Textual note

It's common practice in the English language to write the nominative singular first person pronoun as "I" and second personal pronouns as "thou", "you" and so forth. This is very unusual. I am unaware of any other language which does so. In English itself, the oblique and genitive equivalents are written with a lower-case initial letter. Consequently, i write "i" rather than "I". It is fairly common also to write the second personal pronouns with initial capitals. I don't usually bring myself to do that. The reason i write "i" is neither laziness nor motivated exclusively by low self-esteem but out of a wish to be consistent with other languages.

Friendship and Romantic Love

First of all, let me record that i am a hypocrite. I have been in a stable, exclusive sexual relationship for fourteen years now, and i am emotionally very close with my partner.

According to Plato, love seeks completion and unity with the beautiful. For him, even lust is a form of love and is good because it forms the seed for a kind of love which is considered higher, namely love for a person's character. This assumes a difference between higher and lower things, but i'm going to have to leave that aside for the moment. Love could perhaps also proceed in the opposite direction, from love for character to love which includes attraction to the physical. Would this be a debasement? That would probably depend on the question of higher and lower things as well. I think these two directions, from the physical to the psychological and vice versa, tend to be associated with gender stereotypes, the first with the male and the second female.

There is another aspect of love, this time considered from the viewpoint of romantic love and friendship. Incidentally, it's quite hard to use the word "love" without the suggestion of romantic or sexual elements, which makes this passage somewhat difficult to write. For the sake of argument, i'll describe friendship as non-exclusive commitment and intimacy where attraction to physical aspects is discounted, and romantic love as exclusive, committed and passionate intimacy where attraction to physical aspects is considered relevant and has been or is being pursued. I'm portraying these as polarised ideals and ignoring issues of violation to simplify the issue. There are intermediate positions.

It's common among people i know to prioritise romantic relationships. Why? Romantic love can distract people from caring for others and leads them to make poor life choices. A celibate, single life could turn people's energy outwards to their friends and the world, and from a utilitarian perspective, there are more people in the world than in the relationship, and also probably more friends. Conflict between the interests or demands of partners and those of others would also be avoided. Given all this, i don't see what's so great about sexual relationships as they actually are rather than ideal ones, which may not exist.

If it's hard to avoid feeling lust, one may confuse friendship with lust and this may impair judgement. The answer may be to redirect sexual energy. This is often seen as negative, but Plato for one didn't see it this way. He saw it as transcending sexual desire, and the idea that this is a bad thing seems to have arrived with Freud.

If the option to redirect sexual energy is available, i would suggest taking it. There are so many abusive relationships, so many people looking inward rather than being there for friends or the wider world, and so many people whose judgement is impaired by the fact that they fancy people and, for example, lend too much weight to those people's opinions rather than others' and fail to recognise flaws and mistakes.

The value system behind what i'm saying here is consequentialist - based on ends. Contractarianism is another relevant way of looking at the situation. People place themselves under obligations, often implicitly rather than explicitly, in undertakings such as deciding to have a child together, live together, marry, enter civil partnerships and many other symbolic acts. I have missed out the word "voluntary". To what extent are these freely undertaken? People may see themselves as doing what's expected of them or confirm to a socially-derived view of being swept off their feet. There are cultural expectations, pressures under which one places oneself and decisions made in the heat of passion, not necessarily passion for the person to whom one commits. Where is freedom and informed consent in these undertakings?

Any thoughts?

Supervenience and "negative herbs"

A property is supervenient when it is entailed by the inclusive disjunction of a set of properties but does not entail any one of those properties itself. I don't know if this is the same as an emergent property.

The notion of supervenience has been applied to mental events, ethics, evolutionary fitness and time. The relationship between high level and low level programming languages could also be seen as supervenient. There are various processes in herbal medicine which could be seen as involving emergence. For instance, there are "negative herbs": species of plant which reputedly have actions which none of the constituents have. This claim is sometimes made of Crataegus oxyacanthoides, hawthorn, and Verbena officinalis, vervain. There may also be synergistic effects: several herbal remedies taken together may have actions which are greater than the sum of the actions each would have when taken separately.

Sometimes, there is a clear explanation of an emergent action in a herb. One example is the lower toxicity of a whole herb relative to that of the alkaloids it contains. This is claimed of Symphytum officinale, and the explanation given is that tannins in the herb precipitate pyrrolizidine alkaloids from an aqueous solution and denature mediator proteins in the intestinal mucosa which would facilitate their absorption.

It may be possible to understand the action of some herbal remedies as supervenient over the biological activity of the constituent parts of the interacting living systems, which could often be considered as the plants and humans involved.

Orthodox medicine is often understood as aspiring to biological reductivism, since this is understood as a more appropriate method of analysing physical health and illness. This suggests that it is possible for a set of minds of widespread humanoid conscious cognitive features to approach medicine in this way. It would also be possible to give an account of an entire ecosystem purely in terms of physics and chemistry, but it seems to me that this would not generally be a helpful exercise. Similarly, although useful information can be gleaned from reductivism, it can also be gathered from consideration of supervenient properties such as synergy. Moreover, claims of emergent properties are clinically falsifiable. For instance, I can measure patients' blood pressures before giving them Crataegus oxyacanthoides, a reputedly negative herb, then measure it again at monthly intervals, then compare these to a control group. If i did this with sufficiently large samples, i would begin to corroborate a claim of a supervenient property with a clinical effect. This means that the notion of negative herbs is at least sometimes falsifiable in a conventional scientific sense.

What isn't clear to me right now is the relationship between supervenience, emergent properties and vitalist metaphysics.

Universalism

Universalism means several different things. For example, it may mean the belief that all spiritual paths are a way to enlightenment, God or some other variety of ultimate concern. I assume this is not what is meant here, but the belief that a single set of values applies to all humans, regardless of ethnicity, gender or other categories.

This is how i see that in connection with human nature. There is, firstly, a categorisation problem akin to various forms of prejudice such as sexism and racism inherent in seeing it as merely applying to humans, because there are other entities towards which we have duties which are non-human, and probably even inanimate, so so-called universalism is actually too limited.

Leaving that aside, however, there is variation in systems of ethics which seems to render them incompatible. For instance, attitudes towards sexual and reproductive ethics vary hugely among cultures and traditions. Taking the values espoused in the Torah/Bible, the general thrust of the value system seems to be about promoting its own survival. However, the Jain system of values is completely non-evangelical and exists in a context where it sees itself as inevitably becoming extinct. These are examples of apparent incompatibilities between value systems. However, it does seem to be possible to identify certain themes behind the value systems, for example, utility (as in utilitarianism), ahimsa (non-violence) and justice. These themes can be arranged in a hierarchy, where for example two situations with comparable happiness can be distinguished morally by choosing the fairer alternative. Even so, they cannot be arranged in a hierarchy where one value is conclusively more important than any of the others, so the situation is like the game "rock - paper - scissors": nothing is on top. This is known as a non-transitive hierarchy.

I believe that the explanation for this is that there is another set of ethical principles which determine the nature of value systems, but which are not conceivable to the human mind, but whose existence can be deduced from the fact that values appear to be incommensurable. Ultimately, there are universal values, but they are inconceivable. I don't think their existence commits one to belief in God, although that is one solution. They are more like linguistic universals, but unlike them, they are not quantifiable. Also, they differ from a Chomskian understanding of the nature of linguistic universals in that although they are like a "deep grammar", this does not necessarily reflect any physical structure of the central nervous system. They are more like the foundations of mathematics.

So, i think that part of the human condition, i.e. human nature, is to find a value system. This is often decided by the conventions of one's community or society, but it can go beyond that and still be ethical. Having said that, there are humans who lack a moral dimension, for instance those described as dyssocial or psychopaths, and possibly also those on the autistic spectrum.

Utilitarianism and environmental ethics

I have generally seen environmental ethics in terms of duty to non-humans, such as the planet, the biosphere and inanimate objects as well as those who are less controversially aware and therefore presumed to be capable of suffering and pleasure, but utilitarianism may also be relevant.

I would say it could be relevant in two main ways. Firstly, the capacity for suffering and pleasure in living organisms could provide a huge environment compared to human population, depending on how far consciousness can be attributed to non-human organisms. If the population of relevant non-human animals is greater than the human population, their suffering becomes highly relevant because it could come to outweigh the pleasure available to the whole human population of the planet. For this to occur, it would only be necessary for rodents to be considered capable of suffering, which is not an outlandish assumption.

This does not, however, distinguish between higher and lower qualities of pleasure - qualitative utilitarianism, as conceived by John Stuart Mill. It seems plausible that either only humans or a small number of other species along with humans are capable of experiencing higher pleasures. If so, sufficiently greater weighting could be given to "higher" pleasures to justify the infliction of harm to members of other species incapable of such pleasures. However, this depends on the commensurability of higher and lower pleasures. If they can be compared, it suggests that there is another scale by which these pleasures can be compared, in which case, a greater level of lower pleasure could trump a certain level of higher pleasures. The qualitative division of the utility principle might also fail to apply to negative utilitarianism, which is the avoidance of suffering, and in terms of environmental ethics, the aim is the minimisation of suffering rather than the maximisation of pleasure. Qualitative utilitarianism can only be extended to negative utilitarianism if there is also higher and lower suffering.

The second way utilitarianism could be relevant to environmental ethics is that if humans are assumed to be the only beings capable of experiencing pleasure or suffering, they may suffer or experience pleasure at the quality of their environment or the knowledge that wilderness still exists. However, with a pastoral aesthetic, a particular cultural understanding leading to enjoyment of an environment which is in ecological terms impoverished, with, for example, lower biodiversity. That is, many people admire and enjoy well-kept gardens, parks and farmland which are relatively unsophisticated ecosystems. There is therefore a possible conflict between utilitarianism and environmental ethics. However, it may be that a different environmental aesthetic could give greater pleasure, although not in an aesthetic sense. If utilitarianism is qualitative, aesthetic appreciation could well be considered a higher pleasure, but if cultural considerations are left aside, this actually means that utilitarianism can be in direct conflict with environmental ethics.

Preference utilitarianism is based on getting what one wants rather than distinguishing between what one doesn't know would give one greater pleasure. This condition would, in general, apply to any conscious being rather than preferring humans, since if drives are associated with conscious desires in non-human animals, this is the relevant factor in how they should be treated as a group. This can be applied to dietary ethics, field sports and animal experimentation. In the first two cases, the argument is that the suffering inflicted outweighs the pleasure derived, and in the third, that it does not directly save human life. These arguments are Peter Singer's.

However, I am not a utilitarian. I believe that environmental ethics is largely based on duty to the planet or individual beings or aesthetic principles rather than utilitarianism. There is controversy over how far consciousness can be attributed: to certain humans, to hominids, to mammals, vertebrates and so forth: how far? Hence the question of whether they can suffer is controversial, and Jeremy Bentham's question does not have a clear answer. This clouds the issue of utilitarianism. Inanimate objects are often seen as beautiful but, more than that, many people have a sense that an act such as deforestation is wrong, and I believe this is regardless of whether any of the organisms in the ecosystem perceived to have been damaged suffered as a result. Imagine a virgin forest consisting solely of non-animal organisms. Most people would not attribute consciousness to anything living in that forest, and therefore would not regard any destructive act as causing suffering, but they would still regard it as wrong to destroy that forest. Nor is this due to the right to life of the organisms in the forest. A completely lifeless area of outstanding natural beauty, for example perhaps the Valles Marineris on Mars, would still have this status. It seems absurd to attribute rights to inanimate objects, so my conclusion is that environmental ethics is based upon the concept of duties to inanimate objects, and although capacity for suffering is a possible additional consideration, it is not necessary to have an environmental ethic.

Memory theatre

In days of yore, one of the ways of memorising complex collections of information was via a technique known as "Memory Theatre". This is similar to the contemporary technique of hanging information on a system where bizarre imagery is used to help one recall less memorable information. For instance, the cabbalistic tree of life is sometimes used in this way.

Astrological imagery is one way of doing this, and another is the doctrine of signatures. I want to start from an agnostic position concerning the nature of the connections made between the features on which one focuses with these methods.

The doctrine of signatures is the belief that there is a link between perceived features of a plant and its medical uses. For instance, hawthorn berries (Crataegus oxyacanthoides (fructus)) are used for their cardiac action and superficially resemble the heart, dandelion root (Taraxacum officinale (radix)) is employed as a liver tonic and has yellow flowers, reminiscent of jaundice, and sage (Salvia officinalis) is hairy and has a traditional use to prevent alopecia. This is quite an ad hoc system. Less arbitrary is the system whereby links are made between the planets in astrological terms and particular plant species. This tends to operate as follows:

Mercury: Plants with finely divided parts, linked to the nervous system or connected to communication. Example: dill (Anethum graveolens).
Venus: Plants with prominent female reproductive parts or concerned with visible aspects of the body. Examples: gooseberry, Ribes uva-crispa and the dog rose, Rosa canina.
Mars: Plants perceived as defending themselves, with mechanical or chemical weapons. Examples: Urtica dioica (nettle), Capsicum minimum (Cayenne pepper).
Jupiter: Expansive herbs, such as Quercus robur (oak),
Saturn: Plants that are poisonous or have prominent rings. Example: Artemisia absinthium (wormwood).
Sun: Plants with parts which resemble the Sun or are warming. Example: Calendula officinalis (French marigold).
Moon: Watery herbs, either high in water content or associated with water. Examples: Salix nigra (black willow), Fucus vesiculosus (bladder wrack).

All of these associations hearken back to astrological categorisations of the world, but they do not have to be taken literally. When I learnt the cranial nerves, I used the mnemonic "On Old Olympus Topmost Top, A Finn And German Viewed A Hop." The fact that I used that sequence does not mean there is any necessary connection between Germany and the glossopharyngeal nerve, but it does help me remember that CN IX supplies the tongue and the pharynx. Similarly, there are associations between features of herbs and their reputed actions and the picturesque realms of the doctrine of signatures and astrology. Sometimes there could be other associations with the herbs: for instance, gooseberry bushes have thorns, and so could be considered to be herbs of Mars rather than Venus, and in fact Nicholas Culpeper comments on this, but an association can be created in this way.

Today, it is possible to look at a herb, say Valeriana officinalis, and make an association between isovalerianic acid and the major neurotransmitter of the parasympathetic nervous system gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), and so it can be seen as a sedative. This is a story I tell myself to connect the sedative action of Valeriana to its constituents. It is a proposition which has not, so far as I know, been falsified, and therefore through Karl Popper's philosophy of science, it is falsifiable or can be corroborated. Empirical scientific propositions are not yet falsified: they are not true in the same sense that a mathematical proof is true. The 'Theory of Everything' for the mediaeval and early modern era included categorisation into associations between, for example, metals, planets, bodily organs and herbs, among other things. Our current scientific theories also constitute such a system. The difference may lie in falsifiability, but in practical terms both perform the same function when I'm trying to decide what herbs to prescribe a patient. I could look at her sympathetic nervous system as labile and decide to dampen it down with Valeriana, or I could think about preventing keloid formation and prescribe Rosa canina, probably as an essential oil, because it is a herb of Venus.

When I use astrological associations, I am not committed to belief in astrology any more than a navigator observing the stars is committed to a geocentric cosmology, but it would not help the navigator to see the Universe as heliocentric.

Hello

Hello everyone, my name's Mark and I'm a philosopher. It's been three days since my last counselling session.

OK, that's the joke out of the way. Other than home educating my children, I do two things with my life to make money. I am a herbalist and I do philosophical counselling. I have a practice in Leicester in the English East Midlands. On the herbal side, I interview people about their health problems, taking a full medical history, and I then prescribe and dispense herbs and give lifestyle advice. On the philosophical side, I help people reach their own conclusions about their world views and examine them philosophically in order to expose possible problems arising from their way of seeing the world. This is a lot more helpful than it sounds. I have found that whereas people can be helped with their physical health problems through herbal remedies, there often comes a point where they get stuck, because I can help them solve their problems only so far before I reach certain, less flexible issues, such as work, family, religion, accommodation, substance abuse or body image. Until I applied Philosophy (with a capital P) to these issues, this was the point at which I had to leave people. This is no longer so. It turns out that this sort of problem can be dealt with rationally (more on that word later) and I can help people to "get over the bump" in those terms also.

More later.