Knowing what you want

Time for some philosophy.

The Oxford philosopher John Broome, whom I think very highly off, has written a world-class paper ("Can a Humean be Moderate?") some time ago, in which he argues that the way we know what our preferences are is through our judgments of betterness. If you cannot figure out what you prefer, A or B, you should consult what you think is better and then you will know what you prefer. I will not go into his reasons for arguing for this. In the essay the reasons are mostly negative: there is serious problems for other possible candidates for the epistemology of preferences which this account does not face.

Obviously, if Broome's account is accepted a whole raft of other problems has to be answered. Among those are the by now standard objections against the idea that we desire (and ipso facto, prefer) under the guise of the good. If we don't always willingly and knowingly desire what is good, what makes Broome think that judgments about value will be reliable in identifying our preferences?

However, I thought of yet another problem which is neat and probably irrelevant. Basically, the problem has to do with changing preferences. Suppose today I prefer A to B, but tomorrow I will prefer B to A. Suppose I believe this to be the case. To make things more interesting: suppose there is nothing wrong (brain damage, irrationality, what have you) with me now, nor do I believe there will be something wrong with me in the future. Suppose also that this is not a case of weakness of the will or anticipated temptation.

Sounds implausible? Here is an example. When I was 16 I preferred David Bowie's music to any opera by Mozart. I also knew that this would change and that it was likely that I would reverse the order of appreciation between the two. Or think of how you felt before and after you had a child. Before I had mine I preferred a career over children. Now, I wish we had more children...

Anyway, you get the idea. Here is what is strange about Broome's epistemology of preference. If today I believe that A is better than B (because I believe that I prefer A to B), and I believe that tomorrow I will prefer B to A and I don't believe tomorrow (or today) I will be incompetent, irrational, hypnotized or tempted, it seems I have a problem. For I believe p and I also believe that I will believe that not-p. And I believe that I will have good grounds for either belief (otherwise I would be incompetent, etc, which we just ruled out). So, I have good reasons for believing p and good reasons for believing that I will come to believe not-p. This seems, irrational. (In fact, this intuition is cast into a principle by Bas van Fraassen: the Principle of Reflection which says that in such a case one of the two beliefs has got to go. Well it does not exactly say that, but the intuition is clear.) So Broome's epistemology of preference has the same problem: it cannot deal with anticipated changes in one's preferences.

There seem to be three possible responses:
1. Broome is wrong and we cannot reliably know our preferences through our value judgments.
2. It is not irrational the believe p and believe that you will believe not-p at the same time.
3. The case is impossible.

Since I like Broome's proposal, I would want to hang on to 1. Furthermore, with some restrictions I like the principle of reflection, so I would want to endorse a qualified version of 2. This leaves us with 3. However, it does not seem strange that you can predict that your preferences will change without this being a case of incompetence or what have you.

So, a real problem. I'll let you know what the solution is.

Once I have found it....

Friedman

Thomas Friedman, the NYT columnist, had an interesting comment on the attacks in Amman. He believes a line is crossed in this attack. It made me think of a BBC documentary I saw about a year ago (sorry the title completely escapes me) in which it was claimed that there were some interesting analogies between the rise of Al Quaida and the neo-conservative movement in the USA: the US and Al Quaida in a perverse way
need each other to legitimize their own agenda.

However, beneath all that bull shit was a very interesting reconstruction of the origins and developments of Al Quaida that led to 9/11. At one point the documentary made an implicit prediction. They made an analogy with the history of the Algerian civil war between the authoritarian army-led government and the GIA factions in the nineties. As you may know, this was a terribly period in which ordinary civilians were continuously targeted by both the government and the GIA guerilla fighters. However, in the end the government became more democratic (though not as much as you or I would want) while the GIA factions started bickering (violently) among themselves. The implicit prediction was that this is likely to come about in Iraq (although it may be that the predicition is more my imagined recollection and reconstruction than that it is actually in there): as Al Zawhari becomes more and more desparate about the very limited success he has had so far, he is likely to target more and more civilians in an effort to stamp out those not-so-fundamentalist muslims who continue to frustrate his overall success. In doing so, the "revolution" will eat its own children and it will sink slowly into oblivion. Before that timeunfortunately many more people will die.

One reason why the process of decline will be more painful and longer drawn out than in the Algerian case (which took 10 years or so and about 3 millions deaths!) is that there is more money, more weapons and moreattention in the Iraq case.

Anyway, Friedman's indignation over the latest attacks in Amman is right, but perhaps he fails to see this bigger picture: it is the next step in the slow, painful and horrible process of the fundamentalistrevolution in the middle east eating its own children.

Finally, I think that this is completely independent of what is going to happen in Europe since the attacks there mostly seem to be domestically grown and are not related to the whims of Osama bin Laden or AlZawhari.

Any thoughts?

Poverty in the first world

Just finished reading Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. It has been out for a while already (published in 2003) and elaborately reviewed and commented. Still, it is a grim tale of what systematic poverty does to a person and a community.

LeBlanc followed two Puerto-Rican teenagers in the South Bronx from the age of roughly 15 for a good ten years. In these years, one went to prison, both had several children. None finished their highschool education and both kept their hopes up even though the reader can immediately see that there is no chance in hell that they could get out.

LeBlanc writes really well and she shows, without moralizing, just how hard life for these two women is. They are in a violent environment, where it seems that all men between 18 en 30 are unemployed except if they deal drugs or are criminals. Many of them get killed. The violence surrounding and permeating the life of the girls and their families is just staggering. Domestic abuse is the rule rather than an exception. All the women seem to have been abused as a child. None seem to use contraception, yet they all have sex. Educational success is rare. Appartments are over-crowded, often filled with people on the move from one to the other place because they do not have housing of their own. Children forced to watch TV all day or ride a bicycle in the kitchen. The women have to spend entire days in waiting rooms accompanied by their children to have 10 minute interview.

Theirs is a culture of shame. The public image neighbors and friends have of you is all-important. Somebody doing cocaine in her own appartment in front of her children is better than a person using crack cocaine in a derelict house who has no children to care for or watching. Conspicuous spending is the ideal for many of the men (and women). There is a story how a $10,000 windfall gets spent on take-out food, leather jackets for everyone and a large tv set. The economic conditions are so critical that a $o.50 donated to a homeless person could result in not being able to take the bus to the welfare office to have your interview in which your eligibility for continuation is assessed.

What really comes through though is just how different a culture the cultures of povety are. LeBlanc herself never judges on some of the choices that the people whom she describes make. She says that in all her years of 'immersion' she quickly lost the intuitions that make me, for example, highly critical of the idea to spend a $10,000 on leather jackets for your wife, siblings and children, if you live in a broom closet of an appartment, surrounded by violent gang-bangers. LeBlanc suggests that growing up in these circumstances make you loose somehow a long-term perspective in the sense that all your energy goes to immediate and mid-term concerns and projects. In short, these poor girls are screwed. Screwed in many ways, some of which literal.

LeBlanc herself says in interviews that it is no rocket science to help these people and mentions several things which all have been cancelled since, first under Clinton and then under Bush. It seems like the US has given up on these people by arguing that they make so many wrong choices and should be held responsible for these choice. However, LeBlanc convincingly shows (not argues) that to make the right choices is extremely hard in such a world. Many, including I, would not have the courage, the stomache and the sheer dogged persistence that her characters have to go on. It is also clear that what LeBlanc describes is not restricted to the South Bronx in the nineties. It clearly is the story of poverty in any contemporary society. In short, I recommend the book. It really was a sort of eye-opener to me.

What I learnt philosophically from it is that we should really re-think the liberal mantra to hold people accountable and responsible for their own free choices. The characters in LeBlanc's book all have a choice. Yet it is wrong to suppose that there is nothing wrong with the fact that they are offered these choices with these consequences: e.g., hold a badly paying job and leave your children with your unstable drug-dealing boyfriend or stay at home and live off welfare. Life is so hard and deprived that it seems callous to hold the girls fully accountable for all the consequences of their choices, even though they did choose to drop out of school, have several children and live off welfare. We owe the poor more than our contempt for the quality of their choices.

The fate of immigrants to Europe

Last week a fire in a detention facility for illegal immigrants near Schiphol airport killed eleven of the detainees and wounded some others. The national newspaper Volkskrant had an editorial arguing that this was fate and that we should learn to live with it instead of be indignant or even sad that this tragedy happened: learn to live with things like this was the implicit message.

Thomas Spijkerboer, professor of immigration law and the Free University in Amsterdam, wrote a piece in the OpEd section of NRC which is the best response to this so far. Spijkerboer argues that it is not accidental that the detainees died, just like it is not accidental that each year thousands of illegal immigrants die trying to reach their destinies. They are returned to the Sahara desert or simply shot in the case of Marocco, if they are not abused, raped, robbed, drown in their crowded boats on the Mediterranean, or even made into slaves on the way there. Illegal immigrants and refugees face such horrible risks all the time. The reason that they are exposed to these risks is because of our borders, our immigration laws and our policies for guarding and upholding these.

Spijkerboer made a subsequent point that is very interesting. He argues inter alia that we are to blame. We bear responsibility for these risks. The situation in the home countries of most migrants, legal or illegal, is such that they want to get out. It is a choice between certain poverty, prosecution or even death and the (small) chance of a better future. Obviously, many, if not most people when faced with such choices will opt for the risk. This is especially true in the case of refugees. But we cannot say what certain philosophers and others subsequently would say: well, these migrants made their choice knowing all these risks, so now they should simply take responsibility. We announced the risks of getting caught, you opted to take the gamble and if you loose - tough luck! Spijkerboer argued that this is inadequate because it is our attitudes, our laws and borders that make the risks and costs so high for migrants. If we had other laws, the risks would be less. He does not call for opening the borders (though I think the logic of his argument would demand this), but claims that because we made those risks as high as they are, we bear responsibility for the hundreds of people dying each year. (Spijkerboer claims the number is 3 per day on average).

I think Spijkerboer is on to something and I fully agree with him that the callous attitude of indifference towards the fate of these illegal migrants is immoral. However, the argument is fishy. It is interesting to note the similarities and differences between Spijkerboer's argument and Pogge's argument that the West is harming the poor in the third world. We could interpret Spijkerboer as saying that we are harming the illegal migrants that die or are hurt otherwise in their quest to come here with our borders. However, just like Pogge's arguments this seems to me is incorrect for the same reasons: we would have to ascertain what fate the migrants would have face in comparison to some other situation and it is unclear what the relevant other situation in this case should be. (No borders? Lax immigration laws? A just world order?) So I don't think we are harming the illegal immigrants in this strict and technical sense.

However, we cannot say that the poor are fully responsible for the consequences of their own actions. We bear some of the responsibility as well. Imagine a misanthrope hanging a million dollars on a tight rope over some ravine and inviting people to come and take their chances Would we really say that the poor sods who fall of the rope trying desparately to get the money only have themselves to blame? Even is this were the only way to get money? Wouldn't the misanthrope behave in an irresponsible way by tempting the poor people in his neighborhood with the money? In other words, just like the misanthrope should not create these risky options for his neighbors, so should we not rigg the options such that migrating becomes so risky. This is not a negative duty of not harming others, but a positive duty it seems to me.

In the mean time, some humility and concern befits us towards illegal migrants.

Follow up on the meaning of orgasm

Subsequent to yesterday's post about Beautiful Agony and the questions the project raises about how young women apparently experience sexuality, I saw this review of two recent books on the 'pornofication' of society and how it got mixed up with feminism. (Pornified by Pamela Paul and Femal Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy) I will not argue that pornofication is our contemporary version of Roman decadence, but at the very least we have to be aware that something gets lost: the idea that intimacy comes together with privacy and that sex comes together with love.

The meaning of orgasms.

First, let me tell you about the extenuating circumstances.

Men are idiots. They are attracted to (men or) women whom they don't know and have no acces to. Men are aroused by pictures of women they know to be dead. Men in general behave in very silly and embarassing ways when it comes to sex and sexual attraction. I am sure I am no exception.

My wife is out of the country for three weeks (and I am a single parent during this time) and it must have been by the end of the second week that I read a feature article in the "Culture" section in NRC Handelsblad on Beautiful Agony, a project by Australian artists Lauren Olney and Richard Lawrence. It consists of a huge internet archive of movies of (some) young men and (mostly) women masturbating. You only get to see their faces. The author of the article (a woman) was fascinated -- and so was I.

You don't see anything, just the facial expressions of these people as they have an orgasm. The archive looks like a yearbook of a university, with a range of bright and beautiful young faces. Of course, being a man, the thought that these people were getting off was quite arousing. Like I said: men are idiots. At the same time, there is a distinct aesthetic quality to the whole thing. The slight reddening of the face, the open mouth to facilitate the heavier breathing and the slight signs of partial loss of control are fascinating in a completely non-sexual manner. Having so many of these expression together works to alienate the viewer from the individual identity of each face. The individuals contributing their orgasm are identified only by number. Some have added videos in which they divulge some of the sexual particulars. The site is now mainly exploited as a mild erotica site, but according to Olney and Lawrence its original motivation was purely artistic. The project apparently has been making the rounds on internet for more than a year now (why am I always the last to hear of these things...).

However, what really struck me was the following. Namely the question why these women (who, if the evolutionary psychologists are correct, are not idiots like men when it comes to sex) send in these videos. Why would you go through the trouble of setting up a digital camera, lie down, on what is without exception a nice drape or duvet, masturbate and send in the tape. The author of the NRC piece speculates about a good orgasm as a good deed to mankind, but doesn't get very far.

After reading her piece and looking (longer than is good for me) to the site, I started thinking about several articles and reports I have seen on how teenagers and twenty somethings approach (if that is the word) sex. To many people of my generation and older, sex is closely linked to falling in love or at least, infatuation. However, it seems that this is less and less true nowadays. It seems more and more true that kids have 'sex dates', just like you can have a date to go to the movies or eat an ice cream. Sex is less and less about intimacy and love and more and more about, well about getting off. I read a report on children and internet in which the author describes how she sat with her 15 year old niece while she chatted on internet. At some point she dared a boy that she barely knew to turn on his webcam and show his penis, which he obligingly did. After prolonged giggling the niece told the reporter that she had met with this boy to have sex once. She did not love the boy, nor was she infatuated or so, it just was a laugh to her. Like other people can go and have a drink with relative strangers, so she could go and have occasional sex with a stranger. I don't want to condemn this sort of behavior here or make moralistic pronouncements on it, but it does help with the question about the women sending in their orgasms. In an environment like that, there will be less inhibitions to send in one's tape to an internet site, just as the boy had no inhibitions to switch on his webcam and show his penis.

OK, but what is the positive motivation? The contributors are not inhibited, but what is in it for them? It is not simply exhibitionism, that much is clear from all the comments. Perhaps that many of these women think it something hip to do: it is cool to cum on the internet, just like it is 'cool' to have a tattoo or sport a designer brand of some sort. The fact that it is 'hip' to these women shows that attitudes towards sex and intimacy are really changing. However, that cannot be right either, because the contributors are anonymous. If it is 'coolness' they are after, they should be able to identify themselves as 'cool' in this regard which is impossible if all contributions are anonymous.

Perhaps the best explanation is that the men and women on this site are simply expressing something about their sexuality (much in the Brennan and Lomasky talk about expressive behavior). Like one expresses one's support for one's soccer team or issues a protest vote. Nobody can trace that to the one expressing, so there are no benefits in it in traditional sense, still people do express all kinds of things. And the contributors of Beautiful Agony express something ... well something to do with masturbation and orgasm. However, for the life of me, I cannot think what... I guess that makes me a typical man when it comes to sex: an idiot!

Immigrants or Muslims?

When exactly did Europeans cease to refer to immigrants from the
Mediterranean as 'Morroccans', 'Arabs' or other national designations
and adopted the general term 'muslim'?

More to the point: why? After all, these 'muslims' have been among us since the 70s. Are we only discovering now that theirs is not a Christian religion? And why do we only do that to them?

One explanation, often heard, has to do with the salience of nuisance. The neighbors at the place I used to live were Jehova's Witnesses (yes, very anoying), but we would not refer to them as Jehovas except when we were discussing their slightly excentric habits in proselytizing. So only when they were a nuisance did we refer to their religious commitments. Similarly, the argument goes, since a lot of the problems Europeans face with their migrants are due to their religion, we refer to them as muslims. Ayaan Hirsi Ali would be someone arguing this.

However, this argument clearly is incorrect. Many of these migrants are muslim in the same way that I am Catholic: only at Christmas (or Id al-Fitr -- the end of Ramadan) and perhaps when there is a baptism or burial. So it is unlikely that the problems that spurred the riots in France for example are religion based. Furthermore, this would in fact be a reason to insist on the label 'Moroccan', 'Arab', etc.

Of course, many of the migrants have had children and are truly settled and have taken on the nationality of their new country (if possible; not all countries are very welcoming in this regard.) So, really, they now are Dutch, German, Belgian, French, or what have you.

In short, I am puzzled. I know that the shift occurred sometime after 9/11, under the influence of fear for fundamentalists, but, really, why? Why are the Europeans so afraid that they change the nomenclature for a good 10% of their population in ways that would be considered deeply insulting, stigmatizing and, in general, unhelpful when applied to Catholics.

And lets face it: Catholics are the real pests.

Change of name or change of heart?

Chris Morris warned me of self-deprecating behavior and advised me to change the name of this site. Since there is something to his advice, this place will no longer go under the name of Capetti's Crap. Instead, I will leave out the crap (which is good advice anyway) and continue under the name of Capetti.

As to the question why Capetti: that was my nickname in college. I think I got it from my girlfriend at the time. I was flattered that somebody actuslly thought up a nickname for me (it was even used by some of my friends back then), but later I found out she did that for everybody. Still, it has a nice ring to it and perhaps I have the unconscious desire that it will be used again...

Dutch courage, Dutch tolerance, Dutch politics...

For a couple of days, Dutch media are "preparing" for the anniversary of the assassination of Theo van Gogh, who got killed November 2 last year (if I remember correctly). As part of this, there are even more pieces about 'what is wrong in the Netherlands', 'how did we get here' and 'how do we get out of here'. Amidst this all, there is general lament that things-have-changed.

I was in Australia at the time Pim Fortuyn emerged and was killed. I returned in 2003 to a strange country, with people being scared, angry and blaming politics and politicians. And worse: blaming foreigners... Things had certainly changed.

I am really puzzled by the general perception of the problems of Dutch society. I don't think that a handful of domestic islamis terrorists who received their enculturation into Islam through shady internet sites poses such risk to our society that we should stop all immigration, revoke civil rights and embrace big brother in our every day lives. Nor am I convinced that life in the Netherlands all of a sudden is so bad. Life is good -- certainly if I compare it to some other places. I just don't understand the basis of discontent of some of my compatriots.

I especially do not understand the professed lack of trust in politics and politicians. Some people claim that there is a gap between those who govern and those governed and that this is bad. Well wake up and smell the coffee! That 'gap' is present in almost all societies, including modern democracies. Secondly, the 'gap' is not a cause for a lack of trust, as we do go on trusting our politicians. If you want to know what a complete lack of trust in politics looks like, I suggest you go to the Philippines and see what a completely useless and inefficient state that has become!

It just is not true that the Dutch don't trust their government or their politicians: witness the absolute lack of civil discontent about the upcoming healthcare reform in Holland. It is supposed to commence in January 2006 and nobody knows yet what it means for him or her exactly. I could mean that we all have to pay much and much more for less care, or not.... And yet, nobody has organized a march on The Hague; started an underground movement or prepared the Revolution. How is that for trust? In short, all this talk and attempt at 'analyzing' the 'national mood' is, dare I say it, crap.

Alternatively, we might take it for Dutch conformism and the lack of real courage then leaves us with Dutch courage: Proost!