Parfit Group Week 2: Open Thread
I haven’t heard from Leigh, so I’m posting this mostly as a placeholder. Feel free to jump in with comments, questions, or discussion on chapters 2 and 3 of Reasons and Persons. Continue Reading »
Parfit Group Week 1: The Scope of Our Inquiry
This is my commentary on the first chapter of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, part of the online reading group I proposed here. If you haven’t gotten the book yet, you can follow along here for at least the first chapter: I think Google will only let you read fifty pages at a time in their ‘preview’ mode, but thankfully the first chapter is only forty-eight pages long. Leigh Johnson has graciously agreed to host the commentary on chapters two and three next week at her blog here. I’ll post a link when her commentary goes live: we’re also looking for commenters to fill out the rest of the schedule, as none of our participants have volunteered yet. Send me an e-mail if you’re interested in doing this initial commentary or hosting the discussion one week.
To begin our discussion about Derek Parfit, I’d like to acknowledge the most important thing about reading him: he is not a very good writer. In his defense, his bad writing is perhaps forgiveable if we accept that ethical inquiry demands more precision than it is usually granted. (For proof that this is so, see the Hallmark Rejoinder: “Aristotle is wrong because friends are always there when you need them, through good times and bad.” Yeah.) His insistence on abbreviated ’self-interest,’ ‘theory,’ and ‘consquentialism’ as S, T, and C, is just the most obvious example of a penchant for reductive symbolization, a disposition attributable to a desire for clarity and precision, though of course the dangers of reductive and systematic approachs to ethics usually get the most attention. In his defense, that awkward writing and ungainly symbolization is often interrupted by memorable examples: Kate the Hedonist, Clare the Callous Consequentialist, the rationally-irrational hostage, the overly honest egoist, etc. Anyway, when we think that bad writing has obscured his point, we should try to be charitable.
Reasons and Dispositions:
Parfit concludes the first chapter by saying that though self-interest and consequentialist theories run into problems, neither theory has been shown to be “false, or indefensible.” (51) In that sense, nothing will be proven throughout the chapter. Fifty pages with nary a conclusion in sight. He will raise many questions and successfully eliminate some relatively simple possibilities. When we are later tempted to offer these simple solutions, Parfit can rightly chastise us. But this may well be the first time I’ve wanted to scrawl “THESIS STATEMENT PLEASE” in the margins of a work of professional analytic philosophy. That said, in another way this chapter is quite good: it raises a set of really terrific questions.
He begins with the question “What do we have the most reason to do?” which I would like to suggest is just a translation of the place where Kant begins his inquiry into pure practical reason: “What ought I to do?” The first line stakes a claim: this isn’t a book about capital-R Reason or Rationality, it’s a book about reasons, and to be small-r rational is simply to be reason-responsive. When we ask ourselves the first line’s question, we assume that actions can have reasons, and that reasons for action can be rendered publicly accessible and consistent.
This immediately becomes an issue on page 3 when Parfit notes that theories (of self-interest or consequence) can serve as both a reason for action and a disposition by which we evaluate particular reasons. Parfit speaks of these as formal and substantial aims: I may want my life to go as well as possible, but this can require me to model my actions on something other than a coldly rational evaluation of present interests. As an example of Parfit’s bad writing, I think the classic means/ends or instrumental/teleological distinction serves us better than the form/substance distinction here. If my ultimate goal is self-interest, I may have to adopt non-self-interested means to that end. In order to achieve their ultimate goals, some people may have to instrumentally deny that their ultimate goals are indeed their goals.
Even thinking in terms of self-interested consequentialist calculation might lead these unfortunates’ lives to go less well or their efforts to fail to achieve the optimal results. Parfit’s account of the hostage who takes the irrationality potion seems to supply an extreme and largely uninstructive example, but we can see echoes of it in the old mutually-assured destruction theory of international conflict or in the solopsist’s loneliness: some ends can only be achieved by forcing an opponent to treat me as irrational or a lover to view me as selfless. Yet I must truly act irrationally or selflessly in order to pull off this stratagem. Thus, it is at least possible to jettison rationality for the best possible reasons, but this is not a contradiction: it is possible to reject the best possible (formal/instrumental) reasons for the best possible (substantial/teleological) reasons.
At least in this first chapter, when Parfit attacks an ethical ‘disposition,’ he attacks it in its psychologically deterministic form: for Parfit, to be self-interested in his sense is first and foremost to seek instrumental reasons for action that are the same as our own teleological self interest, and as we shall see, a robust defense of such a disposition requires that it be transparent or publishable. I believe this is an idiosyncratic use of ‘disposition,’ insofar as Parfit uses it to indicate a unavoidable and overriding ethical attitude rather than a resistible tendency or heuristic strategy. Again, we will see a defense and complication of this usage as we proceed, but it’s worth remarking that Parfit may be getting human moral psychology drastically wrong here, and if so we’re going to need to address that.
Selves and their interests:
Parfit spends the first half of the first chapter asking why anyone should choose any action for reasons other than rational egoism. This question has many forms: why should a utilitarian maximize anyone else’s happiness than her own? Is charity or self-sacrifice really possible? Is loving a delusion or reducible to genetic self-interest? What are people for? Are responsibility and guilt pathologies or healthy moral functioning? Are rational choices always selfish? The list is long, but it’s surprising how generic the problem is: an awful lot of ethical reason-giving is reducible to this one issue.
The art of ethical inquiry seems usually to begin by the process of convincing oneself or a student that self-centeredness is actually the best grounds for some set of actions that seem less than selfish, like being just or forgoing pleasure. While we often dispute exactly what is in a person’s self-interest, to my mind Parfit is correct to focus our attentions on “S” (which I will always spell out as self-interest.) Self-interest requires that “each person’s life goes, for him, as well as possible.” Self-interested action seems to us elementary, and from this perspective altruism and self-sacrifice are either mythical, irrational, or self- and other-deceptive acts of hidden self-interest. Yet most people are not primarily motivated by self-regard, so it’s not clear why we need to devote so much of our ethical inquiry to the few sociopaths who do need to subject every moment of potential other-regard to rigorous testing. The Bad Man is not the ideal ethical subject, that’s why he’s Bad.
Of course, if we take seriously an ‘obligation’ to obey the dictates of self-interest, than we may worry that we are being insufficiently self-interested in a particular case, and then blame ourselves or feel guilt for this deficit. Still, even this population of folks worried that they are not sufficiently selfish does not seem to be significantly expand the addressed group. Parfit instead implies that all ethical theories are rooted in self-interest, even those that are explicitly altruistic like the ‘do-gooder’ version of consequentialism. Certainly attempts to overcome pure ethical intuitionism or ethical subservience to authority (that seems bad so it must be bad, or that’s bad because God/my priest/my mother said so) often require some reference to a supreme principle of morality which is generally self-regarding (utility, autonomy, virtue), so Parfit may be on to something here. That’s why I suspect that Parfit’s real reason for starting with self-interest are actually altruistic. Let’s say an altruist sets out to help the least advantaged: the global poor, for instance. Doesn’t the altruist have to have a theory of self-interest for those disadvantaged others? That is, doesn’t the altruist have to know what would count as having their lives go as well as possible in order to improve them? The counterpoint offered by Singer and many others is that such questions allow the ‘perfect’ to antagonize ‘the good’.It doesn’t take a general theory of human flourishing to know that ‘not dying of easily preventable diseases’ is an improvemnt over the alternative. Yet this is exactly the question that Parfit will eventually broach with the Repugnant Conclusion: that the ‘better’ might eventually become the enemy of the ‘adequately good.’
Self-interest raises two points of contention: first, what exactly is in my interest? Second, who am I? That is, what is this self in whose interests I am hellbent on acting? Parfit illustrates the conflicts around the interest axis of self-interested ethical theories adroitly through the traditional typology of personal utility or pleasure, autonomy or preference, and virtue or ‘natural’ goods, which he refers to as Hedonism, Desire-Fulfillment, and Objective List Theories. There are few hedonists left, since most utilitarians (notably Peter Singer) have adopted a version of preference utllitarianism precisely because of some of the criticisms of hedonism that Parfit articulates later. However, because I will be trying to defend a Sen/Nussbaum ‘capabilities approach’ against Parfit throughout our readings, I am keen to follow the arguments against Objective List theories. I have yet to see any principled objection to the ‘objective list’ that isn’t rooted in fallibilism or pluralism: these arguments suggest that there can be no such list because we either don’t or can’t be certain what such a list will include or exclude, or else we shouldn’t denigrate the preferences or pleasures of others just because they seem vicious or unsustainable to us.
The ’self’ axis of self-interest theories is more difficult to illustrate, and Parfit leaves it untouched for now. However, I think that Parfit’s theory fits neatly within a problem about the ’scope’ of selfhood. For instance, even the Kantian moral law can be understood as a kind of self-interest theory, insofar as it begins with an attempt to distinguish my phenomenal and pathological self-interest from my ‘true’ self interest, the interest of a rational subject that is not self-identical with hunger, greed, or lust, but could only wish to act autonomously rather than have her choices determined by embodied and thus unfree needs and drives. For Kant, ‘I’ am in essence free, and any act that is only the result of a chain of material causation is, because it is unfree, not in ‘my’ interest. This is roughly the same account of autonomy that runs from Augustine to Sartre.
The time-indexed theory of self is difficult to even describe because we all mostly subscribe to some Lockean theory of identity as continuity in memory, except when intuition pumps or thought experiments force us out of that folk-psychological account. However, Parfit is leaving the question open, for now, and I think that’s the responsible move for any philosopher who wants to cover all his reason-giving bases. We have to remain open to the possibility that there’s some reason to prefer a less forensic theory of personal identity than Locke’s, one we just haven’t thought of yet. Parfit will make much of the fact that we have partial control over what our future-self wants and needs, because her preferences, pleasures, and capacity to flourish are all subject to experiences that are under present-self’s control. For instance, I can partly control whether future-Joshua will enjoy playing the guitar by choosing to learn the guitar in the present, and by the same token, I can undermine future-Joshua’s bid for the US Presidency by publicly announcing a history of drug use.
Transparency as Publicity:
Frequently Parfit attacks formulations of the theories he discusses by considering situations involving people who are transparent liars, unable to successfully dissemble, and thus unable to mislead their interlocutors. This is a kind of reverse Ring of Gyges: rather than hiding one’s actions even from the gods, Parfit asks us to put even our motives on display. In this, too, he is like Kant, adopting a version of the principle of publicity in which our reasons for action must be of the sort that no reasonable opposition exists.
Yet in his many examples, Parfit seems to raise the stakes so that even unreasonable opposition, insofar as they had access to our motivations, might take advantage of our publicly available reasons. Publicity is then stretched beyond it’s traditional Kantian conditions to be understood as a general demand for all such ethical reasons: could you tell everyone what your ethical reasons are and succeed in achieving a life lived as-well-as-possible? Might certain reasons, when publicized, leave one open to manipulation, or create a self-undermining state of affairs?
How transparent liars serve Parfit’s overall goals is as yet unclear to me: while it points out one way that a theory might be collectively self-defeating, since the population includes bad liars, it doesn’t exactly point out how a theory is self-defeating for good liars who are looking for reasons to reject rational egoism/self-interest. Consider a world in which many actors adopt utlitarianism but are insufficiently fallibilist about their capacity to calculate the effects of their actions. In considering that world, Henry Sidgwick argued we’d be better off as covert utilitarians, enunciating some alternative theory in public while propogating our true reasons among a select subset of the population.
Perhaps Parfit himself is just a bad liar, and thus fears that he would be excluded from the esoteric circle of enlightened utilitarians for reasons distinct from his enlightenment? This would be a case where the requirement of self-effacement effectively defeats the theory, at least for the excluded individual. Or perhaps he fears that an ethical theory that demands many layers of secrecy, will suffer from inadequate testing and will result in the advancement of less-than-the-best-possible-reasons, and thus, lives that are not lived as-well-as-possible.
Rationality and the Conditions of Self-Defeat:
One goal of these early chapters seems to be to fully delineate the conditions of self-defeat. In addition to publicity, Parfit mobilizes at least five distinct reasons for self-defeat: incoherence (does the theory make sense? Does it fail on its own terms?), overdemandingness (is it possible to achieve the demands of the theory?), collectivisability (could everyone have the same reasons for action without leading to many less-good lives?), universality (are there instances where strategic rejection of an ethical disposition would lead to at least one better life?), and self-effacement (does the theory suggest strategic adoption of a different theory?)
These reasons are roughly divisible into direct and indirect self-defeat. A directly self-defeating theory is incoherent. It is inconsistent with itself, it fails on its own terms, every time. But through his many examples, Parfit identifies theories that defeat themselves indirectly through exceptions, or which don’t properly respond to our moral psychology, and are thus overly demanding, in the sense that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. To illicit the exceptions, he states a universal theory and then identifies at least one situation, however improbable, when the theory would lead to a ‘less-good-than-possible’ life. The transparent liar supplies one such self-defeat, for pure and public self-interest, and the rationally irrational hostage supplies another, for pure and public rationality. In his attacks on self-interest and consequentialism, Parfit seems to be targeting an underlying overcommitment to rationality as such. After all, both consequentialist and self-interested theories are theories that propose a relatively smooth entailment between simple, universal principles and particular reasons for action. That is, I suspect that Parfit is actually attacking ’Psychological Determinism,’ the notion that we act on the basis of our “desires, beliefs, and other dispositions.” (14) Since ethical inquiry allows us to subject our desires, beliefs and dispositions to manipulation and change, it assumes that we only will act a certain way when we find that we have reason to act that way. Yet it is equally possible that we will act rationally without having appropriately rationalized dispositions and desires. In fact, the opposite may be true: we may act rationally by cultivating in ourselves irrational desires and dispositions, as the hostage and the enslaved threat-ignorer both demonstrate. In short, the act of cultivating irrational desires and dispositons may itself be rational.
Why the shift from interest to rationality? I would suggest that rationality, for Parfit, is the flipside of publicity. As the brief turn to contractarian accounts of mutually binding promises of self-denial indicate (the various island slavery examples), the argument from publicity is meant at least in part to remind egoists that they will likely be happier if they pragmatically adopt a non-egoist morality. Thus instrumentalism about one’s own dispositions and desires is the pivot around which Parfit turns from Psychological Determinism to Consequentialism: if the egoist is seeking to achieve the best possible life for herself through an evaluation of how various sham dispositions might lead to that life, then she is adopting a kind of simplistic end-state which she must simultaneously hide from herself. In order to achieve the life prescribed by a self-interested theory of morality, I need to change my motives to be at odds with my ends, and I need to do it in a self-deceptive way, implying that I need to be very careful about the possible consequences of some new set of motivations.
Yet perhaps there is no set of selfishly-adopted altruistic motivations that will guarantee the ‘as-well-as-possible’ life, in which case, both theories are doomed to failure unless they can be altered. Perhaps there are no reasons for action that can be adopted by all human beings collectively. The heightened demands of premeditated self-deception and variegated rationality raise the specter of overdemandingness. We need some of Parfit’s trademark bad syntax to properly address self-defeat through overdemandingness: “Could it be impossible to avoid acting wrongly?” He offers us the example of Clare the consequentialist, who either supplies some benefit to her child or actively saves her child’s life, but in each scenario at the expense of a broader benefit or life-savings for strangers. Clare offers that she either did not know the effects of her actions, or could not help but prefer her own child to strangers, and asks that we hold her blameless for choosing one life or or a lesser benefit over the many lives and larger benefits her efforts might have resulted in if they had been committed farther from home. (Peter Singer’s new book The Life You Can Save reproduces many of these arguments in a very demanding form, and his interview with Tyler Cowen addresses some of the meta-ethical concerns that Parfit raises here.) The question is: can we be blamed for loving our children or our families too much, when that love allows the death or harm of strangers? If we find that our motives (love or preference) are unchangeable, if we find that we “can’t not” love our family, are we blameless for the harms or deaths that result? Should we feel guilty for spending money on our own children’s education or entertainment that could save the lives of both children and adults dying abroad? Here we see the first gesture towards the Repugnant Conclusion that will be spelling out in detail later.
My concern here, which Parfit tries to address, is that our reasons for acting irrationally or at odds with our motivations are entailed by reasons that are themselves entailed by self-interest or consequentialism broadly understood. Does this entail self-defeat? The irrationality potion quaffed by the hostage is an example of a rational risk. Since Parfit himself notes that it is rational to calculate probabilities, is this calculated irrationality a defeat, indirect or otherwise, for the broad S theory of self-interest as the “as-well-as-possible” life? Parfit acknowledges that these arguments from improbable exceptions aren’t intended to directly defeat self-interest, but the scope of rationality here seems like it will be overbroad. It’s like he’s ignoring his own reason/disposition distinction: his defense of ‘rational irrationality’ seems like a defense of rationality full-stop. The same thing goes for consequentialism: both the partial compliance problem (what to do about the fact that not everyone will act fully altruistically regarding the needs of the global poor) and the world-without-charity problem strike me as resolvable within the theories Parfit claims they defeat or efface.
Perhaps Parfit is making a very subtle argument about ‘our beliefs about rationality’, and perhaps he is being too subtle for me. If the result of his argument is just that many people will find that the ‘as-well-as-possible’ life is not sufficiently specific to guide us in many of the complex situations that thought experiments throw at us, I’m not impressed so far. The difficulty in spelling out the particular permutations of levels and meta-levels of each ethical theory do not strike me as defeats: within the literature there are plenty of examples of apologists for these theories attempting to respond to objections with varying success, and Parfit seems not to have met the minimum demands of charitable scholarly responsiveness in evaluating the success or failure of these attempts.
Perhaps this is why he will frequently follow an indeterminate evaluation of self-defeat with the lesser claim that a theory is simply self-effacing: it requires us to dissemble even to ourselves about our reasons. If we are self-interested, we might have to strategically adopt other-interest in order to achieve the best possible life for ourself, without admitting to ourselves that this is what we have done. If we are consequentialist we may have to forgo do-gooding in a strategic manner without constantly holding ourselves blameworthy for this strategic egoism. As I see it, this is possible objection on basically collectivist/universal grounds: because we can’t tell ourselves what we are doing, we may fail to be adequately reason-responsive when the situation changes, and in those situations the self-effacing nature of our theories will lead to the less-than-optimal outcome. Yet for all that, Parfit acknowledges that the best ethical theory may be self-effacing, in which case “the truth about rationality would be depressingly convoluted.” (24) Disturbing if true, but perhaps still true. So that’s a blind alley.
Discussion Questions/Issues:
Reasons, Publicity, and Defeat
- Reason-responsiveness: What counts as a reason to act? Why do acts need reasons?
- Is this theory-building yet? Has Parfit already eliminated some kinds of ethical life by submitting activity to justification? Will it be possible to get from reason-giving to, say, faith or love or authenticity?
- What’s wrong with secrets? Is the transparent liar as an attempt to smuggle in the Kantian principle of publicity?
- The conditions of self defeat: What really counts as defeat? Is universality an appropriate meta-ethical norm? How demanding can our ethical theory be? Must our theory of the best life avoid the ‘fragility of goodness’ i.e. risk?
- What do we want from ethics? Is this it?
S, C, & T: Self-interest, Consequentialism, and Theory
- Just say no to symbolization.
- Why is self-interest the problem to be solved? See Henry Sidgwick.
- Can there be a consistent self-interest theory? Apparently yes, but maybe not a publishable one.
- Can pleasure, preference, and natural goods all be captured with the same letter? Do Parfit’s attacks on self-interest always successfully criticize all three forms of self-interest?
- Does Parfit prove that self-interest requires rational calculation? Does he succeed in making the case for rational irrationality, i.e. self-interested non-calculation?
- Why do we devote so much ethical inquiry to the sociopath and the Bad Man?
- Must a consequentialist be a collectivist?
- What demands do partial compliance place on the consequentialist?
The Scope of Persons
- What kind of self are we interested in? Aristotle’s nous, Christian soul, Cartesian mind, Lockean identity, Heideggerian Da-Sein, Levinasian radically passive responder, Nietzschean/Foucaultian disciplinary self-surveilling subject, Deleuzean body-without-organs, embodied subjectivity, narrative self, the Selfish Gene, communitarian situated self, etc.
- Parfit’s attempt to open the question of scope of personhood to analysis: time-indexing and the right-sized self.
- Is the right-sized self Kant’s autonomous subject? Kant’s subject is reason-responsive and psychologically determined, after all.
The Truth Conditions of Cultural Criticism
After my recent brush with cultural commentary, I’ve been thinking about the business of art and media criticism. The standard concerns about journalism apply to that article: misquoting, misrepresenting, reframing, and strange attributions. (”Miller, the philosopher”? Yup, the one and only, nevermind that he also quotes Dr. Leigh Johnson, who does better philosophy before breakfast than I do all day.) Apparently, though, I am a philosopher, which ought to mean that I’m not generally in the business of diagnosing the Zeitgeist. Nonetheless, I sometimes find myself drawing general conclusions from cultural trends, predicting an uncertain future or analyzing something as grandiose and amorphous as the American psyche, while at the same time I find most of the pronouncements people make along these lines tiresome. Remember the ‘death of irony?’ How’s that working out?
Yet I hope I come by it honestly. As a consumer of culture and popular entertainment, I can’t help but develop opinions and attempt to ground them in my professional expertise and sometimes to make connections between apparently related concerns. Perhaps at times I can help model the philosophical enterprise in these playful moments, for those who are more interested in suspense than sorites paradoxes. And so it seems that we should start with the essential question: what are the truth conditions or rules of evidence for cultural criticism? How do we distinguish true claims about, say, Tony Soprano or Dexter Morgan, from false ones? For instance, is it ‘true’ that Dexter is a sociopath whose appetites have been reigned in by his father’s youthful discipline, or was he actually completely sane until his father’s training regime corrupted his boyish innocence? Is Ferris Bueller a playful con-artist and well-meaning trickster trying to help his friend Cameron break out of his shell, or is he a Tyler Durden-like hallucination, the whole film a fantasy of the fevered Cameron, until he bashes in the front of his father’s car?
Such questions are about the ontology and truth conditions of fictional entities. Does the fictional Harry Potter really have a scar on his head? How can a fictional character have a real scar? That’s not so hard to rectify: the fictional Harry Potter fictionally has a real scar. Okay: but is J.K. Rowling the only one who can say what’s true about her characters? For instance, is she the only authority on the claim that the fictional Albus Dumbledore fictionally is really gay? Consider Star Trek fan fiction, sometimes called ’slash’ fiction (Kirk/Spock fiction, for instance) in which two characters who have always been written as heterosexual are entwined in a homosexual relationship. Is such fiction false, because those characters are really straight? Is the Kirk who fellated his second-in-command the same Kirk who cheated the Kobayashi Maru scenario? And (for those who have seen the recent film) is he the Kirk whose father died the day he was born, or later? Science-fiction that plays with possible worlds gives us the answer: Kirk himself has possible worlds, so there are possible worlds in which he is gay. But is there a possible world in which James T. Kirk is bitten by a radioactive spirder and falls in love with Mary Jane? Probably not, but I haven’t yet figured out why: it seems like that would just be an oddly named Peter Parker.
Of course, that’s only one level of the inquiry. Insofar as the social sciences can study correlations between social facts, we can ask questions about, for instance, the connection between watching 24’s Jack Bauer and approving of torture. Which means we can start offering hypotheses for other kinds of investigations, about which a demographer or a social psychologist might be able to produce conclusive statistical evidence.
In this mode, I imagine cultural commentators as the assistants to social scientists. By necessity, their work is less rigorous, but it is still aiming for accuracy and hoping to supply the hypotheses that will spark further study. Where social scientists are obligated to write only propositions that are based in objectively verifiable facts, using experience and reflection to arrive at true propositions about the world, cultural commentators are hypothesis-generators, forgoing careful inductive experimentation for what C. S. Peirce called abduction. Abduction allows us to generate hypotheses by moving directly from a set of experiences to the most likely explanation, without following a deductive path, and without concern for induction-busters like black swans. Without abduction, scientists would have no hypotheses to test. The early results of abduction can often be disproven through more rigorous testing, but this does not negate the value of the earlier hypothesis-generation. On the abductive model, the goal of cultural criticism is to provide us with insight, not truth. Some critics jump from unproven assumptions to unproven explanations: when I’m being irresponsible or speculative, I’ll do this too. However, I’d prefer to start with questions and draw implications of possible answers. My goal in such moments is to ask questions in a way that makes my readers want to test hypotheses they had never before considered.
In the blog posts and my conversation with Noel Holston, I asked questions like: “Are vampire movies more popular during periods of economic expansion?” “Do people prefer television thematically related to their political concerns?” I think these are testable questions, and if you care about torture, you’ve got to be asking yourself the same set of questions: “Is 24 propaganda?” “Does violence on television promote violent crime or legitimate state-sanctioned violence like war or ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’?”
Lately, I’ve been asking some new questions, ones I’m less certain can be adequately tested: “Is our decades-long love affair with the police procedural drama a cause or an effect of the fear of crime and erosion of trust in American communities?” ”What impact did 24’s fictional black president have on the 2008 presidential election? What effect do stereotype threats have on viewers’ prejudices?” “Is television bad for us? Can we know the answer if we don’t have a theory of human flourishing?”
Some of these questions suggest hypotheses about social facts for which the demands of metricians cannot be met. That’s not the same thing as equating them with bullshit. We see this same problem in science, for instance, when string theorists propose accounts of the nature of matter and the universe that could only be proven using techniques and instruments that won’t be available for centuries, or worse, that would require computers the size of the universe itself. So my claims about antiheroes might simply be beyond the realm of testable hypotheses, a trivial kind of string theory, or they might be just as trivially wrong and provably so. That said, I remain convinced that the questions themselves aren’t trivial. We inhabit a world that is shot through with fictions and narratives that are modeled on fictions. As Heidegger and Arendt would say, art constitutes our shared world: the work of art is the concrete remainder and mark of the human activity of world-making. The same words that weave a film’s plot into an entertainment can be rewoven into a political speech or a declaration of war. In short, we can’t afford to ignore fiction just because it isn’t real.
Proposal: Parfit Reading Group
Derek Parfit is widely regarded as the most interesting ethicist working today. Many have performed their work more provocatively, some may be more original, and I suspect that a few (Sen and Nussbaum, especially) have made more progress in the field, but Parfit definitely has captured our attention with his quest for “Theory X,” that ethical theory that allows us to quantify across populations and resolve the value-theoretical paralysis at the heart of the Repugnant Conclusion: can we distinguish between a world of many people living minimally happy lives and another possible world in which fewer people live maximally happy lives? Is existence better than non-existence? What would count as a good reason for resolving this? This is the meta-ethical question that, in my opinion, ought to drive every ethical project. It’s the one at the heart of the current bioethical debates over abortion and euthanasia, and in a different form (is a self-chosen existence that appears miserable better than one that appear to outsiders as excellent or happy) it’s the one that troubles us all when we think about the various kinds of discipline genealogized by Foucault: prisons, doctors, “mental hygiene,” choice architecture, and sexuality.
One of the best things about Parfit is that he makes his unpublished work available online in the spirit of open inquiry, so that his magnum opus (as well as many of his other articles) can be read for free on Google Scholar while he continues to work out the kinks. This hearkens back to the publication schedules from the Enlightenment era, when books might be circulated and then re-released in response to comments and criticisms. Perhaps because of this openness, Parfit’s work has enjoyed some of the most intense reading and discussion of any living ethical philosopher over the last decade. Even if he was beaten out by Williams or MacIntyre, he certainly takes the prize for most-discussed-while-unpublished.
In the interest of pursuing a collective project of ethical reason-giving and moral story-telling, I have decided to launch yet another reading group on his work. It won’t be the first: there’s even been another one online. However, I hope to draw my readers into this collective project with me: since you are predominantly continentally-trained philosophers, it strikes me that we might collectively have some interesting insights or encounters with Parfit’s Anglo-American analyticism. The idea would be to begin this summer, probably in late May, working quickly through his book Reasons and Persons (which is sadly not available in full online), taking a look at some of the main commentaries on that early work, and then striking out to pursue the new and uncharted territory that he has variously titled On What Matters or Climbing the Mountain.
Today’s Reading
In my view, the U.S. faces two plausible scenarios. The first involves complicated bank-by-bank deals and a continual drumbeat of (repeated) bailouts, like the ones we saw in February with Citigroup and AIG. The administration will try to muddle through, and confusion will reign.
Boris Fyodorov, the late finance minister of Russia, struggled for much of the past 20 years against oligarchs, corruption, and abuse of authority in all its forms. He liked to say that confusion and chaos were very much in the interests of the powerful—letting them take things, legally and illegally, with impunity. When inflation is high, who can say what a piece of property is really worth? When the credit system is supported by byzantine government arrangements and backroom deals, how do you know that you aren’t being fleeced?
Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear.
The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we’ll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because eastern Europe’s banks are mostly owned by western European banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.
Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.
The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.
What’s the Ideal Number of Friends:
“You can have friends because of what you do together or enjoy something together like football or shopping, but they’re not as profound friends as those who you love for themselves because of something in their character. And it doesn’t matter what you’re doing with them, even sitting alone in a room.”
There’s a limit to how many close friends like this you can have and it’s probably between six and 12, he says.
Cathy Caruth on Hannah Arendt on Lying, War, and Testimony:
Arendt draws on a number of examples, remarking, for instance, on the disappearance of Trotsky from the history books of the Soviet Union, and the German and French representations of their actions during World War II. Unlike the ancient world in which the notion of politics first appeared, she suggests, the public realm in the modern world is not only the place of political action that creates history but also, and centrally, the place of the political lie that denies it. Focusing on the ubiquity of the lie in the modern world, then, Arendt ultimately, in my interpretation, asks the following question: what kind of politics is possible in a world in which history is regularly and systematically denied?
Deliberative Democracy and the Bad Man
During my talk at GW on Friday, one concern emerged as the dominant theme, and I stumbled a bit in responding to it. Basically, it’s a version of the Platonic anxiety about democracy: if deliberative institutions give demagogues and sophists equal time to peddle their emotive rhetoric alongside earnest activists and critical thinkers honestly seeking justice, how can we be sure that these institutions will actually be better than non-deliberative institutions like a secret ballot? We know that most citizens are vulnerable to a number of different kinds of pressure in deliberative contexts: various studies of group polarization in juries and activist groups prove this. So why should we encourage our fellow citizens to submit to deliberative encounters that will likely drive them to either ambivalence or extremism, especially when we may then be handing the reigns to political actors advancing their policies in bad faith?
Part of making this argument stick requires us to evaluate exactly what it is about bad faith deliberation that scares us so. Is it rhetorical skill? Charisma? Or are we scared that the force of the better argument will not always be on our side? The strongest argument against the rhetorician is a version of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr’s “Bad Man” argument: there are sociopaths among us, silver-tongued amoralists who will take positions they don’t support for money or power. Let loose, such bad men will overwhelm the resistances of a deliberative democracy, subverting our reason-responsiveness through appeal to our passions. Like a virus, the bad man turns democracy’s strength against it. Socrates’ death at the hands of the Athenians is all the proof we need that when philosophers tangle with sophists, philosophers lose. To protect ourselves from the ‘bad man’ (and all his weak-minded followers) we need liberal rights to trump majoritarian policy-preferences.
I have a long answer in my dissertation’s first chapter, but here’s a sketch.
We don’t protect ourselves from rhetoricians by forgoing broad deliberation. We don’t sidestep these problems by hiding from politics or our neighbors’ political ideas: bad faith arguments still proliferate in the partisan press (Fox News and The Nation both.) Bad faith deliberation is most dangerous to non-deliberative populations. Sophistry is like the chicken pox: early exposure is the best vaccination.
Of course, we all know that even critical thinkers can be led astray when they find themselves on unfamiliar ground. Just think about how long it took us to remember that torture is wrong primarily because it doesn’t work: philosophers and poltiical scientists spent five years debating ticking time bombs with no apparent memory for the very same debates from the eighteenth century. We continually forget why we should prefer a Prince weakened by procedural safeguards when emergencies seem to require a decisive leader rather than legislative squabbling.
At that point, pluralism itself is the best defense against bad reasons. Just as Madison and Hamilton argued that federalism would be a defense against factions, local and active institutions of civic engagement and deliberation supply a crucial resistance to rhetorical infections. The chattering classes are quickly swayed by class-interests and intellectual fads: we need a broader base for public policy arguments. As such, deliberation needs to include many more divergent viewpoints in order to achieve its goals, even though we know that this will lead many to feel listless and ambivalent, and others to grow strident and obsessive.
Broad-based communal deliberation compartmentalizes the deliberative process so that only views that can garner an overlapping consensus gain traction. By supplying localities with opportunities to create reason-giving communities, we require that bad men (and bad women, too!) conquer multiple and plural communities who are persuaded of very different kinds of reasons. Perhaps it’s the optimist in me, but that seems like a pretty good defense. Even if it’s not always perfect, it’s probably as good as it gets.
Staying Au Courant
I’m taking stock of my reading. Almost every morning, I wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and log on to the internet. Unless I still need to prepare my class notes, I’ll generally click through what I’ve come to think of as a standard set of sites to stay abreast of news and ideas:
- Metafilter.com: Users of this site aggregate the ‘best of the web’ and many days I can use up my allotted internet time just following the links there. Since it’s populated by user-selected content, there’s an assortment of political and IT news, editorializing, random meme jokes like the RickRoll or LOLCat, and so on. I gravitate to the political and technological posts: the commentaries by other uses tend to supply the highest level of internet deliberation available. It’s a real community, in which I’m an infrequent participant.
- Financial Times, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and Google Finance: For the last six months or so, these sites have been helping me understand the economic world and the mess in which we’ve landed. Most days I’ll skim the headlines at Bloomberg and WSJ, and then turn to the Financial Times for the best actual reporting and analysis. I’ve been watching as Rupert Murdoch turns the Wall Street Journal into a partisan forum, and the Financial Times has definitely won my respect for taking advantage of the sudden hole in financial reportage. Plus, the pink background is very calming during market collapse.
- Washington Post: My wife reads the New York Times, and I’ll generally encounter all the must-read articles from the Times at some point during my week, but since I live in DC I like to check in with the local news. Having lived in NYC as well, I must say that WaPo juggles its local/national/international responsibilities better than the New York Times.
- Bookforum: Looking for controversy? Hoping for some long-form articles from the likes of the New Yorker or Harper’s? This is the place. Three times a day, bookforum posts a bevvy of links to generally great writing. This replaces Arts and Letters Daily, which frankly had started going heavy on the controversy and given up on quality.
- The Big Picture: The Boston Globe aggregates photographs the way other sites aggregate blog posts or newspaper articles. Their latest picture spread on the recession captures the part of the downturn that words and statistics mostly fail to express. Go there now.
- SignandSight.com: Once a week or so, I’ll check in with international news, generally using Sign and Sight’s international roundup of magazines. That takes me to the Guardian, the Economist, ResetDoc, and the Times Literary Supplement, and summarizes articles from European magazines like L’espresso and Le Nouvel Obseravateur.
- ReadMoreWriteMoreThinkMoreBeMore, Public Reason, Peter Levine: I still read a number of small blogs on a regular basis, using Google Reader. I’ve got about thirty subscriptions, but many of them don’t really post regularly or else they pile up so quickly I just skim the headlines. (Brian Leiter’s blogs are like that. When does he find the time, damn it?!?) Dr. J is a friend, Public Reason is the best source for political philosophers I’ve found, and Peter Levine is a polymath who works on civic engagement. They all post regularly enough to be counted as daily reading. (In the case of Public Reason, this is partially because people post papers that take several days to digest.)
- All this ignores my other internet uses: Gmail manages all my e-mail, and I stay in touch with folks using Facebook and Twitter as well. I buy most books through Amazon, most of my clothes from Lands End and Charles Tyrwhitt. I watch television on Hulu. I blog here. I bank online, pay my credit card online. I’m in the process of setting up a Windows Home Server for my family to do regular backups and share Itunes and other media. I am the very model of a modern networked know-it-all.
So why am I listing all my daily reading? It’s not to show off my breadth of knowledge, I assure you. This isn’t bragging: it’s a cry for help! People often describe reading the internet as ‘drinking from a firehose.’ I think that’s right, and I think it’s one more reason to judge poorly the prudence of anyone who makes a serious effort at it. Rather, I’m working on diagnosing a problem, which is that the writerly world is all here, at my fingertips, and it’s fascinating: beautiful, complex, and unjust. But it’s too much, and ‘more’ is the enemy of ‘enough.’ Basically, staying au courant is beginning to eat up a little bit too much of my time. I need to pare it back, but that’s not how I’m built: I’m a ‘more’ junkie from way back.
All this takes me back to Stephen Elliot’s “month without the internet,” his effort to break the “addiction to continual bursts of small information.” It also takes me back to the first book I was asked to read as an undergraduate, Sven Birkerts’ Gutenberg Elegies:
The physical arrangements of print are in accord with our traditional sense of history. Materials are layered; they lend themselves to rereading and to sustained attention. The pace of reading is variable, with progress determined by the reader’s focus and comprehension.
The electronic order is in most ways opposite. Information and contents do not simply move from one private space to another, but they travel along a network. Engagement is intrinsically public, taking place within a circuit of larger connectedness. The vast resources of the network are always there, potential, even if they do not impinge on the immediate communication. Electronic communication can be passive, as with television watching, or interactive, as with computers. Contents, unless they are printed out (at which point they become part of the static order of print) are felt to be evanescent. They can be changed or deleted with the stroke of a key. With visual media (television, projected graphs, highlighted “bullets”) impression and image take precedence over logic and concept, and detail and linear sequentiality are sacrificed. The pace is rapid, driven by jump-cut increments, and the basic movement is laterally associative rather than vertically cumulative. The presentation structures the reception and, in time, the expectation about how information is organized.
Further, the visual and nonvisual technology in every way encourages in the user a heightened and ever-changing awareness of the present. It works against historical perception, which must depend on the inimical notions of logic and sequential succession. If the print medium exalts the word, fixing it into permanence, the electronic counterpart reduces it to a signal, a means to an end.
Birkerts argues that this transition threatens the humanities, especially, and I think he’s probably right. As he puts it elsehwhere: “Part of any essential understanding of the world is that it is opaque, obdurate.” Birkerts is fighting other battles in his book, battles against something called “postmodernism” that probably was always a chimera, but in this he is on to something. The world is to be loved in its distance and difficulty, not lusted after as a series of nuggets to be consumed, the newest off the line of ersatz products to be used until they’re used up.
And so, I’m taking stock of my reading to see what I can safely throw out. There’s always a bit too much. If I were wiser and a faster reader than I am, I’d also read the Le Monde and the Christian Science Monitor. In reality, many days I just stop at Metafilter and then get on with my day, but the feeling that I’ve left something undone haunts me.
As a culture we’ve been arguing lately whether Google makes us stupid or smart, but that’s not really the question: does it make us happier? Does it give us tools for real communal engagement? Does it engage our souls in a virtuous activity? Is it sustainable? Does it help us solve our problems? Is it what we’d want to be doing if we actually stopped to look at how we’re using it and what the alternatives are?
UPDATE: Can you tell I’ve been teaching Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics?
UPDATE 2 via xkcd:
Service Changes: Improv Everywhere teaches us to love the world
Amor Mundi is Improv Everywhere’s stock-in-trade, but in their latest installment they’ve really put it on display. Service Changes cites the frequent delays and frustrations of metropolitan commuting, but in this case it denotes that joyful creativity for its own sake the Improv Everywhere likes to showcase.
Perhaps my favorite thing about this group is the anonymity: certainly some wouldbe actors and models shuck their pants every year for theannual “No Pants” subway ride, but we never learn or care their names, and ordinary bodies are on display as well, even preferred for the daringness of being uncovered without the goods to back it up. This new improvisation had agents treating a subway platform just like an art exhibit, with cellist, coat rack, and a bar. (Admittedly it was the Fasion Institute of Technology station at 23rd Street, but I think we can forgive this slight digging for an appreciative audience.)
Perhaps best of all, the ordinary items and advertisements of the New York City subway were transformed into works of art through the application of the traditional labels of the art gallery:
Locked Box #2 (1988)
Metropolitan Transit AuthorityThis extremely subtle piece reexamines the assumption that art must be visually accessible to be important and identifiable as a creative work. This artist explores the limitless possibilities of the hidden here, allowing the viewer to reevaluate underlying preconceptions, and to recondition the inner mind to work with the perception of the commonplace outer space.
In many ways this is a play on the Duchamp readymades and the Deweyan rejection of art as a conspicuous taste-demonstration. But it’s also just fun, and many of the participants reported that they quickly lost their capacity to distinguish between pretending that the pipes, wires, and gates were art, and actually treating them as such!
Desiderata for a post on X-Phi
I’ve been struggling to complete a blog entry on the recent trend towards experimental philosophy (X-Phi) for more than a week now. (What’s X-Phi?, The New New Philosophy, Dr. J’s Take) However, I’ve been trying to push some other writing out the door, and so it keeps taking a back seat. Things got worse when I went to Marc Hauser’s lecture at GWU “How We Evolved a Moral Organ.” (I have a copy of the lecture if anyone’s interested.) Hauser is a cognitive scientist, working on a lot of the same issues that X-Phi-ers do, but thoroughly within the framework of the natural sciences.
I’ve found that I simply can’t navigate the competing demands of completeness and brevity if I let an issue stew too long. So, here are some issues I’ll try to address in more depth in other fora: over a cup of coffee, or in a journal-published book review sometime soon.
1. In the 1970s Benjamin Libet did groundbreaking work on consciousness and the phenomenology of time working with a friendly neurosurgeon who let him play around with patient’s brains. He discovered backdating and offered pretty damning proof of determinism. Philosophers of mind have been mining these experiments for decades, but notice the crucial thing about his work: he didn’t have any particular expertise in cutting people’s brains open, just in thinking up interesting tests and interpreting the results.
2. A lot of what X-Phi-ers do already happens in other departments: anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, etc. On the one hand, interdisciplinary work is good: I’ve benefited immeasurably from my time with political scientists and lawyers. On the other hand, departmental infighting for resources is already pretty bad…. let’s not make it worse. That said, if X-Phi is really as good as its apologists claim, there will be more resources for all. The whole university is founded on the ‘love of wisdom’ we branded ourselves with back when we had to compete with the sophists for students, and look where that got us! Maybe competition is good.
3. Wearing my hat as a political philosopher, I struggle to see exactly what X-Phi has to offer me. I think I first heard of “X-Phi” through the work of Jonathan Haidt on partisanship and moral intuition. His research showed that conservative and progressive views could be attributed to certain fundamental intuitions that human beings don’t all share, and others have gone on to demonstrate that these differences are neurophysiological in orgin: even the brains of partisans work differently. Yet this experimental data merely confirmed what we already knew from careful attention to history, not to mention current events. Politics has long served as the only laboratory we need: democracy is the ultimate experiment. Something about X-Phi feels a little bit beside the point, especially those of us who feel an affinity for Marx’s original prescription that the point is not to describe the world but to change it. There’s great work in political science and sociology on decision theory, group polarization, Condorcet’s jury theorem, prejudice, preference-formation, trust, social cohesion, institutional design, and a host of issues directly relevant to the questions “What is Justice?” and “How shall we live?” X-Phi has a way to go before it can prove itself indispensable to my sub-field.
4. If X-phi is nothing new, then we’re looking at a branding phenomenon. Branding doesn’t have to be bad, of course: it’s useful to assemble a novel constellation of problems and practices under a new umbrella. When I first heard of it, I thought it was a stupid name… but then, I thought “google” was a stupid name for a search engine in the nineties. (I was an Alta Vista man!) What do I know? If people want an “X’ in their philosophy, or philia in their sophistry, more power to them.
5. I do struggle to understand what was wrong with “cognitive science,” though. I thought that name was sexy and interdisciplinary enough to last more than the couple of decades we’ve gotten out of it. I mean come on! A functionalist account of mind developed under the title “COG-sci”. Get it? “Cog”? Like in a machine! Which is what the brain is ! No? Ok… nevermind.
6. There -is- something new about X-Phi: it’s drawing research dollars back to philosophy departments. X-Phi-ers need money for fMRIs, they need money to conduct largescale, controlled interviews and surveys. These projects put graduate students to work collating data, they let us teach new courses, invent new sub-specialties, attract new students. Philosophy departments are notoriously underfunded (insert the old joke about needing only pens and paper and dispensing with trash bins) and this is a chance to feed at the trough of federal science dollars and fancy institutes with endowments and grant money. However, remember Eisenhower’s warning that research funding is an addiction that ultimately subordinates inquiry to funding. Large sums of money generally come with thick and tightly-held strings attached. It starts with demanding testable hypotheses and the next thing you know, your funders want industrial applications and a prototype for the Pentagon. Even as it has suffered for not being quite so well-funded as engineering or law, philosophy has benefited, a bit, from not being beholden to grant-makers.
7. The social sciences have people who devote themselves to methodology, who keep everyone’s statistics and research design honest. Philosphers don’t have in-house methods people: we’ve been content with symbolic logicians as our methodological police. In breaking new ground, there are probably going to be some major methodological snafu in the early years of X-Phi. By the same token, we don’t have a professional culture that cultivates a research ethos for human subjects. We can only hope for a controversy the size of the Stanford Prison Experiment… which, by the way, was a handy bit of pre-branded X-Phi.
8. I have a fundamental skepticism that I’ve been struggling to articulate without sounding like a fuddy-duddy. Here’s my best attempt: experimental inquiry into the neural sources of moral intuitions or the polled preferences of a population can accurately describe human beings, but it seems to beg the normative questions that philosophers have traditionally tackled. Of course, the descriptive/prescriptive divide has never been as wide as we philosophers would like to think. Theorists of moral reasoning have often assumed, without evidence, a particular relationship between calculation and the passions, but though Kantians and care-ethicists may draw fundamentally different conclusions on the basis of their differing assumptions, the truth of the matter is a scientific fact. Descriptive philosophy and philosophy that depends on ‘folk psychology’ is especially vulnerable to scientific disproof, which, put positively, means we stand to benefit most from scientific rigor. At the end of the day, though, you won’t find justice in an fMRI. Oh God, I do sound like a fuddy-duddy. So sue me: I’m a sentimental old codger who makes his living on the is-ought gap.
9. One last caveat: X-Phi currently seems to suffer from a lack of metastudies. Interpreting your own experimental data is well and good, but even in my limited experience as an enthusiastic outsider, I’ve seen enough X-Phi work to know that competing, mutually-exclusive theories are collecting mountains of experimental evidence in their favor. For instance, Hauser’s Moral Organ has as much evidence in its favor as the competing Kluge theory of ad hoc moral intuitions. When can we expect these experimenters to start trying to synthesize the competing data with their own? When can we expect, in the best tradition of the natural sciences, some theoretical winnowing to occur? Isn’t the great promise of X-Phi that we can finally resolve some of these big questions?
10. I hope none of this sounds like exclusion or “get-off-my-lawn-ism.” I do welcome our new experiemental colleagues. More questions, more answers, more rigor, more avenues for inquiry… what’s not to like? Just be sure to return that lawn mower: I need something to scare all these kids away.
Queen of the Sciences 4 Life!
