by Martin Butler

In contemporary political debate, particularly with regard to economic relations, the idea of ‘individual responsibility’ has come to encapsulate the standard critique of state regulation or state intervention. The argument goes that citizens should not be overly protected from their lack of responsibility, and that however humane a society becomes, as individuals we should live with the consequences of our actions, good or bad. According to this argument, an overly generous welfare system undermines individual responsibility: human beings have agency and should not be insulated from the real consequences of their lack of ambition, laziness or bad choices. Those that do show individual responsibility and do the right thing should be rewarded.

On the other side is the argument that individual responsibility, although real, plays a minor part in an individual’s success or failure, at least in modern western societies. Other factors, none of which are chosen, such as family background, inherited wealth, social class, upbringing, educational opportunities, generational factors, innate abilities or disabilities, luck, and so on also play their parts. According to this side of the debate it is up to society to level up an intrinsically unlevel playing field. Kant’s categorical imperative can cast light on this debate, pointing to the minimum requirements a society should work towards that would allow us to invoke the notion of individual responsibility in good faith.

Kant’s categorical imperative (first formulation) is a principle which he claims captures the essence of what it is to act ethically. It states that you should “act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”. A ‘maxim’ here is simply a personal principle of action. For my action to be ethical I must accept that anyone else could also chose to perform this action. This outlaws what we intuitively think of as the epitome of unfair or unethical behaviour, i.e. making an exception for yourself. It cannot be one rule for you and a different rule for everyone else. An action is wrong if it cannot be universalised. A thief’s maxim of action might be ‘whenever something is needed, I steal it.’ If this was universalised, the very notion of theft itself would dissolve, since theft depends on a notion of property and ownership. If theft was universal, property rights would become meaningless, so there is something deeply self-contradictory in the idea of theft. This is the essence of its immorality. According to Kant immorality is just irrationality.

The categorical imperative is normally thought of exclusively in terms of individual moral decisions, but it can be applied to the wider issue of political and social policy. How does it relate to the question of individual responsibility? Read more »

by Azra Raza

I recently read about a man who arrived in the United States from India with just thirty dollars in his pocket and, three decades later, had become a billionaire. When asked about the most important lesson of his journey, he answered without hesitation: money matters.

Tara, the protagonist of A Splintering by Dur e Aziz Amna, learns that lesson early, though under far harsher conditions. She grows up in the soul-destroying poverty of a lower middle class family of four sisters and a brother somewhere in a remote Pakistani village, surrounded by brutality, superstition, ignorance, and a rigid patriarchal social order that consigns girls to early marriages and lives of numbing domestic repetition. Cleaning, cooking, washing, bearing children—these are not choices but destinies.

Her mother, one of the novel’s most striking figures, senses something different in Tara and insists on educating her, sparing her from household labor. It is an act of quiet rebellion. But Tara, sharp and observant, has her own ambitions. Education, for her, is not enlightenment or self-empowerment. It is escape.

With it, she secures a proposal from a middle-class urban family and seizes the opportunity. The village, with its suffocation and grime, is left behind. In the city, Tara learns quickly; watching television, studying the women around her, absorbing codes of behavior and aspiration. She adapts with startling ease.

Though she finds neither intellectual companionship nor emotional fulfillment in her husband, she builds the life she had envisioned: two children, financial stability, independence from her in-laws. She has her ugly, protruding teeth fixed, gets her tubes tied, learns to drive, finds a job and moves her nuclear family to a home of their own.

The village girl, it seems, has arrived.

I am not giving away any of the plot as all this is essentially told within the first three pages and this is where the novel truly begins. Read more »

Current Tally:

I’m out here stacking days as if it were a sport,
I’m up to twenty thousand six hundred eight.
I sweat memory. I’ve taken off my shirt,
I’m feeling great, but as I stack them up
time is growing short.

I tally what till now I’ve done.

Not far from a stack of stones
I eye the spot where I’d begun
near an arbor vitae hedge
in a shade of catalpa.

I’m looking for bona fide antiques
scented and yellow as old books.

On spines of days my curate hands
feel to find the ones with bliss-laced hours
stitched with epiphanic seams.
I come upon a few, they’re few
and far between.

The sun’s past high. The pallid moon’s
a perfect ghost of round, sentinel-still
upon a mountain ridge. I think
it might roll down.

I breathe honeysuckle and see wisteria
clutch its pole twist up and round.

I’d placed the pile with care
so as never to occlude the sun
yet carelessly have thrown
some days upon a previous one
then, too late, gone back to
square them up trying
to undo the done

by Jim Culleny
January 2010

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by Eric Feigenbaum

In a city-state that fines spitting in public, requires stores to check identification and log purchasers of chewing gum, heavily taxes alcohol and tobacco and bans durian from public transportation, one could easily think there’s little tolerance for vice.

In many ways, there’s not. Illegal gambling rings have been busted and faces severe punishments. Many a drug runner has been put to death.

But on the quiet, residential streets of the Geylang neighborhood, there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye. It would be easy to think that the relatively central neighborhood has lower property values because of its aging housing or that it wasn’t as well planned as subsequently developed parts of Singapore. In reality, prostitution explains it better.

Singapore’s moral overtones are undergirded by a certain pragmatism. Singapore’s founders decided that being a major international seaport meant prostitution could never be eradicated. And like so many vices, if they are allowed to exist in a black market, then crime and an underworld follow.

There are essentially two ways to prevent a black market: strict and intense deterrents or legalize the vice. America’s experiment with Prohibition led it to abhor the effects of a black market more than the harm mitigation strategy of keeping alcohol legal and holding people responsible for their behaviors under the influence.

Singapore decided from the get-go to go the harm mitigation route as founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew explained in his memoir, From Third World to First:

We were candid about the problems we could not solve. Vices like prostitution, gambling, drug addiction and alcoholism could only be controlled, not eradicated. Singapore’s history as a seaport meant prostitution had to be managed and confined to certain areas of the city where the women were given regular health checks. Gambling was impossible to suppress. It was an addiction Chinese migrants had carried with them wherever they settled. But we had eliminated the triads or secret societies and broken up organized crime.

So quiet Geylang became the almost invisible epicenter of prostitution. There are no ladies of the night on the street, no neon signs, certainly no pimps. Just unmarked doorways with blackout film – similar to an Asian massage parlor. Not only is it not seedy, if you didn’t know, you probably would never notice. Read more »

by William Benzon

OpenAI released GPT-3 in June of 2020, though not to the general public. Those who had access to it were variously impressed or stunned: Is this it? Is AI really coming at long last? Though I was not in the direct access circle, I had indirect access and was deeply impressed, using that access in an interview with Hollis Robbins that I published in 3QD on July 20, 2020: An Electric Conversation with Hollis Robbins on the Black Sonnet Tradition, Progress, and AI, with Guest Appearances by Marcus Christian and GPT-3. That August I issued a working paper: GPT-3: Waterloo or Rubicon? Here be Dragons. I stuck this at the top of the first page:

GPT-3 is a significant achievement.

But I fear the community that has created it may, like other communities have done before – machine translation in the mid-1960s, symbolic computing in the mid-1980s – triumphantly walk over the edge of a cliff and find itself standing proudly in mid-air.

This is not necessary and certainly not inevitable.

As far as I can tell, the AI industry is now well out over the edge of that cliff. While I see prospects for a brilliant and productive long-term future, I fear that the next decade or two will be chaotic.

Here’s how ChatGPT put it to me in a recent dialog:

The engineering success is real. LLMs [large language models] and related systems have given us access to a new conceptual continent. They work, and at extraordinary scale. But the institutional failure lies in the monoculture: too much intellectual, financial, and training-path dependence on one family of architectures and one style of thought about intelligence. The result is that we are building out the utility before we have adequately explored the space of possible successor technologies or developed the conceptual tools needed to understand what these systems are revealing about language, cognition, and cultural structure.

The paradox we are facing, then, is that the unexpected and extravagant success of the transformer technology has resulted in a furious maelstrom of entrepreneurial, investment, and commercial activity that may inhibit the further development of that technology. Read more »

by Michael Liss

For several centuries, as we moved from farm to city, the human ear has engaged in a ceaseless battle against the noise caused by human ingenuity.

The ears are losing. It is loud out there, even in my bucolic and serene New York City. Just getting around can be sonically disruptive. Trucks, especially the multi-axel ones that go through 10 forward gears while they bang-bang-bang over winter-roughed asphalt. Buses, whether newer ones with their air brakes, pneumatic doors, and kneels, or the older version tricked out with diesel engines that sound like an aging warthog with catarrh. Cars—the ones driven by those whose keen sense of anticipation allows them to lean on their horns before the light turns green or who have retrofitted their sound or exhaust system to resemble either a mobile disco or a shooting gallery (and sometimes both).

Want to see New Yorkers come together? Place on the ballot a referendum mandating three days in the stocks for the worst of the worst. Second offenders must limit themselves to Smart Cars with dealer-installed elevator music.

What about our glorious Central Park? Surely, it’s largely carless (except for the odd official vehicle or ambulance)? Yes, it is a place where my running buddies and I can thock-thock, scrape-scrape, wheeze-wheeze to our ears’ delight, but that doesn’t make it intrusion free. Not only does it harbor lurking delivery guys in spacesuits and oven mitts, but it’s also home to high-speed pelotons shouting out the occasional “ON YOUR RIGHT!!!” Those guys flashing the upscale gear and first-class lungpower don’t have a lot of patience for the hapless pedestrian or runner in or out of his designated lane.

OK, that’s way too much complaining about a place that gives me so much satisfaction. The fact is we need quiet, and we need sound. Most of all, we need to communicate. It’s a human thing to do. It also may be a Neanderthalic thing to do. According to the all-knowing AI, musical instruments like the flute have been around for at least 40,000 to 50,000 years.

What’s the perfect “pH” for sound and silence? Surely, it’s based on the idiosyncratic needs of both the person and the community.

The play (and movie) Children of a Lesser God gets at this. Read more »

One end of the new pedestrian bridge across the river Eisack in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Rafaël Newman

Zurich’s electorate went to the polls earlier this month on an Abstimmungstag, or “voting day”, to choose its new city parliament, the Gemeinderat; its new city council, the Stadtrat; and its new mayor, known in Zurich as the Stadtpräsident*in, or Stapi. The Gemeinderat, with 125 seats, is the largest municipal legislature in Switzerland, since Zurich is the country’s largest city; the Stadtrat, made up of nine members, each the head of a Departement or ministry, is Zurich’s government; and the Stapi, who is also a member of the Stadtrat, presides over meetings of the council, manages the city’s administration, and represents Zurich in the Swiss capital, and internationally.

The voters this month returned a Stadtrat with a composition much like that of the outgoing, already left-leaning executive, in which Zurich’s main parties were represented roughly in proportion to their citywide share of support, now however with a slight further shift to the political left. Of the nine newly elected (or re-elected) members, four belong to the Socialist Party (SP), three to the Greens, who are traditionally allies of the SP, one to the Green Liberal Party (GLP), representatives of a more business-oriented ecological movement, and one to the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the center-right party that usually views itself as the generator of Switzerland’s “natural” leaders, having formed governments at the national level from the Confederation’s earliest days. Zurich’s leftward shift this cycle came with one of the two seats on the city council held by the FDP in the previous period being won by the Greens, who had brought in a candidate with name recognition and considerable experience in Bern explicitly to “attack” that FDP seat. The Bürgerliche or center-right parties—the FDP and GLP—have thus now had their minority in Zurich’s government further eroded, from three to two seats out of nine.

The Gemeinderat also saw an increase in seats for parties on the left of the spectrum, with the SP the big winner in virtually all city districts, and the SVP, Switzerland’s reactionary right-wingers and the country’s most popular party, remaining very much in the minority at the Zurich city level.

As for the Stapi, Raphael Golta, the SP candidate, was comfortably elected to the Stadtrat as an incumbent (he had headed the Sozialdepartement during the previous legislature) but faces a runoff election for mayor in May, having failed to achieve the required absolute majority in the mayoral race. But unless another member of the Stadtrat chooses to run against him—an unlikely scenario—Golta’s election as Stapi, and the maintenance of the mayor’s office in SP hands, is all but certain Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by David Winner

A neighbor I ran into out walking his dog in our Brooklyn neighborhood asked me about my recent trip to Chile and relayed his own experience there. He loved the skiing, the landscapes, the wine, but he could not abide the stray dogs.

But stray dogs, more than anything, had brought me to summertime-Chile this January towards the end of the first year of Trump’s second term. Hazel, my wife Angela’s and my large yellow mutt, had died a terrible death a few months before, and, in my mourning, I was besotted by dogs. And similar to shorter humans who are only attracted to much taller humans, I am a smaller man with a taste for larger beasts. The dogs of neighbors and friends, the dogs on the Internet, were just not enough. In Chile, I knew dogs would be everywhere, big ones.

I visted three places: Puerto Montt, a rugged medium sized city in the south, looking out on the Reloncavi Sound, which connects to the Pacific, Castro, a smaller city on Chiloe, the large island off the southern coast, then San Pedro de Atacama, a tourist town in the desert far in the north.

Dogs in Chile straddle a line between housed and unhoused. I don’t know their real stories, and I romanticize what I observe. They appear healthy, friendly, cared for on some level, but free to do as they please, providing glimpses of true dog nature that we don’t get with fully domesticated canines. Fifteen years ago, I watched a pack of them chase madly after passing vehicles on a desolate boulevard in Punta Arenas in Patagonia. Dogs strolled and slept just about everywhere around Villarica in the Lake District when I visited just before the pandemic. Read more »

Utkarsh Makwana. Detail from ‘Finishing Touches’, 2022. Courtesy: Akara Art.

More here, here, and here.

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NEW POSTS BELOW

by Charles Siegel

In one of my first columns for 3 Quarks Daily, I began by noting that my law firm had just filed, along with other firms, a petition for habeas corpus relief in federal court in Dallas.  Our client was Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman living in New Jersey, who was imprisoned in a detention center in Alvarado, 40 miles away.  Last week, almost exactly one year after she was detained, Ms. Kordia was freed.  We are, of course, relieved and beyond happy that she has been released from detention. But her case was an utterly grotesque abuse of the American immigration justice system.

Leqaa grew up in the West Bank. Her parents divorced when she was young and her mother moved to Gaza, and eventually to the United States where she remarried and had other children.  In 2016 Leqaa joined her mother in New Jersey, obtained a student visa, attended classes and worked as a waitress and at other jobs. At home, she took care of her mother, who is severely asthmatic, and her autistic half-brother.

Her mother, who is a U.S. citizen, filed a “family-based” petition for Leqaa to begin the process of obtaining permanent residency. This petition was approved, but this also created a tripwire that ultimately seriously disadvantaged her: a teacher told her, mistakenly, that with the family-based process underway, she did not need to maintain her student-visa status.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza, killing approximately 1200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 250 hostages.  Israel responded with unrestrained fury, bombing Gaza into ruins for two years and destroying the basic infrastructure of life there. Nearly 30 months into the war, conservative estimates are that at least 75,000 deaths have occurred in Gaza.  The Israeli army itself has accepted a figure of 70,000 deaths.  These numbers may well be undercounts, but even if they aren’t, they indicate that for every single Israeli killed by Hamas on or after October 7, 2023 (including hostages who were later killed or who died in captivity), nearly 50 Gazans have died.

Among those tens of thousands of victims are close to 200 of Leqaa’s extended family. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

In his Confessions, Augustine remembers his state after the death of a beloved childhood friend. He writes: “Everywhere I looked I saw death. […] My eyes sought him everywhere, and did not see him. I hated all places because he was not in them.” An unfailingly moving passage, and a testament to Augustine’s power as a thinker – for profound as his account of his loss is, we are already being led along for a much bigger point. Almost immediately, Augustine moves on to chastise his former self: “fool that I was then, enduring with so much rebellion the lot of every man”. A soul that tethers itself to mortal things, rather than lifting itself up to God, will naturally be bloodied when it inevitably loses them.

I was brought back to these passages by the parallels with Christopher Beha’s account in Why I am not an atheist (2026). Beha is modest enough to suggest less exalted models, but of course he is aware of the echo of Augustine. It’s not just that this is another account of an intellectual who returns to the Catholic faith. Beha also shares with the Church father the admirable skill of rendering now-abandoned perspectives with a language that makes their original pull understandable. Here he looks back on his thoughts after nearly losing a friend:

“I still had so much to lose, and I would eventually lose all of it. Everyone I loved would be taken from me, unless I was taken from them first.”

Like Augustine, Beha finds powerful and honest words for a state of mind he used to inhabit, but makes sure these words contain the seeds of self-criticism too. At this point in the narrative, Beha’s meditations on suffering and death push him away from religion; after a book-long journey through godless alternatives, however, he will find a less self-absorbed form of love, one presumably more resilient to the thoughts that dislodged him from his faith. Read more »