It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world

The other day my fellow grad students and I were having a chat about which living philosophers were defending the most out there views, and we came up with a top ten. Of course their real views are probably not so crazy once you understand them properly, but philosophers all like to stare incredulously at one another from time to time. It's fun. So here they are, starting with the craziest:

1.      Donald Baxter (instantiation is identity; so are most other things)

2.      Graham Priest (loads of contradictions are true; noneism is parsimonious)

3.      Terence Parsons (so Meinongian the cogito doesn’t work)

4.      Takashi Yagisawa (concretist about impossibilia)

5.      Peter Unger (no ordinary objects, ex-sceptic)

6.      Michael Bench-Capon (see below)

7.      David Benatar (coming into existence is a harm)

8.      Kit Fine (funny ideas about essence, time and vagueness)

9.      Meg Wallace (plurality of one world, irreducibly tensed properties might be parts)

10.  EJ Lowe (seriously old school metaphysics)

It’s obviously a parochial list drawn up by a bunch of primarily analytic philosophers, and I don’t flatter myself that my inclusion wasn’t partly due to a desire to include one of our own. Nonetheless, they chose me rather than another of our own for a reason. Here are some of the main offenders:

• I’m a moral nihilist, in that I think everything is morally permissible, but I’m also an aesthetic objectivist, in that I think some things are objectively beautiful and others are objectively ugly.
• I’m a counterpart theorist about de re modality, although I’m not a genuine modal realist, I think things have essences and I’m really strict about what counterpart relations are admissible.
• I’m a stage theorist about persistence through time.
• I think composition’s identity, not in the way that helped Baxter to the top spot, but not in the innocuous way David Lewis thought it was either.
• I’m pretty sympathetic to Ryle and Wittgenstein in the philosophy of mind, and sometimes refer to central state materialism (with deliberate abusiveness) as ‘brain-body dualism’.
• I’m a raving Millian in the philosophy of language, to the point that I think there aren't any analytic truths, and probably aren’t any a priori truths either.
• I’m epistemicist about vagueness.
• I’m sympathetic to dialetheism as a solution to the semantic paradoxes.
• I think a sentence can be false, or even true, without expressing a proposition.

One of the reasons I’ve got funny ideas is that I’m very quick to form opinions: I tend to view philosophy as concerned with finding ways to think about things, and I’d rather have a slightly unsatisfactory way than no way at all. I haven’t been picking these views out of perversity though. They really seem like the sensible ways to think about the subject matters in question. Perhaps I’m just being neurotic and actually there’s nothing especially crazy in my repertoire, but if I do have a penchant for thinking things which by most accounts are neither true nor even plausible, is this something I should worry about?

Dry spell over

Regular readers will know that I occasionally go through phases of writing poetry. Some of my friends know that once I even went through a phase of writing songs. I haven’t written anything decent for ages, and until this morning it had been quite a long time since I’d written anything at all. But this morning I wrote this:

Hideaway

There are places you can pay

To hide your stuff away

Where supply never outstrips demand for floorage

But there’s one thing they won’t hide

And that’s who you are inside

So it’s odd this industry is called self-storage

Not very good, is it? I tried developing it into a four-chord song, but I couldn’t get that to work at all. One of the reasons it doesn’t work (as a poem) is because it really ought to be called ‘Self-Storage’, but that’d give away the punchline. I’d call it ‘Untitled’, but I hate things being called that. The only titles I hate more than that are ones like ‘Untitled (Bowl of Fruit)’ and so on. Another problem is that most of line four and all of line five is deliberate clunking sixth-form poetry cliché, a device I've used more effectively in the past but which doesn't add much here. The other main defect is that "floorage" was chosen more or less solely because it was the least terrible rhyme I could think of for "storage". But although this one doesn’t work, it’s nice to be writing anything at all after such a long dry spell. I’ll let you know if I write one that doesn’t suck.

Yes please

Tomorrow my country is going to have an election. There will be some local and regional elections depending on where you live, but the really big one is the referendum on changing the way we elect people to the more powerful of our houses of parliament. (The other house is staying unelected.) Currently we have a First Past the Post (FPTP) system, and tomorrow we’re voting on whether to stick with that or change to Alternative Vote (AV), which is what they use for the House of Representatives in Australia.

Under both systems you say which candidate you like best, and under AV you can also put the others in order, so if your favourite candidate doesn’t have a chance of winning you still get a say. AV doesn’t completely eliminate the scope for tactical voting, but there’s much less of a dilemma between voting for your favourite and trying to influence the result. That dilemma’s pretty commonplace under FPTP. It’s not the only reason I’ll be voting for AV, but it’s one of them. Other reasons are that FPTP makes two-party politics more likely and creates more safe seats, that under AV it's even harder to win if most people hate you and that if the voters get to say more at the ballot box then the parties have to work more to influence what they say. For example, consider someone who pretty much always votes Labour. The politicians can more or less ignore her, because Labour are more or less guaranteed her vote and the others haven’t a hope. Under AV the other parties can work for her other preferences, and Labour can’t ignore her either because she’d be less reluctant to put someone else first if she could still put Labour second. Other things being equal, the more information the electorate can supply, the more work the politicians have to do. That means more accountability, and accountability is the reason democracy is better than all the other systems we’ve thought of. Unless you’re a big believer in the wisdom of crowds.

AV isn’t my favourite voting system, but I like it a lot better than FPTP, and that’s what we’re being asked about tomorrow, because the Tories are scared of asking us whether we’d rather have proportional representation, and nobody who counts has thought of this system yet. So tomorrow I’m voting Yes to AV, and if you’ve got a vote I’d like you to do the same.

How to become top nation

I listen to Radio 5 Live quite a lot, so one of the things I know about my fellow citizens is that quite a lot of them don’t like immigration. David Cameron, who I’m on the record as disliking already, recently made a speech on the subject, because we’ve got an election coming up. I didn’t listen to it but read quite a lot of what claimed to be a transcript here. He didn’t seem to say anything remarkable. I think he said he liked good immigration but not mass immigration. It’s good to know that our leader is a lover of the good, but since I haven’t ruled out mass immigration as being just what this country needs, I'm sad to see he has.

Some people think we’ve got a distinctive culture worth preserving, and that preserving it is possible if but only if we seriously curb immigration. I’m not going to talk about that today. The other thing is that a lot of people think Britain is too crowded. They say it’s a small island. Well, it’s not that small: Great Britain is the ninth largest island in the world, and if we really do fill it up there are always Northern Ireland, Anglesey and so on. It is quite crowded though: while the UK is only about the 33^rd most densely populated country, many of those above it are pretty small. But this seems to me beside the point. Scotland and Wales aren’t very crowded, and there’s plenty of room for more urbanisation even in England. I’m from Wirral, and I think it’d be really cool if Wirral became as densely populated as Singapore, with skyscrapers towering over Greasby and Heswall. There’d be all the kinds of amazing things you get in cities like art galleries, lambananas and vibrant music scenes. When people asked me where I’m from they’d have heard of it, and when people asked each other where the Coral are from they wouldn't say Liverpool. Cities are amazing. What kind of country wouldn’t like another Barcelona?

One argument I sometimes hear is that if there were more people there wouldn’t be enough jobs to go round. I've never understood this. People do jobs, and people create jobs. They earn money and spend money. The Belgians aren’t rolling in cash because the money is shared among so many fewer people, and British people don’t eat five times more than Americans. That isn’t the way it works, and it’s unsurprising that that’s not the way it works.

America is the place to look for an example of what immigration can do. People came to America because it’s a great place to live, and that’s why its population is so big and how it got to be top nation. Canada is even bigger and has loads of natural resources too, but most of it is a ghastly place to live so people mostly only populated the nice bits and Canada didn’t get to be top nation. Japan’s a lot more powerful than it’d be if it was only as densely populated as France, and people take a lot more notice of Singapore than they do of Kiribati, although they're about the same size. People come to cities because they’re great, and this makes them even greater. People want to come to Britain because it’s great, and the more people come the greater it’ll be, until eventually we’re top nation and people are drawing cartoons of the US President as a poodle on our leader’s lap instead of the other way round. London didn’t get to be great by shutting everyone out once it reached the size of Bognor Regis. They spread the word that the streets were paved with gold, and now it’s one of the greatest cities in the world. More of the same, please.

Women's football update

Yesterday Spurs got dumped out of the Champions' League, but it hasn't all been doom and gloom for the beautiful game. This may be an important week for women’s football, which regular readers will know I’ve long thought should get more support. Yesterday was the first day of the inaugural season of the Women’s Super League, which is the most professional women’s league my country has ever had. And as we all know, if you want something done well, you should get a professional. The WSL is receiving about three million pounds of investment from the Football Association, and everyone seems pretty pleased about it. Or at least, women seem to be pleased about it. Jose Mourinho and David Beckham don’t seem to have been asked.

The hope is that the WSL will be more competitive than the Women’s Premier League, which has been dominated by Arsenal for ages. The FA investment is being shared around so more clubs will be able to pay more women to be at least semi-professional. That’s a step in the right direction, though it’s still way off what goes on in the US. A more competitive league should increase standards all round, but Arsenal are still top of the WSL at the moment, of course. So we probably won’t win the World Cup this year, but maybe we’ll win Canada 2015. But we probably won't win that either, because we're really not putting very much money in. Sponsors don't seem to have been that taken with it and as a result the WSL is getting a lot less financial support than was initially hoped. So I'm pleased, but I'm only a little bit pleased. I still think we should give this a try.

The sheriff of Nottingham

My country, like most countries with a welfare system, pays people not to work. This is perverse on the face of it, because we want people to work. We do check up on the people we pay not to work to see that they’re trying to lose their position as non-workers, but the biggest stigma attaches to people who commit the heinous crime of supplementing the income they get from not working by contributing to the economy a bit on the side. Those people are benefit frauds, and we run ad campaigns telling their neighbours to rat them out. But since not working isn’t something we value, it’s odd that we pay people to keep doing it and prosecute people who take the money but don’t treat their economic inactivity as a full-time job.

Of course I know how this situation arose. We don’t want anyone to go hungry or homeless but we’re too stingy to feed and house people who could pay for it themselves if we cut them loose. This leads to some people in work making little more (and sometimes a bit less) than people who don’t work. It seems unfair but it’s a price we’re willing to pay for our stinginess.

One way of looking at the current system is like this: we work out how much somebody needs to subsist, and pay that to everyone. Then we have a tax band of 100% on a worker’s first earnings up to the subsistence level. Of course when you look at it that way it seems to discourage work and disproportionately tax the poor. We counterbalance the economic disincentive by forcing people to attempt to find work, even work where all or nearly all of the pay will be taxed at 100%, on pain of prosecution or removal of their subsistence wage. It’s an ugly system.

What I’d like to see is the government paying a subsistence wage to anyone who claims it, even Richard Branson and Prince Philip. Since it goes to everyone, you wouldn’t have to pretend to find work if you wanted to live off just that, and you wouldn’t have it taken away if you worked, so there wouldn’t be the current economic incentive not to. If you lost your job you wouldn’t have to claim benefits you weren’t claiming before, or which people in the workforce weren’t getting, so I suppose there’d be less stigma attached. It’s also worth pointing out that sometimes people would benefit from what other people would spend their time doing if they didn’t have to work. There’d be more economically unviable art produced, for example. Some would be good, and if you didn’t like it you wouldn’t have to consume it. I suppose it’d improve the lot of the children of single parents, too.

Note that this shouldn’t distort the market at all. It’d change the market, of course: everything changes the market. But it shouldn’t create any inefficiency in the economic sense, because unconditional benefits don’t disincentivise exchanges which would otherwise take place and benefit both parties, because they’re unconditional. It should make the market more efficient in the obvious way that people wouldn’t have an incentive not to work, and also in a less obvious way because there wouldn’t be the same humane imperative to have a statutory minimum wage, the alternative to low-paid work not being starvation. If you wanted someone to join Alarm Clock Britain you'd have to pay them what they thought their time was worth, since they could afford not to take the job.

I suppose some people would be horrified by the idea on the grounds that the world doesn’t owe us a living. But it’s worth looking beyond the slogan to see whether this is what we really think. We already provide education up to age eighteen and most healthcare for free, even to people who could afford to pay for it themselves. We don’t charge people who can afford to pay, and we don’t cut people off from these services for not seeking work. I’m only suggesting we apply the same treatment to food and shelter that we already apply to education and healthcare. (And policing, firefighting, military protection of the national interest, drainage, roads, streetlighting, snow management, the coastguard...) Some people think there are things people deserve just for being human. I can’t remember what the term for such entitlements is at the moment, but I’m sure there is one.

So why aren’t we doing this? It isn’t because nobody has thought of it, because it’s not a new idea. I’m not economically literate enough to know which calculations to do to find out if we could afford it, so perhaps we can’t. I guess it'd be expensive, but so are the NHS, the school system and the armed forces. I’m also aware there’d be issues with children, immigrants, and the children of immigrants if a country implemented the policy unilaterally. But that doesn’t explain why we’re not even doing something a little bit like it, like cutting the de facto tax band from 100% to 80%. If I’m right that the current system is almost equivalent to a national subsistence wage and a 100% tax band for the poorest workers, then it's both economically inefficient and brutal towards the poor. And since we live in a democracy, we could do something about it.

Cutting the apron strings

My country is a monarchy, and I dislike this very much. I seldom hear our national anthem without shuddering, especially when they get to the second to last line. It’s a very silly national anthem, because it isn’t about the country. I’m actually quite a patriotic fellow for someone as beardily Guardian-reading and keen on forming a United States of Europe as I am, so it’s irritating to have this family of buffoons (most of them are buffoons) as a focus of my fellow countrymen’s patriotism. But what irritates me even more is that the arguments for abolishing the monarchy can seem so flimsy.

One argument says that the monarchy still isn’t a constitutional irrelevance, and having a constitutional relevance accountable only to a revolution is dangerous. In a sense it’s true that they’re still constitutionally relevant because various notionally royal powers like being able to declare war without parliament’s agreement or being able to decide when lifers are released from prison are de facto wielded by ministers. We could change this without abolishing the monarchy, though. One also occasionally hears that the Queen would get some real power in the event of a constitutional crisis, but it seems to be a belief exclusive to people who write letters to the Telegraph and I’ve never seen any evidence for it.

Another argument is that the monarchy is a waste of money, what with all the money we pay them directly and the money we spend on moving them around and protecting them from Gavrilo Princip. Of course this seems like money down the toilet, but some people think that they make more than they cost because of their effect on tourism. It’d be a shame to abolish the monarchy to save money if it turned out to be a false economy. Perhaps some proper research should be done into it, instead of monarchists and republicans asserting what they would like to be true on the basis of no evidence at all.

The other problem with them is that they’re a nuisance and a national embarrassment, running around saying un-PC things, not taking their socks off in the Golden Temple and torpedoing any architectural projects that would look out of place on a chocolate box. They make us look like idiots, and there's nothing we can do about it. But people accept that sort of thing from their children, as I don't think I'm the first to point out. We let them have a go at doing various jobs, make foreign businessmen shake their hands and say 'hello Andrew, haven't you got big!'; we support them financially, we won’t shut up when one of them gets married, and when one dies they are mourned. Now I don’t feel at all paternal towards the royals and wish they’d go away, stop asking us for money and never darken our doors again. I don't care when they get born/married/killed any more than I care about these things happening to anyone else. They are, lest this sound callous, not my children. But a lot of people seem fond of them, and if enough people want some collective children then that’s what a democracy can be expected to provide.

Another argument says that there is a useful constitutional or at least ambassadorial role to be played by a proper head of state, and we’re missing out on this by only having a pretend one. I expect this is true. Other countries want to talk to our head of state whether she’s a proper one or not, so perhaps it should be someone we’ve elected and given some real power. (Perhaps there’s something to be said for according people respect in a non-arbitrary way.) And some countries’ heads of state do have real power, even if it’s only for resolving constitutional crises. What are the alternatives? Is everywhere with a proper head of state wasting their money? Or are we missing out? I don't see how we can both be right. So maybe there is a case for cutting the royals loose, in spite of my fellow countrymen’s unexplained fondness for them.