Issue 07 - Doldrums

GADFLY Spring 2022 Columbia University Undergraduate Philosophy Magazine

GADFLY

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edit Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tanaka Managing Editors Aiden Sagerman Ella Markianos Chief Article Editor Chase Bush-McLaughlin Chief Interview Editor Rishi Chhapolia Chief Digital & Design Editor Skylar Wu Discussion Coordinator Matthew Harper Copy Editor Maria Levit Social Media Manager Ashley Blanche Waller

tors Article Editors Jalsa Drinkard Matthew Harper Jeongin Kim Joanne Park Kyle Y. Rodstein Elise Sickinger Judy Tao April Wang

Deputy Editors Brian Chen Amelia Landis Kylie Morrison Lara Smith

Interview Editors Chimelu Ani Henry Astor Wynona Barua Qingyuan Deng William Freedman Wenni Iben Angela Khadijah Oscar Luckett Soham Mehta

Staff Writers Gabrielle Epuran Elena Flack Sophie Lander Ella Markianos Ashley Blanche Waller

Letter from the Editor 02 Jonathan Tanaka Ubuntu: Beyond an African Humanism 07 Andrew Shaw Music is Magic: A Philosophical Interview with Vegyn 25 Angela Khadijah & Wynona Barua Defining Doldrums 33 Lucas Wylie

table of c

Private Government: Elizabeth Anderson on How Employers Rule Our Lives 43 Wenni Iben & Soham Mehta To Err (Not) 55 Simon P. Hamartano Race, Gender, and Artificial Intelligence: Interview with Morgan Klaus Scheuerman 67 William Freedman & Henry Astor If It’s All or Nothing 79 Elliot Blake Hueske

contents

a letter from the editor

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he notion expressed by “doldrums” in common parlance tends to fuse senses of monotony, stagnation, and depression into a conceptual unity, but clearly these notions can come apart. One might go as far as to say that a virtuous disposition towards monotony and stagnation is not disinterest or depression, but rather fascination and wonder. British philosopher and theologian G. K. Chesterton argues as much in Orthodoxy, likening the particular virtue in question to, paradoxically, a mature sense of childlikeness.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

There is no question that perfect contentment and fascination in the face of doldrums is sage-like, or perhaps even divine in character. At the very least, it is abundantly clear that a disposition of virtue in the presence of repetitious monotony is nearly unattainable. In Gadfly 07, Lucas Wylie provides an important and sensitive analysis of the concept invoked by “doldrums,” showing through anecdote its intrinsic similarity to notions of monotony, repetition, and immutability. Yet, he closes with a gesture towards the possibility of proper contentment in the inevitable, inescapable repetitions of studies and vocation. This larger claim should not be confused with an endorsement of quietism, and neither ought Chesterton’s point be misunderstood to suppose that all properties marking adolescence are virtues. Simon P. Hamartano argues later in this issue that suffocating states of sin are marked by properties of spiritual adolescence, and that action and proper philosophical contemplation are required to rise up out of 02

such a state. But this far from shows that monotony and states of sin are coextensive, or that childlike virtues will be extinguished as one ascends to aretē.

On the contrary, the unquenchable flame of intellectual vitality and childlike wonder is the currency of the philosopher, as Plato claims through Socrates in Theaetetus. But positing philosophy as the solution to our struggles with monotony is far from satisfactory. Elliot Hueske argues that there is additional reason to worry that for the standard teleological views, on pain of untenability, the details of the task of attaining this state of aretē are epistemically opaque. She explicates the prima facie plausibility of the early Stoic conception of virtue as an exceptionless binary, where the ascent in Plutarch’s ocean towards the light is relatively straightforward and yet practically unattainable.

The plausible alternative, she argues, is to accept a nuanced position that rejects a binary conception of virtue but sacrifices the pragmatic clarity of traditional accounts.

Departing from the overtly philosophical, the solution to the problem of monotony becomes no more obvious in contexts of collective human experience, especially when embedded in highly complex and differentiated social wholes. Both Hegel and Kierkegaard realized that this identificatory finegrainedness contributes to a distinct de se sense of loss of identity altogether, and both construct radically different proposals to resolve this worry. This is the problem of doldrums in a complex social context—the preeminence of monotony entails an irrevocable loss of identity, which extends to not only social but also economic relations. Gadfly 07 interviewees offer several possible responses to this: Elizabeth Anderson stipulates a prolegomena to a proscriptive theory of equalizing identity-threatening power relations in the private sector, Vegyn gestures to the potency of artistic poeisis in countering repetitious monotony, and Morgan Scheuerman exposes the issue of carving up identities with deference to efficiency rather than to affirmation and truth. While each of these responses are acutely sensitive to the issues at hand, they are indexed to highly specific domains. Andrew Shaw proposes that particular metaethical views are promising in providing a more comprehensive solution.

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The atomistic individualism of Western humanism reifies proclivities for fatal and anti-humanistic social fragmentation. A good metaethics, like one grounded in the concept of ubuntu, emphasizes the relational ratio essendi of just human normativity and of humanity itself. Only in a relational whole can both individuality and virtuous monotony be retained.

The authors of this Gadfly Spring 2022 issue are well aware of the deep and difficult philosophical problem at hand, and each uniquely grapple with important aspects of its possible solutions. One might wonder, however, if they ipso facto reveal the solution in their philosophical theorizing independently of their most profound claims.

Perhaps it is not that philosophical theorizing provides the ratio cognoscendi of the solution to the problem of exultation in monotony.

Perhaps it is the ratio essendi for philosophical theorizing itself—the disposition of the true philosopher—in which exultation in monotony is made actual. Perhaps the task, then, of organizations like Gadfly, is to awaken humanity out of its “dogmatic slumber.” It is to be that “gadfly which God has attached to the state,” arousing humanity to share in His divine exultations in the doldrums of existence.

Editor-in-Chief Joanathan Tanaka

We thank the Columbia Philosophy Department for their continued support in all our endeavors.

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werdna wahs

ubuntu: beyond an african humanism

andrew shaw

:utnubu dnoyeb nacirfa na msinamuh

In light of this essay’s focus on ubuntu, I feel that it is especially important to recognize that it was not written alone—the completion of this essay was thanks in no small part to the discussions and support of many mentors, including AM Weatherford, Cody Dout, Neo Cai, Pacy Yan, the editors of Gadfly, and the members of the Western Washington Debate Union.

I. Introduction

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ecent theorists such as Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter have problematized the figure of the human in modern ethical, political, and philosophical thought. The systems of thought which center on the human subject are commonly referred to under the broader category of “humanism.”

Here, I will also refer to the modern category of the human, which operates through the discourse of human rights, autonomy, and freedom, as “Western liberal humanism.”

Tracing the history of humanism reveals how empires have colluded across time and space to define the boundaries of the “human” in ways that legitimize oppression against those excluded from its definition. The

human as defined by Western rationality, for instance, was used as a tool to justify imperialism by denying African people’s rationality, and by extension their capacity for philosophy. As such, South African philosopher Mogobe Ramose argues in African Philosophy Through Ubuntu that “for too long the teaching of Western philosophy in Africa was decontextualised precisely because both its inspiration and the questions it attempted to answer were not necessarily based upon the living experience of being-an-African in Africa.” Ndumiso Dladla, a philosopher at the University of Pretoria, further adds that this presumption against African rationality continues today in the “distortion and disfiguring of African philosophy”—or in some cases the complete lack of

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African philosophy—in modern universities’ curricula1. Against this backdrop, this essay raises the question: What might an African philosophy situated in the lived experience of African cultures add to our existing conception of Western liberal humanism?

In what follows, I examine this question through the lens of the indigenous African ethic of “ubuntu,” which is practiced widely within Zulu, Xhosa, and other Bantu communities around modern-day South Africa. Though ubuntu has a rich history and practice in these communities, major academic

focus on ubuntu began in the late 20th century with the writings of African philosophers like Ramose. Roughly translated as “I am because we are,” ubuntu is a Nguni word that finds a deeper expression in the maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, meaning “to be a human be-ing is to affirm one’s humanity by recognizing the humanity of others and, on that basis establish human relations with them [sic].”2 A being who possesses ubuntu, as referenced by this maxim, is said to be an “umuntu.” According to ubuntu, actions are not judged to be wrong because they bring about harmful consequences or violate human rights, but because

1.For a further discussion of the lack of African philosophy in modern universities, see Ndumiso Dladla’s “Racism and the Marginality of African Philosophy in South Africa.”

2. Though ubuntu is a Nguni word, it also has equivalencies across other Bantu languages, such as hunhu (Shona) or botho (Sesotho). In African Philosophy Through Ubuntu, Ramose notes that these translations do not capture the richness of the original Bantu languages, as will be discussed below.

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they disrespect friendship and community.

for honest dialogue between the two groups. For this reason, TRC chairman and human rights acMuch of what I will discuss retivist Archbishop Desmond Tutu garding ubuntu is best illustrated explicitly invoked the language by the Truth and Reconciliation of ubuntu, writing that “the Commission (TRC) in South single main ingredient that made Africa, which was formed to ad- the achievements of the TRC dress the legacy of apartheid. Ac- possible was a uniquely African cording to the TRC, the correct ingredient – Ubuntu.” response to apartheid was to heal

the nation’s divisions and wounds by affirming communal principles—to seek reconciliation, not retribution. In this context, reconciliation entailed not only forgiveness on the part of the oppressed but, more importantly, active efforts at reparation on the part of oppressors as well.

Forums like the TRC facilitated this process by creating a space 09

I begin my argument in this essay by summarizing Wynter’s genealogy of Western liberal humanism and how it recreates oppression through exclusion. I proceed by providing a meta-ethical argument in support of a reading of Wynter that acknowledges the need for a conception of the human, but redefines its relation to ethics and inclusion. I then

outline a brief defense of ubuntu and its ethical claims regarding community and character. I further argue that ubuntu shifts the definition of the human to lend moral culpability to immoral actors by virtue of them not performing humaneness in the form of affirming relationality with others. Under ubuntu, I note two key ideas that distinguish it from Western liberal humanism: first, humanity is something that must be earned, not given, and secondly, to qualify as human, one must also treat non-humans with compassion and respect. Ultimately, however, I conclude that although ubuntu shares similarities with humanism, it must be considered more than a genre of humanism because the implied idea of the human as an autonomous individual occludes the complex process of relationality that ubuntu demands of moral agents.

II. The Human After Man

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hile I will not offer an exhaustive summary of Sylvia Wynter’s body of work

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here, I hope to argue for a particular reading of Wynter that motivates my subsequent discussions of ubuntu.3 Broadly speaking, Wynter offers a decolonial project that traces the develop1ment of humanism to reveal how the boundaries of Western humanism have always been drawn with exclusion in mind. After Copernican astronomy caused the decline of the theological order, the Christian model of Man as homo religiosus was remade into the rational political subject homo politicus, which Wynter calls “Man1.” Under this new regime of rationality, however, both indigenous and African peoples were dehumanized as “the physical referent of the irrational/subrational Human Other, to this first degodded (if still hybridly religio-secular) ‘descriptive statement’ of the human in history, as the descriptive statement that would be foundational to modernity.” That is to say, the Western construction of the rational human could only be defined through its negation of the rationality of other subjujugated peoples. It is therefore no

3. This section is a very abbreviated summary of some of Wynter’s many works, including her essays “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument” and “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” My interpretation of Wynter here is also indebted to Elisabeth Paquette’s Universal Emancipation: Race Beyond Badiou.

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surprise that the rise of the human as a rational subject coincided with the rise of European colonization and slavery.

Wynter refers to the current mode of Western liberal humanism as “Man2,” or homo oeconomicus, which began roughly in the 19th century and redefined the human in terms of biology and economics. One way this structure manifests is through a process of economic selection and dysselection, naturalized by appeals to Darwinian evolution, that judges who is deemed closer to the ideal of the human—and thus more worthy of compassion—according to economic success and failure. Though ostensibly “natural,” this new conception of the human in reality only recreated inequalities in economic terms. Thus Wynter writes that “in the wake of the West’s second wave of imperial expansion, pari passu with its reinvention of [Man now in] purely biologized terms, it was to be the peoples of Black African descent who would be constructed as the ultimate referent of the ‘racially inferior’ Human Other.”

In this sense, xenophobia toward African immigrants and racial profiling in the criminal justice 11

system can both be thought of as symptoms of Western liberal humanism, in that these attitudes presuppose an economic natural selection as the ultimate societal arbiter. Therefore, though the human has often been redefined throughout modernity, such redefinitions have only served to reinscribe existing means of subjugation into new forms.

Yet, while problematic conceptions of humanism have given rise to violence in the past, it is also important not to sweepingly reject all humanistic ideas on this basis. Wynter herself acknowledges that “all human orders… mapped their specific criterion of being human, of what it was ‘to be a good man and woman of one’s kind,’…onto the physical cosmos.” The ubiquity of the human, even before the rise of the West, suggests that aiming for the end of Man2 does not eliminate the possibility that a theory may give rise to the dominance of a new mode of the human, though perhaps under a different name. If the human is not an intrinsically Western liberal invention, then it may not be necessary to completely reject any any association with the idea itself. Instead, a more productive

path for liberatory struggle is what Wynter calls the “revalorization of human being itself, outside the necessarily devalorizing terms of the biocentric descriptive statement of Man, over-represented as if it were by that of the human.” Indeed, as I argue in the following paragraphs, there is a strong meta-ethical argument for radically redefining the human and its relation to ethics instead of rejecting the human altogether.

To understand why it is that so many human orders have had their own conception of a “good human,” it is worth looking to

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Christine Korsgaard’s idea of practical identity, which she describes in The Sources of Normativity as “a description under which you value yourself.” People have identities such as a human being, a friend, or an adherent of a religion, all of which “give rise to reasons and obligations” based on what that identity prescribes or forbids. Practical identity is not a scientific fact, but rather a necessary condition of reflexive consciousness that informs how one acts, as Korsgaard writes.

When you deliberate between desires, there is some principle above your desires that dictates which reasons you find compel-

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ling and which desires you act on. In other words, that principle is “expressive of yourself ”—it forms your practical identity.

Though it is true that Korsgaard’s writings follow in the same humanist tradition that Wynter critiques, the idea that one acts under a conception of practical identity seems to me to be a point of agreement between the two, especially given Wynter’s claim that all human orders have their own conception of being a “good man and woman.”

This idea of practical identity bears importantly on the discussion of the merits of humanism.

Imagine, for example, that you were hitting someone on the street. If I were to come up to 13

you and exclaim, “Stop being a bad crow! It is wrong for crows to hit others,” you would likely react with bewilderment and carry on with your act of violence. In contrast, you would be much more likely to stop if I were to call you a “bad human,” or say that “humans should not hit others.” The difference between these sets of statements is obvious: the one that refers to you as a human is much more motivational because presumably, being a good human is one part of your practical identity which you find to be relevant. Thus, any ethical theory that hopes to be a motivating source of obligation, which is especially important for theories that hope to stop ongoing violence, must in some

way reference a practical identity that we all share. That is, it is not enough to reject the current figure of the human without first conceptualizing an alternative practical identity that will come after. Any alternatives to Man2 will share at least some similarities to humanism by prescribing obligations that we can all understand by virtue of being human.

III. I Am Because We Are

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n light of Wynter’s critique of Western liberal humanism, I now turn to discuss ubuntu itself and attempt to sketch a plausible defense of it as an ethical theory. I will focus here on two of ubuntu’s central normative and ontological claims, the first being its emphasis on the place of moral character in ethics. On this basis, several scholars have noted similarities between ubuntu and character-based theories such as virtue ethics; according to ethicist Domoka Lucinda Manda, both ubuntu and virtue ethics are agent-centered, emphasizing “the growth and development of good character through the performance of good actions.”

Such a focus on character is in contrast with deontological and consequentialist theories of eth-

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ics, which both evaluate actions in isolation from their broader social context. Supporting this idea in the broader context of African ethics, Ghanian philosopher Kwame Gyekye writes that “[g]ood character is the essence of the African moral system.”

Character, in this view, results from the habitual actions of a person who applies moral principles to appropriate situations.

For example, if someone reacts with kindness and concern every time they see others suffering, this pattern of behavior eventually becomes second nature, at which point they have acquired a compassionate character. Because of this habitual nature, community plays an essential part in shaping a person’s character to be good. Through moral instruction, stories, and proverbs, societies inculcate moral principles into members of their own communities from a very young age. At the same time, because character is habitual, it continues to be shaped and reshaped in subsequent interpersonal interactions. In this context, it is easy to see why ubuntu prizes character so highly: forming bonds of friendship does not come from one-off gestures of kindness, but rather requires individuals to

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emphatically reaffirm their bonds with others, internalizing the value of such relationships.

The second and most important feature of ubuntu that I will discuss here is the primacy of relationality and community. In arguing in support of ubuntu’s conception of relationality, I first want to distinguish between value in an instrumental sense and in an ethical sense. While instrumental value can arise as a product of biological necessity, ethical value requires that the thing in question have some greater meaning or significance.

For example, I can value food in the instrumental sense that it is biologically necessary and that I desire it, but this does not place any higher obligation on me to act in pursuit of food. Particularly, people may intentionally forgo food as part of a fast for a noble cause, or they might lack food because someone has taken it from them. In these cases, food can take on a qualitatively different ethical significance based on its contextual meaning. Hence, ethical valuation is distinct because it requires a consideration of a thing’s broader connection

to other objects and the lives of others. When people ask questions such as whether something is moral, they are usually concerned with valuation in the second ethical sense—they are asking for a reflective evaluation of meaning.

However, ubuntu’s crucial observation is that ethical meaning can only arise as a product of our relationships with others. If valuation is a process of reflecting on something’s connection to one’s life and the lives of others, this reflection takes place in the context of socially constructed systems of meaning. In our everyday valuations, we commonly rely on systems such as language, family, or the law to make decisions about what we should do.

Each of these systems “has no meaning if there are not ‘others’ (abanye abantu) in its description, definition and practice.” 4 In this view, character represents the internalization of systems of meaning such that valuation becomes more or less an unconscious process. Furthermore, this argument implies that having relations to others is not just instrumentally valuable but

4. Italics are mine. This translation was supplied by Ndumiso Dladla in “Towards an African Critical Philosophy of Race: Ubuntu as a Philo-praxis of Liberation.”

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rather a necessary precondition for subjectivity at all, if subjectivity is defined as the capacity for meaningful existence. In this sense, ubuntu is similar to Lévinas’ critique of liberal humanism via his account of human existence as infinite responsibility to the Other. Being-in-the-world, as Diane Perpich writes in The Ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas, requires that “my subjectivity has been constituted within a series of intimate and dependent relationships that make my meaningful relations to the world possible.” In contrast, then, to the liberal individualist self, ubuntu locates the human as always involved in a complex process of relationality and calls on us to affirm our humanity by affirming that relationality. To ask why we should prize social relations is itself a question of valuation that “always comes too late,” borrowing from Perpich, because valuation already presupposes that our relations with others are valuable.

In what ways might we affirm relationality with others? One answer is located in the connection between the community and character development. Recall that ubuntu emphasizes the community as the source of character

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because both moral instruction and interaction with others shape our responses to future situations. As a result, ubuntu obligates us to support our own communities as a central part of not only our own ethical growth but also that of other individuals.

Because communities are groups of people sharing in a way of life, supporting the community could take the form of developing virtues aimed at concern for others, such as empathy, patience, or love. This argument also suggests that ubuntu cannot be unconditionally exclusionary; it requires us to treat each person as a potential member of our community, regardless of whether they are currently a member of our immediate community.

Treating a stranger cruelly, for 16

instance, violates ubuntu for two reasons: first, it fails to recognize the person as a being in the process of their own character development, and secondly, it demonstrates a profound moral failure of the agent in question to exhibit traits like empathy and compassion. For this reason, despite the moral prominence given to their own community, indigenous sub-Saharan societies have traditionally welcomed strangers to their villages.

IV. An African Humanism

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iven ubuntu’s focus on human relationality, African scholars like philosopher Fainos

Mangena have termed it an “African humanism.” To what extent does this characterization as a genre of humanism hold true?

To begin, it is common in Nguni languages to say “Wo, akumuntu lowo,” translating to “Oh, that is no person,” whenever someone acts immorally or fails to exhibit ubuntu.5 Here, this saying does not literally mean that the person is not a homo sapiens in a biological sense, but rather that ethically, they are not considered human because they lack the upstanding moral character required by ubuntu. Several points of comparison between ubuntu and Western humanism can be observed from this proverb. On

5.Italics mine. Further discussion of important proverbs under ubuntu can be found in “From Rationality to Relationality: Ubuntu as an Ethical & Human Rights Framework for Artificial Intelligence Governance” by Sabelo Mhlambi.

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the one hand, ubuntu appears to be similar to Western humanism in that the human occupies an important place in its ethical system. On the other hand, unlike Wynter’s Man2, ubuntu considers humanity something that must be earned through moral action and good character, not something biologically determined or given.

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lish genuine relations with those lacking humanity in an attempt to guide them toward a humane character. If humanity is indeed earned, as ubuntu suggests, then it is illogical to make categorical judgements based on the humanity of others precisely because their humanity or lack thereof is always subject to change. This view represents an important This way of thinking seems to distinction in the relationship accord better with common between the human and ethics, intuitions and use of moral breaking from Western liberal language. Many people find it humanism by rejecting the idea morally wrong, for instance, to that we should use the category inflict unnecessary violence on of the human to decide who is animals, even though they are not worthy of rights or compassion. human even in a biological sense. In other words, my interpretation Despite this fact, one might con- is that ubuntu shifts the focus of demn such an action by making ethics to be one of humaneness judgment of character: commit(as a quality of character) instead ting unnecessary violence against of humanity. living beings is morally wrong because it demonstrates cruelty I am also reminded here of on the part of the perpetrator. feminist philosopher Lisa TessUnder ubuntu, the immorality of man’s work on liberatory virtue such violence—or more general- ethics, owing to its similar focus ly, oppression of others—would on character. In Burdened Virtues: similarly be attributed to a lack Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Strugof good moral character and des- gles, Tessman notes that those ignate the perpetrator as non-hu- who are privileged in oppressive man, as previously discussed. societies display what she terms Regardless, the proper response “ordinary vices of domination,” is not to be violent in return or a failure of moral character in and thereby degrade one’s own their treatment of the oppressed. humanity, but instead to estabSimilar to how, for ubuntu, op-

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pressors who lack moral character are deemed non-human, virtue ethics views oppressors as vicious and morally deficient.

As such, Tessman encourages those in positions of privilege to reflect critically on their own vices. However, even Tessman acknowledges that adopting such a viewpoint faces significant societal barriers: “much of virtue ethics literature speaks as if most people are basically virtuous,” she writes, but “[i]n oppressively structured societies, a large proportion of the population will display…ordinary vices of domination.” In short, Tessman reaffirms an ugly truth about a Western humanism that demarcates ethical treatment on the basis of humanity: it is much easier to assume others as vicious or inhuman than to think of oneself in the same way, thus inhibiting the possibility of the critical self-reflection needed to resolve domination and oppression.

Additionally, to conduct a more detailed comparison between ubuntu and Western liberal humanism, it is necessary to critically examine translations from the original Nguni languages into English. For this reason, I turn now to an exploration of the 19

etymology of the word ubuntu itself. In African Philosophy Through Ubuntu, Ramose explains: Ubuntu is actually two words in one. It consists of the prefix ubu- and the stem ntu-.

Ubu- evokes the idea of being in general. It is enfolded be-ing before it manifests itself in the concrete form or mode of ex-istence of a particular entity. Ubu- as enfolded be-ing is always oriented towards unfoldment, that is, incessant continual concrete manifestation through particular forms and modes of being. In this sense ubu- is always oriented towards -ntu. [sic] Ramose’s notion of incessant unfoldment, which he also refers to as “be-ing becoming,” means that ubu-, or be-ing, is always unfolding and becoming -ntu, or particular manifestations of be-ing. This concept of incessant unfoldment represents the importance of character in ubuntu—namely, that one’s existence is always being shaped and reshaped by the surrounding community and interactions with others. Hence, when taken altogether, the word ubuntu itself

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already instructs us to recognize the value of communal relationships in becoming human.

Ramose similarly explains the term umuntu by calling attention to the prefix umu-: “Whereas the range of ubu- is the widest generality, umu- tends towards the more specific.” As a result, umuntu is a being with ubuntu, “the specific entity which continues to conduct an inquiry into

as merely a type of humanism. In the same book, Ramose makes it clear that ubuntu is “always a -ness and not an -ism.” Clarifying this point, he states that “[t]he -ism suffix gives the erroneous impression that we are dealing with verbs and nouns as fixed and separate entities existing independently.” Here, Ramose refers back to an earlier characterization of ubuntu as a “verbal

be-ing, experience, knowledge, and truth.” To translate umuntu as simply “human” or ubuntu as simply “African humanism” without acknowledging be-ing becoming thus risks occluding an essential component of this African ontology.

noun.” In this sense, ubuntu cannot be thought of only as a state of humaneness which one can attain; rather, it is the active practice and manifestation of relationality that one must continuously work toward. It is the recognition that the actor, the action, and the acted-upon are inseparable, simultaneously reflecting and shaping character. Theorizing humanity as an ongoing process of relationality

Moreover, the idea of be-ing becoming as embodied in the etymology of ubuntu makes it untenable to categorize ubuntu

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emerging out of surrounding contexts and histories, ubuntu cannot be encapsulated by liberal humanist views of the human as a singular noun (that is, individual and autonomous).

By this reasoning then, ubuntu both transforms and exceeds the genre of humanism as bracketed out by the Western philosophical tradition.

V. Conclusion

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eturning to the example of the TRC given at the beginning of this essay, it is now apparent why Tutu’s invocation of ubuntu demanded a reconciliatory and not retributive approach to apartheid. Following ubuntu, the TRC condemned apartheid not only because it inflicted violence on oppressed groups, but also because it damaged the moral character of the oppressors and made them less human.

The obvious response, therefore, was not to also become less human by enacting revenge on oppressors, but instead to break the cycle of inhumaneness: to guide a divided nation toward ubuntu by encouraging reparation and forgiveness between

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oppressors and oppressed.6 Furthermore, although racism is still prevalent in South Africa and the TRC’s mission is clearly far from fulfilled, it is important to remember Ramose’s wisdom that ubuntu is not something which may be fully achieved, but must still be worked toward through a conscious embodiment of relationality. In struggling against injustice, one must always recognize that the struggle is larger than oneself or one’s lifetime, but rather extends out to the community and into the future to be carried on by subsequent generations.

In short, examples like the TRC demonstrate that by positing humanity as something which must be earned through humaneness and good moral character, ubuntu marks a radical shift from Man2’s bioeconomic definition of the human. At the same time, ubuntu also subverts the logic of exclusion which, for Wynter, is what enables Western liberal humanism to recreate violence: by assigning rights to those included within the category of the human, these rights only gain coherence through the denial of

6. Many of these connections between ubuntu and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are elucidated by Thaddeus Metz in his article “What Archbishop Tutu’s ubuntu credo teaches the world about justice and harmony.”

rights to non-humans excluded from this category. In contrast, ubuntu demands compassion and respect, especially toward non-humans, because to act violently toward others degrades one’s own humanity. Yet, examining the etymology of ubuntu as a verbal noun reveals that it is important to recognize ubuntu as more than just a genre of humanism, because such a designation obscures its important ontological connotation of be-ing becoming. By theorizing humanity as an ongoing process, ubuntu is an embodied practice of relationality, not just a stagnant definition of the human.

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ism. Given the divergent expressions of ubuntu across different Bantu languages and cultures, I have offered merely one possible interpretation of ubuntu out of many, specifically putting it in dialogue with Wynter. Much remains to be said regarding ubuntu’s connection to other scholars, or even Wynter’s other works, as part of this broader conversation. While ubuntu cannot literally be translated into the English language, it is my hope that this essay provides a starting point for readers to live by the spirit of ubuntu and rethink their relations toward those excluded by the current dominant mode of Western humanism.

This essay should be read as only a small part of a much larger ongoing conversation on human22

music musicisismagi magi aaphilosoph philosoph

angelakhadijah khadijah angela &wynona wynonabarua baru &

ic: ic: hical hicalinterview interview with withvegyn vegyn

hh ua a

Vegyn is an electronic music producer, DJ, graphic designer, and founder of the record label PLZ Make It Ruins. He is best known for contributing production on over 10 Frank Ocean songs and recently released the 75-track album Don’t Follow Me Because I’m Lost Too!! Vegyn’s clean, innovative production provokes a wealth of emotional experiences and invites the listener into a metallic, involved soundscape. Our conversation explores the process of creating music and celebrates art as an innate aspect of human life. Check out The Gadfly’s top philosophical Vegyn tracks on Spotify by scanning the QR code provided at the end of the article. This interview was conducted by Angela Khadijah and edited

by Wynona Barua.

As a fellow artist, I’m curious about your process of creation. In my own life I’ve found that creation isn’t a continual state of being—it takes time and introspection.

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like to think of creation as a flow state in which you tap into a natural rhythm. I try to practice transcendental meditation, which has its rewards in what David Lynch describes as “catching the big fish,” but you can only catch the big fish if you’re sat at the riverbank fishing.

So when I go to make music, I try to set zero expectations for myself and my collaborators. I’ve realized that sometimes it’s better to not even attempt to make music, especially when working with people for the first time.

It really works, and allows us to create very naturally. It turns out, you might have to get to know

someone before you can open up or feel comfortable making mistakes with them. I love the process of generating new ideas; I find it very fortuitous.

During that process, I try to let my subconscious or my instinct lead as much as possible. Whenever an element of doubt or confusion creeps up, or as soon as I hit any kind of wall, I’ll save the file, close the session, start something new and just generate ideas like that. When I’m in a good flow, the longer I’m repeating this cycle, the better I get …

It’s like getting into gear. I could be making 15 tracks a day by just letting ideas loose. I get into a rhythm where I’m not questioning myself. When I feel stuck, I just move on, put it to one side, and start something else.

There are so many different head spaces to explore when you’re

khadjiah & barua

creating with this pure idea generation. analysis or doubt: you have to be like an infant and keep trialing.

You describe songs as “ideas.”

Does making a track start with an idea for you, or does the idea make itself in the track?

Y

es, much more like the latter. I just turn the machines on and see what happens.

I often lean into a certain familiarity—like set progressions or even playing the same things.

Duval Timothy, who I work with quite a lot, will play the same chords over and over again. The ideas come through in how he’s playing them and how those chords are being interpolated. He knows what the small differences are and I really admire that. It’s

much more improvisational than analytical.

Fred Moten, a philosopher who writes about performance and aesthetics, discusses improvisation as “making something out of nothing.”

I was at a talk recently where he explained that if you really look at the process of creation in jazz, you find that the same exact sequencing is repeatedly used at different shows. The secret is that improvisation really isn’t on the fly, but is more like a practiced ability.

W

hen you’re familiar with the standards, improvisation can simply be doing renditions of those standards within the musical format. It’s similar to playing in a rock band, where musicians know their respec26

tive roles and bounce off each other. Play is the most important element. I love collaborating because, when successful, you fill in the blanks and play off each other’s strengths.

There’s always a moment when you’re creating and finally hit the wall. If you have a communicative relationship like this, then usually one of you will take the sound to where it needs to go.

While you step back, they carry the baton. Collaboration is a back-and-forth effort. Musicians can communicate simply by playing their respective instruments—to make music is to speak silently. Music is magic to me, just like knowledge is power. And the more understanding and tools you have, the better you can communicate, especially with other musicians. Ultimately, music is still just play! There are no wrong notes. There are only 12—some notes sound better than others, but there are still only 12.

I remember the magic of listening to The Beatles as a child and thinking, “This music has existed within me my entire life.” Do you have more to say about music not only as 26

a vehicle for communication but also as an experience?

I love this quote by Charles Lloyd, who says in regards to music: “Words don’t go there.”

I

like electronic music because there aren’t as many tethers to conventional structures—it’s so much more fluid. That fluidity allows my music to elicit an emotive experience when you listen to it; that’s what I’m looking for when I’m reviewing improvisational tracks. I’m trying to make the emotional experience as fulfilling as possible for listeners. The melody is the key to

achieving that. I want my sound to be like a vessel or a reliquary for a feeling, … a gilded skull piece from some ancient Catholic Saint. I don’t know, maybe that’s a bit macabre, but I feel like what’s missing from a lot of music today is a distinct honesty.

It’s a lot harder to make something that you yourself are proud of than to make something that you think other people will like.

And I’ve always tried to stay as far away from any kind of trend as much as possible. My music is about taking something very internal and then displaying it in perpetuity.

I love that. I’m thinking about the clarity of your sound and

music is magic

what it feels like to step into a soundscape. Even your most intense sounds convey a crystal clear purpose.

I

t can also be not clear, but muddy—a viscous sound. I’ve found with my own stuff that achieving the right sound means having as little going on as possible. You can communicate an idea through as few notations as possible.

It’s like Occam’s razor in philosophy—the simpler, the better. That leads me to my last question: In an increasingly capitalistic world, what is the value in making art for art’s sake?

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A

rt creates a vessel for people to project onto and inspires self reflection, allowing them to ask their own questions. My favorite films are the ones from which I take away more questions than I do answers. Sometimes that lies in the comfort a piece of art provides, sometimes it’s in how a composition challenges the conventions of what I believe to be successful. Not every experience necessarily needs to be fantastic. I think about the movies of Andrei Tarkovsky, or, more recently, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films, like Memoria and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. They are drawn out and slow, but purposeful in that slowness. Yes, there is an element of “Is this kind of boring?” And yes, it is. You might ask, “Then is it pointless?”

No—it’s about finding the spaces in between. Apichatpong’s work is a quagmire of information given the setting and the context of Thailand having had so many coups in the last 15 years. Even scenes in which everyone is doing karaoke possess a profound and unsettling undercurrent.

That’s what I think of as the space in between—it is neither that life is happy or sad, or that we should be happy to have been 29

sad, or that although we were once sad we are now happy. Art is all about juxtaposition.

Art is that slash in between.

Y

eah. There’s something that I wrote for one of my songs recently. It goes, “Laughing is a lot like crying you know… Like two sides of the same coin. But what’s the space in-between?

Which side is face up when the coin is still spinning?”

khadijah & barua

playlist pPlaylist

playlist playlist 30

dold defin lucas

defin dold

rums ning wylie

ning rums

August, 2020 – December, 2020

I

actually have one of the nicer dorm rooms on my floor. The couple of times I’ve been in my floormates’ rooms, I’ve appreciated my own lack of exposed support beams covered in dried drips of paint, reaching down like wannabe stalactites. I have the room that would usually be reserved for a disabled student, with such amenities as a peephole four feet off the ground and a doorbell that causes the light in the fire alarm to flash.

The lack of the usual two lofted beds relieves me of the creeping feeling of claustrophobia I have in my floormates’ rooms; I can tell that it’s just more space overall. I shouldn’t hold it against the room—all in all, it’s a better option than the rest. I’m sure it’s hosted many boisterous and social freshman years, but right now it just serves as more empty space.

The repetition of limited stimuli available to me in this environment has really started to drag on my mind. Every time I leave the room: do I have my keys, do I have my phone, my wallet? The walk to the cafeteria, which I’ve optimized for maximum efficien-

33

cy: jay walk across the street at a diagonal, to avoid losing distance on those pesky right angles; only slightly passive-aggressively pass anyone walking slower than me; get in and get out, get whatever food looks the most palatable.

In retrospect I feel like I should have been more affected by the sight of all the empty tables in the cafeteria, but it didn’t even occur to me that people would usually be sitting there. That dining hall serves two of the largest dorm complexes and it definitely feels like it was designed with a throng in mind. Instead, the class of 2024 moves through the echoey space in a socially distanced single-file line. I take the same route back, closing the loop. I make sure I’m not outside for any longer than is needed, even if being stuck in my dorm room is also the last place I want to be. Stuck is definitely what I am, inside or out. If I want to have contact with someone outside of my dorm that consists of more than walking outdoors with masks on, I then need to quarantine for two weeks before seeing my floormates again. We get tested twice a week, and the walk to and from the testing center—formerly a basketball court—is probably the farthest I

wylie

consistently get from my dorm.

If we ever miss a test, we’re not allowed in the dining hall—an overworked essential worker will have to bring us our meal. All of these constant reminders of how necessary it is to limit my movements have certainly made their message clear.

“Doldrums” feels like almost too appropriate a word for it, coming from an old English phrase that describes a person or action as acting “as the dolt runs”—that is, in circles—if said person or endeavor is stalled or seems fruitless. All the small cycles that now make up my life have sent me into an increasingly monotonous frame of mind. I’m grateful for any reprieve: the few times that I have forgotten my keys in my room have almost served as little adventures. I go down

the stairs in the courtyard of the dorm complex and speak to whichever tired student worker is there, show them my ID and take the spare key up to get back into my room. It provides a detour that, while annoying in the moment, serves as a small ripple on a glassy surface, something that happened today that didn’t yesterday. In many ways, it feels like circles are the only direction I can go in. The idea of doing something without knowing how it will end has ceased to be a possible route for me to take.

If you had asked me outside the context of the pandemic, I might have said I enjoyed being alone. I’ve always been an introvert, reading in my room for hours reading as a kid, taking refuge in the moments free from social anxiety as a teenager. This 34

35

inclination inward influenced how I constructed my world and, among other things, led me to actively choose an atheist worldview. As counterintuitive as many seem to find it, I find comfort in atheism. To me, the idea that all of this, all of us, came from absolute chaos and nothing, that

me. The fact that the experiences I go through are reflected 7.8 billion times obligates me to place value in them, just as I place value in myself. But with the space between all our worlds so suddenly expanded, that meaning feels light years away.

we are a small part of the universe that coalesced just so as to become aware of itself, is incredibly compelling. However, that frame of mind inevitably leads to a search for meaning within the chaos, what to do with this random chance we’ve been given. To me, I find the most meaning in the experiences of those around

I haven’t been happy with Ivy for a long time. I knew something was wrong even before everything shut down, but I couldn’t hurt her. It would be too selfish.

I’m still going to see her, but our visits are often weeks apart, because of how strict quarantine protocol is. Simultaneously trying to socially distance enough to still

be able to interact with my floormates without exposing them to her bubble, and vice versa, hasn’t been good for either of us. This is on top of all the issues we’d already had surrounding communication and her asking for more from me than I often felt capable of providing. I’ve always been bad at dealing with people who are angry with me, so when she gets upset, my mind goes blank as my heart rate skyrockets and I scramble blindly for the nearest exit. This dynamic has provided a false sense of progress while our core issues never get properly addressed. I know this pattern isn’t taking me anywhere, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere else to go.

defining dolrums

out of vocabulary. I keep trying, spending limited windows with them whenever I feel I have the energy. They’re the only people I’m allowed to see right now: how can I give up on that? And yet, I have given up. The inertia of my exhaustion slows me down until I can barely leave my room at all, my circles becoming smaller and smaller, tightening in on some invisible center of mass in my subconscious.

While in isolation, I seek out any distraction I can find from being alone with my thoughts, whether it’s spending hours watching shows I’ve already seen or listening to the same albums over and over. The most effective method by far is getting high. In high The week-long time sacrifices school I had been more stonI make to spend time with my er-adjacent than stoner-proper. It floormates have quickly subsided, was fun to go walk around with as my efforts to bond with them my friends and smoke, but it was begin to feel increasingly futile. never my own weed; I was always Someone will text the group relying on that one friend who chat; we’ll all go out, get some knows a guy. I was not particsubpar food, attempt to make ularly committed to the cause. conversation, get to know each However, I had gotten a vape other. It’s become painfully clear pen over the summer, and, for a that this is a group of people stretch of time, I began to retreat who are remarkably incompatible to it every night. The pen makes with each other, with more and it so easy: no smell, no coughmore interactions lapsing into ing, about as likely to set off a prolonged silences as people run fire alarm as my electric kettle. It 36

allows me to fully disengage—no need to worry about consequences, no need for anything at all. Sometimes when I reach for it, the little light is flashing red, so I grab the power cord and complete its circuit so that I can complete my own. It lets me get away, when nothing else does. As the cartridge begins to run out, I stare at the thin line of amber sitting at the bottom, a little bit of escape stuck to the side that I can’t bear to let go to waste. My main strategy is to tap it against my desk, trying to fight viscosity through repetitive sound. I wonder sometimes if the one person I share a wall with ever hears this, a small woodpecker starting up late at night, going through the same motion over and over, generating its monotonous rhythm.

Eventually the little amber line fades entirely, and I’m left alone again, looking for another distraction.

January, 2021 – May, 2021

P

ost winter break, back in the room, I have the opportunity once again to get to know the patch of ceiling just above my bed, really wrestle with it, intellectually, you know, see what its opinions are on life and

37

the world and philosophy and climate change and which Marvel movie is best and how to pronounce GIF. Who knows what troves of knowledge I might uncover? And, sometimes, it responds: footsteps of someone upstairs going to the bathroom, a drawn out Doppler effect as they approach, enter, exit, retreat. Or the sound of someone hitting snooze on their alarm 7 to 8 times over the course of two hours on a Saturday morning.

But, most of the time, the conversation is fairly one-sided.

I had insisted to my parents that even though the previous semester hadn’t been “ideal,” I wanted to give it another shot. I think I just can’t stand the idea of giving up what small experience I might get out of this period of college, even if its minuteness is exactly why I won’t be able to enjoy it. I want more, but given how last year went my track record doesn’t suggest much. I’ve been exploring new depths of doldrums, which (fun fact!) comes from the idea of literal “dull drums,” unchanging, simple, stretching into eternity.

Left alone, you get pretty used to your own dull drum, as it’s the only thing keeping you company.

It’s mainly at night, I guess. My main association with the sound is just from lying in bed, the slow pounding that begins to build in your ears as your awareness of the beat increases throughout the rest of your body. You know you need it to continue, you’d much rather keep hearing it than not, but the echoes of your most basic bodily function off the inside of your skull can certainly drown out everything else. You lie in bed, right in the corner of the room, moving as far away from this place as you can without moving a muscle.

The dullness has started to round out my thoughts, highs not as high and lows not as low.

One might think that in that kind of isolation it would be hard to be in anything but near

wylie

constant despondency, but in reality my average emotion is one of blankness. That kind of negative headspace is so hard to maintain. I really don’t have any choice but to give myself a break from it all, just to not go crazy.

Ironically, the powerlessness I’ve been feeling in the face of the circumstances that have kept me confined has also given me a way out from a constant state of negative emotion. At the very least, this isn’t my fault. I have no level of control over the state of the world. However, this has also led me to abandon any attempts to exert control over the things in my life that I could actually have an effect on.

I broke the cycle with Ivy, at the very least. It only happened when it became clear how unhappy my

38

unhappiness was making her. Decisive action was not the word of the day. I also started up therapy, right at the beginning of the year.

I’m putting a lot of my hopes into it. I hadn’t been unaware of my state previously, but that inertia had been so powerful that awareness hadn’t come close to giving me the means to escape it.

But being at home, enjoying simple, everyday interactions with my family, was enough to motivate me to get myself the kind of help I needed. With therapy, my main intention is to not hold anything back, since that seems to be the root of a lot of my problems.

I obsess over small things, always having something, more often many things, eating away at the back of my head. The dull beat of repetitive thoughts erodes away my sense of self, my confi-

39

dence, my ability to see the world clearly. Therapy, I hope, will be a way to sift through all the noise and figure out what I’m actually hearing, what music might be lurking in the drumbeat.

My mind, obsess’d with beats and taps and thrums, the daily ways my brain turns on itself, reveal themselves to me in sharp relief.

Iambs; they chase me.

August, 2021 – May, 2021

I

’ve been out of that dorm room for a while now, and I’ve got to say I don’t miss it. I realized this when I was at home

freshman year, but simple, everyday human contact and interactions, not even necessarily deep or meaningful ones, can really help me to keep moving forward.

Being back in person is a breath of fresh air, as much as breathing through a mask can be. I had never been aware of the true scale of the 40,000 people who flow in and out of campus each day. The cacophony of voices and footsteps, people advertising clubs with offers of free donuts and free condoms, the buzz of a bicycle and the rustle of windy trees. I don’t mind the change.

However, as weird as it is to say, there was something about all that isolation that benefitted me.

Free from the gravity of everyone else’s worlds, I was able to explore my own. For essentially the first time, I experienced the phenomenon of doing things because they truly brought me joy, independent of any and all outside influence. So much of my previous experience had been wrapped up in social dynamics and how others perceived me and, as the pandemic has receded, I’ve had to deal with that all over again. But I found a way to create value within my own experience, and before the pandemic,

defining dolrums

I didn’t know that this path was available to me.

Over the summer, my therapist gave me a diagnosis of major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. After struggling with these things for so long, I’m grateful to have a real definition that I can put to it. I wouldn’t say that I’m out of the doldrums just yet, but I think I’m coming to peace with the idea that I don’t have to be rid of them entirely to still be okay. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (feel free to look it up if you don’t believe me), the word “doldrums” comes from a combination of the word “dull” and the ending of “tantrum.” Sometimes, things won’t be great: I’ll slip into bad patterns of thought, or something will trigger a depressive episode, and my brain will carry me away to someplace I don’t want to be. But they’ll pass, and I’ll be okay.

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private private

elizabeth elizabethande and soham sohammehta mehta

on onho h rule ruleour ourlives lives

eegovernment: government: wenni wenniiben iben

derson erson

how ow employers employers s

Elizabeth Anderson is a John Dewey Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan where she specializes in moral, social, and political philosophy, among other areas of philosophy. She is the author of several books, the most recent of which, titled Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It), is the subject of this interview. Our discussion centers on a notion of the firm as a form of government and is focused on the need to restructure the firm to give employees representation within their workplace governments. This interview was conducted by Wenni Iben and edited by Soham Mehta.

Out of curiosity, how did you become interested in this topic? Did you have a really bad boss or something?

I

’ve been interested in the organization of work since my undergraduate days. I went to Swarthmore College outside of Philadelphia and started off as an intended economics major, but then I took philosophy. The late 70s and early 80s, when I was an undergraduate there, was an era of a lot of labor unrest.

There were much higher rates of labor, unionization, and a lot of worker discontent. So these issues were much more salient, and the business pages would routinely interview labor union representatives. These days, you open up the business pages and they hardly ever talk to workers or union leaders.

So I got those concerns back

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then. A lot of my work in philosophy is really in political economy or thinking philosophically about economic arrangements.

Really, all of my philosophical work has been conducted in deep conjunction with research in the social sciences, in economics, history, psychology, and so forth.

These interests have led me to revive our discussions of problems at work. So in Private Government, I start off looking at why classical economists, like Adam Smith, were so pro-market. And what I argue is, classical free-market economists like Smith and Mill liked the free market because they wanted to liberate workers to enable them to become self-employed.

Of course, that only works if each worker owns his own capital and is the only person working it. The Industrial Revolution crushed that model by allowing

for huge economies of scale.

That model really doesn’t make sense for advanced economies where you have huge organizations like hospitals, universities, auto assembly plants. Teamwork ends up being the most productive kind of work, and the most efficient. And that’s why we need to look at the government of large numbers of people within the firm.

A major project of your book is to bring back the concept of “private government” as a way to talk about the power employers have over workers’ lives. Could you explain what the term “private government” means?

T

he best way to think about the concept of private gov-

iben & mehta

ernment is the possibly apocryphal saying attributed to King Louis XIV, “L’état c’est moi”— I’m the state. The state is my business. It’s my private business.

It’s none of the business of my subjects. So private government is private to the ruler and it’s kept private from everybody who is ruled; it is government that is unaccountable to the governed.

So it refers to the way employees, who are the people being governed within the workplace, are excluded from governance. Why is it important that we talk about corporate structure as a form of governance?

I

’m trying to dispel the illusion that the organization of work is simply the product of

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freedom of contract. In fact, the organization of work is defined by the state. There are a whole bunch of laws governing the employment relationship: we call these corporate governance laws.

Essentially, these laws, which are set up by the state, deal all of the authority cards to the representatives of capital investors. These investors call the shots via their representatives, who are the managers within the firm. Workers have no authority under the system: employees are the governed, but they have no voice in the government of the workplace.

Some people might point to the fact that the cost of leaving an oppressive work environment is often much lower than the cost of leaving an oppressive state. Are there ways in which workers are less free than citizens of the state, in the context of the US?

W

ell, it’s also the case that citizens of the state have their freedoms restricted by laws.

But there are significant differences. One is that the laws of the state outside of the employment context generally restrict means and not ends. So we’re free to go our way and choose our own 45

ends. Laws only limit how we can achieve them. So you can’t pursue your ends by killing people or speeding on the highway.

But still, your ends are chosen by you. Whereas at the workplace, the workers’ ends, as well as the means, are set by the employer.

And often workers are micromanaged down to the minute; employers govern every word they say if they’re a customer service representative and every motion of their body if they’re a factory worker. Every aspect of work, from its pace to the tasks being conducted, is minutely regulated both in terms of ends and means.

Do firms and states serve different purposes and should that factor into how we talk about firms as forms of gover-

nance?

C

ertainly. Firms exist to provide goods and services.

I’m not objecting to the fact that workers have to sign on to the provision of particular goods and services. What I find problematic is that they have no voice in how those goods and services are supplied. That is, they have no voice over the nature of their work, and its pace and so forth.

And sometimes they have no voice with respect to cases of what one could call moral injury, where there is a dedicated mission to their jobs. For the sake of profits, an employer can order a worker to do something that contravenes the ultimate mission of their work.

Here’s an example of moral injury: pharmacists used to be largely self-employed, and they would have a little pharmaceutical shop that they would run themselves.

In the past few decades, almost all of these independent pharmacies have been bought by major chains like Walmart, CVS, Walgreens. So now pharmacists have been reduced from professionals to employees of big chains.

And that has played a pivotal role in the opioid crisis. Under

private government

federal law, pharmacists have to report doctors who they think are writing far too many opioid prescriptions than could possibly be justified given the patient population that they’re serving.

Many of these pharmacists want to report some doctors who they think are either illegally channeling pills to the black market, or just over prescribing opioids at the danger of their patients. But, if they’re employees of CVS, or Walmart, or another large chain, they’re told that they’ll be fired if they report this, because these large chains are making huge profits from writing prescriptions for opioids. This kind of conflict is happening all the time.

For instance, we know that Facebook employees wanted to stop the propagation of various kinds of hateful propaganda.

They wanted to stop vaccine misinformation that is deadly when people take it seriously, or posts fueling the genocide in Myanmar. But Facebook algorithms were actually amplifying misinformation, hatred, outrage, and all kinds of toxic propaganda that undermines democracy and threatens human lives.

It is true that every so often 46

Facebook engineers have managed to pressure Mark Zuckerberg to give in: for a brief period of time before the 2020 election, Zuckerberg accepted tweaking of the algorithm that would promote truth over lies. But as soon as the election was over, he wanted to go back to algorithms that amplify all kinds of falsehoods that the election was stolen, since this stuff is the profit center when it goes viral. And it turns out that the stuff that goes viral is the stuff that gets people really angry and upset. That makes them spend more time on Facebook, which allows more ads to be sold.

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H

Essentially, Zuckerberg is the state of Facebook, or Meta.

He’s just like Louis XIV: he’s the dictator. Facebook employees are suffering moral injury because they have to live with Facebook’s effect on the world. And Zuckerberg doesn’t care. He’s destroying democracy, promoting genocide, promoting hatred of Muslims in India by letting Modi and the BJP promote anti-Muslim propaganda. These kinds of things.

istorically, the ideal has always been workers-cooperatives, where workers own and manage the firm together. We do have some wonderful examples of cooperatives and other worker-managed, owned, and operated firms. The most famous case is the Mondragon cooperative in Spain, which is a very large conglomerate these days.

However, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, these cooperatives, while they exist, haven’t spread.

It might be a model that’s difficult to replicate. One issue has to do with workers being unable to come up with the cash to actually own the firm. There are also conflicts of interest among workers, depending on their job within the firm—which results in coordination problems. And it’s not always optimal for workers to have all their investment eggs in one firm. So, although I’d like to see more workers-cooperatives, and we should open up the laws to make them more feasible than they are currently, it’s not clear to me that this is an entirely universalizable model.

What are some alternative workplace models that offer workers more of a voice?

Another model I’ve been interested in is codetermination, where the workers are considered

iben & mehta

independent investors, but not financial investors. What they’re investing is their human capital, their skills which they develop tailored to the needs of their particular firm. And investment of human capital should be treated as on a par with investments of financial capital. Under codetermination, you have joint management by workers and shareholders. Germany has a pretty well-developed model, and one of the first models of codetermination. Codetermination also exists in the Scandinavian countries, in France, and in the Netherlands. Usually, this can only happen after a firm scales up. Then, I think it becomes very easy to implement [this] model.

Under codetermination, workers have a voice at two different

levels in the firm. One is [that] they hold seats on the board of directors. And that’s a pretty distant relationship. What I find more interesting about codetermination is that there are also works-councils that regulate the day-to-day operation of work, that is, the actual day-to-day experience of workers on the shop floor. You have joint management by workers and representatives of the shareholders. So at the board level, workers have a say in whether, for instance, a plant will be shut down. That would be a major strategic decision. Whereas at the works-council level, they’ll be, say, regulating the pace of work and maybe some of the conditions of work: health and safety, and things like that.

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Could you say a bit more about this concept of investment of human capital?

W

ell, every firm has its own peculiar ways of operating. They have specific ways of doing things that have been developed over time. So workers acquire firm-specific skills rather than just generic skills they learned in school, or in a work or training program. For instance, a firm might have specifications

for how customer relations should be managed. It’s going to be specific to that firm’s outlook and marketing strategy. When workers learn those procedures, they’re developing their human 49

capital and investing that human capital. These skills are being tailored to the firm’s specific needs, and workers are investing their human capital in the firm.

That’s at least as important as financial capital. And so, by analogy, if you think shareholders are entitled to a say, workers should be too.

What kind of role should consumers play in this type of workplace structure?

W

ell, that’s a really great question. So codetermination falls short of, say, stakeholder capitalism. We should first distinguish between sharehold-

er capitalism and stakeholder capitalism. Under shareholder capitalism, the ultimate goal of the firm is simply to maximize returns to the shareholders, maximize profits. Whereas under stakeholder capitalism, the model of the firm is that it should be serving all the stakeholders. And the stakeholders include the workers as well as the shareholders, but they also include customers, suppliers, and vendors: essentially, people who are providing things that the firm needs to run its business—even including creditors, depending on your model. At the most expansive view, it includes the community where the firm operates, because firms depend on inputs of public goods, roads, transportation, infrastructure, an educated workforce, and so forth. And in this model, the board of directors would include representatives from all the stakeholders, not just workers and owners.

Over the course of this pandemic, we’ve seen a shift in bargaining power from employer to employee with many workers leaving their jobs for opportunities offering greater benefits or to simply not work for a while. Might this be a

private government

good opportunity to massively restructure the workplace and give workers more autonomy?

W

ell, really major social changes and institutional arrangements often require a concerted social movement, especially when the change involves flattening a hierarchy.

This is because people in power generally wish to keep power to themselves. So I do think the time is right, and we already do see widening discontent, with workers making demands for higher wages and so forth.

However, I want to stress that in order to make codetermination a reality in the United States, you need substantive changes in labor law. Under current American labor law, codetermination isn’t legal because the New Deal laws that regulate collective bargaining prohibit what’s known as a company union. A company union is an employer-run union. These unions are prohibited because it’s likely that the employer will run the union in their own interests.

Under American labor law, where there’s a very sharp division between supervisory and non-supervisory employees, all the non-supervisory employees can be members of a labor union, 50

but the supervisory employees cannot. This makes it very hard to devise a structure [like a work-council] in which workers would have a voice in management, because then that would make them supervisory.

Now I do want to stress that the structures of codetermination are distinct from labor unions: they work hand in hand, but on different issues. So in Europe, where they have codetermination, labor unions deal with the bread and butter issues, pay and benefits and a few other things.

The works-councils and the seats on the board deal with corporate strategic decisions and with managing day-to-day operations, working conditions, and so forth.

But it’s very difficult to set up a structure like that in America given the way American labor laws are set up, so you’d really have to rewrite a lot of laws in order to make that model feasible in the United States.

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iben & mehta

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o errto errto err (not)(not)(not) o errto errto err (not)(not)(not) o errto errto err (not)(not)(not)

simon p. hamartano

I

wonder if I will fall once more. I worry a time will come when I will return to my past. I contemplate whether such residual viciousness still lies within the depths of my being, lurking to spring forth and bring me back to that lowly state of existence.

I fear that, even worse, I will not rise again if such a moment lies in my future. I consider whether I have completely expelled it and if I am finally on that continual ascent. I ponder whether, for the remaining days of my life, I will have to always keep watch, continually guard myself, and at all times be ready to wage war against those vermin, insects, and beasts that are ever so desperate to infect me once more. I hope I have finally and fully turned toward God. I wonder, and I am not sure.

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There was a time when I was in the mire of myself. I felt submerged, suffocated, stuck. Had the corruption and vice taken me away, or had I used the corruption and vice to get away? I do not know the answer, and I do not wish to answer it. I am no longer there, of that I am sure.

Yet, there is no denying that I was there. A part of my past will forever be defined by that sin, that overwhelming, unfathomable toxicity that I could not escape, nay, did not want to escape. Even though I am no longer there, I nonetheless still wonder. Will I return? Will my life merely be a series of falls, after which I get up, only to fall once more? Is this repetitious monotony my life?

Am I this repetition? These questions seem to follow me. They creep into my thoughts when I least expect them. And, since I

do not know the answer, I keep guard, seeking and watching for those beings of death, wherever they may be, for I know not what form they may take. All I can do is hope that I am forever past it.

I do not wish to be dramatic, nor do I want to suggest that I have now attained any sort of existence that resembles perfection.

I am not only far from it, but I have my doubts that I will ever reach such an existence devoid of sin. Yet, this lowly state of which I speak is not merely that mode of life that contains the occasional sin but is otherwise virtuous; such a life is perhaps all for which one can ask. Rather, I am speaking of a life, which was my life, wholly constituted by sin. In a certain sense, then, I was sin, through and through. I may have certainly appeared to be living the good life from the perspective of others, but I know that in the depths of my being, it was not so. The difference today, however, is that I am now on that upward path. I certainly sin, but I am no longer submerged.

The waves may sweep me under the surface of the water from time to time, but I am now most certainly breathing air. Yet, in order to strike at the heart of the

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matter, namely how I actually left that lowly state of existence, further clarification is needed.

This sinful condition has, perhaps comfortingly so, been suffered by a great many people, as religious writings repeatedly confirm. Indeed, many of those who have died in a state of piety began their lives far from it, overwhelmed by their sinful nature, or at least the perception of such. I turn then to the words of John Bunyan, that Puritan of the seventeenth century who writes in his Grace Abounding Among the Chief of Sinners: But my original and inward pollution, that was my plague and my affliction. By reason of that, I was more loathsome in my own eyes than was a toad; and I thought I was so in God’s eyes too. Sin and corruption, I said, would as naturally bubble out of my heart as water would bubble out of a fountain. I could have changed heart with anybody. I thought none but the Devil himself could equal me for inward wickedness and pollution of mind. Sure, thought I, I am forsaken of God; and thus I continued 56

a long while, even for some years together.

I find myself wholly expressed in these words. It was this very affliction from which I also had suffered. Yet, above all, it is the last sentence that makes me feel as if, impossibly of course, John Bunyan was actually writing about me. Let me explain.

In the very infancy of that state of pure wrongdoing, I had not recognized what I was doing. I had not been aware that I was leading myself away from where I wanted to go. I had not realized that I was walking into the very pits of Hell, and that the Devil himself was guiding me there and watching in silent approval.

I had not known that my eyes were full of mud, and that those terrible vermin were gnawing at my flesh. Of course, though after quite some time, I learned that the life I was living, unbeknownst to me, was most far from God. However, instead of adopting an immediate reformation of my soul, which would have made myself wholly forgivable in the eyes of God, I continued on the very path before me. In short, I had recognized the error of my ways, and I did not change anything. I turned my back even 57

further from God and pursued my downward spiral into a state of abject misery and despair, for I had thought that the distance I had set between God and myself was unbridgeable.

An astonishingly similar sentiment is expressed by Saint Augustine of Hippo. In his Confessions, he explains that state of sin that had defined his adolescence: I had grown deaf from the clanking of the chain of my mortality, the punishment for the pride of my soul: and I departed further from You, and You left me to myself; and I was tossed about and wasted and poured out and boiling over in my fornications: and You were silent, O my late-won Joy. You were silent, and I, arrogant and depressed, weary and restless, wandered further and further from You into more and more sins which could bear no fruit save sorrows.

What strangeness it is to read these words in the unlikeliest of places! How can such a venerable person, a Doctor of the Church no less, have fallen into the same disease-ridden way of life where

to err (not)

I, a mere nothing, found myself only a short while ago? How can these wondrous pages of the religious life take on such a similar character to my very own experience? How could my failures be the same as that of Augustine and John Bunyan? Why did they also continue their descent, just as I did? I know not. All I can do is speak for myself.

would free myself of this burden, then I would not so often fall into sin. You may maintain that the world would be a better place if we were to only accept our faults and not so intensely attempt to stamp them out from every fiber of our existence. I consider what you say most surely, and I recognize that there is some truth to your objections.

I sense an objection. You may object to this ethics where sin must be avoided at all costs or otherwise eternal damnation awaits. You may contend that the very imposition of this ethical framework is the reason for the actions herein described, and that if I were to only recognize that this ethics is too rigid and that my entire fate is not in question, then I would live a much happier life. You may insist that if only I

I concur that the severity in which I attempted to rid myself of all baseness and lowliness did lead me to that which I had so rigorously attempted to avoid.

It made my existence not only lowlier but much harder to escape. The taunts and jeers of sin pursued me more viciously wherever I went, due to the very insistence that I must avoid it at all costs. And thus, I continued to fall. Of course, I would get 58

back up, but only for an exceedingly short time, for the traps that the Devil had set were everywhere. This continuous stumbling overwhelmed me to such a burdensome degree that eventually I gave up entirely. I no longer woke each morning ready to wage war upon those beasts that lurked everywhere, despite the fact that I had lost every previous battle. My exceedingly long series of defeats had taken its toll, so I let myself live a life wholly unto sin. I had deemed not merely the battle lost but the war itself.

Nonetheless, I disagree wholeheartedly with the claim that we should be content in our faults and adopt an ethics that accepts and permits error, intentional or not. There is no doubt that my failures have been exceedingly great, but I know that to give up this framework, in which vir59

tue leads to God and sin to the Hellfire, would be even worse than all those times in which I indeed made communion with those vile and wicked beasts. If this view of morality where all our efforts do indeed have these stakes is, as you seem to suggest, misguided, then what is life? Is this it? Is there truly nowhere we are meant to go, no need to put in that labor to move beyond this existence and reach a place with greater light, peace, and love?

If life only consists of a crude relativism that allows for error without any higher effect upon ourselves, then I think you have many more questions to answer than you initially suspect. Ah, it would perhaps be easier to live without that upward path ever present. It would be a simpler life, that is for sure. And yet, this suggestion can only be, at least in my eyes, a temptation, a

lowly thought meant to lead me away from God. For how could it be otherwise that only through labor and continuous effort will I undoubtedly reach Him? As I have said, I am not there.

And despite all that lies between myself and God, I am nonetheless looking up and gaining a surer footing than I have had before. I am no longer retreating into the abyss, making that distance ever greater. I know that I have made progress. There are certainly days, as I have also said, where various bits of mud and tar do blind me, but I more quickly dip my hands into that Fountain of clear running water to clean myself. But how did I, after so long walking away, actually change directions? How did I realize the error of my ways?

How did I go from down there to here?

The answer is philosophy. I cannot describe how it specifically happened, for the feeling that philosophy descended upon me seems to escape language. Nonetheless, as I began to read pages from the annals of philosophy, I began to reflect upon myself, and, through this contemplation, I recognized that I could not

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continue any further. I had been pursuing a path of vice with the constant rationalization that tomorrow would be the day I would change my ways. But the problem with tomorrow is that it never comes. Augustine “had grown deaf from the clanking of the chain of [his] mortality,” and so had I. I refused to acknowledge that not only would I succumb to death, just as every other person has and will, but that death could arrive at any moment. If the specter of death is ever present, then how could I willingly sin, as if I could change my ways later on unborrowed time? If I was going to change my ways, at least to some measurable degree, it would not be tomorrow, not in an hour, not even in a minute, but now.

The particular words that awakened me and put me onto the correct path lie in the Enchiridion of Epictetus, that man of wisdom and a true philosopher indeed. He writes: How long will you still wait to think yourself worthy of the best things, and in nothing to transgress against the distinctions set up by the reason? You have received

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the philosophical principles which you ought to accept, and you have accepted them.

What sort of a teacher, then, do you still wait for, that you should put off reforming yourself until he arrives?

You are no longer a lad, but already a full-grown man. … [R]emember that now is the contest, and here before you are the Olympic games, and that it is impossible to delay any longer, and that it depends on a single day and a single action, whether progress is lost or saved.

These very words pierced the inner workings of my being and I finally heard, truly heard, the commandment that I could not continue any further in my way of sin. As if speaking directly to me, I realized that I was an utter and complete hypocrite, for I had accepted many principles in theory and failed to put them into practice. And further, I then recognized that I could not afford to wait any longer, that the Olympic games are indeed right now, and that they can end at any moment.

Philosophy spoke to me in the same way it did for Augustine.

Whereas the particular words that changed me were those of 61

Epictetus, Augustine was likewise moved by Cicero’s Hortensius, a text unfortunately lost to time.

In Confessions, Augustine explains how Cicero similarly inflamed the inner depths of his soul: Quite definitely it changed the direction of my mind, altered my prayers to You, O Lord, and gave me a new purpose and ambition.

Suddenly all the vanity I had hoped in I saw as worthless, and with an incredible intensity of desire I longed after immortal wisdom. I had begun that journey upward by which I was to return to You. … But the one thing that delighted me in Cicero’s exhortation was that I should love, and seek, and win, and hold, and embrace, not this or that philosophical school but Wisdom itself, whatever it might be.

I do not know what Cicero said exactly in that text, but I sense that those words, whatever they might have been, contained a reverence for philosophy and its extraordinary ability to imbue one’s being with virtue, righteousness, and integrity. Regardless, the feeling that Augustine

describes is precisely the way I felt upon reading those marvelous words in the Enchiridion.

I reiterate (again) the great separation that lies between my present state of existence and that which I wish to reach. I continue to make mistakes, to err, to sin, but I no longer do so in the way that I had done before. I am a significantly better person than I was in my past, even if I am still not a good person by any means.

When Augustine read Hortensius, he likewise not only continued to struggle with temptation and sin but also fell into its traps and snares. His conversion was still many years away, and he was certainly not a saint the moment he finished reading that book by Cicero. All that became apparent to Augustine and myself was that

to err (not)

the way of life in which we were living was mere folly and that we could no longer put off our reformation. We began our ascent.

Yet, the moment in which Augustine (and Bunyan as well) truly reached that state of which I am yet to be in possession was characterized by surrender and a release of all that struggle, suffering, and hardship that, up until that moment, continued to plague Augustine and continues to plague me. I thus conclude with the words of Augustine that describe this very moment: When my most searching scrutiny had drawn up all my vileness from the secret depths of my soul and heaped it in my heart’s sight, a mighty storm arose in me,

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bringing a mighty rain of tears. … And much I said not in these words but to this effect: “And thou, O, Lord, how long? How long, Lord; wilt Thou be angry forever? Remember not our former iniquities.” For I felt that I was still bound by them. And I continued my miserable complaining; “How long, how long shall I go on saying tomorrow and again tomorrow? Why not now, why not have an end to my uncleanliness this very hour?” Such things I said, weeping in the most bitter sorrow of my heart.

And suddenly I heard a voice from some nearby house, a boy’s voice or a girl’s voice, I do not know: but it was a sort of sing-song repeated again and again, “Take and read, take and read.”

I ceased weeping and … I arose, interpreting the incident as quite certainly a divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the passage at which I should open. … I snatched it up, opened it and in silence read the passage upon which my eyes first fell: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in

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contention and envy, but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscences. [Romans xiii, 13.]

I had no wish to read further, and no need. For in that instant, with the very ending of the sentence, it was though a light of utter confidence shone in all my heart, and all the darkness of uncertainty vanished away.

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henry astor

interview with morgan klaus scheuerman

race, gender, andarti intelligence william freedman

Morgan Klaus Scheuerman is a PhD student studying Information Science at The University of Colorado Boulder. He studies the intersection between identity theory and computer vision, focusing on the ways in which artificial intelligences understand racial and gender identity. His recent paper, “Auto-essentialization: Gender in automated facial analysis as extended colonial project”, discusses the colonial implications of computer vision, addressing the problems associated with facial categorization and recognition. This interview was conducted by William Freedman and edited by Henry Astor.

Your paper discusses algorithms designed to determine identity information about a person based on their face.

Could you explain the process of designing and training these algorithms?

S

o first of all, like most computer systems, you have to specify exactly what the system is going to do. What tasks are we designing, and what machine learning model? In our paper, it’s gender classification. So to do that, you then need to train the model to see whatever genders you define as relevant. Generally, that’s male and female. See, we basically need to gather a bunch of images of what a male is supposed to look like and a bunch of images of what a female is supposed to look like. And basically, that’s how you teach the model to see specific patterns across those images.

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What are some common problems that occur in the process of training facial categorization algorithms, specifically regarding race and gender, like your paper discussed?

S

o obviously, these are socially determined. The people who are designing the model and designing the dataset to train the model will have a lot of power in terms of what those categories should look like. And so a lot of normative assumptions can come into that. This is where you get instances of bias, just even by accident, such as, “We didn’t think we needed to pay attention to this variable. We didn’t think that we needed this category enough. We didn’t have enough of this category of person.” But then there are also these kinds of normative assumptions in an average dataset: “What do men look like?”, for example.

“Are they usually white? Do they

usually have short hair? Do they usually have a beard? What are they wearing?” A model might pick up on that as an indicator of gender. So largely, especially in this paper, we’re focusing on the normative assumptions, the kind of cultural values that are becoming embedded, when you’re classifying something like race and gender.

Your research adopts Fanon’s concept of epidermalization.

Could you explain what that term means and how you use it, specifically in regards to your paper’s idea of auto-essentialization?

W

e adopted it at a really shallow level, probably.

But basically, it’s the idea of assigning not only specific racial categories to someone based on

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their visuality, but also characteristics of those categories. So we also kind of adopt this for gender, which is not generally how it’s used. But yeah, I would say we’re talking about it from the perspective of how people assign not only race to people—but that they’ve also assigned a level of inferiority of certain races and their practices alongside that visual marker.

Auto-essentialization is using the visual individuality of a person, their embodiment, as the essence of their underlying characteristics. So even things like physiognomy, I think, are a good example of that. And yes, automating that, which is a much larger scale. And I also think it obscures those human decisions in a unique way. People have the ability to say, “Well, it’s a model

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that’s outputting these potentially biased decisions.” Or they can hide behind a technical facade of “it’s not really possible to do X thing” or “it’s much simpler to just have male and female.” And so there’s this interesting ability to hide behind the technology as something that is difficult to control. It’s also often treated as objective.

Machine learning, or computer vision, is a visual tool. And it’s doing really the same thing that people do on a larger scale. So

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in this case, in visually assigning specific categories to people, we’re kind of arguing that the way that people are doing this is still reflective of those notions of superiority and inferiority.

And we’re really focused on how that’s happened with gender and how gender has been racialized itself. And so a way that certain people are treated as threats, for example, in computer vision is pretty reflective of the way certain gender minorities have been treated as threats culturally. So I think we explicate some

examples of how people have designed systems or datasets to recognize trans people across transition and the proposed use cases like security generally. We’re arguing that auto-essentialization is a little more broad, that it’s focused not only on gender, but other identities, but it’s also that the visual is the essence of a person’s identity. And that’s kind of how your vision is treating identity. So I guess that that’s how it maps to this idea of assigning certain characteristics of a person by their visuality.1 Your paper argues that auto-essentialization mimics or aids colonial systems of categorization, and that those categorizations are then used to justify control. How does auto-essentialization and the insertion of computers into this process reproduce the same kinds of colonial categorization?

I

think a pretty good example is the use of automation to

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monitor specific marginalized groups. I think China’s Uyghurs are the most common example of this. To me that’s a very explicit imperialist application of this type of technology. It maps pretty well. How can we dominate a specific other marginalized group and enact our own culture through reeducation camps and things like that? But we also talk about, I think, lower level things, which is more of an extension or a calcification of those values.

I think this is generally how our society operates around gender as well.

Right now, we generally treat gender as kind of a stable, fixed thing. It’s really “obvious” what it is. The debates that I keep seeing are about what is naturalized here and what is not. So I would argue that these smaller interventions, like Giggle,2 for example, are more of a calcification of the belief of gender as a fixed binary that is natural, and that reflects Western thought and Western medicalism. And

1. “Scheuerman cites Simone Browne, author of ‘Dark Matters: On The Surveillance of Blackness’ as philosophically influential. She writes: “Digital epidermalization is the exercise of power cast by the disembodied gaze of certain surveillance technologies ... that can be employed to do the work of alienating the subject by producing a truth about the racial body and one’s identity (or identities) despite the subject’s claims.”

2. Giggle, an app that describes itself as a “female social network,” is discussed in the paper for its use of facial categorization to determine who is allowed to use the app, as well as its executives’ trans-exclusionary understandings of gender.

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then we also talk about how underlying that seems to be a number of assumptions that people make about what gender looks like. So we discussed how the CEO defends the platform by referring to these other kinds of countries outside of the West that are unsafe for women. And I don’t have much insight into it but I also imagine that that kind of worldview reflects the question of, “What does a woman look like?” In terms of training a system, is a woman, as an example, ever masculine? I think we argue that it can be reflective of those practices in the sense that it could be adopted for similar practices, but also it’s extending what we’ve already established through colonialism: gender is a fixed binary that looks a certain way. And it generally favors white faces as the ultimate example of what a man and a woman look like. And that’s just through these kinds of mundane, tinier interventions.

How do we weigh the more identity-oriented critiques— auto-essentialization and epidermalization—with their potential benefits on a practical level?

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H

onestly, I think this is really hard. I think of all the work that I’ve done, this is the most critical piece. A lot of the other work I’ve done has been critical.

But I also wonder, how can we design interventions to improve these systems that already exist, just under the assumption that they will continue to exist, and that critiques are not going to make people say, “We should not build computer vision.” I do think that this paper, for a developer in the industry, would fall into the category of, “There’s nothing we could do about this.”

But I do think the takeaway is that identity itself should be at least treated with a lot more thought. People should be thinking through not only, “Is my system potentially biased towards one group and what is the demographic parity that I have in this?” but about the assumptions that are laden with those categories in the first place. I think the difficulty I have in applying it is whether doing that work is actually worthwhile, because it’s still upholding that this system should exist for some sort of identity classification. But I don’t think that it would be adopted in any way that would make people

stop doing this on human beings.

I don’t think that there’s a lot that the computer vision community would think was practical about this. And I imagine if they adopted it, it would be about, “How can I be more thoughtful about the histories that I’m embedding?” But that comes across often as “Here’s a posi-

tionality statement,” or “Here’s a statement of ethical decisions,” and it doesn’t change the fact that a system was built. Any human-centric computer vision, regardless of if it classifies gender or race explicitly, still has to contend with gender or race, or else that system will be biased.

And if it’s deployed, that’s also really problematic. I am aware of the limitations of this paper in actually changing any practices

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in computer vision. So hopefully, it’s more of a lens for people who are critical of these systems.

And it is a way to change computer vision, because I just think that the two worldviews inherently clash.

One thing we haven’t really touched on is the human side of facial categorization.

It’s an undeniable fact that

humans exhibit many of the same exact problems that AIs do, including, but not limited to, racial profiling and misidentification of gender. Do you think AI research can ever escape the trap of reproducing the same problems that human minds run into?

I

don’t think that there’s a way for AI to escape anything about the human mind because 72

humans are designing it, and it’s heavily reliant on humans. There is no magical autonomous AI system that can build itself from scratch and then train itself. So I don’t think there are ways to escape that. I think there are ways to use tools to mitigate human biases because you have to be really conscious of them. I think a problem has arisen where people are not trained in any way to be conscious of them. I think that the computer vision community has slowly become more aware through researchers outside the community and journalists, because AI is being deployed in the real world, it’s having real world impacts at this point.

change my approach,” or does that mean, “I’m just going to have proposed limitations of my system”? So I do think that there’s no escaping it, but there may be ways to account for it more thoughtfully. But it’s still always going to reproduce some value that a person holds. So I think, in the context of even accessibility3 , it’s reproducing the values of classifying identity, and potentially getting it wrong for some people is still beneficial to a certain community. And that community is the one we’re valuing. We’re doing this in terms of facial recognition and security.

I think that’s also just a value that certain people hold.

But I think it’s more like, “Okay, I’m going to acknowledge that I have this bias in some way,” and does that mean, “I’m going to

So there’s this value of, if you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t be concerned about it.

I think that’s embedded into fa-

3. Previous papers have discussed the utility of facial categorization for alt text, providing identity information for people who use screen readers, for example.

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cial recognition and surveillance systems. And obviously, all this is also conditioned by society.

How are we being conditioned to accept or not accept policing and security? I think no matter what, if you’re classifying a person, you’re going to be embedding some kind of norms about what that person is, and then at the higher level of the task itself. I think there’s a lot about human values and whether you even value the task. So short answer, I don’t think there’s any escaping human biases, human values, human opinions when they’re designing these things.

Your work has these two distinct ideas. First, the ontological, identity-oriented critiques around epidermalization, and then the specific instances of bias and dataset annotation problems that you mentioned.

How do these two distinct but seemingly related ideas interact and how should we understand your broader stance on computer vision?

I

would say that the way they interact is through a focus on the datasets and annotations4 of those datasets. Everything that

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we’ve been taught is connected through all these cultural histories. And so the way that we view things like gender and race, and the way that we view others, in general, is very connected to that history, and is reflective of that history. And so that diversification, or just the annotation, the collecting of data about certain groups is going to reflect those worldviews. Oftentimes, I don’t think anyone explicitly thinks, “Okay, I’m focusing on this colonialist view,” but I would say that would generally be my argument for what the connection is. We have a legacy of how identity has been constructed as a tool of power, to be used against specific people in favor of the superiority of other people, and that is reflective of how we see race. And then if we go on to use racial classification, the way we do that is informed by how our society has shaped the way we see race.

I don’t want to speak broadly on AI, but within computer vision, I’m heavily critical. But I’m also pragmatic. So I do think that this lens of viewing computer vision as reflective of histories of problematic gender and race classification is valid. And so I would

4. “Data annotation is the categorization and labeling of data for AI applications” - https:// appen.com/blog/data-annotation/

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say that I do agree with the idea that computer vision is problematic because it’s laden with these types of assumptions. But I’m also very cognizant of the power of this industry, in that computer vision will continue to exist. And so I do agree with the people who are trying to improve the status quo that in many ways upholds the fact that computer vision will exist. So there’s kind of a tension there, which is that the concept of computer vision itself generally seems inherently problematic. And I think it would be beneficial if computer vision didn’t necessarily exist, because I think society could function without it. And there’s just so much harm that can be done with it.

But it already does exist. And so I’m really cognizant that it’s going to continue to exist, now that it is an extremely powerful industry and has a very strong research community. And so at that point, “How do we mitigate the most harm possible?” is kind of my stance, even though in many ways it does uphold computer vision as a viable industry.

I have these two tensions in my own view.

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elliot blake hueske if it’s all or nothing

elliot blake hueske if it’s all or nothing

I

t is spring again and there is a certain virulent light that clings to the surface of the earth with shaky fingers. It coruscates in gutter puddles and intensifies films of oil before their descent to a dusky, dayless world. It mocks my torpor as it dances in mud and animates the soiled permanence of sidewalk stains with shuddering flickers. It shimmers in its circumstance in ways that I envy and hunger for—transforming obscurity into clarity and breathing an intense, albeit ephemeral, glow into sediment before it slinks into shadows.

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I sit on a bench in the park engulfed by springtime light. The mist of my breath materializes before me and vanishes. It is too cold to be this bright, and I remain complacently blinded by the blurry energy of afternoon.

The wind is a hurried, panicked exhalation from the Hudson, and it shakes the trees into nervousness, producing agitated tessellations of light and shadow on the asphalt. This volatile flashing of sun and darkness is kaleidoscopic and grand—a theater of dynamic reflections. Each leaf becomes something precious, burnished,

and bright like colored glass.

Everything moves, changes, and radiates around me.

I have always associated an abstruse melancholy with the blinding rebirth of spring. Tulip shoots have never known the ruthlessness of memory, the subtle violence of nostalgia, the impossibility of return. And as newness abounds, it resurrects the things and the people that I have lost. It revitalizes questions still unanswered, moments in time, smells and sounds that I thought I had forgotten. Balmy nights of late September, foreheads swept with hair, elbow brushing elbow, words unsaid, the smell of rain before cement, this and that and this accumulating as a production of parts with a cruel director. This bloom of spring prompts dreams so sweet you cry when you wake—a sinister gloom of poetry exchanged, and coffee sipped, and walks at dusk, and setting suns, and taking too long to say goodbye. It is then (in the child-like sentimentality of summer’s end) that I question the intentions of others, the goodness of others, the goodness of myself.

As I sit in the park, I wait to see myself more clearly. Perhaps the

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brightness of the day that burns through my eyelids will illuminate the twilight chambers of my nature, projecting their contents into consciousness in an act of brilliant unveiling. It may offer explanations to my questions.

Does the subjective experience of regret indicate virtue or vice?

Is the attempt to revive the extinct an act of compassion or selfishness? Does goodness aggregate in reality and scream its presence like cicadas in the summer? Yet as I seek a formula for characterizing goodness and its manifestations, nothing so unequivocal exists. In spite of the activity that surrounds me and the brilliance of the sun, I feel no closer to the answers I want.

I think I condemn such radiance because, despite its luster, it does not reveal what I seek. Yet it is by virtue of brightness that we are capable of exploration in the first place.

I think I know now that despite our efforts to see where goodness lives, there is no light that can unmask its presence or confirm its absence. No candle or bulb can expose cases of virtue in a direct and unambiguous way.

Intentionally looking for manifestations of virtue can make 80

locating it feel impossibly difficult. Thus, in the midst of exploration I find a sense of truth in the early Stoic view that virtue is as elusive as it is rare. “Early Stoics” references a generation of thinkers immediately following the foundation of the Stoic school by Zeno after his time at Plato’s Academy: alongside Zeno, notable figures include Chrysippus and Cleanthes. These thinkers hold that the truly virtuous person does not exist in reality.

To regard the virtuous agent as a construct is productive, but to look for them in everyday life is like searching for pearls in flower beds or waiting for whitecaps to turn into meteors. While I contend that virtue is increasingly uncommon to detect, I am unsatisfied with the notion that it cannot be achieved at all. I tend to believe that virtue exists on a spectrum and can be identified in people and their actions.

Given that the early Stoics do not theorize virtue in terms of degrees, it is not the case that some individuals are more or less virtuous than others. Rather, virtue is possessed entirely by some and not at all by the majority of people: there is no intermediate state. Therefore, the attempt to 81

illuminate some virtuous characteristics is fruitless, as true goodness would already be evident in its magnificent completeness. We cannot scavenge for shreds of virtue and call them meaningful, while shrouding indications of vice. There are no virtuous parts that can be praised independently from a whole.

The Stoics assert that a plurality of virtues exists within a unified collective, understood through the concepts of agent and action interentailment, meaning that the separate virtues entail each other such that a virtuous person has access to them all. If an agent has one virtue, she possesses all of them. Thus, it is not comprehensible to say that an individual can be courageous without also being wise, for example. Moreover, it is also the case that a virtuous action is the product of “agreement” among the many virtues. Therefore, if an action is entirely good, all virtues are coherently involved with each other. To illustrate, imagine a lost man. He is trying to return home, and although he lacks an understanding of his exact location, he knows that he must cross a river. Knowledge and experience are necessary to both

if it’s all or nothing

recall this piece of information and to navigate the stretch of whitewater effectively. Perhaps he determines that he should attempt passage at nightfall, when he knows the rapids will calm.

Yet he must still invoke courage to act in a time of uncertainty and danger.

There is an almost suffocating sense of futility in this assertion.

Virtue, and the possibility of

systematic body of knowledge.

Such a thing is possessed by few, if any. As the Stoics are literalists about the claim that virtue is knowledge in a cohesive and unified sense, an individual cannot have more or less knowledge just as they cannot be more or less virtuous. It follows that one cannot lead a good life without having a comprehensive understanding of physics, logic,

obtaining it, is an all-or-nothing phenomenon. One can never be good if one is not wholly good, so our transgressions are not lessened by our benevolence.

In fact, the culmination of all excellent deeds cannot alter one’s moral status. For the Stoics it is conceivable that one may work towards virtue, but the act of achieving it is practically impossible: This is because a prerequisite to virtue is access to an established and unchanging

and ethics—the three exhaustive subfields of the Stoic principles of inquiry. When someone lacks this framework, new information cannot be appropriately organized and stabilized within a system. This feels incomprehensibly demanding and entirely inconsistent with contemporary intuitions surrounding behavior and cognition. Let us say that a quantum physicist who is the leading expert in quarks applies her knowledge to new theoretical 82

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frameworks about dark matter, yet she is entirely ignorant of normative ethical theories. Many people might maintain that she is still a knowledgeable person, just not in all subjects. Moreover, let us say that the physicist is generally known to be humble and kind. The Stoics would argue that she is not only ignorant, but also vicious. It is not until she has a systematic and coordinated account of knowledge that she can truly escape ignorance and acquire virtue.

other, making knowledge even more difficult to achieve. Yes, we may learn from errors, but if the lessons we glean only advance us millimeters towards virtue, what urges us to seek meaning in those lessons? The world offers us opportunities to extract value, but what is the significance of a single piece of knowledge when we lack a system in which to conceptualize it as a part? If the progress we make is practically imperceptible, what keeps us trying?

Given this structure of virtuous knowledge, the majority of people tend only to express beliefs, or opinions, and remain in a condition of “viciousness.” This is because a very limited set of individuals possess fully inclusive knowledge systems for information to systematically function within. Most of us simply have belief systems that are constantly evolving. Although our beliefs may aim at the truth, they do not have a claim to them insofar as they are not part of a stable, coherent system. Continuous shifting and development makes us prone to mistakes: a perpetually evolving belief system might prompt opinions or judgments that are inconsistent with each

This concern is evident in Plutarch’s rendering of Stoic virtue ethics in On Common Conceptions: “Just as in the sea, the man an arm’s length from

the surface is drowning no less than the one who has sunk five-hundred fathoms, so even those getting closer to virtue are no less in a state of vice than those far from it.” It may seem that the corrupt wrongdoer has far more moral ground to traverse in attempting to acquire virtue than the saint does. Yet, if virtue is binary, the distance one must cover to attain goodness is not entirely significant. This may feel unimaginably demanding to some, but paradoxically liberating to others—particularly those inclined to vice. When an accumulation of transgressions amounts to nothing, what is the worth of redemption? If goodness is practically unattainable, why break our backs crawling toward it? If everyone is simply vicious, what compels us to swim to the surface?

I find both extremes unsatisfactory. Emancipation from moral responsibility and obsession with virtue are too simplistic.

They both invoke a type of unabashed severity that verges on destruction—both to oneself and to others. I sit in the park on the bench that is drenched in light and I am submerged in this dizzying glare that fills

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my lungs and purples my skin and lips. I am engulfed in its effulgence, drowning in the way it illuminates. There are those swimmers five-hundred fathoms deep who still command their bodies upwards, choking through the midnight zone and persisting until sunlight shines across their hypoxic tissue. And there are those who revel in the lightless trenches under a pressure one thousand times that of land.

Something the Stoics do not address is the case of the individual who does not want to sink, but does not want to swim. The one who merely treads water.

While she is not sinking, she also does not resist inertia. She conserves her energy with the weight of many seas above her.

Yet she can still identify small instances of value, fragments of beauty, remnants of goodness, and glimpses of virtue that she collects piece by piece. Some of them are hazy, abstract shreds, but some are more transparent.

In this space of tranquility, she might think of the secrets she keeps for others. She might think back to the night in winter when she walked with someone she cared for too late. She might remember how it was starting to

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rain and their eyelashes caught the droplets in split-second moments before the wind brushed them away. She might think of the bittersweet blurriness of that time and the brutal clarity of now. She might think of her childhood bedroom. She might think that what she has lost is more valuable than what she might gain. She might think of a girl with the face of another in her hands, asking in messy embrace for her words to mean something, withdrawing in cruel confusion. She might think of how the light falls on the river.

She might want to be a droplet of rain on an eyelash.

Maybe this is all we can have.

Maybe virtue can only be possessed in small doses. Yet maybe these slivers of goodness aggregate to produce something that is technically incomplete, but is not lacking. Although it seems incomprehensible to know what possessing virtue in the Stoic sense might feel like, life can seem fulfilling even when virtue is not the only guiding force to motivation, action, or judgment.

Nonetheless, virtue is unattainable if one lacks the ability or incentive to uncover it. As virtue is sometimes not immediately 85

recognizable, an agent must work to illuminate its presence by modifying her attentional processes or perhaps engaging in ex post facto reappraisal of an event or interaction.

The Stoics present the achievement of goodness as an exclusively active development, yet I tend not to think of it in such energetic movements. Rather, I see virtue in personal inclinations, in memory, in the flicker of coins tossed in a fountain and the wishes they once held. Virtue pervades an unpretentious gait, a pensive inhalation that drags in cold air like something heavy, the thoughtful pause before speech as if conducting an orchestra of semantics before words erupt into the world with the strength of a symphony. It is in the modest gestures: fingers gliding through water in perfect circles and flutter kicks helping us tread water below the surface. Perhaps the most productive space for virtue to inhabit is not the land but this aquatic middleground.

When someone has acquired virtue, it is no longer motivationally productive. Yet the region just below the surface is a space of dynamism and creativity. Here, the cases of virtue can be com-

if it’s all or nothing

When someone has acquired virtue, it is no longer motivationally productive. Yet the region just below the surface is a space of dynamism and creativity. Here, the cases of virtue can be compiled so as to guide our future action. If it can be identified in this space, then we can know what it is and strive for it.

Virtue lacks motivational force if it is already possessed as well as if it is never known. In order to be virtuous, at least some initial progress towards the surface must be made. Plutarch suggests that we begin life at the bottom of the ocean. Our ethical origins are located in total darkness, among hydrothermal vents, filled with extreme heat and a noxious mixture of sulfide and methane.

Such an environment is inhospitable for most living organisms, although some thrive in it. Nonetheless, the majority of earth’s creatures must rise a bit before flourishing. To lead a good life would be nearly impossible in the abyssopelagic zone, as it is a state in which the meaning of virtue is entirely unknown. Light cannot penetrate such depths, and it is only when brightness filters through that we can begin to see its value. Only by knowing its presence can we comprehend its worth and desire it. Conversely, those who reside at the depths of the sea will not know the importance of virtue if they never experience it.

It only takes some photons of light to know what virtue is and 86

and to want it. Even in the dimness, we start to feel its warmth.

It does not necessitate that we pursue it frenetically. Instead it illuminates brief instances of goodness, like the iridescence of a school of fish or the gentle pull of the waves. I conceptualize navigating life in terms of salient recollections, of regrets, of desires, of motivations. These experiences run like wild horses across my memory. They are not commanded by a single rider or a binary framework, rather they announce their presence in powerfully necessary ways. Sometimes they glide through my consciousness in an electrifying, unbroken rush. Sometimes it is more of an ambling trot. Sometimes one will hold back, while others race ahead. Yet although there are distinctions in the quality and contributions of each member of the herd, there is an earth-trembling unity to their existence.

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They nurture, enhance, and guide each other. It is precisely their nature as a group of distinct and yet coordinated entities that gives them strength.

I do not act, think, or want in binaries. Nor is it the general case that I align my behavior perfectly in adherence to acquiring virtue and escaping vice.

Context, disposition, and inclinations make a multitude of actions suitable or inappropriate for any given circumstance. It is quite instinctive to feel that life is a chaotic accumulation of compassion, hurt, contrition, silence, and noise—not a pursuit of righteousness or descent into depravity. We know ourselves through our collected experiences. Life consists of events and behaviors and concepts that are not entirely virtuous, but also not absolutely vicious. Instead they are a hybrid of the two extremes

and we learn to appreciate such complexity. As long as we know that virtue exists and that it can shine onto us at some moments, we can grow from its effects. We feel it on our skin and know that we have some claim to it even if not in totality. ***

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he sun is descending over the river. There is an uneasy indifference to the late evening— like passing eye contact with a former friend. My hands shake a bit in the chill of late evening, and my teeth chatter as I exhale, in a kind of affected gesture, into the cold. It is true that virtue can feel remote at times, but I contend that it is never entirely lost.

Even when it feels absent, we might discover its manifestations in unexpected places. It exists in the comfortable silence between you and the person sitting next to you, emerges in the songs that you cannot listen to without thinking of them. It wanders through memory to advise our present action.

Although the light still dances in tired flickers on the water of the Hudson, it has left me in shadow. It strikes me as bizarre that I

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can still gaze upon its brightness but am no longer engulfed by it. I feel its warmth on my skin even as I watch the current of the river extinguish it. The Stoics do not offer a framework to guide the individual who is close enough to the surface to glimpse the light, but is not compelled to reach it. I think it is more convincing that an individual identifies the function and instances of virtue in their current condition, while also maintaining an awareness of the existence of vice. To forget a state of viciousness is to forget its enduring danger. Would someone who has emerged from the water ever consider diving once again below the waves? It seems that such a return would be unlikely. Yet does this indicate that they have lost touch with the concept of vice entirely?

Does dry land correlate with the erasure of a vicious past? If so, the Stoic conception of virtue feels ironically like a state of ignorance. Without at least some peripheral awareness of vice, one is naive to the actions of the world. Without understanding how vice operates, one is unable to navigate its manifestations.

Thus, it would seem that a better alternative is to access virtue and vice equally in the half-light and

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half-darkness of the space just beneath the surface.

Perhaps this intermediate stagnation feels like the best choice compared to the analogously self-destructive behaviors of constant swimming and passive sinking. When one is addicted to achieving a regimented and exclusionary notion of virtue, one might drown in fervent pursuit of what they think is good. As they paddle to the surface, the rapid change in pressure deposits nitrogen gas into their lungs and blood, yet despite the pain of decompression sickness, they will not even have virtue unless they obsessively continue to pursue it. Likewise, sinking to the ocean basin ensures oblivion. In both cases, the individual relinquishes their autonomy and dubiously embraces one of two extremes.

Treading water near the surface allows one to glean the virtues that are most praised, while not forgetting the vices from which they have progressed. One still must exert energy so as not to sink further, while not exerting enough to destroy oneself in the process. Life should not be an excruciating upwards movement nor a complete surrender.

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There is a Greek word, galene, that describes the ocean with no wind. As the Stoics are corporealists of the soul, galene refers to a condition of cognition that is placid as opposed to the physical agitation of the mind that we sometimes experience in response to certain stimuli.

Not everything is so categorically distinctive as sailing through a hurricane versus floating in the doldrums. As we navigate the world, we sometimes thrive in disarray and alternatively desire tranquility. Nonetheless, we tend to seek the middle ground. We let our feelings and experiences ripple through us, tangible but not all-consuming. ***

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y hands are getting colder and I shove them in my pockets to leave the park. Although the sunlight has retired, it persists in new ways. It is reflected in the ephemeral spark of a lighter that illuminates a familiar face now blurry with time.

The headlights of a passing cab remind me of the suffocating and yet brilliantly covetable light of mid-afternoon. There is a lonely intimacy of the streetlight outside the building on 115th

that I have not stepped inside in quite some time. These flashing instances make me think of the worlds yet to be illuminated and the things that can never be illuminated again—slowly extinguishing memories like moments within that building that feel more distant with every new day.

As I walk, it does not feel dark.

I remember hearing once about false dawn, or zodiacal light. It is a transitory thing—a diluted, pearly gleam in the night that extends from the sun like a white scar on the ecliptic. It is the cinematic output of sunlight ricocheting against interplanetary

if it’s all or nothing

dust and cascading along the zodiac. Despite its presence, light pollution often veils it such that we cannot see its flush against early morning. It glows in temporary obscurity, yet we need not see it to know that it exists.

I think of the enigmatic wonder that this sublunar radiation holds.

Some beautiful things are not immediately transparent, so we allow them to slip from us with aching effortlessness. Some beautiful things only show us parts of themselves, and we must be content with such. Some beautiful things are worth pushing against the current to grasp, to hold, and to know.

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