LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012

The Philosophy Program and Philosophy Club of LaGuardia Community College

and

The Student Advisory Council of LaGuardia Community College proudly presents the third annual issue of:

THE GADFLY Dying for the truth since 399 BC

Editors in Chief Joheiry Pereya and Jonathan Lucas-Sacta

Managing Editor E.J. Lee

A Note from the Editors It has been a remarkable two years since the first issue of The Gadfly was published. In that time, the seed of LaGuardia Philosophy has flourished into the sensational curriculum of awe and wisdom it is today. We have expanded and developed to open the doors that allow more inquisitive minds to discover the wonders embedded in the world of Philosophy. If you do not believe us, look around our campus and listen to your peers. LaGuardia Philosophy is on the map and it is here to stay. It is already in route to becoming one of the largest philosophy programs in CUNY.

Due to the wild success of the of the previous CUNY Undergraduate Philosophy Conference, LaGuardia Philosophy sponsored a Second Annual CUNY Undergraduate Philosophy Conference on April 20, 2012 at LaGuardia Community College. This issue of The Gadfly is uniquely notable as it showcases the work of four students and commentators who presented at the conference and one of a LaGuardia student who captured the attention of our staff.

Therefore, it is a pleasure to present to you the papers of five outstanding undergraduates representing Brooklyn College, City College, Hunter College, and LaGuardia Community College

We hope you enjoy the third issue of The Gadfly LaGuardia Community College’s Philosophy Journal.

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012

Special Thanks to:

LaGuardia Philosophy Program Faculty, for all your hard work and dedication, but more importantly, your nonstop support and guidance.

The Student Advisory Council of LaGuardia Community College, for funding the printing of this journal.

The LaGuardia Philosophy Program and Philosophy Club for sponsoring this journal.

all the students who submitted their original work.

Karl Azizi at Neko Print and Document Imaging, for your high quality service and the printing of the journal.

Joheiry Pereya for the design of the front cover.

Mirian Tellez for your unique insights, marvelous ingenuity and unrivaled favor.

LaGuardia Community College Philosophy THE GADFLY Spring 2012 [email protected]

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

Special Thanks 2

Table of Contents 3 ______

The Buddhism Objection to Pascal’s Wager 5 Joshua Liveris – City College

Commentary on The Buddhism Objection to Pascal’s Wager 9 David Seiple – LaGuardia Community College ______

Spectrum Inversion and The Nature of Color 12 Said Achmiz – Brooklyn College

Commentary on Spectrum Inversion and The Nature of Color 23 Roberto Ruiz – LaGuardia Community College ______

The Problem of Not Perceiving Art 42 Nickolas Calabrese – Hunter College

Commentary on The Problem of Not Perceiving Art 54 Mateo Duque – CUNY Graduate Center ______

Life, Liberty, and Property: 56 The Right Wing Neglect of Happiness Reuben Fuller-Bennett – Brooklyn College

Commentary on Life, Liberty, and Property: 65 The Right Wing Neglect of Happiness Anna Gotlib – Brooklyn College ______

Law of the Flies: 66 Restrictive Measures on Cyber Bullying Adrienn Miklos – LaGuardia Community College

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012

Read Issue I & II of The Gadfly here: http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/philosophy/gadfly/

If you would like to submit a paper for publication in the next issue of The Gadfly, send it to: [email protected] with your name and “Gadfly submission” in the subject line. Please include your name and school in the body of the email.

Philosophy at LaGuardia Community College [email protected] Become a fan on Facebook and Google Groups! Find us on the web at: http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/philosophy Philosophy Program – Humanities Department LaGuardia Community College 3110 Thomson Ave E202 Long Island City, NY 11101

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012

The Buddhism Objection to Pascal’s Wager By Joshua Liveris City College, CUNY

Blaise Pascal presents an argument for believing in God that is commonly referred to as Pascal’s Wager. Pascal assumes that human reason is incapable of deciding whether or not God exists, therefore one must wager on whether or not believing in God will maximize one’s happiness given that God exists or God does not exist. Pascal argues that believing in God is the reasonable belief to have rather than not, and his conclusion can be shown by constructing a decision table:

(Table 1) God exists God does not exist

Believe in God Heaven (+ ) Status quo (f 1)

Don’t believe in God Hell (-) Status quo (f 2)

As Table 1 shows, believing in God has a far greater potential pay off when you die if God really does exist. But, if God does not exist and you believe in his existence, then you simply break even and you neither gain nor lose anything. However, if God exists and you do not believe in him, the potential consequences are far greater than if you believe in God and he really does not exist. Therefore, by believing in God you have everything to gain and nothing to lose, whereas if you don’t believe in God you have nothing to gain and potentially everything to lose. Pascal argues that the belief in God is a dominating option and will maximize your expected utility. De cision theory tells us to always choose dominating options; therefore, Pascal’s conclusion seems correct (Weatherson). However, although it appears that wagering for the existence of God seems like the proper decision to make, I shall argue that Pascal’s W ager is not a good argument by presenting the Buddhism objection to Pascal’s wager. I shall now argue that Pascal’s Wager is undermined by what I have termed the Buddhism objection to Pascal’s Wager. Pascal argues that if God exists and you believe in him then you will gain eternal bliss in heaven (+ ), but if God exists and you do not believe in him then you will gain eternal misery in hell (-). Now, let’s suppose the opposite: if God doesn’t exist and you don’t believe in him you gain eternal bliss ( +), and if God doesn’t exist and you believe in him you gain eternal misery (-). Such an argument would serve to undermine Pascal’s Wager and the Buddhism objection provides such an argument. While there are many versions of Buddhism, I shall stick to Buddhism as defined in Saka’s paper Pascal’s Wager and the Many God’s Objection. Saka states, “Buddhism teaches that existence is suffering and that suffering, because of reincarnation, is eternal unless the soul attains the beatific release of nirvana . . . nirvana is attained by emptying the mind of all desires and attachments (including love for God) and all thoughts (including belief in God)” (Saka 331). Therefore, according to Buddhism, Buddhist practice rather than a belief in God is what will end suf fering in one’s life, leading to the attainment of eternal happiness. If one chooses to believe in God and not believe in Buddhism, then the result is reincarnation and eternal suffering. A decision table comparing Buddhism and Pascalian theism would look something like this:

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012

(Table 2) God exists Nirvana exists (Nirvana doesn’t exist) (God doesn’t exist) Believe in God Heaven (+ ) Reincarnation (-) (You worship God) Believe in Buddhism Hell (-) Nirvana (+ ) (You empty your mind) *A similar table appears in Saka’s paper, Pascal’s Wager and the Many God’s Objection , this is a modified version (331).

According to this table, believing in God does not maximize your expected utility any more than believing in Buddhism, therefore neither option is a dominating option. So, because both options have equally good maximum expected utilities, and “since there is no reason to exclude this possibility [that Buddhism is correct], there is no decision-theoretic reason to believe in God” (Saka 331). Furthermore, Buddhism is endorsed by tradition and is a genuine religion supported by millions of people; therefore, Buddhism “should be considered a genuine option” (Saka 331). Therefore, Pascal’s conclusion is undermined by the Buddhism objection to Pascal’s wager. Pascal might respond to the Buddhism objection by stating that nirvana in Buddhism is not as great as eternity in Heaven. Therefore, because reason cannot be used to decide whether or not Heaven exists or nirvana exists, we must try to maximize our expected utility and choose the option with the greatest potential payoff, which is Heaven. Pascal might reach this conclusion by stating that the bliss of nirvana is something that can only be experienced in a finite human body, whereas Heaven is infinite bliss for the eternal soul. However, the Buddhist response would be that the utility of the Buddhist nirvana can be compared to the utility of the Christian Heaven by taking into account parinirvana in Buddhism. Parinirvana is the realm of eternal and pure bliss where those who have attained nirvana go after death. Therefore, when parinirvana is taken into account Buddhist nirvana seems much more desirable than the Christian Heaven. Not only does Buddhism promise eternal bliss in this life, it also promises eternal bliss in the afterlife. As a result, if one truly wanted to maximize their expected utility they would choose to believe in Buddhism rather than believe in God. Another response that Pascal might have to the Buddhism objection is by saying that when making our wager of whether or not to believe in God we must also take into account the consequences of being wrong and try to minimize our expected loss if we are wrong. Pascal might argue that we should choose to believe in the option with the worst consequences, for if we are wrong in our choice we will avoid the worst possible hell. Clearly it seems that an eternity in Hell is much worse than an eternity of reincarnation, therefore, since we do not know whether Buddhism or God is correct, we should choose to believe in God to avoid the more negative possible consequence of Hell. If we are wrong in our choice then we are destined for an eternity of reincarnation, but that wouldn’t be as bad as an eternity of misery in Hell if we chose to believe in Buddhism and God really did exist. One answer to this response would be to argue: whether or not the Christian Hell is worse than an eternity of reincarnation is irrelevant, for the probability of the existence of God should be 0. If the probability of the existence of God is 0, then believing in God does not have infinite expected utility (Bradley). Pascal’s initial assumption is that reason alone cannot prove God’s existence or non-existence. Some contend, “reason alone can settle that God does not exist . . .

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 by arguing that the very notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being is contradictory” ( Hájek ). Pascal had in mind the Christian God, who is described as an “ all- powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good” entity (Tooley). The riddle of Epicurus offers an argument that shows how this concept of God is contradictory by citing the problem of evil. The riddle is as follows: Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? Tooley, who presents an argument for the non-existence of God, offers further explication of how the problem of evil contradicts the notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect God:

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect. 2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil. 3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists. 4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil. 5. Evil exists. 6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn't have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn't know when evil exists, or doesn't have the desire to eliminate all evil. 7. Therefore, God doesn't exist.

So, if the previous arguments offered by Epicurus and Tooley are correct, then it seems that we should assign a probability of 0 to the existence of God, for the concept of God is contradictory in light of the problem of evil. However, Pascal might still argue that assigning a probability of 0 would be irrational. One might respond to this by stating, “Assuming a weak kind of rationality (that endorsed by subjective probability theorists i.e. Bayesians) it is rational to assign probability of 0 to God existing if you also assign probability of 1 to God not existing” (Bradley). Therefore, if we are to assume that the probability for God existing is 0, then we have reason to believe that God does not exist. So, instead of wagering on whether or not God exists, we should instead wager on whether or not Buddhism is correct. The decision table is as follows:

(Table 3) Nirvana exists Nirvana does not exist

Believe in Buddhism Nirvana (+ ) Status Quo (You empty your mind) Don’t believe in Buddhism Reincarnation (-) Status Quo (You don’t empty your mind)

As a result, Table 3 shows us that we should maximize our expected utility and believe in Buddhism rather than not believe in Buddhism because we have the potential to gain infinite utility by believing in Buddhism. In conclusion, I have shown that the Buddhism objection to Pascal’s Wager successfully undermines Pascal’s conclusion. Furthermore, I have refuted two responses to the Buddhism objection by first arguing that the Buddhist nirvana is equal to the Christian Heaven, and

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 secondly that the probability for the existence of God should be 0, therefore we should wager on whether or not Buddhism is correct, instead of whether or not God exists.

Works Cited

Bradley, Darren. "Re: Irani Class Overtally and Fellowship" Message to the author. 6 Dec. 2011. E-mail.

Hájek, Alan, "Pascal's Wager", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition) , Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/pascal-wager/

Saka, Paul. "Pascal's Wager and the Many Gods Objection." Religious Studies 37.3 (2001): 321- 341. JSTOR . Web. 6 Dec. 2011. Tooley, Michael, "The Problem of Evil", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition) , Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/evil/

Weatherson, Brian. "Chapter 13 Understanding Utility." Decision Theory . 65-67. Decision Theory . Web. 17 Oct. 2011. http://sites.google.com/site/darrenbradleyphilosophy/home/teaching/decision-theory.

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Commentary by David Seiple LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

Philosophy is a labyrinth, into which Joshua Liveris’s remarkably clever paper is bound to attract anyone who listens. When I agreed to be a respondent, I had no idea of how deeply I’d be pulled in. “A Buddhist Objection to Pascal’s Wager” – the title struck me as especially attractive, since both Christianity and Buddhism are areas I find interesting. But alas, I neglected to consider the fact that this was about Pascal’s wager , and that means that I was about to be swept up into the black hole of decision theory – whose prominence among philosophers I’m sure added several excruciating years to my ow n graduate education. So I’ll do the best I can in response to the argument that is being presented. But first I want to say something general about philosophy papers, and this is aimed towards what my task is here, which is to offer constructive suggestions for the wonderfully talented author of the paper before us here. Philosophy papers at their best accomplish, I think, two goals. (1) One is instrumental: they ought to show that the writer knows his or her craft, and can apply it in an original and insightful way to some topic of interest. (2) The other goal has to do with intrinsic goods, in that philosophy arguably ought to be the love of real wisdom -- about what is good in a final and unqualified sense, good in itself, not just as a means to something else. This is difficult to keep before us in an era of Postmodernity, but I’m convinced that this is the calling of philosophy, and I’m always looking for intimations of that vision in the philosophers I read. And what I see in Mr Liveris’ choi ce of topic are clear intimations of such a search for wisdom, and I would encourage him to be even more open in expounding on it. So let me now turn to the paper. Mr Liveris is obviously very much at home in a craft that relatively few people on this planet have even dreamed of mastering. He has attempted something genuinely interesting: he has tried to undermine an argument by expanding the context of options available to it, and prominent in his project is a recognition that Pascal’s universe of possibilities is quite narrow – Pascal’s decision matrix is too narrow, in fact, to generate much interest beyond the quasi-Calvinist 17 th -century world of Pascal’s Jansenist community. So what real interest does it have for us ? Philosophy at its best engages listeners in their own time. But most of us are not 17 th century French quasi-Calvinists. So how do we bring the Liveris project out of its purely historical context? One option is to do decision theory! And decision theory is a remarkable tool with rich promise in its proper domain. But here? I’m not so sure. I think that may be the wrong way to go, and that’s what I’m going to talk about here. Now it’s not at all surprising that Joshua took this route. After all, Pascal virtually invented decision theory – and this has everything to do with the fact that Pascal was no Cartesian: Pascal did not think that we could know God’s existence with any certainty (which is why belief is a wager). The resulting choice between believing and not believing seems to present us with a momentous option, because our eternal well-being would seem to be at stake. A person’s belief is a stairway to heaven, and disbelief a trap door to hellfire. Pascal might have formulated this as a premise:

(P1) Belief in God has infinite subjective expected utility & disbelief in God has infinite expected disutility

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012

Buddhism on the other hand clearly takes a very different line from P1. For the Buddhist, belief in God is a form of attachment; and attachments, as the Four Noble Truths tell us, are the source of the very suffering Pascal’s Christian commitment wants to avoid. So Buddhism denies the truth of P1. From here, Mr Liveris’s paper sets out to show that Pascal’s argument is undermined, because – in decision-theoretical language -- belief in God is not a “dominating option.” That just means that belief in God is no more attractive than not believing in God . If this can be shown, then indeed the Pascalian wager seems a bad bet, just because the relative hierarchy of utilities no longer picks out a uniquely favorable one. So Pascal’s argument is undermined just because it’s possible to imagine a larger matrix of options than Pascal did. But is that the most interesting line to take on this? Here I would urge an even more ambitious range of vision on Joshua’s part. He may already be thinking in these terms, actually, because it’s hard for me to imagine anyone pursuing this topic without sensing something a bit more sublime than just the outcome of, say, some prison er’s dilemmas. (Although, come to think of it, this does depend upon which “prisoner’s dilemma” we’re talking about. If we take Plato seriously, each of us faces our own prisoner’s dilemma – which is that while we mortals are being called out of the cave of everyday existence, we remain stuck down here in our own complacency and confusion. That is the dilemma of the religious seeker generally. I think this is what truly interesting philosophy aspires to address, and maybe this is what Joshua’s paper secretly aspires to as well.) Joshua wants to undermine Pascal’s argument. I think Joshua senses that there is something wrong with Pascal’s theology and something right about Buddhist psychology. So what is it about Pascal’s efforts here that seems suspi cious? Is it just the fact that Pascal is not a Buddhist? That obvious fact alone does not undermine Pascal’s argument; mentioning it simply changes the subject, and philosophers should be doing more than just changing the subject. So here’s what I think. Joshua’s project seeks to show that belief in P1 is overall unjustified, yet it seeks to do so solely within the decision-theoretic framework, and maybe that’s just too narrow. For it assumes that the two parties to the discussion (Pascal and the philosophically sophisticated Buddhist) share a common philosophical interest – which is to maximize subjective utilities and minimize subjective disutilities. In other words, a suppressed premise hangs over this entire discussion, which is:

(P2) I should base my decision (on whether or not to believe in God) upon expected subjective utilities and disutilities.

And here’s the point: One way of undermining Pascal is to continue to assume P2 and to show, as Joshua seems to have done, that Pascal’s P1 does not hold up. But I think a better move (one that may fit Joshua’s purposes even better) would be to argue that Pascal’s argument is undermined because -- for both the Christian and the Buddhist -- this turns out to be an unacceptable premise , and for similar reasons:

 For the Christian who takes the notion of “sin” seriously (and you don’t have to take a literal reading of the Garden of Eden story to do so), subjective utilities tend to be skewed by alienation from God. This is exactly what is wrong with many versions of the Divine Command theory, which we can find expressed on Cable TV on virtually any Sunday morning (“Do what God says, just so you can reap your own eternal reward and

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avoid your own eternal punishment!”) And the decision -theorist simply transforms this unfortunate style of addressing the problem into a calculus governed by the very self- interested impulses that faith is trying to save us from! Were Ayn Rand a believer, this would be her theology.

 And for the Buddhist, for whom spiritual practice is grounded on the avoidance of self- serving appropriations of spirituality – what Rinpoche Trungpa once famously called “spiritual materialism” -- the same considerations hold: the aim of spiritual practice should be to extinguish the very force of subjective utilities –the Buddhist term would be “ skandhas ” – and not to aggravate their rapacious and compulsive force by fixing one’s entire spiritual orientation upon them!

In offering Buddhism as a stand-in for “other gods,” Joshua has done something that Paul Saka, from whom he borrows some of his strategy, did not attempt, and I can only speculate as to why Joshua made this addition. I suspect “Buddhism” was not just picked out of a hat. So what is it doing there? Maybe Joshua sees here what a Buddhist himself would probably see in this project – an opportunity to begin working one’ s way, piece by piece, through the thickets of scholastic decision-theory towards something more spiritually enlightening. Nagarjuna himself would probably say that decision-theory is at best only a skillful means ( upaya-kaushalya ) towards the spiritual wisdom that philosophy aims to convey. In that case, it should be abandoned just as soon as its own spiritual utility is exhausted – which is likely to be fairly early along the religious seeker’s journey.

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012

Spectrum Inversion and the Nature of Color by Said Achmiz Brooklyn College, CUNY

“It seems possible to imagine two observers who are alike in all relevant psychological respects except that experiences having the qualitative content of red for one observer would have the qualitative content of green for the other. Nothing about their behavior need reveal the difference because both of them see ripe tomatoes and flaming sunsets as being similar in color and both of them call that color "red". Moreover, the causal connection between their (qualitatively distinct) experiences and their other mental states could also be identical. Perhaps they both think of Little Red Riding Hood when they see ripe tomatoes, feel depressed when they see the color green and so on. It seems as if anything that could be packed into the notion of the causal role of their experiences could be shared by them, and yet the qualitative content of their experiences could be as different as you like. If this is possible, then the functionalist account does not work for mental states that have qualitative content. If one person is having a green experience while another person is having a red one, then surely they must be in different mental states.” Jerry Fodor (1980)

“The idea of the possibility of such 'inverted qualia' is one of philosophy's most virulent memes.” Daniel Dennett (1991)

“Some messes are best walked away from.” Daniel Dennett (1991), on qualia

The "inverted spectrum hypothesis" given in the Jerry Fodor quote above is one of the classic philosophical arguments for qualia, also known as "intrinsic properties of experience", "purely phenomenal content", and many other terms. Like many arguments in the philosophy of consciousness, it makes almost no concrete predictions or claims about the physical world, nor does it depend for its persuasiveness on scientific data (indeed, many versions of it are undermined by our scientific understanding of color 1). Instead, as is also the trend in the field, inverted spectrum arguments rely on intuition, the "imaginability" or "plausibility" of various fanciful scenarios, and such poorly-defined concepts as "conceptual possibility". Intuition, however, is strongly influenced by language, by common terminology and conventions of usage. Many of the philosophers on both sides of this debate use critical terms Ñ words and phrases which refer to colors, the things (whatever they are) at the very heart of the debate Ñ with distressing imprecision and laxity.

So let's ignore Dennett's well-meaning advice, and instead take our cue from David Stove:

1 For example, Shoemaker acknowledges that the asymmetry of human color quality space makes behaviorally undetectable inversion scenarios impossible in humans, which forces him to resort to inversion scenarios involving aliens or other hypothetical life-forms.

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That philosophers' errors are usually most intimately connected with their abuses of language, I not only do not deny but am most anxious to affirm. (1991)

How much of the debate around inverted spectra can we cut through just by attending carefully to proper use of color terminology?

To answer that question, we'll examine first just what "color" is, or at least what we refer to when we talk about it. We'll then look at the positions of two prominent philosophers in this debate: Gilbert Harman, who finds spectrum inversion implausible and comes out against qualia, and Sydney Shoemaker, who argues in favor of inversion hypotheses and for the existence of qualia. In the course of these critiques, my own position on the matter of qualia and spectrum inversion scenarios will become clear.

What is Color?

If we look closely at just what we mean when we say that a tomato "is red", we find that it may be decomposed into two distinct but (normally) related things: one, that a tomato reflects light in a certain specific range of wavelengths (to be precise, that it has a certain surface spectral reflectance function), and two, that looking at a tomato consistently causes certain effects 2 in normal humans. These two meanings, while not necessarily explicitly held in the minds of most people, nonetheless "fall out" of our beliefs about color. We speak, for example, of the "real color" of objects, and distinguish this from their apparent color, in situations such as viewing an object through colored glass. We also refer to the apparent colors of things which, most people agree, have no "real color", such as afterimages. These two different sorts of referents of color terms, however, are quite distinct, and are linked only contingently! Consider the following thought experiment. Let's say that we've got Invert and Nonvert, who are "inverted" in color perception relative to each other, not just phenomenally, but also functionally/anything-else-ally. Perhaps one of them is wearing color-inverting lenses, or perhaps evil neurosurgeons have rewired key parts of his visual cortex. We present to them both a device (such as a standard computer monitor) which has been programmed to emit a solid field of light of a single wavelength (namely, the same wavelength that ripe tomatoes reflect Ñ ignoring for a moment the fact that tomatoes reflect light of a range of wavelengths). We instruct Invert and Nonvert to attend to the emitted light, and to note (privately, without verbalizing their judgment) what color they see; neither of our subjects has any difficulty with this. We then present to Invert and Nonvert a series of objects: tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, bananas, charcoal, glass, paper, blueberries, oranges, dirt, etc., and in each case ask: Is this object of the same color as the light you saw on the monitor? If not Ñ how different is it? (On a scale of 1 to 10, perhaps, or using some other informal means of scaling differences.) Both Invert and Nonvert will have no difficulty with these tasks. Both of them will correctly identify all other bright, solid red 3objects as being the same color as the light from the

2 Whether these are functional or phenomenal effects, or both, is an important question generally, but makes no difference to the current point. All that matters is that we're talking about effects produced on a perceiver qua perceiver (as distinct from e.g. thermal effects of electromagnetic radiation striking organic tissue).

3 That is, objects we generally refer to as "red"; no judgment about the nature of color is implied (yet).

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 monitor; and their judgments about how different the colors of other objects are from said light, will correlate equally well with differences in surface spectral reflectance. (Invert and Nonvert will also do equally well on color vision tests.) Thus we'll be quite justified in asserting that neither Invert nor Nonvert is misperceiving the colors of any of the test objects 4 But ex hypothesi , Invert and Nonvert differ functionally Ñ we may freely assume that their affective states upon seeing a certain color are quite different, for instance Ñ as well as phenomenally, and indeed in any way that doesn't affect their ability to make judgments of discrimination and identification about colors. They don't see the same thing when they look at a ripe tomato, which is to say that their visual experiences of the tomato's color differ. How can this be, if both of our subjects are perceiving the tomato's color correctly ? They can't (it would seem) both be right, while perceiving the tomato's color differently, if the tomato does indeed "have" a color. Is the tomato red (and not any other color), or is it not? Well, sure it is Ñ on the first meaning of "is red". On the second Ñ no. Yes, the tomato reflects light in one specific set of wavelengths; no, there is no single set of effects which the tomato produces in observers who correctly perceive its color. Why should this be a problem? The link between the two meanings is contingent. The tomato causes one set of effects in normal humans, and some other effects entirely in spectrum-inverted humans. Nevertheless, it reflects a certain wavelength of light, and this fact does not change no matter who looks at it (or even if no one does). The point becomes more clear when we see that surface spectral reflectance can be measured by machines, without ever needing any human to look at the object. Thus these are the properties that the object itself can be said to have. How the tomato "looks" to someone, or what qualia are associated with the experience of looking at the tomato, are not properties of the tomato; they are properties of the tomato's interaction with the visual system of some specific humans (or whoever). These, again, are two entirely different concepts, only contingently linked! This conclusion goes to the heart of much of the debate over inverted spectrum scenarios and hypotheses, because confused use of color terms and color concepts is endemic to the philosophical literature on spectrum inversion. Much of what is "intuitive" or "plausible" about these scenarios, and many of the objections to functionalist accounts, fall away when we apply color terms and concepts consistently and rigorously. Let's examine the positions of two major contributors to the debate, applying what we've concluded above, and see what may be clarified.

Harman

Gilbert Harman tackles the question in "The Intrinsic Quality of Experience" (1990). The paper deals with three arguments against functionalism, of which the second (the blind color scientist) is only tangentially relevant to the inverted spectrum problem; I won't address it here. The other two arguments, and Harman's treatment of them, bear directly on the issue at hand.

Here's how Harman characterizes the inverted spectrum argument:

4 This account of veridicality of color vision (see section on Sydney Shoemaker) is also consistent with modern consensus about its evolutionary origins, which holds, very briefly, that the selective advantage of color vision, and thus what we may take to be its designed function, is the ability to discriminate between and identify objects on the basis of their surface reflections.

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The objection [to functionalism] has us consider two people, call them Alice and Fred, with similarly functioning visual systems but with inverted spectra with respect to each other. Things that look red to Alice look green to Fred, things that look blue to Alice look orange to Fred, and so on. We are to imagine that this difference between Alice and Fred is not reflected in their behavior in any way. They both call ripe strawberries "red" and call grass "green" and they do this in the effortless ways in which normal perceivers do who have learned English in the usual ways.

This is a very telling formulation. On this account, to one of these two people strawberries look red and grass looks green; to the other, strawberries look green and grass looks red. But which is which? That is Ñ do strawberries look red to Fred and green to Alice, or vice versa? They both call strawberries "red". It would seem that they are both correct in doing so. They would also both say that strawberries "look red" to them. Are both of them correct about that, as well? If not Ñ which one of them is incorrect?

Harman gives what appears to be a reply to such questions:

Now, in the normal case of perception, there can be no distinction between how things look and how they are believed to be, since how things look is given by the content of one's perceptual representation and in the normal case one's perceptual representation is used as one's belief about the environment. 5

Harman goes on to emphasize that, in the inverted spectrum hypothesis (at least, his portrayal of it), the strawberry looks different in color to Alice and Fred. He claims that they must therefore have different beliefs about the strawberry's color, for if they did not, says Harman, then one of them would have to be mistaken. He continues:

A further consequence of the inverted spectrum hypothesis is that, since in the normal case Alice and Fred express their beliefs about the color of strawberries and grass by saying "it is red" and "it is green," they must mean something different by their color words. By "red" Fred means the way ripe strawberries look to him. Since that is the way grass looks to Alice, what Fred means by "red" is what she means by "green". [italics mine]

Yet presumably, Alice and Fred both look at a ripe strawberry and agree that its surface spectral reflectance (SSR) function has a certain form (high in the longest wavelengths of visible light, low in the shortest ones), which by convention they both call "red". Likewise, Alice and Fred

5 It's important to note here that Harman seems to be using "perceptual representation", "perceptual experience", and "perceptual state" to fulfill much the same function in his conceptual model of perception that qualia occupy in the models of other philosophers (at least in the context of spectrum inversion discussions): a consequence of perception which is explicitly not functional, and indeed is carefully distinguished from functional consequences of perception. It's clear enough that Harman is not talking about qualia here, and indeed he makes an extensive case in the first part of his paper that we are never aware of any "intrinsic features" of our experience. But if perceptual states/representations can't be a part of a purely functional account of mental activity, and they're also not qualia, what exactly are they? Whatever they are, they seem to be "used as beliefs" (but without thereby being amenable to functional descriptions).

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 both agree that the light which reaches their eyes after striking the strawberry has a certain spectral power distribution (SPD) function (likewise high in the longest wavelengths of visible light and low in the shortest ones Ñ assuming normal lighting conditions), which, by convention, they also both call "red". It's clear that neither Alice nor Fred are mistaken about any facts in this situation; they hold no incorrect beliefs. (It should also be noted that all of these beliefs that Alice and Fred have are about measurable aspects of the world, not about any "intrinsic features" of their own experience.) Should a pane of colored glass be placed in front of the strawberry, Alice and Fred will now agree that the strawberry is still "red" Ñ that its SSR is unchanged Ñ but that the light which reaches their eyes after striking the strawberry is now, say, "green" Ñ that it has a different SPD function than before; one which, by convention, they both call "green". On this, again, they are both quite correct. What sense, then, are we to make of the claim that to one of the these two people Ñ either Alice or Fred Ñ the strawberry "looks 'red'", and to the other it "looks 'green'"? To what could the color terms in those phrases refer? Not to the strawberry's surface spectral reflectance; nor again to the spectral power distribution of the light which reaches Alice's or Fred's eyes after striking the strawberry. Why not? Because if the color terms in the phrases "looks red" and "looks green" referred to those things, then it would follow that either Alice or Fred must be mistaken, must hold some false beliefs; and we've already seen that this is not so. The "red" in "looks red", and the "green" in "looks green", must therefore refer to properties or phenomena which are decoupled from, independent from, any facts about the world on which Alice and Fred can agree. Notably, these properties must be entirely decoupled from color terms as used to refer to any features of the external world. So Harman is partly right when he says that Alice and Fred "must mean something different by their color words". The missing puzzle piece is that both Alice and Fred mean several different, distinct things by their color terms. Some of these meanings do indeed express beliefs, which are about features of the external world, such as object SSR and light SPD; and these meanings of color terms are shared by Alice and Fred. But color terms used in the second way can easily have different meanings for Alice and Fred. Even if we eschew talk of qualia, and grant, with Harman, that even color terms used in this way express beliefs, these are not beliefs about anything in the external world. They are, perhaps, beliefs about the tomato as an "intentional object" (in Harman's words), but in any case Alice's beliefs and Fred's beliefs, in this sense, are about different things! They don't disagree Ñ they are merely irrelevant to one another. But if this is so, what does it mean to say that the strawberry "looks red" to Alice, but "looks green" to Fred? How could we establish the truth of that claim rather than its reverse? What state of the world could serve as evidence of the one claim as opposed to the other? If there is no way to distinguish a world where strawberries "look red" to Alice but "look green" to Fred from its opposite, then can we really be sure that such claims have any meaning whatever? What could motivate us to make such claims, once our mistaken intuitions about the nature of color Ñ supported by equivocation on color terms Ñ are removed? Harman concludes by likewise rejecting spectrum inversion, though on the grounds of plausibility rather than coherence, by appealing to a "common sense" linguistic argument which to me seems weak. (It is in any case irrelevant to my point.) Harman's article deals with so-called intersubjective spectrum inversion, of the sort described by Jerry Fodor in the quote earlier in this paper. There is another sort of spectrum

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 inversion scenario, intrasubjective spectrum inversion, discussed at length by Sydney Shoemaker.

Shoemaker

In "Intrasubjective/intersubjective" (1996), Shoemaker attempts to demonstrate the conceptual possibility of inter subjective spectrum inversion by starting from intra subjective inversion and showing that accepting the plausibility of the latter must lead to accepting the former as well, a line of reasoning he calls the "intra/inner argument". The chain of reasoning goes something like this: Shoemaker invites us to consider a certain scenario (the "partial inversion" scenario, described below), which is (he claims) quite plausible. Should this scenario obtain, says Shoemaker, we are forced inevitably to conclude that intra subjective spectrum inversion has taken place. Given the plausibility, thus established, of intrasubjective inversion, Shoemaker proceeds, via a highly technical, elaborate argument, to establish (allegedly) the plausibility of inter subjective inversion. I will not address that last part of Shoemaker's reasoning here, because whatever its merits, the relevance of that latter step depends entirely on its precursors; and there is, I believe, a flaw in the step from the partial spectrum inversion scenario to the conclusion that intra subjective inversion is plausible.

First, here's Shoemaker giving an overview of that part of his argument:

My aim here is to present a case of intrasubjective spectrum inversion that cannot be given an intentionalist interpretation. Like any case of intrasubjective inversion, it will initially involve what we might call color content inversion Ñ changes in what colors objects appear to have. The claim, however, is that these changes involve, in addition to a change in the color content of experiences produced by certain causes (e.g., a change in ripe tomato produced experience from being "as of red" to being "as of green"), a change in the "phenomenal character" of the experiences that could persist even after the color content of the subject's experiences has reverted to normal.

The "intentionalist" interpretation should here be taken to mean a functional account of some sort, as distinct from an account which contains "phenomenal character", i.e. qualia. Shoemaker here is apparently saying that what color something "appears" to have, the "color content" of experiences, is specifically not to be identified with its "phenomenal character". This is a strange position to take, for two reasons: one, it flies in the face of exactly that intuition that motivates belief in qualia in the first place Ñ that the "phenomenal character" of experiences is what's meant by "how things look"; two, it requires an explanation of just what this "color content" is.

Shoemaker recognizes the problem:

The challenge is to present a case whose most plausible description involves such a distinction between phenomenal character and intentional color content Ñ a case appropriately described by saying that after the person has reverted to her former way of talking about the colors of

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 things (including how they look as well as how they are) it remains true that the phenomenal character of her experience of them is different from how it was before.

This would be a rather strange situation. Consider the naive, intuitive concept of colors:

Light of certain wavelengths enters my eyes; I can see that light, and I can discriminate between light of different spectral power distributions; this is the way colors actually are. There is, however, a "something it is like" for me to see and discriminate light of various wavelengths, and that's the way colors look to me Ñ the phenomenal character of color vision. I can imagine that phenomenal character changing without any changes in the light or my ability to see or discriminate it.

Much of the debate over spectrum inversion has been about reformulating that "phenomenal character", that something-it-is-like of color vision, in various ways. Dennett is a committed functionalist on the matter, for example, while Harman attempts to give a non-functionalist representational account. Shoemaker, however, seems to be doing something else entirely: he introduces a third aspect to the situation, a "color content" of visual experience which is identical neither with any properties of the external world such as light SPD or object SSR, or with beliefs about those things, nor with the "phenomenal character", or qualia, involved in color vision. It's hard to see what this third thing could be, or why we should include it in our model. Shoemaker now presents the thought experiment which is his first step toward establishing the plausibility of intrasubjective spectrum inversion:

I start with the possibility of a partial inversion. Someone reports, after the microsurgeons have been at work on her, that nearly everything looks the way it did before, but that the shades of color within a very small range have "switched places" with their complementaries, each shade now looking the way its complementary used to look. This would be reflected in behaviorally detectable changes in the subject's discriminatory abilities. (It could not be the result of memory tampering.)

In other words, lemons would look the same to me as they always did, and so would fire hydrants, but oranges would now look the way that a cloudless sky once did, and the sky would take on, in my eyes, the former color of oranges; orange and blue (or perhaps just certain shades of orange and certain shades of blue) would have thus switched places in my color quality space, but everything else would stay the same. Shoemaker then invites us to imagine that the subject makes a "semantic accommodation" to the change, after which she refers to colors exactly as we do:

At this point it seems right to say that things of most colors look to the subject the way they did previously but that, e.g., chartreuse things look the way crimson things used to look, and vice versa, although the subject now says that chartreuse things look chartreuse and that crimson things look crimson.

Shoemaker describes a series of such partial inversions, at the end of which:

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The final partial inversion in the series would restore the structure of the subject's quality space to what it was before the series began; and we can suppose that together with the semantic accommodation to that change it would restore the person's "reactive dispositions" to what they were initially. But it would be ridiculous to suppose that these (final partial inversion plus semantic accommodation to it) would, at one fell swoop, restore the character of the person's experience to what it was originally Ñ for what the subject reports, and what her behavior would confirm, is that the final change affected the appearance of only a tiny fraction of the shades of color.

In other words, first orange and blue (say) switch places; then red and green; then purple and yellow 6, at which point the structure (relative positions) of the color quality space has been restored, but the absolute positions of the colors have been inverted (rotated by 180¼). This end result must be, according to Shoemaker, that much-hoped-for intrasubjective spectrum inversion. The argument, let us recall, is that the scenario of the individual partial inversion is plausible; that a series of such partial inversions is also plausible; that the result of a "full set" of partial inversions must be a full inversion, any other interpretation being "ridiculous to suppose"; and that therefore that final result, the intrasubjective inversion, is by extension also plausible. Let us grant the plausibility of the initial "partial inversion" scenario, and examine an alternate interpretation of the thought experiment as a whole. Suppose that, after the first round of microsurgery, the subject reports that crimson and chartreuse have switched places; but what has actually happened is that the rest of the color wheel has been inverted, and only those two colors have stayed where they were. It may at this point be objected that the subject will remember colors having looked different. Such an objection stems from the intuition that we have direct veridical access to our past experiences, via our memories of them. This intuition is mistaken but persistent; to do away with it, we may assume that the subject has also suffered amnesia with regard to her previous color experiences, or we may assert, with Dennett (quoted by Shoemaker in a footnote to this section), that memories of this sort are in essence constructed rather than retrieved and that our feelings about how something looked to us in the past are not reliable. It's reasonable to suppose that, in either case, the subject would prefer Shoemaker's characterization of her experience to my own, for reasons of parsimony. But could we be sure which of the two actually happened? It seems to me that, if human color quality space is "invertible", as Shoemaker puts it, the two scenarios ought to be indistinguishable. However, if the subsequent series of partial inversions are in fact partial inversions of narrow color bands (rather than the complementary near-total inversions, like the first one was), then they would in effect be slowly restoring the subject's quality space to its initial state, culminating in a complete restoration following the final partial inversion. This (a restoration to initial state as the culmination of the process) seems substantially less "ridiculous to suppose" in this scenario than in Shoemaker's. But if my characterization of the scenario is not distinguishable from Shoemaker's, as I claim, then restoration to initial state as the final result is not ridiculous under Shoemaker's description either. The result, then, is that a series of partial spectrum inversions which together account for the entire color wheel do not obviously add up to

6 Or some subsets thereof. We may set the granularity of these inversions at whatever level we please, according to Shoemaker; thus entire primary color chunks of the color wheel may switch places at once, or the partial inversions may proceed one tiny sliver of a specific shade at a time.

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 a complete inversion. They might, but then again they might not; our intuitions are silent on the matter, and we have no clear reason to prefer one conclusion to the other. The "series of partial inversions" scenario is the foundation of much of Shoemaker's voluminous body of writings on the inverted spectrum hypothesis. Without it, Shoemaker concedes, intersubjective inversion has no effective defense against the so-called Frege-Schlick view 7, which holds that questions of qualitative similarity and difference are meaningless in the interpersonal case. Since Shoemaker makes no alternative arguments for intrasubjective inversion, my scenario above seems to be a problem for his position as a whole. The other major component of Shoemaker's position on inverted spectra, and on qualia in general, is the notion of veridicality : whether, when we look at a tomato and judge it to be red, we perceive its color correctly or not. Shoemaker addresses veridicality in numerous papers and lectures, and it seems to underlie his motivation for postulating “color content" to visual experience which is separate from both colors as external properties of things in the world (SSR, SPD, etc.) and colors as phenomenal properties of experience. Were Shoemaker to refrain from postulating this "color content", he could embrace relativism about colors. Under this view, a tomato is not simply "red" in any sense beyond mechanically measurable physical properties; it is "red for Alice", meaning simply that Alice's visual experience of the tomato is accompanied by a certain phenomenal character, which Alice calls "red". Fred's experience of the tomato might have a different phenomenal character, or the same as Alice's, but relativism does not commit us to any position on intersubjective comparability of phenomenology.

Shoemaker, however, rejects relativism:

Suppose, then, that overnight we all undergo intrasubjective "spectrum inversion" (perhaps we have to be permanently fitted with special spectacles to protect our eyes from harmful radiation, and owing to bad design these make grass look red, port wine look green, etc.) It cannot be seriously maintained that the result of the change would be that henceforth grass is red, port wine green, etc. (1986)

... I don't think that if overnight massive surgery produces intrasubjective spectrum inversion in everyone, grass will have become red and daffodils will have become blue; instead, it will have become the case that green things look the way red things used to, yellow things look the way blue things used to, and so on. (1994)

Consider again the example of Invert and Nonvert in the first section of this paper. A proper relativist account doesn't answer the question of whether both Invert's and Nonvert's experiences are veridical by appealing to qualia, phenomenology, or how the tomato "looks" to them. Their experiences are veridical just if they can successfully perform the sorts of tasks described in the thought experiment above.

7 A term coined by Shoemaker, in reference to two philosophers who most prominently espoused it, Gottlob Frege and Moritz Schlick.

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This sort of relativism is, of course, essentially a functionalist one; it gives a normative account of a subject's color perception by asking whether the subject can take certain input and process it in such a way as to give certain output. It also gives us an easy answer to Shoemaker's objection. He says that it "cannot seriously be maintained that the result of [an overnight intrasubjective spectrum inversion] would be that henceforth grass is red, port wine green, etc." No, naturally not Ñ on the first of the two meanings of "is red". Grass and port wine reflect the same wavelengths of light as they always did. As for the second meaning Ñ well, if the postulated spectrum inversion is a coherent scenario, then yes, grass now is red, in the sense of causing the sorts of (functional, phenomenal) effects in normal humans that were once caused by tomatoes. And if that is in fact not the case Ñ if grass does not now cause the effects previously caused by tomatoes Ñ then no spectrum inversion has taken place. Or, to put it another way, if grass isn't red now, then it wasn't green before. Presumably we can all agree that it reflects such- and-such wavelengths of light, then as now, but as for "having" a "color" in any other sense, that color has either changed now or it never existed before. You can't have it both ways.

Conclusion

Many of the positions and arguments of those philosophers, who argue for spectrum inversion, and for qualia, rest on the plausibility, imaginability, or intuitive appeal of certain scenarios. It is, for example, the refusal of many philosophers to grant the plausibility of the intrasubjective inversion scenario that forced Sydney Shoemaker to construct his elaborate "series of partial inversions" thought experiment, in an attempt to construct an intuition out of smaller parts. Correspondingly, much work has been done by opponents of the qualophiles to dispel intuitions, to take microscopes to scenarios in efforts to reveal gaps and flaws and places where strange implications and counterintuitive conclusions have been glossed over. If successful, such an "unmasking" should leave our intuitions in their original state, prior to being "pumped" by hypothetical scenarios such as spectrum inversion. My efforts in this paper have been of that sort. I've tried to show that what we think we are imagining when we picture spectrum inversion is shaped, at least in part, by careless use of color terms, insufficiently rigorous application of conceptual categories, and disguised fallacies of equivocation. Certainly it's possible to imagine, for instance, a scenario where Alice and Fred, both looking at a red tomato and perceiving its color correctly, nonetheless are having a visual experience that is different in some way Ñ we'll refrain from using color terms! Ñ and that therefore a functional account of their perception would be incomplete; but of such scenarios it is far easier to protest unimaginability, because if we can't describe what we're talking about, it's far more difficult to be sure we're talking about anything meaningful at all. Devoid of strong intuitive support: inversion scenarios become unmotivated, not to mention unverifiable. It may by now be clear where my own sympathies lie. I endorse the sort of "functionalist relativism" described above. It seems to me that the structure of our color quality space, together with all of the functionally describable consequences of color perception events, tells us everything we need to know about the phenomenology of color perception. Under this view, spectrum inversion scenarios in, or between, human perceivers, are both impossible and incoherent.

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Works Cited Byrne, Alex (2004). Inverted qualia. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Dennett, Daniel C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Penguin.

Fodor, Jerry A. (1981). The mind-body problem. Scientific American 244: 114-25.

Harman, Gilbert (1990). The intrinsic quality of experience. Philosophical Perspectives 4: 31-52. Shepard, Roger N (1992). The perceptual organization of colors: an adaptation to regularities of the terrestrial world? In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (Eds.) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. 495-532. Oxford.

Shoemaker, Sydney (1982). The inverted spectrum. Journal of Philosophy 79 (July): 357-381.

Ñ (1986). Review of Colin McGinn's The Subjective View. Journal of Philosophy, 83: 407- 13.

Ñ (1994). Self-knowledge and "inner sense": Lecture III: The phenomenal character of experience. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (2): 291-314.

Ñ (1996). Color, subjective reactions, and qualia. In Enrique Villanueva (ed.), Philosophical Issues. Atascadero: Ridgeview.

Stove, David (1991). The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies. Blackwell.

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Commentary by Roberto Ruiz LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

Wittgenstein once remarked that “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” This has always struck me as a particularly ironic phrase because, as stated, it is not sufficiently clear whether Wittgenstein meant that language is the tool philosophers use to help us escape the natural bewitchment of our intelligence, or whether language is the bewitcher. Presumably, he meant the latter, so it is especially poignant to note that the very same philosopher who understood and warned us that language can bewitch and confuse us unnecessarily, unnecessarily confused us in the formulation of such an idea. But with the kind of clarity and precision of which philosophers ought to be proud, Said Achmiz has eloquently made an important and urgently needed call for researchers of mind, consciousness and phenomenology to be more precise in their use of various related but ultimately distinct concepts. The particular example Said uses to illustrate this general point, as we have seen, is the concept of color, and there is much at stake here. If I understood him correctly, Said has proposed that a thorough conceptual analysis of “color” can show us that “much of what is [usually taken to be] ‘intuitive’ or ‘plausible’ about [spectru m inversion] scenarios, and many of the objections to functionalist accounts, fall away when we apply color terms and concepts consistently and rigorously.” In other words, Said seems to be taking the position that objections to functionalism, at least those based on color spectrum inversion scenarios, may not count as legitimate defeaters of functionalism because they’re ultimately the result of confused and muddled thinking and the fallacy of equivocation (using the same word with multiple meanings). Beca use of time constraints, I will have to skip discussion of the details concerning Shoemaker’s intrasubjective spectrum inversion scenarios. Focus your attention, if you’d please, on the center of the following picture (as seen on the back cover of this issue):

The image, a mosaic of colors smoothly transitioning randomly in all directions, is a still picture. You will notice after a few seconds, however, that your subjective experience of the picture

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 changes. If you look away from the picture and fix your gaze back on it, you will probably have a similar, but, and this is key, different experience than you did previously. Obviously, this is not a spectrum inversion scenario. Still, the verifiable empirical facts about the world have not changed. Neither has the functional relationship between the object and your perception: the image itself has not changed, and you’re still the same individual with the same visual system as the person a few seconds ago. If we pay close attention to our experience of this admittedly tangential and brief example, we can then see that a purely objective, measurable and mind-independent scientific account of color, in conjunction with a functionalist account in which color refers to the properties of an object’s causal interaction with the visual system of some subject of experience, may fail to capture everything we mean by the word color. What such a combination of accounts seems to leave out is the phenomenological, subjective, what-it’s -like, first-person experience of how something “looks” to a particular subject. Opponents of functionalism, such as Shoemaker, want to claim that functionally identical experiences can be behaviorally indistinguishable and still leave something unaccounted for. At this point, Said could rightly argue that the two different intrasubjective experiences based on the picture above can be fully accounted for by a functionalist account, since the shift from one perceptual state to the other is behaviorally detectable because we can verbally report the change. I think that’s incidentally true in most instances, but doubt whether it’s necessarily the case (for instance, we could imagine cases in which subjects of experience, such as patients with locked-in syndrome, could conceivably have the two different and distinct experiences, and yet not be able to display any output behavior at all). Still, the requirement for verbal communication (or behavioral detectability) looks rather circular, since it assumes a third-person functionalist account (one in which there is necessarily output behavior) in order to establish the truth of functionalism, which is precisely the point in question. Additionally, if different intrasubjective experiences can be had without behavioral output differences (or even any behavioral output at all), it’s hard to see why intersubjective experiences could not be postulated on similar grounds as a challenge to functionalism. On the functionalist account, a belief or a perception is any entity that, standing in certain causal relations to input stimuli (or other mental states, similarly defined), will produce some external behavior (or other mental states, similarly defined). According to Said’s analysis of Harman, therefore, it makes no sense to ask the question of what it means for the strawberry to “look red” to Alice, but “look green” to Fred. Why doesn’t this question make sense? First, because the causal relations in both cases are all there is to the perception of color on a functionalist view. And second, because “if there is no way to distinguish a world where strawberries ‘look red’ to Alice but ‘look green’ to Fred from its opposite,” then such statement is meaningless because it cannot be verified empirically. It would take us beyond the scope of this response to deal with the question of verificationism. The usual objection to such a criterion is that the principle of verification cannot itself be verified, so it’s meaningless on its own terms. Be that as it may, however, it’s not clear that because some state of affairs is unverifiable, it must ultimately be meaningless. There is no way to distinguish, for instance, a world in which past events really did exist from a world that was created just a moment ago, but which is populated by the same objects and memories that exist in the first world (except for their temporal ontology). Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem meaningless to wonder which of the two worlds we happen to inhabit precisely because we must inhabit some world, and it is at least logically possible we live in the latter (as the recent simulation hypothesis proposed by Nick Bostrom could suggest). Similarly, we know from the problem of other minds that we cannot verify empirically that other people aren’t simply min dless zombie automata, but it is not

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 meaningless to suppose such a possibility, nor the possibility, equally unverifiable, that other people do have minds and that there is something that it’s like to be them. But even if we decide to accept the principle of verification, we may have here precisely the unintended kind of confusion that Said’s overall thesis wants to address and help us avoid: the problem of confusing related terms for each other. In this case, it would be useful to think of the verification principle as an epistemic rule according to which our beliefs may or may not be justified or confirmed as various degrees and forms of knowledge . But it would probably be a mistake to think that such an epistemic principle, by itself at least, has anything definitive to tell us about logical coherence or ontological possibility. The verification principle alone, therefore, can be distinguished from at least three other related but distinct concepts, only the first of which is amenable to verification:

1. the causal antecedents that give rise to experience, 2. the ontological status of first-person experience, 3. the phenomenological subjectivity of experience.

However, if I’m mistaken about the distinction between a first -person ontology and a third- person verificationism criterion (and that may be a question for another time), Said could justifiably argue that we ought to ignore claims that are both unverifiable and unsubstantiated. In such cases, it would be incumbent on those who propose some further fact unaccounted for by functionalism to provide evidence to support their intuitions instead of simply relying on intuition pumps that functionalists think themselves justified in rejecting when no evidence is presented in their favor. If there is such a thing as the what-it’s -likeness of subjective first-person experience, however, that ontological possibility, and its phenomenological consequences, cannot be undermined by an epistemic failure that requires a first-person ontology to be verified from a third-person perspective. In fact, it’s worth noting that on Said’s own account of the indistinguishability between his spectrum restoration scenario and Shoemaker’s spectrum inversion scenario, when Said argues that the subject may have suffered amnesia with regard to her previous color experiences, we could always raise the skeptical question of whether she would be able to tell the difference between her past and current color experiences (remember that, after all, she doesn’t remember what yellow or green or red used to look like in the past). This statement seems to be unverifiable, even from the point of view of the subject of experience herself. Nevertheless, Said uses this unverifiable state of affairs to draw some skeptical inferences from this thought-experiment, quite convincingly in fact, regarding the plausibility of Shoemaker’s intrasubjective spectrum inversion leading to the presumed inevitability of intersubjective spectrum inversion scenarios. We are left, therefore, with a dilemma, either:

a) we accept Harman’s psychophysical functionalist account, and require that our claims about color be verifiable, but then Said cannot appeal to an unverifiable state of affairs to refute Shoemaker, or b) we acknowledge that while unverifiable claims (from a third-person point of view) do produce skeptical epistemic problems, they leave first-person ontological and phenomenological possibilities intact by virtue of the nature of such ontology.

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If the picture I showed earlier persuades us that a functionalist account leaves out certain important features of phenomenological experience, we ought to opt for b, and thank Said for calling to our attention the need to clarify and make distinctions that, while in this particular case may undermine his minor goal of refuting objections against functionalism, nevertheless fulfill his larger call to help us make philosophical progress by understanding and acknowledging subtle conceptual distinctions.

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The Problem of Not Perceiving Art by Nickolas Calabrese Hunter College, CUNY

This paper will take up a few issues in contemporary analytic aesthetics regarding non- perceptual art. The first part of this paper will focus on James Shelley. I will begin with Shelley's historical account of the status of non-perceptual art, an account that takes as a starting point the views of predecessors like Beardsley, Sibley, and Binkley. Shelley's own view, expressed in a provocative recent paper, “The Problem of Non -Perceptual Art” 8 will then be considered in some detail. In this paper he argues that the following two conditions are necessary for aesthetic experience: “(R) Artworks necessarily have aesthetic properties that are relevant to their appreciation as artworks” and “(X) There exist artworks th at need not be perceived by means of the five senses to be appreciated as artworks”. 9 He proceeds to deny (though this third claim could arguably follow from the second) the following proposition: “(S) Aesthetic properties necessarily depend, at least in p art, on properties perceived by means of the five senses.” 10 I will also take up Noël Carroll’s response 11 to Shelley’s paper as both support for and as against Shelley’s position. Throughout much of the first half of the paper I will be explaining Carroll’s argument from form and Shelley’s argument from sensation . I will argue that artworks are never non-perceptual 12 in the second half of this paper. I will assert that an artwork must always be sense-perceptual in order to be best understood. I think that my view on this subject is similar to George Dickie’s, but not as rigid as – though I will not be able to give this topic the discussion it deserves within this paper. I will, however, talk about the implications of my argument against non-perceptual art. The theory for non- perceptual art entails, so it seems, that much of the art that is currently being made is of the non- perceptual kind. Conceptual art has such a prominent presence in the current art market, that it should be noted that much, if not most , o f this type of art is akin to Duchamp’s Fountain , being directly inspired by his model and approach to art-making.

I.I – The Accepted Accounts of Non-Perceptual Art

In James Shelley’s paper “The Problem of Non -Perceptual Art”, he takes a comprehensive look at the varied approaches to what he deems non-perceptual art. He discusses what other philosophers of art have written about “non -perceptual” art, and then gives hi s own stance. As the literature puts it, non-perceptual artworks are artworks which do not depend upon the five senses in order to be understood. This means that someone would understand or ‘get’ a non-perceptual artwork merely by a second-hand account from someone who did experience it first-hand. Supposedly the person who is told about the non-perceptual artwork will understand it just as well as the person who experienced it in person. This is the view held by Shelley, Carroll,

8 Shelley, James. “The Problem of Non -Perceptual Art”, British Journal of Aesthetics , vol.43 (October 2003), no. 4, pp. 363-378. 9 Ibid., p. 364. 10 Ibid., p. 364. 11 Noël Carroll, “Non -Perceptual Aesthetic Properties: Comments for James Shelley”, British Journal of Aesthetics , vol. 44 (October 2004), no. 4, pp. 413-423. 12 I suppose that I should say artworks are never non-perceptual, at least none yet . There is no reason to suppose that an artist will create a new type of artwork that actually is non-perceptual. But the artworks that have been made thus far are not examples of non-perceptual art according to my argument. 27

LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 and others 13 in the philosophy of art. This view of non-perceptual art, however, should not be understood as coextensive with non-aesthetic art, according to Shelley. Non-aesthetic artworks are ones that Shelley call non-perceptual, but have no aesthetic value as well (and Shelley claims that non-perceptual artworks are without doubt aesthetic). Some philosophers like Monroe Beardsley held that view, but it is certainly an indefensible stance to take, especially in light of the types of artworks that have been made in the past century. 14 Shelley says instead that artworks are not necessarily perceptual in order to have aesthetic properties. Non-perceptual artworks are still valid aesthetic pieces of work, even if they do not have anything that the five senses can tell you about them. For him, the sensation that one gets from an artwork is all that is necessary when dealing with non-perceptual art. 15 The sensation of the artwork is derived from the impressions conveyed by the idea of the artwork. Noël Carroll holds an improved version of Shelley’s position which focuses on an artwork’s form rather than the sensation it elicits, though I believe it still fails to be convincing. Here is an example that is frequently referenced by the supporters of non-perceptual art: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. It is a white porcelain urinal which has been turned upside down and signed with a false signature. It was submitted to an open submission art show, where anyone could show their work as long as they paid the submission fee to the gallery showing the works. When Duchamp submitted it, it enraged almost everybody; but it successfully challenged the traditional conceptions of what art could be or should be. Now, Shelley thinks, this piece is witty, daring, perhaps impudent, and absolutely cunning – but there is nothing in Fountain that someone would perceive with their five senses to give them the sensation of wittiness, or of cunning. The reaction to the artwork is not dependent upon some kind of first-hand experience of it. It is only the idea of the urinal which gives people the varied sensations of Fountain . He says that the sensations which Fountain engenders in the viewer are non-perceptual; they are independent of the sensible properties of the artwork. He says: “…ordinary urinals do not strike us with daring or wit, but Fountain , which for practical purposes is indistinguishable from them, does.” 16 This urinal is no different in sense perception than any other one according to Shelley (though I believe art can have a transformative value – read footnote) 17 Hence, on this line of thought, Fountain must be a non-perceptual artwork that still retains its aesthetic properties. He believes that it retains the aesthetic properties as a general principle of his which says that an

13 James Shelley takes both Timothy Binkley and Frank Sibley to hold a similar stance on non-perceptual art. See Timothy Binkley, “Piece: Contra Aesthetics”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , vol. 35 (1970), pp. 265-277; and Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic and Non -Aesthetic”, Philosophical Review , 74, (1957), no. 2, p. 135-159. 14 Shelley rightly points out that Beardsley is simply wrong by taking this view. He quotes Beardsley as saying, “The fuss that has been made about Duchamp’s Fountain has long amazed me. It does not seem that in submitting that object to the art show and getting it more or less hidden from view, Duchamp or anyone else thought of it either as art or as having an aesthetic capacity. He did not establish a new meaning of ‘artwork’, nor did he really inaugurate a tradition that led to the acceptance of plumbing f igures (or other ‘readymades’) as artworks today.” Monroe C. Beardsley, “An Aesthetic Definition of Art”, p. 25; cited in Shelley, “The Problem of Non -Perceptual Art”, p. 366. There is no way that Beardsley could defend his opinion that Duchamp “did not es tablish a new meaning of ‘artwork’”, because that is exactly what Duchamp achieved with his ready -mades. 15 James Shelley, “The Problem of Non -Perceptual Art”, pp. 363 -378. 16 Ibid., p.373. 17 I would like to mention that Shelley’s claim about ordinary urina ls is not an absolute truth. I believe that art has a transformative value. And I should be confident that I am not the only person who believes this. What I mean is this: if you experience Duchamp’s Fountain , you may find it witty, impudent, and any other relevant adjective. The transformative value comes in when I see an ordinary urinal in a bathroom and chuckle to myself in reference to Duchamp’s version. Now it is hard for me to see any urinal as just an ordinary urinal . I think that Duchamp’s artwork has had a lasting cultural change in the perception of urinals – at least in the opinions of art critics, philosophers of art, and the general public whom have encountered Duchamp’s work. 28

LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 artwork need not be perceptual in order to be aesthetic. The gesture is what is important in Duchamp’s piece; and this could be understood – according to Shelley – without the aid of a firsthand experience. It is the nature of Duchamp’s intention in disrup ting the art show that Shelley believes is the entire aesthetic experience to be had when dealing with Fountain , and he does not want this to be misunderstood. Another example from Duchamp that is believed to be perfect for the non-perceptual artwork model is his L.H.O.O.Q. in which a simple, inexpensive reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is given a moustache and goatee by Duchamp with the letters L,H,O,O, and Q inscribed at the bottom. Now, in the eyes of someone like Timothy Binkley, L.H.O.O.Q. is the perfect example of an artwork that has aesthetic value by virtue only of what it means, and not how it looks . Binkley writes about it:

“Excursions into the beauty with which the moustache was drawn or the delicacy with which the goatee was made to fit the contours of the face are fatuous attempts to say something meaningful about the work of art. If we do look at the piece, what is important to notice is that there is a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, that a moustache has been added, etc. It hardly matters exactly how this was done, how it looks.” 18

Clearly Binkley thinks that the nature of how L.H.O.O.Q. was made to look is unimportant. It is just the conceptual value of what it is intended to do that is important – the fact that a da Vinci reproduction has been defaced with facial hair. And he makes a strong point, because surely Duchamp wanted the confrontational idea behind his works to be the focal point which is addressed in the viewer’s mind. But Binkley and Shelley alike seem to be pointing to a very reductive view of these works as necessarily and only conceptualized; meaning that the works are only important or valuable for their idea and not their properties perceptible by the five senses. Whether or not this line of defense can hold up will be explored later in this paper – but as I have already mentioned in the beginning, I disagree with the belief that artworks like the ones Duchamp produced are artworks that need only be understood by virtue of their non- perceptible properties. I will provide one more beloved example, this time a musical one which Noël Carroll is particularly fond of citing as an example of non-perceptual art. This is a different type of art, so I believe that it is suitable to demonstrate the stance of those who promote the idea of non-perceptual artworks. Noël Carroll gives the example of John Cage’s 4’33” in a recent paper which he wrote as a response to Shelley’s paper. Cage’s 4’33” is approximately four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence; or rather, of the composer and his orchestra remaining quiet while the incidental sounds of being at an opera house are objectified in the orchestra’s silence. This is certainly a conceptual work of a fine composer. But this is also, for Carroll, an excellent example of a non-perceptual work of art. Carroll observes:

“…one can experience the formal properties of works such as John Cage’s 4’33” on the basis of a reliable report without ever encountering – and, therefore, without perceiving – them directly…But one can grasp the point of 4’33” without ever attending a performance of it; one can understand its design – how it is intended to work in order to fulfil its purpose – without hearing anything. That is, one can divine the form of the work or a significant part of it – its use

18 Timothy Binkley, “Piece: Contra Aesthetics”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , vol. 35 (1970), pp. 265-277 29

LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 of silence as a framing device, for example – and the concept it subserves from a reliable description of the piece.” 19

This is a description that adheres to Carroll’s notion of his argument from form . He understands artworks as being dependent on a certain formal structure that conveys their meaning. An artist must have the intention of creating a suitable form to carry the meaning of an artwork – this is imperative in Carroll’s view. The reason that 4’33” works so well for him is that the composer carried out a well-designed idea, of which the viewer must have some sort of intelligence in order to understand the concept. Carroll’s argument from form is a functionalist account 20 which goes as follows:

“…I have argued that an experience of an artwork is aesthetic if it involves attention to the form of the work or to its expressive or other properties. I call this the content-oriented approach to aesthetic experience…This argument depends on a certain conception of the form of the artwork – what I call the functional account. On my view, the artistic form of the artwork is the ensemble of choices intended to realize the point or purpose of the artwork.” 21

Thus if one can understand the notion of an artwork’s purpose through its form, then for Carroll, it is an aesthetic artwork without necessitating a perceptual experience of that artwork. Now it seems obvious that Carroll is correct in observing that one can grasp the form of a work, or the general idea about it, by a reliable description from a person who observed it first-handedly. Yet, there seems to be something intuitively wrong with this simplification of the situation at hand. What I mean is this: Cage’s composition here is something that is incredibly powerful. It is dependent upon one grasping the idea but the idea can be easily described to anyone. They will be able to understand it as long as they have a modicum of knowledge about contemporary art. These things have to be experienced by somebody to begin with in order to even be able to give a second-hand account of a work. There must be a person who has had a perceptual experience of every artwork in the first place, or else a second hand-account would be impossible. With that being said, the same account holds true for the Kritios Boy , of ancient Greek art. You would be hard-pressed to consider the Kritios Boy to be a conceptual artwork. Kritios Boy is simply an unattributed life-size statue of a nude Grecian boy with a short haircut typical of that era, who is rendered in marble and is standing in a contrapposto stance (meaning that he has his weight centered on one foot, with a tightened buttocks on that side – this is a simple standing position, just where one is putting most weight on one leg). The artist who rendered the boy completed it with details of the muscles and bone structure, an impressive feat for people who did not have full knowledge yet of human anatomy. The boy is also missing the following parts, due to wear and tear from centuries of being buried: below the knee of the right leg, below the elbow on both arms, and the eyes are just empty cavities.

19 Noël Carroll, “Non -Perceptual Aesthetic Properties: Comments for James Shelley”, British Journal of Aesthetics , vol. 44 (October 2004), no. 4, pp. 413-423. 20 Of course Carroll is borrowing the concept of functionalism from analytic philosophy of mind. The concept of functionalism was made popular by philosophers like Jerry Fodor and Hilary Putnam. According to the functionalist account, a thing that fulfils all of the functions of a mind may be considered a mind. This condition is known as multiple realizability, which is when a type of thing has many tokens which all satisfy the type. So if something is art, for Carroll, it does not need to be perceptual, it just has to be a token for the type Art . Multiple realizability is a significantly useful tool when dealing with assessing artworks. But I think that I would have used a condition of multiple realizability which says the conditions of artworks are that they can be multiply realized in a number of different of mediums, as long as they fulfill all of the functions of an artwork, of which I think being perceptual is one. 21 Ibid, 414-415. 30

LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012

Now I believe that in a few sentences I have just described the Kritios Boy in enough detail to give someone a general idea of its form as Carroll would put it, or of its sensation as Shelley would have it. But there is still something essential missing in my account, and that is the direct sensual experience of the work. One cannot really know everything about Kritios Boy without some kind of direct perceptual experience. There are numerous other examples that could easily be described though they are not non-perceptual on this account: the Great Pyramids, an Ad Reinhardt painting, some Pollock paintings, and numerous other works. This is going to be my main claim in the second half of this paper, namely that an artwork must necessarily be perceptual. I think that a second-hand account of an artwork is not sufficient for it to be understood completely. There seem to be very real problems in the way these artworks are being claimed as non-perceptual.

II – Sense Perception is a Necessary Condition of Aesthetic Experience

I take Shelley and Carroll as having well thought out aesthetical theories regarding the nature of non-perceptual artwork, but there are a few other factors in this debate which they are both guilty of neglecting to mention. I am certain that sense perception is necessary in order to fully understand each of the artworks which they consider to be non-perceptual artworks. I am not saying that works such as Fountain or 4’33” are not aesthetic works like Beardsley did, or that they do not have important conceptual qualities which must be thought about. I am saying that they are aesthetic works and they necessarily have to be perceptual. Sure they have non- perceptual qualities, but we cannot be so general as to say that they are only non-perceptual artworks as the others claim. I want to outline my argument against all accounts of non- perceptual artwork with the following four points. First, artworks are necessarily sensed in context of an exhibiting setting. This is perhaps the most important consideration, which includes museums, galleries, permanent installations, and temporary exhibiting spaces. Second, there is a difference between speculating about an artwork and having a cogent, intellectual discussion about one – I will explain what I mean by this further down, but I rely on the fact that a second hand account is never the type of thing that is taken as authority, as this is the type of fallacy from authority that is not acceptable with regards to artworks. Third, I think it is appropriate to talk about th e “ what it’s like ” quality that one has when experiencing art. This is obvious to most people working in the area of the philosophy of mind, but since I think it is overlooked by some individuals it is assuredly appropriate to mention it here – basically it is the question of how a perceptual experience is intrinsically different than a comprehensive account of that experience. And fourth, the ‘arbitrary’ decisions mentioned by some critics, such as the moustache on L.H.O.O.Q. are not arbitrary at all, and I will give examples of why not. I think that every good decision made by an artist is an important decision, and has much consideration behind it. As an upshot from the four points, I want to argue that much of the art that is currently being produced and embraced within the art world is very conceptual work which would, I believe, be considered non-perceptual by folks like Shelley and Carroll. I am of the opinion that much, if not most, artwork that is being made now is directly or indirectly inspired by Duchamp’s method of working. I will discuss this point and provide a few examples of exactly the type of work that is being pointed to at the end of this section. Something that must be addressed first is more of an intuitive consideration of the problem at hand, a position that is actually held by art critics and philosophers of art alike. 22

22 Calvin Tomkins is one of the foremost critics who think that Fountain’s me aning is located exactly in its uncompromising presence - Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography. Critic and poet Octavio Paz also writes of the 31

LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012

Namely this: how could one look at any undulating, gleaming, pristine, innocent object like Fountain and say that the impression left upon their senses is no better than a second-hand account? It really seems more of an intuition that this object has some undeniably sensible qualities that are intimately tied in with its appreciation, meaning, and understanding of. Some critics have said a great many things regarding the actual appearance of Fountian . New York Times art critic and personal friend of Duchamp, Calvin Tomkins relates the following comment about the work’s physical presence:

“Arensberg had referred to a ‘lovely form’ and it does not take much stretching of the imagination to see in the upside-down urinal’s gently flowing curves the veiled head of a classic Renaissance Madonna or a seated Buddha (…).” 23

Whether or not Tomkins is correct in assuming the likeness of Fountain is a Madonna or Buddha is up to art critics to determine, because Duchamp certainly can have no bearing on the discussion now. Although, it should be noted that he does have a valid point, and once one is aware of this likeness, it is hard not to at least try and see the similarities (take note of the keyword ‘see’, as this kind of inspection would obviously have to be done by way of a first -hand encounter with the work). But the problem is just this: why have so many people been enthralled with their physical encounters with supposedly non-perceptual artworks? This point does not need to be dwelled on for too long, as this paper seeks to tease out the more systematic reasons why the theory of non-perceptible art is untenable, but we should keep it in our minds nonetheless, as we are creatures that inherently know our world through sensations, and this is how we define our world.

II.I – Artworks in Context

It seems that the fuss that is made over works of art like Duchamp’s urinal rests on the fact that it is exhibited in a gallery or museum alongside other works of aesthetic value. Had his urinal been exhibited in the bathroom next to a wash sink or in an alleyway on the ground next to a dumpster, then perhaps it would have possessed a different value, but it has not been. This seems so critical to me that it should not be mistaken. It is well-known among artists themselves, that the surroundings of their installations are part of the artworks themselves. Visual artists like James Turrell and Robert Irwin have gone through great pains to ensure that minute contextual details are made, like the type of light bulbs used by the gallery, or the time of day to open an exhibit. Surely they are not just being obsessive compulsives by doing this – no; rather, they understand that the context in which they show their work will greatly alter its reception. That is, the sense perception of their artworks in this context will produce that effect . This should make clear why Duchamp’s works like Fountain were not non-perceptual at all. It is not that he exhibited a urinal that enraged critics and artists alike, it is that he exhibited the urinal alongside these precious paintings and sculptures. I once again want to use a quote from Shelley that I used above:

importance of the “presence” of Duchamp’s works in his book Marcel Duchamp: Appearances Stripped Bare . Philosopher George Dickie also makes a convincing case for the presence of perceptual aesthetic qualities in Duchamp’s works in his book Art and the Aesthetic . Another champion of this opinion is artist Sherrie Levine, who has stated in interviews that she was grea tly inspired by Duchamp’s choice of “anthropomorphic” readymades; that is, readymades that appear to our senses as meaningfully representative of human qualities. 23 Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography , New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1998, pp. 185-186. 32

LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012

“…ordinary urinals do not strike us with daring or wit, but Fountain, which for practical purposes is perceptually indistinguishable from them, does.” 24

It is absolutely true that ordinary urinals do not strike us with daring or wit (except for some gas station urinals, but that is a different discussion), but it is absolutely false that Fountain is perceptually indistinguishable from ordinary urinals. Apart from the fact that it is upside down and signed, there is another problem with his characterization of its indifference: ordinary urinals are never sitting on a pedestal in a gallery surrounded by expensive works of art! To discuss Fountain without having actually seen it in this setting of artists and collectors seems to miss a crucial point that Duchamp was trying to make. Sure we can describe the artwork with great detail and clarity. But its purpose was primarily a perceptual one when people visited the space at which it was exhibited. It was meant to shock gallery goers when they physically saw it in this setting . It surely would lack some of its efficacy in an exhibition today, since it has long been accepted by the general art world. And by virtue of the fact that it would lose some of its effect in a contemporary exhibition just shows that the sense perception of it was necessarily an aesthetic property of it. Something that we should bear in mind about this discussion is that context is only part of the perception that one has of an artwork. The artwork has many other properties, ones that must indeed be thought about and determined once the viewer has all the facts from the perceptual experience of the artwork. These other properties could include biographical facts about the artist who made the piece, political views at the era the piece is made, current events, social facts, and other categories as well. But the perceptual experience is the immediate point from which one starts. If Duchamp’s urinal really was non -perceptual, then why did he not just send in a drawing of a urinal, or even better, just the word ‘urinal’ written on a piece of paper? Because the urinal’s physical presence was paramount to its purpose. The fact that it is a shiny, white, perfectly new example of a common commodity presented within this setting consisting of unique, handmade pieces of art is of utmost importance. Imagine the shock one must have felt upon seeing Fountain for the first time in that era. Certainly, this is not a feeling that could adequately be reproduced by a mere account of what it was like. The take-off point for any good philosophical account of anything is the physical facts that one can perceive. I will get to exactly why second- hand accounts are insufficient next.

II.II – Second Hand Accounts vs. Immediate Perception

As I said before, we should admit of physical facts as being the most relevant in any discussion about any philosophically interesting conversation. Our way of accounting for most phenomena is by judging our experiences. I think that this is one of the reasons that many philosophers have considered non-perceptual art to be a real phenomenon. Nelson Goodman writes the following about how personal the art judging experience really is:

“…we have to read the painting as well as the poem, and that aesthetic experience is dynamic rather than static. It involves making delicate discriminations and discerning subtle relationships, identifying symbol systems and characters within these systems and what these characters denote and exemplify, interpreting works and reorganizing the world in terms of works and works in terms of the world. Much of our experience and many of our skills are

24 James Shelley, “The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art”, pp. 373. 33

LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 brought to bear and may be transformed by the encounter. The aesthetic ‘attitude’ is restless, searching, testing – are fewer attitudes than action: creation and recreation.” 25

What Goodman is saying here is that when one ‘reads’ an artwork, one is acting. They are not merely speculating about a piece of art that they have been told about. If someone went to John Cage’s 4’33” and told me, “It was such an amazing experience – so powerful, so revealing about the audience that attends contemporary compositions…”, I (who have never attended this piece in person) would c ertainly be out of line in saying, “Yes, it was such an extraordinary experience when you told me about it.” I find it hard to believe that anyone who had not seen the piece in person would have this type of reaction. Conversely, I doubt that the person who told me about it would be thinking, “Great, now I feel certain that Nickolas knows everything that I do about Cage’s work.” There is only so much that one can learn about a thing without first -hand experience of it. Sure, we could convey the general idea easily in some cases, as I did earlier with the Kritios Boy , but to convey something is not to provide a thorough understanding of a thing. When there is a discussion about an artwork by two people – one of who has first-hand experience of the artwork, and the other only has a second-hand story of the artwork – then the person without the sense experience of the work will only be speculating about what they think it is like. Similarly, I feel sure that, although we can both conceptually talk about the Eart h’s moon, Neil Armstrong’s account will be more cogent and intelligent than my speculation about what it is like (I know, I know – the Earth’s moon is not a piece of art…or is it?). Here is another possible case that should illuminate the cause for concern on this issue: what if a revered current artist who falls in line with what Shelley would call non-perceptual art, say someone like Damien Hirst, what if he was to issue a statement saying that he was not going to show his artwork anymore. Not to anyone in the general public . Only Hirst would see the artworks that he made. This poses the question: what if he said that he was still going to exhibit at galleries and museums, but that the gallery and museum shows would consist of a person standing there who would tell you about the artworks. Furthermore, only this person had seen Hirst’s artwork, apart from Hirst himself. Would anyone be willing to take her word for it that these artworks were exactly as they are being described? Would anyone be just as informed on the works as she is? This seems too absurd to even consider, but following Carroll and Shelley’s line of thought, they think that this type of experience would be just as informing as the first- hand encounter with these hypothetical Hirst works. I am not happy with that type of experience of artworks, nor do I think that many other people interested in art would be. The case of these phantom works that could hypothetically be made is not pleasing at all. It serves to illuminate the necessity of perceptual experience of a work of art in order for one to have a more complete understanding of that work of art. What it is like to experience a piece of art is more than just a description of that artwork. It is a perceptual experience that could tie together what one knows about an artwork. I will return to this point a further down in this paper.

II.III – The “What It’s Like” of Artworks

Knowledge of a thing is more than just the facts . Now, this statement may not be true, but there is certainly something more to a thing than just the facts about it. One can know everything that there is to know about any given thing, but their first-hand experience of the thing will provide them with something else that they now possess. Frank Jackson gives the brilliant and

25 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), p. 258. 34

LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 simple thought experiment for the “ what it’s like ”26 of experience with his epiphenominalist account of conscious exp erience through a thought experiment about ‘Mary’s room’. 27 In the thought experiment, as most philosophers are familiar with, Jackson gives the example of a young woman named Mary who has lived inside a colorless room for her entire life. There is no perceptual access to a color like red or blue. But Mary is in there with many physics books, and has taught herself everything one could know about the physics of color: how the rods and cones are affected by color; what color is and why we perceive it the way we do; the wavelengths that color operates on; and so on. It is tempting to say that Mary knows everything that she possibly could about the color red because she has learned every single fact that was ever recorded about the color red. But when Mary emerges from the room, she experiences red for the very first time, and this experience could not have been predicted by her wealth of knowledge about it. So has she just gained something new in this first-hand experience of the color red? Unmistakably yes. One cannot challenge this claim; it would be too counter-intuitive to brush off her astounding first experience of the color red. Now how does this apply to the discussion at hand? When the proponents of non- perceptual art claim that a second-hand account is sufficient, they are forgetting this example. Somebody could know every fact about Duchamp’s Fountain , every single recorded physical fact and opinion regarding the artwork, but they would still not have that missing – and essential – experience of the artwork for themselves. They would just have a list of every physical fact about the artwork. This list is probably useless unless they have experienced some more conceptual artworks in their own time. The point that Jackson is trying explicate is that it is great to have a list of every physical fact about a thing, but this knowledge is lacking something without at least one first-hand perceptual experience of that thing. So on this view (which is definitely not a controversial one) artworks would require first-hand experience of them in order to understand them best. A second-hand account just does not satisfy our understanding of an artwork in the way that a first-hand experience does. If we follow the logical implications of ‘Mary’s room’, we will conclude that perceptual experience of an artwork is the best way to understand it. Someone who simply relates a bunch of facts about an artwork fails to sufficiently give their audience the best possible understanding of an artwork. I should like to mention here about quite a bit of vagueness that some philosophers of art write with when they suppose that an artwork can have visual elegance but not visual daring. Some of the philosophers mentioned have seemed to suggest that one can see elegance or beauty within a work by, say, Jacques-Louis David, but that something like daring or wit is not visible in a Duchamp ready-made. I find this to be terribly vague, and hard to back up. It is similar to discussions on morality in which someone says to another person, “Can you see the ‘bad’ when you see a teenager set a kitten on fire?” Intuitively, she wants to respond yes. But on further thought, it becomes clear that ‘bad’ is just a term of judgment that is ascribed to the act of setting kittens on fire, and that people, as moral agents must be the ones to ascribe that judgment. Similarly, elegance is something that must be ascribed (while, of course, it is true that it must be seen, and thought about). But why would daring not follow the same rules as elegance? If I am in a gallery and see David’s Death of Marat for the first time, I will see the piece and ascribe beauty and struggle to it if I know something of the French Revolution. Likewise, if I am in a gallery and see Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. for the first time, I will certainly see the piece and ascribe wit and daring to it if I know something of the history of art. This is not something

26 The phrase “what it’s like”, of course, is from Thomas Nagel’s less developed, but catalyst paper “What it’s Lik e to be a Bat”. I chose Frank Jackson’s thought experiment for this paper, because it is far more appropriately applied to art. And though Jackson has come to refute his own position, I think it still illustrates problems in many situations of conscious experience. 27 Frank Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, Philosophical Quarterly , vol. 32 (1982), pp. 127-136. 35

LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 separate from my sense perceptions. For all purposes, it seems totally dependent upon my sense perception of it. The separation of some terms as being aesthetic terms, and some terms not being aesthetic terms is terribly selective.

II.IV – Everything Matters When Evaluating an Artwork

I would like to quickly make mention again of a quote by Binkley. He says about Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. the following statement:

“Excursions into the beauty with which the moustache was drawn or the delicacy with which the goatee was made to fit the contours of the face are fatuous attempts to say something meaningful about the work of art. If we do look at the piece, what is important to notice is that there is a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, that a moustache has been added, etc. It hardly matters exactly how this was done, how it looks.” 28

Now, this point seems to be difficult to deny; but I think that there is more wrong with it than right with it. All we have to do is take Binkley’s advice and change the type of moustache that Duchamp has put upon the painting. Let us consider if the moustache were a centimeter longer or shorter. Then it seems pretty clear that the work of art would be unchanged, still the same meaning as the work with the other moustache. How about if it was one or two shades darker or lighter. Would anybody really notice it, or try to make a case for it being radically different than the one that was on it? It is silly to even try to make a different assessment of the piece based on such a trivial change in the moustache as this. Imagine this: what if the moustache had been a Fu-Manchu moustache, or if it had been the moustache of a certain notorious dictator of the time? What if the moustache was like one of Dali’s famously ostentatious moustaches? What if it was a full beard instead of a delicate moustache? Would it still be just a moustach e? The simple answer to the question is: no. If the type of moustache is different enough, then there will certainly be a change in its perception. The type of moustache that Duchamp chose probably was not arbitrary, and since he was notoriously minimal in giving descriptions or reasons for his work, we may never know exactly why he chose the moustache that he did. But one can probably assume that he chose it for the way it looked on the Mona Lisa depiction. A moustache that had only been slightly altered is one thing; but clearly if the moustache had been completely different, then there would be cause to think of the piece as being different from the original conception. And I think to argue for the arbitrary nature of Duchamp’s moustache application is to grossly understate his abilities as a maker of art. In fact, to take the stance that any part of an artwork is arbitrary kind of precludes the possibility of it having any real depth at all. Binkley writes quite resoundingly about Duchamp’s talent, and the quality of his wo rk. But if Duchamp is really making such arbitrary decisions, then why would Binkley hold so much value in the work at all? It just seems so discrediting to assume that such a crucial part of Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. is random. I suppose arguments could be made for appreciation of arbitrarily chosen artwork symbolism, but it would reflect a lowered interest in one’s own art making, thus lowering the perceived quality of one’s artworks. 29

28 Binkley, Timothy. “Piece: Contra Aesthetics”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , vol. 35 (1970), pp. 266- 267. 29 Shelley, Carroll, and others who praise artworks that they consider to have arbitrary symbols should really assess this point on their own. It is a very murky area, and I think that there would be less quality if the main motif in a piece of art was just some random decision with little thought in how it was actually perceived. 36

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So it is true that an artwork could have slightly different manifestations of crucial parts and still retain its meaning. But once the degree of change has gone beyond what one would consider slight, then the meaning will be changing with it. It must be remembered that the artist who creates the work of art is an intentional agent; and so since an intentional agent created the work, it is that author (the artist) who is the one who imbues his or her artwork with the meanings that are to be found in it. This is not a new idea - artworks have been considered embodied meanings 30 by important philosophers of art starting with Danto. The meanings that are embodied in these artworks are put there by their creators through a serious of intentional acts upon the artwork. It seems obvious that intentionality in art is important in order to understand its meaning. Through a series of intentional actions L.H.O.O.Q. was produced and presented as an artwork by Duchamp. We should not assume an intentional act to be so randomly generated when dealing with artists and their art. This type of attitude functions to subvert the veneration that we hold for artists and their ability to create what we appreciate. Intentionality plays such an important role in the making of art that it would be silly to neglect it. It is intentionality that satisfies the primary causal property of art-making. So we should acknowledge that any important part of an artwork, strictly speaking, is intentionally put into it.

II.V – The Upshot, or, Where We Are Now

The upshot from this discussion is a complex review of contemporary art, as most of it has been directly influenced by Duchamp’s practice. A good place to start is with the example of Damien Hirst. He is arguably one of the most productive artists of the current time, and he probably makes more money from his art than any other living artist right now. An example of his spectacle-causing artwork is his piece For the Love of God . This is an extremely conceptual work of sculpture. It is, essentially, a human skull that is covered in flawless diamonds. That is all. For the Love of God was done directly in the vain of Duchamp’s Fountain . Following Shelley’s view would lead one to judge this artwork as non -perceptual. It could not be more of a mistake to consider the perceptual experience of it as just as sufficient as a second-hand account. Hirst’s piece is equally witty, as well as a scathing view of the art world and its commerce as well. It conveys the sense of a spectacle as being an extremely rich endeavor, one which can stun us with its gleaming beauty or shock us with its ostentatious presentation. This piece conforms to the Shelley’s category of non -perceptual art, but without seeing the piece will leave one with a large privation of understanding for the work, for the reasons which I argued above. Another example is Jeff Koons, who makes artworks out of things like unaltered vacuum cleaners, pool toys, and Nike basketball posters. These things are mundane, trite, and utterly stunning in the gallery setting. He has built quite a few sculptures that look exactly like pool toys, floating devices, and blow-up toys but are actually built out of stainless steel or other metals. Now there is no trick here - that is an exact description of what some of his pieces are physically. But one cannot grasp the total meaning of these artworks without a personal perceptual experience of the artworks. He even acknowledges in interviews and articles that his work is done directly in response to Duchamp’s works. With today’s major artists being the type who produce what other philosophers c all non- perceptual, what is the need for galleries, museums, and public art installations? I would think that corporeal art serves no purpose anymore on their view. I think that in order for art to thrive

30 Arthur Danto came up with the concept of embodied meanings (which has been widely embraced in the philosophy of art), and I think that it serves to assist the point that is trying to be made here. For more information, see Danto’s writings, especially his book of essays on art – Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations . 37

LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 and continue its progress, this confusion over non-perceptual art must be discarded with other failed theories. It is simply an untenable position to take.

Works Cited Beardsley, Monroe C. “An Aesthetic Definition of Art”, p. 25; cited in Shelley, “The Problem of Non-Perceptual Art”, p. 366. Binkley, Timothy. “Piece: Contra Aesthetics”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , vol. 35 (1970), pp. 265-277.

Carroll, Noël. “Non -Perceptual Aesthetic Properties: Comments for James Shelley”, British Journal of Aesthetics , vol. 44 (October 2004), no. 4, pp. 413-423.

Danto, Arthur. Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994).

Dickie, George. Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1974).

Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), p. 258.

Jackson, Frank. “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, Philosophical Quarterly , vol. 32 (1982), pp. 127-136.

Nagel, Thomas. “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?”, Philosophical Review , vol. 83 (October 1974), no. 4, pp. 435-50.

Paz, Octavio. Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1991).

Shelley, James. “The Problem of Non -Perceptual Art”, British Journal of Aesthetics , vol.43 (October 2003), no. 4, pp. 363-378.

Sibley, Frank. “Aesthetic and Non -Aesthetic”, Philosophical Review , 74, (1957), no. 2, p. 135- 159.

Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp: A Biography , New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1998, pp. 185-186.

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Commentary by Mateo Duque Graduate Center, CUNY

I am very impressed with, and sympathetic to, Nickolas Calabrese’s position. I think he does an excellent job of defending a view that artworks are never non-perceptual. However, I have two issues with his argument. First, at the end of his paper, he writes “the artist who cr eates the work of art is an intentional agent; and so since an intentional agent created the work, it is that author (the artist) who is the one who imbues his or her artwork with the meanings that are to be found in it.” This stance is commonly known as Intentionalism. Speaking in broad strokes, the idea is to interpret the meaning of a work of art requires understanding the intentions of the artist. This thesis can actually be detached from a critique of non-perceptual art. For example, Noël Carroll defends a notion of non-perceptual art, but (like Calabrese) he is also a staunch defender of Intentionalism. Whereas I am sympathetic with Calabrese’s view that artworks are never non -perceptual, I do not hold to a form of Intentionalism. This is not the place, nor do I have the time, to get into a debate about Intentionalism vs. Anti-Intentionalism, but it is worth noting that this premise can, and has been, disentangled from the argument for or against non-perceptual art. Second, Calabrese spends much of the paper discussing Duchamp’s Fountain and implies that this ready-made work of art might require us to perceive it in order to fully understand it. But which Fountain? A funny thing about Duchamp’s first -edition of the Fountain is that it is now lost. Someone either broke it and threw it out, or perhaps misplaced it. The only material record we have of the original Fountain is a very famous photograph. So we can’t see the original, but there are several copies authorized by Duchamp. Does it matter if we see, or perceive, a copy instead of the original work of art? If I told you: “Oh yeah, I couldn’t see Raphael’s Madonna of the Meadow, but I saw an exact atom -for-atom replica of it.” Would you accept the fact that I had perceived Raphael’s painting? If an artw ork can be reproduced, like the Fountain, then the very identity of a work of art is called into question. Nelson Goodman makes a distinction between “autographic” and “allographic” kinds of art forms that is very helpful. For Goodman, if the history of production plays a crucial role in a work of art then it is autographic. Thus, art forms such as painting, watercolor, sculpture, and even etchings (from an original plate) are autographic. So, extending Goodman, we can say that seeing an exact duplicate of Raphael’s Madonna should not count as a true perception of the original. In the case of material paintings, it matters whether I see the genuine original, which has a history connecting it to its maker, or whether I see a reproduction or forgery. On the other hand, art such as music, dance, theater, and literature don’t require us to be causally related to its first instantiation. For Goodman, if an art form has a notational system, a ‘score,’ and thus allows for multiple instantiations, then it is “allographic.” It doesn’t matter whether I see the first -ever theatrical performance of Hamlet, Swan Lake, or Rite of Spring, or read the handwritten notes of Moby Dick. These art forms are meant to be reproduced, and perceiving a copy is just as valid as seeing the first-edition, or a first-night performance. Now the question comes, is Duchamp’s Fountain autographic or allographic? It’s a hard case. If we say autographic, then the copies do not permit of the same kind of perception as the original, which is lost. If we say allographic, then we allow that the perceptions of copies are just as good as the absent first-edition. However, calling Fountain allographic comes with a price. In order for a work to be allographic we must concede that there is some kind of abstract, multiply realizable and insatiable ‘score’ or notation. Thus, there is something that persists of the work of art that is not-perceptible. It is in virtue of this abstract ‘language’ that an art work lives on and can be reproduced. There is a recipe that exists outside of all the possible, deliciously-baked,

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 instances. Maybe the Fountain, like other modern, conceptual works of art, is hybrids, somewhere in-between. Part of their impact stems from their allographic nature: fragile, contingent, momentary, and, thus, with a finite--human-like--existence.

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Life, Liberty, and Property: The Right Wing Neglect of Happiness by Reuben Fuller-Bennett Brooklyn College, CUNY

There is a dichotomy near the center of moral philosophy which says that a moral theory should either be consequentialist or deontic. 31 It is thought that a moral or political claim, if it is to be internally consistent, must either get its argumentative force from an action's aggregate consequences, or from concerns for duty, but not both. I intend to argue that America's political Right Wing is gripped by a pervasive logical fallacy which conflates these two bedrocks of moral thought. The Right is a political movement with a philosophical basis in deontology —in assertions of rights, liberties, and duties. Yet many justifications offered for Right Wing views are couched in strikingly consequentialist terms —they claim they will make the nation happier, more prosperous, better off. A close examination of the connection between Right Wing philosophy and policy though, shows that the Right’s policies are not truly motivated by a concern for good consequences, but rather are wholly unsubstantiated adaptations of firmly deontic assertions put, for purely political reasons, in consequentialist terms. I will argue that this leap —from acting from duty to acting for consequences —is often left unexplained, that it is adopted ad hoc, and is born from a desire to sway voters toward inscrutable stances on some key issues. I further hope to suggest that many of these stances actually work against those voters' best interests, and arguably against the interests of the nation as a whole, that claims of their beneficial consequences are not, very often, supported by current economic, sociological, and otherwise empirical findings. I plan to accomplish all of this through a consideration of two viewpoints that are essential to today's Right Wing. The first viewpoint: notion that tax rates should be lowered for the wealthy and corporations. Second, that the government should have a very limited scope, with little power to regulate businesses.

Definitions

The American Right Wing includes, most prominently, members of the Republican Party, libertarians, social and fiscal conservatives, the religious right, and now members of the Tea Party. The principle that unites such diverse political groups, that identifies them as 'Right Wing,' is their shared belief that societal equality is neither possible nor desirable (Bobbio 1994, 65). To be Right Wing is to be in-egalitarian. Members of the Right endorse the variant conception of equality emblematic of the classical liberal tradition: equal opportunity. Wherein all citizens are treated identically with respect to the society’s laws but the State has little or no responsibility to promote parity of income or of quality-of-life. Their reasoning dictates that a society whose members all enjoy the same opportunities will naturally become a meritocracy, while retaining maximal liberty for its citizens.

Consequentialism is easy to grasp. An action is endorsed by consequentialists if that action has —overall —good consequences for society. A good consequence is one that increases the total aggregate happiness or well-being of that society's members. Most political proposals are justified in terms of consequences (either engendering the good ones or avoiding the bad ones) simply because rational voters have a unanimous desire to live well and avoid harm.

31 31 For simplicity's sake, I'll treat them as dichotomous in this paper; though this does ignore some interesting wrinkles in each theory, as well as alternative moral theories to the two discussed herein. 41

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Everyone agrees: all actions of the State should aim toward a better, more prosperous future society —one that is the product of the beneficial consequences of today's policies. It should be noted that determining these various benefits and harms requires going out into the world and collecting empirical data. The necessity of this investigative process means that policies proposed on the basis of consequences are always derived a posteriori . Deontology , in contrast, is a moral system that is derived a priori —before any such investigation. To an adherent of deontology, duty is the basis of moral action. The fulfillment of a duty means, conforming one's actions to an established rule without regard to the consequences that result from doing so. The factors that determine one's duty must not vary from one situation to the next; rules, by definition, are predictable. The main source of that kind of rigidity in ethics lies in the a priori truths that designate (among others) life, liberty, property, and self- determination as inalienable rights —as necessary for a human's very existence. Once she's straightened out her duty, a deontologist must then act for one reason alone: because she acknowledges that duty. Deontology is, therefore, contrary to consequentialism. To consider consequences is to forsake deontology, which —practically speaking —means that deontic rhetoric makes a weak basis for democratically-proposed policies. It simply lacks the potential for ubiquitous appeal enjoyed by systems that do regard consequences. Nevertheless, as I intend to show, the staples of contemporary Right Wing policy come directly out of just such purely deontic considerations, which are then dressed up in consequentialist robes and thrust out into the political arena, to be eagerly embraced by roughly half of United States.

The Right Wing on Taxation

Tax policy is one of the more divisive issues in American politics today. The popular economic wisdom on the Right says that it is the health of the economies supply-side that matters most to its overall health. This approach, famously championed by President Reagan's economic adviser Milton Friedman, pushes for minimal taxes on large corporations and wealthy individuals on the theory that they will spend that extra capital, adequately fueling the consumer economy, and all while allowing businesses to increase productivity, efficiency, and investment and at the same time improve their workers’ living conditions and spending -power through wage- and benefit-increases (Baradat 2000, 41). This, the orthodox Right Wing tax platform, with its promises of increased benefits, productivity, and prosperity, makes some unequivocally consequentialist claims; but the mainstream support they garner is not the result, as it should be, of any empirical finding. Friedman’s supply -side framework was, at the time of its conception, a largely untested proposal based on logical truths and only limited provisional data. And it has few proponents today among mainstream economists because of its failure to find support in solid, data-based findings (Ettlinger et al, 2008). Fried man’s ideas were conceived in no small part as an ideological rejection of Keynesian stimulus, which seeks to increase demand by redistributing wealth down the socioeconomic ladder through a progressive tax, unemployment insurance, social security, minimum wage laws, and other social initiatives. The Right Wing continues to reject these initiatives. In so doing they show themselves to be motivated by the kind of deontic moral reasoning emblematic of the classical liberal tradition, advanced in part by John Locke, upon which the whole project of American democracy —and especially the American Right —has built its edifice.

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Taxation: Deontic Origins

Private property is the very foundation of Locke's civil society. One of the chief responsibilities borne by the State as Locke conceives of it in his Second Treatise on Government is ensuring the just acquisition, maintenance, and trade of private goods. And Locke's determinations regarding the origins and worth of property are uncontroversially deontic, as is made clear when he writes, “Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom, and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of nature, equally with any other man …hath by nature a power...to pr eserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate” (1690, 7.87). Indeed, any proclamation of invariable or inborn rights is inherently deontic. Rights are rules that cannot be broken, regardless of the positive consequences that might result from their violation. This kind of rigidity is both a necessary and sufficient condition of the deontic method. The difficulty is that Locke's conception of private property as a natural right, followed to its natural conclusions, in isolation from some critical caveats later on in the text, strongly suggests that a progressive tax (the forced redistribution of property) is nothing more than state- sanctioned theft. 32 Furthermore, elsewhere in the treatise Locke writes that if we want to enjoy the benefits o f life in a civil society, we must expect to give up some measure of our “...equality, liberty, and executive power into the hands of the society . . . ” (1690, 8.13). Conspicuously missing from his list of relinquished rights is the subject (and title) of the entire fifth chapter of Locke's treatise: private property. So the Right’s case is easy to make, that a philosophical founder of American liberal democracy saw neither fundamental need nor justification for the State to take property from its citizens through taxation or any other coercive means. The anti-tax sentiments of classical liberalism, still a dominant feature of American Right Wing thought, saw a swell of support in the earlier 20 th century thanks in part to the rise of laissez-faire and libertarian philosophies. The work of William Graham Sumner is emblematic of the laissez- faire position. He writes in 1919's The Challenge of Facts, “We can take the rewards from those who have done better and give them to those who have done worse. We shall thus lessen the inequalities. We shall favor the survival of the unfittest, and we shall accomplish this by destroying liberty” (25). It is evident that there are strains of Sumner’s thought which place far greater value on deontic rights and liberties over a consideration of the good consequences of a progressive tax; and these are certainly the strains that have been most enthusiastically embraced by the American Right. Yet today's Right Wing also endorses political views which, though far less callous and extreme, have genuine analogues in Sumner's claim that the free market behaves much like a natural ecosystem, where the fittest survive and flourish while the weak are culled by natural laws, and all for the betterment of society. The Right Wing tendency to leave the wealth in the hands of the wealthy, letting the free market do its good work, are echoes of this laissez-faire conviction. So it is a crucially pertinent point of fact that Sumner's Darwinian conclusions have now been shown, empirically, to be false. In fact, economic equality —achieved in part through a progressive tax —is a tremendous benefit to national prosperity. A recent statistical analysis

32 Thomas Jefferson famously took issue, during the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, with the Right Wing, Lockean conception of private property as a fundamental, a necessary, and therefore an inalienable right. Conservatives of the day argued that the famous phrase that begins the declaration should have been changed to read 'life, liberty and property ' (emphasis added), just as John Locke had originally written. Jefferson challenged their conception of property as a human right because he saw no necessary connection between private property —as opposed to communal property, public property, etc. — and human well-being (Baradat 31).

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LaGuardia Community College Philosophy Presents The Gadfly – Spring 2012 conducted by Richard Wilkinson of the University of Nottingham, which measured national income disparity and its correlates in developed global states, found that equality of income across social strata (the lessening of the difference between the super-rich and the very poor) is closely linked to significant declines in drug abuse, infant mortality, mental illness, violent crime, and incarceration rates, as well as remarkable increases in math and literacy rates, life expectancy, and social-mobility (2011). I can think of some outspoken individuals on the Right who would do well to learn from Sumner's ignorance. Many seem too easily to lose sight of the rightfully intimate connection between good science and good legislation, that those public policies that will have, on average, the greatest benefit to society are those that are based not on an adherence to rigid duties, but on the best and most up-to-date empirical evidence. To illustrate this point: imagine it became impossible to construct a firearm from anything but radioactive uranium, a substance known by science to be harmful and even fatal to humans. Carrying a weapon for any length of time now necessarily inflicts the bearer with deadly radiation poisoning. If this were the case, even Charlton Heston, I suspect, would quickly and gladly hand over his arms, along with his right to bear them —and without any need for cold, dead hands. In a world where the scientific finding that the rifle is radioactive conflicts with the right to defend oneself by using that rifle, the a priori assertion of rights loses all of its force and, rightfully, the support of the public along with it. As a matter of sound public policy, a deontic assertion of rights or duties should never be allowed to survive beyond the science that tells us its proclamations have no net benefit for society. Government is meant to improve the human condition, not enforce a priori pronouncements (which history has shown can be used to support all sorts of ghastly positions regarding the rights of women and minorities and those to privacy and justice, among others). The enthusiasm for laissez-faire philosophy and economics had largely waned by the end of the Second World War, due in large part to the Nazis' embrace of the movement's social-Darwinian themes. The laissez-faire position on taxes and property rights, however, found new life in the significant contribution made to Right Wing thought by 20 th century libertarian philosophy. Robert Nozick writes straightforwardly that progressive taxation is an incontrovertible injustice, that any coerced redistribution of wealth on the part of the government is no different —with regard to fairness —than an armed assailant demanding a wallet on the street. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia , Nozick boils down his guiding philosophy for justice of economic transaction into the principle: from each as they choose, to each as they are chosen . Later on in the text he even equates the federal income tax, in strong moral terms, with forced labor (1974; 160, 169). Deontology is the guiding principle behind Nozick's philosophy, and the contemporary American Right Wing gets its anti-taxation convictions directly from his and others' work in the libertarian tradition.

Taxation: Consequentialist Rhetoric

In 1986 Grover Norquist created the Taxpayer Protection Pledge —a lifelong commitment not to raise taxes. Norquist, a firmly Right Wing lobbyist, has since seen his pledge signed by thousands of lawmakers in all levels of government. On the federal level, the majority of the Congress has pledged: 276 Republicans —that's all but thirteen —along with three Democrats (Radman 2012). These legislators have sworn to the taxpayers of their respective districts to oppose all efforts to increase income tax rates, and to close tax loopholes and eliminate deductions only when matched dollar for dollar by further reductions in tax rates. The version of the pledge that 1,259 currently serving state legislators have signed straightforwardly compels them to “oppose and vote against any and all efforts to increase taxes” (Norquist 1986).

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A pledge is a rule, and following a rule, heedless of the consequences and the political, social, or economic context in which one acts, is a perfect example of the deontic method at work. Yet, when he was asked to justify his stated objective of shrinking the federal government to less than one-quarter its current size, of cutting it down to its cost in the year 1910, before Medicare, social security, welfare, and unemployment assistance —a goal that he hopes to accomplish, in part, with the Taxpayer Protection Pledge —Norquist gave the following, blatantly consequence- based justification. “Each of these government programs was set up, supposedly—in name —to solve a problem. Okay. Do they solve the problem? Could the problem be better solved through individual initiative? . . . I think we found under welfare that we were doing more harm than good” (60 Minutes, 2011). How can such eminently practical concerns —solving problems and minimizing harms — be used, in good faith, to justify such an uncompromising pledge? This is rhetorical slight-of- hand, performed with artistry. If the reason not to raise taxes is because doing so will cause more harmful, negative consequences than helpful, positive consequences, how can this motivation be reconciled with the rigid, unchanging-despite-what-harm-or-good-may-come-of-it nature of the pledge itself? What happens when an obviously beneficial but very expensive piece of legislation comes along, requiring a tax increase to pay for it? The 279 members of Congress who have pledged never to raise taxes will be forced either to forsake their word and good name, or else uphold the oath they swore by rejecting an undoubtedly advantageous tax hike. Pledges of this sort have no place in politics, where it is the duty of our leaders to adapt to the changing conditions of the world and always strive to maximize societal benefit . This criticism has been leveled before. The Right's reply is that in a perfect world we wouldn't need to require our representatives to commit to a rigid oath; but that in the real world, it is naive to trust a politician to honor any promise made informally on the campaign trail. Right Wing reasoning dictates that unrestrained legislators will inevitably raise taxes even when no long-term societal benefit can be shown, that they will yield to earmarked, self-interested, and corrupt concerns that are of little or no use to society, and therefore that neglecting to demand an unyielding no-tax-hike commitment in writing, is to all but guarantee that we will be taxed into poverty and out of economic competitiveness. This rationalization goes too far. It amounts to a severe and systematic pessimism, a commitment to the intractable untrustworthiness of those we have chosen to represent us in government. It is utterly irrational to embrace cynicism so completely. To pledge, in good faith, never to raise taxes, requires adopting the extreme position that the revenue created by a tax increase could never be used for the good of society. For those of us —and I think this describes most Americans —who want a better government, but not necessarily a smaller one, this obstinate pessimism simply does not reflect the will of the nation as much as it does partisan dogma.

The Right Wing on Government Regulation

With less revenue in the form of taxes to fill the government's coffers, it must limit the scope of its power or else go broke. In this way, the Right's position against the government regulation of business fits well with its belief in the injustice of progressive taxation. These two issues together form the heart of what it means to be on the political Right in America today. The conviction that a smaller government is a better government, that strict limits should be placed on its ability diminish its citizens' liberties through regulation, can be traced back as far as the philosophical founder of capitalism itself, Adam Smith. Deregulation: Deontic Origins

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Regulation degrades liberty. And, as Adam Smith argues in The Wealth of Nations , maximizing liberty in economic transactions is a most efficient way to benefit society. Smith's is a straightforwardly consequentialist argument. Two of the most prevalent Right Wing interpretations of it, however, are strikingly deontic, and are therefore necessarily aloof from Smith’s concerns for the beneficial consequences of capitalist economies. First, the cult of liberty has a firm hold on the American Right. Gripped by a selective amnesia, they forget that perhaps the most drastic change one undergoes upon entering civil society —in transition from the proverbial state of nature —is the absolute loss of one's claim to complete freedom. Yet, in the media and on Capitol Hill, the Right Wing often asserts the distinctly deontic and impossible notion of a right to undiminished liberty. They allow this misconception to trump empirical findings about the benefits and detriments of the very freedoms they assert. Thus, the liberty for the sake of good consequences that Adam Smith defended has become, under the auspices of today's Right Wing, an argument for liberty for the sake of liberty itself. This conflation manifests most obviously in the willful ignorance displayed by climate change deniers, who promote unsustainable business practices in the face of conclusive evidence that those practices greatly contribute to catastrophic environmental effects. When the Right's perceived duty to be free clashes with sound science that recommends regulation, they have resolved to ignore the consequences of their denial by acting in accord with their true deontic values, and so fight for the unobtainable ideal of uncompromised freedom. Second, the cult of the invisible hand, in its interpretations of Adam Smith, has similarly tightened its grip on Right Wing thought. When Smith writes of the national prosperity that results from capitalist economies this prosperity as he conceives it has one ultimate indicator: a nation's wealth. And it is manifestly true that economic systems built on free market principles generate more wealth than others; but the assumption that this greater wealth will equate to the greatest national happiness (the best consequences) has not been similarly confirmed by history. Nevertheless, the Right Wing has adopted Smith as dogma, transforming his argument that free enterprise and economic competition will bring about the best outcomes for society into one based on a faith in the free market's omnipotent, omniscient, and beneficent invisible hand. They have seized upon Smith's analysis, formulated before the existence of any reliable empirical data on the consequences of capitalism, and have adopted his conclusions for their own purposes without bothering to amend them in the light of the last two hundred years' experience. Yet there is much to be learned from the history of capitalism, from the human rights abuses of the industrial revolution, from the monopolies of the early 20th century, from the abject poverty of the Great Depression, from the recent collapse and subsequent bailout of some of America's and the world's largest banks, from the sub-prime mortgage crisis, from the Euro- zone debt crisis and the current global recession. Each of these economic catastrophes prompted a new wave of government regulations. Though, we mostly to legislate retrospectively —after the damage is done —such measures are generally quite effective at mitigating lasting and recurrent harm. The intelligent regulation of business is a boon, if for no other reason than because it can lessen the damage from, and even avert, social and economic crises; and this means that we ought, absolutely, to adopt an attitude of doubt toward Smith's argument that the best consequences will result from relinquishing economic control to free market forces alone. This attitude of doubt is what is missing from present-day Right Wing rhetoric. Its absence is what leads me to believe that from the uncontroversially consequence-regarding origins of Adam Smith's thought, the Right has gleaned yet another deontic rule: that it is our duty to abide by the invisible hand of the free market.

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Deregulation: Consequentialist Rhetoric

This section discusses business deregulation with regard to the environment, though this is far from the only area negatively affected by a dearth of regulation. I take it as a typical example among many. Now, fro m Robert Muccigrosso’s Basic History of American Conservatism :

A major component of so-called Reaganonomics was the effort to diminish the government regulation of private enterprise. This was particularly evident with regard to environmental matters. To the consternation of environmentalists, the Environmental Protection Agency diluted the guidelines for removing toxic wastes and diminishing pollution, while the Department of the Interior attempted to permit private enterprise the use of certain public lands. Denying that it was hostile to environmentalism, the administration argued that overregulation had been counterproductive and that businesses could police themselves. Budgets were trimmed for various other federal agencies as well. This was in line with the president's Inaugural Address contention that "government is not the solution to our problem: government is the problem (2001, 113).

This account of the still-dominant Right Wing position captures the kind of consequence-based rhetoric routinely used to justify the Right’s deep seated deontic values. Members of the Right allege to support deregulation because of its beneficial consequences, its tendency to stimulate the economy and increase government efficiency. And the logic underlying these conclusions is sound, but they are far from the whole story. There are many, and I would argue many more , negative consequences that come about as a result of deregulating the business sector. Some on the Right seem able to dismiss out of hand the damage to the environment (as well as to the health of the economy and the greater society) that very often results from the profit-driven actions of under-regulated businesses. This apparent contempt for the claims of science tends to puzzle environmentalists, who from the start have had a consequentialist outlook, and who, therefore, generally wait for findings in the environmental sciences to recommend policies that would regulate or deregulate businesses that pollute. The Right's is a position that should be reexamined in light of the continued contamination of groundwater through hydraulic fracturing, and 2010's British Petroleum oil spill (the largest ever); rampant overfishing, habitat destruction, and the horrific conditions for animals in factory farms; the massive amounts of carbon emitted daily by the automobile, energy, and manufacturing industries; and other such disasters. The vast negative consequences wrought by each of these environmental calamities have been studied and delineated; but the Right Wing, in solidarity with the business sector, in the singular pursuit of profit, continues to push for fewer and looser regulations despite the existence of solid empirical data and the validity of the scientific method. Science is humanity’s main too l for finding out what is true. To consistently deny the validity of scientific findings is to deny truth itself. Often, such contrarianism is the sign of an implicit assumption. This latent belief, endemic in the Right Wing perspective, is that matters of duty can be translated into matters of consequence without specific relevant justification .

An Objection Considered

One might object:

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“Doesn't your assertion that no consequentialist conclusion can be accepted based, without any further justification, upon purely deontic values severely —and maybe even dangerously —downplay the fundamental importance of our most basic human rights? Might robbing the Right of its ability to argue for the importance of absolute rights and the limits of government, while using ostensibly (but not quite) related consequentialist arguments to appeal to the masses, weaken our ability to claim our rights and potentially even leave the United States vulnerable to domination by a totalitarian dictator?”

This is a valid concern, but I think that one need not be worried; for my aim is only to debunk unjustified leaps of logic. In so far as it can be truly and reliably shown that a deontic rule, right, or duty actually has beneficial consequences, arguing, from these good consequences, that we should adhere to such a duty is perfectly justified. For example, the rights and liberties guaranteed by the American Constitution, while they are certainly and essentially deontic, have been long-deliberated, and have proved patently beneficial to American society. A despot, in a political environment concerned only with consequences, would not be able to justify violating a civil right unless it could be shown to bring about overall negative consequences. None of the rights Americans enjoy —except perhaps that guaranteed by the Second Amendment —have any chance of being shown to degrade happiness or well-being. And importantly, these unequivocally beneficial rights certainly include, despite the Bush and Obama administrations' continual infringements on them, the right to the due process of the law, the right to privacy, and the rights enemy combatants. Certain rights are inalienable; they simply cannot be relinquished. Lacking in an inalienable right naturally causes great harm or death. The inalienable rights are, among others, those to food, water, self-determination, and life itself. The harm that is caused when such rights are denied constitutes a harsh negative consequence, an extreme offense to health and happiness from which that right's designation of inalienability derives. This suggests the beginnings of a consequentialist conception of rights. Rights must have a rule-like consistency; consequentialist rights are consistent simply because the consequences of those actions that violate them are consistently negative. In this way, some of deontology's more intuitively-advantageous rigidity can be maintained even within a strictly consequentialist framework. Furthermore, the rights asserted by the Constitution are just such consequentialist rights. In Article 5, the foundation is laid out for the procedure for constitutional amendment, is proof enough of that. When the 1919 constitutional amendment to enact prohibition was thought, by the early 1930’s, to be doing more harm than good, it was repealed for the good of the nation. And correctly so! When it becomes clear that an asserted right, liberty, or duty is doing more harm than good, it rightfully loses the public's support, which simply cannot be maintained in the face of determinate negative consequences. I stated at the start that I would try in this paper to suggest —over and above my assertion that the inner workings of Right Wing logic are deeply fallacious —that the Right's conclusions, the policies that they propose and enact, also have a fatal flaw: they lead to bad consequences —a future society that is worse off, on the whole, than today's. A policy's solid deontic origins are simply not enough, on their own, to determine whether or not it will benefit society. The reason the Right continues to fall back on deontology is simply that they have nothing else; their policies primarily benefit the citizens who least need the government's help in order to live prosperous and satisfying lives, those with great wealth and prestige. Right Wing positions consistently serve the interests of our nation's best-off by allowing them, despite the consequences for the rest of us, to make more money than they deserve, keep more of it than they should, and invest it unethically. But these same public policies fail the test that all should

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Works Cited Baradat, Leon P. Political Ideologies: Their Origins and Impact . Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall, 2000. Print.

Bobbio, Norberto, and Allan Cameron. Left and Right: the Significance of a Political Distinction . Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996. Print. Original Italian pub. 1994. De Tocqueville, Alexis as cited in Ellis Sandoz, “Classical and Christian Dimensions of American Political Thought,” A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding . University of Missouri Press, 2001. Print, pp. 98.

Ettlinger, Michael, and John Irons. Take a Walk on the Supply Side: Tax Cuts on Profits, Savings, and the Wealthy Fail to Spur Economic Growth . Report. Center for American Progress & the Economic Policy Institute, Sept. 2008. Web. 11 Jan. 2012..

Locke, John. “Second Treatise of Government.” 1690. Project Gutenberg . 28 July 2010. Web. 6 January 2011.

Muccigrosso, Robert. Basic History of American Conservatism . Malabar, FL: Krieger Pub., 2001. Print.

Norquist, Grover. “Taxpayer Protection Pledge.” Letter to U.S. House of Representatives . Pledge. 1986. Manuscript.

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia . New York: Basic, 1974. Print

Radman, Adam, comp. The Taxpayer Protection Pledge Signers. Rep. Americans for Tax Reform, 11 Jan. 2012. Web. 15 Jan. 2012. < http://www.atr.org/taxpayer-protection-pledge >

Smith, Adam, and Andrew S. Skinner. The Wealth of Nations. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982. Print.

Sumner, William Graham. The Challenge of Facts . Erie, Penna: Employment and Service Dept.Hammermill Paper, 1919. Print.

“The Pledge: Grover Norquist's Hold on the GOP” Interview by Steve Kroft. Youtube . CBSNewsOnline, 20 Nov. 2011. Web. 19 Dec. 2011. .

Wilkinson, Richard. “How Economic Inequality Harms Societies.” Lecture. TEDGlobal 2011.Ted.com . Oct. 2011. Web. 15 Dec. 2011

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Commentary by Anna Gotlib Brooklyn College, CUNY

Mr. Fuller-Bennett offers a powerful and compelling account of the theoretical and practical conflict between the political right wing’s stated commitment to duty -bound deontological principles and its reliance on consequentialist justifications. While I think that he gets the contradictions, and the resulting theoretical muddle, just right, I do have a few comments that might be useful to his larger project. My first worry has to do with his singular focus on deontology as the central driving force behind right wing ideological theory-making and subsequent sociopolitical manipulation. Specifically, it seems to me that foundationally, the right wing’s reliance on deontological thinking, while certainly important, is not quite as deeply rooted as its reliance on an oddly misconstrued, but still recognizable, version of virtue theory. What this suggests is an appeal to its audience to be particular kinds of people -- that is, self-reliant, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own- boostraps, deeply patriotic, and largely suspicious of foreigners, “the state,” and any kind of central management or regulation. This appeal, I think, is more directed at the virtue ethics- esque emphasis on character than a Kantian emphasis on duty (although, of course, without being exclusive of the latter). In the case of taxation, much of the argument against the state’s power to tax (especially the wealthy) seems to rely on a particular master narrative that the right tells about the virtues of hard work, self-reliance (and subsequent wealth), and the viciousness of an outside power (the state) that conspires to steal the fruits of this labor. This narrative is supplemented by a further story of the “average American” as just such a potential millionaire if only they have the proper character to work hard enough and avoid the moral failure inherent in state assistance (understood as “laziness”), or anything that looks like collectivism. While duty-talk is not entirely absent from these claims, it seems to me that the emphasis on a particular kind of character (and the denouncement of its perceived opposite) is closer associated with the claims of virtue ethics than with Kantian deontology. My second worry focuses on consequentialism as the right wing’s justificatory strategy. Although Mr. Fuller-Bennett’s arguments about the role of consequentialism in right wing’s claims are on more solid ground, I wonder if they could not be fruitfully supplemented by a consideration of contract theory. Specifically, it seems that a not insignificant portion of the argument for, say, a cessation, or at least a lessening, of environmental protection that one often hears from the right wing derives not only from consequentialist claims of more domestic oil, cheaper gas, and increased efficiency, but from claims of a violated social contract between the private sector and the government. The claims of “overregulation” that Mr. Fuller -Bennett notes could be understood not only as consequentialist appeals to unsatisfactory results, but also as contractarian accusations of a government that has grossly overstepped its circumscribed powers, and violated its purported promises of a light, laissez-faire touch -- at least toward business and private enterprise. I am very curious about how Mr. Fuller-Bennett might incorporate these contractarian claims into his general account. I must add that I find this paper very promising and its arguments far-reaching. I also do not mean for my two small worries to suggest that Mr. Fuller-Bennett’s claims do not stand on their own. Even if one adds virtue theory and contractarianism to the mix, the initial argument that there is a deep and serious disconnect between how the right wing theorizes its claims and how it justifies them still stands. We have much look forward to the development of this fascinating

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Law of the Flies: Restrictive Measures on Cyber Bullying by Adrienn Miklos LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

When we hear the phrase ‘social media is everywhere’ we don’t necessarily think about how literal that idea can be for those of us who employ at least a few forms of electronic communications. This trend is also rapidly becoming the norm instead of the exception, and newer generations are more and more reliant on these technologies. It’s also no longer simply a form of entertainment or source of some information, but a powerful tool for political success, a global market place driving our collective economy, and often the single type of communication between individuals and entities, as well as by far the most influential source of knowledge and intelligence for the citizens of the new millennium. It is why I believe that it’s our responsibility as a society to control and regulate conduct in cyber reality. Actions such as bullying —along with defamation, security breaching, identity theft and information hacking —are threats to our security online- and in the ‘real’ world. Complete separation of our cyber and physical reality is no longer a realistic option; and cases like the suicide of Megan Meier and Ryan Halligan are the tragic examples of this phenomenon. As we only see the intensification of the of cyber bullying problem, we must decide how much longer are we willing to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that this issue will just ‘go away’ on its own before we stand up for the rights of those affected, and provide them with the protection they deserve. Technological advancement is not only present in our social life, but has undeniably become a part of it. While this argument specifically concerns teenagers, the concept of legal control over personal conduct in cyberspace has ramifications concerning a much larger population, namely all users of the internet. After all, the technology of social media has always led the way, and as it became interwoven into the fabric of our reality, legal regulations were forced to follow. Upon the invention of the newspaper or television, no one initially thought of limiting them based on individual concerns. Today however, it is difficult to imagine these media outlets without the control of defamation, libel and slander laws. These laws aren’t directly protecting our physical safety, or the ownership of our belongings; they simply protect our characters. Of course, given the nature of these publications, we can certainly choose not to read or watch what is said about us on social media. However, our courts nonetheless decided that these outlets have a large enough audience that we will experience the effects of malicious and untrue comments and rumors spread about us. Logically then, if we are concerned with effects produced by these mediums, we most definitely should extend our considerations to the newest channels of electronic communications. In cyberspace we all have access we have never been given before: we are not only consumers of both goods and information, but also providers of them as well, which makes the internet by far the most powerful media we have ever seen. For that reason, it is essential that we lay out proper guidelines of cyber conduct, and enforce these guidelines to ensure our overall well-being. There could be no argument about the morality of cyber bulling. It cannot be deemed accidental, as the harassment is continuous, and is done with a clear intention of hurting the victim’s feelings. It is also clearly perceived as a malicious act targeting a specific individual, and experienced as hurtful, cruel and often depressing. Victims of bullying often feel entirely helpless and rejected not only by an individual or a group, but by society as a whole, because adolescents see their role within their immediate surroundings as permanent and universal. Therefore it is easy to see how detrimental the effects of bullying can be, possibly resulting in consideration or even the actualization of suicide, as illustrated by precedence.

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Both harassment and stalking are illegal activities in New York State. As a matter of fact, if the perpetrator “causes a communic ation to be initiated by mechanical or electronic means in a manner likely to cause annoyance or alarm” (New York Penal Law), it is considered a class A misdemeanor resulting in automatic arrest. Our State law demonstrates the understanding of how the usage of electronic media can worsen an otherwise already horrible experience:

It removes the bully’s limitations of time and space, because not only can they harass teenagers like Megan Meier and Ryan Halligan anywhere and anytime, mementos of the bullying are also permanent in cyber space, therefore providing the tormenters with an instant audience that is virtually limitless .

Without laws, the victims have nowhere to hide: even if they try to ignore the humiliating messages and slanderous claims, all of their peers will hear and possibly believe the allegations and probably further taunt the targets. Cyber bullying then circles around, and becomes a seemingly inescapable reality for those victimized. I believe that cyber bullying threatens our basic rights; hence there could be no valid contra-arguments to be considered when deciding to outlaw them. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “no one shall be subjected to cruel, or degrading treatment” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) as well as “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Furthermore, the Declaration states that “everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights). While we cherish our First Amendment, harassment and slander laws have previously demonstrated that our freedom of speech must not infringe on other’s human rights. To this end, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights contains very specific clause regarding its right to freedom of expression, stating that “the exercise of the rights carries with it special duties and res ponsibilities” (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) for which reason it may be “subject to certain restrictions” (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). One of the restrictions along with concerns for national and public s ecurity is the “respect of the rights or reputations of others” (International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). In this context, it is easy to see how opposing arguments of cyber bully laws should not be ethically validated, but I will nonetheless examine few of the common ones in order to provide a well thought out critical analysis of the subject matter. The counterargument against laws restricting cyber bullying on the grounds of it ‘building character’ strikes me as vague at best and faulty ove rall. First and foremost, there is no scientific definition for ‘character building’, but if it means to imply a healthy personality development, verbal and emotional abuse would certainly not qualify as tools for successful achievement. On the other hand, if the phrase ‘character building’ is used to describe the reason for an individual appearing to be self-assured and stoic due to the various possible consequences of being bullied-such as being guarded with or incapable of expressing emotions, being incapable of trust in others, the inability of building lasting and meaningful relationships with others, masking or bottling up emotional reactions to rejection, depression, disassociation, low self-esteem, and consequentially performing actions to overcompensate for low self-esteem (overachievement)- then I suppose the argument has merit. However, condoning the act that could result in the development of these unhealthy coping mechanisms is clearly unethical. Lastly, even if we presuppose the merit of ‘character building’, however ‘stronger’ one’s

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character might become after surviving a vicious attack, it does not deem the attack itself neither morally justifiable, nor legal. Another reason for critics opposing laws regulating cyber bullying is that it predominantly concerns a very specific population, namely teenagers, with the majority attending middle-and high school. This argument seems to imply, that the concerns of this specific population is somehow less valuable than others, as these worries may just be some sort of fad, like fashion accessories, waiting to disappear in a few years. Morally, this argument is faulty by definition: humanitarian ethics must be objective and universal, applicable to all individuals, without regards to any discriminatory objections. Therefore, if cyber bulling is a concern for a certain group of people, it must be a concern for all of us, and if it allows anyone to be treated less than ethically, it must be acted upon and restricted. Also, it is foolish to think that issues regarding social media are about to disappear any time soon —the fact that the cases of Megan Meier and Ryan Halligan have taken place five and seven years ago, but the issue of cyber bullying only seems to become a larger and larger concern, is testament to that notion. Finally, we have already existent laws protecting very specific populations characterized both by age —such as child welfare laws —and by circumstantial affiliation —such as laws and regulations applied at the workplace —so precedence argues for the welfare of all citizens inclusively, regardless of specific characteristics. Finally, I’ll examine the argument of the possibility that one could simply avoid connecting to these technologies, therefore preventing any and all effects of cyber bullying. This theory’s foundation is that our representation in cyberspace is not an extension of us. While I suspect that a psychological examination of a teenager’s perception of this topic would find otherwise, I believe that the theory is irrelevant to the argument. Again, precedence is on the supportive side: as I mentioned earlier, defamation laws already have decided that intentionally harmful publications about an individual are unlawful, even though they don’t concern the physical being of the person. Also, as I previously wrote, simply not reading the postings, IM’s, tweets etc. does not mean that the target will not feel the effects of bullying, as everyone else around him will read them and proceed in their conduct with the knowledge of that information. Finally, to say that a person mustn’t use his electronic devices in order to avoid pain and humiliation is a direct infringement on his freedom of will —our most basic of human rights of all, and hence clearly a morally unjust notion. I don’t believe that a target of systematic harassment has any other option of escaping his situation other than reliance on laws created to protect him. Reciprocity of the act would be clearly immoral, as this paper has deemed cyber bullying categorically unethical previously. I also don’t think that reciprocation would be effective in stopping the bully: victims are usually picked based on low self-esteem and/or a timid nature, therefore bullying affects these individuals differently than it would others. Bullies also often use their popularity to involve others in the torment of the victim, a support the target does not have access to; therefore, his reciprocal attempt would fail to demonstrate the damage that he is enduring. Of course relocating or changing schools could be an option, but not only would most parents not find this alternative feasible; to suggest running away as an option to escape an unhealthy and hateful environment would be a failure of justice. Hence, it is my belief, that it’s our societal responsibility to provide protection against and punishment for cyber bullying in a form of legal enactment. While not quite a contra argument to the legislature of anti-bullying laws, I found creating suitable punishment for underage cyber tormenters difficult to develop, especially with regards to their age, and hence their comprehension of their own actions. There are two basic notions that I believe ought to be at the forefront of anti-bullying laws:

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1. Lack of intent should not undermine the responsibility of those who cause serious harm to their victims (such as the cases examined here)

2. Adult offenders should certainly be punished more severely due to the fact that a preexistent power inequality between an adult bully and a teenage victim is even further magnified by the adult’s capability to understand the emotional destruction bullying may cause to an adolescent target.

Beyond these specifics, I would treat cyber bullying (that do esn’t result in substantial physical or psychological harm to the victims) as harassment punishable by fines dictated by a court hearing, and repeat offenses as aggravated harassment. In order to account for the offenders’ likely lack of understanding regarding the effects of cyber bullying, I’d mandate that first time offenders must attend a sensitivity training, similar to sexual harassment classes. These classes would entail role play exercises, during which the bully would be forced to experience some of the emotions evoked in the victims. Cyber bullying is an act intentionally inflicting emotional pain on defenseless victims. It is immoral, dangerous and imposes on our basic human rights. Even if it doesn’t result in tragic consequences seen in the Meier and Halligan cases, this form of harassment is potentially harmful to the development of the psyche of its teenage victims. For these reasons, I believe that cyber bullying should be punishable by law. We cannot stop technological advancement, and neither do we want to for the most part. However, with the reign of social media come a new set of inconveniences and dangers, and it is up to us to create a corresponding set of contemporary norms in order to defend our interests. In the age where past mistakes are becoming impossible to conceal, and where privacy seems to slowly disappear, we must do all that we can to protect our rights from being sacrificed on the altar of electronic communication.

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Works Cited

“International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights” Office of the High Commissioner forHuman Rights. United Nations, Web. 26 Nov 2011

“New York Penal Law Chapter 40 of the Consolidated Laws Part Three—Specific Offenses Title N—Offenses Against Public Order, Public Sensibilities and the Right to Privacy Article 240—Offenses Against Public Order” University at Buffalo The State University of New York. University at Buffalo, Web. 26 Nov 2011

“Universal Declaration of Human Rights” UN.org. United Nations, Web. 26 Nov 2011

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Read Issue I & II of The Gadfly here: http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/philosophy/gadfly/

If you would like to submit a paper for publication in the next issue of The Gadfly, send it to: [email protected] with your name and “Gadfly submission” in the subject line. Please include your name and school in the body of the email.

Philosophy at LaGuardia Community College [email protected] Become a fan on Facebook and Google Groups! Find us on the web at: http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/philosophy Philosophy Program – Humanities Department LaGuardia Community College 3110 Thomson Ave E202 Long Island City, NY 11101

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NOTES

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