Sleep

Why do humans sleep? Scientists may not know the answer to this question, but I do: it's because we're tired. Especially the parents.

I suppose, though, that that isn't the "why" the scientists are after.

Let me try again. My explanation for why humans sleep is something that will make sense to most parents of newborns, and indeed it occurred to me as I tried to get a baby of mine to go back to sleep one night.

My explanation is a simple evolutionary explanation. It may ultimately be question-begging, but don't let that deter us. So here goes. The traits we have are the traits our evolutionary ancestors had. These ancestors are the ones who lived to be old enough to reproduce. Not everyone lived to be that old. Some children died before they were physically mature enough to have babies and pass on their traits. Now suppose that "back in the day" there were two kinds of infants: those who slept a lot and those who did not. Other things equal, which would be more likely to survive? Yeah, parents, you know the answer to this question, and you know the why, too. Dare I say it? Very well. Parents need a break. Babies are lots of things (saccharin here), but they are also time-consuming, ear-splitting, arm-tiring, shower-shortening, laundry-producing, plan-ruining, conversation-interrupting, etc., etc. pains in the asses. Parents who did not get a break from their children because their children did not sleep would, I submit, be more likely to suffer from baby-rage and kill their children. These children would not grow up to reproduce and pass on their non-sleeping ways to subsequent generations. The children who were most likely to survive were the sleepers. The sleepers procreated and passed this trait on down the line to us.

So why do we sleep? In short, because our parents would have killed us if we didn't.

P.S. In assessing the above claims, please keep in mind that I am not a scientist, philosopher of science, or baby-killer. Thanks.

Election Day

Today is Election Day. Schools are closed in our county so Wife and I will be taking the kids with us to vote. My oldest, #1, is five, and he understands the concept of voting. At his school last week they had a mock vote for kids his age. Instead of political candidates, though, the vote was over which juice is better, apple or orange. As it turns out, comparing apples and oranges is not only possible, it’s child play.

And while we are on the topic of comparing apples and oranges, I can’t help but link to this video. It’s a heroic and humorous attempt at overcoming incommensurability via the use of an NCAA tournament-like chart to compare everything. Yes, everything. You’ll be interested to learn that oranges are better than apples (though apples are better than Regis Philbin). These folks also tackle questions such as whether seahorses are better than English people, whether penguins are better than Miracle-Gro, and whether slow food is better than democracy.

I think democracy wins. And that takes us back to our topic for today. We are supposed to teach our children that voting is important. Yet it is a mystery exactly why this is so. The familiar rational choice argument against voting is that in any state- or nationwide election, one vote—your vote—will not make a difference. Instead of waiting in line to vote, you could do something better with your time, such as volunteer at a charity, or earn extra money to buy gifts for your kids. If these two sites are to be believed, we can infer that you have a much greater chance of getting hit by lightning than making a difference in the popular vote results of a presidential election. If it’s alright for me to not worry about getting hit by lightning, I ought not to worry about failing to cast the tie-breaking vote.

My kids and I sit out on the front stoop to watch the lightning. We play soccer in the rain. No one objects. But if I tell my kids that voting is not worth it, I anticipate complaints. Heck, I feel bad saying it. Why? One counterargument to the rational choice conclusion is that it is incomplete. According to this counterargument, the relevant calculation is one in which you monetize the benefit to the country that would obtain by your preferred candidate winning, and multiply that by the chances of your vote making a difference. If that amount outweighs the monetized value of whatever else you’d be doing if you weren’t voting, then you should vote. Whether this makes it rational for you to vote depends on your estimate of how valuable your candidate’s win would be and how much good you can do in the amount of time it takes to vote. These might be difficult to figure out. But even if we could, something seems strange about an answer to the question “Why are you voting, Dad?” that involves a calculator.

One might argue that it is our civic duty to vote, our responsibility as citizens of democracy. Call this the civic responsibility approach. This sounds nice, but the point of philosophy is to move beyond nice-sounding rhetoric. If my vote will in fact not make a difference, then the civic responsibility approach is asserting that I have a duty to do something that will have no relevant effect. Call an act that will make no difference “futile” and a duty to perform such an act a “futile duty.” If the duty to vote is indeed a futile duty, then that seems to be a mark against believing it is actually a duty.

Are there other futile duties that we do accept? Sure. I have a duty to refrain from shooting an innocent person, even in cases in which there are a sufficient number of other simultaneous shooters to guarantee the person’s death. I have this duty even though it does not make a difference to the outcome.

The question, then, is whether there is a worthwhile difference between the futile duty not to contribute to a murder-in-progress and the futile duty to vote. I’ll leave that to another time. Even if I couldn’t come up with an account of why there is a difference, I’d still need an argument in favor of the civic responsibility approach, for the inevitable “why” that would follow any assertions about a duty to vote.

“What if everyone did that?” we might ask. If everyone skipped voting, that might be bad. But in any event, the question I’m asking is whether I should vote, not whether no one should vote. Asking “what if everyone did that” is a lousy way of checking to see whether one is acting correctly. As my grad student buddies and I joked, if the only acts that were allowed were those that everyone could do without a problem, then it would be wrong to “get there early to beat the rush.”

So I do not know how to explain to my children why one should vote, or even how to answer the question of whether, when they are old enough, they should vote. This will probably not stop me from heading to the polls today, carried on by the social inertia to which the study of philosophy was supposed to help me be less susceptible.

Update: Does voting kill?

From "Why?" to Lie

Children force the question of honesty on parents frequently. One way they do so is by asking “why?” all the time. Kids ask this question in response to commands, requests, explanations, stories, movies, and so on, and on, and on. Good for them for being so curious. “Why?” is a big way of learning about the world. The problem is that we parents all suffer from a shortage of patience, communicative skill, and knowledge. These shortages, alongside an occasional desire to shield children from certain harsh realities, take turns providing an impetus to lie: it is quicker, easier, and in the short term it maintains the useful illusion of parental omniscience.

Lying is a regular and highly institutionalized feature of parenting. I try to fight it as much as I can (more on that another time). It is just interesting to note the opposed interests here: the child’s interest in managing in the world, and the parent’s interest in managing the child.