Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "You're Being Manipulated: Learn How Others Try to Control Your Mind" video.

I did a post to Novara Media just, on a live show they did last nigh part of which was on Trump. I can appropriately post it here too i think with a little preamble. I had first remarked on something Trump had said prior to the vote yesterday. Trump said something like: "You must vote. Even if you die after the election it will be worth it." Now my first thought was not about social conscience or rule utilitarianism, but since it was in a religious context i thought of some Christians i knew years ago who said if you believe in God and pray you will get rich. Now Kant has a moral postulate that says a good will and virtue will be rewarded in the after life ie the synthesis of vitrue and happiness. But its a postulate and so cannot be treated as a pragmatic tactic (i guess Nietzsche here) its not a causal connection obviously since its beyond the world, its cannot be not a hypothetical imperative or even a Wager or inferential probability function, eschatology might be too late unless we reincarnate and can remember and do cross or inter-life metric comparisons and rationally infer marginal changes between lives. But of course Kant's point is about the autonomy and non hypothetical nature of practical reason. its really about dignities and respect for the other as they are and so on, and this cannot be instrumental even perhaps for ones self. the good will. Now the philosopher i discuss in the Novara post bellow is Phillipa Foot. She did think that ethics required a notions of the good. That there are real natural facts about human beings that can be treated teleologically, and provide reasons for people to follow certain traditions and rules as appropriate in a situation. In this she was reacting to the non cognitivism of Ayer and Stevenson and the "empty freedom" of R. M. Hare. But her position is not so much substantive and Aristotelian its not about internal feelings and states but external activity or we might say behaviour. Now clearly this would be easily taken over by a science of health and behavioural modification. A ethical naturalism but with external scientific criteria only and like law could be done by force and like psychology be done without the patents knowledge and consent. So i post in the reply bellow my Novara post on Trump and Foot.
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There might be a whole host of reasons, why some kinds or sorts of people don’t like Donald Trump. It might be that he will bring in an autocratic rule, a one man dictatorship, though a quasi-emergencies or false flag emergency, suspend the constitution of rights as positive capacity and capability rights (economic re distribution under fairness by race and gender) and then suspend negative freedoms of academic research, teaching, advocacy and activism eg freedom from government interference to practice their academic capabilities capacities in accord with political projects of positive freedom and their dispositions attitudes and feelings and characters and public private inner and outer duties. It might be that they are worried that Trump intends to not just to abandon justice as fairness schematised according to race and gender, but too go completely the other way to the other extreme, of furthering the wealth inequality in the US creating a new Gilded Age of oligarchs, a plutocracy, inaugurate the age of the trillionaires (so this new word appears in the Microsoft Word dictionary), and that would have the look of rich white men. It seems that he might well intends to move away from globalisation with it outsourcing of manufacturing and consumer markets and population movements and so move in the direction of America first and American workers and consumers, bringing back global externalism markets into internalism markets. It might mean then harder boarders, and less involvement in overseas business and military actions. The democrats and the left oppose all this and maintain the further creation of an internal national health care system and welfare system claiming Trump will cut taxes for the rich I guess and leave vulnerable people and the left behinds to fend for themselves in poverty, the archetypes of this are vulnerable women and blacks in general. I’m not sure if “blacks” is still the correct or appropriate word to use here. And that lead onto another issue that the left have with Trump not just the possibility of racism and sexism, but a certain lack of middle class university educated grace taste and etiquette. Indeed it is a certain kind of appropriate to the situation etiquette that Philippa Foot focuses on in her famous and influential “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives”(1972). Foot holds that etiquette rules imperatives and principles are action guiding and constitute proper situation and context judgements and reasons and are grammatically “categorical” and whether people recognise this in polite society or not. Her example of inappropriate unprincipled unruled behaviour is replying in the first person to a third person invitation “would you like to come to the party”, with “I’d love to”. This is wrong regardless of the agent’s feelings an inner states. Foot has in mind Emily Post’s etiquette of rules and conventions (1960) that do not change regardless of the agents feelings and interests. It is curious that the long post world war two left social justice tradition of Critique and praxis for institutional and dispositional change involved the criticism and then creative breaking of such rules as political revolution from the bottom up Yellow Submarines Nitrogen at -273ish and so on. Back in the day of the 60’s the left were drawing on classic liberalism and individual negative freedoms from traditions particularly through the young students to create a movement or movements and solidarity or solidarities. I guess Philippa Foot would have disliked this intensely and referred them to the proper rules in the context and the person in their place as normative and binding and judgement evaluative. Foot probability had the long march of liberalism’s negative freedoms in mind in her criticism of this behaviour in freedom, as well as the lefts student movements of the 1960s and on into the 1970s. Indeed the ground laying for the actualisation of the potential of the left movements for process revolution and the taking over of the institutions was made in 1968 by Derrida Deleuze and Foucault, the being of difference overt identity, material process to differentially replace determined laws and situational performativity tactics respectively. It clear in Derrida’s work on law and the constitution in the 1980’s and 1990’s that conventions unwritten are the target. To make all conventions into rules by social theory then treat them as quasie laws sub late them by further laws and force. In the end though this has led to the personal is political intersubjective Hegelian Marxist conflict thesis between people particularly w.r.t. race and gender and the political turn in jurisprudence. Now we have what is described as “political correctness” as grammatical external rules laid down as both a quasi etiquette and concern of universal laws of antiracism and antisexist. The conventions are backed up by various ordinances depending on context from public criminality, private/public sacking, deleting, and now shame and guilt referring to inner states and dispositions and soon I image brain and behavioural science to inspect our introspections, predict risk and if not too high prescribe various national medical treatments. I think goes to disclose a certain aspect of the culture wars in US UK politics.
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part 2: Foots work though has many targets and context from 20th century philosophy and has drawn many more responses since. One of contextual relevance is the so called “Paradox of Analysis” (“Metaethics: A Contemporary Introduction” Mark van Roojen 2015 page 205-6). It goes right back to the original problem of Moore’s Open Question argument “But is this Good?” since Foot is claiming substantive notions for the good here as hypothetical imperatives in part as a response to R.M. Hare (and hence Rawls) “empty” account of freedom and morality and justice. But Foot will have difficulty in responding to a lesser known earlier figure Pritchard who problematizes rights and rules in situations with a causality problem from Natural and common laws and so conventions. Foot hold that there can be a clear account of a manifold of synoptic rules, and these carry or travail (like bootstrapping in discourse perhaps Bandom 1992) across contexts so as to disclose external rule breaking in action if not inner hypocrisy. There is the idea of agent external rule breaking and evaluation and punishment in the proper use of the term good just as there is in the use of any cognitive language. Moral and ethical Non cognitivist and R.M. Hare denied this. Foot saw no way to show an agents irrationality of say acting contrary to one own ends through reasons or also hypocrisy given only rule breaking as a kind. Rather it requires for disapproval and perhaps retribution or medical educational modification for the agent substantive publically recognisable notions of the good. I guess for modern left social justice the Right and the just go proxy for this or in tandem with say GDP. Certainly with right and justice placed here for evaluation and retribution and modification it seems the middle class that decide what the proper rules of grammar are here but it looks kind of either arbitrary or purely political if the later then an agents rejection of its normative justification and legitimacy might go on to becomes a general rejection of all and any rules proclaimed by the middleclass. As rule by them for their own purposes a class in itself for itself with its own view on Good sublated fallaciously into an account of justice, then expressed as prohibitive and obligatory laws to the rest. The problem pointed out by Pritchard then 100 years ago is now really a political is personal and personal is political and is judged in and by various courts and institutions going proxy for the freedom of real life successive discourse. We don’t discuss and play in twist and turns we attack each other set traps and watch court proceeding and court proceeding about court proceedings on tv that we cannot understand. John McDowell made a famous intervention in this debate in 1978 “Are moral requirements hypothetical imperatives?” It’s ironic that most of the books on metaethics discuss McDowell with no reference to Foot, and Foot has been “Jason Borne-ed” from many recent books on ethics. My original work on Foot was from Open University course books from late 1970’s and early 1980’s and “A Century of Moral Philosophy” W.D. Hudson and a book on Moral Philosophy called Moral Vision I think by Philip Norman. The latter I leant out years ago and never got back. They aren’t borrowing anymore of my books. The others: some were stolen from my garage 20 years ago “Someone has taken my booooks”. I caught one guy, who looked proper homeless with my old and out of date copy of Plato’s Republic. I mean what do you do?
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