Category Archives: contemporary ethics

people as clusters of attention

Posted on by
Reply

Attention is endangered. It is what Silicon Valley has learned to capture and commoditize. It is what LLMs pretend to offer by speaking in the first-person singular, often in a sycophantic voice. It is what my iPhone takes from me. It is what Donald Trump constantly demands.

To understand why our attention should be valuable to us, we need a satisfactory theory of it. We should not depend on the idea that we have a private, inner self that creates or determines its own attention and owns it like a plot of property. Yet our attention does not belong to Google and Meta or to Donald Trump, and we are worse off when they determine it. Here is an effort at an explanation.

1. The belief in a willing self

It feels as if we decide to do certain things. The reason they occur is that we will them. Other things happen to us, or just happen. For instance, I stand up because I decide to do so, but I fall down because someone pushes me or the leg of my chair breaks.

What am I? I am the thing that wills my own actions.

Sometimes we hear that this theory is “Western” or “modern,” but classical Indian Buddhist thinkers–who disagreed with the theory–nevertheless argued that all sentient beings believe it until they achieve enlightenment. The intended reader of a classical Buddhist text was neither Western nor modern yet believed in a self that willed its own actions. Classical Buddhist authors defined themselves as opponents of other Asian authors who explicitly endorsed this theory, including foundational Hindu texts.

I presume that most or all people believe in a willing self because it makes sense of experience. We are so constituted that we feel that we decide and choose some things, while other things happen to us.

This theory also supports significant and appropriate moral distinctions. We hold ourselves and other people accountable for choices, not for accidents. And just as we value and care for our self–which we credit with making choices–so we value and care for other selves.

When we begin by believing in our own willing selves, we naturally pose questions about other wills. Presumably, other human beings are just like us; to assume otherwise is solipsistic and maybe even psychopathic. But from there, the answers become trickier. Do other animals have selves, and if so, which animals? (My dog seems to, but it’s hard to believe that a bacterium does.) Can a group of human beings or a human institution have a will? How about a computer?

2. Drawbacks of the theory

The theory of a willing self has advantages but also limitations that many people recognize, in principle, even as our experiences keep convincing us that it is true.

For one thing, we have no direct knowledge of the self. It can seem like a magical exception in a universe otherwise determined by the causes that are known to science.

The theory of a self implies a sharp distinction between choices and accidents, even though many–possibly all–intentional behavior seems to be a mix of both. I assume that I have freely decided to stand up, but that behavior resulted from a series of neurological events that were affected, in part, by other people and objects.

Although the theory suggests a binary, the world seems to be shaded in grey. My dog Luca has a similar psychology to mine but not completely the same; a lizard is like Luca but also different from him; and an ant is further along the same continuum. A crowd of humans can have a kind of will, but not exactly like mine. A Large Language Model (LLM) exhibits will-like behavior but isn’t a person.

Finally, the notion of a freely choosing self violates important moral intuitions. It is incompatible with Moral Luck, the idea that we can be better or worse as a result of things that happen without our choosing them. For example, I didn’t choose to be an American citizen led by President Trump, but I am. It is wrong to distance myself from that fact on the ground that I didn’t will it. The theory can also encourage us to care too much about our own selves and to regard our freedom and survival as paramount while making us too judgmental about other people. In Buddhism, an enlightened person has shed the belief in itself.

But it is also problematic to deny the existence of selves in such a way that it no longer seems to matter whether we and other people have agency–or even whether we or they survive. A person is a thing of inestimable value even it’s not quite right to understand it as a self that has a will. And a dog is a being of great value even if it’s not on a par with a human person. Somehow, it must make sense to complain when a person’s private space has been violated.

3. Attention, not self

Here is an alternative. I am inspired by Jonardon Ganeri’s book Attention, Not Self (Oxford 2017), which is primarily an interpretation of Buddhaghosa’s The Path of Purification (written around 450 CE) and other works by this classical Theravada thinker, who (in turn) claimed to be faithfully interpreting the words of the Buddha as recorded in the Pali Canon. Indeed, Buddhaghosa claims that his whole Path of Purification, which is 853 pages long in the English translation by Bhikkhu Nanamoli, is a commentary on the second stanza of Linked Discourses 1.23 (which I have loosely translated here.)

It would be a thorny matter to decide whether I am interpreting Ganeri reasonably well, whether he offers an accurate reading of Buddhaghosa, whether Buddhaghosa is a reliable interpreter of the Pali Canon, and whether the Canon reflects the ideas of the actual Buddha. Instead, I will simply sketch a view that I’ve formed while reading Ganeri.

We can begin with attention. Although this word does not have a self-evident meaning, we use it successfully. Even a toddler can understand the phrase “Pay attention!” When I say my dog’s name, he attends to me, and when he barks, he wants to get my attention. In other words, Luca and I can play language-games involving attention even if he couldn’t learn the word. In this sense, “attention” is much more tractable than “consciousness.”

In its most general sense, attention is some kind of ordering of experience by an organism. An ant can attend to a leaf.

Ganeri argues that our attention has two general aspects: it functions like a window or aperture that removes most of what we could notice so that we are less distracted; and it directs or faces us toward certain phenomena within the window so that we can more deeply understand those things. When I stare at a tree, I am ignoring other objects in my peripheral vision and I am thinking about the tree. “I have reconstructed Pali Buddhist theory as consisting in the claim that the role of attention in experience consists in an exclusion-guided placing together with a directing towards, where there is no incompatibility between them” (Ganeri 117).

This is a general account of attention, at least for human beings. Ganeri further argues that “attention is disunified;” it comes in many forms.

Among the varieties of attention are focal and placed attention, retained attention, reflective attention, attention through language to the world beyond one’s horizons, attention to one’s own mind, attention to the minds of others through their poise and posture, and attention to one’s life in total. These varieties of attention are, as we will see, put to work to explain perception, memory, mindfulness, testimony, introspection, and empathy (Generi, 221).

Each person’s attention is differentiated from others’. For example, only I can remember my own past experiences, which is a particular way of attending. You can learn about my past and possibly even know facts about my past that I don’t know, but I alone can attend to my past as a memory. Likewise, only I can focus on my future as my own, which I do when I plan. I can attend to you in the way that we call empathy, which you cannot offer to yourself.

If you and I are sitting in a lecture, I may be paying attention while your mind is wondering (or vice-versa, of course). If there is a sudden loud noise, such as a thunderclap, both of us may have our attentions captured or “grabbed,” but this may feel different to each of us because I experienced an interrupted lecture while you experienced an interrupted daydream. Compare William James:

for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it. Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling of anything that went before. (James, The Principles of Psychology, 1890, vol. 1, Chapter 9, p. 103.)

There is such a thing as voluntary or intended attention. We can tell by the fact that such attention requires effort. Maybe I am forcing myself to pay attention to the lecture while you are allowing yourself be distracted by someone else in the room, by a feeling of hunger, or by a memory.

James argues that “the question of free-will is insoluble on strictly psychologic grounds” yet there is a clear difference between trying to attend to something and doing so because we failed to try or because something else compelled our attention. The difference matters morally:

The question of fact in the free-will controversy is thus extremely simple. It relates solely to the amount of effort of attention or consent which we can at any time put forth. Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? Now, as I just said, it seems as if the effort were an independent variable, as if we might exert more or less of it in any given case. When a man has let his thoughts go for days and weeks until at last they culminate in some particularly dirty or cowardly or cruel act, it is hard to persuade him, in the midst of his remorse, that he might not have reined them in…. But, on the other hand, there is the certainty that all his effortless volitions are resultants of interests and associations whose strength and sequence are mechanically determined by the structure of that physical mass, his brain; and the general continuity of things and the monistic conception of the world may lead one irresistibly to postulate that a little fact like effort can form no real exception to the overwhelming reign of deterministic law (James, vol; 2, chap 35, p. 497).

Ganeri posits that “Attention is the active organization of experience and action into centred arenas, and Buddhist anatta [the doctrine of no-self] is the claim that there is no room for something real at the centre doing or observing the ordering” (p. 26).

4. Consequences and applications

This theory has the advantage of explaining why each person’s attention is different from others’ without positing a self behind the curtain. It allows us to care whether a given person, including me or you, remains alive and free. A person is a unique cluster or concentration of attention that can attend to its past and future in a unique way. The world will be less when it is gone.

Yet there is also a continuum of qualities and degrees of attention, so that I am very similar to Luca and yet not completely like him. My attention while I write this post is not the same as your attention while you read it, but they connect to each other via the text and our shared experiences. When I am gone, some of what I attended to will be forgotten and some will still receive attention.

Most examples of attention have many causes, some of which can be located mostly inside the organism and others beyond it. There are no sharp boundaries between self and other or between freedom and necessity, but there is a difference between an intense, effortful, deliberated, and concentrated experience of attention versus a complete accident, such as a thunderclap that interrupts a lecture. There is also a difference between reading a novel or listening to a friend and being directed by an algorithm.

Moral responsibility waxes to the degree that we do–or could–expend effort on our own attention. Thus we can be blamed for focusing on bad things or for failing to attend to our responsibilities.

I think we can blame a dog for failing to attend, although much less censoriously than we would blame an adult human being; and we can blame an institution, like the Supreme Court, although we should excuse a dissenting minority.

Ganeri’s theory (to the extent that I have captured it here) is perennial, developed in dialogue with authors who lived in Asia more than 1,500 years ago. It is a theory about human beings, or perhaps about all sentient creatures. But it also feels timely and urgent because human attention is so badly threatened now.

I am currently on vacation in Penzance, Cornwall. I asked Google Gemini’s LLM whether it could summarize a long text for me, and it replied:

I would love to! Please go ahead and upload or paste the text.

Since I’m in Penzance, I’m ready to dive right into your document and pull out the key points, actionable items, or core arguments so you can get the information you need at a glance.

What would you like me to focus on?

Gemini is here in Penzance? That is just creepy. Nevertheless, I uploaded the poem from the Pali Canon that had absorbed Buddaghosa for 853 pages. Gemini “focused on it” and cheerfully gave me a summary in four bullet points. All that was lost was any possible advantage of my attending to that text.

You might think the same of this blog post. if you have read this far, you have devoted some time to my essay, whereas you could instead have read a bit of Ganeri’s book, or the 5th-century Buddhist classic that he interprets, or the original Pali Canon. The fact that I attended to my writing whereas Gemini automatically generated its summary does not make my text better for you.

Indeed, it would be better to read a classic than my blog, but it is also true that we have limited attention and cannot contemplate everything. Summaries are not intrinsically bad, so long as they allow us to focus seriously on other things. Even Gemini’s four-point summary of a poem attributed to the Buddha could enrich a person’s attention if that person then turned to other works.

If we are clusters or concentrations of attention, then each of us has the opportunity to improve their own cluster. What makes attention better is a matter for discussion, but I would nominate complexity, depth, distinctiveness, and service to other people as criteria that we can strive for. A technical tool, such as an LLM or an iPhone, can help, but it can surely erode each of those values if we are not vigilant about it.

See also: The Tangle (a translation of 1.23); AI as Satanic; what should we pay attention to?

generosity as a virtue

Posted on by
Reply

Summary: I will argue here that generosity is a virtue when it is involves respectful care for an individual. Therefore, paradigm cases of generosity involve acts of personal attention and two-way communication, such as carefully selecting an appropriate gift or making a kind remark. To assess a transfer of money, it is better to ask whether it manifests justice, not generosity. Aristotle launched this whole discussion by drawing a useful distinction between generosity and justice. However, because his ideas of justice were constrained, and because he analyzed generosity strictly in terms of money, he left the impression that generosity was not a very appealing virtue. We can do better by focusing on acts conducted in the context of mutually respectful relationships.

To begin: virtues are traits or dispositions that we should want to cultivate in ourselves and in others to improve these individuals’ characters, to raise the odds that they will benefit their communities, or both.

Generosity is found on famous lists of virtues, such as Aristotle’s twelve (or so) and the Buddha’s six paramitas. However, generosity receives much less attention than most other virtues in contemporary English-language philosophy. Miller (2018) finds only three “mainstream philosophy” articles about generosity prior to his own. Ward (2011) finds little discussion of generosity in scholarship on Aristotle, notwithstanding that a whole section of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is focused on it.

I would propose this explanation. Aristotle continues to provide the most influential framework for theories of virtues in the academic world, partly because he is often insightful, and also because he shaped ethics in the three Abrahamic religions. However, his account of generosity (eleutheriotes–more literally translated as “liberality”) makes it a problematic trait. And that is why the virtue does not receive much attention in Anglophone and European academic philosophy.

Aristotle introduces his discussion of generosity with an explicit mention of money:

Let us speak then of freeness-in-giving [eleutheristes, generally translated as generosity or liberality]. It seems to be a mean in respect to needs/goods/property [chremata], for a man is not praised as generous in war, nor in matters that involve temperance, nor in court decisions, but in the giving or taking of goods, and especially in giving them–“goods” meaning all those things whose worth is measured with coins (NE 1119b–my translations).

For Aristotle, generosity does not mean transferring money to people who have a right to it, because that is the separate virtue of justice. Rather, generosity means donating material things voluntarily because one is not overly enamored of them, and doing so in an excellent way.

Things that are done in virtue are noble and are done for their nobility. The generous man therefore will certainly give for the nobility of it. And he will do it rightly, for he will give to the right people, in the right amount, at the right time, and whatever else counts as right giving; and he will give with pleasure or at least painlessly, for whatever is done virtuously is pleasant and painless, or at least not distressing (NE 1120a).

The appropriate recipient is not one who deserves the money (again, that would be an act of justice), but rather someone whom a person of generous spirit would desire to help. I imagine a land-owner being generous to his tenant or to a retainer of long standing.

Aristotle acknowledges that a person with less money can be as generous as a rich man, since the appropriate measure is the proportion of one’s wealth that one donates. Nevertheless, his paradigm of a generous person is a man of inherited wealth who is liberated enough from the base appeal of material things that he voluntarily gives some money away in a gentlemanly fashion (NE 1120b).

I will not claim that the ideal of generosity in the Buddhist canon is the same as in Aristotle, but the early Buddhist texts also appreciate people who give things away because they are free from a desire for goods:

Furthermore, a noble disciple recollects their own generosity: “I’m so fortunate, so very fortunate! Among people full of the stain of stinginess I live at home rid of stinginess, freely generous, open-handed, loving to let go, committed to charity, loving to give and to share.” Then a noble disciple recollects their own generosity, their mind is not full of greed, hate, and delusion. This is called a noble disciple who lives in balance among people who are unbalanced, and lives untroubled among people who are troubled. They’ve entered the stream of the teaching and develop the recollection of generosity (Numbered Discourses 6.10.1, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato).

One difference is that Aristotle mainly thinks about generosity to people who are poor against their will, whereas the paradigm of generosity in early Buddhism is a wealthy layperson’s donation to monks, who have voluntarily renounced worldly goods. In fact, I am not sure that monks can be generous in the Pali Canon, because their role is to receive alms. Another difference—typical when comparing Aristotle to classical Buddhism–is that the Buddhist path leads toward complete liberation, whereas Aristotle expects us to navigate happiness and suffering until death.

In any case, for Aristotle, generosity is relational (one person is generous to another), and it usually accompanies an unequal relationship. As Ward writes, it “abstracts” from justice. When we are being generous, in Aristotle’s sense, we do not have justice on our minds, although we might also act justly.

If one accepts inequality and suffering as natural, then justice is simply a matter of paying one’s debts, honoring contracts, and otherwise following the current rules; and generosity easily accompanies justice. A true aristocrat exhibits justice by paying his bills and taxes. He may also make generous gifts, although never giving so much as to threaten his social standing. (Aristotle defines prodigality as giving so much as to ruin one’s own resources: NE 1119b–1120a.)

However, if we decide that the current distribution of rights and goods is unjust and should be changed, then we will not be impressed by a person who is generous yet not just. More than that, we may feel that justice is the only standard, and generosity is virtuous just to the degree that it approximates justice. Then a gentleman’s holiday gifts are virtuous insofar as they diminish an unjustifiable disparity between the lord and his tenants. The effect is probably quite small. It would be better if the gentleman were prodigal or if his lands were reallocated. Meanwhile, if he takes satisfaction in his own gift-making–as evidence that he is free from base material desires–then he looks worse, not better. If he makes gifts, he should demonstrate respect for the recipients by making the payments seem obligatory and insufficient.

By alluding to land reform, I am suggesting that a social system should be egalitarian, and some powerful force, such as a modern government, should make it so. This is not necessarily correct. Adam Smith makes a different argument for generosity. In his view, a market economy is best for everyone because it continuously increases prosperity. But rich people should be generous, not only for the sake of those with less but also because a reasonable person will not be overly attached to his own wealth and will know when he has more than enough.

When “a man of fortune spends his revenue chiefly in hospitality” (benefitting friends), he demonstrates a “liberal or generous spirit” and also puts his wealth into circulation, thus contributing to the “increase of the public capital.” On the other hand, by hoarding his money for himself, a person would manifest “a base and selfish disposition” (Wealth of Nations, ii:3). It is less clear whether Smith recommends generosity toward poor people who are not one’s friends (discussed in Birch 1998). But in general, virtues are good for the individual and contribute to a civil society. Generosity is just one example; “humanity, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship and esteem” are others (Theory of Moral Sentiments, IV).

Whether you endorse or reject Smith’s view of markets, at least his theory of generosity is connected to his theory of social justice. Ward argues that Aristotle also considers generosity in the context of his view of a good community. She discusses the sections in the Politics where Aristotle says that the best regime empowers the middle classes. They are neither arrogant, like the rich, nor craven, like the poor (Pol. 1295b5).

A democracy dominated by the middle classes enables deliberation among peers. Equal citizens can look one another in the eye, say what they think, and cast equal votes to set policy. To the extent that Aristotle appreciates this kind of political system, then his discussions of generosity (giving moderate amounts of money to individuals) and munificence (giving lots of money to the city) begin to seem ironic. These are virtues of oligarchy, and Aristotle prefers democracy (albeit with qualifications).

I appreciate Ward’s argument, but I suspect that for Aristotle, equal standing or eisonomia can only work for an elite (even if it extends to the middling sort), and they should be generous to those who are naturally inferior. Members of the Assembly should treat the large majority of humans who are non-citizens generously, while treating one another with equal respect. However, once we embrace universal human rights, then everyone should be a citizen–somewhere–and the Aristotelian versions of generosity and munificence begin to look problematic.

As long as we are thinking primarily about the transfer of money or goods that money can buy, then I think that justice is the relevant virtue, and generosity is a poor substitute. This point does not depend on a radically egalitarian theory of social justice, because a libertarian should also put justice first and generosity well behind.

However, we naturally use the word “generous” for things other than money. For instance, “generous reading” is a common phrase for interpretive methods that seek to reconstruct persuasive positions from texts. Ann Ward reads Aristotle generously by combining his discussion of generosity in the Nicomachean Ethics with his analysis of democracy in the Politics.

Likewise, we can make “generous remarks” at a colleague’s retirement party, and our words will offer real insights about the colleague’s contributions. We can also give things or people our “generous attention.”

Our partner the Vuslat Foundation defines generous listening as “active, empathetic engagement with another person’s thoughts and feelings. At its core, generous listening is about creating a space for authentic dialogue.”

Think of a colleague who skillfully chooses holiday gifts, wrapping them nicely, and adding thoughtful notes. The objects may have limited monetary value yet reflect generous attitudes toward their recipients because they match each person’s desires and needs. Finding the gifts required time, and during that time, the donor focused on the recipient. We would not object if the skillful donor takes pleasure and pride, just as we generally appreciate cases when people derive happiness from their own virtue.

Whereas money is fungible, the generosity in these examples is specific to the individuals involved. Aristotle (like the Buddhist sutra I quoted earlier) is most interested in generosity as a display of freedom on the part of the giver, but in the cases I am sketching, the donors focus on the recipients. And these forms of generosity are relatively independent of the social system. I presume that generous speeches at retirement parties are appreciated alike in state socialism, corporate capitalism, and the nonprofit sector.

We might, then, agree with Smith in the Theory of Moral Sentiments that generosity is one of the virtues that “appear in every respect agreeable to us.” Generosity is agreeable regardless of the social or economic system, and apart from justice. But it is a virtue that requires benevolent respect for the recipient, listening and speaking as well as giving. Contrary to Aristotle, it is least relevant to monetary transfers and does not reflect a gentlemanly insouciance about private wealth. Rather, it is best manifested in reciprocal relationships, when the parties devote time and attention to one another.

Sources: Christian B. Miller, “Generosity,: in Michel Croce and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza, eds., Connecting Virtues: Advances in Ethics, Epistemology, and Political Philosophy (Wiley, 2018): 23-50; Ann Ward, “Generosity and inequality in Aristotle’s ethics.” Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought 28.2 (2011): 267-278; Thomas D. Birch, “An analysis of Adam Smith’s theory of charity and the problems of the poor.” Eastern Economic Journal 24.1 (1998): 25-41.my translations of Aristotle use the text from Project Perseus.

The post generosity as a virtue appeared first on Peter Levine.