Published writings

This blog post is a list of my published writings at places other than my blogs and social media (and not counting Wikipedia contributions). As of now, most of those have been for mises.org, so this blog post is largely redundant with respect to my author page at mises.org, but it will be kept up-to-date, as I have been keeping my personal page up-to-date.

I have gotten some opinion pieces published by the Mises Wire. Some of those have been translated to Portuguese by Instituto Mises Brasil, and I have linked the translation here.

• A Rothbardian Critique of Effective Altruism
• How the Farmland Protection Policy Act Has Socialized Farm Land
• Unmasking Academia: The State’s Ministry of Opinion
• The Bureaucratization of Science Is a Feature, Not a Bug
• Reading Against the State: A Libertarian Guide to Critical Discourse Analysis
• Why Taxpayers Are Right to Reject Immoral Research
• The State’s Favorite Fallacy: The Cudgel in a Suit – this one was translated to Portuguese by Instituto Mises Brasil
• The “Right to Roam” Is Not a Right. It’s a State-Issued Trespass Permit
• Who Owns the Bus?
• Why the Post Office and Non-Profits Share a Socialist Calculation Problem
• The Next Food Pyramid: Lab-Grown Meat and the New Moral Orthodoxy
• If Science Is a Public Good, Let China Pay for It
• Fukuyama Was Wrong; History Did Not End
• Marx Was Wrong About the “Necessary” Ruin of Small Landed Property
• Who Owns the Airwaves and the Sea?
• Moloch in the Regulatory State
• How Adam Smith Helped Create Modern Unionism – this one was translated to Portuguese by Instituto Mises Brasil

I also got an opinion piece published by the Mises Institute’s other publication, Power & Market:

• Non-Intervention Without the Fairy Tale of Sovereignty

I have gotten one opinion piece published exclusively by Instituto Mises Brasil, a Misesian institute which is unaffiliated with the Mises Institute. This does not exist in English as of yet:

• Salvar os jogos sem estatizar o código: o mérito e o erro do PL 3612/2026

LessWrong culture and Eliezer Yudkowsky

There are many problems with LessWrong culture, in general:

• They have wrong views about utilitarianism.
• They have wrong views about Newcomb’s problem.
• They have wrong views about philosophy-of-mind.
• They have wrong views about probability theory.
• They have wrong views about ontology and religion.
• About all of these issues, they are openly irrational, and do not care to defend their views with arguments; and this is because, to a man, they are evil, horrible human beings.

There are also many problems with Eliezer Yudkowsky, in particular, aside from sharing the above:

• He was wrong about a variety of things that were central to his famous sequences of blog posts, such as heuristics and biases, etc.
• He was dismissive of academic philosophy (and apparently still is).
• He claimed that (it seemed to him that) “telegrams were the optimal level of social communication technology, and society began to disintegrate after voice radio was invented, though not to the same extent as it began to collapse after television.”

Now, to be fair, aren’t there also some things that they are right about, or valuable thoughts that they have?

No, there aren’t any, as far as I know.

Against the Academics

This blog post tells the story of my intellectual development from an indeterminate point shortly before my memory cutoff around 2018 until today.

Saint Augustine wrote a dialogue whose title can be literally rendered “Against the Academics” (Contra academicos), but since this can be misleading, it is also often rendered into English as “Against the Academicians”. Augustine’s title was targeting the philosophers of the late Academy, which had begun as a Platonist school of philosophy founded by Plato himself, but had by Cicero’s time become a haven for philosophical sceptics, which is to say, people who denied the possibility of certain knowledge. With his work, Augustine intends to target the “Academic scepticism”, as it was called, and criticize it so as to refute it.

In editions of Augustine’s work in Brazil, the title in Portuguese is only ever translated “Contra os acadêmicos”, i.e., the exact same as “against the academics”. The equivalent of “Academicians” might have been “Academicianos” but this sounds odd and stilted, and I have never seen it. No matter. My intellectual development began with a Facebook page named after this work, “Contra os Acadêmicos” (CoA), at some unclear point in time shortly before 2018. The page often clarified that they had nothing against academics, but they were also against the sceptical philosophy of the late Academy, and similarly against whatever philosophies they saw as its modern descendants, such as relativism and postmodernism, etc. This is the common conservative narrative bemoaning contemporary relativism and postmodernism as the root of social ills.

The group running CoA was vaguely conservative-leaning, but they saw themselves as “anti-ideological” and were huge fans of Eric Voegelin; they often criticized right-wing “ideologues” as well as left-wing. The page mostly posted quotes by philosophers and sometimes shared relevant videos by Olavo de Carvalho or Clóvis de Barros Filho or whoever. (The most famous video by the latter, of course, is the video about “brio”, which is very applicable to CoA’s mission. Just today, the day when this post was written, Clóvis posted a reaction video to his own years-old video. More on the former in the next paragraph.) Their most popular posts were memes that they sometimes made to make fun of some philosophical opinions that they disliked. These were infrequent enough; they didn’t want to be a meme page, but they appreciated the increased reach that they got from the memes.

CoA was obviously downstream of Olavo de Carvalho, who, as I have mentioned before, single-handedly began the entire Brazilian right wing. They had clearly been students of Olavo to an unclear extent and appreciated the old man’s teachings and advice, but they weren’t dogmatic “olavistas” in any way and did not emphasize him much. They respected him and shared relevant clips from his lectures (e.g. clips of him giving study tips or summarizing some body of literature) at some points, moreso in the group that was associated with the page than in the page itself. The group was for discussion, I don’t recall many details of it.

CoA also posted reading lists. The biggest fan favorite was their general reading list about philosophy, which was roughly “in order of difficulty”, beginning with easier texts and moving on to more difficult ones. This list was first published as an image, then as an expanded image, and eventually, when they had a website, the very long latest revised version was published on their website. The website also hosted blog posts and various other reading lists on various subjects, as well as “ordered reading lists” about particular authors they recommended, because they often got the question “which book by this author should I read first?”, so they decided to set up a path through each author. Often they simply recommended reading everything by the author in chronological order, but there were exceptions.

Obviously I loved all these resources, and was earnestly edified by the philosopher quotes and study tips and videos that they shared. But the picture of what they provided to me is incomplete without the general vibe, or climate, of talking to them, which was the motivation that they implicitly gave for an intellectual life. It was the idea of getting serious about culture war. You may have heard the conservative concern about how left-wingers control academia, and which is sometimes used to defend “DEI for conservatives”. Well, not for them. They wanted to inspire the conservative movement to study harder than the left-wingers, to become more knowledgeable than their opponents, to expose their charlatanry, and take academia back by the force of their merits. That was the vibe that I got from them, anyway. And in some way I wanted to be part of that, too, although I never became an academic.

In this sense, they really were “Against the Academics”, although they didn’t say it in so many words. They were defined by their desire to be better than the academics who opposed their views, although of course, they had nothing against academics as such, and many were studying to become academics themselves. They wanted their constellation of online study groups to be an academia unto itself, and take back academia from the academics. This was certainly a cause that Olavo de Carvalho supported, indeed it was plausibly the main goal of his entire teaching career, and he praised CoA at some points (although I don’t care to find the Facebook posts where he did this).

I began to read serious books with much help from CoA’s lists, but also from my own curiosity, attempting also to follow some “Great Books” lists I found (see Greater Books). Eventually, what I followed in my readings was roughly an historical order (first the ancient philosophers, then the medievals, then the early moderns, etc.), but the introductory books that they recommended got me to wet my feet. During this time, in which I was still first learning about intellectual topics, I never got much into Olavo de Carvalho beyond what is called The Minimum, which is a collection of newspaper columns written by Olavo. My curiosity about Olavo intensified only years later, leading to the page on my blog about him.

Eventually CoA became much less active for whatever reason, although thankfully, their website is still up. I began to follow various English-speaking philosophy meme pages on Facebook, and became friends with some meme page admins. During this time, which was still 2018–2019, I had just converted to Catholicism due to some of my readings and some encouragement that I had found in religion discussion Discord servers, and some of my Facebook philosophy meme page friends were Catholic philosophy nerds who also encouraged me. I was still relatively early into getting into intellectual topics, and I did much of my discussion in a now-defunct Facebook group that was run by two of these meme page admins, who have since fallen out, hence I am not giving names and details about them so as to avoid stoking the drama again. But discussions among these people who I found through Facebook were also very formative to my intellectual development.

Eventually, let’s say by late 2022 at the latest, I fell mostly out of touch with the people I met through Facebook. I also became less conservative and more libertarian. Elaborating properly on this would require elaborating, for contrast, on the people whose personal details I omitted, but let’s say the main thrust of this development is something I underwent entirely on my own, through the development of my own ideas, which I systematized by writing this very blog (hence its unusual structure, with an ordered table of contents and a glossary, although much of the content is not fully up to my current quality standards).

Much later than that, in the latter half of 2023, I started using (although my account was created much earlier) Twitter, which got renamed to X, which is where I made an entirely different set of friends, which encouraged the interest in analytic philosophy that I had already developed on my own. Hence, today I am very interested in analytic philosophy, which is what informs my newer blog posts, whereas my older blog posts about philosophy were informed only by ancient and medieval writings, or Kant at the latest. I have finally caught up to the contemporary era, so to speak. But I still have much to learn.

Due to my current libertarian political beliefs, I advocate policies that would result in the destruction of academia as we know it, since that is largely state-funded. Hence, I should also like to undermine trust in academics and their theories and publications, so that people don’t feel very many qualms about nuking all of their institutions. And my sense of pride, and of wanting to know my enemy, still leads me to want to study academic theories in detail, and be an academia unto myself, so as to oppose their theories with proper rigor, indeed more rigor than those who I oppose. In this way, today, I am “against the academics”, in much the same sense as CoA were, but much more intensely than they ever were, and not particularly for culture-war reasons (since I am culturally progressive myself). In terms of general attitude and motivation for intellectual development, I am back somewhere near where I started.

How to forget your memories

If you have some memories that you’d rather forget, you can simply do so. This post will say how I did it.

My background: Years ago, (somehow, I still remember this, but obviously can’t be sure when precisely) I used to struggle with randomly recalling very embarrassing memories. Whenever I recalled one, this had a strong effect on me. It distracted me from what I was doing, it ruined my day, I kept mulling them over pointlessly. Then somehow I had the idea of making a focused effort to not think of them anymore.

How to do it: The way to do this is simply to notice whenever you’re about to think of those memories, and instead try to think of something else very fast. Obviously you shouldn’t try to not think of the memories, that’s like trying not to think of a pink elephant, which I bet you just did. No, actually change the subject, fast. Look for a specific thing as fast as you can, and think as deeply as you can about that thing.

Tips of things to think of: Memories can come to you anywhere. It’s great if you can always have some sort of very interesting content related to your personal interests that you can come back to instantly to get away from the memories, but personally I find it impossible to carry any such content everywhere. Besides, even when you’re looking at your favorite book, you might be currently at a not-so-great passage which isn’t good enough to distract you from the memories that you were about to think of. So what I recommend is to try to focus very hard on the first thing that you do see in the environment you’re currently in. (Or if that was what brought up the memories, some other thing. But if you have objects that reliably make you remember bad memories, consider getting rid of those objects.) For me, at least, the first thing I see around me is usually whatever furniture is in the room I’m currently in. If you go outside more than I do, then it might be other things, such as streets and buildings and trees. Try to think very hard about the thing you’re looking at from a new perspective, such as for instance: how it was physically built, the materials that it’s made of, its history, depictions of it in art, the types of activities that it’s used for, its geometrical shape and features, its deep metaphysical nature. Think very intensely about that, and if you stop being able to think of more stuff about that thing, then look around yourself harder for a second thing. If you apply yourself enough to this activity, you will hopefully forget which memory it was that you were about to remember, and be unable to come back to it.

Why this works: This works because it is the opposite principle to spaced repetition. Whenever you recall memories, this reinforces them, so what you need to do if you want to kill some memories is to prevent them being recalled.

Caveats: Memories are associated to other memories. Sometimes, you know recalling a good memory from your past will quickly remind you of a bad one. There’s no way to keep the good ones without the bad ones in that case, you have to kill the entire network. As a result of what I did, I basically cannot recall any of my past from before about 2017, when I turned 18 and got into college. I cannot remember anything about my school friends, or earlier online friends, even if I try.

Nowadays, I feel like I have grown as a person to the extent that I am very emotionally resilient, and I could definitely simply deal with the memories if somehow I got them all back now. But they’re gone, I can’t get them back. In order to be able to tell people about my life more accurately, I have made a deliberate effort to reconstruct my past from whatever physical or digital evidence I had left from back then, which wasn’t that much, since I had wisely gotten rid of most of it. But there are a lot of things I simply don’t know.

I’m glad I did what I did. The memories were holding me back. They were actively preventing me from achieving the personal growth which I did achieve, over the years since I lost them.

It helps that the cut-off point, 2017, is also when I began losing interest in childish pastimes such as video games, and began getting more interested in intellectual matters of various sorts. I began reading a lot of serious nonfiction, which I had more or less never done before. The person I had been before had more or less nothing to contribute to developing the person I became.

Examples of theories

This is an extended quotation from An Invitation to Mathematical Logic, by David Marker.

Below, I also added an extended quotation from A Course on Mathematical Logic, by Shashi Mohan Srivastava.

Personality

This post is about what it means to get to know someone. It consists of various previously unconnected points on this subject that I have gathered over the course of some years.

• History
• Conveyance
• Length
• Popularity
• Tolerance

History

Everyone has a story. By this I mean that almost everyone is able and, in some contexts, willing to tell their entire life story from birth to the present. The older they are, the more story there is to tell, but also the more times they have been asked to tell it before, which makes them readier to do it.

I have a story, too. I will not tell it here, but I have it down to a pretty coherent narrative that I tell a little differently each time depending on the audience, but the details of which are pretty fixed. I usually begin my story in 2017 rather than at my birth, considering events before that point uninteresting. Everyone who knows me knows my reasons for beginning at 2017; only a few, besides my family, know about my life before then. (My family, in turn, do not know much about my life since then.)

Not everyone is equally good at telling their story. Some people are particularly interested in some aspects of their life and will omit others. But there are a few major aspects to someone’s life, and you cannot be considered to know someone well if you do not know those, even if they usually pass over them. Roughly, in trying to get to know someone, you’re trying to get them to hit at least these points:

• Who are their current friends, and how did they come to meet them?
• What are their current interests (and/or career), and how did they get into them?
• What religion were they brought up in? How did their own religious views develop over time, if at all?
• How did their political beliefs develop over time, if at all?
• What have their romantic and sexual experiences been?
• What have their experiences with drugs and alcohol been?
• If they do not have children, do they want to? Have their feelings, with regard to wanting to have children, always been the same? Do they have any particular views on childrearing?

I just wrote this list up for the first time, so it’s not something I have been explicitly checking every time I wanted to get to know someone. But mentally, I have probably always gone through something like this, since I wanted to learn almost all of these things about most people I made a deliberate effort to get to know.

Conveyance

A distinction I like to make is between clarity and transparency.

Clarity refers to how clearly you can convey what you think when you speak; its opposite is obscurity. Transparency refers to how much you tend to say what you think; its opposite is opacity.

Someone who is very clear, but very opaque, will not often speak his mind, but will usually be understood when he does so; someone who is very transparent, but very obscure, will speak his mind a lot, but people will usually be confused as to what he means by what he says, and requests for clarification won’t seem to help.

I do not claim that the two tend to either go together or appear separately; the qualities are simply worth distinguishing. Both make someone easier to befriend.

Length

There’s a niche indie film called Classical Period, directed by Ted Fendt, which I know about because I have been internet friends with one of the actors, Calvin Engime. (Due to regional restrictions, I have not actually watched it.) Cal showed me some of the published reviews of the film, which spoke to its relative notability within its niche. One was this one by Jonathan Romney, which includes the line: “These are people who speak in paragraphs. Very long paragraphs. With footnotes.” This line has stuck with me for some years, because it describes me and my closest friends very well.

I have sometimes texted people who don’t read or write a lot. There’s a lot more orality to how they text than to how assiduous readers text, even if they stick to a high register – they’ll send many short messages to say what could have been said in one longer message, because that’s what writing looks like when written by someone who is more used to speaking. This style with a lot of short sentences, juxtaposed rather than connected, is also found in the Old Testament, which was written in a culture where writing was not very common yet.

Popularity

There’s one sense of popularity which is equivalent to notoriety, i.e., how many people know about you or have heard of you. This is the most common way to describe someone as “popular”, and while it can be measured by doing polls on how well people know someone, it is usually measured by checking the number of Google results when looking their name up, or by looking at their number of followers on social media.

There’s another sense of popularity which is something like likability or status, and which is seen in the phenomenon of “popular kids” in school. In school, due to common roll calls and such, almost everyone knows almost everyone else’s name, so everyone is equally notorious. But only a few kids are popular. They’re the kids that everyone likes, or admires, or aspires to be like – the coolest kids. Popularity, in this sense, refers to the extent to which people like you, or have a high opinion of you.

I have never been notorious. I do not do anything important enough, or widely enjoyable enough, to achieve notoriety. But I think I have usually been one of the more popular persons within the groups I’ve gotten into.

At the same time, I am peculiarly unlikable, and I am not allowed into many groups. My account on X (formerly Twitter) is blocked by so many other accounts that it often gets hard to read the site while logged into it, due to the large number of comments that are hidden from me. This had usually left me out of group chats on the site, as well, back when an account could not be in the same group chat with anyone who blocked them. Even after this rule was changed, I was still not added to many group chats.

I don’t like many people myself, either – sometimes I connect this sense of ‘liking and being liked by few people’ with a personality disorder. But this is not the place to go into this.

Tolerance

The novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, begins by describing a peculiar quality of its protagonist, Nick Carraway. I will quote the first three paragraphs of the novel in full, since it costs nothing to do so, since the book is in public domain, and space within a webpage is practically unlimited.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret grief’s of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

Carraway goes on to say that he had grown tired of listening to everyone’s personal story, but that he made an exception for Gatsby, the novel’s titular character.

Ever since it was pointed out to me by a close friend that I seemed to also have this quality, I have related strongly to Carraway’s sense of his tolerance, because I have also often had the experience of someone opening up a lot to me very quickly. The occasion in which it was pointed out to me was also significant – I was remarking to my friend that I was, at the same time, close friends with two persons who had also been close friends with each other, but were in the process of bitterly falling out, so that I heard both of them tell me how they felt about their dispute in closer detail than they’d ever tell each other to their face. This experience of being privy to the internals, as it were, of both sides of a conflict, was very interesting. (It did not, for all that, help me prevent their falling out, and they have not spoken in almost three years.)

Although I am not liked by many people, the people who can stand me are unusually comfortable with me. This is also, evidently, a quality that makes it easier to get to know people.

Brazilians Use Sunday First

Almost all calendars in Portuguese-speaking countries, such as Brazil and Portugal, have Sunday as the first day of the week, because this is baked into the language itself. Portuguese, along with Galician and Mirandese, are the only Romance languages where, instead of the names of the weekdays being derived from the pagan planetary gods, they are derived simply from numbers, numbered from Sunday.

Example Brazilian calendar.

The names for the days of the week literally just mean “the Lord’s day”, “second-day”, “third-day”, “fourth-day”, “fifth-day”, “sixth-day” and “sabbath”. So calendars follow along with this, it feels wrong not to. In English, it is sometimes disputed that Sunday should not be first because then there is no singular “weekend”, there are two “ends” of the week at Saturday and Sunday. But we just use the equivalent expression and assume it refers to the “work week”.

Regarding the weekend, as in many other Romance languages, the word for Saturday is literally the same word used to talk about the Sabbath, while the word for Sunday is a word that just means Sunday, but is etymologically derived from Latin for “lord”.

Regarding the weekdays, the word used for “day” within the ordinal weekdays is “feira”, which comes from Latin “feria” meaning a day, but in modern Portuguese does not mean a day at all outside of these fixed weekday names, it means a street fair. Many children are confused why there are so many street fairs in the calendar, and often they don’t even get an explanation, they just stop asking about it.

Although it is so confusing, the word “feira” has the advantage of being feminine, unlike the normal word for day, “dia”, which is masculine. So it is in fact impossible to confuse the second-day (Monday) with the second day (e.g. of the month), since the latter is masculine.

Portuguese does have a descendant of “feria” from Latin in actual uncompounded use, which is the word “férias” (almost always plural) referring to a vacation. I like to use the Phineas & Ferb theme song as an example of that word: the initial line “there’s 104 days of summer vacation” was rendered in Portuguese as “são três meses de férias, que passam depressa”, which, translated back, means “there are three months of vacations, which pass by quickly”. (The additional clause, about “passing by quickly”, was inserted to fit the meter, because otherwise the line would be too short. And I guess they made it “three months” to make the song more plausible with regard to Brazilian school schedules.)

The word for “third” within Tuesday (terça-feira) is actually usually only used for a third as in the fraction (one-third is “um terço” in the masculine and “uma terça” in the feminine) in modern Portuguese, whereas for the ordinal third you usually say a different word (the third ordinal place is called “terceiro” in the masculine and “terceira” in the feminine).

Meme explanation: the King Size of Rio de Janeiro

I often mention the meme about “the King Size of Rio de Janeiro”, which can be a problem when I do so in an English-speaking context, because it’s a Brazilian meme in Portuguese, and it’s kind of obscure even within Brazil. It refers to this video:

In the video, they picked a random man off the street to say his opinion about the ferry service in Niterói, and he obliges. However, it happened that the man they picked was insane. After briefly saying something about the ferry service, he attaches a deadpan schizophrenic rant about the “King Size” dynasty. (He uses the actual English words “king size” in what is otherwise a Portuguese-language speech, making it clear that he mistook a size of bed for a sort of title of nobility.) In full, what he is saying translates to this:

The ferry service is an excellent service, because it is a transport of a not very high cost, it takes you to Rio de Janeiro, and it will get better as soon as I take over as King Size, the lord of the lands of Rio de Janeiro.

The Chinese mafia had the ability to scale my existence to rape my daughter's mother, and making this a motive of constant mockery in my life. Being that this purpose was for me to disappear from Rio de Janeiro and not make the discovery of being the King Size.

The King Size—the Kings Sizes are the greatest kings that exist on the planet. In Portugal, in 1485, by the Portuguese Court—the Portuguese Court gave the Kings Sizes the King Size Coat of Arms. Arriving in Rio de Janeiro, and in many lands of Brazil, they colonized—immigrated and colonized many lands in Brazil.

Today, I am the youngest son, I am the King Size, and I have my daughter, who is Késia Castro Lima, who is going to be heir to everything within a very—in a short time.

Alright, the ferry service has much to improve as soon as the Jumbo Cat reopens, because there is an orgy going on in there, where innumerable executions go on. I am Alexandre dos Santos Lima, the King Size of Rio de Janeiro.

Awkward phrasings in this translation are an attempt to reflect awkward phrasings in the original speech.

In Brazil, although the video was viral, the meme had few repercussions, the most important one being the Brazilian Uncyclopedia (Desciclopédia) article about it, which I will not translate because it mostly rehashes the video itself.

One noteworthy part of the humor is that the business name “Jumbo Cat” is said in a way that sounds like “Ju Boquete”, that is, a common woman’s nickname (“Ju”, which may be short for Julia or Juliana or some such name) and a slang word for “blowjob”. But it is fairly certain that “Jumbo Cat” is what was said.

I enjoy making references to the video. I may express my feelings of vague optimism by saying that something “will get better as soon as I take over as King Size, the lord of the lands of Rio de Janeiro”. Also, the chaotic image of “an orgy with innumerable executions” may be brought back to my mind by various other chaotic situations.

Thiago V. S. Coelho

My name is Thiago V. S. Coelho, and I live in Brazil. I was born on 1999-04-19, so I’m currently 27.

This blog post is my personal page, which is kept up-to-date as information about me develops.

Facts about me:

• I have an X (formerly Twitter) profile, and a Facebook profile. You can send me anonymous mail here.
• I have gotten some opinion pieces published by the Mises Wire; I keep a list of them here.
• I am the creator and author of this blog. For a while, I had no personal page about myself besides the page I wrote about this blog.
• My blog includes a fan page for academic philosopher Agnes Callard, which she herself appreciated. My blog also includes a summary of her book Aspiration. Agnes at one point confirmed that I’m her biggest fan.
• Besides this blog, I have two other blogs, namely a blog of translations called Thiago’s Translations Blog, and a blog for sharing other interesting LLM-generated content, called Thiago’s ChatGPT Blog. Also, recently, a newsletter called Children and Rights.
• I have made translations of key works by Olavo de Carvalho and Severinus Boethius.
• I have been deeply involved with Internet memes. At this post, my various Facebook meme pages and groups, and blog posts on meme research, are listed. My main meme page, then called Aesthetic Intellectual Meme Stash (now called Scholarly Scholastic Memes), was correctly cited by KnowYourMeme as the origin of the English version of the “Divorce Leads Children to the Worst Places” meme template.
• I have made various contributions to Wikipedia, outlined in my user page at the site. I consider myself the main author of the articles Absence of good, Best of all possible worlds, Egregore, A Preface to Paradise Lost, and Propositional logic.
• I have a GitHub profile, with very few open-source contributions to my name. One of my projects was a browser game, Color Golf; another was The Dots–Brackets Converter, a webapp for converting logical formulas into and out of the Principia Mathematica dotted notation.
• I generally take thiagovscoelho as a username, which corresponds to my full name. It is my username in all the previously mentioned platforms, but also various other platforms, such as Discord.

Facts for English speakers about my name

First name origin. My first name, “Thiago”, is a variant of “Tiago” (see below about the spelling), which is the Portuguese version of the name of St James, from the Bible – specifically, St James the Great. This is not the James that authored the Book of James, nor the one who was the brother of Jesus – in the Bible, he is really not all that important, aside from how he was one of the two disciples who got the nickname “Boanerges” from Jesus. He is most likely called “the Great” because he was taller than the other James, called James the Less. But there is a tradition that he evangelized the Iberian peninsula, hence the popularity of his name among descendants of people from that area.

Both of the saints known as James were late antique Jews who, in their original languages, were named exactly the same as the great Jewish patriarch, Jacob. But the name distinction developed historically as the name spread from Hebrew to Greek and Latin and thence to many other languages, and it turns out to be helpful to easily distinguish between these biblical characters. In some contexts, I’d be fine with people calling me James if they find “Thiago” unwieldy, it would just be confusing on a public site where Thiago is my display name. Aside from how every Bible in Portuguese calls St James “Tiago”, there is also the interesting fact that James Potter, from the Harry Potter series, was accurately localized in Portuguese as Tiago Potter.

First name pronunciation and spelling. In the original Portuguese, I pronounce my first name [t͡ʃiˈa.ɡu], or [ˈt͡ʃja.ɡu] if I say it fast. (That is, tchee-AH-goo, or TCHAH-goo when said fast.)

The “tch” sound, oddly enough, is standard practice among (almost all) Portuguese speakers whenever a T comes before an I sound (which includes the letter E when it is not stressed). It has nothing to do with the H in the spelling: in fact, “Thiago” is pronounced exactly the same as “Tiago”, which is the original spelling. (Although “Tiago” is more common, and more sensibly spelled, that’s not the version my mom put on my birth certificate.) The H is really only “decorative”: it does not affect sound at all, and in particular, it does not produce a theta sound in Portuguese (since this sound is absent from the language, anyway), although historically, this spelling probably does come from someone incorrectly thinking that there was a theta in the Greek of St James’s name.

In different accents, it might sound more like [tʃiˈa.ɡo], [tiˈa.ɡu], [ˈtja.ɡu], [ti'a.ɡo], [ti'a.ɣu], [ti'a.ɣo], [ˈtja.ɣu], or [ˈtja.ɣo].

I really don’t mind it when English speakers pronounce it [θaɪˈæ.ɡo], as they tend to do when they’ve only seen it written down. It does puzzle me when they abbreviate it to “Thia” as a nickname – in Brazil, it is instead shortened to “Thi”, pronounced [t͡ʃi] (“tchee”).

Middle and last names. My middle names are abbreviated V. S., it does not mean “versus”.

My last name, Coelho, means “rabbit”. (If you were localizing my name to English, the closest rendering might actually be “Coney”.) I am not related to the famous author Paulo Coelho, as far as I know.

Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454

[What follows is an excerpt from chapter 12 of Mostly Harmless, by Douglas Adams. I enjoy this gag in the book and wanted a post with which to refer to it easily, which is this. Ford Prefect is the name of a character, who was named after a line of cars produced from 1938–1961, as explained earlier in the series.]

He closed his eyes, which he’d been wanting to do for a bit anyway. He wondered what the hell to do next. Jump? Climb? He didn’t think there was going to be any way of breaking in. OK, the supposedly rocket-proof glass hadn’t stood up, when it came to it, to an actual rocket, but then that had been a rocket that had been fired at very short range from inside, which probably wasn’t what the engineers who designed it had had in mind. It didn’t mean he was going to be able to break the window here by wrapping his fist in his towel and punching. What the hell, he tried it anyway and hurt his fist. It was just as well he couldn’t get a good swing from where he was sitting or he might have hurt it quite badly. The building had been sturdily reinforced when it was completely rebuilt after the Frogstar attack, and was probably the most heavily armoured publishing company in the business, but there was always, he thought, some weakness in any system designed by a corporate committee. He had already found one of them. The engineers who designed the windows had not expected them to be hit by a rocket from short range from the inside, so the window had failed.

So, what would the engineers not be expecting someone sitting on the ledge outside the window to do?

He wracked his brains for a moment or so before he got it.

The thing they wouldn’t be expecting him to do was to be there in the first place. Only an absolute idiot would be sitting where he was, so he was winning already. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.

He pulled his newly acquired credit card from his pocket, slid it into a crack where the window met its surrounding frame, and did something a rocket would not have been able to do. He wiggled it around a bit. He felt a catch slip. He slid the window open and almost fell backwards off the ledge laughing, giving thanks as he did so for the Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454.

The Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454 had started off as just a lot of hot air. Hot air was, of course, the problem that ventilation was supposed to solve and generally it had solved the problem reasonably well up to the point when someone invented air-conditioning, which solved the problem far more throbbingly.

And that was all well and good provided you could stand the noise and the dribbling until someone else came up with something even sexier and smarter than air-conditioning which was called in-building climate control.

Now this was quite something.

The major differences from just ordinary air-conditioning were that it was thrillingly more expensive, involved a huge amount of sophisticated measuring and regulating equipment which was far better at knowing, moment by moment, what kind of air people wanted to breathe than mere people did.

It also meant that, to be sure that mere people didn’t muck up the sophisticated calculations which the system was making on their behalf, all the windows in the buildings were built sealed shut. This is true.

While the systems were being installed, a number of people who were going to work in the buildings found themselves having conversations with Breathe-o-Smart systems fitters which went something like this:

“But what if we want to have the windows open?”

“You won’t want to have the windows open with new Breathe-o-Smart.”

“Yes but supposing we just wanted to have them open for a little bit?”

“You won’t want to have them open even for a little bit. The new Breathe-o-Smart system will see to that.”

“Hmmm.”

“Enjoy Breathe-o-Smart!”

“OK, so what if the Breathe-o-Smart breaks down or goes wrong or something?”

“Ah! One of the smartest features of the Breathe-o-Smart is that it cannot possibly go wrong. So. No worries on that score. Enjoy your breathing now, and have a nice day.”

(It was, of course, as a result of the Great Ventilation and Telephone Riots of SrDt 3454, that all mechanical or electrical or quantum-mechanical or hydraulic or even wind, steam or piston-driven devices, are now requited to have a certain legend emblazoned on them somewhere. It doesn’t matter how small the object is, the designers of the object have got to find a way of squeezing the legend in somewhere, because it is their attention which is being drawn to it rather than necessarily that of the user’s.

The legend is this:

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”)

Major heat waves started to coincide, with almost magical precision, with major failures of the Breathe-o-Smart systems. To begin with this merely caused simmering resentment and only a few deaths from asphyxiation.

The real horror erupted on the day that three events happened simultaneously. The first event was that Breathe-o-Smart Inc. issued a statement to the effect that best results were achieved by using their systems in temperate climates.

The second event was the breakdown of a Breathe-o-Smart system on a particularly hot and humid day with the resulting evacuation of many hundreds of office staff into the street where they met the third event, which was a rampaging mob of long-distance telephone operators who had got so twisted with having to say, all day and every day, “Thank you for using BS&S” to every single idiot who picked up a phone that they had finally taken to the streets with trash cans, megaphones and rifles.

In the ensuing days of carnage every single window in the city, rocket-proof or not, was smashed, usually to accompanying cries of “Get off the line, asshole! I don’t care what number you want, what extension you’re calling from. Go and stick a firework up your bottom! Yeeehaah! Hoo Hoo Hoo! Velooooom! Squawk!” and a variety of other animal noises that they didn’t get a chance to practise in the normal line of their work.

As a result of this, all telephone operators were granted a constitutional right to say “Use BS&S and die!” at least once an hour when answering the phone and all office buildings were required to have windows that opened, even if only a little bit.

Another, unexpected result was a dramatic lowering of the suicide rate. All sorts of stressed and rising executives who had been forced, during the dark days of the Breathe-o-Smart tyranny, to jump in front of trains or stab themselves, could now just clamber out on to their own window ledges and leap off at their leisure. What frequently happened, though, was that in the moment or two they had to look around and gather their thoughts they would suddenly discover that all they had really needed was a breath of air and a fresh perspective on things, and maybe also a farm on which they could keep a few sheep.

Another completely unlooked for result was that Ford Prefect, stranded thirteen stories up a heavily armoured building armed with nothing but a towel and a credit card was nevertheless able to clamber through a supposedly rocket-proof window to safety.

He closed the window neatly after him, having first allowed Colin to follow him through, and then started to look around for this bird thing.

The thing he realised about the windows was this: because they had been converted into openable windows after they had first been designed to be impregnable, they were, in fact, much less secure than if they had been designed as openable windows in the first place.

Hey ho, it’s a funny old life, he was just thinking to himself, when he suddenly realised that the room he had gone to all this trouble to break into was not a very interesting one.

Conservative animalism

I recently saw a conservative Facebook friend share, approvingly, a translation of the following quotation from Roger Scruton. The post was relatively popular, and had a good deal of likes and shares, seemingly all from conservatives.

It is a tautology to say that a conservative is a person who wants to conserve things: the question is what things? To this I think we can give a simple one-word answer, namely: us. At the heart of every conservative endeavor is the effort to conserve a historically given community. In any conflict the conservative is the one who sides with “us” against “them” – not knowing, but trusting. He is the one who looks for the good in the institutions, customs and habits that he has inherited. He is the one who seeks to defend and perpetuate an instinctive sense of loyalty, and who is therefore suspicious of experiments and innovations that put loyalty at risk.

So defined, conservatism is less a philosophy than a temperament; but it is, I believe, a temperament that emerges naturally from the experience of society, and which is indeed necessary if societies are to endure. The conservative strives to diminish social entropy. The second law of thermodynamics implies that, in the long run, all conservatism must fail. But the same is true of life itself, and conservatism might equally be defined as the social organism's will to live. (Scruton, A Question of Temperament, WSJ, 2002)

Soon after, I saw a different conservative friend share a different quotation. This friend was more open to listening to libertarian-leaning writers such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who was the source of the quote – of course, the quote speaks of conservatives in a superficially positive tone, so it was not that surprising. Similarly, the quote was shared approvingly and got nothing but positive reactions from his peers.

Conservative refers to someone who recognizes the old and natural through the “noise” of anomalies and accidents and who defends, supports, and helps to preserve it against the temporary and anomalous. Within the realm of the humanities, including the social sciences, a conservative recognizes families (fathers, mothers, children, grandchildren) and households based on private property and in cooperation with a community of other households as the most fundamental, natural, essential, ancient, and indispensable social units. Moreover, the family household also represents the model of the social order at large. Just as a hierarchical order exists in a family, so is there a hierarchical order within a community of families—of apprentices, servants, and masters, vassals, knights, lords, overlords, and even kings—tied together by an elaborate and intricate system of kinship relations; and of children, parents, priests, bishops, cardinals, patriarchs or popes, and finally the transcendent God. Of the two layers of authority, the earthly physical power of parents, lords, and kings is naturally subordinate and subject to control by the ultimate spiritual-intellectual authority of fathers, priests, bishops, and ultimately God.

Conservatives (or more specifically, Western Greco-Christian conservatives), if they stand for anything, stand for and want to preserve the family and the social hierarchies and layers of material as well as spiritual-intellectual authority based on and growing out of family bonds and kinship relations. (Hoppe, Democracy, §10)

What had struck me about the first quote was how Scruton frankly said that conservatism is nothing more than an animal instinct of loyalty to your family or community. Having this on my mind, I noticed how the second quote, although liable to a more philosophical interpretation of what “family bonds” mean, is also strongly suggestive of such an instinct.

Similar things may be found in other acclaimed conservative literature, such as Edmund Burke’s defense of “prejudice” in the Reflections, and Jordan Peterson also comes to mind, since he sees political beliefs in general as largely determined by temperament and personality, and after some time of noncommittally giving ideas “for conservatism”, has recently come to identify as a conservative himself, and joined the conservative media company Daily Wire.

I just think that there’s something deeply off about this whole thing. How can someone admit to be doing nothing but following his instincts? How can he do so without shame, and in public, and get away with it?

In the culture of Plato and Descartes, that ought to be social suicide. Why would we listen to a self-proclaimed mere animal? If your idea “is less a philosophy than a temperament”, you should be told to shut up and come back when you have more deliberate thoughts to communicate; insofar as that is not our reaction, we are a deeply unserious culture.

Of course, that conservatives in particular are the ones to do this is not surprising to me. They generally represent aristocratic ideas, which, like proletarian ideas, are fundamentally irrational; the aristocracy being addled by excess and the proletariat by want, only the bourgeoisie are capable of reason.

Theoretical ambitions

I write here about the sort of theories that I would like to read, and which I would like to write if I were sure of having time and an income. This is basically the stuff that I fantasize about in the shower.

Geometrical method

Social theories should be presented in geometrical style, à la Spinoza, though perhaps with more explanation of definitions and axioms than Spinoza employed, and possibly with answers to objections, à la Thomas Aquinas. This does not ensure that they are more likely to be right, but it makes claims more clear and distinct – whether they are meant as analytic or as synthetic, for instance – and it makes the connections between claims more explicit. Someone who wishes to criticize a claim made by a theory should be able to easily find all other claims on which it depends, and make explicit the stance of his criticism toward all of the dependencies and the validity and soundness of the inferences. This is best done if claims are emphasized and named, and referred to by their names, as is done in the geometrical style, where someone may say, for instance, “this follows from proposition 5 and axiom 2”.

Ethics into law

Natural-law ethics, which is already formulated deductively, should be put into the geometrical form just requested, and elaborated deductively to such a level of specificity that you can actually try particular cases by it. Positive law only exists because ethicists have slacked off.

Of course, I believe that an important practical aspect of law, viz., the measure of punishments, cannot be rationally determined in the abstract. A complete natural-law system of ethics should give some alternative standards of punishment so that the readers can apply the one that seems best to them, or formulate their own standards in relation to the ones given. For instance, historical standards of punishment from various countries could be given, alongside the opinions of notable philosophers, such as the Rothbardian “two teeth for a tooth” standard.

Supposing that there are no legitimate states, and that only legitimate states can apply coercive punishments, the judge who applies natural-law ethics would be determining the proper response of uncoercive punishers, viz., society at large, i.e., the decisions of individual buyers and sellers in the market to boycott or exclude the punished. As such, the judgment of the offenders would be broadcast publicly and each member of society would apply his own standards as he sees fit.

Once natural law can try all cases, its explicit rationality will evidently have more legitimacy than the state, and we may hope for a future where governments are not trusted to make laws.

Economics

Economics should also be developed according to the geometrical method. Since the Austrian School’s tradition already develops economics deductively, the translation should be straightforward, though laborious. Theories from alternative schools could possibly be translated as well.

The system of economics can then be synthesized with the system of ethics into a sound system of political theory, which can guide movements and revolutions. The greater clarity of this system would also allow it to more easily guide the revisionist reinterpretation of historical events; the geometrical system of economics would also be more easily used as a guide to methods in business and accounting.

Voting

 There is no reason to think that voting involves either

• consent to the general system of government, or
• consent to the government of the person you voted for, or
• support for the government you voted for, in any absolute sense.

The only thing which voting inherently involves is support for the government you voted for in preference to the alternatives, since that is the only thing which the act of voting can inherently do. Accordingly, it can only make you responsible for the actions of the government insofar as they are different from what the alternative would have been – and insofar as you could foresee them before voting.

Usually, support for not voting in leftist and libertarian groups comes from misinterpreting the act of voting in one of the three ways I listed above, or something like them. If you cannot, in good conscience, vote without thinking you are doing these things, then by all means don’t vote, but those meanings are entirely in your head.

It is true that voting does almost nothing, and that any time spent on advocacy about voting could probably be better spent on other advocacy, or other kinds of political action. If you live in a country where voting itself takes considerable effort, then the effort is probably better spent elsewhere. To that extent, there is something venerable about the voting-abstinence tradition in these political circles. But no further.

Uranian Defense

And am I not right in asserting that there are two goddesses? The elder one, having no mother, who is called the heavenly Aphrodite—she is the daughter of Uranus; the younger, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione—her we call common; and the Love who is her fellow-worker is rightly named common, as the other love is called heavenly. (Plato, Symposium, 180d–e)

In order to better serve the purpose of this blog, I collect some of my opinions about sexual relations, with special reference to gay relationships, into one place.

0. Contents

1. Reason
2. Faith
3. Culture
4. Politics

1. Reason

1. Ethics may be derived from human nature. This is assumed here, though in relation to my own metaphysics, I have proved it before. Here we may note that the only major alternative ethical theory that can judge consistently about all actions is utilitarianism, it is trivially demonstrable that all consensual sex acts are permitted within it, or at least not bad.

2. Human beings are, by nature, rational animals. By this, I mean the fact that human beings are able to explicitly refer their actions to known purposes, from which fact we know that they have, as we observe in ourselves, the power of reason, i.e., of defining and dividing concepts, judging, and deducing. Although none of them do this in every action, all of them do it in some circumstances, in which a failure to do so is understood as their falling short of their nature, whether by disease or by vice. In judging this power to be essential to human nature rather than accidental, I merely follow the crowd.

3. Rational animals may form special friendships. Rational animals are able to have rational goodwill for each other, i.e., to desire the other’s good; and having this, they are able to seek it sometimes to its fullest extent, namely by giving of all that they have. This is done, first, by one teaching the other so that they have the same knowledge; and when they have the same knowledge, they must have the same rational desires, which in turn allows them to control each other’s property without conflict, thereby having really given each other everything; and so it is that friends own all things in common.

4. Friendships are the best temporal good acquirable. Since to have a friend is the same as to have another human life; and since rational animals are, metaphysically, the best creatures on earth; it follows that there is no greater good to be acquired among material things than a friend. Further, a friend is of service to every end of a human being, since friends are sources of knowledge and helpful to every practical pursuit; so that the pursuit and maintenance of a friendship is truly a rational end of a human being, rather than a merely animal one.

5. The end of the sexual organs is reproduction. Although modern science may contribute to a reinterpretation of the natural purpose of the sexual organs, I am not aware of any attempts at doing so, and I will base my reasonings upon the traditional doctrine, which is, at any rate, how I understand them. It does not seem that any other use of the sexual organs is essential to the human nature, whereas the reproductive use is how the species is propagated.

6. Reproductive use of the sexual organs may not be lawfully engaged in outside of marriage. Marriage being defined as a heterotelic, voluntary relationship, oriented to the production and rearing of children, it is irrational for human beings to seek reproduction without first getting married. For reproduction, by nature, creates children and places them under the responsibility of both parents, who must then agree about raising the child, so that they may do so without conflict.

7. Animal ends may lawfully be subordinated to the rational end. The end of a creature being dictated by the end of its highest part, viz., the senses in brutes and reason in human beings, it may sometimes enter into conflict with the full perfection of some of its lower parts, which may then be sacrificed for the end of the whole. So it is that, taking the universe itself as an animal, the brutes may be slaughtered for the nourishment of human beings; and so it is that, in human beings themselves, the amputation of a limb may be justified to preserve the life of the mind.

8. Unreproductive use of the sexual organs may possibly be subordinated to the end of rational friendship. Sexual acts which are perverted from their reproductive end may nevertheless serve the end of maintaining a friendship between rational animals, since such acts are known to have such an effect on the emotions as promotes bonding and intimacy between the agents. In such cases, the reproductive parts are made to serve the end of reason, to the detriment of their particular ends.

9. Unreproductive use of the sexual organs is justified when subordinated to the end of rational friendship. This follows from the foregoing two sections. Although the natural end of the sexual organs makes certain acts with them intrinsically wrong, nevertheless the natural end of reason allows for such acts to be justified from an extrinsic consideration. This includes all acts except properly reproductive sexual acts, since such are also contrary to reason, as seen in the sixth section.

2. Faith

10. The Catholic Church has always allowed, implied, or taught, the doctrines 1 through 8, from which the ninth follows logically. The first six doctrines have been common since antiquity and have always been taught in the schools; see, for instance, [1,2,3,4,5,6]. The seventh doctrine is also commonly taught, although usually implicitly, such as in the moral justification of amputations, and of the human use of animals. The eighth doctrine is taught when the Church acknowledges, as in Humanae vitae, that the marital act has a “unitive end” which is fulfilled even when its “procreative end” is impeded by infertility; since antiphysical sexual acts differ from the marital act chiefly in their lack of intrinsic ordering to reproduction, they must be able to fulfill the same end. The ninth doctrine, though never explicitly taught, must follow.

11. Seemingly categorical condemnations of unreproductive sexual acts ought not to be interpreted in an absolute sense. Since the Catholic Church should not be held to be inconsistent, which the foregoing section proves that it would be, if it taught an absolutely comprehensive prohibition of unreproductive sexual acts; and since the Church herself has taught, in Vatican I, that “there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason”, and the doctrines in this post have been proved through reason; it follows that, although there have been seemingly categorical statements in condemnation of unreproductive sexual acts in the Bible and in various Church teachings, those statements should not be interpreted as applying to every case, but to the general case, viz., the case where the sexual act is not subordinated to rational friendship. When the act is justified by its ordering to reason, it must be clear that nothing can condemn it.

3. Culture

12. Marriage, while permissible, is not ideal. This is known philosophically, since marriage involves serving the animal end of reproduction to the detriment of contemplation, which is the end of the rational powers of man, and therefore his highest end. Scripture also supports this, since in 1 Corinthians 7, the Apostle warns that, while “it is good for a man not to touch a woman”, marriage is allowed “because of fornications”, and “by way of concession”, solely because “it is better to marry than to burn”. If someone is able to keep from lust, he ought to be unmarried, as the Apostle was.

13. Gay relationships, when justified, are superior to nongay relationships. Since gay relationships cannot reproduce, it follows that insofar as they are justified, they must be maintained solely by the rational end of friendship, and can never succumb to the temptation of derogating from their highest end in order to serve their reproductive parts. Evidently, this makes them more commendable and nobler.

4. Politics

14. All uses of the sexual organs which only involve consenting adults ought to be permitted by the state. Although not all such acts are morally permissible, nevertheless all such acts contribute to the general welfare, defined as the fulfilment of subjective desires. Since the state has little hope of using punishment to conduce citizens to moral behavior, it can best fulfill its duty by keeping its restrictions to securing the general welfare, which is objectively determinable by means of the demonstration of preferences in human action.

15. Legal marriage between persons of the same sex ought to be permitted by states. The state’s monopoly over contract enforcement is unjustified in principle, since it is incapable of serving the common good. So, the state ought to end its monopoly immediately, or at least in the meantime, recognize all intrinsically valid contracts. Although in 2003 conditions, the CDF thought that this recognition of same-sex legal marriage would lead to the social redefinition of marriage, it is unclear that it must do so any more than so-called “intellectual property” laws should lead to the redefinition of property, since legal fictions have always existed. At any rate, nowadays it seems that almost no one thinks of marriage as intrinsically connected with reproduction, so that the concept is already radically transformed and unlikely to be repaired, and the maintenance of this unjust restriction upon individual contract freedom does no good to the social order in that respect either. (If I had not given a definition of marriage in section 6, I think that the section would probably not have been understood.)

16. Couples ought not to be excluded from adopting children for the reason that they are of the same sex. Although there may be reasons, as the CDF alleged, to believe that children are raised better by an opposite-sex couple than a same-sex one, nevertheless the alternative for a child facing adoption is to have no adoptive parents at all, in which experience there is no “sexual complementarity” either. Since it cannot be shown that being adopted by a gay couple is better than not being adopted, there is no good reason to exclude same-sex couples from adoption, although such reasons as the CDF alleged, if well-founded, could support discriminating against them in adoption waiting lists.

Hume’s perversions

This post is not about salacious details of David Hume’s life, since I don’t know of any. It is about passages in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding which were quite tangential to his main arguments, but in which he portrayed the world in a false and dangerous way.

I have written this post while having only read the Enquiry, besides the first two parts of the Treatise; I plan to update it if I find relevant information when reading Hume’s other works and biographical details.

0. Contents

1. Contemplative life condemned
2. Scepticism a restraint upon passions
3. Sensible things clearer, and more distinct, than intelligible things
4. Reasoning more fallible than instinct
5. Notes

1. Contemplative life condemned

Hume begins section 5 of the Enquiry by speaking of “the passion for philosophy”. He correctly describes the temptation to use the methods of philosophy to give an appearance of reasonableness to our vices, that is, to “render our philosophy like that of Epictetus, and other Stoics, only a more refined system of selfishness, and reason ourselves out of all virtue, as well as social enjoyment.”

Here he already begins perverting things. While he does not say so in so many words, he apparently thinks that the Stoics are selfish because they thought that the “contemplative”, or “theoretical” life, was the superior kind. Hume, in section 1, had written about the active and contemplative life, and favored a “mixed kind of life as most suitable to the human race”. He had this reproach about the contemplative:

The mere philosopher is a character, which is commonly but little acceptable in the world, as being supposed to contribute nothing either to the advantage or pleasure of society; while he lives remote from communication with mankind, and is wrapped up in principles and notions equally remote from their comprehension. (§1¶5)

In section 1, he attributed those opinions to “the world”, and then afterwards said that the mixed life is favored by “nature”. But in section 5, after condemning the Stoics, he adds:

While we study with attention the vanity of human life, and turn all our thoughts towards the empty and transitory nature of riches and honours, we are, perhaps, all the while flattering our natural indolence, which, hating the bustle of the world, and drudgery of business, seeks a pretence of reason to give itself a full and uncontrolled indulgence. (§5¶1)

It seems clear, then, that Hume shares the opinion that he had attributed to mankind. The philosopher is not useful to the world; his researches really do “contribute nothing either to the advantage or pleasure of society”; and when he praises the contemplative life, he is merely flattering his lazy and selfish desire to retreat from useful business into the indulgence of his passion for science. 

Hume is not a hypocrite here, since he thinks, after all, that

the mere ignorant is still more despised [than the mere philosopher]; nor is any thing deemed a surer sign of an illiberal genius in an age and nation where the sciences flourish, than to be entirely destitute of all relish for those noble entertainments. (§1¶5)

But he leaves no doubt that he thinks of the sciences as mere “entertainments”, though “noble”; and he probably thinks that being “ignorant” is only despicable because of how it makes you less interesting when conversing in society. Knowledge has no inherent value apart from action, and the search for knowledge is indulgent when not subordinated to action, oriented to “the advantage or pleasure of society”.

Hume seems even to think that “riches and honours” ought not to be despised, since, after all, riches are a sign of industry when peacefully acquired – Hume was an economist –, and honours are bestowed by society upon those who are thought to serve its interest.

What sort of ethics are we left with here?

Hume probably thinks that “the interest of society” does not generally consist in the disinterested acquisition of knowledge, because of how the masses do not generally have “the passion for philosophy,” its “principles and notions” being far “remote from their comprehension”. This is why knowledge is regarded as, ideally, instrumental. But then, necessarily, the interest of society must consist in fleeting things.

The old proofs about the end of life remain unimpeachable. Wealth is unsuited to be the chief goal of one’s pursuits because it is a mere means to other things; honor, besides being only an effect of the good life, is generally given by the stupid masses, who do not know it when they see it. Bodily pleasure, in turn, is fleeting and movable, and at the mercy of fortune. Only knowledge is permanent and eternal, and virtue is identical with it.

Against these old notions, Hume has only this to say:

Man is a reasonable being; and as such, receives from science his proper food and nourishment: But so narrow are the bounds of human understanding, that little satisfaction can be hoped for in this particular, either from the extent or security of his acquisitions. (§1¶6)

We see, then, what his epistemology has done to his ethics. Hume thinks that philosophical knowledge is generally false; that all our thoughts are ultimately copied from sense impressions, and are only made general by our use of language; and therefore, that our beliefs consist entirely of probable inductive judgments about material things, which he rightly regards as fleeting, since they may be disproved by any new observations. Near the end of the Enquiry, of course, he famously made an exception for mathematics (§12¶27), but he made it arbitrarily,[1] and it clearly played no part in his ethics.[2]

Hume, of course, had no reason to think any of these things. The “copy principle” was entirely made up, and the rest of his notions clearly came from a failure to distinguish imagination from conceptual understanding; which, being a confusion of a bodily power with a spiritual one, is just as much the mark of a carnal man as his effective making of bodily pleasure into the end of human life.

2. Scepticism a restraint upon passions

In view of what was just shown about his ethics, Hume’s next perversion becomes much more ridiculous. He continues section 5 as follows:

There is, however, one species of philosophy which seems little liable to this inconvenience, and that because it strikes in with no disorderly passion of the human mind, nor can mingle itself with any natural affection or propensity; and that is the Academic or Sceptical philosophy. The academics always talk of doubt and suspense of judgement, of danger in hasty determinations, of confining to very narrow bounds the enquiries of the understanding, and of renouncing all speculations which lie not within the limits of common life and practice. Nothing, therefore, can be more contrary than such a philosophy to the supine indolence of the mind, its rash arrogance, its lofty pretensions, and its superstitious credulity. (§5¶1)

He has already begun perverting things by supposing that pride takes the form of a man being too confident in his judgment; it does not, and this is an old canard of the sceptics, who have ever tried to frame their scepticism as “epistemic humility”. But he continues:

Every passion is mortified by it, except the love of truth; and that passion never is, nor can be, carried to too high a degree. It is surprising, therefore, that this philosophy, which, in almost every instance, must be harmless and innocent, should be the subject of so much groundless reproach and obloquy. But, perhaps, the very circumstance which renders it so innocent is what chiefly exposes it to the public hatred and resentment. By flattering no irregular passion, it gains few partizans: By opposing so many vices and follies, it raises to itself abundance of enemies, who stigmatize it as libertine, profane, and irreligious. (§5¶1)

Now this is just ridiculous. Obviously the “love of truth”, if it be a passion, is the only passion mortified by scepticism, which tends ever to make people diffident in their pursuit of it, as Hume just acknowledged.[3] The love of truth is perfectly virtuous, of course, and it is precisely for stymieing it that scepticism is condemned.

Further, since it commonly takes the form of scepticism about ethical propositions, it is rather used in favor of every vice. Hume probably thinks that it cannot be used in this way, of course, as he wrote elsewhere about determinism:

Are such remote and uncertain speculations able to counterbalance the sentiments, which arise from the natural and immediate view of the objects? A man who is robbed of a considerable sum; does he find his vexation for the loss any wise diminished by these sublime reflections? Why then should his moral resentment against the crime be supposed incompatible with them? (§8¶35)

But plainly, the reason why scepticism is thought to be “libertine, profane, and irreligious” is that, if applied to religion and ethics, it removes from such “moral resentment” any pretense of being reasonable, and justified by the nature of things. If you wish to renounce reason and live as the beasts, you can do no better than to proclaim reason “infirm” and uncertain; such will be the judgment which you shall foster about all reproaches of your conduct.

3. Sensible things clearer, and more distinct, than intelligible things

Hume continues to present a perverted worldview in section 7, where he makes sensible things to be more sharply distinguished than intelligible ones:

The great advantage of the mathematical sciences above the moral consists in this, that the ideas of the former, being sensible, are always clear and determinate, the smallest distinction between them is immediately perceptible, and the same terms are still expressive of the same ideas, without ambiguity or variation. An oval is never mistaken for a circle, nor an hyperbola for an ellipsis. The isosceles and scalenum are distinguished by boundaries more exact than vice and virtue, right and wrong. If any term be defined in geometry, the mind readily, of itself, substitutes, on all occasions, the definition for the term defined: Or even when no definition is employed, the object itself may be presented to the senses, and by that means be steadily and clearly apprehended. But the finer sentiments of the mind, the operations of the understanding, the various agitations of the passions, though really in themselves distinct, easily escape us, when surveyed by reflection; nor is it in our power to recal the original object, as often as we have occasion to contemplate it. Ambiguity, by this means, is gradually introduced into our reasonings: Similar objects are readily taken to be the same: And the conclusion becomes at last very wide of the premises. (§7¶1)

Obviously the isosceles and scalenum are not distinguished more exactly “than vice and virtue, right and wrong”, which are contradictory opposites. While these triangles are usually defined as having equal and unequal sides respectively, the terms themselves are connected chiefly with sensible images. There is, accordingly, disagreement about whether the isosceles should be defined as having exactly two equal sides or at least two equal sides; and someone could, in theory, think that the essential property of the isosceles is that its “intriangle” has two equal sides, in which case there could be scalene isosceles triangles. This is why mathematical terms are conventional, and authors are free to use them in whatever ways they think are in accordance with the imagination of readers. There are, of course, educational benefits to defining them in particular ways; but each teacher may do as he thinks best. An oval may not be mistaken for a circle, nor an hyperbola for an ellipsis; but an oval may be mistaken for an ellipsis, until definitions are brought to bear.

Metaphysical and ethical terms, by contrast, are free from sensible images; there is generally no “original object” to recall. It is impossible to imagine vice and virtue in the abstract. So, the metaphysical reasoner is unable to create confusion by replacing images for concepts; he must think in terms of the definitions, and he can get nowhere by trying to use his imagination.

Accordingly, since it is impossible to think about metaphysics and ethics without substituting definitions, whereas such vague imaginations are sometimes useful in geometry, it follows that the sciences of quantity, and of sensible things generally, are more prone to ambiguity than metaphysics and ethics. And this is to be expected, given that they treat of objects which are so connected to our imprecise senses. Empiricism, which is always a pernicious vice, sometimes leads to a complete inversion of reality.

4. Reasoning more fallible than instinct

The final perversion of David Hume, by which he again exalts the body over the soul, is to claim that instincts operate more reliably than reason. His actual arguments are partly involved into this, since he claims that our process of inferring effects from causes is such an instinct:

I shall add, for a further confirmation of the foregoing theory, that, as this operation of the mind, by which we infer like effects from like causes, and vice versa, is so essential to the subsistence of all human creatures, it is not probable, that it could be trusted to the fallacious deductions of our reason, which is slow in its operations; appears not, in any degree, during the first years of infancy; and at best is, in every age and period of human life, extremely liable to error and mistake. It is more conformable to the ordinary wisdom of nature to secure so necessary an act of the mind, by some instinct or mechanical tendency, which may be infallible in its operations, may discover itself at the first appearance of life and thought, and may be independent of all the laboured deductions of the understanding. As nature has taught us the use of our limbs, without giving us the knowledge of the muscles and nerves, by which they are actuated; so has she implanted in us an instinct, which carries forward the thought in a correspondent course to that which she has established among external objects; though we are ignorant of those powers and forces, on which this regular course and succession of objects totally depends. (§5¶22)

We certainly do make such inferences somewhat automatically, and cannot explain the process by which we do them in great detail. This is no more proof that they are infra-rational than the same facts being true about all other inferences.

If we are to explain why the reasoning, that all men are mortal, and all philosophers are men, therefore all philosophers are mortal, is valid, we might say that it belongs to the barbara logical form. We cannot explain, however, why the barbara logical form is valid; this is knowledge which we certainly have from reason, but cannot express in very elaborate words.

The effect of Hume’s rhetoric here is to degrade reason. Reason always works infallibly when it works by itself; it just happens that, often, passions intrude upon it. Our instincts, by contrast, although they generally perform useful functions for our body, are frequently “fooled” by peculiar material circumstances for which our nature does not prepare us; and variously, a man may feel hunger when he is full, feel full when he is starving, or feel fear while he is safe. These circumstances are frequently manipulated for medicine or entertainment, as the last one is exploited by horror movies.

It may be that there is also an instinct for inferring effects from causes, since it does seem, as Hume points out in §9, that the brutes are capable of doing this. This would not seem to be beyond the power of mere bodily mechanism, since probable inductive judgments are necessarily imperfect with respect to deductions, and may require only mere images rather than true concepts. But this would certainly not be because “an operation of such immense consequence in life” cannot “be trusted to the uncertain process of reasoning and argumentation.” (§9¶5) If reason is not certain, nothing is.

5. Notes

[1] Hume explained his exception like this:

As the component parts of quantity and number are entirely similar, their relations become intricate and involved; and nothing can be more curious, as well as useful, than to trace, by a variety of mediums, their equality or inequality, through their different appearances. But as all other ideas are clearly distinct and different from each other, we can never advance farther, by our outmost scrutiny, than to observe this diversity, and, by an obvious reflection, pronounce one thing not to be another. (§12¶27)

Now, what the hell does the “component parts” being “entirely similar” have to do with anything? In particular, with being an object of demonstration? I can only think of this as a spurious justification, made up on the spot to explain how obviously successful mathematical demonstrations are.

[2] Bertrand Russell’s essay on The Study of Mathematics is a very useful comparison here. Russell was also inclined to empiricism, though not as thoroughly as Hume; and he also regarded mathematics as uniquely certain. After noting the unique certainty of mathematics, which is a “perpetual reproof” against “that kind of scepticism which abandons the pursuit of ideals because the road is arduous and the goal not certainly attainable”, he also noted how mathematics, since it is clearly practically useful, also allayed his thoughts, similar to Hume’s, that mere speculation is a vain and indulgent pursuit:

The effects of mathematics upon practical life, though they should not be regarded as the motive of our studies, may be used to answer a doubt to which the solitary student must always be liable. In a world so full of evil and suffering, retirement into the cloister of contemplation, to the enjoyment of delights which, however noble, must always be for the few only, cannot but appear as a somewhat selfish refusal to share the burden imposed upon others by accidents in which justice plays no part. Have any of us the right, we ask, to withdraw from present evils, to leave our fellow-men unaided, while we live a life which, though arduous and austere, is yet plainly good in its own nature? When these questions arise, the true answer is, no doubt, that some must keep alive the sacred fire, some must preserve, in every generation, the haunting vision which shadows forth the goal of so much striving. But when, as must sometimes occur, this answer seems too cold, when we are almost maddened by the spectacle of sorrows to which we bring no help, then we may reflect that indirectly the mathematician often does more for human happiness than any of his more practically active contemporaries. The history of science abundantly proves that a body of abstract propositions—even if, as in the case of conic sections, it remains two thousand years without effect upon daily life—may yet, at any moment, be used to cause a revolution in the habitual thoughts and occupations of every citizen. The use of steam and electricity—to take striking instances—is rendered possible only by mathematics. In the results of abstract thought the world possesses a capital of which the employment in enriching the common round has no hitherto discoverable limits. Nor does experience give any means of deciding what parts of mathematics will be found useful. Utility, therefore, can be only a consolation in moments of discouragement, not a guide in directing our studies.

The obvious practical usefulness of mathematics, which Hume had not mentioned, may have been a motivation for his arbitrary distinction of it. But of course, mathematics is only uniquely practical among demonstrative sciences to men such as these, who regard metaphysics as absurd, ethics as separate from it, and ethical inquiry as being ultimately an expression of inscrutable, and possibly idiosyncratic, emotions.

[3] If any one thinks that Hume does not think that scepticism makes someone generally diffident, but rather is merely directed against vicious “arrogance”, “pretension” and “credulity”, let him hear what Hume says of Berkeley’s arguments, in a footnote to the last section:

He professes, however, in his title-page (and undoubtedly with great truth) to have composed his book against the sceptics as well as against the atheists and free-thinkers. But that all his arguments, though otherwise intended, are, in reality, merely sceptical, appears from this, that they admit of no answer and produce no conviction. Their only effect is to cause that momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion, which is the result of scepticism. (§12¶15, fn32)

While in the rest of the chapter he distinguishes the Pyrrhonian from the Academic sceptics, favoring the latter, here he does not. There is, at any rate, no possible way to deny that the Academic scepticism is harmful in the same way as the Pyrrhonian – by producing “irresolution and confusion”, and putting moral truths into doubt – although perhaps in a “mitigated” way, insofar as it admits of probabilities.

The harm of Academic scepticism might not even be so mitigated, however, since while the Pyrhonian sceptic “cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind”, (§12¶23) the Academic scepticism is capable of being “durable”. (§12¶24)

Hume thinks that the latter is “useful” besides durable, since it humbles the pride of “such dogmatical reasoners” as are “the greater part of mankind”; but it is a lie to claim that there is pride in dogmatic reasoning. It seems clear that a mitigated version of principles, by the prevalence of which “all human life must perish” (§12¶23), can only tend to destroy human life to a somewhat smaller extent.