[TRINPsite, 59.02.6-60.51.5, mvvm.net/En/MNI/BoF4-6.txt ] [Plain text file of section files at www.trinp.org/MNI/BoF/4/(*/)*.HTM to 6/(*/)*.HTM. Additions and revisions in the original *.HTM files have been incorporated until 59.02.6, with the exception of paragraph 4.1.1.1 (a prose poem), which was updated on 60.51.5. This file is not part of the digital Model, as it may not be up to date and does not contain special symbols and fonts.] MODEL OF NEUTRAL-INCLUSIVITY by Vinsent Nandi, 41 aSWW BOOK OF FUNDAMENTALS, PART II [chapters 4-6] 4 NEUTRAL-INCLUSIVITY, TRUTH AND PERSONHOOD 4.1 NEUTRAL-INCLUSIVITY 4.1.1 THE NEW MODEL OF HARMONY AND UNITY 4.1.1.1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE CAUSE OF NEUTRAL-INCLUSIVITY We must discriminate between neutralness and unneutralness, and recognize the supreme value of neutrality; between the unneutralness which is nanapolar, that is, neutral-directed, and that which is not. We must discriminate between inclusiveness and exclusiveness, and recognize the value of inclusivity. Let every person distinguish the neutral and inclusive attitude from the extreme and exclusive attitude, from the unneutral and exclusive attitude. And let every person realize that these two ways of thinking, these two ways of feeling and behaving, are fundamentally incompatible. Those who know this are aware of the active side of the exclusive attitude: preferential treatment or privileges, and exclusion or subordination, on the basis of family ties or race, of people's denominational persuasion, of language, political creed, wealth or class, of age, sex or sexual orientation, or on the basis of any other factor irrelevant to the ultimate values. And those who know this are aware of the sentimental side of the exclusive attitude: inhibition, compulsion and alienation, from nature and what is natural in our kind, from groups of a different culture or mind, if not from the immutable norms themselves. We adherents shall advance the neutral or neutral-directed in the world, where it echoes "Down with extremism!"; the inclusive in ourselves and in others, while it echoes "Down with exclusivism!". We shall not discriminate but to further the neutral and the inclusive, the cause of neutral-inclusivity. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- As noted before, it is often hard to tell protoneutralist ideas or systems of thought apart from protorelevantist ones. Similarly, it will often be hard or impossible to distinguish neutralism from inclusive relevantism. The foundation of neutralism is a relevantist one in that the norm of neutrality has been defined as "the relevantist interpretation of the principle of neutrality"; the foundation of inclusivism is a neutralist one in that the norm of inclusivity has been defined as "the neutralist interpretation of the principle of relevance". At this point it must be admitted that our reasoning has been circular. But the circle we have drawn is so all-embracing that no further justification is needed, or that we cannot conceive of any alternative belief or proposal which would be more plausible. Neutralism is concerned with the catenical dimension of thought, and inclusivism with the relevancy-conditional dimension of it. Neither neutralism nor inclusivism covers the truth-conditional aspect of thought as such, let alone metadoctrinal and purely propositional aspects of it. When neutralism-inclusivism is for us the most plausible (or least implausible) normative system of disciplinary thought, it is therefore for us the most plausible catenical and relevancy-conditional normative system of disciplinary thought. Like protoneutralist conceptions and theories, neutralism pictures for us a model of harmony, but whereas this new model is catenical, protoneutralist conceptions and theories build on antonymical metaphysics; like protorelevantist conceptions and theories inclusivism pictures for us a model of unity, but whereas this new model is now relevancy-conditional, protorelevantist conceptions and theories build on inconsistent and obscure premises. The idea of a perfect world of harmony and unity is perhaps as old as thought itself. As we have seen in the previous chapter, even antineutralist thinkers have made their strife of opposites issue in harmony and unity in the end. Hence what is new about the neutralist-inclusivist model is not the idea of harmony and unity as perfect things but, firstly, the catenical interpretation of harmony and the relevancy-conditional interpretation of unity; and secondly, the special interplay between the neutralist theory of 'harmony' and the inclusivist theory of 'unity'. Because of the intimate connection which exists in our model between the norm of neutrality and the norm of inclusivity, or between the notion of neutrality and the notion of inclusivity, it is reasonable to speak of "one notion of neutral-inclusivity". It is this catenical, relevancy-conditional concept which replaces all traditional and ancient concepts of harmony and unity. The norm of neutrality is a ground-world norm; the principle of neutrality a ground-world principle. It is when this norm or principle is applied to the making of distinctions that it coincides with the norm of inclusivity, for no distinction shall be made so that things on the one side of a divide are undervalued and those on the other side overvalued. The norm of inclusivity itself is the ground-world application of the principle of relevance. Via this principle we enter propositional reality. Here propositional principles, or norms of thought, take over, like the principles of truth, coherence and parsimony. Neutrality and inclusivity are connected in at least two fundamentally different ways. One way is thru the interpretation of the respective principles. With regard to the principle of discriminational relevance this means that equal treatment in a literal sense needs no justification, and that the burden of proof is with someone who claims that a distinction is relevant. Another way is thru the focus of relevancy, which always has to be a neutralist value. This value may be a perfective one, like equality, or an instrumental or corrective one, like the minimization of unhappiness or a maximum situational improvement in neutralist terms. Everyday goals like the best quality of work to be done, or the greatest possible safety to be achieved, should fit in with this scheme, for example, because they minimize (the chance of) unhappiness or because they contribute to the establishment of optimum conditions for good health. Neutral-inclusivity requires that such goals always serve neutrality in the end, however remote the position of these goals may be with respect to that ultimate, perfective value. 4.1.2 THE NON-METADOCTRINAL PRINCIPLES OF ONE DOCTRINE It is not only reasonable to speak of "one notion of neutral-inclusivity", it is also evident that there is no separate doctrine of neutrality besides a separate doctrine of inclusivity. In other words: ours is one doctrine of neutral-inclusivity. A convenient and significant abbreviation for this doctrine is DNI. The norm of neutrality and the norm of inclusivity are the paradigmatic or immutable norms of the DNI; paradigmatic in that they together wholly determine our denominational paradigm or potential paradigm, and immutable in that they are not capable or susceptible of replacement or great change without ruining the entire doctrine itself. They are the sole, purely ground-world norms or principles, and as such form the kernel of our doctrine. Of the principles which are not purely nonpropositional, the metadoctrinal one underlying the right to personhood is no part of the DNI, altho it is part of our denominational system of disciplinary thought (and denominational 'doctrine' in a wider sense). The principles of the DNI are non-metadoctrinal, that is, doctrinal as opposed to metadoctrinal. The sole principle in addition to those of catenated neutrality and of discriminational relevance, which is not purely propositional and part of the DNI, is the principle of truth. If we confine ourselves to the nonpropositional realm and conceive of neutral-inclusivity as one perfective value, the DNI is ultimately a monistic ground-world doctrine. On the surface it may seem rather pluralistic with values like nondiscrimination, beneficence, symmetry, equality, nanhonore, truth and coherence. But firstly, values like truth and coherence are not ground-world values; and secondly, we have seen how the norm of neutrality starts from the normative superiority of a secondary predicate. By taking a secondary predicate like neutralness as the value to be pursued, many primary values of different dimensions can be subsumed under one supervalue. Given the intimate connection between neutrality and inclusivity, neutral-inclusivism offers therefore a monistic view of nonpropositional reality, altho not the monistic view of a system in which a number of old and/or new theories are eclectically soldered together. It is the one value of neutral-inclusivity itself which encompasses an indefinite number of values of indefinitely many different dimensions. Neutral-inclusivity transcends all these dimensions. Those who have claimed that a complete normative doctrine must always be pluralistic, while thinking of values supposedly being of the same category, like happiness, justice or equality, freedom and truth, have made a number of mistakes. Firstly, they have not differentiated doctrinal and metadoctrinal values such as freedom in a sense. Secondly, they have not differentiated nonpropositional and propositional values such as truth. Thirdly, they have not realized that values which are of a different dimension can still be subsumed under one supervalue if the former ones belong to the primary domain, and the latter one to the secondary domain. And fourthly, they have confused perfective values on the one hand and instrumental or corrective values on the other. Neutral-inclusivism proves that a ground-world doctrine can be monistic without suffering from the serious flaws, fallacies and fancies of monistic beliefs like utilitarianism, libertarianism, agapism and monotheism. Tho our denominational ideology is not monistic on the whole, what is to be added to neutral-inclusivism is a principle of truth which is (partially) propositional; and what is in turn to be added to the DNI is a principle of personhood which is metadoctrinal. The principle of truth is propositional insofar as it governs the relationship between the ground-world and propositional reality. Unlike the norm of inclusivity and the norm of neutrality it is not paradigmatic since most, if not all, lovers of disciplinary thought pay lip-service to some kind of truth or principle of truth. (Adherents of certain monotheist ideologies may thus call their supreme deity "Truth"; and adherents of the same or other ideologies may thus call their supreme newspaper "Truth".) The recognition of truth as a value does not distinguish the DNI from exclusivist and extremist doctrines, yet what does distinguish it from those doctrines is the neutral-inclusivist, non-supernaturalist interpretation of truth. It has already been shown, and will be shown again, at many places in this Model how much the supernaturalist assault on truth, which has been going on for thousands of years, deviates from the neutral-inclusivist position on this value. And this even tho truth in itself is neither neutral nor inclusive. 4.2 TRUTH IN A SOCIAL PERSPECTIVE 4.2.1 TRUE STATEMENTS, PROMISES AND THREATS Typical of the doctrine of neutral-inclusivity is not only the non-supernaturalist interpretation of truth but also its application to both promises and threats. Traditionally ethical theorists treat the duty not to lie, or the duty to tell the truth, and the duty to keep one's promises as separate, independent duties. Deontologists, for instance, will recognize these duties but seldom or never a duty to make good one's threat. While they hate to get (too much) involved in consequences, this is just another indication that the consequences of acts they prescribe or forbid may already be implicit in the descriptions or formulations of those acts. (Compare the tendency not to call an utterance "a promise" when the bad consequences of doing something else than 'foretold' are, or would be, small or negligible; that is, the bad consequences with respect to people's, or other people's, happiness or well-being.) How can the misleading 'intuition' to recognize a duty to keep one's promises and not to recognize a duty to make good one's threats --even not a prima facie one-- be explained? The reason cannot lie in what promises and threats have in common, namely that they refer to the future, usually to something the person promising or threatening will or will not do if a certain state of affairs does or does not hold. The reason must lie in what distinguishes promises from threats. And this is, first and foremost, that what a person intends to do in a promise is something of which 'e supposes that the person to whom 'e promises it, likes or prefers it, or something that the promiser supposes to be good or better for that person. On the other hand, what a person intends to do in a threat is something of which 'e supposes that the person whom 'e threatens does not like or prefer it, or something which the threatener supposes to be bad or not as good for that person. The difference between promises and threats is therefore not a question of truth but of well-being, beneficence or preference. Nonetheless, granted that there is a duty to keep one's promises which cannot be entirely derived from the duty to be beneficent, or which is to be more than a derivative utilitarian duty --as deontologists will claim with us-- and granted that factual-modal morality or passed-on intuition cannot be accepted as an argument per se, this duty to keep one's promises must ensue from the general duty to tell the truth. For this latter duty does not only concern the relationship between what a person says now and the past or present but also that between what 'e says now and what 'e will do or not do 'imself in the future. (The way certain people used to, or still, react to the difference between aggrandizemental discrimination and abnegational discrimination can be similarly explained: relevancy-conditionally there is not any difference between the two, just as there is truth-conditionally no difference between keeping one's promise and carrying out a threat. The difference lies in eudaimonistic considerations. Aggrandizemental discrimination is supposed to make someone happy or to serve 'er well-being, whereas abnegational discrimination is supposed to make someone unhappy or to be unfavorable to 'im. Those who condemn the abnegational but not the aggrandizemental manifestations of discrimination thus completely neglect what is essential to discrimination, namely the relevancy-conditional aspect. Moreover, also here the deontologists among them turn out to be secretive consequentialists of the eudaimonist brand in their intuitive selection of so-called 'ultimate' or 'intrinsic' duties.) From the point of view of truth it just does not matter at all whether the relationship between what one says now, and what one will do or not do in the future is a relationship with a state of affairs which is liked or not liked, preferred or not preferred, by the person to whom it was said. Therefore, from the point of view of truth proper there is not only a duty to keep one's promise but also a duty to make good one's threat. Both these duties are intrinsic (in our sense of doctrinal but also in the deontological sense of perfective or noninstrumental); neither one is ultimate, however. Ultimate is the duty to tell the truth, or not to lie, in the widest sense possible. Yet, this is not to say that the principle of truth is the sole principle underlying the duty to keep one's promise: the principle of beneficence is certainly part of this duty as well. In questions of promise-keeping truth and beneficence support each other almost by definition. (Exceptions are cases in which the total utility would decrease by keeping a promise.) This is quite unlike the nature of threats: here telling the truth, or having told the truth, and beneficence tend to pull in opposite directions. That is the very reason why traditional thinkers have (almost?) never had an instinctive urge to defend a duty to make good one's threat. As we ourselves feel bound not to base our normative doctrine on conventional, arbitrary or incoherent intuitions, we must conclude that a consistent interpretation of the principle of truth requires us to adopt the existence of a prima facie, derivative duty to make good one's threat even tho there is at the same time a derivative duty of beneficence according to which one should not do things which harm people or sentient beings. Keeping one's promise is a nice thing to do, and both deontological and consequentialist theorists have probably found a duty such as carrying out one's threat a task too unpalatable for their taste. But if an act of making good one's threat is (believed to be) disagreeable, it is not disagreeable as an act in which an utterance is made true but as an act which has bad effects with respect to a purely nonpropositional value (particularly the minimization of unhappiness). The implication of our position is therefore not so much threaten and carry out your threat but rather never threaten, unless you are willing and able to stand the effects. The recognition of a prima facie duty to make good threats should not contribute to an increase of maleficent acts by people who have been threatening others with such acts; instead, this recognition should be conducive to a decrease in the number of threats, and preferably to their total extinction. One reason that the DNI does not allow its adherents to edify children or people by indoctrination and commination is precisely that its respect for truth also extends to threats, inclusive of comminations, whether godly or not. Only theodemonical or other ideologies for which truth is nothing else than a believer's duty not to lie or a believer's duty not to break a promise can promise anything and everything, and can threaten people with anything or everything, without bothering about the question whether those promises and those threats will certainly or probably come true. Not only should we not threaten someone, unless we are willing and able to create the unpleasant condition and to stand the consequences, we should not promise anything either, unless we are willing and able to create the pleasant condition and to stand the consequences too. In both cases the good consequences should on the whole outweigh the bad ones. Even when a threat is carried out which harms the person who has been threatened, the action in question should have more good than bad consequences, especially when taking into consideration the preventive effects of such an action. Consequences in themselves, however, are not part of the truth-conditional aspect of keeping a promise or carrying out a threat. The principle of truth is not a consequentialist principle even tho we look upon truth as a value. With respect to keeping a promise and making good a threat it is past-regarding and noncausal, and could therefore be called "antecedentialist". Like consequentialist principles the principle of truth is future-regarding with respect to statements about the future, but the relationship concerned is now one of correspondence between a proposition and a lower-level reality and not one of causality as in consequentialism. The principle of truth is present-regarding and noncausal with respect to statements about the present, and also past-regarding and noncausal with respect to statements about the past. This order is reversed for promises and threats since the utterance is there in the past and the reality it is about, schematically speaking, in the present. If one promises something, one should keep one's promise; and if one threatens with something, one should carry out one's threat from the perspective of truth; that is, other things being equal. However, the principle of truth does not require people to promise something to others, or to threaten others with something, by any manner of means. In the same way it does not require people to say something or to believe something. It is only if one says or believes something that it should be true. Instead of telling and believing in what is far-fetched or irrelevantly unneutral, we should have the courage to acknowledge that there are things beyond, or still beyond, our ken. True humility bows to verity and silence rather than to comforting or threatening falsehoods. 4.2.2 PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND FAITHFULNESS There is much which can, and partially has already, been said about personal relationships from the standpoint of the norm of inclusivity and the norm of neutrality. Personal relationships must, then, be understood as denoting relationships with people one knows, particularly friendships, whether with relatives or nonrelatives, neighbors or nonneighbors. Being friends adds to personal relationships a dimension of more or less intensely liking each other and of more or less regularly being together or voluntarily doing things together. Friendship could be distinguished from love in that the intensity of liking, or of emotional dependence, is much higher in the case of love, but there is no need to do so: if people who like each other very much are 'friends', this includes 'lovers'. Whether one speaks of "a lover", "mate", "chum", "comrade", "friendly neighbor" or "beloved relative", they all are friends with whom one enjoys being together at certain times (often or always). This may or may not include sharing a household, having sexual or physical contacts with each other, and/or having one or more children in common. The most drastic institutionalization of personal relationships in religious and religiogenic societies is the institution of wedlock. It is a standard contract drawn up by a religious organization or state in which exclusively two people at a time of exclusively different gender who are not close relatives, are theoretically joined together for life. Under the rules of such a contract, the two partners are traditionally seldom or never united on equal terms: the two sexes have different, that is, unequal and exclusive, rights and responsibilities. To those who have entered the institution, special advantages are often offered in the sphere of, for example, social and parental status, hereditary rights, taxation and accomodation, often regardless of whether the married people concerned look after minors or not. Since wedlock only covers one type of human relationships in which the parties are practically always unequal as well, and since it offers advantages from outside the relationship proper of which other personal relationships are deprived, it must be looked upon as an institution which in its traditional form has always violated sexual inclusivity and interpersonal equality. Because of a preferential treatment of the relationship of those who are married on a religious or religiogenic basis, other personal relationships are, relatively speaking, made unfavorable. The first relationships to be prevented from developing optimally are, then, friendships of two or more people which do not comply with the prerequisites of the established marriage contract. A clear example is a racist or ethnocentrist country in which persons of a different race or ethnicity are not allowed to marry or even to have sexual contacts. But personal relationships are not only made unfavorable by illegalizing them or by depriving them of matrimonial equality, they can also be made unfavorable by more or less hidden prejudices and customs. Thus it may be legally possible to marry somebody of a different ethnic group, of a different social class or of a different political party, yet the social pressure not to get involved in such a relationship may be so strong that this is felt as a serious restraint. And prejudices are not only found in opinions; they are also found in expectations. The most notorious of these expectations are what 'people (parents, neighbors, friends or relatives) might think of it'. It is under such circumstances that factors such as ethnicity, class, ideological belief, gender, job, education, and so on, were, or still are, used to break off friendships or to harass human beings who love or like each other. Relationships are equal, regardless of whether the persons involved belong, say, to the same race, family, gender, class, or age, or to a different race, family, gender, class or age, so long as these persons want the relationship and are mature enough to show decision in their refusals or consents. Granted that the people involved agree among themselves and respect the personal rights of others, no system of relationships of more than two human beings, for example, of one man and two women, or of one woman and two men, is inferior to relationships of only two human beings. Hence, a law which allows a man to be wedded to several women at once (or a custom which allows a man to have a 'mistress' in addition to his wife), and not a woman to be wedded to several men at once (or to have a 'mister' in addition to her husband), is nothing else than an illegitimate hybrid of sexual and matrimonial exclusivism. Sexual relationships of which children are born definitely demand special attention. In fact a common offspring is the most concrete confirmation of a relationship between human or other sexual beings. Because children are not capable of providing for their own needs of safety, food and shelter, mature beings are required to care for them. However, such does not mean that children need exclusively or necessarily to be brought up by their biological parents, particularly not in a culture that no longer discriminates between so-called 'legitimate children', children born out of wedlock and step-children, and particularly not in a culture where the material 'ties of blood' are no mental 'ties of conduct', that is, reasons for exlusiveness or exclusion, anymore. But when there is no good alternative, the procreators have the first responsibility for the satisfaction of the children's needs. In the relationship of one man and one woman both are equally responsible; in general, all partners have this responsibility together, or may have this responsibility instead of (exclusively) the biological parent or parents. As soon as the child is no longer helpless and shows decision on its own, this responsibility terminates. Until this stage is reached the norm of well-being requires that a child shall not be left to its fate. The institution of wedlock can be stripped of exclusivisms and impingements of the right to personhood by incorporating it into an inclusive system of personal contracts. Such a system is to be inclusive in that it shall not make the formalization of any kind of personal relationship impossible: any group of two or more persons (male, female, both or neither) has the right to enter into any personal contract, the conditions being determined by the partners of that contract themselves. Such an agreement may specify the terms on which two or more people decide to live together, the terms defining the social aspects of their sexuality towards each other and towards outsiders, the pecuniary and fiscal terms, and possibly also the terms regulating the responsibility for children entering into the relationship. The participants should also determine themselves for how long the contract will be valid and what will be the penalty (if any) for breaking it. The binding nature of a family contract may automatically come to an end, for instance, when the last child reaches the state of maturity (as defined in advance). Characteristic of an inclusive system of contracts is the personal consent of the people involved: every decision to which the contract applies directly has to be unanimous, inclusive of the decision to give a mandate to one or more particular persons. The situation in exclusivist countries where a man can only marry one woman, or can marry several women in different wedding ceremonies without being legally bound by the consent of his other wife or wives, is far different from the situation where a person can have a formalized relationship with one or more other persons who together voluntarily agree to enter into such a relationship. The prerequisite that the acceptance of new partners has the unanimous consent of all who are bound by the contract indicates that it formalizes a personal relationship and not just membership of a social group like an association or a union. A contract is not simply an agreement between two or more persons (or parties) but a binding agreement. If it were merely a useful agreement, people could forget about it as soon as it would turn out not to be useful anymore. Similarly, if it solely served neutral-inclusivity, it would not be wrong in any way to leave the contract for what it is as soon as breaking the contract served neutral-inclusivity better. What makes a contract binding (in the normative sense) is what makes a promise or a threat binding in the first place, namely the principle of truth. It is this principle which demands that we keep our promises and observe our contractual duties. This does not mean that we actually must do, or refrain from doing, certain things in the future, because every promise or contract makes an im- or ex-plicit use of exceptive clauses. In general this is the condition that one shall do, or refrain from doing, something, unless the other person or persons concerned give permission to do or not to do this (because it is the other party's preference which counts in a promise). If such an exceptive clause were not somehow part of the promise or contract, one would still violate the principle of truth even tho one's partner(s) would not mind if one did not do what one had promised. Not doing what one has promised would, then, still be wrong from a truth-conditional point of view, whereas it is not actually wrong with the proviso that one can be relieved by someone else of one's promisory or contractual duty if there are good reasons for not doing what was promised. (Dependent on the weight attached to the proviso, it may remain prima facie wrong from the purely truth-conditional point of view nevertheless.) To stick to one's promises and to observe what one has agreed upon in a personal relationship, whether by means of a contract or not, is what is called "faithfulness". Faithfulness is a truth-conditional normative concept and has no bearing on the content of a contract or on what has been promised. What has been promised may be wrong from the perspective of a neutral-inclusive subnorm, yet to keep one's promise is always right in terms of the principle of truth. Exclusivist moralists love confusing these things. Equating moral with normative in matters of sexuality they are obsessed with a negative, sexual conception of faithfulness in which partner relations must be, and remain, monogamous or exclusive under all circumstances. For them faithful merely means not having or having had intercourse with anyone else, if not not having intercourse with anyone at all (for the relationship may be, or have become, devoid of any erotic significance). Such a negative conception of faithfulness is quite different from the positive one which demands of the people concerned that they keep their relationship going, also (and perhaps primarily) in the erotic respect (provided that it was meant to have an erotic component). Positive faithfulness does not possessively and jealously preclude relations or contacts with others, unless it has been promised not to get involved in such relations, or not to have such contacts. Thus faithfulness is not firmness in adherence to the doxastic values of supernaturalist, exclusivist or extremist ideologies; faithfulness is firmness in adherence to agreements with other people, whatever the contents of those agreements might be. 4.3 TRUTH AND NEUTRAL-INCLUSIVITY 4.3.1 TRUTH AND RELEVANCE IN OBJECTIVITY Judgments in which an individual gives free play to 'er own way of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching things in the outside world are founded upon mere feelings rather than upon interpersonal considerations and are thus subjective. While associating and processing the sensory reactions in the body's parts and organs, the feelings developing in such an individual are feelings of love or liking, of anger, hate or disliking. 'E may anticipate danger and pain, possibly accompanied by fear; or protection and pleasure, possibly accompanied by a feeling of security. The same stimulus may induce love in one individual and hate in another; or it may induce a feeling of security in the former individual and fear in the latter one. Things which are related for the one, because 'e is used to associate them while liking or disliking them all, are completely unrelated for the other, because 'e is not used to associate them. Even when people's (or their bodies') feelings are not opposed, they can still differ considerably in intensity: what induces mere liking in A may induce a deeply felt love in B; or what induces mere disliking in C may induce a deeply felt hatred in D. This lack of interindividual (or 'interpersonal', or 'intersubjective') continuity is precisely what characterizes subjectivity. It is not utterances in which a person gives free rein to 'er own feelings which are subjective in that they are, or could be, illusory. When someone says that 'e 'imself likes or dislikes a certain sight or smell, for instance, there is not any reason to assume that what 'e says would not be true. And if 'e also says it to explain or justify 'er own, personal behavior, there is not any reason to assume that 'er feelings would not be relevant in that context. When we speak of "judgments", however, we do not refer to mere utterances but to opinions, assertions or formal utterances. To say that one likes a certain type of fruit may be true and relevant, but it could hardly be termed "a judgment". The subjectivity of such an utterance is not the kind of subjectivity to be concerned about, for the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity just does not act a part for utterances of which the scope is purely individual. Even when the scope of an utterance is not purely individual, the utterance may still be subjective when it applies to each individual separately. For example, we all like babanas stands for a conjunction of the type A likes bananas and B likes bananas and ... . However, bananas taste good or bananas are healthy are not mere utterances but judgments of a scope which is not purely individual, and it is such judgments which have to be objective, that is, interindividually reliable. To be reliable they cannot be exclusively based on the speaker or writer's own feelings or experiences, because other people's feelings and experiences may have a different intensity, or may even be opposed. One particular human being's or group of human beings' sensory reactions does not establish a nonpersonal or supra-individual fact. To obtain an objective judgment the same stimulus has to evoke the same reaction in all who can sense this stimulus. This is not to say that the universal frame of reference (of all individuals which can sense a certain kind of stimulus) could not be immeasurably large and even unknown so far as other planets or galaxies are concerned. In practise human beings are forced to confine themselves to a relatively small frame of reference. This does not at all have to discredit a judgment so long as it is realized and expressed that the judgment in question is solely valid for the same frame of reference. Within such a smaller frame, judgments can still be interindividually reliable. To be an objective statement, bananas are healthy, for instance, must at least specify for what species and age-groups they are healthy and under what conditions (such as the number to be eaten in a certain period). Subjectivity is wrong when it involves utterances or ideas which are perhaps reliable and justifiable for one individual or for one particular group of individuals, but which are considered binding, or demanded to be binding, for other individuals as well, or for individuals not belonging to that particular group. There is a confusion of scopes: the scope of the judgment's reliability and justifiability is different from that of its application. In other words, the judgment is not relevant in the practical context concerned. To be objective a judgment has to be both true and relevant in the context in which it is applied. Objectivity is therefore not simply a matter of being intersubjectively observable, verifiable or falsifiable. Or, if it is, such would not be a reason to regard it as normatively superior to subjectivity. It is only normatively superior when it involves truth instead of falsehood, and relevance instead of irrelevance. Judgments are not only objective because they are reliable for the same framework as the one in which they are used, they can also be objective when the framework in which they are used is much bigger. This is the case when the basis of the judgment is restricted to the past and the present, but when there is no reason to assume that it will not be true in the future as well. It is an objective view (held true by scientists) to believe that apples will continue to fall off trees in the future, altho this cannot now be observed, and altho this cannot now be verified or falsified. It would even be arbitrary or 'subjective' to believe that apples did and do solely happen to fall off trees in the past or present (unless it can be made plausible that human civilization is not capable of improving drastically and will eventually lead to the destruction of a great part or of all life on Earth, inclusive of apple trees). Strictly speaking, it can indeed not be proved that ground-world events which were 'always' conjoined, or 'always' succeeded each other in the past, will continue to be conjoined or will continue to succeed each other in the future. But if two of such events are not believed to be conjoined or to succeed each other anymore in the future, the onus is on the one who does not assume that the conjunction or the succession will remain unaltered, to prove that such a discontinuity is to be expected. For the one who must show that the assumption of discontinuity (such as that the Sun will not rise anymore tomorrow) is more plausible than the assumption of sameness or continuity (that the Sun will rise as usual tomorrow), it is imperative to bring forward relevant factors overlooked before or relevant recent changes. The objective attitude in the factual or modal spheres can and must be extended to the normative sphere. In this sphere it cannot be proved either that, for example, people are 'equal', that is, should be treated in the same way in similar situations. But if two persons are not believed to be equal, the onus is on the one who does not assume equality between people to prove that a different treatment of persons in similar situations is relevant. This is what both the norm of inclusivity and the norm of interpersonal equality demand from us. In this respect, too, normative theories like inclusivism and relevantist egalitarianism turn out to be not more and not less objective than factual-modal ones like the theory on cause and effect. 4.3.2 TRUTH AND NEUTRALITY IN EXPECTATIONS People's behavior does not have to be goal-directed according to the norm of neutrality, but if it is goal-directed the goal aimed at should ultimately be a neutral one. It has quite commonly been pointed out that people's (or 'human') behavior is in actual fact 'mostly goal-directed'. This kind of behavior is then described as "rational", because it involves the choice of the best means available for attaining the goal in question. Correct tho this description may be, it does not follow that a person who does not choose the best means available, for example, because this violates someone else's right to personhood, would behave 'irrationally'. Or, if one wants to call such behavior "irrational", it does not follow that a person would always have to behave 'rationally'. Yet, since we are in the context of this division primarily interested in doctrinal considerations, we should not only choose neutral-inclusive objectives, but also behave rationally with respect to these objectives. On this teleological scheme the means-end concept of rational behavior is, indeed, a useful one. When a decision maker can predict the outcome of an action, the situation is not problematic. A person who thus acts under certainty should choose the right goal (a neutral or nanapolar one) and make sure that 'er prediction is a true one, that is, corresponds with reality. But only under ideal circumstances can a person be entirely sure about the state of affairs 'er action will bring about. In actual fact a person (more) often (than not) acts under risk and under uncertainty. In the case of risk 'e knows at least the objective probabilities of the possible outcomes; in the case of uncertainty even these objective probabilities will not all be known to 'im. When objective probabilities are not known and not given, mere adherence to the principle of truth will not help. The decision maker is then forced to work with 'subjective' probabilities or expectations. (Subjective is used here in the sense of nonepistemic doxastic and expectation in the standard sense, not in the mathematical sense of product of the probability that an event will occur and the amount to be received if it does occur.) If a decision maker has a goal in mind, and if not all outcomes are known to 'im, 'e will have to make comparisons, also intra- and inter-personal ones. Even abstaining from every action presupposes that this would serve the goal in question at least as good as any positive action. There is nothing dramatic about this situation: everyone performs such mental operations all the time, altho definitely not always to serve a neutral or nanapolar end. The function of the theory dealing with the problems and principles of decision-making, decision theory, is not to tell us what end we ought to choose. Its function is merely to formulate decision rules telling us what to do given a certain end. Hence, so far as these ends are concerned decision theory is neither neutralistic nor antineutralistic. Therefore it is even more remarkable that one of the classical principles of decision theory is a neutralist one, namely the principle of indifference, also labeled "the rule for choice under uncertainty" or "the principle of insufficient reason". On this principle one should assign equal probabilities to all possibilities in a situation of complete ignorance, if one has to employ probabilities at all. Altho the principle of indifference does not prescribe that a person must employ 'subjective' probabilities, the rational decision maker can usually not help acting as if 'e does use them. This, at least, is what one school of decision theory teaches. The theorists of this school propose expected-utility maximization as decision rule under uncertainty. Taken literally, the formulation of the end to be pursued in terms of 'maximum utility' is extremist and inconsistent with the neutralist character of the principle of indifference. On our terms, the decision rule concerned should be a rule of expected neutralization, but this reformulation has little or no impact on the mathematical enterprise itself. It only underscores that those who accept the principle of indifference in decision theory should also accept neutralization as an ultimate corrective value instead of maximization or, for that matter, minimization. Even when restricting themselves to means-end rationality and even when accepting the same goal or goals, decision theorists may still disagree about what a rational decision maker is actually supposed to do. For the principle of indifference has its competitors too. And if this principle were wrong, it would not benefit neutrality in the end, if we tried to achieve a neutral or nanapolar goal by assigning equal probabilities to the possibilities in question (assuming that they are completely unknown to the decision maker). One alternative principle proposed is the maximin principle. According to this principle every action or policy must be evaluated in terms of the worst possibility which can occur by choosing this action or policy, and it is this worst possiblity which must then be maximized. It has been argued, however, that the maximin and similar principles often suggest entirely unacceptable decisions in practise and 'lead to highly irrational decisions in important cases'. On the maximin principle a person would always have to choose something unpleasant if choosing something pleasant could possibly lead to the worst outcome, however unlikely it might be that this ever happened. On a related principle in political philosophy (the so-called 'difference principle') society has to give absolute priority to the interests of the one worst-off individual, even tho an alternative policy would be beneficial to no matter how many people. (It should be noted that the system to which the principle is made to apply does not distinguish extrinsic and intrinsic rights and that therefore the worst-off individual in this system may not even have 'er extrinsic property at 'er disposal.) Where this principle does lead to reasonable decisions, it is 'essentially equivalent to the expected-utility maximization principle' --as has been said. When we now substitute neutralization for utility (maximization), we have come full circle; that is, we are then back in the original position in which it is ultimately only neutrality and neutralization which count. Throughout nature and culture neutrality appears as symmetry. So also in the probabilities of decision theory. There it is called "symmetry in probability". In effect, symmetry considerations require here that one attach exactly equal mathematical probabilities to each of all possible outcomes (assuming that one does not know that the probabilities are unequal). It is, of course, nothing else than the principle of indifference which establishes this equality of probabilities. But while it is admitted that this principle 'will continue to be a most fertile idea in the theory of probability' it has also been criticized for reasons other than those of the maximin type. Some theorists do not accept the indifference principle as a formal postulate, but believe that there is 'an element of truth' in it --a rather odd and ambiguous position indeed. One objection is not very serious. It is that the principle would not be strictly applicable for a person who has had the relevant experience. As the argument runs, one cannot expect a person to maintain a symmetrical attitude toward a kind of situation (such as when confronted with a piece of apparatus) with which 'e has had long experience. Such a person would have to continue believing against all odds that the possible outcomes of such a situation were equally probable and independent from case to case. Since the principle of indifference applies to situations of 'complete uncertainty' and the principle of truth to situations of 'complete certainty', there is a wide range of situations between these two epistemological extremes. Situations in which a person has had some relevant experience are typically situations in which 'e is not completely uncertain anymore (hopefully for the right reasons). A relevantist interpretation of the principle of indifference will therefore bypass the objection altogether: probabilities should be taken equal, unless the assumption that they are unequal can be justified. Hence, the 'element of truth' in the principle of indifference is that a symmetrical initial attitude towards probabilities needs no justification. (Note that the traditional belief that all religions would be equally valid which is called "indifferentism" can only be held by those who confuse ideologies or systems of thought in general with religions, and who have never seriously reflected on the attitude assumed in different systems of thought with respect to truth and its interpretation, and with respect to neutrality and its interpretation. To be an indifferentist a person must be totally ignorant of the completely anti-indifferentist content of the religions claimed to be 'equally valid'.) It has been argued, too, that people do in practise not act on the indifference principle, nor on the maximin principle or some other general decision-theoretical rule. But objections of this sort are rather weak. Firstly, even where only consequentialist or teleological considerations are concerned, there is no reason to suppose that people always act rationally --on the contrary. Secondly, even if we assume that they always do act rationally, it may not be clear what end or ends they have in mind. Thus, according to the indifference principle, taking part in a lottery is irrational if the participator's sole aim is to win a prize. If there are many lots and few prizes, it is unneutral to expect that one will win such a prize. Yet, if the lottery is held in aid of a good cause, and if it is known that the money one will probably lose, goes to a cause one supports, then one does behave rationally nonetheless. In such a case one spends money on something which will, presumably, always serve a good end, either a personal or a nonpersonal one. A more serious objection against the principle of indifference is that it is 'not always obvious what the symmetry of the information is'. There may be partitions of the domain in question which many different people all consider uniform partitions, but the partitioning may in other instances be controversial. Nonetheless, where there is, perhaps, no agreement on a single, 'correct' way of partitioning, people will probably agree that a great number of partitions is not correct. In all those cases the indifference principle is still operative in that it makes it impossible to justify many unneutral expectations. In the next section we shall take a look at an example of the indifference principle's marked effectiveness even when it is not immediately obvious what the equal probabilities must be assigned to. 4.3.3 REALISM BEFORE AND AFTER DEATH 4.3.3.1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- REALISTIC A poor sense of reality is what those people display who have too much fantasy, who overlook the actual constraints, and who daydream until nightfall about what certainly never will be: they may be optimists, they are not realists. And a poor sense of reality is what those people display who have too little fantasy, who overlook the possibilities, and who cannot conceive of anything else than what seemingly always has been: they may be pessimists, they are not realists either. A better sense of reality is what those people display who know how to employ their fantasy to make things which seem impossible today the reality of tomorrow: they are the real realists. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Let us assume that we are in a state of complete uncertainty and do not know whether there will be a happy, nanhappy or unhappy life after death. We are not sure either, whether there will be any life after death. Maybe these assumptions are ridiculous, or outmoded when they once will be reconsidered. But if so, then from the point of view of truth. We will now examine this issue from the point of view of neutrality, granted that we do not (yet?) know the truth. The question of whether there will exist a life after death (and whether there did exist a life before birth or conception), and if so, what kind of life, is in itself a scientific question and not a denominational one. Neither the neutrality principle in general nor the indifference principle in particular forces us to accept any belief concerning the question of whether a person or mental being remains in existence after 'er body has died (or did already exist before 'er body came into being). Nevertheless it is dead certain that the adherents of these principles are forbidden to adopt or readopt unneutral beliefs which have been religiously entertained by a great many previous generations. The unneutrality has always, or usually, been of the happiness-catenary type, and we will therefore confine ourselves to this aspect. When looking at the logical future possibilities, the first choice is one between no life after death (noncatenality) and some life after death (catenality). To suggest that the first choice might as well be between noncatenality, happiness, nanhappiness and unhappiness, or between noncatenality and all proper predicates of the happiness-catena, is to forget that every proper or improper happiness-catenary predicate represents catenality, and that noncatenality has been defined as negation of catenality. (Noncatenality, nanhappiness and unhappiness also represent nonhappiness, but this is different, because they have not been defined as negation of happiness.) Therefore the principle of indifference in itself does allow us to assume that the chance of no life after death (and no life before birth or conception) is the same as the chance of a life after death (and a life before birth and conception). Both are 1/2. When considering the kind of life after death, we may suppose that there is an equal chance of having any of the, say, n predicates of the happiness-catena. But as the chance of having a happiness-catenary predicate is 1/2, the chance of having a particular happiness-catenary predicate is 1 / 2n. Since there is no reason to assume that the number of proper happiness predicates is different from the number of proper unhappiness predicates, the chance of having a happy life after death is then (n-1) / 4n ; this is the same as the chance of having an unhappy life after death. Now, there are good reasons to assume that the chance of having a nanhappy life is greater than the chance of having an unneutrally happiness-catenal life, and certainly greater than that of having an extremely happy or extremely unhappy life, just as the chance that a totally unknown, adult human being is medium tall is greater than that 'e is very tall or very short. (This merely as an illustration, because an important difference might be that the shortness catena is a modulus-catena, whereas the happiness catena is not.) Whatever the construction, however, if we do not have the true and relevant ground-world knowledge the indifference principle does not allow us to assume that our death will be followed by a happy or by an unhappy life. It will either be followed by no life at all, or by a life which is nanhappy on the average. Given our premises this conclusion does even hold when the same chance is assigned to noncatenality as to happiness, nanhappiness and unhappiness, or as to every single, proper predicate of the happiness catena. Extremist supernaturalism does not only promise the believer a happy life after death if 'he' abides by the commandments of 'his' ideology but no less than an eternally happy life; and it does not only threaten the believer with an unhappy life after death if 'he' does not abide by the commandments of 'his' ideology but with no less than an eternally unhappy life. 'Unfortunately', an eternally happy life, whether on Earth or elsewhere, seems even theoretically impossible, because it would require an eternal amelioration of the catenal's situation. This would eventually terminate in a good situation or in a state of well-being in which improvement would not even logically be possible anymore. Before this state, the threshold of happiness-catenary feeling would have been attained, and nanhappiness would already have set in. This situation could only be changed again by a deterioration accompanied by unhappiness. (Hence, supernaturalists who still expect an eternally happy afterlife by being nice to other supernaturalists are flogging a dead horse.) Theoretically an eternally unhappy life seems possible, but this would require a perpetual deterioration of a sentient being's situation (on the relative view of the relationship between happiness-catenary and situational catenality). It appears that such a deterioration does in actual fact always issue in decatenalization. The most plausible moment of decatenalization is, then, the moment a happiness-catenal's body dies. (This is not to say that such a catenal must die under unhappy circumstances.) When a religion or other ideology tries to win people over to its side by promisory and comminatory means it does not only violate the norm of neutrality but usually also the principle of truth and people's (especially young people's) right to personhood. What such a religion or other ideology also often heavily draws on is the confusion between hope and expectation. We may hope for anything desirable, even tho we do not think it will actually happen, but we may only expect to happen what certainly will happen, or what probably will happen on the basis of the indifference principle in combination with the relevant experience. For but too many people, however, hope and expectation have been, or still are, synonyms. The things such people hope for, and the things they expect, are often or too often the same. The difference between hope and expectation tends particularly to fade away in emotional times, for example, during a competition or war. It is then that an exceedingly unrealistic, optimistic belief may manifest itself in which the intensity of the expectation is extremely high or much higher than can be justified on the basis of the probability of the occurrence hoped for. Some people seem to believe that optimism is expecting something good and then like to consider themselves optimists. If this is 'optimism' at all, it is not necessarily 'optimism' as a mode of unrealistic thought. What makes 'optimism' in the sense we shall use it here, unrealistic and unneutralistic is that it is a belief in the best possible outcome or the inclination to always expect good outcomes, regardless of the facts or in contradistinction to the indifference principle. Even the doctrine that this world would be the best of all possible worlds is a product of such optimism. The antithesis of optimism, pessimism, is then the belief in the worst possible outcome or the inclination to always expect bad outcomes, again, regardless of the facts or in contradistinction to the indifference principle. Specimens of pessimism are the doctrine that 'reality is essentially evil' or that 'unhappiness overbalances happiness'. A 'real' pessimist should not only believe that unhappiness must outweigh happiness in life, that is, before death but also after death, for a 'real' pessimist is also someone who is never optimistic. In practise tho, there are but too many people who are pessimists today and optimists tomorrow: unrealistic pessimists and unrealistic optimists are certainly not known for their equanimity. But whether they are staunch pessimists, staunch optimists or fluctuating between pessimism and optimism, for none of these people there is a neutral vantage point from which they can take the right decision. The type of realism founded in the principle of indifference which preserves the nanhappy mean between unrealistic optimism and unrealistic pessimism is decision-theoretical realism. If the facts or experience show that a good outcome is more probable than a bad one, and if we do have expectations at all, this decision-theoretical realism requires us to expect a good outcome. Yet, this is not optimism, for if the facts or experience showed that a bad outcome were more probable, we would have to expect a bad outcome; and this is not pessimism either. Decision-theoretical realism centers primarily round the principle of neutrality, whereas non-supernatural realism (as we have provisionally called it in I.6.2.1) centers primarily round the principle of truth. In spite of this, they are plainly two strands of one realist attitude. This could be a reason to argue that the principle of indifference, like the principle of truth, is not a ground-world principle. To this argument it can be replied that truth may play a role in the cognitive component of the realist attitude, while decision-theoretical indifference plays a role in the affective, and particularly the conative, component of this attitude. Moreover, one can implicitly adhere to the neutralist principle of indifference in practise without ever talking or even thinking about this principle and about what one is doing or choosing. Indeed, one can adhere to it without being involved in thinking at all, something that can definitely not be said about the principle of truth. 4.3.4 VERIDICALISM INSTEAD OF SUPERNATURALISM Proselytizing supernaturalists love to pose questions like how do you know that there is no life after death? or how do you know that God does not exist?. Such questions are hypocritical, because the supernaturalist does not know the answers 'imself either. Yet, such questions need not be inappropriate when a nonbeliever does actually claim that 'e 'knows that life after death and God do not exist'. Naturally, many supernaturalists are completely unable to make a distinction between the claim or belief that something does not exist and the absence of a claim or belief that something does exist. They do not realize that it is one thing to be an a(nti)theist who argues that a supernatural or supreme being named "God" does not exist, and quite another to be an agnostic or someone who is not denominationally interested and who neither argues that something or someone by that name exists, nor that it or 'he' does not exist. (For the agnostic and the antitheist the question of Mono's existence is as relevant as for the theist, but we will see that for us as normists the question itself is irrelevant on the highest level.) The supernaturalist does not really have to be capable of distinguishing between a belief that something does not exist and the absence of a belief that something does exist; what suffices for 'im in point of fact is that 'e can differentiate a belief which 'e knows to be false and any other kind of belief. The reason is that 'er principle of truth merely requires from 'im that 'e do not lie. In other words, that 'e do not contend and --for 'imself-- believe something which 'e knows to be untrue. Supernaturalist ideologies have no substantive criterion whatsoever for the infinite number of cases that the falsity of a statement cannot be proved. What is worse, a supernaturalist has only to make sure that what 'e tells children or other people cannot be falsified or made implausible in any way. Such is preferably done by means of expressions which have never been univocally defined, and by means of proper names which have never been assigned to particular individuals. Thus a supernaturalist can utter the most nonsensical, absurd and implausible statements without feeling forced to believe that 'e does not take the truth seriously, provided at least that 'e does not lie intentionally. But this is, of course, the most narrow and egregious interpretation of the principle of truth one can think of and subscribe to. If truth were really such an extremely limited affair as supernaturalist (and certain naturalist) creations cause innocent human beings to believe, every person could say that 'e will die tomorrow, for instance, because 'e cannot know today that 'e does not die tomorrow. Every person could argue that the world will end the day after tomorrow because no-one can know today that it does not end the day after tomorrow. Every person could claim that there is an all-beautiful being named "Dog" living in a place or on a planet named "the nevaeh" (or an all-ugly being named "Lived" being dead in a place or on a planet named "the lleh"), because no-one can prove that Dog and the nevaeh do not exist, and that Dog does not live in the nevaeh (or that Lived is not dead in the lleh). These and all suchlike flights of fancy are supernaturalist illusions and delusions, however effective and 'natural' their dissemination by the Ministry of Love or other such agencies may once have been (or still is). And this is what truthful people must reject, not necessarily because it is known to be false, but because no sincere person has a reason to assume that it is true, let alone literally true. In the doctrine of neutral-inclusivity the principle of truth is interpreted in such a manner that one should only say that something is the case if one can prove that it is the case, or if one can make it plausible that it was, is or will be the case, or made the case. This plausible must be understood in a scientific or otherwise non-supernatural, realist sense, and definitely not in the sense of millenniums or centuries old, sacred books. It is also to apply to the supernatural or theodemonical promises and comminations in such books. And if the truth of an utterance about the future depends on oneself, then a way of making it true is not only by fulfilling a promise or carrying out a threat, but also by not promising something or threatening with something, when one is not able or likely to make it come true. No narrower interpretation of the principle of truth than this one can deserve the epithet veridical. (Taking into consideration that veridical derives from verus meaning true and dicere meaning (to) say.) Our neutral-inclusivist position with respect to the principle of truth shall therefore be called "veridicalism". Being the antithesis of supernaturalism, our veridicalism shows in a fundamental preference of the plausible to the false or farfetched. (The veridicalist word is not made flashy but well-balanced.) In literature and in other fields of art fantasies do not have to be taken seriously, and utterances not literally. In fundamental denominationalism, however, we prefer to see the real world presented as a theater in which purposes are unfolded which are, first of all, not sure nor likely to be extreme, exclusive or extravagant. 4.3.4.0 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- TRUTH, RELEVANCE AND NEUTRALITY TOGETHER Truth in isolation is not worth anything Reflections on truth cannot be separated from reflections on relevancy. Some might argue that truth also involves the question whether it is true or not whether something is relevant or not. That's true, but relevancy also involves the question whether it is relevant or not whether something is true or not. Everyone interested in truth must always choose between infinitely many conditions or propositions, and between different descriptions of the entities involved. The question 'e will always be confronted with is: what do i base my choice upon?, why assert the one truth and not the other? or why apply the one description and not the other?. The distinctions 'e draws --because in choosing 'e does draw distinctions-- must then be relevant ones. While a truthful thinker of the past sought for truth in isolation, the sincere thinker of the future will seek for relevance as well. Truth and relevance in isolation are not worth anything either Reflections on truth cannot be separated from reflections on relevance. Some might argue that truth and relevancy also involve the question whether it is true or not whether something is the focus of relevance or not. That's true, but if truth and relevance cannot be separated from each other, the search for truth is itself dependent on its own focus of relevancy. Everyone interested in truth and relevance must always choose 'er own focus of relevancy first in order to assess what is relevant or not with respect to this determinant. The question 'e will always be confronted with is: what should this focus of relevancy be?. The neutralist will then opt for a neutral determinant. And if it's true that there are reasons not to opt for neutrality in one respect, 'e will opt for neutrality in another, more basic respect. Only then will 'e accept polarity in the former respect. The neutralist will not seek for truth and relevance in isolation. 'E will seek for neutrality above all. And it is by realizing this that truth, relevance and neutrality become of supreme value together. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.4 PERSONHOOD AS ONE OF FOUR PILLARS 4.4.1 FROM ANANORM TO ANANORM The system of disciplinary thought centering round the norm of neutrality or ananorm is neutralism. Neutrality is the ultimate end, purpose or 'telos' of neutralism. The system of disciplinary thought centering round both the norm of neutrality and the norm of inclusivity is neutralism-inclusivism or neutral-inclusivism. Neutral-inclusivity is the general, ultimate value of neutral-inclusivism. The system of disciplinary thought centering round the norms of neutrality and inclusivity and the veridicalist interpretation of the principle of truth is what we have called "the doctrine of neutral-inclusivity" or "DNI". This doctrine is a goal-duty-based doctrine, and so are the neutral-inclusivist and neutralist components of it. Goal is, then, to be understood in a wide, past-, present- and future-regarding, causal and noncausal sense. The DNI does recognize rights too, but they are intrinsic rights derived from neutral-inclusive or truth-related, doctrinal goals. That is why our ideology is, doctrinally speaking, goal-duty-based or teleological. On the other hand it is, metadoctrinally speaking, right-duty-based or rights-theoretical. This agrees with an interideologically inclusive attitude towards adherence to the DNI itself. The extrinsic right in question is the right to personhood which is based on the sole practical metadoctrinal principle espoused by us in addition to the principles of the doctrine of neutral-inclusivity. The recognition of the doctrinal principle of neutrality leads within the bounds of neutral-inclusivism itself to the formulation of both distributive goals like those of equality and nondistributive goals like well-being and the minimization of unhappiness or suffering. Besides this the recognition of the doctrinal principle of relevance demands from us nondiscrimination and respect for persons. Altho the ananorm and the norm of inclusivity together seem sufficient to guarantee people's autonomy and bodily integrity, personhood requires that every person be treated as such regardless of the first-order doctrine 'e or anyone else embraces. While in our case the DNI is fully compatible with the right to personhood, there are but too many ideologies or normative doctrines for which this has not held, or for which this still does not hold. For those who distinguish first- from second-order reasons, it might be said that the doctrinal principles of the DNI provide us with first-order reasons to act or not to act in a certain way. Or, it might be said that the doctrine's intrinsic rights and duties are first-order reasons. The right to personhood, or the metadoctrinal principle of personhood, however, provides us with a second-order reason not to do a certain act. In general second-order reason has been defined as reason to act or to refrain from acting for some reason. Since rights of personhood are nonactivating, the second-order reason concerned is always a reason to refrain from acting for some reason. Such second-order reasons have been termed "exclusionary", but they have nothing to do with the type of exclusion or exclusiveness as denounced in the norm of inclusivity. So the metadoctrinal principle can --if not in practise, then at least theoretically-- confront us with a so-called 'exclusionary' reason not to act in accordance with the DNI. The reason is then that acting on one of our doctrine's principles would infringe a right of personhood, that is, the extrinsic right of a person who is not willing to cooperate with us, while having the right not to cooperate with us. But the knife cuts both ways: if adherents of the DNI do not have the right to impose their own principles on nonadherents of the DNI (and they do not have that right), then adherents of supernaturalist, exclusivist, extremist and lesser unneutralist doctrines do not have the right either to impose their beliefs, institutions and symbols on adherents of the DNI. The doctrine of neutral-inclusivity is a normative doctrine, and the principle of personhood a normative principle. The normative system of disciplinary thought which comprises both, and which is our denominational ideology or 'doctrine' in the widest sense, may therefore be referred to as "the Norm". The Norm is a proper name but obviously not an arbitrary one. No other proper name can more clearly and adequately express that our ideology is a normist instead of a theocentrist one. (In the last chapter of this book we will further discuss the position of this proper name in the antithesis between normism and theocentrism.) To emphasize that our denominational doctrine is not just a normist denominational doctrine, we shall speak of "the Ananorm", that is, the Norm of neutrality or the Norm of neutral-inclusivity. The proper adjective belonging to it is Ananormative. There is one pillar which supports neutralism, namely the ananorm. There are two pillars which support neutral-inclusivism, namely the previous one and the norm of inclusivity. There are three pillars which support the DNI, namely the previous ones and the principle of truth. And finally, there are four pillars which support the total normative edifice of the Ananorm, namely the previous ones and the right to personhood. It is these four normative pillars we shall hold on to in this Model. They are listed in figure F.4.4.1.1. 4.4.2 FREEDOM, EXTRINSIC AND INTRINSIC Like justice, 'freedom' is something almost all people are in favor of. Virtually every religion and political ideology promises freedom or liberation, with or without simultaneous equality for everyone. This is a reason to listen to any talk about freedom or liberation with skepticism. (Even when a religion or political ideology brought freedom in one respect, it has but too often brought a new kind of lordship or dictatorship at the same time.) Yet, it is when freedom is blatantly absent that one best realizes that it means something important. This is first and foremost the case when people are murdered, tortured, injured, raped, imprisoned or enslaved who have not violated other people's personal rights. In one country it may be the state or an army of occupation which commits such atrocities, in another it may be individual citizens or groups of citizens who commit them. Freedom is not there because the law says so; freedom is there when the authorities respect people's rights in actual fact and when the structure of society is such that it does not create or perpetuate the conditions in which violence is stimulated, provoked or even made necessary. Freedom is often denied in the name of freedom. That is why one theorist has argued that people should differentiate negative and positive liberty and stick to the first form of it. 'Negative liberty' is the absence of interference or domination, that is, the absence of interference by the state, of the pressures of social conformism and of invasions by other individuals. 'Positive liberty' is on this account the absence of impediments over and above simple, deliberate coercion. It is said to derive from 'the wish on the part of the individual to be 'er own master'. This notion of positive liberty has proved to be highly prone to abuse in the hands of those who conceive of self-mastery as mastery of some 'higher' or 'real' self over some 'lower' or 'animal' self. The higher or real self is then the sort of self which best suits the ideals or aspirations of certain 'liberators' who are but too willing to arrogate all power and influence unto themselves, especially in the name of a god or a political party. It has been objected that the above-mentioned division between 'negative' and 'positive liberty' does only count as interference direct, physical obstruction and neglects the form of domination exercised by withholding the means of life or labor from people. The alternative division proposed is one between counterextractive and developmental liberty. Counterextractive liberty is defined as immunity from the extractive power of others and is a wider notion than negative liberty. Developmental liberty, on the other hand, is narrower than positive liberty and is said to denote 'individual self-direction' and 'the ability to live in accordance with one's own conscious purposes'. It is clearly not meant to denote coercion of 'those who do not (yet) know the truth' by 'those who say that they know it'. In terms of metadoctrinal and doctrinal considerations both the division between 'negative' and 'positive', and that between 'counterextractive' and 'developmental liberty' are faulty or too vague. Roughly speaking, negative and counterextractive liberty deal implicitly with the right to personhood. Negative liberty underscores the aspect of freedom in the mere sense of personal and bodily autonomy, whereas counterextractive liberty focuses on the property aspect inherent in the right to personhood, not only where it concerns the person's body, but also where it concerns external things. Again roughly speaking, positive and developmental liberty deal with doctrinal rights and ideals. But the so-called 'ability to live in accordance with one's own conscious purposes' is, of course, first of all a metadoctrinally required condition. It is additional demands which make it more and more doctrinal. To the extent that it is metadoctrinal, that is extrinsic, we ought to support this ideal; to the extent that it is supposed to be doctrinal, that is intrinsic, it depends on the person's ends whether we ought to support it or not. To live in accordance with one's own, individual purposes (whatever those purposes might be) is nothing intrinsically good in itself. What it all hinges upon is the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic freedom or liberty. 'Extrinsic liberty' is the liberty of the active, discretionary right to personhood and closely related to the notions of negative and counterextractive liberty. But this proposition cannot be reversed: the notion of the right to personhood is not merely a notion of extrinsic liberty, it is as much a notion of extrinsic property (a notion to be discussed in 4.4.5). 'Intrinsic liberty' is liberty on the principles of the DNI, that is, liberty as warranted, or insofar as warranted, from the perspective of neutral-inclusivity and truth. It is a form of 'positive' and 'developmental liberty' when the person or persons concerned have the freedom to do what is best for their own well-being without violating anyone's rights and without doing more harm than good on the whole. Metadoctrinally, liberty must be defended; doctrinally, it can be defended, not only on the basis of people's well-being but also on the basis of the minimization of unhappiness, on the basis of interpersonal equality and on the basis of nondiscrimination. However, each time it is a particular type of liberty which is then justifed. For example, (positive) liberty has also been interpreted as the greatest number of options available. Such a form of liberty is extremist and not a perfective value to be strived for on the neutralistic model. Ultimately, there is nothing intrinsically good in a great number of available options, let alone something better in a number which is even greater, and that ad infinitum. If and when the freedom of a great number of available options is good, this is only so for instrumental reasons. The right to personhood teaches us that we have a certain freedom, an extrinsic freedom to be precise. The DNI teaches us what we should do or not do with this freedom. This does only partially confirm our freedom, for in a way every sensible, doctrinal principle solely restrains people's extrinsic freedom. For example, the principle of truth does in the first instance nothing else than this: instead of telling the truth and lying as we please, we must now always tell the truth. Whereas we had (and still have) the extrinsic freedom to lie, we do not have the intrinsic freedom anymore to do so. Only indirectly could it be argued that all of us eventually will have more freedom on the whole by not lying. For the agent who is to act morally it is the very essence of the normative to limit the number of physical or metaphysical options open to 'im. With morality the number of options an individual decision maker has is smaller than without (altho this may only hold so long as enough other people lead moral lives). Therefore morality itself contravenes '(total) freedom' in a normative sense. It does not contravene 'freedom' in a social or legal sense, however, because that kind of freedom does not interfere with it. This is not to say, of course, that a lack of social or legal freedom could not interfere with what one ought to do or refrain from doing in practise. 4.4.3 THE FREEDOM NOT TO SUPPORT POLARITY OR EXCLUSIVITY Freedom is not an ultimate doctrinal value in itself. It may be derived as a lower-level value from neutrality and inclusivity, but neither of these ultimate values can be replaced by it. Inclusivity, for instance, may entail intrinsic liberty, but intrinsic liberty (even liberty in general) does not entail as much as inclusivity does. From the inclusivist angle freedom is merely the absence of the most severe forms of direct exclusionism, that is, the bare minimum on the way to the inclusiveness of total nondiscrimination. So denominational freedom is the bare minimum on the way to denominational inclusivity; religious freedom is even much less than that. A country with denominational freedom can still be very religionistic, for instance. The state will in such a country not injure or imprison nonreligious people, or people of another religion than the established one, but it will confront them, day and night, with the institutions and symbols of religion, or of the favored religion, nevertheless. Unlike denominational freedom, both denominational inclusivity and the right to personhood forbid states and other inter- or non-ideological agencies to support and perpetuate one particular type of denominationalism, let alone to indoctrinate citizens with it. Hence, governments and people who speak of "respect for religious freedom" rather than for "denominational impartiality", because they prefer so or do not know better, have still a hell of a long way to go. That exclusivist institutions and symbols are in actual fact but too often imposed upon everyone by the state or community in which people live is very regrettable. Yet, this is no reason whatsoever to voluntarily contribute to the perpetuation of their existence. Thus more than 50% in a 'democratic' country, or less than 50% in an undemocratic country, may foist a monarchist system in which one 'man' and 'his' family are granted extensive privileges, onto the whole of society. While they may fancily style the members of that chosen family "king", "queen", "prince", or what have you, everyone retains the extrinsic freedom not to participate in the practise --in their practise-- of referring to people in exclusivist terms. If one calls every other person in one's country who one does not know intimately by 'er surname, then one shall call every person of that particular family who one does not know intimately by 'er surname. No doubt, the use of monarchist or aristocratic titles is part of the perpetuation of familially exclusivist practises and institutions. In a majoritarian polity 51% can 'democratically' impose any system on the rest of society, but no majority or minority can force individual citizens to believe in exclusivism and to talk in an irrelevantist fashion, least of all among themselves. Those who do that nevertheless voluntarily perpetuate the exclusivist institution. (Under a dictatorial regime one could, perhaps, style every male "Prince Such" and every female "Princess So" thus draining titles like these of all exclusiveness.) In an undemocratic country (including countries with a disproportional representation) 49% or less can force every citizen to pay taxes for the maintenance of a monarchist, religionist or party-political totalitarian system, however meretricious or obnoxious; but no 49%, even no 67% or more, can force neutral-inclusivist citizens to change their thoughts or to alter their language. Those who do in spite of this have their thoughts or their language knowingly colored by exclusivist, political or communal institutions do not care about equality and inclusivity, and do not deserve it. Not only can people not be forced to change their thoughts and language, they cannot be forced either to provide information which is not pertinent to the issue concerned, even when legitimate. All of us have the extrinsic freedom to refuse to answer any question which is discriminatory in that the information is not relevant to the subject, or to the listeners, spectators or readers in general. It is true that people do not only have the extrinsic freedom not to perpetuate, and participate in, exclusivist or extremist undertakings and institutions, but that they do also have the extrinsic right to do this. The point is, however, that those who want, for example, to speak of themselves or others in exclusive terms, and who want to have themselves financially supported or want to support others merely because of something like their ancestry or marriage ties, should establish and maintain such an exclusivist institution themselves. For their money they have the extrinsic right to do that, but they should not involve the state and other citizens in such a major manifestation of familial favoritism. On the whole we as adherents of the DNI will certainly have more freedom than the adherents of most religious and political ideologies. Nonetheless, we do not have the intrinsic freedom to participate in, or to perpetuate, systems which are unneutralistic, exclusivistic or supernaturalistic. Neutral-inclusivity has to be attained or furthered in the first place by making use of our extrinsic right to noncollaboration and noncooperation. In the political domain this implies before all noncooperation with fascism, party-political totalitarianism, state religionism and monarchism. Those who collaborate and cooperate with people striving for these and other forms of polarity and exclusivity promote polarity and exclusivity themselves. 4.4.4 FREEDOM VERSUS OTHER VALUES A normative doctrine in which freedom is the sole value cannot be a ground-world doctrine; at most it is a sort of metadoctrinal normative theory dealing with the relationship between a person and 'er ideals or lack thereof. A normative doctrine in which freedom is the sole value just knows no ground-world ideals. But what if freedom is not the only value and the system of disciplinary thought concerned pluralistic? Traditional ideologies or doctrines teach that in such a case freedom has to be balanced against the other values recognized. However, those doctrines never managed to differentiate doctrinal and metadoctrinal (or even metaphysical) considerations, and often not normative and social or legal, nonnormative considerations either. From the metadoctrinal perspective of personhood, the idea of balancing freedom against other values is definitely fallacious. It is only on the doctrinal level that it makes sense to let freedom be part of the evaluative calculus. In other words, extrinsic freedom with its purely rights-theoretical basis cannot be weighed against anything; intrinsic freedom, on the other hand, whether ultimate or not, can indeed be made part of any consequentialist or other calculus. Traditional pluralists who do not distinguish between the doctrinal and the metadoctrinal, like to construe a conflict between freedom and two other values in particular -- or rather, one value and one disvalue. Firstly, there is the so-called 'conflict between freedom and the prevention of harm', and secondly, there is the so-called 'conflict between freedom and equality'. By construing these conflicts as purely doctrinal ones, pluralist ideologues or theorists give themselves the greatest freedom possible to choose what suits them best. When they prefer totalitarianism of the sexual-monotheist brand, they will argue that more individual freedom does too much harm to society as a whole; when they prefer totalitarianism of the socioeconomic brand, they will argue that more individual freedom is detrimental to equality in the material sense. And, of course, when they prefer liberty above all, they will argue that both the increase of harm and the decrease of equality are negligible compared with the benefits of liberty. The criterion of harm was originally introduced to confine the power and influence of the state to the area of public interest, that is, to keep it out of the sphere of the purely private. Against this view that individual freedom in the private domain is not harmful to anybody, it has later been objected that also purely private acts or practises could be 'harmful' to society as a whole. The purported 'harm' concerned would then not be direct, bodily harm like murder or injury but some kind of 'indirect' or 'spiritual harm'. (This concept of harm stands to bodily harm as structural violence stands to bodily violence.) Deviation from the established, 'moral' conceptions of a society would endanger that society and be a potential harm to it. On this construction any kind of individual freedom could be 'injurious' (like any kind of communal or collective system could be blamed for its 'structural violence'). When an ideologue of the above persuasion speaks of "fundamental values which all people in a society have to share", one would expect that 'e liked to get rid of all religious and other ideological minorities in the first place --a standpoint which, altho immoral, would be courageous in a society that demands respect for religious minorities--, but somehow 'er most beloved victims are minorities and ex-minorities in matters of sexuality and family-planning instead. 'E will not point out that certain religious and political ideologies are harmful to society, or that a cinema, television and computer game cult of violence and disrespectfulness is, even when the harm concerned in these instances might be truly indirect in that it does contribute to murder, rape and other forms of bodily harm in stages. When the phrase indirect harm is not in any way related to bodily harm, but is used to denote spiritual or societal 'harm', it evidently serves as a mere deus ex machina. It then merely provides a contrived solution to the problem of how to associate everything that is believed to be bad in terms of some doxastic value with bodily harm, such as killing and injuring. This is done according to an age-old recipe: take a word which has a negative evaluative meaning for everyone (such as harm or violence) and 'mix' this word with something that has completely different conceptual contents, while exploiting the negative connotation of the word to the utmost. To top it all, add an extra adjective (such as spiritual or structural) now and then to make clear what the actual denotation of the phrase thus concocted is supposed to be. Now, freedom from harm, that is bodily harm, may indeed be a fundamental value shared by almost everyone. To the extent that it is, people may not even recognize it as a value. But other values, or doxastic values, are controversial, for example, because they are blatantly exclusivistic. To call such values "fundamental", and to say that doing something that does not agree with those doxastic values does 'harm' to society, is a question of ideological strategy, not of morality. Fundamental in this interideological context is solely extrinsic liberty. And no-one's doxastic values, even not those of a majority of people, can interfere with an individual's liberty in the sense of the right to personhood. While harm is the disvalue with which freedom has been confronted, equality is the value. As the argument runs, the ideal of freedom would always disagree with the ideal of equality in some way. If one allowed people freely to choose what they wanted, their free choices would upset any ideal, egalitarian pattern for society as a whole -- it has been said. But the opposition construed between freedom and equality is largely based on a confusion, firstly, of the different kinds of freedom, and secondly, of the different ontological spheres, namely the normative sphere and the factual-modal sphere to which social rules and laws belong. When speaking of "extrinsic" and "intrinsic freedom", we associate these concepts with normative principles, while already having presupposed 'freedom' in some metaphysical, modal sense. That is, we take it that the people we are talking about can choose to act morally or immorally. This is the sort of freedom people have, because they are not mere bodies of which the behavior is wholly predetermined. (It only makes sense to assume that their behavior is partially free and partially predetermined.) If denominational and other normative doctrines are to be of any significance at all to people, then people must be free in this sense. To say that they should be free in this sense is superfluous, if not nonsensical. Should equality conflict with freedom, it is therefore not this metaphysical freedom it conflicts with. In a social or legal sense freedom is the absence of a (mandatory) social rule or law forbidding certain actions, or even the presence of a permissive social rule or law explicitly allowing certain actions. But the principle of freedom in a social or legal sense is a factual-modal principle, not a normative one; or if so, then contingently so. An act may be right but illegal (when one does not have the legal freedom to do it); and it may be wrong but legal (when one has the legal freedom, or even duty, to do it). (And whether or not something is forbidden by the state or community, people normally still have the 'metaphysical freedom' to do what they want to do.) The question of whether acts which are (morally) wrong should always be forbidden we will not deal with here, but this question can be asked precisely because of the distinct character of the normative, doctrinal sphere on the one hand and the social or legal sphere on the other. Equality with respect to societal patterns or the distribution of goods is something to strive for on the basis of the prescriptive reading of the norm of interpersonal equality. There can be no direct conflict between this normative ideal and the ideal of social and legal freedom. It is one's metaphysical freedom and this very social and legal freedom which one should employ to further the ideal of equality. Every act which leads to an inequality or greater inequality of distribution is, then, prima facie wrong and ought to be abstained from. Also in the event that it is legal to act wrongly in this respect, this still does not take away one's moral responsibility to act rightly in this respect. The conflict construed by some between equality and freedom is therefore primarily due to mixing up normative, doctrinal considerations with social or legal, nonnormative and with metadoctrinal considerations. This does not mean that the intrinsic ideal of personal freedom could not disagree with the intrinsic ideal of interpersonal equality, but if this is the case, the conflict is one between well-being or minimization of unhappiness and equality. This conflict is one between derivative, neutral-inclusive doctrinal values. It does not serve clarity to label this conflict as one between (a principle of) equality and (a principle of) freedom, because this rendering is both too restrictive and too liberal. It is too restrictive in that well-being and the absence of suffering are much more than a question of being free to choose. And it is too liberal in that the concept of freedom is also used in metadoctrinal, metaphysical, social and legal thought. 4.4.5 PROPERTY, EXTRINSIC AND INTRINSIC When speaking of "property" as a moral or normative right, extrinsic property rights must be distinguished from intrinsic ones. Also with respect to property, every normative system of disciplinary thought has to look at people and their relationships with other people or things both from a doctrinal and from a metadoctrinal standpoint. The basics of extrinsic property have already been discussed in Property as a right to personhood in the last division of the Book of Instruments (I.9.4). There it has been pointed out that extrinsic property is an active, discretionary right, that everyone owns 'er own body and the things which are made by 'im (at least initially and under the relevant description), and that everyone has an initial, equal share too in all things which are not person-made. This latter property right may involve an extrinsic right to an income, dependent on the fact whether natural resources are privately used and/or exploited by other people, or on the fact whether they are collectively used and/or exploited by the state or community. The right to personhood in itself does not guarantee such an income, let alone one which is sufficient for a living. However, everywhere where natural resources are indeed used and/or exploited by others, a person has the extrinsic right to compensation where such use or exploitation involves 'er personal share in these natural resources. In the Book of Instruments it has also been made clear already that the constellation of extrinsic property rights and duties has still to be fleshed up with substantive normative contents as provided by a first-order ground-world doctrine. The liberty of choosing may be prerequisite for being a moral agent, and the actual possession of extrinsic property for being recognized as a moral agent, to be moral in an intrinsic sense one has to comply with doctrinal principles. On the neutral-inclusivist model this means that one shall opt for equality or solidarity, for everyone's well-being and for inclusivity. Thus, metadoctrinally speaking, one has the right to exclude everyone from one's extrinsic property as one likes, but doctrinally speaking, one does not have this right if doing so would be inequitable, harsh or discriminatory. In such a case a person's intrinsic property is smaller than 'er extrinsic property for the one, and bigger for the other. As regards external things each person starts life with extrinsic property of the same value, apart from variations thru time which effect everyone. In the intitial stage it is only people's personal, physical conditions which can differ considerably. From the metadoctrinal point of view those who are strong and healthy can say to the weak and sick that they have bad luck. (Those for whom freedom is the sole or highest value do say that.) All persons own the body they have, but these bodies are not all equally strong and healthy. It is from the doctrinal perspective of the DNI that we realize that the strong should help the weak and the healthy the sick, where this is beneficial to people's and children's overall well-being, or where solidarity demands it. This, at least, holds with respect to people or children who are not to blame for their weakness or illness. If they are to blame themselves for it, they have had pleasures or advantages which the others have not had, or they have not fulfilled their own duties towards their bodies either. In such a case the strong and healthy who did not have those pleasures or advantages, or who themselves did fulfil their duties towards their bodies, may not be obliged to help them. People who had pleasures in the past, but who suffer now because of those pleasures may on the whole not be worse off than people who did not have those pleasures, and who do not suffer now. By arguing that the latter people need, then, not be obliged to help the former, we use a temporal principle of equality, that is, we do not so much look at interpersonal equality at this moment but at interpersonal equality thru time. Evidently this does not preclude anyone from helping another person, even if 'er present misery is 'er own fault or is due to a risk 'e chose to take 'imself. Helping 'im nevertheless will be beneficent and will be conducive to equality at the present moment. All these considerations can play a role, because the DNI is past-, present- and future-regarding. Not only the Ananorm's doctrinal principles are temporal, also the Ananorm's metadoctrinal principle is. The difference is tho, that the right to personhood can give rise to gross inequalitites while those inequalities are not even prima facie bad in themselves. On the metadoctrinal principle solely initial equality is required. But on the doctrinal principle of interpersonal equality inequalitites are bad in themselves unless they can be justified on a temporal reckoning. Extrinsic inequalities may start with differences in people's physical conditions, but they will be found particularly in the added value of person-made things. From a metadoctrinal perspective every person has the exclusive (extrinsic) right to the whole value 'e has added to a thing (but not to the thing itself, that is, independent of its description). Hence, a person who is very talented has a much greater chance of acquiring more extrinsic property, even tho 'e does, perhaps, not work harder than other people. But 'e does not have the same intrinsic right to the total value 'e has added to a thing; 'e only has such an intrinsic right to the extent that it benefits the whole (the community, society or all sentient beings). From the point of view of equality alone 'e should not have an intrinsic right to more than the average added value. In other words, 'er personal, intrinsic property is smaller than 'er extrinsic property, and on the DNI it is intrinsic property which counts. Yet, a person may also have acquired more extrinsic property, not because of 'er natural cleverness or skilfulness, but because 'e has worked harder than others. In such a case 'e will also have the intrinsic right to more property on the basis of temporal considerations of interpersonal equality, and on the basis of balancing that person's right to more property against 'er loss of free time. So far as the right to personhood is concerned a person may allow or disallow someone else to use 'er extrinsic property as 'e likes; 'e may also give it away or bequeath it to whomever 'e likes. So far as the norms of neutrality and inclusivity are concerned, however, a person should not in allowing or disallowing the use of 'er extrinsic property discriminate between people on the basis of an irrelevant factor. And when giving away or bequeathing 'er extrinsic property to individuals a person should give and bequeath to poor people and children; other things being equal, that is. In this respect the more than average extrinsic property of the rich is the intrinsic property of the poor. 5 LIFE AND NONLIFE 5.1 THE INVIABILITY OF AN ULTIMATE PRINCIPLE OF LIFE 5.1.1 THE MEANINGS OF LIFE AND DEATH When defining a term, there are three approaches which can be taken: 1. empirical-linguistic 2. lexical 3. stipulative On the empirical-linguistic approach the term in question is studied as actually used by a sufficient number of people, or by people who have special knowledge or skills in the field concerned. From the synonyms and examples of usage, and from the contexts in which the term is employed one then derives (if possible) the objective meaning of this term for a particular speech community. On the lexical approach one consults a number of dictionaries and starts from the less subjective definition(s) given in these dictionaries which are left over after deleting those which are blatantly exclusivistic, supernaturalistic or obviously wrong for other reasons. (To take just one example: a traditional dictionary may seriously want the user to believe that death would also refer to what is unreal and untrue.) On the stipulative approach the term is defined in advance in order to make clear what one is talking about. Ideally, however, the empirical, lexical and stipulative definitions of a term ought to coincide so that no confusion can arise. And ideally, the term to be employed ought to have only one meaning, for homonyms are a notorious source of fallacious reasoning. Unfortunately, life and to a lesser extent also death and killing do not fulfil these conditions. Etymologically life, to live and living belong together and we cannot accept any definition according to which the literal, original meaning of life is not related to what is characteristic of living beings. These 'living beings', in turn, must encompass at least all animal beings (including, for example, human beings) and all plants (including, for example, bacteria). It is now a question of stipulative definition whether things such as viruses are also living organisms, or merely complex protein molecules; or if not merely a question of stipulative definition, then a result of defining another term in a stipulative way. 'Life' is then the state of an organism with the capacity for reaction to stimuli and for metabolism and growth. A being which grows and which can reproduce itself independently is certainly a living being, but viruses which are capable of growth and multiplication only in the cells of other living beings may for this reason be said not to be individual, living beings. Consequently, if they are not counted as living beings for this reason, not any organism which needs, or still needs, an intimate bodily contact with a living individual can be considered a living being itself. This would not only apply to viruses but also, say, to spermatozoons and to fetuses if, and so long as, they need a womb or an artificial system maintained by human beings to grow and to keep growing. If it does not make a difference whether the organism needs a woman's or a man's body to survive and to grow, or whether this is all taken care of artificially outside anyone's body, then consistence requires that we forgo this criterion for all organisms from viruses, or the most simple organisms, to the most complex ones. When we look at what characteristic quality, or set of qualities, living beings such as animals and plants have in common, our view of them is a nontemporal one in a loose sense. Strictly speaking of course, metabolism, growth and reproduction are temporal processes, yet given that a certain being has these capacities, it belongs to a species of living beings in the nontemporal (or not exclusively present) tense of to belong, unlike, for example, stones and minerals. On a temporal view, however, one individual is followed from its coming into existence, during its lifetime and until its death. Life then means something like period of existence of a living individual. Variants of this meaning are period between birth and death and the sequence of physical and/or mental experiences which make up the existence of an individual. In the temporal sense of living it is obvious that a living being need not be able to reproduce or multiply at all in order to be a living being, nor does it need to grow in the sense of getting taller or larger. While the boundary between nontemporal life and death, that is, between living beings and dead things, is not sharp from an empirical-linguistic or lexical standpoint, the boundary between temporal life and death, that is, between an individual which is still living and an individual which has died, is not that sharp either. Some say that human beings in irreversible coma should be regarded as already dead. A patient may thus be declared "dead" if 'er brain has not been functioning for at least twenty-four hours (the body showing no response to stimuli, no general movements, no reflexes and an isoelectric electroencephalogram). The heart may then still beat spontaneously without the aid of a machine, something that is reason enough for others to call such a human being "still alive". Instead of irreversible loss of all electrical activity in the brain, irreversible loss of consciousness may also be held as a criterion of death. It has been said that death should be defined in terms of this absence of consciousness, since it would be from this alone that interest in the electrical activity derives. On the so-called 'double-test view' it is necessary that both all respiratory and circulatory activities have stopped and that the brain is so badly damaged that the loss of consciousness has become irreversible. This should guarantee that both the person and the body 'e had are dead. For a person may need a living body, but a living body certainly does not need a person. What is important when choosing a definition or criterion is the consistence with which such a definition or criterion is applied: if the absence of all electrical activity in the brain is a criterion at the end of one's existence, it is also a criterion at the beginning of one's existence (here as a fetus of which the brain waves can already be monitored). As regards life in a nontemporal sense: if a spontaneous beating heart, or consciousness, were a prerequisite for being called "(still) living", beings which have no heart, or which are not conscious, would not be living beings. This would exclude plants, if not many animals as well, unless life and living are used in two different senses. What is also important is that the definition of what is 'life' or 'living' does not conceptually depend on some principle of life, or on any idea about the value or disvalue of life or nonlife. It is one thing to say that a person or 'er body is dead and quite another to say that 'er or its life is not worth preserving anymore. Nonlife and death are the or a negation of life and as such privative concepts. What characterizes a nonliving or dead thing or body is the absence of any response to stimuli, metabolism, growth, reproduction and the capacity to move by itself, altho the absence of only one of these features is not enough per se to call a thing or body "nonliving" or "dead". As the negation of nontemporal life dead means nonliving (in a nontemporal sense), while as a negation of temporal life it means having died or not living anymore. Temporal death is only part of temporal nonlife, the negation of temporal life, because this negation also covers the period of preexistence, that is, the period before a living being came into existence. Furthermore, it also covers eternal nonexistence. (To define the temporal dead as not living as some dictionaries do, is therefore erroneous, when it means having died.) It is preexistence, life and death together which extend over the whole dimension of time. (Preexistence is not used here in the sense of eternal existence of the soul or person before the coming into being of 'er body, in which case not preexistence and death are complementary notions but preexistence and immortality.) Neither temporal life and death nor nontemporal life and death are catenical concepts, even tho temporal life and death belong to a series of three concepts. Preexistence and death are not opposites, nor are life and death. Moreover, life, death and preexistence are not concepts which admit of degrees, or which do not admit of degrees while limiting concepts which do. (Altho it has been argued that life diminishes by degrees in a scale descending to death, it has never been pointed out what would be the unique catena or dimension involved.) The temporal transition from life to nonlife or death is called "dying". Dying is to pass out of existence, that is, to pass from life in the case of living beings. When this transition is caused by a particular agency, people speak of "killing". What this agency is, may vary from a virus to a person, but in a moral context it is of course the question of persons killing living beings which is the focus of attention. It is not so obvious tho, whether the difference between causing the death of a living being and risking or allowing the death of such a being is of any moral significance. We must not delude ourselves into thinking that it is only killing which counts, and not risking or allowing death, or letting something or someone die. The fact that there is only a special word for causing death in the present language, and not for risking or allowing death, is merely a propositional fact with no bearing on the ground-facts. Similarly, it is only a propositional fact that there are no special words in the present language for causing, risking or allowing something to remain in a preexistent or potential state, but also here we must ask what the implications are of the difference between remaining in a preexistent state and having died; and what they are not. Unlike killing, which refers to the mere fact of death caused by an agency in any manner, murder is said to imply full moral responsibility. Murder is not just a kind of killing which is bad, it is a kind of bad killing which is also intended and therefore wrong. When it is claimed that murder implies 'motive', it is intention which is meant, for people also speak of 'murder' when the motive is not someone's death but, for example, someone's valuables when these could only be obtained by killing the person in question. Such a motive is then probably a personal motive, but it can also be an impersonal one, while the killing itself remains deliberate. In such a case people tend to speak of "assassination". However, a political or military authority carrying out a death sentence would rather call it "an execution". It is precisely because murder has an inherent wrongness, and because 'everyone' is against murder, that people will employ every expression but the expression murder to describe their own deeds or those of their comrades. Only by seeing thru the emptiness and inconsistence of this verbalism can the plot of those playing this game of words be exposed. The substantive matters of life and death are just too serious to remain hidden between evaluative meanings and nebulous notions. 5.1.2 THE SO-CALLED 'INTRINSIC VALUE' OR 'SANCTITY OF LIFE' To say that something lives or is alive is one thing, to say that it should live or be alive quite another. Now, it does not seem to make sense to assert that things should live, or be made into living beings, in a nontemporal sense, because even if we knew what this were to mean exactly, we would not have the power anyhow. But to say that living beings should remain alive on the temporal view is a meaningful statement which deserves further attention. Those who claim this maintain that life or living beings have an 'intrinsic' --that is, noninstrumental, nonderivative-- worth, that life is of supreme value, or that it is sacred. If this is true, there is always something against killing a living being, because on this schema a dead thing is worthless. (If not, then a dead thing's value is based on another principle, a principle which theoretically may decrease or outweigh the value of life at the same time.) To believe that living beings have a value merely as living beings (a value nonliving beings do not have), is to adhere to an independent or ultimate principle of life, whether it be labeled "respect for living beings (but not for nonliving beings)", "the supreme value of life", "the sanctity of life (but not of nonlife)" or something similar. At this place we will only consider identity-dependent interpretations of this principle. On such interpretations individual living beings are not replaceable by other living beings. Taken literally, the traditional principle of life states that (being a) living (being) is 'intrinsically' valuable, whereas (being a) nonliving (being) is not. In the nontemporal view of life this would mean that a virus has a worth if it is a living organism, but that a molecule which is not a living organism has no intrinsic worth, regardless of the question whether it is more complex or not. And, according to such a principle of life itself, no distinction can be made between a living organism like a bacterium and a living organism like a human being. Any difference in value between these two organisms must be attributed to another factor and another principle. According to that other principle nonliving beings have either no value at all or they do. If they have no value at all on the basis of that other principle, then the first principle (that of life) is superfluous, and those talking about 'a supreme value' or 'sanctity of life' should let us know what principle they are really thinking of. On the other hand, if nonliving beings have a value too according to the hidden principle with which different types of living beings are compared, then the principle of life is, perhaps, not superfluous, but the theory it is meant to support is in that case pitifully deprived of all practical significance. The reason is simply that on balance both nonliving and living beings have a value now. The question remains what factor would determine the difference in value of the different types of living and nonliving beings. In the temporal view of life, a true principle of life would make a life of permanent coma of equal value as the fully conscious life of a person. It would entail that killing a person were wrong, but not putting 'er body in a permanently comatose state, since such a transition is only one between two forms of living. The same applies to the comparison between a fetus and a conscious, adult being. And again, should the 'ultimate lifer' object that fetuses and conscious, adult beings and permanently comatose beings are all of intrinsic worth but of a different intrinsic worth, 'e employs another principle, a principle which either makes the principle of life superfluous or entirely vitiates it. Combining the nontemporal and the temporal aspects of life, someone who believes that the life of fetuses and permanently comatose beings has an intrinsic, nonderivative value, must also admit that the life of plants has an intrinsic, nonderivative value, and an equal value (as far as the principle of life is concerned). On the principle of life in itself the life of a plant is of the same value as the life of a human vegetable and as the life of a conscious person. Consistence requires also that the life of a virus is of intrinsic value, and of the same intrinsic value as that of a fetus or spermatozoon which cannot stay alive outside another living body or without artificial means. Either all of them are living organisms or no-one is. In an attempt to save the principle of life as an independent principle it has been rejoined that it is not life in the broadest sense, but that it is really being conscious which is intrinsically valuable. However, this amounts to a confession of defeat, because what we are then talking about is a principle of consciousness, not a principle of life anymore. For life encompasses both conscious and nonconscious (including unconscious) living beings. But, for the sake of argument, let us say that this is only a terminological question. Now, if consciousness is mere consciousness, then those who adhere to a principle of life as consciousness must assign the same value to the 'lowest' conscious living beings as to the 'highest' conscious person -- lowest and highest to be understood in the purely descriptive terms of some other factor than mere consciousness. In cases of conflict there would be no reason to give priority to the one conscious being over the other. It would make no difference whether to kill a lower or a higher, conscious being. On the other hand, if the consciousness referred to in the formulation of the principle admits of degrees, then --as has already been pointed out-- certain nonhuman animals may in a number of respects be more conscious than human beings. It may then be worse to kill those animals than to kill conscious human beings. But even if this supranthropic conclusion were accepted, why would consciousness be an ultimate or perfective value, or a higher degree of consciousness of a higher perfective value? Not only is the latter view extremist, but if consciousness is a matter of the presence and acuity of different senses, one would expect it to be of instrumental value. (On this reckoning the charge of extremism could no longer be made either.) When talking of "a principle of life" or "consciousness", however, this principle is presented as a fundamental principle, not as some derivative principle, and the value of life or consciousness as an (ultimate) perfective value, not as some derivative value. (Note that a derivative value may be either a single nonultimate or nonperfective value or a value derived from a blend of perfective and corrective or instrumental values.) In another attempt to save the principle of life it has been claimed that it is being human which is intrinsically valuable. Such a principle of human life is of course rank anthropocentrism, one of the speciesist manifestations of exclusivism. If, and insofar as, human refers merely to a biological species, the principle does not deserve our further attention, but what if it is person which is meant in a sense different from that of human being? Those adhering to such a principle of personal life may define person as self-conscious or self-aware being. Such a being is aware of itself as an individual, distinct from other entities in the world, and --as has been added-- it must also be aware that it exists over a period of time. On this account certain nonhuman animals can be 'persons', whereas, for example, human vegetables are not. The category of living beings which are of 'intrinsic' worth would be much smaller than that of conscious beings and there would be no differentiation between self-conscious beings. This principle of self-consciousness hardly resembles the original, genuine principle of life anymore. That is why it does not suffer from the defaults of a belief in the intrinsic, ultimate value or sanctity of all life as life. Yet, the question remains why self-awareness would be of any noninstrumental, nonderivative worth. Has the sanctity of human life, perhaps, merely been replaced by the sanctity of self-awareness to better accomodate the needs of self-conscious human beings who do not want to be accused of speciesism? Altho this substitution may be an improvement, the relevance of the distinction between beings which are self-aware and those which are not, cannot be made plausible in this context. (It has also been suggested by people asserting the existence of immortal souls, that it would be the life of a being with an immortal soul which is valuable. But in questions of killing it is the 'mortal' life which is at stake and therefore it should rather be the killing of beings without an immortal soul which is wrong in the first place. Such a consistent scheme is not what these supernaturalists envisage, however, because for them it is exclusively or particularly the killing of the bodies of human beings which is wrong, even tho they are claimed to have souls which survive every killing.) In short, our conclusion is that it is vital to the cogency of the DNI that we forget about a separate, fundamental principle of life altogether. And we have then even not yet discussed the actual conduct and historical record of those who have always so religiously preached on the sanctity of life, or on the sanctity of human life. Such a discussion might not be appropriate in philosophy, it could certainly be appropriate in the field of comprehensive ideology where it is not so much theories without engagements but attitudes and practises which count. 5.1.3 THE RIGHT TO LIVE ON THE IMMUTABLE NORMS 5.1.3.1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE DOMINION OF THE X-IST FATHER AND HIS SONS The fear of them and the dread of them was upon everything on the ground, and in the air, and in the water; upon every animal of the earth, upon all mothers and daughters, upon all fathers and sons of a different persuasion. Into their hands was everything delivered. And the life and death of every living being was subject to their exclusive use, to their abuse. [This prose poem was inspired by the text of a theodemonist, sacred book.] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A principle of life, whether accepted or rejected as a fundamental principle, is a (non-metadoctrinal) doctrinal principle. The value which life, conscious life, self-conscious life or human life have or would have is a doctrinal datum. On the metadoctrinal model one cannot assign any value to anything, not because things would not have a value, but simply because assigning values is a doctrinal activity. When all people have their own right to personhood according to metadoctrinal theory, this is not because of some intrinsic value of their personhood, or of personal life, but because of their role as rational, moral agents who adhere to their own moralities, to their own normative doctrines. It is this right to personhood which is the foundation of all persons' right to life. This right --as we have seen in section 8.5.2 of the Book of Instruments-- is an active, discretionary right, that is, it is a right to live and to die. It is also correlated with a duty to respect other people's personhood which entails that one must not kill or use them either without their permission. However, rights to personhood solely concern relations between people. In no way does it follow from the metadoctrinal principle that one would be allowed (or disallowed) to kill or use nonpersonal living beings. Since the right to personhood forbids the killing of people without their permission, it might look as if the principle underlying it were an identity-dependent principle of personal life in which personal is not defined in terms of mere selfconsciousness but in terms of adherence to one's own normative convictions instead, or some such way. This, however, is a mistake, for if the principle underlying the right to life as ensuing from the right to personhood were a principle of personal life, the right to life would not be discretionary. It would still be life (even if only the life of personal beings) which would be of intrinsic worth. Consequently, it would be wrong ever to kill a person even with 'er permission. But on the metadoctrinal level the concept of intrinsic worth is not applicable, and it is only the person's integrity and autonomy (as an independent decision maker) which matters, not 'er life as such. Rather than being based on the value of life, or of personal life, a person's right to life precedes all questions of the value of life, at least if, and insofar as, it is used as a trump in front of other persons. The value of life as distinct from nontemporal nonlife, and as distinct from preexistence and temporal death, is a doctrinal issue. As a separate, fundamental principle of life cannot be accepted for theoretical and practical reasons, the intrinsic value of life has to be derived from other principles; or if not the intrinsic value of life, then at least the general guidelines with respect to killing, to risking lives, to letting die and to letting be born or grow up. These subjects used to be, or still may be, called "matters of life and death" in popular parlance, but they are actually matters of life and nonlife, that is, of life, death and preexistence or potentiality. They encompass such general issues as the preservation of the natural environment, the killing or saving of living beings in general and of sentient beings in particular; and they encompass such human issues as abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, execution, assassination, war, famine relief and self-killing. Each of these issues would require a separate chapter, if not book, to deal with, something we have to forgo here. What is more important is that a normative doctrine itself would not suffice anyhow to solve all practical, normative problems with regard to the above topics, because to do this one also needs to have all relevant information, and to justify all one's factual and modal presuppositions. This, however, is a requirement which may lead to different conclusions at different moments in time. (As to life and nonlife this applies in particular to our knowledge of a living being's happiness-catenality and to areas with fuzzy boundaries between what is and what is not plausible anymore. The advancement of technology, especially medical technology, will also continually affect the factual and modal conditions on which the decisions are to be based.) A universal, normative doctrine defeats its own ends by making statements on specific questions which heavily draw on the factual and modal conditions and suppositions of a particular time and place, in the most banal case the time and place of its origination. It has been done too often before, it shall not be repeated here. From the perspective of our own doctrine, our attitude towards life and nonlife and towards causing, risking or allowing certain transitions from life to nonlife, and from nonlife to life, will reflect our adherence to the immutable norms: the norm of inclusivity and the norm of neutrality. Always and everywhere it is and will be our fundamental right to live on the DNI, that is, on the principles of the DNI. This right itself, however, is part of the extrinsic right-duty constellation. The rules of this constellation primarily govern our relationship with other people as people, and therefore it is reasonable to start our general discussion of matters of life and nonlife with the status of nonpersonal living beings or systems of living beings. Since they can only have intrinsic rights, it must be on derivative doctrinal values like well-being, or the minimization of unhappiness, and equilibrium, or the preservation of stability, that their rights rest. 5.2 THE LIVES OF ECOSYSTEMS AND NONPERSONAL LIVING BEINGS 5.2.1 THE LIVES OF ECOSYSTEMS AND LIVING BEINGS IN GENERAL What is called "an ecosystem" may vary from a fallen log with its insect fauna and fungi living on the dead material to the environment of an entire planet with all its organisms and nonliving elements. Thus there are good reasons to doubt the usefulness of the term ecosystem, especially because of the vagueness of environment when ecosystem is defined as functioning whole of an ecological community and its environment. An ecosystem is said to be a system formed by the interaction of all living beings with their physical and chemical environment, but at least on Earth complete isolation seems hardly possible, and therefore the area in which living beings interact is probably never entirely self-contained and restricted. Yet, for our purpose the extent of ecosystems in itself need not interest us here (so long as it is not taken in such a broad sense that an ecosystem can never be killed or destroyed). What does deserve our special attention here is that the so-called 'life' of an ecosystem and the lives of its individual, living members are two basically different quantities. (Incidentally, when individuating living beings one will run in much the same problems as when individuating ecosystems.) A well-functioning ecosystem requires that certain of its members die, be eaten or be killed. Therefore, the preservation of the life of the ecosystem conflicts with the preservation of the lives of certain of its members. Maybe, the number of plants and animals which must die in this way is the minimum number which has to die anyhow. If the whole ecosystem withered away, or were ruined, many more plants and animals would die. The death of the one living being in an ecosystem is simply prerequisite for the survival of the other. But what if life has a value, albeit a derivative one on our account? Obviously, if the life of an ecosystem has a value, the life of living beings is looked upon from an identity-independent standpoint. On the other hand, if the lives of living beings are looked upon from an identity-dependent standpoint, then an ecosystem itself has no life with a value of its own. All living beings in an ecosystem are replaceable, not only in the physical and biological sense but also in the normative sense of an identity-independent principle of life. Those who do not like the idea of replaceability may now argue that ecosystems are 'individuals' in their own right, and that it is accordingly an identity-dependent principle which furnishes ecosystems with their own value. To do this, however, is to acknowledge two different principles of life (fundamental or derivative), both identity-dependent, but the one concerned with the lives of ecosystems and the other with those of individual, living beings. The disadvantage of this maneuver is that both principles may easily conflict, and that then the life of an individual, living being is due to be sacrificed to the ends of the ecosystem. Nonetheless, in the relation to external agents, like people or human beings, it is certainly an asset to both ecosystems and living beings that it is recognized that their existence as living systems or beings is of worth. The question is then what their value would be based upon. If all living beings have a value which no nonliving beings possess, this must have something to do with their capacity to react to stimuli, their capacity to grow and multiply or their metabolism. Yet, since this capacity for self-determination or autonomy is a modal notion it is absurd to suggest that this capacity itself would be a perfective instead of instrumental value. And if ecosystems have a value of their own (not derived from their value for individual living beings), this must have something to do with their adequate functioning or with the structure of their members' interactions. But as an ultimate end in itself there is nothing valuable in reacting (or being capable of reacting) to stimuli, growing, multiplying or interacting. A system which functions well may be a stable or creative system, it may also be a destructive one. It could be a well-functioning, human-made destroyer or a healthy beast of prey. The sole thing left over is that the typical features of ecosystems and living beings are of instrumental value for, or indicative of, something else. To say that living beings have interests and that their capacities serve these interests will, then, not help. This is merely another way of saying that living beings have a value of their own, or that they need what is good for their well-being. Moreover, ecosystems could hardly be said to have interests in any literal sense. (If interest means right, title or share in something, it is most patently begging the question to start from the proposition that all living beings have interests which no nonliving being has.) To say that it is the good or well-being of living things which count, may be true, but good and well-being are then purely evaluative terms without conceptual content and need first to be filled in --as we have already done in the case of happiness-catenal beings--. From our neutralist standpoint it is obvious that if ecosystems and living beings do have a value (as ecosystems and living beings), it is because they are systems which somehow preserve stability or which somehow maintain an equilibrium. This presupposes, however, that the stability preserved, or the equilibrium maintained, is not itself unneutral in an important respect (and, if possible, not in any respect). But then, it is not exceptional in nature either that one equilibrium is succeeded by another equilibrium which is better in a certain way. For stability and harmony are typical of nature, except for the not seldom fatal transitions from the one stable state to the next stable state (which, naturally, makes the idea tautologous). What is true nevertheless, is that 'life' (both that of an ecosystem and that of an individual living being) is of value, even of supreme intrinsic value, if, and insofar as, it is characterized by harmony, equilibrium and stability. Disturbing the harmony, equilibrium and stability of living systems can therefore solely be warranted when the objective is a new equilibrium which better serves the ultimate end of catenated neutrality for the aspect or aspects concerned. This, however, does not only apply to living systems, it applies to nonliving and mixed, living-nonliving systems as well. The fundamental reason is that the norm of neutrality transcends all life and all nonlife. 5.2.2 THE LIVES OF HAPPINESS-CATENAL BEINGS All happiness-catenals are living beings, but only part of all living beings are happiness-catenal. They are lucky: unhappiness is a disvalue and therefore one must not do anything that makes a happiness-catenal being unhappy or unhappier; other things being equal, that is. Happiness in itself is a disvalue too, but if making a happiness-catenal being happy or happier is expressive of an improvement of situation, it may be justifiable. This requires, however, that it can be shown what the situational neutrality is which is being reached, or which is coming closer, by making the living being in question happy or happier. It is here that the normative significance of the difference between living beings which are happiness-catenal and those which are not seems to fade out. Another way of looking at it is --as we have discussed before-- to regard happiness as a sign, a sign of situational improvement or of what is needed to keep a situation good, or to make it better (if only in one particular respect). The crucial question which then arises is whether living beings could be catenal with respect to a situational improvement catena without being catenal with respect to the happiness catena. In the event that there are living beings which are catenal in a situational sense, but which have no happiness-catenality amelioration, it is much harder to justify a difference in treatment between beings which are happiness-catenal and beings which are not. If happiness is merely a sign of situational improvement and for that reason justifiable, it must be the situational improvement, or rather situational goodness itself, which should be aimed at. Yet, in that case it is not relevant whether the living being concerned can feel the improvement or not. Thus with regard to happiness it is questionable why living beings which are not happiness-catenal could not demand respect for life or well-being too. But if so, then the 'equal treatment' required has to be understood in a relevantist sense in which it does not necessarily imply identical treatment. The marked difference between happiness-catenals and other, living and nonliving beings lies in the intrinsic (but not ultimate) disvalue of unhappiness. The minimization of this form of negative unneutrality only is already of vital importance in matters of life, death and preexistence. It entails not less than the elimination of all suffering, not only of persons or human beings but of all happiness-catenal living beings. As we have seen, it is not the elimination or minimization of suffering in itself which matters but neutralization with respect to the happiness-catena. This is one of the reasons why the objection against negative utilitarianism, that the best way to eliminate all suffering would be to painlessly kill all beings which can suffer, that is, all happiness-catenal beings, cannot be made against catenical neutralism. Not noncatenality or the absence of unneutrality is of supreme value but neutrality, that is nanhappiness, given that a thing is already happiness-catenal. Accordingly, a living being which suffers has to be made less unhappy, and if possible, at least nanhappy. In practise our approach with respect to happiness-catenal beings will thus be eudaimonistic to a considerable extent. It is 'neutrally eudaimonistic', so to say: neither negatively eudaimonistic like negative utilitarianism nor positively eudaimonistic like classical, positive utilitarianism. It is not utilitarian, because by no means is happiness, or the minimization of unhappiness, our sole value, let alone the sole value to judge, for example, living beings or persons by. Yet, as it is the sole value in utilitarianism (in the sense of monistic eudaimonism) we can --also in matters of life and death or nonlife-- learn much from utilitarian theories so far as happiness-catenal beings are concerned. We can also learn much from anti-utilitarian criticisms, but --in matters of life and nonlife-- they usually concern living beings in general or persons (if not human beings) in particular. Instead of speaking of "a happy life", a utilitarian may speak of "a life worth living". And altho life is not something valuable in an ultimate sense then, it would still be 'directly' wrong to kill a happiness-catenal being whose life is worth living. Direct refers here to the fact that the wrongness of the killing is based solely on the effects on the sentient being killed itself. The minor, direct effect is the fear and pain involved in killing, the major one the loss of future happiness the sentient being killed would otherwise have had (especially when this future happiness should compensate 'im for the short-term pleasures 'e has forgone in the past as part of an overall life plan). The side-effects are the effects on other happiness-catenal beings than the one killed, but it is easy to conceive of cases in which an act of killing would have no such side-effects. If killing is at least sometimes wrong for reasons independent of side-effects, it must be directly wrong in those cases. To demonstrate this direct wrongness it is not necessary to appeal to the sanctity of life or some such concept; it can already be shown on simple utilitarian, that is, eudaimonist grounds, altho only for lives that are worth living or that will on balance be more happy than unhappy. The principle of utility is identity-independent and accordingly subject to the replaceability argument. This argument is used to justify the killing of animals by those who have reared them in the first place. For the people who kill these animals and eat their flesh are not only responsible for their deaths but also for the creation of more animals of the same species. (This does not have to hold for every person individually, but may hold for the community or the group of people concerned as a whole.) The argument presupposes not only that the happiness-catenal animals killed owe their existence to the people concerned, but also that they do not have an unpleasant life, for example, by being crowded together in abominable circumstances. It goes without saying that they must be killed painlessly, if killed at all. From the purely eudaimonist point of view animals may be killed if on balance the pleasure of, for example, eating their meat, or of eating fish, is greater than the total happiness which they would experience by staying alive. This may be the case when the animals concerned are not happiness-catenal at all, or when they have a very small amplitude which only allows for limited sensations of pleasure and pain. But even then their suffering has to be prevented if one can, or mimimized as much as possible. For animals which have not been reared or planted, but which form part of the natural equilibrium of an ecosystem, eudaimonist considerations certainly do not suffice, however; even not from an identity-independent standpoint. It is then also the natural equilibrium itself which has value and which should not be disturbed. As said before: if the replaceability argument applies to animals, it must apply to humans at a comparable level as well. For example, it would not be wrong to perform a scientific experiment on a severely mentally retarded, human being and even to kill it painlessly, provided that another human being were conceived to take its place, or provided that it were a more suitable subject for the experiment than any nonhuman animal. Moreover, if it is good to create life, then it must be good for there to be as many (happy) sentient beings as possible, which presumably would mean also as many (happy) human beings as possible. One could then --so the argument continues-- support many more people by growing plant foods than by raising animals. Raising animals is at least an inefficient method of obtaining food for human consumption. Faced with the replaceability argument the utilitarian has to find a reason for considering deliberate killing directly wrong without considering deliberate nonconception equally wrong on eudaimonist grounds. For if a smaller number of worthwhile lives is just as good as a larger number, the argument against (painless) killing collapses, but if it is better for more sentient beings to have such lives, not conceiving is as bad as killing. One way of increasing the total of worthwhile life in the world might just be to painlessly kill off some of the presently existing happiness-catenal beings in order to create vacancies for new, happier human, or other sentient, beings. It is only by appealing to the side-effects that a utilitarian, that is a monistic eudaimonist, can meet this criticism. 'E may reply that the terrible consequences of 'er position do not show how terrible utilitarianism is, but rather that it is a position a utilitarian would not favor. However, the validity of this reply largely depends on people's discontentment with a consistently utilitarian, or with an anthropocentrist-utilitarian policy. (It should not go unnoticed that many a 'utilitarian' speaks of people and human beings where strictly monistic eudaimonism would only allow 'im to speak of happiness-catenal or 'sentient' beings.) Looking at a happiness-catenal being from an individual, temporal perspective, the crucial questions are when it becomes happiness-catenal --the moment of catenalization-- and when it ceases to be so --the moment of decatenalization--. Supposedly there is no special connection between a beating heart and happiness-catenality, whereas it is quite plausible that such a connection exists between a functioning brain and happiness-catenality. A functioning brain appears to be a necessary condition for happiness-catenality, altho, perhaps, not a sufficient condition. When it seems odd that, for example, an eight-week old fetus of which brain waves can be monitored, might already be happiness-catenal, this is probably due to the confusion of happiness-catenality as such with the amplitude of happiness-catenality. It could very well be (and seems plausible) that an animal being which just becomes happiness-catenal starts with an amplitude of almost 0 , while this amplitude becomes larger and larger as the animal being develops into a full or mature member of the species. Also in this way a fetus would then be going thru all preceding stages of the evolutionary scale. This means that the value or significance of its life as a happiness-catenal being is the same at each stage and moment as the value or significance of adult members of other species with an equal amplitude of happiness-catenality. The same eudaimonist considerations must then be applied to both this fetus or baby, and those adult living beings. Thus, from a purely eudaimonist or utilitarian point of view killing is either directly wrong for both of them or for neither of them. One man (a philosopher regarded with extreme veneration, especially in monotheist times and circles) could not care less that a mother would kill her baby, if it were born of a father she was not married to, for --as he dictated-- 'a child born into the world outside marriage is outside the law' and consequently 'also outside the protection of the law'. This legalist perversion of morality is a far cry from the sensible arguments of later thinkers who say that hopelessly malformed infants ought to be killed before they grow into persons. This saves them a longer life judged to be certainly not worth living. It has thus been argued that if one knows that a fetus or neonate will have an unhappy life, or a life not worth living, and if one allows it to be born or to survive into personhood nevertheless, then that fetus or neonate is badly wronged. The concern with personhood in these arguments illustrates not only why living beings which are (the bodies of) persons deserve our special attention, but also living beings which will normally grow into (the bodies of) persons, or --at the other end of the individual, temporal scale-- which have ceased to be (the bodies of) persons. 5.2.3 THE LIVING BODIES OF POTENTIAL AND DEAD PERSONS It cannot be known for sure in advance whether a zygote, an embryo, a (postembryonic) fetus or a baby is the living body of a preexistent person. If no member of the animal species concerned ever develops into a person, it may be said that it is not the living body of a potential, let alone a preexistent, person. But if the fetus or baby belongs to an animal species of which the members normally develop into persons, it may be said that it probably is. As a living, or happiness-catenal, being there is no difference between the one fetus or baby and the other; the difference lies in its relation to personhood. Yet, the fetus or baby which is to develop into the body of a person at a later stage, is not (yet) a person itself, and not even the body of a person. Traditional antiabortionists have claimed that the fetus in a human mother is a human being or a potential human being; and rightly so. Every fetus is a being belonging to the same species as that of the parents (granted that the parents are members of the same species, and that no important mutation has occurred). This is not typically human, and there is nothing typical about being human or potentially human in this respect. As a (potential) human being the human fetus is a living being, an animal being and, perhaps, a happiness-catenal being, not a fetish with the magical power of membership of an exclusive club. The traditional antiabortionist argument that the human fetus would be a person with its own right to life is, naturally, nonsensical. Or, if person is used as a mere synonym of human being, it suffers from the same speciesism as in the former reasoning. More interesting tho, is the claim that the human fetus is a potential person. This is the claim that it is possibly the living body of a preexistent person. If abortion were wrong because a person who had existed in the future will not exist 'anymore', then this would also make contraception wrong -- as has been pointed out. And contraception would not only be wrong, it would be equally wrong, something the antiabortionists would probably not have intended (except for those methods of contraception not preventing fertilization but causing the rejection of fertilized eggs, which are indeed techniques of very early abortion). When the reply is that the fetus is a potential person that has already started its existence, the problem is why terminating the process would be wrong at this stage and not at a previous stage. (As one human being conceived: 'if it is the cake you are interested in, it is equally a pity if the ingredients were thrown away before being mixed as after being mixed'.) This antiabortionist position is but one remove from both spermatism, the belief that the human spermatozoon contains all properties of a new human being, and ovism, the belief that a new human being is already formed in the ovum before being fertilized by the male's sperm. The antiabortionist might now rejoin that it is precisely the absurdity of both spermatism (with its obsession about and fear of the masturbation of male humans) and ovism which justifies 'er drawing the line at conception or the fertilization of the ovum. But this moment is not necessarily the moment that a new, individual human being starts its life either, because one fertilized egg may still split up later, or two eggs may still combine. Moreover, even the fertilized egg which does not split up or combine (anymore) is not an individual human being if the prerequisite for being an individual, or whole, living being is the capacity to survive outside the body of another living being. The difference between the new (potential) human being and the separate ovum and spermatozoon is one in the packages of genetic information. This is a purely biological difference, and from the perspective of potential personhood it is not relevant whether the body of a person or potential person has the same genetic information as that of a particular woman, as that of a particular man, or a mixture of both; the reproduction might as well be metagenetic. What counts is that if viability, that is the capacity to survive and function outside a mother's or father's body, is not a criterion of potential personhood, this applies to both the zygotes, or other inviable fetuses, and the gametes of the human, or other animal, species. Viability of the body cannot be a necessary criterion of personhood (and of potential personhood), for it would mean that a person whose body had become inviable on its own had to be denied personhood even tho this person would clearly have and express 'er own ideas about life or other matters. If the only way to keep someone alive were by plugging 'er body into another body, even if permanently, the person concerned would still be a person despite 'er physical dependence. Now, if viability cannot mark the end of personhood, it cannot mark the beginning of it either. Moreover, viability is a shifting boundary: because of medical developments the zone of probable survival of a fetus has been moving back further and further. Once it is possible to fertilize eggs and produce children entirely outside the womb the boundary of potential personhood has moved back to the individual ovum and spermatozoon, or their potential combination. Inclusivism urges us to respect not only both living and nonliving things, both human and nonhuman beings, but also both personal and nonpersonal beings. The DNI does not know a doctrinal principle of the sanctity of life as such, of human life as such, or of personhood as such. The significance of personhood derives from the metadoctrinal principle, but it does not follow that potential personhood is of any value in itself; a being simply has extrinsic rights and duties or does not have them, and only persons have these rights and duties, not their bodies. That a being will have extrinsic rights and duties becomes important later on; that it did have them was important before. Another way to put it is: a potential person may have potential rights (and duties), it does not have actual rights (and duties). The potentiality criterion is logically erroneous. A potential president, for instance, does not on that account have the right to preside over a meeting, nor does anyone on that account have a duty to obey 'er instructions. Person A who may now be the president of country B, did not have any right as a president, or as a potential president, when 'e was still a baby, nor did anyone have any duties towards 'im as a president, or as a potential president, at that time. Given that only actual possession of the characteristics of personhood may justify a direct difference in treatment between living, animal or human beings, we must treat the living bodies of preexistent or potential persons in the same way as all other living beings, or as all other happiness-catenal beings of the same happiness-catenary type, unless there is a significant difference in side-effects. Such side-effects have been stated as a reason to differentiate between nonconception and abortion: the effects of an abortion on the mother, the father, the surgeon(s), the nurse(s) and all others involved are quite different from those of a nonconception, particularly when the abortion takes place at a later stage. Moreover, abortion is a form of deliberate killing, and unlike nonconception it might thus make it easier for people to kill living, happiness-catenal or human beings in general. This argument can only be taken seriously, however, if it is put forward by people who also apply it to the killing of other human beings (for example, by or for the state) and to the killing of living or happiness-catenal beings of the same or a more developed type (for example, for food or hunting). While side-effects are important to distinguish our attitude towards abortion from that towards nonconception, they are still more important to distinguish our attitude towards infanticide from that towards abortion. There are first the side-effects for those closely affected. Yet, where the effects of having to kill a neonate may be very bad to them, the effects of having a child, and of rearing a child, which is radically deformed may be much worse. Then there are the social effects of allowing infanticide, even if only in exceptional cases. It is here that we are confronted with the 'slippery slope' or the 'wedge problem'. Arguments using the image of the slippery slope or wedge are not only put forward in the case of infanticide but also in cases of killing animals for food and in cases of euthanasia, especially active euthanasia. Theorists distinguish a logical and a psychological or empirical version of such arguments. The logical version is that if accepting the thin end of the wedge is justified, the rest of it cannot be rejected anymore, because a cut-off point somewhere between the two ends would always be arbitrary. But it has been rightly argued that this interpretation fails, for altho there may be a field of uncertainty to which carefully formulated moral principles cannot be applied with precision, such does not mean that the fuzzy border between what is allowed and what is not allowed could lie anywhere. (We do not have to choose between a ban on all motorized traffic and a system in which people are permitted to drive at any speed anywhere. Altho there may not be a precise justification for a particular speed limit in, for example, a residential area, we know that certain limits would be too low and that other limits would be too high.) On the psychological version of wedge arguments it is claimed that in fact more and more of the wedge will follow once the thin end is allowed to be inserted. This claim is empirical, and as such not one for a normative doctrine to validate or invalidate. As a general claim it is not convincing, however, for --as has been pointed out elsewhere-- many people also start to drink without ending up as alcoholics. (And is working wrong because some workers end up as workaholics?) Nevertheless, the strength of the psychological version of the wedge argument against infanticide is that the sharp boundary of birth is removed by moving from abortion to infanticide as a form of killing which may be warranted under specific circumstances. The crucial question has now become where to draw the line between an infant without any of the characteristics of personhood and an older individual with the minimum characteristics of personhood. It has been said that the whole complex of traits which make up personhood would not obviously be present until the second year of childhood, and this would imply that the killing of babies in their first year were no violation of their extrinsic rights. In spite of this it may be a serious violation of their intrinsic rights as living and happiness-catenal beings. On the other hand --as has already been pointed out too--, not killing or letting a neonate or fetus die which is (probably) going to be severely deformed may be an equally serious violation of its intrinsic rights. That is why to religiously strive to keep alive radically deformed human babies, while allowing healthy adult human beings (such as young men in warfare) or sentient beings (such as animals for food) to be killed at the same time, makes a complete mockery of the whole idea of the value of life. What the body of a preexistent or potential person has in common with living beings which are in no way related to personhood is that there is no person who has this body and who can decide on its use, or who has decided on its use. This condition is quite different not only from that of the bodies of living persons but also from that of the bodies of dead persons. People cannot decide during their lives what must not have been done to them (or rather to their bodies) as fetuses or as infants, but they can decide during their lives what must not be done to them when they will not be in a position anymore to have or to express their own wishes. This is important when their personhood has terminated, that is, when they are dead as persons, but when their bodies are still alive or kept alive. Such a body of which, for example, the heart is still beating but the brain no longer functioning, is then only a living being like all other living beings if the person who died never expressed what should be done to it, or if 'e did lay down 'imself that it should be treated as any living thing of the same category of life. In the event that the dead person's living body does not survive in a happiness-catenary state, it should be treated as a non-happiness-catenal living thing, and in the event that it does, as a happiness-catenal being of the happiness-catenary category concerned, unless the body is under the posthumous influence of the person who had it. If the actions to be taken with respect to this body are affected by the dead person's will, the relationship in question is not really one between a person acting and a nonpersonal living thing but one between several people. It is the role of this kind of relationship in matters of life and death to which we will now turn. 5.3 CAUSING, RISKING OR ALLOWING THE DEATH OF OTHERS 5.3.1 KILLING OTHER PEOPLE OR THEIR BODIES AT THEIR REQUEST When speaking of "causing", "risking" and "allowing the death of other people" or "of the bodies of other people", some might immediately associate these terms with a descending scale of wrongness. Causing someone else's death, or killing, would then be worse (that is more wrong) than risking it, and risking someone else's death would, in turn, be worse (more wrong) than allowing it. Those believing this to hold in general are in error, however. In the event that the beings we are speaking about are persons, it may be worse to cause another person's death than to risk it, but the fact that allowing another person's death is not wrong has nothing to do with a descending scale but everything with the nonactivating character of the extrinsic duty concerned. Those who cause another person's death against 'er will do interfere in the gravest way possible and those who risk this other person's death risk interference, but those who allow the other person's death do not allow interference (unless the other person is involuntarily killed by a third person): they simply do not interfere, which is their extrinsic right (even when a person is involuntarily killed by a third person, albeit a very questionable attitude to take in such a case). Now, if a person asks to be killed there is nothing extrinsically wrong in killing 'im in accordance with 'er express wishes after having taken every precaution to ensure that the decision is a free, personal one. Causing 'er death is then even a better way to fulfil such a wish than merely risking 'er death. And it is in this case the act of not allowing 'er death which would be a flagrant violation of the person's discretionary right to live and to die. A person who requests to be killed painlessly on account of 'er distressing, physical and/or mental state, because 'e is not able to do this 'imself, is someone asking for voluntary active euthanasia. Such euthanasia is called "active" since it requires an action, namely that someone (a doctor, for instance) causes 'er death; passive euthanasia, on the other hand, requires a nonaction, namely that no-one tries to postpone the death of the person concerned or 'to prolong the act of dying'. Being termed "voluntary" for obvious reasons, it should be distinguished from both 'involuntary' and 'nonvoluntary' euthanasia. Involuntary euthanasia is the act or practise of intentionally killing, or letting die, someone who is ill or injured, or whose future well-being is threatened, in disregard of 'er own views but with the motive to serve 'er own interests. Nonvoluntary euthanasia is the act or practise of intentionally killing, or letting die, an ill, injured or threatened sentient being which is not in the position to have or to express, and which has not expressed, any view on the matter, with the motive to serve its own interests. Voluntary and involuntary euthanasia can only apply to persons or their bodies, nonvoluntary euthanasia may also apply to sentient beings with which one has a special relationship (like domestic animals). Nonvoluntary euthanasia is not related to personhood, and the killing of happiness-catenal (or living) beings must in this context be judged by the standards applied to killing happiness-catenal (or living) beings as discussed in the previous division. Involuntary euthanasia is a form of killing or not saving people, or their bodies, against their will and will be discussed later in this division. Voluntary euthanasia is governed by the rules of the extrinsic right-duty constellation (like involuntary euthanasia) and, consequently, the difference between passive and active, voluntary euthanasia is significant. Whereas passive voluntary euthanasia only requires that one allow another person to die, active voluntary euthanasia requires that one cause 'er death (or that of 'er body) oneself. If this is done, the person's right is not violated, because one has 'er permission (by definition), but whether it should be done does, strictly speaking, not depend on the person's own wishes. And if one thinks that it should not be done, it is also every person's right to refuse cooperation, that is, to refuse to perform the act of euthanasia. Whether one is allowed to or not allowed to kill other people, or their bodies, is in the first place a question of extrinsic rights and duties; whether one should or should not do this a question of intrinsic rights and duties. As soon as intrinsic rights and duties come up for discussion, however, we must look at people, or their bodies, as happiness-catenal beings or as living beings. It is then that we should painlessly kill a person as a happiness-catenal being if 'e is bound to suffer a lot from a painful and incurable disease, and under such conditions that the side-effects to other happiness-catenal beings are nonexistent or minimal. (But this should not be done if the person as a hapiness-catenal is only not going to lead a happy life anymore, without definitely having to experience much more pain than pleasure.) As a living being the life of a person is not worth living anymore if 'e is pining away due to a disease which destroys more and more of 'er body and its parts. When both considerations (that is, that of the happiness-catenary value and that of the value of life) point in this direction, one should evidently assist in an act of voluntary euthanasia. If they both point in the opposite direction one may have the extrinsic right to cause the person's death, but then it would still be wrong according to the neutralist doctrine. But the person's own wish is indirectly also of great import from the doctrinal angle, because if 'e wants to die, it is more likely that 'e suffers unbearably and that no future happiness will outweigh 'er pains. Other things being equal this is a reason to validate 'er request for euthanasia. The definition of euthanasia (act or practise of intentionally killing, or letting die, a person or sentient being that is ill or injured, or whose future well-being is threatened, with the motive to serve its own interests) will probably be attacked for being vague. Thus it might be argued that being ill and a being whose future well-being is threatened admit of different interpretations. This criticism is certainly correct, but can only lead to terminological differences. It does not effect our normative considerations. Firstly, on the metadoctrinal model, a person may give permission to kill or use 'er body regardless of 'er being sick or of 'er well-being being threatened or not. And secondly, on the doctrinal model, if a happiness-catenal or living being is not really sick, or if its well-being is not really threatened, this must influence the decision whether to kill this happiness-catenal, or living, being or not. The procedure to reach this decision does by no means depend on the definition of euthanasia, let alone on its vagueness. It is rather the other way round: if it is believed that something or someone who has not expressed 'er will to stay alive should be killed, then people would rather call this killing "euthanasia". Another charge of vagueness as regards euthanasia might be that the killing must take place 'with the motive to serve the interests' of the sentient being concerned. This objection is mistaken tho. The concept of motive is not vague in itself; it may only be hard to establish what the real motive is. If the motive to kill or to have killed, say, someone from whom the killer inherits all possesions, is only the killed person's money, then it can easily be pretended that the motive is or was to serve that person's own interests, if the killing would indeed save 'er own interests. (A reason why important decisions like these must not be taken exclusively by those 'most closely affected' unless they do in no way benefit personally from a decision to perform the act of euthanasia.) Such a motive would be a very wicked one, but in the case of voluntary euthanasia it is the person requesting 'er own death who has to take such possibilities into account. Just as in the case of infanticide, so some theorists use a slippery slope or wedge argument against euthanasia, especially against the decriminalization (or 'legalization') of active euthanasia. The 'logical' interpretation of this argument is that once the all-important first step has been taken to kill human life, there would be no good reason for not accepting additional practises which are plainly unacceptable, and therefore the first step had better not be taken. This, of course, is rubbish, even if we read for "human life", "the life of a person". As has been replied elsewhere already, there is a rational ground for distinguishing between the person 'in agony who wants to die and other cases, such as that of an old infirm person who does not want to die'. This rational ground is that the death is requested in the first case, and not requested in the second one. Such a ground is metadoctrinal, but even on the doctrinal view there is an important difference between the first person who suffers terribly, and the second one who does not suffer in any comparable way. If logic were that simple, a wedge argument might as well prove that the illegalization of euthanasia with respect to human beings would compel a country to illegalize all forms of killing human beings without exception, that is, inclusive of capital punishments and of the killing of members of foreign armies (to say nothing of nonhuman animals or sentient beings). On the psychological version of the slippery slope argument against active euthanasia it is claimed that this form of killing would in fact lead to terrible consequences reflecting a general breakdown in respect for 'life' (which in the language of these human beings means human life when it suits them). There are several reasons which make this argument implausible. Firstly --as has been pointed out--, in societies in which defective babies, or even feeble old people, used to be killed, this did not lead to an easy approval of other types of killing. Secondly, in societies in which people are permitted to kill others in self-defense, people seem smart enough to also distinguish killing in self-defense from other types of killing nevertheless. And finally, it has been pointed out that in societies where euthanasia, or active euthanasia, is illegal the choice is not between a benign policy and a potentially dangerous one. The existing policy in such a society has its own evils, the worst of them being that the right of a person to decide over 'er own life and death is violated by the law of the country or state. Those who do not want the slippery slope argument to hold can always build in safeguards, and more and stronger safeguards, dependent on the time and place concerned. 5.3.2 KILLING OTHER PEOPLE OR THEIR BODIES AGAINST THEIR WILL In the first instance it is murder to intentionally cause the death of another person when 'e does not want to die, or to intentionally cause the death of 'er body when 'e has expressed the wish that 'er body should be kept alive. This is why active involuntary euthanasia is murder. There is no conceivable case in which it can be justified. Even if someone's well-being is threatened in that 'er future life is going to be 'utterly hellish' this is no reason to override 'er autonomy as a person. No-one knows for sure that a life, or a future life, will on balance be more unhappy than happy, and even if it is, it is only in utilitarianism the sole thing that counts. Nonutilitarians may come to a different decision, and so may utilitarians, because even inconsistence does not override personhood. Insofar as it does not harm the integrity of other people, people do even have the extrinsic right to lead 'utterly hellish' lives. In the event that the human, or other sentient, being in question 'cannot grasp what it will be like', it is either no person or a person who does not accept someone else's advice. If it is not a person (but, for example, a small infant), then the act of euthanasia is not involuntary but nonvoluntary; if it is a person who does not accept another person's advice, then it is 'er extrinsic right not to accept the authority of other people, even when this would be foolish. If active involuntary euthanasia is wrong, that is, the intential killing of people who are ill (if not fatally ill), injured (if not severely injured) or whose well-being is threatened by external factors (if not seriously threatened), then intentionally killing other people against their will who are not fatally ill, not severely injured and whose well-being is not seriously threatened by external factors, is definitely wrong, one would say. It is wrong, then, both from a metadoctrinal and from a doctrinal point of view, and as such plain murder. Or, is it? If it is indeed murder per se, then assassination, killing people in times of war and executions are murders too. Absolute pacifists may agree with this. But absolute pacifists or not, there is something that requires our special attention in questions of killing others against their will. This is that the reason why it is wrong to kill them is primarily based on their extrinsic right to life and our extrinsic duty not to interfere with them. But what when someone else contemptuously flouts the rules of the extrinsic right-duty constellation? 'E may be in good health, 'e may not have any injuries, and 'er well-being may not be threatened by any external factor, least of all by us. The situation is analogous to that in questions of discrimination: we must not discriminate between people, but we may make a distinction between people who do and people who do not discriminate. Similarly, we must not interfere with other people's freedom against their will, but we may interfere with the freedom of other people who interfere with other people's freedom against their will. Those who discriminate deliberately cannot appeal to the norm of inclusivity, or to a principle of relevance, in order not to be discriminated against themselves; and those who deliberately infringe the rules of the extrinsic right-duty constellation cannot appeal to the right to personhood, to a metadoctrinal principle, or to a principle of liberty, in order to be left alone themselves. But this means that not all cases of killing another person who does not want to die, are wrong, even not all cases of intentionally killing such a person. The clearest cases that it is not, are killings in self-defense in which the person attacked has not provoked the attack. (Provoked in the sense that 'e 'imself first interfered with the right to personhood of the person killed.) But even these cases have their complications. May you solely kill another person in self-defense when you are completely sure that 'e wants to kill you personally, and when you have never in any way interfered with 'er right to personhood before? May you kill another person if 'e 'only' wants to enslave (but not kill) you? May you kill another person if 'e merely attempts to occupy a negligible part of what is your property in terms of the extrinsic right-duty constellation (the loss of which will not affect your material well-being at all)? The doctrinal counterpart of these primarily metadoctrinal questions is should you kill such a person? The most simplistic answer to the may questions is that one may not, or must not, kill such a person, and that only 'the state' or 'the government' may do so, with the possible exception of that form of killing which is needed for immediate self-defense. This is a legalist position which takes no notice of the fact that the questions posed are independent, normative questions. What this means, becomes clear at once, when 'the state' or 'the government' itself is the person, or personified being, that must be able to justify 'er own acts of killing. This applies then both to the killing of 'er own citizens or residents and to that of foreigners, that is, armed or unarmed citizens or residents of other countries. May a country A kill persons of another country B if they only want to enslave the citizens and residents of country A? May this country A kill persons of country B if they only want to occupy a negligible part of what is A's territory in terms of the extrinsic right-duty constellation? And if so, should it? In the above questions, in which we have personified 'the state' and 'the government', we have assumed that that government itself is somehow legitimate. But what if a government murders its own citizens or residents, for example, citizens who have always respected the extrinsic rights of other people, both with regard to their bodies and with regard to their external possessions? Such a government cannot be legitimate, unless it takes appropriate measures to undo the evil done (if possible). In the above questions we have also assumed that a person or country would take property away which belongs to another person or country according to the metadoctrinal principle. But what if a supposedly legitimate government legally considers something the property of a resident, or of its own, which is not 'er, or its, property in the normative sense of the extrinsic right-duty constellation? Also such a government interferes with the freedom of other 'persons' (the citizens, residents or countries whose valid claims are ignored) before its own freedom is interfered with. If a person or country has not violated any extrinsic right to one's own body or any extrinsic right to one's own external possessions, then killing such a person against 'er will and on purpose is murder, and then attacking such a country is an unjust war or terrorism. But in all other cases the aforementioned problems illustrate very well how hard it is to prove that the killing of a particular person against 'er will is just or unjust, or that the killing of more or less arbitrary members of a particular group against their will is just or unjust (unless --again-- the person or group concerned have not violated any right to one's own body and any right to one's own external possessions on the same metadoctrinal principle). It is relatively easy to provide some answer to each question, what makes it difficult is to remain consistent throughout -- a necessary criterion for both truth and relevance. Suppose that it is agreed that a cruel tyrant, who keeps 'er subjects in great poverty by stealing from them what normatively belongs to them, may be killed ('assassinated') to liberate 'er subjects, even tho 'e is not directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of other people. Does it not follow that a legitimate government may execute a person for committing a crime which need not be as serious as murder? If not, why not? It is plausible to assume that someone who has never killed another person against 'er will other than in self-defense must never be killed 'imself against 'er will other than in self-defense. (What is defended must then be one's body or life, not one's external property.) In practise a dictator will probably be at least indirectly responsible for the deaths of other people, and cannot appeal to the right to life, but if 'e were solely responsible for cruelties other than murder, 'e could on this interpretation still appeal to the right to life. All that could be done, is to expose 'im to the same cruelties and/or to take all 'er external possessions, while disallowing 'im to make use of anyone else's. This would amount to imprisonment with or without corporal punishment. Should 'e try to prevent this by killing, or attempting to kill, 'er opponents, 'e will forfeit 'er right to life. It is then, indeed, that 'e may be killed in spite of what was the case before. Often we do not need to have an answer to the metadoctrinally Ananormative may question before being able to tackle the neutral-inclusivist should question. We merely need to know the answer to the may question when the answer to the should question is in the affirmative. One would say that it is particularly those who profess that wars are 'required by the world spirit' or that wars are 'sublime' or that all murderers 'must die', who always need the solution to the additional may question. However, these people are usually the very people who cannot be bothered by the difference between doctrinal and metadoctrinal considerations: their (doctrinal) should is held to be automatically a (metadoctrinal) may, and vice versa. (Incidentally, the philosopher who said that 'even if a society were to dissolve itself, the last murderer remaining in prison had first to be executed', was the same one as the one allowing the killing of children born of parents not married to each other. It would seem therefore that his murderers did not refer to unmarried mothers killing their children, nor to executioners.) As neutralists we reject any idea of the sublimity or necessity of war, and as neutralists we reject the obsession with punitive retribution or the theodemonist law of retaliation which requires retaliative punishment. On our view also murderers and thieves are happiness-catenal and living beings, and if they should be killed or otherwise punished in spite of considerations of happiness-catenality and life, then only when we can be sure that this will in the long run serve, or also serve, people's respect for each other as persons. Under certain circumstances retaliation may be a necessary evil to prevent reoccurrence or to restore an equilibrium, but it must never degenerate into an end in itself. If a person may be killed against 'er will, because 'e has killed another person against 'er will who never violated anyone's right to personhood, then it is still the case that this person should not be killed, unless 'er killing has a stronger crime-preventive function, or is a much more effective crime deterrent than, for example, life imprisonment. (An execution is said to be a crime-preventive measure if, and insofar as, the person excuted would have committed other crimes; it is said to be a crime-deterrent if, and insofar as, it frightens off other persons from also committing a crime.) The 'crime' we are talking about must then be a crime in the normative sense of the extrinsic right-duty constellation. It is not a 'crime' like witchcraft or cursing one's parents which used to deserve the death penalty in ancient religious times, nor a 'crime' in the factual-modal sense of the law of the land (according to which, in certain countries or states, even passive euthanasia performed by a doctor at the request of a terminally ill patient might be designated "a crime" and made illegal). The question if, and to what extent, capital punishment does prevent and deter real crimes is an empirical question, the answer to which may vary from place to place and from time to time. But if it cannot be made very plausible at a particular time and place that the number of lives saved due to the existence of the death penalty at that time and place clearly exceeds, and continues to exceed, the number of executions, then capital punishment is definitely murder. It is then murder not necessarily because no-one may be executed, but because no-one should be executed. And no-one should be executed, because it is the killing of a living being and the killing of a happiness-catenal being, and because of its bad, if not horrible, side-effects. If assassination is defined as deliberate, nonlegal killing of a particular person against 'er will for impersonal motives, then assassination is not (necessarily) murder, that is, not wrong by definition. It has been pointed out that the issue of assassination in this sense closely resembles that of execution. Thus, as with execution, the bad side-effects of assassination are sufficient in themselves to set severe limits to any policy of simply maximizing the number of lives saved (the assumption being that the death of one particular, public figure would at least save the lives of two or more other people). Unlike impartial executions, however --if they exist--, political, or other ideological, killings set a precedent --as has been rightly argued-- ' which can soon build up a tradition of attempts to change society by violence rather than by persuasion'. The same applies to an even greater extent to terrorist killing whose targets are more or less arbitrary members of particular groups. Add to this the fallibility of assassination and terrorist killing in bringing about the change aimed at, and it is evident that a public figure or members of certain groups should solely be killed against their will under exceptional circumstances, and solely if they may be killed because of their serious violation or violations of other people's rights of personhood. (Violations which are either their personal responsibility or their shared responsibility as members of a certain group.) Consequently, saving exceptional circumstances and conditions, assassination and terrorist killing are murder. 5.3.3 RISKING THE DEATH OF OTHER PEOPLE OR THEIR BODIES The difference between causing the death of a number of people of a certain category and risking the death of a number of people of a certain category is merely gradual (if existent at all). It is only with respect to a particular person that the difference between causing and risking 'er death is of greater significance. Thus when it is certain that a particular person has been convicted of murdering someone else, it is also certain that the execution of this convicted murderer causes the death of a convicted person. But considering the system of capital punishment in general, it is not always the death of a guilty person which an execution causes; in practise it may also be the death of an innocent person. Therefore every time that an execution causes the death of a convicted person, it risks the death of an innocent person. This is another, very serious, objection against the death penalty, because insofar as it is based on maximizing the number of lives saved (and not on fanaticism or retributivism) it is actually based on minimizing the risk of death. If the death penalty prevented other killings, it is only a question of the risk which would be lower if the convict were executed (instead of being given a life sentence): people never have the knowledge of the number of actual killings which would be prevented; and similarly, if, and insofar as, the death penalty deterred other killings. This is why one theorist has said about executions and assassinations with uncertain consequences that the decision makers in question 'are gambling with lives, whether they kill or not'. The certain death of a convict or public figure whose career is costly in lives is simply gambled against the chance of averting a number of other deaths. Not only the institution of capital punishment but terrorism in particular involves then the risk of the death of innocent people. Risking the death of people, or their bodies, who have not committed any crime, is an everyday practise. Allowing cars to drive on the road is risking the death of others, not only of the people who drive a car themselves, but also of people who do not drive, of small children and of nonhuman animals. All systems of motorized traffic take their toll of lives, and we know that a number of lives will be saved --if not a great number-- by not building such systems or by building more expensive systems (without dangerous level crossings, for instance). Only those who believe in the fundamental sanctity of life itself, and who also attribute to life, or to human life, a value incomparable with anything else, are committed to saying that allowing motorized traffic is definitely wrong for this reason. In their so-called 'no-trade-off' view the complete absence of motorized traffic must be preferred to any kind of general system of motorized traffic, a piece of life-saving equipment to any amount of better housing or schooling, and so on and so forth. But for no-one else can the saving of life automatically have such absolute priority over all other objectives. If on balance the existence of a traffic system is better than its nonexistence, then the advantages outweigh the number of fatal and other casualties (such as the 'statistical deaths') in consequence of its existence (and which would not have been there without it). Yet, such does not release anyone from 'er personal duty to minimize as much as possible the risk of killing, for example, by not speeding or by not driving while under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. It is in such cases that killing another person is slaughter (manslaughter in traditional parlance): an unintended or accidental killing (and accordingly without express or implied malice) for which a person can be held responsible nevertheless. It is not that one would not be allowed to take any risk, for taking the risk of killing someone is inherent in a system of motorized traffic; it is rather that one must not take too big a risk. There are, or can be, important moral differences between running a general system of motorized traffic and carrying on a war (civil or international), the most important one being whether participation is voluntary or not. Yet, there also is, or can be, a remarkable similarity. It is that war too --particularly a revolution-- may be waged solely to attain a social objective, and not to kill anyone. Nonetheless, by engaging in a war (or revolution) the decision maker always takes the risk of people being killed, if not at the other side, then at 'er own side. The metadoctrinal principle requires that no-one be killed against 'er will who respects other people's extrinsic rights, but if the people fought against in the war concerned do not recognize other people's extrinsic rights without being, or having been, provoked to do so, then they cannot appeal to the right to personhood. (They may, for example, keep and use a considerably larger portion of the natural resources than belongs to them according to the rules of the extrinsic right-duty constellation.) In such a case one may fight such people, but whether one should do so is another issue altogether again. The doctrinal principle of neutrality may affirm that the social objective of the party whose extrinsic rights are violated is a good one, but when the war is bound to bring about the death of living beings, the death of happiness-catenal beings, an awful lot of destruction and terrible suffering, the badness of the war itself may outweigh the goodness of the proposed objective. In other words, the end does not justify the means on the neutralist model, for both the end (a penultimate or lower-level value) and the means will have to be judged by the same catenary standard. By choosing means which are worse than what is fought for in the first place, a party or country would overshoot its mark. One way, then, to prevent defeating one's own ultimate end is to minimize the risk that others in the conflict concerned will be killed. Again, it is probably true that some risk of killing human or other living beings will have to be taken in a war or during an insurrection, yet this in itself does not justify taking too big a risk, nor does it justify taking a risk of killing too many human or other living beings. 'War' is a conflict between opposed parties characterized by the coercive use of violence. Violence itself has been defined as intentional infliction of damage, pain, injury or death by forcible means. Now, genuine pacifists would argue that people are to refrain from using violence under all circumstances. On their view violence is evil, and people ought to eradicate, or at least minimize, it by not getting involved in it themselves. (Their reply to those who 'fight for peace' is sometimes that this is as absurd and self-defeating as 'fucking for virginity'.) The crux is, of course, whether pacifism does indeed reduce violence given that not all other people are pacifists as well. An interesting point made is then that a moral principle is not a principle to be adopted by one person or group only but by everyone. And if everyone were to adopt the principle of pacifism, violence would indeed cease to exist. But it has been demonstrated that this argument is fallacious in that it does not solely apply to the pacifist principle but also, for instance, to the principle that violence should only be employed defensively. If everyone were to live up to this principle, violence would be eradicated too. The principle may not be as simple as that of the pacifist, but it is equally universal. Defensively tho, is too vague a term for us, as it may be so narrow that it only concerns a person's own body (or the lives of the members of the group 'e belongs to), or so broad that it also concerns everything that is called "'er property" in the country or community in question. On our normative considerations the alternative to the pacifist principle is rather: use violence against other people only if extrinsic rights are violated . However, if they are, the implication is not yet that we should use violence. We may still, like pacifists, actually never use violence. In cases of armed conflict risking the death of other people or their bodies does not only mean risking the death of those belonging to an opposed party, it equally frequently means risking the death of others belonging to the same party. When a government forces its own citizens, or a particular category thereof, to fight in a just or unjust war, it risks the death of other people; those making the decisions at the top are seldom or never the ones risking their own lives. In the event that a person who fights in a war has voluntarily agreed to participate in that particular war, or in all wars waged by the government in question, 'er right to personhood is not violated in this respect. The situation is quite different, however, if the person whose life is at stake is forcibly made to partake in that war despite 'er conscientious objection. It may be that the war in question is a brutal act of violence, or a serious violation of foreign extrinsic rights. It may be that the government in question requires its citizens to die, or risk their lives, for a state of religionism and/or monarchism, or for a state of party-political and/or military totalitarianism. It may be that the nation's armed forces discriminatingly conscript or hire people or human bodies of one particular category only (gender, race or otherwise). These are all reasons why risking the death of a countryman or countrywoman in a war can be in the same league as murder. 5.3.4 ALLOWING THE DEATH OF OTHER PEOPLE OR THEIR BODIES Except for differences of side-effects consequentialist or teleological arguments against killing are equally good arguments against letting die, or in favor of saving lives. Utilitarians in particular teach that killing is shortening a life, while saving a life is extending it, and that the traditional difference of moral evaluation is solely defensible to the extent that it reflects differences of side-effects on other people. They do not think that an act like killing (intentionally) or an omission like allowing someone to die (intentionally) can ever vary in moral value when having identical effects. This may be correct within the consequentialist framework of the utilitarian, and also within the teleological framework of our neutralist, doctrine, it is not correct when this doctrine, or adherence to this doctrine, is judged from a metadoctrinal position. Then it has to be taken into account that two persons may adhere to different teleological, or other, doctrines and moralities. Acts and omissions do not relate in the same way to active extrinsic rights and nonactivating extrinsic duties. Altho a doctrinaire utilitarian, or other consequentialist, would not be able to view matters from a metadoctrinal standpoint (like so many religious and political dogmatizers), it is even possible to attack 'er position from within a consequentialist doctrine on other considerations than those of side-effects. The point is that refraining from a wrong act and a right omission do not require anything physical of the agent, whereas a right act and refraining from a wrong omission do. Thus abstaining from murder requires no physical effort as such but refraining from not saving lives, or from not striving to keep alive, does. Now, it is quite possible that everyone can endeavor to keep one person alive, but no-one may be able to keep everyone alive. Or, more generally, it is quite possible to abstain from one, or a limited number of wrong omissions, but it may physically be impossible to abstain from all omissions which are consequentially speaking wrong. This is not a question of normative conditions in themselves anymore but of modal conditions: a person may be able to do everything 'e should do separately, but is 'e able to do everything 'e should do together? (Compare the precautions you should take to prevent the occurrence of one particular disease. You can take these precautions, yet if you had to take all precautions you should take to prevent the occurrence of each disease, or of any disease, you could get, you would probably soon collapse from exhaustion.) In respect of the DNI there is the additional aspect that it would fall foul of the spirit of neutralism to require a (positive) action which somehow involves change. All we can demand on the relevantist interpretation of the doctrinal principle of neutrality is that if one acts, it should ultimately serve a neutral purpose. This, of course, holds also for the consequences or effects of an intentional omission, yet an omission in itself differs markedly in character from an action. The theory on which there can be a normative difference between an act and an omission with the same consequences is called "the acts and omissions doctrine". If we completely rejected this theory (as consequentialists do), not giving to a famine relief fund without being able to justify one's alternative spending as more important would be very similar to an act of killing. (It is to be feared tho that this position might make people not more willing to give to such relief funds but less reluctant to murder instead.) Yet, there is one significant difference: if the act of killing is a murder regardless of the doctrine espoused, then it is the most serious violation of someone's right to personhood, whereas not contributing to a relief fund is not as such. On the other hand, in the event that the famine concerned results from a large-scale violation of extrinsic property-rights in a region, or in the world, a contribution to the relief of this famine is merely a (partial) compensation for this violation. Not contributing to famine relief can in that case be on a par with murder even from a metadoctrinal standpoint. It is only when the country or the people that suffer from famine have not respected, or will not respect, the rules of the extrinsic right-duty constellation themselves that they cannot appeal to this compensative, metadoctrinal aspect of helping them. On the utilitarian reckoning everyone should spend 'er time on good works right up to the point where the disadvantages to 'im outweigh the benefits to others. The ensuing prospect of an enormous reduction in income and/or the loss of a lot of spare time is a very demanding morality indeed for many (comparatively) rich people. One approach suggested to this problem (if it is one), is to accept the utilitarian, eudaimonist view, but 'to allow a huge discrepancy between professed beliefs and actual conduct' and to distinguish 'ordinary people' from the 'few saints who manage to live up to the utilitarian view'. This, however, is a serious admission of failure largely due, not only to the utilitarian's neglect of extrinsic right-duty relationships but also of the individual's general modal condition. Take the modal condition of a bridge by way of comparison: a bridge may easily be able to carry each one of a thousand vehicles, without being able to carry all of them. In other words, a bridge has a carrying-capacity, but so has a person, or human body, in a way. When two people do not live up to the utilitarian's expectations, it may be that one of them does not try hard enough, but it may also be that their carrying-capacities are simply dissimilar. In that case they may both be exerting themselves to the utmost. Thus we had better forget the deceptive terminology of one of them being 'a saint' and the other just being 'ordinary'. Not only suppositions about modal conditions but also suppositions about factual conditions play a role in consequentialist or teleological ethics. The positions of two utilitarians, for instance, may radically differ dependent on their empirical or modal presuppositions. In discussions on whether famine can be avoided there is a remarkable difference of opinion amongst utilitarians themselves. First of all, there is the position of those who believe that a population growth which is faster than the growth in food supplies leads to famine. Among them we find so-called 'optimists' who believe that famine can be reduced and averted by bringing the rate of growth of population below the rate of achievable economic growth, and so-called 'pessimists' who do not believe that population control programs can end or avert famine. Furthermore, there are the 'developmentalists' who hold the view that population growth rates often do not fall until after a reasonable level of economic well-being has been reached. An optimistic utilitarian may tend to underestimate the long-term consequences of saving human beings from famine when the growth of population is merely going to outstrip the available resources. A pessimistic utilitarian may see no way 'to curtail population growth except by letting famines run their natural course' -- as has seriously been argued. This divergence of opinions between thinkers with apparently the same moral outlook seems to be largely the result of the uncertainty of consequences. Utilitarianism (and with it all consequentialism) has been attacked for not distinguishing justice from beneficence or 'essential duties' which are stringently required from 'supererogatory duties' which are meritorious, but which would not be required so stringently. In deontological terms it may be said that the duties of justice require that one act on no maxim which uses people as mere means, and that duties of beneficence require that one act on some maxim which fosters other people's ends. (Note the metadoctrinal basis of the supposedly doctrinal duty of beneficence.) It is then said to be 'a matter for judgment and discretion which of their ends to foster'. (Note how this valueless evaluative formulation now touches on a doctrinal dimension.) All those who emphasize this distinction between duties have to do, is to make sure that their acts are not unjust in that they would use people as mere means (whatever this might mean). Regardless of whether one is in a position to do something about it, helping the starving is merely a supererogatory duty on this deontological reasoning. Assuming that any beneficence is to be allocated at all, it leaves the allocation of this beneficence in utter darkness. Altho it may be mentioned that 'relief of famine should stand very high among duties of beneficence' since 'extreme poverty and hunger leave people unable to pursue any of their other ends', it may be stressed at the same time that 'the important moral choices are above all those in which one acts directly', that is, those which involve personal communication. Such a lack of concern with social issues (and such a lack of socioeconomic insight) on a larger than personal scale does not even require pessimistic presuppositions with regard to famine relief. When metadoctrinal considerations are not mixed up with doctrinal ones, the difference between so-called 'duties of justice' and 'duties of beneficence' in matters of life and death resembles that between extrinsic and intrinsic duties. It is true that a person must not act unjustly in terms of the extrinsic right-duty constellation, but intrinsic duties are only supererogatory from the metadoctrinal angle. To maintain that they would be supererogatory on the doctrinal level is a fallacy; it is precisely at this level where the core of morality lies. Thus, on the Ananormative model we may accept the eudaimonist, doctrinal considerations of utilitarians with respect to saving lives if, and insofar as, they do not contradict anyone's right to personhood, do not disregard other neutral-inclusive values than the minimization of suffering, and do take into account that every person is a being with limited capacities. What the neutral-inclusivist should suppose with respect to the factual and modal conditions of famine relief and related issues cannot be laid down here since the truth and relevance of such suppositions are too much time- and place-dependent. There is a lugubrious similarity between allowing other people to die of hunger, or of illnesses they would easily have survived if hunger had not weakened them, and passive involuntary euthanasia. In both cases people die, because they are allowed to die, not because their death is the result of a particular action (discounting the possible infringement of extrinsic property rights). And in both cases they die against their will. If a person's reaction should be different in the instance of passive involuntary euthanasia, then only because 'e is probably able to do much more about one isolated case close to home than about so many cases far away. But this argument is weak and the strong similarity remains. No-one can call passive involuntary euthanasia "murder", if 'e does not equally condemn the situation in which people let other people die of starvation. If aid is supererogatory in the latter case, it is so in the former case. Granted that it is not supererogatory on the doctrinal level, we must either condemn both situations or neither one. Involuntary euthanasia would, perhaps, hit a person we know, but only one or a limited number of people (who, moreover, cannot be cured either). On the other hand, the number of human beings struck by a famine is likely to be beyond comparison. The least problematic instance of allowing the death of another person, or 'er body, is passive voluntary euthanasia. As it is passive, it only requires an omission; and as it is voluntary, it is an omission which is requested. It is the right to personhood of every person to refuse medical, or other, treatment while 'e is still able to communicate this desire, but also thereafter, if 'e has made it known beforehand that 'e does not want the life of 'er body to be prolonged. When the decision is an unmistakably free one, no-one has the right to treat, or continue treating, the person or 'er body, not even to save 'er life, if, and insofar as, only 'er own death is involved (and not the involuntary death, or possible death, of another person). It may be very regrettable that someone who is seriously ill or badly injured chooses to die; it may be that 'er life should be saved and could be worthwhile in our eyes. Yet, it is not our life, and our normative convictions may not be the other person's normative convictions, or our information and suppositions may not be the other person's information and suppositions. People also allow, risk or cause their own death when they do not suffer from a terminal disease or are not seriously injured, or when their well-being does not seem to be threatened by demonstrable external factors. This matter will be our final concern. 5.4 CAUSING, RISKING OR ALLOWING ONE'S OWN DEATH 5.4.1 THE REASONS FOR CHOOSING OR RISKING DEATH Those voluntarily asking for euthanasia by not continuing medical treatment, or by being killed painlessly, presumably have a good reason to choose death. They have a fatal illness or injury, or, under exceptional circumstances, they are bound to be killed or fatally wounded, or to suffer in some other, horrible way. It is by definition only in such relatively well-defined cases that the term euthanasia is used. Some say that the difference between active voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide is merely that the very last act is performed by someone else. Suicide is then employed without a connotation, merely meaning intentional self-killing or voluntary intentional self-killing. However, if 'suicide' is disapproved of by people, they will only call an act of self-killing "suicide" when it incurs their disapproval. It then depends, for example, on the reason or motive for taking one's own life intentionally (or voluntarily and intentionally) whether it is called "suicidal" or "sacrificial". It has been suggested that an act of self-killing is a 'suicide' if it is self-regarding, that is, performed to relieve oneself, and a 'sacrifice' if other-regarding, that is, performed to relieve others. Altho such a difference could be created by stipulative definition, it would not be one in moral status, for in itself there is nothing wrong in relieving oneself --on the contrary. (There may be something wrong in relieving oneself in spite of the harm done to others, but it is then the harm done to others which is wrong, not relieving oneself. ) In order to prevent all confusion and question-begging it is probably better not to use the term suicide at all, and only to speak of "the different forms of self-killing". A very important aspect of self-killing is indeed the reason or motive for causing one's own death, but relieving others is just one kind of reason which may be legitimate. (Assuming that relieving is not used in an overextended, self-defeating sense. It cannot be applied, for example, to the grief of those who would be terribly distressed, if a widow did not kill herself so that she might be cremated with her husband's body; this to show her religious devotion to him.) Given that one causes one's own death of one's own free will, there is no significant difference with allowing one's death. Since we hold the view that a person owns the body 'e has --as explained in section 9.4.1 of the Book of Instruments-- causing the death of this body makes no difference on the metadoctrinal level with allowing to die. It is only when one does not own a personal body that there is an important difference. Even on the neutralistic, doctrinal level there is no difference in principle, because in the event of an omission, the death is caused by certain changes anyhow. Causing death is only a limiting case of risking it, and in this sense the difference between self-killing and risking death is merely gradual. Self-killing is an act in which a person drastically shortens 'er life, but there are numerous other ways in which people less drastically shorten their lives, the most notorious ways being, probably, the addictive use of tobacco, alcohol and other drugs, hard drugs in particular. Yet, not only the addictive use, any (more than minimal?) use of artificial aids, and just eating too much while exercising too little, will shorten a person's life on the average. There are also those who participate in dangerous sports or take on dangerous jobs. Are they not self-killers because they are not sure that their sport or job will kill them? Moreover, there are people (called "suicides" too by some) who only attempt to kill themselves without making it absolutely certain that they will die. There is a whole range of acts on the border of self-killing which are attempts at self-killing and which do not succeed. In all these cases it does not seem to be in the first place the probability of death which counts. The question is therefore whether it is, perhaps, the intention or the motive of the act or omission which makes the difference. When an apparent attempt at self-killing is not intended to succeed, it is not an attempt at self-killing but a cry for help. Or --as has been pointed out-- the situation may also be a mixed one in which 'a gamble is taken with some risk of death and some chance of survival followed by help'. Gambling with their own lives (if not other people's lives as well) is what many people do, however, who would never be called "suicides": those partaking in a war or revolution, those off on a dangerous job, those playing a perilous game, those on hard drugs, those driving under the influence of alcohol, and so on and so forth. All of them may kill themselves, or be killed, yet none of them presumably have the intention of killing themselves or of being killed. The reason for risking death may be to defend or overthrow a government, to save (other) lives, to amass wealth or to get high; the reason may be to escape boredom, to find a way out for their aggressions and frustrations, or to liberate themselves from the shackles of an exclusionist milieu. In practise several of such reasons may play a role at the same time, possibly in addition to increasing the risk of death itself. It is not 'er death which is the motive of person who aspires to a better society, for instance; that is not even the motive of a person who wants to destroy it. But are the reasons or motives of those risking their own deaths fundamentally different from those causing them? People kill themselves also to escape suffering when they cannot improve their situation in another way, and because they do not want to be a burden on society or on people they know. So the reasons of a person choosing 'er own death may be much more praiseworthy than those of a person only risking 'er own death. To be sure, it may be the other way round too. The normative significant difference is accordingly not really between causing and risking one's own death when one's life is on balance worth living but rather between taking and not taking too high a risk. (Compare the difference between taking a risk when driving, and taking too high a risk when speeding or being intoxicated.) Taking too high a risk with respect to one's own life, for whatever reason or lack of reason, is everyone's right of personhood, if, and insofar as, one does not risk another person's life (and assuming that one does not take this risk while using another person's property without 'er permission). Yet, as regards taking the 'risk of certainty' it has been claimed by one philosopher that 'man has duties to himself as an animal being' and that 'he cannot renounce his personality so long as he is a subject of duty, hence so long as he lives'. However, if a man or other animal being may never kill himself so long as he lives, then he may never kill himself. And indeed, killing oneself was self-murder on this construction, surpassed in its 'viciousness' perhaps solely by masturbation or some such 'unnatural vice of carnal self-defilement'. (It is historically not justifiable to conclude that self-killing was believed to be as innocent as, or even more innocent than, masturbation in the eyes of the theoretician concerned.) Even 'depriving oneself of an integral organic part' was professed to be an instance of 'partial self-murder', unless the organ was already dead or diseased, or unless the bodily 'part' was not an organ. (Cutting one's hair, fortunately, was not partial self-murder, except when done to sell it.) This hilarious ethical theory of 'perfect duties to oneself' has one important thing going for it, namely that it is true that every person is 'a subject of duty' and that 'to dispose of oneself as a mere means to an arbitrary end is to abase' personhood (not 'humanity') 'in one's own person'. But it is, then, intrinsic duty one is talking about. So far as a person's relationship to 'er own body is concerned, it is intrinsic duty to oneself as a happiness-catenal and living being. It is everyone's right as a person (not as a happiness-catenal, animal or living being) to do with 'er life as 'e pleases, even to use 'imself, that is, 'er own body, as a mere means to an arbitrary end. On the metadoctrinal model the major problem is not self-killing but the criminalization of self-killing and 'suicide' intervention. Those pleading for intervention are but too ready to assume that 'an attempt to commit suicide is the act of a mentally sick person' and that 'suicidal persons are under the strain of temporary crises or under the influence of drugs' and 'beset with considerable ambivalence'. This would be the equivalent of assuming that loving a nonnatural god and/or hating a nonnatural demon is a mental illness, and that theodemonists are often under the strain of extreme or queer emotions while constantly being beset by existential anxieties. It may all be true, but merely believing that it is, does not make it so, and relevance requires that it not be equally true of nonmembers of the class in question. When people are asleep or temporarily unconscious their bodies may be protected for their own good. Similarly, when they do act under the strain of a temporary crisis, or are under the influence of alcohol or other drugs (without having decided beforehand that they wanted to die), their bodies may also be protected, supposedly for their own good. Both when people are temporarily unconscious and when they are temporarily under stress, not taking the risk of interfering with their autonomy at that moment might indicate a serious lack of concern. The interference must not be permanent tho, but may only be temporary. The person concerned must be able to undo it at any point in time, for example, by giving reasons for 'er conduct. And if those reasons are not good or consistent ones, this is no sign of absence of personhood. It is only with respect to one's own life that terminating it requires reasons which are good and consistent from the standpoint of one's own normative convictions. If the reasons in favor of one's own life outweigh those against it, then one should stay alive, or save one's life, and then one is allowed to do so. On the other hand, if the reasons against one's own life outweigh those in favor of it, then one should take the risk of death, altho one is not obliged to do so. But it is implicit in a person's posing the question whether 'e should or should not risk 'er life, that 'e has already chosen. 5.4.2 THE MEANING OF LIFE AND DEATH Personhood in itself is 'nothingness' devoid of normative substance. The right to personhood is a liberty right which 'condemns' people to freedom, 'a dreadful freedom' in the words of one thinker. It confronts each person with the fundamental questions about 'er existence as an individual, questions such as What is the meaning of life?, What sense can i make out of my existence?. Existentialists, the traditional 'philosophers of life', have often sketched a picture of human life as 'anguished and absurd, distressing and meaningless', of everyone's own being as finite and even of the whole of reality as nothingness because of everybody's anxiety about impending death: 'thrown into the world a human being experiences forlornness and a sense of abandonment'. This is the pessimist or nihilist side of existentialism, and this is the side of formal personhood. While the origin of every person may be nothingness, 'e achieves 'thingness' by choosing. It is by making decisions that 'e can attain existence, that is, authentic existence. (It has been said that a person thereby creates 'er own nature and values.) Being 'trapped in existence' the world in which 'e lives would be totally meaningless, if 'e had no criterions and principles to order and evaluate what 'e experiences. To make sense out of it, 'e must deal with existence, with the freedom forced upon 'im as a person. It is then that 'e realizes that 'e is not only free to choose 'er own world-view and way of living, but that 'e must choose 'er own world-view and way of living. Yet --as has been correctly argued-- 'e can never be entirely sure that it is the right choice, that it is the right decision 'e has taken, and that 'er life will indeed become meaningful. To find the meaning of 'er existence as a living being, a sentient being or a human being, 'e needs knowledge, and yet the only certainty that can be guaranteed is the certainty of truths without content. Hence, also in this respect 'e has to take risks, for 'e cannot remain in a state of nothingness or emptiness forever; as a skeptic forever. The solution to a person's existential problems has been said to lie in 'the decision to believe, to have faith'. It should be added that a person must have the courage of 'er convictions to boot. As mere bodies people's (that is, their bodies') attitudes and actions can in principle be explained and predicted on purely behavioristic grounds. That they say such-and-such and do so-and-so, is thus construed a question of their upbringing, their relatives or friends, the class they belong to, the region or country where they live or used to live, the influence of the mediums of communication, and so on and so forth. As persons, however, people can choose regardless of their upbringing, regardless of their relatives or friends, regardless of the class they might belong to, regardless of the region or country where they live, regardless of the influence of radio and television, and so on and so forth; regardless, that is, of what behaviorist science or, for that matter, public opinion expect them to choose. In the 'nothingness' of mere personhood all these physical and social constraints are absent. But if people do not want to, if they cannot, remain in this state and need to take decisions, this does not imply that they have to 'leap into absurdity' and adopt the untruths, prevarications and inconsistences of fideism. The knights of irrational or supernatural faith who embrace a belief 'in virtue of the absurd' escape the darkness of nothingness not to become enlightened but to become blinded by the infinite brightness of exist ideology. The lives of people are made to appear meaningful --it has been claimed-- in a way they would otherwise not be by people's believing in the existence of one or more gods. Thus, it would not matter whether gods really exist, but what function the belief in a god, or in gods, fulfils in the lives of those who hold it. Altho the belief itself may be nonsensical, accepting it, even if only as a myth, would be useful on this theist view, for it is this which would give life a meaning. Naturally, also this suggestion is preposterous. Firstly --as has been replied before-- the utility of the acceptance of the belief depends upon people's not judging it as mythical. Secondly, the myth is not useful but, on the contrary, harmful because of its extremist and exclusivist content and record. And thirdly, the argument fallaciously presupposes the logical primacy of the existence of one or more gods who tell people what they ought to do and what they ought not to do. (Take the tale of a god who commanded people not to murder, while at the same time commanding a father to kill his only child in order to show his faithfulness). A person who starts from the primacy of the normative (instead of that of the authority of one or more gods) may attach value to the ends 'e pursues. But 'e only 'creates' 'er own values insofar as they are personal, doxastic ones. The universal norms and values exist independently of the individual and are there not to be created but to be recognized and adhered to. Unlike cultural or subcultural norms and personal values, they are the ones that meaningfully relate things, events, actions, attitudes and ideas to one another and to a supreme goal. The very moment that we chose catenated neutrality as an ultimate value, and the universal norms of neutrality and inclusivity as paradigmatic principles, we gave life its meaning. But, paradoxically, it is because of this meaning of life, that is, one's own life, that death, one's own death, may have acquired meaning too. When there are reasons in favor of one's own life, these reasons must be based on the norms and value, or values, which give life its meaning; but when there are reasons against (the continuation of) one's own life, they must be based on the very same norms and values. It is merely the factual and modal conditions which differ then. Only if one's life has meaning can one's death have meaning as well. The most obvious neutral-inclusive reasons for causing or risking one's own death have been mentioned in our discussion of the various aspects of euthanasia. They are in the first place reasons for not choosing or risking death, and are related to one's status both as a living and as a happiness-catenal being. As a living being one has to preserve oneself so long as one is healthy or has a disease which can be cured, but if an incurable illness eats into one's body like acid into metal, it is not a body in equilibrium which is preserved; then it is only the destruction of such a body which is preserved. As a happiness-catenal being one has to fight one's own suffering and that of other happiness-catenals, but if there is no end to one's suffering in sight, and if the continuation of one's existence contributes more to deterioration than to amelioration, this is not the minimization of suffering; then this is only the perpetuation of such suffering. In these instances one should, after prolonged deliberation, while having considered the certainty or probability of the effects and side-effects, cause or risk one's own death. Also in cases in which one is not very ill or seriously injured, it may be worthwhile to risk one's own death, if the motive is the attainment of an objective which is commendable on the Ananormative model. As regards living beings this motive may be to save other lives; as regards happiness-catenal beings it may be work on a dangerous project or task which improves the situation of many of them when completed. Such objectives have a derivative value according to the DNI. The objective may also be the protection of the interests of the DNI itself, or of its adherents, for example, when their fundamental extrinsic rights are, or otherwise would be, violated. Should one's service to the objectives or interests of the Ananorm lead to one's death, this has, perhaps, no immediate impact on the attainment of a neutral-inclusive society, of the ideal of veridical truth or of a universal respect for persons, yet it is a way of dying which stands out among all other ways of dying because of its meaning. Being determined by the Norm itself, the meaning of such a death is the same as that of life. The path of anafactive conduct which leads to death, while pursuing neutral-inclusive ends or while serving the interests of the Norm, does not lead to meaninglessness; on the contrary, it preserves the very meaningfulness of the mortal life in death. It is in this manner that 'to partake of Dao', the Way, the ultimate principle, 'and so to be authentic, that is eternal, immortal' is 'to grasp the imperishable in the perishable' or the suprapersonal in the personal. This conclusion was already drawn more than two thousand years earlier: "The person who attains the ultimate, attains the everlasting. Tho 'er body may decay, 'e never perishes". 5.4.2.0 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE DAO OF NANHONORE When people know how to show honor as honor, they know how to show dishonor as dishonor. When they are thus subject to being honored, they are thus subject to being dishonored. When they further distinguish 'high' and 'big' and 'in', they further distinguish 'low' and 'small' and 'out'. When they speak of "young" and "rich" and "mine", they speak of "old" and "poor" and "thine". And when there finally arises the recognition of what is really wrong, there arises the recognition of what is really right. Therefore, the person who promotes the cause of neutral-inclusivity under the denomination of the Ananorm accomplishes 'er task without claiming exclusive credit for it, and without receiving such credit for it. It is precisely because 'e does not claim exclusive credit for it, and because 'e does not receive such credit for it, that 'er accomplishment can wholly remain with 'im. [This canon was inspired by a two to two-and-a-half thousand years older one.] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6 THE DOCTRINE OF NEUTRAL-INCLUSIVITY 6.1 THE DNI, THE ADHERENT AND CONFLICTING DUTIES 6.1.1 A SYNOPSIS The life of sentient and other living beings may be of derivative value; there is no fundamental principle of life, as we have seen. When we save and respect life, it is because it is a person who has a right to live as we have ourselves, or because we should be beneficent as others should be towards us, or because we should not disturb the balance of nature. But so far as the balance of nature is concerned, also nonlife is part of this balance. So far as beneficence is concerned, it may be better, under certain circumstances, to let a sentient being die than to keep it alive. And so far as personhood is concerned, the person in question may prefer death to life, a choice which has to be respected too if it is a personal one which only concerns 'er own body. Traditional ideologies or ethical doctrines have often formally recognized a separate principle of life because they did not realize what the meaning of such a principle would be, because they used life in at least two different senses, or because they did not care about the weak constitution and the internal conflicts of a ground-world doctrine which is pluralistic or more pluralistic than absolutely necessary. On our analysis there is no need to conceive of life as an ultimate value in itself, nor is it correct that it would be. Life being neither a doctrinal, nor a metadoctrinal, ultimate value, the normative edifice of the Ananorm will indeed not have more than four pillars as already stated before: neutrality, inclusivity, truth and personhood. The first three of these pillars are those of the doctrine of neutral-inclusivity. Let us now look at a synopsis of the normative content of the DNI by means of three tables. The first table in figure F.6.1.1.1 shows the three pillars of the DNI. So far, it is not much different from figure F.4.4.1.1 which showed the four pillars of the Ananorm. But that figure was particularly meant to display the nesting of the Ananormative systems of disciplinary thought: neutralism within neutral-inclusivism, neutral-inclusivism within the DNI and the DNI within the Ananorm. The figure in this section does not only mention the three principles (in the first column) on which our doctrine is founded but also (in the second column) the interpretation which typifies it. It is each principle together with its specific interpretation which characterizes one of the DNI's subsystems. The third column in the table lists the violations of the principles mentioned in the first column. They are not so much occasional, one-time violations but more systematic ones (the anti-systems of figure F.4.4.1.1). The fourth column lists ideologies antithetical to the DNI typified by the particular principle they violate or interpret in a way incompatible with the doctrine of neutral-inclusivity. Since the DNI is a denominational doctrine, the typology of counter-ideologies is basically a denominational one too, altho it is partially applicable to political ideologies as well. Ideology is used in figure F.6.1.1.1 in a very broad sense, because it might be said that what is listed are rather facets of ideologies. In practise extremist, theodemonist and religious ideologies often did not or do not exist side by side; in practise extremism, theodemonism and religiousness were or are not seldom characteristics of one and the same ideology. It should also be noted (again) that the meaning of the terms used in this and the following tables must to a certain extent be stipulative. For example, if someone used religion as a synonym of denominationalism or denominational doctrine, then 'religion' would in that sense not necessarily be supernaturalistic; and not theodemonistic or extremist either. This, however, would not affect what the tables display by any manner of means. It would merely make the terminology clumsy: everywhere where we now say "religion", for instance, one would have to say "supernaturalist religion". Figure F.6.1.1.2 summarizes the values and disvalues of the DNI. For each norm or principle there are at least three values: a performatory, an intentional and a motivational one. And there is for each of these three values a performatory, intentional and motivational disvalue. The values are shown in three columns, or in four to distinguish perfective from corrective or instrumental values. The last column indicates all perfective disvalues and a number of decision-theoretical ones. The values and disvalues listed as belonging to the supernorm of neutrality and its subnorms need no further explanation after what we have said about this supernorm in chapter 3. The supernorm of inclusivity has as many subnorms as there are facets of inclusivity. Thus it could be said that there is a '(sub)norm of ethnical inclusivity' with ethnical inclusivity as perfective value and ethnical discrimination or ethnical exclusivism as disvalue. Since the manifestations of exclusivism have been quite thoroughly classified in chapter 2, and since it would be impracticable to repeat all these manifestations and the antithetical facets of inclusivity here, no subnorms of inclusivity are listed in figure F.6.1.1.2. The corrective-instrumental and decision-theoretical values which are parenthetically mentioned (nanaicity, anafaction and anafactiveness) belong, strictly speaking, to the norm of neutrality, but they may be employed in the integral context of neutralism-inclusivism. A notion which has not been discussed separately in the previous chapters of this book is sincerity. Some take sincere to be a synonym of true or truthful, but sincerity also requires relevance as a criterion. It is easy to say something true, or to be truthful, without being sincere; it is even easier not to say something untrue without being sincere. For example, it might be true that the members of a certain group of people do on the average not meet a certain standard. It would not be untruthful then to tell this to others. But if the non-members of that group do on the average not meet this standard either, it is insincere to exclusively look at and mention that group's shortcomings and not those of all other people as well. Sincerity does not only require truth (or the absence of falsity) but relevance (or the absence of irrelevance) too in the distinctions one makes between what one says and what one does not say. Finally, the table of figures F.6.1.1.3 and 4 should make clear that the DNI is not an (exclusively) consequentialist doctrine, altho it will be termed by us "teleological". Even neutral-inclusivism, and even neutralism, are not exclusively consequentialistic, because of the past-, present- and future-regarding character of the DNI in which not only causal but also noncausal relations count. Insofar as the doctrine of neutral-inclusivity is future-regarding and causal (that is, concerned with causality), it is consequentialistic; insofar as it is past-regarding (with the possible exception of telling the truth about the past) it is antecedentialistic; and for the rest it may be called "deontological". In the second column of the table of figures F.6.1.1.3 and 4 it is also listed whether the normative consideration is 'absolute' or 'relative' (in the case of catenical and relevancy-conditional descriptions), and whether it is 'unitemporal' or 'multitemporal' (in the case of normative considerations of catenical acts which are future-regarding, causal and relative). A normative consideration is termed "absolute" here when its goal is one ideal state of being at a particular moment, and "relative" when its goal can only be understood by comparing different states of being. Such different states of being may either succeed each other in time, or occur at the same moment. In the former case the normative consideration is described as "multitemporal", in the latter case as "unitemporal". An example of a unitemporal relative consideration is that everyone should have, or be given, the same good at exactly the same moment. If a similar consideration is multitemporal, then everyone should also have, or be given, the same but not (necessarily) at exactly the same moment. An act which is right from a multitemporal catenical point of view need, of course, not be right from a relevancy-conditional point of view. Even when everyone will eventually receive the same, one should not discriminate when determining who will get things first and who will get them later. 6.1.2 POTENTIAL CONFLICTS BETWEEN DUTIES There is a difference between a pluralistic system of ultimate values or intrinsic right-duty constellations and a monistic system of the same values or intrinsic right-duty constellations which are not claimed to be ultimate. Take, for example, a normative system with only well-being or beneficence and truth as ultimate values, and compare such a system with a utilitarian one in which individual well-being and truth are derivative values, that is, are derived from the ultimate value of utility. What happens if in a particular situation being beneficent and telling the truth are incompatible? Such a problem may arise when in a country with a dictatorial regime, for instance, the authorities ask someone whether there are people living in 'er house or neighborhood who belong to a particular persecuted minority, and when this is indeed the case. If the person interrogated says "yes", 'e tells the truth, but is maleficent or cooperates with people who are; if 'e says "no", 'e lies, but is beneficent or at least not maleficent. On the monistic account the person interrogated should simply calculate what act will yield more utility or happiness on the whole and in the end, taking into consideration all short- and long-term consequences. Assuming that such a calculation is feasible, and assuming that the moral decision maker finds it plausible that saying "no" will yield a greater utility, 'e ought to say "no". By saying "no" 'e then does the right thing, and nothing wrong at all, nor anything 'e should regret. Also on the pluralistic account the person interrogated has to choose. But now 'e is forced to do something wrong. If 'er answer is in the affirmative, 'e contributes to 'er interrogators' maleficence; and if 'er answer is in the negative, 'e lies. 'E must then try to choose the lesser of two evils. In a case like the one above ethical theorists say that the conflict between the two moral judgments has a contingent basis. On the one hand a person ought to tell the truth, because truth is a value or telling the truth a duty; on the other, a person ought to be beneficent (and in this case not to tell the truth), because beneficence is a value or being beneficent a duty. It has been argued that the decision 'to act on one of the oughts in a moral conflict does not necessarily involve deciding that the other had no application'. Thus, if one decides to lie in order to save another person's life, such does not imply that the duty not to lie would not actually have applied at all. Even when deciding to lie, the truth-related ought does not have to be totally rejected. This also means that regret --as the ethical argument runs-- is a very appropriate reaction in such circumstances. When a person faced with a conflict of duties has acted for the best, 'e will, from a moral point of view, still have 'er 'regrets about the rejected course of action'. It may be added that such regret will be weak when the ought of the action taken did appear much stronger than that of the action rejected and that the regret will be profound when the decision was a difficult one to take. In this respect conflicts between moral judgments resemble conflicts of desires -- it has been pointed out. That is, by taking a decision none of the conflicting items is necessarily eliminated, at least not on a pluralistic construction. On an entirely monistic construction a conflict of (nonultimate) duties is like a conflict of descriptive beliefs. Just as one of the beliefs is completely abandoned when solving a conflict of beliefs, so one of the duties is on such a construction completely abandoned when solving a conflict of duties. In principle conflicts of ultimate duties or values can never be adequately solved, for if they could, there would be a 'really ultimate' value comprising both lower-level values believed to be 'ultimate'. It does not help to call the ultimate duties of a pluralistic doctrine "prima facie" when not applied to a particular situation and "actual" when still effective in a particular situation, because the problem is then that there is no standard procedure to determine whether a prima facie duty is also an actual one. If it could be exactly assessed what to do when the prima facie duty not to lie and the prima facie duty to be beneficent, for instance, conflict, there would be a superordinate duty related to this assessment itself. There cannot be such a superordinate duty, because the duty to be beneficent is founded in a ground-norm and the duty not to lie in a norm of correspondence. Hence, knowing that conflicts of truth-related and neutral-inclusive duties cannot be adequately solved, the adherent of the DNI should do everything possible (and acceptable) to avoid them. 'E ought not to get into situations in which conflicts between ultimate moral judgments do, or are likely to, arise. Only with such a strategy can 'e continue to pay full respect to the different ultimate values of 'er denominational doctrine. In the event that a conflict of duties is not the result of recognizing different ultimate values like truth and neutrality, but of recognizing different derivative values subordinate to the same ultimate value, such a conflict does not have to be avoided. It is then solvable in principle. This is not to say that it could not be a very hard problem in practise. An example is the potential conflict between overall well-being and interpersonal equality. Since complete interpersonal equality need not always serve overall well-being, some interpersonal inequality may have to be accepted if people's well-being will benefit from it. In such a case we need not regret the inequality, provided that the decision taken can be defended on neutralist grounds. But how does one weigh equality against well-being? To be able to weigh them at all, the equality itself must be one in well-being. One can also weigh equality against happiness or nanhappiness, but then the equality must be one in happiness-catenality. In accordance with the principle of indifference the answer is that one should assign the same weight to the attempt to attain a neutral state of well-being or happiness-catenality as to the attempt to attain the smallest possible average inequality, unless there is in the situation concerned another neutralist reason to assign more weight to the one than to the other. Not only should we apply a principle of indifference to conflicts between nonultimate neutralist duties, we should also apply this principle to conflicts between different ultimate duties of the DNI. Thus when a duty of telling the truth conflicts with a duty of beneficence, we must in the first instance not consider the one duty more important than the other. This is the reason why such a conflict is possible. If we knew beforehand, for example, that the duty to tell the truth is always overruled by the duty to be beneficent, there would be no conflict in the first place. The special problem with a truth-related duty is tho, that it does not admit of degrees in the way a catenical duty does. One cannot balance truth against well-being in the same way as one can balance equality (of well-being) against well-being. But we must always ask ourselves whether the moral conflict between truth and well-being as it seems to exist on certain occasions is a purely doctrinal conflict, or even a doctrinal conflict at all. In the example of information which is used to persecute a certain group of people it is probably not merely their well-being as such which is at stake but their rights of personhood. When looking at the situation from this metadoctrinal perspective there is no conflict between normative judgments. One should then simply not infringe other people's right of personhood, nor assist at such infringements. When this implies that one must say "no", one should say "no", even when the true answer is in the affirmative. Such does not create a conflict on this level, because it is a right of personhood that --so far as the content is concerned-- one may say whatever one likes. No person can, metadoctrinally speaking, require from another person that 'e tell the truth only, since truth is a doctrinal value and the normative principle of truth a doctrinal principle. Of course, the DNI still forbids us to say anything which is false, but if the basis of a moral conflict is metadoctrinal, or if it is created by people with other or no doctrinal convictions, there is a good reason to argue that in such a context metadoctrinal considerations take precedence over doctrinal ones. This means that we should then primarily look at the matter as a metadoctrinal affair. In that light there is no moral conflict, and we have only to make sure that everyone's rights of personhood are protected. Altho it is not well-being as such which is the value pursued, this protection will probably be experienced as part of one's well-being. That is why it looks as tho it is a doctrinal scale which is turned in favor of well-being at the expense of truth. The reason that this doctrinal scale seems to be turned that way is then not that truth was deemed less important than well-being, but that doctrinal considerations were deemed less appropriate than metadoctrinal ones. 6.1.3 UNDER THE DENOMINATION OF THE NORM In view of truth, relevance and neutrality the adherents of the DNI cannot rely on any deus ex machina or other contrived 'solution' offered to them by theocrats or technocrats. While keeping in mind the three good ends, they must perforce rely on their own realization. This means that they should personally try to live as much as possible in accordance with the principles of the DNI, and that they should avoid as much as possible situations in which these principles might conflict. They should especially not threaten other people, unless this is needed for very urgent reasons, or unless the context concerned is metadoctrinal rather than doctrinal. When individual adherents of the DNI or a group of adherents of the DNI do succeed in living in accordance with the principles of the doctrine, they must not advertise their anafactiveness and truthfulness. For the genuine inclusivist does not attempt to call other people's attention to 'er wholeness or 'holiness'. Those with a supernaturalist, exclusivist or extremist belief or attitude may endeavor to refute and ridicule the doctrine put forward in this Model in all possible ways. If so, they will demonstrate again that supernaturalism, exclusivism and extremism do exist, and that it remains a matter of all-encompassing necessity to unremittingly fight against such ideologies. Where, and to the extent that, the DNI is indeed imperfect, the neutral-inclusivist shall help to improve, to further and to refine it. The choice which people have in the actual world of denominationalism is not a choice between one completely certain and perfect doctrine on the one hand and all lesser doctrines on the other --such a choice they do not even have in the world of science--; the choice they have is one between the most plausible, least imperfect doctrine on the one hand and all less plausible, more imperfect ones on the other. The imperfection or incompleteness of the doctrine which is to become the new denominational paradigm is then not different from that of a new scientific paradigm. When supernaturalists, or people who say that they adhere to the DNI, indulge in flights of fancy and flagrantly violate the requirement of truth, or when exclusivists, or people who say that they adhere to the DNI, draw unjust distinctions and flagrantly violate the requirement of inclusivity, or when extremists, or people who say that they adhere to the DNI, strive for the most unneutral and flagrantly violate the requirement of neutrality, they may be told that it is wrong according to what we believe to be the most plausible, least imperfect of denominational doctrines. And it may always be pointed out to them that the Norm does not require, but that the Norm requires. 6.1.3.0 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE NORM DOES NOT REQUIRE; THE NORM REQUIRES The Norm does not require that we speak, but if we speak, we should tell the truth. And if we are not sure what is the truth, we shall carefully avoid telling a falsehood. For the Norm requires that we intend and try to tell the truth only. The Norm does not require that we make distinctions, but if we make a distinction, we should make a relevant one. And if we are not sure what distinction is relevant, we shall carefully avoid making an irrelevant one. For the Norm requires that we intend and try to make relevant distinctions only. The Norm does not require that we aim at something, but if we aim at something, we should ultimately aim at neutrality. And if we are not sure what serves neutrality ultimately, we shall carefully avoid serving an unneutral purpose. For the Norm requires that we intend and try to aim at neutrality only. (For the Ananorm requires that we intend and try to aim at perfect neutrality only.)* *: the last two lines may be deleted ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6.2 THE DNI, THE STATE AND POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES 6.2.1 TRUTH, NONDISCRIMINATION AND THE STATE For statists or 'archists' the value of the state is perhaps ultimate; for anarchists the disvalue of the state is perhaps ultimate; for us the value or disvalue of the state is derivative. Those who accept the existence of a state will usually say that its primary function, or one of its most important functions, is the protection of individual people against bodily harm. More generally, the same people will probably also agree that the state should protect property in external things, but since there are such widely divergent theories of property this 'agreement' does not mean much in practise. Yet, it is worthwhile to note that an important function of the state (if not the only one) is the protection of people's extrinsic rights. This will not only involve the citizens' freedom from bodily invasions but also their extrinsic property. Contrary to what libertarians or minimal-state theorists may want us to believe this property is not (necessarily) what someone('s family) actually or historically happens to posses, or to have taken possession of, but the property someone has an equal right in as a person amongst persons. When it is supposed that the role of the state comprises more (maybe even much more) than the protection of personal rights, the protection of contracts is one of the first things to come to the fore. The state should, then, make sure that people fulfil their contractual duties, both among themselves and vis-à-vis the state. But why should the state care about this ? Because it will be beneficial to people's well-being? If so, then the function of the state is not just to make sure that people fulfil their contractual duties (in addition to the protection of their extrinsic rights), but to serve their well-being too; and that may require a lot more and/or different things than the enforcement of contracts. Let us assume instead that the state cares about the citizen's contractual duties because people have to keep their promises, certainly those promises they have given expression to in a formal way. Again, it could be reasoned that the state should have to care about keeping promises, because this is prerequisite for an orderly society. But if an orderly society is taken as the prerequisite, the state's concern should be with much more than with the contractual duties of its citizens. Here we will not consider such a broad function which the state does or might have. For the moment we can accept that the state or 'the law' has indeed a function in the protection of personal contracts. So far as the promise-keeping aspect of contracts is concerned, the value of the state is then that it enforces the morality of promise-keeping, or more generally, of telling the truth. Whereas a state can hardly be called "moralistic" so long as it merely protects people's extrinsic rights, it does become 'moralistic' in a way as soon as it starts doing more than this. This is not necessarily wrong; it is even right from the point of view of the DNI when the moral attention is directed to truth in a scientific or otherwise non-supernaturalist sense. When a state does more than protecting people's extrinsic rights but concerns itself with contractual duties or promise-keeping as well, the question must be posed, why the state should exclusively preoccupy itself with truth or truth-related aspects of intrinsic morality. The question which arises in particular is why the state should not also concern itself with relevancy-related aspects of morality, that is, issues of discrimination. As a concrete example we might consider a person who has always fully paid 'er insurance premiums. Now, if the insurance company concerned did not pay out when something happened that is covered according to the contract signed by both parties, it would seem to be good that the insured person could go to court and get justice there. Without such a possibility 'insurance' would hardly seem to make sense, for who is going to insure people against fake insurance companies who lie about their assets and who do not keep their promises, that is, who do not respect the conditions agreed upon? For many or most people it would not make sense to think of paying insurance premiums if the agency they dealt with were not subjected to the law of a political system they trust or trust sufficiently. But why should the reliability of this system only depend on its defense of the principle of truth, or of the precept that one should keep one's promises? Why would its reliability not depend on the principle of relevance as well, or on the precept that one should not discriminate on the basis of factors which are not relevant? How can anyone trust a legal system which admits of discrimination? Of course, no-one can, for anyone can be the victim of traditional or nontraditional, arbitrary distinctions. No insurance business that accepts and relies on a legal system to make sure that people tell the truth and keep their promises can object against this same legal system forbidding to treat people differently on the grounds of irrelevant factors (for example, by having them pay different premiums). It is neither the principle of truth nor the principle of relevance, or it is both doctrinal principles which must provide legal security. If someone argued that it is people's own business to enter into discriminatory contracts or to make agreements with companies that discriminate on the basis of whatever factor, this might be correct from a metadoctrinal angle. But if and when it is correct, it is also correct that it is people's own business to break personal contracts, and that it is the state's extrinsic right not to get involved in business-dealings and -swindlings in any way, provided that everyone's rights of personhood are respected. Private citizens and organizations may have the extrinsic right to lie and to discriminate, but the state or any other political body like it should either not say anything that could be false or make any distinction that could be irrelevant, or, if it does say something, it should be true, and if it does make distinctions, they should be relevant (and not with respect to a determinant in which an irrelevant distinction has already been made). Furthermore, the state has the extrinsic right and the intrinsic duty not to cooperate with, and not to subsidize, private citizens and organizations that do lie or discriminate (altho this cooperation and this subsidy do not concern what is those citizens' and their organizations' extrinsic property). In other words, the institutions established and the measures taken by a political body which is or has to be nonpartisan shall not be based on false or farfetched party-political or religious dogmas, and shall not be exclusivistic, that is, they shall include, take into consideration and respect all citizens on equal terms. No political body (state, and so on) should allow the abnegational discrimination or preferential treatment of any group of citizens distinguished on the basis of ethnicity, language, ancestry, age, gender, sexual propensity, marital status, class, wealthiness, personal convictions, or any other factor which is not relevant in the context concerned (with respect to a determinant in which no irrelevant distinction has already been made). And every political body ought to prevent the perpetuation and the occurrence of unequal chances for any of the groups so distinguished. The state or any such political body must not grant or assign an exclusive, official status to the institutions and beliefs of any political, religious or other ideology in particular, or engage in a special relationship with such an ideology other than one that is a purely political theory dealing with the management of state affairs and the relationship between state and citizen. Only by abiding by such a code of inclusivity can a state assure that all its citizens' rights are respected in all fields, and only in this way can it assure that it shall not hamper the fulfilment of the needs and the satisfaction of the personal desires of its citizens in the socioeconomic and political management of its affairs. The conditions of this code of inclusivity are the sole conditions under which universal ideals like those of democracy, peace, equality and liberty can eventually gain victory. 6.2.2 MONARCHISM The abolition or absence of a particular exclusivist institution or practise does not mean that the social system in question has become or is neutral and inclusive, even not in the field which used to be pervaded by that exclusivism. There may be many exclusivist institutions or practises left which result in the same degree or in an even greater degree of inequality than in a system which still displays the particular form of exclusivity or exclusion. But an entirely neutral-inclusive, social system will be free from all exclusivist institutions and practises, and any abolition of a remaining exclusivism will thus contribute towards the establishment of neutral-inclusivity. Altho exclusivist institutions and practises may themselves be the result of a historical development, the perpetuation of these exclusivisms is something present-day people are responsible for. And whereas individual people have the extrinsic right to perpetuate exclusivist systems which only concern themselves, the state does not have the right to perpetuate such systems, particularly not when they involve everyone and particularly not when they comprise several exclusivisms at once. One exclusivist state institution, remnant of medieval feudalism, is the monarchical system. Its alternative, a republic, is a nonmonarchy which need not per se be less exclusivistic in every respect. Yet, as a monarchy a polity is exclusivistic and as a republic (a 'res publica', that is, a 'public thing' or 'commonwealth') it is not. While republics can be totally nondiscriminatory, in monarchical systems the discriminatory nature is inherent. It could be said that republic stands to monarchy as coherence stands to incoherence. Only a coherent theory can reveal the truth -- a set of true propositions must be coherent --, but a particular coherent theory might reveal less of the truth than a particular incoherent theory. Similarly, the best polity is a republic -- an inclusive and egalitarian polity can solely be republican --, but a particular (type of) republic could, on the whole, be worse than a particular (type of) monarchy. Monarchical fanaticists often try to exploit this by pointing at certain republican systems or countries and by calling attention to all their defects, not realizing that such reasoning is as preposterous as that of someone arguing in favor of incoherence, because there do exist coherent theories which contain more falsehoods than other, incoherent ones. If such an argument proves anything at all, it is that the one type of republic is a better one than the other type of republic. What the minions of monarchism tend to conveniently forget is that the essential difference between a kingdom, empire, principality or other sort of monarchy and a republic is that in the former kind of polity, the office of chief of state and possibly certain other state positions are by law reserved for the members of one chosen family or narrow, exclusive circle of families, while this is not (necessarily) the case in a republic. This inequality before or in the law is often further informally supplemented by the monarch's own nepotism or 'their' government's familial exclusivism. (Not to mention the favors for the cronies of the Crown.) Thus state offices or positions in a country with royal apartheid are not open to all but entirely or partially based on biological-materialist relationship rather than on personal capacity or merit. (A perfect illustration of the analogy between monarchy and incoherence is that also theorists of 'justice' and so-called 'democratic' politicians in monarchist countries will say that 'state positions and offices should be open to all', while at the same time collaborating with, or even defending, the monarchical system. Another illustration is that ethical theorists who have attacked utilitarianism for its not taking justice into account, have -- at least in the past -- never attacked the unalloyed utilitarian arguments used to 'justify' the same monarchical system. It seems -- again -- that it is ultimately ideology which determines what the ethical or democratic theorist will attack or defend, and that 'er theory is usually only to provide 'im with extra, more explicit reasons for a position 'e has already taken.) Monarchism is a plural exclusivism. It allows or requires people to indulge in all or most of the following manifestations of exclusivism: (a) generative familial exclusivism (the monarch has become head of state not because of 'er personal capacities or merits but by virtue of 'er ancestry; rather than being made on the basis of skin color, the irrelevant distinction is made on the basis of blood color or 'purity') (b) familial exclusivism, both physical and nonphysical (members of the family of the monarch have certain privileges solely on the basis of their belonging to this, or one of the, chosen families; the monarch and possibly all members of 'er family do not have to pay taxes on their more or less excessive state and other incomes, on their property and on their business transactions, altho they usually belong to the richest families in the country) (c) sexual exclusivism (royal heir lines are sexist: while the basic rule is that the first child will succeed the reigning monarch, daughters follow in line behind sons even when older; while the wife of a king becomes a 'queen', the husband of a reigning queen does not become a 'king') (d) marriage-centered exclusivism (children of the monarch born out of wedlock do not have the same legal right as those born in wedlock: consanguinity turns out to be a necessary but not a sufficient criterion) (e) title-based exclusivism, both hereditary and nonhereditary (while other citizens are called by their forenames and/or surnames, the members of the monarch's family are tricked up with highly exclusive titles; it is a custom that the monarch bestows other fancy titles upon members of the higher classes of society leaving the lower classes with no or inferior titles; these titles may be only or largely given out on the basis of personal connections and ideological devotion, rather than desert) (f) class-based exclusivism (the 'royal', 'imperial' or otherwise chosen family belongs historically to the upper-class or the wealthy, propertied class of society; members of other classes have no chance to ever represent the whole society at the state's upper level) (g) ethnical or racial exclusivism (the chosen family belongs to one particular ethnic group or race; people of other descent or with another skin color have no chance to ever represent the whole society at the state's upper level) (h) ideological, that is, religious or monotheist exclusivism (the denominational convictions of the monarch, or even of a member of 'er family, are not 'er private business : 'e is symbolic head of the state religion or symbolizes the country's real or feigned belief in the main dogmas of the creed which used to be the state religion; a particular religion, monotheism in general or religion in general thus enjoys an exclusive status; the intimate connection between monarchy and religion becomes very conspicuous when a word like king is employed both for the doxastic supreme being called "God" and for a worldly head of state: in the sense of leader of our community of believers 'God' is a 'King' and the 'King' is (a) 'God') If the monarchy is 'merely' a symbol, it is indeed the supreme symbol of exclusivism! Some of the forms of exclusivism monarchists indulge in can be found in certain republican systems as well, but none of those exclusivisms is inherent in the republican system as such. Many republics, for instance, yield or did yield to classism, ethnocentrism and/or state religionism too, but other republics do or did without these forms of exclusivism (and all of them should). Furthermore, it has to be noted that the exclusivisms which characterize monarchical systems are liable to be found throughout the whole society in question. The monarchy may have originally come into being by virtue of an exclusivist attitude, having become an established institution it perpetuates this very attitude. It goes without saying that the monarchist ideology is completely incompatible with the principles of the DNI. The (symbolically) authoritarian and exclusivistic state system it advocates offends first of all against the (spirit of the) right to personhood and the norm of inclusivity. But it is not less incompatible with the norm of neutrality, particularly the subnorm of nanhonore. The personality cult in which a monarch and 'er family are worshiped and idolized is a gross violation of this norm (a violation which -- it must be added -- can be found in some republics as well with respect to the president and 'er family). Moreover, such a cult is inimical to truth, since monarchies are notorious for hushing up royal affairs which elected politicians would never have been allowed to survive. Neither truth nor relevance have ever been served by the obsequiousness or smarminess of human beings loyal to the monarchist tradition. The basic ingredients of monarchism could theoretically be compatible with the right to personhood, if the followers of the chosen family or families supported that family or those families themselves and did not try to get the state involved in their familial, sexual, marital, title-based, class-based, ethnical and ideological exclusivisms. So long as monarchists do manage or endeavor to impose their obnoxious, parasitic scheme on the whole of society nevertheless, they must be met with recusancy --to say the least. 6.2.3 POLITICO-IDEOLOGICAL EXCLUSIVISM People can be discriminated for or against on the basis of any factor related to their having or not having a certain predicate. Such a predicate may be a proper whole-predicate or a part-predicate. To discriminate for or against people as people is to discriminate between them on the basis of a personal whole-predicate. To discriminate between them on the basis of a physical part-predicate is, strictly speaking, not to discriminate between people but to discriminate between bodies. From the point of view of well-being or happiness-catenality discrimination on the basis of a physical characteristic such as ancestry ('blood', 'purity'), skin color, gender or sexual orientation is more serious than discrimination on the basis of a mental or personal characteristic such as belief in what a political or religious organization claims to be true, if the former type of discrimination causes more unhappiness than the latter. But it might also be the other way around. The gravity of an irrelevant distinction is not solely determined by the suffering or unhappiness it causes (or, if it is, there is more which counts). That is why the norm of inclusivity is an independent norm besides the principle of well-being. Apart from this aspect, the discrimination of people (not bodies) on the basis of a personal characteristic is in a way more serious than on the basis of a physical or body-related characteristic. Discrimination and inequality in the socioeconomic field does not only concern the social and economic forms of discrimination and inequality which are, or have been, legal in certain countries, and to which groups are liable distinguished on the basis of race, gender, denominational doctrine or other characteristics. It also concerns the discrimination of groups with a particular politico-economic ideology. In politically highly exclusivistic societies every political party with a different ideology than the 'official' one is outlawed, or at least the kind of party that advocates a socioeconomic system which deviates from the established one to a substantial degree. Those whose political convictions deviate from the official ideology form, or did form, a special group often discriminated against, and often even legally excluded from civil equality. Also the alienation from these people causes ignorance and bias, and also in this way the arguments for the exclusion which resulted in that alienation are confirmed (possibly even accentuated by an unjustified militant behavior of members of the oppressed group). To exclude people on the basis of such political convictions is not just to exclude their bodies as in the case of familial, racial or sexual exclusivism, but to exclude them as persons. This is not to say that it would be easier in practise to establish that people's ideological convictions are irrelevant than to establish that their race or sexuality are irrelevant. When we discussed thought-related subanthropic exclusivism it was already pointed out that it may be 'highly relevant' to make a distinction between systems of thought, while it is not relevant to make a distinction between the people who espouse those systems. (See 2.5.1.) But if, purportedly, 'all' people of one nation, ethnic group or race espouse one system of thought, and 'all' people who do not belong to that nation, ethnic group or race another, the distinction drawn between the systems of thought concerned may appear to be a distinction drawn between the nation, ethnic group or race concerned and all other people. Racialists and nationalists who are not capable of judging people free from their skin color or nationality are often not capable of judging a political, religious or other ideology free from the human beings adhering to it either. Yet, this does not mean that antiracialists and antinationalists have to display the same lack of critical insight. We can completely reject or thoroughly criticize an ideology even when it is only adhered to by people of one ethnic group or nation, provided that ethnicity or nationality are not the reasons for the rejection or objections. (That is why we shall not yield to the cheap immunization strategy of those who claim that everyone who attacks their group's beliefs must be a racialist, ethnocentrist or nationalist.) What we are concerned with here is not even the rejection of ideologies for substantive reasons but the exclusion of people themselves because of their convictions, especially by the state. Countries where people are murdered, injured, tortured, imprisoned or spited because of their political ideas, for instance, are clearly antidemocratic in that they do not respect people's rights, and clearly exclusivistic in that they discriminate on the basis of political ideology adhered to. But even when no-one is murdered, injured, tortured, imprisoned or spited because of 'er political ideas such countries can still be antidemocratic in that they exclusively allow or disallow certain political parties to exist, or certain political opinions to be made, or not to be made, public. From the normative perspective there is no essential difference between the situation in which a majority of the citizens is in favor of a one-party state, or in which such a majority is in favor of outlawing one party. In a majoritarian democracy this criterion may be believed to be sufficient, but no majority can, normatively speaking, overrule the rights of people belonging to minorities, political or otherwise. If, and to the extent that, the people concerned respect other people's rights of personhood and do not practise or preach the violent overthrow of a democratic government that respects people's extrinsic rights, the state must respect their rights too, however repugnant their political (or other) ideas or behavior may be. Moreover, one must not discriminate against such people, that is, one must not treat them differently in a context which is not political, or which is political but irrelevant with respect to their convictions nevertheless. Political authoritarianism is not the prerogative of antidemocratic minorities, it can also be exercised by so-called 'democratic' majorities. Rather than being the dictatorship, subordination and symbol imposition of one person or clique, it is then that of a democratic majority or a class comprising the majority of the population. Also in the latter case the state is used as an instrument for the exclusive furtherance of one political ideology among a number of two or more conflicting ones. But there are democrats who seriously hold that this is legitimate, granted that the group in question represents 51% or 67% of the population. Their majoritarian conception of democracy is closely related to the silly, majoritarian conception of culture or national culture. To explain this resemblance let us first look at the culture side of it. Some people seem to be very sure that the citizens of a particular country, or the inhabitants of a particular region or the 'original' inhabitants of that region have a certain culture distinct from all other cultures. But if they are right at all, it can only mean that most citizens or inhabitants think, feel and behave in a certain way. Yet, if it were just the majority of a population which completely determined what 'the culture' of that population would be, many forms of art would not belong to that population's culture either. Going to the opera, for instance, would probably not be part of that country's or region's culture. And while there might be a particular language essential to that culture, most poetry in that language would probably not be part of it. This is the dilemma of majoritarian culture (that is, of the majoritarian conception of culture). Now, similarly, it is the dilemma of majoritarian democracy that if a majority could decide and do whatever it liked to decide or do, this would be antidemocratic insofar as such decisions or acts infringed other people's extrinsic freedom or treatment as equals. The state should either represent all citizens or no-one at all; or when it represents a part of the citizens, other citizens should be represented, or have the same chance of being represented, another time. To constantly represent only a part of the citizens, for example, by propagating one political ideology among conflicting ideologies as the official one, and by using the phraseology and emblems of one political party as those of the state, may be democratic in a majoritarian sense, it certainly is not in an inclusive sense, unless the ideology concerned is that of ideological or thought-related, anthropic inclusivity itself. Politico-economic ideologies are often aimed at certain (socioeconomic) classes of society, also when they purport to strive for a classless society. A distinction made in this connection is the one between the class which is or was, legally speaking, propertied and the class which is or was, legally speaking, propertyless (not seldom equated with the class of workers, or of workers, peasants and students). An inclusive ideology, on the other hand, must be aimed at all classes of society or at a classless society. Ideologies which are only useful for its adherents because they serve the exclusive interests of their own socioeconomic class have to be considered exclusivistic. While the power of political ideologies waxes and wanes, it is the necessity of the state's politico-ideological and class-neutral inclusivity which invariably remains. Ideological totalitarianism cannot preserve the appearance of unity forever, for where citizens actually adhere to conflicting, political or other, beliefs, ideological oppression and discrimination must sooner or later lead to insurrections: sooner, later or, neutrally, at the right moment. 6.3 THE DNI, THE STATE AND RELIGIOUS IDEOLOGIES 6.3.1 FROM RELIGION-BASED TO RELIGIOUS EXCLUSIVISM There are at least two types of exclusivist totalitarian countries: those which claim to be one nation under a Party, and those which claim to be one nation under a God. The former countries suffer from aggrandizemental political-party-related, the latter from aggrandizemental, theocentrist or monotheist, exclusivism. Political-party-related exism is a manifestation of politico-ideological exclusivism; theocentrist exism is a primacy-related manifestation of denominational exclusivism, and monotheist exism a principalship-related manifestation of it. Altho denominational exclusivism is not worse, nor better, than politico-ideological exclusivism, it deserves extra attention here, because our own doctrine, the DNI, is a denominational, and not a political, one. In theory principle-related manifestations of denominationalism must be distinguished from primacy- and principalship-related ones --as discussed in 2.5.2--, but in practise these different manifestations usually coincide and when we thus speak of "religionism" in these sections, one may often read "theocentrist", "theodemonism-related" or "(mono)theist exclusivism" instead. As already mentioned in the second chapter of this book, religionism itself refers both to religion-based and religious (person-centered) exism. The reprobates of the former brand of religionism are people with a different religion than the one aggrandized by the person or government discriminating, whereas those of the latter brand of religionism are people who adhere to no religion. Religion always has been and, where not extinct, still is the cause of serious conflicts which could easily lead, or actually lead or have led, to bloody civil and international wars. People of different religious denominations used to kill, or are still killing, one another ruthlessly, while 'justifying' their deeds by referring to their god(s) and/or to their adversaries' demon(s). In actual fact god has, then, for them the pragmatic meaning of the leader(s) of our community of believers. It is such a god who sanctions all eruptions of violence against the ideological enemy, and it is such a god who is believed to bring eventual victory to their own side. Nowhere seem doctrines more exclusivist and extremist than during religious or theodemonical warfare, altho certain nonreligious, political ideologies may follow their abominable examples but too faithfully. Those living in countries which are not directly involved in religious, civil or international wars do not seldom look upon the warring parties as uncivilized societies or communities. If 'civilization' means a high degree of social and cultural inclusivity, it may be true that such parties are indeed little civilized so far as this aspect is concerned. But rather than exclusively pointing at the lack of inclusivity among those who are involved in religious warfare, we should be prepared to take a closer look at so-called 'civilized' societies or communities where religion did, or still does, play a dominant role without being the immediate cause of bloody conflicts. The parts of the world which are presently not involved (anymore) in a religious war or conflict have known a long period of religious quarrels and expressions of intolerance too between people of different, religious beliefs. But this period came to a close --so it seems-- when the ideal of religious liberty and tolerance was introduced by public figures who were progressive for their time. These reformers foresaw that freedom of religion would not only end the official discrimination of those who adhered to another religion than the established one, but that it would also create an ambience of tolerance which was to stimulate the will to cooperate in all fields. Enthusiastic supporters of the ideal of freedom saw a pluralistic society emerging in which all citizens, whatever their persuasion, would live together in peace forever. To prevent friction between the religions many countries did not recognize by law any denominational doctrine as the official state religion any longer. Supporters of religious liberty said that all believers actually worshiped one and the same god, and that in this spirit they should together build the future of their nation. Tho in many of these countries political parties were often founded on a particular creed, parties with different kinds of religious backgrounds were thereafter accepted. In other countries, or divisions of countries, where political parties were not explicitly associated with one particular religion, democratically elected presidents or premiers scrupulously tried to have a representative of 'every' religion in their governments, that is, every religion which somehow belonged to the denominational paradigm of the time and place. A seven-league wave of self-satisfaction would sweep a land when it turned out tolerant enough to elect a president who belonged to a different religion than chiefs of state ought to belong to in foregoing times. Altho so-called 'national' anthems usually continued to invoke Mono, any reference to a particular creed the citizens were expected to adhere to was deleted from then on. The old political system in which this creed used to have the status of a state-religion became henceforth a seemingly impartial symbol of stability and national unity. Grants for denominational organizations and spiritual radio and television programs were proportionally divided over the different temple societies or religious denominations. Books, films and plays were censored by a board that represented or made believe to represent 'the people', holding back every work which might offend the feelings of some citizens, whatever religion they adhered to. (The narrow-minded and inhibitionist feelings of the most religious among them were called "those of the general public" or "population".) With the introduction of religious liberty it was no longer automatically the state's 'true faith' which could wield power over all other beliefs. In democratic polities power had now formally become a purely numerical matter: the more souls a religious community counted, the more votes it could cast. By producing a large offspring, the members of each religious community were thus able to contribute to the spread of their religion in a very concrete way without having to be accused of a thirst for disproportional political influence. In a society which attained a level of technology sophisticated enough to commence visits to the moon or other celestial bodies, it became extraordinarily spectacular for a man to say his lordly prayers from a real spaceship and to have his divine words heard from high in the sky all over 'Mono's own country' (the country possessed by his own community of theodemonist believers). Everyone sensitive to supernatural lights had to be profoundly touched by such a wonderful and heavenly spectacle of piety programmed at such an extremely high level. (In a country possessed by atheist materialists astronauts assured people back home that they had not seen and did not see any god in space. But in comparison with the theist happening this nondiscovery was not half as exciting.) Since most citizens preached and practised religious tolerance, there was believed to be no injustice in the sphere of people's denominational beliefs anymore. The adherents of supernaturalist, theodemonist ideologies were living in peace -- at least, that is what they believed they were. Those who introduced religious liberty and equality were, perhaps, 'progressive' in a sense, but if so, then only within their own frame, namely religion. Because the denominational doctrines of the past were religious ideologies in the majority of cases, the concept of religion was treated as synonymous to the concept of denominationalism (or of 'morality' or of 'philosophy of life'). This was also what the supporters of religious liberty, and even supporters of liberty in general, had had in mind: all who recognized a system of norms and values should be united in the belief in one (and supposedly the same) god. They excluded the religions which were not monotheistic, and they excluded all normative doctrines which were not religious. Such doctrines were treated as wicked or awkward aberrations which did not fit in with the whole. In later times the number of people in religion-dominated countries who could not, or hardly, be considered religious anymore, started to grow (again). From the point of view of religion most of them lacked any serious outlook on life, because they were not interested in spiritual affairs, something imputed to the level of prosperity attained and to the increase of materialism. A few of these nonreligious people started calling themselves "agnostics", saying that they did not or could not know whether gods (or 'God') existed. Logically speaking, not the atheists who said that gods (and demons) did not exist but these agnostics were the real unbelievers. (Ordinary language users often fail to distinguish between the absence of the belief that a certain entity exists and the belief that it does not exist.) Agnosticism, however, never took root as a denominational alternative, which is not surprizing because a doctrine centered round what one does not know just cannot be expected to strike the right note; it cannot be expected to strike any note. As a lack of persuasion does neither radiate vigor nor conviction no difficulties arose with these agnostics. Those who made up the offscourings of theodemonist society in the denominational sphere were the atheists who bluntly declared that there did (and does) not exist any god. It may be logically incorrect, but they were seen as the 'real' unbelievers. In some countries atheists were disqualified as witnesses and as members of parliament. Traditional (theist) dictionaries described them as "godless" --which is correct-- and "immorally living". The double meaning of godless reflected the common, theodemonical belief that nonreligious people would be wicked. Principled atheists usually came from so-called 'good' families, and were fortunately regarded as merely having gone astray. Because of the significance attached to the institution of the family, for many atheists and persons not interested in religion, the religiosity of their family (especially of their parents or spouse) was the most important of the extenuating circumstances in their case. Since atheists were nonreligious, no supporter of religious liberty had to take them into account. They were believed to have no values at all, for they did not recognize a divine authority -- a mysterious kind of reasoning indeed, because principled atheists did not and do not recognize such an authority precisely because of the values they have. However, since atheists made up such a little minority in the beginning, no difficulties arose. The nonreligious people without any definite world-view made up the bulk of those who stood outside the supernatural, theodemonical system. Basically these people were little or not interested in spiritual matters as dealt with in their times, and therefore they did not have, or were not able to express, any particular wishes or suggestions for improvement in this field, let alone that they could show any strength. Altho they made up a large group, no difficulties arose with them either. Even in a time of continued secularization, theodemonist societies were living in apparent peace after those in power had started preaching religious tolerance. On the whole the old, religious paradigm remained in force anyhow. 6.3.2 FREEDOM OF RELIGION AND RELIGIONISM Since the introduction of religious liberty conditions did not change much in religion-dominated societies. When one considers the high-flying way in which religous ideologies have still infiltrated whole countries, also in those fields which have nothing to do with supernatural belief or divine worship, one realizes that there is in those countries still a more or less official state ideology. It is perhaps not a particular religion anymore which is implicitly or explicitly aggrandized but religion in general. In the main, the religion-based discrimination between the one form of religiousness and the other which existed before the introduction of religious liberty and equality has often become the discrimination between religiousness and irreligiousness. And instead of cultivating a single monotheist ideology or variant of an ideology to the exclusion of all other ideologies and variants, latter-day Mono-cultures cultivate monotheism in general to the exclusion of all non-monotheist alternatives. But where theodemonical believers were or are still in the majority, the insolent characterization and treatment of nonreligiousness cannot impress an increasing number of people anymore, nor could or can the false distinction construed between belief (the 'true faith') and superstition, heresy or magic to distinguish supernaturalists from fellow-supernaturalists frowned upon. No longer do non-supernaturalists accept that a religion tries to impose its own pattern of life on nonadherents, because other patterns do not suit its book and would expose inhibited or ignorant members of its temple society to fear and doubt. And no longer do non-theodemonists accept that a religion tries to impose its own law and methods of punishment on nonadherents, because different laws and ways of punishment are too humane and would deprive the revengeful members of the theodemonical public of their retributivist pleasures. More and more so-called 'nonbelievers' have realized, and still realize, that the number of exclusivist institutions, attitudes and practises originally 'justified' on the grounds of religion or theodemonism and forcibly imposed on whole societies has been countless, whether it be in political, socioeconomic, medical, marital, sexual or other types of affairs. Religious liberty has turned out to be not more than the exclusive liberty of religion where denominational inclusivity would require both freedom and equality of denominationalism. For religious and nonreligious, theocentrist and normistic, denominational doctrines cover the same field: they offer a system of disciplinary thought and of nonpropositional symbols relating things of the human world, or of a much broader sphere, to each other as they supposedly are or can be and as they should be. Hence, religious liberty does not include, take into consideration and respect nonreligious denominational doctrines even tho there is only one field of denominationalism. The traditional institutions of marriage and celibacy are very much religious products, and so are the institutions of divorce, repudiation and adultery. Yet, everyone has the extrinsic right to marry in a religious or theist marriage ceremony, or to remain celebate for inconsistent reasons (say, to devote his future to the propagation of marital exism and religious family life). This is religous freedom. But it is at once religous exclusivism when civil marriages and laws relating to divorce, repudiation and extramarital sex are exclusively formed in the religious mould, and when weddings in temples are officially recognized by the state. In some countries civil marriages between men and women did not, or still do not, exist at all. There is nothing wrong with this, for example, if it is possible for everyone in such countries to sign a personal contract with another person. However, it is utterly repulsive if the state does recognize religious marriages and treats men and women thus married differently from people not married in that way. And it is utterly repulsive if the state does recognize religious acts of repudiation in which men have legal rights which women do not have. Children that cannot yet fend for themselves have to be taken care of in the first place by those who brought them into being. This has been a major raison d' être for the traditional marriage institution too. In itself this concern for the well-being of children or potential children is very praiseworthy, but the concern has traditionally also often been a very limited and partial one. The examples of children of religious families threatened and pestered with the dogmas and rituals of their parents are too numerous to be mentioned here. Just one serious example is the sending of small boys to the war front in order to become martyrs of the state's, that is the clergy's, godly revolution. Special attention should be called nevertheless to the ideological rites which always have been, or still are, performed on the bodies of children, such as baptism, circumcision and clitoridectomy. In many countries these rites were, or still are, a main ingredient of the legal freedom of religious parents. In spite of this these acts are criminal encroachments upon the own bodily spheres of persons-to-be, particularly since they are irrevocable when children are going to choose themselves as persons which comprehensive ideology to adhere to or not to adhere to. If it is believed that human infants and young children should be protected because they are persons-to-be, they should definitely be protected against the 'freedom' to perform ritual operations on their bodies, when these children have not knowingly and voluntarily agreed to such operations. A nonreligionist country would not provide biased information on certain denominational doctrines or groups, or no information at all, while providing ample, favorable and uncritical information on other denominational doctrines or groups. But the public or state schools of religionist countries do not impartially acquaint their children with the whole gamut of denominational or ideological thought, and religionist countries have state (or quasi-independent) broadcasting corporations that use radio and television as instruments to indoctrinate people with religion or monotheism and to support its institutions. Schools in such countries exclusively teach the values and disvalues of the still-existing or former state religion or of doctrines closely related to it. They do not objectively present their pupils with denominationalism in general as this ranges from poly-theodemonism to non-theodemonism and as this involves the antithesis between theocentrism and normism. State broadcasting corporations in such countries have special religious radio and television departments which send out 'reports on religion', not on denominational thought, spiritual life or philosophy of life in general. When they broadcast 'reflections', preferably right after the news, they do not intend to educate their listeners philosophically (as such a program name would suggest), but merely to ideologically immerse them in the denominationalism of the old school. And when they broadcast 'new ideas', they do not intend to acquaint their listeners with novel thought in the denominational, political or other such field, but only with technical gadgets meant to solve material problems. In addition to all this, their supposedly 'nonreligious' programs are but too often heavily laden with the presuppositions, tenets, traditional features and symbols of the same religion, or of (monotheist) religion in general, without ever properly representing the other side of the denominational or philosophical way of life and thought. Obviously, schools and the media are the most important instruments of perpetuating the state ideology for both religious and political totalitarians. Also here the difference is often not more than that a religionist speaks of "God" where a politico-ideological exclusivist speaks of "Party" (while both of them speak of "Truth"). A nonreligionist country would not arbitrarily and exclusively select or be appealed by denominational opinions and symbols of one kind, while not selecting and not being appealed by denominational opinions and symbols of another kind. But religionist countries only celebrate as national holidays the special days of one particular religion or set of religions supposed to represent all religion and all denominationalism. (Sometimes even the name given to an entire country is religious.) And religionist countries keep one particular day of the week as an official day of rest and worship for all citizens regardless of their personal, denominational convictions or lack thereof. There were, or still are, countries in which some sort of 'Mono's Day Observance Society' did or does everything it can to make everyone abide by the god-day rules of its own airy-fairy belief, whether people had or have chosen to belong to the religious flock in question or not. The fact that those of a different religious persuasion may have different special days, and the fact that the official celebration of religious days of rest, worship or feasting is repugnant to conscientiously nonreligious and antireligionist citizens, is not something aggrandizing religionists feel like taking into consideration. To be sure, everyone should have the opportunity to celebrate a number of days, or one day of the week, for whatever purpose, but no-one should be forced to take days off or to stop working at a time that others want to celebrate their special days. (The celebration of these special days does not mean an extra number of days off, it means that a number of days off has to be taken at a fixed time.) In a nonreligionist country there is a complete separation of state and religion (more generally, denominationalism or ideology) and no religious or religiogenic holiday or day of rest can have a statutory status where people are equal in and before the law. A nonreligionist country would not treat religious organizations differently from nonreligious ones. But religionist countries exempt temples (of whatever polytheist, monotheist or nontheist cult) from paying taxes, whereas high taxes may have to be paid for the property of nonreligious, ideological or social organizations. Some religionist governments even did, or still do, openly withhold a percentage of the taxpayers' money to financially support a particular religious organization or congeries of religious organizations. In a nonreligionist country, on the other hand, there is a complete separation of state and religion and no temple society or other religious organization can be exempted from paying the taxes which other ideological and cultural organizations have to pay; and no religious organization has the right to receive more financial support than any other ideological organization, unless this support is purely proportionate to the number of adhering or practising people who have personally expressed their wish to be a member. (Naturally, temple denotes any supernaturalist place of worship or divination, including those of religions adhered to by people who use the word temple exclusively to refer to the places of worship of other religions than their own.) There are countless other examples of state religionism in countries with religious liberty. But too often has the state's freedom of religion been construed as freedom of state religionism. Religious and religiogenic countries still officially use religious calendars, thus suggesting that the early readers of this Model would be living, or have lived, in the x-th century and in the y-th millennium (that is, of the old, religionist era) as if it concerned some absolute chronological system. In actual fact, however, the early readers of this Model can only be living, and can only have lived, at a time before the year 1 (of the new, nonreligionist era). In a similar religionist vein the texts of certain so-called 'national' anthems mention the doxastic supreme being or creator and the emblem of one particular (sort of) religion (if not that emblem and the sword together), whereas these anthems are supposed to be sung on special occasions by all citizens regardless of their personal denominational beliefs. However, when an anthem is an exclusivist song with ingrained, supernaturalist or theodemonist, symbols, it has no general, even no national, value and cannot command universal respect. Such an anthem cannot even command respect in the country it is claimed to represent; that is, it is claimed to represent by those who were, or still are, so odiously impertinent to fellow-citizens with truly and relevantly different denominational convictions. 6.3.3 DENOMINATIONAL INCLUSIVITY INSTEAD OF RELIGIONISM To discriminate against us because of, or with respect to, our convictions is to discriminate against us as persons, not just as bodies like in the case of racism and sexism. To discriminate against us because of, or with respect to, our denominational convictions, or the comprehensive ideology we adhere to, is the most far-reaching form of discriminating against us, since it is in our inclusive doctrine itself that all antidiscriminatory conceptions have coalesced to form a single, central belief. Hence, when we are or were discriminated against with respect to our denominational convictions, we are or would be indirectly subjected to any form of discrimination embraced or acquiesced in by the religious or political ideology drawn on by the discriminator. Discrimination because of our neutral-inclusive doctrine, or one of its inherent qualities, is not only wicked a single time directly, it is, in addition, wicked a great number of times indirectly. Such cannot be said of any other form of discrimination. The discrimination of adherents of the DNI, or of others, does not have to consist of intentional acts like deliberate physical invasions, it may simply consist of ignorance or neglect. Thus people who claim that they are against discrimination often discriminate when they start to tell what they are against. They may mention "discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin and religion" without realizing that human beings do and need not have a religion in the way they necessarily have a skin color and a national or ethnic origin. What is at issue in nonreligionist terms is, first of all, whether a person adheres to a denominational doctrine at all. Denominational inclusivity is then the freedom and equality of all people, whether they adhere to a denominational doctrine or not; and if so, whether that doctrine is a religion or not; and if so, whatever that religion might be; and if not so, whatever that nonreligious denominational doctrine might be. The religious liberty which excludes nonreligious denominational doctrines or ways of life will therefore have to be substituted by an inclusive ideological liberty and equality which comprises both supernaturalist and non-supernaturalist ideologies, both theodemonist and non-theodemonist ideologies (assuming, of course, that there still are people who believe in the supernatural and/or the theodemonical). In many countries no blood has been shed anymore between the followers of different religious creeds since the introduction of religious liberty. Religion-based discrimination and possible conflicts have been replaced there by impartiality towards all religious denominations. But not until the introduction of denominational or ideological inclusivity will discrimination and potential new conflicts between incompatible, comprehensive or specialist, ideologies be replaced by impartiality towards all people. The concept of ideological liberty and equality must be as broad in orientation as feasible, and inadmissible generalizations must be refrained from. It is common knowledge that some ideologies (religious or nonreligious) have been, or still are, viewed as products from foreign soil which would endanger national security according to some people. This fact that a doctrine originated on foreign soil can be used as a pretext to outlaw that doctrine or to bring it into disrepute, even when the established religion or political ideology itself originated in another country or even in another continent. Sometimes the followers of certain religious or nonreligious ideologies have indeed shown exclusive loyalty to a foreign nation, but to automatically consider all followers of such an ideology unreliable is a generalization which is only meant to conceal or rationalize an exclusivist attitude. What should be cause for political concern in the first place is religions or other ideologies with a fuehrer at the top of an undemocratic, hierarchical organization who is at once a foreign head of state. When such a person is a man who is the head of state of the, or one of the, most religionist and sexist countries in the world, and also claims to be infallible, there is indeed every reason to suspect that those people who swear allegiance to (the duce of) such a totalitarian system will or can be disloyal to a nonsexist, democratic state which does not discriminate its citizens on the basis of their denominational or other ideological convictions. Where people of different religions (or interpretations of one religion) massacre one another, it is the authoritarian, antiveridical, exclusivist or extremist foundation of their outlook on life which is the source of this evil. But also the relations between those who adhere to a religious ideology and those who adhere to a nonreligious one can be subject to the same forms of misery so long as at least one of those ideologies is authoritarian, antiveridical, exclusivistic and/or extremist. It is in such environments that people with a different denominational persuasion are ignored, maltreated or excluded altogether from the common framework. In traditional societies the intolerance and prejudicialness can, then, even strike the denominations which are most closely related to the official or dominant one, for it can be those very doctrines which most markedly expose the adherents of the paradigmatic ideology to an alternative manner of living and thinking which challenges their conscious or unconscious doubt about their own manner of living and denominational thinking. It is also here the alienation from particular groups, in this case based upon a certain denominational doctrine or ideology, which makes these groups unknown and therefore liable to be disliked. Except that such alienation and the concomitant injustice and possibly violence is caused by an exclusivist attitude of those who exclude, it is often also caused by the exclusivist belief of those excluded themselves, for example, when they claim in any way that they belong to a chosen class with a special political task, or --worse-- that they are 'the elect' of the supreme being 'Himself'. A state in which laws, institutions, censorship, and so on, are based on judgments derived from religious books and the doctrines of religious organizations flouts denominational inclusivity. Altho reference to those books and organizations is often suffused with a color of legal and moral validity in such a society, every state law which is founded in one or more religious tenets is, morally speaking, an offense or crime. That is, such a law is an offense if the state regards a religious document or statement as a reason in itself to proscribe or prescribe something. No parliament, government or other state organ has the moral right to make binding judgments for a whole territory on the basis of the doctrinal tenets of an ideology which does not represent all citizens of this territory, let alone on the basis of an ideology which exhibits a sustained belief in phenomena for which the interindividual irreliability is symptomatic. Moreover, no person has a moral obligation to obey a state constitution, law or regulation which opens or closes with monotheist verbalism, or which is otherwise infected with the symbols of theodemonism or religion, if 'e does not adhere to a theodemonist or religious ideology. Such a state constitution, such a law or such an official regulation is addressed to monotheists, theodemonists or religous people exclusively. (Similarly, no person has a moral obligation to obey a state constitution, law or regulation which opens or closes with party-political verbalism, or which is otherwise infected with the symbols of a party-political doctrine, if 'e does not adhere to that political ideology. Such a state constitution, such a law or such an official regulation is addressed to party-members and sympathizers only.) Any obedience to such a constitution, law or regulation is, if not brutally enforced by the theodemonical or religious (or political) followers in question, at the most of a strictly prudential, utilitarian nature. The right to personhood and the norm of inclusivity cover countless other fields than those of denominational inclusivity in a political or legal context. Yet, it is in these fields that we have to fight for our political freedom of speech and organization, for our right to be spared the false or extremely implausible beliefs and the exclusivist emblems of others, and for our legal and de facto recognition by the state as equals. Only under these conditions can we adhere to the DNI as equals and can we freely build on the ideals of neutral-inclusivity and veridical truth. A state or governmental agency that attempts to further theodemonism and supernaturalism is not only inimical to these ideals, it offends against them and violates our personal rights, for we have never agreed and will never agree to a state of that sort. Like party-political exclusivism, religionism is a shortsighted strategy too as its perpetuation is once bound to backfire. Theodemonical religionism will, if not abandoned, more and more antagonize the adherents of modern secularism into themselves discriminating, if not fighting, against all religious beliefs and practises, whether religionistic or not. This will eventually be fatal for the traditional religion or religions in question when a new, nonreligious doctrine, which was in religionist times espoused by perhaps only a few, does become the new denominational paradigm after having been gaining ground rapidly. Should the discrimination of the adherents of the new paradigm not have ended long before that moment, it will be too late for the adherents of the old religion to sincerely declare themselves in favor of denominational inclusivity or equality. Then, it will be too late for them to sincerely claim that the state ought not to represent and propagate any form of denominationalism in particular. This is especially important to keep in mind when the new paradigm will not only be a present- and/or future-regarding, but also a past-regarding, normative doctrine. Where state religionism continues to exist nevertheless, the open or concealed penetration of state affairs by religion can find expression in the wording of so-called 'national' anthems, the so-called 'national' celebration of religious feast-days, the system the head of state is incorporated into, the formation of political parties or the representation of religious sects in governments, the official tasks of the armed forces, and so on and so forth. In religionist countries non-theodemonists are expected to show respect for supernaturalist or theist anthems; the rejoicing at exclusivist expressions of praise or worship is thrusted upon people who want to be freed from them; citizens or immigrants who want to become a citizen are required to swear for a representative of the still-existing or former state religion; nonbelievers are politically treated as nonexistent; and during wars conscripts have to risk their lives for a cause which is mainly religious or in which religious-irreligious differences play a crucial role. At the same time also religionist countries pretend to represent all citizens and to be democratic, but if they are 'democratic' at all, then in nothing else than a cheap, majoritarian sense. Something that both religionist and politico-ideological totalitarians will often allege is that a state could not be entirely impartial vis-à-vis the religious or other ideological beliefs of its citizens, or that a society would disintegrate if it did not embrace a common doctrinal ideology (in addition to, or instead of, a metadoctrinal theory of democracy). Should those totalitarians be right, there is only one alternative for the future: the disintegration of society must be prevented or brought to a standstill by the general acceptance of our doctrine as the new denominational one. If the unity of the nation is really what state religionists and party-political totalitarians are concerned about, they cannot refuse this offer. Hence, the unity of every nation, or the unity of humankind, shall either be attained by the universal adoption of the ideal of denominational inclusivity or else by the universal adoption of the ideal of inclusivist denominationalism. 6.4 THE QUESTION OF DENOMINATIONAL PRIMACY 6.4.1 SOME INITIAL PHILOSOPHIZING ON WHAT COMES FIRST The central question of an ancient philosophical dialog is what is piety? (or, dependent on the translation, what is holiness?). The most superficial answer to this question is piety is doing as i am doing (in more modern terms good is doing what i am doing). But when it is demonstrated by the philosopher in the dialog that such an answer will certainly not do, the person interrogated says that piety is that which is dear to the gods. However, in the polytheist setting of the dialog concerned this answer does not take into account that gods differ as much among themselves as human beings do. All of them may agree, for example, that a murderer should be punished. However, what they are likely to disagree about is what kind of killing is murder, and who did what and when. To overcome this typically polytheistic difficulty, the definition of piety is amended: 'pious' is that which all gods love. Now the dialog arrives at a point which is very interesting for polytheists and non-polytheists alike, for the philosopher in question wants to know from 'er partner in the conversation whether the pious is beloved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because it is beloved by the gods. In other words, is being loved by the gods (or by a god) merely something that succeeds someone's being pious, or something's being holy, or is it the essence of piety or holiness itself (that is, what defines it)? In the dialog it is further argued that piety is 'that part of justice which attends to the gods', that 'piety is learning how to please the gods in word and deed, by prayers and sacrifices'. This (supernaturalist) lore of giving and asking cannot solve the problem of defining piety either --it is rejoined--, because if the essence of piety is that it is pleasing to the gods (but not beneficial or dear to them), how can it then be asserted at the same time that the essence of piety is that which is dear to the gods? Altho the ancient dialog did not offer a solution itself, it acutely challenged the popular, religious conceptions of piety and holiness. It did not speak of any suitable alternative, and yet it cleverly attacked the 'religion of the letter', the naivety of the 'narrow and unenlightened conscience'. More than two thousand years later another philosopher posed a question similar to the most interesting one of the dialog just discussed. In monotheist supernaturalist terms it read "is something good made or willed by God because it is good, or is it good because it is made or willed by God?". This time the thinker concerned opted for the first answer by asserting that goodness or perfection is in the nature of things themselves. They are good by some rule of goodness, and not 'sheerly by the will of God', 'e maintained. By taking this position 'e dissociated 'imself from all those monotheists who seriously believed (or still believe) that their doxastic supreme being would be 'equally praiseworthy', if it were or had done something entirely different from what it is believed to actually be or have done. Their definition is --as correctly pointed out-- that which is pleasing to the most powerful is, as such, just. It is obvious that the above definition is not the right one of just or good, but it is not so obvious that it would not do for a word such as pious. Altho only meaning dutyful, pious is akin to piare which means (to) appease. Etymologically 'piety' is therefore the fulfilment of, or the intention to fulfil, a duty to appease a god, a parent or any other authority believed to be 'natural'. And if, and insofar as, this meaning is still present in piety, the essence of religious piety is indeed that it is (or would be) pleasing to one or more gods, whatever it may be. This answer is then already incorporated into the meaning of piety itself. Therefore we must not make the mistake of using a term such as pious, but speak in the most general of normative terms when discussing the relationship between the normative and the (divinely) authoritative. Those self-confident theists who do not say that something is good because it has been created and is loved or willed by a god, but that, instead, a god created, loved or willed it because it is good, do, wittingly or unwittingly, render supernaturalist theism impotent. For, if 'rules of perfection' (that is norms or principles) exist independently of what a god is/was or does/did, gods themselves (and also evil demons) are subject to those same rules of perfection. Those who believe in a certain norm will then, perhaps, believe in a god that creates, loves and wills in accordance with that norm, but they will also have to reject the belief in any god that does not act in accordance with that norm, and they will have to reject all belief itself which violates that norm. When someone speaks of "holy", "good" or "perfect", 'e implicitly refers to the normative aspect of denominationalism, of ideology or of disciplinary thought; when 'e speaks of "a god creating, loving or willing something", to the authoritative aspect of it. The fundamental question the ancient dialog already dealt with is therefore in general terms: What comes first: the norm or the authority?. As we will see, it is of the very essence of theism that divine authority comes first, and that the normative is merely subsidiary to it. This is not to say that all individual theists really believe that something is good because some god wanted it that way, and that no theist believes that there are one or more independent rules of goodness or norms. This is certainly not logically implied, for, like any belief, an individual theist's belief need not be consistent, or 'e may believe that a particular god does not violate any of the independent rules of goodness 'e also believes in. Yet, the latter position is not the position of a theist as theist. Because for a theist as theist one would not say that it is a logically contingent matter whether a particular god or group of gods in whose existence as principal beings 'e believes, are 'good' or 'just' in the sense of an independent rule of goodness or justice. For a theist as theist this is a logical necessity, if only to distinguish the one type of principal being, namely a god, from the other, namely a demon. Hence, the divine, or the authoritative, does come first for the theist as theist, or for the theodemonist as theodemonist. Those theists who claim that a particular god creates, loves or wills something because it is good or just, and definitely not the other way around, do not speak as adherents of a theist or theodemonist ideology but rather --to take the historical example-- as philosophers. 6.4.2 NORMISM INSTEAD OF THEOCENTRISM A comprehensive ideology like ours which starts from the primacy of the normative is --what we have called-- 'normistic', whereas a comprehensive ideology which starts from the primacy of the authoritative, that is, from the primacy of divine authority, is theistic and authoritarian or 'theocentr(ist)ic'. The prime notion of a normistic doctrine is the norm or the norms (or the notions pertaining to particular principles), whereas the prime notion of a theocentric doctrine is God or the gods (or the notions pertaining to particular gods). Thus when we call our total disciplinary body "the Norm" or "the Ananorm", this emphasizes its normistic nature (and/or the additional recognition of the right to personhood when it is done to distinguish it from 'the DNI'). It is not that our Norm simply replaces the God of the monotheists, for Norm is not the name of some (personal) authority, if only because we speak of "the Norm". In that case we could be blamed for merely believing in the primacy of the authority of a different 'god', but we do not believe in the primacy of any authority. (Insofar as we 'believe in' authority it is for derivative reasons.) We believe in the primacy of the normative, and no doubt this position is fundamentally different from that of the theocentrists. Theirs is ultimately the primacy of the authoritative: if Mono had commanded them to sacrifice every daughter born before the first son, they would have had to sacrifice every daughter born before the first son. Ours, however, is the primacy of the normative: we must do what the norm requires, and we must abstain from what would offend against the norm, regardless of what Mono or any other personal or personified being orders or is believed to have ordered. (While they say "for God's sake", we say "for goodness' sake".) A normist will teach that people have to realize a state of being (or that they have to act or refrain from acting) as prescribed by the norm(s) or principle(s). A typically normistic symbolic statement is the doctrine is your master. A person possessed by a god, on the other hand, may enjoin that people have to 'realize Mono' here and now. Twisting the language itself, a beloved theocentric slogan is God-realization. Such phraseology reflects the fact that in theocentrist and other authoritarian ideologies it is a particular being (the Authority) which counts, for it is this being (God or Party) which must determine what is good or just by what it commands, loves, and so on. (The authoritarian commandment of commandments is thou shalt obey orders or orders are orders.) In normistic ideology it is ultimately the norm which counts, and it is then a particular state of being which has to be realized (or a particular act which has to be performed or abstained from) so that the ideal of the norm may come true. Theism or theocentrism primarily teaches people to love or worship a certain god, or the gods in general, whereas normism primarily teaches people to live in accordance with a particular norm, or the norms in general. This is not to say that theists would not find it important that people live in accordance with the rules, but if so, then because those rules have been laid down by a god, or because a god wills that people follow them. By the same token, a normistic ideology does, logically speaking, not necessarily have to deny the existence of gods or demons. The existence or nonexistence of gods and demons is not only a contingent matter, from a purely normistic point of view it is even irrelevant, because the existence of the norm or norms does not depend on them. If any god or demon exists (however it may be defined, and whatever it may turn out to be), it will have to be judged by the same normative standard or standards as all other beings, and so will the belief in a god and/or demon. Not only is the existence of a particular god or group of gods 'relevant' and believed in in theocentrist ideology, the name of a god is often in itself of the greatest significance. So it is a spiritual practise to hallow a divine name (or 'to praise his holy name'), and to pray in the name of a certain god. This may even exuberate into an unceasing repetition of a mantra, which is believed to lead to union with the divine being of that name itself. Altho the potential symbolic significance of names is recognized in the DNI too, this can by no means be compared to the practise of theocentrists who attempt to harnass certain names in order to get literally closer to a particular personal or personified being. Name symbols do lead to union with the natural mortals who live under the same denomination, and symbolically thru them to union with the ideal they have in common; they do not lead to union with any nonnatural god or demon. Only supernaturalists believe that name symbols can replace real, fundamental attempts at realizing the ideal state of being according to the norm (or, for that matter, according to a god). And only supernaturalists believe that the word name itself would be a synonym of spiritual nature or essence. In the relationship between principal beings, or sacred books, and the normative, it is the normative, that is the whole of universal norms and values, which comes first. Consequently it is the choice of norms and values which precedes the belief in principal beings such as gods and demons, and the belief in books which prescribe or proscribe without offering a justification and without reflecting upon what has been said before and elsewhere. Those for whom the attitude and conduct of a god or other doxastic principal being contradict the most fundamental of norms will not accept the authority of such a being, even if it did exist; and those for whom the tales and tenor of a sacred or other book contradict the most fundamental of principles will not accept the authority of such a book, even if it had been revealed in a nonnatural way. This is what the primacy of the normative implies. It is therefore the choice of norms and values itself which gives the life of a normist its meaning. 'Er existence has meaning when certain norms and values have come to engage 'im, irrespective of 'er belief in one or more gods or other principal beings; and irrespective of 'er belief in something like immortality, for immortal beings, whether they exist or not, are subject to the same universal norms as mortal beings. (Should there be a difference, it is the very belief in immortality which will make the life of a person with a body meaningless or less meaningful.) It comes as no surprise that some social scientists have found that there is a distinct correlation between adherence to theist ideology founded upon the primacy of the authoritative and a general authoritarian attitude. It will come as no surprise either that theocentric believers choose for 'law and order', whereas we as adherents of a normistic denominational doctrine choose for 'legitimacy and order'. Now, those who believe in the primacy of the authoritative and in a doxastic truth as revealed by a deity are likely to ask a normist how 'e knows what norm or principle is the true or right one. But a theocentrist who poses such a question does not understand, or conceals the fact, that 'e has to face the same kind of question 'imself: how does 'e know what god or divine revelation is the true or right one (that is to say, apart from the claim that the revelation occurred in 'er own part of the world, or in that of those who colonized 'er own country). A normist may as a person have to choose between different norms, or between different contents or interpretations of one principle, but a theist will have to choose between different gods, or between different beliefs in, or predicates of, one god. (It is one of the extraordinary acts of theism to bypass this problem by speaking, not of "the god" but of "God". However, the normist can do exactly the same by introducing a proper name, for example, by speaking of "(the) Norm", whether as an abbreviation of "the Ananorm" or not.) Hence, this is not the kind of question which exposes a fundamental epistemological difference between the normistic and the the(ocentr)ist approach. Such a difference is rather that theists claim the existence of one or more particular (immaterial) beings with a great number of particular predicates (such as unique relationships with avatars), whereas normists will only have to claim the existence of one or a limited number of principles or norms (which are immaterial as well). Even when the theocentrist asks how it could be known whether it is true that one should do so and so, or that something should be such and such, 'e has already implicitly recognized one principle, namely that of truth. And not only has 'e thus implicitly recognized the first principle of doctrinal principles, 'er very question itself perfectly demonstrates that this principle needs no god. An outrageous example of normless theocentrism is antinomianism. Antinomians (if still existing) hold that norms, categorical principles or the 'moral law' are of no use or obligation because faith alone would be necessary to salvation (the 'saving of man from the power and effects of sin'). Characteristic of religious existentialists adhering to such antinomianism is that they claim that the 'law of love' should be applied directly and separately in each situation. If this applying of a 'moral law' sounds inconsistent, then only so on the surface, for the injunction to love, on which their situation ethics is based, has in practise never provided any normative directive whatsoever (at least not in addition to what the principle of beneficence enjoins). In actual fact, also antinomians who are not willing to dispense with the clichés of theodemonical agapism always have been, or still are, staunchly opposed to normistic discipline. When a the(ocentr)ist still scornfully calls people who do recognize principles, but no god or gods, "atheists", 'e may now expect that 'er derogatory way of speaking will soon backfire on 'im. For if a normist who believes in the primacy of the normative is an 'atheist', then a theist who does not believe in the primacy of the normative is an 'anormist' or --worse-- an 'antinormist'. 6.4.3 THE QUESTION TABLED 6.4.3.1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- IN THE PRIMACY OF THE NORM The norm is not subject to the supreme being, it is the supreme being that is subject to the norm. The norm itself determines what being is supreme, or would be supreme, not the other way around as in religions of lordship and submission. For the supreme is not just what it is. For the supreme is not what 'He' is. The question of the existence of the supreme being is of no fundamental significance. Whether in a dependent, cultural or in an independent sense, it is the existence of the norm, not that of the supreme being, which is relevant: the actual existence of the supreme is immaterial. It is in this way that the supreme is beyond being. For it is not, or would not be, supreme because it exists, but because it is, and would be, what it should be according to the norm. For 'e is not, or would not be, supreme because 'e exists, but because 'e is, and would be, what 'e should be according to the norm. So it is that we believe and live, in the primacy of the norm, in the primacy of the ananorm. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The distinction between normistic and theocentrist denominational doctrines is so important that we will use this section mainly to give a condensed enumeration of the statements made in the previous one. This will be done by juxtaposing the normistic and theocentrist positions on a number of historical and systematic issues, as shown in the table of figures F.6.4.3.1 and 2. This table can obviously only give a picture of consistent positions. A particular ideology may in actual fact be so inconsistent or opportunistic as to combine elements of both normism and theocentrism. 6.5 POSTRELIGIOUS, CATENICAL NORMISM 6.5.1 DENOMINATIONAL AND SECULAR CONCERNS 6.5.1.1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- FOR GOODNESS' SAKE No imposition of theocentrism for the sake of personhood. No supernatural god or demon for the sake of truth and inclusivity. No extremist supreme being for the sake of neutrality. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- An existential trauma of many traditional atheists or secularists used to be (or still is) the theocentrist accusation that they would have to be totally unprincipled, or that they would have no fundamental respect for universal values. At present we know that so far as normist denominationalism is concerned, the situation is rather the other way round: it is normist doctrines that take principles and values most seriously, whereas they are merely of secondary import in theocentric doctrines. But traditional secularists, who call or called themselves "atheists", "agnostics", "humanists" or something else of that ilk, have in this respect always been on the defensive. They have tried hard to underscore their explicit recognition of ethical principles, for example, by organizing themselves in so-called 'ethical societies'. And they have emphatically asserted that ethics can be developed independently of belief in a god. (To understand the historical context, one must not forget what medieval forces they had, or still have, to overcome in religionist countries or subcultures. Ethics, for instance, was, or still is, treated in such countries or subcultures as a branch of theology!) One of the preparatory conditions of an assertion is that it is not obvious to both the speaker or writer and the listener or reader that the latter knows already what is stated, or does not need to be reminded of it. That is why the best way to obliterate what is self-evident, is to assert it. It is by the very assertion of the truth that theism or demonism are no prerequisite for ethics or morality at all, that the traditional secularist takes away the self-evidence of this truth. For by declaring this, 'e must implicitly assume that there are people who listen to or read 'er declaration, and who sincerely believe that it is not obvious that ethics can be developed independently of any form of theodemonism. Thus only to placate a few theocentrist listeners or readers with a morbid bias against nonreligious comprehensive ideologies, who are not capable of rationally coping with a declaration against obscurantism and irrationalism anyhow, is the self-evidence of the possibility of non-theodemonist normism obliterated. We ourselves shall not continue to do so. What is definitely not self-evident is the meaning of terms like secular and secularism. Within the narrow, traditional frame of reference in which merely the religious is distinguished from the irreligious, secular is defined as not religious, not spiritual or not overtly or specifically religious. Traditionally not religious may also be understood as worldly, temporal, or in a narrower sense, as nonclerical. In the new framework of ideological thought secular is to function on one of the following levels: 1. the general level of ideologies 2. the level of comprehensive ideologies, whether supernaturalistic or non-supernaturalistic, whether theodemonistic or non-theodemonistic 3. the level(s) of religion(s) or theodemonist doctrines. In the first case its stipulative meaning would be nonideological, in the second case nondenominational, and in the third case nonreligious or non-theodemonist. The first meaning of secular is to be rejected because political thought and institutions could not then be described as "secular" anymore. The third meaning is to be rejected, because the DNI (the first and only nonreligious, non-theodemonist denominational doctrine of its kind) would then have to be described as "a secular doctrine", inclusive of its neutralist symbolism (as to be evolved in the Book of Symbols). The concerns of the DNI extend far beyond the purely 'secular', and so do those froms of art which are and will be inspired by, or express, the neutralist symbolism and the essence of inclusive thinking, feeling and acting. It is not art which is not specifically religious which should be called "secular"; it is art which is neither specifically neutralistic nor religious, that is, which is nondenominational, which should now be called "secular". This meaning of secular should not be confused with interdenominational. The extra advantage of defining secular as nondenominational is that it indirectly more firmly establishes the inclusive meaning of denominational, which differs more from its traditional meaning than ideological and religious. Granted that our stipulative definition of secular is not denominational, secularism does not mean indifference to or exclusion of religious doctrines but something like indifference to or exclusion of denominational doctrines. (Compare interdenominationalism: a theory or practise involving or occurring between different denominations, and in this sense inclusive, but possibly in a very partial way nevertheless.) Whether the doctrines concerned are religious or denominational, the kind of secularism which is an exclusivist theory or practise, antithetical to ideological inclusivity, must be distinguished from the kind of secularism which merely confines itself to the secular, or the kind of secularism which does not reject religion but religionism. Only the former type of secularism is exclusivistic; the latter type is nonexclusivistic or even ideologically inclusive so far as the rejection of religionism is concerned. It is clear that we as adherents of a nonreligious and nonsecular doctrine have to fight religionism, but it must also be clear that (other) 'secularists' can solely join us in this fight so long as they are willing to respect 'nonsecular' denominational considerations. Of course, as always under the conditions of denominational freedom and equality. 6.5.2 POSTRELIGIOUS, POST-THEODEMONISTIC AND CATENICAL 6.5.2.1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A DENOMINATIONAL DOCTRINE A denominational doctrine does not merely involve the recognition of a system of norms and values: it tries to satisfy the need to meaningfully relate things, events and actions, attitudes and ideas, to one another and to the supreme being or to supreme being. A denominational doctrine does not merely involve the recognition of a system of norms and values: it is a product of exclusivism and authoritarianism, degenerating into the apotheosis of the human race, the 'Holy Land', the male sex and the powerful elite, when teaching that the supreme being is an exclusively human, male god specially related to one city or people, and with the attributes of a member of an upper-class; that 'He' is an almighty Overlord who rules, punishes and forgives. A denominational doctrine does not merely involve the recognition of a system of norms and values: it is a product of inclusivism and neutralism, culminating in a post-theodemonistic neutrality towards all lands, races, sexes and still-existing classes, when teaching that the supreme being is the all-neutral being, or that supreme being is all-neutral being. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The DNI is a postreligious normist doctrine in its interpretation of truth, a post-theodemonist normist doctrine in its interpretation of relevance or inclusivity, and a catenical normist doctrine in its interpretation of neutrality. In general also normist doctrines can be either religious or nonreligious, theodemonistic or non-theodemonistic, and catenical or noncatenical. As a matter of fact, traditional or ancient forms of normism are religious rather than nonreligious (and antonymical or otherwise precatenical instead of catenical). Altho starting from the primacy of the normative, a world-view might center round a number of supernaturalist representations and myths. That is why people in the past were not always sure whether to classify such a world-view as "a religion" or as "a philosophical system", because they thought that only theocentric denominational doctrines deserved the name religion, while realizing at the same time that all supernaturalist comprehensive ideologies must be called "religions". We should distinguish the DNI as a postreligious doctrine from traditional 'antireligious' doctrines. Antireligious doctrines exist by the grace of religion at the same time as religion. A postreligious doctrine, on the other hand, does not depend on religion for its existence; it succeeds both religious and antireligious ideologies in time; and in some way it transcends the old antithesis between religion and irreligion. This may sound like a dialectical mystery if religion is supposed to stand for (denominational) supernaturalism and irreligion for non-supernaturalism, yet in the old antithesis irreligion does not just denote non-supernaturalism; it also denotes the rejection of the concept of a supreme being and the possibility of the existence of such a being, and/or the rejection of all denominational nonpropositional symbolism, and/or the rejection of the psychological and sociological meaning of denominationalism, and/or the rejection of the belief in anything else than facts which can be empirically verified or falsified. The solution to the 'mystery' is therefore that while the DNI is not supernaturalistic or religious, it does recognize that several of the features of traditional or ancient religions are worthwhile as features of any comprehensive ideology. They are qualities which are not supernaturalistic, nor theocentric, in themselves, and which need not per se be repudiated for other normative reasons either. In other words, in disposing of religion as a bastion of supernaturalism and theodemonism, we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater. This should explain too why the DNI is a post-theodemonist doctrine, and not just an anti-theodemonist one, like traditional atheism. The traditional atheist passionately denies the existence of 'God', of any god, or of any god or demon. In thus denying the existence of such theodemonical beings 'e takes the theocentric position that their actual existence would be relevant. But the question whether one or more gods or demons (or beings which are called "a god", "God", "a demon" or "(the) Devil") do actually exist or not, is not relevant from a normist standpoint. The question whether a certain god (or demon) exists may only be interesting from the perspective of truth and its veridicalist interpretation, when its existence is actually asserted by some people. Nonetheless, this truth-aspect of the belief in gods and demons we have labeled "religion"; it is the relevancy-aspect of this belief which we have labeled "theodemonism". What is, then, normatively of paramount importance is that one shall never recognize one of the exclusivistically conceived principal beings of theodemonical ideologies as a supreme or superior being, nor as an inferior being. Anti-theodemonists will deny the true existence of such a being --and probably rightly so--, for us as post-theodemonists this is not to the point. As a catenical doctrine the DNI defines normative supremacy in catenical terms. On the principle of catenated neutrality a being is supreme in a certain respect, if it is neutral in that respect, unless its unneutrality corresponds to, or would serve, neutrality in a more basic respect. Hence, a being is supreme in all respects if it is neutral in all respects (for which neutrality is ananormatively superior). Theoretically a supreme being would thus be an all-neutral being, and an all-neutral being the or a supreme being. The actual existence of such a being is of no fundamental significance. Since it is the normative principle of neutrality which would have to make it significant, it is this principle itself which is fundamental. Therefore, the adherent of the DNI may be agnostic with regard to the (possible) existence of the or a supreme being. If 'e chooses to do as if (the) all-neutral being does exist, 'e does so for symbolic reasons. (This symbolic significance of the all-neutral supreme being will be discussed in the third chapter of the Book of Symbols.) The distinctions we have drawn between theocentrism, religion, theodemonism, exclusivism and unneutralism, or between normism, veridicalist denominationalism, non-theodemonism, inclusivism and neutralism, are sometimes very plain, sometimes very subtle. In practise several of these distinctions will often play a role together. This is also the case in the following short dialog between a theocentrist of the monotheist or atheist persuasion and a normist of the neutral-inclusivist persuasion. It is called "a post-theodemonist response to a traditional question". T is the traditional mono- or atheist, N the normist of the neutral-inclusive persuasion. T: "Do you believe in God?" N: "God is a proper name. What does it mean 'to believe in Dog'? To accept its or 'er existence as a fact? To have faith in its or 'er behavior or authority, while its or 'er existence is not disputed?" T: "Do you believe in the existence of the Supreme Being, and name it "God"?" N: "In your question you presuppose that the existence or nonexistence of a supreme being is of fundamental significance, but what we believe in is the primacy of the normative: it is the Norm that determines which being is supreme, or would be supreme, not the other way around as in religions of lordship and submission. Your presupposition puts the cart before the horse, for it is above all the belief in norms which is relevant, not that in a supreme being. And, then, if the supreme being exists, or when we do assume that it exists, it would be blasphemy to name it "God", because what is the highest of all beings according to the Norm would thus be associated with the exclusivist, often extremist, contents and dismal, if not abominable, record of theodemonism. We may believe in the existence of the supreme being, but it is not a god, for we shall not have any god before us. Of all being only all-neutral being is supreme, and of all beings only the most neutral, or the least unneutral, being is supreme." T: "Is this the answer to my question?" N: "Yes and no: yes, insofar as your question is answerable; no, insofar as it is questionable." 6.5.3 A NEW DENOMINATIONAL PARADIGM The crucial point with respect to the issue of denominational liberty and equality is: if the nonreligious in a country where supernaturalism or theodemonism (particularly monotheism) is still more or less the state ideology want to be put on the same footing as their religous fellow-citizens, then, at least, they will have to offer something which can be put on the same footing as the traditional, supernaturalist or theodemonist paradigm. Only in that case is it theoretically possible that they will not just be tolerated but included as equals. Irreligious doctrines which are not much more than antireligions (if not exclusivist antireligions) may temporarily develop such a strength that an almost equal position could be reached, but such antireligions will always exist by the grace of religion, and will mainly have a destructive nature instead of a constructive one. In the relationship with those of another persuasion they are bound to lapse into the same faults as the religious ideologies they oppose, used to lapse into. And no-one who means well by humankind wants that in countries in which 'nonbelievers' do or will make up the bulk of society supernaturalists and theodemonists will be disqualified as witnesses, will be withheld membership of parliament, and will be described in the dictionaries as "immorally living" and "godly" (in the combined sense of theistic and wicked). Psychiatric hospitals which have been, or still are, often abused to dispose of people who do not act, feel and believe as a majority of the population or a government prefer, have already been ordered to treat people because of their religious or other ideological beliefs. No society, however, will become more inclusive (that is less exclusivistic) by replacing the one type of ideological exclusionism with the other, whether denominational or political. The lordship of religionist organizations and the dictatorship of undemocratic political systems over those who do not support the religious administration or party in power can never be permanently overcome by some form of unsubstantial atheism, of vapid humanism or of egocentric liberalism. To get rid of both religious and political subordination one needs the force and spirit of a doctrine which is at least as strong as the form of religionism and of party-political exclusivism which has to be combated. The yoke of religious and party-political oppression and discrimination can only be thrown off, if people unite themselves under the denomination of a doctrine with a clear and lucid, normative substance and with a symbolic besides a basic component, a doctrine which is both informing and inspiring. No wishy-washy nonreligion and no lack of denominational or political interest will ever be a challenge to any religionist or dictatorial political power. Only by means of a denominational doctrine as explicit as the classic religions, but now guided by the principles of truth, relevance and neutrality can nonadherents of the traditional paradigm in a religion-dominated or religiogenic society win the battle for recognition as equals, for an alternative way of life, for a liberty of conscience and behavior free from exist curtailments and symbol impositions. It is such a normative doctrine which must do away, not only in theory but also in practise, with the values and disvalues which have caused so many of the real and illusory problems of the past. Comprehensive ideologies have always existed, and will continue to exist, so long as the world is not good in every respect, because of people's need to relate concrete and abstract things, events, attitudes and ideas to one another (including themselves) and to a normative frame of reference. Perhaps, the first objective of human beings is the satisfaction of primary needs like safety, nutrition and shelter, and of secondary needs like friendship and sexuality, but everywhere where those needs are at least partially satisfied, human beings have felt the need to express, and to be part of, supra-individual ideals. (It could be argued that this need is even more urgent in cases that secondary, and possibly also primary, needs are not satisfied.) It is the timeless interest in supra-individual ideals which is ideological (or 'idealogical' ) and normative. Where it concerns comprehensive ideals and conceptions, religion is the institutionalized system which has traditionally always tried to evoke and mould them. But where more and more people fall away from religion because they can no longer believe in its supernaturalist fancies and dogmas, and because they can no longer share responsibility for its sexual, marital, age-based, ethnocentric, monarchical, territorial and other exclusivist theories and practises, the need of denominationalism itself remains. This is the tragedy of societies in transition: while the influence of the traditional denominational paradigm fades away, many people have the feeling that they are destined for a state of anomie. Having lost their old faith, they have also lost their hope for the future, that is, their old hope for the future. In such a time the voluntary or forced retreat of religion and the severance of the social ties originating in it engender a considerable increase in egoistic individualism, loneliness and disillusion among people. A symptom of such a time can be the disorientation or a growing aimlessness of the arts; it can also be a reactionary reorientation by a part of the population towards a period in the past when the authority of the (still-)paradigmatic world-view was not seriously challenged. Another cause of denominational crisis is the discrepancy between the scientific-technological development of a society and the mental state of the average citizen and politician when it ideologically resembles that of people who lived several thousands of years ago. Science and technology are largely meant to take care of the material aspects of the satisfaction of human needs, and yet progress in these fields --assuming that it is 'progress'-- will eventually have an impact in all fields. Human civilization is not exclusively a question of advancement or 'new ideas' in science and technology as exponents of the traditional paradigm may be but too eager to suggest. If people's philosophy of life, their treatment of women or girls, of men or boys, and of minorities, their symptoms of alienation, compulsion and inhibition, or their linguistic systems, to name but a few examples, are the same as they were millenniums before, when they visit the moon or other planets, then their machinery may have undergone a revolutionary change, but they themselves will, in such a case, not have evolved at all. This can be specially disastrous when the same people have (been given) the military power to destroy whole countries or continents. A future nuclear holocaust does then seem but too likely. Where religion does lose its preponderant influence believers or ex-believers will estrange more and more from the old lights and (dis)values. So long as no new standards have taken the place of the traditional ones, the feelings of belonging to something that gives spiritual and social security disappear. Also in such a case people speak of "alienation". But while this form of alienation will be experienced as uncomfortable too (in addition to the pleasure of being liberated from the old dogmatizers), it is one of the few forms of alienation which will benefit humanity; that is, so far as it concerns the estrangement from (dis)values incompatible with the right to personhood, the veridicalist interpretation of the principle of truth and the norms of inclusivity and neutrality. With the estrangement from traditional authoritarian, supernaturalist, exclusivist and extremist attitudes and beliefs, a world free from oppression, obscurantism, discrimination and inequality, a world free from the threat of nuclear or chemical warfare, violence, hunger and unjust dispossession, has a chance to arise eventually. Where religious or theodemonist ideologies lose more and more of their followers, while a new denominational doctrine has not yet been accepted by a sufficient number of people, a society will gradually drift into a spiritual vacuum. But in such a period when the old denominational paradigm has exhausted its fertility, the suction force which carries the immutable norms and values of the new doctrine is bound to become irresistable. And what else can this doctrine be than postreligious, post-theodemonistic and neutral-inclusivistic if it is to be a truly new paradigm, and not the nth variation on the old one? So long as there is a need of denominationalism in human society --that is, something more profound than political ideology-- there will be a need of a comprehensive system of disciplinary thought which is compatible with modern science and secular philosophy. So long as truth and relevance are not both recognized as indispensible values, so long as so many human beings are still in want of the most essential things in life, so long as the threat of discrimination and inequality stalk society, there will be a need of a form of denominationalism which leads people not to the peace of the most efficient mode of oppression or exploitation but to the peace of neutral-inclusivity. Even where there is evidence of an evolution in a great number of fields where exclusivist institutions are being replaced by more inclusive ones, the vigorous assistance of a wholly neutral-inclusive doctrine will be required to continue and expand this nanapolar process until at least all state exclusivisms and all exclusivisms in which people's extrinsic rights are violated have been removed. The DNI unites several movements for liberty and equality or emancipation, several movements for the abolition or reform of exclusivist institutions or practises, and several movements for the betterment of people's lives under one ideal. The objectives of these anafactive movements and endeavors should not be dissociated from one another. For together we have to build a more neutral and inclusive society, if necessary by means of nanaicity; for together we will have to live in such a society even tho our personal needs, preferences and capacities may differ. After the gestation and emergence of the new denominational paradigm there need be no talk of alienation from old norms and values anymore. So far as the DNI is concerned they will be replaced with the values of truthfulness, sincerity and nondiscrimination and all other values comprehended by the veridicalist principle of truth and the norm of inclusivity; and they will be replaced with well-being and equality and all other values comprehended by the norm of neutrality. The arts will find a renewed inspiration; and friendships will be formed which would or could not be formed before. Above all, the paradigmatic Norm will give us a new ideal and a new hope which at once include and transcend our individual being. END OF THE BOOK OF FUNDAMENTALS ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The foundation of the doctrine of neutral-inclusivity has now been laid; the framework is finished. This is the moment that those who want to may look at the Ananormative structure in a symbolic light. [Copyright ©MVVM, 41-69 a(fter)S(econd)W(orld)W(ar) M. Vincent van Mechelen] [TRINPsite, trinp.org; owner Stichting DNI Foundation, reception2@trinp.org]