Thursday, November 20, 2008

Self Pleasuring

Can We Please Ourselves?

By John Taylor; 2008 Nov 20, 17 Qudrat 165 BE



I have been devoting this essay series to certain self-contradictions among my beliefs, as uncovered and challenged by a philosophical robot that I butted horns with online not long ago. Today I want to start off with a broadside that it called "Can we please ourselves?"


==========

You agreed that: So long as they do not harm others, individuals should be free to pursue their own ends.

But disagreed that: The possession of drugs for personal use should be decriminalised.

==========


The bot points out that only some forty thousand of the almost one hundred and forty thousand philosophy aficionados who completed this activity had this "tension" in their beliefs. Meaning, I guess, that I am in the bottom third of the population. Not the first time I have been caught out as a bottom dweller, I must say. Here is how it analysed the clash between my two answers to questions on the quiz.



"In order not to be in contradiction here, you must be able to make a convincing case that the personal use of drugs harms people other than the drug user. More than this - you must also show that prohibited drug use harms others more than other legal activities such as smoking, drinking and driving cars, unless you want to argue that these should also be made criminal offences. As alcohol, tobacco and car accidents are among the leading killers in western society, this case may be hard to make. You also have to make the case for each drug you think should not be decriminalised. The set of drugs which are currently illegal is not a natural one, so there is no reason to treat all currently illegal drugs the same."



I have been sitting on my counter-argument to this broadside for weeks. Not, I suppose, that I could not have given an adequate defence right away. It is just that I wanted to treat the bot as goad, a gadfly, like Socrates was to the Athenians. I felt a need to think all that it said through deeply and thoroughly. Clearly, any direct argument you might offer would be squeezed out of all recognition by the carefully pre-arranged presuppositions. It is as if somebody opened up a door and invited you to put your finger in the crack next to the door jam. The best response is to refuse to put your finger in there.


During the time I was mulling this over I ran across at least three wonderful papers by the world's most compendious Baha'i scholar, Moojan Momen. These papers, each in its own indirect way, offered a different answer to this argument. I will mention Momen's helps when the time comes. But first, my much delayed bare bones argument for advocating free agency while supporting laws against drugs.


First of all, I refuse to put my finger into the crack.


The machine puts the onus squarely on me. Why should I accept such a heavy burden of proof? Every time a new chemical is discovered, is it my job to prove that if somebody decides they want to eat, inject, smoke or otherwise introduce it into their body for any reason whatever, they should have the right to do so unless I can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it will harm not only that individual but society in general? Surely the reverse should be the case. Anything new must be proved safe by scientific tests beyond a shadow of a doubt before we allow it anywhere near our bodies, or even into the world at large. This is the principle of conservatism.


Second of all, why don't you put your finger in the crack?


We are at a point in history where thousands of new chemicals are being invented daily. Because of arguments like this one, the onus is on everybody to prove that each and every one of these chemicals does more harm than good. There is no conservative principle left. These chemicals are indiscriminately introduced not only into our bodies but the environment generally. More and more thinking people realize that there is no hard and firm line between the body and the planet, between individual and earth. A libertarian may think he harms only himself when he takes Viagra or snorts cocaine. But that is a dangerous illusion. Both those substances and many more are turning up in the water system, which means that plants, animals and other humans are doing these drugs right along with the selfish uses whose unbounded desires created the demand in the first place.


The sad fact is, nature does not care if a chemical is legal or not. Neither should we. We should do what is right and actively purify ourselves, the environment, and most of all, our own desires. The first step to doing that is to learn to refute and reject fallacious arguments like this one. Once that is done, we can start blocking new chemicals coming out of Pandora's Box, and when that conservatism is established, we can go on to putting more ills roaming the earth back into her Box. That is, eliminating one by one all older noxious poisons, be they legal or not. The long term survival of the human race depends on our doing this.


I guess I have been spending time on this because behind the surface dispute is another, subtler argument. Refuting a shadow proposition like that is harder but also more rewarding. This is where Moojan Momen came in handy. Let us go there.


I agreed that "So long as they do not harm others, individuals should be free to pursue their own ends." But I consented with a grain of salt. Most of the salt fell on that word "should." Why is it there?


The fact is that, barring a tyranny or some other variety of dictatorial rule, people _are_ free to pursue their own ends. There is no "should" about it. They do what they want. The only thing that constrains them are the bounds of their own understanding. I cannot jump inside the skin of others and force them to do my will. In fact, thinking and doing what you want is fundamental to all thinking beings. Without some degree of free will, thought would be impossible. So freedom is a fact, it not need to be defended. People do what they want, what they think best, and there is nothing you or I can do to change that.


True, anybody can be fooled, coerced or influenced by rewards and punishments to do what others wish and what they started out not wanting. But under rule of law and morality there is no question of forcing anything upon someone who does not want to, especially if they are mature and educated enough to think competently for themselves. The only way I can see that this might change and there might be a need to argue that people "should" do what they want is if in future some technology connected brains directly to computers; then we could introduce a virus forcing others to our will. Otherwise, there is no means to force free citizens to think thoughts and pursue ends not their own.


To go from "individuals are free to pursue their own ends if they do no harm" to arguing that individuals "should" be free is to commit the `is' `ought' fallacy, the same as saying, "Trees ought to grow out of the ground towards the sky."


What, then, is behind this ridiculous proposition? Why is it so often invoked, especially by liberals, utilitarians and libertarians? What they really are after is quite different from a mere defence of freedom. By defending the right to total exclusion from interference, even from owning controlled substances, they are really making freedom into a form of absolutism, paradoxical as it sounds. "Absolute freedom" is an oxymoron if ever there was one. What they really are after is the same thing any fanatic longs for: complete exclusion. Nobody, not society, not the law, not nobody, has any right to influence or educate, other than the individual.


This is where the stellar work of Moojan Momen came in so handy. He wrote in the early 1990's a paper with the strange title, "In all the Ways that Matter, Women Don't Count." He explains what he means by that title in the paper. Check it out, and we will meet back here at the Badi' Blog next time.


"In all the Ways that Matter, Women Don't Count"
bahai-library.org/bsr/bsr04/44_momen_women.htm



--
John Taylor

email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/

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