April 2, 2015 at 1:25 P.M. Alterations of the size of the text and previously corrected "errors" were reinserted in this essay. I will try to make all necessary corrections.
I have yet to receive a response concerning the Invicta watch matter. I look forward to receiving such a response from any one of the many parties that I have contacted about the issue.
I invite and welcome members of the public inquiring further about my watch. I will make as many of the details and documents public (concerning the Invicta watch "case") as I possibly can.
I will also continue to pursue the matter which so many people find symbolic of the very issues discussed in this essay. ("New Jersey Steals From the Poor to Give to the Rich.")
What follows is a list of sources accompanying my essay responding to Derek Parfit's classic article: "Innumerate Ethics."
I have experienced great difficulties and obstructions in signing-in to these blogs from my home computer and from NYPL computers. At any time I may be unable to sign-in to these blogs in order to continue writing. If this happens, I will struggle to create another blog somewhere online.
Another of my home computers has been rendered useless. I will do what I can at NYPL computers during 45 minutes per day.
Primary Sources:
John M. Trauber, "Should Numbers Count?," Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (Summer 1977), pp. 293-316.
Derek Parfit, "Innumerate Ethics," Philosophy and Public Affairs 7, no. 4 (Fall 1977).
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 67-87.
Secondary Sources:
Ian McEwan, The Children Act (New York: Doubleday, 2014).
Examination of autonomy in connection with the right to die question allows the British novelist to explore not only the underlying problem of ethical versus legal justice, but to focus on women's unique investment in critiques of the public/private distinction in liberal jurisprudence as expressed, for example, in the abortion controversy, but also with regard to freedom in sexual relations and equal dignity before the law regardless of gender.
Mr. McEwan's second recent novel to feature a woman's narrative voice is an engagement with crucial feminist issues in literature and law as well as philosophy. No reviewer has detected these themes in commenting on the novel, to my knowledge, as of my writing this paragraph.
Identity and agency issues are among the very questions dealt with by Derek Parfit in his article entitled "Innumerate Ethics" and in all of Professor Parfit's philosophical writings.
Ian McEwan is one of the most important novelists in the English language at the moment.
Deborah Friedelle, "The Body's Temple: In this Ian McEwan novel, a judge must decide the case of a teenage Jehova's Witness who refuses treatment for leukemia," The New York Times Book Review, September 14, 2014, p. 11. (What are the boundaries of paternalism by the state as against rights of individuals in the private realm? This reviewer seems confused as to the central themes of the book or why these themes matter to women in positions of authority. Is Ms. Friedelle also "Jennifer Shuessler"? Jill Abramson?)
Tessa Hadley, "The Children Act by Ian McEwan -- The Intricate Workings of Institutionalized Power," The Guardian, Thursday 11 September 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/the-children-act-ian-mcewan-review-novel ("Tessa" also missed the point of the novel. "'The Constant Gardner': A Movie Review.")
Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). ("Mana" -- the good -- and how to distribute the good in the bare-bones liberal state.)
F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (New York: MacMillan, 1897).
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1977). ("Hard Cases.")
Charles Fried, Right and Wrong (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1978). (The priority of rights to human dignity in the struggle for good results in biomedical controversies.)
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence On Modern Morals and Happiness (London: Penguin, 1985). (1st pub. 1793.) ("William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.") ("William Godwin" or "William Godwyn" are common spellings of this name before the standardization of spelling in the twentieth century and these are still acceptable uses, according to my Oxford Companion to the English Language. Hence, "counsellor" and "counselor," "algorithm" and "algorythm" are also acceptable spellings of these words.)
Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1983). (Public versus private moralities: "Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch on Freedom of Mind.")
H.L.A. Hart, "Between Utility and Rights," in Alan Ryan, Ed., The Idea of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1979), pp. 77-98.
Kimberly Hutchins, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (London: Polity, 2003). (Dialectics between, among, "as" genders: "Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
J.R. Lucas, On Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), esp. pp. 163-170. (Problems of distributive justice: Does justice inhere in situations, outcomes, persons, actions, rules or results?)
Alasdair McIntyre, "Egoism and Altruism," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. II, pp. 462-466. (New York: Dutton, 1967). (Paul Edwards, Ed.)
Alasdair McIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (Indiana: Notre Dame U. Press, 1968).
Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Harmonsworth, 1975). (R. Livingstone and G. Benton translators and editors. "Inequality.")
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark, 1989). ("The Idea of Perfection" and "The Sovereignty of Good.")
Michael Newman, Socialism: A Very Brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ("'Che': A Movie Review.")
Susan Moller Okin, "Gender, the Public and the Private," in David Held, Ed., Political Theory Today (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1991), pp. 67-91. (See the discussion above of Ian McEwan's The Children Act.)
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York & Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974). (Also Harvard University Press in America.)
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1971).
W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1930). ("Zero Dark Thirty.")
Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1982).
Judith Jarvis Thomson, Rights, Restitution and Risk: Essays in Moral Theory (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1986).
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Law in Modern Society (New York: Free Press, 1976).
Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (London & Indiana: Notre Dame U. Press, 1994), pp. 21-39.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindications of the Rights of Woman (London: Penguin Classics, 1975). (1st Pub. 1792.) ("Master and Commander.") (Rejecting the province of "ladies," for the first time in Western philosophy, as against the public or political life in society for "women" as equal "persons" before the law.)
I.
Discussions of ethics and/or politics as well as legal theory often center on problems of competing values: Individual liberty concerns are pitted against the collective need for equality. Rights questions of men and women are weighed against the interests of majorities, or the social good for groups of persons.
There are debates about the terms used to designate and understand these questions of metaethical-hermeneutics. A choice must be made between "deontological" as against "telelogical"," rights-based as distinguished from consequentialist-utilitarian theories. ("Derek Parfit's Ethics" and "John Rawls and Justice.")
At the heart of these discussions is the challenge of determining whether the "good of the many" (whatever that may mean if the notion is even coherent) is preferable to the "good of the few."
This tendentious formulation privileges good outcomes in the world over right actions that are a matter of conscience. A doubtful assumption that is often unarticulated in these discussions, however, is that it is at least possible to decide what is the good for many, or a majority, of persons that is somehow different from the decision-maker's opinion of what is the good (or best) outcome for him- or herself, and/or others like the decision-maker(s), to say nothing about who gets to make such decisions in the first place:
"Rawls insists on the essential plurality of the human subject when he faults utilitarianism for extending to society as a whole the principles of choice for one man. This is a fallacy, he argues, because it conflates diverse systems of justice into a single system of desire, and so fails to take seriously the distinctions between persons. ... There is no reason to suppose that the principles which should regulate an association of men is simply an extension of the principles of choice for one man." (Sandel, pp. 50-51, emphasis added.)
A classic example of the analysis of these dilemmas in political and legal theory is Derek Parfit's comment upon and reaction to John Trauber's classic essay on "numbers" in ethics.
Returning to these wonderful essays many years after I first read them, I am sure that the issues are more timely than ever before. I am also certain that the discussion from the late twentieth century needs to be supplemented by theoretical developments following, among other things, from feminist philosophy's much-noted political turn.
Judith Jarvis Thomson and Judith Butler as well as Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, and others have altered the terms of the debate making their works essential to any discussion today dealing with public paternalism involved in a dialectic with the dignity and autonomy of persons -- especially with regard to women as persons -- but also in light of the torture controversy in American political thought.
Confidence that "the individual choosing agent" may act upon the lives of "others" (usually the little brown people and all women) "for their own good" has been undermined, as a general or blanket principle, after the abortion and right to die conundrums besides the torture and spying controversies that have accompanied America's post-9/11 paranoia phase. ("Cornel West On Universality" and "Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism.")
The impressive philosophical literature emerging in the seventies establishing the "inviolable dignity enshrined in rights" of persons, as legal subjects, under Anglo-American political liberalism, has turned out to be far more frail and vulnerable than anyone suspected, particularly when it comes to "annoying" immigrants and persons adhering to strange religions in the Middle East, to say nothing of "terrorists" (an amorphous category of sub-humans that may include any of us on any given day).
Those anointed by the Lord (or the Pentagon) to decide what is good for the majority of persons on the planet rarely pause to consider the extent of the burden to be imposed on persons whose interests and welfare must be sacrificed to their definition of the greater good coinciding, suspiciously, with the advantage of elites like themselves. ("The Audacity of Hope" and "Israel Heightens Gaza Crisis" then "America's Torture Lawyers" and "NSA Spying is Illegal" and "Drones and Murder.")
"But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital [Stuart Rabner?] now tells you 'Look, we're sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you -- we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it's only for nine months.' ... Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation?" (Thomson, pp. 2-3.)
True, this unfortunate situation involves a massive imposition on you -- as the victim -- and violations of your fundamental rights, but think of the benefit to society from torturing you and you will be bound to agree on how wonderful such a situation can be for the rest of us. ("What is Enlightenment?")
Similar arguments were used to "justify" slavery. If you create a society in which it is not necessary to pay for human labor then you may be sure that your industries will out-perform the rival industries of other nations where workers are actually paid monetary wages for their labors.
Over the course of a century or so a nation may become wealthy and powerful -- thanks to slavery -- despite the frustrating inconvenience of a civil war setting the slaves "free" towards the end of that century as well as puzzling claims about the rights of slaves to be free and equal persons in society. ("America's Holocaust.")
A similar process of reasoning for many persons would sanction limiting a woman's right to abortion in order to achieve the "good" social result of protecting the potential human lives of "unborn children."
Kantian deontology forbids this sort of decision in either case (slavery or abortion), I believe, because it violates the integrity of the potential slave or any woman, as a person with autonomous control over the most self-regarding decisions and life-choices in a person's life, even against the welfare or values of society as determined by others.
Professor Parfit states the issue with deceptive simplicity:
"Suppose that we can help the one person or many others. Is it a reason to help the many that we may thus be helping more people?" (All references to Parfit's thinking will be to "Innumerate Ethics" unless otherwise indicated.)
After all, Parfit insists: "Suppose that we could save either the life of one stranger or the arm of another. Call these strangers X and Y."
No one is X and Y, or as law students are taught to express it: "P and D."
The difficulties of an ethical dilemma can only be appreciated fully when "X and Y" become real persons with names -- persons whom we love or hate, respect and cherish, feel responsible for or struggle against. ("Magician's Choice.")
The difficulties only increase when we set principle against passion by pondering obligations to remain ethical persons even in terms of our conduct regarding enemies (or former enemies) who are also persons. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")
The duty owed to another person, according to Kant, transcends issues of identity. Where obligations are absolute they must attach to any other person merely because he or she is a moral subject. This aspect of Kant's thinking moved Marx to express outrage at inequalities that denied the moral status of "person" to victims. ("Dehumanization" and "Little Brown Men Are Only Objects For Us" then "Ape and Essence" and "Persons and Personhood.")
Suppose that we must decide whether to sacrifice the arm of someone we love to save the life of an important stranger? Or even an enemy who happens to be a philanthropist? Should we make the choice that is "objectively" required by consequentialism in order to benefit a majority? Or is my duty to a beloved other person, say, primary regardless of the effects on strangers? ("A Doll's Aria.")
I doubt that most of us would accept the choice made on our behalf on such issues by any authority. The arrogance and presumption of choosing "for" others -- much worse is to do so, secretly, without communicating the fact -- alone is sufficient to make some choices unacceptable to persons insisting on their dignity and freedom. ("Obama Says Torture is a Secret!" and "Americans May be Killed Illegally.")
I will respond to a few questions that struck me as I reflected on Parfit's essay:
What are the boundaries of "self-interest"? Where does the individual end so that the community or collectivity may begin? Does the very notion of an "individual choosing agent" that is so beloved in liberal theory become meaningless in light of the challenge to the entire species (climate warming) and problems of resource distribution essential to survival for persons who are unjustly denied the means to live in our world? Is the individual not a product of the community? Can the liberal subject "stand apart" from the society he agrees to join? Or must there be a society that forms a person before he or she is in a position to choose anything? After all, even Richard Posner must have been a baby at some point in his life. ("Richard A. Posner On Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility" then "Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
How much should burdens and numbers count, if at all, in establishing these divisions in goods, services, needs? Will the sacrifice of my loved-one's arm be justified by the saving of one thousand, a million, or billion strangers' lives? Should I give up my SUV if by doing so I may rescue five persons from developing lethal cancers? Should the person making such a decision for another be compelled to accept a similar judgment about his or her life, and/or loved-ones? Should the beneficiaries of inequality decide whether the status quo that creates those inequalities is "fair"? Are these merely questions of power and not of justice or fairness? Who defines human rights for humanity? America? China? Israel? The United Kingdom? UN? ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
Are motives and causes (private/internal) to the subject primary over harms and results (public/external) in assessing actions as opposed to events? If Charles Manson adheres to the letter of the law for sinister reasons whereas Mother Theresa violates a law -- consciously and for moral reasons -- is one of them ethically or legally "superior" to the other? Is the legal judgment in this hypothetical identical or diametrically opposed to the ethical conclusion? (See Dr. King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" and Ralws "On Civil Disobedience.")
I conclude my comments with reflections that are forbidden to analytical philosophers on the importance of love even in political/ethical decisions. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
II.
Trauber writes:
"Unless it is for some reason impermissible for one person to take the same interest in another's welfare as he himself [permissibly] takes in it, it must be permissible for me, in the absence of special obligations to the contrary, to choose the outcome that is in [Y's] self-interest." (Trauber, p. 302, quoted by Parfit.)
Is it "permissible" for me to decide on another person's "self-interest"? If I did so, would it remain the self-interest of another person? Or is the residue of such a choice merely what I decide that I want -- probably for my own reasons of interest or convenience -- to become the other person's interest?
Other persons (if they are truly persons) are as unique in their values and beliefs as well as desires as those of us who presume to be choosing agents "for" the so-called inferior "others" requiring our wisdom in such matters.
"Their" choices are usually based on values and valuing different from our own.
Differences of fundamental values may lead, for example, to decisions to forego life-saving blood transfusions, which offend some people's religious sensibilities and beliefs, even when persons know that they may die as a result of those refusals. ("Law and Literature.")
We presumptive decision-makers may regard such a choice by anyone as insane, bizarre, or irrational because it is self-destructive, but respect for the integrity of persons -- for the differences among us made possible by individual autonomy -- may require neutrality, at least by the state, or non-presumption even by powerful prospective decision-makers, that is, respect for the "otherness of the other" may require a sometimes painful willingness to allow the other person to be who she is and not necessarily who we would like her to be. ("Marilyn Straus Was Right!")
A person must be permitted to live and love, to feel and even die as she wishes, even if this means terminating a pregnancy or ending her life, on her terms, when she suffers from a terminal illness. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")
Assuming that we can accept a principle that "self-regarding behavior" is properly the subject of an individual's determination, provided that any behavior is sufficiently "self-regarding" in a world of mutual dependencies -- given normal competence -- the issue becomes whether public "concern" or "community" requires respecting that choice and (more importantly) the "choosing" (freedom) because others will in turn respect and facilitate our choices and choosing.
Determinations concerning incompetence must be made in legal proceedings where persons may submit contrary evidence from their own experts and where all due process protections are afforded to the subject of proceedings.
The material conditions of our lives, wealth and/or poverty are rarely a matter of choice, but these material conditions set the background conditions or contexts for our "choices."
What we have -- or can have -- often determines what we can choose to do or be.
Where individuals' choices and values conflict, may we give priority to our own choices and desires, or interests and needs, even if they concern or affect others? If so, to what extent? What are the limits on this "priority"?
"Perhaps Y could save his arm rather than X's life; but he ought to save X rather than his own umbrella. May we give priority to the welfare of others? Most of us think we sometimes may, and sometimes ought to do so. Thus we ought to give priority to the welfare of our own children. This is what Trauber calls a 'special obligation.' ..." (Parfit.)
The annoying historical fact of mutuality (globalization) suggests that to protect "our" children's interests we may have to respect the rights and interests of other people's children.
The difficulty concerning mutuality raises the most uncomfortable problem for those of us residing in wealthy societies: 80% of the persons in our world make do with a monetary income that is a tiny fraction of what residents of the richest societies spend on fast food in equivalent time periods.
The richest 1% of the world's population now receives as much income as the poorest 57%, while the income of the 25 million richest Americans, alone, is the equivalent of almost 2 billion of the world's people. The latter number may have risen to 3 billion people. Please see Michael Newman's Socialism: A Very brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 140 for many more such depressing facts.
Disparities and inequalities in income or wealth, and the limitations imposed in terms not only of the quality of life and life-options for the poorest as compared with the richest persons in the world -- also on what persons can even dream of having or being -- have reached a level that can only be described as obscene.
It is injustice that is the true obscenity in the world and not representations of sexual behavior in erotic art that is limited to consenting adults as creators and recipients.
Most human beings in the world today survive on about one dollar per day, some on considerably less than this amount. What is much worse is that we in the wealthy nations (even those of us who are of very modest means) are implicated in grotesque injustices or disparities in material conditions from which we, knowingly or not, benefit in countless ways all the time.
The poverty of others makes possible the wealth of a few in the First World. It is "convenient" (for me and you) that people by the billions are kept on the edge of starvation if we are to retain our affluent lifestyles. We are amazingly good at living with this injustice.
The "War on Terror" rarely deals with the "terror" of hunger.
It is hunger and failures of recognition of people's sufferings and pains at injustice that supplies terrorist organizations with suicide bombers for their agendas.
"Shopping" in rich countries is not limited to what one does to acquire necessary supplies for living; "shopping" has become entertainment and self-expression. Interestingly, "shopping" is one of the English words that has become universal by way of the Internet.
We live, according to Jean Baudrillard, in the "Age of Shopping." We buy things in order to have the pleasure of buying more things. A number of college students -- mostly women -- have listed their religious affiliation as "shopping." These students may not be joking. ("Why Jane Can't Read" and "America's Nursery School Campus" then "Nihilists in Disneyworld" and "Whatever!")
"When it would cost us nothing to do either, we ought to relieve one stranger's agony rather than another's [a loved-one's?] minor pain. And we ought to save lives rather than limbs." (Parfit.)
I suggest that we ought to "relieve a stranger's agony" even when it costs us "something," or a great deal to do so. ("Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison.")
If we take the "ethics of love" seriously -- whether as religious persons or secular humanists -- we ought to do much more than we are doing now to balance the inequities in our world.
At the very least, we should be willing to share in the pain of others even -- or especially -- when we can do little to diminish that suffering or pain. This is to hint at the importance of love that I mentioned at the outset.
Merely to recognize or feel the pain of one other person is a gift of respect and a sign of fundamental equality. Perhaps, in a moral sense, this "sharing" in another human being's pain, alone, relieves the sufferer's agony. ("Pieta" and "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
"The self," Iris Murdoch writes, "the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness [and love?] is connected to the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of virtuous consciousness. 'Good is transcendent reality' [Simone Weil] means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful." ("The Sovereignty of Good," p. 93.)
III.
"Why do we think it worse if more people die? If David dies, he would lose as much as any of the five. But they together would lose more. Their combined losses could outweigh his." (Parfit.)
The idea of "combined," "accumulated," or "sums of suffering" is a subject of controversy.
Many conservatives reject the notion that large numbers of people suffering is worse than only one person suffering (especially a rich white person) because there is no way to compare or combine, to sum-up sufferings, so as to generate a large mass of pain. After all, if there is one human experience that is particular or unique it must be endurance of agony:
"Justice requires difference -- different goods distributed for different persons among different groups of people -- and it is this requirement that makes justice a thick or maximalist moral idea, reflecting the actual thickness of particular cultures and societies." (Walzer, p. 33.)
Justice is always particular. Philosophers who have responded to Parfit's essay from a Kantian direction have argued that more persons "experiencing" wrongs or pains is worse than one person experiencing such harms, without assuming a collectivist stance with respect to the violations of rights or ethical judgment.
The wrong inflicted on a person is always individual to that subject; doing the same harm to many others merely burdens more "individuals" and, in that sense, is "worse."
The danger with a collectivist-consequentialist or utilitarian view that allows for infliction of suffering on some persons -- or illegality only on some occasions -- in order to avoid an injury committed against a larger number, or otherwise to benefit many persons, is that this only universalizes and legitimates a principle applicable to all and (therefore) hurts everyone. This universalizing practice of collectivizing choice creates a principle that says:
"Your individual rights and the rule of law may be set aside, at any time, when from a social or collective perspective, [whatever that may be,] it is deemed convenient or 'useful' for the majority of the population to do so."
The moral injury to one person resulting from dehumanization (deprivation of rights) is moral harm to ALL members of a community who may be similarly placed at any future time.
"Hurting" one person "for his or her own good" is hurting everyone (all persons) in a community, at the level of moral principle, which is never "for their own good." ("Manifesto For the Unfinished American Revolution.")
Drones may be used to kill thousands of innocent persons, for example, because by doing so, we are told, among the dead we will probably find some "terrorists."
These so-called "terrorists" pose a danger to a group of persons "we" (decision-makers) wish to protect by using these drones, or even a majority of persons in the selected group who are not targeted by these drones. Inevitably, those to be protected by the use of drones will be, in fact, a few privileged elites in centers of power, often at the cost of thousands of innocent persons' lives in poor countries. ("The Audacity of Hope" and "Israel Heightens Gaza Crisis.")
Sometimes the deaths of thousands in Third World countries bears no relation to making anyone safer, anywhere, and may well make everyone far less safe, everywhere, in the long term. Parfit quotes Tauber:
"Suffering is not additive in this way. The discomfort of each of a large number of individuals experiencing a minor headache does not add up to anyone's experiencing a migraine." (Parfit.)
C.S. Lewis writes:
"We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about 'the unimaginable sum of human misery.' Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity X: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity X. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2X. But you must remember that no one is [actually] suffering 2X: search all time and space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness."
You will, however, discover two persons afflicted where before there was only one.
Mr. Lewis' views on the subject of pain certainly changed after his own experience of great suffering at the loss of his wife. Compare Surprised by Joy with A Grief Observed and other writings appearing after Lewis' "The Problem of Pain":
"There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but have reached all the suffering there can ever be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow sufferers adds no more pain."
This is plainly absurd if we recognize that two persons in agony is worse than only one individual suffering.
Nevertheless, granting this point does not necessarily license the infliction of suffering on one person by any individual believing (possibly falsely) that, somehow, this will prevent suffering by many more persons at some future point in time. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
Violating rights, deliberately, is always an evil. It may be that a political leader will find it necessary to embrace such evil, but this can only be done honestly, with full acceptance of responsibility and recognition that, it is in fact, evil that is being done that sets a dangerous precedent by causing a collective moral/jurisprudential harm to society, or the totality of individuals and/or to the very idea of legality and a legal system. ("America's Torture Lawyers" and, again, "John Rawls and Justice.")
Definitions of mild headaches as compared with migraine, "atrocity" as compared with "acceptable losses," may well depend on the identity of the victim or victims.
Your child's mild headache may be worse to you than my child's migraine. In fact, if your child's mild headache in Jerusalem may be avoided, allegedly, by causing the migraine of a Palestinian child in Gaza, you may deem the sacrifice by others worthwhile.
Philosophers all over the world are excellent at enduring the suffering of others.
The Palestinian child's migraine may become the Jerusalem child's migraine soon enough. The existence of either child's headache may be connected to the other's dilemma, in other words, in a world of mutual dependencies.
This is to say nothing of the pain any normal person feels at the suffering of a child, anywhere, including hungry children in Cuba or even New Jersey. ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")
Two children suffering from migraine may be the worst possible outcome for all concerned. This is true both from a rights-based and utilitarian perspective.
It is difficult to admit one's shared humanity with another person and also to inflict suffering on that other person. Victimizing another human being, for any alleged "reason," seems to require dehumanization. Dehumanizing another person also dehumanizes the culprit. ("Dehumanization" and "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Mechanisms of denial and dehumanization kick-in the moment we must do evil to others who suddenly become "Jihadists" or "fundamentalists" or "militants" (also "unethical") even when many of OUR victims happen to be children.
Racial epithets are all too familiar a part of recent world history for much the same reason. Bombing "extremists" is easier than bombing innocent people who happen to live in Islamic societies. ("So Black and So Blue in Prison" and "Is Western Philosophy Racist?")
Philosophers in Kantian and other traditions -- this is especially true in America in light of the Jeffersonian and Lincolnesque traditions with the added teachings of Dr. King -- have argued that human self-interest and desire for happiness, or material advantage, are certainly important for everyone and all nations, but it cannot stop us from doing what is right even at a cost in happiness (social good); this does not mean that morality is more important than happiness, but remaining a person or moral subject is about being more than happy at all times.
Utilitarians and other hedonists fail to realize that "happiness" is merely "conditionally valuable" (an "instrumental good") whereas being a person is uncondititionally valuable -- also inescapable in thinking about these questions of ethics -- and other matters involving weighing of factors.
Being a "moral person" (which may be a redundancy) may be the precondition of true happiness, as Aristotle suggested, so that consequentialism may put the proverbial cart before the horse.
To conclude with a return to the importance of higher emotions, like love, F.H. Bradley writes:
"The way of taking the world which I have found most tenable is to regard it as a single Experience, superior to relations and containing in the fullest sense everything which is. [Jerusalem and Palestine] Whether there is any particular matter in this whole which falls outside of any finite center of feeling, I cannot certainly decide; but the contrary seems perhaps more probable. We have then the Absolute reality appearing in and to finite centres [sic.] and uniting in one experience." (Bradley, p. 245.)
To speak of "one experience" uniting all of us may be another way of discussing love. Love obviates the need for much of this analysis. ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism" and "'Interstellar': A Movie Review.")
