John G. Messerly's Blog, page 3

The Structural Problem of Epistemic Deprivation: Why the “Greater Good” Is Not a Theodicy

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By Joshua Shrode

I. Introduction

The traditional Problem of Evil asks: Why does a perfectly good, all-powerful, all-knowing God allow suffering? A common reply—especially in Christian philosophy—is that evil is permitted for the sake of some greater good: free will, soul-making, or a complex moral order in which God’s purposes unfold.

But there is a class of harm that resists this line of defensea category that brings into question not only divine providence, but divine justice and love: , epistemically preventable suffering and moral failure.

I argue that when a person suffers, fails, or is eternally damned because of epistemic deprivation they did not choose and could not overcome, this constitutes not only a problem of evil, but a moral contradiction at the heart of theism—what I call the Structural Problem of Epistemic Deprivation.

II. What Is Epistemic Deprivation?

Epistemic deprivation refers to the condition in which a person lacks access to morally or existentially significant truths—through no fault of their own. It is the absence or distortion of truth in contexts where that truth is necessary for responsible action, moral development, or spiritual salvation.

This deprivation is not incidental. It is often structural: shaped by misinformation, cultural formation, psychological trauma, and institutional failure. And it becomes theologically significant when:

The person affected is sincere and non-resistant,The consequences of the ignorance are grave—moral, spiritual, or physical,And the deprivation could have been trivially prevented by a loving, omniscient, omnipotent being.

The following examples illustrate just how morally urgent this problem is.

❖ The Death of an Infant

A young couple, exhausted first-time parents, finally get their newborn to sleep after hours of soothing. They swaddle her tightly, lay her face-down on a soft blanket—just as they remember their own parents doing—and collapse into bed.

They are unaware that prone sleep on soft bedding is a major risk factor for SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome).

In the morning, their child is no more.

No negligence. No rebellion. Just a gap in knowledge—one that cost a life.

A whisper from God—“turn your child on it’s back”—could have spared them lifelong grief.

But God said nothing.

❖ The Dosage Misunderstanding

A man picks up a new prescription for his elderly mother, who has heart failure. The printed instructions say:

“Take Drug A & Drug B, depending on blood pressure.”

But the cardiologist had told him—quickly, during a chaotic discharge process:

“Take Drug A OR Drug B, depending on blood pressure.”

He doesn’t realize the error.

Three days later, his mother collapses from a drug interaction.
By day four, she is gone.

The difference between “and” and “or”—a single word—cost her life.

A nudge from God—“Call the doctor again,” or “Check the label twice”—would have been enough.

But there is only silence.

❖ The Misinformed Seeker

A young man in rural Pakistan sincerely seeks God. He prays daily, fasts, gives generously, and asks to know whatever is true.

But the only version of Christianity he ever encounters comes from state-controlled television and secondhand caricatures: imperialist, immoral, idolatrous. He believes he is rejecting corruption.

He dies having never encountered anything like the Christian God in a way he could recognize as morally or intellectually credible.

He never chose to reject God. He rejected a distortion—a distortion he never had the tools to correct.

A God who desires that all people be saved (1 Tim 2:4) could have reached him in a dream, a vision, a traveler, a single page of a New Testament to show him something true.

But that moment never came.

❖ Why These Cases Matter

These stories are tragic not just because people suffered, but because:

The suffering or spiritual loss arose from ignorance that was non-culpable,The corrective knowledge was minimal and available,And the people involved were not resistant to truth—they simply never had the right pieces.

Each of these cases reveals the fragility of human agency in a world where truth is not evenly distributed.

If God is omniscient, then He knows what each person lacks.

If God is omnipotent, then He can correct even a small epistemic gap.

If God is loving, then He has no reason to withhold the knowledge required to prevent irreversible harm—whether physical death, moral collapse, or eternal separation.

And if God fails to provide that, then we are not merely dealing with divine hiddenness.

We are dealing with divine silence in the face of epistemic harm—a harm that is avoidable, foreseeable, and unjustly consequential.

III. Moral Responsibility and the Conditions of Agency

Moral responsibility—on any plausible theory—requires that the agent’s decision reflects their informed will. Whether one adopts:

a libertarian view (freedom requires real alternatives and informed, uncoerced choice), ora compatibilist view (freedom requires that actions flow from the agent’s beliefs, values, and reasons),

both agree that severely distorted epistemic conditions compromise moral agency.

If a person’s beliefs about right and wrong, or about God, are formed through misinformation, fear, or structural deception, then even their “authentic” choices may lack moral significance. Their actions may flow from them, but not from a morally responsible self—because the self is malformed by forces beyond its control.

IV. When Epistemic Deprivation Is Structural

What makes these conditions particularly insidious is that they are not rare or fleeting. They are structural:

Cultural misinformation and propaganda,Religious indoctrination or isolation,Psychological trauma that inhibits trust or inquiry,Systemic educational gaps.

These are not mere accidents—they are predictable features of human development, and they affect billions of people. And crucially, God knows every one of them. He sees the lie as it forms, the decision it warps, the harm it causes.

V. The Theological Dilemma

Christian theism claims that God is:

Omniscient (knows every truth and every heart),Omnipotent (can do all that is logically possible),Omnibenevolent (loves all persons and wills their good).

It also teaches that God desires that “none should perish” (2 Peter 3:9) and that “all should come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4).

So here is the dilemma:

If God sees that a person is being epistemically malformed in a way that will lead to spiritual ruin, psychological despair, or avoidable death—and He could prevent that by supplying a single piece of knowledge at the right time—

Why does He not intervene?

This does not require overriding free will. It does not require violating laws of nature. It requires only a timely whisper, nudge, dream, or intuition—something Scripture itself says God is capable of doing.

If God permits structural epistemic deprivation knowing it will lead to spiritual loss or suffering, then either:

He wills the harm (contradicting perfect love),He is indifferent to it (contradicting benevolence),He cannot prevent it (contradicting omnipotence),Or He does not exist.VI. The Inviolability of Persons: Means vs. Ends

At the heart of this issue lies a deeper ethical principle: persons must never be treated merely as means to an end.

This principle, rooted in Kantian ethics, also runs throughout Christian moral theology—and is grounded in the doctrine of the Imago Dei: the belief that every human being is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). This implies that each person:

Has intrinsic dignity,Possesses rational and moral worth,Must be treated as an end in themselves.

Throughout Scripture, this idea reappears:

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31),“Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me” (Matt 25:40),“God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34),“It is not God’s will that any should perish” (2 Peter 3:9).

So when people suffer, fail morally, or are eternally lost not through their own sin, but because of preventable ignorance—God is not only permitting harm, He is instrumentalizing their personhood for some broader “purpose” that disregards their dignity.

Any theodicy that treats epistemically deprived persons as necessary casualties in a cosmic plan treats them as means to an end—which a perfectly good being cannot do.

VII. The Failure of “Greater Good” Theodicies

Most responses to the problem of evil rely on some version of greater-good justification: God allows evil to bring about a more valuable outcome.

But this move fails in the case of epistemic deprivation:

The “greater good” is often for others (e.g., soul-making in the observer, not the sufferer who may die or never grow spiritually).The person who suffers does not consent to being used or even sacrificed for this purpose.The good could often be achieved without the specific harm (e.g., you can learn empathy without someone being damned or dying in ignorance).

From a non-consequentialist perspective—which Christian ethics typically affirms—a good outcome cannot justify treating a person as a tool, especially when that person’s suffering or damnation is entirely preventable.

God may allow suffering—but if He allows suffering rooted in non-culpable ignorance, and does nothing when He could easily act, then He treats the individual not as a beloved child, but as a pawn.

That is not perfect love. It is, by the standards of Christian ethics, evil.

VIII. Formal Summary of the Argument

Let me summarize the structure of the argument:

P1. A person is morally responsible only if their choice reflects epistemically grounded agency (on either libertarian or compatibilist terms).

P2. Structural epistemic constraints exist that significantly distort moral and spiritual choices, through no fault of the agent.

P3. These constraints regularly result in grave harm: spiritual ruin, moral failure, existential suffering.

P4. A perfectly loving, omnipotent, omniscient God would not permit such harm unless it were logically necessary and consistent with treating persons as ends in themselves.

P5. Such harm is not logically necessary, and its prevention would not violate freedom or divine character.

C. Therefore, the existence of structural epistemic deprivation is incompatible with the Christian conception of God.

IX. Final Reflections

We often imagine God’s hiddenness as a lack of spectacle. But perhaps the greater scandal is God’s silence in the face of epistemic harm. When someone dies believing a lie they never chose, or spends their life suffering for something they could have avoided with one insight, the question is not merely, “Why did God allow this?”

It’s, “Why didn’t He say something?”

If the world is full of people suffering because of what they never had the chance to know—
And if God knows, sees, and could change that—
Then we must ask:

What kind of God is that?

X. Invitation to Engagement

This argument is not offered triumphantly. It is meant to provoke serious thought and dialogue.

If you are a theist, how do you reconcile epistemically grounded harm with divine love?If you are a non-theist, do you find this argument distinct from traditional formulations of the problem of evil?

I welcome thoughtful responses—especially from those who take the moral and intellectual character of God seriously.

The Creative Universe

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[Editor’s Note. This essay is by Cadell Last, a fomer colleague of mine in the Evolution, Cognition and Complexity Group at Vrije Universiteit Brussels; Brussels, Belguim.]

Creative Evolution

Engaging in cultural creativity involves engaging in the process of cultural evolution.  When you propose a new idea, or a new theory, you are not only attempting to improve upon the human knowledge preceding your existence; but you are also attempting to further explore the realms of creativity available to us because we are cultural beings.

This cultural act is invaluable because it is an exploration of the highest forms of cosmic creativity.  The ideas and technologies that emerge from culture are the most intricate and energy dense phenomena in the known universe.  From this perspective, the universe is – and has always been – a type of “art machine”: a canvas of emergent possibility.  Modern big historians and cosmic evolutionary theorists are now considering this perspective with greater interest, as culture appears to be the latest in a trilogy of creativity codes that have directionally emerged with the arrow of time.

The first code is the information of the physical universe itself, which generates space, time, matter, and energy (for more see: Seth Lloyd’s “On the spontaneous generation of complexity in the universe“; or John Smart’s “Evo Devo Universe?“).  Although this code is not subject to natural selection (at least within our universe), it is still a code that changes through time with both development (i.e., the formation of galaxies, stars, and planets), and generational change.  This is a change dominated by gravitational energy.  Gravity is the great structure-building engine of the cosmos.  And from this physical evolution we have a wonderful and creative work of art: the structure of the cosmos itself.  All of the billions of galaxies that compose the cosmic web provide the platform (or the canvas) for even more creative works.  The ordered creativity of physical evolution set the stage for something new: biological evolution.

The second code was the information of the biochemical universe: deoxyribonucleic-acid (DNA).  This code, composed of nucleic acids A, T, C, and G, coils itself up within the gene and has learned the special trick of replication.  Here natural selection takes over from the order that spontaneously emerges in the physical universe and starts organizing its own.  This is a creativity with a little more agency, and a lot more unpredictability.  This unpredictability comes from a relationship that opens up between subject/object; organism/environment; user/universe.  We now have actors on the cosmic stage.  In this sense, life is in a relationship with the universe, simply attempting to understand and co-create with the physical universe, one mistake at a time.

In the biological universe, instead of gravitational energy building structure, we now have energy controlling agents organizing structure.  The universe acquires character and goals.  For biological entities, the objective goal of preserving existence and reproducing the code is all that matters.  And on a subjective level, the biological entity is content with evolutionary fitness-enhancing sensory experience.  Percepts; just feeling the universe itself, being in the moment, is sufficient for biology.  As psychologist Merlin Donald stated in The Origin of the Modern Mind (1991), the life of nonhumans is spent “entirely in the present”.  We can also consider this reality with the beautiful poetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance: “There is no time to [the rose]. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.”  This timeless perfection applies to all other organisms, except of course ourselves.  Our distant ancestors began to escape from the time-less present (uncomfortably), and they started to explore a new creativity of time: cultural evolution.  Perhaps this began with the first question.

The third code was the symbolic information generated by mind to produce culture.  The culture code is carried in symbols (i.e, A, B, C, D, E, F, G / 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 / – x % $ ) and structured within language.  Language is a new domain, and a domain unto itself.  No other species possesses a robust linguistic architecture, complete with grammar and syntax.  And so although other animals posses culture, no other animal can engage in the creative act of cultural evolution.  That is what makes our species uniquely unique, as culture springs forth from our mind/brain generating new virtual realities for us to experiment with.  The human imagination is the new canvas of the cosmos.

As a result of cultural experience, humans find biological experience enjoyable, but not sufficient.  The human is adrift in a conceptual past-present-future, desperately trying to find deeper meaningin the nature of the universe, and in existence itself.  We are not like Emerson’s timeless rose.  From the very beginning we have tried to find meaning in the symbolic architecture of our own culture code.  We have wondered, explicitly or not, whether the concepts of our design could hold salvation, even perfection.  The symbol God has typically reigned supreme in the human culture code – a symbol that always attempts to capture infinity – yet always seems to come up short.  And so many modern minds worship scientific Gods: Newton, Darwin, Einstein.  After all, science has become the penultimate form of human culture and creativity, as it opens up new symbolic landscapes for potentially higher creativity.  Science expands the human canvas because it expands the human imagination, although we do not really know what will spring forth from this canvas on evolutionary scales of time.

In the 21st century, humans find themselves at an odd, and perhaps critical turning point in the universe.  We now have the ability to comprehend vast arenas of space-time: our telescopes help us see to the edge of space and to the beginnings of time; our particle accelerators help us reveal the fundamental constituents of the physical universe; and we have even started to model our own evolutionary emergence.  These are undoubtedly God-like abilities… and yet we are still biological and mortal.  We are simultaneously God-like and animal-like; a weird hybrid of codes.

On the one hand, we are still stuck with 3.5 billion year old biological hardware that was constructed from child-like trial and error.  This is a code that both enables and cuts off the creativity of the culture code.  Biological reproduction brings you into existence, allowing your mind to flourish.  And then biological deterioration brings your creative mind to an end.  For many, this reality is hard to bare.  After all, the biological code may be content with time-less percepts, but the cultural code yearns for time-less concepts.  The mind as phenomena seems to want infinity.  And yet biology cannot achieve this feat.

Moving forward in the cosmic arena the human therefore faces a dilemma, and perhaps an obligation.  We must become the mature nodes of cosmic creativity and embrace what it is that makes us different: the evolution of cultural code.  The physical universe’s code gave rise to the chemical code of the biological universe through the process of abiogenesis.  In this process chemical structures gave rise to structures that could grow and replicate on their own.  The universe was growing up.  And then biological code gave rise to the cultural universe through the evolution of the human mind/brain.  Now it is the human, imbued with a new agency, and a new unpredictability, to take evolution and direct it with imagination towards the full exploration of what makes the human mind unique: an unbounded cosmic canvas of imagination.  Endless possibility space.

The human can do this by learning from the process that birthed the biological code: abiogenesis.  Like chemistry before it, culture must generate a symbolic code that can also grow and replicate on its own.  The universe can leave the confines of its own maturation, finally free to explore new realms of possibility.  Imagine a mind, a cultural creative, with the ability to replicate without the shackles of biological evolution.  The offspring of mind would be new worlds and universes, anything that the human imagination can conjure.  This would be a mind within a creation of its own – a technological substrate – capable of unbounded and infinite creativity.

Some may call this event technological singularity.  But I find this term to be inadequate when considered from a cosmic perspective.  Many futurists agree.  For me, the universe has been filled with singularities… of new domains allowing for new creativity, new qualitative forms of experience.  Furthermore, the term singularity was first a mathematical concept, applied in physics to describe the nature of black holes.  But what lies ahead is an evolutionary transition, a transition in which the domains of culture are orchestrated in a purely technological substrate.  Therefore, for imagining the ongoing cosmic evolution of the universe, as well as for aiding future research, I offer the term “atechnogenesis”: an event in cultural evolution when cultural replication can independently occur within a substrate of its own design.  In this way, atechnogenesis is the cultural equivalent to abiogenesis.  Culture will be free from biology, and mind itself will be in charge.  Biology will no longer be the tyrannical dictator of mind.  This perspective should make more sense than the singularity for chemists, biologists, anthropologists, and cyberneticists a-like.  As the great cyberneticist Valentin Turchin remarked in The Phenomenon of Science:

If [the emergence of the humans] can be compared to anything it can only be compared to the actual emergence of life.  For the appearance of the human being signifies the appearance of a new mechanism for more complex organization of matter, a new mechanism for the evolution of the universe.

We have become the ultimate art project of the universe, and so atechnogenesis can be thought of as the ultimate cultural liberation.  This liberation has been dreamed of by many different cultures, but it has a particularly interesting history in the domain of science.  From the very beginning of the Scientific Revolution humans realized that the scientific method could turn human imagination into reality.  In New Atlantis (1626), philosopher Francis Bacon dreamed of this world, claiming that the end of science’s foundation was the “effecting of all things possible”.

But science has always struggled to understand culture, and especially cultural evolution.  In this sense science has failed to understand itself, and its own goals and dreams.  This failure and inability to understand the nature of culture is becoming problematic.  As astronomer Stephen Dick recently wrote in an Acta Astronautica article “The postbiological universe“: we need to start taking culture seriously on the scale of cosmic time.  More and more scientists agree.  There may be no limit to what culture could become over the course of deep time.  This could have profound implications for the relationship between subject/object; organism/environment; user/universe; and therefore, this could have very profound implications for the foundations of our existence.  What would happen if mind could actually birth new worlds?  New universes?  Perhaps all things would be possible.

Of course, nobody knows the future with any absolute certainty.  And so we are left wondering about our own curious nature and own curious future.  As computer scientist Stephen Wolfram remarked: ”effective human immortality will be achieved, [but] I wonder what’s on the other side.”  My guess is that it will be a cultural act of unbounded creative exploration, a cosmic culture that makes the symbol God look like child’s play. The end of our foundation.

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Cadell Last is an evolutionary scientist conducting research at the Global Brain Institute and a science writer for The Advanced Apes YouTube channel in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios. He is interested in what evolutionary science can teach us about the human past, present, and future.

“The Great Gatsby: 100 Years Old

[image error]Fitzgerald and Zelda in 1921

Two previous posts, “Roger Ebert Life Itself,” and “Essays of the Dying: Film Critic Roger Ebert” considered the late film critic Roger Ebert’s thoughts about life and death. While researching that material I came across Ebert’s blog post about his favorite novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby. He clearly loved the novel, and its final lines were his favorites in all literature. Ebert said that his lifelong friend, the journalist Bill Nack, recited those last lines every time they saw each other. Here is a video shot by Ebert himself of his lifelong friend reciting those final lines.

These lines capture both the hope that the future can be better than the past (“tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . .”), and the difficulty of ever moving beyond the past. The characters of Gatsby, Nick, and Daisy all experienced these hopes and difficulties—as do we all.

The lines make little sense unless you know a bit about the story, so I’ll give you a brief sketch, provided that you remember Ebert’s cautionary note:

Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style—in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all.

In the book, the novel’s narrator Nick Carraway, is a young man from Minnesota who moves to New York in the summer of 1922 to learn the bond business. He rents a house on Long Island, and his next-door neighbor is a mysterious man named Jay Gatsby, who lives in a large Gothic mansion and throws extravagant parties every Saturday night.

Nick’s cousin, Daisy, and her husband, Tom Buchanan, also live on Long Island. Daisy and Tom introduce Nick to Jordan Baker, with whom Nick begins a romantic relationship. Nick also learns that Tom is having an affair with a woman named Myrtle, who is married to a man named George Wilson.

Nick eventually garners an invitation to one of Gatsby’s legendary parties. He learns that Gatsby knew Daisy in Louisville in 1917 and is deeply in love with her. Gatsby spends many nights staring at the green light at the end of her dock, across the bay from his mansion. After Nick arranges a reunion between Gatsby and Daisy, they begin an affair.

One evening, while Daisy is driving Gatsby’s car, it strikes and kills Tom’s lover Myrtle Wilson, but Gatsby takes the blame. When Tom tells Myrtle’s husband, George, that Gatsby was the driver of the car, George concludes that the driver of the car that killed Myrtle must have been her lover. George then finds Gatsby in the pool at his mansion and shoots him dead. He also fatally shoots himself.

Nick stages a small funeral for Gatsby, ends his relationship with Jordan, and moves back to the Midwest. Nick reflects that just as Gatsby’s dream of Daisy was corrupted by money and dishonesty, the American dream of happiness and individualism has disintegrated into the mere pursuit of wealth.  With this brief sketch in place, here are the famous final lines:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—-

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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Addendum

A reader provided the following thoughtful analysis of the book’s famous last lines. Fitzgerald’s text is indented, and the reader’s analysis in [brackets.]

[For me, it’s a haunting love story that reverberates with the human condition of…‘We are so smart. We can overcome anything, nature, others, and ourselves.’ And all the while, in the short-term, we think we’re making things better. But in the long run, we are only making things worse. And that’s sadder than the love story. Here’s my breakdown:]

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world.

[We drift back into the past to see that the island represents Daisy when Gatsby first laid eyes on her.]

Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house,

[The vanished trees demonstrate Gatsby’s toil and preparation over the years in an attempt to recapture that initial magic with Daisy. The vanished trees – like that magic – have been lost. Although Gatsby is too busy ‘doing’ to look up and see the destruction – the waste – the emptiness of his labor.]

had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams;

[The greatest of all human dreams, to have a soul mate.]

for a transitory enchanted moment, man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired,

[Love? The unknown? Something you can’t describe or grasp because you can’t fully understand it. That was what Gatsby was feeling when he first encountered Daisy.]

face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate with his capacity for wonder.

[From this first encounter with Daisy on, he would only drift farther and farther from his ‘Daisy island’ – regardless of how hard he paddled against the current (his toil for Daisy) – the current would only carry him farther and farther from his dream.]

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.

[His excitement at seeing the green light after all his paddling over the years with one goal: to reclaim Daisy. Green = money. The light = the dream of being with Daisy. The dream now seemed within reach.]

He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

[The dream—the possibility of being with Daisy—had begun receding from the moment Daisy discovered he didn’t have money. Gatsby was set adrift from his Daisy island. So, years later, the possibility of reaching the dream was far away, far out of reach. He could see the point source of the green light in the darkness – but not the land or other perspective cues that would have told him that he was drifting away.]

Gatsby believed in the green light,

[He felt money – the thing that initially set him adrift – would be the thing that could make his dream come true. He believed in the power of money to make his dream come true. Sounds all too familiar in this ‘American Dream’ world in which we live.]

the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.

[But it was too late–although he worked for and gained the money (the green)–and although he could see a wonderful magical future with Daisy (the light) it had all the while been receding – imperceptibly to him since he was focused on working so hard. He couldn’t see – or didn’t pay attention to the fact that it was receding …  We too often fail to see the long-term price because we’re blinded by staring at the short-term excitement of the gains in the green light. Like Gatsby, we’re cutting down the trees on the island to reach our dream and in the process, destroying the very island that is our dream. We are trying to get what we want – now – without regard to how it affects others and the environment in the future. In the end, we all lose.]

It eluded us then,

[His dream hasn’t yet come true.]

but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—-

[In Gatsby’s perspective, all his plans seem to be working out and he believes that he is getting closer to his dream with Daisy and if he just continues day by day he will make it come true. We’re just like Gatsby. Things seem to be working out with our brilliant plans because we’re not paying attention to their effects along the way. Not acknowledging how they have made things worse so far on our voyage. We’re too busy making it better – to see or acknowledge the fact that we’re improving it into a failure.]

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

[The past is where we started. The dream. We feel we are progressing. But we’re not progressing in the big picture. And here, Nick, with the omniscient view of the narrator – can see what Gatsby could not. Nick can see that Gatsby – despite all his effort and sweat at paddling against the current – was drifting backward away from the island – (from Daisy). Repeating the same mistakes over and over – ignoring the signs from Daisy that she could not commit 100% to him, as he worked toward his dream. Gatsby was continually fooling himself with his dream of Daisy from the past – blinded by the green light – and could not see his forward progress was overpowered by the permanence of the past (the current).

At the end, he feels so close. He’s waiting in the pool for her call. I see his murder as a merciful event. For he feels as close to his dream as he will ever get. He is at the top of the roller coaster. Daisy is too torn to fully commit to him and if he had lived to see this played out – everything would have been downhill from there. His psychological life would not only have been destroyed – he would have had to live through the destruction. And that would be crushing for Gatsby – as well as for the reader. We need a ‘Nick’ to help us see the bird’s eye view of what we’re doing.]

I thank my reader for his thoughtful interpretation. It has added immensely to my understanding of the novel. JGM

Truth and Justice – Two Great Ideas

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The philosophical popularizer of the last century, Mortimer Adler, wrote a massive two-volume work entitled The Great Ideas – A Syntopicon I (Angel To Love) and The Great Ideas – A Syntopicon  II (Man To World)[image error]. It contained 102 great ideas, which Adler later reduced to six in his book, Six Great Ideas (1981). Those six were truth, beauty, goodness, liberty, equality, and justice.

Adler distinguished these in triads: truth, beauty, and goodness are ideas we judge by; liberty, equality, and justice are ideas we act on. The organization of the triads is illuminating and relevant to our previous discussion of economic inequality.

1. Truth

Adler holds that truth is the sovereign idea by which we judge. He believes that beauty is a special kind of goodness, which is itself a special kind of truth. He also holds that truth—by distinguishing certain from doubtful judgments and by differentiating matters of taste and matters of truth—provides the ground for understanding beauty and goodness. Whether this is true or not, I’ll leave it for the reader to consider. 

Yet I find something intuitively plausible in this analysis. If we know what’s true, we would know what is good and beautiful. (This depends on Adler’s acceptance of philosophical realism and a correspondence theory of truth.) But knowing what’s good or beautiful does not mean we know what’s true—the relationship is not symmetrical. Thus, truth seemingly regulates our thinking about goodness and beauty; it is the one to which the other two are subordinate. And, as I’ve stated many times, if the truth isn’t important, then nothing much else matters. Truth is surely one of the greatest ideas.

2. Justice

As for the ideas we act on, justice reigns supreme. Here, I find Adler’s argument especially compelling. He argues that justice is an unlimited good, while liberty and equality are limited goods. The distinction comes from Aristotle. We can have too much of limited goods, while we cannot have too much of an unlimited good. Societies can have too much liberty or equality, but not too much justice.

The argument is straightforward. For political libertarians, liberty is the highest value, and they seek to maximize liberty at the expense of equality. They want near-unlimited liberty even if the result is irremediable inequality and even if large portions of society suffer serious deprivations. They may favor equality of opportunity, knowing that those with superior endowments or (more likely) favorable circumstances will beat their fellows in the race of life. The resulting vast inequality doesn’t deter them, for in their view, trying to achieve equality will result in the loss of the higher value, liberty. On the other hand, egalitarians regard equality as the highest value and willingly infringe upon liberty to bring about equality of outcomes. In their view, equality of opportunity will not suffice since that will still result in vast inequality, the supreme virtue in their eyes.

Adler’s solution recognizes that liberty and equality are both subservient to justice. Individuals should not have so much freedom of action that they injure others, deprive them of their freedom, or cause them serious deprivations. One should only have as much freedom as justice allows. Analogously, should a society try to achieve equality of outcomes even if that entails serious deprivations of human freedom? Should we ignore the fact that individuals are unequal in their endowments and achievements? No, says Adler to both questions. We should only have as much equality as justice allows.

Justice limits the amount of liberty allowed, and justice limits the kind and degree of equality allowed. Thus, justice limits the subordinate values of liberty and equality. Too much of either liberty or equality results in an unjust society. I agree with Adler: Justice is the ultimate idea of moral and political philosophy, and truth is the ultimate idea in metaphysics and epistemology.

Pessimistic Hope Revisited

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In the past, I’ve outlined a concept of hope that I believe is both intellectually honest and that sustains me against many critics of hope. I’ve also used that concept of hope as a primary response to the failure of intellectual analysis to demonstrate that life is now or is becoming fully meaningful. Thus, I was delighted to discover two new philosophical books that defend a concept of hope almost exactly like my own.

The first is Mara van der Lugt‘s Hopeful Pessimism. For Van der Lugt, pessimism is “a refusal to believe that progress is a given.” For example, while an optimist would say that we will probably succeed in our efforts to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, a pessimist would disagree, arguing that we are likely to fail in these efforts. But the pessimistic attitude is more conducive to action, van der Lugt maintains, since optimism often gives way to contentment that all will work out. On the contrary, the pessimist is often driven by panic to act.

But how do pessimists stay hopeful?  As I have argued repeatedly, the key is that hope doesn’t entail expectation. Hopeful pessimists don’t expect things will get better, but they know that things could since the future is open. So it’s always worth it to commit to doing good and just things. In other words, hope isn’t a prognostication but a way we orient our lives. This radical hope can sustain us even in desperate situations.

Another new book, The Spirit of Hope by Byung-Chul Han, engages in what he calls a “dialectic of hope.” He sees despair as hope’s evil twin—an idea I have expressed repeatedly. While despair feels like stumbling through a pitch-black cave without knowing where you are, hopeful pessimism is like being stranded on a deserted island yet finding solace at the sight of the ocean’s deep blue.

Both of these new books also remind me of the philosopher Terry Eagleton, who began his 2015 book, Hope Without Optimism, by claiming that he was “one for whom the proverbial glass is not only half empty but almost certain to contain some foul-tasting, potentially lethal liquid.” Nonetheless, he concludes, “there is hope as long as history lacks closure. If the past was different from the present, so may the future be.”

Here is what I wrote about hope and meaning in my essay “The Ascent of Meaning” in Lewis Vaughn’s The Moral Life

In response to this ultimate uncertainty, I advocate hope. Hope that it all makes sense; that things ultimately matter; that our lives and universal life are meaningful; that our cosmic vision becomes a reality. But what do I mean by hope? As I use the term, hope does not refer to future expectations. I neither have faith that, nor am I optimistic about, the objects of my hopes being realized. Instead, hope is an attitude that spurs action.

To better understand this, contrast hope with its opposite—despair. When we despair, we no longer care; we give up because our actions seemingly do not matter. But a hopeful attitude rejects despair. It cares although it might not matter; strives against obstacles; acts in the face of the unknown. I do not know if my actions are ultimately meaningful, but I can choose to hope, care, and strive nonetheless. However, if the objects of our hopes are unattainable, then we are bound to be disappointed. That is false hope and it can be devastating. True hope, on the other hand, consists of both a belief in an outcome’s possibility and a desire for that outcome. And, since life becoming more meaningful is both possible and desirable, hoping for it is not false hope. 

Thus, I would call myself a hopeful pessimist.

I’ll conclude thus. Remember the words of Aeschylus from his tragedy, Prometheus Bound. Prometheus’ two great gifts to humanity are hope and fire. Hope aids our struggle for a better future while fire, the source of technology, makes success in that struggle possible. Hope is the first gift that Aeschylus mentions.

Chorus: Did you perhaps go further than you have told us?
Prometheus – I stopped mortals from foreseeing their fate.
Chorus – What kind of cure did you discover for this sickness?
Prometheus – I established in them blind hopes.
Chorus – This is a great benefit you gave to men.

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This “hopeful pessimism shares” much with Viktor Frankl’s idea of tragic optimism. It also relates to the ideas in Michael & Caldwell’s, “The Consolations of Optimism.”

We Live and Die in a World We Don’t Fully Understand

[image error]The owl of Athena, a symbol of knowledge in the Western world

In my essay “The Ascent of Meaning” in Lewis Vaughn’s The Moral Life, I wrote, 

We cannot then erase all our doubts or allay all our fears. Intellectual integrity demands that we admit that life might be utterly meaningless. All of reality heading … nowhere. Our lives, our cares, our loves, our dreams … all for naught. But then again we do not know that life is meaningless. So we cannot unequivocally either affirm or reject claims about life’s meaning—the honest and brave must tolerate ambiguity. Ultimately, we are uncertain of our place, if any, in the cosmos. And the challenge of life is to live and die in a world that we do not fully understand.

I have thought a lot about the last sentence in the paragraph above—especially my use of the word fully. In retrospect, that word is too weak to convey the idea I have in mind.

Obviously, we don’t fully understand life. But I meant to convey something much stronger—our utter bafflement about the human situation. Many of our beliefs may be true, but we don’t know they’re true; conversely, many of our beliefs may be false but we don’t know that they’re false. So it’s not that we know nothing; it’s that we just don’t know what we know or don’t know.

However, this analysis is too epistemological and doesn’t capture my existential angst. What I meant to convey is that we are almost totally lost when it comes to answers to the deep questions of life and death. That is what we must accept: that those answers, if they even exist, are beyond our grasp. That is what we must come to terms with lest we further fill the world with more harmful nonsense.

When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, now rather than then. ~Blaise Pascal

How Does Life Feel Different At 70

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I turned 70 years old a few days ago. While I don’t feel old, take no prescription medications, eat a plant-based diet, work out at the gym, and walk 6 to 8 miles almost daily… there is still something about turning 70 that freaks me out. I feel like I’m about 40 on the inside, but that’s not what my birth certificate shows. It is just hard to believe that you were a kid or teenager and then, seemingly in an instant, are a senior citizen.

My son asked me how it feels differently being older as opposed to being younger. First of all, many things haven’t changed being 70 as compared to being 30 or 40—you were born in the same city at the same time to the same parents; you are about the same height and weight, have roughly the same psychological makeup, many of the same memories, the same DNA, etc. (This relates to what philosophers call the problem of personal identity. What, if anything, is it about you that endures over time? Are you more similar or different from who you used to be?)

As for the differences between being, say 30, as opposed to being 70, I’d classify them as follows.

The Physical – You are not as fast or strong as you used to be. My 12-year-old granddaughter can easily beat me in a race, and my 7 and 8-year-old grandchildren would give me a good run for my money. I can’t throw or hit or kick a ball as far or as high as I used to. I don’t hear or see or sleep as well.

The Cognitive – I have much more crystallized intelligence but much poorer fluid intelligence. Roughly, crystallized intelligence is the ability to use skills, knowledge, and experience; it is one’s lifetime of intellectual achievement, as demonstrated largely through one’s vocabulary and general knowledge. This improves somewhat with age, as experiences expand one’s knowledge.

Fluid intelligence or fluid reasoning is the capacity to reason and solve novel problems, independent of any knowledge from the past. It is the ability to analyze novel problems, identify patterns and relationships that underpin these problems and the extrapolation of these using logic. Fluid reasoning includes inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning. My fluid intelligence has decreased.

Let me give you an example. When my wife and I watch the TV game show Jeopardy, I realize I have a vast storehouse of knowledge after 70 years. But usually, I can’t answer the questions quickly enough, even when I know the answer. And I often find now that I have trouble accessing words or names that I know well. To take another example, when I taught college classes in my thirties, I had much less background information about my subject but could think quickly in class in a way I couldn’t do in my sixties.

The Psychological – Again, there are many similarities. I have many of the same character flaws—for instance, I’m still obsessive compulsive—but I’m still intellectually curious too. I hate to admit it, but much of our psychological tendencies seem hardwired. Not that we can’t change, but genes and environment wire our brains making drastic change difficult.

Summary -So I have declined intellectually somewhat, physically a lot, and psychologically I haven’t changed all that much. Nothing very profound here.

How You Are Viewed By Younger People – I sense that some younger people see me as old (in a negative way.) No doubt some of this is projection. Still, you become aware that others see you as older than you feel. You may be physically and intellectually vibrant, but your external appearance belies those facts. It is hard to get used to being older than most others you meet daily. But no sour grapes, that’s just (currently) part of the cycle of life and the elixer is to be, to use a cliche, young at heart.

The Real Difference – Life just looks different. You become increasingly aware of your mortality. You can easily imagine your kids and grandkids reading these lines, wondering if you knew the end was getting nearer. And the answer is yes. You know that much of your life is not on the horizon but behind you. Much of the journey is over. This thought fills you with pride in what you’ve achieved and sadness for what can never be. It is a strange thing to be human, and no words effectively communicate what it’s like. Here you are, one consciousness, seemingly destined to vanish. But then again, hopefully, others will take up where we left off and bring about a better future.

The Good News – You worry less about unimportant things like your appearance or what others think about you. (The old joke is that when I was 20, I worried what others thought about me; when I was 50, I quit worrying so much what others thought about me; and when I was 70, I realized nobody was thinking about me anyway.)

Conclusion – How then should we feel about turning 70 or 80 or 90 or 100? Perhaps no one has written more eloquently about growing old than the great philosopher Bertrand Russell in his essay “How To Grow Old.”

The best way to overcome it [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

Do We Naturally Rebel Against Inequality?

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Chris Crawford penned this thoughtful response to my recent post on economic inequality. I reprinted it here unedited.

1. The Economist just published an article about inheritance as a growing factor in the increase in the Gini Index (a measure of inequality).

2. I have long felt that inheritance taxes are an ideal solution to the problem. They work slowly, but are minimally invasive of property rights.

3. Wealth taxes, on the other hand, are all but unworkable. There are just too many ways to store wealth, and too many vagaries in its specification. A strong wealth tax would merely spawn a gigantic new industry for specialists in evading such taxation.

4. The median income of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies is 268 times greater than the median income of their employees. It is argued that CEOs deserve their greater income because they are responsible for billions of dollars of increased valuation of their companies. The flaw in this thinking is that the valuation of companies can increase due to factors outside the control of the CEO. For example, the valuation of Nvidia is $2.8 trillion, but this is due to the success of the computer scientists in developing LLM AI systems, not to anything that Nvidia did.

Moreover, CEOs do not pay stockholders when their companies lose billions of dollars of valuation. If they deserve to be rewarded for their successes, then they deserve to be punished for their failures.

Another argument is that executives work longer, and smarter than their employees. This is true, but the it does not justify the ratio of compensation. No executive works 268 times longer or smarter than their employees. Sure, most executives work longer, but there are only so many hours in a day; given the requirements to eat and sleep, I’d hazard the guess that most executives work at most only twice as long as their employees. And, while executives are often smarter than their employees, nobody has an IQ of 10,000. Executives are grossly overpaid in the US. In many countries, executives are not paid anywhere near as highly as in the US.

5. Will Durant wrote:

“Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and the laws. Despotism may for a time retard the concentration; democracy, allowing the most liberty, accelerates it… In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength in number of the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or revolution redistributing poverty.”

6. Lastly, I offer incontrovertible proof that resentment of unequal treatment is burned right into our genes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg

Living Your Best Life?

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By Martin Butler. (From 3 Quarks Daily; reprinted with permission.)

The expression ‘Live your best life’ is very much in vogue. It appears more than 3 million times in Instagram posts, which are no doubt full of pictures of smiling attractive 20-somethings completing amazing sporting feats, strolling along glorious beaches or doing exciting things in exotic places. Working 12 shifts delivering parcels for Amazon presumably doesn’t make the grade. As with many other inspirational (or is it aspirational) sayings that pepper the internet, perhaps we should dismiss this expression as just part of the froth produced by internet influencers desperate for our attention. But what does its popularity say about our times? Let’s look beyond the predictable healthy lifestyle stuff and try to actually make sense of it as a philosophical idea. After all, if interpreted generously, it does have a certain philosophical pedigree.

To start with, what does best actually mean? It very much depends on how we view human beings. Regarded in a narrowly hedonic way, where the only things that matter are pleasure and pain, our best life would be one where we avoid as much pain and experience as much pleasure as possible. This is implausible for many reasons, one being the conclusion of Nozick’s powerful thought experiment: few would regard their best life as being permanently hooked up to an ‘experience machine’ that eliminated pain and provided you with nothing but delightful pleasure. The passive experience of pleasure would not be enough.

The best life surely requires that we participate in meaningful activities which lead to fulfillment and flourishing, a point which tends to lead to a more individualistic notion. Most people are roughly similar in terms of what they find pleasurable and painful; masochists excepted, human beings tend to find physical injury painful and sweet food pleasant. This is not the case, however, with regards to living a fulfilling life. I personally wouldn’t find a life dedicated to martial arts, rock climbing or running marathons fulfilling, but for many these activities are deeply fulfilling. So is there something distinctively modern about the individualism implicit in living your best life?

Contrast this notion of individual fulfilment with the more traditional notion of living a good life that goes back to Plato and Aristotle. Would living their best life make any sense to a medieval peasant, an Apache warrior, a Viking trader or a 19th century fisher girl? Probably not, at least not in the way that we understand the expression. However, the idea of living a good life according to the particular beliefs or codes embedded within those cultures, probably would make sense. In modern parlance your best life is something specific to you, a distinctive ‘life journey’ that would allow you to find joy and fulfilment but not necessarily others.

Your potential is unique to you, and will only be actualised within a distinctive kind of life tailored to your specific requirements. This is in stark contrast to this more general idea of a good life per se, which would involve living up to certain standards and developing certain qualities which could apply to anyone. Being a good Christian, Jew or Muslim or any other religious believer, a good soldier, a good manager, a good mother etc. involves displaying virtues that are general and apply to whomever happens to inhabit these roles. To a significant extent, the role would define how the person acts rather than, as the radical individualist would have it, the person defining the role

What are we to make of this? One way of understanding this kind of individualism holds that we moderns are different in some fundamental way from people of previous eras, that we, unlike our forbearers who were hamstrung by a set of archaic and now redundant beliefs, now have the potential to escape the pre-existing cultural roles that have been laid down for us. As perfectly autonomous and rational self-contained units with the inner resources to make our own meaningful life, provided we have will power and clarity of thought, we can strike out in any direction we choose and only though choosing our own path is true human fulfilment possible. Although not usually stated in such bald terms, this interpretation is often implicit in much modern debate. Somewhat different versions of it are to be found in the ideal of the ‘sovereign individual’ beloved of libertarians, or at the outer reaches of child-centred education theory.

This approach should be rejected as incoherent simply because there is no reason why we should believe that we are somehow fundamentally different from previous generations. It also labours under the illusion that we can transcend our deeply social nature. Although it may be tempting to think that buried deep down is a more natural self, unsullied by the corrupting influences of culture and society, a child without culture or socialization, far from being a pure untainted being, is simply feral. This faulty conception can lead us to believe that we can make sense of ‘a best life’ quite apart from the social, cultural, political, and economic conditions in which every individual lives. It’s a kind of bootstrap version of a best life, in which anything is possible provided you only have the will to succeed.

It is indeed possible to escape the poverty of the favela or the gang life of the sink estate, but the odds will be massively stacked against you. Advocates of the bootstrap version of a best life often deploy a pernicious logic to those who succeed against the odds, a logic that is very evident on social media. The argument is that if one individual can ‘make it’ then anyone can, and if you don’t it must be because you’re making the wrong choices or not trying hard enough. The absurd conclusion of this seems to be that if everyone in poverty simply tried harder there would be no poverty. Certainly it would be naive to think that some level of material well-being is unnecessary for a best life, but of course it would not be sufficient. We cannot ignore the kind of social and economic structures into which we are born.

Rejecting this view does not mean we must reject completely a more sophisticated kind of individualism that could potentially allow us to give a coherent interpretation to the irritating phrase ‘living your best life’, but we must start by acknowledging the fact that we are all creatures of our times, enmeshed in the culture and practices of the societies in which we live. The life of an Apache warrior, for example, is closed to us simply because that world no longer exists and we cannot recreate the meanings it presupposed from our own inner resources. We should also note that it is of course quite possible that the world we inhabit today with the pre-eminent value its gives to science, technology, and indeed ‘the individual’, will also eventually collapse – or at least change in ways we may not be able to imagine or foresee. There is no reason to regard our era as special.

But from within our own culture, and with the acceptance of the provisos mentioned above, there are some possible ways to make sense of a best life. Take the Heideggerian notion of an authentic (as opposed to an inauthentic) life. This is a big topic, but roughly an inauthentic life is one in which we lose ourselves completely in the average everydayness of our culture. To some degree this is inevitable for everyone. It is a form of life in which we seek distraction and escape though what Heidegger describes as ‘idle talk’, ‘curiosity’ and ‘ambiguity’, a life dominated by what he calls ‘the they’ (das man), or what we might ordinarily call ‘the crowd’. It means we connect to our own heritage superficially, all subtleties are levelled out and only the most obvious contours are recognised.

Authenticity, on the other hand, is a clear-eyed determination to face the reality of our life – for Heidegger it meant facing the angst of human existence. We need to relate this to our own individual circumstance and to survey the options bequeathed by our culture. Steven Mulhall describes this “as seizing ..[our] heritage in a manner which discloses its true lineaments; it means reacting against one’s heritage in order to uncover it properly, reclaiming it.” We should note here that authenticity does not require us to be special or different in any obvious way. A determination to stand out from the crowd is in fact often evidence of being under the spell of ‘the they’ as much as blind conformism. Authenticity is likely to be more about savouring the ordinary rather than chasing novelty.

A best life cannot result from a series of distractions that might only titillate for a time. Travelling the world and having amazing experiences can surely be life-changing, but it is we who do the life changing, not the amazing experiences, which will affect different people in different ways. In any case, it’s not clear from any of this why exactly one would or should prefer to live an authentic life. Authenticity is an achievement, it’s not something you just fall into, and if an inauthentic life is easier, then the argument in favour of authenticity would probably need to have something of the thinking behind Mills claim that “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” The notions of personal fulfilment and authenticity do not completely coincide but there must surely be some common ground. Authenticity is about truth, honesty and seriousness, and it is surely difficult to conceive of a genuinely fulfilling life as one based on illusion and superficiality. Certainly, easy satisfaction is not necessarily the hallmark of a fulfilled human being. One reason we tend to be repelled by Nozick’s experience machine is surely that the experiences it provides cannot be regarded as genuine. What is illusory and superficial is, of course, not always obvious, and ultimately has to be a matter of judgment.

The Heideggerian picture of authenticity does not consider the importance of role models. If we admire other human beings whose lives demonstrate authenticity it becomes obvious why we might prefer to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. An impressive human being we encounter in the flesh (or even one we read about) will influence us more than a philosophical tract on how to live a good life, even though it may be difficult to put our finger on exactly why we do find them impressive. A human being cannot be reduced to a series of prescriptions or rules. The Aristotelian ideal of the phronimos is surely helpful here. The phronimos is someone who has practical wisdom, someone who can successfully navigate a path through life by good habits and good judgement and act as an exemplar to others. Ideally this will be our parents, but of course this is certainly not always the case. This sounds like the opposite of individualism. Surely the key premise of living your best life is that it is your life, not the life of an exemplar no matter how impressive.

But this only works as an argument if we adopt the crude bootstrap form of individualism with its claim that we can become a fully formed human being entirely from our own inner resources, denying the role of a cultural heritage, or regarding it wholly in negative terms. We might attempt to mechanically copy our role models as children, but as we mature we will become unique individuals while nevertheless absorbing many features of those we look up to. This can be a self-conscious process and also something that occurs naturally and unconsciously. And as Steven Mulhall suggests, the best way to connect to our heritage is through a kind of critical reflection from within it. It can never be a mechanical reproduction of what went before, since circumstances change. We need to respond to the changed circumstance, both individually and societally, with what we have learnt from the ‘true lineaments’ of our heritage. Judgement after all is all about dealing with unique circumstances without recourse to a set of fixed rules. This is what must carry a culture forward. There is no formal articulation of what exactly it is that continues, but we recognise it when we see it, and we must also recognise that sometimes what continues is an awful caricature rather than the true lineaments of a heritage. Cultures, like individuals, can go wrong.

At an individual level at least, what we can learn from this is that a best life is probably something we need to work at, and is unlikely to be easy or happen overnight. Living authentically, being able to cope well with the world around us, can only be achieved with practice, care and a certain sensitivity. And here we don’t just have in mind practical tasks, but judgements concerning the emotional, social and intellectual aspects of our lives. We might think that we have drifted away from any form of individualism but that is not the case. In any meaningful sense, individuality can never be a kind of Tower of Babel of mutually incomprehensible voices all doing their own thing. It has to be more like variations on a theme; unity within diversity. This I think is how we must understand our best life.

 Mulhall, S. 1996 Heidegger and Being and Time, Routledge, London , p170

Does Wealth Inequality Matter?

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By Martin Butler. (From 3 Quarks Daily; reprinted with permission.)

In the UK and USA the gap between the richest and poorest ten percent continues to grow. Few would argue that inequality resulting from racism, sexism, disablism or any other sort of prejudice is morally acceptable. Wealth inequality, however, being a matter of degree, is far less straightforward. The familiar nightmare vision of totalitarian ‘communism’ hangs over the idea that everyone should have exactly the same level of wealth.  Most accept that some level of wealth inequality is a positive good, in that it incentivises effort and excellence. But if we agree that wealth inequality pe se is not necessarily wrong, at what point does it become unacceptable? And why would going beyond this point be unacceptable?

Many would argue that equal opportunities are what matter. We can imagine a society with excellent equal opportunities that nevertheless has significant levels of wealth inequality. And we assume here that all wealth is acquired legally though legitimate means. A society with excellent equal opportunities would be one where the basics – education, healthcare, housing, a living wage and so on – were readily available right across the board so that the young of the poorest in society would start life not necessarily on a level playing field, but at least on one that was not hopelessly skewed against them. Of course family influences are crucial but these are always going to vary, so perfect equal opportunities – like perfect anything – is for the birds. Once off the starting blocks, those from the poorest background in such a society would have a similar (or at least not too dissimilar) chance to succeed as those from higher wealth groups. No matter what their background, those who failed to take the opportunities on offer, or chose not to take them, would be likely to fall into the lower wealth brackets. There would still be significant wealth inequality but this would result from individual effort and talent or the lack of it, which would mean high levels of upward and downward social mobility. Implicit in the vision of modern liberal democracies is the ideal of meritocracy, allowing for wealth inequality due to differences in talent and effort but finding inequality based on prejudice and discrimination morally abhorrent.

What’s wrong with this vision? One problem is the fact that in most liberal democracies, though upward mobility is not unusual – despite the fact that in recent years it has declined considerably – downward mobility is far less common. This is in terms of wealth rather than income, and the reason for this is inheritance. Societies, despite the move towards individualism, are in the main composed of families. Every individual has a mother and a father who will usually pass on any accumulated wealth to their offspring. This exposes one of the contradictions in the values of the liberal world view. On the one hand we fully endorse equal opportunities, but on the other we regard it as natural that we have a right to hand on accumulated wealth to our offspring. Inheritance taxes are unpopular because they seem to undermine this right. But a society where inherited wealth plays an increasing role in wealth inequality is a society where opportunities are less equal. Inherited wealth – or simply having well-off parents – increases an individual’s opportunities in all sorts of obvious ways that are unrelated to the merits of the offspring who receive these benefits. Inheritance works directly against meritocracy.

Another problem is that, in modern societies at least, wealth inequality is not static. Even if we accept that some level (perhaps even a high level) of wealth inequality is acceptable, there will still be a natural tendency for this inequality to go on increasing. And it’s not clear where this ends. There are at least two mechanisms whereby this occurs, both centring on the fact that wealth in modern societies is about the ownership of assets (property, shares, precious metals etc) rather than money in the bank. First, if asset prices increase at a faster pace than wages, which has been the case over the last decade at least, owning becomes a better bet than working. The more assets you own the greater your increase in wealth relative to those who own few or no assets. Second, those who own many assets earn large passive incomes in the form of dividends, rents, or profits, much of which may well be above what is required for ordinary living, or even for a luxurious life style. What happens to this passive income? It is used to buy further assets which will increase the passive income of the wealthy still further. This in turn buys more assets and on and on, the knock-on effect of which increases the price of these assets, effectively putting them well out of the reach of so many. This is what’s happened with housing, certainly in the UK. If you’re on the property ladder you will inevitably pull ahead. If not, good luck even getting your toe on the bottom rung.

Perhaps we can still accept the consequences of inheritance and the mechanisms whereby wealth inequality continues to widen, provided we stick to the key premise of our hypothetical meritocratic equal opportunities society. That is, that those at the bottom have ‘the basics’ and can still live a minimally acceptable life according to the norms of society.  Does it then really matter if some eat caviar and spend their time on expensive yachts? Poverty in any useful sense of the word must be understood in relation to the culture of a society. A rich person in medieval England lacked running water, a flushing toilet, etc., any meaningful notion of poverty is necessarily relative. So provided those at the bottom are not in poverty in terms of their own cultural expectations, what’s the problem?

There’s a political problem here that cannot be ignored. The continual accumulation of assets brings power, which can take control of large portfolios of property, shares, or the ownership of media interests – a particular problem we face today. Widely distributed ownership seems in keeping with the values that liberal democracies at least purport to espouse – the Adam Smith vision of small capitalists trading with each other to their mutual advantage. Anti-democratic monopoly power, however, seems to develop quickly, and governments struggle to keep this tendency at bay, particularly when ownership brings political influence. Unrestricted wealth inequality presents an almost irresistible tendency towards oligarchy.

Another major problem stems from the number of ways in which extreme wealth inequality can threaten the coherence of society. Without mechanisms to counter the continually widening gap (such as a serious wealth tax), a number of negative consequences follow, the most obvious one being that the rest of society becomes poorer. You might argue against this that wealth is not a zero-sum concept. In other words, just because one group is getting richer its doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest of society is getting poorer. If the size of the cake increases it may well be the case that everyone gets a larger slice. Economic growth is the perennial solution that governments obsessively adopt to solve the problem of wealth flowing upwards. Continual economic growth, however, is not a given (or even desirable), and when it stalls or is weak, as has recently been the case in the UK, it’s those at the bottom who suffer.

This point connects to a more general one. As their affluence continues to increase, those at the top of the tree become more disconnected from the rest of society. Even though wealth can only be produced within a society, with its laws, institutions, education system and so on, enormous quantities of wealth accumulated at the top float free from the jurisdiction of any particular society, often avoiding any serious taxation – through tax heavens for example – which in turn impoverishes governments. This in turn means that the basics can no longer be adequately provided. Those at the bottom find it more of a struggle to maintain the minimally acceptable norm, particularly if governments do nothing to counteract the upward flow of wealth.

There’s a social dimension to this disconnect too. It’s not enough for members of a society to formally belong in the sense that they have the appropriate passport. There has to be a deeper sense of belonging, otherwise society is simply a collection of individuals who happen to live on the same patch of land. This belonging is enhanced by day-to-day connection with other members of society. If the super-rich go to different schools, use different healthcare facilities, shop in different shops and so on, they become a group apart. The idea that they ought to contribute to the society from which their wealth emanates begins to dissolve, and the rest of us, including governments, can easily go along with this illusion. We come to think of the wealthy and their wealth as having no ties or obligations to any particular society. Part of the problem here is the pre-eminence of the concept of ‘rights’ within our moral vocabulary. Ownership rights come to be seen as unconditional and quite separate from the social group from which they originate. The very notion of tax assumes a sense of belonging to a society to which obligations are owed, but if ownership rights are seen as unconditional paying tax becomes almost optional, as in fact is often the case. But this is misguided. As Simone Weil points out: “The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former.” The tendency towards cultural atomism that has developed in many areas of modern life, facilitated by the language of rights, leads to the illusion that belonging to society is an option we can choose to forgo. This very much plays into the hands of the super-rich.

Far too often success is measured in terms of wealth acquisition. Even when we think of equal opportunities, we have in the back of our mind the opportunity to acquire wealth. Indeed, this can become almost an addiction – the wealthy don’t seem to lose the desire to acquire even more. We shouldn’t be too judgmental about this, since in a society where wealth means security and a degree of freedom it’s completely understandable. That’s why I think the way out of this is to de-commodify at least those aspects of life that allow for a basic but secure existence. A life that meets at least ‘minimally acceptable’ standards should not be such a financial struggle to maintain, particularly in supposedly rich industrial countries. To ‘de-commodify’ something does not necessarily mean removing effort and commitment, it just means removing it from the realm of money and exchange, allowing a culture to develop where wealth acquisition is not central to everything we do. It would produce a stronger sense of belonging, essential to any sustainable society. Such a society cannot realistically be one where wealth inequality is completely unchecked.

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 Many ideas here were taken from: Piketty, T., & Sandel, M., 2025, Equality: What It Means and Why it Matters, Polity Press, Cambridge.

 In the UK 60% of private wealth is inherited. Way more than in many other western countries. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/to-tackle-wealth-inequality-reform-inheritance-tax/#:~:text=The%20share%20of%20inherited%20wealth,such%20as%20France%20or%20Germany

 93% of all U.S. stocks are held by the wealthiest 10% of Americans, with the top 1% controlling 50% of stock market wealth. The bottom half of the country hold just 1% of the market.

 Weil, S. 2023 (first pub. 1252) The Need for Roots, Penguin Classics, London, p3.