Fall 2009 Portfolio of Philosophy

Fall 2009 Portfolio of PhilosophyNathan Schmitt

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Table of Contents

I. Summaries of Thinkers in Analytic PhilosophyHow Nagel’s intuitive approach to philosophy is echoed in Locke. . . . . . . . . . . 5Frege’s View on Truth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Wittgenstein and Quine on ‘What There is’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7Gettier and Quine on Epistemology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8Nagel and Searle on Consciousness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9Moore and Stevenson on Ethics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10Ayer, Quine, and Wittgenstein on Approaching Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

II. Political PhilosophyHobbes on Voluntary Action. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13On Rawls on Hobbes: The Rational and the Reasonable as Relates to the Formation of Political Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15On Hobbes and Locke on Freedom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18On Hobbes’s So-Called ‘Personhood’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21On Locke’s Justification of Private Property. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23On Rousseau’s Views on Liberty and Equality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27On Marx’s So-Called ‘Human Emancipation’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

III. Letters between Nathan Schmitt and Tony Dundon: On Whether the Present Generation has an Obligation in Action to Consider the Wellbeing of Future Generations

Letter 1: On The Purpose of the Letters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33Letter 2: On Identity a Foundation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36Letter 3: On the Grounds for the Obligations of Current Generations. . . . . . . . . 39Letter 4: On the Grounds for the Obligations of Current Generations

Again. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42Letter 5: A Response and Concern Regarding the Project Broadly. . . . . . . . . . . . 46Letter 6: On Grounding Obligation in Criminal Law. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Endnotes 53

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Summary of Various Analytic Philosophers’ Ideas

[Essay 1] “How Nagel’s intuitive approach to philosophy is echoed in Locke”

Both Thomas Nagel and John Locke view philosophy as an intuitive experience in that they believe it can and should be accessible to the general public. These two philosophers closely mirror each other’s approach by identifying three major aspects of analytic philosophy as central to its practice: that truth is the principal priority and focus of enquiry, that any such truth must be derived using certain sets of rules and principles, and that analytic philosophic enquiry must end with the limits of potential experience. For Nagel and Locke, the relationship between these three aspects seem to be what make philosophy an intuitive activity.

First and foremost, Nagel’s What Does it All Mean is an essay into the nature of the truth about things. Immediately following the introduction he begins by asserting that the contents of one’s own mind are all that can be certainly known (Nagel 8). This is an important point as it sets up his remaining philosophic questions as subject to necessary yet varying degrees of uncertainty. That is, he immediately asserts that though truth is the chief aim of philosophy, nothing but that which is directly contained in the mind can be held with certainty—an issue that will arise later with the limits of analytic philosophy. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Epistle to the Reader, Locke does not explicitly make such a strong assertion but says that he seeks nothing but truth regardless of its origins (Locke 5). This slightly different perspective on truth is perhaps what allows Locke to reach slightly further than Nagel on the next point in terms of the relationship between truth and experience.

Though Nagel’s overall trajectory of thought is often less than precise, he follows definite structures of reasoning in examining the truth of things. For example, he provide a systematic argument against solipsism by employing formal logic to reach an absurd conclusion; he uses a logical function—the reductio ad absurdum—to disprove a potential truth (Nagel 16). This systematic approach is the second aspect Nagel holds to be at the center of philosophy and is distinct from other methods of potential truth discovery such as faith. Locke agrees on these points and adds that these methods are a result solely of experience and that innate ideas—ideas inherent to the mind itself—do not in fact exist (Locke 6). He asserts that simple ideas and later, by extension, those principles that govern the acquisition of truth can only be discovered through experience, and that experiences are in turn governed by the principles of the understanding. Thus, philosophy is accessible to anyone capable of making sense of their experience—i.e., it is in intuitive.

However, analytic philosophical enquiry is not endless in its scope and is necessarily limited by the bounds of experience. Nagel highlights this point in the questions he poses at the end of each chapter. Perhaps the clearest example of this is his chapter on death in which he admits that he does not understand how a faith-inspired belief in the afterlife is possible on the grounds that we can have no experience or proof of an afterlife while still living (Nagel 90). Locke makes the same observation from a slightly different perspective. He frames this final point thusly: if there exists a thing I cannot experience, I cannot regret my lack of understanding of it because it is wholly unknown (Locke 1). That is to say, if something is outside of the realm of experience it is no use attempting to subject it to analytic methods of inquiry because it is categorically irrelevant.

In summary, the intuitive brand of philosophical activity that Nagel and Locke hold largely in common arises from the ability to make sense of one’s own experience and explicitly excludes that which is outside of experience.

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[Essay 2] “Frege’s View on Truth”

Gottlob Frege frames a discussion about the nature of truth primarily through a distinction between ideas and thoughts. Through a discussion of language he dispels some of the more popular conceptions of truth, essentially arguing that these views speak about the truth of sentences and language rather than the truth itself; concludes that truth is only concerned with thought as it is in itself.

Frege makes a number of arguments against certain conceptions of truth but the most notable is his argument against the correspondence theory—a theory that states that that which is true is that which correctly corresponds to its particular reference or representation. To this theory Frege has many objections, all leading to his final argument against it: the correspondence theory of truth breaks down in that when given the task of determining whether or not a reference correctly corresponds to its object, we must determine whether or not it is true that the two correspond. (Blackwell 20) We are then still left with the question, “what does it mean for something to be true?” This, in fact, leaves the questioner no better off than before and renders the theory a useless tool for Frege in the pursuit of truth. He then asserts that truth is not determined by a correspondence to the world but that truth requires a much more independent source.

Ideas now become the focus of Frege’s inquiry and he identifies them as having three characteristics. First, that ideas are something that cannot be directly experienced with the external senses; second, that ideas are something that “belong to the content of [a person’s] consciousness;” and finally, that an idea requires a subject to own it (Blackwell 24). It is very important to recognize these three attributes as belonging specifically to the concept “idea,” as they signify ideas as those things that each individual has direct, subjective control over. Ideas are therefore identified as an internal experience of an individual subject, and because of this, each subject can only know their own ideas and has no direct access to the ideas of others. He then raises the question as to whether or not a thought is just an idea or if it has some other nature.

Frege’s view on thought is as follows: we do not have thoughts but rather, we grasp them as they belong to a distinct third realm—neither the realm of external experience nor the realm of internal ideas, though they have aspects in common with both. Like the external world, a thought does not require a subject to recognize it, and like ideas, a thought cannot be perceived by the senses. Further, he asserts that we are not the owners of thoughts but the owners only of our own thinking (Blackwell 29). In a sense, through thinking we can work with a thought, but the thought is not something we ourselves own or can change—an idea fills this general role. Given this stark contrast between ideas and thoughts, Frege moves on to discuss how truth emerges through this distinction.

Because thought exists in its own realm independent of experience, the nature of thought must be timeless—temporality is quality of experience. Here Frege distinguishes between two properties of thought: essential properties which do not change and are the true nature of thought, and inessential properties which are the properties with which we grasp the thought and personally relate to it. Therefore, Frege concludes, the truth of a thought is contained in the essential properties of thought—it is true regardless of experience or our ideas. (Blackwell 29-30) Truth itself, then, for Frege consists only in the truth of thought—in its distinct realm—and is not dependent on experience in the phenomenal world.

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[Essay 3] “Wittgenstein and Quine on ‘What There is’”

To the ontological question, “What is there?” Ludwig Wittgenstein and W.V. Quine offer very different solutions. Though both employ linguistic analysis, and both generally sidestep the issue, the former holds that language functions to answer this question while the latter asserts that though linguistics is involved, it should not be confused with the real issue—certain conceptual scheme that are employed to arrange one’s experience.

For Wittgenstein, the goal of philosophy is “to say nothing except what can be said” and the role of philosophy is to, “when someone else wishes to say something metaphysical, [demonstrate that he has] given no meaning to certain signs in his proposition.”1 That is, Wittgenstein wishes philosophy only to speak of the propositions of natural science in a descriptive manner and to point to particular terms in metaphysical arguments as meaningless and therefore irrelevant to ontology. His aim is to show that by rendering the terms of a proposition meaningless, it is impossible to take the proposition on in a serious way. His argument may be summarized as follows. A fact is defined as an actual state of the world2 while a proposition is a statement about the state of the world.3 Because of the logical relationship of propositions that Wittgenstein outlines, “the truth of one proposition follows from the truth of other propositions.”4 Therefore, to prove the terms of a proposition as meaningless is to negate the ontological relevance of the proposition itself, and consequently to negate the validity of derivative propositions: it becomes impossible to speak about “what there is” when a propositional term is rendered meaningless. This argument is Wittgenstein’s main weapon against all propositions outside those of the natural sciences. Thus, he cleverly sidesteps the issue by concluding that “what there is” comes down to a question of the propositions of natural science—i.e., all we can say about the world is what we can say about the propositions of the natural sciences; ultimately, the logical structure of the world must be mirrored by the logical structure of the language we use to speak about it, and what we know of it must follow.

Quine takes quite a different view. To Wittgenstein’s first premise regarding facts and propositions, Quine argues that “we can use singular terms significantly in sentences without presupposing that there are the entities which those terms purport to name.”5 This is in direct contradiction to Wittgenstein’s assertion in that Quine essentially argues that there need not be an actual fact on which the base a proposition: a proposition may still be meaningful without a corresponding fact. To this end, Quine invokes Bertrand Russell’s theory of description by reducing the particular terms of a proposition into generalized terms—bound variables—that do not presuppose the existence of the formerly identified particular object, but refer only to the placeholder that the object occupies.6 This undercuts Wittgenstein’s argument by avoiding the need to designate meaningful and particular terms in a proposition. Quine’s enquiry, then, is not limited simply to descriptive propositions of natural science, but extends to encompass any proposition whose terms can be generalized in this way. Like Wittgenstein, Quine sidesteps our original ontological question but in his own unique way. He writes that though “ontological controversy should tend into controversy over language […] we must not jump to the conclusion that what there is depends on words.”7 Here, Quine asserts that we may analyze propositions to see what they say about what there is, but not to learn what it is that actually exists. The answer to the ontological question, he argues, depends on the conceptual scheme that we chose to adopt in order to make sense of our experience. Quine is led to the conclusion that the ontological question is still an open question—that experimentation with varied conceptual schema is necessary to the end of a sufficient answer.

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[Essay 4] “Gettier and Quine on Epistemology”

Both Gettier and Quine raise questions about what we can know and both lead to the adoption of some sort of standard outside of the knower by which knowledge may be verified. Gettier’s pithy essay focuses on a very specific problem with justified true belief while Quine focuses on the history of epistemology concluding that it should actually be a branch of psychology.

Gettier argues that “it is possible for a person to be justified in believing a proposition which is in fact false.”8 That is to say, the actual truth of a proposition and that the believer is justified in his belief are not sufficient conditions for actual true knowledge. He proves this by example, arguing essentially that if by a mere coincidence unknown to the believer the conditions for the truth of a proposition are satisfied by a set of conditions A but the believer believes the truth to be justified by the similarly truth fulfilling condition set B, then the believer does not actually have knowledge of the conclusion.9 The unstated ramifications of Gettier’s observation points inevitably toward the development of some sort of objective standard for truth. Because the weakness in prior epistemological thought is that a believer may hold a justified yet incomplete picture of the situation about which they believe, a standard for truth in knowledge must account for every possible perspective relevant to an event. Gettier seems to point to this: that true knowledge must be judged ad populum whereby each of the sciences and every possible method of gaining truth are the individual constituents, rather than actual people.

Quine points out three failed epistemological reductions and asserts that epistemology must be integrated as a branch of psychology. The first of these was the attempt to reduce mathematics to mere logic. This effort fails, he recounts, because mathematics actually reduces to set theory, not logic proper. He observes: “Such reduction still enhances clarity, but only because of the interrelations that emerge and not because the end terms of the analysis are clearer than others.”10 A reduction of mathematics is therefore shown not to be certain as logic is certain, but in fact it shows that such a reduction actually produces less certainty: particular mathematically derived theorems are actually more certain than the conclusion of a reduction thereof—i.e., the axioms of set theory. Next, Quine takes on the supposed reduction of natural science to sense experience. His reply asserts that some particular statements of the natural sciences can be reduced to sense experience, but general statements and statements about the future cannot.11 The last of these reductions is the attempt to assert that discussions of physical objects are translatable into discussions of immediate sense perceptions. To this, Quine writes that, “The most modest of generalizations about observable traits will cover more cases than its utterer can have had occasion actually to observe.”12 This reduction attempt fails because discussions of objects must include general terms in some way, each and every of which a person cannot have had immediate experience. Next, Quine states “that theoretical sentences have their evidence not as single sentences but only as larger blocks of theory”13 and therefore we must assert that an entire theoretical system must be translated—a single sentence within one cannot be. After proceeding to strip epistemology of its remaining rational advantages over psychology, he asserts that it must become a branch of psychology—the new relationship: epistemology is contained within the natural sciences via psychology yet epistemology still contains the natural sciences in that they are the object thereof.14 By placing epistemology squarely in the realm of psychology, Quine affirm that what we can know is not a metaphysical problem, but an empirical one. To the question of what we know, Quine answers, “Epistemology remains centered as always on evidence, and meaning remains centered as always on verification; and evidence is verification.”15 That is, for Quine, what we know hinges on others’ verification of it.

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[Essay 5] “Nagel and Searle on Consciousness”

The way in which Nagel and Searle’s articles are connected becomes clear through their respective analyses of consciousness and understanding and their relation—Searle’s view of simulation becomes severely complicated when considered in light of Nagel.

Nagel identifies what he calls the “subjective character of experience” as a central concept to his discussion and defines it as something it is like to be a particular organism—an organism that has conscious experience.16 He elaborates by pointing out that each type of thing is connected with the particular point of view of its own type, and that this point of view is, by definition, unique to its type by virtue of the very distinctness of the thing apart from others. Nagel then asserts a conclusion which he spends much of the rest of the article elaborating: “We cannot form more than a schematic conception of what it is like [to be something of a different type than our own].”17 This is the case because in attempting to construct the point of view of another type of organism, we have no choice but to use only the tools of our own point of view, and thus our attempt to understand another type’s point of view is really just a description of how we imagine it to be. The other main point that Nagel makes in this article is that an organism has “more objective character than is revealed in its…appearance.”18 He presents this view and concludes that it is impossible to fully describe subjective experience via physicalist reduction—i.e., by reducing mental states to bodily states. This proves to be very relevant to Searle’s discussion of minds.

Searle conceives of the mind as capable of understanding by way of semantics. That is, “Understanding…involves having an interpretation or a meaning attached to…symbols.”19 He asserts that computers could never “think,” or understand, as humans do because they operate, by definition, solely though the manipulation of syntax—rules by which symbols are related. Because “syntax is not sufficient for semantics,”20 there could be no way in which understanding could emerge, as it is a function of the interpretation of the meaning from semantic relation. Searle concludes, no computer program could result in the creation of a human mind because computer programs operate strictly in the syntactic realm and, as he has shown, syntax is not sufficient for semantics—i.e., a system of relations of symbols is not sufficient for a meaningful interpretation of these relations. Searle qualifies this by conceding that if it were the case that a thing equivalent to the powers of the human brain could be manufactured, it may have the capability of semantics and all that follows from this.

These two thinkers overlap in two very interesting ways: First, even in the case that we could create a thing equivalent to the powers of the human brain, by Nagel’s conclusion that subjective experience cannot be reduced to physicalism, it is unclear what we would have if we were able to produce, in its entirety, the physical aspect of experience, that is, an equivalent to the brain. We would certainly seem to have produced what of a consciousness that can be explained by physicalism, but it is not clear what else might be necessary to truly enable understanding. Second, even if we are to assume, contra-Nagel, that a physicalist reduction is possible, Searle is confounded with Negel’s original assertion that consciousness demands that there must be something like a thing to be. If we were to successfully, physically simulate a human brain, then what it would be like to be this simulated human brain is not “what it is like to be a human brain,” but simply “what it is like to be a simulation of a human brain.” Thus, it seems that in attempting to create a simulation of an actual human brain, we would merely create what it is like to be a simulation of the human brain, and would not properly simulating it. The only way in which such a thing could be truly “simulated” is by way of authenticity, and that is just to say that true simulation—a re-creation of the original—is impossible.

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[Essay 6] “Moore and Stevenson on Ethics”

Moore and Stevenson approach ethics in very different ways—the former, scientifically; the latter, emotively—and as a result, they end up with nearly opposite conclusions. Moore insists that “good” is in fact a quality and cannot be defined, though it can be identified in the context of a thing, while Stevenson argues that ethical statements must meet three criteria of “good” and that ethics is concerned not with the a priori “goodness” of things, but rather with emotive suggestion towards certain ends adherent to interests.

The basic premise that Moore starts with is that ethics is “the general enquiry into what is good.”21 This immediately establishes that he views goodness as a quality or attribute that things possess—Stevenson strongly opposes this view, as we will discuss shortly. Moore differentiates between “good” and “the good:” the former is the quality of a thing previously mentioned and is indefinable because it is a simple quality, irreducible to any sort of parts or sub-qualities22; the latter is a particular instance of a thing which holds “good” as one of its several qualities, and may be defined in terms of its qualities.23 He uses this distinction to argue that statements about the “good” (particular) are inherently synthetic, and never analytic. This is vital to his theory of ethics because it disallows for defining “good” simply as another term such as “pleasure” or “happiness.” From here, Moore is able to explicate what he believes to be the goal of ethics: to discover “what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good.”24 This is where Moore believes others go wrong in their studies of ethics—that they mistake the other qualities that things hold, in addition to “good,” as qualities themselves of “good” when they are really qualities of “the good” (particular).

Stevenson has a very different approach to the question of ethics and views “good” not as a quality of a thing but rather as a function of action as well the relations between interests. He first identifies “three ‘vital’ senses of ‘good:’” first, disagreement must be possible as to whether or not a thing is good; second, the thing must have a certain “magnetism,” i.e., compel us in its favor; and third, a thing’s goodness must not be verifiable on scientific bases alone.25 By laying out these three criteria, Stevenson claims that an ethical statement is not the mere observation about the goodness of a thing: it includes a suggestion to particular action. He differentiates between the “descriptive” use of terms—i.e., a use of terms aimed towards observation and information—and the “dynamic” use of terms, which utilize their context to communicate something outside of the scope of the strict definition of the term.26 The dynamic use of terms employs “emotive meaning” which aims to result in affective responses from others. Further, ethical statements, which meet the criteria discussed above, are different from imperatives in that they allow the speaker to potentially affect others’ action in a much less direct and conscious way.27 Stevenson then identifies traditional theories of ethics (such as Moore’s) as only concerned with a descriptive use of terms, leaving out emotive meaning. That is, a descriptive approach to ethics is focused strictly on beliefs about the goodness of things, while emotive meaning gets to the heart of ethics: encouraging a change in the interests of another. He then states that “disagreement in interest may be rooted in disagreement in belief” and that it is the purpose of the emotive meaning inherent to ethical terms to initiate a reasoned conversation and incite a change in interests.28 This is the main point at which Moore and Stevenson are opposed. Moore sees ethics as a science of observing and describing “good” as it relates to things, and as something to which a prescription of action does not belong. Stevenson, on the other hand, sees ethics not as a science of discovering “good” but rather as a social instrument29 whose purpose is to encourage mutual changes in persons’ interests such that they ideally align: this idea of ethical statements that he has constructed now clearly satisfies the three criteria he originally laid out.

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[Essay 7] “Ayer, Quine, and Wittgenstein on Approaching Philosophy”

Each of these philosophers—Ayer, Quine, and Wittgenstein—take on philosophy in a very broad and non-traditional way. However, Wittgenstein’s analysis is unique in that it not only avoids the problems with which the other two struggle, but points to the philosophic tradition in which they are grounded and asserts that it is in fact a false foundation.

Ayer takes up metaphysics as whole and believes he succeeds in debunking it completely. His argument is grounded in claims that metaphysicians are simply using and interpreting language inaccurately. His main point is that metaphysics is wrong to assume that “to every word or phrase that can be the grammatical subject of a sentence, there must somewhere be a real entity corresponding.”30 That is, that metaphysics is simply a result of confusion: of thinkers attempting to assign an actual thing to a grammatical subject which has no thing that it corresponds to in reality. At the beginning of his article, Ayer assumes that that in order for a statement to be meaningful, something about it must be verifiable in experience, either by principle or practicality. However, this assumption may be at odds with his condemnation of metaphysics: it is difficult to think of a metaphysical statement that is not in some way verifiable even in the weak sense,31 and if no term or statement can be identified that has nothing to do with experience, then it is unclear exactly what Ayer claims to disprove.

Quine’s argument is also a linguistic one, but he takes issue with the foundational distinction between synthetic and analytic propositions. He essentially argues that there can be no distinction drawn between the two because of the impossibility of identifying a definition of analyticity, or “sameness.” Sameness in meaning can be shown through the practical use of language but it cannot be defined through a description of terms.32 Quine then asserts his main position: “The totality of our so-called knowledge…is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.”33 What he means to say here is that all forms of knowledge that we have developed are simply “myths” which we embrace as far as they both guide and are determined by our own experiences. Finally, Quine asserts that we use these perceptual schemes in order to make sense of the world—the distinction between the synthetic and the analytic is simply a mistake.

Wittgenstein takes a view that differs even more radically from philosophic tradition than the first two thinkers and in doing so, points to what he sees as the common error in much of philosophy. He begins by showing that we learn primarily through ostensive definition34 and that once a thing has been learned, we do not constantly consider the rules of the thing when acting, but we rather rely on the sense of the thing gained through the learning process.35 After distinguishing between the inorganic aspect—the signs and symbols—and the organic aspect (the meaning behind the symbols) of language, Quine asserts that when we actually act in the world, we draw on our understanding of meaning (organic) and not through employing systems and relations between symbols (inorganic).36 This leads him to his main quarrel with philosophy: that in the past, philosophers have tried to use it as a tool as science is a tool. He believes that philosophy is not a tool to be used to explain or reduce ideas: “Philosophy really is ‘purely descriptive.’”37

To Ayer’s problem, that there may be grammatical subjects which do not correspond to a particular thing, Wittgenstein would respond that it is not the case that we rely on these inorganic terms when we act—we use our understanding of their meaning, not the rules by which they refer to certain things. Wittgenstein answers Quine in a similar way: our action in the world is not a matter of what conceptual schemes we adopt to use; we rather learn from these schemes ostensively—by learning their meanings—then we operate in the world with an understanding of this meaning.

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[Essay 8] “Hobbes on Voluntary Action”

Hobbes’ conception of voluntary action can be summarized thusly: to act voluntarily is to express your will and to will an action is to act according to your strongest desire. Therefore, Hobbes concludes, to act according to your strongest desire is by definition to act voluntarily. Though this may have been adequate in Hobbes’ time—and even this is doubtful—this conception of the voluntary is now severely outdated. Perhaps the most urgent question raised by Hobbes’ incomplete definition is that of the relationship between coercion, addiction, and voluntary action.

One of the common arguments against Hobbes’ conception involves external coercion that causes a person’s strongest desire to correspond to the wishes of the coercive actor. This causes some serious problems with Hobbes’ voluntary action as it relocates the voluntary quality of action in the coercive actor rather than the subject from whom the act originates. The acting subject cannot, therefore, said to be acting voluntarily because the desire on which they act is actually the desire of the coercive party. Within the context of Hobbes’ above syllogism the act would still be considered voluntary but I must reject his premises; to accept them is to underestimate the significance of the external actions that influence a person and contribute to their decision making. Once Hobbes’ premises have been rejected, the conflict between addiction and voluntary action arises as the center of contemporary focus.

Addiction is commonly defined as a set of internal forces outside of the subject’s control that change his or her desire based on the object of addiction. However, there is a significant problem with this definition: it does not address from whence the desire was changed. Put in the form of a question, this problem can be stated, “If an addiction changes someone’s desires to be something other than their own desires, what is it that distinguishes their own desires from those caused by the addiction?” The problem of free will now becomes the central question, but neither free will nor determinism provide sufficient answers to the question at hand. If I am to assume my own free will, this allows for an “internally compelling force”—i.e., addiction—that causes me to act contrary to my radically free will. The fundamental problem with this answer is that it is not clear what it means to have a “free will,” and neither historical nor contemporary philosophers provide a conception of a radically free will with which I am satisfied. Aside from conceptions that severely limit the “free will” to the point where it is nearly indistinguishable from determinism, the only other explanations seem to be either religiously based or built on a conception of some sort of magical actor that is unexplainably free of external influence. Determinism, on the other hand, sees addiction as simply another cause among causes and renders the original question irrelevant. These descriptions of free will and determinism are, of course, oversimplified due to time constraints, but they get at the heart of the problems with each.

Since a philosophical analysis of the free will/determinism problem does not seem to provide a useful answer to the question “how does addiction affect the voluntary nature of action?” the question must be approached from the angle of utility. That is, regardless of whether we truly have free will or are wholly determined, we conceive ourselves as acting in the world and must create a means of dealing with the problems that arise for us. I believe the most useful way to frame this issue is in terms of the mind-body problem: the way in which our physical brain affects our experienced mind.

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The phenomenon of addiction is physiologically explained as a relationship of neurotransmitters to their receptor sites in a synaptic pathway. In essence, the craving felt by an addict is the result of open receptor sites that have not been satisfied by the appropriate neurotransmitter—the more open receptors, the stronger the craving. Addiction now becomes a matter of brain chemistry and in a very real sense, there is no qualitative difference between so-called “external coercion” and internal coercion—i.e., addiction—other than that external coercion presumably involves the will of another sovereign actor. The presence of another actor is certainly relevant when responsibility and accountability come into the picture but it is irrelevant to the strict issue of whether or not my action is voluntary if I am an addict. In other words, when determining whether my action can be voluntary if I suffer from an addiction, the issue must be treated exactly the same as if I were being externally coerced to act. My addiction-influenced actions must be judged on a sliding scale of “voluntary” to “involuntary” depending on the other factors that play into a certain situation. An example is helpful to illustrate this point: if Paul, a heroin addict, murders a person because it is the only way to get his drugs, the murder must be viewed as less voluntary than his initial decision to try heroin in the first place. This way of framing it allows Paul to be held accountable for his actions under the condition that his decision to start taking heroin was voluntary while still allowing recognition of his “impaired voluntary nature” once addicted.

To summarize, the idea of voluntary action is tremendously complicated given the introduction of addiction. Ideas of free will and determinism do not offer satisfactory resolution to the issue and make it quite clear that a utilitarian answer is the best route. Therefore, I must assert that addiction should be treated on a sliding scale of voluntariness and—other than a consideration for joint responsibility with another party—that there is little practical reason to differentiate between external coercion and internal coercion.

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[Essay 9] “On Rawls on Hobbes: The Rational and the Reasonable as Relates to the Formation of Political Society”

In his Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, John Rawls discusses Thomas Hobbes’ explanation of how society is formed—via social contract—though the employment of practical reasoning. Rawls breaks down Hobbes’ idea of practical reasoning into two concepts: the rational and the reasonable. He uses the relation between these two terms to explain the way in which people enter into a social contract to create a society. Rawls’ analysis is very interesting but it falls short in two significant ways: first, though does Rawls acknowledge its presence, the role of promise keeping is significantly downplayed; second, the way in which Rawls explains the relation between the rational and the reasonable actually does away with practical reasoning in the proper sense and reduces to a mere system of rationality.

Foundational to this discussion is the distinction Rawls makes between the rational and the reasonable. The rational he defines as “furthering the good or advantage of oneself, or of each person cooperating,” while the reasonable is defined as “fair terms of cooperation” (emphasis mine).38 That is, the former focuses on action as it relates to the interests of the individual while the latter focuses on action as it relates to the interests of the whole of a sample group itself. However, the relation between these two concepts is the critical point here. Rawls offers the following description: “Principles that we could accept as reasonable, in my sense of that term, are rational principles for us to follow, based on our fundamental interests, provided that others follow them also.” 39 In other words, Rawls interprets Hobbes to be saying that the reasonable is really derived from the rational—we act in ways that are fair to others solely because to do otherwise would be against our own individual self interest.

Now that these terms have been defined, Rawls proceeds to offer an account of Hobbes that uses this rational-reasonable relation as its perspectival foundation. Rawls’ first application of this relation, and the starting point of his interpretation of Hobbes’ justification for individuals entering into social contracts, is in social cooperation. Social cooperation is divided into two parts: first, the advantage gained by an individual as a result of an action, and second, how these gained advantages are correctly concerned with the mutual reciprocity among the involved parties—i.e., fair gains to all parties.40 It is quite clear that this conception of social cooperation is rooted in the idea that the top priority of humans is their own individual interest. In order to see how this assertion is justified within a Hobbesian system, an brief account of nature must be considered.

For Hobbes, the state of nature—a state with no system of political organization—is synonymous with a state of war. According to Hobbes, because humans naturally seek peace, they are motivated to find a way to avoid a state of war.41 Therefore, Rawls submits, humans consider the fairness of agreements via their own personal desire to avoid falling into a state of war. In order to avoid this collapse, the people agree to legitimize a sovereign entity to “stabilize, and thereby to maintain, that social state in which everyone […] adheres to the Laws of Nature, [i.e.,] the ‘State of Peace.’”42 This the point in Rawls’ argument at which the relation of the rational and the reasonable becomes relevant to the formation of a social contract. The role of a sovereign entity in agreements is to enforce performance and inflict sanctions in the absence thereof. The way in which the sovereign carries out this duty is explained by Rawls through the use of the Prisoner Dilemma.43 The main point of this example is to demonstrate that in the state of nature, a person cannot be certain that another will hold to the terms of an agreement, so

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neither can be sure that the most advantageous circumstances will come of it. The function of the sovereign under this conception is to ensure that all people have sufficient motivation to comply with the social contract—their agreement to all the rest of the population. By placing the sovereign in this position, Hobbes does not attempt to change human nature in an effort to maintain a state of peace, but rather to “alter the background conditions against which people reason and against which they are going to make contracts and decide to honor them.”44 All of this is to say that individuals enter into a social contract because they trust that all others will be reasonable—via rationality—in their deliberations regarding honoring their contracts because they can safely assume all others will do the same on pain of sanctions imposed by the sovereign.

Rawls perspective as previously outlined is very useful in a number of ways—very importantly, it reconciles Hobbes view of human nature as selfish45 with the human ability and tendency to enter into a social contract. However, in doing this Rawls makes the two mistakes mentioned earlier. First, his approach to the justification of social contracts via the rational-reasonable relation—i.e., that Rawls believes that individuals’ decisions to perform on agreements is based primarily in reasonable consideration and avoidance of the sanctions of the sovereign—detracts from the importance of promise keeping itself among the people themselves. Rawls seems to place to focus of his discussion of social contract justification on the fact that the sovereign creates the conditions for promises to be meaningful. However, though these conditions are certainly important, they are still just a precondition to the real, most important condition of the social contract: actual promise keeping. In order of direct importance to the social contract, promise keeping must be considered paramount because it is the aspect thereof which is most directly related to action and to contract performance. In other words, it may make sense to talk about promise keeping without talking about an enforcing sovereign, but it is absolutely absurd to talk about a sovereign who enforces promise keeping without first mentioning promise keeping. This criticism is not intended to point out that Rawls’ ideas are wrong in any way, but rather that the way in which he constructs a hierarchy of importance among Hobbes’ ideas is not wholly accurate. Hobbes makes the high importance of promise keeping explicit in a number of passages. In explicating his third law of nature, Hobbes writes, “That men performe their Covenants made: without which, Covenants are in vain, and but Empty words.”46 Here, Hobbes makes it quite clear that regardless of the enforcement of a sovereign, if a promise (Covenant) is not kept, it is only “Empty words,” that is, meaningless. Rawls is correct in thinking that Hobbes believes that it is the role of the sovereign to avoid these sorts of meaningless promises, but in focusing so heavily on this role, he downplays the importance of the very activity of promise keeping upon which the sovereign’s enforcement rests. Hobbes drives this point home when he writes that, “He therefore that breaketh his Covenant […] cannot be received into any Society.”47 Hobbes places this entire discussion about the importance of promise keeping among individuals altogether before the function of the sovereign is brought up. Again, the criticism is not that Rawls is wrong in his facts or in the content he presents. It is that the way in which Rawls prioritizes Hobbes’ most important points misrepresents Hobbes’ focus on the priority of individual promise keeping over the individual’s compliance to a sovereign entity.

My second and somewhat more serious criticism of Rawls’ interpretation is that his distinction between the rational and the reasonable actually reduces in itself such that it negates itself. Rawls holds that what is reasonable is actually just a form of enlightened self-interest. Rawls states that “practical reasoning is deliberating concerning what is the rational thing to do.”48 However, this view actually just obliterates a concept of practical reasoning all together

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and reduces it to mere rational deliberation—though the view does still allow for the idea of a reasonable principle (a thing) distinct from practical reasoning (a process). Consider an example: let us say that Yohan’s justification for yielding at a stop sign is to avoid harm to himself, not because his ignoring the sign would harm society as a whole. The result of his action is one which, on its face, may seem to show concern for the whole of society when his concern actually lies only with the wellbeing of his own person. Thus, Yohan’s obedience to the stop sign can be seen as creating a reasonable principle in that the effect of his obedience is good for society, but it in no way involves a process properly called practical reasoning. It therefore makes sense to talk about rational consideration as it relates to a reasonable principle—i.e., a principle that is fair for all—but it is completely nonsensical to then submit, as Rawls does, that because a reasonable principle has been arrived at, it must have come from a process called practical reasoning. My criticism of Rawls on this point is that the term “practical reasoning,” by his analysis, becomes utterly meaningless and useless. What the term “practical reasoning” properly means is that the deliberation on the part of an individual is completely focused on the interest of the population at large and is in no way a process that solely considers individuals’ interests, despite that the deliberative process may terminate with the result of a reasonable principle—i.e., a principle which is in the interest of the population at large. It is then, of course, nonsense to say that practical reasoning is rooted in rational deliberation; this is where Rawls goes astray. What can and should be said, on the other hand, is that rational deliberation results in reasonable principles. This criticism is in no way a critique of Hobbes’ conception of practical reasoning; it is merely a critique of Rawls’ approach to the problem and serves to point out that by attempting to define practical reasoning in terms of rational deliberation, Rawls’ argument ends up negating the very idea it attempts to prove.

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[Essay 10] “On Hobbes and Locke on Freedom”

In their respective works, Leviathan and Second Treatise of Government, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke address issues of freedom through separate accounts of the state of nature and consequently raise questions about the nature of slavery. These two thinkers are quite opposed to each other in their views as the justificatory steps taken by the former lead to an absolutist conception of government while those of the latter lead to what today we might call a much more “free” society. Though both Hobbes and Locke are very impressive thinkers, I will conclude that Locke’s general conceptions, flawed as they may be, are a much more accurate account.

For Hobbes, freedom is “the absence of…Impediments of motion.” 49 That is, something is free in the case that there is no other thing to constrain it. He expands this definition to describe a “free person” as one who has the ability to do as they will, and a “free will” as acting in accordance with one’s own desires.50 The combination of these two ideas is what Hobbes refers to as freedom with reference to humans—a person is free so long as their action is not externally prevented from fulfilling the desire that they will to do. It is very important to notice that Hobbes specifies that for an act not to be free, it must be constrained during the time which the actor wills to fulfill his or her desire; self-restrain out of a fear of consequences is still a free choice to Hobbes, even if that fear is caused by the threat of another human. When this conception of freedom is taken in conjunction with Hobbes’ account of human nature, it is quite clear why he believes the state of nature to be equivalent to the state of war.

There are two characteristics of Hobbes’ account of human nature that are particularly relevant to this discussion and which allow him to connect his conception of freedom to his conception of the state of nature. First, Hobbes believes that humans are innately selfish: “Men have no pleasure, (but on the contrary a great deal of grief) in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe them all. For every man…naturally endeavors, as far as he dares…to extort a greater value…from others.”51 It is quite clear in this passage that Hobbes intends to generalize that all people in a state of nature prefer not to be around others and that if they are, they will try to take from them what they can. Secondly, it is part of human nature that we are innately inclined to quarrel.52 Given these two characteristics, selfishness and an inclination towards conflict, and given the nature of absolute freedom—outlined above—as manifest in the state of nature, it follows that the state of nature could be nothing else but a state of war. However, it is important to recognize that Hobbes “state of war” is different than what today we might think. He writes, “The nature of War, consisteth not in actuall fighting; but in the known disposition thereto.”53 Though this definition is less bold than the assertion that humans are constantly in immediate conflict, it is still quite strong: he argues that humans are inclined by their very nature to fight each other. The connection between Hobbes’ conception of freedom and his account of the state of nature is now clear. To summarize the discussion thus far, as a result of humans’ less than benevolent human nature and how this manifests itself given radical freedom, the state of nature is one in which there is an incessant and pervasive disposition to war.

At this point it is interesting to note that the notion of slavery is curiously, or perhaps appropriately, absent in Hobbes. Though he does not mention the term, slavery—which is distinct from mere constraint by virtue of its perpetuity—, or lack of freedom, can only be defined as a person’s being continual, physical, and perpetual constraint from all desired action

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whatsoever. This definition describes such a case that it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to actually point to in reality. Thus, slavery in the common sense is not an issue for Hobbes. However, if he were presented with the task of explaining the situation of someone who we might call a slave, he would explain it as follows. The slave freely chooses to be a slave because it accords with his or her desire—if a slave stays such out of fear, he or she does so as a free choice since Hobbes believes that choices made out of fear of consequences are still free. This issue will become particularly interesting once Locke enters into the discussion.

For Locke, there are two things that people call freedom: license and liberty. The former he defines as Hobbes defines freedom—as the absolute ability to act on one’s desires. Locke insists that this is not true freedom, but rather that liberty—pure freedom—is the ability to act “within the bounds of the law of nature, without… depending upon the will of any other man.”54 This is distinct from Hobbes, and from what Locke calls license, in that one’s actions are constrained by the laws of nature and a person is therefore not free to act absolutely as they might desire. In order to understand Locke’s conception of liberty (freedom), it is necessary to understand his conception of the state of nature, of which the laws of nature are an integral part.

To summarize, Locke believes that the state of nature is a state of equality such that no person has either things or power more than another. This is derivative of the law of nature, which is essentially that “no one ought to harm another. Further, not only does one not have the right to harm others, but one does not have the right to inflict self-harm. Locke justifies this theologically, arguing that this is the case because God created humans and we are here for his pleasure, not our own; therefore to harm our self or others is to do injustice to God. 55 Furthermore, he believes that this liberty to act comes with the duty to enforce the natural law. That is, in a state of nature, each person has liberty to act so long as they do not break the natural law, and each person also has the duty to execute punishment to others who break the natural law—but only insofar as the punishment is specifically intended as a reparation or a restraint.56 Though this duty to punish seems as though it might imply that Locke views the state of nature as a state of war, this is not the case. He differentiates between the two and takes a swing at Hobbes when he says that “Men living together according to reason…with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature. But force, or declared design of force, upon the person of another…is the state of war.”57 This passage drives home the distinction between Hobbes’ and Locke’s respective pictures of the state of nature as derived from their distinct conceptions of freedom. Locke’s “freedom” is defined in terms of free action qualified by the law of nature, which naturally leads to his view of a state of nature which is based on obedience to this law, and the duty of all to justly enforce it. Hobbes’ “freedom,” on the other hand, allows for any kind of action whatsoever and therefore leads to a considerably bleaker account of the state of nature, focusing on humans’ abuse of such freedom.

Now, the issue of slavery comes to the fore, and is arguably the point in Locke’s writing that raises the biggest objection to Hobbes’ system. In summary, Locke believes that freedom is inalienable, cannot be subject to non-consensual legislation, and is the “liberty to follow my own will in all things”58—a striking similarity to the soon-to-emerge Rousseau. Because humans live for God’s pleasure, we cannot give away what we do not ourselves have the right to (i.e., complete license to destroy our body, etc) and can therefore never voluntarily enter into slavery. The one exception made here by Locke is that of a war prisoner, and only because the prisoner already consented to be killed in the case of defeat. However, what is most interesting about Locke’s analysis of slavery are the two characteristics of it that he identifies: first, that slavery means to depend on the will of another,59 and second, that slavery requires the condition that the

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master may draw as harsh sanctions as he or she wishes.60 By defining slavery in this way, Locke also perfectly describes Hobbes’ conception of the social contract—i.e., a relation in which mutual parties to a contract, the people, are absolutely subject to the will of the sovereign on pain of harsh sanctions.61 In other words, Locke says that what Hobbes actually accomplishes in his creation of a social contract is a society totally and completely enslaved by a sovereign master. This is an incredibly forceful statement and serves to highlight the epitome of the difference between the two thinkers.

As to which of these two thinkers has a more accurate conception of freedom, I must side with Locke, though it is derived from what I hold to be an illegitimate foundation. I side mostly with Locke because of Hobbes’s fatal error: he blatantly rejects non-physical coercion as a legitimate form of coercion and reduces an extremely complex issue to nearly nothing, simply by assuming some kind of unexplained, metaphysical “free will” which is able to make free decisions regardless of threat. Locke’s view, on the other hand, allows for both physical and non-physical coercion and even accidentally accounts for the particularly contemporary issue of addiction. Locke accounts for addiction in that his description of the law of nature disallows humans to harm their self or others except for the sake of justice. Because Locke defines freedom as obeying the law of nature, a person who does harm to their self or others as a result of an addiction—i.e., a person who breaks the law of nature—is not a free person. Though I believe that Locke’s conception of freedom is more accurate than Hobbes’ in this particular case, there are still some serious problems with Locke’s thought. Perhaps the most fundamental and crippling of these objections is that Locke bases his entire argument on the assumption that certain action is wrong because it does injustice to God. A theological account is far from satisfactory and his system would be better justified by the assumption of the innate value of human life (anthropocentrically rooted) or by aggregate utilitarianism—that such a system contributes best to the average advantage of humanity.

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[Essay 11] “On Hobbes’s So-Called ‘Personhood’”

The way in which Thomas Hobbes defines “personhood” in his work, Leviathan, is the foundation on which he rests the justification of his entire political philosophy. Through making a series of key distinctions about types of persons, Hobbes constructs a conception of the person that allows for the creation of a joint compact, or social contract, among them which gives rise to the commonwealth. Though his conception of the person is certainly useful and is seemingly innocent on its face, serious problems arise when it is subjected to rigorous analysis.

Hobbes begins his discussion of personhood in an appropriate manner: he defines a person as “He, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another.”62 This definition is straightforward enough and he continues by further categorizing the term into two types of persons: the natural person, who is an entity whose actions we consider to be its own; and the artificial person, who is an entity whose actions we consider to represent another. In the case of artificial persons who represent natural persons, the former is referred to as the actor, as the latter is referred to as the author.63 This language is important because it is the origin of Hobbes’ use of the term “authority.” The use of the term references that the author of an act—i.e., the natural person from whence the action originates—gives the person who acts on his or her behalf the right to act with the author’s own authority.

At this point, Hobbes makes another distinction between personation and representation. The former concerns a person speaking or acting for an individual entity, while the latter concerns a single actor speaking or acting on behalf of multiple entities at once. In certain cases that Hobbes deals with,64 personation may take the form of authority vest in the actor but absent a direct author—in these cases, Hobbes holds that a civil state must be the grantor of authority. Representation, on the other hand, is an entirely different issue: it is when a group of authors is brought to singular unity. Now, the phrase “singular unity” may be deceptive in that it could imply that the group of actors as such is a single entity in itself. However, this is not how Hobbes views it. He writes that “it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the [artificial] person one.”65 Thus, Hobbes does not agree with the notion that by virtue of the sum of its parts and relations a body of multiple individuals can be said to belong to a singular entity called “group,” or whatever so called, but rather that this singular entity “group” is identified by its unifying representative, that is, the actor in which the multiple authority is vested.

At this point, Hobbes begins to make his crucial move from discussing authors and actors to justifying the creation of a commonwealth via this relationship. As previously discussed, each person represented gives the actor their individual permission to act on their behalf, however, in the case that “the representative consist of many men, the voice of the greater number, must be considered as the voice of all of them.”66 This is the way in which Hobbes justifies that a social contract—that is, the individual consent of persons giving their authority to a representative—must be employed in the creation of a commonwealth.67 More concisely, Hobbes believes that a commonwealth is generated through the agreement of individual authors to authorize a sovereign actor to represent them and act as in such a way that the sovereign’s actions are their own. To frame it in yet another way, natural persons—the represented authors—authorize an artificial person—the representative actor—in the creation of a commonwealth via the social contract among the natural persons. It should be noted that it is also possible for artificial persons to enter into such a contract as well, given that the natural person whom they personate has authorized

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this power,68 but for the sake of commonwealths via social contract, the parties to the contract are overwhelmingly natural persons.

Up to this point the discussion has been wholly centered on Hobbes definition and development of personhood as it relates to the creation of a commonwealth by way of social contract. However, given that this conception is the foundation for Hobbes’ entire system of political philosophy, an analysis of his conception of personhood is in order.

First, to dissect Hobbes’ definition, let us consider the first half of his definition of personhood: an entity whose actions and words can be thought of as its own. Though this definition will prove to be philosophically problematic it is nonetheless extremely useful. First, this is a good definition because it is the only way of thinking about personhood that will allow us to hold people accountable for their actions. If we cannot identify a person by actions which we attribute to them, there is no way that they can be responsible for any action whatsoever. Failure to identify an action as corresponding to a specific person would reduce any political system to complete and utter disarray. This is especially true within Hobbes’ own system given that a person’s consent to authorize a sovereign must be identified as their own in order for the sovereign to act with authority. Secondly, Hobbes definition of a person as one who corresponds to its actions is useful because it seems to be the most important, if not the only, source of meaning in a person’s life. Meaning is, of course, not even close to Hobbes’ discussion here, but it is certainly a positive result of his definition. This is the case because without the ability to identify our person with our action, we are by definition alienated from our actions and therefore from ourselves. To put it into Hobbesian terms, when author and actor are one and the same, a person is capable of assigning meaning to their action. This is true simply by definition if it is a necessary condition to meaning that a person must in some relates to something outside their self. I include mere relation as a sufficient condition to meaning because even if a person can identify with the thought of a thing, the thought can still be seen as the person’s own thought. To put it in another, more vivid way, consider the implications to meaning in the case that Hobbes’ definition were not the case—if the actions or words of a person could not be considered their own. If this were the case, a person would be absolutely incapacitated because he or she would be incapable of personally relating to anything whatsoever. There could only be actions and words distinct in every way from persons and the two would seem to the individual to have nothing to do with each other. Though these arguments strongly support this definition of personhood as necessary in practicality, they say nothing of the problems raised by a philosophic consideration of the definition and grounds of personhood itself.

My objections to Hobbes’ conception of personhood are as follows. First, let us consider again only half of Hobbes’ definition of a person: an entity whose actions and words can be thought of as its own. This is problematic because we do not actually know what we refer to when we say that an action is one’s own. There are a host of conditions that go into shaping a person, so the question becomes what it is exactly that “owns” the action or words. The personal identity seems to be shaped in part by both a degree of social conditioning and by genetic predispositions. The relation between mind and brain also complicates the issue: is the mind and therefore the identity shaped entirely through physiological causes in the brain, or can it be said that there is an external, metaphysical will that directs the identity? Even further, external and internal influences—i.e., coercion and addiction respectively—seems to have a large impact on our identity and our choices of actions and words. In light of all of these conditions which make up a person, and there are certainly more, it becomes unclear exactly to what we attribute a person’s actions and words. The problem here is that the definition which Hobbes offers of

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personhood is a conceptual definition—a definition which defines a concept, like personhood, in terms of other concepts, like actions and words. The problem with this approach is that there becomes a point, and it appears that we have reached it, that more specificity is required: an operational definition (a definition explicated in terms of measurable variables) of personhood is necessary if we are to respond to the above concerns. Unfortunately, Hobbes does not offer such a definition and we are left with the futile task of determining exactly what it is that owns these actions and words with which a person is identified.

Finally, let us consider the second half of Hobbes’ definition of personhood: one who is considered to represent the words or actions of another. All of the objections raised above still apply, but the problem is compounded by the addition of an intermediary who stands between action and author. This intermediary—the actor—complicates the issue because according to Hobbes conception of freedom, in determining whether or not to break a law, the actor still holds the freedom to choose to disobey the will of the author. However, this is in direct conflict to Hobbes’ representative conception of personhood as he states, “When the actor doth any thing against the law of nature by command of the author…not he, but the author breaketh the law of nature.” 69 Hobbes tries to reconcile this by arguing that the actor does not break the law because he is adhering to the higher natural law of covenant-keeping, but this does not resolve the issue. In actuality, it is true that the actor does not break the natural law of covenant-keeping, but it is also true that the action of the actor breaks the other law of nature, whatever it may be. Consider an analogy: that a number of students will abuse a fair classroom policy does not negate the fact that it is still, in fact, a fair policy. Something analogous can be said about Hobbes: that an actor adheres to the law against covenant-breaking does not change the fact that an action taken in harmony with a covenant may break a different law—and the person who carries out this act must be said to have broken a law since he or she could have freely chosen otherwise.

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[Essay 12] “On Locke’s Justification of Private Property”

John Locke has a very interesting justification for private property—in fact, it is a conception so compelling that it continues to be dominant, in some form, even today. Interesting though it may be, and though it may have been justified in its original context, to espouse such a belief today is misguided at best and disingenuous at worst. In order to further expand on this assertion it is necessary first to discover what exactly Locke means by “private property.”

Locke begins by grounding his theory religiously: he argues that originally, God gave the earth to everyone in common. However, the earth is no good to us if we cannot make exclusive use of it so God also gave us reason, which we may properly use to appropriate the earth as we see fit. To divide the God-given earth into private allocations serves the common interest: for the earth to benefit humans some sort of economic industry is required, and such division of resources encourages if not singularly allows for such industry. Now, Locke’s argument thus far is not properly an account of the creation of private property itself, but rather establishes conditions for the possibility of such a notion by way of establishing the need for its justification—i.e., a society with an economy. His account of the nature of private property is reasoned as follows. Each individual owns their own self; to labor on a thing is to mix oneself with the thing; we therefore come to own a thing by laboring on it; and thus, private property is created via labor.

On its face, this account of private property seems relatively harmless—in fact, it is certainly beneficial in many ways. First and most obviously, as Locke said, it allows for economic industry and trade; it gives a way for individuals to provide for themselves and their kin. It establishes the most fundamental foundation required for a social economy: goods which have value and belong to particular people. Further, privatization through labor is a method by which a society may properly designate particular property as belonging to a specific individual—this is an important point: property via labor provides a justification for exclusive rights. If, on the other hand, property were arbitrarily distributed, there would be little reason to respect its exclusivity other than the rule of law. The integration of a person’s labor into a thing personalizes it: by linking a person to a thing, an imperative to respect the exclusivity of a person’s property is created. Finally, Locke’s account provides a reasoning that is religiously grounded—I do not believe this to be an adequate justification, but it is nonetheless an aspect which cannot be ignored given the authority with which religiosity often speaks, especially in Locke’s time. It is important because the laws of God have historically been held to be sacred and therefore, anything that can be said to have been legitimately derived from them must therefore also be respected. It is no wonder that Locke’s conception of private property has been so dominant: it provides answers to the biggest questions of justifying exclusive property rights and creates a foundation on which an economy may be built.

Convenient though this justification may be, there are many serious issues with it and it is ultimately not an honest* account if taken in a contemporary context. First and foremost, “labor” is an extraordinarily vague notion. Though he does not define it, Locke seems to think of labor as a person’s expenditure of physical effort on a thing that in some way changes an aspect of it. There are far too many problematic aspects of this definition to address in depth here: after how much labor can a person be said to own a thing; can there be joint ownership and if not, why not; and so on. However, perhaps the most interesting of all of these problems today is this: “How

* Though “honesty” seems to be a peculiar criticism I will show later why I believe this to be the case.

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does Locke’s justification for private property fit into a service economy?” In a service economy, transactions take place through an exchange of a service for goods, capitol, or other services, but if a service takes the form of a person physically exerting their labor on a thing, then the notion of private property gets very complicated. Consider an example: Tony comes to my apartment and asks that I fix his laptop and I oblige. I have physically labored over Tony’s laptop and it is in a different state now than it was before. This scenario raises a very interesting problem: Tony’s ownership of the laptop does not change that I did in fact labor over it and therefore must have exclusive claim to it. This example is further complicated if instead of fixing a computer, I give Tony a haircut—do I own Tony? This line of reasoning clearly leads to absurd conclusions and shows how Locke’s account of private property collapse in the context of a service economy. It should be noted that though his justification has been shown to collapse though the use of a contemporary context, the temporal disparity between Locke’s time and the present day is not a valid criticism of this critique—my criticism is an analysis of two timeless concepts.

Locke’s justification of private property seems to be unraveling from the top down: I have argued that exclusivity through labor is not an adequate argument and leads to absurd conclusions if extended beyond unrealistically simplistic uses of property. Next, the foundation on which he bases this argument—that private property is a God-given natural right—must be subjected to scrutiny. As to claims about property’s religious justification, no in-depth discussion can be made short of a vast exploration of religious and theological tradition. In this discussion, based in rationality, I must remain agnostic as to the existence of God and I therefore cannot make claims as the truth of this aspect of Locke’s argument. However, this problem may be easily side-stepped. Locke believes God gave humans the natural right to private property; given this framing of the issue, the existence of God is irrelevant—it only matters that Locke asserts that humans have the natural right to private property. This is where the problem in Locke’s theory lies. He argues that because by our very nature we own our self and our labor, we therefore own what we mix with it. However, because he bases this natural right of private property in an account of human nature, an impossible contradiction arises. Because our ownership is derived from our very nature, there can only be one possible operation of ownership (my term) so to speak: each time a person labors over a thing, they mix their self with it, this mixture cannot be undone, and thus each of the persons who labor on the same thing all must be said to own it. By grounding private property as a natural right arising from human nature, Locke appears to negate it with the very properties by which he seeks to create it. In other words: if each person, by nature, owns what they mix their self with, then all one must do to establish ownership of something is to labor over it. To move a thing, such as an apple from a tree to a basket, legitimately creates ownership in the person who moves it even if another person already legitimately owns it by virtue of planting the apple tree. Further, if all must one do to own a thing is to exert some sort of effort (labor) over it, it actually becomes impossible for a person not to own a thing with which they interact. Private ownership has now become effectively meaningless and in practicality, everything appears to belong to everyone in common. The difference between Locke’s state of nature and his state of private property essentially comes down to a mere legal distinction: in the former, there is no ownership so everyone can use everything and in the latter, everyone owns everything with which they interact. Locke’s conception of private property is so problematic that it cannot be saved simply by amending portions of it. I have asserted that this notion of private property, if held by someone today—and indeed it is still arguably the dominant conception by which people operate—is, if not resulting from a lack of thoughtfulness, dishonest.

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If Locke’s conception were a mere account of how private property came about, the issue of honesty would not arise (though it would still be rationally inconsistent). However, it is not a mere account of private property, it is a justification for it. This is not a simple disagreement over terms; there is a very important conceptual distinction. An account of a thing is purely descriptive; a justification for a thing, on the other hand, has a reason or an end that the argument works toward. Though the lives of isolated individuals are not, societies are by nature dependant on some sort of economic transaction to function. Some form of exclusive property is necessary in order to form a society, and therefore a justification is required in order to achieve this goal. In contemporary society, we need to justify our own exclusive possession of property because our possession of things, on the whole, harms other living things—even if it also benefits others. Justification is necessary because in order to have what we want (an active society) we must enable exclusive property rights, but by doing so, we necessarily harm or disadvantage others, whether it be other humans or animals.

It is disingenuous to hold that private property is a natural right arising out of one’s own labor because—even if this theory were conceptually consistent, and I have shown that it is not—it is simply not the case that the more one labors on things, the more one owns. Private property is not a naturally occurring artifact of nature: such a notion is simply a blunder of metaphysics. “Private property” is a term whose Lockean users do not realize they are speaking of a nonsensical a priori concept. In actuality, “private property” is a complex network of social relations of persons to things which we must rely on in order to live in a functional society. It is a social construction which results in disproportionate disadvantage and has thus compelled the more fortunate to justify their position by essentially saying, “Private property is a natural right derived from labor. The only thing you need to do to get more of it is to labor more, to work harder.” Such a position is disingenuous to the truly complex relations between objects and persons and reduces a social dynamic based on interests and desires to an analytic system of description.

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[Essay 13] “On Rousseau’s Views on Liberty and Equality”

Rousseau believes that an inequality is illegitimate if it diminishes or restricts liberty. He sets up quite a complex explanation as to why this is the case and in the end, asserts that people can and should be forced to be free if they are either coerced or if they consent to such inequalities. Though the model Rousseau constructs is for the most part solid, his conception of liberty as it relates to inequality has a couple of minor problems: it doesn’t account for error in the “general will” and it does away with a certain kind of political diversity.

This discussion must begin not as a discussion of inequality, but a discussion of Rousseau’s conception of liberty, for liberty is the foundation from which he builds his theory of inequality. He begins by identifying two kinds of liberty: natural liberty and civil liberty. Natural liberty is “the absolute right to anything that tempts [a person]” and civil liberty is “the legal right in property in what [a person] possesses.”70 In a civil society, civil liberty is accompanied by moral freedom which is guided by the general will. The general will “studies only the common interest” and is distinct from the will of all which “studies private [individual] interests.”71 That is to say, the former is concerned with those interests common to all—real needs, so to speak. The latter is concerned with those interests that are not common to all but which a person may nevertheless believe to be important—false needs. Rousseau defines moral freedom as “obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself.”72 To say that a person has moral freedom is to say that they are not ruled by any law which they do not believe to be in their interests, whether by true or false need—however, it should be noted that it will later be shown that false needs cannot be conducive to moral freedom. Now, it was stated before that moral freedom is guided by the general will, but then Rousseau also says that it is the obedience to self-prescribed laws. These are both one and the same because in Rousseau’s republican framework stipulates that the people ideally determine laws in the interest of the general will. To act otherwise, to determine laws based on individual interest is “to be governed by appetite alone [and] is slavery.”73 Thus, ideally society as a whole makes laws in the interest of the general will and “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free.”74 The phrase “forced to be free” is quite a peculiar one, but in fact is very useful in understanding what Rousseau understands to be illegitimate inequality. But first, a short discussion of what Rousseau understands equality to mean.

Rousseau believes that there are two important types of equality: absolute political equality and relative economic equality. The former, that “power shall...never be exercised except by virtue of authority and law,” and the latter that, “where wealth is concerned, not citizen shall be rich enough to buy another and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself.”75 Absolute political equality is necessary because only in the absence of political coercion may the body politic create laws that serve the general will, therefore rendering this form of equality necessary to moral freedom. Relative economic equality is necessary because vast inequalities of this nature give illegitimate and disproportionate power to those who simply have more money. Now, on to why Rousseau believes people consent to illegitimate inequalities.

In the first place, it has been noted that laws should be determined based on the general will (i.e., interests common to all). To do otherwise, to determine laws based on the will of all (i.e., individual interests) is contrary to moral freedom because it establishes laws which may in fact not be self-determined—the laws may reflect the individual interests of a person other than

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oneself if they happen to be in the political minority.76 If, however, laws are determined with respect to the general will, the laws necessarily adhere to common interests by virtue of the very definition of “the general will.” Herein lies the origin of consensual illegitimate inequality: laws determined when the body politic is primarily concerned with the will of all (false needs) are enacted with consent, yet they are illegitimate because their enactment is contradictory to moral freedom and therefore harms society. Inequalities created by laws adherent only to individual interests are harmful to society because, “no one can injure any one of the members without attacking the whole, yet still less injure the whole without each member feeling it.”77 This plays directly into his notion of false needs and convention. Rousseau states that, “Society consisted at first merely of a few general conventions.”78 These conventions are not grounded in explicitly laid out laws but are implicit, and are the root of social inequalities. They are the source of the misguided motivation of the body politic to determine laws based on their individual interests rather than common interests. Thus, social inequalities, which in many cases are consented to, are not properly rooted in explicit laws, but in convention which may knowingly or unknowingly affect laws which perpetuate or worsen this illegitimate inequality. This incredibly complex web of conceptual interrelations becomes even denser when the language of true and false needs is introduced. True needs can be thought of as those which adhere to the common interests of everyone via the general will (e.g. water, air, etc.) and false needs are those which are reflected by convention in the determination of laws via concern for individual interests (e.g. redaction of elicit substance regulation for personal pleasure). False needs are therefore, like convention, a primary source of illegitimate inequality—i.e., inequality which disproportionally harms portions of the body politic whose interests do not align with the laws and have therefore been stripped of their moral freedom.

As outlined above, Rousseau’s theory of inequality—and freedom, to which it is inexorably linked—is impressively complex. I believe that it is, for the most part, quite compelling. Perhaps the strength in this conception which most dominantly presents itself is the consequences resulting from the notion that one may be forced to be free. This is most compelling, in Rousseau’s original context, because it allows a means for us to protect ourselves and society from being enslaved by false needs. To legislate based on true needs—that are good for all people—and to enforce laws to serve these true needs is to prevent the slavery that results from greed, selfishness, and host of other vices. From a more contemporary perspective, Rousseau seems here to be providing a defense against addiction. The freedom to become addicted to heroin, for instance, is actually less than freedom because it is essentially the freedom to negate one’s own freedom. To force an addict to be free is to force them to fulfill a true need, and such a need is properly considered by the general will in outlawing such a substance.

Though Rousseau’s philosophy here seems to be very strong as a whole, there are some problematic issues that arise. First, that he does not consider that individuals’ deliberations as to what the general will is might be inaccurate. He writes that, “From the deliberations of a people properly informed… [and if they do not otherwise influence each other, they] will always produce a general will and the decision will always be good.”79 Perhaps his biggest assumption is not that humans can under the right circumstances determine what is in the best interest of all, but that there even are such objective common interests. To the first issue, even if one assumes that there are objective common interests, it is nearly impossible to say what it means that people may be “properly informed” because such a statement presupposes an entire system of valued judgments which are not in any way laid out. In order for this statement to hold significant, there

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must be guidelines to which one must compare a person and say that they are or are not properly informed.

To the second issue, it seems that such an assumption that there are objective common interests goes largely unsupported. Surely it may be said that all persons have an interest in certain natural resources such as physical space, air, water, food, and the like. However, these cannot be what we mean when we say “objective common interests,” or true needs. Laws are not made to establish whether or not these needs should be met. Laws are made in order to determine the ways in which these true needs should be met. Thus, to say that laws can be made in the common interest is to say that laws can be made that establish the ways in which real needs can be met that adhere to the general will. This now becomes an issue of diversity. It seems that legislation that is in the interest of the general will must lay out rules to which all people in a society must adhere. This leaves little room for diversity in political practice, or in other words, it supposes that there is one right way for a political system to function. This assertion is in direct conflict with the idea of political diversity because it establishes that in a world with politically diverse sovereign nations, there can only be a single “correct” system of government, i.e., one which properly adheres to the interests of the general will. This objection may be countered with the argument that each sovereign nation may have its own culture which creates different sets of “general wills,” yet if this were the case then the borderlines of countries are merely arbitrary dividers of culture. That is, you could just as easily subdivide a single nation into subcultures and make the same argument until each individual person becomes a subculture of their own and the entire objection collapses on itself.

Despite these two problems with Rousseau’s philosophy of inequality, I nonetheless find it compelling by virtue of its practicality. It lends itself very well to a discussion of differentiating between real and false needs and by viewing inequality as a product of convention, identifies the source of a host of major social issues which I regrettably do not have time to discuss here.

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[Essay 14] “On Marx’s So-Called ‘Human Emancipation’”

Marx’s account of the world, as expressed through his discussion of equality and emancipation, is quite refreshing following a deep exploration of modern social contract theorists. His discussion is fundamentally based on the distinction he makes and the relationship he establishes between the political realm and the more general human realm of life. His argument is quite strong, and its only significant weakness may actually become another of its strengths if properly taken up.

Marx begins his journey toward the idea of human emancipation by distinguishing between the rights of citizens and the rights of man. The former, he identifies as the rights that a person holds as a member of civil society while the latter are those rights which a person has regardless of their social context. He then defines liberty as the right to do anything that one wishes so long as it does not harm others and equality as the equal right of all to liberty. Then, he establishes security as the chief concern of civil society and states that security exists in a civil society so long as its citizens are guaranteed the preservation of their person, their rights, and their property. However, political equality is not a necessary condition for security and likewise, security is not a sufficient condition for equality. That is to say, there is no relationship of necessity or causality between security and equality. This is important for Marx because it shows where exactly he believes society goes wrong. Referring to and critiquing social contract theorists and their construction of political society as a distinct realm of its own, Marx argues that this “old civil society” has a “directly political” character which alienates a person from the experience of the whole of human life. In other words, he asserts that old civil society creates an artificial separation between the true human experience of a person and their political participation in civil society. Though he does not use this language, it is very helpful to think of his point here as being a commentary on personal contexts. His argument is that in old civil society, people lose sight of the fullness of human experience because they get so caught up with the context they operate in, i.e., the political realm. Each person is then seen essentially as a mechanical part that makes up a political state; Marx finds this objectionable because it reduces humans to merely political entities. People, then, live simply to serve the political state—the political state no longer exists to serve the people: the roles have been reversed.

To find a way out of this, Marx introduces the notion of emancipation. He writes, “All emancipation is restoration of the human world and the relationships of men themselves.”80 There is perhaps no better way to say it than this. Marx’s chief endeavor is to free humanity of this false and alienating relationship to the political state. He then distinguishes between two forms of emancipation: political emancipation and human emancipation. The latter, he believes, separates a person into two halves: “an egoistic independent individual on the one hand and to a citizen, a moral person, on the other.”81 This is the alienation I discussed above. Human emancipation, on the other hand, Marx holds to be of paramount concern and the end to which his whole model thus far is leading.

Before the concept of human emancipation can be fully grasped, it is necessary to understand its component parts. First, Marx gathers the different aspects of a person: a person as they relate to the political realm, a person’s individual work, and the relationships they have with other people. Next, he suggests that these identities should not be alienated from one another, but they should rather be merged into one identity which he calls a species-being. Once this has happened, a person must re-establish their political power as an integral part of their social

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power. Political power must no longer be separated from social power, but they should properly become one thing. Marx makes an important point as to why a distinction should be made between political and human emancipation, and why exactly human emancipation is of the utmost importance. He recognizes that political emancipation does not necessarily lead to human emancipation and that they are two very distinct concepts. Political emancipation is, in a sense, strictly legal. It gives people rights as citizens and corrects institutionalized inequalities. However, it is quite clear to any remotely socially conscious person that the legal recognition of equality does not mean that certain groups are actually held as equal in every way. In other words, just because a group is legally recognized as equal does not mean that they are recognized by their community as such. To achieve human emancipation, on the other hand, is to account for the entirety of a species-being and to integrate equality throughout the whole of it. Human emancipation is truly liberating because it does not reduce a person to a mere political being, but recognizes them in their entirety.

Marx’s critique is overall a very strong one. There is, however, one weakness that I would like to discuss, and that is that it may be the case in some circumstances, political emancipation must be the catalyst for human emancipation. Depending on how Marx is read, this may not even be an issue at all. On some level, this must be the case, as he states that All emancipation is restoration of the human world and the relationships of men themselves,”82 yet he gives primacy to human emancipation. If the two different classes of emancipation were not at odds with each other, the weakness I identified would not at all exist. However, it seems that in approaching very large, broad issues through the lens of political emancipation, the component parts of the species-being are necessarily severed from one another. That is to say, Marx seems to allow for political emancipation so long as it may truly lead to human emancipation and if possible at all, it is only possible through very small-scale corrections in inequality. As for true shifts in equality leading to emancipation, human emancipation must be the precise goal. Though this may be the case, political emancipation may still yet render itself useful. Though political emancipation is not ideal and should not be the goal, in the case that political inequality and alienation are so profound, political emancipation may be the first step toward human emancipation. In this way, human emancipation may be thought of metaphorically as two steps forward, while political emancipation may be thought of as one step back and two steps forward.

The strengths of Marx’s argument greatly outweigh the weaknesses. First and foremost, he identifies a real problem in the world—his is not an endeavor of intellectual muscle-flexing or a mere exercise in political philosophy. His work is extraordinarily focused, especially in the context of his historical predecessors, on only the problems directly relevant to the problem he is trying to solve. That is not at all to say that Rousseau, Locke, and the like squander their philosophic capitol on irrelevancies, but simply that Marx’s focus is clearly set on a very specific set of social problems from which his political prescription originates. This is quite clear by his lack of an account of human nature. Rather than concerning himself with a priori, metaphysical truths about the nature of humanity, he bases his philosophy on the social inequalities and alienation he identifies in society. The very fact that he is so focused on the socio-political context that he finds himself in plays a key role in the way in which he holds human emancipation above political emancipation. This is the case because it allows him to recognize that the real problem is not that certain people hold unequal political opportunities and rights, but that the very framework that separates a person from the experiences they have creates a profound form alienation that cannot be accounted for by simply changing laws. His account is very refreshing because it seems so connected with reality in a very real sense. What I mean by

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this is that he does not talk about the political realm as if it were a legitimately distinct “other world” in which different rules apply, but he takes it rather to be just another aspect, albeit an important one, of human life. He grounds his approach in social claims relevant to his world context—i.e., that economic, political, social, and other systems exist as they do—and not in a broad religious claim or a claim about the nature of humanity. By doing this Marx creates the condition for the possibility of human emancipation to appear as it does in his work. He recognizes that vast and dynamic change takes place throughout history but because he identifies the development of species-being (through human emancipation, in the case that society goes astray) as of paramount importance, his political philosophy will remain relevant in many more contexts than that of his social contractarian predecessors.

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[Letters 1-6] “On Whether the Present Generation has an Obligation in Action to Consider the Wellbeing of Future Generations”

[Letter 1 Written by Tony Dundon]

Nathan,

I was thinking the other day during philosophy about a couple of the authors we had read in the past couple of weeks in Intergenerational Justice. As I was going over their respective arguments about how we owe or don't owe respective duties or considerations to future generations and I couldn't help but think to myself that this whole debate hinges on a question which perhaps may not be at issue at all. I want to suggest that any debate over the form or validity of a concept of intergenerational justice derives from the problem of understanding the identity of posterity and future persons and thus how those persons should be regarded in terms of political and legal justice. I furthermore want to assert that while the question of identity is significant to a conception of justice at all.

I suppose I should begin by explaining why I feel that the question of identity is so significant to intergenerational justice issues. The question of identity is a crucial for any human being: bar none. The conception of a “self” and “who an individual is” is a fundamental and yet disturbingly unclear issue inside the realm of politics at large. Political philosophy and political theory provides some discussion of identity, but mostly on a limited, functional definition necessary for discussing political and legal mechanics for a greater conception of government and society. Such functional definitions are limited in scope necessarily: to form an actual and workable system of justice, some provision of “who a person is” must be established, since laws are formed to limit the behaviors of individuals. However, the unique problem presented in issues of temporal justice, particularly in contemporary liberal society, is that “who a person is” is something that the normal understanding of persons does not easily conform itself to. In questions of intergenerational justice, future generations are a party who literally cannot be defined in a strict understanding of “real.” However, I want to posit that in light of this question, being “real” may not be the necessary precondition for identity in the first place and that it can be derived logically. In a way similar to Hobbes and his conception of the Leviathan, posterity and future generations have a legally and politically real force the same way other political bodies exist and carry with them their own metaphorical, yet legally valid gravity. The conception of identity in the political and legal issues of intergenerational justice may in fact leap forward as a necessary step from the focus on “real” contemporary political issues.

To lay groundwork, I want to look back on previous concepts of intergenerational justice and explore why the issue of identity was not a problem for other societal systems which recognized obligations for future persons. A good example of a society which recognized obligation to future persons without an issue of identity is in the Hebraic tradition. Hebraic society saw persons in the light of a very specific religious tradition. In this tradition, Jewish persons were privileged beings in the light of the creator, favored and loved, and imbued with inherent

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protections according to the Covenant of Abraham. Persons were obligated by religious law, but were in the same way protected by it. This was executed in mandatory sabbath years and also in the practice of the Jubilee cycle, essentially assuring that society would return to an equalized and equitable state of affairs where persons could not be born wholly condemned by societal or political decisions of their predecessors. Concepts of what we would define as intergenerational justice in the Hebraic system derive from a simple basic assumption: God. In the Hebraic conception, all creation, including the land, animals, and especially people, had an intrinsic inherent value granted into is a part of God's creation. Thus to treat any part of God's creation with disrespect or iniquity was a criminal affront to his law. In the Hebraic tradition, identity does not emerge as a problem because it was decided: Jewish persons were a part of God's creation born into the obligations and protections of the Covenant, having an intrinsic value. Most strikingly, the conception of temporal justice which is exhibited in the Hebraic tradition gives a view of it which is not limited according to case only, but occurring over time. The Hebraic tradition's logic resolves according to the notion of intrinsic religious values to all of creation, however, these values do not need to be based in religion in order for their function to carry out in contemporary political society. The basic mechanics of the Hebraic intergenerational justice system actually provide an effective outline for determining a system of temporal justice in the present.

Present issues with intergenerational justice come mostly from an ideological breakdown built into an individualist and case based legal system. One of the beauties of liberal systems of government was in that ability to adapt and modify according to the real and necessary problems facing a political system. In drawing away from religiously based systems of government, government was better able to deal with issues of political entanglement by working on a case by case system of resolutions. In religious systems, doctrine and dogma had the final say in how an issue was resolved, sometimes disallowing societal, cultural, or political change which undermined the very purpose in keeping order and preserving justice as the dogmatic conceptions of the world limited the scope of tradition's effectiveness. Ironically enough, individualistic, capitalist, liberalism has in some ways reached this same point. Within contemporary individualist systems, justice is determined according to case by case individual encounters with justice. In the language of the enlightenment, these individual encounters are the emergent concepts of rights where-in justice is the preservation of an individual's, or a group of individuals', rights. However, a shortfall of this conception of justice which the Hebraic system actually manages is that of the concept time. Life is not static, and in many ways, specific events are carried out continuously following their being-done. Because events take place over time and the effects of events are felt far into the future, a system of justice must follow an understanding that this temporal factor and the effects of an event moving forward in time must be addressed, meaning that the conception of individual rights, or many individuals' rights, must also be understood according to an assumption of temporal effect.

Simply put, a good conception of justice must preserve the rights of all involved in the case equitably—what I claim must be reconsidered is the notion of rights following a necessary

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capacity to be affected by a decision. I am claiming that some manner of identity must be considered as given to those individuals who will feel the effects of a decision, even if that identity can only logically extend to that very recognition. Identity is in part formed by the decisions prior to its actual conception. Persons are before they are persons proper. Future generations are warranted protection because they are now, before their coming into being, feeling the effects of present generations. I stipulate that future identity, while mutable in the sense of precise circumstances and exact form in instantiation, can as a political and legal concept carry weight and bear necessary consideration by present generations.

My future self looks forward to your response,Tony

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[Letter 2 Written by Nathan Schmitt]

Tony,

I must thank you for your letter—I have wanted to take part in a rigorous conversation with someone over the issues that have come up in our Intergenerational Justice course and now the opportunity has finally presents itself.

Your letter raises some very interesting and extremely relevant points and I’d like to develop them in some depth. Without further delay, here are the assertions you have presented as I understand them:

1. The “realness” of a person is not a necessary condition for the concept of identity.2. Identity can be logically derived—i.e., in the absence of an instantiated and carnal

person, identity may still be recognized.3. Prior circumstances sufficiently comprise the identity of a future person such that a future

person may be said to be worthy of protection from harm before being carnally instantiated.

In this reply, I will respond to your first two assertions and will send you another letter soon in an effort to frame a discussion of the third, which will inevitably be more difficult to take on.

The main argument I have identified in support of the first assertion outlined above is this: that the term and concept “posterity” must be thought of as one and the same as an actual collective political body. In other words, though a political body is not an “actual person,” so to speak, and cannot be spatially identified, it still has rights and therefore the same treatment should be afforded to future generations as is to the present generation.

Implicit to this argument is the idea that principles applied in the spatial dimension—i.e., geographically and among actual people—can be extended also into the temporal dimension.

This, I believe, may be the case, but it does not answer the question of how an identity may be said to exist in absence of its physical manifestation. The closest to an argument for this that I can identify in your letter is when you write: “Because events take place over time and the effects of events are felt far into the future, a system of justice must follow an understanding that this temporal factor and the effects of an event moving forward in time must be addressed [by this justice system].”

This, however, assumes identity in order to justify intergenerational justice, instead of providing a logical proof for non-carnal identity. In light of this, I would like to propose a proof for identity that does not require a corresponding particular and physical person. In the following analysis, I will attempt to answer both of your first two assertions.

Our good friend G.W.F. Hegel lends himself very well to this argument, though perhaps against his will—or at the very least, without intention. In his Philosophy of History, Hegel writes that

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the history of the state is comprised of the deeds of the people.83 That is to say, the people, by their deeds, form the substance of the state’s history and share this all in common.

To interject my own observation—the relevance of which will shortly become obvious—I would like to point out that the people who enact these deeds are each a part of a generation. This statement can be reduced to logical terms by a couple of applications of the law of equivalence, the steps of which I will leave out as they are quite obvious: all generations are in part comprised of a multitude of deeds. Furthermore, in reality, a generation overlaps the next in such a way that it is impossible to pinpoint a particular generation within a temporal continuum. In essence, all I mean is that because people are continuously being born every second, there is no real separation between generations—we create the idea of “generations” as a way of artificially delineating our collective inhabitance of time—and therefore the history of a state via the deeds of its people is simply a continuous history.

Hegel continues, “The spirit of a people is a determinate and particular spirit, and is further modified by the degree of its historical development.”84 The “spirit of the people” (Geist) that he refers to is the conglomeration and synthesis of all of the deeds and conditions of the society—Geist is a determinate and necessary part of an individual’s identity. Given that a generation already exists, Geist exists as a part of the concept identity-itself, regardless of whether or not this identity actualizes itself in a carnal future person. That is to say, by the very existence of Geist, a particular part of human identity can be said to exist.

We’re still not quite to the point of justification that we need to be, but we’re getting close. I have proven that an aspect of identity, Geist, exists regardless of whether or not a future person will be actualized. Now it must be shown that this aspect is a sufficient condition for claiming identity itself. To this end, I must momentarily resort to very abstract terms. I apologize for the Hegelian style, but it seems particularly useful:

A particular aspect of a general concept affects the entire concept insofar as it interacts with the whole or another part of the concept. If a particular aspect of a general concept does not in any way affect the general concept in question, the aspect must be said to be completely distinct from the concept and therefore not an aspect thereof. It follows that, any particular aspect which corresponds to a general concept affects the whole of the concept either by affecting the whole directly, or by affecting another part which in turn affects another, etc, eventually affecting the whole of the concept. Therefore, I conclude, that a particular aspect (in our case, Geist) must necessarily affect, either directly or indirectly, the general concept to which it relates (in our case, identity), or the two would not relate at all—however, it has already been shown that the two do relate in our case.

Thus, Geist is a necessary condition of identity. In order to make the move from a necessary to sufficient condition, I must point out that in the absence of certainty against future people, Geist must be considered a sufficient condition for identity because of the mere possibility of an actual future person. The very possibility of an actual person is enough to satisfy this argument

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because, as a result of the lack of indisputable evidence for the non-existence of future people, we are forced into the following logical statement: it must not not be the case that Geist affects the identity of future people.† By the law of double negation, this statement can be restated: it must be the case that Geist affects the identity of future persons. We have finally arrived at our sufficient condition, and thus have completed a (formally) logical proof of real identity despite a lack of a physical individual.

To take the preceding argument out of the realm of the abstract and reframe it in a way that is once again useful to our original question, here is a summary:

Generations are not actually distinct from each other, but are rather continuous, and therefore each person is effectively part of one continuous generation. Each person within this continuous generation enacts deeds that shape the “spirit of the people,” which is an aspect of identity. Given that these premises are true, it follows from logical argument that unless we are one-hundred percent certain that there will be no future people, we must recognize that our actions directly or indirectly affect the entirety of their identity.

The bulk of this response to you has been a proof for your second assertion: that identity can be logically derived. Indeed it can. I would like to point out that though I have proven that we can affect future people with our present deeds, I have stopped short of positing that they in fact deserve protection from harm. This is because thus far my argument has been amoral, and the question of duties and rights is a question of morality.

Please expect my first correspondence on the issue of rights to arrive soon, but now it is after 3:00 AM, and I must relieve myself of the conscious world.

Stay fresh,Nathan

P.S. The above argument is based on logic, and logic is to be distinguished from reason. Logic I believe to be a tool of analytic philosophy, which is to be the basis of the deontological claims above. The argument is meant to provide an answer to the claim: “Actual identity cannot be logically derived in the case that not real and particular person exists.” Please recognize that though it is logically valid, the argument is not intended to justify anything on the basis of pragmatism or practicality.

† We are forced into this statement because we begin with the statement “it must not be the case that Geist affects the identity of future persons” but since this has been shown to be false, we must negate this statement resulting in: “not: it must not be the case that Geist affects the identity of future persons.” I have simply relocated the negation “not” in order to make the meaning more clear.

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[Letter 3 Written by Nathan Schmitt]

Tony,

In this I hope to begin a dialogue in order to address the last of three points identified in my previous letter:

“Prior action sufficiently comprises the identity of a future person such that a future person may be said to be worthy of protection from harm before being carnally instantiated.”

Now, some form or another of discussion as to whether or not future persons deserve protection against harm has been presented in multifarious forms throughout our Intergenerational Justice course. Some thinkers have insisted that duties be tied to rights in such a way that one may not have the latter in the absence of the former.85 Others justify rights of future persons via interests—essentially, if they can have interests, they have rights.86 Others abandon metaphysical justifications in favor of utilitarian ones.87

I’d like to avoid a prolonged discussion of Derek Parfit’s paradox as it’s been all but beaten to death in class, but I can’t avoid saying a bit about it since it does raise legitimate concerns—or as I hope to show, maybe it doesn’t. What I have to say about Parfit is that just because we shape the identity of future persons does not in any way entail that we are free of our responsibility for the effects of our actions on their wellbeing. To argue otherwise is to also necessarily and categorically negate all rights of all persons: if I act on you, Tony Dundon, I shape your identity in some way. My own moral accountability then disappears because the person you might have been post-my-action does not exist and you were therefore not harmed in any way. That is, if I punch you at 12:00 pm on November 13, 2009 I have not harmed you in any way because there was no Tony Dundon who was not punched at 12:00 pm on November 13, 2009 who would have been the recipient of the harm.

This is of course an absurd argument because it contradicts its own premises (Hegel would be proud). Parfit bases his argument on the assumption that our actions can have moral consequences but by simply developing his argument to the end of its logical course as I have above, we see that moral consequences at all are, in fact, categorically impossible. In effect, the position I am arguing against is summarized logically as follows—it is grossly oversimplified and I will skip several steps for brevity’s sake but it gets the point across well enough:

P ⊃ (Q • R) (Premise) Key(Q v R) ⊃ ¬P (Premise) P = moral consequences of action P (Parfit’s Assumption) existQ • R Q = a set particular action¬P R = a set of moral consequences

of actionConclusion: P • ¬P

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As I have shown, it takes nothing more than rudimentary logic to prove invalid, false, and absurd the argument that because we shape a future person’s identity we do not harm them.

The next and final step in the logical argument for protection of future persons is to provide a justification for a moral imperative in light of the prior discussion of identity. In other words, I have established that our actions do, in fact, affect future persons, but we now need to know why this can be a bad thing and what reason we have to be compelled by moral directive against such action. A summary of where we have been thus far:

“Generations are not actually distinct from each other, but are rather continuous, and therefore each person is effectively part of one continuous generation. Each person within this continuous generation enacts deeds that shape the “spirit of the people,” which is an aspect of identity. Given that these premises are true, it follows from logical argument that unless we are one-hundred percent certain that there will be no future people, we must recognize that our actions directly or indirectly affect the entirety of their identity.”

The conclusion of my last letter is now the premise of the present issue: that our actions in the present affect the entirety of the identity of future persons. At this point I must make one assumption that follows from another:

1. It is morally repugnant to do harm against a person.2. It is a moral imperative that we do not harm others.

I make these two assumptions because they seem to be, for the most part, universally agreed upon. By the very nature of acting on a person we affect their identity and therefore, if the act we take is a harmful one, we can say that the actor harms the identity of the recipient of the action—this is the moral link we needed. When the second assumption above is applied, we must say that if an act we take harms the identity of a person, we have a moral imperative to prevent that harmful action. As I discussed in my previous letter to you, our actions in the now affect the identities of future persons and therefore the present argument also applies to future persons.

To distill my argument and make it useful in the real world, let me summarize: we have an obligation to future people to not commit acts of harm against them, in the exact way that we have these obligations for people who are currently living. As I discussed above, to say that we do not harm them because we shape the identity of future persons (that is, the way the argument was originally taken) leads to a contradiction and is therefore not a valid argument.

What I have shown is not, then, that future persons have rights, but rather that we in the present have an obligation not to harm these people-to-be; this is derived from our obligation not to harm people in general. Up until now I have purposefully avoided the question, “What if I don’t think it’s wrong to harm other people?” because it seems to me to be a disingenuous effort to take on the issue at hand. If a person doesn’t see the wrong in harming others, the question of morality in general is irrelevant and they will certainly not be fit for any sort of society.

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The question may arise, “How do we determine what constitutes a harm to a person?” and to this my answer is simple. My job here is to prove:

4. The “realness” of an actual person is not a necessary condition for the concept of identity.5. Identity can be logically derived—i.e., in the absence of a carnal person, identity must

still be recognized.6. Prior action sufficiently comprises the identity of a future person such that a future person

may be said to be worth of protection from harm before being carnally instantiated.

Essentially, my response to the question raised is to invoke the political question doctrine: I have provided the foundation for the justification and obligation of harms protection and it is the job of the policy maker and of society to determine exactly how to apply this protection.

On the side of practical application, I certainly have my opinions about the issue at hand and would be glad to discuss them when it is appropriate. For now, though, I would like to know if you believe my reasoning to stand on solid ground and if not, how I might help it hastily solidify.

Metaphysically,Nathan

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[Letter 4 Written by Tony Dunon]

Nathan,

I want to begin this letter by saying that I certainly hope your choice of example in discussion of Parfit’s moral theories was not the subconscious expression of some offense which I offered you unknowingly. Given the black belt, you are fully qualified to, as they say, “beat the living crap out of me,” so please do let me know if there’s any issue that need be addressed. Moving on, I want to address the points you’ve brought up so far.

I want to begin by first summarizing what I’ve gathered from your points thus far. First, I want to identify the point you made at the end of your first letter, regarding a conception of Hegelian “Geist” as a sort abstract way of constituting an analytic substance for the identity of future generations. These actually well suits the conception of morality and justice I want to put forth in this letter.

I want to retouch on the argument for a conception of posterity as an aspect of Geist for just a moment and parse out what I understand to be the most significant parts relative to the premise you provide in the conclusion of your last letter. Let me restate your summary in brief:

1. “Generations” should be thought of not as distinct but rather as a single continuous generation

2. Each person within this continuous generation enacts deeds that shape its identity. 3. It follows logically that unless we are certain that there will be no future people, we

must recognize that our actions necessarily affect the entirety of their identity.

To begin, I think that the conception of generations not actually being distinct from one another, but continuous successfully grounds a concept of justice which is not subject to the analytic pitfalls of other morality systems. By assuming the connection between generations, we effectively do two things in terms of the conception of morality, and so the conception of justice which we’re trying to achieve here. First, we remove the problems presented by Person Affecting Principles. By establishing future generations as a form of person, that is, while they are not instantiated, their assurance of becoming so is such that they must logically be considered persons already, we do away with the (and I agree you’re your assessment of it as such) fallacious assumption in Parfit’s identity paradox. When we recognize future generations as necessarily affected by the present one, then we’ve established the grounds for rational regulation of behavior. This leads into the second portion of the argument where since we’ve established viable moral subjects of future generations, we can then form solid and lasting deontological moral imperative which both preserves the freedom of present generations by outlining just restrictions on behavior which are basis for further legal rights.

I think the pressing issue at hand, now that we have established the viability of future generations as at least logical moral persons, is to determine what it means to establish a system of morality based both on consequential and deontological principles which form a concept of justice for

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future generations. I want to revisit another assertion you made in your previous letter that I find a crucial notion for beginning the process of forming this theory. You state that, “we must say that if an act we take harms the identity of a person, we have a moral imperative to prevent that harmful action” (Letter 3). I want to reply by beginning first, that I find this to be a valid prerogative for morality as a whole and a sound principle on which to base the restriction of a behavior. The premise which any concept of restriction of self-serving behavior on the basis of secular morality must begin with is simply that human life has intrinsic value. Without this conception of human life having value, I would have to say that there cannot be any morality in the first place: all moral understanding hinges upon some sort of value system. If there is to be any conception of societal morality that extends itself beyond the Hobbesian moral imposition, then the members of that society must be considered as having value. The understanding of human life as having an intrinsic value thus provides the basis for your moral imperative, since working for the preservation of the human life and so necessarily its quality which our behaviors may be justly restricted and the interests of others rightly preserved.

I now want to move to setting up the ground work for an intergenerational moral imperative which will serve the purposes we have been working for. First, I want to discuss the conceptions of morality which we discussed in class namely consequentialism and deontology. Consequentialism is an understanding of morality based on ends: an act is immoral based on the relative trade which occurs in the means by which the outcome is achieved (the ends can justify the means taken to achieve them). The second conception, deontology, views morality according to judgment principles: acts can be a priori immoral. For our purposes, these two conceptions, which I will say now, are not mutually exclusive, will serve the purpose of providing the blueprints for the moral schema I want to put in place. Given these two conceptions we set about outlining actions which are just by marking those which are unjust.

The point I want to engage now is that of what it thus means to inflict harm or do wrongs to a person whom is not yet carnally instantiated. When anyone takes a particular course of action which they know has a high probability or will certainly result in harm to another they are acting immorally, as you stated above. However, what I want carry forward your moral imperative into the scheme of intergenerational justice. The point I intend to make here is that it is unjust when a generation knowingly acts in such a way which diminishes the quality of life of a future generation. What this establishes is fairly clear: if a generation of individuals has the capability for foreseeing that an act or behavior has a high probability of causing harm, the avoidance of which we shall call the damage to the reasonable foreseeable interest of that future generation, then that present generation has a moral obligation (as per your imperative) to mitigate those damages by acting in an alternative fashion or not at all if possible. This intergenerational imperative that I suggest preserves the notions which you have put forward in your previous letters and jumps to the next logical conclusion given our subject.

What I want to address now is the potential counter argument which we have been dealing with in some form for the last letters, mainly how do we justify limiting our behaviors in the present now which have guaranteed benefits for people already instantiated who have real interests. For

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this discussion, I actually want to reference Auerbach and his discussion on obligations to previous generations. Auerbach basically puts forward that while it is possible to wrong the dead, it is not truly possible to harm them. Auerbach frames his discussion on Feinberg’s and Partridge’s discussion of this issue and basically concludes that while a moral or sociological imperative can create the possibility of wronging the dead, it is not equally possible (contra Feinberg) to harm the dead who can have no “staked” interests which can be harmed. The point I want to draw from this discussion is that the intergenerational moral imperative is based on both consequentialist and deontological morality, presenting an opportunity for both wrongs and harms. If one generation knowingly acts in such a fashion which will assure some sort of harm comes to a future generation, they have violated the consequentialist moral basis by assuring a real harm which has not yet come to fruition. Conversely, if a generation knowingly acts in violation of the foreseeable reasonable interests of a future generation by damaging those interests (thus causing a harm) then they have also wronged posterity.

To clarify my point regarding the notion of how the consequentialist basis works here, I want to present a metaphor. When a person fires a gun, a person knowingly sets in motion a chain of events. The shooter pulls the trigger which activates the spring which triggers the hammer which ignites the powder in the cartridge which propels the bullet or shot down the barrel of the weapon and flying off into space in whatever direction that barrel is fixated. The impact and effects of the projectile upon impact are assured which a great deal of certainty, though unforeseen factors may change this outcome in both negligible and insubstantial ways. Now, when we discuss firing a weapon we refer to this process as all one act, from the pull of the trigger to the impact of the projectile with its intended or unintended target, however, this singular act is actually a series of actions. Why is this example significant to our understanding of intergenerational morality? When we as rational actors perform a deed we effectively fire a gun, the projectile there-of being the impact of our actions on future generations. If we point the “barrel” which can be construed as the projected results of our actions in a particular direction which is the foreseeable results of our actions the impact of our deeds in the present can have a very real and profound negative or positive effect, for future generations. These effects, like a bullet, may have to travel through time and space before it can impact and cause harm, but knowingly creating a future harm to a future person is equivocal to causing present harm to a present person. Guns and gunfire, because they present such great potential for certain and profound harm, are (justly) strictly regulated. In fact, the legal principles which allow for the strict regulation of gunfire and guns generally are at work in other aspects of the law already as well.

If legal limitations on behavior can based on foresight and reasonable conduct already serve the preservation of the rights and interests of others presently, according to the conception you have laid out with the very personhood and identity of future generations being real according to the actions of the present generation, it is not a stretch to extend these legal theories to that of persons-yet-to-be. If we take the conception of persons as one continuous generation, comprised of individuals who do have real and valid interests occurring over different moments in time,

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then it is not difficult to extend the legality of negligence law and expectations of the “reasonable and prudent person” and place this expectation on issues of intergenerational harms which may occur over longer periods of time. In fact, the attractive nuisance doctrine may also have legal basis for intergenerational morality since it derives from the basic negligence principles.

The next logical step to this discussion will be to set about fully formulating the moral principles which we’ve developed thus far and applying them to already existing legal theory and making the argument for how this might be enforceable. However, as it now approaches the witching hour of three in the morning, reasonable foresight tells me it might be prudent leave the discussion of legal theory to my next letter and retire.

Keep it real,Tony

Post Script: Yes, I fully accept the responsibility for every pun made in the sign-off. You now have the vindication to punch me in the face if necessary.

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[Letter 5 Written by Nathan Schmitt]

Tony,

Funny you should mention that example; I’ve been put in a number of uncomfortable situations because of it. For some reason, whenever I need an example of personal harm on-the-fly, I seem to always ask the person I’m speaking with to imagine that I punch them. I’m not sure exactly why this comes to mind first, and why I then decide to actually say it, but I used it in one of Cheyney Ryan’s classes and he gave me a blank stare…and it was quite uncomfortable.

Now, to the point. I believe it is the case through the previous analyses that we can conclude that it is possible for current people to harm future generations. I particularly liked your gun-fire example; however, I would take it in a different direction to prove an additional point. You said that, “We refer to [the firing of a gun] as all one act…however, this singular act is actually a series of actions.”88

Consider for a moment that the reverse of this statement were the case, that we actually think of firing a gun as a series of actions, and it seems that we end up with an analogical equivalent to the argument in opposition to our own—the argument that we in the present cannot harm future persons. In order for them to say that we cannot harm future persons, they must only look at a part of the chain of consequences that result from their action.

If the proponents of this opposing view were to try to use their same reasoning to answer the question, “Can a person be held responsible for the death of someone whom he or she shoots with a gun?” the answer would have to be “no.” For, by the same reasoning they used to dismiss present persons’ moral responsibility to future persons, they must also dismiss the moral responsibility of a gunman to the victim. That is to say, the only action the gunman could be held responsible for is the very first effect in the causal chain, whatever it may be. That the bullet flies through the air and later penetrates a body cannot be seen as the person’s own action—the moral responsibility is thus transferred from the gunman to the bullet as soon as the bullet leaves the gun.

The most likely counter argument to what I have just asserted is something to the effect of the following: “Yes this is true, but you miss the point. In the case of future generations, the harmed person does not yet exist—is not a real person—but in the case of the gunman, the harmed person does, in fact, exist.” This person has clearly not been following our discussion. In response:

“First, I would point out that Tony has already made the distinction between harms and wrongs quite clear. Your argument,” I would say to them, “seems to fall apart on this alone. You would likely change ‘harm’ in the first place to ‘wrong’ in referring to future generations, but then your argument breaks down altogether. In recognizing a wrong to a future person, you are recognizing that an injustice is done and therefore proving our argument to us.

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“Second, and more crippling to your position, is that we have already discussed what it means to be person enough to be the object of rights, and future persons have been shown to fit into this category by arguments discussed in previous letters.”

To put the final nail in the coffin of such objections, think of what our opponent’s argument entails. Their argument entails that identity is not continuous in the way in which I described in letter two, because if it were, injustice could be done to a future person. However, if identity is not in fact continuous, then they have no argument for holding a gunman responsible for a shooting. This is because each instant identity must be different than the previous—which is just to say it is not continuous—and therefore the identity of the gunman at the instant the gun was fired is a different identity during the instant the victim was killed. Our opponent is then forced into agreeing that identity is continuous and consequently accepting our line of reasoning.

You mentioned near the end of your last letter that you intend on formulating the philosophy we’ve discussed so far into something recognizable under the law. This is a task I will leave you to for now, though I would like to provide you with some advice in this endeavor. In fact, I would like to give advice generally to all who endeavor to construct such a system.

In his essay, Democracy and Educational Administration, John Dewey writes:

Democracy is so often and so naturally associated in our minds with freedom of action, forgetting the importance of freed intelligence which is necessary to direct and to warrant freedom of action…[Rights to guarantee freedom of mind] are guaranteed because without them individuals are not free to develop and society is deprived of what they might contribute.89

This I think is a lesson that is of the utmost importance if issues of intergenerational justice—that is, all issues—are to advance as major political outcomes. Let me briefly unpack the above passage and I’ll explain what I mean. The main issue that Dewey is getting at is the utter lack of importance assigned to intellectual freedom—i.e., freedom of expressing opinions, of belief, of assembly for discussion, of the press, etc—in relation to freedom of action (freedom to use property however the owner wants, for business to act mostly unrestrained, etc).

He establishes a hierarchy that I believe is not only fitting, but necessary. If primacy is given to freedom of action, then these free actions may end up severely limiting our freedom of mind. It’s easy to see where I’m going with this: primacy has been given to freedom of action, and these free actions have already severely limited our freedom of mind. Take American education as an example.

There are an incredible number of factors that play a role in the education crisis in America today, but one of the most fundamental seems to be that certain class of people have been forced into circumstances that do not allow them even the awareness of the possibility of the opportunity they may have. This is certainly not a result of paramount concern with a freedom of

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the mind—it is just outright incompatible with reality. The lack of freedom of mind—in this case the lack of being aware of the incredible opportunity that might be available—seems to be in part a result of the lack of regulation of the institutions which shape this climate (corporations, schools, Wall Street, the real estate industry, etc: institutions whose actions play even a slight role in creating this disadvantaged class). A lack of regulation has essentially been a result of these institutions objecting that they should have the freedom to act as they will. I apologize for grossly oversimplifying the issue at hand, but it is far too complex to take up here, and this skeleton is all that is relevant to the discussion.

What Dewey points out in his passage is that situations such as these come about as a result of valuing the freedom of people and institutions to act however they wish, simply because they claim the right, over the freedom of mind that is required for a just and productive society.

This is important for our discussion because without a shift toward focusing on freedom of mind, the future looks incredibly bleak. There is no reason to assume that people’s intentions will become all of the sudden morally exemplary and their actions will follow suit. This is not to say that we should restrict freedom of action—I would claim nothing of the sort. All I mean is that freedom of mind must not be compromised by freedom of action, and that if one must be partially restrained, it should be freedom of action, but only for the purposes of perfecting the former.

Finally, I would like to respond to what I guess will be a common objection to what I have presented: that this will lead to utter oppression of actions but freedom of thought. However, I would point out that with physical oppression necessarily comes oppression of thought, and therefore this objection holds no water.

Solvo vestri mens,Nathan

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[Letter 6 Written by Tony Dundon]

Nathan,

I have to admit that in light of the fact that this hypothetical situation of you punching people comes up with more frequency, I will be less concerned for my safety specifically. However, I find it humorous that it’s one of your conversational “go-to” examples, but I figure if you spent a good portion of your developmental years studying martial arts and (speaking frankly) the most effective way to USE your fists, it would only be logical. I nevertheless take it with some consideration. Moving on, I think it’s probably about time to discuss the other forms of intergenerational potential for harm which have been our focus thus far.

I want to begin by saying that in this letter I want to make sure to deal with laying out some of the existing legal theory which I believe provides a framework for the legality of enforcing controls on present behaviors on an intergenerational basis. I want to then address the point you made about freedom of mind as being a crucial element to the basis for a generational ethic. Lastly, as the term is wrapping up and all manner of insanity is assuredly going to begin relatively soon, I wanted to provide a few of my closing thoughts on intergenerational justice and what I believe to be its great significance to the future of both philosophy and political science generally.

One of the reasons I chose to use the metaphor of the firing of a gun is because this activity which is one of the most legally important issues in modern prohibitive law. Guns and their use is one of the most dangerous and potentially harmful operations humans perform and it is because of the foreseeable drastic effects it entails it is justly strictly regulated. On a very specific level, gunfire creates a great potential for loss, through death and destruction, while also potentially creating gain for persons; sometimes this gain is illegitimate, such as in murder for gain, other times, it is a cause which assures the very survival of an individual, such as in self-defense or acquisition of food. While I am not here to discuss in great detail the philosophy of gunfire, I want to expand on this metaphor as a means to understand intergenerational ethics and justice. What we regulate guns and their use it is not the guns themselves but their use or their potential use. Thus, what we legally regulate is the behavior of persons, not guns per se; what we regulate is their well understood real potential harms of present acts which entail future consequence.

I want to now establish the groundwork for what it means to regulate or “criminalize” a behavior. By American jurisprudence, we define a crime as being of four parts: the act, the intent, the causation, and concurrence. The act, or actus reus, is necessarily made with intent to break the law in some fashion, or in legal terminology mens rea. With this follows causation, which is the causal relation from the actus reus and mens rea to the result (which will serve for our purposes as a harm/wrong). The final element of a crime is concurrence, which is the necessary temporal linking of the actus reus and the mens rea. If we are to legally regulate

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behaviors on the basis of intergenerational injustice, then we must show that these elements are already at play in intergenerational issues and are at present not being dealt with.

I now want to present what I feel is the most significant issue to my discussion in these letters which is that intergenerational justice is as valid a subject for legal regulation as contemporary justice and that the legal precepts and understandings at work in criminal common-law understanding provide a valid basis for the legal enforcement of intergenerational justice.

In order for an intergenerational “wrong” or “harm” to be at work, there must be either a violation of duty (wrong) or the violation of right (harm) and as you established by providing the proof for understanding that ultimately, “that unless we are one-hundred percent certain that there will be no future people, we must recognize that our actions affect the entirety of their identity” (Letter 2). In understanding that there will be future persons you also showed that by any assumption of justice or ethics, “that we in the present have an obligation not to harm these people-to-be” (Letter 3). I then demonstrated in my last letter that in any secular moral system, there is at work an assumption that, “that human life has intrinsic value” and that given this combined with the previous premises that future human life is assured we are both capable of harming posterity and morally obligated to avoid that harm (Letter 4). What we have done here is established the first three elements of a crime. The actus reus is any action which will, or will almost assuredly, result in harm to the foreseeable interests of posterity and thus wrongs them. The mens rea is the knowing commission of said act which results in harm to posterity which a person (read: both natural person and conglomerated body, such as corporation) can reasonably foresee. The element of causation is in the demonstrable connection of the committed actus reus and knowingly wrongful commission of the act in the mens rea in the act which causes the harm and wronging to posterity. Finally, it is the element of concurrence which is the most crucial and most problematic element to any aspect of intergenerational justice, since the three previous elements of a crime are determined by this binding of the actus reus to the mens rea in time. In understanding concurrence it can be understood that if an individual has specific intent to knowingly cause harm to posterity through some action, concurrence took place at such time that the action was made with the knowledge of guarantee future harm. However what makes concurrence problematic is in intergenerational harms which occur via lack of foresight, or negligence. However, through already established principles of reasonable prudence in crimes of negligence it is possible to show that foresight is a legally enforceable practice and can be adjusted to issues of intergenerational justice.

In jurisprudence, criminal negligence is defined as the “failure to exercise the care toward others which a reasonable or prudent person would do in the circumstances or taking action which such a reasonable person would not.”90 The elements at play here are that an actor must have a sufficient duty to exercise prudence, and that not doing so violated that duty and that violation caused harms to the injured party. Now for our purposes, as we are dealing with issues on a comprehensively large and temporally elongated scope, we must necessarily shift the understandings which go into the elements of criminal negligence. I thus now turn to our discussions in previous letters as I believe that they have already laid out the logical precepts for

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a suitable shift. First, when we understand human life to have an intrinsic and legally defensible value, we create the aforementioned duty not to harm the interests of posterity through the harm of diminishing their quality of life, proving the first element of intergenerational criminal negligence. Second, when we diminish the quality of life for posterity and future generations it is a violation of said duty since we are causing real harms-yet-to-be to persons-yet-to-be. Finally, when we have created assured or certain harms to assured or certain persons we have in fact performed certain damages.

Now that it has been shown that negligence can be intergenerational injustice, the necessary question is at what point a person acting negligently of future generations. I feel that it is necessary to clarify here that when a person knowingly acts in such a way which will result in harm to future generations, as in such as in Derek Parfit’s (ironically titled) “Risky Energy Policy” example they are, as you showed in Letter 3, they are not acting negligently but with outright specific intent. What I want to define as intergenerational negligence is when an earlier generational party has acted in such a way that was in their ability to foresee as potentially harmful, but did nothing to remedy or mitigate the damage to posterity, thus violating their duty. To be clear, such cases are necessarily extremely rare, since the point at which persons who profit by and are responsible for the harm realize that they are acting in such a way which will result in damages to future persons, they have acted with malfeasance. In Parfit’s example of the “risky” energy policy, when that body of persons, be it the state or corporation, adopted a policy which it knew would result in damage and destruction to future persons, it acted with the same malfeasance which is present when a person sets a car rolling down a hill into busy intersection. It can be understood then that any and all acts of intergenerational criminal negligence can be understood as ones in which no active steps were taken to mitigate potential damages which might not have occurred if not for the actions body involved. The issue at hand here is that persons must be held accountable for their actions such as they are responsible for them.

It is not hard to see, given our understanding of intergenerational justice, that the elements of a crime can be fitted to a conception of intergenerational justice which fits. The next logical step is to then place a presently enforceable deontological duty based in avoiding consequential harms to future generations on bodies who can affect suitably large damages on posterity with either enough capability of foresight or actual foresight to said damages. It is clearly that by even the most basic understanding of Essentially what is at play here is exactly what you brought up in discussion of Dewey, namely that when freedom of action goes unlimited such that it infringes ultimately upon freedom of mind, what results is actually enforced ignorance. In order to achieve freedom of mind I argue that persons maybe be ethically compelled to think regarding the consequences of their actions and such where a lack of this consideration may result in real physical harms to present or future persons they may be justly legally compelled to do so.

It is a basic understanding of the political theory which has shaped Western political thought, all the way from Machiavelli and Hobbes that the principle advantage of society is that some regulation of behavior, some diminishing of individual freedom on account of the success of the

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whole, can assure greater prosperity. What has not been considered thus far and is now an emerging school of thought is that the world and human kind must be considered in more holistic and comprehensive terms. No longer do individuals have the luxury of avoiding the radical existentialist freedom that we are responsible for our actions, as modernity has shown us in two-hundred years of wars, pollution, strife and gross disparity that blind “progress” is no progress at all. Specifically, I feel that what we have set about doing here is combating that bad faith in freedom of action the same way that unrestricted capitalism in modern society has shown itself equitably problematic. I feel that what we’ve done here are the best things we can hope to do which is provide a more mature conception of political philosophy and justice. I use the word maturity in the sense of growth and development: we have reached the capability as a species to understand that we affect ourselves and our world in their entirety and that we our actions have distinct consequences which we as species (just as your original conception of Geist suggests) will have to deal with. Just as with any new acquisition of capability, strength, power, or knowledge, we are now responsible for the wider effects of our actions.

Realistically is it possible to develop a system of legal enforcement which provides greater justice than the present one that persons will consent to in exchange for the system in which they currently exist? The answer to this question is, sadly, as you also mentioned, probably not. However this does not change what is at work. As people become more connected, better informed, and more frequently encounter the stark and terrifying realities of the results of their political conceptions, the demand for change, adaptation, and better designed systems which preserve and guarantee justice and well-being for humanity as a whole will continue. I thus want to assert in congruence with you that so long as we busy ourselves only with the occupations of our present circumstances and do not allow ourselves to consider (limiting freedom of thought on its face) whether or not the protection of the actions we take now is a just thing, we will never evolve socially and the world will continue to degrade at its present and extremely alarming rate.

Thus I feel that we have contributed to this project of maturity by presenting a conception of justice which extends beyond the mere here and now. The project which we have sought to affect has thus in some way been completed, however, it seems to be that it is only suitable consider it completed as another step in achieving a more just conception of politics and society. As far as what this end schema will look like, this potential utopia, I must admit that I lack any manner of articulating it. The best that I can do and I feel we have done together in some small way, is to point out where these problems exist and explore them in hopes of finding a better solution.

As it is now, once again, exceptionally late, I find that perhaps a future “I” can deal with these problems later. I figure that these problems will probably still be there for me to solve in the morning and if they’re not then I’ll have a new one to solve: finding another major.

Here’s to progress,Tony

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Endnotes

1 Sosa, David. Analytic Philosophy An Anthology (Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies (Paper)). Grand Rapids: Blackwell Limited, 2001. 121.2 Ibid. 1123 Ibid. 1154 Ibid. 1205 Ibid. 1406 Ibid. 1377 Ibid. 1428 Ibid. 199.9 Ibid. 20010 Ibid. 22511 Ibid. 22612 Ibid. 22713 Ibid. 22914 Ibid. 23015 Ibid. 23316 Ibid. 26317 Ibid. 26418 Ibid. 26619Ibid. 27920Ibid. 28221Ibid. 34522 Ibid. 34823 Ibid. 34924 Ibid. 34925 Ibid. 35626 Ibid. 35927 Ibid. 36128 Ibid. 362-36329 Ibid 36430 Ibid. 42331 Ibid. 42032 Ibid. 45733 Ibid. 459-46034 Ibid. 49835 Ibid. 50436 Ibid. 50637 Ibid. 50638 Rawls, John. Lectures in the History of Political Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2007. Print. 5439 Ibid. 5540 Ibid. 56-5741 Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. 8742 Rawls, John. Lectures in the History of Political Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2007. Print. 7343 Ibid. 74-7844 Ibid. 7845 Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. 83 (Part I, Chap. 13, Par. 5)46 Ibid. 9547 Ibid. 9748 Rawls, John. Lectures in the History of Political Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap of Harvard UP, 2007. Print. 5449 Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. 13950 Ibid. 14051 Ibid. 8352 Ibid. 83 Par. 653 Ibid. 8454 Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis: Hackett Company, Inc., 1980. Print. 855 Ibid. 9 (Sec. 6)

56 Ibid. 1057 Ibid. 1558 Ibid. 1759 Ibid. 860 Ibid. 1761 Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. 115-11662 Ibid. 10663 Ibid. 10764 Ibid. 10865 Ibid. 10966 Ibid. 109 (Sec 15)67 Ibid. 11568 Ibid. 10769 Ibid. 107 (Par. 7)70Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract (Penguin Classics). New York: Penguin Classics, 1968. Print. 6571 Ibid. 7272 Ibid. 6573 Ibid. 6574 Ibid. 6475 Ibid. 9676 Ibid. 7377 Ibid. 6378 Discourse on Inequality, as distributed in class. 4379Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract (Penguin Classics). New York: Penguin Classics, 1968. Print. 7380Marx, Karl. Ed. Lawrence H. Simon. Selected Writings. Indianapolis, ID: Hackett Company, Inc., 1994. Print. 2081 Ibid. 2182 Ibid. 2083 Runes, Dagobert D., ed. Treasury of Philosophy. New York, New York: The Philosophical LIbrary, 481. Print.84 Ibid. 48285 Macklin, Ruth. “Can Future Generations Correctly Be Said to Have Rights?” American Philosophical Association, 1973.86 Feinberg, Joel. “Rights, Justice, and the Bounds of Liberty.” Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.87 Rawls, John. “A Theory of Justice.” Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA.88 Letter 489 Dewey, John. Intelligence in the Modern World. New York: Random House Inc., 1939. Print. 40490 Law.com, ALM. "Definition: Negligence." 2009.http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=1314

(accessed 11/20/2009).