Rational View Podcasts
2008-08-23 - Worrying about China
Philosopher's Zone
To the outside world, China might look a self-confident, if pushy, country. But how confident are Chinese intellectuals after a century of tumultuous history? This week, we examine the state of critical inquiry in China, what Chinese intellectuals do with Western philosophy and the rediscovery of the Confucian heritage. TRANSCRIPT: Transcript available Monday 25 August read less
Latest Episodes for this Channel
2008-08-23 - Worrying about China
Fri August 22 2008
To the outside world, China might look a self-confident, if pushy, country. But how confident are Chinese intellectuals after a century of tumultuous history? This week, we examine the state of critical inquiry in China, what Chinese intellectuals do with Western philosophy and the rediscovery of the Confucian heritage. TRANSCRIPT: Transcript available Monday 25 August read less
2008-08-16 - Uprootedness and national conflicts
Fri August 15 2008
The French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil identified the basic human need for roots as crucial. Uprootedness and disapora in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have shaped the narratives about the past and the future on both sides. Jonathan Glover, a Professor of Philosophy at King's College London has been in Australia to deliver the annual Simone Weil lecture on human value and joins us. TRANSCRIPT: Alan Saunders: `We owe a cornfield respect, not because of itself but because it is food for mankind. In the say way we owe our respect to a collectivity of whatever kind, country, family, or any other, not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls´. The words of the French philosopher, Simone Weil who died in 1943 at the age of 34, while working for the French Resistance in England. It was hard work and she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and instructed to rest and eat well. But she limited her food intake to what she believed was available to the citizens of Occupied France, and succumbed to cardiac failure. Hello and welcome to The Philosopher´s Zone, I´m Alan Saunders. Every year since 2000 the Australian Catholic University has invited a distinguished international scholar to deliver the Simone Weil lecture on human value. This year it was the turn of Jonathan Glover, one of the world´s most distinguished moral philosophers and currently Professor in the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King´s College, London. His subject was one dear to Simone Weil: uprootedness, narratives and national conflict. And he turned his philosophical attention to the conflict in the Middle East. But to begin with, who was Simone Weil? Jonathan Glover: She was a French Catholic, she was a philosopher and she was a very unusual person in that she wasn´t at all conventional. She took up for instance, the idea of worker-priests long before it was fashionable. She was passionately on the side of the Resistance, and worked for the Resistance during the war against the Nazis, and afterwards she was extremely interested in the idea of the spiritual rebirth of France, what sort of country should it be, and she was given the task of working out an account of what human beings need. She wrote a long thing called The Needs of the Soul, where she talked about how people need community, people need truthfulness, people need autonomy, and so on, and one of the things she said was `a need of the soul was the need for roots, the need to be rooted to belong in a community to be recognised, to have a place and so on. Alan Saunders: And she was one of those people, I´ve seen her compared to Wittgenstein in that she was one of those philosophers who have about them a sort of air of saintliness or purity of a lived live, wasn´t she? Jonathan Glover: Yes. I´m not sure if I think Wittgenstein had an air of purity so much as a kind of strange intensity and seriousness. But she certainly had both, because partly I think she was a very religious person, a deeply believing Catholic, but also she had a kind of saintliness and a kind of intellectual intensity, which is a bit like Wittgenstein. Alan Saunders: Now your lecture applies her ideas to the conflict in Palestine, and you say that the conflict between the two peoples there is also a conflict between their rival narratives of their shared history. Tell us about that. Jonathan Glover: Well the thing I was struck by is that every time there´s a particular episode, in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians there are always these two rival accounts. And I was struck by the British newspaper The Guardian a couple of years ago when there was the conflict between the Israeli armed forces and Hezbollah in the Lebanon. The Guardian ran two articles, absolutely parallel. One was by someone who was in the Israeli Security Cabinet, and the other was a leading figure in Hezbollah. And they were given the same number of words and they were describing the same conflict, but their views were diametrically opposed about what happened, who started it, what the intentions of the other side were, what their own intentions were. And I think this is just one tiny slice of a narrative that goes back through the 1967 war through the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and far beyond. There´s a kind of account according to which we only react defensively. On both sides they say we react defensively, they start the conflict, we only try to make peace, we only ask for justice. They are trying to wipe us out, they would like to be rid of us, they are liars and so on. And I suppose what I worry about is that these narratives are self-supporting because each time we don´t believe what the other side say, whichever side one´s on, we don´t believe what the other side´s saying. Why not? Because they proven liars. How do we know they´re proven liars? Well because of all the past episodes which we have interpreted in our story. And in this way these self-supporting narratives seem to me to be a real contributory factor in keeping the conflict going. Alan Saunders: But presumably one of the problems here is not just that there are two self-supporting narratives but that as you say, there is a sort of symmetry to them. I mean in every conflict there are presumably two different narratives, `it was ours and they took it from us´, or `we were here and they invaded us´. But here we have those elements too, but we also have a curious symmetry. Jonathan Glover: Well very often I think there´s a symmetry where each can represent the other as an aggressor and so on. I´m partly interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict for its own sake because it´s obviously a tragic conflict and its poison spreads out to infect so much of international relations all over the world. So many people get killed, it´s a terrible conflict. And I´m also interested in it in a way as a really well-documented example of a conflict of this kind where there are the rival stories. But the reason I link it up with Simone Weil´s ideas about the need for roots, is that I think one of the things that´s distinctive about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is that both sides feel they´re victims and both sides feel they´re victims partly because they feel they have lived a life of exile, diaspora, and their roots have been denied. The Palestinians obviously many of them were driven out of Jerusalem and other parts of what are now Israel, lived in refugee camps, they now live under the Israeli occupation in the Occupied Territories. They feel that their roots have been torn up. But equally, why did the Israelis set up the State of Israel? Partly because of centuries of experience of the awfulness, the alienation, the humiliation of being always in someone else´s country, always being seen as a stranger, always being the odd group who might be discriminated against or far worse as in Nazi Germany. Alan Saunders: How then does Simone Weil address the issue of rootedness? Jonathan Glover: Well she says that what one needs is the experience of participating actively and naturally, she says, in a certain kind of community. And she´s a very interesting writer but she often writes in a way that´s slightly hard to pin down. So I´ve in my lecture, I did a bit of attempt at kind of pinning down a bit, but I´m slightly diffident about whether she would utterly endorse what I say, because you can´t put something precise where there´s something not quite so precise and of course you may be getting it slightly wrong as far as her intentions go. But the way I unpack it is that you need the sense of belonging. They need somewhere which you say `This is my village, this is my town, this my country´, you don´t have to legally own it, but you have to have a kind of emotional ownership of it. And people don´t feel that if they´re in exile. I quote the Palestinian poet who´s lived many years in exile, Mourid Barghouti and he describes the life of moving from one hotel in another country to another boarding house somewhere, and so on, and he feels that there´s nothing he actually possesses. So I think the sense of belonging in that sense, is very important. Then the second thing I suggest as part of the idea of rootedness, is the sense of security, the feeling, `I´m rooted here and in a sense this is why I feel comfortable, relaxed, I don´t have to be always looking over my shoulder to see if someone´s about to kill me.´ But of course both Israelis and Palestinians have been denied that because of their conflict. Israelis when they send their children off to school in the school bus wonder if there´ll be a suicide bomber on it. Palestinians wonder even if they´re living in the Occupied Territories, whether Israeli soldiers will come and demolish their house, or shoot at them. So security is a very important thing, which again is missing in the condition of what Simone Weil calls `uprootedness´. And there is also a side to it which I think has to do with the sense of our own identity. Again this comes out quite a lot in Mourid Barghouti´s accounts of his own thoughts about being exiled from Palestine. When we think about ourselves and our lives, we think we´d try and make some sense of our lives, people don´t just want their life to be a heap of events one after another in a kind of chaos. People like to think that their lives add up to some kind of coherent story which makes some kind of sense, until they have an answer to the question What have you done with your life? And that involves to as it were keep in touch with your own narrative of the early years. It´s good to be able to go back to the places where you were at school, or the place where you lived as a child. And there´s a huge sense of being deprived of that. And then when Mourid Barghouti did eventually go back to the West Bank, to Ramallah, he went back as a famous poet and he gave a poetry reading, and it should have been one of the happiest moments of his life, the children in the school where he´d been at school, tore pages out of their exercise books and came up and asked him to give his autograph. But it was, in a way, a happy moment; he said it also wasn´t, because he felt having been away, he´d got out of sync with the place, he didn´t know what had happened while he was away. They didn´t know what had been happening in his life. And he did feel a sense of a kind of disjoined identity. The other part of I think of what´s important to the idea of rootedness is the idea of self-respect, because I think the belonging somewhere being recognised to having a status, a position, a job, being a family member in a community where people know you, the sense of security not always being worried about your safety, and having the sense of a known and respected identity, that all contributes to self-respect. One of the things I´m struck by which is parallel between Israelis and Palestinians is that both Israelis talking about often their parents in their life in, say, Poland in the pre-Second World War period, describe humiliations, describe a lack of self-respect, which came from being alien Jews in an alien land. Amos Oz for instance, the Israeli novelist, talks about the way in which his father and his grandfather were both humiliated when they lived in Poland. His father was a schoolboy in Poland and was bullied, teased and tortured for being a Jew. And when his father, Amos Oz´s grandfather went to the school to complain about this, the bullies attacked him, tore his trousers off and humiliated him in the playground, sneered and talked about what a Jew he was. And Amos Oz recounts the night when he was a small boy himself, the night that the United Nations voted to set up the State of Israel, and he says that his father talked about this, and then said `From tonight, now we have our own State, never again will people be treated like that just because you´re a Jew´. And you can see how the sense of humiliation and lack of self respect fed into the idea that you wanted the protection of your own nation-state. And this is very parallel to humiliations that the Palestinians now describe in the Occupied Territories, being taunted by Israeli soldiers, women being humiliated, treated at sex toys, forced to kiss Arab men and so on. And this kind of humiliation seems to me an enormously important ingredient in explaining why it is that people are so angry with each other and resort to so much violence in their conflict. Alan Saunders: If I can return to the experience of Mourid Barghouti you quote a moving lament from Barghouti about how exile has created a generation of Palestinians who know nothing of the texture of their country´s daily life, and he describes "generations that never saw our grandmothers squatting in front of the ovens to present us with a loaf of bread to dip in olive oil, never saw the village preacher in his head-dress and Azhari piety hiding in a cave to spy on the girls and the women of the village when they took off their clothes and bathed naked in the pool of Ein al-Deir. Well that´s very sad, but you could say, couldn´t you, about this experience and to some extent about the experience of all exiles that this life in the modern world, which is all about the fracturing of a sense of continuity. For the last century, life in the industrialised West has all been about constant change, perhaps not as keenly felt as this, but nonetheless a fact of life. Jonathan Glover: Well I agree that it´s a very plausible thing to say that the complex modern world with things like industrialisation, globalisation, travel, families disappearing to different parts of the earth, certainly it´s true that there´s a considerable loss of continuity, and perhaps it´s, I mean Simone Weil might have said that one of the things wrong with the modern world is that all of us, to some extent, have the experience of a degree of uprootedness, perhaps not all of us, but many more people than, say a couple of hundred years ago. But I suppose what I´m trying to say is that in the case of the Israelis and Palestinians it´s these things are combined to an intense degree. People are actually not allowed to go back to the occupied territories in many cases. Mourid Barghouti describes his brother, who he believes died as a result of a kind of broken heart after endlessly trying to get back to the places where he felt he belonged, and being denied it. The history of the humiliations and horrors of Jewish life with anti-semitism in 1930s Europe are instantly familiar. I agree that there may be uprootedness spreading a bit more in the world, but I think the whole thing is a matter of degree and the conflict which I´m talking about isn´t as a result of just, as it were, the standard `We haven´t seen our daughter for five years because she´s gone off to live in Texas´ or wherever it is. It´s that a whole community feels that they are uprooted, there isn´t as it were a home base any more for them if they´re driven out into exile. And also they feel the humiliations of this being imposed on them rather than being chosen by say, a son or a daughter who chooses to emigrate somewhere else. News montage... Alan Saunders: That was the sound of conflict in the Middle East. One place though where conflict is no longer quite so clamorous as it used to be is South Africa, and Jonathan Glover believes there is something to be learnt from the South African Truth and Reconciliation process. Jonathan Glover: Well first let me say that I don´t think there´s any, you know, the whole struggle between Israelis and Palestinians has many causes, and there´s no one magic formula for simply bringing about peace. I mean no doubt we´ll need pressures from outside countries, peace proposals, attempts to run negotiations, attempts to broker deals, possibly economic subsidies so the Palestinians aren´t so relatively poor compared to the Israelis. There are all sorts of political and economic moves we need. But what I´m concentrating on here, partly because I´m a philosopher and I´m no expert on the politics or the economics, but I´m concentrating in a way on the psychological, and I´m interested in the way these rival narratives about `we´re always in the right, and they always betrayed us and attacked us´ and so on and `you cant trust them.´ I´m interested in how those narratives trap the people who believe into them into conflicts, interviewing with each other. And the things I´m struck by is that of course you can´t necessarily extrapolate from what happens after a conflict to what you can do within. But if you look at the South African conflict, in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission what they did afterwards, was first do everything they could to nail lying propaganda so that they nailed various lies which the old apartheid government had put about, saying that torture was only a few rotten apples, it wasn´t a systematic policy and that kind of thing. They also nailed some lies which people in the liberation movement as they called it, had put about that they weren´t actually responsible for any atrocities; they too were responsible for some atrocities. So firstly they tried to establish the facts with the idea that the false propagandist narratives about the past, as happened in Yugoslavia where Serbs and Croats and people had these legends about each other as horrible tricksters, betrayers, aggressors and so on. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission said If we can get a true account, stripped of this lying propaganda, that means that the old enmities are less likely to focus around the propaganda and as a result the conflict is less likely to break out again. But they also said that there are certain psychological needs for many victims of both sides in the South African conflict who´ve been injured, their families have been tortured or killed, or whatever it is, and if we´re to make real peace, they argued, we have to bring out not only the facts of what happened, but also hear their accounts of what it meant for their lives, what it did as insults to their dignity, because it´s only by giving victims the right to express what happened to them, that you make it likely that they´re going to feel in a psychological state where they can forgive people. And what I´m suggesting is that you can´t run a Truth and Reconciliation Commission exactly as they did in South Africa while a conflict like the Israeli-Palestinian one is still going on, because people who testified would become victims, you know, they´d either be thought traitors to their own side and perhaps be killed by them, or they´d be thought enemies and killed by the other side. You can´t run it exactly like that while the conflict is still going on. But what you can do is think out various educational projects which may help people see the limitations and the biases of their own narratives, and that´s what I´d like to do. I´d like to help to set up various ways in which Palestinians and Israelis get together and teach each other about their versions of the history and talk to each other and try to understand each other´s accounts. Alan Saunders: Just finally it´s only a generation or so since moral philosophy in the English-speaking world was really about rules and the justification for rules, and the obligation to obey rules. You have talked entirely in terms of narrative, rival narratives of events, so there is, is there, a sort of narrative turn in moral philosophy of which you are part? Jonathan Glover: You could say that. I´m talking about narrative in the context of this particular kind of conflict. If I was talking about a different set of moral issues, I might well be talking in a rather different way. I´m not sure there´s a sort of one-size-fits-all approach to moral philosophy. I think that I´m talking a lot about narratives; I agree that narratives wasn´t a topic talked about at all 20 or 30 years ago in moral philosophy, so in a way that´s a change, but it isn´t as it were, sweeping movements as far as I´m concerned, that to be applied to absolutely any question that comes up. Alan Saunders: Jonathan Glover, thank you very much indeed for joining us. Jonathan Glover: Thank you. Alan Saunders: Professor Jonathan Glover, who was in Australia to deliver this year´s Simone Weil lecture on human value. And if you were expecting to hear more of Jonathan le Coq on Enlightenment and music this week, well, don´t worry, he will be turning up very soon in a future program. The show is produced by Kyla Slaven with technical production by Charlie McCune. I´m Alan Saunders and I´ll be back next week with another Philosopher´s Zone. read less
2008-08-09 - Objective truth
Fri August 08 2008
For a long time now, it has been fashionable to say that what science offers is not a true mirror of nature but a distorting mirror, reflecting our presuppositions, prejudices and politics. But can we take the criticisms on board while still maintaining a belief in objective truth? We meet a philosopher who says we can. Also, objectivity and the arts: can artistic judgments ever be objective or is it all down to just knowing what you like? TRANSCRIPT: Alan Saunders: Hello, and welcome to The Philosopher´s Zone. I´m Alan Saunders. And this week I´m in search of an old friend who´s fallen a bit on hard times lately. I´m talking about the concept of objective truth. In the age of post modernism it became fashionable to say that what science offers is not a true mirror of nature, but a distorting mirror, reflecting our presuppositions, prejudices, and politics. But can we take the criticisms on board while still maintaining a belief in objective truth? We´ll find out. And we´ll also look at objectivity and the arts. Can artistic judgments ever be objective, or is it all down to just knowing what you like? Let´s begin with science. To talk about that I spoke to Richard Boyd, Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University who was in this country for the annual conference of the Australasian Association for Philosophy. Richard Boyd: If you look at post modernist approaches to science I think they actually have two roots. One is the sort of strong program in the sociology of science that Barnes and Bloor initiated at Edinburgh. They were responding to a situation which I think they accurately describe in which they said that the characteristic way in which sociologists and historians of science often think about science is that when scientists get things right, that´s because they use the scientific method, and when they get things wrong, that´s because some social factors intervene. And they pointed out that this is really naïve because all the social structures of scientific inference are socially mediated. They proposed what they call the symmetry principle, according to which true and false scientific findings should be explained using exactly the same resources. And they took that, and almost everybody took that to mean that the notions of truth and falsity shouldn´t play a role in the social explanation of scientific theorising. There´s an alternative view that I favour, according to which you could honour the symmetry principle without abandoning the notion of truth or falsity, you just have to think that when scientists systematically get it right, there´s a complicated social explanation in which the notion of truth can play a role. And when they get it wrong, there´s an equally complex social explanation which notions of truth and falsity can get it wrong. And I think the other source of this post modernist view comes mainly out of feminist theory with a history in Marxist theory, namely a concern for social ideology in science. Imperialist policies were justified by scientific discoveries that colonised non-white people were inferior, the difference in income and status between men and women was defended by allegedly scientific discoveries about fundamental and essential differences between the sexes, and I think many scholars found it attractive to say that the key tool they should have is to criticise the very notion of objectivity or truth. That´s not a view I agree with but I think the motives for it were quite admirable actually. Alan Saunders: Well let´s focus in on a few of these notions that you´ve just alluded to. Let´s start with objectivity. What do we mean by objectivity and why should we be in favour of it? Richard Boyd: Well I actually think the notion that people have of objectivity, have always had, is a kind of mixture of the idea of systematically getting to the truth. So if you asked about our research strategy whether it´s objective, if you understand that question to be the question of whether doing research in that way is pretty likely often enough to get somewhere near the truth, that seems to be a very important property that our research strategy might have. I think that what confuses people is that we have a culturally transmitted conception of what underwrites objectivity in that sense, and what our culture teaches us is that you´re doing things objectively if you aren´t prejudiced, and what does it mean not to be prejudiced? It means not to have any presuppositions and that means to study each question on its own merits with no presuppositions. And it turns out that nobody does that in science, and so if you notice that nobody does that in science, you might think, `Ah, we discovered that there´s no objectivity´. But in fact, what seems to be the case in the sciences that work well, and in daily life, is that the real rule is not the rule, don´t have any presuppositions, the rule you want to follow if you can is to have approximately true presuppositions and very often in many mature sciences, where there´s no money-betting on one side or the other, or no political project in the way, the presuppositions that people have in say, elementary chemistry are pretty accurate, and so having those presuppositions allows you to design experiments to find out new stuff. So I think what there is, is a tension between the ideal of objectivity understood as the ideal of getting closer to the truth in a systematic way, and this model of how objectivity is attained, according to which it´s obtained by not having presuppositions, and that can´t be right. But I think many people who are moved by post modernism associate objectivity with freedom from presupposition and then by doing historical or sociological work, they can demonstrate that there isn´t research that´s even remotely free from presupposition in there, then led to deny the notion of objectivity altogether. Alan Saunders: Let´s look at some of the other concepts that you´re working with. One is that of the natural kind. What is a natural kind? Richard Boyd: Well for a very long time, Mill is the person who sort of introduced, reintroduced this term. Alan Saunders: This is John Stuart Mill in the 19th century. Richard Boyd: Yes. People have noticed for a long time that if you are trying to explain something or you´re trying to make generalisations, it helps to have a somehow appropriate vocabulary. So for example, if I´m trying to figure out chemical reactions and I sort reagents by what colour they are, I´m not going to be able to see very many interesting patterns because there are lots of chemically very different whites substances and red substances and so forth. So the notion of a natural kind got introduced by Mill reintroducing some older ideas, as a kind of thing that was a locus of important generalisations or explanations, and what´s characteristic I think of our use of natural kind concepts, is that because we know that our task is to carve things up in a way that´s useful for induction or explanation, we treat our taxonomies as revisable. So for a long time acids were detected mainly by having an acrid smell, and being able to etch metals and things like that. But once it became clear that what those reagents have in common that explains the properties people had already noticed was that they were proton donors, the notion of an acid was fruitfully expanded because when you think of acids as proton donors you have a taxonomy that helps you see more about how chemical mechanisms work. So it´s characteristic of natural kind concepts that appropriate method allows us to revise and reconceptualise our standards of application. Alan Saunders: You talked about natural kinds in terms of the way in which we carve up the world. What is the difference here between the realist and the relativist? Is it that the relativist is going to put more emphasis on the carving up part of the process of arriving in a natural kind and he´s not going to think of a natural kind as natural, but as the product of our concepts? Richard Boyd: What we´re doing when we talk about natural concepts, we´re talking about ways people sort stuff that turns out to be fruitful or not fruitful. I think the real contrast to the notion of natural kind is the notion of a nominal kind, the idea of a kind that´s defined by whatever criteria we happen to choose. So if I have a kind that consists of all things that are either pencils or glasses of water, that´s an arbitrary kind, they´re not going to be any interesting explanatory laws or inducted generalisations about those things. Whereas if I have either acids or late capitalist economies, or flightless birds, those are all going to be low sigh (?) interesting properties that figure an explanation and induction. But I think the notion of a natural kind has been assimilated by post modernists to the idea of kinds defined by unchanging essences. So if you think of races as being kinds because you think you have to appeal to notions of race in order to do social explanation, the worry is that you would have to think that races were characterised by eternal among changing properties. I just think that´s a mistaken conception of how we should understand kinds I mean there You can´t explain social stratification in racism without appealing to social categories like negro or whatever, but that doesn´t mean that you´re committed to there being any eternal essence of negritude . I think that´s a point that hasn´t been adequately emphasised in the disputes between post modernists and scientific realists. Alan Saunders: In what you say about the post modernists, you seem to be suggesting that they´re guilty of what I would think of as the sceptical, or the sceptics´ strategy. The sceptic sets the standards for knowledge very, very high, points out that these high standards for knowledge cannot possibly be met by any claims we want to make in the world, and therefore falls back on complete scepticism, says we can know nothing. Now you seem to be suggesting that the post modernists are doing something rather similar. They are assuming that say natural kinds have to be natural, that´s what we mean by them, they have to be eternal and part of the world, lo and behold, they´re not. So that´s one up to the post modernists. Richard Boyd: Well I think that you´re right in thinking that the strategy is a sceptical strategy, but I think that very often when people deploy sceptical strategies of that sort or of other sorts, they´re doing that in service of some project and you can independently evaluate the project, and so insofar as post modernists are interested in being able to illuminate the way in which conceptions of race or gender or human nature have figured pathologically in the way science has functioned ideologically, I think their project is admirable and in fact part of the reason I haven´t been talking about post modernist as unfavourably as I might have, is I think that very often the actually scholarship done by people in science studies or in gender studies for example, or in the States, in African-American studies, these are disciplines where sometimes post modernist slogans loom large, but often their empirical research is extremely good and uncovers exactly the sort of interesting ideological facts that as a matter of fact most analytic philosophers of science don´t know about. I mean we´re not professional historians or sociologists, but it´s true that if you are part of this post modernist project, when you´re doing empirical studies, you´re likely to be sensitive to some really important calls or variables. Now it´s true that your official view may say that there´s no such thing as causation, and there´s no such thing as good work or something, but I wouldn´t want to demean the empirical accomplishments that many of these people have achieved in their empirical work. I agree with you that there´s a kind of sceptical approach that raises the standards very, very high, and then says nothing meets it, and then reaches a sceptical conclusion, but I think it´s important to see that as part of a broader research program that it´s often actually quite fruitful in other respects. Alan Saunders: What about the process of empirical testing? Again, do you want to put some emphasis on the degree to which the empirical testing of theories might be informed by conceptual structures, cultural practices and so on? Richard Boyd: Sure, and in fact I think that´s one way of seeing why a reasonable notion of objectivity isn´t the notion of proceeding without presuppositions is this: suppose I have a scientific theory that I especially like and I want to test predictions from it. There are going to be an indefinite number of predictions that that theory might allow me to make. If I want to test my theory rigorously, in particular if I want to persuade others to agree with me, I can´t choose experiments at random. What I have to do is I have to ask myself what are the reasonable alternatives to my theory? What other theories addressing the same subject matter should people take seriously, and then can I find experiments or field observations or whatever, depending on what the theory is, that will discriminate between the truth of my theory and the truth of these reasonable alternatives? And I think, this is Popper, you should try to falsify theories. How do you try to falsify a theory? Well you try to figure out what sorts of experiments would be most likely to show that it´s mistaken, if it´s mistaken. How do you do that? You ask yourself from a scientifically informed point of view, which theories among the infinitely many ones that a logician could dream up, which ones are the ones that are serious rivals to the theory that´s been proposed, which ones are the ones that are most like one of which is most likely to be true if the theory isn´t true. And then you test the theory rigorously, by pitting it experimentally against those rivals. So objectivity in the sense of rigorous theory testing actually requires that one deploy one´s culturally transmitted scientific background knowledge to identify relevant alternatives. This is relevant to issues about ideology in science that we were discussing earlier, because of course if you are in the unfortunate position of operating in a cultural tradition where, say, conceptions of race are so profoundly wrong that your understanding is deeply limited, then you could test a racist hypothesis against all the alternatives plausible in your cultural scheme and you might never get anywhere near the truth, that´s why there´s a kind of radical contingency in the reliability of scientific methods. If an answer somewhere near the truth isn´t among the things that are even remotely plausible at the time, scientific research isn´t very likely at all to uncover the truth. Alan Saunders: Just finally, where do we find ourselves if we go to a higher level of abstraction? The great 20th century American philosopher Quine said that philosophy was continuous with the empirical sciences. So it wasn´t as though philosophy was above physics, legislating for physics, telling physics how to go about its business, there was in fact no dividing line between the two. Where do you stand on this? Richard Boyd: Well that should be called philosophical naturalism. I think that part of what put philosophical naturalism at a disadvantage in dialogue with post modernism is that Quine´s own conception was, I´m being crude, but to a good first approximation it looked as though he thought that epistemology should be turned over to perceptual and cognitive psychologists and that metaphysics should be turned over to physicists, so that the range of empirical sciences with which philosophy was continuous, might just be physics and perceptual psychology. I think philosophy continues with other kinds of empirical inquiry, including not only physics and perceptual psychology, but the sociology of science and that social history, racial exploitation and the social history of biology. So I think that the way in which we should view philosophy as a kind of empirical science is that it has special sorts of methodological concerns, special sorts of concerns about rationally reconstructing how people are thinking, but its broadly an empirical discipline. But the other empirical disciplines to which it´s closely related are quite diverse, and I think that - I guess if you´d asked Quine he might have agreed in principle, but I don´t think that was what most people took as their take-home lesson from Quine. Alan Saunders: Well on that happy notion of diversity we´re going to have to close. Professor Richard Boyd, thank you very much indeed for joining us. Richard Boyd: Thank you very much, I enjoyed it. MUSIC Alan Saunders: From the score to Sally Potter´s movie Orlando, what I suppose is a post modernist take on the music of the late 17th century. Though it sounds to me a bit like a parody of Michael Neiman´s post modernist take on the music of the late 17th century, which is a really post modernist thing to do. And now the late 17th century saw the birth of that movement of European intellectual life known as the Enlightenment, which held to the idea of objective values in the arts, as well as in the sciences. So can we after the romanticism of the 19th century and the modernism and then the post modernism of the 20th, still believe in objective values in the arts? To discuss that, here´s Jonathan Le Cocq, senior lecturer in history and philosophy of music, lute and historical performance at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Jonathan Le Cocq: I don´t really want to be in the position of saying that, to take a simple case that a Handel chorus is better than a mass movement by Josquin des Prez. One from the 18th century, one from the 16th century. And I think if you like that´s a degree of enlightenment optimism that we can´t really bring into the present day where art is concerned. But I do think we can say that one work is more substantial than another, that there is more value in a Handel cantata than in a 3-1/2 minute formulaic popular song, and with closer examples as well. I think a rather hideous example of this sort of thing is what happens when you apply drum beats to classical music which sometimes happens. I remember an opera loving friend coming into a meeting with an expression of glee on his face once, who´d discovered a record, it was an old vinyl record that was called Hits on Opera where classic opera areas were subjected to having a drumbeat or a disco beat put underneath them. And the thing that struck me about it was that the moment you introduced that heavy drumbeat, you lost the nuances, and the subtlety and all of the things that made the original operatic setting a fine piece of music, really a beautifully sophisticated piece of music. And in some cases adding things makes them worse. Alan Saunders: What is the relationship between modernism and the Enlightenment? Jonathan Le Cocq: Well it´s a theory, I would say. There is a school of thought which said that modernism was the last gasp of the Enlightenment, in the sense that modernist composers and artists were seeking to make progress, to take art to where in a sense they thought it had to go, because they thought it had to be changed, but in doing that, followed a path that left the audience behind, that their technical developments were such that the audience, the general audience could no longer follow them, and that was just unfortunate, but there was no avoiding it. And then the Enlightenment project has died if you like, with the death of modernism and the arrival of post modernism, in the sense that now the claim is there are no longer any sorts of objective values, no longer any talk of progress in the arts in any way, shape or form, and that that marks since the death of both modernism and the Enlightenment program at one and the same time. I think the flaw in that is that the Enlightenment isn´t just about this belief in the possibility of progress, I think there is also a set of values that underlay the Enlightenment, and those values are essentially humane values. They put first and forward human development over say political ideology or especially religious ideology. I would say that if you were composing a work of music or if you´re producing a piece of art and you cannot bring with you the audience that has learnt to love and appreciate the art of other generations, then one of two things has happened. Either you share those sort of Enlightenment humane values, but you haven´t solved all of the problems that you need to solve, or else you don´t share those Enlightenment human values, you´re not concerned about bringing the audience with you, and in fact that´s not the failure of the Enlightenment project, that´s a failure of the Romantic project, the 19th century project that said that revolution is vital and radical change is vital, or in the arts, originality is primary. Alan Saunders: Is there a tension here between something that does emerge from the Enlightenment which is a belief in the individual and in individual judgement, and the objected values that you´re looking for? Because if I believe in the individual, can we not get to the stage where I simply end up saying, `Well if you like it, good for you, I´m not going to tell you that it´s bad, it´s just that you like it and I don´t. You like Nessun Dorma with a drumbeat along with it, well, OK, I have no argument against that. There can be no argument against that.´ Jonathan Le Cocq: Well I tried to say earlier that where I think the argument against that lies, and it lies in what you can objectively say about those works, and what you can hear in them. No I think that if you like, the liberalism of the Enlightenment project is to do with what you´ll tolerate and what you will accept and what you will argue over. It´s not a liberalism that says that anything goes and all ideas are equal. That would be an idea that was very far away from the mindset of the Enlightenment thinker altogether. I guess if that does impinge on the contemporary issues, it really probably comes down to questions about how the arts are paid for, or how the arts are funded. When you have subsidy for the arts, you have a situation where a group of people, taxpayers are required to support the arts, and that´s problematical. Now I hesitate enormously to say that, because as with anybody else who´s involved with the arts, we spend most of our time trying to drum up support for it, and trying to fund them, and we think they´re just about the most important thing that there is, and they need support wherever you can find support. But I think we have really quite an extraordinary, unique sort of situation in the present day, or since the Second World War where there is that built-in separation between consumer of art and patron of art. And the person who´s paying for it isn´t the person consuming it. And I sometimes wonder whether that doesn´t encourage this sort of situation where you have a separation between artist and audience, which I think it is important to close down, to close down that gap. But I think increasingly actually, artists perceive that as well. Alan Saunders: How do you close the gap? Jonathan Le Cocq: What I think you can´t do is say what artists should or shouldn´t be doing. I see artists as sort of entrepreneurial really. Artists experiment, they develop ideas, and they work or they don´t. I would myself say that one of the ways in which you have to judge whether an idea works or whether it hasn´t, is how meaningful it is to the audience you´d expect it to be meaningful to. But that doesn´t really answer your question. That´s the sort of negative side of it. But because I´m unwilling to tell artists what I think they should or shouldn´t do, all I would really say is `Don´t put in place methods or practices that help encourage that gap between artists and audience.´ For example, if you´re talking about how the State funds the arts, I would lean more towards a system of tax breaks than I would lean towards a system of direct subsidy. If I take a little corner of an issue that´s fairly particular in the universities for example, funding for the universities is now partly done through assessing research and research assessment exercises, and that means that artists and composers will be funded on the sort of research that they bring out, and that they have to describe artworks as research. That means they have to be original work because that´s a defining quality of research, and you need to place a premium on originality. I think originality is great, but if it´s your ultimate goal as an artist I think experience suggests you´re going to run into problems. Sooner or later you run out of ways of being original and you certainly run the risk of leaving your audience behind. Alan Saunders: More next week from Jonathan Le Cocq who was in this country for the Centre for Independent Studies 2008 Big Ideas forum. The show is produced by Kyla Slaven with technical production this week by Charlie McCune. I´m Alan Saunders and I´ll be back next week with another Philosopher´s Zone. read less
2008-08-02 - Stoics at war
Fri August 01 2008
Recent philosophical debate on war has focused on the idea that you don´t just have to fight by the rules; you also have to be fighting in a just cause. But does this ignore much of the moral context of a soldier´s life. What binds comrades in arms together? What about stress and what about grief, and what does the ancient Roman philosophy of Stoicism have to tell us about it? TRANSCRIPT: Alan Saunders: Hello, and welcome to The Philosopher´s Zone. I´m Alan Saunders. Over the last couple of weeks, we´ve been looking at moral dilemmas and last week it was a moral dilemma at sea, as illustrated in the novella Billy Budd. Well having looked at the way a naval officer might or might not behave, this week it´s the army on land. Nancy Sherman is a university Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown Law School. She has also been the inaugural holder of the distinguished Chair in Ethics at the United States Naval Academy, and this is very relevant to our conversation. So let´s begin by looking at the philosophical direction she´s coming from. She´s written that in the military ethics course she taught at the Naval Academy, she covered honesty, liberty, virtue, and just war, interspersed with the writings of philosophers such as Aristotle, and St Thomas Aquinas, John Stuart Mill and Kant. But it was when she arrived at the Roman philosopher Epictetus who was what is called a Stoic, that students and officers alike felt they had come home. So first of all, what is, or was, Stoicism? Nancy Sherman: Stoicism is a word that survived in the vernacular. So many of us will claim to be stoic in popular talk. So Stoicism though was an ancient philosophy started by the Greeks following Aristotle in the Hellenistic world and then went right through from 3rd, 4th century before the Common Era to the 2nd century of the Common Era. The idea was that you emphasised your control what you can be in charge of, and in particular your rational control, and so you let go - it sounds pretty Buddhist - but in fact it was a kind of rational, self-control notion detached from things that are outside your immediate ambit and control, and be in charge of and take responsibility for what´s within. So it´s virtue, defined narrowly, as up to myself in my control. Alan Saunders: And why was coming to Epictetus, a Stoic, like coming home for you and your military students? Nancy Sherman: The military resonates with the Stoic ethos of war, and of deprivation and of having to suck it up. I don´t know if it´s a term you use in Australia. Alan Saunders: We know what it means we´ve seen enough American TV here. Nancy Sherman: Right. Stiff upper lip if you´re British. And pull up your socks, essentially. And that´s what military men and women do. So being Stoic was their language and suck it up and truck on, and to find that Romans, some of them even warriors like not only Epictetus but Marcus Aurelius wrote about this, was very, very edifying to them. Alan Saunders: And in fact you mentioned Jim Stockdale who was a senior prisoner-of-war in the Vietnam war, survived 7-1/2 years as a POW in the so-called `Hanoi Hilton´ and he was sustained in part, no doubt by many things, but he was sustained in part by some words of Epictetus that he´d actually memorised. So he had almost literally internalised stoicism. Nancy Sherman: Absolutely. I interviewed him many times, he´s now deceased, but once just after 9/11 I was in his home, and to listen to him was to listen to Epictetus, or I didn´t know when he, Jim Stockdale ended and Epictetus began. It was part of his fabric, and he was an international relations student at Stanford, wandered into a philosophy course which he said he took to like a duck takes to water, and was handed upon leaving and upon going to Vietnam, this little tract of Epictetus and it was salvation. Interestingly, he never converted others, thought that that was not the way to proceed. Once did, and through tap language on the wall and got a dead silence and realised `I´ve got my ducks lined up one way, others have theirs; don´t try to preach´. Alan Saunders: Well that does actually make me wonder whether obviously if there are philosophically minded soldiers or sailors indeed, you´re likely to find them, but are there many around, philosophical and thoughtfully minded members of the military profession? Nancy Sherman: Well that´s a wonderful question and I know is struck and indeed my work in this book that you were talking about Stoic Warriors and a forthcoming book, The War Within, which continues the moral landscape of soldiering, with how many reflective soldiers there are, you know, not everyone who´s in boot camp thinks about the cause of war or how to survive it with integrity, but many do. And here´s a little anecdote that kind of captures it. One of my friends was heading to West Point, shared a taxi with a Colonel and asked my friend `What do you do for a living?´ and he very sheepishly said `I teach legal ethics and military ethics´. And the Colonel said, `Oh, I never read philosophy but I read Epictetus four times a year and Marcus Aurelius five times a year.´ So there are more popular philosophers that are read by the philosophically minded soldiers and sailors and marines, airmen. Alan Saunders: And does Stoicism, does this make the young soldiers or the young officers think about their actions in a different way? Nancy Sherman: Well I think so. Part of the burden of my work, talking to the public but also to the military, is to emphasise the blessings and curses of Stoicism. There are obvious blessings, that it arms you with a mental barrier that sometimes kicks in instinctually when you´re in the face of trauma, but also those of them that have studied Epic Stoicism, including Epictetus and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, will know about it through the writings. But it can come with great cost. There is liability as well, and the liability is that you really think that things outside your control don´t matter, that your family doesn´t matter, or that if you lose a leg or you come home with traumatic brain injury which is the signature disease of the current war, concussive disorder, that somehow it won´t matter. But it does matter and it´s only kind of short-term survival, and if you make it long-term, and you narrow off all the things that matter, you get yourself into a kind of denial that can be very self-effacing. Alan Saunders: There´s a problem here isn´t there, that it is in the nature of war that it releases, if it does not actually rely upon some very profound human passions and if I have just seen a lot of my comrades killed by an enemy who is now in my control because I´ve captured him, I might not be answerable for my actions. But the Stoics claim don´t they, that the professional soldier must rely not on rage to whet his appetite for battle but he must be motivated by a desire for justice. That sounds a bit like a Council of Perfection in the extreme circumstances of war. Nancy Sherman: Well put. I think that Stoics are answering Aristotle and Plato who say that anger is a battle motivator, and that the soldier has rage in his belly, Plato would say `thumos´ a kind of warrior spirit, and unless you can rely on that, you simply won´t have the guts to get out there and the kind of fire that kindles courage, and you´re right, and we know even in response to calls of war, rallies to war like 9/11 or once you´re on the battlefield and see someone killed, that revenge, payback kick in. And the Stoics counsel of perfection is reasonable in that revenge is fairly ugly. It can lead to the kind of behaviour that knows no bounds, that leaps before reason and that will lead to massacre, or atrocity. The absolute abolition of it, or the sense that some of my more moralistic commanders will have, that I don´t want any revenge or payback on the battlefield, is unreasonable, I would argue. And that as ugly an emotion as anger is, compared to say grief, it still may have a place in the battlefield. Certainly indignation and resentment would have a place or of the kind of anger that spurs on righteous action. It´s the boundedlessness of revenge is ugly and the fact that you can´t have enough dead people to get the payback. We know Hector was killed after Achilles lost his Petrocolus.. Alan Saunders: This is The Iliad? Nancy Sherman: Yes, and Achilles was so enraged that he dragged Hector round and round at the end, seven times round the ring. He couldn´t get enough corpses to punish the deed. He wanted the corpse over and over again. So we know that payback is a generation of violence, reissued every generation, a sort of transmission through the generations. We don´t want that but something that´s at the basis of courage is a reasonable thing. Alan Saunders: Stoicism is in many respects a philosophy of extremities. You describe one of the best-known of the Stoics, Seneca, as a 1st century Roman Stoic and resident philosopher, spin doctor and political adviser in the court of Nero. And obviously somebody in that position, or those positions, isn´t going to find untroubled sleep that easy, not necessarily because you have a guilty conscience, but because you´re worried about what´s going to happen to you next, and a Stoic challenge is surely one that the soldier has to face in extreme circumstances when like Jim Stockdale whom you´ve mentioned, he becomes a prisoner-of-war. He has, as you put it, `to find dignity when stripped of nearly all nourishments of the body and soul´. That is a most extreme set of circumstances to find yourself in, isn´t it? Nancy Sherman: Yes. And some would say Stoicism is the philosophy of deprivation, and it doesn´t work for everyday usage. I would argue, Stocism appeals to many of us when we have less extreme stressors than being a POW or facing torture which is what Jim faced for 7-1/2 years, 2-1/2 years in solitary, and in leg irons, constraints. People that have losses of their children which to me is one of the most horrific thoughts, try to figure out Well how can I control my attitude and my own responses even in the face of horrific tragic luck? So the examples don´t have to be that extreme, but they still can be palpable and ask you to take charge when you seem like you have so little in charge. I don´t say in Nero´s, in Seneca´s case excuse me, he was constantly pleading mercy to Nero, so his tract on anger was just about those other responses to the servant whom you don´t like, or to the politician whom you can´t stand for them throwing them in with the vipers and the iguanas. Show a little patience, show a little mercy. So there was a tract on mercy as well. Alan Saunders: Yes, he´s cropped up on this program fairly recently and we do know what happened to him, what thanks he got. MUSIC Reader: There are things which are within our power and there are things which are beyond our power. Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion and in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power, are body, property, reputation, office and in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs. Remember then that if you attribute freedom to things by nature dependent, and take what belongs to others or your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will find fault both with gods and men. If it concerns anything beyond our power, be prepared to say that it is nothing to you. Alan Saunders: The words of the man whose name in Greek Epic Tatos means simply `acquired´. Epictetus born around 55AD who spent his youth as a slave in Rome. You talk about surviving torture and you talk about Jim Stockdale as surviving torture in Hanoi. Stoicism teaches us how to endure torture, perhaps, but it also teaches us you say, to avoid inflicting torture, and you´ve just mentioned Seneca´s appeals for mercy. How does Stoicism do this? Nancy Sherman: Well you know, we think of Stoicism as the enduring side, and facing a hardship. But I argue that it´s limited because you risk your own humanity in giving up all vulnerability, the pain and distress, but what Stoicism does remind you, that your virtue and what you do as opposed to what´s done to you, is in your control. So in the case of being a torturer rather than being the tortured, this really is a place where you are the actor, you´re the full actor, you´re the agent and you´re trying to co-opt someone´s co-operation, their rapport, build a liaison that´s what it´s all about. The opportunity to so abuse that person, degrade, is a mild word for what you could do, torture however politically charged the term is, captures it more, is there for you, you were the dominator and there´s someone dominated who worries about what they need divulge in response. Stoicism is about holding on to your virtue when you have all the power. And so in a sense, I´ve argued that go to war if there´s a chance that you´re being the interrogator, the prison guard, military police, with the kind of high standards that Stoicism instils in you, which is essentially a Socratic thing, know yourself and be responsible for what you do and inflict on others. Alan Saunders: So we are seeing a falling-off from those high standards in Guantánamo Bay or Bagram? Nancy Sherman: Oh I would certainly argue. But it´s not individual responsibility. Stoicism, any philosophy gets it wrong if you think you´re all individual actors. This is institutional, torture is an institutional practice, and even if you´re a doctor who is overseeing or if you´re a psychologist, you´re still dealing with the forensics of interrogation, how people break and the like, you´re part of a pressure chain of command where there´s an institution, and legalese that´s trying to support practices that aren´t always above board, far from above board. Alan Saunders: Well this does lead me to wonder if you´ve got people like you teaching Stoicism at the Naval Academy, if you have as you said, officers reading Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius at West Point every year, it doesn´t seem to be making any difference, and really if Stoic philosophy is entering the thoughts of the command, the command structure that high up in the command structure, it still doesn´t seem to be making a difference. Nancy Sherman: Well the sad point about something like Guantanomo where I had visited and advised the Defence Department on their health practices and psychological interrogations, and similarly Abu Ghraib we know this very well, is that a lot of what was done it was at the low level and there were a lot of reservists and National Guards that came in that were not well trained. Now the command structure did come from high on, and also they came from civilians and civilians in our Office of Legal Counsel that advises the Commander-in-Chief to rewrite or reconceive what counts as torture. But then it was transmitted by loyal soldiers, so there certainly was dereliction of duty at the civilian and of the command chain and the military end of the command chain, and then transported from Gitno, Guantanomo, to Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraib was said to be Gitmo-ised with certain kinds of methods. So yes, I do think there was a breach. Does it make a difference? We´re looking at a huge behemoth military with lots of individuals, a number of individuals including many, many military lawyers are objecting very loud to the current tribunals in Guantanomo and to the practices that have persisted in the detention system and the legal system that´s interrogated the detainees. Alan Saunders: If Stoicism encourages me to concentrate on the things I can control, and I see torture going on, I can´t control it, I can´t do anything about it because of my role, relatively, say, low role in the hierarchy, and I´m not taking part in it though, I´m just seeing it happen, am I justified in ignoring it, saying Well it´s nothing to do with me, and I can´t control it, I can´t do anything, I will just attend to my own virtues? Nancy Sherman: Well that resignation might be read as sort of resigning to fate, which we spoke about earlier, but in fact the whistle was blown by fairly low-level people in the case of Abu Ghraib, and often the low-level people that blew the whistle or the low-level folks who were following orders, got the punishment and some of the top brasses as often happens, don´t do much. So what you can do is a fairly vague blank statement, and often the protest is itself something you do. I´m sure always in any philosophy, but Stoicism too, about how the world will take up your action. Will it welcome it? Will it squash it and scotch it? Or will someone listen somewhere down the line, even it´s a Congressman in a very delayed response. Alan Saunders: Let´s look at the circumstances in which they find themselves now and recent philosophical debate on war has focused on the causes of war; the notion is that soldiers are accountable not only as is traditional, for their conduct in war, but for the cause of the war as well. So the idea is that you don´t just have to fight by the rules, you have to be fighting in a just cause, is that the situation? Nancy Sherman: That´s right. So the conventional view is that those that are a higher pay grade decide when the cause is just, and you answer the rally. By signing up, or conscription if that´s the case, enlistment or conscription, and then how you prosecute the war `jus in bello´, the justice in the conduct of war is what you´re held responsible for. So whether you´re fighting for the allies or you´re fighting on the other side as a German, it´s on the battle that you conduct yourself with justice or not. Now a lot of philosophers have argued of late that let´s hold soldiers also responsible for the cause. Because then you´d have fewer wars, more people protesting unjust wars, or at least that conscientiousness we were talking about earlier, the reflectiveness, and I would argue it´s far too demanding to hold the individual soldier responsible for the cause because they often, poor guy, and many women often are under duress to enlist because of economic realities, opportunity, that´s where the education, the training is, or because of a kind of misguided sense of the authority of their government. But what they are responsible still for is conduct. And then the question is so what happens when they´re out there and they don´t believe in the cause? We may as outsiders not hold them responsible for cause, nor criminally I think should we hold them responsible for cause. I don´t think any International Court should prosecute the soldier for fighting, he´s been a foot soldier, for fighting the cause that ends up in hindsight being unjust. But they feel it and they carry and mix together what they fight for and how they fight, and I think what they hold on to throughout the whole thing is whatever cause I´m fighting for, I´m always fighting for each other, camaraderie, shoulder to aching shoulder, Siegfried Sassoon World War I poet put it, and he really protested the war, he started talking to Bertrand Russell who was pacifist, came home, thought he wasn´t going to fight any more, goes back because his soldiers are whispering to him `When are you coming back to me´ in the trenches? Alan Saunders: However, a central tenet of Stoicism is a belief in cosmopolitanism. We are global citizens, we´re members of the universal ethical community. So we´re not just members of a tribe, a religion, a nation, or for that matter a regiment or a squad. Nancy Sherman: That´s right, so we think more justly or we think more globally about justice, and I think one way to apply that claim of being citizens of the universe is that for soldiers now, when fighting an enemy that seems to not fight by just conduct rules, they don´t make their weapons visible, they´re hidden, they´re often phones or other kinds of remote electronics, they don´t wear uniforms, so again they don´t advertise themselves as soldiers responsible for their conduct. The demand for our soldiers who do wear uniforms is to still fight the combatant with respect; a kind of respect to all citizens of the universe. Very challenging, very demanding, hard to not want revenge when you´re buddies get blown up by a roadside bomb or other kind of mortar, when you can´t even see the enemy, but still demanded. The civility of war is not there by any means but the civility of respect due those on the battlefield still have to be there, and it makes for taking the high road, it makes for feeling the kind of perfectionist standards of virtue that your enemy often doesn´t feel towards you. Alan Saunders: Nancy Sherman, thank you very much indeed for joining us. Nancy Sherman: So, it´s really been my pleasure, thanks so much. Alan Saunders: And Nancy Sherman was in this country for Truth and Faith in Ethics, an international conference held recently at the Sydney campus of the University of Notre Dame. The show is produced by Kyla Slaven with technical production this week by Charlie McCune and Stephen Crittenden was the voice of Epictetus. I´m Alan Saunders and I´ll be back next week with another Philosopher´s Zone. read less
