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Abandonment: To believe in 'abandonment' is to take seriously the probability that human beings have, in effect, been 'abandoned' to their fate. Thoughtful Christians have always believed in abandonment because the Christian belief in human free will demands it. Of course, from an atheist point of view, we cannot have literally been abandoned if there is no one to have abandoned us. But, for all of known human history, it has been almost universally assumed that there has been some kind of extra-human agency, at work in the world, of the kind that could abandon us if we don't keep our end of an implicit bargain. So taking abandonment seriously is a matter of living as if there is no super parent or parent like agency on which we can rely to lead us into truth or justice, keep us safe and make us good.
        The fear of being abandoned by a parent is probably the earliest, and greatest, anxiety we face. So it is little wonder that the various agencies, supposed to be underwriting human safety and significance, have traditionally been conceived of in parent like terms - a God or gods, goddesses or god substitutes such as moral laws, karma, spirit guides, angels, highly evolved aliens and so on. In my society, folk also commonly speak of market forces, evolution, genetics, and/or science and technology, as if they were god-like agencies with wills, intentions and purposes of their own. So the agency in question could be any person, law, force or person like mechanism to which humans surrender responsibility and look for help through divination, submission, sacrifice and/or supposed force manipulating rituals. Our normal way of manipulating such agencies are variations of the ways we learned to manipulate parents, parentos and bullies in our parentocentric cultures. But, on the one hand, the assumption that we have God, history, evolution or some kind of law on our side, makes it all too easy to reason that we have some kind of right to violate our neighbours if we are not getting our own way. This gives rise to human evil. On the other hand, if we believe that some sort of spiritual, natural or scientific super parent is going to somehow give us or our children a second chance, sort out our mistakes and/or otherwise clean up after us, then it is all too easy to act as if we do not have the full, final and only, responsibility for the values that we are realising, or as if the values we realise are not the only values being realised in the world. For a species like ours, addicted to irresponsibility and the violation of integrity, such beliefs are morally poisonous. So what I call 'abandonment' (a term I borrow from Existentialism) is a kind of moral antidote to this. It is a matter of changing our attitude to our responsibility, for the values that we realise, on the premise that there is no 'parent' - no God or god substitutes (evolution, spirit guides, UFOs, etc.) and/or other objective transcendent forces or agencies or texts - who/that will take responsibility for guiding us, judging us, putting things to rights or otherwise cleaning up the mess that we are making.

As a description of the world (a factual claim), this 'antidote' may or may not be true. At best, it is an inductive thesis moving from a faith in honest reasoning, through a lack of reliable data, to the conclusion that we are not justified in relying on some other-worldly source to underwrite our values and/or the success of our endeavours. As a rule for living, however, abandonment is a faith (a premise for action), that has to do with self-responsibility. It's a bit like growing up; we try to be responsible for our own lives by acting like children who have finally realised that we have no 'parent' to pick up after us - acting like we are alone in the universe, responsible for our own choices, and without any alternative but to live with the consequences of our choices.
        This, I believe, is valuable - especially as an antidote to our normal and chronic irresponsibility. But, like all values, it is not without risk and not without cost. One of the consequences of abandonment is that of having to go without any transcendent affirmation of our worth or of our trying to live the life of a person. This matters because, although not all humans admit it, we all desire validation of who we are and how we live our lives. One of the emotional functions of religious belief is the comforting thought that someone who matters knows that we are not a worthless waste of evolution; it doesn't matter that human histories slander the good, ignore the righteous and laud fashionable trash - someone knows the truth. Pseudo-religions (politics, bigotries, ideologies and scientism) usually offer a counterfeit of this comfort through some other, less certain, mechanism. But if there is no God or other agency to say 'well done' to our lives then (a) we must affirm ourselves, (b) other humans must affirm us or (c) we must go without affirmation.
        It is a measure, of just how hard we find it to go without external affirmation, that humans have always maintained vast and costly institutions for winning the affirmation of other people; human folk will kill, die, abase themselves, waste their entire lives on trivial harms, start wars, despoil the planet or become journalists, just to feel significant. But if someone chooses to forego all this stress, waste and violence - by, for example, choosing to stand against their own addiction to parentocentricity - then that person must either affirm herself or go without affirmation. And it is a mark of our addiction that neither of these is enough - the moral pleasure of knowing that we maintained our own integrity, when we were tempted to violate it, is not as satisfying to us as is the thought that God and/or another significant being or group of beings knows and approves of what we have done. Nevertheless, if there is no God, no transcendent realm, then there simply is no transcendent 'pat on the back' and we will just have to accept that. Moreover, if we wish to be honest then we will also have to accept that the affirmation of others is usually fickle, fleeting, self-interested and uninformed, while self-affirmation is typically self-deceptive and masturbatory. So our choice may well reduce to either accepting our addiction to parentocentricity, with all that implies, or taking responsibility for the fact that we already are morally significant and morally responsible regardless of whether we, or anyone else, approves of that fact (Caves 8.31).

As a moral attitude or premise, abandonment is particularly relevant to a violence-detoxified engagement with the world. Believing in various supposed gods or forces has been a powerful source of much good in the world, but humans are addicted to irresponsibility - and to violence - and all such belief is dangerous for humans (doubly so for those majority of humans who deceive themselves that they are not so addicted). When we believe in, rely on and/or commit to, any extra-human mechanism, power or agency, then we make it easy to seriously underestimate our responsibility as selves in a world. Giving our responsibility away, even to human persons or institutions, merely increases our chances of staying permanently addicted to parentocentricity, of messing up our lives, and of messing up our world. If, however, we condition ourselves to think and act as if there is no one and nothing else to blame when we mess up, no 'referee', no father who knows best and no mummy to kiss it better, then we can begin to act as moral 'grown ups'. So, if we genuinely want to detoxify ourselves from our share of the human addiction to violence then what we should do is regard ourselves as free in respect of our choices, which are limited but still real, and solely responsible for what we do with our power.
        It does not follow from the acceptance of abandonment that 'anything goes', that life and suffering are pointless and/or that either hedonism or *nihilism are the only valid choices. These are all just further products of our addiction to traditional thinking - if we have assumed that human virtue is prescribed and enforced only by some arch parent then, by dichotomy, a lack of such parenting automatically licences human viciousness. This appeals to our conditioned love of irresponsibility, but we are not obliged to simply lurch from one kind of irresponsibility to another. Responsible self-realisation may be alien to us but it is still a possibility within our reach. The doctrine of abandonment calls us to recognise that the world is meaningful but that we, and only we [all the members of the human person-species], are giving it the meaning it has. The same doctrine recognises that the life of every human person is and must be meaningful but, again, that the meaning of each human life is wholly and solely a function of the values and uses of power personally input by human individuals. So what the notion of abandonment entails (and all that it entails) is that we stop excusing ourselves; in the words of a (Spanish?) proverb, we take what we want and we pay for it. If someone does not want to strive for the full realisation of her personhood then that is her choice. That choice has benefits, risks and a cost; to accept abandonment is to let her make that choice, enjoy those benefits, take those risks and pay that cost (although see Social Morality and Law). Likewise, there are risks, costs and benefits to striving after virtue, the realisation of value and the realisation of all that it seems possible we can be. It is not difficult to neglect, abuse or fail the possibilities with which being alive fleetingly presents us, but if we want to succeed (and we don't have to) then we are going to have to start taking for ourselves the responsibility that we have hitherto been in the habit of giving away. In that case it helps if we school ourselves into the habit of giving careful thought to what we are going to do with whatever power we happen to have on the clear understanding that we are doing this, no one else is forcing our hand as a part of any grand plan. Only then will we have given ourselves clear reasons for inputting only those values which we seriously want ourselves, our loved ones and our children to live with.

Atheism: Atheism is a faith in the non existence of any deities. Like all faiths, it is not provable from the evidence; if not an argument from ignorance it is, at best, an educated guess.

The atheism that asserts there is no God presumes to rule on what we can never know simply because we can never exhaust the possibilities for any such existence. The Creator God of the Bible, for example, is said to be infinite. Finite human beings simply cannot exhaust the infinite in principle (in practice, we cannot even exhaust the finite), so we can never have the evidence necessary to verify atheism as an empirical claim. This makes atheism, as a narrative about God rather than just about the atheist, even more of a faith than is theism. It is because I do not believe in any transcendent gods, forces or agencies, but do not have enough faith to be an atheist, that I have no religion.
        Atheists who assert "I don't believe there is a God", or that "There is/might be a God, but I do not believe in him/her/it", avoid ruling on the unknowable by making claims not about God but only about themselves - these claims are capable of being true whether or not there is a God in fact. The first is a statement about the atheist's factual beliefs, the second about his or her moral standing-place (to believe 'in' a God is to rely on and trust God). The second claim, that there is/might be a God but the speaker does not believe in him, is the most intellectually credible form of atheism because it takes responsibility for a moral choice without ruling on what human persons cannot know (see *abandonment).

The idea of a moral God is an uncomfortable one because it entails the awful possibility that we might have to account for ourselves before a genuine justice. Addicts don't like being threatened with responsibility. And most humans deal with the threat of a just God by (a) creating and worshipping either human sized or impersonal God substitutes such as karma, evolution, politics, Mary worship, saint making, vegetarianism, animism and idolatry, (b) living as if there was no God except when an ally and/or scapegoat is needed, (c) resorting to magic [divination, religion, superstition, sorcery and witchcraft] and/or (d) keeping alive a kind of vague Goddess and/or religious form without the inconvenience of being either honest or intellectually rigorous about the idea.
        Although these forms of pseudo atheism and pseudo theism are embraced by most humans in fact, they are merely products of typical addictive dishonesty and are too confused and insincere to count as genuine atheism. Genuine beliefs are lived, so genuine [sincere] atheism requires a lived rejection of any God, gods or goddesses, in both content and form, just as sincere theism requires a lived acceptance of a God, gods or goddess, in both content and form. Because humans tend to both accept and reject theism irresponsibly, genuine atheism is as rare as genuine theism.

In keeping with this general irresponsibility, few (if any) supposed atheists, of any kind, face up to the implications of their factual belief for their beliefs about values. If we are going to do without God then we need to be ready, willing, and able, to do for ourselves what we have hitherto been giving God to do. It is not enough to simply abandon values to convention or whim. Persons simply cannot live without rules and values; even the most ardent atheists and most dogmatic nihilists still do and must not only live by and promote rules and values but also try to impose those values and rules on others. So we undermine our own personhood if we do not at least try for some kind of credible justification for our values. But some sort of inherited God or God-like mechanism still underwrites all human narratives about meaning, right and wrong, fair play, justice, rights, social order and the realisation of personhood. If we are going to scrap rational theism as a factual narrative then we need to create another justification for those or other values.
    Gods and god-like agencies are humanity's traditional moral parents, and it is theistic concepts which stocked the moral cupboard from which humans still feed. But citizens of modern secular societies no longer integrate social/moral beliefs with their religious roots. For example, modern notions of rights, justice, the dignity of individuals, representative democracy, equality before the law, and so on, grew out of the Christianity which those who continue to morally feed off now commonly despise. By this we have made ourselves into moral parasites who no longer nourish the source from which we continue to take our values: we are living off moral resources being looted from a 'cupboard' that was stocked in the past but which no one is restocking in the present. Of course, many folk think they are 're-stocking the cupboard' just because they chew their Judaeo-Christian food with anti Christian sauces. What they don't notice, however, is that many Christ derived notions - such as the sanctity of the individual or obligations to the needy for instance - don't make sense, and cannot withstand the pressures on them, in a post Christian world.

The moral problem of believing in a God or god substitute, however explicitly or vaguely, is the temptation to escape from 'this world' responsibility into 'other worldliness'. This matters given the human determination to avoid responsibility. But giving away a genuine (i.e., life affecting) faith in God, and still not picking up our responsibility, is no improvement. As recovering addicts (if we choose to recover from our addiction), we can begin to discharge our responsibility for being who we are, and so begin to fully realise our personhood, only if we take seriously the notion that there is no 'super parent' to clean up the mess we are making and kiss it all better. In this endeavour, faith in *abandonment is probably the most valuable form of non theistic living.
        We are, of course, all free to take care of justice or not as we each choose, but secular folk deceive themselves about the reality of our situation when they go on living as if justice will somehow take care of itself, is not really their responsibility, isn't important, and/or can be reduced to the kind of politics which excuse/justify our own injustice while damning the same behaviour in those we don't like or approve of, and so on. This kind of irresponsibility inevitably leads to a kind of moral bankruptcy in which we have a form of morality - just so long as there's not too much pressure on it - but cannot justify our values when they do come under pressure. This inevitably leads to the overcoming of morality (which needs to be believed in by individuals before it can work) with *politics (which needs only violence to work). We cannot justify a morality that is based on premises which neither we nor our interlocutors believe anymore. So the secular heirs of hitherto religion based values systems can continue nourishing their historical and existing morality only on the basis of some new secular set of reasons, reasons which we genuinely believe in.

The challenge here is to be honest with ourselves. Most humans do and always have lived as if God was some sort of 'spare wheel' which won't take up precious space in our lives but to whom we can appeal when that is convenient, and we live as if there is no God or law that can obligate us when that is inconvenient. But that is an hypocrisy which deceives only ourselves. If we honestly believe in the kind of God who enforces both justice and obligation then, for our own sake, let us live as if we believe that. If we do not honestly believe in the kind of God who enforces both justice and obligation then we owe it to our own integrity to stop pretending that we do when the pretence is comforting and as if we don't when it is inconvenient. Pretence helps no one, least of all the pretenders.
        If there really is no God, no objective and/or transcendent realm of values, then our values and rules simply cannot come to us from outside of us. So the challenge of atheism - whether we avow it or merely live our daily lives without specific reference to deity - is to take responsibility for what we believe and for the way of life that our beliefs commit us to. Given this, and given that there is not (and, hopefully, never will be) a global consensus of religious belief, responsible human persons need to avoid the lure of moral irresponsibility that stands on reducing values to opinion, politics, convention or convenience, and carry out for ourselves an honest and thorough reappraisal and reconstruction of our values. We need to recognise that rules and values are wholly our creation and solely our responsibility. Human citizens of human societies, together and over time, decide what they shall be; we bring them into existence, we collectively evolve them and we individually choose whether or not they shall govern our lives. Even in a society of believers, the citizens are responsible in fact for their own values. ⁴¹ Various scriptures may purport to tell us what values are right, and to threaten us with reward and penalty accordingly. But we each still choose whether or not to live by all or some of those values - and we are remarkably flexible about which values we choose to apply when and to whom. So we need to re-evaluate our values, rejecting those which are not longer tenable, re-writing those which need rewriting, establishing sound foundations for those in which we have genuine belief, and finally (perhaps for the first time in human history) accepting full responsibility for them as our creation. Embracing atheism may be the only way that addicts of parentocentricity can do this.

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Notes:

41. The person who says 'God commands' still chooses to make that commandment his or her own and is as responsible for that choice as he or she would be without a faith in God. If we dissociate ourselves from responsibility for what we do in God's name then we dishonour our own personhood.

Being: Being can be thought of in several different ways. In the first place, being can be thought of as synonymous with existence. And when we feel overwhelmed by a sense of our 'beingness' what we are actually realising is the awesome fact, power and potential of our existence. That I exist is a power that has no form until I do something with it; being imaginatively open to the power, potential and challenge of that is an experience that can be simultaneously exhilarating, comforting and scary. Such an awareness of our existence-being seems to somehow 'locate' us on a world stage that is packed with meaning and bright with possibility. ¹
        The identification of being with existence can, however, lead to the common mistake of thinking that being is some kind of property, essence, quality or domain which existing things have or within which they dwell. This is much the same as the mistake of treating nothing as a mysterious kind of something (a nothingness).
        Finally, and inevitably under the influence of thingological parentology, being is dichotomised from doing and is over defined as an inert, passive or semi-dormant state or condition. The moral consequence of this is that doing becomes equated with mere busyness while being becomes an excuse for not doing anything.

The treating of 'being' as a noun is a useful ally in the kind of self-deception that is involved in denying moral responsibility. Franz Stangl, for example, commanded the Treblinka extermination camp during the latter part of World War II and was later found to be guilty of co-responsibility for the murder of 900,000 people. During his trial Stangl defended himself against claims that he was an evil person by insisting that he hadn't personally killed anyone. He appeared to consider it irrelevant to his personal moral integrity that whole trainloads of people were routinely killed by others who were ultimately and specifically under his control. This kind of self deceptive casuistry represents a common concept whereby moral responsibility is limited to momentary and often isolated doing, and to a few individuals, under the Assault Paradigm (Caves 3.1) as part of the Blame Game (Caves 6.34). Limiting responsibility to what we each personally do is useful, and perhaps even necessary, in the legal enforcement of social laws. But that limit is inadequate for rationally settling issues of moral responsibility. Legally, what matters is only what we each do with our power, but morally what matters is what we do plus who we make ourselves in the process plus what we motivate others to do and become. It is only because of this universal acceptance of a false concept - applying the necessarily restricted criteria for legal guilt to the evaluation of moral responsibility - that folk like Stangl and countless others have assumed that who we are can be separated from what we do, almost as if what matters in law is all that matters in the whole conduct of human affairs.
        As I understand being and doing, however, there are differences between them but no dichotomy. Doing is always actual, the term 'being' can point at both actual or potential actions or processes [doings], and it is only the addition of that 'potential' which differentiates being from doing. The 'being' of a machine, for instance, cannot be separated from what the machine does or fails to do as the machine it is. Likewise, a human being is someone who is doing whatever it is that makes humans different from machines or plants or whatever - she or he is being human. And I suspect that it is the apprehension of potential, of half formed possibilities awaiting realisation, that awes the imagination during the times when persons experience the feeling of being. ²

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As persons, the 'being' of humans is one of our 'stand on and point away to' mode of being. This is to say that it is by following a rule governed 'stand on and point away to' logic that we do what it is that makes us what we are. So our being especially needs to be understood as an ethical (rule following) activity. The words 'be' and 'being', used this way, are verbs rather than nouns; that is, metaphors of an action rather than names of a state. I do not 'have being' in the sense that I have, say, mass, a form, character and history. I just am [present tense verb] being who and what I am; I am doing what it is that makes me what I am. I am not even 'a' being except in the sense that I am being [in the process of acting as] someone or something. That is why talk about pure being, like talk of pure consciousness, is just an irrational way of talking non being [death]; if 'pure' being does nothing then it is dead.
        This is why, when talking about virtue ethics (Caves 11.3), I argue that virtue morality [the virtue ethics of being a good person] does not 'flip flop' from the busyness [doing] of act centred moralities to some sort of quietism under a 'being versus doing [faith versus works]' dichotomy. Virtue morality simply recognises that (a) acts are performed by actors, (b) the values embodied in different kinds of acts flow into [input] and out from [output] different kinds of actor character, and (c) similar acts can be more or less valuable according to the character which motives them. It is the fact that we cannot properly judge motive that warrants social morality being strictly act judging (see social morality). But under a virtue ethic, as I narrate it, the most valuable object of a personal morality is not just to be good or do good (a machine can do that just by doing what it was designed to do) but to realise [create/generate] value - to both be and do good - as a person. To 'be' is always to be something or someone; and being a person, in particular, is a skill that we perform.  So being virtuous is very much a matter of trying to heal the dichotomy between doing and being by being the kind of person who does what is valuable. It is about developing and practising the skills of being a valuable person.

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Some existentialists dichotomise being and existence, attributing 'mere' being to things, plants and animals and existence only to persons. But this over defines the important truth that, unlike things, persons can and have to make choices.

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Some supposedly theistic philosophers of religion like to claim that God simply is being as such. This appears to reduce God to a concept, an abstraction, rather than allowing that God might be the actual, dynamic, agent-Creator 'God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel'.

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Notes:

1. The metaphor here is of our world as a kind of 'stage' on which we play our role as a unique self (Caves 8.2). The experience of 'being' includes our intuition of our being in the proper place and right relations; there are elements not only of awe and excitement but also especially of 'fittingness' within the larger integrity that is the world and the whole human adventure within the world.

2.  Of course, a machine that is doing nothing is still a machine, but to complicate the identity claim 'x is a machine' as 'x is being a machine' or 'an x that is doing nothing still has being' or whatever, adds nothing to the '..is..' relationship except confusion.

Bell Towers, Penises and Rocket Ships: In virtually every Christian Parish of the world there is a church and, on most churches, there is a steeple or bell tower. In Freudian and Feminist narratives, these towers are phallic symbols and a great, anti Christian politics is built thereon. To Von Daniken and his followers, steeples bespeak a race memory of visiting space ships and a silly, anti Christian faith is built thereon. These kinds of thesis can appear to explain the data but, in fact, all they do is show how the data can be variously mis-explained according to the premises by which it is mis-interpreted.
        The reason why churches have steeples is because, at the time of most European church building, clocks were virtually unknown. And the best way to gather a congregation to worship, especially in the rural parish, was to put the most carrying sound you could high in the air near the centre of the parish. In Mediaeval times, bells could be heard for greater distances than any other human controllable sound. Bells are heavy and require stout towers to support them safely up off the ground. That is why there is a tradition of building steeples or bell towers on the churches at or near the centre of Christian parishes. That is merely a fact, and there are no politics to be made from such facts; much more satisfyingly violent to misrepresent the facts for political purposes.

Bigotry:  Bigotry is a *politics from the same family as prejudice and *self-righteousness. The moral parent of this family is parentocentricity - the politics of 'higher' and 'lower' status.

Through our addiction to parentocentric thinking, humans condition ourselves to vest our significance in being high 'up' some hierarchy. Climbing a hierarchy can be hard work and, for a morally lazy species like ourselves, it is easier to feel significant ('up') by defining folk as 'below' us.³  There is little difficulty finding such folk (they are, after all, humans). All we have to do is group some folk into a not-P moiety (Caves 5.31). This too can be easily achieved; so easily, in fact, as to usually be done without the bigot even being aware of doing it. In my life, for example, I have been let down, betrayed and violated by men, women, rich, poor, members of different races, religions, creeds and so on. But if I want to feel good about myself by sneering at a not-P moiety then it would make little sense to pick men as my moiety - I am a man and, if I am going to group folks into not-P moieties to make myself feel good (by not being a member of that moiety) then it would make more sense to pick other men by race or class or whatever. But if I pick not-men [women] as a not-P class then I can not only feel good about not being a woman, I can also blame women for many of my own failings taking, as my 'evidence', the fact that women have let me down, betrayed and violated me.

Bigotry - like self-righteousness, evil and, indeed, parentocentricity itself - is woven of fear [insecurity] and violence. Those who are secure in their values do not need to counterfeit significance through being 'superior' to others by some external token such as race, gender, goodness, taste, religion or social status. But we can only be secure in our values if they are rationally self chosen. This means that, for most of us, our values are uncertain in our own minds and vulnerable to the narratives of others. The traditional form of self-defence, for an insecure parento defending a vulnerable value, has always been to attack those 'below' him or her in a hierarchy. This is what bigots do; being unable to rationally defend their values, they attack dissent as immoral; those who disagree with the bigot - like those who disagree with parentos of any kind - are not mistaken [intellectually wrong] but bad [morally wrong].

The benefit of bigotry is that it dramatically simplifies the world. To a Maori bigot, for example, non Maori are easy to identify and, because they are culturally 'lower' by definition, nothing they say or do can threaten the bigot's fragile self image. That may be why race, gender and religion are so often vehicles of bigotry - the 'badges' of these moieties (shape, skin colour, facial features, religious garb, food faddism and/or hair cuts) are easy to identify without having to engage with the person who wears them (engaging with individual members of a despised moiety is a real threat to bigotry). One of the disvalues of bigotry is that it makes the bigot irrational. The person who explains any moiety of humans according to a disparaging generalisation does not understand that group but is self-deceived into thinking that she or he does. This self-deception keeps the bigot ignorant of those she or he feels superior to - no one knows less about race than a racist, no one knows less about gender than a sexist.

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Notes:

3. This also applies to animals. One of the attractions of owning a dog, for example, (especially a dangerous one) is the feeling of superiority we get from dominating the animal. This feeling is political rather than moral)

Choice: If there is a basic problem for human persons living meaningful lives, it is that we just don't know what to do with our lives. We all have to fill our lives with something, but we don't know what. In this regard, human life is a bit like the Third Day of Creation the Judaeo-Christian narrative. In Genesis, God is said to have created the world in seven days by the power of language (God 'spoke'). On the Third Day, He created the sea in one place and the dry land in another, and He caused vegetation to grow everywhere. Each human self begins like that; a kind of partly furnished integrity of grass and dry land with the odd patch of water. And each of us has to think what else should go in there using the same creative tools as God (i.e., language).
        By-and-large, most of us stock our selfhood spaces with habits, assumptions and the left-over furniture of our hunter-warrior past. But the fact remains that we are finally in charge from the 'Third Day' on - we are our own 'interior decorators' - we can choose what to put in all that space, we do choose, and we must choose. Other people can choose to give us the benefit of their experience, but we still have to choose whether to accept instruction and/or education; we have to choose what to learn from other people's successes and mistakes; we have to choose what values to realise, whether to make ourselves better or worse and, although we are generally neither as happy nor as miserable as we tend to think we are, we do have to choose whether to make ourselves happier or more miserable. Like it or not, we really do make choices in all the vital areas that contingency doesn't predetermine. And one difficulty is that the choices we make tend to be based on all the chances that happened to us on 'Day One' and 'Day Two', which we don't remember because we were too young and unformed.
        One good reason for basing our choices on reason is to break our own unremembered 'programming' and so truly liberate ourselves from furniture and baggage that we wouldn't have chosen had we had the choice.

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On p.38 of existentialism & humanism (1973) Jean-Paul Sartre makes a leap from 'you are free' through 'therefore choose....that is to say, invent'. This is not quite right because our freedom is merely a fact from which no value can be derived. We cannot choose not to choose and, unavoidably, human persons experience their situation in terms of possible alternatives among which they must choose. But we do not choose to make the world this way. Our moral autonomy [freedom] is the relationship between ourselves and the world which is presupposed in any morality and any search for guiding principles to harmonise our systems of the values by which we do choose in fact; it is not the source of any values or rules for guiding human conduct.

Christian Existentialism: On my understanding, a Christian existentialism could rest on the Biblical notion of what it is to be made in 'the image of God [or Christ]'. This is because the Bible first and most presents God as the Creator - and to be made in God's image is to be made in the image of one who creates worlds by His word. Serious problems for Christian existentialists can, however, arise from three sources:

• The suspicion that existentialist 'responsibility' actually boils down to god playing (Genesis 3)
• The insistence, by trendy theologians, that all supposedly objective statements about God and good manners are actually subjective claims about the speaker (i.e., that the Christian who says "God is love' is actually saying something about herself and nothing about God).
• The implication that the 'leap of faith' places Christianity (the most historical-rational religion) in an 'upper storey' that somehow escapes sound reasoning.

Conscience: Conscience is a kind of moral intuition that counts as an emotion only insofar as we feel moral pleasure or distress [guilt] when we violate or accord with our own values. A 'guilty' conscience is related to self contempt because the 'voice' of conscience with which guilt 'speaks' is an effect of internalised cultural conditioning. When the anticipation of guilt inhibits a use of power then we are talking of conscience.

Conscience is often understood as a kind of distinct moral faculty - an innate sense of the moral propriety of our own conduct, intentions, or character, with regard to a feeling of obligation to do right or be good. In consequence, conscience is thought to give intuitively authoritative judgements regarding the moral quality of our actions. Historically, almost every human culture seems to have recognized the existence of a conscience in this sense and, in many belief systems, conscience is regarded as the voice of divine morality and therefore a completely reliable guide of conduct.
        I personally doubt that conscience is a 'faculty', and I am quite sure that it is not a reliable guide to moral behaviour. Conscience is just internalised acculturation. So to appeal to conscience as a guide to moral behaviour is to appeal to something created by our moral behaviour (i.e., it is viciously circular). It is probable that the idea of 'letting your conscience be your guide' arises because the values that inform our conscience are those that we have genuinely internalised; it is when we compromise our own standards that our conscience 'speaks'. The voice of conscience, however, is still the voice of our internalised conditioning rather than of any objective standard. If we have internalised a sound morality then we do not need a conscience. If we do not then our conscience will almost certainly be informed by a lot of conventional, cultural, political, religious and neurotic nonsense that we have internalised uncritically and simply cannot rely on to guide our behaviour in valuable ways.

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The fear of guilt (which is also often the fear of punishment) speaks as the voice of conscience and is probably conditioned by the traditional parentocentric use of fear as means of social control. We often use the language of guilt to speak what is really fear of consequences. Most moralities, including that of Caves Chapter 11, narrate that turning away from wrong because it is wrong is moral superior to turning away from wrong because we fear punishment, shame or violence. It is, however, not irrational to refrain from what we desire on the grounds of preferring not to gamble on incurring a cost that we don't want to pay. Where this restraint is predicted to cause problems, however, is when we resent denying ourselves a pleasure out of fear.

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Giving advice or sympathy to those who are suffering helps those who give it insofar as it lightens the burdens of conscience (i.e., advice, like sympathy, is often a substitute for actually doing anything helpful).

Control. The compulsive element of control, predicted on violence being an addiction, may be verified by anyone but is most often attested to by creative folk. If someone creates an artefact of any kind, however significant or trivial and in any medium (words, music, materials of various kinds, and so on), and shares it with another human being, the person she or he shares it with will find it almost impossible just to accept it as it is. The normal human response is to 'lay possessive hands' on the artefact in order to assert the value of their having a controlling influence. This is usually through a prescription (an 'ought') such as criticism, 'helpful' advice, ideas about how it could be changed/improved, and so on. With non-representational artefacts, such as music, colour painting, certain kinds of dance or sculpture, etc., this will often take the form of asking or stating what it 'means' ("It looks like/sounds like...."). The mechanism is much the same as the commentator who tries to possess the work through her or his narrative.
        These comments are seldom asked for, helpful or well informed. They are more a kind of reflex action by which persons assert, in effect, that any exercise in creativity is less valuable than it would be if the artist deferred to non artistic, parento input. They assert, in other words, a compulsive need to violate the integrity of a work in order to feel significant in the face of someone else's achievement - it is the value of the commentator (and not the value of the art work) which is at stake.

Counselling (psychological counselling, psychotherapy): In a parentocentric culture such as that endured bu humans across the globe, counsellors, priests, life coaches, psychotherapists, and the like, are almost always parent players with their own (political) agenda - they get to play the parent, and affirm that what they believe is 'right', just by being those to whom folks who have it 'wrong' in some way come for help.
Ii is my contention that the counselling industry (and, in New Zealand at least, it is an industry) could be significantly improved by 'detoxifying' it of its implicit parentocentricity. The only sure way of doing this, for as long as human remain addicted to the politics of violence, would be to make sure that no one who wants to be a counsellor is allowed to be.⁴²  But, as this is impractical, understanding the self as a cultural construction in need only of 'proof reading' help (see Caves 8.211) might help.

If my understanding of human personhood is on the right track then mental and emotional health is, like physical or moral health, a function of integrity. There are two major kinds of dis-integration which result in mental and/or emotional harm: there is the small, but still significant, minority of cases where disorders result from physical dis-integrity [brain damage], and there is the majority of disorders resulting from cultural dis-integrity caused by trying to live with and/or enact inconsistent self-stories. It is the second kind which forms the vast bulk of therapeutic and counselling need, and which I want to argue need proof reading.
        A proof reader is someone who reads an author's narrative for mistakes, incoherencies, narrative gaps, and the like. Unlike an editor, a proof reader does not suggest 'improvements' to the narrative itself but only to its integrity.

I very much doubt that this kind of help can wholly avoid parent playing on the part of the 'proof reader' for as long as humans remain addicted to parentocentricity. But my thesis is that as part of a general programme of detoxifying ourselves from out addiction to the politics of violation:

1. brain damage and mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or dementia should be dealt with medically
2. grief, despair, anxiety, relationship problems and personality disorders such as phobias or self deception, should be dealt with non morally, non legally, non medically and non parentally, as problems arising from the poor editing of personal narratives.
3. moral guilt should be dealt with morally rather than psychologically
4. anti-social uses of power that issue in law-breaking should be dealt with legally by laws aimed at justly de-profitabilising violence rather than by therapy aimed at 'curing' it (see Social Law).

The normal human self is not made of parts like the conscious and unconscious struggling for the control of one life; nor is it naturally a 'parento self' who is beset by an unruly under self. The normal human self is simply an addict of violence who edits uncomfortable truths out of her or his self-story, without even being fully aware of doing so, in the commonplace manner of addicts everywhere (see Caves 6.12). This editing, which is politically motivated, violates the self by violating the integrity of his or her self-story. And what the self needs to do, to heal the harms resulting from this, is to re-edit her or his self-story back to integrity. To do this the self needs (1) to turn away from the dishonest habits of thought by which she or he, in effect, builds and maintains a mental closet in which to hide the skeletons of all his or her murdered truths, and (2) to bring the skeletons out of the closet, flesh them out and face them.
        The 'skeletons' in this metaphor are narratives that are relevant to who the self is but which he or she has disavowed for one (political) reason or another. The reasons for disavowing a narrative are not always sinister and the results are not always harmful. But, as authors or composers of our own moral and emotional personalities, our 'saying of a self' is normally fraught with all kinds of restraints and violences that deny our value and distort our creation. And, as addicts, we also typically (a) avow politically useful narratives about ourselves and the world which we know or suspect are unjustified, and (b) disavow politically useless or harmful, embarrassing and/or unflattering narratives about ourselves and the world which we know or suspect are justified. This is a kind of self violation that, as with all violence, results in harm. A public 'face' (the parento 'me') for example, is very much the kind of avowed 'half truth' that can sit uneasily with justified beliefs that the self tries to disavow (see self-deception).
        Because selfhood is both informed and deformed by narratives, renovating a self requires detoxifying a self-story from the contradictions, inconsistencies, lies, half truths and incoherence with which circumstance and our addiction to the politics of violence has marred it. These inconsistencies in a self-story can be healed (and can only be healed) be re-editing the story to restore its violated integrity. But we cannot do this until we know what our stories are and to what they commit us. Few of us have the editorial skills to even speak our stories plainly and well without help - let alone to spot the suppressed premises, confusions, prejudices, half truths, self-deceptions and inconsistencies that they embody. This is where the help of a proof reader could be valuable.
        The task of the proof reader would be to help the 'author' of a life narrate an coherent [integrated] story which she [the author] considers valuable and which she can enact as valuable before the community which is her 'public'. Getting this kind of help would be a literary exercise rather than a moral, political or medical one.
        Such help would not impose any narratives of selfhood on the self, nor would it seek to re-integrate supposed parts of the person into the whole of whom they supposedly are a part - that would be to 'play the parent' which, in turn, is a kind of violence. The proof reader would simply assist the author of a self-story to speak the whole story so as to spot and re-narrate any inconsistencies that harmfully violate its integrity.

If the human compulsion to violate integrity is a product of our addiction to parentocentricity then it can be expected that someone whose addictive self violation is healed would become less violent than previously. But it needs to be stressed that the object of editorial help cannot be the production of any kind of society- and/or editor-valued self simply because the attempt to do so cannot be made without being parentocentric. It would be silly to institute a parentocentric regime for healing the harms brought about by addiction to parentocentricity. So the object would be wholly and only to heal the alienations, that follow from our being persons violated by our involvement with the addictive mythos, and so become whole [integrated] persons.⁴³

It can be predicted, from the Out of the Caves understanding of selfhood as a cultural construct, that if a self speaks out his narratives, alone or in the hearing of someone safe, then the supposed machinations of the 'unconscious' will be revealed as no more than that self knowledge which playing the parento role has suppressed, denied, forgotten, distorted and/or overlooked. This self knowledge can often be heard just by being still and listening to ourselves speak our narratives aloud. ⁴⁴  But, as with an author trying to proof read his or her own work, it is all too easy to miss holes and contradictions in our own self-story. This is where a proof reader comes. Where listening this isn't enough, knowledge can be elicited by questions asking for clarification of obscure passages. Listening to a narrative, and then asking questions about it, is a task that a proof reader can often do for the author of a life better than she can do for herself.
        I am aware that many counsellors sincerely believe that this is what they are doing right now, just as many journalists and reporters sincerely believe that they are presenting the news without prejudice or censorship. But few if any are - their own addiction to parentocentricity sees to that. Professional helpers have their own agendas and, as addicts of parentocentricity, desire confirmation that their preferred values and beliefs really are 'P' - that is why they are in the business.
        It is undoubtedly safer to interrogate ourselves out loud, on paper or by talking to a tape recorder, than to expose our most vulnerable narratives to a probable parent player. Nevertheless, even serious psychotherapy can be no more than a process of listening to a self-story with an ear for those parts of the story which have been suppressed and put 'on silence' as part of our normal addiction to the politics of violation. To listen to another's story is to recognise that other as a self-author in her own right. And that in itself is therapeutic. Problems only arise when (a) the narrative is subtly (or not so subtly) invalidated by the listener's narrative (see *control) and/or (b) the interpretation of a self narrative is treated as information or evidence having significance for those other than the self whose narrative it is - a good therapist is there to help the needy, not to learn any facts about the human condition from them.

To be the voice of the inarticulate used to be recognised as the poet's calling. Psychotherapy, as a personal helping project rather than a branch of parent like control, is more valuable as an heir of that literary tradition than as an heir of the medical, priestly or legal traditions. Through listening and questioned discourse with our self-story, the dichotomy between conscious and unconscious, feeling and reason, etc., could be broken down and the 'unconscious' understood using no more than the speech of a whole [integrated] self who has so long been denied that he has given up trying to be heard. And, who knows? if we teach ourselves to listen to those aspects of our wholeness which are not inarticulate but merely unheard, we may well find that the abyss between the conscious and the unconscious, reason and emotion, etc., is not an abyss at all - it is only the middle artificially excluded by dichotomy (Caves 5.31). We may, for example, discover that emotions, far from being contrary to rational thought, are just ideas expressed with a different language. We may find that ideas are a kind of emotion expressed with words in propositional form.

If mental health counselling is put on a literary footing, within a violence detoxified context, then the resulting therapy better approximates the whole point of seeking help from the help seeker's perspective (rather than the parent like perspective naturally favoured by theorists and teachers of supposedly psychotherapeutic techniques). Such therapy could help folk achieve, for themselves, more personal freedom, power and responsibility (i.e., the conditions of fully realised personhood, see Caves 2.31).
       Freedom: False and/or inconsistent self beliefs cripple the realisation of our selves as selves. Narrative focussed therapy could help selves to 'know what they know' and so attain greater personal freedom. We may not know what we are, but that knowledge is not significant to our well being as selves in a world. What does matter to our well being is understanding who we are, what narratives we believe, what value we enact, what premises drive our evaluations, and so on. Our thoughts, feelings, personality, fears, intuitions and behaviours are all informed by narratives. We create some of these narratives for ourselves, although most are inherited and/or imposed on us by others, we internalise most of them without even being aware of having done so, and some of them conflict with others that we also hold (holding contrary beliefs is normal for human persons). We cannot be free unless we know, choose and own the narratives which shape who we are. And we need to say those narratives before we can know what they are. By saying our narratives aloud, and preferably in the presence of a safe listener, we can know what they are, spot any lies or other dis-integrities (incoherence, dissonances, etc.), and so detoxify ourselves from any avowal of what is not ours and/or disavowal of what is.
       Power: Freedom, in this context, is about speaking with your own voice, power is about making your voice heard by others. Narrative focussed therapy or counselling could help folk narrate more valuable stories about themselves and their relationships and thereby attain the personal power needed to create a non addicted reality or, at least, renovate their existing reality. Constraints on the expression of this renovated selfhood arise from the fact that who we are exists as part of a language driven and language shaped ideological community. We are each members of the human person-species, and any new story any of us tells, especially about who we are am, must connect with our community's narrative traditions. This is not easy to do given the violence embodied in human traditions. But narrative therapy could help mediate a responsible 'turning outward' from personal freedom to personal power because a skilled proof reader can help an author communicate where otherwise he or she would alienate. Communication is a voice being heard, and being heard is power.
       Responsibility: Personal freedom and power are conditions of responsibility. Responsibility for who we are is the final goal of healing from any addiction. It is also one of the most reliable symptoms of healing. This cannot be attained under any terms in which a therapist or counsellor usurps a client's evaluating integrity by 'playing the parent'. The addicted editor will try to tell the author what story she or he should tell and how it should be told; the proof reader will not. Self-stories are finally about the value of a self. Proof readers can and should do no more than help the author speak and take responsibility for his or her own story in a way that better communicates the values which the author wants to speak. If the resultant values issue in violence then the law can deal with that without disrespecting the author of the violence as a free person who has chosen to use her or his power in a way for which she or he can justly be held responsible. Only that respects the integrity, and the value, of the self.

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Notes:

42. The same goes for politicians - the integrity of anyone who actually wants to be a politician is intrinsically suspect.

43. There would be no justification, under such a regime, for the generalisation of expertise by which a parent/counsellor assumes that any given plot and/or characterisation is more valuable than that valued by the person seeking help. Nor would there be any justification for casting the 'client' into an implicitly child-like role. The author of a life is the only authority on what that life should say; any therapist/editor is there only to help the author find a voice, and finding a voice is not the same as finding a story.

44. In my experience it needs to be aloud because that seems to be the only way of turning off the endless mantra of excuses, 'oughts', justifiers and half truths that humans normally feed themselves.

Democracy: I take democracy to be a form of social order in which the governed control the organs of government either directly or through agents (representatives) which they have appointed by one mechanism or another. This kind of government is quite contrary to the traditional 'father (or mother) knows best' government of parentocracy. And, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a fully democratic society, tribe, city or nation state in human history. The extent of parentocentric subversion varies widely over time and from place to place, and some small or informal democracies could well exist outside my experience. But all historical 'democracies' have, at the very least, excluded certain classes of the governed from political rights of citizenship. In New Zealand, for example, a political right of citizenship is the right to vote for all representatives on local Councils and for most in the national Parliament. Children and adolescents, however, are denied the right to vote despite being even more rigorously governed than adults and despite being taxed at the same rate as adults.⁴  In practice, most democracies have also been 'representative' only in a parentocentric sense. It is convenient for groups of citizens to elect or otherwise appoint an agent to represent their shared interests; especially once a jurisdiction has reached a modest size. That jurisdictions will reach a more than modest size is common and predictable in that compulsive parentocentric 'empire building' lends itself to social power structures which are too large and complex to be directly under the control of citizens. But once representatives of a citizenry have been elected, and begin to function within a parentocentric framework, they inevitably betray their addiction to parentocentricity by behaving like parents (deciding what their constituents should have rather than simply representing what the constituents do want). The only limit in these cases, to parentocentric subversion of citizens' interests, lies in the power of citizens to dismiss their representative at election time. This kind of gesture in the direction of democracy may not deliver many outstanding leaders but it is still the best method, that any one has so far been able to devise, for dumping the incompetent and those parentos who had become too autocratic.⁵  This system does not require that politicians be good persons (that is its strength) but it does require some responsibility from its citizens (that is its weakness).

Most of New Zealand's formal and informal political groupings are every bit as parentocentric as the nation's government - with dominant (warrior-bully) leaders, an intolerant and often 'anti something' ideology, mechanisms of group think (jargon, local rituals, imposed and/or mutual censorship, conformity of dress, etc.), and even little patches of 'turf' (clubrooms, marae, women's rooms, gang houses, areas of neighbourhood, taverns and so on) which they defend fiercely in the manner of territorial animals everywhere. Ironically enough, many of our most profoundly retrograde and oppressive group structures are to be found amongst supposedly radical and progressive groups who institutionalise oppressive regimes in the name of 'liberation' (even our 'anarchists' have rules prohibiting cigarette smoking and meat eating at their annual conference!). This irony is not unique to New Zealand. As a nation, this country endures the usual kind of semi-representative government which results from an uneasy compromise between democracy and parentocentricity. This form of government is typical of that endured by many of the world's nations (and is less overtly violent than many). It is not yet a purely warrior regime. Nor is it a form of government which has succeeded in realising the personhood serving ideals of liberal democracy on which it is supposedly based. Rather, it is that common form of cosmetically representative government in which our many and well meaning attempts to 'live by grace' have been and are being relentlessly subverted by our addiction to parentocentricity.

The social economy of this kind of democracy is fundamentally Hobbesian.⁶  A more-or-less rationally self interested citizenry surrender to government certain power (and, thereby, certain freedoms and autonomy) over their collective destiny in order to secure the benefits of ordered society. This power is often surrendered irresponsibly by an apathetic, misinformed and relentlessly manipulated citizenry. And I suspect that Hobbes was right in attributing our desire for orderly society more to mutual fear than to mutual love or respect. But, if the trade is done at all, then the surrendered power is supposedly used on behalf of those who gave it. It is, in other words, held by government in trust to the citizens. If human governors themselves were not addictively parentocentric then the system would probably work. But the exercising of individual freedom and power by citizens is both feared by and inconvenient for parentocentric government. It is part of our addiction to parentocentricity that all of us are prone to assume that others would do best to realise their selfhood according to our evaluations rather than according to their own - and we do take their disagreements with our evaluations as evidence of a child-like incompetence on their part. Parentos do not trust the kiddies to make the 'right' choices and do genuinely believe that only they (the parentos) know what is in the best interests for the people on whose behalf they exercise their derived power.⁷  Thus, often in the name of good order or efficiency, parentocentric governments, not being fully alive to their only morally just function, are prone to overcome those from whom their power and legitimacy derive. The servants become masters and representation becomes tokenism that is indulged only to keep the kiddies happy. Human government, wherever and in whatever benevolent or malevolent form it has existed, has always most valued the surrender of this freedom (the freedom simply to be ourselves and speak our truths in our own voice) into the hands of the governors. The citizens' need for security, our apathy and our need or desire to concentrate our energies on more immediate pursuits, means that the surrender of responsibility to government is a willing one up to a point. Beyond this point the tolerance level of ordinary citizens cannot cope with the institutional violence of government. Folk who have been denied personal power and selfhood by authority have repeatedly shown themselves willing to kill and be killed in pursuit of the freedom, power and responsibility denied them by their own governments. We all resent being treated like moral children and disempowered by paternalism, but we are most often willing to put up with it, to a certain extent, as the price of getting on with our lives. It is hard to quantify the point at which denials of freedom become intolerable to a given group of persons. But, if the value of any fact can be measured in terms of what people will pay to preserve it, and the victims of institutionalised devaluation have repeatedly shown a willingness to 'die on their feet' (as moral adults) rather than 'live on their knees' (as moral children), then the evidence of history indicates that political freedom is highly valued state of affairs (see also self government). Only a democracy can fully recognise that value of that state.

Democracy is the only form of government justified by an integrity respecting understanding of human personhood because all government exercises a power over its citizens, and only a society whose citizens exercise power over government allows the non-violent reconciliation of personal and collective interests; only if we govern what governs us do we genuinely share the power, freedom and responsibility of free citizens in a free society. Only democracy allows that, within the mutual constraints necessary to any society, human citizens deserve a prima facie right to order their own destinies and ways of life in recognition of their evaluating integrity. Democracy, in other words, recognises the value of allowing persons to realise their own personhood and selfhood in their own way in society with others. This accords with renovated morality because to not allow citizens the freedom, power and responsibility, to realise their own evaluating integrity, simply is to violate their integrity as persons in some way (Caves 2.31).
        Disputing this justification of democracy is the age old parentocentric half truth that ordinary citizens are moral children who are not competent to order their own society in their own best interests. The normal behaviour of human citizens lends credence to this argument. Human beings are chronically prone to addictive denial, self-deception and moral myopia, most folk are happy to swear that the whole world is fed just so long as their own bellies are full, and few folk seriously consider the implications of their own behaviour just so long as today is not inconvenient. The addiction hypothesis (Caves chapter 4) may explain why human persons are not as competent to order their own lives as our intellectual capabilities suggest we could be. But the same hypothesis disputes the assumption that those most validated by our general addiction to violence (i.e., the most parentocentric) are better qualified to order human society than are those who are not so well validated. So while I do not dispute the claim that the 'children' are not fully competent to order their own lives, either as selves or as citizens, I do vigorously dispute the assumption that the 'parents' are competent.
        My observations of ordinary human carelessness lead me to predict that any genuine democracy would, initially at least, almost certainly be self indulgent. And if morally myopic self indulgence is not valuable (as 'responsible' parentos insist is the case) then a genuine democracy may be little more valuable than a parento-democracy (it would merely be less than valuable in a different way). I am not entirely convinced by the standard parento trepidation about self indulgence, or the fear that dire consequences will follow for any society in which the citizens enjoy themselves. I can, however, imagine that a society which did allow genuine democracy, in a world where other countries remained committed to parentocentricity, could well expect to face various forms of military and/or economic adventurism from all those offended and threatened heroes who fancy that they are made of sterner stuff. But that it is valuable, for human societies to risk the freedom of citizens to try to realise our own selfhood in our own way, can be argued on the grounds that, because only persons can narrate value and only persons can be motivated by narratives about value, personhood is the only possible basis for any value at all. This entails that if any integrity is valuable, including the value of human society and any of the values assumed by any parento authority or expert, then evaluating integrity (personhood) must be valuable. If personhood is not valuable then no values can be asserted; including those asserted by whoever avows that his or her notions of valuable social arrangements are superior to those of less exalted citizens. The freedom to be ourselves within the community of our fellows, is a necessary condition for the realisation of personhood. So freedom in community is as valuable as the personhood it helps realise. As the realisation of their own personhood is the most valuable value there is for the only beings who make talk of value possible, freedom within community is priceless.
        Under the dichotomy which pits freedom for 'self' against the freedom of 'others', personal freedom is often viewed fearfully because we assume that any such freedom will automatically be used to violate others (and, in a society of addicts, it usually is). But the notion of freedom, entailed by the evaluating integrity understanding of personhood, does not entail a licence to harm others, disregard them or otherwise violate their integrity, because the organic integrity of personhood does not support the traditional parentocentric dichotomy between self and others. Thus, under renovated understanding, personal freedom cannot be either self- or other-regarding but only and always a dynamic integrity of both self- and other-regarding uses of personal power. This understanding of freedom (which is the only narrative fully compatible with the facts of human personhood) allows for the fullest realisation of what is valuable to us without entailing a liberty to violate the freedom of others for our sake.

The kind of democracy, entailed by this morality, entails more than 'one citizen, one vote' (in which a 'citizen' is every man, woman and child of the society). The power surrendered to government, on this paradigm, is surrendered for the better realisation of the welfare of those persons whose power it is (just as the rights surrendered by criminals is best given to the healing of violated integrity). It cannot therefore be the case that, having given lip service to the moral equality of its citizens in equal voting rights, and derived its authority from the integrity of the citizens, a governing authority is thereafter absolved of further responsibility to the evaluating integrity of the voters. The realisation of personal power and freedom, for example, entails the freedom and power to narrate our own evaluations of both fact (to assert what we believe is the case) and value (to assert what we believe ought to be the case). It is this power and freedom which is defined as valuable personal property by a 'right to free speech'. No person or government can be said to be respecting the integrity of citizens or other persons if this right is violated or if it is used to violate. Justifying the use of narratives to violate persons (by verbal abuse, lies, the incitement of hostility and so on), by appealing to a 'right to free speech', is irrational in the manner of all self-righteousness. It also contradicts the notion of freedom entailed by an evaluating integrity/organic understanding of personhood. But if persons have a right to free speech (in recognition of the value of individual power to narrate their own interest in their own welfare) then, more than having an obligation to let its citizens speak without censure, a government has an obligation to listen, pay attention to and treat as valuable, what its citizens narrate. Freedom of speech is a hollow right if those who supposedly exercise power on the citizens' behalf place themselves beyond the effective influence of that right when it is exercised.⁸

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Notes:

4. The New Zealand government is particularly, and increasingly, parentocentric - a fact which entails it being both implicitly totalitarian and particularly rapacious. All persons, within the jurisdiction of the New Zealand government, pay a 'GST' tax on any goods or services they purchase as well as being taxed at source on incomes and for any interest earned on savings and investments. Children's 'pocket money' is exempt but their saving, purchases and other income are not (even the smallest item purchased by a child still attracts a 12.5% GST tax). This, if nothing else, clearly violates the democratic notion of fairness narrated by the principle of 'No taxation without representation'.

5. Parentocentric resentment of this power seems to be what lay behind a major subversion of the system that was engineered by New Zealand politicians in the early 1990s. Under the new system (called 'mixed member proportional' or 'MMP' for short) it is much harder for citizens to vote disliked parentos out of power. This is because, now, not all members of our Parliament are elected by the citizens. Rather, a significant number a now 'list MPs' - parentos who neither enter nor leave Parliament via the public ballot box but are appointed or dismissed directly by a political party. This shift of power, from voters to quasi-tribal 'clubs', is fairly typical of how parentocentric bias subverts the ostensible intent of democracy.

6. See Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan (1651) - especially chapters 13-16 from Part I (Of Man) and chapter 17 from Part II (Of Commonwealth). Note, however, that, in chapters 18-21 of Part II, Hobbes himself derives a radically parentocentric, and strongly anti-democratic, form of government from the fear driven trade-off of freedom for security which motivates his argument.

7. A good example of this follows on from footnote 5. When MMP was first introduced into New Zealand, the numbers of representatives in Parliament was raised significantly (and at some cost). The citizens were promised a referendum, on this matter, after a couple of terms. The referendum was held, and over 90% of the voters voted to reduce the number of MPs back to a manageable level - and so reduce the cost of government. The Prime Minister, however (herself a 'list MP' whose party clung onto power by a much smaller majority) simply announced that the voters didn't understand the issues and carried on regardless.

8. Democracy can be an effective antidote to parentocentricity if it is not the victim of parentocentricity. For example, when re-structuring or 'down sizing' a company or government department, parentologic has it that each level in the hierarchy determines who is to go in the level 'below' it. Under democracy, each level would determine who is to go in level above. This would be not only more democratic but more dynamic because 'underlings' are far more aware, and less tolerant, of bad 'overlings' than are the overlings' bosses.

Desmond Morris logic: Desmond Morris, of The Naked Ape and People Watching fame, made a hugely successful career out of observing bits of human behaviour and attributing motives to them. His observations are so acute that few of his readers seem to notice that the motives, which he attributes to the behaviour, are not derived from any facts at all but only from a [highly dubious] ideological presumption. This kind of dishonesty presents an observation of fact (such as that the winners of motor races traditionally spray the crowd with champagne) and a theoretical explanation (such as that the act is a symbolic ejaculation of the dominant male) as a single and seamless package. The observation itself is often interesting and true, so folk don't notice that the theory, for which the fact is being used a vehicle, is a fiction that is not supported by the observation at all (see Caves 6.342 for a more sinister version of this logic).

Destiny: Humans normally think of destiny as that which is pre-ordained by forces outside of our control. This is a half truth. It is true that human persons live in a world of cause and effect - a world in which inputs have outputs in which input values are conserved. Because this is so, there is a sense in which it is true that our destiny is determined. What is not true is the assumption that our destiny is somehow pre-determined by God, evolution, karma, fate, star sign or whatever.
        The truth is that our personal and collective destinies are determined partly by contingency (the facts of our circumstances), and partly by what each of us does with the facts of his or her circumstances.⁵¹  Because this is so, there is no overall human destiny; each person's destiny is different and unique for that self. Each person does, however, have a destiny - and this destiny is as implacable as any god fixed fate. It is just that (a) no two persons, and certainly no 'class' of persons, have the same destiny and (b) no destiny is 'destined' except that we make it so. Each life is different and each life situation is different - falling in love, for example, being born, growing up, being well or ill, winning or losing, growing old and dying, are like springtime; every year there is a spring but, although all springs are similar, no two springs are ever the same. So the notion of destiny is most accurately narrated in terms of 'destination' - the (moral) place at which we end up. And, when I think of our destiny, we should think of the kind of self we are becoming as a result of where we are am morally 'pointing' our selves, in our circumstances, right here and right now.

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If predestination [fate] were real, it would be a kind of powerlessness. Fate isn't real, but one of the ways in which powerlessness corrupts is the temptation to believe in fate.

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Notes:

51. Note that 'what the self does with the facts' can be emphasised in two ways: as what the self does with the facts and as what the self does with the facts.

Determinism: That persons act freely to some extent is one of those 'common sense' intuitions of personhood that is a function of our evaluating integrity (Caves 2.2). We assume that it makes sense to talk of various human behaviours as justified or not only because we assume that humans are persons and that persons form and act on intentions, they have some understanding of what their choices are, some freedom to make those choices and some control over their behaviour (i.e., they act from their evaluating integrity). This  notion of human personhood carries over into the 'organic' evaluation of violence (Caves 3.2) to the extent that I talk of human beings as moral actors - that is, beings capable of generating, understanding and acting on narratives that have to do with the value of acts. Only moral actors can be held morally responsible for their behaviour in a way that makes sense of questions about justifications of violence. I do not hold possums, slugs or hurricanes morally responsible for the violations of integrity which they achieve because I believe that they have no choice in the matter; their behaviours are not intentional but merely determined by mechanical forces about which they have no knowledge and over which they have no control. Determinism is the theory that all human behaviours, including human violence, are similarly the mindless outcome of impersonal forces. If determinism is true then human beings are not moral actors and it makes no sense to evaluate human behaviours as justified or not.
        We tend to assume that determinism is true for all events except some behaviour of human persons. Thus, if we want to understand hurricanes we do not ask what the hurricane intended or what justification it has for its destructive behaviour. But if we want to understand a violence then, as well as looking at the circumstances, we also look to the narratives, beliefs, motives and justifications involved

If determinism is true then it cannot be argued for (argument requires that we be free to be persuaded for or against a position). But the kind of scepticism about human personhood, that is embodied in determinism, is based on the progress of natural science in mapping strictly impersonal cause and effect explanations for previously mysterious phenomena. For example, it was once widely believed that volcanoes were animated by persons in the form of gods and goddesses; most of us now (justifiably) attribute volcanic activity to the impersonal forces of plate tectonics. Diseases that were once explained by reference to malignant spirits are now better explained by reference to entirely impersonal agencies such as diet, microbes, physical malfunction and so on. As science has progressively and relentlessly denuded the natural world of animating personages, so a kind of scientific triumphalism has emerged. The fact that science has explained away all the supposed persons animating non human activity, becomes an article of faith that science will eventually explain away all supposed persons - including those supposedly animating human activity. Personhood and its allied notions (such as mind or soul, personal freedom, moral responsibility and so on) are held to be illusions of a kind with the belief in disease causing spirits and fire spitting gods. The illusion of personal freedom, it is held, endures only as a hang-over from pre scientific ignorance of the impersonal processes which, in fact, determine our behaviour.
        If this is the case then the common sense assumptions of human personhood (such as that we are moral actors, capable of choosing courses of action for which we can be held responsible) are an illusion and the whole organic/integrity understanding of violence is simply wrong.⁴⁶  More to the point, if persons are not free, in the way assumed by the understanding, then they are not free to solve or obviate any problem of human violence and the problem will just have to be endured in the way we endure the harms caused by non human violations of integrity.

I cannot know for sure that persons escape physical determinism in a way that validates the assumption that I am dealing with moral actors when I evaluate human violence. It certainly feels that way to me as a person. And I assume, in the process of living my life as a person, that I and other human persons do enjoy enough freedom of choice both to have some control over our violence and to be held culturally accountable for our choices. But this assumption is, in the final analysis, a subjective act of faith in my own live experience rather than a demonstrably objective fact about human persons. Of course, it must be admitted that adopting a sceptical posture towards the evaluative assumptions of personhood is also an act of faith; the sceptic must deny the validity of her own experience as an act of faith in scientific theory. So it is obvious that any sceptical challenge to the assumptions of personhood cannot be met by comparing 'fact with fact' or 'fact with faith' because, in both cases, our very understanding of the facts will change according to the assumptions of personhood (acts of faith) by which we interpret our experiences. So the best that any person can do is compare competing faiths/assumptions in terms of some cultural rule or measure which will itself be taken on faith.
        This does not entail that the measure chosen will be arbitrary or that it doesn't matter one way or the other. If we are going to compare anything at all then at least some of the cultural assumptions of personhood are going to be necessary. After all, we have to follow rules of perception, reason and language just to think about the issue at all. We have to trust our perceptions and intelligence to a certain degree, and simply must assume that some beliefs make more sense than others. But if we do this (and we must or forever keep silent) then the measure is immediately biased in favour of the cultural assumptions of personhood being valid. Any argument in favour of scepticism, for example, will ultimately rely on the same cultural notions of coherence as do any of our evaluations because, in the end, coherence is the only measure of evaluation open to us (cf; Caves 7.1:3). None of us (including the sceptic) can get outside of our perceptions in order to check that they are or are not accurate. And none of us (especially the sceptic) can obtain any objective confirmation that our rules of perception, belief or reason are or are not valid. These rules are not in nature. They are a cultural component of the human perceptual and belief system, they make perception and belief possible, but they can be confirmed only because they 'make sense' of a cultural/natural integrity (i.e., they give coherence to our experiences).⁴⁷   We do not and cannot know that anything really does make sense in fact, but we have to assume some degree of coherence in reality just to function at all. And we trust our culture of personhood because that, and that alone, gives us enough coherence to make sense of anything - including doubts about the what we must trust in order to doubt it.

On the basis of this it is obvious that the only coherent measure I have, for deciding which among competing faiths is most worthy of my allegiance, will be the integrity of those faiths - and this on the grounds that a coherent faith conforms better with the assumptions of personhood than does an incoherent faith. Human personhood, just to be what it is, embodies a radical bias towards coherence [integrity]. To deny this bias is to forego all notion of fact, all notion of truth or falsity, all language, reason, knowledge and personhood itself (all of which utterly depend on culturally constructed coherence). For humans, the only alternatives to the evaluative assumptions of personhood are silence and death. This means that the evaluative assumptions of personhood are, and must be, the default position for persons. If this condition is not accepted then neither faith in personhood nor faith in scepticism can be debated or even thought about.
        If this condition is accepted then the burden of proof falls squarely on the sceptic. It is not up to me to defend what is subjectively justified by my experiences as a person (i.e., that I am a moral actor with a significant freedom of choice); that is not an intellectual theory but the way I have to live my life as a person. It is up to those who claim to know me better than I know myself to prove that I am not as I seem to be to myself.

When sceptical arguments are put on this footing then they rapidly reveal themselves not to be up to the job.
        Negative scepticism, which merely raises doubts about the value assumptions of personhood, is readily dismissed. Much of it is simply more-or-less sophisticated variations on the fallacious theme of 'you do not know that the assumptions of personhood are true therefore the assumptions of personhood are not true'. This is an 'argument from ignorance' and is fallacious (logically incoherent) because to assert that 'S does not know x' entails only a negative claim about what S does not know). It does not entail any positive claim about what anyone does know (such that S, or anyone else, knows that not-x), and it entails no claim about x at all (such as that x is or is not true). But even non fallacious negative scepticism is incoherent, if not hypocritical, in selectively withholding assent from only some evaluative assumptions of personhood (such as freedom and moral agency) while relying utterly on other evaluative assumptions (such as those of language, reason and knowledge) which are problematic in exactly the same way. This selective withholding of assent is necessarily arbitrary because withholding assent to all the assumptions of value entails not scepticism but silence.
        Positive scepticism (which offers a theory in place of the doubted faith in human values) fares no better. Determinism, for instance, (the most scientifically plausible argument against personal freedom) is self-defeating (logically incoherent). If determinism is true then neither the determinist nor the anti determinist can have any freedom of choice about what beliefs they hold (they cannot believe what they believe because it is 'true' but merely because various factors, outside of their control, have determined that they will believe or not). Moreover, the arguments they pursue cannot be aimed at proving a contestable point but must be simply the acting out of pre-determined behaviours that are essentially meaningless. Determinism cannot be argued for without self contradiction, and it would be absurd to try to convince someone that determinism is true when the argument itself entails that the person does not have the freedom to be convinced or not.

The case for personal freedom is still not known to be true objectively, but belief in freedom is justified (albeit subjectively) and the arguments of scepticism do not give anywhere near adequate reason for rejecting common sense faith in our own experience.

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Notes:

46. Not that it makes a great deal of difference in the final analysis; if determinism is correct then human beings have no control over their violence and this whole project is pointless but, if determinism is true, then I have no choice but to continue with it anyway.

47. It is not so much that the rules are in nature, or in culture, but that personhood (which integrates culture and nature) is in the rules.

Don't Criticise what You don't Understand: Psychics, clairvoyants, mediums, fortune tellers and witches come in three main kinds: the deceived, the deceivers, and the majority which are both. But whenever I try to point this out in any particular case, the usual (and political) response is "You shouldn't criticise what you don't understand". I heartily agree. That is why it is only after having gone to considerable effort to understand and test witchcraft (including wicca), and so-called psychic powers, that I conclude psychics, clairvoyants, mediums, fortune tellers and witches to be of three main kinds: the deceived, the deceivers, and the majority which are both.

Of course, the assumption behind the 'don't criticise what you don't understand' defence is that if we understood then we wouldn't disagree. This begs the question quite shamelessly (it presumes that the belief in question is true). Some beliefs simply are false and/or delusional, and we do not have to swallow a falsehood or enter into a delusion in order to understand that it is irrational.

Entropy and Attitude: A change in mental attitude can dramatically affect bodily health. But, although there seems to be no limit on the negative effects of attitude (people can and do literally believe themselves to death) there are obviously limits on the positive effects. All persons grow old and die, regardless of how emphatically they point themselves at health and life. Depression, stress, the laying of curses or 'pointing the bone', are all effective agents of dis-integration. Folk who are told that they have six months to live, or are 'warned' to expect lung cancer on every packet of cigarettes they buy, do tend to die on schedule and/or develop the diseases pointed at them. But clearly no one can simply appoint himself or herself to permanent health and life in the way that we can all and easily appoint ourselves to permanent sickness and/or death. And telling someone that she will live forever, or that cancer cannot live where there is love, does not work except teasingly at best.
        All this may be a function of the universal human addiction to the ideology of violence (all life and value depends utterly on integrity, and our compulsive, chronic and relentless violation of integrity could be expected to have an effect not unlike that once narrated by the Christian doctrine of Original Sin). But I suspect that it is more than that. Everything in the world dies in the end, all integrates eventually disintegrate. The Second Law of Thermodynamics recognises that there is a general tendency towards increasing entropy in all energy systems (including the whole cosmos itself). Pleasure tends to be short lived but pain can endure for a lifetime. Similarly, a teaspoon of poison can pollute a whole lake of pure water but a teaspoon of pure water cannot cleanse even a puddle of poison. This does seem to be a function of entropy more than (or as well as) human violence.

Environmental Ethics: All morality necessarily revolves around persons because only persons can choose between behaviours on the grounds of narratives saying that different behaviours are more or less valuable.

All human morality revolves around humans because being human is our vehicle for being persons.

The limit of human morality is the limit of human power.

Human persons have power which significantly affects non human integrates. And all uses of this power, like any refusals to use it, simply are more or less valuable on a scale of all the alternative uses available. The history of the human species, however, is one of having repeatedly survived only by struggling against various entities and forces which we collectively know as 'nature'. For most of our history, nature was a dangerous threat which had to be overcome if we were to survive at all. The parentocentric hunter-warrior mythos secured human survival, against the odds, by marrying our intelligence and sociability to our violence. During the times in which members of the species most needed the hunter-warrior mythos to secure their survival, those who thrived best were those who overcame best. These bequeathed to the human species our personhood culture, our 'place in the sun' and our addiction to violence.
        Given that history, our parentocentric bias, and the apparent absence of moral agency in non human integrates, it has long been normal for human persons to value nature mainly or only as a truculent resource. The human-centred nature of our ethics has seemed to legitimise this attitude and make it difficult to conceive of any valuable alternative. Because humans are persons, the power uses and interests of humans are negotiable (even given that humans are lousy negotiators). But we cannot negotiate interests and uses of power with plants, animals, fungi, eco-systems or any other integrates which are not fully accessible as persons. The vehicle of any social morality is a shared cultural environment (relationships of personhood and language). We share a physical world with non humans but not a cultural world of personhood and language.⁴⁸  Without a shared vehicle there can be no negotiation. And, without means of negotiation, but favoured with a  disparity of power, we seem to have no alternative to a parent like moral relationship with nature. We can be kind or despotic 'parents' (caretakers, tyrants or a compromise of the two) but the absence of shared personhood denies us a vehicle for negotiating a society with non human nature. We are still in a relationship with nature, however, we do have power that affects that relationship, and, the self-deceptive arguments of pseudo innocence notwithstanding, we will use that power to survive or not. So, as always, the only questions concern how we should best use our power.

Under the traditional 'humans versus nature' dichotomy, the only alternative to a self-righteous human power over nature (humans as P, nature as not-P) is a self abnegating surrender of human power to nature (nature as P, humans as not-P). But whereas human power over nature has been equated with environmental violence, it also has been and is of immense value to the welfare our species. Surrendering such power would be suicidal for most of us and, although there are parentos of such addiction that they would happily sacrifice others to their environmental Molochs, catastrophic violations of human society have never yet proved to be a valuable way of preserving any ideological purity. Humans have repeatedly shown a perverse willingness to sacrifice human life to ideological causes, but that only makes it possible to sell a 'nature as P, humans as not-P' politics to its victims, it doesn't make the politics valuable.
        We can, however, derive a morality for our relationships with nature directly from an understanding of the value of integrity. As far as is generally known, human persons are the most sophisticated and values realising integrates in the world by a considerable difference of degree. But humans are not the only integrates in the world and an integrity does not have to be a person before its integrity has value. Integrity is valuable to whatever is realised through it. A plant has an integrity on which it depends for its well being every bit as much as we depend on ours. A plant might not know that it embodies an integrity or that its integrity is valuable to it. But that is irrelevant. That the integrity of a plant is valuable to the plant is a fact quite independent of whether or not a plant is the kind of [evaluating] integrity which could understand value. Plants also have interests. Once again, plants do not know that they have interests, nor do they know that their interests frequently clash with those of human beings and other integrates in their environment. Nevertheless the interest of a plant, in maintaining its integrity as a plant, can clash with other interests, including the interests of human beings. The same can be said of all integrates within any environment shared by persons.

If value depends on integrity then the most valuable [integrity respecting] morality of relationships will be that which emerges from a voluntary respect for the value of integrity. We do well to treat other persons courteously in any event. But we do best when we voluntarily treat others courteously because we recognise that they matter, they have valid interests, their interests matter, and we care about their value. In such a case it is irrelevant whether or not others share our morality, can contest their interests, defend their own rights or even recognise their own value. Good manners is what we do based on what we know about the value of their integrity. The same logic applies to inarticulate integrates. Snakes might not know that they have value and interests - but we do. We might not be able to reason with a snake about killing humans, but we can reason with ourselves and each other about killing snakes. If a prima facie respect for integrity is the reasonable basis of a valuable morality then respect for integrity is the logical basis of all morality governing the uses of human power in all circumstances. By whatever logic we narrate a respect for the value of human integrity, we thereby narrate a like respect for all integrity.
        Within this general respect for integrity, I value the preservation of integrates more as I perceive them to be more person like. On the observation that integrity is the basis of value, and that human persons share an increased likeness to our own integrity with more person like integrates, this assumption is justified (Caves 11.42). It is distorted only through our addiction to parentocentricity derived evaluations. On this distortion person likeness is confused with human likeness (so that we tend to value human-like qualities over unhuman-like qualities) and value of human likeness is measured in terms of hunter-warrior-likeness. This then issues in the traditional human tendency to behave as if the value of an integrity lessens as it gets less like the dominant adults of our species. Ally this with the parentocentric fallacy that equates power to violate (a fact) with a moral authority to violate (a value) and we have traditional human speciesism. But once we recognise that integrity is the basis of value, and that integrates are different on a continuum of sophistication (rather than dichotomised between persons and non persons) then we have the reasonable basis for a valuable morality which is [properly] person-centred without being [violently] human-limited. Under such a morality all integrity demands prima facie respect. That simply means that we shouldn't violate any integrity without adequate  justification. The violation of less sophisticated integrates would not require as much justification as would the violation of a more sophisticated integrity (killing a virus would require less justification than killing a tree) but, in the end, all human violation of any integrity would require justification of some kind - and the mere fact that we can violate an integrity would not count as adequate justification. Thus, although renovated morality still 'stands on' humanity, and still includes human value and interests, it is not human limited because it 'points' beyond humanity to the value of all integrity.

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Under parentologic, humans are either victims of or gods over the natural world - victims if reality is given, gods if it is not. It is, however, more likely that our creative powers are a *responsibility, as well as a privilege, and that we are neither gods nor victims of the world so much as its accidental midwives and husbandmen. This is because the reality of personhood culture gives us the power to create, modify and destroy value while the reality of nature entails that there are real costs and consequences for what we create and destroy - and neither anyone nor anything will take those costs and consequences away, clean up any mess we make, or otherwise let us off the hook. So our situation is not that some of us choose to be responsible and some do not but that some of us discharge the responsibility that we all have and some do not.

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Notes:

48. For all I know, other integrates may well have a language and embody highly sophisticated degrees of personhood, but if they do then it is not one that humans share at this time.

The Organic Paradigm of Violence (Caves 3.32-3.23) requires me to evaluate violence according to a 'three questions and two measures' formula. The three questions are:
    (Q1) does a use of power violate an integrity? If so,
    (Q2) is the violation significant in (a) the quantity of harm done (one measure) and (b) the quality of integrity
             violated (the second measure)? and
    (Q3) does the violation need or have justification? ⁹
In this entry I want to give some idea of how this evaluation works in actual cases.

1. Evaluating Violence against Non Persons

Question: Does an organic paradigm of violence entail that it is violent to kill vegetables, microbes, animals, forests or vermin, either to survive or for pleasure?

Answer: Yes, but how significant the violence (and therefore how much justification it requires) is will depend on the quality (i.e., the scope and complexity) of the integrity being violated and the quantity (degree of harm) being perpetrated. Killing animals for food, for example, is a more significant violence than is harvesting vegetables due to the scope and complexity of an animal's integrity, and the pain it subsequently suffers, compared to that of a vegetable.
        The organic paradigm cannot tell us whether of not any given violence is justified (Q3) because that is a question of values, but it can give us a sensitive apparatus for measuring how significant a violence is in fact (Q2). If a morality assumes that significant violations warrant significant justification then the paradigm can provide that morality with a reasonable framework for comparing relative values. The paradigm also gives grounds for arguing that violence does violate value and that there is a problem of human violence where any violences are performed without adequate justification.

Commentary: If the organic paradigm of violence is factually accurate, and if there is a 'problem' of human violence, then a good part of that problem can be understood as involving the violation of significant integrates, by human persons, with the intent and/or effect of causing harm. The inclusion of harm is important in this understanding because it seems implausible that harmless intrusions into an integrity should count as violence. The inclusion of significance is needed because obviously the picking, shredding and eating of a cabbage both harms and violates the integrity of the cabbage, but it seems silly to consider the making of coleslaw to be a violence of a kind with war or rape. The measure of significance given in answer to question Q2 does seem to give us the kind of narrative we need to articulate our intuitions that shredding cabbages is considerably less significant than shredding persons either physically or psychologically. But only if a morality then attaches the notion of value to the fact of significance, such that persons are more valuable than cabbages, can we cast the notion of there being a problem of violence in moral terms. Part of the problem of violence, in this case, would be that integrates are valuable and, because violence violates integrity, violence violates value.
        When folk worry about violence, the violation of humans by other humans is normally talked of as being particularly significant. And this makes sense given that the significance of violence is a function of integrity, and the integrity of nature and culture as persons is the most significant integrity with which we normally deal. It further seems plausible to me that other problematic aspects of human violence, such as our destruction of ecosystems, can be derived from the personhood-integrity understanding of violence. Indeed, it seems to me that they can be better derived from this understanding than from the common concept branch of the family. But I am aware that the Q2 notion of significance entails making an evaluative judgement which sits uneasily on the edge of morality - it implies, for example, that human integrity is 'worth' more than the flora, fauna and fungi we violate to survive. We have to believe this just to survive, ¹⁰  but the logic of our intuitions still needs spelling out in terms of the organic paradigm. Few of us would doubt that throwing a stilling cat into a pot of boiling water would be much harder to justify than would be throwing stilling carrots into the pot - but is it more violent? Both acts violate integrates with the intent and effect of harming the integrity being thrown into the pot, and who is to say that cats are more 'significant' than carrots? Cats are more person like than carrots. Cats have sophisticated nervous systems and carrots do not. That, together with the fact that violated cats exhibit pain behaviour and carrots do not, would seem to be sufficient evidence that violated cats suffer more pain than carrots (if, indeed, carrots suffer any pain at all). That could be part of the answer except that violated forests, habitats and eco-systems also evidently suffer no personal pain. Thus, on a simple pleasure/pain hypothesis, violating their integrity cannot be significant. Violating the integrates of forests, habitats and eco-systems does seem to be significant, but on what basis?
         In answer to this question, consider a case in which a primarily non human habitat (a forest) is being destroyed in the process of being converted into a human habitat (farmland). You, being evaluating integral, will evaluate what is going on as either more or less justified than the alternative. To do this properly you need to know what is happening in fact, what significance it has and what considerations are motivating it.

• Under the common concept of violence (Caves 1.11) what is happening is not violent (although, under the assault paradigm, Caves 3.1) you could invoke the metaphor of humans 'assaulting' the forest). Your evaluation of the significance and justification for destroying the non human habitat could be cast morally or politically in terms of right and wrong but not factually in terms of violence.
• Under the lateral branch of the violence family of concepts Caves 1.12), what is happening clearly is a violence; human beings are wilfully violating the integrity of the habitat, the habitat is valuable and so humans are violating value.
• Under the organic/violated integrity paradigm the violation of a habitat counts as a significant violation in fact. Systems are part of the many and various integrates which are part of the system. Violating a system violates every integrity which is nexus in the system: if you have 100 mutually supporting components integrated into an electrical circuit, and you cut that circuit anywhere within or between components, then all the components will be affected. If we violate a habitat then we violate every nexus integrated within it and, probably, a great many related systems and their component integrates as well. The violating of nexus (the connections and relationships of a 'circuit') is, in fact, more significant than the violation of items. Such a significant violation would require significant justification which the creation of farmland may or may not provide, depending on circumstances and how values are attributed by whatever moral or political ethic is being used.

None of this will settle the Q3 question (is the violence justified?) because that requires resort to moral or political theory. Nevertheless the organic violated integrity line of thought does seem to embody insights into the nature of human violence. It makes sense of the intuition that violating a person, with or without resort to common concept manifestations of violence, is significant in a way that violating a cabbage or colony of bacteria are not. It also makes sense of the intuition that various kinds of integrity violating human activity, from atomic wars to deceit to suicide, from the killing of cancers to meat eating to the wholesale destruction of non human habitats, should somehow be distinguishable on a kind of continuum that will enable us to understand them in a context.
        The organic paradigm also gives me a reasonable, fact based framework into which I can fit whatever morality I have or evolve - although it does seem to spell out somewhat differently to that with which I am more familiar. To see how this is so, consider the making of cabbage into coleslaw. The cabbage is wrenched from the ground, violating the integrity of plant and soil, its stem and outer leaves are removed and the body of the plant is shredded. To evaluate this event, as a potential instance of violence, I need to ask my three questions. Under the organic/violated integrity framework these reduce to (Q1) is it a violation? (Q2) is it significant? and Q3) is it justified?
    Q1. Making cabbage into coleslaw violates the integrity of the cabbage and, therefore, is a kind of violence. That answers the first question.
    Q2. Making cabbage into coleslaw is not a significant violation due to the cabbage's relative lack of person like complexity (see the 'qualitative' measure of significance in Caves 11.42) or significance of place in any larger integrity. Cabbages not only lack any discernible person like qualities, their scope is limited and the integrity of a garden is not significantly violated by the harvesting of cabbages (although the integrity of soil can be violated by over cropping). That answers the second question.
    Q3. The harvesting and consumption of vegetables, directly or via the consumption of herbivorous animals, is necessary for our survival and well being. All animals have more person like qualities [complexity] than vegetables, and person-species (such as homo sapiens) embody qualities of natural and cultural complexity well in excess of most animals. Violating the integrity of vegetables, to preserve that of homo sapiens, consequently sacrifices a relatively less significant integrity to the well being of one that is relatively more significant. That doesn't make it right or wrong, but it does makes it easier to justify than would be the preserving of trivial integrates at the expense of ones that are more significant. The necessities of our survival are their own justification, at least as far as eating vegetables are concerned (I am not sure what the limits of that justification are, at the moment, but I am sure that they far exceed the consumption of vegetables). Given that we can preserve a less significant integrity (vegetables) only by violating a more significant integrity (ourselves), no moral justification for eating cabbages even seems necessary. That answers the third question.
        Having answered all three questions I find that my intuitions are confirmed. The human penchant for eating vegetables is not an issue as far any putative problem of human violence is concerned. A human penchant for cannibalism would be an issue, so would the human penchant for smashing up the environment in the pursuit of vegetables. Violating the integrity of plant life, without good reason or for malice, could likewise be an issue. Say that someone destroys a cabbage without justification. The cabbage is neither eaten, composted or returned to the soil, it is not diseased and is not taking up space or nutrients that are needed for another purpose. Under the organic/violated integrity line of thought that violation of integrity, although trivial in itself, would still count as unjustified violence and, as such, come under that sphere of human activity which is the problem of human violence. Violating an integrity for a reason may be one thing, but violating even a trivial integrity, just because we want to and can, would seem to relate to the problem of human violence. Unjustifiably violating a cabbage may not count for much in the overall scheme of things, but it could still count.

A similar kind of economy would seem to hold over the eradication of destructive vermin. It would count as a violence under Q1, and could be a significant violence under Q2, but if it was genuinely necessary to ensure the preservation of a more significant integrity such as a habitat or human population, and was done for that reason, then it would be easier to justify under Q3 than it would be if done for some other reason. There would still be some tricky questions to answer; such as establishing that the preservation of a habitat really does require eradicating vermin which are destroying it (i.e., that there are no less violent options open to us) and establishing the relative significance of a native habitat as compared to significance of vermin which have colonised it. But at least we would have a reasonable, fact based framework within which we can attempt such evaluations.
        The logic of the organic paradigm entails only that the link between Q2 and Q3 is proportional - as the violence becomes more significant so too must the reasons, given in justification of that violence, become more compelling. We need, for example, better justification for exterminating a population of vermin than we would for harvesting a field of cabbages. One justification, common to existing intuitions and preconditioned by the organic paradigm, is that (1) some integrates are more significant than others and (2) the preservation of a more significant integrity can justify the violation of a less significant integrity - assuming, of course, that the violation is actually necessary. If a significant integrity, such as my health, is being significantly violated by other integrates, such as germs, then what matters is only that (a) I have the power to act or not act, (b) I will act or not act, and (c) both my actions or any inaction will entail some integrity being violated - both taking germ killing medicines and not taking such medicines will require more or less justification according to what integrity is violated, and to what extent, by the extent of my action or inaction. Similarly, if a significant integrity, such as an eco-system, is being significantly violated by other integrates, such as introduced vermin, then what matters is only that (*a) human persons have the power to act or not act, (*b) we will act or not act, and (*c) both our actions or any inaction will entail an integrity being violated - both killing vermin or not killing vermin will require more or less justification according to what integrity is violated, and to what extent, by our degree of action or inaction. To destructively intrude into a habitat or ecosystem violates a more significant integrity than does a similar intrusion into a single vegetable. It would therefore count as a more significant violation, and one which subsequently would demand a greater degree of justification.
    In none of these cases does the organic/violated integrity line of thought deliver a morality by which we can decide that various violations are or are not justified. What it delivers is insight into how significant any violation of integrity is in fact, what kinds of justifications are going to be necessary, and why.

2. Evaluating Violence by Non Persons

Question: Would an organic paradigm of violence commit us to evaluating the violation of integrity by non persons, such as insects, animals and hurricanes, in the same way as we evaluate the violence of persons?

Answer: Yes. The only difference is that it makes no sense to ask of a non person whether or not its violence is justified.

Commentary: If another person trespasses on your garden, and harvests one of your cabbages, the violation involved extends to the integrity of you, your space, property and projects. That would explain why such intrusions are typically experienced as a more significant violence than is the eating of coleslaw. But slugs getting into your cabbage patch, and likewise violating the integrates of your garden, would feel like a less significant violation in that slugs seem to embody so little personhood that it makes no sense to ask if they are justified in what they do. The violation of your garden may still be experienced as significant, but not as significant as an equivalent degree of violation by a person. This raises the issue of violation by non persons. Obviously slugs, micro-organisms, earthquakes, various predators and so on, can all violate integrity in much the same way, and with similar effect, as do human beings. So the organic paradigm, if it is an accurate model of violence as a fact, should enable us to evaluate these kinds of violations accurately and without having to arbitrarily change the rules of evaluation.

We normally make a clear distinction between the violence of persons and that of non persons. As persons we assume, rightly or wrongly, that we act knowingly, and with some freedom of choice, that makes us responsible for our violence in a way that non persons are not. It makes no sense to speak of a hurricane or colony of microbes choosing to attack whatever integrity they violate. But it does make sense to talk of a hyaena 'choosing' to attack this prey rather than that one because this reflects the degree to which we assume or observe that social mammals partake of personhood.
        This entails, in terms of the organic paradigm, that we evaluate the attack of a hyaena pack on prey, the destructive force of a hurricane or the assault on an organism by microbes, as violence in fact (Q1). In cases involving more significant integrates (such as persons or eco-systems), and/or serious harm (such as the death of persons and/or destruction of property, habitats, land and so on), we can evaluate the violence as significant in terms of Q2. Both of these evaluations accord with our existing concepts of violence such as when a typhoon or hurricane is adjudged 'violent' by bare concepts applied to the forces involved and according to the amount of destruction caused. It is only when we get to the moral Q3 (was the violence justified?) that the answers change over non persons. In this case the question seems to make sense when asked of an attack by an animal and to whatever degree it may be said that the animal acts purposively. It makes sense, for example, to say that hyaena are justified in killing wildebeest for food, but there is something quite odd about saying that a typhoon was justified in attacking a ship - the question applies, with suitable qualification, to the first case but does not apply at all in the second.
        This intuition is explained once we acknowledge that justification, in the full sense, applies unambiguously only to persons and from then on, by degrees, to beings in proportion to their person likeness. If you perceive the behaviour of hyaena as person like in its purposiveness then it makes sense to adjudge the purpose as justifying the violence. The notion of justification, in these cases, lacks the full moral connotations that are present when applied to persons. But once we believe that the animal in question shares enough in common with the agency associated with persons, for the question to make sense, then the question can be given a sensible answer. Once we get to agencies that are too far removed from person like purpose, choice, freedom and so on, then the issue does not arise even if the agency is profoundly violent and/or destructive.

3. Evaluating Violence against Persons
    Punishment
    Suicide, Self-sacrifice and Euthanasia
    Volunteers and Consent to Risk

Question: What role does consent play in the evaluation of a violence? Does the assumption that persons can give or withhold consent to violations of their integrity make any difference to the evaluation of such violation under an organic paradigm?

Answer: Yes. Some otherwise violent acts, such as being cut by a knife, may not count as significant violence if we consent to so having our integrity violated (as, for example, in a surgical operation) while some otherwise innocuous acts, such as sexual intercourse, will be evaluated as significant violence in the absence of consent.

Commentary: The assumption that persons have at least some freedom of choice includes the notion of consent which, in turn, entails that violence spells out somewhat variously when persons are the objects of violation. Persons, unlike non persons, are held to be able to give or withhold consent to intrusions into their integrity, as when you give consent for surgery, dentistry or hypnosis. Under traditional narratives of violence some intrusions into our bodies or personhood, which would count as a violence and a problem if done without our consent, apparently cease to be a violence at all if done with our consent. If someone drills a hole in one of your teeth, without your consent and with the intent of harm, then it does seem that she has done you a violence. But if you consent to someone drilling one of your teeth in order to repair decay then it does not seem to be a violence unless done carelessly, even if the drilling significantly violates the integrity of the tooth. In this section I want to think through these kinds of issues to see what effect they have on the organic/violated integrity understanding of violence as a putative problem of human behaviour.

The Notions of Trespass. Under a violated integrity understanding of violence, gross force is not necessary for an act, attitude or behaviour to be violent. Take, for example, the act of butting into or eavesdropping on a private conversation. The victims of these kinds of intrusion commonly experience them as a kind of violence even though the latter act may require no more force than staying still and listening. The notion of violence, operating in these examples, is clearest in the verb form 'violate', which is informed by the concept of breaching some sort of boundary. The idea here is that certain activities, spaces and information, are 'private property', they are 'owned' by the person whose integrity is protected by having them safe from the intrusion of others except by consent. Saying that persons have a right to privacy, for instance, is a way of narrating that privacy is valuable to the persons in question. The right puts a kind of cultural boundary, around certain activities, information and spaces centred on an individual, such that others have a duty to respect that boundary and so treat individual privacy as a valuable moral property under the ownership of the persons protected and nourished by it. Because privacy is so intimately connected with the persons, on whom it is centred, to disrespect the moral boundary is typically held to be synonymous with disrespecting the persons, and violations of privacy are experienced as violence against persons.
        The crossing of a culturally defined moral boundary, such as that defining privacy, is moral trespass. Moral trespass is wrong by definition according to whatever moral system is being invoked by the concept. But trespass, although necessarily a cultural notion, is not necessarily a moral concept because not all boundaries are moral boundaries. All integrates have boundaries which can be breached, as a matter of fact, to the detriment of the integrity at stake. Sticking a knife into a toe violates the integrity of the toe, as a matter of fact, whether or not so doing is well intentioned, malicious or accidental. Trespass, in this sense, may be defined as violent in fact (Q1), variously significant (Q2) and good, wrong or neither (Q3) depending on how it is evaluated.
        Violating the integrity of a toe with a knife is detrimental to the functioning of the toe, as a toe, even when it is valuable to the long term well being of the body as in, say, an operation to amputate a gangrenous toe. Violating an integrity with the intent of effect of harm, as a matter of fact, I will call 'factual trespass' although it is not the act of breaching a boundary which differs so much as the nature of the boundary breached. Moral trespass breaches a culturally defined moral boundary - it involves breaking the rules and/or doing wrong according to a morality - factual trespass breaches the culturally recognised boundary of any integrity, to the detriment of that integrity, whether that violation is right, wrong, or moral neutral. Bad manners are an instance of purely moral trespass, surgery is an instance of factual trespass; surgery on a consenting patient is an instance of factual trespass without moral trespass, cutting up a non consenting victim out of malice or cruelty would normally count as both a factual and moral trespass.
        A distinction, between factual and moral trespass, is analogous with that between bare, stock, restricted and common concepts of violence. A set of movements may be violent in fact without invoking any of the moral notions associated with violence. The motives and actions involved in hacking a cabbage to death out of fury or frustration can be substantially the same as those involved in hacking a person to death. We have little trouble in considering both to be violent in Q1 fact, and we may worry about a person who attacks cabbages in blind rage, but consider only the second to be truly violent in any moral sense because we consider persons to be significantly more valuable than cabbages and so do not generally accord moral boundaries [rights] to the integrity of cabbages. Similarly, the actions of a surgeon in violating someone's bodily integrity to save a life can be recognised as violating the boundaries of an integrity, in fact, without invoking of the moral disapprobation that would normally be associated with that same person performing the same action unnecessarily or out of spite.

This distinction, between moral and factual trespass, plays a role in analyses of the notion of consent as delineating the distinction between violent and non-violent boundary crossings into the integrity of personhood. As personhood is a cultural phenomenon it seems valid to distinguish the factual violation of personhood as 'personal trespass'. Under most moral systems the factual violation of someone's integrity as a person would be held to be moral trespass or, at the very least, more significantly violent than the factual trespass of other local integrates such as cabbages or mice. To see how this is so, assume that you live in a society which embraces the concepts of private space and private property. Assume further that this society defines your home as private. Now consider four cases of someone walking uninvited into your home when you are not there. In every case, the facts of the intrusion are identical, and no actual harm is suffered to your body or property. Only the degree of consent differs from case to case. In the first case the person is a close friend, and you freely consent to close friends treating your home as their own. In the second case the person is your landlord, who has obtained your reluctant general consent as a legal condition of your occupying her property. In the third case the person is just a curious stranger nosing around. In the fourth case the intruder is a criminal opportunist who sees, and seizes, a chance to enter your home with the intent of stealing anything portable and worthwhile. In the event he sees nothing he particularly wants and so leaves empty handed.
        In the first two cases (the close friend and the landlord) few folk in the society would consider you to have been violated; although those who object to the politics of landlord-tenant inequality might feel that you were justified in resenting your landlord's intrusion, legal rights or not (and, for me, it would tend to feel like a violation to the extent that the landlord is both being discourteous and asserting the value of her property over the value of her tenant). Most people in the society would tend to agree that for a stranger just to wander in and around your home uninvited was unambiguously some kind of violation. Opinion would be almost unanimous that the criminal had done you a wrong. Both of these last perceptions hinge neither around the concepts of harm or force, but of consent. So it would seem that consent can play a key role in delineating violence from non-violent intrusions on the integrity of persons.

Only persons can give or withhold consent. Many people object more to the risking of animals on a film set than to the risking of stunt people precisely because the animals, lacking personhood, are unable to consent to their participation. This idea can be reinforced by a number of examples showing how consent makes a difference to our perceptions of violence. There is, for example, a world of difference between having someone stick a knife in you, without your consent, and your consenting to having a surgeon cut you open - even if the surgeon does, in actual fact, do a lot more damage in the short term. Thus, prima facie, the notion of consent can seem central in delineating the harm consequent on violence from other harms not consequent on violence.
        This can be further shown by comparing various cases in which the force of intrusion and/or subsequent harms are identical but in one case consent is mutual while, in the other, it is not. A sadist, acting only for her own pleasure, strikes someone forcefully with a cane in a way that inflicts bruising and laceration (the struck person does suffer physical harm). In one instance the struck person does not want to be hit (and does not consent) but, in a second instance, the struck person is a masochist, getting a kind of pleasure from pain, who consents wholeheartedly. In both cases the facts of physical harm are identical. I tend to see both these behaviours as disturbed or unhealthy in some way, but I tend to evaluate only the first case as a clear moral trespass [unambiguously a violation of personal integrity] precisely because the struck person does not want to be violated.

The same sort of mechanism works even when no physical harm is done and thereby seems to make consent even more crucial than either harm or force to the concept of violence. Say, for example, that two men share the same late shift in a factory. One of them boasts that he likes the late shift because, when he gets home, his wife is always snugly asleep in bed and consents, in a somnambulist sort of way, to a bit of sleepy sex every night. One night he has to stay on after the shift and his mate takes advantage of this by going to his home and temporarily taking his place in the nuptial bed. The woman in question does not wake up enough to detect the deceit, she enjoys the act, and the man's fraud is not discovered until the real husband comes home and disturbs her for the second time. The man who does this is charged with, and found guilty of, rape by fraud. Rape is intuitively a violation even when, as in this case, there is no assault or assault like force used and no physical trauma suffered. The economy of evaluation, in this case, is not unlike we have already seen. The three questions we need to settle are again (Q1, factual definition) is this violence?, (Q2, factual evaluation) if so, how significant is it? and (Q3, moral evaluation) is it justified?
        Q1. Under the common concept/assault paradigm approach to evaluating human behaviours the rape of this woman may count as a wrong, and it may count as a significant wrong, but the act itself does not count as violent - the evaluation of the event rests wholly on Q3 values rather than Q1 facts. Under the lateral-organic approach it is recognised as a violence - the evaluation settles Q1 on the fact of personal trespass (of the victim's integrity having been violated). This illustrates a valid point. Having sex with someone, in one case with and, in the other case, without his or her consent, does seem to logically mark the second case off as a violence - even if, in all other respects, the two acts are identical and no physical trauma was suffered in either case. Personhood may be a cultural construct but it is still a fact, and violating that fact (personal trespass) is still a violence in fact. Consent - itself a cultural notion - marks trespass off from sharing and can subsequently be used to mark violence off from non violence, to answer the first question in fact, without reference to moral theory and even if the two acts are otherwise indistinguishable.
        Q2. Acknowledging that our common intuitions about rape do have a solid factual basis, recognised morally through the lateral branch of the violence family of concepts, then helps develop our evaluation of this case along plausible lines. Violating someone's integrity as a person is always significant and, subsequently, needs powerful justification.
        Q3. There is no moral measure by which the pleasure of one person can be held as valuable enough to warrant being paid for by the enduring pain of another. You would need to have a political double standard of evaluation to justify this man's behaviour. As double standards are unreasonable, the organic/violated integrity line of thought seems to give us the kind of mechanism we need to make sense of the woman's experience - her personhood has been violated (Q1), that is significant (Q2) and the violation is unjustifiable (not more valuable than the alternative) by any reasonable morality (Q3).

The organic/violated integrity line of thought gives a more satisfying evaluation of this case than does the common/assault line. I find it especially congenial in helping me to understand more of why the victims of this kind of violation experience the trespass in the way they tend to. Most of what I have read about human violence tends to focus almost exclusively on the violators rather than on their victims. This may be understandable given that we have conditioned ourselves to treat violators as significant ('P'). But has not proved as helpful as I would have liked, probably because addicts of violence have so little insight into their own violence. Perhaps more concentration on the victims may serve to generate some useful insights into what violence is and what it does. It seems plausible that if we can understand how the victims of violence experience their violation, and why, then perhaps we may have understood more about what violence is in itself.

That the organic/violated integrity line of thought has given a satisfying explanation of this case does not, of itself, prove anything. But it does indicate that the line of thought is worth pursuing further. For example, an act of rape need not differ in its physiological details from an act of sexual love, in fact it could be more physically gentle than some mutually vigorous love-making. Yet rape is plainly an act of violence. I would stress 'physical' here because, more often than not, the presence or absence of consent marks not only the presence or absence of violence, but also the presence or absence of harm. If we grant that the woman was violated, in the rape by fraud example, then we can easily see how two otherwise identical acts (one with her husband and one with his workmate) would differ not only in the fact of one being violent but in that, all things being equal, only the one so defined as 'violent' is really likely to prove harmful. And it is not difficult to imagine that rape by fraud could be extremely harmful to the victim's personhood in spite of its physical innocuousness.
        This harm would only accrue if, in fact, the woman knew what had happened. If the fraud had not been discovered then presumably, again with all other things being equal, the woman would have suffered no harm; had she suffered any subsequent harm, such as a venereal infection, then the odds are that the fraud would be discovered. On this example it seems plausible that not only the violence of an act, but also the harm associated with violence, can hinge on consent and, thereby, on personhood. ¹¹

Violence, Integrity and Consent. One problem, in taking consent to be a linchpin in any concept of violence against persons, is that it can appear to lead to some odd results. Lawbreakers are typically punished without being asked for, or giving, their consent to the punishment. Does the lack of consent make all punishment violent? Some people who choose to kill themselves may be presumed to be consenting to their own deaths. If consent is a key factor, differentiating violence from non-violent intrusions on personal integrity, then it seems to follow that suicide is not a kind of violence. But suicide does seem to be a kind of violence - it is a violence by someone against themselves (violence against their own bodily integrity and their own personhood) or, in the case of voluntary euthanasia, a case of invited violation by another. Volunteer soldiers are often injured or killed in battle, and they know this when they volunteer. They could thus be seen as consenting to their own violation. If violations do not count as violence whenever the victim consents then, on any lateral definition of violence, it seems that combat between volunteers is not a violence. This is implausible and needs to be thought of in more detail.

3.1 Punishment. If wrongdoers do not consent to being punished for their wrongdoing then does that make punishment a violence?

Answer: Yes. The only interesting question about punishment concerns whether or not punishment is justified (Q3). The organic paradigm has nothing to say on the moral justification or otherwise of punishment. It does, however, seem to indicate that punishing wrongdoers in proportion to their crimes may be a less violent option, in fact, than either unfairly punitive regimes or failing to institute regimes which make violence unprofitable for the violent (see Social Morality and Law for a 'renovated' theory of punishment as deprofitabilising violence).

Commentary: The logic of punishment has to do with cultural narratives offering moral, political, religious and/or social justifications for treating wrongdoers in ways that would not otherwise be justified but which are considered legitimate because of some behaviour by the person being punished. As with all human narratives the notion of punishment is frequently invoked maliciously and/or unreasonably. The malicious or unreasonable invocation of 'punishment', as an excuse for savagery, would obviously count as part of any putative problem of human violence. But the issue I want to address is the possibility that even 'proper' uses of punishment can count as violence. To this end I will consider punishment as properly involving a moral logic such that the punished person is treated in a manner which would be wrong, under an ethic, but which is held to be justified (more valuable than the alternatives) as a response to some violation, of that same ethic, by the person being punished. Some people argue that the lack of consent, by those being punished, entails that all punishment is a violence. Others argue that consent to punishment is implicit in choosing to break law in the first place - when someone breaks a law that they know carries a penalty if they are caught then, perhaps, they can be said to have implicitly consented to the punishment. What could be said here is that an integrity is violated, and that violation could be significant (depending on the punishment meted out) but that, depending on your theory of punishment, it may or may not be justified (more valuable than the alternatives).

Under an organic/violated integrity understanding of violence, that punishment involves violating the integrity of the punished, by hurting them or depriving them of certain liberties and/or property without their consent, is not in dispute. Thus to punish someone does count as a violence under Q1. The violence is significant to whatever extent the integrity of the person being punished is violated. Severe sentences count as a significant violence under Q2 evaluations. Because the understanding is not a moral theory, and nothing in the understanding entails that any violence is or is not morally justified, it does not address Q3 and offers no help in answering questions concerning moral justifications for punishment. It is, however, helpful in spelling out the logic of any given punishment in terms of that punishment being more or less violent, as a matter of Q1 fact, than whatever alternatives are available.

The logic of the organic/violated integrity understanding of violence entails that, because society and personhood are each integrates integrated with each other, all constituent members of a society are affected by any violation of the integrity of that society and who counts as a constituent member of a society is defined by the facts of relationship rather than by the political values of law, prejudice or ideology. Crimes against persons, property and relationships do violate the integrity of persons in society and, because everything touches everything else, any local violation of any part of an integrity counts as a violence against the whole and all within it. Because everyone in a society is, to some extent, a victim of any violence within that society, everyone in that society, acting alone or in concert with others, can respond to violence in ways that are more or less violent. If the victims of crime respond to criminal violence in ways designed to defend/heal/restore integrity then that response is, in fact, less violent than a response which either contributes to the contagion of violence or does nothing and so leaves the violation unaddressed. Only if integrity is valuable will defending, healing and/or restoring integrity be better (more valuable) than allowing or increasing its violation.

To see how this is so imagine a case in which we are members of a society in which someone has stolen a valued possession from someone else who was not individually strong enough to prevent the theft and is not now strong enough to recover the stolen property. The theft, done without consent of the primary victim, violates integrity in several ways and thereby counts as a violence in fact. The primary victim of this violence is so placed that if the collateral victims (the other members of his society) do not act on his behalf then he must simply endure his violation. The thief is unwilling to restore the property, or to stop thieving, so that only a coercive action of some kind will secure the integrity of the victim and his property. But the criminal does not consent to coercive action against her profiting from theft.
        This is one of those situations in which our choice is not simply to violate or not to violate. An integrity has been violated, at the expense of the integrity and to the profit of the violator, and that violence simply will be addressed or not. If the violence is not addressed then (a) the integrity of the victim remains violated and (b) we are sanctioning the profitability of violence and should not be surprised if the contagion of violence continues and even spreads. If the violation is addressed then the thief's freedom to profit from theft will be violated (and, because the thief does not consent to that, it will be violated coercively). Our only choice is between which violation we will support and, whether we like it or not, that choice will be made according to values rather than facts; if we value the victim's relationship with the property and our own property rights then we will violate the thief, and if we value the thief's relationship with the property and/or the convenience of indifference then we will violate the victim and our own ongoing interests as members of a property owning society.
        Under the organic paradigm, indifference is shown to be more violent than caring because caring maintains/repairs integrity while indifference allows it to unravel; a society which neglects those who are not strong enough to maintain their own standing is a more violent society than one which actively tries to maintain the integrity. It follows that a caring society, which institutes systems to protect its vulnerable members from violence, is a less violent society than one which does not. So imagine now that this crime has taken place in a society which values integrity (which is to value non violence) and has instituted a representative procedure, to protect its members from violation, in the form of a police force and legal system. Such a system simply must employ coercive mechanisms if it is to maintain the integrity of a society against those who consent to violate that integrity and do not consent to being restrained. The organic paradigm of violence does not morally justify either coercion or non coercion, but it does entail that to minimise the violation of integrity is less violent, even if it is done coercively, than it would be to either leave the violence unchecked or to compound it by some kind of excessive response. The only reason that theft endures is because it is profitable to thieves in some way. A police/legal system, which acts so as to make theft unprofitable to the thief, by punishing theft in proportion to the scope and quality of the thievery committed, is acting so as to preserve integrity and is therefore less violent than one which either 'overcharges' thieves (through extreme punishments) or 'undercharges' thieves (through making little or no endeavour to punish theft). Keeping a balance of the crime and the response, with a radical bias in favour of minimising violation, is more likely to maintain/enhance the integrity of a society than is an imbalance either way. If this is the rationale behind our narratives of crime and punishment, and we punish criminals in keeping with this narrative, then punishment, although still a significant violence, will tend to be less violent than any other alternatives open to us. If our narratives of punishment follow other rationales then they are likely to be more violent one way or the other (e.g., either in favour of property owners or in favour of property takers).

3.2 Suicide, Euthanasia and Self Sacrifice. If someone consents to his own death, does that mean that the terminal violation of his integrity is not a violence under the organic paradigm?

Answer: No. Suicide, euthanasia and self-sacrifice all count as significant violations of integrity under an organic paradigm. As in the case of punishment, the only interesting question, for any self-destruction or self-sacrifice, concerns Q3 justifications of the violation. Justification is a moral or political matter and the personhood-integrity understanding, being only a factual thesis, is silent on such issues. It does, however, raise doubts about whether it is appropriate to settle issues of justification by arguments about who owns the suicide's life.

Commentary: The dynamics of consent in terminally self-destructive acts are seldom, if ever, clear enough for it to be certain that in any given suicide genuinely and freely consented to die in fact. Some suicides are clearly deranged, some are merely irrational and more than a few are malicious (it is not uncommon for suicides to be arranged for dramatic effect and apparently with the intent of punishing those whose supposed fault it is that the suicide was unhappy). Many more suicides, I suspect, are actually withdrawing their consent to going on living in an uncongenial way, which they feel otherwise powerless to change, rather than consenting to die as such; and that seems to be a slightly different rationale. It may be held that withdrawing consent, from a life which has become seriously uncongenial, is equivalent with consenting to die given that living and dying are apparently exclusive of each other. But that reasoning overlooks the coercive effect of many kinds of suffering. If someone hands over the key to a safe, because the alternative is continued torture, then we do not normally consider that person to have 'consented' to hand over any valuables in the safe, even though the loss of those valuables was entailed in handing over the key. This is because the element of coercion overrides the notion of cultural freedom on which consent depends. Similarly, if a suicide hands over his life, because the alternative is to live in some kind of distress which makes life not worth living (an inescapably subjective judgement), then it is not clear that the suicide 'consented' to die as such even though death was entailed in escaping the suffering; the coercive disvalue of distress once again is a kind of 'gun to the head' which overrides the notion of freedom on which consent depends.
        Those who freely choose to sacrifice their lives, for the sake of some person, persons or ideal which they value, seem to be following a similar kind of rationale. It is actually the value of what is saved, rather than of what is lost, that motivates the self-destructive action. The self-sacrificer does not consent to violate his own integrity so much as to respect the integrity of what is valued in a circumstance which entails the violation of his own integrity as a by-product of the attempt.

Those suicides whose integrity as persons is already violated, through distress, alienation, malice or mental derangement, cannot be said to reasonably consent to their own deaths. But if, for the sake of argument, we grant that it is possible that some suicides do genuinely and freely consent to their own deaths, for whatever reason, then the questions arises - is suicide a violence in such cases?
        In the case of rape by fraud the absence of consent marked an act off as a significant violation when, had consent been given, it would not have been violent at all. The presence of consent in suicide, however, does not as clearly mark it off as not violent. Regardless of the quality of consent, and regardless of what moral or political values are attributed to the act, suicides do violate their own integrity in fact. Consenting suicide also typically entails some kind of moral trespass against those affected by the suicide's self violation: friends, family and others - such as those who find the body and/or have to clean up the mess - often suffer varying degrees of distress or loss as a result of a suicide. There seems to be little or no moral trespass against the suicide herself, as would be measured by the absence of consent. Only if violating personhood is wrong, in and of itself, could the suicide be said to have trespassed against herself in any other moral sense. But, whatever the case in regards moral trespass, there is still a significant factual trespass as measured by the presence of significant harm to integrity. This means that, even if suicides genuinely consent to die and even if they hold an ethic which allows them the moral right to kill themselves, suicide is still a violence in terms of Q1.

Suicide is also a significant violence, in terms of Q2, given that it seriously violates a significant integrity. And suicide remains a significant violence even if no gross force is used, as when the means of euthanasia is an overdose of painkillers or the means of self violence is an overdose of sleeping pills or carbon monoxide poisoning, all of which are physically gentle and painless means of ending life. Integrity can be violated in a gentle manner, but the end does not cease to be a significant violation in fact just because the means to that end is not violent, any more than it ceases to be violent in fact just because it is desirable, morally justified or otherwise valuable in some way. Suicide is obviously a less significant violence than murder by a factor of the victim's consent. The intention and effects of both murder and suicide may be the same if successful, and both would require a fair degree of justification under most ethical systems. But the absence of victim consent in murder, and its presence in consenting suicide, does not mark one off as violent and the other as not violent; what it alters is the Q2 evaluation of significance.
        By an analogous economy the unintentional or accidental killing of oneself or another would also count as significant in the harm done, although the harm done, to the family and friends of someone killed in an accident, seems to be often experienced as less severe than that suffered by those involved with suicide or murder victims. In such cases we would want to be able to assure ourselves that the death really was unintended and genuinely accidental. To the extent that someone is violated through the negligence of others we would require justifications in proportion to that negligence. The negligent person might not have intended the violation achieved, but most ethics would still require some sort of moral accountability from someone who is factually responsible for enabling harm. ¹²  Violations of integrity that are beyond the control of persons would plausibly count as being of a kind with those by non persons or impersonal agencies, this time by a factor of non intention and/or no factual responsibility.

The issue of consent, in a suicide, seems to affect mainly Q3 justifications of the act. If consent is genuine then suicide may be morally innocuous or even valuable. But the act itself still remains a significant violence through involving the terminal violation of a person's integrity and various degrees of moral trespass/harm to others in their relationships. Traditionally the Q3 justification of suicide has hinged around cultural notions of property rights. Some may rail against the selfishness of suicides, or despise suicides as cowardly, but the debate most often comes down to questions of who 'owns' the life being disposed of. If our lives belong to God, our tribe, the State, or are properly submitted to some karmic mechanism, then they are not ours to dispose of as we wish. In such cases suicide is held to be unjustified. But if we own our own lives, and we have a right to dispose of our own property as we wish, then we are morally justified in suicide just so long as killing ourselves does not harm anyone else.
        That it is actually possible, to ever kill ourselves without harming others, is doubtful. Under the assault paradigm, which isolates people from the web of social connections which define and sustain their personhood, it is relatively easy to overlook or discount both the effect of suicide on others and the effect of others on a suicide. Economically Fascist societies, for example, which prejudice sick, old or economically unproductive folk towards feeling worthless and/or guilty about 'being a burden', may have significantly violated the integrity of candidates for euthanasia long before issues of consent even arise. It is also evident that many suicides are seriously alienated from community, and feel that they do not 'belong', for some time before dying their lonely deaths. Thus incidents of suicide, like incidents of assault, could well be symptoms of already violated integrates. That kinds of suicide often occur in clusters seems also to indicate that the effects of suicide could be significant in the contagion of violence. Under the organic paradigm, which understands violence crucially in terms of personal and social integrity, what is otherwise dismissed as 'collateral harm' or 'a side effect' becomes far more visible. If these facts are as significant as the paradigm suggests they are then acknowledging them could significantly increase our understanding of what is actually going on in a society that embodies frequent suicides.

Once again the organic paradigm offers no values or rules for settling moral issues, but it can alter our awareness of what facts are at stake in settling ethical unease about suicide. For example, a debate about the ethics of euthanasia, pursued under the organic paradigm of violence, would give far more prominence to social myths and narratives of human worth, underlying the debate, than would otherwise be the case.¹³  It would also pay much closer attention to the effects of legalising euthanasia on medical staff, other patients and the wider community, than would a similar debate pursued under an assault paradigm.
        Perhaps more significantly, the organic paradigm of violence raises serious questions concerning the cultural notion of property rights over our own lives. It is a common assumption, by those contemplating suicide that "It's my life to dispose of how I wish". The organic/violated integrity understanding shows this assumption, where it is held, to be incomplete in its facts and of dubious validity in its reasoning. But the same understanding makes it just as difficult for anyone else to claim ownership of a suicide's life. Indeed, the understanding suggests that perhaps talk of who 'owns' a person's life is not an appropriate language for deciding the ethics of suicide at all.
        The organic/violated integrity understanding of violence, as a factual thesis, entails no moral notions of ownership one way or the other. The factual understanding, however, seems initially sympathetic towards an ethic which couches respect for personal integrity in terms of each person enjoying primary ownership over their own lives; the notions of liberty, power and personal responsibility, for example, fit best with the idea that I own my own life. But the understanding simultaneously alerts us to the fact that, because persons are not culturally autonomous in fact (because they are essentially part of a social matrix), whatever affects an individual also affects the matrix of which they are part. The suicide is not disposing only of her or his own life. The suicide is also disposing of other folk's personhood and well being through the effect which suicide has on the relational matrix in which he or she lives. As a matter of reasoning, property rights are moral notions attainable only within and through the cultural milieu of personhood. The suicide would have life neither as homo sapiens nor as a person unless it had been given to her by others. Without her social matrix the suicide would not even know that she had a life or had an option to end that life. She certainly could not appeal to notions of property. In other words, the mere fact of being able to resort to argument itself contradicts the argument's central claim (the 'my' in 'it's my life' is dependent on the very 'our' which the suicide denies).

Consent may not be assumed when the suicide is mentally deranged or in extremis of terminal pain. Someone who undertakes a suicidal defence of others, or who possesses information and, facing torture he believes he will succumb to, kills himself to prevent the information being used against others, is arguably dying in self-sacrifice rather than self-service. But the great majority of suicides occur in situations which fall far short of such extremes. It is evident that suicides typically kill themselves for their own sakes rather than for the sake of others; either in cowardice, despair (to avoid some personal disvalue such as shame, loneliness, pain or grief) and/or in self-righteousness (to punish others who they feel have not adequately acknowledged their worth). It is also evident that such suicides do not harm only themselves.

It is predictable, from the organic paradigm, that any violence against a personal nexus in the web of human relationships is going to have a destructive effect on other 'knots' in the web, proportional to their proximity and involvement (the closer we are to a person, the more we are affected by what she or he does). This prediction is confirmed by the near universal testimony of those related to a suicide. Except in some of those extreme cases, mentioned above, suicides do leave a legacy of guilt, bewilderment, grief and distress that is both hurtful and harmful. Evidence suggests that, in many cases, it is actually the punitive effects of this legacy which the suicide is seeking to achieve. Certainly it seems to be a common theme in suicide notes, and in the testimony of those rescued from suicide attempts, that the suicide wants her death to provoke regret and/or guilt in others whom she feels have devalued her life. Even in the extreme cases there is consequent harm to others (and the cases are put aside only because they do not unambiguously embody the "it's my life" line of reasoning). The suicide's justification, that "It's my life" is, therefore, fully of a kind with the various lies which we all tell ourselves in justification of our violent uses of power. This does not entail that, because the individual cannot claim unambiguous ownership of her own life, her life must therefore automatically belong to God, the state, Life (with a capital 'L') or the community to which she owes her personhood. The traditional dichotomy, which assumes that if I do not own my life then it must be owned by some other agency assumes that life must be owned by somebody. This assumption, although nearly universal, seems quite unfounded; why should we assume that a life needs to 'belong' to anyone or anything in the first place? Debates about ownership have traditionally hinged around institutionalised violence; with citizens claiming self ownership as a defence against exploitation by those religious, political, economic and ideological 'authorities' who effectively deny citizens self ownership precisely in order to exploit them. But it is hard to see how any ethic, attaching values to the facts as revealed by the organic/violated integrity understanding, could reasonably attribute the ownership of a life to anyone (least of all to anything as ethically dubious as an 'authority'). And it is hard to see why we should bother with attributions of self ownership in the case of suicide unless some kind of euthanasia regime is to be instituted (in which case a narrative of self ownership would be needed to counter the threat to our lives posed by the pressures of medical and/or financial convenience). At best, the facts support an ethic under which it is recognised that we each hold our lives in trust to all the other persons in the species wide web of our personhood (and to whom we owe the debt of our personhood). If that is the case then no one has a right to violate a life, including her own, and everyone has an obligation to treat all persons, including themselves, as valuable. If this is so then the ethic, best supported by an organic/violated integrity paradigm, would seem to be one which recognises that ownership is simply not an appropriate moral language for deciding Q3 questions concerning suicide.

3.3 Volunteers and Consent to Risk. If warriors willingly enter into battle, knowing the risks involved and with every chance to defend themselves, does an organic paradigm of violence evaluate this as not violent or, at least, as less violent than battles involving those who do not consent to fight?

Answer: A life-and-death conflict involving only willing volunteers would be evaluated by the organic paradigm as less violent than one involving unwilling participants (although both kinds of combat would count as significant violations of integrity). The paradigm remains silent on moral (Q3) justifications of mutual violence but alerts us to two important facts. The first is the probability that a willingness to kill and be killed indicates that there is a problem of human violence which raises serious doubts about the quality of any consent supposedly given. The second is that all human violence is an ethical (values driven) activity which can be properly understood, as a fact, only if the values motivating the violence are taken into account.

Commentary: At the time of writing this, and especially in the face of the way technology has made wars impersonal, it has become fashionable in my own society to overtly disapprove of war. That, historically, is very much a minority view. For virtually all human history, and for most conflicts right up until the present day, wars have been held by mutual, and often enthusiastic, consent. In hunter-warrior societies, combat was and is eagerly sought after as the ultimate validation of personhood. If an enemy is not at hand then hunter-warriors will go looking for one, politics will manufacture one if necessary, and there has evidently never been any shortage of folk willing to assume that role. Absence of consent would clearly mark off military combat as gross violence. But if consent is significant enough to mark off some otherwise violent actions, as not violent at all, then it may be asked whether or not combat by mutual consent still counts as a significant violence.
        Parallels may be drawn here between mutually consenting combat and warrior like contact sports. Many contact sports, for example boxing or rugby football, are violent in the bare sense of employing forceful (and combat derived) rituals towards the end of winning a contest by beating the opposition. These sports can also involve serious risk of injury and even death for participants, albeit on a much lesser scale than warfare. The organic/violated integrity understanding would not prima facie seem to evaluate such activities as significantly violent in themselves except to the extent that integrity is violated in fact. Physical integrity is nearly always violated in boxing and is often violated in other sports. This is factual trespass. Personhood would not be violated, except in cases of coercion, because there is no moral trespass where consent is freely given and mutual. In this the organic/violated integrity line of thought accords with the common sense evaluation of contact sports. But if this logic is followed into more serious ritual violence, such as warfare between volunteer soldiers, then the understanding seems to part company with common sense through implying that war is not a significant violence unless non volunteers and/or their property is harmed. The five month battle of the Somme for example, begun in July of 1916, resulted in at least 790,000 casualties. It is hard to see such a battle as being less than significantly violent just because the killed and wounded were all volunteers who had enthusiastically consented to fight. The battle itself soon killed that enthusiasm and, for the rest of the First World War, the conscription meant that consent could not be assumed. But the fact remains that, at the time that the battle for the Somme was first joined, virtually everyone there (on both sides) had expressed consent to a military showdown; most believed wholeheartedly in the rightness of the war and the glory of falling in battle, and all the attackers had volunteered for service. Thus, if consent is an essential ingredient of violence, then the Somme battle was not violent in any but the senses of involving (a) gross and impetuous force, (b) significant harm through the extensive violation of physical integrity, and (c) coercive taxation regimes which extorted property from citizens, without getting individual consent and under threat of legal sanction, to finance the whole affair.
        Evaluating the violence of mutually consenting combatants, under an organic/violated integrity understanding of violence, shares features of both suicide and punishment. Certainly it is easy enough, from our perspective, to see battles like the Somme as much like mass suicide as mass murder. But, unlike suicide proper, the volunteer soldiers cannot be said to be explicitly consenting to their own violation. Soldiers typically hope that they will survive the wars in which they participate. The consent here is more like that of the criminal who explicitly consents only to do wrong but who can be held as having implicitly consented to the risk of being caught and punished. Criminals can not be said to consent to suffering personal harm as a punishment; indeed, having only become criminals by violating the rights, persons and/or property of others, such folk are notoriously and vociferously over-sensitive about any real or supposed violation of their own rights, persons or property. Like any risk taker, and like volunteer soldiers, they consent only to the risk of personal harm.

Consent to the risk of harm is a feature of many human activities. Consider two boxers consenting to fight each other. As in the case of war, the pressures put on young folk by violent societies makes it dubious just how 'free' this consent really is in fact. But, again for the sake of argument, we can consider theoretical cases in which consent is mutual. What these pugilists consent to is not to being beaten up as such. They consent only to the risk of being beaten up in pursuit of a goal which they consider to be worth the risk. This is much the same as criminals consenting to the risk of capture or any risk taker consenting to the risks taken. People like taking risks, they like climbing mountains or driving fast vehicles or jumping out of aeroplanes and so on. Few recent wars have been able to compete with the ongoing carnage on the world's roads and highways in terms of persistent death and injury, but it is evident that most folk, given the choice, prefer the risks of private transport to the inconvenience of the alternatives. If you climb a mountain then you risk the distinct possibility of falling and being killed or injured. But climbing a mountain is not synonymous with consenting to actually being killed or injured any more than choosing to use a public road entails consenting to be killed or injured. It can only be taken as implying consent to the possibility of being killed or injured. If consenting to the risk of being killed was tantamount to consenting to actually being killed then killing a motorist or mountain climber would not count as murder or manslaughter but only as assisted suicide. The reason it does not is because motorists and mountain climbers do not consent to being killed but only to the risk of being killed in the pursuit of some other, and very specific, end which she or he values. Volunteer soldiers, it seems to me, can be seen in much the same light. They consent to attempting the violation of others but only to the risk of being violated themselves. In the case of conscripts, socially coerced pseudo consent, and the violation of non-combatants (even as an 'accident of war'), combat is unambiguously a violence under any branch of the violence family of concepts. Deliberately violating the integrity of those who have consented to the risk of violation still counts as a significant violence, under the organic/violated integrity answer to Q1 and Q2, by a factor of how extensive is the violation and how grossly the integrity is harmed. Using an enormous range of weaponry to shatter the lives of 790,000 volunteers is a fairly extensive and gross violation of integrity.

Many otherwise innocuous acts can count as violence, if performed without consent, because they violate a moral integrity. But this does not entail that the mere presence of consent automatically makes it alright to violate someone's integrity. This is so whether the consent is explicit (as in suicide) or implicit (as in risk taking). In present-day New Zealand, for example, it must be said that every woman who walks the streets alone after dark takes a known and real risk of being violated. Because the risk is known it must be said that any woman voluntarily walking alone after dark is implicitly consenting to the risk of violation. But it cannot be said that, in such cases, women consent to the risk of harm in the same way that boxers, rugby players, motorists and mountain climbers consent to the risk of being harmed. Nor is it clear that, even if a woman does consent to the risk, violating her would be justified in the same way that, say, tackling an opponent in rugby is justified.
        Part of the difference here is that a woman, going for an evening stroll in the park, does not consent to there being a risk in the same way that pugilists and rugby players consent to there being a risk when they enter a boxing ring or sports field. A boxer consents to her opponent trying to hurt her in fact, a woman walking in her local park does not consent to someone in that park trying to hurt her. The fact of risk is such that a woman climbing into a boxing ring is far more likely to be hurt than she is if she walks in the park after dark, although the degree of hurt is likely to be significantly less traumatic than in the second case; it is the value, attached to the risk, which changes - pugilists believe that their opponents are justified in trying to attack them, very few women believe that muggers, molesters and rapists are justified in trying to attack women walking in their local streets and parks. But there is more to the difference than that. A woman driving a car on New Zealand roads, for example, faces even greater risk of injury or death than she does by walking alone after dark, the risk of trauma is as great, and she does not consent to there being a risk, but there is still intuitively a difference between consenting to the risk of being hurt or killed by other road users and consenting to the risk of being hurt or killed by other park users.
        The difference here becomes more clear if we consider a range of related risk consenting activities. For example, mountain climbers consent to the risk of non intentional violation by impersonal agencies (gravity, cold and so on); bullfighters consent to the risk of being intentionally violated by an animal which they goad into attack; criminals consent to the risk of being caught and punished, even if they do not consent to actually being punished; rugby players consent to the risk of violation by other players who do not intend harm per se (hurting other players is not the point of the game) but who intend using forceful means to achieve victory; pugilists consent to much the same risk but in the knowledge that the other players will be deliberately and specifically trying to violate their integrity; road users consent to the risk that other drivers may harm or kill them either accidentally, carelessly, or just through stupidity, incompetence and/or in the process of intentionally breaking the road rules; volunteer soldiers risk greater intentional harms by more serious opponents. In all these cases the risk of violation is real, and consented to, as a potential price to pay for a valued goal (excitement, winning a competition, fame, conquest, defence of kin, personal convenience, the defence or imposition of an ideal, or whatever). In many cases these values may have a coercive function such that free and informed consent cannot be taken for granted. A person whose home, kin or ideals are threatened by invasion, for example, may 'volunteer' to risk her or his life in their defence without consenting to there being a risk in the first place. But it is only once we get to a situation in which persons intend violent acts that we begin to intuit that there might be a 'problem' of violence. This is in part because that a person intends to violate significantly alters the qualitative measure of violence; gravity may kill a mountain climber just as dead as a bullet but that the bullet was manufactured and fired with the intent to violate integrity alters the quality of the violation.

This observation introduces what is probably the most significant factor in our intuitions concerning the difference between the risk faced by a woman walking alone after dark and the risks faced by the same woman driving a vehicle on the public highways. Persons, being evaluating integrates, are value oriented in their behaviour. Human beings are a person-species and consequently all the behaviours of human persons are value oriented both in motivation (we act in pursuit of value or in escape of disvalue) and in evaluation (when we agree with the values motivating or being embodied in a behaviour then we evaluate the behaviour as good, right or justified). This matters because it entails that all human violence is a values driven and rule governed activity. It is because the behaviour of rapists, muggers and molesters is intentionally violent, in a way that is ethically different to the intentions of pugilists, rugby players and road users, that we intuit a difference in the associated relationships of risk and consent. War is a significant violence, not just in the harm achieved but in the degree of violation intended. The person who attacks a citizen using a public facility, such as a street or park, intends a significant violation of personal integrity that is of a different ethical quality to that of a careless motorist, an aggressive boxer or even a volunteer soldier in combat with other volunteers. It is the difference in ethical quality that motivates our intuitions about the differences in the quality of violence. On this count both the mountain climber, and the woman taking a walk through her local park, differ from the other examples in that neither intends to violate. The difference for the woman is that she faces the risk of fully malicious intentional violation (unlike the mountain climber), without a reciprocal intent to violate (unlike the pugilist) and without the protective ritual of shared rules consented to by rugby players.
        This again suggests that to say 'violence is harmful because it is wrong' is closer to the truth than is the claim that violence is wrong because it is harmful. It may also be observed that if violent behaviours are pursued because they are believed to be valuable (a question of fact), but that the violation of integrity is not valuable (a question of ethics), then we have the makings of a problem of violence.
        Similar considerations could apply to those who consent to their own deaths or to intentional harm against themselves. Helping a suicide, or performing an unnecessary operation on a hypochondriac or whatever, may not be justified simply because the violation occurs with the consent of the person to be harmed or killed. What the organic/violated integrity understanding alerts us to, in these cases, is the distinct possibility that any consent to self violation indicates an already violated person - only those already violated would consent to (value) further violation. Such logic may be reasonable in anticipating violated integrity. A person who values life for its quality and does not fear death, for example, may draw up a Living Will stating their wish not to be kept artificially alive in the event of being incapacitated by accident or extreme illness. This does not consent to death per se so much as withhold consent to being forced to live with certain consequences of already violated integrity. It also follows the general rule that only already violated integrity can make it valuable to violate integrity further. But I would feel profoundly uncomfortable about violating, say, a motorist's or distressed person's integrity, and as profoundly sceptical of any ethic which justified deliberately violating another, just because he or she had consented either to the risk of being violated or even to being violated in fact.

In all of the above cases the essentially moral notion, of consent, is running parallel to the factual notion of violating, or violence intending, force and the similarly bifurcated notion of harm (which can also be seen in both moral and non moral senses because persons can suffer significant harm to their moral, cultural and/or personal integrity as well as physical harm to their biological integrity). What the contents shift between, or merge, are the non moral notion of force (bare violence as a means to a valued end), the notion of factual trespass and the notion of moral trespass - all of which can differ in degree as well as in kind. We can accept that there may be no moral trespass when volunteers fight each other, just so long as the consent is uncoerced. But there is still a destructive trespass, in the purely factual sense, when volunteers maim and/or kill each other. If this trespass is embraced, in a deluded belief that it is valuable, then we would have a problem of violence. An organic/violated integrity understanding is silent on whether or not such a belief is deluded. But that our perceptions of violence shift, in a way indicating that human violence is, in fact, an ethical activity, is not just a product of the way the way violence is defined under the understanding. We all use the words 'violent' and 'violence' in ordinary speech, and if we pay attention to the way the words are used then it soon becomes clear that each user imputes shifting contents to the concept, and this slipperiness inhibits communication.

The fact of force can, itself, have moral connotations. A wrongful use of force will be experienced, by the person who believes it to be wrongful, as more violent than would the same degree of force if used for a purpose of which the person approves. The notion of excessive force denotes the going beyond some kind of boundary. That some boundary exists around an integrity, and was exceeded, may be no more than a factual issue. If the value achieved by exceeding the boundary was not sufficient, to justify going beyond the boundary, then the term 'excessive' picks up the values connotation of moral disapprobation (to say the force was excessive becomes a way of saying that it should not have gone beyond the boundary which, in fact, it did). Similarly 'trespass' can be seen non morally as the mere fact of crossing some boundary that exists. That such a trespass did or did not take place can be settled quite independently of considerations about whether the trespass was justified or not.
        The personhood-integrity understanding of violence does not commit me to saying that the absence of consent makes violence morally wrong. What is asserted is only that human violence is an ethical activity, consent is a function of personhood, the violation of our integrity as persons makes violence against persons significant, and that a values driven intent to violate integrity makes violence a problem if integrity is valuable.
        Acting invasively without consent is one of the ways in which our integrity as persons is violated. Thus it is also one of the ways in which we are significantly violent. It is not the only way. Acting invasively with the intent or effect of harm is one of the ways in which any integrity is violated. Thus it is also one of the ways in which we are significantly violent. The point seems to be that, whereas quantitative harm is the primary measure of significance over the violation of or by non personhood integrity, consent, harm and intent all play significant roles in the violation of or by persons. Only if the integrity of a person is intruded on, both with consent (a qualitative, cultural component) and without harm (a quantitative component) is there apparently no violence done. Consenting intrusions into private places or private information, for example, is an activity which meets these criteria - what is done with consent is not a violence, what is done without consent is both a violence and a harm to personhood.
        Both the absence of consent and the presence of harm can each, alone, make the difference between an intrusion into someone's integrity being more or less violent. Sometimes the presence or absence of consent can make the difference between whether the intrusion is harmful or not. The absence of consent can make some, otherwise innocuous, intrusions violent (as in the rape by fraud example). The presence of consent does not automatically make otherwise violent acts innocuous - that seems to depend more on the degree of factual trespass, the amount of harm intended or achieved and the values which drive the trespass.
        The degrees of consent, harm and moral intent correlate to the degrees of violence and the degrees of significance. If the person consents to the intrusion explicitly (such as when you consent to surgery) or implicitly (such as when you volunteer to fight), then any degree of violence depends primarily on the quality of the consent, the ethical quality of the intent of the violator, and the amount of any harm done. A surgeon who violates biological integrity in order to improve someone's quality of life may, in fact, cut a person to the same degree as a mugger or surgeon who cuts someone purely for monetary gain. How violent the act is depends as much on the intent of the violator as it does on the quality of any consent given or withheld and the degree of harm done. Thus, in the presence of consent and in the absence of malice, the fact and degree of violence is evaluated in the same way it is over non persons. In the absence of consent, and in the presence of a malicious and/or irrational intent, another level of significance is added to the evaluation.

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Notes:

9. See Out of the Caves 3.23 or 'Evaluating Violence' in About Human Violence for my explanation and justification of this formula.

10. There are those who variously protest that human survival is not worth the price that non humans pay for it in terms of our violence. But, given that we all must violate to survive, these protesters are of two kinds only: the insincere and the dead - and neither of these need to be taken seriously in the following argument.

11. Considering this and similar cases, the usual Naturalistic Fallacy - that violence is wrong because it is harmful - seems to be turnable on its head. Violence is not wrong because it is harmful but it may well be harmful because it is wrong; to violate the value of an integrity may thereby violate the integrity in fact.

12. Moral systems attribute moral responsibility for a harm to those whose acts or omissions are factually responsible for that harm. Political systems frequently do not (preferring to juggle moral or legal responsibility according to how high 'up' or 'down' a hierarchy a factually responsible person is (Caves 6.3). See Caves 2.312 for the distinction between factual and moral responsibility.

13. The social myth which reduces persons to 'human resources', for example, could be a significant factor in both acceptance (by some folk) and unease (by others) about legalising euthanasia because reducing human beings to resources both makes it easy to justify euthanasia as efficient and to write off unprofitable persons as not deserving costly care. An organic paradigm of violence would give such myths a prominence in keeping with their actual significance. Without the aid of an organic paradigm the wider effect of the reductionist 'human resources' myth seems largely to have escaped notice.

Evil: In Out of the Caves, I use the general term 'disvalue' for any state of harm or suffering that is detrimental to the value of any integrity. I reserve the specifically moral term 'evil' for states of disvalue (harm, suffering, cruelty, humiliation, violence, deception, cheating, spite and so on) that are, directly or indirectly, inflicted by persons. This distinction is idiosyncratic and, in general usage, the terms 'evil', 'bad', 'wrong' and 'disvalue' are often used synonymously. There is, however, a quality about evil that underwrites a tendency to reserve the term, when applied to human uses of power, for particular kinds of disvalue. It is this 'quality of evil' which I which to think about in this entry.

Put simply, a value is the meaning of any difference. Only if the values we prize are compared with those we don't [disvalues] does the word 'value' take on the connotations of 'good'. In terms of Renovation Morality, the difference is that value-as-good realises a larger integrity while a disvalue violates an integrity (i.e., the unjustified violation of integrity is the only disvalue I recognise as morally wrong). It is only because all value-as-good depends on integrity that there is a difference in value [a difference in meaning] between value/good and disvalue/bad. It is the value of integrity, and the disvalue of dis-integrity [disintegration], that enables the basic term 'value' to pick up the connotation of good when values are distinguished as values and disvalues. A disvalue, in this case, is any violation of integrity, and evil is a kind or degree of disvalue. It is because the violation of integrity is harmful, and sentient beings experience harm as suffering, that a disvalue can be defined as any state of harm or suffering that violates the value of an integrity.
        The concept of evil entails treating value as not valuable. If all integrity is valuable to whatever that integrity enables, then to be evil would be to not treat all integrity as valuable or to treat at least some valuable integrity as not valuable. Violence, on this count, would be wrongful [not valuable]. The worst [least valuable] mode of living life as a person would be one in which we violate the evaluating integrity of others and ourselves; we live our lives not as meaningless (something persons cannot do) but as value denying while, at the same time (and, to an inevitable extent, by) violating the value and meaningfulness of other beings' lives. To live this way is to be evil.

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A good game, good theory or good apple, one which meets or exceeds a standard for measuring the quality of a game, theory or apple. Good, in this case, is the general 'attainment of standard' value. The goodness of any fact is defined by the values-set being used to evaluate that fact. A good book, for instance, is determined by the values that the evaluator expects to derive from a book. Evil, in this case, can be both the absence of good and its contrary (i.e., whatever violation of integrity brings about the absence of good).

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The standard of good, relevant to understanding human evil, is specifically moral. In morality, the measure of good attaches to a realisation of personhood values, and moral goodness is a matter of meeting or exceeding a standard of valuable personhood. Bad, worse and worst, in this case, are facts about a person, and uses or non-uses of personhood power, which fail a measure of valuable personhood. Evil is a kind of worst.

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I suspect that human evil is woven by habit [addiction] from threads of fear and self-righteousness [politics]. Consider, for example, the evil of Joseph Stalin or Lavrenti Beria. Between them these two were responsible for more suffering and death in the Soviet Union than the 1941-45 war with Nazi Germany. Yet neither of these men behaved as they did because the behaviour was evil but only because of the supposed good which the behaviour was intended to bring about. And, their political protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, I suspect that the value it was intended to bring about was the soothing of the fear that both men lived with as a result of having risen up a political hierarchy by violence. Those who rise by violence fear the fall by violence that they made possible in their own rise to power. And the evil of Stalin and Beria, like that of Napoleon, Hitler or Lucretia Borgia, was not so much an absence of good as a counterfeit [political] good. And this is the case with all evil of which I am aware. No one foments a war, become a witch, a Robert Mugabe, a rapist, Satanist, drug pusher or Concentration Camp guard, for what he or she knows to be evil purposes - it is the supposed value of the evil, a counterfeit political good, which motivates it. Evil people are *self-righteous folk who want and have power. Hitler, for instance, believed in Darwinian evolution and used his power to hurry-up the process of natural selection as he saw it. The root of Hitler's war was his belief that coercion is sometimes necessary and justifiable to realise good, coupled with a belief in the value of power and the lessons of experience by which he knew that coercion often succeeds very well indeed.
        The problem with all these political counterfeits of good is that to input violence cannot output goodness because values such as goodness can only emerge from integrity - and you do not realise integrity by violating it. To input pain, fear or suffering to the world is to creates the form for a world; it literally creates a world after an image. To create the world in the image of disvalue is evil.
        All evil folk believe that they are realising some kind of good, but evil is driven by fear and is what happens to folk who have been corrupted by powerlessness. All tyrants were victims first, and the evil seek power to make themselves safe, strong and significant. They want to secure an insecure personhood against insignificance and violence. But it is not the power they seek that is evil (power is a tonic); it is only because the evil are already corrupt that the power they wield does so much harm.

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The worst [most evil] lies are those closest to the truth

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Because humans are addicted to violence, we are willingly misled by popular misrepresentations of evil as a kind of exuberance, something 'larger' and more energetic than goodness. If we pay attention, however, we soon notice that evil is not colourful, there is nothing grand or 'swash-buckling' about it; evil is humourless, mean, petty, self-righteous, malicious, vindictive and dull. Evil is people in pain and fear.
        In popular entertainments evil folk are often shown laughing while the righteous are portrayed as po-faced. In reality, however, because evil is self-righteous and the self-righteous take themselves very seriously, the evil are humourless. Does anyone associate Stalin, Hitler, or Pol Pot with playfulness, a sense of fun or humour? No. The laughter of the evil is without mirth, without joy; it is the hard laughter of sneering malice. The evil only have fun if someone else is suffering and/or if depravity is giving them a thrill (humiliating others is endlessly entertaining to evil folk). And one of the fears that evil folk nurture is the fear that someone, somewhere, might be having fun that is not sanctioned by them.
        Evil is similarly portrayed in popular entertainments as 'larger than life'. This too misrepresents the reality that real evil folk are typically small minded, mean and petty. This is not incidental to evil. Evil is shrivelled and shrivelling; to choose evil is to choose almost nothing because, unlike integrity, evil is death-oriented rather than life-oriented.
        The 'smallness' of evil can be recognised once we notice that it was not the vices of folk like Hitler that brought them to such destructive power but their virtues. Had Hitler not had the vision, the commitment and the skills at oratory which he put at the service of evil, then he would have been no more than a harmless crank. It was what was good about Hitler that enabled him to realise so such harm. So, to correct a popular metaphor, it was not the dark that made the light brighter but the light that made the dark darker.

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If I were to create a myth of evil then it would involve the political fear that making room for freedom and love makes the world untidy, unpredictable and out of control. Evil folk are fearful, insecure; they need to be in control not because they are strong but because they are weak. If there is a Satan then, far from being the Miltonian arch rebel, surely he is the arch bureaucrat; a compulsive tidier-upper who resents the untidiness allowed by life. Satan would be the one who kills the weeds growing through cracks in the concrete; he would despise love as irrational and freedom as both undeserved and untidy; he would prefer the symmetrical sterility of stainless steel palms in a paved square to the fecundity of the real thing in messy bush settings. There would be no mess in Satan's world - no trees, no bugs, no weeds, no love, no freedom - because there would be no life. That is why evil humans are the great homogenisers; they like other folk to be in uniforms, standing in ranks and files, spouting the same jargon, thinking the same way, liking the same music; the evil like conformity, sameness, androgyny, predictability. Concentration Camps are very ordered places. It is the need for the power to control what we fear that makes divination, witchcraft and so on, so attractive to the evil in all of us - if we can get our hands on the wheels that turn the world then we are safe.
        Order is normally good [valuable], and giving form to the world is what persons do. This perhaps is why evil is the normal power and responsibility of personhood pushed beyond good into god-playing. Evil folk, having an inflated sense of their own self worth, forget the humility that properly belongs with human finitude and begin to 'play parent' beyond the proper limits of human virtue.

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Cases in which you have to choose 'the lesser of two evils' do not make the 'lesser evil' any less of an evil.  There are special cases in which taking the life of another may be justified (e.g., as in cases of self-defence) but that does not entail that taking the life of another is a good thing.

Evolution: All the main theories of evolution are religious faiths in a god-like process of change without the inconvenience of a personal God. Like the faithful of all religions, adherents of evolution trade in half truths, claim knowledge of what cannot be known, and rely on miracles.
        The central miracle of evolution is random mutation. Random mutations are a kind of deus ex machina invoked to fill the gaps in evolutionary theory. If, for example, you ask how eyes could 'evolve' given that they are weaknesses that serve no survival function until already fully evolved, then the most common 'explanation' is an appeal to random mutation. All such appeals should be read as 'and then a miracle occurs'.

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The phrase 'survival of the fittest' is a tautology because the only measure of evolutionary fitness is survival (i.e., survivors show their fitness to survive only by surviving). So 'survival of the fittest' means 'survival of the survivors'.

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A popular misconception, derived from theories of evolution, is that the only imperative in nature is to survive. This is false because imperatives are solely a function of culture; there are no imperatives in nature.

The Philosophy of Human Existence:
 

Existence

Existence Philosophy

Existentialism

Existential Despair

Existence: Some folk talk as if existence should be spelled with a capital 'E' and only discussed using lots of specialised words in elliptical sentences (preferably with folk who dress quaintly and are superstitious about what they eat). Others, impatient with all the nonsense normally talked by the kind of folk who like using specialised jargon in elliptical sentences, dismiss all talk of existence as meaningless.
        I take both of these positions as half truths. Talk about existence is not meaningless, but it does seem to be a great way of missing the important point that existing is something the talker is doing, right now. And while, for example, the fact that I exist tells me nothing about what I am, who I am and/or what I should do with who and what I am, it is still clearly the most interesting, challenging and dangerous fact of my life. No human self is entirely powerless for as long as she or he exists. But the existence of a self has no intrinsic form, and no final goal except non-existence, so it is up to each self to give her or his own existence form [meaning] by what she or he does with it; that is, by how he or she lives. And that, I suspect, is the great challenge of life: not to find out why anything exists but to work out what to do with the power that our existence has abruptly and fleetingly thrust into our unready and  untrained hands.

To say that a thing, fact or state of affairs exists sounds like a proposition attributing the property 'existence' to the thing or fact. As a property, however, existence turns out to be curiously empty. If I arrange to meet a stranger at a certain place, for example, and I tell her that I'm a male of a certain height, shape, colouring and so on, then she gains useful information about me. But if I add "I exist" to the list, there seems to be nothing  she can do with that. No information about me is conveyed by adding 'exists' to the list of predicates describing myself - existence doesn't 'round out', fill up, complete or add anything to the description of anything. In that sense, existence seems wholly insignificant. On the other hand, however, that an object or property does or does not exist is probably the most significant thing about it. My own existence, for example, may add nothing to who and what I am - so nothing is added to the description of who or what I am by adding 'exists' to a list of predicates - but that I am [that I exist] is still the ground for everything when it comes to my living of a life in the world.

The reason why saying 'I exist' both sounds momentous and seems to say nothing is because that, as an idea, existence is the vaguest of generalities while, as a fact, existing is the most basic and real reality of human life. To describe a leaf as existing, for example, is a bit like describing it as being very 'leafish' - true but too vague, too general, to tell me anything about it. Existing is what leaves do when they are being leaves, not when they are being 'existent'. The idea of a particular kind of leaf may be a form that needs to be realised by a content in order to exist as a leaf. But the content of an existing leaf is not existence but cellulose, water, chlorophyll and so on. On the other hand, for the leaf, its existence is the real and fundamental fact of its life; all possibilities flow from existence, all power depends on it, and nothing is more real or significant to it or about it.
        The same particularly goes for persons because, unlike leaves, we are aware of our own existence. Every so often, for example, the fact that I exist, that anything exists, 'hits' me. I look at my hand - the play of muscles, tendons and veins beneath the skin as I move my fingers - and it strikes me as both marvellous and mysterious. How it works is merely amazing, but that it exists is a thought almost too big to comprehend. I look at the trees, flowers, birds and insects around my door, at people and things all moving or in their place, and the sheer 'fact-ness' of it all is simultaneously delightful, awe inspiring and philosophically intimidating. For folk who don't believe in miracles, existence is faith-shattering.

Of course, not everyone is swept away by how momentous - how surprising - it is that anything exists, let alone that so much exists as it does; the familiarity of existence inures us to the wonder of existence.⁴⁹  But, as if it wasn't enough that the mere fact of existence is almost too 'big' to take in, existence itself feels as if it points to something even bigger - something beyond itself that is the reason why it exists, something that will make sense of existence.
        Although I am frankly dubious of any talk about what is 'behind' reality, I can understand the common assumption that there must be some reason why everything exists. After all, human understanding is based on the assumption that all effects are caused, and that nothing exists, or is as it is, without a reason. This assumption is fundamental to all human knowledge, curiosity, common sense, religion and science, and it has served us well. But now apply this quite ordinary assumption of meaning to the largest of all larger integrates - the cosmos. On the assumption by which I understand anything at all, that fact (the cosmos) should, like everything in it, 'point' beyond itself to some further fact that explains it. But this is where understanding comes unstuck: here I am, merrily going along explaining facts in terms of their participation in larger integrates, and suddenly I bang into this 'wall' - the cosmos cannot explain its own existence. And there is no larger integrity left to point to, outside the universe, which could explain it without literally smuggling in a religious or scientific deus ex machina which itself would then need explaining

The fact that anything exists feels as if it matters or should matter [points or should point at some significance] in some way. Surely there must be a 'point' to it all. The problem, however, is that if there is a point then no one knows what it is.¹⁴  No one knows how what exists came into existence; neither religion nor science can help us here because both end in unexplained, and perhaps unexplainable, events. No one knows whether or not there is a 'why' to existence, whether existence in general, and/or their own existence in particular, is significant and, if so, what its significance is.
        Of course, there is no end of folk who like to think that they do know answers to the questions implied in these 'how's, 'why's and 'what's. Some think they know that existence is an illusion, others claim to know that it's all just an accident and that nothing is significant (although they do not live as if that was true), still others think that they know why the universe exists and what the significance of its existence is. But, to date and to the best of my knowledge, no philosopher, priest, scientist, mystic, occultist or other supposed knower of secrets, has ever come up with anything like adequate evidence and/or argument to support their many and various claims about the point or not of existence.

Although most human thinkers have assumed or argued that there must be some reason why a reality exists and, especially, why the unpleasant bits of that reality (suffering and death) exist, this doesn't rule out intelligent folk declaring both human and general existence to be absurd. But, against the absurdity thesis, it must be admitted that the assumption, that there is always a reason for everything, is precisely what has led human beings - time and time again - to discover so many of those reasons. But why is there something rather than nothing? If there is an answer to this question, if there is a reason why what exists does exist and why it exists in the way it does, then that reason has effortlessly and completely eluded common sense, religious superstition, and the sciences. Any intelligible answer to the question "Why does anything exist?" quickly ends in infinite regress. More than a few folk, for example, have argued from the existence and apparent integrity of the universe to the notion of a divine or evolutionary purpose, a natural/moral/spiritual law, or whatever. But if what exists does so in accordance with some agency, be it divine or natural, then the question simply becomes 'Why does this agency exist? Why is there a God or evolution or karma? Why was there a Big Bang?' and so on. This doesn't answer the question but simply pushes it back further into unanswerability. Responding to this, many thinkers have kept faith in the common sense rationality criterion [that nothing exists without a reason] while nevertheless concluding that there is no reason for what exists. In this case, the universe (i.e., all that exists) must be irrational [absurd]. This seems a bit hard to swallow given that the sciences have consistently, repeatedly and emphatically, shown the universe to be an orderly place (science, after all, works on prediction, and prediction depends on order). ¹⁵ Nevertheless, from the point of view of the average person - who usually has many troubles but little science - it is not too hard to conclude that the world is just an accident, that existence is superfluous, and that anything exists is just an accident of circumstance.

There may well be no reason why the universe exists; perhaps it just happens to be there. If we decide that what exists is accidental [contingent], while hanging onto to the common sense idea of rationality, then we are left with the conclusion that the universe is real but quite without significance (it 'points' at nothing). This conclusion is a kind of unhappy 'half way house' - a bit like *nihilism - where we retreat from the idea of existence being meaningful while nevertheless carrying some of the valuable baggage of meaning with us.
        Meaningis an ethic in which we apply rules to differences in order to generate an evaluation. Rules are a function of the values from which they emerge. The common sense notion of rationality assumes that what exists is meaningful (i.e., can be understood). Nihilists purport to reject the existence of value but selectively keep some of the rules - such as the rules which generate meaning - that emerged from value. This is leaves the rules of meaning somehow 'hanging in space' by pure faith. But, by doing this, nihilists are able to start with the assumptions of meaning and use them to conclude that the universe, our existence and our suffering, is meaningless; the universe has order [integrity] but no design, no value and no purpose. So living a life and making sense of the world is just something pointless that we do to fill up the time between when the darkness accidentally spewed us out and when it will swallow us up again.

My own reasoning has led me to the conclusion that the existence of the universe is a 'miracle' but only in the sense that nothing in or about the universe can explain the universe's own existence. The universe has an integrity but no point or purpose as such. The same reasoning, however, has driven me to admit that my own existence is and must be meaningful, in the same way as is the existence of all persons, just because I do and must live by inputting values which, by the Law of Conservation (part of the world's integrity), must output as the meaning of my life.
        I have also concluded that worrying about why there is something, rather than nothing, is philosophically pointless  - not because I doubt that any worthwhile answer to the mystery of existence is within human reach but because my own existence confronts me with questions that demand far more urgent attention. It is fun to speculate on the origin and fact of existence, but what matters far more is that a world does exist, this world includes myself, and an immediate problem for any self living in the world concerns what to do about what exists now that it is here. This is the domain of existence philosophy.

Existence Philosophy: Considered objectively, existence is an abstract quality, something to be rationally considered in our calm moments. Considered subjectively, there is nothing cool or abstract about it. My existence, for instance, is not a matter of objective impartiality to me because (a) it is all that I have, (b) it 'ambushed' me when I wasn't looking, and (c) it is revealed to me, as it is to each of us, by happening to me in a very specific way. To ignore this fact is to ignore my reality as a real subject engaged in existing in a real world. To me, as a living self, existence is as basic as it gets; I cannot reliably understand the meaning of my existence like some armchair general or Monday footballer - I'm 'on the field', I'm 'in the war'. To anyone in such a situation, the facts of human personhood lose significance if viewed objectively, in abstraction, or through an ideological lens. And any 'meaning of existence' can only be reliably understood in terms of the impact that experiences have on a particular existent self.

Of course we can, and sometimes should, look at life objectively (from the 'spectator' point of view, Caves 9.13), but we must all live our lives 'from the inside' (the 'actor' point of view) - making it up as we go along.

All this means that the existence of persons is not like a game of chess - the moves are not neatly ordered, the possible outcomes cannot all be predicted, the pieces don't wait to be moved. We are one of the pieces, we never have all the information we need, and we seldom have time to carefully consider what to do next. Our existence is more like a game of rugby into which we are each pitched without warning, and that we must each keep on playing not only without a guide book, coach or referee, but with endless pseudo coaches and putative referees who each claim to have the supposed Guide Book, know the point of the game, and so on. Most of us barely have time to catch our breath let alone try to figure out what the rules are and whether or not the game has a point (and it usually takes us years to realise that all the coaches and referees are talking tripe). This is a swiftly moving game which demands more fitness than most of us anticipated, and in which it is easy to get hurt (especially when we are not match fit and/or aren't playing well). It is a game that we cannot avoid but which we can lose, the rules of which are entirely uncertain, and which is played for high stakes (we all and always gamble what we cannot afford to lose) in a changing and often dangerous world. So the subjective challenge of existence - of being engaged as an actor in the world - simply must take precedence over that of objective theory in philosophical investigations into the meaning of existence. In short, realising a meaning of life will always be more of an art and skill (knowledge-how) than a science (knowledge-that) - and that is not a failure.

Faced with this fact, the immediate predicament of any self living in the world spells out thus:

• while we exist as persons, we (a) can, do and must, think; (b) can, do and must make choices; (c) can, do and must make choices that are informed by and input values,
• These choices have profound consequences for ourselves, others, and the meaning of life, BUT
• We can never know enough to know for certain that our reasoning is valid, our choices are right and/or that we really know anything beyond the fact that we exist and that living is costing us our lives.

This is the predicament of every human existence - although few notice it. And there is no 'solution' to this. But recognising the role of integrity in existence does help. Reasoning, for example, is the only tool I have with which to make sense of anything. Reasoning is based on an act of faith that sense can be made. This is an act of faith, and the 'down-side' of this faith is that I make nonsense when I am wrong.  However, given that, in the actual and practical living of a life, I have to make an act of faith in either sense or nonsense, no matter what I do, I choose to gamble on the possibility of making sense just because, if sense can be made (and I don't know that it can) then that would be vastly more valuable than if it turns out that sense cannot be made.

Existentialism: Existentialism, as I understand it, is a series of world views based on the premise that our existence as persons is a power which challenges us to do something with it but without telling us what. And it is that 'without telling us what' (the admission of *existential despair) that marks pure existentialism off from *religion and religion-like ideologies. All religions and religion-like beliefs hold that there is some kind of sub-text to human existence, some meta-story or objectively transcendent reality which, if we decode it properly, will tell us the point of existence, the meaning of life and how to live.⁷⁵ Existentialist narratives, however, are based on the premise that there is no sub-text and that, for human persons, our essence is our existence (see  Heidegger page for more).
        To say that, for humans, essence is existence is to contrast the way that persons realise selfhood with the way that the character of non persons is determined. The nature or character of an animal, plant or created object is fixed by factors that exist prior to it existence - its genes, its environmental context, the idea or plan that its creator/manufacturer had in mind, and so on (a sheep, tree or house, for example, does not get to define what kind of character it will have). With humans, however, it is different. Humans are persons and, as persons, we get to define and realise who we are [our 'essence'] on an ongoing basis after we come into existence - we define ourselves as builders, traders, teachers, and so on, by building, trading and/or teaching. We not only can do this; we must do it simply because we must choose, we must choose by values, and the values we input must output as the definition and meaning of who we are. So persons do not just exist in the way that rocks or trees or hedgehogs exist; we get to choose our character within the bounds of our freedom. What I call 'character' here simply is our 'essense' (our selfhood or 'soul'). So, for us, existence comes first, essence come after. The problem of having to define who we are for our selves after we are born, without having any sure guides telling us how best to use our power, is what existentialist narratives are about.

Because there is no pre-determined *human nature, there can be no  objective definition of a good person or a valuable life. We must and do live by values which define our character and worth. But values themselves are human creations, and among the challenges of human existence is that of choosing which values to input and which rules to live by.

It follows from this that, logically, any existentialism can be no more than a fact-saying narrative which, if true, entails no morality or politics. Existence is, after all, merely a fact which gives us no guidance about dealing with it (see *choice). This means that there is always a problem with any existentialist uses of value terms such as 'right', 'best', 'worst', 'must' and so on. It is, however, just a fact of human persons (and a fact fully compatible with existentialism) that we always generate facts by values and respond to facts as values. Thus it is that virtually all existentialists who have gone into print have promoted an explicit or implicit moral or political values-system even though doing so makes no sense if their own factual theses are correct.** The moral terms used by existentialists can legitimately invoke no more than a conditional 'we' - a sort of 'If you value the realisation of personhood, and if you agree with the thesis about personhood and value that I am arguing, then you and I become the 'we' that I argue should/must do so-and-so'. Even here, however, the 'should/must' depends on notions of obligation and rule following of the kind which existentialists typically invoke but none satisfactorily justify (and many don't bother to justify at all). This is a necessary weakness of existentialist belief. In the end, for any existentialist, the justification for any morality is subjective and enacted in the world rather than objectively arrived by rational appeal to objective standards. The 'occupational hazard' therefore, for all existentialism, is the slide into a radical relativism - a kind of 'it's right if it's right for you' contradiction of the ethics of meaning and morality on which the existentialist argument necessarily relies.
        This is why the morality of Out of the Caves, although fully consistent with an existentialist narrative of facts, is presented in the first person singular. I respect the value of integrity in all ethics, including both reason and morality, but I cannot justify prescribing a coherent [integrity respecting] morality for others. I can tell the story, I can argue my case (as I do in other pages on this website) and endeavour to help others recognise the logic and value of integrity, but there can be no 'this is just how values are' in any position which avows the reality of human existence. I recognise that, as a matter of fact, moral input [the values I live by] determines epistemological output [the meaning of my life]. And I try to avoid radical relativism while, at the same time, remaining true to an implicitly existentialist world view by 'standing on' the value of integrity. I recognise that personhood is an integrity, that selfhood is a culturally constructed emergent fact of personhood, and that culture, being based on and made of language, is necessarily shared in such a way that I cannot realise myself, as a self in a world, without respecting and caring about the larger integrity of culture and nature which includes myself, all other persons, and all other integrates. My morality, therefore, is like my language - mine to use to express who I am but only within a shared set of rules such that, if I violate the rules destructively, I necessarily undermine my own ability to realise my own personhood.

Existentialist narratives differ considerably in their ideas about what the responsibility for being a self entails. According to traditional parentocentricity, either the human self is an essence [soul, genetic blueprint or whatever] or, by dichotomy, an illusion. According to my understanding, however, humans have a self but the human self is not an essence as traditionally understood. This is because our selfhood is a function not of any natural or extra-natural sub-text or purpose but of our choices which, in turn, are a function of the values we choose to realise by our uses and nonusers of power. So I agree with traditional existentialists that human existence is not a problem to be solved but an adventure to be lived (although it is a fraught, dangerous, practical, often painful, sometimes tragic, sometimes farcical, sometimes boring, and always terminal, adventure to be sure). Perhaps more to the point, persons - those who live the life of selves existing in a world - give life meaning. They must give it meaning, the meaning they give is the only meaning it has, and the meaning they give it is realised by the values input by uses of power. Human persons must do this, and thereby simultaneously realise themselves as selves, through a whole series of decisions that must each be made with no way of actually knowing that our choices are actually right. When they are confronted by a need to make up our minds, thoughtful folk often feel that they could make the choice easily enough if only they had a little more information. In the final analysis, however, human persons never have all the information we need to be sure that our choices are the right ones - we cannot even know what a 'right' choice would be. Each of us must sift through the possibilities for ourselves; we must determine right and wrong; decide which beliefs are justified and which are not; choose what to do and what not to do. And we must do this not only with the data of our lives but with the very standards, rules, principles and criteria by which we not only sort the data but decide what the data shall be (see Caves 8.211). There are no objective standards or rules to which human persons can turn for answers to problems of choice; not only do different standards supply conflicting advice, but all standards whatsoever are themselves generated by values, and it is precisely values that are real without being objectively true or false. Human selves must therefore decide which standards to accept and which ones to reject. This is usually done irrationally and merely in conformity with whatever laws, politics and/or traditions happen to predominate at the time. To do it rationally can be no more than an educated guess gambling on whatever standards are best justified by faith in reason. There are no external constraints obliging us to be rational or not in our choices. We are, however, obliged to choose and to choose for ourselves. We are, in short, compelled to be free and to live with the consequences of what we do with that freedom. Existentialism is just a call to accept the fact of our freedom and the responsibility that it entails.

Existential despair: Despair is the emotion that accompanies a loss of hope. This feeling is, like all emotions, informed by a belief. The belief that informs existential despair is that which recognises that neither our lives nor the universe have any objective point, purpose, values or meaning. For persons who are used to assuming that some sort of objective meaning and/or values systems is built-in to the universe, this belief can (but need not) inform the feeling of hopelessness that arises when we experience life as meaningless.

The challenge of existential despair is of particular significance at my own time in human history. As human personhood has developed over the millennia, we have modified and increasingly replaced our animal instincts with more sophisticated and powerful institutions of meaning (reasoning, faith and knowledge). This development has served us well but at a price. The innocent ignorance of a non personhood state is now lost to us forever; we simply are aware and do read everything for meaning - including our own lives. If we do not experience our existence as meaningful then we may cope but do not thrive. Over the last two or three centuries, however, various scientific and political narratives have undermined many of the traditional beliefs on which humans have hitherto based our assumptions of meaning. This has led to a crisis of meaning for human persons in all kinds of cultures right around the world: the voice of instinct has decayed, the voices of tradition are everywhere under siege, and our addiction to the politics of violence has left us ill equipped to speak our own narratives in place of what is lost.

What is happening here is a failure of an idolatry. An idol is an object of worship which is created by its worshippers. Idols are thought to have powers but, in fact and at best, merely focus the power that is generated by the worshippers' faith. Reliance on external events, forces, structures and/or beings, to give life meaning, keep us safe or make us significant, is a kind of idolatry. And the problem with idolatry is that (a) no idol can or will actually do for us what we want and (b) we will not do what we want for ourselves for as long as we rely on idols.
        To addicts, addictive processes are like idols to which they make sacrifice and on which they rely for help and comfort. Our self violation means that we cannot depend on our own integrity for the realisation of meaning and validation of our own existence, and our addiction to parentocentricity conditions us to seek meaning and validation outside of ourselves. Parentocentricity and its offspring (political, religious, scientific or economic) are idols to which humans are addicted in our search for validation. These idols have, and continue to, let us down (idols always let their worshippers down). And, to an addict reliant on his addiction to solve his personhood problems, realising that the addiction is an idol can lead to feelings of hopelessness and betrayal (i.e., existential despair) as he 'flip flops' from false hope to no hope.
        For those who have lost faith in their religious, political or other idols, the first symptoms of despair are often cynicism (including nihilism and relativism) and/or boredom. In 'developed' societies especially, boredom, and attempts to escape boredom, now account for a huge part of the noise, crime, pollution and neuroses which mar them. This is because, to the morally unfulfilled, any sensation, even an unpleasant one, is better than the threat posed to moral emptiness by silence.¹⁶
        In an attempt to combat existential despair, an increased the will to pleasure and/or power (often in the form of getting and using money) become attractive and demanding new idols. The simultaneous rise of sexual libertarianism, New Right economics, superstition, drug use, and religious fundamentalism in many societies of the late 20th century is probably related to the collapse of hitherto meaningful idols and accompanying rise in existential despair. And this may well be why those involved in dealing with neuroses in developed societies considered the pleasure principle and the will to power so important - to those whose will to meaning is weak, pleasure and power are the 'natural' [addictively normal] counterfeits. In my own lifetime, for example, political extremism (communism, fascism and nationalism) has come and gone at enormous cost but, in its wake, it has given way to hedonism (mainly in the form of consumerism and sensation seeking - tourism, thrill seeking, extreme sports, drug abuse and sexual self indulgence), religious extremism, such as Islamic fundamentalism (almost a text book flight from freedom), and the slightly desperate re-invention of otherwise long discredited superstitions under the heading of 'ethnicity', 'Neo Paganism, or 'New Age spirituality'. When it comes to dealing with existential despair, it apparently helps to have a neglected intelligence and little or no imagination.

For those stuck with reasonably well evolved personhood, existential despair can become an intellectual honesty. Our idols of objective meaning - science, religion, politics, romantic love, pleasure, wealth, etc., - were and are false, and they only ever gave the lives dedicated to them a kind of counterfeit meaning. The honesty of existential despair entails rejecting all idols of external meaning and limiting ourselves to a reliance only on that which is within our power and within the sum of the possibilities which render our actions feasible. This can be liberating because that power is all that we've really had all along. The fact is that the lives of all persons necessarily have meaning just because persons do choose, choices do input values, and values do output meaning (only values output meaning). So our lives already have meaning, and they already have significance, it's just that the meaning they have, and the only meaning they have, is that which we are already giving them by the values we input to the world by our choices (see Caves 8.3).
        This honesty is not a matter of lurching from false hope to no hope [despair] but of shifting from the extravagant false hopes of idolaters to the realistic smaller hopes of the self reliant. Feelings of existential despair arise from losing faith in idols on which we have made ourselves emotionally reliant for the point and purpose of our lives. But these feelings emerge from a narrative which does not have to entail the feelings unless we really are dependent on idols to give our lives meaning. And if the feelings are dealt with then a loss of faith in idols can lead to a reliance on our own unavoidable power to give our lives the only meaning any life of a person has ever had.

Intellectually, the claim for existential despair is simply that neither our old nor our new parentocentric idols are  helping us, so we must help ourselves - and the point is that we can help ourselves just so long as we stop relying on idols. If we despair intellectually then we stop relying on make-believe, hubris, wishful thinking, addictive denial and institutionalised violence to give us the meaning we desire but are not realising for ourselves. Rejecting idols such as business or other success, karma, politics, divine plans, science, race, gender, gods and goddesses, evolution-as-progress, aliens, fate, life forces or historical necessity does not leave us with meaninglessness but with our own selves, our powers, freedoms and responsibilities. Our idols may be false, but we are real.
        This intellectual honesty remains in the world of possibilities - it does not rely on any possibilities beyond those that provide the range of a person's choices. We do what we can, in our circumstances, not what we could do if only things were ever-so-slightly different. Things are not 'ever-so-slightly different'. If we are to ever recover from our addictive irresponsibility then perhaps we had better start facing that. And, beyond the point at which the possibilities under consideration cease to affect our choices and uses of power, perhaps we ought to despair of meaning.

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Notes:

49. Besides this, one of the shared agendas of both religion and science is to make the universe conceptually small enough for scientists and religious folk to cope with.

14. The popular notion that evolution provides the point only works if its proponents illegitimately smuggle in some kind of purposeful mechanism (a sort of 'pseudo god'). This, of course, is precisely what popular representations of evolution do.

15. It is presently fashionable among some folk to challenge this claim by making noises about 'quantum uncertainty', 'randomness at the sub-atomic level' and so on. But these misrepresentation are more a product of 'paperback physics' than any serious science.

17. I am aware that many human folk believe that we can get outside of reasoning. I am also well aware that many folk deny (a) that we are free, (b) that we choose by values, and (c) that there is not any real uncertainty about how the world is. Folk often sincerely believe that they have, or can have, some kind of direct, unmediated, appreciation of the truth and, on the basis of this belief, such persons often presume to sit in dismissive judgement on normal human reasoning and perception. I, however, am more interested in facing the facts than in avoiding them. And the fact is that, like it or not, we all do and must think, we do and must choose, and we must do both with nothing to help us but values, rules and perceptions which we place by faith in the 'empty box' of our existence as human selves in a world. Nothing we can do, and no lies we tell ourselves, will actually change that.

50. This does not mean that, by flip flopping from objectivity to subjectivity under dichotomy, reality is merely whatever I make of it, it means only that I can never escape living by faith in my own experiences and rule governed interpretations of experience.

75. Ironically (and, I believe, sadly) a number of Twentieth Century existentialists 'sold out' on this insight by smuggling in a political sub-text. If my thesis is correct - and Existentialism cannot legitimately derive a moral/political posture on the basis of its own ontologival theory - then Heidegger's Being and Time may be nearest there is to a truly existential text.

16. This is why existential despair particularly shows up as the kind of depression which strikes retirees, the unemployed and those who suffer the 'Weekend blahs'. Keeping busy fends off our recognition that the busyness is vacuous, and when a normally busy life is interrupted, even by a holiday, then the interruption reveals the yawning lack of life content normally hidden beneath stress.

Freedom: There is an interesting narrative, linking freedom with significance, that arises from Christian belief. This narrative comes about because Christians hold that we, and all that is, are created and sustained by a Creator God who is omniscient [in possession of all logically possible knowledge], omnipotent [capable of performing all logically possible acts] and benevolent [loving]. One obvious objection to this claim is that we live in a world of suffering. And it is argued that if God was omniscient then He would know that the world could be a much kinder place, if He was benevolent then He would want it to be a kinder place, and if He was omnipotent then He could make it a kinder place. The world is not a kinder place. Therefore, if God exists at all, He is either ignorant, impotent, uncaring or all three. So goes the objection. The riposte (the 'Free Will Defence') answers that the objection underestimates the respect that God has for the integrity of His creation. God, it is said, gives human persons the freedom to choose among options according to a range of values which are genuinely open to them. He has placed us in a causally determined world (one in which actions have real and largely predictable consequences) because if our choices make a real difference, and we can know what that difference is, then what we choose matters (is significant). The idea here is that only free beings, located in a world that conserves inputs, can be really significant. And the gift of significance is the greatest [most loving] gift that a Creator God could give any creature.

Genuine freedom of choice entails being able to 'mess up' if we so choose. God is not like those parents who say to their offspring "You can do what you like just so long as you don't do anything stupid". Real freedom just is the freedom to do anything stupid if we so choose.
        God, according to the Free Will Defence, gave us real freedom, and a real price to pay for our choices, because only real freedom (which includes the freedom to mess up) makes us really significant. Only persons [language users] can be free because only the language enabled creativity of our personhood culture gives us the means, and the authority, to input values into the causally determined necessities of nature. We have the power to realise real value and real disvalue. What we do matters. And it matters only because it genuinely makes a difference and the difference 'sticks'. So, in conformity with the Law of Conservation and because the world is an integrity, both we and everyone else in the world have to live with the consequences of our choices. The integrity of human reality makes it impossible for any of us to use our freedom and power in a way that does not impact on the freedom, interests and values of others.
        Thus, if we choose to love God and each other then God will allow us the freedom to choose that, pay for it and live with the consequences. If we choose to reject God, trash our planet, violate each other and so on, then God will allow us the freedom to choose that, pay for it and live with it. There is no magic karma trick, reincarnated second chances or cosmic grandparent to come along and kiss it all better. If we make a mess, as we are free to do, then we both live with the mess we make and compel others to do the same.

Although I personally avow no religion, and do not accept the metaphysical implications of this argument , I do believe that its moral insights are valid. The Free Will defence narrates an integrated dynamic in which love issues in freedom, freedom issues in significance, and significance issues in love. ⁵⁴  The whole dynamic is coherent; it 'hangs together'. Our significance, for example, can issue in violence rather than love, and love can issue in paternalistic control rather than freedom, and so on. But in any such case, the whole dynamic breaks down. Love that issues in control, for instance, does not allow freedom and, thereby, treats the object of the control as insignificant and so on.
        The point here is that, want it or not (and the self-defeating arguments of *determinism notwithstanding), we do have choices and that does make us significant (Caves 8.31). One of the reasons that persons are more significant than microbes is precisely because bugs have no choice about what values they will input to the world. We do have that choice; we have little choice about what kinds of human we will be - that is too much a function of contingency - but we can and do choose what kind of self we will cultivate within the contingent constraints of human personhood.
        If I extrapolate the 'moral of the story' from the Free Will Defence then I have a quite different narrative of significance from that embedded in parentocentric thought. Our significance as persons does not derive from, and is not measured by, our power to violate. Falling rocks have that power. But the significance of persons derives from, and may therefore be measured by, our power and freedom to choose and be responsible for the values we input and realise. It is how we use the skills of personhood, and not any human fact about us, that makes human persons significant. The significance of our freedom, as persons, is a function of the values we input and realise by our uses of power. And, by the conservation of value, our output significance [meaning] as selves is a function of input values [morality] - just as is any meaning of life.

It follows from this that we respect ourselves and others as significant when we use our powers as persons to enact the recognition that we are all owed the loving freedom to be who we are rather than who another believes that we ought to be (and that 'another' includes us when it comes to the lives of others).
        I stress the word 'loving' here because indifference also allows others the 'freedom to go to Hell' if they want to. But indifference does not treat others as significant; indifference does not care; indifference treats others as insignificant (not-P). This is why motive matters and why any act-governing moral narrative, such as rights talk or ends-aimed ethics, is best integrated with an actor-centred virtue morality. A reasonable ends-aimed morality can remind us of good reasons for acting, and reasonable rights talk can remind us of valuable boundaries to our actions, but virtue morality stresses the importance of acting from a valuable motive  and of practising the skills we need to act wisely . Knowing that we should respect integrity for example, is only the start of living well. Knowing how to respect freedom out of a respect for integrity, in the complex and ever changing reality of daily life, is a skill to be learned by honest doing rather than by merely acquiring information.
        This being the case, an integrity cherishing and violence-recovered relatedness¹⁸  will (a) respect both difference and conformity, just so long as both are integrity respecting (i.e., not coerced), and (b) will impose no preference or political values on another self. Differences make us who we are, so an integrity-respecting morality will value the differences by which selves are defined as unique. Sameness is valued for the sense of belonging that it gives a self, so an integrity-respecting morality will respect the conformities by which selves define themselves as belonging. This means that respect for integrity is a way of life that reaches out to relate [integrate] difference in shared variety [a 'larger integrity'] rather than coercive unity. A renovated relationship would, like language, connect [integrate] without overcoming. This does not require that I do not evaluate or do not discriminate. It does require that I practice evaluating and discriminating honestly, carefully and with some humility.

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Jesus claimed that we could know the truth and that truth would set us free. I used to believe and preach that but stumbled over the fact that human folk don't want to be free - we want to be comfortable, we want to feel safe and self-important, but genuine freedom threatens us with risk, work and responsibility; these we will evidently tolerate in only counterfeit.

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As long as we can choose - even if our choice is only between two ways of losing - we are free in the morally responsible sense. We can, do and must choose, constantly, and to that extent we are free and therefore morally responsible for our choices. The problem is that, for addicts of irresponsibility, such as human beings, freedom equates with licence; folk make a leap of faith from "You are free" to "therefore do what you want". One problem with this is that we are addicted to the violation of integrity and, of course, addicts are not free; there is a compulsive element to our 'do what you want' behaviour. That is why what we 'want' is freedom dis-integrated from the responsibility it entails. But freedom is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story, only one aspect of a whole integrity for which