PS...I found online the original paper by Levine from 1983, which talks about qualia and introduced the concept of 'the explanatory gap', a concept I should have mentioned in my rambling post because it seems to me useful even if qualia aren't: the notion that any physical account of an experience will have something missing.

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~abailey/Resources/levine.pdf

The perception of her humanity. We're done here. — Mongrel

Hey Mongrel, I'm with you in spirit :) I confess, I'm not with either protagonist in this thread. But I'm off tomorrow to practice with my choir. We still sing the South African song 'Freedom is coming'. 'Amandla Awethu' as it is in Zulu (Power to us!)...although not so many like to sing 'Viva COSATU!' which is the pro-union verse. Freedom is coming!

I'm studying a module in Metaphysics of Mind at the moment in (analytic) Academe. I have a sensible tutor who doesn't speak about qualia much. It seems to me that 'experience' and 'the first person' are the important concepts to keep a hold of: we experience living in certain ways, I feel and think and act in certain ways, and these ways are not always quantifiable, they are often qualitative, and most certainly they are ill-represented by the present language of the natural sciences.

I am reading round the topic and found a nice essay by Chomsky from the 90's about language and mind, much of which is about linguistics, but some of it is about terminology. While he comes from a naturalistic perspective he was interestingly relaxed about the supposed distinction between 'mental' and 'physical' that analytics get worked up about. These are just words we use, they don't represent ontological categories. If belief and desire precipitate action, in our usual way of putting things, who is to say they are merely 'mental'? I see 'belief' and 'desire' in other people's demeanour and behaviour. Conversely, to call someone 'hot-blooded' or 'sharp-tongued' is not to refer to them by physical terms.

'Qualia' have become a bit of problematic catch-all, representing too many things to too many different people, at least that's my take on them. But then, at the moment I am much more excited in opposing the 'causal closure of the physical', which people of a natural-scientific inclination seem to presume awfully easily. They can't provide me with a forecast-successful empirical model of the little spider that keeps crawling across my desk - but say that physics is causally closed - it beggars belief. Or so I think! But I'm such an empiricist I suppose. I love science because it's empirical, getting to the bottom of all sorts of phenomena, and hate it when people try and impose Big Theories on me with evidence that's a chain of a thousand inferences from the actual phenomenon I'm experiencing.

I suppose, lastly, that's why one would want to hang on to qualia: because they represent feelings we have that Big Science with its Big Theories seems to be trampling out of existence. Perhaps I should be at the barricades for them after all, but 'in the literature' they have been rather misused to mean all sorts of things, so I don't know if there's a way of hauling them back in.

So, what do you expect to happen in your life (job, housing, cost of living, etc.) as a result of Brexit, assuming that the exit is negotiated with a middle-of-the-road outcome (neither the worst possible or best possible)? — Bitter Crank

I think the Canada treaty problem suggests a juggernaut so big and unwieldy that it finds it hard to steer.

I expect a minor short-term drop in standard of living compared to how it might have been; what I think Remainers miscalculated is that in poorer areas such as where I live, real wages haven't risen for years so short-term economic issues don't count for much. London and the South East feels like another much more affluent country to me, with enormous public investment in infrastucture, for instance, even among people who claim to be ideologically opposed to it.

My wife's an immigration lawyer so I'm expecting Brexit to be quite good for business! She's an (American) immigrant; it's very unclear at the moment what the immigration policy will be, I expect some sort of need-based system - need being defined by businesses, with the Tories in power. I'm a bit shocked that the Tories have made some early noises about discouraging foreign students, since that brings income and intellectual enrichment to us. The higher education system is on tenterhooks because their funding and their admissions are EU-networked, and the UK gets a disproportionate amount of EU research money; either a new system is needed or the present system will be re-adopted lock stock and barrel (EU students pay the same fees as Brits at the moment).

The ease of country-to-country work movement is a worry to people I know, but despite the tabloids I don't expect big inroads into workers' rights, we're already among the most anti-union in the EU. There's plenty of rhetoric around about ditching red tape and barmy EU rules, but in practice an awful lot of regulation of industry, banking and retail is Europe-wide, Norway Switzerland et al included, and our producers will have to conform to EU standards to sell there.

All in all, uncertainty seems the greatest difficulty at the moment. The quality of the pre-referendum debate was so appallingly poor that the issues at stake have been little debated, and even now there's little talk - and a lot of wittering as if the referendum could somehow be undone by right-minded people. The Guardian seems to be going through a rubbish period and mostly I've moved over to the Independent for clearer-sightedness. I keep trying to engage Green people for instance in talk about food and farming, where the UK may be reinventing a policy from scratch, but there's little interest in such debates yet.

Onwards. Onwards.

Shock news: Brexiter and Remainer agree on way forward :)

But then if you don't accept that our biology and sociology expresses natural principles, then that seems to leave you with only the options that either whatever we do (biologically and socially) is thus arbitrary - it lacks any rational support - or that this support must come from some other (transcendent) source.

So we are back to creating gods, Platonic goods, or whatever.

If you want to reject my naturalism, you have to be able to point to the alternative basis you would then embrace. Otherwise that rejection is simply in bad faith. — apokrisis

I think our social and political lives express culture, which has a history. There is no clear rationality in nature, on my reading. You are claiming 'natural principles' lead to 'rational support', but on my reading that's not a logical step, the premiss does not imply the conclusion. Humans have found in themselves - from the 'natural' - inferential powers and have deliberately, culturally fostered rationality (and other qualities, like compassion and warmongering). They might have developed one way, or another, but socially it turns out they have developed thus - where we have reached.

There's no need for gods here. It's just a different metaphysics. You and I see 'the world' differently

To me all your claims about what nature has in mind, which was the phrasing you used at the start of this thread, are about what you have in mind, which you ascribe to natural principle because of your belief-system, which is your own choice within a culturally, historically determined set of 'constraints', which was in turn originally set in motion by our 'natures'.

But surely we can reasonably estimate what the consequences are going to be. Is this not how we live our daily lives? I press the letter B on my keyboard; I am reasonably confident that the representation of B will appear on my screen. I am reasonably sure I will not explode when I take a drink of water. I am reasonably sure that I will be able to pass this midterm. etc. Intentions don't change the reality of an outcome. — darthbarracuda

I would say these are not ethical examples. If you take those standard thought experiments that Michael Sandel uses about saving one life versus saving many lives as trains pass underneath bridges - such examples do tend to assume that the consequences of each act are perfectly knowable, and in this sense I don't accept them.

Where an ethical question involves action between humans or between a human and other creatures, we are not pressing a B on the keyboard: we are taking a step without being at all sure how the other is going to respond. Conciliation and negotiation are the stuff of living.

But I'm not claiming this happens all the time. It's easy enough to know the consequences of paying people starvation wages and to institute more ethical wages. Even then, though, who knows how the world may respond? For example, other organisations who are less responsible and more cunningly secretive may price the ethical ones out of the market while using indentured workers. So a 'victory' for ethical investors can turn into defeat because of unintended consequences.

The question is, what are one's grounds for defining the good?

Aristotle mostly reported what like-minded people regarded as virtues, looked at how we govern ourselves using the virtues, rolled 'em up into eudaimonia, and then explained how to educate ourselves to achieve such ways.

The virtue theory still seems the most attractive to me. It accepts the individualism of our moral quest, and balances it against what people think and what the polis, society as a whole, will benefit from.

I agree with apo's eco-outlook but from a different base altogether. I think naturalism as a basis for ethics is a metaphor/analogy which has a sort of virtue theory lurking in it; that naturalism in itself implies nothing in the way of the good, because nature did not originally have anything in mind.

I can't be doing with rules, whether Kant's super-logical principle, or consequentialism/utilitarianism (as I've said before, we don't know the consequences till we've acted, so I think again we're smuggling in virtues/vices in disguise).

And I can't be doing with gods...and...

Well, that's me.

Well, according to this 7% of those surveyed regretted their vote to leave, which if an accurate representation amounts to 1.2 million. — Michael

It says 'up to 7%' regretted their Leave vote and '3%' regretted their Remain vote: one week afterwards. This seems flimsy, and too soon, to me.

Here's a YouGov focus group survey, a month after, that doesn't find regret a big theme: https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/08/11/yougov-focus-groups/

I don't think there's much empirical evidence. And what would it show? A vote was held on a certain date which we all knew had been coming for months.On what criteria is one to claim that this particular vote among all the votes that have ever been held was somehow wrong? These discussions seem pointless to me. We have to get on and work out what our agriculture and food policy is going to be, and put pressure on the trade negotiations, and decide our immigration criteria, and so forth. The business now is, how to move forward, not keep replaying a vote.

Is it the case that we are each aware of how little we can be sure of, and about which we can say, "this is the Truth"? Are we each merely creating our own hypotheses and then conducting experiments with our lives, to see how closely our hypotheses align with what is the case? — anonymous66

I don't accept an objective world in the way you assume; not as an ontology. But I'm with the earlier-in-the-thread notion - I commit myself to a given narrative. To commit means that at most times other than these moments of quiet reflection, I put my heart and soul into it. To do otherwise would be to act inauthentically, as old Sartre would have it.

The liberal commentariat is strongly 'Remain' and still can't seem to get over losing the vote. I voted Brexit. Here's Jenny Jones presenting the Green case before the vote: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/08/eu-reform-green-brexit

Paul Mason made a socialist case for Brexit before the vote. Here's a recent article by him: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/10/paul-mason-how-left-should-respond-brexit

The EU is a rich countries' club. It's likely to have more rather than less internal strife in the near future. It's not a liberal cause: it exists to keep the free flow of labour and especially capital within the EU boundaries. It's not a great example of subsidiarity: making decisions at the lowest possible level.

I don't personally think the referendum vote is binding, but it would be a brave government that defied the result, and much of the talk about revisiting the vote is wishful thinking: many people still can't quite believe it, and keep telling me about the supposed Brexit voters who already wish they hadn't (the empirical evidence is slim for that). Many middle-class people I know were more emotionally attached to the whole project than I'd realised; to me it wasn't about whether I'm a European, it was a vote about being in a customs union that had grown rather big for its boots. Norwegians and Swiss still manage a good impersonation of Europeanness outside the union.

It turns out quite a lot of personal feeling was also invested in the freedom of their children and grandchildren to work in Europe; there are lots of tales about how to obtain an irish or other eu passport.

Still, I'm very glad it brings France, Germany and Italy together, for stability's sake.

Many of the economic forecasts of short-term doom have turned out to be ill-judged. There's certainly going to be a period of uncertainty, but that's what a big constitutional change does. I'm not clear if the medium-term economic forecasts are any less politicised than the short-term ones were.

I hope it will be of interest to link to this debate about Explanation, including one of my favourite philosophers Nancy Cartwright, plus philosopher of science James Ladyman and a slightly wacky meteorologist.

IAI video about explanation

I want to see if it is possible to reject religion and yet accept it as a legitimate avenue in itself, or if non-religious belief is entirely incompatible with religious tolerance on the philosophical and practical levels — darthbarracuda

I was born a lapsed Catholic, my Dad a former devout believer who had lost his faith in the (2nd) war, my Mum a vague Anglican. So in my childhood I got some Jesuitical training and a complete absence of the sense of a single God. Now I'm nearing old age these basics remain with me.

I think the Richard Dawkins of the 1970's had terrific insights, 'The Selfish gene' and 'The Blind Watchmaker' were both excellent books in their way, so I don't like to denigrate the man; in his later years he's become crusty with self-importance, just when the world of ideas has moved on past and around him. Even 'genes' aren't what they were in his day. But that happens, look at the self-important novels that writers get prizes for when they're past their primes.

What I don't like about the Dennett/Dawkins view of God is the undisguised contempt they have for the intellects of most other people. Something at the heart of me rejects their arrogance, a sneering view that people in general don't understand who or what they are. It seems the converse of wisdom, and links itself in my mind to a kind of Scholasticism among some academics, actually post-modernists and analytics alike, a whirl of circular-seeming debate using terms they have conjured up to debate arcane matters among themselves.

I'm an empiricist by nature, I see that plainly. I like empirical science that investigates what's going on with all sorts of clever ideas and tools, and that doesn't worry all that much about What We Are Made Of. I like art, making stuff work, engineers solving problems. I like most people, I'm curious about them, we are after all fellows of one kind or another. And I like (some) people who have a lifetime of religious experience, and reflect on it, and plough steadily on. Why or how would I 'reject' them? They seem deeply honest to me and to themselves. They have something to show and tell me that pompous people don't. They feel they have touched something profound, and I experience that otherwise mostly in the greatest art, from Euripides to Cindy Sherman. I feel some strong relationship between what's called aesthetic and what's called religious experience.

You can certainly be begotten of the Wittgenstein of the P I and feel this way. But I think it involves you being doubtful of most systems, even the appealing ones, and building a philosophy for yourself brick by brick, mostly sans isms.

Thanks to everyone who's been posting lately, I just had a busy couple of days.

I agree with Moliere that it's often unexplored, what 'world' is or represents: sometimes people feel they need to imply an ontology by incantation of 'world' when, perhaps, it only needs to be provisional, for the purposes of present discussion.

And with Cava I have been thinking about those two Sellarsian 'images'. Why only two? I had a fad, a year or two ago, in that way we self-taught folk do, for Nelson Goodman's 'ways of world-making' where worlds can be multiple, and I still roll the idea round my head fondly. In his conception a world didn't go over to relativism just by being not the only world there is: each world in his 'irrealism' had to have clear rules, bounds, definitions. I imagine such multiple worlds like a map on which you can overlay different properties - here's the geological way of seeing, here's the Google Street Views, here's the population of non-humans, and so on.

Lately my preoccupation is much more with emotion and with power. If you imagine 'the world' as an incredibly complicated 3-D map of what matters to each person, for instance, you can begin with a kind of Heideggerian approach - basic three elements being Dasein or selves, the present at and the ready to hand - and sketch out an immanent world of worlds, one where the 'objects' lack objectivity or even object-ness, yet truths are represented there that wouldn't be represented by the supposedly objective world, and all the known objects would still be in such a world yet strangely changed.

Or again, imagine a 3-D map of possession- and power-claims. This would show up a sort of political landscape beginning in the household/family and spreading out geographically across a locality and imaginatively through communities. My cup, my land, my society, my job. Our this and that.

When [Wittgenstein] said 'that of which we cannot speak...', and 'I am my world', he actually was speaking from the perspective of traditional philosophy in the sense meant above. He wasn't saying that nothing existed beyond what could be empirically verified, but was drawing attention to the limitations of language. — Wayfarer

Have to agree. I presume that's part of the reason why at one time he wanted the Tractatus to be republished in the same volume as Philosophical Investigations, to show the relations between his philosophical selves.

Postmodernists are just too "advanced" to be made fun of. — jkop

You think so? I find a lot more jokes in Derrida than Quine, I must say. Analysis doesn't lend itself to a sense of the absurd, at least in my reading experience. J.L. Austin excepted.

Personally, I just like the word "world". I use it in many contexts to mean a wide range of subtly different things, and I employ the word a lot because I like it. It sounds cool. — Wosret

It is the relish for the word 'world' that I'm fretting at, in part. The word does seem wonderfully all-encompassing, while conveniently glossing over, if one wants to, what's included and what isn't.

If someone claims that the world isn't all there is, I would make the claim that they are misusing terms. The world is all there is, which includes their area of time and space that they claim isn't part of the world, especially if this other domain, not some other world, has a causal effect on the "world" — Harry Hindu

Thanks, Harry. This word domain can sometimes stand for a subsidiary zone and might be useful to me. I don't claim that the world isn't all there is, myself. I just allege we don't even need to ask and answer that sort of question to get on with our scientific enquiries, our art and our lives.

So really this becomes a metaphysical question, as much as we wish that metaphysics could be disposed of for once and for all. Philosophy, observed Etienne Gilson, has often been declared dead; but it usually ends up burying its undertakers. — Wayfarer

Cosmos, the Greek word, is interesting in itself, for it implies an order, vis-vis chaos, and I gather was re-invented, as it were, by Humboldt in the 19th century. Again his implication is of unity. (Barry's reference to translation made me think about this)

I think part of my difficulty is that the claims of 'science' are indeed metaphysical, but they often insinuate themselves into that sphere as if it were an innocuous development from scientific enquiry. I see that methodological naturalism will, in its methods, treat some 'world' as within its orbit. That's where the likes of me and you and Harry Hindu can agree about the details of science and enjoy its fruits and its follies. But beyond that, I can't follow them into the way things are in the world.

There is a secondary issue, I realise, in the detail of what I'm studying, about whether physical scientists can imagine that 'social science' has validity. For instance:

It is a remarkable fact that in most areas of science, all we ultimately need to take for granted are the laws of physics and perhaps some boundary conditions. — Chalmers, Conscious Mind p 214

Here the 'world' of physical science is insisting on jurisdiction over the 'world' of psychology, society and economics, as if there wasn't already some perfectly good scientific work going on over there.

Well, I will leave Wayfarer to defend his own remark, I picked up on what he said as a common adage often quoted by people, and when so quoted, I believed it to be generally taken to be from that bit of John, even if the translation is in error.

'...it's a bit unfair to paint me as an advocate of factory farming don't you think? — apokrisis'


I'm afraid that crusaders in this field tend to have little time for fairness. — Barry Etheridge

Apo, I didn't mean to paint you as an advocate of factory farming, quite the contrary, I think of you as an eco-friendly poster, indeed I'm intrigued that, as I read you, you think something like factory farming is indeed a symptom of how we as human creatures are going wrong. I just can't get to that via naturalism; I have to approach it from a different angle.

Crusading, Barry: I'm an old git who stands for elections, knocks on doors, discusses ecology and the plight of fossil fuels with strangers on behalf of the Greens. I have a point of view, and I'm a fair man: these two things are possible in the same person. It seems an odd idea to me that to campaign is somehow to be unfair: how will the polis survive without a lot of pavement-pounders like me? Let's all be polite.

More likely John 17:16. 'They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.'

I know that Deleuze considered himself a transcendental empiricist and actually a metaphysician who wanted to provide a metaphysics to support mathematics and science. But this is very far from traditional metaphysics, because it has already accepted that there is a 'master' metaphysics implicit in math and science'; that is it has already accepted materialism. So it is really a rejection of traditional metaphysics; it is only a matter of working out all the details. — John

It does seem puzzling that you don't enjoy arguing with Deleuze, since he seems to have some of the same primary concerns as you but emerges with a different view.

What is common to metaphysics and transcendental philosophy is, above all, this alternative which they both impose on us: either, an undifferentiated ground, a groundlessness, formless nonbeing, or an abyss without differences and without properties, or a supremely indivduated Being and an intensely personalized For. Without this Being or this Form, you will have only chaos... — "Deleuze,

This whole section, in the 'Fifteenth series of singularities', seems like a debate with what you're interested in.

Is her book good? — Cavacava

(Suze Rotolo) Yes I think it is good. She seems to look back without any rancour or awe, with indeed, memories of love, and it's a differently-angled insight into how things were 1960 to 66.

Great song. I think we're nit-picking about a great man. All prizes are somewhat arbitrary.

I'm just reading Suze Rotolo's memoir of the Freewheelin' Dylan, very acute on the shift in personality visited upon him by fame and Albert Grossman.

So what is your assessment of its credibility? — apokrisis

I am harking back to the evidential: ants appear to recognise themselves in mirrors, and this is a surprise to us.

To me the research looks robust but I agree, it makes me think that 'the mirror test' may not be telling us what we thought it told us. I watch my cat prowl behind the mirror looking for the cat it just saw in the glass and am unconvinced that there is some step-change up to the ant; rather, they have different ways of seeing because of (the genealogy of) their different ecologies.

Nevertheless, apo, I am more sympathetic to the op than you are. I read you as presenting a kind of naturalistic ethics. I think that culturally we have developed our 'natural' relationship to other creatures into a cruelly exploitative one. The lives of the chickens we subsequently eat, for instance, are horrible; once someone becomes aware of that, I'm surprised they can ever tuck into kfc with anything other than a heavy heart (to go with the bloated stomach). 'Disgust' as an emotion points to something ethical in this instance. We treat these animals as our instruments and in doing so we show a lack of respect, in our sophisticated culture, for the nature of which we are a part. We industrialize their lives and slaughter, insulate ourselves from how it happens, and protect ourselves from the ethical dilemma that face-to-face knowledge would involve.

It's in this vein that I suspect our science about human and other animals is itself corrupted by our instrumental view of our fellow-creatures. It is in our interests to imagine that other animals 'are instinctual' or 'don't feel what we feel' or 'can't possibly be conscious in the way we are conscious'. All these propositions may be true but I suspect them because I suspect that we taint the evidence by our very approach. Historically most of our research has been on captive creatures, and studying the same creatures in the wild has shown us in some cases how wrong we were. In the present, perfectly decent people argue that we must experiment on other animals 'or we wouldn't understand human heart disease'; that needs the ethical counter-weight of saying, there is another viewpoint from which such a purportedly ethical statement is unethical, for it cannot imagine that other animals deserve respect, it can only seem to place value on human lives. The natural world itself has value, and when we eat factory chickens, experiment on rats or monkeys, use other animals as our pets or for our sport we make a value judgment which we should at the least acknowledge, and attempt to weigh.

Vileness may enter in, if we lack or stifle natural emotion. But so does justice. Justice seeks rational appraisal of emotion. One reading I have of Greek drama and early ethics is that justice tries to bring an end to tales of revenge, and bring us to culture and civilisation.

I have Dylan lyrics in my head many days. They're selling postcards of the hanging, today, but other days it can be Johnny's in the basement, or if you see her say hello, or Blind Willie McTell. (If any of us ever meet you'll have to hear me singing All along the watchtower, with Wayfarer on harmonies). To my mind he changed the way we think, and few people do that.

The only quibble I would raise is that, I think Derrida, and some others, are actually quite playful in their approach. — Wayfarer

I completely agree. When I've spent some hours struggling over some analytic analysis that has emphasised the 'anal' in both those words, it's a relief to get to Derrida, and laugh sometimes. If only more philosophy were funny.

pigeons — Bitter Crank

Spring is here, spring is here
Life is skittles and life is beer
I think the loveliest time of the year
Is the spring, I do, don't you? Course you do
But there's one thing that makes spring complete for me
And makes every Sunday a treat for me

All the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon
When we're poisoning pigeons in the park
Every Sunday you'll see my sweetheart and me
As we poison the pigeons in the park

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhuMLpdnOjY

'??? It's known that ants have sometimes reacted in such a way as to warrant the consideration of them having at least a rudimentary sense of self, when they scrape off the paint on their heads. — darthbarracuda'

After looking in the mirror? References please. — apokrisis

There is actually some evidence on this front: http://www.journalofscience.net/File_Folder/521-532%28jos%29.pdf

It's interesting how most of us, including the participants in this thread, drift from saying 'non-human animals' to mistakenly saying 'animals' - by which we mean all animal life but humans. We are like them; oh, but we aren't.

This drift suggests to me that we find it hard to focus our rationality on the issue in question. We eat, experiment on and use for work and pet-loving leisure non-human animals. How shall we speak with any clear-sightedness about our attitude to them? We find it hard to imagine a commonality between 'us' and 'them', even if we theorise since Darwin that we abstractly accept there is a continuity.

I don't subscribe to an -ism like the op's - I'm not even sure that 'species' is that well-defined - but I completely agree on the benefits of rethinking our role in the ecology of where we live, and what respect we give to other creatures and the wider world we're in. We find it hard to imagine a finitude to the resources we exploit (and this includes other animals), so the Economics we live by imagines ravenous appetites and endless alternative sources of supply. But there are limits to appetites and souorces of supply, our Economics is mistaken in the long run. A shift in mindset would enable us to live more harmoniously with the earth . Greater respect for fellow animals would be one part of such a shift.

One starting point would be that you have a reasonable expectation that we will understand your question and the words and grammar that express it. A shared language coaxes us immediately into notions of a shared world, in which we understand some things to be objectively put, such as 'The objective world remains only an inference at best.'

I think the idea of 'political correctness' is a mistaken generalisation, and even to start accepting the term is to succumb to an agenda instigated or supported by people who use the phrase. Let us talk about each instance as it comes, and we find that we are talking about a variety of debates about a variety of words.

Lots of people in different contexts use words of opprobrium among themselves. People who've experienced mental distress, for instance, often talk to each other happily about loonies, barminess, being in the bin, fruitcakes and so on. To talk to one's own language community on equal terms is quite different from talking with those outside it who are trying to generalise about you. Jewish jokes are for Jews to tell each other.

There are different rules of politeness whoever you are and whoever you're with. No-one talks to Grandma the way they talk to their friends or their teacher or the driver on the bus. Much of my attempt to stop people being, say, racist in front of me is simply to persuade them to act with social decorum and decency. I think to call my attitude 'political correctness' is an attempt to silence me and justify their rudeness and, by their rudeness, their assertion of power. I'm not having it.

And so while I can't resolve THE problem, I do think it's reasonable to resolve the best I can one person at a time, with the understanding that eventually there'll be some that really need aid and then we can deal with them one person at a time. — Hanover

I think this is a philosophical mistake, particularly in relation to economics. A macro problem is not always solvable at the micro level. Problems that present themselves at different levels require different answers. Indeed, quite often if everyone does the right thing for themselves on the micro scale, the macro result is not the right thing for the group as a whole. People crossing a footbridge begin to march in step, making the whole footbridge swing perilously; the intervention of engineers becomes necessary to re-balance the system as a whole.

In my youth I was a housing aid adviser to people, and it became clear to me at one point that the best thing for an individual to do was to cheat the system, even though that would mess up the system as a whole. The affluent were already doing that by piling up housing debt when they didn't need the loan, because they received tax relief on the interest repayments, and while this seemed to me an ethical cheat it was entirely lawful; it therefore meant that every rich house-owner was receiving a far greater subsidy from the government than, say, a poor tenant in public housing that had long ago paid off its own debt. All the poor could do was to find ways of elevating themselves up the waiting list, or illicitly sub-letting part of their dwellings (besides fiddling the details of their income to receive more benefit.

These inequities and follies remain in the UK housing system, and have been compounded by subsidies to buy-to-let landlords for their investment and running costs. The thing requires a system-wide reform, which it has alas no prospect of getting under either prospective regime.

Wasn't Royston Vasey set near there? (Sorry couldn't help it). My folks come from Huddersfield, I know that part of the world well, beautiful countryside. — Punshhh

Alas there aren't enough local jobs for local people round here :)

A way of helping recipients budget? Are you fucking kidding me? They need to get their priorities straight, and the sooner the better. They've made a right mess of it. — Sapientia

One difficulty in getting political traction here is that 'they' include both Conservatives and originally New Labour.

Be careful, there. I can just see your little corner of paradise being over-run and ruined by a plague of tourists, developers, builders, summer people--marauders all--coming to trash the place. — Bitter Crank

Call some place paradise / Kiss it goodbye...:)

No danger of excess immigration of late, BC, but thanks for worrying for me.

I live in a terraced house, which is modest though not tiny, and I live in one of the poorest areas of England, which is the only way I can afford a house with a view.

In my young days I was in Shelter, a housing charity and campaign group, and I keep up an interest in how it's all going. Sadly the British housing market has been seriously distorted by vote-seeking political parties: there is too much selling-off on the cheap of public housing to buy the votes of the tenants-turned owners, not enough building of public housing, and the wrong sort of tax incentives and disincentives, fantastic sums spent on benefits which go to landlords . We could remove tax relief for mortgage payers, sting the owners of empty properties with big fines, allocate more public funds to house-building, control the rapaciousness of landlords through the tax and licensing system, and introduce a Land Value Tax which economists of all political stripes have long agreed to be a good idea. (http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/11/economist-explains-0) I'm not holding my breath re any of these ideas. Meanwhile, come and live in Todmorden, OP, it's lovely here! I daresay you could afford it! - But it'll be a bit of a commute to work.