This game comes from Margaret Drabble’s novel, The Witch of Exmoor and is called ‘the veil of ignorance’. The game was used on a recent episode of the Philosopher’s Zone to introduce a discussion on Justice and Society with Martha Nussbaum who has written a book about it.

From the Philosopher’s Zone Transcript:

...it’s not enough to compare the opportunities that the people have in one society with what they have in another. We also want to say that a minimally decent society will give to all of its citizens, a certain threshold level of ten central capabilities. And then I go on to spell them out in a very general form, and I think of them as a kind of set of constitutional entitlements that whether there’s a written constitution or not, we could understand to be fundamental to the idea of minimal social justice in society. (Martha Nussbaum)

I thought about this discussion in terms of our own Australian society and how we always have people saying “those jobless people can get a job anytime, they just need to go back to school” but don’t account for other factors in these people’s lives that prevent them from doing so even if it’s just inertia. Nussbaum’s approach is not just about what people can theoretically do but what they can realistically access from society.

She talks about how in government we seem to focus on getting good and fair procedures or laws made and don’t think enough about the actual outcomes:

Well I want to say that the Rawlsean approach just says Well let’s figure out what a good-looking pasta machine would be, and let’s just define good pasta is whatever it is that comes out from that good-looking machine, and of course in real life you never do that, you design the machine in order to get the result that you independently think is a good pasta.

Just thought I’d throw these notes up so I can keep them in mind.

...I discovered [the following] a few months ago from a philosopher who shall remain un-named, and I quote: ‘If X loves Y, then X wants to benefit and be with Y, and he has these wants, or at least some of them, because he believes that Y has some determinate characteristics, V, in virtue of which he thinks it worthwhile to benefit and be with Y. And he regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means to some other end.’

Well, be still my beating heart. One can only imagine Y’s deep delight at a lover’s declaration couched in such terms.

I liked how she progressed through various approaches to love starting with the rather shallow idea of it being attributes based (i.e. I love her blonde hair) and moving towards ideas of it being about a unique relationship (we have shared experiences and a unique understanding of one another), looking at the idea that relationships form our identity and finally discussing the pure irrationality of love and the idea of love as the simple recognition of another self unto themselves. I suppose my critique would be that Kennett moves from talking romantic love to something else at some stage and perhaps I missed that transition.

My reflections were that love takes many forms in many contexts and moves between all of the understandings presented by Kennett. For example, I think romances often start in the shallow excitement of sexuality and desire and only move to a deeper place as over time these two people might encounter each other in other aspects of their being.

In the context of my previous post on feminism I think feminists such as de Beauvoir and Firestone may have underestimated the role of love in sexuality for both men and women. For example, de Beauvoir felt that the outlook for independent women was bleak yet she didn’t see that men are capable of love and in that role might be able to respond to new ways of relating. Is there much feminist writing that looks at how men respond to feminism and their role in social change? (I’ve only had feminist readings from the early nineties so I’m a bit behind in this area)

For example, in our lecture on logic last night we discussed all the different types of fallacies that crop up in persuasive discourse. (A fallacy is another word for a flawed or invalid argument.) One example our lecturer used for the fallacy of confusing cause with correlation was with aboriginal communities and alcoholism. An example proposition (philosophy lingo for a statement of argument) might be: “Alcoholism is rife in Aboriginal communities, therefore Aboriginals are just naturally alcohol abusers”. The fallacy in that argument is that a correlation doesn’t mean that there is a cause and of course we know that there are many factors that cause alcoholism in some Aboriginal communities and we have no evidence of a cultural or genetic predisposition (at least not in traditional aboriginal culture). But the point I’m making is that a seemingly abstract and boring topic can be applied positively to a contemporary and relevant problem.

The Philosopher’s Zone seems to also reflect this. When I tuned in, they were interviewing Jonathan Glover, a Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London about his recent talk on the Israel Palestine conflict and how narratives are constructed and used by both sides. His topic not only spoke to the conflict of study but had implications for all of us and how we form our identity and live our lives:

When we think about ourselves and our lives, we think we’d try and make some sense of our lives, people don’t just want their life to be a heap of events one after another in a kind of chaos. People like to think that their lives add up to some kind of coherent story which makes some kind of sense, until they have an answer to the question What have you done with your life? (Jonathan Glover, “Uprootedness and national conflicts”, The Philosopher’s Zone)

He talks about “rootedness” and the need for people to have a place where they belong and the humiliation that we feel when that is denied.

Any other fans of the Philosopher’s Zone out there? Recommended philosophy / theology podcasts?

References:

Jonathan Glover, “Uprootedness and national conflicts”, The Philosopher’s Zone.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2008/2332471.htm#transcript.