Stephen R. L. Clark

Notes on the underground

The victory of Ellermans technetronic civilization is indeed a fearful prospect, but one that is much less plausible than he allows. His imagined makers, as was pointed out forty odd years ago by C. S. Lewis, could themselves have no criterion of right action or right belief, nor could they sensibly expect ‐ either on secular or on thcistic suppositions ‐ to be able to control the world forever.

Feyerabend's Conquest of Abundance

a book on reality, which was very slowly taking shape. The working title is Conquest of Abundance. The book is intended to show how specialists and common people reduce the abundance that surrounds and confuses them, and the consequences of their actions. It is mainly a study of the role of abstractions – mathematical and physical notions especially – and of the stability and ‘objectivity’ they seem to carry with them. It deals with the ways in which such abstractions rise, are supported by common ways of speaking and living, and change as a result of argumentation and/or practical pressure. In the book I also try to emphasise the essential ambiguity of all concepts, images, and notions that presuppose change. Without ambiguity, no change, ever. The quantum theory, as interpreted by Niels Bohr, is a perfect example of that. Conquest of Abundance should be a simple book, pleasant to read and easy to understand. . . . What is more important – to be understood by outsiders or to be regarded as a ‘deep thinker’?

The rights of Wild things

It has been argued that if non‐human animals had rights we should be obliged to defend them against predators. I contend that this either does not follow, follows in the abstract but not in practice, or is not absurd. We should defend non‐humans against large or unusual dangers, when we can, but should not claim so much authority as to regulate all the relationships of wild things. Some non‐human animals are members of our society, and the rhetoric of ‘the land as a community’ is an attempt, paralleling that of humanism, to create the moral ideal of Earths Household. But wild animals should be considered as Nozicks ‘independents’ and have correspondingly fewer claims on our assistance than members of our society. They still have some claims, often strong ones.

How Many Selves Make Me

Cartesian accounts of the mental make it axiomatic that consciousness is transparent: what I feel, I know I feel, however many errors I may make about its cause. ‘I’ names a simple, unextended, irreducible substance, created ex nihilo or eternally existent, and only associated with the complete, extended, dissoluble substance or pretend-substance that is ‘my’ body by divine fiat. Good moderns take it for granted that ‘we’ now realize how shifting, foggy and deconstructible are the boundaries of the self; ‘we’ know that our own motives, feelings and intentions constantly escape us; ‘I’ names only the current speaker, or the momentarily dominant self among many fluid identities.

Making up animals: the view from science fiction

There are stories, and invented creatures, which bring us pleasure largely because we know they are not real. ‘When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle claimed to have photographed a fairy, I did not, in fact, believe it: but the mere making of the claim, the approach of the fairy to within even that hailing distance of actuality - revealed to me at once that if the claim had succeeded it would have chilled rather than satisfied the desire which fairy literature had hitherto aroused.’

Natural Integrity And Biotechnology

My aim is to show that even consequentialists must recognize that some acts are intrinsically wrong, and that there is therefore no good reason to reject other examples of intrinsic wrongness than those they, typically, acknowledge. So many ethicists assume the opposite that I must devote some time to showing the error of their ways, before pointing out some objections that can be seriously mounted against genetic engineering. First, I shall show that even consequentialists must be rule-consequentialists, and hence determine the rightness or wrongness of particular acts apart from the expected consequences of those acts themselves. Second, I shall make clear the unacceptable consequences for ordinary moral judgment of adopting even that rule-consequentialist outlook. An alternative approach is suggested by the example of genetic engineering: those who oppose such manipulation bear witness to ‘natural integrity’ or ‘beauty’ as vital factors in moral decency.

Minds, Memes, and Rhetoric

Dennetts Consciousness Explained presents, but does not demonstrate, a fully naturalized account of consciousness that manages to leave out the very consciousness he purports to explain. If he were correct, realism and methodological individualism would collapse, as would the very enterprise of giving reasons. The metaphors he deploys actually testify to the power of metaphoric imagination that can no more be identified with the metaphors it creates than minds can be identified with memes. That latter equation, of minds with meme‐complexes, rests for its meaning on the existence of real minds, which are not to be equated with the thoughts they have.

Taylor's waking dream: No one's reply

Taylor recognizes the problems posed by the ideals of disengaged reason and the affirmation of ‘ordinary life’ for unproblematic commitment to other ideals of universal justice and the like. His picture of ‘the modern identity’ neglects too much of present importance and he is too disdainful of Platonic realism to offer a convincing solution. The romantic expressivism that he seeks to re‐establish as an important moral resource can only avoid destructive effects if it is taken in its original and Platonic context.

World Religions and World Orders

There are good reasons for being suspicious of the very concept of ‘a religion’, let alone a ‘world religion’. It may be useful for a hospital administrator to know a patients ‘religion’ – as Protestant or Church of England or Catholic or Buddhist – but such labels clearly do little more than identify the most suitable chaplain, and connote groupings in the vast and confusing region of ‘religious thought and practice’ that are of very different ranks. By any rational, genealogical taxonomy ‘Protestant’, ‘Anglican’, ‘Catholic’ connote species, genera or families within Christianity, which is in turn a taxon within the multivariant tradition traced back to Abraham. ‘Buddhism’ includes as many variants as would ‘Abrahamism’. Most Abrahamists, traditionally, have been theists, but it is difficult not to suspect that Marxist socialism is an atypical (and probably non-viable) variant which has inherited a linear view of time, a contest between the chosen agents of justice and the doomed powers-that-be, and the prospect of a future in which ‘there shall be no more sea’.

Non-personal minds

Persons are creatures with a range of personal capacities. Most known to us are also people, though nothing in observation or biological theory demands that all and only people are persons, nor even that persons, any more than people, constitute a natural kind. My aim is to consider what non-personal minds are like. Darwins Earthworms are sensitive, passionate and, in their degree, intelligent. They may even construct maps, embedded in the world they perceive around them, so as to be able to construct their tunnels. Other creatures may be able to perceive that world as also accessible to other minds, and structure it by locality and temporal relation, without having many personal qualities. Non-personal mind, on both modern materialist and Plotinian grounds, may be the more usual, and the less deluded, sort of mind.