It being Samhain today, decided it was time for a bit of Autumnal cleaning here at the Game. So I’ve resequenced the side bar, added a search box that someone asked for a while back, and update the bio and sidebar of the ‘About’ page. If you have anything else you’d like done, let me know. (We could switch to Disqus for comments, if anyone wants this, but so far no-one has been keen).
Happy Autumn Festival!
Could there be a viable concept of ‘player rights’, and if not, are there any grounds for legally restricting games?
There have been several attempts to propose a ‘Player’s Bill of Rights’ (e.g. Graham Nelson in 1994, Raph Koster in 2000, Peterb of Tea Leaves in 2004, Ernest Adams in 2005, and Brad Wardell in 2008), but the tendency of these has been to present wish lists of requirements game developers should adhere to, motivated partly by personal frustrations, and partly by professional expertise. Such statements can be exceptionally useful as proposals of best practices for game design or commercial game development, but the ‘bill of rights’ aspect of such manifestos is best understood as an imaginative framing. It certainly helps such claims get noticed, but it does not rise to the level of a genuine claim to rights.
There are two possible ways that we might get clear of this problem. Firstly, we could involve many different players in a discourse on their issues – which will prove intractable in the face of the immense diversity of players, and the vocal bloody-mindedness of certain factions among them. The alternative, which I take up here, is to pursue a concept of player rights from similar philosophical groundings to the US Bill of Rights and the so-called Universal Declaration of Human Rights, namely Kant’s concept of Recht (what I will call ‘the rightful state’ or ‘rightful conditions’). This idea has been a substantial influence in the emergence of what are now asserted as ‘rights’, although it should be noted that the very first Bill of Rights (pictured above) was written in 1689 and reflected the earlier philosophy of John Locke (although this was also an influence on Kant’s work).
It is worth observing that of the above mentioned bills of player rights, Raph Koster’s A Declaration of the Rights of Avatars is closest in form to historical documents of this kind (being partly modelled upon them). But for these kinds of player rights claim to hold up, they must hold up on grounds parallel to historical rights legislature – and this is far from obviously the case, for reasons this enquiry will undertake to make clear.
Kant divided morals into ethics (which he saw as rational self-constraint) and the rightful state (which concerns civil law). Rightful conditions are distinct from ethics because Kant thought, as many of us do today, that freedom consists in setting your own ends (that is, your own life goals), without being unnecessarily constrained by others.
As Allen Wood explains, it was Kant’s proposal that the only justifiable role for coercion of any kind was to secure the external freedom of citizens – this and this alone is the rightful state for any nation. Kant did not consider it reasonable for anyone to be forced to adopt other people’s ends, since anyone who is constrained in this way is not free. But ensuring that everyone was able to set their own ends in a civil society means protecting against attempts to force other people to adopt ends that are not their own – and the only reasonable use of coercion would be to prevent this.
Such enforcement does not require anyone to adopt any specific end, it merely protects everyone against any such attempts to dominate their freedom. We are only free, the argument goes, if we are free to choose our own ends, our life goals, although we may be rightfully constrained in the pursuit of those ends because some things that we might intend to do would violate the rightful condition (e.g. murdering people who block your chosen end).
It is thus from the idea of a rightful condition that the authority of civil police arises, and also from the rightful state that concepts of human rights develop, to protect against external coercion. This sets the background to exploring the idea of player rights: if such an idea is valid, there must be a rightful condition for games.
To begin with we must ask: do we ever possess ends when we play? It is important to appreciate that an end is far more than just something you want. As I explain in Chaos Ethics, ends are imagined future states in your life that you actively commit to pursuing. You may heartily crave an ice cold beer but it cannot be one of your ends – although it could be one of your ends to own a brewery, say.
Either our gaming-ends – to reach Level 70, build a castle, 100% a game etc. – are truly ends in the sense that freedom implies, or else they are something akin to fictional-ends, hence (analogously to Walton’s quasi-emotions) quasi-ends i.e. imagined ends whose meaning occurs solely within fictional worlds and not in everyday life as such. This distinction is not that easy to settle, however. A player may genuinely want to 100% a game, but then lose interest and play something else – or may become so obsessed with World of Warcraft that they drop out of college.
Notice also that some kinds of game are difficult to imagine quasi-ends for – what I have called thin play games such as Dear Esther and Proteus do not afford much room for willing future states, as they are experiential, like other artworks. Similarly, you may want to win at Snakes & Ladders but it is not a plausible end to set, nor is becoming a master at this particular game a particularly plausible end, as it might be (potentially) for Chess or Tetris.
The safest answer is to provisionally treat ends within the fictional worlds of games as quasi-ends that nonetheless can affect the ends we set in life – such as the undergraduate who succumbs to the lure of Azeroth, and thus frustrates his original end to earn a degree. This approach helps us deal with ambiguities about the diversity of player responses to the very same games that should affect our assessment of whether and how players set ends in the games they (freely) choose to play.
For there to be a question of player rights in Kant’s philosophy there must be a possibility of coercion that should be excluded – so we must ask: can game developers force quasi-ends upon players against their will? It is not entirely clear that they can.
In the case of the MMO drop-out, it does not seem entirely reasonable to suggest the player was coerced by Blizzard so much as suffered a personal moral failure after playing their game (i.e. this is an ethical problem, not an issue with rightful conditions). Blizzard, World of Warcraft, and other players who know the drop-out are all implicated in the network of moral agency here, but implying coercion seems to massively overstate the level of responsibility of anyone involved. The same would appear to apply to scurrilous microtransactions that take advantage of frustrated players – they may be ethically questionable, but preying upon the impulses of players does not quite seem to be of the magnitude required to constitute coercion. After all, isn’t this more or less what casinos do?
What this suggests is that there cannot be any player rights based upon this idea of rightful conditions, which is where all our other uses of ‘rights’ descend from (even those older conceptions drawing against Locke). It may be immoral for developers to produce games that take advantage of compulsive tendencies, but it does not qualify as a breach of rightful condition. The developer, on the other hand, does have its ends unrightfully frustrated by players who acquire access to their game via piracy – namely their end of being compensated for their own work. But this was not the subject of this particular enquiry.
The reason it sometimes feels as if there should be player rights is that some decisions developers make frustrate players and seem thoroughly unnecessary – not allowing cut scenes to be skipped being a classic example (included in both Ernest’s and Peterb’s bills of rights), or using inadequately specified puzzles (as Graham Nelson’s bill of rights argues against).
However, at best we can say that it is bad business sense not to appreciate the needs of players in this regard, and (on the other side of this coin) players ought to be aware that software development is expensive and time-consuming and even small features place significant burdens on developers if they are required to implement them. In this regard, ‘player rights’ as lists of bugbears are not something that can be justified as anything other than advice for best practices. (Of course, this doesn’t mean developers shouldn’t pay attention to such issues, only that they cannot be compelled to adhere to them!)
In other cases (such as with Brad Wardell’s bill of rights), certain specific demands concern the commercial relationship between a player and a supplier that do not actually relate to games at all. For instance, it might indeed be a breach of rightful condition to secretly install hidden software drivers in so much as the individual’s ends regarding being in control of their own computer are being thwarted. But this has nothing to do with playing games.
Issues like this do, however, suggest there might be software rights that could be pursued, depending in part upon the rather important question of whether users are effectively forced to use certain instances of software. Again, this idea lies beyond the scope of this enquiry.
On purely philosophical grounds, I can draw several conclusions:
These latter games, where they are especially compulsive, might justifiably be subjected to legal limitations in so much as civil societies restrict narcotics and gambling for similar (moral) reasons – and it could be argued (although I will not do so here) that such things do breach rightful conditions, although this claim is certainly a matter of debate.
Along similar lines, game developers who prey upon players through manipulative microtransactions cannot necessarily be prevented from doing so as a question of rightful conditions – but this does not preclude them from being judged immoral, and as such communities might decide to institute laws to restrict access to such games by (say) age, or some other appropriate criterion.
Such laws would not necessarily be consistent with Kant’s concept of rightful conditions, except where in so doing they clearly protected external freedom. This might be justifiable when dealing with children, who we tend to treat as being more susceptible to external influences, but if we think an adult is sufficiently autonomous to get drunk, we should equally think them capable of being in control of their games. It is not that players have rights so much as it is that players have responsibilities – and not least of all, to themselves.
If you’re on RSS and just saw that post about player rights, my apologies – that is supposed to run tomorrow morning. You may have got a sneak peak…
Having a new PC installed, which has delayed this week’s post – it’ll be ready soon, and takes a sceptical look at the idea of a player’s Bill of Rights. Stay tuned!
Could a social medium be designed for leveraging collective intelligence, rather than entertainment and advertising?
We currently have social networking media, but we do not yet have social intelligence media. Existing social media is effective at building networks based upon familiarity or common interests to deliver simple diversions (for the users) or paid, targeted promotions (for the sponsors). Conversely, that other staple of digital culture, the Wikipedia, is neither social nor intelligent, and is apt to represent the collective trivia of the internet and the prejudice of nerds. I dream, perhaps idly, of something more than this – an online communication and knowledge aggregation tool that could not be ideologically dominated, and that might allow our intellectual resources to be effectively pooled.
How would we go about designing a social networking tool for leveraging intelligence? We would first have to avoid the obvious pitfalls. My purpose here is to suggest what these might be, and to propose possible solutions that could allow for the creation of something like a social intelligence network (SIN).
Pictures of cute animals spread easily on Facebook but challenging ideas do not and cannot. Similarly, among the most commonly propagated materials on Google+ you will find a great many pictures from the Hubble space telescope. Because these systems are based on Like or +1 (i.e. “I agree!” or “Interesting...”) tallies and motivated reshares, social networks thrive on the concurrence of interests at the lowest common denominator. This is precisely what you want for entertainment and petty diversions – not to mention advertising. But it is not a way to leverage intelligence in problem solving, nor to aggregate knowledge.
If problems are identifiable nodes linked to conceptual labels, solutions can aggregate around these nodes for discussion and refinement. Let's suppose that one of the databases at the root of a social intelligence network is a wiki-esque keyword tree. Each keyword has linked to it clusters of related thematic discussions, perhaps grouped as questions. Some machine curation is possible with such a system, but it might also rely on users being willing to connect their posts into the existing knowledge infrastructure.
However, they would be motivated to do so by the requirements of discoverability – if you don't link well, nobody could find what you wrote!
Related to this, the system should be set up to iterate on the material, so content can become refined through successive stages. The Wikipedia does a reasonable job with this, but it may be better for a SIN to actively encourage iteration by asking users if they would like to issue a revision – or put out a community call to revise and synthesize discussion on a given topic or problem.
Such an aggregation and iteration system needs more that a one dimensional response mechanic if it is to make the best value from user contributions. Users need to be able to tag content as (say) “Agree” or “Disagree”, as well as marking some content as “Interesting”, to show desire for further engagement. The robot curation system would need to process agreement and disagreement in respect of claims in order to tackle the next pitfall.
The Wikipedia runs aground on Platonic metaphysics: there is one truth, we must discover what it is and enforce it. This, as I observed in The Mythology of Evolution, is precisely the mistake medieval Christianity made – and today it can just as often be found among those who have a non-religious commitment to Science. Similar fault lines occur around moral and political positions, as I outline in Chaos Ethics – such problems are widespread within contemporary culture precisely because it is not a unified culture at all, but rather a ‘multiverse’ of competing worldviews. We cannot eliminate this issue and we must therefore plan a way around it if we are going to avoid fostering the empty argumentation that occurs between those with opposing worldviews. How could we prevent time and information from being wasted by irresolvable disputants conversing with each other?
Rather than fight over singular claims, an alternative is to collect competing or related claims in their own network nodes, which would be crosslinked. Thus wherever there is substantial disagreement, the competing claims would form their own cluster under the relevant concept. Undisputed information can then filter through into a bridging node, with the alternative perspectives clustered around it. In effect, ‘rival’ clusters around a node represent shared worldviews (or at least, elements of shared worldviews), and thanks to the “agree/disagree” tagging can offer insights into these worldviews. This is more promising than self-identifying a ‘faction’ since only religious individuals have any skill at doing so.
Consider the age of the Earth as one example of a topic that is contentious. The main positions within scientific orthodoxy will likely fall out as a dispute within the same worldview (one likely to agree with 'measurement is a reliable route to truth' or some such claim or cluster of claims). Conversely, Young Earth Creationist claims will be united in agreement with ‘the Bible is true’, while more moderate positions can be subsumed into the orthodox clusters on this topic, while deviating on specific claims concerning evolutionary theory. It will be possible to see from such a system that disputes within orthodox scientific positions (e.g. over group selection) are more varied than contesting views from other sources. However, all knowledge claims would be collated in such a system – as indeed they should be. Even if you are dedicated to scientific process and are absolutely convinced all forms of Creationism are wrong, Creationist knowledge claims are still a part of human information as a whole: it would be perfectly plausible, for instance, for an anthropologist to study Creationism.
Suppression of disagreement is suppression of knowledge, and the ideological assumptions that are deployed to do so always assume the worth of a claim is to be judged against some conception of knowledge as a single coherent whole. Yet you could not, for instance, study Palestine without examining the framework behind the competing positions on this national claim. The same is correct of all disputed knowledge. Only by avoiding premature conclusions about what might be potentially of interest, irrespective of context, can you be sure to record everything of possible value to any hypothetical individual. “Disagree” yet “Interesting” is a whole category of discourse suppressed in conventional internet media.
The above discussion makes it sound as if the primary role of situated perspective is to separate out religious and non-religious background contexts. But actually, it would be just as useful for dividing up content via its technical content since not everyone is equipped to read every piece of written material. To put this another way, the idea that everyone speaking (say) English is using the same language is woefully misleading since each specialisation has its own special language.
Nothing could be easier for a robot than distinguishing popular and technical discussions, and this could be fantastically useful in SIN. It would allow users to be differentiated into subcultures just on the basis of the words used. As before, everything is cross-linked and accessible – but content tagged Technical can be ignored by those without the requisite lexicon, and content tagged Popular ignored by those more interested in the more complex discussions. This also suggests a role for those ambassadors capable of bridging between the two.
When nerds accumulate in a sealed ‘room’, they get into arguments that devolve into flame wars and noise. This was the blight of the old Usenet forums and it persists wherever the forum or mailing list model of internet discussion is dominant (e.g. Google+ Communities). The essential problem is that there is no way out in such a dispute: both parties claim membership in the shared space, and no third parties are as able (or, for that matter, willing) to intercede in such fights as they would be had it occurred 'in the flesh'. The result is unpleasant for everyone involved.
If the automatic curation system sidelines arguments between two parties so they are less prominent, this problem could be lessoned. It could even enforce a 'cooldown' period on willing users to prevent 'posting in anger' – and allow users to mute flames from users with no cooldown, as well as branching content by worldview by default (e.g. few want to read about a theology or atheology they do not hold!). Some experimentation would be required, but a comfortable balance is possible, and all the information would be accessible to anyone by voluntarily defining conditions for exploration.
I am confident this problem is manageable because during the height of the blogosphere, before the social networks drove it to the point of extinction, it was far more possible to avoid flame wars than in the Usenet era. The reason was that your violent disagreements occurred on someone else’s blog, and returning to writing at your own blog was far less likely to escalate conflict than pushing on with the same vehement dispute. Similar techniques could make SIN arguments more civil – or at least, less volatile! – and they could do this without automatically closing down discussions. Two disputants can keep at it - if they want - and the results of their argument could be resurfaced if they managed to reach an accord. In the meantime, they can fight in private since anyone not interested will not be shown the most heated exchanges.
Some online discussions are too long to be widely read (blogs), and some are too short to have substance (Twitter). Is there a way to get the best of both worlds?
Solution 4: Variable Spaces
The benefits of a word limit on Twitter are that it shapes content for quick and easy consumption – to do it well requires careful construction, but either way it's quick. Setting limits like this control the depth and complexity of discussion – so why not explore this phenomena further by striating discussions into (say) Essays (2,000 words – about 10 minutes reading), Discussion (500 words – 3 minutes reading), Thoughts (100 words – a minute to read), and Blips (25 words – about the length of a tweet).
Now because of machine curation you could choose to launch discussion at any point in this scale, and equally choose to examine any problem or topic node at any scale. And of course, each scale is independently tagged – so you could go to look at “Rainforest preservation” (say) and find the best Discussion-length piece for someone with your approximate worldview based solely on the most valued Blips about it. Indeed, you could monitor Blip-feeds, or Essay-feeds, on any topic you liked, according to whatever filter criteria you liked.
As an additional suggestion to enhance this experience, replies to posts into the SIN can default to one step down. If you wrote an Essay (2,000 words), people's replies would be co-or donated as Discussions (500 words) by default. Nothing stops someone writing their own Essay in reply and linking to you (the equivalent of blog Trackbacks), but the system can make it easier to support shorter replies to help discourse remain fluid.
We live in a world where large organisations can literally buy attention and, ironically, already possess a share of our collective attention by being well-known. This is a benefit (of a certain kind) in conventional social media, since wealthy organisations bankroll free usage through paid advertising. But this might not be so desirable in a social intelligence network – you would not want a tobacco conglomerate dominating discourse on smoking, for instance.
The solution here must be to permit access solely to individuals. Large organisations will still get in by sending representatives, but could not plausibly buy attention in such a set up. However, this does not solve the question of how a SIN would be funded. The brutal truth is that every social network depends upon corporate involvement for its funding, and it might be difficult to pursue a project of this kind without such involvement. Even the Wikipedia doesn't get by without advertising – admittedly, the PBS-style ‘begging’ adverts rather than anything from the commercial marketplace. Perhaps the codebase could come about through open source means, although I doubt it. This problem is one I shall have to leave open.
The above assumes a social intelligence network that is a combination of distributed human intelligence and robotic automation – a cross between social networks and the Wikipedia. But to end this blue sky discussion, I want to look at an entirely different way of leveraging collective intelligence.
What I shall call a virtuous social network (VSN) is predicated on the idea of communities, linked only by common interests. These communities would be capped at a certain number of participants – something between 20 and 50 – so that anyone involved might plausibly get to know the others in their cluster. Each individual would be encouraged to belong to several clusters, thus allowing the collective intelligence present in each community to be leveraged on a grander scale, should it be appropriate. This is a much simpler idea than the SIN fantasy described above – but that makes it radically easier to implement, since at its core is only the idea of linking individuals into potentially productive clusters.
The pitfalls described above – and perhaps some of the solutions, too – would still apply to a VSN, but such an approach would have the added value of being more than just an abstract space within the depths of the internet. It would be a path to creating transnational communities on any topic imaginable. I wistfully like to think that this could be even more valuable than the techno-utopian vision that motivates my description above of a hypothetical network for social intelligence.
Do you think a Social Intelligence Network is plausible and desirable? Do you think Virtuous Networking is something we need? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
In Part II: Allen Wood on Tolerance, Professor Allen W. Wood argued against my concept of ‘intolerant tolerance’. This final part explores the contemporary political situation in the United States, and asks what hope there might be for peace.
Chris: One clear difference between us is that, in resisting political injustice in the U.S., you are on a ‘war footing’ – and as I argue in this book, we need people to take such positions to defend against what is indefensible – especially in your nation at this perilous time. But as is well known, a warrior cannot make peace. I have my eye on a future peace, one perhaps beyond your horizons. We could not afford everyone to be on my path... evil must be resisted... but we cannot afford nobody to be on my path either.
Allen: ‘War’ is being used metaphorically here, I assume, and also hyperbolically. But let's be literal for a minute. When it comes to literal war, my position is not different from yours. And I want to be among those who are on the side of peace when it comes to literal wars. Of course I am not going to go out and murder Republicans (except in my fantasies). I want them defeated (decisively) in political terms. Unlike Obama, I do not want to compromise with them, or tolerate them, because I think their position on most issues, and their modes of political conduct (buying elections, gerrymandering, voter suppression) are intolerable – beyond what may justifiably be tolerated. So in that sense, I do not want to make peace with them. But we are talking here about politics, not violent slaughter. (The gun-carrying faction of their side wants to intimidate with weapons, but I do not.) To want to defeat someone politically, and not compromise (or that sense, make peace) with some people, is not wrong, if their views and actions are beyond what can be justifiably tolerated. But do not confuse this with war in the literal sense, or a refusal to behave peacefully, in the literal sense. I am, when it comes to literal violence, a pacifist. This dates from the Vietnam War, and even before it.
Chris: Just to clarify that I of course meant ‘war’ figuratively, politics-as-war, and I am in no doubt that you are a pacifist at heart. It is politics-as-war that I hope to find a way to move beyond... I am uncertain it is possible – perhaps, as Kant has it, it is “merely possible”. But such is my hope.
Allen: I dearly wish I lived in a country where the range of potent political options never exceeded the acceptable. I think it probably was this way for a long time in the US during the twentieth century. But it no longer is. The other side has claimed that we are now at a stage comparable to before the U.S. civil war. I think that is an exaggeration, but it is an exaggerated version of a truth, and what is more frightening, it is the way some of them definitely see it. Republicans will be the first to tell you that ‘peace’ (in your sense) is not possible. They are the ones who declare this not an option, and refuse to compromise or to accept the will of the majority, the interests of the majority, even the rights of the majority.
Chris: Indeed [the political options do exceed the acceptable in the contemporary US] – and its troubling that the situation seems to have become far worse in the last thirty years or so. I always think it disturbing that the citizens of the US were able to get outraged over Watergate, and now seem to take in their stride all manner of horrors perpetrated in their name...
Allen: I do not think that peace in your metaphorical sense is a realistic option when dealing with such a party. My honest conviction is that if the U.S. is to survive as a country worth living in, the Republican party in its present form must cease to exist as a potent political force. The party must either fundamentally change – go back to being something like what it was about mid-20th century – or it must lose its capacity seriously to affect our political life. But mid-century Republicanism (of Eisenhower, for instance) is as much an enemy of the present day Republican party as anything. At the time, Eisenhower was accused of being a communist by the direct ancestors of today's Republicans.
Chris: I do not believe ‘peace’ in my sense can be attained in the US by the current politicians – Democrat or Republican – it must begin elsewhere, at the grassroots, perhaps, anywhere but Capitol Hill where peace is perhaps already impossible under the current conditions of political practice. As I suggested before, it is not something I see attainable in the short term – but it must be something we see as at least possible in the future, certainly if the Kantian Realm of Ends is to remain “merely possible”.
Allen: There is no moral equivalence here. Democrats and Republicans are not equally to blame for the present metaphorical state of war. Indeed, regarding the point on which you are focusing (and without denying that there are many other things on which I’d be the first to criticize Democrats), I don’t think the Democrats are to blame at all for it.The mentality that now dominates the [Republican] party is one which for most of the 20th century (even as late as the Reagan era) was that of a tiny marginalized and fanatical minority that was out of touch with basic realities and believed whatever suited its ideology and its quest for power. ‘Peace’ (in your sense) with such a mentality is not possible on mutually acceptable terms, because the only terms acceptable to them would be their total domination and the total acceptance of their delusions, which would preclude dealing realistically with the world as it is, and preclude even recognizing the basic rights of the vast majority of society.
Chris: Something is required to restore politics to governance in the United States, but I do not think this is a problem solely for the Republicans. It disturbs me that Obama has felt it acceptable to pursue drone assassinations with fearful loss of live to innocents, or at the very least has been unwilling or unable to intercede against these attacks. Your nation has fallen far from its ideals – and this, we can agree, is a tragedy.
Allen: I criticize Obama too, for perpetuating the wartime policies of the previous administration. This is literal war, and it is not about the political conflicts within our system. On that subject, I fault Obama only for thinking naively that he can treat Republicans as if they were reasonable people and expect them to respond in kind. He began his presidency this way and learned the hard way the high cost of it. Even now, he has this tendency more than is desirable. Obama is himself a decent, reasonable man; this is not always optimal in a politician, though it is refreshingly rare among American presidents, which is why I have a hard time condemning him even where I disagree with his positions or actions.
Chris: It may be that Obama’s political hands are tied, but this only serves to emphasise the terrible problems in US politics at the moment. But I do not know if I can forgive him for letting the CIA rain death upon innocents... what can be done when the President cannot stop the institutions of his own nation from doing evil?
Allen: Regarding drones, deportations and other acts of the current administration that we on the left deplore, I think Obama is politically boxed in on these issues. Even as it is, Cheney and McCain accuse him of being "weak" in foreign affairs, and people still listen to that crap. The way the US is positioned in the world now, when you elect someone President you are essentially electing them to be Darth Vader (or whatever metaphor one wants). It’s not a question of forgiving or not forgiving a given individual. It is a question of what the world is going to do about an empire out of control that increasingly is being run by a party, which, even when it is supposedly out of power, is quite literally criminally insane. The insanity is even increased when the party is out of power, because then its members feel they are not responsible for what happens. They can force the government to do or not do certain things, or to continue policies and actions inherited from the previous Republican administration, and then the government (in this case, Obama) takes the blame. This dynamic explains a lot of what is going on in American politics right now.
The opening image is Red by Matthew James Anderson, which I found on his website Abstract Art Sydney. The artist suggests this painting “represents peace and innocence”. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended, and I will take the image down if asked.
Chris’ first book of moral philosophy, Chaos Ethics, is out now from Zero Books, while Allen Wood’s twelfth on the subject, The Free Development of Each: Studies on Freedom, Right, and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy is out now from Oxford University Press.