Hey!
The show is fun. Keep making it so that I can keep listening to it.
I have a question. In both the Kevin and Usher episodes there was a general impulse to talk about whether or not the characters in the stories shouldered the blame for what was going on. I want to hear more about that.
Namely, the chemistry of Kevin and Usher's brains seemed to exempt them from blame. Isn't the chemistry of our brains who we are? If we can't be blamed for the things that make us us, is blame even a helpful thing to talk about? And if it's not helpful to talk about, why is there such an impulse to talk about it?
Maybe you can find another bit of fiction where you get to talk about blame and I get to listen.
Keep having fun,
Ted
Jhana: I just had to respond to this great listener email. It's a topic that I love to think about and I can articulate my thoughts most clearly in a blog post. Cheers, Ted
It seems to be in vogue to point to brain states as the definitive factor for emancipation from moral responsibility and blame. After all, you didn’t choose your brain state, so how can you be held responsible for it and the actions it causes you to take?
The thought process goes like this: “That person didn’t choose brain state X, and therefore can’t be responsible for consequences of brain state X”
In his essay, “Moral Luck” Thomas Nagel brilliantly shows two things:
That the domain of “things beyond our control” extends FAR FAR beyond brain states and into every single fibre of our being and action we take.
We don’t really seem to care about the “degree to which someone did or did not have control over factor X” when examining our intuitions regarding blame & responsibility.
Example of 2: Even though two identical acts were taken by two people, and the actions were 100% beyond their control, if the consequences are worse for one of the two, we attribute more blame/responsibility to them.
Take two truck drivers who, on their way home, forget to check their brakes. One gets home safely, the other, when he is going down a hill has a little girl on a bike come out of nowhere and gets hit by the driver (due to his broken brakes). Both of these drivers have committed the exact same amount of negligence, yet we harbour so much more ill will towards the latter. Even though the only difference in these two cases is luck, we hold different attitudes towards each.
This is one of the four types of Moral Luck Nagel identifies.
Resultant Moral Luck (consequential): Two identical actions, different consequences (seen in example above).
Circumstantial Moral Luck: Different surroundings and environment leading to diff actions (ex. Regular person in Nazi Germany getting swept up in the regime and committing awful crimes vs a person in a safer environment, say Argentina, who, may be of similar character, but commits no such acts)
Constitutive Moral Luck: Differences in personality, temperament, upbringing, etc. lead to different behaviour. Along with brain states, all of the above listed are outside of the control of the individual.
Causal Moral Luck: basically the problem of free will & cause/effect. Less important for this blog post.
Ted astutely points out that brain states are a part of who we are, and questions why, in the case of Kevin and Usher, our analysis emancipates them from responsibility. (We called Kevin the equivalent of a tsunami).
If we do this, then we must also be able to take a non-psychopath who commits a crime, and emancipate them from blame & responsibility for the very same reasons (ie. they didn’t choose their brain state, they didn’t choose upbringing & temperament, they didn’t choose the environment they were birthed into and bred within).
So now, the question becomes:
Do we bite the bullet and emancipate all (psychopath or not) bad actions committed by agents because ultimately none of the causal factors of those actions are within control of the agent? Then we can throw out the concepts of blame and responsibility too!
Do we not emancipate Kevin for his deeds because Kevin is no different from the rest of us (in the sense that none of us choose anything, brain state being no different)?
Or do we use different criteria aside from the degree-to-which-something-is-within-one’s-control in our evaluation of blame and responsibility?
If you accept 3, then, (in my view) you can choose to not emancipate the regular non-psychopath for his bad deeds even though everything he did was out of his control, but you can STILL emancipate the Kevins of the world.
This is because the criteria I use for emancipation is NOT, the degree to which something is in his control, but instead, the fact that his neural chemistry is sufficiently deviated from the norm of normal brain states that there was no chance for him to begin with.
Even though all of us as human beings live a life of things being outside of our control, we still exist within a very tight range of the “base rate” of conditions (ie. functioning brain, stable personality, decent upbringing, etc).
If you are close to the base rate, you can still be held responsible, the further you deviate from it, the less likely I am to hold you responsible.
We use brain states in this case to emancipate Kevin (constitutive moral luck), but, in my opinion, the same principle applies to the poor man who grew up in the projects commits a theft (who you then find out had an awful upbringing and shitty parents, etc.). Albeit, to a lesser degree.
The man described above deviates from the "mean" in a different kind of moral luck (circumstantial), yet, I am okay with emancipating him (although, again, to a lesser degree than Kevin). This means that there is a spectrum or gradations of responsibility dependent on how close or far someone is from the mean of all of these factors beyond our control.
This is opposed to leaning on a binary system of: within control = responsible, outside control=not-responsible.
I hope that's a good enough answer from me, Ted. There are some additional answers to your question in the podcast itself (like the utility of blame as a concept when implemented in a society) that we dive deeper into. Again, thanks for your email, you are amazing.
Send us your thoughts on the podcast at [email protected] We'll read it, discuss it, and maybe even respond to it.
Thanks to all your support,
Jhana
]]>So you want to start a podcast? Hell, it seems like just about everyone has one. Where’s yours? Well, my friend, you’ve come to the right place--The Jacksway Collective. We’re 10 Episodes in, and while we still have a lot to learn (obviously), we think that this two-digit episode milestone gives us permission to chat about such a subject. So here’s what we’ve learned so far.
With apps like Anchor and Zencastr, all you need to get going is a friend and a good internet connection. One of these is more important than the other. You decide which.
Back in July 2018, when we started recording episodes for The Jacksway Collective, we used Anchor. It was super simple to use and the audio quality was decent considering we were both using standard Apple headphones. Things were looking good.
Unfortunately, using Anchor began to get tricky. On several occasions we experienced dropped calls which was terrifying (“Did we just lose all of that material!?”) and zapped the energy of the conversation.
And so we moved onto Zencaster. At first we thought this platform would solve all our problems. We could record on multiple tracks and there was even a built-in soundboard to add some extra flare--amazing! But as soon as we began editing our episodes, we came face to face with The Zencaster Drift--an annoying error where one person’s audio is no longer in sync. And sure, you can easily fix this problem if you’re a proficient audio editor but when you’re just starting out, you’re probably not.
Currently we’re recording on our own computers while conversing on Google Hangouts. So far it seems to be working.
The original idea for our podcast was to read slowly through tough philosophy books and chat about what we’re learning along the way. As you can see, it soon morphed into a 3-4 person short story podcast that sprinkles philosophy throughout. It’s now a fully-fledged discussion and hot take-based podcast, as opposed to one where two guys slog through Being and Time.
Embrace these changes as you go about making the product. You are NOT stuck within a template after your first episode, revise, revise, revise. Your podcast will be better for it (ours certainly is). We still find ourselves in the process of reevaluation and we're assuming that will never stop.
That being said, the essence of our podcast has stayed the same throughout. We’d always wanted to dance between academic/thoughtful discussion and off-the-rails madness. We think we’ve struck that balance pretty well in recent episodes.
There’s no getting around this part. If you want to have a podcast, someone’s gonna have to put their head to the ground for a few hours every week to edit the pod. We utilize a hired gun on freelancer.com to do the first “rough cut” for us--optimizing audio quality and consolidating the multiple audio streams into one. After that, it’s on us to open up Logic Pro X or Garageband and go in for that final cut.
Editing uhms, uhhhs, likes, and other nonsense takes a ton of time. Also, a large number of editorial cuts take place on this final pass since we tend to go off the rails A LOT. It’s awful, but turning an hour and a half of choppy nonsense into something (somewhat) worth listening to is quite satisfying.
A lot goes on between the record and the post, so although editing is a huge time sink, it really is what makes the podcast listenable. Thankfully, the rest of what surrounds the podcast--graphics, copy, marketing, reading--ranges from bearable to genuinely awesome.
We certainly aren’t. We read, we record, we ramble, and then cut and cut and cut. We have mere bachelor degrees and read the odd book on the side. Actually, the fact that we’re not experts and don’t claim to be emancipates us from any sort of academic or professional responsibility. We can say what we want, and if we’re wrong or misrepresent, so it goes.
That being said, you learn as you go. The reason we started this podcast in the first place is so that we can learn, that we can read these great stories, and 10 episodes in, we’re still no closer to being experts. Knowing things is not a prerequisite for recording a podcast, we wouldn’t be surprised if some of our listeners knew more than we did about the text at hand. We embrace that and encourage those of you to right our wrongs! (send us an email).
Regardless of who we’ve talked to, philosophy grads to Instagram models, everyone is genuinely interested when they find out you have a podcast. People want to know what it’s about, how you record and why you decided to start--they also have strong opinions about their own favorite podcasts as well.
Perhaps people are interested in those who’ve followed through with their creative projects. Everyone has their own creative project in mind, but few follow through on it. To be the people who actually have accomplished something like that, however small, you open yourself up to many interesting conversations with others.
So many directions. Currently, we aim for recording once a week and often have very little prep time before we hit the record button. The three of us rarely, if ever, talk about the story beforehand (aside from notes on a shared Google Doc) and then we basically just wing it.
We’re looking to tweak this by moving to a bi-weekly cadence, upping the amount of discussion we have before hopping on the mic, and maybe adding some secondary literature. One of the best things about our most recent episode with Sarah Johnson was the amount of background reading she had completed. Her expertise on gothic literature turned the show from a solely discussion-based podcast (this isn’t changing) to something that was educational for the rest of us (and hopefully the listener) We welcome this change and hope to implement it soon.
We’re gonna start introducing ourselves at the beginning of each episode and teasing what we’re going to be reading for the next episode. Also, maybe more secondary literature? We’ll see.
Let us know what you’d like to see from the Jacksway Collective.
Send us an email at: [email protected] or review us on itunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-jacksway-collective-philosophy-fiction/id1432876543?mt=2
A group of Western University humanities graduates/ex-roommates who've decided to kick back once a week and discuss academic papers, philosophy books, and short stories.
"Why would we do such a thing?" one may ask. Well, because we love it. In college, we'd get together on weekends in our apartment on "Jacksway Crescent" (maybe not entirely sober) to watch obscure movies and discuss whatever we'd been reading at the time.
Now, we find ourselves separated by vast stretches of geography, but set on staying in touch. One year out of university, we've found that when we finish reading books/papers, there's no lecture to attend or fellow students to discuss our thoughts with. The follow-up after reading is perhaps the most vital part of the learning process; it's also the most fun. This podcast is an attempt to recreate that.
None of us claim to be experts in any of what we read. This gives us a huge amount of freedom to throw whatever ideas we think are interesting out there and see if it makes sense or not. We're not looking to educate; instead, we're looking to learn alongside our audience and enjoy ourselves in the process. Things are bound to go off the rails when recording, but that's exactly the way we want it. We know there are others out there who love these topics and are hungry for discussion about them. To those of you out there, we invite you to join us once a week in this endeavour.
This is a podcast that will grow and improve every week. We've never done anything like this before, so you can expect the quality of the podcast to increase as our competence for making it does too. Sound quality has consistently improved every week and we're working on optimizing our entire workflow. This will be an ongoing process of revision, so we thank you for sticking with us through the bumps in the road.
We hope that this podcast will evolve into something great. If you have any feedback or criticisms about any of the episodes, feel free to send us an email at: [email protected]
Haven't heard any episodes yet? Check out our very first episode where we discuss Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus here: https://jackswaycollective.fireside.fm/1-absurd
More interested in short stories? We recommend starting with Episode 2, where all three of us are on the track as we break down Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge: https://jackswaycollective.fireside.fm/2-risemustfall
We'd love for you to subscribe to us or rate us on iTunes if you have the time. Here are the links to do so.
https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-jacksway-collective/id1432876543?mt=2
That covers everything. Thanks so much for listening and being part of The Jacksway Collective.
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