Sunday supervillainy - Doctor Doom as the Infamous Iron Man

It seems that Iron Man (Tony Stark) may be in for a rocky time as the current Civil War II series/event unfolds in Marvel Comics. We don't know what is in store, except that there are two ongoing series planned, with one version of Iron Man (the Invincible Iron Man) played by a Black teenage girl (Riri Williams) and another version (the Infamous Iron Man) played by Doctor Doom, who is currently reformed from his usual villainous, megalomaniacal self. Doom has a new set of Iron Man armour that draws on his own classic look.

Poor Tony Stark may be dropping out of the picture somehow! Let's hope they don't kill him off as they've done to some other classic heroes of late.

Having Doom as a good guy of sorts is not all that unusual these days. He's one of those villains who are so interesting, and have become so popular, that you have to keep telling stories about them. And those can't, at the risk of boredom, be story after story in which a charismatic adversary like Doctor Doom simply loses, with various heroes in sequence foiling his various evil plans. He has to do more interesting stuff than that, save the world now and then, and generally get to kick ass in his own right.

This syndrome whereby a well-constructed and charismatic villain becomes a sort of hero or anti-hero - and certainly a character with depth and motivational complexity, and a code of honorable conduct - has a venerable history in popular culture. In the long-running serial form of comics, it's almost inevitable that many fan-favorite villains will take that path. At Marvel alone, there are now innumerable villains who've become much-loved semi-heroic characters despite their moral flaws (as well as several out-and-out heroes who began as villains). Even monstrously powerful hardened criminals, like Juggernaut and Absorbing Man, are shown to have likeable sides.

However, it's a bit more than that with Doom, since the events of the most recent Secret Wars event have left him very much physically and psychologically changed.

The creation of Riri Williams is transparently part of Marvel's ongoing attempt to create a more diverse (in terms of race, sex, cultural background, sexuality, etc.) crop of superheroes for our contemporary world. Most of Marvel's core recurring cast - its most iconic characters - were created in the 1960s (or even earlier in a very small number of cases); as a result most of them are white, male, and straight, and many of the heroes in particular are from conventional American backgrounds (as imagined around the middle of last century).

I'm good with the attempt to alter this mix, but the trick is to create great new characters whom readers relate to and actually care about. Readers won't warm to characters out of a sense of political duty, but must come to love them because they engage interest and concern, and because reading about them is actually fun. So it has to be an organic, carefully thought out process. It seems to have worked well with the new Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan), so I'll hope Riri Williams will also turn out to be an engaging character.

Saturday self-promotion - "Margaret Somerville and the Perils of Bioethics"

I've long been troubled that much in contemporary bioethics is illiberal, unjustifiable, and motivated by quasi-religious (or outright religious) sentiments that should have no place in public policy. This does not apply so much to philosophical bioethicists employed as university academics, but even here too much free rein is given to views that are put forward as having policy implications while being at least quasi-religious in nature. "Margaret Somerville and the Perils of Bioethics", first published back in 2001, was an early effort of mine to articulate some of this at length. In this case, I was replying to The Ethical Canary by Margaret Somerville, which I think exemplifies the troubling tendencies in the bioethics discipline.

At this stage of my life, I had a law degree, a deep interest in bioethical controversies, some relevant publications, and some experience working in the health/medical law area of a major Australian law firm. I did not, however, have formal qualifications in bioethics as an academic discipline. My thinking about such issues led me to do something about that, and I went on to undertake a Masters degree in bioethics at Monash University in 2002. (Monash has long had a very respected program in philosophical bioethics - perhaps the most prestigious in the southern hemisphere.) Since I was doing a lot of other things at the time, I could easily have justified studying this over two years... but I managed to complete it in one year, with a perfect run of High Distinctions in my coursework and research essay.

The Nice attack: When fanatics commit atrocities, it is not merely "tragic"

Fanatics - motivated by extreme religious views or extreme political ideologies - are all too likely to engage in atrocities. When they do so, as in the terror attack on Nice, it is not just a run of bad luck, or a misunderstanding among essentially good-willed people. It's not even the fatalistic unfolding of consequences from some moral failing. It's nothing like any of that.

Thus, there's something very misleading about calling such events "tragedies" or "tragic". They are premeditated and willed acts that are better labeled as what they are, as "atrocities", made more particular if we can specify the extreme worldview that motivated a particular set of actions. Thus, we can talk accurately about Nazi atrocities, Stalinist atrocities, Jihadist atrocities, and so on. When it appears that a politician (or a journalist, or whoever) is deliberately avoiding accurate labeling, it looks sanctimonious and even indecent. I can understand taking time before being certain of the motivation of a particular attacker, as mistakes are sometimes made in a rush to judgment. But premeditated, atrocious, murderous, terroristic acts are just that, irrespective of what the more specific motivation turns out to be. To call them "tragic" or "tragedies" is an evasion. Please stop using that wording.

I have reviewed The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism

The new issue of Free Inquiry (which should reach subscribers in the next couple of weeks) contains a lengthy book review, by me, of The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism. (Warning, the link will take you to the site but the full review is then behind a paywall.) The book is an important, useful resource, and your local academic library should get a copy. However, as I explain in the review, it is flawed in not offering any defences of philosophical naturalism among its diverse chapters - and in even appearing somewhat hostile to philosophical naturalism. That's not uncommon, of course: many people simply take philosophical naturalism for granted, work out various implications, but make no effort to defend it. Fine, it's perfectly acceptable to take that approach, and some solid chapters in the Companion are just like that. Still, it would have been good to see some defences of one or another form of philosophical naturalism, when the book is well stocked with critics of it. There are, of course, plenty of people (in this book and elsewhere) who are prepared to embrace a merely methodological naturalism as an approach to science. Often, however, they reject philosophical naturalism on weak grounds. Others who do embrace philosophical naturalism are often unwilling to explain why.

Introducing myself ... and philosophy

[This article was originally published on The Conversation on June 9, 2015. It was my attempt on the Cogito blog to introduce myself to its audience. I'm republishing it here for folks who might have missed it at the time. The "book about fundamental moral theory" that I was working on has been published in the interim as The Mystery of Moral Authority. Read the original article.]


Before we go too far, allow me to introduce myself to the readers of Cogito (and more generally, of The Conversation). Before I even get to that… let me say that I am pleased and proud to have been invited to join this multi-author blog, which features a diverse group of Australian philosophers with established public profiles. I expect to see provocative contributions on a wide range of issues.

A bit about me

A little about myself, then. First, so you can put a face to the name, I’m providing a photo, courtesy of Embiggen Books. Second, you can find my website here, including an academic CV.

I grew up in Newcastle, NSW, where I returned a few years ago after three decades in Melbourne. Over those decades, I had a somewhat tortuous career that involved periods in academia, the Australian Public Service, industrial relations (particularly courtroom advocacy), and legal practice. I am now a Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle, while devoting most of my time to writing books and editing the Journal of Evolution and Technology. This editorial, published in 2008 when I was based at Monash University and had only recently taken over as editor-in-chief at JET, sets out something of my vision for the journal.

My personal blog, Metamagician and the Hellfire Club, can be found here, and you can follow my Twitter feed: @Metamagician. I’m also a frequent contributor to Free Inquiry, New Philosopher, and The Philosophers' Magazine.

My work

My work often involves sceptical scrutiny of social institutions that claim the authority to tell us how to live our lives: notably religion, political ideology, morality, and the law. I defend philosophical atheism, secular government, political liberalism of a kind familiar to readers of (say) John Stuart Mill or Joel Feinberg, and a form of moral scepticism that understands morality as a pragmatically useful form of social technology that is often (indeed, somewhat pervasively) regarded as something more.

As a taste of my views on the so-called “scientific skeptic” movement, which I support, you might like to check out this blog post, where I distinguish between scepticism and denialism. (This movement is, of course, not sceptical about science but about pseudoscientific and supernatural claims.)

I am currently working on a book about fundamental moral theory, another about the presentation of moral issues within science fiction, and an edited collection (with co-editor Damien Broderick) on the problem of philosophical progress. I’m also working on articles and talks about moral error theory and its implications, bioethics without a concept of sanctity, the intellectual relationship between Nietzsche and the contemporary transhumanist movement, and the vexed concept of “scientism”.

Philosophy and public debate

In this introductory post, I don’t plan to set out any particularly sophisticated or complete views on the role of philosophy. As a first approximation only (and with a hat tip to Graham Oppy), I understand philosophy as reason-based, intellectually honest and rigorous investigation of deep questions that produce much existential anxiety while defying any empirical solution. Those questions relate, for example, to the possible existence of God and/or an afterlife, free will, the authority or otherwise of morality, and the foundations of inquiry itself: i.e., to questions of what should count (either in general or in specific domains) as a cogent argument or as good evidence for a proposition.

I don’t see any sharp dividing line between philosophy and other fields of inquiry, including the sciences. Although I can’t argue the case in this introductory post, I think philosophers should draw upon well-established empirical findings from the sciences and from the other humanities - such as various areas of historical and textual scholarship - while making our best attempts at conceptual clarification of massively confused issues. In some cases, a successful outcome of philosophical inquiry might be the founding of a new field of empirical study (whether or not it should, strictly speaking, be called a “science”). Indeed (though again, I can’t argue for such a large claim today), I believe that we are now well-placed to integrate moral philosophy with other sub-disciplines from the sciences and humanities that study the phenomenon of morality. Our generation has an opportunity to create an expanded and more empirical (or broadly scientific) discipline of moral philosophy or moral science.

These questions are all inherently fascinating and of obvious public interest. I wholeheartedly urge other philosophers to engage with them publicly. Furthermore, I think that philosophers have a role in commenting on more specific moral, political, and cultural controversies. With our commitment to intellectual rigour and to high standards of logic and evidence, we can comment in ways that contrast with the tribalism, propaganda, and polemics that characterise so much contemporary debate on hot-button topics.

We do, of course, inevitably have our biases and prior assumptions, but at least we can be aware of such things as formal and informal logical fallacies, reliance on deeply contested assumptions, motivated reasoning, the dangers of emotional manipulation, group polarisation, and information cascades, and other factors that distort inquiry and debate. When we’re at our best - and difficult though it may be - we approach our opponents and their views with charity, looking for whatever truth or wisdom may be found in their viewpoints.

Our own contributions will never be perfect in their standards of rationality. As philosophers, we may, however, be able to offer fresh perspectives on difficult issues. We can strive for at least some detachment from the rival views of the usual moral and political tribes. That’s an ideal, of course, and I realise in advance that I will not model it flawlessly. Nonetheless, it’s an ideal that I recommend and that I’ll aim for as well as I can in the posts to follow.

Sunday supervillainy - Donald Trump as the supervillain M.O.D.A.A.K.

I don't read a lot into Marvel's decision to do this - it's surely just a bit of slightly satirical fun - but in the spin-off universe of "Spider-Gwen" the prominent supervillain M.O.D.O.K. (Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing) has been reimagined as something of a Donald Trump lookalike, and with the new name M.O.D.A.A.K. (Mental Organism Designed As America's King). This has been getting quite a lot of international coverage, including a story in the India/US crossover newspaper the Indian Panorama. I assume that M.O.D.A.A.K. has similar psi-based powers to the original M.O.D.O.K., but I can't confirm this or report on how the swollen-headed, tiny-handed villain fares in battle.

Saturday self-promotion - "Technological Meliorism and the Posthuman Vision: Arthur C. Clarke on the Ultimate Future of Intelligence"

This article, on the work of Arthur C. Clarke, was first published in the New York Review of Science Fiction back in 2001. At one level, that seems like a lifetime ago, but I'm sufficiently proud of the piece to put it back into circulation - hey, and for free! - for any who might be interested.

Clarke was undoubtedly one of the great classic practitioners of what we could call "professional science fiction". That is, his work is part of the classical canon of science fiction written for a specific SF market. In that respect, contrast work that was regarded as "science fiction" retrospectively (such as that of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells) and/or work that meets various plausible formal criteria of science fiction, but is related only tenuously to the field when considered from a more sociological perspective. Obviously, there are plenty of complexities and grey areas once we make these distinctions, but at any rate there's no doubt that Clarke's novels and stories are central to the SF field as it evolved during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

In "Technological Meliorism and the Posthuman Vision", I try to analyse Clarke's picture (in his SF and some of his non-fiction writing, specifically Profiles of the Future) of the possible future of mentality. I'm also interested in how this fits into what I take to be Clarke's overall science-based worldview, which is more or less the worldview that dominated SF through most of last century (and to a large extent still does, at least if we concentrate on prose fiction). Is there a consistent picture here, recognisable across Clarke's work? Well yes, to a considerable extent I think there is.

That's what the article is about. If you have access to it, have not already read it (e.g. when it was first published), and have an interest in Clarke (or in SF, or in ideas about the human future), do have a look!

Should there be a Nobel Prize for Philosophy?

Note: similarly to my previous post, I'm republishing this op-ed piece in light of the unfortunate decision, announced earlier today, to close the ABC's opinion site, "The Drum". This piece was first published there on 8 October 2015.

***

There's a strong case for having a Nobel Prize for philosophy, recognising the discipline's particular benefit to mankind. After all, in our age of propaganda there is surely cause to reward an emphasis on reason and clarity, writes Russell Blackford.

When Alfred Nobel, the renowned inventor of dynamite, died in 1896, he left behind a will that laid a foundation for the prestigious Nobel Prizes.

He directed most of his wealth to fund prizes for those who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind" in a number of specified fields. Hence we have the Nobel Prizes for physics, chemistry, medicine or physiology, literature, and peace.

The prize winners for 2015 are being announced with much fanfare, and the prizes will be awarded formally in December at splendid ceremonies in Sweden and Norway. Apart from the worldwide recognition involved, each prize carries a monetary component of eight million Swedish kronor (well over 1.3 million Australian dollars).

A separate Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was created in 1968, funded by the central bank of Sweden, but many fields of learning are still not covered.

Notably, there is no Nobel Prize for philosophy, although Bertrand Russell won the Literature Prize in 1950. Albert Camus also won it (in 1957), as did Jean-Paul Sartre (in 1964), though he chose to turn it down. Camus and Sartre were, of course, largely known as creative writers.

I doubt that any philosophers begrudge creative writers the Nobel Prize for Literature, but there's a strong case for a separate Nobel Prize for Philosophy, recognising the discipline's particular "benefit to mankind".

Philosophy is the reason-based, intellectually rigorous, investigation of deep questions that have always caused puzzlement and anxiety: Is there a god or an afterlife? Do we possess free will? What is a good life for a human being? What is the nature of a just society? Philosophy challenges obfuscation and orthodoxies, and extends into examining the foundations of inquiry itself.

Thus, it includes the sub-disciplines of epistemology (or theory of knowledge) and logic - the study of what should count as a good argument for a claim.

As with any other academic discipline, much philosophical research is specialised and technical. By necessity, this can be inaccessible to a general audience. Yet, philosophers often bring their skills to the great questions of our time, including problems of global injustice and the risks to humanity's future.

Major living philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas (in Germany), A.C. Grayling (in the UK), and Martha Nussbaum (in the United States) are prominent in public debate across a wide range of urgent issues.

All too often, that debate is dominated by tribalism, dogma and emotional manipulation. We live, as has often been said, in an age of propaganda. With its emphasis on reason and clarity, the study of philosophy provides an indispensable counterweight to this. In particular, it offers valuable training for leaders of the future.

The main barrier to a Nobel Prize for Philosophy is simply tradition: it's unlikely that the Nobel Foundation would want to extend the established fields any further, even if it received additional funding. Fair enough, I think, so what about an equivalent to a Nobel Prize for Philosophy?

Until recently, the nearest equivalent was possibly the Templeton Prize, awarded annually to an individual who "has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works". Though it has sometimes been won by a philosopher (such as Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in 2007), this prize's recipients have been a varied group. They include, for example, Mother Teresa (1973) and the Dalai Lama (2012). The Templeton Prize has a clear religious bias, whereas many philosophers treat the claims of religion with suspicion.

Over the past decade or two, there has been a growth of lucrative new prizes for high intellectual achievement. Among these, the government of Norway has introduced two prizes that can be seen as near-equivalents to Nobel Prizes in their fields. The Abel Prize, which had its first winner in 2003, is almost a Nobel Prize for Mathematics under another name. Similarly, the Holberg Prize can be seen as a Nobel Prize for scholarship in the humanities and related disciplines. It has sometimes been won by philosophers, including Habermas in 2005 and the late Ronald Dworkin in 2007.

The Holberg Prize notwithstanding, philosophy still lacks a clear equivalent to its own Nobel Prize. Most recently, however, the Berggruen Philosophy Prize has been announced for "a living thinker whose ideas have deeply influenced our world". From 2016, it will be awarded annually by the recently launched Berggruen Philosophy and Culture Center, based in Los Angeles.

The reputations of the Berggruen Center and the Berggruen Prize remain to be established, but the prize money of $US1 million makes a large symbolic statement. It rivals the monetary value of a Nobel Prize.

Perhaps the Berrgruen Prize can become, in time, the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for Philosophy, as seems to be intended. That will depend on the wisdom of its judges and the quality of its future laureates.

The State, religion and the need for rational scrutiny

This piece was originally published on the ABC's "The Drum" site on 24 December (updated 27 December) 2010. Since cancellation of "The Drum" has been announced today, I am republishing it here to make sure it is not lost.


Religious teachings promise us a deeper understanding of reality, more meaningful lives, morally superior conduct, and such benefits as rightness with a Supreme Being or liberation from earthly attachments. One way or another, the world's religions offer spiritual salvation, or something very like it. If any of their teachings are rationally warranted, it would be good to know which ones.

At the same time, however, religious teachings can be onerous in their demands; if they can't deliver on what they promise, it would be just as well to know that. I take it, then, that there's a strong case for rational scrutiny of religious teachings. Even if reason can take us only so far, it would be good to explore just how far.

But just how urgent a task is the rational scrutiny of religion? Is it really needed in a modern, and apparently secular, liberal democracy such as Australia? Isn’t Australian religiosity rather unobtrusive and undemanding? In that case, is there any need to engage in strong, publicly prominent criticism of religious teachings, the organisations that promote them, or the leaders of those organisations? Perhaps rational critiques of religion should be available in peer-reviewed philosophy journals - but no great effort should be made to debunk religion in popular books, magazine or newspaper articles, or media appearances.

I disagree. All too often, religious organisations and their representatives seek to control how we plan and run our lives, including how we die. At various times, the religious have opposed a vast range of activities and innovations: anaesthesia; abortion; contraceptive technologies; stem-cell and therapeutic cloning research; physician-assisted suicide; the teaching of robust scientific findings, such as those of evolutionary biology; and a wide range of essentially harmless sexual conduct involving consenting adults. Even in Australia, churches and sects frequently lobby for laws that restrict our freedoms.

As in other Western democracies, religious organisations in Australia are not always politically liberal or even moderate. On the contrary, recent years have seen the increasing influence of very large Pentecostal organisations, such as Hillsong and Catch the Fire Ministries, which pursue a political agenda little different from that of the Christian Right in America. Conservative Catholics, such as Cardinal George Pell, actively seek to influence political affairs. We have seen considerable activism from Australia’s religious lobbies, and successive governments have pandered blatantly to Christian moral concerns.

It's not surprising that so many contributors to The Australian Book of Atheism (Scribe Publications; ed. Warren Bonnet) are appalled by the promotion of religion by the Howard and Rudd governments, with Julia Gillard now following suit.

Public scrutiny and criticism of religion’s truth-claims and moral authority would be less urgent if the various churches and sects agreed unequivocally to a wall of separation between themselves and the state. Unfortunately, however, they often have good reasons, judged by their own lights, to oppose such a strict secularism. Some churches and sects do not distinguish sharply between guidance on individual salvation and the exercise of political power.

They may be sceptical about the independence of secular goals from religious ones, or about the distinction between personal goals and those of the state. They may be sceptical about the danger that liberal-minded people see when adherents of competing worldviews jostle to impose them by means of political power. Some religious groups do not accept the reality of continuing social pluralism. Instead, they look to a day when their views will prevail over others.

When religion claims authority in the political sphere, it is unsurprising and totally justifiable that atheists and sceptics question the source of this authority. If religious organisations or their leaders claim to speak on behalf of a god, it is fair to ask whether the god concerned really makes the claims that are communicated on its behalf. Does this god even exist? Where is the evidence? And even if this being does exist, why, exactly, should its wishes be heeded, let alone translated into laws enforced by the state’s coercive power?

These questions are being asked more often, and so they should be. When they're asked publicly, even with a touch of aggression, that’s an entirely healthy thing.

Sunday supervillainy - Cass Sunstein on Darth Vader

I've been reading Cass R. Sunstein's The World According to Stars Wars, which examines the Star
Wars franchise from many angles, allowing the author to discuss moral and aesthetic points, issues to do with the social reception of ideas and cultural products, analogies between the development of a movie series and the development of a legal tradition, and much more. It's a fascinating, likeable, and accessible book.

Sunstein observes at one point:

Say it loud and say it proud: Vader steals the show. Who's the most memorable character in the series? Vader is the most memorable chacter in the series. No one else comes close.

Sunstein examines why Darth Vader is such a memorable figure - alluring; cool; possessed, even, of a kind of erotic power - despite being coded through most of the original trilogy as a figure of evil. Taken as a whole, the original trilogy and its prequels can be viewed as the story of his moral fall and ultimate redemption. Certainly, Darth Vader seems to dominate those six movies more than Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, or any other character; and that's true of the original trilogy, taken by itself, independently of Vader's manifestation as Anakin Skywalker in the prequels. As Sunstein insists, it appears that Vader was the character who most caught George Lucas's own imagination.

A great villain can do that - can dominate a story and capture imaginations - and the best villains possess a certain allure that causes many of us in the audience to identify with them and admire them, partly embracing their values and attitudes, even as we also absorb the lesson that they are not actually role models for anybody to follow. When they are (partly or wholly) redeemed, we cheer for them even if they've previously caused death, pain, and destruction that seem virtually unforgivable when pondered more objectively.

Sunstein rightly observes that we can look forward to more examples of evil choices and character redemption as the new series of Star Wars films, begun with The Force Awakens, unfolds. This trope looks a bit like the workings of a religious, or even specifically Christian, concept of redemption. But I suspect that it goes even deeper than that.