In this blog-post I will discuss current polices in Ireland in relation to restrictive practices in the disability sector. I will argue the fact that there not a specific policy in relation to the disability sector in relation to restrictive practices is a serious oversight which indicates a lack of concern with the disability sector, that could result in potential dangers for people who are or will be disabled.

Current policies in relation to restrictive practices in Ireland have gaps which can lead to dangers for people with an intellectual disability. A restrictive practice is defined as “the intentional restriction of a person’s voluntary movement or behaviour” (Hiqa 2019. p. 2). Different types of restrictive practices are (1) Chemical Restraints: the use of medication to modify a person’s behaviour when no medical reason to give the medicine is given (ibid p.3) (2) Mechanical Restraints: the use of devices or garments bodily movements of a person (ibid p. 3) (3) Physical Restraints: which is physical contact which is used with the intention of restricting the movement of a person’s body or a part of a person’s body. (ibid p.3) (4) Environmental Restraints: which is the intentional restriction of a person’s normal access to their environment (ibid p 3). An example of an environmental restraint would be a locked press blocking a person access to their own clothes. There is currently no policy in relation to restrictive practices in disability centres. Disability centres are asked to follow the guidelines provided in ‘Towards a restraint free environment in Nursing Homes’ (2011).

The 2011 policy is generic enough that it is possible to apply it across the disability sector. It offers the following guidance: any use of a restrictive practice must be person-centred, have staff that know the resident’s needs, comprehensive assessments are done, restraints are regularly monitored, recorded, and reviewed, and the organisation must have a policy in place in line with national policy (Department of Health 2011 p. 2). This guidance was specifically designed for nursing homes, but the advice contained in it is generic enough that it is deemed suitable to apply in the disability sector.

However, the fact that there isn’t a specific policy for restrictive practices in the disability sector is troubling given the long history of restrictive practices abuses in the sector. The history of specific abuse in the disability sector has been used as a rationale in the past to justify the creation of specific policies. For example, a criticism of the Convention for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was that it involved unnecessary duplication since the materials contained in it were contained in Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The obvious rejoinder to this criticism was that given the history of the way people with disabilities have had their rights abused in the past, it is vital that that separate rights for people with disabilities are enshrined in international law. Analogously in the case of restrictive practices. There has been a history of abuses in relation to people with disabilities and restrictive practices. For this reason, the fact that there is not a specific restrictive practice policy in place is a major concern.

Some Context

There is no specific policy in place for restrictive practices in relation to people with disabilities. The CDRP set a precedent for rights having specific policies in the case of disability. The vagueness of the current policy creates legal problems potentially because it isn’t specific enough as to when people can consent to restrictive practices. The lack of specific policies in relation to the disability sector is troubling. While there is a policy specific to nursing homes, the lack of a specific policy for the disability sector implies that those who are disabled are less worthy of specific policies and protections than older people. Furthermore, the evidence of the rates of restrictive practices that occur in Ireland demonstrates that factors such as age, geographical location, sex, etc appear to play a role in the number of restrictive practices which are introduced (Mental Health Commission 2019 p.1). Having a policy that is specific to nursing homes and using them to govern the behaviour of providers in the disability sector means that factors such as age which may play a causal role in the likelihood of a restrictive practice being necessary won’t be captured in the relevant policies (ibid. p. 5). So, example, the Mental Health Commission 2019 noted that the majority of service users (24%) who were physically restrained were between the age of 18 and 29 (ibid p.5). A policy which gives guidance on restrictive practices and is designed for nursing homes is going be blind to the discoveries of the Mental Health Commission Report.

The government needs to look into this policy because despite the fact that there is an agreed upon philosophy in place that aims to minimise any use of restrictive practices; empirical research indicates that restrictive practices are actually increasing in Ireland (Ibid p. 7). In a society which values freedom of choice and as a universal human right, to have a system where there is an increase in the practice of deliberately restricting a person’s voluntary movement could be construed to be barbaric. However, it is in the context of a balancing of rights that restrictive practices are in place. And sometimes where a person’s life is in danger the right to life should take precedence over the right to liberty (Freeman 2015 p.7).

The current approach isn’t working because it strikes with too broad a stroke. The there isn’t enough empirical detail about specific disability related factors in the current policy. Furthermore, the current policy aims to balance the right to liberty with the right to health. To ensure that a person’s liberty is respected to the greatest extent possible, it is emphasized that we need to try and ensure that we work with people in terms of augmentative communication tools to help them express their needs and wishes as best they can. The current policy in relation restrictive practices and nursing homes has only a cursory discussion of communication and would need to be updated in light of the assisted decision-making act. Furthermore, guidance on what augmentative devices are considered reliable is needed in order to help people accurately assess whether a person is actually expressing a particular wish in relation to a restrictive practice or not.

It has been demonstrated that a key factor in reducing restrictive practices in relation to physical restraints is the introduction of sensory rooms to help service users relax (Champagne and Stromberg p. 34). These benefits can be seen in nursing homes, psychiatric units, intellectual disability centres etc. However, the type of sensory rooms that will work will vary depending on the profile of the service users. Some sensory equipment will be very useful for people on the autism spectrum, while this same equipment will not necessarily have the same effects on people in a nursing home with Dementia. The 2011 policy in relation to nursing homes does mention the importance of person-centred care and to this degree it would take into account the different types of sensory rooms that may be helpful in reducing the prevalence of restrictive practices. However, more specific guidance in a policy designed directly for those in the disability sector would be very useful in terms of instructing providers on how to reduce restrictive practices.

The 2011 policy in relation to restrictive practices belies a false objectivity in how it thinks about such practices. In her paper ‘Care Ethics and Physical Restraints in residential childcare’ Laura Steckley discusses the underlying philosophy which practitioners use to justify the use of restrictive practices and notes that justifications come from both a Utilitarian and a Deontological perspective. The Utilitarian argument is that the use of a restrictive practice can be justified if its use results in less negative consequences than would have occurred if the restrictive practice had not been imposed. While the rights-based philosophy which draws in deontological arguments is influenced by the social contract tradition. This tradition focuses on rational agents entering into binding agreements and as a result they tend to focus less on our interdependent vulnerable nature.

            Policies in relation to restrictive practice don’t explicitly state the philosophical premises which underlie their position. In practice they use a rights-based approach. Thus, some debates around implementing a restrictive practice will involve an argument which aims to balance the right to health against the right to autonomy. The advice to use the least restrictive practice, which is necessary, for the shortest possible time seems common-sensical but it doesn’t really specify enough detail to be useful. Steckley argues that reducing restrictive practices involves the following factors:

“Effective restraint reduction involves strong leadership, investment in staffing, training and development, unit culture, therapeutic relationships. There are also proven effects of alternatives to restraint including Snoezelen or Sensory rooms as alternatives to restraints” (Steckley, p.199)

Things like unit culture and therapeutic relationships are hard to measure and as we discussed above different kinds of sensory rooms will be appropriate to help reduce the need for restrictive practices for individualised service users.

The combination of advice to use the least restrictive practice necessary coinciding with discussing of the importance of therapeutic relationships and unit cultures, creates an ambiguity of scope. Things like therapeutic relationships involve a human factor, that are qualitative in nature, there is an intersubjective element to such relationships. While speaking of things such as “least restrictive practice necessary” moves into the realm of quantitative thinking. This gap between policy advice and actual day to day practice involving human relationships may be the reason why we are finding it so difficult to reduce the number of restrictive practices which are employed in Ireland currently.

Critique of Policy Options

Policies in relation to restrictive practices need to be considered in the context of the Convention for the Rights of Person’s with Intellectual Disabilities. Article 3 of the CDRP’s first principle notes the importance of “individual autonomy including the freedom to make one’s own choices” (The United Nations 2006 Article 3).  Another factor to be considered in relation to restrictive practices is the Irish constitution section forty which guarantees the rights of Irish Citizens in Law (ibid 3). Any policy in relation to restrictive practice will need to ensure that it is not contravening the rights described in the CDRP and the Irish Constitution.  

The ‘Towards a restraint free environment in Nursing Homes’ (2011), specifies that a restrictive practice is only justified if it can be demonstrated that the cost of not using a restrictive practice is higher than the cost of using it.  So, for example if a person, continually takes off their seat belt this could potentially result in the death of a service user. In this instance it could be deemed that an angel guard can be used to protect the service user from hurting themselves because of not wearing a seat belt. But before any restrictive practice can be put in place; it is necessary to get the consent of the person who may be the recipient of the restrictive practice.

            Some people with an intellectual disability may not be capable of consenting to a restrictive practice being put in place for them. On page 7 of the ‘Towards a Restraint Free Environment in Nursing Homes’, cognitive disability is mentioned when it comes to the issue of consent. The very cursory remarks do reference the importance of assuming capacity with people unless we have compelling evidence to indicate otherwise. An updated policy that was specific to the disability sector would have to refer to the 2015 ‘Assisted Decision-Making Act’. In section 3 of this Act, there is a detailed discussion on the importance of functional assessments in deciding any issues in relation to a person’s capacity to consent. And it is noted that “a person’s capacity to act is judged based on their ability to understand a decision is being made at a particular time, and to understand the consequences of the decision, in the context of available choices at the time” (Assisted Decision-Making Act p.15)

            The Assisted Decision-Making Act notes that there are four key criterion which should be met if we are to deem a person unable to make a decision. The person is unable to understand information relevant to making the decision, to retain that information long enough to make a voluntary choice, to use or weigh that decision as part of a process of making a decision, is unable to communicate his decision even through a third party or through using augmentative communication (ibid p.15).

            Any specific policy which relates to the use of restrictive practices for people who have an intellectual disability will have make use of the Assisted Decision-Making Act. But in the specific case of disability studies further criterion may be needed to specify when a person is communicating their choices through augmentative technology. The case of Anna Stubblefield an academic who was convicted of raping an adult with a profound intellectual disability warns of the dangers of ambiguity. Stubblefield argued that through facilitated communication, DJ the profoundly intellectually disabled adult she was caring for, was able to consent to having sex with her (Engber 2018 p. 2). The scientific evidence that assisted decision making is a valid technique for helping non-verbal people communicate is scant (Wombles 2014 p.5). And ultimately Stubblefield pled guilty of the rape. Nonetheless it is important that any future policy is specific about the types of technologies which are acceptable in assisted communication.

            In the case of restrictive practices, it is vital that a policy is specific about when consent can be given, and if it cannot be given, a legal definition must be in place which can specify why it is deemed that consent cannot be given. So, for example, in cases of restrictive practices, we need specific laws in place which will specify what forms of augmentative communication devices are suitable for getting consent from a service user. If our policies are not specific enough to provide guidance on this issue it would be possible for a service to use unproven techniques such as facilitated communication as evidence that consent has been given. This lax attitude could result in pseudo-consent being used as justification for draconian restrictive practices being used for service users who did not consent to the practices.

Policy Recommendations

• Create a new policy which is specific to disability and restrictive practices.
• Ensure that the policy is written in such a manner that there is less of a gap between the intersubjective relationships which occur in the disability sector and specific advice from when restrictive practices are justified according to the new policy.
• Ensure that the new policy has up to date empirical data on trends which involve increases or decreases in restrictive practices, the types of restrictive practices which are more common, have relevant data on which groups are most likely to be restricted to a restrictive practice etc.
• Ensure that the new policy is in line with specific recommendations from the Assisted Decision-Making Act.
• Ensure that the policy lists which current communication devices are deemed legitimate devices to help people with disabilities with communication issues to communicate their needs.

Concluding remarks

A new policy on Restrictive Practices which is specific to the disability sector and is updated with information from the Assisted Decision-Making Act needs to be developed. This policy needs to reflect the intersubjective and emotional nature of care work and be written in a manner that lessens the typical gap between policies This policy needs to be more explicit on what types of augmentative communication devices are deemed valid to use as a tool to try and help people give consent around issues such as restrictive practices being put in place.  If we are to try and ensure that we do not continue with the human-rights abuses which have occurred repeatedly to people who have an intellectual disability.

                                                   Bibliography

Champagne, T, and Stromberg, N. (2004) “Sensory Approaches in inpatient psychiatric settings: innovative alternatives to seclusion & restraint” Journal of Psychosocial Nursing and Mental Health Services. 42 (9) pp 34-44.

Department of Health (2011) Towards a Restraint Free Environment in Nursing Homes.

https://assets.gov.ie/18830/9ef5610bf0814bf792263e844e0d9378.pdf [Accessed on 30/04/22]

Engber, D. (2018) “The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield, Revisited.” The New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/05/magazine/the-strange-case-of-anna-stubblefield-revisited.html [Accessed 29/4/22]

Freeman, C. M. (2015)  “Reversing hard won victories in the name of human rights: A critique of the General Comment on Article 12 of the UN convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.” The Lancet Psychiatry 2 (9).

Hiqa (2019) Guidance for promoting a care environment that is free from Restrictive Practices: Older People’s Services.

https://www.hiqa.ie/sites/default/files/2019-03/Restrictive-Practice-Guidance%20_DCOP.pdf  [Accessed on 2/5/2022]

Mental Health Commission (2019) The Use of Restrictive Practices in Approved Centres.

https://www.mhcirl.ie/sites/default/files/2021-01/Restrictive%20Practices%20Activity%20Report%202019.pdf [Accessed 1/5/22]

Steckley, L. (2015) “Care Ethics and physical restraint in residential child-care” in M Barnes, Brannelly T,. Ward, L, & Ward, N. (ED). Ethics of Care: Critical advances in international perspective (pp. 195-206). Bristol: Policy Press.

The Irish Statute Book (2015) Assisted Decision Making (capacity) Act 2015. https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2015/act/64/enacted/en/html [Accessed on 25/04/22]

The Irish Statute Book (1937) Constitution of Ireland.

https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/cons/en  [Accessed on 1/5/22]

The United Nations (2006) The Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities.

https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-on-the-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities/convention-on-the-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities-2.html [Accessed 30/4/22]

Wombles, K. (2014) “Some Fads never die-they only hide behind other names: Facilitated Communication is not and never will be Augmentative or Alternative Communication.” Evidence Based and Communication based Assessment and Intervention. Volume 8. Issue 4.

Introduction

In this blogpost I will discuss restrictive practices in the disability sector from the point of view of care ethics. I will begin by outlining what care ethics is, and how it differs from traditional philosophical conceptions. I will then move on to describing restrictive practices from the point of view of policy, and how the policies rely on an implicit philosophy which misunderstands lived human experience and hence offers impractical policy advice.

Care Ethics

Care ethics is a philosophy which focuses on our dependent and relational nature as human beings. The philosophy opposes itself to the Cartesian tradition which conceives of humans as disembodied agents who make their decisions based on logical dispassionate reasoning. In her 1982 book ‘In a Different Voice’ psychologist Carol Gilligan distinguished between male and female ways of reasoning. She argued that male ways of thinking were individualistic and rationalistic while female thinking was more relational and interpersonal. She also claimed that female thinking focused more on care than male thinking.

            There has been a healthy debate on the degree to which Gilligan’s essentialist psychological speculations stand up to critical scrutiny. But I will bracket that question for the purposes of this blog-post. Whether people agree with Gilligan’s essentialist theories of human nature or not, empirical data strongly indicates that the majority of care burdens falls on women’s shoulders. And this fact clearly has had an impact on our philosophical conception on the nature of ethical theorising.

            Descartes is a paradigm example of the modern western philosopher. His atomistic emphasis on reason and his disembodied conception of the mind creates a picture of man as an isolated independent figure who uses the power of reason to deduce the nature of reality. On this Cartesian picture, the body and the mind are separate entities.

            A substantial proportion of the great philosophers in the western cannon were not family men. And those who did have families, were affluent people who relied on their wives and servants to provide the majority of care for their children. So, it is unsurprising that care wasn’t high on the philosophical agenda[1]. To the great philosophers, care was an unimportant background task performed by those, who they believed to be lesser people, primarily women. Eva Kittay puts the point cogently:

“There is a plausible explanation for why there is little in the long history of moral thought that highlights care, whether as a virtue or as the basis for right action. Very few of those who have penned moral theories have been women or had access to the experiences of women when not in the company of men. Women, moreover, have been in a position neither to make decisions in the sphere that men have dominated, nor have they been sufficiently independent of a man’s power to say what it is that they really think. The systematic moral scrutiny applied to promises, contracts, and conduct in battle and business was not applied to areas that men didn’t occupy, like care for children and the ill. (Kittay 2019 p. 166).

This lack of emphasis on the importance of care as an ethical concept feeds into the objectivist paradigm which treats humans as independent, disembodied, rational Cartesian egos.

            Care ethics with its emphasis on relationships, dependency and embodiment provides a corrective to traditional philosophy. Gilligan opposed her care-ethics to what she called the justice paradigm (Kittay 2019 p. 166). A large proportion of the justice paradigm is the social contract theory. This theory which involves a paradigm of self-sufficient individuals coming together to agree on rules they have to live by. It has been noted by critics of the social contract theory[2], that the theory leaves out people with an intellectual disability as being active agents in construction of a social contract.

            Utilitarian philosophy with its emphasis on objective context independent moral rules, and deontology with its moral obligations and universal rules are often pitted against each other as alternative ethical frameworks. While the two systems are obviously opposed to each other in terms of the importance of consequences to our ethical systems they do share one thing in common; both think that it is possible to discover context independent moral rules which can govern our behaviours.

            Care-ethics with its focus on interpersonal context dependent factors in ethical deliberation represents a different more grounded way of thinking about ethics. Policies which deal with ethical issues are sometimes vague about their underlying philosophical justifications. But despite the fact that they appeal to things like universal rights, the primary mode of policy guidance is led by a kind of crude utilitarian calculus. In the next section I will discuss this crude utilitarian calculus in relation to restrictive practice and discuss how care-ethics offers a corrective to this idealistic approach.

Social Care and Care Ethics

            In the Social Care field restrictive practices are a source of embarrassment. Official guidance is to try and drive out restrictive practices entirely. However, it is acknowledged by practitioners in the social care field that sometimes these practices are necessary. But a practice that, for example, restricts a person’s movement against their will, is a violation of their human rights. To justify these practices policies appeal to pragmatic and utilitarian considerations which in effect argue that the harm done by the restrictive practice is less than the harm that would be caused if it wasn’t implemented.

Utilitarian arguments can be used to justify draconian practices. This is something that has long been noted in other areas of ethics. It is easy to throw out justifications for draconian actions which have with blasé appeals to utilitarian considerations. Thus, people have often justified dropping a nuclear bomb during WW2 on the grounds that doing so saved countless lives. But the truth is we cannot realistically calculate how many people could have died if the bombs were not dropped.

            Likewise, in the case of restrictive practices, the pretence that we can objectively calculate that a restrictive practice is justified because of numbers assigned on a risk assessment is idealistic at best. Assigning numbers on a page gives an appearance of objectivity which my not be present. It could be argued that we can estimate the potential risk of damage, if an incident occurs, and estimate the likelihood that the person engaging in the risky behaviour, and with this data we can estimate the overall danger. With this in place if the probability of someone being seriously hurt is extremely high then a restrictive practice may be justified.

            All of this sounds reassuringly objective. However, in reality things are not that simple. When we are estimating the probability of a behaviour occurring, we can appeal to previous incidents over the last 12 months to estimate the probability of the behaviour. But the probability of a behaviour has to be specified against a set of background conditions. If I drink coffee every morning at 8am the probability of me drinking it tomorrow would be high; but if I fell into a coma the night before I won’t be drinking coffee tomorrow. On a Bayesian analysis you can also calculate the odds of me falling into a coma. And factor it into your overall analysis of the probability of my drinking coffee tomorrow. But there will always be some uncertainty.

            In the case of restrictive practice similar considerations apply. If we take the case of self-injurious behaviour. If a service-user is engaging in severe self-injurious behaviour every day that could cause them serious damage, then then the probability that they could hurt themselves tomorrow would be high. However, when you factor in background conditions, things change. In his ‘Care Ethics and Restraint in Residential Child Care’ Steckley notes that there is good empirical evidence that Snoezelen and sensory rooms can result in a reduction in the need for restrictive practices (Steckley 2015 p 200). Furthermore, he notes that things like staff training, unit culture, therapeutic approaches and primarily relationships are potent causal features of reducing restrictive practices (ibid p. 200). When one tries to factor these things into our background conditions which may change the probability of a behaviour occurring things get tricky. It is hard to assign a number to a culture changing, or to a relationship between a service user and a staff resulting in changed behaviour. And this is where the false objectivity of the implicit utilitarian calculus which is appealed to in our restrictive practice policies gets exposed. Hiqa 2019 note:

“The use of a restrictive practice is warranted when there is a real and substantive risk to a person and this risk cannot be addressed by a non-restrictive means.” ( Hiqa 2019 p. 5)

But as we have seen above despite the objective sounding language it is extremely difficult to calculate when a risk is extremely high and cannot be addressed using non-restrictive mean.

Social Care practice in Ireland is replete with concepts such as person-centred planning, community inclusion etc. And these concepts find their way into policies. But policies are also written with calculations designed to implemented in an efficient black and white manner in Capitalist market. And this black and white philosophy is not flexible enough to do justice to concepts such as person-centred care etc. The black and white philosophy may fit people who are “rational, autonomous, capable of making a choice, possessed of adequate information” (Toronto 2010 p. 159). Toronto notes that a lot of service users do not fit the above description. But the truth is we all don’t always fit the above description. As our discussion of restrictive practices above indicates we sometimes act on inadequate information and our choices aren’t always strictly rational. Holland notes that the quality of care suffers when it is considered a commodity not a process. (Holland 2010. pp. 163-166). And I think this is true in terms of policies when they are constructed according to strict utilitarian or deontological principles. The value of care ethics is that it focuses on our human and dependent nature. One difficulty with this conception is that we live in a world run according to rabid-Capitalism and this Capitalist system with its focus on the bottom line will find care-ethics with its ambiguities and focus on context a difficult philosophy to adapt.

Conclusion

In this blogpost I discussed care ethics and how it differs from traditional philosophical conceptions of ethics. The traditional conception of philosophy was contrasted with care-ethics with its focus on dependency, context and the body. To illustrate the importance of care ethics for the social care field the author discussed care ethics and restrictive practices. It was demonstrated that absolutist ethical positions written into policies cannot cope with the ambiguities of the real world while Care Ethics is much better equipped to deal with these ambiguities. However, given the current economic order we all live in Care Ethics is unlikely to make it into social care policies any time soon.

Bibliography

Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press.

Holland, S. (2010) “Looking After Children and the Ethic of Care”. The British Journal of Social Work. 40. No6 pp 1664-1680.

Kittay, E. (2019) Learning From My Daughter: The Value and Core of Disabled Minds. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

Nussbaum, M (2011) Creating Capabilities. Cambridge MA: Belknap Harvard.

Nussbaum, M (2006) Frontiers of Justice. Cambridge MA: Belknap Harvard.

Nussbaum, M (2013) Political Emotions. Cambridge MA: Belknap Harvard.

Rawls, J (1971) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Steckley, L. (2015). “Care ethics and physical restraint in residential childcare”. In M. Barnes, Brannelly, T., Ward, L. & Ward, N. (Ed.), Ethics of care: Critical advances in international perspective (pp.195 – 206). Bristol: Policy Press.

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[1] Kittay (2019) notes that reflection on care wasn’t entirely absent from the western philosophical cannon some philosophers such as Plato, and Heidegger did consider the concept of care however their abstract reflections don’t touch on the concrete responsibilities in relation to care that recent feminist philosophers in the care ethics tradition have been concerned with.

[2] See Nussbaum (2006, 2011, 2013)

In this blog-post I will briefly discuss chapter 6 of Buntings book Labours of Love. In chapter 6 Bunting discusses home care from the point of view of care workers, owners of home care companies, and people who are receiving home help. I will begin by describing the methodology which Bunting uses to arrive at her conclusions. And will then evaluate Bunting’s diagnosis of the current state of the social care provision before explaining some disparities in the treatment of social care and health care that Bunting noted. Because Bunting’s book is not intended to be an academic piece; she doesn’t explicitly delve into the philosophical and sociological theories underlying her discoveries. I will, therefore, interpret some of Buntings claims in light of some current philosophical and sociological theories. A key claim of this blog-post will be that a possible explanation for the disparity between the way social care and health care is treated is because of an implicit denial of our humanness and vulnerability.

                              Methodological Preliminaries

Bunting’s empirical methodology is four-fold. (1) Qualitative Data: She relies on case-studies to detail how the workers and owners experience working in the social care system in the UK. These case studies give us a phenomenological description of the lived experiences of the people working in a social care setting. Her focus includes voices from people working in social care, and people who own care homes (2) Quantitative Data in the form of studies which detail the financial arrangements of care companies. The funding available for social care in England. (3) Historical Data which aims to illustrate past trends of literary, scientific, and political perceptions of the elderly and speculation on how these views have influenced the current state of play in the UK re-social care. (4) Reports of her direct experiences when visiting the care home facility, home care provision etc. This can be best described as introspective reflections on her feelings as well as phenomenological reflections on her experiences in these centres.

          The empirical evidence Bunting provides demonstrates that social care is criminally underfunded and that this underfunding results from an underlying ethical philosophy of individualism. In chapter 6 of her book Bunting describes historical attitudes towards the elderly throughout history; demonstrating that politicians and historians viewed the elderly with distain and as a burden on society. The elderly were described as burdens on society, who were unproductive, and therefore a drain on the system. As a result of these attitudes when people became older, they were sent to dank unhomely institutes where they were stripped of their individuality and freedom.

            This general attitude towards those elderly, mirrored treatments for the mentally ill, people with intellectual disabilities. People who were deemed to be of no use to society were hidden away from the public in institutions. Given the attitudes towards the people being cared for; it is no surprise that the quality of people providing the care was not deemed an important matter.

                               The Devaluing of Care Work

            In her interviews with homecare workers, they noted that home care work was in general viewed through a negative lens. Over fifty percent of the carers Bunting interviewed noted that their friends and family looked down on the type of work they did[1]. Baker and Lynch (2012), cite further studies which indicate that Carers feel that their work is looked down on by both politicians and society.  Bunting didn’t delve into why people viewed care work as something to feel embarrassed about. On the face of it one would think that care work; a job that involves helping the vulnerable would be viewed in a positive light. However, the anecdotal reports from the care workers indicate that some people in their lives view care work as low status work. One of the care workers even said she was deeply ashamed of being a care worker (Bunting 2020 p. 205).

            Another complaint which is made by the care workers is that they are extremely poorly paid. It is difficult to isolate the causal structure in this sphere; are care workers low paid because they are not respected or does society does not respect care workers because they are poorly paid and hence are categorised in a particular socio-economic class? We can see on Buntings historical analysis that the subjects of care; the elderly and the disabled are generally viewed under the guise of an economic burden. When the elderly are described as consumers who do not produce (Bunting 2020 p. 207) they are being conceptualized in a particular manner. The language we use to describe people has effects on how we conceptualize them (Lakoff and Johnson 1980 p. 3). When thought of primarily as an unproductive economic unit, as opposed to individuals with dignity who happens to need help, the quality of help we provide will be affected.

            This viewing of people as economic units who are either productive members of society or are not; may explain the disparity between social care funding and NHS funding that Bunting notes. People who have a temporary sickness still have the potential to re-enter society and engage in productive work. Whereas on this extreme socio-economic thinking people who could no longer work were deemed a drain on society. This could explain why even arch conservatives like Thatcher were forced to safeguard the NHS but let social care become privatised. A substantial proportion of those in need of social care fell into the category of people who could not work because of disability[2], or the elderly who could no longer work. On the conservative world view such people were not productive members of society and hence were not the governments problem. The burden fell to families to care for those people in their families who needed help.

            If families were incapable of providing the necessary care they expected to try and access the care through home-care companies. Buntings’ descriptions of these companies are derived from interview with owners, care work, and admin staff. These interviews tell the story of time pressed workers moving from job to job with little time to engage with the people whom they are supposed to support.

            Buntings’ analysis points towards a severe lack of funding for Social Care in comparison to the funding available to those in the healthcare sector. This divergence in funding is on the face of it hard give a rationale for. As Bunting correctly points out people pretheoretically would expect to have social care available for a parent who has dementia in the same way they would expect to have health-care available if they had Cancer. But the reality is very different; social care funding in the UK and Ireland is severely depleted. Bunting doesn’t develop an analysis of why this divergence occurred; she merely points to the fact that Thatcher safeguarded the NHS while she privatized social care.

            As we discussed above a possible explanation between the disparity with which Thatcher treated the NHS and the Social Care system was that the NHS’s primary focus was on getting economic units back out working; it was deemed good for the economy to have a fully functioning NHS[3]. Social care on the other hand was associated with aging and disabled people, and on rabid individualism with its underlying philosophy where people were portrayed as; atomistic freely choosing agents, those who were dependent on others to meet their daily needs were deemed as radically other. These radical others were viewed the responsibilities of their families, or recipients of charity[4], not as citizens with rights owed to them by society.

            At the heart of this ideology, which leads to the poor social care system Bunting documents; is a kind of false consciousness. This false consciousness comes from the denial of our human animal nature. Dependency isn’t something that happens to others; it is a fact all human lives from the moment we are born. Eva Feder Kittay correctly notes that while independence is often valorised in our society this valorisation is very dubious:

“Is it not better to recognize and create conditions that foster relationships of dependency replete with affective bonds and a sense that each participant has received her due; relationships which can transform otherwise unpleasant intimate tasks into times of trust and demonstrations of trustworthiness, gratifying and dignifying to both caregiver and the recipient of care? A truly independent life-one in which we need no one and no one needs us-would be a very impoverished one even if it were possible. The person with an impairment who requires the assistance of a caregiver is not the exception, but a person living out a frequent occurrence in any human life, our inevitable dependency” (Kittay 2019 p 161)

Dependency is inevitable for every human at some point in their lives and a society which downplays this fact is a deeply unhealthy one.

 Philosopher Martha Nussbaum illustrates our dependent nature using references from the point of view of developmental psychology, with help from history, literature, and psychoanalysis. Nussbaum’s story begins in childhood (Nussbaum 2018 pp 17-60).  Humans, unlike most other species are born almost entirely helpless, for the first year of our lives we are entirely dependent on our mother for everything; if we defecate ourselves, we need our mother to clean us, if we are hungry, we need our mother to feed us, we are innately social and need our mother’s[5] social feedback to survive. We eventually develop the sensory motor skills to partially gain freedom from our parents but for the first ten years of our lives we are small with little power and very dependent on our parents. Post our teen years we slowly gain independence and eventually become a citizen of our society with some degree of autonomy. But no matter how free we are, at the back of our minds we still remember how vulnerable we once felt. But while our memory of our abject humility of being entirely controlled by another, implicitly terrorises our consciousness, the reflective part of our mind is looking towards another terror, the terror of future or potential present vulnerability.

Religious and philosophical fantasies may be 100% consciously believed but we know from our experiences how vulnerable our bodies are. We know from experience that people can become vulnerable through brain tumours, brain damage through a car crash, neurological disorders like MS, MMD etc. We know that at any minute we can slip from being able bodied to being disabled in the space of a few weeks. We also know that if we are lucky enough to not die young; if we are to be in the top 1% of lucky people in history, we will live to become old enough to be as disabled as we were in infancy. To steal a line from a comic movie; “run from it, deny it, there is no escaping your destiny”. The only possible escape is to die at the prime of your life.

Individuals with memories of their childhood, with the capacity to think of possible diseases, or to reflect on the limits of old age; all know we are only temporally able bodied. But we stick this fact to the back of our minds; this is probably why Superhero films are so popular; better to identify with a fantasy of being invulnerable than face the radical vulnerability. Nussbaum’s philosophy asks us to reflect on our humanness. But furthermore, she offers a corrective to the procedural views of rationalistic philosophy. Our emotional nature as humans clouds our thinking about the type of society, we want to live in.

            Individualistic philosophies such as the conservative philosophy Thatcher; inspired by Hayek, adhered to when she was privatising social care was implicitly influenced by an unconscious denial of our dependency and humanity. Once this denial is made then social care seems to be a problem for individual families instead a universal problem which faces all humans.

            This denial of our humanness and vulnerability infects all aspects of our social care provision. In Buntings case studies her subjects all complain about the quantitative nature of their work. In the top end home care provision people are given more time to provide their care (between thirty minutes and an hour). While at the lower end of the scale people are given 15 minutes to provide their care. The carers at all ends of the scale complain that they cannot always guarantee to provide sufficient care within a specific time frame. Partly this time frame is simply the result of working within a capitalist system in a privatised sector; care must be quantified into discrete measurable units to guarantee a profit.

            But it is only partly because of this capitalist system that this quantization occurs. Another, reason is a failure to appreciate the human nature of the job. When you think of care as a series of jobs that need can be quantified you are thinking of care as a series of abstract tasks. Washing could be one task, giving meds another task etc. The reality is that care tasks are not abstractions that occur in a void. Rather they are tasks that occur in the contexts of human relationships. Even when a home care worker enters a house for the first time to provide care for person whom they have never met before; as soon as they step through the door, they are immersed in a human relationship.  They are dealing with individuals with time and context specific needs and not an abstract set of tasks that must be finished within a particular time. It is through abstracting away from interpersonal relationships and humanity of people being cared for that one loses the essence of the human relationship that underlies all care work.

            Bunting’s book is extremely valuable because she puts human relationships at the centre of all aspects of her book. She notes her own feelings when caring for the extremely old and aged, she reveals the world of people in care, and relates this world to the world of people providing care. The overall tenor of the book is to exemplify the human nature of the care work and how this work is relational and human work that cannot be reduced to time sheets and fixed tasks squeezed within set periods of time.

                                             Bibliography

Baker, J, and Lynch, (2012) “Inequalities of Love and Care and their Theoretical Implications”. Social Justice Series. Vol. 12. No 1.

Bunting, M (2020) Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care. London: Granta

Fine, D. (2014) “Dependency work: A critical exploration of Kittay’s perspective on care as a relationship of power”. Health and Sociological Review.

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[1] Baker and Lynch (2012) p. 12 cites a different set of studies which supports the contention that care workers feel their work is undervalued by both employees and politicians.

[2] In the case of disability a substantial proportion of them were indeed capable of working but society didn’t deem it worth its while to make environmental adjustments which would make accessing work possible.

[3] Subsequent history has shown that health care services are less and less considered off limit as the push to entirely privatize them continues apace.

[4] Rawls social contract theory though championed by liberal philosophers similarly held the view that people with intellectual disabilities are recipients of charity not subjects of justice. See Nussbaum 2006)

[5] I am speaking of mothers feedback because it is particularly important for the first 6 months of a child’s life; particularly for things like breast feeding

In this blog I will discuss the Animal Rights Movement. The Animal rights movement is a diverse movement which goes back centuries. However, I will limit my discussion to the movement that began with the work of Henry Spira in the 1970’s. Typically when theorists discuss social justice movements, they do so in terms of raising class consciousness. The emphasis is on helping people to realise they are being exploited so that they can fight back against injustice. However, animals do not have the capacity to have their consciousness raised, and this poses terminal difficulties for any analysis of the animal rights movement in terms of class consciousness. To understand animal rights as a social justice movement the author used Sidney Tarrow’s definition of a social justice movement and will demonstrate that Spira’s movement is a social movement in Tarrow’s sense. To demonstrate that Spira’s movement meets Tarrow’s criterion I will detail the history of how his movement got started (philosophical influences), the political opposition it faced, and the successes it achieved. With this done the author will analyse some weakness with Spira’s movement and discuss the importance of framing for any social justice movement.

                           Spira’s activism as a Social Justice Movement

The animal rights movement is diverse and has a long history culminating in the antivivisectionists in the 18^th century. However, the movement only began to achieve concrete results in the 1970’s when activist Henry Spira started using a pragmatic approach to achieving narrow limited change in decreasing animal cruelty. Spira’s tactic was to pick out companies which were vulnerable in some way, and to negotiate with them first, and if the negotiation failed, he would stage escalating protests.

In his ‘Power as Movement’ Sidney Tarrow defined social movements as follows:

• “I shall argue that contentious politics emerges in response to changes in political opportunities and threats when participants perceive and respond to a variety of incentives: material and ideological, partisan and group-based, long-standing, and episodic. Building on these opportunities, and using known repertoires of action, people with limited resources can act together contentiously-if only sporadically. When their actions are based on dense social networks and effective connective structures and draw on legitimate action-orientated cultural frames, they can sustain these actions even in contact with powerful opponents. In such cases-and only in such cases-we are in the presence of a social movement.” (Tarrow: 1994 p. 16)

Tarrow’s description of a social movement offers a very specific vision. It will be instructive for our purposes to see if the Animal Liberation movement as exemplified by Henry Spira’s work matches Tarrow’s criterion.

As I mentioned above attempts of antivivisectionists to stop animal cruelty traditionally failed. With Spira’s activism this changed, and more practical results were achieved. Spira’s activism did spring from a perceived opportunity. He noted that corporations were increasingly concerned with their public image and spent millions to cultivate this image. This need for corporations to protect their public image presented an opportunity for activists. They could present evidence of the disturbing experiments being done on animals and demand that the experiments be made safer, or the evidence could be used to tarnish the reputation of the corporations.

A further material and ideological opportunity that presented itself to Spira was that the animal rights movement was beginning to have a respectable face to the general public. Novelist Bridget Brophy’s 1965 article in the Sunday Times alerted the public to the issue of animal rights and inspired philosophical debates on the nature of animal rights. Culminating in a series of academic books and articles on the topic (‘Animal Rights Movement’ Wikipedia p.2 ).

The publication of ‘Animal Liberation’ by Utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer in 1975 was a game changer. The book popularised the phrase Speciesism. Singer defined Speciesism as follows:

“Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Sexists violate the principle of equality by favouring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.” (Singer 1975 p. 9)

In his book Singer detailed experiments that were done on animals and critiqued the scientific validity of the experiments. His measured arguments and lucid prose made his book popular with the public, as well as with academics. Furthermore, his book boosted the image of animal rights activism. At the time animal rights activists were portrayed as irrational dogmatists who were led entirely by emotion and who couldn’t be reasoned with. With this image prevalent before the public mind; big business could dismiss the concerns being raised by activists. Singer’s book helped change this perception. And the changed perspective created opportunities for people to get a seat at the table in negotiations with businesses that otherwise wouldn’t have taken them seriously. Spira was able to utilise this greater public reputation of activists to get himself into meetings with business who were practicing unethical experiments on animals.

On Tarrow’s analysis a key component of being a social movement involves having dense social networks that can involve sustained effective connective structures and legitimate action orientated cultural frames (Tarrow 1994 p. 16). Using these dense social networks and action orientated cultural frames gives a movement the ability to launch sustained actions against more powerful opponents (ibid p.16).

Spira used a four-fold technique to try and achieve change on behalf of the animals he was advocating for; persuasion, facilitation, bargaining, and coercion (Munro 2002 p. 175). The first three techniques were typically used by Spira when he was negotiating with business. But the fourth technique; the use of coercion, involved social networks, high connectivity, and legitimate culturally framed acts. So, in this sense Spira’s animal activism meets Tarrow’s criterion of being a social movement. To understand the social networks Spira utilised, and the actions they mandated, it will be helpful to consider some of his campaigns.

                             The Natural History Museum Campaign

Spira saw a report published by United Action for Animals about experiments being done on cats in the American Museum of Natural History. These experiments typically involved cutting out sections of the cat’s brain and measuring how this effected the Cats sexual behaviour. So, after the operation the cat was placed in a room with various animals, and the scientist would observe which animals (if any) the Cat would try to mount. Being a pragmatist by nature Spira picked the Natural History Museum because it involved a somewhat easy target. While from a logical point of view it makes no difference whether the animal being experimented on is a rat or a cat, they are both sentient creatures; from an emotional point of view, it is easier to elicit sympathy for a household pet being experimented on (Singer 1998 p, 52). Furthermore, the experiments didn’t have any immediate scientific applications that were useful in curing any diseases, so it would be easy to convince the public that the experiments were pointless as well as cruel. These experiments were also funded by public money, and it was a useful tactic to convince people that their tax money was being misused (ibid p. 53).

Spira’s pragmatic approach coheres with Tarrow’s suggestion that using emotional laden cultural packages is important in building a social movement:

“From assuming grievances, scholars of social movements now began to focus on how movements embed concrete grievances with emotion-laden “packages” (Gamson 1992), or in “frames” capable of convincing participants their cause is just and important” (Tarrow 1994 p. 26)

We can see that Spira’s tactics which focused vivisections being done on animals which are considered in our culture cute and loveable, and on vivisectionists who were getting paid to torture animals with public funds made framing the issue easier. People were being given a concrete target; and easily digestible, but emotionally laden facts, about what this target was doing wrong.

Spira began his campaign by gathering data through reading publicly available reports on the contents and results of the experiments which were being done. When he had done his research, he began by sending a letter to the Natural History Museum followed by series of phone calls (Singer 1998 p. 54). These letters and phone calls were ignored. So, he began a media campaign; he appeared on the Pegeen and Ed Fitzgerald radio talk show, got an article in published in ‘Our Town’ a Manhattan weekly paper (ibid p. 55). He also began circulating materials to other animal rights organisations. This work helped to create a connected network of actors all working towards a common purpose.

With the media and animal rights organisations to some degree involved in the campaign against the vivisections being done in the Natural History Museum, they had the numbers to protest outside the museum. These protests were supported by Society for Animal Rights, and Friends of Animals, as well as by interested members of the public who heard about the campaign through the media.

The protests went on for over a year (ibid p. 56). And of course, the protests led to more media coverage which in turn inspired more and more people to join the protests. Another tactic used was contacting the benefactors of the museum and detailing to them the nature of the experiments being performed. This tactic resulted in the museum losing substantial funding. Congressman Ed Koch, inspired by the protests visited the museum and found the experiments lacking in scientific importance and commented that the government had paid nearly half a million dollars to fund these experiments (ibid p. 60). This led to 120 members of congress writing letters to the NIH asking about the nature of the experiments. Prompting the Natural History Museum to review the experimental procedures and exonerating themselves of any wrongdoing (ibid p.58). Letters from congress, weekly protests, radio show appearances etc gave great publicity to the movement.

As a result of the increasing publicity the famous journal Science ran four-page article on animal liberation in general, and the protests against the Natural History Museum in particular (ibid p.62). The article was written by Nicholas Wade and in it he noted the low citation index for the experiments on the Cats. This led him to question the scientific importance of the experiments. This article was particularly important; scientists generally dismissed animal rights activists as illiterate lunatics, and this was the first time a scientific magazine spoke about them as reasonable people (ibid p.64). In August 1977 the museum stopped its experiments on the Cats. The Animal liberation movement had won its first battle to get experimentation stopped.

When explicating the nature of social justice movements Tarrow made the following important point:

“Contentious politic is produced when threats are experienced and opportunities are perceived, when the existence of available allies is demonstrated and when the vulnerability of opponents is exposed.” (Tarrow 1994 p. 33)

My brief description of Spira’s campaign against the Natural History Museum shows that his campaign meets all the criterion set by Tarrow for something to count as a social movement. Furthermore, Spira’s social movement was extremely successful from a pragmatic point of view.

                                              The Revlon Campaign

Spira launched a campaign against the cosmetic company Revlon. They like all other cosmetic companies used animal experiments to test their products. Spira singled out Revlon because they had a carefully honed public image which they wanted to protect. He reasoned that it was easy to make the case that their tests were frivolous and cruel (Singer 1998 p, 69). He noted that most people would agree that blinding a rabbit in the name in making a new type of shampoo was extremely cruel. The Draize test was a test performed on Rabbits by cosmetic companies which was designed to see what damage various chemical combinations would have when sprayed in the animal’s eyes. 

Spira followed a similar campaign as he did against the Natural History Museum. He adopted a pragmatic approach and didn’t demand to stop all animal testing. He just asked for Revlon to donate a percentage of their profits to finding a less cruel manner of testing. A similar pattern emerged. The company ignored them. Spira arranged protests; fund-raised for advertising that hurt the public image of the company and eventually the company gave way and submitted to the demands.

                    Was Spira’s campaigns a success?

                           Animals and Legal Rights

As we saw above Spira achieved more concrete results than his predecessors. His pragmatic approach helped him work well with businesses and get them to concede something. For Spira who was a Utilitarian; since he was reducing the percentage of animal suffering, he was achieving the ends he set himself. However, some people argued that merely decreasing a percentage of suffering wasn’t enough. Animals have rights and we need to work towards, arguing for those rights philosophically before trying to enshrine them in the law. If we could enshrine animal rights in law, then we wouldn’t need to negotiate with big business to get them to make minimal concessions. Tom Regan’s ‘The Case for Animal Rights’ (1983), which a was criticism of the utilitarian philosophy inspiring Spira, was the first step in the direction in trying to get animal rights taken seriously. These philosophical debates have moved on to more practical legal based arguments where organisations like nonhumanrights.org bring legal cases before courts in order to enshrine rights for animals in the court of law. It is an open question whether this rights-based approach will achieve more protection for non-human animals than Spira’s pragmatic utilitarian approach.

               Direct Action Group: Beyond the Law

Spira, the pragmatist and utilitarian, adopted the tactic of working with big business to try and achieve incremental change. And some rights-based approaches sought to use the law make it illegal for animals to have their rights violated by either big business or government labs. Both views are operating within existing legal systems. Direct action groups sometimes operate outside the law and break into labs and businesses to try and expose the conditions that animals currently live under. While they don’t recommend violence against humans they do engage in vandalism in labs and operate on an underground system which makes it difficult to discover who, if anyone, is in charge of the group.

Whether this moving beyond the law is justified is beyond the remit of this blog. In his ‘The Justification for Civil Disobedience’ John Rawls argued that there are four conditions which justify civil disobedience: (1) When Normal political appeals to the majority have already been made in good faith and been rejected. (2) When fundamental equal liberties are denied (minorities not being given the right to vote) (3) When the protester acknowledges that any other party subjected to a similar degree of justice has an equal right to protest in a similar way. (4) When the protest is rational and has a good rational chance of achieving our aims. (Civil disobedience would be pointless if we had no chance of achieving our aims) (Rawls 1969 p.187). I will leave as an exercise for the reader to reflect on whether animal rights organisations which break the law meet the criterion set out by Rawls.

                   Francis Power Cobbe and the Power of Framing 

As we discussed above Spira’s lasting contribution was his concrete achievements which resulted in decreasing animal experimentation. I contrasted these concrete achievements with the antivivisectionist movement which preceded him and their lack of pragmatic success. One of the explanations I gave was that philosophers like Peter Singer managed to reach a popular audience, and an academic audience with his Animal Liberation, and this helped to improve the movements image and made it more respectable to the general public. I argued that the image enhancement of the movement made possible by the likes of Singer gave Spira the opportunity (in Tarrow’s sense) to build his social movement. However, while it is true that Singer did improve the image of the antivivisectionist movement. This improved image was only necessary because of caricatures that existed in the public. Most antivivisectionists at the end of the eighteenth century were women. And one of the most prominent antivivisectionists was an Anglo-Irish lady named Frances Power Cobbe. Cobbe was an accomplished philosopher who had published dozens of books on animal rights and other philosophical topics (Frances Power Cobbe Wikipedia p.1). She was far from the hysterical illiterate caricature of animal rights activists that existed prior to Singer’s publications. Cobbe was up to date in both the best science and philosophy of her day and wrote cogent reasoned arguments against vivisectionists.

So why did it take Singer’s arguments to help animal rights activists to get a reputation for being reasonable and educated people? A possible hypothesis is that the Misogynistic society in which Cobbe and her colleagues were working in made it easy for opponents to frame a women led movement in such an unflattering manner. Certainly, there was no sensible argument to be made that could portray Cobbe as anything other than an intelligent capable activist and scholar. The fact that vivisectionists managed to paint Cobbe et all in such an unflattering and inaccurate manner demonstrates the importance of cognitive frames in any social movement.

                                                          Bibliography

Munro, L. (2002) ‘The Animal Activism of Henry Spira (1927-1988) Society and Animals, 10 (2): 173-191.

Regan, T. (1983) The Case for Animal Rights. California: University of California Press.

Singer, P. (1975) Animal Liberation. New York: Harper Collins Publications.

Singer, P. (1998) Ethics in Action. London: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Rawls, J. (1969) “The Justification of Civil Disobedience” in Freeman, S. (EDS) John Rawls Collected Papers. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 176-190.

Tarrow, S,G. (1994) Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wikipedia. (2021) Animal Rights Movement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_rights_movement [Accessed on the 3/1/22]

Wikipedia (2021) Francais Power Cobbe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Power_Cobbe [Accessed on 3/1/22]

With the unlimited money of Disney Plus Marvel keep churning out more and more content at an uneven pace in terms of quality. Their latest attempt is an animated series called ‘What if?’ where a narrator who is a kind of multiversal celestial being talks us through a series of possible worlds where reality involves characters we are familiar from the cannon Marvel Cinematic Universe but who live different lives from the ones we know. Each episode is supposed to be a different universe and all episodes are distinct from the Marvel Universe we take as cannon.

In the latest ‘What-if?’ episode we are shown a story about Dr Strange which was very sad and moving. The story involves Dr Strange’s wife being killed in a car crash. Strange cannot cope with his girlfriend’s death and uses the eye of Agamotto (an enchanted stone which gives him some control over time), to try and change the past and ensure that his girlfriend never dies. However, no matter how many times Strange changes the past his girlfriend keeps on dying. The story unfolds with Strange obsessively trying and failing to stop his girlfriend from dying. The culmination is that Strange turns to the dark arts to bring back his girlfriend while he does end up bringing her briefly back to life, she is terrified of the abomination that he has become, and she ends up dying anyway.  Ultimately, the spell which brought her back to life ends up destroying the entire universe, except for Strange, leaving him on his own crying and bemoaning his mistakes.

As the episode ends one is left feeling some sympathy for Strange as he weeps and regrets his actions. But while an immediate sense of sympathy for a character is understandable one, it leads one to reflect on whether the sympathy is warranted. When Strange starts to try and modify time to bring his wife back it first seems to be motivated by love. But slowly it takes the form of an obsession, a dreadful need to control reality that is motivated less and less by love as the episode ends. In one sense the fact that Strange appears to be motivated less and less by love makes him a less sympathetic character. But on another level his compulsive need to control reality reveals a child like side of Strange that is both pathetic and tragic. Strange seems to want reality to unfold precisely as he wills it and one is left to feel some pity for his puerile attempts to play god. But to pity a person is not to justify their behaviour. We can pity a person who is in the depths of alcoholism who drives under the influence and ends up knocking someone down and killing them[1]. The pity can derive from the fact that the person is a pathetic figure who wasn’t fully in control of their actions. However, even if one did feel pity for the drunk driver, most people would still hold the drunk driver morally responsible for his actions. To hold a person morally responsible for their actions one needs to argue that they could have done otherwise. The drunk driver could have chosen to not drink when he was driving, or if he felt compelled to drink, he could have desisted from driving. If the drunk person couldn’t have done otherwise, then he cannot be held responsible for his actions. A determinist who argues that all our behaviours are determined by causal antecedents would hold the view that ultimately nobody is responsible for their actions.

But adopting a determinist perspective on Dr Strange’s behaviour in his fictional world may be in tension with what we know about the Marvel Multiverse. In the episode we are discussing there is a twist where we find out that the sorcerer supreme splits Strange in two (unknownst to Strange), so while one version of Strange obsessively tries to bring his girl friend back to life the other one moves on with his life and is a force for good in his universe. Indeed, the whole premise of ‘What If?’, is that there exists an infinite possible version of Dr Strange all of them living slightly different lives.  Furthermore, we know from the Marvel Cinematic Universe that there exists at least one other Strange whose girlfriend died in a crash and yet this Strange managed to move on with his life without destroying a universe. To some the fact that there are alternative versions of Strange who do not engage in his abhorrent behaviours indicate that he could have done otherwise.

In the under-described and fictional world of Marvel which appeals to magic as well as pseudo-scientific explanation in its world building; there will obviously be no matter of fact answer to whether Strange’s behaviour was determined. However, from the point of view of the real world, our world, there is no logical compulsion that possible worlds or a multiverse imply the existence of freewill. In fact physicist Sean Carroll argues that one version of the multiverse which is supported by a realistic interpretation in Quantum Mechanics is entirely deterministic:

“The right way to think about the causality is “some microscopic processes happened that caused branching, and on different branches you ended up making different decisions,” rather than “you made a decision, which caused the wave function in the universe to branch”…Quantum Mechanics is not necessarily indeterministic. Many-Worlds is a counterexample. You evolve, perfectly deterministically, from a single person now into multiple persons at a future time. No choices come into the matter anywhere.” (Sean Carroll ‘Something Deeply Hidden pp 214-218)

There is obviously no fact of the matter about whether Strange lives in a deterministic universe like our own one. Nonetheless he does make a useful thought experiment on whether we should feel sympathy for people in a deterministic universe. In this authors view a deterministic universe should elicit universal sympathy; as no agent is truly responsible for their behaviour. But responsible or not they get to live their behaviour.

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[1] Some would argue that it would be inappropriate to feel sympathy for the drunk driver that all sympathy should be directed towards the innocent victim killed by the drunken driver and the victim’s family. However, it is possible to feel some sympathy for the drunk driver even if most of your sympathy is with the victim and his family.

Below I will briefly outline the central outline of Forrester’s book ‘In the Shadow of Justice’. The primary aim of the blow will be to outline what the central arguments are she presents in each chapter. I will present a more thorough criticism of the book in my next blogpost.

Chapter 1 of Forrester’s ‘In the Shadow of Justice’, focuses on the development of Rawls Theory of Justice. Forrester portrays Rawls firmly as a man of his time who took on the concerns of his time and firmly integrated them into his political theories. In the aftermath of World War 2, with the rise of communism in Russia, western thinkers were concerned with the dangers of totalitarianism.  In Forrester’s view Rawls philosophical system was shot through with concerns of too much state control drifting towards a totalitarian state. Hence, key concern of Rawls’ Theory of Justice was to minimise state control except where necessary. Rawls two principles, (1) to maximise liberty to the degree that one’s liberty didn’t impinge on others liberty and (2) The equality principle: differences in income were only permitted if they differences benefited the least advantaged members of society, was a threadbare structure designed to ensure basic justice while minimizing state interference. Forrester’s chapter seems to be written for an intended audience of analytic philosophers who, to their detriment, sometimes focus entirely on abstract philosophical argumentation and downplay the importance of time and context in shaping theories.

            While Forrester does a good job in tracing the roots of Rawls’s Theory of Justice, she doesn’t go into much detail in evaluating the justification for Rawls’s theory. Forrester details the influence of linguistic philosophy (Wittgenstein’s, Ryle etc) on Rawls’s conception of a society being like a game which consists of rules made by people, but she never questions whether Rawls was justified in adopting this approach. She notes that Rawls attempted to constrain his conception of what a just society could look by grounding his view of human nature in facts discovered in psychology, in particular Piaget’s developmental approach to human nature. While Forrester places Rawls’s firmly as a product of his time in terms of societal trends and philosophical concerns, she fails to do so, when it comes to scientific influences on Rawls’s theory.

            While Rawls obviously cannot be faulted for scientific developments which occurred after he was writing, contemporary scientific, research indicates that Piaget’s developmental story underestimated the innate constraints on human development. Any conception of society models it on an analogy of man-made games will have to face the question of whether the type of games we can play will be constrained by our innate psychology. While Forrester does a good job of tracing the degree to which Rawls is a product of his times in most cases, she doesn’t sufficiently detail the degree to which his scientific understanding was time specific, and how this time specific scientific world-view effects the validity of Rawls’s theory of justice.

Chapter 2  ‘Obligations’ centres on Rawls and his contemporaries evolving views on our obligation to the state. The sixties in America were a time of unrest, and there were protests centred on a variety of different issues, such as civil rights issues, anti-war protests, nuclear disarmament protests etc. Forrester notes that one of the hot button issues philosophers needed to address when considering our obligations to the state is civil disobedience and when it is justified. When appealing to the notion of civil disobedience Rawls modelled it on the concept of fair play. By entering society and receiving the benefits of being a member, people acquire obligations to that society. One such obligation is to not engage in practices that are harmful to that society. A key concept for Rawls when thinking through these issues was the importance of the stability of our society. Rawls argued that if most people had agreed on the principles and constitutions for society then this limited the scope of legitimate protest. Rawls went as far as to argue that even if a person could show on utilitarian grounds that civil disobedience could do more good than harm then this would not justify the disobedience. He argued if people are part of a fair practice and receiving benefits from it then their duty of fair play bound them to abide by the laws even if they personally find them unjust. Forrester notes that Rawls did offer some scope for civil disagreement noting that if a society is deliberately disadvantaging a particular group of people, then they are no longer bound by the duty of fair play.

            Forrester does a good job of showing how philosophers writing at the time disagreed with Rawls views on civil disobedience on the grounds that it proposed a very high bar on when civil disobedience is justified. And she does a good job of situating Rawls philosophical in their historical context, which is something which isn’t always done when discussing philosopher’s philosophical views.

             The primary question discussed in this chapter is when is civil discontent justified? It is a timely question and one that is obviously pertinent today. The protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd which were screened all over the world paint a visceral reaction in most people. And people’s response to the riots have divided people in America and across the world. Rawls’s general principles seem very disembodied and abstract, but they do offer proposals for when civil dissent is justified. However, as Forrester correctly notes the bar set by Rawls for legitimate civil dissent is extremely high and does rule out a lot of dissent that citizens would argue is justified.

Chapter 3 ‘War and Responsibility’, focuses on Rawls and his fellow philosopher’s reaction to the Vietnam War. The Vietnam war raised several philosophical issues. In the wake of the war some philosophers wanted to thread a line between the extremes of Utilitarian justifications of any war crime on pragmatic grounds, and passivism which condemned any war act no matter how justified. The backdrop of these philosophical discussions were war crimes in Vietnam such as the My Lai massacre which involved the mass murder and rape of hundreds of innocent Vietnam citizens. While the My Lai massacre was an obvious case of a war crime; philosophers wanted to find a set of moral principles which could deal with more ambiguous war acts. One attempted principle was the doctrine of double effect which roughly put states that if a person does something which is morally good, but which has an unintended side effect which is bad, we can judge the persons act as ethically ok. Forrester describes Anscombe’s explication of the doctrine of double effect and outlines the responses of philosophers such as Philippa Foot, and Rawls to the argument. And she notes that Rawls found the doctrine somewhat compelling as an alternative to Utilitarianism. Furthermore, Rawls found the argument convincing as it gave him a way of avoiding the supposed extremes of passivism and utilitarianism. Nonetheless despite Rawls being impressed with the arguments for the double effect doctrine he claimed that the best way to explicate the limits of a just war was to argue from the Original Position. Thus, Rawls noted that no rational agent would opt for a genocide option when reasoning under the veil of Ignorance.

            The central focus of the chapter is on how philosophers tried to rise to the challenge of the Vietnam war and the horrific acts that occurred during the war. She notes that philosophers tried to deal with the ethical challenges raised by the war using a series of thought experiments designed to help us think clearer about the ethical issues it raised. She did an excellent job in explicating the various positions philosophers took on the ethical issues. However, the central subject of her book John Rawls played less of a role in the chapter than he did in other areas of the book. The chapter could have benefited from her going into more detail on Rawls evolving views on the ethical challenges posed by war.

Chapter 5 ‘Going Global’, details the various attempts by philosophers influenced by Rawls to deal with problems of global justice. Forrester details the responses of three Rawlsian Philosophers (Brian Barry, Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge) to dealing with problems of global justice. Forrester outlined the fact that Singer’s 1972 paper ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’ which was a utilitarian attempt to sketch our global duties to each other. Rawls had been very critical of utilitarian philosophy in general and his Theory of Justice was very critical of utilitarian conceptions of justice. With criticisms of Rawls Theory of Justice abounding and Singer presenting a utilitarian account of international justice; Rawlsian philosophers set out to explicate how Rawls theory could be developed to cope with problems of international justice.

            Rawls had been sceptical about whether his Original Position could be scaled up to a global scale. He thought that it was psychologically implausible that people across the international community could realistically comply with the principles. He argued that in order to realistically expect people to comply with any principles agreed to in the original position they would need to be from a shared community. Charles Beitz argued that Rawls was incorrect in this assumption and that if Rawls really accepted this assumption, then he would find it hard to explain how his Original Position would work for people who lived in large states. Beitz argued that once in the Original Position in an international arrangement people would agree that redistribution was necessary from poor to rich states.

            Beitz’s Rawlsian position was criticized from a number of directions; some philosophers noted that Beitz’s position because it abstracted from history, was guilty of being unable to handle the facts that some nations are poor because of their exploitation by other nations in the past. While others such as Brian Barry noted that Beitz’s theory had the conspicuous failing that he never told a plausible political story of how we would convince richer nations to redistribute their wealth.

            Forrester tells a story of philosophers beginning to deal with international justice in concrete terms before becoming more and more abstract and concerned with internal consistency and the world fell from view to Rawlsian Philosophers. I think she made her case very well and went into good detail in exploring the various philosophical attempts to make Rawls theory of justice cross international boundaries. However, since her ultimate focus was on how Rawlsian philosophers became so abstract in their theorizing they lost sight of the world, I think her case would have been helped by contrasting the Rawlsians with Utilitarian Philosophers who were becoming more and more concrete in their thinking at the same time Rawlsians were losing sight of the world.

Chapter 4  ‘The New Egalitarians’ tells the story of the publication of Rawls theory of Justice and its reception by his critics. Several of Rawls critics on the left argued that his conception of man in the Original Position was unrealistic and influenced by the concept of homo-economicus. They further argued that his distributive principle offered little practical advice on how to implement it. They noted that Rawls theory relies on the rich being benefactors for the most disadvantaged but does not tell us how convince rich people to depart with a proportion of their wealth and redistribute them to the poor. Having sketched a number of objections to Rawls from the left Forrester goes outline criticisms from the right in the form of Robert Nozick’s famous criticism of Rawls in his Anarchy, State and Utopia.  Nozick argued that Rawls principles of redistribution were unjust because they ignored the historical conditions in which wealth was acquired. For Nozick people have rights independent of any social contract and the historical process of acquiring one’s wealth and property gives us rights that should not be overridden by any social contract theory. Forrester argues that the challenge set by Nozick’s criticisms led to a series of philosophers self-consciously identifying as Rawlsians. Forrester claims that there are three principles that self-described Rawlsians seemed to share: (1) The importance of basic structure, (2) An egalitarian commitment (3) Lack of sensitivity to historical arguments (ibid p. 130)

            The Rawlsian argument that involved abstracting away from historical contingencies didn’t just draw ire from people on the right like Nozick, for many on the left Rawls ignoring history was very problematic. In the era of civil-rights disputes activists noted that black people had been systematically disadvantaged throughout the ages, through slavery and institutional racism. A proposed resolution for this unjust state of affairs was the notion that reparations should be paid to those whose lives have been systemically made worse because of these historical facts. Forrester notes that because of the conceptual features of the Original Position that Rawls sketches he hasn’t got the resources to deal with things like reparations and his redistribution position is blind to considerations like reparations. Overall, Forrester does a good job of outlining the reaction to Rawls book by the left and the right. And she made an interesting case that it was a reaction to Nozick’s criticisms that lead a lot of philosophers to self-consciously identify as Rawlsian philosophers.

Chapter 6 of Forrester’s ‘In the Shadow of Justice’ focuses on philosophers who were influenced by Rawls (either positively or negatively), and their attempt to understand what our ethical obligations to future generations were. After the publication of the Ehrlich’s 1968 best seller ‘The Population Bomb’, the issue of what our duties are to future generations became prominent for philosophers. Rawls 1971 ‘A Theory of Justice’ didn’t appear to have the conceptual resources to deal with the issues raised considerations of our obligation to the future.

            A key question of the original position was who was in it. Rawls had argued that subjects in the original position represented people from all areas of society. However, he argued it would be psychologically impossible to include parties from all generations in the original position. But Rawls didn’t want people in the original position think only of the present moment and to entirely discount the future. For this reason, he inserted two arguments into his Original Position (1) People behind the veil of ignorance were deprived of knowledge of what generation they were from, (2) People behind the veil were part of a family line stretching into the past and the future. Rawls believed that having people as members of family lines would make them sympathetic to people a couple of generations down the line. While not knowing what generation they were from would temper them from being too parochial in their thinking.

            Forrester details several critics reactions to Rawls attempt to deal with the problem of the future. One major criticism sprung from Hardin’s conception of the future as being one which will inevitably lead to population crises, famine etc. Rawls famous circumstances of justice made it of a criterion of the principles of justice that there is ‘moderate scarcity’ in resources. Having moderate scarcity as a criterion meant that Rawls principles of justice would not be binding an any future like the lifeboat story Hardin told where severe scarcity ruled. Forrester goes on to note that philosophers influenced by Rawls tried to handle difficulties raised by his principles of justice by focusing on different aspects of his theory to save it from criticism.

            Forrester does a good job of surveying the different reactions to Rawls theory of justice in relation to problems of duties to future generations. She also manages to clearly demonstrate how by emphasising different aspects of Rawls theory different philosophers were capable of shaping his theory for different purposes.

Chapter 7 ‘New Right and Left’ focuses on philosophical reactions to the rise of the right in both Britain and America. With Thatcher as prime minister of England and Regan as president of America the philosophy of free market capitalism was very much in vogue. This free market capitalism with its emphasis privatisation of public goods and the confident belief that the market could magically fix all ills was key belief of a substantial amount of people in power in the late seventies and throughout the eighties.

            Forrester discusses how philosophers on the left and right reacted to the above political developments. Philosophers like Dworkin reacted to the rise of the right by a social democratic theory that is decoupled from its association with the labour movement. Dworkin was cheerleading the movement of the labour party away from its leftist origins towards a more centrist position. With his thought experiment about people stranded on an island Dworkin argued for a basic structure where people would agree on trade solutions and a kind of social insurance picked from a veil of ignorance. When behind this veil of ignorance, the people do not know whether they have a disability or a marketable talent. Each person can buy insurance against the risks they take. Once out of the veil of ignorance they either win or lose depending on the level of insurance they have and the marketability of their talents. But at this stage any risks they take and whether they win or lose is up to them. Forrester notes that Dworkin’s notions of responsibility, choice and markets were ideas shared by people on the right.

            She goes on to argue that philosophers on the left began to incorporate a lot of Dworkins ideas of responsibility, choice and markets and these ideas became a kind of framework for centrist thought. She ends her chapter with a discussion of how Rawls tamed challenges to his views from Marxist perspectives and domesticated analytical Marxists to quasi Rawlsians. Ultimately, she argues that leftist politics morphed into a Rawlsian redistributive paradigm working within market forces and not really challenging them.

            Forrester does an excellent job of telling how philosophers reacted to political developments in the late seventies and eighties. It would have been interesting to tell the story from the opposite end and discuss how the market forces shaped the type of stories these philosophers felt comfortable telling.

Chapter 8 of Forrester’s book explores a sleuth of philosophers who were very critical of Rawls. She uses these philosophers’ criticisms of him to try and tell a story of how Rawls brand of liberalism fell out of favour. Forrester notes that (1) Rawls is regarded as one of the best and most influential philosophers this century, (2) He is a paradigm exemplar of liberal philosophy, (3) Liberal philosophy not very respected in contemporary political discourse by a substantial proportion of the population. A key aspect of chapter 8 is to try to explicate Rawls liberalism as a product of its time and to explain how liberalism fell out of favour.

Forrester draws on the work of a dozen critics of Rawls liberal philosophy in her chapter 8. Philosophers as diverse as Stanley Cavell, Alister Macintyre, Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty attacked Rawls liberal philosophy as relying on an aminic notion of the self and an atomised conception of the self that ignored the social world of engaged active agents.  As Rawls philosophy developed over the years, he came to stress Kantian aspects of his philosophy. To his critics Rawls views of the self with its emphasis on rules and rational agents downplayed the importance of the lived world. Forrester explicates Bernard Williams attack on Rawls rule-based conception of justice as being psychologically implausible. She also does a good job of detailing other philosophers such as Cavell and Rorty who use evidence from art and psychoanalysis to demonstrate that Rawls conception of the self and is implausible and this fact undermines the whole theory of justice which is built on this conception of the self.

            Forrester notes that there is a great irony in the criticisms levelled at Rawls in that he at times held similar views to those of his critics such as Williams and Cavel. In his 1963 ‘The Sense of Justice’ Rawls sketchs a moral psychology which he argues is consistent with the choices that would be made in the original position. While Rawls conception of the developing self is told in abstract academic tones, he does take on bord considerations from theorists such as Freud, Piaget. In short Rawls sketches three kinds of guilt (1) authority guilt, (2) association guilt, and (3) principle guilt (The Sense of Justice p.100). Rawls conception of the child developing his moral principles based on feelings of guilt tells a story of the self that is not quite as abstract and disembodied as critics like Cavel and Williams suggest.

             A major difficulty in her treatment is that because she discusses so many theorists, she doesn’t give herself enough space to delve into the argumentative structure of Rawls’ major critics. Aside from her quick treatment of Rawls critics I would argue that the narrative she was trying to tell of critics of Rawls leading to defanged liberal philosophy blinded her to liberal critics of Rawls whose views are eminently practical such as Nussbaum and Singer.

David Berman has a new book out on Consciousness. He describes it as follows:

“My book, Consciousness from Descartes to Ayer contains my fullest and clearest account of what I take to be the dualist and monist types. 

The book consists of four chapters and an Epilogue.  Its main thesis, put forward in chapter one, is that all humans have one of two basic forms of consciousness, one that is monistic, the other is dualistic. Yet it is universally believed that all humans have one basic and natural form of consciousness. This is what I call the Assumption, which I take to be profoundly untrue. Yet I do accept that all humans have a mode of consciousness that has arisen through nurture and is a mixture of the monistic and dualistic in the way that green is a mixture of yellow and blue.  The greenish mode of consciousness is what I call socio-linguistic, because it is constituted by language and required for living in society. And it is this socio-linguistic mode of consciousness that has largely occluded the monistic and dualistic. 

Chapter one is foundational, and the following three chapters build on its foundation.  Chapter two, entitled ‘Irish Philosophy: Past and Future’, begins with an account of the one period when Ireland was at the cutting edge of world philosophy. This was the golden age, which was born with John Toland’s Christianity not Mysterious (1696), grew with the answers to his challenge, culminating in the work of Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke and especially George Berkeley, and then came to a close in the late 1750s. One thesis of this chapter is that Ireland might again be at the cutting edge if it follows the lead of its two greatest thinkers, Toland, the great monist, and Berkeley, the great dualist.  But the more important aim of this chapter is to display the two basic types as exemplified by Berkeley and Toland. 

Chapter three is on David Hume, another great monist, and his use of what I call the Art of theological lying, as found most clearly in his celebrated account of miracles. However, my more important and controversial thesis, which is the main focus of this chapter, is that Hume also uses the Art in his alleged retraction of his monistic theory of personal identity, according to which theory a person is only a bundle of perceptions with no perceiver of these perceptions.  In short, what I try to show is that Hume’s alleged retraction of his monistic theory in the Appendix to his Treatise was not sincere but Artful and strategic lying. And this is both explained and supported by my account of monism and dualism in chapter one. However, if my main claim in chapter three is accepted- which I think it should be, since powerfully supported by the available evidence- then that would show the power of typal theory developed in chapter one.  

Chapter four is chiefly on A.J. Ayer, who, like Hume, was a monist. But while Ayer followed Hume in many ways, what I try to show is that he can be considered a clearer and more complete monist than Hume.  Another aim of this chapter is to show how much tangle and confusion there is in 20^th century philosophy, but how the tangle can be untangled once we see the importance of the dualist and monist dichotomy as described in chapter one. 

In the conclusion of this work, the Epilogue, I address what, it is generally agreed, distinguishes human beings from other animals, namely that we are the most social animal, which is shown in our ability to live and operate in huge numbers.  But whereas most biologists and anthropologists trace this to our genetic makeup, I trace it to a cultural development which occurred circa 30,000 to 70, 000 years ago, when Homo sapiens learned to speak, that is, understand and teach symbolic language.  This is the kind of language which no other animal has acquired; for their use of language is limited to signs, such as that of danger, which is largely instinctive and genetic. Whereas symbolic language, which we human beings alone have, is and was a cultural acquisition that must be taught and learned if it is not to be lost.  And this cultural acquisition I argue, drawing on the 2010 breakthrough in evolutionary genetics and my account of basic types in chapters 1-4, arose from the successful mating of Homo sapiens with the Neanderthal 30,000 to 70,000 years ago and, more specifically, the (temporary) emergence of hybrids.”

                                           Free Speech Absolutism

In political debates across the internet the issue of free speech has taken on a central role. It is primarily (though not exclusively) people who identify on the centre or right of the political spectrum who are concerned with this issue. The worry they voice is that liberal types in big tech, or other corporate organisations and University admins are sacrificing free speech to appease the PC or so called ‘Woke’ brigade. To address this worry they point to what they think of paradigm as examples of people’s speech being stifled; such as Professors being told they will lose their job if they don’t refer to people by their preferred pronouns, or people being banned from Twitter or YouTube for purported hate speech. The free-speech absolutists take it as a mantra that free-speech is a fundamental right that should not be overrun no matter the cost. Pod-caster Joe Rogan who is a member of a group called the IDW which is obsessed with the notion of free speech, has discussed this issue on many occasions. Rogan holds the view that the solution to hate speech isn’t banning people from public platforms, rather the solution to hate speech is more speech countering it.

Not all theorists who worry about free speech hold the wild view that any speech should be allowed no matter the consequences. Thus, a substantial proportion of the IDW supported Jordan Peterson threatening to sue people who wrote articles critical of his work. Their view was that this wasn’t a free speech issue but rather it was an issue of defamation of character; hence it was legal issue. I won’t get into the issue of whether Peterson’s use of lawyers was justified from a legal perspective, I will just note that those who support Peterson on this issue do agree that there should be some legal constraints on the notion of free speech. Such people presumably wouldn’t support a Rogan type figure who said that the solution to defamation is to simply state why you disagree with what the person said; as opposed to making defamation illegal.

The notion of speech being constrained for legal reasons should not seem overly objectionable to most people. Speech is a form of behaviour, and like all other behaviour, it is constrained in various ways for various reasons. Driving a Car is a form of behaviour. This behaviour is severely constrained for a variety of different reasons. When driving you are only allowed to drive on one side of the road, you cannot drive through a red traffic light, and you can only drive at a certain speed. Walking is a form of behaviour. I cannot just walk anywhere I want. If there is a sign outside a house that says: ‘Private Property: Trespassers will be prosecuted’, then I cannot just walk into the house. My behaviour of walking and driving are subject to many legal constraints. Likewise, my verbal behaviour is subject to many constraints legal and otherwise. A clichéd example is the example of shouting ‘Fire’ in a busy theatre, when there demonstrably no fire and causing a riot. This is a form of verbal behaviour that will result in getting one banned from the theatre. As we discussed above defamation of character is a form of verbal behaviour that will lead to you getting sued if it is proven you engaged in it. Part of living in a complex society means that a lot of your behaviour (whether Verbal or not) is constrained for a variety of different reasons.

Given these obvious facts one wonders why the debate is framed as it is. Why would one side call themselves free speech absolutists? Why would the likes of Rogan argue that the proper response to hate speech is better speech? Is the proper response to people driving on the wrong side of the road to set an example by driving on the right side of the road? All behaviour has consequences and hence there are rules in place that constrain some of our behaviours. So why then do people appear to be more worried about free speech in the case of verbal behaviour than they are with other kinds of behaviour? I think that the reason people have such worries is because of the spectre of Orwell’s 1984.

In Orwell’s 1984 we are told of a totalitarian world where the government has strict rules on the way people think and the aim of the government is to make thoughts critical of their regime unthinkable. This nightmarish world presents a terrifying picture of reality. Few people agree with Orwell that language determines reality to such an extent that governments banning words like ‘Freedom’ from public discourse will stop people from being able to think about freedom. Nonetheless as power gets centralized into massive corporations who hold more power than most world governments do; one can understand why people may be fearful about such people using their power to control the topics we are allowed to speak about. If Twitter or YouTube ban certain topics from even being discussed people some people feel that we are veering towards a state of affairs where a handful of tech billionaires get to decide what people are allowed to say about certain political topics.

The Orwellian worries go even deeper than just worries about whether tech companies are banning people for certain speech acts. The worry is also that these tech billionaires are trying to implement a type of Orwellian thought control where you get people to accept certain patently false statements. In 1984 the party forced Winston to believe that 2 + 2=5 for no other reason than to establish dominance over him and divorce him from any other reality than the reality of big brother. Some free speech absolutists draw a line in the sand, they hold certain truths as immutable facts, or ground works that cannot coherently be questioned.  One such line in the sand free speech absolutists draw is on the issue of biological sex. These Orwellian worries take the form of arguing that tech billionaires, university admins, and corporations of all sorts are trying to force people to deny obvious biological facts. Why are these corporations supposedly trying to control our thoughts? The answer to this question depends on which conspiracy theorist you talk to. One set of conspiracy theorist will argue that the corporations are being forced to do this by ‘woke’ people who are unknowingly in the grip of Neo-Marxist ideology. To another set of conspiracy theorists the aim is to get people to lose grip of any objective reality and give those in power the ability to control what you can speak of and destroy any answerability to the world. In this nightmare world the only thing you are answerable to is those in power.

So called Free Speech Absolutists range from people who think that some of our verbal behaviour may be subject to restrictions for various reasons in the same way that all other behaviour is subject to constraints, to conspiracy theorists who think that attacks on our free speech are part of some Orwellian Plot to control us and divorce us from any concept of reality. In addressing these views, it is important to consider how free is our free speech is in general, independently of the contexts free speech absolutists typically care about. In ordinary conversations does the notion of free speech play much of a role.

                           How Free is Free Speech?

“One fundamental contribution of what we have been calling “Cartesian Linguistics” is the observation that human language, in its normal use, is free from the control of  independently identifiable external stimuli or internal states and it is not restricted to any practical communicative function…The limitless possibilities of thought and imagination are reflected in the creative aspect of language use. Language provides finite means and infinite possibilities of expressions constrained only by rules of concept formation and sentence formation” (Chomsky ‘Cartesian Linguistics’ p. 77)

Linguist Noam Chomsky has noted that Language has some curious properties. These properties should be acknowledged in any discussion of Free-Speech. A key feature of language is linguistic productivity which relies on a basic set of concepts and a grammar with a recursive device (the ability to embed concepts within concepts), by using these tools humans have the capacity to construct a potentially infinite amount of sentences. It is not just that we can construct a potentially infinite number of grammatical sentences, we also manage to construct a potentially infinite number of sentences that are coherent. Chomsky gives a famous grammatical sentence ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ while the sentence is grammatically well formed it has no meaning, and the idea of green ideas sleeping furiously does not seem to be coherent. Most sentences humans speak are coherent. Grammatical but incoherent sentences are very unusual in the normal linguistic community. Aside from sentences typically having combinatorial productivity, and coherence they also typically have appropriateness to the situation. If two people were sitting at a table and one of them proposed to the other. There are many different responses that could be offered. Such as accepting the proposal or saying no I am not ready for the marriage. But if a person responded to the proposal by saying ‘No black scorpions are falling on this table’, most people would judge this a very inappropriate response. Normal human sentences are typically appropriate to the situation in which they are spoken.

            Linguistic productivity, coherence, and appropriateness to the situation are indeed key features of language. However, Chomsky goes even further than just pointing out these three truisms. Chomsky argues that these capacities are un-caused by environmental factors and social reinforcement or by internal factors ( Cartesian Linguistics p. 77). He goes on to further argue that it is a mystery how we manage to use language freely and appropriately.

            Chomsky’s conception of language as an instrument of thought that we can freely use is one that is congenial to so called free speech absolutists. It is also congenial to the individualistic way Western people have been encultured. While there is much in Chomsky’s account that is very persuasive, his emphasis on behaviour being uncaused is very strange. In his ‘Criticism of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour’, Chomsky lambasted Skinner’s use of the notion of stimulus control. Chomsky gave an example of a person viewing a picture in a museum. He noted the absurdity of thinking that every time the person saw the picture they said ‘picture’ or ‘art’ etc. Chomsky was of course correct to note that words aren’t elicited in a crude stimulus response manner. Nonetheless he was incorrect in his belief that Skinner was proposing a stimulus-response account of word learning, and he ignored the fact that Skinner emphasized multiple sources of control of our use of words. I won’t today go into the long complicated debate between Skinner and Chomsky, I will just note that both of them are making contradictory assumptions about role the environment plays in the causation of verbal behaviour and neither really manages to justify their a-priori intuitions[1]. Skinner assumes that our language is under constant environmental control (and control from the environment our ancestors evolved in through genetic constraints), but never demonstrated this fact. Chomsky argues that our ability to coherently an appropriately use language is a mystery which will probably always remain beyond our ken an he even speculates that this ability may not be causally explicable through either internal factors or external factors.

            We won’t solve the debate between Chomsky and Skinner on this topic but I think it is worth just thinking through the notion of verbal behaviour and ways that it may be constrained by environmental and psychological contingencies. Thinking through these different constraints may help us understand whether the notion of free speech absolutism makes sense.

            In ordinary every-day conversation we implicitly police the type of speech we use. People do not speak about the same things or in the same way when conversing with a very young child, as they would when talking to another adult. A plausible reason why we speak in this way to young children is that they prefer that type of speech so give us positive feedback when we engage in it (Fernalt 1985). Furthermore if we spoke to an adult using motherese they would more than likely find it irritating and condescending and a normal human would pick up on cues from the adult that they don’t find the speech tone appropriate. To some degree the way we talk to a person (whether an adult or a child) is constrained by environmental feed back such as how they react to the speech.

            Even in simple conversational things such as slips of the tongue we sometimes indicate a type of implicit policing of our verbal behaviour. A lot of Freud’s theories have been discredited and his reputation has probably never been lower. However, his two books ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’, and his ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’ offer some plausible speculations as to why we make slips of the tongue. These speculations aren’t scientific but they do offer a mirror into the types of factors that sometimes influence us making slips of the tongue.

            Freud tells a story about him and his children staying with a family friend in a summer resort. The host was anti-Semitic and was ranting a series of horrible things about Jewish people. Freud, who was of course Jewish, wanted to reprimand the woman and correct her false claims about Jewish people. However, he didn’t want to start an argument and have to go find another place for him and his children to stay in. Freud’s discretion won out and he decided not to confront his host. But he decided to get his children out of the way of the hosts anti Semitism by asking the children to go to the garden. He turned to the children and said:

“Go into the garden, “Juden [Jews]”,  quickly correcting it to Jungen [youngsters]” (Psychopathology of Everyday Life p. 134)

A plausible interpretation of the events is that while one part of Freud wanted to admit to being Jewish, this part lost out because of other pragmatic issues. However, the part of him that wanted to admit being Jewish still managed to insert it into the conversation via a slip of the tongue. One doesn’t have to buy into Freudian Psychoanalysis to see that our every day conversations are shot through with our own pragmatic (largely unconscious) verbal behaviour and don’t just act like free speech absolutists. 

            In his Verbal Behaviour Skinner makes a similar point:

       “One of the two possible responses is differentially selected because the other is also to some extent punishing when the speaker uses a “euphemistic” expression. The euphemistic response has fewer aversive effects upon the speaker, either directly or indirectly through the listener.”  (Verbal Behaviour pp 235-336)

In Skinners example we use euphemisms because we have been trained that out right insults typically have punishing consequences. Again, we can see self-policing of verbal behaviour as people try to pragmatically make their way through life.

            This self-policing also occurs in jokes and again Skinner has an interesting quasi scientific take on jokes. I don’t entirely agree with Skinner’s take as I think incongruity resolution theory is a more comprehensive theory of jokes. However, I think that Skinner’s take is accurate to some cases of humour. Skinner makes the following point:

“Freud has emphasized the fact that witty responses are (a) automatically reinforcing to the speaker, (b) punishable by the listener or community. Humour is preoccupied with tabooed subjects, in particular sex, and with having aversive effects upon the listeners or others. Freud argued that wit permits the “release” of repressed responses, but the point can be made by saying that the response receiving supplemental support is weak because of punishment. Both interpretations miss an important point…The aggressive nature of the remark no doubt accounted for much of its strength; the function of the wit was to make an aggressive response unpunishable. But it is not enough to say that the speaker could appeal to the “harmless meaning” in a legalistic extenuation ( I was only adding a rather thoughtless conversational remark) because the “aggressive meaning” ( you may not be on the throne for long) was clear to everyone. Rather we have to appeal to a particular characteristic of the witty verbal community. Just as the literary community tolerates weak determiners of strength, so the witty community exacts a quid pro quo for otherwise offensive behaviour. It is almost as if the community had agreed: you may be aggressive provided you are amusing. (ibid pp.287-288)

Skinner’s account of humour is pretty basic, but it is on the money for a lot of cases. We have all probably used humour to lampoon people knowing full well that if we said the same thing in a serious way we would be punished. It seems reasonably plausible to argue that humour is another type of verbal behaviour that we engage in self-policing for a variety of pragmatic reasons.

            I don’t want to belabour the point too much, but Chomskian worries aside, most people will admit as obvious that our verbal behaviour in ordinary life is caught in a causal sequence where some verbal behaviour is deemed appropriate, and some inappropriate, and this dictates how we typically speak.

                                                    Concluding Thoughts

The purpose of this essay was merely to point out that our verbal behaviour is subject to societal constraints in the same way as all our other behaviour. Some of these constraints are self-imposed for the purposes of pragmatic interaction with each other, and some are legal for the purpose of running an effective and moral society containing a complex network of agents. In pointing out that the idea of Free-Speech absolutism makes little sense in terms of how language is typically used I am not giving censorship a free pass.

            Above I noted that Verbal Behaviour is a form of behaviour like all other behaviour. We have laws for how-to drive-in traffic which help us have a functioning travel system that is safe for citizens. Accepting constraints on driving behaviour doesn’t commit me to accepting absurd constraints on all behaviour; I wouldn’t agree with a constraint which involves imprisoning people without trial for criticizing the government. I look at verbal behaviour the same way. If a person posts details of how to make a deadly poison on Twitter and encourages their followers to make the poison and use it on certain people; then I think that person should be banned. But while I disagree with a lot of what Jordan Peterson says I think trying to ban his books or ban him from Twitter is absurd. I purposely chose Skinner, Freud and Chomsky to make some of my points. All three of them have at various points throughout their career had people try to ban their books as dangerous abominations. I hope it goes without saying that I am not comparing Peterson with Skinner or Chomsky in terms of intellectual achievements. My only point is that with someone like Peterson the proper course of action is to criticise his works on intellectual grounds (and hope he doesn’t sue you 😉 ) banning his books would be absurd.

            There are plenty of intermediary cases which are much more complex than banning people proposing mass murder and banning books with scientific theses you don’t agree with. I don’t have the answer to all of these cases. I would ask people to think of these cases in terms of embodied agents negotiating their way in the world and trying to minimize pain in as pragmatic a manner as possible. Thinking of free speech as some God given right of a disembodied Cartesian intelligence risks us losing touch with the world and the difficulties of negotiating it pragmatically.

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[1] Note the issue of causal accounts of verbal behaviour is not a debate about the existence of the language faculty nor is it a debate that rests on accepting Skinner’s behaviourism. Pinker argues for a language instinct, is a critic of behaviourism but would in no way accept the assumption that our linguistic behaviour is uncaused. I just focused on Skinner and Chomsky above because of their very clear and contradictory intuitions.

A key aspect of contemporary naturalistic analytic philosophy emphasises the fact that we cannot go directly to reality. Our grasp of reality is conceptually mediated. We do not have direct access to the thing in-itself. Our understanding of reality is of necessity mediated by our conceptual models. Naturalistic philosophers who argue against the Myth-of-the-Given (the idea that we have unmediated access to sensory data or the physical world), don’t all deny that we can refer to objects that exist outside of our conceptual scheme. Quine, for example, made heavy weight of observation sentences, sentences which hook onto aspects of the mind independent world. Even Quine’s biggest fans would acknowledge that he never managed to fully make clear the notion of an observation sentence and its relation to other sentences in our conceptual scheme. Philosophers of a more cognitive bent have tried to fix reference via internal cognitive structures with the role of conceptualization plays in fixing reference is still debated (See Fodor and Pylyshn’s 2014 criticism of Tyler Burge). Despite some impressive evidence from neuroscience; our best scientific theories still support the notion that our purchase on the world is gained in a theory laden way and we have no reasonable way of ripping our minds off and seeing the world as it is.

            Given this fact, I think it is worth reflecting on how the notion of observation is used in other schools of thought. In popular lore Phenomenology studies reality as it reveals itself to us in experience. On this caricatured view of phenomenology, we have experiences which are unmediated by conceptual schemes and it is the job of the philosopher to study these experiences prior to conceptualizing them. At the other end of the spectrum we are told observation plays a key role in behavioural science. Common lore has it that behavioural scientists refuse to acknowledge intermediate cognitive structures because they cannot be directly observed. Direct observation is the paradigm for the behavioural scientist; or so popular science tells us. Based on these two popular stories one could conclude that both behavioural science and phenomenology while approaching reality from different perspectives still agree on the same misguided premise; that we can directly observe reality. A critic who accepted the above caricatures could argue that both traditions haven’t kept up with developments in neuroscience, cognitive science and analytic philosophy.

            In this blog-post I will argue that the concept of observation used by both behavioural scientists and phenomenologists is much more sophisticated than the usual caricatures spouted by their critics. After explaining how both disciplines use the concept of observation I will then contrast them arguing that the behavioural notion of observation and measurement is incomplete and can be improved on by using insights from phenomenology.

            In tackling this project there is a danger that I will be applying labels in too broad a brush stroke. Phenomenologists from Husserl, Heidegger, Ponty and Derrida all start with radically different presuppositions. Likewise, in the field of Behavioural Science people like Watson, Skinner, Tolman, and Hayes all held widely divergent philosophical assumptions about the nature of the field. To avoid painting in too broad a brush stroke I will limit my approach to phenomenology as it is represented by Merlearu-Ponty and behavioural science as it is practiced by contemporary Applied Behavioural Analysis. By focusing on these different techniques and how they are used in the field I hope to be able to give a more grounded conception of how they use the notion of observation. In the final section I will draw some connections between behavioural science, phenomenology and their different ways of dealing with observation.

                          Behavioural Science and the Concept of Observation.

“Not to define precisely and to measure these behavioural excesses and deficiencies, then, is a fundamental error, it is akin to the malpractice of a nurse who decides not to measure vital signs (heart rate, respiration rate, temperature, and blood pressure), perhaps arguing that she is too busy, that subjective estimates of vital signs are quite adequate, the vital signs are only superficial estimates of the patient’s health, or that vital signs do not signify the nature of the underlying pathology. ( ABA p. 95)

While in the scientific community behavioural science is considered an outdated position, which was refuted by Chomsky half a century ago. In the applied sciences it is flourishing as a field. Applied Behavioural Analysis[1] focuses on behaviour modification and their chief clientele is people with autism and people with intellectual disabilities. They sell themselves as the only form of therapy that achieves predictable results which can be measured scientifically. Hence, they focus heavily on the notion of observation which they argue is the only way to guarantee that you can measure behavioural change.

            In ABA the emphasis isn’t so much on observation as on measurement of what is observed. And measurement is important for the ABA practitioner not because they want to sketch an epistemological theory of how we know what we know. Rather they argue that it is only through measurement we gain accurate descriptions and prediction and control of our subject matter. Without measurement our theories will be nothing more than subjective hunches. The key for the ABA practitioner is to gain predictive control over the subject matter they are studying. So rather than just relying on passive observation one is led down the route of using careful measurements of behaviours, so any behaviour change that occurs because of treatment can be precisely quantified.

            A behaviour is not just measured in isolation. So, for example, consider a form of self-injurious behaviour where a person is hitting themselves on the jaw. The aim of measuring this behaviour is to get answers about whether there are functional relations between the behaviour and environmental contingencies (ABA p. 94). To do this you need to ascertain when the behaviour began; what the antecedent events were that preceded the behaviour, the duration of the behaviour, the intensity of the behaviour, whether the behaviours varied or changed as a result of treatment. Furthermore, if you keep a detailed measure of anytime a particular behaviour occurs, you will be able to establish the possible effects of different environments on the intensity, duration and likelihood of the said behaviour occurring.

            ABA practitioners note that because behaviour occurs over time it has three primary qualities. (1) Countability: Instances of a response class can occur repeatedly through time. Hence, they can be counted. (2) Temporal extent: every behaviour occurs during some amount of time (which can be measured). (3) Temporal Locus: every behaviour occurs at a certain point of time with respect to other events (ibid p. 95).

            As a form of therapy ABA emphasises measurement because it is the only way to guarantee the efficaciousness of the treatment. As you cannot argue that a treatment led to certain problematic behaviours decreasing, unless you are able to quantify the how often the behaviour occurred prior to the treatment, and how often it occurred post treatment. While ABA’s emphasis on measurement is laudable and is a way of keeping honest about what you are achieving; there is a sense in which it gives an air of objectivity to your treatments that is not fully warranted.

                              Phenomenology and Intellectual Disability

“We must return to the social world with which we are in contact through the simple fact of our existence, and that we inseparably bear along with us prior to every objectification. The social world is already there when we come to know it or when we judge it. An individualistic or sociological philosophy is a certain perception of coexistence systematized and made explicit. Prior to this coming to awareness, the social exists silently and as a solicitation.” ( Phenomenology of Perception p. 379)

In our above discussion of behavioural science we discussed a person hitting themselves on the jaw repeatedly, the ABA beginning point was to count the amount of times the behaviour occurred, this approach in effect treats the person as an object in the world like any other object. The aim was to measure the intensity, duration, and temporal locus of an event because this type of accurate measurement made prediction and control of the subject more likely. This evidence-based approach is a useful tool which is favoured by many services because it is easier to justify spending on a form of therapy if one can objectively characterise its utility. However, from a phenomenological perspective this behavioural approach is open to criticism for ignoring a key form of evidence. The phenomenological approach asks us to key in on our lived experience of the world and this lived experience is sometimes ignored by behavioural methodology.

            From a behavioural perspective if an instance of challenging behaviour occurs the emphasis is on finding antecedents, measuring the behaviours that occurred during the incident, and measuring the consequences of the incident. Overtime, as we classify behavioural patterns into groups and measure how these patterns change based on treatment, we can map all this data statistically to demonstrate the rate of behaviour change. However, in all this measuring and classifying the lived world of experience is pushed out of our description of events.

In his Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty emphasized the lived world of experience which is at odds with the ABA conception of humans as just objects amongst objects waiting to be measured:

“…the whole escapes the well -known instruments of physical-mathematical analysis to open onto another type of intelligibility.” ( ibid p. 11)

When Ponty is criticizing the idea of studying humans using the tools of physical-mathematical analysis; he is attacking both empiricists such as Hume and the Logical Positivists. On Ponty’s view empiricists are guilty of ignoring the background conditions which give our observations sense. However, while his criticisms were directed to logical positivists and empiricists, they have clear relevance to the practice of ABA. Below Ponty describes what it is that he thinks the likes of ABA practitioners are missing:

“… we find, as a fundamental layer, a whole already pregnant with sense. This is not a series of incomplete sensations between which memories would have to be embedded, but rather the physiognomy-the structure of the landscape or of the world-spontaneously in accordance with our present intentions and with our previous experiences. Here the true problem of memory’s role in perception appears, and it is tied to the general problem of perceptual consciousness. It is a question of understanding how consciousness-by its own energy and without bringing along any additional materials in a mythical unconsciousness-can, with time, alter the structure of landscapes; how at each instant, its previous experience is present to it in the form of an horizon that it can reopen, if it takes the horizon as a theme for knowledge in an act of remembering, but can also leave “on the margins” and that thus immediately provides the perceived with a present atmosphere and signification. A field always available to consciousness that, for this very reason, surrounds and envelops all of its perceptions; it is an atmosphere, an horizon, or even the “settings” that assign consciousness a temporal situation-such is the present of the past that makes distinct acts of perception and remembering possible. To perceive is not to experience a multitude of impressions that bring along with them some memories capable of completing them, it is to see an immanent  sense bursting forth from a constellation of givens without which no call to memory is possible. To remember is not to bring back before the gaze of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past, it is to plunge into the horizon of the past and gradually to unfold tightly packed perspectives until the experiences that it summarizes are as if lived a new in their own temporal place. To perceive is not to remember. (ibid p. 23)

In the above lengthy quote Ponty is describing our perceptions and their relations to memory in a vastly different manner to the way in which ABA practitioners do. Consider our above example of a service user engaging in self-injurious behaviour. We have seen above how an ABA practitioner would address the situation in terms of quantification of the class of behaviour, the number of times the behaviour occurred, and antecedents and consequences of the behaviour. But Ponty’s emphasis would be on different factors.

            When you see another human engage in self-injurious behaviour you do not just see the behaviour from the outside as a passive observer. Rather you are caught up in the events occurring. While you can try to count the behaviours occurring, and afterwards analyse what has happened; at the moment the behaviour is occurring, you are a participant in an event and not an observer of an event. You see a person in distress who is hurting himself; this behaviour impacts on you emotionally. Furthermore, when this distress occurs memories at the horizons of your consciousness will become more prominent, your memories of previous experiences similar to this one will flood forward, these memories will colour how you experience the current event.

            As well your memories colouring how you deal with the self-injurious behaviour; your mind will also be directed towards the future. Based on your past experiences you will anticipate how long this behaviour may go on for and this will colour how you feel about this behaviour. All of this happens in the moment. But each moment floods into the next one and your engagement with the service user as you try to calm them down will ensue a flow of events that is unpredictable. Any behaviour you engage in to minimize the self-injurious behaviour will impact the consciousness of the service user you are working with. The service user may recall instances in the past where staff try to intervene when they engage in self-injurious behaviour and this recollection will colour how they experience the intervention. Their past experiences of interventions may colour how they view this current interaction.  Furthermore, they may have an idea of how much frustrations the interventions typically bring them; this may cause them to anticipate an extended period of frustration[2]. In this interaction you have two people engaging in a struggle, who interact and react to each other in a dynamic process that is not subject to prediction and control.  For any idea of measuring the behaviour of the service user to make sense; one would need to also put in place measurement system for the staff, which detailed their history of interactions with the service user and a system to analyse the culture of interaction in relation to group dynamics. Furthermore, an analysis of the dynamics that shaped this group would be necessary. When trying to quantify a service users behaviour ABA style a more contextual approach is needed. No behaviour occurs in isolation.

            An approach to a person that engages in self-injurious behaviour that treats the behaviour as an independent event to be measured, will ignore the fact that the person doing the measuring is not an objective scientific instrument like a thermostat or a camera but is rather a subject engaged in the drama unfolding in the moment.  Whether the person is aware of their own behaviour, feelings and how they are affecting the way the event unfolds or not they will still be a part of the event. And being aware of themselves and lived experience in the moment can help them modify their role in the event that is unfolding and this may offer an insight that is more useful than simply passively measuring the challenging behaviour.

            So, for example, a health care worker experiencing a service user engaging in a bout of challenging behaviour such as self-injurious behaviour and loud screaming may re call that in the past this behaviour lasted for hours. This recollection may make the worker experience frustration, which will make them tense and hence less effective in implementing calming procedures and could result in the behaviour getting worse. No amount of observing the behaviour of the service user will tell you why they their behaviour got worse unless you factor in your own feelings and behaviour that played a key causal role in the unfolding drama.

            One difficulty in understanding in these situations is that we are not always good at that type of self-reflection:

       “In general, a manner of thinking that is unaware of itself and that is at home in the things cannot be refuted by describing phenomena. The physicist’s atoms will always seem more real than the historical and qualitative picture of this world; the physico-chemical processes more real than organic forms; empiricisms psychic atoms more real than perceived phenomena; and intellectual atoms (namely, the Vienna Circle’s “significations”) more than real consciousness, so long as one seeks to construct the picture of this world, life perception, or mind, rather than recognizing the experience we have of them as the immediate source and as the final authority of our knowledge.” (ibid p. 24)

Here Ponty is noting that to a person so committed a scientistic philosophy the world as we experience it will always recede to a background and appear unreal. Such unreflective people will either dismiss the lived world of both them and the service user they are working with. However, despite this dismissive attitude; whether they like it or not they are immersed in this world and their engagement in this world will have influences on them that cannot be measured from the point of view of an objective spectator.

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[1] Henceforth Applied Behavioural Analysis will be referred to as ABA.

[2] The service user may have difficulties in projecting into the future or in remembering the past and this will impact on how they experience the interaction.