Axel Hägerström is best known as a founder of the (quasi-) positivistic Uppsala school of philosophy - and the father of emotivism.  The Uppsala School was the Swedish counterpart of the anglo-American Analytical Philosophy as well as of the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle - and as the founder of the Scandinavian legal realism movement.

In Is There Such a Thing As Intrinsic Value At All? R. M. Hare [1919-2002] advocated the 'prescriptivism' where judgments about goodness and badness, are not descriptive statements but represent a kind of command or prescription as to how we are to act. Notions regarding the intrinsic value of organisations such as ecosystems accept the intrinsic worth of life forms in general and therefore extends to human embryos and people in a coma.. If one believes in the intrinsic value of entities that are part of a holism [such as the body of a pregnant woman] is necessarily an anti-abortionist and anti-euthanasia in nature. The "noncognitivist "Axel Hägerström [1868-1939], said that ascriptions of value are neither true nor false. Hägerström's nocognitivism is called 'emotivism.' Like David Hume he claimed that ascriptions of value are in essence expressions of emotion. An emotivist believes that to say: 'That tree is good' is not to make a statement about the tree, but to say something like: 'Hooray for that tree!'

MAN AS AN EMOTING HOLISM - A TRIBUTE TO AXEL HÄGERSTRÖM


The reification "consciousness" is a folk myth. One cannot engage with consciousness theoretically or scientifically other than to reprise the myth as an embarrassing aspect of human ignorance carried over from man's most primitive past. The human brain like that of most other animals, is a unified, auto-concatenational, self-booting and programmatically self-initiating computational object of cause and effect. There is no putative conjugation of the physical and metaphysical. There is simply the conscious brain-meat undergoing change in the way it exists from one causally-effective fleshy sequence to the next.

If the above is to be offered as some sort of an axiom it needs to mention self referentiality. On the question of the inclusion of cause and effect I now realise that I have not represented my ideas clearly enough, and an important ambiguity is present. I hereby present the material which will go towards the creation of a redraft which will include the following tripartite combination of cause, effect and self-referentiality as existential modalic unity of the emoting brain - or in eliminativist-speak: the causal, eventive, self-referential emoting human holism.

1. Firstly cause and effect are the same thing. If because of inattention driver (a) smashes his car into the car of driver (b) then both drivers are at the same time the cause and the effect of the crash. In order to accept this fact it is necessary to view the event in purely physical terms (as no court or insurance company would.) Physically as far as the vehicles are concerned the crash occurred because both vehicles were placed in a position of competing to occupy the same space. To accept this as a fact it is necessary to suspend all human concepts of guilt and responsibly and just view the event rather in the same way that you would dispassionately observe two asteroids colliding in the absence of any human presence or intervention whatsoever. From the point of view of the vehicles, they just happened to be on a collision course. No blame can be attached to them for one being on the wrong course, and the other being in the way or vice versa.

Accepting that we cannot blame the insensate automobiles for the crash, let us now turn to the humans and consider their involvement.

2. Are Both Objects the Cause and Effect of Shared Occurences? Was the driver (b) responsible for the crash? Considering the driver as a competent road user as far as the highway code and the law is concerned - the answer is no. But considering the event as the outcome of his being there with his car at the precise moment the other driver took his eyes from the road and the fact that the accident would not have occurred if he had not been there - the answer is yes.

Thus far I have merely extrapolated and extended in more detail an argument by Sartre, in which he famously said that if you get mugged in Montmartre then it is just as much your fault for being there as it is the mugger's for attacking you, which is an attempt to view such events as purely physical impingements abstracted away from human laws, opinions and morals etc. The interesting bit comes when we consider the role of the mugger or driver (a).

3. The Law, Determinism and Free Will. A court of law's consideration of the role of driver (a) or the mugger usually involves a consideration of intentionality. Did the mugger intend to mug the victim - if so why? Did driver (a) deliberately drive his car at the car of driver (b) (perhaps his wife's lover, etc.) A lawyer acting for the defence inevitably introduces circumstances which he hopes that the jury will accept as mitigation. The mugger had a wife and children who were starving, he had been abused as a child, he had been drinking heavily and did not know what he was doing and had no recollection of committing the offence, etc.

The driver had business worries, a bailiff was due to repossess his house, he was on his way to hospital to visit his dying child, he suffered from a temporary blurring of his vision which since the accident had been diagnosed as a symptom of incipient diabetes, etc. What do these pleadings all have in common? What they have in common is the belief that twelve good jurymen and true accept that prior events effect later events and that those antecedal occurrences caused the plaintiff to be present in court to answer the charges before the court.

Now if those excuses where to be true does this not mean that for all intents and purposes we should consider the mugger and driver (a) to be in a certain sense out of control or under the control of an irreversible concatenation of events triggered a priori and they are therefore not responsible for their own actions? An acquittal by judge and jury would seem to validate determinism. A guilty verdict would dismiss any claim that the offences were the inevitable consequences of antecedent sufficient causes and would be a declaration of the supremacy of free will in those particular cases.

What has all this got to do with the brain? Was all the above catenulate scene-setting necessary as a part of the explanation? Well I believe yes for driver (a) and driver (b) and the mugger and the victim all had brains just like all the other members of the human race, so perhaps yes - perhaps not, for what I am suggesting is that the terms which describe the abstract concepts cause and effect in fact describe one concept and not a dichotomised pair.

Conclusion. I suggest that the brain operates at such a speed that there is no eventive gap or self reflective memorist interstice and that neural cause is stored in memory and any eventive outcome is a present immediacy and the neurologically zipped causal templates and their contingent eventive outcomes are fused into what we call emotion and in an Axel Hägerström and Humean sense, neurological cause and effect are indistinguishably homogenised into man as an emoting object.