2019
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-48885846 el sistema penitenciari de Noruega, que tracta els presoners com a persones, té menys reincidents. Potser només ho pot fer un país ric. Moral, càstig o reinserció.
https://newrepublic.com/article/155294/john-rawls-missed-create-just-society Rawls i la societat justa. First, a just society would protect the strongest set of civil liberties and personal rights compatible with everyone else having the same rights. Second, it would tolerate economic inequalities only if they improved the situation of the poorest and most marginalized (for example, by paying doctors well to encourage people to enter a socially necessary profession).
However, this familiar view ignores the fact that, in many cases, the problem is not how best to override or silence one’s dark side, but how to cope with having too many good or morally neutral demands on your limited time, energy or resources. In other words, the key issue in many cases is not whether to be moral at all – but rather how best to distribute your moral resources in conditions of scarcity and conflict. Coping well with this latter kind of moral challenge requires very different ways of thinking about moral agency and how to lead good lives.
What are these three basic normative domains or classes of value? It can be helpful to think of these in terms of the traditional literary distinction between the first-, second- and third-person perspectives.
From the first-person stance, you navigate the world as an agent trying to realise your projects and satisfy your desires. From the second-person perspective, you understand yourself and the world through the lens of other people, who are a locus of projects and preferences of their own; projects and preferences that make legitimate demands on your time and attention. From the third-person stance, you understand yourself as one among many, called to fit yourself into the shared standards and rules governing a world made up of a multitude of creatures like you.
The fact that there’s a plurality of these normative perspectives means that there’s more than one way of understanding what’s best.
Best for whom? For me? [autorealització] For you? [ altruisme per l’altre] For the many who share the world with us and the institutions that enable this sharing? [ utilitarianisme] No single perspective can fully encompass the others.
Flourishing is human excellence within each of these domains (self-fulfilment, good relationships, and responsiveness to the demands of a shared world) but achieved in such a way that success in one domain doesn’t unduly compromise success in another.
Am I happy? Am I generous? Am I contributing to the world? The moral struggle we face is finding a way to honestly and accurately answer ‘Yes’ to all three of these questions at once, over the course of a life that presents us with many obstacles to doing so.
https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-know-what-you-really-want-and-be-free-from-mimetic-desire [acabem definint la nostra vida per imitació dels altres, no sabem què volem i imitem]
Desire is a social process – it is mimetic
When it comes to understanding the mystery of desire, one contemporary thinker stands above all others: the French social theorist René Girard, a historian-turned-polymath who came to the United States shortly after the Second World War and taught at numerous US universities, including Johns Hopkins and Stanford. By the time he died in 2015, he had been named to the Académie Française and was considered one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.
Girard realised one peculiar feature of desire: ‘We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths,’ he said, ‘but if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.’ Girard noted that desire is not, as we often imagine it, something that we ourselves fully control. It is not something that we can generate or manufacture on our own. It is largely the product of a social process.
‘Man is the creature who does not know what to desire,’ wrote Girard, ‘and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.’ He called this mimetic, or imitative, desire. Mimesis comes from the Greek word for ‘imitation’, which is the root of the English word ‘mimic’. Mimetic desires are the desires that we mimic from the people and culture around us. If I perceive some career or lifestyle or vacation as good, it’s because someone else has modelled it in such a way that it appears good to me.
Identify the people influencing what you want
The first step is to identify the models of desire who are influencing what you want. These are the people who serve as your models, or mediators, colouring what you consider to be desirable.
When I think about the lifestyle that I would most like to have, who do I feel most embodies it? In reality, this person almost certainly does not live the lifestyle you imagine them to have, but it’s still good to identify those you pay attention to the most when you’re thinking about the kind of life you want.
Aside from my parents, who were the most important influences on me in my childhood? Which ‘world’ did they come from – a familiar one or a less familiar one? Were they close to me (friends, family), or far away from me (professional athletes, rock stars)? As I’ll explain shortly, the proximity of our models of desire determines how they affect us.
Is there anyone I would not like to see succeed? Are there certain people whose achievements make me uncomfortable or self-conscious? This is the first clue that they might be a ‘negative model of desire’ – ie, someone you are constantly measuring yourself against.
Beware of becoming obsessively focused on what your neighbours have or want
Because desire is mimetic, people are naturally drawn to want what others want. ‘Two desires converging on the same object are bound to clash,’ writes Girard. This means that mimetic desire often leads people into unnecessary competition and rivalry with one another in an infernal game of status anxiety. Mimetic desire is why a class of students can enter a university with very different ideas of what they want to do when they graduate (ideas formed from all the diverse influences and places they came from) yet converge on a much smaller set of opportunities – which they mimetically reinforce in one another – by the time they graduate.
Map out the systems of desire in your life
As well as identifying the specific models influencing your desires, it is also helpful to consider whether you have become embedded in a particular system of desire. For example, consider the chef Sébastien Bras, owner of Le Suquet restaurant in Laguiole, France, who had three Michelin stars – the highest culinary distinction for a French restaurant – for a full 18 years. Until 2018. That year, he took the unprecedented step of asking the Michelin Guide to stop rating his restaurant and never come back.
Live an anti-mimetic life
To be anti-mimetic is to be free from the unintentional following of desires without knowing where they came from; it’s freedom from the herd mentality; freedom from the ‘default’ mode that causes us to pursue things without examining why.
Today, prediction is mostly done through machine learning algorithms that use statistics to fill in the blanks of the unknown. Text algorithms use enormous language databases to predict the most plausible ending to a string of words. Game algorithms use data from past games to predict the best possible next move. And algorithms that are applied to human behavior use historical data to infer our future: what we are going to buy, whether we are planning to change jobs, whether we are going to get sick, whether we are going to commit a crime or crash our car. Under such a model, insurance is no longer about pooling risk from large sets of people. Rather, predictions have become individualized, and you are increasingly paying your own way, according to your personal risk scores—which raises a new set of ethical concerns.
The ways we are using predictions raise ethical issues that lead back to one of the oldest debates in philosophy: If there is an omniscient God, we can be said to be truly free? If God already knows all that is going to happen, that means whatever is going to happen has been predetermined—otherwise it would be unknowable. The implication is that our feeling of free will is nothing but that: a feeling. This view is called theological fatalism.
What is worrying about this argument, above and beyond questions about God, is the idea that, if accurate forecasts are possible (regardless of who makes them), then that which has been forecasted has already been determined. In the age of AI, this worry becomes all the more salient, since predictive analytics are constantly targeting people.
One major ethical problem is that by making forecasts about human behavior just like we make forecasts about the weather, we are treating people like things. Part of what it means to treat a person with respect is to acknowledge their agency and ability to change themselves and their circumstances. If we decide that we know what someone’s future will be before it arrives, and treat them accordingly, we are not giving them the opportunity to act freely and defy the odds of that prediction.
A second, related ethical problem with predicting human behavior is that by treating people like things, we are creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Predictions are rarely neutral. More often than not, the act of prediction intervenes in the reality it purports to merely observe. For example, when Facebook predicts that a post will go viral, it maximizes exposure to that post, and lo and behold, the post goes viral. Or, let’s return to the example of the algorithm that determines you are unlikely to be a good employee. Your inability to get a job might be explained not by the algorithm’s accuracy, but because the algorithm itself is recommending against companies hiring you and companies take its advice. Getting blacklisted by an algorithm can severely restrict your options in life.
There is an irresolvable tension between the practice of predicting human behavior and the belief in free will as part of our everyday life. A healthy degree of uncertainty about what is to come motivates us to want to do better, and it keeps possibilities open. The desire to leave no potential data point uncollected with the objective of mapping out our future is incompatible with treating individuals as masters of their own lives.
We have to choose between treating human beings as mechanistic machines whose future can and should be predicted (in which case it would be nonsensical to believe in meritocracy), or treating each other as agents (in which case making people the target of individual predictions is inappropriate). It would never occur to us to put a tractor or other machine in jail. If human beings are like tractors, then we shouldn’t jail them either. If, on the other hand, human beings are different from machines, and we want to continue to impart praise and blame, then we shouldn’t treat people as things by predicting what they are going to do next as if they had no say in the matter.
Predictions are not innocuous. The extensive use of predictive analytics can even change the way human beings think about themselves. There is value in believing in free will. Research in psychology has shown that undermining people’s confidence in free will increases cheating, aggression, and conformity and decreases helpful behavior and positive feelings like gratitude and authenticity. The more we use predictive analytics on people, the more we conceptualize human beings as nothing more than the result of their circumstances, and the more people are likely to experience themselves as devoid of agency and powerless in the face of hardship. The less we allow people opportunities to defy the odds, the more we will be guilty of condemning them, and society, to the status quo.
By deciding the fate of human beings on the basis of predictive algorithms, we are turning people into robots. People’s creativity in challenging probabilities has helped save entire nations. Think of Roosevelt and Churchill during World War II. They overcame unspeakable difficulties in their personal and professional lives and helped save the world from totalitarianism in the process. The ability to defy the odds is one of the greatest gifts of humanity, and we undermine it at our peril.
[ què faríem si la predicció acurada fos possible? Eugenèsia? Basaríem la llibertat en que no és del tot acurat? O potser deixaríem que les coses seguissin el seu curs? Eliminem els embrions no viables però. Aquest coneixement,, d’altra banda, no ens serviria per canviar les coses?]
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-59740588 Com ser més racional, Steven Pinker: trobar un equilibri entre els beneficis presents i futurs, que pensar en una recompensa futura no ens faci perdre el present / no creure que tot passa per una raó i veure patrons on no n’hi ha [ no ho diu però aplica a les teories conspiranoiques ] /
altruisme efectiu
There are four simple steps to the Feynman Technique, which I’ll explain below:
Choose a Concept
Teach it to a Toddler (un noi de 8 anys, intel·ligent)
Identify Gaps and Go Back to The Source Material
Review and Simplify (optional)
[si no ho sabem expressar és que no ho sabem prou bé]
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/a-philosophy-professors-final-class
The great insight of classical pragmatists was to recognize that we conduct intellectual inquiries in the same way that we go about living and acting in the world. We clash with the world when we test our theories in the field and when we argue with our political enemies. Truth may be elusive, but our experience is real, and it forces us to think, to argue—possibly, to change. This conception of truth, and the social process by which we attempt to reach it, is more democratic, Bernstein believed, than trying to transcend our point of view by reasoning our way toward some supposedly universal perspective.
Arendt, Rorty, and Habermas were not only his philosophical interlocutors but his friends.
The two philosophers agreed that the seed of sectarian politics seemed to lie within the rational project of modernity: people had tried to establish the one true political system on the basis of reason when, really, all politics had to be rooted in a social give-and-take with others. But Habermas argued that, in the process of rationally justifying our moral and political beliefs to one another, the force of the better argument could lead us to moral and political norms that transcend the limits of our communities. Bernstein would not go that far. To think like that, he maintained, one would have to believe that there was a fundamental difference between the way we know the world and the way we decide how to behave—or, in Kantian terms, between theoretical and practical uses of reason. A mistake, in his view.
Bernstein and Arendt last spoke in the spring of 1975. “She was very agitated at that time, because she thought that the New School was going to end philosophy. New York’s department of education, responding to an overabundance of Ph.D. graduates without job prospects, announced plans to evaluate every doctoral program in the state, with the intention of closing down the weaker ones. The department of education asked two philosophers to evaluate the New School for Social Research’s program: Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty. “At this moment in the United States philosophy is to some degree in crisis,” MacIntyre wrote. He saw “the overproduction of Ph.D.’s” trained in analytic philosophy as a “major factor in distorting the job market.”
The department became as idiosyncratic and pluralistic as the tables of contents in his books: analytic philosophers, pragmatists, phenomenologists. He told me that rebuilding the department “was like fulfilling a testament” left to him by Arendt.
Habermas, Bernstein felt, was too attached to a conception of truth that is universal, without conditions. If philosophy proved anything, Bernstein believed, it was that things are never fixed, and our conversation never ends.
The book picks up a thread that goes back to Bernstein’s dissertation on Dewey, written more than sixty years earlier: at the core of both our nature and our way of being within nature is a relentless, collective conversation about what is good and what is true.
Filosofia política. El difícil equilibri de poders. A Espanya, els jutges conservadors interfereixen a la política d’esquerra. A Israel és a l’inrevés i és el govern conservador que vol limitar el poder dels jutges que són més progressistes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-65086871
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2023-10-17/stanford-scientist-robert-sapolskys-decades-of-study-led-him-to-conclude-we-dont-have-free-will-determined-book?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not
https://bigthink.com/13-8/physical-philosophical-problem-time/?utm_source=pocket_mylist
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68558967 reforma del corredor de la mort a San Quintin
Els errors del effective altruism
https://www.wired.com/story/deaths-of-effective-altruism/?utm_source=pocket_mylist
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-children-acquire-racial-biases/?utm_source=pocket_mylist
Futurs millors possibles https://www.npr.org/2024/04/01/1240026582/dystopias-are-so-2020-meet-the-new-protopias-that-show-a-hopeful-future?utm_source=pocket_mylist
https://www.quantamagazine.org/insects-and-other-animals-have-consciousness-experts-declare-20240419/?utm_source=pocket_mylist tenen consciència els animals?
https://aeon.co/essays/the-moral-imperative-to-learn-from-diverse-phenomenal-experiences?utm_source=pocket_mylist la diversitat d’experiències fenomenologia
Australia no vol inmigrants discapacitats perquè serien una càrrega financera. [fins on arriba la solidaritat? família, país, el món, generacions futures? BBC
Are Your Morals Too Good to Be True? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/16/are-your-morals-too-good-to-be-true
(descarregat)