Computer-generated characters in films

The film Ted, which will appeal to all arctophiles, is about to be released in the UK. The star, a talking and beer-swilling teddy bear, is a piece of computer-generated animation. The human actors had to act as if he were there, then he was inserted after the human actors had been filmed.

Now suppose that human actors will be replaced in the same way, and that we will watch films with wholly realistic animated characters, such that human perceptual apparatus cannot tell the difference between them and human actors. That would take a lot of computing power, and some sophisticated programming, but it is perfectly possible that we shall see this development within the next 50 years, and perhaps sooner.

Philosophers of perception might find this an interesting new source of problems. It seems that there ought to be some difference in how we should describe the perception of the viewer, but it is not obvious how to characterize the difference. Disjunctivists, for example, could not capture the difference merely in terms of seeing human actors versus having an impression that was qualitatively indistinguishable from seeing them, because the stage of generating a mere impression that would be at issue would take place outside the perceiver's head. The fork that reflected the disjunction would have to be placed outside any specific perceiver, at the point of creation of the film, with one prong running back to real actors and the other to a computer that generated images. One might prevent this from being a problem for the philosophy of perception by regarding viewing a film as a species of seeing the objects filmed, but that would be a challenging course to take. However, it does not seem that this sort of problem would be specific to the portrayal of human beings, as distinct from the portrayal of other entities, such as mountains,  by computer-generated images.

Another question would arise in connection with the paradox of fiction. We get emotionally involved in films, even though we know that the characters are not real. If we knew that the characters were not even portrayed by real actors, would that affect our degree of emotional involvement? If the theory that we suspend our disbelief is straightforwardly correct, our degree of emotional involvement should be unaffected. If we suspend disbelief, we do not see the characters as portrayed by actors: we see them as real. Then the fact that actors had been replaced by animations should not matter. We might learn something from the extent of our capacity to get emotionally involved in cartoons that are obviously cartoons. The greater that capacity, the more likely it is that we would get fully involved in films where the characters seemed to be played by real actors, but were in fact computer-generated.

Finally, what would such developments do to the film industry? There would be many more films. They would be cheaper to make, and cheaper to amend after release in order to make small improvements, or to correct continuity errors. Films might be more finely honed to the preferences of audiences, because it would be cheaper to make extracts that could be tried on sample audiences before the final content of the film was determined. Such developments would be disruptive, but I think that on balance, they would be welcome, just as the word processor and electronic publishing have been disruptive, but have also brought great benefits.

Tax avoidance and the problem of establishing purposes

Tax avoidance is the reduction of tax liabilities by the use of contrived schemes, which are such that when the law is applied to them, the resulting tax liabilities are less than one might have expected. It differs from tax evasion, which is the reduction of tax liabilities by not disclosing the full facts, or by misrepresenting the facts.

The tax code of the UK is likely to have a general anti-avoidance rule, alternatively known as a general anti-abuse rule, or a GAAR, in the near future. The Government proposes to introduce one in 2013. Its consultation document on the proposal, published on 12 June 2012, and related documents, are available here:

http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/tax_avoidance_gaar.htm

(The link to the June 2012 document is about half way down the page, following the heading "GAAR consultation".)

The purpose of a GAAR is to remove the tax advantages that would be obtained by the use of contrived tax avoidance schemes,when the schemes are not defeated by specific provisions (for example, a specific provision that says that when an asset is sold between connected parties for less than its market value, the transaction is to be treated as taking place at market value). Governments are interested in GAARs because the counteraction of avoidance by specific provisions is an endless game of cat and mouse. Each year, new provisions are introduced to defeat known schemes. And each year, new schemes are devised to get round the existing specific provisions.

I shall not discuss the merits of GAARs here. Instead, I shall set out how some problems concerning the identification of the purposes of arrangements that have been devised by human beings arise in the context of GAARs.

It is common for anti-avoidance legislation to include a purpose test of some sort. The legislation may, for example, only take effect if a reduction in tax is one of the main purposes of the arrangements that the taxpayer has chosen. "One of the main purposes" is likely to be the phrase, rather than "the main purpose", so as to catch schemes in which tax avoidance is a significant purpose, but there is some greater commercial purpose that has nothing to do with reducing tax liabilities. For example, clause 2(1) of the proposed GAAR, discussed on page 13 of the June 2012 document, reads:

'Arrangements are "tax arrangements" if, having regard to all the circumstances, it would be reasonable to conclude that the obtaining of a tax advantage was the main purpose, or one of the main purposes, of the arrangements.'

The problem is this: how should we determine whether obtaining a tax advantage was a main purpose of some given arrangements?

The first point to make is that the challenge is not to find a way to look inside the actual taxpayer's head, and establish his or her subjective motives. The question is, "What is the point of these arrangements?", not "What was this taxpayer trying to achieve?". Some of the points that follow would have parallels in a discussion of the problem of establishing motives, but that is not the topic here.

Having said that, we cannot ignore the human element. Purposes are purposes of creatures that have goals. We can reconcile this point with the irrelevance of the motives of the particular taxpayer who in fact entered into the arrangements, by regarding the purposes in question as those of a hypothetical rational taxpayer who entered into the arrangements. Abstracting from the actual taxpayer's psychology, what would we say was going on, if all we knew was that some taxpayer had entered into the arrangements, and we were told nothing more about the taxpayer apart from his or her income, assets, and existing family or financial links to other people who were affected financially, along with any other facts that we would need to know in order to understand his or her tax affairs?

It is not enough for arrangements to be such that tax liabilities are lower than one would expect, for example when a profit is made, but no tax arises on it, nor will arise in the future. That is not enough because the lack of tax might be a pure accident. While the motives of the actual taxpayer may be irrelevant, the achievement of accidental consequences could not be seen as a purpose at all, not even a purpose of a hypothetical taxpayer, about whom nothing psychological was known. It is, however, most unlikely that such accidents would occur. Their occurrence would indicate that the tax system had been very badly designed.

It seems that we must look for indications that tax-saving features were included in the arrangements by design. One sign would be that a feature took some work to include, but that the other likely purposes of the arrangements (such as the transfer of an asset from grandparent to grandchild, or the purchase of some land followed by its sale at a profit) would have been achieved just as well without the feature, and without its replacement by another feature that would have taken a comparable amount of work to include.

This does seem to be the appropriate sort of way to proceed, if we are to abstract from the psychology of the actual taxpayer. We should compare what happened with other things that might have happened. The basis on which we would establish purposes could then be a principle of sufficient reason, something like this, where B is what the taxpayer actually did:

'If some commercial result was achieved by doing B rather than C or D, where all of B, C and D were possible, take it that the purposes of the agent must include enough purposes to explain the preference for B over C, and the preference for B over D, and identify enough purposes accordingly.'

Three problems with this principle as it stands are immediately apparent.

First, the purposes that would explain the preference for B over C might be incompatible with the purposes that would explain the preference for B over D. That would not, however, affect the workability of a GAAR, so long as the purpose of achieving a reduction in tax featured in both sets of purposes. We can imagine one hypothetical taxpayer preferring B to C, and another one preferring B to D.

Second, there might be some differences between B and C, or between B and D, about which the hypothetical taxpayer would be indifferent, making it inappropriate to seek explanatory purposes. If there were other differences which meant that the preference for B could only reasonably be explained by a purpose of achieving a reduction in tax, that would not affect the workability of a GAAR. But if all of the differences were ones about which the hypothetical taxpayer would be indifferent, while B was nonetheless the choice that happened to reduce tax, legislation which ensured that a GAAR still applied would have the same effect as legislation that required people deliberately to arrange their affairs so as not to make tax savings. Such legislation could reasonably be argued to be excessive.

Third, the principle would not always be enough to allow us to work out whether a GAAR should apply to take away a particular tax advantage. There might be a range of possible sets of purposes to impute to our hypothetical taxpayer. Each set would be sufficient to explain his or her preference for B, but some sets would include a purpose of achieving a reduction in tax, and others would not include such a purpose. This problem would become more acute if we were required to determine, not only what the hypothetical taxpayer's purposes were, but which ones were main purposes.

These difficulties may not be insuperable. But if they are not addressed explicitly in the guidance that we are promised will accompany the UK's forthcoming GAAR, it may not be easy to discern a consistent line of thought behind the decisions that judges will make, once cases start to be litigated.

What is conscious?

Philosophers have thought up examples of entities that behave like thinking human beings, but that leave us wondering whether they are conscious. The China brain has been debated for many years. In recent months, Eric Schwitzgebel has discussed other entities, including the United States, on his blog (see posts dated 31 October 2011, 4 May 2012 and 19 June 2012):

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/

The more I think about examples like these, the more I think that we should not say there is always a fact of the matter, out there, as to whether a given entity is conscious. Rather, we should ask whether it makes sense for us (or whichever rational beings happen to be having the discussion) to regard the entity as conscious. Whether it makes sense will depend on the nature of our social interactions with the entity, our views on moral obligation to the entity, whether we see the entity as made up of smaller entities that we see as individually conscious, and lots of other things.

We must regard other human beings, and a fair number of animals high up the evolutionary scale, as conscious. But human beings can disagree as to how far down the scale to go. Martians can also disagree with human beings about the consciousness of at least some of the entities that human beings must regard as conscious, and we can disagree with Martians about the consciousness of at least some of the entities that they must regard as conscious.

(This assumes that Martians have a concept that corresponds to our concept of consciousness. They may not have. If my general approach is right, a possible reason for them not to have would be that they might well not have concepts that corresponded to our concepts of social interaction or of moral responsibility.)

Then a dispute about whether the China brain is conscious, or whether the United States is conscious, can be seen as a dispute about the relative significance of the members of two groups of indicators of consciousness. The first group, on which such entities score highly, includes the sophistication of processing and the existence of a generally consistent, yet gently mutable, character of conduct, that differs, but does not differ radically, from the characters exhibited by other, comparable, entities. The second group, on which such entities score badly, includes the personal nature of our interaction with the entities, the existence of feelings of moral responsibility towards them that are very similar to our feelings towards other human beings, and a sense that the entities have qualia of experience. (I do not mean to claim that qualia are real, only that most of us, in our everyday lives, think that they are real.)

The example that Eric Schwitzgebel cites in his post on 19 June 2012 presents a new challenge. There is an artificial body, which looks to us like a person, and behaves appropriately. But there is a China brain arrangement in the background, feeding instructions to the body, rather than a normal brain in the body. We are presented with a single body, with which we can interact as we would with a person. So this example scores highly on personal interaction, and might easily come to score highly on being regarded as an object of moral responsibility. The one thing about which we would still worry would be the qualia (or whatever our views on the human mind allowed along the lines of qualia).

Another interesting example is the David character in the film A.I. This is an artificial child, the capacity of which to display love towards the human being who acts as its mother can be switched on, but cannot then be switched off. Once this capacity had been switched on, and the "love" had developed, could the mother argue that the creature was just a machine, to which she had no moral responsibility? I rather think that it would depend on how the programming was done. If the intelligent processing of data from the child's environment went on deep inside, but it was only near the surface, in a separate module, that appropriate behaviour was generated, then the mother would have less of a moral obligation than if the intelligent processing and the generation of behaviour were fully integrated. I have not worked this out properly, but if there is something in this idea, and if considerations of moral responsibility are relevant to the attribution of consciousness, then the details of implementation of processing could matter to the attribution of consciousness.

I have cross-posted these thoughts, with minor amendments to allow for the context as a comment on Eric Schwitzgebel's post of 19 June 2012, on his blog at:


http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2012/06/chinese-room-persona.html

Cash and transparency

This week, a study of the extent to which different think tanks disclose their donors was published. It is available at:

http://whofundsyou.org/

Those that got high ratings were no doubt pleased. At least one that got a low rating did not accept the presumption that transparency was a virtue, and argued that donors had a perfect right to privacy, as can be seen here:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/timworstall/100018107/it-doesnt-matter-who-funds-think-tanks-but-if-it-did-left-wing-ones-would-do-particularly-badly/

Meanwhile, in the United States, there has been considerable concern about the use of supposedly independent Political Action Committees, or PACs, to circumvent limits on politicians' campaign spending. And some of the big corporate donors to political campaigns don't even want to have their names disclosed:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76919.html

So what would be a sensible position, given the tension between:

(a) the prima facie right of each person to decide whether or not to disclose his or her spending (on anything, not just on politics) and whether or not to disclose his or her political views; and

(b) the need to do what we can to prevent the corruption of the political process by those of the rich and powerful - I hope a fairly small proportion - who try to corrupt it?

The kind of corruption I have in mind is the twisting of legislation and government administration to suit the private interests of those who spend money to get certain politicians elected, or to lobby the politicians who get into power. It amounts to corruption because legislation and government administration are imposed on all of us, without the freedom to opt in or out: they should therefore be in the interests of all of us, not in the interests of a few. The spending of lots of money in the marketplace, promoting the production of the goods and services that the rich happen to like, does not amount to corruption, because we are free to participate, or not to participate, in any given market, and because the production of some goods and services, at high prices, does not prevent the production of others, at lower prices.

I think that the answer depends on the current state of the polity.

If we have a healthy, free, democratic polity, or one that has only wandered a little way from that ideal, then disclosure will help to keep it healthy. I would therefore favour full disclosure in the UK, whether or not the donees are political parties. Some think tanks say that they are not party political. Such claims are often true. But they still seek to change legislation, and if they may be promoting the interests of their funders, whether because the funders ask them to or because they decide their policies first and then naturally attract the funders who agree with them, that should be disclosed. When changes to legislation or to government administration are being advocated, we need to be aware of possible selfish motives, so that we can appraise the arguments being put forward with an appropriate degree of scepticism.

An important counterpart to this is total transparency on the side of government. All papers related to the conduct of government should be freely available, except when national security would be put at risk. That should help to prevent corruption in the reverse direction, for example when a local council might refuse planning permission for new business premises because the proprietor was known to support political views that were at variance with those of councillors.

Given those conditions, I do not see the right to privacy as carrying much weight. It is not even clear to me that we do have a right to privacy against anyone except an intrusive government. (I find Article 8 of the European Convention acceptable only as a right against the state: if it is a right against the press, we can say farewell to a free press. But that is another argument.)

If, on the other hand, there is a repressive government, secrecy may be essential in order to have a chance against the authorities. But in that position, opposition movements would probably be breaking the state's (unjust) laws anyway, and the state would inspect bank accounts, whether or not it was authorised to do so. Laws on privacy of funding would then be neither here nor there.

On keeping one's distance from those who lack epistemic virtues

Suppose that X works with Y in some business in which knowledge is important, and in which people need to draw sensible conclusions from evidence, and to recognize and suppress wishful thinking when the conclusions are not what they might expect or like. X reckons that Y exhibits the appropriate epistemic virtues, and is therefore a good colleague to have.

Now suppose that X finds that in some unrelated area of life, Y holds a belief that X thinks no reasonable person could hold, if that person were confronted with evidence that is plainly available to Y, and that Y could plainly grasp and understand how to use.

Should X be less happy about working with Y? I think not. Y's performance at work would be evidence that what X saw as Y's lack of epistemic virtue in the unrelated field had not infected Y's work. And while it would be a bit much to ask X to acknowledge that he or she might be wrong about the unrelated matter, it would not be unreasonable to ask X to acknowledge that his or her perception of Y's lack of epistemic virtue might be mistaken. Y's reasoning processes would not be likely to be fully transparent to X.

X could respond to this point by saying that the reasoning processes did not matter. Y's belief was so manifestly absurd that Y should have said, "I must be wrong here, now I should try to find the error in my reasoning". On that basis, Y would be guilty of one specific epistemic vice, a failure to recognize manifest absurdity. But even then, could X be sure that Y suffered from that vice? Perhaps the process of reasoning had itself led Y to change his or her view of what was absurd.

Now let us change the example. X is considering whether to work with a think tank, T, on some project. X is impressed with T's work in the relevant field. But X also knows that T's official views, in unrelated fields, are quite as bad as Y's conclusions in an unrelated field. They are not just mistaken. X cannot see how any rational person, confronted with the widely available and easily understood evidence, could reach those conclusions.

Should this deter X from working with T? There might be a risk to X's reputation, if he or she were seen to be working with an organization that X's peers might well regard as crazy, but we shall set that to one side, and concentrate on the question that arose as between X and Y. Would it be appropriate for X to think there was a serious risk that what X perceived as T's lack of epistemic virtue would infect work in the area of the proposed joint project? (There is a side issue as to whether institutions, as opposed to individuals, can have or lack epistemic virtues.)

It would not be hard to say yes, the risk should be taken more seriously in the case of X and T than in the case of X and Y. If an institution adopted crazy views, that would be likely to reflect the views of more than one person. There might be only one person formulating views on the topics in question, but he or she would be answerable to the institution's management. The management would therefore have a general outlook that allowed the views to be published, whether an outlook that staff should not be controlled, or an outlook that included sharing the crazy views. And that management outlook might very well infect the recruitment and the management of those who would work on the proposed joint project. People who lack epistemic virtues may well associate with, recruit, and encourage other people who also lack those virtues.

Such a conclusion would have an interesting implication. The conclusion would suggest that epistemic vice could spread more easily from one area of thought to another in a group of people than within a single person, despite the fact that a single person seems to be much more closely integrated than a group of people. That is not, however, absurd. In a group of people, propositions are expressed by some and are consciously considered by others. That stage of conscious consideration may given the propositions more power to influence behaviour than if they were merely present in a single cortex, encoded in a form that did not even look particularly propositional, and were occasionally and dreamily considered by the subject.

Examinations, earthquakes and the Euro

There is a well-known paradox of the surprise examination. A teacher tells some students that there will be an examination one morning next week (Monday to Friday), but that they will not know until the morning of the examination that it is on that day.

The students reason that it cannot be on Friday, because then they could work out the day by Thursday evening. But if they know it cannot be on Friday, it cannot be on Thursday either, because they would be able to work out the day by Wednesday evening. They continue to reason on these lines, and conclude that the examination cannot be held at all, under the conditions stated by the teacher.

It is important that the timespan over which the students would be at risk has an end-point, Friday, backwards from which the students can reason. If the days at risk went on for ever, they could not reason as they do. (It is an interesting question, whether the end-point needs to be a determinate one, up to which they are at risk. I think that is not necessary. That is, it would suffice for them to be able to identify a specific date, a finite time in the future, beyond which the period of risk had definitely ended. It would not matter whether they were definitely at risk up to that date.)

It is also important that the examination would definitely be held within the finite timespan. If the teacher only said that there might be an examination next week, and that if there were, it would be held on a day that the students could not predict before that day, the students could come to school each day, unsure of whether there would be an examination that day.

It is also important that the students would definitely be unable to identify the day of the examination before that day. If they were told only that they might not be able to identify the day in advance, then Friday would be a possible day. Then it could not be eliminated, and the other days would also be possible days.

We may note that there is no requirement for the teacher to have decided, at the time of the announcement to the students, the day of the examination. The paradox would arise if the teacher planned to pick a day on impulse, as the week wore on. The teacher, wanting to meet the conditions, would know that he or she could not leave the examination until Friday, and would also know that the students knew this. The teacher would therefore know that he or she could not leave the examination until Thursday, and would also know that the students knew this. This chain of reasoning in the teacher's mind would lead the teacher to the same conclusion as the students. The examination could not be held at all, under the stated conditions, even though the teacher's initial proposal of a surprise examination looked perfectly reasonable.

We can also see that human intention only matters to make the story plausible, not to generate the paradox once we have the story, by considering a predicted earthquake.

Having studied the ways in which stresses have built up, we may conclude that there will be an earthquake at a given location on some day between now and the end of 31 December 2100, that it will be the only earthquake there before 2500 (because stresses will be relieved by the earthquake and will take a while to build up again), and that we will not know, until the day of the earthquake, that it is on that day.

Just to make the problem as similar as possible as that of the examination, let us assume that our methods give us no way of telling when the probability of an earthquake within the next year, or the next month, or any other future time period shorter than the time to 31 December 2100, is rising (apart from the rise due to the fact that as time passes, there are fewer days left to go). We cannot see it coming, and each remaining day in the given time period will always seem to us as likely as any other remaining day.

The lack of human agency makes the story implausible. There is no-one out to keep us in ignorance. But if we can overlook that, we can see that given the conditions, the earthquake could not be on the last day, because we would know by the end of 30 December 2100 that it would be on that day. Therefore it could not be on the penultimate day, and the paradox would arise all over again.

One approach would be to say that while the students, or the potential victims of the earthquake, could not say that they were in some unidentified member or other of a set of possible worlds (the examination-set being the world in which the examination is on Monday, the world in which it is on Tuesday, and so on to Friday), they could say that they were in some superposition of worlds, and that this superposition would be collapsed into a particular world by the teacher's announcement, or by the first movement of the tectonic plates. Analogies with quantum mechanics may be fun, but I fear that they can also degenerate into mere hand-waving. I shall not pursue this approach here.

Instead, we can improve our understanding by looking at a feature of the mathematical structure of the problem. Not only is there a finite timespan of risk. That timespan contains a finite number of risk-points, the individual days. For each such risk-point, there is an immediately preceding risk-point, the day before. That allows the paradox to be generated. To take the example of the examination, there is a last risk-point, Friday. The examination cannot be held on that day. Therefore, the immediately preceding risk-point, Thursday, effectively becomes the last risk-point. But the examination cannot be held at the last risk-point, so Thursday is eliminated, Wednesday effectively becomes the last risk-point, and the reasoning is repeated.

Suppose instead that the teacher had said that an examination of two hours would start at some unexpected moment within school hours, say 0900 to 1700, on some day within the next week. The examination would have to start by 1500, but there would still be an infinite number of moments in each day at which it could start. (We shall assume that time is infinitely divisible.) Then the students' reasoning would be blocked.

It would be blocked because moments of time are densely ordered. That is, between any two moments in order of time, there is another moment. Between 0901 and 0902, there is 0901 + 30 seconds. Between 0901 and 0901 + 30 seconds, there is 0901 + 15 seconds. However finely we chop up time, even into microseconds, there will always be more moments in between the ones that we have already identified. And each moment would be a risk-point, if the teacher had announced that the examination would start at some unexpected moment.

The dense ordering would be enough to block the students' reasoning. Their reasoning relied on deleting the last risk-point, and moving back to the immediately preceding risk-point. But if the risk-points were densely ordered, there would be no immediately preceding risk-point, to which they could move. Any preceding risk-point they identified would not be the immediate predecessor of the point they had deleted, because there would be another risk-point, later than that one but earlier than the point they had deleted.

Thus a densely ordered stretch of risk-points blocks the chain of reasoning. It is not even necessary for the whole stretch of risk-points to be densely ordered. (Indeed, it is not densely ordered in the case of the examination. There is, for example, no risk-point between the one at 1500 on Monday and the one at 0900 on Tuesday.) All that is necessary is for there to be some densely ordered stretch of risk-points before the last risk-point. If there is a stretch reaching back from that last point that is not densely ordered, the reasoning of the paradox can be used to eliminate all of the risk-points in that stretch, but once we have eliminated the risk-point at the end of the last densely ordered stretch, the reasoning is blocked.

(The last densely ordered stretch might be open at its end, that is, it might not include its end point. It might, for example, be all moments from 0900 on Thursday up to, but not including, 1200 on Thursday. In that case, there would be no final risk-point of the stretch to be eliminated. One could only work back as far as eliminating the risk-point that came first in order of time after the last densely ordered stretch.)

Another feature of the arrangement, which would arise outside densely ordered stretches of risk-points, but which would not arise within any densely ordered stretch, is that there would be an interval between each risk-point (other than the final one) and a risk-point that came later, which was itself empty of risk-points, and within which the students could come to appreciate that only the later risk-points were still possibilities. This matters because such appreciation would be the mechanism, by virtue of which it would be impossible for the students to have the promised ignorance of which risk-point was the one at which the examination would occur. In the interval between the penultimate and the final risk-points, satisfaction of the condition of ignorance would rule out the final risk-point.

My thoughts turned to the paradox because of Greece's likely exit from the Euro. It is essential for currency reforms to be kept secret until they take effect. Otherwise the withdrawal of funds, and speculation, will lead to a bigger crisis than the one that the reform is intended to resolve. Witness, for example, the highly secretive preparations for the introduction of the Deutsche Mark in 1948, first the Konklave von Rothwesten, at which the reform was worked out, and then the delivery of banknotes, in advance of the announcement, in Operation Bird Dog. Moreover, currency reforms take place on specific days, not at specific moments (except, possibly, midnight at the start of some day.) So is there scope for a paradox of the surprise currency reform?

There is one fact that prevents such a paradox from arising, and it is a fact that politicians happily exploit, although perhaps not out of a conscious desire to avoid the trap of this paradox. The relevant fact is that there is no known end-point to the period of risk. Even if one is certain that Greece will leave the Euro, and however bad things get, there is always the possibility that some new fix will tide Greece over for a little bit longer.

Alternatively, people might become certain that the fixes would run out, and that Greece would leave the Euro within a period with an end-point that was already known. But once people became certain of that, the markets would not sit around like students, worrying whether the examination would be today, tomorrow or the next day. They would respond immediately, as if the examination had just started, with only a very limited softening of their reaction in recognition of the fact that the exit might still be delayed by a few months.

The accreditation of qualifications

The market in qualifications is growing, and getting more open. I wonder whether modern trends will have only the expected and desired results, or some unexpected or undesired ones too.

For a long time, we have had universities, school examination boards, and professional institutes. Some of these entities are given special powers by the state, for example the exclusive right to award qualifications that are called degrees, or to confer qualifications that entitle people to represent others in court.

Now, we see a profusion of new bodies that offer qualifications, some for areas of work that did not exist a few decades ago, such as information technology, and some for long-standing trades. More interestingly, there are now some businesses that are detached from those subject-specific bodies, but that offer accreditation services. Googling on the phrase "accreditation services" will turn up several examples.

One expected and desired result of this proliferation of qualifications is that there are now plenty of focused and assessed courses available. This should increase the level of skills of the population, and indeed the general educational level of the population, more effectively than a less-focused exhortation to read books. It is also good if people seek out focused courses in in the humanities, and in the natural and social sciences considered in their own right (rather than in relation to their practical application). And plenty of courses like that are now available, some of them provided free of charge by universities. But the push to undertake such courses is not going to come from people's employment.

Another result is that there is no longer a single clear significance of accreditation. There is no single framework of standards, within which the endorsers of qualifications work. To some extent, it was ever thus. Universities and professional bodies worked separately. But when there are commercial providers of accreditation, we must ask whether they are as strict as they should be, or whether their commercial interests affect their work. Strictness requires more than consistency. One could be consistently generous in granting accreditation, but that would make accreditation valueless.

Many of the accreditors are at pains to assure us of their ethical stances and independence. But self-certification of that nature should carry no weight. Even non-profit bodies cannot be assumed to be immune to untoward influences. There may be no shareholders to seek profits, but there are still employees who seek their continued employment. That requires keeping existing customers and, just to be on the safe side, acquiring new ones.

So where there is a free market in accreditation, the mere fact that a qualification has been accredited proves little or nothing. Anyone who sought to establish the worth of a given accreditation would have to find out which body had conferred it, how that body worked, and in particular, how many qualifications that body refused to accredit. No prestige would automatically attach to qualifications that were accredited in the free market. Having said that, the process of accreditation could still be useful to those who ran qualifications, because it would give them some external comment on their work.

Is this result desirable? The choice is between the following.

1. A single framework of standards. I do not favour this option. It would be cumbersome to ensure compliance across the full range of accreditations of qualifications. Mindless bureaucrats and users of management-speak would devise forms that would be tedious and the completion of which would prove little. And the standards would probably be inappropriate to some accreditations.

2. A free market in accreditation. This is the option we have accidentally chosen, and I think it is better than option 1., although it has disadvantages, as already noted.

3. No accreditation for the great majority of qualifications. I suspect this would be just as good as option 2. It is not clear to me that either the people who take courses, or the people who offer jobs to those who may hold certain qualifications or who send their employees on courses, gain much useful information from accreditation in the free market. It must be up to individual students and employers to decide whether they wish to choose accredited qualifications, when there are non-accredited (and quite possibly cheaper) alternatives. But they should not think that non-accredited qualifications would necessarily be worth any less than accredited alternatives.