Philosophy for Real Life

A current New York Times article describes controversy over birth control pills at Roman Catholic colleges.⁽¹⁾ The difference between two ways of thinking about ethics, the Goodness paradigm and the Rightness paradigm, could not be illustrated more starkly.

The U.S. Health Care Reform legislation mandates that employer-funded insurance plans cover birth control for employees, including students at Catholic colleges, according to a recent ruling from the Obama administration. Catholic institutions are howling in protest, claiming that to do so would force them to violate their religious beliefs.

The ruling is based on recommendations of the Institute of Medicine, an independent group of doctors and researchers that concluded that birth control is not just a convenience but is medically necessary to ensure women’s health and well-being. Providing birth control would likely lower both pregnancy and abortion rates. And women with unintended pregnancies are more likely to be depressed and to smoke, drink and delay or skip prenatal care, potentially harming fetuses and putting babies at increased risk of being born prematurely and having low birth weight.⁽²⁾

In other words, providing birth control provides unmistakable benefits to women and avoids harm to infants. This way of thinking is the hallmark of the Goodness paradigm, evaluating choices on the basis of the benefits and harms expected from the various alternatives. If you allow birth control, you increase the chances for women’s health and reduce the chances for the depressing consequences of unintended pregnancy. If you forbid it, you do the opposite. In the former case, more good ensues; in the latter, more harm.

Opposed to this is the Rightness paradigm, evaluating choices on the basis of moral rules regardless of consequences. The Catholic Church considers it morally wrong to prevent conception by any artificial means, including condoms, IUDs, birth control pills and sterilization. So Catholic college administrators don’t want to prescribe birth control pills even though according to Catholic doctrine itself abortion is a graver sin than contraception, and banning contraceptives would most likely increase abortions.

So how should we adjudicate this? I am thoroughly in the Goodness camp here. There is no systematic way to find out what the moral rules are. In the case of the Catholic church, all it can do is appeal to authority. But there is a systematic way to find out what the benefits and harms are: observe reality carefully. So I find the Goodness paradigm far more preferable. for this and several other reasons outlined in my paper on the subject, “The Good and the Right.”⁽³⁾

The Catholic Church is being obstructionist. The law already exempts churches and other religious institutions from having to provide contraceptive coverage for their employees.⁽⁴⁾ The issue here is Catholic schools. You can make the case that if someone joins the church they are agreeing that the church’s moral rules apply to them. But you can’t make the same case for someone who merely attends a church college.

A lot of philosophical controversy is rightly regarded as abstruse, theoretical and of little practical import. But not this one. Where you come down on the Goodness vs. Rightness question has profound consequences not only for your own actions but for societal policies that impact millions of people.

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(1) Grady, Denise, “Ruling on Contraception Draws Battle Lines at Catholic Colleges.” New York Times, 29 January 2012. On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/health/policy/law-fuels-contraception-controversy-on-catholic-campuses.html.

(2) “Excerpts From a Report on Women’s Health.” New York Times, 29 January 2012. On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/health/policy/excerpts-from-a-report-on-womens-health.html.

(3) Meacham, Bill. “The Good and the Right.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/GoodAndRight.html.

(4) “A New Battle Over Contraception.” New York Times, 5 November 2011. On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/opinion/sunday/a-new-battle-over-contraception.html as of 29 January 2012.

I was asked recently whether science is a religion. My answer: No, not at all, but some people treat it as if it were.

It is easy to contrast science and religion as two fundamentally different and incompatible ways of acquiring beliefs about the world. Science is based on empirical evidence. Religion, many say, is based on faith, which is belief without evidence. And empirical evidence is better than faith, so science is better than religion. In its extreme form, this account says that science is the only reliable way to knowledge, and religion is total bunk. End of story, and a fat fickle finger of fate to those deluded souls who still believe in the latter.

That, however, is rather an oversimplification. In fact there are elements of faith in science and elements of empirical inquiry in religion, or at least religion at its best. (One of the problems in the science-vs-religion controversy is that there are many forms of religion and some of them are undoubtedly full of ignorance and superstition. But some aren’t. So I’ll talk about religion at its worst and religion at its best, recognizing that most religions fall somewhere in between.)

There are a couple of ways to acquire knowledge about the world. The most fundamental, which we all do from infancy onward, is to notice regularities in our experience of the world, devise strategies for dealing with them, and hone and revise our strategies as we get more experience. Babies and small children are mighty learners, with huge curiosity and love of finding out new things and mastering new skills. If we are lucky, we retain that inquisitiveness throughout life. If not, if we succumb to the distresses of the adults around us and the rigidity of the schools we are forced to attend, we gradually lose our zest for learning.

This is not to say that paying attention to what adults tell us is bad. In fact, it is not only a necessary component of learning, but the other primary way we find out things. We listen to what others tell us about what they have learned from their experience of the world, and thereby avoid having to go through a lot of those experiences ourselves. Without culture, without shared learning, we would hardly be human.

And then we test what others have told us against our own experience, which is why paying attention to our experience is primary and listening to others is secondary, although certainly a very close second.

So here is the fundamental difference between science and religion at its worst: Science is a systematic way of checking what people say about reality. Religion at its worst is systematically believing others without checking. And the claim of the pro-science folks, of which I am one, is that the former is a far more reliable way of acquiring true beliefs than the latter.

The word “science” can mean two things: a method for acquiring knowledge and the sum of the knowledge thus acquired. I am talking about the first meaning, the scientific method, which consists of five steps:⁽¹⁾

1. Observe and describe some phenomenon or group of phenomena of interest.
2. Formulate a hypothesis to explain the phenomena.
3. Make predictions based on that hypothesis. You can predict observation of other phenomena or the quantitative results of experiments to be performed.
4. Perform experimental tests of the predictions. Ideally, get several independent experimenters to perform the experiments. Document both the procedure and the results so others can replicate them.
5. Come to some conclusion about the hypothesis. If the experiments come out as predicted, they confirm (but do not fully prove) the hypothesis. If the experiments fail to come out as predicted, they disprove the hypothesis.

You don’t have to be a scientist in a laboratory to do this. The scientific method is just a formalized approach to everyday problem solving. For instance:

1. Phenomenon of interest: the car won’t start.
2. Hypothesis: It is out of gas.
3. Prediction: If I put gas in it, it will start.
4. Experiment: Put gas in it and try to start it.
5. Conclusion: If it starts, the hypothesis was correct and the problem is solved. if not, the hypothesis was wrong, and I need to try something else.

Carefully elaborate that procedure, put in stringent safeguards to isolate the variables so you are sure that you are measuring just what you want, and you have the scientific method. The strength of this approach is that it minimizes the influence of bias or prejudice. By getting others to replicate the experiments and document their results the process weeds out mistaken observations, overly-hasty conclusions, biased interpretations and the like. The result is a model or representation of the world that is reliable, consistent and non-arbitrary. In other words, it results in our best attempt at knowledge of the world, always recognizing that future findings might alter the model.

In the scientific method, what we take to be true is always provisional, subject to change based on further observation. Of course, some aspects of our knowledge have been confirmed so much that it would take quite a lot to dislodge them. But the point is that science does not give us theoretical certainty, only the practical certainty that comes from basing our actions on what we have found out and having our actions be successful in the world. And that practical certainty has given us defense against disease, a secure supply of food, roads, bridges, electricity, indoor plumbing, the Internet and all the other technological marvels that we enjoy today.

It is all based on public verifiability, on repeatable observation of facts that any competent observer can see. But what happens when the phenomena to be investigated are private, not public? What happens, to take an extreme case, when you see a burning bush and hear a voice that nobody else hears, and that voice tells you to do something well outside your comfort zone? I have addressed this question before. Given a single numinous experience of this kind, there is no way to tell whether it is truthful or delusional. But given more than one of them, or given reports of others about similar experiences, or – most importantly – given your response to such an experience and the results of that response, you have some basis for belief.

In other words, religion at its best bears some resemblance to science. The phenomena it concerns are not public in the same way that the subject matter of the physical sciences is. But they are subject to verification. There exist, for instance, quite detailed sets of instructions for meditative practices that produce altered experiential states. They are reliable, having been replicated many times over the centuries, and if you do the practices you too will experience those states. The instructions carry with them conceptual frameworks for interpreting and understanding what you experience, including recommendations for how to conduct your life. If you live your life as recommended, you will experience the benefits, which typically include more peace, harmony and happiness than before.

You can think of spiritual practice as a sort of experiment. You have to do the experiment to get the results, just as you do in the physical sciences. Unlike the physical sciences, the results are largely private, not public; but they are not unverifiable. You can talk to others about them. And some of the results  – increased compassion and generosity, decreased anger and harshness toward others, for instance – are indeed observable by others. The best religious teachers encourage a scientific attitude: “Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense,” says the Buddha.⁽²⁾

That’s religion at its best. What about science at its worst? Just as many in the pro-science camp find fault with religion, many religionists find fault with science. Science, they fear, leaves out all the important things in life: meaning, value, personal freedom and responsibility, connection with a transcendent reality. They think science denigrates profound sources of truth, sources on which they have staked their lives. Hence the question that prompted this essay. They think science is just another form of religion, antithetical to their own.

Science itself is not religion, it’s a method of investigation, but some people do make a religion out of it. We can call that religion “scientism” rather than science. Scientism asserts that public knowledge is the only real knowledge; that physical matter is all that exists; that consciousness is at best an epiphenomenon, along for the ride so to speak, but without causal efficacy; that belief in God, spirits or anything that goes beyond the physical is sheer delusion. People who espouse scientism (perhaps we could call them “scientismists” to distinguish them from true scientists) take as the ultimate and only truth a narrow view of the scientific method and a subset of the findings of science. In this they are indeed religious; they espouse their view of the world with the same dogmatism and fervor as the worst of the religionists.

What those who make a religion out of science don’t seem to understand is that the scientific method itself is based on some assumptions that are not, strictly speaking, demonstrated by the method: that there is an objective reality; that it is ordered in a rational and intelligible way; that it is describable by immutable mathematical laws, laws that are not going to change arbitrarily with the passage of time or in different regions of space; and that these laws are discoverable by systematic observation and experimentation. And science – meaning both the scientific method and the results of that method so far – fails to explain why these things are so. Science cannot tell us where the mathematical laws come from, nor why they apply as they do. Science is based on faith in an orderly universe. So far that faith has panned out, and we have no reason to disbelieve it; but faith it is, nevertheless.

Uncritical faith in anything is unworthy of a true human being, whether that be revealed religion or the findings of science. Religious believers would do well to understand and appreciate what science is really about: “The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know.”⁽³⁾ And those who make a religion out of science would do well to have some humility and realize that they are not so different from those to whom they think they are superior.

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Notes

(1) Wolfs, Frank L. H, “Appendix E: Introduction to the Scientific Method.” On-line publication, URL = http://teacher.pas.rochester.edu/phy_labs/appendixe/appendixe.html as of 22 November 2011. See also Science Made Simple, Inc., “Understanding and using
The Scientific Method.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/scientific_method.html as of 22 November 2011.

(2) Buddhist-Tourism.Com, “Buddha Quotes.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.buddhist-tourism.com/buddhism/buddha-quotes.html as of 7 January 2012.

(3) Pirsig, Robert M., _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ as quoted in Railsback, Bruce, “Some Definitions of Science.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/1122sciencedefns.html as of 22 November 2011.

References

Davies, Paul. “Taking Science on Faith.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html as of 7 January 2012.

Overby, Dennis. “Laws of Nature, Source Unknown.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18law.html as of 7 January 2012.

Wikipedia. “Science.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science as of 22 November 2011.

Two people – let’s call them Alice and Bob – recently had similar experiences that illustrate some philosophical points about ethics.

Alice returned an item that she bought on sale and was given credit for the full price. She then told the clerk to give her credit only for the sale price.

Bob ordered some items on line and got a discount because he bought three for the price of two. Then he called back and canceled two of them, but the customer service rep left the discount on the order. Bob thought about it and called back and had them remove the discount.

Admirable honesty, right? But why is it admirable? And why did Alice and Bob return the money? In both cases the sales clerk or service rep thought it was unusual (you could tell by their look or their tone of voice). Perhaps they thought it was stupid, too. Certainly a lot of people would; why not just take the extra money?

Alice returned the money because she did not want to get the clerk in trouble, and it would not be fair to keep the money. She did not think about whether she should do it or how she would feel later. She just did it, because it was right.

Bob returned the money because he knew he would feel bad if he kept it. The knowledge that he had caused harm to someone else would prey on his mind. He would feel ashamed of himself, unworthy, afraid of being punished in some karmic way, or at least of missing out on some karmic benefit. He, too, did not fully work all this out at the time; he just realized he would feel bad.

These actions are admirable by the standards of conventional morality, which says we should all be honest and avoid cheating. But as philosophers we want to examine conventional morality, not just blindly adhere to it. Why should we be honest and avoid cheating?

It is easy enough to make plausible speculations about the origins of morality. Humans evolved a moral sense because it promotes group harmony and cooperation, and humans in groups survive a lot better than humans alone. To be more precise, those humans who exchanged favors cooperatively had more offspring than those who didn’t. Those humans who could sense who was trustworthy and who was not, who was taking more than their share or taking without returning equally, had more offspring than those who didn’t. Consequently, by this time we have developed quite a keen moral sense. Different cultures may channel that moral sense in different ways – in some cultures a person who cuts in line is very much disapproved of, and in other cultures it is just expected that everyone will crowd toward the front – but the underlying tendency to have intuitions about fairness and the desirability of doing good to others are inbred. So it is not surprising that we find Alice and Bob admirable.

That is not a philosophical justification of morality however. It’s only a story about how we came to have the morality we find ourselves with.

To recap briefly what I have written about elsewhere, there are two ways of speaking, and hence thinking, about ethics. The first is the language of right and wrong; the second, the language of goodness and harm. For many reasons I think the language of goodness and harm makes more sense. What is right has to do with conformance to rules or regulations; but philosophers have profound differences of opinion about what the rules are and, more importantly, no agreement about how to find out what they are. What is good, by contrast, has to do with observable benefits. It is easy – or if not easy at least in principle possible – to determine what is beneficial and harmful in any given situation, including to whom and how much. On that basis you can make sound ethical judgements.

In the Rightness paradigm it is easy to see why giving back the money is admirable. It is ethically wrong to take something you are not entitled to, so giving it back is the right thing to do. And it is always admirable to do the right thing.

In the Goodness paradigm it is also easy to see why the choice to give the money back is admirable: it benefits both the merchant and the customer (Alice or Bob), and possibly the sales clerk as well. It is obvious how it benefits the merchant and the sales clerk; the merchant gets more money, and the sales clerk stays out of trouble. It is less obvious how it benefits Alice or Bob. They get less money, which is why people are surprised when they act honestly. But just looking at the money is short-sighted. Looking at how they feel afterwards, proud and not guilty, worthy and not shameful, involves taking a longer and deeper view of what is beneficial. And those feelings of worth or shame last longer and have more prolonged effects than just having more money (particularly the relatively small amounts involved in these examples).

(I am not, by the way, claiming that the choice that Alice and Bob made is morally superior in some absolute sense or even that it was morally superior at the time. Somebody who needed the money more than they did might make a different choice. And that might be OK, because we’ve got to survive physically before we can take care of anything else, including our ongoing psychological state or the welfare of others. I am only claiming that paying attention to our choices and how we make them is a good thing.)

And there is an even deeper effect to consider, beyond the money and beyond the feelings of pride or guilt: the kind of person we become as a result of such choices.

It would be entirely too unwieldy to have to think through all our choices. It is much easier to rely on habit, and in fact we do so most of the time. The effect of the ethically admirable choice is to make it easier to make a similar choice in the future. And we want to make similar choices because they lead to a greater sense of satisfaction and well-being. As Aristotle pointed out, what we are looking for are dispositions to act in a certain way, character traits that reliably lead to happiness or fulfillment.

Most of us can figure out what the right or best thing to do is, but are tempted to do something else, such as taking the money, that may have short-term benefits but long-term disadvantages. Aristotle, ever the classifier, lists three deficient modes of ethical behavior. The worst is the evil person, who pays no attention to what is right or good and acts only to satisfy his or her own immediate desires. Slightly better is the person who lacks mastery, who knows what is right or good but is unable to overcome temptation. Even better is the one who is a master of himself or herself, who knows what is right or good and feels temptation, but overcomes it. Best of all is the one who is not deficient at all, who feels no temptation to do what is not right or good.

I venture to guess that most of us do not fall in the last category; we all feel temptation to aggrandize ourselves at the expense of others at times. The point of the philosophical inquiry is to give ourselves ammunition to overcome the temptation. Having a clear understanding of our ethics ahead of time, before the moral quandary arises, helps us make the better choice when it does.

What we want is a character that is capable of being guided by benevolence. Such benevolence might be good habits or divine inspiration or something in between, but the point is to clear out the mental rubbish, the noise, the internal pressures that tend to lead us astray. Every time we make an ethically good choice we reduce the strength of the temptation to do otherwise.

So the choice to give back the money benefits more than just the parties to the transaction, the merchant, the clerk and us, the customer. It also benefits the selves we will become. And it benefits all those with whom our future selves will come into contact. And all those people will, in turn, benefit us, who may remember then successfully resolving a quandary today.

It seems like a no-brainer. Who would not want to join in such an upward spiral of benevolence? Start now. There is no better time.

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References

Kraut, Richard, “Aristotle’s Ethics” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. On-line publication, URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/ as of 29 December 2011.

The mind-body problem just refuses to go away so long as we are stuck in an inadequate metaphysics that postulates such a separation as one of its premises. One of its conundrums is mental causation: how to explain how a mental event can cause a physical event. Here is a common example: I decide to raise my arm and, voilà, my arm raises. The decision to raise my arm is a mental event, and the actual raising of the arm is a physical event. What is the connection between the two? How does the former cause the latter? The explanation is elusive.

That is partly because the kind of explanation we are looking for is inappropriate. Typically we want to know what specific physical events – which neurons, which parts of the brain – are the causal entities behind the decision to raise the arm. If we knew that, we think, we would have a physical chain of events leading from start to finish, and thus would have an adequate explanation. But we wouldn’t, and not just because the decision is something other than brain events. Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t; but even if it is, we still would not have an adequate explanation because we would want to know what caused the decision. And what caused the cause of the decision, and what caused the cause of the cause of the decision, and so forth. And that is a fruitless task when applied to human beings, because what makes human beings do things is not in the same category of explanation as what makes physical stuff do things.

Consider what explanation is all about. It has two aims, two objectives. The first is to predict and control. We want to predict what the object of our interest is going to do, how it is going to behave, so that we can either make it do what we want or, if we can’t do that, at least be prepared to respond to it. That’s what science and technology are all about. The physical sciences tell us how things behave, and technology gives us tools for dealing with them. What this kind of explanation gives us is laws, regularities, insights into the mechanisms of nature. With that knowledge we can pull the levers, so to speak, and make things happen.

The second aim of explanation is to tell a plausible story about how the object of our interest got here, how it came to be what it is. There is something satisfying about putting a phenomenon in the context of its developmental history. We feel that we know it. Story-telling is common to human beings; we all love a good story precisely because it puts things in context and enables us to understand them and deal with them. Typically the stories involve people or animals and plants that act like people — in short, agents. We don’t have to actually undergo all the adventures, trials and tribulations that befall the characters in the story. Instead we learn how those characters handled their situations and thereby learn how we could handle ourselves in similar situations. That is a lot faster than starting from scratch and learning from our own mistakes every time. Stories are at the root of human culture, which advances far more rapidly than biological evolution.

And it’s even better when the story helps us predict and control. Stories about people do that in the cultural and interpersonal realm. We learn what motivates them and how to get along with them and influence them. Stories about physical history do it in the physical realm. The story of how the land we live in came to be formed gives us insight into its geology and its biology. With that knowledge we know what kinds of things grow there and what is likely to lie underground, and we find ways to provide for our physical sustenance. The story of evolution tells us how living things, including ourselves, came to be; and that gives us clues about, among other things, how our minds work and how we can improve the way we think about ourselves and thus handle ourselves in all sorts of situations.

Back to mental causation. Which kind of explanation gives us a better handle on what makes someone raise their arm? Not the physics or chemistry; it’s the story that is important. Even if we knew all the physical events involved in raising the arm, all the neural firings and muscle activations, something would be left out if we just left it at that.

Consider that in fact you hardly ever decide merely to raise your arm. You raise your arm to reach the jar on the top shelf. You raise your arm to wave goodbye to someone, or to wave hello. You raise your arm to illustrate a philosophical point about mental causation. But you don’t just decide to raise your arm in the absence of some context. And the context that makes sense of it all is the context of human motive. What we look for in an explanation of arm-raising is not the cause, but the reason.

Humans do things because they have reasons for doing them. By “reason” I mean a prediction, a goal and an action plan. The prediction is often implicit. You predict that the shelf won’t fall down, that the jar will contain what you think it does, and so forth. The goal is to get the jar down so you can use its contents, and the action plan is to reach for it. None of that requires you to think of the chemical composition of the jar or of the patterns of neural firings going on in your brain. Nor do those things explain your action. It is the story that counts.

So in sense the whole question is bogus. Mental events do not in fact cause physical events. Instead, mental events are the reasons for physical events. Causality as a category of explanation is inadequate and inappropriate.

Now certainly there is a connection. When a researcher stimulates certain areas of your brain you see colors or feel sensations, perhaps even raise your arm. And you can influence your own pulse rate and blood pressure by doing certain kinds of meditation. The mental is not separate from the physical. What causes us to be puzzled about it is our mistaken metaphysics.

I’ve written about this before. The mistake is to think that the fundamental categories of all that exists are disjoint, that mind is somehow separate from body. If we start there we have no end of puzzles, one of which is the problem of mental causation. A better view is Panpsychism, the view that everything, from the smallest quantum event to the most complex living being, has an aspect of mentality as well as physicality. If we start with Panpsychism we see that what makes the us do something is our motives, reasons, goals, desires, perceptions and beliefs. Then, since we are both mental and physical, the physical parts — the nerves, the brain cells, the motor muscles — activate so as to carry out our intentions. Can mental events cause physical events? No. But events that are both mental and physical can certainly cause events that are both physical and mental.

Philosophy Now magazine runs an occasional contest: Write an answer to a philosophical question in 400 words or fewer. The winning essays are printed in the magazine. My essay in answer to the question “What is Truth” was selected⁽¹⁾, and I am pleased to present it here, along with another winning essay by my colleague Robert “Little Bobby” Tables.

by Bill Meacham
Several factors determine the truthfulness of a theory or an explanation of events: congruence, consistency, coherence and usefulness.

• A true theory is congruent with our experience. It fits the facts. No fact is left unexplained. It is falsifiable, and nothing falsifying has been found. People think truth is correspondence to reality, understood as something independent of us. But we don’t have direct contact with reality, only with our experience of it. When what we experience is predictable then we can infer that our theory corresponds with reality. Our theory is congruent with the facts, as we experience them. When we discover new facts, we can change our theory. Truth is always provisional, not an end state.
• A true theory is internally consistent. It has no contradictions within itself, and it all fits together elegantly. Consistency allows us to infer things from what we already know. An inconsistent theory, one that contains contradictions, does not allow us to do this.
• A true theory is coherent with everything else we consider true. It confirms, or at least fails to contradict, the rest of our knowledge, where “knowledge” means beliefs for which we can give rigorous reasons. The physical sciences, for example, hold together quite well. Physics, chemistry, geology, biology and astronomy all reinforce each other.
• A true theory is useful. It has predictive power, allowing us to gain control of the world by making good choices concerning what is likely to happen, choices that pan out. It gives us mastery. When we act on the basis of a true theory or explanation, our actions are successful.

Truth enables us to exert our power, in the sense of our ability to get things done, successfully. We master both the world of physical things and the world of ideas, of theory. What is true is what works to organize our practice and our thought, so that we are able both to handle reality effectively and to reason with logical rigor to true conclusions.

Truth is useful. Does that mean that what is useful is true? That is not a useful question. Let’s not ask what truth is; let’s ask instead how we can recognize it reliably when it appears. If a theory is congruent with our experience, internally consistent, coherent with everything else we know, and useful for organizing our thinking and practice, then we can confidently consider it true.

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by Robert Tables
Truth is interpersonal. We tell each other things, and when they work out we call them truths. When they don’t, we call them errors or, if we are not charitable, lies. What we take as truth depends on what others around us espouse. For many centuries European Christians believed that men had one fewer rib than women because the Bible says that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. Nobody bothered to count because everyone assumed it was true. And when they finally counted, it was because everyone agreed on the count that the real truth became known. Even when we are alone, truth is interpersonal. We express these truths or errors or lies to others and to ourselves in language; and, as Wittgenstein pointed out, there can be no private language.

But the most essential truth, the truth by which we all live our lives, is intensely personal, private. We might call this “Truth,” with a capital T. Even though each of us lives our life by it, it can be different for each person. Shall I believe and obey the Torah, the New Testament, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Zend Avesta, the Dhammapada? Or none of the above: shall I find my own Truth in my own way? Am I more authentic if I do so? What if I find my Truth and it sets me apart from others? Am I then authentically lonely?

We need a community of seekers with a commitment to meta-Truth, recognizing that everyone’s personal Truth is to be respected, even though it might differ from someone else’s.

But even in such a community, some beliefs would be acceptable and others not. My belief that I am exceptional and deserve preferential treatment, perhaps because I alone have received a special revelation, is not likely to be shared by others. Whether that changes my mind or not depends on how compelling are my reasons for believing it and how deeply I feel the need for acceptance. From within the in-group we look with fear and revulsion on those who deny the accepted beliefs. From outside, we admire those who hold aloft the light of truth amidst the darkness of human ignorance.

And in every case it is we who judge, not I alone. Even the most personal Truth is adjudicated within a community and depends on the esteem of others.

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(1) Philosophy Now magazine, “What Is Truth?” Issue 86 Sept/Oct 2011, pp. 34-37. London: Anya Publications, 2011. Also online publication, URL = http://www.philosophynow.org/issue86/What_Is_Truth as of 22 November 2011.

I was pleased recently to find the full text of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity freely available on line. De Beauvoir was one of a cadre of post-World-War-II French existentialists that also included Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others. Her work provides a fascinating window into a unique point of view on what it is to be human and how that pertains to the struggle for political and spiritual liberty.

The starting point to understanding de Beauvoir is human freedom. Philosophers have had quite a debate about whether human beings have free will.⁽¹⁾ The French existentialists not only assume we do but make it the center point of their view of human nature.

They do this because of what is revealed by their methodology. The existentialists describe the human condition from a radically first-person point of view, the point of view of a free agent; and in doing so they try to avoid all preconceptions and presuppositions. De Beauvoir says “… let man put his will ‘in parentheses’ and he will thereby be brought to the consciousness of his true condition.”⁽²⁾ By “in parentheses” she means that we set aside all theories from psychology, history, sociology, biology and similar sciences and we also set aside, as much as we can, all our taken-for-granted assumptions about who we are. Instead we describe our life purely as we experience it. Immersed in the first-person point of view and trying to avoid terminology from other disciplines, the existentialists employ cryptically evocative terms intended to lead us to new realizations about ourselves and our lives.

From this point of view there are three categories of stuff we find in our world.⁽³⁾ The first is “I myself,” the self or person as each of us experiences himself or herself; the second is the world of non-human things; and the third is other people.

Each of us – each self, each person – has two fundamental characteristics. One is that we can be conscious of ourselves; we have self-awareness and can mentally step back from our engagement in life and examine, not just what we are engaged with but ourselves as engaged beings as well. The human is “… a being who … questions himself in his being, a being who is at a distance from himself ….” This ability is the root of the famous nothingness that both de Beauvoir and Sartre claim to be foundational: “… the nothingness which is at the heart of man is also the consciousness that he has of himself.” When you are observing yourself, the you that is doing the observing is not the you that is being observed. In all the elements of experience that you are observing, you the observer are not present. That’s the nothingness.

And this nothingness is free to choose, free to act, undetermined by any of what it is conscious of. The existentialists do not engage in the standard arguments about hard determinism, incompatibilism, and so forth that have populated the historical debate about free will. They just recognize that our activity – as observed in this impartial, presuppositionless way – just happens, springing forth from the same nothingness that underlies our experience. Just as you the observer cannot be observed, neither can you the agent be observed. You could say that human freedom is a premise of her whole argument, not a result of any logical deduction, but certainly not unexamined either. She does not use the term, but she is asserting agent causality; the human being, she says, is “a cause of itself.” She uses the term “existence” for this kind of being, the kind of being that can transcend itself to become more than what it already has been.

The second category is everything that is not human, that does not have self-awareness and freedom. She calls this “facticity” or “brute fact.” This includes all physical objects, such as tables and chairs, rocks and trees, as well as animals and plants that may be conscious of their world but are not conscious of themselves. The factical is just there; it does not act and cannot transcend itself.

But the factical depends on the human for its being. The nothingness that we each fundamentally are “discloses being.” This does not make any sense from an objective, scientific point of view, but from the existential point of view it does, because by “being” she means what is just there as an element in our experience. Consider a beautiful sunset. Without our experience of the beauty, would there be beauty? Without our experience of the colors would there even be color? From a scientific point of view we can say that there would be light waves of a certain frequency and intensity. But there is only color and beauty if someone is there to experience them. If we understand this distinction between existence – what we are – and being – what only exists (for us) as disclosed to us in our experience –, then we can begin to make some sense of enigmatic passages such as these:

My freedom must not seek to trap being but to disclose it. The disclosure is the transition from being to existence. The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence across the always inadequate density of being.

The trick of tyrants is to enclose a man in the immanence of his facticity and to try to forget that man is always, as Heidegger puts it, ‘infinitely more than what he would be if he were reduced to being what he is’ ….

The third category is other people, disclosed through what Heidegger called Mitsein, or being-with. We recognize that others are like us, that each of them is an existence, a freedom, that can transcend itself just as we can. But they are also objects, factical things, that can get in our way or that can be useful to us. And, as they regard us, we become factical and thing-like for them.

The ambiguity that de Beauvoir refers to in the title of her work is just this: that each of us is both an existence, a freedom, “a pure internality against which no external power can take hold” and simultaneously a facticity, “a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things.” (Existentialists, unlike, say, analytic philosophers, can be quite dramatic.) And the ethical question is how to comport ourselves while being true to both aspects of our existence.

She rejects any notion of an absolute goodness or moral imperative that exists on its own. There are no goals or ends to which we are obliged to devote ourselves outside of what we ourselves choose as our projects. “It is desire which creates the desirable, and the project which sets up the end. It is human existence which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which it will be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged.” Once you have a project – to accomplish something at work, or to raise healthy children, or to create a work of art, or to pursue a hobby – then values spring up in relation to it. There are activities that will promote or hinder your accomplishment of it. But what justifies the project itself?

It is a common complaint about existentialism that it provides no basis for ethics. “[I]f man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes?” But, de Beauvoir responds, there is one goal that comes with being human: the exercise of freedom itself. “[H]uman freedom is the ultimate, the unique end to which man should destine himself,” she says. Freedom is the “universal, absolute end.”

In this she is quite Aristotelian, although she does not acknowledge it. The goal or end of being human, says Aristotle, is to do well what humans uniquely do. When you are exercising your function – which, for de Beauvoir, is to exercise freedom – then you are fulfilled and experience happiness. Happiness as such is not a goal for the existentialists, but the exercise of the uniquely human function is: “If man wishes to save his existence, as only he himself can do, his original spontaneity must be raised to the height of moral freedom by taking itself as an end through the disclosure of a particular content.” By “disclosure of a particular content” she means the projects that we freely choose. You can’t just choose freedom in the abstract; it is always freedom to pursue a particular goal. The point is to choose our projects knowingly rather than blindly or habitually, and to choose projects that will enable us to expand our powers and to exercise our creativity in ever more satisfying ways so that we may “feel the joy of existing.”

And in order to do this, we must allow others their freedom as well. And not only allow it, but actively promote it. Exercising our own freedom requires that others be free. The goal is to “become conscious of the real requirements of [our] own freedom, which can will itself only by destining itself to an open future, by seeking to extend itself by means of the freedom of others. … [T]he freedom of other men must be respected and they must be helped to free themselves. Such a law imposes limits upon action and at the same time immediately gives it a content.”

She does not demonstrate that this concern for the freedom of others is required, in the sense of deriving it logically. We could say that she merely asserts it, but that would be missing the point of the existentialist program. She examines her own experience of being in the world and finds it disclosed to her, part of her existence itself: “I concern others and they concern me,” she says. “There we have an irreducible truth. The me-others relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship.” “[T]he existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom.”

Philosophically, we can get at the injunction to have concern for others in many ways. With Kant we could derive it from principles of pure reason. With the Utilitarians we could derive it from the mandate to maximize happiness or pleasure. Perhaps closer to de Beauvoir’s view, we could say that rational self-interest requires it. But de Beauvoir finds it in an essential part of human existence: the impulse to be generous. “There is vitality only by means of free generosity,” she says. “Contrary to the formal strictness of Kantianism for whom the more abstract the act is the more virtuous it is, generosity seems to us to be better grounded and therefore more valid the less distinction there is between the other and ourself and the more we fulfill ourself in taking the other as an end. That is what happens if I am engaged in relation to others.”

So if you are radically free to choose at any moment, how do you figure out what to do? What projects would be suitable for a free existent such as yourself? Art, scientific inquiry, technological innovation and philosophy are all good candidates in so far as they are open-ended, aiming at “an indefinite disclosure of being.” Science is at its best when it keeps opening the possibilities for new discoveries; technological innovation, when it frees us from drudgery and enables more creativity. And certainly art is high on the list. Not only does the best art flow from the creativity of the artist, but it inspires the audience – the viewer, listener, reader or participant – to find new potentialities, new avenues for self-expression, as well. “Art reveals the transitory as an absolute; and as the transitory existence is perpetuated through the centuries, art too, through the centuries, must perpetuate this never-to-be-finished revelation.”

But the paradigmatic case of an authentic project is the struggle for liberation, politically, socially and economically, a topic that recurs throughout her work. She published The Ethics of Ambiguity in 1947, and the struggle to liberate France from the Nazis was undoubtedly fresh in her mind. And she was on the editorial board of the left-leaning literary journal Les Temps modernes. A good portion of the third chapter of her book concerns the intricacies and nuances of political action.

The connection between existentialism and politics is obvious. We are all inherently free; hence the slave is always free to rebel against the master. The negro, the woman, the colonized native, the worker in a capitalist enterprise: all are free to rise up against their oppressors. “[T]he oppressed,” says de Beauvoir, “can fulfill his freedom as a man only in revolt, since the essential characteristic of the situation against which he is rebelling is precisely its prohibiting him from any positive development; it is only in social and political struggle that his transcendence passes beyond to the infinite.” She would, I am confident, quite approve of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

We would be ill advised to swallow the existentialist program whole hog. The radical first-person point of view is, after all, just one person’s opinion. It is up to each of us to examine our own experience of life to see how much of de Beauvoir’s description resonates with us as true. (The ability to do that is another expression of our freedom, she would say.)

If you did so you would notice that you are, in addition to your radical freedom and nothingness, an animal body, an organism. You would find yourself, not floating in empty space, but situated, embedded in the world. You would understand that at the very least you need to choose strategies for being in your world that enhance your ability to survive and stay free. You would find your world shot through and through with other people, some of whom indeed seem to limit and constrain you, but others of whom thrill to your existence as you thrill to theirs, and with whom you find mutual comfort and joy, or at least pleasant conversation. You would see that, far from being something alien, some heavy density that limits your soaring freedom, your environment in fact supports and sustains you, and it makes sense to support and sustain it in turn. And you would find, with de Beauvoir, that a strategy of being generous, of being cooperative, of being – she does not use the word, but I will – compassionate, is a strategy that enhances your life.

Right now you are breathing a new breath. Right now is a new moment. What will you do with it?

——–

Notes
(1) My own view is that we certainly do have free will. See my “Do Humans Have Free Will?” at http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/FreeWill.html and “Beyond the Causal Veil” at http://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=424.

(2) De Beauvoir, Simone, The Ethics of Ambiguity. All quotations are from this work, which is on line and has no page numbers, so I won’t footnote each one. By “man” she means human beings generally, male or female. She wrote before the feminist movement – which took inspiration, in part, from her own The Second Sex – brought to our attention the inherent unfairness and bias of such language.

(3) I’m describing an ontology, but I can’t say three categories of “being” or of “existence,” as both these terms have special meanings for de Beauvoir. And I can’t say categories of “things” because some of them are not things.

References
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Ethics of Ambiguity. On-line publication, URL = http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/ambiguity/index.htm as of 6 October 2011. Another version, not as well proof-read, is here: http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/philosophy/existentialism/debeauvoir/ambiguity.html as of 6 October 2011.

The Information Philosopher. “Agent-Causality.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/agent-causality.html as of 27 October 2011.

Wikipedia. “Free will.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will as of 27 October 2011.

Quantum indeterminacy operates inside your brain. What does that say about the nature of human will and decision-making?⁽¹⁾

We’ve taken a look at the world of quantum physics before, but a little recap is in order in case you missed it. The quantum level is where thing are quite tiny, less than about 100 nanometers long. Here things behave very strangely. We can describe their properties and behavior mathematically by a formula called the “wave function,” and under certain circumstances the wave function divides into two or more pairs or branches, each with its own consequences. Each of these branches represents a potential future or a potential version of reality. When observed, only one of these branches is perceived; that is, only one of the potential futures becomes the actual perceived present.

A famous experiment, widely replicated, called the Double-Slit experiment reveals the strangeness of this level of reality. It consists of sending light through two side-by-side vertical slits to a recording medium, such as film; and it shows, among other things, that light can behave both as a stream of particles and as a wave. When light is sent through one slit at a time, a vertical band appears. In this case light acts like a series of particles that go through the slit, hit the recording medium and make an impression. If you open the slit on the right, the band appears on the right, and if you open the slit on the left, the band appears on the left. You would expect that if both slits were opened, the result would be two side-by-side bands. In fact, however, the result is a strong band in the middle, the expected bands on the left and right, and then dimmer bands extending outward in each direction. Light in this case acts like waves that cause interference patterns. That is, when a crest meets a crest, a more intense crest results; and when a crest meets a trough they cancel out. The bands of light are from the crests reinforcing each other, and the darkness in between is the from crests and troughs canceling each other out.

Even more interesting, when light is emitted one photon at a time and aimed at the two slits, it shows the same interference pattern. You would expect that a photon would go through one slit or the other. In fact it appears to act like a wave that goes through both slits, interferes with itself, and results in an impression in one and only one of the bands.

And you cannot predict in advance where the photon will make an impression.

You can predict that given a great number of photons, they will result in bands. That is, they won’t all end up in the same place, but rather in various places according to their probability distribution. But there is only a probability, not an absolute certainty, that any single photon will end up in one place or another.

We might well ask what causes the wave, which is mathematically described as a collection of probabilities of being detected in various places, to be in fact detected at only one place. I’ll return to this question shortly. For now, note the quantum indeterminacy, our inability to predict the final location of any single photon. The sequence in which the singly-emitted photons will arrive is completely unpredictable. We have a radical discontinuity of causality.

In ordinary life and in classical (non-quantum) physics, we have a clear concept of causality: a cause is something that reliably produces an effect. Given the same or a similar set of circumstances, we expect the same results to appear. Hitting a billiard ball at a certain angle and with a certain force will always cause it to move in a certain direction and at a certain speed. This conception of causality has three parts:

• Regularity – A cause always produces its effect according to physical laws that can be discovered by observation and experiment.
• Temporal sequence – The cause always precedes its effect in time. The cause never follows the effect.
• Spatial contiguity – There is always some physical connection or spatial contact between the cause and its effect, or a chain of such connections.

At the quantum level, the regularity is missing. There is no set of circumstances that causes the photon always to be detected in a specific place. (And, as we have seen, sometimes spatial contiguity is missing as well.)

Once the photon has been detected then the ordinary chain of causality takes over. The beginning of a macroscopic event can certainly be dependent on a microscopic event. In that case, each microscopic possibility at the beginning can lead to a different chain of macroscopic events at the end.

This becomes important when we consider that some events in the brain happen at the quantum level.

The human brain is a mass of electrochemical activity. It contains approximately 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, and up to five quadrillion connection points between them. Neurons are the fundamental elements of the brain; they transmit electrochemical impulses to and from other neurons, sense organs or muscles. Some impulses are triggered by sense organs, and some by the excitation of neighboring neurons. Some impulses excite or inhibit neighboring neurons and some cause muscle contractions that move the body.

A neuron consists of several parts: numerous dendrites, which look vaguely like trees with many branches, a cell body, and a single axon, a tube that divides at the end to many terminals. Dendrites are the incoming channels; they receive electrochemical impulses from other cells, which then pass through the body and out the axon terminals. Between the axon terminals and the dendrites of the neighboring neurons are gaps, called synapses, only twenty nanometers wide. On the other side of the synaptic gap from the axon is a receptor area on a dendrite of a neighboring cell. An axon can have many terminals, and each dendrite can have many receptor areas. Thus each neuron transmits impulses to and receives impulses from a great many neighboring neurons. Some neurons receive impulses from up to 10,000 neighbors. Some in the cerebellum receive up to 100,000. Clearly the brain is an organ of almost unimaginable complexity.

The impulse traveling through the neuron is an electrical charge. A neuron either transmits the impulse (we say it fires) or it does not; it is a binary element, either on (firing) or off (not firing). When the electrical charge reaches the synaptic gap, it triggers the release of chemicals, neurotransmitters, which is why we call brain activity electrochemical. A single release of a neurotransmitter might be too weak to trigger the receiving neuron, but since each neuron forms outgoing synapses with many others and likewise receives synaptic inputs from many others, the combination of several inputs at once can be enough to trigger it. Or the receipt of an inhibitory neurotransmitter can prevent an impulse that otherwise would have fired. The output of a neuron thus depends on the inputs from many others, each of which may have a different degree of influence depending on the strength of its synapse with that neuron.

What is interesting for the present discussion is what happens to cause the neurotransmitters to travel across the synapse. The chemistry is a bit complex, but basically neurotransmitter chemicals sit docked in little pockets, called vesicles, waiting for something to release them. When the electrical impulse arrives at the terminal, it opens up channels that let calcium ions in. The calcium makes the vesicle fuse with the cell wall and open up so the neurotransmitters go out into the synaptic gap and then hit the receiving neuron.

The channels through which calcium ions enter the nerve terminal from outside the neuron are tiny, only about a nanometer at their narrowest, not much bigger than a calcium ion itself. The calcium ions migrate from their entry channels to sites within the nerve terminal where they trigger the release of the contents of a vesicle. At this submicroscopic level of reality, quantum indeterminacy is in play. A given calcium ion might or might not hit a given triggering site; hence, a given neurotransmitter might or might not be released; hence the receiving neuron might or might not get excited (or inhibited).

In other words, at the most fundamental level, brain functioning is not causally determined.

And since the ordinary chain of causality takes over after the quantum event happens, quantum uncertainty at the synaptic level can lead to causal uncertainty at the level of the whole brain. And that means – since the state of the brain at least heavily influences, if not causally determines, our perceptions, thoughts, feelings and actions – that human conduct is not fully causally determined in the physical world.

What causes a quantum event – in this case the impact of a calcium ion on a triggering site – to cease being merely a probability and start being something that happens at a certain place? Not anything in the physical world. There is a causal discontinuity in nature. Events at the quantum level of reality have no physical cause, but are themselves causes of subsequent events. What is on the other side of the causal discontinuity?

At this point we move beyond what physics can tell us, but clearly it leaves open the possibility that human will is free and even that something that transcends our ordinary notion of the physical – a soul, perhaps, or a god or a plethora of deities – intervenes in the physical world.

Some protest that the causal uncertainty at the quantum level of reality is merely statistical. Events happen randomly; hence, we can draw no conclusions about nonphysical causality, free will, the existence of a soul or of God, or any such thing. In particular, they say, a decision that is initiated by a random occurrence is no more free than one initiated by physical causality. But random as they may be individually, quantum events considered as a group certainly do exhibit regularities. Light passed through double slits exhibits distinct patterns, not random noise.

Consider a pointillist painting, which consists of distinct dots of pigment. If you look at it up close, all you see is random dots. When you view it from afar, you see identifiable forms and shapes, recognizable objects, patterns. So what are the patterns that we find in the behavior that issues from the firing of our brain cells? Does what is outside the bounds of physical causality have any regularity or structure of its own that we can use to understand and predict what it will do? Are there any categories of causal explanation that might be applicable?

The answer is, yes, of course there are: the concepts that pertain to agents. We explain the behavior of agents not in terms of physics and chemistry but in terms of their perceptions, beliefs, desires and goals.

By “agent” I mean the usual: something with will and intention, something that initiates movement without an external nudge, something that acts or has the power to act on its own rather than merely reacting to events. Agency is a different category of causation from physical causation. What agents do is not uncaused, but what causes agents to act is their beliefs and desires, not mechanical or chemical forces. And what agents do is not completely predictable. We try to influence people by persuasion, but we can only influence them, we cannot completely control them. Rather like a single photon, we can never be sure what somebody will do until they have done it. Nor can we be sure what we ourselves will do until we have done it. And afterwards we recognize that we could have done differently.

We are agents not automata. In other words, we have free will. Now the question is, what shall we do with it?

———–

Notes

(1) What follows is summarized from my paper “The Quantum Level of Reality,” located here: http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/Quantum.html. That paper contains more detail and all the footnotes and references. See also “Do Humans Have Free Will?” here: http://www.bmeacham.com/whatswhat/FreeWill.html.

The human capacity for second-order mentation – the ability we have to consider in thought and imagination not just the world around us but ourselves as well – has led existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone deBeauvoir to say that the human being is always free to recreate himself or herself, that we have no fixed essence, but are what we make of ourselves. There is certainly a germ of truth in this assertion. If you suffer from some behavioral or psychological problem, the first step in fixing it is to admit that you have a problem; that is, to be conscious enough of yourself to know that there is something you are doing or feeling or thinking that is causing trouble. Then you can mentally step back, reassess the situation and start doing something different. In practice, of course, this is often more easily said than done, and there is in fact quite a bit that is fixed about human nature. But within that fixity we have the freedom to reinvent ourselves. By virtue of second-order mentation, we are not fully constrained by the past.

In the individualistic West we tend to think of this freedom in purely personal terms. A young man asks whether he should leave his ailing mother to join the resistance or stay and take care of her, and Sarte’s answer is that the only answer is the young man’s freedom to choose: “You are free, therefore choose, that is to say, invent.”⁽¹⁾ But a more powerful form of self-invention is to be found in the social realm. Case in point: The Mondragon cooperatives.

The Mondragon cooperatives are a federation of worker-owned cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain. Founded in 1956 through the efforts of a visionary Catholic priest, Father José María Arizmendiarrieta, it started as a small, worker-owned enterprise making kerosene stoves in 1956. It has since grown to become the seventh-largest business group in Spain, with annual sales of 14 billion Euros and over 100,000 workers. It comprises over 260 affiliated enterprises, including 120 core cooperatives, and has affiliates not just in Europe but around the globe.

The worker-owned cooperative is the core Mondragon social institution and the most ingenious reinvention of what it is to be human. In the cooperative, the workers themselves own the enterprise. There is no outside owner, unlike the capitalist corporation or the communist state-owned collective. Each worker-owner has one vote, and decisions are made by democratic vote of all owners. Structurally, it is like a sole-proprietorship, except that there are many proprietors, the workers. Nobody gets a wage; instead each is paid a monthly advance on his or her share of the year’s projected profit.

The worker cooperative is a fundamental inversion of the corporate model we take for granted in the capitalist world. In a conventional company, the owners of capital have ultimate authority, and the laborers are subservient. In a worker-owned cooperative, labor has ultimate authority, and capital is subservient, a principle known as Sovereignty of Labor. What it means in practice is that the workers, being the owners, run the enterprise for their own benefit, not for the benefit of a separate class of people who own it but do not do the work. No outside owner can shut down a factory, fire the workers, and move production somewhere else. No outside owner can mandate overtime, reduced pay or hazardous working conditions. The objective is not to make as much profit as possible for a few, but to make a good living for all. And in fact the worker-owners make, on average, ten percent more than their counterparts in neighboring non-cooperative businesses.

Sovereignty of labor has several implications:

• Democratic control: one worker, one share, one vote.
• Distribution of profits only to workers, the cooperative or the local community, not to outside investors.
• Egalitarian income spread. On average, the highest-paid worker in a Mondragon enterprise makes four to five times as much as the lowest. The maximum is nine times as much. (Contrast this to many big corporations, whose ratio may be as much as several hundred to one.)
• Participation in decision making. Each cooperative elects its own management team and has an annual meeting at which the worker-owners make strategic decisions about the enterprise. And there is a general council consisting of representatives from all the member cooperatives that makes decisions about the corporation as a whole.

Three things were of crucial importance from the very start: school, credit union and factory. In 1943, well before the first manufacturing enterprise, Father Arizmendiarrieta started a trade school, so students would have necessary skills to make a living and to form and run a cooperative. He also started a credit union, so people could pool their savings to provide start-up capital. Only when these were in place did the first manufacturing operation begin. A factory alone would lack ongoing sources of credit and new innovative skills.

In addition, the Mondragon cooperatives correct a fatal flaw that has historically led to the demise of worker-owned enterprises. In the Mondragon co-ops, a retiring worker’s share cannot be sold to just anyone, not even another co-op member, but only to a new incoming worker or back to the co-op. This prevents external stock buyers, speculative capitalists, from taking over successful co-ops. Many an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) enterprise has collapsed because shares were sold to non-employees who, after acquiring enough of them, terminated or radically changed the business. In the Mondragon cooperatives, capital and ownership of the business stays with the workers.

Sovereignty of labor is only one of the ten core principles of the enterprise. The complete list includes such things as a ban on discrimination for religious, political, ethnic or sexual reasons; democratic and participatory management; cooperation among member co-ops and with other cooperative movements world-wide; and a commitment to social transformation and education. It is a striking vision, and a welcome alternative to the dog-eat-dog competition that is rampant both within and between conventional enterprises.

Certainly the worker-owners think so. Even if offered more pay somewhere else, most would not leave. They like the job security and the fact that they have a vote. The cooperative meets fundamental human needs: not just the needs for sustenance and social contact, but for self-determination as well.

The cooperative model is promising for a sustainable future, because it is not driven to grow in the same way as the capitalist model and because it allows its worker-owners benefits other than increased material consumption.

Democratically-controlled firms do not have the same drive for growth as capitalist firms. Capitalist firms aim at maximizing total profit, while cooperative firms aim at maximizing profit per worker. If a capitalist firm grows, doubles its workforce and doubles its profit, the owners get richer. If a cooperative firm grows, doubles its workforce and doubles its profit, each worker-owner gets the same amount of money. There is no internal motivation to grow.⁽²⁾

There are external motivations to grow, of course. Growth can provide economies of scale, driving costs down. Growth can provide more share of the market, so the firm is more assured of continued operation. The Mondragon cooperatives are enterprises in a market economy, subject to the same constraints and imperatives of competition that capitalist enterprises are. But there is an important difference. When innovation brings about a productivity gain, worker-owners are free, if they wish, to opt for more leisure or investment in other market opportunities instead of higher pay, which would lead to increased consumption. Reduced consumption makes for reduced environmental impact.

In a world of vast but limited resources, an expanding population and more and more pollution, it is crucial to find ways of satisfying human needs without degrading the environment. Over-consumption – buying stuff we don’t really need – is a threat to the environment because it uses up more resources and produces more waste than necessary. A capitalist owner would be unlikely to allow workers to work less because they have become more productive. There’s no profit in that. But worker-owners, once they reach a certain level of income, might well opt for such a solution, preferring time with family and friends to the means to buy more goods.⁽³⁾

The success of the Mondragon co-ops is undeniable, so it is natural to want to replicate it elsewhere. One wonders how much that success is due to factors unique to the Basque country where it started. Perhaps there is something special about the Basque culture. Mondragon is the best known but not the only cooperative enterprise there. The area is rife with producer co-ops (where farm owners, but not their workers, are members), marketing co-ops, consumer co-ops, transport co-ops, housing co-ops and cooperative schools.⁽⁴⁾ The Basque people have a strong sense of ethnic, linguistic and cultural identity, and they were an oppressed minority under Franco, leading to an even stronger internal cohesion. They have a tradition of equitable land distribution. The first business produced a much-needed product at a good price; and the area is strategically located, with easy access to large ports like Bilbao, and short distances to major export markets.⁽⁵⁾

Which of these factors are most important for a successful worker’s co-op? Beyond the ability to make and sell a product, which is essential to any economic enterprise, my guess is that in-group cooperation in the face of external hostility had a lot to do with it in the Basque country.

Cooperation, of course, is an inherent human ability and activity. We are most cooperative in the face of an external threat, but we have the ability, in common with our bonobo cousins, to cooperate among groups as well. If we want to replicate Mondragon’s success, we need to foster a sense of empathy, solidarity and compassion among all humans, a sense that we are all members of one tribe, one family, the human family.

Can we do that? Can we emulate the vision and drive of Father Arizmendiarrieta, without whom the Mondragon co-ops would not have begun? A journalist once remarked that Arizmendiarrieta had created a progressive economic movement anchored in an educational institution. He replied “No, it is just the reverse. We are creating an educational movement for social change, but with anchors in economic institutions.”⁽⁶⁾ It is the whole of humanity that matters most. Perhaps we can form a more cooperative society if we take as our common enemy ignorance, rather than some other group of humans.

————–

Notes

(1) Sarte, “Existentialism is a Humanism.”

(2) Schweickart, “Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible?” p. 112.

(3) Idem., p. 113.

(4) Davidson, New Paths to Socialism, p. 26.

(5) Long, “The Mondragon Co-operative Federation.”

(6) Davidson, New Paths to Socialism, p. 25.

References

Davidson, Carl. New Paths to Socialism: Essays on the Mondragon Cooperatives. Pittsburgh, PA: Changemaker Publications, 2011.

Long, Mike. “The Mondragon Co-operative Federation: A Model for our Time?” On-line publication, URL = http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/long_mondragon.html as of 18 September, 2011.

Mondragon Corporation. Corporate website. On-line publication, URL = http://www.mcc.es/ENG.aspx as of 17 September 2011.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Existentialism is a Humanism.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm as of 17 September 2011.

Schweickart, David. “Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible?” In Davidson, New Paths to Socialism, pp. 103 – 126.

Wikipedia. “Mondragon Corporation.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation as of 17 September 2011.

The subatomic world of quantum reality is strange, not like the everyday world we are accustomed to at all. But it underlies our perceived world and has profound (but disputed) implications for metaphysics, so please bear with me for a little while as I try to explain some of it.

By “quantum reality” I mean things and events that are quite tiny, less than about 100 nanometers long. They are called “quantum,” from a Latin word meaning “how much,” because the magnitudes of certain properties at this level can take on only discrete, not continuous, values. For example electrons orbit their nuclei only at certain discrete distances, not in between, so the electron is said to be quantized. So is light. You may have heard that light behaves sometimes as a wave and sometimes as a particle. The particle aspect of light is the photon, a quantum unit of light.

We can’t see electrons or photons, of course, but we can detect them through instrumentation, and their properties and behavior can be described mathematically by a formula called the “wave function.” Under certain circumstances the wave function divides into two or more pairs or branches, each with its own consequences. Each of these branches represents a potential future or a potential version of reality. When observed, only one of these branches is perceived; that is, only one of the potential futures becomes the actual perceived present. And you can’t tell in advance which one it will be. Things and events at this level are indeterminate, meaning that the outcomes of events cannot be predicted in advance, except in statistical terms. An initial configuration of things and forces does not determine a subsequent configuration. Mathematics can describe the probability of a range of outcomes, but cannot predict a single outcome.

Here is an example. The Stern-Gerlach experiment, named after the scientists who first performed it, consists of sending a series of electrons through a magnetic field, which deflects them. On the other side of the field from the emitter is a recording medium, which registers where the electron hits the medium. Each electron is detected at one of two places on the medium, depending on a property it has called “spin.” One finding of this experiment is that electrons are detected in only two places rather than in a range between them. Thus, an electron’s spin can take only two values; it is quantized. This corroborates the quantum nature of reality at this level.

Another finding is quantum indeterminacy: you cannot predict in advance where the electron will be detected. Given a great number of electrons and the known characteristics of the magnetic field, you can predict the relative number of impressions at each detection point. But there is only a probability, not an absolute certainty, that any single electron will end up in one place or another. An electron is not like a billiard ball. If you know the mass of two billiard balls, the amount of force and its direction applied to one, and the angle at which it hits the second, you can predict in what direction and how fast the second ball will travel. Not so with quanta.

This is weird, but it gets even weirder.

A subatomic particle called a pion decays and emits two photons, traveling in opposite directions. Each photon, like an electron, has spin, and you can measure spin in different directions. Think of a globe with a horizontal axis. As you look at it, it can spin so the surface you see goes up, or it can spin so the surface you see goes down. So the globe can be in one of two states, spin-up or spin-down.⁽¹⁾ Now imagine that it has two more axes, each at right angles to the others. We can call the axes X, Y and Z. The photon, unlike a globe, can spin along any of these axes, but along only one at a time. So we have three things to detect, X-spin, Y-spin and Z-spin, each of which can have one of two states, up or down. Thus there are six possible states: X-up, X-down, Y-up, Y-down, Z-up and Z-down.

The photon is a quantum object; before you measure it, its state is indeterminate. There is no way of telling, before you take a measurement, which kind of spin it has along any given axis. If lots and lots of pions decay and emit photons, we know statistically that half of the photons in each direction will be in state up when measured on the X axis and half will be in state down. But there is no way to tell in advance for a given photon which one it will be.

And you can measure only one axis at a time. Once you measure one axis, the others are indeterminate. Imagine several detectors in a line so that the photon goes through one and then another and then another, and so forth. If the first one measures X-spin and the second one does also, the second one will always agree with the first. So you know that, once measured, the X-spin stays the same. If the first one measures X-spin and the second one measures Y-spin, the Y-spin is indeterminate until you measure it. Half the time it will be up and half the time down, but you can’t know in advance which it will be for any particular photon. If a third detector again measures X-spin, that X-spin might or might not agree with the first measurement. (Yes, this is weird. As I said, Nature works differently at the quantum level from how it works at the classical level.)

When you measure one of the pair of photons – call it A – and then measure the other one – call it B –, they are always opposite. If photon A is X-up, you know for certain that photon B is X-down. If photon A is X-down, you know for certain that photon B is X-up. This is true no matter how far apart they are, a millimeter or thousands of kilometers. This is true even if the measurements are made simultaneously, so that there would be no chance of a signal traveling from A to B. This is true even if they are so far apart that light would not have time to travel from A to B between the time you measure A and the time someone (not you, because you are too far away) measures B, so that there is absolutely no way a signal could travel from one to the other.

Imagine two observers, typically called Alice and Bob. Alice observes the A photons and Bob observes the B photons. They are too far apart to communicate with each other, and they have not decided their observational strategy in advance, so neither knows exactly what aspect of each photon, X, Y or Z, the other will measure. After the experiment is over, they get together to compare notes. They find that when Alice observed X-up, maybe Bob observed Z-down, and when Alice observed Y-down, maybe Bob observed X-up, and so forth. But whenever they happened to observe the same aspect, the observations were correlated. Every time Alice observed X-up, if Bob observed X, it was X-down. Every time Alice observed X-down, if Bob observed X, it was X-up, without fail. And this is true whether Alice observed before Bob did, or Bob observed first or they both observed at the same time.

So here is the question: How does photon B “know” that Alice is observing X-up so that when Bob observes X, it must be X-down?

You might object that it is not mysterious. Suppose you take a coin and carefully slice it in half along the circumference so that one piece has the heads side and the other has the tails side. If you put each half in an envelope and shuffle the envelopes and then open one and it contains heads, you would know without looking that the other one contains tails. But quantum objects are not like that. They don’t exist as heads or tails (up or down) until they are detected. They have only a probability of being one or the other. To use the lingo, they are in a “superposition” of states. Only when a quantum object is detected does it unambiguously take on one property or another.

Albert Einstein and two colleagues, Podolsky and Rosen, developed a thought experiment that, they believed, proved that quantum theory was incomplete. Quantum theory says that you can’t know with certainty two different properties of the same quantum object, for instance its position and its momentum, or its X-spin and its Y-spin. The more closely you pin down one, the less precisely you know the other. But in this case you could theoretically know both X-spin and Y-spin. If Alice observes X-up and Bob observes Y-up, then we know that Alice’s photon is both X-up and Y-down, and we know that Bob’s photon is both X-down and Y-up. This is known as the EPR Paradox, the paradox being that even though theory says you can’t know two properties with certainty, here is a way you can. Einstein thought this proved that something, a hidden variable of some kind, one that we do not yet know about, determines the outcome, and that quantum indeterminacy was bogus.

Since then researchers have proved mathematically and experimentally that quantum theory is correct and that Einstein was wrong. Unfortunately, the math quickly gets very complex, and I am not competent to understand it, much less explain it. The gist of it is that classical (determinate) statistics say one thing about how often you would find combinations of properties, such as X-up, Y-up and Z-up, but actual experiment finds a different distribution. The results of the experiment do not agree with classical assumptions, but they do agree with quantum assumptions, so something about the classical assumptions must be wrong.

The primary assumption violated is called “locality,” meaning that what happens at one place can’t instantaneously affect what happens someplace else. Locality says there has to be some connection between them, some impetus traveling from one to the other. But in this case measuring photon A does in fact instantaneously affect the measurement of photon B. We appear to have what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

Except it’s not action. No signal, impulse, stimulus or data of any sort is transmitted between the two. Instead the two photons appear to be aspects of the same thing. Each member of the pair is described by the same quantum mechanical wave function, and when it “collapses” into something determinate, both aspects become determinate at the same time. They don’t communicate; they are not transmitting information. They are connected, even though physically separate. In the lingo, they are “entangled.”

Last time we saw instances in the biological world where disparate physical elements act as one. Here is an instance at the very foundation of physical reality.

We have to be careful when interpreting quantum physics. The observed facts are unequivocal and repeatable, but what it all means is something else entirely. That quantum objects are sometimes entangled does not prove the mystical intuition that all is one, no matter how many new-age aficionados would like to believe so. But it does open the possibility.

———

Notes

(1) Having no spin is not an option. The pion was at rest, having no angular momentum. When it splits, the child photons go in an opposite directions and have opposite spin. The sum of their spin equals zero, the same as the initial pion.

References

Blanton, John, et. al. “Does Bell’s Inequality rule out local theories of quantum mechanics?” Online publication, URL = http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/bells_inequality.html as of 25 August 2011.

Felder, Gary. “Spooky Action at a Distance: An Explanation of Bell’s Theorem.” Online publication, URL = http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/kenny/papers/bell.html as of 25 August 2011.

Harrison, David M. “Bell’s Theorem.” Online publication, URL = http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/BellsTheorem/BellsTheorem.html as of 22 August 2011.

Harrison, David M. “The Stern-Gerlach Experiment, Electron Spin, and Correlation Experiments.” On-line publication: URL = http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/GeneralInterest/Harrison/SternGerlach/SternGerlach.html as of 29 August 2007.

Harrison, David M. “Bell’s Theorem.” Online publication, URL = http://www.upscale.utoronto.ca/PVB/Harrison/BellsTheorem/BellsTheorem.html as of 24 August 2011.

National Science Teachers Association. “The Stern-Gerlach Experiment.” On-line publication, URL = http://www.if.ufrgs.br/~betz/quantum/SGtext.htm as of 29 August 2007.

Rothman, Tony, and Sudarshan, George. Doubt and Certainty. NY: Helix Books (Perseus Book Group), 1998.

Thinkquest Library. “Bell’s Inequality and The EPR Paradox.” Online publication, URL = http://library.thinkquest.org/C008537/cool/bellsinequality/bellsinequality.html as of 24 August 2011.

Wikipedia. “Bell’s Theorem.” Online publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell’s_Theorem as of 19 September 2011.

Wikipedia. “EPR Paradox.” Online publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox as of 24 August 2011.

Wikipedia. “Interpretations of quantum mechanics.” Online publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics as of 20 September 2011.

Wikipedia. “Introduction to quantum mechanics.” Online publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechanics as of 24 August 2011.

Wikipedia. “Pion.” Online publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pion as of 24 August 2011.

Wikipedia. “Quantum entanglement.” Online publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement as of 24 August 2011.

Wikipedia. “Stern-Gerlach experiment.” On-line publication, URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern–Gerlach_experiment as of 29 August 2007.