Creator Gods

Suppose , for the sake of discussion, that the concept of God does NOT necessarily imply infinities. The defining characteristic of the god I am imagining is “simply” being a world-creator. From the point of views of the inhabitants of the world, the creatures, the notion of a being who could create “all this” will likely imply omnipotence, but, if we take things that way, it may just be due to our impoverished grasp of great magnitudes. A world creating being (thought of as an agent) need not have infinite powers. Naturalism is the view that the world was “created” by very simple non-agents (material particles and fields operating in accord with simple natural laws), with nothing at all like an agent behind it all. But we can imagine that our world is finite and that it is also the creation of a creator who is also finite in its powers. For example, we may be the inhabitants of a simulation of a world, running in a creator’s mind (the dream of Brahman) or more prosaically, a simulation running on some computer-like entity, perhaps a computer so powerful that we will be irresistibly drawn to attributing mind and agency to it.

Moving from the level of the cosmic to the level of the individual organism, it may again be fruitful to think in terms of a creator god at work. I am confronted by a world that I almost always take in a naively realistic manner. Yet both reflection and empirical study reveal that the world that I take as simple reality is actually a model, a simulation if you will, that exists within me, chiefly within my brain. My radically finite system operates through a very simplified model as a means of dealing with a world too complex and fast moving to be reacted to in any sort of comprehensive way. To engender anything like a fully realistic model would require infinite modeling resources, i.e. something like a traditional, infinitely powerful god. The model through which the system operates is constantly dynamically updating itself while making predictions of what immediate future data inflows should be. Only discordant information gets registered in the parts of the system to which we are drawn to attribute consciousness. I think that consciousness, taken in the way we seem reflexively prone to take it, also is implicated in claims to what turn out to be infinite powers. The model through which we operate in the world is not only a model of the world but also a model of a self in the world, me. This entity, me, as it appears in my model (as well as other people’s model of me) has properties no finite thing could have, for example perfect internal transparency or ultimate control over its own activities.

I saw a video of Elon Musk being interviewed by Lex Fridman of MIT. The last question he was asked was “What is the one question whose answer you would you most like to find?. He paused for what I thought was an inordinate time. I began to think the recording had stopped or that something had broken. But then he said, “What is outside the simulation?”

About agency. We (virtually all of us with the exception of a few mystics) operate through models that depict us as agents, with control over what happens. Chief among the things that happen that we are modeled as controlling are the things our bodies do. If this is an illusion, it is probably a highly useful one, and a largely comforting one (given that the alternative is viewing events as happening out of anyone’s control). The “at bottom, things just happen” way of taking things is scary, and it seemingly leaves us with nothing to do, with no ultimate justification for doing one thing rather than another. Nevertheless, people who believe they lack control will still do things, fill up their time with one activity after another, just like the believers in control do. The only difference is, if they think about it, they will admit that they do not know of any ultimate justification for whatever it is that they do, that it may well arise from impersonal causal conditions that are under nobody’s control. People who are moved  to be agentic about it can cut of further questioning by saying, “It was just my choice to do what I did.” By claiming final, ultimate control, the believer in strong agency gives an “answer” to the question “Why did you do that rather than this?” that is no answer at all. It almost amounts to the childish, “Just because”. Even if many events turn out to arise from causes we cannot currently trace and may forever remain unable to do so, there are also some causal connections we can trace out and make sense of. Stopping with “I just chose to do it, that’s all” is to give up on any investigation into causes behind what we do. Stopping there is, in a way, to give respect for the supposed dignity of the agent. To suggest that there were causes at work which were not transparent to him or her at the time is an insult, something like questioning the majesty of a king or a god. “How dare you suggest that I may not have been fully aware of what I was doing and why I was doing it!”

Adversary Intellectuals

Eric Hoffer in his book Our Time:

In a Western democracy the adversary intellectual is not only against his country and against the middle class into which he was born, but he sides with the colored races against the white, with animals against man, and with the wilderness against the sown. Predictably, an adversary intellectual who is a Jew sides with the Arabs against Israel. Is this hatred of one’s own a variant of self-hatred? Hardly so. One who hates what most people love probably savors his uniqueness. He believes that secession from his country, class, race and species bespeaks righteousness and partakes of the heroic. But above all he has an almost insane vanity. The adversary intellectual feels superior to the people who govern his country, but he will not run for office. He will not demean himself to beg the votes of stupid people. He lusts instead for an apocalyptic denouement that will topple the power structure and give him his chance. The adversary intellectual cannot actually wreck a society, and he cannot seize power. But by discrediting and besmirching a society he undermines the faith of its potential defenders. When the Tucholskys had done their work, Weimar Germany could not defend itself against the wreckers—the communists and the Nazis.

The “adversary intellectual” is a necessary figure in public debates and deliberation, a good thing, but a dose-dependent good thing. If everybody takes up the role of adversary intellectual, or if being an adversary intellectual is what is all the “cool kids” admire and want to be, then there is nothing left to be adversarial against. For example, actual Fascists are pretty rare, and blatant racism is rare as well. But those who want to feel the exhilarating virtue of smashing fascism or combatting racism will argue with a straight face that, far from being fragmentary relics of a rapidly receding past, that fascism and racism are not less prevalent but more.

A small proportion of skeptics and nay-sayers is useful. They test the main themes and efforts that a group or society may be engaged in, serving to clean off the weak bits, much as small fish clean the parasites off of big fish. I count myself among the critics, skeptics, and nay-sayers about a lot of things, but if there are too many such people, if most people become that way, then very little will get done. We will endlessly find and examine reasons and arguments to NOT to do any particular thing anyone proposes and, thereby, never do anything. A person whose primary activity is to criticize his or her own culture, to always show his own ways in the worst light is a gadfly, sometimes annoying, but vitally necessary to the ongoing “health” of a way of life. Among the “good” gadflies, there is still an underlying loyalty to the culture in that the desire is to make it better, to improve its defects. Beyond a certain point, adversarial criticism of a culture put the critic truly outside of the culture he or she criticizes (even while continuing to live within it). Such a “bad” gadfly may advocate for the wholesale razing of prior cultural institutions, seeing them as beyond fixing and as incorrigibly pernicious in their current forms. A desire to cleanse, reform, or improve gives way to a desire for a ceasing of that which has become seen as intolerable, even if that ceasing happens in a disorderly way. Improvement-minded criticism gives way to revolutionary yearnings to stop business as usual by any means necessary.

Abortion and Role-responsibility

I read about a recent Gallup poll about public attitudes toward abortion in the US. The report said that 46% of respondents labeled abortion as “morally wrong”, while 43% found it “morally acceptable”. For fairly complicated reasons, I try to avoid using terms like “morally wrong” or the like. Briefly, my analysis of what we mean by those terms has convinced me that we are attributing a dubious power to human beings, the power to freely make two-way choices between alternatives, matters that they could genuinely decide either way. Since I doubt that we have such powers, I wind up doubting that anyone turns out to be morally responsible for anything.

However, this does not mean I believe we can or should get along by making no evaluations of each other’s behavior. Exactly how much regulation needs to be imposed to have a well-functioning society is an empirical question to which I do not know the answer. The exact regulations we wind up with are a result of a political process, and that’s fine by me. The only real difference my metaphysical scruples about free-will and moral responsibility would make is that we would re-define our laws and other social regulations to avoid making them depend on metaphysics about which there isn’t stable agreement.

Instead of seeing ourselves as enforcing some sort of moral order on free agents and focusing in on their inner lives and intentions and their supposed free choices, I would see the focus as fashioning a set of strategies designed to make (almost) everybody better off. It would be what I conceive of as “strict-liability role responsibility”. First, let’s look at strict-liability. “Strict-liability” means we look at overt behavior and give little attention to people’s inner states. Trying to get at someone’s “true intentions” is a fool’s errand. Since we are, each of us, frequently prey to self-deception, rule violators can’t tell us what really moved them because they don’t know themselves. I would think it a great simplification to avoid all that and focus on things that happen that can be publicly observed and (more or less) objectively verified. Think of no-fault insurance for auto accidents. Your car is involved in an accident and damage results. We don’t spend time wondering whether you meant for what happened to do so. Put aside for now complications such as legally culpable negligence, or substance abuse rule violations. If such conditions are relevant, they are also to be treated in a strict-liability way, as turning on questions of public fact rather than inner private states. Have the damage appraised and either you pay or your insurance company pays.

Next, consider “role responsibility”. I envision regulations as establishing a variety of general social roles defined by the qualifications for occupying them. If you behave in ways that violate those qualifications, you lose access to the social role. In this case, if you get involved in a lot of accidents, you will lose the social role of vehicle operator. It really is not germane whether you meant to get into the accidents or tried hard to avoid them and failed. If someone loses access to a role because of failure to fulfill the qualifications, it may seem to him that he is being blamed morally and punished, but he is no more being punished than I am being punished by not being allowed to be the chief violinist in the orchestra. I can’t play the violin, and therefore do not qualify. My moral worth or lack are irrelevant, as is the strength of my desire to occupy the role.

So, my criticism of the customary concept of “moral responsibility” and my conclusion of doubting that any finite human being ever has it does not imply that all rules and restraints are overthrown. It is not a recipe for libertinism or evaluative nihilism. It is, I suppose, a recipe for a sort of moral nihilism, but not of a pernicious sort. Yet nothing that is external or public is necessarily taken away (except for behavior that is part of having moral reactive attitudes, such as moral blame). The rules could get weaker, harsher, or stay the same. All that is taken away (or, better, set aside as indeterminable) is the search for inner intention, for what the law calls “mens rea”.

With all that as a preamble, let’s return to the Gallup poll about abortion and imagine that the questions were re-cast to avoid mentioning moral rightness or wrongness. Most of the questions were about public policy issues such as whether abortions should be permitted or restricted under various conditions and time-frames. Being a skeptic about morality like I am need have no bearing on these questions. To be sure, if I think having an abortion is morally wrong or if think that standing in the way of abortion-seeking women in any way is morally wrong, then those beliefs will color my responses to the public policy questions. My point is that withholding from treating the issues in morally colored terms does not imply any position on abortion in either direction. I can be a skeptic about moral responsibility and consistently completely oppose abortion or consistently support it being available without restriction, as well as any position in between those extremes.

What is the social role-responsibility involved in abortion? The social role is “mother”. A woman who finds herself pregnant for the first time is not a mother, but she is involved in a process that will lead her into the role of mother if it is allowed to take its natural course. Being a female capable of conception is a biological qualifications for that role, mother, but there are socially conditioned qualifications as well. For example, there are qualifications of competency and considerations of the interests of other people. For example, a woman will be excluded from that social role if she behaves in ways that endanger children to a sufficient degree. The fact that she very much wants to continue in that role is relevant, but can be overridden by severe enough demonstrations of incompetence. The community takes on itself the authority to determine that someone is not suitable for the role of mother, which is strictly separate from any supposed determination about her moral worth. Being unqualified for the role of mother is not, on its face, a moral flaw. It is a sort of incompetence that may well arise due to mere bad luck , an incompetence that may well be overbalanced by other competences that she possesses for other roles.

Considerations of social role-responsibility instead of individual moral responsibility lead us away from personal blame or praise and raise questions about what the effects of various encouragements and discouragements we can devise to manage each others behavior. This requires us to form some general ideas about how we want each other to behave and general ideas as to how much of our time and resources we want to expend in moving our behavior in the directions we decide we want. What qualifications should we set for the social role of “mother” in our society or community? Crucial for the abortion debate, should we include as a qualification “wants to be a mother at this time”? If we write that in as one of our qualifications, then anyone not willing to be a mother would automatically be disqualified from that role. Wanting motherhood could be a necessary but not sufficient condition. If you don’t want to be a mother, you don’t get to be one; but, even if you do want to be a mother, you might still be disqualified on other grounds, for example because you are incapable of exercising due care for a child.

Imagine that we have agreed (at least provisionally) by some political process on our specifications for our social roles, including motherhood. Now we can turn to what we may be willing to do to regulate the way people perform that role or even how they come to take it on in the first place. One of the first considerations we must face is identifying the sorts of behavior we want to enhance or discourage in ourselves, and then find the least costly, least restrictive ways to bring about the results we want. In the specific case of abortion, I would favor beginning by considering the sorts of situations that lead people to become pregnant and then want to not continue the pregnancy. If we are among those who deplore the cutting off of the life process at any stage, we would consider how we might decrease the number of situations where the question of ending the pregnancy even comes up.  In my opinion, we would do well to consider both the costs of attempting to influence people’s behavior in this area and our prospects for success should we favor a policy designed to reduce the number of abortions that women find themselves wanting. Even if we strongly deplore abortions, we might nevertheless judge that any practical attempts to prevent abortions would create even more problems than tolerating them.

Next, we might turn to considerations that are more metaphysical, but in a different way than the metaphysics involved in grounding moral judgments. By “metaphysical” I mean beliefs or assertions or assumptions that are not provable one way or the other by ordinary scientific means. Suppose we decide as a society or a community that life versus death decisions are to be made by taking all affected parties’ interests into account. The metaphysical bit is: should we count the prospective life-to-be as one of the  “affected parties”, or not? We can’t begin to deal with that question until we have settled on how we shall treat the status of future things, things that we may expect, but things that do not exist in the present and may never exist. We have to make some metaphysical decisions or assumptions because, just looking at the facts before us, we come to no stable answer and have no good way to adjudicate between people with metaphysical positions that disagree about the status of non-actual things, things that do not (yet) exist in the here and now. Even while recognizing that I am making somewhat arbitrary metaphysical moves, I do believe that good public policy should give some attention to the interests of affected parties that do not yet exist. For example, most of us judge it proper to restrain our propensity to pollute and thereby somewhat reduce our current consumption of non-renewable resources because we want them to be available for use by our (not yet existing) grandchildren. We give the interests of future children weight in the latter case, and perhaps that gives some plausible practical justification for counting the interests of currently developing fetuses in our deliberations about abortion, at least to some degree. Those who dearly value women having unrestricted access to abortion may see giving the developing embryo a sort of “standing” by counting its interests to any degree as fatal to their position. Yet its interests are as least as “real” as the interests of people who will not be born before a hundred years from now. The difference is that we know to a high degree of probability that there will exist some set of people who will be our descendants, people who will have interests as fully as we do and about whose interests we properly may make sacrifices of our own. By contrast, a particular developing fetus may or may not come to have the same sorts of conscious interests and concerns that we do. Whether he or she does get to develop the capacity of such personal interests is the very issue at stake if abortion is under consideration.

Even if the future-life of somebody that may be aborted does count, its interests could count, metaphysically (that is undecideably) either way. Someone could assert that to be a child born to an unwilling mother, to someone who never wanted to be your mother, is a circumstance likely to be highly associated with a blighted life, a life the person concerned would have been better off not having at all. We imagine ourselves as being the one in the womb but somehow (impossibly) sentient and being asked to express a preference between continuing and ending the process. It’s easy to imagine saying, “I don’t care about disadvantages, I want my one and only chance to exist.”; but it’s also possible for me to imagine taking a pass given such an unpromising beginning to it all. Of course, when we socially tolerate abortion, while such imagining ourselves into strange positions may move us emotionally, I find myself with a separate concern. Giving somebody a role that allows that person to make a judgment, about somebody else, that the probable life he or she faces is not worth living is a very dangerous role to give anybody because it is so prone to be abused.  We may debate long about whether a fetus qualifies for the role of a socially recognized person with socially enforceable interests; but I not see real room for debate that decisions about abortions are matters of life and death. A new life will be accepted into the lives of others, into a shared community, or not. Sometimes there are overwhelmingly good reasons to refrain from fostering and accepting the process leading to that new life. At other times, the reasons and interests involved are less clear, and a decision is less easy to reach and consensus may be permanently elusive.

The metaphysics I keep mentioning has to do with statements and beliefs we make about counterfactual situations. All that we ever really experience is the unfolding of events as they actually happen to us and through us. But we constantly speak about things that do not happen but which we judge (somehow) could have happened if something that did happen were otherwise, and we also imagine various different futures unfolding depending on whether certain things happen in the future or not. I really am curious as to how we come to make these counterfactual judgments and compare them to each other weighing how plausible it is that they should happen. I think there is some very complicated work we do involving making divergent models of reality by means of imagination and then contemplating them. This process, I believe, causes us to have beliefs about these objects of our imagining, and I can understand and accept that is how we typically operate psychologically. But I see little in all of that to justify our confidence in our beliefs about counterfactual suppositions. Sometimes these judgments seem so obviously true, that there seems no room for quibbling. “If you hadn’t knocked the vase off the table, it would not be broken now.” But even in that seemingly clearest of cases there lurks a bit of quibble-room nevertheless. What are the chances that, if I hadn’t knocked it off, it would have become broken by some other means?” Astronomically unlikely, perhaps, but not a zero probability, not impossible. The metaphysical problem is that we have no principled way of figuring out what effects changing one thing would have on the rest of the world. We help ourselves to a working principle: that you can change one or a few things and treat everything else as continuing unaffected, but we really have no firm grasp on how interconnected or separate things and events are, causally, with respect to each other. That’s another one of those metaphysically unknown “facts”, which we can and do fill in in whatever various ways it takes to make our pre-reflective position come out true. But even given that working principle or largely causally separate events combined with overwhelming overall causal continuity, which simplifies a lot, I still regard disputes about counterfactual claims as irresolvable. The primary reason for this is because we have no way to “prove” which party is correct when they make incompatible claims about a counterfactual situation. At most, only one of the imagined counterfactual scenarios will “come true” revealed in a publicly observable actual outcome. As communities, we could, as an experiment, adopt harsh restrictions on abortion and see what then happens. But we can never see how events would have unfolded in the counterfactual case where we instead adopted a less restrictive set of regulations or a hands-off, no regulation at all policy. We can’t repeatedly run controlled experiments in most large scale social behavior situations. We can look for similar cases that were handled in different ways and try to draw general conclusions. But deciding issues of exactly which cases are relevantly similar and which are not drags us back into metaphysics and conflicts about which we can’t  come to any stable settlement.

So, at best, skepticism about moral accountability will remove one bit of metaphysics from our way of crafting social practices, but leave plenty of room for metaphysical moves in the area of counterfactuals. The reason I think that is a problem is because, when questions become untethered from facts, it is too easy to manipulate background factors in self-serving ways. Suppose I look at a situation where an abortion might occur and think about the future life-to-be. If I tend to restrictive attitudes about abortion, I will be prone to imagining the new person overcoming a difficult start and then going on to live a good life. If I tend to favor less restrictive policies, I may resist thinking about the life-to-be at all, or argue that it should not be given any standing (since it does not exist, perhaps), and, if finally I cannot avoid it and come to consider the life-to-be, I would tend to imagine a life not worth living, something you do the life-to-be a favor to prevent. My point is not to commend any one side or another, but to note that the indeterminacy of counterfactual situations allows the disputants to help themselves to imagined “facts” that help to support the positions they had to begin with. If you and I disagree about what would happen if some change were made, there is no principled way that I know of to settle the matter. We have rough and unsteady criteria about what is plausible or far-fetched, but if someone else doesn’t see a scenario as far-fetched and you do, reasonable argument seems at an end.

I don’t think ceasing to talk about abortion with the language of moral responsibility would much affect the actual policies about abortion we wind up with. It wouldn’t abolish all restrictions or make abortion more difficult to obtain (or perform). It would eliminate one avenue for invective and one mode of disagreement based in contrary moral evaluations. I do think the change to a different way of describing things would likely affect the incidence of people personally blaming or shaming themselves or others. That might be a great loss if such reactive emotions are necessary for a workable social order. But, I see such moral reactive attitudes as metaphysically unjustified or, at least, metaphysically question-begging. For all I know and have been able to discover, human beings may well not have enough control over what they do to merit moral blame (or praise). There is some sense in which I feel it would be wrong to treat someone in a negative way because I have made a metaphysical assumption about his abilities to be a real originator of his own actions. So, since I have doubts about anyone’s qualifying for proper moral judgment, I conclude that I would be wrong to do so. I don’t know the underlying metaphysical fact of the matter. Perhaps the person before me has that power of two-way control that I find so unlikely and thus deserves my moral condemnation. Perhaps he doesn’t. I have no way of knowing, and never will. But what is the nature of this reluctance, this scruple against holding someone morally responsible because the metaphysics is dubious? It’s obviously not moral wrongness. My take is that it is the sort of wrongness that arises from breaches of intellectual honesty. I would be wrong to hold a human being to a standard that only a superhuman being, a god, perhaps could meet, unless I had very good reason to believe he might qualify under that standard. Gods can just create something out or nothing independently of whatever else there may be. Maybe human beings can do that too, but I have my doubts. I guess the qualm I would feel at morally condemning someone who I suspected couldn’t deserve is in the realm of intellectual integrity combined with a practical principle that being in doubt about one’s practical justification is a good motive for desisting from unwelcome behavior toward another (or oneself for that matter).

Supposing we have agreed to drop moral accountability talk from our public structure of rules, that still leaves plenty of room for other sorts of disagreements and for divergent imagination-based claims about what will happen should be do this or that. Let me end my attempting to formulate my own provisional personal opinion/position on abortion at this time. When I think about the question, I imagine being in a place where I could stand in the way of another individual human being, either literally or figuratively. She is  a human being who is currently pregnant and she has her own reasons for wanting to end the pregnancy that strike her as sufficient to justify doing so. It is very hard for me to imagine continuing to stand in her way to attempt to prevent the abortion from happening. The only fantastic scenario I can dredge up is of a very young and very distraught woman/girl who I have good reason to believe is beset with a severe, acute psychological disorder in full crisis. That situation, by itself would almost certainly lead me to favor her ending her pregnancy. But, if I had known her well enough in her less beset moments and if I were pretty confident about the psychotic episode ending soon and also confident about what the young woman would want to have happened when she returned to calmness, then, if I had the power to override her immediate decision and force a delay, I imagine myself doing so, much as I might prevent a person bent on suicide from proceeding if I believed they were motivated by derangement that would likely be temporary. In such extreme cases, we sometimes prevent a person from doing what they may very much want to do, taking upon ourselves the job of fostering their more long term interests over their passing urges. But I’m not sure if the fact that it would take something that extreme to move me to oppose a particular abortion reflects well or badly on me. I have never been particularly comfortable with confronting and thwarting people, doing something directly to prevent them from doing what they want. Whether that amounts to weakness or strength on my part is in the eye of the evaluator, I suppose. Even if I was very opposed to what the person planned to do, I would avoid getting involved if there was any way I could stay out of it. I could dress it up as respect for the autonomy of others, but there are big elements of squeamishness and cowardice as well.

There are various reasons that people seek abortions, and they each deserve their own discussion, but for the sake of brevity, let me focus on what is, to me, the most questionable sort of case: abortion for mild convenience. Imagine a woman who finds herself pregnant. She was not raped, she is very healthy and could be predicted to withstand the rigors and pregnancy and delivery as well as anybody. She is not psychologically beset in any particular way. She has considered things as carefully as she can and has decided to end the pregnancy because she would prefer to have her first (or next) child a few months later than this pregnancy would end, so that she can free  up the coming few months to pursue some project that interests her. It’s not a “central life project” or a “once in a lifetime opportunity” but just something that she mildly interested in pursuing. She has compared the personal value to her, all things considered, of a baby now vs studying drawing (as a hobbyist, with no idea of a career in art or selling her works) and having a baby six months later than she would if her current pregnancy continued. Her preference for an art course over a baby is perhaps unusual. Perhaps most people would have the opposite priority, but she does not. If we imagine the regulations being such as would thwart her from getting an abortion, neither her life nor the resulting child’s life would be blighted. Her life and the child’s life would be very similar to the counterfactual life where she bears a child six months later.

The only real difference, let us stipulate, would be: who gets to be the child that lives its life? If they were to be conceived months apart, it’s clear that they would be two different people, developing from a different egg and a different sperm. Is the currently developing child more “real” than the future one, and thus deserving of more consideration? Maybe so. It’s actually developing in the here and now and the prospective replacement is only in the planning stages. Plenty of room for confusion and disagreement remain for me, even in this case, which I had tried to construct to be “easy”. I envision my community incorporating a rule that allowed women to make the choice whether or not to get an abortion conditional on their having whatever their community determined was among a set of “good enough” reasons, but restricting or blocking their choice in cases where their reasons were deemed insufficient.  I could support such a policy. The devil would be in the details as to what we decide constitutes “good enough” reason. That reveals to me that I see the interests of the person as meriting fairly significant weight in individual decisions. I realize that to go even so far is to have put myself at enmity with those who think full and unrestricted access to abortion as an individual right of each woman in all conceivable circumstances is of utmost importance. I can understand, at least a little bit, I think, how angering and frightening it is to contemplate a hard-won right being taken away, even a little bit. I recognize that my thinking may be perverted and distorted by factors and manipulations I may not even understand or be aware of. But, given all that, I can only call it like I see it, provisionally and for now.

All I can really do to shed light concretely for myself is to look at facts about situations that have actually happened. I have been involved, directly and indirectly in three pregnancies that ended by abortion. That’s less than a handful of cases, and each had its own different individual circumstances, but in each case I supported and facilitated what the woman who was pregnant wanted to happen. I refrained from compcicating her situation by expressing what I may have wanted to have happen in some imagined circumstance where my solely self-regarding preferences and interests were to prevail. In each of those cases, my preference, narrowly conceived, would would have been to continue the pregnancy. Recognizing  the facts about where the burden would overwhelmingly likely fall if I got my imaginary way, I carefully avoided expressing my pro-birth private opinions. I didn’t strongly disagree with the decision that was made, and I felt it better not to try to push events the other way. I think that the principle of locating full authority for a decision in a single place is generally a good one, to be overridden only under extreme circumstances.

So, that’s my best evidence of where I finally come down about abortion. I did my part in the cases I remember, but I did not and do not feel particularly comfortable, or free from regrets. I imagine that I would have supported and been pleased had the decision been to the continue those pregnancies, but I am also, on balance,  pleased to have supported the contrary decisions that actually were made, to support the terminations. I must also add that I am often surprised by the differences between what I actually wind up doing and what I had imagined beforehand. In fact it happens so often that I wonder how I continue to be surprised. I have an optimism about my ability to frame counterfactuals that they will become actual that should have been extinguished by now, because they almost never do.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/235445/abortion-attitudes-remain-closely-divided.aspx?g_source=link_NEWSV9&g_medium=TOPIC&g_campaign=item_&g_content=U.S.%2520Abortion%2520Attitudes%2520Remain%2520Closely%2520Divided

How Many Selves?

There seem three possible states of affairs: 1) there is no such thing as a self operating a body; 2) there is a single self operating a body; and 3) there are multiple selves operating a body. Each alternative is epistemically possible. Each could be true, given all we currently know. I respect each alternative and have operated from within each of them at various times in my life. Each alternative has its proponents and detractors and a large corpus of literature has been produced over, actually, thousands of years. The uncritical, naive realist, approach is the view that there is one self. Individuals (almost all of them) naturally and effortlessly operate with it as an unquestioned background. And, should someone have a moment’s doubt somehow, we each (at least seemingly) have constant and direct evidence of being a single conscious self. The no-self proponents produce argument and empirical evidence that the naive realist picture is not true, cannot be true. The unitary self camp responds in kind.

Then we come to the multiple-self view, one that I have played with, off and on, for many years, since the 1980’s, at least. Whatever else they might be, selves are explanatory devices. When something happens that puzzles us, finding a self to which to attribute it gives us a resting place in our search for an explanation. We make sense of our own behavior and the behavior of other people and animals by attributing a self to each of them that operates the physical body in question. What has drawn/forced me to the hypothesis that, at least sometimes, individual’s bodies are under the operation of separate, often competing, selves is behavior for which I can find no better explanation. Now, a single-self adherent could grant that, in addition to the one and only real self, other sophisticated but unconscious information processing is going on to operate the self’s body. For example, the immune system is very intelligent in what it does, but we need not attribute consciousness to it. The cases that support the multiple self account are things such as self-deception or, in general, systematic self-defeating behavior given an individual’s own sincerely stated goals and values. Another case of a candidate for selfhood is the part of us that stages the dream experiences we have every night, a seemingly intelligent story teller who must be distinct from the one who experiences the dreams, or else how could genuine surprise or terror result? Single self proponents have to tie themselves in knots, with more and more sophisticated and cunning, yet unconscious processing going on, while a multiple self can explain what we see in self deception or self thwarting as what amounts to an interpersonal conflict between two distinct selves, each consciously and intelligently pursuing its own agenda. That we experience dreams not as stories we are telling ourselves is perfectly explained if we countenance that someone else is telling the story. The primary thing that supports there only being a single self is that one of the selves has control of the expressive system, speech and writing. Faced with puzzling behavior, we see the conflict, but we only get to hear one side’s account. The one (or ones) thwarting the plans of the one controlling the voice box do their work in silence. Even speech production itself may well be a group effort. One bit does the talking, but some other (very intelligent) bit provides the actual words that spring, seemingly spontaneously, from my lips. I almost never feel an effort in coming up with the words that express what I want to say. From my point of view, it happens automatically.

What does attributing consciousness add to a dynamically updating system that is functioning well to serve the organism’s interests in non-conscious ways? Grappling with that question has driven at least a few philosophers to the desperate position of treating consciousness itself (whatever it may be) as causally epiphenomenal, which loosely put means that consciousness is along for the ride made makes no causal difference. But most people who have thought about the question have not followed that route. Consciousness has causal effects and can be itself affected my non-conscious material causes. The usual answer to the question of what it adds is that consciousness allows for a real-time flexibility in our behavior, as well as some ability to become self-reflective about our behavior and perhaps be motivated to change it. I think that response fails to give enough credit to what non-conscious systems can manage. Our unconscious self-preservation responses kick in much quicker and much more reliably than our conscious, explicit stories to ourselves about what is going on. We perhaps only become conscious of anything at all when there is a problem with it. When things are going smoothly, consciousness in the form of explicit, slow thinking only gets in the way (you can’t dance smoothly while thinking about one’s movements). However, put all that aside. Whatever the value-added that consciousness provides, why does the part that speaks get it and the rest of the system does not? If we could get clearer about precisely what that value-added is in detail, maybe we will find that there is something special about one part of the overall enterprise that makes sense of it, and it alone, being conscious. I can’t rule it out at this point, and that’s why I have not made the multiple self view my permanent home. In fact, I spend more time with the more fundamental criticisms developed by the no-self camp. Perhaps nothing in what operates my body has consciousness because consciousness itself is not a well formed concept or perhaps it is but it involves the attribution properties that no finite being could possess. But all that is a long story, for another time.

Group and Individual IQ

Although there is ferocious controversy about the matter, suppose, for the sake of this discussion, that IQ measures something “real”. There is at least one version of a general intelligence test, Ravens Progressive Matrices, that is non-verbal and thus, arguably, avoids being culture-bound. Theoretically at least, it could be administered anywhere and yield results that can be compared across settings. The results from the Ravens test closely track the results from more traditional tests based on verbally posed questions. If someone scores at the 98th percentile, then he or she is 2 standard deviations above the general mean of 100. Suppose that Alice has an IQ score of 130, which puts her at the 98^th percentile. Only one person in 50 will be her intellectual match. Since almost everyone Alice meets is less intelligent that her. She has to get herself into a post-graduate program of studies before people like her will be “common” in her surroundings. If George scores at the 99.9^th percentile, he is 3 standard deviations above the mean. Only one person in a thousand can keep up with him.

Everything above is predicated on a distribution with a mean IQ score of 100. However, when we look at populations, we find that some have a higher average mean IQ, and others lower. Some East Asian ethnic groups, such as people living in Hong Kong or Singapore have an average IQ half a standard deviation above 100 (108), while other countries, for example Haiti, have an average IQ more than 2 standard deviations below 100 (67). However, human beings do not come in units labeled “population” but in units labeled “individual”. Despite coming from a population with a low average IQ, some individuals will still have high IQ’s, and not just “high for their group” but high for all groups. My daughter has a friend who is of Haitian background. Looking at his academic and career progress, I would estimate his IQ as at least 130 and more likely in the 140’s or even beyond that. He is 2 to 3 standard deviations above the mean for everybody. In order to get into a setting that matches his intellectual firepower, he went to a highly selective technical university and studied engineering. In that setting, he likely encountered more Asians relative to their proportion in the surrounding population and few to no Haitians. Suppose, as an estimate, that he is 3 standard deviations above the mean for the general population, but, if the mean of 67 for people from Haiti is accurate (a big if) and a standard deviation of about 10, Samantha’s friend is an astonishing 8 standard deviations above his group mean! He has to encounter over 1000 people from the general US population before he comes across someone on his level intellectually, but, focusing just on Haitians, being even 6 standard deviations above the mean puts an individual in the “one in a billion” category. 8 standard deviations would be 1 in many billions. There are only 15 million Haitians, counting both people in Haiti and the diaspora living in other countries. That all adds up to a significant probability that Samantha’s friend is the smartest Haitian in the world. He could look forever among his own countrymen and probably not find someone who could deal with him on his own level. I wonder whether Samantha’s friend identifies so much with being Haitian that he would be insulted by his ethnic group having such a low rating for average IQ, rather than being proud of his own personal intelligence that puts him in the first rank for all ethnic groups and not just his own. Perhaps there are reasons for the low test performance in Haiti other that the obvious one. It could be that IQ tests are seen by Haitians as tools of white cultural domination and that Haitians deliberately avoid such testing and deliberately underperform when forced to take them.

Both Samantha and I are fairly high IQ, and thus we are used to being sharper than most people we meet. Being unusual in any way, even a good way, imposes a sort of loneliness, but, still, she and I manage to find people who can talk to us on our own level. If Samantha’s friend were to go to Haiti to live, and if the average intelligence is as low as reported, he would find a few people within shouting distance, but probably no one his equal. A profound loneliness indeed.

Seeing how it all comes out in the end

When I was a young student in a Catholic elementary school, I remember actual theological discussions we had with the nuns. My interest in philosophy probably began there, although my intellectual passion at the time was astronomy. In one case, the sister (I can’t remember for sure which one) was trying to describe what Heaven would be like for those who died and went there. She described the supposedly supreme ecstasy of the Beatific Vision, but it was a sort of corollary of that vision that inspired me more, personally. You see, having a vision of God was not to be merely a visual experience for the blessed soul. It would involve the soul’s understanding God and His being in a much more profound way. She went on from there to perform a bit of theodicy and to give some assurance that the Church was not just a matter of mystery-mongering. There are many things we cannot understand in our fallen and restricted states, some profoundly important and others trivial. Why do bad things happen to seemingly innocent people? How can three distinct persons, at the some time, be one person? Is there a highest prime number? Sister admitted that these are mysteries to us now, but, if we manage to merit a divine reward, they will cease to be mysteries because our ability to understand will become enhanced and we will have access to all the information we need.

The idea that all questions would be answered in time was incredibly powerful to me. I guess it came out of a more basic desire to know coupled with a dim recognition of how very much I did not know. The idea of having all things explained was intoxicating to such a degree that I probably have never recovered from it. My childhood faith, such as it was, has waned and waxed, but I am left at the moment with no live hope of ever understand everything, or even of understanding a single thing in all its depth of detail and connection. I say that because I believe such understanding would take supernatural powers, such as completing an infinite task in a finite period of time. Even if I were equipped with such wonder-working powers, I would also have to undergo such profound transformations as an information processing being that I do not expect much of “me” would survive the transition. I am a radically finite, limited being. Promote “me” to something ethereal and unlimited, and the “me-ness” is lost. Sister, and the Church that stood behind her and which she was ably representing, to the extent they recognized a problem at all, had to contend that the finite, sin-prone, aspects are not of the soul’s true essence. They are adventitious dross to be cleansed away, leaving the pure True Self, pleasing to God. My current contention is that the finitude and limitedness are the whole show, the phenomenal self is the only self, and depictions of “true selves” are just that, depictions and not a flesh and blood reality like I am. Take away my specific characteristics, my limits, and you take me away too, leaving, at best, a bleached-out, featureless everyman, with nothing distinctive to mark out one individual from another.

Be all that as it may, a sort of “special case” of understanding a mystery comes to mind: seeing how it all comes out. As individuals, we almost always do not get to see the either the beginnings nor the endings of things. For many (most?) things we are born in the middle and die in the middle. I don’t think I’m all that unusual in craving understanding and the resolution that comes from finally seeing how something turns out. Almost all the stories we read or see depicted involve conflict followed by resolution. We, most of us, get upset by novelists or dramatists who end the story with plot elements left unresolved. We contrive events tied to specific dates in order to have an experience of definite resolution (weddings, graduations, sporting events, elections). We used to go to war, partly, to force definite resolutions of disputes, one way or the other. But, somehow, wars stopped working that way. After 1945, I see most wars producing no clear-cut or final resolution of the disputes that prompted them. Even the contrivances we make to set the stage for the experience of seeing how things come out do not really work, at least not for more than a moment, because things have the damnable quality of not standing still. Your team wins the championship, the bride is resplendently happy, whatever: time does not stop, and what was firmly resolved loses its firmness. Next season looms. The inevitable trials of actually living a married life begin. Short of death there is no final result, and even then, it’s only final for the one who dies. Assuming that death is death, no one gets to experience how things finally turn out because the only one who might is in no position to experience anything. What we want is an impossible thing, to see how things turn out in the end. It’s impossible because there is no end, but just a seamless process unfolding, one damn thing after another.

We have these images of final completion where events will be resolved or people will finally settle down to who they really are. That would require a stasis that is not available in the real world and that would probably be stultifying were we to approach it. Despite Sister Joseph’s hopeful assurance, I fear that such mysteries as how things will turn out will never be penetrated in any satisfying way for most of us, most of the time.

 

 

Blood lust and the Need to Protect/Be Protected

The stereotype of woman, as an archetype, is of a squeamish person, someone easily upset, but basically good and kind-hearted. As they say, “She wouldn’t hurt a fly.” I had an encounter with a woman I know yesterday that (in combination with my deplorable nature) led my thoughts in a direction that was new for me. The woman was in what she herself called “a panic” because she had seen a large cockroach scuttling from under something she picked up from the floor. I understand that some individuals have apparently hard-wired tendencies to fall apart at the sight of spiders, insects in general, mice, or (God forbid) bats. Maybe that is the way she is. Let’s assume it so. She became very excited and she called upon me to “get it” and “kill it”. One of my own built-in behavior programs kicked in, one complementary to hers, and I began to try to kill the cockroach. He was not only large, but wily and strong. I am squeamish enough myself that I did not want to touch it with my hands or my feet (which were bare at the time). I swatted it with a shoe, quite hard I thought, but it just ran away when I lifted the shoe. My damsel-in distress was still very upset, but, rather than daintily averting her eyes, she watched my every move with rapt attention, and pointed out where the bug had run to hide, urging me on to “Get it! Get it!”. I flushed him out of that lair and gave him a stronger whack. Although at least one of his legs was coming loose from his body, he struggled on. A final coup de grace, and my very worthy opponent was stilled. His physical skills and intelligence versus mine, and he made a near thing of it.

It wasn’t until some hours later that it occurred to me: this particular woman, at least, was not averse at all to killing; she was averse to doing the killing herself. While it was going on, she seemed to revel in it, still afraid, but excited, engaged, who knows? maybe even aroused. I can understand that sort of division of labor between wanting a death and wanting to directly cause that death. I eat meat, but do not directly kill any of the animals whose flesh I consume. I want it done, but not by me. If I had no other choice, I would have to decide what was more important: continuing to eat meat or keeping my hands clean. But I suspect that there was something more to our little dance than just her avoiding killing the cockroach. If no one else had been there, she would have dealt with it somehow. The something more, I think, was that, in tiny miniature, my friend and I were acting out a primal script. Women, almost all women, will kill to protect their offspring, but, again, if at all possible, they prefer that someone other than they themselves kill when that seems necessary to protect their offspring. Men, almost all men, are willing to oblige. They want to protect women they care about and their offspring, especially if they believe they are the fathers of those offspring. Why is it important who does the protecting? Why is this such a seemingly stable role difference between the male and female sexes? I think that the cold, cruel answer, in Darwinian terms, is that males are more expendable. They are less necessary to the production of the next generation than are females. Protecting offspring can be dangerous to the one doing the protecting. If there is a choice available, it is better for a male to run the risk than a female. If he loses his gamble and dies, that will not directly reduce the number of babies that make up the next generation. If she dies, it very likely will. So, the process of natural selection would favor women who engaged in sexual selection, in this particular case, selectively favoring men who showed promise of protecting them if things ever came to that. Part of that process of sexual selection could be what some call “shit tests”, in which a woman either creates an emergency or (unconsciously) exaggerates a real situation in part to see how men in her vicinity will react. If women do things like this long enough, then most of the men who get to pass on their own genes through women (the only way, at least for the time being) will have genes for either genuinely protecting women and their children or for, at least, being able to put on a convincing front in that regard.

Men, most men, run risks of various degrees and even expose themselves to the danger of death in wars to impress women, to demonstrate a willingness to care for and defend them. And many women, in turn, are impressed. Being a man in uniform at least used to raise one’s sexual attractiveness. Many educated and sophisticated women today are anti-military and, thus, immune the the man-in-uniform phenomenon and consider women who “fall” for it to be retrograde. The modern prescription for how a female should be is at odds with all this being protected stuff. Modern women are supposed to develop skills to protect themselves directly and to be able to fight their own battles, needing no one else to defend them. Rather than being turned on by a man’s willingness to help them through a situation, they should be insulted that he would think she might need help at all.

It’s a beautiful, even fierce, image of an ideal, but who of us, male or female, is really so strong and self-assured that she or he can handle everything single-handedly? As social beings, we want to be helped and also to help in our turn. The damsel/white knight scenario seems, on the surface at least, to be non-reciprocal: he helps, she gets helped. But, when things are working smoothly (that is unconsciously), and no one is thinking about sex-role implications, each party can perhaps derive an equal benefit in terms of caring and feeling cared for and recognizing that at, a meta level, that the other person relies on you because, in her eyes, you are reliable. The fact that he cares induces her to express care for him, which, in turn, engenders even more caring on his part. Taking all those reverberations into account, sometimes the male would get more out of a particular interaction, sometimes the female, even though, at the base level, the script is that she gets and he gives.

“Peace-loving” women have trouble understanding why there are wars, but they are fairly sure it is because of something about men that they don’t understand. They are exactly correct. They would be horrified to think that they, themselves, had inspired the bloodthirsty antics they despise, that the poor saps getting blown to bits were doing it in some grandiose demonstration of how fervently they would protect those who needed it, in their eyes. If the soldiers really believed no one needed taking care of, they would join the pacifists in seeing war as nothing but pointless waste. So sometimes men will project onto perfectly self-sufficient human beings who happen to be female a need to be protected that isn’t really there Nevertheless, that, I think, is the start of the martial spirit for most men who join the military or other protective services: to protect and serve. Then, once you are in, there is a booster shot for the martial spirit – the idea of a band of brothers. In real battle (I hear), you have to trust the other guys in your unit to be looking out for you and at the same time you have to be looking out for them. Each must be ready to risk and, if necessary, give his life for those “brothers”. That whole ethos is why shared wartime experiences can lead to very deep friendships based on a shared experience that no one who wasn’t there can ever get. So, while war truly is hell, it is also the occasion of episodes of transcendent sacrifices and genuine heroism.

Blood on my hands?

 

I just heard a radio commentator charge that some people he disagrees with have “blood on their hands”. The particular commentator and issue are not important to the point I want to examine. He relays a coherent narrative that will be convincing to others who share certain premises in common with him. Listening to it, it sounds like he is relating facts, but the tactic is rhetorical, I believe. This is not because there are no clear cases in which some killer was apprehended with his victims’ blood literally on his hands, and not because other clear cases cannot be found in which the charge figuratively fits glaringly well. The tactic is rhetorical because no cases can be brought forth where “blood on their hands” conclusively does not apply. If a narrative can be stretched so far that it can be made to fit just about any case, then it is not a fact-report narrative but a persuasion-focused narrative. Now, I do not criticize commentators for using rhetoric. It’s their job to tell us a story and try to convince us of it. It looks like they are listing facts and that the facts tell the story, not the commentator. But that is a false appearance. Any recitation of the facts has to be selective because we have finite time and energy and reality is very complex, most likely more complex than we can imagine or grasp. If we want to be honest reporters of fact, we will make the necessary abridgments of the full story in an impartial way. If we are commentators seeking to persuade, we may be tactically selective in what we include or leave out of our story, and that’s fine with me. However, given human beings’ easily demonstrable proclivities for self-deception, even a supposedly “just the facts” account constructed by someone with the best will in the world will leave ample room for his or her unknowingly slanting the story that is told. Objectivity, I believe, is beyond the reach of inherently subjective beings such as we are.

How can I imply that “everybody” can be made out to have blood on his or her hands? Easy. Social critics of various sorts often argue that we complacent bourgeois consumers have a lifestyle that is only made possible by the oppression and even death of those who are kept out of our view. On this account (which I do not accept) anybody who unthinkingly buys products has blood on his or her hands. The charge against us is that each and every one of us benefits from the deaths of others. The causal networks which give rise to real-world events are so complex and interconnected that it is impossible to conclusively prove that any two things are causally independent. If someone wants to say that I benefit from Slavery, or the Holocaust, or the depredations of Genghis Khan, I can’t prove him wrong.

Nevertheless, I do not feel guilty about having killed anybody else. Maybe that just shows how far gone I am in my criminality that I can look at it and feel no shame. I have reached the age of three score and ten. As far as I can recall, I have never directly caused the death of another human being. My memory is not the best, but I don’t think that is something I would forget. I suppose that there is a tiny possibility that I caused someone’s death in a way that I did not notice at the time. But, let’s give me the benefit of the doubt and assume I have never actually caused someone’s death, on my own and directly, with my own hands. Does that establish that I am innocent of spilling others’ blood? Not necessarily. The social critic’s charge that I have indirectly benefited from others’ deaths remains neither proven nor refuted. Further, the notion of “cause” itself involves an element counterfactual reasoning. I may be responsible as much for what I could have done as for what I actually did. Are there people whose lives I could have saved if I had gone out of my way to do so? Very likely there are. Instead of living the individual private life I have conducted chiefly for the benefit of myself and a select few people that I care about, I could have listened to Peter Singer’s call and devoted myself to working on saving lives, starting with those that can easily be saved with things like mosquito nets and nutritional supplements and vaccines. If I could not work on those things directly for some reason, then Singer’s view is that I should have generated income to donate to the support of those who could do the life-saving, retaining for my own use only the barest minimum that would allow me to keep generating the income to save still more lives. Despite being exposed to the Gospel according to Singer, I didn’t do those things. It is very likely that people, actual people, died who would be alive today if I had made those efforts. Blood on my hand, and it’s arguably a worse sort of blood than an actual killer who deals with his victims openly and face to face, who risks that it may be his own blood that gets on somebody else’s hands. Living in the unrepentant way I have is very similar to the benefit I get out of eating the parts of other animals’ bodies that I want while never actually killing an animal with my own hands or tools. I get the benefits and also get to be spared facing the nasty bits.

To escape from the box Singer and other social critics have created for us and continue with what we consider “normal life”, we have to either defeat these  arguments/narratives somehow or accept them with a shrug. An example of the first approach would be depicting Singer’s conclusion as obviously defective and then using its defectiveness as a reductio of the consequentialist (utilitarian) framework used to generate that conclusion. If your argument leads to the conclusion that ordinary people must become saints, then it may be a fine argument but fail to apply to people as they are. Most of us do not have it in us to live as saints, no matter what the arguments that may be made that we must. An example of the second, shrugging, approach would be to accept the attribution of victim’s blood on our hands as sound, as far as it goes, and then say, “So what?” Even if we “shouldn’t” we find other things, in practice, more important than doing what Singer says we should do. Universalizing consequentialism does not have room for special relationships. Singer must say that I am wrong to give my daughter a gift of something she wants, but does not vitally need if I could give to meet someone else’s’ vital need instead. His prescriptions are so demanding that they would sweep aside so much of the rest of life as we have known it that they show themselves to be impractical. Yet, by saying that, I may just be demonstrating self-satisfied, willfully oblivious complacency in the face of other people’s life and death needs. If Singer is right, there is a real emergency, and my response basically amounts to “not enough people are going to do enough about it to make a difference, so I get to continue with business a usual.” Somewhere, right now, somebody is in mortal need of something that she will not get and she will die. It is something that, if I knew about the situation, I could provide, and likely would provide, if she were here in front of me. We respond differently to different sorts of appeals for help. I believe the contingencies of how we developed as a species equip us to respond best in face-to-face situations where someone is in need. It’s awful that someone, anyone, finds herself in need and without effective help nearby. But the world cannot and, I think, should not be warped to make saving lives the chief purpose of our individual and collective lives. Helping those who need help is important, but it is not an overridingly important thing, dominating all other concerns. Arguments and narratives aside, making any one thing, no matter how important it may be considered in isolation, into the only important thing for everybody will not work in practice because human beings do not work that way. Individuals differ on which things they find important. That’s a good thing, not a deviance to be stamped out, a feature, not a bug.

M2 and Inflation

From 2013 to 2018, the M2 measure of money supply increased from $10.5T to $14T, a 33% increase overall and a 6.6% annualized rate averaged the 5 years. For those same 5 years, the “official” government reported rate of inflation amounted to a decrease in the purchasing power of a dollar of 9.2%, or an annualized rate of 1.8% averaged over the 5 years.

Austrian economics (i.e. the school descended from Ludwig von Mises) holds that the cause of inflation is always monetary expansion. It seems plausible, if you assume a fixed amount of wealth. Somehow introduce more money to “cover” the same amount of property and marketable services, and each item will command more nominal money. Increasing the supply of money lowers its “price” as measured by non-monetary items. That would seem a straightforward application of the relationship between supply and demand. However, it’s doubtful that things are operating that simply. If the relation between money supply increase and inflation were simple and linear, we could not have experienced what happened over the last 5 years. Inflation “should” have been 6.6%, on average, but it appears that it was actually much less, averaging 1.8%. Where did the “missing” inflation go? For the Austrians to turn out right, there must actually have been 6.6% inflation and the official government statistics have to be wrong.

As an individual consumer, all I have to go on are vague and unstable impressions about the rate at which prices have been rising. I suppose I could select a basket of goods and find how prices have changed by searching on the Internet, but I have not yet done so and likely never will. My vague impression is that 1.8% is too low and that the actual number, if you could somehow get at it, might well have been 6.6%. Still, the matter is unclear enough that government statisticians can make their pronouncements with a straight face. They are professionals and I am an amateur.

When asked to account for the discrepancy between the steady increase in the money supply and continued relatively flat inflation, the answer I have heard from pundits is that the new money that the Fed is creating doesn’t actually get released into the “real” economy and thus it does not cause inflation. When the new money is created, the Fed uses it as cash to buy existing T-bills from a primary broker-dealer.  Primary broker-dealers (a select group of big banks) have T-bills that they may have bought from a Treasury debt-financing auction or from third parties. The Fed buying them increases the cash available to the participating banks, which can then be loaned out into the rest of the economy. If that “real” economy does not very quickly somehow grow enough to justify a higher nominal total worth, then it probably would result in inflation, more money pursuing the same amount of goods.

But the Fed has offered its primary broker-dealer banks another option. Rather than lending the money that they Fed has newly created, they can deposit the cash with the Fed as “excess reserves”. This is money in the form of both cash and debt securities that the banks have beyond what the banks are required to hold as reserves and that they are not actually using in their banking activities. Placed with the Fed, this money would remain available for augmenting reserves should the broker-dealer bank so require. Primary broker-dealer banks have always been able to park money in the with the Fed, but it is only recently that the Fed has begun to pay interest on such deposits. Whether the fairly modest interest that the primary broker-dealers get is what makes the deal work is questionable. Whether it makes straight business sense to the member bank depends on that bank’s own measurement of what it thinks inflation actually is. If the Fed’s interest payment is more than eaten up by real inflation, then it’s a losing deal. As I understand it, the facts are that most of the newly created money has actually been recycled by the broker-dealers to the Fed and this is what has kept it out of the “real” economy. Maybe it was the banks’ cool appraisal of the interest received versus the inflation perceived. Or maybe they saw it as an offer they dare not refuse regardless of whether it paid off or not in the short term.

At this point, if not earlier, I lose the thread. I can see how sequestering the new money somewhere could prevent it from having the normal inflationary effect, but I can’t see how the exercise helps the banks in any way (except for the interest they get from the Fed), nor do I see how creating liquidity and then rendering it illiquid by sequestering it at the Fed can help the “Wall Street” part of the real economy and still leave the “Main Street” part (where ordinary consumers live) relatively unscathed by inflation. Maybe the effect is psychological. The money is created and then hidden away, but Wall Street knows that it’s already there, ready to be released into the real economy the moment it should be needed. This creates the impression of a safety net under stocks, which allows optimists to heavily discount the downside risks because, if things start to go wrong, the overhanging, already created, liquidity will be released and save the day. That’s somewhat plausible, but there seems to me no real difference between the Fed creating an emergency liquidity fund in advance by pure fiat versus its simply creating whatever liquidity is needed on the spot by the same pure fiat. Is the idea that the money already being there protects us against the remote chance that the Central Bank will not create liquidity in a crisis, that they will lose their nerve or even finally face the facts of arithmetic? If the Central Bankers were spooked enough by something not to create liquidity on the spot, the same conditions could spook them out of releasing the liquidity stockpile they had previously built up. The pre-created stockpile “belongs” to the member banks who have deposited it with the Fed, and maybe the idea is  that they will be able to withdraw it in spite of whatever the Fed itself might want. But I think this is an error. Banks have declared “holidays” in our past history, periods when depositors were prevented from withdrawing “their” money. So far as I know, there is nothing to prevent the Central Bank from preventing withdrawals by member banks if the Fed judges that to be the wisest course in a hypothetical crisis.

Domination, Submission, and Third-Parties

For the purposes of discussion, I am going to describe an example. I suppose I should try to avoid sexism and make the people described be of different genders and with different sexual appetites and dispositions, but it’s easier to get to the points I want to discuss if we resort to what are broad stereotypes that also describe at least some real live people, or at least so I claim.

D is a male heterosexual adult who is in a fairly long term relationship with S, who is a female heterosexual adult. A major aspect of their relationship is domination and submission. S says, and apparently believes, that she gets a lot out of playing a sexually submissive role with respect to D. Whatever it takes to count as willing consent, she willingly consents. Someone might object right at this point by claiming that the right sort of willing consent is impossible. Such a person might go further and claim that S is mistaken about what is good for her and that her desires are defective and delusional. Another might claim that whether the parties involved willingly consent or not is irrelevant because such relationships are simply morally wrong. On this view, a person who makes himself or herself a slave does something wrong because slavery itself, someone’s being under another person’s unlimited domination, is itself inherently wrong. These are weighty objections to getting my discussion off the ground, but let’s set them aside, at least for a moment. Stipulate that the domination is not unlimited. In addition to her apparent consent, S has the option to call a halt to the action at any time she wants by using a “safe word” or by simply moving away from D. This is consistent with her getting a thrill out of being ordered to do things and being subjected to the whims of another (so long as she wants to keep doing that). I can imagine that for some people a pleasurable release from one’s inhibitions can be caused by someone else setting the agenda in a forceful way. A lot of people (including myself) would say that, while we might not be attracted to that sort of behavior ourselves, as long as it involves only consenting adults, it is the business of those people and not a matter with which we should concern ourselves.

Stipulate that D treats S as a sex object, that during their sexual domination activities he enjoys disregarding her full human complexity and instead thinking of her and openly referring to S to her own face as “just a vagina, a mouth, an anus”. Does the fact that S willingly, even eagerly participates in her own reduction, even degradation, relieve D of moral responsibility? Is S herself also morally blameworthy for her part in this inherently sexist activity? D and S are acting out roles that most of us find deplorable, disgusting, and even dangerous to others. Their “bad example” may mislead others who find out about it into also attempting to act out master/slave sexual fantasies and thereby spread retrograde attitudes in ways that will sometimes spill over into something more than private, consensual fun and games: real situations of unlimited domination by one person over another. Despite safeguards like safe words, there is always the danger of things going too far between S and D. In fact, that danger of excess is a big part of what fuels the thrills that both D and S experience. They are risking permanent damage, both to their physical tissues, but also in terms of their psychologies or even, to use a word that has perhaps become old-fashioned, their characters. Engaging in what most people would consider extreme behavior very likely changes a person. In addition, there is at least some reason to believe that participating in extreme sexual situations is similar to some addictive drugs: you have to keep going further and further to get the same levels of stimulation. These dangers give most people all the motivation they need to avoid sadomasochistic behavior and to be repelled by such elements even in fantasy. Still, even though most people might strongly disdain such behavior and the people who engage in it, our society also strongly values individual autonomy. I am describing D and S as maximally autonomous human beings. Neither is deceiving or taking advantage of the other. They know the risks and they both think the thrills they get out of taking those risks are worth it. Perhaps no real world situation could ever be so fully and explicitly autonomous as I am stipulating, but accept that for the sake of argument that S and D have managed it.

However, further suppose that one of the ways D exerts his mutually titillating domination over S is by “ordering” her to have sex with a third party, X, another male. Is it wrong for D to “offer” S to X? If it is, who is the wronged party or parties? that depends on how S and X feel about the proposition. If X’s inclination is to refuse D’s “hospitality”, that likely puts everyone in an awkward position, but that sort of wrongness would be more like a faux pas or a breach of etiquette than specifically moral wrongness. If S either consented in advance to what D planned to do or, if she is surprised by D’s offer, it is a delighted sort of surprise, then she is plausibly not wronged by what D has done. On the other hand, it is plausible to think of X as a wronged party if he is damaged in any way by being exposed to D’s suggestion. If we suppose that D and S’s proclivities are widely disapproved, then asking X if he would like to join in the “fun” might cause him an unpleasant shock or even cause X more lasting psychological damage (“If these people think I might engage in such depravity, maybe they are picking up on something very dark within me that I didn’t know was there.”) But since this is an example I am making up, let’s suppose that D and S are very subtle and skillful, even considerate, in the way they build up to their proposition to X. They take care to broach the issue gradually while giving X every opportunity to refuse not only the actual offer but also the discussion itself. Let’s stipulate that D and S protect X from incidental damage as best they can and that if X consents, his consent is as full as S’s. Suppose that X gets to discuss things privately with S, out of D’s presence, and S convinces X that she is not just going along with the idea because she has given D power over her, but that she actively and personally consents to sex with X. D’s wanting it to happen is a big consideration for S, but she also, independently, has a desire to explore this new dimension of submission and see what happens. If X eventually agrees to participate, perhaps a case can be made that all three parties benefit and no one suffers harm (or, at a minimum, no one is unwillingly subjected to harm).

As the situation has been described so far, I come down on the side of individual autonomy. Suppose that X considers D’s offer and winds up consenting equally with the other two. S, D, and X are engaged in explorations that feature a lot of danger. There are dangers of harm for each of them, and we can never really eliminate effects on other parties outside the three who may be affected badly, parties who have not consented in advance. But, all those things considered, if S, D, and X want to engage in sadomasochism, I do not see that anyone has a clear right to coercively interfere.

Now, add a new detail: D offers S to X in exchange for money from X. D has taken on the role of pimp. He is trafficking in S’s sexuality for both money and for the sexual thrill he gets out of selling S. Suppose S is equally thrilled with this new aspect of their role-playing, and that X is neither opposed in general to his being a customer of a prostitute nor to this particular way of construing the sexual role-playing activity in which he is engaging with D and S. I do not see introducing this new element as providing sufficient justification for other people coercively interfering. What, by my lights, would that take? I think a good case can be made for interfering with a person, even a consenting person, who intends to do something that will very likely result in permanent bodily harm. However, this “good case” may not be sufficient because it conflicts with broad acceptance within our society of bodily modification techniques such as tattooing, scarification, or branding. If S has the right to brand herself, how can she lack the right to allow D to brand her? Perhaps it’s just a matter of the degree of harm. We may have no right to prevent someone from getting a tattoo or a piercing or a brand, but perhaps we are justified in preventing a willing person from getting a perfectly well-functioning limb amputated (unless, apparently, it is a penis). When we do interfere, we typically first claim that the person in question cannot really consent due to a psychological problem. We discount their stated preferences on the purported grounds that they cannot appraise their own interests as well as we can, and we use that basis to strip them of their autonomy, at least as far as this particular decision is concerned.

Suppose that we allow for personal individual autonomy when it comes to voluntary behavior that does not result in harm below a certain threshold. Consenting S&M, consenting commercial sex are left to the control of the individuals involved. This doesn’t prevent us from recognizing the great potential for abuse through tricking or manipulating people into situations where they either do not consent or do not consent fully enough. Since the potential for abuse is so great, as a society I think we are fully justified in trying to detect such abuse when it occurs and to interfere with it quickly and decisively when we determine it is happening. If a sub knows what she is doing and participates with sufficient consent, then she is not being harmed and she is not a victim, but merely someone with statistically unusual tastes. If any of that is lacking, then there is victimization and harm. Being subjected unwillingly to the sexual behavior of others is one of the grossest possible sorts of violation of individual autonomy, and society is right to try to suppress that victimization by as strong means as are required.

With all that as preamble, assume D to be a powerful businessman or politician, and that he uses a woman, S, who both he and she refer to as his “slave” as a sort of party favor or an item in a “goody bag”, a tool with which to influence other powerful men to do things that D wants. Suppose that X is one of those other powerful men. If X is influenced by his encounters with S to give a valuable contract to D, a contract that otherwise would have gone to Y, is the fact that the decision came about that way inherently a case of corruption? Does Y have a basis for challenging the contract? It depends. If X is an officer or an executive for a public corporation, then by law he has a fiduciary obligation to get the better contract in terms of the corporation’s interests. If inducements to X by D cause X to enter a worse contract than he could have had, then X may properly face sanctions from the corporation as well as a suit from Y, assuming there to be sufficient proof of what happened. Sexual access to S would have functioned as a bribe by D that corruptly influenced the corporate decision to the loss of both Y and the corporation. But suppose instead that X is the sole owner of a non-public business, and so is D. Neither X nor D has any fiduciary obligations to anyone else with respect to business decisions they make. Stipulate that D’s offer of S to X is the crucial factor in X’s awarding a contract to D rather than Y. As onlookers, we may not like it, but is it any of our business?

Now consider a differently specified case. D is a powerful man, and S is a sexually attractive woman who wants D to do something for her, say help her with her career. They are not yet in any sort of relationship. We need not assume that S is especially submissive. Suppose that S, on her own and without prior prompting from D, decides to communicate her sexual availability to D and that he takes her up on her offer and then subsequently does things aimed at furthering her career. Suppose that neither S nor D have any illusions about what is happening. Each recognizes it as a quid pro quo exchange between two willing adults. If S winds up with a desirable position that would have gone to W but for the influence of the sexual exchange on D, is W (or anyone else) a victim? If I am not hired for a position I want and another person is chosen instead, I only have a cause of action on certain very narrow legal bases having to do with certain specific sorts of discrimination (racial, religious, gender, national origin, age, or disability status). If none of those things is a factor, and if I have no contrary fiduciary obligations, I can discriminate as much as I want on other bases. If  I only want to hire tall people, or short people, then I am clearly being discriminatory, but not in a way that the law prohibits. If, as in the case we are imagining, I hire or award a contract for my own private business based on differences between what the contending parties offer me and the difference that is crucial for me is that one party offers offers an opportunity for sex while the other does not, then I am discriminating, but not in a legally prohibited way. It may be bad business to accept a worse contract because of a sexual inducement, but I am under no obligation to run my business in the best way I can (as I would be if I worked for a publicly traded corporation).

To take a more concrete example that has been much in the news lately, if the woman who goes by the stage name Stormy Daniels thought she could do well for herself by communicating her sexual availability to Donald Trump, then unless it affected his fiduciary responsibilities to one of his corporations, it is nobody’s business except for the two of them and their spouses what happened or did not happen sexually between them. The situation is complicated in that both parties have executed sworn statements that there was no sexual intercourse between them. She has indicated indirectly but repeatedly that sex did nevertheless happen, while he has continued to deny it. I recall that when Bill Clinton made similar denials, some of his apologists claimed that he did the proper things, which is to lie in order to spare one’s spouse having to publicly face the fact that she was married to an adulterer. Funny how virtually no one credits Trump with “nobly” sparing his wife as some did with Clinton. Almost everyone I know believes that sex did happen, but no one I know thinks it was an “affair”. It seems that it was, at most, a one-time encounter. There is only one consideration that is at at all supportive of the President’s denials: His long established reputation as a “germophobe”. Against that, however, is the well-attested fact that people will often do things when sex is on the agenda that go against their normal patterns. Trump may be reluctant to shake hands with other people and yet still find himself going much further than shaking hands with a stranger he has just met. When the prick gets hard, the brain, gets soft.

I do not paint Trump as an innocent, naive dupe (although, given the disparagement of his intellect by some of his critics, perhaps I should entertain such a hypothesis). But I do not. What I can imagine is that Stormy Daniels may have been someone’s idea of a “party favor” to influence Trump in favor of something or other. She might have even been a self-directed, autonomous party favor, and might have thereby become part of the evidence base for Trump’s famous comment to Billy Bush, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

As boorish as Trump reveals himself to be here, I take him to still be operating with at least  some respect for some notion of ‘consent’. He says to Billy Bush that, if he finds a woman beautiful, he will just start kissing her. That is assault. Legally, just about any physical contact, or even a credible threat of such contact, can constitute assault, if someone wants to make a case out of it. But what Trump’s words say to me is that he has often gotten a welcome reaction from the objects of his interests when he has behaved, to say the least, “forwardly”. I see no evidence that anyone has brought forth that he refuses to take “No” for an answer. He seems to feel entitled to “one free grope”, which is a standard for powerful men that was first explicitly discussed by feminist icon Gloria Steinem when President Clinton was being accused of similarly pre-emptive lunges at women who caught his fancy. It may be unfair, but certain men do, in fact, experience many more sexual opportunities than others. Put aside financial or political power, a male, merely being a professional athlete or a minor entertainment celebrity, is going to be attractive enough to enough women that the male will find sexual opportunities at every turn, and some of them very blatant. Perhaps Trump is just describing reality as it appears to him.