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EXISTENTIALISM
Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre,
Albert Camus, Søren Kierkegaard,
authenticity, absurdity, freedom
 new from tiger bark press
From the author of How to Be Bertrand Russell, Public In
Intellectual
an Existentialist,, Gary Cox Tim Madigan and Peter Stone, Editors

From being pursued The consistently first-rate papers

in the collection Bertrand Russell,
by a giant lobster,
Public IIn
ntellectual serve as a pow- w
to his complex erful reminder of the breadth and
relationship with depth of the contributions from
Simone de Beauvoir, one of the leading philosophers
of the twentieth century...This text
this is a fast- is an invaluable resource fo for stu-
paced and at times dents of Russell’s liffee aand thought.
deeply moving new
—Alan Schwerin, Associate Professor
biography of Sartre.
of Philosophy, Monmouth University
and ffoormer President of
of
the Bertrand Russell Society

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Philosophy Now ISSUE 115 Aug/Sept 2016
Philosophy Now, EDITORIAL & NEWS
43a Jerningham Road, 4 You Always Have a Choice! Rick Lewis
Telegraph Hill,
London SE14 5NQ 5 News in Brief
United Kingdom 51 Thinkers Against Xenophobia: Anja Steinbauer
Tel. 020 7639 7314
editors@philosophynow.org EXISTENTIALISM

SISYPHUS BY ANTONIO ZANCHI, 1665

philosophynow.org 6 On Being an Existentialist
Editor-in-Chief Rick Lewis
Stuart Greenstreet tells us what existentialism is
Editors Anja Steinbauer, Grant Bartley 9 Authenticity and the Treatment of Depression
Digital Editor Bora Dogan Alisa Anokhina on how existentialist thinking could help
Graphic Design Grant Bartley, Katy
Baker, Anja Steinbauer 10 Is Kierkegaard Still Relevant Today?
Book Reviews Editor Teresa Britton Lucian Lupescu says he dares us to live
Film Editor Thomas Wartenberg 11 Simone’s Existentialist Ethics
Marketing Manager Sue Roberts
Administration Ewa Stacey, Katy Baker Anja Steinbauer on de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity
Advertising Team 12 Existentialism as Punk Philosophy
Jay Sanders, Ellen Stevens
jay.sanders@philosophynow.org
Stuart Hanscomb explains existentialism through punk rock
UK Editorial Board 14 The Absurd Heroics of Monsieur Mersault
Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer,
Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley
Existentialism Alex Holzman reveals Albert Camus’ absurd vision of heroism
US Editorial Board Zut alors! Pages 6-22 16 Why Camus Was Not An Existentialist
Dr Timothy J. Madigan (St John Fisher Greg Stone spills the beings
College), Prof. Charles Echelbarger, 18 “all the consequences of this”
Prof. Raymond Pfeiffer, Prof. Massimo
Pigliucci (CUNY - City College), Prof. Kile Jones argues that only atheists make authentic existentialists
Teresa Britton (Eastern Illinois Univ.)
Contributing Editors
LES GENERAL ARTICLES
Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.) 23 Facts & Opinions
Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland) Christoffer Lammer-Heindel tells us what they are, and aren’t
David Boersema (Pacific University)
UK Editorial Advisors 26 Bad Arguments That Make You Smarter
Piers Benn, Constantine Sandis, Gordon Henrik Schoeneberg provides a field guide to fallacies
Giles, Paul Gregory, John Heawood 28 The Philosophy Professor and the Holy Book of Baseball
US Editorial Advisors
Prof. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Toni Chris Christensen on a yearning for logical consistency
Vogel Carey, Prof. Walter Sinnott- 30 Science, Ockham’s Razor and God
Armstrong, Prof. Harvey Siegel
Cover Image Simone de Beauvoir
David Glass & Mark McCartney say science doesn’t cut out God
by Gail Campbell 2016 38 The Consequences of Accepting Consequentialism
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August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 3
Editorial
You Always Have a Choice!
Given the current fashion for referendums Rick Lewis has decided to offer you
a choice of editorials. Pick wisely!
Despairing Editorial
W elcome to Philosophy Now’s new issue on Existentialism.
We have to do an Existentialism-themed issue every
couple of years because you people apparently never get tired
of those gloomy, angst-ridden, black-polo-necked, coffee-
swilling Parisian poseurs. I hope you realise how tough it is
for us, having to produce features on Sisyphus and the
meaninglessness of life over and over again. It seems like we
are trapped in an Eternal Return of the same, and yet at the
same time we are reproached and taunted at every moment by
the knowledge that we are actually completely and inescapably
free – free to turn Philosophy Now into a golfing magazine, free
to paint the editorial office bright purple, free even to end it
all (for example by selling the magazine to the Vasto
Publishing Corporation and running off to Brazil with the
proceeds, if we can get a really cheap flight). So why do we
not do so? Our failure to constantly weigh these options
clearly shows we are in Bad Faith. Why, oh why, do we allow
ourselves to be trapped in a little room with Camus, Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir until finally it feels like an eternity in
hell? And why do we assume that you will buy this issue, just
because you all did so the previous times we produced an
Existentialism-themed issue? Perhaps us putting the issue
together at all is a Leap of Faith?
We’ve now been publishing this magazine for twenty five
years. Twenty five! Though to be honest it feels a lot longer.
Bah humbug.
[The Editor has gone for a little lie down. He thought you might
like this photo of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s favourite café, Les Deux
Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris]
Photo by Rick Lewis, Paris, 2015. In memory of Marilu.
4 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
Hopeful Editorial
W elcome to Philosophy Now’s new issue on Existentialism,
one of the most important and fascinating philo-
sophical movements of modern times. Its popularity never
dims, because its concerns are not merely of interest to
scholars: it grapples with some of the biggest questions we all
face in our own lives – questions of meaning, of freedom, of
responsibility, of personal identity and authenticity, of
religious belief, of mortality, of the apparent absurdity of life.
These questions also, of course, run through much of
culture including art, music, theatre, cinema and literature. So
it isn’t surprising that people use Existentialist ideas to under-
stand works of art, or that some of the key philosophers of
Existentialism were novelists or playwrights as well.
So what is this philosophy? What are its central assump-
tions and its central claims? It starts with the assumption that
we are thrown into a universe that doesn’t care about us, and
that we have no pre-determined purpose in being here and no
pre-determined essence of who we are. So our existence
comes first, and who we then become through our freely-
chosen actions is up to us. Or, in the popular Existentialist
slogan, “existence preceeds essence”. To find out more, read
Stuart Greenstreet’s introduction. This issue also contains a
selection of articles about Existentialist thinkers including
Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and
their sometime friend Albert ‘I’m-Not-Really-An-
Existentialist’ Camus. It applies their ideas to life and art
including the treatment of depression and understanding punk
rock music. We even take a look at de Beauvoir’s Existentialist
ethics. So enjoy the articles in this issue but remember that
they barely scratch the surface of this subject.
Existentialism is a very rich philosophy; let’s take just one
of its concepts as an example: Bad Faith. According to Sartre,
we can be in Bad Faith in two different ways. One kind of Bad
Faith is when we refuse to face up to particular facts about our
lives (“Yes, he beats me up, but I know that deep down he
loves me.”). A second kind is when we refuse to recognize our
own freedom (“I can’t join the circus because I’m head waiter
and this café needs me.”). Sartre believes that we always have
choices, even if the various alternatives open to us may not
always be very appealing. This one concept of Bad Faith
alone, carefully applied, offers so much potential for under-
standing and indeed improving our lives; and that’s before we
even get started on concepts like authenticity and absurdity. If
you think that philosophy should have the potential to change
the way people live, then Existentialism is one school of
thought you really have to study!
• Self-Driving Car Studies Cast Light on
Attitudes to Ethics • Nussbaum Wins Prize
• Heidegger Has A New Book Out •
News reports by Anja Steinbauer.
The Rise of Chinese Philosophy
Chinese philosophy has now become
the third most popular undergraduate
course at Harvard University, eclipsed only
by Computer Sciences and Economics.
Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese
History at Harvard, says that works of clas-
sical Chinese philosophy are thought of as
fulfilling the function of a ‘philosophy of
life’, giving guidance and providing princi-
ples to good living. As well as Chinese
philosophy, great works of Chinese poetry
are also enjoying popularity, especially
those of Du Fu (712-770), who is now
hailed as the ‘Chinese Shakespeare’.
Ethics and Self-Driving Cars
A recent academic study of the
processing of moral dilemmas by self-
driving cars may throw some light on a
more general ethical problem. Enthusiasts
for self-driving cars have argued that they
will drastically reduce the number of traffic
accidents. However, the computers
controlling them will occasionally confront
crisis situations, just as human drivers do,
in which they must choose between the
safety of those inside the vehicle and that
of people outside the vehicle – pedestrians
or other motorists. How should they be
programmed to deal with such dilemmas?
An article in Science in June has done much
to clarify this difficulty. French and Amer-
ican researchers J.-F. Bonnefon, Azim
Shariff and Iyal Rahwan presented six
online questionnaires to 2,000 people
asking in varying ways about priorities of
passenger safety versus the safety of others
outside the car. Though the responses
varied depending on the precise questions
asked, they all showed to the same broad
preferences. The authors concluded that
the surveys showed a threefold result:
Firstly, most respondents agreed that self-
drive cars should be programmed to always
prioritize the lives of many over the lives of
fewer individuals. Secondly, respondents
believed it a good idea for people to use
such cars. Thirdly, however, they did not
want to drive such a car themselves – for
fear that its moral algorithm might subor-
dinate their own safety or that of their
loved ones to that of a greater number of
strangers outside the car. This means that
the advantage of self-drive cars saving more
lives may be lost if people are unwilling to
use them.
Self-driving car
Elie Wiesel Dies
Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel has
died at the age of 87. German President
Joachim Gauck remarked: “We have lost a
great person, an extraordinary scholar and
writer.” The Holocaust surviver who lost
all his family to the horror of the Nazi
period had dedicated his life to fighting for
human rights. President Obama referred to
Wiesel as “one of the great moral voices of
our time”, a “conscience of the world.”
Wiesel published extensively about the
Holocaust and set up a foundation against
intolerance and indifference. In 1986 he
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his
efforts in combatting violence and racism.
New Heidegger Manuscripts
A scholarly volume just published
contains lectures given by existentialist
philosopher Martin Heidegger from 1915-
1932. The book mainly contains lectures
from the 1920’s, dating from before the
1927 publication of Heidegger’s magnum
opus Being and Time. Even then, Heidegger
had a reputation as a brilliant young
thinker and was much in demand not only
at the universities but far beyond. The
general public had a great interest in
philosophy at the time; there were
numerous ‘Kant Societies’ and Heidegger
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 5
News
was asked to give lectures all over
Germany. Perhaps this new volume can
throw light on the controversial thinker’s
allure.
Nussbaum Wins Kyoto Prize
Prominent American philosopher
Martha Nussbaum of the University of
Chicago has been given the Kyoto Prize in
Arts and Philosophy by Japan’s Inamori
Foundation. The annual prize, one of the
top international honours for scholarly
work, is given only once every four years in
the sub-category of thought and ethics.
The Foundation says that Professor Nuss-
baum has “led global discourse on philo-
sophical topics that influence the human
condition in profound ways, including
contemporary theories of justice, law,
education, feminism and international
development assistance,” adding that “she
established a new theory of justice that
ensures the inclusion of the weak and
marginalized, who are deprived of oppor-
tunities to develop their capabilities in
society, and has proposed ways to apply
this theory in the real world.”
Bishops, Ethics and Politics
For the first time in their history,
Catholic bishops from both sides of the
Atlantic have published a common position
on a political issue. The Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)
treaty will, when completed, directly affect
the lives of almost a billion people in the
EU and the USA, as well as having a
profound impact on many other countries.
Seeing that the debate concerning of the
agreement is highly polarized, the
Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences
of the European Community (COMECE)
and the United States’ Conference of
Catholic Bishops (USCCB) have jointly
announced a ‘toolbox’ of nine moral prin-
ciples for the evaluation of TTIP. While
they acknowledge that trade can be truly
beneficial for all, they say it must be struc-
tured in such a way as to help reduce
inequality and injustice.
Existentialism
On Being An Existentialist
Stuart Greenstreet chooses to tell us how to become authentically existentialist.
I
t took almost a century of thought before existentialism
came to fruition as a popular movement – almost a craze –
in post-war France in the nineteen-forties and fifties. This
was the time of its greatest influence, not only on philosophy
but also on literature, drama and film-making, extending far
beyond France. But here I am dealing with existentialism solely
as a school of philosophy – one which arose mainly from the
work of five men and one woman: Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul
Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. (Although Albert Camus is
often called an existentialist, he himself denied he was one [see
later, ed].) Of these, Sartre was the only one to accept the name
‘existentialist’ and employ all of its key concepts: ‘anguish’, ‘bad
faith’, ‘facticity’, ‘commitment’, and ‘authenticity’.
All philosophers in the existentialist camp shared the same
mission: to make us recognise that human beings are free to
choose, not only what to do when faced with moral choices,
but what to value and how to live. They want these facts about
human freedom to be not merely accepted, but absorbed by
each person for him- or herself, so that when they have
absorbed them their whole view of life will be different. Existen-
tialism as a cultural movement belongs to the past. But as a phi-
losophy with this utterly practical mission it can be as liberating
to us now as it was to men and women in war-torn Europe.
Basics
When readers of the Parisian newspaper Le Monde began to
take notice of existentialism, the newspaper published an arti-
cle in December 1945 to tell them what it meant. Although it
did its best, Le Monde finally felt it had to admit that “Existen-
tialism, like faith, cannot be explained; it can only be lived.”
Why is existentialism like faith? Because to base one’s con-
duct on a belief that one is free to choose is an act of faith, for
there’s no way of knowing for sure whether it’s true or false.
And what makes existentialism hard to explain? Perhaps it is its
claim that no objective moral order exists, independently of
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6 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
humanity. That makes it futile to seek a code for behaviour
anywhere outside of ourselves. Each individual has to create his
or her own value by living and affirming it, and must do so in a
way that satisfies a single governing norm of ‘authenticity’ – in
perhaps oversimplistic terms, through always ‘being myself’.
Existentialism is obsessed with how individuals choose to
live their lives. Our choices are demonstrated by our acts, and
always concern matters within our power. To choose, then,
involves deliberating about things that are in our control and
attainable by our action. Then by whatever actions we choose
to take, we define and create the selves that we gradually
become. For example, we become ‘just’ by performing just acts,
and similarly as regards other virtues. This is not meant as a
moral point – no ‘should’ or ‘ought’ is implied – but as a fact
about the nature of the world and of human choice: that my
choices of good or evil will determine my character and make
me the kind of human being that I turn out to be.
Authentic Being
Existentialism obviously rests on some pretty bold ontologi-
cal assumptions, then – claims about what exists and how it
exists. The first is that values are not part of the fabric of the
world, in the sense of existing independently of us. To live your
life as if your values were somehow given from outside, as
though to adopt the attitude of an uptight, conventional person
whose duties all seem to be laid out for them, would amount to
a refusal to face up to your freedom. In that case, you wrongly
think you can escape your freedom by taking refuge in a fixed
role, or essence. But even when people do passively adopt
ready-made values in this way, they still choose to do so, albeit in
a way that has failed to live up to the standard of authenticity,
because it doesn’t recognise their inalienable freedom.
My attitude is authentic when I engage in my projects as my
own. My attitude would not be authentic if keeping my
promises, for instance, is something I do just because that’s
‘what one does’ – what ‘moral people’ normally do – or because
it is what society expects of me. My way of behaving is authentic
if and only if my action is a reflection of my choice – that is, when
I commit myself to behave in that sort of way because that is
what I expect of myself whether or not it is socially sanctioned.
Choosing Value
Existentialism makes every individual responsible for decid-
ing for him- or herself how to evaluate their choices. Sartre
further remarked that it is in the nature of values that they
make demands on us. I do not just see the homeless person; I
encounter him as someone ‘to be helped’. Why ought I help the
homeless? The answer can be revealed, Sartre thought, only to
a free agent who makes the value exist by the fact of recogniz-
ing it as such. You judge a homeless man as someone to be
helped only because you have already chosen yourself as a person
who helps people. There is an answer to ‘Why ought I help the

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homeless?’ from within that prior ‘self-making’ choice; but
outside of it there is none. Moreover, the principle of helping –
say kindliness or compassion – is sanctioned by your action,
rather than the action by the principle.
To value a certain way of acting more highly than any alter-
native is to choose that particular way as a goal – to set it up as
an ideal to be aimed at. For although the values you adopt are
indeed your values, they do not merely express your private
feelings about what is right or wrong. If in some particular
instance you judge that tax evasion is wrong then, whether you
realise it or not, you have judged that it is wrong in general.
For the concept of ‘choice’ entails the idea of whatever is
chosen is the right thing to do, and ‘right’ means ‘right for
everyone’. As Sartre put it, “when a man chooses for himself
he chooses for mankind” (Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946) –
meaning that every action that he (and we) choose provides an
example for the rest of humanity. If I choose a particular good
for myself such as freedom, I am thereby committed to choos-
ing freedom for everyone.
The Facts of Freedom
Existentialism’s most basic premise is that human beings
have no pre-existing or set nature or character. We are not
Existentialism
essentially anything, except that we are essentially free. We
become self-created beings by virtue of our actions and our rela-
tions with other people. Hence the existentialist slogan ‘exis-
tence precedes essence’.
That each one of us has absolute freedom of choice is an
existentialist article of faith – to the existentialist it is a truth so
self-evident that it never needs to be proved or even argued
for. And who needs theoretical proof of something indispens-
able to the practical business of living? To an existentialist,
“My freedom is my essence and my salvation. I cannot lose it
without ceasing to be” (Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy,
2012). So every honest person must recognize my freedom.
Obviously no one chooses entirely what he or she becomes,
or is. Each of us has a set of given natural and social properties
that influence the kind of person we become. Sartre gave to
these features the collective name ‘facticity’. One’s facticity
comprises all those properties another person could discover
and investigate. They include natural properties, such as sex,
weight, height, and skin colour; social facts, such as race, class,
and nationality; psychological properties, such as my extant
web of beliefs, desires, and character traits; and historical facts,
such as my family background, schooling; and so forth.
Our own facticity hardly ever occupies our own minds in
this third-person kind of way, even though it does weigh on us
and colour our moods and approach to life. However, when I
do step back and take a third-person, objective, view of my fac-
ticity, then these given facts about me may strike me as pre-
cisely what does define who I am. But for an existentialist, to
think this would be a radical mistake, not because my factual
properties are misleading, but because the person each one of
us is cannot be defined in third-person terms. No objective
account of my properties could ever describe my subjective
experience of what it’s like to be me, the person who has them.
So someone observing me can make out my skin colour, class,
or ethnicity; but the moment he attempts to identify me in
terms of these properties, he encounters a paradox, since the
kind of being I am is defined, among other things, by the atti-
tude I adopt towards my own facticity – by how I choose to
interpret it – and that is not fixed by the facts. Who I am
depends (among other things) on what I make of my facticity,
on how I try to go beyond, or transcend it. In other words,
whatever my facticity, and no matter how fixed it may be, it
does not curtail my freedom. I am still free to decide what
values to ascribe to my facticity, and what stance to take
towards it. To become the person you choose to be despite the
burden of your facticity is the only authentic way to live your
life, whereas to live it as though you were at the mercy of your
facticity – to pretend that it has robbed you of your freedom –
is inauthenticity. It would be to lose both one’s autonomy and
one’s integrity, and in this way give in to determinism.
The Price of Freedom
It would be hard to feel otherwise about freedom and
choice if you had lived in occupied France between 1940 and
1945, when existentialism came of age as the philosophie officielle
of the resistance movement. In those years, and even during
the post-1945 reconstruction, it exerted a powerful appeal that
was as much emotional as intellectual. If “man is nothing but
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 7
Existentialism
Creating Yourself
Elizabeth Bevington
2016
that which he makes of himself” (Sartre), then no one is bound
by fate, or by forces outside their control. By uniting with like-
minded people, the individual can challenge authority – even
tyrannical power – and change things. He or she can choose to
oppose the Nazis, or to create a more just society than had
existed before the war. Only by exercising their personal free-
dom could people regain their civil liberties.
But there is a price to be paid for the freedom to do whatever
you choose at every juncture. No one can decide on your behalf;
the choice of action is always yours and yours alone. And no one
can ever avoid the personal responsibility for judging what the
morally right thing to do is. You thus suffer the potential
anguish of having to endure an endless series of choices in the
knowledge that only you can decide, that you may evaluate
anything as you please, and that you have no character to guide
your choice other than the one you’re forming for yourself.
Not everyone can cope with the burden of an existentialist
approach to shaping their lives and characters. Some may try to
flee the tyranny of choice by hiding from themselves the truth
that we are all, as Sartre said, “condemned to be free” – which
means not free to cease being free. All our acts inevitably pre-
suppose choice; and so we are still choosing even when we think
we are not – even when we have deliberately chosen not to choose.
When France was over-run and occupied by the German
army in 1940, every French man and woman was forced to
think about their values and decide whether to resist and strug-
8 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
gle to free their country, or to resign themselves to Nazi domi-
nation. They had to choose, and it was a time when they faced
their freedom in great anguish. Some were unable to bear the
thought of their freedom, and in order to escape its pressure
adopted the cover of what Sartre called ‘bad faith’, perhaps the
most important concept of his philosophy. (Note how he too
turned to the word ‘faith’.) Someone is in bad faith when, in
order to protect himself from the anxiety of having to choose,
he pretends to himself that he is not as free as he actually is. It
is a specific kind of self-deception, a core betrayal of one’s self.
A common type of bad faith is the denial of one’s freedom in
the form of an excuse, typically beginning with “I couldn’t help
it…” We hear this in the excuse made by those Nazi soldiers
who insisted “I could not do otherwise” or “I was just doing my
duty.” One can always do otherwise: one can quit, or run away,
or even choose to be shot. The cost might enormous – even
one’s life – but it is never a case of cannot, always of will not. They
chose to continue to obey orders: it was not determined by their
nature. Existentialism doesn’t allow excuses. There is never a
legitimate reason for denying one’s freedom. No matter how
oppressed we may be by our situation or circumstances, we
know we can always imagine alternatives – and act on them too,
if we’re brave enough. The only way to stay in good faith is hon-
estly to continually own up and respond to being free to choose,
and accountable for whatever you decide to do.
Thinking & Living
I detect in the language I use here the characteristic ‘mis-
sionary’ tone of existentialism, which implores us all to experi-
ence our freedom to choose, and to practice it. Existentialism is a
coherent theory rooted in an idealist (that is, a consciousness-
based) metaphysics; but it is not enough merely to understand
it intellectually in that way. To grasp it properly, one has to
engage with it as a practical and committed philosophy – in
other words, to commit to being an existentialist. Then you
would see yourself as free and autonomous in way you did not
recognize before, and by so doing acquire the power to tran-
scend your facticity.
‘Facticity’ and ‘transcendence’ are the grand concepts of exis-
tentialism. Our facticity defines our situation and who we are up
to this point in our lives. Transcendence opens up the world of
possibilities: what we can now go on to make of that situation
and of ourselves, given who or what we have become so far.
Existentialism is absolutely not ‘academic’. It is the antithe-
sis of the purely analytical (normally Anglo-American)
approach to philosophy, the prime purpose of which seems to
be to deliver mental hygiene. The whole point of existential-
ism is to practice its liberating ideas, to apply them to becoming
the person one chooses to be.
That we can be the authors of our own lives and characters
strikes me as a very appealing thought. It means that a life can
in a sense itself become the stuff of art – something to be
shaped according to one’s own vision of oneself.
© STUART GREENSTREET 2016
Stuart Greenstreet earned his living as a business manager and
writer and was awarded a diploma in philosophy by Birkbeck College.
London. After graduating from the Open University he did further
philosophy at the University of Sussex.

Authenticity & Treatment For Depression
Alisa Anokhina on how the quest for authenticity can help in treating depression.
C
olloquially, the word ‘depression’ is often used for list-
lessness, extreme sadness, or a profound sense of loss.
It’s no wonder that so many people with a diagnosis of
depression struggle to be taken seriously: to the unaffected, the
problem sounds akin to a diagnosis of ‘sadness’. But sadness, in
fact, is not the only or even the main complaint: a clinical diag-
nosis of Major Depressive Disorder requires at least five symp-
toms, and only one of those refers to a ‘depressed mood’.
Depression is exhausting. Feelings of listlessness and fatigue
saturate life, and everyday tasks become laborious, as though
wading through tar. Things which previously gave joy or rest
become encumbering; socializing is a chore. Shadows creep
across the walls of the mind. Depression is not the same as sad-
ness. Sadness is transient – depression is pervasive.
Depression is like schizophrenia in the sense that both are
disorders of perception. It is difficult to accept the extent to
which our emotions warp our reality. Writer Andrew Solomon
has said that, in a depressed state, “you think that the veil has
been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you are
seeing truly” (see www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_depres-
sion_the_secret_we_share). The depressive comes to believe the
worthlessness – either their own or the world’s – and this belief
appears infallible, despite evidence to the contrary.
The nature of the link between perception and reality is per-
haps one of the oldest philosophical debates. The debate is also
one without a resolution. Even if what we perceive as reality
might not be reality, we have no choice but to continue behav-
ing as if it were. Yet from a neuropsychological perspective, the
possibility that our grasp of reality is limited, or even corrupted,
is almost a certainty. Our brains provide our only window to the
world, and, like any other organ, they’re fallible and prone to
malfunction. Our brains are capable of creating false memories;
we mistake dreams for reality; and we fall for optical illusions.
Hallucinogenic drugs systematically distort perception.
Existentialist philosophers discuss the nature of experience
from the perspective of meaning and morality, arguing that the
world is intrinsically meaningless. This realisation can be the
source of anguish and anxiety: if life is intrinsically meaning-
less, then why live? The existentialist solution to this nihilistic
dread is autonomy. Within existentialist philosophy, the onus is
on us to define our values, and to act in a way that is consistent
with them, so shaping our selves. We are thus to reject the
social roles and assumptions thrust upon us by others, and dis-
cover our authentic selves. The self only becomes authentic
when it is consciously constructed; until we do that we are
merely a patchwork of our genes, culture, upbringing, and
experiences. Discovering the authentic self also means making
decisions about the version of reality we choose to accept. By
definition, this process is subjective. And it can be applied to
help treat clinical depression.
People who have overcome depression talk about it as a
restorative process: a disintegration and subsequent rebuilding
Existentialism
of the self. Severe depression can be crippling, but these phases
will often naturally give way to periods of remission. In these
states a beneficial reevaluation of perception can be sought.
This can involve questioning deeply ingrained thought pat-
terns, (re)assessing personal values, and evaluating one’s per-
sonal development. Because the immediate causes of depres-
sion will be different for every person afflicted with it, over-
coming it also requires introspection.
The issue of agency comes into play here. Often, depression
can arise seemingly out of nowhere, causing significant confu-
sion and distress to a person. Other times, depression follows a
catalyst: the loss of a loved one, or a significant personal failure.
The negative aspects of life which can serve to exacerbate
depression can sometimes be removed; for example, a toxic
relationship, or an unfulfilling job. However, we must accept
that our agency is limited. We will always be tethered to our
basic biological needs, and constricted by social rules. The only
way in which we are infinitely flexible is in the construction of
our values. This is, perhaps, the only sphere in which our own
agency is absolute. The pursuit of authenticity allows us to set
our own parameters here. Ultimately, depression is the conse-
quence of genetic predisposition, chemical dysfunction, and, in
many cases, a catalyst. We cannot undo the loss of a loved one,
or escape the confines of social norms. However, fallacies in
perception and interpretation perpetuate depression, and we
have the agency to alter these.
People with depression are often reluctant to try drug thera-
pies because they worry about warping their reality and sacri-
ficing their authenticity: Is the medicated mind artificial, or
does medication restore normality to a mind which is defi-
cient? Am I still myself if every day I swallow a powder which
changes how I think and feel? Seeking treatment can also feel
like lying to yourself: if one is unworthy of life, then one is cer-
tainly unworthy of treatment. In a state of depression, worth-
lessness appears to be a fact, a complete certainty. Viewing the
world through depression can give the impression of finally
seeing things for what they are. Through existentialist think-
ing, however, it is possible to break down these sorts of
assumptions: if no values are objectively true, then the
depressed mind can be reevaluated. Here medication is noth-
ing more than a repair mechanism for a malfunctioning organ.
Of course, not all medications work equally for everyone, and
side effects are a valid concern. However, through existentialist
eyes, we can see that refusing treatment on the basis of its
effects on one’s ‘objective’ reality or on the ‘authentic unmed-
icated self’ is invalid.
Depression can often be devastating – but in cases where
subjective reevaluation can lead to the creation of an authentic
self, the person can be transformed.
© DR ALISA ANOKHINA 2016
Alisa Anokhina obtained her PhD in Psychology at University Col-
lege London. She works in London as a research psychologist.
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 9
Existentialism
Is Kierkegaard Still Relevant Today?
Lucian Lupescu says the disputatious Dane dares us to live.
T
here is a general tendency in the non-philosophical
world to dismiss philosophy as being purely theoreti-
cal, with no connection to the types of prob-
lems that people are confronted within their
everyday lives. But this is not necessarily true.
Many philosophers struggled to find ways to
improve people’s lives, by drawing attention
KIERKEGAARD PORTRAIT © ATHAMOS STRADIS 2010
to, and making people think about, funda-
mental aspects of life. A good example
would be Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855).
Feeling discontent with Hegel’s then-
dominant philosophical system (and
with every other philosophy popular in
his time), Kierkegaard sought to answer
life’s questions by turning back to ancient
times, and a thinker to whom he felt
closer in mind and spirit. Socrates, ‘the
gadfly of Athens’, became the role-model
for the young Kierkegaard, who wanted to
continue his spiritual mentor’s art of ‘philosoph-
ical midwifery’, and become himself ‘the gadfly of
Copenhagen’. Just as Socrates did, Kierkegaard tried to
challenge the common beliefs of his time. He wanted to show
that the only truth that is important is subjective truth. For
Kierkegaard, only through a deep and honest analysis of one-
self, can one truly know what one is or is not, what are one’s
values and beliefs, what are one’s truths.
Unlike Socrates, whose ideas we know only through other
sources, Kierkegaard was a prolific writer. He left behind a
collection of writings centered on particular themes and inter-
ests. His works may seem contradictory at first glance. How-
ever, on a closer reading, one can see that they follow the same
‘negative’ scheme as Socrates. The ancient philosopher
believed that no one had a privileged claim to absolute knowl-
edge (hence the title ‘negative’, as opposed to ‘positive’, phi-
losophy), and that each individual can and should think for
themselves and so find their own paths in life, and their own
values. This can be done by a close examination of one’s think-
ing. Socrates called his technique of helping people become
aware of their inner knowledge maieutic, or midwifery.
Socrates humbled himself, claiming he didn’t know anything,
and would ask his interlocutor a series of questions that aimed
to reveal that person’s knowledge, or lack of it. These dia-
logues usually ended in aporia – a state of puzzlement about
the subject being discussed, without finding a solution, but the
person thus realizing his ignorance.
Kierkegaard embraced Socrates’ project, analyzing his own
thinking, and in doing so, realized that:
“the thing is to find a truth which is a truth for me, to find the idea for
which I am willing to live and die…. What use would it be in this respect
if I were to discover a so-called objective truth, or if I worked my way
through the philosophers’ systems…? And what use would it be in that
respect to be able to work out a theory of the state…which I myself did
not inhabit but merely held up for others to see? What use would it be to
10 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
be able to propound the meaning of Christianity, to explain many separate
facts, if it had no deeper meaning for myself and my life? One must first
learn to know oneself before knowing anything else… Only when the
person has inwardly understood himself, and then sees the way
forward on his path, does his life acquire repose and meaning.”
(Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vol.1, p.22, 2008)
Kierkegaard used pseudonyms to, in a way, dis-
tance himself from the ideas in each book.
Each persona is an embodiment of a way of
seeing the world, a way of living your life.
Across his works he suggests three main
paths of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and
the religious (for him, Christian). The aes-
thete sees the world through an interest-
ing/boring dichotomy. For him, life is made
to live, to experience, and there are no serious
choices. Life is immediacy. For the ethicist, on
the contrary, there are only serious choices. For
him, life is what you make of it. It is not enough to
just live it; you must make concrete choices that will
give shape to your existence, to your self. Life is respon-
sibility. The ethicist’s dichotomy is, let’s say, good versus evil.
The Christian, on the other hand, acknowledges that you
cannot succeed in creating a perfect self. But through faith in
God’s forgiveness you can accept your imperfect condition, and
live your life as yourself. However, although these options look
a lot like they represent ultimate solutions, Kierkegaard’s life
possibilities are just that – possibilities. None of them repre-
sents an ‘ultimate truth’. As Kierkegaard sees them, they are
merely choices that one can make in one’s life.
Kierkegaard’s Socratic approach is still relevant because of
its focus on the individual. Each of us feels the need for pur-
pose. What Kierkegaard, and Socrates, teach us, is that this
purpose can be gained only by our choices, our actions, the
way we live our lives. No one, neither philosopher nor priest,
can tell us who or what we are, or what we should do. We must
discover and decide that for ourselves, in our inner, most inti-
mate place, where we can make our true self come to light,
then shine upon our own, singular path. It is important for us
to know ourselves, to discover what are really our values, our
beliefs – our truths – in order to live a more fulfilling life. It is
important to know who we truly are, so that nobody can
manipulate us into doing what is contrary to our inner selves.
Kierkegaard does not present us with absolute, objective
truths, but challenges us to discover subjective truths for our-
selves. He proposes to encourage us to become independent:
“The phrase ‘know yourself’ means: separate yourself from the
other” (The Concept of Irony, 1841, trans H.V. Hong and E.H.
Hong, p.177, 1989). In the end, what Kierkegaard does is dare
us to live, by choosing how we live, and by taking responsibility
for our lives. Can we rise to his expectations?
© LUCIAN LUPESCU 2016
Lucian Lupescu is a freelance translator. He can be found at
LLTranslator.com, or at ASynonymForRambling.wordpress.com
 Existentialism
Simone’s Existentialist Ethics
Anja Steinbauer on Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity

“
My life is my work,” Simone de Beauvoir once said. jects. Beauvoir gives examples of how many of us make poor use,
Spoken like a true Existentialist: to her, life and thought or no use at all, of our freedom. She even explains how freedom
were inextricably linked; we are what we do. Existentialism for children differs from adult freedom. Children can do what
is a philosophy that outlines the conditions of human existence they like to an extent, without being morally judged for it,
but rejects any conception of human nature; a philosophy that because they are largely free of responsibilities to others. Not so
affirms human freedom but emphasises that it brings with it not adults, yet some adults still try and live in the naïve freedom of
happy empowerment but anguish and despair, a philosophy that childhood. Others try to control or manipulate people in an
stresses that humans have choices but expresses little optimism attempt to limit their freedom – a tactic that according to Beau-
that we will make good use of them or even understand what it voir is ironically doomed to end in self-deception and the limit-
would mean to make the right choice. It is on this last point that ing of one’s own freedom. A mature and constructive use of our
Simone de Beauvoir most markedly departs from her lifelong freedom, our only chance of fulfilling ourselves as individuals,
partner Jean-Paul Sartre. involves making a ‘plea’ to others, appealing to them for their
Beauvoir’s Existentialism is scattered through her many attention and cooperation.
works, both literary and theoretical, including her classic femi- This short space is utterly inadequate to give you a proper
nist text The Second Sex. However, it finds it’s clearest and most idea of how rich Beauvoir’s ethics truly is. So you will just have to
rigorous form in her relatively underrated book The Ethics of read The Ethics of Ambiguity yourselves. It is beautifully written –
Ambiguity. The title is intriguing and unattractive at the same don’t forget that Beauvoir was a highly acclaimed novelist and
time: The fact that an Existentialist talks explicitly about ethics author, and worked hard to show her ideas’ relevance not just to
(rather than simply stressing our inescapable freedom) is a rare moral theorists but to all human beings. Why? Because all our
treat, but surely an ethics that bonds itself to ambiguity is hardly lives are marked by living with others, by ambiguity and free-
promising to propose any useful answers to moral problems? dom. That much is completely unambiguous.
This is exactly as Beauvoir intended. She accepts Sartre’s © DR ANJA STEINBAUER 2016
Existentialist tenets that there is no human nature and that Anja Steinbauer teaches at the London School of Philosophy and is an
human freedom is absolute, i.e. that in any situation whatever Editor for Philosophy Now.
we always have a choice. In other words, human life is not on
autopilot, nor is there an instruction manual telling us how to
make the right decisions. This means that there is a good deal Simone de Beauvoir
Portrait by
of ambiguity, and, in short, Beauvoir tells us to face up to it and
Gail Campbell
live with it. Given this ambiguity there would seem to be very 2016
little opportunity for moral theorising. Not so, objects Beauvoir
to this standard Existentialist conclusion. We must not expect
absolute solutions and lasting answers: “Man fulfils himself in
the transitory or not at all.” But this doesn’t mean that all ways
of living, and all courses of action, are equally good. The way
forward is to look at the nature of our relationship to other
people.
Sartre’s Existentialism leads to a clear individualism, in which
the fact that there are other people presents a constant threat of
falling into ‘bad faith’. Others judge us and impose limits on us
to the unbearable degree that “hell is other people”. By con-
trast, Beauvoir’s own individualism is more nuanced, in a Kant-
ian way: “Is this kind of ethics individualistic, or not? Yes, if one
means by that that it accords to the individual an absolute value
and recognises in him alone the power of laying the foundations
of his own existence. …The individual is defined only by his
relationship to the world and to other individuals…. His free-
dom can only be achieved through the freedom of others.”
And here we finally have it: “No existence can be validly ful-
filled if it is limited to itself.” Beauvoir’s ethics views the exis-
tence of others as an opportunity. In fact it is the only opportu-
nity we have to give reality and meaning to what we do and
therefore to what we are: We must invite others to join our pro-

August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 11

Existentialism
EXISTENTIALISM AS PUNK PHILOSOPHY
Stuart Hanscomb argues that existentialism is punk philosophy par excellence.
W
henever I’m asked “So, what exactly is existentialism?” I
experience a sinking feeling. It’s a difficult philosophy to
explain; efforts typically end up trivializing or obfuscat-
ing so much about it that is important, original, and relevant.
A number of things account for this, but an important one is
that existentialism is a state of mind as much as it is a collec-
tion of ideas. As Kierkegaard’s ‘aesthetic’ works, and the novels
and plays of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus demonstrate, the
communication of this form of philosophy benefits from being
indirect. To appreciate its significance you have to be there, in
amongst the detailed stories, rolling critiques and inspirational
prose: you have to catch a dose of it through its resonance with
your own often unarticulated fears and aspirations. Along
these lines I am offering a new way in; a hook in the form of
an analogy with a movement in pop and rock music. Existen-
tialism, I want to claim, is the punk rock of philosophy.
Punk rock I’m characterizing as nihilistic, extreme, passion-
ate, liberating, inclusive, amateur, and violent. It had precur-
sors, and it still exists, but Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols
and all that they catalysed in the mid-Seventies are its most
important moment of impact. Punk was a wake-up snarl to an
atrophied establishment – a “loud raucous ‘No!’ ” (Garry Mul-
holland, Fear of Music, 2006). It sought to destroy, and in the
ruins left behind it flexed its gnarly uneducated wings and
expressed anger and frustration in a crude but deliberate sub-
version of the previous rock scene. In place of refinement and
privilege, it offered energy and inclusiveness. The distance
between band and audience shrank, and sometimes disap-
peared. In place of a rider of white wine, Evian and cocaine, it
offered spit, sweat and blood. In place of systems, plans,
improvable pasts and functional futures, it offered an exhilarat-
ing and dangerous present like a hyperactive adolescent. It
couldn’t be stage-managed. It wasn’t a performance in any
conventional sense of the word, but a happening.
no future: Nihilism
Dada is art that is anti-art. Punk is music that is anti-music .
Existentialism is a philosophy that is anti-philosophy.
How do they avoid the contradiction? They walk a
tightrope, which is part of the point. Punk music is an “outsider
aesthetic” (Jon Savage, England’s Dreaming, 1991), but it’s still
an aesthetic. Likewise, existentialism must recognize a place for
reflective rational discourse, since that’s necessary to philoso-
phy; but part of its agenda is to identify the limits of such dis-
course, and in so doing redirect us to what this perspective
marginalizes and represses. It will rail against conceits such as
the possibility of absolute knowledge, universal moral codes, an
ultimate meaning of life, a final harmony between individual
and state, or between the self and its possibilities. It will, in
short, point to the limits of rational enquiry, and accordingly,
the limits of the rational mind’s jurisdiction over emotion,
12 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
desire, and the body. Hegel was the Prog Rock of philosophy.
‘Right Guard will not help you here’: Extremes
The most radical element of this ‘anti’ stance, inheres as
much in the subversive nature of existentialism’s metaphors and
stories as in its theory of the human situation (as valid as that
theory is).
Punk was “a politics of energy” (Stewart Home, The Assault
on Culture, 1988), and also traded in extremes: short songs
aggressively delivered, Mohican haircuts, ripped PVC, and the
pogo dance. The medium, like the message, was intense and to
the point. Similarly, the existential in Kafka is firmly linked to
the surreal and grotesque worlds of dung beetles, hunger artists,
and burrow-dwellers; Camus presents murder, despotism,
plagues, and the punishment of Sisyphus; Sartre began with the
neo-horror of Nausea (1938) and moved on to suicide squads,
jealous assassins, and condemned prisoners; Kierkegaard used
seducers and infanticide to illuminate the human condition; and
Nietzsche styled himself as the anti-Christ. Since human exis-
tence is so vividly exposed by exploring its boundaries, extreme
situations present the existentialist with a perfect method.
The Filth and the Fury: Passion
“Punk broke out across the face of Britain like a disfiguring
rash” (Stuart Maconie, Cider With Roadies, 2004). The Sex Pis-
tols were an “attraction/repulsion machine” (England’s Dream-
ing). At a punk gig, to be spat at was a compliment. The emo-
tions and moods at the epicentre of existentialism are anxiety
and disgust. Anxiety recognizes the instability and contingency
in life; and disgust is often manifested as anger and cynicism
towards a complacent bourgeoisie who are insensitive to possi-
bility and the fragility of their forms of life. In the grotesque or
immoral lurks a strange beauty that corresponds with the unset-
tling ambivalence that often results from existential aesthetics.
Babylon’s Burning: Inclusive
We refer to authors as ‘existential’ as much because of their
anti-systematising intensity as for their distinctive ideas. This is
not a trivial point. The style models both the fact that only you
can know what it’s like to be you, and the desire to inspire the
reader to wake up and take responsibility. Kafka wanted to
‘shake us awake’; Kierkegaard described his life as an “epigram
calculated to make people aware”; and Sartre stressed that exis-
tentialism is a philosophy of action, not quietism. We are all the
philosophers of our own lives. Existentialism is therefore inclu-
sive. Punk attitude is “reacting from your own self, your own
spirit ... and not accepting what’s supposed to be established.”
(Jim Jarmusch, in Don Letts’ film Punk Attitude, 2005). We can
all live authentically. Anyone can start a band. Bassist Sid
Vicious became the whole point of the Sex Pistols and couldn’t
even play his instrument.

SARTRE PORTRAIT © ATHAMOS STRADIS 2010
WITH HAIRSTYLING BY KATY BAKER 2016
Oh Bondage Up Yours: Liberation
Nihilism – that “desperate stubborn refusal of the world”
(England’s Dreaming), is not an end-point but a rite of passage,
a temporary descent into the underworld. Existentialism isn’t
just a reaction against rational or academic excess, it also pro-
motes self-creation and spontaneity. Equally, Malcolm
McLaren’s mantra was “get a life and do something with it.”
His stepson recalls how “he made up the best bedtime stories,
but they always stopped in the middle and you had to finish
them yourself” (The Word magazine, June 2010).
Punk shouldn’t be just listened to, and even dancing isn’t
enough. It’s about a mood that needs full commitment – not
just appreciation of grooves and tunes, but the total attune-
ment of one’s rebellious, absurd self. To dwell too soberly on
Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground or Nietzsche’s Thus
Spoke Zarathustra also misses the point. They are designed to
capture and create adrenalized moments with the escape veloc-
ity to inspire life-changing self-awareness.
Do it Yourself: Amateur
A high proportion of philosophers classed as ‘existentialist’
have had tenuous relationships with the academic establish-
ment. This doesn’t necessarily make their output ‘amateur’ in
the pejorative sense (though Camus was accused of this), but it
does in the sense of placing them outside of the establishment.
The result can be a freedom and spontaneity in their ideas, and
a perspective on life less biased by the analytical gaze of an aca-
demic persona. Also, to be on the outside creates a kind of anx-
iety that focuses thoughts on the concrete content of life as
lived. The outsiders feel more in need of a home than those
employed by an institution.
Existentialism
Like the boiling lines of the punk cartoon Roobarb and Cus-
tard, existence is shaky, and the unemployed are more aware of
this than most. A career and the training or education it
implies is a source of stability which can create a halo that fal-
sifies existence as a whole. The punk is granted no such illu-
sion. Cult punk spoken word guru Henry Rollins wasn’t
aiming at anything like a career in music, but he was dedicated
to punk and to the spirit of his band Black Flag. Nor did he
aim to be a stand up comedian, but he turned his hand to
something like it, and the results are his highly unusual spoken
word performances. He’s an amateur and an auteur, himself
inspired by Dostoyevsky and by Nietzsche’s ‘pithy one liners’.
He imagines Nietzsche’s return as a stand up comic: “There’s
the crazy crowd at the back – Whatever doesn’t kill you makes
you stronger!” (Sweatbox, 1992).
White Riot: Violent
There is good violence, such as violence against oppression,
or violence serving as a metaphor for the ostensibly harmless
expression of frustration. Most punk is good violence. But of
course there is bad violence, and punk has a truly nasty fascist
wing. Nietzsche and Heidegger were violent philosophers; they
challenged the entire canon of Western philosophy and with it
the infrastructure of civilized values. But to apply a cultural
purgative is to run risks. By ‘philosophizing with a hammer’
Nietzsche courted misappropriation. Heidegger was for a while
existentialism’s Nazi Punk.
I have here attempted an indirect and partial illumination of
the well-known but little-understood philosophy that is existen-
tialism. It’s not the whole picture for sure; the punk analogy
can’t encompass its gentler claims about the mysteries of the
human condition and its more harmonious ties to the academic
establishment via, phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychother-
apy and virtue theory. Nevertheless, more than any other West-
ern philosophy, it’s one to be inhaled with keen personal aware-
ness and exhaled in the living moment. For this reason its
proper force must be communicated indirectly.
Punk, says Jon Savage, was “at its most powerful when
impossible to define” (England’s Dreaming). There is some-
thing about vitality that precludes satisfying definitions or
manifestos, and so all the time existentialism defies clear cate-
gorization there’s reason to believe it’s alive and well.
© STUART HANSCOMB 2016
Stuart Hanscomb is lecturer in philosophy at University of Glasgow’s
School of Interdisciplinary Studies (Dumfries). A version of this arti-
cle appeared in Café Philosophy (Auckland) in 2014.
Glossary
no future Song from the album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s
the Sex Pistols
‘Right Guard will not help you here’ A line from the Dead
Kennedys’ song Holiday in Cambodia
The Filth and the Fury The biopic of the Sex Pistols
Oh Bondage Up Yours A song by X-Ray Spex
Babylon’s Burning A song by The Ruts
Do it Yourself An album by Ian Dury and the Blockheads
White Riot A song by The Clash
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 13
Existentialism
The Absurd Heroics of Monsieur Meursault
Alex Holzman asks what a hero is, and if Camus’ infamous character qualifies.
H
eroics lie near the heart of both literary and historical
culture. Something about the ‘greatness’ of heroes
lends context to and brings to vivid life the events in
which they took part and often come to represent. They are
anchors in the sea of history, often cast by desperate people;
and like an anchor, they often alter the course of the vessel.
Heroes, fictional or otherwise, are quite diverse. We revere
Odysseus for his guile and tenacity, Atticus Finch for his just-
ness and morality, and Christ for his self-sacrifice; others we
exalt for their military exploits, ethical guidance, ideological
commitment, civic service, or rebelliousness. Heroes can be
controversial – perhaps even necessarily so for non-fictional
heroes. Neither Caesar nor Napoleon were without fault, to
say the very least, yet they command a place of respect in the
annals of history. Why is this the case? What do heroes cap-
ture in people’s minds that us historical wallflowers cannot?
The Essence of Heroism
The answer lies perhaps in a deconstruction of the terms
‘heroic’ and ‘heroic deeds’. What does it mean to behave hero-
ically? Self-sacrifice, generosity, piety, humility, and such traits
are sometimes considered central to heroics, but that’s certainly
not always the case. This is a conflation of moral heroics with
heroics of a more general nature. Many historical and fictional
heroes were neither unwaveringly moral nor particularly inter-
ested in morality. A more Hegelian conception of ‘hero’ might
simply be an influential figure in history – a Napoleon or
Caesar, a Stalin or Mao: someone who moves the historical
process along. The similarities between these barbarous heroes
and the more palatable ones (Christ, Gandhi, etc) are scarce, but
essential to understanding the nature of heroics.
An existentialist understanding of heroics may indeed dis-
pense with moral considerations altogether. If for the sake of
argument we accept the core existentialist idea that morality is
self-imposed, so that no one can be objectively more or less
moral than anyone else, would it follow that heroism cannot
exist? This seems unlikely: existentialists from Kierkegaard to
Camus have made reference to heroics despite their preclusion of
objective morality. So morality cannot be the basis of heroism, as
heroes no doubt exist but morality may not. Justness and moral
conscientiousness may be sufficient for heroism, given certain
contexts and standards; but from an existentialist perspective, it
cannot be necessary. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s greatest hero, Abra-
ham, was but a few heartbeats away from murdering his own son.
If morality is occasionally sufficient for heroism, but not nec-
essary for it, what trait unifies all heroes necessarily? It can be
nothing but bravery. Indeed, heroism and bravery are nearly syn-
onymous in the common vernacular. ‘Bravery’ can be under-
stood as performing actions even when one is afraid of either the
actions themselves or of their consequences. To some profound
extent, then, bravery, and subsequently heroism, is defined
largely in response to fear – or, fear is the vacuum into which
bravery and heroism flows. Every great hero, fictional or histori-
14 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
cal, existentialist or moralist, has demonstrated both fear and the
equivalent bravery.
If bravery is the necessary trait of heroes, its contrary can aid
us in understanding its singularity. What constitutes cowardice,
the opposite of bravery? For a soldier, the greatest coward is
undoubtedly the deserter – the fellow soldier who abandons his
comrades and flees from the battle. Traditionally, captured
deserters were executed; in modern times, they are tried to the
fullest extent of military law. On one hand, this severity is due
to the perceived attack on martial camaraderie that desertion
represents. On the other, it is a punishment for cowardice in
the face of some conflict.
This situating is absolutely essential. The coalescent theme of
all heroics is that they represent the human experience of some
conflict or struggle. Heroes can win and heroes can lose; but if
there is nothing to win and nothing to lose, then there can be
no heroics. One is neither hero nor coward while watching tele-
vision. And the greatest and most uncontroversial of heroes are
those who, in the face of unimaginable opposition and personal
terror, overcome and propagate the best qualities of humanity,
be they humility, intelligence, compassion, or fortitude.
Sisyphus & The Absurd
Monsieur Meursault, the protagonist of Albert Camus’ novel
The Stranger, is surely an intentionally unconventional hero.
The Stranger was first published in 1942, after WWI, and
therefore marked by extreme pessimism, and in the midst of
WWII, and therefore belonging to a world thoroughly in
upheaval. Correspondingly, the philosophy underscoring The
Stranger is one of listlessness, dissatisfaction, cynicism, and
exhaustion. In short, the novel is consumed wholly by a preoccu-
pation with the absurd. Camus’ conception of heroics inevitably
reflects this preoccupation, and subsequently, so does Meursault’s
heroism. However, it is in The Myth of Sisyphus (also 1942) that
Camus most explicitly describes the heroics of absurdity. There
he writes: “You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd
hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture.
His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life
won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is
exerted towards accomplishing nothing. This is the price that
must be paid for the passions of life.”
Like many legendary heros, Sisyphus struggled (and, if myth is
to be believed, continues to struggle) against the will of the gods
themselves. Sisyphus sought eternal life by challenging Death and
Hades, and so was punished with ceaseless, meaningless toil, by
having to push a boulder up a hill only to watch it tumble back
down again, for all eternity. This punishment is an attempt by the
gods to suppress Sisyphus’s freedom of choice, to make him into a
mere object. However, to call it an ‘attempt’ reveals the possibility
for heroics for Sisyphus. The primordial authority of the
Olympian gods bore down on Sisyphus, and to some extent, he
had no power but to submit; but even in the hopelessness of this
unending torture, there remains the possibility of transcendence:

“Sisyphus, the proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the
whole extent of his wretched condition; it is what he thinks of during his
descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns
his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn… if the
descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.”
If Sisyphus were but a disembodied soul, there would be no
suffering. But we imagine him as an aching and ancient man,
toiling in the mud and filth for all eternity. Yet in a great irony,
the locus of Sisyphus’s intended suffering is the same as that of
his heroics: his embodied consciousness. We imagine him as
conscious of his suffering; but if one is conscious of his suffer-
ing, surely he can choose to be conscious of something else
instead. As Camus says, there is no fate for consciousness that
cannot be surmounted by consciousness of something else – by
scorn for the gods’ decree, for example. And there is no scorn
so cutting and permanent as heroic joy. “We must imagine
Sisyphus happy,” Camus writes.
Meursault’s Absurdity
Let’s return to Meursault. In a world without gods, in which
human experience reigns as the sole transcendence, heroism is
defined not by a scorn for the will of the gods, but instead by a
scorn for the machinations of man and for the contingency of
the universe. With this established, Meursault is the realization
of an absurd hero. The absurd swirls around Meursault as it
does us all, lurking beneath our glib rationalizations. For
instance, we grind our noses against the absurd in the nauseat-
ingly alien moments of semantic satiation, where the meaning-
fulness of the arbitrary structures of grammar and language
collapse through the repetition of words. We also face the
absurd in those uncomfortably inexplicable but thankfully
momentary experiences of disembodiment.
The absurd is similar in operation to Sartre’s nothingness, in
that it is first and foremost a function of consciousness. Only con-
sciousness can offer the awareness of the absurd – thereby creat-
ing absurdity; and once experienced, it can never be forgotten.
The struggle against the absurd is consciousness’s ultimate battle.
Death is the supreme symbol of the absurd, since death rep-
resents both the cessation of consciousness and an unknowable
phenomenon. It is in the depths of the struggle against absurdist
death that we find
Meursault at the end of
The Stranger. The crime
that has led him to the
guillotine was pointless,
insofar as we can tell: he
has murdered an Arab,
but not out of passion
or spite, nor even
bloodlust. The act was
contingent upon noth-
ing but the bright sun.
It simply happened. It
was an absurd act.
Marcello Mastroianni as Mersault in Of course, human law
Visconti’s adaptation of The Stranger cannot comprehend
Existentialism
this. For the legal system, crimes must have intent; there must
have been a motive. So as a matter of course, Meursault is
(justly) condemned by this institutional reaction to the absurd.
But in a certain sense, the legal system has become another
component of Meursault’s consciousness of absurdity.
He is sentenced to death, the most severe punishment
allowable by law. The absurd has ensnared Meursault, just as it
did Sisyphus, snatched from the sea and sand to his toilsome
stone. Led to his cell, Meursault is expected to either repent
and surrender to the whims of man, or suffer in terror until
the drop of the blade. This expectation is predicated upon
both his consciousness of experiencing imprisonment and an
expectation of a consciousness of fear, to be terminated by his
death. And for a time it works as intended: Meursault quakes
in his bunk each morning, awaiting the heavy footsteps of the
guard coming to take him to his end. It is not until after his
climactic rage against the prison chaplain that Meursault’s
deconstruction of traditional expectations becomes clear.
Meursault was content with the pleasures and passions of
his world. He loved and longed for the sea and the bends of
the coast, the alluring touch of a young lover, and the other
aesthetic joys of a casual life, just as did (or does) Sisyphus.
When asked by the chaplain what he’d desire in death, Meur-
sault replies curtly that he desires nothing more or less than
his own life again – what else could a man desire at the end?
In the face of religion, Meursault remains unrepentant.
And in the face of society, he feels no guilt. He does not suffer
the concerns of others, nor does he submit to a fear of the
absurd. The absurdity of Meursault’s world – personified and
punctuated by his companions, the Arabs, the magistrate, the
prosecutor, the judges, and the priest – seeks to collapse him
into a choiceless object, whose only remaining transcendence
will be his suffering and death. But Meursault, the Algerian
Sisyphus, resists this reduction to a choiceless nothingness,
and in doing so, affirms his own transcendence. At the sight of
his own great stone tumbling down for the final time, Meur-
sault merely shrugs his shoulders and begins his descent.
Absurd Heroics
It is only conscious life that separates us from death, and
death can only come at the end of consciousness. Yet we fear it
as though it is something to be suffered, like an illness. Rather,
death is simply a bracketing of conscious life – no different in
function than birth. Fear of death is in actuality an expression
of love for life. It is the fear of an unknown that steals our pos-
sibilities from us. But it is only while fearful that one can
choose instead to be brave; and it is only while brave that one
can be a hero. Meursault routinely demonstrates radical brav-
ery in the face of the absurd. He is not a good man; but he
attains a level of authenticity that few ever mimic. And he
faces death with contentedness, taking responsibility for the
man he chose to be. Thus he opens himself to the happiness
of Sisyphus. Hades kneels before Chaos, and Meursault awaits
the scornful cries, comforted by their familiarity.
© ALEX HOLZMAN 2016
Alex Holzman is studying Political Science, Philosophy, and Psychol-
ogy at The College of New Jersey.
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 15
Existentialism
Why Camus Was NOT An Existentialist
Greg Stone presents the evidence.
W
hen Johnny Depp raises a wry eyebrow on screen,
it’s an ‘existential performance’. When Donald
Rumsfeld says there are ‘unknown unknowns’,
they call it ‘existential poetry’. Though many politicians and
entertainers welcome the label, Albert Camus certainly did
not. Even so, many people, even in academic publications,
have inaccurately identified him as an existentialist. What in
the name of Nietszche is going on?
In an interview in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 15 November,
1945, Camus said point-blank: “I am not an existentialist.” He
went on to say, “Sartre and I are always surprised to see our
names linked. We have even thought of publishing a short
statement in which the undersigned declare that they have
nothing in common with each other and refuse to be held
responsible for the debts they might respectively incur. It’s a
joke actually. Sartre and I published our books without excep-
tion before we had ever met. When we did get to know each
other, it was to realize how much we differed. Sartre is an exis-
tentialist, and the only book of ideas that I have published, The
Myth of Sisyphus, was directed against the so-called existentialist
philosophers.” Camus compared existentialism to “philosophi-
cal suicide,” causing followers to “deify what crushes them” –
saying, in effect, that they turn negation into a religion. Camus
in turn had a religion of his own – a quasi-pagan quasi-Greek
reverence for nature. Case in point: Sisyphus, his hero of the
absurd, who is condemned to push a heavy boulder up a hill for
eternity, only to watch it roll down each time into the valley
below. Sisyphus achieves a serene unity with the physical world:
“The cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the
clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with
arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-
clotted hands” (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942). In Camus’ version
of the story, Sisyphus is happy. If Jean-Paul Sartre had written
CARTOON © PHIL WITTE 2016
Sisyphus sighs
16 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
it, Sisyphus would have experienced nausea as he contemplated
the alien substantiality – the ‘being-in-itself’ – of the rock.
So what is existentialism, and why does Camus not qualify?
In simple terms, Sartre believed that existence precedes
essence; Camus however contended that essence precedes exis-
tence. That is to say, in Sartre’s bleak cosmos, man becomes
conscious primarily of his existence as a free agent, and is then
condemned to forge his own identity – his essence – in a world
without God. Camus, on the other hand, was willing to posit
legal rules so absolute that they could be said to point to
‘essences’ – among them a belief that almost all violence is
immoral. Therein lies the foul: dogmatic principles for living,
no matter how well intentioned, are not ‘existential’.
Although Camus is invariably linked with Sartre, whose
name is synonymous with existentialism, they were an odd
couple, who clashed like Voltaire and Rousseau, or Verlaine
and Rimbaud. Sartre was tiny, plump, and ugly; Camus tall,
elegant, and handsome: Sartre played Quasimodo to Camus’
Humphrey Bogart. Sartre famously described man as a “useless
passion”; Camus described himself as a man of passion. Sartre
felt most at home in the dark cafés of Paris; Camus in the blaz-
ing sunlight of the Algeria of his childhood. Sartre wrote at
Mozartian speed; Camus at Beethoven’s tortured pace.
Their political differences spilled into public view in 1952, in
the pages of Sartre’s newspaper Les Temps Modernes. By this time,
Sartre’s views had evolved to include support for communism,
which Camus regarded as the extension of a harsh Teutonic
tradition stretching from Hegel to Marx, and reaching a per-
verse conclusion in Stalin’s labor camps. He decried Marx’s
theory of history, dialectical materialism, and its use by com-
munists to “authorize any excess” in their quest for a classless
society. In his view there are no privileged executioners.
In his fashion, Sartre also opposed Stalin’s methods – while at
the same time claiming that mass imprisonment in the Soviet
Union was not as bad as one lynching in the United States. He
objected, however, to the exploitation of Stalin’s labor camps by
the ‘bourgeois press’ to fuel their anti-communist propaganda.
But after Camus’ taunt that Sartre was a detached intellectual
who merely pointed his armchair at history, Sartre stabbed back:
“My dear Camus: our friendship was not easy, but I will miss
it… I don’t dare advise you to go back to Being and Nothingness,
since reading it would be needlessly difficult for you… You are
only half-alive among us.” Privately, Sartre characterized
Camus as “a kind of schoolteacher, worthless in philosophy.”
Whew. I sum it up this way: Camus was a poet who wished
he could be an influential thinker; Sartre a deep thinker who
wished he could attain the eloquence of a poet. Camus stum-
bled with the minutiae of philosophical logic, and Sartre with
words – as anyone who has tried to read either closely will
quickly discover. Yet only one of them was an existentialist.
© GREG STONE 2016
Greg Stone is a media consultant, independent producer and existen-
tial thinker in the Boston area.
Albert Camus
by Woodrow Cowher
More work of his can be seen at
instagram.com/woodrawspictures August/September 2016● Philosophy Now 17
Existentialism
“all the consequences of this”
Kile Jones argues that atheistic existentialism is more compelling than
religious existentialism.
xistentialism, as I understand it, is primarily a philosophy (Danish for ‘dread’ or ‘anxiety’) in his famous work The Concept

E of tragedy. It often speaks of tragedy as bound up with

existence – that you cannot have one without the other.
Tragedy
Before the rise of German, and in turn French, existential-
ism, tragedy was considered primarily a poetic and literary style.
We can think of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, or
Euripides’ Alcestis as well-known examples of tragedy. Centuries
later, in Germany, the writings of Hegel, Schopenhauer, Niet-
zsche, and Jaspers. elevated tragedy outside of literary expres-
sion to a place of philosophical and existential importance.
Arthur Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, The World as Will and
Representation (1818) raises tragedy to “the summit of poetic art”
as it expresses “the terrible side of life”; Nietzsche’s early work
The Birth of Tragedy (1872) argues strongly for a Dionysian rev-
elry in tragedy; and Jasper’s Tragedy Is Not Enough (1969) finds
tragedy to be a condition for the experience of transcendence.
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) was an existentialist philosopher
who saw tragedy as a launching pad for authentic faith. What
he calls ‘tragic knowledge’ or ‘absolute and radical tragedy,’ is
comparable to Sartre’s or Camus’ notions of meaninglessness
or absurdity. Jaspers’ kind of tragedy is opposed to salvation or
redemption, since they are both answers to it. As Jaspers says,
tragedy is not enough – implying that we can, and ought to,
move beyond the brute tragedy of existence. He says that “the
chance of being saved destroys the tragic sense of being
trapped without chance of escape.” In contrast, many atheist
existentialists see the whole of human existence as tragic.
The fact that Jaspers retains his ideas in the face of the tragic
nature of existence shows how he differs from atheist existential-
ists (e.g. Heidegger, Sartre, Camus). These – myself included –
argue that the tragic nature of existence does not have an
answer; it is just how existence is. We cannot escape it, avoid it,
or supply a remedy for it. Therefore I argue that the atheist
existentialists develop a more authentic form of existentialism,
since they accept absolute tragedy and do not seek to dodge its
consequences. Sartre says, “when we speak of forlornness, a
term Heidegger was fond of, we mean only that God does not
exist and that we have to face all the consequences of this” (Exis-
tentialism and Human Emotions, 1957). So Sartre and other athe-
ist existentialists “face all the consequences of this” – while reli-
gious existentialists (such as Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Marcel)
do not. They would be uneasy with Sartre’s notion, put forward
in his novel Nausea (1938), which carries radical tragedy to its
logical conclusion: “Every existing thing is born without reason,
prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.”
of Dread (1844). Dread, according to Kierkegaard, comes from
within the individual (spirit) and from without (as an ‘alien
power’). Kierkegaard connects dread with the entrance of sin
into human existence, the Fall of Adam and Eve. This brought
with it dread, not of something external to the individual, but
as dread of one’s own self: “one will encounter the phenome-
non that a man seems to become guilty merely for dread of
himself.” Man also finds dread in his longing for release from
guilt. Kierkegaard writes, “the expression for such a longing is
dread, for in dread the state out of which a man longs to be
delivered announces itself…” The central existential paradox
regarding dread is that man “cannot flee from dread, for he
loves it; really he does not love it, for he flees from it.” With
dread, man continues the vicious cycle of: freedom-fall-dread-
guilt, freedom-fall-dread-guilt, ad infinitum.
Kierkegaard’s response to dread (and to most other prob-
lems) is faith. He writes:
“The one and only thing which is able to disarm the sophistry of remorse
is faith… courage to renounce dread without any dread, which only faith is
capable of – not that it annihilates dread, but remaining ever young, it is
continually developing itself out of the death throes of dread. Only faith is
capable of doing this, for only in faith is the synthesis eternally and every
instant possible.” (p.104)
Dread, like tragedy, should lead you somewhere; and in this
case, where you’re led is faith. Kierkegaard thinks that tragedy,
paradox, and dread should lead one out of attempts to rationalize
and towards a subjective ‘leap of faith’. Although Kierkegaard
Oedipus and Antigone
by Eugéne-Ernest
Hillemacher

Dread
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) examined the philosophi-
cal, psychological, and theological implications of angest

18 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016


acknowledges that faith does not do away with dread, he thinks
that it develops “out of the death throes of dread” and that faith
is the courage to “renounce dread without any dread.” But what
is renouncing other than conquering and moving beyond? And
what if, on the contrary, dread should lead you nowhere?
Both Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) argue
against purely rationalistic answers to existential problems, since
rationality cannot completely explain the subjective experiences
of paradox and mystery. Rationalism also assumes a scientific
stance of ‘objectivity’ that tacitly thinks it can gain certainty
about the external world and humanity’s relationship to it.
Marcel is especially opposed to this. He thinks this kind of ‘sci-
entific’ posture poses all inquiry in the form of problem and
answer, and leaves out, or completely ignores, the idea of mys-
tery. “A problem” Marcel says, “is something which I meet,
which I find complete before me, but which I can therefore lay
siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I
myself am involved” (Being and Having, 1965). He also says, “a
mystery, by definition, transcends every conceivable technique.”
Both Kierkegaard and Marcel acknowledge the role anxiety
plays in human experience, and yet they both see subjective
experience as pointing towards something ‘beyond,’ and ‘tran-
scendent’. They note how language cannot penetrate this realm
beyond normal human experience, but they still choose to keep
this realm as a possibility. Why they choose to do so is beyond
comprehension for rationalist atheist existentialists, who would
ask, why believe in anything indescribable or beyond compre-
hension? Why not simply accept human existence on its own
terms, as something radically and absolutely tragic, riddled with
anxiety and dread, from which there is no escape? So I think
both Kierkegaard and Marcel do not take anxiety and existen-
tial angst seriously because they think it points beyond itself to
a transcendental realm. The contradiction in Marcel’s thought
is that although he is against the scientific manner of framing
inquiry as problem/answer, he nonetheless retains mystery and
transcendence as potential answers to the problems posed by
existence. To be consistent, he and Kierkegaard, should have
abandoned those elusive phantasms, and carry tragedy and
Existentialism
weak, and passive, a victim of forces beyond his control.
The greatness of Nietzsche’s philosophy is that it encour-
ages, uplifts, empowers, and revitalizes. It tells the individual
to conquer fear and self-pity by affirming her unique power in
the world. He tells us that the “greatness and fruitfulness and
the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously.
Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into
uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be
robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and
owners, you lovers of knowledge!” (The Gay Science, 1882).
Nietzsche, who was at once an admirer of Schopenhauer, later
rejected Schopenhauer’s idea that one should resign oneself to
the cosmic Will. Nietzsche would rather think of the individ-
ual as actively engaged in the world, and not, like Schopen-
hauer or Kafka, as a passive product of circumstances.
Kafka, by contrast, shows how powerless humans are in the
face of forces beyond their control. His most popular fiction,
The Metamorphosis (1915) is the story of Gregor Samsa, who
awakes to find himself turned into “a monstrous vermin” (usu-
ally thought of as a cockroach). He cannot answer his door, he
can barely move, and the struggles he endures to get out of bed
seem almost endless: “no matter how hard he threw himself
onto his right side, he always rocked onto his back again.” The
Metamorphosis has been thought to represent many different
aspects of Kafka’s life and thought; but no matter what one
thinks the story is an allegory of, the theme of powerlessness is
central. The never-ending struggle of any of Gregor’s projects
is illustrative of the torment experienced by those who feel
powerless. If placed in Camus’ story The Myth of Sisyphus,

PUPPETEER IMAGE © VADIM DOZMOROV 2016. PLEASE VISIT VADIM.CREVADO.COM

angst to their logical conclusions as Sartre argues.

Powerlessness
Many existential philosophers have described, sometimes in
vivid detail, what it is like to feel powerless. Social and political
forces external to you can take away your freedoms and
impugn you with guilt, creating a sense of powerlessness. Psy-
chological forces internal to you can do the same thing. The
internal forces are especially frightening because they occur
inside you and yet can feel beyond your control. They can
inculcate feelings of isolation, fear, and dread, along with a
sense of being trapped in your own personality.
A good way to explore the feeling of powerlessness is through
the work of those who have examined it in great detail. For me
the best exemplars of this are Nietzsche and the novelist Franz
Kafka. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is well acquainted
with the forces, both internal and external, and thinks that we
ought to harness the power of our desires and affirm ourselves
by willing to live with dangerous confidence. Kafka (1883-
1924), on the other hand, depicts the individual as powerless,

August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 19

“K. ends up in a constant war against
the bureaucracy and social norms of
the village surrounding the castle.”
Portrait of Franz Kafka by
Darren McAndrew 2016

20 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016


Gregor Samsa would spend his whole time struggling to move
the boulder, and one can only imagine him unhappy.
Kafka’s protagonists are all similar. In The Trial (1925), Josef
K. is hauled off by authorities he does not meet for a crime of
which he is not even aware. At the end of his thirty-first year of
incarceration, Josef K. is executed. In The Castle (1926), protago-
nist K. is sent (the story never says by whom) as a land-surveyor
to a remote mountain village surrounding a castle. He is sent to
and fro, never being able to meet Count Westwest and so begin
his task. He ends up in a constant war against the invisible
bureaucracy and social norms of the village. He eventually dies
there, never knowing what his purpose was, never completing
his task, and never coming to terms with the strangeness of the
village. Each of these characters are subject to the whims of
powers outside of their control. Although they try, they never
accomplish any meaningful changes in the lot they were given.
As Sartre would say, they “prolong … out of weakness.”
Wisdom involves knowing when you can change things and
when you cannot. Reinhold Niebuhr contemplated this and
composed his famous ‘Serenity Prayer’, which asks God to
“grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the
difference.” This prayer contains a kernel of truth. Whether or
not we ought to orientate ourselves in a manner similar to
Nietzsche or Kafka is a different question. I am of the opinion
that even though the world is much as Kafka depicts it, we
should still have a Nietzschean orientation. We ought to act as
if we can change things, conquer fears, and affirm our lives. As
Sartre constantly points out, the responsibility of our lives, our
projects, and our personalities, is on ourselves. We are the
authors of our own life stories.
Absurdity
Absurdity is another important theme in existentialism.
Absurdity in the existentialist sense is the contrast between
human values, hopes and projects, and a universe which seems
mockingly indifferent to them. Kierkegaard wrote about it in
his Fear and Trembling (1843), The Sickness Unto Death (1849),
and in his posthumously collected Journals and Papers (1967).
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard praises Abraham because
he “believed on the strength of the absurd.” In his Journals and
Papers, Kierkegaard juxtaposes understanding and the absurd:
“Faith hopes for this life also, but, note well, by virtue of the
absurd, not by virtue of human understanding.” He also thinks
that “to see God or to see the miracle is by virtue of the
absurd, for understanding must step aside.” In this way
Kierkegaard uses absurdity to express the limits of reason, and
especially of ‘pure reason’. In this sense, Kierkegaard is in
agreement with atheist existentialists, who often speak of the
impotence of human reason; but he is in disagreement with
them when he speaks of a God reached by ‘the leap of faith’.
Against Kierkegaard, Albert Camus (1913-1960) treats
absurdity not just as something opposed to reason, but as a cen-
tral quality of human existence. In The Stranger (1942), Camus’
protagonist Meursault does not conform to the social system he
is born into because he sees life as absurd. Camus says of him
that he is “condemned because he does not play the game.” In
The Plague (1947), Camus uses an epidemic to reveal the absur-
Existentialism
dity of the human condition. Those caught in the plague have
to deal with their own individual existential crises, but eventu-
ally find themselves in solidarity with the infected.
Many religiously-inclined people have argued that Sartre’s
and Camus’ thoughts on meaninglessness and absurdity lead
people to immorality, nihilism, and despair. Camus responds to
this idea in the ‘Three Interviews’ section of Lyrical and Critical
Essays (1968). He’s asked, “Doesn’t a philosophy that insists
upon the absurdity of the world run the risk of driving people
to despair?” and he responds, “Accepting the absurdity of
everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it
should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can
become fruitful.” So a recognition of absurdity can create an
impetus for positive social change.
Atheistic Existentialists Take These Themes Seriously
My argument is that only atheistic existentialists take exis-
tential themes seriously. They take them seriously because they
are taken on their own terms: they do not try to remedy them
with faith, mystery, or paradox. For instance, it is my con-
tention that theistic existentialism is incompatible with what
Jaspers calls “absolute and radical tragedy.” Tragedy and absur-
dity are given, partially understood by the intellect, and deeply
felt at the level of the emotions. But in religious existentialism
there is always something to which tragedy and absurdity point,
whereas I agree with Sartre and Camus that tragedy and absur-
dity point nowhere. They are not means to an end.
To take tragedy and absurdity and the other issues seriously
is to accept them as legitimate – not to be solved by resorting
either to rational answers or to mystery and paradox, but to be
pondered and investigated. But how does God’s existence or
non-existence factor into this? Does God’s existence or non-
existence really make any difference? Sartre says of some
French teachers who tried to set up a secular ethic that, like
Laplace, they thought of God as a “useless and costly hypothe-
sis” (Existentialism and Human Emotions). He also said, “This, I
believe, is the tendency of everything called reformism in
France – nothing will be changed if God does not exist.”
Against this type of thinking he says “the existentialist, on the
contrary, thinks it very distressing that God does not exist,
because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas dis-
appears along with Him.”
Mary Warnock says the opposite to Sartre: “We may note in
passing how little difference it makes to Existentialist theory
whether it includes or does not include belief in God. For in
practice there is no help to be found in believing in God” (Exis-
tentialism, 1970). I disagree. Sartre was right that it makes all the
difference if a God exists or not. If He does, there are radical
consequences, not only metaphysically, but also existentially, psy-
chologically, and practically; and if he does not there are similar
radical consequences, many of which Sartre notes. If God exists,
it would be strange to think of life as absolutely and radically
tragic, because God, it is traditionally thought, gives meaning
to existence. So taking tragedy and absurdity seriously requires
a belief in the non-existence of God, gods, and an afterlife.
Many existentialists, Sartre included, think that the non-
existence of God is ‘distressing’ and ‘disturbing’, since it
negates universal values. Indeed, the idea of a Godless world,
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 21
Existentialism
where humans are forlorn and abandoned, is frightening to
many people. This may be what keeps many people believing
in God. However, I think, as Christopher Hitchens did, that
the idea of God’s non-existence may be disturbing at first, but
eventually you come to understand how horrific the idea of the
existence of God itself seems. Atheists may be without univer-
sal values, but at least we’re not constantly watched and
judged. This idea of God is similar to Orwell’s Big Brother: the
elusive ruler who controls everything, whom you must fear
and love, and who watches your every thought. This kind of
God-created world is also ‘distressing’ and ‘disturbing’.
Atheistic Existentialists Take These Themes
To Their Logical Conclusions
When Sartre says, “God does not exist and we have to face
all the consequences of this” he is saying that we should take
the idea of a Godless world to its conclusions. In other words,
tragedy, anxiety, powerlessness, and absurdity fit perfectly with
a Godless world, but when they’re given religious spin they
lose their strength and fecundity. Tragedy, taken to its logical
conclusion, is absolute; anxiety, taken to its logical conclusion,
is anxiety without an answer; powerlessness, taken to its logical
conclusion, shows how embedded we are in this world; and
absurdity, taken to its logical conclusion, is complete. To live
authentically in the face of these themes is not to supply an
answer to them, but to know there is none.
One of the main reasons why I think atheistic existentialism
is more authentic than religious existentialism, is that the
former accepts the idea of radical responsibility. This kind of
responsibility – usually associated with Sartre – says that we
cannot look beyond ourselves to find accountability. It’s true
that Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Marcel also place responsibility
in the agency of the individual; but they do so thinking that
God is watching, even if we do not take the leap of faith, or
accept the mystery of being, transcendence, or the encompass-
ing. This is incompatible with an absolute idea of human
responsibility. Walter Kaufmann got it right when discussing
Sartre. He wrote, “All man’s alibis are unacceptable: no gods
are responsible for his condition; no original sin; no heredity
and no environment; no race, no caste, no father, and no
mother; no wrong-headed education, no governess, no
teacher” (Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 1956). The
God of religious existentialism, no matter how elusive, myste-
rious, and paradoxical, is still an alibi.
Camus wrote an interesting story about the uselessness of
God when facing despair and other existential crises. In Irony
(1937), Camus tells of an old woman who is slowly dying and
is terrified by her isolation, and of dying alone, even though
she’s religious; “her whole life was reduced to God.” She finds
comfort only in a young man who tries his best to listen to and
care for her. When the old woman’s relatives leave for the
movies, the young man hesitates out of pity: then “she saw that
the one person who had taken an interest in her was leaving.
She didn’t want to be alone. She could already feel the horror
of loneliness, the long, sleepless hours, the frustrating intimacy
with God. She was afraid, could now only rely on man… God
was of no use for her. All He did was cut her off from people
and make her lonely.” This story illustrates that not even God
22 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
can experience your pain and death for you. Your pain and
your death are yours only. So even in the face of the most diffi-
cult existential experience, “God is of no use to us.” The
responsibility can be only on the individual.
Atheistic Existentialism Provides A Life-Affirming
Philosophy For The Twenty-First Century
If atheist existentialism takes tragedy, anxiety, powerlessness,
and absurdity seriously and to their logical conclusions, then it
is easy to see how this can give us a radical and life-affirming
philosophy for the twenty-first century. If we accept the themes
of the existentialist literature with seriousness, and if all respon-
sibility is on us, then since the themes of existentialism cannot
be answered, remedied, or overcome, they should be embraced
and used as a way of affirming one’s individuality and as an
impetus towards living authentically. What follows from this is
a philosophy of action. And if there were ever a time when an
existential philosophy of human responsibility were needed, it
would surely be now. Political unrest, globalization, social
change, and the loss of modernist certainties, are only a few of
the paradigm shifts occurring at the present time. Feeling pow-
erless is an all-too-common phenomenon in the twenty-first
century. ‘Resignation’ and ‘life; have become almost synony-
mous, since political, social, and individual change often appear
to be utterly beyond our power. The bombardment of informa-
tion also stirs a sense of confusion, skepticism, and disdain.
The thinking of the millennial generation mirrors atheistic
existentialism in many ways. Its focus on the individual, on
doubt, and on disenchantment with political systems, echoes
French intellectual life from the forties through the sixties.
Although we are offered many ‘solutions’ to our current
predicament – New Age spirituality, religious hope, psychics,
consumer commodities, lifestyle enhancers, pharmaceuticals –
none of these offers seem authentic or realistic. They are
simply veils that hide the void between the haves (who present
themselves as happy) and the have-nots (who have limited
venues to present themselves at all). Instead of examining and
evaluating the ways in which people orient their lives, we are
offered quick and easy ‘answers’. But we don’t need ‘answers’
as much as we need honesty. Atheistic existentialism can help
modern society by providing people with a philosophy that
accepts the tragedy and absurdity of existence while promoting
responsibility and authentic living. It can help people move
past resignation into an orientation that affirms the uniqueness
of the individual and her projects. Her subjectivity, when seen
in relationship to others, can create a sense of sympathy and
empathy. So against the idea of an ‘infinite distance between
the self and the Other’ (see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and
Infinity, 1961), I believe genuine and authentic communication
can take place, even if made difficult by the distance between
the individual’s authentic private self and her public expres-
sions. Existentialism provides an ethic that honors individual
projects and social responsibility, and encourages the sympathy
and empathy that arise through communication.
© KILE JONES 2016
Kile Jones is an atheist who does interfaith work. He has a Masters of
Sacred Theology from Boston University, as well as a Masters of The-
ological Studies from the same place. His Twitter is @KileBJones
 Facts & Opinions
Christoffer Lammer-Heindel tells us some important facts about them.

F
rom a very young age we are encouraged to distinguish Facts & Knowledge
facts from opinions. Now the ability to distinguish facts Still, it is sometimes asked in response to controversial
from merely alleged facts, and the ability to distinguish issues, “Who determines what the facts are?”
opinions from considered judgments, is an important skill. This is an ambiguous question. On the one hand, the ques-
However, the fact-opinion duality is a false dichotomy which tion can be understood as asking, “Who would be in a position
rests on a category mistake. In claiming that facts and opinions to discern what the facts are?” This is a perfectly reasonable
stand in a dichotomous relationship, we ignore the two classes question to ask, since some of us are more equipped than
which stand in genuine opposition to each set in turn: facts are others to discern the facts in a certain area. For example, I
properly opposed to what we variously call non-facts, merely know very little about automobiles. As a consequence, I am in
alleged facts, fictions, or falsehoods; and opinions really stand no position to pronounce on whether the clicking noise I hear
in opposition to considered judgments. when I start up my car is caused by the fuel system, the timing
belt, or whatever. By contrast, I am in a position to determine,
A Fact Is Whatever Is The Case in the sense of discern or figure out, whether my wife picked
When someone asks, “Is that a fact?” they can be understood up our child from school this afternoon, whereas you are not.
as asking, “Is that really the case?” or “Is that ultimately true?” The ability to make an informed judgment as to what the facts
When someone says, “It is a fact that…” they are telling us, in are in a certain situation is a function of available evidence,
other words, “It is the case that…” or “It is true that…” That is, experience, training, and so forth. And of course, with respect
facts are not the statements themselves; they are, rather, the state to some issues, no one is in a position to discern the facts. (We
of affairs or the reality to which a true statement corresponds. will return to this point in a moment.)
Now it is neither necessary nor useful – indeed, it is posi- On the other hand, the question, “Who determines what
tively misleading – to define ‘fact’ in terms of what is indis- the facts are?” could be understood as asking, “Who makes it so
putably the case – yet people sometimes do. We should resist that something is or is not a fact?” When applied to the ques-
the temptation to endorse this qualification, for the simple tion of whether God exists, the answer is obvious: no one does.
reason that whether a particular matter is disputable or not has Neither the existence nor the non-existence of God (whatever
no bearing on what is the case. Moreover, there is very little the fact of the matter may be) is caused by human action; so no
that is not, at least in some sense, disputable. one makes it a fact that God exists, and no one makes it a fact
To appreciate that disputability has no bearing on whether
something is or is not a fact, consider the following case. It is
well-known that some people believe that Lee Harvey Oswald
did not kill John F. Kennedy, while many others believe that he
did. Both views are backed up by reasons and supported by at
least some evidence. So this is clearly a disputable issue. To say
that a point is disputable is to say, at the very least, that differ-
ent individuals hold different views on it. Nevertheless, there
is a fact of the matter as to whether Oswald was involved in the
assassination: he either was or he wasn’t. One of the two
options must be the case.
The same thing can be said about the question of whether
God exists. This is clearly a disputable issue, but we must recog-
nize that it either is the case that the being referred to by the
term ‘God’ (let us say, ‘creator of the universe’) exists, or it is not
the case that such a being exists. (The fact that people have dif-
fering conceptions of God doesn’t serve to undermine this point,
but simply to make it more complicated: for each conception
of God, the being so conceived either does or does not exist.)
Arguing about an issue doesn’t somehow make it into an
issue about which there is no answer. Indeed, genuine dispute
is only meaningful when there is an answer. It’s basically point-
less to engage in a dispute about something for which there is
no fact of the matter.

August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 23

that God doesn’t exist. In this case, the fact of the matter is
totally independent of us. In the case of Oswald’s involvement
or lack of involvement in the assassination of President
Kennedy, Oswald was the one who made the fact what it is.
We, looking back on the incident and the evidence, do not.
This illustrates an obvious but rather important point. To the
extent that people act, they clearly do make various things the
case and various things not the case. If I place my coffee cup on
the table, I’ve made it a fact that the coffee cup is on the table
and I’ve made it a falsehood that the coffee cup is in the cup-
board. This is because I can interact with the physical world and
change physical states of affairs, thus to that extent determining
what the physical facts are. There are, however, facts beyond
physical facts. For example, sometimes our actions take on
meaning and so create facts because of institutional rules that are
in place. When a sufficient number of individuals on a college’s
board of trustees all vote to divest the college’s holdings in Com-
pany X, then it becomes a matter of institutional fact that the
college is not to hold shares in Company X. Similarly, when the
Pope speaks ex cathedra [meaning, with the agreement of all the
cardinals, Ed] on matters of faith or morals, he makes it the case
that those things become, as a matter of fact, Catholic doctrine.
They will be Catholic doctrine whether other Catholics (and
non-Catholics) agree with the proclamation or not, and regard-
less of whether we even care.
In these and myriad other ways, people do determine the
facts in the sense of make them.
Something Can Be A Fact Even If We Can’t Know It
Consider the claim, “At precisely the moment that the US
National Institute of Standards and Technology’s atomic clock
struck 15:00:00 on the afternoon of March 4, 2015, there were
an odd number of people inside the New York Public Library’s
Main Reading Room.” This claim is either true or false: it either
was the case that an odd number of people were (completely)
inside the room at that time, or it was not the case. Now, if it was
the case, then the claim would express a fact. If it wasn’t the case,
it would express merely an alleged fact, which was (in fact) false.
Notice, however, that we probably can’t know whether the claim
is true or false – which is to say that we can’t know whether it is
a fact or not. Such is life. There are, quite literally, an infinite
number of possible claims that we could make that we know
must be either true or false (it is a fact that there is a fact about
it!), but we cannot possibly figure out their truth-values. For
another example, it either is or is not a fact that Julius Caesar
was red-green color blind; but it is doubtful that anyone will
ever now know what the fact of the matter is.
Facts Are Not Properly Contrasted With Opinions
As I mentioned at the outset, facts are often presented as
the opposite of opinions. Justin P. McBrayer, a philosophy pro-
fessor at Fort Lewis College, Colorado, reported in the New
York Times' blog, The Stone in 2015(‘Why Our Children Don’t
Think There Are Moral Facts’) that national education stan-
dards in the United States require elementary school children
to learn to categorize statements according to whether they
express facts or express opinions – the assumption being that
all of the statements with which they’re provided express either
24 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
facts or opinions, and that no statement could express both.
McBrayer rightly points out that, contrary to the assumption
that forms the basis of that standard, the fact-opinion
dichotomy is a false dichotomy.
To say that statements must either express facts or express
opinions, but not both, is a bit like saying that all fruit must
either be an apple, or be produce available at my local grocer.
While a banana is clearly produce available at my local grocer
but not an apple, and a Red Astrakhan – a relatively rare heir-
loom apple – is an apple but not available at my local grocer, it
is simply not true that every fruit must either be an apple or
available at my grocer. Nor is it true that a fruit could not be
neither. The Granny Smith sitting in my fridge is clearly both
an apple and available at my grocer, while physalis – sometimes
known as giant ground cherries – are neither apples nor avail-
able at my grocer.
To appreciate this analogy, we must clarify what an opinion
is. Clearly, the term ‘opinion’ denotes a kind of belief. In
common usage, an opinion is a belief which has not been suffi-
ciently well-supported or substantiated to count as a consid-
ered judgment. Indeed, beliefs can be usefully classified as
either opinions (beliefs which do not enjoy sufficient support
or justification) or considered judgments (beliefs which do
enjoy sufficient support or justification). This is a perfectly
appropriate dichotomy. Note, however, that it should not be
confused with another equally important and legitimate
dichotomy: namely, the distinction between true beliefs and
false beliefs. Both every opinion and every considered judg-
ment – in other words, every belief – will either be true or
false. This is a function of the fact that beliefs are about things
or states of affairs and they will either comport with the facts
or not. So as with the fruit example, it is not true that a belief
is either a fact or an opinion. Rather, an opinion may or may
not express a fact, just as a considered judgment may or may
not express a fact. (And again, it is a separate issue whether the
fact in question can ever be known or not.)
It should be noted that a belief being false doesn’t automati-
cally render it a mere opinion. Suppose that, in addition to
lying to their child by telling her that Santa Claus exists, a
couple also set out to create an elaborate ruse to provide the
child with evidence (albeit concocted, misleading evidence) that
Santa exists. It is perfectly possible that the child’s false belief
in Santa has then risen to the level of a considered judgment.
It is also worth noting that whether a particular belief is a
mere opinion or a considered judgment is highly variable: it’s
relative to the individual believer, and to a particular time in
their life, too. To return to the automobile example, my
mechanic and I could independently arrive at the belief that
the clicking noise I hear when starting up my car is caused by a
faulty valve in the engine. In my case, and considering the state
of my current knowledge (that is, my current ignorance), this
would be nothing more than an opinion – just short of a wild
guess, really – whereas in the case of my mechanic, it would be
a considered judgment (or so I hope). Now, let’s suppose that
the clicking noise is in fact caused by a faulty valve. In this
case, the statement “My car engine has a faulty valve”
expresses a fact; but before my conferring with my mechanic,
my own belief would nevertheless be a mere opinion.

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Moral Facts and Moral Opinions
In the context of a heated discussion about a controversial
moral issue, it is not uncommon to hear the retort, “Well,
that’s just your opinion,” where this is intended to mean that
the matter in question is something about which there can
only be opinions, for there are no moral facts.
This is a view that enjoys a fair amount of currency in con-
temporary society, and unlike some, I do not think it is a view
that should be dismissed out of hand. It could end up being the
case that those who believe that there are moral facts are mis-
taken. There is nothing obviously incoherent about that view.
Yet it must also be emphasized that it isn’t obviously true that
there are no facts about what is moral, good, right, just, etc.
There may well be objective moral facts. If moral matters are
genuinely disputable, we must assume that there is some fact of
the matter under dispute, although we can and perhaps should
admit that the facts are sometimes very difficult to discern. Fur-
ther, as J.L. Mackie argued in his book Ethics: Inventing Right and
Wrong (1977), if there are no moral facts, it will turn out that all
beliefs dependent upon supposed moral facts will be false beliefs.
Philosophers have also long debated what kinds of facts
moral facts would be. Some have sought to reduce them to
other kinds of facts – for example, institutional facts or psycho-
logical facts – while others have claimed they are a unique and
irreducible type of fact. Matters of taste are sometimes thought
to be a close cousin of value judgments. Indeed, various
philosophers (such as David Hume) have entertained the pos-
sibility that moral judgments are nothing more than matters of
taste. Such views are interesting and worthy of careful, critical
examination, although it is beyond the scope of the present
article to consider them. What is within our scope is the wide-
spread claim that matters of taste are simply opinions.
Matters of Taste Are Not Opinions
Suppose someone declares that licorice is disgusting; we could
imagine another person responding by saying, “That’s simply
your opinion.” In such a case, this latter claim clearly means
something like, “That’s just a matter of your personal taste.”
Now it is surely correct to say that whether licorice is dis-
gusting or pleasing is a matter of personal taste. To that extent,
labeling it a matter of opinion is understandable. Notice, how-
ever, that the meaning of ‘opinion’ here is very different from
the meaning used above, where an opinion is an insufficiently
supported belief. This difference in meaning is significant, for
in ordinary circumstances it would be a mistake to say that
one’s report that one finds licorice disgusting is an insuffi-
ciently supported belief. If one has tasted it and found it unap-
pealing, one’s declaration concerning its disgustingness is per-
fectly well-supported, so long as the disgustingness is under-
stood as being relative to the subject and not implied to be an
observer-independent (objective) quality of the licorice. Put
another way, it is a fact that this person finds licorice distaste-
ful; and this is perfectly compatible with it being a fact that a
different person finds it quite satisfying.
Conclusion
Properly understood, the term ‘fact’ refers to a state of
affairs or an aspect of reality, not to a class of beliefs. By con-
trast, ‘opinions’ and ‘considered judgments’ are types of beliefs,
and those labels are most usefully used to distinguish suffi-
ciently well-supported from insufficiently well-supported
beliefs. The primary thing these distinctions reveal is that it is
inappropriate to contrast facts with opinions. To do so is to
make a category mistake: it is to treat facts in themselves as a
species of beliefs. Of course we have beliefs about what the
facts are, and there are also psychological facts about what
individuals believe. However, maintaining a fact-opinion
dichotomy only serves to cloud discussions that would be more
productively oriented towards figuring out whether our beliefs
are justified and whether they conform to the facts.
© DR CHRISTOFFER S. LAMMER-HEINDEL 2016
Christoffer Lammer-Heindel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at
Loras College, Dubuque, Iowa.
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 25
Bad Arguments That Make You Smarter
Henrik Schoeneberg gets smart about fallacious reasoning.
H
ave you ever heard of the Straw Man fallacy, or the
Red Herring fallacy? If not, perhaps you will be inter-
ested to know that these form parts of a set of con-
cepts that have the potential to enhance your thinking power.
In fact, by the time you finish reading this article you will have
become smarter, because you will see the flaws in your own
and others’ arguments more clearly.
Think of your brain as a toolbox. In the same way that
there are tools for building, there are what philosopher Daniel
Dennett calls ‘thinking tools’. Language, for instance, is a
thinking tool, because it enables us to think better, through
internal dialogue and by the sharing of ideas with others.
Whenever a useful new word is invented, a new thinking tool
is made available.
It didn’t used to be thought that we require tools for think-
ing better. Classical economic theory, for instance, is based on
the assumption that we tend to make rational decisions. How-
ever, in the last hundred years, cognitive science has made it
increasingly evident that we largely see the world through
biases, and do not reliably think either rationally or objectively
when left to our own devices, including in our economic
choices. To counteract these psychological tendencies, we need
to make better use of the thinking tools that have been devel-
oped since Aristotle’s invention of logic.
A particular step forward has been the identification and
labelling of various different types of bad argument, collec-
tively known as informal fallacies. These now go by widely-rec-
ognized and sometimes colourful names. For instance, an ad
hominem (Latin for ‘to the man’) is a type of fallacy where you
counteract the force of someone’s argument by attacking their
character instead of their argument. This is a bad way of argu-
ing because what is usually important is not the messenger but
the message. Nonetheless, ad hominem arguments are widely
used in all kinds of situations – for instance in political cam-
paigns, where disproportionate, irrelevant or downright dishon-
est personal attacks are often used to overshadow an opponent’s
actual arguments.
26 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
Many fallacious arguments might seem trivial at first glance.
Of course it is not right to assume that one rude tourist repre-
sents an entire nation’s attitude; shouldn’t we know that? We
should, but we often don’t: in practice people often fall victim
to the hasty generalization fallacy. Or how many of us have not
committed the argument from emotion fallacy; for instance, when
we unjustly blame each other because we’re upset? It would
have been better if we had calmed ourselves down before
trying to talk things through. But in fact, it is just because we
are so prone to irrational thinking that it is very useful to be
acquainted with even the most apparently trivial types of fallac-
ies. This way we’re reminded of our own irrational shortcom-
ings and we can better keep them in check. As they say at
addiction clinics, the first step toward being cured is to
acknowledge that you have a problem. Furthermore we
become better at analyzing the arguments of others when we
know about what types of bad arguments there are. Categoriz-
ing and naming bad arguments helps to systematize our
thoughts so that we can quickly point out what exactly is wrong
with an argument. So when we are acquainted with fallacies we
become more persuasive debaters. Another handy attribute of
fallacies is that in talking about them we can use terminology
that has the authority of logic! It may carry more weight if I
tell you that you’re using an ad hominem argument against me,
than if I simply say that I think it’s a bad way of arguing to
attack my character instead of my argument. So when we call
someone out for using an ad hominem argument, they might
think, “If what she is pointing out to me has a technical name –
ad hominem – perhaps she really is onto something?”
More Biases & Fallacies
The concept of fallacies is closely tied to the concept of
biases. Some biases even have the word ‘fallacy’ in their names,
such as the gambler’s fallacy.
A bias is a prejudice or a preconceived notion. Biases are
upheld either through pure ignorance or through fallacies. It is
a distorted interpretation of facts, and you need bad arguments
to support such views. So you can reduce your biases by
becoming more acquainted with fallacies and their illegitimate
claims to reason.
One of the most prevalent types of biases is the confirmation
bias. This is our tendency to seek out or notice information
that supports our pre-existing ideas, rather than to look for
unbiased information that draw us nearer to the truth. You can
see the confirmation bias operating in claims like this: “I’ve
read the health warnings, but my uncle smokes and he’s fine,
so smoking can’t be so bad.” In this case, the fallacy of general-
ising from limited anecdotal evidence is used to counter the
widely-established scientific finding that smoking can kill you.
A Dream of Reason
Just being acquainted with some of the tools of reason can
change our frame of mind and make us more prone to think
rationally. This is why philosopher Ken Taylor’s twist on
Plato’s ideal state ruled by philosopher kings isn’t so far
fetched. Plato was right, he says; people generally are ruled by
appetite and passion rather than reason, so philosophers
trained in the use of reason should rule. But not just an elite
few of them; instead we should strive to make philosopher
kings – clear rational deep thinkers – out of everyone.
This was also the dream of Bertrand Russell. He too wanted
to make us all better critical thinkers. When asked in a 1959
BBC television interview what advice he would give to future
generations, Russell responded in a way that rather nicely pins
down what any discussion of biases and fallacies amounts to:
“When you are studying any matter or considering a philoso-
phy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth
that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by
what you wish to believe or by what you think would have
beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and
surely at what are the facts.”
Straw Men Eat Red Herrings
In light of this advice, let’s look at the concepts I mentioned
at the start.
The Straw Man is a fallacy where someone attacks a weaker
version of someone’s argument, or perhaps a weaker, different
argument for the same point – just as when soldiers train with
bayonets by attacking a straw man rather than the real enemy.
The Red Herring fallacy is a kind of distraction whereby some-
one wishing to oppose some conclusion produces and tears
down not just a weaker distorted version of the original argu-
ment, but an entirely unrelated argument. The fallacy takes its
name from when a piece of smoked herring is thrown at fox
hounds to lead them in another direction. In the following
example, Sandy’s response to Peter is a red herring:
Peter: “I don’t think we should build a new homeless shelter
right now. We need more money to maintain the power grid.”
Sandy: “How can you not care about the homeless? That’s just
heartless.”
Sandy attacks a different argument than Peter’s own point.
Peter didn’t say he didn’t care about the homeless; he might be
volunteering at a soup kitchen for all Sandy knows. It just so
happens that he thinks that
energy supply is also important, and
that priorities have to be chosen. A red
herring argument also presents itself if
someone says that it is wrong to be con-
cerned with animal welfare when there is so
much human suffering going on. The concern for animals is not
related to the point concerning human suffering, and bringing
an unrelated argument into a debate in order to justify your
position is a red herring. But in the case of both fallacies, as Rus-
sell says, you have to make sure that you “look only at what are
the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out.” Otherwise
you risk jumping to hasty conclusions and falling into argumen-
tative traps.
Actively striving to follow the truth above all else and not
taking for granted that we do is necessary for critical thinking,
and this can be encouraged by getting acquainted with various
types of fallacies. It might surprise you how many straw men,
red herrings, ad hominem attacks, hasty generalizations, and
arguments from emotion, you can find all around you; and
how much smarter it makes you just to have knowledge of
these fallacies.
© HENRIK SCHOENEBERG 2016
Henrik Schoeneberg has a masters degree in philosophy of science. In
his home country of Denmark he is also the highest authority in the
field of Veterinary Communication – a subject he introduced to the
Danish veterinary profession. Teaching communication is one reason
why he has an interest in the subject of fallacies.
Some Other Informal Fallacies
• No True Scotsman
(“No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge” “No? But my Uncle Hamish
does!” “Oh... well, no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”)
• Begging the Question (petitio principii)
A type of circular reasoning where the conclusion supposedly to be
proved is smuggled into the premises of the argument.
• Appeal to Authority
An illegitimate attempt to win argument by irrelevant claim of expertise
• Appeal to the Stone (Argumentum ad lapidum)
The fallacy of dismissing a claim as obviously absurd without providing
proof of its absurdity.
Informal fallacies should not be confused with formal fallacies,
which always involve a flaw in the logical structure of an inductive or
deductive argument. One example of a formal fallacy is Affirming the
Consequent. “If A is true, then B is true. B is true. Therefore A is true.”
(This argument is flawed because B might be true even if A is not true).
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 27
The Philosophy Professor &
The Holy Book of Baseball
Chris Christensen tells a story of contradictory rules and faith broken and restored.
“If you look closely enough at a rule, the cosmos will appear in all its physi-
cal, metaphysical, moral and spiritual aspects, presenting you a life’s work.”
– Ted Cohen
T
ed Cohen, a philosophy professor at the Uni-
versity of Chicago, was a fan of baseball
and a student of its rule book. More
than a student, he considered The Official Rules
of Major League Baseball a divine document.
Bertrand Russell once wrote, “Mathematics,
I believe, is the chief source of the belief in
eternal and exact truth... In Plato, St Augustine,
Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant
there is an intimate blending of religion and rea-
soning, of moral aspiration with logical admiration The professor
of what is timeless... which comes from Pythagoras.” (A
History of Western Philosophy, 1945). Russell’s observation cap-
tures Professor Cohen’s reverence for baseball’s rule book.
Cohen saw in its pages a Platonic ideal; it fitted Russell’s blend
of mathematical logic and metaphysical longing, he thought.
He loved the book’s precise array of paragraphs and sub-para-
graphs; he reveled in its quaint, nineteenth century idiom, such
as: “The pitcher shall deliver the pitch to the batter who may
elect to strike the ball, or who may not offer at it, as he
chooses.” To Cohen the rule book was a thing of beauty, an
instrument of flawless perfection – until the day he found a flaw
in the holy book, a day that changed his life.
It happened on a day in early June 1982. Cohen, along with
a few other adults, organized a picnic and softball game for
Chicago youths. During the game, a batter hit a ground ball to
third and ran to first base, arriving at the same time as the
thrown ball. “Safe!” cried the team at bat. “Out!” yelled the
team in the field. A dispute ensued, ending when an adult said,
“It was a tie. Let’s let him be safe.” That satisfied the children,
but not the philosophy professor, who chimed in, “If it was a
tie, then you don’t have to let him be safe; he was safe. The
rule says that the runner is safe unless the ball arrives before
him. If the ball arrives at the same time, then it doesn’t arrive
before him, and so he is safe.” Cohen had silenced the other
adult while gaining the awe and respect of the children. “I was
trembling with a sense of moral triumph,” he recalled. “I can
remember nothing else from that game.”
The professor had an overbearing streak, to be sure, but he
was the first to acknowledge it. He was also known to be a
kind and loving man. He was liked and respected enough to
have served as the Chairman of the Philosophy Department,
and was also elected President of the American Philosophical
Association (2006-7). He adored music, was a drummer in a
jazz band, and loved a good joke. He even published a wonder-
ful book on the philosophy of jokes.
But the rule book was no laughing matter. Soon after the
28 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
softball game, a sliver of doubt pierced the professor’s pride. He
was sure of the rule, but what if he were wrong? Better check
the rule book. Rule 6.05(j): “A batter is out when after ... he hits
a fair ball, he or first base is tagged before he touches the base.”
So he was right. A tie means the batter is safe. But
Cohen continued reading, and found Rule 7.08(e):
“Any runner is out when he fails to reach the next
base before a fielder tags him or the base …”
“This was stupefying,” recalled Cohen. “The
anomaly seemed marvelous: if a runner is forced
to second base, he is out if he doesn’t reach
second before the ball, the opposite of the call at
first base.” Checking further, Cohen comes
across the stark brevity of Rule 6.09(a): “The batter
becomes a runner when he hits a fair ball.”
“My God,” Cohen continued, “I saw at once that with
6.09(a) in the works, it was not merely an anomaly that I had
uncovered but that 6.05(j) and 7.08(e) are inconsistent with one
another. I cannot help putting it this way; I am a philosopher.
These two rules are contradictory. You see it, don’t you? The
rules in Section 6 concern the batter. Section 7 is about the
runner. This led me to believe they could not ever be in conflict.
But 6.09 tells us that under certain circumstances the batter is a
runner ... and if he arrives at first base simultaneously with the
throw, 6.05(j) says that he’s safe, while 7.08(e) says that he’s out.”
Cohen was deeply troubled by the logical rot that he had dis-
covered in the official baseball rules: “I had become extremely
fond of the rules,” he mused. “They have charm and, so I
thought, precision ... Now I found them wanting to their core.”
Strike One
He decided to write to Major League Baseball about the
contradiction. He acquired the address of an executive, the
Administrator of the National League of Professional Baseball
Clubs. Before he began writing, his wife offered two sugges-
tions that she thought would enhance his chances. First, he
should use University of Chicago stationery. He hesitated,
thinking it might compromise his university and his depart-
ment. “But my wife saw the truth,” he later wrote, “that my case
was proper and urgent, and indeed the university should be
proud that another of its faculty was entering history.” Her
second suggestion was that he write “with no attempt at humor
or irony, but that I just do the job.” So he wrote “seriously and
carefully, with all the lucidity” he could manage. Still, he
thought he might be dismissed by the Administrator as a crank,
his letter consigned to a trash can. But to his delight he got a
reply a week later from the Administrator of the National
League, who thanked him and said the Rules Committee would
look into his “interpretation” at its December meeting.
He was ecstatic. Already upon finding the flaw in the rules,
Cohen had “anticipated the statutory immortality that would
be due me.” Now he was truly energized. “Before it had been a
lark,” he said. “Now it was a serious lark.”
This correspondence took place in the fall of 1982, a few
months after the softball game. December, the month of Rules
Committee meetings, came and went. Cohen got no word. He
waited until June and wrote again, asking what had happened.
In his reply the executive explained that umpires present at the
meeting said there were never any ties at first base, adding that
to make a ‘special’ rule allowing for ties would be too confusing.
Cohen was dismayed. He asked himself, “What am I to say
of that?” and consulted a friend, a professor of physics, who
assured him that “it is perfectly possible for a foot to touch a
base at the same time as a ball touches a glove.” He had an
urge to write again, marshalling a new argument, but he now
realized that Major League Baseball didn’t really care, and
would think he truly was a crank. “But I cannot rest,” he
wrote. “If anything in this world could be right, it is baseball;
but baseball isn’t right with its current rules. I can’t stand it.”
A Philosopher At First Base
Despondent, he retreated to memories of his youth: “I have
been reminded, with pain, melancholy, and sweetness, of my
personal discovery that I could never play baseball at a high
level.” His realization came as a high-school player, when he
came to bat against a fastball pitcher renowned for his wildness.
The first two pitches zipped by – both strikes. Cohen describes
what happened next: “The third pitch was wild, coming right at
my head; at least as I saw it, and I leaped backward in terror.
The terror is still with me. It is permanent.” He struck out on
the next pitch. “I knew that I would always strike out against
that pitcher. And that was painful, but it was not the occasion for
the metaphysical pain that I recalled when I struck out with the
rules committee.” That pain came with the next time at bat. As
Baseball
he walked to the plate, Cohen knew exactly what he would do.
He would use Rule 6.09(b): “The batter becomes a runner when
the third strike called by the umpire is not caught...”
He swung weakly at the first two fastballs, then hoped for a
wild pitch. He got one. “This time the ball sailed at least five
feet over my head, and I swung. I did not swing unvoluntarily,
nor was I enfeebled by fear. I did it on purpose, with calcula-
tion, and I immediately dashed for first base. I was safe by a
mile.” He stood on first base, thrilled to the core. “I had never
been as proud of myself athletically as I was in that moment, in
which I had overcome the finest pitcher I knew. I could not do
it by hitting, but I had done it by knowing the rules and think-
ing fast despite a nearly paralyzing fear. And then my soul was
squeezed. By my teammates. They did not care for what I had
done. They regarded me as someone who did not really grasp
the nature of the game; they knew the game in some other
way. It was this ache that reappeared when I heard the last word
from the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs.”
What good are the rules if no one knows them? What good
is it to know the rules when no one believes you? And what if
they believe you but just don’t care?
Fixing The Rules
Thoroughly demoralized, Professor Cohen returned to his
academic life. But he wasn’t done. He may not have been
aware of it, but something started percolating. It percolated for
ten years. Then he sat down and wrote a prize-winning essay
recounting his impasse with the rules committee. ‘There Are
No Ties at First Base’ (from which the framework of this story
is taken) was first published in the Yale Review in 1992. Later
that year it was reprinted in Elysian Fields Quarterly, a literary
journal devoted to baseball. It’s quite probable that some read-
ers of the essay wrote to the rules committee, asking why it
hadn’t fixed the flaw found by the professor. Probably because
the amount of mail was small, the committee ignored it. But it
couldn’t ignore the third printing of the essay twelve years
later. In 2004, ‘There Are No Ties at First Base’ was published
in a briskly-selling anthology titled Baseball and Philosophy. By
then the internet and email were in full stride. It’s more than
probable that the trickle of mail from the earlier printings
grew into a steady stream, if not a torrent. The committee
could no longer turn a blind eye. At long last, in 2010, the cor-
rection appeared – or rather, the contradiction of the rules dis-
appeared – from The Official Rules of Major League Baseball. It
took 28 years, but thanks to the power of the professor’s pen,
combined with a small army of lesser pens, Professor Cohen’s
broken rule book was made whole.
Ted Cohen died on March 14, 2014. He was 74. He never
got credit from the rules committee, but his ‘statutory immor-
tality’ lives on among his fellow fans of philosophy and base-
ball. As for the members of the rules committee, they no doubt
looked closely at the rules in order to fix them, but one may
doubt that when they did so the cosmos appeared to them in
all its physical, metaphysical, moral and spiritual aspects.
© CHRIS CHRISTENSEN 2016
Chris Christensen is a delivery driver in Portland, Oregon. In addi-
tion to studying philosophy, he and his wife Bobbie produce a blog,
Red Stitches: Mostly Baseball.
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 29
Science, Ockham’s Razor
& God
David Glass and Mark McCartney say Ockham’s razor doesn’t cut it with God.
T
he idea that science has explained God away is very
popular. The suggestion is that as science explains
more and more about the world there is less and less
need for God. Sometimes this is expressed in terms of
Ockham’s razor. William of Ockham was a medieval philoso-
pher and theologian, and his famous ‘razor’ is the idea that “It
is futile to do with more things that which can be done with
fewer.” Applied to science and God, the implication seems to
be that if science can explain the world around us on its own,
there is no need for science and God. There is no need for two
explanations when one will do.
This kind of reasoning is central to the New Atheism. The
late Christopher Hitchens appealed explicitly to Ockham’s
razor as part of his case against God and the same idea is found
in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006) where he claims
that “Historically, religion aspired to explain our own exis-
tence and the nature of the universe in which we find our-
selves. In this role it is now completely superseded by science.”
In claiming that science explains God away, Dawkins focuses
in particular on “Darwin’s destruction of the argument from
design.” Outside the New Atheism, cosmologist Sean Carroll
sums up the view clearly, “Over the past five hundred years,
the progress of science has worked to strip away God’s roles in
30 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
the world … Two thousand years ago, it was perfectly reason-
able to invoke God as an explanation for natural phenomena;
now, we can do much better.” (The Blackwell Companion to Sci-
ence and Christianity, eds J.B. Stump and A.G. Padgett, p.196,
2012).
But some caution is needed. If Ockham’s razor is used prop-
erly it can be a very helpful tool, but if used incorrectly it can
become a dangerous instrument. First, consider a scenario
where Ockham’s razor works. Suppose your car won’t start.
Two possible explanations are a) that the battery is faulty and b)
that the starter motor is faulty. You call a mechanic who quickly
determines that there is indeed a problem with the battery.
Since this would explain why the car didn’t start, there is no
longer any reason to think that there is a problem with the
starter motor. Ockham’s razor removes the need for the further
explanation. Or to put it another way, the truth of the faulty
battery hypothesis has explained away the faulty starter motor
hypothesis. Of course, it is possible that there is a problem with
both the battery and the starter motor. That cannot be ruled out
until the car starts, but it would be really unlucky; based on the
evidence so far and the application of Ockham’s razor, one
explanation is sufficient.
Now consider another scenario. A road traffic accident has
taken place near a set of traffic lights. Based on preliminary evi-
dence relating to the scene and the condition of one of the dri-
vers, the police propose two possible explanations: a) that the
driver of one of the cars went through a red light and b) that
this same driver had been drinking. Sure enough, further evi-
dence confirms that the driver had indeed been drinking.
Could we now apply Ockham’s razor as before and conclude
that there is no longer any reason to think the car went
through a red light? No, in this case it is quite plausible to
think that the two explanations go together. The two hypothe-
ses are needed to account for all the evidence and alcohol con-
sumption could explain why the driver went through a red
light. It would be inappropriate to apply Ockham’s razor in this
case since doing so could very easily lead us astray.
Cut Here!
So how do you decide in a particular case whether Ockham’s
razor can be applied legitimately to use one hypothesis, A, to dis-
miss another hypothesis, B? In some recent work (‘Can evidence
for design be explained away?’, in Probability in the Philosophy of
Religion, eds J. Chandler and V. Harrison, 2012; and ‘Explaining
and explaining away in science and religion’, Theology and Science,
12(4), 2014), we’ve proposed both a formal account based on
probability theory and an informal account based on answering a burne, it still makes sense to search for an
number of questions including the following: explanation for the fact that the uni-
verse operates according to such
Question 1: Are the two hypotheses A and B mutually exclu- laws and the best explanation is
sive? If so, then accepting A requires rejecting B and indeed provided by theism. Here, the
vice versa. Clearly, this can give rise to a trivial version of idea is that theism provides a dif-
Ockham’s razor, but it is much more interesting to consider ferent kind of explanation; a per-
cases where A and B are not mutually exclusive. sonal, not a scientific, explanation.
Question 2: Does one of the hypotheses depend on the other? Design arguments based on the
If so, that reduces the potential for applying Ockham’s razor. fine-tuning of physical parame-
Question 3: How likely is it that the available evidence would ters would provide a further
have been produced by each hypothesis on its own? If the reason for thinking that science
answer is ‘very likely’, that increases the potential for Ockham’s depends on theism, as would the-
razor. istic arguments based on the com-
Question 4: Is there good reason to accept hypothesis A? If prehensibility and mathematical
not, this reduces the impact of Ockham’s razor in cases where it nature of the universe. Others have
could occur. argued for a historical dependence
between science and theism on the
Let’s apply these questions to our two scenarios. In the case grounds that modern science devel-
of the car not starting, while the two explanations were not oped in a theistic context and that it
mutually exclusive (Question 1), the answers to Questions 2-4 was because of theistic beliefs, such as
help us see why Ockham’s razor is appropriately applied. It belief in God as a rational creator and
seems that neither hypothesis depends strongly on the other God’s freedom in creation, that sci-
(Question 2), either explanation could account for the evidence ence took off.
on its own (Question 3), and the mechanic has found out that If there is in fact any kind of depen-
one of them is indeed true (Question 4). In the case of the road dence of science on theism and hence a
traffic accident, the two explanations are not mutually exclusive positive answer to Question 2, the case
(Question 1), there is a dependence between them since one for applying Ockham’s razor to explain
could explain the other (Question 2), and both are needed to God away through science is very weak
account for all the evidence (Question 3). In this case, confir- indeed. Proponents of applying Ockham’s
mation that the drink driving hypothesis is true (Question 4) razor in this way will be quick to object to
does nothing to undermine the other explanation. the theistic arguments in the last paragraph;
How does all of this relate to science and God? How can we our purpose here is not to defend them but
use it to evaluate the claim that via an application of Ockham’s to draw attention to the fact that a
razor the progress of science explains God away? Let’s consider number of them, as well as objections
each of our questions in turn. to them, are relevant to our discus-
In response to Question 1, it is clear that science and theism sion and that serious philosoph-
are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes atheist popularisers ical points are put forward
might claim that they are, but there’s no good reason to think on both sides. The point
that science and theism are logically incompatible. If one is to is that proponents of
argue that science removes the need for God, it will have to be applying Ockham’s
an argument – like that of the New Atheists – that involves a razor against
non-trivial application of Ockham’s razor. The point would be,
not that science logically refutes God’s existence, but that it
makes God redundant.
Question 2 asks whether there is a dependence between sci-
ence and theism. Many theists have argued that there is indeed.
Some versions of the cosmological argument claim that the
very existence of the universe, and hence science, depend on
God. Similarly, an important version of the design argument
defended by Richard Swinburne in The Existence of God
(2004) is that theism provides the best explanation for William of Ockham’s actual
the order in the universe expressed in the laws of sci- razor, recently discovered in a
ence. The point of that argument is not to undermine drawer in a Belgian
science, but just to say that it cannot do the impossible monastery
since whatever the most fundamental scientific laws (or
law perhaps) turn out to be, they cannot themselves be
given a scientific explanation. Yet, maintains Swin-

August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 31

God can’t simply assume that these theistic arguments fail if
their use of Ockham’s razor is to have any force. Maybe there
are serious flaws in these theistic arguments, maybe not, but to
avoid begging the question in their application of Ockham’s
razor, its proponents need to engage in detailed philosophical
work to show that these theistic arguments fail, or else risk a
positive answer to Question 2.
This weakens the appeal of the strategy. It might have been
thought that a combination of science and Ockham’s razor
would somehow shortcut this process by avoiding the need to
refute detailed philosophical arguments for God’s existence,
but that is not the case. It’s worth comparing this argument
against God with the problem of evil (the claim that the exis-
tence of suffering in the world makes it unlikely that there is a
God who is simultaneously all-good, all-powerful and all-
knowing). Whatever the merits of the problem of evil as an
argument against God, it can be considered to some extent in
isolation from other theistic arguments. One could argue that
the problem of evil has some force against the existence of
God while setting aside the question of whether other argu-
ments might count in favour of God’s existence. Given the
importance of Question 2 in determining whether Ockham’s
razor can be applied, it seems that this isolation from other
theistic arguments isn’t available in the current context. It’s
interesting to note that while using science and Ockham’s
razor to explain God away is very popular in the New Atheism
and in Internet discussion, such an argument is rarely to be
found in the philosophical literature. Atheist philosophers tend
to focus on more standard objections to belief in God such as
the problem of evil and are perhaps aware of just how difficult
it is to make a convincing argument based on science and an
application of Ockham’s razor.
Question 3 is more difficult to answer in an abstract sense, accept what science tells us about the world, while also accept-
but becomes more relevant in particular cases where science ing that science is fallible. In some cases, the truth of a hypoth-
might be thought to explain God away. We will consider it esis could make the application of Ockham’s razor much more
presently in a specific discussion of evolution. It is important plausible, as it did in the earlier example of the car not starting.
to note that theists often think about theistic explanations of In other cases, like the road traffic example, Ockham’s razor
features of the world as working not in isolation from science, does not apply and so Question 4 is not relevant. Learning the
but via scientific laws. Natural phenomena are to be explained truth of one hypothesis in this case does not undermine, and
directly by science and only indirectly by God. One way of may well enhance, the other. Even in cases where Ockham’s
putting this is to say that God acts through causes which can razor might be applicable, the mere possibility of one hypothe-
be described scientifically. Think of this is in terms of a causal sis being true is not sufficient for its application. For example,
chain where A causes B and B in turn causes C; A’s influence in the case of the car not starting, Ockham’s razor can be
on C comes via B. An interesting result of our formal account applied once we have good reason to believe that there is a
of the applicability of Ockham’s razor was to show that it does problem with the battery, but the mere possibility of there
not apply to causal chains. Here’s a simple example. Suppose being such a problem would not merit application of the razor.
your friend has arranged to get the train and meet you at the This is relevant here because sometimes ideas that are not sci-
railway station after work, but he isn’t there at the specified entifically well established are appealed to by atheists in just
time. One explanation might be that he missed the train while this way. For example, in response to the apparent fine-tuning
another might be that he was delayed at work. The evidence of natural laws as evidence for God, it is sometimes claimed
shows he missed the train, but even so, Ockham’s razor clearly that the possibility of a multiverse removes the need for God.
wouldn’t dispose of the hypothesis that he was delayed at work. Whatever the merits of fine-tuning arguments, it should be
Why? Because his being delayed at work could have caused clear that pointing to the mere possibility of a multiverse is
him to miss the train. Similarly, if the above account of God inadequate as a response.
acting through natural causes is correct, then Ockham’s razor
cannot be applied against God even if natural causes appeared Evolving Explanations
to explain all of the physical evidence available to us. The most famous specific topic in science which might be
What about Question 4? We surely do have good reasons to thought to explain God away is, of course, evolution and

32 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016


design. Given the success of Darwin’s theory of evolution by
natural selection (and so a positive answer to Question 4),
does it remove the need for God as an explanation of intelli-
gent life? In response to Question 1, evolution and God are
not mutually exclusive. Some people might claim that evolu-
tion requires atheism, but this far outstrips any claim that sci-
entific evidence can establish. Besides, those like Dawkins,
who use evolution to argue against God do so not on the
basis of their logical incompatibility, but in terms of
Ockham’s razor since evolution is claimed to remove, not dis-
prove, God.
With regards to Question 2, there are multiple reasons
that could be given by theists for thinking that evolution
depends on God. Clearly, evolution requires an orderly,
physical universe with appropriate scientific laws in place as
well as the very fine-tuning of its physical parameters. All of
these features of the universe form the basis of some of the
main theistic arguments found in the contemporary litera-
ture. As with our earlier discussion of Question 2, propo-
nents of an evolutionary case against God will reject these
arguments, but given their relevance they cannot be set aside
without begging the question. In other words, showing that
evolution explains God away will require detailed arguments
to show that the features of the world that are necessary for
evolution do not also support a belief in God.
With regards to Question 3, the likelihood of intelligent
life having arisen solely through unguided evolutionary
processes is far from clear. This is not a criticism of the
theory of natural selection, but just recognises that the evolu-
tion of intelligent life might well be dependent on some
highly fortuitous events having occurred in the history of life
on Earth. Richard Dawkins, for example, says of the origin of
life as well as other evolutionary transitions that they might
have needed to be ‘bridged by sheer luck’ (The God Delusion,
p.140). Irrespective of whether, and if so how, God might
have guided natural processes to bring about intelligent life,
this suggests a negative answer to Question 3 and so raises a
serious problem for attempts to apply Ockham’s razor in this
context. This brief discussion of evolution suggests that it is
very doubtful that Ockham’s razor can be applied here. And if
it can’t be applied here, it seems unlikely it can be applied
successfully anywhere in an attempt to explain God away.
In conclusion, we have attempted to show why using sci-
ence and Ockham’s razor to explain God away is very
unlikely to be successful. No doubt it is a tempting strategy
for some atheists. Its appeal both to science and to a legiti-
mate tool of scientific reasoning – the razor itself – seems to
offer the possibility of a powerful and straightforward argu-
ment against theism that circumvents the need to get
involved in the details of standard philosophical arguments
for the existence of God. However, our analysis of the valid
uses of Ockham’s razor suggests that nothing could be fur-
ther from the truth.
© DAVID H. GLASS AND MARK MCCARTNEY 2016
David Glass and Mark McCartney are Senior Lecturers in the
School of Computing and Mathematics at Ulster University. This
article is based on work that was carried out as part of a project
funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
Philosophical Haiku
SØREN KIERKEGAARD (1813–1855)
Laughter masks despair
Reason crucified by faith
We must ourselves choose.
ierkegaard is seen today as one of the founders of existential-
K ism, with its emphasis on the need to choose for oneself how to
find meaning in this godless life. But existentialism of this kind is
not exactly what Kierkegaard had in mind. Over the course of his short
life, and writing under a bewildering range of pseudonyms (which help-
fully allowed him to criticise his own works later on), he knitted
together the disparate skeins of moral psychology and Christian theol-
ogy to form an elaborate garment quite unlike anything seen before
(and not necessarily one you’d want to wear out of the house). Project-
ing his own misery onto the world, he diagnosed a collective case of
despair as the world’s great ill. Many people don’t even realise they are
suffering this despair, foolishly mistaking it for joy – that’s how ignorant
people can be! You’re laughing, but really you should be crying!
We are free to choose for ourselves how we will live, and indeed we
must do so – this is the human condition. Yet Kierkegaard argued that
with no philosophical basis for the spirit, there’s no basis for composed
selfhood, so we are left to drift hither and yon at the whims of the tide,
directionless, lost, and bewildered. Thus, in the spiritual wasteland that
is the world, people turn to religious cults, worship false idols such as
Beauty, delude themselves with utopian political visions (quo vadis,
Proudhon?), or just wearily give themselves up to insanity (my pre-
ferred approach) – anything to escape the frightening emptiness. But in
his humorous [sic] analysis of this condition entitled The Sickness unto
Death (1849), Kierkegaard held out the possibility of meaningful exis-
tence. We can establish a basis for our selves by accepting the possi-
bility of a transcendent power through faith. But we are in error if we
seek this condition through the exercise of reason – it is not for reason
to comprehend the mysteries of faith. In this, Kierkegaard sounds
much like William James, who talked of the ‘will to believe’.
Shortly before he died, Kierkegaard spoke with a friend, saying, “I
pray to be free of despair at the time of my death.” Don’t we all.
© TERENCE GREEN 2016
Terence is a peripatetic (though not Peripatetic) writer, historian and
lecturer. He holds a PhD in the history of political thought from
Columbia University, NYC, and lives with his wife and their dog in
Wellington, NZ. He blogs at hardlysurprised.blogspot.co.nz
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 33
 Question of the Month
Is Morality Objective?
The following answers to this key philosophical question each win a random book.
I t is clear that morality is a feature of humanity. However, if
morality were objective then every member of our species
would share the same moral values. But it is patent that we do
not share the same moral values. For example, there’s clearly a
lack of moral consensus with respect to our views on euthana-
sia, abortion, or our treatment towards non-human animals.
For any given moral situation various factors exist that must
be taken into account. So, before we can judge whether an act
is right or wrong we need to evaluate several things: the differ-
ent personalities of the people involved – their emotions, inten-
tions, intuitions – as well as the consequences of the act. These
factors can relativize the morality of an action. For example, an
uptight person may expect us to always tell the truth no matter
what, but in a situation where someone is extremely sensitive it
might be justified to tell a lie to spare their feelings.
Even great moral philosophers disagree about the nature of
morality. Immanuel Kant’s influential duty-based theory of
ethics maintains that truth-telling is universally binding on all
rational beings. Thus, if a serial killer demands to know where
you’re hiding your sibling, Kant’s absolute system would aver
that you tell the truth because it is not possible to consistently
universalize the act of telling any kind of lie. On the other
hand, John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism would insist that you lie
to the serial killer because this would most likely maximize the
greatest amount of happiness or pleasure by minimizing the
unhappiness or pain for you and your sibling.
In a pristine world of crystallized moral ideals, perhaps
morality could be objective and universally binding on all peo-
ple. However, we live in a world of moral flux, impermanence,
and flexibility. And it is because of this that morality is not nor
could ever be objective.
ALBERT FILICE
SCOTTSDALE, AZ
Y es, morality is objective. (By ‘morality’ I mean that which
we all recognise as right behaviour – that which we call
‘good’). Have you ever tried making up your own morality and
applying it to your family and friends? If you have, you could
well be reading this magazine whilst sitting in a prison cell or an
asylum.
Certainly many people have attempted to invent their own
morality and then impose it on others, for instance, Stalin,
Hitler, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot. And look what they created
– a new Humanity, a new Society! Does anyone fancy living in
their morally subjective worlds? Each led to inhumanity and
madness. It is also a fact that none of the great moral teachers
of our world ever invented a morality of their own. For exam-
ple, Jesus didn’t teach new morality, but rather he elaborated
on what already existed. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ already
was, and is, a universal and eternal principle.
It is of course the case that moral codes, although objective,
are tailored to, or tailored by, the particular culture and age
34 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
???
into which they are incarnated. For instance, it has never been
the case (as far as we know) in any culture, at any time, that a
man (even the chief) can take whichever woman he wants to be
his wife. In Britain today she has to be over sixteen, and in
other countries her age may be higher or lower. Also, someone
has to give consent to the marriage; either the woman herself,
or her family, or the elders of the tribe, or the chief’s other
wives! Whatever the ‘subjective’ cultural differences, the same
objective moral principle applies.
We can no more invent a subjective morality than we can
invent a new primary colour. We can no more come up with a
novel morality which is in no way connected to an objective
morality than we can come up with a new way of breathing.
KARL WRAY
CARLISLE, CUMBRIA
H ere I will treat ‘objectivity’ as the property of an idea or
object that let’s it be evaluated in the same way indepen-
dently of who the evaluator is. Evaluating morality in light of
this, we face two components that pose a potential threat to
moral objectivity: space and time. For instance, when the Con-
quistadors arrived in South America at the beginning of the
Sixteenth Century, they were shocked at various rituals of
human sacrifice practiced by the Incas. Those rituals were
morally wrong to the Spanish, who had been brought up with
the morals of another culture on a different continent. The
vast majority of people in South America today will likely
agree that human sacrifice is wrong, so we can see that
accepted morality has strongly depended on time and place.
However, with the increasing interconnectedness among
mankind through the internet and especially social media, I
suppose that the spatial component will get lost some day. We
may see this in vegetarianism and veganism. Although both
diets existed in ancient times, there had never been a spread of
those ideas as remarkable as in these times of hashtags, blogs
and the international exchange of bits within milliseconds.
Furthermore, although a high number of people are still being
treated unethically, we also must acknowledge that we have
come to a more or less internationally congruent understand-
ing of a morally correct treatment of people.
How objective should we rate this development? On the
one hand, we have never been closer to an objective (in terms
of a universally acceptable) morality. On the other hand, we
need to ask ourselves whether the temporal component may
still pose a threat. If you asked Plato whether 2 plus 2 equals 4,
you would certainly have received the same answer as you’ll
receive today, whereas answers to questions of morality are
highly dependant on the time in which they’re asked. There-
fore, morality cannot be seen as objective, but perhaps rather
as developing towards a set of globally shared morals.
JEANETTE LANG
HEUSWEILER, SAARLAND, GERMANY
Question: Is Morality Objective?

M orality is objective. That is, moral claims are true or false
about aspects of human interaction that involve the ideas
of rights and obligations. Further, the fundamental moral max-
ims apply universally, and reasonable people can agree on their
truth.
There are really just two alternatives to moral objectivism:
moral relativism, and all the rest. But all the rest lead to absur-
dity: if I truly believe that I cannot know right from wrong
(moral skepticism), or that all moral claims are false (moral
error theory), or that there is no right or wrong (moral
nihilism and non-cognitivism), then I must conclude I don’t
know what I should do. However, as a social animal I must
interact with others. Thus, I find myself in the dilemma of hav-
ing to act but not knowing how to act. Any theory that leads to
this absurd state of mind must be rejected.
Moral relativism then is the only credible challenge to
moral objectivism. The case for moral relativism is that differ-
ent societies have different moral judgments. However, most
more complex moral judgments are derived from a few basic
ones, with components that vary with the material conditions
of different societies. But the fact that different societies make
different moral judgments does not prove relativism. To prove
their position, relativists must dig down to the fundamental
moral judgments in every society, and then show that these
judgments are not shared by societies. This they have not done.
This is the indirect case for moral objectivism. The direct
case includes the following ideas: (1) All societies share certain
values necessary for any society to function (for example, no
lying, promise-keeping, nurturing children) (2) Objectivism
appeals to reason over feeling and offers a better chance for
humanity to solve its many problems; (3) The purpose of ethics
is to provide guidance, and humanity needs guidance for world
affairs and not just within any particular society, and (4)
Nations and societies must cooperate, and this requires agree-
ment on core values.
Ethics first; meta-ethics [that is, thinking about the founda-
tions of ethics] second. Meta-ethics should not be an obstacle
to the pragmatic project of seeking guidance for human social
interaction grounded on something we can all agree on, which
I believe is a common human nature.
JOHN TALLEY
RUTHERFORDTON, NC
I should like to reformulate the question as follows: Can we
demonstrate that any moral claim is objectively true? My reply is
‘Yes and No’.
It seems clear that to answer this rephrased question, we
must have a notional idea of what the term ‘objective’ means.
Not surprisingly, its meaning is highly contested.
The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has described
two central features of objectivity: observation dependence and
impersonality. In effect, Sen meant here that objectivity requires
both careful observation and inter-observer corroboration.
Thus, on Sen’s view, if I say, “I truly and deeply believe that
your house is on fire” without having observed your house, I
am making a subjective claim. In contrast, if two people simul-
taneously witness smoke coming from your house and say, “We
believe your house is on fire,” Sen would argue that they are
making a type of objective statement.
But Sen’s use of ‘objective’ doesn’t seem to work well for
moral claims. After all, it is much easier to get two people to
Question: Is Morality Objective?
agree on what smoke looks like than on what an immoral or
evil act looks like. Smith and Jones might agree that someone
just stole a loaf of bread from the grocer, but disagree as to the
‘wrongness’ of the act. For example, suppose the thief was pen-
niless, starving and had no other recourse. It appears there is
no objective means of adjudicating the matter.
However, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s ‘virtue ethics’
suggests that a degree of moral objectivity is possible – within
the confines of certain communities and their shared values.
For MacIntyre, there are objective standards of virtue found
within a tradition, such as the ethical traditions of ancient
Athens. For MacIntyre, in a given society, the moral code is
based on what is agreed to be the shared end of the society and
the best way to achieve it, which also gives each member their
proper role in the society and their own proper tasks. Thus, in
a society one of whose shared aims is the protection of private
property, it would be objectively wrong to steal a loaf of bread,
all other things being equal. So, morality itself may not be objec-
tive, but for people who share a worldview expressed by the
community, morality has context and a shared meaning.
RONALD W. PIES M.D.
LEXINGTON, MA
Y ou are ugly and grossly overweight. Consider how you feel
after reading that. Keep that feeling to hand for the
moment. That sentence is an insult, and I shouldn’t have writ-
ten it, due to the feeling it has most certainly caused in you, and
would cause in me had such an insult been aimed at me, regard-
less of its truth or falsity. A wrong has been committed, a moral
law has been broken. It’s not a law contained in a spelt-out legal
system; but it doesn’t have to be spelt-out to be real. Instead, the
hurt feelings in the insulted person make the offence fairly
objective. By ‘objective’ here, I mean existing universally, or vir-
tually universally: anyone and everyone would feel insulted,
assuming they understood the words. By those words I have
created something that’s out there: it’s objective. You can’t see it,
but you feel its sting. It registers.
You will of course have realised that I didn’t mean what I
wrote; but for that initial moment the feeling was real. It is in
those kinds of moments where morality is shown to be objec-
tive, where everyone ‘sees’ the offence: when the ghost in the
machine (if I may borrow that phrase) becomes solid. This kind
of ‘real’ is clearly not the same real as, say, the keyboard with
which I wrote the sentence, but there are many types of real:
real love, real bananas, real quantum particles. While the feeling
isn’t empirical evidence as are results taken with a ruler or beeps
on a Geiger Counter, it is real evidence of a different kind. I
can’t proclaim an area safe from radiation with a ruler, it’s the
wrong detector. I need the correct tool, a Geiger Counter, to do
that. We, human beings, are the morality detectors. We all feel
the sting when something wrong has been created, say an insult
has been slung – and therein lies the objectivity.
KRISTINE KERR (who reckons you are beautiful and fit),
GOUROCK, RENFREWSHIRE
O ne reason for denying that morality is objective is the claim
that science will provide an exhaustive description of
objective reality which leaves no room for objective moral facts,
and so morality must be either subjective or a matter of conven-
tion. However, it could be argued that mathematics faces the
same problem here as morality. Mathematical objects such as
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 35
?? numbers do not appear in the list of items in the natural world
that science can detect. They cannot be observed as part of the
physical universe – even though they are a prerequisite for the
success of science. But we should notice that this does not pre-
vent us from regarding mathematical truths as objective. In fact
mathematics, as the Greeks recognised, is the paradigm of
objective truth. Thus the claim that objective truths must be
scientific truths seems simply a metaphysical prejudice.
If we allow for the possibility of objective moral truths, how
might such truths be identified? Science boasts replicable
empirical research that has identified entities which seem uncon-
troversially objective, such as atoms. Mathematics uses logic to
prove mathematical theorems. In contrast, there is no accepted
procedure that enables us to settle moral debate, which often
seems interminable. There is no experiment, for example,
which can determine whether abortion is morally acceptable.
Nevertheless, the controversial nature of morality is itself a
reason to think that there are objective truths at stake. We do
not seriously debate matters of taste (e.g. whether coffee or tea
is the better drink ), because we do not believe there is an
objective answer.
Moreover, the distinction should be made between proce-
dures for identifying objective reality, and objective reality
itself. Atoms possessed objectivity before the scientific methods
were established that confirmed their existence. So a lack of
scientific method does not necessarily mean a lack of objectiv-
ity. And, although much ethical debate seems interminable,
progress has been made here. For example, we have surely
established that slavery is objectively wrong, although formerly
this was a controversial issue.
Moral debate does not deliver clear-cut answers in the way
science appears to, but this does not mean that it cannot deliver
objective conclusions at all. The process is just more difficult.
Because of the success of science in identifying objective truths,
beliefs that are established by non-scientific means are assumed
to lack objectivity. But is this justified? Surely ‘It is wrong to
torture babies’ is as objectively true as anything in science.
MARTIN BUTLER
LANCASTER
TO SEE HIS SCULPTURES, PLEASE VISIT WWW.HARVEYGALLERY.COM
CARTOON © CAMERON HARVEY 2016
“Would you go back in time to kill Col. Sanders?”
36 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
T he mind is caused by the brain. But the brain doesn’t have
a ‘nodule of morality’ or even a ‘deciding zone’ any more
than it has a ‘chocolate-liking tubercle’. Rather, decision-mak-
ing, which includes moral decisions, is performed by the whole
neural net. This process is entirely objective, not just as a phe-
nomenon, but the mechanics of the brain’s decision-making
activity are thoroughly physical, visible, solid, and testable.
Our neural net makes our decisions by a fairly simple
process of one-on-one comparison-and-match. This means
that the results of the process look like the simple comparisons
they are, and moral decisions seem to be comparative.
But then again, there does seem to be a definitive, objective,
fixed and unshakeable system of knowing-what’s-right behind
it all. Not just feelings but experience tells us so. And indeed,
there is such a definitive system – it is the fixed and objective
process by which the moral comparison is done.
So, morality is comparative, and is determined by an objec-
tive system. Which is not only an explanation of how moral
judgement works, but an explanation of why the apparent con-
flict between objective and comparative accounts of morality
occurs. Tarraaaa!
GLYN HUGHES
SQUASHED PHILOSOPHERS (SQAPO.COM)
M orality has both subjective and objective components.
The objective component is provided by the laws of
Game Theory. The subjective element is the strategy selected
by a player attempting to maximise their personal reward.
Game theory describes the competitive or collaborative
strategies that a rational agent can use to maximise their benefit
in any situation. (In this context, a rational agent is someone
capable of thinking about then acting in their own best inter-
est.) Often, cooperation provides the optimum outcome for all
interacting parties, but at any time an agent might break the
contract in an attempt to increase their own rewards. Such an
action might have short term benefits, but it has been shown
that in a series of interaction games, such a cheat will lose out
because the others will soon refuse further cooperation. There
are, therefore, substantial individual and group advantages to
keeping such a contract. This ‘reciprocal altruism’, where the
group rewards collaboration and punishes the cheat, is mod-
elled by the ‘tit-for-tat’ strategy in Game Theory.
I would argue with the Mathematical Platonists that abstract
mathematical ideas are mind-independent entities. Like any
other object, they can be discovered and verified by anyone
with the right equipment – in this case a skill in mathematics.
Therefore, the outcome of our moral behaviour, subject to the
laws of relationships determined by the mathematical objects of
Game Theory, in this sense are objective. However, the strate-
gies are subjectively chosen by agents acting in what they per-
ceive to be their own best interest. Their choices may or may
not coincide with supporting the social order.
Human civilization is highly dependent on the operation of
Game Theory’s reciprocal altruism. A society’s moral codes are
attempts to ensure that individuals choose the collaborative
strategy over many ‘plays’, that is, social interactions. Although
the moral rules encapsulated by the Golden Rule (‘Do unto oth-
ers...’) and Law of Retaliation (‘an eye for an eye’) are simple, in
practice they can become very complex. Human agents are play-
ing many parallel games in an ever-changing social and physical
environment, with no guarantee of group success. To retain
Question: Is Morality Objective?
social cohesion, the moral code may incorporate many complex
taboos or ritualistic actions, lack of compliance with which can
be used as an explanation of the group’s failures. An agent, how-
ever, is always free to challenge the code by choosing the antiso-
cial strategy. In such cases the agent will find themselves in peril
of retribution in the form of tribal or civil law.
DR STEVE BREWER
CARBIS BAY, ST IVES
T wo types of morality co-exist virtually everywhere and at
all times, yet they are, for the most part, poles apart.
They are morality in theory and morality in practice, and they
align with objective morality and subjective morality respec-
tively. I will demonstrate what I mean by example, but first let
me elaborate on morality as it is practiced.
For most people, morality stems from their surrounding
cultural norms. That is, many people rely on their conscience
to point their moral compass; but one’s conscience is a social
construct largely determined by one’s upbringing. For exam-
ple, in some societies, one can be made to feel guilty about the
most natural sexual impulses. Guilt and sex have been associ-
ated over generations, but it is usually lop-sided: women are
often forced to carry the greater burden of guilt, and homo-
sexuals can be forced to feel criminal. Both these examples
illustrate how cultural norms can determine the morality one
accepts.
In some societies there are cultural clashes – usually genera-
tional – where the same moral issue can inflame opposing atti-
tudes. In India in December 2012, a young woman, Jyoti
Singh, was raped and murdered on a bus after she went to a
movie with her boyfriend. A documentary by British film-
maker Leslee Udwin explored the cultural schism in India over
this issue. Some (including the lawyers representing the gang
who committed the crime) believed that the girl was responsi-
ble for her own fate, whereas others campaigned to have the
rape laws strengthened. This demonstrates starkly how some-
one’s specific cultural influences can set moral values that
become normative and then intransigent.
In many cultures it is taught that God or the gods deter-
mine moral values, yet these are often the most prescriptive,
oppressive, and misogynistic examples of enforced cultural
mores. People who hold to this perspective often claim that
theirs is the only true objective morality, but unfortunately it
seems that when one evokes God [or indeed, any other
absolute, Ed] to rationalise one’s morality, anything, including
the most savage actions, can thereby be ostensively justified.
On the other hand, morality in theory is very simple: it is to
treat everyone the same and give everyone the same rights, be
they men, women, homosexuals, people of different faith, or
with a different skin colour. However, one only has to look at
the treatment of refugees to realise how even the most liberal
societies struggle with this precept.
PAUL MEALING
MELBOURNE
T his question initially seems simple, as there appear to be
many things that most people would automatically
believe to be intrinsically morally wrong, in all times and
place, such as murder, lying, and theft. But after reflection,
many would agree there are also cases where these things may
be acceptable. For example, stealing medicine to save the life
Question: Is Morality Objective?
of a critically ill child, or lying to someone over the where-
abouts of your friend whom they express an intention to kill.
However, people would not necessarily give the same reasons
why these are exceptions to the rule. Some may argue there is
greater moral responsibility to a friend than to a stranger, so,
in this circumstance, lying in their defence is acceptable; but
others may argue a hierarchy of moral actions: so although
lying, or stealing, is ethically wrong, not acting to prevent a
??
murder, or to save the life of a child, is a far greater wrong.
Others still may stress the importance of social mores in ethi-
cal situations.
In conclusion, despite a widespread belief there are things
that are inherently morally correct apart from in exceptional
circumstances, there is lack of consensus on what these exemp-
tions are, or when and why they are acceptable. This is what
makes debate over whether there is truly an objective morality
uncertain, and makes moral philosophy the challenging preoc-
cupation it is.
JONATHAN TIPTON
PRESTON, LANCASHIRE
T he common belief is that there are two kinds of knowl-
edge: subjective and objective. The latter is held to be
more certain than the former, and is usually contrasted with it.
However, the distinction is ultimately untenable. Objective
knowledge is actually derived from subjective knowledge. This
is because of the absolute privacy of conscious experience,
which ensures that there can be no composite or collective
view of reality. So every so-called ‘objective fact’ is derivative –
that is, it is derived from the private observations of individuals
insofar as they seem to agree with each other.
The process of arriving at a moral truth is in principle
exactly the same as that: by inquiry and agreement among
autonomous individuals. The status of a value would thus be
no less (and no more) ‘objective’ than that of a ‘fact’. (Unfortu-
nately, in traditional societies, it is the authority of the past
which is usually deferred to.)
Moreover, no ‘objective facts’ can be arrived at unless cer-
tain values are observed. These values are arrived at in the
same way as we arrive at facts: namely by mutual agreement.
They include (1) Respect for reason and truth, (2) Recognition
of knowledge, (3) Respect for each other’s freedom and auton-
omy, (4) Respect for each other’s conscious experience, and (5)
Frankness, even where this involves admitting one’s own mis-
takes. It will be seen that the Golden Rule is implicit here. We
require therefore moral values when seeking out facts – values
are at the root of so-called ‘facts’. And we may assert that both
facts and values are derived from individual human experience,
and so are as ‘objective’, or not, as each other.
GRAHAM DUNSTAN MARTIN
EDINBURGH
In honour both of Albert Camus and William Shakespeare, the next
question is: To Be or Not To Be – What Is The Answer?
Please both give and justify your sagacity in less than 400 words. The
prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Subject lines
should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by
17th October 2016. If you want a chance of getting a book, please
include your physical address. Submission is permission to repro-
duce your answer physically and electronically. Thanks.
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 37
The Consequences of
Accepting
Consequentialism
Katy Baker on the demands of consequentialist theories of morality.
“Jim finds himself in the central square of a small South American town.
Tied up against the wall are a row of twenty Indians, most terrified, a few
defiant, in front of them several armed men in uniform. A heavy man in a
sweat-stained khaki shirt turns out to be the captain in charge and, after a
good deal of questioning of Jim which establishes that he got there by
accident while on a botanical expedition, explains that the Indians are a
random group of the inhabitants who, after recent acts of protest against
the government, are just about to be killed to remind other possible pro-
testors of the advantages of not protesting. However, since Jim is an hon-
oured visitor from another land, the captain is happy to offer him a guest’s
privilege of killing one of the Indians himself. If Jim accepts, then as a spe-
cial mark of the occasion, the other Indians will be let off. Of course, if Jim
refuses, then there is no special occasion, and Pedro here will do what he
was about to do when Jim arrived, and kill them all... The men against the
wall and the other villagers understand the situation, and are obviously
begging him to accept. What should he do?”
Bernard Williams in the book Utilitarianism: For and Against,
by J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, 1973
C
onsequentialism is the theory in moral philosophy that
says our actions should aim at producing the best con-
sequences. A consequence of consequentialism, how-
ever, is that it fails to respect the integrity of the individuals
involved. As what matters is only the end result, who is acting
or how they arrive at the decisions they make is irrelevant.
The lack of respect for the integrity of the individual is raised
by Bernard Williams’ famous ‘Jim and the Indians’ thought
experiment, quoted above. Williams’ example shows that con-
hard times are on their way
38 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
sequentialism disregards the agent’s own personal commit-
ments and allows for negative responsibility. I intend to show
that expecting individuals to take an impersonal standpoint in a
decision that so greatly affects them is unrealistic and leads to
alienation. Consequentialists may try to respond by arguing
that alienation and taking an impersonal standpoint can be a
virtue, but this seems a high price to pay if the agent is
expected to disregard her most fundamental relationships, leav-
ing her deeply unhappy. For a theory often touted as promot-
ing happiness, this is a problem.
A Utilitarian Approach
Consequentialism focuses on promoting the best conse-
quences, but what kind of consequences are the best? The best-
known consequentialist ethical theory is utilitarianism, which
says that the wrongness or rightness of an action depends on
the amount of overall good or ‘utility’ that is produced. So, to
decide whether or not to take some step, we must calculate
whether it will produce the best overall outcome for the high-
est number of people. Many utilitarians take a hedonistic
approach, saying that utility equates to happiness, so we should
act to produce the greatest happiness, and to minimize pain
and unhappiness. For example, if I have the choice between
saving one of my two cats, Benjy and Oliver, from a house fire,
I should save the cat that would produce the most utility over
the other one. So, if Oliver had a wide network of adoring cat
lovers because of his friendly, playful nature, unlike Benjy who
prefers a life of peaceful solitude I should save Oliver as this
would cause the least pain and produce the most pleasure for

the people that know him. For consequentialism, life is a num-
bers game; an action should aim to make the majority happy,
regardless of who they are, and should aim to go for actions
that produce minimal pain. Williams furthers this explanation;
“making the best of a bad job is one of its maxims, and it will
have something to say even on the difference between mas-
sacring seven million, and massacring seven million and one”
(Consequentialism and its Critics, 1988). So whilst both acts are
morally abhorrent, the consequentialist will inevitably say that
if these are the only options available then not only should we
choose to massacre seven million, but that it would be right to
do so. What matters is not so much the horrific act in itself but
the outcome of that act.
Jim & The Indians
As consequentialism only looks at the consequences it
allows for negative responsibility; that is, being held morally
accountable not for some action, but for failing to act to pre-
vent bad things happening. Also, it does not matter who per-
forms the action, only the action itself as Williams’ example
shows.
For the consequentialist it is obvious that the right choice
for Jim would be to kill one Indian in order to save the lives of
the other nineteen. If Jim refuses to kill anyone then he is
therefore responsible for the deaths of the others. From a
consequentialist point of view it doesn’t matter who commits
the murder, merely the amount of lives lost in the end, so Jim
would be just as responsible for the deaths as the captain is –
surely an absurd outcome. So what exactly is wrong with it?
By saying that Jim should shoot the one Indian the conse-
quentialist fails to take into account the impact that this would
have on Jim’s life. In one moment Jim goes from being a
tourist in a foreign country to becoming a murderer for the
sake of morality. He is likely to have his own commitments in
which murder (rather than letting others die) would go
against his most fundamental beliefs. Does the pain that Jim
Who would you save?
would feel not need to be taken into account when looking at
the best overall outcome? Killing the one Indian is going to
have a profound effect on Jim’s life but for the consequential-
ist, Jim’s values are irrelevant. What matters in this example is
saving the highest number of lives, and how this is attained is
unimportant.
Can The Consequentialist Adequately Respond?
In response to criticism of the unappealing idea that by
doing nothing Jim is as responsible for the deaths of the
twenty Indians as the captain, the consequentialist can choose
to bite the bullet by accepting the idea of negative responsibil-
ity; that is, to accept that we can be held morally responsible
for not acting. Our duty to others can be illustrated using
another example, one used by contemporary utilitarian
philosopher Peter Singer. Imagine you are in your local park
feeding the ducks on the pond when you hear a loud splash; a
child has fallen into the pond and is struggling to swim. No
other adults or swimmers are anywhere to be seen, so without
your help the child will drown. It is not unreasonable to say
that in this example you should pause your duck feeding and
jump in to save the child. If you don’t, you should be held
partly responsible for the child’s death. The same could be said
for Jim who by doing nothing is responsible for the lives of the
twenty Indians. But Jim has to actively kill someone unlike the
duck feeder for whom the only bad consequences are that he
will get wet and muddy. Whilst the drowning child example
seems to support the existence of negative responsibility, it dif-
fers in that there are no commitments or beliefs preventing us
from saving the child. And this is the central problem; that
Jim’s values are seen as unimportant when it comes to deciding
how he should act in the given situation.
The consequentialist could retort that in calculating what
course of action is right, the individual’s integrity can be taken
into account. Perhaps it can in some way be quantified, so that
if carrying out some act would damage the integrity of the
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 39

CARTOON © BILL STOTT 2016 FOR MORE, PLEASE VISIT WWW.BILLSTOTT.CO.UK
The meaning of life? Well, that depends what sort of mood I’m in.
individual so grievously that the maximum utility could be
reached only if they failed to act, then not acting would be the
right thing to do. But in Jim’s case his pain at killing one
person is a relatively minor consideration when the very lives
of nineteen others (and the happiness of their families and
friends) is at stake. Furthermore, whilst the consequentialist
can agree that the individual agent’s integrity should not be
ignored, as Williams explains, “(h)is own substantial projects
and commitments come into it, but only as one lot among
others.” (Ethics, 1994) As our integrity is one among many
others and consequentialism expects us all to take an imper-
sonal standpoint, it would follow that everyone would need to
disregard their personal commitments, which is likely to lead
in turn to overall unhappiness, a problem for a moral theory
with hedonistic tendencies.
Alienation
Even if the damage to Jim’s integrity is taken into account,
there is another problem: the consequentialist would regard
Jim’s killing another person not merely as preferable, but as
morally required. It is a problem that consequentialism forces
us to take an impersonal, objective view of situations and over-
ride some of our most cherished beliefs because of its require-
ment that we focus exclusively on the final result. Taking an
impersonal standpoint leads to alienation; this is the state of
someone who has become separated from their commitments
to themselves and others. This makes consequentialist theories
very demanding on the agent involved. Consequentialism
requires that the agent should step outside herself, as it were,
and assess the consequences not in terms of prior commit-
ments, but just on the results produced.
To this objection, the consequentialist can protest that alien- ating ourselves from our values and social ideas is likely to result
ation can be a virtue. In effect we become moral martyrs, sur-
rendering our integrity (leading to alienation) in order to
achieve what they believe is morally right. Some consequential-
ists even argue that alienation is necessary for social progress.
As Peter Railton says: “The alienation of some individuals or
groups from their milieu may at times be necessary for funda-
mental social criticism or cultural innovation” (Alienation,
40 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
Consequentialism and the
Demands of Morality, Philosophy
and Public Affairs 1984). Rather
than taking into account our
own attitudes towards an
action, by taking an objective
standpoint we are able to
remove ourselves from our
usual social groups and ideolo-
gies which affect the way in
which we act and look at a situ-
ation, and instead we should act
without bias. In practice this a
very difficult thing to do – to
step outside of the values we
have been brought up with –
and the state of being alienated
itself often causes unhappiness
within the individual. For con-
sequentialism this is not a problem, as the individual is just a
mechanism for maximising overall happiness; they are instru-
mental. Through alienating ourselves Railton shows that
“adopting one’s exclusive ultimate end in life in the pursuit of
maximum happiness may well prevent one from having experi-
ences or engaging in certain sorts of commitments that are
among the greatest sources of happiness” (‘Alienation, Conse-
quentialism and the Demands of Morality’, Philosophy and Public
Affairs, 1984). Again, consequentialism forces us to put our
commitments second, regardless of how strongly we are con-
nected to them or how much pleasure we derive from them.
The happiness of the individual is overridden by the happiness
of the masses.
Using the example of Jim and the Indians, Williams success-
fully illustrates that consequentialism fails to respect the
integrity of the individual because in deciding what is wrong or
right what really matters is not the action but the outcome of it.
Any prior commitments are disregarded or, if taken into consid-
eration, are unlikely to have any substantial effect on the out-
come. Consequentialism entails that we can be held morally
responsible for a lack of action, and whilst the case of the
drowning child shows that it is possible to be indirectly respon-
sible by not acting, in cases like Jim’s it involves going further
than can be reasonably expected. The consequence of conse-
quentialism is that by taking an impersonal standpoint we alien-
ate ourselves and whilst the consequentialist can argue that this
should be a virtue, the expected result of unhappiness shows its
inadequacy for this is a high price to pay for a view that values
happiness. If consequentialism is to take a hedonistic approach –
that we should act so as to maximise overall happiness – then it
results in a contradiction. Disregarding our integrity and alien-
in a life of unhappiness. If this is demanded of all moral agents,
then general unhappiness is likely to ensue rather than the
opposite. So by treating the individual as merely a means to an
end, consequentialism may turn out to be self-defeating.
© KATY BAKER 2016
Katy Baker studied Philosophy at the University of Kent and is now
part of the Philosophy Now team.

The Reflective Turn
DEAR EDITOR: I read Tim Wilkinson’s
article on mirrors (PN 114) with interest
as, many years ago, I came up with a
different theory of why mirrors appear
to reverse left and right but not up and
down. My argument is that the effect is
due to the direction in which we turn
round – the axis around which we rotate
– when we change from looking at an
object to looking at its reflection.
Imagine that you are standing in
front of a large mirror and that, behind
you, is a large square. Each corner of the
square is coloured differently. You turn
from looking at the actual square to
looking at its reflection in the mirror.
The reflection appears to reverse the left
and right side of the square, but not to
reverse top and bottom. Now imagine
you are a different kind of creature, that
turns round by turning head over heels
(in other words, by rotating vertically
around a horizontal axis, instead of
around the vertical axis as we usually
do). Now when you rotate from looking
at the square to looking at its reflection,
the square seems to get turned upside
down, but what appeared to be on the
left still appears on the left when you
look at the reflection. This principle can
be illustrated by a tree reflected in a
lake. In going from looking at the tree to
looking at its reflection, we rotate our
line of sight vertically (around a hori-
zontal axis ). What is on the left of the
tree still appears to be on the left of the
reflection, but what is at the top of the
tree is at the bottom of the reflection.
My point is that reflection inverts along
the direction in which we rotate our line
of sight when we go from looking at the
object to looking at the reflection. If we
usually turned around a horizontal axis,
rather than a vertical one, we would
think that mirrors inverted up and down
but not left and right. Perhaps some-
where in the universe there is a species
that’s puzzled about why mirrors do that.
PETER SPURRIER, HALSTEAD, ESSEX
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up!
Write to me at: Philosophy Now
43a Jerningham Road • London • SE14 5NQ, U.K.
or email rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
Scientific Limits
DEAR EDITOR: Grant Bartley in his edito-
rial in Issue 114 is too timid and too brave.
If some scientists think of philosophy as a
poor man’s version of science this is good.
Gives everyone involved something to
argue about. The fact is, everyone has a
license to think: it’s called a brain, and
moreover you can think about anything at
all. Absolutely anything. Wow! And if you
take advantage of this freedom you are
doing philosophy. Science is a fairly
respectable part of that. So is mathematics,
a different part. But that leaves an awful
lot of other things to think about. And
what is being done by engineers and scien-
tists these days would have been dismissed
as philosophical lunacy a century ago.
On the other hand the idea that you get
any help from Kant in understanding
space and time is rather silly. A philoso-
pher argued that Einstein had to be wrong
because he contradicted Kant. Einstein
and others had a far deeper insight than
Kant. Argue with me about this when you
understand what the Lorentz group has to
do with space and time.
MIKE ALDER, PERTH, AUSTRALIA
DEAR EDITOR: Some scientists believe
that philosophy is unnecessary for under-
standing our world, but I don’t think we
could have survived the mental distress
and chaos experienced after the calamitous
events of the Holocaust and the dropping
of the atomic bombs on Japan without
engaging in philosophy. I’m sure science
alone couldn’t have dealt with the mental
and moral anguish we faced after those
events. Moreover, I think that if we were
left with only cold scientific thinking we
could easily have fallen into repeating
those events. It’s mostly through philoso-
phizing about them that we’ve gained an
understanding into what triggered them,
which then put us on a course of trying to
avoid repeating them. It’s not science
alone that has given us the understanding
and fortitude to overcome our history.
DAVID AIRTH, TORONTO
August/September 2016 l Philosophy Now 41
DEAR EDITOR: In ‘Catherine Malabou &
the Continental Philosophy of Brains’,
Issue 114, Dale DeBakcsy mentions that
Jacques Derrida thought that there is
always something elusive about our
attempts to experience ourselves – here
the ‘I’ seems to need to treat itself as an
Other. I wonder if Derrida was familiar
with psychiatrist Roberto Assioli’s
concept of ‘I, the observer’ being separate
and distinct from ‘I, the personal self’?
RAY SHERMAN, DUARTE, CA
More Women In Philosophy
DEAR EDITOR: I read the letter by
Marthe Kerkwijk in Issue 114 with great
interest, and a lot of questions. I struggle
to comprehend Prof. David Papineau’s
apparent claim that one solution to the
problem of the underrepresentation of
women in academic philosophy could be
for philosophy departments to cut out
some of the technical, scholastic bits, on
the basis that these deter women.
Although I agree that some areas of
philosophy are seen as less applicable to
the competitive employment market, the
answer is to show that the technical
nature of these topics inculcates valuable
transferrable skills, not to remove this
element so that women won’t be ‘put
off’. Such technical elements are the
training needed to have a sharp mind
and well-honed analytical skills when
tackling any other area of philosophy or
debate. They are not irrelevant.
There was an expectation that Mary
Warnock, as one of our most celebrated
female philosophers, would be a feminist
mouthpiece, but she refused to be so.
Her views can be found in What Philoso-
phers Think (ed. Baggini and Stan-
groom). She denied that philosophy
produced by women is being ‘passed
over’: rather, there isn’t much of it. This
echoes Marthe’s hypothesis that women
self-select out of the subject. Warnock
attributes some of her own academic
success to the fact that at the time,
women’s colleges in Oxford and
Letters
Cambridge employed only female lectur-
ers. She also suggested that women, when
busy having children, tend to publish less
than men, putting them at a disadvantage
when looking for academic jobs. Having
two children myself, I know that there
isn’t the time to read the journals and
books one would want to, let alone
produce publications (and I wouldn’t
change a second of it, by the way).
Warnock also mentions the concentra-
tion of women in the ‘soft’ subjects of
philosophy, in particular religion and
ethics. One reason she gives for the inter-
est in religion is that women were often
locked in their traditional, supportive,
probably religious role in the family.
Another is that they have ‘divided lives’,
and so whilst trying to keep many plates
spinning, tend to excel at the subjects that
‘take less concentration’. She speaks auto-
biographically here, referring to the ‘soft’
subjects as not requiring the hours in the
library, or even hours sitting undisturbed
as you work out a logical problem. I was
riled by this. So men are able to sit peace-
fully and do modal logic, but women can
think about God while they sweep the
floors?! However, I also have to admit
that I’m writing parts of this letter while
getting the kids’ tea ready. I also remem-
ber a PhD student writing to me (yes, a
letter on paper) after my first year under-
graduate exams, telling me to select the
modules that “would get me more
respect” in the department – namely, not
religion and ethics. Unfortunately I had
already decided to do a dissertation on
neo-Wittgensteinian fideism by then; but
I also took philosophy of mind and meta-
physics. But, again, whatever the reasons
for the lack of women in the ‘hard’
subject, the solution is not to remove
these elements from courses.
I don’t claim to have the answers. I
can’t claim to be a career philosopher. I
teach, I write, I get involved in projects. I
have rarely experienced any discrimina-
tion, probably because I never climbed
high enough up the academic ladder.
There have been encounters with male
academics where I have felt that I was
viewed as inferior, but I was not sure what
the reason was. I did consider that it
might be because I am female; but I also
considered that it might be because I have
a Brummy accent, or (more likely) not
enough letters after my name. There have
certainly been times when I have begun to
lose confidence, to question myself and
42 Philosophy Now l August/September 2016
my intellect. I don’t think anyone of any
gender, class, ethnicity or sexual orienta-
tion should be made to feel like that.
Eleanor Roosevelt claimed no-one can
make you feel inferior without your
consent, but that’s simplifying the issue.
There aren’t enough female philoso-
phers, especially in the ‘hard’ subjects.
This is because either a) They aren’t
clever enough; b) Their work is ignored
by male academics; or c) They’re not
producing the work in the first place. I
take it as a given that a) is false. But if it is
c), then we’re not providing the environ-
ment for young bright minds to develop
philosophically, which is a tragedy.
Perhaps we need to tell young girls that
to spend hours on a metaphysical prob-
lem is a perfectly good use of her time.
SALLY LATHAM, SUTTON COLDFIELD
Reality’s Limits
DEAR EDITOR: Judging by your feature
on it in Issue 113, New Realism has a lot
of promising features, but there does
seem to be a problem in its claim that
individuals exist outside of thought in
the way that classes do not.
Consider the individual object that we
call the planet Venus. Is the atmosphere of
Venus part of this object, or not? The
answer may be ‘yes’ or ‘no’ according to
the context, and more importantly, the
obvious answer in most cases is that it
doesn’t matter. When a meteorite strikes
Venus, in which nanosecond do two
objects become one? Again, it never
matters, except perhaps within rough
limits. This shows that when we speak of
Venus as an object we speak of an idea
that is less precise than the reality – a
mental model that elides irrelevant
distinctions. The New Realists are right to
emphasise that material reality has a
mind-independent structure; but to get
from that structure to individual ‘objects’
requires that a boundary be drawn
between what is part of a particular object
and what is not – and it is not reality which
draws those boundaries, but our attempts
to understand it. Typically, reality itself is
characterised by constellations of closely
concentric or overlapping boundaries
which afford approximate descriptions in
terms of ‘objects’ whose precise bound-
aries are not fully defined, and, as far as
they matter, are context-dependent.
There is a helpful shorthand for this
situation that has a wide application. If
‘facts’ are answers to questions in a given
context, then it is only our minds that can
choose the questions, and only reality that
can choose the answers. So we can only
‘invent’ the questions, and only ‘discover’
the answers. This has important philo-
sophical consequences, including:
• There are no ‘things in themselves’ –
but there is a ‘reality in itself’ which does
not comprise individual ‘things’. We
know of this reality in itself because of its
function in setting the answers to our
questions (or in NR terms, its affordance
of and resistance to our models).
• However, we cannot be said to fully
know this reality in itself – not because of
its ‘mystery’, or because of a ‘barrier’ or
‘veil’, but simply because of its indefinite
complexity. Yet we can always know more
by increasing the accuracy of our models
of individuals and classes.
• Realism and Constructivism are thus
not alternatives, but complementary.
Shouldn’t we therefore rather aim for
‘Constructive Realism’? John Searle’s
claim that external Realism is consistent
with conceptual relativity is one precedent
for this approach (cf ‘The Construction of
Social Reality’). Another is Davis &
Hersh’s reconciliation of the claims of
Platonism and formalism in mathematics,
in The Mathematical Experience.
ROGER HAINES, LONDON
DEAR EDITOR: I’m glad that you
published Sam Woolfe’s article on the
ideas of Max Tegmark in Issue 113. In his
book, Our Mathematical Universe (2014),
Tegmark defines his Mathematical
Universe Hypothesis (MUH) as: “Our
external physical reality is a mathematical
structure.” Woolfe presents Tegmark’s
hypothesis as if it were metaphysical spec-
ulation, but Tegmark’s argument on this,
as well as the multiverse models Woolfe
discusses, are based upon general relativ-
ity and quantum field theory, together
with cosmological inflation theory.
Let me confess straightaway that my
initial reaction to MUH was that it was
simply a category mistake. I have long
argued that mathematical entities were
abstract and not physical objects. No
matter how you combine any number of
7s or πs or special unitary groups or
circles, you can’t construct the Eiffel
Tower or an elephant. For me Tegmark’s
most persuasive argument is a reduction-
ist one. Every physical object is
composed of subatomic particles. Their
properties are now well displayed in the

Standard Model of particle physics. This
model comprises fields, together with 17
particles. Tegmark claims that these
fields and particles have no properties
other than purely mathematical ones, so
at its root physical reality is mathemati-
cal. As we move up the physical scale
through atoms, cells, organisms, stars,
galaxies, new properties emerge, provid-
ing us with a conceptual framework
which allows us to understand the world,
but they are not fundamental to reality.
Tegmark refers to them as ‘baggage’.
Intelligent beings from another galaxy,
or intelligent machines here, are likely
to use utterly different concepts.
In regard to mathematics, Tegmark is
a Platonist as opposed to a formalist.
Platonists view mathematical objects as
real: they objectively exist outside of phys-
ical space and time quite independently of
our knowledge of them. Here mathemati-
cians are somewhat like scientists in
discovering and exploring a pre-existing
reality, which will remain unchanged for
all time. In contrast, formalism, which
was introduced by David Hilbert, holds
that all mathematics can be reduced to
rules for manipulating formulas. It has
been claimed that most mathematicians
are Platonists on week-days when they are
working, but formalists on Sundays when,
in philosophical mode, they reflect on
their work. The question seems
completely irresolvable. But one can see
that Tegmark being a Platonist might
make MUH attractive to him. I strongly
recommend that Philosophy Now readers
read Tegmark’s excellent book, which is
written in an engaging style.
JOHN RADCLIFFE,
WELWYN GARDEN CITY
DEAR EDITOR: I enjoyed Sam Woolfe’s
article on Max Tegmark’s hierarchy of
multiverses, but Woolfe let Tegmark off
lightly in terms of any discussion of
weaknesses and gaps in his position. For
example, Tegmark assumes that his four
levels of multiverses form a consistent
hierarchy, but his Level I and II multi-
verses are not purely quantum mechani-
cal as his Level III is, but rather, cosmo-
logical in scale; and since quantum
theory and relativity are still not fully
unified, his assumption of congruency is
dubious. Secondly, Tegmark is some-
what suspicious of infinities in physics.
Understandably so, but he is surpris-
ingly silent about the role of infinities in
his all-encompassing Level IV mathe-
matical multiverse. Cantor’s theory of
transfinite numbers is a perfectly legiti-
mate mathematical structure; but
Tegmark omits discussion of it alto-
gether – a strange oversight indeed.
PHIL HOFFMANN, CALGARY, CANADA
DEAR EDITOR: I believe your correspon-
dent in Issue 114, Tom Graham, may be
somewhat confused about the nature of
the infinite. Something being infinite
does not imply that nothing can exist
outside it. There are infinitely many
numbers between zero and one; but
there are also an infinite number of
numbers between one and two, and so
on: in fact, an infinite number of such
infinities! Would it not therefore be
possible that each individual multiverse
is like each of these infinities, so an infi-
nite number of them could exist without
overlapping? I am not suggesting that
the analogy from numbers to space is
direct, but I believe it demonstrates that
there is no contradiction in multiple infi-
nite universes.
NICHOLAS DYSON, YORK
Liberal Conservatism
DEAR EDITOR: Musa al-Gharbi in
Issue113 is certainly right in contrasting
conservatism with its opposite, progres-
sivism, and in holding that conservatives’
inclination towards tradition is a feature
of conservatism, not its essence. I was
however surprised to read that he chose
to include neo-conservatives among what
he called ‘other conservative strains”. As
he says, they embrace “progressive abso-
lutism”, including “forcibly spreading
liberalism around the world.” Surely this
is not very conservative?
In his posthumously published book
The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scep-
ticism, philosopher Michael Oakeshott
(1901-1990) identifies two styles or poles
in the last 500 years of political history.
Whereas the ‘politics of faith’ is charged
by grand designs and absolutist forms of
government, the ‘politics of scepticism’ is
very much reluctant to believe strongly
in any given scheme, and absolutist
schemes in particular. Now, although
conservatism understood as the opposite
of progressivism probably exemplify a
politics of scepticism, Oakeshott includes
left- as well as right-wing politics into
both poles or charges. On this account, it
becomes a stretch too far to hold neo-
August/September 2016 l Philosophy Now 43
Letters
conservatism as a strain of conservatism.
It is more helpful to distinguish a politi-
cal type– right-wing politics – from its
tokens, conservatism and neo-conser-
vatism: Whereas conservatism is a poli-
tics of scepticism, neo-conservatism,
with its belief in ‘progressive abso-
lutism’, is clearly a politics of faith.
Thus, although they are both to the
right of the political spectrum, they are
charged very differently. One could say
that epistemologically speaking, they are
polar opposites.
FRODE BJERKÅS, OSLO, NORWAY
More Philosophy Now Slip-Ups
DEAR EDITOR: Although Mary Gregg
correctly distinguishes between savoir
and connaître in the article ‘Knowledge
and Language’ in Issue 114, she uses the
word être instead of faire in the sentence
‘je sais que deux et deux sont quatre’.
Although it does not make any differ-
ence to her argument, the correct
version is, ‘je sais que deux et deux font
quatre’. However, what if Descartes had
said ‘Je pense, donc je suis’ instead of ‘cogito
ergo sum’? Also, why is the spelling of
ordinateur correct in the text, but not in
the cartoon?
EVA TYSON, DALGETY BAY, FIFE
DEAR EDITOR: I’ve just got the new
Philosophy Now (114), and upon seeing
the title of one of the articles – ‘Is Žižek
the Elvis of Philosophy?’ – I couldn’t
resist to check it out immediately. But as
Slavoj Žižek’s compatriot, and thus
fluent in Slovenian, I was really disap-
pointed when I saw at the end of the
article a quote saying that the southern
Slav (Yugoslav) word for ‘Cheers’ is
‘Zivali’. Unfortunately, there is no
southern Slav word zivali. The situation
changes if you add a circumflex to the Z,
to make it Živali. In this case you get a
word, but I am afraid Žižek might get
confused or offended by this kind of
toast, since it means animals! If you want
to make a toast in Slovenia or any neigh-
bouring countries that share Slavic
roots, you should say ‘Živeli!’
SABINA PLESNAR KASCA, ROME
DEAR EDITOR: Regarding the excellent
article by Geoff Sheehan, ‘Socrates &
Zen’, in Issue 113, the parable attributed
to Mark Vernon should be attributed to
Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902).
DOROTHY BERRY, PRESCOTT, AZ

Books
Modality & Explana-
tory Reasoning
by Boris Kment
YOUR FOOTBALL TEAM
only drew a game yester-
day. But things could
very easily have been different. If your
goalkeeper had been standing two inches to
the right at the crucial moment, the oppos-
ing team would not have scored the fateful
goal and your team would have won. Still
annoyed this morning, you dropped a cup
and it fell to the floor. Given that you
dropped the cup, it was very likely to fall. It
might not have fallen, but only if there had
been a sudden updraught of air. Unlike
with the goal, the outcome could only have
been different if something quite extraordi-
nary had happened.
When philosophers try to get a grip on
the idea that some things could easily have
been different, while other things could
only have been different in quite extraordi-
nary circumstances, they talk about possible
worlds. We live in the actual world, where
44 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
Richard Baron explains modal reasoning, while Matt
DeStefano is unswayed by an argument explaining
atheism by immorality, & Nick Everitt experiences views
on the nature of experience’s that don’t yield knowledge.
the game was only drawn and the cup fell
to the floor. There is a close possible
world – close because only a little bit dif-
ferent – in which the game was won. That
world is very similar to the actual world,
up to the time when the opposing team
tries to score. There is just a slight differ-
ence in the position of the goalkeeper.
There is another possible world, much
more distant, in which the dropped cup
does not fall to the floor. In that world,
there is an amazingly strong updraught at
just the right moment.
These possible worlds are not located in
our Universe, a million miles or a million
light years away. They are imaginary
worlds. So ‘close’ and ‘distant’ are just
vivid ways to talk about worlds being very
similar to ours or radically different from
ours. But it is jolly useful to talk in terms
of possible worlds, because they allow us
to think systematically about what might
easily have been the case, and what might
only have been the case if things had been
very different. At the extreme, we can talk
about things being possible if they are the
case in at least one possible world, whether
close or distant. If there is a possible world
in which people live to age 500, then such
lifespans are possible. We can also talk
about things being necessary if they are the
case in every possible world. For example,
in every possible world, 2 + 2 = 4.
Philosophers bring possibility and
necessity under the banner of modality –
the first word in Boris Kment’s title. One
reason why modality is important is its
connection with explanation. How do we
explain that your dropped cup fell? We
talk about gravity. Gravity makes it neces-
sary for objects to fall, unless something
holds them up, and if there were no grav-
ity it would be possible for unsupported
objects not to fall. So gravity is at least part
of the explanation of the cup’s falling.
Kment’s book explores the connections
between necessity, possibility and explana-
tion. He also weaves in another thread:
counterfactuals. These are claims about what
did not happen but could have happened:
“If our goalkeeper had stood two inches to
the right, we would have won”; “If there
If only the goalkeeper had
been two inches to the right
Book Reviews

“ When philosophers try to get a grip on the idea that some
things could easily have been different, while other things could
only have been different in quite extraordinary circumstances,
they talk about possible worlds.
had been a sudden updraught of air, the
cup would not have fallen to the floor.”
Counterfactuals need to be brought
into the picture because they also central
to explanation. Suppose we think that if
the goalkeeper had stood two inches to
the right, we would have won. Then we
think that the goalkeeper’s actual posi-
tion explains, or at least helps to explain,
our not winning. Counterfactuals can also
underpin attempts to explain what hap-
pens in scientific contexts. Suppose that
you mix two chemicals, and the mixture
does nothing until you heat it. Then the
chemicals react and create a new com-
pound. You say “If I had not heated the
chemicals, they would not have reacted.”
That encourages you to say “The heating
explains the reaction.”
Modality and counterfactuals are
brought together by their connection
with the idea of possible worlds. Neces-
sity is being the case in every possible
world. Possibility is being the case in at
least one possible world. And a counter-
factual is true if the consequent would be
true in the closest worlds in which the
antecedent was true. “If the goalkeeper
had stood two inches to the right, we
would have won” is true because in
worlds very close to the actual world, in
which we just move the goalkeeper a
little bit and make very few other
changes, the goalkeeper blocks the
incoming ball. We do not need to con-
sider more distant worlds, for example
those in which the goalkeeper stands two
inches to the right but a sudden very
strong gust of wind diverts the ball to the
left. Likewise, “If I had not heated the
chemicals, they would not have reacted”
is true because in close possible worlds, in
which you do not light the Bunsen
burner but nearly everything else is the
same, there is no reaction. We do not
need to consider more distant worlds, in
which some strange atmospheric condi-
tions lead to a chemical reaction.
The discussion of counterfactuals, and
of how to work out which possible worlds
are closest so we can use counterfactuals
to work out what explains what without
making too many mistakes, takes up the
Book Reviews
majority of this book. The discussion is
detailed and technical. This is all to the
good. The devil often lies in the detail, so
details need to be explored. Kment does so
in a way that is as clear as it can be, given
his decision to write continuous prose that
will make sense to most philosophers with-
out their having to do extra reading. But
his discussion might have been even
clearer if he had been a bit more technical,
and had used mathematical concepts to
define the properties of the space in which
all possible worlds are laid out. He needs
enough of a conception of the distances
between possible worlds to say that some
are closer to the actual world than others,
to pick out the ones closest to the actual
world, and to classify worlds as tolerably
close (where physical laws like the law of
gravity still hold) or as very distant (where
some physical laws are different). On the
other hand, he does not want distances to
be too exact. He does not want us to be
able to say that one world is twice as far
away as another. If the required mathe-
matical structure and how to measure and
use distances had been spelt out in full at
the beginning, rather than the require-
ments being outlined at the start and the
details then filled in gradually as ways to
overcome difficulties, that would have
given a different shape to the discussion.
Similarly, he might usefully have been
more explicitly mathematical in his discus-
sion of how some facts are ‘explanatory
ancestors’ of other facts, in the sense that
they directly or indirectly explain the
others. He could also have set out all the
necessary definitions at the start. These
are not concerns about this book alone.
Many works of philosophy could benefit
from giving the whole game away at the
start, before going on to justify the views
stated. Kment’s admirable synopsis in
chapter 1 doesn’t give away quite as much
as it could.
The exciting claims come in the con-
cluding chapters. We have seen how neces-
sity, possibility and counterfactuals are
connected with explanation. But this does
not prove that the idea of explanation is
built on top of ideas of necessity and possi-
bility. Nor does it mean that we must use
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 45
Books
”
counterfactuals to define what counts as an
explanation. Kment puts forward the
thought that it is the other way round. We
want to explain things, and we develop
ideas of necessity and possibility, and the
tool of counterfactual thought, in order to
allow us to find explanations. The desire to
explain comes first. So naturally enough,
having shown how to use counterfactuals,
Kment acknowledges that this tool does
not always give the right answers when we
use it to establish what explains what. He
also notes that we sometimes have to make
ad hoc adjustments to the ways in which we
use counterfactuals, in order to reach sensi-
ble conclusions about what explains what.
Kment discusses how ideas about neces-
sity and so on serve our purposes. In doing
so, he writes of grades of necessity, and of
wide or narrow ranges of possible worlds
that we might consider. (If we pick a narrow
range, it will be relatively easy for things to
be necessary: they need only be the case
throughout that narrow range.) This
reflects our ordinary thinking. For example,
when we seek to explain a rise in the stock
market by considering what might have
been different in the business world and
what effects those differences would have
had on share prices, we just take it for
granted that there is a stock market in
which supply and demand determine prices,
that investors can move their money
around, and so on. But we could go beyond
this practical attitude, and consider whether
necessity is merely something we have
invented because we want to explain things,
rather than something real that we have dis-
covered. Kment does not take that bold
step, although he does not think that facts
about necessity are fundamental. But if
anyone were to be inspired by this intricate
and exhilarating book to take the step, then
David Hume, a philosopher with whom
Kment disagrees on natural laws, would
allow himself a wry smile from the grave.
© RICHARD BARON 2016
Richard Baron is a philosopher in London. His
website is www.rbphilo.com
• Modality and Explanatory Reasoning, Boris
Kment, Oxford University Press, 2014, xii + 362
pages, £48.00 hb, ISBN 978-0-19-960468-5
 Books
The Making of An
Atheist
by Jason Spiegel
C.S. LEWIS HAD GREAT
disdain for the argument
that theism was simply a
matter of wish-fulfillment – that a belief in
God’s existence was just a manifestation of
a desire for an eternal afterlife. However,
he also had sharp words for arguments that
went in reverse – that disbelief in God is
just due to fear of an eternal afterlife –
which is the main argument offered by
Jason Spiegel in this book. As Lewis wrote,
“Men wish on both sides: and again, there is
fear-fulfillment as well as wish-fulfillment,
and hypochondriac temperaments will
always tend to think that true what they
most wish to be false... as a general explana-
tion of [either atheism or theism] they will
not help us” (On Obstinacy in Belief, 1960).
I’m sympathetic to Lewis’s view about
these types of arguments, and that’s why I
found Spiegel’s book so troubling. Two of
the cardinal sins in philosophy are ad
hominem (that is, personal) attacks on your
interlocutor, and making sweeping universal
claims without warrant. In The Making of An
Atheist, Spiegel manages to commit both,
quite frequently. The book is mostly invec-
tive. But when he wades into the depths of
argumentation, the author is beyond his ken.
Spiegel’s goal is straightforward: to
explain the existence of atheism given the
evidence for the existence of God. His
answer is that atheists are not actively
engaging the evidence (otherwise they’d be
theists), but rather, that they are rebelling
against God. According to Spiegel, atheists
STAINED GLASS BY ALFRED HANDEL, 1945. PHOTO © TOBY HUDSON 2009
46 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
are, generally speaking, morally deficient
creatures who are for instance blinded by
their own rampant sexual deviances, or led
astray by troublesome relationships with
their fathers.
One of Spiegel’s predominant argu-
ments to explain the existence of atheists is
a poor relationship with one’s father. His
major support is Paul Vitz’s highly contro-
versial work, Faith of the Fatherless (1999).
Vitz’s work stems from an idiosyncratic
interpretation of the psychoanalytic tradi-
tion. Spiegel recites Vitz’s anecdotal evi-
dence from a case study of fifteen histori-
cal atheists who either had their father die
at an early age or had tumultuous relation-
ships with them. Fifteen people is a hor-
rendously small sample size for any type of
analysis, and especially of a group as large
and as diverse as atheism. And Vitz’s work
has already been the subject of intense
scrutiny and scepticism in the psychologi-
cal community, a fact that Spiegel glosses
over completely. A serious scholarly work
will seek to address significant arguments
in the literature against their position, but
Spiegel avoids this throughout his work. A
footnote in Spiegel’s book argues that Vitz
succeeds because he also examined several
famous theists. But the problem isn’t that
Vitz failed to address either believers or
non-believers, but that his analysis does
not map onto the general population, and
only seems plausible because of the sub-
stantial limitation on the cases examined.
The other major claim Spiegel makes is
that atheists reject God in an effort to ratio-
nalize their sexual misconduct. I find this
particularly shocking as it is pretty clear that
sexual misconduct is not limited to the secu-
lar community. Whether it is the scandalous
treatment of sexual
offenses by the
Catholic Church, or
the high rates of porn
consumption by con-
servative American
Christians, or the cor-
relation between
increased religiosity
and higher teen birth
rates, we can see that
people do not need to
become atheists in
order to engage in the
behavior that Spiegel
finds intolerable.
If one truly
believes that God
exists, Spiegel’s task
to explain non-belief
Paul Vitz
in such a being is an important one. Argu-
ments from divine hiddenness and other
reasons for non-belief have been predomi-
nant in philosophy, and a good answer to
these arguments would be an important step
in making a case for theism. It’s clear, how-
ever, that Spiegel is far off the mark. Resort-
ing to an over-easy explanation – those who
disagree with me are immoral – is rarely a
good tactic in rational disagreement. His
tired arguments have already been decisively
refuted, and if Spiegel had bothered to do
his research, he might have seen this.
Spiegel’s egregious thesis about non-belief
strikes out on nearly all counts, and only
serves to move the debate backwards.
At the end of a section entitled ‘Where
Atheists are Correct’, Spiegel writes that
Christians should be epistemically humble:
they should admit that the supernatural is
mysterious, especially with regard to the
Trinity and other doctrinal positions.
When Christians err, either through
hypocrisy, malpractice by the church, or
overconfidence in theological matters,
“Christians should be grateful for atheists’
perceptiveness in pointing them out; we
should be willing to repent of these
errors.” This advice seems relevant to the
content of his own book, and we should
hope that he takes it.
© MATT DESTEFANO 2016
Matt is a PhD student in philosophy at the Uni-
versity of Arizona. His main interests are in
philosophy of mind and cognitive science. He also
has substantial interests in philosophy of religion.
• The Making of An Atheist: How Immorality
Leads to Unbelief by Jason Spiegel, Moody Publishers,
2010, $12.99, ISBN: 978-0-8024-7611-1
Book Reviews

Berkeley’s Puzzle most direct way, is the table itself.
by John Campbell & This idea faces an immediate obvious
Quassim Cassam problem. Hallucinations present us with
cases where I can have an apparent visual
IT SEEMS PLAUSIBLE TO experience of, say, a table, even when there
say that we have some is no table present – when, for example the
knowledge of some of the objects in the experience has been caused by some brain
world around us. I know now, for example, malfunction. So, how can experience be a
that I am sitting at a table, that the table is relation in the way Campbell supposes –
roughly rectangular, and that it is a shade that is, how can experience of a table guar-
of brown. It also seems plausible to say that antee the presence of the real, mind-inde-
we have knowledge of this kind because of pendent object?
the sensory experiences we have. These Campbell’s response to this objection is
claims seem reassuringly, perhaps even rather curious: he denies that there are any
boringly, secure. hallucinations in the sense intended by the
These seeming truisms form the basis of objection. He says that if you subtract the
a debate between John Campbell, profes- presence of the table from the visual expe-
sor of philosophy at Berkeley, who defends rience you have when you look at the table,
a so-called ‘relational’ view of sensory you are left with… nothing at all!
experience, and Quassim Cassam, profes- This claim seems so obviously mistaken
sor of philosophy at Warwick, who that it is natural to wonder if he really
defends a so-called ‘representational’ view. means it. But it seems he does: speaking of
The difference between these views con- hallucinating an airport, he says “Subtract
sists in how the concept of sensory experi- the airport [from your visual experience],
ence is to be understood, in particular con- and there is nothing left to inspect” (p.92).
cerning the way in which it underpins the Although Cassam does not himself
knowledge we have of the world around us. advance this objection to Campbell’s rela-
According to Campbell’s view, as the tionist account of sense experience, he nev-
label suggests, sense experiences are rela- ertheless maintains that Campbell’s position
tions between perceivers and external objects. is mistaken, and that we should instead hold
To say for example that I have a visual a representationalist view. In general terms,
experience of the table, is to say that there this is the claim that “sensory experience has
exist two things – myself and the table – representational content” (p.105 footnote).
and there is a relation between us. What I Thus we perceive chairs and tables by
am aware of, says Campbell, is not some having representational experiences whose
item intermediate between myself and the content is chair or table. For Cassam it is not
table such as a visual image or visual sensa- simply that the objects of our awareness are
tion, from which I (usually automatically, mental images of chairs and tables, such that
that is, nonconsciously) infer the presence those images represent the things. Rather,
of the table. Rather, what I aware of, in the to see a real table is, in part, to have an expe-
rience with a table
Do we perceive things content.
as they really are?
Woven into this
debate about the rela-
tion between our
minds, our sense
experiences, and the
external world, both
authors are concerned
with the further ques-
tion ‘How does our
sensory experience
ground our conception
of objects that exist
independently of our
perceiving them?’
This question is
answered, says Camp-
bell, by accepting that
to have the concept of
Book Reviews
Books
a physical object is to know what its identity
conditions are, and in particular, how its
identity at one time is causally dependent on
its identity at an earlier time.
Aside from the detailed reservations one
can have about the individual theses
defended by Campbell and Cassam, there
are two further problems with what they
both say. Firstly, their main question is
how sensory experience gives rise to reli-
able knowledge of a mind-independent
world. But at best they show only how to
cross the gap between ‘John has a sensory
experience of something table-like’ and
‘John sees a table’. This is inadequate as an
explanation of perception-based knowledge,
because John can well see something red
without gaining any knowledge at all: he
may for example still wrongly think that
what he sees is blue or yellow. He may
even believe that he’s hallucinating, and
therefore not believe that he’s seeing any-
thing mind-independent at all. What still
needs explaining is how to get from ‘John
sees something red’ to ‘John knows that
there is something red and mind-indepen-
dent in his line of sight’. Without that link,
we will still have no complete account of
how our knowledge of the world around us
arises from our sensory experience.
The second problem concerns the fact
that neither of the authors lays out what
they take knowledge to be. There are cur-
rently half a dozen or more well-defended
accounts of what knowledge is. Without
some specification of which notion of
knowledge is being presupposed, it is not
clear exactly what question is being asked
by someone who asks ‘How do our sense
experiences give rise to knowledge of the
world round us?’
In spite of a seductively beautiful cover,
this not a text for the lay reader, even one
prepared to make a serious effort. Too
much of the debate is left implicit, too
many technical terms introduced without
adequate explanation, and the style is heavy
going throughout. So it is hard to believe
that this book would add much to such a
reader’s grasp of sense perception, or of
their knowledge of the external world.
© NICK EVERITT 2016
Nick Everitt, now retired, was Senior Lecturer
in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia.
He is the author of The Non-Existence of
God (Routledge).
• Berkeley’s Puzzle by John Campbell and Quassim
Cassam, OUP, 2014, 224 pages, £19.99, ISBN:
0198716257
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 47

Films ow do you reboot a classic sci fi fran-
H chise under new corporate and direc-
torial control while pleasing loyal
legions of international fans? You give it to
J.J. Abrams, apparently – as his recent big-
budget Star Trek and Star Wars films both
demonstrate. The six original episodes of the
Star Wars franchise are ripe for philosophical,
psychological, and religious analysis. But
what Abrams brings to the newest install-
ment, Episode VII: The Force Awakens
(2015), also demands a meta-philosophical
approach.
Seeing Double
The internal mythology of Star Wars rests
on a kind of dualism, with the dark and light
sides of the Force, but Episode VII also deals
with a lot of doubles. Critics have pointed
out how in The Force Awakens Rey doubles
for Luke Skywalker, Finn – as both comic
relief and a source of moral ambiguity – dou-
bles for Han Solo, and once again we have a
wise, short, and comically odd character in
the form of Maz Kanata (cf Yoda). The idea
of doubles is a recurrent trope of fiction,
which has taken basic problems of reality
and appearance from the very start of phi-
losophy. Think for instance of Plato and Aris-
totle’s use of the idea of mimesis – artistic
creation understood as the re-presentation
of nature. The ‘doubles’ theme also appears
in the ‘double consciousness’ of W.E.B.
Dreyja vu:
two apparent
orphans
48 Philosophy Now l August/September 2016
STAR WARS:
The Force Awakens
Jason Eberl and Kevin Decker
awaken the philosophy of the Force.
DuBois, the ‘Other’ in existentialist literature
and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and in many
other philosophies. As Bryan Seitz of Babson
College puts it in his article ‘Philosophy and
the Double’, “Philosophy finds power and
security in the double but from it simultane-
ously inherits countless forms of depen-
dence and instability.” The same inheritance
of dependence and instability is true of Star
Wars. In The Force Awakens, a new masked
villain, Kylo Ren, addresses the burnt-out hel-
met of his grandfather Darth Vader, promising
to “finish what you started”; but later, the
film’s heroine Rey discovers that Kylo Ren is
afraid that he’ll never be as strong as Vader.
The Force Awakens as a whole is itself a
double of the original Star Wars film (now
known as Episode IV: A New Hope), with
some key elements of Episode V: The
Empire Strikes Back thrown in. Some com-
plain that Abrams simply retells the original
story, with the First Order as ‘Empire 2.0’,
and the Starkiller weapon as a bigger Death
Star, among other direct parallels. This fact
has troubled many fans who left the theater
exhilarated as John Williams’ latest score
thundered away, only to reach home feeling
cheated by the lack of originality in the plot.
It’s lmost as if, in order to help the audience
overlook the much-derided prequel trilogy
(Episodes I-III), Abrams wanted to reassure
everyone that “This is your father’s Star
Wars.”
Running Circles
In his book Truth and Method (1960),
Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote, “The circle of
whole and part is not dissolved in perfect
understanding, but, on the contrary, is most
fully realized.” Correspondingly, each of the
Star Wars films needs to be interpreted in
terms of the whole story cycle. Our under-
standing and appreciation of these films is
dependent upon what has come before and
what we know is coming or anticipate com-
ing later in the saga. (Episode VII does the lat-
ter brilliantly in withholding the person of
Luke Skywalker for so long.)
In the original film, Darth Vader taunted
Obi-Wan Kenobi with the words, “The circle
is now complete.” To complete the narrative
circle, the heavy emphasis on the doubling of
characters, situations, and plot in The Force
Awakens will have to be redeemed by
Episode VIII, in which our investment in the
new characters must be rewarded by taking
real risks in a darker, more psychologically-
driven plot, as The Empire Strikes Back did in
1980.
Alternatively, it might be said that, on the
contrary, Star Wars seems to be trapped
within its own narrative structures, endlessly
replicating doubles of its original characters
and setting them against each other in new
concatenations. Perhaps this is done inten-
tionally by the filmmakers, bringing us back
to the mythological origins of the film saga
by invoking the concept of ‘eternal recur-
rence’ or the ‘karmic cycle’.
Loss & Recovery
If the prequel trilogy was guilty of deca-
dence (both in terms of the moral decay of
the Republic and the films’ own over-
wrought production values), then the
newest film must be characterized in terms
of loss and recovery. In its final act, classic
heroes Han Solo and Chewbacca join with
ex-stormtrooper Finn to infiltrate and dis-
able the shields surrounding the evil First
Order’s planet-sized Starkiller weapon,
which is capable of obliterating entire plane-
tary systems light-years away. Upon discov-
ering that Finn’s job was in sanitation, Han
complains that the entire galaxy is counting
on them to lower the shields so Resistance

forces can fly in and destroy it. Finn
responds, “We’ll figure it out, we’ll use the
Force!” Han retorts, “That’s not how the
Force works!”
Finn’s misunderstanding stems from his
having grown up in a society in which the
Jedi Order and the Force have been rele-
gated to mythological status. Finn’s world is
what Charles Taylor, in his A Secular Age
(2007), would call ‘disenchanted’. In a disen-
chanted world, belief in anything beyond
what is evident to the senses or that can be
rationally inferred from them has been
largely abandoned. Han Solo himself, nearly
forty years before, professed his preference
for more pragmatic solutions to life’s battles
to aspiring Jedi Luke Skywalker, saying:
“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are
no match for a good blaster at your side,
kid… I’ve never seen anything to make me
believe there’s one all-powerful Force con-
trolling everything… It’s all a lot of simple
tricks and nonsense.” Clearly, everything he
has since seen of the Force has satisfied
Here comes trouble
at the double
even Han Solo’s demanding epistemic stan-
dards.
Re-Enchanting The Galaxy
Abrams and Co. have eschewed the
sappy romance, details of galactic eco-
nomics, and over-reliance on computer-gen-
erated characters and settings that led to
fan derision of the prequel trilogy. Also
apparently abandoned from the prequels is
the seeming reduction of the Force from a
mystical energy field to ‘midi-chlorians’ –
tiny life-forms. Instead, the Force has been
returned to its rightful place as something
both mysterious and ubiquitous. In the
recent film, even non-Jedis, such as the
ancient and wise barkeep Maz Kanata, are
able to sense the omnipresent Force. Kylo
Ren also uses the Force in new ways: not
just planting mild telepathic suggestions in
the weak-minded, but pillaging his victims’
minds for information.
Combining both views of the Force, one
could describe a similar relationship
August/September 2016 l Philosophy Now 49
Films
between the Force and the physical world
that certain philosophers of mind (such as
David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind,
1996) allege to exist between immaterial
mental properties – beliefs, desires, propo-
sitional knowledge etc – and neural corre-
lates in the brain. That is to say, just
because there’s a physical correlate of
one’s ability to access the Force doesn’t
mean that the Force itself doesn’t remain
something immaterial, transcendental. (A
physical correlate is arguably necessary to
explain how sensitivity to the Force tends to
run in families.)
Is the Star Wars galaxy better off for hav-
ing been re-enchanted in The Force Awak-
ens? One valuable by-product of belief in
the Force as a mystical power is that it
allows for clear distinctions to be drawn
between good and evil. So even though Kylo
Ren feels an internal struggle between the
light and darkness within himself, he seems
to have a clear idea of the difference of the
two sides of the Force. The sacrifice he
A galaxy of adventure
reawakens
ALL FORCE AWAKENS IMAGES © WALT DISNEY STUDIOS 2015
LUKE SKYWALKER IMAGE © 20TH CENTURY FOX 1977
 Looks familiar:
Not the first vision of universal order
must make to cement his alliance with the
dark side, while difficult to go through with,
is nevertheless very evident to him.
Heroes & Villains
If a movie writer cares to follow Aristo-
tle’s advice in his Nicomachean Ethics, that
cultivating moral virtue from youth is all-
important, then a perennial issue for a cine-
matic saga that aims for universal appeal
not only across cultures but also across
generations is that a good morality tale
must be graspable even by young minds. In
this, Star Wars is arguably no different from
The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of
Narnia, or the Harry Potter series. The
trade-off for moral simplicity, however, is
that there is correspondingly less represen-
tation of the complexities of human moral
psychology. The story of the fall and
redemption of Anakin Skywalker (Darth
Vader), as told in the previous six films,
does show a degree of complexity, as
Anakin seeks to balance his love for his wife
and unborn children with his duties as a Jedi
Knight. As Augustine would put it in On Free
Choice of the Will, Anakin ultimately falls
because of his “inordinate desire for tempo-
ral goods” or, as the Buddha (and Yoda)
would contend, his inability to detach him-
self from what is perishable and transitory.
Complexity is lacking, though, in the
repeated refrain of there being a single
moment of turning from the light side to the
dark, or vice versa: Anakin becomes Vader
the moment he attacks Mace Windu in
Revenge of the Sith. Then he’s unrepen-
tantly evil for over two decades until the
moment he kills the Emperor and is
redeemed. Similarly, Kylo Ren struggles with
his turn to the dark side until the moment
he makes a dire decision which many fans
think now makes him irredeemable.
50 Philosophy Now l August/September 2016
Order & Disorder
The political atmosphere depicted in The
Force Awakens thematically mirrors both the
galactic politics of the saga’s previous trilogies
and the moral motivations of their heroes and
villains. ‘The First Order’ is aptly named, since
General Hux decries its enemies, the politically
dominant New Republic, as “a regime that
acquiesces to disorder.” In the prequel trilogy,
Chancellor Palpatine fabricated a galactic civil
war to destabilize the Old Republic, allowing
him to transform a diverse and democratic
government into a tyrannical Empire through
his manipulation of senators desiring “a safe
and secure society.” While the senators’ moti-
vation in trading liberty for security is under-
standable (even if wrongheaded and short-
sighted), Hux’s disdain for the ‘disorder’ of the
New Republic appears unmotivated; there
seems to be no evident conflict or strife within
the new democratic regime other than what
the First Order itself introduces.
Perhaps it is worth reflecting here on
Abrams’ intentional use of Nazi imagery
when Hux addresses his troops before firing
the Starkiller weapon. The First Order is not
so much combatting the perceived inherent
disorder of democratic society, but rather
asserting its own ‘will to power’ – to cite
Nietzsche’s concept of the fundamental drive
of all living beings. Perhaps that same moti-
vation drove Anakin Skywalker towards his
destiny as Darth Vader as he strove to con-
trol his own fate and that of those he loves –
with the classically tragic outcome that he
ended up causing the very death he was
seeking the power to avoid.
Star Wars Reawakens
As the first in a new trilogy of Star Wars
films, The Force Awakens succeeds tremen-
dously in revitalizing the spirit of the original
films and functions as an effective foundation
for the next two episodes. The strength of
Abrams’ direction in extracting dramatic and
physical performances, especially from the
new leads, makes us genuinely invested in the
successes and failures of the next generation
of the Resistance in ways that the flat perfor-
mances of Lucas’s characters in Episodes I-III
simply could not. What it fails to accomplish,
however – on its own at least – is to move the
story forward in a novel direction that intro-
duces new and distinct philosophical ques-
tions or issues. As we considered, Star Wars
might now be trapped within its own narra-
tive. At the very least, Abrams and his collabo-
rators have once again channeled the persis-
tent appeal of the ‘hero’s journey’ as
described by mythologist Joseph Campbell in
his The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).
Whether it’s Anakin Skywalker, Luke Sky-
walker, or Rey (Skywalker?), we see a young
protagonist with a mysterious past living in a
desert place, guided by a wise elder, who is
led to discover his or her innate potential, and
eventually faces a moment of choice between
using their power for good or evil. Maybe this
oft-repeated cycle also captures the essence
of the human condition: a relatively immature
species, living in a hostile and unforgiving
world whose origin is not fully understood,
guided by the wisdom of our philosophical
elders as we endeavor to discover our inher-
ent collective potential, continually facing the
choice to employ our rationality and auton-
omy to better or to worsen the world. May the
Force be with us all – we’ll need it!
© PROFS JASON T. EBERL & KEVIN S. DECKER 2016
Jason T. Eberl is the Semler Endowed Chair
for Medical Ethics and Professor of Philoso-
phy at Marian University, Indianapolis. Kevin
S. Decker is Professor of Philosophy at East-
ern Washington University. They are the edi-
tors of The Ultimate Star Wars and Philoso-
phy (Wiley-Blackwell).
 Thinkers Against Xenophobia
How To Deal with Pride and Prejudice
Anja Steinbauer
W
ho are you, and who am I? As a reader of Philoso-
phy Now you have probably come across such
questions many times. We ask them in meta-
physics, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, as well as the
philosophy of psychology and related areas. However,
nowhere does the problem of the supposed identity of self and
other wreak havoc as it does in the area of human relation-
ships – moral, social and political.
When we think about who we are, we also think about who
we are not; we define ourselves off against an ‘other’. How do
we deal with the existence of the other?
G.W.F. Hegel thought that the encounter
between two self-conscious beings is best
described as a ‘life-and-death’ struggle.
Luckily, not all encounters with others are
like that. We can develop sincere bonds,
friendships that mean happiness rather
than a threat. However, as the existence of
racism, xenophobia, sexism and other
kinds of prejudice suggest, there is plenty
of potential for it to go wrong.
Why do we ever react to the existence
to other people with prejudice and rejec-
tion? Many explanations of the causes of
prejudice have been suggested. Philosoph-
ical, psychological and sociological theo-
ries abound: social inequality, peer pres-
sure, the desire to elevate one’s own status,
the ‘horns effect’, in-group bias, tribalism and many more.
Immanuel Kant thought that prejudice arises from a natural
preference for oneself and one’s interests over those of others.
However, although this kind of ‘logical egoism’ affects most of
us, it is the ability to relativise this selfishness and put it in
proper social perspective that allows us to overcome prejudice.
One of the worst forms of prejudice, and strangely also
perhaps the one that is easiest to understand is xenophobia: we
tend to fear what we don’t know, and we exaggerate what
we’re afraid of. There seem to be so many things that divide
us, and in a climate of social uncertainty and injustices it is
tempting to focus on these. We have seen the rise of this to a
worrying degree in all corners of the globe.
There are many reasons to be deeply worried about xeno-
phobia and other forms of social prejudice: reasons connected
with flawed moral thinking, reasons having to do with devas-
tating political and social consequences. In many ways, preju-
dice is the nemesis of the philosopher. It is one of the things to
which Philosophy Now tries to draw attention with its annual
Award For Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity: prej-
udice annuls truth.
Arthur Schopenhauer was one of those extraordinary
thinkers who early on recognized this dangerous power of
prejudice: “The discovery of truth is prevented more effec-
tively, not by the false appearance things present and which
mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning
powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.” What
makes prejudice so tricky to expose for what it is and fight
effectively is that often it is shared and thereby reinforced,
sometimes even a majority view and generally held to be true.
Mary Wollstonecraft observes that “when any prevailing preju-
dice is attacked, the wise will consider, and
leave the narrow-minded to rail with thought-
less vehemence at innovation.”
We must do more than that. We must calmly
and constructively, yet unrelentingly challenge
prejudice wherever we find it. I believe that
this is at the heart of what Hannah Arendt
wants to say when she says that human lives
can only find true fulfillment in the political
context.
When Nietzsche referred to the philosopher
as a dangerous explosive in the presence of
which nothing is safe – he was right. Philoso-
phy can unmask our own prejudices as well as
show up those of others. This is what we
intend to do over the next few months and
years, and should it be necessary to the end of
our lives. We want to explore the issues
concerning xenophobia, its roots, forms and rationality, the
nature of prejudice generally, racism, sexism and homophobia,
multiculturalism, globalisation, democracy in a globalised
world, and overcome prejudice by honest and constructive
dialogue.
Philosophy Now calls on all thinkers of the world, inside and
out of academia, to join us in taking a stand against xenopho-
bia. We believe that to fight prejudice in all its forms is a major
responsibility of all thinking individuals. In order to raise
awareness of these issues we will organise a number of events,
which we will advertise on our website (philosophynow.org)
and on Facebook. We also invite articles on all aspects of xeno-
phobia and general prejudice, as well as about relevant values
such as cosmopolitanism and solidarity.
Join us in our battle against xenophobia! Albert Einstein is
rumoured to have bemoaned the fact that “it is harder to crack
a prejudice than an atom.” The atom has been cracked; preju-
dice is next.
© DR ANJA STEINBAUER 2016
Anja Steinbauer teaches at the London School of Philosophy and is an
Editor for Philosophy Now.
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 51
Brief Lives
Xunzi (c.320-235 BCE)
Dale DeBakcsy thinks diligently about Xunzi’s psychological Confucianism.
O
ne of the intellectual
crutches you’re first
given as a Western
student of Chinese philoso-
phy is the idea of Confucius
as Socrates, Mencius as Plato,
and Xunzi as Aristotle. Thus
we remember Confucius
(551-479 BCE) as the foun-
dational moralist who speaks
only through his students;
Mencius (372-289 BCE) as
the eloquent inheritor of the
founder whose praise con-
tained a subtle push of his
master’s words in a new
How do we make a society that works? direction; and Xunzi (c.320-
235 BCE) as the logician who
put everything together. There’s broad truth in that. Like most
crutches, this gets you walking – but not incredibly well. For
there’s also a good deal in the comparison that blanches one of
the most interesting figures in world philosophy – for Xunzi
was a fearless thinker who trimmed philosophy of any clutter
that didn’t address the question, ‘How do we make a society
that works?’
A Long Life Briefly Related
For all of Xunzi’s importance in the Chinese tradition, we
know virtually nothing about him. The two earliest sources we
have are those of Sze-ma Ch’ien, written a hundred years after
Xunzi’s death, and Liu Hsian, about another fifty years after
that. These accounts begin with Xunzi entering the court of
the king of Ts’i around 270 BCE, at the age of fifty. The king
actively cultivated the development of philosophy by founding
a college at Ts’i-hsia and luring eminent philosophers there
through the granting of honorary ranks.
Of course, we all know what happens when you get a group
of eminent philosophers together. Envy and the mad scramble
for status bred the usual slander, and Xunzi, as the most
famous philosopher of the time, received the brunt of these
sotto voce machinations. The king ultimately dismissed him,
and he was left to wander China in search of a wise royal
master who would heed his anti-war, pro-Confucian counsel.
Now, speaking against war during the Warring States era of
Chinese history might seem like a hard sell; and it was. Xunzi
never found his wise, peace-loving ruler, and instead settled for
a lowly position as a district magistrate for Prince Ch’uin-
shen. He held that position until his eighty-third year, when
his prince was assassinated and the new ruler promptly
drummed Xunzi out of office, prompting him to retire from
public work. At 82, he probably deserved the rest.
This course of career was typical for a philosopher in ancient
China. During that era, philosophy went hand in hand with
52 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
administration – many of the major figures we know today led
dual lives as thinkers and as organizers of men, which is another
reason why pragmatism rules the day in their writings.
Xunzi’s Revolutionary Conservatism
Xunzi is deeply paradoxical in that, in the name of preserv-
ing tradition he made antiquity’s most thorough-going attacks
on traditional belief. He stood by Confucius to the letter, but
swept a million ancestral spirits out the back door. That is, he
couldn’t abide a single alteration in the terms and distinctions
that delineated the Confucian limits of each person’s social
duty and expectations, but he denied as a matter of basic fact
the efficacy of all prayer.
At first glance, this may not make sense: he fights with gusto
and spite for the preservation of a name, and shrugs his shoul-
ders at the loss of personal immortality. But if we expand our
perspective on his times, his startlingly destructive conser-
vatism starts making sense. He lived during the last years of the
Warring States era, when everything that the Chinese thought
they knew about society was ground to tatters under the wheels
of warfare. During that era of shifting power and armed diplo-
macy, Confucius’s concern with lavish funeral procedures and
linguistic accuracy seemed downright quaint, and a number of
philosophers rushed to say so. The founding sage was openly
mocked, and sophists not so different from those whom
Socrates sparred against (at about the same time in Athens),
rose to profit from the abuse of the crumbling Confucian
order. By playing wild games with words – confusing their
common meanings and referents – these Chinese sophists cre-
ated cracks in the justice system through which any manner of
charlatan might romp with ease, while the common people sat-
isfied themselves with prayers to the ancestors rather than con-
certed action to actually improve their lot.
Here is Xunzi analyzing the efficacy of spirit propitiation:
“If people pray for rain and get rain, why is that? I answer: There is no
reason for it. If people do not pray for rain, it will nevertheless rain. When
people save the sun or moon from being eaten, or when they pray for rain in
a drought, or when they decide an important affair only after divination –
this is not because they think in this way they will get what they seek, but
only to gloss over the matter. Hence the prince thinks it is glossing over the
matter, but the people think it supernatural. He who thinks it is glossing over
the matter is fortunate; he who thinks it is supernatural is unfortunate.”
(The Works of Hsuntze, Bk XVII, Concerning Heaven, trans H.H. Dubs, 1928.)
That’s the honesty of a man who has been an administrator
and is willing to at last reveal the cynics behind the curtain.
And he’s not nearly done:
“How can exalting Heaven and wishing for its gifts be as good as heaping
up wealth and using it advantageously? How can obeying Heaven and
praising it be as good as adapting oneself to the appointments of Heaven
and using them? How can hoping for the proper time and waiting for it be

as good as seizing the opportunity and acting? How can relying on things
increasing of themselves be as good as putting forth one’s energy and
developing things? How can thinking of things and comparing them be as
good as looking after things and not losing them? How can wishing that
things may come to pass be as good as taking what one has and bringing
things to pass? Therefore if a person neglects what men can do and seeks
for what Heaven does, he fails to understand the nature of things” (ibid).
That is about as unambiguous a statement of the impotence
of religiosity and the primacy of purely human action that you
will see this side of Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525), and it
could only have come from a culture where the lawmaker and
the philosophical theorist were one and the same.
A Shock To The System
Xunzi saw all the chaos and opportunism, the wasted yam-
mering towards an indifferent sky, and at once perceived the
root problem: that people were putting too much faith in the
unknowable, and not enough in the simple social principles
that had bound person to person in China since times of
legend. They needed to spend less time meditating and
hoping, and more time learning and acting. They needed a
profound philosophical shock that would upset intellectual
complacency and tell unpleasant truths that could seal the
breaches that had been made in the Confucian societal fabric.
He delivered that shock in a series of writings of such stark
realism and frankness that they have no equal in antiquity,
Western or Eastern. As opposed to Mencius, who had hypoth-
esized that humans are basically good, and improve upon that
basic nature through following Confucian principles, Xunzi
leveled with us. Human beings are innately evil. They are pro-
pelled by desires that bring them into conflicts that are decided
to the detriment of the weak. Mencius’s pretty talk about us
being basically good might make us feel nice; but it is contra-
dicted by our need for extensive laws and governance. We
make and strictly enforce laws to protect us from ourselves – a
fact that makes no sense if we’re inherently good, but which
follows readily if our nature is basically evil.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that, evil though we
are by nature, we are boundlessly perfectible through culture.
Xunzi is astoundingly democratic in his notion of human
improvement. Anybody can become a great sage, no matter
what their origins, as long as they resolve to study, to avoid
questions that consume time with no profit (such as anything
hinting of metaphysics), and to seek and follow useful criticism.
His faith in the improving power of civilization and the self-
transformative power of intellectual cultivation is unshakeable.
Even living in desperate times, where everything he loved
about Chinese culture was being summarily trashed in the
name of territory, he held to the idea that correct speech would
become correct behavior, would become a beautiful society. But
he recast that restored vision of Confucian civilization in a
thoroughly secular form, replacing its occasional spiritualism
with an instinct for psychological truth. He defended the Con-
fucian funerary practices not in the name of propitiation of
ancestral spirits or reward from Heaven, but as a beautiful and
useful way of transitioning people through the pangs of grief.
Thus sacrificing to the spirits is not about receiving tangible
Brief Lives
gain, it’s about having a recognized vehicle for cathartically
purging anguish. The ceremonial aspect allows those who feel
too little to not be conspicuously offensive, and prevents those
who feel too much from collapsing. Ceremony provides the
middle ground that allows everybody to comfortably and reas-
suringly go through the waystations of life, and therefore it is
valuable in a way that tradition had refused to expound upon.
Explanations like these, which explore the human necessity and
subtle benefits of precisely those institutions the Warring State
sophists savagely mocked, kept Xunzi in the canon even as his
view of humanity’s evil but perfectible nature lost ground to
Mencius’s more cheerful assessment. He assembled and ana-
lyzed the crucial texts of China’s rich intellectual past, and
transmitted them in a form that the future could recognize as
something as beyond mere Tradition For Tradition’s Sake.
A Chinese Leviathan
Like Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Xunzi was the sort of
conservative whose traditionalism ended up being more radical
than the most liberal of his contemporaries. The parallels are
striking: both lived in an age of civil war, and took from it simi-
lar lessons about the need for civilization to protect oppression-
prone minorities – which lessons are remembered almost exclu-
sively, and unfairly, for their negative content. Both men also
rejected much of the religious thinking of their day in favor of a
psychology-based approach to human institutions and motivations.
But let’s not forget their conservative content: Hobbes ulti-
mately defended the unifying potential of monarchy, and Xunzi
was an acidic critic of anything that smacked of unorthodoxy
with regards to Confucianism. His sixth book is little more than
an extended rap against every philosopher of his age who had
the audacity to not interpret Confucius the way that he did.
However, unlike Hobbes, who was an avid, if often unfortunate
mathematician, Xunzi had no interest in furthering the sciences,
or any discernible curiosity in how things work. He considered
those questions to be as useless as metaphysical queries. Who
cares what heat is, we need to keep filial piety well-defined!
Xunzi’s ideal world is static, where terms stay comfortably
what they are because nothing changes, and where people seek
wisdom through study of an approved list of books, and enjoy
comfort through a reasonable and ordered relation to their
society mediated by universally understood ceremony. Nothing
evolves in this place, and, for a man who lived through the last
years of the Warring States era, that’s perfectly fine. Beneath
that inertia, however, there is a pulsing spirit that refuses to be
fooled, that cuts through sophistry and theology to insist that if
we are to improve our lot it’s down to us and our willingness to
act with mutual consideration for each other’s weaknesses.
Xunzi had an ecstatic appreciation of our ability to cultivate
ourselves through education. He exploded the big deceptions of
popular belief in order to illuminate the little truths of day-to-
day civility. That intellectual daring warrants something more
than the indifferent title of ‘the Eastern Aristotle’.
© DALE DEBAKCSY 2016
Dale DeBakcsy writes the ‘History of Humanism’ feature at The-
Humanist.com and is the co-writer of the twice-weekly history and
philosophy webcomic Frederick the Great: A Most Lamentable
Comedy.
August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 53
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August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 55

 T allis Time & Change
in
Wonderland
quick glance through back issues of
A Philosophy Now tells me that I have
managed to resist writing about time
for a full year. This seems a decent interval,
so I hope you will forgive me for returning
to a topic which has been my main philo-
sophical preoccupation for the decade I
have been writing Of Time and Lamentation:
Reflections on Transience, which is due out
next Spring. One of its many concerns has
been the puzzling relationship between
time and change.
It seems that change and time are insep-
arable: changes take time; are located and
ordered in time; and they are separated by
time. The inseparability of time and
change is a kind of logical truth. Time, it
has often been said, stops everything from
happening at once. If everything happened
at once, the material world would seem to
be in a permanent state of self-contradic-
tion. And agency would impossible: I
would be simultaneously setting out for
and returning from holiday. But there is a
flaw in this way of conceiving things,
flagged up by the phrase ‘at once’. This
phrase itself implies a time relationship –
simultaneity. Time, it seems, would not be
required to stop everything happening at
once (this is the kind of thing that passes
for a joke in metaphysical circles) if there
were no time in the first place.
There is, of course, a more serious point
behind this assertion. Time allows differ-
ence without contradiction. Think of pairs
of apparently incompatible propositions:
56 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
Take the time to allow Raymond Tallis to change your
view on time and change. Or leave it unchanged.
‘The ball is in position 1’ and ‘The ball is
in position 2’, or ‘The ball is green all
over’ and ‘The ball is red all over’. All four
propositions can be true if we add ‘at time
t1’ and ‘at time t2’ to the first and second
members of the pairs respectively. Time, it
appears, is permissive of change.
Permissiveness Problems
There are at least two problems with this
seemingly innocent truism. The first is that
it is difficult to see how we get from a gen-
eral permissiveness to the distinctive aspects
of time we have already alluded to: duration
(the quantity of time changes take); location
(when the changes occur); and temporal
relations between events (simultaneity and
precedence). The second is the danger of
translating permission into causation.
There are many problems with the idea of
time as a cause, or, more generally, of time
being characterised by something it does.
If time itself really were a cause, then
every event would have two causes: the
cause in the usual sense of ‘a prior event’,
such as lightning causing thunder; and a
second cause, time. This would be an exam-
ple of what philosophers call ‘causal over-
determination’. More worryingly, it is diffi-
cult to see how the two causes could work
together to assume joint responsibility for
the effect. How, anyway, would time oper-
ate at a particular point (in space and time)
to bring about a particular effect? And given
that time is homogenous and is present at
all times, it is even more difficult to see how
it could make a distinctive contribution to
the unfolding of events, helping to cause
this event rather than that. There is also an
important ambiguity in the notion of time
as a cause, identified by W.H. Newton-
Smith in The Structure of Time (1980). New-
ton-Smith distinguishes ‘date causation’
(with each moment in time putatively
bringing its distinctive causal contribution
to the unfolding of events) from ‘duration
causation’ (where the causal contribution of
time would be a reflection of the quantity of
time deployed). The idea of date causation,
however, merely reflects the fact that cer-
tain times are propitious for the occurrence
of certain events. This plausibly reduces to
the idea that certain circumstances that hap-
pen to be prevailing at one time rather than
another predispose to certain events. With
this interpretation, we can cut out the mid-
dle man – time – from the causal process. It
is not ‘12 noon on 5th June 2016’ that
causes the events that happen immediately
after 12 noon, but how things are, and what
is already ongoing, at 12 noon.
It is not time, but fibroblasts or the
spirit of forgiveness, that heal wounds.
And perhaps we need to row back from the
idea of time as generally ‘permissive’ of
change. Many things are not permitted
(even independent of the constraints of
logical contradiction). What’s more, a
global permissiveness would permit noth-
ing in particular: if everything were per-
mitted, nothing could happen. Worse still,
the idea that time itself prevents contradic-
tion imports the logic of propositions (‘not
(p and not-p)’) into the material world,
including those parts of it, such as the uni-
verse prior to sentient beings (which is
most of its history), that are innocent of
logic, discourse, and consciousness.
Is Changeless Time No Time At All?
So even though change clearly takes
time (as all changes occur at a finite rate),
time does not seem to make change. But is
the reverse true? Does change make time?
Should we agree with Aristotle in his
Physics that “time does not exist without
change,” such that time without change is
the equivalent of dehydrated water? Could
there be periods when time ‘passes’ and yet
nothing at all is happening in the entire
universe? Is it legitimate to admit the pos-
sibility of a temporal vacuum unoccupied
by changes, analogous to a spatial vacuum
unoccupied by objects or fields?
Some thought experiments – such as
that by Sydney Shoemaker in ‘Time with-
out Change’ (Journal of Philosophy, 1969) –
defend the conceivability of temporal
vacua by envisaging them as being
achieved by a stepwise ‘freezing’ or ‘emp-
tying’ of the world part by part. This is a
way of getting round the difficulty of the
necessary disappearance of the observer
(and consequently, observations) in a
wholly frozen universe. There has to be an
unfrozen outside to observe the temporally
frozen part of the world since (as is com-
monly believed) observations are the result
of causal interactions between the observer
and the observed. Shoemaker circumvents
this difficulty by imagining that the uni-
verse has three parts, A, B, and C, which
take it in turns to freeze. Crucially, their
freezing has different periodicity: A freezes
for a year once every three years, B once
every four years, and C once every five
years. There will be one year in sixty in
which all three regions are frozen at once,
and the entire universe is changeless.
While the wholly frozen universe cannot
be observed, its occurrence can be inferred.
Unfortunately, the thought experiment
does not work. The inhabitants of the uni-
verse are expected, as an inference from
their observation of the frozen parts A, B,
and C, to arrive at the conclusion that once
every sixty years there would be a total
freeze. But what basis would there be for
observation of the frozen state even of the
parts? How can anything which does not
emit any energy (because nothing is hap-
pening in it) be observed from without?
What’s more, if the entire universe became
frozen at Year 60, there would be no
grounds for thinking of the duration of the
freeze as a definite period of time, between
Year 59 and Year 61: there would seem to
be a direct movement from Year 59 to (so-
called) Year 61. At any rate, there would be
no measurable time periods in the vacuum,
because measurement requires, indeed is, a
set of events. ‘A year’ there would be
empty of meaning. There would be noth-
ing to distinguish a period of total freezing
in the entire universe that lasted an instant
from one that lasted forever. In addition,
as Ken Warmbrod has pointed out, there
would be nothing occurring to re-start a
frozen universe, so no freezing could be
confined to a year, or to any non-infinite
period of time (‘Temporal Vacua’, The
Philosophical Quarterly, 2004).
Relatively Insubstantial
Irrespective of whether Shoemaker’s
thought experiment is coherent, it is useful
for examining whether time can be con-
ceived as existing independently of the pos-
sibility of change. Is Richard Feynman’s
joke that “time is what happens when noth-
ing else does” based on a fallacy? Is time
something that happens? Is it, as Isaac
Newton claimed, something “of itself and
from its own nature” that “flows equably
and without regards to anything external”?
This is the so-called substantivalist view of
time. The opposite view, originally associ-
ated with Leibniz, and underpinning the
Special Theory of Relativity, is that time
boils down to the relations between events,
and hence cannot be separated from them.
Those who subscribe to a relational the-
ory of time get into trouble when they spec-
ify what kinds of relations they are talking
about. The relations are of course temporal
relations. But to reduce time to, for example,
simultaneity exhibited in successive moments,
is not to reduce it at all. So the issue of
whether time is separable from change –
from events – or whether it is in some sense
the product of events, remains unresolved.
Anyone looking to physics for assistance
is going to be disappointed. Einstein began
as a relationist, denying that space and
time were independent of events and
rejecting Newton’s idea of space and time
as an absolute background or ‘frame of ref-
erence’. In his fully developed General
Relativity, however, space and time have
morphed into the more substantial space-
time. Now, as twin aspects of curved
space-time, space and time are active play-
ers in the universe, having observable
effects on the motion of material objects in
the form of gravitational and inertial
forces. And things get even more messy
and confusing. As Lawrence Sklar has
argued, a consistent reduction of space-
time to relations between events threatens
to “move ordinary matter into the same
dispensable category as substantival space-
time…” (Philosophy and Space-Time Physics,
T allis
in
Wonderland
1985). Ordinary matter starts to look as
insubstantial, as unreal, as space-time.
The problems began as they so often
do, with the solution to another problem.
The idea of time and space as absolute
containers separate from the changes
occurring in them was offensive to empiri-
cal science because empty time and empty
space would be unobservable. Ernst Mach,
the philosopher-physicist who inspired
Einstein, argued that we could not directly
measure the quantity of time. “Quite the
contrary, time is an abstraction, at which
we arrive by means of the changes of
things.” Clocks do not directly measure
time: they are sources of events that are
compared with other events.
Still In Search of Lost Time
The relationship between time and
change remains elusive. Giving time prior-
ity over change, and imagining time con-
tinuing in the absence of events, have
unsatisfactory consequences. It is no less
unsatisfactory to see time as generated
from, or subsisting in, the relations
between events, if only because this leaves
us with the seeming impossibility of char-
acterising the nature of that relationship
without mentioning the word ‘time’.
Time, perhaps, to change the subject.
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2016
Raymond Tallis’s latest book The Mystery of
Being Human: God, Freedom and the
NHS will be published in September. His
website is raymondtallis.com.

August/September 2016 ● Philosophy Now 57

 Inadequate Options in Adequate Space
Kevin Robson’s existential hero finds that you can’t escape having to choose.
ames Emerson 5 sits at the controls of his
J one-man craft. It’s an unglamorous
cargo carrier, with just enough fuel
for this interstellar hop. His cargo, as
The view is
pretty but bleak
far as has been explained to him, is
17.55kg of archive: paper docu-
ments, bound for the nearest desti-
nation, the planet M223a.
The vessel is automatic, so
there’s little for James to do. His
duties are just to sign the cargo
on board and gain a signature for
its transfer at the other end. The
ship has no distraction or entertain-
ment: in keeping with the austere
rationing, it’s been streamlined for maxi-
mum fuel economy. One of the reasons
James himself has been able to gain employment
on board is his small, skinny frame. Were it not for the
signatures, they wouldn’t need him at all. The thought gives
him no comfort.
James morose and bored; the chair, a synthetic lightweight
raffia; the lights green for OK on screens showing distance and
fuel remaining, speed, and bearing. Green. Green. Green.
Orange. This is the first inkling that anything’s wrong.
James taps the errant screen. It remains orange. It’s the
screen monitoring the ship’s course. If the message is true, he’s
off course, with no means to correct it.
He taps it again. No change. Obviously a malfunction, he
reassures himself.
Then the speedo joins in with the bearing screen, both dis-
plays flashing orange. Tapping the glass helps not. And the cir-
cuit boards are cased and inaccessible.
Perhaps there is a problem.
Moments later the fuel screen also shows orange. The fuel
is running out early.
Only one conclusion: a stowaway. And there is only one
possible place that anyone can hide.
When James removes the panel, there she is, no more than
sixteen Earth years, and very frightened. Large eyes, curled on
her side in the foetal position. He motions her out and up, but
she’s paralysed with fear. “I won’t hurt you.” His own voice,
rarely used, rarely needed, sounds strange to his ears.
After a while she emerges. She’s taller than him, just. Per-
haps a little heavier. She stands, out of reach, by the airlock
hatch. James shifts round to face her.
“Do you know what you’ve done?”
She nods slowly. James waits for her to speak. A small voice:
“I’m sorry, I know this’ll get you into trouble. You can tell
them it’s my fault.”
“And that’s it, is it…?” James is angry, but his voice is still
level: “You thought this would be a telling off?”
58 Philosophy Now ● August/September 2016
“Yes, I’ve an aunt on M223c, she’ll pay my bond.”
“I’m afraid it’s more serious than that. We’re not
going to M223c. In fact, very soon we’re not
gonna be going anywhere.” He points at
the orange lights: “We’re off course,
we’re running out of fuel, we’re losing
speed, and we’re too far away from any-
where for anyone to help us.”
“I’m… sorry,” she ventures.
“You said that…” James replies. “Not
that it matters – why did you do this?
What were you hoping to gain?”
By way of answer, she rolls up her sleeve.
At first, James thinks that she’s showing
him a soiled and bloody undershirt; he then
realises with a start that the skin is missing
from a patch of her arm. “This is how my uncle
treats me,” she says. “Never my face, or anywhere it
might show.” All James can say is “Oh my dear God!”
“Everyone thinks he’s a saint for giving me a home when my
parents died. He knows what he’s doing to me. I wasn’t going
to hang around and find out how far he would take it. That’s
why I’ve done this.”
“I do understand,” responds James. He searches his brain
for the right words. The right words don’t come.
She speaks again, “I’m Sandra. What’s your name?” She says
it brightly, as if this is a tourist trip. No reply from James, so
she adds, “This isn’t much like I thought it would look. I
thought it would be huge and luxurious, like in the movies.
When do we eat? I’m starved!”
“Sandra, there’s no food here. There’s not much of anything.”
“So what do we do? How do you pass the time?”
“It passes.” James is starting to become irritable. “Sandra,
I’d like you to listen to me. Listen very carefully.”
“Okay.”
“This vessel is built for one, and there’s no way of correcting
what you’ve done just by being here. We can’t both survive
with the fuel we have.”
“But you can radio for help, yes?”
“No. There is no long-range comms equipment onboard. It
would add unnecessary mass to the ship.”
Sandra tries again “An escape pod? That’d be exciting.”
James shakes his head dolefully: “Not even a pressure suit.”
The situation suddenly becomes clear to Sandra: “You
mean…?”
“Yes.” James nods, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
He takes one last look at her face, then enters the airlock. As he
ejects himself into the inky blackness, his final thought is that
she just might, somehow or other, make it alone.
© KEVIN ROBSON 2016
Kevin Robson’s book of short stories and skits, Funder, Chunder,
Reign Asunder, is available as an ebook for 99p.
Advertise in
Philosophy Now
jay.sanders@philosophynow.org

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