A Perfect Ten

So, as as I recently noted, I’ve just gotten cable again. So I was home early and started watching some of the sitcoms that I used to watch as a kid, like “Full House”, “Who’s the Boss?” and “Growing Pains”. However, the episodes of “Growing Pains” that I watched happened to reference a sitcom that I definitely remember fondly “Just the Ten of Us”. Since that show isn’t running anywhere, I decided to search on the Internet to see if I could see any episodes of it. Most of them aren’t, but I did manage to find some of them and decided that, yes, I still really like that show.

The show was about an explicitly Catholic family — which was referenced a number of times during the show — that had eight children, and was headed by a high school football coach father and a stay-at-home mother. As stated, religion was referenced, but it was both mocked at times but also treated reasonably seriously; the mother and eldest daughter were both very religious, and this wasn’t generally presented as an odd or a bad thing (although the eldest daughter, in true sitcom fashion, took it to extremes). The cast was predominantly female, and that gave the show, in my opinion, its greatest strengths. Sure, it had a number of attractive female characters, as the four oldest children were female teenagers — whose actresses were all older than their ages in the show, in true sitcom fashion; the youngest of the four was actually played by one of the oldest actresses — which is what the show is probably best remembered for, especially once the show formed the band “The Lubbock Babes” where they sang old songs in attractive outfits. But that’s actually not the strength I mean. The strength it had is that by not having an overly mixed cast they could focus — in typical sitcom fashion — on building a range of “stereotypical” female characters, and then putting them together and letting that drive the storylines and interactions. So, a bit like the mix in “Sailor Moon” except the differences between the girls drove the comedy and the storylines, which didn’t happen as often in “Sailor Moon”.

The other thing is that despite them being stereotypical, they all were, in fact, teenage girls, and thus often a mass of contradictions as they tried to figure just how all of this stuff was supposed to work anyway. So, for example, Marie was the excessively religious, pious, and “good” sister … who still at times was interested in the more salacious details of what her less “repressed” sisters were up up, while at times being excessively judgemental about it. This being a sitcom, depending in the episode she was either more “trampy” or more judgemental and offended by that sort of thing, but her character is at its best when her interest is more against her better judgement than something that she accepts.

Ultimately, it was a very clever show, and it’s a shame that it effectively only got two full seasons.

So Happy Together?

So as we’ve already seen, Ophelia Benson is taking on the idea that we should take a rational and not an emotional approach towards our decisions, and particularly towards moral decisions. Unfortunately, most of the posts from her and from others don’t really seem to have a central thesis to them; they seem to be based on a strawman view of logic that says “No emotions at all” and so essentially say “Well, we don’t want to get rid of emotions completely” for various reasons like “We can’t”, “We need them”, or “Pure reason will make you a monster”.

Benson is semi-summarizing her thoughts on the issue in an article on “The Freethinker” entitled “Working Together”, which presumably puts forward the thesis that emotion and reason need to, well, work together. Unfortunately, like most of the posts on this subject just how they’re supposed to work together and what role each is to take isn’t well-defined and certainly isn’t well-argued. As I pointed out in my posts, there aren’t too many “Vulcanites” — ie people who insist on dispassionate reason — that would deny that emotional states can be relevant to an argument. However, they’d insist that when and if emotional states are relevant to an argument is again something that’s to be rationally determined. So, no, just because people feel things doesn’t mean that their feelings are relevant, but for certain arguments their feelings may indeed be relevant as facts about the world that have to be considered, in much the same way as the acceleration due to gravity needs to be considered. It’s not relevant to a discussion about what I want to eat for dinner tonight what the acceleration due to gravity is (for almost all people), but it would be relevant to my deciding if I can jump across that rooftop to escape an oncoming fire, or if I should wait here for rescue.

So when Vulcanites oppose emotion, it isn’t opposing emotions as states in the world. Instead, it’s opposing emotions as a combination of two things: a) a judgement about the world and about what the appropriate action to take in response to that is and b) a motivation to make and commit to that judgement and that action. If emotions are going to both judge the world and urge us to take immediate actions on the basis of that judgement, well, they’d better be right … which means that they’d better be in accordance with what a fully rational and unbiased assessment with all the available facts would judge to be the case and to be the appropriate action is. And the fact is that most of the time — especially for very strong emotions — they aren’t. When they’re right, they’re only right because a rational assessment would have come to the same conclusion, and when they’re wrong we know that because a rational assessment based on what we knew at the time says that it was indeed wrong. Add in that we’ll likely have acted without thinking if we rely on them and that emotional commitments can last longer than the first initial feeling of it and there’s lots of good reasons to distrust emotion and work to minimize its role in our decision-making.

So one counter to this is the idea that you can’t have any kind of reasonable reason without emotion, which Benson brings up early in her article:

For one thing, at the most basic level, it’s now understood that damage to parts of the brain responsible for emotion doesn’t result in a hyper-rational person but a dithering useless mess. Cognitive science is demonstrating that emotion is not the antithesis of rationality but a necessary part of it.

Now, I’m not totally up-to-date on the very latest work on emotion and reason — I’ve been out of coursework for a year or two due to work and life pressures — but as someone who is Stoic-leaning I’ve certainly paid attention to a lot of it, and it hasn’t actually managed to do that yet. The most common one that I’ve come across is the work of Antonio Damasio and his work with people who have the right sort of damage, but his examples aren’t convincing. One of the major ones is a card game that he set up with those who had this damage and those who didn’t. Essentially, there are a number of decks that give out various positive and negative values of money, and the goal is to have the most money when the game ends. One deck in particular has very large rewards, but also very large and frequent penalties. Pretty much everyone, at the start, sampled all the decks and learned what they had. The people with undamaged emotional centres tended to avoid the high-risk deck, while those that had the damage tended to go back to the high-risk deck frequently. This led to the people with the damage having a bad time of it in the game, often having to borrow money to even stay in it, while those who didn’t have the damage fared much better. On top of all of this, Damasio measured a skin capacitance reaction when considering the high-risk deck among those without the damage that was missing in those with the damage, which indicates an emotional reaction, and likely an aversive one that steered those without the damage away from the irrational and unsuccessful high-risk deck, while those without it acted on their own and continued to go to it.

The other example is simpler, and is likely what Benson is thinking of when she mentions “dithering useless mess” above. Damasio asked his patient which of two days would work better for him. He spent a lot of time thinking and reasoning about it, and Damasio, curious, let him work it out. He spent a long, long time dithering between the two options, until Damasio finally interrupted him and decided for him … at which point the patient seemed to be completely satisfied and went on with his life.

So why aren’t these good examples of how we need rationality? Well, for one thing, in the card game example it isn’t clear that those with the damage were actually acting irrationally. The game was not set-up as a game where you are given a certain amount of time or turns in order to maximize your winnings, but instead was set-up as a game that could end at any time. Sure, over the long term choosing the lower risk decks will obviously leave you further ahead, but if the game is going to end right this very minute and you need to be as high as possible — and not just “positive” — then you really ought to take the high risk deck and hope it works out. Think of it like pulling the goalie at the end of a hockey game when you’re down by a goal: you greatly increase the risk that you’ll be scored on, but you’re going to lose if you don’t, so you might as well. Now put yourself in the situation where the referee is going to end the game totally at random and, well, you can see that being rational might indeed make you do that as soon as someone scores a goal on you. The rational move is not one that always works out, but is the best one based on the situation you find yourself in.

Another thing is that these were people who were not trained to act rationally, and instead learned to act based on the mix of reason and emotion that our society is based on. There are things that reason has a harder time doing than emotion does, and we all have our built-in emotional ways to get around that. In the appointment example, reason is indeed going to have a hard time deciding between two choices that seem equal overall, but have different benefits and detriments. Think of the story of the donkey an equal distance from two bales of hay, except that one is hay and one is oats; the hay is more filling, but the oats taste better. How does reason decide that when both are equally desirable? Well, reason should ultimately decide that either choice works out equally well, and you should just pick one. And reason can do this, by, say, having the person note the time spent and deciding if that much time spent is efficient, and if not simply picking one at random. However, most of us don’t need to do this, because what we have is an emotional state — likely embarrassment at taking up so much of someone’s time — that kicks in and makes us pick one. Which works out really, really badly if the decision might actually matter, since we’d have to overcome the emotion to keep thinking about it, even inconveniencing the other person. So the only reason those people are a mess there is because we didn’t teach them how to replace their emotional coping mechanism with a rational one, and the emotional coping mechanism might actually well, screw things up. So, no, that’s not reason to think that we really need emotion after all, as the emotional component might actually be acting irrationally, and we ought to be able to replace what the emotion gives us with reason if we try hard enough.

Benson goes on:

But more than that, for the purposes of thinking about human-related subjects – moral, political, social – it’s not rational to exclude emotion from the discussion, because humans are emotional. If you try to talk about human affairs in the terms suitable for talking about machines or blueprints or chemistry, you will get a train wreck.
I don’t mean that people arguing or writing articles about moral or social issues should be in a heightened emotional state themselves; I mean they should not pretend the subject is a matter of pure logic or number-crunching or engineering.

I … I really don’t know what she means here. Does she just mean the “emotional states are useful facts” point I made above? If so, then I agree, but then we might not have a train wreck, and might actually be right. If she’s taking this further, as it seems, and arguing that the conclusions are going to be something other than that produced by logic or number-crunching … well, then, there’s a problem here. Even the moral system that’s mostly likely to both be right and take emotional states into consideration — Utilitarianism — uses emotional states only to calculate a number of utility that you should use to determine what’s right. And more reason-based views like Stoicism and Kantianism wouldn’t go that far. About the only ones that wouldn’t are emotivist views like that of, say, Jesse Prinz … which also tend towards subjectivism about morality, which isn’t all that great either. So much more argumentation would be needed to take the stronger view, and the weaker view is one that even Vulcanites can hold because Vulcanites can indeed be Utilitarians: the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few, or the one.

Above all, what we should not do is claim that our argument is Pure Reason while that of our opponent is nothing but emotion. It won’t work, for a start, and it’s not likely to be true, and it’s toe-curlingly arrogant. It helps to remember that we all have enormous built-in cognitive flaws, and that it’s never safe to assume we’ve managed to correct or avoid all of them at any given time.

Fair enough; take the log out of your own eye before removing the splinter from your neighbour’s and all that. Sure, we agree on that. That being said, of course, pointing out that an argument is emotional, with facts, evidence, and reasoning is still okay; we don’t want to leave people immune to charges that they’re making an appeal to emotion when they should be making an appeal to reason, right?

It’s here that Benson starts to make a claim about where feelings come in to morality:

Morality is rooted in feelings – we want some things and want to avoid other things.

Except that “wants” aren’t “feelings”; wants are desires, and desires can be rationally assessed. In fact, we all should strive to have rational desires, and not irrational ones. While we might not be able to criticize all of someone else’s desires, it’s certainly true that we can indeed call some people’s desires “irrational”, if for no other reason than that they’re inconsistent: you want world peace and the ability to conquer other countries through war, for example. When we can’t criticize other people’s desires, it’s not because we can’t apply reason to them, but is instead because they are subjective; there are desires I have just because I have them, and they don’t lead to contradiction, and so they’re mine and mine alone. For example, that I might want to watch wrestling and not want to watch a documentary on the Etruscans doesn’t make my desire irrational or something that you can criticize because you want the opposite. As long as I have certain desires, and those desires don’t contradict more basic desires, then you can’t say that it’s wrong of me to want something that you don’t want. In fact, one of the problems with Mill’s repair work on Utilitarianism is that by introducing the concept of a quality of pleasure he starts ranking desires … even those that are, indeed, just subjective.

So where does morality come in here? Well, to me, one of the basic desires that all moral agents have is the desire to act morally, and what makes moral agents moral agents is the ability to put that desire ahead of all others. This is why I’d argue that animals can’t be moral, no matter how moral they act, because they have never demonstrated the ability to take an action because it is the moral one as opposed to being the action that they want to take that happens to be moral by our assessment of morality. So, no, morality is not rooted in feelings, as the only relevant desire is the desire to act morally, a desire that trumps all other considerations.

The goal can’t be to strip emotion out of our thinking on these subjects, but only to channel it in the right ways. That requires both reason and feeling – and as Hume pointed out, feeling has priority.

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them – The Treatise of Human Nature 2.3.3.4

So, here we get to something that looks like a position on how reason and emotion should interact, with reason the slave of passion or emotion or, tying back to the previous quote, desire. Except that I’d argue that the opposite is true, and that all of these things not only should, but must be the slave of reason. Channeling emotion and desire in the right ways just means making our emotion and desire, above all, rational. Not necessarily objective, but at the very least rational. When I get angry, it had better only be when it is rational to be angry. When I feel depressed, it had better only be when it is rational to be depressed. When I am happy, it had better only be when it is rational to be happy. When I fall in love, it will be forever had better be when it is rational to be in love. When I act on any of these emotions, it had better be because the action is rational, and not just because the emotion says so. And all of my desires had better be rational, and all of my actions taken on the basis of my desires had better be the rational ones given all of my beliefs about the world and all of the desires I hold. And I had better always put the desire to be moral ahead of every other desire I hold. To do anything else is to give up the goal of taking the actions that are right and are based on the way the world really is, and to give up being a moral person … and I’m sure that Benson wants to take right actions based on the way the world really is and to be a moral person.

Sure, what I just said is hard. Very hard. No one, in fact, actually has managed to do that in recorded history as far as we know. But it is what we should strive for, and Benson’s view of emotion and reason working together seems to be striving to achieve the opposite … and I cannot see what good that can possibly do.

Cable (Without Deadpool) …

So, almost five years ago I ditched cable TV, right before the 2010 Winter Olympics. It wasn’t really that I couldn’t afford it, but was that I didn’t feel I was getting enough value out of it for the money I was paying, especially since at the time I was definitely watching DVDs more than the cable, and there seemed to be nothing on when I actually wanted to watch TV anyway (evenings and weekend afternoons, mostly) meaning that I ended up watching DVDs even more instead of cable. That’s not a good thing.

But there were two main advantages that cable had over DVDs. The first was that you can’t really get any interesting sporting events on DVD. The second was that it was much better for the times when I didn’t really want to watch TV or pay a lot of attention to it, but wanted something for noise or to pay attention to when things were slow. So, when I was eating. Or washing dishes/cleaning the house. Or playing a game. Or, ironically, when I was waiting for someone to, say, come and hook up my cable … as I was reminded yesterday.

Because, yes, I re-upped to cable TV. It’s costing me more than it cost me five years ago when I ditched it, and I don’t have everything I had then. But there do seem to be things there that I’d watch, and I did miss sports and missed being able to watch a TV show without it stuttering on me. So we’ll have to see if or how long this works.

Higher Taxes Aren’t Good In and Of Themselves …

So, Ophelia Benson at Butterflies and Wheels liked part of an interview with a Swedish actor:

Mr. Skarsgård, where do you live?

I live in Sweden because the taxes are higher, nobody is starving, good health care, free schools and universities. It’s a civilized country and I like that.

You prefer paying higher taxes?

Of course. If you make a lot of money like I do you should pay higher taxes. Everybody should have the possibility to go to school, and university, and have good healthcare.

She comments on it this way:

Goodness. How reasonable, and how rare.

Well, it’s a good thing that it’s rare, because it isn’t that reasonable. The reason is that the reason for his living there isn’t, in fact, because he pays higher taxes in Sweden … or, if it is, then he’s actually being quite unreasonable. Either way, something’s missing here.

Now, I’m sure some will comment that I only say this because I’m caught up in some kind of uber-capitalist notions about what society should do and that taxes are evil, and if I only could see the light that the people in these nations have already seen this wouldn’t seem so odd or unreasonable to me. I’ll counter that with this little thought experiment:

Imagine that you have two countries. Both countries have exactly the same quality of social programs: they have excellent schools, no one is starving, they have free health care, and so on and so forth. However, country A has lower taxes than country B. Which country would you rather live in?

If you say country B, then, well, I’d like to see a good argument for why, because rationally country A is the better place to live. You get all of the social program goodies of country B, and get to keep more of your own income to pursue your own interests. How could it not be better?

The reason why someone could think that Skarsgård’s comment on preferring Sweden because he pays higher taxes isn’t just an utterly irrational statement is because of the correlation between tax rates and social programs. In general, we all understand — or at least strongly believe — that in general if you pay higher taxes then you have more social programs, and if you pay lower taxes then you have less social programs. And this is generally the case, because if a government is getting the resources it needs to provide social programs from taxes, then the higher its taxes then the more social programs it can provide, and the lower its taxes then it will be able to provide less social programs. Thus, we expect a range between 100% taxation with the government providing everything for you, and 0% taxation but you not having anything that looks like a government at all.

While many people will easily see the latter case as being bad, the former isn’t good either. Lower taxes provides people with discretionary spending, in the sense that it’s money that they can use to get what they personally want or need. If the only way to get anything is to get it free from the government, then the only things you will be able to get are the things that the government provides. You’d better hope that you want what they want to provide, because if you have non-standard desires you may find yourself out of luck. On the other hand, if the government provides nothing then you can only get what you can afford to pay for yourself, no matter how badly you need it, or how badly everyone needs it. A capitalist system may provide, but your only guarantee will be what you can afford; if you can’t, then that’s likely tough luck. And the instant people get together to pool their resources to build what they need you start to get something that looks a lot like a government … and start introducing things that look a lot like taxes to fund it. Even user fees would quickly grow into general taxation since it would be difficult and expensive to track who’s using what for how much and how much worth.

So neither extreme is actually good, so what we really want is a mix of the two: taxes to fund social programs that pretty much everyone agrees they want and/or need, but taxes kept low enough that we have room for people to spend their own money on the things they need and, also, to not have too many cases where money is taken from them and spent on things that they’ll never want, never need or that they disapprove of. Taxes, in general, are used to provide the things that we really need provided to maintain the social contract, and a functioning society; people will always take it badly — and rightly so — if they are used to fund the personal ideals of politicians or the majority or even a minority of people.

A lot of complaints about taxes and tax increases, in my opinion, comes from a cynicism or distrust that the government needs the money to provide necessary services, and is instead using that money to promote themselves or specific causes that they favour (and many taxpayers don’t). A lot of the complaints about foreign aid, for example, are complaints that the government is spending a lot of money in foreign countries while they aren’t providing sufficient social programs in their own country … you know, the one that contains the people that are paying taxes. And a lot of the complaints about funding special interest groups is the same: the ones that the government likes get money, but things that impact more people or are supported by more people don’t, and surely there are better things to do with that money than to promote a cause that, if it was worth anything at all, could be funded by people who support it instead of with general taxpayer dollars.

Ultimately, it is critical in a democratic society — or, probably, any society with taxpayers for that matter — that people feel that the money they pay in taxes is not wasted or spent on things that a government shouldn’t be providing. If the government didn’t need that money to provide the essential services that we need a government to provide, then it should return that money to the taxpayers to let them support causes they want to support and get things that they want to get. Because of this, it’s critical that taxpayers feel that they have a say in where their tax dollars go, to ensure that they aren’t giving money to a government that is using it to gain more power for themselves, enrich themselves, or support causes that they favour but won’t fund themselves. Hence, the importance of a democracy which does provide that feeling. But note that the higher taxes someone pays, the more they’re going to want to make sure that that money is used properly, because everyone feels that if the government isn’t going to use their money wisely they have uses for it that would certainly, at least, benefit them more than what the government is going to do with it.

Which, then, reveals a major problem with having the wealthy pay more taxes than everyone else. If they note that they fund the government’s activities to a disproportionate amount, they’ll want to have a say in how that funding is used — and therefore, in that government’s activities — to a degree that matches the funding they’d putting into it. This is a perfectly natural response, as in most things we think it fair that if someone is footing most of the bills they get a bigger say in what is getting bought, at least to avoid people racking up the bills because they don’t actually have to pay for it. But they can’t politically get more of a say in a democracy, and so then they’ll demand that they only pay as much as everyone else does. So the choices then are to lower their taxes, or let them have more influence in what programs get funded.

Now, one way around this is to argue that there are certain things that need to be funded, and that the government needs a certain amount of funding to do that, and that taking equal proportions from everyone would unduly burden people with lower incomes while would be less of a burden for those with higher incomes, and so we can have higher taxes on people with higher incomes. And this works perfectly well … as longer as the government is using that money to a) provide those essentials and b) only to provide those essentials. So, the deal works as long as those who have higher incomes believe that, and the government can prove that they are doing that. As soon as that is no longer the case … the deal breaks, and people with higher incomes can again rightly complain about being taken advantage of: the government justifies taking more of their earnings on the basis that it needs it to provide services that it isn’t providing while it provides services that it doesn’t need to provide. And we’re right back where we started.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, all groups, no matter what their income, need the proper and fair balance of taxation versus social programs. Where this line is drawn will depend on a society, of course, but in general the government has to offer the social programs the people need, not offer the programs that people don’t want or want to fund themselves, and then set tax rates specifically to fund the programs that the society agrees they need. Anything beyond that breaks the agreement of what taxes are for and shouldn’t be seen in a free and democratic society.

The List – Year 3 (A month late)

Last year at this time I calculated that I had finished 7 of about 51 games on my list of games to finish, for about a 14% finish rate. This year, I have 9 finished out of 53, which is about a 17% finish rate. Considering that I didn’t put a push on games to finish this year and have spent a lot of time replaying games that I liked — like the Personas — that’s actually pretty good. Although I may have to consider that there are a number of games on that list that I am just never, ever going to finish.

Ultimately, the reason for the increase is that I didn’t add a lot of games to the list this year, either by not buying new games or, at least, by deciding that they weren’t going to be games that I was going to strive to finish. We’ll see if that changes over the next year.

Why I Don’t Take Summer Vacation

Most people like to take their vacations in the summer, but I prefer taking vacation in the winter. The reason is essentially this: The weather in the summer gets in the way of what I want to do as much as or sometimes more than winter weather does, but not in a way where I wouldn’t want to go to work either.

I took a week’s vacation in August once a long time ago. It ended up being the hottest week of the summer. But I had plans to do things that would involve a long walk, and you can’t do that in really, really hot weather. So some of the things that I had been looking forward to I ended up not being able to do. But at the same time, none of that stopped me from going to work (and, in fact, since I didn’t have air conditioning at the time I considered doing just that).

In the winter, weather like snow or freezing rain or extreme cold will stop me from doing the same sorts of things. But when we get snow or freezing rain, I’m also very glad that I don’t have to go in to work that day; the reason winter weather stops me from doing things is because it makes me not want to leave the house at all. Summer weather that stops me from doing things only stops me from doing things, but I could always drive out to work because it doesn’t impact driving at all. Thus, even if the weather stops me from doing things in the winter, I always feel that at least I didn’t have to go to work in that weather. That’s not true in the summer. And that’s why I prefer to take vacation in the winter instead of the summer.