Book Launch at QUB

Thomas Aquinas: Teacher and Scholar
Order this book online via: www.fourcourtspress.ie

The School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast have pleasure in inviting you to the launch of Thomas Aquinas: Teacher and Scholar edited by James McEvoy, Michael Dunne, and Julia Hynes on Friday 30 March at 6.00 p.m. in the Canada Room, Lanyon Building, Queen’s University Belfast.
RSVP to Julia Hynes: j.m.hynes@qub.ac.uk

This book will be launched by Dr Michael Dunne.

This is a book launch and a memorial event to mark Professor James McEvoy’s academic contribution to Queen’s University Belfast.

Please do not hesitate to contact me should you require any additional information on the book or the launch.

With best wishes,

Anthony Tierney

Buy our books online via www.fourcourtspress.ie

Personhood and After Birth Abortion

In the Journal of Medical Ethics (February, 2012), Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue that given the same moral status or lack thereof between a foetus and a new born baby, the same conditions that would justify the killing of the foetus also justify the killing of the new born ('After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?'). They structure their argument around what they take to be the fact that neither the new born nor the foetus is a person, in which case it is not subject to a moral right to life in which case the rights and interests of actual persons, such as the mother, society etc, ought to take priority. They consider the potentiality objection to the effect that both the foetus and the new born are potential persons and reject it arguing that no harm is done to a potential person by not allowing such an entity to develop into a person. They also reject the adoption objection to the effect that adoption would be a better option than abortion or after birth abortion since they do not believe that it is straightforwardly true that the mental health of the mother would be better in the adoption case than in the abortion/after birth abortion case; and if in this case the interests of an actual person (the mother) should prevail, then after birth abortion should be a valid alternative to adoption.

I do not wish to engage in-depth with the details and presuppositions of their article. What I would like to do is take the occasion of their paper to explore a position on what it is to be a person. On one account of personhood (an account broad enough to include that of Giubilini and Minerva), to be a person is to have some property or set of properties such that one can potentially but not actually possess them and then, if allowed to develop, actually possess them; in which case one was only potentially a person and then actually so. I want to present an alternative view.

On the alternative view, to be a person is not essentially to have a certain property or set of properties, but it is a distinct state of being, that is to say, a person is a type of thing and thus personhood goes along with being that type of thing. The motivation for the view that being a person is being a type of thing and not having certain person constituting properties is as follows. Properties whilst serving to identify a thing are not identifiable with a thing. Rather, properties are multiply realisable such that different individuals can possess the same properties. But if several different individuals can possess the same properties, then a problem arises with regard to the property based conception of personhood. A person is a unique and non-repeatable individual; there might be many people named Gaven Kerr in the world, but there is only one of me. So whilst there are a lot of people, a person is essentially an individual. But if a person is essentially an individual, then it cannot be constituted by some property or set of properties, since properties are such that they are multiply realisable whereas a person is not. It follows then that the status a thing has as a person is not granted to it on the basis of properties that it has, but on the basis of the thing itself that instantiates those properties. Thus, it is the very individual that is a person, and not the properties that make the individual a person.

Given the latter, to be a person is to be an individual type of thing and not to come to possess a certain property or properties. Now, if being a person grants one a moral status, as Giubilini and Minerva grant, then a thing that is a person has such a status. But contrary to Giubilini and Minerva, a person is not something that becomes over time through the accumulation of certain properties, but is what the thing in question is. This then entails that one is not potentially a person and then actually so, but that one just is a person period, from beginning to end.

On this account of personhood, if one is prepared to recognise that the entity which is 28 years old is the same entity that was 18 years old and is the same entity that was 8 years old and is the same entity that was newborn, and the same entity that was in utero, i.e. in my own case, a self-developing and independent human substance, then given that to be a person is to be a type of thing and given the continuity of identity over all of the aforementioned time spans, a human substance did not first come into being and then a human person, rather a particular self-developing independent substance that is a person came into being, and, qua person, such an entity is subject to a moral right to life.

Friday Question: Aristotle on the Soul

David Mckay, a student in the first-year Human Nature module at Queen's University Belfast, submitted the following Friday Question:

Aristotle’s De Anima

Aristotle’s groundbreaking and influential work on the soul in De Anima (mainly focused on in Book II) fundamentally changed the face of philosophy. However, Aristotle’s views on the soul are, at the very least, controversial. Modern scholars and philosophers cannot even seem to agree on a common understanding of his theories, which have been so widely interpreted that Aristotle has been made to fit into almost every school of thought in the philosophy of mind. Differentiating the true Aristotle from the interpretations is, therefore, extremely difficult, if not impossible.

His thought was nothing if not original, and his systematic approach has left a profound body of work still being interpreted to this day. His work on the soul however, seems to leave a number of unanswered questions and has been subject to harsh criticism.

To explain very briefly, Aristotle seeks to discover the nature of the soul through a teleological analysis, trying to discover the purpose of it, the role it serves. For Aristotle this alone distinguishes an object, with the example he gives (De Anima, Book II, Chapter 1, 412b 10.) being an axe; “Suppose, for example, that an instrument, say an axe, were a natural body, its axiety (i.e. what it would be for it to be an axe) would be its substance, would in fact be its soul.”

This thought was motivated in Aristotle by a division which runs through the core of Aristotle’s work. Aristotle differentiates between potentiality (matter) and actuality (form). Think of a sculpture, the potentiality is the stone which when formed/sculpted becomes a statue and is actualised or realises its actuality. For something to exist therefore it requires both potentiality/matter and actuality/form. Human beings are no different, the body is the matter to which the soul animates and forms what it is to be a living human.

Finally, (for the purposes of this entry) the big question, what is the purpose of the soul? What makes a soul a soul if you will? Living and perceiving, the latter can be done by all living beings by the base sense (sense-organ), touch. What is it to be distinctly human? To engage in thought and communication- which Aristotle believed to be innately and exclusively human.

In this brief summary, there are two questionable areas which I wish to challenge- (i) the basis of his teleological understanding, (ii) his reliance on perception.

Aristotle’s entire investigation relies upon teleology. Can we really understand human nature simply by the functions and capacities of the soul which is inseparable from the body? If an axe cannot cut, is it still an axe? Does the same apply for humans, if a human cannot think or communicate is he not a human? This appears a very narrow scope of human activity, being human involves a lot more than simply thinking, or maybe a lot less.

My major concern is can we really understand human nature or even the “thing-in-itself” solely by the external activities of the thing? Once an axe goes unused, it slips back into potentiality- it has the potential to cut, until it is used this potential is not realised. But Descartes took the opposite approach, for Descartes (something never considered by Aristotle) we can only discover human nature and the soul by ignoring the potentially deceptive sense perceptions of the external world, and (to quote Confucius) “turn(ing) your gaze within.” Which approach is more meritorious?

This overreliance on a vulgar conception of perception has led to G.R.T Ross condemning Aristotle as promoting “what looks like the crudest materialism.” Ultimately, without perception a thing cannot be alive. However, in an issue increasingly prevalent in modern philosophy of mind, how do we know other human beings think or perceive as we do (or as I exclusively do)? How do we know that an animal’s sense of touch (the base perception) is the same as our own?

Has Aristotle pandered to ‘common-sense’, making assumptions which leave noticeable gaps? Fundamentally for Aristotle, the soul is nothing more than a categorising terminology, without the body or individual it does not exist. Do we, therefore, lose all sense of what we mean when we say ‘I’? Can ‘I’ exist separate from the bodily form, free from purpose? For Aristotle, clearly not.

Violence and disparity: two challenges for non-patterned principles of justice and libertarian capitalism

The following is a post by Mikael Kristiansen who is the serving treasurer for the QUB Philosophy Society and a 2nd year undergraduate studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics:

Consider a society with a widely disproportionate distribution of wealth, where only a small percentage of people, or even a single person, owns property, and the rest subsist solely on wages from selling their labour.  This state of affairs, depending on your situation and interpretation of the actual world economy, may sound somewhat familiar.  In what sense can this pattern of distribution of goods be called just, and what remedial measures, if any, should be taken?  Some theories are understood to predicate the answers to these questions on a distribution meeting some sort of social goal or its conformity to an ideal pattern of holdings.  In contrast, a right-libertarian theory of justice characteristically holds that a distribution of goods in a society is just inasmuch as it is the result of free exchanges, regardless of the pattern of actual holdings.  As a result, these so-called non-patterned theories are concerned with procedural aspects of property accumulation as relevant to justice. This, according to Robert Nozick, is made clear via an analogy to logical inference:  ‘As correct rules of inference are truth-preserving, and any conclusion deduced via repeated application of such rules from only true premises is itself true, so the means of transition from one situation to another specified by the principle of justice in transfer are justice-preserving...’ (1977, p. 151).  Rival theories that make reference to social goals (e.g egalitarianism and utilitarianism) are charged with an error comparable to manipulating an argument to reach a favoured conclusion and, perhaps more heinously, unjustifiably forcing individuals to become resources for others (i.e. by forcibly redistributing the fruit of their labour or their entitled property, etc.).  Thus, a free market in capital and labour is characteristically prescribed.

Two challenges are outlined below that have been touched upon by Will Kymlicka and Jeffrey Reiman.  These are directed at Robert Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice, which is of course not the only right-libertarian theory of justice, but it is perhaps the most well-known, so it serves well as a starting point for discussion and consideration. How other theories may fare with these puzzles will hopefully be brought forth by commentators to this article.

Some Musings on Wisdom and the New Evil Demon Problem

Imagine that a team of extraordinarily gifted scientists can do the following bizarre thing: they can (through the powers of, say, “lasers”) duplicate your body (including brain), atom from atom, and cause it to appear—a perfect intrinsic duplicate of your right now—in a parallel universe. Call your duplicate in the parallel universe “You2.” Suppose further that You2 is not only your physical duplicate but also your psychological duplicate, and suppose further that the parallel universe looks to You2 just like ours does to you, and in fact, everything there is perceptually indistinguishable from how things seem to you here. There is just one catch: everything in the parallel universe is an illusion, created by the gifted scientists’ cohort, an equally gifted malicious demon, who feeds your psychological duplicate with images of all the same things you see in the actual world, only for your duplicate, these are all mirages. The situation I am describing here is used in various guises by contemporary epistemologists under the heading of the “New Evil Demon” problem. This thought experiment has typically been employed as a way of committing reliabilists about epistemic justification to an absurd consequence. Reliabilists about justification claim that a belief p is epistemically justified for S just in case p is produced by a reliable belief forming process of S. A belief forming process is reliable just in case it typically produces true beliefs and avoids error. To see how the gist of the New Evil Demon argument against reliabilism (about justification) goes: Suppose you are looking at a goldfinch, and your psychological duplicate, You2, is having an indistinguishable experience , though for You2, it is a goldfinch-mirage. Plausibly, as the line goes, if you are perceptually justified in believing “There is a goldfinch,” your psychological duplicate is also justified in believing “There is a goldfinch” when looking at the goldfinch-mirage, given that you and your duplicate are psychologically identical and form the belief “There is a goldfinch” on the basis of perceptually indistinguishable experiences. According to reliabilism, though, only you are justified; your counterpart You2 did not form the belief via a reliable belief-forming process; this is because all of You2’s belief forming processes are (unlike your own) maximally unreliable. Although reliabilists have used different strategies to try to show that this thought experiment isn’t ultimately problematic for their position, most all reliabilists are at least in agreement that You2 does not have a reliably produced belief. I want to abstract a bit from the scenario as one that threatens reliabilism about justification and consider that You2 fails to have any factive state; all of You2’s beliefs are false. You2, of course, fails to have any knowledge; knowledge is factive; one knows p just in case p is true. Also plausibly (though perhaps a bit more controversially), You2 fails to have any understanding. We think that understanding is factive in a way that is slightly different from how knowledge is factive. Whereas the object of (propositional) knowledge is a proposition (that must be true for the agent to know it), the object of one interesting sort of understanding—objectual understanding—is rather than a proposition, a subject matter. For example, following Kvanvig’s example, “The Comanche’s dominance of the North American plains between the 17^th and 19^th centuries”. Understanding a subject matter requires (plausibly) that one grasp the explanatory relationships between a range of true propositions one believes about a subject matter. (After all, I fail to understand the Comanche’s dominance of the North American plains if all or most of the propositions I believe on the matter are false).  While “You” understand the Comanche dominance, let’s say that You2, in virtue of failing the factive requirement of understanding, merely has an “intelligibile picture” (or something weaker than understanding), which involves a grasping of explanatory relations between a coherent set of believed propositions, which turn out to be false. If this is right, you understand the Comanche dominance of the North American plains between the 17^th and 19^th centuries, but your intrinsic duplicate doesn’t. After this rather long set-up, I have now made my way to the actual question I want to ask: presumably, like understanding, wisdom is a cognitive achievement that has at least some factive element. I’ll capture this idea as uncontroversially as I can: an individual cannot achieve wisdom without at least some correct beliefs. If this factive element of wisdom is right, then we should expect that the New Evil Demon scenario will be one in which your recently created counterpart (You2) in the demon world would fail to be wise. After all, You2 has all false beliefs, courtesy of the demon. However, this seems somehow wrong: it seems that anyone who is a psychological duplicate of someone who is wise is also wise. Take, for instance, Aristotle or Gandolf, or whomever you revere as a bastion of wisdom. Now suppose the scientists create an intrinsic duplicate (that is also a psychological duplicate) of Aristotle and Gandolf and put them in a demon-world, where their beliefs about the world are all false. Aristotle2 and Gandolf2 inherit the wisdom of Aristotle1 and Gandolf1, don’t they? If you think they do, then how can this much be reconciled with the plausible thought that wisdom is (in some sense) factive and the demon strips Aristotle2 and Gandolf2 of any facts to correspond with their beliefs about the world.  I have a few ideas about what to say at this point, but will stop for now and encourage readers to weigh in. 

Friday Question: Morality and Government

Keir Anderson is a student in the QUB first-year Human Nature module (PHL1002). He submitted the following Friday Question after reflecting on the analogy between a soul and a city-state in Plato's Republic:

In Plato’s dialogue Republic, he compares the human soul to the government of an idealized city, noting parallels between the two. In discussing this perfect city, he touches on the parallel concepts of morality. In light of current political controversies, this raises an interesting point: is there any moral code by which governments should abide? Naturally they must be bound by some sort of preconditions, a constitution or the like. Ideally, some set of ideals would be written into this, but what about issues that aren’t addressed therein?

For example, President George W. Bush has been verbally slaughtered for his role in waging the war in Iraq. The argument could be made for a “just war,” liberating the Iraqi people from a dictator. A different argument could be made about unjustly forcing Western political ideals upon an unwilling population. This sort of controversy seems to imply that, being unable to agree on a moral standard for the war, the United States should leave such things up to the voters, allowing them to use their personal moralities in conglomerate.

Perhaps more pertinent to the citizens of a nation is the domestic policies of its government. The question of administrative morality, while easily ignored in foreign matters, becomes harder to ignore closer to home; the more personal it becomes, the more relevant. One of the favorite cases in the United States, for example, is the issue of healthcare. Naturally, most people can agree that it is good for individuals to have access to modern medical services. However, the question never fails to arise: is it the moral responsibility of the government to provide for this? In this case, one would be more likely to say that, as an entity whose responsibility is to provide for the welfare of its people, the government should certainly offer this service.

Clearly government has some necessary responsibility toward its citizens, namely, to carry out the terms under which the government exists. In addition, there is also a certain requirement to keep up civil foreign relations, if only for the purpose of self-preservation. On the one hand, it seems logical to allow controversial issues to be decided by popular vote, rather than by a set moral code. After all, who would be responsible for determining such a thing? But on the other, popular opinion changes with spatiotemporal location, so it can’t adhere to any absolute morality. Should governments be held to their own moral code? And if so, how is that code determined?

Thinking about Nature

The following is a post by David Knowles who is the serving vice-president of the philosophy society and a post-graduate student in the school:

Philosophical reflection on environmental issues generally tends to focus on environmental ethics and the clarification of relevant concepts such as sustainability. What is relatively neglected is a philosophical account of nature. In response to the current ecological crisis what is required is a philosophy of nature that is both scientific (paying particular attention to the science of ecology) and ethical (in so far as ecological degradation is an ethical issue, requiring an ethical solution). The French philosopher Deleuze once remarked in an interview that he and Guattari (hereafter D&G) would like to “produce a sort of philosophy of Nature, now that any distinction between nature and artifice is becoming blurred.”[1]  In this short post I shall argue that D&G‘s work does in fact contain a nascent philosophy of nature which can be grounded in Deleuzian ethics.

Often nature is considered to be an untamed wilderness that exists in an antagonistic relationship to civilisation or ‘man.’ Nature is also often held to be a place of beauty that is perhaps ‘revelatory’ in the sense that it discloses beauty or truth and forms subjects (for example, people are encouraged to go on ‘nature trips’ in order to ‘find themselves’). In each of these cases there is a bifurcation between humanity and nature. These views can be seen in pop-cultural expressions of eco-apocalypse, such as Wall-E, The Day After Tomorrow and The Road and in films which depict ‘nature’ as that which provides authenticity and truth (most famously in Avatar). In the second case (the view of nature as friend) nature is instrumentalised relative to humanity (i.e. nature is seen as that which gifts experiences or materials to humanity. Thus nature is that which is at the service of humanity rather than a limiting or encroaching force, as in the previous case).

In contrast to this nature-human dichotomy D&G write that:  “[W]e make no distinction between man and nature.”[2] The removal of the human-nature distinction acknowledges that humans are actors within ecosystems, rather than a unique species which stands above nature (to extract resources or truth from nature). This then means that nature cannot be conceived as that which existed prior to or apart from human influence. This raises questions for the issues of conservation and ecological restoration.