Interviews

Peter Singer: Claiming Darwin for the Left

In 1998, Julian Baggini interviewed Peter Singer for Issue 4 of The Philosophers' Magazine.

 JULIAN BAGGINI

 

 INTERVIEWS

 

 29 OCTOBER 2015

Peter Singer looks a very tired man. It’s not so much the early morning start of the interview, but the weeks of media scrutiny, misrepresentation and criticism, which seem to have taken their toll.

Singer came to England to talk about "A Darwinian Left", but no sooner had he stepped off the plane than the Daily Express was reviving the old controversy over Singer’s view that in certain circumstances, it may be better to end the life of a very severely handicapped baby in a humane way, rather than use all modern medicine can do to let it live a painful and often brief life. Singer tried to defend himself on Radio Four’s Today programme, but in such a brief news item, his calm reasoning was always likely to have less impact than the emotive pleas of his opponent.

So once again, what Singer really wanted to say was overshadowed by his reputation. Which is a pity, because in his LSE lecture, A Darwinian Left?, which formed the centrepiece of his visit, Singer challenges a rather different taboo: the exclusion from left-wing thought of the ideas of Charles Darwin.

Singer argues that the left’s utopianism has failed to take account of human nature, because it has denied there is such a thing as a human nature. For Marx, it is the "ensemble of social relations" which makes us the people we are, and so, as Singer points out, "It follows from this belief that if you can change the ‘ensemble of social relations’, you can totally change human nature."

The corruption and authoritarianism of so-called Marxist and communist states in this century is testament to the naïveté of this view. As the anarchist Bakunin said, once even workers are given absolute power, "they represent not the people but themselves … Those who doubt this know nothing at all about human nature."

But what then is this human nature? Singer believes the answer comes from Darwin. Human nature is an evolved human nature. To understand why we are the way we are and the origins of ethics, we have to understand how we have evolved not just physically, but mentally. Evolutionary psychology, as it is known, is the intellectual growth industry of the last decade of the millennium, though it is not without its detractors.

If the left takes account of evolutionary psychology, Singer argues, it will be better able to harness that understanding of human nature to implement policies which have a better chance of success. In doing so, two evolutionary fallacies have to be cleared up. First of all, we have evolved not to be ruthless proto-capitalists, but to "enter into mutually beneficial forms of co-operation." It is the evolutionary psychologist’s work in explaining how ‘survival of the fittest’ translates into co-operative behaviour which has been, arguably, its greatest success. Secondly, there is the "is/ought" gap. To say a certain type of behaviour has evolved is not to say it is morally right. To accept a need to understand how our minds evolved is not to endorse every human trait with an evolutionary origin.

When I spoke to Peter Singer, I wanted to get clearer about what he thinks Darwinism can do to help us understand ethics. Singer is a preference utilitarian, which means he thinks the morally right action is that which has the consequences of satisfying the preferences of the greatest number of people. Singer seems now to be saying that the importance of Darwinism is that if we take it into account, we will be better at producing the greatest utility - the satisfaction of people’s preferences.

"That’s my philosophical goal," acknowledges Singer. "I was speaking more broadly for anyone who shares a whole range of values. You don’t have to be a preference utilitarian. But I think it would be true generally that anyone who has views about how society should end up will have a better chance to achieve that if they understand the Darwinian framework of human nature."

Singer also argues that Darwinism has a destructive effect, in that if you accept it, certain other positions are fatally undermined. For example, the idea that God gave Adam, and by proxy, us, dominion over the animal kingdom is a view "thoroughly refuted by the theory of evolution."

I was unsure that those victories are always so straightforward. For example, there are, presumably, many Christians who don’t buy the Adam and Eve creation myth as literal truth. Nevertheless, can’t they live with Darwinism and have their ethics?

"I don’t think Darwinism is incompatible with any Christian ethic," Singer is happy to allow, "except a really fundamentalist one that takes Genesis literally. And it’s not even incompatible strictly with the divine command theory, it just means the divine command theory is based on all sorts of hypotheses which you don’t need because you’ve got other explanations."

So how is the divine command theory undermined by evolution? Couldn’t the Christian, for example, say, yes, evolution is how man came to be, but given there is an is/ought gap, can’t the ethical commands come from on high, as it were?

"Entirely possible. I was just saying that a lot of the impetus for a divine command theory comes from the question ‘where could ethics come from?’. It’s something totally different, out of this world, so therefore you have to assume we’re talking about the will of God or something. Once you have a Darwinian understanding of how ethics can emerge, you absolutely don’t have to assume that, but it’s still possible to assume it. It’s really the ‘I have no need of the hypothesis’ rather than ‘that hypothesis is hereby refuted’."

The question of how far evolution can help us understand the origin of ethics is perhaps the most contentious part of evolutionary psychologists’ claims in general and Singer’s thesis in particular. Singer believes Darwinian theory gives us an understanding of the origin of ethics, because, for example, it gives an evolutionary explanation of how reciprocity came to be. Put crudely, if you model the survival prospects for different kinds of creatures with different ways of interacting with others - from serial exploiters to serial co-operators and every shade in between - it turns out that the creatures who thrive in the long run are those that adopt a strategy called ‘tit for tat’. This means that they always seek to co-operate with others, but withdraw that co-operation as soon as they are taken advantage of. Because this is the attitude which increases the survival value of a species, it would seem to follow that humans have evolved an in-built tendency to co-operation, along with a tendency to withdraw that co-operation if exploited. Hence, it is argued, and essential feature of ethics - reciprocity - is explained by evolution.

But, I put it to Singer, does the is/ought gap reappear in a historical version if you follow that theory? When we give an evolutionary explanation of how reciprocity came to be, so far we’re only describing evolved behaviour, but it’s quite clear that what you think ethics is now goes beyond a mere description of our evolved behaviour. So how, historically or logically, is that gap bridged?

"It’s not bridged historically at all. Of any culture and people you can describe their ethic, but that remains entirely on the level of description. ‘The Inuit people do this and this and this, the British people do that and that and that’. You can describe that ethic but you don’t get from the answer to ‘what ought I to do?’ So the gap is a logical one and it just arises from the fact that when we seek to answer the question, ‘What ought I to do?’ we’re asking for a prescription, we’re not asking for a description. Any description of existing morals in our culture or the origins of morals is not going to enable us to deduce what ought we to do."

But, I insist, doesn’t evolution then merely explain the descriptive part of how certain behaviours came to be? It doesn’t really explain our ethics, it explains social codes, rules of social conduct. If ethics is a prescriptive field rather than a descriptive one, how does evolutionary explanation of how merely described behaviour comes to be explain how ethics came to be?

"I think in a way that’s so obvious that it doesn’t need any explanation," retorts Singer. "That’s just that we have the capacity to make choices and that we make judgements which are prescriptive: first person, second person or third person judgements. So, in a way, that is not what I’m trying to explain the origins of, although you can see how if you add it to the kinds of accounts I’ve given, we have language and we are a social animals you can see why we end up talking about these things and discussing them. It’s not something that I talked about. We know that we do that, and that’s a process you would expect beings, once they had a certain degree of language, faced with these choices, to do."

The question is important, because some prominent workers in the area of decision-theory and evolution argue that evolution explains how it comes to be that we have social rules and that in fact understanding these origins shows us that there’s no extra moral dimension to these things. They are merely evolved and we deceive ourselves if we think there is an ethical dimension.

I tried to probe this apparent gap between evolution and ethics by considering two of Singer’s examples of how our ethics must account for our evolved human nature. If we take into account the fact that we feel more protective towards our own offspring than towards children in general, it’s a good rule that parents should take care of their children because there’s a greater chance it will increase the general happiness. On the other hand, the double standard towards female and male sexual behaviour, even though it may have an evolutionary explanation, is something that should not be tolerated. I put it to Singer that, it follows that the moral judgements that we’re going to make are going to be of the sort, ‘If the evolved behaviour is going to lead to the morally desirable result follow it and if the evolved behaviour does not lead to the morally desirable result, don’t follow it’. So isn’t the observation of what has evolved going to drop out of the equation? It’s not going to feed at all directly into what our moral rules are going to be.

Singer’s answer reveals more precisely the limited, but important role, he believes Darwinian explanations play in our ethics. "I think the Darwinian is going to alert us to what rules are going to work and what rules are going to meet a lot of resistance and I think we have to bear that in mind. But always there’s a trade off between how important the values are to us and the strength of the evolved tendency in our natures."

Given Singer’s willingness to challenge established views, I was a little surprised that he still talks in terms of the left and right, particularly as it seems his conception of the left is a long way from any traditional view. Singer characterises the left as being concerned with eliminating the sufferings of others and of the oppressed. A lot of people on the left would consider that quite a diluted view of the left, which is generally thought to have something to do with common ownership. I wondered if it was useful to maintain the label ‘the left’.

"The label’s kind of there to stay," replies Singer. "It’s been there so long. We’re not about to get rid of it. You would have to be rather far on the left now to think that a lot of common ownership is a good idea, beyond some major utilities. I wouldn’t say the left ought to be committed to common ownership. Common Ownership is possibly a means to achieving the goals of the left. That debate should continue. But I wouldn’t say it was a prerequisite for being part of the left."

But is Singer’s view really leftist at all? Take what he says about tit-for tat, for example. He argues that tit-for-tat would appeal to people on the left because it is a ‘nice’ strategy, but presumably a lot of people who wouldn’t identify themselves as left-wing would be keen on adopting what he calls nice strategies. And similarly a number of people on the left might be against the nicer strategies - the more revolutionary left wing, for example. So I’m left wondering if there really is a significant distinction to be made between the left and other political stances that are committed to the reduction of inequality.

But it’s quite clear that Singer, though keen to identify himself as being on the left, isn’t as interested this particular issue as I am. He simply replies, "I think there’s a lot less to the distinction [left/right] than there was, undoubtedly."

Singer’s interest in Darwin pre-dates the current revival in evolutionary explanations, and goes back to his earlier work in animal liberation.

"It was there in the background. It wasn’t central to it but I did talk about it a bit in Animal Liberation. I certainly was interested in it before Wilson’s Sociobiology came out, but my interest in it as an aid to understanding what ethics is really does date from Sociobiology because I then addressed that in the Expanding Circle, which was published in 1982, and that was explicitly a response to Wilson."

What, I wondered, explains the current explosion of interest in Darwin, particularly in philosophy and psychology?

"Well, Darwin’s been around for such a long period of time but understanding Darwinian accounts of human affairs has not been about for such a long time. It’s been neglected after Darwin himself. And then there was this great taboo against applying Darwinian hypotheses to human social behaviour until Wilson’s Sociobiology in 1975 and that was greeted with a huge amount of hostility, which is evidence of the taboo. Even then a lot of people shuddered because they saw it as something that was associated with nasty, right-wing biological determinism, which is not really true. So it’s only more recently than 1975 that the taboo has broken down and people have started to accept that there are interesting and important insights into human affairs that come from applying Darwinian thinking to human social conduct."

Singer may feel that his new take on Darwin ought to have been the main focus of his visit to London. But aside from Singer the academic philosopher, there is also Singer the campaigner and polemicist. If the media have focused on other things, it is at least partly due to Singer’s own outspokenness about issues that matter to him.

One of the first controversies to blow up in the press during Singer’s visit was his withdrawal of a lecture he was due to give at the King’s Centre for Philosophy, because of its sponsorship by Shell UK, and his very public letter to the Guardian explaining why.

Singer’s reason for pulling out is that, "I did not really want to appear on a programme that says ‘supported by Shell’ and is seen as therefore promoting the idea that Shell is a good corporate citizen. It’s not that I’m against taking corporate money under any circumstances. I think there are some circumstances in which I would take it, but I think that you always have to be careful about taking corporate money. At present Shell’s record, particularly in Nigeria, is really lamentable. I think that you can see a connection between the money that is going here [to the King’s Centre] and the profits made out of the extraction of oil in Nigeria, with all of the consequences that has for the Ogoni people, both in terms of environmental damage to their land, the way in which Shell revenues support the Nigerian dictatorship, which is one of the most oppressive around. So I just didn’t want to be part of that."

Interestingly, at one recent Environmental Ethics conference, at which the Shell issue in particular was in the forefront of people’s minds, a lot of the people who ran consequentialist arguments at the conference actually came out in favour of taking the money because they felt that the benefits of having the conference supported would outweigh the very marginal benefits that Shell would receive for having its logo in the corner of the posters. People said thinks like "It’s better this money is spent on a conference in environmental ethics, which should be discussed, than the money should go to a big billboard poster for Shell or something." What does Singer, as a consequentialist, make of this argument?

"The consequentialist could go both ways, I don’t deny that. I don’t think it’s all that important to have another environmental ethics conference frankly - there are plenty of environmental ethics conferences and discussions about environmental ethics around. There’s certainly an argument about what else would happen to the money. But I think that in fact it’s clear that as far as my gesture of refusing to take Shell’s sponsorship is concerned - and it was a gesture, there’s no doubt about it - it’s had worthwhile consequences. What it’s meant is that there’s one lecture in my London programme that did not go ahead as sponsored, but in fact that was made up for by the fact that I gave a lecture organised at King’s College by some students who were opposed to Shell’s sponsorship. So people at King’s still got to hear me give a lecture, if that’s what the were interested in. Because I refused and because I wrote a letter to The Guardian about my refusing to do so, there was a whole lot more discussion of the issue, so people have again become more aware that there is a real issue about corporate sponsorship and the question about Shell in particular has got aired. So, it seems to me that’s clearly been a good thing. In other words, it’s clear that I made the right decision on consequentialist grounds.

"But I think it’s important that people enter some discussion, that it’s not just a silent gesture that I didn’t give a lecture and no one ever heard about why I didn’t."

Singer is always very open in showing the full implications, consequences and ramifications of his viewpoint, which doesn’t always make him popular. As a consequentialist, how does he feel about the argument that the best way to bring about a better society from a utilitarian point of view is not to advance complex utilitarian arguments but to appeal to more simple concepts?

"I think people are in different positions and different roles. For a political heavyweight involved in strategies for a political party to achieve office, it probably wouldn’t be possible to be quite so open. But I think philosophers can have a role in clarifying people’s thinking, with broader aims than simply saying ‘I want the political party with these view to get into office and do this and that’."

As an animal rights campaigner, I suggest, his roles perhaps are more mixed and I asked Singer whether he felt that being so open, and talking about the implications of his views on animals for mentally handicapped children, has had the effect of blunting his points on animal liberation, because people are inevitably not going to focus on his positive points about animals, they focus on the perceived negative implications for the sanctity of life.

"Maybe that’s true. It’s become a larger focus in recent years. I’m not quite sure why, but I think that what you’d have to say there was that if you take the line that that was a mistake to write Should the Baby Live? back in 1985. It’s done now and I think the book’s done some good in alerting people to the nature of that particular problem and making parents of the disabled able to discuss it more openly. I’m not going to deny that the conclusions still seem to be sound ones.

"I think you could say that politically it’s been a mistake to accept invitations to debate it. What’s happened in Britain over the last couple of weeks is that there was a rather silly article in the Daily Express that raised this issue, which probably should have been ignored, and I was called by the BBC for the Today programme and a lot of people heard that, so maybe I would be more prudent to tell the BBC that I didn’t really want to discuss that anymore and that wasn’t what I was coming here to discuss this time.

"It’s very hard because on the other hand some of the discussions were quite useful and it wasn’t all silly stuff as the one on the Today programme I think was. So you have to say, well, it gets more attention and more read about my views, maybe some of them will think, ‘Well, this is not so silly and bad, maybe I should look at some of his books’, and maybe more people will get involved in it. It’s very hard to say, I think."

Singer is always going to be a controversial thinker because of his willingness to confront political and ethical issues without being constrained by current orthodoxy. His application of Darwin to left-wing thought is certainly not going to make him popular with the right, but it is also likely to lose him some friends on the left, just as his measured contribution to the issue of animal rights challenges society’s attitudes while not going far enough to satisfy many activists.

Singer returned to his native Australia leaving behind a big question and a tentative answer. Can the scientific theories of Charles Darwin really contribute to our philosophical understanding of ethics? Singer has tried to show how it can, but this is a debate which clearly has a lot further to run.

Julian Baggini's latest book, Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will, is published by Granta in the UK and by Chicago University Press in North America.

https://www.philosophersmag.com/

Want to Be Good at Philosophy? Study Maths and Science

Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay argue that philosophers must be scientifically informed.

 PETER BOGHOSSIAN AND JAMES LINDSAY

ESSAYS  29 MAY 2016

If you want to be a good philosopher, don’t rely on intuition or comfort. Study maths and science. They’ll allow you access the best methods we have for knowing the world while teaching you to think clearly and analytically. Mathematics is the philosophical language nature prefers, and science is the only truly effective means we have for connecting our philosophy to reality. Thus maths and science are crucial for good philosophy – for getting things right.

Truth is not always intuitive or comfortable. As a quirk of our base-ten number system, for example, the number 0.999..., the one that is an infinite concatenation of nines, happens to equal 1. That is, 0.999... is 1, and the two expressions, 0.999... and 1, are simply two ways to express the same thing. The proofs of this fact are numerous, easy, and accessible to people without a background in mathematics (the easiest being to add one third, 0.333..., to two thirds, 0.666..., and see what you get). This result isn't intuitive, and – as anyone who has taught it can attest – not everyone is comfortable with it at first blush.

The sciences, which were largely born out of philosophy, are also replete with nonintuitive, and even uncomfortable truths. The most extreme examples of this are found in quantum mechanics, with interpretations of double slit experiments, quantum entanglement, and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle confounding essentially everyone. But even sciences investigating scales more familiar to us, like biological evolution, are nonintuitive and uncomfortable to the point of being rejected by surprising numbers of people despite overwhelming scientific consensus spanning nearly a century and a half.

Thinking philosophically requires the capacity to logically and rigorously engage ideas and then either accept the results or reject our assumptions – no matter how nonintuitive or how uncomfortable those assumptions may be. Mathematics is an ideal tool for teaching this as it is deeply abstract and simplifies reality nearly to the point of ignoring it. This does not mean that mathematics qua mathematics is always important for good philosophy, though it certainly can be. It does mean that learning to organise, think, and denote like a mathematician reaps enormous benefits for clear philosophical thought. Philosophers who can think like mathematicians are better at clear thinking, and thus philosophy.

For instance, consider the application of basic set theory to linguistics. Set-theoretic thinking – particularly, the applications of subset relations, intersections and unions, set inclusion, and even the relevant mathematical notation to modifiers such as adjectives, adverbs, and participial phrases – has proven fruitful in helping linguists clarify the relationships between words and the classes of ideas they represent. This application has allowed a more precise, deeper understanding of the ways that different uses of words create meaning in sentences and thus a capacity for clearer and richer expressions of ideas, including philosophical propositions. It has done so despite the fact that linguistics is not nearly as mathematically dependent as fields like physics.

Even philosophical efforts on desperately difficult topics like ethics – the apparently subjective nature of which serves quite reasonably something of a cordon sanitaire against the intrusion of too much objective empiricism into the provinces of philosophy – benefit from the habits of mathematical thought. For example, take Sam Harris's controversial 2010 contribution to the field in his bestselling book, The Moral Landscape. He argued for determining human values scientifically. The metaphorical moral landscape itself is most easily comprehended by picturing multidimensional topographies in which some measure of flourishing and suffering ranges in the vertical and peaks and troughs can be visualised as local maxima and minima. Further, Harris's entire argument rests in part upon his ability to articulate an objective nadir, an absolute minimum, in that space – the maximum possible suffering of every sentient creature. The entire moral landscape can be thus thought of as a partially ordered set of moral positions together with their resultant consequences as measured on hypothetical metric related to well-being and suffering.

Of course, mathematics is most clearly applicable to philosophy where it intersects with the mathematically hard sciences, like physics. Much in physics, for example, depends upon clearly understanding the scope, power, and impact of Noether's (first) theorem, named for Emmy Noether. Her theorem, proved a century ago and published in 1918, was truly revolutionary for physics because it completely changed how we understand conservation laws, revealing that conservation laws follow automatically from certain assumptions of invariance of physical laws (for example, if the laws of physics do not vary with locations in space, conservation of momentum automatically follows). Whether Noether's theorem is best classified as a result in abstract mathematics or theoretical physics isn't important, but that philosophers need to understand it is, at least if they want to work competently on ideas related to that which it pertains. Fully understanding and appreciating Noether's theorem, however, requires a solid grasp of abstract algebra, at the least at an advanced undergraduate level. Cosmological metaphysicians don't have much choice, then, but to learn enough mathematics to understand such ideas.

However, philosophy in general, and metaphysics in particular, isn't as neat as mathematics because it must engage with the messiness of the world to help us ascertain its truths. It therefore does not have the luxury of being purely abstract. Metaphysics attempts to extract truths about the world and articulate those truths in propositional format. It does this by examining the logical consequences of assumptions about reality which are based as closely as possible on reality, almost exactly like mathematics (counting and geometrical figures are empirical starting places for much of our mathematical reasoning) – and so metaphysics must begin with the recognition that the sciences are the only legitimate way to hook our ideas to reality. Even a powerful result like Noether's theorem is of no real application if we don't have good, data-supported reasons to think that conservation laws apply to the universe. Metaphysical pursuits that become too tangential to the world by being oblivious to science are little more than academic hobbyhorses.

One might contest that some branches of philosophy, like ethics, don't need to articulate truths about the world, or even that no branch of philosophy does because the purview of philosophy is inherently abstract. Whatever merit resides in this objection is lost to the fact that even if philosophy simply works out the logical consequences of various assumptions, the real-world worth of those assumptions comes down to being based upon observations of reality. Further, if philosophical inquiry is to have real-world significance – which has been the goal of every ethicist since Socrates – the results of one’s inquiry must be capable of being applied. Peter Singer's eloquent adjurations against eating animals, for example, may be logical consequences of his assumptions, but both his assumptions and his conclusions are immediately tied to reality – don't eat animals, a real applicable behaviour, because of the real suffering of real animals.

Moreover, the sub-disciplines of ethics in particular require tremendous insight into the nature of complicated real-world systems and a sincere willingness to revise beliefs in light of new discoveries – both of which are fostered by understanding science, the scientific methods, and the manner of scientific thought. Ethics plays out on the constrained system of human and other sentient psychology, which is a set of in-principle determinable facts about the world. (John Rawls, one of the most influential philosophers of the last century, explicitly acknowledged this in The Theory of Justice, as did Robert Nozick, one of Rawls’ principal detractors.) These facts are unlikely to be neat and clean in the same way as calculating ballistics for a rocket going to Jupiter, but they still represent a hypothetically knowable set of facts about the world. Poignantly, much within that set of facts is not arbitrary. Everything in that set depends entirely upon the realities of minds that perceive pain and pleasure, joy and despair, pity and schadenfreude. (Further, varied as we are, we're not that varied, so normative statements are remarkably powerful, for all that they may miss in the particulars.) Ethicists, therefore, should be scientifically informed in multiple domains of thought, like psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and the particulars of any science applicable to their specific projects, such as medicine, biology, and genetics.

In having contributed to the development of the scientific method, philosophy can be said to be a cart that brought forth and hitched its own horse. It can hardly escape notice that both science and philosophy begrudge the hitching. Scientists, not unfairly, often criticise philosophers for making speculations that are untethered to reality and for failing to make substantive progress. Philosophers, not unfairly, tend to disparage scientists for a lack of philosophical savvy, whether that savvy is relevant to working in the sciences or not. Science, however, unambiguously gets exactly what philosophy is after: correct answers relevant to the world. At times, those correct answers are the desired outputs of the philosophical process, and at other times, they are necessary inputs since one key role for philosophers is to help science ask the right questions and make contextual sense out of the answers it obtains.

As a necessary result of this arrangement, no matter how much grumbling it stirs in the philosophically inclined, the fact is that good philosophy should be scientifically informed – the cart must be hitched to the horse to be of much use. Fortunately, the idea that philosophy should be more mathematical and scientific has a strong precedent in the history of the discipline. (Spinoza, Descartes and others, for example, are known for using the "Geometric Method" in philosophy.) And eminent philosophers recognise both the historical significance of maths and science on the discipline of philosophy and the consequences of its absence. Take, for instance, Daniel Dennett, who likened many philosophical projects to exploring the logical universes of a fictional and irrelevant variant on chess, and the harsher Peter Unger, whose Empty Ideas is devastating to enormous swaths of philosophical pursuit, especially those that are scientifically uninformed. If philosophy hopes to achieve its truth seeking epistemological and metaphysical ambitions, and thus have “abiding significance,” it must be rooted in science.

Still, just as good philosophers gain competence by being scientifically informed, good theoretical scientists gain competence by knowing more and deeper mathematics. This does not imply that all good science is heavily mathematical, as biology is a conspicuous example of good science that isn't primarily mathematical. In On the Origin of Species, for example, there are no equations, but it abounds with observations and inferences. Even evolutionary biology, however, is deepened by the ideas in graph theory (the "tree of life," for example), set-subset relationships (taxonomy), probability and combinatorics (gene inheritance), dynamic modelling (differential growth rates of populations to describe effects of environmental pressures, say as modelled by the Lotka-Volterra equations and others), stochastic processes (random variation of traits), and the combinatorial approach to thinking about DNA as "mathematical words" in a four-letter alphabet. No discipline is better than mathematics for tuning an intellect to think in such a manner.

Some may object that the onus to develop mathematical competence and habits of thought lays upon theoretical scientists more than on philosophers, but this sells short the capabilities of good philosophers and the demands of good philosophy. The lines that divide theoretical science and good philosophy of the sciences are both blurred and thin, and hence many branches of philosophy necessitate that philosophers are in fact theoreticians. In that case, just as theoretical scientists are ultimately beholden to the data, no matter the elegance of their models, so too are good philosophers. Therefore, it’s necessary that philosophers are scientifically informed and it would be worthwhile for philosophers to be mathematically adept.

When the conclusions of sound argumentation proceeding from evidence conflict with common sense, it should be the latter that we dismiss and not the former. Good philosophers don’t rely on intuition or comfort. They use maths and science to clarify and inform their philosophy. Maths helps hone skills of clear, rigorous thinking, and science is unparalleled at determining facts and explanatory theories describing reality. Maths and science are therefore crucial for philosophy to make contributions of enduring worth, and so those who wish to be good at philosophy should study both.

Peter Boghossian is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University and author of A Manual For Creating Atheists. He was thrown out of a philosophy PhD program at the University of New Mexico. You can find him on Twitter at @PeterBoghossian

James A. Lindsay has a PhD in mathematics and is the author of God Doesn't; We Do; Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly; and Everybody Is Wrong About God. Follow him on Twitter: @GodDoesnt

https://www.philosophersmag.com/

Moral Lessons from COVID

Sandra Laugier reflects on the political and ethical importance of care work as revealed during the COVID pandemic.

 SANDRA LAUGIER

 

 ESSAYS

 

 22 APRIL 2022

The COVID pandemic is a global tragedy, but it also presents a strange pedagogical moment. The word care has been at the centre of the global conversation. Care work has been revealed as what keeps everyone going. And what is least acknowledged. What matters most to ordinary, but also professional lives - what makes it possible? The work of caregivers… but also cleaners, garbage collectors, cashiers, delivery people, truck drivers, and in fact, everything that matters least in the scale of values.

The importance of care and the people who take care of “us” appears to everyone, and ignorance on the part of an entire society of what makes it live, whether it be in daily life or in the urgency of the risk of death, is finally obvious. If such a moral education is possible, it is because the disaster has revealed radical vulnerabilities. The vulnerability of institutions, the vulnerability of the species; the vulnerability of fragile populations who are precisely “on the front line”, but also the vulnerability of every individual brought back to their “home” and back to their own resources, without the myriad of people and “services” that accompany them – back to housework, tidying up, even schooling… to services usually entrusted to others. The grammar of care has thus subtly imposed itself on everyone, because care is never so visible as in those situations where the “normal” form of life is shaken.

In the exposure to disaster, the truth of our dependencies emerges. We are all vulnerable, dependent on others. Men are in the majority among the sick, women among the caregivers. Women take care of our forms of life – “form of life” understood, to quote Stanley Cavell and Veena Das, both in a horizontal sense (our social life) and in a vertical sense (biological life). It is indeed these two meanings of life, biological and social, that have suddenly imposed themselves on us: the life that is given to us (mainly by women) and that we can lose; and, the everyday life, made possible or helped (mainly by women). The continuum of care activities, so complex to explain in theories, has finally become clear – the care that makes us live extends from the hospital to the supermarket.

In the crisis, women are curiously omnipresent… and absent. Present on all fronts, because they are constantly shown to us in the media: at their sewing machines, making makeshift masks; at the broom, cleaning up in hospitals and stores that are still open; at the bedside of patients, whose well-being they ensure, whose lives they save; at the cash registers of the businesses that allow us to continue a normal life. A wave of collective bad conscience is emerging; customers greet and thank the cashiers as they pay for their purchases – cashiers to whom a few weeks ago they would not have given a glance because they were too busy speaking on their phone to someone not present but clearly much more important.

This is an awareness of care, of the role of women and other “help” in our daily lives. It is the work of care that at the moment ensures the continuity of life. “Society must be defended”, certainly. But those who defend it are the invisible ones who, until recently, were taken for granted as the underwater face of society, the “taken for granted” that make our lives possible. Reduced (in whole or in part) to our domestic lives, we realise that we are in constant need of care… because suddenly, we are, each in our own way, men and women, at last, doing some of the work, the cleaning, the tidying up, the raising and schooling of children… work so often normally entrusted to others. And in public life, we heroize the work of care, first in the form of the work done in the hospital; then in other, more modest forms.

Care is at once a practical response to specific needs and a sensitivity to the ordinary details of human life that matter. Hence, care is a concrete matter that ensures maintenance (for example, as conversation and conservation) and continuity of the human world and form of life. This is nothing less than a paradigm shift in ethics, with a reorientation toward vulnerability and a shift from the “just” to the “important.” Measuring the importance of care for human life requires first acknowledging the truth: that human life forms are fundamentally vulnerable, subject to failure. To pay attention to ordinary life is to become aware of its vulnerability – it is constantly threatening to dissolve or else to reveal itself to have been unreal all along, a mere fantasy.

Human vulnerability is the “original condition” of the need for care – what needs to be taken care of and cared about. In response to the “original position” described by Rawls in his 1971 A Theory of Justice, the perspective of care would tend to set this “original condition” of vulnerability as the anchor point of moral and political thought. Not a position on which to build an ideal theory or set principles, but the mere fact of vulnerability that appears in “the difficulty of reality.” This is something that is obvious in the contexts Veena Das’s Life and Words accounts for, when violence destroys the everyday and the sense of life as defining the human.

Autonomy, so much vaunted by philosophers – and by feminists as well, and by politicians – turns out to be an optical illusion: the autonomy of some is made possible by the work of others.

Attention to the everyday is the first step in caring: care is attention, and the ethics of care calls our attention to phenomena commonly unseen, but that stand right before our eyes. Here the definition of care by Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher has to be taken very seriously:

In the most general sense, care is a species of activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web.

The perspective of care by calling our attention to our general situation of dependence, and to the danger of denying these connections, is thus indissociably political and ethical; it develops an analysis of social relations organised around dependence and vulnerability – blind spots of the ethics of justice.

Thus, the approaches of care target the theory of justice as it has developed and taken the dominant position in both political and moral fields of reflection over the course of the second half of the last century. This is not only because, as the controversies between the partisans of care and those of justice illustrate, these approaches call into question the universality of Rawls’s conception of justice, but also because they transform the very nature of moral and social questioning and the very concept of justice.

Care is a practice, not a moral feeling or disposition: you “see the world differently” when you are attentive. In Tronto’s words:

Care is everywhere, and it is so pervasive a part of human life that it is never seen for what it is: activities by which we act to organize our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. When we get down to the ways that we actually live our lives, care activities are central and pervasive. How different the world looks when we begin to take these activities seriously. The world will look different if we place care, and its related values and concerns, closer to the centre of human life.

Yet women are the great absentees today from political reflection and action, as if the crisis, which reveals their role, kept them on the edge of the discussion, always invisible. Women are present remarkably little in the public space of media and politics, whereas many male experts are speaking out, full of certainty and competence and always proposing solutions to this crisis. This is a constant reminder of male domination in a world that is sustained by the work of women. It is also a patriarchal reminder of the monopoly of expertise and competence.

So, the perception of the world is split in two. On the one hand, this martial or heroic discourse, based on a so-called rationality of numbers, economics, science. This is the discourse of the government and most of the experts summoned by the media – mostly men. On the other hand, an ordinary life that has to react day by day to the time of COVID and take action: women in the majority. Women are confined with violent spouses at the risk of their lives, in circumstances where they have never had so little room to defend themselves. Despite progress in some families amongst younger generations, the time given to domestic work by women is still much higher, and moreover the object of many disputes.

The practices that weave human life together are relegated to the background, to the register of anecdotes, testimonies, stories of “human interest” or the gossip columns. All of these women who work to keep the world going, to recreate the ordinary, are credited with no expertise, no knowledge likely to reorganise the world. The time of the COVID, which superficially led so many people to realise what they owe to women’s care work, sets the scene for an exacerbation of patriarchy. Visible men, dominating the situation and the subject, invisible women, indispensable hands and bodies exposed to violence, contamination, overwork.

There is a beginning of moral awareness of the inversion of values through which capitalist societies have long operated: what is most truly useful, what makes our ordinary lives possible, is the most despised, and the least valued. In the exposing of the forms of life that a disaster situation brings about, the truth of our dependencies emerges.

Although men are the most numerous among the sick, women are vulnerable in a larger sense, they are massively impacted by the financial consequences of the crisis and they are also the most exposed. In addition to the fact that they are mostly part-time workers, and have to take material and mental responsibility (“the mental load”) for domestic tasks, they constitute the vast majority of single-parent family carers. Not to mention the indifference of policy-makers towards the elderly who die by the thousands in institutions – because institutionalised old age concerns women above all. And the fact turns out that “long COVID” affects them more than others.

In Europe, hospitals have a large majority of women on staff, especially at the lowest levels of the hierarchy, who are actually on the front line against coronavirus. The proportion of women is still rising among employees in nursing homes, home care workers and day-care centres. Women are in the majority at checkouts in shops, pharmacies, supermarkets. Many women have been involved in the production of hand-made masks. These women are relatively visible and taken into consideration, particularly in the media, but they are taken into account in proportion to the value given to the care activity: always described anecdotally, secondary to the struggles of doctors and the deliberations of politicians.

In the intellectual field, men sign the vast majority of the forums and analyses of the consequences of COVID published in the media. They are publishing more than before, women are publishing much less, and the numbers of articles submitted by women are dropping.

We are therefore in a position of huge ambiguity in relation to care: women’s work is still underestimated and underpaid, at the very moment when its importance emerges in the eyes of all. Care has long been the very name of what has been neglected and despised by public policies; and it is indeed the lack of attention (the lack of care) paid by governments over the last decade to all the sectors in charge of the care and protection of citizens (health, education, poverty, old age, disability) that has made the fight against COVID so difficult. A war on care has been waged for years, systematically, against the very institutions that are today taking the brunt of the health disaster, and not only the public hospital. It is not only the recognition of the work of care or the sudden visibility of what was previously invisible. The health disaster shows the radical injustice of policies against public services and (re)places social protection at the heart of shared concerns.

The first lesson of COVID is a sudden awareness of a reversal of values that have been accepted for decades and denounced from the outset by the ethics of care: the most truly useful professions are the least well paid and the least well regarded. What matters most for our ordinary lives – carers, cleaners, garbage collectors, cashiers, delivery men, truck drivers – is in fact what counts the least in a scale of values that we have collectively validated. It is not only a matter of the multiple structural injustices that the epidemic has highlighted, between those who are in the comfort of second homes and those who are at work. It has to do with the lack of knowledge – the denial – by an entire society of what keeps it alive.

The ethics of care, by suggesting a new attention to the unexplored or neglected details of life, confronts us with our own inabilities and inattentions. In becoming political, what is at stake in ethics of care is epistemological: they seek to bring to light the connection between our lack of attention to neglected realities and the lack of theorisation (or, more directly, the rejection of the theorisation) of these social realities, rendered invisible.

We see that it is in passing from ethics to politics that ethics of care can be given their critical power. By calling for a society in which caregivers would have their voice, their relevance, and in which the tasks of care would not be structurally invisible or inconspicuous, they bring to light the difficulty of thinking these social realities. The ethical affirmation of the importance and dignity of care cannot go without a political reflection on the allocation of resources and the social distribution of tasks this allocation defines – as Tronto reminds us:

As a type of activity, care requires a moral disposition and a type of moral conduct. We can express some of these qualities in the form of a universalist moral principle, such as: one should care for those around or in one’s society. Nevertheless, in order for these qualities to become a part of moral conduct, people must engage in both private and public practices that teach them, and reinforce their senses of, these moral concerns. In order to be created and sustained, then, an ethic of care relies upon a political commitment to value care and to reshape institutions to reflect that changed value.

Truly carrying out the ethics of care would imply both including practices linked to care in the agenda of democratic reflection and empowering those concerned – care givers and receivers. The recognition of the theoretical pertinence of ethics of care, and the valorization of affects – the importance of which we have seen in correcting a narrow vision of justice – necessarily pass through a practical revalorization of activities linked to care and a joint modification of intellectual and political programmes.

No ethics of care, then, without politics. We must perhaps pursue the critical and radical idea that was at the source of the ethics of care: the idea that dominant liberal ethics is the product and expression of social practices that devalorize the feelings, attitudes, and work of care, the people who do it.

Sandra Laugier is Professor of Philosophy at University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne and author of Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Politics of the Ordinary: Care, Ethics, Forms of Life (Peeters, 2020). Her work focuses on ordinary language philosophy and on the ethics of care, and she’s also working on popular culture (TV series). She is a columnist at the French Journal Libération.

https://www.philosophersmag.com/

THIRD WORLD USA

Lead in Water Harms Red States, Too

Today, there are an estimated 10 million lead pipes carrying — and potentially contaminating — U.S. drinking water.

BY MAUREEN CUNNINGHAM

APRIL 22, 2022

Lead in drinking water is an urgent national problem, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to certain members of Congress.

This neurotoxin known to cause devastating cognitive and behavioral problems is especially harmful for infants and children. Today, there are an estimated 10 million lead pipes carrying — and potentially contaminating — U.S. drinking water. Replacing those pipes is essential to safeguarding public health and ensuring safe drinking water for all.

While lead-contaminated water may be associated with cities such as Flint and Newark, lead water pipes are just as big of a problem in less urban states.

But last fall, 200 House Republicans voted against spending $15 billion to replace lead service lines, as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law. Thirty Republican Senators also voted against the law.

While debating funding for lead pipe replacement in the Build Back Better Act, which would have contributed billions more, several Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee balked at this investment, casting it as only a problem in big cities disproportionately located in blue states. Indeed, Oklahoma GOP Congressman Markwayne Mullin called lead funding “a bailout for cities.”

Despite such rhetoric, red states also have a significant lead problem. Of the 15 states with the highest number of lead service lines, seven voted for President Donald Trump in 2020. For example, solid red Missouri, ironically nicknamed the “lead state” as a former global producer of lead, has an estimated 330,000 lead service lines, the sixth highest in the nation. (Of Missouri’s seven House members, all but one voted against the infrastructure bill.)

Or consider Indiana, with 290,000 lead service lines. Indiana’s seven House GOP members and both its senators voted against the bipartisan infrastructure law. In the House committee hearing described above, Indiana Representative Larry Bucshon said lead service lines were “the result of decades and decades of mismanagement, in my view, at the local level,” suggesting they are not the federal government’s responsibility.

While lead-contaminated water may be associated with cities such as Flint and Newark, lead water pipes are just as big of a problem in less urban states. Iowa and Kansas, with 160,000 lead lines each, are among the top six states for lead pipes per capita; Texas has a whopping 270,000 lead lines.

If members of Congress could put partisan politics aside, they would have a real chance to solve this problem through new technologies, innovative strategies and contracting and procurement reforms. Leaders from both sides of the political aisle can also make the case for funding to match the scale of states’ lead pipe problem.

Today, we have an opportunity to address lead in drinking water. If we saw this as a national problem, not a red- or a blue-state one, we just might be able to come together and solve it.

This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, which is run by The Progressive magazine and distributed by Tribune News Service.

Maureen Cunningham serves as the chief strategy officer and director of water at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, as well as being an elected council member in the town of Bethlehem, NY.

Ruben Gallego says Kyrsten Sinema is 'all about herself' and 'doesn't care about working class people'

Bryan Metzger
Fri, April 22, 2022

Rep. Ruben Gallego and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, both Democrats from Arizona.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call and Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego says Kyrsten Sinema is "all about herself" and "doesn't care about working class people."

This is the harshest criticism he's leveled against Sinema as he considers challenging her in 2024.

Polling shows Gallego beating Sinema in a hypothetical match-up, and his fundraising has seen a boost.

Rep. Ruben Gallego is stepping up his attacks on Sen. Kyrsten Sinema — a fellow Arizona Democrat — as he mulls challenging her in the 2024 Senate Democratic primary.

In an interview with Politico's Ryan Lizza, Gallego said he's still weighing whether challenging Sinema would be good for the Arizona Democratic Party, which, he added, Sinema doesn't care about.

"Look ... I care about the Arizona Democratic Party," Gallego said during the interview. "I have done everything, some of the hardest time, to keep this party alive. But I'm not going to do something that's going to harm the Democratic Party."

Gallego said he considered challenging currently-serving Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona in 2020, but decided against it for the sake of the party.

"I realized that two things are going to happen," he told Politico. "We're going to have a blowout fight all the way up into the primary, and the most likely thing is that whoever won that primary was going to lose that general because we're going to fight each other."

Gallego then turned his fire on Sinema, alleging that the senior Democratic senator from Arizona is "not here that often" and is "not going to be out here stumping for Democrats."

"She's all about herself," Gallego said. "She's not going to help Mark. She's not going to help Katie Hobbs or whoever the Democrat is [in the governor's race]. It's all about herself."

"It's just like she cares about herself," he added. "She doesn't care about the Democratic movement. She doesn't care about working class people."

Sinema "cares more about her career than she cares about what we can do with our elected office," and doesn't understand the state's electorate as well as him, Gallego went on to say.

"I think she understands Arizona from a perspective many years ago, but she actually doesn't understand Arizona like what's happening," he said. "She's running based on past elections, but she isn't involved to see what's happening here."

Sinema's office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

Gallego is frequently mentioned as a top potential contender to Sinema in 2024, given Democratic frustrations with her hindrance of President Joe Biden's domestic agenda. Progressives and liberals blame Sinema, in part, for the failure of the Build Back Better climate and social spending bill given her opposition to key provisions of the bill.

Sinema also blocked an attempt by Senate Democrats to change the chamber's filibuster rules — which requires 60 votes to pass most pieces of legislation — in order to pass voting rights legislation. In January, Gallego said it was "deeply disappointing" that Sinema didn't stand with the Democratic party on federal election reform.

"We won't shrink from protecting our democracy and the voting rights of all Americans," he said. "It's past time for the US Senate and Senator Sinema to do the same."

In both instances, Sinema was joined by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. But some Democrats are willing to live with Manchin's opposition to major Democratic priorities — West Virginia has become a deeply conservative state, and many are skeptical that a Democrat besides Manchin can win there — while Arizona has drifted towards Democrats in recent years, with Biden narrowly carrying the state in 2020.

Gallego, for his part, recently had a record fundraising quarter, and an October 2021 poll found him leading Sinema 62-23 in a hypothetical 2024 matchup.

Indigenous, racialized, LGBTQ groups and sex workers criticize online hate bill

Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez holds a press conference regarding the introduction of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, April 5, 2022. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

Marie Woolf
The Canadian Press
Staff
Published April 23, 2022 

OTTAWA -

Members of the LGBTQ community, Indigenous people and racialized groups fear a proposed law tackling online harm could disproportionately curtail their online freedoms and even make them police targets, responses to a government consultation have warned.

The documents, revealed through an access to information request, contain warnings that federal plans to curb online hate speech could lead to marginalized groups, including sex workers, being unfairly monitored and targeted by the police.

The proposed online hate law, which is now being considered by an expert panel appointed by Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, would give the Canadian Security Intelligence Service expanded powers to obtain subscriber information from companies. Online platforms may also have to report some posts to the police and security services.

The bill is designed to update Bill C-36, an anti-hate law introduced at the tail end of the last Parliament that died when the election was called.

The government began public consultation on an updated law just before the election campaign and has said introducing a bill is a priority.

The law is designed to clamp down on hate speech and abuse -- including against women and racialized, Jewish, Muslim and LGBTQ Canadians -- by blocking certain websites and forcing platforms to swiftly remove hateful content.

But Canadians from some of these groups said the internet is one of the few platforms where free speech is possible for them and that the law could curtail their rights.

Darryl Carmichael, from the University of Calgary's law faculty, said in his response that the law risks curbs on racialized and marginalized groups, and could lead to their posts being misconstrued as harmful.

"Black Lives Matter posts have been mistakenly labelled hate speech and removed," he said, warning that posts such as those raising awareness of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls could also be removed.

"The result is that the voices of the very groups you seek to protect would be further isolated," he said.

Sex workers from across Canada warned that such a law could lead to sites they use to carry out safe sex work online being shut down if they are captured by curbs on harmful online sexual content. They also raised fears of risk of arrest because of remarks made in their online sex work.

The Safe Harbour Outreach Project, advocating for the rights of sex workers in Newfoundland and Labrador, warned that the bill could lead to LGBTQ and other marginalized groups being disproportionately harmed as well as sites "crucial for sex workers' safety" blocked. Its submission expressed fears the law could lead to censorship and mass reporting of many innocent people "already demonized … for their gender expression, race (and) sexuality."

Some Indigenous people feared the bill could give more power to law enforcement agencies to target them, their speech and protest activities.

The National Association of Friendship Centres, a network of community hubs offering programs and supports for urban Indigenous people, said "Indigenous-led organizing, community and resistance have flourished online," with protests about "resource extraction and development" relying on social media as "a significant part of their communication strategy."

"These acts of resistance would easily be framed as anti-government or manifestations of Indigenous cyberterrorism," it said in its submission, warning of a "risk of governing bodies weaponizing this legislation to identify protests as anti-government."

Experts say an artificial intelligence algorithm may just pick on keywords, rather than the context or nuance of online remarks, leading to their being misconstrued and triggering the involvement of law enforcement.

Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa's Canada Research Chair in internet law, who obtained the consultation documents through an access to information request, said "leveraging AI and automated notifications could put these communities at risk."

He said the level of criticism in the consultation, which includes a string of submissions complaining about curbs on freedom of speech, should be a "wake-up call for the government" that they are taking the wrong approach.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims warned that the government plans could "inadvertently result in one of the most significant assaults on marginalized and racialized communities in years."

Richard Marceau of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs said a new law clamping down on online hate is necessary, but it "should be properly calibrated to combat hate and make sure that freedom of expression is fully protected."

The centre's submission said it is important that the involvement of law enforcement is proportionate and appropriate.

Laura Scaffidi, a spokeswoman for the heritage minister, said the government "took what we heard from Canadians seriously during the consultation that took place last year," which is why it has appointed an expert advisory group on how to tackle harmful online content.

"We know this is an important issue for Canadians," she said. "We will take the time we need to get this right."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 23, 2022.

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Crypto Bros Are Trying to Buy an Island in the Pacific

Crypto millionaires are attempting to buy an island in the Southwest Pacific. It’s the latest in a long line of schemes by libertarians asserting the rights of private capital above all else.

Tourist bungalows on Iririki island, Vanuatu.

 (Phillip Capper / Wikimedia Commons)

BY RAYMOND CRAIB

JACOBIN

04.22.2022

Utopian thinking is everywhere out of favor, except in the libertarian fantasies of crypto enthusiasts who dream of a world free from the regulatory state, law, and all other forms of external authority. Hucksterism and hostility to collective life are this movement’s defining features. The worldview underlying it is embodied nowhere more literally than in the schemes to exit from the territorial jurisdiction of the nation-state prevalent throughout the history of libertarianism. Crypto luminaries have even sought to buy and govern islands, using oceans to separate themselves from taxes and democracy.

Satoshi Island — named after the alleged creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, and located in the southwest Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu — is the most recent creation of crypto’s venture capitalists. “A real-life private island dedicated to the crypto community,” reads the promotional material. Measuring some eight hundred acres (just over one square mile), Satoshi Island is at this point almost entirely rainforest. Its main attraction: a rare species of giant coconut crabs. Other than flora and fauna, Satoshi boasts a small coastal clearing and a large house on its western edge facing the archipelago’s largest island, Santo. If plans go ahead, the tropical paradise will not remain pristine for long. Would-be crypto colonizers hope to transform the island into a “sustainable smart city.”

Much of the island’s promotional material, with its claims of private ownership and Satoshi citizenship, is misleading. Citizenship, for example, suggests Satoshi Island will be its own state and can confer political rights to its inhabitants. That is not the case. Rather, citizenship in this instance is a catchy way of acknowledging that you own one of the 21,000 Satoshi Island NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and thus can access the island community. But you would still need to hold a valid passport from another country in order to first enter Vanuatu, and no form of Vanuatu citizenship is attached to the island NFT.While the archipelago’s native inhabitants fought for independence, the libertarians advocated a very different form of self-determination . . . a new country governed entirely through contractual, market relations.

One could, in this broad sense, count oneself a citizen of Satoshi Island in the same way that one could, in a sense, count oneself a citizen of Disneyland. Even the use of the phrase “private island” is a misnomer. Since independence in 1980, all land in Vanuatu is held by custom owners — native Ni-Vanuatu (native inhabitants of the islands) — who can lease but not sell land. It is not a “private island” because foreign investors will not be able to enjoy freehold ownership. Even the island’s name is more complicated than the promoters would like to let on.

The brains behind the project, Anthony Welch, a retired property investor who now lives in Vanuatu, renamed the island, in grand imperial fashion, two years ago. Vanuatu’s government has pointed out that such an act has no force of law or real significance. According to the country’s director general of the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources, in order to formally change the name — which is actually Le-Tharo — the government’s Place Name Committee would need to approve such request. This hasn’t happened. Satoshi Island is, for all intents and purposes, a fantasy island.
Hijacking Independence

All of this could be filed away under the growing folder of goofy grifts that characterize efforts to create private countries, all too often involving cryptocurrency advocates. The archetype for these libertarian adventures is Burning Man; more often they are closer to the infamous Fyre Festival. There is, however, more at stake in these schemes then the money of naive investors. The language of citizenship and private property may be disingenuous, but it points toward how libertarian schemes dream of asserting the rights of private capital over those of sovereign states and their populations.

Although the distinctly modern form that these encroachments have taken may seem new, they have a long history, even in Vanuatu itself. In the 1970s, a group of US-based libertarians looked to Vanuatu — known as the New Hebrides and jointly colonized by the British and the French at the time — as a site to create a new country.


While the archipelago’s native inhabitants fought for independence, the libertarians advocated a very different form of self-determination: the creation of a new country governed entirely through contractual, market relations. Inspired by the fictions of Ayn Rand and the myth of Robinson Crusoe, men such as Nevada coin dealer and land developer Michael Oliver, University of Southern California philosophy professor John Hospers, Rand’s former acolyte and paramour Nathaniel Branden, and international finance guru Harry Schultz founded the Phoenix Foundation with the hopes of forging their own private archipelago.

Fantasies of libertarian exit from society were not uncommon at the time. The 1960s in the United States was as much the heyday of market libertarianism as it was of New Left anti-capitalism. Fears of demographic, ecological, and monetary collapse, combined with anxieties over the activities of social movements seeking racial, gender, and economic justice and redress, hastened efforts to find ways to abandon the sinking ship of state and to start anew elsewhere. But where?Given the uncertainties that would accompany processes of decolonization, libertarian exiters saw an opportunity to pursue individual self-determination in the very places struggling against colonial rule.

In seeking new places for a new country, exiters found their efforts frustrated by the territorial realities of state sovereignty. They soon turned to new far-away locales in which to realize their utopian dreams. Islands have long served as the basis for libertarian political ecology — the ideal space upon which the drama of individualism, of man alone, could be staged — but more important, perhaps, is that Oceania and the Caribbean were places of incipient decolonization.

Michael Oliver, one of the foremost exit advocates of the period and author of both A New Constitution for a New Country (1968) and the Capitalist Country Newsletter (1968–1970), made this clear:


A surprising number of nearly uninhabited, yet quite suitable places for establishing a new country still exist. . . . Many such places are scarcely developed colonies whose governmental or other activities are of little or no concern at all to their “mother” countries. There will be little problem in purchasing the land, or in having the opportunity to conduct affairs on a free enterprise basis from the very beginning.

Oliver was observant. This was, after all, the high point of decolonization. United Nations Resolution 1514 on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples enshrined national self-determination as a fundamental right of colonized peoples. Given the uncertainties that would accompany processes of decolonization, libertarian exiters saw an opportunity to pursue individual self-determination in the very places struggling against colonial rule. The ugly and ironic perversion of Resolution 1514 should not be overlooked: in the era of self-determination, selfish-determination arrived in the Southwest Pacific.

Oliver had garnered some hard-earned experience at countrymaking. With support from wheat and housing magnate Willard Garvey, horologist and yachtsman Seth Atwood, and famed investor John Templeton, Oliver had first tried to build an island on an atoll south of Tonga. Tongan assertions of territorial water rights ended the project abruptly in 1972. They then sought to colonize, rather than build, an island by plotting to invade Abaco in the Bahamas. Although allied with an English lord, an American arms merchant, and three ex-CIA agents, Oliver’s efforts failed when Abaconian supporters withdrew and the FBI intervened. The Phoenix Foundation thus turned to the New Hebridean island of Santo, a place where Oliver had previously made contact with a chief named Jimmy Stevens.Masses of working people . . . worried that a transfer of power from colonial to national rule would constitute little more than a shift from external to internal colonialism.

By 1975 New Hebridean independence appeared not only possible, but probable. The British wanted out; the French held slim hopes of maintaining some presence in the archipelago. New Hebrideans themselves led the way to independence, through the Santo-based movement known as Nagriamel and the largely Anglophone Vanua’aku Pati (VP) — led by Anglican priests and intellectuals such as Walter Lini, Barak Sope, and Grace Mera Molisa — which formed in the early 1970s and drew inspiration from the examples of Ghana, Tanzania, and the United States’ Black Power movement.
Failed Rebellions

The VP and Nagriamel should have been natural allies. They shared many commitments: land to Ni-Vanuatu, the end of colonial rule, and self-determination. Up to this point, they had hardly been rivals. And yet Jimmy Stevens turned away from the VP and toward the Phoenix Foundation. Why? For one, the VP’s base was in the Anglophone Protestant church, which often found itself at odds with those in Nagriamel who tended to come from the bush and embraced kastom (custom), what anthropologist Margaret Jolly defines as a “self-conscious perpetuation of ancestral ways and resistance to European values and practices.”

Stevens equated custom with bush people, but leaders in the VP understood that the equation was not so simple. The Phoenix Foundation had mobilized around the idea of custom to further its own agenda and to cultivate a lasting political relationship with Stevens. But beyond custom, what Stevens and Nagriamel feared most is that they would not be directing their own destiny once independence arrived, and they chafed against what they perceived as second-class treatment by the Anglophone-dominated VP and its educated and politically cosmopolitan leaders.


Such concerns characterized struggles over decolonization in many places around the globe as the masses of working people, as well as ethnic and linguistic minorities, worried that a transfer of power from colonial to national rule would constitute little more than a shift from external to internal colonialism. Stevens proffered an alternative: drawing upon a certain cartographic logic, he emphasized that the New Hebrides was “an artificial creation, a colonial convenience,” and thus he would create an “autonomous, self-governing region or province of NaGriamel as part of a New Hebrides Confederation . . . based on Melanesian traditions.”

In order to pursue secession, Stevens relied on his libertarian allies and incorporated their ideological language. Warnings of communist influences, of taxation, and of VP shenanigans appeared with regularity in Stevens’s rhetoric, and the slogan “Individual Rights for All” began appearing on the Nagriamel flag. Eventually, with the Phoenix Foundation’s financial and logistical support, Stevens and Nagriamel launched a rebellion to secede from the new state of Vanuatu in 1980. That rebellion ended with death and displacement.

Stevens was sentenced to a long prison term and branded a traitor, even as he mourned the death of a son, shot during the rebellion’s suppression. His coleaders also served stints in prison, one of whom died from tetanus at the beginning of his sentence. Meanwhile, the collaborators in the Phoenix Foundation watched from a distant shore and then, like the British and the French, went home.
A Free Trade Zone

In 1995 Oliver returned to Vanuatu in a joint venture with Romanian economist Stefan Mandel. Mandel had managed to game the lottery system in the 1990s by purchasing every possible combination of tickets for the Virginia lottery’s $27 million jackpot. He had convinced investors to loan him money to purchase all the combinations, at the cost of some $7 million, in exchange for a share of the winnings. “I knew that I would win one first prize, six second prizes, 132 third prizes and thousands of minor prizes,” Mandel bragged. He pulled in nearly $20 million, but his investors saw little return on their investment after taxes, reimbursements, and Mandel’s appropriation of nearly $2 million as a “consulting fee.”

Because of Mandel, the US lottery system no longer allows people to fill in their own tickets. In addition, they have expanded the possible number of configurations to offset the possibility of another Mandel. In the late 1990s, Oliver and Mandel worked with the Israeli Mondragon group to try to create a free trade zone (FTZ) on Big Bay on Santo. In a subversive twist, the group took its name from the highly successful Mondragón cooperatives of the Basque region in Spain, but with vastly different aims in mind. Rather than creating workers’ cooperatives that provide an array of economic and social services, the Israeli Mondragon group sought a ninety-nine-year lease to create an economic and cultural enclave free of taxes, customs duties, and import/export regulations.

The free trade zone would have had its own postal service, currency, and offshore financial center. The effort initially moved forward, although Oliver left after a falling out with Mandel. In any case, it did not end well. In late 1999 and early 2000, Vanuatu’s Council of Ministers and its Foreign Investment Review Board approved the project, but it quickly foundered after an ombudsman investigation in early 2001 determined the deal was corrupt.

Five years later, in 2006, US ambassador to Papua New Guinea Robert Fitts reported to the United States Pacific Command:


The Vanuatu Minister of Lands [Maxime Carlot Korman] recently signed an MOU with an obscure group of American investors to consider establishing a free port with an autonomous government. This closely parallels a 1980 attempt by the Phoenix Foundation which was only ended by bringing in PNG troops (ref A). The 1980 version would have had the powers to issue currency, passports, and was supposed to have featured untaxed and unregulated free flow of capital. (C) Ambassador learned Sept 6 from the Vanuatu Deputy Prime Minister that many of the same American figures are behind the current effort.

At least one of those figures was Michael Oliver.

The MOU went nowhere. Memories of Oliver linger. Claims circulated that he was in Santo in 2015, at the age of eighty-seven, and were met with fanfare; they turned out to be false. But now, as in the 1970s, there are male chiefs and Ni-Vanuatu with rights to custom land who want to see it developed, and they remember his name. Nagriamel endorsed a 2019 plan to create a free trade zone on Santo. The desires and needs are as real as the differences of opinion among custom landowners. Some counsel development, while others counsel against it. Some want free trade zones and to lease land because of the promise of jobs and a potentially improved quality of life; others are concerned that FTZs constitute little more than a land grab and will bring minimal benefits to local communities. Such concerns are not new. The route to independence, as well as what it would look like, was intensely contested among Ni-Vanuatu, and the question of land rights is central to such debates.

Prior to the 1980 rebellion on Santo, a French official tried to explain why American speculators had targeted the New Hebrides in the 1970s. He concluded that they were looking to reproduce life as it was in “Guatemala in the good old days.” It is an unnerving indictment. As the official surely knew, the landowners’ belle epoque that preceded Guatemala’s democratic revolution in 1944 had been characterized by feudal lords and “their” indigenous serfs, wealthy landowners and indebted tenants, capricious rule and unquestioned submission. That schemes arose to resettle Vietnamese refugees on Santo as unpaid laborers suggests that the characterization is not necessarily an exaggeration.

The French official’s observation was a self-serving, exculpatory barb designed to forgive his own country’s colonial legacies, but it was also a sharp recognition of what lay just under the surface of the libertarian rhetoric and market idealism. Rather than a brave new world of widespread freedom, Vanuatu might have become little more than a patchwork landscape of private fiefdoms worked by a dispossessed class of Ni-Vanuatu. Little more, that is, than a Melanesian banana republic.

Exactly what free trade zones and crypto paradises — if they come to pass — hold in store for Vanuatu now is unclear. But the efforts from the 1960s and 1970s should give us pause, as should more recent libertarian private-country schemes. Over the past decade, the Seasteading Institute has sought out locations to colonize, beginning initially with the “high seas” and continuing more recently with a Tahitian lagoon and the coastal waters of Panama. A repurposed cruise ship, christened by its cryptocurrency-enthusiast owners “Satoshi,” floated around the Circum-Caribbean for a while with similar private country aspirations.

Bitcoin disaster capitalists, rebranded as the Puertopians, descended on Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria with promises of charity, wealth, and progress. Self-professed “radical social entrepreneurs” competed with former Ronald Reagan administration officials to develop free private cities and special economic zones in Honduras, with the blessing of an illegal regime that came to power through a coup d’état. These may be only the most visible of the varied projects underway. But at least thus far, all of these initiatives have floundered in the face of understandable opposition by communities that see such schemes for what they are: colonization, real estate speculation, land grabbing, and an assault on democracy and national self-determination.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Raymond Craib is a professor of history at Cornell University and the author of the forthcoming Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, From the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age (PM Press/Spectre, 2022).