DO ENDS JUSTIFY THE MEANS?

 

To answer this question one can look within and, as Nietzsche famously suggested, ask “what does my conscience tell me?” Or such a one can look at the greatest thinkers and their body of work in respect to the philosophical problematic of “means and ends.” In my view, one towering figure stands alone in this regard. And that is Mahatma Gandhi. For Gandhi there were no boundary demarcations between ends and means. Where some dialectical materialists steadfastly cling to the thesis of ends justifying the means, thereby excusing violent methods via which they and their followers sometimes achieve their goals, Gandhi always stood in a moral space diametrically opposed to such a view, never accepting it.

 

It suffices to say that Gandhi—correctly, I shall argue –believed in a direct moral connection between means and ends. Given the commitment he had to truth and nonviolence and their interdependence, it follows that one ought not employ immoral acts to gain social justice, as these acts will transform one from a moral agent to an immoral agent. In one of his early writings in Young India journal he wrote, “The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree.”  

 

To follow Gandhi’s duty-ethics of truth and nonviolence is to pursue what Rousseau called “civilization.” No civilization can be achieved by violent means. Dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima may have led to an early surrender of Japanese imperial forces (one that many historians argue was inevitable without the bomb), but it destroyed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives and led to the nuclear proliferation, which is a major planetary concern. The means transformed the world in this case into a more violent place where smaller wars in tandem with potential nuclear annihilation are not farfetched realities. To be ethical human beings we must think in holographic ways and see the means as part of any end. In other words, ends do not justify the means. We must commit to the morally correct philosophy of truth and nonviolence if we seek planetary peace.

PHILANTROPY OR STATE GIVING

Some folks argue that certain rich people will give to the poor in enough numbers that will make up for lack of virtue attributed to their fellow wealthy counterparts. Bill Gates, for example, seems to be the perfect example to contextualize their argument. The world needs the super-rich, the argument goes, so as to balance the scale of poverty and prosperity. Those who utilize this line of reasoning call their words, statement of philanthropy.    

I should like to argue differently. I say, it is good that certain rich people willingly accept the moral obligation to give back to the world. That is all good and always welcome. But the world needs something else to balance the scale. There is too much evidence to prove that individual acts of altruism are simply inadequate. To permanently and in a wholesale manner remove poverty from the planet, help should come from the governments. What is more, the wealthy nations ought to take the lion’s share of this systematic contribution. If and when aid comes through the state, all citizens who earn above the mid range national income of their respective countries will contribute something as part of their duty-ethics—enforced by the law.

As it stands now, the fate of millions of people around the world hangs on the decisions of rich countries such as the US contingent upon the strategic interests of the giving nations. The fact of the matter is that rich nations have never given enough and that speaks badly about their ethics of state philanthropy. The Europeans and the US have benefited from the world’s resources, including its cheap and sometimes free labor (i.e., slavery) for the past five hundred years, but given back very little.

Given the planetary condition that humanity finds itself in, with all the cross-migrations and interdependencies that get more complex rapidly, the rich must give back systematically or the whole ship will go down like the Titanic.  

TELECOMMUNICATIONS ACT OF 1996

Starting with 1980s and Reagan administration’s philosophy of easing restrictions on all businesses, big media companies became bigger. Bill Clinton’s administration continued this push towards deregulation which culminated in Congress approving in 1996 a new media law known as the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The bill was passed ostensibly to usher in new competition, which promised to lead to lower prices and higher quality programs on radio, television, cinema, etc. The logic of “deregulation” posits that the market regulates itself with maximum efficiency. However, what actually happened was just the opposite. The new law erased the limit to ownership of media, and this lead to a handful of gigantic corporations buying up radio stations, TV stations, telephone service companies, and film studios. Instead of diversity, particularly in radio, we now have standardized, conservative, and overly commercialized programs. Deregulation has helped an elite group but not the public at large. In the words of media scholar Robert McChesney, “When you hear the term ‘deregulation,’ you should substitute that. Deregulation means regulation purely on behalf of private parties, not on behalf of the public.” Economic globalization has followed this logic to a great extent. In the twenty first century with the project of globalization American film industry has a firmly established hegemony. When a cartel finances films, produces the same films, shows them in theaters mostly owned by the cartel, broadcasts and promotes its own productions on its own TV and radio stations, then it has total control of the industry. This is vertical integration all over again. Economically, there is no competition on the world stage to fend off the blockbuster films that come out of Hollywood and colonize the consciousness of populations around the globe.

But a new reality is emerging and people are pushing back against the new vertical integration. The Internet is at the heart of this up and coming reality!

AMERICAN SOCIETY & BIOETHICS

Americans live in a society that strives for an ideal democracy. It fosters freedom of speech and freedom of movement. Our society is also quite complex, comprised of people with different cultural, educational, economical, religious, moral, and ultimately philosophical backgrounds.

Now you take all of these differentiations and integrate them together, what do you get? An enormous  complexity, known as the United States of America. Any modern society has two major factions; the government and the civil (or civic) society, which from time to time exchange members and/or overlap in their actions. There has been a lot of discussion, thus far, about the role of government in respect to health care. Given that we are not senators, congress people, state legislators, governors, or other high-ranking powerful agents of government, we can consider our discussions a dialogue amongst members of civil society.

But what is clear is that we as individual members of civil society have different value systems, while at once also having a collective value system. So, generally speaking, what is it about our society that allows for access to decent health care to become a privilege and not a right? Is there a pressing need to reevaluate our collective value system? Every man and woman for himself or herself, is that concept at the center of our value system? But we seem to value patriotism. Is patriotism same as militarism or is it about loving one’s nation deeply enough to sacrifice for it when needed. Why do we say yes to the idea of decent health care for all, but collectively are reluctant to pay for it by way of taxes and personal sacrifice—when needed.

Why don’t we teach bioethics to our kids at K-12? We seem to value greatly our national security, but isn’t excellent health care for all of our citizens part of that security? Our civil society seems to distrust our government(s) to the extent that we display hopelessness towards any meaningful change. Do we fail ourselves as a result of collective poor ethics? Or are we just a work in progress as a nation and must learn from failures in order to succeed. FDR’s new deal put an end to the gilded age era, and we were on a decent path–concerning bioethics. But since the return of the gilded age some thirty years ago, we seem to be on the wrong path. Or are we just reaching a learning curve, which results in collective punishment of a large part of our citizenry, but will soon teach us ways in which to achieve our goal of excellent health care for all.

In the final analysis, bioethics matters, and it matters a great deal. A human life is not a commodity and ought not to be treated as such. Humanity matters, and it matters a great deal. A sick citizenry victimized by poor bioethics ought to be everybody’s problem and not just the uninsured or underinsured. After all we are all in this thing together, regardless of race, class, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Aren’t we?  

KANT, QUANTUM REALITY PARADIGM & THE INTERNET!

Lately in my inquiry into the ways in which the Internet is shaping our reality I have been comparing Kant’s philosophy vis-à-vis quantum physics and what it ushers into our consciousness as a possible reality. Of course, as most historians of philosophy will agree, we owe Kant’s influential perspectives to David Hume’s challenge to classical philosophy.  After David Hume, folks were looking into closing the book on philosophy. But Herr Professor Kant who in his late middle-age decided to take up Hume’s challenge would have none of that. Upon responding to Hume, Kant famously pronounced that Humean skepticism awakened him “from his dogmatic slumbers,” hence starting a whole new chapter in philosophy. In his new and improved way to see the world, Kant looked at the mind with a brave new system of philosophical conception. He saw the mind as an active entity that utilizes intuition, perception, deep understanding, reflection, and reasoning. Kant believed that although our minds conceive of  “reality” as a result of experiencing that “reality,” we have no direct access to the “real world” as the ways in which we perceive the world is in fact warped by the limitations of our minds. So for Kant the real world is independent of our minds. Sounds like a footnote to Plato. Nonetheless, considered an original approach, Kant named this so-called real world the “noumenal world.” I wonder what he would be thinking in respect to the Internet and the how “the digital way” is permeating every facet of our lives in the developed world, and soon the rest of the globe as well. In some ways the Internet is mirroring what quantum physics has been theorizing. But more on that later. Indeed, we can refer to this way of experiencing reality as a phenomenal reality.  Many philosophers and social scientists claim the world we perceive is the phenomenal world. Then again, from a metaphysical perspective, one that is grounded in scientific thinking, we could argue that our whole experience of the world is a blend of the noumenal and the phenomenal. Kant would argue that our perception is obscured, given that we receive everything in terms of time and space, and science cannot help us there.  But there was no quantum physics in those days. So, following that logic we actually construct the notion of time and space.   So, what about the quantum paradigm? There are three things that distinguish the quantum world from the classical word.  Indeterminism, Nonlocality, and Holism. Indeterminism tells us that even if we know the condition and location of subatomic particles, from Newtonian physics we can’t know where these particles will be or what may happen to them in the future with certainty. The German film, Run Lola Run (1998) made by Tom Tykwer toys with this idea in a quantum fashion, where Lola runs against conventional reality. Non-locality proves that a pair of subatomic particles that come into interaction, can and often do disjoin and go to different places. However, it has been known–and exaggerated cinematically in Run Lola Run–that this interaction can, and does, affect each particle despite the fact that there seems to be a great distance between particles. Holism shows that the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. In short, even if we know all properties of quanta that are parts of a complex entity, such as a human being, the complex entity has a holistic property that we cannot know–and is changing all the time.  

In order to understand quantum reality, predicated on findings of quantum physics (mechanics), we need to acquire a new language. We cannot speak in Newtonian language and expect to be inside this paradigm. With the new language of course we can start asking questions like, “To what extent can we find freedom to gain access to the real reality?”

Freedom vs. determinism has been one of the most fundamental issues that have kept philosophers of past and present occupied. Given this fundamental problem at hand, how does quantum paradigm deal with freedom, consciousness and determinism or rather indeterminism? If Newton was right, and many still think he may have been free will is a convoluted notion. What if the future is determined because the physical reality presents to us the states of objects, conceived in time and space?  Conversely, Quantum physics, producing a sort of quantum realty, dictates much indeterminism. Ironically we have to employ Aristotelian logic to make sense out of quantum reality, hence the language problem we must solve. Scientific experiments have proven that subatomic particles are quite unpredictable and can be at two places at once. So, if we as human beings are made up of these subatomic particles, does it not make sense to draw a conclusion that we can be at two places at once as well? As I alluded to earlier, this of course requires a radical way in which we understand reality. We as human beings may just be indeterministic. As it stands, we simply have not acquired the tools to access the “real” reality. The internet is ushering in some of these new tools to help us to at least develop new metaphysical theories.    Someday, perhaps! Unless of course that day has come and gone or keeps coming and going!