Political philosopher John Gray has an interesting theory, expounded in his 2002 book Straw Dogs (on pp. 141-2) of my 2007 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux paperback edition).

Prohibiting drugs makes the trade in the fabulously profitable. It breeds crime and greatly enlarges the prison population. Despite this, there is a worldwide drug pandemic. Prohibiting drugs has failed. Why then will no contemporary government legalise them? Some say organized crime and the law are locked in a symbiosis that blocks radical reform. There may be some truth in this, but the real explanation lies elsewhere.

The most pitiless warriors against drugs have always been militant progressives….It is no accident that the crusade against drugs today is led by a country wedded to the pursuit of happiness — the United States. For the corollary of that improbable quest is the puritan war on pleasure.

Drug use is a tacit admission of a forbidden truth. For most people happiness is beyond reach. Fulfillment is found not in daily life but in escaping from it. Since happiness is unavailable, the mass of mankind seeks pleasure.

Religious cultures could admit that earthly life was hard, for they promised another in which all tears would be wiped away. Their humanist successors affirm something still more incredible — that in the future, even the near future, everyone can be happy. Such a faith in progress cannot admit the normal unhappiness of human life. As a result, they are bound to wage war on those who seek artificial happiness in drugs.

Something for me to reflect on as I watch The Wire for the Nth time.

My weekend reading, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (New York: Basic Books, 2010), starts as follows (the link is my bonus):

“Now we will live!” This is what the hungry boy liked to say, as he walked along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people. “I will meet her,” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. “They asked me for my wedding ring, which I….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country. Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary, “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin, her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death. The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans.

Such a worthy world of starting new lives in!

You can find some surprising wisdom on tumblr, if you try.

Sourced to Xxxela’s erotic etch book via brenstorm.

I have to admit that I’m a fan of Cracked.com, largely because its writers are willing to be so brutal in being funny. And today I would like to commend your attention to Felix Clay‘s “The 4 Worst Things About Being in Love.” As anyone who reads back through this site will know, I am no fan of love, and the fact that I can easily point to three of the four items on Mr. Clay’s list as things that have blighted my existence doubtless goes a long way toward explaining my sour disposition on the matter.

What really strikes me, though, is that in reading through the comments on the article is the remarkable number of comments that repeat the same tiresome platitude: “Just hang in there, because there’s somebody out there for everyone.” The observation invariably thrown down as decisive evidence in favor of this remarkable proposition is some first- or second-hand experience: “I (or some friend/family member) thought things would never work out, and then I met this wonderful person, etc. etc.” Does no one reflect on the fact that such evidence is not even remotely adequate to sustain the proposition?

One wants to weep.

In a way, this represents my idiosyncratic variant on Richard Joyce’s The Myth of Morality.

There are many Candidate Moralities: Kantianisms, Virtue Theories, Natural Law Theories, Utilitarianisms, and as many Common Sense Moralities as there are people with a mish-mash of intuitions and principles in their heads, which is to say, as many as there are people. But for the most part every Candidate Morality claims at least two properties for itself:

Universality (U): If a Morality dictates a moral obligation to φ, then every person, actual or potential, has an obligation to φ. (Note that “to φ” here can be to act or to refrain from acting).

Rational overridingness (RO): If a Morality dictates a moral obligation to φ, then it gives an overriding reason to φ to the relevant person who has the obligation to φ. An “overriding reason” is one such that if one can have such a reason to φ, then one must rationally φ, notwithstanding whatever other reasons one has to not-φ.

Combining U and RO we get a General Property of Morality or GPM:

(GPM) If a Morality dictates that φ, then that Morality gives every actual and potential person an overriding reason to φ.

If we propose a highly intuitive proposition called the Exclusivity of Overriding Reasons (EOR):

(EOR) If a person has an overriding reason to φ, then that person does not have have overriding reason to not-φ

then we can conclude

(GPM’) If a Morality dictates that φ, then there is no person with an overriding reason to not-φ

But I find at least two other propositions highly intuitive:

Rationality of Minimal Self-Interest (RMSI): If a person will suffer enough as a consequence of φ-ing, then that person has an overriding reason to not-φ.

and

Morality Always Screws Somebody (MASS): There will always be either an actual or potential person who will suffer enough as a consequence of φ-ing that they will have an overriding reason to not-φ. (As William Blake once expressed it, “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.”

but if MASS is true then GPM’ must be false, which since it is derived from U, RO, and EOR means that at least one of these must be false. EOR seems to be true almost by definition, so that leaves us with throwing out either U or RO, either one of which seems fatal for any Morality. Throwing out U leads (most likely) to some variant of moral relativism, while throwing out RO threatens to make Morality purely arbitrary, or simply optional.

The concept of consent is a rock upon which decency is founded, at least so right-thinking people today believe. In medical ethics, for example, informed consent is considered absolutely necessary both for therapies and for participation in medical research. The Nuremberg Code, codified for the purpose of dealing with Nazi doctors in the aftermath of the Second World War, requires consent of subjects in medical research absolutely. If you have consent, you might be conducting bona fideresearch. Without it, you’re committing crimes against humanity, no ifs ands or buts. And consent is the core of decent sexual ethics as well. If from your partner you have it, if you affirmatively and enthusiastically have it, then good for you! And if you don’t have it, you’re a rapist.

Two subsidiary principles are important to the notion of consent: First, it must be obtained affirmatively. mere submission, acquiescence, failure to protest, and so on, do not constitute obtaining consent. Second, consent may be withdrawn at any time. In medical experiments this right to withdraw consent is implicit in the right of a subject to withdraw if ve believes continuation to be impossible. In sexual ethics it means that if your partner expresses a desire for you to stop doing what you’re doing, then you need to stop, no questions asked.

Defenders of consent speak of creating a “consent culture” and I’m certainly sympathetic to them; and alternative to a consent culture is without doubt profoundly unpalatable. But if we had a culture really based on consent, some interesting results would seem to obtain.

Consider: life itself is an experiment, and potentially one far worse than any medical experiment, or any sexual experience (or at least, potentially as bad, since in the process of being alive necessarily includes all the horrible things that can happen to you in medical practice or in sex, as well as far, far else besides). But it is impossible to obtain anyone’s consent to be brought into existence. And that would seem to indicate that if we had a consent culture, we should be antinatalists, indeed, very hard antinatalists if we take the core ethical notion of our consent culture at all seriously.

Likewise, just as in a consent culture we would necessarily have the right to withdraw from an experiment if we find it impossible to go on, and the right to withdraw from sex at any time and for any reason (or indeed, for no reason), then we surely have the right to walk away from life if we no longer consent to being alive. The right to turn down the deal on offer, to walk away from that we find repugnant, is as fundamental to our liberty and our autonomy as anything could be. A real consent culture would be pro-suicide choice.

It is no defense that life contains some good things. The Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg would not have gotten off if they had somehow conveyed benefits on their experimental subjects, and in a consent you’re not allowed to have sex with someone who can’t consent (say, a minor or an incompetent person). You’re still a rapist even if the person you had sex with wasn’t harmed, even if they enjoyed it.

Perhaps there’s some fancy intellectual dancing that can distinguish between subjecting people to life without their consent and other, more narrow fields in which consent is seen as somehow necessary. I don’t think so, though.

A guide to abortion funds.

The text as follows:

Need help accessing safe, legal abortion?

Conttact the Aborition Assistance Blog

aboritionassistanceblog.tumblr.com

abortionassistance@gmail.com

• Transportation to your appointment
• Lodging for overnight travelers
• Babysitting
• Funds
• And many more resources!

These folks also have a twitter feed at @prochoicehlp

Update: Also, be sure sometime to visit Sister Y’s pamphlet Five Reasons to Have an Abortion.

Being rational means being resistant to wishful thinking. Unfortunately for us, we are rather prone to wishful thinking. It is also unfortunately the case that there are lots of people out there who know about our propensity for wishful thinking and would like to exploit it. Animal communication systems, as Robert Trivers famously noted, did not evolve to produce truth but to procure reproductive advantages for the communicators. For human animals, swindling people out of wealth and loyalty are a pretty good way to get advantages. So if you want to be rational and resist such forces, you should apportion your skepticism about any claim such that, the more it would be good for you if that claim were true, the more skeptical of it you ought to be.

Concrete illustration: consider three claims.

Claim A: Spreading WonderVegeGreen on your lawn will make it lovely, thick, and lush!

Claim B: Taking Ironized Yeast will cure your common cold!

Claim C: This drug made from apricot pits will cure your cancer!

Ask yourself, just intuitively, which of these claims ought we to be most skeptical of? Which would most be likely to induce wishful thinking? If it looks like a ladder for skepticism, you’re doing well with rationality.

The view that we ought to apportion our skepticism against our propensity for wishful thinking I call the Snake Oil Dispersant. Snake Oil claims are what it is there to rid us of. (For those unfamiliar with the term, “snake oil” was a generic term for mystery medicines peddled by itinerant salesmen in nineteenth century America. These medicines would supposedly cure a wide range of ailments which the real medicine of the day was largely powerless against.

The claims of things like religion ought to be something like Claim Z on my ladder: real snake oil in need of being dispersed. What could we want more desperately to believe than with all the suffering in the world and in our lives, that somehow we are getting (or at least, potentially can get) something (a blissful eternal afterlife, or “meaning”) that somehow makes it all worthwhile. Many among us, seeing how the brutal and nasty so often prosper in the world, while the kindly and gentle are trodden underfoot, might also long for some sort of justice in the world. But precisely because we so long for such things is why we should be burningly skeptical of any claims that such states of affairs could ever, in fact, be realized — that is, we should be skeptical of precisely the claims that religions advance.

The claims of religion are notoriously weak even against mild skepticism, a fact which goes a long way to explaining my incredulity with respect thereto.

Though I don’t mean to bash religion only. Snake-oil dispersant ought to be liberally deployed against forms of secular optimism as well. Both trite and untrue folk beliefs (“If you work hard and play by the rules, you’re sure to succeed,” “There’s somebody out there for everyone”) or grand secular substitutes for religion, such as humanism or transhumanism are unlikely to survive much contact with skepticism. It’s all to easy to somehow want to believe, as humanists would have us do, that life is “meaningful” even in spite of the fact that it’s often so miserable, or that in some glorious future we’ll all live in some amazing awesome virtual reality. Maybe that’s sad. So be it. It is not a property of truth that it is here to make us happy.

I have always had a hard time understanding concepts like “the meaning of life” and the “search for meaning.” In my fifth decade of life, I now hold a rule of thumb that if I encounter someone who appears to take these or similarly-described concepts serious, then with a probability exceeding 0.99 I have encountered an intellect so vague and cloudy that productive or even entertaining engagement therewith is impossible.

Nonetheless in the spirit of fairness I’ll try my hand at a definition of “meaning” when applied outside of its primary and useful context (that is, when it isn’t applied to sentences, signs, signals, predictive events, etc.). It is this: “meaning” is something that the speaker alleges that if you have it, then somehow in spite of the fact that your life contains a large (perhaps even vast) balance of misery over happiness (as by far most human lives that go on for long enough do), you will somehow not be sorry about the fact of your ever having come into existence.

Not that I think that there is “meaning” any more than there are leprechauns, of course.

“This Be the Verse,” which might be the most famous dozen lines written by Phillip Larkin (1922-1985). Were it up to me I would have every schoolchild commit them to memory, though that will never be, and not just because of the robust use of the vernacular in the first line.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.