Peg Tittle's Blog, page 52

Assholes or Idiots (take your pick)

Every now and then I hear something really insightful on tv.  What recently caught my mind was an explanation of the behavior of one of the alphas on, of course, Alphas. Rosen says that Marcus can see twenty moves ahead and doesn’t understand why others can’t; so when what they do harms him, he believes it’s intentional.

Yes!  I too—and many, many others, it’s not an alpha trait—can think ahead. I can imagine the likely effect on others of my actions. And I work through the ethics of my behavior. So when what someone else does affects me, I can only assume that they don’t care about others (and so haven’t bothered to think ahead about the effects of their actions, or work through the ethics of their behavior) or they do, and have, and consider what they’ve done to be morally acceptable. Or I must assume that, unlike me, they cannot imagine the effects of their actions; they do not comprehend the ethics of their behavior. Which means, in short, either they’re inconsiderate, egoistic, irresponsible, lazy assholes or they’re idiots.

And so when I point out that what they’re doing does affect me, invariably they respond with aggressive defensiveness.  Because, of course, I’m implying they’re either assholes or idiots.

(Pity they don’t apologize for their thoughtlessness and ask me to help them work through the ethics of their behavior. After all, I’m an authority on applied ethics. Don’t people seek expert opinion on important matters?  Yes, but not from a woman.  Who’s either a bitch or just crazy.)

Rules of Combat

Why are there rules of combat?  Rules apply to civil interactions and games.  Combat is neither.

Rules give the impression of fairness, decency, civility.  They thus make war permissible.

But if war is really about defending your loved ones, wouldn’t you do whatever is necessary?  Wouldn’t you ‘fight dirty’ if that’s what it takes?

Rules of combat suggest, therefore, that war isn’t about defending your loved ones.  Or even your land, your water, your resources.  As Allan G. Johnson points out, in the best analysis of men and war I’ve ever read (The Gender Knot, p.138-142), “war allows men to reaffirm their masculine standing in relation to other men….  It is an opportunity for men to bond with other men—friend and foe alike—and reaffirm their common masculine warrior codes.  If war was simply about self-sacrifice in the face of monstrous enemies who threaten men’s loved ones, how do we make sense of the long tradition of respect between wartime enemies, the codes of ‘honor’ that bind them together even as they bomb and devastate civilian populations that consist primarily of women and children?”  Good question.  So (and this explains the response to women in the military) war is really all about men getting together and hating, hurting, killing women.

Same old same old.

The Waiting-for-the-Elevator Thing

So I’m sure this has happened at least once to every woman.  You’re standing in front of an elevator, waiting for it, and a man comes up and presses one of the buttons.

Oh is that what those are for?  I saw the two buttons, one with an upward-pointing arrow and one with a downward-pointing arrow, and I understand that elevators go up and down, but you know, I just never put the two together!!

I was just waiting for it to know that I was standing there.

I thought I might try to push one of the buttons, but then I thought, no, I’m just not strong enough.

So I was just standing there.

Or maybe I did push one of the buttons (you know, I just don’t know?), but the system doesn’t recognize buttons pushed by people with uteruses.  Which is why you had to push a button.  You’ve got a penis!

So good thing you happened to come by!  I could still be standing there!

In Praise of Dead Air

People are uncomfortable with silence.  On the radio, over the telephone, in person.  It’s a curious thing.

We are obsessed with filling up the air space.  That sounds very male – the need to occupy territory (take a look at how men sit, their legs crossed open and their arms resting on the backs of the adjacent chairs, compared to how women sit, legs crossed closed and their hands in their laps).  But women too consider dead air problematic.

Is it that we’re afraid to say ‘I’ll have to think about that’?  Because thinking about it is for philosophers, contemplatives, monks?  Ordinary people who think are so odd, they’re commented upon – ‘a penny for your thoughts’.  (And so poor at thinking, their thoughts are worth only a penny.)

Or is it that we’re afraid to say ‘I don’t know’.  Men especially seem unable to get those words out.  (I assume this is related to their inability to stop and ask for directions.)  Better a poor response than no response at all.  More often than not, better a lie.

So we don’t say these things.  We chatter instead.  We fill the air with small talk.  Is it that noise suggests activity?  If you’re a child, I guess you think so.  But even so, activity is not necessarily good.  (Am I back to the male thing?  They’re the ones obsessed with action: they start with action figures, then go on to action movies, and big team action sports, and finally it all gets sublimated into the task-oriented Type A personality – vp meets coronary.)  But it’s women too.  Rule #4 of ‘How to be a Good Date’ is all about the art of conversation, i.e. how to keep it going.  Dead air is embarrassing.  Dead air is rude.

I suggest not.  I suggest that the absence of dead air is what’s rude.  Nonstop patter allows no time to think; in fact, it discourages thought.  When you aim for a continuous conversation, you get a superficial conversation.  You can’t ask good questions if you’re is trying to get instant responses.  And if, by mistake, a good question is asked, you can’t take time to consider it if you’re afraid of dead air – so you don’t really consider it.  And isn’t that rude?  Not taking the other person’s comments and questions seriously?

Perhaps those who call it dead air are themselves dead – unable, or worse, unwilling, to think.  Dead air can be alive,  bustling with the work of understanding what was just said, and then of judging it – right? wrong? important? trivial?  Can I add to it? change it? use it?  Only those unaccustomed to mental activity would mistake silence for inactivity.

Crossing the Line

I crossed a picket line once.  The Ontario Federation of Secondary School Teachers (OSSTF) in the Toronto area was on strike in 1983, and one of their demands was that union members be hired to fill night school and summer school teaching positions.  They were concerned about quality of education: they didn’t want these courses to become second-class courses as a result of being taught by second-class teachers who were unqualified and inexperienced.

Well.  I was qualified.  More qualified than many of the older OSSTF members who got their teaching jobs when you didn’t even need a B.A., let alone a B.Ed.  And I was experienced.  In addition to about ten years of private music and dance teaching experience, I’d had a half-time regular day school position for one year and had taught a few night school courses the following year.

But more than that, I was enraged: what right does a person who already has a full-time teaching job and income (a wage that even at the lowest point is enough to support two people) have to an extra, a second, teaching job and income when there are so many without even a first?

Insofar as unions fight against abuses by management, I support them.  It’s the have-nots pulling together against the haves.  But more and more today, union members themselves are the haves – they have jobs.  And when they take action to protect (only) their own members, as is their mandate, well, it’s the same old us/them thing, isn’t it?  And it perpetuates, it doesn’t eradicate, class inequality.

If unions really want to honour their socialist history, they’d not be selfishly protecting their own but sharing.  In Canada, about one in ten is unemployed.  If those nine employed people gave up just four hours of their forty-hour work week, that tenth would be employed – and all ten would have a very adequate thirty-six hours a week income.

There’s something morally indecent about expecting the have-nots to support the haves, asking them to forego the little bit of income they could get as replacement workers (I prefer the term ‘bandages’ to ‘scabs’) in support of fringe benefits and pension plans for the regular workers.  Pretty soon, unions will be asking the people in Thailand and wherever not to accept the jobs at Mattel and GM.  And that’s crossing the line.

The Road to Hell

I’ve reconsidered intent-based moralities.  They’re bloody irresponsible.  I’m giving new meaning to “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” (or maybe I’m just finally understanding it).

Intention-based moralities are for people too stupid or too lazy to consider the consequences of their actions.  “But I didn’t mean to” is the cry of an idiot.  (What did you think would happen when you put a firecracker in the dog’s mouth?)  “I was only trying to help” is an attempt to absolve oneself of the burden of figuring out the effect one’s behavior has on others.  (In what universe is that helpful?)

If you only meant to have a bit of fun, getting in your car drunk out of your mind and driving down the 401, if you didn’t intend to hurt anyone, well then, okay, you can go (you should go) — to hell.

Business Rules the World. Do we want it to?

One of the most common – and most serious – weaknesses of codes of ethics, and indeed, most ethical theories, is that they don’t prioritize values.  They’re fine for many of the simpler ethical questions, but when goods and interests conflict, when virtues and rights collide, they don’t provide a way to determine which interest, which right, is stronger.  For example, it’s all very nice to say that both customers and shareholders are valued, but which is valued more?  Do you opt for lower prices or greater profits?  And it’s all very good to say that loyalty and honesty are among the company’s virtues.  But what does an employee do when honesty seems to be a breach of loyalty?  Does the employee blow the whistle or not?  The code I begin to develop here is an attempt to solve that problem, an attempt to prioritize values.

First, I propose that life be set in the position of highest priority: nothing is more valuable than life itself.  This is so if only for logical reasons – without life, nothing else is possible, nothing else matters.  A point of clarification: violations of this value, that is, the causing of death, need not be sudden or immediate: a slow poisoning is a poisoning nevertheless.

Included at this point, though perhaps better listed as a separate, second, item so as not to be forgotten, would be the resources necessary to sustain life: food, water, and oxygen.  Again, a point of clarification: since I am referring to quantity of life as this point, I refer also to quantity, not quality, of resources.

Having put life at the top, however, I hasten to explain that life for life’s sake is not my aim.  Rather, I see the value of life to be in its quality; life itself is a means to an end, the end being a certain quality of life.  And I suggest, therefore, that freedom from pain and injury be listed third in our hierarchy.  A life of pain is not a life worth living.  It is here that quality of resources are implicated.

Obviously, even to this point, there are questions I need to address.  With respect to the first value, that of life itself, just exactly which life forms am I including?  I am a little uncomfortable specifying only human life.  But I am more uncomfortable including all life: the simplest construction project surely kills a few worms, and prohibiting such construction for that reason seems unwise.  Where I draw the line is not clear to me at the moment.  However, with respect to freedom from pain and injury, I include all sentient life: the presence of pain is worse than the absence of life for many creatures, especially those with fully developed pain receptors but little sense of time continuity and attendant life plans.

A further problem is that we often don’t know for sure that someone is going to get killed.  So probability must play a role.  But, and here’s the big question, how probable is probable enough?  If there’s a fifty-fifty chance that someone will get killed if X is done, is that a sufficient reason for choosing not to do X?

With respect to resources necessary to sustain life, one might well ask ‘how much life?’  Is it fair to say that the conduct of business must not diminish resources below the level required to sustain life while at the same time allowing life unlimited increase?  I think not.  Surely we can calculate the ideal quality of life we desire, and from that calculate the ideal population level, given the nature (limits and renewability) of our resources.  (I suspect these calculations have already been done, but since limiting population means limiting markets…)  Business must then not diminish the resources below the level needed to sustain that population.

Further, while in theory, the quantities of food, water, and oxygen necessary to sustain life are known amounts, ensuring these amounts is a difficult matter in practice.  Since people are, at this moment, dying for lack of food and water, one might assume that we’ve already gone beyond the point of equilibrium.  However, surplus food and water elsewhere on the planet suggests that the problem is one of distribution, not quantity.

With respect to the third value, that of freedom from pain and injury, one must ask ‘how much pain and injury?’  Specifying ‘serious’ solves little – ‘how serious is serious?’

Further, given that all sentient life forms are included, one must ask whether they are also to be given equal consideration?  That is, is a rat’s pain of the same value as a human’s pain?

And yet, even to this point, even with the most conservative answers to these questions, this code of ethics, if implemented, would radically change the face of business as we know it.  Let me repeat that.  Even with the most conservative answers to these questions, this code of ethics, if implemented, would radically change the face of business as we know it. 

Before describing some of these changes, I’d like to append to my code two possibilities for veto.  The first veto is that of voluntary and informed consent: if the person who is (probably) going to die or be injured is identifiable and s/he agrees to (the risk of) that death or injury, one is justified in carrying on with one’s business.  Proxy consent of non-human sentient life is not allowed, however.

The second veto involves the purpose of the business: if one is in the life-saving business, then perhaps some degree of life-taking is justified.  Ditto for the business of life-sustaining resource production or the business of serious pain and injury alleviation – some ‘taking in kind’ may be allowed.  The notion of sacrifice is difficult and beyond my objective at the moment, but I want to leave this door open: perhaps we can justify causing some pain, or even death, to some life forms, even of our own species, if we can thereby prevent a great deal of pain or save a great deal of lives.

Now, the application of my code so far is simple: no business decision that entails death, the destruction of life-sustaining resources, or serious injury is ethically justified.  (See what I mean by radically changing the face of business….)

The implications of this code, however, are extensive: if the conduct of one’s business entails someone’s death, one should not conduct said business.  No business is worth dying for.  Even CEOs would (hopefully) agree.  I expect the entire industrial revolution would have been considerably slower had this code been in use.  Even today, some of the higher risk operations such as mining might be far less developed (and perhaps alternate energy sources would have been far more developed).

Further, if business-as-usual involves causing serious pain, one should not engage in such business-as-usual.  No company’s existence, let alone its profit margin, is worth another’s pain, be it human or rodent.  That is to say, almost any business involving animal experimentation would have to close.  A fourth brand of dish detergent or eye mascara is simply not worth causing severe pain to even one rabbit.  It is also to say that the military business would have to shut down.  No more manufacture of ‘anti-personnel missiles’.

And if the consequence is bankruptcy, so be it.  Better that a company go bankrupt than that someone dies or gets seriously injured.  (Note that the company does not have a right to life or to freedom from pain and injury.)

Further, assuming that we are already over the point of equilibrium with regard to life and resources, any business that is not environmentally-sustaining is ethically unjustified.  Wow.  That alone cuts out a lot.

Now at this point, I’d like to anticipate and respond to one objection.  Closing down my business, one might argue, will involve a lot of negative consequences: thousands will be put out of a job, there will be no food on their tables, etc.  To respond, I don’t believe that a business closure has ever resulted in employee death or even serious pain and injury.  When a company employs the whole town and it goes out of business, the town becomes a ghost town, yes, but because its people have moved on, not because they’ve died.  Life goes on.  Perhaps they are poorer, but better that some are poor than that some are dead.  So, by my code, since life and freedom from pain and injury are ranked above having a job, the closure must be chosen if otherwise someone will die or get hurt.

The greatest result of implementing a code such as the one I propose might be, simply, the reduction of business.  So many businesses provide services or products we simply don’t need, or at least not in the quantity they’re being produced, and as long as their production, in the process, violate this code (and I’ve just identified the first three values – I expect values four through whatever would include various freedoms and virtues that would further enhance quality of life),  their very existence is unjustifiable.

With the reduction in business per se will come, hopefully, a marked decrease in its all-pervasive role in our lives.  Nations are already just corporations; presidents and those who fill political offices are, more often than not, business men – not philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, scientists…  Business rules the world.  Do we want it to?  Do we really want someone’s pursuit of profit to determine our lives? 

I’m too drunk. No I’m not.

According to the Canadian Criminal Code, (self-induced) intoxication is no defence against charges of assault (33.1): if you’re drunk, you’re still able to form the general intent to commit said assault.

And yet, with regard to the sub-category of sexual assault, belief that someone is consenting is cancelled if that someone is intoxicated (273.1(2)): if you’re drunk, you can’t consent to sex.

So if you’re drunk, you’re capable of forming the intent to assault, but you’re not capable of forming the intent to have sex? Given that it’s mostly men who do the assaulting, and it’s mostly women who do the consenting (and given, it’s my guess, that the lawmakers had men in mind for 33.1 and women in mind for 273.1(2)), is this some sort of ‘protect the weaker sex’ double standard?

Hey, if we expect men to foresee the effects of alcohol and to be responsible for their behavior while under its influence, we should expect the same of women. Yes, it may be morally scuzzy to have sex with someone who’s drunk (and got that way of her own free will), climbing all over you and moaning ‘do me’, and you suspect that if she were sober she wouldn’t be quite so willing – but you’re not her legal guardian. ‘Yes’ means ‘yes’ and if she regrets it the morning after, that’s her headache. Doing something really stupid is the risk you take when you get drunk (unless you’ve got a dependable designated sober friend with you).

The only way the difference can be justified is if in both cases we consider the man to be the agent, the only one doing the deed. In the first case, that’s fine. But in the second? Well, okay, if she’s the one done to, I guess, maybe, he’s the only one guilty of a deed. But the tricky part is that then the legality of the deed depends on her behavior. If she, drunk, does to him, she’s the one guilty of assault while intoxicated.

If while drunk she says I can borrow her car, and I do so, am I really justly accused of theft? Am I my sister’s keeper? She said I could. Do I have to second guess her? She may well say I can borrow her car when she’s sober too. Or not. Am I supposed to know?

A Little Less Evolved

Sometimes I wonder whether men have a defective chromosome: the Y was supposed to be an X, but somehow it ended up missing something – a case of stunted growth, or arrested development. This defective chromosome, uniquely characteristic of the human male, causes them to be a little lower on the evolutionary scale, a little less evolved.

Consider their fascination with movement. They always have to be doing something, moving around, busy at this or that. They can’t sit still. This importance of movement is characteristic of many lower animals; something doesn’t even register in the frog’s visual field unless it moves. Certainly movement is required for flight and fight. (And no other options occur to lower animals.) And for many, movement is a form of posturing – which explains the way men walk, and stand, and sit. On the other hand, such excessive physical activity may simply suggest that the organism’s mental activity does not provide enough stimulation.

Not only must they be doing something, they must be doing it loudly. They even speak more loudly than women. And when they’re not speaking, they must be making noise. They derive endless delight from engines, jackhammers, chainsaws… This propensity is suggestive of the lion’s roar – the louder the noise, the greater the threat.

Because, usually, the larger the animal. And of course size is another male obsession. Girth which in a woman would be considered obese and disgusting is carried by men as if it increases their legitimacy, their authority: they thrust out their gut just as they thrust out their chest. It brings to mind animals that inflate themselves to achieve greater size (the balloonfish can actually double its size). Men are concerned not only with physical size, in general and in particular, but also with the size of their paycheques, their houses, their corporations. The bigger, the better.

Closely related to the size thing is the territory thing. Men occupy a lot of space – again, look at the way they stand and sit. They take up, they occupy, more space than they need – they lean on counters, sprawl on chairs, take over small countries. They engage in turf wars, at every level.

Consider also men’s obsession with speed. Cars, trains, planes. Sex. Speed is, of course, important for flight, one of the forementioned behaviours favoured by so many lower animals.

Like their sexual response, men’s emotional response is, well, uncomplicated. They are easy to please. This lack of complexity is further indication that they are simply less evolved.

Some say that language is the mark of higher life forms. And, of course, any grade school teacher will tell you that boys lag behind girls in verbal development. They’re just not very good at communicating. I believe the word I’m looking for is ‘inarticulate.’

By way of summary, consider dick flicks. Also called action movies, there is indeed lots of action. And lots of noise. The heroes are usually big. And they have big things – big guns, usually. The central conflict of a dick flick is almost always territorial. There is little in the way of plot or character development, but there’s always at least one high-speed chase scene. And, understandably, the dialogue in a dick flick consists mostly of short and often incomplete sentences.

John Smith and his Biochem Cubes

Suppose John Smith makes biochem cubes – biological-chemical cubes about one metre by one metre with an input for resources required for sustenance and an output for unusable processed resources. Why does John Smith make biochem cubes? Good question. Truth be told, they’re unlikely to make the world a better place. And he doesn’t sell them.

Should we make allowances for John Smith with regard to money (salary, income tax, subsidies, etc.)? After all, he has, let’s say, ten biochem cubes to support. If they are to stay alive, he needs to provide sustenance. He needs a bigger house. More electricity. More food.

Should we encourage his ‘hobby’? Perhaps consider it respectable, or a rite of passage to maturity?

Or should we censure it? Because once his biochem cubes become ambulatory, the rest of us have to go around them in one way or another. And when we’re both dead, his ecological footprint will have been at least ten times mine. (More, if the biochem cubes he made go out and make other biochem cubes.)