Benefits Street drew the biggest TV audience in over a year for one of the countries most watched TV channels. It is perhaps no surprise to see it generating such a huge debate about welfare benefits, crime and immigration; topics which the reality show covers in a divisive manner. Some claim that it’s a depiction of real life and thus no different to any other reality TV, whilst others claim it is propaganda aimed at attacking the ideals of left-wing politics such as welfare benefits.

 

Drawn from economics, political and ethics research for my second book, I wish to briefly examine five myths sparked by these issues.

 

 

1)      People are unemployed because they are lazy.

Perhaps the easiest myth to debunk on this entire list; regardless of current levels of unemployment, some level of unemployment is a necessity in any system of capitalism. Capitalism must be incredibly flexible in order for it to work: the supply of products must rise or fall based on the demand for those products. In periods of economic recession this means that demand for many products falls, thus companies must be allowed to sack excess workers and create further unemployment in order to keep profits functioning as high as possible (the core principle a private company must follow). Similarly, when the economy picks up, there needs to be an excess of unemployed workers with which companies can hire in order to boost production.

 

The final thing to note is that in order for companies to make the most money, there must always be a pool of unemployed people with which to dip into when they want to boost production. So generally speaking, without unemployment, there can be no growth as production could not be increased to allow for it (although growth can also come from technological progress or invention). And, of course, growth is the ideal of capitalist economics – without it we are not looking at capitalism, so a lack of target for growth could not be accommodated.

 

This is economic reality. Unemployment is not the fault of lazy workers or the unemployed; it is an absolute necessity of the system we live under. Under a logical system of capitalism, the collective groups of companies in the country should completely cover the cost of keeping unemployed individuals. This is partly the logic behind corporation tax as well as employment tax, etc, and also why we fail when we deliver tax breaks to big companies.

 

 

2)      People on unemployment benefits should be in poverty/should not be allowed luxuries.

The assumption we make in this kind of statement is that we pay for what these people on benefits have, and so we should have more than them because we work and they don’t.

 

We might want to agree with the assumption that those on unemployment benefits shouldn’t be on more than those working, this seems fair enough. The unemployment benefit never currently reaches minimum wage though, so this is already happening. However, more importantly, we have already discussed how unemployment is a necessity in the system in which we work. We wouldn’t even be able to work in our system of economics without unemployed people existing – they play as important a part of the system as the workers – so how can we logically justify a forced underclass of unemployed people? After all we need them to be there, it isn’t their fault.

 

There may well be argument to say workers should be better off than the unemployed, but we must understand the economic reality of necessary unemployment before we begin demonising or creating such a class of poverty stricken people. Similarly, if we are unhappy that unemployed people are living almost as well as the working people then we should be less concerned about lowering benefits (as these already are low enough to often put people in states of poverty) and more concerned about creating laws to guarantee higher minimum wages. At current both benefits and wages are relatively low in comparison with the profits companies bank each year.

 

 

3)      Immigrants are stealing our jobs

In general, those employers who favour immigrants do so for the low cost of the labour. Just as unemployment is an economic necessity, if we allow companies to pay less for labour from elsewhere they will do so. This is primarily a problem of the system of capitalism, not with political decisions or immigrants themselves.

 

As a philosophical point, there is also the idea of national identity. Many eastern Europeans, for instance, hold a reputation for being hard workers. This is far from proven opinion, however if it were true it would beg the question: why shouldn’t they be allowed to compete with a British person for a ‘British’ job? Just because you fell onto a particular piece of land when you were born should not rationally justify that you have the right to work on it over anyone else.

 

There are various practical reasons why that kind of philosophy is not the be all and end all, but roughly speaking it is the reason why immigration is more open than it used to be. Tribalism – such as nationalism, in which one decries certain rights over other nationalities – is an out-dated concept when it is practiced for nationalism’s sake. It does make sense to allow people more of a chance for a livelihood where they were raised than half way around the world (for practical and community reasons), but we still must challenge this notion of what ‘our’ jobs really means, or why ‘we Brits’ is any more meaningful than ‘we Europeans’, or even we ‘earthlings’!

 

 

4)      If the unemployed turn to crime we should cut their benefits.

I find it as difficult to sympathise with criminals as the next person, however we must accept the social realities of poverty and unemployment. Unemployment is a necessity of capitalism, however we provide very low benefits to those who are unemployed – in some instances leading to poverty – and thus we offer little help for this person within the law.

 

Crime – from drug taking to shoplifting – is statistically much more likely in areas where unemployment and poverty rates are high. It isn’t rocket science to work out why. People in these two statistical brackets feel like they have less to lose and more to gain from such risks. If anything, the occurrence of crime means we should spend more on the community in question, not less. Spending less is a way of enacting senseless and irrational revenge – let’s not forget that we, as a society, put this unemployment there. If we continue to remove resources or opportunities from run down communities, or even simply ignore the lack of them, then we will encourage more crime. We can accept this reality and do something about it, or else we can ignore it and support mythical revenge fantasies.

 

 

5)      Unemployment is necessary for our economic system to remain, why shouldn’t we be harsh on those who do not accept it? After all, we have to accept our wages being taxed.

The final myth is a much less common one. Suppose that you are a working person but accept the necessity of unemployment. Why shouldn’t you be angry about other people in the system – namely the unemployed – committing crime or being lazy?

 

This seems a fairer conclusion than the other myth-based opinions that I have so far examined. However, it assumes that unemployment (and the low benefit associated with it) is something we must all put up with. This is simply not true. It is certainly necessary for the system we live in, yet the system we live in grants massive tax cuts to companies that make billions of pounds profit a year and pays huge bonuses to people who already make millions individually per year. None of us chose to live in it, and it has clearly become extremely biased toward certain people.

 

There are undeniably benefits to capitalism which, in my opinion, we would be foolish to lose. But the system of capitalism which we currently have is extremely biased toward big business and the wealthy, despite its responsibility to be a system which organises all of society’s trade and wellbeing. There are other ways to run capitalism; we shouldn’t put up with a system which forces high levels of unemployment, low levels of pay, much lower levels of welfare for those out of work and yet lets the obscenely wealthy away with the kind of tax cuts which could solve these kinds of financial problems in one swift move. Capitalism is an economic system, and as such it’s job is to ensure everyone has the right level of resources to live happily; as a side note we wish for it to motivate people to advance and progress society. The current system focuses solely on the side note rather than the principle it was set up to do, and it needs changing. As do our opinions.

 

 

“A Theory of Everything That Matters: How to Fix Politics and Economics” is currently in progress with a plan to publish in 2015.

 

“Rational Morality: A Science of Right and Wrong” is available now: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rational-Morality-science-right-wrong/dp/1908675179/

It’s difficult to read a headline like that without imagining it being about some form of art which, intentionally or not, tries to disregard social ethics in its quest for meaning. Many artists make a name for themselves through such controversy; regardless of whether Guillermo “Habacuc” Vargas actually starved a dog as part of an exhibit in 2007, he is one of those with such a reputation. Widespread rumours and e-mail petitions about the ethics/art conflict which many believed him to be indulging, resulted in an almost legend-yet-devil like status.

 

This kind of dispute is a relatively easy ethical conundrum to solve: is it unethical to starve a sentient individual in an attempt at creating aesthetic value? Yes. We can teach ourselves to get aesthetic pleasure from almost anything, so to go about demanding it (or trying to teach some sort of message of meaning) through enforced suffering is to allow art to encroach upon basic ethics. This doesn’t seem to be a controversial analysis.

 

But what about when artists and performers try to do the opposite? What about when art is used to promote or ‘preach’ about ethics? That’s a whole different and more interesting story; one which we have a lot more familiarity with.

 

Bill Bragg, for instance, is well-known not only for his ‘normal bloke’ ballads but also for his promotion of working class causes. He’s a song-writer who has not just influenced honest folk music for 30 years, but also played a heavy hand in influencing the US and UK punk scenes. This influence can mainly can be seen in ethical stances. He even made an appearance on the first ‘Rock Against Bush’ compilation: a project aimed at mobilising alternative musicians and fans against the 2004 US presidential re-election campaign of George W Bush.

 

There are many Bragg-esque examples on the music scene, especially as you dig into the youth subculture genres, however the issue of mingling art with ethics doesn’t stop with music. Mark Thomas is a comedian who also highlights issues of ethics and politics within his work: work which spanned six series of the ‘Mark Thomas Comedy Product’ on Channel 4, as well as various other shows, stand up tours and documentaries.

 

Again, Thomas’ influence is not hard to spot, but he also is only one speck on the comedy map of ethics. The alternative comedy movement of the 80’s – partly reinvigorated by Stewart Lee last year after he spotted a building change in style through comedy clubs up and down the country – is abundant with comedians pushing ethical positions or statements of some sort.

 

Stand-up comedy, in fact, gives a unique insight into the merging of art and ethics. As many have noted, stand up often consists of the performer sharing values with an audience, or throwing out an opinion with which the audience can sympathise or share: at which point the comic can then create absurdity or an idea of the bizarre with which to garner shared humour. This kind of analysis would argue that it is almost impossible to have ‘ethics-neutral’ art, as promoting one’s opinion (or the opinion of one’s stage persona) is a vital part of much art.

 

To be clear, it is not indirect ‘value-sharing’ that I am talking about, so much as promotion of direct ethical causes. Is it right for performers of any moral persuasion to use art to promote their causes?

 

So far I have talked about primarily politically moderate performers, but what about the ultimate in extremely political art? The Nazi’s famously promoted art that they believed to be in agreement with their values of racial purity and obedience.

 

This is where we can begin to see a potential problem with the merging of art and ethics: art can become like a Trojan horse, cloaking the values and opinions for hidden entrance into a person’s mind. The Nazi’s are an extreme example of this – a fascist government who clearly believed that propaganda was best when mobilised in a Trojan manner. How firmly did they believe this though? After all, the Luftwaffe were not endowed with speakers and banners, they were filled with bombs.

 

Never-the-less, the problem remains. A good theory of moral philosophy has to stand up to criticism in journals, a study touting an ethical result has to do the same, and at the very least moral causes tend to face a strict examination in the media before becoming accepted. What artists can do is push an ethical position purely on the basis of one shared observation with an audience: this is, at least to some degree, a dangerous proposition.

 

The question, when it comes to art and ethics, is whether we think we are educated enough to spot bad ideas when they are disguised in a loveable manner? Or at least, are we educated enough to reject new bad ideas (after all you can hardly blame art for pushing negative norms which the media may have given us)? In general, I tend to sit with the opinion that we are, but this is based on little but my own experiences of enjoying the odd performer but rejecting their ethical stance on politics.

 

I like to think that I enjoy watching some political comics perform because I enjoy their overtly self-aware and critical comedy, just as I like to think I like listening to Billy Bragg and Frank Turner because their style appeals to my aesthetic senses. But it can be no coincidence that I share comparable views to many of the explicitly political acts that I enjoy.

 

Similarly, how many of us with an appreciation of ethics can claim to have not been influenced by art during our formative years? If you had grown up with art of a different perspective, would your views be as they are now? I love that art can interest people in ethical causes, especially in a world that seems to have become colder to philanthropy, but I worry that art can cloak the transfer of values that I disagree with. Being an honest rationalist, I also therefore worry about art that can cloak the unexamined transfer of my preferred values.

2013 was an eventful year to say the least: from an ethics perspective, we saw a wide range of issues explored in the headlines of the year and chatted about around the water coolers.

 

A review of these events are useful because at the time we do not fully see the issues being played out. So, below is a look back at the big stories of the year that were tinged with ethics. You might be surprised at the huge scope of ethics you have been thinking about and discussing over the last year – not only in this small selection of headlines, but also in the variety of other news stories which have not made this list. For a country addicted to reality TV we’re a lot deeper than we like to pretend!

 

 

Animal Products: A Horse too Far?

 

The first major headline of the year, for us Brits at least, came in the form of the horse meat scandal which kicked off in January. We saw the media debate animal ethics at length: how dare big companies put horse meat into our cow meat products?

 

Many believed this to be a debate about animal ethics, but the discussion rarely even touched that subject. This itself was probably a wise move, given that there is no relevant moral difference between a horse and a cow: this debate would have quickly turned to a question of why we aren’t outraged about killing cows for food when we can get the relevant nutrients in beef from various plant foods without causing pain and suffering. Instead the debate centred on a more widely approvable issue: informed consent. The consensus was that eating horse is not wrong, it is simply wrong to sell it to people when labelled as something else.

 

As a result the topic became relatively arbitrary. Of course it is wrong on some level to sell the wrong type of meat in lasagnes, but the media failed to grasp the really interesting debate on why we eat animals at all.

 

 

Syria: A War in Progress

 

I intentionally put the topic of the Syrian Civil War second on this list, even though it was already raging on the 1^st January, to showcase a point. Whilst the horse meat scandal ruled the column inches for much of January, a war which this year progressed to a death toll of 130,000 was largely relegated in importance behind many of these kinds of stories. One also would find it difficult to imagine that January saw more coffee time discussion of Syria than of horse meat.

 

This is understandable given our growing familiarity with war; the last decade has seen media coverage of conflict rocket skywards, helped by a growing affordability of technology. The shock we have toward news coverage of war diminishes every year. Whilst Chomsky wrote that we should blame the media coverage for not showing enough of foreign atrocities, it’s clear that the fault isn’t with media alone. We appear to be less shocked by war, and we might even argue that our desensitivity to violence in this way is a factor that nourishes war in the first place (be it the selling of arms to militants, or the ignorance of immoral leaderships until they threaten us).

 

These are interesting debates that should be had, but either way, the continuing Syrian civil war has cast on us the perennial moral debate about war, along with a fresher discussion about how we cover it and how we stop it happening altogether.

 

 

Debating Death in the Spotlight

 

The world lost two politicians with very different images this year, which resulted in two very different discussions about death. In April the first, and somehow still the only, female British PM Margaret Thatcher died. Thatcher was divisive to say the least, and whilst most mainstream politicians paid tribute, those areas of the UK which most felt the wrath of her Conservative ideology of spending cuts showed genuine signs of elation. This was a woman, remember, who caused great suffering to a great many people: necessary or not (a debate which still continues). Street parties and elated interviewers sparked huge outrage: is it right to celebrate someone’s death in this way? Should we not be concerned about her family and friends’ feelings? Do entire communities have a right to find solace in symbolic events, and does this outweigh the suffering of her loved ones? These are all tough moral questions.

 

Worlds apart, in almost every sense, was the death of Nelson Mandela in December. As opposed to Thatcher who was primarily a symbol of divisive political policy, Mandela was a symbol of great human achievement: a spearhead of the movement against apartheid, and the icon of its defeat. Indeed it was difficult to find anyone with anything negative to say about him. Even more interesting ethical discussions raged: why do we not see heroic figures in politics anymore? Have we created systems where politicians cannot take unpopular but moral stands? Is it right for the media to celebrate the life of a man for one achievement, whilst opposing and ignoring his other vocal views (such as on liberal politics, or membership of communist parties)?

 

 

Religious Terrorism Continues

 

In nightmarish scenes, April’s Boston Marathon was disrupted by two pressure cookers bombs which killed 3 people and injured around 260 others. The culprits were said to be motivated by ‘extremist’ Islamist beliefs.

 

In May, British Army drummer Lee Rigby was run down by two men in Woolwich, before being stabbed and hacked to death. Chilling scenes of the aftermath were captured on a mobile phone by a passer-by. The assailants were motivated by ‘extremist’ Islamist beliefs.

 

These are relatively isolated cases in the West, but there is no doubt that the events are spreading. Russia, Pakistan, Somalia, India, Philippines, Indonesia, Israel, Nigeria, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, Iraq, Kenya, Mali, Afghanistan and China all saw religiously motivated suicide bombings, attacks or other mass murders. The vast majority of these countries saw multiple actions, most stretching into double figures.

 

Without doubt, the most common assailants tend to be Islamist groups. However the debate in the media, at least in the UK, largely focuses on ‘extremist’ Islam: they ask how we can stop young Muslims being indoctrinated into this ‘extremist’ wing of belief?

 

A more historically accurate opinion would show that it isn’t just Islam, and it isn’t just ‘extremists’ either. All religions – built as they are on the suppression of critical thinking and the valuing of belief without evidence – inherently ask followers to not be swayed by rational debate, and to hold certain beliefs regardless of what other opinion or facts are shown to them. For most religious people, these ‘steadfast and untestable’ beliefs go no further than a belief in a creator or an afterlife, however it is absolutely no shock that other religious people stick steadfastly by other beliefs in the holy books (such as the murder of non-believers or the doctrine of an eye for an eye). The question ‘how do we get Muslims or Christians to keep their harmless religious beliefs but drop the harmful ones?’ presupposes that you could teach every person to devalue rationality in one area, but value it in another, thus picking and choosing the beliefs we want them to pick and choose when discovering religion. This is certainly possible as a theoretical matter, but impossible in practice.

 

As already noted, the real hotspots of terrorism are not in secular countries: if they were, the task would be easier, as society has a base of rationality with which to influence beliefs. The hotspots for terrorism are in countries where the base is religion (particularly Islamic, in the modern world) so there is no base of rationality or critical thinking with which to moderate the harmful religious views.

 

We still experience the odd Christian terrorist act, but these have all but disappeared as secularisation increased fast enough before technology could arm every extremist Christian to do significant damage. The moral question on the subject of religious terrorism should be how do we effect great secularisation both here and abroad? Perhaps, also, how do we promote and extend secularisation without the use of aggressive tactics of forcing our opinions down other culture’s throats?

 

If there is one story left to explore on this topic – one that supports the call for a change in debate – it is the interesting case of the Taliban’s letter to Malala Yousafzai, the girl whom they shot in 2012 aged 15. In what appeared to be a bizarre attempt at PR, senior member of the Taliban Adnan Rasheed showed signs of regret at her shooting. It was interesting to see the mainstream media cover this, as we are so used to seeing the Taliban portrayed as evil people from foreign lands. To see them as a religious sect, like any other, trying to foster support for their faith through the media, was to see that they are really no different to any other religion. Increasing secularisation in the West has meant that Christianity almost always has to act through the media – through pen and not sword – else face even faster dwindling participants. But whilst Islam runs the politics and media in so many countries, there is no doubt that it will manage to continue doing the opposite. The debate for secularisation must continue into 2014 and beyond.

 

 

A Very British Celebrity

 

July saw the start of a very different news story, completely manufactured by the media itself. Katie Hopkins, a celebrity famous for nothing more than being a contestant on TV, shocked the country after being invited onto a TV interview to air her comments that she would affect her children’s choice of friends based on those friend’s names.

 

To our credit, we unanimously reacted how we were expected. We disagreed vocally: what does a name have to do with the content of a character? This was not so much a debate, as an almost universal declaration that we no longer want to judge people based on irrelevant factors. Wait, did we all watch her interview just because we wanted to judge and disagree with her…and why are all these Essex and Geordie Shore people on our TVs all the time…perhaps we’re not there yet!

 

 

Doctoring the Record Books

 

Continuing the TV theme, the BBC decided to smash various records and just generally show off with a globally synced screening of a Doctor Who Special in November. Even in this the ethics is hard to ignore, as I wrote about not long after its screening. Doctor Who, and his trademark principle which the episode focussed on, tell us not only a lot about what we believe, but also about where we want society to go. Doctor Who, like any other TV superhero, is of course popular because of his amazing abilities and interesting character. But the values of superheroes reflect the values of society: Captain America, upon his invention, reflected our fear of communism just as Doctor Who now reflects our will to not settle for moral ‘grey areas’.

 

Further reflection on this topic also leads to a stark realisation that we currently live under political systems that are incapable of allowing us to create a society which we truly believe in. We currently settle for ‘the least bad’ political party, with little to no interest, and have even less faith in the decisions our governments make. Far from making us apathetic, why shouldn’t this make us hopeful and willing to change things? Revolution is not the only way to sway society to a better place, so a Doctor Who-led debate on our moral viewpoints should be welcomed in 2014.

 

 

A Traitor or a Hero?

 

Whilst this title could easily describe Thatcher’s death, it relates to two very different people in a very different situation: Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Depending on how the world changes, history will remember Assange and Snowden either as freedom fighters or as divisive trouble makers.

 

Assange continues to reside safely in the Ecuadorian embassy, amid a storm of personal allegations which many suspect are methods of attacking his Wikileaks program of publishing government secrets. Snowden, on the other hand, was unknown before 2013. In June he came to prominence as the architect of one of the most important information leaks in US history: one which has caused tension between the US and Europe on the subject of US privacy breaches.

 

The moral debate these two continue to cause is huge. Should governments ever attempt to mine information without the subject’s informed consent? Should someone ever be punished by the state for telling the truth? Is the person who publishes the secret as guilty as the person who mines the information? Indeed, how can the important area of investigative journalism survive if journalists themselves are subject to coercion (such as in the case of Glenn Greenwald, who published Snowden’s leaks)?

 

 

Feminism Still Ignored by the Music Industry

 

Any review of 2013 wouldn’t be complete without one further foray into ‘popular culture’, though that two word phrase may be one too long to describe Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus. Almost as if to make it easier for my review to segway into feminism, these two performed together in August at the MTV VMA awards, probably filling more column inches than the entire month devoted to Syria’s tragic and on-going war.

 

After Cyrus’ performance with Thicke, she entered a media fuelled battle with Irish pop star Sinead O’Connor in which O’Connor warned her not to let the music industry “make a prostitute” of her. Cyrus angrily responded in an inappropriate fashion, referring to O’Connor’s mental health problems. Cyrus finished the year having stripped and lap danced on stages across the world, fellating sledge hammers, grinding over-sized fingers and creating further soft-core porn with which to promote music videos.

 

‘Twerking’ aside; Thicke caused controversy all over the place with his blatantly sexist song and video, Blurred Lines. Student Unions across the land banned the song, for its seeming rape-promoting lyrics and sexually objectifying video, whilst Thicke simply claimed what post-modern feminists have been claiming in the face of feminists for years: what you think is sexism is actually feminism as well!

 

The positive debate to come out of all this is about feminism. Whilst feminism has progressed in wider society, sexism is still a huge problem. Women are still paid less for the same jobs, are still the victims of sexual and physical abuse, etc. In the music industry, women are largely still seen as sex objects and eye candy while the men get on with being respected. No doubt there has been various debate on what is sexist and what isn’t – what harms women’s interests and what doesn’t – but at least it’s being talked about in the music industry, which is one of the remaining bastions of sexually objectifying women for profit.