Levinas, Buber and the Ethics of the Face

There’s a time-worn philosophical problem in certain circles which has a recent iteration through the medium of video games.  Although they have changed considerably since, Space Invaders illustrates this.  Computer game protagonists are either player characters, PCs, ornon-player characters, NPCs.  In Space Invaders, the PC is the base shooty thing you move about at the bottom of the screen.  NPCs are the aliens and flying saucers.  You can’t play Space Invaders as one of those – they’re NPCs.

Nowadays, games are much more convincing and imagination has become less important, so gamers have more immersive experiences in 3-D simulations, but there are still PCs and NPCs.  There are still characters whom one can play as and characters one cannot play as.

Some people extend that to meatspace.  There are people who roleplay as NPCs, for example.  Some people also now truly believe there are NPCs in the physical world, or at least in the simulation which some of them hold reality to be. That is, there are people who see themselves as real and another set of figures around them as not having minds or consciousness at all.  Not a very healthy development, but it has significant implications.  However, there is nothing new under the Sun, and this is just today’s solipsism.  In analytical philosophy, this is the problem of other minds: since we only have access to our own consciousness, for all we know everyone else we meet could be a robot or a zombie with no inner life at all.

I’ll get back to that, because for now I want to mention Edwina Currie.  I was once at a protest against Edwina Currie in the mid-’80s, and it was like the Five Minutes Hate.  I was at the front of the crowd, and she stepped out of her car right in front of me.  This immediate face-to-face meeting completely disarmed me as I realised that, far from a hate figure, she was a fellow human being with her own subjectivity and consciousness.  Right then, I couldn’t conceive of her any other way.

Sartre might have sympathised with the notion of an NPC.  He was acutely aware of how some people act out a particular role rather too strongly, but I want to dwell not on that right now but on his take on the problem of other minds.  Sartre saw the very idea that the problem could be taken seriously as scandalous and symptomatic of what was wrong with Western philosophy.  Showing how this was a pseudo-problem, he imagined the following scenario, referred to as ‘The Look’.   Suppose you’re at the end of a long corridor spying on someone in a room through a keyhole  when you hear footsteps behind you, making you ashamed or guilty, and self-conscious.  None of that could happen without you assuming other minds.  The apparent issue of their existence or otherwise is a kind of abstract, cold-blooded issue which Sartre sees as irrelevant to properly engaged philosophy.

This can be used to introduce the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, a French-Lithuanian Jewish philosopher.  Levinas is significant and worth reading for all sorts of reasons, not least his views on the nature of Jewish thought separate from its involvement with Hellenisation which might be helpful for Bible study, but for now I just want to consider his ethics of the face, and ethics as first philosophy.

Modify Sartre’s Look slightly.  Imagine you are driving along a deserted road in a remote area and you come across someone whose car has broken down at the side of the road.  That meeting makes an original demand on you before you consider anything else about the situation:  this person needs help, and you can provide it.  In fact, if you can, you should provide it.  These are the “ethics of the face”.  The face-to-face encounter makes an immediate ethical demand, and everything else can be built from that. Clear parallels can also be drawn with the Good Samaritan.

English is unusual in having only one word for “you”.  We rarely contrast “you” and “thou”.  When I chose my name, this was partly an attempt to overcome this, because if there are formal and informal versions of names, it gives one a clue as to the nature of one’s relationship, but it doesn’t work very well because the T-V distinction is a little different.  Even German speakers can be unsure, doing things like using the plural familiar form when they only know one member of a couple well.  There and in Hungary, they have a ceremony for thouing.

For Buber, pronouns occur in pairs:  I-It and I-Thou.  Each implies the existence of the other member of the pair.  Sie, and for that matter “a senhora” and “Usted”, are third person, and therefore correspond to I-It.  “It” here stands in for the other singular third person pronouns.  God is the eternal “Thou” and we are also each “thou” to God. Being omniscient, God knows us intimately. God asks for a face-to-face relationship, and demands we have face-to-face relationships with each other.  We must be “I-Thou”, although we must begin from “I-It” in order to reach “I-Thou”.

Sacred argument:  The Talmud comprises a series of nested commentaries on each page centred on the oral Torah, also known as the Mishnah, consisting of fewer than a hundred words per page.  Around this are Rashi’s commentary, around twice as long, the Gemara, a record of intricate debates on matters arising, written around the time of the Fall of Rome, and the Tofasot, Mediaeval European attempts to resolve conflicts between the other commentaries.  The Mishnah is about a tenth of the content.  The discussion is where the action is.  It’s the point of the whole activity and when the Talmud is studied, further discussion occurs around all of these.  There is a seven year daily cycle of Talmudic teaching which is considered inadequate by many Jews.

The I cannot exist without the Other.  This is true in practical terms:  we had to learn to speak and take care of ourselves, serve the community and so forth from others, often our parents.  Babies and children are of course vulnerable and dependent, although the point at which they begin to contribute varies according to culture and family ethos.

There must be sacred argument: authentic presentation and mutual respect with proper dialogue and without over-simplification.  In fact, it could be pursued by trying to construct and strengthen one’s opponent’s position and possibly by swapping positions, arguing for the opposite to your own opinion.  Loving and sacred argument.

The issue of first philosophy:

Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ is an attempt at epistemology as first philosophy.  A metaphysical foundation might be another option, where the likes of the nature of reality might be considered to be its basis.  Levinas took a different view, suggesting that philosophy should be based on ethics, and this is in fact also my position although I don’t know how similar it is as I might be reading my own views into his.

It’s very easy to build a self-serving system if you aren’t careful.  There’s a myth that male scholastic philosophers claimed women had no souls whereas men had.  This is a misrepresentation of what was actually said.  The Council of Macon in 585, despite claims to the contrary, did not claim that women had no souls.  This would have made no sense given the acceptance of, for example, martyrdom, female saints and of course Mary the mother of Christ.  Even so, it is very often the case that self-serving claims are made, and these are set into the presumed structure of reality.  I would posit such claims can dominate what we imagine are neutral, innocent world views.

To illustrate this, I want to talk about Jean Baudrillard.  who claimed that the 1991 Gulf War would not take place because it was sufficient that the media hype and representation of the imminent conflict occur and could replace any purported “reality” of the situation.  Then, of course, the Gulf War happened, but Baudrillard said it didn’t happen for the same reasons.  The reality of the war, whatever your view of the rights and wrongs of the situation politically, is that people suffered and died in countless numbers.  I would say that he’s wrong because his assertion is unethical, which also means the past is real.  You could say the world was created just now or the past is less real than the present.  Responding to these ideas is a possible philosophical exercise, but more importantly, they would allow, for example, Holocaust denial.  Hence it’s more important that it’s unethical to make such claims.

But there’s a problem.  If you are in a position of privilege, it may be salutary and magnanimous to examine what assumptions you might be making about the world.  However, how do you know you’re in that position?  Also, if you’re not, and you make concessions to others on the strength of assuming that you are, you could end up distorting your view of reality just as much as someone in that privileged position might without examining their assumptions.

Finally, I want to mention politics.  This is an ethical position.  Is it feasible to extend this into a political position which in some way transcends the likes of the left-right division?  I encountered Edwina Currie and was unable to demonise her.  What would the world look like if nobody demonised anyone?  What does this look like in view of the imperfection of the world and our tendency to sin?

Vegan vs. Plant-Based

Why is a non-vegan Lithuanian chakam supremely relevant to veganism? I’ll come to that.

The Vegan Society defines veganism thus:

“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.”

I’ve been into this before on here, so I’m risking repeating myself: veganism is not a diet. It’s more like pacifism. Looking at the definition above, it’s important to bear in mind what an animal is. I would define an animal as a eukaryotic multicellular heterotroph without cell walls. Two important things about that definition are that it includes humans and that it doesn’t just apply to vertebrates. Because it applies to humans, the above definition can be reworded thus:

“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, humans for any purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans and the environment.”

This definition is not veganism, but veganism implies it. Moreover, since on a conscious level the most significant bulk of interactions we have is usually with our own species, it’s this which is the most significant part of veganism to us. Hence the statement by a certain animal liberation pressure group that they were glad about a particular coach crash on the M1 because it meant the death of thirty meat-eaters is not a vegan one. It also means that when we interact with other humans about veganism in particular, we have to do it in a respectful manner. Not doing so is in any case likely to be counterproductive.

The other side of this equation is that it applies to all animals, not just vertebrates. Vertebrates are the animals many humans find easiest to interact with, and identify most strongly with, although that drops off very fast when some of them consider fish. The supposèd red flag for a psychopath that they were cruel to “animals” as a child actually seems to mean they were cruel to other mammals and birds. It doesn’t even seem to mean fish. Generally going fishing is not seen as antisocial behaviour, and people often seem to get a free pass to do this compared to other bloodsports. Well it’s not okay. Simply because it’s a working class form of cruelty doesn’t make it better or worse than foxhunting.

Some of you will be aware that the reason this is on my mind right now is that I’ve just left the “UK Vegan” group on Facebook, because I found it so very irritating. Whereas this could be put down to a bit of irrelevant social media drama, and to some extent it is, I also believe that the group reflects the current state of veganism in the “U”K. There were actually three sources of annoyance on the group: the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is common across human interaction generally, where uninformed people are less aware of their lack of knowledge than more informed people are of their own; reluctance or refusal to extend the circle of compassion widely; repeated conversations about meat and dairy substitutes.

I’ll just deal briefly with the Dunning-Kruger aspect. People don’t know that they don’t know things. This was actually the precipitating factor in me leaving, due to a conversation about digestive enzymes. This might sound tangential, but I consider it incumbent upon a person adopting a plant-based diet to research the nutritional aspects before going for it, and that would include the physiology of digestion. There are excuses for this – for instance, someone may have suffered from the use of anti-language in technical texts or they may be dyslexic – but the focus should always be not on finding reasons for not becoming vegan, but on finding ways around perceived obstacles in doing so. That means informing yourself. I would add that veganism is a personal decision which needs to be put in context. As I sit here, phagocytes in my colon are killing countless bacteria and fungi, who are not animals but are living organisms, and if they didn’t I would quickly die of immune deficiency. Life is violent by its very nature, and therefore from a strictly utilitarian perspective veganism is a mere gesture, but it’s about what one can personally do to avoid causing suffering and death intentionally or via negligence. Hence the focus is on the individual and nobody should be judged for not being vegan. However, if they’ve made the decision to do so, they need to be informed.

Now for the reluctance or refusal to extend the circle of compassion. This can work in two ways, bearing in mind the categories mentioned above regarding animals. One can be dismissive of or aggressive towards other humans or ignore their needs when considering the needs of other species, as with the coach crash incident. This doesn’t seem to happen much on the group, and I presume it tends not to happen more widely as much as it used to. What does happen is that people are dismissive of the needs of the likes of arthropods, annelids and molluscs other than cephalopods along with other animals they might encounter such as nematodes. Bear in mind that that is nearly all animals. There are estimated to be 4.4 × 10²⁰ nematodes on this planet, which is over fifty milliard per human. The justification given for this is that the others are not sentient. This is a baseless assertion, more or less. It does follow from the premise that a complex central nervous system is required for sentience, but there is not really any reason to suppose this to be the case because the nature of consciousness is entirely mysterious. Various solutions have been proposed to the mind-body problem by philosophers through the centuries, but they all have a tendency to be found wanting, and in the process of those proposals a notable factor is to focus on just those features which are able to suggest that the person making the argument is sentient and members of a particular out-group are not. This is where we come to the Lithuanian chakam I mentioned at the start: Emmanuel Levinas and his argument that ethics is first philosophy.

Just to explain what that means, it’s been popular in the past for philosophers to come up with a total theory of everything which explains the nature of reality. This is not so popular nowadays for various reasons, such as the subservience of philosophy to science and the dominance of postmodernity in certain circles. This could be seen as first philosophy. An example of it would be Descartes and his “cogito ergo sum” – I think, therefore I am. Descartes attempted to doubt everything he possibly could before proceeding to attempt to rebuild the world, which interestingly for the purposes of this discussion he did by attempting to use the ontological argument, that is, the necessary existence of a perfect Being who would not deceive him that the world was real by making him imagine it. However, on the whole such projects have always tended to be metaphysical in nature. Levinas considers the Other as subject and the demand their existence makes on one to be obliged towards them in someway – to take responsibility for the Other. I’ve previously mentioned Jean-Paul Sartre’s example of “The Look” as a solution to what he calls the scandal of other minds. Sartre imagines spying on someone through a keyhole at the end of a corridor and hearing footsteps behind him, at which point he feels shame, based on the sudden awareness of himself as an object for another subject. Levinas appears to take this shame and turn it into responsibility, and as such makes ethics first philosophy. This corresponds to the idea of the Torah being created before the Universe.

I would take this idea of ethics as first philosophy and apply it to all the decisions we make about the nature of the world, so in a sense the world is created by the Torah, i.e. the ethical underpinnings of all reality. Metaphysics should never be based on expedience. If one adopts a position where one is aware that if a particular belief about the world is highly convenient for one, one should immediately doubt that belief and test it to see if other beliefs would be in the interests of the Other. Applying this to veganism, the statement that any particular organism is not sentient should arouse our suspicion, even if it’s based on the apparently rational premise that said organism does not have a central nervous system, or a sophisticated central nervous system, or whatever other excuse one might want to make to ignore the potential pain of others. Nor should we be ashamed of adopting a moral rather than an apparently rational stance in these situations.

In fact the beliefs expressed on this group go a lot further than simply confining sentience to vertebrates and denying it to, say, insects and bivalves. Some of them actually describe rodents primarily as, and this is my word, “vermin”. I’m not in fact conscious of their use of this word but they have definitely said “health hazards”. These would be rodents sharing living space with humans and who are not companion animals. Whereas I recognise that this situation does pose health risks for humans, I take exception to the objectifying language. The word is being used as a primary description of a sentient being, and moreover a sentient being who happens to be a close relative. Humans and rodents are in the same superorder, the Euarchontoglires or Supraprimates, who began to radiate between eighty-five and ninety-five million years ago in the Turonian or Coniacian Age. They’re more closely related to us than even-toed ungulates or fissipedal carnivores such as pigs or dogs, animals who generally tend to encourage sentiment in us. I’m not going to say there isn’t a problem cohabiting with certain rodents, but various measures need to be taken to prevent that from happening, which may of course not be fruitful, such as blocking holes to the outside, keeping undergrowth down and so forth. Likewise, the issue with parasites such as headlice or Oxyuris nematodes is that their arrival needs to be prevented, because we may like to imagine that they don’t suffer when we kill them but that’s just convenient denial. Likewise, farm animals suffer but the response to that is to avoid situations where they’re born in the first place. This is what we should be doing with animals other than our own: prevent their existence rather than have to confront them after they have come to be.

Having said all that, although the precipitating event was Dunning-Kruger and I object to the restriction of care to certain birds and mammals as opposed to all organisms, the stem of my reason for leaving is actually quite different and based on an event which didn’t even happen on the group. As a celebration of some kind a few weeks ago, I ordered a vegan takeaway pizza online. Unfortunately I misread the pictures on the website and ended up getting a pizza which was vegan, or at least said it was on the box, but had a pepperoni-like topping on it. I found this very off-putting because it resembled meat, and although I could intellectually accept that it was nothing of the kind, I strongly regretted buying it, or rather, wished I hadn’t made that mistake. There is a problem here. Meat, and other substitutes, such as for egg and cheese, are being made increasingly like their animal-based counterparts. Now I should explain my position here because it seems to be unusual. I always found meat disgusting but considered it my duty to eat it in order that the animals it came from existed in the first place, and one of my major shifts in perspective was that, as I mentioned above, it would’ve been better for them not to have been born, so I gave up meat as a transitional stage towards veganism, becoming vegan about a year and a half later. Consequently I find the recent plethora of meat mimicry personally nauseating. One of the problems I encountered with the group is that it seemed to consist largely of a stream of status updates about products found in supermarkets which were vegan, or at least plant-based and the distinction here is important for reasons I’ll go into, and often attempted to replace dairy or meat. This is not, to my mind, what veganism is about at all.

Just as a bit of a contrary note, I’m aware that there are people out there who like eating meat but who recognise veganism as a good thing, who might be encouraged to go vegan if they are able to access things which look, feel, taste and smell like meat or dairy, so there is a rôle for such products. If it’s a question of someone being vegan but eating this stuff or just not being vegan at all, then clearly this is what they should do. However, it should also be recognised that being plant-based doesn’t mean something is vegan. For instance, the recent meat-imitating burger manufactured using the hæm found in the roots of Leguminosæ was tested on animals before being released to the public. Moreover, the fact that an industrial process, packaging, transport and the like is involved in bringing these to the consumer at least runs the risk of introducing processes which are harmful to animals, not least the labour conditions of the human workers involved. This may of course not be the case, but the problem is that it introduces another headache because the responsible approach to these things would involve investigating all of this path, unless some kind of ethical certification scheme is involved, which would of course need to match one’s own values. It’s far simpler just to acquire some fruit and veg and make your own meals from them.

But is that feasible for everyone? What about food deserts, time poverty and ableism? We are given to understand that there are densely-populated areas where healthy food is unavailable, and this would of course mean that foraging had been ruled out although that is in any case likely to be adversely affected by pollution and not be sufficient to support the human and non-human population. However, the question then arises of whether plant-based composite and processed products such as these would even be available in such places. It seems more likely to me that one could get hold of a cauliflower and a tin of baked beans in such an area than a meat-free burger of the kind mentioned. Time poverty is another concern. It isn’t always possible for someone to find the time to prepare a meal and I can also see a rôle there. Finally, there’s the issue of disabilities, which means that it may make sense for someone to get their food in this form. Therefore there is an argument for such things.

What worries me, though, is that it seems to be a form of recuperation. Recuperation is the commodification of radical ideals by capitalism. The term “vegan” seems to be appropriated and turned into something which is highly profitable, and therefore unaffordable to many, and this gives people the idea that a plant-based diet is a luxury available only to the rich. This is not so, and various foods spring to mind such as rice, lentils, cabbage, potatoes, baked beans, bananas, peanuts . . . the list goes on and on. The existence and promotion of these products creates the illusion that it’s expensive to be vegan when it really isn’t.

Is this merely semantic drift though? Am I like one of those people who bemoan the use of the word “gay” to mean “homosexual” because they claim to have used it themselves to mean “happy” (but probably didn’t)? Words do change their meaning over time and nobody can control it. I would say not, because in fact the history of the word “vegan” where it means something close to pacifism rather than something associated with the star at the top of this post, starts in 1944 with the foundation of the British Vegan Society, and the definition it formulated itself has been in use since 1988. It’s almost a proprietary term, although I don’t think the Vegan Society claims any property rights over it. It has a fairly precise definition, and that definition includes but is not restricted to diet. It’s also a more politicised use, because if one temporarily disregards the exploitation of other species the word refers to a lifestyle where one cares about and fights against the exploitation of any human being and “promotes the development of” non-exploitative alternatives, for example to multinationals or companies using slave labour. I can’t overemphasise the fact that this includes all humans.

To conclude, then, I don’t like the drift towards veganism being merely about buying the right stuff in supermarkets. Some people may feel the need to do that or have a genuine requirement for such action, but that isn’t what veganism is about. Veganism is about fighting against exploitation and abuse wherever you see it, whether it’s in a slaughterhouse, a lab, a workplace or one’s own home. It has nothing to do with buying stuff, and to the extent that we are tempted to think it is, we’re distracted from capitalist exploitation and the need to defeat that.

Ethics As Foundation

It’s important to bear in mind that certain issues tend to serve as a distraction from working together for the common good, and therefore that certain discussions, dialogues or arguments are not fruitful because they take energy from the main effort to do this. There are two situations in particular which come to mind in this respect. One of them is the gender identity issue. In certain circles, Mumsnet comes to mind, feminist discussion is dominated by this concern at the cost of others, such as period poverty, the importance of female access to toilets in the developing world, rape culture, domestic violence, and basically everything which comes up in Everyday Sexism. I often wonder if that’s almost the point: to prevent action being taken on these issues by focussing on trans stuff. To a lesser extent, the same issue can arise in conversations about atheism, agnosticism, theism and the much more interesting but rarely mentioned misotheism and ignosticism. Therefore, I have only reluctantly decided to address this point here. It is, however, an important point because sometimes there needs to be a united front on certain issues, and while we’re fighting or discussing, we aren’t addressing those and that serves the “Other Side”. There’s also the issue of what constitutes the other side, and whether that’s even the right way of describing things.

Nonetheless, communication is important and I recently got the impression this wasn’t working very well because I wasn’t giving people the context to my views. It’s not easy to do this because they involved a lot of work and thinking and are, like everyone’s, drawn on life experience, and you haven’t lived my life. All of this hardly needs saying, although it probably does need saying that through no fault of my own, I seem to reliably arrive at different conclusions from everyone else, which is probably to do with neurodiversity, but the conclusions I reach, particularly in this case, might illustrate why I’ve previously described myself as being “neurodiverse not otherwise specified”.

Here it is then.

Immanuel Kant once analysed our apprehension of the phenomenal via something he called “categories”. We are initially confronted with a blizzard of impressions he referred to as the Manifold, and in order to conceive of and think of anything at all, we impose structure on them. The thought that a physical object is known is making a judgement about it. The word is not used here in terms of classification but as what can be stated about any object. They include such things as cause and effect, existence, necessity and contingency. Now at some point in the past I noticed a remarkable parallel between Kantian categories and Freudian ego defences such as projection, rationalisation, transference and the like. I am not Freudian but do believe ego defences are valid and can be observed in oneself and others, although not with sufficient rigour to become valid natural kinds. Also, Herbert Marcuse attempted a synthesis of Marxist analysis of society with Freudianism in his work in the 1950s and ’60s. This is the kind of environment in which I think of the world.

A second, much less nebulous factor in my thinking is based on a process which may be practically universal. There is generally something about the characteristics of the thinker in their beliefs which appears to justify their position, which are convenient for that thinker. For example, a meat eater may believe that humans have souls and other species haven’t or a man may believe that women can’t be raped because “the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down”. A White person may believe that Black people are naturally less intelligent than White people. I probably don’t need to give many more examples. We might like to think we’re objective and neutral, but we aren’t, and in the past this has applied to science so there’s no particular reason to suppose that it no longer applies.

Addressing this is difficult, but one way of doing so is a little like the Cartesian method of doubt, which is well-known enough not to need introduction, but it’s still worthwhile to describe it to pursue this analysis. The Cartesian method of doubt is to systematically doubt everything until one is left with what can be known, in the sense of beliefs which cannot be rationally doubted. This left him, in his opinion, with sensory impressions, the laws of logic and mathematics and his own consciousness, although some would reduce that further. He then made what in most circles today looks like a very silly move involving attempting to prove the existence of a benevolent deity via the ontological argument, which I can’t even be bothered to repeat, in order to establish that he would not be deceived and therefore the “external world” exists more or less as it’s perceived. This was not a sensible move, but the method of doubt is sound.

What I chose to do was establish a similar ethical process in order to reach a stage where my motives couldn’t be doubted, and to reconstruct the world in a similar way based on moral considerations rather than logical or rational ones. This applies mostly to the issue of consciousness. It’s impossible to be certain that one lacks ulterior self-serving motives for particular beliefs and in fact it’s very common for people to believe things first and try to find reasons for believing them later. This is of course rationalisation.

One of the most significant features of my world view, following from this, is panpsychism. If one believes that all reality is conscious (and there’s an issue here regarding whether it’s atomic matter, all matter or matter, energy and space), it’s likely to make one a lot more cautious and considerate. If I believed something else, I could be motivated unethically and it could be about selfishness.

What we consider to be rational thought is in fact moulded by emotions, maybe sometimes unconscious ones. I believe this is true to the extent that we are never truly rational and it isn’t even desirable to be so. We just aren’t, we should embrace that and acknowledge it, and when we explore our reasoning we should also explore our feelings, because the two are inextricably entwined and may not even be distinct.

This has a number of consequences. One is that it solves the problem of deriving an “ought” from an “is”. Utilitarians notoriously attempted to establish the principle of utility from the idea that that which was desired was therefore worthy of desire. This is partly due to a shortcoming of the English language, that whereas many others would use a gerund or future participle to derive their word for “desirable” from “desire”, English instead tacks “-able” on the end: capable of being desired as opposed to worthy of being desired. This leaves the whole world of ethics apparently unfounded in naturalistic terms, and is therefore known as the naturalistic fallacy. But what if it’s the other way round? What if, instead of deriving evaluative terms from descriptive ones, descriptive ones derive from evaluative ones? This would explain why you can’t get an “ought” from an “is”. It’s simply the wrong way round.

A couple of other people have come up with something similar. One of them is the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Much of his thought involves the attempt to purify a Jewish approach to things, although his thought needn’t be taken theistically. It isn’t clear to me whether he is in fact theistic, and this is undoubtedly a good thing because it’s better to transcend the distinction between theism and atheism than to focus on it in, as I mentioned above, the interests of solidarity in pursuing social justive. It also crops up in Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship, and the idea that when we relate to each other it’s ideally face to face, i.e. authentic, honest, personal. There should never be a point where something is simply used, and that of course hearkens back to Immanuel Kant’s Kingdom of Ends.

So there you go. This could’ve been more detailed but I think I’ve at least presented my view even if I haven’t justified it. This is generally how I attempt to conceive of the world and relate to it. It justifies, for example, my veganism, anti-racism, anti-sexism and so forth, and at least in psychological terms helps to explain why I relate to certain people the way I do.

And now I’m going to do the census form.