Wednesday 31 March 2021

Vaccine Repugnance

 Odd things are happening in  the discussion of moral repugnance in relation to the use of vaccines derived from abortion tissue.  The disanalogy which I mentioned before has been mentioned by a philosopher whose speciality is the crafting of complex thought experiments:

"The use of the cell-lines in itself is not innately morally evil (after all, it need not be wrong to transplant an organ from a murder victim).”

vaccine doubt

I hope that he means a murder done to provide an organ which outside China must be extremely rare.falun gong organs

An ordinary murder would not supply any organ probably even if the victim had signed an organ donor card or relatives were willing to allow harvesting.  Autopsy!

This occlusion of nous in one normally extremely punctilious might be caused by fear generated by extraordinary measures such as mandatory mask wearing, social distancing and lockdown. People are unsettled and extremely suggestible and forget that Covid mortality is low and mostly within the elderly co-morbid at an age in which life itself is co-morbidity.

Public Discourse has been promoting the moral licity of covid vaccines derived as they believe in the dim and distant from aborted tissue.   Are those cell lines really immortal or have they to be renewed or improved at long intervals?  Grisly harvesting goes on:

"Every month, Lishan Su receives a small test tube on ice from a company in California. In it is a piece of liver from a human fetus aborted at between 14 and 19 weeks of pregnancy.”  (from ‘Scientific American’ 12/9/15 - ‘The Truth about Fetal Tissue Research’ -

research

Willing the end requires willing the means if there is no other causal nexus  offered.

Richard Stith in dialogue with Melisa Moschella (Public Discourse article) argues that natural repugnance is a good indicator of moral licity.  What the good man thinks to be good is good was Aristotle’s position in the Nichomachean Ethics.  Repugnance felt by the general population is not reliable, a point which Moschella does not attend to when she offers the disgust felt at miscegenation in the past.

"But because these evils are in the past and are not perpetuated by the current use of HEK 293, moral repugnance at the vaccines themselves is misplaced. My answer would be the same if the cell line were derived from the tissue of someone killed in a Nazi concentration camp.” (Moschella)

No one is claiming that concentration camps continued at a controlled level might yield research useful to humanity.  Lishan Su continues to receive his grams of flesh because the majority believe that there is no other option which is not correct.

You can take the whole article as a exercise in professional casuistry or the occlusion of nous.  Worth a read anyway:

moral repugnance

Sunday 28 March 2021

Epistocratic Duty

 The concern comes in waves all of the same form.  How are we to explain to the populist hordes the true nature of political reality?  Can we reach them with reasoned argument, persuade them that their fears of rigged elections are unfounded and that wearing a mask is a sovereign remedy against the animalcules that swarm.  It is a difficult duty but as epistocrats  we must accept it.  Low information and misinformation must be countered.  We owe it to our fellow citizens to put them right even though we get no thanks for it, nothing but abuse.

Higher Karenism of this sort is not difficult to counter.  Ignoring it induces complacency and the emollient streams of sweetness and light won’t cease.   My conservative solution is to find positions that we both can agree on.  Does setting fire to things and breaking windows really advance the cause of peace between our two great traditions?  Does the manifest opportunity for the commission of fraud incite fraud?  As in the good old days ought we not  leave our keys in the doors and dispense with hasps and staples ungainly symbols of lack of trust in the respect for private property.  These are serious questions demanding a serious response.   Growth will come in the spring nevertheless it is prudent to cover tiny carrot seeds with boards lest they be washed away.

Thursday 25 March 2021

John Waters, Gemma O'Doherty, and the Bermuda Triangle of the High Court

 Cases brought to the High Court in Ireland run the risk of costs for the appellants which can be substantial. In cases where the matter to be decided on is deemed to be of public interest those costs are remitted.  John Waters (cf. Give Us Back the Bad Roads

bad roads) and Gemma O’Doherty brought a case questioning the legality of emergency provisions in relation to Covid.  The Wikipedia article on John Waters high court and his career sum up the result of this action:

"On 2 March 2021, the Irish Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal by Waters and Gemma O'Doherty of the High Court’s refusal to permit them to bring their challenge, and its award of costs of that hearing against them. Counsel for the state in the appeal argued that some of the applicants' submissions were Bermuda Triangle stuff."

All accounts of this result mention the Bermuda Triangle, and there is a generic quality to the reports as though all journalists, in the safety of their homes, were working from the report of a single intrepid member of the Fourth Estate.  Costs were awarded against Waters and O’Doherty.  Estimates put it at a five figure sum which is a severe range of financial pain.

What made John  and Gemma lose their bearings and challenge the world wide consensus that this virus was so supremely dangerous extraordinary measures needed to be taken?  Only one result was possible: disappearing off the radar.

In time this covidology will come to be seen as an amplified version of the Y2K problem that was going to cause massive disruption but didn’t.  The technocratic mind cannot abide uncertainty and wants no truck with negative capability.

"I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. (John Keats)

To live with risk is to live a human life.  It was a series of mutations that brought us from the big bang to now. Let’s get on with it. In fact we are getting on with it and doing up a 70‘s bungalow that our son has bought.  New plumbing, wiring, stoves, tiling and no shortage of tradesmen to do the work since the construction sites are closed down.  Don’t tell the government.

Saturday 20 March 2021

ANK’HOR VAT by Denis Devlin

 ANK’HOR VAT


The antlered forests
Move down to the sea
Here the dung-filled jungle pauses
Buddha has covered the walls of the great temple
With the vegetative speed of his imagery

Let us wait, hand in hand

No Western god or saint
Ever smiled with the lissom fury of this god
Who holds in doubt
The wooden stare of Apollo
Our Christian crown of thorns;

There is no mystery in the luminous lines
Of that high, animal face
The smile, sad, humouring and equal
Blesses without obliging
Loves without condescension:
The god, clear as spring-water
Sees through everything, while everything
Flows through him

A fling of flowers here
Whose names I do not know
Downy, scarlet gullets
Green legs yielding and closing

While, at my mental distance from passion,
The prolific divinity of the temple
Is a quiet lettering on vellum

Let us lie down before him
His look will flow like oil over us.

Friday 12 March 2021

Divine Mania and Philosophy

 

"The knowledge of what is knowable, pure, and simple, that illuminates the soul like a thunderbolt and for this time alone allows it to touch and see. For which reason Plato and Aristotle termed this part of philosophy ‘epoptic’ because they pass by ostensible, heterogeneous, and manifold notions, and leap up towards the primal, the simple, and the immaterial, and when they really touch the pure truth concerning these matters they think that, just as in mystery initiations ( teletê ), they reached the end ( telos ) of philosophy."

Plutarch (quote taken from 'Divine Mania: Alteration of Consciousness in Ancient Greece' by Yulia Ustinova)

Tuesday 9 March 2021

Chandogya Upanishad: Clay and Vessels made of Clay

 “A classic Advaita illustration of this, based on Chandogya Upanishad 6.1.4, is a causal substance such as clay shaped into new names and forms, like a pot or plate. The latter effects arise and resolve back into their cause. They have no existence apart from their metaphysical ground, the persisting clay content. Clay is therefore the reality (satyam). Not only does the clay possess more reality than either the pot or the plate because it continues through each form, but the individual existence of either artifact is entirely ontologically dependent upon its clay content. The clay is analogous to Brahman which is the underlying existence of the universe. For Sankara, each temporal artifact is simply a name (nāma) and form (rūpa), and unreal because it can be reduced to its cause.”

(Neil Dalal writing on Sankara’s Advaita Vedanta in ‘The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedanta’)

Let me pick a nit and pop it.  An illustration is on the same level as that which it illustrates e.g. Dickens illustrates the cruelty of the Murdstones in his novel ‘David Copperfield’ by  ....

An analogy attempts to guide us towards understanding by the use of an example that is removed from the area of difficulty.  The relation between pure Being and individual forms of being is difficult to comprehend because in our fallen state we have no experience of pure Being or Being as such.  The analogy drawn from the potter’s trade helps us towards an understanding or orients our attention towards this relationship.  That task completed the analogy retires from the scene.  The clay and vessels made of clay is not an ontological outline in a classic metaphysical theory.  Pure changeless Being may be more real, under a certain definition of ‘real’ than the fleeting manifestations of mundane being.  The clay/vessels does not partake of that disjunction of more and less real.  A cup or a marble is just as real as a lump of clay.   The final cause differentiates them; the one will hold a liquid and the other roll down an inclined plane.  The lump of clay is also an individual entity.  There is no ontological clay.  Substance or Prime Matter is another story and should not be conflated with the analogy of clay/vessels.

Thursday 4 March 2021

Panpsychism (trending?)

 Generally this will come from the analytic tradition.  Panpsychism is absurd, mad and a surrender to the forces of unreason.  ‘Our way of life is under threat’.  Well not quite but the fact that it’s, as it were, trending as a philosophy is troubling.  The reductio that is offered and viewed as a knockout punch is the characterisation of an electron or even a quark having a mind.  Then if all these little minds add up to one big mind as in the human being or the chimp isn’t there a problem about how they might combine and present a unified front.  Won’t they squabble?  They are of one mind (sorry) with Ralph Cudworth in his ‘The True Intellectual System of the Universe’ (1678):

“And to say that these innumerable particles of matter do all confederate together—that is to make every man and animal, to be a multitude or commonwealth of percipients and persons, as it were, clubbing together—is a thing so absurd and ridiculous, that one would wonder, the Hylozoists should not choose to recant that their fundamental error of the life of matter, than seek shelter and sanctuary for the same, under such a Proteus.”

I think the fundamental problem here with the anti-panpsychist view is that it is based on an implicit dualism.  Mind and matter are are irreducible.  Yet at the same time mind sort of happened when matter became complex enough.  Is that more intelligible than the monistic view expressed by the ‘satkaryavada’ theory of Vedanta (non-difference of cause and effect) or the ‘ex nihil nihilo fit’ about which the Chandogya Upanishad affects to be ambivilent.

Interesting speculations to be hewn from the obdurate metaphysic. Anon.