merely from invalid empirical beliefs,
like those of Berlin re. what is a sine qua non for communication
or involve a very different view of the world from my own, then I am liable to condemn such beliefs and acts as not so much wicked or abominable as unintelligible, in extreme cases mad, not human; and I have to protect myself or my society against them as I would against dangerous animals,
or 'vermin' who must be exterminated
not human beings moved by beliefs to which I can find analogy in my own experience.
We can find an analogy for anything at all in our own experience. What is difficult is to find an analogy wholly outside our experience. I often say 'The theory of Quantum Super-Gravity can be best understood by analogy to my Aunty's second marriage to Uranus.' Sadly, people I say this to jump to the conclusion that I am a cretin.
I think that the capacity for choosing is a sine qua non for men;
If so, so is a capacity for non-choosing because otherwise man could not choose not to choose and thus would have no capacity for choosing- at least in one important respect.
The plain fact is, you only need to make a choice where there is scarcity or 'opportunity cost'- in other words something is sacrificed so that something else is attained. Such choice may be delegated or else might be 'bundled' with other choices in a contract of adhesion. However, what gives rise to it is scarcity. If you can have your cake and eat it to, your felicity is greater than that of those constrained to choose one or the other option.
that men who are prevented from choice are prevented from acting in a human manner.
A revolting creed. Slaves may act in a more human and humane manner though they are wholly prevented from choosing anything.
Of course all choice is choice of something.
Or nothing. One may choose to be a Buddhist.
And the content of the choice, of course is crucially important. But simply to be a chooser – to be able to choose and not to be chosen for, to be able to go to the bad in one’s own way, rather than be conditioned towards the good (whatever it may be) by the efforts of others (as the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists seemed to hold) – seems to me paramount, as belonging to the essence of being a man.
If man has an essence, he exists in all possible worlds- including ones where the laws of Physics would not permit the formation of our planet or the evolution of carbon-based life forms.
Kant makes this very plain in that essay on ‘What is Civilisation?’, his great attack on paternalism. Not to be able to choose, not to be able to be responsible, is to be de-humanised.
No it isn't. One may as well say 'not being born German is to be less than human'.
To choose what is evil is to behave as a moral agent.
No. It is what happens when we choose to marry a woman who will put cyanide in our coffee because she wants to get her hands on the life insurance pay-out. We didn't act as a 'moral agent'. We acted as organisms with a strong reproductive drive.
Not to be able to choose at all is to cease to be one.
It may be the first step to becoming able to have an expanded choice menu.
being driven in a direction, however desirable, is to be like a child or an animal.
Nothing wrong with being either. The reason women I cohabited with did not kill me was because of certain child-like or dog-like qualities I possess.
What I hold most strongly is that it is the act of choice, not what is chosen – that is central to man’s humanity.
In which case, Buridan's ass was more human than Balaam's.
I really do mean that. Surely that is self-evident. Do you really disagree?
What is central to a man's humanity or a cat's felinity is the capacity to contribute to the propagation of the species. Sure, you can make a shibboleth about the right to send your kid to a school different to that which is allotted by the Local Authority, or the right to choose a baby different from the one the nurse at the maternity ward hands over to you, but people may come to think you have a screw loose. Also, mebbe, you are a teensy bit racist?
I suppose one might say that Berlin was part of a tradition which believed in values and ideals and the great importance of sitting in your armchair choosing between different schemes of life or conceptions of liberty or other such verbiage.
In his talk 'the pursuit of the ideal' Berlin said-
There are, in my view, two factors that, above all others, have shaped human history in the twentieth century.
Total War on the one hand, which led to the end of multi-ethnic Empires and their replacement by Nation States, and, on the other, a revolution in Information Technology which meant that Global Markets became much more allocatively efficient than bureaucratic dirigisme. There was a mathematical aspect to this. Witsenhausen's counter-example was formulated in 1968. Previously, it was thought that the certainty equivalence property held in stochastic control. But, under decentralized control, non-linear control laws can outperform all linear ones. More generally, this problem highlights the communicative role of control actions. On open markets, they are not strategic. Nobody has an incentive to buy more or less than they want. In a command economy, there is an incentive to overstate your requirement. But this also has to do with costs and values. We act strategically, not to say deceptively, in exaggerating what we value or what cost we could incur. But, if we are price takers, there is no point doing so.
One is the development of the natural sciences and technology,
which had been happening for centuries
certainly the greatest success story of our time – to this, great and mounting attention has been paid from all quarters. The other, without doubt, consists in the great ideological storms that have altered the lives of virtually all mankind: the Russian Revolution and its aftermath – totalitarian tyrannies of both right and left
which arose from the ashes of Total War and represented its continuation by political means. Sadly, Command Economies proved allocatively and dynamically inefficient. Also, why be a Commissar when you can be an Oligarch?
and the explosions of nationalism, racism and, in places, religious bigotry which, interestingly enough, not one among the most perceptive social thinkers of the nineteenth century had ever predicted.
There were plenty of such explosions in the Nineteenth and Eighteenth and Seventeenth and Sixteenth Centuries. Prior to that, Crusaders cuddled with Saracens and everybody was nice to darkies, homosexuals, Jews, and guys who thought the Earth revolved around the Sun.
When our descendants, in two or three centuries’ time (if mankind survives until then), come to look at our age, it is these two phenomena that will, I think, be held to be the outstanding characteristics of our century – the most demanding of explanation and analysis.
Nope. They are going to be all like 'fuck made you think H-bombs were a good idea?' As for generative A.I, did you guys not watch Terminator?'
But it is as well to realise that these great movements began with ideas in people’s heads:
but those ideas in people's heads arose during the course of bowel movements. Even if they didn't, they were shit.
ideas about what relations between men have been, are, might be and should be; and to realise how they came to be transformed in the name of a vision of some supreme goal in the minds of the leaders, above all of the prophets with armies at their backs.
There was no such transformation. Exercising power may involve killing people but it is conditional on their not killing you first. Sadly, guys doing the killing still want to get paid. Thus, in the end, this is a story about economics, not ideas.
Such ideas are the substance of ethics.
They are shit- which is the substance of shit ethics.
Ethical thought consists of the systematic examination of the relations of human beings to each other,
No. It consists of thinking everybody else's ethical thought is totes shit.
the conceptions, interests and ideals from which human ways of treating one another spring, and the systems of value on which such ends of life are based.
If 'ethical thought' comprehended this, it would be making billions on financial markets.
These beliefs about how life should be lived, what men and women should be and do, are objects of moral enquiry; and when applied to groups and nations, and, indeed, mankind as a whole, are called political philosophy, which is but ethics applied to society.
Till society tells it to fuck off because it is stupid and ignorant.
If we are to hope to understand the often violent world in which we live
we need to tell philosophers to fuck the fuck off
(and unless we try to understand it, we cannot expect to be able to act rationally in it and on it), we cannot confine our attention to the great impersonal forces, natural and man-made, which act upon us.
Nope. Focus on the impersonal. There is always a 'mechanism'- i.e. a mix of incentives and penalties- which causes sensible people to fall in line.
The goals and motives that guide human action must be looked at in the light of all that we know and understand; their roots and growth, their essence, and above all their validity, must be critically examined with every intellectual resource that we have.
In which case, smart people would be employed at the task. Yet, it is obvious, such is not the case. Only stupid windbags go in for this shit. Berlin wrote well and had taken the trouble to read a lot of German and Russian books at a time when both countries still counted for something. But reading shit turns your brain to shit.
This urgent need, apart from the intrinsic value of the discovery of truth about human relationships, makes ethics a field of primary importance. Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.
Only racist cunts talk about barbarians.
The study of the variety of ideas about the views of life that embody such values and such ends is something that I have spent forty years of my long life in trying to make clear to myself.
because that's what you got paid for doing. Since you were stupid, there was no big 'opportunity cost' for society.
I should like to say something about how I came to become absorbed by this topic, and particularly about a turning-point which altered my thoughts about the heart of it. This will, to some degree, inevitably turn out to be somewhat autobiographical – from this I offer my apologies, but I do not know how else to give an account of it.
Just say 'I have a low IQ. So I taught stupid shit.'
When I was young I read War and Peace by Tolstoy, much too early.
Nothing wrong with that. It is low IQ shit.
The real impact on me of this great novel came only later, together with that of other Russian writers, both novelists and social thinkers, of the mid-nineteenth century.
In other words, the boy was retarded. Nineteenth Century Russia was backward. There was and is little to be learned from its literature.
These writers did much to shape my outlook. It seemed to me, and still does, that the purpose of these writers was not principally to give realistic accounts of the lives and relationships to one another of individuals or social groups or classes,
they were naturalistic enough. The problem was that few places could be ruled as Russia was ruled. Reading Balzac or Dickens helps you understand Economics and Sociology better. Turgenev or Tolstoy don't. Doestoevsky is in a class by himself. But then he knew about Lobachevsky and non-Euclidean geometry.
not psychological or social analysis for its own sake – although, of course, the best of them achieved precisely this, incomparably.
Deficiently. An autocracy will feature some social epiphenomena which can be found elsewhere, but an industrializing Parliamentary Democracy will exhibit a dynamics wholly absent from a backward, mainly agricultural, autocracy.
Their approach seemed to me essentially moral:
i.e. they stopped at the threshold of 'Economia'
they were concerned most deeply with what was responsible for injustice, oppression, falsity in human relations, imprisonment whether by stone walls or conformism – unprotesting submission to man-made yokes – moral blindness, egoism, cruelty, humiliation, servility, poverty, helplessness, bitter indignation, despair on the part of so many.
Tl; dr. Autocracy sucks. That's what was responsible for the bad shit the Rooskis complained about. But this was fucking obvious.
In short, they were concerned with the nature of these experiences and their roots in the human condition: the condition of Russia in the first place, but, by implication, of all mankind.
Most of mankind didn't have autocracy.
And conversely they wished to know what would bring about the opposite of this, a reign of truth, love, honesty, justice, security, personal relations based on the possibility of human dignity, decency, independence, freedom, spiritual fulfilment.
Nothing would. The problem with taking Autocracy for granted is that you start to think the only thing which can replace it is Millenarianism. Virgil said as much in the fourth Eclogue.
Some, like Tolstoy, found this in the outlook of simple people, unspoiled by civilisation;
drunken serfs
like Rousseau, he wished to believe that the moral universe of peasants was not unlike that of children, not distorted by the conventions and institutions of civilisation, which sprang from human vices – greed, egoism, spiritual blindness; that the world could be saved if only men saw the truth that lay at their feet; if they but looked, it was to be found in the Christian gospels, the Sermon on the Mount.
The fellow was mad. Sad.
Others among these Russians put their faith in scientific rationalism, or in social and political revolution founded on a true theory of historical change.
Their faith didn't matter. Could the Russian merchant turn into an industrialist capable of technological innovation? Could the land owning class transfer inherited wealth into Joint Stock Enterprises? Could the National Debt be financed internally? If so, there would be a risk-free asset which would enable rational portfolio choice and the emergence of bourgeois capitalism linked to a strong Civil Society and the Rule of Law. But the first step was to create a market for agricultural land on terms favourable to the 'kulak'. Incidentally, female African American had higher participation in education, post-Emancipation, than the daughters of ex-serfs in Russia. The Russian 'Mir' could not be the foundation of a Narodnik utopia.
Others again looked for answers in the teachings of the Orthodox theology, or in liberal Western democracy, or in a return to ancient Slav values, obscured by the reforms of Peter the Great and his successors. What was common to all these outlooks was
stupidity and ignorance
the belief that solutions to the central problems existed, that one could discover them, and, with sufficient selfless effort, realise them on earth.
Not really. What was common to them was what was common to German pedants of a previous period- viz. puerility and an inability to get away from the notion that Enlightenment of any type must be dirigiste and despotic not mercantile and laissez faire.
They all believed that the essence of human beings was to be able to choose how to live: societies could be transformed in the light of true ideals believed in with enough fervour and dedication.
In other words, they were theological or historicist.
If, like Tolstoy, they sometimes thought that man was not truly free but determined by factors outside his control, they knew well enough, as he did, that if freedom was an illusion it was one without which one could not live or think.
Slaves live and think. Nobody does not know that.
None of this was part of my school curriculum, which consisted of Greek and Latin authors,
who chronicled the decline from Democracy to the autocratic rule of Divine Emperors till Caesar yielded to Christ in Europe's Dark Ages.
but it remained with me. When I became a student at the University of Oxford, I began to read the works of the great philosophers, and found that the major figures, especially in the field of ethical and political thought, believed this too.
Other students found that those 'major figures' were full of shit. The point about going to Uni is that you come to feel a salutary contempt for pedantry, prejudice or plain paranoia masquerading as scholarship. No doubt, the true undergirding of Paideia was provided by pederastic priests or Public School masters but, thankfully, neither posed any further threat to your own anal cherry.
Socrates thought that if certainty could be established in our knowledge of the external world by rational methods (had not Anaxagoras arrived at the truth that the sun was many times larger than the Peloponnese, however small it looked in the sky?), the same methods would surely yield equal certainty in the field of human behaviour – how to live, what to be.
In Athens, you could pay experts who would help you become a better equestrian or sailor or farmer or whatever.
This could be achieved by rational argument.
Or by demonstrable superiority. This trainer is superior to that trainer because his trainees win more prizes at the Olympics. This architect is better than that architect because his building do not collapse.
Plato thought that an elite of sages who arrived at such certainty should be given the power of governing others intellectually less well endowed, in obedience to patterns dictated by the correct solutions to personal and social problems.
Power depended on military muscle. I suppose Plato thought that his own Academy might supply a Despot with Civil Servants termed 'Guardians'.
The Stoics thought that the attainment of these solutions was in the power of any man who set himself to live according to reason. Jews, Christians, Muslims (I knew too little about Buddhism) believed that the true answers had been revealed by God to his chosen prophets and saints, and accepted the interpretation of these revealed truths by qualified teachers and the traditions to which they belonged.
Nonsense! They thrived in trade. Revealed Religion was used to support a better method of conflict resolution in commercial or inheritance disputes. Remarkably, the solution concept used in the Talmud was what we call 'Shapley Values'. I have explained elsewhere why this diverged from Greek isonomia.
The rationalists of the seventeenth century thought that the answers could be found by a species of metaphysical insight, a special application of the light of reason with which all men were endowed.
There was considerable continuity between them and the Scholastic theologians.
The empiricists of the eighteenth century, impressed by the vast new realms of knowledge opened by the natural sciences based on mathematical techniques, which had driven out so much error, superstition, dogmatic nonsense, asked themselves, like Socrates, why the same methods should not succeed in establishing similar irrefutable laws in the realm of human affairs.
Actually, econometric 'laws' (i.e. mathematical regularities) were already being used by the 'Political Arithmeticians' attached to the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Exchequers of Monarchs- e.g. the Tudors. Gresham's law states 'bad money drives out good' (till Isaac Newton found a simple method to prevent the 'clipping' of coins). King and Davenant had estimated the Demand curve for food by the end of the Seventeenth Century.
With the new methods discovered by natural science, order could be introduced into the social sphere as well – uniformities could be observed, hypotheses formulated and tested by experiment; laws could be based on them, and then laws in specific regions of experience could be seen to be entailed by wider laws; and these in turn to be entailed by still wider laws, and so on upwards, until a great harmonious system, connected by unbreakable logical links and capable of being formulated in precise – that is, mathematical – terms, could be established.
That wasn't the case. It was only in the second half of the Nineteenth Century that we have the first glimmerings of a mathematical 'general equilibrium' theory based on the 'Marginal Revolution'. But 'Classical' models continued to have currency.
The rational reorganisation of society would put an end to spiritual and intellectual confusion, the reign of prejudice and superstition, blind obedience to unexamined dogmas, and the stupidities and cruelties of the oppressive regimes which such intellectual darkness bred and promoted.
Actually, the long eighteenth century went in the opposite direction. It found complicated, metaphysical, methods to justify popular opinion- as Nietzsche pointed out. It wasn't till Darwin's 'dangerous idea' took hold, that there was a clear break with what went before.
All that was wanted was the identification of the principal human needs and discovery of the means of satisfying them. This would create the happy, free, just, virtuous, harmonious world which Condorcet so movingly predicted in his prison cell in 1794.
But Malthus promptly kicked his head in. Darwin applies Malthus's dangerous idea to non-human populations to get to a theory of Evolution.
This view lay at the basis of all progressive thought in the nineteenth century, and was at the heart of much of the critical empiricism which I imbibed in Oxford as a student.
What Berlin was imbibing was the warmed up sick of a pre-Darwinian age. Oxford wasn't where you went if you wanted to become more of a scholar than a gentleman.
At some point I realised that what all these views had in common was a Platonic ideal: in the first place that, as in the sciences, all genuine questions must have one true answer and one only,
Nonsense! By the time Berlin got to Oxford it was widely known that Light was both a particle and a wave. There is no 'naturality' or 'unicity' discoverable by a priori means.
all the rest being necessarily errors; in the second place that there must be a dependable path towards the discovery of these truths;
those paths would take you to 'complementarity'- i.e. the coexistence of two incompossible truths. Light is both a particle and a wave.
in the third place that the true answers, when found, must necessarily be compatible with one another and form a single whole, for one truth cannot be incompatible with another – that we knew a priori.
This might be the case if we knew even one 'atomic proposition'. But no such Punctum Archimedis has been found. There is no Absolute Proof, which is why Godel's proof of God fails. Indeed, it appears there are no 'natural proofs' either.
This kind of omniscience was the solution of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle.
This is Laplacian. But it wasn't compatible with the second law of Thermodynamics and was dead in the water by the early Nineteenth century. After all, there was money to be made out of steam engines and thus Thermodynamics was bound to take off whereas philosophy was bound to get confined to the more useless branches of the Academy.
In the case of morals, we could then conceive what the perfect life must be, founded as it would be on a correct understanding of the rules that governed the universe.
Sadly, those rules are Darwinian. Only the fitness landscape matters. What doesn't matter is having an optimal strategy. It is enough to survive. But without 'optimality' there can be no 'naturality'. There is only arbitrariness.
True, we might never get to this condition of perfect knowledge – we may be too feeble-witted, or too weak or corrupt or sinful, to achieve this. The obstacles, both intellectual and those of external nature, may be too many. Moreover, opinions, as I say, had widely differed about the right path to pursue – some found it in Churches, some in laboratories; some believed in intuition, others in experiment, or in mystical visions, or in mathematical calculation. But even if we could not ourselves reach these true answers, or indeed, the final system that interweaves them all, the answers must exist – else the questions were not real.
Questions are real enough- e.g. where is the toilet? Their answers are solutions to coordination or discoordination games. If everybody pisses on a particular tree, that is where you should relieve yourself. On the other hand, if it is de rigueur to shit on the boss's desk, you should follow best practice.
The answers must be known to someone: perhaps Adam in Paradise knew; perhaps we shall only reach them at the end of days; if men cannot know them, perhaps the angels know; and if not the angels, then God knows. The timeless truths must in principle be knowable.
Some were- e.g. 'eating your own shit will make you ill. Don't do it.'
Some nineteenth-century thinkers – Hegel, Marx – thought it was not quite so simple.
Eat your own shit.
There were no timeless truths. There was historical development, continuous change; human horizons altered with each new step in the evolutionary ladder; history was a drama with many acts; it was moved by conflicts of forces, sometimes called dialectical, in the realms of both ideas and reality – conflicts which took the form of wars, revolutions, violent upheavals of nations, classes, cultures, movements. Yet after inevitable setbacks, failures, relapses, returns to barbarism, Condorcet’s dream would come true. The drama would have a happy ending – man’s reason had achieved triumphs in the past, it could not be held back for ever.
Newton knew that all life could be wiped out by a comet or an asteroid. Pedants and polemicists may not have grasped this.
Men would no longer be victims of nature or of their own largely irrational societies: reason would triumph; universal harmonious co-operation, true history, would at last begin.
Shit would be eaten and thus Man would have freed himself from the arduous business of harvesting crops and catching fish or butchering sheep.
(The views of Vico and Herder could be) called cultural or moral relativism – this is what that great scholar, my friend Arnaldo Momigliano, whom I greatly admired, supposed both about Vico and about Herder. He was mistaken. It is not relativism. Members of one culture can, by the force of imaginative insight, understand (what Vico called entrare) the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time or space.
Could they interact with people there? If not, they hadn't entered shit. They are in the same position as Rousseau who had entered many beautiful women while wanking.
They may find these values unacceptable, but if they open their minds sufficiently they can grasp how one might be a full human being, with whom one could communicate, and at the same time live in the light of values widely different from one’s own, but which nevertheless one can see to be values, ends of life, by the realisation of which men could be fulfilled.
I am, at this moment, cuddling the baby I fathered upon a young super-model. I find this very fulfilling till I get the bill for nappies. I give up the imaginary baby and focus on my imaginary career as the Pharoah of Egypt.
‘I prefer coffee, you prefer champagne. We have different tastes. There is no more to be said.’ That is relativism.
No it isn't. More can always be said. You prefer champagne till the market crashes and you say 'actually, I prefer the gruel I get from the soup kitchen. Champagne made me gassy.'
But Herder’s view, and Vico’s, is not that: it is what I should describe as pluralism –
Amartya Sen champions this view. How could it not be shite?
that is, the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathising with and deriving light from each other, as we derive it from reading Plato or the novels of medieval Japan – worlds, outlooks, very remote from our own.
Nonsense! A guy who is deriving light from Plato or Genji when he should be fixing your toilet is a guy who won't get paid. His wife will leave him. He will take to drink and end up a hobo. That isn't a rational plan of life.
Of course, if we did not have any values in common with these distant figures, each civilisation would be enclosed in its own impenetrable bubble, and we could not understand them at all; this is what Spengler’s typology amounts to.
We don't understand our own civilization. Why is Trump POTUS? How the fuck did that happen? If I could explain this, I could also predict what Trump will do and thus make a fortune as a speculator on the Forex market.
Intercommunication between cultures in time and space is possible only
if those cultures leave behind books or other artefacts which can be deciphered later on. The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu has offered ten million dollars to anyone who can decipher the Indus Valley script. Till that is done, we can't be sure what language was spoken there. Hopefully, it will be Tamil. Stalin will look a fool if it turns out to be Sanskrit.
because what makes men human is common to them, and acts as a bridge between them. But our values are ours, and theirs are theirs. We are free to criticise the values of other cultures, to condemn them, but we cannot pretend not to understand them at all, or to regard them simply as subjective, the products of creatures in different circumstances with different tastes from our own, which do not speak to us at all.
We can pretend anything we like. The plain fact is, Vico and Herder and Spengler and so forth knew much less about various ancient civilizations than we do now.
There is a world of objective values.
Which arise where there is an inter-subjective optimization problem. That's what yields naturality and unicity etc. Sadly, it appears that, in the realm of the Social Sciences, they are far to seek.
By this I mean those ends that men pursue for their own sakes, to which other things are means.
We don't know what are ends and what are means. There is no Momus window into the soul. It is likely that 'socio-biology', as encoded by the Price equation, has a bigger role than we can guess. The artist pursuing the ideal may just be a vehicle for the transmission of genes. The same is true of the Revolutionary who seeks to usher in an age of absolute Equality. Three generations later, what we find is a hereditary 'nomenklatura' or, as in China, 'Princelings' (太子党) descended from senior Communist Party officials.
I am not blind to what the Greeks valued – their values may not be mine, but I can grasp what it would be like to live by their light,
It would involve knowing how to row a galley and stab the enemy with a short sword.
I can admire and respect them, and even imagine myself as pursuing them, although I do not – and do not wish to, and perhaps could not if I wished.
Berlin would have done well as a Sophist. He was erudite, charming and gentlemanly.
Forms of life differ. Ends, moral principles, are many. But not infinitely many: they must be within the human horizon. If they are not, then they are outside the human sphere.
We don't know what is within the 'human sphere'. A lot of higher math looked wholly useless till not so long ago. But stuff which appeared useful- e.g. the mathematical economics of Kantorovich- is now known to be no good to either man or beast.
If I find men who worship trees, not because they are symbols of fertility or because they are divine, with a mysterious life and powers of their own, or because this grove is sacred to Athena – but only because they are made of wood; and if when I ask them why they worship wood they say ‘Because it is wood’ and give no other answer; then I do not know what they mean.
You would understand them well enough if they said 'we are hylozoists and follow the teachings of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Moreover, we have acquired the timber monopoly through our alliance with the Druids of Britain and the Skalds of the Baltic. You can become a member of our cult by paying ten thousand drachmae.'
If they are human, they are not beings with whom I can communicate – there is a real barrier. They are not human for me. I cannot even call their values subjective if I cannot conceive what it would be like to pursue such a life.
Initially, perhaps. But if you find out that the members of this cult are making a lot of money, you will change your mind. I recall meeting some fat, prosperous, men dressed in female garb in Bihar. Were they 'transgender'? No. They were 'Sadha Suhagins'- eternal brides of the Lord- a Vaishnava sect who had cornered the wholesale grain trade in that Province. Wearing female garb was a 'costly signal' giving rise to a 'separating equilibrium' such that there were more 'high trust' transactions within the sect.
What is clear is that values can clash – that is why civilisations are incompatible.
They aren't. The Brits in India were presiding over Islamic and Hindu and Buddhist civilizations even in directly administered areas.
Values may easily clash within the breast of a single individual; and it does not follow that, if they do, some must be true and others false.
One is more 'eligible' than any other for the purpose of making a particular decision.
Justice, rigorous justice, is for some people an absolute value,
or so they pretend. Why believe them? People say all sorts of crazy shit.
but it is not compatible with what may be no less ultimate values for them – mercy, compassion – as arises in concrete cases.
Yet, what they ultimately value is breathing and eating and shitting and pissing. It is not necessary to pursue these ideals. Just stay still and they will overtake you soon enough.
Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings through many centuries;
Nonsense! They are mere slogans.
but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs,
Nope. Shepherds kill wolves. Also their pelts may be worth something. But the 'Stationary Bandit' may impose a tax on shepherds.
total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.
There is no such right because there is no corresponding obligation under a bond of law. My existence is very indecent indeed but nobody can do anything about it.
An artist, in order to create a masterpiece, may lead a life which plunges his family into misery and squalor to which he is indifferent.
His family is welcome to abandon him.
We may condemn him and declare that the masterpiece should be sacrificed to human needs, or we may take his side – but both attitudes embody values which for some men or women are ultimate, and which are intelligible to us all if we have any sympathy or imagination or understanding of human beings.
We don't think we have a right to stop a bad husband being a bad husband. We may fund courts of law which make him pay alimony and child care but if the fellow is a pauper there is little more we can do.
Equality may demand the restraint of the liberty of those who wish to dominate; liberty – without some modicum of which there is no choice and therefore no possibility of remaining human as we understand the word
Rubbish! Guys in prison are still human.
– may have to be curtailed in order to make room for social welfare, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to leave room for the liberty of others, to allow justice or fairness to be exercised.
Sadly, the reverse is more likely. Curtail economic liberty and the talented and the productive may flee the jurisdiction.
Antigone is faced with a dilemma
No. Antigone is merely a fictional character who is depicted as facing a silly dilemma because Creon had shit for brains. Why give the crown along with your sister to some stranger- who turns out to be that sister's child and also a parricide? At a later point, why does this cretin bring Antigone back to Thebes? In the end, this destroys his own family.
to which Sophocles implied one solution,
a tragic one because the dude was into tragedy. Euripides gives a happy solution.
Sartre offers the opposite,
He offers nonsense. Antigone is stubborn like her Dad. She asserts herself, purely for reasons of family pride rather than some existential commitment to freedom, and thus becomes instrumental in destroying Creon's family.
while Hegel proposes ‘sublimation’ on to some higher level – poor comfort to those who are agonised by dilemmas of this kind.
Nobody has ever been 'agonized' by anything so stupid. Women, even in ancient Greece, weren't undertakers.
Spontaneity, a marvellous human quality, is not compatible with capacity for organised planning,
Nonsense! Britain was kept safe by sailors of the Senior Service who were meticulous planners with a great gift for spontaneity so as to baffle the plots of the enemy. Look at Lord Mountbatten. Atlee sent him to India with clear orders to get the fuck out. He gets through the files in double quick time (as Maulana Azad grudgingly admits) delivers Independence in six months and then is asked to stay on by Nehru! Why? He wasn't just a great organizer. He understood 'kairos'- timeliness- and when to act spontaneously so as to secure the trust and friendship of Britain's greatest adversary in the region. He remained a close advisor of Nehru till the latter died in 1964. Berlin, it seems, didn't understand the country to which he came as a refugee. It wasn't run by Oxford Dons. It was protected by Jolly Jack Tar. As for who ran it, nobody could be sure. That's why it was impossible to defeat.
for the nice calculation of what and how much and where – on which the welfare of society may largely depend. We are all aware of the agonising alternatives in the recent past. Should a man resist a monstrous tyranny at all costs, at the expense of the lives of his parents or his children?
Gather up your family and get the fuck out. It's what Berlin's family had done.
Should children be tortured to extract information about dangerous traitors or criminals?
Just give them some sweeties and encourage them to babble away to each other. You'll get actionable evidence that way. If you torture a kid, he will soon identify Santa Claus as the head of the League of Assassins.
These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are.
No. These are exceptional situations which smart peeps will have been beforehand in running the fuck away from.
If we are told that these contradictions will be solved in some perfect world in which all good things can be harmonised in principle, then we must answer, to those who say this, that the meanings they attach to the names which for us denote the conflicting values are not ours.
In other words, there is an 'intensional fallacy' at the bottom of this misology.
We must say
nothing unless paid to do so.
that the world in which what we see as incompatible values are not in conflict is a world altogether beyond our ken;
This is false. We know that eating your cake is incompatible with having it. This has been within our ken since about the age of three. I recall going to a birthday party, at age 5, in the house of a Japanese development economist. He sternly warned us that we could either have cake or else some sticky Japanese confection. I chose the Japanese sweet which was nice enough. Then the economist's wife pushed him to one side and gave us large helpings of cake. This disappointed me. Kids become attached to rules at an early age. They don't like to see them broken.
that principles which are harmonised in this other world are not the principles with which, in our daily lives, we are acquainted; if they are transformed, it is into conceptions not known to us on earth.
but they are known to us if we visit nearby planets.
But it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.
Till we get to Mars.
The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution, in which all good things coexist, seems to me to be not merely unattainable – that is a truism – but conceptually incoherent;
Nonsense! Most people think their Mummies or, later on, their Wives or Babies are 'perfect wholes' and 'ultimate solutions' because, in them, all good things coexist. Moreover, they are attainable through kissing, cuddling and making cooing noises.
I do not know what is meant by a harmony of this kind. Some among the Great Goods cannot live together.
Only if you keep telling them so. My mother-in-law certainly thought her daughter could do better for herself.
That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.
Equally, that loss may be seen as a gain. Having this baby rather than that baby is wonderful because our baby is the bestest. That other baby is clearly going to grow up to be a jail-bird.
Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question,
They are happier if they question and improve that discipline. This is what happens in STEM subjects
who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal,
or scientific or mathematical. When Terence Tao points out a mistake in a mathematical proof, the mathematician is grateful to him. The alternative is to fall out of mathematics into some type of masturbation.
whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law;
the essence of the law is defeasibility as HLA Hart kept saying.
or those who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt.
I accept that I am a fat, elderly, very poor and stupid man. This conviction of mine brooks no possible doubt. Am I happy? Happy enough. Things could have been worse. I could have been an Iyengar.
I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of selfinduced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human.
If you really understand what it is to be human you could create an exact simulacrum of human life.
So much for the theoretical objection, a fatal one, it seems to me, to the notion of the perfect State as the proper goal of our endeavours.
Is the American Constitution wrong to seek a 'more perfect union'? Not in the opinion of Berlin's own people who sought refuge there and did very well.
But on the other hand, the search for perfection does seem to me a recipe for bloodshed, no better even if it is demanded by the sincerest of idealists, the purest of heart.
Thus, it is wrong to seek to prepare the perfect pancake. Your kids are bound to start knifing each other if you do so.
No more rigorous moralist than Immanuel Kant has ever lived,
He was a pedant from a backward part of Europe. He had no conception of how liberal institutions work.
but even he said, in a moment of illumination, ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’
Yet, my dining table is straight enough though it was made out of crooked timber. Also, my Bank and my Insurance Company are straight enough in their dealings even though they are staffed by imperfect mortals. Mechanism Design- a type of reverse game theory- is welcome to aim at optimality.
To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity.
Mummy used to force me into a neat uniform. She had a dogmatic belief in the value of my going to School. She was totes inhuman!
We can do only what we can:
What Berlin was doing was useless. He could have done something less useless.
but that we must do, against difficulties. Of course social or political collisions will take place; the mere conflict of positive values alone makes this unavoidable.
People kept colliding with Berlin in the faculty lounge. But this wasn't unavoidable at all. By smearing himself with shit, Berlin could have ensured that his colleagues gave him a wide berth.
Yet they can, I believe, be minimised by promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair – that alone, I repeat, is the precondition for decent societies and morally acceptable behaviour, otherwise we are bound to lose our way.
Why not promote an easy equilibrium- such as that established by the market? That's how 'decent societies' become more productive and nicer for those who live in them.
A little dull as a solution, you will say? Not the stuff of which calls to heroic action by inspired leaders are made? Yet if there is some truth in this view, perhaps that is sufficient. An eminent American philosopher of our day once said that there is no a priori reason for supposing that the truth, when it is discovered, will necessarily prove interesting.
Yes there is. Discovering the truth costs money. That money won't be spent unless the truth which is sought for is utile- i.e. can pay for itself. True, a layman might not find the latest discoveries in Chemistry to be 'interesting'. But venture capitalists find it highly interesting as may the Defence Department.
It may be enough if it is truth, or even an approximation to it; consequently I do not feel apologetic for advancing this.
Because being a pedant, teaching useless shite, means never having to say you are sorry.
Truth, said Tolstoy, ‘has been, is and will be beautiful’.
If you cavil at sickness, God won't grant you death. That may not be true, but it is a beautiful sentiment.
I do not know if this is so in the realm of ethics,
let ethics concentrate on improving the ethos of those who profess it. That way they will remain silent and spare us a mischievous nuisance.
but it seems to me near enough to what most of us wish to believe not to be too lightly set aside.
Most of us wish to believe that our dicks are above average in size. Sadly, our womenfolk set them aside lightly enough. Still, if they present us with a bouncing baby, we discover that what we really value is not a ginormous dick, but a son and heir who, admittedly, will soon discover we are as thick as shit and no fun at all.
Still, values are epistemic, impredicative and 'intensional'. The true 'extension' of seemingly conflicting values may well be, at the 'end of mathematical time', a single 'slingshot'. In other words, there may be only one single imperative underlying everything else. Indeed, at that point, Hume's fork disappears. That which is alethic is also imperative. Thankfully, the Universe would have ended long before this can be algorithmically proven to be the case.
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