I often hear the idealogy (and I am paraphrasing) : “People should be free to do whatever they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt an innocent third party” .
I really like this idealogy, and I feel it is the correct ideaology to have -- deep down this rings true in my soul. However, as a practical man, and a man who thinks about how to implement this in a government, I sometimes ask very pressing, even annoying questions about what this means. We cannot build a government on what we “feel” is right, but rather must have a logical and rational basis for our beliefs.
To this end, I’d like to discuss the concept of “hurt”. What does it actually mean? “To hurt” is defined as “1) cause physical pain or injury to; 2) cause mental pain or distress to; 2) feel mental pain or distress; 4) be detrimental to” accodeing to the dictionary on my Macbook.
We can see two key things in the definition of hurt, physical and mental pain or distress. Let’s focus on these two.
In physical pain or injury, there is some impediment that causes an inability to act in a manner that one sees fit. If someone breaks my leg, it means that I cannot walk or run, even if I want to. for instance. To a large extent we are very familiar with what physical pain and injury means.
However, the same is not true for mental pain or distress. Suppose I tell someone that they are ugly, we can kind of intuit that this causes mental pain or distress. However it is much more complicated because we don’t actually see the effect on the person directly, but must see it through their actions and behaviors.
Now, whenever I discuss the idealogy above, I am always flummoxed by why physical pain is almost always the only definition of hurt that is considered. Oftentimes, mental pain is said to be something that can be “just gotten over”. But I think if we take a deeper look things are not as clear.
First, who says that mental pain can be just gotten over? If so, the area of psychology would not exist, and people would be able to get over experiences from their childhood easily -- but clearly not. Painful incidences and memories permeate the present and influence behavior -- and some, people, if not all, cannot control how these past incidents influence and bias their current decision making.
Secondly, if we look at the biology of the brain, aren’t memories stored in neurons? Thus memories change the physical nature of the brain by causing certain neurons to fire etc. Now if someone sets your neurons in a particular way which causes you to not be able to do what you want, then isn’t that a physical hurt akin to a breaking of the leg? Perhaps we cannot set the neurons to certain values, but we can say stuff to the person and that could set the neurons.
As I said, I really like the idealogy stated above and I want this idealogy to become more prominent in the government. However to do so, we will have to ask the hard questions and not rely on just our intuition to tell us what is “hurt” and what isn’t -- as always, we should let rationality and logic be our light. And by we, I mean all those who believe in this idealogy and want to see it shine forth, of which I count myself one.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
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Take a look at the recent story about modifying a flies memory. Is this considered mental pain?
ReplyDeletehttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8310365.stm
I think your description of the ideology is incomplete. I don't believe we can do whatever we want.. suppose you have a situation where the party you are trying to hurt is not innocent, maybe they caused you some type of loss, does that mean that you can take the law into your own hands and hurt them? I don't believe that.
ReplyDeleteBut I don't think that is the important part of your post. You are trying to understand more about what is the difference between mental/emotional and physical pain, right?
It is difficult for me to imagine a situation that leads to mental/emotional pain without voluntary consent or intial physical force, unless it was fraud. For example, you might have signed up to be part of an experiment, and what you signed up for in not exactly what happend to you. Maybe the experiment traumatized you in some way. This I think falls under fraud and you would be right to appeal to appropriate laws. The only example I can think of is domestic abuse where the abuse is only emotional. I think this is controversial and I wouldn't be comfortable stating whether or not there is voluntary consent in this situation.
I don't see why the justice dept cannot be used to decide whether or not emotional hurt is valid on a case by case basis, in a similar way to physical hurt.
Also, I don't think we should say "pain" as the measure of "loss." Even if there was no pain, there could be loss.
Oh and you definitely ask annoying questions!! :p
ReplyDeleteI think Apos hit on the crucial bit here:
ReplyDeleteIt is difficult for me to imagine a situation that leads to mental/emotional pain without voluntary consent or intial physical force, unless it was fraud.
Rug and I have discussed this a few times since our late night coffee on the Isle of Lost Children. I just wanted to state it a bit more explicitly. Let me make a overly strong statement and lets see if we have to weaken it.
It is impossible for a person to cause me emotional pain without my consent, because I have to first decide to value/believe what the person says before it can effect me. Otherwise its just noise.
Therefore, emotional pain is, in this sense, consensual. Someone close to me, for example can hurt me emotionally, but only until I recognize that what they are saying is false and devalue their past and future statements.
If the statement that hurts me is true(and these are the ones that really sting), it is also in a sense consensual, since I am the one that has done or said or behaved, or failed to act etc... in some way that I find shameful when pointed out to me.
The idealogy is originally framed in the context of Physical vs Mental force and not pain . It is the basis for laying out the very fundamentals of fundamental rights . Cast in this form, with a keen eye on the purpose of the dicsussion (i.e.,freedom as a fundamental right), some people (like me) claim that men should be free to do whatever they want as long as their action doesn't take away the freedom of other men. Then, the obvious stark black and white line between the imaginary freedom bubble that each man and woman live inside DEFINITELY bursts when physical force is used. There is no maybe, there is no talk of cause-correlation and no question of long-term effect. X points a gun at Y, Y needn't even know of the gun's existence . This latter is a deep deep point that Apos and Trisco referred to. Y need NOT VALIDATE the gun. Hence, while laying out a fundamental right , we can very comfortably say one has freedom to live and act as long as it doesn't impinge on another's right to do so. This creed can then be universally applied to all of mankind everywhere and at any time. When we come to the question of mental force, there is again no question that severe damage can be caused (there is enough research and broken hearts to confirm this) - no one here is denying that. The problems come when you try to cast it as fundamental right: 1. Mental force definitely needs Y to validate it over and over again. Y, especially as an adult, has the choice to walk away, not pay heed etc. For mental force to manifest itself as mental pain that results in damaging Y's freedom to live, the act needs Y's consent! 2. The act needs to be committed, for the most part, over and over again i.e., the act and the results are definitely long term 3. It is extremely subjective. Y doesn't care if Z calls him "ugly" but is suicidal if X does. 4. Y's freedom bubble isn't immediately burst, maybe squished little-by-little with every word and perhaps even a tiny air leak.
ReplyDeleteThe key point is that the results of mental force extremely subjective (especially since it required validation) and very hard to evaluate. This itself makes it very hard to cast as a fundamental wrong. What makes it even harder is that a strong statement like " Everyone has a right to not be slandered", takes away a crucial and yet another fundamental right : freedom of speech.
This is not to say we stand back and cheer on abusers and sadists in the name of freedom. Not at all. This is precisely the reason we have laws and "emotional damage" lawsuits.This is exactly what the courts are supposed to be for - evaluate on a case by case basis the amount of damage caused by mental force.
Thus, mental force and thereby mental pain is demoted (sorry Komma) to a mere law whereas physical force and murder sits on the high throne as a fundamental wrong .
Oh lots of discussion!
ReplyDeleteNeedless to say, I have some responses, however at the moment I am somewhat busy (I'm depositing!) so I just wanted to comment to say that I will comment more later :)
As promised:
ReplyDeleteAs I thought about this more and more interesting issues came up. Seeing as I cannot write about them all, let me focus on two. First, I think we need to have a working definition of “freedom” in order to have a fruitful discussion, thus I will comment a little on being “free”. Second, I’ll address a few of the issues raised in the last few comments about the difference between emotional force/impact and physical force/impact.
If we are to take the above statement as the basis for laying out the fundamentals of fundamental rights, then we should really take a look at what freedom means. The critical line here is “... men should be free to do whatever they want as long as their action doesn’t take away the freedom of other men”. The primary issue here is in defining the freedom of a man, and then identifying which actions strictly diminish the freedom of someone.
Let’s start by looking at the extreme case, say someone hurts or maims person X. I think we can all agree that X’s freedom has been reduced -- there are actions that X could have take before being maimed that X is now incapable of doing; I would argue that this is a strict reduction of the freedom of X. Note the importance of this -- it is not that they do not want to, or choose not to, it is that they cannot.
Now lets go in the opposite direction, suppose person X wishes to eat a fruit in a field, however person Y has placed a wall between person X and the fruit; has person X’s freedom been diminished? One could say yes, it has -- person X wished to eat that fruit, however they cannot. However, the type of restriction is different than before; Person X is not incapable of eating the fruit, it is merely that the actions to get the fruit will not succeed.
It seems to me that in both cases Person X has lost some freedom -- but somehow it seems like the first case, maiming and murdering is a more clear loss of freedom than the second case. When thinking about the nice metaphor of “popping the freedom bubble” of someone, I think of the former case rather than the latter. The latter seems to be a “tearing” of the bubble rather than a full pop.
So what does it mean to be free? I think we can define many levels of freedoms, and as pointed out in the previous comment, some of these actions will tear and push the bubble around. In both of these cases physical force was used, but our intuition about which restricts the freedom of a person differs.
To summarize, what do you mean by freedom?
Now for the second part. One of the main issues in the difference between physical impact vs. mental impact is the idea of subjectivity. Let me try to address that a bit more and show you how physical impact is similar mental impact.
ReplyDeleteFirst, let us differentiate between mental and physical force vs mental and physical impact. Physical force is some action that is physical (and I don’t know how to describe this better), and physical impact is the impact this force has on another person ability to execute physical force. Similarly, mental “force” is some mental action, which I would argue is some kind of vocalization, or image that a person perceives. Mental impact is how this force changes the behavior of a person.
Now one of the claims made is that mental force needs validation in order to provide a significant mental impact. I view this as the same as subjectivity -- some people are impacted more by some mental forces than others.
Now let’s take two examples in the physical realm. Person A is a boxer and punches person B and person C. Person B is a well built, stunningly handsome and muscular guy (i imagine person B to be very similar to me), and Person C is a very thin, unmuscular fellow. Now the physical force (the punch from person A) applied to person B and C results in significantly different physical impacts, person B doesn’t get affected at all, while person C is incapacitated.
Now in this case, there is a high level of subjectivity to how the physical force transforms to physical impact -- just like the situation with mental force and mental impact. So how are these cases different?
All right, I have lots more to say, which I will try to write down in the next few weeks, but these are some of the major points. I hope a heated, passionate discussion will follow!
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIn reply to the first part of Kommas comments on freedom:
ReplyDeleteI doubt that our disagreement arises because of a difference in our definitions of freedom. If you really think so, offer me your definition and I can point out if I disagree. I say this especially because I specifically point out in my first reply that " when it comes to the question of mental force there is again no question that severe damage can be caused"..and that the freedom bubble might get "squished little-by-little with every word and perhaps even develop a tiny air leak". This seems to be something we agree on. Point is I acknowledge that a person's freedom MIGHT BE invaded on. So, perhaps you can clarify what your main point here is and where we agree/disagree.
In Reply to Komma's Part 2 comments on subjectivity:
ReplyDeleteI completely disagree with Komma's statement that validation is the same thing as subjectivity. This leads to the incorrect inference/conclusion that mental force=physical force.
I introduced the concept of sujectivity in mental force as a minor third point (in my very first comment) - it simply reveals the impracticality and unfairness of having a mental-force police. Validation , however, my first point, is the main difference between mental and physical force. Before we even worry about impact/pain, which are the effects of a force, mental force needs validation. Physical force doesn't.
While validation, is "subjective" in the sense that one might choose to either consent or not consent, it not subjectivity , which as used here, implies the amount of percieved pain.
Point is, someone can hurl mental force at me all day long and I am free to ignore it and go about my life unaffected. This is not true for physical force.(thanks Trisco for this punchy summary!) Do you agree/disagree with this?
To redirect our discussion keeping in mind the original purpose of translating the idealogy of freedom into policy: is there a particular related law/fundamental right you would like to see enforced or revoked? i.e., if you think it is unfair to punish mental force by evaluating on a case-by-case basis, what *new* fundamental right would you add?