Planet Solutions Podcasts
2008-10-04 - Music and the Enlightenment
Philosopher's Zone
The age of a great movement of ideas, the Enlightenment, was also a great age of music: Bach and Handel, Mozart and Haydn. But how did Enlightenment thinkers reflect on music and how does their belief in progress relate to our views of art today? TRANSCRIPT: Transcript available Monday 6 October read less
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2008-10-04 - Music and the Enlightenment
Fri October 03 2008
The age of a great movement of ideas, the Enlightenment, was also a great age of music: Bach and Handel, Mozart and Haydn. But how did Enlightenment thinkers reflect on music and how does their belief in progress relate to our views of art today? TRANSCRIPT: Transcript available Monday 6 October read less
2008-09-27 - 'It's alive!' Frankenstein, science and philosophy in the Romantic period
Fri September 26 2008
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is more than just the story of a man bolting together his own creature from bits of pre-loved human beings; it's a serious examination of the science and philosophy of its day. This week, we look at the ideas behind the book and how a new enthusiasm for electricity and the spirit world animated the young author's work. TRANSCRIPT: Alan Saunders: Hello, and welcome to The Philosopher´s Zone, I´m Alan Saunders. GRAB - Frankenstein Alan Saunders: Colin Clive as Victor Frankenstein, or as the movie insisted on calling him, Henry, in the Director, James Whale´s film of 1931, the one with Boris Karloff as the Creature. Today we´re looking at where the novel Frankenstein, first published in 1818 by the young Mary Shelley, comes from. Is it really about a man who wants to know what it is like to be God? Or does it sound other and more profound philosophy depths? These depths are the subject of a new collection of essays called Frankenstein´s Science - Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780-1850. The book takes in not just Mary Shelley and her circle (she was the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) but also the spiritualist thinker, Emmanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, the advocate of hypnotism. So to find out more about Frankenstein, we´ll soon be joined by one of the contributors to the book, Associate Professor Joan Kirkby from Women´s Studies at Macquarie University. But first, here´s one of its editors, Professor Jane Goodall, from the Writing and Research Program at the University of Western Sydney. Jane Goodall: The movies got into this kind of spin-off cycle, where they proliferated, and they were semi-comic kind of pop culture movies. I mean the original Frankenstein´s a rather beautiful movie, but the spin-off ones were... Alan Saunders: The James Whale one is a masterpiece, I think, yes. Jane Goodall: I mean the bolt in the neck thing, and the cartoons and The Munsters, they all made a joke out of it, and then the novel was kind of known in this rather one-dimensional way as `a Monster novel´ and an `early horror novel´. Then it went through a phase where it was really the property of feminist criticism, and the dominant theme out of that was that it was a novel written as a cautionary tale against the scientific over-reacher, and the masculine ego in science. And I think what happened was critical views of the novel got stuck on this, and people became unable to read it as other than a cautionary tale against science. And that´s an interesting thing to happen, because people weren´t reading the novel at all. They were reading an idea of the novel. And if you actually any attention to these vast, rich passages in the novel, it´s not that at all. It´s a novel written absolutely out of the Romantic movement, which was in love with inquiry of all kinds, free inquiry, and particularly scientific inquiry because people really thought it could save the world, and that was not a naïve notion at that time. Alan Saunders: Joan, it has been a significant feminist text hasn´t it? And one of the readings of the book is that we´re told that this is the story, really it´s sort of vagina envy on the part of Frankenstein, he can´t give birth, so he has to use these diabolical means of bringing another creature into the world. Would you say that we need to move beyond that sort of reading? Joan Kirkby: Yes, definitely, yes. I think that Victor Frankenstein gets a lot of bad press as well, because I think his aims were kind of large, grandiose, extraordinary, and when you become acquainted with the actual science of the time, it was pretty heady stuff, you know, this view that you could solve the secrets of the universe. You might be able to prolong human life, you might be able to cure disease. It was part of this euphoria I suppose. But also the novel, it likes the monster, because he has been created without a mate, and he is - he suffers, and people find him repulsive, and he doesn´t know why, and so it´s kind of about the education I suppose of a human being, or a not-quite human being in this case perhaps. Alan Saunders: So Jane, the proper title of the book, the full title is Presumption, or The Fate of Frankenstein. We tend to see that as meaning that Frankenstein is like Prometheus, who stole the fire from the Gods. He´s a presumptuous mortal and presumption is bad. We see it as a cautionary tale. Do you think we´re wrong to see it in that light? Jane Goodall: Well what´s really interesting there is that Presumption, or The Fate of Frankenstein was actually the title of the first dramatisation of the novel in 1830. The sub-title of the novel itself is The Modern Prometheus. So what happened as soon as other interpreters got onto it, they translated the Prometheus into a presumptuous figure. And presumption was a term that belonged to Calvinism. It was one of the primal sins of Calvinism, was to overshoot in the world, to have too much ambition for yourself and for your life and to presume that you had control over your life and your destiny. So this is Frankenstein´s sin as far as the Calvinists are concerned. But this is a complex story and I don´t know how much of it you want to go into, but Mary Shelley´s father, Godwin, was brought up a Calvinist. It was a religion that had a stranglehold on England. Calvin was England´s most published author for a whole century, into the 17th century, and many people were brought up with this dark vision that they were completely subordinate in their lives to this unknown God, it was a sin to even try to think about what this God meant or wanted for you. And you should never try anything, you should never get outside the envelope of obedience. Alan Saunders: That´s one of the points of Calvinism, isn´t it, that God is so great, he is so far removed from you, that no effort on your part, will enable you to reach God. He has to choose you. And if he´s chosen you, you´re chosen and you can´t be un-chosen, you can´t decide, `I don´t want to be chosen´, and if he hasn´t chosen you, you´re not chosen and there´s nothing you can do one way or the other. Jane Goodall: That´s right. And when it gets in people´s heads as it did through these terrible sermons that were delivered from the pulpits of England, it becomes this savage conscience. I mean I´ve got a piece of a sermon here: `Thought calleth to fear; fear whistlest to horror; horror beckoneth to despair and saith, "Come out and help torment this sinner".´ Alan Saunders: Who is that? Jane Goodall: That´s a sermon from 1592, I can´t remember the name of the guy who gave it, he´s not a well-known figure. But when that´s inside people´s heads, you get this incredible culture of misery and anti-knowledge, anti-insight, anti-inquiry, and Godwin was one of a generation that rebelled against it. Alan Saunders: Jane, what do we know about Mary Shelley´s as it were, philosophical background and how much of it comes from her Dad and how much of it comes from the man she married, Percy Bysshe Shelley? Jane Goodall: It´s a case of ideas being in the air, in the milieu, they were living in this house, Byron was living with them a lot of the time. They were in a fairly high old state you know, taking in toxicants of one sort or another, and who knows how they conversed with each other. I mean they were telling each other their dreams and the fiction is, according to legend, written as part of a kind of pact, and Polidori also. Alan Saunders: John Polidori, Byron´s doctor who wrote The Vampyre, and it´s this famous night, which actually does turn up in the, I think, the greatest Frankenstein movie, The Bride of Frankenstein, they´re all there in the Villa Diodati telling each other frightening stories, yes. Jane Goodall: Yes, I mean you can´t separate the minds in that house. They just became this kind of hallucinating organism together I think. And I have a heretical suspicion that Shelley actually wrote fairly large amounts of Frankenstein. I don´t have any grounds for saying that, other than that there were such permeable boundaries between those people in that house. Shelley and Mary Shelley were like a kind of fusion of a psyche for a long time. I mean they were absolutely living together 24 hours of the day, they were crossing the country together at all hours of the day and night on foot, getting to Europe when they ran away. He was giving her reading, he was writing notes, but she had also absorbed huge amounts from her father who was also Shelley´s mentor. So there was a whole circuitry of ideas and Byron also shared them. I think it´s a mistake to try and separate out what she knew. The later stories she wrote show a different spirit. I mean that´s one of my suspicions that Shelley had a hand in Frankenstein. Alan Saunders: You´ll be drummed out of the women´s movement for this, won´t you? Jane Goodall: The women´s movement is bigger than people who insist on believing that Frankenstein´s a birth-envy story. I mean one of the most extraordinary things to me is here is this woman whose mother died at her birth. She was haunted by that throughout her life, as you would be. Her own first child died as an infant; her second child died at I think around two; and then she lost the third child; and then she lost her husband. And `Frankenstein´ to me is not a story about birth-envy, it´s a story about someone who is absolutely psychically tormented by the fear of death, and of losing the people close to them, from death. So `Frankenstein´ gets this determination to create a creature when his mother dies. And he wants to cross this boundary between life and death. He says, `Life and death seem to me to be ideal bounds.´ And he wants to pour a torrent of life into our dark world. It´s part of a whole enlarging, a romantic vision of crossing bounds, where does human being begin and end? That becomes a wide-open question all of a sudden. Does it end at death? Does it begin at birth? Is there a definable space between one person and another? I mean that was something Mesmer was breaking down. And electricity seemed to be a science that gave images to that. Alan Saunders: But what role did electricity play in the creation of the Creature? Rudi Belmer - Frankenstein reading: `It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning. The rain pattered dismally against the panes and my candle was nearly burnt out when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull, yellow eye of the Creature open. It breathed hard and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.´ Then she goes on. She left it deliberately vague, but you´re not quite sure whether there was some Black Magic involved, or whether there was some vague elixir or something; certainly not by thunder, lightning, electrical impulses and so forth and so on. There was none of that. There´s certainly many dimensions to this story, and we can talk about Faust, we can talk about the over-achiever, we can talk about man trying to emulate God, there are so many aspects, which I think is the keynote as to why this particular idea has transcended time. Alan Saunders: The film historian Rudi Belmer, talking about the great movie version of 1931. Interestingly, you talk about the electrical science of the time, and one of the great students of electrical science at the time was Joseph Priestly, the great 18th century chemist, one of the discoverers of oxygen, and he himself had been brought up a Calvinist, had had a terrible time in childhood because of uncertainty as to whether he was saved. And he, like Godwin, broke free from the Calvinist shackles and among other things, wrote about and experimented on electricity. Jane Goodall: Well electricity I suppose helped to liberate people from that psychology, because it was a form of visible and palpable power that you could operate. If you made sparks fly, that was the most exhilarating experience, and you get from Priestly´s generation, sort of 1730 through to the end of that century, this new mood of incredible sense of possibility and hype surrounding science and experiment. And electricity I suppose was the visualisation of that, because you saw the spark. Alan Saunders: It was the most theatrical of the sciences really. I mean there were people who went around the country demonstrating electrical equipment because you could, as you say, produce sparks, you know, it´s really impressive. Jane Goodall: Yes, it was spectacle, it was showbiz and it was up in the heavens, it was lightning coming down and hitting church spires. Joan Kirkby: I was just going to add to that. I think that Spiritualism also -- it was kind of on the frontiers of science and was exploring the powers of the mind and the possibility of life after death etc, but it also was kind of practiced as part-science, part-religion and part-entertainment. So there were the séances, and table-rappings as people kind of exploited the possibilities of this new science. Alan Saunders: And there´s a sort of crossover, isn´t there, with things like hypnotism or mesmerism, as it was known at the time, which again is a very theatrical sort of thing. Joan Kirkby: Yes, absolutely, yes. Alan Saunders: You write Joan, in your contribution to the book about Emmanuel Swedenborg and these days Swedenborg has a very, very odd reputation. For a long time I just thought he was this loony, who had visions, and gave rise to a sort of church, which has very impressive headquarters in London, I remember them, great real estate they´ve got there, but really not somebody I needed to take seriously. Whereas in Sweden where he came from, he is regarded as a substantial philosophical figure, and he was taken seriously by the great 18th century philosopher, Immanuel Kant, so tell us about him. Joan Kirkby: He was a very quiet, unassuming person, who just worked for like 50 years in the Mineral Office of the Swedish government, and then somewhere, when he was about 55, 56, he decided perhaps he should turn his scientific attention from minerals and metal to the human brain. And he hoped in his studies of the brain, to find the point where the soul was connected to the body, and so that was his plan. And he´s credited with finding out things about the cerebral cortex and various aspects of the brain; that he made genuine contributions to our understanding of them, have not been substantially changed. However, in about the 1740s, he started having visions of spirits, and he was amazed. And finally in about, I think it was 1745, at Easter, he had this vision of Christ that was just so astounding that he then turned his attention to the kind of spiritual world and tried to elucidate that. And he did it with great conviction and integrity and he studied these beings who came to him and was able to tell when there was a fire somewhere when he was hundreds of miles away. He managed to have a conversation with the Queen´s brother and tell the Queen about this conversation, and she agreed it was obviously her brother he had talked to. Alan Saunders: This is a dead brother, is it? Joan Kirkby: Yes, a dead brother. And Kant heard about this and wrote to him and said that he hadn´t really ever thought about ghosts or spirits, and thought it was ridiculous, but he was very impressed with Swedenborg´s experiences, and so got his books and read them, and then wrote his own Dreams of a Spirit Seer. Alan Saunders: This is the purely critical Kant, isn´t it? Kant publishes the great Critique of Pure Reason and the Kant who emerges from the enormous intellectual task of writing the Critique of Pure Reason is rather different from the Kant who went into it. But did he leave Swedenborg behind? Joan Kirkby: No, I don´t think so. I mean yes, what you say is absolutely right, and he also even wrote and said he didn´t want this earlier pre-critical work to be counted among his philosophy. However he did continue to teach Swedenborg at his university for the rest of his life, and some of the notes are extant, and say what he thought of them. And scholars now, some scholars say well look, Kant´s book on Swedenborg is a bit of a sport´, but other people say, No, that you can see the transcendental idealism coming out of his kind of critique of Swedenborg´s spiritualist ego, that he had a mind. So I think it´s kind of a debate, or a controversy. Alan Saunders: Well interestingly, Joseph Priestly, who wrote the history of the study of electricity and did a lot of experimental work himself on electricity, his correspondence reveals that he took Swedenborg quite seriously. What has all this got to do though, with 19-year-old Mary Shelley, not formally educated, admittedly the daughter of a philosopher and of course also the daughter, though she never met her mother, the daughter of a great feminist writer. What´s Swedenborg got to do with her? Joan Kirkby: I´m beginning to think that possibly Swedenborg had been among their reading. I mean he´s not listed, Kant is. But certainly Kant´s reading of Swedenborg was I believe, by the Shelleys. And various people, like the English socialist Robert Owen was part of the Shelley circle and his son, Robert Dale Owen, who in fact courted Mary Shelley after Percy´s death, he went off to the States and took up a major study of Spiritualism and published a book about The debatable land between this world and the next or something like that, but I mean these ideas were just in the air, and obviously the Godwin household particularly, had all of these currents. Alan Saunders: `Currents´ a good word in the circumstances. This is Joan Kirkby talking about the exciting intellectual ferment of the late 18th century, when the hypnotic work of Franz Mesmer seemed worth taking seriously and even a great rationalist like the philosopher Immanuel Kant could be interested in the spirit world. Joan Kirkby: He had this view of the spirit world that we are all inhabitants of a parallel universe, that there the spirit world lives side by side with the kind of natural world, and it´s only in dreams or illness that there´s an inflex of the spirit world into the ordinary world. But he saw it more as a kind of different intuition, that it didn´t exist, and that we wouldn´t be aware of it until death or in these extreme circumstances. I´d love to read this quote from Benjamin Franklin if I could, because he was brought in to be on the tribunal that judged on Mesmer; about whether Mesmerism worked or whether it was a fraud or what, and at the end of this report, which he wrote for the King of France, in 1784, he said that, `it´s perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists and does not seem to require so much an active energy as a passive aptitude of soul, in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified. It has no reality but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field, the soul has room enough to expand herself to display all her boundless faculties and all of her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities.´ Which I thought was a great conclusion to a scientific report. Alan Saunders: Well that´s lovely, and it also I think puts Victor Frankenstein back into the position of being a hero, because he´s gone too far, perhaps, overstepped the mark a little, but he has been a scientific adventurer. Joan Kirkby: Yes. I mean I do a lot of work on Emily Dickinson, and she´s got a line where she says `The unknown is the largest need of the intellect, though for that, no-one thinks to thank God.´ and I think that sense that they´re kind of experimenting in the unknown and pushing the boundaries, and people like Wallace, who was the co-discoverer of evolution - Alan Saunders: Alfred Russel Wallace, yes. Joan Kirkby: Yes, he became a Spiritualist. Alan Saunders: Yes, he did, yes. Joan Kirkby: And it was just an oddball enterprise, all these philosophers and ministers. Jane Goodall: You could see it coming back through cog science. People start to look at certain areas of the brain as responsible for certain kinds of experiences. It might throw up a lot of questions that people thought they´d answered. Joan Kirkby: Yes, absolutely. I think that one of the interesting things about reading modern work on consciousness, the brain, the mind, etc., is you realise that they´re still really working with the same kinds of questions that the Shelleys were working with. It hasn´t progressed all that far. Alan Saunders: Joan Kirkby and Jane Goodall, thank you very much indeed for joining us. Both: Thank you. Alan Saunders: The book, Frankenstein´s Science - Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780-1850 is edited by Christa Knellwolf King and Jane Goodall. Details on our website. The show is produced by Kyla Slaven with technical production by Charlie McKune. I´m Alan Saunders and I´ll be back next week with another Philosopher´s Zone. MOVIE GRAB - Frankenstein read less
2008-09-20 - The ethics of keeping your mouth shut - the case of the buried bodies
Fri September 19 2008
This week The Philosopher´s Zone looks at what happens when lawyers know more than they are able to tell. What should you do when ethical duty collides with personal morality? We´ll take an infamous American murder trial from the 1970s as our case study TRANSCRIPT: Alan Saunders: Hello, Alan Saunders with you for The Philosopher´s Zone, and this week, the ethics of keeping your mouth shut. We´re looking at a famous American murder trial from the 1970s, and what we´re concerned about is the behaviour of the defence lawyers; that´s why the case is still discussed today. In popular culture, defence lawyers are often presented as brave underdogs, going into battle against powerful people and institutions. But particularly on American TV shows like Law and Order, they´re more likely to be naïve crim lovers, anti-authority troublemakers, or publicity-seekers making a name for themselves by way of their brutal clients. Essentially, they are to blame for bad and dangerous people going free. Today´s show centres on the lawyers Frank Armani and Frank Belge, who were pilloried for something they did, or more precisely did not do, when representing their client on a murder charge. They were publicly harassed and threatened; charges were laid and later dropped against one of them, and their careers were destroyed, though Frank Armani later rebuilt his legal practice. But what was it they did wrong? Frank Armani: Your mind is screaming one way relieve these parents. Now what is your responsibility? Should you report this? Shouldn´t you report it? You know, one sense of morality wants you to relieve the grief. Woman: We were outraged at the fact that there were probably people that knew more than was ever told, and it just seems that the judicial system was more in favour of the guilty. Man: People in the community seemed to take sides. Interviewer: In what way? Woman: I don´t know, they were just kind of like mean. Some wouldn´t even speak to you if you go to the Post Office. Alan Saunders: Lisa Lerman is Professor of Law at the Catholic University of America. Lisa Lerman: In the early `70s in upstate New York, a series of murders happened of young teenagers, most of them girls, some boys, and there was one particular case involving a 16-year-old boy named Philip Domblewski who was on a camping trip with some friends, and was murdered by a psychopath in the woods. The other kids were rescued by the police and then en sued the largest manhunt that had ever taken place in New York State. And after eleven days, they caught who they thought was the killer, a man named Robert Garrow. Alan Saunders: Who was he? Lisa Lerman: Well Garrow to many people who knew him, he seemed like a fairly normal guy. He was a master mechanic at a bakery, he was married, he had three children, but he was a very disturbed person and he seems to have had a kind of secret life where periodically he kidnapped young girls and raped them and sometimes killed them, and sometimes killed their boyfriends. And so he had a history of criminal charges. He had spent eight years in prison on a prior sexual assault case. Alan Saunders: And this comes after an abusive childhood and I gather sex with animals on his part? Lisa Lerman: Yes. Garrow had a very difficult relationship with his parents. Apparently they beat him a lot and then when he was seven, they sent him to work on a neighbour´s farm and he stayed there eight years and during that period he is reported to have begun having sex with animals and drinking animals´ blood. Alan Saunders: Oh dear. So Robert Garrow was charged with the murder of 18 year old Philip Domblewski. He was also a suspect in a number of other murder and rape cases making news at the time. But he was not indicted for any other murders until after the Domblewski trial was over. The two defence lawyers at the centre of everything were Frank Belge and Frank Armani. Here´s Lisa Lerman. Lisa Lerman: Belge and Armani were good friends, and Armani said that his nickname for Belge was - I don´t know if you can say this on radio, it was `Balls´, because Belge was a really flamboyant sort of outspoken, shoot from the hip trial lawyer, and Armani said that he had never represented anyone on a murder charge before, and he was afraid, and he felt he needed courage. So he went to Belge and after some wrangling, persuaded Belge to act as his co-counsel. Belge didn´t want to do it because it was such a notorious case, they knew that it was going to take up enormous amounts of time, and Garrow didn´t have any money, so they were going to get paid the pittance that the State pays criminal defence lawyers for indigents in the United States. Alan Saunders: We don´t want to get bogged down in the jurisdictional differences between here and the US or between the rules that apply now and those that existed in the 1970s. Suffice it to say that in Australia we have what´s known as legal professional privilege which in the US and possibly many of us are more familiar with the US rules because we´ve seen American TV. You have attorney client privilege. This principle has been in place in our legal systems in one form or another for centuries, so can you give us a quick theoretical overview of why this confidentiality exists and then how it applies to the present case? Lisa Lerman: OK. Well to start with, we have a justice system in which people who are accused of crimes are entitled to be represented by counsel, and we want clients who are accused of crimes, to communicate fully and openly with their counsel, the idea being that then they get represented better. And so because of that, if you want the person accused of a crime to speak openly with his lawyer, then you have to have a lawyer who is obliged to keep confidential everything that his client tells him. If the lawyer were to spill the beans on what his client had told him about a crime that he had committed in the past, then all of a sudden the lawyer would be an agent of the police department or the prosector´s office, and would be essentially helping to convict the client. And we´ve got a whole criminal justice system that takes care of that part, so we kind of cordon off the lawyer, and ask him to protect confidences. Alan Saunders: And this is the key factor in the present case, isn´t it? Lisa Lerman: It is. And when Armani eventually agreed to take on this murder case and went to see Garrow in the hospital, (Garrow had been apprehended by the police and had been shot in the course of that chase, so he was in the hospital) and Armani started asking him about these cases and Garrow was telling Armani such as he could remember, but he couldn´t remember anything. And so Armani believing that he really needed the information in order to represent Garrow, Armani had a little casual training in hypnosis, and so he persuaded his client to allow the lawyer to hypnotise him, and while under hypnosis Armani told Garrow that when he woke up he would remember everything that had happened in the last couple of months. Alan Saunders: Ethically this is slightly bizarre, isn´t it, because if you hypnotise your client, I mean fair enough, everything your client tells you is protected by attorney-client privilege, but it´s rather odd that you hypnotise your client who may then tell you things that he didn´t intend to tell you. Lisa Lerman: It is rather odd, and even if you could justify hypnotising a client who was mentally OK, could a client who´s obviously severely disturbed and probably psychotic, give a meaningful consent to hypnosis? And even if he could, then shouldn´t you, before you do this weird thing, shouldn´t you consult with your co-counsel? Alan Saunders: And Armani didn´t consult with Belge at this point? Lisa Lerman: He didn´t tell Belge about it because he said he thought Belge would think he was nuts. So he just went on and did it anyway. And it worked, because then Belge went to visit Garrow that afternoon, and Garrow told in lurid detail, about the murders of Alicia Hauck and Susan Petz who were two teenage girls who were missing. And it was suspected that they had been murdered, but nobody really knew whether they had been murdered, and if so, where their remains were. Alan Saunders: Now you present this case as an ethical dilemma to your students. So when you take them to this point in the case, what are the options available to them? Lisa Lerman: Well when you get to that point, in the real case what actually happened after they learned this information, is that they were just dumbfounded about what to do. First of all, their client is a little bit nuts, and so could he be making this up? He was under hypnosis; does that reduce the reliability of what he´s saying? Even if he´s telling the truth, or thinks he´s telling the truth, it might have been a hallucination or something, so Garrow had given the lawyers very detailed information about the location of the bodies, so the two lawyers decided that the only really good way to confirm what their client had told them would be to put on their hiking boots and go out and look for the remains of these two girls. But the other thing that really impelled them to undertake this disagreeable task is that Susan Petz had been missing for almost three weeks, and there was a possibility that she might still be alive, and the police investigator was really hysterical about that possibility, and the lawyers were very worried about it, too. Because if she was still alive, they wanted to find her in time for her to be rescued. Alan Saunders: One of the ethical issues here is we have a 16 year old girl who´s been killed, she´s down a mine shaft, she has parents who want to know - they don´t want to know the worst, but they do want to know what´s happened to her, and you have these people representing the man who killed her. What are the ethical choices available to them? Lisa Lerman: In the US nowadays, the rules have changed a little bit. The rule now says if you know that your client is going to commit a crime that would cause severe injury or death to another person, you´re allowed to reveal the information. But even now in the US, the rule as to a crime that was committed in the past, is you´re representing somebody on this charge, it´s your job to protect those confidences. So they didn´t really have any choice, except to keep the information to themselves. Alan Saunders: Did they in fact have contact with the families of the murdered girls? Lisa Lerman: Yes. First of all, one of the girls was named Alicia Hauck. She was a high school student in Syracuse and Frank Armani´s daughter went to a parochial school in Syracuse with the Hauck girls, and Alicia Hauck´s sister was in Frank´s daughter´s class. And Alicia Hauck´s dad was a custodian in the court house where Frank worked, and sometimes before calendar call, they had coffee together. So he actually knew this family. But after the Garrow case got started, Susan Petz who had been an undergraduate at a college in Boston, her father came from Chicago to Syracuse to visit Armani, came to his office, and pretty much broke down in Frank´s office and begged Frank to tell them if he knew where his daughter was. Alan Saunders: And we should say that they didn´t just know where the daughter was, that they took photos and in one case Frank Belge moved one of the girl´s heads back into position above her neck. So they know quite a lot, that they´re not telling, don´t they? Lisa Lerman: They do. And Frank said that that visit from Susan Petz´s father was just anguishing, that he wanted so badly to relieve the suffering of this man, but he really felt that when he had been sworn in as a lawyer in New York State, that he had made a solemn oath to keep his client´s confidences, and that it would have been a betrayal of that oath to share this information. He told me that his mother was really angry at him because he wouldn´t tell the parents - she found out later of course, and he said, `Ma, a lawyer is like a priest´, and his mother who´s of course Italian Catholic, said `But Frank, you´re not a priest!´ And part of what one wants is for lawyers to actually shoulder that ordinary morality and struggle with it. Alan Saunders: So do we have here a conflict between a personal morality, obviously you want to tell the parents, and professional ethics? Lisa Lerman: Yes. And that´s really what the kind of famous issue in this case is about , is whether a lawyer because of his special role, should be subject to a kind of different moral code than a regular human being, because any normal person with knowledge of the location of a dead teenage girl, the first impulse, the first duty would be to tell the parents, and the police, and everybody else who wanted to know. Alan Saunders: Here´s Bill Hauck, the father of murdered teenager Alicia Hauck. Bill Hauck: I was invited to his office and when I got there his girl said he wasn´t in, and I called several different times for an appointment and I was refused. Frank Armani: I don´t think I would have been able to stand the pressure, really, I just couldn´t trust myself to meet him face to face. Alan Saunders: The lawyer, Frank Armani. So does the case illustrate that client protection by definition, involves lawyers having to be, or having to be prepared to be, dishonest, or at least evasive about what they know? In other words, is the lawyer´s position by definition an ethically problematic one? Law Professor, Lisa Lerman. Lisa Lerman: It does. And you know, I think that especially if a lawyer is representing an indigent criminal defendant, that the justification for the lawyer to protect these type of confidences in a kind of absolute sense, is more justifiable than if, for example, a lawyer is representing a large corporation that´s charged with some kind of institutional white-collar financial crime. I just don´t think the justification is the same. My sister does a appellate criminal defence work in Alaska, and the way she puts it is `When you´re representing poor criminal defendants, all the resources are on the other side; that the Prosecutor and the Police, they have investigators, they have experts, they have all kinds of resources at their disposal, and the amount of resources that we allocate to defence representation is miniscule, and in light of that it´s like the lawyer is the only one on the side of the defendant. And the defendant, even if he´s a sociopath, even if he´s a disgusting person who drinks animal blood, he´s still a human being. They wanted to use the information though to try to negotiate a deal with the prosecutor. Garrow could have been subject to the death penalty or at least to life in prison, and they felt that he was mentally ill and that really a better solution would be for him to be found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to a mental institution. So they, in going to find the remains of these two girls, were hoping to trade this information about two unsolved murders, in exchange for a promise of not guilty by reason of insanity in the Domblewski case. Alan Saunders: The way you put it makes it sound seriously unpleasant because we´re talking about two teenage girls who´ve been killed and you use the word `trade´. Is there something unethical in this? I mean we can argue about whether there´s something unethical in the whole process of plea bargaining, but is there anything unethical in this particular case? Lisa Lerman: Certainly questions have been raised about it, but I don´t think so. In fact at least in the States, probably over 95% of all criminal charges are resolved by plea bargaining, just as civil cases are almost all resolved through a negotiated settlement. And it´s not like a corrupt behind-closed-doors unlawful deal making, the lawyers actually have information that will help the prosecutors to resolve other cases and they´re willing to give it up with their client´s consent in exchange for a promise that Garrow would go to a mental hospital rather than to prison. And Garrow was actually terrified. He said to the lawyers, `Do you know what happens to child molesters in prison?´ You know, he knew that he would be raped and/or murdered by the other prisoners. Alan Saunders: Frank Armani later decided he could breach the confidentiality of a client in certain circumstances. In this case when he perceived his family to be under threat. Doesn´t this undo his whole argument about the absolute importance of lawyer-client confidentiality? Lisa Lerman: I think it actually - it´s one of the most surprising parts of the case, and it´s one that most people don´t know, but I think it vividly illustrates how much these decisions are a matter of judgment and that the rules are not to be just obeyed absolutely, but that the lawyer has to think it through. What happened is that Garrow was sent to prison and he actually pretended that he was paralysed and was stuck in a wheelchair so although he was in a maximum security prison, they didn´t watch him all that carefully, and eventually he scaled a wall and escaped from prison. And when they searched his prison cell they found a hit list in his cell that included the names of both of his lawyers. And before that time, one time during the Domblewski trial, Armani´s daughter Dorina had come into the court room, and Garrow had - who had never met her, turned to her and said, `Nice to see you again, Dorina.´ And that led Frank to believe that his client had actually been stalking his daughter. So at the point at which Garrow escaped from prison, Frank decided, and when he learned that he was on a hit list that had been made by his client, he decided that enough was enough, and he told the police what he knew about where Garrow might be hiding, and then the police went to search that location, found Garrow and in the course of apprehending him, killed him. And I asked Frank how did it feel to have revealed a confidence in a way that resulted in the death of his client, and he said, `I´m not a hero, my feet are of clay. I was relieved.´ Alan Saunders: How did you feel about that as an answer? `I´m not a hero, my feet are of clay´. It sounds a bit of a confession of weakness on his part. Or did you accept it as that, or did you think `Well what would anybody else have done in those circumstances´? Lisa Lerman: My reaction was to say `No, Frank, that´s not right, you are a hero´, because he did the right thing twice. And he did the right thing by being a lawyer, up to a point that pushed him almost past what he could tolerate and then by reverting back to his morality as a human being, and doing what was absolutely compelled for his own personal safety. You know, I really think that if earlier in the case, if they had decided to co-operate with the police and reveal the information about the location of the remains of the girls, probably no-one would have faulted them. Because it was such an extreme case. But I also think that at the point at which they were doing that, when they were about to go to trial on a murder case, that the better thing to do was to keep their mouths shut. And they revealed the information just as soon as they could do it without severely impacting their client, and I think it´s easy to justify. Alan Saunders: Lisa Lerman, Professor of Law at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. We´ve been talking about the trial of Robert Garrow who murdered a number of teenagers in upstate New York in 1973. And thanks to PBS, the American Public Broadcaster, for use of the interviews with Frank Armani and others involved in the case. I´m Alan Saunders. The program´s producer is Kyla Slaven, and the sound engineer on The Philosopher´s Zone is Charlie McCune. Thanks for tuning in today. To take us out, Paul Simon with a tune of his that went to No.1 on the American charts in the year we´ve been talking about, 1973. SONG Loves me like a rock - Paul Simon read less
2008-09-13 - Justify my love
Fri September 12 2008
The finely tuned minds of philosophers become curiously blunt and obtuse when the turn their attention to love. Can we talk philosophically of love? Do we love people for their qualities? If so, why we go on loving them when those qualities change? This week, a philosopher looks at one of the most mysterious forces in life. TRANSCRIPT: Alan Saunders: Hello and welcome to The Philosopher´s Zone. I´m Alan Saunders. We didn´t do love when I was a philosophy student, or at least we didn´t do it in our academic lives. Since then however, even the formalistic, analytical tradition in which I was brought up, has turned its attention to this most fundamental and basic of feelings, though not always with success. Jeanette Kennett is Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University. She writes on a wide variety of topics, including love and friendship. And she begins this talk at the Melbourne Writers´ Festival with a look at how we would have tackled the subject when I was a student, if we turned our attention to how you justify your love. SONG - Madonna´s Justify My Love Jeanette Kennett: I´m afraid that some philosophers have not done well by the subject, to whit: my favourite example which I discovered a few months ago from a philosopher who shall remain un-named, and I quote: `If X loves Y, then X wants to benefit and be with Y, and he has these wants, or at least some of them, because he believes that Y has some determinate characteristics, V, in virtue of which he thinks it worthwhile to benefit and be with Y. And he regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means to some other end.´ Well, be still my beating heart. One can only imagine Y´s deep delight at a lover´s declaration couched in such terms. Surely the philosophical equivalent of Mr Collin´s proposal to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. It´s enough to send one rushing back to Barbara Cartland for advice on love. Who wouldn´t prefer her silent, square-jawed, passionate heroes to this dry, cautious and distinctly unromantic approach? Such views rather more attractively expressed are common in philosophy however. The idea is that love has reasons as well as providing reasons, that we can explain and justify our loves by pointing to the qualities of the other which elicit love and which it is claimed warrant love. Love then involves in part, a positive evaluation of those qualities. Now this is not so surprising as it might seem at first blush. After all, we´re not usually stuck for an answer when asked what we love about our partners, friends or children, and the answers we give usually involve pointing to their superior virtues or cute or appealing properties, the tilt of her head, her warmth, her adventurous spirit, his subversive sense of humour, and brilliant intellect. Such answers serve not merely to explain but in some sense to justify our loves. They suggest that the beloved deserves to be loved on the basis of those very properties or characteristics. But views like these are subject to an obvious objection. Shakespeare said it, well, maybe first, I don´t know, `Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove: Oh, no! It is an ever-fixed mark. That looks on tempests and is never shaken; it is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come; love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.´ In philosophy too, we find a view akin to this, known somewhat prosaically as the `trading-up objection´. If the quality´s view of love is correct, then it would seem that if I love you for your yellow hair, then when your hair ceases to be yellow, my love too may justifiably cease. If I loved him for this loopy sense of humour and his musical talent then surely under pain of inconsistency, I cannot withhold my love from Tom, who has an even loopier sense of humour and a finer musical talent than Tim. Now you may have met people who actually engage in trading up, certainly you will have encountered them in popular culture. Think of the tycoon or movie star who regularly updates his wife. But I suspect that you along with Shakespeare would doubt that they truly love the objects of their passing attention. It´s part of our very concept of love that it is non-fungible. It´s not a commodity to be traded. The beloved is simply irreplaceable. That´s why past or lost loves may be regretted and remembered in ways that past televisions are not. It seems we always fall short of the mark when we try to explain or justify love in terms of a list of qualities that the beloved contingently possesses. Worse still, those who go looking for love armed with a checklist of essential qualities of the kind to be found in personal advertisements, ´35-40 years old, C of E, non-smoking, professional, sporty, good sense of humour, likes cats, arthouse movies and Sichuan cuisine´ seem unlikely to find it. And the reason is that love is essentially open-ended. In loving someone, we embark on a journey whose path and destination is largely unknown. Love takes us hostage to fortune. It binds us to the wheel and woe of the beloved in ways we could not have anticipated and cannot reject. To be genuinely open to being someone´s close friend or lover, is precisely to admit to yourself that you´re not entirely sure where the journey will take you. And this truism about love is one that the quality´s view has a hard time accounting for. The point becomes even clearer when we shift focus from romantic love to love of one´s children. While we can exhaustively enumerate their lovable qualities, we don´t seriously suppose that our love for our children depends upon their continued possession of those very qualities. If that were the case, parental love would never survive the onset of adolescence and the loss of childish charms. Now of course defenders of the view will argue that their view of love is not nearly so crude nor so rigid as the trading up objection supposes. We needn´t think that a person must be able to articulate all the qualities of the beloved which serve as reasons for love, just that those qualities do indeed justify the love that one has for them. Moreover, it´s quite unlikely that the very particular constellation of qualities possessed by the beloved will be instantiated in just that way by another individual. Nevertheless, qualities matter for love, and some qualities may matter more than others. A Melbourne colleague of mine, Simon Keller, suggests that there are some propertie4s which play a central, but not exclusive role, in romantic love. These are the properties that make us good romantic partners, properties like being a good listener, being caring and sensitive, being generous. Some of these properties will be relational properties. For example, one reason why someone might find you attractive as a romantic partner is that you know exactly how to treat him when he´s in a bad mood. Just which properties make us good romantic partners is going to depend upon what we and our partners are like, so there´s no list of the properties for which every romantic partner should be loved. When we speak of romantic love for properties, we mean especially, but not only, the properties that make someone a good romantic partner in the context of that particular relationship. Once we allow relational properties like this into the picture, trading up doesn´t make much sense. A new person may share or exceed certain of the qualities we love in our existing friends and partners, a winning smile, or musical talent, but they cannot share their relational and historical properties. They cannot, for example, be the person with whom I saw Elvis Costello, or played scrabble till dawn, or celebrated my graduation or mourned my father´s death. Keller also reminds us that romantic love, and perhaps other loves too, ideally involve a mutual responsiveness, so when lovers change, they do not change alone. In embracing love we embrace the prospect of being changed by and through the love relationship. Shakespeare´s claim that love endures through change, can come true after all on this account, since the properties or qualities for which we love someone and which justify our love, are properties that co-evolve through the course of a relationship. My identity is partly shaped by my beloved´s interpretations of me, and in the context of our relationship, I have reason to do things I didn´t have reason to do before. So my taste for opera develops under your influence. I become more confident in cracking jokes, you become less focused on saving the world, and we discover a new passion for rock-climbing. If over time, you become in part my creation, and I become in part yours, then in ending this relationship to take on another, I lose something of myself as well as losing you and that counters any reason we might otherwise have for trading up. This gets close to the mark I think, but still you might want to resist reasons talk in the context of love. For love is surely not confined to rational consenting adults. All this talk about reasons and qualities, this is love´s most striking feature. Love is, after all, an emotion. Love picks us up and sweeps us away. It moves us against reason. Where then is any recognition in philosophy of the essential phenomenology of love? Well a full account of the phenomenology of love is certainly best left to poetry and literature rather than to philosophy. But there are philosophers who hold that love has causes, but not reasons. A colleague of mine, Nick Zangwill from Durham, argues that love is not at all a matter of judgement or evaluation, it´s a primitive, raw and untamed response which bypasses our cognitive and rational selves as evidenced by the fact that children, the mad and the demented, may love as fully and passionately as anyone else. Zangwill puts it well. `Views of love are often criticised for being over-romantic, but I reply that most moral philosophers could stand to be more rather less romantic about this subject, which is, after all, love. We should embrace an unapologetically romantic conception of love. If we cannot have a romantic conception of love, what can we have a romantic conception of?´ Now part of me wants to stand and cheer at this point. Moral philosophers do have an unfortunate tendency to want to tidy up and sanitise love. They claim it for morality by cheerily dismissing any passions that might lead us astray as not being genuine instances of love, and this colonised version of love seems distinctly unromantic, boring and unfaithful to the phenomenon. Nonetheless there´s a problem with the kind of view expressed by Zangwill and not, or not simply, because it claims that love is fundamentally amoral or because it allows that love may lead us into moral danger. If love not only has no reasons but is not concerned with the valuable at all, if it´s just untamed, raw emotion, then there´s no distinction to be drawn between genuine love and various forms of infatuation and obsession. And it´s not at all clear that this is what we want from those who claim to love us, any more than we want to be loved for instantiating the other´s shopping list of desirable characteristics. We don´t, those of us who are grown up at any rate, want to be loved blindly, without any regard for who we actually are. Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National, you´re with The Philosopher´s Zone, and this is Jeanette Kennett from the Australian National University. Jeanette Kennett: One of the pleasures of being loved lies in being seen as we really are; in being psychologically visible to the lover. True love, I contend, involves attentiveness to the beloved. It involves really seeing them. Perceptual accounts of love thus seem to me capable of capturing both the phenomenology of love and the intuition that it´s a response to the value of a particular other. So I want to look at a recent account which I think gets tantalising close to the truth about love. And then pinpoint where I think it goes wrong. The philosopher David Velleman says this: `In my view, appreciation for someone´s value as a person is not incidental to loving him, it´s the evaluative core of love. I do not mean that love is a value judgment, to the effect that the beloved has value, love is rather an appreciative response to the perception of that value, and I mean perception literally; the people we love are the ones whom we succeed in perceiving as persons within some of the human organisms milling about us.´ Love for Velleman is a response to a value that´s universal in persons but that we do not and probably cannot universally and vividly perceive. It´s revealed to us via the contingent and particular features of the beloved that capture our attention, the crooked smile, the turn of the head, but what is revealed is the inner presence, the self. Vellman argues further that love is not to be identified with feelings of sympathy, empathy, liking, benevolence or attraction, or with desires to be near or to benefit the beloved. It´s clear, he thinks, that we can love relatives or ex-spouses whom we do not much like, or wish to be near, or to those whom we stand in more formal relations, whom we wouldn´t presume to try to benefit. What unites all the instances of love of a person in Velleman´s account is the powerful perception of the other as a person like ourselves. This perception arrests our emotional defences against him, leaving us emotionally vulnerable to him. The heart, Velleman says, responds to another seen as having a heart. That is why love deserves to be called a moral emotion. It is in fact the core moral emotion. The emotion, according to Velemen, by which moral sensibilities are first implanted in children. I want to hold on to Velleman´s central idea of love, that love involves the vivid and disarming perception of the others as a self, like us. However I think that there are two points where he goes a little awry. First, Velleman claims love as a moral emotion because it´s revelatory of the special value of persons as selves. And since this is a value we all possess, he argues there could be no conflict in spirit between love and morality. Does this mean that love could not lead us into moral danger? Velleman seems to think that it could not. I think he´s right to warn us as he does, against identifying love with some limited range of emotions, feelings and desires that are commonly associated with it, or with particular types of relationships, including romantic ones, which may be ideally, but are not necessarily attended by love. Co-dependency or obsession, or possessiveness, should be distinguished from love. And so even if for example, romantic or familial ties can lead us morally astray by providing us with reasons and motives to action which conflict with morality, this doesn´t show that it´s love that leads us astray. It´s harder however to draw a moral line between love and the emotions and motives that it unleashes by arresting our emotional defences to the other. On Velleman´s account, it´s an essential part of love that it arrests those defences. `Our emotional responses´, he says, `are indicative of our having really seen the other´. If so, he rather misleadingly characterises the emotions that follow as independent responses that love merely unleashes. Love cannot wash its hands entirely of what it motivates the lover to do. Love can give rise to hate and anger and resentment, and surely we sometimes act wrongly out of that very hate, anger, or resentment. And even the favourable notions that love gives rise to, including empathy, fascination and attraction, may motivate us in ways which conflict with moral requirements. Does this mean there´s a conflict in spirit between love and morality? I agree with Velleman that there´s not, but neither is there a merely practical conflict. If love is indeed the emotion by which human moral sensibilities are implanted and maintained, then it would seem that our very susceptibility to moral demands is yoked to our moral frailty. They are two sides of the same coin and that´s the paradox at the heart of human moral psychology. Second, and more centrally, while I think that Velleman provides a powerful and accurate account of the phenomenology of love, his conception of the value to which we respond in others is surely too narrow, if not downright false. What he thinks we see and respond to in love is a self-aware, autonomous other, a self-governing, fully-fledged adult really. But what then of our love for our infant children, which in my experience is fierce, disarming, and utterly revelatory of the value of all children. The phenomenology of love here is just what Velleman describes, but is it based on a wing and prayer, focused on what will be rather than what is? Is our love for our children based on either an illusion of their personhood, or a misunderstanding of the true value of persons? And what of their love for us, or the love expressed by the elderly demented. I side with Zangwill at this point. The capacities and responses which Velleman thinks are critical to love, attention to the other, appreciation of their value as another self, and the resulting emotional disarmament don´t arrive fully-formed in adults. We find them present, albeit it in simpler forms in infants. Infants attend actively to their parents, initiating and co-ordinating interactions between them. Growing awareness in attentiveness to the other as like men, allied with delight in their presence, sensitivity to their emotions and preferences which we see even in very young children, deserves to be called love. It thus seems to me that the two compelling components of Velleman´s account, the arresting perception of a value distinctive of persons, and the resulting emotional disarmament and vulnerability can be substantially satisfied in our relations with those whose rational autonomy is undeveloped or diminished. And so to some personal moments of arresting awareness. It´s a summer night, my son is two. I wake up to footsteps running through the house and then the slam of the back door. I leap out of bed and follow. In the backyard he´s dancing and whirling under the stars, arms reaching up to them. He looks at me, ecstatic. `I can see stars, I can see the moon!´ he cries. Fast forward. My son is nine. We´ve just received news that his uncle in England has died. We haven´t seen Derek for six years. My husband, whose brother it is, doesn´t know how to feel; they were not close. The rest of us are awkwardly silent. I pick my son up from his friend´s place and deliver the news. When we arrive home he flings himself into his father´s arms and weeps. He gives his father permission to grieve. Fast forward. My son is in his late teens and in a very dark and uncommunicative phase. I phone to tell him that the mother of his oldest friend has cancer. He is silent, and then he says simply, `Tell her. She´s been another mother to me. Tell her.´ And in those few words I can see him again. What is precisely that I saw on these three occasions to which love is a proper response? On Velleman´s account, I was forcibly alerted to the presence of an inner life alongside my own, an arresting awareness of personhood. True enough, but was it at bottom a vivid awareness of my son´s rational autonomy, contingently made available to me on these occasions not via a crooked smile or a tilt of the head, but via his perfectly tuned emotional responses? I don´t believe the qualities I saw and responded to on these occasions were signs and symbols of his rational will. What I saw so vividly in the most general sense was my son as a valuer. Emotional and aesthetic responsiveness is not I submit, merely emblematic of a person´s value in the way that a crooked smile might be; its true aspect of their value such that they would be diminished without it. The rational capacities that we dearly wish for our children out of love, and that we may view with wonder and awe as we trace their development, is not the full story of their value as persons here and now or in the future. I don´t think we make a mistake or fall under an illusion when we love our children or anyone else in the full recognition that these capacities are not present. I´ll finish then with some extracts from Anne Deveson´s moving account in, Tell me I´m here of life with her son Jonathan who suffered from severe schizophrenia and died aged 24 from drug overdose. Jonathan´s mental and physical decline and Deveson´s response starkly reveal the poverty of the quality´s view of love and the limits of any appeal to autonomy as a basis for love. Love for Jonathan exposes Deveson to the full gamut of emotions, many of them violent and negative. She describes terrible rage, resentment, frustration, grief and pity. Deveson tells of the last time she saw her son; in poor health, covered in sores. `He had a large bundle of white pills wrapped in polythene, and he went to take two of them. "Please Jonathan", I begged, "put them away". "Listen", he said, "they gave my father morphine for the pain in his cancer, and it helped him, right? And no-one´s going to tell me not to take stuff for my pain, right?" Later she found him banging his head and crying. `I took him to the couch and held him in my arms and stroked his head and kissed his head, and all the while his body was heaving with sobs while he shuddered out disconnected statements like, "I can´t go on, the pain in my head. Terrible. Terrible. Look at me. Look at what I´ve fucking become. Oh God."´ Jonathan´s capacity for rational self-government was terribly impaired. His life was one of pain, not of flourishing, not the life anyone would wish for their child. If autonomy was the sole source of our value of persons, if it were at the heart of our very capacity to value, then it´s clear Jonathan did not possess the value to which love is an appreciative response. Yet he, Jonathan was surely valuable and his mother made no mistake in loving him. Jonathan was clearly a valuer, and self to himself like us. `Jonathan talked for a long time, and I listened. Then there was silence even though the music was frolicking and the crowds chattering. Jonathan´s phrasing may have been eccentric, but if you spent time with him and felt your way into what he was saying, it was almost always possible to understand him. I looked up, Jonathan was grinning, with his head on one side. He looked quite old and wise. "It was a good try, wasn´t it? Thank you for listening, that was very brave of you. People have to learn that underlying business, the message of everything is love. Which is why society sticks together. You and I have love."´ Alan Saunders: Jeanette Kennett from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University, talking at this year´s Melbourne Writers´ Festival as part of the History of Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand Project, being undertaken by Monash University. The Philosopher´s Zone is produced by Kyla Slaven with technical production by Charlie McCune, and I´m Alan Saunders. The philosophical call for the justification of love at the beginning of the show came of course from Madonna, which gives me an opportunity, belatedly, to wish Madge a Happy 50th. read less
