Tabula Rasa Issue 5 (Claremont Colleges Philosophy Journal)
Tabula Rasa
The Claremont Colleges
Tabula Rasa is the undergraduate philosophy journal of the Claremont Colleges, founded in December 2020. Tabula Rasa is published biannually and includes both written pieces and artwork within the realm of philosophy. In creating and publishing Tabula Rasa, we hope to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and creative work among undergraduate students interested in philosophy.
Etymology: (/’tæbjələ rasə) is the Latin term for “blank slate.” In philosophy, the term is associated with John Locke’s theory that individuals are born without innate mental content, and so knowledge is gained exclusively through sensory experience and perception.
EDITORS-IN-CHIEF
Aaron Morgan (Pomona '25)
Sam Hernandez (Pomona '24)
Sophie Krop (Pitzer '25)
LAYOUT EDITOR
Aaron Morgan (Pomona '25)
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Aaron Morgan (Pomona '25)
Andrew Kim (Pomona '26)
Emilio N. Bankier (Pomona '27)
Sam Hernandez (Pomona '24)
Shawn Kathuria (Pomona '27)
Tim Jiang (Pomona '27)
RESIDENT ARTISTS
Sam Hernandez (Pomona '24)
Cecilia Ransburg (Pomona '25)
Aaron Morgan (Pomona '25)
Cover Photo by Sam Hernandez
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
We are delighted to present the Fall 2023 issue of Tabula Rasa. For the first time, this letter is written collaboratively by Tabula Rasa’s first co-editors-in-chief—a shift that reflects something new about the spirit of our journal and the environment in which the pieces we are presenting were written.
The articles in this issue explore a wide array of topics and spans multiple traditions— from continental to analytic philosophy, from political and social theory to metaphysics and ethics—and undertakes a range of stylistic approaches, ranging from the traditional scholarly essay to the stylized manifesto. Each offers a unique perspective on pressing philosophical questions, beginning with Aaron Morgan’s re-consideration of the relationships between the politics of environmental and land justice, decolonization, and questions of epistemology. This is followed by Andrew Kim's thought-provoking proposed revision to Quinean naturalism, challenging his criterion of ontological commitment by rethinking it’s platonic underpinnings, while Shawn Kathuria challenges us to consider the ethical implications of emerging technologies through a discussion of quantum computing. Sam Hernandez then offers a nuanced perspective on the epistemic privilege thesis in standpoint epistemology, introducing a new distinction that might help to clarify problems such a theory encounters.
The issue also features Emilio N. Bankier’s creative manifesto on genius, a genre we rarely encounter in contemporary academic work, alongside Tim Jiang’s treatise against ruled-based decision making’s stranglehold over our ethical thinking, which he contends functions as a bottleneck limiting sustainable living in his piece on Greenboxes, round out this diverse collection.
We hope that these essays inspire you to join us in our ongoing exploration of philosophical ideas. We extend our deepest gratitude to Michael Green, whose unwavering support as our faculty advisor has been instrumental in bringing this issue to life.
As always, we invite you to visit our website, tabularasaclaremont.com, to explore past issues and submit your own work for future editions. We welcome your questions and contributions as we continue to grow this community of philosophical inquiry.
Sam Hernandez, Aaron Morgan, and Sophie Krop
Co-Editors-in-Chief
CONTENTS / FALL 2023
TITLE: THIS IS THE TITLE
WHAT, FOR JOAT, IS ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS?
Writer Name, Pomona ’23
NAVIGATING RESPECT IN TOVANGAR/LOS ANGELES
Aaron Morgan, Pomona '25
I’m not advocating that we all learn Potawatomi or Hopi or Seminole, even if we could. Immigrants came to these shores bearing a legacy of languages, all to be cherished. But to become native to this place, if we are to survive here, and our neighbors too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might truly be at home.
Robin Wall Kimmerer1
I write this paper in view of Joat. It can be seen while walking on most parts of Pomona College’s campus, looking down from above the roofs of Spanish Colonial Revival dorm halls. On occasional winter days, students and community members comment on its snow-capped peaks while meandering through the self-proclaimed “Campus in a Garden.”2
Joat is a name that aptly means Snowy Mountain.3 Joat is also almost universally known on campus as Mount Baldy, one peak in a range first named Hidakapu and later called the San Gabriel Mountains by settlers and the state;4 San Gabriel, of course, referring to Mission San
1 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions, 2015), 58
2 Pomona College Office of Facilities and Campus Services, “Campus Planning and Landscaping Guidelines,” Design Guidelines, https://www.pomona.edu/sites/default/ files/planning_guidelines.pdf
3 Mark Frank Acuña, The Place Below Snowy Mountain (Claremont: League of Women Voters of Claremont Area, 2010), 3
4 Mark Frank Acuña, The Place Below Snowy Mountain, 9
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Gabriel, the institution established in the late 1700s by which the Spanish colonized Tovangar, the World,5 and enslaved the Tongva and other local Indigenous people. Pomona College, named after the Roman goddess of fruit and plenty in homage to the booming settler citrus industry of the late 1800s,6 sits upon Torojoatgna—the place below Joat, one of many Tongva villages now long decimated by the processes of Spanish and American colonization.7 The names Joat and Torojoatgna are now scarcely remembered in official memory; the only notable mentions are a timeline on Pomona’s website that few community members will likely ever read8 and a commemorative re-naming of Cahuilla Park in the Claremont Village to Joat Park in 2023 that has not yet been implemented in signage or taken up by many residents.9 It is as if the name itself is as crucial to forget as the society and the people who still lack federal recognition as a sovereign nation and occupied territory, and therefore still lack any ownership and the ability to steward even small parts of their ancestral
5 Acuña, 10
and stolen territory. It is as if by utterance the land itself, let alone the Tongva people, will revolt, unsettling the reality that Pomona College holds onto by any means necessary—legitimate institution as it claims to be with what seems to be a perfectly normal history and relationship to the colonizing state apparatus. What incursions into the status quo might occur if the sanctity of Joat, once a bedrock of the World that was silenced and torn asunder by ongoing colonization, were to reappear from within the ski-lifts and camping sites of Mount Baldy? What if the acorns, buckwheat, and sage that line its peaks and crests were rediscovered as not mere brush on property set out for recreation or private ownership, but as a gift from a being greater than ourselves?
It is in the spirit of that settler nightmare that I chose to begin this paper with this brief discussion of how settlers and settler institutions name the land and environment in which they live: to perturb any assumptions that academics and their readers know the entities about which we
6 “Pomona Valley Historical Collection,” University Library, Cal Poly Pomona, https:// libguides.library.cpp.edu/c.php?g=771946&p=6020434
7 “An Intro to the Land We Live On,” Organic Farm (blog), Pomona College, https:// www.pomona.edu/farm/blog/posts/intro-land-we-live
8 “1884 and Before,” Pomona College TIMELINE, Pomona College, https://www.pomona.edu/timeline/1880s/1884
9 Steven Felschundneff, “Council uses Tongva word for ‘snowy mountain’ to rename Cahuilla Park,” Claremont Courier, 11/26/2023, https://claremont-courier.com/latest-news/cahuilla-park-gets-a-name-change-75602/
talk when we discuss “the environment,” particularly when thinking about how to restore our relationship to it.
While ecological thought has existed within and even exemplified various traditions of philosophy for millennia, Euro-American philosophy only canonically caught up to thinking about the environment as more than a passive thing to be mastered in the 20th century, notably through the contributions of thinkers like Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Arne Naess, Holmes Rolston III, Rachel Carson and more.10 In this paper I will revisit Aldo Leopold, a writer and conservationist, as he offers critiques of Euro-American capitalist conceptions of nature and ethical relations to the environment by the introduction of the concept of the land ethic and the biotic community. The goal for Leopold, and the broader movement in environmental ethics that he represents, is not to promote action only in the interests of humanity, utilizing instrumental reason to preserve the integrity of the natural object that is the environment. Leopold’s project is instead to resituate human beings as one entity in a broader ecology of life and to
elaborate an ethic that reflects and respects this integrated totality. There are, as one might expect, many critiques to be made of such early Euro-American environmental thought. However, the question I foremost want to pose, and the one I will return to throughout my analysis of Leopold’s environmental philosophy, is the following: what, for Joat, is environmental ethics?
Leopold worked for nearly two decades for the U.S. Forest Service11 and in 1949 published a book of environmental writings, A Sand County Almanac, that became a touchstone for the nascent environmentalism movement. In the Almanac, Leopold lays the foundation for a non-anthropocentric environmental ethic, one that has admirable ambition but still largely failed to escape key features of capitalist and colonial ideology. Critical of capitalism’s callous treatment of nature, Leopold rejects the dominant American “system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest,” arguing that it is blinded to essential aspects of ecological networks simply because they “lack commercial value.”12 For Leopold, the government’s inability to properly manage the environment derives from an inadequate understanding of the complexity of the ecological totality of nature, which he calls
10 Andrew Brennan and Norva Y. S. Lo, “Environmental Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental/
12 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 2020), 214
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the “biotic community.”13 In this account, the environment cannot be only understood as passive property—the biotic community, of which we are a part, is instead “a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals,”14 and as such is “too large, too complex, or too widely dispersed” to be handled by a centralized government that is “handicapped by its own dimensions.”15 Recognizing our place within the biotic community thus entails for Leopold the creation of a new ethical attitude that smust be taken up by farmers, land managers, and all of humanity more broadly. This intervention has the potential, as Leopold intended, to radically disrupt hegemonic Euro-American conceptions of nature; yet Leopold’s turn to personal ethics still fits snugly within capitalist individualism as he fails to recognize the incompatibility of the land ethic with the larger structures of American governance and ownership. Leopold’s injunction to recognize the value of the environment and our ethical obligation to it is primarily an “ethical obligation on the part of the private owner.”16 For Leopold, a thick conception of land as biotic community does not, as it might in many Indigenous philosophies,
demand the recognition of land as something that cannot be owned. Leopold also fails to recognize the colonial origins of the violence and alienation he seeks to remedy, attributing it to the “density” of American society and ecology instead,17 and in doing so maintains the integrity of the American colonial state project and regime of private property while appealing to the better natures of its hardworking citizens. If not a critique of the structures of colonialism, what use does the land ethic have?
Although too narrowly applied by Leopold himself to the individual consciences of the American petty bourgeoisie, Leopold’s conception of the land ethic provides a basis for thinking about ethical relations to land and the environment beyond anthropocentric instrumental reason. Following from his alternative ontology of the biotic community, Leopold suggests that we can elaborate from our biological interdependence essential attitudes of respect and appreciation towards the environment. As Leopold points out, “we can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or
13 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 204
14 Leopold, 216
15 Leopold, 213
16 Leopold, 214
17 Leopold, 220
otherwise have faith in.”18 A primary failure of economic or rationalist approaches to the environment is that they fail to develop these affects, or what Leopold calls the “ecological conscience,” and thus any attempt at fostering “individual responsibility for the health of the land” is rendered ineffective.19 Leopold’s account of a possible ethical relationship to land, which “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals,”20 is a natural extension of the progression of Western ethics that, according to him, first articulated obligations at the scale of the individual, then society, and only now to the final stage of the land and natural world. Despite this questionable intellectual genealogy, Leopold is rightly pointing to the general inability of Euro-American philosophical traditions to consider non-humans as inherently valuable, and worth considering as ethical beings in themselves. The land ethic requires us to consider as part of our ethical life an additional holistic obligation to the land itself: “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” Leopold writes. “It is wrong when it tends
otherwise.”21 This holistic maxim can be critiqued as potentially sidelining human interests to that of an abstract totality, but as J. Baird Callicott argues, Leopold posits the land ethic as “an accretion—that is, an addition—to our several accumulated social ethics, not something that is supposed to replace them.”22 The attention and significance Leopold gives to affective dimensions of ethical and ecological life, and the gap he articulates in canonical philosophical ethics, provides a starting point within Euro-American thought from which to begin reconsidering humanity’s many connections and relations to nonhuman and more-than-human worlds. Leopold’s intervention is strongest when he elaborates the possibility of a form of ecological and communal respect that can be developed from an affective environmental ethic, something that is suppressed by the managerial calculus of capitalist conservation. Callicott, in his analysis of Leopold and the land ethic, suggests that the ethical demand of a land ethic is not a denial of all human interests but a respectful integration of human action within the entangled web of life and death that constitutes the biotic community.
18 Leopold, 214
19 Leopold, 221
20 Leopold, 204
21 Leopold, 224-25
22 J. Baird Callicott, “The Land Ethic,” 211, my emphasis
Callicott writes:
In the biotic community there are producers and consumers, predators and prey. One might say that the integrity and stability of the biotic community depends upon death as well as life: indeed, one might say further, that the life of one member is premised squarely on the death of another. So one could hardly argue that our killing of fellow-members of the biotic community is, prima facie, land ethically wrong. It depends on who is killed, for what reasons, under what circumstances, and how. The filling in of these blanks would provide, in each case, an answer to the question about respect. Models of respectful, but often violent and lethal use of fellow-members of the biotic community are provided by traditional American Indian peoples.23
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While Callicott acknowledges that respect-based ecological practices can be found in Indigenous traditions and sciences, Leopold fails to recognize this oversight.
23 Callicott, 210
24 Leopold, 129
25 Leopold, 204
Instead, he attempts to narrativize of this mode of thinking in his essay “Thinking like a Mountain,” wherein he embodies the perspective of a mountain, one that lives “in mortal fear of its deer” as does the deer herd live in fear of the wolves. “Thinking like a Mountain” is a microcosm of Leopold’s critique of governmental conservation, describing how “state after state” decimates their wolf populations as a method of wildlife management, and as a result turn “newly wolfless mountain[s]” into “anemic desuetude, and then to death.”24 An ethical attitude based in respect for the integrity of the biotic community, according to Leopold, would prevent such callous conservation practices while still acknowledging the inevitability of death and life in human-nonhuman entanglements. The land ethic requires “respect for the community as such,” and thus at the very least protects the environment’s “right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, [its] continued existence in a natural state” while actively negotiating human projects, interests, and relationships.25 And perhaps more importantly, an attitude of respect would more closely align with what the mountain truly needs to thrive. This proposed shift towards affects and practices of respect proved immensely influential for Euro-American environmental movements,
but it also represented some of Western environmentalisms’ largest omissions. For instance, the idea that there is ever such a natural state of nature already invisiblizes Indigenous stewardship and reinserts a binary between humanity and nature at the exact moment Leopold claims to deny it. At his most ambitious, Leopold claims that the land ethic “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it,” abstracting away the logic of domination in colonial land management he is attempting to remedy from the concrete reality of colonization.26 At best, Leopold’s conception of respect relies exclusively on the ability of individual settlers to imagine, and then act upon, what they believe would be in the mountain’s best interest without subsuming those interests to the calculus of the economy or state. But is this as far as respect can take us? If the land ethic cannot address colonization as a collective process and structure, what use would it be for Joat? *
What might it mean, in the fullest sense of the term, to act respectfully towards Joat? To even begin to consider how Leopold’s land ethic could be a
26 Leopold, 204
27 Acuña, 3
framework according to which one could act respectfully towards Joat (or otherwise constructively resonate with projects of preserving the relationships that constitute Joat), it is important to explore how Joat and Mount Baldy may differ as entities. Even if they embody the same space and form, what practices bring them into being? Does the fact that one lives in Tovangar and the other in Los Angeles matter? How might they be distinguished in more than name, as only part of incommensurable and partially connected worlds? A devastating result of colonization is the erasure of Indigenous sources, oral histories, and archives; it is difficult to know what, in a Tongva cosmology or worldview, might become translated centuries later as a “sacred mountain.”27 Marisol de la Cadena’s account of the earth-being Ausangate in her book Earth Beings, also considered a sacred mountain by settlers and state officials, can serve as a possible analogy in the absence of the same extensive anthropological work on Tovangar and the Indigenous human and non-human worlds of southern California. De la Cadena foregrounds the necessary disruption of the EuroAmerican “assumption of onto-epistemic sameness”28 in her account of the political struggles of Mariano and Nazario Turpo
28 Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
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against the Peruvian hacienda system, detailing the Turpos’ relations with Ausangate, “the earth-being that is also a mountain” that plays an active role in their activism.29 In the onto-epistemic frameworks of modern nation-states and academic institutions, Indigenous histories and beings are reduced to mere belief: the Turpos believe they know Ausangate, and their ritual offerings to it performed at home and in the chambers of Peruvian government are nothing more than one of many cultural spiritualisms or superstitions. De la Cadena denies this epistemic erasure, arguing that Indigenous worlds and worlding practices are not mere cultural perspectives but just as real as the hegemonic reals of the modern colonial state. Rather than assuming the existence one hegemonic reality—what John Law calls the “One-World-World”30—accessed by the objective knowledge practices of Euro-American sciences, de la Cadena draws on ontological anthropology to argue that the categories and kinds of beings that constitute the real are constructed through, rather than known by, performative cultural 2015), 16
29 Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings, xxvii
and scientific practices. According to de la Cadena, “Ausangate is, period. Not a belief but a presence enacted through everyday practices through which runakuna [Quechua people] and earth-beings are together in ayllu [the relational world and kinship network of Indigenous Andeans].”31 Ausangate is. This claim should shatter any form of environmentalism that assumes a simple biological reality or universalism. How might the biotic community change if it is peopled with many kinds of beings untranslatable into the paradigms of Western science? What if nature, the environment, and the biotic community are only some of “the many available and existing culturally contingent or collectivedependent ways of carving up reality”32 that are practiced and sometimes authorized by the powers-that-be in a pluriversal world? Following anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, de la Cadena describes the reduction of Ausangate—or in this case, Joat—to a mountain as an equivocation, a “type of communicative disjuncture in which, while using the same words, interlocutors are not talking about the same
30 John Law, “What’s Wrong with a One-World-World?”, HeterogeneitiesDotNet, 3
31 de la Cadena, 26
32 Julia J. Turska, “Back by popular demand, ontology,” Synthese, 3
thing and do not know this.”33 If reality, as Law describes, “consists of a fundamental flux and indistinction,”34 and the kinds of beings that can exist are dependent on contingent ontological practices and assumptions, it must also be true (given the heterogeneity and diversity of “cultural” worlding practices) that it is possible for multiple beings to exist and appear at once, perhaps even materialized in the same body or form. The anthropologist Mario Blaser, who works with de la Cadena on describing and theorizing the pluriverse, similarly describes the simultaneous coexistence of caribou (a “techno-scientific artifact” that biologists “‘do’”35) and atiku (volitional non-human persons, who have a special relationship to spirit masters, that are likewise “done”/performed in Innu cosmological practices). Blaser provides an account of how the Canadian state asymmetrically mediates the equivocation between caribou and atiku, authenticating caribou while dismissing atiku despite the fact that, ultimately, they both exist: “the various practices associated with caribou and atiku encounter each other in the flesh of a being (so to speak).”36 Blaser
describes this equivocation with reference to the rabbit-duck illusion. While it may look like there is one being which can be seen from different perspectives, Blaser wants us to imagine there are, in fact, two distinct beings present, a duck and a rabbit whose non-overlapping bodies are simply out of frame. We must consider that Joat, described as a sacred mountain if mentioned at all, may be its own distinct being with aspects and characteristics unaccounted for by the equivocation in the frameworks of Western science and discourse. Without land over which the Tonvga have ownership and sovereignty, it is difficult to say whether the practices that sustain Joat pre-colonization are still possible to be practiced collectively, and therefore whether Joat is still present. This is exactly the problem that is addressed by landback, which I will return to later. We must consider that Joat may have been closer to Ausangate than Mount Baldy: in article on the significance of the San Gabriel Mountains to local Indigenous people writes that “in the highlands, as well as below, the elements of nature— from granite boulders to acorns—were
33 de la Cadena, 27
34 Arturo Escobar, Pluriversal Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020), 26
35 Mario Blaser, “Doing and undoing Caribou/Atiku: diffractive and divergent multiplicities and their cosmopolitical orientations,” Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 51
36 Blaser, 74
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considered sensate. All was kin to the human community.”37 If Joat is anything like Ausangate—which their positions in relation to the “colonial matrix that renders them erroneous and/or unreal colonized worldings”38 might suggest—how could Joat and Mount Baldy encounter each other in the material existence of a mountain? What conservation practices may preserve Mount Baldy at Joat’s expense?
Leopold’s intervention in A Sand County Almanac suggests that conservation practices elaborated from a land ethic are substantially different from that of economically-driven conservation. Yet is it also necessary to interrogate the differences between settler and Indigenous conceptions of respect, and consider how those ontological differences may impact ecological practices. In her paper “Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!),” Vanessa Watts argues that Euro-American posthumanist philosophies that ascribe agency to nonhuman actors only manage to redefine agency, reinforcing a distinction between
the mere agency of non-humans and the full intentionality and volition of human agents. This asymmetrical attribution of volition is similarly operative in Leopold’s ontological proposal, an inequity that is absent in many Indigenous cosmologies and restricts how radical the concept of the land ethic can really be. In the case of land, Watts argues even when “dirt/soil has been granted entrance into the human web of action [in Euro-American environmental philosophy], it is still relegated to a mere unwitting player in the game of human understandings.”39 This relegation can also be found in Leopold’s land ethic— while all biological life is now part of one community which has a collective value, humans are the only beings granted the capacity to consider and act upon Leopold’s ethical maxim. For Watts, this human exceptionalism is not present in Indigenous ontologies of nature: “habitats and ecosystems are better understood as societies from an Indigenous point of view; meaning that they have ethical structures, inter-species treaties and agreements, and further their ability to interpret, understand and implement.”40 Following Watts, we
37 Daniel Medina, “The Indigenous Dawn of the San Gabriel Mountains,” PBS So-Cal, https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/departures/the-indigenous-dawn-of-the-san-gabrielmountains
38 Blaser, 80
39 Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!), Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, Vol. 2, No. 1, 30
40 Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and
ought reconsider what forms of respectful relations are truly possible in a framework such as Leopold’s biotic community in which humans are described as a “plain member” and yet still retain the exclusive right to interpretation and mediation. Leopold thinks like a mountain. Watts and the mountain both think together as what she calls Place-Thought, “intrinsically and inseparably tied to land’s intentionality.”41
The various affects related to appreciation are enough to develop a relationship of respect for Leopold, yet this is a distinctly different conception of respect than that which one usually applies to other humans, which involves a greater consideration for the autonomy, intention, and will of the other party. Place-Thought goes even further, requiring a radical rejection of anthropocentrism that reconsiders at every level of Euro-American philosophy what thought and intention is, what kinds of beings possess the capacity for such a will, and how our collective powers of cognition are connected to the land and more-than-human spirits or beings. Leopold’s ethical attitude of respect, while claiming to eliminate the binary between humans and nature, also only manages to redefine respect away from an ontology of mutual or collective volition
and intentionality, such as that found in Place-Thought.
It is often recognized, as Callicot did, that Indigenous traditional practices and ways of knowing have for centuries outdone the environmental thought of Euro-modernity and enacted a much fuller form of respect than even environmentally-inflected affects and attitudes generated by the movements of thought Leopold helped inspire. De la Cadena’s account of Ausangate provides an example of how Place-Thought can result in a distinctly different approach to environmental ethics. Nazario Turpo, for instance, did not immediately understand himself to be fighting against climate change in his defense of Ausangate, but instead considered himself to be holding the Peruvian state accountable to the force of will expressed in Ausangate’s rage. The equivocation at play between Ausangate’s rage and the discourse of global warming was one Nazario had to learn to navigate, joking knowingly afterwards that the Spanish calentarse can mean both to heat up and to become angry.42 According to de la Cadena, Nazario and other Quechua activists were much more likely than the state to (in terms of Euro-modern ontology) understand, negotiate, and
non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!), 23
41 Watts, 30
42 de la Cadena, xxii-xxiii
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advocate for the needs and interests of the mountain, local environment, and the natural world. Cadena writes: “in the end, I was sure that Nazario’s will to understand ‘global warming’ was far more capacious than that of the World Bank officials, who could not even begin to fathom taking Ausangate’s rage seriously. Nazario certainly outdid them in complexity; he had the ability to visit many worlds, and through them offer his as well.”43 Nazario’s capacious strategies for land defense are the rule, not the exception. As written in the Kari-Oca 2 Declaration, “[Indigenous people] have a distinct spiritual and material relationship with our lands and territories and they are inextricably linked to our survival and to the preservation and further development of our knowledge systems and cultures, conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystem management.”44 When considering Euro-American environmental philosophies such as Leopold’s land ethic, we cannot ignore the spiritual aspect of this relationship, the ontological commitments active in Watts’ contention that “our ability to have sophisticated governance systems is directly related to not only the animals’ [and the environment’s]
ability to communicate with us, but their willingness to communicate with us.”45 Perhaps then the question one should be asking regarding environmental ethics is how a settler on Tongva land should best conceive of and enact a land ethic that supports Joat’s willingness to communicate with us, while recognizing that it may not be possible to access or reconstitute the web of relations and practices that constituted Joat with the knowledge I have as a settler, or the connections I have within settler institutions.
* This project—of remedying the colonization of the natural world via the reestablishment of decolonial relationships and beings—is taken up by Tongva and Acjachemen scholar Charles Sepulveda in his paper “Our Sacred Waters.” In the essay, Sepulveda articulates a critique of conservation that resonates with Leopold’s critique, yet suggests mode of respect that both avoids separating human and nonhuman forms of spirit and agency (as Watts proposes) and returns our conception of respect to the concrete relations of domination of U.S. settler colonialism (as
43 Ibid.
44 “KARI-OCA 2 Declaration - Indigenous Peoples Global Conference on RIO + 20 and Mother Earth,” World Rainforest Movements, 6/19/2012, https://www.wrm.org.uy/ other-information/kari-oca-2-declaration-indigenous-peoples-global-conference-onrio-20-and-mother-earth
45 Watts, 30
Leopold fails to do). Sepulveda focuses his critique on the Santa Ana River instead of the San Gabriel Mountains, as water has a particular importance in Tongva cosmology, but his project is still deeply instructive for considering what use environmental ethics is for all colonized earth-beings. “I do not want to continue mourning for the Santa Ana River,” he states. “I want to bring her back to life and decolonize our sacred waters.”46 For Sepulveda, both the Santa Ana River and the Tongva people—particularly Tongva women through monjeríos, what Sepulveda calls the “first prisons”47—were domesticated using the same logics and strategies of domination, and thus any genuine decolonial project must address not just the oppression of Tongva people but also the environment, land, and morethan-human persons to whom they have relations. Sepulveda argues that, like the economic mindset that Leopold criticizes, an environmentalist attitude that centers only human interests will never genuinely aid the environment nor play a positive role in decolonization. Regarding settler projects to restore the Santa Ana River, he writes:
The river is still seen as advancing empire and economic opportunities; and nature is seen as a site of recreation instead of containing spirit. Humans are centered within the city’s restoration of the river, rather than the river itself and all of the varied life its environment can support. By centering humans and human interactions with the environment, the various restoration projects along the river are continuing the project of domestication despite their attempt to protect the environment.48
In defining Place-Thought, Watts writes that “spirit is contained within all elements of nature” and it is from this shared spirit of land and the earth that we are connected to the environment in both being, as Leopold might recognize, and thought, which Leopold cannot.49
For Sepulveda, the domestication that is equally instantiated in Missions, dams, or other contemporary forms of development inevitably aims “to extend the American
46 Charles Sepulveda, “Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2018, 40
47 Charles Sepulveda, “Our Sacred Waters: Theorizing Kuuyam as a Decolonial Possibility,” 46
48 Sepulveda, 51-52, my emphasis
49 Watts, 30
project rooted in white supremacy, capitalism and heteropatriarchy.”50
Colonization is not an event but a process and structure, and it is essential to recognize when solutions, such as the green colonialism of modern ecological restoration, only modify the appearance of this process or rearrange the manifestations of the structure. In the case of the Santa Ana River, it is deeply inconvenient and unprofitable to allow the river to seasonally overflow its banks and provide necessary water to nearby marshes and wetlands.51
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Conceived as part of a biotic community, we may have no trouble controlling the river through extensive infrastructural intervention for the sake of members of the community with more important interests—as long as, according to Leopold, the river exists in some parts in its natural state. But when the river is conceived as a being imbued with Spirit and volition, this is a process of imprisonment. Thus we can elaborate on Sepulveda to argue that any form of environmental ethic must then envision a future alongside Indigenous peoples, where “the river will be what it needs to be again: free from channelization and dams, free from pollution, without invasive species, and alive with native plants and animals—in a living spiritual
relationship with the Indigenous peoples of this land and their guests.”52 And their guests. An environmental ethic cannot simply rely on imaginative acts of generosity towards an entity that, in a settler colonial ontology, lacks any form of sentience or volition. Instead, for Sepulveda settlers are by necessity also in relation to the land they live on, and as such Euro-American environmentalism must root out ontological frameworks and discursive cultural practices that invisiblize the importance of spirit to land and life. In fact, new concepts and discourses must be cultivated that foster new spiritual relations, or the revival and communal reestablishment of old spiritual relations, so that settlers and Indigenous people alike can truly instantiate meaningful respect and appreciation for the other-thanhuman biotic communities with which we live.
With Sepulveda, we can finally turn to the Tongva concept of kuuyam to flesh out a conception of respect that we began to construct with Leopold, one that may contribute positively to decolonization and decolonial futures. Kuuyam is the Tongva word for guest, a relationship offered to settlers by the Tongva people— and “more importantly, by the land itself
50 Sepulveda, 43
51 Sepulveda, 47
52 Sepulveda, 52
which contains spirit”53—from the first moment of arrival. Kuuyam, for Sepulveda, denies an absolute binary of settler and native and instead focuses on whether or not one takes up the land as a mutual partner in respectful kinship relations. Native people, as well as settlers, may contribute to processes and ideologies of colonization, and thus decolonization is not exclusively a settler issue, and nor will it only be solved by Indigenous people; Sepulveda writes that “[Indigenous people] must not be complicit, but instead seek awareness of the ways in which we have been colonized.”54 What then defines indigeneity? For Sepulveda, it all comes down to respectful relations: “either [one acts] in ways that are respectful to the earth or [one does] not.” This respect requires, however, an ontology of nature that can be respected or disrespected on its own terms, and has the capacity via will and intention to communicate its own needs and desires. Hence the importance and inseparability of Indigenous cosmologies from the relations that constitute their indigeneity. Settlercolonial ideologies, on the other hand, deny any such abilities to the land and to nature in order to facilitate exploitation and extraction. Yet there is still room for growth: “the earth,” Sepulveda writes, “which has been treated with disrespect by humans on a global scale, continues
53 Sepulveda, 54
54 Sepulveda, 55
to be welcoming.” Sepulveda suggests that kuuyam is a powerful decolonial way forward. Settlers may begin to act as better guests to Indigenous people as a mode of learning, as a practice in developing the ways of being that facilitate collective and collaborative action and respect towards the earth, whether understood as Nature or Mother Earth. Kuuyam is an example of what de la Cadena would call partial connection—it is only by recognizing and calling out the overlapping equivocations among our many worlds and collectively negotiating their benefits and harms will decolonization be possible. Kuuyam is also a theorization that attempts to imagine a future for California Indians in which we can bring our lands and our sacred waters back to life while not rejecting but also learning from Euro-American sciences of geology, geography, biology, and more. Sepulveda recognizes how difficult creating this future will be, but insists on its possibility:
Although the majority of Acjachemen and Tongva today are Catholic or another denomination of Christianity, due to colonial violences, and may not know or truly understand their pre-contact creation stories, I believe we continue to feel the essence
20 TR2
of the stories and know deep within us that our lands and waters are sacred. Furthermore, the loss of these stories for humans is retained by the spirit of our lands and are never completely lost because of this. They are waiting to be relearned, evaluated, analyzed and applied in ways I can only imagine.55
*
Environmental justice must begin with landback. Land ethics must begin with landback. That much is an immediate and undeniable fact. When it comes to bringing Joat back to life, I have no place to start but kuuyam, and kuuyam first and foremost demands that the Tongva people have lands on which they can live with full legal protection and jurisdiction over their self-directed autonomous stewardship.
“Kuuyam,” Sepulveda writes, “is not an open invitation for settler possession of Native land. Instead, it is a defiant act of love for our lands; placing them above the needs of humans.”56
55 Sepulveda, 44
56 Sepulveda, 55
Joat, like Ausangate, has a history of rage and resistance, lashing out with devastating floods and fires against mines, dams, lodges, ski-lifts, and other destructive colonial development projects.57 Hundreds of years of extraction, dispossession and gratuitous violence has both terraformed Joat’s material form and reconstituted Joat in the relational world that was once only Tovangar and now is nearly entirely Los Angeles, California. I truly believe, with Leopold and Sepulveda, that affects, practices, and relations of respect are some of the only immediately available tools we have to reconstitute the environment and the many beings that exist simultaneously within other worlds. But following Watts, we must work to develop forms of respect that do not deny mutuality across radical ontological difference. Donna Haraway, a settler theorist writing and living in California, recognizes the extent to which decolonial and posthumanist forms of respect—or what she calls "responseability," the basic capacity for attention and awareness that grounds ethical life—are often incompatible with Euro-American modernist ontological frameworks: “it is very hard for a secularist to really listen to the squid, bacteria, and angry old women of Terra/Gaia.”58
57 Felicia Agrelius, “Materializing Trauma: Ceramic Embodiment, Environmental Violence, and the Colonial Legacies of Mount Baldy,” 47-50
58 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 185
There is, then, some work to be done by research, theory, and ethnography. De la Cadena states that “while ethnographic commentary cannot put words and things back together and know the world thus made, it can acknowledge the ontological differences enacted in the conversations across which communication occurs.”59 If I have done anything in writing this paper, it is to underline this necessity and attempt to connect it to the local reality of Joat/Mount Baldy. Joat’s survival and flourishing is a political end both settlers and native Californians must share. It is an end that Pomona College, an institution which loves to advertise Mount Baldy as an amenity for its students, must take much more seriously than it currently does. It is my hope that there may exist, or that we can together insist there be, space within the paradigms and disciplinary norms of environmental ethics for projects of partial connection, of kuuyam, of collaboration across worlds that may, one day, prove Sepulveda right: that Joat is indeed waiting to be rediscovered and re-learned, that “decolonial possibilities remain.”60
59 de la Cadena, 30
60 Sepulveda, 56
INDISPENSABILITY, PLATONISM, AND PHYSICALISM
Andrew Kim, Pomona ’26
Views on the ontological status of mathematical objects can be roughly divided into two groups: realism in ontology and antirealism in ontology. Realism in ontology is the view that mathematical objects exist objectively and independently of mathematicians, and minds more generally. One common version of this view corresponds with Platonism because on this view, mathematical objects, like Plato’s Forms, exist acausally, atemporally, and are not part of space-time. In the present essay, I will be concerned with Platonism concerning mathematical objects based on Quinean naturalism. This position is supported by what many take to be the most (some say only) convincing argument for realism concerning mathematical objects: the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument. I argue that even if we suppose that Platonic mathematical objects exist—i.e. that the indispensability argument is successful—the overall Platonist position as it stands is at best incomplete when viewed from a physicalistic standpoint because it fails to provide a suitable physicalist account of our knowledge of such acausal mathematical objects. I then propose that this
difficulty suggests that naturalists who are also physicalists ought not to accept Platonic entities into their ontology in the first place, which, in effect, amounts to a revision of Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment.
I.
In Paul Benacerraf’s “Mathematical truth,” Benacerraf outlines an epistemological challenge to Platonism concerning mathematical objects, which is not unlike more general challenges to Platonism brought up throughout the philosophical literature in that it questions our ability to interact with and have knowledge of nonspatial, acausal entities (Benacerraf 1973). In the article, Benacerraf challenges Platonists by claiming that even if true, belief in a theory that posits that there are abstract mathematical objects cannot be knowledge. As Burgess (1990) notes, much of the post-Benacerraf literature uses some version of Benacerraf’s argument for this claim—which we will outline below—as motivation for seeking an anti-realist view on
numbers and such. Benacerraf’s challenge, in its strongest formulation, is more or less as follows:
B1: The causal theory of knowledge is true.
B2: Platonism says that mathematical entities like numbers and sets are mind and language independent and do not exist spatiotemporally, and that mathematics is about such abstract entities.
B3: If Platonism is true, then we cannot have mathematical knowledge.
B4: We do have mathematical knowledge.
B5: Therefore, Platonism is false.
This argument is used by many as justification for dismissing Platonism as untenable, despite Benacerraf not drawing such a conclusion himself. Now, the causal theory of knowledge has fallen out favor ever since Benacerraf’s paper came out in the 1970s, but as Maddy in her (1990) has shown, the essence of the argument does not rely on the causal theory and can
be formulated in a way that avoids all talk of specific theories of truth, justification, and the like. As such, Maddy claims that the epistemological challenge must be taken on directly and applies to any realist philosophy of mathematics—one who posits the existence of mind-independent mathematical objects must give an account of how we come about having about beliefs about those objects.1 I think that Maddy is correct in taking the challenge seriously, for it would indeed be disingenuous to posit the existence of Platonic mathematical objects about which we have so many reliable beliefs (the Platonists affirm our possession of not just beliefs, but indeed knowledge, about mathematics) without giving an account of how we come about having those beliefs, especially given the general disrepute that Platonism in general has fallen into.2 Benacerraf’s challenge for mathematical Platonism will come into play later on, but let us now turn to the Quine/ Putnam indispensability argument.
II.
Quine’s philosophy of mathematics is characterized by a combination of his
1 Maddy (1990) goes about trying to meet this challenge by offering a version of realism in ontology that locates mathematical objects squarely within the physical world, in effect disavowing the Platonist account of mathematical objects supposed in (2).
2 Most philosophers would assert that we certainly have at least some mathematical knowledge, whatever that amounts to. Only a radical sceptic would deny this, for whom the present essay will be uninteresting.
empiricism, naturalism, confirmational holism, and his criterion of ontological commitment. What follows will be but a brief outline of these doctrines for the sake of situating the Quinean indispensability argument.
In brief, empiricism is the view that the ultimate evidence for our beliefs is sensory evidence. Naturalism is the idea that science is the ultimate arbiter of existence, that “it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described” (Quine 1981, 21).
In Quine’s version of this view, philosophy is seen to be the enterprise of cleaning up and analyzing the statements of science, so to speak. Quine’s confirmational holism is the doctrine that every claim of theoretical science is confirmed or disproved only as part of a larger system of beliefs—it is to a system of hypotheses that notions of confirmation and refutation are applied, not to individual claims. Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment—which says that sentences (of theories) are committed to those entities over which their bound variables must range in order for them to be true—is a direct outgrowth of the latter two doctrines. This criterion only tells us what a theory says exists, but by combining it with Quine’s naturalism, the criterion can tell us what, according to science (which
has the best line on determining the nature of the world), exists. The final component of the indispensability argument is the contention that mathematics is highly useful—indeed indispensable—for science; much of modern science relies heavily on mathematical methods and tools, and the elimination of mathematics would radically change the way that science is done, and perhaps even make it impossible to do science.
The indispensability argument for mathematical objects can be seen as a natural synthesis of these ideas. I will focus on a common formulation of the indispensability argument given by Colyvan (2001), which is as follows:3
IA1: We ought to have ontological commitment to all and only those entities that are indispensable to our best scientific theories.
IA2: Mathematical entities are indispensable to our best scientific theories.
Therefore:
IA3: We ought to have ontological commitment to mathematical entities.
This argument, as mentioned above, is
3 This argument is a standard generalization of what most writers refer to when they discuss the Quine-Putnam indispensability argument, which Putnam put forth explicitly in his (1971) based on Quine’s work.
taken by most contemporary philosophers of mathematics to be the best argument for Platonism concerning mathematical objects. Quine himself, though he never explicitly formulates the argument thus, avows the existence of abstract mathematical objects—ultimately classes— based on such reasoning.
Importantly, though, as Colyvan (2001, 142) points out, the indispensability argument alone is mute on the exact ontological status of mathematical objects—it says only that mathematical entities exist, and nothing more. As such, it can be used to argue for views that mathematical objects are universals, relations, structures, physical sets, and so on. My concern in the next section will be specifically with uses of the indispensability argument to argue for the conclusion that mathematical objects enjoy Platonic (acausal, atemporal, non-spatial) existence; I do not purport to show anything about uses of indispensability to argue that causal mathematical objects exist, for example, and do not claim to deal specifically with Quine’s views on this matter. I also do not intend to mount a direct attack on the argument itself, but will instead set out to show that the indispensability argument is, on its own, not enough to establish the truth of mathematical Platonism. In
particular, I show, along Benacerrafian lines, that the view that mathematical objects are Platonic must be reinforced with an account of the epistemology of such objects for the Platonic thesis to hold.
III.
Now, consider the Quinean Platonist4 who is a physicalist about all things except for the objects of mathematics. Such a person says that the number √2 is indispensable for our best scientific theories, and that because we ought to have ontological commitment to all the entities that are indispensable to our best scientific theories, there must therefore be an entity (whether a set, a position in a structure, or something else altogether) that is the √2. Such a view of mathematical objects— though it is arrived at after a considerable amount of theorizing about holism and such matters—amounts to the common-sense Platonist view of them.
Let us concede, for the moment, that the indispensability argument succeeds and that the Quinean is justified in making this claim. This argument is not, indeed cannot be, the end of the story. For even if confirmational holism and all the other doctrines that go into this argument are true and the ontological thesis holds,
4 Henceforth, I shall just use “Quinean” to refer to Quinean Platonists—those who subscribe to Quine’s naturalism and also use the indispensability argument to argue for Platonism concerning mathematical objects. This is just terminology, though, and I do not intend to attack Quine’s ontology of mathematics specifically, much less that of the whole lot of Quinean naturalists.
the Quinean must still provide an account of our knowledge of Platonic objects. But such an account, as far as I can see, does not seem to be forthcoming. Indeed, such Platonism must answer to Benacerraf, who says:
If, for example, numbers are the kinds of entities they are normally taken to be [i.e. objects], then the connection between the truth conditions for the statements of number theory and any relevant events connected with people who are supposed to have mathematical knowledge cannot be made out. It will be impossible to account for how anyone knows any properly numbertheoretic propositions. (Benacerraf 1973)
That is to say, for our case, a Platonist who asserts that the √2 is irrational and exists acausally or whatnot must establish a connection between the truth conditions of its being irrational and events connected with herself that affirm that it is so. On a more general level, such a Platonist must give an account of how she has a reliable connection (or something of the sort) with that number in order to know about its existence and properties. But on the Platonic Quinean view under discussion, that number—and every other mathematical
object—is an non-spatiotemporal, acausal entity, so apart from positing a Platonic sort of anamnesis—which is just the sort of thing that a naturalist recoils from—it is difficult, even impossible, to see how we can have an appropriate (causal or other) sort of connection with that number to know about it in the first place. That is to say, it is one thing to posit such entities, and it is another to show that we have knowledge of them.
Indeed, the Quinean’s entire enterprise seems to be motivated by a desire similar to that of developing a “homogenous semantical theory in which semantics for the propositions of mathematics parallel the semantics for the rest of the language,” which fails on the front of having a homogenous epistemological theory (Benacerraf 1973). For on the Quinean’s view, mathematical objects and medium-sized physical objects are both indispensable to our scientific theories, and talk about one is in principle no different from talk about the other. But such projects will achieve their goal only at the expense of addressing the concern that the account of mathematical truth mesh with a reasonable epistemology, and that the burden is on the Quinean Platonist to give such an account, lest it be judged inadequate. What I am saying, then, is that Benacerraf’s problems with Platonism in his (1973) apply even to Platonism reached via the indispensability argument; indispensability itself is not enough to guarantee the truth of mathematical Platonism.
In response to this challenge, the Quinean might step in to say that the required connection can be found in the practice of science itself, which is the ultimate arbiter of existence. The scientists that work on our best theories encounter the √2 in their calculations, and the supposition of its irrationality and its other properties results in successful models or predictions of physical phenomena. The belief in the existence of the number √2 thus has its basis in science, and it is in their theorizing that scientists connect with the √2.
This reply does nothing to solve the problem presented, though; indeed, my response to it is much the same as what I laid out earlier. In particular, I might ask exactly where and how in their practice scientists make contact (or something of the sort) with these immutable mathematical objects. After all, science is concerned with uncovering the nature of the physical world, so how can it possibly have a line on the existence of such non-spatiotemporal entities? From the claim that science assumes mathematical principles does not follow the claim that any scientist—or any human, for that matter—has actually encountered or has any contact with the abstract number itself that is the √2, no
matter how often they invoke the number in their calculations and whatnot.
Indeed, Quine himself, as a staunch empiricist, affirms that our basic beliefforming mechanism is perception. Does he mean to say that scientists can somehow, via their senses, access the realm of nonspatiotemporal mathematical objects? That can hardly be the case, for, as Field notes, “it seems as if to answer these questions one is going to have to postulate some aphysical connection, some mysterious mental grasping” (Field 1982, 52), which goes against the entire spirit of naturalism, or at least physicalism.5 That is to say, even if we concede that we ought to have ontological commitment to the mathematical entities that our best sciences quantify over, the problem of explaining our knowledge of them remains open, and as long as that is so, a Quinean Platonist philosophy of mathematics based on the indispensability argument will be inadequate.6
IV.
I have suggested that the failure of the Platonist view to hold up on the epistemological front indicates that it is
5 Here I make the assumption that most naturalists these days are physicalists about the mind and whatnot. The rest of my remarks in this paper should be seen as directed specifically to physicalists.
6 In fact, many of the traditional epistemological objections to Plato’s theory of the Forms apply here. I have chosen to focus on Benacerraf’s challenge because his directly concerns Platonism in mathematics.
an error to allow Platonic objects into our ontology in the first place. Perhaps this problem can be done away with by positing some sort of Platonic anamnesis, but doing so would amount to a repudiation of physicalism, which, on the face of it, appears to me a worthy philosophical position that is endorsed by current science. Indeed, naturalists seem to be physicalists about most things; it is only when they come to mathematics that they are tempted to endorse the existence of aphysical entities, or at least entities that, in principle, we cannot physically observe or encounter. Now, it is true that the task of accommodating mathematics is one of the more difficult problems facing physicalism, but difficulty does not entail impossibility. In what follows, I lay out some physicalistic alternatives to the Platonist view.
For those who want to maintain a physicalistic attitude there are, as I see it, three options available. The first is to follow the Platonist in accepting the indispensability argument as it is, but to stop short of positing that such objects are Platonic. One who goes this way can instead claim that mathematical objects exist squarely within the physical world, in effect reducing the epistemic problem to the problem of explaining our knowledge of physical objects. One immediate problem with this sort of view involves explaining our pre-theoretic intuition that mathematics deals with unchanging, eternal objects, and that mathematics proceeds by a priori methods; this problem, I think, is
far less pernicious than the problem with Platonism, though, and is worth taking on for the sake of having a homogenous semantical and epistemological theory. Another, more pressing, problem would be that of explaining where we can find functions and numbers in the physical world; Maddy (1990) claims that sets—from which all other mathematical entities can be constructed—are just sets of physical objects. However, it is not exactly clear whether such sets exist independently of our minds, for on that account, it seems like minds play an important role in construing collections of objects as sets in the first place. The second option is based on a revision of Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment, which, in effect, changes the face of the indispensability argument. Those who go down this route must revise the first premise of the indispensability argument to something like:
(IA1*) We ought to have ontological commitment to all and only those entities that are indispensable to our best scientific theories and participate in causal processes.
Of course, those inclined to make this move must specify what exactly it means to participate in causal processes, which is no easy task. This option further involves arguing that mathematical objects are indeed causally active or whatnot in order to arrive at the general realist conclusion
that we ought to have ontological commitment to such entities. It is not difficult to see how this sort of view might lead to positions similar to those reached via the first option, like Maddy’s discussed above. Indeed, in the end, the first and second options might lead to views that are not altogether different, depending on the exact moves that are made. There may, though, be other ways of countenancing causal mathematical entities besides claiming that they are wholly physical; in any case, this second option rules out the existence of Platonic objects. The third route involves following those who choose the second option in claiming that we ought not to not accept acausal entities into our ontology. The difference is that this last option involves foregoing realism altogether by arguing that mathematical objects are acausal and thus the sorts of things that are not real, where being real means existing independently of minds. As such, this last option opens the door to all sorts of anti-realist, or nominalist, views.
If I am correct in this assessment, physicalists must choose a philosophy of mathematics based on one of these positions. There is much to be said for each of these views, but weighing them against each other would take us too far afield. In any case, I hope that I have been successful in at least showing that the indispensability argument is not enough to guarantee the mathematical Platonist a spot at the physicalist convention of acceptable, complete philosophies of mathematics.
CECLILIA RANSBURG
THE MORAL QUALMS OF THE QUBIT
Shawn Kathuria, Pomona ’27
Quantum computation’s unprecedented processing capacities portend a revolution not solely technological, but ethical as well. By operationalizing quintessential quantum properties like superposition, entanglement, and probabilistic uncertainty, this emergent computing paradigm promises unprecedented utility matched only by its attendant risks. In this paper, I critically examine quantum technology’s escalating impacts across the pragmatic domains of privacy and security as well as foundational realms of metaphysics and identity.
Quantum computing’s decryption potential problematizes encryption while highlighting limitations in notions of consent. Simultaneously, irreducible quantum uncertainty contradicts deterministic assumptions grounding dominant ethical frameworks while quantum indistinctness at the particle level resonates more universally, challenging discrete, unitary notions of selfhood.
My central contention is this –reconciling quantum technology’s mounting influence demands conceptual revision
across both practical and metaphysical registers. Technological transformation tests moral imagination as profoundly as scientific ingenuity. Our task ahead is twofold – fostering quantum computing’s immense benefits for discovery across fields as varied as cryptography, energy, climate, healthcare, and materials science while carefully weighing concomitant risks that cannot be discounted or dismissed.
The aforementioned seismic shift resulting from the advent of the quantum computer is its unique ability to process information and perform computations in ways fundamentally different from classical computers, allowing previously computationally strenuous calculations to be completed in a fraction of the time. While classical computers can only store information in bits, or 0s and 1s, Quantum computers store information in qubits, which can exist in multiple states (i.e a 0 or a 1) simultaneously.
Classical encryption techniques rely on the immense computational difficulty
of problems such as factoring large numbers—a task that quantum computers could simplify dramatically, as such, the advent of the quantum computer poses a direct threat to classical encryption methods, which form the bedrock of current data security protocols.1 As one can imagine, the implications of the very basis of our virtual security being called into question are profound. On one hand, there is a significant risk to individual privacy. Personal data, including sensitive financial and communication records, could become vulnerable to unauthorized access by entities wielding quantum computing power. This risk extends to national security, where encrypted state secrets could be exposed, altering the dynamics of international relations and defense. Beyond the threat to privacy, this technological shift challenges the existing ethical frameworks governing data security. In my view, the power of quantum computers to overwhelm existing encryption represents more than just a technical failure of security protocols in the face of processing advances. Rather, it signifies the more fundamental ethical limitations of modern consent frameworks underlying data privacy. Consent represents an implicit social contract predicated on agreed procedures delimiting access to personal information, relying on encryption as its chief enforcement mechanism. In turn, these access permissions center individual agency, con-
trol, and disclosure timing regarding private data. Traditional ideas of consent over personal data assume individuals can control access to their information in an orderly, step-by-step way over time. For example, I share my data only on specific terms that restrict future use. But quantum computing threatens this chronological control. By using quantum properties like superposition or entanglement, quantum algorithms can potentially decrypt data in ways that override previous privacy restrictions. This means personal records thought to be secure could lose confidentiality despite earlier promises, and as a result, individual control is undermined. Quantum computing breaks the predictable sequences central to traditional consent frameworks and it severs their capacity to uphold personal agency in disclosing private information going forward. To that end, it seems that strengthened encryption alone cannot restore meaningful consent because the threat itself is broader - quantum computing challenges the very assumption that individuals can secure open-ended sovereignty over their data. True resolution requires rethinking consent not as total, forever control but as limited, contextual authority that is vulnerable to unforeseeable technical advances. Reframing our idea of consent in this way would require a systemic upheaval of fundamental tenets of virtual security that we take
1 ”Shor’s Factoring Algorithm,” Quantiki, last modified October 26, 2015, https://www. quantiki.org/wiki/shors-factoring-algorithm.’
for granted on a regular basis. It calls into question whether we have the right to our data purely based on the fact that it was produced by our doing. In this newfound quantum era, ethical standards must center on protecting privacy within specific informational contexts while accepting intrinsic unpredictability beyond those settings. Concepts of consent must evolve - from blanket claims of data control across all future settings toward emphasizing governance regimes that bound appropriate data use within definable domains yet acknowledge technical progress enables new access capacities that cannot be completely forestalled.
The decryption capacities unlocked by quantum computing disturb not only privacy but the very philosophical integrity of secrecy itself. Beyond material concerns of unauthorized data access, quantum computation threatens metaphysical conceptions of concealed knowledge central to social cohesion. Secrecy’s epistemic containment enables the segmented disclosure underpinning complex cooperation - discreet diplomacy between rival states, clandestine research protecting public safety, and anonymity sustaining private association. Yet in collapsing cryptography, quantum algorithms rupture these delimited knowledge planes, conjoining once-disparate informational spheres. The resulting intersections between decrypted datasets compound exponentially, defeating segregated cognition essential for multiparty coordination. Therefore, widespread quantum-powered
decryption jeopardizes the philosophical integrity underpinning secrecy itself. By enabling the unchecked unraveling of concealed knowledge domains, quantum computing risks unraveling the segmented disclosure and bounded cognizance that allows for complex cooperation across specialized sectors of society. Diplomatic overtures conducted discretely between rival states, confidential research on matters of public safety, anonymous participation in support groups - these examples of prudent compartmentalization permitting collective advancement could devolve into uncontrolled information leakage without the safeguarding veil of secrecy. The turbulence of uncontrolled decryption could thereby spur regression toward fragmented information shards lacking the protocols for aggregation and cross-pollination. Thus quantum computing’s capacity for rapid decryption poses more than just a logistical headache for cybersecurity experts - it threatens to undermine the philosophical assumptions grounding segmented knowledge exchange that characterize modern institutions and advancements.
Thus far, we have focused on ethical issues rooted in pragmatic data access concerns. However, further philosophical quandaries emerge when examining the metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics itself - the very physics enabling quantum computational power. Concepts like quantum superposition and entanglement introduce fundamental indeterminacy into quantum systems, with outcomes
governed by intrinsic probability waves. Electrons or photons may occupy contradictory states simultaneously, only resolving into singular observable realities upon measurement.2 This irreducible uncertainty at the quantum substrate challenges philosophical assumptions on causality and free will. Traditional ethics presume clear causal chains linking defined choices to tangible outcomes, upholding moral responsibility. Yet with quantum randomness permeating existence, all phenomena contain innate indeterminacies clouding once-stable lines of causation. Thereby, quantum mechanics erodes the bedrock of determinism underpinning most ethical frameworks. Without rigid predictability, individual agency blurs amid the probabilities, calling into question the coherence of praise and blame anchored to a wavering chain of events. Reconciling quantum vagueness with ethical clarity constitutes the next horizon for philosophy, and while decryption hazards justifiably dominate quantum ethical debates, we cannot ignore equally monumental prospective benefits unlocked by quantum information access across healthcare, materials science, energy, and more. Quantum simulation of molecular interactions may enable complex drug creation exceeding current biochemistry. Detailed climate mapping through quantum geospatial analysis could seed re-
silience-enhancing solutions. Encrypted astronomical datasets decrypted via quantum methods may uncover exoplanetary worlds ripe for habitation amid future space exploration.
Quantum computing also unsettles philosophical notions of identity, challenging assumptions of discrete, unitary selfhood that ethical frameworks rely upon. Quantum principles like entanglement and superposition introduce an intrinsic multiplicity within quantum systems, allowing single particles to exist in two places simultaneously. This conceptual fluidity defies classical logic, which presumes that objects occupy definite states at defined positions. Yet at the quantum scale, such steadfast individuation gives way to a probabilistic blurring of boundaries. Particles exhibit a characteristically fundamental vagueness regarding the very nature of their being that only changes upon their measurement. Extrapolating such quantum indistinctness to human subjectivity provokes disquieting questions about the coherent self required to ground morality. If selves exhibit the same inherent uncertainty as entangled electrons, acting upon a range of overlapping potentialities, then who precisely merits ethical consideration? Against such porous, probability-ridden backdrops, notions of personal duty and reciprocity
2 ”Quantum Theory’s ‘Measurement Problem’ May Be a Poison Pill for Objective Reality,” Scientific American, accessed December 24, 2023, https://www.scientificamerican. com/article/quantum-theorys-measurement-problem-may-be-a-poison-pill-for-objective-reality/.
risk incoherence lacking discrete agents to fulfill them. Thereby, seemingly esoteric quantum properties resonate more universally, challenging the rugged individualism grounding Western ethical frameworks.
Reconciling quantum indistinctness with robust human agency requires conceiving identity not as an essential immutable property, but as an ongoing performance enacted amid a field of potentials. As we navigate everyday decisions engaging different situations and relationships, we consolidate temporary social roles that crystallize context-dependent facets of self. Yet nothing guarantees these fleeting identities will cohere into some grander unified persona, no imagined endpoint for personhood’s fluctuating trajectory. From this vantage point, morality becomes less about immutable codes legislated from on high, but instead about responsible, situated choice within a continuum of probabilities. Goodness emerges dynamically via attuned, imaginative decisions suited to the specifics of each emerging moment. Such ethical formation eschews rigid abstractions, foregrounding concrete human relationships all parties care enough to nurture. In place of ramified duties and rights, here one finds caretaking, generosity, and communal dialogue.
Of course, such flexibility raises legitimate fears about the dilution of personal responsibility. However, fixed identities prove equally hazardous, naturalizing structural violence when classifications seek permanence. Against quantum computing’s
unintended decryption, situating encryption protocols themselves as probabilistic and impermanent may better balance security aims with responsive redress. Much ink has been spilled debating privacy’s irreducibly public dimensions - how intimacies disclosed to intimates variegate identity’s supposedly inviolable core. Thus quantum indistinctness provides opportunity alongside hazard - opening self-knowledge to connections presently unfathomed. Rather than rebutting quantum uncertainty with some contrived philosophical antidote, a more fertile path may reside in evolving new ethical paradigms organically from within the quantum worldview itself. One prospect is exploring an ethics of potentiality that foregrounds the inherent multiplicity of possibilities and seeks to judiciously actualize trajectories aligned with democratic flourishing. Such ethics eschews fixed identities and duties legislated from above, turning instead toward situated, collaborative discernment attuned to the specifics of multidimensional contexts. It also accepts the intrinsic open-mindedness of technosocial systems, promoting adaptive governance regimes that integrate plural perspectives and balance precaution with enabling equitable access to quantum advancements over time.
Additionally, cultivating ethical responsiveness to uncertainty may come from honing faculties of imagination, empathy, and courage to navigate ambiguous outcomes. We require creative rationality combining rigorous critical analysis with a
willingness to suspend assumptions about causality and selfhood when grappling with unfamiliar quantum realities. Any presumed certitudes become secondary to sustaining good-faith dialogue across differences and directing innovations toward justice. In the end, quantum ethics may resemble less a defined destination than an unfolding adventure - more quest than conquest. Our task is thus to travel hopefully into uncharted territory with care, inclusion, and moral conviction as our key provisions. In closing, quantum computing presents profound philosophical challenges across the planes of ethics, identity, and metaphysics. As we have seen, quantum principles like superposition and entanglement introduce intrinsic indeterminacy that erodes longstanding assumptions of causality, discrete selfhood, and moral responsibility. Traditional notions of consent, secrecy and deterministic free will risk incoherence against quantum computing’s exponential processing capacities. Yet with hazard comes the possibility if we resist reactionary technophobia. Quantum indistinctness provides opportunities to reconceive identity and ethics on more dynamic, relational grounds. Rather than fixed classifications legislating morality from above, quantum uncertainty invites caring, imaginative decision-making attuned to each situation’s unique potential. Encryption grounded in quantum principles may better balance security, privacy, and responsive redress if we view protocols themselves as impermanent, open-ended performances.
And quantum computing’s decryption capacities, while disquieting, offer scientific and social benefits we have only begun to grasp. Ultimately, our task is not to master quantum strangeness through brute philosophical force, but to open thoughtful dialogue between ancient traditions and quantum insights still unfolding. Computational transformation demands collective moral courage - suspending assumptions whilst expanding ethical conversation to encompass radically divergent standpoints. Only through gracious imagination and good faith struggle with different worldviews may we discover novel truths restoring coherent meaning.
SEEING DOUBLE
SPLIT PERSPECTIVE AND EPISTEMIC PRIVILEGE
Within standpoint epistemology, it is generally accepted that occupying a specific social position gives one a certain epistemic privilege, an advantage in accessing certain kinds of information or perceptions. But many advocates of the epistemic privilege thesis also insist that this advantage is not determinative: George Yancy, writing on anti-Blackness, explains that “Black communities’ perceptions are not in principle inaccessible to those not from them.”1 Non-black people, with the right education and awareness, have access to the same knowledge; it is a matter of ease, not possibility. Rachel McKinnon, discussing transness and its relation to epistemic privilege, maintains that those not occupying a given social location can eventually “come to see what it’s like to be oppressed,” even if it is significantly more difficult.2 Certainly we (socially-
aware philosophers against bigotry and marginalization) want this to be the case— cutting people off from certain kinds of knowledge seems like a barrier to the sorts of dialogues that inspire social change, and the idea that non-Black people could never fully get it feels defeatist. Yet a progressive desire for something to be the case does not make it so. I am curious to take this skepticism to its fullest extent. In critically examining Yancy’s account, I evaluate his argument regarding epistemic privilege and why it is not exclusionary; from there, I argue that there is a difference between the recognitional aspect of perception— which is accessible to anyone willing to learn—and the phenomenological aspect of perception—which is only available to those in the community of knowers with regard to an act of bigotry.
1 George Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 34, no. 8 (2008): 843–76, https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453708094727, 851.
It is perhaps best to start with a thorough explanation of what the epistemic privilege thesis consists in. The definition I take from McKinnon, who articulates it as follows: “those with a particular situatedness—particularly those with oppressed intersectional identities— have, as a consequence of having their identity within a social structure, an epistemic advantage in accessing certain kinds of knowledge, especially of the structures of oppression themselves.”3 The language here is important insofar as it emphasizes an epistemic advantage rather than an epistemic ability; advantages can be overcome. The implications of the epistemic privilege thesis for social justice are immense—it is a solid foundation for the call to listen to marginalized voices, undermining the idea that those in social locations of power (straight, white, cis men, generally, at least in the United States) have a universal and immediate understanding of all experience. If they are less likely than someone marginalized to grasp the ways in which a given act or structure or policy is harmful, the epistemic privilege thesis gives philosophical ground to defer to the historically unheard. The advantage aspect is equally important, though, because if those situated in power are fundamentally unable to know what the person articulating a problem to them knows, the
communication will be ineffective. The epistemic privilege thesis both gives cause for listening to marginalized voices and makes possible such a communication of experiential knowledge. The social justice utility for the epistemic privilege thesis diminishes significantly without this second step.
Yancy, in his paper on racism and social spaces, discusses at length the particular example of a white woman who becomes uncomfortable when he, a Black man, enters the elevator with her. What is important in this case, Yancy notes, is neither his comportment (“It is not necessary that I first perform a threatening action”) nor his raiment (he is welldressed); it is that “[his] Black body, [his] existence in Black, poses a threat.”4 He feels her reduce his humanity to animality, to make him into a threat irrespective of who he is or what his intentions are. His account is harrowing: “Despite what I think about myself, how I am for-myself, her perspective, her third-person account, seeps into my consciousness. I catch a glimpse of myself through her eyes and just for that moment I experience some form of double consciousness…Indeed, I find her gaze disconcerting and despicable.”5 Even though he does not accede to her gaze—he retains his sense of self (who he is and how he is capable of being) and his sense of moral
3 McKinnon, “Trans*formative Experiences,” 428.
4 Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces, and Racism,” 846.
5 Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces, and Racism,” 847.
decency—he immediately discerns her read of his racialized body. His understanding of what she has done is intuitive and does not require contemplative reflection to comprehend; her actions fit within a schema of knowing for Black people, who come to know on a community level what constitutes racism and racist acts.
He roots this intuitional ability in the epistemic privilege not of himself as an individual in a specific social location but himself as a member of a community of knowers (in this case, the Black community).6 “The fact of the matter is that from the perspective of their oppressed and marginalized social position, Blacks do in fact derive from this social position a level of heightened sensitivity to recognizable and repeated occurrences that might very well slip beneath the radar of others who do not have such a place and history in a white dominant and hegemonic society.”7 And it is this community of knowers occupying this marginalized social position that disrupts the intelligibility of the substitutability of all knowers. What differentiates knowers is their “differential histories,” their subjectivities formed through a set of shared experiences distinct from those of people not in the shared community; he elaborates
that “[t]o say that any knower can know what I do about the white woman’s racist gesture would render my experiences and the similarly shared experiences that other Blacks have had under like circumstances irrelevant.”8 It is Yancy’s membership in a community of knowers, who have historically experienced, analyzed, and discussed these instances of racism, that enables him to know the woman’s act as racist; the community of knowers renders intelligible the woman’s act by situating it in a shared history of similar acts. The rejection of a neutral, universal knower calls for a deferral to (in this case) Black voices that can speak to a specific history yielding a specific understanding of racist acts from white people.
But it is crucial to recognize that this rejection of a neutral, universal knower does not entail an endorsement of the idea that only members of the community of knowers have the possibility of access to this knowledge. Yancy is clear that “even if all knowers are not inter-substitutable, it does not mean that non-black knowers, once suitably instructed, cannot come to learn to cognize in ways that enable them to identify racist behavior readily.”9 The neutral knower (that does not exist) is not
6 The rest of this paper will use the Black community given the focus of Yancy’s paper, but I think the general thrust of the argument applies to other marginalized groups, though it is possible that certain specifics would complicate this question.
7 Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces, and Racism,” 848.
8 Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces, and Racism,” 849.
9 Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces, and Racism,” 851.
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meant to encompass all non-Black knowers, but specifically those who have not been instructed or otherwise come to learn how to appropriately cognize such that they readily recognize racist behavior. Epistemic privilege, then, is in this case being a part of the community of Black knowers and so eliding the step of having to be instructed to recognize behavior—the intuition is developed through being in the world while Black. 10 And again, this possibility of sharing the knowledge is oriented toward the goal of communicability: in response to a comment from Charles Mills, Yancy notes that his articulation avoids “the ‘picture of monadic epistemic communities with divergent perceptions who are unable to have any kind of intersubjective dialogue’.”11 It is an advantage of Yancy’s account that nonBlack knowers can come to know because it enables dialogue—if they could not come to know, each community of knowers would be a monadic island, capable of gesturing at but not communicating their perceptual knowledge. Incommunicable knowledge, it seems, is of lower utility.
The actual nature of this communicability, though, is subject to further investigation. What it is that non-Black knowers can come to know
is very specific. “In short, the shared experience, the conceptual frameworks, the background assumptions, can be communicated to others if they are open to be instructed and willing to take the time.”12 From this we derive three things that can be communicated: shared experience, conceptual frameworks, and background assumptions. Interestingly, none of these things are, as McKinnon articulates, “what it is like to be oppressed” in the sense of experiential knowledge.13 Shared experience is the closest term, but by that Yancy refers more generally to the history of intersubjective experience of Black people with regard to racism, not the personal, experiential knowledge of what it is like to face racism individually. All three of these aspects of the situation seem fairly impersonal—more intellectual exercises than reorientations of one’s way of being in the world, even if truly ingraining them to the level of intuition and instinct would take time, as Yancy says. To some extent, the epistemic privilege thesis is unbothered by this revelation—the structure of oppression as a kind of knowledge does appear to be communicable—but in other ways there appears to be a problem given that another kind of knowledge—the what it is like to
10 Privilege here obviously does not retain its positive connotation—there is an advantage in the ability to access information, but not an advantage in the sense of increased ease moving through the world.
11 Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces, and Racism,” 851.
12 Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces, and Racism,” 851.
13 McKinnon, “Trans*formative Experiences,” 435.
be on the receiving end of this treatment— does not seem to be communicable in the same way.
In fact, Yancy does not seem to be making a claim stronger than a baseline communicability of the broad structures at play in racist scenarios. Specifically, he does not say that non-Black knowers can come to know what his experience is like in the elevator, just that they can, as stated earlier, come to “learn to cognize in ways that enable them to identify racist behavior readily.”14 Cognition is distinct from experience: to cognize in a new way is to know or perceive in a new way, not to be in a new way. Even if I, a non-Black person, come to cognize differently as a result of the communication of Yancy’s experience of the white woman in the elevator, I would not know what it is like, experientially (which is embodied and affective), to be the target of her racist perception and reaction. Moreover, difference between cognition and experience aside, non-Black learners are specifically enabled to identify racist behavior. Whatever this new cognition would afford me does not extend past the ability to classify a given act as racist; it certainly does not give me the knowledge of what it is like to be subject to racist behavior.
Hypothetically, an advanced machine15 could be imbued with enough examples (shared experiences), rules for classification (conceptual frameworks), and limiting parameters (background assumptions) to identify an act as racist or not, all without being capable of experiential knowledge at all.16 Certain kinds of knowledge—namely, experiential—still appear far beyond the reach of non-Black knowers.
What Yancy does not articulate, and what I think his argument turns on (perhaps without his full realization), is a split between two kinds of knowledge— recognitional and experiential. Recognition, I agree, is accessible to everyone, given that they either have the epistemic privilege which advantages their knowing or they undergo the proper instruction to come to perceive the world in a specifically new way, sensitive to oppression and bigotry. It is this type of knowledge that evidences Yancy’s claim that the white woman is being racist: “So, what is the evidence for my claim that the white woman’s behavior in the elevator is racist? Her gestures cohere with my knowledge of white racism, her gestures cohere with other experiences that I have had vis-à-vis whites performing racist gestures in the past and
14 Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces, and Racism,” 851, italics mine.
15 A particularly sophisticated algorithm seems sufficient for our purposes here.
16 Whether this would even constitute perception is not immediately clear.
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my experience is consistent with the shared experiences of other Blacks.”17 All three of these standards are, in principle, accessible to a non-Black person; the second offers some difficulty, but even then, a non-Black person could still develop a familiarity with recognizing white people elsewhere engage in racist acts, and the third at first implies the discerner as Black but theoretically only requires that the perception is consistent with what members of the Black community of knowers generally have perceived in their own experience discerning racist acts.18 But perception goes beyond recognition and classification; as an act of the inhabited body, perception is affective and phenomenological—recall that Yancy was forced momentarily into a double consciousness wherein he sees himself through her eyes as a part his perception of this moment and the woman’s act. The moment is physically jarring and disconcerting.
This aspect of perception, the phenomenological side, is also a kind of knowledge subject to epistemic privilege,
but it cannot be accessed by a non-Black knower. There is no education I could undergo, no perception I could develop, that would make me perceive what it is like to be dehumanized by a white woman’s anti-Black gaze upon stepping into an elevator, even if I could recognize what she is doing to someone else with intuitive ease. The phenomenological character of my discerning and categorizing perception is distinct from that of Yancy insofar as I might feel discomfort at watching a racist act unfold, but I do not become tangled up in the same sort of double consciousness that Yancy does when he sees himself through her eyes. Yancy’s perception of himself through her eyes is distinct because it is a perception of self through the (racist) Other—even if I look at him through her eyes (and am appalled at the racism therein), I am not seeing myself in her gaze; I might be disconcerted, as he is, but not for the same reasons or in the same way. My knowledge of this perception is fundamentally distinct from his, and his is fundamentally inaccessible to me. To
17 Yancy, “Elevators, Social Spaces, and Racism,” 849.
18 Yancy is clear elsewhere that a community of knowers is not monolithic, and a given instance can be a site of disagreement even for people occupying the same social location. ‘Generally’ does not have a specific definition in this case, as there is no critical mass that would have to agree on a given act being racist for the perception to be legitimate, but the experience should cohere with other experiences of racism not just limited to the perceiving individual but rather fit within a history of racist acts and encounters that spans the historical community of knowers. Still, notice that this consistency of the experience is not necessarily the experience of being subject to a racist act but rather the experience of being able to recognize racist acts; a non-Black person can access that kind of experience.
reduce the perception of this moment to the mere identification of the act as racist is to make perception hollow and to leave out key aspects of what is being perceived. In a general sense, it is true that Yancy perceives a racist act, and that the broad contours of that act are both recognizable to a nonBlack perceiver and sufficient to identify the act as racist, but Yancy does more than that; he undergoes a specific double vision in the act of perception, and through the act of perception, that is only available to the person experiencing this racist gaze.
In dividing perception into these two aspects, I preserve the benefits of Yancy’s articulation while drawing back from an overreach in the possibilities of perception. In agreeing with Yancy that non-Black knowers can come to cognize such that they correctly recognize racist acts as such, I maintain the possibility of intersubjective dialogues and do not fall into the trap of monadic communities isolated by the impossibility of shared recognitional capacities. Furthermore, this ability to identify racism fulfills the double aspect of the epistemic privilege thesis’ advantage for social justice—the instruction to come to cognize in this way still requires an uplifting of marginalized voices, and the new abilities allow for (and demand) conversations about racism and anti-racist praxis. At the same time, I offer a new understanding19 of perception
19 At least in the context of Yancy’s paper.
as involving another aspect which is not recognitional but phenomenological—the feeling of perceiving a racist act involves the experiential feeling of being the subject of that racist act—and which is not accessible to those who are not socially located to be the victim of the racist act. Within the community of knowers, however, this phenomenological aspect is also rendered intelligible; as a non-Black person, I will not know what this double consciousness Yancy speaks of is like, but other Black men who have had similar experiences certainly might. In that way, some aspects of perception are limited to their own community of knowers, while others—sufficient, I believe, for our social justice purposes—are available to those willing to put in the work and learn from those epistemically privileged by their positionality.
ON GENIUS
Tossed around like a ball in the street, the word genius has become separated from the notion. We may blame this on hyperbolizsation, and that is undoubtedly a factor, but I believe another lies in this discipline of philosophy, a discipline which has never truly interested itself in the notion. There are no major or notable minor works on it, and the notion even lacks a page on Stanford’s Plato Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Genius must have done something to philosophers in order to deserve such ignorance. Here I venture into hyperbole myself, as to say that no philosopher has concerned himself with genius is a lie, and I will later explore what has been said of genius by the likes of Kant, Schopenhauer and others. I will emphasize, though, that while they have mentioned and defined genius, these philosophers have never devoted themselves to it. Their definitions are often an aside and incomplete. They define genius within a specific context, leaving broader genius undefined, or define the genius in opposition to another, or in opposition to nothing at all.
Left with no definition of genius, only with definitions of this genius or that genius, or
competing definitions of the same genius, it is no wonder the word has lost all meaning, has become hyperbole to the point of not being enough a hyperbole.
But after all, isn’t it such a useful one? Who doesn’t like a catch-all? You can call anything genius and anyone a genius. We’ve arrived even to the point that anything stupid enough is so stupid as to be genius. I regret to say that it is perhaps that type of genius we see most today, but never mind.
I have no issue with hyperbole. Hyperboles are fantastic and I use many myself, but the issue with this hyperbole is that, unlike many other hyperboles, has lost much of its non-hyperbolic meaning, if it ever had any to begin with. The hope is not to eliminate the use of genius as hyperbole, but rather to uncover that hidden side of the word which rests under the shadow of the other.
It would be disappointing, however, to find that no such other side exists. In an age where any notion of the superiority of one over another is taboo and shunned, the notion of genius is not a natural one. In genius is implied superiority, and a rather significant
Emilio N. Bankier, Pomona ’27
one too. The genius is not just smarter, he is beyond that. “Smarter” is comparative, but within the same category as we might call “normal”. There is no such thing as ‘the smart’. You don’t say “he is a smart”. You say, “he is smarter”, smarter than the reference point. But when you call someone or something a genius, that individual or thing is in an entirely new category, there is no comparison there, at least explicitly. But anything can be compared implicitly. And it is here that we redeem genius from the shame of ‘superiority’, for while it is almost universally (and in my mind rightly so) associated with superiority of some kind, it is foremost a differentiation, not a comparison. It is not ‘superior’ so much as it is ‘other’. While we may try to dispel superiority and comparison, we cannot realistically deny otherness and differentiation.
What then is the differentiation, and between who? One half of the answer to the latter is obvious, the genius. But who is he different from? Everyone else, no? Does that include the other geniuses, or are they all alike in some way? The way, perhaps, that makes them geniuses? Let us go then from the general to the specific like a good filter; from the genius vs. all to the genius vs. the genius.
Know that I am aware of the task I shirk by defining the ‘all’ quite lazily as the average person, but I only have so many pages today. I will justify it here by telling
you that the gap between the ‘all’ and the genius is so large that it matters very little that the ‘all’ is a very heterogenous group with its own distinct topography. From where the genius sits, and where we sit watching him, it all looks very flat. The all is the all, what is the genius?
It wouldn’t be all that wrong to say that the genius is just much, much smarter than the all, but it wouldn’t be very helpful. If genius is just high intelligence, then we have the issue of a linear system where we go from ‘dumb’ to ‘average’ to ‘smart’ to ‘genius’, which looks fine, until you take away the labels and you just have a line and no idea where to draw to the barriers. Maybe it’s a gradient, but genius has no fading characteristic. Genius is bold. There is no such thing as a little genius, or mostly smart and some genius. One is not 85% genius, there is no such thing as 85% on the way to becoming a genius. Genius is a trait which cocoons the whole individual. Genius is to a genius as brown hair is to someone with brown hair, but it is also the nature of that person to be a genius. It is, in some ways, diminutive, and yet completely appropriate given the quality. It is the first word that comes to mind when describing the genius, and the word, besides maybe the names of his accomplishments, that he will be remembered by.
As says Kierkegaard, "the genius is born”1. There is nothing gradual in genius, and there is no growth in genius. The
1 Kierkegaard, “The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle,” 95.
individual may evolve in other aspects of their personality, but the fact of their genius, and their genius in itself, remains constant. A genius is not created, he arrives, much like a revelation, or a minor messiah. As much as one might try, via rigorous education, or making a fetus listen to Mozart, or a forced involvement in some artistic pursuit, genius “is immediacy, natural qualifications.”2 The fact of genius is decided, who knows how, in a manner that cannot be modified by any earthly power3.
What lies then within the quality that makes the man? “Originality must be its primary property”4, says Kant of genius in the Critique of Judgement. The statement, plain and simple, and on the surface so agreeable, is as problematic as it is insightful. In the reasoning for it, Kant opposes the original achievements of the genius to the ‘learnable’ achievements of the all. And of all the people to use as his example for the all, Kant uses Isaac Newton. Newton, for Kant, is not a genius because his achievements come from a base he learned, and more importantly, that he, or anyone, can communicate and teach. Homer, as Kant uses him, cannot teach his talent. The base of his achievements is illearnable, most of all because it is incomprehensible even to him. Homer cannot explain and nor can anyone else and therein is its originality.
The genius of Homer lives and dies with Homer. No one else could compose the Iliad and the Odyssey—if there were no Homer, there would be neither. If there were no Newton, can we honestly say there would be no theory of universal gravitation, no laws of physics?
There is something strange about denying Newton the title of genius, something so deeply unfitting, and yet if you call Newton a genius then a genius is no more than the first to cross the finish line. The genius becomes just the first or the ‘faster’, and we have reverted to that comparative form we had previously rejected. Newton was no genius. And neither is anyone else who’s great brilliance can be reduced to the ability to do something others can, only faster or in new ways which are still communicable. It may indeed be great talent, brilliance, or prodigy which gives the individual that ability, that speed, that inventiveness, but it is not genius.
The fundamental question here is one of ability versus achievement as the subject of judgment. A first impression may be that what shapes our world is the achievements of great people, and not their greatness in itself. In the case of both Homer and Newton, it is their achievements which stand immortal as fundaments of our world. What then is the
2 Kierkegaard, 95.
3 Excepting perhaps any incidents leading to brain damage, especially in youth.
4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, 137.
relevance of their ability? Indeed, it may shorten our work considerably to arrive here at the conclusion that to judge the individual as genius will lead us nowhere, and that true genius can only be ascribed to achievements. While we cannot solidly define genius for the individual, we can define it rather easily for achievements and works, as these themselves are far more constrained objects that can be judged far more easily. But in that ease of judgment lies the lack of genius by the principles of Kant which we have accepted.
Homer is a genius, and that genius is by Kant’s definition beyond explanation, but there exists a whole profession around explaining and communicating the brilliance of the Odyssey. If genius lies even only partially in an inexplicability, then all these concrete genius achievements, all so explainable to various degrees of ease, are not genius at all. If one can learn from Hamlet how to write a great play, then Hamlet is no work of genius. If one looks at Shakespeare, however, how shall they derive any personal insight from this? The problem of the individual genius cannot be set aside and replaced by the genius achievement, because the former exists, and the latter does not. Achievements are great in their own manner, let us not grant them the accolades that only certain people are truly worthy of.
We must face, however, that in making this distinction we truly do entrench
ourselves in the problem of deciding who is and isn’t a genius, or rather, what category of great person can or cannot be qualified as genius. Here is a first mistake, to say that in order for one to be genius one must be great. If the genius is born, then all geniuses have been geniuses before they were great. Greatness is established through genius, although not all greatness is. Indeed, an important note to make is that not all the greats are geniuses. It is important because far too many confuse the two, and decidedly idiotic or untalented people, who are great because of achievements or prowess or authority, are called geniuses. There is in such cases fundamental ignorance of the meaning of the word.
The matter of authority is, however, important, because authority, above all else, is what promotes an individual in society. A genius is born with genius and not with authority. The latter he gains through his achievements, more precisely, through their success. Indeed, while a genius may be genius by virtue of himself, he can only be recognized as such if he creates and does so publicly. A genius could very well seclude himself and create just for his own pleasure, never publishing. His works may be great and sublime, and he a genius, but no one will know it. For Kierkegaard, “This is simultaneously the humanity of the genius and his pride”5, he may be as secluded as he wishes. If he remains so, he will never have any authority, because this can only
5 Kierkegaard, “The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle,” 107.
be gained through public displays of his genius, be it through whatever medium. His authority comes not from genius but the execution thereof. One is first a genius, then an authority, and more importantly, one must make demonstrable that he is genius. To make someone an authority because he is supposedly a genius without much concrete evidence is a fallacy. This is one we see often in the speculative market, usually in the form of a disaster.
Genius cannot be surpassed. An athlete cannot be a genius because he is bound, from what we know of all sport, to be overtaken by some newer athlete. And even if there may be debate as to which is greater, a contest, real or imagined, may exist which will yield a definitive answer. A poet though, cannot be surpassed by another in terms of their poetry. Someone may prefer one over the other, but it would be wholly inappropriate to say that poet A is better than poet B, because all this really means is that one likes poet A over poet B. The greatness of one genius over another is a subjective matter. There is no objective comparison of their abilities, or their particularities.
Returning to genius’ nature as a trait such as a particular color of hair, it’s constance, it is inevitable that no genius is greater than another in the matter
6 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 85.
of genius. The achievements may be of greater significance, cultural importance, the individual may have more authority, but his genius is the same as the genius of any other. And so, when comparison between geniuses arises, it is inevitably a comparison of things truly unrelated to the individual in any profound way. Comparison will always be of achievements or authority, which as established, are unrelated to genius in itself. Genius does not require achievement or authority to accompany it.
Nietzsche would accuse me of subscribing to a cult. “Cult of genius out of vanity”6, he titles the 162nd chapter of Human, All too Human. Genius may be an excuse. A way of avoiding the effort of trying to create those sublime achievements. Only the genius can achieve those works of “originality”7 we say out of vanity, because we are for whatever reason bound to limit ourselves. To Nietzsche then, there is nothing special about the genius except a drive that others lack. “Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius; but none is a miracle”8. Nietzsche compares genius to laying bricks. We can all learn to lay bricks, but we call genius those that never stop laying bricks. Those whose efforts never cease. Genius then, would be an effort; one we are all capable of, like jogging.
7 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, 137.
8 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 86.
His criticism of the cult of genius has its merits. Perhaps we do glamorize geniuses so that we may justify our own mediocrity. But one can make that judgment, which is a judgment of society, without making a judgment on the notion of genius itself. And most troubling, is that nowhere in Nietzsche is provided a full account of genius. The notion is attacked without it being defined. A defendant brought to court without a defense.
Nietzsche’s reference to the “activity of the genius” being like any other in its complexity, is astoundingly one-legged. The “activity of the genus” is irrelevant to the genius! Why must the genius act? He may very well be a genius and not act at all. And when he does act, is it really so complicated? No, there is no complexity at all. Nietzsche makes hazy the distinction between complex and inexplicable. Indeed, something complex can be explained. How to paint can be explained, how to write can be explained, how to create film can be explained. But none of these or other arts can be explained when they have been conducted by those artists we call geniuses. We cannot explain how Homer or Shakespeare wrote, or how Rembrandt and Picasso painted, or how Kurosawa and Kubrick directed to the degree that we understand. You may make an attempt at an explanation, but you will never understand, because even they did not understand. Why not? Because it was not complex. It was inexplicable.
There is something ridiculous about genius. That there should a gift, given only by chance or fate, that marks the difference between art and true art, or art and fine art is so ill-fitting in a society which denies natural superiority, even if, as we have done, we replace superiority with a kinder word. Nietzsche seems to imply that genius puts a cap on the ability of others to create. The ‘all’ is limited by the genius. But the real implication is that genius limits the ‘all’s’ will to engage in the activity of artistic creation. This is undeniably true. Creation requires great effort from anyone, and if one does not believe in themselves that they are capable not only of creation but of great creation, then the effort is pointless is it not?
Therein lies perhaps the final distinction. For the ‘all’, there must be some utility to effort. Utility either to benefit others or oneself. Someone who writes poetry but is no genius may write poetry only for the joy of it. And though it may be mediocre, even bad poetry, they rejoice in it. Others might even enjoy it. All this has been done without genius. No one who is not under duress though, will continue to write if they find no joy in it, and certainly if they find no success. Artistic creation is not one of the activities which requires a particular perseverance. If one does not enjoy the process, the results, and finds success in neither, no one will criticize them for abandoning the pursuit entirely. Perseverance is perhaps a requirement for social and commercial success, for the
attainment of achievement and authority, but it is not a requirement for the activity itself. If the ‘all’s’ will was not stifled by the “cult of genius”, then everyone might try their hand at painting or poetry. And most will follow from something they have learned. Some will research and experiment and read books and watch videos. And when all are done, they will not be uniform in quality and originality, because, like any other ability, some can do it well, and others cannot. But the works of geniuses are not the results of an activity done well. They are not the result of following a book or video. If we walk among the ‘all’ and their works, and ask each one how they achieved it, and look at the work, for most we will understand. If it is bad, and their explanation fits, then we will understand. If it is good, and the explanation fits, then we will understand. This was a person who put in more effort than others. Who researched and experimented and tried. But they will explain how they got there, and they will understand.
When we arrive at the genius among the all, it will be immediately apparent that they, their work, are different. Genius may not be the immediate conclusion, but a hesitation in judgment, the fast, simple judgment of the previous works, will leave doubt. Then try to explain this doubt, this hesitation. There is certainty in what is bad, what is mediocre, even in what is good. Genius is uncertain.
The animal we are drives us to love certainty. From this we evolved the ability to explain. We derived from it logic and thought and everything else. That which we cannot explain is first feared, loathed. Was there ever a genius who encountered no hatred? And then comes veneration.
TR5 55
WHY OLDENBORG SHOULD ALLOW GREENBOXES¹
AN EXAMINATION OF THE NOTION OF DEFEASIBILITY IN NONLEGAL PRESCRIPTIVE RULES
Tim Jiang, Pomona '27
Introduction1
I typically skip lunch on Fridays for an important commitment of mine, but I could not help myself from bringing a greenbox2 to Oldenborg Dining Hall3 a few Fridays ago. Oldenborg was serving fish and chips, and I might just be the biggest fan of fish and chips in Claremont. My plan on getting a quick, takeaway meal was nevertheless unsuccessful: upon showing up to Oldenborg with a greenbox in my hand, I was denied entry. The staff at the entrance told me Oldenborg has a no greenbox policy; taking food out of Oldenborg is against the rule. To a large degree, it was right for the staff to deny me entry. At Oldenborg, diners sit at foreign language tables and exclusively speak that foreign language; the dining hall has the
aim of creating an environment where diners can practise speaking foreign languages. For this aim to not be undermined, diners should participate in language tables. Surely, the norm of participating in language tables whenever one has a meal at Oldenborg should be upheld, but I am unsure if it was entirely right for Oldenborg to deny me entry. I did not know the rule stating no greenboxes are allowed existed, and I also did not desire to undermine the aim of Oldenborg (henceforth AO). Denying me entry seems a little harsh. The aim of a rule can be achieved without having that rule being enforced unconditionally. This essay will argue against rule-bound decision making and construct a rule-based decision making process for deciding whether one should be allowed to take food out of Oldenborg.
1 I like to thank Professor Michael Green and Sam Hernandez, the editor of the journal, for my completion of this essay. Discussions with them were more than helpful.
2 Reusable to-go containers circulating around dining halls at the Claremont Colleges.
3 A dining hall at Pomona College where diners communicate with each other using languages other than English. Oldenborg is meant to create an environment for diners to practise speaking foreign languages.
I. Initial Reasoning
Let us first outline the reasoning process behind why I most definitely should have been denied entry into Oldenborg with a greenbox. We observe the following statements one to three (henceforth S1, S2, and S3):
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S1: A person taking food out of Oldenborg is having a meal from Oldenborg but not participating in language tables.4
S2: Having food from Oldenborg but not participating in language tables undermines AO.
S3: Hence, the person taking food out of Oldenborg undermines AO.
Let us assert that S1 is descriptive in nature. S1 is merely stating the observational fact that a person who has a meal – taken from Oldenborg – outside of Oldenborg cannot be participating in language tables, as that participation requires the person to be having their meal inside Oldenborg. We will treat the content of S1 – both the initial action of taking food out of Oldenborg and the following actions of having a meal and not participating in language tables – as one
course of action. On the other hand, we assert S2 to be ascriptive. S2 makes a judgement; it ascribes the effect of undermining AO to the course of action described in S1. Let us take S2 to be absolutely true for now. As for S3, it is a conclusion deduced from S1 and S2. Note that S3 implies if no one takes food out of Oldenborg, AO is achieved. If S3 is true, then a rule which states no one should be allowed to take food out of Oldenborg needs to be prescribed if we wish to protect AO from being undermined. Let us now make the common assumption that for a rule to be just and effective, it needs to be enforced universally over some domain (in this case, Oldenborg Dining Hall). Then, when any person P attempts to enter Oldenborg with a greenbox in their hand and the thought of taking some delicious fish and chips out of Oldenborg with them, we observe that the course of action P desires to carry out follows the description in S1, and we thereby judge that P’s actions will undermine AO as stated by S2. We thus conclude that P should be denied entry. This conclusion is the product of strictly following the rule “no one should be allowed to take food out of Oldenborg.” This rule, which we will denote using R, is to be prescribed because it is an implication of S3. And S3 is in turn deduced from a judgement ascribed to an observational
4 Though certain key terms will be defined, this essay will not specifically consider the issue of open texture, or vagueness, of language. For instance, by “Person,” I am merely referring to a potential diner at Oldenborg. And “Food” here simply refers to an amount of food appropriate to be considered as what we conventionally understand a “meal” to be.
fact. Thus, on the whole, we may conclude that P (any person) whose desired course of action matches the description in S1 is to be denied entry into Oldenborg. This is what had happened to me when I was denied entry.
II. The Issue of Defeasibility
Our initial reasoning process presents a kind of rule-bound decisionmaking, where we do not make a judgement on how P’s actions affect AO case by case. We are thereby neglecting variations between the unique circumstances of each particular case where P desires to carry out the course of action described in S1. Rather, we arrive at a conclusion on whether P’s actions undermine AO from systematically ascribing a judgement to P’s actions anytime we identify certain observational facts (i.e. the actions described in S1) about P. This is rigid and problematic. Rulebound decision-making limits our decisionmaking process to the scope of a rule itself: instead of actually performing the action of a judgement, we end up arriving at a judgement by solely identifying certain observational facts listed by a rule, as if we are going through a checklist that grants us a valid judgement whenever items on the list have been ticked off as “yes.” This kind of
judgement is fallacious. Hart points out it is untrue that a judgement can be made from merely identifying a series of observational facts, as there exist no necessary and sufficient criteria that can guarantee the validity of a judgement in moral and legal realms.5 A rule which serves as a check-list, that acts like a list of criteria, for arriving at a judgement systematically is subject to being defeated under certain conditions.6 For instance, a rule may state that if person Q has killed another person, then person Q is guilty of murder. By our initial reasoning, this rule implies we can make the judgement that Q is guilty of murder if we identify the factual observation that Q has killed a person. However, the rule is subject to being defeated. If Q has killed someone in self-defence, it would be wrong to judge that Q is guilty of murder even if we are able to identify the factual observation that Q has killed a person. Self-defence is merely one additional condition that can influence the judgement in this particular example about Q; there could exist an infinite number of conditions capable of influencing judgments. Thus, necessary and sufficient criteria for moral and legal judgements that are to be made from the identification of observational facts do not exist. Now, let us apply the notions we have discussed to our initial reasoning in
5 H. L. A. Hart, “XI.—the Ascription of Responsibility and Rights,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 49, no. 1 (June 1, 1949): 172-183.
6 Hart, “Responsibility and Rights,” 175. Note that this is where the terminology of “defeasibility” was first introduced into legal discourse.
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denying P entry to Oldenborg whenever P is observed to carry out the course of action described in S1. Since no necessary and sufficient criteria for judgments in the moral and legal realm exist, we recognise that there cannot be a set of necessary and sufficient criteria for ascribing the effect of undermining AO to the course of action described in S1. Thus, S2 is subject to being defeated, and S1 does not always imply S3. Given that S3 is not always true due to the defeasibility of the ascriptive S2, the rule we had prescribed on the basis of S3 is also defeasible. This suggests that the assumption we had made in our initial reasoning is false. It is untrue that a rule has to be enforced universally over some domain to be just and effective. And we can see this by examining examples where rule R “no one should be allowed to take food out of Oldenborg” is defeated under appropriate conditions. But before we do so, let us make an important distinction between two ways a rule is defeated. A rule may be defeated either because it is inapplicable under some domain or because it has been overridden.7 We can illustrate this from a rule about the speed limit on a road.8 If there is a speed limit of 20 kilometres per hour, the speed limit does not apply to
subjects who are running on the road on foot. Such subjects fall out of the domain of the rule, which exclusively includes motorcars. Alternatively, ambulances, which are motorcars, do not need to follow the speed limit; their need to travel rapidly overrides the rule.
Rule R “no one should be allowed to take food out of Oldenborg” is not defeated in its application. All Oldenborg diners fall under the domain of the rule. However, the rule is subject to being defeated by overridden conditions. Say that I am dining at Oldenborg, I have taken too much food, and there is still food (about the portion of a meal) left on my plate that I cannot finish after dining for half an hour. Wouldn’t it be bizarre to say I cannot take the leftover food out of Oldenborg, using a greenbox I happen to be carrying in my bag, to prevent food waste? Here, the fact that I have already been participating in language tables along with the principle of not wasting food defeats rule R. Yet, though the rule is defeated, me taking my leftover out of Oldenborg would undermine neither the justness of the rule nor its effectiveness in protecting AO. The rule does not cease being just because it never ceases to apply to me. The reason I am exempt from it is because my conditions have overridden
7 Frederick Schauer, “Review of Allowing for Exceptions: A Theory of Defences and Defeasibility in Law,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (University of Notre Dame, February 25, 2016), https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/allowing-for-exceptions-a-theory-of-defences-and-defeasibility-in-law/.
8 Frederick Schauer, “Review.” The speed limit example comes from Schauer; I do not think I can come up with a better example.
the enforcement of the rule over me and not its application over me.9 At the same time, though the literal aim of the goal, when taken verbatim, is not attained, its real-world effectiveness in protecting AO is not undermined. Me following the course of action described in S1 does not necessarily and sufficiently mean I am undermining AO; it only means I could be undermining AO. And since my decision to adopt the course of action described in S1 has a valid reason, my course of action does not undermine AO. Ultimately, we must recognise that prescriptive rules act as humanly constructed tools to achieve some desired outcome or outcomes; they serve as means and not ends. Even if we do not enforce a rule universally over its domain, the rule could still be just and the real-world impact the rule aims to generate may still be effectively achieved. With the notion of defeasibility in mind, we may revise S2 to the following statement: having food from Oldenborg but not participating in language tables may undermine AO. Hence, S3 is subsequently revised to the following: a person taking food out of Oldenborg may undermine AO. Let us refer to the revisions we have made in this section as modification 1, or simply M1.
III. The Issue of Triviality
M1 allows us to move from rulebound to rule-based decision making; it does not allow ascriptive statements to be systematically granted from the identification of a series of descriptive facts like our initial reasoning does. But the issue of M1 is that it also implies we need to modify the rule (i.e. R) we had initially prescribed to “some people may be allowed to take food out of Oldenborg.” Let us denote this modified version of our initial rule R to be MR1. Holton has pointed out that rules such as MR1 are trivial.10 We cannot make the attempt to alleviate this triviality by revising the rule – through incorporating clauses that consider conditions under which our initial rule R would be defeated. The revised version would simply be defeated by additional conditions, and even more clauses would need to be added to the rule. For instance, we can revise the rule “person Q may kill another person and not be guilty of murder” to “if person Q has killed another person, and the killing was done in self-defence, then person Q is not guilty of murder.” But the new rule would be defeated under the condition that the magnitude of Q’s self-defence was
9 This essay considers the actualisation of the demand of a rule over a subject to be a necessary component to the “enforcement” of the rule over that subject. Such actualisation is not a necessary component to the “application” of a rule over its subject. A rule may apply to a subject but not be enforced over them due to overridden conditions regarding the subject.
10 Richard Holton, “The Exception Proves the Rule,” Journal of Political Philosophy 18, no. 4 (2010): 374.
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significantly disproportionate to the threat Q received from the person they killed. And if we were to add a clause addressing the condition regarding proportionality to our rule, the newest version would still be defeated under the condition that Q suffers from mental issues and is unable to fully control their actions. In the end, there will always be more conditions that could cause a rule to be defeated, no matter how many clauses had already been added to the rule. As we recall, Hart has pointed out there exist no such things as necessary and sufficient criteria that can guarantee the validity of a judgement in moral and legal realms. Unfortunately, M1 has put us at a place even worse than where we started. We now do not have a functional rule at all. MR1, which states that “some people may be allowed to take food out of Oldenborg,” has little, if any, practicality. Trivial rules are almost meaningless. If trivial rules can even be considered as rules, they are bad rules. Luckily, Holton offers a solution to the issue of triviality. He proposes the addition of a That’s it clause to rules such as MR1.11 Horton writes that a “moral rule will apply to the case unless there are other
moral rules that apply to that case that render the verdict of the first rule wrong.”12 A moral rule applies if and only if no other moral rules that defeat the original are at play, as a result of the introduction of previously unconsidered conditions. The That’s it clase offers a way of rejecting the effect of all other rules that would defeat initial rule R, as it rejects the potentiality of any new conditions that are to be considered.13 If person Q has killed another person, the killing was done in self-defence, and That’s it, then person Q is not guilty of murder. As long as the That’s it clause is true, that there really are no other moral rules capable of defeating the original rule in play, the rule holds. We can thus make a second modification (M2) to S2: having food from Oldenborg but not participating in language tables for a valid reason V, which defeats the notion “taking food out of Oldenborg violates AO,” and That’s it, does not violate AO. Hence, a second modified rule, MR2, comes along to be: “a person may be allowed to take food out of Oldenborg if and only if they have a valid reason V and That’s it.” MR2 requires two judgments to be made. The first one is to judge that V is
11 Holton, “Exception Proves the Rule,” 374-380. This essay’s illustration of Holton’s That’s it clause is an oversimplification. Holton derives his clause from moral particularism and illustrates his reasoning through logic. He also has two versions of it: one for the moral realm and the other for the legal realm. Holton goes on to consider the complications of applying a clause derived from moral particularism in the legal realm. We ignore such details as the scope of this essay is nowhere near as nuanced.
12 Holton, “Exception Proves the Rule,” 374.
13 The term “effect” here refers to the state of being or becoming operative.
truly a valid reason that defeats the notion “taking food out of Oldenborg violates AO.” And the second one is to judge the That’s it clause to be true, that there really aren’t any other moral rules capable of defeating the original rule in play. The first judgement can be made fairly easily, but we must admit that the second one is rather difficult.
IV. Desire and Preference
Holton recognises that judging the That’s it clause to be true is difficult. For this reason, he admits that rules involving a That’s it model lack a decision procedure appropriate for the legal domain. Holton points out that a rule utilising the That’s it clause is best to be used as either a structure that allows arguments to be constructed upon, a base of reasoning that provides a justification to a decision, or a guide in decision-making.14 Since we are not considering matters within the legal domain, we may attempt to revise MR2 and eliminate the active process of having to make the difficult judgement that the That’s it clause is in fact true. If V implies the That’s it clause, the clause is passively judged to be true whenever V is judged to be true.
We are going to start by distinguishing desire from preference. If an agent does not desire a consequence, they
would not wish to have that consequence actualised. And if the agent does perform an action which actualises the consequence, they have some valid reason which justifies their action. On the other hand, if an agent merely does not prefer a consequence, they are a lot more indifferent towards whether the consequence is actualised. They could perform an action that actualises the consequence without having some valid reason. If I desire to not hurt my friend’s feelings, I must have some valid reason why I had performed an action which did hurt their feelings. But if I merely prefer to not hurt my friend’s feelings, I might not have a valid reason why I had performed the same action.15
The valid reason is what causes the agent to carry out an action that actualises a consequence they do not desire. This “valid reason” we have been referring to, since we began distinguishing desire from preference, differs from the “valid reason V” in M2 and MR2. Our previous use of the term “valid reason” (i.e. V) refers to a reason that defeats a rule (in the case of M2 and MR2: “taking food out of Oldenborg violates AO”), whilst our recent use of the term “valid reason” refers to a reason that defeats the agent’s desire to not carry out an action. From now on, let us denote the former “valid reason” as V1 and the latter “valid reason” as V2. Unlike V1, which
14 Holton, “Exception Proves the Rule,” 380-384.
15 Of course, there exists the notion of accidents which we must consider. We will ignore this for now and use it to illustrate an important principle in Section V.
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allows the agent to perform an action that is permitted by a rule through its ability in defeating that rule, V2 causes the agent to perform an action they do not desire. V2 leaves the agent no choice but to perform the action, which V1 does not. Hence, two attributes can be ascribed to V2:
(i) by being valid, the reason V2 defeats the agent’s desire to not carry out an action which actualises a consequence the agent does not desire, and causes the agent to carry out that action.
(ii) by being valid, the reason V2 remains undefeated, or else it loses its ability to cause the agent to carry out that action which actualises a consequence the agent does not desire.
We observe that (i) is true as we have illustrated its truth using the example about my friend, and (ii) is true because it is implied by (i). Further, by our use of the term desire, which takes desire to be a strong feeling of preference, an agent desires the opposite of a consequence if they do not desire that consequence. This suggests that when an agent does not desire a consequence, they desire the opposite of that consequence: when faced with a rule that aims to create some consequence, if an agent does not desire the undermining
of that consequence, they desire to follow the rule. Hence, if a valid reason V2 defeats the agent’s desire to not carry out an action which actualises a consequence the agent does not desire, then by the agent’s judgement, the reason also defeats the rule which prevents the agent from carrying out that action. It is untrue that the agent may view any condition to qualify as a V2, as we have said the agent desires to follow the rule. Under the assumption that the agent is responsible and competent in making a judgement, we may recognise that (i) contains a V1 and (ii) contains the clause That’s it.16
We can now modify MR2 to construct a MR3 that is practical: “a person may be allowed to take food out of Oldenborg if and only if they do not desire to undermine AO.” By judging that the person P does not desire to undermine AO, we judge that there exists a V2 to P, which means we are also ascribing the existence of a valid reason V1 and a true That’s it clause to P’s condition. MR3 allows us to decide whether P should be let into Oldenborg or not by judging whether P desires to undermine AO. Though this judgement is still not simple and still vulnerable to errors, it is better than all of the other rules we have had. Further, it does not reduce the rule to a necessary and sufficient criteria; it merely narrows the scope of judgement to a necessary and sufficient judgement. This does not violate what Hart has argued.
16 I see this assumption as fair. I will explain why I believe so after I distinguish direct and indirect consequences in Section V.
V. Direct and Indirect Consequence17
Again, Holton could not have eliminated the That’s it clause in the direct wording of a rule, and that is because he considers a universal model for both moral and legal rules whilst we do not. We may illustrate this difference by making a distinction between direct and indirect consequences. First, a direct consequence is a consequence that is bound to occur given a particular action it is associated with has occurred; the action here is sufficient in achieving the consequence. And an indirect consequence is a consequence that merely could occur given a particular action it is associated with has occurred; the action here is not sufficient in achieving the consequence. Second, another important distinction is that the achievement of direct consequences does not require a degree of collectivity among subjects, whilst that of indirect consequences does. MR3 works because the real-world consequence our rule tries to achieve is an indirect consequence to the course of action the rule governs. It is true that person P undermines the real-world consequence MR3 aims to achieve, namely AO, on an individual level by performing the course of actions described in S1. But the overall realworld consequence MR3 aims to achieve may still be achieved on a collective level
despite P’s accidental undermining of it. P’s actions alone does not fully undermine the indirect, real-world consequence MR3 aims to achieve; a single diner’s refusal to not participate in language tables does not mean Oldenborg no longer provides an environment for diners to practise speaking foreign languages. Hence, the course of action described in S1 is not sufficient in undermining the aim of MR3, alias the real-world consequence MR3 aims to achieve, alias AO. Holton, unlike us, must consider rules that aim to achieve direct consequences as well, and that is why he could not have eliminated the That’s it clause. For instance, if person Q kills someone, their action is necessarily undermining the real-world consequence any rule about manslaughter aims to achieve. Q’s action alone leads to a direct consequence of someone being killed, which is a real-world consequence any rule on manslaughter aims to prevent. There nevertheless exists an issue in our second distinction between direct and indirect consequences, which is on the principle of collectivity in the achievement of a consequence. The principle implies that even if P does desire to undermine AO, their performance of the course of actions described in S1 still does not undermine AO due to the fact that it is singular and the real-world consequence AO may still
17 Whenever appearing with the idea of a rule, the term “consequence” in this section refers to a “real-world consequence”. I have omitted the word “real-world” in certain parts for the purpose of being concise.
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be achieved since it is of a collective level. This issue does not undermine MR3. MR3 is prescriptive and it simply rejects any P who does desire to undermine AO entry into Oldenborg. However, this issue on the principle of collectivity, in the achievement of a consequence, nevertheless demonstrates why rules aiming to achieve a direct real-world consequence cannot follow the format of MR3 and eliminate the That’s it clause. Accidents are unavoidable, and rules following the model of MR3, which eliminates the explicit That’s it clause by incorporating the concept of desire, remain effective in cases of accidents only if the real-world consequence the rule aims to achieve is indirect.
As the aforementioned principle from Section IV states: if an agent does perform an action which actualises a consequence they do not desire, the agent has to have some valid reason V2 which justifies their action. However, an agent may perform such an action without
a V2 and solely by accident. Incidents where people do not desire to perform an action that undermines the real-world consequence some rule tries to achieve, but the action is accidentally performed either way, test the applicability of the general “no desire to undermine” model based on MR3. For prescriptive rules that aim to achieve an indirect consequence, accidents are tolerable. Again, if I accidentally perform the course of action in S1 despite my desire to not undermine the real-world consequence MR3 tries to achieve (i.e. AO), I do not necessarily undermine AO, as the course of action in S1 is not sufficient in undermining AO. Similarly, if I accidentally run in a hallway where the rule “a person may be allowed to run in the hallway if and only if they do not desire to undermine the aim of the rule, which is preventing people from tripping and hurting themselves” is prescribed.18 Since tripping and hurting oneself from running in the hallway is an indirect consequence from the action of
18 We observe that the wording of this rule contains the real-world consequence the rule aims to achieve; its wording is different from MR3. This is because the indirect-consequence MR3 tries to achieve is already substituted into the rule itself. That is to say “not undermining AO,” which implies the indirect real-world consequence of AO, is already substituted into MR3 for “aim of the rule.” This is nevertheless founded on the assumption that the desire for a consequence is the same as the desire to not undermine the actualisation of that consequence. We have granted this assumption in Section IV, when we said that “by our use of the term desire, which takes desire to be a strong feeling of preference, an agent desires the opposite of a consequence if they do not desire that consequence.” I only noticed that this assumption is rather problematic after I had finished the essay, but the assumption can be avoided if we had approached MR3 with the “desire to achieve a real-world consequence” instead of the “desire to not undermine a real-world consequence.” That is to say, we should have formulated MR3 to be the following: “a person may be allowed to take food out of Oldenborg if and only if they do desire AO to be achieved.”
running in the hallway, my action is not sufficient in undermining the indirectconsequence the rule tries to achieve. My act of running does not necessarily mean I will trip and hurt myself, hence the action does not necessarily undermine the real-world consequence the rule aims to achieve. However, if the consequence is direct, accidents are no longer tolerable. If I accidentally kill someone or speak in the library, the real-world consequence that the rules “a person may be allowed to kill someone if and only if they do not desire to undermine the aim of the rule, which is preventing people from being killed” and “a person may be allowed to talk in the library if and only if they do not desire to undermine the aim of the rule, which is keeping the library silent” are sufficiently undermined. This is because the aims of the rules, “preventing people from being killed” and “keeping the library silent” are direct consequences of the actions of killing someone and speaking in the library. The actions themselves, even when performed alone, on an individual level, sufficiently undermine the real-world consequence each corresponding rule aims to achieve. A person is killed if a singular case of killing occurs, and the silence of the library ceases to exist even if a single person speaks even if these actions are performed by accident. On the flipside, Oldenborg still offers an environment for diners to practise speaking foreign languages even if a singular diner refuses to participate by accident, and no one is necessarily tripping and hurting
themselves if a single incident of running in the hallway has accidentally occurred. This once again shows why Holton could not have replaced the explicit That’s it clause with an implicit That’s it clause implied by a V2.
Conclusion
We have shown Holton could not eliminate the That’s it clause in the direct wording of a rule due to his consideration of rules aiming to achieve both direct and indirect real-world consequences, whereas we only consider direct ones. The final issue we have to address is the assumption we have made in Section IV. The assumption we have made states that the agent our non-legal prescriptive rule that aims to achieve some indirect consequence applies over is competent in making a judgement. This is fair, as any prescriptive rule that does not absolutely abolish the freedom of its subjects, and somewhat depends on the subject’s interpretation of the rule, must make this assumption. If the assumption that the agent is responsible and competent must be rejected, then any suggestive rule such as “only take an appropriate amount of candies,” “keep a safe distance from the edge,” or “do not park at a spot inconvenient for others” have no practicality. With our one assumption defended, we may now conclude that I should have been allowed entry into Oldenborg. By MR3, a person may be allowed to take food out of Oldenborg if
and only if they do not desire to undermine AO. Since I did not desire to undermine AO, I did not desire to undermine the indirect, real-world consequence our final revision of the rule tries to achieve. However, since a rule-bound decision making process was used, my course of action was systematically judged to be a sufficient condition that I should be denied entry into Oldenborg.
TR2
More importantly, we have demonstrated that such a rule-bound decision making system, which seeks to ascribe a judgement from identifying a series of observable, descriptive facts, to be fallacious. No series of descriptive facts can be necessary and sufficient; such criteria simply do not exist in moral and legal realms. Hence, the ascriptive component of S2 is not automatically triggered by an observation of the course of action in S1. This reveals that all moral and legal rules are subjected to being defeated by other rules. Finally, we have constructed a model for non-legal prescriptive rules that aim to achieve some indirect, real-world consequence based on MR3. This model lies in the form: a person may be allowed to perform an action that defeats the rule if and only if they do not desire to undermine the aim of the rule. This model is to be applied with rulebased decision making, where a necessary and sufficient judgement provided by the rule is to be made. The key attribute of the model lies in its exemption from both the issue of defeasibility and that of triviality; it can neither be defeated nor be characterised as trivial.
