Author Archives: Amod Lele

How can we return to techno-optimism?

30 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by in Economics, Politics

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The technological innovations of the last fifteen years, from advertising enshittifcation to AI cheating, have largely been a disaster. We are sadly at the point where, as Ted Gioia says, “most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.” I dare say that if we could revert all digital technology to where it was in 2009 – before the invention of the retweet – we’d all be better off.

I am not a hard techno-pessimist; I don’t think I could be. I love technology too much. I remember eras where technology was making our lives better; that was most of my life, the ’80s, the ’90s, and especially the ’00s. There’s no iron law that says technology has to make things worse, things have to enshittify. It’s just that they are currently doing so, have been doing so for over a decade. The question is how we change things back – not reverting back to old technology, but reverting back to a state where new technology serves rather than opposes human interests, where it is progress and not regress.

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The reluctant techno-pessimist

16 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by in Politics, Work

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I’ve loved digital technology as long as I’ve been alive. Growing up in the analog world of the 1980s, I was excited by every bright light and new world opened up by a digital display. I was so excited by what computers could do that, before my family owned a computer, I wrote out the code for a text-based computer game on an electric typewriter. Circa 2000 I would physically go to the Apple Store to watch the live-streamed Steve Jobs keynote introducing new Apple products, even when I wasn’t planning on buying one soon. At a family Christmas event in 2011, I became clear that educational technology was the right non-faculty career choice for me, when I realized everyone else had left the room while my wife’s uncle and I had a heated discussion about operating systems. After all that I doubled down and got a master’s in computer science.

That’s why it pains me deeply to say: I’ve become a techno-pessimist.

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Embrace culture, not race

02 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by in Biology, Politics

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Glenn Loury – who is not exactly a fan of the woke racial agenda – nevertheless hesitates on the idea of racial abolition, for understandable reasons. In a 2022 dialogue with racial abolitionist Kmele Foster, Loury asks for a “sense of racial identity… on behalf of blackness”, on these reasonable grounds:

I don’t just mean dark skin. I mean, descent from enslaved persons in the United States who migrated up the Illinois Central Railroad from Mississippi and Alabama to places like Chicago and Detroit, who fought first to be citizens, then to be equal citizens against travail, and so on. Those stories imparted to one’s children. You descend from people of this sort, you embody the aspirations of prior generations who labored so that you could have this opportunity. The food you eat, the music that you listen to, the style, the way you carry yourself, the musical form that you can create, and art and the literature that I read of people who have struggled with the conditions of blacks in the history of the United States, producing great works of profound human interest but rooted in the African American [experience].

So why eschew all of that? I agree that the racial coloration is itself meaningless, but that experience, those stories, that narrative, that history is not meaningless. It’s something around which a sense of identity could be built. And why would I throw all of that out on behalf of a race abolition program, Kmele?

My response, not far from Foster’s, is: you don’t have to throw out those stories to abolish race. Because those stories do not constitute a people’s race, but rather their culture.

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Abolish race… eventually

19 Sunday May 2024

Posted by in Politics, Social Science

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Many people around the world still have implicit bias, and discrimination on the basis of race, unconscious or otherwise, remains stubbornly real. We’re not going to get rid of that bias and discrimination by ignoring it, as John Roberts advocates; we need to take measures to fix the problems of racism, however difficult it might be to figure out what those measures should be.

But the eventual goal of all those measures should be to end the misleading colonialist social construct of race. It should never have been there.

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In defence of moral laxity

05 Sunday May 2024

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Morality, Shame and Guilt

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Richard Chappell recently had a lovely post asking people to disagree with him. I obliged by expressing my misgivings about what he calls beneficentrism, “The view that promoting the general welfare is deeply important, and should be amongst one’s central life projects.” I argued instead for

a relatively strong partialist account, in which one is obligated to promote the welfare of those one is directly engaged with – co-workers, family, friends, fellow organization members, maybe neighbours – but going beyond that is supererogatory. (Beyond that circle there are harms that one is obligated not to cause, but harm and benefit are not symmetrical.)

I liked Chappell’s main response, which seemed to deemphasize obligation, and I didn’t find much to object to:

we would do well, morally speaking, to dedicate at least 10% of our efforts or resources to doing as much good as possible (via permissible means). Whether this is obligatory or supererogatory doesn’t much interest me. The more important normative claim is just that this is clearly a very worthwhile thing to do, very much better than largely ignoring utilitarian considerations.

But he also linked to a backgrounder on obligation, and there I found much more to disagree with. I agree with Chappell’s most basic point in the backgrounder: that it is “unfortunate” that “Delineating the boundary between ‘permissible’ and ‘impermissible’ actions… has traditionally been seen as the central question of ethics”. But I disagree entirely with his reasoning for this view.

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You don’t have to drop philosophy for activism

21 Sunday Apr 2024

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Philosophy of Language, Politics

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The United States has always been a relentlessly pragmatic place, which doesn’t leave it much room for philosophy. Watching three Republican presidential candidates all take pot-shots at philosophy on the same night was only the most vivid recent example. But it’s not just right-wingers. Today Helen De Cruz discussed a recent article from socialist former philosopher Nathan J. Robinson that wonders whether we should do philosophy at all – whether, in fact, we have an obligation not to do philosophy. He claims, “I definitely feel, though, that I couldn’t have justified spending a career as an academic philosopher” – not because there are so few such jobs out there and you’re taking them from people who want them more, but because the time you spend on such a career is supposedly abdicating a larger political responsibility.

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Listening to non-pragmatists

07 Sunday Apr 2024

Posted by in Confucianism, Deity, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Politics

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I’ll close my discussion of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In by noting how its radical pragmatism undermines itself in practice – which, for pragmatists, is the place that matters. Seth wants to listen to political foes and reach political understanding, but his prgamatism reaches so deep that it doesn’t allow him to do that – given how many such foes would be conservative Christians and Muslims.

At the heart of most monotheistic thought is the idea that God is the true source of all value, the proper end and meaning of our lives. That view is directly antithetical to the one Seth advocates, in which “whenever we ask ‘what’s the meaning of “X?”‘, we are really asking, ‘what is the significance of “X” for maintaining and enhancing our lives.'” (107) When faced with 2500 years’ worth of monotheistic thought that asserts the contrary, he doubles down by tossing it all aside in this surprisingly flippant quip:

Things do not have meanings in themselves but are only meaningful in terms of their relevance to living beings. Since, so far as we know, there is nothing outside of life for life to be relevant to, the question is largely meaningless. If one believes in God, one can ask God what life means for him but until one gets to ask Him directly one would only be guessing. (108)

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In defence of ultimate meaning and truth

24 Sunday Mar 2024

Posted by in Aesthetics, Buddhism, Epistemology, Flourishing, Foundations of Ethics, Greek and Roman Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, Self, Truth

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While the cover of Seth Zuihō Segall’s The House We Live In claims the book draws its account primarily from Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius, the deeper, animating influence turns out to be pragmatism. There’s no problem with taking inspiration from pragmatism as such; the problem is that Seth’s pragmatism is so relentless and extreme that it rules out of court all opinions that differ from it – including, it turns out, those of Aristotle, the Buddha and Confucius.

The excessive pragmatism in question is expressed above all in this sentence: “whenever we ask ‘what’s the meaning of “X?”‘, we are really asking, ‘what is the significance of “X” for maintaining and enhancing our lives.'” (107) This pragmatic claim is simply not true. Some of us are really asking the latter question when we ask the former. Seth would like it to be the case that all of us are asking the latter question. But it’s not.

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The importance of deep differences

10 Sunday Mar 2024

Posted by in Buddhism, Friends, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Monasticism, Stoicism

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In thinking further about Seth Segall’s The House We Live In: Virtue, Wisdom and Pluralism, I want to turn from reviewing the book itself, whose broad approach I generally agree with, to exploring my major points of philosophical difference with it. I think this is a particularly important approach here because the book’s biggest weakness is its refusal to go down to deep philosophical differences, differences in questions of ultimate value, meaning, truth, reality. Such an approach leaves Seth in no position to understand his political opponents, many of whom are going to be conservative Christians (in the US) or conservative Muslims (worldwide). I don’t think you can reach a full mutual understanding with them unless you understand their differences from you at this very deep, foundational level.

For when we look at Seth’s engagement with monotheistic thought – the thought that underlies those conservative Christian or Muslim views – it turns out to be unfortunately superficial. They get their most extensive treatment on pp 133-7, in which the wide range of thinkers quoted includes Francis of Assisi, Rabbi Hillel and Albert Schweitzer. But notice how the section characterizes the work done by its quotations:

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