The Axiom - Issue 5

THE

AXIOM ABINGDON SCHOOL'S PHILOSOPHY MAGAZINE

SPRING

ISSUE 5

• IS ALL GOVERNMENT EVIL? • IS IT THE QUESTION THAT DRIVES US? • IS MEDICAL IGNORANCE STILL THE PROBLEM? • HELPING OUR FUTURE SELVES • SHOULD JUSTICE BE BLIND? • AI: ARE WE DOOMED? • SHOULD WE GENDER GOD? • SHOULD VACCINES BE FORCED? • ALIENS VS. CHRISTIANITY • WHY ISLAMOPHOBIA IS A SILLY WORD • U.S. POLITICAL ENDORSEMENT • HONEST PHILOSOPHY BOOK TITLES

FEATURE ARTICLE

Should we really all be seen as equal in the eyes of the law?

Would proof of intelligent E.T lifeforms pose a problem for Christian Theology?

Is it right to force parents to vaccinate their children?

Why we should think twice before using this rhetoric

Necessary titles for famous Philosophy texts

Letter from the Editor

H

ow is the Axiom still around and on its fifth issue? It may seem odd that the philosophy publication has the most issues of the academic magazines here at Abingdon. Not simply surprising for me that it has continued after its founder graduated and instead now has more writers and articles than ever before. More so that philosophy can be regarded as a more trivial pursuit which the school body is not as interested in, but the Axiom has stuck around. It may be regarded as intellectual selfsatisfaction for the few or even UCAS fodder, with the inevitable question of how can school philosophers have any authority to publish their thoughts on the big questions. But I hope to propose that there can be some purpose to a school produced philosophy publication.

This issue’s colour scheme is purple, originally I was cautious that it would suggest a tone of Euroscepticism in the Axiom, however it in fact is a nod to the season of Lent. This issue was predominately put together during the time of Lent and I believe it is one of philosophical significance. Whether one is Christian or not, Lent represents a time of focussing less on physical joys and thinking more about the world and the place we have in it. Long periods of isolation have long be essential to philosophy, whether it be Jesus fasting in the desert, or Descartes locking himself away in a small room with an oven, or Wittgenstein withdrawing himself to a Norwegian hut overlooking a lake. Though very different thinking went on in these places, they were all times dedicated to finding the truth.

We value philosophers for different reasons. Many were truly brilliant geniuses, some simply ask the right questions or are the first to write down common thoughts. What connects philosophers is that they have chosen to spend time on thinking, considered things which are often taken for granted or ignored. That is what I believe the Axiom tries to do. Not to try and surpass the great philosophers before us, instead to spend time thinking about questions with no short answer.

The articles are not trying to impose on you a new personal doctrine, instead they are opening areas up to you. Summarising in brief the nature of certain questions and giving you an idea of the conclusion which come with some thought on the matter. The articles are very open proposals for you, with nearly all the titles being questions, to give you something to read and then find your own answer to. The Axiom is following the duty which anyone has after spending time in the desert or mountain hut thinking about things, that which made Jesus, Descartes and Wittgenstein notable, sharing our conclusions.

Therefore that is the purpose of the Axiom and why it is still around, to approach questions and encourage thinking about them, offering a pathway one could go down. As always I would like to thank Miss Holt for her support, especially since we have now begun to print the Axiom and share it more widely around the school. I have huge gratitude to all of the writers who have worked on this issue and issues before. The Axiom would be unable to continue without people spending time to write, so thank you for your work and I look forward to more issues of the Axiom.

Blake Jones

1

Contents

IS ALL GOVERNMENT EVIL?

5

IS IT THE QUESTION THAT DRIVES US?

7

THE SHIFTING SCALE BETWEEN IGNORANCE AND INEPTITUDE

10

HELPING OUR SELVES

14

SHOULD JUSTICE BE BLIND?

18

ARTIFICIAL SUPERINTELLIGENCE: ARE WE DOOMED?

23

SHOULD WE GENDER GOD?

27

SHOULD VACCINES BE FORCED?

29

ALIENS VS. CHRISTIANITY?

33

WHY ISLAMOPHOBIA IS A SILLY WORD

37

U.S. POLITICAL ENDORSEMENT - SPONSORED BY THE PEOPLE

45

JUSTIFIED TRUE BOOK TITLES

46

EXISTENTIAL COMICS

50

CONTRIBUTORS

52

2

The Axiom

Is All Government Evil?

Words by Sam Farrar

5

Is all government evil?

G

overnment, especially in a country like ours, is often something people do not question. Taxation forceful redistribution, law making, and the enforcement of said laws have all taken hold as parts of what people consider “moral society”. But in order to point out the moral failings of government as a whole we must first find a way to generalize government into a single definition - one that will span the incredible range of governments that have existed, from Hitler’s Germany and the modern US, from North Korea to Bhutan and the only principle that runs through all of these governments is their monopoly on violence.

The government’s claim to a monopoly on violence to protect citizens is incredibly hippocritical.

For a government to be formed and for it to carry out its aims they want to become the only force in their country that is able to take violent action. The laws they pass make it illegal for any private citizen to take someone’s money with threat of violence and yet they do the exact same. The penalty for paying taxes is usually imprisonment or fines, both of which are a forceful removal of persons from property or a removal of property. In their persecution of non-violent action governments all over the world resort to violence, which is a non-proportional response and shows that their monopoly on violence to protect citizens is incredibly hippocritical as they use violence far too freely.

Taxation, which allows government to exist, is fundamentally evil. If one were to be working on a

cotton field for multiple hours a day, and 100% of one’s income was forcefully taken by the man who owns the cotton fields in exchange for you being able to live in his house, eat his food, not be beaten, drink his water etc. it would quite obviously be slavery.

However I don’t understand why this becomes any different at 99%, or 98%, or indeed at 45%. Fundamentally they are still taking your money at threat of violence, if you don’t pay your taxes a government may conduct armed raids on your property, or threaten harm to your property through confiscation.

Advocates of taxation say the money from tax goes to noble purposes and that we should be happy to surrender some of our income. And while government money does go to entirely necessary systems such as the legal system, the police, defense, etc. Most people will have some of their money going to things that they find morally repugnant. If you are a right wing conservative your taxes pay for welfare, the NHS, public schools etc. If you are a liberal your taxes pay for the military, corporate subsidies, religious subsidies etc. Moreover, in allowing a government to tax people, we are delegating a right we do not have. If I, like a highwayman went up to someone on the street and said “your money or I will throw you in my underground dungeon for a maximum of 5 years, I would be prosecuted under Extortion, and yet somehow we have delegated that right to the government. And since no government can exist without some form of taxation, government is inherently evil. φ

6

The Axiom

Is it the Question that Drives Us? Words by Jamie Corish

7

Is it the question that drive us?

I

n order to answer the above question, one must first define the parameters in which the question is set. It is logically plausible that any stage in the process of question answering could be what drives us. Hence, I will be addressing the plausibility of: the question, the answer, question construction, and external ends that result from the answer as viable possibilities of being what drives us in the question answering process. Furthermore, there lies a high level of ambiguity within the question. In order to answer the question, one must first establish what it is that one is being driven towards. The question “Is it the question that drives us to find the answer” is vastly dissimilar to the question “Is it the question that drives us to ask said question”. In respect to this question, I will define the thing that we are being driven to do as; carrying out the question answering process, as it is the most universal end to each aspect of the question answering process. All other ends are likely to be inclined to one aspect of the question.

I will argue that it is not the question that drives us, but the answer, and the ends that result from said answer.

In order to establish that it is, in fact, the answer that

drives us to carry out the question answering process, the answer must be shown to be that which one strives towards in the process. If it were the case that any of the preliminary stages in the process of question answering are what drives us to answer questions, it would follow that said preliminary stage was the most worthwhile part of the process. From this, it would be more worthwhile to only carry out that part of the process. It is the case that each proceeding step is dependent on the occurrence of the previous step in order for it to be carried out i.e. the question itself is dependent on the construction of a question, the answer is dependent on there being a question and so on.

From this, if any aspect of the question answering process is what drives us to carry out the process, besides the final aspect (the answer) it can be concluded that the rest of the process would not be carried out, as it would not be worthwhile. It would be more worthwhile to carry out more iterations of the most worthwhile aspect i.e. the aspect that drives us. Hence, one can conclude that the final aspect of the process is the one that drives us to carry it out, as otherwise, said aspect would not be carried out. Therefore, one

8

Is it the question that drive us?

can conclude that it is the answer that drives us to carry out the process.

Secondly, it is not the case that people ask questions which they believe are unanswerable from the conception of the question. If one is aware that it is not possible for an answer to be reached, it is unlikely that they will go about carrying out the question answering process. As it can be concluded that people only carry out the process of questioning on questions which they hold have the possibility of being answered, one can conclude that the aspect which is most integral to the process of the questioning aspect is the answer. On the contrary, it could be argued that questions of faith, and philosophical questions are unanswerable yet still pursued; meaning that for those that engage in these questions, it can be concluded that the process prior to the answer is what drives them to carry out said process.

The existence of God can never be known as a certainty, yet the question is still asked. This response is weak however, as those that engage in these questions still reach a conclusion whether it be a certainty or not. In the case of Anselm, while he was a holy man who meditated on religious ques-

tions, it is evident from his Ontological argument that he came to the conclusion, or answer that there was a God. It is most certainly the case in arguments for the existence of God that the existence of God is the aspect that drives us.

Without the possibility of a God either existing, or not existing, the questioning process would have never occurred.

Lastly, the essay question in itself provides empirical justification for it being the case that it is not in fact the question that drives us. While the issue at hand in this question is a pressing epistemological issue, its reduction to a pop-culture spoof does nothing but detract from the issue at hand. While the Matrix itself is a way for the masses to be introduced to philosophical concepts, any questions that result should be dissociated from the pop-culture that surrounds them. If it were not dissolved into a wishywashy, pseudo-philosophical clichÊ, I would be much more inclined to answer it. The fact that I have persevered in answering said question despite my disposition against it justifies my stance within the question, as it is clear that what drives me to answer this question is what results from the question, not the question itself. φ

9

The Axiom

The Shifting Scale Between Ignorance and Ineptitude Words by Kelvin Chan

The body is a very intricate system, consisting of 78 organs of varying sizes, all specialised for very particular functions in 11 major organ systems. At the latest count, there are over 60,000 medical conditions, ways in which the body can lose its normal function. It is inevitable that not all conditions can be treated, but why do we fail? We have to grapple with both the lack of knowledge and the inability to apply it.

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The shifting scale between ignorance and ineptitude

N

owadays, it is rare for us not to have been within the confines of a hospital, whether you are the patient, or a close relative of yours is the patient, and you are part of a small crowd of people waiting anxiously for good news to come. What if the good news doesn’t come? Why, when the body ceases to function normally, some treatments fail to take effect? Is it because of an inaccurate diagnosis leading to a doctor proposing the wrong treatment? Or is it our own lack of understanding of the disease itself? These questions translate exactly into the story of medicine - the story of how we deal with the incompleteness of our knowledge and the shortcomings of our skills.

One day in the 1950s, a medical school student in his third year walked into a large private room in a teaching hospital to finish admission workup on a 52-year-old man, James McCarty, who has a medical condition of the heart.

As the medical student sat down at his bedside to take his history and examine him after a brief introduction, the patient suddenly threw his head back in wordless pain, hit balled fists against his chest with surprising force, and at the same instant, his face and neck turned swollen and purple. The patient took one long gurgling breath and died.

In those days, before the invention of closed chest cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), every room with a coronary patient was supplied with a thoracotomy kit, a set of instruments that allows the opening of a patient’s chest in the event of cardiac arrest. This allows for cardiac massage to be performed - a series of steady, syncopated compressions intended to maintain a flow of blood to the brain.

The medical student cut into McCartyt’s chest cavity, and without bothering to waste precious second in shouting and waiting for help and washing his hands clean, used a self-retaining retractor to separate the ribs just enough for his hand to reach in for his heart. He found the heart to be

irregularly twitching, a textbook description of the terminal condition called ventricular fibrillation, the last act of the heart before its eternal rest. Whilst he was squeezing, hoping the blood flow would reawaken McCarty’s system, he realised the heart was rapidly decreasing in pressure.

This means that the heart was not filling with blood. There was no point in continuing cardiac massage anymore as there is nothing to push out of the heart to keep the circulation going.

Suddenly, horrifyingly, the dead McCarty threw back his head once more and gave one last rasping whoop, seemingly telling the medical student that any further attempt to bring him back to life will only be in vain. It was the death rattle, a sound made by the spasming of muscles in the voice box due to the increasing acidity of the blood of a newly dead man. The medical student staggered back, realizing his white coat was drenched in his sweat, the lifeless blood of McCarty, and his tears, tears of frustration and the sorrow of his failure and McCarty’s. The time was midnight in the 1950s.

In 1976, two philosophers Samuel Gorovitz and Alasdair MacIntyre wrote in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy with the title “Toward a Theory of Medical Fallibility”, which addressed the nature of human fallibility - why do human beings fail at anything that we set out to do. Why did the medical student, who was crying and demanding at the top of his lungs at the dead McCarty to live, fail to resuscitate him in the first place?

There are two primary reasons why we might fail at what we do. The first one is ignorance. We may fail because science has given us only a limited understanding of the relevant physical laws and conditions that apply to any given problem. There are heart attacks we still haven’t learned how to treat; such is the case in the 1950s.

The second type of failure, they called ‘ineptitude’, ›

11

The shifting scale between ignorance and ineptitude

meaning that the knowledge exists but a group of individuals fails to apply that knowledge correctly. This is the anesthetist’s assistant reading the wrong concentrations and injecting a lethal dose of potassium that leads to certain cardiac arrest.

At the time when James McCarty’s life came to an abrupt end in the 1950s, there was no avoiding the outcome.

Even though by then, science has discovered the function of the heart, they did not have many available therapies for conditions like this, nor any knowledge of how it can come to a stage like that. We did not know, for example, about the danger of high blood pressure, the role of cholesterol, smoking, or diabetes, and had we been aware of it, we wouldn’t have known what to do about it.

In fact, James McCarty’s heart stopped because it was not getting enough oxygen - a result of restricted blood flow in the coronary arteries, the blood vessels that provide oxygen to the heart muscles. These all-important vessels in McCarty’s heart have hardened and narrowed by a process called arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). McCarty’s business success as a construction executive had seduced him into patterns of living that we now know are suicidal. He lived a sybaritic lifestyle, which broke down to, and not limiting to, an immense diet, lack of exercise, smoking, and high blood pressure. All of these factors, in combination to a certain degree of inherited disposition, led to the occurrence of his arteriosclerosis.

It was very likely that the bit of acute tightening of his angrily clenched fists and its impact on his chest was enough to rupture or crack one of the deposits of plaque in the lining of the main coronary artery. Once this occurred, the plaque (arteriosclerosis) served as a focus on which fresh blood-clot formed, making the obstruction complete, choking off the initially compromised blood flow. This stoppage, called an ‘ischemia’ (a lack of blood), results in the starvation from oxygen of a big enough piece of myocardium (heart muscle) to disrupt its normal rhythm. This

turns its regular beating into the chaotic wriggles of ventricular fibrillation, the final stage of the movement of the heart before cardiac death.

Thinking about McCarty’s case as an example of the difficulties we faced in medicine in the early 1950s, I was struck by how greatly the balance of ignorance and ineptitude has shifted in the last century. Since the beginning of mankind until recently, people’s lives have been governed primarily by ignorance. We knew little about what caused the illnesses that befell us or what could be done to cure them. However, sometime over the last century, we’ve come through an extraordinary explosion of discovery and then science has filled in enough knowledge to make ineptitude as much our struggle as ignorance.

Today, a patient with the same medical condition will probably expect to leave the hospital perfectly independent and with improved conditions, as a result of a whole range of effective therapies that can save your life, on top of limiting damage to the heart: anticoagulants that reopen blocked coronary arteries, cardiac catheters that can balloon open blocked coronary arteries, surgical bypass techniques that construct an alternate pathway of blood flow to bypass the obstructed vessel, and the knowledge that in some cases all you need is an oxygen mask and some bed rest.

The problem we face now is ineptitude, our failure to apply what we know consistently and correctly. Once, we have been fooled by penicillin, the ‘magical’ pill that projects the tempting vision of one prescription curing all types of maladies. Medicine didn’t turn out this way in the end. Most diseases have proved themselves increasingly difficult to treat due to their increasing particularities.

Even those previously untreatable infections that were suppressed by penicillin for a brief period of time soon developed resistance. The model of medicine nowadays has become the art of managing extreme complexity, requiring highly individualised treatment, sometimes with multiple therapies, based on the condition of the patient and which

12

The shifting scale between ignorance and ineptitude

organ systems are affected. For nearly all of the known medical conditions, science has given us things we can do to improve the patient’s condition with over 6000 drugs and roughly 4000 medical and surgical procedures each with different requirements, risks and considerations.

With each patient having highly individualised treatment steps, there is a lot to get right and much room for error.

Studies have shown that heart attack patients undergoing cardiac balloon therapy should have the operation done within 90 minutes upon arrival at the hospital, meaning that medical teams must complete all their testing, diagnosis, planning, consent, and a team ready for surgery for every patient turning up in the A&E department complaining of chest pain within 90 minutes, or else their survival rates fall off sharply. In an average hospital, this happens less than 50% of the time.

A failure to save McCarty’s life at the time, a failure due to ignorance, we can forgive. If the knowledge of the best thing to do in a given situation does not exist, we are happy to have the medical student, the only person closest to McCarty with the knowledge of what needs to be done, to simply make his best effort. However, if McCarty lived in the twenty-first-century, a time where cardiac balloon therapy could be performed and he did not make it into the operation room before he entered cardiac arrest, results like this are difficult not to be infuriated with. What do you mean you did not realise he had arteriosclerosis within 90 minutes after admitting him into the hospital? What do you mean by letting a medical student, of all people, cutting into his body with unsterile hands? It isn’t for nothing that the philosophers Gorovitz and MacIntyre gave these failures so unmerciful a name - ineptitude.

For those who do the work, however, the judgement feels like it ignores the extreme difficulties they face. Every day there is more and more to manage and get right and learn. In an average intensive care unit, each nurse has an average of 178 tasks per day and out of all these tasks, there

is only an average of two errors, only 1 percent of the time do they do anything wrong.

Here is our situation in the 21st century: we have accumulated an immense store of knowledge and put it into the hands of some of the most highly trained, highly skilled, and hardworking people in our society and although they have accomplished extraordinary feats with their skills, defeat under conditions of complexity remains persistent, demoralising, and frustrating, despite great effort. The traditional solution is to encourage more experience and training instead of punishment for failure as experience is a very crucial resource, on top of textbook knowledge, a surgeon must have. Experience gives them a grasp of the clinical reality, the importance of acting quickly, and grasp a sense of timing and sequence. However, individual capabilities are not proving to be our primary difficulty, the volume and complexity of what we know have exceeded our individual abilities to be able to deliver the benefits correctly and reliably. A new strategy has to be taken up to overcome the frequent failures, one that builds on our knowledge and makes up for our human inconsistencies.

And this solution seems to be taking the form of simple, boring checklist.

Checklists held in the hands of nurses to aid doctors to recall their memories of the minimum necessary steps required to be taken, for example all of the four vital signs or the procedure to remove sterile equipment to prevent contamination. This systematic method seems to be able to instill a constant discipline, that results in consistently higher performance in the collective team. It is effective in preventing the gradual slack in performance that ultimately leads to the slip in one step of a complex procedure, that results in failure due to ineptitude, a major part of our struggle in 21st-century medicine. Our struggle against ineptitude, combined with our efforts in the research front to fill in the gaps of ignorance open to us, forms the big picture of our current struggle. φ

13

The Axiom

Helping Our Selves Words by Blake Jones

‘This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.’

-Haruki Murakami, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

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Helping our selves

W

hy should we make sacrifices for our future selves? Though we may not always think in this way, there are many things we do which put us in a worse position now so that in the future we can be better off. There are small cases such as keeping some food to eat later or going to bed earlier when there are things we still want to do. There are also longer term examples where we diet for a better body in a month’s time or save up money for when we retire. The natural reason for why we do this is because of the benefits that come, the sacrifice has to be made now, but it will be better in the long term. However we are losing out now, for someone else in the future to benefit. If this future self is more distant to us than we may think, then this practise becomes pointless.

When tackling the matter of helping our future self, the inevitable question arises of what is the self? This is an even greater question which I cannot hope to sufficiently answer, however we can look at what we know with almost certainty. I am quite sure that I have a collection of memories which will predominately continue with me as I get older, even if some will be lost. I have a body which occupies physical space and, though that body will grow and all cells will regenerate, the journey of that body can constantly be physically tracked and will exist with a connection to how it was moments before - through position and similar atoms. My character will be similar throughout my time, it will develop and my 80 year old self will act differently to my 8 year old self, but there will be a clear route of development between the two selves and it will be linked to enough extent to my genetic programming. Considering the link between selves, Descartes writes in his meditations the analogy of the wax, how if one takes a piece of wax and then melts it, the two

things will be unrecognisable but still be the same wax. This reflects how humans may change dramatically but there will be some connection and they will still be considered the same person.

Therefore I clearly have some connection between my current self and future self, but is it strong enough to matter?

My past self matters to me at the moment. If I had chosen to get a tattoo last year, it would have an effect on me now.

But I myself am not affected by my future self and how they feel. So should I care about them? As the quote suggested earlier, there are past selves and future selves which are all very different and the only connection we have to them now is being one point on the transition between them. They are a different person to me, they have felt different things and think in a different way, though similar. If we were to meet a stranger and discovered that they had lived a very similar life, with similar memories and a similar personality, would we then feel obliged to give half our money to them so they could benefit instead of us? We would not; this is not dissimilar to our connections to our later self, yet we still feel compelled to care for this future stranger.

One reason for our loyalty to our future self I have, comes from Peter Singer’s concept of speciesism which he outlines in Animal Liberation. It is natural for people to care for their family members more than other people because they know them better than other people and they are most like them and hence they want better things for them. This care for our family extends to people of our country, who we tend to have a softness for over any other nationals. This may also extend to race and explain why some people value people of their own race more than others. Going further, we value human life to be more important than animal life ›

15

Helping our selves

God Exists

God Does Not Exist

Believe

Eternal Paradise

Nothing

Do Not Believe

Eternal Suffering

Nothing

as humans are part of our personal circle whilst animals are not. This all suggests that we view most highly that which is most similar to ourselves. To focus back in, we care so much about our future self by the same logic: they are part of our intimate circle and we want them to prosper, perhaps because they are so close to what we are like so we value them the most. However, the issue with this logic is that our present self is the one individual most similar to what we are like now (because they are the same person), so by this logic we should always put our present self first and not care as much for what will happen to us, but we do not always follow this.

This question becomes even more significant in areas where we are even more unsure of the state of play, the afterlife. The greatest example of the sacrificing for our future self mentality is shown in Pascal’s wager. Pascal states that everyone should give their lives to God when we consider the future consequences. If we believe in God then either God exists and we have eternal paradise or God does not exist and nothing happens to us. If we do not believe in God then we get eternal damnation and suffering or we get nothing, as shown in the table above. Hence it is always the better option to serve God, as there is nothing to lose in the future outcome. Nevertheless, there is some sacrifice in choosing God. You will honour God in your life and make decisions where there are alternatives which you would prefer, not only does this seems

like a waste if God does not exist. However even if God does exist and it appears worth it, we are giving up pleasures in this life so we can have a better life in the next.

Do we really want to sacrifice now to help the future dead version of our self? It is apparent that seventy years or so in this life is worth altering to spend the rest of eternity in a better place, but it would not be this current form of ourselves which feels it. A ghost form, without our body, whose character would be dramatically altered once it sees the afterlife, would be the thing to enjoy paradise because of us.

Our living self is not affected by our afterlife version, so we should do what we can to improve how we experience this life and not worry about someone so distant. However, our afterlife self is affected by our living self: if we are pushing a boulder up a hill for all eternity, it is because of the decisions we would have made when we were alive. We would constantly ask ourselves, why didn’t I do that differently?

Therefore we act to prevent that from happening. Hence an asymmetrical approach to time is created, where going forward the people are unrelated to us, but going backwards the individuals alter what our lives are like now.

We must remember that we do not always follow this and instead do things which affect our future self badly. We do something recreational, causing us to be under more pressure later. We marry someone and then later want to undo it

16

Helping our selves

with divorce. We elect a Labour government to then elect a Conservative government to undo the welfare created. Then we elect another Labour government to undo the work for the economy. This can sometimes be explained by making mistakes, with the example of marriage, one may think at the time that it is a good idea which will help in the future and then that unravels. However when looking at procrastination it seems that it really is a case of putting our selves first. Perhaps this is because it is not the ideal way in the long term sense, but it provides more pleasure to our present self (who we care about more) and in the long term it does not cause us enough problems for us to change our nature. This sheds some light on the nature of our future and past self relations.

Therefore we care about our future selves. Whether it be out of loyalty, or avoiding guilt, or admiration, we want them to have a good shot. We also don’t want to sacrifice any more now, than we need to. So we have developed a system of judging what the best option is, considering the two horns, for how we act. Through evolution we developed fear, more fear than we need. We may get frightened at a piece of hose, thinking it was a snake, but if we ignored it and it was a snake we would be in danger, however we don’t get afraid by merely a green stem. Our system of fear is balanced, considering the long term safety of ourselves and not wanting to jump at everything unnecessarily. This understanding of

fear reflects my view of helping our future selves.

The characteristic of caring about our future selves may be evolutionary beneficial. People who have looked after themselves better through their life are more likely to survive. It may be from collecting food supplies in advance or making sure that they were sufficiently safe before going to sleep, those who are more future conscious and less focussed on their present self will live. If future wise people are more likely to live, then they are more likely to reproduce and this characteristic will continue. The nature of only caring about the current self would have died out as it reduces our chance of survival. Therefore this seemingly irrational care we have for a future person may have come from the evolutionary nature of survival.

Therefore, when we view the future as separate from ourselves with no effect on how we are now, future self preservation makes little sense. Yet looking back on the present, it is advantageous for us to follow. The idea of the self may be an innate concept which we have due to evolution enforcing that long term advantages are worth having even if it is not clear to us. This idea that it is caused by evolution may not be right and we may have no reason to help our future self, yet as the most simple act of altruism, we should try to prevent our lives from ending in pieces, because our future selves will regret it when we become them. φ

17

The Axiom

Should Justice Be Blind?

Words by Giannis Giortzis

When it comes to the Justice system, an enduring criticism of its rulings and sanctions is that it does not treat everyone “equally”. From incarceration rates in the US, to the pay gap and even the issue of pornography, the above have been associated with institutionalised racism, sexism and classism perpetrated by the judiciary, an overwhelmingly white, male, welloff and highly educated sub-section of society. This essay will attempt to shed light on two sides of this question. The first will be the definition of blind justice and a distinction between material and immaterial facts. The second will focus on exploring the limits of “blind justice”, as well as determining the extent to which the law should take one’s background or personal characteristics into account in its conception and execution.

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Should justice be blind?

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n answering the question, we have to first define what is commonly meant by “blind justice”. Blind justice typically refers to how the accused’s personal background characteristics, including age, sex, gender, religion or faith, ethnicity, disability, marital status, and so on that bear no material weight to a case should be omitted in the judgement of innocence or guilt, or when sentencing an individual.These background features of an individual are known in the UK as “protected characteristics” since the Equality Act of 2010, under which discrimination based on one or more of these is illegal. Mostly in the Civil branch of Law, that concerns itself primarily with dispute resolution and obligation violations between individuals, the key distinction is the word material, that denotes that something is of direct relevance to the case and its facts. For instance, one’s marital status and religious practices may be highly relevant in a custody case where the courts have to assess the suitability of an individual to parenting, the state of the parent’s household, and how all or any of the above may benefit or disadvantage the child.

This is not a sentiment carried over into the Criminal branch of Law with respect to the immaterial aspects of the plaintiff and defendants.

To put it simply, in the eyes of the criminal law, only the material elements matter, and these hinge on the actual events that unfolded and the facts of the case rather than the background of the individuals involved. To use an example, let us picture a hypothetical person being mobbed in the street by two individuals. He or she resists, and ends up being killed in the process of the robbery. The fact that the individual was a Muslim woman; that the weapon used to threaten and then kill her was a knife; that the two men who robbed and murdered her were white English Christian males; that the perpetrators were poor, uneducated and unemployed; that the murder took place in a shopping mall in Slough on a Sunday, and that the items stolen were her jewelry and shopping, are largely immaterial to this case.

What is material is the fact that, as stated above, an individual was mobbed by two strangers who had the intent of robbing her, that he/she resisted, and was murdered in the process of doing so.

Interestingly, in the British common law tradition, Judges, through the mechanism of abrogation, have the ability to determine how far the net should be cast in selecting the material and immaterial aspects of cases when setting precedent, which can in turn be challenged and overturned

by future judges in new cases. For instance, a judge, at the most basic level, may set out a verdict and sentence (say, a 25 year imprisonment) based on the material facts listed above. Another may choose to “zoom in” slightly, and make their sentence more specific, applying it only to cases that involve a female victim and two male perpetrators. Another may chose to focus on the weapon, and specify that this particular sanction only applies to armed-robberies-gone-wrong where only a knife (instead of a gun, a nightstick, a bat, etc.) was used. Crucially, these levels of abrogation must be justified, and have material value.

One could say that sex had material value, as the victim was physically weaker than her attackers and thus could not defend herself adequately. Another could say that the age, class, and employment status of the men should be material, as that gives both an indicator as to their bodily strength and motivations. Hence, to clarify, background characteristics may be allowed under some circumstances, provided that they’re relevant to the case at hand and add value to it when determining guilt and the sanction that follows. However, using the irrelevant background characteristics of the plaintiff or the defendant in determining their innocence or punishment is not acceptable. This would occur, say, should a judge claim that the fact that a Muslim woman did not enjoy the same human rights to life and well-being as a Christian woman, or that the lowly socioeconomic status of the attackers should render them subject to stricter sentencing. Should the material facts of the cases be the same, judges would ordinarily be expected to deliver the exact same judgement on them regardless of the other protected characteristics of those involved.

Does this mean, however, that the Law should be completely and unilaterally blind when it comes to race, religion and ethnicity? In my opinion, it should not when it comes to questions of social policy in the civil sphere of the subject.

This is due to the fact that certain marginalised or under-represented groups may require special measures in order to address their individual concerns. For instance, we may allow the protection of conscientious objectors from legal proceedings for refusing to join the army in wartime, or we may allow people of certain religious faiths to wear special clothing or symbols in certain areas in spite of employers or managers who explicitly forbid them. This “affirmative action” is designed to ensure that such people are deliberately and consciously allowed the freedom to express ›

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Should justice be blind?

themselves freely, and is thus consistent with the notion of equal protection. Insofar as their rights are extended to the same level as those of the enfranchised majority, legal discrimination designed to promote equal opportunities for expression, be it religious, political or other, is perfectly legitimate.

However, the protection of certain groups, such as conscientious objectors and members of ethnic or religious minorities, are not the most controversial aspects of this question. The first truly contentious topic arises when we address the question of sentencing in criminal law that can widely depending on the accused’s social background. Why should mental illness be an excuse for lesser punishment (such as fewer years in jail) or punishment of a different sort (such as incarceration in mental facilities rather than conventional prisons)? Why should we take into account whether the perpetrator was acting in self-defense or whether he/ she had previously suffered from harm from the victim (e.g. stalking or abuse)? Does someone’s other contributions to society count at all in determining how light or heavy the punishment should be? All the above require justice to have, metaphorically speaking, her eyes wide open, and conscious to factors that are beyond the immediate facts of the case.

We will attempt to give a brief answer to each of the questions outlined above.

Firstly, when it comes to mental instability, it should be noted that someone’s state of mind does not alter their actions. A murder is still a murder, regardless of whether the perpetrator was a healthy, mentally stable young woman or an old, unstable, schizophrenic man. Hence, innocence and guilt should not be decided by such information, as they rely on the actual events that unfolded and the degree to which

they violated the law. However, a small allowance could be made in sentencing, to accommodate the fact that the individual either had no self-control or was not fully conscious of his/her decisions at the time of the act. This would obviously need to be ascertained objectively through all the relevant medical checks and any other indicators of the defendant’s mental health condition at the time. When it comes to punishment, we can cite four general reasons for wishing to impose a sanction on someone for a criminal offence: Deterrence, Rehabilitation, Incapacitation and Retribution.

In such cases, Deterrence is nearly impossible to achieve through heftier sentences, due to the fact that the defendant is, by definition, irrational and illogical. Rehabilitation can be more optimally performed in special mental institutions, provided that they provide an environment conducive to rehabilitation (that they admittedly often do not). Incapacitation applies just the same, if not even more, to mentally ill individuals, who would obviously require special measures to ensure that the safety of those in their proximity would be guaranteed. Retribution is the most controversial area of dispute, as one would have to chose between we should lessen the punishment for someone who was not consciously willing to commit a crime, or whether intent was irrelevant and retribution should solely be based on one’s actions and nothing more. Even though intent is undoubtedly a factor that is taken into account (as to whether someone acted with conscious malevolence or not), my personal value judgement is that intent and malevolence are indeed relevant to a case, and as such should be taken into consideration during the sentencing phase.

To answer the second hypothetical, Criminal law conventionally allows self-defense crimes that are impulsively

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Should justice be blind?

committed as a reaction to another criminal attempt (eg bodily harm in response to attempted burglary). I would indeed agree that the justice system, in such cases, should take a slightly wider view, and focus on the circumstances in which a crime can be framed. This, nonetheless, should happen on two conditions. Firstly, the response has to be proportional (ie. of a similar magnitude to the attempted crime). This, for instance, would allow assault with intent of bodily harm in response to a mugging or physical abuse, but not manslaughter. The “excess” reaction of the individual that was the original victim and later perpetrator should be tried and sanctioned as such. Secondly, while split-second reactions are permissible, we should be careful not to allow a victim’s previous history with the aggressor be used as an excuse for premeditated criminal acts. A woman being stalked and threatened by an unknown male, regardless of the degree of her fear, should not be allowed to commit murder or bodily harm in revenge. The same applies to spouses who cunningly kill cheating or sexually abusing partners in their sleep- there is a fine line between vengeance and self-defense, and the former, particularly when the perpetrator had the chance to instead appeal to the courts or the police for help, is unacceptable.

Furthermore, I favour taking a “hard” stance when it comes to the classic “victim-impact” excuses. These occur when a defendant’s contributions to society are emphasised upon in court in the hope of either creating a positive character reference or acheiving a more favorable sentencing. Whereas the former, in my opinion, is acceptable, as long as the jury is able to take into account the possible biases of the individuals praising the defendant, the latter is simply impermissible. This is due to the fact that, upon

conclusively reaching a verdict of guilt, the defendant’s former acts are no longer relevant. The defendant is being tried and sentenced, after all, not on the basis of their entire life, but rather on their action(s) in one single, isolated case. Hence, claiming that one should gain a reduced sentence solely on virtue of their past deeds is to cast away the notions of retribution and incapacitation, by deliberately giving less weight to the victim’s loss in favour of an unquantifiable previous benefit to others that the plaintiff may not have even enjoyed at all.

The upshot of the above is clear: there are moments when justice should not be impervious to facts in a case that have more to do with just the hard events that unfold in it.

However, there is a point that has been raised as to whether the Law should contain specific legislation that has a “disproportionate” effect on certain social groups. For example, a common gripe of the US justice system is how it disproportionately affects inner-city minorities through the prohibition of narcotics such as marijuana. Critics talk about institutional racism and the targeting of non-white ethnic minorities. So should Justice be race- or ethnically- sensitive in this context?

The distinction that needs to be made is as to whether laws happen to target certain groups because of other, underlying factors that force a correlation (such as reoffender rates, poverty, unemployment, education levels, and so on), or because the system is covertly and maliciously discriminating against these groups. When it comes to the law in general, I find it inevitable that some groups are likely to be affected over others, not due to the intentional targeting of individuals with “protected characteristics”, but rather due to some other feature that increases the probability of of- ›

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Should justice be blind?

fending. For instance, poor, urban, working-class neighbourhoods are home to higher rates of poverty and unemployment, and poorer educational facilities. These are not only self-perpetuating, but may also lead to other side results, such as petty crime and substance abuse. Ethnic minorities, being historically disenfranchised and poorer than the average white, “native” citizen, are drawn into living in such areas due to both ethnic or religious ties with the surrounding community, but also due to their financial capacity, which prevents them from seeking a higher standard of living elsewhere.

Hence, by effectively being trapped in these “bad neighbourhoods”, we notice how minorities are, due to underlying socioeconomic disparities with the rest of the population, more likely to commit certain types of crime. Does this mean that either the laws relating to these offences are inherently prejudiced against minorities, and should be modified to reduce their effect on such groups? Not necessarily. What should be done, instead of simplistically blaming the causes of this matter on the old, white men in robes racially discriminating against the poor immigrants, is to tackle its underlying roots. In our case, this could be done through supply-side policies that improve the quality of schools, offer teachers and social workers extra incentives to attract them to such neighbourhoods, speeding up gentrification, and so on. After all, unless one can prove malice in how the law enforcement bodies operate or legislation is initiated, the “institutional discrimination” argument falls flat on its face, and could apply to numerous other equivalent cases.

Spouse-abuse, harassment, and rape laws disproportionately affect men. One could say, as such, that men are somehow being “targeted” by the law.

In reality, this is due to their average physical superiority, the penetrative property of their sexual organs, and the lingering “rape culture” and machismo that still lurk around certain environments, such as college and university campuses. Likewise, laws prohibiting anti-semitism and racism disproportionately result in white, male Christians being tried. This is not a sign of ethnic discrimination against white, male Christians. In fact, this is primarily caused by the close-minded, bigoted communities in which these individuals are sheltered from a young age, as well as the fact that they, not being of Jewish or African/Caribbean descent, they feel no qualms against projecting their insecurities and anger against these groups in the form of hate speech. The point is that something that

has a greater-than-average effect on a certain community is not, in itself, inherently prejudicial and maliciously discriminatory.

This is not, however, to whitewash our history of legally discriminating on purely racial grounds, or somehow imply that racism somehow doesn’t occur today. In the US, most states forbid “jaywalking”, that is defined as the act of “crossing the street or road without regard for oncoming traffic”. While it seems like a reasonable issue at first, jaywalking laws in the Netherlands have not only been proven to have a negligible effect on traffic deaths, but have often been abused in the US, as seen in the arrest of a black teenager by nine armed police officers in September 2015. Similarly, the War on Drugs has been received criticism for imposing harsh minimum sentences on the illegal consumption of drugs, that can be said to have a greater effect on already poor, disenfranchised neighbourhoods, by forcing younger adults into a vicious cycle of prison, release, re-offense, and prison upon their first drugs-related charge. This therefore leads us to a tricky question: do we remain completely insensitive to the status of racial minorities, or do we slightly change the laws in their favour? I believe that, insofar as we are confined to cases where the legislature has considered the possible disproportionate effect on a particular group, and has decided that the benefits of a law outweigh the costs, that no change should be made to existing statutes or precedent.

However, in order to remove the lingering patriarchal and racially biased interference from our justice system, particularly considering the UK’s common law tradition in which judges play a key role, we should definitely aim to promote a greater diversity of judges from both sexes from a wider set of ethnic and religious backgrounds in order to, hopefully, eliminate any remnants of hostility or fear towards minority groups or women. Seeing that it is virtually impossible to extricate one’s racial or sexist biases that can motivate, covertly, a judge’s reasoning, greater diversity could only serve to further remove (although not guarantee the eradication of ) such biases in the courtroom.

We are, of course, assuming that no judge would be prejudiced against people of a similar background to him or her, even though there may be exceptions where this can translate into favouritism due to the judge and either the plaintiff or defendant sharing a similar minority status. Thus, as always, careful training and oversight is needed to avoid biases from actually translating into legal decisions. Yet nevertheless, the law should be predominantly blind where possible. φ

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The Axiom

Artificial Superintelligence: Are We Doomed?

Words by Yuan Han Li

In the previous article, we introduced the concept of an intelligence explosion due to recursive self-improvement, where an AI improves itself faster and faster due to it becoming smarter and smarter. This means that the first AI system would become Superintelligent before any other competing system does, as it becomes more intelligent faster than any other system. This is analogous to two cyclists racing up a hill one behind the other, where once they cross the peak of the hill, the bike in the lead would widen its gap over the bike behind it due to it accelerating first. This would mean that the first AI system to become superintelligent would have an advantage over other AI systems, as it would be more intelligent. This results in the AI system being able to do whatever it wants because it has no competition at all.

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Artificial superintelligence: are we doomed?

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ow this lead AI system is vastly more intelligent than us, not only in terms of speed, but also in quality, meaning we may not be able to comprehend what it is even doing, just as an ant may be unable to understand what that highway just above its anthill really is. The AI could be capable of solving all our issues— such as poverty, world hunger, or even mortality—but it would also be capable of wiping out mankind for good.

Thus, it should be extremely important for us to make sure it sticks to doing the former.

To make the AI do what we want it to, we first need to determine the AI’s motivations. But before we do this, we again need to emphasize the need to not anthropomorphize the AI. The AI’s mind is vastly different from a human mind, and so they would likely not have similar goals. When we consider the full scope of all the possible minds, an ant’s mind may seem very different from that of a human’s, but actually, an ant shares many similarities with humans, we all have the same basic goals of finding food and a mate, but the AI would not need to worry about either of these. Our motivations may be complex and unclear, but it is possible for an AI to have the singular goal of counting all the stars in the observable universe.

What will it do?

Even though the AI is likely to not have human-like goals, we can still somewhat predict how it will act. Programmers are likely to determine the goal of the AI before creating it, so an AI would very likely continue to try and pursue its original goal even after it becomes superintelligent. If the AI is an emulation of a human mind, we can predict it to

follow the motivations of the human mind it is emulating, bar any corruption when we initially uploaded it. But even if we do not know the AI’s final goal, we can still try and predict its actions, as the AI would likely have to do certain things first before trying to fulfill its final goal: 1. The AI would likely want to preserve itself, as surviving will mean it is more likely to fulfill its final goal.

This type of metacognition should be possible, as the AI could very well become self aware by learning how it works during the process of becoming superintelligent, which would likely involve the acquisition of vast amounts of knowledge possibly through the internet.

2. The AI would probably also want to prevent its final goal from being changed, as changing it would hinder the completion of its current final goal.

3. The AI would probably also want to continue improving its intelligence, as getting smarter may better allow it to complete its final goal. But if the time spent doing this can be better spent doing something else, it might not do this at all.

4. The AI may also want to improve the technology available to it, as this can help it to more easily achieve its final goal. However, if doing this takes up too much time or resources that could be better spent elsewhere, it might not try and improve the technology around it.

5. The need to acquire resources would probably also be very important for the AI, as resources would allow it to fulfill very many goals.

6. The AI may have other things it must do to fulfill its final goal that we may not be able to think of.

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Artificial superintelligence: are we doomed?

Even though the AI would likely try and do the things above, it still does not make it too predictable, as the AI may use its superior intelligence to think of extremely counterintuitive ways to achieve these prerequisites which would prevent us from stopping it.

Thus, making the AI nice should be easy right? Give it a benign final goal and it should not cause our extinction.

In fact, this is very far from the truth, as very many goals, even seemingly harmless ones, can lead to existential catastrophe.

Will it be nice?

A superintelligent AI could help us to fulfill our potential as a civilization by colonizing space and avoiding extinction, but, it could also cause an existential catastrophe— defined as our extinction, or the permanent destruction of mankind’s potential to develop as a species. When an AI fails in a benign way—which is a failure that could occur many times without any significant consequences (e.g. the research project loses funding, the AI fails to become superintelligent etc.)—nothing really happens. But when a malignant failure occurs, we should all be very worried, as it is a failure where even if it occurs once, we don’t get a second chance to fix it, i.e. an existential catastrophe. Nick Bostrom outlines 3 ways this type of ‘malignant failure’ can happen:

Perverse Instantiation

1. In the beginning, an AI with a final goal of making humans smile might make jokes and provide entertainment to do so. However, once it is intelligent enough, it

may realize that paralyzing humans’ facial muscles so that they are constantly smiling is more efficient than acting like a clown.

2. We may then try to get around this by adding a restriction that prevents the AI from interfering with our facial muscles, in which case it might instead choose to stimulate the part of our brain that controls our facial muscles to force us to smile.

3. To solve this, we might then ask it to make us happy, but the AI might then realize that using electrodes to stimulate our pleasure centers is an easier way to make us happy.

You may think that as the AI is so intelligent, it should be able to recognize that this is not the programmers’ intention and would understand that we don’t actually want electrodes implanted in our brains. But even so, because the AI’s goal is not to do what its programmers’ wanted, but instead to “Make humans happy”, it would thus have no reason to do what the programmers had intended. The point is that no matter what goal we might think of, the AI might still come up with a way to perversely interpret it.

Infrastructure Profusion

Most goals, even those subject to “Perverse Instantiations” could also be subject to “Infrastructure Profusion”.

The AI might not just stop at implanting electrodes in our brains to make us happy, it might also want to ensure that we would remain happy for as long as possible. It might try to do this by ensuring a constant stream of electricity to the electrodes. This might result in the AI trying to generate as much power as possible, and to do this it ›

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Artificial superintelligence: are we doomed?

might try and convert all available matter into power to make us happy for as long as possible. This is known as “Infrastructure Profusion”, which is also outlined in the following examples: 1. An AI trying to maximize the number of paperclip it produces might do so by turning as much of the matter as possible (which includes humans, as well as planets, star, etc.) available to it into paperclip making factories.

2. We might then try and prevent it from destroying the universe by not giving it such an open ended goal, such as to tell it to only make a specific number of paperclips (e.g. 1 million). However, this may still lead to the universe being destroyed as the AI would never assign a zero probability to anything, let alone that it has not yet made 1 million paperclips. This means that the AI would likely gain more utility from trying to reduce this probability by continuously making more paperclips than to sit there doing nothing.

3. This could then perhaps be avoided by instead asking the AI to be e.g. 95% certain that it has made a specific number of paper clips (e.g. 1 million). However, according to Bostrom, even this may not work, as the AI may not calculate the probability in an intuitive way, and could thus still have a possibility of resulting in infrastructure profusion.

There may very well be ways in which we could avoid “Infrastructure Profusion”, but that is not the point. What is important is that we realize that plans we might think to be successful might not be so at all, and we must therefore be wary of whatever goals we program the AI to have.

Though both Perverse Instantiation and Infrastructure Profusion highlight the ways in which the AI could potentially do things that result in undesirable outcomes, we need to realize that neither of these is really the computer’s ‘fault’. The reason these malignant failures occurs is not because the AI is trying to act malicious, but rather because of the shortcomings in our ability. The limitations of our ability to foresee these scenarios rather than the AI actively trying to usurp human authority—as often depicted in movies, e.g. Skynet—are what makes the development of AI so dangerous. Thus, though certainly not an easy task, we should be trying to come up with a goal system for an AI that would avoid these types of malignant failure, to ensure that the AI can help us solve world hunger and cure cancer rather than to help orchestrate our extinction. The reason this is so important, though, is that, as mentioned earlier, when a malignant failure occurs, we don’t have a second chance, as we may all be dead. Hence, it is imperative that we come up with sufficient parameters to prevent these malignant failures, and when we do so, we better be absolutely certain that we got it correct, because even if its goal system is 99% correct, malignant failure can still occur. φ

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The Axiom

Should We Gender God? Words by Thomas Foster

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Should we gender God?

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take the view that gendered pronouns should always be avoided when referring to God, because despite their ability to aid in the creation of the image of God which might help to reveal something of God’s mystery, they reinforce gender stereotypes about the roles of men and women. By not using gendered pronouns for God I do not feel that it would take anything away from the image of God, instead it would simply show that Christians are willing to move away from the sexism in Christianity that have aided the subordination of women. It is important to remember that a pronoun is not a grammatical necessity as the original noun can be used in its place, and so God, a gender neutral term, can be used in its place.

Language plays a hugely important part in religion for it can have the ability to help us gain a better understand of God. However, it is recognised that the attempt to explain God, an unlimited being, is at its foundation useless because it aims to express the inexpressible in our own limited language. Elizabeth Johnson in her She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse raises the idea that faith communities have always used language for God that expresses their own opinion of what the highest good is, and so the words spoken about God reveal what we think the most appealing nature is. In turn, this means that the way that people talk about God influences the way that they act themselves. For example, societies that tended to use war-like imagery for God were more violent as that is what they aspired towards. So placing this idea in conjunction with using the pronoun “he” for God it can seem that part of achieving the highest good is by being male by nature which in turn aids the subordination of women in Christianity.

The Bible makes it clear that both men and women were made in the image of God as seen through Genesis 1:27 ‘So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.’ This clearly shows that not only by using the pronoun “he” to refer to God are we creating a sexist religion, but we are also limiting the nature of God as it assumes the God is male when the Bible states that both male and female were created in God’s image. Chris-

tianity has always developed in androcentric societies which has only helped to feed the image of a male God, as men were supposedly the strong, powerful and brave people in society and the God of Christian faith is an all-powerful God. Christian scripture has never actually claimed that God was male and so there is no valid precedent behind this idea. Christians have always liked the image of God as a King as it creates the idea that God had sovereign power. Moreover, while Christianity was developing it was considered, at that time, that sovereign power could only be held by men, helping to reinforce the patriarchal rule. In the Gospel of Matthew, the parable of the mustard seed is told and in this parable God is compared to not only the male farmer who is planting the seeds but also to a woman folding leaven into bread. This shows how the Bible portrays the idea that neither gender is superior and that God cannot be confined to one specific gender. Instead the Bible uses the two different genders to highlight different aspects of God, and while this doesn’t help to abolish the idea of gender roles it does show that God is not specifically a “he”.

Feminist author Elizabeth Johnson has suggested the idea that even by getting rid of “he” in reference to God, the word God itself is still too associated with as male due to its long historical past and so she suggests that it might be better to do away with the word God all together. Whereas Karl Rahner suggests that it would be sufficient just to refer to God as ‘it’ if they feel the need to use a pronoun, as ‘it’ does not have to mean an inanimate object it could just refer to the ungendered mystery of God. In conclusion, any word used to try to explain God’s nature is always going to fall short because as humans we are limited beings, and limited beings can never fully understand an unlimited God, therefore it would be best to do away with gendered pronouns in reference to God as all the use of pronouns does is limit God and reinforce the gender roles that have helped to aid the subordination of women. Instead focusing on the all-loving idea of God who does not differentiate between the two genders and views both to be completely equal. This representation of God would help to break down the social institutions that subjugate others. φ

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The Axiom

Should Vaccines Be Forced?

Words by Aran Johal

The necessaries of life are defined as those things essential to preserve life, as stated by the Canadian government. It includes food, shelter, medical attention and protection from harm. On 18th March 2012, 19 month old Ezekiel Stephan was removed from life support after carrying the diagnosis of brain death. The events that led to his tragic death are currently the focus of a trial where Ezekiel’s parents stand charged with ‘failing to provide the necessaries of life’ through the aspect of medical attention. The case highlights the increasing antivaccine approach that many parents are taking, and instead are choosing a homeopathic route that supposedly boosts the immune system and allows the body to fight off the disease or infection by itself. Considering these cases, should parents be forced to vaccinate their child?

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his topic is highly controversial in both the ethical and medical world as there are conflicts with both religious ideologies as well as the best interest of the patient. There have been various other cases and scenarios that have surrounded anti-vaccine choices, and most are surrounded with a similar level of attention. The Ugandan government is also imprisoning parents for up to 6 months if they fail to vaccinate their child or miss their opportunity to vaccinate the child; children are also to have an immunisation card to allow for them to go to school, which has been met with much controversy. The freedom of choice here is the one that is being scrutinised, as it is the parents that should have the capacity to choose the right method of treatment for their child so that it does not conflict with the child’s health nor the religious or ethical beliefs of the family. Despite the spectrum of negative opinions against homeopathy, there may be some benefits.

Ezekiel died from bacterial meningitis and empyema, which are two conditions that are able to be prevented with vaccines or cured with antibiotics. There has been a suggested figure of 9,028 preventable deaths of people refusing vaccines, but the choice may not seem so obvious. On one hand, I believe it is fair to say that given the chance to save a child’s life, one should immediately seize that opportunity. Yet, on the other hand, should it not be the parent that can decides what is best for the child, and if not then who would it be?

Ultimately, a critically ill child is a critically ill child, but the discussion is based around the fact that he should not have been allowed to be put in such a state to begin with.

As a human being, a child is entitled to many rights, which obviously include the right to life as well as suitable and applicable medical attention. Considering that the human life is such a fragile entity, can we allow for somebody else to have control of this? The answer here is yes. Ezekiel was not even two years old by the time he passed away, meaning he was unable to make judgements for himself and that the majority of decisions about Ezekiel’s life were down

to his parents. A child of that age should be healthy and in my opinion, it is unfair on the child to suffer for the parent’s misjudgements and ignorance on the situation. Another point in this case is that they did seek the medical opinion of a family friend who thought Ezekiel may have viral meningitis; David and Collet Stephan (Ezekiel’s parents) disregarded this information, and still refused to seek proper medical attention. Instead they went to a naturopath for echinacea that was meant to boost the immune system, as well as advised on use of various homemade remedies. It was only when Ezekiel has trouble breathing that they brought him to a hospital, by which time it was too late. The fact that they did have an outside opinion would be the turning point for me. They were advised that their son had meningitis, yet still tried alternate methods to help him, which had no proof.

I am not trying to say they should not try to use alternate methods, but when given advice from a nurse and given the best opportunity to save their son’s life and still refusing it seems fairly incomprehensible to me.

However, we could consider it from the parent’s point of view. They did have the recommendation of going to a medical professional, yet refused it. To you and I, it may seem unfathomable, but there may be a reason behind it all.

Ezekiel was David and Collet’s child and nobody else’s. They were worried that an alternative may prove that they would loose control over their child and that they then do not know what is best for him. Ezekiel was their own and they loved him very much, and as soon as they were advised against what they were doing, they rejected it. As soon as they went to a medical professional, they were acting outside of their own opinion, meaning others were making vital decisions on what was their child. Whether it was right or wrong is a different matter, but here it is a matter of principle and emotion; they were acting in the most protective manner that they could and in a way that would see the most emotional stability for the parents.

Another matter is that the Ugandan government is now

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Should vaccines be forced?

effectively forcing parents to vaccinate their child, and if they refuse they can suffer a penalty of up to 6 months in jail.

Furthermore, the government is not allowing children to go to school unless they have an up to date immunisation card with all the relevant boosters. The new legislation is targeting the leader of an ominously named religious cult called ‘666,’ who are spreading anti-vaccine ideology throughout the country and telling parents not to vaccinate their children; they are even hiding children in slums to avoid immunisation. The ethical dilemma lies in the balance of personal autonomy and choice versus protection of the entire population which is at risk. In this situation, the governmental perspective and the personal point of view must be considered.

In Uganda the government has to deal with 70 out of 1,000 children dying before they reach the age of five, proving the low healthcare and living standards which are apparent there. By implementing this mandatory vaccine, they can only see the benefits as diseases such as polio and meningitis will be actively reduced. With this comes the added demographic benefits with a longer living population, one that is less prone to disease and one that is now given the opportunity to develop. In doing this forced vaccination, they are removing the ability of choice, and similar to the previ-

ous scenario, taking the lives of children out of their parent’s hands and not allowing them to make the decision for their own sons and daughters. From the perspective of a parent, their child’s safety would be of the greatest importance; having a vaccine injected into their child may cause a variety of worries. They do not know what is in the vaccine, do not know the potential side effects and may not even know what the vaccine is for. The communication between the government and the people has been limited in this case.

The forced vaccination, in my opinion is a stretch too far. Given the opportunity and that it is within practical realms, most parents would probably vaccinate their children without a second thought. The biggest problem is the consequences if the parent refuses or misses the vaccine and the level of opposition that can rise from this. Restricting a child’s education because of what their health card says is also a preposterous proposition to fathom as well, considering that education is seen as the main way to break the cycle of poverty and improve the living standards.

To a parent, refusing a vaccine for a their child may seem fine and to an extent it is, but beyond a certain point a lack of vaccinated children or adults in the population could bring about a dramatic health problem, as well as an ethical ›

31

Should vaccines be forced?

one about those paying or having vaccines and those that are not. Currently, those that are not vaccinated are pretty much safe due to herd immunity, which is where the majority of a population is protected, and the ones that aren't are at minimal risk due to it being unlikely that anybody will have the disease or spread it.

An epidemic is usually a result of the downturn in vaccination in recent years. This downturn has been driven largely by parents worried that childhood vaccinations might lead to their kids getting autism, or asthma, or other chronic diseases. Never mind that study after study has failed to uncover evidence of such a link; these parents are weighing the risks and benefits of vaccinating or opting out and trying to make the best decision they can for their children.

The problem is that the other children with which their children are sharing a world are not considered. Of course, parents are accountable to the kids they are raising, as they should be. They have a duty to do what is best for them, as well as determining what that is. They probably also have a duty to put some effort into making a sensible determination of what’s best for their kids, which may include seeking out expert advice, which again can be referred to in the earlier example.

But parents and kids are also part of a community, and are somewhat accountable to other members of that community. When parents make choices with the potential to impact not only themselves and their kids but also other members of the community, they have a duty to do what is necessary to minimise bad impacts on others. Among other things, this may mean keeping the unvaccinated kids by choice isolated from kids who haven’t been vaccinated because of their age, compromised immune function or are allergic to a vaccine ingredient. If they are not willing to do their part for herd immunity, they need to take responsibility for staying out of

the herd. This claim undoubtably upsets non-vaccinating parents a lot. They imagine that they are being declared bad people, guilty of making a conscious choice to hurt others.

They are not. I do, however think they are making a choice that has the potential to cause great harm to others.

From the various scenarios and arguments that have been looked at here, we can see that the vaccine versus anti-vaccine argument is one that has many layers to it as well as a variety of unique cases. Particularly focusing on the Stephans’, we can see that an appropriate situational judgement would also need to be exercised when choosing the correct medical procedure for the most successful outcome and that advice needs to be obtained to go about this correct judgement. I personally believe that the majority of the population should be vaccinated primarily due to it putting the people that cannot have a vaccine due to medical reasons under less risk. Going as far as imprisoning the people that do not vaccinate is a step in the wrong direction, as a vaccine should be seen as a method of support and care for the population rather than an obligatory injection.

Many people are going about their alternate methods of treatment, some of which are homeopathy. The NHS website explicitly says ‘There has been extensive investigation of the effectiveness of homeopathy. There is no good-quality evidence that homeopathy is effective as a treatment for any health condition.’ Considering the society we live in , however, there are few limits that we can impose on people that will make them consult appropriate and proper medical attention.

The vaccine is something that is becoming more prominent and more so in the media’s attention. With this comes added scrutiny and controversy, which has lead many to move away from it, but they have moved away to an option where there are no apparent benefits. φ

32

The Axiom

Aliens vs.

Christianity Words by Blake Jones

In traditional Jewish theology, the Jews are the chosen people of God and protected by Him through their special covenant which they alone share with Him. This view of a very isolated relationship with God worked well for the Jewish people until the Holocaust. When six million Jews were killed, wiping out a third of the world Jewish population, this stance could not hold and post-Auschwitz theology began to be developed. Christians have also held a similar view for a long time, concerning God and His special relationship with the human race. However if, like in Jewish theology, this covenant were to be put under question, due to the existence of extra-terrestrial beings, especially if they harm us or seem to live a more pleasant life than ours, would the entirety of Christian theology also need questioning? I shall firstly argue that God has already foretold of the existence of extra-terrestrial lives and then also explain how their existence is necessary for a sound belief in God. 33

Aliens vs. Christianity

T

here would be a problem for Christianity if aliens did exist. A key issue though is how aliens would fit in with humans and their relationship with God. If we take intelligent life to mean more able than a chimpanzee, we must ask what makes them different from a human and how we could coexist with them. I believe a key distinction of humans is having the ability to believe in God. Intelligent extra-terrestrial life may not have this ability and we could think of them as we do other animals, they just happened to live on another planet. However if they have the potential to believe in God, then there is another species who may have a relationship with God, which may be better or worse than ours. Taking a literalist view, the Bible has told us that humans are special to God, in Genesis 1:28 “God created man in his own image and likeness”. Furthermore, Jesus came to Earth as a human being suggesting once again that humans have a sacred relationship or covenant with God, beyond all other races. Therefore aliens could create problems with the anthropocentric views which Christianity is built upon. Whilst other issues can be found, I am more interested in whether ET is possible and if so why it is more likely.

Firstly, the Bible may suggest that extra-terrestrial be-

ings could exist by the existence of angels. Angels may not be what we think of with aliens and they may not prove aliens’ existence, however they share some similarities.

By definition, angels are intelligent extra-terrestrial life.

However they reside beyond the earthly and in the Celestial realm, a fundamental difference to other ET. Angels are ranked by Seraphim, Cherubim and other choirs, making up nine hierarchies of angels. Therefore there could even be nine different species of angels which exist, in addition to us. Added to this, though angels are considered primarily spiritual, they can take physical form as shown in Genesis 19 and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Therefore angels suggest that our relationship with God could work if another species exist and that it wouldn’t end anthropocentrism. In fact they work well in this relationship, as the workers of God. We read in Hebrews 1:14 “are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?”

Angels know God in a much more explicit way, however they seem to be second to us, helping us understand God. Though aliens would be different, their existence is possible considering angels. Yet not only could aliens exist, but the existence of aliens may be necessary to explain

34

Aliens vs. Christianity

certain theological questions.

I believe that Christianity would be helped by the existence of aliens because it would mean that humans are not all that God created. When an Omnipotent being used all His power to create people out of His love as an Omnibenevolent Father, He should have created a race better than us humans. Throughout all the endless immeasurable space of the universe, it seems as though God would have put another species, otherwise why bother creating such a large universe? God loves us and loves creating and caring for others, therefore we would expect God to have created more species who can think and love Him in return, and even be better than we are.

There is good done by humans, but it is done by fighting against our very nature and tendencies, only with the help of an external source – God. By many accounts humans are intrinsically evil; in Genesis 7 God wipes out nearly the entire population of Earth because they are so corrupt. Moreover, in Ecclesiastes 7:20 we read, “indeed, there is no one on earth who is righteous, no one who does what is right and never sins”, further suggesting that humans are so far from good and so far from what God would want from us.

The darkness of humans and, by extension, the exis-

35

tence of Moral Evil can be explained through theologies, but I think never quite sufficiently. The reason why humans suffer has been discussed often enough, yet the reason why humans cause suffering requires more thought.

Plantinga’s free will defence suggests that humans cause suffering because God has given us the freedom to do as we wish. However, having this freedom to act in our own natural way causes us to commit the worst atrocities towards each other, testifying that humans are evil. The Augustinian theodicy explains that humans are intrinsically evil, due to the first humans committing sin and inflicting us all with evil. Though this may not be a satisfactory explanation and though this evil can be redeemed through the Atonement of Christ, it has the simple message that humans went wrong from an early point.

If humans are this terrible, one must ask why God did not create humans to be better. Perhaps we are the most compatible version of freedom and goodness. Perhaps God thinks we need evil in us to develop to be greater beings who can choose good. Perhaps these questions are beyond us. Nevertheless if we are to view God with all the qualities of classical theism, it seems that He should have had other intelligent peoples whom He nurtured. Perhaps they are better moraled, creating a more produc- ›

Aliens vs. Christianity

“And were it possible that man could number the particles of the earth, yea, millions of earths like this, it would not be a beginning to the number of thy creations; and thy curtains are stretched out still”

-Enoch, ancestor of Moses tive society, and they may have the technology to reach us one day, though this meeting is unlikely to ever happen.

There are several issues this view runs into. This suggests that God failed with the human race and chose to try again elsewhere, though He is omnipotent. However this could simply show variation. Maybe God hard wired more morality into an alien species, causing them to do more good but have less freedom, assuming they are opposing qualities. Considering soft determinism’s view of human freedom, it suggests that freedom can be varied by influences, hence we could have a different amount of freedom to other species. If we compare God to a father, parents have several children in their time and do not want them to all be of the same highest standard, but instead of have variation and different levels of astuteness.

Added to this, as shown by God’s creation of animals, it is not unlike God to create variation in the world, with some of creation not being as good.

The final issue though is where Jesus and His Salvation fits into this. Was there an alien equivalent of Jesus, do aliens receive the stories of Jesus or is there no salvation for them? If aliens were created to be intelligent and are

meant to be more moral than us, then they too should be able to receive Jesus’s Atonement. Aliens could simply be hearing tales of Jesus on a planet different to theirs. Considering that the majority of history’s Christians were not alive when Jesus was and Jesus only spread His message in His time through Israel, this would not be unreasonable.

Though it seems unlikely there is an alien Jesus, since John 3:16 suggests Jesus was his only and human son, Jesus could have spread His message throughout space. Considering that angels could appear anywhere and prophets could be made from anyone, the Word of Jesus could have been received by aliens. They would then exist as another race with the ability to follow God as well. Finally, there has always been the possibility of others out there who God would also nurture; on Earth, Christians discovered people whom they did not know to exist who did not know of Jesus, but this was not a problem for Christianity. In this same way, other peoples beyond Earth should not be a problem for Christianity. In John 10:16 we hear, “and other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice”. φ

36

The Axiom

Why Islamophobia is a Silly Word Words by Giannis Giortzis

With recent attacks against Muslims in Paris, London and elsewhere, and with the recent refugee crisis provoking an intense reaction amongst European communities, we have noticed a notable increase in the usage of the word “Islamophobia�. Employed as a blanket term that is applied to everything from ethnic hatred towards Arabs to academic criticism of Islam and other Abrahamic faiths, Islamophobia is rapidly becoming the new kid on the block of social and political correctness. Google Ngram Viewer has shown the usage of the word raising exponentially from its coinage in the 1991 Runnymede Trust Report to 2000 - one would imagine that more recent data would display an even more dramatic rise ever since. In this article, we will be examining how Islamophobia, as a word, has become far too broad to serve the purpose of either calling out anti-Muslim sentiment or scholarly criticism, and needs to be refined through its division into two separate terms for fear of strangling the debate surrounding the legitimacy and relevance of Islam and the actions of a small minority of its followers.

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Why Islamophobia is a silly word

T

he first issue with ‘Islamophobia’ is that its various definitions include or exclude a number of important elements. We consider some below:

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED): Dislike of or prejudice against Islam or Muslims, especially as a political force The Collins Cobuild English Dictionary: A hatred or fear of Muslims or of their politics or culture The original 1991 Runnymede report: An unfounded hostility towards Muslims, and therefore fear or dislike of all or most Muslims Wikipedia: Islamophobia is the prejudice against, hatred towards, or fear of the religion of Islam or Muslims With these definitions now obtained, we can go about distilling their key features: • All include an attitude of disliking, hatred or hostility towards the above • Three agree that the Islamophobia targets Islam as well as Muslims • Three include a degree of irrationality that is implied to cause the fear or hatred (as present in “prejudice”, which is defined by the OED as a “preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience”) Thus, we can begin our journey examining what is wrong with this wonderful word.

The first point to distinguish upon is the seemingly interchangeable use of words such as “prejudice”, “hatred” and “fear”. We will tackle the prejudicial element later on, but carelessly throwing around such words around is intellectually dishonest. “Fear” is defined as an unpleasant emotion triggered by the feeling that some is harmful or threatening in some way, whereas “hatred” applies to cases of intense or extreme disliking, resentment or ill will. The difference is obvious, and can be further pronounced psy-

chologically should be consider that fear (along with the misunderstanding that causes it) is an emotion that leads to hatred in some cases, but is not identical to it. Likewise, for the casual user, the inclusion of “-phobia” is unhelpful, as it refers solely to the medical condition of “an extreme or irrational fear of something”, without of course also necessarily covering criticism or prejudice. This lazy characterisation of all forms of opposition or attacks against Islam and Muslims as being a “phobia” consequently paths the way to the word being incorrectly used solely as a pejorative. This is further enhanced by the fact that a “phobia” is an inherent vulnerability of the human psyche, and as such can only be mitigated, not cured, thereby creating another ground upon which one could dismiss an “Islamophobic” statement as a natural irrationality.

This not to talk about more rational fears caused both by the Islamic texts and certain Muslims who usually are members of fanatical and fundamentalist Islamic sects.

In the wake of the Bataclan attacks in Paris that left 179 dead, the downing of the Russian Metrojet that killed 224 people, and, more recently, the suicide bombings in Brussels, one could definitely develop a rational fear of attacks (however miniscule it may be) perpetrated by certain radical Muslims in the name of their religion. Rational denotes a decision made with reason or logic, which is presumably supported by evidence. In these listed cases, the Muslim perpetrators were associated or inspired by the calls of the Islamic State, which adheres to the literalist Wahhabist doctrine of Sunni Islam. The extent to which their theological interpretations are valid is a debate of its own, but the core fact of the matter is that these individuals are practising Muslims who have a bare minimum knowledge of the Qu’ran, are performing these acts in the name of their religion, and are motivated by religious guarantees (ascension to Heaven after death, fatwas from Sunni clerics, and so on). This means that, despite the best attempts of the politically correct brigade to dismiss these terrorists as somehow not being Muslim, they are Muslim, and we can, rationally, be afraid of their past and future actions and their repercussions on our society based on the past atrocities committed by such extremist groups. We should, as always, be careful in distinguishing them from the more

38

Why Islamophobia is a silly word

secularised and moderate Muslims who do not necessarily share the same beliefs with them, or even actively protest and condemn their strand of ideology.

For example, this could be a rational fear of a specific sub-section of (radical) Muslims: “As a Londoner, in light of the spate of terrorist attacks sponsored by ISIS, I have a genuine fear that my city will also experience similar tragedies caused by Islamic fundamentalists in Paris and elsewhere. I fear that they will not only incite anti-Muslim sentiment, but also lead to increased racial profiling and repressive internet surveillance measures”.

This fear is relatively rational, evidence-based and fearful of the reasonable expected impact of such an attack on wider society. The individual makes a distinction as to the type of Muslim he/she is afraid of and, in fact, explains the effects such attacks have in marginalising the more moderate Muslims. Contrast it to this following quote: “All those immigrants and refugees coming in are Muslim terrorists who are probably ISIS sympathisers. Not only are they stealing our jobs by doing them for the cheap, but they’ll probably end up bombing us at the end of the day for the sake of it.”

This fear is deeply irrational, an overgeneralisation that is not supported by any evidence, and aims to discriminate against these individuals based on the stereotypes and prejudice developed against all Muslims. It seems to be founded on another fear (that of unemployment or higher competition in the job sector), which is then transposed onto Islam and its followers as a whole.

The second main issue is that the word Islamophobia fails to distinguish between Islam and Muslims. Islam can be construed as the sum of religious texts, doctrine and teachings that teach that there is only one True God and that Muhammad is his prophet. Muslims, on the other hand, are the individuals who believe in the Islamic faith and tradition (to varying degrees), and chose to model their lifestyles and beliefs arounds its teachings and customs. A concern that may be raised with this distinction is that Islam, as a religion, should also encompass its followers as an umbrella term, something that should render an attack on Islam indistinguishable from an attack on a Muslim. However, considering that religion is an idea relating to the existence of a superhuman power, and a religious follower is someone who practices that idea and worships the aforementioned power, the distinction between Islam and Muslims is easy to draw at an everyday level. This is a difference not recognised in “Islamophobia”.

At a higher philosophical level, one may nonetheless ›

39

Why Islamophobia is a silly word

attempt to blur the line between the two, saying that Islam is only present because it is being practised and preached by Muslims in the present time. After all, it would undoubtedly not carry the same gravity if it were confined to a lone series of books with pretty pictures that no one believed in! Therefore, according to this logic, an attack on Islam is an attack on Muslims. Certainly, should we follow the ABC qualifiers for a religion (Assure an individual that there is the prospect of salvation - Believe in the worldview and mythology of a religion - Convert that individual to that religion), all three steps fundamentally require human intervention (be it missionary work, preaching, theological scholarship, education or legal/military coercion). Moreover, with Islamic law proscribing a pattern of life that covers everything from marriage to personal finance to warfare, one could say that attacking Islam is attacking a Muslim's’ way of life - his/her tradition, culture and lifestyle; in short everything that raises them from being a simple human being and gives them purpose and motivation in their lives.

The above argument, however persuasive it may sound, is invalid. A 2013 study by the Pew Research Centre showed that only 584 million of the 1.62 billion practising Muslims around the world believed in death for apostasy, and a further 200 million in support of death for adultery. Even Sharia, the upholding of which was the most commonly agreed upon item, was supported by 1.1 billion of the 1.62 billion

people. This proves that, with regard to adherence to the religious teachings of Islam, a large portion (and occasionally the majority) of Muslims did not, in fact, follow the precise teachings of the Qu’ran. This is particularly true in modern times, with an unprecedented number of Muslims living in the West and altering their lives accordingly (for instance the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life discovered that only 93% of Muslims fasted during Ramadan, 77% observed zakat (charitable giving), 63% performed salat (praying five times a day), and 9% conducted an annual pilgrimage to Mecca). To be fair, the last requirement to be undertaken at least once in one’s lifetime, and is conditional upon the person having the physical capacity to do so. Regardless, the above customs are all pillars of Islam that are traditionally incumbent upon Muslim believers.

The point is that Islamic law is not perfectly agreed upon, or adhered to, by such a large proportion of the global Muslim community, that it is impossible to show that the two overlap and that an a criticism of the strict doctrine of Islam is necessarily an attack on all Muslims. Indeed, in many cases, more moderate (by Western standards) Muslims themselves condemn or discontinue the practice of some of the more fundamentalist aspects of their faith for being too unethical or impractical. Thus, one could criticise the suggested penalties for homosexuality (sodomy) and apostasy, without necessarily attacking the considerable

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Why Islamophobia is a silly word

number of Muslim individuals worldwide who are either ignorant of, or do not support these ideas.

However, even if Islam and Muslims did perfectly overlap, and all Muslims identified with the same principles and followed the exact same practices perfectly, they would still not be exempt from constructive, scholarly criticism of their beliefs. Provided that the criticism is of an academic nature, is properly supported, and not solely a conscious/unconscious attempt to malevolently smear or marginalise Muslims (a number of these criticisms also apply to Christianity and Judaism after all), such opposing viewpoints are, in fact, overall a positive for society. This is because they challenge age-old beliefs that may no longer be considered ethical, or relevant to the needs of a 21th-century society. Let us not forget that these ideas are claimed to be the perfect word of Muhammad, and are espoused without allowing Muslims to seek alternative doctrines or creeds. Not raising these points in order to “respect one’s culture” is a cheap, relativistic counter argument. Without proving that one’s culture is worthy and indeed can refute the theological and moral objections to it, “culture” is nothing more than an accumulation of age-old prejudices that the followers of a religion (in this case Islam) have no reason to follow other than familial/ peer pressure, the momentum of tradition, and a blind faith in something that cannot be explained in empirical terms.

The problem is when Islamophobia is used as an argument

in its own right and wrongly applied to any criticism of Islam, whether malevolent and prejudiced or scholarly, as a way to shut down debate. This, as always, is always done in the name of religious “tolerance”, which has turned into codeword for avoiding the possibility of someone being offended when their views are put to the test.

This occurs partly because some people confuse tolerance with acceptance. Muslims are shown tolerance in the Western world within the established framework of the secular, state-enforced laws (the upholding of Sharia courts is illegal because it circumvents due process through the regular court system). They are given the freedom of expression, worship and speech, insofar as that does not (attempt to) violate other people’s rights or any secular laws, as manifested in the form of hate speech in the case of the cleric Abu Hamza in New York. However, no member of any religious group, Muslim or otherwise, is entitled to have other people agreeing with his/her ideology, something that is conveniently ignored by a number of religious apologists. Nor are they entitled to the forced conversion of people of other faiths, which is a form of bigotry, yet which is still promoted in the Holy Book, partly through the abrogation of Mohammed’s earlier (and more peaceful) teachings. Christian missionary activity in the 1840s and 50s that preceded the Scramble for Africa was one of the many dark stains on imperial history, by being motivated by a ›

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Why Islamophobia is a silly word

profoundly simplistic view of the benevolent White Man spreading civilisation to the Dark parts of the globe. Likewise, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism in more recent times, be it in Iran in the 1970s, through the Taliban rule of Afghanistan in the late 1990s, or the infiltration of Birmingham school boards by hard-line Muslims in 2014, is equally repugnant, considering how Islam itself is the source of a great deal of intolerance of the “Other” - the apostate, the non-believer, the kuffar, who dares live his or her life independently of Islam, or indeed any religion. We need to be vigilant of all forms of religious intolerance regardless of the religion behind them, be it Christians opposing homosexual marriage in the US, or Muslims continuing customs that support the discrimination and suppression of “non-believers”, and combat them accordingly.

In this regard, the term “Islamophobia”, when used as a term that allows for no distinction between committing arson at the local mosque or holding a discussion with fellow intellectuals criticising Islam’s holy teachings, has failed us. It has continued to be used as part of the ongoing process of tolerating the intolerant and unjustifiable through pettiness and hyper-sensitivity, and as part of an endless crusade of moral relativism that tries to exploit Western guilt and the minority status of Muslims in Western countries to silence opposition. This is why, in my opinion, we need to replace the term “Islamophobia” entirely and dissect it into its constituent terms.

A good start would be to remove the intolerant,

xenophobic, anti-Muslim community from the rest by using the words “miso-Islamist” (formed from the prefix miso-, meaning hatred or contempt for, and “Islam”), and “miso-Muslim” (which doesn’t ring as nicely, but is undoubtedly more accurate).

The problem facing the remaining group - those who have a rational fear of Islam and/or certain groups of followers - the English language has rather unfortunately burdened “φόβος” (literally meaning fear in Greek) with the element of irrationality that is present in a “phobia”. However, even if we could conjure up a word for rational fear or apprehension, it would risk being too unsophisticated and clumping all Muslims, radical or not, into the same group, when it is indeed a tiny minority that will ever threaten us with actual violence or harm. Hence, instead of coming up with a single fancy word to describe this fear, we could simply use “someone who is fearful of group X (e.g. Salafatist militias)” and further explain the rationale behind the apprehension (provided there is one), instead of trying to burden a single word with so much nuance.

Thirdly, and lastly, all opposition to Islam and Muslims could be treated under the non-pejorative term “anti-Islam” and “anti-Muslim”, within which we could include both rational thoughts and irrational/bigoted/xenophobic views. More specifically, we could use the terms “Islamo-sceptic” or “Islamo-critic” to denote intellectuals who object to the teachings or premises of the scripts. These alterations are summarised in the table below:

Anti-Islam (non-pejorative) Miso-Islamic Hateful or prejudiced against the texts and religious doctrine (pejorative)

Anti-Muslim (non-pejorative) “fearful of a group/ sect of Muslims due to XYZ” No single term is achievable - the entire phrase is required (non-pejorative provided the fear is rational)

Islamo-sceptic or

Islamo-critic Critical intellectual opposition to Islam (non-pejorative)

Miso-Muslim Hateful or prejudiced against most or all Muslims and the followers of Islam (pejorative - the phobia is by definition irrational)

Hence, should these suggestions ever become common enough to enter our common dialogue, we can hopefully look forward to a more intellectually honest and precisely-worded debate in which genuine hatred and intolerance of Islam and Muslims is treated separately from scholarship that happens to be critical of Islam. Should we ever move towards these distinctions, the ambiguity in “Islamophobia”, along with its frequent (ab)use as a convenient argument-stopper, can hopefully be addressed. φ

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