Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Report: UK Police Don’t Investigate Anti-White Hate Speech" video.
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Just some notes of mine up to 7:00 mins, I'm not happy with it but post it anyway:
There is a common understanding, "on the omnibus" maybe, that represents the the ethical as reduced to various utilitarianisms of which Social Justice could be one possible schema. that is maximise total pleasure and minimise the total pain as a criteria for policy as utility for institutional action. I emphasise utility: by way of policy and institutions, because really since such calculations involve general even universal data and projections of possible policy, and so must measure and compare the differences between different policies outcomes, the whole understanding already requires certain institutions and rules and laws and workers in them, as well as those subject to the policy metrics, so this version of hedonistic human action as also an obligation to maximising total utility makes little or no sense outside of, apart form, in abstraction from, the institutions and possible instituional constructions and reconstructions. Here then the ethical demand is that any ethical agent must think of action as through rules and data and must seek to determine such actions with reference to maximisation of utilities to the totality of humanity. Now that the individual is never really present here, they are only data and the totality is never really addressed only the idea of incremental differences over time and between policies of provisional maximisation. So no one really thinks utilitarianism and institutions can act in practice to deliver the universal ethical demand as an actual single act or event, so the policy differences involve decisions about allocations eg from whom to whom and this is not given in the data but is underdetermined. This of course manifests or has symptoms that different groups can argue and force their own particular interest into the open freedom of the space of possible policy. Here of course there are categories of groups eg by space: family, friends, neighbours, community, country, the world, and by identity: such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation. Since there can be no one off universal maximising utility act, the ethical utilitarianism must recognise institutional change and reconstruction as internal to utilitarianisms meaning, it is transformative and progressive and so adds time to the schema and often adding time and progress expands the scope of humanity under it though greater and greater scope institutions. The ethical demand of utilitarianism then is temporally infinite and seeks a totally of humans and even beyond humans e.g. Peter Singer. Singer (1972) also sees the infinite totality as not a charity or choice but an absolute obligation as a call and demand for us all to be mediated by institution's and possible institutions and so institutions constructions is also an infinite call.
From this view point MeToo, BLM, and post patriarchal and post colonialism are merely delivering on infinite utilitarianism as a project. It maybe that the whole arguments here are really jsut utilitarianisms arguments and all the rest is mere epiphenomena and rhetoric to the ethical science of utilitarianism. The talk of privilege and guilt and historical restorative justice is just rhetoric we can ignore, an individuals relation to the totality and infinity is not personal but mediated by data and institutions, and so the ethical is not between the individual and humanity but between policy choices: there is the guilt and and privilege not in the relation of tax and spend as it is in action but in policy choice. So the guilt and privilege is about policy. Talk of the past and future is really talk about policy now. This then would already be enough for much dispute, but most players in politics see the utility criteria really in terms of its affordances to get the individual and there belonging and inclusion groups their own maximised pleasure in direct and immediate conflict with other groups not as different routes to the same absolute utilitarianism, but just self interest competition's between groups. With both but especially the later we perhaps cannot talk of a totality at all since each policy change, changes the policy possible space in the future and so there is no identity group or symmetry over time and space its a connected space but not given as a totality. the self and group interest reinterpretation of utilitarian justice then sits quite finely with the Hegel/Marx conflict theory of politics and reason.
In this then there is much space of freedom in making and breaking alliances between and within gropes, to be sure as much conflict goes on within a group and between groups that dynamically rearrange themselves as people try and calculate in the complexity find which alliances will give them maximum pleasure. I have shared interests with “a” but opposite (?) to “b”, however “a” and “b” might be in agreement or not, and what about “c” and the bundles of actual policies. It can make for strange alliances and contradictions between reasons and rhetorics that were made before the new alliance was deemed appropriate to self interest. People love to point out these kinds of contradictions on their opposing side like “Lesbians for radical Islam”. Where there was thought a connected space of reasons there really is a de facto history of changing alliances and traditions. Like in the 1980’s when the far left united left striking miners with liberal gay rights for example. Opponents then can point out contradictions that might emerge, that is contradictions in the diachronic reasons over time with changing alliances, such as other liberal policies being entertained at an earlier time. For extreme examples look at Estonia during the Russian Revolution and then during World War Two. What happens then is past alliances haunt the present reasoning’s, as if like a contradiction or hypocrisy and possible futures beckon to the present doomed future contradictions and hypocrisies to come. There appears to be a simple temporal spacial reason here such as if A were to back Israel on the “Right to justice and self-defence”, after 6th then A would be committed to similar judgements on other cases, simple if attacked at time t then defence at time t+1. If though a person B were to back Gaza “right to resist an Israeli occupation” then they would be committed to support any indigenous group against such a “colonial occupation”. Of course the descriptions here “occupation” and “Right of a State to self-defence”, as such are contradictory concepts with regard to application that place. When it comes to other policy then we see a person C now arguing about indigenous rights against immigration, would apparently have to side with Hamas and Gaza unless the description can be put in other ways that disappear the contradiction or hide it. But these simple uses of contradiction and hypocrisy presuppose a homogeneous and connected space of reasons over time. Indeed, if this space is not laid out before us already as if there is no human freedom and change no new possibilities etc, then maybe score keeping is inappropriate and the ad hoc re-description to avoid the charge of hypocrisy are addressing not a genuine problem to be solved but rather a paradox as a symptom of a paradigm or world view or logic that has an ontological metaphysical error informing it, this is be dissolved then not solved because there is no connected space within which the contradiction can manifest. A connected space laid out before us for all time is a necessary condition of the possibility of contradiction and hypocrisies over time and space. The erred view is like a score keeper in cricket moving with their score card to a tennis match, this is not case of contradiction in scoring but rather a symptom of different games being played. Only the myth of a utilitarian myth of the abstraction of pure data that is outside of space and time and so independent of reason in context would give the ground or basis for contradictions, and of course utilitarian cannot allow such given homogeneous data: as I said at the start it does not exist.
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I'm going through the Covid Enquiry at the moment and i can add that in Helen MacNamara's verbal evidence to the enquiry of 1st November 2023 at 41:00 mins into the am session (MacNaramra's prior written statement is not available at the moment), MacNamara is questioned on paragraph 36 of "Narrowed Perspective" section: that she expressed "doubts about the argument that we should "follow the science". This from her now lost text messages from late Jan to early Feb ,lost that is by the Cabiante Office, she acknowledges those in the Cabinate Office were one step removed from "handling" the response. She explains that she respected the scientist but she thought that it is not what governments normally do "follow the science blindly". She questioned where this was the right thing to do, that it was like a "cop out", and "unfair on the scientists", and that there is no just the Science" here, rather government have to judge, and this is underdetermined by any particular science, and that the many different scientific approaches together did not determine the judgement in itself. I agree with this so far, for my example: the application of behavioural science to the population as a whole, really begins from the position that people respond to causes and fears, that the "correct" policy application has to in a way determine people's actions from outside of them, which means treating the people as objects that can be determined heteronomiously to them. That is the whole metaphysical view of science w.r.t. humans is one of engineering the person into compliance with some aim, such that compliance has to be based in a certain process of the removal of freedom of choice and judgment agency responsibility on the part of the agent and on behalf of government. That for science the notion of political consent becomes a task of the appellation of causes and structures in attempts to determine the population into certain desired choices. two competing party use science to mediate the relations of consent of the public to government, in terms of the government and political parties as a struggle over causes, in which all political players are concerned to just cause the person to vote a certain way behave in a certain "desirable" way. Obviously then there is a conflict between people given free responsible consent and the application of science to try and cause a particular end. The political use and practice of cognitive behavioural psychology and mass data laden population models in social science as attempts like advertising to make the person chose a certain way actually is by passing consent and responsibility. MacNamara then I would say is recognising that this is an approach taken up by government in such a way as not jsut to remove responsibility and freedom from a subject but that it also allows the government to abrogate responsibility, to use "the Science" as an exculpation".
She is surly right about this, apart from the moral and ethical risk of a system of exculpation, also that while a particular structured science can follow a rule a series by virtue of a single law and its architectural frame and application in one department, in the real world not this series abstracted linearly diminished world, the one rule will not determine in the real event case in its dispositional and other contexts of difference a particular outcome. that there is no way to synthesise the nexuses of all the different scientific analysis's over a case, and so no way the science can determine a political judgment here. Truth of the event act cannot be derived from any synthesis or differential combinations of single rules that must be truth preserving functions. Two notions here of Truth in judgement and truth preserving in an axiomatic system necessary for a science. This problem is indeed a symptom, one of many i would say that manifests a token of a type of problem with enlightenment science and law. Here the Kant Wittgenstein problem of a rule determine a case. the problem of the gladiator and the decathlon contender i have talked about at length. Questions of precision and pure facts that necessarily determine activity in a Cabinet Office department do not scale up to being the kinds of problems of judgement in a government over seeing as a whole all the different department relevant to a case event. Really questions of pure fact and precision do not belong to the category or ontological of government in multiple departments over a case. It is an error hen to equivocate this, but also the error can happen the other way when people in Cabinet Office might see that they can exploit the freedom lost in government as condensed into freedom they now have to organise institutions so as to make it look like an independent science is determining a fact when in fact they have so arranged the architecture to make it the case priori. facts are determined not jsut passively by nature but actively by their architecture. Enlightenment science and law then are at odds with responsibility in a very general sense and so at odds with a certain conception of a human other than as a machine to fine tune.
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Some time later (paragraph 194) in the context of Government and Cabinet Office officials getting covid themselves, they are not the biological or class exception then, MacNamara explains how: there were no plans, and "indicative of a lack of care" even given a "duty of care" for staff (and lack of humanity), UK has no constitution, that everything is not written down, rather in practice "sensible people making sensible decisions". I have to say that this seems to draw heavily on a certain modern feminist analysis that seeks to inflate the notion of care, a notion that makes medical science sovereign and has a tendency to need to approach risk as a decreasing differential asymptote for each function to zero. it is a mirror of functions seek maximum total utility for the state or maximum social Justice and equality for all. Indeed this "feminist ethics of Care" approach to politics is central though Virginia Held, and fragility and vulnerability is central to feminist virtue ethics like Martha Nusbaum. Thus fragility vulnerability "Care" "protection" here is already a particular left political agenda which draws on in as a universal paradigm for much feminist theory and practice and analysis, and can be connected to a totality in terms of an emphasis from the late 1970's of reframing left Critique as positive freedom rights capabilities etc.
Care is a powerful rhetoric as a principle or rule since it's negation or denial would seem to push a Critique into a logical conceptual place of "not caring". Indeed this has being the take away from the 2008 financial Crisis, that three was a lack of care and too much misogyny with the bankers, thus the concept of risk was taken away from this debate about Bankers and Banks by the left and made a new kind of paradigm for political in general. A good tactic to trans substantiate the vocabulary of risk and care from academia into a usable political currency. Now under some kind of principle of care the quantity of risk is calculated by Baysian algorithms and policy introduced on that bias of projection. it is powerful rhetorically since every bad event now is seen in terms of a risk that could have been legislated towards its prevention and so avoided. its presents an image of the world as an ontology of risk events to be avoided.
The political Right moving against this have taken views such as it is inefficient in utility outcomes, it is laden with its origins in feminism that men are a risk and women carers, it has too much emphasis on working class type risks such as men's violence towards women (even though its public origins were the rich during the financial crisis ), that the risk regulations involve massive limits to freedom, an emphasis on policies to predict and avoid crime before it happens, (eg not against the law but could become). In a rhyme with Bernard Williams on utilitarianism and rights Pornography from 1979 the opponents of the risk end up drawing on versions of risk themselves to oppose other risks. Risk then like utility and rights are drawn on by both sides and so no absolute decisions can be made on its basis. What happen is both sides claim risks and then both sides create different targets for risk, and attack each other with their own risk avoidance ordinance. opponents do not hen oppose the risk paradigm but jsut add their own list of risks, risky people, and what to do about them. Medical science becomes central to this. But now what happens too consent in this political medical context.
So a series: 2008 financial crisis interpreted as male rich and bankers and risky individuals and weak regulations, so policy is risk avoidance and regulations. Then MeToo and BLM take this up as vulnerabilities and then then Covid allows it to be given medical and crime content though risk. Now the the poor white man is subject to smoking bands for his good and his sins.
Since this political left agenda was already theorised in the early 1990s by feminists, the problem covid has revealed interpreted and identified by MacNamara as lack of care and humanity is just the standard feminist critique of politics from the 1990's. it thus rather than being a judged in the event creation of concepts from the event, it looks like a shelf ready political ideology waiting for an event to launch. Particularly since in the 1990s there was a massive move by feminists to enter politics at the level and discipline of heath care and regulatory systems. An extreme Hegelian reflection that can subvert government judgement , and have regulatory system deal with everything. That replaces consent and re-represents particularly white men as high risk to particularly women. its ironic because MacNamara has already effectually said that judgement in the whole is quite different from calculations of series functions by Cabnate Officials and regulatory systems. Question is are the regulative ideas regulative or constitutive,
I must say this care and risk project is very much a feminist and left world view, so when MacNamara talks of narrow view points of government officials and all from the same background what she means is non of them were third wave Feminist ethics of care ideologues. and typically their perspective here is not one view among other but characterised as a first principle, an absolute and delivered by regulative overseers of all things. thus by passes transcends democratic consent and accountability. in practice this means any member of the public with a complaint jsut has their complain taken over by regulators of one kind and it jsut becomes an entirely internal mater to the institutions between its actors and its regulators end up in long expensive court cases. This division is often gendered also.
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