Personal Formation and Utilitarianism in the Trolley Problem

So, what follows here is my writing sample for grad school applications.  It mostly speaks for itself, but I'm very proud of it and I thought that some of y'all might want to read it.  Also, I don't feel like really writing a post today, so this is what you get.  I hope you like it,

-J.R.M.C.


Since its introduction by Philipa Foote in 1978, the Trolley Problem has remained a staple in discussions of consequentialist and deontological ethical theories.  In its most basic form, the problem asks whether it is better to allow the death of five persons or to cause the death of a single person.#  Normally, the dilemma is presented to illustrate the quintessential difference between Utilitarian ethics and other ethical systems which evaluate certain actions as intrinsically wrong or right, regardless of their outcome.  The traditional candidate for the latter is usually some form Kantian Deontological ethics or Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, both of which tend to evaluate as essentially wrong the choice to sacrifice one person in order to save five others.  In contrast, some form of Mill’s Utilitarianism is usually postulated as the opposing response, which evaluates the termination and subsequent loss of one life as quantitatively better than the loss of five lives.  This stark contradiction between the Utilitarian and Deontological answers has been historically important in seeking an answer to the Trolley Problem, but it is nonetheless possible to reach both conclusions (to allow the death of five persons or to cause the death of one,) within Utilitarian theory.  It is possible, if standard Utilitarian theory is modified with some of the insights of Aristotle’s virtue ethics, to justify both decisions in a strictly Utilitarian calculation.  This paper will seek to prove that when the formative results of an action on the agent of that action are factored into a Utilitarian calculation of the Trolley problem as actual consequences thereof, it is possible that some individuals would be justified in choosing to not redirect the trolley.
Of course, one can hardly help but ask why this project is necessary.  To the casual observer, the somewhat obvious question is whether any modification to Utilitarian theory is necessary and, if so, why it is.  The primary justification for modifying the system is that recent psychological research suggests that very few, if any, persons actually consider the consequential or deontological aspects of a decision separately.  Rather, individuals tend to make hybrid considerations of both consequential utility and intrinsic wrongness or rightness.#  In short, there is a tendency within most persons studied to combine Utilitarian criteria and intrinsic criteria.  This being the case, it seems natural that ethical theory might develop to better suit what psychologists understand as normative patterns of thought.
Nonetheless, before exploring modifications to Utilitarianism, it will be necessary to reaffirm the basic presuppositions of Mill’s Utilitarian theory.  Its central assertion is “...that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”#  In other words, the central determining factor of an action’s moral rightness or wrongness is the tendency of that action to create happiness or pain.  An important distinction between what is more properly called hedonism and Mill’s full Utilitarianism is that, for Mill, pleasure is both greater and more valuable as it pertains to a higher nature.#  Thus, while a delicious meal is certainly pleasurable and good, it is significantly less valuable in a Utilitarian calculation than a pleasure of a higher order, like enjoying a conversation.  

Another principle of Mill’s Utilitarianism which will be important to its modification herein is his conception of sacrificial virtue.  Mill contends that virtue for virtue’s sake is worthless, and tends too much after “the ascetic mounted on his pillar.”#  However, in his consideration, virtue as a human quality is valuable inasmuch as humans that are virtuous tend to create more happiness than individuals who are not virtuous.#  Thereby, Mill claims that while virtue is not in and of itself valuable, persons who practice the virtues are valuable because by their practice of virtue they tend to create more happiness.  It is not, then, too much to say that actions may be moral within the Utilitarian calculation both because they create happiness and because they create an individual who is capable of creating more happiness.  To give an example, a man who cooks a meal for his sick neighbor accomplishes three separate aims.  First, he relieves his sick neighbor from the toil of preparing a dinner while sick.  Second, he himself is likely to receive the pleasure that often accompanies the assistance of a fellow in need.  These first two ends are standard within most Utilitarian calculations.  However, the consequences of his actions reach even further.  A third and less obvious benefit to both the man himself and society at large is that by cooking dinner for a sick neighbor, the man in question becomes a more generous person.  By acting in a certain way, we become more and more the kind of person who acts in a certain way.  If today I make dinner for my sick neighbor, I take a single step towards forming habits of generosity that will create more happiness than acting otherwise would do.  It may furthermore be said that this habit-forming aspect of virtuous actions places them in a qualitatively higher sphere of pleasurable experiences than most other experiences because it pertains to a higher nature than most other actions.  

There is potential for justifying this classification within Mill himself.  As Marcus G. Singer points out in his article, “Actual Consequence Utilitarianism”, both Bentham and Mill utilize the language of tendency in their evaluation of moral right and moral wrong.#  It is crucial, in reading Mill’s primary assertion to realize that the word tend indicates both a prospective focus on an action’s rightness and a generalized quality to the nature of that prediction.  Something is right inasmuch as doing that particular action or other actions like it has a general tendency to produce more happiness.
Happiness, as stated earlier, tends to be produced by the actions of virtuous individuals.  Thus, actions in any context may be justified if the virtue practiced in an action is likely to create more happiness in the world than the omission of that virtue is.  Therefore, in the earlier case of cooking dinner for a sick friend, the action is justified so long as the actual benefits to both parties along with the formational prospects of the action outweigh any negative effects of the decision such as a strain on one’s finances or leisure.  Similarly, the negative habituation against the virtues which occurs from the omission of a virtuous action or the commission of a morally wrong act must be factored in.  Therefore, if one chooses to refrain from preparing dinner for his or her sick neighbor, that action can only be considered ethical so long as the pleasure gained from the independent use of that time outweighs both the neighbor’s experiences and the fact that the agent is now, even in the slightest way, a more selfish and less virtuous person.
This notion is supported by Aristotle’s habituation principle, found in his Nicomachean Ethics.  Aristotle writes:

...by doing things in our interactions with human beings, some of us become just, others unjust; and by doing things in terrifying circumstances and by being habituated to feel fear or confidence, some of us become courageous, others cowards.  The case is similar as regards desires and bouts of anger.  For some people become moderate and gentle, others licentious and irascible, the former as a result of conducting themselves in the one way, the latter as a result of do so in the other.  And so, in a word, the characteristics come into being as a result of the activities akin to them.#

In other words, we accomplish the virtues and become more virtuous kinds of people by nothing more or less than practicing the virtues.  As any particular man does more and more courageous things, he becomes more courageous, and the same is true both for any of the virtues and for any of the vices.

Furthermore, as M.F. Burnyeat states in his essay, “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good”, for Aristotle the practice of virtue is both good in and of itself and because it is the means by which one may come to know and better understand the virtues.#  For Aristotle, good ethics and moral behavior are necessary before we can even begin to comprehend what the ultimate good is, but they are also the primary path to the ultimate good itself.  There is then a certain sense in which virtuous behavior is a kind of positive feedback loop: the more virtuous one is in his or her choices, that individual becomes more and more likely to behave virtuously and to grasp the ultimate good in all of her choices.  The inverse of this is also true, that as an individual neglects the development of his or her moral fiber, that individual becomes more and more likely to make vicious decisions.

These considerations being taken into account, it is necessary that as one goes about making a Utilitarian calculation, one considers both the direct effects of a decision, (the pleasure or pain created directly by the act) and the formative consequences of that act on its agent.  If this consideration is neglected, the single most important consequence of most human actions is avoided, since most human actions only directly affect a small number of persons.  The only individual consistently affected by every decision that an individual makes is that individual herself.  Therefore, to avoid the formative consequences of an act while considering its experiential consequences is ultimately both inconsiderate to the agent in question and an irresponsible neglect of the basic principles of habituation.  This principle is reiterated in John Dewey’s essay, “The Nature of Aims”.  He writes:

Certainly nothing can justify or condemn means except ends, results.  But we have to include consequences impartially.  Even admitting that lying will save a man’s soul, whatever that may mean, it would still be true that lying will have other consequences, namely, the usual consequences that follow from tampering with good faith and that lead lying to be condemned.  It is wilful folly to fasten upon some single end or consequence which is liked, and permit the view of that to blot from perception all other undesired and undesirable consequences.#

This reiterates the underlying sentiment of a formative consideration of Utilitarianism: regardless of an action’s experiential consequences, even if they are of the highest order and greatest amount, it is fundamentally necessary to consider the effect of any action on the character of that individual.

Moving on from these premises, it is necessary to return to the Trolley Problem itself.  The problem, in its most general form, is as follows:  You are within reaching distance of a lever which can change the direction of the trolley tracks directly before you.  If you do not pull the lever, the tracks will continue along path A, whereas if you do pull the lever the tracks will be shifted to path B.  On path A there are five persons, and on path B there is a single person.  You become aware of a trolley, barreling down the tracks at a lethal speed.  If you do not touch the lever, the five people on path A will die but you will have simply allowed their deaths.  In contrast, if you flip the lever, only the person on path B will die, but you will have caused his or her death.  These are the only two options in the dilemma, the consequences are assured and there is no way that all six individuals can be saved.#

As stated earlier, this dilemma normally functions to illustrate the basic principles of Utilitarianism through its general preference for the second option.  Quite simply, most consequentialist estimations of the two prospective outcomes evaluate the loss of five lives as substantially worse than the loss of one life.  However, simply evaluating the direct consequences of flipping the lever and causing one person’s death, namely the saving of five persons over and against the saving of one, is an incomplete evaluation of the problem.  Such a consideration does not give enough regard to the internal state of the individual or to the formative effects that flipping the lever might have on a particular individual.

It may be that some people, especially those who frequently make decisions involving the life or death of large numbers of people, would be justified in choosing to not change the direction of the trolley.  If so, they would be justified because the formative effect that action would have on them as an individual would make them less likely to create pleasure for a large number of people in the future.  Such persons, however few, may include heads of state, military leaders, and executives that oversee large companies.  Essentially, the decision to allow five deaths would be potentially justifiable for any man or woman who must give primary regard to the following of significant rules (i.e. national, international or federal regulations, etc.) in their Utilitarian calculations.  There are quite simply some people who, for the sake of general utility, cannot afford to get in the habit of personally causing even one death.  For these individuals, the sheer potential for harming others which is available to them could justify the allowance of five deaths.  If today the President of the United States is somehow forced into the trolley dilemma, he may be justified in allowing the five people on path A to die because there are fairly reasonable scenarios in which the habits formed by sacrificing the person on path B would be devastating.  An example will serve to explain.

Imagine that there are five U.S. citizens being held prisoner by a terrorist organization.  There is no information on the exact whereabouts of the citizens, and thus military action to accomplish their rescue is impossible.  Image that furthermore, there is a member of the terrorist organization in question in U.S. custody.  This individual knows the whereabouts of the citizens, and normal interrogation methods have failed to extract that information.  For the sake of creating a dilemma, let us say that the President’s choice in this scenario is limited to allowing the death of five citizens or torturing a terrorist to save those five citizens.  In such a situation, the international outcry and the extent to which the sheer rage of many extremist groups would be provoked would likely cause more than five deaths, so allowing the deaths is a better, more Utilitarian option.  However, a president who has decided to sacrifice the person on path B in the trolley problem would likely be more prone to torture the terrorist.  As such, I would propose that a president faced with this theoretical scenario would be fairly justified in choosing to allow the deaths of the five people on path A.

This is not, of course, to say that all or even most people in powerful positions would be justified in the same decision.  As a matter of fact, I think it is fairly clear that most of the time decisions which are often pejoratively labeled Utilitarian for their grim consequences, decisions like sacrificing the person on path B or sacrificing the lives of 100 people so that 1000 might live, are still the only justified decisions.  All I have sought to prove here is that sometimes, for some people in very specific circumstances, allowing the death of five people in the trolley problem may be justified.  It is true that this justification would only be applicable to a very small number of people in a very small number of situations, but such is to be expected of a more pragmatic Utilitarianism.  Brian Ellis predicts as much in his article “Retrospective and Prospective Utilitarianism.”  Therein, Ellis seeks to formulate what a pragmatic, practical Utilitarianism might look like for the common man.  He proposes a kind of loose rule-based Utilitarianism, but importantly he acknowledges that in the formulation of any Utilitarian ethical conception, “...we should not expect to be able to formulate a practical ethical system applicable to all societies at all times.”#  Almost certainly, then, especially considering the particularly personal nature of the factors at play in formational considerations, it is reasonable to expect that two persons may come to completely different justified conclusions in a large number of situations.  It is therefore reasonable that different persons could be specifically obliged to act differently in congruent situations like the Trolley Problem.

In conclusion, one may see with relative ease that for certain individuals, the negative formational results of causing one person’s death may outweigh the positive results of saving the lives of five persons.  If this is the case, then those individuals are justified in choosing to allow the death of five persons, and they are justified in a strictly Utilitarian sense.

Works Cited

Aristotle.  Nicomachean Ethics.  Trans Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011

Burnyeat,‭ ‬M.F.,‭ ‬“Aristotle on Learning to Be Good.‭”‬ Aristotle‭’‬s Ethics:‭ ‬Critical Essays‭ ‬ed.‭ ‬Nancy Sherman.‭  ‬Lanham,‭ ‬Maryland:‭ ‬Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.,‭ ‬1999.‭  ‬Pp.‭ ‬205-230.

Dewey, John, “The Nature of Aims.” Aristotle’s Ethics: Issues and Interpretations ed. James J. Walsh and Henry L. Shapiro.  Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company Inc., 1967.  Pp.  47-55.

Ellis,‭ ‬Bryan.‭ ‬“Retrospective and Prospective Utilitarianism.‭”‬  Nous‭ ‬15/3‭ (‬1981‭)‬:‭ ‬325-339.

Mill, John Stuart.  Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government.  New York: 1951.

Singer,‭ ‬Marcus G.‭ ‬“Actual Consequence Utilitarianism.‭”‬  Mind‭ ‬86/341‭ (‬1977‭)‬:‭ ‬pp.‭ ‬67-77.

Shallow,‭ ‬Christopher,‭ ‬Ruman Iliev and Douglas Medin.‭ ‬“Trolley Problems in Context.‭”‬ Judgement and Decision Making‭ ‬6/7‭ (‬2011‭)‬:‭ ‬pp.‭ ‬593-601.

Waldman,‭ ‬Michael R.‭ ‬and Jorn H.‭ ‬Dietrich.‭  ‬“Throwing a Bomb on a Person vs.‭ ‬Throwing a Person on a Bomb:‭ ‬Intervention Myopia in Moral Intuitions.‭”‬  Psychological Science‭ ‬18/3‭ (‬2007‭)‬:‭ ‬pp.‭ ‬247-253.

My God doesn't need your Christmas.

Foregoing my normal format of beginning with a quote, I thought I would share with you a couple of things about Christmas that really grind my gears and then I'll proceed to philosophically tear them to shreds because that's what I like doing.  I'll present these positions as quotes of other people.

1.  "There was only really one Christmas, and all the others are anniversaries."

My big problem with this one is that it misunderstands just what Christmas is, so let's get one thing clear: the birth of Jesus to Mary and the incarnation of the Word of God which was simultaneous with it was not the first Christmas.  Christmas is a celebration of that event, it's a time to sit back and say, "Oh gee, wasn't it great when God did that whole becoming a person thing?  That was really nice of him to do that."

This is a minor objection, but even more annoying to me is:

2.  "Just remember, Christmas isn't really for us, it's for Jesus."

Before I tear this position to shreds, let me make it clear that I realize that these people have good intentions.  They mean to refocus our Christmas joy on Jesus and on the event of the incarnation, and if there is one thing with which I don't have a problem, it's that.

Also, there's the semantic issue that what these people really mean is more like, "Christmas isn't about us, it's about Jesus," that is to say that the subject matter of Christmas is, as per its name, Christ.  That's true.

Nonetheless, my God doesn't need your Christmas.  He doesn't need your Sunday mass, your contemporary service, your youth group, your children's ministry, your invitational, your Bible study or you.  If all of those things ceased to exist, God would still be on his throne.

Worship, at its core, is an experience in which we re-orient ourselves toward God.  Yes, he gets pleasure from our worship and yes, he wants it, but experiences of worship, days of remembrance and other religious observances are distinctly for us so that we can learn to be better followers of God.

Thus, Christmas is fundamentally for us.  Christmas is a time when we should sit back, celebrate the incarnation of the almighty foundation of all being into human flesh, and reflect on what that means for us, how it should change our life that our God did that for us.  Yes, it's about him, but it's for you.  Again, God is big enough that he doesn't need Christmas, but we are small enough that we do.

We're all gonna die!

"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

Chuck Plahniuk in Fight Club

According to an awful misreading of an obscure ancient calendar, today is the day the world ends.  With all evidence thus far pointing to the failure of that prediction, I feel like it's nonetheless useful to take today and meditate on death.  Obviously, that's not exactly a comfortable procedure, but the careful consideration of one's eventual death has a long and wonderful tradition in pretty much every major religion.  This is especially prominent in some forms of Shinto: some monks will meditate for days in front of the mutilated corpses of small animals.

Interesting grotesque trivia bits aside, the simple fact is that the only particular event in your entire life of which you can be absolutely assured is your death.  You can't be sure that you're going to eat dinner tonight, and you certainly can't be sure that you're going to get married or get promoted or go to that thing you love or play that awesome game or finally write the next great American novel.  The only event you can be sure of is your decidedly inevitable death.

You can be sure that at some point, your heart will stop beating, your neurons will stop firing and your body will begin to decompose.  If you're reading this, it's a pretty solid bet that this will happen within the next fifty to one hundred years.  Understandably, some people get pretty thoroughly depressed by this thought.  After all, who in the world really wants to die, except crazy Jesuit missionaries and people who need serious psychological help.

However, I for one think that it's a kind of happy thought.

For one, there's a kind of unifying principle to the fact that everyone dies.  We're all going to do it eventually, so in a sense waiting for death is one of two or three universal human experiences, right up there with being born, living and actually dying.  Really though, if you ask me it's a kind of beautiful thought: everyone from Henry VIII to Henry Ford and Vladimir Putin either did die or will die.  That's an experience that you and I share with each other, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Shelley, Cleopatra, Spartacus and every other human being who has ever walked this planet.  That's cool in a sublime, humbling kind of way.

Secondly, it gives us cause for joy.  We only have so much time here on the planet, the eventual and inevitable fact of our death guarantees that.  Therefore, it only makes sense to choose to be happy whenever and wherever possible., since the only thing you can really be sure of is that you only have a limited time in which to be happy.

Not my best argument, but it works for me.

Anyway, it's been wonderful, and I'll see y'all next week.

J.R.M.C.

Surprise!?

"You see, Doctor, God didn't kill that little girl. Fate didn't butcher her and destiny didn't feed her to those dogs...God doesn't make the world this way. We do."

Rorschach in Watchmen by David Gibbons and Alan Moore

Let's get one thing out of the way first: gun violence, violence in general, mass homicide, mass murder, any murder, and especially the murder of children, all of these things are damn near unequivocally awful, evil, terrible, horrific, repugnant and reprehensible.  The execution of violence upon undeserving parties is understandably one of the most unilaterally condemned categories of immoral acts for damn good reason.  The shootings that have taken place over the last several weeks and months are awful, tragic events.

They are not, however, surprising.  At least, not if you're familiar with the greater part of human history.

Colonial Americans essentially destroyed the Native Americans in what is now New England.  The Spanish essentially exterminated almost all of the native inhabitants of the areas of South America that they conquered.  So did the Portuguese.  The Romans obliterated so many different ethnic groups that there is simply not enough room in this post to enumerate them.  Whites in the south dehumanized and murdered untold scores of Africans and African Americans.  Let's not forget the Nazis either.  Or the famine that Joseph Stalin forced upon the Ukrainian people.

Then there are the serial killers.

Don't forget political movements that killed untold scores of people (i.e. China's Cultural Revolution, Stalin's Great Purge, etc.).

Deserving special mention are all the captains of industry who constructed or perpetuated the often unjust labor system that dominates the world.

People are shitty.  Really shitty.

Big surprise: people do awful, malicious, evil things.  All the time.

Not everyone, and I would bet that even the worst people aren't always doing something evil at every moment.  Nonetheless, with more than 7 billion of us on this terrestrial ball, I'd wager that at any given moment, someone somewhere is doing something truly awful.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said that the natural state of human beings was fundamentally anarchic, barbaric and ignoble.  I would say that he goes too far, but we as a species have an undeniable collective addiction to doing awful, evil things.

So then, what do we do?  What is the answer to the tireless problem of human evil, and how should we respond?

We must hate it.  Events like the shootings of the last few months cannot be allowed to repeat themselves.  Genocide, murder, assault, slavery and all other horrendously immoral actions must be hated and scorned.  Let us never, at any time, accept in ourselves even the smallest thought that tends toward unjustified violence against others.  More than that, let us hate those thoughts.  We must indefatigably strive to rid ourselves of whatever element of human nature it is that lets these things happen.

But we must never let ourselves be surprised.  We know that people do evil things.  If we allow ourselves to be surprised, that must mean on some level that we have let ourselves forget just how awful we are capable of being.  Let us maintain always an awareness that we are fundamentally flawed, that we have a seemingly irrevocable tendency towards these reprehensible acts.  This awareness must be utilized to hate that barbaric element.

Any other response: to forget it or to allow it to fester, is nothing less than an invitation for the worst part of our nature to genuinely become a part of who we are.

It's been wonderful,

J.R.M.C.

People Propagating Pleasure through Pleasantness

Hello dear readers,

I'd like to apologize for the drought that has been the last few days, I've been busy coming home for break.  Normally I'll try to post four times a week, but for the next month or so I'll be keeping it to three.  It is vacation time after all.

In other news, the blog is currently up to 199 total views and 2 followers.  Thank you to everyone for reading and making me feel good about myself.  Now, without further adieu:

"In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant." - Jimmy Stewart in Harvey

For those poor, unfortunate souls among my readers who are unaffiliated with the life and works of Jimmy Stewart, or even with the movie Harvey, go out now and as soon as you can watch Harvey.  It's not only one of Stewart's personal favorites of the movies he made, it truly is a wonderful film and, although not a Christmas movie itself, it's message is thoroughly appropriate to the emotionally heightened and stressful holiday season.

I'm willing to admit that the quote is, like most folk wisdom, both an oversimplification and a false dichotomy.  That being said, it does bring some wonderful, pleasant, and wonderfully pleasant philosophical notions to the table.  As I understand it, the basic choice which the quote tries to outline is this:

In all occasions of human interaction, there is a fundamental choice presented to the agent in question.  On the one hand, there is an opportunity to exploit the individual at hand in one way or another: to make ourselves feel smarter, stronger, or otherwise superior to the individual, to procure some item or service from them, or to otherwise seek to gain something from them with little or no consideration to their own position in life or the consequences of the exploitative action.  On the other hand, there is an opportunity to genuinely relate with the individual in question and to seek their benefit.

I could blab on and on for several paragraphs about using people as means instead of ends, but the basic working principle at hand is this: be considerate this Christmas season.  It can be hard to be nice to people, and it's often tempting to belittle those with whom we are close because we know their dirty laundry.  Nonetheless, most of time, being nice to people (especially when you don't want to) makes everyone happier in the long run.  

Speaking from personal experience, the surprising thing is that really, you're the one most likely to have a better time.

It's been wonderful,

J.R.M.C.

Pessimism, Hope, and Dead Robots

On July 4th, 2011, I went to see Transformers: Dark of the Moon.  Unlike most who have seen the movie, I managed to enjoy it.  Part of that was watching Megatron get shot through the face, a moment I had admittedly anticipated with baited breath since I was eight years old.  Broken robot countenances aside, I managed to enjoy the movie because I maintain a strong position of what I call pessimistic hope.

Pessimism, as I'm sure you all know, is the general belief that things are going to go pretty shitty.
Hope, as I'm sure you all know, is the general feeling that things are going to go pretty well.

The casual reader may be tempted to say that the two would mix about as well as English colonization and pretty much any indigenous people, but they're surprisingly helpful when held in tandem.  As a matter of fact, I would argue that they only really accomplish their goals when they're put together.

If someone is always pessimistic about everything, he or she is bound to find very little pleasure and to enjoy even less of it.  Even when a genuine pessimist finds and enjoys a bit of pleasure, their overriding tendency is to waste the moment in consideration of how briefly they will probably be able to enjoy that pleasure.  These are the people who don't want to get Mexican food, spend eighteen hours deciding what to order, and then complain the whole time they're eating that even though they love their food, it will make them sick later in the evening.

In contrast, a man or woman who goes about his or her life always hopeful about everything and everyone eventually getting better, is quite simply bound to be disappointed most of the time.  If we expect too much of people, they will always let us down.  Even if we expect less than normal from people, they're still pretty good on the whole at letting us down even more.  These obsessively hopeful, optimistic persons are bound to tell you that "El Sombrero Rojo" has the best cheese dip ever.  These are also the people who fail to tell you that they got an F on their health inspection.  Furthermore, these are the people who tell you that the hours you spent sick were really worth it because the place had such a good bit of character.

While these poor souls rest in their respective miseries, the man or woman who adopts pessimistic hope is able to enjoy almost any scenario.  The basic method, as I practice it, is as follows:

1)  Try to figure out what the most reasonable and likely worst case scenario is in any given situation.

2)  Assume that worst case scenario will happen.

3)  Once you've got that firmly in your mind, let yourself hope that something better will happen.  The crucial thing here is not to hope that the worst case scenario doesn't happen, because then if it does you're screwed.  Rather, hope that something minimally pleasant like spotting an adorable kitten will happen to you while a team of KGB agents forces you to watch the Twilight movies on repeat.

4)  Allow yourself to be genuinely surprised when the worst case scenario doesn't happen.  Enjoy this moment, relish in it.  Watch Megatron's face get blown to pieces.

The bottom line is that you maintain the pessimist perspective, so that if shit really goes down, you're not surprised in the slightest by how poorly things have gone.  However, since you've let yourself hope that something good will happen, you will be both ready and able to enjoy when it does.

Yes, it means that you end up watching movies with subtitles like Dark of the Moon, but it also means that when Optimus Prime pistol-whips a 20 ton villain, you're able, ready, and willing to be surprised by how not-awful that moment is.

It's been wonderful,
-J.R.M.C.

Christmas Ponderings: A Thrill of Hope

"Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death" C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce

Most of my readers know that about a year ago, depending on how you date these things, I decided to join the Roman Catholic Church.  I was raised Southern Baptist, and as such there are parts of Catholicism which are frankly and simply new to me.  The liturgy, the lack of a guitar in the worship service, the missals in the pews and the ever-conspicuous lack of a bulletin providing the outline that I already know, all of these trivial things are fairly new to me.  However, the one part of Catholicism which has fundamentally changed how I think about my religious life is confession.

For those of you who don't know, confession can be a surprisingly complicated endeavor.  The movies would have you believe that in every church there is always a priest waiting in the confessional for some repentant sinner to wander in and give a confession.  The scene from "The Boondock Saints" in which Agent Smecker wanders drunk into a confessional is stereotypical of this.  I know, the movies lied, big suprise, right?

The simple fact is that once you've mulled things over and told yourself, "I should go to confession," the logistics of actually getting to confession can be discouraging.  Most churches only have confession once a week (or once a month), and it's usually on Saturday afternoon, which I can say after a year as a Catholic is literally the most inconvenient time to confess all the awful things you've done over the course of a month.  Furthermore, once you get there, there's usually a long line of old people and small children who are (at least in my case) unabashed in visibly wondering what a 6'7", 21 year old guy is doing there.Mind you, this whole time, from the moment you get in the car and drive out to confession, the consideration of your iniquities weighs on your conscience like a lead backpack.

Finally, though, the moment itself comes.  The liturgy of confession is simple, there's a bit about asking for forgiveness, saying how long you've been away, and then you bleed.  The priest, who represents Christ himself in the liturgy, watches and listens as your deepest insecurities, your most secret secrets and the worst parts of your soul are laid bare before him.  For two or three minutes, you are at your most vulnerable as you overflow with the basic consideration of your own unworthiness.  This is validated and made real by the verbal expression of sin: there is no place in the confessional for the words of your confession to hide, and the stark reality instantly presented to the believer is the desperate need for Christ's forgiveness and the moral regeneration that comes with closeness to him.  What follows is the most profound religious experience of which I am aware.

The priest, faced with all of your iniquities, having a personal knowledge of all the particular ways in which you have failed to serve Christ and become a child of God, speaks forgiveness to your indubitably tired and vulnerable soul.  Through the mysteries of interpersonal relations and psychology, God works his way into the deepest, darkest, most vulnerable part of your spiritual life and tells you through his representative that he loves you and wants you to walk with him.

That is, in a sense, the joy of Christmas and what I would encourage all of you to ponder in this season of Advent.  God saw the deplorable condition of the human species and decided that it was worth fixing.  The thrill of hope is that as long as we are willing to kill our sin, we are promised something more beautiful than we can imagine.  If we will submit our evil tendencies to redemption we are invited to join with the Almighty foundation of all being, the Father of Lights, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

It's been wonderful,

J.R.M.C.

Probability, Uncertainty and Personal Formation

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare."  C.S. Lewis in "The Weight of Glory"

My ethics stand on a very vulnerable foundation.  As a number of critics have pointed out to other Utilitarian thinkers, any practical Utilitarianism must be prospective: that is to say, it must make projections about what the probable consequences of an action or event must be.  Normally, consequences are fairly easy to predict for simple actions.

If I punch you in the face, it is pretty fair to expect that I will cause you physical pain and furthermore damage our relationship.  If I cook dinner for you while you're sick, it's similarly fair to expect that both of us will benefit from that (assuming that I know how to cook.)  But what about when the consequences of an action aren't so certain?

Let's take a theoretical situation into examination, and then I'll offer my take on Utilitarian answers to uncertain situations.

Let's say that Joe is your best friend, and he is in a serious relationship with Jane.  You know that Joe is cheating on Jane, but Joe does not know that you are aware of his infidelity and Jane is furthermore unaware of his infidelity.  Jane comes to you concerned about their relationship.  If you tell her, she will indubitably experience pain, she will confront Joe, their relationship will end, and Joe is likely to terminate your friendship.  If you don't tell her, none of that is guarunteed to happen, and the consequences remain completely ambiguous, dependant on Joe's ability to hide his infidelity, your ability to hide his infidelity, and Jane's deductive faculties.  Anything from a vicious breakup to a long-lasting, ultimately satisfying relationship for Joe and Jane is possible.  Techincally speaking, depending on how stupid Jane is and how good of a liar Joe is, the consequenes of your lie are actually quite likely to be good consequences.  But all of this is uncertain, you have no real way of determining the consequences of hiding the information from Jane.  Almost all of the consequences of that action remain ambiguous.

Nonetheless, there is one consequence of both decisions, to tell or to refrain from telling, which is certain: you will be formed into a certain kind of person by the decision.

If you do not tell Jane, you indubitably become a kind of deceitful person.  You become the kind of person who does not speak the truth, a habit which grows from a personal bias towards a particular party.  You become the kind of person who allows the sin of your friends to fester within their soul and rot their moral fiber.  Furthermore, you become an individual who is less trustworthy in all of your relations.

If, however, you tell Jane, you can be sure that you will become the kind of person who tells the truth, regardless of personal bias.  You become the kind of person who is willing to call out even their close friends on what is seriously wrong with them.  Finally, you become an individual who is more trustworthy in all of your relations.

In any situation, the only consequence of which you can be sure is that the decision you make will form you into a kind of person.  Whether you stay up late and sleep in, go to bed early and rise with the sun, tell Jane about Joe's infidelity or remain a co-conspirator in the destruction of a friend's moral fiber, tell someone how you really feel about them or hide your true sentiments behind a veil of pretendings, the only consequence of which you can be certain is that you will become that particular kind of individual. 

Therefore, I would argue, in situations where all or most other consequences are uncertain, the primary deciding factor in the making of a decision must be the kind of individual that you are likely to make yourself into through that decision.  You are responsible for yourself above all things, and above all things it is your responsibility to make sure that you do not become "a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare."

Otherness is Awesomeness

The philosophers Andrew Kaethler and George Grant have been two of my primary formative influences, so I thought that for today I would share their philosophies with you.  Both of these Canadian philosophers propose that love is not a sentiment or a feeling.  As Kaethler said more times than I can count in the two classes I took with him, "Love is the acknowledgement of otherness."  (I believe this is a quote from Grant, but I've never read much Grant so don't take that as fact.)

In other words, love is an active process in which we say of another, "You are not me and I am not you; you are completely separate from me, your thoughts are your thoughts, my thoughts are my thoughts, and while they may agree they are never the same."  The essence here is that when we love people we are acknowledging that we must relate to them, we must communicate with them and we must seek to understand what they mean to tell us, not what we want to hear.  We avoid objectification of another soul by acknowledging that they think differently than us, know differently than us and come to different conclusions than we do.  Then, we begin the difficult process of relating to one another and trying to bring our genuinely different, distinctly separate selves closer to one another by relating to them.

This process is painful, and it involves, on our part, the willingness to allow others to see us as they really are, and the more important willingness to see others as they really are.  This is, I think, what Sartre means when he famously says, "Hell is other people."  The process of genuinely relating to another human being the reality of the self is among the more painful (though rewarding) processes available to mankind.  Nonetheless, the painfully vulnerable center, where the real self resides and our darkest impulses sit next to our most elevated desires, is the only place where we can really ever get to know one another.

I believe that it is genuinely possible to really relate to people in a conversation about pretty much anything.  For example, if you and I sit and talk for two hours about how well we like chicken nuggets, it's true that we really could have a great conversation.  While the subject matter is trivial, ithe surprising reality of human communications is that the little things are more important than we could ever know.  Besides, although we are unlikely to have touched upon the particularities of Plantinga's theory of properly basic beliefs, a careful observer can, in a conversation about chicken nuggets, observe the conversational patterns of their parter, how dominant or submissive they are in conversation, how ardently they feel about cuisine, their general sentiments on the industrialized food system, how they feel about the loss or cheapening of genuine American culture, and a plethora of other matters.

My basic point is that once you really start listening to someone, once you acknowledge that they are not you and take their position as completely original from your own, there is a great deal of room to genuinely get to know that person.

Working into my last post, a major problem here is honesty.  If you're a vegetarian and you go on and on for two hours with me about how awesome we think chicken nuggets are, you've presented a self to me that does not really exist.  From thereon out, I will base my knowledge of you from a set of propositions, inflections and positions which you do not genuinely hold, which is distinctly likely to cause both of us some level of awkwardness or displeasure in the future.

So there you go, that's today's lesson: let other people be themselves and don't tell lies.  If you do both of these, life will probably be a lot better for everyone.

It's been wonderful,

-J.R.M.C.

The Truth

I've been thinking about truth a lot lately.  Yes, I know, cue the stereotype checklist for the philosophy major.  But in all seriousness, I've been trying to think about why truth is important and, more specifically, why lying is bad.  Any better?

There are multiple and varied definitions of what truth is in and of itself, but for the sake of common sense, sanity and readability I think it will work to say that the truth is anything that really is or really was.  This touches on Kant's concept of the noumenal, that which truly is, in and of itself.  Now, there are some problematic notions in Kant that entail that we can't ever really know the noumenal, but for now we'll trust any perceptions of the senses which are clear and distinct, adopting the position of the Scottish Common Sense school of philosophy.  In summary, truth is what is and we can generally trust that what we sense is the truth.

Big deal.  Especially as a Utilitarian, I have to consider why lying is wrong.  What if the overall consequences are good?  What if I save someone time, or even worse, save someone's life by telling what is genuinely a lie?

The problem really comes in when you start to think about what communication really is.  If you tell me anything, whether it's that Taco Bell is giving out free tacos, or that you're having a nice day, you are providing me with information which I can then use to construct an understanding of reality.  So long as you're telling the truth, I'm able to form a mostly genuine conception of the real world and as a consequence I am able to make good decisions.  However, if you lie to me and tell me that you're fine when you're not, or provide me with a devastating surprise at the Taco Bell checkout, what you have ultimately done is present to me a version of the world that doesn't exist.  That's fundamentally disrespectful to me and to my right to make informed decisions.

Also, I love taco bell, and now I have a huge bill to pay up.  Why would you lie to me like that?  That was a dick move.

These thoughts aren't really complete, but that's what I've been processing lately in a rough form: lying and deception are immoral because they fundamentally disrespect the decision-making ability of the individual(s) to whom the deception is presented, by leading them to form a conception of a world that does not exist.  Thoughts?  Comments?  Pithy suggestions on improving my theory?

It's been wonderful,

J.R.M.C.

Another poem - Give Me This

Give me this.
I do not want another thing.
I do not want a substitution.
I do not want a similar thing.
I want this.
Give me this.

I do not want a forest park.
I do not want an open reserve.
I do not want some helpless piece,
some guarded soil,
some sacred plants.
I do not want chauvinism veiled with the promise of non-aggression.
I want this.
Give me this.

I do not want a quiet room.
I do not want a quiet time.
I do not want a moment.
I do not want a mobile sanctuary.
I do not want a shielded shell.
I want this.
Give me this.

I do not want to be alone.
I do not want to be your friend.
I do not want to see your face.
I do not want to hear your words.
I don't want you to hear my voice.
I don't want you to see my face.
I want this.
Give me this.

I do not want to speak.
I do not want to hear.
I don't want you to let me be.
I don't want to let you be.
I want this.
Give me this.

A poem - Melancholia

A little blossom
    veiled in gray
cries out against the void.

A child's dance
    stopped short
with the screams of discipline.

My thoughts drive on indefatigable
    like a heavy stone dragged through a swamp,
    like a fight I cannot win,
    like a fight I cannot win.

The magic of my marks made manifest.

Hello, dearest friend,

So here you are, reading my blog.

Thank you.  I appreciate your consideration and that you're reading my thoughts.  That's curious, in a certain sense, isn't it?  I remember reading a book by Stephen King when I was in high school on writing in which he referred to writing as magic.  Basically, the magic is that no matter where you are reading this, no matter who you are and no matter what the circumstances surrounding your reading of my words are, I am communicating with you exactly as I am at 1:08 A.M. on December 3rd, 2012.  That's just cool.

I'm striking keys on a circuit board that send a digitized signal to a central processing unit, interpreted as characters which vaguely represent verbal sounds that human beings can create.  These characters are arranged into words, which are "the means to meaning and, to those who will listen, the manifestation of truth."  Long story short, my ideas are conceptualized in my head, processed through my verbal processing, input into a seemingly magical device of technology and then broadcast through a wireless signal onto a relatively unknown part of a vast network of human communication.

But through all of that, I, James Robert Michael Carabello, am communicating with you, fair soul, and (if have expressed them clearly enough) you can understand the thoughts that started out in my head.  Maybe the world would be a better place if all of us took a moment every now and then to recognize that fact and simply appreciate our ability to communicate with one another.

J.R.M.C.