Paul P. Mealing

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Sunday 18 August 2013

Moral relativism – a much abused and misconstrued term

The latest issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 97; July/August 2013) has as its theme ‘The Self’ but there are a couple of articles that touch on ethics and morality, including one that looks at moral relativism (Julien Beillard, pp. 23-4). In a nutshell, Beillard claims that moral relativism is ‘unintelligible’, because, to the moral relativist, all moral stances are equally true and equally false, which is patently ‘absurd’. I know it’s unfair to reduce a 2 page argument to a one-liner, but it’s not the direction I wish to take, albeit I think he has a point.

In another article, Joel Marks (p.52) expounds on 3 books he’s written on the subject of Ethics without Morals (one of the titles) without actually arguing his case, so I can’t comment, let alone analyse his position, without reading at least one of them. The reason I raise it at all is because he briefly discusses the idea of ‘morality [being] independent of religion’. Marks calls himself an ‘amoralist’, but again, this is not the direction I wish to take.

Moral relativism is one of the most abused terms one finds on blogs like mine, especially by religious fundamentalists. It’s a reflex action for many of them when faced with an atheist or a non-theist. (I make the distinction, because non-theists don’t particularly care, whereas atheists tend to take a much harder stance towards religion in general.) The point is that fundamentalists take immediate refuge in the belief that all atheists must be moral relativists, which is just nonsense. To paraphrase Marks (out of context) they believe that ‘secular moralists …are on much less secure ground than traditional theism, because it purports to issue commands… without a commander (God).’ (parentheses in the original.)

The point I’d make, in response to this, is that people project their morality onto their God rather than the other way round. For example, homophobes have a homophobic God, and they will find the relevant text to support this view, disregarding the obvious point that the text was written by a human, just as mortal as themselves. Others of the same faith, but a different disposition towards homosexuality, will find relevant texts to support the exact opposite point of view. This was recently demonstrated on this TV panel discussion, involving opposing theologians from the Catholic Church, Judaism and Islam (some were audience members and one was video-linked from California). And one has to ask the obvious question, given the context of this discussion: is this moral relativism in action?

The point is that most moral attitudes and beliefs are cultural, and that includes all the religious ones as well. And like all cultural phenomena, morality evolves, so what was taboo generations ago, can become the social norm, and gay marriage is a good example of a social norm in transition. It also highlights the point that conservative voices like to keep the status quo (some even want to turn the clock back) while radical voices tend to advocate change, which we all recognise, politically, as being right and left. But over generations the radical becomes the status quo, and eventually conservatives defend what was once considered radical, which is how morality evolves.

I would argue that no one ever practices moral relativism – I’ve never met one and I never expect to. Why? Because everyone has a moral stance on virtually every moral question. In effect, this is exactly the point that Beillard makes, albeit in a more roundabout way. The real question is where do they get that stance? For conservatives, the answer is tradition and often religion. But there are liberal theologians as well, so religion is very flexible, completely dependent on the subjective perspective of its adherents. In a secular pluralist society, like the one I live in, there are many diverse moral views (on topics like gay marriage) as the abovementioned TV discussion demonstrates. Abortion is another example that can be delineated pretty much between conservatives and liberals. Are these examples of moral relativism? No, they are examples of diverse cultural norms and topics of debate, as they should be. Some of these issues are decided, for the society as a whole, in Parliaments, where democratically elected members can discuss and argue, sometimes being allowed a conscience vote. In other words, they don’t have to follow party lines. Gay marriage is an issue that should be allowed a conscience vote, though one conservative party, in our country, still refuses. As Penny Wong, a gay member of parliament and a mother, says in the above debate: the issue will only be resolved when both major parties allow a conscience vote. This is democracy in action.

So moral relativism has to be looked at in the context of an evolving culture where mores of the past, like abolition and women’s right to vote, have become the accepted norm, even for conservatives. The same will eventually occur for gay marriage, as we are seeing the transition occurring all over the world. There really is no such thing as moral relativism, except as a catch-phrase for religious conservatives to attempt to sideline their philosophical opponents. No one is a moral relativist for as long as they hold a philosophical position on a moral issue, and that includes most of us.

Addendum: This is Penny Wong's speech to parliament that effectively demonstrates the evolvement of social norms. It says a lot about Australian politics that she's effectively talking to an empty chamber.


Monday 29 July 2013

Why the economic growth paradigm is past its use-by date

Last week’s New Scientist (20 July 2013, pp.42-5) had an intriguing article on the relationship between demographics and economic health in various countries. It’s not the first time that they’ve featured this little known aspect of political and economic interaction, but this article was better than the previous one, because the interactions they describe are more obviously perceived. Basically, the median age of a country is a determining factor in that country’s economic future.

Economic growth is related to burgeoning population growth, which led to the so-called 'Asian Tigers' in the 1980s and the huge spurt in post-war economic growth in Western countries, as well as Japan. Many of these countries, like Japan and much of Europe, are now economically stagnant due to ageing populations, so you can see the relationship between median age and economic growth. The author, Fred Pearce, claims that even China’s against-the-trend growth will be stymied by their ‘one child’ policy in coming generations.

But stability is also an issue and ageing populations are more politically stable, whereas youthful countries trying to embrace democracy (like Egypt and Afghanistan) are struggling and unlikely to succeed in the near future.

Countries like the US, Canada and Australia depend on immigration to maintain economic growth. In Australia, it is ridiculous that our economic health is always gauged by new home construction, which is obviously dependent on sustained population growth (only yesterday, the flag went up that housing had slumped therefore we were in trouble). It’s ridiculous because ‘sustained population growth’ has limits, and those limits are beginning to be experienced in many Western countries, especially Europe.

The problem, which is readily understood in this context, is that economic growth is married to a youthful burgeoning population without limits, which obviously can’t be sustained indefinitely. Yet all our so-called ‘future’ policies ignore this fact of nature. It’s ironic that conservative politics are determined to keep everything the same, yet it’s these very policies that will create the greatest change the planet has ever seen, and not necessarily for the better.

Friday 19 July 2013

Writing’s 3 Essential Skills

I’ve written on this topic before and even given classes in it, as well as talks, but this is a slightly different approach. Basically, I’m looking at the fundamental skills one has to acquire or develop in order to write fiction, as opposed to non-fiction. In a nutshell, they are the ability to create character, the ability to create emotions and the ability to create narrative tension. None of these are required for ordinary writing but they are all requisite skills for fiction. I’ll address them in reverse order.

Some people may prefer the term ‘narrative drive’ to ‘narrative tension’ but the word tension is more appropriate in my view. Tension is antithetical to resolution and has a comparable role in music which is less obvious. Narrative tension can be manifest in many forms, but it’s essential to fiction because it’s what motivates the reader to turn the page. A novel without narrative tension won’t be read. You can have tension between characters, in many forms: sexual, familial, or between colleagues or between protagonist and antagonist. Tension can be created by jeopardy, which is suspense, or by anticipation or by knowledge semi-revealed. In a word, this is called drama. And, of course, all these forms can be combined to occur in parallel or in series, and have different spans over the duration of the story. Tension requires resolution and the resolution is no less important a skill than the tension itself. Ideally, you want tension in some form on every page.

Emotion is what art is all about, and the greatest exemplar is music. Music is arguably the purest art form because music is the most emotive of art forms. No where is this more apparent than in cinema, where it is employed so successfully that the audience, for the most part, is unaware of its presence, yet it manipulates you emotionally as much as anything on the screen. In novels, the writer doesn’t have access to this medium, yet he or she is equally adept at manipulating emotions. And, once again, this is an essential skill, otherwise the reader will find the story lifeless. Novels can make you laugh, make you cry, make you horny, make you scared and make you excited, sometimes all in the same book.

Normally, I start any discussion on writing with character, because it is the most essential skill of all. I can’t tell you how to create characters – it’s one of those skills that comes with practice – I only know that I do it without thinking about it too much. For me, when I’m writing, the characters take on a life of their own, and if they don’t, I know I’m wasting my time. But there is one thing I’ll say about characters, based on other reading I’ve done, and that is if I’m not sympathetic to the protagonist(s) I find the story an ordeal. If the protagonist is depressed, I get depressed; if the protagonist is an angry young man, I find myself avoiding his company; if the protagonist is a pretentious prat, I find myself wishing they’d have an accident. It’s a very skilled writer who can engage you with uninviting characters, and I’m not one of them.

There is a link between character and emotion, because the character is the channel through which you feel emotion. A story is told through its characters, including description and exposition. If you want to describe something or explain something do it through the characters' senses and introspection.

Finally, why is crime the most popular form of fiction? Because crime often involves a mystery or a puzzle and invariably involves suspense, which is a guaranteed form of narrative tension. The best crime fiction (for example, Scandinavian) involves psychologically authentic characters, and that will always separate good fiction from mediocre. We like complex drawn characters, because they feel like people we know, and their evolvement is one of the reasons we return to the page.

Saturday 13 July 2013

Malala Day


A 16 year old girl, shot by the Taliban for going to school, stands defiant and delivers an impassioned and inspirational speech to the United Nations General Assembly. This girl not only represents the face of feminism in Islam but represents the future of women all over the world. Education is the key to humanity's future and, as the Dalai Lama once said, ignorance is one of the major poisons of the mind. Ignorance is the enemy of the 21st Century. May this day go down in history as the representation of a young girl's courage and determination to forge her own future in a society where the idea is condemned.

Tuesday 25 June 2013

Fruits of Corporate Greed


A couple of years ago I wrote a post about global feudalism, but it’s much worse than I thought.

This eye-opening programme is shameful. As Kerry O’Brien says at the end: out of sight, out of mind. This is the so-called level playing field in action. Jobs going overseas because the labour is cheaper. Actually it’s jobs going overseas because it’s virtually slave labour - I’m talking literally not figuratively.

But more revelatory than anything else is that there is no code of ethics for these companies unless it is forced upon them. They really don’t care if the workers, who actually create the products they sell, die or are injured or are abused. When things go wrong they do their best to avoid accountability, and, like all criminals, only own up when incontrovertible evidence is produced.

Algebra - the language of mathematics


I know I’m doing things back-to-front – arse-about - as we say in Oz (and possibly elsewhere) but, considering all the esoteric mathematics I produce on this blog, I thought I should try and explain some basics.

As I mentioned earlier this year in a post on ‘analogy’, mathematics is a cumulative endeavour and you can’t understand calculus, for example, if you don’t know algebra. I’ve come across more than a few highly intelligent people, of both sexes, who struggle with maths (or math as Americans call it) and the sight of an equation stops them in their tracks.

Mathematics is one of those topics where the gap, between what you are expected to know and what you actually learn, can grow as you progress through school, mainly because you were stumped by algebra. You know: the day you were suddenly faced with numbers being replaced by letters; and things like counting, adding, subtracting, dividing, multiplying, fractions and even decimals suddenly seemed irrelevant. In other words, everything you’d learned about mathematics, which was firmly grounded in numbers – something you’d learned almost as soon as you could talk – suddenly seemed useless. Even Carl Jung, according to his autobiography, stopped understanding maths the day he had to deal with ‘x’. In fact, his wife, Emma, had a better understanding of physics than Jung did.

But for those who jump this hurdle, seemingly effortlessly, ‘x’ is a liberator in the same way that the imaginary number i is perceived by those who appreciate its multi-purposefulness. In both cases, we can do a lot more than we could before, and that is why algebra is a stepping-stone to higher mathematics.

Fundamentally, mathematics is not so much about numbers as the relationship between numbers, and algebra allows us to see the relationships without the numbers, and that’s the conceptual hurdle one has to overcome.

I’ll give a very simple example that everyone should know: Pythagoras’s triangle.

I don’t even have to draw it, I only have to state it: a2 + b2 = c2; and you should know what I’m talking about. But a picture is worth innumerable words.

The point is that we can use actual integers, called Pythagorean triples, that obey this relationship; the smallest being 52 = 42 + 32. Do the math as you Americans like to say.

But the truth is that this relationship applies to all Pythagorean triangles, irrespective of their size, length of sides and units of measurement. The only criteria being that the triangle is ‘flat’, or Euclidean (is not on a curved surface) and contains one right angle (90o).

By using letters, we have stated a mathematical truth, a universal law that applies right across the universe. Pythagoras’s triangle was discovered well before Pythagoras (circa 500BC) by the Egyptians, Babylonians and the Chinese, and possibly other cultures as well.

Most of the mathematics, that I do, involves the manipulation of algebraic equations, including a lot of the stuff I describe on this blog. If you know how to manipulate equations, you can do a lot of mathematics, but if you don’t, you can’t do any.

A lot of people are taught BIDMAS, which gives the priority of working out an equation: Brackets, Indices, Division, Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction. To be honest, I’ve never come across a mathematician who uses it.

On the other hand, a lot of maths books talk about the commutative law, the associative law and the distributive law as the fundaments of algebra.

There is a commutative law for addition and a commutative law for multiplication, which are both simple and basic.

A + B = B + A  and  A x B = B x A (that’s it)

Obviously there is no commutative law for subtraction or division.

A – B B – A  and  A/B B/A (pretty obvious)

There are some areas of mathematics where this rule doesn’t apply, like matrices, but we won’t go there.

The associative law also applies to addition and multiplication.

So A + (B + C) = (A + B) + C  and  A x (B x C) = (A x B) x C

It effectively says that it doesn’t matter what order you perform these operations you’ll get the same result, and, obviously, you can extend this to any length of numbers, because any addition or multiplication creates a new number that can then be added or multiplied to any other number or string of numbers.

But the most important rule to understand is the distributive law because it combines addition and multiplication and can be extended to include subtraction and division (if you know what you're doing). The distributive law lies at the heart of algebra.

A(B + C) = AB + AC  and  A(B + C) ≠ AB + C (where AB = A x B)

And this is where brackets come in under BIDMAS. In other words, if you do what’s in the brackets first you’ll be okay. But you can also eliminate the brackets and get the same answer if you follow the distributive rule.

But we can extend this: 1/A(B - C) = B/A - C/A (where B/A = B ÷ A)

And  -A(B – C) = CA – BA  because (-1)2 = 1, so a minus times a minus equals a plus.

If 1/A(B + C) = B/A + C/A then (B + C)/A = B/A + C/A

And  A/C + B/D = (DA + BC)/DC

To appreciate this do the converse:

(DA + BC)/DC = DA/DC + BC/DC = A/C + B/D

But the most important technique one can learn is how to change the subject of an equation. If we go back to Pythagoras’s equation:

a2 + b2 = c2  what’s b = ?

The very simple rule is that whatever you do to one side of an equation you must do to the other side. So if you take something away from one side you must take it away from the other side and if you multiply or divide one side by something you must do the same on the other side.

So, given the above example, the first thing we want to do is isolate b2. Which means we take a2 from the LHS and also the RHS (left hand side and right hand side).

So b2 = c2 – a2

And to get b from b2 we take the square root of b2, which means we take the square root of the RHS.

So b = (c2 – a2)

Note b ca  because (c2 – a2) c2 - a2

In the same way that (a + b)2 a2 + b2

In fact (a + b)2 = (a + b)(a + b)

And applying the distributive law: (a + b)(a + b) = a(a + b) + b(a + b)

Which expands to  a2 + ab + ba + b2 = a2 + 2ab + b2

But (a + b)(a – b) = a2 – b2  (work it out for yourself)

An equation by definition (and by name) means that something equals something. To maintain the equality whatever you do on one side must be done on the other side, and that’s basically the most important rule of all. So if you take the square root or a logarithm or whatever of a single quantity on one side you must take the square root or logarithm or whatever of everything on the other side. Which means you put brackets around everything first and apply the distributive law if possible, and, if not, leave it in brackets like I did with the example of Pythagoras’s equation.

Final Example:  A/B = C + D    What’s B = ?

Invert both sides:  B/A = 1/(C + D)

Multiply both sides by A:   B = A/(C + D)   (Easy)

Note: A/(C + D) A/C + A/D