busyOne of them gave me a shout-out today for a comment I left. We're talking about how and why the treatment of mental complaints lags behind that of physical complaints, and it started with a previous discussion about whether and why drugs can be helpful.
Basically, I have noticed certain patterns in dealing with friends who have mental challenges, and that has built up a little basket of ideas on the topic. Sometimes when an opportunity arises, I set one of them out. One of these days I need to flesh these out and present them in full. You can see bits of several here: different solutions work for different people because there are many different causes of mental complaints, and there's a difference between mental illness and mental </i> injury, and we just don't have ways of perceiving exactly what needs to be fixed let alone the ability to reach in and repair it. So we ... muddle.
August 10 2009, 17:38:42 UTC 11 years ago
That's somewhat akin so saying because we all sneeze in a dusty environment, we are all physically ill. The concept of mental illness does not seek to explain what one might call existential problems, which are philosophical in origin, but specific potentially crippling anomalies that are present in a percentage of the population.
Also, you suggest that this endemic "mental illness" prevents us from creating "a more rational and ethical society". There are two problems with this statement. First, addressing the "rational" portion of your statement, keep in mind that, unlike the fictional Vulcans, humans are not perfectly rational beings. They have an emotive element that is not based on reason as such. Second, addressing the "ethical" portion of your statement, whose ethics shall we put in place? Plato's? Hume's? Kant's? Nietzsche's? Rand's? There is little agreement among philosophers (and, for that matter, religious leaders) of what constitutes ethical behavior - trust me, I was a philosophy major in college. So which set of ethics do you wish to choose? And enforce (noting that some will inevitably disagree with you)?
Raven
Hmm...
August 10 2009, 22:22:54 UTC 11 years ago
A rational society tends to survive better than an irrational society, because when irrational people ignore rational facts, the consequences can be crushing. As we are currently experiencing in the effects of global warming: you can say that it doesn't exist, you can keep choosing profit over sustainability, but that will not put out the wildfires or water the crops.
>> Second, addressing the "ethical" portion of your statement, whose ethics shall we put in place? Plato's? Hume's? Kant's? Nietzsche's? Rand's? There is little agreement among philosophers (and, for that matter, religious leaders) of what constitutes ethical behavior - trust me, I was a philosophy major in college. So which set of ethics do you wish to choose? And enforce (noting that some will inevitably disagree with you)?<<
Preferably something more effective than the wretched mess we have now, in which profits are generally valued above human well-being, planetary safety, and the survival of the human race. I'm a more serious student of comparative religions than of comparative philosophy, but my personal inclination would be to pile everything together and look for two things: the stuff that all or almost all systems agree on (i.e. it's unethical to kill innocent people) and the stuff that one system has figured out a better way to handle than what anyone else has. As a social mechanic, I tend to see systems as sets of connected parts, which can be detached, changed, replaced, improved, discarded, etc. at need.
Re: Hmm...
August 12 2009, 13:37:55 UTC 11 years ago
I'm inclined to agree. The problem is that it's very difficult to enforce rationality, especially concerning long-term effects. As an example (perhaps this is the Rand in me speaking), I see no problem with the pursuit of profit as such, but in particular, there are too many examples of the pursuit of short-term profits driving people's behavior (which tends to be both short-sighted and destructive) versus the pursuit of long-term profit (which tends to look at the larger picture and is eventually more profitable, to boot).
I think the one of the problems with selecting a philosophical position for a society is the matter of enforcement. How does one do this? One thing that seems clear to me is that certain systems (libertarianism and Marxism come to mind) can work only on the condition that everyone in the group agrees to the same basic principles - as soon as a person or persons acts contrary to the system, it falls apart. This is why these system generally only work on a small scale (co-ops come to mind). Larger groups require more flexible systems - it becomes a matter of determining a system that works and is agreeable to enough people that outliers don't disrupt the system as a whole.
Then again, reality has a tendency to enforce the results of rational versus irrational behavior...
Raven