Month: April 2026

As a young political science and philosophy major I learned about types of governments. Among these is the plutocracy—rule by the wealthy. I recall thinking, in my young anarchist days, that all governments were, are and will be plutocracies. After all, the rich always have influence proportional to their wealth and society tends to head in the direction desired by the wealthy. I was aware, of course, that there can be momentary disruptions of the plutocracy. For example, a rebellion or revolution might result in the old rich being killed, exiled or stripped of their wealth. However, history shows that a new rich always emerges (or the old rich return). Even in the allegedly communist states, a wealthy class has always appeared. “Communist” China, after all, has billionaires. The plutocratic system seems eternal.

As might be imagined, my cynical view was countered by some of my friends—they insisted that America was a democracy and not a plutocracy. After all, they argued, the rich do not always get their way in everything and money did not always decide elections. In fact, they pointed out that there were strict restrictions on political spending. A plutocracy would not have such limits.  As such, some might conclude that my younger anarchist self was mistaken. But I think, here in 2026, that my young self has been tragically proven right.

Years ago, the infamous Supreme Court ruling allowed unlimited campaign spending by corporations on the grounds that corporations are people, spending is speech and people have a right to free speech. The idea that corporations are people can be easily disproven by a simple reduction ad absurdum: If corporations have the right to free speech because they are people, then they cannot be owned. After all, the Constitution expressly forbids slavery (that is, the ownership of people). To contend that corporations can be owned yet are people who have freedom of speech is to either accept slavery or to fail to grasp the logical notion of consistency. So, a corporation can have freedom of speech, provided it is set free from being owned. Since it is obvious that corporations are things that can be justly owned, it should be obvious that they are not people. As such, they do not get freedom of speech. Naturally, the actual people associated with corporations have their right to freedom of speech. What remains is, of course, the matter of whether spending is speech or not.

On 4/2/2014 the Supreme Court struck down the aggregate campaign contribution limits. This was based, not surprisingly, on the Citizens United ruling in 2010.  That ruling included the absurd claim that the influence and access offered unlimited spending is not a concern in regard to corruption. The years since then have proven the obvious: unlimited spending invites corruption.

The case was brought by Shaun McCutcheon—a very wealthy Republican donor. The impact of his victory is that a single donor, such as McCutcheon, can contribute millions to parties, candidates and PACs. The ruling did leave some limits in place: an individual can give:  $2,600 per candidate, per election; $32,400 to political party committees per year; and $5,000 per PAC, per year. The main change was there is no longer an overall cap to the total donations. Previously, a donor could not give more than $123,200 to all political committees, with limits of $48,600 to candidates and $74,600 to political parties and PACs.

McCutcheon claimed, in error or falsely, that this was a grassroots victory against the status quo:  “With the ruling, we continue to chip away at the long entrenched status quo from the grassroots—a status quo that has kept challengers, better ideas, and new entrants to the political arena mostly locked out. Ensuring that citizens are able to contribute to multiple candidates or causes who share their views only provides further support to a system in which ‘We the People’ hold the ultimate reins of power.”

This was an odd claim in 2014, given that it benefits most those wealthy enough to make such donations as opposed to the average citizen who lacks the funds to take advantage of this ruling. As I predicted in 2014, this ruling weakened what little grasp the people still have on the reins of power and strengthened the grip of the wealth. As I predicted, this ruling was a boon for the Republican party and billionaires as was evident by the billionaires attemnding Trump’s last inauguration. While it is true that the Democrats also have their wealthy supporters, the Democrats rely more heavily on large numbers of small donations.

Back in 2014 I was concerned the ruling would lead to increased corruption and increased influence on politics by the wealthy. On the face of it, these seem to be the obvious consequences of lifting such restrictions and allowing the money to flow more freely into politics. After all, the original purpose of the restrictions was to address problems with corruption and influence buying. It was an easy prediction to get right.

While those who supported it insisted that corruption and influence buying would not increase, they also appealed to the principle of freedom. As Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner said at the time, “What I think this means is freedom of speech is being upheld. Donors ought to have the freedom to give what they want to give.”

The basic issue, then, was and still is whether such spending is speech.  That spending is free speech, seemed a dubious claim then and appears even more dubious now But let us reason through this. Suppose that spending money for political purposes should be considered speech. Now, it is acceptable to try to persuade a politician by speaking to them. If spending is speech, then I should be able to try to persuade politicians by speaking to them with money. However, this is bribery. But, if spending is a form of free speech, bribery should be acceptable as a form of free speech. This seems absurd, to say the least.

It might be countered that such contributions cannot be direct bribes in that there can be no direct giving of money in return for specific actions or promises to act. However, it would be foolish to believe campaign financing is not intended to influence behavior by providing money and support. After all, it would be ludicrous to imagine that millionaires and billionaires would donate millions of dollars and expect nothing in return. While this is not logically impossible, it is exceptionally unlikely. What has happened since 2014 has confirmed this repeatedly and the Trump regime has abandoned all pretense of not being a plutocracy. Although, to be fair and balanced, Trump’s approach is best seen as a griftocracy.

However, suppose  spending is a form of speech and tprotected by the right of free expression. It does not, of course, follow that such speech should be free of limits. After all, limits are justly placed on speech. The example everyone uses is yelling of “fire” in a crowded theater in which there is no fire. In the case of allowing this sort of spending, it would do serious harm to the political process by increasing the influence of an individual based on his wealth and thus proportionally decreasing the influence of those who are less wealthy. To use an analogy, it is on par with having a public discussion in which the wealthy are allowed to blast their speech from concert grade loudspeakers up on a stage while the rest of us are expected to try to shout out our views from the crowd.

To counter arguments like this, Roberts made an analogy to newspaper endorsements. As he said, there is no limit to the number of candidates a newspaper can endorse. As such, by analogy, it should follow that there should be no limit on the number of candidates a person can donate money to. There are two easy and obvious replies I made back in 2014. The first is to go back to the original argument that spending is not speech. While a newspaper endorsement is speech (it is the expression of ideas and views) handing people money does not seem to qualify as an expression of ideas and views. When I buy a pair of running shoes or pay my entry to a road race, I am not engaged in expression—I am trading money for goods and services. Likewise, when a person donates to a political cause, they are trading money for goods and services. But, even if it is accepted that spending is speech, there is still a significant difference. A newspaper endorsement works by persuasion—one is either swayed by it or not. In contrast, large sums of money have far more impact: money allows people to become viable candidates, and it allows them to run campaigns. As such, the influence of money is much more significant than the influence of a newspaper endorsement and this increases the likelihood of corruption.

This returns to the corruption issue. My contention, back in 2014, was that such a flow of money would lead to corruption and grant the wealthy even more influence, while reducing the political influence of the less wealthy. The competing claim is that allowing this sort of spending will not have any negative impact. Given the usual effect of large sums of money, I would claim that increased corruption seems to be the likely outcome. Looking back twelve years after that 2014 decision, my predictions were proven correct; although that was one of the easiest predictions I ever made.

 People want to gain as much as they can for as little effort as possible. For example, people seem to buy exercise equipment thinking it will make exercise easier. They usually find out that is not the case—thus the trade in barely used exercise equipment that spent its time buried under clothes. Years ago, brain training games were all the rage. The appeal was, of course, that the games were supposed to fun rather than burdensome, unliked education. The question was whether such games worked.

The idea that playing brain games can have positive effects makes sense. After all, exercising the body improves it. By analogy, the same should hold for the brain. The obvious concern is that not everything that people think is exercise improves the body. Likewise, some brain games might be like useless exercises for the body: you are doing something, but it is having no significant effect. To address this matter, the thing to do is to turn to science.

As it stands, the research showed that the commercial brain training games had no meaningful impact. While people do get better at the games, this is most likely due to familiarity. For example, I used to play World of Warcraft and I “got good” at boss fights by doing them repeatedly until I was familiar with the mechanisms. While there is some skill transference between fights, I found I had to learn each boss to “get good.” The same generally holds for brain games and getting better at such a game does not entail that one is smarter or more mentally capable.

Fortunately for me, video games of the more “traditional” sort can improve memory and mental skills. This is not surprising as they typically present challenges analogous to those in the real world. As such, rather than simply focusing on a simple game that is narrowly focused, the gamer is forced to fully engage the general challenge and develop a broader set of capabilities. As such, video games of this sort probably help improve mental abilities in a way analogous to how reality does: you improve skills that have a general application. In the case of video games, the challenges will tend to be more challenging and more frequent than what a person would generally encounter in the real world. For example, participating in a World of Warcraft dungeon or raid involves tracking abilities, maintaining situational awareness, following (or giving) orders, using strategy and so on. That is, it provides a mental workout. So, a person looking for games to make her smarter would be better off getting a gaming console or PC and selecting challenging games. They will probably be much more fun than most brain games and apparently more effective.

That said, there are certain brain games that do seem to have a positive benefit. One promising example is a speed training game that seems to help reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia.

I would also like to put in a plug for traditional tabletop games as well—be they games like Risk or role-playing games like D&D. They can provide enjoyable challenges that seem to have a positive impact on cognitive abilities. Plus, they are social activities—and that is better for a person than playing solo brain games.

When a well-connected author publishes a new book, they make the rounds of various shows. Such authors also enjoy mentions in the media, as befitting their fame and connections. For example, favored authors will often be interviewed and reviewed on NPR. Authors who have their own shows plug their own books. Elite authors are also supported by other cultural elites. These are the people, such as Oprah, who tell the rest of us what is good.

There is considerable advantage to being blessed by the curators of culture. First, there is the boon of exposure. Being a gamer, I will present this in gaming terms. One way to look at this is that a certain percentage of people will buy a book if they hear about it. Alternatively, this can be thought of in terms of a percent chance that a person who hears of the book will buy it. So, for example, a book with a 5% purchase rating would be bought by 5% of those who hear about it. Or each person who hears about it has a 5% chance of buying it. While this is an abstract, game style simplification, it shows that the more people who hear about a book, the more copies of a book will be sold. This is true even for books that are not good. This is the principle that spam works on: if enough people hear about something money can still be made even if the response or purchase rate is low. Obviously when an author gets on a significant show to talk about her book, her sales will increase. Likewise for other forms of exposure for the author and the book. Equally obvious is that access to the curators of culture is limited and carefully controlled—an author must be properly connected to make it into the brightest circle of media light. This connection might even be luck: the book just happens to catch the attention of the right person, and the author is invited, perhaps briefly, into the circle.

Second, there is the gift of endorsement. If a book is endorsed or praised by the right people, this can boost to sales over and above the boon granted by exposure. While endorsement does provide exposure, exposure does not always entail endorsement. After all, the curators of culture do sometimes speak of books they dislike. While condemnation of a work might impair its sales, the exposure can increase sales. And being condemned by the right sort of people can boost sales. In the case of ideological works, for example, being condemned by an ideological foe could boost sales among ideological friends.

As discussed in an early essay on luck, the quality of a work has little connection to its success. Luck is a major factor. Exposure and endorsement add to this, and either might be acquired by luck). In an ideal aesthetic world, works would receive exposure and endorsement proportionate to their merit. In the actual world, there is often little correlation. The best books need not be the most exposed or most endorsed. Mediocre (or worse) books might garner great attention and receive unwarranted praise from the curators of culture.

This is not to say that merit never achieves success, just that merit seems a small factor in successful sales. Sometimes, just sometimes, a meritorious work does achieve success against long odds because of its merit—but this is notable in its rarity.

Over a decade ago Susan Patton, better known as the “Princeton Mom”, made the rounds promoting her book, Marry Smart: Advice for Finding THE ONE.  This book presented the 18th century view that a woman should focus primarily on quickly finding a husband as fertility diminishes with time.

Patton attracted more attention with her March 11, 2014 interview with the Daily Princetonian. In a letter to the editor written about a year before the interview, she wrote, “Please spare me your ‘blaming the victim’ outrage” and claimed that a woman who is drunk and provocatively dressed “must bear accountability for what may happen.” When asked why the woman is responsible in the case of rape or sexual assault, she had the following to say:

 

 The reason is, she is the one most likely to be harmed, so she is the one that needs to take control of the situation. She is that one that needs to take responsibility for herself and for her own safety, and simply not allow herself to come to a point where she is no longer capable of protecting her physical self. The analogy that I would give you is: If you cross the street without looking both ways and a car jumps the light or isn’t paying attention, and you get hit by a car — as a woman or as anybody — and you say, ‘Well I had a green light,’ well yes you did have a green light but that wasn’t enough. So in the same way, a woman who is going to say, ‘Well the man should have recognized that I was drunk and not pushed me beyond the level at which I was happy to engage with him,’ well, you didn’t look both ways. I mean yes, you’re right, a man should act better, men should be more respectful of women, but in the absence of that, and regardless of whether they are or are not, women must take care of themselves.

 

As might be imagined, this view generated some backlash from faculty at Princeton and other people. While this is all old news, the triumph of MAGA, the rise of misogynistic authoritarianism and the tradwife movement make reconsidering these claims relevant to today.

Patton’s first claim is that since the woman is most likely to be harmed, she needs to be responsible for her safety. There are at least two ways to view this claim. One is the reasonable claim a person has an obligation to herself to make sure she is not needlessly in danger. This view that self-preservation is rational and obligatory is ably defended by thinkers like Hobbes and Locke. Another way to view the claim, which was taken by her critics, is that the burden falls completely on the woman. While this can be seen as a prudent view, it runs afoul of the notion that the wrongdoer should bear most of the responsibility for the harm inflicted (if not all of it).

Patton’s second claim is that a woman has an obligation to not allow herself to be incapable of self-defense. This might mean that a woman has an obligation to not become so drunk that she cannot defend herself from assault or rape. In defense of this claim, Patton offers her analogy: a woman who gets assaulted or raped when she is too drunk to defend herself is like someone who gets hit by a car because they did not look both ways before crossing the street—even though she had the right to cross.

The analogy has some merit—while drivers are obligated to take care not to hit people, a person should take care to avoid being hit and to do otherwise is foolish. As an experienced runner, I understand the value of defensive crossing and respond with horror when I see people starring at their phones as they blindly step into the crosswalk.

However, there is a distinction between what is prudent and what is morally obligatory. While a woman should not impair herself when she believes she will be at risk of assault or rape, this is different from her having a moral obligation to herself to avoid being vulnerable. There is also a third matter, namely who is responsible when a drunk woman is raped or assaulted.

About the second matter, this is a question of whether there is a moral obligation for self-defense. It is generally accepted that people have a moral right to self-defense and for the sake of the discussion that will be assumed (see John Locke for an argument). This right gives a person the liberty to protect herself. If it is only a liberty, then the person has the right to not act in self-defense and thus increase their risk of being a victim. However, if there is an obligation for self-defense, then failing to act on this would be a moral failing. challenge is to show that there is such an obligation.

On the face of it, it would seem self-defense is a liberty rather than an obligation. However, some consideration suggests this is not as obvious as it might seem.  In the Leviathan, Hobbes presents what the Law of Nature (lex naturalis): “a precept or general rule, found by reason, that forbids a man to do what is destructive of his life or takes away the means of preserving it and to omit that by which he thinks it may be best preserved.” Hobbes goes on to note that “right consists in liberty to do or to forbear” and “law determines and binds.” If Hobbes is correct, then people would have both a right to and an obligation for self-defense.

John Locke and Thomas Aquinas also contend that life is to be preserved and if they are right, then this would impose an obligation of self-defense. Of course, this notion could be countered by contending that all it requires is for a person to seek protection from possible threats and doing so could involve relying on the protection or restraint of others rather than oneself. However, there are arguments against this.

I will start with a practical argument. While the modern Western state projects its coercive force and spying eyes into society, the state’s agents cannot (yet) observe all that occurs nor can they always be close at hand in times of danger. This assumes, of course, that agents of the state want to protect citizens from harm.

As such, relying solely on the state would put a person at risk—after all, they would often be helpless in the face of danger. If a person relies on other individuals, then unless she is always guarded, then she also faces the risk of being a helpless victim. Relying on the state or others would, at the very least, seem imprudent.

This argument can be used as the basis for a moral argument. If a person is morally obligated to preserve life (including their own) and others cannot be reliably depended on, then they would have an obligation of self-defense and this would include not intentionally making themselves vulnerable to known threats. These threats would include those presented by bad men. As such, a woman would have a moral obligation to avoid being vulnerable. This seems reasonable.

The third matter is the question of moral responsibility when a drunk woman is assaulted or raped by a man who takes advantage of her vulnerability.  In the abstract, it could be argued that the woman does bear some responsibility—if a woman has an obligation to defend herself, she would have failed in her obligation by becoming vulnerable. As with the road analogy, someone who crosses the road without looking and gets hit has failed in a duty to herself. However, even if this point is granted, there is still the matter of who bears most of the moral responsibility.

On the face of it, it seems evident that the man who assaulted or raped the woman bears the overwhelming moral responsibility. After all, even if the woman should have avoided being vulnerable, the man has a far greater moral obligation to not harm her. There is also the matter of reasonable expectations. To be specific, while a person is obligated to protect herself, this does not obligate her to be hyper-vigilant against all possible dangers. If a woman does not buy body armor to wear on campus (after all, there are campus shooting) and she is shot by a gunman, it would be absurd to blame her for her injury or death. The blame rests on the shooter—his obligation to not shoot her outweighs the extent of her obligation to be prepared.

In the case of rape and sexual assault, while a woman should be prudent for the sake of self-protection, the overwhelming moral responsibility is on the man. That the woman makes herself vulnerable to rape or assault no more lessens the rapist’s responsibility than the fact that the woman was not wearing body armor lessens the responsibility of the shooter. The principle here is that vulnerability does not mitigate moral responsibility. This is intuitively plausible: just because a victimizer has an easier time with his victim, it hardly makes his misdeeds less bad.

Patton did acknowledge that men should act better, but she insisted that a woman must take care of herself. This could be seen as sensible advice: a woman should not count on the goodwill of others but be on guard against reasonably foreseeable harm. This advice is, of course, consistent with the view that the rapist is the one truly responsible for the rape.

One cognitive bias is the tendency of a person to regard themself as better than average—even when there is no evidence for that belief. Surveys illustrate this bias: most Americans rank themselves as above average in everything ranging from leadership ability to accuracy in self-assessment.

Obviously, most people cannot be better than average—that is just how averages work. As to why people think the way they do, the disparity between what is claimed and what is the case can be explained in two ways. One is another cognitive bias, which is the tendency people have to believe their performance is better than it is. Teachers see this often—students generally believe that they did better on a test or paper than they really did. I have lost count of the number of students who have told me their papers “felt like an A.” I never doubted this; having felt the same thing about various C and D papers I wrote as a student. Given that people regard their own performance as better than it is, it certainly makes sense that they would see their abilities as better than average.

Another reason is yet another bias: people tend to give more weight to the negative over the positive. As such, when assessing other people, we tend to consider negative things about them as more significant than the positive. So, for example, when Sally is assessing the honesty of Bill, she will give more weight to incidents in which Bill was dishonest relative to those in which he was honest. So, Sally will probably see herself as being more honest than Bill. After enough comparisons, she will probably see herself as above average.

This self-delusion probably has some positive effects. It no doubt allows people to maintain a sense of worth. But there are downsides—after all, a person who does not do a good job assessing himself and others will be operating based on inaccurate information and this rarely leads to good decision making.

The better-than-average delusion holds up well even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. For example, the British Journal of Social Psychology did a survey of British prisoners asking them to compare themselves to other prisoners and the general population in terms of such traits as honesty, compassion, and trustworthiness. Not surprisingly, the prisoners ranked themselves as above average. They did, however, only rank themselves as average when it came to the trait of law-abidingness. This suggests that reality has some slight impact on people, but not as much as one might hope.

 

The March 2014 issue of National Geographic featured Kenneth Brower’s article on Bluefin tuna. Back then, it led me to consider the issues raised by the tuna harvest. Now, in 2026, I am revisiting tuna from a philosophical perspective. As a full disclosure, I’ve eaten a lot of tuna and hence probably have an impressive mercury content. Which might explain my becoming a philosopher. That fish is brain food, of course.

Like many species, tuna is generally in decline. This is due to human activity, primarily overfishing and environmental degradation. Like most industries, the tuna industry has a regulatory organization, the International Commission for the Conservation of Tuna (ICCAT). Given the name, one might suspect it aims at conserving tuna. However, critics claim that ICCAT stands for “International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.” While this might not be completely accurate, ICCAT seems to ignore scientific data and in favor of keeping the catch limits high.

For example, in tracking catch volume ICCAT has divided the North Atlantic into western and eastern zones. The problem is that the management data is not accurate—the fish are treated as two distinct stocks that do not mix, but they do. So, fish caught in the western zone could be from the eastern zone and vice versa. As another example, the ICCAT models also fail to consider illegally caught fish, although this might be significant.

Like many regulatory entities, the ICCAT often ignores its own scientific advisors. In the case of ICCAT, catch limits have been set higher than the recommended levels for sustainability and it seems to ignore actual catch levels. Scientists have recommended that the catch limits be reduced and fishing be suspended during most of the spawning time for the fish.

While some might claim that these recommendations arise from a liberal agenda to destroy the fishing industry and from a hatred of all that is good and holy in capitalism, they were aimed at sustainable fishing. That is, the recommendation is aimed at preserving the industry rather than destroying it.

It might be contended that fishing companies would not engage in behavior that would destroy their industry. However, history shows that this is unlikely to be true. One reason is that there is a “strip mining” mentality towards resources. The aim is to get as much short-term profit as fast as possible and not worry too much about long term consequences. This approach is also fueled by the human tendency to discount the future and focus on the short term at the expense of the long term. For example, people often buy things they want (but do not need) on credit and end up suffering financially later. This also applies to handling resources such as tuna. Or, as some might prefer, living creatures like tuna.

This also ties into the “move on” attitude which is the view that once something has been stripped of its value, the thing to do is move on to another area in which to achieve fast and maximum profit. That these attitudes are prevalent is clearly shown by the way that other resources are often managed, such as fossil fuels, forests, and humans.

As such, it is reasonable to believe that fishing companies and their regulators would engage in the seemingly irrational activity of destroying their own industry by overfishing. One reason for this is that it has been done before. At one time Monterey Bay had a thriving sardine industry but in the 1950s this industry crashed in part due to overfishing. What has already occurred can occur again, only this time with a different species. While the big corporations can easily move on to new profits, there is always a terrible price paid by all the people who depended on the resources for their livelihood and find them exhausted.

It might be contended that it is possible to keep moving on—that is, to shift to a new species once one species is eliminated. This is, of course, possible—but there a finite limit to how often this can be done. It is also worth pointing out that human activity often impacts many species at once, which will also reduce the ability to switch species. We do not, after all, have a tuna 2.0 swimming the seas, waiting to replace the tuna.

It might be contended that a solution will be found that does not require sustainable fishing—people like to point to past forecasts of doom that did not come true because of some innovation or invention. While human ingenuity is impressive, to assume we will be able to solve the problem would be wishful thinking.  Naturally, if there is a plausible solution being proposed, that would be another matter.

In addition to ignoring scientific data, there is also the tactic of “massaging” science.  A common method is to appeal to uncertainty. The idea is that uncertainty in the data warrants sticking with the status quo.  In the case of tuna, it has been claimed there is uncertainty about the stock assessments in terms of numbers and the impact of human activity. This uncertainty is then exploited to warrant expanding or at least maintaining quotas. The reasoning seems to be this: since the exact numbers and effects are not known with certainty, the new limits suggested by scientists are not warranted—so keep the old ones or set them higher. This same approach is taken with the environment in general, as has been the case with climate change. A general pattern is also to deny that humans are the cause and attributing it to other causes—and claiming that there is nothing we can do other than staying the course.

In an interesting parallel with fossil fuels, biologists who are funded by the tuna industry have claimed there might be as-of-yet undiscovered tuna spawning grounds so the fishing can continue at the current rate (or increase).  While this is possible, there seems to be no evidence for undiscovered spawning grounds that can compensate for overfishing known spawning grounds. However, this sort of wishful thinking allows business to operate on false hope unsupported by facts.

Given the world population, effective management of resources is critical not only for the profits of the few, but the survival of the many. As such, we should do more to ensure a sustainable harvest of tuna. After all, future generations will need that brain food and mercury to produce more philosophers.

In my first political science class, I learned every large human society has had a pyramid shaped distribution of wealth. Inevitably, the small population of the top controls a disproportionally large amount of wealth while the large population at the bottom owns a disproportionally small amount. This pattern holds whether the society is a monarchy, a dictatorship, a “communist” state or a democracy.

From a moral standpoint, one question is whether an unequal distribution is just. While some might be tempted to see any disproportional distribution as unjust, this would be an error. After all, the justness of a distribution is not only matter of numbers. For example, consider the unequal distribution of running trophies. First, most people who have them are or were runners. Most people will not have even a single running trophy. Second, even among runners there is a disproportionate distribution: there is a small percentage of runners who have a large percentage of the trophies. As such, there is a concentration of running trophies. However, this does not seem unjust: the competition for such trophies is usually open and fair and a trophy is generally earned by running well. The better runners will have more trophies and will be a small percentage of the runner population. Because of the nature of the competition, I have no issue with this. There is, of course, my bias in that I have won a lot of running trophies.

Those who defend the unequal distribution of wealth often claim competition for it is analogous to that of running trophies: the competition is open, the competition is fair, and the reward is justly earned by competing well. While this is a reasonable approach to justifying the massive inequality, the obvious problem is that these claims are simply not true.

Those who start out in a wealthy family might not make their money by inheritance, but they enjoy a significant starting advantage over those born into less affluent families. While it is true that a few people rise from humble origins to great financial success, those stories are so impressive because of the difficulty of doing so and the small number of people who achieve such great success. If people could consistently become wealthy through hard work and talent, these stories would be unremarkable, and the inequality of wealth would be much lower.

There is also the fact that the wealthy use their influence to ensure the political and social system favors them. While their efforts might not be explicitly aimed at keeping other people down, the effect is that the wealthy are favored and defended against attempts to “intrude” into the top of the pyramid. Naturally, people will point to those who succeeded fantastically despite this system. But, once again, these stories are impressive because of the incredible challenges that had to be overcome and because they are incredibly rare.

There is also the doubt about whether those who possess the greatest wealth earned the wealth in a way that justifies it. In the case of running, a person must earn her gold medal in the Olympic marathon by being the best runner and there is (usually) little doubt that the achievement has been properly earned. However, the situation of great wealth is not as clear. If a person arose from humble origins and by hard work, virtue, and talent managed to earn a fortune, then it seems fair to accept the justice of that wealth. However, if someone merely inherits an unearned fortune or engages in misdeeds (like corruption or crime) to acquire the wealth, then that is unjust wealth.

So, to the degree that the competition for wealth is open and fair and to the degree that the earning of wealth is proportional to merit, then the unbalanced distribution could be regarded as just. However, this is obviously not the case.  For example, a quick review of the laws, tax codes, and so on in the United States will show how the system is intended to work.

Suppose for the sake of argument, that the distribution of wealth in the United States is warranted on grounds like the distribution of running trophies. That is, suppose that the competition is open, fair and the rewards are merit based. This still provides grounds for criticism of the radical concentration of wealth.

One obvious point is that the distribution of running trophies has no significant impact. After all, a person can have a good life without any trophies. As such, letting them be divided up by competition is morally acceptable—even if most trophies go to a few people. However, wealth is fundamentally different as it is a necessity for survival. Beyond mere survival, it also determines the material quality of life in terms of health, clothing, housing, education, entertainment, and so on. Roughly put, wealth (loosely taken) is a necessity. To have such a competition when the well-being (and perhaps the survival) of people is at stake seems morally repugnant.

One obvious counter is a version of the survival of the fittest arguments of the past. The idea is that, just like all living things, people must compete to survive. As in nature, some people will not compete as well and will have less and perhaps not survive. Others will do better and a very few will do best of all.

The obvious reply is that this competition makes some sense when resources are so scarce that all cannot survive. To use a fictional example, if people are struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, then the competition for basic survival might be warranted by the reality of the situation. However, when resources are plentiful it is morally repugnant for the few to hyper-concentrate wealth while the many are left with little or nothing. To use the obvious analogy, seeing a glutton stuffing herself with a vast tableful of delicacies while her guards keep starving people away and her minions sell the scraps would strike all but the most callous as horrible. However, replace the glutton with one of the 1% and some are willing to insist that the situation is fair and just.

As a final point, the 1% also need to worry about the inequality of distribution. The social order which keeps the 99% from simply slaughtering the 1% requires that enough of the 99% believe that the situation is working for them. This can be done, to a degree, by coercion (police and military force) and delusion (this is where Fox News comes in). However, coercion and delusion have their limits and society, like all things, has a breaking point. While the rich can often escape a collapse in one country by packing up and heading to another (as dictators occasionally do), until space travel is a viable option the 1% are still stuck on earth with everyone else. Which is one reason why the richest of the rich have been so interested in space ships.

In my previous essays I examined the idea that love is mechanical and its ethical implications. In this essay, I will focus on the eternal truth that love hurts.

While there are exceptions, the end of a romantic relationship involves pain. As noted in my l essay on voles and love, Young found that the loss of a partner depresses a prairie vole. This was tested by dropping voles into beakers of water to determine how much they would struggle. Prairie voles who had just lost a partner struggled less that those who were not bereft. The depressed voles differed chemically from the non-depressed voles. When a depressed vole was “treated” for this depression, the vole struggled as strongly as the non-bereft vole.

Human beings also suffer from the hurt of love. For example, a human who has ended a relationship often falls into a vole-like depression and struggles less against the tests of life (though dropping humans into beakers to test this would presumably be unethical).

While some might derive pleasure from stewing in a state of post-love depression, this feeling is something most would want to end. The usual treatment, other than self-medication, is time: people usually tend to recover and seek out a new opportunity for love. And depression.

Given that voles can be treated for this depression, humans could also be treated as well. After all, if love is essentially a chemical romance grounded in strict materialism, then tweaking the brain just so would fix that depression. Interestingly enough, the philosopher Spinoza offered an account of love (and emotions in general) that match up with the mechanistic model being examined.

As Spinoza saw it, people are slaves to their affections and chained by who and what  they love. This is an unwise approach to life because, as the voles in the experiment found, the object of one’s love can die (or leave). This view of Spinoza matches this as voles that bond with a partner become depressed when that partner is lost. In contrast, voles that do not form such bonds do not suffer this depression.

While Spinoza was a pantheist, his view of human beings is similar to that of the mechanist: he regarded humans as within the laws of nature and was a determinist. He believed that all that occurs does so from necessity—there is no chance or choice. This view guided him to the notion that human behavior and motivations can be examined as one might examine “lines, planes or bodies.” He held that emotions follow the same necessity as all other things, thus making the effects of the emotions predictable.  In short, Spinoza engaged in what can be regarded as a scientific examination of the emotions—although he did so without the technology available today and from a more metaphysical standpoint. However, the core idea that the emotions can be analyzed in terms of definitive laws is the same idea that is being followed currently in regards to the mechanics of emotion.

Getting back to the matter of the negative impact of lost love, Spinoza offered his own solution. As he saw it, all emotions are responses to what is in the past, present or future. For example, a person might feel regret because she believes she could have done something different in the past. As another example, a person might worry because he thinks that what he is doing now might not bear fruit in the future. These negative feelings rest, as Spinoza sees it, on the false belief that the past and present could be different and  that the future is not set. Once a person realizes that all that happens occurs of necessity (that is, nothing could have been any different and the future cannot be anything other than what it will be), then that person will suffer less from the emotions. Thus, for Spinoza, freedom from the enslaving chains of love would be the recognition and acceptance that what occurs is determined.

Putting this in the mechanistic terms of modern neuroscience, a Spinoza-like approach would be to realize that love is purely mechanical and that the pain and depression that comes from the loss of love are also purely mechanical. That is, the terrible, empty darkness that seems to devour the soul at the end of love is merely chemical and electrical events in the brain. Once a person recognizes and accepts this, if Spinoza is right, the pain should be reduced. With modern technology it is possible to do even more: whereas Spinoza could merely provide advice, modern science can eventually provide us with the means to simply adjust the brain and set things right—just as one would fix a malfunctioning car or PC.

One problem is, of course, that if everything is necessary and determined, then Spinoza’s advice makes no sense: what is, must be and cannot be otherwise. To use an analogy, it would be like shouting advice at someone watching a cut scene in a video game. This is pointless, since the person cannot do anything to change what is occurring. For Spinoza, while we might think life is a like a game, it is like that cut scene: we are spectators and not players. So, if one is determined to wallow like a sad beast in the mud of depression, that is how it will be.

In terms of the mechanistic mind, advice would seem equally absurd because to say what a person should do implies that a person has a choice. However, the mechanistic mind presumably just ticks away doing what it does, creating the illusion of choice. So, one brain might tick away and end up being treated while another brain might tick away in the chemical state of depression. They both eventually die and it matters not which is which. This is another reason why I choose free will; if I am right, then maybe I can do something about my life. If I am wrong, I am determined to be wrong and hence can neither be blamed nor choose to be any different.

In my previous essay I discussed the theory that love is a mechanical matter. That is, love behavior is the workings of chemistry, neurons and genetics. This view, as noted in the essay, was supported by Larry Young’s research involving voles. This mechanistic view of love has some interesting implications, and I will consider one of these in this essay, the virtue of fidelity.

While humans (such as King Solomon and various officials in the current Trump regime) sometimes have polygamous relationships, the idea of romantic fidelity has been praised in song, fiction and in the professed values of modern society. Given Young’s research, it could be that humans are biochemically inclined to fidelity in that w form pair bonds. Sexual fidelity, as with the voles, is another matter.

While fidelity is publicly praised, an important question is whether it is worthy of praise as a virtue. If humans are like voles and the mechanistic theory of human bonding is correct, then fidelity that grounds pair-bonding would be a form of addiction, as discussed in the previous essay. On the face of it, this would seem to show that such fidelity is not worthy of praise. After all, one does not praise crack addicts for their loyalty to crack. Likewise, being addicted to love would not make a person worthy of praise.

An obvious counter is that while crack addiction is seen as bad because of the harms of crack, the addiction that causes pair bonding should be generally regarded as good because of its consequences. These consequences are those that people usually praise about pair bonding, such as the benefits to health.  However, this counter misses the point: the question is not whether pair bonding is good (it generally is in terms of consequences) but whether fidelity should be praised.

If fidelity is a matter of chemistry (in the literal sense), then it would not seem praiseworthy After all, a lasting bond that forms is merely a matter of a mechanical process, analogous to being chained to a person. If I stick close to a person because I am chained to her, that is hardly worthy of praise—be the chain metal or chemical.

If my fidelity is determined by this process, then I am not acting from the virtue of fidelity but acting as a physical system in accord with deterministic (or whatever physics says these days) processes.  To steal from Kant, I would not be free in my fidelity—it would be imposed upon me by this process. As such, my fidelity would not be morally right (or wrong) and I would not be worthy of praise for my fidelity. For my fidelity to be morally commendable, it would have to be something that I freely chose as a matter of will. At least for thinkers like Kant.

One concern with this view is that it seems to make fidelity a passionless thing. After all, if I chose to be faithful to a person on the basis of a free and rational choice rather than being locked into fidelity by a chemical brew of passion and emotion, then this seems cold and calculating—like how one might select the next move in chess or determine which stock to buy. After all, love is supposed to be something one falls into rather than something one chooses.

This reply has considerable appeal. After all, a rational choice to be loyal would not be the traditional sort of love praised in song, fiction and romantic daydreams. One wants to hear a person gushing about passion, burning emotions, and the ways of the heart—not rational choice.  Of course, an appeal to the idealized version of romantic love might be a poor response—like any appeal to fiction. That said, there does is a certain appeal in the whole emotional love thing—although the idea that love is merely a chemical romance also seems to rob love of that magic.

A second obvious concern is that it assumes that people are capable of free choice, and a person can decide to be faithful or not. The mechanistic view of humans typically does not stop with the emotional aspects. Although Descartes did see emotions, at least in animals, as having a physical basis—while leaving thinking to the immaterial mind. Rather, they tend to extend to all aspects of the human being and this includes decision making. For example, Thomas Hobbes argued that we do not chose—we simply seem to make decisions, but they are purely deterministic. As such, if the choice to be faithful is merely another mechanistic process, then this would be no more praiseworthy than being faithful through a love addiction. In fact, as has long been argued, this sort of mechanistic view would seem to dispose of morality by eliminating agency.

The humble prairie vole was briefly famous because of research into love and voles. Researchers such as Larry Young found that the prairie vole is one of the few socially monogamous mammals that pair bonds for extended periods of time (even for life). Interestingly, this bonding does not occur naturally in other varieties of voles—they behave like typical mammals, such as many politicians.

Larry Young found that the brains of the voles are such that the pleasure reward of sexual activity becomes linked to a specific partner. This mechanism involves oxytocin and vasopressin, and the voles become, in effect, addicted to each other. This is like how a smoker becomes addicted to cigarettes and associates pleasure with the trappings of smoking.  To confirm this, Young genetically modified meadow voles to be like prairie voles. The results showed that the bonding is probably due to the chemistry: the normally non-bonding meadow voles engaged in bonding behavior.

Humans, unlike most other mammals, also engage in pair bonding (sometimes). While humans are different from voles, the mechanism is presumably similar. That is, we are addicted to love.

Young also found that prairie voles suffer from heart ache: when a prairie voles loses its partner, it becomes depressed. Young tested this by dropping voles into beakers of water to determine the degree of struggle offered by the voles. He found that prairie voles who had just lost a partner struggled to a lesser degree than those who were not so bereft. The depressed voles, not surprisingly, showed a chemical difference from the non-depressed voles. When a depressed vole was treated for this depression, the vole struggled as strongly as the non-bereft vole.

This seems to hold for humans as well. While humans typically become saddened by the loss of a partner (by death or breakup), this research suggests that human depression of this sort has a chemical basis and could be cured. This is what is often attempted with therapy and medication.

While the mechanical model of love (and the mind) might seem new, the idea of philosophical materialism (that everything is physical in nature) dates to Thales. Descartes saw the human body as a purely mechanical system, albeit one controlled by a non-material mind. Thomas Hobbes accepted Descartes view that the body is a machine but rejected Descartes’ dualism. Influenced by the physics of his day, Hobbes held that a human being is a deterministic machine, just like all other machines and living creatures.

Perhaps the most explicit early development of the idea of humans as machines was in Julien de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine.  While La Mettrie is not as famous as Hobbes or Descartes, many of his views are duplicated today by modern scientists. La Mettrie held that humans and animals are essentially the same, although humans are more complex than other  animals. He also held that human beings are material, deterministic, mechanist systems. That is, humans are essentially biological machines. Given these views, the idea that human love and vole love are essentially the same would probably be accepted by La Mettrie and would, in fact, be exactly what his theory would predict.

Contemporary science is continuing the project started by philosophers like Thales, Hobbes and La Mettrie. The main difference is that contemporary scientists have much better equipment to work with and can, unlike La Mettrie and Hobbes, examine the chemical and genes that are supposed to determine human behavior. Probably without realizing it, scientists are proving the theories of long dead philosophers.  The chemical theory of love does have some rather interesting philosophical implications and some of these will be considered in upcoming essays.