A Paradox?

The excellent blog Futility Closet recently posted this entry which contains an excerpt from Nicholas Rescher's Paradoxes.

Suppose you borrowed $10 from Tom and $10 from Bob. On your way to repaying them you are robbed of everything but the $10 you had hidden in your shirt pocket. By no fault of your own, you now face the following paradoxical dilemma:

(1) You are obligated to repay Tom and Bob.

(2) If you pay Tom you cannot repay Bob.

(3) If you repay Bob you cannot repay Tom.

(4) You cannot honor all your obligations: in the circumstances this is impossible for you. (By (1)-(3).)

(5) You are (morally) required to honor all your obligations.

(6) You are not (morally) required to do something you cannot possibly do (ultra posse nemo obligatur).

Like many others who are philosophically inclined, I do find paradoxes interesting. However, many seem inapplicable or impractical in real-world considerations. I believe this paradox is a bit flawed because it isolates the entirety of the obligation into a single moment. There is no mention of any future wealth you might accrue. Any pending wealth you might receive would still be held under the obligations to Tom and Bob.

Furthermore, it neglects the notion that you are (morally) required to fulfill obligations insofar as you able, i.e. as much as you can. It seems to me that you would at least be obligated to pay to Tom and Bob $5 under the simplest considerations. It may be argued that you might pay one or the other more out the $10 based on percentages of total wealth invested. However, this is beside the point. There is no reason to assume that your obligations are completely null because you cannot fully satisfy them, especially in cases involving something that is relatively easy to measure (money).

Thus, I think this paradox is, at the very least, poorly constructed. It seems to propose a problem that really isn't a problem. However, I'm sure you could add other circumstances into it to create an actual problem.

Bok and Hume

Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life by Sissela Bok brought up a point against David Hume that I had not considered.
In his work, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume makes a proposition that justice is an artificial moral concept and that it is non-necessary. He proposes two situations where justice would be irrelevant or unnecessary and they are on the completely opposite ends of the spectrum. First, imagine the utopian society wherein all human needs are met. In a situation where there is no want, there is no need for justice. In the second situation, imagine the completely dystopian society, wherein there are nowhere near enough resources for all. Justice is irrelevant here as individual survival trumps the moral personality. It may be true that some would band together and share resources amongst them. However, there would always be some in need of resources that have no recourse for justice because there literally is not enough for everybody to sustain life.
Bok, in a chapter about lying in times of crises, says the following, explaining Hume's position.

In extreme and prolonged threats to survival, as in plagues, invasions, and religious or political persecution, human choice is intolerably restricted. Survival alone counts; moral considerations are nearly obliterated. People may still give each other help and protection in extremes of physical and mental stress; they may still forego lies and still share alike; but such choice goes far beyond duty. And for many, the moral personality is itself crushed; the ability to choose is destroyed.
Hume, describing such conditions, wrote that justice itself can be expected only in an intermediate range of scarcity and benevolence--when there is neither such abundance that all have what they need nor such scarcity that not all can survive; and where people are neither so completely good that they act justly and lovingly spontaneously, nor so incurably evil that nothing can make them do so.*

This asterisk denotes a footnote, where she adds and explains her partial disagreement with Hume.

*See David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section III, Part I. While I agree with Hume about some floor beneath which justice cannot be expected, I do not share his optimism about its superfluity at the highest level of abundance and human benevolence. In the first place, we are coming to realize how limitless human needs can become. And second, we have the experience of situations where grave problems of justice and moral choice arise among well-meaning persons even where scarcity is not a problem. In hospitals, for example, there are times where resources are plentiful, yet where searing moral differences arises. Finally, benevolence can surely bring its own tyranny.
For a comparison with Hume, see Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 126-130 and H. L/ A/ Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 189-195.

I believe Bok's analysis and criticism are very good. However, I think some of her criticism arises out of a misunderstanding of Hume.
If I recall correctly, it seems pretty clear that Hume doesn't expect either of these two scenarios to ever come to fruition. He isn't trying to display real-world examples wherein a need for justice is absent. As with many philosophical exercises, he is only trying to highlight problems with our concepts of justice. While we tend to believe that justice is a natural and necessary concept, he does illustrate scenarios where it might very well be completely unnecessary or wholly irrelevant.
In addition, I don't think Hume intended "justice" to mean wholesale right-and-wrong. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, Hume's use is extremely narrow in comparison to our considerations. He only intends it to be used for "honesty with respect to property." In other words, material justice. The fact that Hume's two scenarios explicitly focus on the scarcity or abundance of necessities illustrates this.
If we adopt our contemporary perspectives on justice, we could easily add a question that would necessitate justice even in the most dystopian of worlds. We skip the question of, "How much should each person get?" and press with the value question of, "Who should get anything at all?" Clearly, we might be inclined to believe that certain people be exempt from their fair share in such a crisis, e.g. those who have committed crimes against others, those who cannot contribute to making the best of the situation through labor, etc. However, this would be expanding on what Hume was trying to drive at.

EAVB_DHFKWGUVPI

Everyday Ethics

I just started Sissela Bok's Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. She says something in the introduction that resonates with me.

It is difficult to understand all the reasons why so few efforts have been made to analyze our everyday dilemmas of truth-telling. The great distance which so often separates philosophers from applied concerns of any kind provides a partial answer. In philosophy, as elsewhere, professionalization has brought in its wake a vocabulary , a theoretical apparatus, and academic boundaries forbidding to outsiders and confining for those within. In part, also, the very background of truth and falsity against which lying must be seen has led many thinkers to set ever greater preliminaries to the moral questions of situations where truth seems to be at issue. How can we ever begin to probe such situations, they ask, unless we first know what "truth" means? In ethics, finally, attention has gone primarily to questions of meaning and theory quite remote from problems of concrete moral choice.

What does this mean? On my interpretation, philosophy has always tended to focus on the whole and is preoccupied with unified systems of morality that work akin to theoretical unified theories of physics. As a result, they tend to gloss over the stuff that we actually deal with on a day-to-day basis (e.g. truth-telling vs. deception). This doesn't interest or help most people. Not everybody is interested in a completely coherent system of thought but, rather, how to live day-to-day. More importantly, how should they act in specific situations. It is possible to infer our oughts from theoretical moral systems but, much of the time, this takes too much time for the individual scenarios people encounter every day. Furthermore, as she said and I once said, philosophy has become professionalized (for better or worse). In the same manner one can't easily jump from chemistry to law without adapting to the new jargon, many can't jump into philosophy without learning the jargon. And, especially so in philosophy, the jargon is not easy. Rather than one-phrase=one-idea, you could have one-phrase with several ideas and interpretations of that idea. Consider pragmatism, a particularly American school of philosophy. Charles Sanders Peirce was is considered the first proponent of pragmatism. However, later interpretations took the ideas in a direction he disagreed with and he renamed his collective thoughts as "pragmaticism." So if you want to learn about pragmatism in philosophy, you not only have to learn what Peirce said but what subsequent pragmatists said. Furthermore, you have to determine what exactly it was in subsequent pragmatists' interpretations that drove Perice away or why he found it incompatible with his thoughts. And this is just one school of philosophy in one area of philosophy.

Thinking extensively, for lack of a better word, is too time-consuming for most people. They usually can't afford this time to learn the theories and apply them. What philosophers need to do is ask people what problems they face in their daily lives and discuss these. Fortunately, applied ethics is close to what this is but it still draws heavily on the theories rather than the practical value for the everyday person.

The Duck That Won the Lottery

The Duck That Won the Lottery: 100 New Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher by Julian Baggini


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Julian Baggini goes through 100 common mistakes in argumentation, citing actual examples he has found. The book is an insightful overview of how we are often led astray with clear fallacies. My favorite was the very last one where Baggini even admits there may be some in this very book itself but concludes with advice to be vigilant in our analyses. I think this book is important reading for anybody, particularly if they want to seriously engage in debates.

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Sioux Eye Sighed

If an S and an I and an O and a U
With an X at the end spell Su;
And an E and a Y and an E spell I,
Pray what is a speller to do?

Then, if also an S and an I and a G
And an HED spell side,
There’s nothing much left for a speller to do
But to go and commit siouxeyesighed.

Charles Follen Adams (maybe)