Category Archives: Interesting

Jim’s Jams

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This is an essay I wrote over the last few days for my Media Ethics subject. I wasn’t sure exactly how it would turn out, but I think it is reasonable. If only in that I can’t currently see anything wrong with it. Which may be to do with my sleep deprivation…

 

 

“When dilemmas such as ‘Jim and the Indians’ demand an ethical choice, is deciding by dice throw: better; just as good; or worse than: deciding via Kant’s Categorical Imperative and Bentham’s Hedonistic Calculus? Why?

When faced with a situation such as that in ‘Jim and the Indians’, the ethical choice demanded, is by no means a simple one. The different epistemological elements that come into play confuse even the most morally apt; as it is far from clear what is the best way to respond. Several options are open to us, however correctly making the decision that leads to the least moral ambiguity seems almost impossible due to the potential gravity of each choice.

Upon reading the dilemma outlined by Williams and Smart, there seem to be two potential courses of action that Jim is able to take, which can be separated into the dominant epistemologies that they fall into; that is, to accept, or not to accept the offer of the captain. Does Bentham’s deontology convince us with his Utilitarian ideology of acting in reference to a Hedonistic Calculus, or is Immanuel Kant more persuasive with his teleological notion of acting via a Categorical Imperative?

The first option open to Jim would be to agree with Pedro, the sweat stained military captain, and shoot one of the protesters in order to save the other 19, thus favoring Bentham’s moral framework. This framework can be summed simply in the more commonly used phrasing: “the ends justifies the means”. Or basically, that if the outcome of an action is perceived to be more beneficial than failing to perform the action, then the action used to achieve this outcome is justified. So for Jim, the act of killing one protester would be seen as justifiable as the result is the saving of 19 lives. But more specifically, Bentham argues that any moral question can be answered by establishing what will generate the most pleasure (good) and conversely, the least pain (bad). As, surely, the totality of happiness after the action is more important than the action itself?

In contrast to this, we see Kant favoring motive rather than outcome in order to establish what is the most moral route through an ethical quagmire. To sum his argument more simply: “don’t do bad to produce good”. Kant based his theory on the thought that ethics was too serious a subject to be left up to probability or chance. He means that by justifying the means with the ends, the protagonist is leaving their decision up to what might happen, or what they suspect is the most likely consequence of their action, which is by no means a certain thing. The projection of a probably future was, for Kant, not enough to base a moral groundwork on. What if Jim chose to kill one protester in the hope of saving 19 other lives, but the captain failed to honor his word, and proceeded to kill the remaining 19 as well as Jim? Even if Jim refused the captains offer, and he killed all 20 before executing Jim too, at least the last moral choice Jim made was not one that resulted in him actively ending the life of an innocent stranger. Or so argues Kant. His argument is that an ethical decision must remain “good”, regardless of the eventual empirical consequences. Not only this, but that the ethical decision must apply to both specific situations, and also universally to all situations. He says this most famously in chapter two of his work, Groundwork of Metaphysics of Morals.

 

“Act only on that maxim through which you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” (Smith, 2013)

 

If Jim were to follow a Kantian process of decision-making, and he chose to kill one protester in order to save 19, he must also will a world where he is happy to be killed by someone in order to save 19 others. This is Kant’s test for ethical maxims; that the M-I (maxim applied individually) must match without contradiction to the corresponding M-U (maxim applied universally). Kant would argue that if a contradiction is found between the M-I and M-U, then the maxim cannot be used, as it is seen to be ethically invalid. This is Kant’s adaptation of the Golden Rule, the ancient moral principle that has been seen across both centuries and cultures, which suggests it to be one of humanity’s only common ethics. It is seen to exist in all major religions, from Christianity to Buddhism, Islam to Taoism. It is from these common principles that Kant derives his Law of Non-Contradiction, from which stems his Categorical Imperative, and thus his motive focused method for overcoming ethical dilemmas.

However, supposing that Jim had either a coin or a dice in his pocket? What if there was in fact a third option for deciding how Jim should act in his difficult situation? Could it be ethical for Jim to toss a coin in order to decide if or not he should kill one to save 19, or refuse the offer, and walk away? This broadens the dilemma significantly, as it takes the decision process out of the hands of Rationalism, for which both Kant and Bentham argue (though admittedly from opposing sides), and puts it firmly within the grasp of Chance. As reason through logical deduction has proven to be flawed in significant ways, even when argued from both sides, perhaps it is better to avoid logic and its inherent failures to provide a clear moral path, and it is better instead to remove it as a variable completely when making such a difficult decision. As French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery argues, logic is self-validating, but does not always produce consequences that sit at moral ease.

 

“If your purpose is to understand man and his needs, to know what is most essential about him, you must not set the proof of one man’s truth against another’s. Yes, you are right. Everyone is right. Anything can be demonstrated by logic. The man who blames the ills of this world on hunchbacks is right. Let’s declare war on hunchbacks and all get carried away.” (Saint-Exupery, 1995)

Logic, by its very nature, serves as a finite explanation of the world. Perhaps logic is not equipped to answer all of the problems we might face in life, as Jim has found. The conclusion that the moral action is to kill one in order to save 19 is based on a firm logical foundation, but so it the conclusion that the only moral path is to never kill. Both arguments are valid as they are both logically consistent, however they are derived from different first principles, thus creating their stark opposition. Even Wittgenstein, the maser logician and philosopher admits in the introduction to his first major work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that thought is limited by both language and logic, with anything remaining outside of logic to be purely absurdity.

 

“…the aim of this book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather – not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

            It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.” (Wittgenstein, 1961)

 

            Perhaps these kinds of logical dilemmas sit outside of what Rationality is capable of overcoming, and instead sits in a realm of absurdity? One example of a clear rejection of morality formulated via logic is in the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men. The character of Chigurh does not appear to behave consistently with any traditional form or rational morality, instead, preferring to use his own word as his final and absolute truth. When he feels like this may not be adequate, he uses coins to decide if or not he should keep his word (usually in regard to if or not he should kill someone). The catch, however, is that the person who he intends to kill must call the toss of the coin.

 

“None of this was your fault.

            She shook her head, sobbing.

            You didn’t do anything. It was bad luck.

            She nodded.

            He watched her, his chin in his hand. All right, he said. This is the best I can do.

            He straightened out his leg and reached into his pocket and drew out a few coins and took one and held it up. He turned it. For her to see the justice of it. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and weighed it and then flipped it spinning in the air and caught it and slapped it down on his wrist. Call it, he said.

            She looked at him, at his outheld wrist. What? She said.

            Call it.

            I wont do it.

            Yes you will. Call it.

            God would not want me to do that.

            Of course he would. You should try to save yourself. Call it. This is your last chance.

            Heads, she said.

            He lifted his hand away. The coin was tails.

            I’m sorry

            She didn’t answer.” (McCarthy, 2005)

 

This scene is an example of pure chance deciding the result of an ethical decision. Is this morally right? This method purer than anything that human reason is capable of. It is distilled morality, the essence of what we strive to achieve with every decision we make, for human reason creates morality in order to strive for fairness and equality. When a judge sits in his chair at the top of a courtroom, his purpose is to pass a sentence that is the fairest response to whatever the crime may have been. However the very fact that the judge is human, who thinks, feels, worries and gets hungry makes this job impossible to complete to perfection. All of those things detract from the seriousness of the decision that the judge is required to deliver. Albert Camus saw this and highlighted it as an absurdity in his novella, The Stranger.

 

            “The fact that the verdict was read out at eight P.M. rather than at five, the fact that it might have been quite different, that it was given by men who change their underclothes, and was credited to so vague an entity as the “French people”—for that matter, why not to the Chinese or the German people? —All these facts seemed to deprive the court’s decision of much of its gravity.” (Camus, 1946)

 

These fluctuating variables take much away from the seriousness of life and death that these dilemmas commonly deal with, and chance nicely avoids these protean aspects. Chance is unaffected and remains immaculate, unlike Rationality, which is inevitably muddied by the logic of mankind, forever relying on itself to justify its own first principle. It is similar in the differences in scoring places between running and gymnastics at the Olympic Games. While gymnastics is based on a grading system out of 100, with judges scoring the athletes for their performances, running remains forever objective as it is ranked via the incorruptible clock. Time, just like Chance, is an unbiased platform from which to accurately and fairly judge a situation. For these reasons, chance should be used in favour of either Rational Deontology or Teleology as a basis for making ethical decisions as it exists independently of human alteration, allowing for a higher position of objectivity to be taken.

If: The most objective motivation to act in a situation is the most moral motivation to act

And: Chance is the most objective motivation

Then: Chance is the most moral motivation to act”

So what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Anything I messed up as far as reasoning or argument goes? Let me know!

Photojournalism in Conflict

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Again, while scrolling down the infinite wall that is tumblr, I saw a photograph (down the bottom of the linked page) of some hands against the back window of a car. It was a grainy photo, the hands were dirty and the car was several decades old (rust spots showing, paint missing and grime tinging roof green) and it was under the title, “Chechen Hands”, by photographer Stanley Greene.

I googled his name and found the company he was attached to, Noor Images, which contained what I can only assume is his entire body of work. Greene mainly seems to photograph conflict, wars and famines, capturing the different scenes that come with those types of environment. As his profile reads:

“For the last 25 years, Stanley Greene (New York, 1949) bore witness to births of new dawns, rising and falling empires, invasions of countries, liberations of others, mass migrations, deportations, displacements, famines, conflicts, wars and destructions. He worked on the five continents trying to document the human condition. “Sometimes I wonder if societies just lust for tragedies.”

I had a look through some of his works, and his most recent one, “Snipers Life in Aleppo“, reminded me that I has read about Aleppo for the first time only few weeks ago, in an article that I wrote a blog post about.

As coincidence would have it, or perhaps a reflection on how little this is being covered by the more general media, the description of the photographs is written by Francesca Borri, the same freelance journalist and human rights activist who wrote the article I wrote a blog post. She tells chillingly about tells of the level of death present in Aleppo.

“Iyad is 32, a broken expression nestled in strong muscles, he was a carpenter. “My workshop is at the end of the corner,” he tells you, even if at the corner there’s but a slid ceiling, the stump of a wall, and even if he now is a sniper, two hours per day, every day, he sleeps here, a mattress and a blanket next to a door’s skeleton, his brother died his father died, his best friend died, everybody died, his two-year-old daughter died, in his Nokia the photo of her body covered in blood, and now he is a sniper, that’s all, two hours per day shielded by sandbags, you look through the hole where he shoots from and the helmets of the last soldiers he hit are still there, in the street.”

Wishing Wall?

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Trawling through tumblr the other (what charming alliteration) day, I came across this piece of art (DON’T CLICK THE LINK YET! READ ON!), by Kate MccGwire that I thought was quite interesting. Copyright being what it is, and this being my self-confessed (though not by myself) online identity, that will add to building a digital reputation, I won’t post any pictures of the actual exhibition, but click through the link to see it in the back-lit flesh.

In fact, perhaps I shall try to describe it to you. I’ll endeavor to build a picture of it in your mind, and then, only then, click through to the exhibition and you can see how close the picture I created is to the actual piece.

It is a large, grey wall, seven meters long and over five meters tall, painted a neutral grey, not quite as dark as slate, perhaps closer to the colour of the grey on a Commonwealth Bank debit card. And on the wall, is a spiral of 23,000 chicken wish bones, starting from the right of center of the wall. The chicken wishbones are completely clean, and are that off-bonewhite, that is similarly called, cream (the colour you might see on the wall of your house). The wishbones are arranged so they almost fit into each other as the form the spiral, like this; “<<<<<<“, but rather than straight, curved in a lazy arc. The effect when seen from a distance is similar to what one might imagine if you saw an ornamental pebble garden from above.

You may now, I suppose, click the link and see what it actually looks like, as now, class must be attended.

(probably to be continued)

Toy Stories

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I stumbled across this article, when I was researching for the last post I did, and thought it was an incredible idea for a photographic project, and produced some incredible images.

It is titled, “Toy Stories“, by Italian photographer, Gabriele Galimberti, who spent 18 months traveling the world taking photographs of children with their favourite toys. As the article says, he spent some time playing with each of the children before helping them arrange their toys neatly on the ground, before taking several portraits of the child next to their toys.

His photograph’s reflected each different child’s world by illuminating their interests, personalities, families, cultures and wealth.

As Gamimberti discovered, there was some significant and obvious relationships between a child’s socioeconomic class and their personality.

“The wealthiest children were more possessive of their belongings, refusing to let Galimberti touch the toys at first. Building rapport with those kids took longer. The poorer children were much more receptive to Galimberti and were more generous with their fewer belongings. In the poorest countries, children often had very few toys, and therefore spent most of their time outdoors with friends.”

This project is special for several reasons, including that Gamimberti traveled so long and far to collect these photos, and that he was able to capture a snapshot of such a wide range of cultural and economic situations through such a simple vehicle. It reminds me of a quote by French writer, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Galimberti chose the denominator common to all societies; children, and then picked a thing that is almost exclusively shared by this common denominator; toys. He gave us insight, not only into the world of the child, but the reality of the society that child was from, highlighting the different values favoured in different places around the world.

But mostly, this project is special because of the sense of nostalgia it creates in everyone who sees the photos, as they remember back to their own childhoods and cannot help but wonder what might have been in their portrait. It takes you back to all of those small pieces of plastic and metal that are either in landfill now, or are sitting in a box that collects dust in an attic or storage container somewhere. Those tokens, no, those idols, that you might have received as a Christmas present from an uncle, or your parent bought you one day after weeks of listening to your nagging, or that especially sacred first purchase with saved pocket money.

What was so special about them? Can you even remember now? Was it really that long ago?

Week 3 Reading: Bruce Sterling on design fictions

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One of the readings for this week was an interview with Bruce Sterling, an award winning science-fiction writer, but also a vocal advocate of what is known as “design fiction”. He defines design fiction as being, “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend belief’s about change.” Sterling is appearing at a conference at Arizona State University, called ‘Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future‘, which serves to facilitate lecturing and discussion about what the future might look like.

I found some of the things said by Sterling to be quite interesting, especially at his mention of a legal case between technology giants Apple and Samsung. In the lawsuit, there was reference to an iPad-like tablet that was used as a prop in the 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which you can watch, here. Sterling used this as an example of a design fiction that proved to be successful, 45 years later, as you can now walk down to your local electronics store and purchase one.

Another interesting observation by Sterling was in his response when asked what it was that made design fictions work so well. He replied quite reasonably, “Talking about a future gadget isn’t like talking about a future government or women’s rights in the future or other hot-button problems. Plus people are interested in things like that.”

A pretty reasonable statement to make, that electronic toys are more likely to grab people’s attention than social rights or political issues. Perhaps a reflection of people’s general exhaustion at the topic of politics, or anything ‘serious’, or maybe more a statement about the imagination within everyone that needs, at least occasionally, to be exercised.

 

Women’s Work

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I came across this article the other day by Francesca Borri, an Italian freelance journalist covering the fighting in the middle east, specifically Syria. It was quite eye-opening as to what the risks actually were as a journalist in those kinds of environments, especially a freelance one who isn’t even guaranteed that her stories will sell.

She speaks with exasperation about her editors not wanting appreciating the danger every single minute in those environments, and that the only stories they wanted were to do with wherever the violence was most concentrated, with the highest number of casualties. She accepts the risks to her own life as part-and-parcel of the job, but says that the word ‘free’ in ‘freelance’ is misnomer as they, more than other types of journalists, are forced to cover the most dangerous stories in order to make ends meet as those are the only stories editors are interested in.

“People have this romantic image of the freelancer as a journalist who’s exchanged the certainty of a regular salary for the freedom to cover the stories she is most fascinated by. But we aren’t free at all; it’s just the opposite. The truth is that the only job opportunity I have today is staying in Syria, where nobody else wants to stay. And it’s not even Aleppo, to be precise; it’s the frontline. Because the editors back in Italy only ask us for the blood, the bang-bang. I write about the Islamists and their network of social services, the roots of their power—a piece that is definitely more complex to build than a frontline piece. I strive to explain, not just to move, to touch, and I am answered with: “What’s this? Six thousand words and nobody died?

Actually, I should have realized it that time my editor asked me for a piece on Gaza, because Gaza, as usual, was being bombed. I got this email: “You know Gaza by heart,” he wrote. “Who cares if you are in Aleppo?” Exactly. The truth is, I ended up in Syria because I saw the photographs in Time by Alessio Romenzi, who was smuggled into Homs through the water pipes when nobody was yet aware of the existence of Homs. I saw his shots while I was listening to Radiohead—those eyes, staring at me; the eyes of people being killed by Assad’s army, one by one, and nobody had even heard of a place called Homs. A vise clamped around my conscience, and I had to go to Syria immediately.

But whether you’re writing from Aleppo or Gaza or Rome, the editors see no difference. You are paid the same: $70 per piece. Even in places like Syria, where prices triple because of rampant speculation. So, for example, sleeping in this rebel base, under mortar fire, on a mattress on the ground, with yellow water that gave me typhoid, costs $50 per night; a car costs $250 per day. So you end up maximizing, rather than minimizing, the risks. Not only can you not afford insurance—it’s almost $1,000 a month—but you cannot afford a fixer or a translator. You find yourself alone in the unknown. The editors are well aware that $70 a piece pushes you to save on everything. They know, too, that if you happen to be seriously wounded, there is a temptation to hope not to survive, because you cannot afford to be wounded. But they buy your article anyway, even if they would never buy the Nike soccer ball handmade by a Pakistani child.

With new communication technologies there is this temptation to believe that speed is information. But it is based on a self-destructive logic: The content is now standardized, and your newspaper, your magazine, no longer has any distinctiveness, and so there is no reason to pay for the reporter. I mean, for the news, I have the Internet—and for free. The crisis today is of the media, not of the readership. Readers are still there, and contrary to what many editors believe, they are bright readers who ask for simplicity without simplification. They want to understand, not simply to know. Every time I publish an eyewitness account from the war, I get a dozen emails from people who say, “Okay, great piece, great tableaux, but I want to understand what’s going on in Syria.” And it would so please me to reply that I cannot submit an analysis piece, because the editors would simply spike it and tell me, “Who do you think you are, kid?”—even though I have three degrees, have written two books, and spent 10 years in various wars, first as a human-rights officer and now as a journalist. My youth, for what it’s worth, vanished when bits of brain splattered on me in Bosnia, when I was 23.”

The final paragraph left chills up my spine as she beautifully illustrates how a different view of the world takes hold of you when death is so present and so possible.

“Had I really understood something of war, I wouldn’t have gotten sidetracked trying to write about rebels and loyalists, Sunnis and Shia. Because really the only story to tell in war is how to live without fear. It all could be over in an instant. If I knew that, then I wouldn’t have been so afraid to love, to dare, in my life; instead of being here, now, hugging myself in this dark, rancid corner, desperately regretting all I didn’t do, all I didn’t say. You who tomorrow are still alive, what are you waiting for? Why don’t you love enough? You who have everything, why you are so afraid?”

Something to Like?

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I had been thinking a little bit about charity and activism in relation to social media, specifically, if it actually does anything more than feed a persons philanthropic sense of themselves.

I read this article which speaks about a new advertising campaign brought out by Crisis Relief Singapore with the slogan, “Liking isn’t helping”. It speaks to a generation of people (my generation) who commonly ‘like’ or ‘share’ a charity page on Facebook, Twitter, or any social media platform, with the intention of… Well, I’m not actually sure what their intention is, or what they hope to achieve by the click of a mouse.

We’ve all seen the ones. It might be a photograph of a horribly malnourished African child, wide-eyed with flies dancing on his lips, he is probably staring directly into the camera with a scabby hand outstretched. And below the photo will inevitably be the caption, “Like = Save, Ignore = Die”.

As the article says, it reminds us of the quasi-charity campaign by Invisible Children who started the KONY2012 movement, promoting the philosophy that by sharing a video through social media, you are building awareness that will affect social change. Leaving aside some of the criticisms of Invisible Children as a charity organisation, the idea may still be have legs, or at least still legitimately begs the question; can social media actually change anything in the ‘real’ world?

In the wake of the Boston Bombings it was seen clearly what can happen when social media flexes it’s muscles and takes matters usually left up to trained professionals into it’s own hands. Reddit users began to do a little bit of investigative detective work for themselves, spreading a wave of misinformation that was picked up by legitimate news sources and published by them as fact. Several people were wrongly accused as being responsible for the bombings after Reddit users began collecting photographs from the event posted on social media in an attempt to discover the perpetrators of the attacks.

So social media can obviously have a significant impact on more than just the virtual sphere. But that doesn’t quite answer the question, as the example of the Boston Bombings was quite reactionary, emotionally fueled and unorganised in it’s response.

So perhaps we need to rephrase the question slightly: is social media able to affect social change in an organised and controlled way, as was suggested by KONY2012 and feminists groups on Tumblr? Or are they just people with a little bit too much spare time on their hands and are looking for a way promote a minority group to reestablish their own altruism?