Philosophy from the Left Coast

Phil 108: Family, Country, and Race

2009-03-07T01:25:00.000-08:00

Some people believe that patriotic partiality is morally permissible, while rejecting the thoroughly communitarian account of morality defended by MacIntyre. Patriotic partiality, on these views, is often taken to be similar to partiality toward one's family - and since even most who endorse what MacIntyre calls "liberal universalism" believe that family partiality is permissible, it is plausible to think, according to those who defend the compatibility of universalism and patriotism, that patriotic partiality can be justified within a universalist framework as well.

Others are skeptical of the attempt to defend patriotic partiality by suggesting that it is, in morally relevant respects, similar to family partiality. Paul Gomberg, for example, claims that patriotic partiality has more in common with racial partiality than it does with family partiality - and since racial partiality is clearly morally unacceptable, we should, according to Gomberg, reject patriotic partiality as well.

There is much that seems clearly right to me about Gomberg's claim that patriotism is quite similar to racism. After all, which country one is born in is just as morally arbitrary as what color skin one is born with. It seems obvious that neither factor should, in itself, have any impact on the degree of moral consideration that others owe to one. Furthermore, none of us have personal relationships with all of our compatriots, while one thing that might plausibly be thought to ground the permissibility of family partiality is the personal relationships that most people have with their family members. Choosing to save the life of a stranger who happens to share one's citizenship status rather than a stranger from another country for no reason other than that the former is from one's country seems at least somewhat arbitrary, in the way that choosing to save a member of one's own race merely because she shares one's race seems objectionably arbitrary. On the other hand, most people think that choosing to save a family member rather than a stranger simply because the former is a family member is at the very least permissible; some would even claim that saving the family member is required.

The challenge for those who claim that patriotism is compatible with universalism, then, would appear to be to explain why we should think that patriotic partiality is different, morally speaking, than racial partiality. There are a few things that might be said in an attempt to meet this challenge, though I admit to not finding any of them terribly convincing. First, we might think that the fact that we share a politcal community with our co-nationals makes it the case that we have a special relationship (despite in most cases lacking a personal relationship) to them that we don't have to those outside our nation, and that this relationship grounds the permissibility of giving extra moral weight to their interests. We might simultaneously deny that there is any such special relationship that we have to those who share our race, either because race is simply not a morally important category, or, more strongly, because race is an illusion altogether. The truth of the latter claim would certainly provide a distinction (though not necessarily a morally relevant one) between race and co-nationality, because there clearly are facts about, for example, citizenship status, whereas the view that race is an illusion denies that there are any facts at all about race. In addition, we might think that the fact that we do not have personal relationships with all of our co-nationals does not distinguish the grounds for accepting the permissibility of family partiality from the grounds for accepting the permissibility of national partiality. We might, for example, think that it would be permissible (or obligatory) for one to save the life of a long lost uncle that one had never met before encountering him in a life threatening situation (of course we must imagine that the potential rescuer knows of the biological relationship) rather than saving an acquantaince simply because the former is a family member. If this is correct, then we might think that in a range of cases national partiality is justified in just the same way that family partiality is, and that whether or not one has a personal relationship with those to whom she is partial is irrelevant.

Interestingly, Stephen Nathanson, who defends the view that patriotism is compatible with universalism, does not say any of these things. Instead, he claims that just as the sort of patriotism that he defends, which he calls "moderate patriotism," is acceptable, so too is what Gomberg critically referred to as "moderate racism." Just as it is permissible to give extra consideration, beyond what is owed to everyone, to some simply because they are one's co-nationals, it is permissible to give extra consideration to some simply because they are members of one's own race. "Moderate racism," on this view, is not morally objectionable, because it does not involve one in giving those of other races less consideration that is owed to everyone in virtue of the principles of universal morality.

This view essentially says that there is a minimum level of consideration owed to everyone, and that beyond that we can choose to give extra consideration to some for what seem clearly to be morally arbitrary reasons, such as that they share one's race. I'm inclined to think that this view is incorrect, but even if it is right, the way in which it justifies patriotism seems to make patriotism nothing more than morally tolerable (and only in limited circumstances). It is certainly not a virtue, and seems to be morally on a par with giving preference to some because they share one's race, or eye color, or favorite TV show, or brand of toothpaste. And if it morally no different than partialities like these, then it is not clear why we should be inclined to accept it in the first place. Given the tendency of any form of partiality, if systematically practiced, to lead to avoidable inequalities, woudn't we do better according to what we actually value (equality over partiality based on race/toothpaste brand/etc.) to simply reject the claim that national partiality is permissible?

Phil 108: MacIntyre on Liberal and Patriotic (Communitarian) Morality

2009-03-06T22:49:00.000-08:00

Liberal morality, according to Alasdair MacIntyre, is incompatible with patriotism. This is because liberal morality, on MacIntyre's description of it, requires "neutral[ity] between rival and competing interests...each individual is to count for one and nobody for more than one," and because liberal moral principles apply equally to everyone - they are "independent of all social particularity." Patriotic morality, on the other hand, requires that the interests of one's own nation or community be privileged in one's decisions about what to do. The patriot cannot take up the standpoint of the impartial observer in, for example, disputes between her nation and another nation over resources or conceptions of the good life. Patriotic morality requires adherence to the principles that one has internalized within her community, principles that will often reflect not the equal concern for the interests of all required by liberal morality, but rather the particular values that define the way of life of the nation or community. These particular values, and the principles that are internalized as a result of immersion in a community that is in part defined by them - and which require the promotion of those values (including, perhaps, by means of going to war with other nations/communities that reject them) - are, according to MacIntyre, the only values and principles that could possibly serve as a motivational basis for moral action. If individuals are not motivated by the particular values that define their community's particular way of life, if they are constantly subjecting these values, and the socially particular moral principles to which they give rise, to rational scrutiny by attempting to determine whether they are consistent with the liberal requirement to take all to count for one and none for more than one, then the social bonds which ensure the stability, and indeed the survival of the community are liable to dissolve (soldiers, for example, are unlikely to have the attitudes necessary to consistently act in the ways necessary to ensure the country's security). Only patriotic morality, on this view, can provide the right sort of motivational basis to sustain any particular community over time. This, on MacIntyre's view, is a reason to prefer patriotic morality to liberal morality, given their incompatibility.

It is clear that one central aim of any patriotic morality, on MacIntyre's understanding, is the preservation of the nation or community's way of life, and the values that its way of life represents. The moral significance of this aim is overriding in cases of conflicts with other communities over their respective ways of life, or over resources that contribute to the sustainability of the community and its values. Nations or communities, rather than individuals, are the fundamental unit of moral concern on this view. MacIntyre's argument, then, appeals to a form of communitarianism - to the view that the nation or community is the fundamental unit of moral concern because individuals are partly constituted by the communities within which they are socialized and from which they get their values. Individuals could not be moral agents without socialization within a community, and they could not be the moral agents that they are in the absence of the community within which they were actually socialized. The patriotic moral requirement to defend one's community and its values, then, is in a sense a requirement to defend an essential part of oneself. To allow one's community and its values to be destroyed, on this view, is to allow an essential part of oneself to be destroyed, and the destruction of one's community and its values is at the same time the destruction of oneself as the moral agent that she is.

It is clear, then, why MacIntyre rejects liberal morality as incompatible with patriotism and as independently untenable. Liberal morality, as he understands it, can require one to promote the values of another nation or community over those of his own (remember, each is to count for one and none for more than one - everyone's interests are on a par, morally speaking), even if this will involve the destruction of her community. But given that we are partly constituted as moral agents by the socialization that we receive in our communities, taking the liberal requirements to be moral requirements is to assume that there is a source of moral reasons, and therefore a possible source of moral motivation, other than the values that one has acquired from her community - that does not derive from the social factors that partly constitute individuals as moral agents. Liberal morality is incoherent, on MacIntyre's view, because it can require individuals to act against, and perhaps even allow or participate in the destruction of, the community that partly constitutes one as the moral agent that she is. It can require one to undermine the source of her moral agency - in effect, to contribute to the destruction of a part of herself, and to render her without any source of moral motivation whatsoever, and therefore without any morality.

MacIntyre's argument relies heavily on the thought that the loss of one's nation or community entails the loss of the only possible source of moral motivation and moral understanding that an individual can have access to - "deprived of the life of [my] community, I would have no reason to be moral," he claims. This thought strikes me as, if not obviously false, at least extremely questionable. If my nation ceased to exist, and its values, some of which I suppose inform my moral thinking to some extent, no longer served as the basis for the sort of social life that currently structures many of my interactions with compatriots, I don't at all imagine that I would cease to be the moral agent that I am, and I certainly do not think that I would no longer have any reason to be moral. This intuitive sense that my moral agency would clearly survive the destruction of my national community leads to me to be deeply skeptical of the communitarian account of the constitution of individuals as moral agents.

There are further difficulties associated with the communitarian view. In particular, it is not clear why MacIntyre seems to privilege national community above all other forms as the one that provides the set of values and the process of socialization that inculcates those values that play an essential role in constituting individuals as the moral agents that they are. Conflicting community associations (national, religious, ethnic, ideological, etc.) can socialize single individuals to identify with conflicting values, and it's not clear why any particular type of community should be taken to be the primary one that provides the social basis for moral motivation and understanding. The value of preserving a nation as a political arrangement for the pursuit of mutual benefits may be a reason for thinking that there are very often strong self-interested reasons for acting so as to preserve one's nation as a nation, but the values that derive from other forms of community are often at least nearly as significant for the pursuit of individuals' conceptions of the good life (this is in part, of course, due to the fact that individuals' conceptions of the good life are influenced by all of the aforementioned types of community, and not just national community).

Given these reasons for skepticism about MacIntyre's patriotic communitarianism, I wonder what might be said in defense of his approach. Am I right in thinking that his view has unacceptably counterintuitive implications about individuals' moral agency? Is there a defensible way of privileging national community in the way that MacIntyre seems to want to?

Phil 108: Marquis on Abortion

2009-02-12T01:51:00.000-08:00

Marquis' argument for the view that abortion is generally impermissible relies on the claim that what is typically wrong about killing normal adult human beings is that doing so deprives them of their futures. The fact that killing something will deprive it of a "future like ours," is, according to Marquis, "sufficient to create the strong presumption that the killing is seriously wrong" (73). This entails that killing fetuses is typically seriously wrong, regardless of whether or not fetuses are already persons. Marquis claims, therefore, that once we understand what typically makes killing normal adult persons wrong, it is clear that aborting fetuses is generally wrong, since doing so shares a property with killing persons that is sufficient for making killing persons wrong (namely, depriving the being killed of a future like ours).

This argument has substantial force. There is something that seems clearly right about the thought that at least part of what makes killing persons wrong is that doing so deprives them of their futures. It also seems clearly true that futures like ours are valuable, and that the value of such futures is something that morality must take seriously. Those who wish to defend a more permissive view about the morality of abortion must, then, respond to the challenges raised by Marquis' argument. There are, however, a number of points that can be raised that present difficulties for his view.

One thing that we might immediately notice about Marquis' account is that it seems to imply that it would be wrong for one to disconnect herself from the violinist in Thomson's famous case. After all, the violinist will, if he continues to live, have a future like ours, and so Marquis seems committed to the claim that it would be wrong to kill him. This thought is supported by Marquis' claim that "abortion, like ordinary killing, could be justified only by the most compelling reasons...abortion could be justified in some circumstances, only if the loss consequent on failing to abort would be at least as great [as the loss to a standard fetus of its future]" (73). Since the loss of nine months of life detached from the violinist is not as great as the loss of the violinist's life, it seems as though Marquis' view implies that it would be wrong to disconnect.

One might suggest that Marquis need not accept that it would be wrong to detach oneself from the violinist, despite maintaining his strongly pro-life stance on abortion. When one detaches herself from the violinist, we might think, she merely allows him to die, whereas abortion involves the deliberate killing of the fetus. Perhaps Marquis can claim that it is only wrong to deprive a being of a future like ours by killing it, and that because one does not kill the violinist by detaching oneself, but merely lets him die, detaching is permissible.

I am skeptical of the thought that Marquis can plausibly make this claim. After all, one must do something, namely detach oneself, in order to put oneself in a position to then allow the violinist to die, and by detaching oneself one ensures that the violinist will not get to enjoy the future that he would otherwise have. If a woman found herself pregnant and wanted to avoid carrying the fetus to term, it would be implausible to think that it is impermissible to kill the fetus, but permissible to take a pill that detaches it from its source of nutrition in the womb, resulting in its death in the near future due to the lack of intervention to save it. It seems clear that Marquis would deny that taking such a pill is permissible, since doing so would deprive the fetus of its future. Whether taking the pill is accurately described as killing the fetus, or whether instead a woman who takes it and then does nothing to save the fetus merely lets it die, surely must, if it makes any difference at all for Marquis, not make enough of a difference to justify divergent moral assessments.

After all, the value of a future like ours account of the wrongness of killing us is taken by Marquis to imply a strongly pro-life position on the ethics of abortion. It would be strange, given his reliance on this type of argument, if he were to allow that the invention of a pill of the sort that I described above would make acting in a way that is known will result in the death of the fetus permissible. This concession would severely undercut the pro-life implications of his argument, and therefore it seems clear that he will not want to make it.

Just as he cannot appeal to the distinction between killing and letting die in order to maintain the position that abortion is generally wrong and also accept Thomson's view that it is permissible to detach from the violinist, Marquis cannot, I think, appeal to the distinction between intending and foreseeing. For just as one might detach oneself from the violinist without intending to kill him (that is, if the violinist were to continue living after detachment one would not be at all disappointed), a woman might remove a fetus from her womb without intending its death (if it were to survive outside the womb she would not be at all disappointed). But surely Marquis wants to maintain that so long as one foresees that the fetus will die if it is removed from the womb, it is impermissible to remove it. So it looks as if he must accept this same conclusion in the violinist case.

Now Marquis may simply bite the bullet and accept that one must stay attached to the violinist. Indeed, it seems to me that he has no other plausible option. His position on abortion, in combination with the way in which this position prevents him from appealing to the doing/allowing or intending/foreseeing distinctions, leaves him with a view on which morality can make very substantial demands on individuals when the futures of others are at stake. This in itself is not necessarily a problem for his view; there is nothing intrinsically problematic about demanding views of morality's requirements, and in fact I'm inclined to think that on the whole more demanding views are more plausible than their less demanding rivals. But Marquis faces a further problem - namely that it's not clear, given the sort of argument that he provides, that he can plausibly avoid the conclusion that we have an obligation to procreate so as to bring about futures like ours.

We have seen that he must deny that the distinctions between doing and allowing and between intending and foreseeing are morally significant enough to justify detaching from the violinist so long as one either does not kill him or does not intend his death, because this would also license acting in ways that are known will result in the death of a fetus. And his account of what makes killing something wrong appeals to the value of the future that such killing would prevent from obtaining. So the reason that we must not kill an embryo is, on Marquis' view, that doing so would prevent a valuable future like ours from being enjoyed. But failing to procreate when we could also prevents a valuable future like ours from being enjoyed. So in order to deny that we have an obligation to procreate, Marquis claims that failure to procreate does not deprive any particular individual of such a future. But the fact that there is no victim in the case of failure to procreate may not be able to fully settle the question. After all, if we were to procreate, then a future like ours would obtain, and such a future would be valuable. Denying that we are obligated to bring such a future about when we can, while maintaining that we have a very strong obligation not to intervene to prevent such a future from obtaining, seems to involve endorsing a very strong distinction between the moral significance of, on the one hand, acting in a way that prevents some good that would otherwise be realized from obtaining, and on the other, failing to act in a way that would result in some good that would otherwise not obtain being realized. Indeed, claiming that an embryo can be a victim, while a sperm and egg before conception cannot, seems to be little more than an endorsement of the moral significance of this distinction; after all, it is far from intuitive that an embryo can be a victim, and Marquis' claim that it can simply rests on the thought that in the absence of the sort of intervention involved in early abortion, the embryo would have a future like ours.

It's far from clear what the reason could be to think that there is such a great deal of moral significance to the distinction between preventing a good that would otherwise be realized from being so and failing to bring about a good when one could, in particular for someone who is committed to rejecting anything close to such significance for the doing/allowing and intending/foreseeing distinctions. We might be suspicious that Marquis is simply (and only implicitly) accepting the moral significance of the distinction in order to avoid commitment to the absurd view that we have an obligation to procreate. If this is the case, then we might suspect that there is something problematic about the arguments for the future like ours account of the wrongness of killing and/or its strongly anti-abortion implications.

Phil 108: Thomson on Rights and Abortion

2009-02-06T01:27:00.000-08:00

Thomson's aim in "A Defense of Abortion" is to argue that even if we assume that fetuses are persons with the same moral status as ordinary adults, abortion is often permissible. Her strategy is to employ a series of examples that she takes to show that we are not morally obligated to make significant sacrifices in order to save the lives of others (or to prevent them from dying). The case that has generated the most discussion is the violinist case, in which the reader is to imagine that she is kidnapped and attached to a famous violinist, who needs the use of her kidneys for nine months in order to survive. Thomson's intuition is that, while it would be nice of a person to remain hooked up to the violinist, and to thereby save his life, it is certainly not morally obligatory to do so. The violinist, on her view, has no right to the use of another person's kidneys.

We should note that although many people share Thomson's intuition, one may simply reject her claim about the violinist case. We might think that if one finds herself in the unfortunate situation of choosing whether to detach oneself from the violinist, and thereby killing him, or else sacrificing nine months of her life in order to save him, she ought, morally speaking, to remain attached. After all, although nine months of her life is a lot to give up, the violinist's life is at stake, and so he has even more to lose. If we think that morality can, at least sometimes , make very significant demands on individuals, we might be inclined to think that Thomson's violinist case is simply one such possible occasion. If this is the right view, which I think it might very well be, then if we grant that fetuses are persons with full moral status, we may not be able to resist the conclusion that abortion is always wrong, except in cases in which the mother's life is threatened.

Warren accepts Thomson's intuition about the violinist case, but claims that, as Thomson describes it, it only shows that abortion in the case of rape is morally permissible. If we also accept Thomson's intuition, then this seems right. If the violinist has no right to the use of the attached person's kidneys due to the fact that this person was kidnapped and therefore did nothing that could have granted him such a right, then a woman who has been raped has certainly done nothing that could have granted the fetus the right to be kept alive by her body, and so the fetus must not have this right.

But perhaps pregnancies that result from voluntary intercourse are such that the woman does implicitly grant the fetus that results from such intercourse the right to be kept alive by her body. Thomson considers this possibility, but claims that this is not the case by appealing to several cases involving burglars, innocent intruders, and people-seeds. The first thing to note about the appeal to cases involving burglars is that such cases may distort our intuitions if we mistakenly accept that such cases are analogous to cases of pregnancy resulting from voluntary intercourse. Burglary, after all, is (at least in most cases) wrong, and therefore it is clear that, all else equal, burglars have no right to remain in a house they have broken into simply because the house's owners did not take every possible precaution against burglars getting into the house. But if we imagine a case in which expelling a burglar from one's home is sure to result in the death of the burglar, as abortion is sure to result in the death of the fetus, it is not obvious, at least to me, that one is not morally required to let the burglar stay until he can leave without perishing. And when we alter the case in a way that makes it relevantly analogous to pregnancy as a result of voluntary intercourse, by making the intruder, like the fetus, innocent, then it is even less clear that it is permissible to expel the intruder from one's home. If a vagrant accidentally stumbles through your window during a terrible storm that is sure to kill him if he returns outside, it seems pretty clear to me that it would be wrong to kick him out of your house. If this case is analogous to pregnancy resulting from voluntary intercourse, then if we assume that the fetus is a person with full moral status it seems that we should accept that abortion is wrong if the pregnancy results from voluntary sex.

Now this position assumes that it is either the case that one can acquire a right to aid from another person without that person explicitly granting the right (the home owner doesn't grant the vagrant the right to be in her house merely by leaving the window open), or that it is the case that it can be wrong to act in a way that will result in someone's death even if the person whose life is at stake has no right that one not act in that way. It appears that Thomson is willing to accept the latter claim, but not the former. But the cases in which she is willing to accept the latter claim seem to be limited to those in which the sacrifice necessary to avoid acting wrongly is minimal - it would be wrong for Henry Fonda to refuse to cross the room to save your life, and it would be wrong for a mother to refuse to carry her fetus for a few more days if this would mean postponing a trip to Europe - and this suggests a perhaps implausible gap between what individuals can be required to do if others have rights against them and what they can be required to do in the absence of such rights.

If morality can require significant sacrifices of individuals when others have rights against them, then we require a reason to think that it cannot require such sacrifices in the absence of such rights, in particular when others' interests provide just as much reason to act in ways that benefit them. And it's not clear that anything Thomson says provides such a reason. It seems, then, that if we are inclined, as I am, to reject her very permissive intuitions about the burglar and innocent intruder cases, then we may be forced to the conclusion that abortion in the case of pregnancy resulting from voluntary intercourse is wrong, so long as we accept that fetuses are persons with full moral status. Perhaps Warren is right, then, that an argument for the permissibility of abortion in cases of pregnancy resulting from voluntary intercourse requires that we establish that fetuses are not persons, and therefore do not have the same moral status as ordinary adults.

Phil 108: Speciesism, Experimentation, and Morality

2009-02-05T17:46:00.000-08:00

Peter Singer argues that our willingness to allow various types of experiments to be performed on non-human animals, but not on brain-damaged humans with similar capacities, reflects a pervasive "speciesist" attitude toward non-human animals. He claims that speciesism is morally equivalent to sexism and racism, and that there is no justification for failing to give the interests of humans and non-human animals equal moral consideration. He concludes, therefore, that in order to be consistent we must oppose all experimentation on animals, except for those experiments that we would also be willing to allow to be performed on brain damaged humans with similar capacities (it is important to note that the extent of the brain damage or mental disability that would be required to render a human similar in the relevant capacities to, say, a rat or a rabbit, or even most primates, would be quite significant; humans with conditions such as, for example, Down Syndrome or other forms of mental retardation, generally fall well above this threshold).

One way that defenders of experimenting on animals might respond to Singer's challenge is to simply accept that, all else equal, it would be equally morally permissible to perform the same experiments on brain damaged humans with similar capacities. I happen to find this view more plausible than most people do, and think that certain types of experiments on severely incapacitated humans might well be justifiable. These cases will, of course, be limited to experiments that are reasonably likely to contribute to the relief of serious suffering - testing new cosmetic products on both incapacitated humans and on animals is, in my view, unjustifiable.

Since most people reject the view that experimenting on severely incapacitated humans could be morally acceptable, the challenge for those who want to defend experimentation on animals is to explain what it is that justifies such experimentation in a way that does not imply that experimentation on incapacitated humans is also justifiable.

One approach is to attempt to defend speciesism against Singer's charge that it is morally equivalent to sexism and racism. But defenses of speciesism tend to do little more than restate the speciesist bias that is implicit in many of our practices, or else cite characteristics that typically distinguish humans from non-human animals, but do not distinguish severely incapacitated humans from non-human animals. The fact that most humans "engage in moral reflection...are morally autonomous...recogniz[e] just claims against their interests" (Cohen 463) does not explain why it is impermissible to experiment on humans who do not possess these characteristics. Because of this, defenses of speciesism that appeal to such characteristics of typical humans seem to clearly fail.

Steinbock attempts what seems to me to be an alternative approach to defending animal experimentation. After pointing to several characteristics that she considers morally relevant, and which humans generally have but non-human animals don't, she concludes that animals are due less moral consideration than humans. But, as we have seen, this sort of argument seems to fail in the case of humans that don't possess the cited characteristics. Steinbock recognizes this, and goes on to suggest that we ought not experiment on severely incapacitated humans (we might also read her as claiming that it would be permissible to experiment on them, but that our experimenting on animals does not obligate us to allow or support experimenting on them as well) because "we feel a special obligation to care for the handicapped members of our own species...when we consider the severely mentally retarded, we think, 'That could be me'" (Steinbock 142). It's not clear why these psychological facts about us are supposed to be morally relevant, but Steinbock claims that these feelings tend to lead us to "extend special care to members of our own species,", and that our doing so is "certainly not wrong" (142).

Why such partiality toward our own species is supposed to be so clearly justifiable is a bit mysterious to me, especially given her claim, which is at the very least controversial, a few sentences later. Recognizing the potential parallel to racism that Singer claims is exhibited by preference for one's own species, Steinbock says that "It is not racist to provde special care to members of your own race; it is racist to fall below your moral obligation to a person because of his or her race" (142). But to "provide special care" to members of one's own race is to treat people differently on the basis of race, and this strikes me as clearly racist, and therefore morally objectionable. If Steinbock's argument for the justifiability of partiality to our species relies on her intuition that partiality toward one's race is justifiable so long as one doesn't fall below a threshold of consideration for the members of other races, then it seems to me we should reject her argument. Indeed, the claim that racial partiality of this sort can be justified strikes me as less plausible than the claim that species partiality can be justified - so it is quite curious to employ the former claim in the service of an argument for the latter.

This seems to return us to something like Singer's position requiring equal consideration for all sentient beings, unless a better argument for rejecting this standard can be mounted.

Morality as a Project?

2007-09-28T20:05:00.000-07:00

Certain views of morality's demands are sometimes attacked because, according to critics, conforming to the proposed demands would interfere with agents' abilities to have the kinds of personal projects that give shape and meaning to our lives, and according to some, without which human lives may cease to be worth living at all. Such critics don't necessarily deny that projects with explicitly altruistic aims can be the sort that can provide meaning within a life, although they are usually concerned to defend non-altruistic projects as morally acceptable, or else as providing reasons for agents that can override those provided by morality. Those who press this view seem to think, not implausibly, that part of what it is to live a distinctly human life is to have such projects, and to develop a motivational structure such that acting in ways that further one's pursuit of one's projects becomes a kind of practical necessity. Given this fact, morality must, on this view, either accommodate this fact about humans within its structure, so as not to impose demands that conflict with the pursuit of (perhaps only some of) our projects, or else give way to (some of) our projects when conflicts between its demands and the reasons provided by our projects arise (so that the reasons provided by morality will sometimes fail to be overriding).

The importance of personal projects to our individual lives is undeniable, and the tension between the reasons provided by the non-altruistic projects that most of us have and the demands of morality is a difficult issue that proponents of any objective theory of morality's demands must face. Of course it is particularly problematic for proponents of very demanding moral theories, and since I'm inclined to accept the view that morality is rather demanding, it is one that I must take on.

I certainly don't have anything close to a fully satisfactory response to this line of criticism of views of morality's demands such as mine. In fact, much of what I want to do here is to explain why certain responses are not particularly helpful. This may help to point us in more a more fruitful direction, but then again it may turn out that the conflict is simply irresolvable; if, as I'm inclined to believe, the state of the world in morally relevant respects is bad enough that we cannot, consistent with certain extremely plausible assumptions (such as that morality demands more of similarly situated individuals the worse the world is in morally relevant respects), deny that morality demands a great deal of us, it may turn out that living a moral life is, given the actual state of the world, inconsistent with living what I above called a "distinctly human life."

But why, we might wonder, should we be so pessimistic about this apparent tension. If living a distinctly human life requires that we have projects that give shape and meaning to our lives, and devotion to which promotes a certain kind of motivational structure, why can't we simply adopt as a project, perhaps as our most important project, the living of a moral life? Why can't morality itself be a project that we take on, in the same way that we might take on the project of becoming a great chef or philosopher? Perhaps in a world that is as bad in morally relevant respects as ours this is the only sort of central project that it is morally acceptable to adopt.

This suggestion is pretty clearly unacceptable. As Susan Wolf points out, morality does not seem to be an appropriate object of passion in the way that the concrete projects that most of us adopt are. To be devoted to morality itself (rather than, say, to a particular morally worthy project such as ending homelessness) would seem objectionably fetishistic, requiring a kind of alienation from one's everyday activities (whether or not such activities are particularly morally good) that is incompatible with the sort of devotion to those activities that is involved in having genuine projects. If, while engaging in work aimed at ending homelessness one were regularly considering whether or not working for educational equality would be morally better, and were one disposed to abandon working to end homelessness if that seemed to be the case, it wouldn't be clear that one could be said to have a project at all. One's actions would be done not as a part of a larger undertaking devotion to which helps to structure one's motivations and give shape to one's life, but would be mere responses to the external conditions that one observes and reflects upon in a more or less detached way. Adopting morality itself as a central project would require one to incorporate into one's motivational structure the most unattractive feature of the Kantian moral agent, namely the disposition to always act from a motive to do one's duty, and for no other reason.

Perhaps a better suggestion on behalf of the view that morality is (at least in the actual world) very demanding is that those who are well-off are morally required to have central projects that are altruistically-focused. On this view morality can require that we not incorporate certain kinds of projects into our lives, but cannot require that we be inclined to abandon the altruistically-focused projects that we have adopted when opportunities to do even more good arise. One might defend such a view on what Railton has called "sophisticated consequentialist" grounds by arguing that, in the long run, our being disposed to continue to pursue our (altruistically-focused) projects will allow us to do more good than the weaker dispositions to stick with those projects that would be required by a less sophisticated consequentialism.

This approach is, I think, better, but it still fails to address many of the most important concerns of those who claim that recognizing the significance of personal projects in our lives requires that we abandon the view that morality is extremely demanding.

As Mike points out in a comment to my previous post, one might admire those who adopt altruistically-focused projects without at the same time finding such projects attractive for one's own pursuit. Wolf's view that most of us would find the character of a moral saint unappealing might be, as I suggested, false, without it being the case that living a life centered around altruistically-focused projects could be personally fulfilling for everyone.

This is important because much of the criticism directed at demanding views of morality by those who stress the importance of personal projects focuses on the ways in which such projects enrich our individual lives, and provide us with sources of personal fulfillment that only genuine projects can. If it's true that many people could not lead fulfilling lives centered around altruistically-focused projects, then the view that morality allows individuals to have projects, but only altruistically-focused ones, does not address the problem so often highlighted by critics of demanding views of morality. Furthermore, it would, I think, be implausible to simply suggest that in fact everyone can live a fulfilling life centered around altruistically-focused projects.

While it's true that many people underestimate the personal satisfaction that can accompany altruistic actions and projects, whether one can live a fulfilling life centered around altruistically-focused projects will depend on a variety of factors, including the values that one has oneself internalized, which will very often depend significantly on the prevailing values of one's society, community, and family. It will also, relatedly, depend on the extent to which having such projects is compatible with developing meaningful personal relationships and being an involved and accepted member of one's community.

The problem, once we recognize these facts, is that it is very likely to be more difficult, and perhaps much more difficult, to live a fulfilling life centered around altruistically-focused projects in societies that are worse off in morally relevant respects than it will be in societies that are much better off, morally speaking. In societies in which altruism is less common (which also tend to be societies that exhibit greater inequality and have more individuals in desperate need), one who adopts altruistically-focused projects is likely to be more isolated from the community at large (this is perhaps especially true of one who is well-off and lives in a well-off community), and to have fewer opportunities to develop the kinds of relationships that do the most to enrich our lives. Individuals in such societies are also, of course, less likely to be taught and to internalize altruistic values, and so the thought of adopting altruistic projects will likely strike people in such societies as alien and unattractive in ways that it wouldn't strike individuals in societies that have a more altruistic or egalitarian ethos.

But this means that if we accept that the ability of individuals to structure their lives around fulfilling personal projects is important enough to outweigh the specifically moral concerns of those who believe that morality is extremely demanding, then we are committed to thinking that morality can be less demanding in societies that are worse off in morally relevant respects than in morally better societies, because in such societies individuals will be less able to live fulfilling lives structured around altruistically-focused projects. Morality will be less demanding in circumstances in which most people (including some who cite the importance of personal projects as a reason to reject the view that morality is extremely demanding) think it must be more demanding.

This suggests that perhaps we ought to reconsider the objection to demanding views of morality that cites the importance of personal projects to our ability to live fulfilling lives. But while we might conclude that the objection fails, we do not, it seems, have a satisfying response to the concerns of its proponents. Concluding that the objection fails may require us to accept that, at least in societies that are badly off enough in morally relevant respects, morality requires some individuals to live lives that are not personally fulfilling. This is not a pleasant conclusion, but it may be one that taking morality seriously requires us to accept.

On the Character of a Moral Saint

2007-09-26T21:23:00.000-07:00

In her famous article "Moral Saints," Susan Wolf argues that the character that one would have to have in order to be a moral saint is not one that seems particularly attractive as a personal ideal. We have good reason, according to Wolf, to be glad that neither we nor those with whom we are close are moral saints, because if we or they were our lives would be in certain important respects impoverished. If we were moral saints, for example, we would be unable to pursue many of the projects that, given our unsaintliness, actually give shape and meaning to our lives. The single-minded focus on "improving the welfare of others or of society as a whole," as Wolf puts it, that would be required of a moral saint would, in part because it would eliminate the possibility of pursuing more self-regarding projects, make us less interesting and less well-rounded individuals.

While some of what Wolf says about the costs of moral sainthood seems plausible enough (after all, we surely do think that it's quite valuable for individuals to develop well-rounded characters, and that one way in which we are able to do that is by engaging in personal projects that help to form such characters), much of her description of what a moral saint would have to be like strikes me as extremely misguided. She says, for example, that

[The moral saint] will have the standard moral virtues to a nonstandard degree. He will be patient, considerate, even-tempered, hospitable...He will be very reluctant to make negative judgments of other people...A moral saint will have to be very, very nice. It is important that he not be offensive. The worry is that, as a result, he will have to be dull-witted or humorless or bland.

It is completely mysterious to me why Wolf would assume that a moral saint would have to possess these virtues to a "nonstandard degree." After all, surely there are situations that, morally speaking, call for one to react not with patience or even-temperedness, but rather with their opposites. Observing the horribly unjust treatment of others is just one obvious example of a case in which moral common sense tells us that the morally appropriate response is a certain sort of outrage, and, at the very least, a certain kind of negative judgment about the perpetrators of the injustice. The moral thing to do will not be to be "very, very nice", or to avoid offending the perpetrators of injustice. Rather, the moral saint will be much more likely than the non-saint to confront such people, and to make her disapproval of their conduct as clear as possible, in the hope that by doing so she might effect a change in their future behavior. It's true that the saint will not be any more hostile than is warranted by the situation, but plenty of situations warrant significant hostility, and I see no reason to think that a moral saint shouldn't be inclined to exhibit such hostility when it is warranted.

Returning to the role of personal projects in our lives, Wolf goes on to point out that because a moral saint will have to devote nearly all of her time to helping others,

...necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe, or improving his backhand. Although no one of the interests or tastes in the category containing these latter activities could be claimed to be a necessary element in a life well lived, a life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life strangely barren.

This is much less implausible than the thoughts I quoted above, but I still think there is something importantly misguided about Wolf's thinking, not necessarily about the value of lives that include the goods she mentions, but about what we should, indeed what in some cases we do, think about the characters of those whom we might legitimately describe as moral saints. The picture that Wolf paints of the moral saint as dull, passive, and lacking the kind of well-developed character and successful nonmoral ground projects that attract us to those whom we most admire, is, it seems to me, quite far off the mark.

Rather, the kind of character that it seems most appropriate to attach the label "moral saint" to is best represented by people such as Gandhi or John Brown, individuals who, unlike most of their contemporaries, both recognized prevailing moral atrocities as such, and dedicated their lives to trying to end those atrocities. And if it is people like this who represent the ideal of a moral saint, then while many will still find the prospect of themselves living the life of a saint unappealing, few will deny, at least when looking back on the saints of the past, that those who have lived such lives possessed characters that deserve our admiration. Gandhi surely possessed a character that is worth aspiring to, and it is absurd to think that his life was "strangely barren" in virtue of his focusing on the specifically moral projects that he did rather than on developing his oboe skills or backhand (or some other such goods). On the contrary, it is the fact that he dedicated so much of his life to opposing moral atrocities that makes his a kind of character that is worth aspiring to. Many of his contemporaries may have found him a strange character that they preferred to avoid, but that is likely because they did not, as he did, recognize the prevailing atrocities for what they were, or at least did not accord them the kind of importance that they deserved (this is perhaps even more clearly the case with respect to John Brown and the other dedicated Abolitionists of his time).

Of course there are many reasons that, at any given time in history (surely including our own), many people are likely to be put off in some ways by those who come closest to being moral saints. First, and most obviously, such people will always be outside the norm of behavior and commitment, and this always makes many people uncomfortable. Second, those who come closest to being moral saints remind those of the rest of us who at least recognize the moral atrocities that the saint is fighting of how much better, morally speaking, we could (and perhaps should) be doing in our own lives, and being made to reflect on this is likely to make most people at least somewhat uncomfortable. And of course those who don't recognize the atrocities as atrocities at all (as most did not recognize slavery in the early days of the Abolition movement) will simply believe that the saint is wasting his life opposing what is the natural order of things, or what is justified for reasons that the saint does not recognize.

The problem for the moral saint is that she is often also a moral visionary, ahead of her time in recognizing the moral failures of the prevailing order of things. And so she will necessarily appear to others as a kind of strange character, as someone detached from the values and ways of life that shape the characters of her compatriots. But often enough those who appear to others in their own time as undesirable characters whom one is better to avoid will be recognized by future generations as the truly admirable individuals that they were. And surely to live a life that will have this result is not something that we should think undesirable.

More on Cullity's Argument Against The Extreme Demand

2007-09-25T21:59:00.000-07:00

In this post I examined an argument recently put forth by Garrett Cullity against the view that morality requires us to live what he calls "altruistically-focused lives." After several helpful discussions of this issue, I'm now convinced that my argument there did not properly address certain aspects of Cullity's argument.

The claim of Cullity's that I argued against in the earlier post is:

When your interest in having (or doing) a certain thing is an interest in having (or doing) what it would be wrong for you to have (or do), that interest cannot be a good reason for morally requiring me to help you to get (or do) it.

I suggested what at the time I took to be a potential counterexample to this claim, in which by helping someone get into a prestigious music school I could ensure that someone else would pursue a career in aid work that would benefit the world's worst off people. The problem with this example is that it is not the potential music school student's interest in pursuing a music career that provides me with the morally compelling reason to help her. Helping her is required, according to my description of the case, only because doing so will, given all of the relevant circumstances, promote the interests of other people.

But Cullity can accept this. He does not consider cases of the sort that I described, but does say that one can be morally required to provide someone with a piece of information that he requires in order to pursue his aim of humiliating someone, so long as she has promised him that she would provide the information. In this case one is required to help someone get something that he needs in order to do something wrong. But the reason that one is required to do so is not the other's interest in doing what is wrong, but the fact that one promised. The person's interest in humiliating someone, on the other hand, cannot itself be a morally compelling reason for requiring me to help him do so.

So Cullity's claim is not that we can never be required to help someone get what it is wrong for her to have. It is only that one's interest in getting what it is wrong for her to have can never, in itself, provide one with a morally compelling reason to help her get it.

But since Cullity thinks that it's obvious that others' interests in achieving the fulfillments of a non-altruistically focused life can provide us with morally compelling reasons to help them obtain those fulfillments, he concludes that it must not be wrong to obtain them. That is, it must not be wrong to live a non-altruistically focused life.

It's important to get clear on precisely what sort of case Cullity must have in mind in which the interests of another themselves provide one with morally compelling reasons to help her pursue those interests. He says, for example,

...suppose that, by making some small effort - passing on a piece of information, say - you could reunite [a long-parted] family, and there was nothing to be said morally against doing so. Or suppose some small effort of yours would determine whether a gifted student is able to pursue a music career, and there was nothing to be said morally against doing so. It would clearly be wrong not to do these things. Clearly, the moral requirements of beneficence extend not just to saving people's lives, but to responding to their interests in the fulfillments that life can contain...The morally compelling reason [you] have for helping does not disappear if [you] know that the lives of the family members, or the music student, are not altruistically focused.

In these cases it is the interests of the family members in being reunited (and in the associated fulfilling relationships that they can (re)establish upon being reunited) and of the aspiring musician in achieving a fulfilling career, respectively, that are supposed to ground the moral requirement to help. We must assume that there are no other reasons, such as benefits to others that would result from helping, or any special relationship that the potential benefactor might have to the family members or musician, that ground the requirement. Even once we make clear that there are no reasons of these sorts, Cullity's thought that we are morally required to help in these kinds of situations seems compelling.

While I accept Cullity's claim that we can be morally required to help in situations like those he describes, it is important to note that someone who accepts both Cullity's view that we cannot have morally compelling reasons to help others get what it is wrong for them to have and the Extreme Demand might claim that he has unfairly built into his description of the cases that there is nothing to be said morally against helping the family and the potential musician. Such a person might claim that since it is wrong to pursue the things that the family members would pursue were they to be reunited, and since it is wrong for the aspiring musician to pursue a music career, there is something to be said morally against helping them, namely that it would be wrong for them to have the things that ground their interests in getting help. Still, so long as there is no question of helping others obtain what it is not wrong for them to have (or some other morally worthy alternative) instead of helping the family or the musician, it is simply not plausible to claim that we cannot be morally required to help them, even if we grant (which I don't necessarily think we should) that there is something to be said morally against helping.

So the way to challenge Cullity's argument is not to claim that, despite our intuitions, we are not morally required to help the family or the musician. Those intuitions are, it seems to me, clearly correct. But I do think that Cullity's argument is subject to two related responses. First, we might simply deny that we cannot have morally compelling reasons to help others get what it is wrong for them to have. If we think, quite plausibly, that it would wrong (or even if we just think it a practical impossibility) to force others to live altruistically focused lives, then to refuse to act so as to promote their interests in achieving the genuinely valuable fulfillments of their chosen non-altruistically focused lives when we could easily do so would seem pointless from a moral perspective. If the only relevant options are making some people better off or making no one better off, it's not clear why, morally speaking, we should care whether the people we can make better off would, if they were doing everything that they ought to do, choose to forgo the benefits that we are in position to help them obtain in order to help others whom we are not ourselves in a position to help. To think that we should care is to reject the following seemingly plausible (if not obvious) principle:

If at little cost to ourselves we can help make some people's lives significantly better, without thereby making anyone's life worse, we have a morally compelling reason to do so.

This principle seems to me almost undeniable. But it is important to note that it is incompatible with Cullity's principle that we cannot have a morally compelling reason to help others get what it would be wrong for them to have (unless one thinks that one's life cannot be made better by having what it is wrong for one to have). So if we accept the principle that I've suggested, we have good reason to reject Cullity's principle, and his argument that it must not be wrong to live a non-altruistically focused life is blocked (this does not, of course, show that it is wrong to live such a life).

The other way in which Cullity's argument can be challenged is by considering what other reasons (besides the interests of the family members and the potential musician in obtaining the fulfillments they would derive from being helped) might ground an obligation to help in the cases Cullity describes. We might think, for example, that it is not the interests of those whom we might help, but rather the interest that we all have in living in a society in which people act so as to promote others' interests when they can do so at little cost to themselves, that grounds our obligations in cases such as Cullity's. It would surely be an undesirable state of affairs if everyone were inclined to, for example, ask a person who requests directions to the center of town whether he is going there to aid the homeless or to eat at one of the many upscale restaurants in the area, and to refuse to provide the directions if the response is the latter (I thank Jay Wallace for providing the general structure of this example). But we might think that in cases such as this it is not (or not only) the individual's interest in eating a fine meal that grounds our obligation to help him.

It seems to me that in many cases the reasons that ground our obligations to help others will not be (or not be only) the interests that those individuals have in being helped. If this is right, then we may be able to account for such obligations without claiming that an interest in having what it is wrong to have is what grounds them, just as Cullity accounted for the obligation to provide the information that would be used to humiliate someone. I also think that in some cases it is not problematic to think that we are obligated to help someone obtain what it is wrong for her to have, given the plausibility of the principle that I outlined above. If I'm right about these matters, then Cullity's argument against the Extreme Demand is significantly weakened.

Some Links (for my UGBA 107 students in particular)

2007-07-20T23:18:00.000-07:00

I mentioned to some of my students that they might find this post of mine from last year, in which I question the practical possibility of Milton's Friedman's vision of a society with a pure free-market economy and in which business interests stay out of politics, interesting. I encourage students (and others, of course) to post their thoughts to the thread, where some of my previous students have already weighed in. You may also want to read this post by Hanno Kaiser, which is a response to my argument, and to which I have posted a comment.

There is also a very interesting discussion going on in the thread to this post at In Socrates' Wake on several issues related to business ethics classes (the discussion continues in part two of the post here). The discussion is largely between people who teach business ethics, and the discussion has focused on issues such as why business students tend to be hostile to thinking about ethics in a serious way, how best to approach introducing new students to ethical thinking, and problems with the way ethics is sometimes taught, in particular in business schools.

These issues are all extremely interesting and important, and I'd love to hear what my students think about them as they relate to how I've approached our course so far (you can post your thoughts as comments to this post).

I must say that my own experience teaching business ethics (limited though it is) has been overwhelmingly positive, and I haven't felt the kind of frustration that others describe in the thread I linked to above. I unexpectedly fell into teaching for Berkeley's summer business ethics course last year when a last minute replacement for another GSI was needed, and so I had very little time to prepare anything. I was extremely concerned that I'd encounter a great deal of hostility to ethical thinking and little interest in seriously discussing either practical or theoretical matters, and since I had no previous teaching experience I was terrified that I wouldn't know how to break the silence.

But the reality was just the opposite. The students were incredibly enthusiastic and genuinely interested in discussing ethical issues right from the start. And they continued to engage seriously with the issues I raised even after I had them read selections from both Singer and Unger (a move which some suggest is a mistake in a business ethics course; I'm not so sure). They made my job not only much less difficult than I anticipated, but extremely enjoyable as well. And this year's class has been equally good; I've been especially impressed by the kinds of questions that students have raised about the various ethical theories that we've discussed, and their ability to raise just the objections to, for example, Unger's arguments, that Unger himself anticipated in parts of his book that I didn't assign.

Of course, even though my impression is that the course is going quite well, there are always ways that it might be made better. Any suggestions from students, past or present, would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to post anonymously or e-mail me your suggestions if you'd rather they not be public.

Jocks, Nerds, and Income Redistribution

2007-07-19T23:22:00.000-07:00

In this comically absurd piece, Bryan Caplan argues that governments engage in income redistribution due to pressure from so-called "jocks" to prevent the "revenge of the nerds." The idea is that those who are physically stronger but mentally weaker, the people who dominated social life in high school due to their physical attractiveness and athletic ability, push for income redistribution because they tend to lose out in economic competition to those whom they looked down upon during their teen years, and succeed in getting redistributive policies enacted essentially by threatening the economically prosperous nerds. Caplan asks us to think about this in terms of what he calls "evolutionary psychology" (I wonder how many actual psychologists would sign on to this ridiculous theory):

When the best hunter in the tribe gets rich, his neighbors will probably ask nicely for a share, if they dare to ask at all. But if the biggest nerd in the tribe gets rich, how long will it take before the jocks show up and warn him that "You'd better share and share alike"?

Now it would be one thing if the picture Caplan was attempting to paint were a mere oversimplification of a more complex reality (which he parenthetically admits that it might be). This could be excused in a short piece designed to put forward a general but incomplete account. One of his assumptions, namely that society breaks down neatly into "jocks" and "nerds", is clearly an oversimplification, but it's one that it seems innocent enough to work with for at least some purposes; I'll assume the distinction in the remainder of this post, despite the relative fluidity and indeterminacy of the categories.

Caplan's overall picture is, it seems to me, wildly off the mark. In his world the "nerds" are simply out in the economic arena trying to make as much money as possible, only to have much of it stolen from them by the big bad bullies, much like their lunch money was probably stolen from them, by the very same people, back in high school. In the absence of government redistribution, the nerds could have their sweet revenge on their high school tormentors as they watched them suffer in poverty, but, alas, the jocks have managed to bully the government into preventing the total economic dominance of the nerds.

I don't know about my readers, but this picture strikes me as obviously false in almost too many ways to count (if others find it more plausible, I'd be very interested to hear about it).

First, the idea that it's the "jocks" who generally support redistribution, with the "nerds" forced, against their will, to acquiesce, seems to me to get things almost backward, though of course there are surely nerds who are vehemently opposed to redistribution (e.g. Steve Moore of the Club for Growth), and jocks who favor it. But in thinking about those with whom I went to high school, college, and the students that I've had at Berkeley, the norm is very much for those who would tend to be considered jocks to be more economically conservative, and those who would tend to be considered nerds to be more economically liberal (of course there are plenty of exceptions to this tendency as well). This point can be expanded beyond my own circle of acquaintances by thinking about some of the prominent politicians within the two major parties. Of George Bush and John Kerry, who is more likely to have been at the school football game and the post-game kegger, and who more likely to have been at home reading books and watching the news? Are we supposed to believe that Harry Reid, Bernie Sanders, and Dennis Kucinich were popular jocks, while Jeb Bush, George Allen, and Mitt Romney spent their high school years buried in books?

Also, Caplan's assumption that nerds tend to do much better economically seems far from universally true. Of course there is a positive correlation between grades and economic success, but it's also the case that many nerds choose to go into fields that are less lucrative than others that they could have pursued. They become doctors instead of businessmen, public interest lawyers instead of corporate lawyers, professors instead of consultants. Far from being disappointed by their inability (due to whatever redistribution there might be) to dominate their less intellectually inclined peers in the economic arena (as Caplan seems to be), most nerds that I know never would have thought to try, and in fact would be horrified at the very idea of it. The motivational structure that would be necessary to pursue such a goal is simply foreign to most nerds.

Interestingly, such a motivational structure is not at all foreign to the jocks who spent their high school years tormenting nerds. The same callousness that allows such individuals to make high school a living hell for others would seem to be just what is needed to pursue vast wealth within our capitalist system. Only someone who possesses this sort of callousness could feel no compassion for the suffering of the world's poor, and promote policies that encourage the exploitation of those people for the sake of massive profits for themselves. My suspicion is that many of the corporate leaders at the very top of the income distribution were not nerds at all, but instead jocks from wealthy families who had (often significant and unfair) advantages over others in getting to where they are. Furthermore, I'm not surprised that some of the corporate leaders who clearly were nerds, such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, are much more generous with their wealth and much more liberal in their politics than most of their peers.

There's no question that during their high school years many nerds have a certain amount of envy toward jocks. But most of them grow up and get over the fact that they missed out on the cool parties and whatever else jocks in high school do (I wouldn't know all that much about it, since I defected to the nerds around sophomore year). And having been at the bottom of the popularity food chain often encourages in nerds a level of compassion for the suffering of others that many jocks never develop. Some nerds, however, never get over having been nerds, and harbor a resentment toward others for the rest of their lives because of it. My best guess is that this is the psychological situation of Mr. Caplan (and perhaps Mr. Moore as well); at least this would help explain how he could put forward such a patently absurd theory of redistributive policies.

* As a sidenote, for some very interesting and far less absurd thoughts on the jock/nerd dynamic and its relation to adult life, see this essay by Paul Graham.

It Seems I'm an Enemy of Faith and Family...

2007-07-18T21:43:00.000-07:00

...according to Freedom Point News, which describes itself as an "Activist Christian Conservatives' News Magazine." They've linked to my post on Homosexuality and Hiring Practices under the heading "Faith Under Fire." Apparently advocating equal employment opportunities for all Americans is contrary to "family values." In any event, I've actually gotten several hits via this link. I'm interested to know whether the Christian conservatives actually read my post and considered my arguments; though somehow I doubt it.

A Constraint Against Imposing Unrequired Sacrifice?

2007-07-16T20:36:00.000-07:00

Liam Murphy argues that we should accept a constraint against imposing unrequired sacrifices on others. The intuitive idea behind such a constraint is that if a person is not herself required to make a sacrifice, then it would be inappropriate for others to force her to make it. Now there is significant intuitive force in this thought, however it seems to me that accepting such a constraint exacerbates existing problems for Murphy's own view of morality's demands, and presents problems for other views as well. In fact, I cannot think of a single overall view of morality's demands on which such a constraint seems plausible.

Murphy's fair share view has the consequence that individuals who are less well-off than they would be under full compliance with morality's demands are not obligated to make any sacrifices at all in order to promote the well-being of others. So someone who is extremely poor is not, on Murphy's view, obligated to rescue a child drowning in a shallow pond if doing so would require ruining his clothes (perhaps they are the only clothes that he owns). Now this in itself is a troubling consequence of the fair share view; but even if we can live with that consequence (perhaps we think it would be inappropriate to require altruistic behavior of someone whose life has been so thoroughly lacking), it seems very difficult to accept that it is not even permissible for me to act so as to ensure that he rescues the child, if I cannot rescue him myself. Imagine that I see the child drowning from a considerable distance, and know that I cannot rescue him in time myself. I also know that, barring my intervention, the extremely poor individual (assume he is the only one who can possibly rescue the child) will not save the child because he does not want to ruin his clothes. I can, however, press a button that will trip him, at which point he will fall into the pond. With his clothes already ruined, he will then rescue the child. Murphy is committed to saying that I am not even permitted to press the button, since doing so would be imposing an unrequired sacrifice on the poor man. But it seems clear that in this case pushing the button is at least permissible, if not required.

The constraint against imposing unrequired sacrifice will also be unacceptable to the many philosophers who support relatively egalitarian redistributive taxation and at the same time reject the view that, in the absence of such taxation, well-off individuals are required to make significant sacrifices of their personal wealth in order to promote the well-being of the less fortunate. Thomas Nagel has argued for such a view, holding that while it may be unreasonable to think that morality requires individuals to make great sacrifices of their wealth for the sake of others, it is not unreasonable for the government to tax the wealthy heavily in order to aid the poor. If this is the case then the government, by adopting heavily progressive tax policies, would be imposing what would otherwise be unrequired sacrifices on individuals.

A thoroughly consequentialist view might have the fewest cases in which it would be acceptable to impose unrequired sacrifices on individuals, since on such a view most of the sacrifices that we might be in a position to impose on people are sacrifices that the theory says they are required to make anyway. But there will be exceptions to this rule whenever the best outcome can be achieved by imposing a sacrifice on someone that, in the absence of her being forced, she would not be required to make because her doing so in the absence of force would not lead to the best outcome. Such cases would surely be rare in the actual world, so that a practical policy of not imposing unrequired sacrifices on individuals would be basically adoptable on a consequentialist view, but of course we can imagine cases for which such policy would prevent us from acting rightly.

It seems, then, that the intuitive thought behind the constraint against imposing unrequired sacrifice is misguided.

On John Mackey's Yahoo Postings: Market Manipulation or Free Speech?

2007-07-14T02:47:00.000-07:00

It was recently revealed that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey posted numerous comments (over 1100 according to the NY Times), over the course of about eight years, on Yahoo's message board on stocks, and did so under a pseudonym. As one might expect, Mackey talked up Whole Foods' stock and disparaged competitors, such as Wild Oats Market, which Whole Foods is currently attempting to purchase over SEC objections that such a takeover would reduce competition.

A number of people have responded critically to the revelation of Mackey's postings, while Peter Gerdes argues that such criticisms amount to an attack on free speech. Those who argue that Mackey acted wrongly by posting claim that he was attempting to influence the price of his company's stock, and that as CEO it was inappropriate for him to be doing so in this way. The idea seems to be that by posting anonymously Mackey misrepresented himself, because readers of the site would assume that he was merely someone who followed the company's stock and business practices, and not someone directly involved with the company, let alone the CEO. Mackey's insider knowledge of Whole Foods', the critics seem to think, made it inappropriate for him to post anonymously on a forum such as Yahoo's, since that knowledge could be used to selectively inform readers, and perhaps paint an overly rosy picture of the company's prospects. Former SEC chairman Harvey Pitt even says that "if anything is inaccurate or selectively disclosed [Mackey] would...be violating the law."

Gerdes, however, claims that it is extremely unlikely that anonymous postings such as Mackey's could have any effect on a stock's price, since readers are not likely to take such postings seriously. He suggests that Mackey was merely posting in order to entertain himself, and cites his frequent postings to his personal blog on Whole Foods' website in order to back up the claim that Mackey seems to use such postings as a way to amuse himself. Furthermore, Gerdes claims, one does not give up his free speech rights when he becomes CEO of a company, and since there would be nothing wrong with you or me anonymously posting positive comments about Whole Foods, there can be nothing wrong with Mackey doing so either.

Now while Gerdes is right that, so long as he did not post false statements, Mackey did nothing illegal, I'm not convinced by his argument that there is nothing at all that should trouble us about Mackey's behavior. As I've argued in previous posts, free speech is, in my view, valuable mainly because it provides for the open exchange of ideas between people who are mutually attempting to get at the truth. One can violate what I take to be the spirit of free speech without violating any laws, and just because one's conduct is legally protected under the 1st amendment (which Mackey's may very well be) does not mean that it cannot be legitimately criticized.

Discussion forums such as the one that Mackey posted to can be excellent vehicles for the kind of exchange of ideas that I believe makes free speech valuable and worth protecting, so long as those posting do so with the aim of pursuing truth. Attempting to persuade others to adopt one's own views is a legitimate part of this process so long as in doing so one is also willing to listen to and consider what others have to say, and to revise one's own beliefs if the evidence, or the arguments of others, warrants doing so. But when someone enters the discussion with an agenda, and with the intention of pushing that agenda no matter what (for financial or other reasons), the entire discussion is corrupted. Now we might think that when the discussion is about which stock purchases will make one the most money (as opposed, say, to loftier topics such as the nature of morality, or topics of greater significance, such as what to do about the mess in Iraq) we should not be overly concerned about the integrity of the debate. But it seems to me that we should still have some concern, since the undermining of the integrity of debate in one area is likely to spill over into others.

Am I wrong? What should we think about Mackey's postings?

Are Libel Laws Constraints on Free Speech?

2007-07-10T23:45:00.000-07:00

Pam asks this question here, in response to a story about a restaurant owner who is suing a food critic for libel over his/her alleged mischaracterization of a piece of meat as a strip steak.

Now this seems to me a pretty ridiculous case, and I certainly don't expect the restaurant owner to win. The bad review that the critic gave his restaurant may have financial consequences, but the basis of the suit is an alleged misstatement of a minor fact, which no reasonable person could believe itself resulted in losses in addition to or independent of those that resulted from the bad review.

Despite the abuse of the libel statutes by plaintiffs like the restaurant owner, I don't think that current libel (or slander) laws are a serious concern for those of us interested in protecting free speech (though if the restaurant owner wins his suit, I may have to reconsider to some extent).

In my three previous posts on free speech I emphasize that we ought to care about free speech for largely instrumental reasons, though I don't deny that there is an intrinsic value to our having the freedom. I do, however, deny that the intrinsic value of our having the freedom means that there's nothing wrong with using its legal protections in certain ways, in particular ways that undermine the instrumental values that free speech is supposed to promote, such as helping us to get at the truth. Therefore, I've been critical of those, including many whose political aims I share (the immigrants' rights protesters at Columbia are the example that I have used), who engage in tactics that stifle debate on important issues rather than promoting it. This is not a legal issue, but it does, I think, highlight the fact that we need to have non-legal limits, that is, social norms, regarding the appropriate exercise of free speech rights. Let me be clear that I am not endorsing any norms that would limit the range of opinions that it is appropriate to express; this is how conservatives tend to think that social norms should regulate free speech, and I abhor such views. For me it's not about what one says, but about whether in saying whatever it is that one wants to say one respects the fact that free speech is valuable when and mainly because it facilitates the exchange of ideas, and not just the expression of them. The exchange of ideas is valuable, in a way that the mere expression of them is very often not, because when it occurs in an atmosphere of open-mindedness and mutual respect it can lead us closer to the truth (of course it doesn't always do so, but it's far superior to the alternatives). The extra-legal conception of free speech that I argue for, then, is one that respects the fact that free speech serves certain social aims that we all ought to share. Free speech does us little good, as a society, when everyone considers it to be nothing more than a contest to see who can scream the loudest and silence all opposing voices.

Now, what does all of this mean for laws against libel and slander. Well, if a significant part of the value of free speech is that it facilitates the exchange of ideas, and the exchange of ideas is valuable because it helps us get at the truth, then we have reason to reject the view that all speech, including deliberate lies aimed at harming people, is equally valuable and equally deserving of legal protections (this argument was much too quick, but hopefully it's clear enough what I'm getting at). So allowing civil judgments to be levied against those who deliberately libel or slander someone seems justified, since far from productively contributing to the exchange of ideas, such people willfully inject falsehoods into the public sphere.

But of course the malicious intent standard is only applied when the plaintiff is a public figure. When the plaintiff is a private figure, she must only prove that the defendant was negligent in making the remarks in question, and that she suffered substantive harms as a result of the remarks; whether the defendant intended that she suffer any harm is irrelevant. It is more difficult, I think, to determine whether this much lower standard might amount to an unjustified restriction on free speech. After all, it's fairly easy to make innocent mistakes (as the food critic mentioned above may have), and if individuals can be sued for making such mistakes, the result may be a chilling effect on speech. On the other hand, it does not seem unreasonable for individuals to be subject to suit when they fail to exercise some minimal degree of caution in making factual claims about others, so it does not seem objectionable that, in principle, one might be subject to suit on the basis of negligence.

I don't think there's an easy answer to the question whether the standard for private figure libel conflicts with free speech in a way that we should be concerned about, since the standard itself is fairly vague (as indeed it must be, as far as I can tell). We should be expected to exercise a minimal degree of caution when making factual claims, but we should not be subject to suit if we simply make a mistake, since that could easily stifle free speech. This is, I think, one of those issues on which our civil courts must simply exercise some common sense in their rulings.

Fairness and the Demands of Beneficence

2007-07-08T02:52:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post I explained some of Liam Murphy's reasons for rejecting arguments that appeal to demandingness in order to reject moral theories such as consequentialism, and for the most part endorsed Murphy's conclusions. Here I want to examine Murphy's attempt to reject optimizing views, such as consequentialism, of our duties to aid others, and suggest one problem (I think there are others as well) for the view that he endorses.

Murphy claims that the demands of plausible moral principles that relate to collective aims that we are all obligated to contribute to, such as promoting (weighted) well-being, will be distributed fairly. One implication of the fair distribution of such demands, according to Murphy, is that one cannot be required to pick up the slack for others' failure to comply; this, according to Murphy, would be unfair. So, on Murphy's view one is obligated to discharge her fair share of the collective burden of promoting well-being, which, especially for the better-off, can involve great sacrifice. He rejects the so-called demandingness objection, so for him the fact that a fair share principle might require individuals to sacrifice a great deal is in itself no objection to it. But one is not, on his view, required to do even more than her fair share simply because others are not doing their shares, or because one knows that others will not do their shares.

There is much that is appealing about the fair share view. Surely we do think that fairness is an important value; and surely it would be unfair if one person's immoral conduct could increase what morality demands of other agents, especially if those agents are already complying with morality's initial demands on them. But there are a number of difficulties attending Murphy's attempt to provide an account of just how the demands on individuals are to be determined. One of these is the problem of past noncompliance, which will be the focus of the remainder of this post.

Murphy claims that when we determine what one's fair share of the collective burden to promote well-being is, we must ignore the past entirely. Limiting the scope of the discussion, for simplicity's sake, to resource allocation, one's fair share at any time is determined by first establishing the overall distribution of resources that would maximize well-being at that time. If one currently possesses more resources than one would in the optimal distribution, then one is obligated to give up the difference between her current share and her share in the optimal distribution. One's fair share at time t is determined, then, by looking from the state of affairs at t forward. Nothing that occurred in the past is relevant.

The problem of past noncompliance arises because it seems clear that the past noncompliance of some has implications for the fairness of the current distribution of demands. And since Murphy's rejection of the optimizing principle is based on his claim that its demands are distributed unfairly, at least with respect to those who do what would be their fair share under full compliance, it would seem devastating to his view if its demands were also distributed unfairly. But by ignoring the past Murphy's view does seem to contravene our ordinary conception of fairness, as I will attempt to show. Furthermore, a fair share view that does take past noncompliance into account, while it may do a bit better in respect of fairness, seems quite implausible for other reasons. And since Murphy has, I think, failed to articulate a view that is both plausible in itself and fair in its distribution of burdens, he hasn't succeeded in undermining the optimizing view.

Imagine that at time t I determine that I must sacrifice, say, $1000, and therefore make a donation in that amount, while nearly all others fail to sacrifice what they ought to. Then, at time t' (say, a month later) I receive my next paycheck, and once again calculate my obligation. Because both my past compliance and others' past noncompliance are not considered on Murphy's view, I must look only at the current distribution of resources. But others' past noncompliance at t means that what I'm obligated to do now, at t', is more than I would have had to do if they had done what they ought at t; and this seems clearly unfair. So Murphy's view does not cohere with our ordinary conception of fairness, which does take into account the extent to which we and others either have and have not complied in the past.

So if we wanted to preserve fairness we would have to adopt an account that does take past (non)compliance into account. But there's no good way to do this, as Murphy rightly points out. If someone at time t wrongly spends a great deal of money that he ought to donate to the poor on expensive dinners and traveling, he cannot be required to donate that same money to the poor at t', for the simple reason that he no longer has it. And if we tried to shift what would be, on Murphy's view, the obligations of past compliers to past noncompliers, the result would be a tremendous loss in overall well-being, and this is unacceptable since on Murphy's view our collective aim is precisely to promote well-being. We could give up on that aim altogether, and make fairness the centerpiece of our entire view, but this is presumably not something Murphy would want to do, nor do I think the result would be at all plausible.

What is a Moral Demand?

2007-07-04T03:36:00.000-07:00

A common objection to consequentialism is that it is too demanding. Some take the fact that consequentialism would impose extreme demands on at least some agents, for example that it would require that well-off individuals refrain from all spending on luxuries in order to aid the world's worst off people, to be a decisive reason to reject the view. But we might wonder exactly what it is that is supposed to make the demands of consequentialism excessive, according to proponents of this view.

Liam Murphy points out that it is important to be clear about how the demands of moral theories are to be measured. The most obvious approach (and the one that seems to underlie the so-called demandingness objection) is to measure demands against the factual status quo. In the end this is the approach that Murphy himself endorses. But he points out that this way of measuring the demands of moral theories seems to undermine the appeal of the demandingness objection, rather than supporting it. After all, to think that the fact that a moral theory would impose extreme demands on some people relative to the factual status quo is a reason to reject the moral theory is to simply assume that there is something morally significant about the factual status quo; that is, this understanding of the demandingness objection privileges the factual status quo relative to other possible states of affairs. But, of course, there is nothing inherently morally significant about the factual status quo. The actual distribution of resources, for example, is, at least to some extent (and I think to a large extent) morally arbitrary; it is of no moral significance whatsoever. The fact that moral theories such as consequentialism would impose significant demands on those who happen to control vast resources is, then, no reason at all to reject such theories. It is also important to note that it is not just consequentialist theories, which require a great deal of the better off, that have the potential to impose extreme demands on individuals. Deontological restrictions can be extremely demanding as well; for example, if stealing, or even killing, is the only way for an individual to save himself and his family, deontological restrictions on performing actions of these types will be extremely demanding on that individual (in fact these restrictions will, in some cases, be even more demanding than the most thoroughly consequentialist views are for the very well off). So even if we think that there is something to be said for the demandingness objection, the theories often favored by those who make it will be undermined at least as much as consequentialism is.

Murphy proposes several other ways that we might understand what a moral demand is. The first is to understand demands relative to the correct moral theory itself, rather than relative to the factual status quo. On this view if one is not morally entitled to possess particular resources, then the fact that one is morally required to give up those resources does not count as a demand of the theory; demands are understood relative to moral entitlement. So, for example, if some version of consequentialism is the correct moral theory, and it requires that one refrain from luxury spending, then refraining from luxury spending is not a demand of the theory, since one is not morally entitled to engage in luxury spending. This approach, then, defines all moral demands out of existence, and therefore makes any demandingness objection impossible to make.

Now there is something right about this approach, in that it makes it clear that it is inappropriate to simply point to the fact that, if a particular theory were true, one would have to sacrifice certain advantages, in order to reject the theory. On this approach it is abundantly clear that the factual status quo is not in itself morally significant. But the approach also obscures some of the issues arising out of attempts to develop the demandingness objection, so I agree with Murphy that it should be rejected.

Murphy also suggests that we might understand moral demands relative to some standard of "minimal morality," which is defined in terms of what we take to be uncontroversial moral requirements, such as the requirement that we not murder people. But to proceed in this way is, as Murphy points out, to employ a conception of moral entitlement that coheres with the normative status quo, but not with more demanding views, and therefore to beg the question against such views. Murphy says of this approach:

"It defines away demands that, for those of us who are fairly well-off in current circumstances, are typically not that great, and counts as demanding only those principles we do not currently follow. So-called commonsense morality comes out imposing no demands at all, whereas, say, utilitarianism imposes extreme demands...And the demands of deontology also fall heavily on those for whom a life on the straight and narrow offers so little that, for example, drug dealing with its associated violence offers substantial relative benefits."

This brings out quite clearly the sense in which deontological views are inherently conservative, and sometimes even impose greater demands on those who are already worse off than it does on those who are fortunate enough to be well off. The fact that commonsense morality, which tends to be very much deontological, at times (and I would claim very often) involves greater demands, relative to the factual status quo, on the worse off gives us very good reason to be suspicious of commonsense morality (and, I think, suggests that commonsense morality is, to a large extent, ideological in Marx's sense).

All of this suggests that Murphy is right to claim that the demandingness objection in itself has no force whatsoever. If views such as consequentialism are to be rejected, they must be rejected on grounds other than their supposed excessive demandingness.

Science and the Structure of Explanation in Evolutionary Theory and Historical Materialism

2007-06-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

In a comment on my previous post Pam asks whether Darwin's theory of evolution might be subject to the same sort of worries regarding its scientific status (e.g. those raised by Popper) as Marx's theory of history. She writes:

In a philosophy of science course I took, we spent a great deal of time discussing testability & falsifiability demarcation conditions for science. Not too surprisingly, Marx's theory of history came up as an example of a pseudoscientific practice that fails those conditions...I always struggled with one particular possible counterexample to testability/falsifiability: the purportedly scientific theory of evolution. Do you think the same argument you made about Marx can be made about evolution? (That is, the theory of evolution is largely true simply in virtue of the fact that whatever organisms happened to survive in the past were defined as the fittest).

This is an interesting question, and there are several important issues to distinguish. But first, let me point out that it seems to me that the theory of evolution is in fact a falsifiable theory. If the remains of an organism of a particular species were found and dated to a historical period in which evolutionary theory cannot account for its presence (e.g. if a homo sapiens skeleton were dated to a million years ago), then the theory would be falsified. In the same way, historical materialism is a falsifiable theory. If, for example, we observed the productive forces continuing to develop in the current capitalist period, and at the same time observed the return of feudalist relations of production, historical materialism would be conclusively falsified. So Popper was wrong to claim that historical materialism is fundamentally unfalsifiable. Still, it may be that it is consistent with too many possible observations to be adequately tested by observation and examination of past historical events. If this is the case then historical materialism ought to be rejected as too vague in its implications, rather than as fundamentally unfalsifiable.

With regard to Pam's suggestion that perhaps "the theory of evolution is largely true simply in virtue of the fact that whatever organisms happened to survive in the past were defined as the fittest," it is important to get clear on exactly what the theory entails. It's not quite right that contemporary evolutionary theory, which incorporates contemporary genetic theory, defines the organisms that survive as the fittest. Rather, the traits that survive within populations are thought to be those that make the organism best suited to survive in the environment in which the population lives. Furthermore, the fact that those traits survive is explained by the fact that they are adaptive for the population in the relevant environment. Adaptive traits are selected for, and the fact that they are selected for helps explain why, within populations as a whole, some traits survive and others don't.

Levine and Sober, in their article "What's Historical About Historical Materialism," suggest that there is a similar structure to historical materialist explanations: "...there will be selection for that set of production relations which is optimal for further developing productive forces." The idea is that at various points in the history of the development of the productive forces changes in production relations were necessary in order to allow the productive forces to continue developing, and that when that is the case the production relations do in fact tend to change so as to allow the further development of the forces. Changes in the production relations are explained by the fact that such changes were necessary in order to allow the productive forces to continue to develop. This, of course, requires the assumption of what Cohen calls the "Development Thesis," which is that the productive forces tend to develop throughout history.

In another comment on my previous post, Gay Species suggested that Marx's theory of history ought to be rejected because it is teleological; but this is incorrect, since Marx's theory can be understood to have roughly the same explanatory structure as evolutionary theory. Just as particular traits are not selected for because their being so moves evolution toward some end that it is aiming at, but rather because, at the time at which they are selected for, they are adaptive for the population relative to its environment, production relations are not, according to historical materialism, selected for because they move history toward some end that it is in any sense "aiming at" (though this is an understandable misinterpretation of Marx given the fact that he refers to the transition to communist relations of production as marking "the end of history"); rather they are selected for because, at the time at which they arise, they are optimal for further developing the productive forces.

Of course there are important differences between the explanatory structures of evolutionary theory and historical materialism as well, and these differences, according to Levine and Sober, give us reasons to be much more skeptical of both historical materialism's truth and its claim to scientific status. For example, evolutionary theory explains macro changes in terms of micro changes, whereas historical materialism explains micro changes by means of explaining macro changes. That is, large-scale changes in the frequencies of particular genes within a population over time are explained by evolutionary theory by the fact that early on, those members of the population with adaptive traits tended to survive longer and procreate more, whereas those lacking such traits tended to die sooner and procreate less. The result of this is that over time, the frequency of adaptive traits within the population increases, and the frequency of non-adaptive traits decreases. The increase in the frequency of adaptive traits (a macro-evolutionary change) is merely a fortuitous consequence (though a predictable one) of the effects of the environment on the procreative success of individual organisms. The same holds for even larger scale evolutionary changes such as speciation. Historical materialism, on the other hand, does not explain changes in the mode of production (e.g. the change from feudalist to capitalist relations of production) as merely the fortuitous consequence of many isolated changes in the relations of production in which individuals stand. Rather, the fact that the relations in which individuals stand change is explained by the fact that the mode of production itself changed, and changes in the mode of production are in turn explained by the fact that the old relations of production had become fetters on the development of the productive forces (and, of course, the Development Thesis). Explanitorily speaking, large scale changes are prior to small scale changes in historical materialism.

Now the explanatory priority of large scale changes within historical materialism is one aspect of the theory that makes it suspect in a way that evolutionary theory is not. For one might object, couldn't some small scale changes in the relations of production occur without the mode of production undergoing a thorough change. Now of course in a purely logical sense, this is entirely possible, but the mere logical possibility of such changes does not itself undermine historical materialism, since it is a theory about actual historical development and change. But still, we might think there are actual historical examples of such changes, including perhaps the growth of the French burghers during late feudalism (an example that Marx himself discussed).

This is a challenge that historical materialism may not be able to meet. But it is important to recognize that if we think that it is not possible to explain small scale historical changes in terms of large scale changes, then we are necessarily led to the conclusion that there can be no systematic theory of historical development at all. We cannot construct a theory of history that systematically explains large scale changes as the results of small scale changes, because there is no mechanism analogous to natural selection to explain small scale historical changes. And it seems to me that it is even more unlikely that there is a mechanism of this sort than that some theory with the explanatory structure (though perhaps not the content) of historical materialism is true. So, if we reject the explanatory structure of historical materialism, then we are left with the view that, as Levine and Sober put it, "history is irreducibly heterogeneous...and therefore ineluctably atheoretical." This is the view that most people accept, and perhaps it is right. If so, then history simply isn't a proper subject for scientific study, and there can be no systematic theory of history. But as Levine and Sober rightly point out, "whether history admits of a general theory should be discovered, not settled by speculative fiat." Historical materialism may very well be false; but if it is, it cannot be proven so merely by citing the apparent heterogeneity of explanations of individual historical events.

Internal Relations and Historical Materialism

2007-06-25T23:30:00.000-07:00

Marx insisted that his dialectical method, much of which derived from Hegel, was essential to his work on social reality and history. G.A. Cohen and others have attempted to reconstruct some of Marx's key theories, including his theory of history, in entirely non-dialectical terms. Cohen's historical materialism is, by his own account, a version of technological determinism. In response, some Marxists who reject technological determinism (both as an interpretation of Marx and as a substantive theory) have claimed that abandoning Marx's method necessarily results in distortions of the content of his views, and inevitably results in a picture of social reality and history that is excessively "mechanical," and obscures the "larger totalities" that constitute social reality by, as Sean Sayers puts it, "fragmenting the world into a disconnected series of atomic particulars." According to Sayers, in order to understand Marx, and in order to develop an adequate theory of history, we must employ a logic of internal relations, within which,

"concrete and particular things are always and essentially related, connected to and interacting with other things within a larger totality...this context of relations is internal and essential to the nature of things, not external and accidental."

Now Sayers may be right that analytic philosophers who employ only the logic of "external relations" in reconstructing Marxian theories miss certain important aspects of Marx's own thinking. But the language of dialectics that was used by Marx, and is used by many contemporary Marxists, is often obscure (as in the Sayers quote above), and so it is difficult to state precisely what the dialectical alternative to technological determinism is, and how the logic of internal relations is supposed to support that alternative. Furthermore, it is not entirely clear how to understand what the logic of internal relations is supposed to imply about the Marxian categories used in the construction of historical materialism, and the particulars that fall into those categories.

Sayers claims that while it's fine for physicists and engineers to treat ordinary physical objects as isolated atomic particulars, social scientists cannot usefully do so, since they seek to understand those objects as, for example, productive forces or commodities. And an object is only a productive force or a commodity when it exists in certain contexts, within certain relations of production. As Sayers puts it,

"A machine is a productive force only in the context of certain relations of production in which it is employed productively...these relations are essential - that is to say internal and not merely external - to its being a productive force."

The forces and relations of production, two of the fundamental categories that Marx employs in constructing his theory of history, then, are, according to Sayers, internally related, since objects such as machines are only productive forces in the context of certain relations of production. But there's an important ambiguity here: it's not clear whether machines are supposed to count as productive forces only when they are actually employed productively (as seems to be the suggestion of the first part of the above quote) within the prevailing relations of production, or whether they count as productive forces so long as they could be so employed within the prevailing relations. The former interpretation is problematic because if unused machines do not count as productive forces, then the Marxian claim that epochal transformations occur in part due to contradictions between the existing forces and relations, including the failure to optimally employ the existing productive forces, is undermined. The latter, on the other hand, is problematic because it is not clear on what basis we could ever conclude that an object that has the physical characteristics necessary to aid in productive activity couldn't possibly, given the existing relations of production, actually do so. So on this view it seems that knowing which relations prevail will be unnecessary in order to conclude that an object is a productive force, and the thesis that forces and relations are internally related turns out to be false.

The dialectical response to my critique of the latter option is to claim that I'm employing an analytic, rather than a dialectical sense of 'could'. Of course we can imagine industrial machinery used in productive activity within feudal relations of production, but this is not a real historical possibility, and dialectical logic, including the thesis of internal relations, is designed precisely to demarcate real historical, rather than abstract logical possibilities.

But it seems to me that all that this move accomplishes is to present what are actually empirical claims about conditional possibilities (i.e. what is nomologically possible given some set of facts) in quasi-logical terms. And it's not clear what this adds to arguments on behalf of historical materialism. If Marx's theory of history is true, it's contingently true. That theory claims that the prevailing production relations in any historical period correspond to the level of development of the productive forces. The thesis of internal relations includes the claim that particular objects are only productive forces within the context of certain relations. But if we accept this than much of the "correspondence" between forces and relations will be ensured by the mere stipulation of when something counts as a productive force.

This is unacceptable. Historical theories, and especially those such as Marx's that purport to be scientific, must, like all scientific theories, be subject to empirical testing. The thesis of internal relations between forces and relations of production makes too much of Marx's theory true by definition alone.

Commitment Goods and the Demands of Morality

2007-06-23T01:46:00.000-07:00

It has become fashionable in debates about the demands of morality to suggest that recognizing the necessary conditions for possessing a certain class of goods requires us to accept limits on what morality can require of us. These goods, which Cullity calls "commitment goods," cannot be possessed by those who have certain attitudes, including a willingness to abandon those goods if an impartially better alternative is available. Personal relationships such as friendships are often cited as an example of a commitment good. Proponents of the view that the value of commitment goods grounds limits on moral demands claim that one cannot be a genuine friend to a person and at the same time have an attitude toward the friendship such that, were a more rewarding potential friendship to become available, one would abandon one's current friendship in favor of the impartially better alternative. Similarly, they claim, one cannot be a true friend if one is willing to act in a way that would have the effect of undermining the friendship in order to, say, save the lives of several children in the world's most impoverished regions. This being the case, and given the extraordinary value and central place of friendships in most of our lives, any view of morality's demands that implies that we are required to abandon our friendships, for any reason, must be rejected, because in order to comply with such a requirement we would have to have attitudes toward our relationships that are fundamentally incompatible with genuine friendship.

I think this argument fails, for several reasons. First, it portrays friendship as involving, and indeed requiring, a kind of pathological devotion to one's friends that is clearly not required to be a genuine friend, and indeed would preclude one from enjoying many of the things that are valuable about good friendships, such as the ability to reflect openly with one's friends about the place of the friendship in one's life and its impact on one's other commitments, such as one's career, or one's moral life. On this picture any consideration of the impact of one's friendships on other values, including one's ability to do morally good things such as contribute to saving the lives of impoverished children, would undermine the status of one's friendships as friendships, and therefore we can't, according to the view's proponents, be morally required to engage in such reflection.

But in fact we do engage in this kind of reflection all the time, and it's not too difficult to imagine cases in which, even if one does not do so, he is clearly morally required to. We actually engage in such reflection whenever we weigh the value of certain friendships against the value of an action that we know or believe will result in the dissolution of those friendships. I knew that if I moved to Berkeley for grad school rather than staying in New York, that several of my friendships with people in New York would likely dissolve. Some friendships are such that they can only be sustained if the friends live in close proximity, and this does not necessarily make them any less valuable than any other friendships. It would be crazy, however, to think that if one has such a friend, that the friendship no longer counts as a friendship the instant that one considers moving away. It was perfectly appropriate to have an attitude toward my friends in New York such that I considered the benefits of moving to Berkeley even though I knew that doing so would result in the dissolution of the friendships. And even the fact that my decision was an easy one doesn't undermine the fact that my friendships were genuine while they lasted.

To relate this point to specifically moral requirements to consider whether to maintain a friendship, consider the case of two mobsters who are close friends. Imagine that one of the two suddenly recognizes that it is morally wrong to engage in much of the behavior that he does in his role in the organization, but also realizes that if he were to leave the organization then his friendship would dissolve. It seems that those who claim that morality cannot require us to give up commitment goods must say that the mobster is not morally required to leave the mob; furthermore they seem commited to saying that merely considering doing so, in the light of his newfound moral beliefs, would require having an objectionable attitude toward one's friendship. But can we really accept this view? I think the answer is clearly that we cannot.

There are two responses that a defender of the view that I'm arguing against might make to my example, but both are question-begging.

First, one might simply claim that one can be required to abandon a friendship when maintaining it would require one to engage in conduct that is clearly immoral, such as participating in mob hits, but cannot be required to do so when maintaining them would not require one to engage in such immoral behavior. But this would be to beg the question against proponents of the Extreme Demand such as myself, because what we claim is that letting others die when we could easily contribute to saving their lives is clearly immoral. If we're right about that then this response to my example would also imply that many of the friendships that those who appeal to friendship in arguments against the Extreme Demand are concerned to shield from the demands of morality will be implicated as well: those that would dissolve if one gave up his country club membership, or if one were no longer willing to eat at expensive restaurants, or if one took up volunteer work in lieu of watching a shared favorite television show.

The second way that one might object is to claim that my example is flawed because the mobster who does not have the change in moral beliefs cannot be a genuine friend at all, due to the fact that he engages in immoral behavior that affects others. On this view being a friend requires that one also stand in more general moral relations to the rest of humanity; if one lacks whatever concern for others that is morally required, then one simply cannot be a friend. Our mobster can be required to leave the mob because his fellow member is not really his friend at all; he can do so without undermining a commitment good, and an attitude that includes a willingness to rethink his mob affiliation is appropriate since there is, and could be, no genuine friendship undermined by that attitude. Again, this is question begging against the Extreme Demand because if the Extreme Demand is the right account of morality's demands, and if friendship requires that one stand in more general moral relations to all of humanity, then anyone who does not comply with the Extreme Demand cannot be a genuine friend, and therefore opponents of the Extreme Demand cannot appeal to the value of friendship to argue against the Extreme Demand. Both this and the previous objection implicitly presuppose a view of morality that is less demanding than the Extreme Demand in arguments that are intended to show that the Extreme Demand must be rejected.

Let me conclude by noting that I find the view that forms the basis of the second objection, namely that being a friend requires that one stand in more general moral relations to the rest of humanity, pretty obviously false. I see no reason to think that two mobsters, or two socialites indifferent to the plight of the rest of humanity, or two racists, etc., can't be genuine friends. Such individuals can care deeply about each other, can share in many valuable activities, can provide shape and meaning to each other's lives (and can do so in ways that are not in themselves morally objectionable), etc. If I'm right about this, then it's obvious that we can be morally required to abandon our friendships; our mobster is clearly morally required to leave the mob. And if we can, in some cases, be morally required to abandon our friendships, then determining in which cases we are so required will involve weighing the value of specific friendships against other values that might be realized were we to give them up. And as I pointed out above, a willingness to engage in such weighing need not involve an objectionable alienation from our friendships that would render them not friendships at all; on the contrary, a willingness to reflect carefully on our friendships (sometimes even to do so with our friends) is one of the things that makes our friendships (or at least those that can survive such reflection) so valuable.

Cullity's Argument Against the Extreme Demand

2007-06-08T02:26:00.000-07:00

In chapter 8 of his extremely interesting recent book The Moral Demands of Affluence (which I highly recommend) Garrett Cullity puts forward an argument that he takes to refute the view that we are morally obligated to live what he calls an "altruistically-focused life." By "altruistically-focused life," Cullity means a life the primary aim of which is to better the lot of the world's worst-off people. This is the sort of life, and according to Cullity the only sort of life, that is prescribed by what he calls the "Extreme Demand." The Extreme Demand refers to the familiar view of what morality requires of the world's better off individuals held by such philosophers as Peter Singer, Peter Unger, Shelly Kagan, and, as many of my readers will be aware, by me. I think Cullity's argument fails, and after setting out the argument, I'll explain why.

Cullity's argument consists of three central claims (I'll quote Cullity in laying them out):

1) Helping people is obviously morally required in response to their interests in the fulfilments of a non-altruistically-focused life.

2) The Extreme Demand implies that the interests to which we are responding in such cases are interests in having what it is wrong to have, since the Extreme Demand requires us to lead altruistically focused lives.

3) When your interest in having (or doing) a certain thing is an interest in having (or doing) what it would be wrong for you to have (or do), that interest cannot be a good reason for morally requiring me to help you to get (or do) it.

Now I agree with Cullity that there can be cases, even in the actual world, in which we are morally required to help people achieve certain fulfilments as part of lives that are non-altruistically-focused, so I accept 1), though I think the occasions on which we're required to so help others are limited by the more stringent requirements that we have to help the world's worst-off people. I'm also inclined to agree with 2); those who enjoy the satisfactions of a non-altruistically-focused life in a world in which others are as badly off as the world's worst-off people actually are behave wrongly, according to the Extreme Demand. Where I take issue with Cullity's argument is claim 3).

Elsewhere in chapter 8, Cullity puts the basic claim of 3) in what seems to me simpler language. He essentially says that if it would be wrong for one to have X, then I cannot have a morally compelling reason to help her get X. But it seems to me that in order for this claim to go through we must make certain assumptions about what can count as reasons that many proponents of the Extreme Demand (e.g. all those who accept a broadly consequentialist ethical framework) would reject. Specifically, we must accept that I cannot have a reason to act so as to increase the level of well-being of a person P if P, morally speaking, ought to be sacrificing such that her level of well-being is lower. But we can easily construct cases in which at least some (e.g. consequentialists) will accept that we do have morally compelling reasons to increase someone's well-being despite the fact that if that person were acting morally she would have a lower level of well-being.

Imagine a case in which I can help Jane, who wants very much to have a career as a concert violinist, get into a prestigious music school by, say, writing her a letter of recommendation. Jane is a more than qualified candidate with a great deal of musical talent, and I know that if she were to get into the school she would be very likely to have a successful career, and her music would bring enjoyment to many people. Now of course it's true that in order for Jane to develop her musical talents to the degree necessary to have the career that she wants, she will have to expend considerable resources, which could otherwise be donated to help the world's worst off people, and spend a great deal of time perfecting her craft, which she could otherwise spend doing aid work. So according to the Extreme Demand, it would be wrong for Jane, given the current state of the world, to pursue her music career.

Does it follow from this that it would be wrong for me to write Jane a letter of recommendation? I don't think that it does. After all, I might know that if Jane were not to get into the prestigious music school, she would instead pursue a different career that would involve her to no greater extent in helping the world's worst off people. I might also know that if she does not get into the school, then Jill, who has less talent than Jane, and who also cares very deeply about the poor and intends to join a non-profit that helps the world's worst off people in the event that she does not get in, will be admitted. In other words, my refusal to help Jane would not result in a better outcome for anyone, let alone the world's off people, who would then be deprived of Jill's efforts on their behalf. In this case it seems clear that the Extreme Demand, interpreted in the broadly consequentialist manner that its most prominent defenders endorse, actually requires helping Jane to achieve the fulfilments of the non-altruistically-focused life that she has chosen to lead.

Of course Cullity may be thinking about cases of a different sort when he puts forward his argument. He may take it to be the case, for example, that one can have morally compelling reasons to, say, help Jane pay for music school rather than donating the relevant funds to Oxfam. And the Extreme Demand surely does deny that, in the actual world, we can have morally compelling reasons to do this. But I take it that this is a strength, rather than a weakness, of the Extreme Demand. While a music school education is no doubt of tremendous value, the Extreme Demand rightly tells us that its value cannot give us compelling reasons to fail to save the lives of many innocent children around the world who will unnecessarily die without our help.

More on Homosexuality and Hiring Practices

2007-06-06T23:56:00.000-07:00

I received a very detailed comment on my previous post which reveals some ways in which what I said there was less clear than it should have been. I'll address the commenter's points in detail here. I strongly encourage readers to read the comment before reading my response.

First, I agree that to some extent my previous post runs together the three issues that the commenter refers to. Whether he's right that the answer to (1) is "no" depends on whether there is a genuine distinction to be drawn between orientation and behavior. Though others in the original thread on this issue have attempted to dispute that such a distinction can be made at all, I'm prepared to grant that it can (the idea of a chaste homosexual is not incoherent). I don't think that the distinction, in the end, justifies the commenter's view on issue (2), or in fact on issue (3) (though I'm less certain about (3)). In any event, the commenter is right that I don't dispute his view on (1), nor do I care to.

(3) is an extremely difficult issue, much more difficult, I think, than the commenter acknowledges (he goes so far as to say that (3) may be even more cut-and-dry than (1), a thought that I find extraordinary). He notes that in the case of Bob Jones University, the result of their ban on interracial dating was not that they were closed down, but merely that they lost some of the privileges (e.g. tax breaks) that are normally granted to private educational institutions. Now perhaps BJU should not have been closed down because of their policies, but it seems to me that merely taking away some tax breaks does not go far enough. I'm not prepared to offer a settled view on what appropriate government action would consist in with respect to BJU and similar institutions, but there are some important points about these institutions that we should keep in mind. The commenter points out that the right of private religious institutions to operate according to their religious views is a "bedrock principle of the modern liberal consensus on religious freedom," and to a large extent I agree. A private religious or, indeed, non-religious organization (including groups like the KKK) has, and ought to have, the right to restrict membership as it sees fit, to advocate whatever views on morality and other issues that it accepts, etc.; the government should not interfere with such organizations doing any of these things, even if the speech of such groups does indirect harm (say, by encouraging hate) to others. But when a private organization, religious or not, opens a school, a business, etc., that is, when it becomes an employer, there are certain regulations that it then becomes subject to and that the government is entitled to enforce. Equal employment opportunity is a staple of liberal thought just as much as religious freedom is, and as I pointed out in my previous post, sometimes we have to weigh different values against each other in deciding which policies to adopt. If the result of allowing religious institutions to hire on the basis of their religiously-based moral beliefs was to seriously limit the employment opportunities of a certain class of citizens relative to other classes (imagine a society in which a significant percentage of employers were private religious institutions opposed to homosexual behavior), then it seems to me there would be a compelling liberal case for refusing to allow religious institutions this freedom. If Wal-Mart and other major private employers decided tomorrow to become religious institutions, and to refuse to hire practicing homosexuals because their executives wanted to create a certain kind of religious community within the companies, this would clearly create a situation in which the employment opportunities of homosexuals would be severely diminished relative to their heterosexual compatriots. I contend that this would be unacceptable from a liberal perspective, and that the government would be entitled to refuse to allow such companies to invoke religious beliefs to justify these policies.

Now one might respond by claiming that the existence of private religious colleges that refuse to hire practicing homosexuals does not seriously limit the employment opportunites of homosexuals, and therefore in their case religious freedom should win out. But I'm not so sure that religious employers, insofar (and only insofar) as they are employers, shouldn't be subject to the same anti-discrimination laws as all other employers. After all, this policy would not infringe on the right of any private organization to create the kinds of communities that they wish to create - they could still do so, and would have many ways of doing so available to them; they would simply be prohibited from operating schools or businesses whose policies would contribute to making employment opportunities unequal for any protected group of citizens. Having such a policy is not only consistent with, but is actually recommended by, certain liberal principles that rank right up there with religious freedom, and have an impact on the lives of individuals that is at least arguably as significant as the aspect of religious freedom (keep in mind, this policy would be FAR from a wholesale rejection of the notion of religious freedom, and would in fact merely be an extension of restrictions on religious freedom that are already in place, e.g. laws against racist hiring policies) that would be limited.

So in response to the commenter's claim that since religious institutions are allowed to refuse to hire those who don't share their religious views, and since religious views and sexual behavior are both choices, there seems no basis on which to refuse to allow them to refuse to hire those who engage in sexual behavior that they find immoral, I'm somewhat drawn to the view that perhaps such institutions shouldn't be allowed to refuse to hire those who don't share their religious views. I admit that in some ways this is an unattractive view, but this, like many, is a difficult issue on which it's not easy to construct a coherent view free of any implausible elements. Often in order to avoid inconsistency, some of our strong intuitions must be abandoned, and in many cases it's not easy to decide which ones. I realize that many will find this view unacceptable, and I'm certainly open to the possibility that I'm mistaken in being drawn to it at all, though at this point I think it's better than the alternative. The commenter is right to point out that if we allow that job descriptions that include the requirement to promote, in part by example, the religious convictions that guide the institution, are themselves legitimate job descriptions, then in many cases engaging in homosexual behavior will prevent individuals from fulfilling the requirements of a job in the same way that failing to share the institutions' guiding religious beliefs would. The only coherent alternative to the view I've reluctantly advocated that I can see is allowing religious institutions to use any moral beliefs at all in their hiring practices, and since this could, at least in principle, result in very unequal employment opportunities for different classes of citizens, I'm inclined to reject this view. I don't think that the view that I've (again, reluctantly) advocated would seriously inhibit the ability of individuals to form communities structured around their religious or other views; they simply would be prohibited from using those views to inform hiring practices. This would inhibit their ability to run schools like Weston, Wheaton, Bethel, Bob Jones, etc., but since I'm dubious of the value of such schools anyway (I don't think a school dedicated to advancing ANY ideology, religious or otherwise, is likely to provide students with the kind of open educational atmosphere that should be part of any student's college experience), this is a consequence that does not particularly concern me, since there are plenty of other ways to develop such ideologically oriented communities that would not require practicing employment discrimination.

Finally, I'll turn to some issues raised by the commenter that defenders of Christian institutions that refuse to hire homosexuals have brought up many times, and which I think are hopeless as attempts to distinguish this policy from those like BJU's. Very often, I think, what defenders of the likes of Weston/Wheaton/Bethel/etc. say on these issues simply reflects an underlying distaste for (or even hatred of) homosexuals. I'll quote the commenter at length before replying:

I think that there's plenty of room to make meaningful distinctions between the BJU policy (or the policy of your hypothetical institution) and those of Westmont, Wheaton, and Bethel - distinctions that go beyond "if you're a religious institution, you can do whatever you want short of physically hurting people". For example, we can ask: is the Bob Jones policy really rooted in Christian ethics, or is it just racist?; or, is there even a *minimally* sensible rationale for a ban on interracial dating (or touching), as opposed to homosexual activities? It seems to me that the answers to these questions are "no" and "no", and I find it rather frightening to find people so insensitive to the content of Christianity that they're unwilling to see this. It seems to me that just as our court system is able to decide, or at least try to decide, that certain associations are religions while others are not (if they couldn't do this, our constitutional system would be in pretty deep shit), we should be able to try and make meaningful distinctions like this one. If you honestly don't think there's a meaningful distinction to be made between a ban against interracial dating and one against homosexual activity, then I really find myself at a loss for words. (It stinks of a self-imposed blindness.)

First, on the question whether BJU's policies were "really rooted in Christian ethics": This question is irrelevant to whether such a policy might be acceptable on religious grounds. We can certainly imagine a religion with a tenet that interracial dating is immoral; the question is whether we will allow that religious belief to justify refusing to hire individuals engaged in interracial relationships. Whether such a policy is "really Christian" or not is neither here nor there. Also, who is to decide if a policy is "really Christian"? There are innumerable interpretations of the Bible and of what Christianity requires of individuals (and throughout history many such interpretations have been explicitly racist), and the whole point of religious freedom is to allow those with different interpretations to act according to their own preferred one. To allow someone (or some group of people) external to any particular religious organization to determine whether some tenet of the group is "really" part of the religion's doctrine is entirely antithetical to the aim of religious freedom. The result would be that some religions would be allowed to use their beliefs in hiring and others wouldn't, and even those who find my view unacceptable should find this one even worse.

Similary, the question of whether there is a "minimally sensible rationale for a ban on interracial dating...as opposed to homosexual activities" can only be answered relative to specific views about whether such behaviors are morally acceptable. Those who accept the religious views of BJU think there is such a rationale for a ban on interracial dating, and that this rationale is religious in nature. On what basis might we conclude, as the commenter seems inclined to, that there is no minimally sensible rational for proscribing interracial dating but there is such a rationale for proscribing homosexual behavior, other than the view that the latter is wrong while the former isn't? To draw this conclusion, and to use it to treat BJU differently than Wheaton/Weston/Bethel/etc., would be to limit the religious freedom of BJU, but not the others, on the basis that one shares the views of WWB but not those of BJU. This is, again, contrary to the entire purpose of religious freedom. The commenter says that he "find[s] it rather frightening to find people so insensitive to the content of Christianity that they're unwilling to see [that there is a minimally sensible rationale for banning homosexual behavior but not interracial dating]." But again, whether there is such a rationale is not a matter of what the "content of Christianity" is (and it seems to me there is no single content to Christianity anyway); it's a matter of whether the behaviors in question are actually wrong. The question we must answer is whether we will allow institutions defined by certain religious beliefs to refuse to hire those who engage in the behavior in question. If we are to protect genuine religious freedom, we cannot answer this question by determining which beliefs are "really Christian" and which aren't.

Furthermore, to claim that those who don't acknowledge a distinction between banning interracial dating and banning homosexual behavior are "insensitive to the content of Christianity" is simply absurd. Christianity has a long history of racism, and the Bible has a hell of a lot more passages endorsing slavery and racism, including the infamous story of Ham used to justify enslaving blacks, than it does passages condemning homosexuality (there are only 2 of these, neither in the New Testament). It's true that Christianity, as it's practiced currently in the United States and other places, is more anti-homosexual than racist (though to a significant extent, at least in some U.S. churches, it's still racist too), but as I'll argue below, this is entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand.

In this vein, one could appeal to public opinion, which currently goes pretty overwhelmingly against BJU (though I doubt not really as much as the numbers indicate; I'm sure plenty of white suburban people who would say that BJU's policy is wrong would be less than pleased if their own child brought a black boy/girlfriend home) but not at all against WWB, in order to claim that there is a minimally sensible rationale for prohibiting homosexual behavior. But if one takes this route, then one must admit that not too long ago in this country there would have been a minimally sensible rationale for policies such as that at BJU, since back in the 1950's and into the 60's opposition to interracial marriage was extremely high, especially among religious conservatives. But whether there is a minimally sensible rationale for refusing to hire those who engage in a certain behavior is not relative to prevailing public opinion, it is relative to the facts about the moral acceptability of the behaviors in question. So the fact that a lot of people still think homosexuality is wrong, but far fewer (at least claim to) think that interracial marriage/dating is wrong does not give us any reason to distinguish the two cases.

Finally, the commenter suggests that if we think, as I've argued, that no relevant distinction between BJU and WWB can be drawn, perhaps we ought to simply allow all religious institutions to use their moral beliefs in hiring decisions, and the APA ought to allow the likes of BJU to advertise in Jobs for Philosophers along with WWB. That is not an entirely implausible position, though I've argued that the liberal commitment to equal employment opportunity should override religious freedom in these cases, and that this should inform the APA's policy on JFP ads. But I want to conclude by examining what the commenter says about such a policy:

So suppose I agree, and say that the APA should be willing to accept advertisements from the likes of Bob Jones University as well. What would be so bad about this? The reason I ask this is that racists of the BJU ilk are a really massive minority in our society, and to some extent I think it's wise to let their bigotry have its minute in the sun so we can address it head-on rather than keeping it closeted and pretending it's not out there. Sure, their dating policies are stupid, arbitrary, racist, fear-mongering, and what have you - but so what? It's not as if our republic - or our "philosophical association" - is going to come crumbling down because we let some idiots take out an ad looking to hire other idiots. Perhaps we should just let them expose themselves for the idiots they are.

I'm inclined to think that some of what the commenter says here is plausible enough, and so perhaps as long as BJU and other similar schools are permitted to continue operating with their racist policies, the APA should simply allow them to advertise jobs and highlight the fact that they have such idiotic policies. Neither the country, nor the APA, would collapse, and the facts about such bigoted institutions would be out there for everyone to see. And perhaps despite the fact that homophobes in America vastly outnumber BJU type racists, it would be better to simply let Wheaton/Weston/Bethel/etc. advertise jobs as well, so that reasonable people will be made aware of their idiotic policies.

In any event, just as the commenter is concerned that people like me don't recognize (what seems clearly false based on my reading of the Bible) that the "content of Christianity" supports anti-gay policies but not racist ones, I'm concerned that many in his camp use such strong (and appropriate) language to condemn the racism of BJU while at the same time endorsing policies that do serious harm to another marginalized group in our society. Hopefully there will come a time in the not too distant future when the majority of Americans realize that the policies of places like Wheaton/Weston/Bethel/etc. are just as idiotic as most already consider the policies of BJU.

Homosexuality and Hiring Practices

2007-06-05T00:07:00.000-07:00

Recently I've been participating in a discussion that's been going on at several philosophy blogs about the hiring practices of certain Christian colleges (my comments can be found here and here, and the beginning of the debate can be found here), and whether or not the APA should refuse to allow schools that prohibit homosexual behavior from advertising in Jobs for Philosophers. The colleges in question require all employees to sign what they call "statements of faith" which basically require employees to promise not to engage in certain behaviors that the schools deem sinful or immoral. Prominent among the proscribed behaviors, not surprisingly, is homosexual activity. Now I think a policy of refusing to hire those who engage in homosexual activity is morally repugnant; homosexual behavior is not in itself wrong, and there is no job that engaging in homosexual behavior would prevent one from doing as well as one who does not. But here I'm interested in addressing the most common defense of the hiring policies of certain Christian colleges that I've come across. Proponents of this defense claim that they do not need to appeal (at least not directly) to the claim that homosexual behavior is wrong in order to justify the policies in question. My claim will be that if we accept their argument we will be committed to the view that institutions could be justified in adopting hiring policies that all (or at least nearly all) parties to the debate would agree are morally repugnant and should not be allowed.

Proponents of the defense that I will argue against begin by making a distinction between homosexual orientation and homosexual behavior. The institutions in question, they claim, will not hire anyone who engages in homosexual behavior, but are perfectly willing to hire those of homosexual orientation, so long as they promise to remain celibate. They claim that this distinction shows that these institutions are not practicing discrimination against homosexuals that is relevantly similar to the kind of, for example, racial or gender discrimination that we all abhor. If the institutions precluded candidates for merely having homosexual desires, that would be wrong. But to proscribe certain behaviors on the basis of the religious convictions that inform the institution's goals is, according to this view, acceptable. And since the content of a principle that allows religious institutions to refuse to hire those who engage in behaviors that it deems sinful or immoral does not in itself endorse the views of those religious institutions, this defense of the policies of Christian colleges that refuse to hire those who engage in homosexual behavior makes no reference at all to the wrongness of such behavior.

The problem with this defense, of course, is that institutions can conceivably, and in the past (and not even too distant past; think Bob Jones University) have, proscribed behaviors such as interracial sex and dating. And clearly this was (and even if it wasn't, it could have been, and would still have been morally repugnant) a policy of prohibiting only behavior; BJU did not refuse to hire or admit persons who merely desired to engage in interracial relations. Only those who actually engaged in such relations were banned from the school. Furthermore, the reason for BJU's having such a policy was that the university's mission was informed by religious beliefs, including the belief that interracial relationships are sinful. If a religious institution is allowed to prohibit its employees from engaging in behaviors that it deems sinful or immoral, then it seems that there can be no limit to what behaviors can be proscribed. On what basis could we outline such limits? Any limits that we set would infringe upon some (at least potential) institutions' ability to hire in accordance with their religious beliefs.

So if we are to allow religious institutions to refuse to hire those who engage in behavior that the institutions deem sinful or immoral, then we can imagine all kinds of morally repugnant policies that almost no one thinks should be allowed. A religious school might prohibit not only interracial dating, but interracial friendships, or, to speak even more concretely in terms of behavior, all interracial physical contact (e.g. handshakes) or communication (which is clearly a form of behavior), and do so on the basis of the religiously based view that God intended racial groups only to have physical contact and direct communication intraracially. Such an institution could have such a policy while remaining willing to both hire and admit members of any particular racial group. I assume that everyone would find such policies morally repugnant and, at the very least, agree that the APA should not allow any institution with such policies to advertise jobs in JFP.

Now, some might still think that religious schools should be allowed to adopt such policies, since it is an important part of our scheme of civil liberties to protect freedom of religion and association and the right to practice religion as one sees fit. I agree that freedom of religion is an important value, but it's important, I think, to recognize just how much of our other values we would have to give up, at least in principle, in order to endorse a view that allows religious institutions to adopt the kinds of policies that I've described. The above example of the imagined religious group that thinks all interracial contact immoral highlights this point well, and I'm sure we could come up with plenty more possible religious views about what conduct is sinful that would make it very difficult to endorse a general policy of allowing religious institutions to refuse to hire anyone who behaves in ways that it finds sinful or immoral. It's also important to recognize that we already weigh other values against the value of religious liberty in determining what can be done in the name of religion. Religious groups aren't exempted from murder charges if they believe that failing to engage in human sacrifice is immoral. Refusing to hire practicing homosexuals is not nearly as bad as engaging in human sacrifice, but religious freedom is not absolute, and so we must determine how the evil of refusing practicing homosexuals the same opportunities as everyone else stacks up against the harm to religious groups of regulating their hiring practices.

If we conclude that the evil of curtailing the liberty of religious groups to hire on the basis of their beliefs about what behaviors are sinful outweighs the harm done to homosexuals of allowing religious institutions to adopt such policies, then we might conclude that religious institutions should be permitted to adopt those policies. But if we do conclude this then we either have to also grant that religious institutions should be allowed to have policies such as that of BJU (or my imagined school that prohibits all interracial contact), or we must claim that the harm to those who would wish to both attend the school(s) in question and engage in interracial relations is greater than the harm to those who would wish to both attend the (perhaps different) relevant school(s) and engage in homosexual relations. And this claim seems to me implausible, especially since at least some of those heterosexuals who would wish to engage in interracial relations would also be attracted to (though perhaps less so) members of their own race, and so could still develop meaningful relationships, whereas the homosexuals in question would be entirely precluded from developing such relationships. If anything the harm to the specific persons on whom the two policies would place a burden would be greater for the homosexuals, and therefore a weighing of the effects of the two policies could not endorse allowing prohibitions on homosexual behavior while disallowing prohibitions on interracial relations.

The only way, as far as I can tell, that defenders of the right of religious institutions to prohibit homosexual behavior can attempt to draw a distinction between that policy and the policies prohibiting interracial contact that I've described above is simply to appeal to their belief that homosexuality is wrong, while interracial contact isn't (in the threads I've linked to above there are a number of instances of just this move, some more subtle than others). But this is precisely what defenders of this view set out to avoid. By appealing to their own religious beliefs as a justification for allowing one policy but not another, they neglect the fact that the whole point of their argument is to justify allowing all religious groups to cite their moral beliefs as a justification for refusing to hire those who don't conform their behavior to those beliefs. They can't draw the distinction they need without citing their own moral beliefs; but if we allow the citation of such beliefs, then we lose the ability to make the distinction.

So we are pushed to either allow religious institutions to cite their moral beliefs in order to justify refusing to hire those who don't conform to them, in which case the "no interracial contact" policy would be permissible, or else to refuse to allow religious institutions to cite their moral beliefs in this way, in which case they will have no justification for refusing to hire those who engage in homosexual behavior. Our decision is not all that simple, since it involves weighing the evil of allowing discriminatory and socially pernicious hiring practices against the evil of restricting religious freedom. But I'm fairly convinced that we should come down on the side of restricting discrimination.

Vegetarianism and Moral Priorities

2007-05-31T23:01:00.000-07:00

I am not a vegetarian, though often I'm inclined to think that I ought to be. Recently I've had several discussions about the ethical issues related to meat consumption with various friends and colleagues who are vegetarians, and in light of some of their arguments it seems to me that the considerations in favor of a policy of refraining from eating meat are quite weighty. And yet I'm not at all inclined to put meat-eating near the top of my list of the moral flaws that I need to work on. As morally abhorrent as the abuses in much of the meat industry are, in the world we live in it seems to me that there are much more pressing moral concerns that we should give priority to in our attempts to reform our characters and behavior patterns. For example, there is a lot that those of us who are reasonably well-off can do to reduce the suffering of the world's poorest people, and that suffering is clearly, I think, even more morally significant than the suffering of non-human animals (which, let me be clear, is still a very serious moral concern).

In fact, I sometimes find it a bit difficult to take the vegetarians with whom I discuss these issues seriously, since so often I find their moral priorities to be so far out of proportion with the moral importance of the relevant issues and behaviors. When someone forcefully argues that eating meat is a terrible moral wrong, and in the next breath comments on how comfortable his $200 shoes are, I can't help but think that he's seriously out of touch with what really matters morally, even if, on their own terms, his arguments for vegetarianism are quite strong.

What makes this even more frustrating is that it is often very difficult to raise the moral issues surrounding personal spending in casual conversation (I guess we might say that doing so is a kind of social taboo) - much more difficult than raising the issue of the ethics of meat-consumption - so often I simply don't bring it up, and leave these conversations convinced both that meat-consumption is quite morally problematic, and that many of those who are acutely aware of this and behave accordingly have moral priorities that are, to put it crudely, very much out of whack.

So, to all the vegetarians out there: I realize that there is much that I should think about whenever I sit down to a cup of ramen with chicken flavoring and the little chicken pieces in it. But I hope that you recognize that there is at least as much to contemplate, morally speaking, when you consider buying that new Ipod or $200 pair of shoes.

Why People Support/Use Torture...and Other Counterproductive Tactics

2007-05-30T17:26:00.000-07:00

Richard at Philosophy, et cetera quotes this post by hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, in which the author suggests that advocates of torture do not even really consider whether it is effective, but instead endorse it because

"they're in love with a fantasy of themselves as the person who is tough enough to do all those dirty things that have to be done while other people just wring their hands and whimper."

Hilzoy says that,

"Arguing about torture without asking [whether it is actually effective] is like arguing about whether you must, absolutely must, eat your children to keep yourself from starving to death without first checking to see whether you have any other food available..."

But in fact it seems to me that it's even worse than that. The above example would have to be modified such that one's actually eating her children would not only fail to save her life, but would in fact accelerate her death. It's not the case that torture accomplishes what its proponents say it does, just in an unnecessarily brutal manner. Those who use torture harm themselves and their cause, despite the fact that tools are available to benefit it, at least in the long run.

Hilzoy's diagnosis of the pro-torture crowd as "embracing some sort of Rambo fantasy," however, seems to me very much correct. And I think it's interesting that the failure of the pro-torture crowd to ask the most basic means-end questions about their chosen tactics strongly resembles the failure of many radical campus activists to ask similar questions that I've described previously. Both groups undermine their own cause by using/supporting tactics that not only don't help them achieve their stated aims, but compromise any claim they might otherwise have to the moral high ground.

The attitude of both the pro-torture crowd and certain segments of the campus left seems to be something like, "we're the good guys and we're fighting the evil guys, so nothing (or almost nothing) we might do in the name of our cause could be wrong." There's almost a kind of messiah complex about their attitudes - while everyone else is sitting on their hands, they're the ones who will be the saviors of the cause, who are willing to go to extremes, to do what's necessary for the cause to succeed. Outside of their fantasy world, however, they're simply undermining the very causes that they claim to be fighting for.

Is the Opacity of the Nature of Social Reality a Bad Thing?

2007-05-29T01:23:00.000-07:00

Marx thinks, to put it rather crudely, that the purpose of science is to reveal the ways in which appearances are deceiving. Appearance suggests, for example, that the sun revolves around the earth; science tells us, however, that this appearance is deceiving, and that in fact it is the earth that revolves around the sun.

The purpose of social science, then, according to Marx, is to reveal the ways in which appearances within the social world are deceiving, and to bring to light the underlying realities. One of the ways that appearances are deceiving within the social world, according to Marx and others, is that some aspects of social reality which are in fact contingent and human-created appear to us to be natural and inevitable. For example, money appears to us in our everyday lives to intrinsically have the power to acquire goods; but in reality it is only because the members of society accept the green bits of paper as a medium of exchange that money has this power. There is nothing in the bits of paper themselves that give them such power.

One of the main aims of Marxist social science, then, is to highlight those aspects of social reality that, despite appearing to us as natural and inevitable, are in fact merely contingent, and the result of the collective acceptance of the relevant community (which for Marx is itself largely conditioned by the prevailing material conditions, or level of technological development, that has been achieved). Social science is particularly important under capitalism, according to Marx, because so much of the functioning of capitalist society depends on the opacity of certain elements of social reality (Marx's favorite example is the fetishism of commodities, in which products appear to be able to fetch a certain price due to facts about the objects themselves, despite the fact that in reality their [exchange]-value derives from the human labor that went into making them; furthermore, commodities only fetch a price, that is, have an exchange-value, within the structure of the market system, which is itself historically contingent). G.A. Cohen argues that, for Marx, social science would be unnecessary in communist society because the appearance of social reality would not be in any way deceiving.

I'm not concerned with whether or not social science would become unnecessary and, as Cohen puts it, "wither away" in communist society, though I doubt it. I want to examine Cohen's contention that the need for social science, in Marx's sense, is "intrinsically regrettable" because "a gulf between social reality and its appearance is surely an unfortunate state of affairs."

Those of my readers familiar with Searle's "The Construction of Social Reality" will, I'm sure, have noticed that we can put Marx's view of science in Searle's terminology, and say that he believes that social science ought to expose those status functions that appear natural and inevitable as, in fact, contingent and dependent on our collectively accepting, or representing, their existence. Of course Marx thinks that there is an explanation for the existence of certain status functions beyond our collectively accepting them, namely the fact that they correspond to the prevailing material conditions, or level of development of the productive forces, that has been achieved. But the basic idea remains the same.

Those who have been fortunate enough to hear Searle lecture about the functioning of social reality will also recall that he is fond of pointing out that often status functions work better when most people aren't aware that their existence is contingent and dependent on our collective acceptance, but rather view their existence as natural and inevitable. So it seems that Searle would disagree, at least with respect to some cases, with Cohen's view that a gulf between appearance and reality in the social world is intrinsically regrettable. But is he right?

One reason to be suspicious of the view that it might be better if the contingent nature of certain status functions remains unknown to most is that it seems elitist. The implication seems to be that if more people were aware of the fact that much of social reality could be changed if we wanted it to then society would be less stable, and that this would be a bad thing. Better to keep the majority of people in the dark about what actually keeps social reality functioning normally, because the alternative, in which people have more knowledge, would be worse. This view might also seem excessively conservative, since it seems to assume not only that the public's awareness of greater possibilities for change would lead to a widespread desire for change (which is an assumption that Marx shared, and led him to stress the importance to the development of class-consciousness of revealing the underlying social realities behind the appearances), but also that such a desire for change would have undesirable consequences.

Still, we might worry that widespread knowledge regarding the contingency of major social institutions would lead to a kind of instability that should concern us. If most people were aware of the extent to which social institutions are, at least in principle, alterable through human action, the result just might be widespread support for ill-conceived and much too drastic changes in our institutions. Rather than wisely engaging only in what Popper calls "piecemeal social engineering" (which isn't really social engineering at all), there may be a movement toward what he calls "utopian social engineering", that is, attempts to remake society overnight in accordance with some pre-conceived plan regarding what it should look like. And there is, I think, good reason to be wary of such efforts.

But I doubt that more widespread knowledge of the contingency of much of social reality would lead to misguided attempts at revolution, and therefore I'm inclined to side with Cohen. At least in general the fact that so much of the nature of social reality is opaque to most people is regrettable. More knowledge is almost always better than less. And if increased knowledge of the nature of social reality would lead to revolutionary efforts among the masses, I'm not convinced that this would be a bad thing.

Objective Integrity and the Demands of Morality

2007-05-28T02:21:00.000-07:00

In my previous post I argued that Williams' view that individuals' existing moral self-conceptions provide constraints on what morality can demand of them is false. The importance to individuals of avoiding the psychological fragmentation that might be associated with acting so as to undermine their subjective integrity cannot ground limits on the demandingness of morality, because whatever value subjective integrity has for agents is, at least in the actual world, significantly outweighed by the needs of the world's worst off people. Ashford's slavery example is helpful in establishing this conclusion, but I supplemented it with a possible contemporary case in order to avoid a potential objection that Williams could raise regarding our ability to make normative judgments about conduct that took place in past historical periods.

Ashford suggests that Williams might do better to appeal to what she calls "objective integrity" in his attempt to limit the demands of morality (though she ultimately rejects this as well). Objective integrity, for Ashford, requires that one act according to the moral obligations that she actually has, and not merely according to those that she believes she has. It also requires that one maintain the personal projects and relationships that provide her with the kind of personal fulfillment that we all value.

"Objective integrity...is...grounded in...adherence to both impartial moral commitments and personal projects and commitments."

One reason that she claims that objective integrity is a more plausible candidate than subjective integrity for grounding limits on morality's demands is that, according to her, we actually value objective, and not subjective, integrity. She points to the fact that most everyone would refuse to plug into Nozick's experience machine in order to claim that we want the sense of meaning that we have in our lives to be grounded in reality, and not the result of some illusion. But her conclusion that we (meaning at least everyone who would refuse to plug into the experience machine) value objective integrity in her sense does not seem to me to follow from the fact that we would refuse to plug into Nozick's machine. After all, it's perfectly consistent to want the satisfaction that one gets from her experiences to be grounded in reality without thinking that it's even possible to suffer an illusion about what one's moral obligations are. Ashford's argument implicitly assumes that all of those who would refuse to plug into the machine also believe that there are objective facts about what morality requires of us, facts that we can be radically mistaken about. And my experience teaching Berkeley undergrads has taught me that, unfortunately, this is far from the case. All too many people would simply reject the idea that there is any content to Ashford's notion of objective integrity that goes beyond the content of subjective integrity; and many of these same people would be horrified by the prospect of plugging into the experience machine. Of course one might think that there's an inconsistency in such a view; but I'm not so sure there is, though I do think that the view that there are no objective facts about what morality requires of us is importantly wrong.

So merely pointing out that nearly all of us would refuse to plug into the experience machine does not by itself get Ashford the conclusion that nearly all of us care about objective integrity in her sense. Those who do not already accept that there are objective moral demands on us will still need to be convinced that there are such demands in order to believe that we should care about objective integrity. But since I think there are objective moral demands on us, this point does not worry me except insofar as it reveals that Ashford's argument will be unsuccessful against moral skeptics.

We should care about objective integrity. We should want our lives to be such that we fulfill the impartial moral demands on us, and of course we also have strong reasons to want our lives to include personally fulfilling projects and relationships. Ashford thinks that in the actual world, however, it is impossible to live a life with objective integrity. Given the fact that we live in a world in which we are constantly in a position to reduce the serious suffering of people in extremely dire circumstances, satisfying the utilitarian obligations we have would require us, according to Ashford, to abandon nearly all, if not all, of the personal projects and relationships that make our lives meaningful to us, and the sacrifice of which will inevitably cause a sense of psychological fragmentation. She doesn't think, however, that the fact that utilitarian moral demands inevitably conflict with objective integrity in the actual world is a reason to conclude that utilitarianism is false. The actual world, on her view, is simply a world that is sufficiently bad in morally relevant respects that the best we can do is recognize the tragic conflict that exists between impartial moral demands and personal projects and relationships. This gives us strong reason to do what we can to bring an end to the circumstances, such as extreme poverty, that lead to the conflict. In a world in which no one faced the kind of extreme poverty that so many face in the actual world, individuals could both satisfy their impartial moral obligations and pursue valuable personal projects and relationships. The tragic conflict is not an ineradicable part of our human condition.

I think there is much in Ashford's view that is correct. Most of us have projects and relationships that can only be maintained by failing to do what utilitarian morality requires of us. And most of these projects and relationships are genuinely valuable, and give us powerful reasons (though, I agree with Ashford, never conclusive reasons) to fail to do what impartial morality requires of us. But I am less pessimistic than she is about the possibility of living a life of objective integrity in the actual world. I see no reason to think that one cannot develop projects and relationships that, far from irresolvably conflicting with the demands of morality, actually help her to satisfy them. It seems to me that someone who has as a central project advancing the cause of social justice through her work with an activist organization, and who forms her most important relationships with others committed to the same cause, could very well be able to integrate morality and the kind of self-fulfillment that we all want from our projects and relationships. Of course in a world like the actual one the range of projects and relationships that will be compatible with objective integrity must be rather limited, and that is certainly regrettable. But it also seems to me that we are often much better at adapting to changes in our lifestyle, projects, and commitments than is acknowledged, especially by those who advocate narrative conceptions of the self and self-understanding. Morality gives most of us strong reasons to alter the character of the projects and relationships that are central to our lives. Doing so is bound to cause some level of psychological fragmentation (though, I think, not as much as some have suggested); but I see no reason to think either that we are incapable of doing so, or that in doing so we will be unable to live a life of objective integrity.

Integrity and the Demandingness of Morality

2007-05-25T00:58:00.000-07:00

Bernard Williams famously claims that utilitarianism is incompatible with the integrity of individual agents, and is therefore too demanding to be taken seriously. Because utilitarianism, at least in the actual world, would require very many people to abandon their ground projects (that is, the projects that provide agents with a coherent sense of their identity over time), Williams claims that living up to utilitarian demands would, for many agents, result in a degree of psychological fragmentation that morality cannot demand that agents subject themselves to. Morality must, on his view, permit each individual to act according to at least those elements of her self-conception that are essential to her sense of identity.

Among the elements of one's self-conception that might provide one with a sense of identity are moral commitments. Williams discusses the case of George, a chemist who is opposed to chemical warfare, and who could reduce the amount of suffering in the world by taking a job in a chemical warfare factory, because in doing so he would be preventing a more talented and less humanitarian chemist from filling the position. Williams claims that morality cannot require George to take the job, since doing so would conflict with his moral self-conception, and thereby threaten his identity. As Elizabeth Ashford points out, Williams must assume that George is not a utilitarian in order to make this claim; but this implicit stipulation does not threaten Williams' argument, since he could simply have stated explicitly George's anti-utilitarian commitments.

One utilitarian response to this argument, as Ashford points out, is simply to claim that George ought to change his moral beliefs, and thereby his moral self-conception, in order to align it with his actual, utilitarian, obligations. By taking agents' actual moral self-conceptions for granted, and viewing them as constraints on what morality itself can demand, Williams' view seems to, as Ashford puts it, "preclude the possibility of a moral theory's claiming that [an agent's actual moral self-conception is] mistaken."

So Williams' view, according to Ashford, cannot make sense of the fact that a slaveowner who lives in a society in which slavery is widely thought to be permissible, and whose sense of identity and moral uprightness is bound up with her position in society and reinforced by her fellow citizens approbation of her behavior, nonetheless has a strong moral obligation to abandon her slaveholding ways. She has an obligation, that is, to abandon a significant part of her existing moral self-conception. If fulfilling this obligation would undermine her integrity, in Williams' subjective sense of integrity, then her integrity simply is not something that is worth preserving, and it certainly cannot limit what morality can demand of her with respect to her slaveholding.

Now given that Williams believes that there is not much in the way of moral criticism that we are justified in leveling at individuals and societies of the past, he would likely simply deny that we can say that a slaveowner in the early 1800's was morally obligated to give up her slaves. But given that Williams focuses on individuals', rather than societies', moral self-conceptions as the basis for limiting what morality can demand, and given that he also believes that we always have an obligation to provide aid to those in immediate rescue situations, we can construct an example that shows that Williams' is committed to holding that individuals can sometimes be morally required to act against their moral self-conception, even if doing so will severely compromise their subjective integrity:

Ann is an extremely religious member of a church that teaches, among other things, that individuals should not aid others who are in immediate extreme danger, because such danger is God's way of expressing anger toward those who are deserving of it. It is up to God, according to the church, whether such people live or die, and it is not man's place to interfere with his determinations. One day Ann comes across a child drowning in a shallow pond, whom she could easily and with little cost rescue if she made the effort. But, because of her devotion to the church's teachings, fidelity to which is an important part of her deeply held moral self-conception, she chooses not to help, and the child therefore drowns.

It seems that in this case it is true that rescuing the child would undermine Ann's moral self-conception, and therefore her subjective integrity. But it is also clear, and Williams himself is committed to the view, that Ann is morally obligated to rescue the child.

Against Williams' view that one's existing moral self-conception can limit what morality can demand of her, Ashford suggests that moral requirements provide limits on what counts as an acceptable moral self-conception. I think that Ashford's slavery example, along with my case of the religious zealot, shows that this is clearly right, and that any attempt to limit what morality can demand of agents that appeals to the psychological cost of acting against existing self-conceptions, moral or otherwise, fail as a result. If there is a good argument for the view that there are limits to what morality can demand of individuals, it must appeal to considerations other than the effects of certain moral demands on agents' existing self-conceptions.

Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani, and Explaining 9/11

2007-05-16T03:11:00.000-07:00

I haven't written much about politics in recent months, but I can't help commenting on the exchange last night between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani during the Republican Presidential Debate.

After answering a question about the war in Iraq by defending a non-interventionist foreign policy, which he claims (and to a significant extent rightly so) has been a common conservative position throughout American history, Congressman Paul was asked by the moderator whether the 9/11 attacks ought to have changed his stance on non-interventionism. Paul responded by pointing out that U.S. interventionism, and in particular the ten year bombing campaign in Iraq and other policies in the Middle East, played a significant role in fueling the hatred that motivated the 9/11 attacks. He suggested that we think about the motivations of those who commit terrorist attacks by considering how we would respond to other nations were they to adopt policies toward the U.S. similar to those that we have adopted toward nations in the Middle East. Wouldn't we be angry if, for example, China began building large military bases on U.S. soil?

After Paul concluded, Giuliani interrupted the proceedings and said of Paul's remarks "that's really an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11th, that we invited the attack, because we were attacking Iraq; I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th." Not surprisingly, this comment elicited a huge round of applause from the audience of South Carolina Republicans, despite the fact that nearly every clause of the statement suggests either gross ignorance or deliberate distortion of what Paul actually said.

There was nothing extraordinary about Congressman Paul's statement. Many people, including some conservatives, have recognized and argued that certain U.S. policies in the Middle East contribute to hatred of the U.S. among some Muslims, and therefore to terrorism.

Next, Paul never said that "we invited the attack." Giuliani, like many Republicans, used this phrase in order to suggest that what Paul intended to say was that because U.S. policy in the Middle East played a role in causing the hatred that led to the attacks, the attacks were somehow justified. But of course he intended to say no such thing, nor does this conclusion follow from the premise that U.S. policy played this role, as many conservatives attempt to imply. Just as ascribing a motive such as romantic jealousy to a defendant in a murder trial helps to explain why the defendant committed the crime without doing anything to justify it, ascribing motives to terrorists such as anger over U.S. foreign policy does nothing to justify terrorist attacks (this is true even if the anger over U.S. foreign policy is itself justified).

As I said above, Paul's statement was anything but extraordinary; at the same time Giuliani's claim that he's never heard anyone say what Paul had just said is beyond extraordinary; it's absolutely unbelievable. It suggests that not only has Giuliani been oblivious to a great deal of the debate over why 9/11 happened and what we can do to prevent similar attacks in the future, but he's also never himself considered the possibility that U.S. policies abroad could play a role in determining how people around the world view our country, and thereby whether or not they're willing to strap bombs to themselves in order to kill Americans. In the world of Giuliani and the Republicans, no U.S. policy could ever be the cause of anger toward the U.S., and therefore no U.S. policy could ever play any role in explaining attacks on our country. This leaves them with nothing to say by way of explaining terrorism other than the standard "they're evil and they hate freedom"nonsense.

Finally, it's absolutely despicable that Giuliani continues to use the fact that he was mayor of New York during 9/11 to claim some sort of infallibility with respect to debates over the attacks, and terrorism more generally. The fact that he "lived through the attack of September 11th" gives him no privileged access to the truth about how best to combat terrorism, and no right to dismiss the views of others who happened not to be in New York on that day. And there's no reason that anyone, including the other Republican candidates, should let him get away with using 9/11 in this way. I too happen to have been in Manhattan on 9/11, but if I or any of the millions of others who were there were to attempt to use this tactic in debates about terrorism, we would be regarded as trying to exploit 9/11 for rhetorical advantage, and rightly so. This is precisely what Giuliani is doing, and yet he is allowed to get away with it.

On a concluding note, it's somewhat encouraging (even if only very slightly, and even if only because we have come to expect so little from political discourse in our country, especially from the two major parties, and even more especially from the Republicans) that a libertarian candidate such as Paul, who remains critical of the war and other disastrous Republican policies, is there to challenge the GOP war-mongers in these debates. There's even a bit of evidence (though I suspect not too reliable) that he's having an impact on some people's thinking. In Fox News' text message poll of viewers in which they asked who won the debate, Paul finished second, with something like 26% of the vote, and for a while was leading (which, incidentally, infuriated Sean Hannity). Of course this could just be due to a few enthusiastic libertarians voting many times, but it was still enjoyable to watch Hannity's angry expression every time the poll was discussed. Ultimately, Paul is not a candidate with whom I agree very often. I'm too much of a cosmopolitan to take his extreme isolationism seriously (I think, for example, that we have an obligation to do something about the situation in Darfur), and his desire to eliminate basically all public aid programs is something that I would strongly oppose. But it is nice to see a Republican with views that are at least somewhat coherent trying to engage seriously about the war, and who isn't afraid to say what even many Democrats seem too afraid to regarding the link between U.S. foreign policy and terrorism.

Second-Personal Reasons and Tragic Rescue Cases

2007-04-10T20:41:00.000-07:00

Stephen Darwall argues in his recently published book The Second Person Standpoint that the reasons that ground moral obligations are "second-personal all the way down." What exactly makes a reason second-personal (as opposed to, for example, third-personal, or "state-of-the-world-regarding", as Darwall puts it) is somewhat elusive, but the central point for Darwall seems to be that second-personal reasons are grounded in the authority that each of us has, as a member of the moral community, to make demands on (or, as Darwall puts it, "address claims to") others to act in certain ways. So, for example, if I am stepping on your gout afflicted toe, you have the authority to address a claim to me that I remove my foot. Because you have this authority (that is, because the claim, were you to actually address it to me, would be legitimate), I have an obligation to remove my foot from your toe. All obligations, for Darwall, have corresponding claims that others can legitimately address to the subjects of those obligations.

This all seems plausible enough in the case in which I am stepping on your gouty toe. In this case it seems that not only do you have the authority to address a claim to me that I remove my foot from your toe, but you have a special kind of authority that others don't have. Others might justifiably be indignant at my causing you gratuitous pain, but the fact that it's your pain puts you in a special position to complain about my conduct. We might think that the legitimacy of your claim in particular grounds a "second-personal" reason for me to remove my foot from your toe. And it is not implausible to think that this reason, rooted in the special complaint that you have against my causing you pain, is the source of the moral obligation that I have to do so.

But it's difficult to see how this account can be generalized to cover all of our moral obligations. Consider the following case:

You are out in a small boat and come upon fifty people in danger of drowning. Your boat can only accommodate ten people, and there is not time to make more than one trip to shore. Furthermore, there are no other boats in the area, and no one close enough to aid in any other way. No matter what you do, at least forty of the fifty will die.

Now I take it for granted that in this Tragic Rescue Case you are obligated to save ten of the fifty, and that morally speaking it doesn't matter which ten (none are relatives or friends, all are equally deserving, etc...). So it seems that none of the fifty have the authority to address a claim to you with a content such as "help me" or "you ought to help me". Your obligation to aid is not an obligation to anyone; you don't owe aid to any particular individuals, but you are required to provide as much aid as you can given the circumstances. Since no one has the authority to address a demand to you to help her in particular, it's difficult to see how the reasons that ground your moral obligation are supposed to be second-personal.

Darwall does not explicitly address a case of this sort in his book, but he does argue that as members of the moral community, we all have the authority to address claims to others in cases in which they have moral obligations. So when I step on your gouty toe, not only you, but everyone has the authority to address a claim to me that I remove my foot. In this case you have a special claim to the removal of my foot, but everyone can legitimately address a claim that I do so. So we might think that Darwall can account for cases of morally required aid in Tragic Rescue Cases by claiming that everyone, including the fifty, have the authority to address a claim with the content "save ten of the fifty".

In some sense it seems true that in the case I described, and indeed in all cases in which one person is morally obligated to aid or refrain from or cease harming another, all members of the moral community are entitled to address a claim to her that she do so. But the fact that in the Tragic Rescue Case everyone, including the fifty, is entitled to make only a demand with the person-neutral content "help ten of us/them", it is difficult to see what is supposed to be second-personal about the demand such that the reason that grounds the moral obligation to save ten is also second-personal. It seems much more natural to think that the reasons that ground the obligations in Tragic Rescue Cases are third-personal, state-of-the-world-regarding reasons. Whether second-personal reasons, rather than third-personal ones, ground obligations in other kinds of cases is a more difficult matter, though I'm inclined to think that state-of-the-world-regarding reasons provide a more solid foundation for all moral obligations.

Does Intending Harm Always Make an Act Wrong?

2007-04-08T23:48:00.000-07:00

As my readers probably suspect, I think the answer is clearly no, though of course most actual acts in which the actor intends harm involve wrongdoing. Frances Kamm seems to think that the answer is yes, though she distinguishes cases in which one intends harm directly (cases in which one acts in order to harm) from cases in which one merely foresees the indirect harm to another that will result from one's action (in which one acts because another will be harmed, for example when doing something that will indirectly harm another is necessary to save multiple lives).

Kamm believes that diverting the trolley in Judy Thomson's famous original trolley case is permissible. For those unfamiliar with the case, a trolley is barrelling down a track on which five people are tied and will be killed if you do nothing. You can either let the five die, or you can pull a lever and divert the trolley from the track on which the five are trapped onto a side track, on which one person is tied down. If you do the latter, the one on the side track will die. Kamm views this case as one in which you can pull the lever and divert the train merely because it will kill the one (rather than the five), and not in order to kill the one. This is quite plausible, since you surely would also divert the train if the one was not there at all (indeed it would be a much easier decision). Diverting the train need not involve intending any harm at all, and therefore it is permissible on Kamm's view, since more lives would be saved.

But now imagine a variant of the trolley case in which the bystander deciding whether or not to pull the switch knows the one tied down on the side track, and despises him to the point of wanting him dead. He sees that the five will die unless he diverts the trolley, and would prefer that they survive, given that he harbors no hostility toward any of them. He also knows that diverting the trolley would kill the one, and since this is something that he very much wants, he has a strong desire to pull the lever. But as he's deliberating about what to do, he realizes that were he to pull the lever, it would be both his desire to kill the one and his desire to save the five that would be motivating him; and this suggests that in pulling the lever, he would intend to kill the one. His psychology is such that he could not pull the lever without intending to kill the one.

On Kamm's view it would seem that in this case the bystander ought not pull the lever, since in doing so he would intend to kill the one. But this can't be right. The bystander's character is surely defective due to his desire to kill the one, but this fact should not affect what he ought to do, given that the lives of the five are at stake. On Kamm's view, the bystander might, without wrongdoing, say to the five something like "I'm sorry, but I can't pull the lever due to the fact that I despise the person on the side track. If I pulled the lever I'd be intentionally harming him because my psychology is such that I can't pull it without having this intention, and so in order to avoid wrongdoing I must let you die."

This view clearly gives excessive weight to a misguided conception of moral purity, and not nearly enough to the interests of people like the five, whose deaths should not be made morally acceptable as a result of the bystander's irrational desire to kill the one.

New Blog: Go Grue!

2007-03-10T02:00:00.000-08:00

Some of the graduate students in philosophy at the University of Michigan have recently started a group blog, Go Grue!. There is a rather interesting post there on the relationship between political science and political theory, on which I have posted a comment.

As a sidenote, I think it's wonderful that more and more departments are starting up such blogs. Not only do they provide an excellent forum for informal philosophical discussion, including discussion with those that geography would otherwise prevent one from interacting with, but they should help to make blogging a more generally accepted part of philosophy as a discipline. Perhaps those of us at Berkeley should follow Michigan's lead...

Thinking Blogger Award

2007-03-02T21:41:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Richard at Philosophy et Cetera for selecting this site for a "Thinking Blogger Award". Here is the rule regarding selection for this award: If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.

Given that Richard is a much more ambitious blogger than I've been, it is nice to know that he at least enjoys the posts that appear all too intermittently here.

Below are my five selections for the Thinking Blogger Award, though there are many more deserving candidates:

1. Atopian: consequentialist moral and political philosophy as well as some current events from an English philosophy student

2. In Search of Enlightenment: a variety of moral and political thought, everything from bioethics to Marx, from a Canadian professor

3. Moral Health: interesting essays on a variety of ethical issues from a professor at Syracuse

4. Atheist Ethicist: thoughts on ethics, politics, and religion from an incredibly prolific blogger

5. Unified View: ethics, politics, and law from an Oxford law student

More on Cultural Identity as a Status Function

2007-03-01T18:29:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Richard Moreno for his extensive and quite interesting comments on my previous post. The issues he raises are, I think, rather important, so rather than burying my response in the comment thread I'll reply here.

First, he points out that often certain of one's physical characterisics, such as skin color, are taken by others to indicate membership in a particular culture. This, of course, is quite right, but in no way undermines my point that nothing in one's physical constitution itself makes one a member of any culture. Rather, certain physical characteristics are sometimes taken as indicators of membership in groups that themselves only exist because they are represented as existing. In general, I think it is unfortunate that factors such as skin color are often taken to be indicators of cultural membership (even when these assumptions are not accompanied by actual racism), for the reasons that I alluded to in my previous post. These assumptions deny to many, and particularly to non-whites, what Baber calls "the privilege of self-invention."

Richard's next point is that governments might reject the view that I call "multiculturalism", namely that all cultures and cultural practices are intrinsically valuable and ought to be protected for that reason, and instead ground their protection in instrumental considerations, such as that the presence of a particular culture will help facilitate progress. This view, however, is even more problematic than the multiculturalist view that I argued against in my previous post. If exemptions for cultural groups from generally applicable laws are granted only on the basis of instrumental considerations, then governments will inevitably wind up favoring some cultures over others based on officials' views of the social benefits and/or detriments that various cultures are likely to provide to society. Officials might decide that granting an exemption to one culture is warranted because having that culture around is beneficial, while denying the same exemption to another on the basis that its presence is detrimental to society. This sort of favoratism is precisely what governments ought, and too often fail, to avoid.

Richard then says this:

Some may argue, as I do, that multiculturalism can be instrumentally valuable by bringing otherwise unnoticed but fruitful forms of behavior and thinking into a homogenous and static society that is limited in vision and scope. We in the U.S. can sometimes take multiculturalism for granted. For example, I am grateful that I have the choice to eat foods not indigenous to my specific culture. That is, I can enjoy sushi one day and burritos another day. I also, more importantly, have access to 18th century German thought and 17th century French socialist ideas. Indeed, social contract theories imported from Europe laid in part the groundwork for our national constitution!

Now I agree with all of this; but the notion of "multiculturalism" employed by Richard here is very different from the rather narrow notion that I was criticizing. It is extremely valuable that we have a wide variety of cultures and cultural practices in our society. The last thing that I would advocate is a homogeneous society in which everyone follows the same culture; this could only be acheived through totalitarianism! What I object to is not the existence of diversity (this is something that every society should embrace, for reasons that Mill explained in On Liberty, among others), but rather social expectations of conformity to the culture of one's family or community, and especially government reenforcement of such expectations.

Cultural Identity as a Status Function

2007-02-15T18:56:00.000-08:00

There is no question that cultural identity is a status function in Searle's sense. There is nothing in anyone's physical constitution that makes her a member of one culture rather than another. One counts as a member of a particular culture only because she is generally recognized to be a member of that culture. In some cases that general acceptance is at least partially the result of one's self-identification with a particular culture, but in other cases it is the result of nothing more than the social and geographical circumstances of one's birth. One is often counted as a member of a particular culture before one can even understand the concept of a culture, let alone the deontic structures that are associated with the particular cultural identity that is ascribed to her.

It seems to me that having a cultural identity ascribed to one in this way, especially in cases in which the culture takes rigid norms of thought and behavior as obligations of membership (and of course this is true of many, if not most, of the world's cultures), is a significant constraint on individual freedom. I take this to be a reason to oppose multiculturalist views that take all cultures and cultural practices to be intrinsically valuable, and think that governments ought to take steps to preserve cultures and cultural practices that might otherwise die out.

Richard over at Philosophy et Cetera points out in this post (on which I've commented; I encourage readers to read the whole post) that a similar argument has been put forward by H.E. Baber in her forthcoming book The Multicultural Mystique: The Liberal Case Against Diversity. Here is a summary of the core argument (taken from Richard's post):

Multiculturalism restricts individual freedom. Because it renders characteristics that are ascribed and immutable salient and imposes scripts on individuals in virtue of them, it restricts the freedom of individuals to be “treated as individuals.”

No one is completely free to invent himself. There are countless characteristics we have that are ascribed and immutable, including sex, race and ancestry, height, handedness and sexual orientation. The aim of liberals, for whom individual freedom is of paramount importance, is to minimize the extent to which such unchosen characteristics affect the way in which people’s lives go — the way in which they are perceived and treated, the way in which they are supposed to behave, and the range of options open to them. Multiculturalism, because it promotes the salience of race and ancestry, and scripts ethnic identity, is therefore inconsistent with liberalism.

The idea is essentially that multiculturalism involves government in sending a message to individuals that they are supposed to behave according to the norms of the culture into which they are born. And this charge seems apt since multiculturalism takes the preservation of cultures and cultural practices to be intrinsically valuable; how else could cultures survive other than by individuals conforming to their practices?

Baber goes on to claim that multiculturalism is actually disproportionately harmful to minorities, the very people that multiculturalists tend to be most interested in benefiting:

Going native, at least temporarily, has always been an option for privileged white Americans, from anthropologists studying exotic cultures as participant-observers to journalists embedded with native families to report on their doings, and no one ever suggests that those who manage to go native permanently are inauthentic or self-hating. White privilege is the privilege of self-invention. Immigrants and members of ethnic minorities do not have that luxury. Even when they are not locked out of the mainstream by discrimination and economic disadvantage, multiculturalist notions of authenticity, role obligation and group loyalty dog them.

This is, I think, an extremely important point, and one that should convince those inclined toward multiculturalist views to take Baber's critique very seriously.

Richard also points out that Baber highlights what she takes to be a contradiction involved in appeals to "group rights", that is to say, rights that individuals have to be exempted from generally applicable rules in virtue of their membership in a particular group:

On the one hand their supporters made out that their behavior was harmless: a matter of self-expression that had no significant consequences for anyone else. On the other hand supporters claimed that it was specially protected on cultural or religious grounds--in which case it was not a mere matter of self-expression that had no significant consequences for anyone else but had import for other [group members].

Richard concludes his post with this:

By granting a special exemption for Muslim schoolgirls to wear headscarves, we affirm that this is part of what it is to be Muslim. It is a slap in the face to other Muslim women who contest those norms, and who would not accept this as an accurate characterization of their (desired) culture. As Baber quotes Ford, to grant such group rights "would be an intervention in the long-standing debate among [group members] about empowerment strategies and norms of identity and identification... A right to group difference may be experienced as meddlesome at best and oppressive at worst even by some members of the group that the rights regime ostensibly benefits."

So is Baber right in her critique of multiculturalism? Am I right to think that cultural identity as an externally imposed status function is a troubling constraint on individual freedom? Can multiculturalism be defended against these criticisms?

Language and Collective Intention

2007-02-04T21:08:00.000-08:00

On Searle's view multiple persons share a collective intention to do X whenever each individual involved both has an Intentional state with the content "we are doing X" or (in the case of a prior intention) "we intend to do X", and a belief that the others involved have that same Intentional state. He gives the example:

"I see a man pushing a car in the street in an effort to get it started; and I simply start pushing with him. No words are exchanged and there is no convention according to which I push his car."

On Searle's view, so long as both he and the man pushing the car both have the Intentional state "we are pushing the car", and believe that the other has the same Intentional state, then there is collective intentionality. Margaret Gilbert objects to Searle's account because she thinks it is too liberal. She presents the following case, suggesting that Searle is, wrongly, committed to counting it as a case of collective intentionality:

"Suppose that Ben is currently thinking, with respect to himself and Elaine, 'we intend to get married'. Indeed, he expresses himself thus to his parents. Elaine is in a similar position. And each assumes the other would sincerely say the same thing if prompted to do so. If a [collective intention] was a series of correlated we-intentions [that is, intentions with the sort of content described above], and so on, then it would be the case that there was a [collective intention] to get married, the members of the 'we' being Ben and Elaine. But surely the description of the situation so far is not enough to show that they do. If Ben's parents learn that Ben and Elaine have never discussed getting married with one another, they would surely judge Ben's announcement to be inaccurate."

Gilbert argues that there must be some kind of pact or agreement to pursue a common goal in order for there to be collective intentionality. Searle counters this claim by arguing that Gilbert makes the mistake of taking language for granted. Pacts and agreements of the sort that Gilbert thinks are required for collective intentionality require language in order to be made; but the use of language itself [and the development of language as well] requires, according to Searle, antecedently existing collective intentionality. This is a powerful argument, and I am strongly inclined to agree with Searle on this point. But his account is, by his own admission, committed to holding that Ben and Elaine really do have a collective intention to get married in the case that Gilbert describes. I don't have a strong intuition either way about this case, but I suspect that many will be inclined to agree with Gilbert that there is something strange about attributing such a collective intention to Ben and Elaine.

At the same time, I have a strong intuition that Searle is right that in the car pushing case there is collective intentionality (this is another reason, in addition to the language problem, to reject Gilbert's view, which is committed to denying that the two men pushing the car have a collective intention). And it's difficult to see what relevant difference there could be between the car pushing case and the case of Ben and Elaine.

So is Searle right to accept that Ben and Elaine have a collective intention to get married? Or do we need a view that somehow distinguishes this case from Searle's car pushing case? Can Gilbert's view be defended despite the problems that I mention?

The Background and Realism

2007-01-29T10:55:00.000-08:00

Many thanks to Marina Bell for being the first to submit a post for discussion. For those readers who are not my students, I am trying something new this semester with my Philosophy of Society sections. In addition to posting items periodically on the course material myself, I have invited students to submit their thoughts to be posted for discussion on this site. The idea is to provide a forum for online discussion that is accessible both to the students and to anyone else with an interest in the issues, so comments from readers not in my class are welcome, and indeed encouraged.

Here is Marina's post:

I was finishing up chapter 5 of Searle's Intentionality, on the Background and I was extremely taken aback by Searle's sudden swerve into such an absolute commitment to realism. I noticed he tends to argue about things by dismissing them as not even belonging to a certain category, or the matter being something "simply irrelevant". That seemed to hold alright for a lot of things, but when it got to realism was when I started to feel that tingling up my spine that is intense disagreement. I like to agree with realism for the most part, that obviously there are certain aspects of our world that exist whether we are here or not, and yet utter commitment to it as is demonstrated at the end of chapter five seems to me gravely erroneous. To the extent that perspective and approach shapes and affects our world, every individual and every society and every culture's experience with their world is completely different. Reality and the world is not cut and dry, living life and understanding it is about a dynamic relationship between ourselves and our world. This is more easily argued for the perceptual level, but it can in some cases be extended to the physical level as well. As far as realism being an inseparable part of Searle's Background (forgive me if i don't get all this right, much to my dismay I don't have the text in front of me) - I completely disagree. The idea of the Background and the Background didn't exist until Searle came along and wrote about it. Same goes for the network and many other things he designates as being part of the makeup of reality. I'm sure a lot of his readers have just as much of a problem with this absolute realism as well. Could you share some of your thoughts on it and give me some feedback on mine?

Can Mental States Function Causally?

2007-01-27T14:52:00.000-08:00

All non-reductionist accounts of mental states face the problem of explaining how such irreducible mental things can function causally in the physical world. How could it be that, for example, my intention to raise my arm can cause the physical movements involved in my arm going up, if my intention is not identical with some physical state in my brain? Allowing that irreducible mental states can cause physical events requires denying that the physical world is causally closed, and given the successes of modern physics this seems quite implausible. Nevertheless there are some who still want to reject reductionism while maintaining that mental states can cause physical events.

Searle's account of intentionality includes the view that prior intentions (i.e. intentions to do something at a later point in time) can cause actions, which consist of both an intention-in-action (i.e. the experience of trying) and a bodily movement. And since he also thinks that "mental states and events...cannot be reduced to something else or eliminated by some kind of re-definition," it seems that he is committed to denying the causal closure of the physical world.

As part of his attempt to address this issue, Searle asserts that mental states are both "caused by the operations of the brain and realized in the structure of the brain." The picture seems to be that mental states result from, e.g., certain arrangements and firings of neurons in the brain, and are instantiated in certain structural relations of neurons in the brain, without being identical to those neural firings or relations. According to Searle, conceiving of mental states in this way allows us to make sense of their ability to cause both further mental states and physical events in the world (or at least in the brain).

He explains why this is so by presenting an analogy:

"Consider the relation of liquid properties of water to the behavior of the individual [water] molecules...we can say both that the liquid properties of the water are caused by the molecular behavior, and that they are realized in the collection of molecules...the relation between the molecular behavior and the surface physical features of the water is clearly causal. If, for example, we alter the molecular behavior we cause the surface features to change...Furthermore, the surface features themselves function causally. In its liquid state water is wet, it pours, you can drink it...etc...When we describe [water] as liquid we are just describing [the H2O molecules] at a higher level of description than that of the individual molecule...The liquidity is realized in the molecular structure...So if one asked "How can there be a causal relation between the molecular behavior and the liquidity if the same stuff is both liquid and a collection of molecules?", the answer is that there can be causal relations between phenomena at different levels in the very same underlying stuff."

But it's not clear that the analogy gets him what he wants. First, it seems that he hasn't explained sufficiently how the surface features of water, such as its liquidity, function causally. It's true that a substance's being a liquid makes it pourable, drinkable, etc., but it's not clear that it is the liquidity of water that causes it to be pourable, etc. After all, the molecular behavior is what makes it a liquid; there is nothing (or at least we might think that there is nothing) to its liquidity over and above the molecular behavior, so why not think that it is, at bottom, the molecular behavior that causes water to be pourable, etc.? Furthermore, it seems clear that water's liquidity does not cause any further molecular behavior, in the way that Searle claims that mental states can cause further physical (i.e. brain) states.

Now when he says that describing water as liquid is just describing the water molecules at a higher level of description, he seems to concede something to the reductionist position. We could, it seems, talk about the very same liquidity by talking about the behavior of the individual molecules. But now it seems that there really isn't anything to water's liquidity over and above the molecular behavior, and that talking in terms of liquidity rather than in terms of molecular behavior is just a matter of linguistic convenience. We can easily understand the phrase "it's liquid, so it's pourable", but if someone were to say "this molecule is doing X, and that molecule is doing Y, and..., so it's pourable", this would be quite confusing. Similarly, we can easily understand the explanation that someone's raising his arm was caused by an intention that he had to raise his arm, while if I tried to explain someone's raising his arm by citing a bunch of neural arrangements and firings, most people would be utterly confused. But none of this entails that there really is anything to intentions and other mental states over and above neural arrangements and firings. Explanations often require a higher level of description in order to be comprehensible, but the fact that we can give explanations in terms of such higher level descriptions does not undermine the reductionist approach to mental states. Mental states may just be descriptions of physical states at a higher level.

Once More on Free Speech

2006-12-21T22:30:00.000-08:00

I received another comment from a Berkeley campus activist on my recent posts relating to free speech, and so once again I must clarify my views. As before, I have posted the full text of the response as an anonymous comment to this post.

The commenter begins by quoting my claim that "if someone standing on the street corner is saying something that I disagree with, I am perfectly within my legal rights to stand a few feet from him and scream my own views so as to prevent others from hearing him. My claim is simply that doing this, rather than engaging in open, rational debate with him, violates the extra-legal conception of what free speech is supposed to be about that I believe we ought to embrace." He responds to this point by saying:

The problem with this argument is that it assumes your opponent has an interest in engaging in open, rational debate.

Now because I neglected to explicitly explain why my argument relies on no such assumption (indeed this assumption would surely be absurd to rely upon in the case of Jim Gilchrist that I have been using as my example), this is not an unfair point to raise. The reason that my argument need not rely on this assumption is that my claim is not that silencing speakers like Gilchrist in the way that the Columbia students did is wrong because it harms Gilchrist himself by denying him the right to engage in open debate. If this were my claim, then it could indeed be objected that since Gilchrist is not interested in such debate, he was not harmed in the relevant way by being silenced by the students. But any harm done to Gilchrist by the students' actions is irrelevant to my argument; I don't care at all that he suffered some harm by being denied the opportunity to speak, and that harm is no part of the justification of my claim that the students acted wrongly. The harms that I am concerned about are: 1) that done to the state of the immigration debate among the general public; and 2) that done to the movement for immigrants' rights itself. As I pointed out previously, the result of the protest at Columbia was, if anything, an increase in support for the Minutemen and a decrease in support for immigrants' rights groups such as those involved in the protest. It is interesting that neither of my commenters have challenged me on this point; neither has thought it important enough to a defense of the protesters actions that those actions did not have the results that I have claimed. I can only speculate on the basis of my experience with campus activists regarding the reasons for this very significant omission, but it seems to me that underlying the lack of interest in such results is the view held by many activists that those who do not already agree with them must be bad, evil, horrible people who don't care about immigrants anyway. Their holding this view helps us to understand why they don't believe it necessary or useful to engage in debate and discussion, and why they don't see a problem engaging in actions that will have the foreseeable result of increasing hostility toward them among a significant segment of the public, including many who are not inclined to sympathize with the Minutemen.

Now I strongly believe that the overwhelming majority of people are not bad/evil/horrible people who have no interest in social justice and are unwilling to reconsider the views they hold. Of course many people are not as interested in debate and discussion, and not as open to reconsidering their views as they should be, but this does not mean that attempts at rational persuasion are doomed to have no effect at all. The fact that Gilchrist himself is not interested in open debate is irrelevant to whether the students should have debated him anyway, then, because the goal of debating him should not be to change his views (we can assume that this is impossible), but to change the views of those listening who do not yet have a settled position, to motivate inactive immigrants' rights supporters to speak out and get involved, and (just as importantly) to develop debating and critical thinking skills that are necessary to being an effective activist (this point is, I think, entirely lost on many activists). These goals could have been advanced by challenging Gilchrist verbally with tough questions and comments. Respecting the conception of free speech that I have advocated, then, benefits everyone, and when combined with good debating and critical thinking skills, can help to advance the concrete goals of progressive movements much more than tactics like those employed at Columbia (which actually make achieving those concrete goals harder). Instead, the students caused harm to their own movement by taking the actions that they did.

The commenter continues:

[The previous commenter] also notes the insulting and humiliating things done in the name of “free speech,” and you consider this comparison “absurd.” Yet you follow similar (if not the same) arguments as those who defend things like the Danish cartoons in the name of free speech.

Now the first sentence above is either the result of an incredible misunderstanding of what I wrote or else reflects a deliberate misrepresentation of my views (and given the care with which I made this point in my previous post it is difficult not to suspect the latter). The comparison that the previous commenter drew was between the actions of the activists and those of right-wingers who spat at and made death threats to him. He insinuated that my support of free speech suggested that I would support the spitting and death threats, and I pointed out that given the extra-legal conception of free speech that I have consistently argued for, this was beyond absurd. The comparison itself is apt; both the activists' actions and those of the people who spat at and made death threats to the commenter fail to respect the conception of free speech that I support.

I'm not sure why the commenter thinks that the Danish cartoon incident is relevant to this point, but it is interesting in its own right. The idea seems to be that publishing the cartoons was an act relevantly like Jim Gilchrist speaking at Columbia, and so my claim that the activists acted wrongly suggests that I take publishing the cartoons to be a legitimate exercise of free speech. Now my thoughts on the cartoons can be found here, where readers will see that I do indeed think that publishing the cartoons was entirely acceptable from the point of view of free speech. But the commenter seems to take his two sentences above as a reductio ad absurdum of my view; he simply assumes that it's obvious that publishing the cartoons was not legitimate from a free speech perspective. The publication of the cartoons may very well have been motivated by the vilest kind of hatred, and if this is the case, then those who published them are deserving of a great deal of criticism. But none of that means that publishing the cartoons was not a legitimate exercise of free speech, just as the publication of Nazi propaganda is. Such material ought to be vigorously criticized by everyone with a conscience; but it should not be censored.

The commenter then remarks:

...freedom (of speech, in particular) must be regarded in context. Words and statements must be considered actions, and all actions take place situated within a given social context—not in a void. The problem with theorizing things to an abstract degree is that it forgets to take this into account, seeking eternal truth rather than looking at the possibilities of a situation (this is one of the differences between native American philosophy and “western” (if we can generalize very broadly) philosophy—the importance given to contextualizing experience...In the case of the Danish cartoons, these took place within an anti-immigrant, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim environment rising in much of Europe, with draconian anti-immigrant legislation, socio-economic marginalization, and of course, the continued imperial projects (and history) in the Middle East. In such a situation, these cartoons were comparable to “mammies” in the Jim Crow South—ideological tools to justify exploitation and inequality. Similarly, when the Minutemen’s “project” takes place within the context of increasing attacks on immigrants in the US, the construction of a border wall, and militarization of the border and immigration policy in general, this too must be considered.

It's not clear what the commenter takes the significance of the point about context to be. He seems to suggest that conditions of oppression justify types of actions in opposition to that oppression, such as protests like that at Columbia, that would not be justified in the absence of those conditions. Now in some cases it is surely true that features of a context, such as conditions of oppression, justify taking action to fight that oppression that would be unjustified under just social conditions. I have certainly never denied that this is true, and explicitly advocate the view here. But if context matters, then a variety of features within any given context must matter. My commenter takes a shot at me (and at what he calls "western" philosophy) for what he takes to be my oversimplification of the relevant issues, my attempt to lay out an "eternal truth" about free speech rather than examining the context carefully. But it is he who fails to address many relevant features of the context in which the Columbia protest took place, and which feature prominently in my argument. One important fact about what the protesters did was, as I have mentioned previously, that it had the foreseeable effect of alienating a large number of Americans who might otherwise have been sympathetic to pro-immigrants' rights views. When deciding whether to take the course of action that they did, the protesters should have considered this fact about the context in which they would be acting. A central claim that I have been making about the protest is that it was irrational from the perspective of the activists' own goals. Another important contextual element related to the protest is one that Mill highlighted in his writing on free speech. He famously argued that "an opinion that corn dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer." Mill's point is precisely that the context in which speech takes place matters for the purpose of determining whether the speaker can legitimately be silenced. If speech is likely to incite violence, as among an angry mob outside the home of a corn dealer, it becomes more than mere speech, and is a kind of action. But not all speech is action in the relevant sense, as my commenter claims. Jim Gilchrist expressing his despicable views to an auditorium full of mostly hostile students at Columbia is not the same as his expressing those same views to a mob of armed racists on the southern border; the former involves no threat of violence to anyone, while the latter may very well lead to harm to immigrants. Context indeed matters, but not in the way my commenter suggests.

The commenter continues:

You note that our society is such that “a small percentage of wealthy (and mostly conservative) citizens control the means necessary to "scream" the loudest.”
These people DON’T consider the possibility they might be wrong (in contrast to your conception of “free speech as essentially involving the open exchange of ideas between parties who are willing to consider the possibility that they might be wrong”), and in fact have a vested interest in NOT engaging in debate with their detractors. It is the same problem so many leftists have when they try to debate right-wingers—they are either ignored, rebuffed and labeled foolish and not worth the time, or if given time, are subject to the very control you allude to of the media, preventing the kind of ideal, rational debate of issues and positions you would, I assume, promote. How can you then fault those, especially those in socially-, economically-, and politically-marginalized positions, of attempting to use other tactics when these are shown to have failed?

First, as I have said before, the aim of engaging in debate (even if it is of poor quality due to the tactics of those that the commenter mentions who really are not interested in genuinely engaging in open debate) with people like Gilchrist is not to change his mind, but to connect with those who are open to changing their views, who do listen to the arguments on both sides and attempt to come to conclusions supported by reason. This is often difficult, for the reasons that the commenter mentions, but even when not entirely successful, it is at least not positively harmful to progressive movements, as actions like the Columbia protest are. Once again, let me be clear: there ARE times when aggressive civil disobedience is justified; the protest at Columbia simply was not one of those times, and the most important reason that it wasn't is that it did more harm than good in terms of advancing the protesters' own concrete goals.

Finally the commenter states:

You note that “If we say that we'll allow others to speak, so long as they're not racists/homophobes/etc., who is to decide who counts as a racist/etc.? The protesters' answer: they are! And that's nothing but authoritarianism…” This argument is lost on me. It is authoritarian to state someone else is being racist? Is it then also authoritarian then to stand up against racism? Finger-pointing endlessly gets us nowhere, of course, but limiting oneself in the way you lay out is debilitating to anyone fighting against injustice (which, I assume, you are).

It's quite clear from these remarks that the commenter did not follow the link that I provided to my argument for the claim about authoritarianism (again, this can be found here). Of course having not read this argument, it's not surprising that he doesn't understand it. But whatever lack of understanding he may have been suffering from, he couldn't possibly think that my view is that merely calling someone a racist, or standing up against racism, is what I meant to be calling authoritarian. It's obvious that he wasn't seriously posing these questions to me; what he was doing, it seems to me, was attempting to misrepresent my views to his readers (who also probably would not read my original argument for the claim that the protest at Columbia suggests that the activists involved have certain authoritartian tendencies). Of course this may be a case of mere intellectual laziness, rather than intellectual dishonesty, but that would only be slightly less troubling.

Free Speech and the Campus Left Yet Again

2006-12-16T00:36:00.000-08:00

I recently received a comment on my earlier postings about free speech from a longtime campus activist at my home institution, UC-Berkeley (the comment was posted to another site at which my posts are published, but I have copied the full text in the form of an anonymous comment to this post). I will respond in detail to each of the commenter's charges against me.

He begins with this:

It's really too bad, Brian, that you can't distinguish between the right of people to protest and "censorship" ... and more to the point, that you think free speech is more important than the lives of Latino immigrants in the US.

Now I'm not sure exactly what the distinction is that he thinks I'm failing to grasp. I have never claimed that campus activists such as those who were involved in the Minutemen protest that inspired my first post on this issue didn't have the right, in the legal sense, to do what they did. In fact, I have said that Columbia University should not punish the students for the protest, precisely because they violated no law (or University policy, as far as I can tell). My claim has always been that the protesters, though perfectly within their legal rights, acted in a manner that is inconsistent with an extra-legal conception of free speech that I believe is necessary for productive and respectful civil discourse. That conception requires, at minimum, that (at least in certain settings, such as talks on college campuses) we be willing to listen to the views of others with whom we disagree, and respond in the spirit of open debate and discussion. We must conceive free speech as essentially involving the open exchange of ideas between parties who are willing to consider the possibility that they might be wrong (the fact that the Minutemen's views were considered by the protesters, rightly in my view, to be absurd, racist, etc., is irrelevant to this point, just as it would be irrelevant if right-wingers were to claim that there's nothing wrong with preventing communists from speaking because their views are absurd, anti-American, etc.). The purely legal requirements of free speech require nothing more than that we don't physically prevent others from speaking; if someone standing on the street corner is saying something that I disagree with, I am perfectly within my legal rights to stand a few feet from him and scream my own views so as to prevent others from hearing him. My claim is simply that doing this, rather than engaging in open, rational debate with him, violates the extra-legal conception of what free speech is supposed to be about that I believe we ought to embrace. Asserting the right to silence opposing voices by simply screaming louder than them (which is essentially what the students at Columbia did) is a perfectly legal exercise of the "right to protest"; yet it is also a claim of the right to, in effect, censor opposing views, and this runs contrary to the spirit of free speech.

On the incredibly absurd point that I "think free speech is more important than the lives of Latino immigrants," I'll say only that it's absolutely ridiculous to think of the matter as a choice of one or the other, as though allowing the Minutemen to speak at Columbia would result in the deaths of any immigrants. If anything, support for the Minutemen was increased by the actions of the protesters; and surely support for the immigrants rights groups to which the students belong was significantly diminished. What would benefit the immigrants who are being targeted by the Minutemen would be to convince a greater number of people that the Minutemen are in the wrong, and all of the banner waving and chanting in the world will not help to accomplish that goal. If the lives of immigrants really were at stake, as they clearly were not in a lecture hall at Columbia University in Manhattan, of course I would support direct action. In fact, I'd support activists going to the border with their banners and chanting at the Minutemen while they patrol the border, even if no lives were in any immediate danger. The Minutemen certainly do not stand at the border looking to engage in debate and discussion, so protesting them in that manner there would not violate the conception of free speech that I have advocated.

The commenter continues:

As someone who has been spat at, has had death threats made against him, and has had to endure some really insulting and humiliating things in the name of "free speech" it seems more than a little sad, to me, that you have little to say in this note about the fact that the left here is defending the defenseless while you are defending, for the most part (your critique of Cheney notwithstanding), the rights of the powerful and the racist.

If the commenter had read my post on the Columbia incident carefully (and as should be obvious from my remarks above), I would be the first to condemn anyone who spat on or made death threats to him; these are precisely the kinds of actions that fall well outside the scope of the extra-legal conception of free speech that I have advocated. To imply that I would consider such things to be legitimate exercises of free speech is the height of absurdity, and I suspect that the commenter knows that.

He next accuses me of "defending...the rights of the powerful and the racist," while the [protesters] were "defending the defenseless." But, of course, if we don't affirm the rights of racists, fear-mongers, and others whose views we rightly despise, we can't affirm our own rights either. If we say that we'll allow others to speak, so long as they're not racists/homophobes/etc., who is to decide who counts as a racist/etc.? The protesters' answer: they are! And that's nothing but authoritarianism, as I point out here. Indeed, if we look carefully at what the commenter says on behalf of the protesters, it amounts to nothing more than "our views are right, and the Minutemen's views are wrong; therefore it's OK for us to prevent them from speaking." But given that the Minutemen disagree, they could make the same argument for shutting down a pro-immigrants rights speaking event by force. And this is the problem with conceiving of free speech as nothing more than a screaming contest; the result is that the only people who get heard are those with the loudest voices, and most of the time these are not people who present rational, well-thought out arguments for their views. Furthermore, in a society like ours in which a small percentage of wealthy (and mostly conservative) citizens control the means necessary to "scream" the loudest, it is hopelessly self-defeating for the left to conceive of free speech in this manner. Our only "victories" in such screaming matches will be at these isolated events on elite university campuses; and these supposed victories are hollow anyway.

Finally, a tried and true classic of the anti-intellectual left:

It seems to me that you have the luxury of not suffering the attacks while criticizing those of us who have to endure them with (dare I say it) a kind of academic (even when peppered with quotes from Voltaire) luxury...It's too bad that you think that the free exchange of ideas happens in a liberal fantasy land and not in the real world where immigrants die trying to cross the border.

So, while he's on the frontlines fighting the battles against the evil ones (read: everyone who disagrees with him), I'm off in an academic fantasy world, too disconnected from the reality on the ground to say anything that is, for those like him, worth listening to. I don't understand why tactics like those employed at Columbia are necessary, because I spend too much time lost in theoretical debates. It's no coincidence that this argument is of exactly the same form as that used by torture apologists like Bill O'Reilly, who claims that those who oppose the U.S. using torture on terror suspects simply don't understand the realities of the so-called "war on terror". The point of this style of argument is to silence debate by claiming that one's opponent is not qualified to say anything about the issue at hand, and when that claim of non-qualification is based on the claim that the person in question spends too much time thinking about the relevant issue, I don't think there's much that needs to be said by way of rebuttal. This is not to deny that getting out in the world and directly involving oneself in the issues about which one writes is valuable; it surely is, and I wish more academics would do so. But to reject the views of academics simply because they're academics (and not, say, activists), shows the kind of hostility that exists toward careful, deliberative thinking about important issues among a segment of the campus left (though, of course, this hostility pales in comparison to that which exists among a large segment of the American right).

Attacks on Free Speech from the Left and Right

2006-12-01T22:33:00.000-08:00

I've posted previously about the lack of respect for free speech among a segment of the American left that is found mainly on college campuses. Here is yet another example of campus leftists attempting to silence those with whom they disagree by force, rather than engaging in open debate and discussion.

Much scarier are the words of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who in a recent speech (audio here) said of the so-called War on Terror that,

"This is a serious long term war and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country, it will lead us to close down every website that is dangerous."

Despite the disturbing trends toward censorship (or at least attempted censorship) on both sides of the political spectrum, there are still some who recognize both the importance of preserving the free and open exchange of ideas, even bad ones (as Mill rightly pointed out in his classic On Liberty), and the threat to whatever free and open discussion we ever had that we currently face from Gingrich and others like him who would use the threat of terrorism to undermine perhaps the most important principle that sets us apart from the people we're supposed to be fighting. Keith Olbermann has some apt thoughts here.

Bring the Troops Home Now?

2006-11-09T21:21:00.000-08:00

Now that the Democrats have won control of Congress, and Rumsfeld has been replaced, it seems that at least some of those who have been so reluctant to say anything sensible about the Iraq fiasco, lest they be accused of lack of patriotism by the Sean Hannittys of the world, finally feel comfortable enough to state the obvious.

On his show tonight Chris Matthews said something like the following about what is likely to happen with respect to Iraq: divided government combined with public anger over the war will force Bush and the Republicans to compromise with the newly elected Democrats. This means that rather than "stay the course," the two parties will likely agree to some kind of gradual withdrawal over the course of the next year or two.

The absurdity of this compromise, Matthews points out, is that it's incredibly unlikely that the American presence will accomplish anything meaningful during that year or two. Even if we assume (what is almost surely false) that one of the actual goals of those who led us to war was to establish a functioning democracy in Iraq, acheiving that goal would surely take decades, if it could be acheived at all (and even if it could, there's still the further point that the lives lost and devastation to Iraq that would be required almost surely wouldn't be worth the end result). The only meaningful difference between a gradual withdrawal and an immediate one is that in the former case more American soldiers will die while we remain there, and more Iraqis will die at the hands of American soldiers. And, of course, those in Washington surely know this.

So why in the world would they agree to such a pointless, indeed quite harmful plan. The answer, of course, is politics, and the blame will lie mainly with the Democrats. They won't push for immediate withdrawal because they're afraid of being labeled "weak," or as supporting a "cut and run" policy. The threat of being demonized by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter will prevent the newly elected majority party from standing up for what's right, and will get more Americans and Iraqis alike killed for no good reason. All this despite the fact that when asked what we should do in Iraq, the plurality of Americans, 32%, believe that we should withdraw all the troops immediately, and another 28% believe that we should begin a gradual withdrawal (though I wonder how much of that 28% would join the 32% if presented with the above argument).

I suppose on issues other than Iraq we can at least take comfort in the fact that the country will, come January, be moving in the wrong direction at a slightly slower pace. Let's hope we manage to leave Iraq more quickly than that.

The Right and the Religious

2006-10-11T18:03:00.000-07:00

Surprise, surprise, the Bush Administration and higher-ups in the Republican Party have been using the Religious Right for votes while ridiculing them behind the scenes. So says David Kuo, the former #2 man in Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, in his soon to be released book entitled Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.

Kuo descibes the OFBI as an office that was "used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities," rather than doing what it was supposedly created to do, namely "providing financial support to charities that serve the poor."

In addition, Kuo says that "some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts,” and that “national Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy.’”

Interestingly, these remarks suggest that Rove and others in the Administration might be slightly closer to sanity than their public remarks might have led us to believe (that is, if we were naive enough to take them at face value). It will be interesting to see if evangelicals react to these revelations (as well as to those surrounding Congressmen Foley, Hastert, Reynolds, and others) by staying home on election day, or if they continue to maintain the same blind faith in the Republicans as they have in their deity.

Free Speech and the Campus Left

2006-10-10T22:57:00.000-07:00

Here is my latest post at Law and Society, a comment on the recent Minutemen protest at Columbia University (text below).

I have long been critical of the tactics that are sometimes employed by left-wing activists on college campuses, and also of the kind of thinking (or perhaps more accurately not thinking) that tends to motivate the use of such tactics. This criticism has earned me much scorn from members of the campus left, and the ways in which activists tend to respond to the most general aspects of my critique make me think that the most vocal advocates of what I think are often (though certainly not always; I have plenty of political disagreements with much of the campus left, and in particular with the most radical elements thereof) importantly correct policy views are not only failing to advance their cause, but actually doing significant harm to it. This concern is especially serious in cases in which the organized activities of leftist groups clearly violate principles that they claim to to defend, such as free speech. These actions accomplish nothing except providing the right with ammunition with which to attack the activists, members of the left generally, and thereby (at least in the minds of many who hear the attacks) the ideas for which the activists stand (or at least claim to).

Last Wednesday the College Republicans at Columbia University organized an event that included a speech by Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman project. Minutes into Gilchrist’s speech, a number of left-wing students stormed the stage, halting the speech and forcing Gilchrist to exit the auditorium out the back door (video here). The students opened banners with slogans painted on them and chanted loudly, turning what was supposed to be a provocative speech by a controversial individual into a chaotic scene in which no discussion was possible at all.

This is yet another example of activists on the left engaging in actions that stifle reasoned debate, rather than fostering it. And this only hurts their chances of having a genuine political impact. It allows right-wing pundits to characterize them as dogmatic ideologues, unwilling to listen to opposing points of view or even to allow those points of view to be heard at all. And in at least some cases, this characterization is basically accurate. Some pundits also accused the students of taking the action that they did because they are incapable of winning a debate on the issues. This characterization is also basically accurate, at least with respect to many of the students who engage in the kind of actions that occured at Columbia. It is not accurate for the reasons that conservative pundits think, namely that the Minutemen are actually in the right. It is accurate only because so many campus activists have little or no interest in developing the skills necessary to engage in reasoned debate. This in turn has to do with a conception of politics that has become common to many left-wing campus activists and many right-wing political operatives. This conception involves the view that reasoned debate has no legitimate role to play in the political process; for right-wingers this view arises out of the view that political legitmacy is nothing more than the ability to exercise power (see here and here), while for those on the left it arises out of the view that there are no correct answers to normative political questions, just the equally valid opinions of individuals. This skepticism about objectively correct answers to normative questions in turn arises from a more general skepticism about reason and rationality. And this skepticism leads not just to the conclusion that reasoned debate has no role to play in politics, but that there is nothing that could even constitute reasoned debate (I’m still amazed how often left-wing campus activists simply accept this conclusion when I press them on these points; this really seems to be what many of them think).

With reasoned debate out the window as a means of advancing their cause, activists often choose to adopt tactics such as those used at Columbia. Of course these tactics seem to clearly undermine free speech, a value which these same activists often claim to defend. On Bill O’Reilly’s show last night Democratic strategist Kirsten Powers (with whom I often disagree) made the perceptive point that the students who rushed the stage at Columbia simply don’t understand what free speech is: “Free speech means that sometimes you have to hear things that offend you”, she said. This is an extremely important point, and one that many on both the left and the right tend to lose sight of. For example, here is a bit of what the students said in defense of their actions:

Fascist scapegoating is not up for academic discussion. Like Hitler in pre-Nazi Germany, Gilchrist and the Minutemen attempt to demonize foreign-born poor people, blaming “illegals” for society’s problems. His group doesn’t present reasoned debate. It spouts racism and hatred, aiming to divide people against one another.

This statement seems to me not entirely false. There are at least racist elements within the Minutemen, and even the comparison to Nazi race-baiting may be apt, at least in some sense. But to call a group ‘fascist’ without explaining what the term means is already to leave the realm of rational discourse; it is mere name-calling, designed to cut off rather than foster debate. More importantly, the students seem to mean their claim that the Minutemen “don’t present reasoned debate” as a criticism; but surely what they did strays even further from reasoned debate than the speeches of Gilchrist and the other Minutemen. If engaging in reasoned debate is the way to address political disagreements, then why not respond to Gilchrist by asking tough questions and presenting arguments against his views, rather than calling him names and eliminating the possibility of any debate at all?

We are sure that if the Nazi party held a public meeting on campus, Jewish groups would be there to challenge them-so would we. We are sure that if the Ku Klux Klan held a public meeting on campus, African American groups would be there to challenge them-so would we. The Minutemen are no different.

Of course individuals and groups have the right to, and indeed should, attend such events and register their dissent from the views being put forward by Nazis and Klan members, just as it would have been perfectly appropriate for students opposed to the Minutemen to attend the event at Columbia in order to register their dissent. But the relevant issue is how to do this in a way that both respects important principles like free speech and will be effective in combating the views of such groups. Holding signs, wearing T-shirts with slogans, passing out fliers, asking tough questions and making arguments against the views of the Minutemen are all perfectly appropriate ways that the students might have made their views known. But even racists, Nazis, and Klan members have the right to free speech, and silencing them in the way that the students did only harms their cause, as well as perversely providing legitimacy to those on the right who use different but equally repugnant means of silencing those with whom they disagree (e.g. communists, atheists, anarchists, etc.).

This is not an issue of free speech. The Minutemen were able to reserve a hall at our university and had the protection of campus security and the NYPD-all to espouse their hate speech. We along with hundreds of others expressed our right to speak and protest.

The students fail to see that this is an issue of free speech because, as Powers said, they do not understand what free speech means. Free speech means that people can say hateful and offensive things (and of course others can, and should, respond by denouncing those statements). The students’ claim seems to be that all that they did was exercise their right to speak, and that since they spoke louder they were able to drown out the message of the Minutemen. But this view assumes a conception of free speech in which everyone simply attempts to drown out opposing views, rather than engaging with them and responding with arguments (that is, engaging in reasoned debate). This not only a deeply troubling conception of free speech, but it is a conception that, as a general matter, surely favors the right and not the left, despite the isolated cases on elite campuses in which leftist students can do what was done at Columbia.

Metapolitics Go-Meme

2006-09-25T21:05:00.000-07:00

Richard over at Philosophy, et cetera asks bloggers to locate their views on the scales below in this post.

How should politics be conducted? I’ve marked in my positions on the 7-point scales below. To participate yourself, simply copy this entire post (including links), and mark your choices accordingly before posting it to your own blog.

A rather brief explanation of my views on each issue follows my responses.

a) Liberalism - - - X - - - Radicalism (4/7)

Do the ends justify the means? Procedural liberals insist on the primacy of fair play and democratic process. Radicals care less about method, and more about getting the desired result.

b) Rationalism - X - -- - - Subjectivism (2/7)

Is there ever a “right answer” to political questions? Rationalists think that reasoned debate could, ideally, lead to consensus about the common good. Subjectivists see politics as a mere contest of wills, all rhetoric and power plays, where the goal is simply to have your individual preferences win through.

c) Direct - - - X- - - Representative Democracy (4/7)

Should power rest more with citizens or elected representatives?

d) Aggregation - - - - X - - Deliberation (5/7)

Should political decisions be reached by simply aggregating individuals’ prior preferences, or by submitting reasons for deliberation and critical scrutiny?

e) Federalist - - - X - - - Globalist (4/7)

What’s the most appropriate level for political decisions? Federalists favour local-level decision-making (which may vary across localities), in contrast to Globalists.

f) Libertarian - X - - - - - Authoritarian (2/7)

How much discretionary power should be allowed in politics? Libertarians favour greater (e.g. constitutional) constraints on the exercise of political power. Authoritarians (may include populists and paternalists) are the opposite.

g) Economic Left X - - - - - - Right (1/7)

How favorably do you view redistributive taxation and other typically “Left-wing” economic policies?

Track List:
1. Philosophy, et cetera
2. Kiwi Pundit
3. GeniusNZ
4. Blargh Blog
5. Crosswords and Puzzles
6. Philosophy From the Left Coast
7. [Add link to your blog here]

On Liberalism vs. Radicalism: While there is much appeal in the liberal view that all political goals should be pursued through the democratic process, it seems to me that this can only be an absolute constraint in societies in which the existing institutional processes are themselves entirely fair. Among societies that count as broadly democratic, some will be more and some less democratic, and those that are less so will, I think, be ones in which at least some radical activism will be justified. This will especially be true if the existing processes are unfair AND it would be impossible to bring about fair (or at least fairer) processes by way of the existing unfair ones. No matter what the existing state of affairs with respect to institutional processes is, we cannot be entirely prohibited from pursuing better processes, and certainly not because we are bound by the inferior processes.

On Rationalism vs. Subjectivism: I certainly think that there are "right" answers to normative political questions. When I speak of a policy being unjust, I certainly mean something more than that I happen to dislike it. The view that there is, and can be, nothing more to politics than struggles between (what must be nothing more than arbitrary) wills, is one of the most dangerous implications of the postmodern denial of objectivity. Most of our actual political debate in the United States seems to proceed on the assumption that politics is nothing more than such a contest (hence my position of 2, rather than 1), but this is a contingent fact about our society, and not a necessary truth about how political debate must be approached.

On Direct vs. Representative Democracy: A significant degree of representative democracy is clearly a necessity in societies as large as contemporary western democracies. We can't all participate in votes on every matter of social or political importance. I do think, however, that the public should play (or at least have the option to play) a more direct role on at least some issues. I support policies which make it relatively simple (say, by collecting a relatively modest number of signatures) for the public, or concerned members thereof, to place issues on state ballots to be voted on by everyone, including laws that have been passed by the legislature (referendum), and to recall elected officials (though not appointed ones).

On Aggregation vs. Deliberation: Deliberation about political issues cannot be endless, otherwise nothing would ever get accomplished, but people's minds can change after seeing the preferences of others and thinking about the relevant issues more deeply, and those changes ought to be taken into account in some way during political decision-making processes.

On Federalism vs. Globalism: Practical issues, ranging from the necessity of local jurisdiction for enforcement purposes to contingent problems associated with social and cultural differences, and the hostilities that often arise therefrom, require that a good deal of decision making be done at the local level. I think that it's extremely important, however, that all political decisions are made with a keen global awareness, and I also think that decisions should be made within some sort of loosely and perhaps even informally organized global structure whenever possible.

On Libertarianism vs. Authoritarianism: History has taught us (or at least it should have) that we ought to be extremely skeptical of government officials who seek to greatly expand the powers of their offices, no matter what side of the political spectrum they fall on. Protections of individual rights such as freedom of speech (and expression more broadly), religion, press, etc. ought to be all but absolute, as should protections against warrantless searches and detention without charges and access to counsel (a point that can't be made strongly enough these days).

On Economic Left vs. Economic Right: The points I made directly above about Libertarianism don't, I think, support economic libertarianism, because the free market requires government support (though perhaps slightly less direct government action) just as economic policies other than free market ones do. Furthermore, in theorizing (though perhaps not in all practical thinking) about distributive justice, equality should be the default position, however unequal the actually prevailing distribution of wealth happens to be. Any departures from equality must be justified in light of the assumption of equality as the default position. Even given this criterion, some inequality may be justified, though I suspect not all that much.

BBC Survey on Trolley Cases

2006-09-22T19:16:00.000-07:00

I recently came across this article, in which readers are asked to respond to four trolley-type cases taken from philosophical work. Close to 20,000 people have responded to each of the four cases, and the results are not particularly surprising. It's nice to see a news organization like the BBC exposing its readers to the ethical issues raised by these kinds of cases; I do wish, however, that the cases had been chosen more carefully, so that readers might begin to think about potential inconsistencies in their intuitive reactions to such cases (perhaps juxtaposing the moral issues raised by the ordinary event of receiving an envelope from OXFAM with the issues raised by Unger's Bugatti case).

Mourning the Victims of 9/11

2006-09-19T00:34:00.000-07:00

My latest at Law and Society, a response to Alex's comment on my previous post (text below).

Given Hanno’s recent post, it is particularly appropriate to examine the question to what extent we ought to mourn the victims of the 9/11 attacks, relative to those who die from many of the causes mentioned in the chart in Hanno’s post.

In response to this post of mine on the anniversity of the 9/11 attacks, Alex Gregory of Atopian commented that I seemed to be writing as though the lives of the 9/11 victims mattered more than the lives of others who have died from other more common causes (e.g. cancer, car accidents). In order to do justice to Alex’s remarks, I’ll quote him in full:

Sometimes academic discussion about these things can seem alienated and innapropriate, and I certainly don’t mean to downplay the idea that many people did lose their lives, which is certainly a very bad thing.

However, with those two caveats noted, I have the impression that you’re a consequentialist kind of person. If that is the case, then why do you mourn these people more than the greater number who have died from cancer, or heart disease, or car accidents, and so on?

That, as I say, is not to say that 9/11 wasn’t a very bad event. It’s just that what was bad about it is surely the badness /for those people who lost their lives/ (and those who thereby lost a loved one). But equally, there are more people who experience equal badness from other causes. Why the disproportionality?

First, Alex is right that my views in ethics are broadly consequentialist in character. Furthermore, it seems clear enough that one need not even be a consequentialist in order to think that, all else equal, every death is equally morally bad, regardless of its cause. The deaths of those on 9/11, tragic as they surely were, were in themselves no worse than many other deaths. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is at least some reason to think that those deaths deserve more of our attention than at least some other deaths, for example deaths resulting from car accidents, not because the deaths are in themselves worse, but because their cause differs from other causes in certain important ways (I will not deal with deaths from cancer in this post, because it is, I think, a much more difficult and complex case than that of car accident deaths).

In some sense we as a society choose to subject ourselves to a certain amount of risk when we allow people to drive, and we as individuals subject ourselves to a certain amount of risk every time we get in a car. We know that so long as people are driving in the numbers that they do, a certain number of people will die as a result of car accidents. We can do much to mitigate the risks (e.g. build safer cars, strictly enforce drunk driving laws, etc.), and we should certainly do all these things unless the costs are prohibitive, but we cannot eliminate the risks entirely. We accept this risk because the benefits that the overwhelming majority of us obtain from being able to get to where we need to go by driving outweigh the very high costs that wind up being imposed on the unfortunate victims of car crashes (and, of course, their loved ones). Given the severe costs suffered by those unlucky individuals, the only justification for allowing anyone to drive at all is that such a policy provides smaller benefits to a much greater number of people, enough to outweigh the costs. This requires that we accept that, at least in some way and to some extent, benefits can be aggregated across persons and weighed (this sort of case is a significant problem for those, like Scanlon, who reject aggregation entirely, and want all justification of actions and policies to be individualistic). The cause of the deaths that occur in car accidents, then, tragic as those deaths surely are, is one that society plans for and accepts as the cost of allowing the majority the benefits provided by driving.

The cause of the deaths on 9/11, on the other hand, was not a danger that our society chose to subject itself to in order to gain benefits. Some might argue that the danger should be considered at least foreseen as a result of our government’s policies in the Middle East, and that therefore the risk was imposed on us by our government. First, this would not make the case exactly analogous to the driving case, since the 9/11 attacks required deliberate action on the part of agents that was surely not justified, no matter how unjust we think U.S. Middle East policy is (and surely it is unjust). Second, even if our government did impose foreseeable risks on us, and failed to do all they could to protect us from those risks, and even if most of us do gain some benefits as a result of U.S. Middle East policy (e.g. cheaper gas), many of us think that we should not be pursuing those benefits or taking on the associated risks at all (we might think this for purely prudential reasons, or for moral reasons; it does not matter for my purposes). But I doubt that very many people think that we should disallow driving entirely in order to avoid any deaths from car accidents (though we should, I think, endorse a significant reduction in driving for environmental and economic reasons).

Because of this difference in the cause of the two types of deaths, I think it is much more important, as a political and social matter, to remind ourselves of the deaths on 9/11, and to have a public debate over how to prevent further such deaths, than it is to remind ourselves of the deaths of car accident victims. This is not because the lives of the 9/11 victims mattered more; surely they did not. But the need to avoid further such deaths in the future is great, while there is no such need to avoid future deaths from car accidents (it would be wonderful if we could, but we can’t without giving up the ability to drive).

Finally, let me acknowledge a significant omission in my original post to which Alex responded. I mentioned the deaths of those who died in the World Trade Center, but neglected to mention the now greater number of American soldiers that have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the much greater number of Iraqi and Afghani civilians who have died as a result of our nation’s military actions in those countries. Their deaths fall into the same category as those who died on 9/11 (at the very least all those who have died in Iraq fall into this category, for surely neither we in the U.S. nor the Iraqis are better off as a result of the war there), and deserved to be mentioned right along side them.

Reflections on the Anniversary of 9/11

2006-09-11T18:34:00.000-07:00

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, and so it seems appropriate to reflect a bit, along with a number of other bloggers, on the significance of that terrible day and, just as importantly, the often terrible things that our leaders have attempted to justify by pointing to it. Brian Leiter has posted some thoughts on the "political and psychological ramifications" of the attacks here, as well as a more personal reflection on the 11th here. Both are well worth reading. For my part, I will not attempt to separate the personal from the political; for me, many of the political outrages stemming from 9/11 are personal (though of course not to the extent that they are for many of those who have really suffered as a result of the co-opting of the 11th for political purposes, e.g. Cindy Sheehan).

I was in Manhattan on that Tuesday morning, having moved to New York from Cleveland not three weeks earlier to begin my freshman year at NYU. The day began like any other; I struggled to get out of bed for my 9:30 political philosophy class, gathered up my notebook and my copy of Plato's Republic, and headed across the street to what was then simply called Main Building (since renamed Silver Center). Before getting to class I was told, I cannot recall by whom, that the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane. At that point it was thought to have been an accident, according to those with whom I spoke, and despite the fact that the second tower was hit almost half an hour prior to the start of my class, no one there seemed to know that more than one plane had been involved, or that the crash was deliberate. After being told by the professor about the one plane that we already knew about, and informed that class would go on as scheduled, we listened to his lecture on Plato, the mood of the classroom one of moderate confusion and only slight anxiety. No one had any idea that the towers were only minutes away from ceasing to exist, or that 2,752 people were about to lose their lives. And none of us could be prepared for the scene on the streets around Washington Square Park that we would encounter once class let out.

I was a naive freshman from Ohio, and was still adjusting to life in Manhattan, but even I could tell immediately upon stepping outside Main Building around 10:45 that morning that something was terribly wrong. One of the first things I learned about the city was that the streets are never quiet, and this is particularly true around Washington Square. But that morning all of Greenwich Village was silent, save the car radios that people were huddled around, trying to comprehend what was happening. The towers had both collapsed during that Plato lecture that I now remember absolutely nothing about, and once outside, paralyzed by the silence, I could only listen to the nearest radio and attempt to piece together what had happened.

I don't remember moving from the street in front of Main Building back to my dorm room, but it was only once I was there that I learned that both towers had collapsed. I watched CNN's coverage in horror, though looking back I realize that it was only days, perhaps weeks later that I really (I won't say fully) appreciated what happened on the 11th. At some point not too long after I got back to my room (the time is all a blur at this point) I spoke to my mother on the phone; I can't recall if she called me or if I called home. Like any parent with a child at NYU, she was anxious to hear that I was safe. I can only imagine what it must have been like for the loved ones of those who were actually in the towers, especially since it became difficult to get through at all to New York numbers.

In the weeks after the towers fell the freshman class at NYU shrunk significantly. Parents who had just weeks earlier sent their children to Manhattan from Nebraska, Montana, and my own home state of Ohio (among many other places) to get a world-class education in one of the greatest cities on the planet, were bringing their children back home out of fear that the terror of the 11th might reoccur in the city. Meanwhile, upperclassmen living in NYU's Water Street dorm building, located in the financial district, were forced to move into uptown hotels for the remainder of the fall semester. The following year I moved into that same building, and on September 11th, 2002, I walked the less than five minutes from my apartment to where the Trade Center had once stood, and attempted to make sense not only of the horror that had been visited on that site one year earlier, but of what that event was doing to our nation.

Though it is clear that the Bush Administration, and in particular Cheney and Rumsfeld, were intent on using 9/11 as a pretext to go to war with Iraq almost from the moment the planes hit the towers, the massive public drumbeat for that war began in earnest sometime around that one year anniversary. And that drumbeat period clearly highlighted one of the most significant problems (among a great many) with our two-party duopoly, the severity of which was greatly increased by post-9/11 hysteria: the so-called opposition party is afraid to oppose anything that the ruling party proposes if doing so might be politically difficult (i.e. if opposition might require explaining to the public why such opposition is necessary). The Democrats, and liberals generally, allowed the war-mongers and their lackeys at Fox News to define the terms of the debate over Iraq, and instead of taking them on, explaining why going to war would be wrong, exposing the manipulations and distortions of evidence, and listening to those who actually knew something about the so-called threat from Iraq, they largely went along with the fear-mongering, saying only things like "we should give the inspectors more time" (which of course in itself was quite a good suggestion; if the inspectors were given more time, we would have found out that Iraq had no WMD's, and the main argument used by the right to convince the public that invading Iraq was necessary would have been undermined). And ultimately, almost none of the big names in the Democratic Party, not Kerry or Edwards, not Hillary or Biden, not Daschle or Cleland, not Feinstein or Harkin, not Reid or Schumer, had the courage to vote against authorizing the war. So, for fear of being called soft on terrorism, these supposed leaders of the opposition party allowed themselves to become complicit in a war that has surely created more terrorists than it has killed. To this day, many Democrats criticize only the execution of the war, rather than the decision to go to war in the first place. It's often said that hindsight is 20/20; if that's true, then what war are these Democrats looking back upon?

With the Democrats unwilling to stand up to the neocons' on Iraq, or on much of anything else for that matter, anti-war Americans were justifiably frustrated with the state of American politics. When the Republicans cynically decided to hold their 2004 convention in New York City, in yet one more attempt to use 9/11 for political gain, thousands of us took to the streets in protest. We were kept blocks away from the convention site itself by road blocks and seemingly boundless seas of police and other security forces, whose job was to insulate our almost-elected President from the people he is supposed to represent. Over 1,800 of those who dared to protest the political ploy that was the '04 convention and the illegal war embarked upon by the party holding it were arrested, almost all on trumped up charges. In attempts to make some of these false charges stick, the police lied and manipulated evidence; still, over 90% of the cases related to convention protests resulted in dismissals or acquittals (it seems that our judicial system, despite its many significant problems, is not yet as corrupted as our police forces).

I was fortunate enough not to be arrested at the convention protests, though not all of my fellow NYU students were so lucky. In the 1960's it was students at my current home institution of UC-Berkeley that led the movement for free speech in America, and they won significant victories. In 2004, however, those victories were under a clear threat from an Administration intent on crushing dissent by almost any means necessary. Their favorite and most effective tactic was, and is, attempting to link dissent with support for the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. If you're not with Bush, you're with the terrorists. In the eyes of the Administration, and the police in New York City, every protestor at the convention was just another potential terrorist, and to them and their supporters this meant that protestors could be denied their right to free speech in the name of protecting national security.

The willingness of so many Americans to accept the narrowing of our fundamental rights in the name of fighting terrorism, and the meager opposition to that narrowing by the Democrats, has left us moving slowly but surely (and perhaps not all that slowly) in the direction of authoritarianism. Our phones are being tapped without warrants (not that the legally required warrants are much of a safeguard against unnecessary invasions of privacy; but at least it's something); our personal records are being given to the government by corporations; American citizens are being held indefinitely without charges; and foreign citizens are being held without even being granted access to a lawyer. And, with tactics reminiscent of both the McCarthy and Vietnam eras, the Pentagon sent spies to student organized protests of military recruiters at both UC-Santa Cruz and my own campus in Berkeley (the Santa-Cruz protest was even listed in the Pentagon database as a "credible threat"; what or whom exactly the students were a threat to I haven't the slightest idea). When news of the secret program to spy on student organizers came to light, the students involved in the protests at both universities, with help from the ACLU, filed a Freedom of Information Act Request in order to obtain documents related to the two protests. After a long legal battle and much stalling on the part of the government, my friends at Berkeley and the others who were spied on by the Pentagon for doing nothing more than exercising their right to free speech finally got to see portions of the documents generated by those sent to observe for the Pentagon (much of the text was, of course, redacted).

The government abuses that I have discussed are merely the ones that have most directly impacted my own life, and only scratch the surface of what has taken place in America in the wake of 9/11. Our so-called President tells us that we must do everything we can to fight terrorism because "civilization itself is at stake". Meanwhile, his Administration has systematically attempted to weaken many of the very freedoms that he claims we are fighting for. They tell us that we must surrender our rights in order to be safe from terrorism, and then involve us in a war that is creating more terrorists by the day. And since the debacle in Iraq has had this effect, it seems that, if the initial post 9/11 claim that we must sacrifice liberty for security were valid, then they will have further reason to claim that we must give up yet more of our rights in the future, since the threat of terrorism is likely increasing. The end result of this hopeless chain of reasoning is that the ever-increasing threat of terrorism, in large part brought on by those in power, requires us to give up nearly all of what made American civilization worth fighting for to begin with. If we accept this, then we will have let our leaders take away our freedoms in order to protect us from a threat that they are largely responsible for. Civilization is indeed at stake in the so-called war on terror. The trouble is, the threat comes not only from the terrorists, but from those who claim to be fighting them.

Democracy and Civil Disobedience

2006-09-05T01:01:00.000-07:00

After a blogging hiatus that was much longer than I had planned, here is my latest post at Law and Society (text below). My blogging pace may continue to be slower than I'd like (I'm currently teaching for a course, taking three, and sitting in on two others), though I will do my best to post reasonably often.

In this post over at Philosophy, et cetera Richard Chappell suggets that in liberal democratic societies civil disobedience may never be morally acceptable. He says of radical activists (including those involved in the actions described here, whose tactics seem to have played a role in motivating his post):

These dogmatists feel so assured of the infallibility of their moral opinions that they’re willing to coercively impose them on others. This implies a startling disrespect for one’s fellow citizens. If you’re really in the moral right, then you ought to be able to persuade your fellow citizens of this, and hence get the needed reforms implemented through legitimate democratic processes. Hence, if you can’t succeed democratically, perhaps it’s just as well…

Now surely Richard is right that many radical activists are excessively self-assured in their views, and tend to be unwilling to seriously and honestly consider the possibility that they might be wrong (I discuss some reasons why this might be the case, in particular among student activists, in my very first post on my blog). And it seems reasonable to think that the activists involved in the animal rights action described in the above link fall into this category; let me be clear that I strongly disapprove of their tactics, given the totality of the circumstances surrounding their actions, despite the fact that I tend to agree with their motivating belief that nonhuman animals’ suffering ought to be given much more weight than it currently is in our society’s moral consciousness.

But it seems also to be the case that even in societies that can reasonably be considered democratic, it is false that, “If you’re really in the moral right, then you ought to be able to persuade your fellow citizens of this.” Just as radical activists tend to have an inflated degree of confidence in their views, so the general public tends to have an inflated degree of confidence in prevailing views on the very same moral issues that motivate radical activism (and others besides). Indeed, radical activists are often motivated to engage in civil disobedience out of (often legitimate) frustration with attempts to convince others of the importance of their cause. Animal rights activists, for example, are often portrayed by the media as out of control vigilantes (the above link shows that this characterization isn’t always wrong), even though most surely aren’t, and this is one reason that most Americans tend to be not just uninterested, but hostile to animal rights claims, despite the fact that the arguments in favor of greater moral consideration for animals are quite strong. The strength of the arguments for a cause, at least in some cases, does not mean that there is much chance that the public can be convinced that the cause is just.

Of course the fact that a cause is just, along with the fact that the public cannot be convinced of this, does not necessarily mean that advocacy of the cause through civil disobedience is morally acceptable. In many cases, including the above animal rights case, civil disobedience will be counterproductive, at least in the long run (for example, these tactics make it even less likely that the public at large will take seriously the case for animal rights). In other cases the injustice is simply not serious enough to justify attempting to rectify it outside the democratic process; for surely there are strong reasons not to engage in civil disobedience in a liberal democratic society that do not exist in non-democratic societies. I simply maintain that these reasons can, at least in principle, be overridden by the reasons provided by severe enough injustices to do whatever one can to rectify them. Richard seems to disagree:

What if one lived in a society that overwhelmingly endorsed slavery? Would it be wrong to “illegally” help slaves break free? That might seem a tough bullet to bite, but I think there is some plausibility to the idea that - even then - one would do better to work through legitimate channels (if such exist). Changing public opinion would have more significant long-term effects than isolated lawbreaking in any case, so could be preferred even on fairly crude utilitarian grounds (so long as such efforts are sufficiently likely to succeed). And again, we need to factor in our own fallibility: it’s not entirely obvious that in such a situation we would have sufficient epistemic justification for our anti-slavery beliefs to warrant coercive action on their basis.

Of course Richard is right that changing public opinion, if one could succeed in doing so, would be much better in the long run than whatever benefits would be obtained through civil disobedience (assuming that such civil disobedience would not itself be a factor in changing the public’s collective mind about an issue, which can surely happen - Rosa Parks’ courageous act of protest on a Montgomery bus is a clear and powerful example). But for many activists changing public opinion is simply not an attainable goal, especially in societies that, though democratic, have poor standards of public debate, or worse, have a public debate that is largely controlled by pro status quo forces that own nearly all of the media, such as is largely the case in the U.S. (though the internet has, I think, improved the situation overall, despite the fact that it has given rise to problems of its own). When one knows that she has no chance of affecting public opinion or government policy, and passionately believes in a cause, what is she to do?

Richard suggests that she should do nothing, since one can never be sure that she has “sufficient epistemic justification” for her beliefs to “warrant coercive action.” Even in a society in which slavery is widely accepted, perhaps it is better to simply defer to the majority on policy until such time as prevailing views change (if they ever do), since we are all fallible and could, for all we know, be mistaken in opposing slavery. Though I think this view is actually more plausible than it may initially appear (after all, we are all fallible, and there are very strong, though overridable, reasons not to engage in civil disobedience in liberal democratic societies), there are problems, particularly in the case of slavery. First, it seems to me that any society in which slavery is legal cannot legitimately be called a liberal democracy. Without going into the details of what makes a society democratic (this would make an already too long post much longer), it seems clear that simply having elections is far from sufficient; legitimate liberal democracies must protect certain individual rights, and allowing slavery certainly violates this requirement. We can even imagine that slaves are given the right to vote, but because they are outnumbered by pro-slavery citizens, their favored (anti-slavery) candidates inevitably lose elections, and so they are condemned to their lives as slaves against their will by the very democratic process that Richard suggests makes civil disobedience necessarily unjustified.

Furthermore, if we accept that our fallibilty with respect to our anti-slavery beliefs means that we should not engage in civil disobedience in order to free slaves, then we ought to be at least as skeptical of our committment to democracy. And if we allow that this sort of radical skepticism should undermine the reasons that we take ourselves to have to work to free slaves by (just about) any means necessary, then it will also undermine the reasons provided by the existence of democratic institutions not to engage in civil disobedience. And then it seems that many of the reasons that we ordinarily take to be legitimate guiding forces for our actions will lose their force. From this state of radical skepticism about our own most strongly held moral beliefs, it seems that conservatism about civil disobedience is just as arbitrary as endorsement of radical activism. We cannot, from this position, either endorse or condemn civil disobedience to free slaves or for any other cause. If we give up the reasons for civil disobedience provided by our anti-slavery convictions due to an acknowledgment of our fallibility, we give up the reasons against that same civil disobedience in the process, and are left without much to say on the subject.

In a comment in the thread for Richard’s post, he gives the following principle that he says underlies his position (along with others that are not as troubling):

The Epistemic principle: No matter how awful X seems to you, if you can’t rationally convince your fellow citizens then you’re probably wrong about it, and so have no business engaging in coercion.

This principle seems to me not just false, but obviously false, and beyond that, dangerous. In effect it is the claim that prevailing views on all issues are likely to be correct, so long as those prevailing views are sufficiently resistent to criticism. But throughout history many of the views that were the most deeply entrenched and resistent to criticism have been ones that we now consider obviously wrong (e.g. slavery is morally acceptable, women should not be treated equally to men, etc…). The fact that one cannot “rationally convince her fellow citizens” of a view is, I think, not much of a reason (if it is a reason at all) to think that she is wrong in her belief.

Finally, Richard treats the democracy condition, which he takes to be a defeater for any claim to the legitimacy of civil disobedience, as an all or nothing matter. Either a society is a liberal democracy or it is not. I’m inclined to think, however, that societies can be more or less democratic, and that this can affect the legitimacy of civil disobedience. For example, a society with publicly financed elections, proportional representation, a multi-party system, and a diverse media that provides outlets for a variety of views on important social, political, and ethical matters, should be considered more democratic than a society like the United States, in which politicians can easily be bought, elections are an all or nothing matter dominated by two parties that don’t differ much on many key issues, and the media is heavily consolidated and managed by pro status quo forces. In societies that are democratic to a lesser extent, the reasons provided by democracy not to engage in civil disobedience are, I think, more easily overridden, though they still possess significant force.

Power and Legitimacy

2006-08-15T03:23:00.000-07:00

Here is the link to my latest post at Law and Society (text below).

Matt Wood’s thoughts on power raise a number of important issues. Ben suggests that questions about power can be separated into 1) questions about what individuals in fact have the power to do, and 2) questions about whether the exercise of certain powers that individuals have is legitimate. Questions in the first category are purely empirical; as Ben says, “power, like any ability, is demonstrated through its exercise.” In this sense, then, the statement “President Bush did not have the power to authorize the NSA wiretapping program” is false, due to the simple fact that he did authorize the program, and citizens were wiretapped. Questions in the second category, on the other hand, are normative, though I think the precise nature of such questions requires some spelling out, and perhaps some further distinctions.

Consider again the statement “President Bush did not have the power to authorize the NSA wiretapping program.” There are multiple things that one might plausibly mean by such a statement. Most obvious among them is that Bush did not have the legal authority to authorize the program. Someone who intends the statement in this way believes that the program itself violates some previously existing (and valid) law or laws, or that it violates certain fundamental and legally guaranteed rights, and is therefore unconstitutional. But Matt raises an interesting point about claims of this sort. In our society it is generally accepted that the courts are the arbiter of legal authority, and because of this it might seem that whether or not the program is legal (and even whether it was legal at the time of implementation) is determined only after the courts have ruled on the issue. If the statement is made prior to any legal ruling regarding the program, then, it might be taken as a mere opinion about what decision the courts should make, given the speaker’s interpretation of the law. Whether or not Bush actually had the power, in this normative sense, to authorize the program, depends on how the courts rule, and (as Matt points out) on whether the public acquiesces to the ruling (of course the public almost always does acquiesce, for a number of reasons, including the fact that the courts tend to follow public opinion, at least on highly publicized issues). In fact, Matt seems to suggest that there is not much more to the legitimacy of an exercize of power than that it is accepted as legitimate by others:

“Legitimacy” exists insofar as individual B ratifies A’s action, either by reference to personal values or institutional structures. Legitimacy exists at the level of individual belief (B’s here), but nothing prevents a belief in legitimacy from being a function of group approval, as in the case of constitutional amendment.

So, since the general population accepts that it is the courts’ role to interpret the laws and the Constitution, then their doing so is legitimate, despite the circularity worries that Matt highlights. And, assuming the courts come down in favor of Bush, he had the power to authorize the NSA program all along, despite the legal ambiguities that existed prior to the ruling.

But might someone also make the statement “Bush did not have the power to authorize the NSA program” even after the courts have ruled the program legal? Perhaps the statement would be made in a slightly different way at this point; in fact, it might be put in terms of legitimacy, as in “authorizing the program was an illegitimate use of power.” In the legal sense discussed above, this is false. The courts have ruled, and the public has not risen up against the ruling; therefore authorizing the program was legitimate in the legal sense. So it may seem that the answer to Matt’s question “can one dissident voice validly stand back from the mass of consensus and say, “I know you all believe he had the power, but he *really* didn’t,” or the converse, “I know you all believe he didn’t have the power, but he *really* did?,” is no, both in the empirical and legal senses.

But is this the whole story? Like Ben, I am inclined to think not. It might seem that once the courts have ruled in Bush’s favor, it is simply false, in every possible sense, to say that he did not really have the power to authorize the program. But there are at least two objections to this conclusion, the second, I think, deeper than the first. The first is simply that the courts may, at some point in the future, reverse their decision. If and when that happens, even if it is decades into the future, it might seem that Bush in fact never actually had the (legitimate) power to authorize the program, not even during the period between the decision in his favor and the later reversal (think about what we might say about the legitimacy of the Fugitive Slave Laws in the period immediately following the Dred Scott decision, now that we are able to look back on that decision long after it has become conventional wisdom that it was disgraceful).

The second objection, which I think is the more interesting one, is that because the courts tend to rule in accordance with prevailing public opinion, they sometimes misinterpret the law, particularly in cases about which public passions are enflamed (consider, for example, cases in which religious displays on public property have been ruled legally acceptable). This view depends upon the premise that there are determinate answers to at least some legal questions prior to actual court rulings on those questions, which is something that Matt seems inclined to deny. Still, at least in certain cases, it might seem clear enough that a decision has no plausible basis in the law, or in the Constitution. And in these cases it might seem reasonable to call a policy illegitimate even after a court ruling has determined the policy to be legal.

Final note: A third objection might involve the claim that “legitimate” powers must meet some standard of moral, in addition to (or perhaps rather than) legal, legitimacy. The Dred Scott decision may have been entirely legally sound (given the Constitution and existing law), as well as generally accepted by the public, but we might still think that those who executed the Fugitive Slave Laws were, in some sense, exercizing illegitimate power. This, however, seems to me a slightly different sort of issue, and I bring it up merely to highlight the difficulty of nailing down precisely what is meant by talk of “legitimacy”.

Why Value Democracy?

2006-08-03T02:19:00.000-07:00

Here is the link to my first guest post over at Law and Society (text below).

In my post entitled Capitalism, Utopianism, and Democracy I say this:

What is perhaps most striking about the articles written by the free marketeers is that, despite containing a great deal of commentary on the role of government, there is no mention of democracy. They clearly emphasize that it is an essential role of government to protect free competition in the marketplace; nowhere do they also claim that it is the role of government to carry out the will of the people. … Their committment to capitalism is prior to their commitment to democracy (this, of course, is not unusual on the American right).

In his response, Hanno says the following:

This is clearly an accurate observation. Even though most free market libertarians are committed to the democratic process, that commitment is usually instrumental in nature. Most libertarians value individual freedom higher than democracy. But is that really a shortcoming? The libertarian concern with democracy is rooted in an individualist political philosophy. Any subordination of the individual will under the collective will, as envisioned, for example, by Rousseau, cannot be conceptualized as a realization of freedom from a libertarian standpoint. Freedom, for libertarians, is primarily a negative concept, defined roughly as the absence of arbitrary interference with the realization of an individual’s subjective preferences. As indicated above, libertarians and free marketers are suspicious of any form of “summing people up,” to use David Friedman’s phrase. Of course, a totalitarian way of summing people up under the banner of an official ideology is worse than the democratic summing up of individual votes, but the fear of majoritarian rule, however achieved, persists. That, I submit, is a perfectly reasonable concern, and treating democracy as a means to the end of individual freedom should not discredit a political philosophy on moral grounds.

While I certainly agree with Hanno’s concluding point that valuing democracy only instrumentally in no way discredits a political philosophy on moral grounds (one could certainly be a thorough-going consequentialist about the value of political arrangements and procedures), I wonder about the implications of this stance for libertarian views (such as Hanno’s) in particular. Specifically, it’s not clear to me that libertarians can argue, consistent with their view that individual liberty is intrinsically valuable, that the democratic process is only instrumentally valuable, insofar as it contributes to ensuring that individuals retain as much personal liberty as possible. After all, the democratic process is, at least ideally, the means by which individuals’ preferences are given voice in decisions about how society functions. It provides individuals with a forum to express their preferences regarding society’s political and economic structure, and the opportunity to have one’s preferences count in such essential social decision-making is, at least arguably, one of the most important forms of the individual liberty that libertarians value intrinsically. In fact, it seems to me a necessary element of any scheme of ordered liberty. Without the democratic process there is either a form of political authority that is not determined by the expression of individuals’ preferences, or else there is anarchy (it is, of course, conceivable that a regime not empowered through democratic processes might choose to adopt policies that reflect the popular will, but as a practical matter this is unlikely). It seems, then, that valuing individual liberty intrinsically may, at least in some sense, entail valuing democracy intrinsically as well.

Of course libertarians are likely to insist, and rightfully so, that society not be governed entirely on the basis of majority preference, because the majority is sure to support at least some policies that infringe on fundamental rights of members of minority groups. The question for the free marketeers that I discuss above, then, assuming I am right that valuing individual liberty intrinsically entails valuing democracy intrinsically, is whether the right to the sort of economic liberty that libertarians tend to endorse is a fundamental right (such as, say, freedom of speech and religion) that even the democratic process should not be able to take away. I contend that it is not. But that is a subject for a future post.

Guest Blogging

2006-08-02T01:57:00.000-07:00

I have been extended an invitation to be a guest blogger over at the Law and Society Blog, so for now my more philosophical posts will appear there, rather than here (I will not be posting at both sites in order to avoid having multiple comment threads on a single post). While much of my blogging will, at least for a brief period, be done at Law and Society, I may still post items of political interest here. I will also post links to my Law and Society posts to this site.

Though I will work hard to maintain a reasonable blogging pace, my teaching duties, and in particular grading responsibilities (I currently have 77 students), will almost surely prevent me from contributing as much as I would like to Law and Society, at least for the next few weeks. Nevertheless, I hope to complete my first post there very soon.

Many thanks to all of the contributors at Law and Society, and in particular to Hanno Kaiser, who was kind enough to extend the guest blogger invitation to me.

More on Capitalism, Utopianism, and Democracy

2006-07-23T21:40:00.000-07:00

Hanno Kaiser has posted a very interesting reply to my previous post over at the Law and Society Blog. I have also posted a reply at that site. I encourage readers to take a look at Hanno's piece, and to post comments there, rather than here, so that the discussion remains at one location.

Capitalism, Utopianism, and Democracy

2006-07-21T03:04:00.000-07:00

My summer job (teaching for a class called The Social, Political, and Ethical Environment of Business in Berkeley's Haas School) has me reading a number of articles on business ethics and corporate social responsibility. It should come as no surprise that the standard conservative position is that in order for a company to fulfill its ethical responsibilities it need do no more than follow the law. Conservatives also tend to think that the notion of corporate social responsibility itself is fundamentally misguided, and that the only responsibility that companies have is to maximize their profits. Despite this extremely complacent view regarding the responsibilities of entities with unprecedented power in America and around the world today, a number of conservative writers are at least slightly disturbed by the increasing entanglement of business and government.

Milton Friedman argued that corporations should not attempt to address societal problems because doing so is the job of government. Businesses, he argued, are not qualified to deal with these kinds of problems, and should stick to what they do best, which is making money. And since only a government that is genuinely autonomous can effectively deal with major social problems, it is important that businesses, which are not qualified to handle such problems, stay out of the affairs of government. The implication seems to be that the ideal society, indeed the only sort of society that can hope to adequately deal with pressing social problems, is one in which free market principles prevail and businesses refrain from involving themselves in the affairs of government.

But is this sort of society really possible? A society that is driven by free market principles will be one that encourages individuals to do whatever they can to maximize their economic self-interests. And in a capitalist society there will always be some that possess a great deal more wealth than others. And with wealth comes power and influence, or at least the potential to gain power and influence. If we assume that our ideal society will have an ethos that strongly encourages the pursuit of rational (i.e. economic) self-interest, why in the world would we think that the wealthy, including those in charge of large corporations, would refrain from involving themselves in the political process, when doing so would surely be an easy way of ensuring greater profits for their companies (politicians would surely be just as strongly influenced by the ethos as their corporate friends, and therefore susceptible to being bought off). It seems fairly easy to see that the vision of free marketeers who want business out of the affairs of government is thoroughly utopian. If government's responsibility is to address pressing social problems, rather than to pander to the interests of the corporate class, then it seems that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with responsible government.

Unlike typical arguments that suggest that socialism is necessarily utopian, the argument that this free market vision is utopian does not rely on the premise that human beings naturally and inevitably pursue only their own interests, and cannot be made to care about the whole of humanity. It relies only on the view that a society with an ethos that strongly encourages the pursuit of self-interest will in fact be one in which individuals vigorously pursue self-interest. A society with a very different ethos will, or at least might, be one in which people behave very differently.

It seems, then, that the free marketeers must either revise their view on the role of government, or else give up on the free market. And I suspect that when pressed, nearly all would choose the former.

If they alter their view such that they no longer claim that government is responsible for addressing social problems (this responsibility would presumably fall on citizens themselves), there remains a very significant question about the view. Whatever the free marketeers think the government's responsibility is with respect to social problems, they also think it is an important part of the government's responsibility to ensure that free market principles are adhered to. It is part of the role of government, on this view, to protect free competition in the marketplace from any and all threats.

What is perhaps most striking about the articles written by the free marketeers is that, despite containing a great deal of commentary on the role of government, there is no mention of democracy. They clearly emphasize that it is an essential role of government to protect free competition in the marketplace; nowhere do they also claim that it is the role of government to carry out the will of the people. Even if they did mention this, the question would arise whether the need to protect the market trumps the will of the people, or whether it is the other way around. This is particularly significant because in the ideal society described by the free marketeers, in which corporations refrain from involving themselves in politics, there is no reason to think that voters would necessarily elect candidates that support free market policies (indeed there is much that suggests that they would not elect such candidates, including the fact that corporations currently invest such a great deal of money to ensure that their message drowns out that of anti-free market voices). What this suggests is that, like that of most American administrations, the free marketeers' committment to democracy is conditional on the democratic process resulting in their favored outcomes. Their committment to capitalism is prior to their committment to democracy (this, of course, is not unusual on the American right). What they seem not to realize is that they only get the results that they want in U.S. elections because corporations are so heavily involved in politics (and even then their candidates sometimes have to resort to outright fraud in order to gain or retain power). A society in which business stayed out of politics would be one in which there would be no guarantee that capitalism would win at the ballot box.

On Marx's Method

2006-07-08T23:03:00.000-07:00

In light of the excellent discussion that resulted from my last post, and after reading Colin Farrelly's interesting paper on historical materialism, I'd like to make some remarks about Marx's methodology that will, hopefully, render some of the points that I have already attempted to make a bit clearer. I begin by quoting, in full, the first paragraph of Farrelly's paper:

"Karl Marx's theory of historical materialism is one of the most prominent accounts of human history. Yet it is a theory that remains a source of both intrigue and puzzlement for contemporary political philosophers. The sheer scale of Marx's theory, ranging as it does from the issues of human production through the workings of the political economy to class divisions and conflict makes the prospect of a concise, unified, and systematic presentation of historical materialism unlikely if not impossible. Once one adds to this the fact that Marx himself is guilty of ambiguity and that many commentators often invoke vague and obscure Hegelian concepts (e.g. dialectic) to explain historical materialism, it is not surprising that some commentators, like H.B. Acton, take the view that Marx's theory is "a philosophical farrago" (my emphasis).

Farrelly is surely correct that the breadth of Marx's theory of history makes a clear and concise presentation of it an extremely difficult task. He is also right in saying that Marx's own work contains much ambiguity, besides being just generally difficult to understand. To claim, however, that the fact that some commentators invoke the concept of dialectic makes things worse in terms of advancing understanding of Marx's work gets things, I think, totally backwards. In order to understand what Marx thought, one must first understand how Marx thought. And Marx thought dialectically. This means that any writer on Marx who employs the concept is doing something right, difficult as it may be to understand dialectics (and surely it is difficult). It also means that attempts to understand Marx's own work within an entirely analytical framework are fundamentally misguided. This does not mean that attempts to reformulate certain of Marx's theories, or explicate certain Marxist concepts within an analytical framework are not worthwhile; many are. But Marx himself operated within a very different philosophical framework than we contemporary analytics, and therefore a basic understanding of Marx's dialectical method is necessary in order to be able to interpret Marx faithfully.

My aim here, then, is to provide the clearest, simplest, and briefest summary that I can of some of the important assumptions and methods that define Marx's dialectical approach to history.

The first important assumption within Marx's methodology is that of internal relations. The philosophy of internal relations involves a very different metaphysics than standard analytic views. Particular concepts involve not only what they are ordinarily taken to refer to, but also the relations that those concepts bear to other concepts that, on analytic views, are related only externally (that is, contingently). So, Marx refers to capital as "that kind of property which exploits wage-labor." As Bertell Ollman explains, "the relation between capital and labor is treated...as a function of capital itself, and part of the meaning of capital." Marx also says things like "capital is necessarily at the same time the capitalist...the capitalist is contained in the concept of capital." Ollman explains that "Marx is offering us a conception of capital in which the factors we generally think of as externally related to it are viewed as co-elements in a single structure."

The philosophy of internal relations makes for a complex and pretty implausible metaphysics; nevertheless it was an essential part of Marx's methodology, and required him to develop a way to extract concepts from the internal relations that he posited (which, at the limit, include absolutely everything). This brings us to the second aspect of Marx's method that tends to bring about confusion: the process of abstraction.

Just as capital and wage-labor are, on Marx's view, internally related, so are base and superstructure and pretty much any of the concepts that Marx employed in his analysis. The seemingly unitary concepts of base and superstructure, then, are in fact abstractions from the web of internal relations. This does not mean that base and superstructure are in fact one and the same thing, any more than capital and wage-labor are. Each is a distinct aspect of a relation (Ollman goes so far as to say that "the relation [rather than the thing or object] is the irreducible minimum for all units in Marx's conception of social reality") from which it can be abstracted in various ways, some more illuminating than others.

Abstracting from certain vantage points, in Marx's view, provided a clearer and more accurate picture of reality, whereas abstracting from others, especially exclusively, could be rather deceiving and conducive to ideological thinking. So, for example, examining the economy solely from the vantage point of consumption can make it appear as though capitalism is an efficient and just system, whereas approaching it from the vantage point of production highlights the exploitation and alienation that Marx thought inherent to the system.

A Marxist Supervenience Thesis?

2006-07-04T23:13:00.000-07:00

Over at In Search of Enlightenment, Colin Farrelly suggests that the concept of supervenience, most often used by philosophers of mind in non-reductionist theories about the relationship between mental and physical facts, can help us understand what Marx is getting at in his theory of history (here is the link to the relevant post). A supervenience relationship holds when one set of facts determines another set of non-identical facts that cannot be reduced to the first set. So, some philosophers of mind hold that mental facts supervene on physical facts. On such views, fixing all of the physical facts necessarily fixes all of the mental facts, despite the fact that mental facts are not themselves physical facts, nor are they reducible to physical facts. The physical facts, then, determine the mental facts. There is only one set of mental facts that is consistent with any set of physical facts.

Farrelly suggests that Marx's view is one on which the relations of production supervene on the forces of production, and the superstructure supervenes on the relations of production.

"The productive forces determine the relations of production...which in turn determine the superstructure of society (e.g. legal and political institutions).," he says.

On this view, the facts about the forces of production (i.e. the level of technological development) fix, in a completely determinate way, the facts about the relations of production (i.e. the nature of the prevailing economic system), and the facts about the relations of production fix, in the same completely determinate way, the facts about the superstructure (i.e. culture, religion, political institutions, the legal system, prevailing views about morality, etc.).

This, however, is a complete distortion of Marx's theory of history. It is the very misinterpretation of Marx that has led so many critics to dismiss his theory of history out of hand. And if it were what Marx intended the critics would be right to dismiss it without taking it very seriously. Farrelly's interpretation of Marx is just plain old economic (or technological) determinism wrapped in the language of supervenience, and it highlights an all too common failure to grasp what Marx's dialectical materialism entails about the causal relationships between base (i.e. the forces and relations of production) and superstructure (it is also the misinterpretation, common even in Marx's lifetime, that led Marx himself to say near the end of his life that "All I know is I'm not a Marxist").

On Farrelly's interpretation, the superstructure (and elements of it) play no causal role whatsoever with respect to the economic base. There is no room, for example, for prevailing views about religion to have an effect on the course of economic development. But that is absurd. Of course religion, culture, the legal system, and prevailing views on morality play some role in the development of the economy. And Marx's dialectical method, properly understood, leads clearly to the view that causation between base and superstructure runs in both directions. The materialist aspect of his methodology simply affirms that the causal efficacy of the base with respect to the superstructure is significantly greater than that of the superstructure with respect to the base.

The facts about the base, then, do not determine the facts about the superstructure. The best way to understand the relationship, I think, is that the facts about the base severely limit the possibilities for the superstructure. It is important to remember that Marx's theory of history was not just an attack on the view that capitalism would last forever (though it was certainly that); it was also an attack on utopian socialism. Marx understood that certain historical conditions, such as the lack of the right kind of technological development, lack of the necessary class divisions, and even the lack of the right cultural conditions (this is why class-consciousness was so important for Marx), would make socialism impossible to achieve. Economic development alone could not, in Marx's view, bring about socialism. And this means that economic determinism, dressed up in the language of supervenience or not, was no part of Marx's view of history.

Marx may not have been right about history, but those who would argue against him should at least understand what it is that they are arguing against. Economic determinism is a straw man; no reasonable person thinks it's true, and Marx never advocated it. Perhaps the most disturbing part of Farrelly's post is the rather approving tone with which he discusses the supervenience account of Marx's theory, as though he thinks that it is not only a reasonable interpretation of Marx but a view to take seriously in its own right. As someone who agrees with Farrelly that Marx is at least still relevant to contemporary political discourse (though certainly wrong on a number of things), it is disturbing enough when his detractors mischaracterize his views so badly. When those who claim to be at least somewhat sympathetic do so, the discourse is in real trouble.

Institutions, Iraq, and Just War Theory

2006-07-01T21:40:00.000-07:00

Traditional Just War Theory states that war is only justifiable as a response to an actual attack or in anticipation of an imminent attack. The U.S. war in Iraq, then, clearly cannot be justified by appeal to traditional Just War Theory. And, of course, by now most sane people believe that no justification on offer by the apologists for the Iraq misadventure is even close to adequate. By any reasonable standards, the war in Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster. Still, even some who clearly recognize the insanity of the Administration's Iraq policy believe that certain conditions that prevail in today's world require, or at least might require, a reformulation of traditional Just War Theory.

Allen Buchanan suggests that this might be the case in his recent article entitled "Institutionalizing the Just War." Briefly, Buchanan thinks that "new conditions of terrorism" (which I think is best interpreted to mean the volume and severity of terrorist threats combined with the likelihood that, if not aggressively defended against, such threats will be carried out) require us to rethink the traditional Just War Norm under which only wars in response to actual or imminent attacks are justified (as a sidenote, I am not particularly convinced that there is much new about the global political situation that is relevant to Just War Theory other than the fact that much more dangerous and deadly weapons are, or at least might be, accessible to more and more nations and non-state organizations, some of them quite dangerous; perhaps it is new technologies and the spread of such technologies, rather than anything unique to terrorism, that requires that we rethink traditional Just War Theory).

Buchanan considers two other possible justifications for war that might, under appropriate conditions, be legitimate. The first is what he calls the "Preventive Self-Defense Justification", which basically states that the reason for going to war is to prevent a gathering but not yet imminent threat from developing to the point that it could inflict (unjustified) harm. This is basically the Administration's "Iraq has WMD's that they might eventually think about attempting to use on us" justification. The second is what he calls the "Forcible Democratization Justification," which states that the reason for going to war is to bring democracy to an oppressed people. This is the Administration's "we're liberating the Iraqis and spreading freedom and democracy to the Middle East" justification.

(As a sidenote, Buchanan, without explicitly saying that he was doing so, explained fairly well why the Administration switched from the former to the latter justification after failing to find the WMD's and after things began to go very badly in Iraq: "Even after the nondemocratic government is deposed, the would-be democratizer can argue that ongoing armed resistance comes from antidemocratic forces and that antidemocratic "wreckers" are impeding the development of new institutions. In that sense, the agent who uses the Forcible Democratization Justification incurs less risk of being exposed as insincere and less risk of being held accountable than an agent who uses the Preventive Self-Defense Justification." Of course the Administration could not have used the Forcible Democratization Justification from the beginning, since the American people would not have supported going to war for this reason.)

Buchanan claims that because the two potential justifications are extremely risky, in the sense that there is great potential for abuse by powerful nations of them in order to go to war to serve their own interests, the only way that they could be legitimate is in the context of an institutional regime that effectively limits their use to appropriate cases. He gives no indication of what such an institutional regime would look like, and says that if such a regime is not practicable, then no deviation from traditional Just War Theory will be appropriate.

Throughout the paper Buchanan urges that moral philosophy must be combined with empirical analysis of the institutional possibilities and the ways in which the potential justifications he offers might actually be employed. Just War Theory requires more than armchair moral theorizing. This seems clearly right, and so I want to examine some of the implications of Buchanan's institutionalist solution to the justification of war problem.

First, it should be clear enough that for the forseeable future, the U.S. is the only nation that will have any real interest in employing these justifications for war (no one really believes that Columbia, Azerbaijan, Eritrea, and the other members of the coalition of the coerced had any real interest, other than appeasing the U.S., in joining in the Iraq effort). And given the disdain of U.S. leaders for the U.N., the refusal of the U.S. to join the International Criminal Court, and the dominance of the U.S. and its interests over institutions such as the World Bank and the WTO, it is hard to imagine the U.S. signing on to be a part of an institution that will effectively regulate the use of the Preventive Self-Defense and Forced Democratization Justifications. Any institution that the U.S. would take part in would surely be such that U.S. interests would dominate policy, so that abuses of the justifications, such as in the Iraq case, would continue so long as U.S. interests would be served by going to war with more nations. In short, given the dominance of the U.S. in global politics and in the global economy, no practicable institution could both include the U.S. and reign in its leaders so that future Iraqs would be prevented.

Second, even if we assume that the U.S. would sign on to such an institution, it would be in no position to legitimately assert the Forced Democratization Justification. This justification requires that the democratizer itself be democratic, and given the prevailing two-party (really one party with a few rogue Democrats) system and the clear fraud in the last two Presidential elections (see here, here, and especially here), the U.S. is clearly far from democratic. Furthermore, given that there are so many nondemocratic countries in the world, any institution that could legitimately vet an assertion of the Forced Democratization Justification would either have to exclude all of these nations, or else provide a plausible explanation as to why nondemocratic nations can participate in decisions regarding whether to invade other nations in order to democratize them.

Third, if we assume that the U.S. would refuse to join any such institution, the most convincing arguments for the use of the Preventive Self-Defense and Forced Democratization Justifications on the part of the nations that would be likely to take part in it might very well be those arguing for war against the U.S.! (an important sidenote: the Preventive Self-Defense Justification would not, I think, be legitimately available to nations whose threats to the U.S. were, even if only in part, responsible for U.S. counterthreats, e.g. North Korea, Iran; also, the Forced Democratization Justification would, of course, only be available to democratic nations, or at least nations significantly more democratic than the U.S., and I suspect that none of these nations would have much interest in engaging in a war to democratize the U.S.).

The reason that I think that the Preventive Self-Defense Justification might be most convincingly applied to war against the U.S. is that the U.S. is the only nation in recent years to engage in massive international campaigns of aggression in the pursuit of its economic and geopolitical interests. Other nations might legitimately wonder if down the road U.S. leaders might find it economically or politically beneficial to invade them, and might invoke the Preventive Self-Defense Justification in order to preempt such a possibility (the fact that this would likely be the best case for the Preventive Self-Defense Justification just shows how bad a justification for war it is; even given the U.S.' recent history of aggression, this justification would not, in my view, be legitimate, even in the context of an institution of the sort that Buchanan envisions).

The reason that the Forced Democratization Justification might be best applied to war against the U.S. is that the lack of democracy in the U.S. has the most significant negative global impact of any national democracy deficit. This is true despite the fact that the U.S. is far from the world's worst tyranny; the democracy deficit is harmful to Americans, but not nearly to the extent that the North Koreans or Saudis are harmed by the lack of democracy in their respective countries. But the global impact of the erosion of democracy in America is immense (even Gore and Kerry would likely have avoided the Iraq mess), and therefore the actual democracies of the world might very well do more good for both themselves and those suffering under other nondemocratic regimes to fight for democracy in America than by attempting to bring it to those suffering under much worse tyrannies.

My conclusion, then, is that given the state of the world, with the U.S. as the only superpower and the ability to dominate any international institutions that it joins and the will to refuse to join those that it perceives as harmful to its interests, it is best not to attempt to develop any institutions along the lines of Buchanan's suggestion. This means that the traditional Just War Norm should still be thought valid; and given the susceptibility of abuse of both the potential new justifications, and the problems associated with attempting to democratize a country by force (even with the best of intentions), this should be a not unwelcome conclusion.

Moral Demands and Social Justice

2006-06-14T22:07:00.000-07:00

A common strategy among the opponents of certain moral theories, and in particular consequentialism, is to argue that, for one reason or another, they are excessively demanding. Morality, they claim, must make room for us to pursue self-interest to some extent; or it must accommodate at least some of the personal projects that are most important to us; or it must allow us to give preference to our loved ones and friends. There is, then, according to this view, a ceiling to how much morality can demand of individuals. On some views this ceiling fluctuates with prevailing social and political conditions, demanding more of individuals the greater the prevailing level of injustice; even on these views, though, there must also be an absolute ceiling, i.e. what would be demanded of the best off individual in the most unjust conditions possible, and this would still be less than consequentialism would demand of such a person.

I'm inclined to reject at least most of these arguments; I think 1) consequentialism can account for these intuitions to some extent (we are often in better position to advance our own interests than those of others, life would be psychologically unbearable if we ALWAYS thought exclusively about maximizing the good rather than having certain projects of our own, which would undermine our ability to contribute to the good at all, we are very often in better position to aid friends and loved ones than strangers, etc.), and 2) in the cases in which the intuitions conflict with consequentialism, it is the intuitions that are wrong.

I want to turn the tables, at least to some extent, on those who argue for a ceiling to morality's demands, by presenting an argument for a floor to its demands. Like the more plausible views of the ceiling, my floor will vary with the level of injustice.

Here is a rather brief summary of how I think the argument can be made out:

1) it is a fundamental social goal to achieve social justice, whatever that consists in; that is to say, collectively, we are obligated to pursue social justice
2) the most plausible views of social justice are egalitarian in character
3) we live in conditions of massive social injustice (from 2 and the empirical facts), and therefore achieving social justice will require massive efforts
4)achieving social justice, like achieving any collective goal, requires contributions from individuals
5) there are moral demands on individuals to contribute to social justice, and full compliance with those demands would, necessarily, result in social justice (from 1 and 4); that is, it is absurd to think that social justice can only be achieved with the help of supererogation
6) the demands on each individual must be such that her compliance, along with the compliance of everyone else, would necessarily result in social justice (from 5)
7) the demands on each individual must be at least her fair share of the collective burden to achieve social justice (from 1-6)

Liam Murphy has argued, mainly based on considerations of fairness, that the demands on an individual cannot be greater than her fair share of the collective burden (he thinks they're not less either). I think his argument fails, and that morality can in fact be more demanding than that in conditions of less than full compliance. What my argument here is intended to show, however, is that any view that allows the demands on any individual to be less than her fair share of the collective burden to achieve social justice is wrong because it is not demanding enough. And this, I think, means that those who argue that morality cannot require individuals to make significant sacrifices involving their personal projects, relationships, and certainly self-interest, must be wrong. There is no guarantee that one's fair share of the collective burden will not require such sacrifices, especially in unjust conditions such as ours. The floor that I have argued for, then, is actually higher than others would put the ceiling. But if the arguments for the ceiling were right, then significant supererogation would be necessary in order to achieve social justice, and therefore either 1) or 2) would have be false. I suspect, however, that few will want to deny 1). My argument will, admittedly, not be convincing to those who deny 2); but since many of the philosophers who argue for something like a ceiling are inclined to accept 2), the argument is, I think, of practical significance.

On Gay Marriage: Republican Pandering and Democratic Cowardice

2006-06-06T07:40:00.000-07:00

With the war in Iraq becoming increasingly unpopular amidst the recent Haditha scandal, and with Republicans fighting amonst themselves over immigration reform, the GOP has returned to its old bag of election year political tricks, as Senate Republicans bring the absurd Federal Marriage Amendment back to the floor. The Amendment, which has almost no chance of passing, would, as many critics like to say, write discrimination into the Constitution for the first time in the history of our country.

Of course this stunt by Republicans is nothing more than a ploy to bring out conservative voters in November's election, a ploy that the Republicans are counting on working, as it did in 2004, as they attempt to retain control of the House and Senate in spite of the President's approval rating going as low as 29%, and the fact that many Republicans are involved in corruption scandals. This transparent attempt by Republicans to court bigoted religious conservative voters is nothing new for the GOP. They are used to appealing to the worst in people in order to gain votes.

We all know where the Republicans stand on gay rights, and on progress and tolerance generally. We can all imagine the same types of arguments (though, of course, not exactly the same arguments) being made by conservatives back in the 1950's and 60's against interracial marriage (these arguments are, sadly enough, still made even today in some places), which was still illegal in most states back then and vigorously opposed by most conservatives and by a huge chunk of the religious community, on the grounds that it went against "traditional" practices and would corrupt society.

I'm not interested in explaining why the Republicans are wrong on gay marriage; the fact is soon enough most Americans will be on the right side of this issue, just as most Americans eventually came around to accept interracial marriage. According to Bill O'Reilly (no friend to the gay community), 39% of Americans are now in favor of gay marriage; that number is much higher than just a few years ago. As more gay Americans become open about their sexuality more of those who currently oppose gay marriage will learn that they have a gay cousin, neice or nephew, aunt or uncle, brother or sister, son or daughter, friend or co-worker. And as more and more people learn that they have gay loved ones, homosexuality will become humanized in their eyes, and their hatred will dissipate (incidentally, due to the relatively low rate of interracial marriages and births, I would not be surprised if we resolve the hatred of gays in America long before we resolve racial hatred; it is much easier to hate a group of people with whom one has little or no interaction). Gay marriage will happen in America; it is only a matter of when.

The real scandal in the latest round of Washington gay-bashing is the response of the Democrats. Even now, with the Republicans on the ropes and public opinion turning to the left (including on gay rights issues), no Democratic leader will stand up to the Republicans and come out in favor of gay marriage. They dance around the issue, or cautiously announce their support of civil unions (which even Bill O'Reilly is for), or complain about the fact that the Republicans insist on discussing the issue while real problems like Iraq, health care, and education go unresolved (this is a perfectly legitimate complaint, but is no reason not to also express support for gay marriage).

As more and more Americans turn in favor of gay marriage, the failure of the Democrats to openly endorse it only further highlights their cowardice and fear of the religious right. Rather than worry about the tiny percentage of so-called "swing voters" who might abandon the Democratic party if they are too open about their support for gay rights, the Democrats need to focus on reaching out to the 50% of the country that does not vote at all. These people are not potential Republican voters, and could be motivated to involve themselves in the political process if someone would just stand up to the corrupt leaders of both parties.

It is unlikely, however, that any major Democrat will adopt this strategy. And surely this will not be the approach in the Presidential race, in which the Democrats are likely to nominate Hillary Clinton, one of the few Democrats who still supports the disaster in Iraq and whose strategy seems to be to stay as close to the Republicans as possible on just about every issue. If the Republicans nominate Giuliani, I may even have to vote for him; at least he supports gay marriage.

On Haditha

2006-05-30T23:29:00.000-07:00

The recent reports regarding the November massacre of 24 innocent Iraqi civilians in Haditha at the hands of about a dozen U.S. Marines, and the (predictable enough) reaction by many conservatives to the story (which was, of course, covered up by the military for about 6 months, until the media acquired damning information), further highlights the need for the U.S. military to leave Iraq immediately. The invasion and occupation itself was enough to destroy the image of the U.S. across the globe (and in the Muslim world in particular); the Abu Ghraib scandal made it clear that the U.S. military and its leaders were willing to flout international law and engage in practices so despicable that even our own medieval legislature had determined that they should be outlawed; and Haditha highlights the fact that at least some U.S. soldiers believe (rightly, it turns out) that they can kill civilians, including women and children, and the U.S. military will shield them from the consequences (at least unless and until they need someone to take the fall in the press).

Now I disagree, at least in some respects, with some on both the right and the left who have said that Haditha, for example "makes Abu Ghraib look like a picnic"; it is true that "no one died from wearing panties on their heads," but the practices at Abu Ghraib were systematic, ranging over a long period of time, and were almost certainly condoned by those at the highest levels in the U.S. military. The Haditha massacre, on the other hand, appears to have been carried out by a relatively small number of Marines in retaliation (though why they would "retaliate" against women and children, including a three year old, is beyond me) for the death of a fellow Marine in a roadside bomb. The extent of the violence at Haditha certainly exceeded that at Abu Ghraib, but I can't imagine that anyone up the chain of command was complicit in the massacre itself (though it looks like they were involved in covering in up).

The desperation of defenders of the war is at this point obvious, and in the face of continually decreasing support among the American people for the continuation of the occupation, the arguments made in defense of the war, and the (usually qualified) defense of the soldiers involved in the Haditha incident as well, have become so absurd as to be laughable, or at least would be if they weren't defending a policy that has resulted in the deaths of well over two thousand American soldiers, untold thousands of Iraqis, and 71 journalists (more than were killed in either World War II or Vietnam). In a discussion of the Haditha incident on his MSNBC program, Joe Scarborough said that we should be proud that more American troops haven't snapped and gone on killing sprees, given the horrific things that they have witnessed in Iraq, including the deaths of many of their fellow soldiers. And the scary thing is, he really believes that; in his mind it shows exceptional virtue on the part of American soldiers that they haven't massacred more innocent women and children in retaliation for the loss of American troops, as if that sort of retaliatory violence against the innocent is just to be expected during war.

But what about the Iraqis? Should we praise the virtue of the Iraqi people for not killing more American soldiers than they actually have after their country was invaded and occupied for more than three years by American forces? Have they, with the exception of the so-called insurgents, shown exceptional restraint in not attempting to indiscrimately kill as many American soldiers (and perhaps journalists and other Americans in Iraq) as possible in retaliation for the deaths of innocent Iraqi civilians? While some on the left have in fact made this argument, I think it is a flawed one; and I'm sure Scarborough and other conservatives would agree. But if this argument is flawed, then how can the argument that an invading army has shown restraint in not killing more civilians even be thought plausible. The answer, of course, is that in "Scarborough Country," American lives matter more than Iraqi lives. And until we rid our country of that kind of arrogant thinking, especially on the part of political and military leaders, there will continue to be more Hadithas, more Abu Ghraibs, and more Iraqs.

The Case of the Mohammad Cartoons: Free Speech, Offense, and Moral Responsibility

2006-02-18T00:43:00.000-08:00

So I finally got around to finishing up this post that I began writing many weeks ago; the cartoons are, of course, old news by now, but the issues raised by their publication and the subsequent reaction in both the West and the Muslim world are as important as ever, especially as an Afghani man faces execution for converting from Islam to Christianity.

It has been extremely interesting to listen to the variety of reactions to the publication of the now infamous cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammad, as well as to the subsequent protests, many of which have involved violence, that have taken place in the Muslim world in reaction to their publication. Predictably, many on the right have used the responses of some Muslims to the cartoons to further their aim of demonizing the entire Muslim world for the sake of their own ends. This is, of course, no surprise, as the racist fear-mongering tactics of at least some on the right today know no limits. But with respect to this story, this is, at least to some extent, beside the point, because the outrage among Muslims at the cartoons is in fact quite widespread, and this points to a very real problem in the Muslim world. Notice that I did not say merely that the way in which many Muslims have expressed their outrage points to a problem, as if the only thing that is troubling is the fact that some have turned to violence in order to express it. That certainly makes things worse, but I want to argue that the mere fact that so many people are outraged to begin with is a sign that something is very wrong with the prevailing social and political culture in the Muslim world. What makes this such an important point to make is that the social and political culture in the United States seems to be growing more and more similar, at least in some respects, to that in many parts of the Muslim world with each passing day. This in turn makes the reaction of the left in the United States to the cartoon controversy (which has been anything but uniform) incredibly important, because if I am right about the cultural trends in the U.S., then it seems that many on the left are likely to defend what seem to amount to incompatible views, so long as we make some basic assumptions about the value of free speech and the free exchange of ideas (that is, while holding that we should strongly oppose the development of this type of culture in the U.S., many will claim that we should not do anything to offend the sensibilities fostered by this same type of culture in the Muslim world).

An example should help illustrate the inconsistency: Imagine that a newspaper in the U.S. prints a series of cartoons poking fun at the priest sex scandal, or at the opposition to evolution (and science in general) of many fundamentalist Christians (in fact, we don't have to imagine such cartoons being printed; despite the increasing fear among the media of offending the right in any way, such cartoons are still printed, at least every now and then). What would be the reactions of those on the right and left in America? Well, of course the most vile elements of the right-wing noise machine (think Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, Robertson) would rant and rave about the liberal and anti-religious bias that they believe (or at least pretend to believe) dominates the media, and Bill O'Reilly would make an almost coherent argument about a media double-standard before falling back into absurd accusations of anti-Christian hatred among media elites. And, most importantly, those on the left would uniformly defend the right of the press to publish anything it sees fit. They would deride the right-wing outcry as a call for censorship, and an affront to the Constitution. And they would be right. We don't censor speech simply because it will offend the sensibilities of others, especially speech that has redeeming social value. And anyone who thinks that speech critical of religion has no redeeming social value clearly has an extremely poor grasp of history.

So why do some on the left seem to think that Islam should be immune from criticism and satire in the West? The argument isn't, thankfully, that there should be legal sanctions imposed on those who commit what Rene Ciria-Cruz calls "violations of common decency, respect and good taste"; at least there is that much respect for free speech among those who think the cartoons should never have been published. The call among left-leaning critics of the cartoons is for self-censorship; they believe that the publication of the cartoons shows a lack of respect for different cultures and religious beliefs. Serious criticism, and even humorous jabs, at the cultures or religions of others is, on this view, off limits to members of the press (and presumably to others as well) because it is distasteful and shows a lack of respect for beliefs and values that those who might author such material do not share. The result of such a regime of self-censorship, taken to the absurd extreme that some on the left seem to endorse, would be to cut off all debate about the appropriateness of embracing certain values and the rationality of holding certain beliefs. Reasoned discourse about a wide variety of issues, including certain political issues (imagine if we couldn't criticize right-to-lifers on the ground that their views rely on faulty religious premises about the moral status of embryos and fetuses), would be eliminated from the public sphere. At a time when ideologues on the right are doing everything they can to increase their control over the terms of the public debate on nearly every significant issue, and power is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of right-wing forces, the left cannot afford to embrace the view (which so many already hold) that all truth and all value is relative and politics is and can be nothing more than the will of the stronger.

The conclusion that we ought not criticize the cultural practices and religious beliefs of others is rooted in a misguided conception of what it means to respect others. Respect for others does not require that we refrain from criticizing anything that they value, or even those things that are of central importance to their lives, such as their religion. In fact, failing to express disagreements can actually be a sign of a lack of respect for others, insofar as it can suggest that one believes that those with whom she disagrees are either not worth engaging in critical discussion with or else are incapable of responding rationally to criticism of their views. While respecting others does not require that we refrain from criticizing their beliefs and values, it does require that when we do so we do it in a way that acknowledges their rational capacities. Insofar as rationality is a defining characteristic of persons, respecting persons as such demands that we engage with them as rational beings (as a sidenote, my philosopher readers will likely find this paragraph to be much more Kantian in character than my work tends to be; this should not be taken to reveal any deep sympathies with Kant).

All this talk about rationality and the importance of engaging with others rationally may seem to count against the publication of the cartoons, for at least two reasons. The first is that publishing a cartoon that depicts Mohammad with a bomb in his turban does not seem to be a paradigm case of rational engagement. It may seem like a cheap shot, very different in character from a well-reasoned article about the dangers of religious fundamentalism, for example one that includes troubling Qu'ran passages and cites instances in which they have been used to justify terrorist acts. But rational engagement is not limited to complex philosophical arguments in which premises are explicitly laid out, conclusions derived, and steps challenged. If that is all there were to rational engagement, it would be pretty tedious and for the most part uninteresting. Luckily for us, rational discourse can take many forms; we have the ability to be creative, to express our views and challenge those of others in a wide variety of ways: using arguments, analogies, metaphors, by writing stories, producing films, performing comedy routines (think Bill Maher), and by creating artwork, including cartoons of the sort that have caused so much outrage (satire is also a particularly effective means of making important points, and this particular example, devised as a response to the Mohammad cartoon episode, may even rival Jonathan Swift). Criticism in the form of artwork (or film or narrative), when done well, is delivered with premises implicit, and can be just as effective (and often more so) as a careful philosophical argument.

The second reason we might think the cartoons problematic in light of the demand that we engage with those whose views we are criticizing as rational beings is that many of those whose views the cartoons were aimed at clearly are not disposed to respond to criticism rationally. Indeed, that is (at least in part) what it is to be a fundamentalist; to willfully ignore any and all rational considerations that tell against whatever ideology one has decided to adhere to (this is why fundamentalists are constantly fighting science; science is in itself an enemy to fundamentalism, because the entire scientific project is built upon the notion that we ought always to respond to evidence rationally, wherever doing so might lead). The fact that certain people are not actually disposed to respond to criticism rationally, however, is no reason to refrain from making rational criticisms of their views. In fact, it is the views of those who eschew rationality that are most in need of criticism, if we hope to stem the tide of theocracy both at home and abroad.

I do not use the term 'theocracy' lightly; though some may be inclined to think that the view that journalists should avoid publishing material that might be offensive to members of a religious group is merely an expression of tolerance, and in the case of Muslims tolerance of a group that is under heavy fire from the right these days (which is not a trivial point), it is in effect an implicit endorsement of a certain sort of theocratic control over freedom of expression. Here's what I mean: many conservative Christians think that their religious belief that abortion is wrong should be binding on the actions of others, who do not share that belief. Those on the left are quick to point out, and rightly so, that those who believe abortion is wrong don't have to avail themselves of that option, but that their religious views cannot be imposed as constraints on the behavior of others (similar examples can be given regarding homosexuality, sex before marriage, etc.), because that would violate the separation of church and state and the freedom of conscience that we all value. Those who believe that non-Muslims should refrain from depicting Mohammad because some Muslims believe it to be wrong on religious grounds are implicitly accepting that the religious beliefs of some ought to be binding on the actions of others (few think that they should be legally binding; of course the case of the Afghani man on trial for his life for converting to Christianity raises significant problems for the defenders of self-censorship regarding the religious beliefs of some Muslims, as it is hard to imagine anyone denying that the theocrats who want to enforce that law should be immune from having their views criticized), and that is in itself theocratic. Muslims who believe that Mohammad ought not be depicted don't have to depict him; but they don't have the right to stop others, who don't share their beliefs, from doing so. That is implicit in any reasonable view of religious freedom, of freedom of expression and conscience, and of the way that discourse regarding controversial issues, whether religious, political, ethical, cultural, etc., ought to proceed.

Moral Philosophy for Anti-War Activists

2005-12-08T02:56:00.000-08:00

With end of the semester papers due, I haven't had time to post in a while. At this point, I still don't. But I had intended to put the text of a talk I gave a few weeks ago up, but neglected to do so. Anyway, here it is:

Moral Philosophy for Anti-War Activists: How to Argue with Republicans about Iraq and Beyond

All too often interaction between anti-war activists and war supporters, and between progressive activists and conservatives generally, consists in little more than the shouting of dogmatic slogans back and forth. We accuse them of being killers of innocent Iraqis, racists, and liars, and they accuse us being killers of innocent fetuses, unpatriotic, and indifferent to the “freedom” of Iraqis. While these confrontations may be cathartic for us, allowing us to unleash our rage and frustration on people who represent the policies that are their cause, it’s clear that this kind of interaction with our political adversaries does nothing to advance our cause.

I want to suggest a method of engaging with conservatives that’s better suited to what our aims as activists should be. In order to make clear why I believe this method ought to be employed by activists, I will begin by stating the assumptions that underlie my analysis, which I hope will be found uncontroversial:

1) One thing we should hope to accomplish as activists is to convince more people to adopt our views on key issues, such as the war in Iraq

2) Shouting slogans at those who disagree with us cannot possibly further this aim

3) Pointing out well-known, or even not so well-known facts about what’s going on in Iraq is very unlikely to convince a war supporter to change his view

4) Appealing to one’s own moral beliefs about a particular policy, such as that the war in Iraq is unjust for reasons X and Y, is also unlikely to change the view of a war supporter

5) Most people, including most conservatives, have moral beliefs, and believe that such beliefs ought to guide one’s action

6) If one can be convinced that a moral belief that she has about a particular policy, such as the war in Iraq, conflicts with a more general moral belief that she also holds, she will have good reason to reconsider her belief about the war

Given these assumptions, a particular approach to arguing with war supporters suggests itself as potentially quite useful. This approach to important moral questions has been developed by a number of moral philosophers in recent years; its first and most famous application is to be found in Peter Singer’s 1972 article entitled “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” Before explaining in detail exactly how this approach to moral argument works, it will be helpful to provide a brief summary of Singer’s argument. He begins by suggesting a general moral principle that he believes everyone will accept. This principle, which I’ll call the Principle of Basic Decency (PBD), is:

If one can prevent something very bad from happening, without sacrificing anything morally significant, she ought to do so.

So, Singer suggests, this Principle implies that if one is walking by a shallow pond and sees a child drowning, she ought to wade in and rescue the child, even if doing so means ruining the expensive clothes she is wearing. This is an implication of the PBD that everyone accepts. But, Singer argues, the principle also implies that if one can save the life of a child in one of the world’s poorest regions, which costs about $3 (in today’s money), she ought to do that, so long as the loss of the $3 is not morally significant. And since for most of us it would be absurd to think that the loss of $3 would be morally significant, it seems that if we accept the very uncontroversial principle Singer proposed, we’re committed to the view that we do something morally wrong if we fail to donate whatever money we have beyond that the loss of which would be morally significant to efficient life-saving charities like OXFAM. But of course most people don’t think that it’s morally wrong to fail to donate such money in order to save lives. But since the moral wrongness of failing to donate is entailed by the PBD, it is either the case that we are wrong to think that it’s morally acceptable not to donate, or we’re wrong in accepting the Principle. And since Singer thinks the truth of the Principle is on much firmer ground, he concludes that we are in fact morally obligated to donate what we can to life-saving charities.

It should be relatively clear how this argument works. Singer has a conclusion that he believes everyone should accept, namely, that we’re morally required to donate money to save lives. Since most people believe that we’re not obligated to do so, Singer must provide people with a reason to think that that belief is wrong. He does this by bringing out the fact that it is inconsistent with another belief that they also hold (the PBD). Given such an inconsistency, one of the beliefs has to go.

The potential usefulness of this method for activists is extensive, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that there are a number of common conservative views to which it can be effectively applied. Singer himself, in his recent book entitled “The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush”, provides us with one such argument. In this case, however, rather than starting with a principle that everyone accepts, he starts with a principle that Bush, and many conservatives accept, and argues that the conservative argument for the war in Iraq, indeed the only kind of moral argument that could be made for the war, is inconsistent with the principle. Singer claims, based on speeches given by Bush on topics such as abortion and stem-cell research, that Bush accepts the following principle, which I’ll refer to as the Sanctity of Life Principle (SLP):

All human life is sacred, and it’s morally wrong to sacrifice any form of human life in order to save other human lives, or for the sake of any other greater good.

So, according to Singer, Bush rejects consequentialist moral arguments when the destruction of human life is involved. This is why he believes that it is immoral to destroy human embryos for the purpose of embryonic stem cell research, even if doing so could provide a cure for diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. But in the war in Iraq, innocent human beings have been killed by the tens of thousands, and Bush knew that this would almost surely be the case well before the invasion of Iraq was launched. Furthermore, once it became clear that there were no WMD’s in Iraq, and that Saddam had no ties to al-Qaeda, the administration turned to arguing that the war is worth the loss of U.S. and Iraqi lives (as well as the financial cost) because we have gotten rid of Saddam and are bringing democracy to the people of Iraq. This is a purely consequentialist argument. For the argument to be so much as plausible, one must first accept that it is morally acceptable to sacrifice human lives (in this case tens of thousands of them) for the sake of some purported greater good. But this is just what Bush denies in his arguments regarding stem-cell research and abortion. And so Bush and other conservatives who support the war on consequentialist grounds and oppose stem-cell research and abortion on the basis of the SLP find themselves in the grip of a contradiction. They cannot have it both ways; either they’re consequentialists, or they’re not.

Conservatives are often able to get by, both politically and psychologically, maintaining such contradictory positions because the contradiction is never brought before their minds. Often times we who are against the war respond to conservative arguments that suggest that the costs of the war are “worth it” by arguing that in fact they are not. The end result of the war, we claim, will not make things better to an extent that justifies the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, the destruction of homes, the billions spent that could have gone toward hurricane relief or our failing education system, etc… It’s true that this, and not the SLP, is the right basis upon which to oppose the war (that is to say, lives, and especially embryos, can be sacrificed for the sake of an actually greater good). But since conservatives tend to believe that the costs are worth it, it is very unlikely that challenging that belief by appeal to facts of which they may or may not be aware, will change their view (3 above). And since our aim in arguing with conservatives is to convince them to reconsider their support of the war, we would do better to argue in the way I’m suggesting, starting with another belief that they hold, and arguing that it is inconsistent with that belief to support the war (note that if our aim were to convince conservatives to reconsider their opposition to stem-cell research, we could start with the fact that they accept consequentialist arguments in favor of the war, and suggest that they ought to give up the SLP…this doesn’t mean that we accept the argument for the war, just as starting with the conservative’s belief in the SLP doesn’t mean we accept the SLP; the choice of a particular starting point is merely a rhetorical strategy designed to bring out a contradiction in the conservative‘s views).

The reason that the typical rhetorical strategies of anti-war activists fail to so much as convince conservatives that they ought to reconsider their views is easy to understand. Imagine that I am trying to convince you that one of your beliefs is false. It should be obvious that I won’t be able to do this by appealing to beliefs of mine that you don’t share. If you believe that it’s wrong to kill someone in order to save two people from dying, I won’t be able to convince you that you’re wrong by invoking my belief that this would be for the greater good, and that we should always act for the greater good, if you don’t already believe that we should always act for the greater good. If, however, I can convince you that one of your other beliefs, which you hold more strongly than your belief about the case of killing one to save two, entails that we should always act for the greater good, then you will be faced with an irreconcilable contradiction, and one of the beliefs will have to go.

To illustrate how this approach can be effective in practice, I’ll summarize, as briefly as I can, a discussion I had with a Marine recruiter last Wednesday. After he stated that anyone who violated orders at Abu Ghraib, and any officer who gave illegal orders, should be punished, I put the following question to him: does a Marine who receives an illegal order have an obligation to follow that order, or an obligation not to. He responded that one has an obligation to report illegal orders to his officer’s superior. Next I asked whether one has an obligation to follow an order given by a superior, so long as that order does not require him to do something illegal. He responded emphatically that one has no choice in such a matter but to follow such an order. To follow up on that point, I asked him if one gives up the right to follow one’s conscience on important moral matters when entering the military. He responded that one does not give up that right. I then asked him if he thought that torturing prisoners is morally wrong, and he said that it is. So, I pointed out to him, he accepts the following:

1) Members of the military are not obligated to follow orders to do something illegal

2) They are, however, required to follow all legal orders

3) They do not give up their right to act on important moral beliefs

4) The belief that torturing prisoners is wrong is such a belief

He agreed that he accepts all of these statements. I then presented him with the following hypothetical: Imagine that Congress passes a law that says that the U.S. military, for purposes of the war on terror, can torture anyone believed to have important information, and that the decision to do so is entirely at the discretion of the commanding officers at the locations where prisoners are being held. Your commanding officer orders you to torture a prisoner, and you believe, based on your interactions with the prisoner, that he has no useful information, and is unlikely to be involved in terrorism at all. The order is perfectly legal, given the new legislation; what do you do?

After pausing for a moment, the recruiter responded that he would have no choice but to torture the prisoner, given the legality of the order. But he was clearly troubled by the conclusion. For one thing, as I pointed out, the conclusion implies that one does in fact give up the right to act on important moral beliefs when joining the military, if those moral beliefs conflict with the law. This should be troubling to anyone who is faced with this fact, as freedom of conscience is a value that most everyone rightly embraces. In addition, the thought that one could, at least hypothetically, find oneself in a situation in which he feels he has no choice but to torture someone he believes to be innocent will surely give almost anyone pause, and provide a good reason to reconsider the moral acceptability of the rules governing the institution that sets up such a framework (i.e. the military).

For activists to be successful in employing this method of argument, they must first develop the necessary analytical and rhetorical skills. They must learn to seek out the contradictions in the beliefs of others that often lie just beneath the surface of the beliefs they openly express. They must learn to direct discussions with conservatives in the right kind of way, by asking the right questions and pointing out inconsistencies at the right time.

But in my experience, activists tend to be skeptical of the usefulness of the kinds of discussions that I’m suggesting, and tend to have little interest in developing the kinds of skills that I‘ve described. Even if one is able to change the views of a few conservatives on the war, that won’t stop it from continuing, they might think. I want to suggest that this thought is misguided, for a few reasons. First, while it is true that convincing a few people to change their view on the war won’t stop it, neither will the chanting or indignant expressions of moral outrage that characterize most confrontations between activists and conservatives. Changing one person’s view is better than changing none. Second, if tens of thousands of us activists were able to engage in the kind of argument that I have described, then we might succeed in changing the views of tens of thousands of others, who might in turn change the views of still others; this, of course, would be quite significant. In addition, the widespread use of this method among activists would entirely change the dynamics of our interaction with conservatives. We would be directing the discussion, both at the individual level and within the debate as a whole. Rather than having to constantly justify our dissent, we would force them to answer our questions. And since our questions wouldn’t be answerable by appeal to mere differences of belief, we will have backed them into a moral corner.

We may think, probably rightly, that such arguments would have no effect on Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the others who orchestrated the war. But it would be wrong to think that they will have no effect on ordinary conservatives, including military recruiters, who, unlike those in charge, do have moral beliefs, and want them to be consistent. There are times for chanting, sloganeering, and angry expressions of moral outrage over the atrocities of the war. But if we really want to make a difference, we ought to recognize that there are also times when we must engage those with whom we disagree in calm and rational debate. We have moral consistency on our side; it is perhaps the most powerful weapon we have in our struggle to win more people to our movement, and therefore we should all know how to use it effectively.