Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "It's NOT Islamophobic To State HORRIFIC Facts About Many UK Muslims' Beliefs u0026 Un-British Values" video.

  1. What follows is a bit of a tangent approach to the issue but its from me working on a post by Politics joe with Carol Vorderman on tactical voting from yesterday. I have posted it on Novara Media tonight (they're welcome). Its just the start and is more how i think than what i will end up posting to Politics Joe, if indeed it ends up making any sense. i don't know in advance yet. It contrasts the neo liberal position from 1950 on values as preferences/social policy, with a medieval tradition. it fits here, serendipity, but that is an accident my aim is different: to Critique the tactical voting if i can. Enjoy (you're welcome). In 1951 the economist Ken Arrow looked at voting from the point of view of choices or preferences of multiple economic agents, but within the framework, common at the time, that there is no way to set up relations of interpersonal agreement in utilities. That is, beginning with a list of an individual's preferences there can be no way to determine that two individuals agree on any one preference, ie there are no intersubjective comparisons of preference, ie then tastes are absolutely subjective. This then orthodox economic view of people seems an intuitively absurd position: surly everyone agrees that food and water would be the top of the list of preferences for all human beings. Indeed our ordinary language suggest this when we make the distinction between necessities for existence, and mere preferences of individual tastes. In pre modern Theological Categories preferences are accidental contingent particular properties of a substance, while basic needs would be essential necessities and universal for all human begins. In medieval thought Existence is prior to non-existence, but for humans then basic essential needs are the conditions of existence, but not the essence of the human being. Why? Not just because our material bodies are made up of many elements other than the matter we gain from basic needs in external nature. As if we would then need to add various vitamins to the shopping list and other elements like traces of metabolically necessary mediating rare metals. Indeed this purely material list extends far beyond what we would ordinarily call basic needs eg Limes and so on. Maybe we really mean: basic needs time bounded for only a few weeks. But no, back in the day human essence involves reasoning beyond what is possible for mere basic animals. In the Scholastic tradition human reason involves categories like responsibility that goes with sensibility and agency. Of course this being a medieval religious tradition or paradigm, self sacrifice was a virtue, while what we might call the modern scientific economic image of man (in 1950) "homo economious" (perhaps contrasted to home sapiens), man is first posited as self interested its called economic content and was or is still the necessary starting point for any economic theory to be classed as rational. In the older pre modern tradition self interest was a vice like Pride, Selfishness. The modern view of framing reason as locked into or grounded in self interest, has more recently been classed as a artificial and narrow imposition of mathematical economic theory on to the real wider nature of human beings. The important point is if, we take self sacrifice as real not just psychologically pathological ie irrational, and not re-describable as some acrobatic twisting of self interest to explain away apparent anomalous to self interest behaviour, then clearly, although counter intuitively there are, or is, no universal necessary agreement on basic needs, on what is truly necessary. Someone might say you need food and water already in place to perform a self sacrifice, but of course the self sacrifice could be for the sake of others or even the sacrifice of food and water as in a hunger strike for some other purpose. The other purpose then is the so called "higher purpose" governing all other reasons. Back in the day they thought of essence as purpose and for man essence was determined by this higher purpose. Indeed made the ultimate purpose and end of the cosmos as determined by a transcendent to the human being Alien Being: God. It means to fully respect human beings what they are and can be we have to try and avoid reducing man to self interest out of full recognition of the phenomena of man. In philosophy this can mean taking history, the history of our thought, seriously and with respect. It means the modern scientific world view with its economic scientific image of man is not simply an advance on, a progress, from a now rejected and redundant previous world view. That something has been left out, rather than being disproved by science or un proven by science. Often in these paradigm shifts what has been left out can later reappear in a somewhat distorted form in logical theoretical twisting of the new paradigm. Eg self-sacrifice as really self-interest or as a form of mental illness and irrational. As the terms betray the old notions of higher transcendent purpose God, “appear” as negations or subtraction of the new paradigm eg now what was higher than animal reason becomes ir-rational, patho-logical. One thing that continues to evade modern sciences reductions is intentionality, responsibility and so any respect for agency and autonomy. These are closely related to notions of the unity and Identity of a person. There is a someone their, not an ever changing sequence of random twitches, but an irreducible single person we might describe in terms of parts but the whole is first. As Wittgenstein asked “Why cannot my left hand give my right hand money. From Davidson we say: “I turned on the light” not “a finger moved a switch”. The basic foods for existence a shopping list a shopping trolley make up an interrelated interconnected whole, we need them all at the same time. But also like character and as vice is to virtue we can have too much of one ingredient as well as too little. For example with one Vitamin the maximum limit is actually lower than the recommended necessary amount. That is counter intuitive why might that be? (it turns out that Wittgenstein uses something similar to my vitamin example I used a bit ago in someone's comments section(?). but i didn't know this till today. its in Geach on logic)
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  2. Part 2: So Arrow's interest is in political policy from the stand point of self interest, and the starting assumption of the possibility of radically different people in terms of their preferences. That he expresses in terms of how different people can possibly hold preferences in a radically different rank order. I guess that means self interest as the starting point must be first in rank order for everyone, and so there is necessarily no possibility of agreement there, rather possibility of agreement is in the rank order of every other preference. Already there are numerable assumption in play like can people even communicate subjective preferences if they are absolutely subjective and private, and preferences can change over time indeed maybe preferences and rank will necessarily change over time, given our sensible and appetitive nature. Arrow though is concerned with objective preferences, that is utilities for preference, and so preference then is audited in terms of time ie an action S wants p, is causal and end determined, ie consequentialism (who named this utilitarian approach as consequentialism?). This objective or public standpoint then introduces public policy judgements ranking priorities etc, as the possible outcomes of agreement between people's utility aims and rankings. Now Arrow wanted to do what is called normative economics that is find limits to and set certain polices as would be universally rationally agreed by everybody and so produce policies which he calls a Social Welfare Function. We might call this a Universal Manifesto. A basic manifesto that all parties would have to rationally agree to. It might turn out then that such a rational arrived at end point, would contradict the starting assumption of personas rationally external to each other in subjective self interest. We would then not say its a irrational construction but rather a kind of sublimation of subjective self interests into a higher universal to put it bizarrely in Hegelian terms, that begin with the assumption of a state of affaires of a many private islands and many subjective Robinson Crusoe's but then ends up demonstrating rational agreement internalities starting from the mere abstract idea of extreme externalities. In this liberal context starting point then we would get a necessary set of rank order preferences ie liberalism sublated into a Social Welfare System of universal necessities for all. As I have said the pre modern God of universal first purpose, Gods preferences of preferences for all humanity, is deflated to a subjected private choice of some individuals but not all. That is not everyone would choose God as a first ranking utility preference, or even on the list at all. Politically it’s a private subjective matter. God is economically expendable. Has the old utility God left a hole then in our world of modern rational meaning? i.e. Jorden Person’s view perhaps or Is that utility God Dead: e.g. Nietzsche and Anscombe. Or maybe someone or something has necessarily rushed into that vacuum to fill that hole? Maybe the proposition or judgement Utility God is a contradiction in terms, but then what would the “definition” of God be if not the transcendent all powerful utility deliverer of all our desires. Also the old view talked of sacrifice in terms of virtue honour duty. An extreme higher value or purpose for a person than self interest or private interest. Taking on the necessary job as if it’s the rank of all ranks for everybody else in a population. We talk of sacrifices as a necessary individual response to individual human finitude. Some might sacrifice a teenage life of pleasure preferences for some long term higher value preference. That is immediate self sacrifice by one person in private for a multiple political space of population, becomes time mediated relation for that one person. Maybe that is to put philosophical structure into the view that some older people “are said to have” of some younger people. I guess a Rock n Roll life style might be seen this way as the degenerate opposite of the old hero, in some peopels minds. Indeed the old God and sacrifice have not gone away rather some parts of them are transferred or reappear in the modern system. The old God of purpose has become legal economic Rights and Justice. And Sacrifice is still necessary but not a personal act or God intervention but done via an anonymous mediating rational system. So, to be blunt, social welfare policy are procedures that pick out a group or groups of people to be sacrificed. It like a perpetual but unavoidable manifestation of a State of Emergency. Gods all powerfully utility policy is selective, indeed the selection of utility for some means effectively the turning of others into utilities for everyone. Sacrifice without consent or even a sacrifice, they make it appear rational in terms of finite utilities and overall GDP. The structure gives the impression of a anonymous population under an anonymous rational machine called the Social Welfare Function. Blaming this for the result is seen as like taking Gods name in vein or flogging the breaking waves on the sea shaw. So can we all agree on who gets picked to be sacrificed or now even who can be persuaded to be sacrificed. The idea of individual legal Rights both positive and negative, were meant to limit extreme possibilities from history. Such as the cabin boy being picked, the low intelligence and socially less productive soldier, the women, the minorities, particular races, a cat, or another country. But these Rights laws sit difficulty with the Rational Social choice structure. Individual rights refer to individuals as individuals first but mediated by international law institutions and justice the global stand point. So already in practice as a instituional utility everyone is in a rank order alongside everyone else. And this rank order is a decision clothed in utility calculations. But rights did not begin as welfare utilities, they began as legal limits to the legal activities of governments ie to welfare policy. Now everyone can re-express preferences as Rights. Justice becomes multiple mediated particular group utilities expressed as rank orders of Rights. This then mealy re-expresses the original problem of preference rank order and sacrifice in a different but ultimately similar structure. It could be said that Rights merely preserve stability to the utility system of sacrifice via legal continuity, ie a rational system rather than an arbitrary system. Increasingly Rights have added new possibilities as utilities themselves that can over reach like the vitamin that has a lower maximum level than recommended level. I guess the question of social political policy ordinance is about whether the whole of political affairs is like a rank order of preferences at all. I mean is there really a Maslov hierarchy at all must they all in someway be in paly at the same time. Rank is wholly the wrong approach to the problem and that is why limits seems either an arbitrary add on to an internal system, or as some stability mechanism as answerable to utility content and GDP etc. in the end. Rights become seen as utilities as tools like the old utility God. Rights as such then have quaisy transcendent role in that they can act as extensions and additions to the original system rather than as limits. Rights can add more preferences and ranking utilities that were not available in the original Arrow framework. Rights as tactics and affordances, as someone said in the 1930’s a New World of Gods and Monsters. One problem must be around how we view a subject and a property (eg page 164) and from there relations.
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  3. Part 3: In many ways i think the problem is about the mix up of what colleagues used to call a specialised static logic (General Logic) and a dynamic logic of inference. They are incongruent the latter necessarily over steps the boundaries in the former. The body politic in dialectic with and political action. Policy is process and expansive. I will try and illustrate this with examples from the discussion above.
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