 
|
|||||||
Ideology or Ethics:
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
"Current ideology legitimates social crimes which benefit one party over another at all stages and levels of policy. In particular, it is a capitalist enterprise to give lip service to ethics whilst persecuting those who practise ethics in reality."
|
|||||||
|
This essay will argue that the "Nash Equilibrium" can be used to overcome the zero sum game problem which pervades the normative system in the public policy areas of family law, teaching and drugs, all of which this essay claims have been governed by ideology as opposed to rationality leading to absurd outcomes which damage the individual and society. In short: If there is a set of strategies with the property that no player can benefit by changing her strategy while the other players keep their strategies unchanged, then that set of strategies and the corresponding payoffs constitute the Nash Equilibrium. [1] Quite simply, the above is saying that what is best for two or more players is a strategy in which all players win. The mechanism is, unsurprisingly, compromise, but also a mathematical calculation that assumes what is best for the individual is what is best for the group (and vice versa). Moreover, this essay will argue that it is pure ideology which sees the interests of an individual, if made primary, as contrary to mutual interests. In other words, the informal laws (i.e. "norms") which govern our social behaviour may or may not uphold the law, but they certainly influence legal judgments and social promotion. To this principle, this essay will expose social practices committed by individuals and groups, which, as "compliant with the law" as they are, hurt others for profit and allow corrupt systems and individuals to operate within justified tautology and fallacy. This thought demarcates the discipline of ethics from law and places itself in the context of the emergent literature on how society, from economy to politics, has failed to supply an ethical system; and therefore social policy and social life are in peril in the aforementioned case studies. The Nash Equilibrium is posited here to act as a litmus test for the rationality of a given case study. In using this mathematical principle to examine social policy, it is hoped that the case studies presented can be reduced to rationality as opposed to ideology avoiding the problem of merely supplanting one ideology with another. This line of inquiry will be applied to the areas of family law, teaching and drugs policy. All of these areas have not only formal and informal rules which govern whose interests must be upheld in a given situation, but also built-in interpretations of "what is best for the individual" depending on statistical models lacking rigorous social scientific critique. Rather than focus on these existing ideologies, however, this essay will establish an alternative way to interpret social behaviour, and in particular, the social behaviour in which two or more interests appear to clash. And so, it is argued here that current ideology legitimates social crimes which benefit one party over another at all stages and levels of policy. In particular, it is a capitalist enterprise to give lip service to ethics whilst persecuting those who practise ethics in reality. Before continuing it is important to clarify what this essay means by "crime," a word which has its origin in the concept "sin," [2] which, however capricious the discussion of religion, basis itself on violations of ethics. Notwithstanding the criticism of the ipso facto correlation of sin with crime, and ethics with religion, crime is more often used now to describe the behaviour of an individual who contradicts the state ideology as opposed to religious dogma. From the works of Karl Marx to Carl Schmitt to Michel Foucault, the idea of the secular state becoming a sovereign religion and the consequences of this move to the lower and middles classes is well-established as the main criticism of capitalism. And yet, this essay will argue that the situation is even worse than a clandestine fascist state using capitalism to legitimate the neo-slavery of credit card debt. The current system encourages unethical behaviour based on ideologies hardened by hundreds of years of propaganda. For example, the destruction of family is not, as conservatives argue, the result of liberalism, but rather the overt support of the institutionalisation of children (at the expense of fathers primarily); the lower standards of teaching and learning is the reduction of teachers to postmen delivering packaged curriculum whose qualitative outcomes are statistically determined by student feedback; and a lack of a drugs policy which promotes effective, as opposed to profitable, treatment results in the promotion of dangerous pharmacology for the benefit of job creation. All of these areas of society suffer from what this essay will call "profit bias" which, like DNA results, sees the statistical measurement of success as success without adequate qualitative reasoning to interpret results. The solution to all of these problems is the application of the Nash Equilibrium (i.e. everyone can win) and an end to the capitalist thinking that the job of society is to place its citizens into a binary world of "winners and losers", i.e. only some can win and only at the expense of others. Below, this essay will posit social crimes for which there is no legal punishment and further carry social benefits for those who practise them. What these crimes have in common is that they rely on ideology over empirical evidence and rational, i.e. deductive, thought concerning the most basic element of the industry to which the behaviour is attached. So, for example, (1) the industry of family would ultimately thrive under variables which psychologists (or human behaviour scientists more generally speaking) determine foster the greatest possible outcome for the whole family, even if outcome cannot be guaranteed, such as in the matter of a child having the right to reasonable access to both of his or her parents. Similarly, (2) teaching would depend upon a psychology that does not always lead to a happy consumer student, an idea which contradicts the current obsession with student feedback. And finally, (3) drugs policy would re-evaluate toleration of alcohol and tobacco (ab)use, which account for thirty times the worldwide death rate of all illegal drugs combined, and promotion of "over the counter" remedies which are often more dangerous than illegal "illicit" substances. Family Law The law says it is a crime to abduct a child from its carers and yet it is a "civil matter" when one parent takes a child away from another without consent and refuses to divulge where they have taken the child requiring a special form and application to Court. In the UK, there is a group called "Fathers for Justice" which engage in high-profile stunts in order to increase awareness of this issue and particularly the ideology that children thrive best in single parent, particularly single mother, households. From Murphy Brown, a hit US 1990's television show causing controversy among Republicans by depicting a single woman choosing to get artificially inseminated, to English councils who pay legal costs for women seeking to take a child out of the care of their father without any evidence of wrongdoing by the father, the ideology of society concerning family is out of sync with what the professionals recommend, namely that whether or not a couple is same sex, opposite sex, living together or living apart, a child thrives best under the care of two parents. The general rubric under which childcare literature operates is mitigation when parenting is lacking, either qualitatively, in the case of one parent abusing a child, perhaps, or quantitatively, when children have fewer than two parents. [3] These circumstances cannot be avoided in some cases, but this essay argues that it has become the rule that fathers are seen as inherently incompetent carers and by inference mothers are good carers. But these assumptions have no basis in any psychology literature. This case study reflects a general bias in society that women make better carers than men as reflected in the empirical outcomes of cases which go to Court. The popular media and the speeches of politicians, i.e. what is said by government and specialists, contradicts this notion in the sense that the government admits "while it is usually in the child's interest to have contact with both parents", they fail to see the importance of putting a child's right into law arguing that "seeking to enshrine that right into law would lead to greater conflict and confusion." [4] It is this disconnect between a crime which hurts the most vulnerable members of society, i.e. children, and any legal remittance to defend this right that demonstrates how crime and punishment in the UK (and most other Western states) does not concern itself with actions which directly harm a victim when a prevailing social norm contradicts what the specialists recommend. Giving lip service to children's rights to both parents does little to protect children in reality as mothers, being of the gender which is, as a rule, seen as a better parent, are given inherent legal promotion without having to satisfy any burden of proof. [5] Ideology is not without its justification of course. The primary justification for not punishing the crime of taking a child away from his or her father is the mantra "what is best for the child" as if a father heartbroken over losing contact is somehow being selfish. This ideology, like so many other ideologies, depends upon false logic to overcome deductive and inductive arguments against it. Quite simply, the ideology is the "fallacy of the excluded middle" which falsely posits two extremes as the only choices. Recent discoveries in mathematics, particularly of the famed John Nash, about whom a motion picture was produced and who discovered the social principle which contradicted fundamental tenets of Adam Smith and other modern founders and proponents of capitalism, provide calculus supporting the idea that an individual's best interest is supported in conjunction with someone else's best interest. In short, what is best for a child is what is best for the mother and father. The parenting instinct of wanting to battle anyone taking away the child (but not battling to take a child away from the other parent for acrimonious reasons) is for the best interest of the child. The above would translate in family law that a child's best interests are best upheld by upholding the best interests of his or her two parents; the interests of a child and parents cannot be separated and to do so not only commits a logical fallacy, but also contradicts mainstream child psychology concerning child development and the parental responsibility of fostering emotional well-being. [6] A simple way of putting it is that "happy parents foster happy children" and assuming the adage includes the plural "parents" as opposed to the singular "parent", it means that a triangle of best interests are important, as opposed to a bifurcation of the mother and child or the singular reduction of complicated family affairs to what is "best for the child" as if a child's and parent's interests are a zero sum game. Studies show that children raised in single parent households are significantly more prone to violent crime, self-harm and a variety of other mental illnesses; nevertheless, the norm is placing children with their mother and marginalising the father even to the extent that councils will aggressively support mothers who seek to take their children out of the father's care. [7] Teaching I have written before about how the fact that "learning is painful" contributes to a market approach to teaching in which student feedback, particularly positive student feedback, determines the future career prospects of a teacher. [8] The mere suggestion that a student should think of their education as satisfactory/poor, or even worse choose between several permutations on a continuum of satisfactory and poor, posits an ideology that learning is a linear process. What would happen if students were surveyed about teachers one year after a class about the impact of that teacher? Five years on? It is often the case that the most hated teachers, from the secondary school teacher requiring too much homework to the absent minded professor, become appreciated in retrospect when life experience comes into contact with the theories presented in class. Classic higher education consisted of a reading of a passage of the literature on the subject and students debating for hours over every minutia. In short, education was boring, a tough climb, and personality clashes with professors whose job seemed to be to confuse and confound and make themselves unnecessarily the bane of a student's existence. The redeeming quality would be their research, and of course the recognition of this research led universities such as Oxford to place these figures in high positions, and in some cases required their courses despite their difficult personalities. John Nash himself was often an hour late. Today, students expect high grades as given and by using student feedback can assure that any perceived fault of the professor is an excuse for a grade change on appeal. Even worse, professors, knowing this fact, could unethically lead students to believe they are getting As well in advance of their surveys, thus guaranteeing their job security. Professors who refuse to do so are seen as ineffective. So, what is the particular crime taking place and who is the perpetrator of this crime? The criminal is the system itself which has embedded student feedback in the central pillar of human resources management. The crime is that the measurement itself filters out certain "types" of teachers who undertake processes of painful learning, who actually challenge the pre-conceived notions of students and fail to consider how liked they are by students whose experience in a class might not meet their expectations. The crime is that these teachers are sacked based on opinion surveys even when fulfilling administration criteria. One event which angers students can mean that no matter how well the majority of the class is taught that, once united in rebellion, students know they can get a teacher punished and therefore have room to argue for a higher grade. From false allegations in secondary schools ruining the careers and social reputations of teachers even when the teacher is found not guilty to tighter and tighter rules subtracting professor discretion in curriculum delivery, teaching is reduced to a formula of pleasing students who already know everything and are just taking classes as a technicality. There are specific problems which come from false assumptions: (1) not enough male teachers in primary school (bias against males being able to care for young children exists here too); (2) administrators forcing compliance with a minimum pass on student feedback (bias against experiential learning); (3) curriculum requirements which emphasise passing a standardised test as an indicator of higher education worthiness as opposed to completing laboratory work (lack of subject in practice); (4) teachers must complete so much administration that lectures, course materials and research become secondary. All these things defy what is best for two parties. Solutions to the above: (1) putting more male teachers in primary schools would help change the ideology that men are poor carers of young children; (2) throwing out student feedback and replacing with a straightforward and fair complaints procedure to clear up misunderstandings as they occur would, at once, take the interests of the institution, student and teacher into consideration; (3) replacing standardised testing with the assessment of completed "real-world" work related to the discipline; (4) reducing administration for teachers by installing classroom assistants whose job is doing admin (teaching assistants already do this to some extent, but these are more work experience jobs on the way to full qualification as opposed to specialist admin roles). These solutions all rely on the Nash Equilibrium which posits that what is best for the individual, e.g. student, is also what is best for the professor (and university). This plurality of interest can be upheld if the ideologies of the previous paragraph are jettisoned and replaced with a more rational approach. Drugs Ideology, not common sense, logic or ethics, rules the laws on drugs. Like other social crimes, such as prostitution, the ideology of morality regarding the action is out of alignment with the actual damage caused to society. Morality is not a minor point, of course, and in the failure to follow the advice of its own internal drug advisory board [9] as well as international teams of scientists and campaigners, the crime of the drug war is that it causes gangs to proliferate due to creating a market for illegal drugs. The inherent belief that reduction of supply is even possible via high-profile drugs raids is itself untested and does not correspond to the last hundred years of data regarding drug use only increasing despite the drug war. [10] If one considers the action of criminalising drugs on the individual drug user, drug dealer and society, then the only one who truly benefits is the police and prison wardens whose job security relies on this illegal market. Prison sentences for drug users and dealers account for up to one half of all prisoners in the US. [11] The taxpayers and families are the worst affected, but the gang culture which specialises in selling narcotics and doing so effectively, i.e. giving bribes, setting up money-laundering operations, adulterating the product, means a significant informal economy determines the lives of those people living in and around the area in which these gangs operate. It is not the drugs they peddle, of course, but the culture of criminality attached which harms people the most. The problem is the ideology surrounding popular recreational drugs such as cocaine, cannabis and ecstasy, that the drugs are more dangerous than they really are, preventing society from making a significant civilisational gain by eliminating the profitability of gang culture and perhaps even wielding the positive medicinal benefits the pure form of these drugs offer. On the other hand, if one considers the Nash Equilibrium and considers how the decision to legalise or criminalise drugs effects the drug user, drug dealer and society - yet another triangle of interests - one can only conclude that the best option is tolerance, accurate information and an end to the distinction between legal and illegal drugs (drugs are drugs distinguished only by their effectiveness as medical treatments; prescription drugs are abused as much as illicit drugs). How best to mitigate abuse of drugs is not to lock up as many users and dealers as possible, a status quo policy which has not reduced the availability of illicit drugs but has further adulterated their quality and made death more likely for the user, but rather to address the social problems leading people to self-medicate and allowing for personal use of soft drugs, as the model of the Netherlands, Portugal, Vancouver and California has demonstrated. A universalization of these policies across the West would certainly help destroy the transnational crime organisations that use drug profits to traffic young children and vulnerable adults. In fact, such a move would even cut off funding for terrorists who sell drugs internationally from Afghanistan (Opium and Heroin) to fund operations against US soldiers there. The crime being committed is a system friendly to gang culture insofar as it creates the market. Drug users would be able to purchase their product, which they would know to be a pure product, under the supervision of a doctor or pharmacist. Moreover, the social stigma attached to doing drugs would mean the 11 million people in the UK (40 million in the US) who have used drugs could be open about it and seek treatment if they have dependence without fear of social persecution. [12] And finally, the beneficial properties of drugs which have been victim of propaganda could be used to ease pain and suffering as well as treat and cure disease. But there is a more overt crime than simply propagating the anti-drugs propaganda. Legal drugs kill more people than illegal drugs. Whilst drugs such as cannabis, cocaine and ecstasy are linked to insanity and death, these drugs are also effective against depression and their side effects, when a patient is given a pure from of the drug, are minimal compared to such drugs as Prozac, whose "success" is more attributable in the United States to stricter gun laws. [13] Whilst all illegal drugs account for 250,000 deaths worldwide per annum, many of which are the result of impure street varieties which often contain little or none of the active ingredient, [14] alcohol accounts for 2.5 million deaths each year, [15] whilst smoking (tobacco) accounts for 5 million deaths. [16] Data is less available on prescription drugs as pharmaceutical companies will not release worldwide drug deaths; however, "Of the 30 million individuals admitted to hospitals each year, approximately 10 per cent or 3 million are admitted specifically because of adverse [prescription] drug reactions." [17] Summary and Conclusion Although it is recognised in the West that a people should not be governed by one overriding religion, the state has become the new religion and ideologies which affect decision-making at the top level of government means that social crimes which affect people directly are civil matters when they support that ideology. This problem is the result of moving against the Nash Equilibrium. Fathers are denied justice and men continue to face a prejudice of not being able to care for young children, if not in the rhetoric of politicians than in the judgements of judges and malaise of councils. Women cannot be held accountable as a gender because Court judgements carry social purchase and hold a precedent which aids parents with bad intentions abusing the system by using children as a weapon against the partner from whom they separated. In addition, teachers are being further reduced to instruments of education capitalists who want to attract money as opposed to delivering what could be interpreted by a student as a painful education - a poor grade or an experience in the classroom which hurts their pride. In this case, too, men are marginalised in primary education due to the unsubstantiated bias that men make poor carers of children. And finally, a prohibition drugs policy promotes gangs as the demand for recreational drugs only increases when quality and supply decreases. Furthermore legal drugs, such as alcohol and tobacco and even seemingly innocuous prescription drugs cause far more deaths worldwide. In all of these cases the Nash Equilibrium would solve the problem by overturning the capitalist ideology of zero sum games and replacing this ideology with the mathematical principle which seeks a win for all interested parties. With scholarly interests in international private security, policing, education and the politics of science, Dr. Chapman is currently using a research grant toward field work in England. This field work seeks to further demonstrate the political similarities of volunteer organisations qualified by high stakes up to and including death, e.g. skydiving, martial arts, mushroom hunting (Fine et al. 1996), etc., and public citizenship. Dr. Chapman can be contacted at: dionysus2001@hotmail.co.uk.
Endnotes |
|||||||
