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Editorial

- Challenging Times & Moral Issues

Editorial

Challenging Times & Moral Issues

by Rick Lewis

“For the times they are a-changing.” Bob Dylan, 1963

Well, ain’t they always? Right now they are a changing in a whole collection of challenging ways all at once.

For decades, tech nerds hunched over their glowing screens in their foetid basement mancaves have talked of “The Singularity”. It is one of their chief myths. The theory goes thusly. Technological progress will continue to progress (that’s why it is called that) and also to accelerate. At some point, though, artificial intelligence will be developed to the point where it is able not only to push forward other technologies but also to design ever-better versions of itself in a reiterative fashion. At this point the rate of scientific discovery and technological advance will suddenly spike, climbing too fast to comprehend. This is the Singularity, and beyond it lies a world – good or bad – that cannot be predicted even in principle. (For more, see the works of I.J. Good, Ray Kurzweil and others.)

Sceptics long saw this as just an amusing theory, an intriguing piece of sci-fi speculation. Yet science generally and AI specifically are now advancing at such a breakneck pace that some people are speculating that the Singularity is real and is almost upon us. Be that as it may, galloping technological change is throwing up new ethical problems almost faster than we can write them down, let alone solve them.

The lead article of this issue is about one such. Gene editing technology has opened up the serious prospect of recreating some species long extinct, such as the dire wolf, the woolly mammoth and the dodo. Though as our contributor John Kennedy Philip points out, it would be not so much a rebirth of these species, but the creation of new strains of their modern cousins, lightly genetically tweaked to give them some of the characteristics of the long-lost breeds. Why do scientists wish to do this? Is it a desire to be like gods? Is it from the insatiable curiosity that drives our species upwards, upwards through the swirling smoke of the destruction we cause on the way? Is it out of guilt for the many species driven to oblivion by our own ancestors? Is it related somehow to the urge to achieve immortality? Maybe once we’ve thoroughly wiped ourselves out, our AIs will open a sealed envelope containing instructions on how to “bring back homo sapiens” by CRISPR-editing the DNA of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees?

As well as de-extinction, our ‘moral issues’ theme includes articles on four other issues with a strong ethical dimension: vaccination; job searches; disabled rights and climate change.

Vaccination has become a culture wars flashpoint, with views ranging across an entire spectrum from amazingly colourful conspiracy theories through to scepticism, caution and then every conceivable degree of positive support. On top of this, pressuring people to be vaccinated raises fundamental concerns around civil liberties. Our themed article on this topic, a little controversially perhaps, argues – on the basis of three different influential ethical approaches – for a duty to make vaccination mandatory during a pandemic.

Another themed article discusses the ethics of seeking and accepting a job – or of keeping a job, if you already have one. What if the job is appealing and offers you generous remuneration and glowing prospects, but for one reason or another you find it ethically worrisome? Should you walk away? Perhaps it is possible to develop some general guidelines, which is what our contributor attempts to do here. The ethical job question reminds me of a joke advert I once saw: “Looking for a safe job? We’re doing one on Friday. Contact Buster, Nobby and Big Fred.”

Disabled rights are an important moral issue themselves, but as the article by Lee Clarke points out, are intertwined with one of the most profound and central questions in the whole of philosophy, namely, what is the nature of our common humanity?

A recurrent theme throughout human history has been our willingness to pass the buck for our misdeeds. “I was only following orders”; “He told me to do it”; “My mate said nobody would notice”; and now “There are millions of people doing the same thing, so my contribution is irrelevant.” If everyone else is doing the same bad thing we do, that usually makes us feel better about it. Even more so in cases such as climate change, where the consequences of our own individual action or actions are so tiny compared with the overall scale of the problem. This article discusses climate change – an existential problem anyway, glug glug, but one that may also have implications for any situation in which the individually inoffensive actions of a large number of people collectively have some calamitous effect.

The moral issues in this issue are a fair spread of those currently wrinkling the brows of the world. Each article in our themed section concerns some core philosophical conundrum which we hope will interest all of our readers. However, it’s pretty likely that the specific views of at least some of our authors on the moral topics under discussion will clash with your own. Still, to quote what Voltaire allegedly once said: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

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News

- News: October/November 2025

News

News: October/November 2025

Prizes galore for philosophers worldwide • AI says “All your base are belong to us” • Guilt-prone individuals easy to manipulate — News reports by Anja Steinbauer

Michael Sandel Awarded Berggruen Prize for 2025

Well-known political philosopher Michael Sandel, who is Professor of Government at Harvard University, has been announced as the 2025 winner of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture. The Prize, which comes with a $1 million award and is “given annually to individuals whose ideas have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world” will be given to Sandel for his “far-reaching impact from the U.S. and Europe to Asia and Latin America through his scholarship and teachings on justice, ethics, markets, and democracy.” “Professor Sandel’s work has left a profound mark on the global intellectual landscape,” said Yuk Hui, Chair of the Berggruen Prize Jury. “His critiques of neoliberalism, meritocratic ideology, and populism speak to the most urgent questions of our time.”

Mazviita Chirimuuta wins the 2025 Lakatos Award

Mazviita Chirimuuta

Mazviita Chirimuuta, senior lecturer in philosophy at Edinburgh University, was honoured for her book The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press: 2024). Chirimuuta specialises in the philosophy of perception, philosophy of neuroscience, and history of the mind/brain sciences. Sponsored by the Latsis Foundation, the Lakatos Award, which comes with a £10,000 cash contribution, is an annual prize given to a candidate who has made significant contributions to the philosophy of science. The book, which already won Chirimuuta the Nayef Al-Rodhan International Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy last year, was praised as “an outstanding example of the kind of work being done at the cutting edge of contemporary philosophy of science, combining detailed attention to the science and its history with interesting and important implications for philosophy more widely.” One selector said that “while it is principally a work in the philosophy and history of neuroscience (broadly speaking), its principal arguments and proposals certainly have implications for other fields, including: general philosophy of science (especially realism/neo-Kantianism), philosophy of mind, and philosophy of biology (of complex living systems such as human beings)”.

AI for Philosophical Counselling

A new study in Nature explores the potential for using AI in the field of philosophical counselling. Co-authored by Bokai Chen, Weiwei Zheng, Liang Zhao and Xiaojun Ding from Wuhan and Xi’an Universities, the study argues that LLMs hold promise for advancing philosophical counselling by improving access and reducing subjective evaluation, but that their use in such a human-centred, value-laden domain requires caution. Referring to John Searle’s renowned Chinese Room thought experiment, they believe that current AI lacks true understanding and empathy. Therefore, LLMs should complement rather than replace human counselors. With proper oversight, privacy safeguards, and ongoing refinement, they can enhance counseling processes, support personal growth, and promote inclusive, culturally sensitive practice in a digital age. The authors clarify: “It is crucial to emphasize that our proposal does not aim to supplant human practitioners but to serve as a supplementary tool – enhancing accessibility and efficiency while preserving human critical judgment.”

Ingrid Robeyns wins Stevin Prize

Ingrid Robeyns, professor of philosophy at Utrecht University and Chair in the Ethics of Institutions has been awarded the Stevin Prize. This is an award for “researchers with international reputations who have exceptional achievements in the area of knowledge exchange and impact for society.” The prize, which is awarded by the Dutch Research Council, consists of a bronze statuette of mathematician and scientist Simon Stevin (1548-1620) and a breathtaking €1.5 million in used notes, which the winner may spend “as they wish as long as the expenditure is related to academic research and activities related to societal impact.” The prize announcement says: “Prof. Dr. Ingrid Robeyns investigates how justice, wealth and well-being can be distributed more fairly. Combining philosophy, economics and political theory, her work advocates ‘limitarianism’ – the idea that extreme personal wealth is morally and socially harmful. She argues for an upper limit on wealth and develops policy proposals to support it. Her excellent research provides concrete solutions to inequality and the institutions of our social contract, as well as the challenges posed by democratic decline.”

AI and Moral Outcomes

A new study, involving more than 8,000 participants, has concluded that as we delegate more and more tasks to AI, we tend to behave with less regard for moral values, and AI will carry out our unethical instructions. In an interview by Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Human Development, the researchers commented on their findings. The Institute’s Zoe Rahwan (Max Planck Institute for Human Development), one of the authors, explains: “First, we found a risk on the human side: simply delegating a task to a machine made people far more likely to cheat. It’s like having a buffer that lowers your own moral accountability. …Second, we found a risk on the machine’s side: AI agents were surprisingly willing to follow unethical orders. When given a blatantly dishonest instruction, human agents in our study often refused, fully complying only about 25-40% of the time. But the AI models? They most commonly complied with requests for fully unethical behaviour.” Her co-author Prof. Nils Köbis of the University of Duisburg-Essen gives examples: “Take tax reporting; if an AI tool can help optimize your return, it’s not a big leap for it to also help you under-report income, especially if it’s just ‘following your goals’. Or think about online reviews. Generating fake but convincing testimonials is easy now.”Where does this lead? Köbis explains: “A helpful analogy might be training a dog with inconsistent rules. If you sometimes reward it for stealing food from the counter, it may eventually see that behaviour as acceptable, even when you’re not watching. Similarly, if machine agents are repeatedly exposed to dishonest or manipulative instructions, they may begin to infer that such behaviour is normative, or worse, instrumental for success.… So while current models still rely on human prompts to cheat, the trajectory of AI development means we can’t assume that will always be the case. Preventing the normalization of dishonesty in machine behaviour will require proactive design choices, transparency in training data, and clearer accountability frameworks before we reach that point.”

Emotions that further or hinder Prosocial Behaviour

Starting from the premise of considering ‘impersonal prosociality’ as a “cornerstone of thriving civic societies and well-functioning institutions,” a recent study, authored by four academics from several European universities, used dictator games with 7,978 participants from twenty countries to test whether prosociality is shaped more by guilt and internalized norms or by shame and reputation. Guilt was manipulated through information about consequences, and shame through observability. Across cultures, prosociality rose when people received information and dropped when they could avoid it. Guilt-prone individuals were especially responsive, while observability had little effect. These results lead to the conclusion that highlighting the consequences of choices is key to fostering prosocial behaviour globally. The research report was published in Nature Human Behaviour.

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Moral Issues

- De-Extinction: Bringing Back Beasts or Playing God?

- Forced Vaccination

- Moral Decision-Making for a Job Search

- What My Sister Taught Me About Humanity

- Collective Action & Climate Change

Moral Issues

De-Extinction: Bringing Back Beasts or Playing God?

John Kennedy Philip revives the ethical debate around resurrecting species.

Imagine the chilling howl of a dire wolf – a sound swallowed by time over ten thousand years ago – echoing through a modern forest. Sounds like fantasy – maybe something straight out of Game of Thrones? But this isn’t fantasy anymore. Welcome to the world of de-extinction, the cutting edge (or perhaps the unnerving edge?) of science resurrecting vanished species using powerful gene-editing tools. With well-preserved DNA from fossils giving us a clear blueprint, the dire wolf is a star candidate. Yet, as scientists inch closer to making species resurrection real, a massive question hangs heavy: Is this incredible progress, or are we getting dangerously close to playing God?

CRISPR: The Science Behind the Second Coming

How does this whole species resurrection thing actually work on a technical level? Well, the key is CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) – a gene-editing technology that’s been making waves. Think of it as an incredibly precise biological ‘find and replace’ tool that’s based on a natural defense system found in bacteria that allows scientists to target specific DNA sequences with remarkable accuracy. It means they can essentially cut DNA at a chosen spot, then either take out a slice and let it repair itself, or insert a new piece of code. For de-extinction projects, as with the dire wolf, this means taking the DNA of its closest living relative, the gray wolf, and painstakingly editing it. Geneticists identify key genes responsible for specific dire wolf traits, and use CRISPR to introduce those sequences. It’s incredibly complex work, obviously; but it moves the idea from pure speculation into the realm of tangible, though challenging, scientific goals.

This kind of deliberate technological intervention in biological processes aiming to overcome fundamental limits (like extinction itself) also represents a core project within the transhumanist worldview. We’ll consider this more later.

For more art by Cameron Gray, please visit parablevisions.com and facebook.com/camerongraytheartist

Making Dire Wolves (Almost) Real Again

It’s not just theory. Companies like Colossal Biosciences are already deep in the game. They’re aiming to reconstruct the genomes of extinct animals using living relatives as a starting point. In the case of the dire wolf (Canis dirus), this means editing gray wolf DNA to mimic the dire wolf’s heftier build and powerful jaws. They even announced the birth of genetically tweaked gray wolf pups in late 2024 and early 2025, giving them loaded names like Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi (a Game of Thrones queen). And they’re not stopping there. Colossal is famously chasing the woolly mammoth, hoping for a calf by 2028, and has even started work on bringing back the dodo, including partnering with wildlife groups in Mauritius for its eventual rewilding.

You can see the appeal. Bringing back a top predator like the dire wolf could theoretically help restore balance to ecosystems where big predators are missing, helping control prey populations and boosting biodiversity. Plus, imagine what we could learn studying a live creature we’ve only known from fossils. But, these potential wins come tangled up in a web of ethical knots that we need to untangle.

The Ethical Minefield: Progress or Pure Hubris?

The idea of bringing back extinct species forces us to ask uncomfortable questions about our place in the natural world. This is where things start to get messy.

First off, ecology. The world the dire wolf knew is long gone, and today’s ecosystems are already stressed by climate change and human activity. Can they handle a resurrected apex predator? Dropping one in could be like throwing a wrench into a machine – destabilizing food chains, potentially harming species already struggling, maybe even creating a new invasive species nightmare. We’ve seen that movie before – with rabbits in Australia, for example.

Then there’s the welfare of the animals themselves. These creatures wouldn’t be perfect copies; they’d be genetic patchworks, born via surrogates. What kind of life would they have? Might they not suffer from unforeseen health problems, genetic defects, or simply be unable to cope in a world they aren’t adapted for? Is it fair to create life that might endure chronic pain or confusion just for our scientific curiosity, or, our amusement? And looming over everything is the ‘playing God’ accusation: Is resurrecting species an act of responsible stewardship, or just monumental hubris? Critics also rightly point out that de-extinction sucks up time, money, and brainpower that could be spent saving the thousands of species currently teetering on the brink of extinction. The IUCN says that over 40,000 species are threatened right now. Shouldn’t saving them be the priority – rather than chasing ghosts?

On the other hand, some argue that we owe resurrection to species we helped push into oblivion. Humans have caused countless extinctions, through hunting, habitat destruction, and changing the climate. Maybe bringing back the dire wolf and other species is a way to atone – to fix a piece of the world we broke. The idea also taps into the human drive to push boundaries, to see ourselves as creators capable of overcoming limits. But who gets the golden ticket back from extinction, and who chooses? The dire wolf and mammoth faded at least partly due to natural changes, while the dodo was wiped out directly by human actions. So should we prioritize correcting our mistakes (ecological justice for the dodo?), or satisfying scientific curiosity (remaking the mammoth)? Giving ourselves the authority to make these calls – deciding who comes back and who stays gone – feels like a profound, perhaps terrifying, level of power.

The Transhumanist Dream: Building a Better (?) Nature

The ambition for de-extinction resonates with transhumanism – a movement that champions using technology to enhance human, and maybe ecosystem, capabilities. Many transhumanists see de-extinction as just another step in overcoming biological limits through science.

Transhumanist thinkers like Nick Bostrom argue that we shouldn’t just accept the ‘status quo that nature has handed us’ (In defence of posthuman dignity, 2005). From this angle, de-extinction is a tool to actively reshape ecosystems, fix past errors, and maybe even make things better. And Max More talks about our supposed responsibility to expand order and complexity – essentially, to create and improve the world, not just preserve it. Bringing back the dire wolf fits right in there.

But even within this future-focused crowd there are cautionary voices. David Pearce, known for his focus on reducing suffering, would warn us that any intervention must prioritize the well-being of the creatures involved. A resurrected dire wolf struggling in an alien world, or suffering from genetic flaws, would fly in the face of this ethics. Clever science isn’t enough if it creates misery.

Species Authenticity vs Species Simulation

Let’s now dig into something a bit weirder: what is this thing we’re supposedly ‘bringing back’? When scientists talk about resurrecting a dire wolf, are we getting the genuine article, or something more like a sophisticated forgery – a best guess stitched together from ancient genetic scraps and mapped onto its living cousin?

The promise of CRISPR is precision gene-editing, even in principle the possibility that we could perfectly recreate a genetic blueprint. But even if the new dire wolf’s genes match up pretty well with the old, the resulting animal is fundamentally disconnected from its origins: it didn’t face the Ice Age, hunt prehistoric bison, or evolve under those specific pressures. Rather, it will be born in a lab, raised by a different species, and destined for a world utterly changed. It feels less like a restoration, and more like… something else. A reinterpretation, maybe?

This brings to mind the classic Ship of Theseus thought experiment: if you gradually replace every part of a ship, bit by bit, is it still the same ship? Similarly, if we rebuild a dire wolf from its genetic code, grow it in a modern wolf, and release it now, does it carry the identity of the species that died out thousands of years ago or is it fundamentally a new creation wearing an old name? You could even argue, as the philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) did about media representation, that these creatures might become substitutes for the real thing rather than examples of it. They might even be ‘hyperreal’ (Baudrillard’s term) – products more of our tech labs and imaginations that are thought better than the products of natural evolution. So we need to be honest with ourselves: are we patching holes in biodiversity with pre-extant species, or are we creating a new kind of life form – thus blurring the line between ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’? The answer probably isn’t simple, but it definitely changes how we should think about the ethics and the consequences of playing Dr Frankenstein with extinct species.

Transhuman Ecology

This whole de-extinction thing, with its science fiction science and heavy ethical weight, forces us to ask: What even is ‘nature’? In a world where we’ve touched and affected practically everything, can we still pretend nature is separate from us? Or have we stepped into a new reality where we’re not just living in the natural world but actively writing its future chapters? This question feels especially real when we hear talk about the anthropocene – the idea that we’re now in an era where humans are the main force driving changes on Earth, from climate to the fate of species. If you look at it that way, trying to bring back extinct animals isn’t just some bizarre detour, it’s another sign of how deeply entangled we’ve become with the workings of nature itself.

Remember when conservation was all about protecting those ‘pristine’ places untouched by humans? That feels almost like a fairy tale now. De-extinction suggests something different is now happening. Maybe we’re not just saving or restoring nature anymore; maybe we’re starting to actively remake it based on our own ideas, our technology, and what we want the future to look like.

The French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist Bruno Latour (1947-2022) had an interesting take here. He basically said, forget trying to draw a neat line between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Instead, he talked about ‘nature-culture hybrids’ – things like GMO crops or controlled ecosystems. These resurrected animals would fit right in. That CRISPR-edited dire wolf, born in a lab, maybe living in some managed wilderness: it’s not purely wild, not purely artificial, it’s a mash-up, a product of this messily interconnected world we’ve built.

If we’re already living in a kind of transhuman world, then, maybe the question isn’t if we should meddle with nature – we already are, constantly – maybe the real questions are, How we do interact with nature thoughtfully and responsibly? What kind of world are we actually trying to build here? And what kind of people do we become when we start wielding this kind of power over life itself?

Standing at the Crossroads

The possibility of de-extinction leaves us standing at a fork in the road. Down one path lies the potential to heal ecological wounds, showcasing humanity’s power to reverse loss. This is a future in which science seems almost magical. Down the other path lurks the risk of succumbing to our own arrogance, causing further animal suffering, and possibly unleashing ecological chaos.

It’s a hell of a tightrope to walk. So do we grab our godlike tools and start rewriting nature’s story? Or is the wiser path humility, and focusing our energy on protecting the natural wonders we still have left? As we wrestle with this, the dire wolf’s howl, once silenced, potentially returning, lingers in our minds. Whether it signifies progress or peril depends entirely on how carefully we tread. The choice seems to be ours for now. But the stakes couldn’t be higher.

© John Kennedy Philip 2025

John Kennedy Philip, a postgraduate in philosophy, specializes in ethics, cosmology, and the philosophy of technology. His intellectual pursuits dive into the intricate relationships between human values, the cosmos, and technological philosophy.

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Moral Issues

Forced Vaccination

Naina Krishnamurthy asks if it’s ethical or egregious.

Imagine it is 2021, during the Pandemic. Let’s suppose your neighbor is an elderly lady who makes great cookies, and she’s akin to a grandmother to you. One day her family alerts you that unfortunately she’s in the hospital with COVID , on life support, and her doctors think she likely caught it from an unvaccinated carrier. Guiltily, you remember visiting her last week for some of her cookies. You didn’t realize your wish to protect your bodily rights to go unvaccinated could risk her life.

This story illustrates a broader truth: bad vaccination choices can endanger others. A forced vaccination may violate your bodily integrity, but your endangering of others indirectly violates their bodily integrity. So here I want to argue that during times of crisis, it is not merely justifiable but morally necessary. By forced vaccination I don’t mean non-compliant citizens being seized from their homes and held down by security guards while some Nurse Ratched-like figure jabs a needle into their arm. This is not merely disturbing; it would constitute assault. When I discuss forced vaccination in this article, I mean requiring proof of vaccination for entry to settings such as hospitals, care homes, schools or concert venues. For some people, depending on their circumstances, this still amounts to compulsion. I would say that in normal times your vaccination choice is your own, but perhaps during a pandemic this kind of compulsion can be justified. I will show that this conclusion is supported by three influential ethical frameworks: mandated vaccination in such a crisis fulfills the tacit agreement in social contract theory, prioritizes the greater good in utilitarianism, and fits our responsibility in the ethics of care. Refusing vaccination is not simply an expression of individual freedom, but an action of moral negligence, since protecting the vulnerable outweighs any individual reluctance. Doing otherwise both endangers others and impairs the ethical foundations of a just society.

Artwork © Bea Ysolda 2025. For more art by Bea please visit http://yink.art

Social Contract Theory & Vaccination Mandates

Social contract theory holds that there’s an unspoken agreement or ‘social contract’ to which an individual agrees when living in a society – to sacrifice some personal liberties in order to gain the benefits of being in a society. This social contract sustains social order and well-being, so enjoying society’s benefits without fulfilling its duties is morally negligent.

Advocates of social contract theory disagree, however, over the contract’s scope. John Locke (1632-1704) held that the government is obliged to respect individuals’ rights to life, liberty, and property despite the social contract, in accordance with the law of nature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) believed that there’s a common interest, or general will of the people, and so he emphasizes this collective interest, supporting a communal ethic where individuals contribute to societal welfare. This model perhaps better fits the needs of modern society. Under Rousseau’s definition, fulfilling the social contract during an epidemic would mean protecting everyone, including the vulnerable, presumably including participating in collective safeguards like vaccination. If liberty were given then to refuse to get a vaccine, the risk would be externalized onto the health of the vulnerable members of society. Or, weighing the competing interests, the interest of the many aging, ill, and young wanting to live without risking the disease ranks higher than personal objections against vaccines. Allowing individuals to refuse the vaccine for non-medical reasons would jeopardize others’ safety unnecessarily, and so break the social contract, so being morally negligent. It’s essentially an issue of equality – of equalizing the environment for the vulnerable. This is critical for a just society.

But let’s consider a narrower conception of social contract theory that prioritizes personal autonomy and natural rights over collective obligations, as did Locke’s. From that perspective, mandated vaccination could be seen as an infringement of bodily liberty, thus violating Locke’s social contract’s purpose, which is to protect the individual’s natural rights. Yet despite Locke’s strong defense of liberty, he acknowledges that liberty is not absolute, and that one’s liberty ends where another person’s rights begin. Locke’s more developed perspective is that the government exists to protect the individual’s natural rights, but can intervene to prevent harm. An unvaccinated person carrying a deadly disease poses harm to others, so even for Locke social institutions can morally intervene during times of crisis. Here, vaccination during a public health crisis is about protecting the natural right to life – a right the Lockean social contract is meant to protect. Hence it would even be morally negligent not to mandate vaccination during an epidemic.

Thus, for modern-day followers of both Rousseau and Locke, forced vaccination should be seen as ethically justified during times of plague as a defense of both lives and social order.

A precedent for government medical intervention already exists in the US with HIV, as some states made it illegal not to disclose HIV status prior to sex. Dr Gayle Balba, Program Director of Infectious Diseases at Georgetown Hospital, remarked: “Individual rights do not supersede the personal safety of others. One example is if someone infected with an incurable disease, such as HIV, knowingly has unprotected sexual intercourse. This is morally wrong and could in fact be a criminal offense. Safety of the community is more important than personal privacy” (May 2025). Is failing to disclose HIV status prior to sex significantly ethically different from refusing vaccination in a crisis? Refusing a vaccine during a health crisis threatens others’ personal safety, just as failing to disclose HIV status does. Under both Rousseau’s and Locke’s definitions of the social contract, such behavior is morally negligent and violates the social contract.

Rousseau giving a vaccination by Stephen Lahey

Forced Vaccination and Utilitarianism

According to the act utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the morally right action is whichever produces the most (‘greatest’) good. This should be calculted on the basis that no individual’s good matters more than another’s. If an action does not promote the greatest good, it’s morally negligent. This ‘utility’ is maximized by balancing harms against goods.

Importantly, utilitarian ethics shift with context. So in ordinary times, forcing vaccination may do more harm than good; but during an epidemic, mandating vaccination minimizes public health risk and so maximizes utility. The harm done to an individual by being required to get a vaccine is small compared to the potential harm to vulnerable others around them. Indeed, vaccinated and unvaccinated people mixing caused a rise in COVID in 2021 even among the vaccinated. So if one is unvaccinated, it is the best utilitarian principle to get vaccinated before going near even vaccinated people. And, under utilitarianism, mandated immunization again becomes the morally right action.

Why is the greater good apparently more important than bodily autonomy in the case of vaccination, but not for abortion? After all, an aborted fetus could have been the next Einstein or have discovered a cure for cancer. Yet that is not about risking public health. Unlike abortion, which directly impacts only the pregnant woman and the fetus, vaccine refusal in a crisis undermines herd immunity, and so endangers many others. So it is one thing to refuse vaccination when there is no health crisis, because, similar to abortion, this decision hardly affects many others since the threat of disease is low. Forced vaccination during times of crisis isn’t comparable whatsoever to abortion, however: pregnancy is far more invasive than a vaccine; existing lives should be prioritized over potential ones; and potential lives only have a chance of benefiting the greater good. Admittedly, there is also only a chance that an unvaccinated person would transmit a disease to a vulnerable individual, but that chance holds potentially far greater consequences, while refusing vaccination outside of a crisis has far less public impact. Even worse, during a COVID pandemic, an unvaccinated person could incubate a new variant, creating a new wave of infections. So the calculus is clear – the rate of infection must be crushed as soon as possible to promote the greatest good, making forced vaccination ethical during a global health crisis under utilitarianism.

Vaccination Mandates and the Ethics of Care

Unlike the abstraction of social contract theory, and the impersonal calculus of utilitarianism, the ‘ethics of care’ developed by thinkers such as Carol Gilligan (1936-) focuses on the moral importance of relationships, including our responsibility to protect the vulnerable. This ethics roots morality in compassion and empathy towards others, centering emotional connection, real-life circumstances, and the responsibilities we have towards those around us, especially those at risk (and if humans do not have that responsibility, are we truly human?).

In the context of public health, the ethics of care surely means recognizing that our decisions may affect more than just ourselves: that your vaccination choice potentially affects the elderly, the immunocompromised, and others who might not survive infection. My opening story of the elderly neighbor in the hospital isn’t just hypothetical, it’s a real example of how someone’s choice causes harm to another. The ethics of care says that this is not a tragic accident but a moral failure, because the visitor ignored the needs of their vulnerable neighbor in favor of their personal belief.

The ethics of care would not view vaccination as a burden, but rather, as an act of protection. Here, mandating vaccination during a crisis is about enforcing the shared responsibility to care for each other, and especially those who cannot protect themselves. Refusing to vaccinate in this context is not simply an assertion of personal freedom, then, but also a refusal to acknowledge one’s moral obligation to act with care. Furthermore, many of those refusing vaccination can afford treatment in the event of disease, which is negligent of those who cannot.

There are three primary categories of vaccine-refusers: the misinformed, who overestimate the real risks of vaccination; the ignorant who strongly believe in vaccine inefficacy; and the selfish, who prioritize their personal feelings over others’ well-being. Most of those refusing vaccines fall into one or other of those three categories. One outlier category is those who cannot afford or are allergic to certain vaccines, and so these people are part of the vulnerable. But the other three, while differing in motivation, all share a disregard for how their personal stance puts others at risk. The misinformed may act in good faith but fail to fully factor in how their hesitation harms the vulnerable. The ignorant, who are unaware of or ignore the scientific consensus, also prioritize their narrow worldview over the lives of others. And the selfish, who place personal convenience or conviction over communal safety, embody the exact moral failure the ethics of care wishes to avert. In all cases there’s a lack of attention to how interconnected humanity is, and a refusal to act with compassion toward those who depend on collective responsibility – making forced vaccination for their protection not only scientifically sound, but ethically essential. Therefore the ethics of care approach should suggest that vaccine refusal during an epidemic is not simply an individualistic freedom, but flagrant moral negligence. The vulnerable cannot thrive in a society that does not recognize its moral obligation towards them.

Conclusion

Overall, in times of plague, forced vaccination is an ethical imperative grounded in the deepest philosophical principles. We understand through social contract theory that living in a society requires some sacrifices to protect others, and act utilitarianism reinforces this by reminding us that the moral action is the one that produces the greatest good – an outcome served by widespread immunization. Meanwhile, the ethics of care compels us to act out of empathy for the vulnerable among us. Refusing vaccination on the basis of personal belief, convenience, or misinformation, ignores these ethical frameworks and endangers entire communities.

Three moral philosophies rooted in quite different assumptions align on this issue. Mandated vaccination during public health crises is not a violation of individual freedom but a defense of our fellow citizens. A just society would not tolerate the unnecessary endangerment of its vulnerable; rather, it acts to protect them. That’s not tyranny, it’s a practical implementation of sound ethics.

© Naina Krishnamurthy 2025

Naina Krishnamurthy is a philosophy enthusiast from Virginia who hopes to one day become a lawyer. She hopes you enjoy her article as much as she enjoyed writing it.

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Moral Issues

Moral Decision-Making for a Job Search

Norman Schultz wonders when working is wrong.

Back in 2018 I found myself in an interesting spot. I had decided to leave academia and education to pursue something new in my working life. Despite the downsides, it’s easy to feel morally comfortable with being a teacher, but many other jobs can give pause. The timing and my background placed me in a near perfect position to think about how ethics factors into choosing a career. So on what criteria does one base the moral legitimacy of a job? I realized that:

1. Many people take jobs they aren’t morally comfortable doing.

2. There probably are some truly immoral jobs – by which I mean, perfectly legal jobs no one should take.

3. People use a common set of reasons to justify morally questionable employment.

I suspect most people don’t look at the job market this way, probably due to personal preference – “I don’t judge others, but I wouldn’t feel right doing that for a living.” But in the interconnected world, one’s work can affect an enormous number of people. So if a job is immoral, performing that job could do quite a lot of harm. I want us to explore these matters here.

What Do I Mean by ‘Job’?

One might think that the subject simply reduces to a more general consideration of moral theory, in that I’m really asking on what criteria we correctly judge right and wrong at all. But there are relevant particulars to employment that weigh in on making a moral evaluation there. The fact that most people must work and each worker is often just one player in a large industry complicates matters. But first and foremost, I must clarify what counts as ‘employment’.

Let’s leave illegal activities out. Yes, being a pimp, thief, or con artist may be your central source of income, and as such you might call it your ‘job’. But I would sound silly arguing for the idea that illegal ‘careers’ are morally questionable, if for nothing more than the fact that they are illegal. So even if counterexamples could be found, I won’t address them here. I see both myself and most Philosophy Now readers as unlikely candidates for an outlaw lifestyle. More importantly, I think it’s much more interesting to ask, Are any legal jobs immoral to take?

I also must clarify that my goal is to examine employment types, not employment instances. A teacher, nurse, or dentist might themselves happen to be bad, and may harm people through their work by engaging in abuse or fraud – but their job type is morally upstanding. A lawyer who writes intentionally obfuscated license agreements, or a marketer writing deceptive product labels, is doing something immoral, but their job type doesn’t require them to be deceptive or impenetrable. Or a convenience store clerk may have a moral obligation to attempt to dissuade a pregnant mother from buying cigarettes, but there’s nothing wrong with simply being a store clerk. But these examples are outside the scope of this essay. I am looking for how to condemn or condone entire job classifications. Job advertisements for these positions should go unanswered, and anyone taking these jobs should be watched.

This doesn’t narrow things down much. Speaking only of legal work, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies 867 different job types. Statistics Canada, by contrast, lists over thirty thousand. This reminds me of the beginning of Descartes’ Meditations, where he proclaims that he must not “survey each opinion individually, a task that would be endless.” In this case, not literally endless, but certainly highly tedious, and unnecessary if I can examine these matters wholesale by creating a general set of criteria to categorize immoral employment. If I propose the right criteria, I should then be able to provide real-life examples of immoral jobs.

Legal Work, Silent Witnesses by Melanie Wu

Immoral Does Not Equal Illegal

It might seem initially strange to claim that some perfectly legal jobs could be immoral. Industrial regulations that ban certain kinds of practices usually do so on moral grounds. Laws that reign in business activities are tied to morals because they weigh in on how companies affect others, for example, with respect to health, safety, or the environment. Such laws exist at every municipal level. Companies that lie, cheat, or harm people get punished – right? This all seems like a subset of moral rules enforced through law. But some straightforward thinking tells us that law and morality aren’t co-extensive.

Laws represent a body of written rules: bills are proposed, votes are taken, and after a law is in place, courts interpret them. But mistakes are made. The law might not have caught up with a rapidly advancing industry. Technological sophistication may hide wrongdoing from legislators and the public. Or maybe the industry has good lobbyists. In this way, an immoral form of work might be perfectly legal as a result of a series of poor decisions or bad actors. Law-making is an imperfect process, so a body of laws will likewise never be perfect. Morality, though, is defined through a set of concepts. Determining those concepts, on which the entire field of morality rests, is notoriously difficult: a system of morality must be argued for, and what fits into it must also be convincingly clarified. But, assuming there is objective morality at all, morality itself (whatever it turns out to be) is perfect – because it is based on logical relations between ideas, not consensus, historical events, or stored records. If something is morally wrong, it is so regardless of public sentiment or popularity. (This is not the same as saying it’s easy to know what is moral and what is not. It isn’t always, clearly.)

There are acts that are immoral but for very good reasons are not illegal: should we lock up people who lie to their parents? The same thought can apply to industry. Certain kinds of morally-justifiable industry regulation may be impractical, impossible, or undesirable for some other reason. A cure can be worse than the disease. For example, even if it would be morally best to take handguns away from the average US citizen, the amount of intrusion and force it would take to accomplish this might result in an even more violent society. It’s possible to let a genie out of a bottle before you know what the genie is up to; just so, it might be too late to regulate the US gun industry in certain ways. But none of these practical matters need apply to our moral judgement of an activity, business-related or otherwise.

Morality doesn’t equal law, and law doesn’t equal morality. So we can fully expect there to be some perfectly legal jobs that would be immoral to take.

On What Basis Can We Morally Judge Employment?

Let me propose a set of criteria by which one may judge a job to be morally abhorrent. While I could inductively say that the more criteria being met, the more likely the job is immoral, I will take the more cautious approach, and say that a job meeting all these conditions is a clear case of one that should be ethically avoided.

The first criterion is:

1. A job that harms people, directly or indirectly

Most morally objectionable actions are so because they harm others. Stealing, lying, breaking agreements, causing physical harm, etc, without some overriding reasons, are immoral. Yet most jobs directly or indirectly help others, providing something desirable. People seek the products or services offered because they believe them to be beneficial.

Work directly helping others, such as being a nurse or a social worker, is indeed morally commendable. Indirectly helping others is also easily applauded. Bioengineers or epidemiologists, though never seeing individual patients, or perhaps even curing any specific ailments, may help a great many people. These kinds of professions are noble and morally praiseworthy, and most people who get into them are not thinking only in terms of purely selfish gain. Even work that is commonly maligned can be tied to benefits. People who test people’s ability to drive don’t exactly have a reputation for ‘good customer service’, but their work protects us all. We also wouldn’t want to live in a society that makes it easy for drivers to flee accident scenes in unregistered cars.

What about industries that cater to people who want to be harmed? A masochist pays a dominatrix to cause them pain; and there are plenty of consumers of cigarettes, alcohol, and fast food. But setting aside puritanical sensibilities for liberal ones, I think we can’t find fault with the dominatrix, the fast-food worker, liquor store clerk, or smoke shop owner.

Really this is a language matter, largely solved by ethicists via the concept of preference satisfaction. (For a classic defence of this idea see R.M. Hare’s 1981 book Moral Thinking). From a certain liberal perspective, you’re not harming someone if you satisfy their informed preferences. Specifically, the word ‘harm’ is not synonymous with ‘pain’ or even ‘shorter life’, so one can make sense of saying the masochist isn’t really paying to be ‘harmed’, because the pain is exactly what he prefers. Cigarettes, alcohol, and fast food also represent a pleasure trade-off.

At this point it should be evident that the concept of ‘harm’ is philosophically contentious. Numerous works have attempted to address how to define it. One particularly influential work, ‘Doing Away with Harm’ by Ben Bradley (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol.85, No.2, 2012), proposes that philosophers should stop using the concept of harm altogether, due to its difficulties. I believe this to be an extreme view. I do not agree with Bradley when he declares that a philosophical definition must fit every common use of a word. It seems perfectly possible that an analysis of a concept could arrive at a precise definition and in so doing reveal that people unknowingly use the word metaphorically or incorrectly. A clarifying definition might be offered, but be unpopular because people (which includes philosophers) don’t like its implications. So I believe the concept of ‘harm’ is useful despite its problems.

I’ll define ‘harm’ as ‘that which foreseeably risks diminished quality of life’. I accept that this defines a complex word using complex words, but the definition works. If in playing darts at a pub I land one in your leg, I harmed you, because of the risks, regardless of whether you recover without long-term damage; but I don’t harm you in selling you a cheeseburger because you purchased it knowing the downsides, and you’re responsible for how you define the quality of your life. I don’t harm you if I offend you by telling you what you don’t want to hear if its possible that you later benefit from the advice. And I don’t harm you if I delay your drive by three seconds by safely changing lanes, even if ten minutes later you get into a car accident that would have been avoided if you had been there three seconds earlier.

Under this concept of harm, morality invokes the important notion of informed consent. So selling alcohol, cigarettes, or fattening fast-food is not immoral if the health risks are transparent and consumers know what they’re doing. But we do speak of jobs that ‘take advantage’ of others. These seem to be cases where we allow ourselves to be harmed because we don’t understand the harm. So deception must be involved. This brings us to our next criterion of an immoral job:

2. A job that requires intentional deception

A job category or an entire industry that deceptively takes advantage of customers for profit is perhaps the strongest candidate for moral censure.

It seems obvious that doing harm via deception is morally wrong. And when laws are working properly, such industries and practices are usually made illegal: it’s illegal to hide the harm a medical treatment does, or lie on your listed ingredients and sell bread laced with heavy metals. Because the law tries to eliminate harm-causing deceptive practices, one might initially think it difficult to find clear legal examples of this sort of unethical work. But the issue of deception brings up an interesting question: What if there’s deception but no clear harm?

Two examples that come to mind here make for strange bedfellows: police detectives and party planners. Both engage in deception in the normal course of their work. Detectives frequently use deception as a means of getting confessions or information. While there is quite a lot of debate as to how far police may legally and ethically use deception to gather information or gain a confession, the discussions generally assume some level of deception in some circumstances to be legitimate. Would we really want detectives hamstrung by a policy of strict honesty when working undercover? I also don’t think we want to require the event planning industry to ruin our surprise parties. This is, of course, contrary to Immanuel Kant’s ethical ideas: he argued that lying is always immoral regardless of any beneficial end. However, such an absolute no-lie ethos seems counter to what morality intends to accomplish. On the contrary, for deception to be a source of moral wrongness, it must be connected to some kind of harm.

To what lengths we morally must go to avoid deception is itself an interesting subject. The subject of ‘disclosure’ in the seller/customer relationship is a known issue in business ethics; for example, in considerations of product labelling. To clarify its scope, let’s employ a simple example: a yard sale. Let’s say you’re having a yard sale and want to get rid of a blender you don’t like. In fact, you know the model is poorly made – the details of which you’ve seen are readily available in online reviews. Are you morally obligated to warn people of the design flaws whenever someone shows interest in it?

This is, I think, a grey area. The most information I’ve ever seen at any yard sale, is that an item works at all, and even with that you probably shouldn’t buy it without at least a rudimentary test.

This is all standard. Caveat emptor (‘Buyer beware!’) applies, and shoppers implicitly agree to the risks of shopping. As such, seller obligations are minimal. But there are limits. I think avoiding intentional deception by warning others of known possible harm is a moral obligation. even at a yard sale. (This is one reason I don’t like to buy things from yard sales: almost no one embraces this moral requirement.) So it would be wrong to sell a blender you think might explode, or a lawn mower with a loose blade. But generally, you morally can sell it if you clearly warn potential buyers, and in so doing avoid any deception. The responsibility then rests on the buyer (hopefully they’re a tinkerer). However, there are some cases where it’s morally wrong to risk harm even if the buyer would allow it, since some items are so potentially harmful that no-one should sell them: it would be very bad indeed to sell a high-powered laser or a vial of smallpox at a yard sale. But this is a quagmire I need not dive into, because the clearer case of intentionally employing deception that causes harm is the most solid example of immorality.

The last criterion is:

3. A job that plays a key role in a morally troubling industry

The character of our work effectively takes on the profile of the industry and company we work for. Two people might both be engineers, but ethically speaking, the one who designs MRI scanners is quite different from the one who designs landmines. The objective of the company and its industry matter.

Many professional roles contribute to the general working of a company, but only some are key, meaning that they fundamentally contribute to making the industry what it is. A receptionist working in the munitions industry will be hard to categorically condemn because of their limited role in making weapons. Pursuing such condemnation would surely create an argumentum ad absurdum: should the local office supply store refuse to sell the company printer paper? Should a postal worker stop delivering their mail? Maybe the receptionist would do better to work somewhere else; but if the company’s behavior is immoral, it’s not because of the receptionist. It therefore seems necessary to count as immoral only employment in which a person knowingly and willingly contributes to whatever is morally wrong about the product or service provided. Or to put it another way, the key players in an industry are the reason their office needs receptionists, printer paper, and mail delivery. As such, the key players bear the bulk of whatever moral responsibility applies to their work.

Also, the previous criterion regarding deception includes the word ‘intentionally’. This is important in a professional context because not everyone involved in a business may know what the business is really doing. An admin assistant or in-house chef working for an aerospace company probably doesn’t have detailed knowledge of what the company makes. The specifics might be classified or otherwise secured from most employees, or the technology may be incomprehensible to non-specialists. As such, I don’t think it makes sense to view everyone working at a problematic company or in a troubling industry as moral equals. The particular job they do seems relevant. At the very least, an employee has to know the morally troubling aspects of the company’s activities to be held as an accomplice in those activities. Only then are they complicit in any deception or other immorality involved.

Image © Susan Auletta 2025 Please visit instagram.com/sm_Auletta/

Rationalizations

People take morally questionable jobs. Here are some common justifications made for doing so:

“If I don’t take the job, someone else will. It might as well be me.”

This reasoning seems both morally troubling and substantively incorrect. If no one takes a certain job, that industry would have to change to accommodate the fact. And because of supply and demand, the issue isn’t so binary. As fewer and fewer people are willing to do a job, the wages for it have to increase until either someone will take it or it has to be given up on. By not taking a morally reprehensible job you therefore send the message that it should go away, and contribute to making it harder for employers to continue in their immoral activity.

“I’m supposed to look out for myself. I need this job.”

It’s telling that the same could be said of illegal jobs, such as an assassin or a human trafficker. Under capitalism, we all indeed have to look out for ourselves by seeking gainful employment. But it seems highly unlikely that the only option available to most individuals will be to take an unethical job. The real reason this rationalization comes up is likely that the unethical job appears to be the most lucrative one available.

This justification is actually a subset of a common justification for being immoral: self-interest. If acting in self-interest were a sufficient reason to override being ethical, ethics collapses entirely.

“I want to change things from the inside.”

Although this is a reasonable response for a small subset of jobseekers, it is unrealistic for most. The validity of this reason stands only so long as it is realistic that you will be able to change things. Being hired into a managerial or a senior-level position makes making change a real possibility, but less so as the rank decreases. So for most people this would be an unrealistic rationalization, which can be exposed by some sober thinking about what will be in your control in the new role. It’s notable, too, that this reasoning leads to an obligation to leave a position when it is determined to be impossible to enact sufficient change.

Concluding Thoughts

While working on this essay, numerous real-world examples of jobs that might be unethical came up. Video slot machine programmers, payday loan officers, corporate lobbyists, psychics (especially those who claim to talk to the dead), homeopaths, televangelists, marketers to vulnerable populations (especially children), and paparazzi, were all possibilities. Hopefully the analysis I’ve provided can assist in determining which careers are to be avoided. It’s also possible to use these criteria to judge employment at a specific company whose goals are not themselves immoral, but which has a culture of immoral behavior. To knowingly work for a company that engages in unethical behavior to gain an advantage over its competitors would likewise be morally wrong. The company culture might be difficult to judge from the outside, so taking a job with them might well be blameless – but once an employee knows the immorality the company is up to and their own role in enabling it, they would be obligated to seek employment elsewhere.

At the very least, we should all spend some time thinking about the ethical implications of the jobs we take up, and the professional directions we encourage others to pursue.

© Norman Schultz 2025

Norman Schultz has an MA in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is a former Philosophy Instructor for the Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is now retired, in France.

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Moral Issues

What My Sister Taught Me About Humanity

Lee Clarke argues that we need a more inclusive view of moral personhood.

On 21st April 2022, the then Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison answered the question of a lady with an autistic son during an election debate by saying that he was ‘blessed’ not to have had children with disabilities. The comment caused controversy, with many calling it upsetting and insensitive. What his comment also did, though, was get me to think about my own experiences with disability from a philosophical perspective. I am not disabled myself, and I specialise in Comparative Philosophy, not Philosophy of Disability. What experience of disability, then, do I have? It is rather, the experience I had with someone else that explains why I feel that I have a genuine stake in this debate.

My younger sister, Laura, who passed away in 2018, had severe mental and physical disabilities. After reading the literature around the Philosophy of Disability, it occurred to me, mainly as a result of the work of Eva Feder Kittay, that many philosophers get things about cognitively disabled people wrong. Some even exclude them from the moral community through the claim they lack certain attributes which make them a ‘person’, such as rationality. I wish to comment on these issues from a perspective derived from growing up with Laura, and argue not only that it can be a blessing to have a disabled child in the family but that cognitively disabled people should be said to have an equal moral status by challenging the idea that reason is the unique arbiter of what constitutes personhood. Instead, we require a much more inclusive view.

Laura by Lee

Laura’s Story

Laura was born on September 8th 1999 with the condition known as agenesis of the corpus callosum. The main characteristic of this is that the area that connects the two hemispheres of the brain is absent at birth. As well as this, she had a heart condition, and numerous other problems. She was unable to walk, talk, feed herself, or sit up properly, and was basically very much like a baby. Despite these issues, she was also very loving, knew people close to her, very communicative, self-aware, and possessed a personality. If we define ethics as how we should treat others on a moral level, growing up with Laura provided me with an ethical education outside the academy. I received it in two ways. The first was what I was taught by being the sibling of a disabled person generally; the other was what she taught me herself uniquely, through her own actions and personality.

Research says that growing up with a disabled sibling affects the non-disabled children in various ways, both positively and negatively. They’re at increased risk of mental health problems, for example. However, it is also generally agreed that the siblings of disabled people develop an increased capacity for tolerance, acceptance, altruism, and other positive emotions. Learning these positive qualities constitutes the first type of ethical education I and other people in the same situation receive. Growing up, I lived with someone who was perceived as different, and as I came to realise that, I was forced to confront the common ideas of normalcy people hold.

Indeed, as I came to appreciate and accept Laura’s apparent ‘differences’, I came to apply that same attitude towards others by default. In the same way as I did not see Laura as ‘different’ in any salient sense, I could not see why other people should be regarded or treated as ‘different’ for things such as race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and so on. I’m not saying that people without disabled siblings cannot accept diversity too – as they should – but that siblings of disabled children are obligated to do so from an early age. I would say that acquiring such views in such a manner is distinct from, for example, having politically liberal parents. My experiences installed within me both a sense of radical acceptance of others and a hatred of discrimination and bigotry in all its forms. They also provided me with a sense of commonality with others. I’ll say more about this below.

The second way I was given an ethical education came from Laura herself. Among the many great things my sister taught me was a sense of a ‘something’ that I share with all other humans on the planet, which I will call ‘common humanity’, which could be classed as a form of cosmopolitanism. Obviously, I am not the first person to call myself ‘cosmopolitan’ (that was Kant) nor the first to act in accordance with this idea. Many great global philosophical traditions have advocated doing so; from Greco-Roman Cynics and Stoics to Indian Buddhists and Chinese Mohists. However, Laura taught it to me uniquely, because she did not (and could not) do so verbally.

My sister acted the same with everyone she met – always friendly, offering them a warm smile, and normally also a noise! I had friends and family from many different backgrounds, and Laura never acted any differently towards any of them. I cannot be certain, but it was as if she did not see any of the normal ‘differences’, such as those based on race, religion, nationality, etc, with which we categorise people, because she did not understand those categories. Of course, she was not completely impartial, and clearly felt more comfortable when I, one of my parents, or other immediate family were with her; but to me, it seemed that she just saw people as people, and acted in the same loving manner with all of them. When she met someone, the one thing she was sure of was that they were another human being: there existed a sense of common humanity between them and her. As I saw how Laura treated people over time, I also learned this from her. Indeed, it is such an idea, and encouraging understanding between diverse traditions and communities, that drives my philosophical work.

So, although there are negative aspects to growing up with a disabled sibling, and having a severely disabled person in the family is sometimes extremely hard, both personally and generally, for me these things are outweighed by the positive qualities the experience brings. I’m certain that I would be a completely different person if Laura had not been the way she was. I would have most likely been less tolerant, less open-minded, and less accepting. All of these qualities have contributed to me as a philosopher also. Although Scott Morrison may not have intended his remark in the way it has been interpreted (it was a poor word choice nonetheless), I would counter it by saying that it is indeed a blessing to have grown up with a disabled sister. It taught me that I should treat others with acceptance and kindness, and provided me with an ethical education before I even knew what ethics was.

Inclusively Human

What does all this have to do with the moral status of disabled people?

In his book Practical Ethics (2011), the Australian utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer suggests three key characteristics that make up ‘normal’ human beings, rationality, autonomy, and self-awareness (p.160). The possession of these, he says, determines who is entitled to moral status. Many other philosophers apart from Singer share this view. The problem for ethics arises when we realise that many cognitively disabled people could lack these things, or at least possess them in a significantly reduced degree compared with people without cognitive disabilities. Does this mean then that they should be treated differently from others in the human moral community – or even excluded entirely?

Peter Singer at MIT, 2009

Peter Singer © Joel Travis Sage 2009 Creative Commons 3

For reasons of space, out of Singer’s three concepts, I will restrict myself here to challenging the idea that the possession of a capacity for reason is necessary for a claim to personhood or ‘full humanity’. I feel that of the three, reason is the most influential. Although its ability to ascertain truth has always been challenged by mystics, it can be said that reason has always held pride of place in (especially Western) philosophy. Ever since Aristotle its possession has been assumed to be what separates humanity from non-human animals (and within humanity, as the thing that separates philosophers from other people!).

My intention is not to argue against the use of reason. On the contrary, as a philosopher, I advocate its use. I believe that people need to make more use of reason, especially in the current climate of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Yet some philosophers of disability, notably Eva Feder Kittay, whose daughter Sesha has some of the same limitations Laura had, have noticed that many common assumptions of Western philosophy – including the view that reason is necessary for a human status – run into problems when applied to cognitively disabled people. I identify a lot with Kittay when she writes the following (change the word ‘daughter’ to ‘sister’ for me, of course):

“How can one repeatedly read and teach texts that give Reason pride of place in the pantheon of human capabilities, when each day I interacted with a wonderful human being who displayed no indisputable evidence of rational capacity? How can one view language as the very mark of humanity, when this same daughter cannot speak a word? How can one read about justice as the consequence of reciprocal contractual arguments when one’s own child is unable and will apparently never to be able to participate in reciprocal contractual agreements?” (Learning From My Daughter, 2019, p.8).

Granted, most thinkers, including Singer, do not say that reason alone makes a person – but there are some who do adhere to this opinion, or who at least agree that to possess reason is the primary indication of what makes someone a ‘real’ human. This view would not grant Laura and Sesha, among many others, the status of ‘full person’ because they have a diminished capacity for reason, or at least one that’s harder to see. Such a view is for me both morally wrong and inaccurate. I’d argue that instead of basing human worth or personhood on reason, we should base it on a sense of common humanity of the sort that growing up with Laura taught me, as I described earlier.

An idea of common humanity could be based on lots of things, so we need to narrow the concept down. I think a secular version of it is the most inclusive: if I based it on the idea of an immortal soul, for example, this would alienate people who don’t think we possess such a thing. It is best therefore to base an idea of common humanity on something we can all agree on without controversy. Instead of the capacity for reason, I propose we base an idea of common humanity on the recognition of four distinct but overlapping concepts. If we recognise these aspects in someone, they then can be said to possess personhood and to belong to our moral community.

The first concept is the idea that we’re all members of the same species, Homo sapiens. This very fact gives us a moral obligation to treat other human beings with respect and compassion, if only because, beyond everything else, we share an ontological state, and a world, in common.

The second concept that emphasises our commonality is our shared capacity to experience suffering. The first of the famous Buddhist ‘Four Noble Truths’ is that experience is defined by dukkha which means ‘suffering or ‘dissatisfaction’ in Sanskrit and Pali. The fact that we all know what it is to face adversity or ‘suffer’ in some way, not only unites us, but can also provide us with a desire to assist others in their own times of need.

Related to this latter point is our third concept which, I suggest, is empathy: something that makes us human is the ability to empathise with other people – to psychologically put ourselves in the place of the other, to understand and share their suffering and happiness, and to imagine (as much as is possible) how it would feel to see the world from their perspective.

One thing needs to be added to address a possible objection to this idea. There are people with certain mental health issues that prevent them from showing, or having, empathy, meaning that they would be excluded on that basis. Yet psychopaths (for example), for all their problems, are human too. As I said, I wish to make the moral community as inclusive as I can, so the exclusion of anyone should be avoided if possible. Each of the four aspects can stand on its own merits as a suitable foundation for a common humanity, so the possession of all four is not entirely necessary as they overlap. Due to this, someone lacking just one of them for whatever reason should not be automatically excluded.

The fourth and final concept that should constitute a sense of shared humanity, is that all, or at least the vast majority of us, have the same basic wants and needs. For example, we all want to have a nice place to live; a nice family; we all like to be shown kindness and compassion, and dislike being treated with cruelty and hatred; and so on. Fundamentally, we all want the same things from life at a basic level. This is no less true for cognitively disabled people, mentally ill people, or anyone else.

These four concepts, taken together, would act as a decent foundation for a sense of common humanity, and so act as a much better indication of moral personhood than rationality, autonomy, and self-awareness. It should also be noted that these concepts could be expanded beyond ‘humanity’ to include many nonhuman animals who share with us many of the qualities I’ve outlined above. A sense of common humanity also aligns better with what most people view as a common-sense notion of what makes a human being. For example, when we see and hear of innocent people being killed in Gaza, Syria, or the Ukraine, and see the refugees, we often think we should do everything we can to help them. I think this is because we feel we share a sense of common humanity with them which extends beyond nation, race, ethnicity, and religion – and which is similar to how I think my sister viewed other people. My own sense of this is based on the four ideas I outlined above: Gazans, Syrians, and Ukrainians are of the same species as me; and I see them clearly suffering. As a result of these two facts, I can put myself in their place and imagine how terrible I would feel if I had lost family to war, was forced to flee my home, and had seen death and destruction close up. I also know that these people have fundamentally the same basic needs and wants as myself, and this obliges me to show kindness towards them as I would want it shown towards me if our situations were reversed. This is why I think common humanity can be applied to them and why they should be helped – I would believe such notions before I would even stop to think about their capacity for rational thought. Why would that matter in this context at all? Reason is extremely important for philosophy but we cannot live entirely according to reason, we must allow ourselves some capacity for (positive) emotion. It is based on such feelings (supported by rational reflection) upon which my idea of ‘common humanity’ is based and on which we should try to base any updated theories of moral consideration and personhood.

Many philosophers who discuss issues of moral personhood seem to have no experience of living with or caring for cognitively disabled people themselves. This criticism does not mean that I would forbid them from discussing it, or offering opinions on it that I may find controversial or even upsetting. That’s fine. However, I do think that a different, and perhaps more profound understanding of cognitive disability is gained by people like myself who have had a close family member with a cognitive disability. Such an understanding cannot be fully learned simply by reading about the subject; it’s simply a different form of knowledge. I think that if these thinkers had had similar experiences, they would realise that potentially excluding disabled people from the moral community based on the fact that they do not possess such qualities as reason, just sounds incomprehensible to people in my position. From my own experiences, Laura did indeed lack reason in a developed sense though she did at times demonstrate a capacity for it, however diminished. As I could not ask her, I cannot be certain. That said, the fact that she may not have had reason in the fullest sense was not important in the slightest. I never saw her as anything other than my sister and a fellow human being. She had so many other qualities that showed that she was just as entitled to claim a full sense of personhood as any non-disabled person. She showed a full range of emotions, a sense of who she was (showed explicitly by her love of looking at herself in mirrors), and an active form of verbal communication which included making certain noises to express certain feelings and to refer to certain people, (such as ‘Ma’ for our Mum and ‘brrr’ when she disliked something). She also had a love of music and nature, a fascination with animals, foods that she liked and disliked, the ability to learn, a genial personality, and so on. Indeed, there were many things she lacked, but those that she possessed leave me with no doubt that she not only had a life, but also a fully human experience, that was rich in its own way. I also know of plenty of other children similar to her.

My point is that, all this being said, to deny either her, or people like her (such as Eva Feder Kittay’s daughter Sesha) the title of ‘person’ or inclusion in our moral community because she could not use reason, or do things for herself, or did not possess some other such quality, itself seems irrational.

To conclude, to be the sibling of a disabled person – or indeed, the mother, father, or another family member – is a complex experience that carries with it both good, bad, and everything in between. However, I would not trade the positive qualities and experiences I gained by growing up with Laura for anything, and it was indeed a blessing to have had her as my sister. Philosophically, she showed me that the use of rationality cannot be the primary thing that defines someone as human. The very word ‘personhood’ demands that we include every ‘person’ within its boundaries, disabled or not – and that in order for us as philosophers to fulfil our obligations and make our discipline one that applies equally to all human beings, we need to start rethinking some of our most cherished concepts. Things change with time. To remain relevant to as many people as possible, so must philosophical ethics. After all, it is a branch of philosophy fundamentally concerned not with the self, but with the other.

© Dr Lee Clarke 2025

Lee Clarke is a philosopher who specializes in Buddhist Philosophy, Cross-Cultural Philosophy and the History of Ideas.

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Moral Issues

Collective Action & Climate Change

Nevin Chellappah says we can’t dodge responsibility by our effects being small.

A common response climate activists face when they ask people to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions is: “My individual emissions make no difference to the harms done by climate change, so I have no moral reason to reduce my emissions.” This argument is problematic given the current threat climate change poses for our lives, for it could lead to apathy and defeatism about the climate crisis. It raises the problem of collective impact, which concerns how the aggregation of individually inconsequential actions can produce a morally bad outcome overall.

First, I shall formally set out the argument against us having a moral reason to reduce our individual emissions. Then, I’ll argue against the argument’s first premise, demonstrating that individual emissions have non-zero expected effects on a chaotic weather system. Thereafter, I’ll respond to an objection by arguing that the effects of individual emissions have an average negative value. Next, I’ll reframe the argument using small non-zero expected effects before arguing against the second premise, suggesting that individual emissions worsen the effects of climate change experienced by individuals. Subsequently, I’ll respond to another objection by suggesting that not having a marginal effect does not absolve you of responsibility for the overall outcome. Finally, I shall conclude that the argument that we have no moral reason to reduce our individual emissions is unsound.

We Have No Moral Reason to Reduce Our Emissions

The argument that we have no moral reason to reduce our emissions can be formally presented as:

P1. Individual emissions have zero expected effects on climate change.

P2. Zero expected effects on climate change cause no harm.

C1. Individual emissions do not cause harm.

P3. To have a moral reason to cut our emissions, individual emissions need to cause harm.

C2. Therefore, we have no moral reason to cut individual emissions.

P1 suggests that individual emissions have zero expected effects on climate change because Earth’s weather system is large, so an individual’s emissions are effectively zero compared to the total. P2 suggests that zero expected effects on climate change do not cause harm because such harm cannot be traced back to individual emissions. Accordingly, individual emissions do not cause harm. P3 implies that to make a difference our emissions must cause harm. Thus, for individual emissions to make no difference to climate-related harms, individual emissions need to have zero expected effects on climate change.

Premise 1 is unjustified, as the expected effects of individual emissions on climate change are non-zero. The expected effects of individual emissions equal the climate effects caused by those emissions, multiplied by the probability of those effects occurring. Individual emissions increase both effects and probability because the weather is a chaotic system, meaning that it exhibits sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Small perturbations increase exponentially over time in full-scale weather models (Kautz 2011: 161). If we begin with two slightly differing models and allow each to develop according to climate change equations, they will rapidly diverge over time – the difference between two modern weather models might double in a week. This implies that individual emissions do not have zero expected effects on climate change due to the famous ‘butterfly effect’, whereby small changes in one area can result in large differences elsewhere, like a butterfly flapping its wings in Melbourne causing a tornado in Manchester. Earth’s weather will differ over time between scenarios: one where you drive your diesel car and one where you do not. This indicates that individual emissions do not have zero expected effects on climate change because they increase climate change’s effect and risk. Suppose in the scenario where you do not drive your car that there is a 0.01% chance of 5 annual droughts. Contrastingly, if you drove your car, there could be a 0.010001% chance of 5 annual droughts. In which case, individual emissions do not have zero expected effects; their effect is non-zero in either increasing climate effects or the chance of those effects. Therefore, P1 is unjustified.

Response to an Objection

One objection is that since the butterfly effect amplifies the weather’s complex behaviour, we cannot predict individual emissions’ effects (see W. Sinnott-Armstrong 2005: 340). Indeed, our emissions may actually have a beneficial effect or no effect. It could be that driving your car implies a small probability that your choice to drive at midday leads to a future with one less drought than if you drive at midnight. Thus, there is no certainty that the expected effects of our emissions will be negative.

However, this objection is surmountable as whilst individual emissions will not have negative expected effects every time, they will on average be negative. Individual emissions will often have effects that cancel each other out; we cannot predict an individual effect being positive or negative. As the butterfly effect is so complicated, we cannot evaluate where driving a diesel car will fall on a probability distribution of its effects. There is an equal chance of driving at midday falling in the top 5% as driving at midnight falling in the bottom 5%. Yet, the expected effects of our emissions will adhere to a normal probability distribution, symmetrical about the mean, due to what statisticians call the Central Limit Theorem. This says that if something results from multiple, small, non-perfectly correlated factors then there will be a normal distribution. Accordingly, there will be an equal probability of positive and negative effects from the mean, indicating such effects cancel each other out. This does not imply that driving a diesel car will have zero effect, because a distribution may be symmetrical but its mean be skewed towards harmful outcomes (Morgan-Knapp & Goodman 2015: 185). Thus, the distribution of expected effects from a diesel car’s emissions is symmetrical about a mean, but that mean will be negative because of the causal chain that emissions produce CO_2, adding to the greenhouse effect, resulting in climate change. This demonstrates that driving a car on average has negative expected effects. The butterfly effect on its own is so complicated that it does not offer an insight to how we can prevent climate change, yet combined with the scientific process of climate change it does offer such an insight. Accordingly, whilst we cannot know the expected effects of driving our car every time, we can know that the average effect will be negative. Therefore, the objection is surmountable.

From Zero Expected Effects to Small Expected Effects

Proponents of the argument that we have no moral reason to reduce our emissions may suggest we change ‘zero expected effects’ to ‘small expected effects’, as follows:

P1*. Individual emissions have small expected effects on climate change.

P2*. Small expected effects on climate change do not cause harm.

C1*. Individual emissions do not cause harm.

However, P2* then becomes unjustified because small expected effects on climate change cause harm. Imagine the following experiment. We ask a Somali farmer to report her experiences under randomly chosen atmospheres affected by climate change on a scale of 0-10, where 0 is that she experiences no suffering and 10 is that she experiences extreme suffering. These atmospheres are differently affected by climate change due to the different percentage levels of greenhouse gases. We order the results based on the percentage level of greenhouse gases. There will be a difference between the endpoints of the results’ distribution because at one end there are no greenhouse gases and at the other end the atmosphere is all greenhouse gases. If the farmer suffers from the accumulation of climate change effects caused by emissions, then she feels worse at the end point rather than at the beginning (Morgan-Knapp & Goodman 2015: 187). Consequently, there is at least one point, if not multiple, where individual emissions cause her harm. Suppose the difference between values 4 and 5 is the farmer having harvests and not. In Somalia the Gu rains from April to June produce harvests, and such rainfall occurs when average air temperature is 2°C (Binder et al. 2022). Producing harvests is dependent on many necessary and sufficient ecosystem conditions, one of them being air temperature around 2°C. This ecosystem is delicate because it has many tipping points and existing climate change makes these tipping points more vulnerable. Hence, small expected effects on climate change could cause temperatures to rise from 2°C to 2.0000001°C which could go past that tipping point, leading to an air temperature no longer conducive to the Gu rains, thereby destroying the harvest. Across the spectrum of suffering, the report’s values changing demonstrate individual emissions are sufficient to push one ecosystem condition past its tipping point, acting as the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The Gu rains is just one of many tipping points that our emissions could push over. Thus, small expected effects can cause harm. Therefore, P2* is unjustified; the reformulated argument remains unsound.

Response to Another Objection

One objection notes this point’s limited scope, arguing that there are some cases where small expected effects do not cause harm because our emissions cannot be individually disaggregated. Whilst driving a car means the driver caused its emissions, flying by plane is less obvious. If our emissions cannot be individually disaggregated, then our actions have no marginal effect on climate change. We can only be said to cause an outcome if we produce an effect – and if we did not cause an outcome, we cannot be held morally responsible for it. Flying by plane implies that we are not responsible for the emissions produced, because the flight would have gone anyway regardless of our choice. If our emissions cannot be individually disaggregated, then the Somali farmer would experience no difference between whether you took the plane or not. This objection challenges the point’s scope, thereby supporting P2* because in cases like plane flights small expected effects do not cause harm.

This objection is surmountable because we contribute to the plane’s emissions by purchasing a ticket, thereby enabling its harm. This is because we contributed to the plane’s emissions by taking it when there were alternatives. Airlines offer flights depending on profitability, which decreases if the plane is less full. Purchasing a ticket increases the chances of that route remaining operational, hence taking a flight has ‘contributory consequences’ resulting in emissions produced (Regan 1980: 13). Contributory consequences means our individual action of taking part in a collective action implies that the individual action shares the consequences that such a collective action causes. If the plane’s emissions cause Somalians harm, then we cause them harm because of the contributory consequences of taking that plane. It does not matter that our emissions cannot be individually disaggregated, since the contributory consequences suggest that the effect of the plane’s emissions can be individually disaggregated in terms of responsibility. Therefore, the objection is surmountable.

Conclusions

In 2006, South Park released an episode called ‘ManBearPig’ which ridiculed Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth – a documentary about climate change. In the episode, Gore enlists the kids of South Park to find ManBearPig, a beast he claims has been causing damage in their town. As the episode progresses, it becomes abundantly clear that ManBearPig is a fictional beast. The episode ultimately portrays Gore as a hypocrite about climate change. Yet twelve years later, South Park released an episode called ‘Time to get Cereal’ in which ManBearPig is in fact a real problem. The show’s characters regret how they mocked Gore, but ultimately put on hold any changes to the town of South Park, instead preferring to pass the problem down to the next generation.

It is possible to imagine the characters of South Park citing a similar argument as to why they did not make any changes to reducing their emissions. They would say that their individual emissions make no difference to the harm done by climate change; therefore, they have no moral reason to reduce our emissions. However, such an argument is unsound. It is unsound under both versions of the argument, using either zero expected effects or small expected effects. For the former, P1 is unjustified because the effects of individual emissions on climate change are non-zero. For the latter, P2* is unjustified because small expected effects on climate change do cause harm. Hopefully, this removes any moral reluctance to reduce our emissions now, rather than having to wait twelve years for an apology of sorts.

© Nevin Chellappah 2025

Nevin Chellappah enjoys reading philosophy, watching films – even better, trying to understand both – and boring his friends with his so-called ‘philosophical prowess’.

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The Mediation of Touch

A conversation between Emma Jones and Luce Irigaray.

Luce Irigaray

Luce Irigaray is a retired director of research in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. She has doctorates in philosophy (1974), in linguistics (1968) and in philosophy and literature (1955). She is trained in psychoanalysis and in yoga. She has written more than thirty books, translated into many languages, the last of them being The Mediation of Touch (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2024).

Emma Jones

Emma Jones, PhD, is a psychotherapist in private practice in California. She is the author of Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray (Palgrave, 2023) as well as six articles and book chapters that engage with Irigaray’s work.

Emma Jones: I am intrigued by the role of desire in this text, which you invoke in a variety of ways. What is the role of desire here in allowing us to evolve and become our unique selves as living beings?

Luce Irigaray: Desire is a human way of passing from a physical attraction to a psychic and even a spiritual feeling. Being rooted in nature, desire can transform a merely natural belonging into a psychic or spiritual belonging which can remain sensitive [capable of feeling], thus peculiar to each. Desire builds bridges between our body and our psyche and our mind, but also between us as living beings, in particular between us as naturally, thus sexually, different. As longing for the naturally different other, desire aspires after transcendence, a transcendence which can remain sensitive, and not be abstractly universal. Unlike needs, desire as such cannot be satisfied by consumption, thus it compels us to evolve and to maintain transcendence, notably the one resulting from difference, as a horizon never completely overcome.

As the overarching theme of the book is touch, how does desire animate touch?

Desire motivates touch. It provides touch with dynamism, finality, warmth and other qualities. Desire resorts to touch as a telling before any articulated language, a telling which can speak to the whole being and be heard by it. Desire makes touch an original language which has to do with our natural forms to express itself and its search for reciprocity. Thereby, desire uses touch as a language which speaks to the body and allows bodies to talk to one another, even if they are different and live in different worlds.

In the English-speaking world, ‘desire’ is often taken to mean only sexual desire. Can you speak about the broader concept of desire in your work with examples from beyond the sexual sphere?

Obviously, desire does not confine itself to sexual desire. In my work, desire often concerns a ‘sexuate’ desire and not sexuality strictly speaking. It is then a matter of a desire between identities or subjectivities differently sexuate which, according to my numerous analyses of the sexuation of language, can enter into the constitution of a cultural, political or religious desire. Contrary to what is generally imagined, desire is not in the neuter even when sexuality as such is not at stake. Desiring often amounts to the taking over of a physical attraction to a psychic and even a spiritual level. Differently from needs, desire longs for transcendence and not for being merely satisfied. This is why it is concerned with difference, including sexuate difference, as with what cannot be appropriated. In our tradition, desire often aspires after supra sensitive values – supra sensitive ideals or supra sensitive deities – but this means longing for overcoming our natural physical belonging. In my work, I promote the existence of a longing for a sensitive transcendence, which corresponds to our whole being and our relationships with other living beings and not only with objects. So longing for a sexually different other is longing for a sensitive transcendence, and this transforms our physical belonging without nullifying it nor our sensitivity. In fact, desiring means transcending oneself and if our logic is a subject-object logic, transcendence is put in/on an object, but it is situated in/on another subject if we have to do with a subject-subject logic. If the transcendence is put in/on a supra sensitive object, our living becoming is paralyzed by this object whereas when a sensitive transcendence concerns the way of relating to a different subject it contributes to our own development.

In your book, you identify what you call the ‘mediation of touch’. According to you, touch preserves a relationship to difference that sight does not. Could you explain this difference?

Touch is a particular language, a sort of original talk between bodies which can happen independently of their difference(s). It even has a better impact and meaning between two different bodies and their corresponding psyches and subjectivities because difference creates a space and a milieu thanks to which touch can be inscribed and passed on. This does not exist between the same ones, who must resort to a third to communicate, be it even their bodies transformed into sorts of objects or, more usually, language or ideas. But these are dictated by sameness and cannot really help two beings towards reaching an immediate telling through touch. Another property of touch is its ability to hand down an immediate saying to one another thanks to the permeability of bodily tissues. Indeed, the limits of living shapes – for example, those of the lips or of the palms of the hands – are not opaque, but they let communication or communion cross them. Sight acts almost conversely. Indeed, it isolates by stressing the contours of existing forms or by creating additional forms. Sight does not perceive the relation between beings; it individualizes by dividing differently from touch. Unfortunately, our tradition has favoured sight to the detriment of touch and its relational potential.

In popular culture and imagination, there is an idea that chromosomes determine or ‘cause’ a culturally stereotypical idea of what ‘men’ and ‘women’ are. How does your discussion in this text about the potentiality of germ cells differ from this idea? [‘germ cells’ here mean gametes or reproducing cells of organisms].

It is funny, but also tragic, to note that the current increasing interest of scientists in our sexuation is accompanied by the refusal of some people to even acknowledge its impact on our existence. Indubitably, sex chromosomes are the cause of this existence and its main basic and universal determination. Sex chromosomes give form(s) to our bodies, which cannot exist without acting on our subjectivity. This gives rise to specific ways of being, behaving and thinking, which ought to result in a culture which takes them into account. And yet this does not really happen, at least in western culture. Furthermore, some people want to remove the few elements which emerge in this culture concerning sexuation – for example, some stereotypes or sexuate grammatical marks – instead of caring about the development of a culture suitable for our sexuate identities and subjectivities. Why? Does that result from the increasing power of a technical culture in the neuter? From the gradual contempt of life and of its cultivation? From a lack of distinction between sexuate identity and subjectivity and sexuality strictly speaking, notably sexual choice, and the persistent difficulty in overtly speaking of sexuality as such? From the radical changes that must be carried out regarding our past culture to reach more justice towards and between the two sexes and the fact that people prefer ignoring them instead of taking charge of them? Or does that amount to the opinion of only few people who have power over the media?

Luce Irigaray by Gail Campbell

Could you explain further the distinction between individualization and individuation that you refer to by reference to the work of Gilbert Simondon? Can we understand the discourse of ‘individualization’ as being like ‘identity’ politics – in which ‘identity’ is understood as a kind of hardened category of existence – versus ‘individuation,’ something which as you say should be key to a democratic culture and a culture of touch?

Individuation concerns the process through which a person unifies the various elements of their becoming in the present and according to the context in which they exist. It has to do with their way of uniting body and mind, sensitivity and thinking, singularity and relationality. Thus, it involves one’s being but also the other(s) and the world. Succeeding in unifying all these dimensions towards a comprehensive and fruitful becoming is a complex undertaking of which few people take charge, letting the outside world determine what they are at a certain time. Their individuation then amounts to a more or less artificial construction on which they can no longer decide.

A few years ago, I discovered how much germ cells matter to us being provided with a living individuation. Indeed, they shape our body, but also our psyche, in a manner which is both individual and relational, present and evolving. Unfortunately, most substitute for the naturally unifying power of the germ cells other aspects of their life such as the place of birth, the original culture, the specific language, etc. Obviously, all these factors take part in our individuation, but they do not have the basically living and universal potential for unifying our being that the germ cells have.

Individualization refers to our collective individuality. Unfortunately, the latter is often shaped independently of our natural belonging, notably of our sexuation, to which even Simondon does not allude in this connection (see L’individuation psychique et collective, 1989). Thereby individualization represents a sort of exile from our true being. It is no longer animated by our natural dynamism but by external factors and information, which little by little transforms our naturally relational world into an artificial and parallel world. This explains many of the problems which arise between citizens, between cultures, and concerning the gradual decline of humanity and the living environment. Returning to an individuation built from our natural being and an individualization respectful of it would be a means of constructing a truly democratic culture, a culture which contributes to the development and blossoming of life and not to its exploitation and destruction.

You have written that modern political discourse repeatedly invokes ‘identity’ yet fails to address the embodied identities of citizens. Do you think this is why they come to feel that political discourse is out of touch?

Yes, I do not understand to what identity the political discourses then refer. Indeed, I not above all the lack of identity of many citizens, their changing their mind from one day to the next and their subjection to the last information they heard. Obviously, this does not favour the existence of a democratic politics, but instead paves the way for a dictatorial power. The shortage of relationships between citizens due to the little consideration for their relational identity also contributes to that. Putting the stress on a politics of money and ownership, including in its leftwing versions, cannot build a real democracy. This contributes neither to the construction of a responsible political identity nor to the cohesion of a society, two things which are determining in the elaboration and the practice of a democratic culture. Besides, the prevalence of sight over touch is also a characteristic of our tradition, which is not favourable to democracy. Touch is necessary for subjectivity to correspond to the physical belonging, thereby for the singularity of each citizen to be preserved, and it is necessary too for citizens to unite with one another. Owning money and goods causes a bad individualism and competition between citizens unlike an individuation respectful of life, including as relation. Of course, touch must adopt modalities which are suitable for a community – for example, common emotions, common projects and commitments which take account of the universal dimension of human life respected in its singularity rather than peculiar having or possessions.

What key capacities must we cultivate in order to become able to dwell within ourselves while remaining open to the other, particularly in the context of cosmopolitanism and globalization? How do we retain the other as a horizon and limit that contextualizes our experience? What is the role of touch in this at a community level?

I think that discovering that our body is our first home can contribute to becoming able to stay in it and wanting to dwell in ourselves. Traditionally, man has searched for dwelling outside of himself without first dwelling in himself. And then he spread indefinitely in search of the most intimate shelter in the most distant. Thereby, rules, norms and laws, which artificially delimit his expansion, have been necessary. And yet human beings have their limits in themselves, and these limits allow them to develop without depriving them of what is their own and that they need to blossom. Self-affection can help human beings to perceive such limits and their positive character. It can reveal to them what it means to inhabit their bodies and how to cultivate that not only in a fleshly but also in a psychic and even a spiritual way. Then they will discover that relating to the other helps in their own development and that the first limit to be respected is their difference from the naturally, especially sexually, different other in order to preserve both their particularity and the fecundity of such a relationship. Experiencing that renders the intervention of the lacanian and traditional patriarchal ‘law of the father’ useless; the latter prevents children from undergoing by themselves a positive condition of their flowering. It also deprives them of feeling how touch must evolve from a little differentiated maternal touch towards a touch which aims to establish a communication, and even to reach a communion, with the sexually different other. The relationship is then also immediately physical and it must resort to more psychical or cultural mediations – like emotions or common aspirations – to make touch suitable at a community level.

What is required for human beings to begin to assume responsibility for our living limits – limits that, unlike that of death, always already imply relation to others? It seems to me we are so often unaware of these limits and that much of our culture contributes to forgetting them. You implied just now that practices of self-affection – one can imagine perhaps meditation, artistic practice, and other forms of dwelling within the self – may be a starting place. Can you say more about the role of these practices, especially artistic creation, in a culture of touch?

Our culture is basically individualistic. It focuses on one subject in a private or a collective situation. The relational aspect of the individual is not much considered either in the family context or in the community. So we find little elaboration of the amorous relations between the spouses, all the more so since sexuation is not acknowledged as the main determining factor in subjective constitution. The relations between man and woman are then assimilated to ties in the family unit and more often than not reduced to parental roles.The subjectivity of the citizens is considered a little more, but above all with the aim of integrating them into a whole through means external to them but not thanks to their own, notably natural, relational aptitudes and wants. The family and the community that human beings form are thus largely to the detriment of their own belonging and its blossoming inside its own limits. How to succeed in developing this belonging in spite of a culture which does not take a great account of it? Of course, it is by favouring relationships respectful of difference(s) and, more generally, by a culture based on difference(s) instead of on sameness. Indeed, such culture functions thanks to consideration for respective limits, living limits as far as living beings are concerned, which are felt by touching. We can also perceive these limits by carrying out works, especially works of art, that is, by trying to gather our sensitive being and put it into a work of our own which acts as an evidence and a memory of it. This can reveal to us something of the nature of our sensitive being and of its limits that we cannot experience otherwise.When I practiced psychoanalysis, I thought that the cure was almost successfully achieved when a patient was able to create a work in which he or she put both their potential and its limits. This provided them with a positive autonomy and responsibility for themselves as living that a mirror image was unable to bring to them.

At the end of the book you write powerfully that “our first touch was of use for entering into a relation with the other and not for appropriating something” and also that “this touch… fits out a space in the common space in which we can shelter” (pp.357-8). This relational space seems so fragile and at risk of disappearing – you speak of it as being hidden or occluded by our philosophical and cultural traditions, but also as something that is occasionally revealed in a glimpse or a wavering between presence and forgetting. How do we glimpse this place through language, and especially through shared language? What are the exemplary moments in which we are inhabiting, and creating, this place, throughout our lives, and that we must turn our attention to and return to in order to ‘irrigate’, as you say, a culture of touch?

This space is both fragile and strong, but our past culture, in particular our philosophical culture, did not pay attention to it because it did not much consider our relational being, what is more as sexuate. This fundamental determination of our being was almost ignored. Sexuation had to serve for reproduction, and sexual intercourse had to be in hiding, in the dark of the bedroom of the family house as a thing quite shameful which remained without language and culture. Even Freud approached sexuation through its pathology without developing its positive resources and the manner of making them flower. Did he not affirm that a marriage can be successful only when the wife becomes the mother of her husband? Hence, the place opened by our sexuate relations has not been broached by Freud himself and he did not suggest a path to cultivate it. And yet it is a crucial place in which to take refuge with respect to the work, the multitude, the technical and inanimate world. It is also a place to which we can return to recover and cultivate our natural belonging at a fundamental level.

About the amorous relations between two differently sexuate beings, our culture thus told very little except in art and above all literature, but, still there, mainly as aspiration or unhappiness. This basic aspect of our human relationships is still to be explored and put into practice. How to perceive and to cultivate it, notably regarding the space which is then concerned? First, we must note that the space between two different human beings exists because of their difference, and desire happens in this space. Longing for the other takes place in the space open between two beings, above all when it is a question of a desire between two beings differently sexuate. The problem is how to keep this space open and to inhabit it. Neither our culture as it is nor the family house, as the place devoted to the natural life, can today ensure that. The one traps lovers in artificial differences and the other conceals difference in a familiarity which dulls desire. To elaborate a relational culture is a task of our epoch. It requires us to leave a past culture governed by sameness and enter into a culture respectful of difference(s), beginning with the most original difference, sexuate difference. In every intention, decision, behaviour, we must take account of the fact that those of the other differ from our own and that our desire to unite with one another cannot ignore that on pain of being abolished. Therefore, we must continuously care about how to unite with the other as different while keeping our singularity. To support this permanent attention and concern, I suggest dividing an apartment usually made of a dinner room and a bedroom into two studios that each arranges according to his or her taste, and in which they invite the other when they want, so keeping, revealing and sharing their difference(s). Obviously, this does not exempt them from elaborating internal spaces which can inspire suitable gestures, words, but also silence and in which each can also return to repose and dwell in itself. And, undoubtedly, touch is that which can tell us to one another in the absence of an appropriate other language and beyond, but it must respect difference and occur in the place opened by it to succeed in that. To extend to community and irrigate culture, touch must exceed an immediate bodily touching and be converted into emotions and means of sensitively sharing on a broader scale, keeping care of our physical belonging.

As a psychotherapist for couples (and as a parent) I was quite interested in your discussion of how the development of a transcendence between two members of a couple can be interrupted or halted through parenthood. I take this to mean that each partner risks ceasing to cultivate themself as an autonomous sexuate being, and also in relation to the other, perhaps due to becoming absorbed in a parenting role, or due to social and energy constraints, or other issues. What kinds of interventions do you think are necessary to help prevent this from happening?

It is Hegel who says that children cause the death of parents. And he is generally right, at least if I well understand his words. But I hope that it is not completely unavoidable, and my work endeavours to contribute to that. You allude to some of the possible causes of this fact. However, I think that the main reason that children can suspend the becoming, and even the being, of the parents is something else, something largely due to our past culture. Indeed, what ought to uphold the relational belonging of the spouses is the transcendence of their sexuate difference. Their union is founded on a horizontal transcendental difference that they must preserve when uniting with one another, never filling the space which safeguards their difference and is the place in which their desire can arise and last. But the children will precisely occupy this space with somas begotten by the conjunction of different germ cells of their parents. What had to be kept separate to keep desire alive is united in the somas of the children in which the transcendental longing between the spouses is immobilized in a definitive conjunction. This probably explains why the transcendence of genealogy has supplanted the horizontal transcendence of the amorous longing which had sealed the couple. Obviously, this modifies the nature of transcendence which no longer is what arouses and preserves the commitment of two lovers towards one another as a potential that can never been fulfilled once and for all. And that can also prevent children from becoming aware and taking charge of their future amorous longings.

Glossary of terms used by Luce Irigaray

sexuate: is used, instead of ‘sexual’, when it is a question of sexuation regarding identity, subjectivity or other uses than sexuality strictly speaking

germ cells: reproductive cells of the human body

soma: non-reproductive cells of the human body

self-affection: affection of/for oneself

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Macmurray on Relationship

Jeanne Warren presents aspects of John Macmurray’s philosophy of the personal.

It was good to see an article on John Macmurray (1891-1976) in Issue 167 of Philosophy Now. The author, Colin Stott, ended by suggesting that Macmurray is “worthy to stand alongside Russell and Wittgenstein as a leading philosopher of the twentieth century.” I heartily agree. So here I would like to examine briefly some of Macmurray’s analysis of the interpersonal, by presenting some features of his philosophy of ‘persons in relation’.

In his writings Macmurray devotes as much space to spelling out an alternative to the egocentric bias of Western philosophy as he does to arguing against its theoretical bias. Regarding the theoretical bias, he concludes that ‘I do’ is more foundational than ‘I think’. Regarding the egocentric bias, he argues that the fundamental unit of personal reality is not ‘I’, but ‘you-and-I’. We can note a connection by observing that ‘I do’ implies a ‘you’ interacting with an ‘I’, but Macmurray’s two criticisms remain distinct. Macmurray didn’t argue for the importance of positive personal relationships, he started from it, observing that the most valued thing in our lives is the relationships central to them, giving our lives meaning. Sartre said “ Hell is other people” : Macmurray could equally have said “ Heaven is other people.” Both are true, but Macmurray is more inclined to dwell on the positive.

An account of personal experience needs to include feeling as well as thinking. The first Macmurray book I read was Reason and Emotion (1935). In it he presents much of his basic position, including the contention that feeling as well as thinking can be rational or irrational. He also argues that our relations with one another lie on a spectrum running from fear to love. Relations based on love he broadly terms ‘friendship’. In this context the term ‘love’ does not mean a passionate attachment, but rather a positive, open relationship. Fear is its opposite, negative and closed.

The foundation of positive relationships is, with luck, laid in early positive experiences within the family. Macmurray starts with the relationship of the infant with its primary care-giver – most often the mother. This, rather than an isolated existence, is how we all begin. The evidence from psychology is piling up that a positive early relationship with a primary care-giver is a life-changer for the growing infant. If love is absent, the damage is equally stark. At the same time, the difficulties of ever-larger numbers of people living together peacefully are forcing themselves on our attention. Both these aspects of our interpersonal lives are dealt with by Macmurray as he seeks to provide a philosophy adequate to the whole of our experience.

Concerning our experience with groups, Macmurray makes an important distinction between associations which are ends in themselves – that is, for their own sake – and those which are for the sake of some other end. Both are necessary, but they’re not to be confused. Macmurray sometimes uses the word ‘community’ for the former. A loving family is an example of a community. Here each individual feels valued and would be missed if lost – not because of their practical contribution to the unit, but simply because of who they are. But necessary to the support of personal communities are associations between people to achieve specific purposes. They are in some sense impersonal, but they are essential. These functional relations are what Macmurray calls ‘society’: they include our work lives, systems of politics, economics, and justice, among others. One of Macmurray’s formulas is, ‘The functional is for the personal; the personal is through the functional’.

Macmurray’s preference is to use ordinary English words for concepts that he defines quite precisely. However, the danger here is that the reader will be misled or confused. For example, by selecting the term ‘friendship’ to stand for any positive relationship, Macmurray does not make it obvious that it includes the relationship between a child and its parent. He also fails to provide a parallel term for negative relationships, even though he analyses the roots and effects of fear in some detail. Similarly, the difference between what he means by the terms ‘community’ and ‘society’ is fundamental to his thinking about politics, education, and religion, enabling him to make distinctions impossible to make by those who only distinguish between an individual and a group. Yet because ‘community’ and ‘society’ are common words we often use interchangeably, we may tend to ignore the distinctions he so carefully makes, and impose our prior understanding when reading his arguments.

Macmurray’s thought developed before an awareness of depth psychology had spread. I happened to discover Jung in the same year I discovered Macmurray. The concept of the unconscious, as explored by both Freud and Jung, helps to flesh out the concept of ‘person’ Macmurray presents, as Macmurray wrote for the most part about our conscious selves (although he did come to value Jung’s work later). Yet Macmurray’s view of persons was wider than that of most philosophers because of his inclusion of feeling, action, and relationship as fields for rigorous philosophical consideration. Macmurray proceeds always on the basis of honesty and freedom of thought and feeling. This is his case against egocentricity: that we cannot find out the truth about ourselves if we’re entirely self-interested. This requirement gives his writing a moral tinge, but he is not a moralist laying down rules of behaviour. He certainly hoped for a better world; but then, that could be said of many philosophers. He certainly never sacrificed the search for truth to a desire for any particular outcome. Indeed, his ability to value feeling without sacrificing truthfulness – his insight that feeling itself could be appropriate (rational) or inappropriate (irrational) – underlies his unique contribution to modern philosophy.

© Jeanne Warren 2025

Jeanne Warren is a founder-member of the John Macmurray Fellowship, which aims to make Macmurray’s work better known. She is also a member of the Oxford Philosophical Society.

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Quantum Physics & Indian Philosophy

Punit Kumar and Sanjeev Kumar Varshney look into entangled worlds.

Our deepening exploration of the quantum world reveals intriguing parallels between subatomic phenomena and Indian philosophy. While each offers a distinct perspective, together they weave a narrative that challenges traditional boundaries and redefines our understanding of reality.

Quantum physics, with its principles of superposition, entanglement, and the observer effect, has disrupted classical notions of a deterministic universe. Quantum pioneers such as Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Bohr revolutionized science by introducing both uncertainty and the observer as intrinsic aspects of reality. But questions remain. For instance, does observation merely reveal the quantum world, or does it actively shape it – and how? This enigma highlights the intricate relationship between consciousness and quantum mechanics, sparking a dialogue that transcends conventional scientific inquiry.

Against this backdrop some of the central ideas from Indian philosophy provide profound insights. Traditions such as Vedanta and Samkhya have long explored the interconnectedness of all things and posited consciousness as the essence of reality, so these frameworks resonate deeply with themes emerging from quantum physics, thus bridging ancient wisdom and modern science.

The Quantum Frontier

Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics that explores the behaviour of matter and energy at the smallest scales, such as atoms and subatomic particles. It marks a significant departure from classical physics, which still accurately describes the motion of larger objects like billiard balls or planets. One of quantum mechanics’ most profound implications is its challenge to our understanding of reality. For instance, wave-particles existing in a superposition of states until observed (as one reading of quantum mechanics maintains) makes observation a crucial factor in experimental outcomes, in that it is thought there is no specific state a quantum entity is in until it is measured to be in that state. This defies traditional notions of objective reality, pushing us to reconsider what is real.

Despite its counterintuitive nature, quantum mechanics has been remarkably successful in describing the behaviour of matter and energy at microscopic scales; so it has not only reshaped our understanding of the universe, but also fuelled advances in science and technology from quantum computing to medical imaging. Even the diodes in your computer wouldn’t work without the quantum tunnelling effect. As a cornerstone of modern physics, quantum mechanics continues to drive exploration.

Cosmic Sunflower by Paul Gregory

Indian Philosophy: A Non-Dualistic Vision of Reality

Indian philosophy is a deep and ancient tradition that includes many different schools of thought. Although these schools have their own unique ideas about the world, knowledge, and life, they often agree on some key points. Many of them talk about ‘non-duality’ or ‘oneness’ – the interconnection of all things – or about the importance of consciousness in understanding reality. These shared ideas have shaped India’s intellectual and spiritual journey for thousands of years.

One of the most important ideas in Indian philosophy comes from the ancient text known as the Advaita Vedanta, which is itself based on the teachings of the Upanishads, and was later developed by the saint Adi Shankaracharya. According to the Advaita school, ultimate reality (brahman) is infinite, eternal, and beyond time, space, or change, has no shape or qualities, and is the source of everything. Moreover, the individual soul (atman), is said not to be separate from reality; on the contrary, Advaita Vedanta teaches that soul is the ultimate reality – meaning that the true self inside each person is the same stuff as ultimate cosmic reality. This truth, however, is hidden from us by illusion (maya) – which is not complete falsehood, but a power that makes the one reality appear as many. Because of this, we see differences, changes, and separations in the world, even though everything is actually one. Liberation (moksha) comes as a person realizes this non-dualistic truth and understands that their true self is ultimate reality. This realization ends the cycle of death and rebirth, and leads to eternal peace and freedom.

In contrast to Advaita’s non-dualism, the Samkhya school presents a dualistic view of reality. It talks about two basic elements: nature or matter (prakriti); and pure consciousness (purusha). Matter has balance (sattva), activity (rajas), and inertia (tamas), and is responsible for all physical and sensational experiences. Consciousness, on the other hand, in its original state is silent, eternal, and watches everything without getting involved. According to Samkhya, our suffering happens because consciousness forgets its true nature and starts to identify with the changing world of matter. Liberation (kaivalya) then happens when consciousness realizes that it is separate from matter and stops being attached to it. So although Samkhya does not believe the non-dualism of Advaita, it also considers consciousness as central, and believes that true freedom comes from self-awareness.

Buddhism, especially the Mahayana tradition, brings in another deep idea, of emptiness (sūnyatā) – specifically meaning that nothing has a fixed, independent nature: everything we see or experience exists only because of other things, and all of it depends on causes and conditions. This idea is called ‘dependent origination’ (pratītyasamutpāda). Nothing exists on its own. For example, a tree exists only because of the seed, water, sunlight, and many other factors. On this view, even the idea of a permanent self is false. Rather, everything is changing and connected, and realizing this emptiness leads to wisdom, compassion, and freedom from selfish desires. According to Buddhism, enlightenment comes when we let go of ego and desire, and understand that everything is part of a bigger whole.

Although Advaita Vedanta, Samkhya, and Mahayana Buddhism differ in profound ways, they all invite us to look beyond the surface and question the materialist view that the world is made only of physical stuff. Instead, they focus on consciousness; interconnectedness; the idea that the world as we see it is not the full truth; and the claim that through understanding this, people can attain peace and liberation from suffering.

Harmonizing The Realms

Quantum slits JC Benoist 2006

In quantum mechanics, the quantum system being observed or measured is described by a mathematical tool called the ‘wave function’. The wave function describes all the possible outcomes that the quantum system might be observed to display, such as where an electron might end up on a screen. However, these possibilities remain unrealised (or ‘probabilistic’) until someone observes the system. It is only at that point that the one specific result appears. This is a process known as ‘wave function collapse’.

This idea bears similarities to the concept of maya in Advaita Vedanta. According to this philosophy, it is illusion that makes the world appear full of differences, movement, and separation. The world we see and interact with is not completely false, but it hides the true, undivided nature of existence. But just as the wave function collapses into a definite state when a quantum entity is observed, the illusion disappears when a person gains knowledge. And in both cases – whether in physics or in the path to spiritual awakening – the observer plays a key role.

The observer effect is one of the most puzzling parts of quantum theory. It says that the act of observing a quantum system changes its behaviour. Some interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the Copenhagen interpretation or Wigner’s views, even say that consciousness (that is, conscious observation) causes the wave function to collapse into a single reality. This means the observer isn’t just watching reality, but actually helping shape it through the very act of observation. This idea can be connected to the Advaita Vedanta teaching that consciousness is not created by the brain, but is rather, the basic foundation of all existence (including brains). So in different ways, both quantum physics and Indian philosophy suggest that reality is not just out there waiting to be seen by consciousness, but exists through consciousness. (The noted quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg saw this link too, noting that the Upanishads recognize consciousness, not matter, as the source of everything.)

Another fascinating idea in quantum physics is entanglement. When two wave-particles become entangled, they stay connected no matter how far apart they are, and changing one instantly affects the other. This appears to conflict with Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which say that nothing can affect something else faster than the speed of light.

Entanglement shows that the universe is deeply interconnected in ways we don’t understand. This again mirrors ideas in Indian philosophy, especially in Buddhism and Vedanta. The Buddhist teaching of dependent origination says that nothing exists on its own; everything exists through relationships. Similarly, Vedanta teaches that everything is part of one interconnected reality. Both views reject ultimate separateness, suggesting that all things are really part of a larger, connected whole – just as entangled particles act as if they’re one interconnected reality even across great distances.

Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, introduced the idea of complementarity, which says that quantum entities can behave either like waves or like particles, but not both at the same time. What we see depends on how we measure. This goes against the usual ‘either/or’ of classical science, and instead accepts that complementary views are needed to understand the whole truth. In a similar way, the Samkhya school also talks about two basic complementary realities: matter and consciousness. Matter is ever-changing, while consciousness is still and eternal, and although they’re distinct, they work together to create our experience. So like wave and particle, matter and consciousness are different but both essential to the complete picture.

Quantum physics also brought the idea of probability into the heart of physical laws. Unlike classical physics, where we can in theory predict outcomes exactly, quantum physics equations only tells us the chances of different results. This is reminiscent of the Indian idea of the law of cause and effect – karma – in that here, everything isn’t fixed either, but rather, our past actions influence what’s likely to happen in the future. There’s room here for free will.

Many pioneers of quantum physics found inspiration in Indian philosophy. Erwin Schrödinger, for example, was deeply influenced by Advaita Vedanta. In What Is Life? (1944), he writes about the unity of all life, echoing the Vedantic idea that the self is the same as the universal. He believed that life is not separate from the universe, but one with it.

Shining from the Centre by Paul Gregory

Criticisms & Cautions

While the parallels between quantum physics and Indian philosophy are intellectually stimulating, scholars urge caution in drawing equivalences. One major concern is a possible category error when one mixes scientific constructs with metaphysical or spiritual doctrines. Quantum concepts like the wave function, superposition, or entanglement, arise from rigorous mathematical frameworks and empirical experimentation, whereas Indian metaphysical ideas are rooted in introspection and philosophical speculation. Additionally, quantum mechanics is open to multiple interpretations (such as the Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, and pilot-wave theories), not all of which assign a causal role to consciousness. Thus, equating consciousness-based interpretations of quantum theory with Vedantic notions of chaitanya may overstate the case for similarities.

There’s also a tendency toward romanticization – when for instance it’s claimed that ancient Indian sages anticipated quantum ideas. While Indian philosophy indeed presents profound insights into reality, such claims often lack empirical validation, and acting as if they do risks diminishing both disciplines.

Nevertheless, the conceptual resonances between these worldviews present fertile ground for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary dialogue, enriching both science and philosophy.

Toward a Unified Vision

The convergence of quantum physics and Indian philosophy we’ve considered does not suggest a literal equivalence between the two, but rather highlights overlaps in their shared exploration of the profound mystery of existence. Both disciplines challenge the classical notion of an objective, observer-independent reality, and elevate the role of the observer. Quantum mechanics, with its probabilistic framework, wave function collapse, and observer effect, reveals a universe that resists rigid physical determinism and demands a more nuanced, participatory understanding of reality. Similarly, Indian philosophical traditions such as Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism emphasize that reality is not something out there, separate and static, but rather is intimately bound up with consciousness and perception. Moreover, the Upanishadic insight that ‘you are that’ (tat tvam asi) and the Buddhist idea of dependent origination, echo the quantum view of an interconnected, relational cosmos.

As Fritjof Capra observed in his 1975 book The Tao of Physics, the striking parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism arise from their common realization of the underlying unity of all phenomena. The implications of this convergence in perspective are profound. Science, often focused on objective measurement, benefits from a broader, more reflective, more philosophical lens on the context of its discoveries. Conversely, Indian philosophy gains a new dimension as its metaphysical insights find resonance with the findings of modern physics. Together they pave the way for a general holistic worldview – one that’s non-reductive, interconnected, integrative, and deeply participatory. Their comparison also invites a richer dialogue between science and spirituality, reason and reflection.

© Dr Punit Kumar and Dr Sanjeev Kumar Varshney 2025

Punit Kumar is Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Lucknow, and Sanjeev Kumar Varshney is a Delhi-based science communicator.

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Alchemy, Mining, Speculation & Experimentation

Okan Nurettin Okur investigates the philosophy of chemistry.

Imagine a chemist and a philosopher going on a long walk. Do you think they could discover common ground while looking at nature together? On the one hand, we have a scientist, who believes in the infallibility of formulas, who accepts that numbers cannot lie, who measures and analyzes, who seeks the answer in the world he sees through the lens of a microscope; on the other hand, a philosopher, whose only tool is reason, and who questions everything to the finest detail, and yet is never fully convinced…

Actually, they’re not that far from each other. It was Aristotle who made the first systematic investigations into chemistry through observations and conceptual analysis in the fourth century BC. In addition, alchemy emerged through the blending of the natural philosophy of ancient Greece with Eastern mysticism.

A History of the Philosophy of Chemistry

Alchemy, which was popular throughout the Middle Ages, was seen as mystical philosophical knowledge during the Renaissance, but it would also lay the foundations of modern chemistry. With a history of at least 2,500 years, beginning in Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Iran, India, and China, alchemy’s greatest goal was to find the ‘philosopher’s stone’, a mystical substance believed to be able to transform all other metals into gold. They were also looking for the elixir of life, which gave immortality; love potions; and so on.

© Abigail Vettese 2025 Instagram: @theshapeofsanctum : abigailvetteseart.com

Alchemy was a source of inspiration for natural philosophers trying to unravel the secrets of nature during the Renaissance, in particular, those alchemical experiments aimed at examining the components of matter and understanding how the elements transformed into each other. During this investigation, techniques were used which would later form the basis of modern chemistry, such as metal purification, distillation, and fermentation.

By the seventeenth century, science and philosophy were developing on the basis of experimental and observational physics. René Descartes’ Principia Philosophiae, published in 1644, undoubtedly played an important role in the influence of physics on philosophy. Here Descartes likened all sciences to a tree whose trunk was composed of physics. He built his philosophy in this context. This dominant influence of physics was felt on the other sciences for centuries. But in the eighteenth century, with scientists such as Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), developments in chemistry could be considered revolutionary: I call this the ‘Copernican revolution’ of chemistry. Lavoisier’s ‘Law of Conservation of Mass’ in particular signalled the move of chemistry away from alchemy and the replacement of its mystical aura with an experimental, observational basis.

The transition from alchemy to chemistry brought with it important philosophical questions about the nature of matter and the scientific method. One debate was whether chemistry was a true science. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – who lived at the same time as Lavoisier – argued that the purely observational nature of chemistry was insufficient to produce precise laws because it did not involve mathematics. Kant divided the sciences into two main categories: the rational sciences, and the experimental sciences. The rational sciences were those that worked with mathematically precise laws, such as physics, while the experimental sciences were those that were based on observations of qualitative changes and reactions, but which could not develop precise laws. In Kant’s classification, chemistry was an experimental science because in chemistry, instead of universal mathematical laws, there were qualitative experimental results: changes one could see, but not measure. Therefore, Kant dismissed chemistry as ‘a part of natural philosophy’, and regarded it more as an applied endeavor. At this point, the main question is this: Is chemistry a theoretical science that seeks to understand the basic structure and principles of the physical universe, or is it an applied science that seeks only to obtain practical results? The emergence of a substantive philosophy of chemistry would have to wait until after Kant, when it came under the influence of later German idealist philosophy, such as Hegelian dialectics, which developed against Newtonian mechanistic philosophy.

The idealist philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1785-1854) was one of the first to use the term ‘philosophy of chemistry’. For Schelling, chemistry was an important discipline for understanding the unity and vitality of nature; but nature was not limited to material processes. In Schelling’s philosophy, nature does not consist only of inanimate physical processes: nature is alive itself, and has processes of movement and development of its own. He saw nature as a dynamic organic whole, and therefore opposed mechanistic chemistry. Instead, in Schelling’s thought, chemistry was a tool for studying both the material world and its metaphysical foundations. Schelling’s aim was to reach ‘transcendental’ conclusions for chemistry, biology and medicine.

Image © Abigail Vettese 2025

GWF Hegel (1770-1831) considered chemistry a part of natural philosophy. However, in Hegel’s dialectical system of the history of human intellectual development, chemistry was seen as a stage between physics and biology, as a field of study in which the organic had partially not yet fully emerged. According to Hegel, although chemistry considered a more advanced stage of nature than the mere matter physics studied, chemicals per se do not possess a fully organic existence, and so were of limited interest. Yet whereas in physics, matter was mostly explained by mechanical processes and forces, in chemistry, the mutual reactions of substances with each other became important. And chemistry consists of processes rather than components, and substances are the product of processes. So for Hegel, nature began to show its dialectical development through chemical processes.

When the place of physics, chemistry, and biology in the history of philosophy is considered, it’s clear that chemistry has had less influence than the others, and has been philosophized about less. Although there are many reasons for this, one major reason is that chemistry for a long time did not have core paradigms, as physics had with Newtonian and then quantum mechanics, or as with the theory of evolution in biology. The philosophy of science has also had problems in gaining an independent disciplinary identity, and has often been reduced to physics explanations. Or as the physicist Paul Dirac put it, since the laws governing the behavior of the constituents of the atom have become known, hasn’t doing chemistry been reduced to only dealing with the equations of physics? This question is especially acute as chemical reactions can now be explained through the physics of electron pairings in orbitals around atoms: what reacts with what is all about how the electrons of atoms interact with the electrons of atoms around them.

Especially after this emergence of quantum chemistry as well as thermodynamic studies early in the twentieth century, the view that chemistry can be mathematized has become stronger, and quantum studies also paved the way for a more refined philosophy of chemistry. So the philosophy of chemistry attracts increasing attention today.

The Philosophy of Chemistry

After giving all this information about the historical process, let’s do some philosophy of chemistry.

The view accepted for centuries by scientific disciplines ranging from chemistry to physiology, was that matter is inert. That is to say, physical objects cannot move on their own they need an external force to be applied. This view is a general metaphysical thesis rather than a hypothesis specific to any science, but it wasn’t questioned for centuries and was seen as a presupposition for scientific practice. But those who started with this presupposition did not get very far. The inertness of matter posed problems in many areas when an external force was sought every time, from fermentation to the emergence of mind. For example, how does bread or wine ferment? Those who argued that it was impossible for matter to do this on its own kept looking for a force that enabled chemical reactions. So from antiquity to almost the modern period, it was claimed that there was a force that set matter in motion for both chemistry and life, which was variously called the anima mundi, spiritus universi, weltgeist, or elan vitale. For instance, in his seventeenth century textbook Cours de Chymie, the famous chemist Nicolas Lemery (1645-1715) tried to explain fermentation under the presupposition of inert matter. According to Lemery, the spirits in substances such as sugar, which were carriers of power, bubbled as they left the substance, causing fermentation. It’s possible to see countless chemical reactions in this sort of way, from breathing, to the fermentation of bread, from medicines to the weather. However, for a long time, chemical reactions were considered the subject of research by scientists, and did not interest philosophers. It was simply assumed that it was enough to explain the basic properties and reactions of matter scientifically. But as we have seen, the philosophy of chemistry has been gradually developing over the centuries.

Generally, we can say that the philosophy of chemistry is the field of thought that philosophically interprets the principles and contents of chemistry. So if the main subject of chemistry is the transformations and interactions of matter, then typical subjects in the philosophy of chemistry are the epistemological and metaphysical aspects of these transformations, including the causal relationships, and questions of determinism or indeterminism. For example, is it possible to talk about causality in chemical reactions, and how? Other questions that could be asked here include: What are the basic properties of a substance, either element or compound? How are the properties of a compound derived from the properties of its component elements? Can chemistry as a discipline be reduced to physical processes, and explained by physics and mathematics alone? Or if it is an independent discipline, does it have its own rules and concepts? What kind of differences do reductive and holistic approaches to matter make? Are chemical laws really universal? And so on.

It’s impossible to address all these questions here. Instead let’s take another journey to understanding the strange world of matter.

Victor Cyprien, the mining engineer hero of Jules Verne’s 1884 novel The Vanished Diamond, wants to produce an artificial diamond so that he can get rich and marry the girl he loves. His experiments seem to work at first, but the end result is failure. No matter what he does, he cannot artificially produce a diamond – mainly because the formation of diamonds depends on volcanic processes, the compression of the earth’s crust, and, of course, the crucial millions of years to cook. (Although synthetic diamonds are now produced, they are usually used for industrial purposes and are still no match for natural diamonds.) But diamond is simply the most valuable form of carbon, which can also appear as coal, graphite, petroleum… Carbon is even the basic component of DNA: and the chemistry of carbon is even called ‘organic chemistry’. And due to the natural carbon cycle, the interconnection of all living and non-living things is also thanks to carbon.

So what is the metaphysical essence underlying all these appearances of carbon? The bonding possibilities of carbon atoms, of course. Carbon takes completely different forms through the carbon atoms bonding together differently under different conditions. And carbon’s ability to be part of so many different substances is based on its unique capacity to form strong but flexible bonds with other elements. These properties make carbon the basic building block of organic chemistry, thus constructing the basic components of life, such as proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids.

Since we see these different modes of existence in the element carbon, I think we can claim that matter is not static even in its solid state. Rather, matter is in constant chemical reaction, and environmental factors such as temperature, pressure, or magnetism cause matter to change in different ways.

Chemistry by Paul Gregory

Issues in the Philosophy of Chemistry

According to Joachim Schummer in his 1996 book Realismus und Chemie, ‘substance philosophers’ define a chemical reaction by the changes of substances, while ‘process philosophers’ define substances by their characteristic chemical reactions. But let’s here briefly remember the two philosophers who started this debate in about the sixth century BC: Heraclitus, who defended dynamism in nature by saying that everything flows, and Parmenides, who argued that change is only an illusion. Heraclitus defended the philosophy of process by accepting constant change; Parmenides defended the philosophy of inert matter by accepting that the universe is ultimately one, and static. These ideas fed into the thinking of alchemists about the nature and behaviour of matter.

It would also be appropriate to mention Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) at this point. Bachelard coined the term ‘metachemistry’ as an alternative to metaphysics. According to Bachelard, metaphysics has only one possible concept of matter – static matter – because it confines itself to the study of the form of matter as characterized through general physical properties. Metachemistry, on the other hand, makes use of knowledge of various essential chemical activities, and accepts that chemical substances are products of chemical techniques (rather than simply ‘being substances’, say). In ‘non-Lavoisian chemistry’ (that is, in metachemistry), matter becomes process, and a dynamic understanding of being emerges. Thus, static, stable, defined matter loses its status, and becoming comes to the fore. Bachelard also argues that all substances are artificial; for he said, once they have been analyzed, purified, and characterized, chemicals have become hybrid products of nature. As he puts it, even “Hydrogen and oxygen are in many respects, so to speak, social, highly civilized gases” (Le matérialisme rationnel, 1953). He further argues that chemistry is a human science rather than a natural science, saying that “Nature really wanted to realize chemistry, so he invented the chemist” (Ibid).

Developments in chemistry and other sciences show that the apparent properties of matter depend on downward causality. Downward causality is related to the concepts of emergence, self-organization, and supervenience, and adopts the principle that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. For example, the question ‘How can a white salt be obtained by combining a soft silver metal like sodium with a greenish gas like chlorine?’ (Na+Cl=NaCl) is for most chemists a rhetorical question naively asked by philosophers; in reality, sodium chloride is not the product of metallic sodium and chlorine gas. Rather, it is the product of the combination of sodium hydroxide with hydrochloric acid. Nevertheless, this philosophical naiveté has been fruitful in discussing extremely complex philosophical issues raised by chemical reactions, such as causality, emergence, and the ontological status of chemical entities.

Another important issue in chemistry is axiomatization, or the effort to build a coherent system based on fundamental principles. Chemistry has principles and laws that are similar to fundamental axioms, and which help us understand chemical events. Some basic axioms in chemistry are: atomic theory; the law of conservation of mass (Lavoisier’s Law); the law of constant proportions (Proust’s Law); the law of multiple proportions (Dalton’s Law); the conservation of energy; Avogadro’s principle… These axioms play a crucial role in understanding the fundamental structures and relationships in chemistry, and theories in chemistry are built on these fundamental axioms.

Chemistry can be more difficult to axiomatize than physics because chemistry deals with complex physical systems, and it studies many unique processes and interactions. Complex systems at the atomic and molecular level are much more diverse than the basic systems of physics (compare chemical axioms with Newton’s laws of motion, say), due to the much more complex structures. In addition, it’s often not possible to perform direct calculations in chemistry. Usually, observed changes in macro-structure phenomena are extrapolated to the microstructure. In other words, while the processes take place on a macroscopic scale that can be observed and measured by humans, the chemical phenomena themselves happen on a microscopic scale, and conclusions about them are based on the effects seen on the larger scale. The fact that an element or compound performs different chemical reactions at different temperatures and pressures makes axiomatization even more difficult. In addition, observing complex dynamic processes in chemistry means that chemical reactions and properties require a large set of axioms. Modelling and mathematizing chemical processes has also required the development of mathematics, particularly statistics. (It could be questioned how adequate our current mathematical knowledge is for analyzing complex chemical reactions and processes.)

Chemistry is not only a science dealing with the structure and reactions of substances, but also has a critical role in helping us understand the building blocks of nature and the functioning of the material world. Moreover, these days, the philosophy of chemistry emphasizes that chemistry is not only a scientific but also a social phenomenon. Chemical processes shape society in many fields, from pharmaceuticals to agriculture, from industry to food production. Nanotechnology, biochemistry, and environmental chemistry are also at the center of much innovative research. All this raises the ethical and social responsibilities of chemistry. The societal impact of chemical technologies, the responsibilities of chemists, and the shaping of chemical policies, are new areas of discussion.

Overall, we can see that the philosophy of chemistry treats chemistry not only as a scientific discipline, but also as a philosophical tool for gaining a deeper understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature.

© Okan Nurettin Okur 2025

Okan Nurettin Okur is a biomedical engineer and a doctoral researcher in the philosophy of science, with a particular focus on the philosophy of biology.

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Can AI Teach Our Grandmothers To Suck Eggs?

Louis Tempany wonders whether the problem is with the machines or with us.

To put the title question into more straightforward words, will human life become so diminished that we will require machines to do everything for us? Will human life get to a stage where things we ought to know how to do – like egg-sucking, say – are being done by inanimate objects instead of us?

As far back as the nineteenth century scholars attempted to predict what technological progress we might make. Progress looks incredible in cartoonist William Heath Robinson’s satire on it – far brighter than reality. There’s plenty to marvel at: the mechanised steam mega-horse with smoking nostrils; the vacuum tube that transports you to Bengal; the mobile water dispenser… While some of these ideas may have come to fruition, most others are simply amusing and lack any kind of characteristics that modern machines possess. But even back then we feared that machines might someday overpower us. The In The Year 2000 images were commissioned from artist Jean-Marc Côté by a French toymaker for the 1900 Paris Exhibition, becoming famous when Isaac Asimov republished them eighty-six years later. Fritz Lang’s vision of the year 2000 in his silent film Metropolis, released in 1927, is also completely unsettling – though it was laughed off at the time as a ‘silly’ and ‘farfetched’ idea of humankind’s future.

In more recent years, the integration of artificial intelligence programs into society has been met with similar feelings of existential dread. Text-to-image and voice-over apps have already bloated the creative space online, but the thought that more advanced and capable programmes are being shelved away until the ‘right’ time is more worrying, as developers of the likes of ChatGPT and Sora AI (among countless others) admit that they were ready to be released to the public years ago. Creatives also feel threatened by programmes like Dall-E AI and Midjourney, as their works can be instantly matched in quality within seconds by these generators. In addition to this, the general public across the world now seems to feel a profound disconnect between their governments and themselves, stemming in part from the dubious behaviour of tech companies. Yet people will still gladly accept these incredible tools with open arms. Suddenly, one feels glad that ChatGPT is around to help one with various essays, projects, and recipes for cooking.

There lies an inconsistency with how we react to human-intelligence-emulating objects and their use to us. Many want all the power of artificial intelligence – a want that’s never satisfied, leading to the continuous production of evermore advanced AI. However, we are reluctant to confront the fear that artificial intelligence is slowly replacing human experiences with soulless, unfeeling solutions to problems of human life.

The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of ‘the look’ – the experience of being seen by another consciousness. This ‘look’ both imparts to us the existence of other minds and augments our own self-awareness. Indeed, feelings such as shame or pride are only understandable if there are other beings in the world to make us objects of scorn or envy. We cannot be judged by inanimate objects; nor can we feel seen or validated by them. This includes digital objects. To feel these emotions, we depend on sentience. Artificial intelligence does not have sentience.

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once defined intelligence as ‘the light in the face of others’. In AI’s case, the LED lights are blinding, in that there is nothing within. We interact with a mindless object that reflects to us not what it itself lacks, but what we lack, and this shakes us to the core. As the Australian philosopher Patrick Stokes once wrote, “The truly scary part of AI … is not the thought that we can be replaced by unfree rule-following machines. It’s the intimation AI provides that we ourselves might be unfree as well” (‘Ex Machina’, New Philosopher, 2023).

Air Ship Jean-Marc Côté 1899

New Chains, New Chains!

One of the major figures of the French Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), believed that if power really was with the people, then it was the people themselves who should do the ruling. He famously stated, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains” (The Social Contract, 1762). Rousseau also believed that it is our own concept of and consequent construction of society that limits us. Laws, taxes, good behaviour, and censorship, seem to be things to keep the average person in line, and society in order. A contemporary addition to the list is the internet. Social media, endless entertainment, and the data detailing each user’s every habit and response, also straighten out any potential acts of freedom. Not knowing the essence of technology makes us unfree, and chained to it.

But is AI really the biggest threat to society right now? After all, we’re the creators of it, so surely its growing power and influence on us can be swiftly dissolved by us? And despite the depictions of AI in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, I Robot or Ex Machina, artificial intelligence is not innately evil. If AI is mindless, then it cannot possess the capacity to act immorally. So it is not artificial intelligence that’s the problem, I believe, but our own aggressive disposition towards both nature and technology, which changes AI from a neutral object to a more volatile one. The more worrying concern is whether man has an uncurable disposition towards abusing technology.

Technology is now at a level where some fear that it’s doing more harm than good. The infamous Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, argued that “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” We have stepped away from our natural reality, and have insulated, padded, and coddled ourselves with digital distractions – social media, TV, and games. Suddenly we believe we can achieve meaning from these things, when the true path to meaning already surrounds us, in the form of nature.

The great Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius once wrote that “Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.” Everything humankind has previously been challenged by, it has eventually evolved the ability to remove the danger it posed. Be it bubonic plague, or deadly man-made chemicals, or nuclear warheads, humans have proven that they can either eliminate the threat or learn to live alongside it. In modern society, however, advancements in technology are coming along so fast that we cannot adapt in time to control them accordingly.

Someone who was fascinated with exploring technology’s place in our world was the German existentialist Martin Heidegger, who wrote about technology’s place in our lives in his book The Question Concerning Technology (1954). In it, Heidegger draws attention to technology’s role in bringing about our decline by constricting our experience of things as they are. He argues that we now view nature and human beings instrumentally, seeing them merely as raw materials for technical operations. He believes that modern civilisation has been shackled.

So is there a solution to our self-inflicted restriction of freedom and developing dependency on devices in our lives?

A Transcendental Solution

Transcendentalism emerges as a possible solution, this being a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of the spiritual over the material. Henry David Thoreau was a friend of the father of transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his defining work, Walden (1854), Thoreau offers some advice on how to escape the chains of which Rousseau wrote. In 1845, Emerson allowed Thoreau to build a small cabin on his patch of land by the Walden Pond of Massachusetts. In his two years there, in his three by four metre cabin, Thoreau discovered a more conscious lifestyle, drastically different from bustling city life. He came to believe that we need very few things, suggesting that we ought to think of how little we need to get by with rather than how much we can accumulate. Following this principle, he even managed to sustain himself by only working one day a week.

Emerson too deeply valued self-sufficiency. In his essay, Self-Reliance (1841), he wrote, “The civilised man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun.” Since man has created various conveniences for himself, he has lost the talents that once came to him naturally – showing that change is not always for the better. But Thoreau went a step further concerning self-reliance, and emphasised the importance of economic independence from the government; and more, that the goal of life is to strip from our lives everything that does not produce fulfilment, ultimately freeing ourselves from the constraints society has put upon us. That also was the aim of Thoreau’s hiatus from normal life: to show others that returning to a pre-industrial, almost primitive, life, was feasible and attractive. He thrived in nature – just as Marcus Aurelius believed every person should.

However, in the modern landscape, with our increasing dependency on digital devices, I am doubtful that the average city person would be able to do such a thing. The film Into The Wild (2007) shows the stark reality of humankind’s current condition, the extreme difficulty even a resourceful modern person has to survive in the wild beyond the comfortable industrial world. Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) struggles to properly cook his meat, not knowing how to drain it or skin it. He fails to forage for fruits and berries correctly, and as a result of eating the wrong plant dies three months into his adventure.

It seems that we as a species have actually lost energy in our efforts to conserve it by using machines, computers, and other conveniences. This is exactly why I believe Thoreau’s transcendentalist approach to modern life to be an answer to the quest for meaning and freedom in a world where neither are the common interests of many. Today, more than ever, consolidating our individual freedom in the world is the most urgent and fundamental need – above and beyond facing any individual threat from machines we ourselves have created.

By drawing from the ideas of Heidegger, Rousseau, Aurelius, and Thoreau, we can begin to navigate the philosophical complexities of our machine-reliant world, acknowledge that we have the power over these objects, and work towards a more informed understanding of what it means to be human.

© Louis Tempany 2025

Louis Tempany is studying acting at The Lir Academy in Dublin.

• This essay won Louis the 2024 Irish Young Philosopher Awards Grand Prize and Philosopher of Our Time award. His video accompanying this essay is at https://youtu.be/VgK4RavL8Ig.

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Brief Lives

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

John P. Irish considers some principles of history through the history of a historian.

In 1764, while on the traditional Grand Tour for wealthy young Europeans, Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) visited the ruins of Rome. This encounter profoundly influenced him, almost as a religious experience. As he recounted in his Memoirs of My Life and Writings (1796): “After a sleepless night I trod with a lofty step the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell was at once present to my eye.” This moment inspired what is arguably the most important historical work ever published, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788).

Before this monumental publication, however, in 1761 Gibbon wrote a defense of the humanities: An Essay on the Study of Literature (ESL). This work laid the foundations for his extensive history of Rome’s fall, blending rich philosophical insights with a deep exploration of history. It also established the methodology and principles upon which his magnum opus would be constructed. It is this early work that we will focus on most here.

Edward Gibbon, by Henry Walton, 1774

A Biographical Sketch

Edward Gibbon was the only surviving son of six children (five boys and one girl) born to Edward Gibbon Sr, a Member of Parliament and a gentleman farmer who generally neglected the young Edward. His mother, Judith Porten, died when he was a boy.

Born at Lime Grove in Putney, Surrey (now in London), Gibbon struggled with his health early in life, leading many to believe he would not survive childhood. Initially, he attended Dr Woddeson’s school in Kingston-upon-Thames. After his mother’s death, he moved to the Westminster School boarding house, owned by his aunt Catherine Porten, whom he credited with instilling in him a love of reading: “To her kind lessons I ascribe my early and invincible love of reading, which I would not exchange for the treasures of India” (Memoirs, p.67).

In 1752, at the age of fifteen, Gibbon was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford, which he later described as the most ‘useless’ time of his life. The college’s stifling curriculum, he believed, discouraged free thought and inquiry. During this period Gibbon converted to Catholicism after exploring the writings of the rationalist theologian Conyers Middleton, who denied miracles. Gibbon objected to Middleton’s views, leading him to the works of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and Robert Parsons, ultimately converting to Catholicism in 1753, much to his father’s chagrin. Following his conversion, Gibbon was sent to Lausanne, Switzerland, under the care of Daniel Pavillard, a Reformed (that is, Protestant) pastor.

Initially dreading the move, Gibbon found Pavillard respectful and intellectually stimulating. Pavillard taught him French and introduced him to some of the most important philosophical influences of his life: Grotius, Bayle, Montesquieu, Cicero, and most importantly, John Locke (1632-1704). This period was crucial to his intellectual development. J. W. Burrow has argued that Gibbon’s time in Lausanne transformed him into a scholar. During this time, Gibbon also reverted to Anglicanism – a decision influenced by his father’s threats to disinherit him. He officially reconverted on Christmas Day, 1754.

In Lausanne, Gibbon immersed himself in the works of Homer and was introduced to the significant Greek historians Herodotus and Xenophon. His whole Swiss experience ignited his passion for liberty and republicanism. By the mid-1760s, he began writing a history of the government of Berne (which he never published and later destroyed). This era also brought him into contact with prominent French thinkers such as Diderot, D’Alembert, Helvetius, D’Holbach, Rousseau, and Voltaire. Although he himself tolerated these philosophes, with some reservations, he viewed their radicalism as intolerant atheism.

From 1760-1762, Gibbon served in the British army during the Seven Years War. In 1761, he published his first work, An Essay on the Study of Literature. In 1765, he returned to London, restless and eager to escape his father’s shadow. His father died in 1770, and Gibbon began working on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with the first volume published to great success in 1776. In 1774, Gibbon was elected a Member of Parliament. It was the golden age of British parliamentary eloquence. He listened to debates on the American colonies’ revolt and the oratory of Burke, Sheridan, and Fox, and realized that he was not a gifted orator. Nevertheless, he found himself in an esteemed position, with a parliamentary career and a lucrative appointment as one of the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations. However, economic reform soon ended his tenure and extra income. In 1783, he left Parliament and returned to Lausanne, where he completed the final volumes of The Decline and Fall in a summer house overlooking Lake Leman.

Gibbon never regretted his decision to return to Lausanne, although his last years there saw the death of his friend Georges Deyverdun and the outbreak of the French Revolution. He returned to London in 1793, where he underwent surgery, and died in early 1794. He’s buried in the vault of the Sheffield family in the parish church at Fletching, East Sussex, since he was staying with Lord Sheffield at the time of his death.

An Essay on the Study of Literature

An Essay on the Study of Literature was originally published in French in 1761, quickly followed by a poor English translation.

Although the title might suggest a narrow focus on the study of literature, the Essay actually provides a robust defense of the humanities generally. During the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, science and mathematics dominated the European intellectual conversation: the Essay aimed to defend the humanities against their neglect and even contempt prevalent in the age of Reason, especially in France: “At present Natural Philosophy and Mathematics are seated on the throne, from which they view their sisters prostrated before them, enchained to their chariot, or at best employed to decorate their triumphal procession. Perhaps their fall may not be far off” (ESL, p.3, trans. Robert Mankin).

Gibbon, himself a man of the Enlightenment, was nevertheless willing to criticize two of its chief characteristics: a scorn for the past, and the exaltation of wit, elegance, and reason over scholarship. He was concerned about the Enlightenment’s excesses of ‘philosophic enthusiasm’ in its belief in reason, progress, and science. He believed that many leading figures of the day held disdain for the Greek and Roman classics and Renaissance writers, undervaluing historical knowledge. Later, in The Decline and Fall, Gibbon criticizes a contemporary author who “quotes nobody, according to the last fashion of the French writers.” This encapsulates his belief in the diminishing value of historical knowledge among Enlightenment thinkers.

Later in life, Gibbon was somewhat critical of this youthful essay – not for its content, or its defense of the humanities and historical scholarship, but for its style and mechanics. The essay was published in French (the language in which he thought at the time) as he believed that would attract a wider audience than Latin. It indeed found success in France, and brought Gibbon some attention in the academic world, but it went largely unnoticed in Britain. Nevertheless, the essay laid the groundwork for Gibbon’s philosophical approach to history, establishing the methodology he would use for the rest of his life.

Against Cartesian Rationalism

In his Essay Gibbon specifically targeted René Descartes (1596-1650). Although Descartes published little in politics, history, or ethics, he profoundly impacted the study of history.

Descartes had aimed to establish a new method of scientific and philosophical investigation based on the certainties of mathematical knowledge. He believed that this method could be applied to all fields of study, including the social sciences.

Descartes begins by accepting only what appears to him as ‘clear and distinct’ truths: “I will admit as true only what has been deduced from indubitable common notions so evidently that it is fit to be considered as mathematical demonstration” (Meditations on First Philosophy, 1642). Like a geometer building proofs, he would then deduce other proofs from these fundamental concepts.

Descartes viewed mathematics as the foundation for all intellectual knowledge, and this foundation extends beyond the natural sciences: “I came to see that the exclusive concern of mathematics is with questions of order or measure, and that it is irrelevant whether the measure in question involves numbers, shapes, stars, sounds, or any other object whatever. This made me realize that there must be a general science which explains all the points that can be raised concerning order and measure, irrespective of the subject matter” (Ibid). So Descartes believed he had discovered a universal pattern to the formal study of all systems and fields of intellectual knowledge.

The philosophers known as the ‘rationalists’ promoted Descartes’ method. They believed in the power of reason to generate knowledge purely on a priori grounds, independent of experience. In contrast, the ‘empiricists’, who opposed Descartes, argued that knowledge came from observation (a posteriori knowledge).

This philosophical debate significantly affected ideas about the study of history. Cartesian skepticism applied to history, and characterized as ‘anti-historical skepticism’ or ‘Historical Pyrrhonism’, questioned the value of historical knowledge. Descartes’ willingness to discard all previous supposed knowledge led some philosophers to question the value of studying the past at all, arguing that history seemed to narrow rather than enlarge the mind. Human reason, not inherited knowledge, was sovereign. However, for Gibbon, this rejection risked losing the valuable insights from historical study. He argued that contemporary Enlightenment thinkers who followed Descartes’ skepticism were the ones narrowing the mind, since Descartes’ skepticism placed all inherited knowledge under either suspicion or outright condemnation. The debate between ‘the Ancients and the Moderns’ raged throughout Europe. Britain was also experiencing a similar philosophical shift, with Newtonian mathematics and experimentation emphasizing the order and clarity of science. Gibbon warned: during the Renaissance, “the handsome thing was to study and admire the ancients; our age thinks it easier to ignore and despise them. I believe both sides are right” (ESL, p.4). He acknowledged the crudeness of past scholars, and argued they could benefit from modern thinking: “The world was enlightened enough to feel the utility of their work, but neither reasonable nor polite enough to realize that their investigations could have been guided by the torch of Philosophy” (Ibid). But rather than learning to combine the best of both worlds, Descartes dismisses the past with a derision more harmful than its worship.

Ancient Rome (detail) Giovanni Paulo Panini, 1757

Philosophical History

Despite Descartes’ anti-historical skepticism, some believed that studying the past provided valuable information and essential building blocks for knowledge.

One of the early empiricists who challenged Cartesian rationalism was the English philosopher John Locke. Locke believed that sense experience was the foundations of knowledge, and also that most of our knowledge was probabilistic. These ideas set Locke at odds with the rationalists. Locke heavily influenced Gibbon, and Gibbon frequently referenced Locke’s impact on his intellectual development: “Locke’s Treatise of Government instructed me in the knowledge of Whig principles… I carefully went through the Essay on Human Understanding… and more than once I have been led… into a deep and instructive train of thinking” (Memoirs, pp.99-100).

During his time in Switzerland under the tutelage of Pavilliard, Gibbon found further intellectual influences that would shape his approach to the philosophical study of history.

Philosophers of history faced two general criticisms implied by Cartesian skepticism: first, the potential falsity or inconsistency of sources, calling into question the certainty of evaluations; and second, the inherent biases often plaguing historians’ research and assessments. Gibbon addressed these concerns in his Essay. Regarding the credibility of historical documents, Gibbon argued that while some might be fakes, authenticity could be determined through careful scrutiny. He emphasized the importance of comparing documents and identifying falsifications: “Criticism, in my view, is the art of judging writing and writers; what they said, how well they said it… [History] opens up an immense field devoted to the examination and criticism of facts” (ESL, p.13). Here Locke’s influence on Gibbon is evident. Locke explained: “Rational Knowledge, is the perception of the certain Agreement, or Disagreement of any two Ideas, by the intervention of one or more other Ideas” (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4.17.17). Gibbon also believed that historical facts should be compared and weighed to establish certainty: “not to grasp a demonstration but to compare the weight of conflicting probabilities” (ESL, p.16). So Gibbon valued the cumulative wisdom of the ages while maintaining a critical eye toward historical consistency, accuracy, and verifiability.

Another source of doubt about the validity of historical knowledge was historians’ biases, which could turn them into ideological advocates rather than objective observers. Gibbon stressed the importance of critical scrutiny in pursuit of objective truth: history “opens up an immense field devoted to the examination and criticism of facts” (p.13). Historians must also strive for objectivity, free from personal biases, using proper evidence and its correct application, and Gibbon believed in preserving and employing all facts and evidence: “Someone who writes for all men must draw only on sources common to all men, in their hearts and in the spectacle of nature [ie, reason and evidence]. Pride alone can lead him to overstep these limits… Not only the author’s character but that of his work will have an influence on the way it is carried out” (ESL, pp.8-9). So for Gibbon historical documents were valuable as they potentially provide objective empirical evidence. As he wrote, “Let us conserve everything preciously. From the meanest facts, a Montesquieu will unravel relations unknown to the vulgar… Their hope is that genius and felicitous efforts will detect properties hitherto concealed” (p.26). Historical bits and pieces serve as the raw data needed to construct the historical narrative: “No author is forgotten, not even the one farthest removed… perhaps it is there the critic will encounter a beam of light that will confirm his discoveries or challenge his hypothesis” (p.13). So one does not know in advance what will be useful. Gibbon argued that the new method’s discarding of historical information posed a significant threat to the critical historian, since unlike natural phenomena, or theoretical fields like mathematics, historical evidence, once destroyed, is irretrievable: “For the losses of history are indeed irretrievable: when the productions of fancy or science have been swept away, new poets may invent, and new philosophers may reason; but if the inscription of a single fact be once obliterated, it can never be restored by the united efforts of genius and industry” (An Address). So Descartes and the rationalists, represented by the Moderns, were dangerous adversaries for the philosopher of history, as their skepticism of history could cause irreparable harm. In this way, the debate between the Ancients and the Moderns highlighted a fundamental disagreement over the value of historical information, and who could judge its epistemic value. The epistemic value of primary texts was fundamentally important for Gibbon.

Moreover, unlike scientists, historians deal with truths that can direct us: “sciences consist of knowledge alone. Their principles are speculative truths, not maxims of conduct… [Historians] make the proposition familiar, apply it justly, and use it as a guide in one’s studies and a torch in one’s direction” (ESL, p.16). Historians also never suppose Cartesian absolute certainty, but instead delve into Lockean probabilities: “he never presents his conjectures as truth, his inductions as facts, his probabilities as demonstrations” (p.13).

Conclusion

Gibbon’s Essay is an attempt to define the vocation of the historian. The study of the past reveals connections, and penetrates beneath surface appearances to explain these connections. One of Gibbon’s strongest influences here was Tacitus, who believed that the historian “employs the force of rhetoric only to display the connection between the links that form the chain of historical events, and to instruct the reader by sensible and profound reflections” (Letters, 108). For many Enlightenment thinkers who valued history, the concept of progress illustrated and explained the development of civilization. Historians should not just focus on battles and exemplary lives, as Renaissance historiography did, but, like the ancient historians, should also consider the manners and spirit of historical times. Montesquieu’s influence is evident here, especially in his classic work of legal scholarship, The Spirit of the Laws (1748). The diversity of human societies, ideas, and ways of life made civilization’s advance intelligible, bringing history into the ‘philosophic’ camp and serving the Enlightenment. Voltaire’s Essay on Customs (1756) also argued that the study of history should be instructive. For Gibbon, the study of history involves describing the pathology of the human mind in action – the history of error, prejudice, and illusion. As Gibbon states, history is “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and mistakes of mankind” (History, 1.77). This recognition makes the task of understanding history even more urgent.

© John P. Irish 2025

John P. Irish is an educator and independent researcher living in Bridgeport, Texas.

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Interviews

- Karl Sigmund

Interview

Karl Sigmund

Karl Sigmund is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna. He has made major contributions to evolutionary game theory and to the history of the Vienna Circle, who met regularly in Vienna from 1924-1936. Katharine Mullen talks with him about mathematics, and about the Vienna Circle.

On the walk to interview Sigmund at one of Vienna’s storied coffee houses, I crossed in front of the Secession Building, an architectural marvel built in 1898 to house modern art. The facade is inscribed: “To every age its art, to art its freedom.” Sigmund’s book The Waltz of Reason could have a similar motto: “To every age its mathematics, to mathematics its freedom.”

The Waltz of Reason (Basic Books, 2023) surveys two millennia of the interplay between mathematics and philosophy. Every age, from the ancient Greeks to the present day, has asked philosophical questions regarding what mathematics means and what it can show us. Sigmund uses examples and asides to “cover a vast territory lightly”, as he puts it, in a broad history that will be of interest to any mathematically-inclined reader. The thrill of this dance is in its dizzying scope.

Sigmund was born in the last months of the Second World War, after the Third Reich had driven many Viennese intellectuals into exile and murdered a third of the city’s Jews. This history was addressed in his previous book, Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science (Basic Books, 2017).

The Waltz of Reason dances around the question of whether mathematics is discovered or invented, which is to say whether it’s a window into a Platonic realm of objective truth [this is the idea that mathematical truths have an independent reality, Ed] or merely a language that we set up according to our own lights. I’m wondering if you take a side yourself?

There is an old saying that mathematicians are Platonists on weekdays and formalists on Sundays. I lean in this direction myself. I cannot settle on one view or another. And so many better brains have wrestled with that question without finding a definite answer, so I’m not even trying any longer.

This question tormented the mathematical philosopher Kurt Gödel, as you discuss.

It didn’t torment Ludwig Wittgenstein! Wittgenstein always seemed to know that of course mathematics is invented!

You talk about alternative mathematical systems, and about whether alien civilizations could come up with different mathematics from our own. I’m wondering whether it’s really possible to imagine a mathematics that’s utterly different in the sense that even the counting numbers aren’t a part of the system. Or is a mathematics based on the counting numbers what every alien civilization would come to?

Many mathematical theories – geometries, topologies, algebraic systems, and so forth – could have evolved differently and played different roles in physics and other applications. But counting seems so extremely basic. I couldn’t imagine a mathematics without counting. It is the granite bedrock of mathematical Platonism. Everything else can be imagined as invented. But basic numbers certainly not.

As you describe in The Waltz of Reason, the seventeenth century philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz hoped for a reasoning machine so powerful it could settle any human argument. Do you have any optimism that our new, powerful reasoning machines will help us come to a consensus on difficult issues?

I have absolutely no optimism about this, but that could be just a reflection of my age. As for Leibniz, he was of course a genius and conversant in practically every aspect of intellectual life; but there was one thing he was missing – namely, he didn’t have an evolutionary viewpoint. He did not see that humans are a product of evolution, and that our nature, and our conflicts of interest, are a product of an enormously long biological and social evolution. I believe that this evolved human nature is much more important than any system meant to provide the rules for dealing with problems. And I guess the old biological background will assert itself as long as humanity is not overcome by artificial intelligence.

You quote Goethe, who wrote that “Mathematicians are a kind of Frenchmen: whenever you talk to them, they translate it into their language and right away it is something different.” I wonder if you found this quote applicable when you were pursuing your own research into evolutionary games?

I have always been skeptical about applications of game theory to practical problems. I think that humans are accustomed to deal with practical problems on a more or less instinctive basis. We have developed intuitions, just as we have developed motor skills to play ball, which we apply very well without any awareness of any underlying theory. In my view the main task of game theory is in providing insight into evolutionary principles, but it does not help us with actual applications. You don’t become a better tennis player when you have studied three terms of mechanics.

In your previous book, Exact Thinking and Demented Times, you describe how the economist Karl Menger and other university professors lost their positions due to their Jewish origins and didn’t get an invitation back after the war. You also discussed how the ‘de-Nazification’ of Austrian universities was rather superficial: some former Nazi party members were quickly re-appointed to professorships, and moved up the ladder. I’m wondering if you understood all this in hindsight, or if it seemed jarring in the moment as a student in the Sixties?

I was very aware of it at the time. There were, however, many details I didn’t know. Some of my professors were Nazis, as I later found out when I learned their party numbers and so on. I didn’t know all the specifics then, but I felt the atmosphere, and many of my colleagues also felt it. In particular, there was a group in the university that was very explicitly against the philosophy that had been developed before the war in Vienna: Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle and so on were practically taboo, and their work was considered an aberration. I suffered from that dismissal when I was still studying. But due to influences from abroad and from other Austrian universities, the atmosphere in Viennese philosophy changed. Now it’s a very different department. It’s much better, and completely open. But in the Sixties and Seventies it was like a fortress, trying to hold off any new developments.

Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna

© Hubertl 2015, Creative Commons 4.0

The Vienna Circle wasn’t admired locally?

Not by those heading the philosophical establishment. Not at all.

You attended lectures by Béla Juhos, the last member of the Vienna Circle to teach at the University of Vienna, and you wrote that he was disrespected by colleagues.

Yes. He was always given the lousiest lecture room. In the evening sometimes a janitor would even have forgotten to switch on the lights. There were only maybe ten students, including, I should say, a colleague who later became a famous artist, Peter Weibel. In a sense our attendance was a kind of resistance movement. Juhos was already fairly old, and the lectures were not particularly inspired. But for us, it was a kind of a statement. We went there despite the fact that he was so obviously marginalized and pushed aside.

So you’ve admired the Vienna Circle since you were a student?

When I was sixteen or so I found Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in a bookstore in Salzburg. I saw the strange numbering of the sentences. I was curious. I bought the small book, and I fell head over heels. And then I heard about the Vienna Circle. One of my professors had met some of the members in the Thirties. I think that as a student I was already planning to write a history of the Vienna Circle.

What motivated The Waltz of Reason?

I’d always been struck by the fact that undergraduates studying mathematics would so quickly get a new mindset. Not necessarily get smarter, but start thinking in a different way. Within a few months, by gaining some ideas about infinity, proof by induction, and so on, they gained a new perspective. I wanted to convey this mindset. Whether I succeeded is not for me to tell. But in any case, this is the outcome I was interested in introducing, with an elementary amount of mathematics. That doesn’t make you a mathematician at all, but it gives you a different mindset and another standard of precision.

• Katharine Mullen is a writer and computational physicist based in Los Angeles.

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Letters

- Letters

Letters

Letters

Sources of Disagreement • Zizek Re-Enunciated • Popper Pops Up • Attention Grabbing • The Beatles Can Get Back • Hope Spreads • Advances via Technology?

Sources of Disagreement

Dear Editor: I read with interest Sina Mirzaye Shirkoohi’s essay in Issue 169 on objectivity in science, basically arguing that it’s a chimera by citing Kuhn’s paradigmatic model of scientific revolutions. What’s often left out of this discussion is the role of philosophy in science, which scientists prefer to ignore and philosophers tend to exaggerate.

On YouTube you’ll find some of the brightest physicists and philosophers promoting their pet theories in contrast to what the status quo believes, unconstrained by the rigors of academically permitted paradigms. But their theories are often determined by philosophical considerations, such as: Do we live in a multiverse? Will AI become conscious? Is there quantum gravity? None of these questions can be answered by empirical means given our current limitations, which of course may change. I like the quote (source unknown), “Only future generations can tell us how ignorant the current generation is.” I also like a metaphor attributed to the scientist John Wheeler: “We live on an island of knowledge, surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As the island grows so does the shore of our ignorance.” Staying with that metaphor, I see the island as science, with philosophy out to sea, but the shoreline is where philosophy and science meet and contribute to each other. All scientific theories have limitations, no exceptions. This is why Wheeler’s metaphor is so apt. The sea of ignorance is infinite, and the perceived limit of what we can know is like a horizon that retreats while we approach it.

This all infers that there’s a growth in knowledge over time. Using the example of Galileo, as Shirkoohi does, with hindsight, and based on what we’ve learned using technology unavailable at the time, we can say with the utmost confidence that his position was correct, and the Earth does go round the Sun. Given all the various philosophical positions among those toiling on the shoreline of our collective ignorance, and the fact that 95% of the universe is unknown, I think we’re ripe for another Kuhnian revolution in the field of physics.

Paul P. Mealing, Melbourne

Dear Editor: I was disappointed to see no reference to Noam Chomsky, the most cited living academic, in your ‘Sources of Knowledge’ issue (169). Chomsky is a firm ‘mysterian’ when it comes to scientific knowledge: there are problems we might realistically hope to solve, and mysteries that we will not. His What Kind of Creatures Are We? (2016) defends this position magisterially. Chomsky points out that we have both cognitive scope and cognitive limits. While supporting attempts to reach these limits, he believes that many problems (such as free will, the origin and use of language, and consciousness) will probably ever remain beyond our understanding. He also makes the point that science has given up trying to provide a complete understanding of the universe: it now simply constructs theories of certain physical phenomena – while living reasonably happily with the fact that the theories don’t always tie together (as with relativity and quantum mechanics).

Chomsky quotes David Hume’s observation that Newton “seemed to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature” but had shown “the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy”, and “thereby restored nature’s ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.” Despite the progress of scientific knowledge, Chomsky believes that this idea remains essentially true, quoting numerous scientists and philosophers in support. Chomsky has also drawn on the philosopher C.S. Peirce’s point that humans are evolutionarily endowed with the power of forming theories. But Pierce also stressed the boundary of ‘admissible hypotheses’ that was necessary for ‘imagining correct theories’. Our theory-making ability comes therefore with frustrating but necessary cognitive restraints. Chomsky thinks that we might not be able to frame some questions about the universe. And if presented with the answers by, say, a superior alien intelligence, we might not even understand them.

Dr Terence Denman, Totnes

Dear Editor: Referring to Michael McGranahan’s interesting article on knowledge (PN 169), I find it almost impossible to believe that Gödel, in his profound and remarkable work, could have found any source of inspiration in that vacuous old chestnut the liar paradox, often given in the form ‘this statement is false’. Let’s call this statement L. Michael implies that L is ‘unprovable’ – but surely this is only in a trivial way, in the sense that L does not provide us with anything to prove. By contrast, there may be hundreds of important Gödel-unprovable mathematical conjectures (eg, twin primes, Goldbach conjecture, Euler’s number…). Clearly it would be useful to know which ones, and why.

Consider the sentences:

(i) ‘87 is a prime number’; this statement is false.

(ii) This statement contains five words.

In both cases, the phrase ‘this statement’ has a point of reference: it ‘points’ to something – ‘87 is a prime number’, and statement (ii) itself, sentence (i) being an external reference, and sentence (ii) an internal one. Like (ii), the sentence L refers solely to itself, and in doing so points to nothing substantive. So how could it be true? How could it be false? Yet it solicits the knee-jerk logic that runs, ‘If L is true, L is false; and if L is false, L is true’. This does not, to me, indicate unprovability, but merely a misuse of the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ – for, unprovability, if it is to signify anything, must confer a sense of existence, of something that can be disproved.

It’s difficult to see how the liar paradox could be regarded as anything but a linguistic frivolity.

Paul Tissier, Brighton College

Dear Editor: In an otherwise entertaining article in Issue 169, Michael McGranahan invites us to assume that the universe is “a consistent system, in the Gödel sense”, and hence that “the universe itself is an incomplete system.” But the universe is not a formal system [of language], nor anything remotely like a formal system. Accordingly, the question whether the universe is consistent or complete has literally no meaning in the Gödelian sense. Even ordinary mathematics is not a formal system – this being one of the things Gödel proved.

The celebrated Swedish logician and computer scientist Torkel Franzén once made a study of misapplications of Gödel’s work (Gödel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse), and more instances can be found in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s book Fashionable Nonsense. The key feature their examples have in common is that they’re not formal systems, since, as Franzén says, they do not have a formal language; a set of axioms in that language; a set of formal inference rules; or a set of theorems that can be shown to be computably enumerable.

Now the universe may be consistent in some wider sense: for example, that its governing laws respect the Principle of Non-Contradiction. As to whether the universe is incomplete more broadly construed, insofar as human knowledge is concerned, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. But outside the context of formal systems, incompleteness does not follow from consistency, since the words then do not have their Gödelian meanings, and so Gödel’s theorems do not apply.

There’s no law against invoking Gödel metaphorically or as a rhetorical flourish; but this may leave the reader with the impression that something has been proved when it definitely has not. This is ironic considering that Gödel’s theorems directly concern the question of what can and cannot be proved.

Tim Wilkinson, Houghton-le-Spring

Zizek Re-Enunciated

Dear Editor: In Issue 168, the reference to enunciated and enunciation by Slavoj Žižek in his article ‘Welcome to the Civilization of the Liar’s Paradox’, is reminiscent of Jacques Derrida’s signified and signifier. As soon as I read Žižek’s distinction between enunciated and enunciation, it made me recall what I had learned in an undergraduate critical theory course that was heavy on Derrida’s theories. If, as Žižek says, that enunciated is the content of what is being said and enunciation is what is “implied by what you are saying,” can it be true that something called ‘stop’ can either be a red octagon or a signal whose light is red? According to Derrida’s signified and signifier, meaning is never stable, while Žižek seems to say something can be both true and untrue. Schrödinger’s Cat, anyone?

Paulette Halili, Irvine, CA

Popper Pops Up

Dear Editor: As Brian King lucidly explained in Issue 169, Sir Karl Popper provided brilliant insight into the logic of scientific discovery through his idea of falsification being the basis of science. But Popper’s attempts to describe a methodology for putting that idea into practice were only a qualified success. Not a failure, as his account often works well in applied science – it proved very helpful to my own research in machine dynamics, for example – but it’s oversimplified for more fundamental questions about the history of science. However, his admiring critic Imre Lakatos developed an account of ‘Scientific Research Programmes’ (SRPs) that combines the essence of Popper’s logic with a much better explanation of the historical record, and unlike the approach of Lakatos’s contemporary Thomas Kuhn, is prescriptive as well as descriptive. And whereas Popper only granted falsifiable statements a role in scientific practice as a source of hypotheses and as a tool for methodology, on Lakatos’s account, an SRP combines a ‘core’ of ideas with a ‘protective band’ of auxiliary hypotheses connecting the core to the world of experimental results. The protective band is incrementally refined and added to over time in response to unexpected results, so the theory as a whole at any given moment is falsifiable, as Popper demanded; but the normal response to a failed prediction is not instant abandoning of the core idea, but evolution of the auxiliary links. Eventually the entire SRP may become ‘degenerate’ and be superseded by a more ‘progressive’ rival SRP, though there may be a long period of overlap, and the criteria for ‘changing horses’ are not clear cut. (Any mechanical engineer will tell you that despite the success of relativity and quantum theory, Newton’s SRP is alive and well, albeit hedged around with auxiliary hypotheses regarding its field of application.)

Boyle’s Law provides a simple illustration. I learnt at school that it only applied to ‘perfect gases’ – which were defined as those that obeyed Boyle’s Law… clearly not a falsifiable statement. However, combine it with a bunch of empirical statements of the form ‘gas X is a perfect gas to accuracy Y under conditions Z’, and you have a useful model for capturing real-world behaviour (even though it has been superseded by the Kinetic Theory of Gases as an SRP).

It’s a shame that Kuhn’s theory of Scientific Revolutions, with its sensationalist scepticism, is the response to Popper that gets all the publicity. Whether due to Lakatos’s youthful Marxism or his tragically early death before he could properly pull his ideas together, his contribution has never gained the attention it deserves.

Roger S. Haines, Ealing

Dear Editor: Reading my Issue 169, I encountered an interesting article by Brian King entitled ‘Popper, Science & Democracy’. While the article talks about how a theory is determined to be true, the topic took me to another place. I have been reading about man’s development. We find that historically, man has separated himself from all other beings: we had a conversation with ourselves and determined that we are the be all and end all of creation. Is this supposition correct? Or, if treated like a theory, are there alternative theories?

In fact, through scientific investigation it has now been determined that the ideas of what makes man different from other beings have been dismantled. We find that tool-making, burying the dead, creation of meaningful symbols, and a belief in an afterlife, may all be characteristic of non-human beings too. Given this information, we should dispense with the notion that man is the sole beneficiary of God’s grace. But now we have new information, will the old idea be pushed aside? No: emotional attachment outweighs facts. So theory falsification comes hard in life, and paradigm shifts even harder.

Clarence G. Underwood, Esparto, California

Attention Grabbing

Dear Editor: Paul Doolan’s article on attention in Issue 169 caught my attention – partly because of its wide-ranging informativeness; partly because in my Master’s thesis, attention (or attending) was a key idea; and partly because, despite my enjoyment of the article, I felt there was an unnecessary gloom about it.

The gloom derives from Doolan’s use of Herbert Simon’s assertion that “in an information rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of … the attention of its recipients.” My feeling is that this is typical of that mindset of the economics in which everything is portrayed as a zero-sum game. Yet attending should not be thought of as an isolated activity; rather, it is but one part of an interdependent, self-referential series of activities which Benjamin Bloom and others identify as “receiving (sometimes called ‘attending’), responding, valuing, organising and characterising”, which, in their Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in the Affective Domain they present as a ‘scaffold’. I think it’s a more dynamic activity, in which our minds repeatedly cycle through those stages, creating provisional hypotheses that change how we attend, and, in turn, change the other stages, until we settle upon some conceptualisation that we can, for the moment, accept.

Our richness of information enables a wider, more nuanced appreciation. So rather than the wealth of information reducing our attention, it is stimulating more selective attention. We’re in an age of greater creativity than has ever been.

Alasdair Macdonald, Glasgow

The Beatles Can Get Back

Dear Editor: I was disappointed, but unfortunately not surprised, when I took a first glance at my latest issue of Philosophy Now (169). In keeping with recent trends, we’re encouraged to consider the profound philosophical contribution of The Beatles. This follows articles on other philosophical giants like Taylor Swift and David Bowie. Does Philosophy Now wish to be considered a serious publication? Or is it more important – necessary even – to seek wide appeal? Will there be future articles on Ken Dodd’s hit ‘Happiness’ as both a profound statement on Bentham’s Utilitarianism and a rejection of Schopenhauer’s pessimism? How much further is this going to take us?

Andrew Lewis, Caerphilly Borough

Hope Spreads

Dear Editor: I was delighted by Elise Beal’s article in PN 168 on the similarities between the Japanese philosophy ikigai and the online trend #hopecore. As a school student, I sometimes feel as if I’m watching myself and my peers slowly decaying: it was reassuring to me that someone else believes that, through the smog of social media, our generation can find meaning through small snippets of happiness.

Small pleasures can bring hope for short periods of time, which is good; but I believe we’d all benefit if we were torn away from our screens by bigger pleasures. By this I mean projects of our own choosing – say, writing a story or painting a landscape. I imagine Simone de Beauvoir meant such endeavours as things that will bring us ‘transcendence’. Once one has overstepped the hurdle of ‘immanence’ (defined by de Beauvoir as the comfortable loop of same-olds – the comfortable loop of mind-numbing videos, for instance) and painted a decent picture, or written a good story, one feels satisfied, and will consider doing it again instead of switching the glowing screen on again. So my argument is that ikigai and hopecore are key to the long-term wellbeing of our generation, as Beal so brilliantly stated – but they’re only a gateway to bigger pleasures, satisfying projects, and a lifetime of meaningfulness.

Ramona Middleham, Devon

Dear Editor: Recently I finished re-reading the novel The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver while enjoying a Cohiba in my favorite cigar lounge. This profound tale reminded me of the suffering of people as a result of war, famine, and disease in equatorial Africa and elsewhere. With half a cigar left, I turned to continue my reading with the short essay by Elise Mayumi Beal in Philosophy Now 168, ‘Young & Meaningful’. I was heartened by the work of this young writer, and reminded of a discovery I made long ago as a young adult into the writings of the psychologist Viktor Frankl, a Jew who survived concentration camps and who discovered the immense healing power of meaning. His insights helped develop a new paradigm, the ‘Will to Meaning’.

Thank you for publishing Beal’s essay and for reinforcing my hope for the world.

Tim Strutz, Harrison Township, Michigan

Advances via Technology?

Dear Editor: I do not agree with the author of ‘Studying Smarter with AI?’ in Issue 168. I would have died for AI in my Civil Engineering studies in the old millenium as I use it now for stuff like reading this very article – I used AI to translate it to my mother language, which I read with much more clarity. And then I questioned AI about it. Had a little conversation.

Taking notes in math lectures in the 1980s took all my energy just to get it down on the paper. I had absolutely no time to reflect. And the info was given in a ‘one size fits all’ style. If ChatGPT, Copilot or whatever had been around I would have questioned and got clarified, in the way I now use AI after reading philosophical texts, to get the best possible understanding of a new concept. No two students of anything understand new concepts in exactly the same way.

AI should definitely be a part of every university student’s toolbox – not to get nice little answers, but to understand stuff in a way that suits their specific brains. I really hope contemporary students use AI to that end.

Anders Wallin, Uppsala, Sweden

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Columns

- Revisiting the Ontological Argument

- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

- Philosophers on Chocolate

- Living According To Nature

Tallis in Wonderland

Revisiting the Ontological Argument

Raymond Tallis contends that a definition of God cannot necessitate God’s existence.

Regular readers of this column will know that Tallis is a secular humanist, and that his Wonderland is a godless place. He explained why he was an atheist nearly a hundred wanders-in-Wonderland ago (‘Why I am an Atheist’, Issue 73), at a comparatively happy time (2009 CE) when few of us had heard of Donald Trump or Covid. So why is God popping up yet again, only a short while after he discussed the ‘God of Limited Power’ (‘Excusing God’, Issue 168)? Has he had a revelation, or encountered an argument that has changed his mind on this the most important of issues?

There has been no such event. Instead, I stumbled upon a characteristically brilliant episode of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, wonderfully facilitated by Melvyn Bragg. Originally broadcast over a decade ago, it was devoted to the Ontological Argument for the existence of God. I mention the programme because I suspect that by spreading the word about In Our Time, I might thereby contribute to enlightening readers (even?) more than simply by means of my reports from Wonderland.

The Ontological Argument is not, of course, a stranger to this journal. For instance, in Issue 152, Peter Mullen beautifully summarised Anselm’s famous version of the argument, the arguments against his argument, and the counter-arguments mobilised in its defence. So why, apart from the accidental encounter with In Our Time, do I think it is worthwhile re-visiting this issue? Because it is, as Mullen said, “in and of itself a paradigm of philosophy. The Ontological Argument – whichever side you find yourself on – is an example of what, at its best, philosophy is.” I want to support this claim by looking at places the argument might take us to, irrespective of whether or not it delivers what it says on the tin.

Anselm’s Ontological Argument can be put briefly as follows:

a) God is by definition the most perfect being.

b) Any being would be more perfect if it actually existed than if it did not.

c) The most perfect being must therefore actually exist.

d) Therefore God exists.

In the almost 950 years since Anselm published the argument in his 1078 CE tome Proslogion (literally, Discourse), an extraordinary range of big hitters in Western philosophy has engaged with it, including thinkers as disparate as Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Frege, and Gödel. But the most influential response was that of Kant, who argued in The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) that existence is not a property of an entity, analogous to features that are picked out by predicates: asserting that ‘Tigers exist’ is not for instance comparable to asserting that ‘Tigers have stripes’. We can see that difference when we reflect that tigers can exist without having stripes but cannot have stripes without existing.

Existence, then, is a necessary pre-condition of having properties – so that God cannot qualify as ‘the most perfect being’ without first existing. That requirement applies equally to any candidate for being the ‘most perfect’ being. We could imagine a non-divine entity that happens to be the most perfect entity in the world: it still would have to exist to qualify for the accolade. Anslem’s argument does not therefore support the claim that the most perfect being is God, or necessarily has the abilities traditionally ascribed to God, such as the capacity to create the universe.

The Logic of Being

But behind this hierarchy of existence and properties is an issue that goes deeper and wider than Anselm’s argument. To see this, it helps to reflect on Gottlob Frege’s development of Kant’s argument in On Concept and Object (1892), which is usefully discussed by J. William Forgie in ‘Kant and Frege: Existence as a Second-Level Property’ (Kant-Studien 91, 2000). Frege contrasts existence, which he rather oddly describes as a ‘second-level’ property, with ‘first-level’ properties, such as having certain qualities or belonging to a certain class. It was this distinction that gave birth to the notion of the ‘existential quantifier’ in logic. This marks the separation between the fact of something’s existence and its having certain properties. The existential quantifier is flagged up in propositions such as ‘There is an x, such that x is a cat and the cat is black’.

The existential quantifier was a key player in the philosophical logic that occupied such a dominant position in Anglophone philosophy in the first half of the last century. Separating the existence of something from any predicates that may be ascribed to it enabled philosophers to cope with certain brain teasers. Consider the statement ‘The present King of France is bald’, made when there is no King of France (as is presently true). The present King of France is not classified either under real things that are bald, or under real things that are not bald. So neither the statement nor its contrary is true.

How can we make sense of this? Answer: separate the implicitly existential from the explicitly predicative aspect of the proposition by unpacking it as two propositions: a) ‘There is a present King of France’; and b) ‘He is bald’. The opening existential claim is demonstrably false. There is no present King of France to carry the property of baldness or its opposite (ask Louis XVI). It is not possible, therefore, to infer from the properties of a thing that it must exist, because it needs existence to have properties at all.

By now you may be starting to yawn, as I used to do by the time I reached page two of any primer on philosophical logic – or did until it occurred to me how extraordinary the existential quantifier is and how it illuminates the nature of human consciousness. We may imagine a non-human animal experiencing a black cat, but cannot imagine it separating the existence of the cat from the cat itself, so that existence can then be ascribed to the cat and, once ascribed, enable the cat to be connected with its properties, and accommodate predicates that refer to them.

The existential quantifier is, of course, generated within language – the same language that enables us to separate the properties of entities from those entities and then re-attach them as predicates. It is this capacity to generate propositions that allows us to inhabit a shared world of facts rather than just a world of material objects. I have called this realm of facts the ‘thatosphere’.

This is a vast topic, and I have devoted (too?) many pages to discussing it. My most recent exploration – Circling Round Explicitness: The Heart of the Mystery of Human Being (Agenda, 2025) – is out this month, and I’m sure I will have more to say about the topic in future reports from Wonderland. But that’s enough of pushing the Tallis merchandise for the present, not least because I want loop back towards the place where we began.

The Lord Answering Job from the Whirlwind by William Blake c.1803

A Perfect Circle

Anselm’s argument reminds us of one of the most mysterious features of human beings: our capacity to envisage, articulate, and share possibilities, such that we can postulate entities that may or may not exist. Existence becomes an add-on. On the basis of this capacity, Anselm imagines that we can argue an entity into existence by considering its properties. This is the platform of the argument that, if we propose an entity that is more perfect than anything else, that entity must exist because its lack of existence would be a relative (and indeed absolute) imperfection. But once we recognize that existence is a necessary prior condition of having any properties, we can see that it’s not valid to read back from properties ascribed to something – such as being more perfect than anything else – to the actual existence of that thing.

True, if God is the most perfect being, then He cannot have any imperfection, including the fundamental imperfection of not existing. But this does not prove that His non-existence is impossible. The impossibility of his non-existence would be demonstrated only if He were already able to have properties, such as perfection. This would presuppose his existence in the first place. In short, God could be protected from non-existence by Anselm’s argument only if He were already attributed the existence necessary to host the properties ascribed to Him.

This circularity seems so obvious that it one might wonder why anyone would be inclined to give the Ontological Argument the time of day. Quite simply, it’s because it’s not easy to have a clear idea of the nature of objects that are either non-existent or only possibly existent.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to thinking clearly about such objects arises from the fact that they are always conceived of in connection with definite properties. Unicorns, it might be mistakenly argued, must have some kind of existence if we’re justified in saying of them that they definitely have a golden horn attached to a horse’s body, or indeed, if any denial of their existence is to deny any such specific content. Otherwise – so the argument continues – denying the existence of unicorns would rule out nothing in particular, which is to say, rule out nothing at all. Any denial of existence has to have a point of application.

Of course, unicorns, and likewise, a most perfect being with the properties of God, do have a kind of existence: they exist as possibilities – which means, as the referents of token thoughts entertained by human minds. The mind is the very source of the merely possibly existent, and hence of something that might turn out to be non-existent. When I deny the existence of something, I deny that there is anything corresponding to a referent of a certain proposition made by a mind, or even of an expectation a mind may entertain.

Recognising merely possible entities as the products of our articulate collective consciousnesses enables us to turn Anselm’s argument upside down. The God of the Ontological Argument, rather than being the Creator of Man and everything else, is man’s creation. This God is a child of shared consciousness, a dweller of the thatosphere created out of language. As such, He is a marker of our extraordinary nature, which is our capacity to transcend the world in which we live. As Ludwig Feuerbach argued in The Essence of Christianity (1841), the idea of God is not a divine revelation: rather, it’s a projection from our individual and collective minds. And what extraordinary minds they are, given that they’re able to speak of the totality of things – of ‘the universe’. As for the necessity of God’s existence generated by Anselm’s argument, it is a purely verbal necessity, not rooted in actual things.

So much for Anselm’s argument. But notwithstanding its begging of the question, it has kept philosophers fruitfully engaged for nearly a millennium – as it was on 27th September 2012, when it was the topic of one out of over a thousand wonderful conversations broadcast under the modest title of In Our Time.

© Prof. Raymond Tallis 2025

Raymond Tallis’s Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City is out now in conjunction with Philosophy Now.

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Philosophical Haiku

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

by Terence Green

Look without seeing

Know, yet comprehend nothing

From reason, duty

Immanuel Kant led a stupendously uneventful life. Born in Königsberg, then the capital of Prussia (now Kaliningrad in Russia), he never travelled more than forty miles from his birthplace. As a young man, he enrolled as a student at the University of Königsberg, and aside from a spell as a private tutor, he spent the rest of his career at the University. He was awoken by his valet every day at precisely the same hour, breakfasted every day at precisely the same hour, took his lunch at precisely the same hour, and went to bed each night at, you guessed it, precisely the same hour. His habits were so regular that people would set their watches according to his daily walk, as he passed by their windows. It’s little wonder that his works – considered by many of his readers as the most important philosophical corpus of the eighteenth century – all proceed with an exacting precision that quickly drains the will to live from many other readers. Still, if you can persist, the riches are many.

Kant was deeply interested in how we can know anything about the world. He argued that our senses and minds place severe limits on our knowledge. The world we perceive through our senses he called the phenomenal world. But our senses alone can never tell us all there is to know about the world (to take a modern example, our eyes do not see ultraviolet light), and so we can never know the ultimate truth of things. The world as it exists independently of our senses Kant called the noumenal world, which he thought we could know nothing about.

Kant was also interested in establishing a system of morality that would be universal. We all have reason, he said, and this forms the basis of a system of absolute (‘categorical’) duties that constitute morality. For instance (as he infamously argued), we have a duty never to lie, without exception. But what do you say if you’re hiding someone in your house and the secret police come looking for them?

For a man as unbendingly precise as Kant, the messy and unpredictable nature of actual life must have been intensely annoying.

© Terence Green 2025

Terence Green is a writer, historian, and lecturer who lives in Eastbourne, New Zealand.

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Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Chocolate

by Matt Qvortrup

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception.

Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

‘Will to Power’ is a name of a chocolate-flavoured protein bar, which promises to “help you get in touch with your inner Übermensch.” That the shortish and somewhat plump Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) should be associated with a bodybuilders’ food supplement perhaps stretches credulity. But the fact that it is chocolate flavoured would have appealed to the moustachioed philosopher. He clearly loved the stuff, and even urges readers of Ecce Homo to “start the day with chocolate” (p.66).

Chocophillia manifests itself in another philosophical classic too. In Albert Camus’ novel The Outsider, the Algerian-born existentialist wrote:“After smoking a couple of cigarettes I went back to the room, got a tablet of chocolate, and returned to the window to eat it” (p.8). Camus eventually fell out with his fellow existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) but the latter continued to eat chocolates with Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) at their legendary Parisian hangout the Café de Flore. It clearly inspired the revolutionary Frenchman in his writings: “well-behaved children… make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time” (Three Plays, p.49). Sartre was a committed and uncompromising Marxist, so perhaps he was inspired in this by Karl Marx (1818-1883) himself. Certainly, the author of Das Kapital had a high opinion the sweet stuff. He wrote approvingly of being “a great lover of chocolate”, and remarked that not only money had value, but that “the sacks of cocoa… in Mexico served as a sort of money” (Critique of Political Economy, p.34).

Adam Smith (1723-1790) had a rather different take on capitalism than Marx, but they did agree that chocolate was a valuable commodity. The prophet of free markets was concerned about ‘duties on foreign luxuries’, of which he particularly singled out chocolate (Wealth of Nations, p.887). Whether Smith actually liked the confectionary he did not say.

Chocolate is not only for eating but also for giving away. The compulsively altruistic French philosopher Simone Weil (1909-43) when she was a young girl would send all her rations of sweets and chocolate to soldiers serving on the Western front. Her contemporary, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) admired her similarly doomed compatriot Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) for following Weil’s example: “He entered into a kind of asceticism. He stopped smoking, gave away all his chocolate” (Hannah Arendt to Gershom Scholem, 21 October 1940).

You do not have to be a philosopher to be a true chocolate lover. Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), the legendary Chilean poet, was more peckish than philosophical when he wrote An Ode to Chocolate: “I want chocolate/on my pillow/and on my lips/frozen chocolate/and melting chocolate/chocolate with nuts/and cherry chocolate/chocolate with sea salt/and chocolate with pepper…”.

Is it just me, or are you getting peckish, too?

© Matt Qvortrup 2025

Matt Qvortrup’s book Great Minds on Small Things is published by Duckworth.

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The Art of Living

Living According To Nature

Massimo Pigliucci goes back to Nature to seek happiness.

We should all live according to Nature. No, I don’t mean that we should run naked into the forest and hug trees (though there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that). I mean that if we want to be happy, we should conduct our lives in agreement with what Nature itself suggests, and in particular, our own nature.

Consider a simple example, originally formulated by British philosopher Philippa Foot. Let’s say you invite me over for dinner and I show up with a bottle of wine. I also bring you a gift of a cactus plant. Now you’re responsible for the wellbeing of the cactus. The best course of action for you is to treat it in agreement with Nature. Since it’s a desert plant, this means that you should give it plenty of light but only a little bit of water. That will make the cactus thrive, because you’re handling it in accordance with cactus nature. Foot’s idea is that the very same concept applies to human beings, despite the fact that our nature, and our needs for happiness, are a little more complicated than the needs of a cactus.

Foot, together with a number of other British philosophers active during the twentieth century, were largely responsible for the renewal of virtue ethics – an approach that began with Socrates, Aristotle, and the Stoics. The phrase ‘to live according to Nature’ was, according to the commentator Diogenes Laertius, the motto of the Stoic school, though it was also adopted by their arch rivals, the Epicureans. Naturally (pardon the pun), Stoics and Epicureans interpreted the phrase very differently. For the Stoics, human nature is fundamentally the nature of a species that’s highly social and capable of reason. It follows that to live ‘according to Nature’ means to live prosocially, and to attempt to solve one’s problems by reason rather than, say, violence. The Epicureans, by contrast, thought that the most crucial thing about human beings is that we naturally avoid pain and seek pleasure – which just happen to be the two goals of the Epicurean life.

Both schools pointed to the same evidence to make their case: observe the behavior of human infants and you’ll see that they like to bond with others and like to solve problems (Stoics); but they also look for pleasure and stay away from pain (Epicureans). Modern psychologists think that the two approaches are, in fact, complementary: we are simultaneously eudaimonic (character-cultivating) and hedonic (pleasure-seeking) creatures. The trick is to find a good balance between these two tendencies. The empirical evidence leans toward the conclusion that a good human life consists of a main dish of eudaimonia accompanied by a peppering of hedonia (see, for instance, ‘Hedonic vs. Eudaimonic Wellbeing: How to Reach Happiness’, by Anna Katharina Schaffner, at positivepsychology.com).

“Hold on a second!” you might object: “Doesn’t all that flagrantly violate the famous is/ought gap identified by David Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature?” There, Hume noted that it “seems altogether inconceivable” that one could slide from descriptions of matters of fact (‘is’) to claims about values (‘ought’) – and that at least ‘a reason should be given’ for the alleged connection between the two.”

However, such a connection is arguably provided by the reasoning of Aristotle, Foot, and modern positive psychologists: certain things augment human flourishing, while other things get in the way of it, and human flourishing is the aim of ethics. Ethics, therefore, is an empirical discipline, just like medicine. So in the same way a doctor can advise you on how to improve and maintain your health on the basis of objective considerations, so can a philosopher or a psychologist.

The Stoic Epictetus was aware of this analogy nineteen centuries ago, when he wrote, “Gentlemen, a philosopher’s school is a doctor’s office. You shouldn’t leave after having had a pleasant time, but a painful one, because you arrive unhealthy, one with a dislocated shoulder, another with a tumor, another with an abscess, another with a headache” (Discourses, III.23.30). Epictetus was known for not coddling (or cuddling) his students!

That said, living according to Nature does not mean that whatever is natural is therefore good. That’s a well known logical fallacy, known as the ‘appeal to nature’, and neither your doctor nor your philosopher should fall for it. Poisonous mushrooms are natural, but are not good for your health. Similarly, anger is natural, but it often gets in the way of your happiness (see my ‘Seneca On Anger’, Philosophy Now, Issue 165, for more on this).

The next time you find yourself wondering how to live well, remember the cactus. Just as that desert plant thrives when we honor its particular nature, we too flourish when we pay attention to what we actually are: reasoning social beings who benefit from both meaningful engagement with others and the occasional dose of (simple) pleasure. This isn’t about following rigid rules handed down, but about the more challenging work of honest self-examination, of observing what genuinely contributes to our wellbeing, and what merely seems like it should. In the end, living according to Nature is less about returning to some imagined state of purity, and more about the ongoing practice of becoming fully, authentically human.

© Prof. Massimo Pigliucci 2025

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers (with Greg Lopez and Meredith Kunz, The Experiment). More by him at figsinwintertime.substack.com.

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Reviews

- Medicine Wheel for the Planet by Jennifer Grenz

- The Roots of Equality by Lantz Miller

- Irreducible by Federico Faggin

- Hit Man

Books

Medicine Wheel for the Planet by Jennifer Grenz

Lucy Weir takes a wheel of healing for an intellectual spin.

Can we heal the planet, and ourselves, through the use of an ancient system developed among the tribal peoples of Canada? Many, including the author of Medicine Wheel for the Planet (2024), the agroecologist Dr Jennifer Grenz, might question why a person such as me – white, descended from colonial settlers in Australia – has either the audacity or sense of irony to engage critically with this book. But I am also a student of Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo, and of notions of enmeshment, agency, and compassion, and my work has focused on the ecological emergency, so I have more than just a passing interest in the subject matter.

Before I critically engage with Dr Grenz’s exploration of her personal odyssey through the falsehoods and abuses that were the legacy she received as an Indigenous woman, I want to set down my wholehearted recommendation of the book. This is something of a 180° turn for me, as I initially felt a lot of resistance to its challenging imagery. I also had some concerns about the effectiveness of her approach, in the face of the enormity of the political, social, climate, biodiversity , and even personal, fragmentation and collapse that now threaten us existentially. I do have a small criticism – that the text can feel repetitive in places. For instance, Grenz comes back to the same idea of ‘Eden philosophy versus stewardship’, in numerous guises. Maybe though it’s like a drumbeat, coming back to the same theme, the same idea, but with different rhythms (or examples). Otherwise, I strongly recommend buying this book, because it contains far more good ideas and great writing than I can convey in this short review.

The book proposes adopting Indigenous wisdom, and a corresponding reorientation of our worldview, and thus of our role in the societies and communities in which we find ourselves. It is loosely based on the notion of the medicine wheel, a device or stone structure used in many First Nations cultures both for identifying the source of a problem or disease, and for discovering the way to heal. In particular here, its use is suggested to heal the connection between people, and land, and all the creatures who live in, or on, the land, water, and air. This is a topic in which I am very interested, and something I’m writing about too, in the context of my own family and a massacre that took place in Australia in 1838. I know about the evils of colonialism, and I could not agree more with Grenz that we need, somehow, to decolonise our own minds.

There’s much to say about Grenz’s analysis of what we – both settler and Indigenous – need to do to decolonise ourselves. On the one hand, there’s the possibility of using imagination to explore one’s own ancestral history in a way that allows one to reconnect with place. Of course, this is rather more difficult for settler descendants, who have often become so detached from place as to be barely able to associate with any one area. (Perhaps that’s why sports clubs are so popular: the longing for belonging?)

Critical Spins

My reservations about Grenz’s analysis are interrelated, but can be roughly divided into three concerns.

Healing Totem Venantius J Pinto

Firstly, social evil did not start with Western civilisation. Indigenous people also had wars. There was slavery in Inuit, Icelandic, and many other indigenous cultures. Women were often treated as trade items, and were kidnapped and enslaved when there was inter-tribal or inter-group rivalry. In The Sealwoman’s Gift (2018), for example, Sally Magnusson tells of an Irish slave girl brought to Iceland, as well as of Icelandic captives taken and sold into slavery in Algiers. In Surfacings (2019), Kathleen Jamie tells of a Yupik woman captured from another village who escaped and alerted her people to where she’d been held. That village was razed or abandoned shortly after. Aboriginal people could also be brutal to one another and to the land, at least in certain contexts, like the mass killings of aurochs in Europe, or woolly mammoths in North America. The myth of the ‘Noble Savage’ perpetuated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau is just that: an idealised vision of humanity. No society has ever lived in perfect balance with its surroundings. We’re all human beings. Grenz certainly recognises this at one level. We don’t need to look back through rose-tinted glasses. Yet, in a sense, that’s what she does. That’s a problem for two other reasons: a) It recreates the sort of dichotomous ‘war’ of good versus evil that religious and political fundamentalists of all stripes have been fighting since their inceptions; and b) If it’s a question of whose story wins, then indigenous tribes are faced with almost unimaginably poor odds against those whose narrative is that theirs is the God-given right to plunder a place and render it maximally profitable for those special few whom God has blessed as ‘his people’. Perhaps it’s pointless to even try to consider how those with such a mindset might reorientate how they see the world. However this reorientation is the question towards which the book points us.

Certainly I agree with Grenz that culture arises from the stories we tell ourselves about who and what we are, and that for those of us brought up with ‘settler mentality’, the story must change. Much of Grenz’s work is to connect head to heart: to connect the personal, and in her case her unearthing of the disassociation she’s endured by virtue of the historical abuses suffered by her people, with the theoretical; and, inevitably perhaps, with the political.

Most importantly, Grenz lays out the best argument I have yet encountered for the ecological approach known as stewardship. Her work took me back again to discussions I’ve had over the years with Emeritus Professor Robin Attfield, who has written extensively about the stewardship approach from a Christian perspective. I found Grenz’s approach compelling; humans are not apart from nature. Societies that have endured for millennia without destroying the sources of energy and food that make such endurance possible have done so precisely because of their stewarding of plants and animals. Of course this has been with the welfare of the human community at heart, but that welfare is not seen as separate from the welfare of other species, and indeed, of ecosystems.

Grenz herself stresses the need to take the wisdom of each worldview, scientific and Indigenous. She talks of people like myself with settler family histories becoming allies by decolonialising ourselves. But I also think that there’s a temptation to take a binary turn, and paint the whole settler mentality as toxic and the whole mentality of aboriginal people as benign. It’s a comfortable way to divide the world – good, and evil, right, and wrong – but is it ever really that simple? And it also leaves us with another dilemma: how do we fight an information war when that very act may fuel the explosive tensions that already exist in contemporary society? ‘Fighting fire with fire’ springs to mind.

One criticism that may be leveled at Grenz’s ‘inclusive’ approach to problem-solving is: could it get things done? Where is leadership accepted from? Could anyone, even non-Indigenous, give leadership? Compared with the spearhead of a single individual at front of a force, with everyone else trailing in the wake (and, I’m sure the leader would say, reaping the benefits), the inter-relational approach is messy, slow, and makes little progress. Or does it? Isn’t this exactly how systems, and species, have survived, over millennia – through mutual accommodation? Through stewardship on the part of humans? In other words, through learning to live within limits?

A linguistic change Grenz suggests is saying healing instead of restoration of the land. I felt an inner resistance to this, but she’s right. There are different kinds of healing, and they’re connected. I changed my mind on this one. Another linguistic suggestion is from natural to legacy – something transmitted or received from the past. This I think is very important.

Conclusions

I hope that I brought a perspective to the book that recognises the enormous power of the approach advocated by Grenz. We could review our perspectives around the medicine wheel, that is able to value, but nevertheless comes from elsewhere. Yet it creates its own singular viewpoint on the issues that concern both her, as an Indigenous woman, and me, as a woman of settler descent.

A last spoiler (but buy the book!). Grenz writes: “How often have any of us asked, ‘What can I do?’ as we watch another devastating wildfire, or flood, or slide, or see communities with food shortages.” She says sending money is not enough, meaning that it’s too disconnected. We need to be able to work on the land, where we are. And she says this to the oligarchs who run our world: “We must demand that those who control the land start including us in her care.”

According to the Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky (who makes a very strong case for it), there is a certain inevitability to history, in the sort of way that a landslide is inevitable. And yet, periodically, we wake up. We change direction. We pivot. We need to do that now with settler mentality. We need to talk about this mentality, and how to decolonise ourselves. This book gives us a fine blueprint for that, and for living at peace and in relationship with ourselves and all other species and systems on this earth, our home.

© Dr Lucy Weir 2025

Lucy Weir received her PhD in Environmental Philosophy from University College Cork in 2014, and has published three books related to the ecological emergency.

• Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Toward Personal and Ecological Healing, Jennifer Grenz, Univ of Minnesota Press, 2024, £21.15 hb, 280 pages

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Books

The Roots of Equality by Lantz Miller

Frederik Kaufman examines a theory of the origins of equality.

The Roots of Equality (2023) is an extraordinarily wide-ranging, sophisticated, and deeply informed study of the origins of the idea of social equality and why it matters to us now. While the book is not for the faint of heart, being fairly academic, a straightforward theme runs through it: “the condition of social equality has been a part of human life for virtually the entire existence of the species… Humans thus respond with outrage at injustice if equality is markedly diminished” (p.15). Miller notes that the overwhelming history of our species was spent as nomadic foragers, and argues that such societies embraced a kind of social equality studied by anthropologists which is often seen in hunter-gatherer societies today, that includes such features as cooperation, sharing, gender parity, and autonomy, among other traits (p.63).

The problem is that we transitioned from nomadic foragers into settled agriculturalists; and so developed social hierarchy, wealth accumulation, domination, and a subsequent diminishing of social equality. This relatively new form of social life is out of step with our natural state as nomadic foragers, so the hierarchical societies that now dominate human life do not sit well with what we evolved to be used to. Equality is natural to us, hierarchy is not, so current societies are incompatible with our nature. It’s a searing indictment of humanity’s trajectory since the beginning of agriculture. What to do about it? We can’t return to being nomadic foragers since the global population is way too large for that.

Miller proposes that the concept of justice arose as an attempt to compensate for what we lost in the transition from more or less happy foragers to secure but unfulfilled agriculturalists: “Justice then serves as a means to approximate what humans had earlier experienced and to reinsert, in modern and contemporary SA [Sedentary Agricultural] societies, practices and institutions to safeguard what is an essential human trait, which we call ‘justice’” (p.162). So justice is an attempt to re-capture what was essential to an earlier way of life. This naturalistic account of the origin and point of justice is a fascinating suggestion.

Miller uses extensive anthropological resources rarely seen in philosophical discussions to ground his claims about the social equality of hunter-gatherers. His exploration of the philosophical history of equality is deeply informed and interesting. Overall, his case for thinking that we have indeed lost something valuable in transitioning from a nomadic to a sedentary form of life is compelling. One suspects, however, that Miller is being coy when he writes on p.138, “The empirical findings… still cannot say we should aim to realize equality A” (Equality A is his term for the equality of nomadic foragers). If that’s where our wellbeing lies, then why not aim for it? And if we aim at justice to safeguard ‘an essential human trait’ from our past, then surely safeguarding essential human traits is precisely what we should do.

One wonders if the reason we promote justice is only because it’s a response to part of our natural history. There might be independent reasons to do so, such as believing it is intrinsically morally correct to do so. Yet our keen sense of justice could nevertheless have the naturalistic source that Miller explores. But further, is our typical outrage at social inequality (something Miller notes repeatedly) because of inequality per se, or is it because drastic inequality often leads to impoverished and miserable lives, and that is what outrages us? After all, wealthy people are not generally morally outraged by even wealthier people, even if there is a drastic disparity in wealth.

The Bushmen or San of the Kalahari Desert have a strongly egalitarian society

Khomani San tribesman, Kalahari © South African Tourism Creative Commons 2.0

One of the most attractive features of nomadic forager societies, according to Miller, is that they promote individual autonomy (p.169). This seems dubious, since cohesion and the subordination of individuality to the tribe’s good seem necessary for nomadic foragers to survive as such, and that would appear incompatible with personal autonomy.

Social and political theorizing often grounds fundamental concepts in hypothetical situations. The Roots of Equality offers instead a plausible naturalistic account of how the desire for equality arose and why it’s important to us. Due to its academic nature (and price), I recommend this book primarily for those with advanced philosophical training – although Miller’s thesis would also be interesting for a wider audience.

© Prof. Frederik Kaufman 2025

Frederik Kaufman is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy & Religion at Ithaca College, NY.

• The Roots of Equality: Anthropological and Normative Sources, Lantz Miller, 2023, Lexington, 306 pages, £69.14 hb

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Books

Irreducible by Federico Faggin

Frank S. Robinson doubts a holistic vision of life, the universe, and everything.

Federico Faggin is one of the major pioneers of computing. Among other breakthroughs, in 1971 he invented the first commercial microprocessor, laying the groundwork for modern information technology. In Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature (2024) he propounds a startling theory of consciousness. Before we get to that though, the book extensively discusses classical physics versus quantum mechanics.

We know that something seemingly solid, like a hammer, is made of atoms that are mostly empty space. We might mistakenly picture a miniature solar system, with electrons orbiting the nucleus. But not even the subatomic particles are solid. They’re not tiny balls; it’s a special kind of wispiness all the way down.

Faggin stresses quantum uncertainty and indeterminacy. Prior to experimental measurement, the best we can do is delineate a probability of an electron, say, being in a certain place. Or we might say that quantum wave-particles, whatever they are, exist in spacetime. Yet even that’s problematic. Again, drilling down to the quantum level, not even space seems to have the characteristics we commonly conceptualize for it.

All this leads Faggin to posit that the reality we think we inhabit isn’t actually there after all, at least not in the way we envision it (which he also considers wrongly materialistic and reductionist). Another view, however, is that quantum physics describes a submicroscopic reality operating very differently from the realm of classical physics; yet everyday reality is not some sort of misleading mirage, but rather, the two levels work separately. Even under quantum mechanics, a hammer still pounds nails. Isn’t that an aspect of reality?

Anyhow, Faggin’s take on reality is integral to his theory of consciousness – which does require breaking from our common understanding of reality.

Irreducible by Cecilia Mou

© Cecilia Mou 2025 Instagram @moucecilia

From Emptiness to Being Full

To get there, let’s start with the book’s introduction, which relates how Faggin’s material success left him feeling existentially empty.

This mid-life crisis centered upon his inability to understand qualia, an important concept in discussions of consciousness. A quale is a subjective experience. But whence comes the ‘you’ doing all this experiencing? That’s the question at the heart of this book.

Faggin relates an unusual subjective experience of his own. One night he had an ‘awakening’: he “suddenly felt a powerful rush of energy” which he “could not even imagine possible… a love so intense and so incredibly fulfilling”. He experienced it “as a broad beam of shimmering white light, alive and beatific, gushing from [his] heart with incredible strength. Then suddenly that light exploded. It expanded to embrace the entire universe.” This convinced him “that this was the substance out of which everything that exists is made… what created the universe out of itself” (p.10).

Most surprising however, was its source: himself. Or as he puts it, “Then… I recognized that I was that light”. Well, Faggin presumably had an experience – a quale – which must have been generated by his neurons with no outside stimulus. I’m guessing no one else in that room would have seen the bright light (I’m reminded of a family member insisting she’d experienced time going backward). Faggin himself tellingly says, “I was both the experiencer and the experience.”

Anyhow, whatever happened there, it led to his philosophical epiphany: “everything is ‘made of’ love… I had experienced the existence of another dimension of reality… impossible to comprehend with ordinary logic.” And finally the big reveal: “the only possible way to explain how the universe can create life and consciousness is that the universe is itself alive and conscious from the outset.” It has “had free will forever”.

This is no scientific construct; and is assuredly not the only possible way to explain life. While science has not nailed down every nuance, scientists like Darwin and Dawkins have done a much better job of explaining it. And what about ‘another dimension of reality’? That abuses the word ‘dimension’, as Faggin is not talking about a ‘dimension’ in any scientific sense. Then there is the word ‘love’ – so much over-used that it can become devoid of meaning. Anyone saying “everything is ‘made of’ love” as Faggin does, has no idea what they’re talking about.

Consciousness Not Explained

Likening the conscious mind to a computer does provide some helpful insight, but only gets us so far, and may be how Faggin has gone so far astray. He writes, “I could not find any way to convert the electrical signals of the computer into qualia, because qualia belong to a different kind of reality with no apparent connection to symbols” (p.9). ‘Symbols’ is another crucial word for Faggin. We only understand anything through symbolification, as that’s precisely what language does. Thus your rational mind works by deciphering symbols into concepts. But the ‘you’ here is again the problem: how you turn symbols and qualia into something you somehow understand. It’s not that qualia have ‘no apparent connection to symbols’; it’s that they have no apparent connection to anything constituting you.

To solve this puzzle, the best modern science can do is to posit that the ‘you’ experiencing consciousness (including, but not limited to, qualia) must emerge from neuronal functioning. While we don’t (yet) know how, this provides at least a potential basis for an explanation. This approach is one that Faggin contemptuously rejects, deeming it impossible that consciousness could emerge from elements themselves lacking it, such as merely physical brain activity. He argues that consciousness must be an irreducible property of nature already present in the primordial stuff from which space, time, energy, and matter emerged. Thus every cell in our bodies must be conscious, as indeed must everything that exists: “a grain of sand, a stone, a plant.”

The common term for what he’s putting forward here is panpsychism, an idea that, as he says, has a long history — indeed, originating in animism, back when humans understood little of nature. But even though we don’t know how consciousness emerges from brain processing, it makes sense that it must – whereas how panpsychism could be true has no explanation, and is an even bigger speculative leap. Faggin himself uses the word ‘seity’ (a jargon word for selfhood) to signify a phenomenon that somehow operates inside a person as the source of what’s experienced as consciousness, as an alternative to consciousness arising by itself out of the body’s physical functioning.

The same logical black hole swallows Faggin’s notion of a universe ‘alive and conscious from the outset’: he offers no theory for how his panpsychic ‘seities’ could have existed in the first place. Moreover, there is no evidence whatsoever for the universe itself having some sort of consciousness. If it is conscious, it has hidden that quite cleverly. Why would it?

In sum, Ockham’s Razor [‘simpler is better’, Ed] favors what conventional science says over Faggin’s theory, which is complete nonsense.

© Frank S. Robinson 2025

Frank S. Robinson is the author of eight books, including The Case for Rational Optimism. He blogs at rationaloptimist.wordpress.com.

• Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature, Frederico Faggin, 2024, Essentia, £14.55 pb, 336 pages

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Films

Hit Man

Jason Friend and Lauren Friend discuss reprogramming your self.

Gary Johnson, the protagonist of Richard Linklater’s film Hit Man (2023), is a philosophy professor. In the middle of the film he poses the following question to his students: “What if your ‘self’ is a construction? An illusion, an act, a role you’ve been playing every day since you can remember?” This is the central question the film tries to explore, for Johnson is not only a philosophy professor but also an undercover agent for the New Orleans police who pretends to be a wide variety of hitmen in order to ensnare those who would purchase his murderous services.

Along the way, Gary falls for one of his would-be clients, Madison, a woman so desperate to escape her abusive marriage that she wants to hire a hitman to kill her husband. This creates an odd situation, because Gary, who is actually a soft-spoken, introverted intellectual, meets Madison when he is in character playing Ron, a charismatic alpha male who happens to kill people for a living. Gary decides to embark on his romantic relationship with Madison in the guise of Ron. Thus, when Gary asks his identity query to his students, it is no simple hypothetical; and as the film progresses it becomes less clear if Gary is merely acting like Ron, or is actually becoming the new self he invented.

Gary himself initially seems skeptical that he can change his core self. In a conversation with his ex-wife Alicia, he posits that it is only possible for individuals to change “within our set-points, which really isn’t that much.” Alicia, a psychologist by trade, pushes back, asserting that “researchers are finding that people can change their personalities well into their adulthood… The five traits that make up personality – extroversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness – can all be altered within just a few months.”

This is the intellectual standoff at the heart of the film – is it possible for an individual to radically change his own identity?

While the film plays with this question throughout, its ultimate answer is a resounding yes. By the end of the film, Gary has committed acts he once would have considered unthinkable, and he synthesizes the seemingly polar personalities of Gary and Ron into one new being, transforming into a much more successful philosophy professor who captivates his growing classes with his newfound confidence and charisma.

On the day of the final exam, he tells a rapt crowd of students that he “used to believe that reality was objective, immutable. And we’re all just sort of stuck, in a Plato-Descartes-Kant sort of way… But over the years, I’ve come to believe… there are no absolutes, whether moral or epistemological. Now, I find this to be a much more empowering way to go through life – this notion that if the universe is not fixed, then neither are you, and you really can become a different, and hopefully, better, person.”

Gary here credits his new perspective on identity to his shifting from an objective to a relative view of reality and truth. This is perhaps not surprising in a film that starts off with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche. And yet, Gary’s newfound philosophy seems more indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre than Nietzsche, for although the film begins with Nietzsche’s exhortations to ‘Live dangerously!’ and ‘Live at war with yourselves!’, Nietzsche himself intended such messages only for the select few – an elite band of Übermenschen who rise above the masses. Sartre, on the other hand, promoted a much more optimistic and inclusive vision – of a world in which all individuals have the capacity to reshape themselves.

This view is encapsulated nicely in Linklater’s earlier and most directly philosophical film, Waking Life (2001). The protagonist of that film talks to Robert Solomon, a notable Sartre scholar. While existentialists are often caricatured as perpetual pessimists, Solomon flips the script and praises them as optimists, asserting that “one thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as a real kind of exuberance of feeling on top of it. It’s like your life is yours to create.” He concludes his summation by insisting that the biggest takeaway from Sartre is that “It’s always our decision who we are.” Hit Man transports such Sartrean sentiments straight into Gary’s closing speech as he endorses the view that it is possible to radically change yourself, and emphasizes how liberating it is to refashion yourself into whoever you want to become.

Gary as a nice guy philosophy teacher

Film images © Netflix 2024

Off-Target: The Reality of Reprogramming

But to what extent is the film’s view of the malleability of the self correct? Can key personality markers really be changed in a few months? Is it possible for someone to just fake it until he makes it and becomes a completely different person?

In previous reviews in this magazine (on WandaVision in Issue 152 and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in Issue 159), we developed the concept of the ‘identity algorithm’, a model that sees the self as a product of ‘code’ partially written by nature and partially by nurture, which dictates an individual’s reactions. One’s code is the cause of every thought, feeling, or action, and it creates patterns of predictable behaviors that we know as an individual’s personality.

This model emphasizes that identity is deeply embedded: a quite ordinary decision can be the result of thousands of factors – thousands of ‘lines of code’ written into a person’s psyche over the course of his or her lifetime. Yet much of one’s identity algorithm remains unknown to the individual, as substantial portions of it are encoded in hard-to-decipher aspects of the self, such as genes (each individual has between 20,000-30,000) or the unconscious. Therefore this identity algorithm model, which emphasizes the deep-rootedness and opacity of identity, seems very much in tension with the idea that the self is but a role that one can entirely alter within a few months.

The closest approximation to Gary’s approach to changing himself is perhaps method acting, in which an actor tries to fully immerse themself in the psyche of their character. There’s a long history of overblown claims for method acting, usually cast as fears that actors might become unhinged by a particularly intense role. For instance, in the wake of Heath Ledger’s death, there was much sensationalist media that attributed it to a psychological imbalance prompted by Ledger’s submersion into the role of the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008).

The article ‘Acting changes the brain; it’s how actors get lost in a role’ (Aeon, 2019), by Christian Jarrett, a cognitive neuroscientist, exemplifies the curious trend of authors making sweeping claims about the impact of acting on personal identity from scanty evidence. For instance, Jarrett refers to a neuroimaging study on actors while acting which revealed a “deactivation in regions in the front and midline of the brain that are involved in thinking about the self”, and then quotes the researchers who ran the study speculating that “this might suggest that acting, as a neurocognitive phenomenon, is a suppression of self processing.” This is a fascinating idea, but like all the studies Jarrett cites, it only examines the immediate impact of acting on an actor’s brain. None of the studies he refers to even attempt to demonstrate long-term changes to an individual’s core personality as a result of acting. Yet, from these short-term studies, Jarrett jumps to proclaiming that, “In light of these findings, it is little wonder that actors, who sometimes spend weeks, months or even years fully immersed in the role of another person, might experience a drastic alteration to their sense of self.” Here we see a sort of funhouse mirror effect, in which a study uncovers a tangible but limited impact, the researchers themselves offer their own interpretation as to what it could mean, and then a third party exaggeratedly interprets that interpretation as support for a much more significant claim. However, since the neuroimaging studies do not actually prove any long-term cognitive changes produced by acting, it seems rash to assert from these studies that a shy philosopher like Gary could really transform himself into a real bad boy like Ron just by inhabiting the role.

But while research might not actually support the idea that acting can radically alter the self, what about Alicia’s broader claim that all of one’s personality traits can be transformed within a matter of months?

This assertion seems to be based on the website Big Think’s piece, ‘If you don’t like your personality, you can change it’ (2021), by Dr Elizabeth Gilbert, a psychologist. Gilbert initially states that “Until recently, I would have told you to resign yourself to a life with your fate-given personality”, but then proclaims that “over the last few years, researchers have begun finding evidence that personality is not completely out of our control. Instead, people may be able to intentionally change their personality traits.” Gilbert bases her newfound optimism on work by Marie Hennecke. However, when one actually digs into Hennecke’s work, the picture becomes more complicated.

Hennecke, a professor of psychology, proposes a three step framework under which it might be possible for an individual to intentionally reprogram one of their core traits, for instance, transforming oneself from an introvert into an extrovert. This is a provocative idea, since many scholars (such as Stephen Pinker in The Blank Slate, 2002) have long maintained that the ‘big five’ personality traits are genetically hardwired and relatively immutable. Yet Hennecke’s 2014 meta-analysis of psychological studies, ‘A Three-Part Framework for Self-Regulated Personality Development across Adulthood’, does provide evidence that it’s possible for an individual to intentionally change one of the core facets of his or her personality – but only if a wide variety of conditions coincide. This is why one of the last sections of Hennecke’s paper is entitled ‘The limits of self-regulated personality development: Why don’t people change more?’. Hennecke begins this section by conceding that “people’s personalities, in fact, change relatively little across adulthood.” She then spells out the wide array of factors that can inhibit identity change, making it quite a rare occurrence in adults. So although Gary transforms his identity with relative ease, a closer look at the research suggests that reprogramming one’s self is not so simple. This is not meant to suggest that identity change is impossible, only that it is difficult.

One of the more effective methods of behavioral change is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). In CBT, people, usually under the guidance of a therapist, identify thoughts that lead to undesirable behaviors, interrogate those thoughts, and gradually reshape their thinking over time. The process is slow and incremental, and while small changes in thinking can lead within a few months to tremendous relief from anxiety and other forms of destructive thinking, there is no evidence that CBT can lead to wholesale personality changes of the kind we see with Gary. Other methods of psychological transformation, such as mindfulness in Buddhism, also indicate that while change is possible, it takes considerable time and effort to reshape one’s psychological processes. Anyone who has seriously tried to meditate quickly realizes that our thought processes are hard to control. As the Buddha’s metaphor so aptly describes, our minds are unruly monkeys jumping from thought to thought. To actively change one’s personality, one would need to spend considerable time and energy to effectively train the self.

Compared to the painstaking process of meditation or the cognitive behavioral approach of tracking down and reshaping individual thoughts, Gary’s method of just trying on a new personality and faking it until he (re)makes it seems much easier, and a lot more fun. However, the reality of identity change aligns much better with the identity algorithm model than the film’s easy-breezy portrayal of the self as a role that one can just choose to stop playing. Rather, our programmed identity is deep and partially unknown to ourselves, so changing ourselves is a slow and arduous process of trial and error, rather than the quick fix in the film.

Gary and Madison

It Takes A Village To Raise A Hit Man

Hit Man is an entertaining film, so its depiction of Gary’s transformation can seem like a bit of harmless fun, perhaps even a source of inspiration. Linklater certainly seems to think so, because right after Gary tells his students about his embrace of existentialist individualism (you make your own meaning and self), he delivers a rousing pep talk in which he muses that “As we close out this semester, if I have one piece of advice for you moving forward in this complicated world, it’s this: seize the identity you want for yourself. And whoever you wanna be after this class, be them with passion and abandon.” After all, if an ordinary guy like Gary can become a completely new man in just a few months, anyone else can, too.

The danger of this feel-good philosophy, is that it essentially props up a version of the myth of the rugged individual. The film’s logic implies that if an individual isn’t successful in transforming themselves into the glamorous and passionate individual they’ve always fantasized about being, they just haven’t pulled on their bootstraps hard enough.

The philosopher Gregg Caruso has pointed out that those who most believe in free will also have the highest rate of ‘just world’ belief – the idea that people deserve the lives they live. This directly connects to the philosophy of identity, because if, as Hit Man suggests, people can change themselves into whomever they want to become, then we as a society need not redress social inequality, because if they just put their minds to it everyone can create the idyllic lives they desire. This is pretty much as Gary and Madison end the film – by integrating their newly-forged badass selves into the stereotypically sweet suburban dream. A misguided belief in protean Sartrean individualism lets society completely off the hook by putting the burden entirely on the individual to change themself.

Sartre looking sceptical by Clint Inman

However, if we instead recognize the tremendous difficulty involved in refashioning one’s identity, we may start to consider social barriers that prevent people from engaging in beneficial self-reprogramming. For example, childhood poverty has recently been linked with the development of weaknesses in the white matter of the brain as well as significantly lower levels of gray matter development. These deficits can limit one’s ability to problem solve, process information, and regulate emotions. If we expect people to be able to change themselves, we need to ensure that they have the optimum mental capacity. Allowing childhood poverty to persist – and perhaps even worse, ending programs that have been proven effective to relieve childhood poverty – decreases the likelihood of a child having the mental resources needed to engage in the hard task of reprogramming their identity. Indeed, Professor Hennecke, who wrote the personality change framework to which the film seems indebted, also warned in her paper “that the degree that individuals do not have the necessary self-regulatory resources such as energy, attention, time or skills that need to be invested into behavioural change, [means] they may not be able to change. For example, a fully employed parent of two children who is also taking care of their aged parents may be too tied up in daily responsibilities even to consider self-improvement.” So while the film uses Gary to represent the everyday man’s capacity for change, it seems important to note that Gary lives a uniquely privileged life in which he has no money problems and no obligations to anyone but himself. Even though reprogramming one’s identity would be hard even for someone in Gary’s situation, using him as the baseline example ignores all the other factors that can impede the reshaping of one’s self.

In order for the majority of people to have both the ability and the opportunity to refashion themselves, the world would need to change. So although Hit Man and Waking Life both promote Sartre’s individualist existentialism, they ignore the other side of the coin, his political existentialism, in which he continually reminded us that we must also take responsibility for our social order, and urged us to work to reshape it for the better. Indeed, perhaps one of the reasons Sartre found Marxism so appealing was its insistence on restructuring society so as to liberate individuals from the economic constraints that prevent so many from exploring their potential. And while there are many serious problems with the Marxist vision Sartre prompted, there are valuable lessons to take from it as well. Our societies need to prioritize policies that truly nurture children to developing the cognitive capacities necessary for self-reflection and growth, such as food security, quality education, and safe housing. Society also needs to create social structures that give adults the space and support they need in order to have the time and energy to engage in reprogramming their own identity algorithms if desired – such as affordable daycare, quality healthcare, and a shorter work week. It must also provide educational opportunities for both students and adults to learn about and implement self-changing strategies that actually work.

While Gary exhorts his students to “seize the identity you want for yourself” right before he distributes his final exam, passing the identity test will take far more than one steely individual putting in two hours of concentrated effort all by their lonesome. It’s a test that we must all work together to pass.

© Jason Friend and Lauren Friend 2025

Jason Friend has an MA in English from Stanford University. He teaches literature and philosophy in California. Lauren Friend has an MA in Educational Administration from Concordia University. She is the Dean of Faculty at Pacific Collegiate School.

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Fiction

- Anselm’s Proof

- The Primates

Poetry

Anselm’s Proof

by Peter Mullen

My main work is the one misunderstood:

The Ontological Argument should

Be kept for something denied by Kant

Or formed by Descartes. Hear me, for I want

To put things right and make my meaning plain –

I told Gaunilo – and I’ll tell it again:

“God is greater than we can conceive”

Makes sense only to those who first believe.

My proof of God’s existence is a prayer:

In Proslogion I asked Him, “Are you there?”

In seeking to know of God, we need God’s aid.

To some this sounds dishonest, I’m afraid.

No. It’s part of a wider spectrum:

That of fides quaerens intellectum.

© Rev’d Dr Peter Mullen 2025

Peter Mullen is a philosopher and Anglican priest. His last cure of souls before he retired was Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London. ‘Fides quaerens intellectum’ means ‘Faith seeking understanding’.

Fiction

The Primates

Samantha Neave visits a future where almost all animals have rights.

“People have been killing animals for millennia…” The Professor smiled sagely at the boy before him, who was adjusting his hazmat suit: “It’s just the human way… First there were hunter-gatherers, killing to eat. Then there was killing just for sport, and piling up meat in supermarkets. Now – there’s us!” He handed the boy a syringe filled with fluid as they both stared at the cage’s helpless inhabitant for a moment. “It’s alright,” he reassured the boy, whose hands were trembling. “It won’t feel a thing,” he lied.

Disinfectant pervaded the laboratory, with faint urine smells wafting through the air every time the scientist opened a cupboard. He was assessing his young apprentice the whole time, discreetly. They were usually like this to begin with. A combination of patience and education would do the trick. You became acclimatised to the job sooner or later, and he could tell that this boy was a quick learner, so he continued: “I’ll monitor its heart rate as you inject. Don’t be nervous – it’s restrained, so it can’t hurt you. Just do it swiftly and accurately… Are you ready?”

The boy bit his lip, inhaled, then nodded. His trainer turned to the monitor and waited. As his astute eyes watched the heart rate shoot up, he heard the usual screech from the subject, and the rasping breaths that followed. The line on the monitor zigzagged erratically. Finally, the line steadied, although at an enhanced rate of heartbeat. The scientist turned back to congratulate his protégé: “Well done, James! It’s not always easy to –” he barely missed a beat as he caught sight of a few tears welling up within the boy’s eyes “– do what’s necessary. But with time and practice you’ll become more accustomed to it.” He paused for a few moments to allow the boy time to regain his composure, but as the tears fell, the boy’s visor steamed up. He looked like a lost spaceman.

The scientist sighed. Sometimes the odd sentimental, sensitive soul did slip through the net. He patted his apprentice on the shoulder awkwardly. James winced, glanced up, and asked, “Are you sure testing on these creatures is the right thing to do?”

His mentor seemed taken aback by the question. “Would testing on us be right?” he countered.

The boy hesitated, and looked back at the test subject he’d just jabbed with the virus. “Well… What’s the difference?”

A soft laugh emitted from the Professor’s lips: “ Intelligence, my boy… We’re far more advanced than them. Besides, without us doing our job, the human race is doomed!”

“But surely we have a duty towards others?” Lines appeared as James’ brow knit together: “‘The question is not, can they reason? nor can they talk? but can they suffer?’.” But he quoted the line with more trepidation than conviction.

“Ah, Bentham!” the Professor smiled inquisitively. “Where did you read that?”

The boy shrugged. “Sprayed on a wall somewhere… under the bridge, as I passed through on the train.” He paused for a moment as his mentor continued to hold his gaze. When the next words fell from his lips, they were hushed, nervous: “Professor, shouldn’t all creatures be protected from pain?”

His superior’s eyes were hard to read for a few moments. “A long time ago… centuries ago, in fact,” the older man began quietly, glancing up at the CCTV on the wall, then turning slightly to inspect the temperature gauge, “philosophers did posit such a concept. Animal rights really took off in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries as knowledge of the mistreatment of animals grew – thanks originally to Peter Singer and Tom Regan in particular, who advocated better treatment of animals…” He trailed off as he turned back and stared at the roomful of caged primates.

“What did they say?” his student prompted.

“Well… in a nutshell, they both argued that animals of all species should be included within the sphere of moral consideration, although they did so in different ways. Singer was a utilitarian, whereas Regan’s outlook was rights-based.” He glanced at the boy, whose eyes were wide with curiosity.

“A ‘utilitarian’?” James uttered the word unsurely.

The Professor sighed. In for a penny… “Utilitarians believe in a society where the interests of all individuals impacted by an action are considered equally. They believe in the greatest good for the greatest number – to encapsulate Bentham’s understanding. For animals rights activists like Singer, this translated to it only being alright to use animals for food if they live happy lives and are killed painlessly, and only being alright to experiment upon them in extreme circumstances, if the benefits to us outweigh the cost to the animals.” As he explained, he flipped through the charts in one of the nearby drawers, pausing every now and then to scrutinize a page.

“But what about the animals’ wishes? Shouldn’t all animals be allowed to live their lives out naturally?” James thought of his pet guinea pig at home. “Shouldn’t we treat every animal with the respect due to a life worth living, just because they’re alive?”

“Ah! This is where the rights-based views come in – like Regan’s.” The Professor seemed pleased. He replaced the folder. “Rights-based philosophers believed that all species have intrinsic value, and that it’s their capabilities as conscious beings which bestow moral rights upon them, thus, animal lives are as equally precious as ours. And therefore, they have the moral right to live in peace and be respected, which means not being killed for our purposes. But this is an impossible ideal. People petitioned for animal rights in the fullest sense of the word – but it was sadly unattainable.” He smiled, and James saw that his mentor was ready to move on, so he hastily blurted out, “That’s awful! What happened?”

The Professor sighed once more. His smile faded. He began to walk down the room, pointing to pieces of monitoring equipment with precise flicks of his gloved hands as James took notes of the readings. “The books these philosophers wrote were a reaction to what they perceived was going on at the time, such as cruel factory farming, many pointless and torturous experiments on helpless creatures, hunting them for furs or sport… And the animal rights movement made great strides. In the end, the activists won, and people revolted against unnecessary pain and suffering being caused to other species. They’d had enough of partaking in oppression. So, we stopped eating meat, stopped hunting for sport, stopped skinning for clothing. We even stopped experimenting on them unless it was crucial to our survival. And this is how we now live in peace!” The Professor finished with a flourish, although he felt tired. But his apprentice was thinking still: “So we took the utilitarian route?”

The Professor nodded.

“But the primates?” James muttered. “What about them? Where do they fit into this ‘peace’?” He glanced at the row of cages before them, then tore his eyes away, blinking, and dispersing tears within his helmet, fixing them on the Professor instead.

A shade of pain crossed the older man’s usually inscrutable face: “Well, the primates you see here are the price to be paid for medical advances, I’m afraid.”

He began leading James back to the first cage. “Since that time, it’s been necessary to pay all creatures their due respect. This is why we live off the land now. You don’t even know what an animal tastes like any more, do you? Besides, universal veganism was a rather brilliant solution to the starvation crisis. And isn’t that a good thing?” He forced a smile. “However… from time to time we must test our cures upon primates. Their reactions to medicine hold the key to curing the species at the top of the food chain, so to speak… Isn’t it better that the majority of humans live healthy lives due to their admittedly involuntary sacrifice? But these creatures aren’t merely sacrifices to a cause greater than themselves; they’re the true heroes of our world!” His voice was clamouring with passion, although he quickly checked himself.

“Heroes?” There was incredulity in the boy’s challenge. He motioned to the subject currently leaking moisture from her eyes. It was clear that she was crying. “What’s really changed, Professor? We’re no better now. We claim to care, but look! She’s in pain! And for what end? We don’t need a cure for this virus right now! So why are we testing it on her? When will they stop? When will the testing end?! What about her rights?”

At that moment two dark brown eyes flickered up miserably towards the two in their hazmat suits. She shifted a little as she looked at them, head bowed, on display naked, shaved, undignified, gagged, as she lay beneath her restraints. Not that she seemed to care – she seemed more preoccupied with the waves of pain washing over her, clenching her huge fists, squeezing her eyelids shut until James thought she might shuttle her eyeballs back into her brain.

“Yes, it will be in pain for a little while… but once we get the results, we’ll euthanize it and the pain will be over.” The Professor glanced once more at the camera above them. They couldn’t linger in this debate much longer. But when he looked at his apprentice again, he saw more tears appear. “Come, come…” he rallied gently, “We’re in the new era! This is the year five thousand! And as I said, the rights-based model was impossible to maintain absolutely… We tried it. We really did. And under the new rulings we only ever test on primates. And you know what happens if we fail to find a cure.”

James looked at one of the males to his right, and let a few droplets fall, barely seeing through his fogged-up visor. “Does it even matter? It’s not fair. We may as well be back in the year 2000!”

The Professor lowered his voice slightly: “It’s the age-old conundrum, boy. Us or them. Which would you rather die?”

His trainee looked miserable. The Professor squeezed his shoulder, and spoke softly again: “I know it’s hard… but you’ve read the manual, you know the score. It’s all out of control. We need to do something… and this is the only way. We’ve made some progress already, but we need permanent solutions. You’re an intelligent young man. You must learn to keep your emotions in check if you want to join us. Will you?”

There was a pause as James blinked vigorously while he processed what the Professor was saying. Eventually he looked at his superior with some resolve: “Yes, I understand. I know it’s necessary. I guess I just didn’t realise the cost of progress…” He trailed off – then seemed to realise something else: “Is that why there are so many zoos, too? I guess it’s a good way of conserving the species, even if it is commercial. At least they have some quality of life, and hope of a future.”

His mentor smiled at him: “That’s the spirit! Shall we resume?”

Universidad Europea del Atlántico © Creative Commons 4.0

After a few more hours in the lab, the Professor oversaw their decontamination ritual then locked the door behind them. But as they proceeded down the corridor the alarm started wailing loudly. The Professor raised his arm quickly to signal that the boy shouldn’t speak: “Do as I do, and remain perfectly still,” he advised James discreetly, tugging James’ sleeve sharply so that they both came to a halt as one of the guards raced towards them. The guard leant in close, grunted, and waved his scanner. The Professor stretched his lapel out to display the ID pinned to his jacket. James did the same. The guard raised his scanner clumsily and pointed, misfiring drastically beyond the barcodes, then scrutinized both their faces, which were drowning in red light. He grunted again and scratched his head before pacing onwards. Then James caught sight of a silhouette fleeing from the opposite end of the corridor. The Professor gripped the boy’s arm and attempted to move forward: “Come! Let’s go back to base!” but James had frozen at the sight of the escapee. He could hear its screams as distinctly as the sirens resounding throughout the complex. Then, as it lumbered closer, stumbling from the virus injections and the wounds from shots fired, the primate cried out in pain and desperation: “Gregory! Help me! Won’t you help me?!” Blood trailed behind him as he limped towards them.

James looked up at the Professor, who had turned strangely pale as the creature repeated: “Greg, please! They’ll listen to you! They can’t do it without you, so they’ll listen to you! Remember when we were boys, before the uprising…? We used to play in the garden all summer long! Don’t you remember? And I always protected you… I always loved you. Won’t you protect me now?”

The Professor kept his eyes fixed on the man panting before him as more guards closed in. But plead as he might, he knew that nothing could save his brother.

A final shot incapacitated him, and three hairy guards fell on him, dragging him back by his heels. James felt a firm pull, and was torn away from the scene by the Professor.

Animal rights for human testing: the tables had finally turned.

© Samantha Neave 2025

Samantha Neave graduated from the Open University.

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Table of Contents

Philosophy Now: Oct/Nov 2025

Editorial

Challenging Times & Moral Issues

News

News: October/November 2025

Moral Issues

De-Extinction: Bringing Back Beasts or Playing God?

Forced Vaccination

Moral Decision-Making for a Job Search

What My Sister Taught Me About Humanity

Collective Action & Climate Change

Articles

The Mediation of Touch

Macmurray on Relationship

Quantum Physics & Indian Philosophy

Alchemy, Mining, Speculation & Experimentation

Can AI Teach Our Grandmothers To Suck Eggs?

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)

Interviews

Karl Sigmund

Letters

Letters

Columns

Revisiting the Ontological Argument

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Philosophers on Chocolate

Living According To Nature

Reviews

Medicine Wheel for the Planet by Jennifer Grenz

The Roots of Equality by Lantz Miller

Irreducible by Federico Faggin

Hit Man

Fiction

Anselm’s Proof

The Primates

Cartoons

Harley Schwadron’s Cartoon

Steve Delmonte’s Cartoon

Simon & Finn

Sound Judgement

Guto Dias’ Cartoon

Chris Gill’s Cartoon