Freedom is Wild: Free Markets, Free Choice, Free Education? A Category Theory for Ethicists One of the reasons I hate human rights discourse is because of its lack of specifying and distinguishing other legal relations for which the term “rights” is a cover set. There are many others, e.g. privilege, power, immunity, and their correlatives, according to Hohfeld. When someone asserts “I have the human right to live, to be fed, to be clothed, to medicines, health care, free travel, and enjoy a cappuccino or beer while on a beach in Honolulu,” I say, “I can understand how you would want those services and things, but how exactly do you pay for them?” “Not my problem,” is the answer. But who pays for what is an essential question because it is implicates a world-wide set of interactions and relations. Anything and everything you consume IS the world. And human rights discourse doesn’t give us an answer. But even more fundamentally, who is who is the question. Why? Because if you are not even a person then how do you even start to justify your request for free assistance, aid and the construction of wealth? Our benefice no matter how generous is limited to some conceptual limit of the self. I remember speaking to a Zen Master in Honolulu who asked me, “Are you against all forms of killing?” “Yes,” I said. “Then why do you eat?” he replied, and he plucked a blade of grass, chewing it. I had no idea what he was on about then. To break the limit of self is the Self. How the heck can we understand such vagueness? Maybe a bit of Category Theory may help. A Category Theory of Ethics may begin with the Ubuntu-Yoneda Lemma which in IsiXhosa is the “proverb, umntu ngumntu ngabantu. In this sentence, um = “a”, ntu=”person”, ngu=”is”, nga=”through”, abantu=”people”. So it means literally a person is a person through other people.” [Bartlett, Bruce (March 4, 2013 10:20 PM) Re: Spivak on Category Theory, at: golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/03/spivak_on_category_theory.html] For those following my snippets on category theory will know that the above proposition is an example of a very useful but vast generalization called the Yoneda Lemma. “In his Algebraic Geometry class a few years back, Ravi Vakil explained Yonedas lemma like this: You work at a particle accelerator. You want to understand some particle. All you can do are throw other particles at it and see what happens. If you understand how your mystery particle responds to all possible test particles at all possible test energies, then you know everything there is to know about your mystery particle.” [mathoverflow.net/questions/3184/philosophical-meaning-of-the-yoneda-lemma] Similarly, if you undertake all possible postures, gestures and experiences as a single human being, you will know what it is to be human in general. Is this what freedom means? No, just human freedom for all humans.
Posted on: Sun, 20 Oct 2013 05:39:49 +0000
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