musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

The Colour of Questions


Do you remember being a teenager, and asking questions about reality: those late night discussions in the dorm at university, or the endless questions that kept throwing sparks around the campfire as you sat with your friends through the night by the lake in summer? Things like ‘What is the colour red?’ And, ‘How do I know you see the same thing as me? Maybe the colour you see is actually something different from me, but you have learned to call anything with a wavelength around 700 nanometers by the name: red…’

Then, of course, the smart aleck in the group would point out that the 17th century English philosopher John Locke divided qualities of objects into primary and secondary categories: primary qualities being intrinsic to the object and possessed by it even when it wasn’t being observed; secondary qualities, however, were up for grabs: they were what we observed and were therefore subjectively defined.

“You mean like the difference between nouns and the adjectives that define them…?” I would often throw that in to pretend I actually understood what the aleck was talking about. Anyway, I have always preferred simple grammar to the complex definitional qualities of real-world things.

Now that I’m retired though, thoughts like that still revisit me on rainy days when the trails are wet, and I don’t dare sit by the window with a book lest I doze off. It occurred to me to wonder if those secondary qualities that so vexed Locke and his fellow philosophers might also be applicable to other things -like, well, morality, or ethics. Surely, given the disparate mores of the various far-flung societies around the world, morals are more like secondary qualities that vary with upbringing than primary qualities that inhere immutably within whatever is being considered.

I suppose that in the traditional Philosophy we amateurs play at, the game is often merely to dispute, rather than prove something -okay, at least it was amongst the crowd I hung around with. It was more an art form than a Wittgensteinian linguistic analysis. Still, I felt I should try out my idea about primary and secondary qualities being applicable to morality on the elderly crowd that attended our Wednesday coffee group at the Food Court in the Mall.

But on the following Wednesday there was far from a crowd at the usual table; only Jeremy the retired teacher in his habitual old-man pants and faded sweatshirt was there, pounding his cane on the floor and talking to the aged Lewis, long retired from the bench, but still wearing a sports jacket and freshly pressed grey flannel pants as if he were going to a meeting -a Lewis still intolerant of poorly constructed arguments. I would have to be careful with mine…

I am not above bribes, however, so I brought extra doughnuts and a smile to the table. They were, of course, arguing as usual, so they accepted my gifts and acknowledged my presence only after Jeremy had stopped waving his arms at the judge -another typical Wednesday coffee morning at the Food Court.

Lewis smiled affably at the doughnut gifts and cautioned Jeremy to do the same. “Are we being bribed, though?” he said and had a bite as if it no longer mattered to him. “I’m retired now,” he added. “I accept gifts…”

Jeremy, however, was suspicious. “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes… I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts.”

Lewis rolled his eyes. “How long have you been waiting to use that phrase about the Trojan Horse, Jer?”

Jeremy shrugged. “You going to try some newly minted philosophy on us again, G?” He had a quick sip of his coffee. “I can always tell…”

I hate being put on the spot like that, but I suppose my motives were obvious; we elders are revered for the wisdom we’ve acquired over the years. I gathered my thoughts together and wondered if I could summarize my ideas; this was a much tougher audience than I had expected. “Uhmm, well, I was wondering about the primary and secondary qualities that objects possess… “

I didn’t get any further than that before Jeremy smiled. “I haven’t thought about those in years, G… John Locke, back in the 17th century wasn’t it?”

Sometimes Jeremy surprises me. Even Lewis seemed impressed.

I nodded. “Take the colour of an object as a secondary quality of it, for example. We seem to agree to call something with a certain range of wavelength of light red, but are we really seeing the same thing…?”

Jeremy nodded, caught up in memories of his youth. “I’m actually seeing blue, but have learned to call it red? I remember those discussions… And how we can never know?”

I nodded enthusiastically, and turned to Lewis. “But I’m wondering about whether some other properties depend upon whether or not people are observing them. Do they retain those properties even unobserved? Are secondary qualities merely a function of observation? A function of prior experience of them; a function of prior teaching about them?

“And furthermore, does morality possess primary and secondary properties like that: conditioned more by past experience and social judgements?”

Lewis was quiet for a moment, as befits a judge. “Is morality an object -like, say, an apple- or a quality itself?”

I had the sinking feeling that I hadn’t sufficiently worked out my thoughts. “But… isn’t morality, even unobserved an objective ‘thing’? Something that, like a ‘thing’, has properties that act upon the observer…? And, even unnoticed, still has a reality with properties attached to it like a ‘thing’ would?”

Lewis thought about that for a while; I sort of hoped he had no answer, because I was already over my head. “Is morality an objective thing like an apple, G -something with different names, perhaps, but nonetheless universally agreed upon? Or is it a quality whose very existence depends upon the observer, or the circumstances?”

On an impulse, I said “Maybe, in the case of morality, the circumstances in which it is embedded, are sort of like its secondary qualities…”

“That’s kind of weak,” Jeremy interjected, having finished his doughnut and wiped his mouth to his satisfaction. “Weak but interesting, don’t you think, Lew…?”

Lewis nodded. “I think we both owe G a doughnut, don’t you Jer?”

At first, Jeremy smiled, but then he wrinkled his forehead at the suggestion. “Do you think a debt also has secondary qualities…?”

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