Month: April 2021

Utilitarian ethics evaluates morality by the ratio of pleasure to pain. John Stuart Mill, who framed the most philosophically robust version of Utilitarianism, applied his ethical theories to his writings on poliical economy. Like many of his contemporaries, Mill promoted “liberal democracy,” a political philosophy with a system of individual rights and freedoms that allows citizens to influence the action of government. Free market capitalism was seen by many political economists, Mill included, to be an essential ingredient of a free society. Unfortunately, capitalism accomplishes the opposite as wealthy people have opportunities never available to the poor. Understanding why Mill does not anticipate this dynamic and reject capitalism shows why Utiltarianism should instead reject capitalism, not merely reform it.

 

As a Utilitarian, Mill argued that moral good is achieved when there is generally more happiness than there is pain. Undergoing pain voluntarily into order to achieve a worthy end, like an athlete training for a competition, is good when the happiness gained outweighs the pain suffered. While an individual can decide to trade some current pain for future pleasure, Mill does not think that a society can ask one person to suffer for the sake of another person’s happiness. In such a situation, Mill argues that no one could be happy because any pleasure they enjoy could be taken away at any time if someone else would benefit.

 

When applied to political economy, Mill’s Utilitarian framework evaluates policies by their potential for enabling happiness and avoiding pain. Since Mill acknowledges that happiness depends on the individual’s preference, he prefers a societal system that enables individuals to pursue whatever happiness they choose as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. Mill also recognizes that concentrated wealth affords a small group more choice, and therefore more possibilities for happiness, than the majority of people enjoy. Instituting a tax on inheritance would ensure that wealth would be gradually redistributed, as Mill argues in his Principles of Political Economy.

 

However, Mill proposes only a gradual redistribution by reducing inheritance rather than an aggressive redistribution by taxing wealth directly. However, the advantages that accompany wealth tend to enable further concentration of wealth. Wealth purchases influence through political donations, lobbying, and propaganda. Political influence allows wealthy people to obstruct redistributive efforts, further exacerbating wealth inequality. Through philanthropy, wealthy individuals influence the education, science, and the economy, shaping it according to their needs and their beliefs. The working class generally enjoy fewer choices, and even their available choices must serve someone else’s happiness even if it luckily also serves their own.

 

A charitable interpretation of Mill’s views would assume that Mill believed the harms done by concentrated wealth are not too severe, that concentrated wealth would not influence public policy to prevent redistribution, and that Mill would revise his proposal if his beliefs changed. Mill argues against socialism by claiming that capitalism provides more freedom than socialism, that inequality provides more motivation to strive, and that monopoly abuses are unlikely to manifest. While Mill did not see wages declining during his day, the decline of real wages from the 20th to 21st century has now been well-documented. Compounding advantages of wealth enable monopolistic collusion to prevent wage increases. Reduced wages motivate workers, requiring them to spend more of their waking hours working in order to provide for their needs. The working class then have very little freedom as long as they remain chained to wage-earning activity.

From a contemporary perspective, none of Mill’s objections hold. While the wealthy may enjoy a high degree of freedom, the corresponding suffering of the working class cannot be justified. As such one might assume that, if he were exposed to the right data, Mill would agree that capitalism fails to enable freedom, and that more direct redisribution of wealth may be needed.

Like many others, I embraced Neopagan Wicca after becoming dissatisfied with Christianity in my early teens. After Catholic school and years of Baptist church services, I found that I did not have faith and rejected the Christian moral universe. From that time onward my understanding of witchcraft and the occult changed, but I have always maintained some connection to those subjects. While Neopagan religion occupies the core of my spirituality, I have had my struggles with it as well.

For these purposes Neopaganism can be defined broadly as spiritual paths that embrace polytheism, the divinity of nature, and the practice of ritual magic. Neopagan paths tend to adopt features that inspired by pre-Christian religious traditions. Translating folklore into magical practices or religious symbols provides the basic framework for most Neopagan traditions.

According to most introductory books, the Pagan revival began when Gerald Gardner received permission to publicize the beliefs of a coven purported to practice a witchcraft religion that had survived in secret since pre-Christian England. Gardner initiated a number of people into what came to be called Wicca. As the religion spread, Wiccans diverged from the Gardnerian tradition and formed new lineages to reconstruct or revive different versions of the Old Religion.

Historians and folklorists find Gardner’s claims implausible and unsubstantiated by evidence. In form the rituals Gardner published resemble the style of ceremonial magic practiced by the Order of the Golden Dawn. Golden Dawn ceremonial magic copies forms inherited from Masonic orders which in turn copy ritual magic procedures outlined in the Keys of Solomon, a medieval forgery of King Solomon’s grimoire. None of these sources predate Christianity, and in the case of Golden Dawn forms, embrace Christian monotheism and the celestial world of heaven, hell, angels, and demons.

Much of Gardner’s assertions about the witchcraft religion rely on Margaret Murray’s theory that pre-Christian practices survive in the folkways of rural people. While Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe enjoyed wide popularity, historians and folklorists rejected her interpretation of the witch trials and superstitions. While evidence of syncretized pagan and Christian practices abounds in Europe, no evidence suggests a surviving “Old Religion” existing in secret alongside Christianity until its revelation in the modern day.

On the other hand, Gardner had been a member of various chapters of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and he claimed to have met the New Forest Coven through such a group. Documented contact between Gardner and other contemporary occultists such as Aleister Crowley show that Gardner sought initiation with several ceremonial magic orders. The available evidence suggests that Gardner and a group of ceremonial magicians fused Golden Dawn rites with Murray’s account of the witch-cult. They shrouded their new tradition in a myth of pre-Christian continuity in much the same way that Helena Blavatsky claimed to proclaim the teaching of Tibetan masters. Both stories provide an air of mystery to the beliefs and practices; they suggest that the authors have received a special revelation, a hidden truth.

Many contemporary Pagans know the facts outlined here. Just as not all Christians believe in the literal truth of the Bible, Pagans may view Gardner’s story as a creation myth, a philosophical guide post that frames the intended attitude. Modern Pagan traditions embrace folk wisdom, organize as mystery religions that require initiation, and practice ritual magic. Those features provide a framework capable of including diverse traditions that can nevertheless share a language and perspective among themselves. In that way modern Paganism can stand independent of the Gardner story or the mythos of any particular tradition.

The practice of magic introduces a complication with questionable foundation myths. Ritual magic employs symbolic action to influence the participant’s mental state and perspective. At the climax of a ritual, the participant stands fully immersed in a living metaphor established by the opening of the ritual and dissolved in its closing. Maintaining focus on the metaphor requires partitioning the internal view from external assessment of the actions. For instance, breaking the mood by sneezing in the incense smoke can disrupt the immersion unless a baseline reverential mood has been established. Ritual practices framed as ancient secrets borrows gravitas from tradition, supplying a sense of authenticity to buttress the ritual space against external intrusion.

If the magician’s perspective on their practice changes from tradition to forgery, the borrowed gravitas evaporates. As the magician studies sources more deeply, the falsehoods and frauds emerge. The transition from youthful enthusiasm to critical study shreds naive faith, especially when witchcraft provided an escape from hypocrisy and manipulation in one’s birth religion. Tracing occult lineages reveals a history of exaggerated claims, questionable authenticity, and unattributed borrowing.

My particular path threaded from Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity to Wicca and then into academic history, anthropology, and philosophy. When I tried to place my Wicca-informed beliefs on firmer ground, the false creation myth and the close association between magic and charlatanry yielded more mud than stone. Historians and archaeologists can confirm very little about Celtic or Germanic religious practices before their conversion to Christianity. Reconstructions using the methods of Margaret Murry prove flawed as experts have largely rejected her theories.

Nevertheless, Paganism and occult studies satiated a need to place my life into a larger context from which to draw guidance and strength. As I studied ethics, I found that my core moral commitments flowed from modern Pagan beliefs and my interactions with Pagan teachers. My studies continued because I wanted a way to build a foundation firm enough for ritual magic but consistent with a scholarly understanding of history, religion, and philosophy.

To replace a false lineage, the magician may ground authenticity in an investigation into the true lineage. In the absence of diving revelation, practiced belief creates traditions. A living tradition changes over time, influenced by the needs of the devotees. Likewise, modern Paganism has creators, influences, and devotees. Understanding a ritual practice would then include investigation into the origin of the practice to identify its source inspiration. Further investigation can show how the ritual changed over time as different traditions adapted it. In the end the magician may then decide how to incorporate or alter practices within their chosen tradition. A tradition presented as an honest reconstruction grounded in inspiration, fallibility, and adaptation acknowledges its founding truth rather than cloaking it in illusory gravitas.

I began this blog knowing vaguely what I wanted to do but without a clear sense of how to do it. As the writing begins to tell its own story to me, I want to define the mission more clearly. In the spirit of exploration, the mission may evolve over time, but a point of origin anchors the beginning of the journey.

Ultimately, I write as a form of introspection. After years of studying, observing, and thinking, I have a few well-considered ideas and a number of open questions with incomplete framing. I need to move the most clear ideas into something I can read, and I need to pose and explore the open questions in order to build frameworks that can supply answers.

In particular I want to unify a few disparate themes in my formative influences. Each theme has given me traits or beliefs that structure my approach to life, but I sometimes feel that I live in different worlds. Revived Pagan traditions informed my most closely held religious beliefs. The practice of witchcraft and occult color my perspective on the relationship between self and abstract phenomena such as culture. Formal ethical philosophy and political theory shape my political attitudes. In each area, I have studied, learned, and unlearned enough to develop a distinct perspective on some topics and to ask interesting questions on others.

Thinking across these domains has given me insight into each of them, but formulating those insights has been difficult. The message feels like it comes from the outside to other members of the discipline. The blog allows me to work these ideas out, free from disciplinary constraints. Nevertheless, I want to maintain intellectual rigor. I hope to fill in the elements of a general framework that spans these domains and then show what we can infer when setting the frame around specific questions.

If I can make my perspective understood to others as well as myself, I will feel successful. The ideas discussed here have provided guidance to me in difficult times, so I also hope that it helps other people who need something similar. I would rather not engage with readers directly on the blog to leave it free of distraction. Instead, follow @grimnircat on Twitter to engage to me and see the less refined versions of the ideas posted here.

Ethics classes often focus on moral dilemmas and other cases that expose conflicting intuitions about right and wrong. These boundary cases require unpacking foundational moral assumptions using the tools of ethical reasoning, so they provide ample opportunities for introducing the topics to students. Unfortunately, disproportionate focus on boundary cases eclipses the wealth of clear cases and widely shared values that form of the foundation of morality. When pedagogy breaks down certainty, it should do so in order to repair a renewed certainty anchored in more complete understanding. Otherwise, students learn the problem only and not the solution as well.

If morality appears only in the lens of dilemma, one learns to fit any moral judgment into the form of a dilemma. A debate over fundamental human rights naturally frames itself as a set of conflicting moral judgments arising from a clash of intuitions. When forced into the dilemma mold, the issue reduces to the conflict of racist and not racist, sexist and not sexist, etc. On the other hand if an appeal to a fundamental moral value would determine the judgment to be made, the dilemma constitutes little more than a question readily answered.

The concept of moral good rests on the possibility of moral responsibility. Praise and blame flow from agency, the ability to make choices, form intentions, or influence the outcome of events. Without agency moral good cannot exist because a lack of agency voids responsibility. One might hold various commitments about the extent to which determinism binds actions or intentions, but an agent must at minimum feel a perceived agency in order to assess their actions in light of morality.

Given the connection between agency and responsibility, moral good requires agency. A world with no agency would be a world where no individual could be praised for their good deeds or blamed for their evil ones. Agency makes moral good possible, serving as a necessary but not sufficient condition for both good and ill. As such, promoting agency and the conditions that allow individuals to form the capacity for agency would also promote moral good. Denying or discrediting the agency of rational, sentient beings hinders moral good. By definition moral norms promote moral good, so morality must require promoting agency and ensuring that beings capable of agency receive the support they need to develop and exercise agency.

The moral value of agency clarifies the broader issues of social justice in just that way. Creation and marginalization of a group creates a division between the dominant group and the marginalized group. The dominant group defines the marginalized group in ways that diminish their humanity and their status as moral agents in order to justify discrimination and prejudice. The effects of systemic oppression further diminish opportunities to develop and exercise agency through distressed material conditions and acculturation of abusive stereotypes propagated by the dominant group.

Given the moral norm in favor of agency, no dimension of identity discrimination can be morally justified. Creating group divisions to deprive an entire group of agency runs afoul of that norm. The consequences of those divisions multiply those wrongs and cannot be morally justified. Social injustice poses a moral wrong that needs to be addressed, not a dilemma that resists resolution.

Nevertheless, this argument does not become clear unless focus shifts from analysis of complex cases to the logical foundation of morality and ethical reasoning. Dilemmas provide solid opportunities to understand the nuances of ethical reasoning, but most everyday morality remains in the space of broad certainty and widely shared values. Rather than demonstrate the instructor’s intelligence by smashing student intuitions, ethics teaching should focus on ensuring that students have both a firm foundation of moral judgments and some practice in applying ethical reasoning to novel cases as well as familiar ones.

A community may organize so that power concentrates in a few decision-makers who organize and direct the efforts the everyone else. The small number of decision-makers relative to the rest of the population constraints the number of opportunities to lead or wield social or political power. A small number of people will hold power over the rest, and very few people will be able to attain those power positions. Power in such a society can be represented by a pyramid with the few “at the top” ruling the many “below” them.

A community may also organize to limit the scope of any social or political power. In such a society leaders or decision makers oversee a small or narrowly defined domain to organize or direct only a few people, or only within a specific circumstance or activity. Opportunities to wield social or political power may be numerous even if the scope of that power remains relatively small. Many people, potentially every person, may find an opportunity to lead in some capacity. Power in such a society can be represented by a horizon with many “leaders” who must cooperate with one another to achieve large scale shared goals.

The Pyramid and the Horizon represent an abstraction of power distribution in a society as one might find it. Political states throughout the world tend toward the Pyramid, ruled by an elite few who organize and direct the many. The Horizon appears in less formal associations or small communities.

When set against the the history of politics and political states, the Pyramid serves as the preferred tool for conquerors and rulers who rely on coercive power. The rising political class forms or allies with a martial class to compel obedience from the working class that forms the majority of the population. The monarchies that arose in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire exhibit this pattern, as do monarchies in India, China, and Japan. Governance aligns with the interests of the political class generally, the martial class where needed to maintain loyalty to the political class, and the working class only to ensure continued support for the political and martial class. Since the political class needs to prevent unified resistance from the working class, they need only to serve the interests of a defined subset at the expense of the rest. Much of the political class’s influence over the working class can be accomplished by propaganda rather than serving material interests, convincing the privileged subset that their interests align with the political class and against the rest of the working class.

The Horizon pattern emerges organically in small communities or in response to systematic oppression by the political class of an established Pyramid. Anarchists and collectivists, generally committed to cooperative power, tend toward the Horizon when organizing for reform or revolution. Distribution of power prevents the formation of a well-defined political class since any person may exercise power in some domain but will be subject to power in other domains.

As such, the political class and its supporters perceive the Horizon as a threat. Establishing a Horizon existentially threatens an established Pyramid and will diminish the power and associated wealth or control over resources that the political class enjoys. The political class will work against any reform that distributes power more broadly, preferring to maintain systems of oppression rather than sacrifice their privilege and power. Pyramid propaganda will frame the Pyramid as the only viable model and argue that the Horizons generally collapse into instability. However, no political entity can survive under constant attack, and a move toward the Horizon attracts sustained attack from any Pyramid. Historically, evidence for Pyramid reactions to such threats can be seen in the wars against France instigated by aristocrats who feared their privilege at risk in the wake of the French Revolution, the framing of anarchist collectives as bent on destruction, and the assassinations of civil rights leaders carried out by the FBI under COINTELPRO.

Nevertheless, the Pyramid instantiates injustice throughout its system of governance. The political class leverages their influence to concentrate wealth and resources, utilizing the martial class to suppress active resistance. Continued extraction of wealth from the working class reinforces established power as it enables the political class to purchase support from the martial class and often a select privileged subset of the working class established to divides the working class.

Since the Pyramid cannot sustain itself without that pattern of exploitation, support for hierarchies of power entails support for continued oppression and abuse of the majority of people for the benefit of a minority aristocratic class. Accepting the status quo of the Pyramid means accepting the rampant death and destruction leveled against a divided working class and whatever foreign states the Pyramid can exploit through the threat of military force. Concentration of power will always produce such abuses because the political class needs to enact abuse to maintain its position. Reform of the Pyramid is impossible. To achieve justice a community must move toward the Horizon.