Education is the number one life regret, accounting for 32.2% of all reported regrets (SD = 1.89). This is a strikingly consistent finding, confirmed by a wide margin in all but two data sets (those exceptions being Landman et al., 1995, and Data Set 3 ofLandman & Manis, 1992).

Educational regrets were things like “should have stayed in school, should have studied harder, should have gotten another degree.” In other words, people wish they’d worked harder. After education, people regret their careers, romance, parenting, self, and leisure. In contrast, few people have regrets related to finance, family, health, friends, spirituality, or community: “the remaining six regrets were so low in frequency as to be effectively inconsequential.”

In short, we probably shouldn’t ignore Ware’s advice, all we need to do is reverse it:

1. Conform to expectations.
2. Work and study harder.
3. Bottle up your feelings.
4. Don’t stay in touch with old friends.
5. Don’t worry so much about happiness.

dgaicun comments:

One hypocrisy to always keep in mind about social class, is that people earn social status brownie points by A) earning lots of money and moving up in high status jobs, and B) simultaneously paying lots of lip service to the idea that money and good jobs are superficial and don’t matter much. People do this all the time; watch for it.

Sounds a lot like the satisficers from my post on the middle class. The study’s authors draw this conclusion:

Opportunity breeds regret, and so regret lingers where opportunity existed. Rankings of life regrets, interesting in and of themselves, point to this deeper theoretical principle. Life regrets are a reflection of where in life people see opportunity, that is, where they see the most tangible prospects for change, growth, and renewal.

In other words: regrets are a luxury, not a truth-tracking emotion. Enjoy them as the mixture of nostalgia and tenderness that they are, but don’t succumb to the fantasy that they necessarily track better choices.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Perhaps this is supposed to inspire the fear of death and the passion for life in us, but consider:

1. Why should we credit someone’s last thoughts over the ones that guided them throughout life? A regret is just an act of hypocrisy, a wish to have had our cake and eaten it, too. Because we don’t really know what regrets we would have had in the counterfactual, regret is largely a fantasy of another, unknown life, more desirable because it is foreign, its pleasures more easily imagined than its pains. There’s no particularly good reason to believe we are wiser when faced with imminent death, chronic pain, and possibly clouded by drugs.
2. Indeed, you rarely hear “In Morphine, Veritas.” If they died with a palliative care nurse like Ware, these patients were likely in pain, on pain killers, and not thinking particularly clearly. Chronic pain leads to depression. Narcotics like codeine have side effects that include mood swings and extremes of euphoria and sadness. While depressed people tend to be more realistic, I’m not sure this extends to drug- and pain-induced depression, especially when the brief insights are likely to be prompted by narcotic euphoria.
3. Ware is trying to sell a book and cash in on the demand for maudlin reminders of mortality. What she writes is more likely to be guided by what sells than what’s true.
4. In selling their stories, she’s also profiting from the private confessions of her patients. If she sought permission from their estates, that’s only ghoulish. If she’s not sharing the profits, it’s exploitative as well. The best scenario would be if she had simply made the confessions up, but then the lessons would be even more likely to be deceptive or to reinforce stereotypes.
5. It is, however, quite useful to confront the fact that you will die someday. Your own reflections on that fact can likely help you to prioritize, because it is your death and thus your life. That’s why there’s a market for reminders of mortality. But if you substitute Ware’s or her patients’ reflections for your own, you’re not really confronting the possibility of your own death: you’re fetishizing the reflections of somebody else. No one can die your death for you, or explain what it should mean. And really: how boring and inauthentic do you have to be in order to hire out your reflections on mortality to someone else?

I guess I won’t have to regret leaving my feelings unexpressed!

For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting–room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky. too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.

Related: Lin Van Hek sings River of Life.

(via, via)

The statements set tough preconditions for a political truce: resignation of the current leadership, introduction of broad democratic freedoms, prosecution of security forces engaged in violence against the opposition and an end to politics in the military, universities and the clergy.

The proposed reforms would amount to a total overhaul of the system. But they also reflect a common desire to prevent an all-out confrontation by engaging the regime in compromise and ending the escalating violence. The three sets of demands all accept that Iran will remain an Islamic republic, if largely in name only.

• 15 Points of the Secular Green Movement
• 10 Demands
• 5 Stages to Resolution

Abdolkarim Soroush explains in a (translated) interview given to Welt Online here:

It will better define, articulate and clarify the aims and intentions of today’s opposition. This is what we need at this stage. For many years now I have been saying that the revolution had no theory. It was a revolution against the Shah – a negative rather than positive theory. I was insistent that the new movement should have a theory. The people should know what they want, not only what they don’t want. That is why we are trying – in our modest way – to create a theory for this movement. (via)

Broadly in the theme of the Green Movement is this excellent piece from Spiegel Online about citizen journalism in Iran:

The surprise element in the Iranian situation defies the wisdom of Western media, trained to focus on the power structure at the top. The extreme form of control that the Islamic Republic has tried to impose has boomeranged in a way that this type of reporting finds difficult to explain. The decentralised form of the current resistance seems to follow the example set by the women’s movement over the last three years. Their network form of organisation and its communication via the internet paved the way for this diffuse form of political activity.

You can see why all the manifestos demand freedom of the press.

Of course, right now it doesn’t work that way, and I find myself unable to practice what I preach. Instead I join in on the student’s excitement, with a few warnings that I quickly dilute by pointing to philosophy’s status in the career rankings (right behind “Dental Hygenist.”) As Brad DeLong recently pointed out, becoming a tenured professor is the closest this country has to becoming landed gentry. Surely that’s worth some risk, and we probably shouldn’t be making that kind of risk/reward calculation for someone else. Plus, I do love my job, and I can’t be blamed if that love is infectious, can I? I tend to pass the buck to the profession and the university as a whole, though I think we all have obligations as potential authorities in the face of a difficult status quo. (See, for instance, my concerns about advice.)

Anyway, if we ever adopted such a test, here are some links that’d be worth using as part of the dissuasion process:

• Is Graduate School a Cult? (No, it’s a pyramid scheme!)
• Just Don’t Go (More) via Adriel Trott
• Wanted: Really Smart Suckers
• The Case of the Invisible Adjunct & The Invisible Adjunct: An appreciation
• How the University Works

Perhaps applicants should have to write an essay on this theme?

I already have PEA Soup (whose collaboration with Ethics looks quite promising.) I’m a longtime fan of Public Reason. Similarly, I recently discovered Philosophy, et cetera. But what else should I be reading? I list my friends and associates on the sidebar, but though I do have some pretty smart friends, I imagine there are some people out there I don’t know who are nonetheless sharp, interesting, or provocative. Who are they? Where do they blog?

By way of exchange, I offer some blog reading advice to my friends. I’m thinking of it as a kind of matchmaking:

• Dr. J and The Attached Observer should read Gary Banham’s Inter Kant.
• Vegifem should read Vegans of Color. Also, Critical Animal.
• Mahogany Feed should read Infinite ThØught.
• Chris Long should be listening to Philosophy Bites.
• Steve Maloney should read The Brooks Blog.
• George Wrisley should read Metafilter.
• Michael Sigrist should actually read fewer blogs. But he might like Charlie’s Diary.
• My non-blogger friend Daniel Brunson should read the Philosophers’ Carnival, hosted this month by Horseless Telegraph. He’ll also enjoy Overcoming Bias if he doesn’t already read it.

Going back to testability, I suspect that one place that markets will not yield much benefit is in evaluations of normativity. Despite the fact that I am a moral realist and believe that there are truth-conditions for ought statements, I worry about the conditions under which a moral proposition could be said to satisfy some futures contract. Yet for many, this is a problem with moral realism, not with idea markets. My moral realism is a belief about the world, and the obvious moral anti-realist claim is simply that there is no evidence for that belief, or that these beliefs are dependent on matters that are not fully resolved. (For instance, when looking for evidence for the belief that “Murder is wrong,” I’d be looking for evidence that can be sustained whether or not I’m a brain in a vat. After all, we might all be brains in vats, and death may be no more than a reset switch.)

As I noted yesterday, one way to  make untestable principles testable is to seek out the middle-range theories that justify them. Indeed, this is what our profession has mostly done, especially in considering the truth-conditions of moral statements. What is it, exactly, that the claim “Murder is wrong” could possibly track? If it is my own moral intuition, then it is nothing more than a self-report, and is clearly not agent-neutral. A sociopath could rightly claim that murder didn’t seem wrong to her, and we’d be at a loss to continue.

One troublesome way to verify such claims is associated with the logical and legal positivists. If, for instance, my claim that “Murder is wrong” depends on JHVH having chiseled “Thou shalt not kill” onto a particular stone tablet, then it stands or falls on that historical fact. But this is not my claim: I believe that murder is wrong regardless of what was chiseled on the tablets stored in the Ark of the Covenant, let alone the identity of the chiseler. The same thing could be said for the claim that “Murder is wrong” because it violates § 18.2-32 of the criminal code of Virginia, where I currently reside. It doesn’t matter what God or the state commands, some acts are, I maintain, morally impermissible. But perhaps I am wrong.  Perhaps this is simply a matter of faith on my part, a curious superstition or vestigial judgment from our ancestors, and going around asking my students and friends whether they really think murder is wrong or not is a kind of ostentatious gesture designed to preserve that superstition. In this sense, discussions of murder are like judgments of taste, and the moralist’s job is to shame her audience into pretending to believe that we like Chopin better than the The Clash. “Seriously? Joe Strummer? Puh-lease.”

But I don’t think so. I am more than willing to admit I could be wrong about which acts are permissible and which obligatory or permitted, or put differently, about which specific facts might count as a justification for killing, so I continue to be a fallibilist, and to seek out opportunities to test my beliefs. Yet if I can be wrong about a moral proposition, then it stands to reason that I can be right about it, too. But perhaps not. For instance, it is tempting to many atheists to say that though our beliefs and claims about God are desperate to track some epistemic reality, it’s simply an unfortunate fact about our lives that they do not. Because God does not exist, then all the wars fought over what communion or baptism means are simply wasted or misdirected efforts. Perhaps discussions of the moral impermissibility of murder are like discussions of God or fairies: they are focused on a fiction. But again, I don’t think so.

As an example, I propose fairness, following Rawls. Though I may not know exactly what fairness entails in many situations, I believe that I can come to tentatively correct conclusions about the demands of fairness through a process we call reflective equilibrium. In short, because conditions like non-contradiction and valid inference apply to my moral reasoning, I suspect that I am reasoning about a real object and that valid moral arguments can also be sound. (The moral-anti-realist can respond that my reasoning resembles the obsessive fandom of a nerd who points out plot holes in Star Trek, but more on this later.) Moving back and forth between cases and principles, I can generate research questions and frame disputes, and at any point we can cast about and show where we started, what justified our progress, and maintain that we have truly achieved a closer approximation of the demands of fairness.

Here, too, I meet with disagreement, but I find that others are not just skeptics of the “you never know if you’re a brain in a vat” sort, but that they are actively committed to the opposing viewpoint. Since it is very, very rarely that I can find an occasion for disagreement with my estimable friend Dr. J, it gave me great pleasure to see her articulating her account of that contrary view in her posts on moral relativism (Lazy Relativism and Strong Relativism) recently.

First, a review: Dr. J shared her distaste for the lazy relativism of some of our students, who articulate a vision of the world that does not require moral deliberation. As she points out, this is rarely because they have a robust conception of agent-relative values, but because they believe that they know the “Truth” and don’t feel like trying to figure out the principles and justifications that ground their opinions. But she ends with a stinger: she too is a relativist!

By way of explanation, Dr. J offers her own position as a “strong” relativist, the relativism of one who nonetheless values robust deliberation about values. How does she justify all this deliberation about something if there is no ‘fact of the matter’ to deliberate about?

As a relativist about moral truths, I deny the authority and the necessity of my antagonist’s moral truths, and I ought to be able to give an account of how I arrived at my value judgments independent of such authority or necessity. If I can give such an account, then the advantage has shifted. Whereas the lazy relativist leaves him- or herself vulnerable to the charge of being simply irrational (i.e., holding that mutually exclusive propositions are equally true), the strong relativist who can give an account of his or her beliefs and take ultimate responsibility for the judgments that constitute his or her values is now able to make different demands of his or her antagonist.

So far, so good: there’s little difference between the position I’ve articulated and the one Dr. J holds. I too believe we must take responsibility for our judgments: though I believe they are agent-neutral, they nonetheless survive only in our institutions and practices, which must be fired by human reason if they are to have any significance. Dr. J argues that she distinguishes herself from her sleepy freshmen because she is willing to pursue moral deliberations even if they’re not ultimately “about” anything that exists as an independent entity out there in the world, like mathematics. Her position trumps theirs, she suggests, because she “can give an account of… her beliefs, and take ultimate responsibility for the judgments that constitute… her values.” I take this to be a coherentist moral epistemology. What distinguishes the lazy relativists and the strong relativist, Dr. J claims, is not that one of their beliefs is true, and one false, but that one is justified by an coherent account, while the other is not. Neither corresponds to any state of affairs in the world, which is why they are both relativists.

I’m interpellating here, so I may be misinterpreting Dr. J, but I suspect that she might accept this description: strong relativism trumps lazy relativism because her account moves logically from premises through inferences to conclusions, while her students offer only conclusions. However, Dr. J seems to maintain that her premises themselves cannot be testable. That is why the lazy relativist is at risk of being deemed ‘irrational’: where Dr. J applies reason, offers reasons, and pays close attention to reasons, her students do not.

Of course, Dr. J is a philosophy professor. She makes her living being reasonable. She’s prejudiced in favor of reasons! If her students are anything like mine, they have likely pointed out this apparent bias-in-favor-of-reason-giving. When my students tell me this, I reply that moral reasons track, or ought to track, moral realities, and so by exchanging reasons we’re engaged in a process of discovering those values. But Dr. J refuses to avail herself of this traditional response. Instead, she maintains:

…strong relativists take human freedom seriously… especially the human freedom exercised in the determination of values, those things that are not governed by necessity or given over to us whole and complete by some transcendent or transcendental authority. Those determinations are the only ones for which we can be “responsible” or “accountable” or any other ethically-loaded adjective that we commonly use, after all.

Dr. J believes that humans are free, and that they freely choose their values. (I assume that Dr. J is also a determinist, and that by “freedom” she means some brand of compatibilism such that physical causation and voluntariness and/or responsibility are compatible.) The lazy relativist has a ready-made response to this: one can freely choose a non-discursive, non-reason-tracking, non-inquisitive kind of human freedom. After all, if moral values are agent-relative, then why can’t an agent decide not to value reasons? At that point, the demand for reasons and ethical inquiry is only an application of force: the strong relativist can only demand reasons from the lazy relativist through coercion, whether it be a bad grade or a lost election. I’m happy to coerce my students to be reasonable because I believe they agree to that kind of coercion when they sign up for my courses. I’m not sure how Dr. J justified this.

I think the problem here is that Dr. J is contrasting relativism with absolutism, rather than with moral realism:

The absolutist can only ever understand his or her antagonists as in error, and has the unfortunate superadded challenge of not being able to correct that error because the basic rules governing the distinction between truth and error are not shared.

The absolutist, as Dr. J depicts her, is someone who claims to know the truth. The absolutist then has just as much difficulty with moral deliberation as the lazy relativist: if your interlocutor is supposed to know the truth, and she doesn’t, then your interlocutor is operating according to a different set of “basic rules.”

What kinds of reasons would ever motivate her to change rules? That’d be like persuading a chess player that we ought to start playing checkers in the middle of a game. Only if we’re playing by the same rules can we understand each other. But this is why relativists like Rorty and Dr. J understand their position in opposition to absolutists, for whom a moral claim like “It is always and everywhere wrong to torture another human being,” can be known (perhaps a priori!) to be true. To the relativist, this is as absurd as claiming that it is always and everywhere wrong to move your ‘king’ two spaces: in checkers, that’s a fine move!

But morality is not a board game, (unless we are all brains in vats,) which is why I’m a moral realist. One way to make these views palatable to each other is simply to claim that we are all playing the same game, part of which involves figuring out the rules. A moral realist is not committed to the existence of a human-independent set of values, only an agent-neutral set of values. In fact, I don’t experience the problem incommensurability problem that Dr. J describes, except when discussing these matters with people like her, who share most of my values but disagree with me on the metaphysics. When I disagree with a non-relativist, I assume that we are using the same basic rules to distinguish truth and error. If I find that we are not, then our dispute is not really about values, but about these ‘basic rules,’ i.e. the middle-range theories by which we move from undisputed facts to disputed facts to disputed values.

For instance, I say that torture is wrong, but primarily because I believe torture doesn’t work, and is more likely to supply bad intelligence than a good, empathic interrogation using no physical coercion. My repugnance for intentional acts of cruelty is peripheral to my skepticism. If there were some inerrant way to identify terrorists, and to get them to tell the truth, then I might be willing to sign on to using that method to interrogate a known terrorist hiding a known ticking time bomb. The whole problem with torture is that there isn’t such certainty in identification, and pain is not the touchstone of truth. If my middle-range theory of torture’s efficacy were disproven, I’d need to re-evaluate my repugnance. However, I believe it is the pro-torture crowd that has made a mistake in the middle-range theorizing, and the evidence seems to support my view. So you see, I do not claim to know the truth about the world in any sort of privileged sense. I only claim that I make an effort to track my values to the best possible reasons.  And why can we not be realists and fallibilists both?

If we take moral inquiry to be adequately addressed through an appeal to justified true beliefs accompanied by an account, then we can seek an account that would make sense of my claim or shows it to be nonsense while maintaining that our beliefs are about the world and either verified by it or not. If, for instance, my claim can be shown to be self-contradictory or if it varied in some impermissibly arbitrary way (“it is wrong to murder except when the victims is redheaded”) we might say that it fails to meet conditions of identity and non-contradiction, conditions we ascribe to all real objects. Thus being unreasonable about morality would be clealy a case of being wrong about morality, rather than of the free choice of unreason. I think this is a problem with moral relativists of the strong variety as well: if my values about murder are at odds with those of another, then one of us is wrong, and we are obliged to discuss the matter until we can make our views converge. The only alternative to such convergence is that one of us, or the world itself, is unreasonable.

If Aristotle and John Brown were both right about slavery, then we live in an incomprehensibly strange world, and moral propositions are the least of our troubles. I suspect that no relativist would be willing to buy a futures contract on the converse, where the conditions are: proof that there both are natural slaves, and, simultaneously, that slavery is an affront to God, because we are made in his image. Of course, it could be possible, as the error theorists would have it, that they are both wrong, but I’d like to think that one of them is less wrong than the other. Nor, I suspect, would a relativist be willing to grant the free choice of values in Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy, even though it contains a very persuasive account the inadequacies of parliamentary democracy. But perhaps I have descended into a strawman argument against a good friend. I believe that would be wrong, but for now, I can’t figure out what it would mean for her to agree with me! For instance, it is also possible that I have confused subjectivism and relativism here, or that Dr. J will respond with an equally cunning distinction around which our entire dispute will dissolve. (She’s smart like that.) I wouldn’t bet on this being over, that’s for sure.

On this topic, my friend Michael Sigrist at Ends of Thought writes that the latest bloggingheads.tv has it wrong. Where Robert Wright and Steve Pinker hold that the moral progress we’ve seen has been due to our growing technological and institutional capacity to imagine ourselves as someone else and to understand that they suffer when we are cruel to them, Sigrist counters that any moral progress can only be attributed to the growth of norms of outrage and condemnation for cruelty. Though I think this is right, I would add that condemnation is a luxury, literally, in the sense that moral progress is a side effect of affluence, and the casualty of poverty.

Sigrist is certainly right in his evaluation of the moral psychology. The theory of moral progress through an ‘enlarged mentality’ enabled by increased access to images and narratives that force us to acknowledge the humanity of the Other is pure bunk. The impetus for decency does not come from imagined access to another’s mental states. Empathy just isn’t all it’s cracked up to be:

In cruel acts, I take pleasure in the fact that I can empathize with your pain, helplessness and humiliation, I put myself in your shoes, understand that you are suffering, and delight in being the agent of that suffering. Such cruelty is not a failure of moral imagination or empathy, but a result.

That’s obviously true. Cruelty is a pointless waste of effort if the perpetrator doesn’t even acknowledge the suffering she’s causing. Yet we continue to assure ourselves otherwise, because empathy combined with decency is an asset in our culture. We remind ourselves just how incomprehensible cruelty is, and that all evil acts are the result of a kind of ignorance. Thus we fail to comprehend it and are left in the dark about the very phenomenon under investigation. In fact, it’s really our failure to imagine the mindset of the torturer or the genocidaire that allows us to maintain this premise. I find it supremely ironic that proponents of moral imagination are so bad at it. In a way, it’s laudable. We tell ourselves that human beings are basically decent, because we want to signal to ourselves and others just how decent we are.

Unfortunately, I think that Sigrist is a little too Pollyanna-ish in his claim that cruelty has become truly rare, even though Steven Pinker is clearly right that the population-wide incidence has dropped off. Sigrist takes this a bit too far:

Only in the darkest depths of Hitler’s genocide in Eastern Europe or Stalin’s in the Soviet Russian Empire has anything approaching routine standards of ancient cruelty been witnessed by any living human.

This just isn’t true, but the error is illuminating. We don’t see that kind of routine cruelty IN EUROPE except under totalitarian regimes, but this mass cruelty has popped up throughout the globe in the last century with pretty jarring regularity. The genocide of ethnic minorities in Cambodia and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, the brutal genocide of Tutsi minorities in Rwanda, the use of amputation as a terror tactic in Ivory Coast and Somalia, disappearances and political torture in Chile, Argentina, and South Africa, rape camps in Bosnia, the janjaweed in Sudan, our own use of torture in Guantanamo Bay and Iraq. (The worst thing is that in making this list I’m sure I’m leaving things out….)

It doesn’t really make sense for Sigrist to ignore most of these because they’re not acts of out-group cruelty: with the exception of the behavior of the Indonesians in East Timor and our own behavior in Iraq, they seem to prove his thesis: they are all examples of people who have had plenty of opportunities to get to know each other, people who ought, by rights, to have the requisite moral imagination to see that the people they were torturing and killing were human beings who suffered like themselves. Each of these moments are moments in which our condemnations broke down, when new allegiances formed new in-groups, deserving respect and especially revenge, and out-groups against whom acts of cruelty were no longer morally relevant or shameful.

If we’re looking for a generic explanation for these acts of cruelty, we’ll be doing a disservice to each of them, which is something a decent person generally shouldn’t do. But I think we’re obligated by decency to quell our desire to seem decent, and so I’ll repeat my claim (grounded in work done by Paul Collier) that condemnation-free cruelty occurs in transitional democracies where absolute poverty levels are too great:

We so want to believe that elections foster peace that we assume it must be true. Unfortunately, the effect of democracy on the risk of political violence depends on a country’s income. Above $2,700 per capita, democracies are less prone to violence than are autocracies. But most political violence happens in countries where income is far below that threshold; there, democracy is associated with a greater risk of bloodshed.

Rich countries that transition to democratic institutions after having created relative wealth simply don’t treat each other the same way as poor countries forced into elections and allegedly democratic institutions without any of the prerequisites like parties or a public sphere.

One reason that most human rights activists eschew any heavy metaphysics in favor of mobilizing outrage, is that there doesn’t seem to be any non-moral reason for moral obligations not to torture each other. Without a rational basis, we’re thrown back onto the moral imagination, which Sigrist rightly notes oculd just as easily lead to cruelty as decency. If it’s shame that does the work in preventing cruelty, and only condemnation can produce shame, the question is: what produces condemnation? What causes an in-group authority to condemn cruelty against out-group victims without actually inviting them into our in-group? Which comes first, the empathy or the condemnation?

Here it helps to note that all moral imagination theories are not created equal. Martha Nussbaum’s version of the moral imagination, as articulated in her essay “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible,” uses Henry James’ fiction to demonstrate the way in which ethical reasoning begins with examples and particular cases before it can work up to rules and principles. That’s a much better and more subtle claim than Rorty’s assertion that reading novels teaches empathy, but that teaching human rights doesn’t. Thinking about moral questions in a selfish mode leads to the development of principles with an obvious extension to others, and the challenges of generalizing our own rights-demands leads to a willingness to condemn. (This is what we call reflective equilibrium.)

Robert Goodin has also taken a swing at the role of imagination, in his case in the development of adequate prerequisites for democratic deliberation. He proposes a kind of internal dialogue with the imagined Other in his essay “Democratic Deliberation Within,” but he concludes that reading fiction or seeing news reports won’t do nearly the kind of work of actual encounters:

It is obviously far easier to imagine what the world looks like from the perspective of a black person or an immigrant or a person from some religious minority if you actually know people like that personally. [S]ocial mixing… constitutes a necessary first step towards firing the imagination in the ways that ‘democratic deliberation within’ would require.

This is known as the ‘contact theory’ and its been largely discredited in school desegregation, at least in the short term. ‘Social mixing’ doesn’t produce empathy all by itself, and at the margins it appears to exacerbate interracial mistrust. Because group members come to each other as competitors for the scarce resource of respect and deference, with ready-made in-group solidarities in the marked differences of race, national origin, or religious affiliation, predictable game theoretical competition results.

Though contact generally leads to an increase in negative judgments of out-groups, there is some evidence that a properly structured school with opportunities for dialogue may be able to trump the general distrust that attends busing. There is also evidence that affluent school districts where bused students suffer wealth inequalities do much, much worse. The structured opportunity for racial dialogue  requires more than just rubbing elbows, it requires students to exchange reasons and engage in full blown ‘external’ deliberation, and it requires moderation, with condemnation for hate speech so that the opportunities for dialogue don’t really model affective moral imagination at all: they model norm setting and rationality!

Obviously, I side with Habermas in these issues: the prerequisite for decency is a reasonably accessible public sphere where widespread agreement on normative standards can emerge. That space can’t work if participants are weighed down by absolute poverty or massive relative inequality. Deliberation is a luxury, available only in relatively affluent societies, which produces consensus on cruelty as shameful. Recognizing that forces us to confront just how contingent our anti-cruelty feelings really are. Predictably, the contingency of our decency standards is what drives so much of this attempt to identify a middle-ground theory based in moral psychology or speech act theory. The result of all this contingency is also predictable: such middle-ground theories inevitably fail. Without any effort to think consistently about what a right is, rights-claims and the attendant outrage can attach as a free-floating signifier to almost anything, including mutually incommensurable rights. Though deliberation can produce a widespread consensus on the existence of outrageous rights-violations, it ends up asserting a dogmatic overlapping consensus and treating theoretical disagreements, including efforts to point out its contingency, as if they undermine the anti-cruelty standards we’ve bought ourselves with our affluence. The terrible thing about these condemnations of further inquiry is that they just might be right: cruelty is entirely too easy to imagine if you are willing to try.

Who was Alexander Hamilton? Bastard, immigrant, Federalist, Secretary of the Treasury,speechwriter, philanderer, industrialist, duelist.

Or as Miranda puts it:

He’s very much like a Charles Dickens-type character. Here is a guy who really pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He was a penniless orphan, both of his parents were dead by the time he was 10. He ended up working for a trading company in St. Croix and was basically running the company by the time he was 14 because he was just this prodigy kid. [At the time] he had written a poem about a hurricane that had devastated the island. The poem gained notoriety and he was sent to the mainland on a scholarship literally on the strength of his writing. He taught himself French and Latin and soon became indispensable to George Washington during the Revolution and his career flourished from there. Only in America could his career flourish. But he was also as self destructive as he was brilliant and got into these epic fights with Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Aaron Burr the last of which ended in him getting shot in Weehawken, NJ. And as I’m reading this, I’m thinking ‘This is Biggie, this is Tupac…this is hip-hop!’

(via)