Can a Never-Ending Defeat Be Meaningful?

Thaddeus Metz, in a paper on the differences between happiness and meaningfulness (Metz, Happiness and Meaningfulness), argues that “performing an action that is likely to help others has meaning, but the action would have even more meaning if it actually ended up benefiting them”. It is easy to see that being engaged in trying to help other people doesn’t necessarily make us happier (because it often requires personal sacrifices), but it is quite possible that it makes our lives more meaningful. But is it correct to say that meaning increases if we are successful in our attempts to help others? Admittedly this sounds plausible enough.

However, consider the following dialogue in Albert Camus’s novel The Plague: when his friend Tarrou asks Dr. Rieux, who has been working tirelessly, though largely unsuccessfully, trying to help those who have come down with the plague, why he is showing such devotion to his task, he replies that he wants to defend people as best he can. When Tarrou asks him against whom or what he wants to defend them, he replies that he doesn’t really know. It is just that he “never managed to get used to seeing people die”. What he objects to, instinctively, and what he struggles against, is the order of the world, which “is shaped by death”. But of course, if that is what he is up against, he simply cannot accomplish his goal. The plague seems incurable. People die despite his best efforts to help them. Yet even if he managed to find a cure against the plague and to actually save people, then all he would have achieved is a postponement of death, which will catch up with them eventually. When Tarrou points this out to him, saying that his “victories will never be lasting”, he agrees: his whole life as a physician is in fact a “never-ending defeat”, symbolized by the incurability of the plague. Yet despite being aware of this, Rieux insists that this “is no reason for giving up the struggle”.

So here’s the situation, which, for Camus, marks the absurdity of life: Rieux cannot help anyone, not permanently, and he knows it. What he does thus appears utterly futile. Yet the struggle, despite its futility, still seems important. Perhaps more important than what that struggle achieves or not achieves. But how can that be? How can it be important to put up a fight if we’ve got absolutely no chance of winning it? And is it conceivable that, paradoxically, the fight we fight in the full knowledge that we cannot win it actually gives more meaning to our life than a fight that we still have some hope of winning someday?

Is Meaningfulness Desirable?

I’m embarking on a new project on (the connection between) death and meaning, prompted by a controversy central to the human enhancement debate, namely whether death (or more precisely mortality) undercuts meaning (as Max More and others have proclaimed) or whether it is, on the contrary, a condition of meaning, so that without death (i.e. the necessity to die) it would be impossible to lead a meaningful life (as for instance Leon Kass has argued). Both sides in this debate quite naturally assume that meaningfulness is a desirable quality. What they disagree about is merely what is needed for there to be meaning in one’s life. But is the fundamental assumption that they have in common really convincing, namely that a life that “means” something is better (more worth living) than a life that means nothing?

David Bellos, in his introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition of Albert Camus’s The Plague (and other writings), chides Camus for his alleged belief that an absurd world, that is one that lacks a God and in which, consequently, nothing has any meaning (beyond itself), is somehow deficient. If everything we did had “meaning”, he argues, life would be pretty much unbearable: “Things would surely be far worse if the opposite were the case. If the world were not at all absurd, in Camus’s sense, then things in general and acts in particular would be endowed irrevocably with ‘meaning’. And that would make the world a very strange and inhuman place indeed. Every cup of tea, broken shoelace, premature death, and outbreak of slaughter would be ‘meaningful’, that is to say fully explicable in terms of a higher order, and thus necessary. Under such conditions, human life, which characteristically involves imponderable choices, rough guesses, effort, and surprise, would surely seem quite futile, since no matter what a person did, it would fit in with a higher scheme by the very fact of having been done. A necessary world thus seems to many readers (myself included) as rather more absurd than one in which meanings are not given.”

This sounds pretty convincing. However, the whole argument rests on a conception of meaningfulness that equates meaning with complete explicability and necessity, and I’m not sure that we have to understand (objective?) meaningfulness in those terms. Is a meaningful life necessarily one in which there is an explanation, a good reason, for everything that happens and everything we do? Is there no scope in a meaningful life for chance and choice? Can our lives only be meaningful if the universe is deterministic, if human freedom is an illusion? If that were the case, then it would indeed be strange if we lamented the lack of meaning. However, Bellos himself seems to acknowledge the possibility of understanding meaning in a different, non-deterministic way when he argues that human life would appear “rather more absurd” and would “surely seem quite futile” if everything we did “fit in with a higher scheme”. A life that is not absurd and not futile - that is more or less what we mean by a meaningful life. So the question is what makes a life not futile, not absurd. I guess that most people would agree that we at least have to be able to make our own choices, which also means that there must be the possibility of failure, of not doing the right thing. If things turned out to be fine no matter what we did, then there doesn’t seem to be much point in doing it in the first place. That doesn’t mean that the freedom to make one’s own choices is in itself sufficient to make our lives meaningful. Perhaps there is something else required, but that something doesn’t have to be a divine plan or any other kind of “higher scheme”. I also don’t see why it should be the case that a life can only be meaningful if everything matters in it, every cup of tea we drink, every shoelace that breaks. Why can there not be things in our lives that do not matter much or do not matter at all, pockets of indifference as it were, while others matter a great deal (“outbreaks of slaughter” for instance and how we react to them)?  

Two New Thought Experiments for the Ethics Classroom

1. The Callous Terrorist: a dangerous terrorist is on the loose. He tried to bomb your government’s headquarters. Fortunately he failed. However, he has announced that he would try again until he succeeded. Now the police have got a lead on his whereabouts. It appears that he is hiding amongst the crowd in a busy marketplace. The police come to the conclusion that their best chance of taking out the terrorist is to machine-gun the crowd. It is either that or risk letting the terrorist escape. They decide to shoot, killing everyone in the process, including the terrorist. When questioned after the shooting, police say they had had no intention of killing all those people, but that unfortunately the terrorist had left them no choice, so that all responsibility for the incident lies solely with the terrorist who callously chose to hide amongst the crowd. 

Questions for discussion:

Who is responsible for the deaths of the people shot by the police?

Was it morally acceptable for the police to shoot into the crowd?

Is there a morally relevant difference between the way the police have acted in this scenario and the way Israel is acting in Gaza? If yes, what is it?

2. The School Burning: after I took away your house and your livelihood, you are determined to take back what is yours, so you threaten me and make several unsuccessful attempts on my life. When I finally decide to eliminate the threat and get rid of you for good, you hide in a school, which you are hoping I won’t dare attack. However, it turns out that in this you are mistaken. I burn down the school. You narrowly escape with your life, but all the children in the school die. I say that this wasn’t my fault and that you alone are to blame for this. I was, after all, only defending myself, and you should have known that I would do whatever it takes to stop you.

Questions for discussion:

Who is responsible for the deaths of the children in the school?

Was it morally acceptable for me to burn down the school?

Is there a morally relevant difference between the way I have acted in this scenario and the way Israel is acting in Gaza? If yes, what is it?

Nothing Justifies the Mass Murder of Civilians

Israel is at it again: killing unarmed and defenceless Palestinians en masse. No matter where they go, an Israeli rocket may always find them. The bombardment is indiscriminate. There is no safe haven for anyone in Gaza. More than 700 Palestinian civilians have been killed during the past few weeks, most of them women and children, compared to two (!) Israeli civilians. 

Given these numbers, it is utterly ludicrous when Israeli politicians brazenly claim that they have no choice, that they are just defending their own people against Hamas terrorists, who, regrettably and “demonically”, now use their own population as “human shields” and try to get international support for their cause by piling up lots of “telegenically dead” Palestinians. In all seriousness Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is styled as a “war between good and evil” (Daniel Abraham, writing in Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz, July 24^th), which of course leaves no room for negotiation. You cannot, and more importantly should not, negotiate with the devil. A compromise is out of the question. The good must prevail and evil needs to be eradicated, wiped out completely, no matter what the costs are. 

Whoever doubts that interpretation, whoever dares criticize Israel’s actions, can only be an “Israel-hater” and “anti-Semite”. How convenient that must be: always to be able to remind the world of the Holocaust, to claim a permanent victim status that gives you the licence to do whatever you damn well please. It’s the oldest defence in the world, which throughout history has helped to justify countless wars and mass killings. The Nazis also claimed that they were only defending themselves when they started killing Jews. And that it was necessary to save the world from a great evil. Not that any of this is even remotely convincing. There is always a choice, and nothing can justify the mass murder of civilians. Yes, Hamas is attacking Israel, but with very limited success. Yes, they may well want to see Israel destroyed, but that is quite understandable given how Israel has treated the Palestinians in the land they have occupied for nearly 50 years now. No matter what they say, Israel is not the victim in this conflict. If you rob a people of their freedom, if you trample on their rights and deny them a life in dignity, then it is no wonder that they fight back in an attempt to regain what has been taken away from them. 

Benjamin Netanyahu and his cronies in the Israeli government are war criminals, not only because they violate international conventions that forbid targeting civilians, but because they don’t give a damn how many people die as long as they are not Israelis. Their actions are thoroughly despicable.  

Sex and the Posthuman Condition

Some of the readers of this blog may be interested to learn that I have now incorporated many of my previous blog posts in a book that Palgrave Macmillan are going to publish next month. It is called Sex and the Posthuman Condition. The book looks at the way sexuality is framed in enhancement scenarios and descriptions of the resulting posthuman future and how those representations are informed by mythological and other historical and literary paradigms. I examine the glorious sex life that we are allegedly going to enjoy, due to greater control of our emotions, a vastly improved capacity for experiencing pleasure, and, most importantly, the ready availability of sex robots that are willing and able to fulfill all our dreams and desires. Through a series of philosophical and literary explorations, questions are raised about both the replacement of the real flesh-and-blood human lover with a machine or other kind of artefact (from Ovid's Pygmalion to the soon-to-be-perfected sexbots) and the mechanization of the process of love (from De Sade to neurotechnological manipulations of our love-related emotions and attitudes), as well as the values that underlie such ideas and developments.

Compulsory Scientific Service for the Fully Alive

Like many other transhumanists, the American sociologist Steve Fuller who currently holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick, UK, doesn’t think much of the precautionary principle (Steve Fuller, Towards a Proactionary Welfare State). All it does is hamper progress by unnecessarily restricting our choices. Basically, it turns us all into cowards, and this cowardice deprives us of all the great goods that we would be likely to achieve if we weren’t so damned careful all the time. We should therefore discard the principle and live instead by the proactionary principle, which encourages us to take (even considerable) risks if the expected gain is large enough. And this should of course be reflected in the law, which currently is far too restrictive. Of course there will be victims, people who are going to be “violated in the process”, but that is a price worth paying. We can also find ways to compensate those victims for their noble sacrifice (undertaken in the name of science and the progress of humanity), presumably by progressing ourselves and thus benefiting from their bravery. The value of our individual lives is overrated anyway. We should realise that our own personal survival is of little importance, given what is at stake here. “This is the largest and most difficult lesson because it calls on people to consider everything they value as negotiable, including their own lives. A proactionary welfare state would remove the taboo that locates the value of life primarily in the body of one’s birth. The legacy of decisions taken in one’s life would play a larger role, as risk-takers are rewarded in ways that keep their spirit alive even if their material existence undergoes radical transformation.”

I’m not entirely sure what that is supposed to mean, but in the given context we must assume that the radical transformation Fuller talks about includes what is commonly called the death of the individual. But Fuller is not content to demand that people be free to take great personal risks in order to speed up scientific progress, should they be willing to do so. He also believes that, if they prove unwilling, we (that is the law of the state) should actually compel them to offer their services to science and thus (at least potentially) sacrifice their own health and well-being, perhaps even their lives, for the greater good of humanity’s progress to posthuman glories. Just like the precautionary principle and the value of individual, embodied life, or life as we know it, Fuller argues that patient choice is much overrated (Steve Fuller, Suspended Ethics). It is in fact an absurd idea. Why do we have to be nearly dead to make it permissible for us to be subjected to risky and largely untested medical procedures? Why do we not use the “fully alive”?

Fuller appears to be puzzled by this “absurdity”, despite the fact that the answer is pretty obvious: because the nearly dead don’t have much to lose. If the procedure kills them, then they are not really worse off than they would have been if it had not been tried on them. Yet if you’re fully alive and healthy, then one should think that the prospect of being seriously harmed or killed as a result of the experiment (whose purpose remains obscure in Fuller’s article, but presumably would be some kind of enhancement) provides you with an excellent reason not to take part in it – unless of course you don’t put much value on your own health and survival. Not putting much value on our health and survival is of course exactly what Fuller expects us to do, but as far as I can see he doesn’t provide any good argument for it. I can only imagine that it is some murky notion of the common good that is meant to justify the demanded revision of our attitude towards our own lives. But just in case we remain unwilling to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good, the law should see to it that we do anyway. Although it would certainly be best if people made that sacrifice knowingly and willingly, the safest course of action is to make sure that they do by introducing a compulsory “scientific service”: “I see this very much on the model of compulsory national military service. Just as people are expected to bear arms when their lives are threatened (a la US Constitution 2nd amendment), they should also be compelled to participate in military service, if only to understand better all that is involved and at stake in maintaining one's life. Indeed, I would welcome compulsory ‘scientific service’ replacing compulsory military service in the long term.”

For me, this is the stuff of dystopian nightmares, and I am rather worried about the ease and nonchalance with which essentially totalitarian ideas like these are being accepted and promoted by academics and public intellectuals who really should know better.