Tyler ’s Comments (group member since May 09, 2008)

Tyler ’s comments from the Philosophy group.

Several posters are confused by this. I've noticed numbers next to many foreign cities, and where people put their birthdays in, the word "age" pops up automatically on that same top line. The information on the profile's top line isn't clear.

I believe the 11 in Mina's profile is a district of Cairo.

I read about four books a month, but it depends on how much free time I have. I find philosophy books much slower reading than other kinds because they force you to think closely about what you're reading.

Hi CK --

It's inevitable that society will impose its values on the young, including whatever random preoccupations exist in any particular place. Anything not included in these preoccupations is implicitly not worth thinking about.

To get out of that bubble, encouraging intellectual curiosity is one step. But after that, I think it's important for young people to learn to ask questions and question things they encounter. A healthy degree of skepticism in an adult is a good way to get beyond childhood conditioning develop what free will one does have.

Hi CK --

I agree that free will does exist in some form. But as you say, our situation places real limits on it. I would add, too, that society conditions our psychological makeup when we're young, and this can have the effect of limiting our freedom by limiting what's acceptable or worthwhile to think about.

Hi Mina --

may you help me about finding a book about egyption philosophy

I'm guessing you're interested in something to do with political philosophy.

A book I can recommend is Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey. One chapter in this book covers developments in the intellectual life of Egypt up until the 1990's, and it contains a lot about the development of political philosophy in Egypt. It explains aspects of philosophical and intellectual trends in the Arab world that have contributed to the recent revolutions.

If the next parliament writes a new constitution, you might want to read On Liberty, a famous work of political philosophy. It is short, less than 200 pages, and relevant to the immediate situation in Egypt.

Much of Egypt's post-colonial philosophy is French in origin. Naguib Mahfouz's novels are an example of the philosophy of existentialism in Egyptian literature.

Hi Everyman --

Msg 392 But taking the principle of the firefighting example ..."

After reading your response I realized this wasn't as good an example as I first thought. Setting aside the utiltarian aspects, the standards of firefighting themselves are actually a non-moral good. As a result, the example doesn't really address the original question about the meaning of disinterest.

Let me answer that this way: When I use the term "disinterested" in defining the public good, I mean impartiality or absence of bias in acts of government. A better example here is the legal principle that all citizens are equal before the law, which means judges must apply a law equally to each citizen.

By defining the public good as disinterested, I'm referring only to the way the government carries out its policies. Disinterest is a universal quality, like the idea of good, and we as thinkers have to decide what particular principles or acts are examples of it.

Whether the policies by which the government acts are fair or good is a separate question, and this relates to the discussion of slavery. But that I'd like to put that off for another post when I have more time.

Hi Everyman --

Slavery was very much in the public interest of the Southern states.

I disagree. Slaves were the private property of a landowning class. The benefits of slavery went to that class, the curses of it to everyone else, including the slaves.

The only way I can see to argue that it was in the public interest is from a utilitarian standpoint, but I disagree with using utilitarianism as the basis for a social contract in the first place.

What is your definition of a disinterested act, and what are some examples of true disinterested government acts?

I think you're confusing the unequal distribution of benefits of a government action with the action itself. Disinterest applies to the government's justification for acting. We know that any government act will benefit someone and cost someone else, but we don't get rid of the institution for that reason. The point of living in a society should be that the greater benefit of belonging to it outweighs the particular costs to us.

The firefighting example illustrates the point. If a fire breaks out, there is presumably a best way to fight it. Let's say this entails a fire line that means tearing down all houses in its path. If the firefighters follow the objective rules of firefighting, fine. They are acting in a disinterested manner for the public good.

But if they avoid tearing down some of the houses because the owners of those houses complain to the mayor, then the public good, public safety in this case, has been sacrificed to the private interests of particular citizens. That means that the people whose houses were torn down and the people whose houses are at risk are, as citizens, unequal to the people who successfully interfered with the objective process of firefighting.

Hi Bill --

What other kind of equality do you think the writers could have been talking about?

I'm not trying to distinguish different versions of the concept of equality. I am contrasting the concept with the poplular notion that men are manifestly unequal.

Hi Everyman --

Post 374: suppose that the citizens and courts agree that an action is good; does that make it so? After all, the majority of citizens throughout much of the country, and certainly the courts prior to the Civil War, approved of slavery and would have said that it met the requirements of a public good.

Does majority opinion determine what constitutes a disinterested act by the government? No. Disinterest has to be part of a social contract.

The idea that all men are created equal is in the Declaration of Independence, and the Contitution reflects an effort to safeguard that principle and guarantee that the government acts in a disinterested manner -- for the public good, that is.

Pragmatism intervened because the "thumb on the scale" Adam Smith mentions inserted itself into the writing of the Constitution. Slavery was in the interest of a private group, not the public interest -- we can all see that -- and it took a war to wring that private interest out of the Constitution.

The fact is that what the DOI says about all men being equal has been a hotly disputed point to this day, though one wouldn't expect it to be. Side by side with that idea is another, that men are manifestly unequal and that government based on equality is bound to fail. It's that competing idea of the status of individuals that lent moral support to the institution of slavery, plus a host of other evils we're all well acquainted with.

The two competing ideas are at war with one another even today. Here's the problem: Slavery was a legal institution, but it is hard to say where exactly a legal right or obligation comes from, even in obvious cases.

To my mind, the law and the Constitution must have a moral basis of some kind, a social contract by which individuals hold society to moral law. Moral reasoning, for its part, has to be disinterested reasoning -- otherwise it doesn't count as moral in the first place.

Moral reasoning is difficult, uncertain, but fascinating to us who think about how best to protect the individual in society. So it's at the level of moral reasoning, specifically about the social contract, that we can determine what the limits to personal freedom might mean.

So I think you're right about moral concepts, especially the concept of "good." There are many ideas about this, but I think, at the very least, that there cannot be an explanation of what's good that doesn't include another moral concept, that of justice. The two are intertwined.

The example of fire that you give raises the question of priority. I think there is a public good, the general safety, that trumps the private good of the individuals whose houses are burned. But for this to be a morally good act, we have to be able to say that the fire department acted in a disinterested manner in its selection of which private houses would have to go. The only reference point by which the firefighters could establish that objectivity is the public good. Unless they can do that, they didn't act morally, and that means they shouldn't have been able to act legally either.

Hi Everyman --

Here's a question for you, Tyler. Under your use of the term, is everything that a government does by definition for the public good?

No. Not everything a government does is for the public good. I don't mean to bring in the concept of "good" at this point. My point is to establish a distinction between a sphere of shared disinterested action from one of private association.


...how does one know which things that a government does are for the public good and which are not?

That's a good question. Even if the government acts in a disinterested or impartial manner, that doesn't mean what it does is right. So now what needs to be decided is what distinguishes a right, or just act, from a wrong one. At this point, the question of what the good is becomes relevant. The judge of whether the government's actions are good is not up to the government. It is up to the citizens and courts to decide, hopefully on the basis of an implied or explicit social contract.


I think the examples you give of Carnegie and the Salvation Army are public goods as long as they are disinterested acts. They may or may not be. The problem with private associations is that non-members have no say in their policies, whereas every citizen has has an unalienable moral claim on the government equal to that of any other citizen.

Hi Rhonda --

The term "objective reality" condensed a question I had raised earlier about whether there exists a reality independent of the many subjective impressions of it.


The greater issue is, of course, that according to a well known theorem of logic, one cannot prove that a finite number of statements of a closed system are true without having access to truths outside that system.

We can't have a series of regressing proofs, I agree, if I'm understanding this point. So a question I posed was whether reality, defined as whatever is, could be treated as and axiom instead of a fact standing in need of proof.

Hi Robert --

That is because, on a pragmatic level, we share sufficient understanding of the concepts "reason" and "five" to communicate successfully.///Our discussions are necessarily subjective because the access to reality is always through the door of our own experience.

What's the difference between understanding the concept of "five" objectively and understanding it pragmatically?

If we lack objectivity, doesn't that mean we can't establish a factual basis for the concept of "five"? I'm not sure how a pragmatic approach would suffice to establish concepts that we apparently agree on.

Hi Patrice --

Didn't Madison consider this in Federalist 10? That factions will develop and they will compete and the end result will be the best government for the country? I think he was realistic.

These interest groups Madison had in mind developed against the backdrop of a Bill of Rights, which is the part of the Constitution that builds in our individual rights in advance. I agree that it was realistic to expect these groups to pop up, but the individual still could count on the disinterested protection of the law. What I wonder is whether modern interest groups have become so powerful that they can render the Bill of Rights meaningless.

Hi Duffy --

It's best not to try to describe all of reality.

Shouldn't we try?

As I understand it, an axiom is something we take to be true in order to build a logical system.

But we do take reality to be true. We draw conclusions about the natural world inductively from observation. I'm wondering if we could also look at it deductively as well. If we could, can we eliminate either the inductive or the deductive category from our reasoning and thus simplify it?

I think its perfectly possible to do epistemology, for example, without resorting to metaphysics. Even simpler, I think its trivial to do some logic or set theory without raising any ontological question.

I agree that we don't need ontology to talk about mathematics, but if epistemology has to do with how we come to know what we know, doesn't that entail that there has to be something to know about?

Metaphysics has led to more nonsense than any other branch of philosophy. Thus, I believe it has been done badly.

About that I agree. If we accept that there is a reality in the first place, then trying to reach beyond it or overexplain it doesn't give much additional information and risks nonsensical detours.

Why wouldn't we have access to a objective reality? It seems sense perception is how that occurs quite naturally.

I'm not denying the existence of a 'public good' or that it shouldn't be a consideration in governing. I just disagree that it is the primary consideration.

I'm not saying the public good is a moral basis for society, but rather that it is the only means by which such a basis can be established. If individual rights, or liberties, or equal justice, or whatever, is to have priority over other principles, then it is only through a concept of a public good that that priority can be enforced.

I do not believe that equality means equal outcomes for each person. On the other hand, the more pronounced inequality becomes, the greater the chance is that the private interests of those who in the best off position will render meaningless the equal rights, liberties, and access to justice of those in worse off positions.


Of course you may doubt the sincerity or the rationality of these atrocities committed for the public good. Unfortunately, I think you'd be wrong. According to the Taliban, 'rationality' means adherence to their interpretation of Islam.

The Taliban are not rational because modern Islam doesn't even admit of rational principles in the first place, regarding them as Western imports. They're certainly not disinterested in the way they govern, either, because a private association, Islam, is the basis of their government.

The public good is a meaningless phrase in and of itself. There is very little, if any, objective agreement on what constitutes the public good.

The public good is an uncontroversial concept. It refers to disinterested action on behalf of society as a whole. In particular, it contrasts with the notion of private association. The only entity in society capable of acting for the public good is the government.

It may be debateable whether a particular act of the government works for the public or private benefit, but that there is a public good in the first place is beyond dispute.

It might be said that all acts are irrational, hence there is no such thing as a disinterested act. But to argue that people cannot think rationally about what's in their interest is a doubtful proposition. Moreover, if that were the case it would be, by the same token, impossible to determine any private interest.

People who think rationally can and do reach agreement as to what contitutes the public good.

Afghanistan is a perfect example of what happens when the concept of a public good is missing from a society. No warlord in the country rules on a disinterested basis. The enforcement of Islamic principles on the public is not a disinterested act; it's an example of state run for a private association, Islam.

The motivation for denying the concept of a public good is the idea that equal liberty cannot be given to people who are manifestly unequal. The alternative to democracy, so the reasoning goes, is some form of corporatism, which means the mediation of group interests. That's because only a democracy governed by an explicit social contract can guarantee individual rights. If you take power from the state, you don't return it to individuals; you merely transfer it to private associations that will act only for the private interests of their members.

Thanks Brian. Here's a link to the book:

Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

I've also added it to the "currently reading" section so more members can see it.

Hi Glen --

If I'm correct, no doctor or pharmacist in the United States will agree to assist in an execution, and this is the source of the problem with lethal injection.

We really do have to have trained executioners in this country, because the personnel who carry out lethal injections now botch what they're doing over and over again.

Now, on top of that, the company making one of the chemicals used in lethal injections has ceased production to avoid having that chemical used in this way. It may be the end of lethal injection as a means of execution.