In “Your Mind is Being Fracked” (May 31, 2024), Ezra Klein Interviews Princeton professor D. Graham Burnett. Their main topic is how companies manipulate our attention for profit–to our severe detriment.

Klein and Burnett also contrast two senses of “attention.” One is a focus on a practical task, leading to action. The other is an openness to experience or to another person that feels more like quiet waiting. These two forms of attention can conflict. The latter is especially at risk in a world of busy work-schedules and portable electronic devices.

At one point, Klein refers to the “debate that we’re having right now about smartphones and kids.” He acknowledges that there is an unresolved debate about the critique of smartphones that Jonathan Haidt and others are making; “the research is very complicated and you can fairly come to a view on either end of it.” But for Klein, the effects of heavy smartphone use are not really the point. He says,

If you convinced me that my kids scroll on their phones for four hours a day, had no outcome on their mental health at all — it did not make them more anxious — it did not make them more depressed — it would change my view on this not at all. I just think, as a way of living a good life, you shouldn’t be staring at your phone for four hours a day.

And yet, I also realize the language of society right now and parenting doesn’t have that much room for that. And I think we have a lot of trouble talking about just what we think a good life would be. Not a life that leads to a good job, not a life that leads to a high income, but just the idea, which I think we were more comfortable talking in terms of at other points in history, that it is better to read books than to not read books ….

As someone who spends about 3.5 hours a day on my smartphone and who reads somewhat fewer books than I once did, I agree that it is better to read books. Either my attention is being “fracked” (forcibly extracted for profit) or I am making unwise choices, or both.

I would define the benefits of reading much as Klein does later in the interview. A carefully constructed, lengthy written work affords us access to someone else’s thinking, thus allowing us to escape from our own limited selves. As my former colleague Maryanne Wolf said in a previous Klein podcast, “deep readers” display signs of absorption, empathy, and creativity. This mental state may have positive outcomes later, but that’s not really the point. Our life consists of time. What matters is the quality of it. Being absorbed, empathetic, and creative is good. Spending our time in a state of distraction and anxiety is not.

But here are some complications …

Klein is rightly concerned about a simplistic ideal of free choice that blocks us from asking whether some choices are better than others, either for ourselves or for our children. On the other hand, as Klein might acknowledge, choice is important. People differ, and we know things about our own needs and interests that others do not know. Also, we have the right to be the authors of our own lives. If someone forcibly took away my iPhone and ordered me into the library, I would have a good reason to be angry.

John Stuart Mill famously argued that individuals should have the liberty to allocate their time, yet if they are exposed to the higher things, they will freely choose them. If Mill was right, then excellence does not conflict with freedom. Liberal education liberates us by giving us the opportunity to choose higher things.

Mill’s predecessor, Jeremy Bentham, had said that poetry was just as valuable as the folk game of “push-pin” (illustrated above by James Gillray). But Mill responded that people who have the opportunity to learn poetry will not want to waste their time on such trivial table games.

Mill may not be right. I was given an expensive and extensive education, yet I am addicted–noticeably, although not overwhelmingly or irretrievably–to my phone. Sure, I sometimes use it for worthy purposes, including episodes of deep reading on its small screen, but I also play Stormbound enough to compete in the Platinum League. Actually, Stormbound has the same basic logic as push-pin–I try to get my tokens over the other player’s baseline, much like the Duke of Queensberry in Gillray’s cartoon.

In short, offering everyone experiences with higher things may not work. Look at me, with my Oxford doctorate in literae humaniores–I spend my day playing Stormbound.

But we should be open-minded and thoughtful when we make value-judgments. The game of push-pin actually doesn’t sound so bad. It was a safe contest of skill between human competitors–maybe a way to sustain relationships.

Meanwhile, Bentham was suspicious of poetry. He saw poets as prone to lies and exaggeration. If we think that Bentham was wrong–poetry is better than push-pin–we owe an account of its value. What is so good about poetry and so bad about games? And is all poetry really worth our time?

I think I can address these questions. Poetry is language that is especially carefully constructed, with particular attention to its formal qualities. As such, it is particularly well suited to promote absorption, assuming that you really attend to it and learn how to analyze it. Reading poetry requires experience, particularly because poems tend to refer to previous poems, and it’s only by reading many of them that you can really begin to see how they operate. Therefore, it is advanced reading that is worthy, not just any reading. As Wallace Stevens says, “Poetry is one of the enlargements of life.”

Games are also worthwhile, particularly when they involve people who know each other and are in physical proximity, so that the players can learn and care about one another and exercise their bodies as well as their minds. I’m for push-pin! In contrast, my smartphone games pit me against the AI or against completely anonymous human opponents, and as such, they offer no human interaction. Besides, they are carefully designed to pull me back in for another round. In these respects, they are worse than poetry. (Yet I sometimes find my mind wandering into worthy topics while I play, so maybe that isn’t so bad.)

The main point here is that our evaluation of various activities should be nuanced and critical, not prejudiced by assumptions about what count as the higher pursuits.

For me at least, the epitome of an absorbing experience that takes me out of my own mind is a classic novel. Because of its length and careful construction, it retains attention. Because it is fictional, it is truly the product of someone else’s thought. Because it is mere text on paper, it requires and promotes imagination. And because I am not a literary critic, I don’t get anything concrete from reading a novel; its value is intrinsic.

Thus we might want to pursue activities that are as much as possible like reading classic novels. However, from his unorthodox Marxist perspective in the 1930s, the great critic Walter Benjamin disparaged novels in favor of “stories.” By the latter word, he meant folktales and other oral narratives that emerge from the masses. Benjamin preferred stories because they are communal and they elicit responses from their listeners, including impromptu additions. In contrast, novels are constructed by solo authors who control the whole narrative, including its end. The relationship between the novelist and the reader is private and consumeristic: I buy the experience that James Joyce manufactured.

If we applied Benjamin’s argument to the present day, it would offer no justification for playing Stormbound. But it might justify spending time interacting with other people on a social network (ignoring, for a moment, the problem of corporate ownership, which Benjamin would decry). Benjamin would see the attention demanded by a novel as individualistic and consumerist.

Here is a different take on somewhat similar issues. In one of the oldest of all Buddhist texts, “The Fruit of Contemplative Life” from the Pali Canon, the Buddha tries to teach a very bad king, Ajatasattu–who is troubled by guilt for having murdered his own father and usurped the throne–to follow a monk’s contemplative path. One recommendation is “sense restraint”:

And how does a mendicant guard the sense doors? When [monks see] a sight with their eyes, they don’t get caught up in the features and details. If the faculty of sight were left unrestrained, bad unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure would become overwhelming. For this reason, they practice restraint, protecting the faculty of sight, and achieving its restraint. When they hear a sound with their ears … When they smell an odor with their nose … When they taste a flavor with their tongue … When they feel a touch with their body … When they know an idea with their mind, they don’t get caught up in the features and details. If the faculty of mind were left unrestrained, bad unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure would become overwhelming. For this reason, they practice restraint, protecting the faculty of mind, and achieving its restraint. When they have this noble sense restraint, they experience an unsullied bliss inside themselves. That’s how a mendicant guards the sense doors.

DN 2, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato, on suttacentral.net

This passage surprises me a little because I would have thought that “getting caught up in … features and details” is how we achieve attention. Our task, when we read a poem by Wallace Stevens, is precisely to analyze its features and details. I suppose there’s a difference between “getting caught up” in something–so that you drift into “covetousness and displeasure”–versus attending to it with openness and equanimity. But the question remains whether complicated things like poems and novels are appropriate objects of attention or whether we would be better off with bare walls and our breath.

Speaking of the Pali Canon: I struggle to attend to it because the narration is very repetitive. Before King Ajatasattu finds his way to the Buddha, he first meets eight misguided sages, and each of those episodes is narrated with precisely the same text, except that each guru’s name and a sentence about his mistaken doctrine is substituted at a key point.

These discourses emerged as stories, not as novels. The medium was oral, meant for memorization and communal experience, not literature constructed for an individual reader. However, I happen to be an individual reader who sometimes opens translations of the Pali Canon–as well as many other kinds of texts–on my smartphone. “Unskillful qualities of covetousness and displeasure” arise rather quickly in my mind, not because I dislike the text but because I am unable to concentrate on it.

We are not going back to oral recitations or baskets of palm leaves with handwritten text, nor should we want to. However, the technologies of the present have costs as well as benefits, and we are just beginning to learn how to deal with them.

See also: Kieran Setiya on midlife: reviving philosophy as a way of life; are we forgetting how to read?; some basics

The post what should we pay attention to? appeared first on Peter Levine.

Human beings have invented a vast and diverse set of institutions that coordinate behavior and allocate resources.

These forms include disciplined organizations headed by leaders, voluntary groups that strive to operate by consensus, procedures for voting directly on policies, elected bodies that deliberate and vote, courts that decide cases and controversies (with or without juries, which may or may not be randomly selected), bureaucracies characterized by hierarchies of defined positions, markets with or without firms (which may themselves by mini-dictatorships, bureaucracies, or co-ops), markets for capital, informal norms defined by a widespread assumption that everyone else will behave in certain ways, scientific disciplines organized by peer-review and replication, and networks that newcomers can join by agreeing to relay messages to other members.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive and is not closed. Several important forms are no more than 300 years old, and the last one originated within the past half century. In the future, new forms will be invented.

We should not view current institutions complacently, since many originated in injustice and still perpetuate bad outcomes. To name just one example, the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, pioneered essential features of capital markets, including shares that could be resold on the world’s first stock market and a board accountable to shareholders. Its major activities included conquest, ethnic cleansing, and slavery. And I do not mean to cite a corporation alone, since governmental forms are also rooted in cruelty.

But I do start with the assumption that each of these forms has been invented and has survived because it serves significant functions and offers distinctive advantages. Also, each one can be improved. Progress is by no means inevitable, but we can identify and enhance changes that are beneficial. A certain kind of arrogance is required to assume that any one of these forms is simply bad and should be dispensed with.

In that case, we must decide which institutional forms should be used for each social purpose. And a second-order question: which institution(s) should decide this matter?

A decision about which institution should play any given role typically looks like a law (although it might technically be a constitutional provision, a decree, or a regulation). For example, to have an independent, private press or else a governmental media system requires a law. Likewise for health insurance.

Which institutions can yield such laws? Not a market, which simply doesn’t offer products that look like laws. Nor are people invited to reason about the role of various other institutions when they are participating in market exchanges.

A king, dictator, high priest, or junta can decide which institution will do what. Instead of grabbing all power for himself, a ruler may favor courts or markets (think of Frederick the Great or Augusto Pinochet). Regardless, we do not want rulers to make these decisions for two major reasons. First, they cannot be trusted to decide which institutions work best for all, when they stand to profit for making them work mainly for themselves. Besides, even in the rare case of a benign despot, he cannot know enough about how each institution affects all the people of the society to be able to decide wisely.

In the US system, courts sometimes decide which kinds of institutions may do what. In the 1905 Lochner decision, the Supreme Court notoriously gave control over wages and working decisions to companies rather than the state. When judges seem to be deciding such cases on the basis of their own views (a charge against the current Supreme Court), then they appear no different from juntas. The special advantage of a court is not allocating responsibilities among institutions but interpreting and applying laws created by other institutions to adjudicate specific cases.

Science might be able to decide which institution works best for each purpose–if this turns out to be a tractable research question. Coase’s Theorem is supposed to be a result of research that proves the superiority of competitive markets for many purposes; some versions of Marxism are supposed to prove the deep flaws of capitalism.

I view these claims as useful inputs to reasoning about which institutions are best for various purposes. Research should be taken seriously and should develop further. I doubt it will ever resolve the discussion, because the choice of institutions involves conflicting values and interests, not merely empirical claims, and also because the world keeps changing as a result of people’s uncontrollable behavior. Any institution that is neatly designed according to a theory will soon be subverted by people who understand it and “hack” its design.

If the decision about which institution should do what looks like a law, and we don’t want rulers, judges, or specialized experts to make such laws, then the best candidate is a democracy. As Knight and Johnson (2014) argue, a democracy elicits views about the role of various other institutions, it gives everyone an equal opportunity to affect the decision, and it permits continued reflection once a decision is made.

One does not need optimistic assumptions about individuals’ wisdom or their tendency to learn from other people to believe that our best available way to decide the role of other institutions is to have an ongoing debate in civil society, then to empower elected, accountable representatives to vote, and then to debate the results and reconsider the decisions.

In fact, a reasonably healthy democracy seems to be one in which political competition is about the role of other institutions. For example, things would be going better if US voters were thinking about whether the government of the United States should channel resources into “green” technologies or else leave the allocation of capital to markets. I mention this example because the 2024 election is not about the pros or cons of Biden’s channeling more than a trillion dollars into green industries, but about who counts as a real American.

The above argument is deeply inspired by Knight and Johnson. Paul Aligica (2014) dissents in part. He sees all the different kinds of institutions as more or less on par within a polycentric order. He argues that institutions should and do grow and change as a result of decentralized decisions made by many actors across the society as a whole. In that sense, the people rule through all the institutions. Aligica defends an elected, democratic government but emphasizes that it cannot assess and influence the other institutions wisely unless they develop robustly and independently and demonstrate successes and failures.

I think Aligica makes valid points, but the gap between him and Knight and Johnson is not very wide, and I’m inclined to endorse the priority of democracy as long as we remember (as Knight and Johnson do) that a plurality of institutions is an asset for democratic government.

Sources: Jack Knight and James Johnson, The priority of democracy: Political consequences of pragmatism. Princeton University Press, 2014; Paul Aligica, Institutional Diversity and Political Economy: The Ostroms and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. See also polycentricity: the case for a (very) mixed economy; modus vivendi theory; what if people’s political opinions are very heterogeneous?; China teaches the value of political pluralism, etc.

The post democracy’s sovereignty appeared first on Peter Levine.

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
  -- Wallace Stevens, "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon" (1921)

For those who are interested in the most fundamental questions, it has often proven useful to ask about the thinker rather than what is thought. We can derive insights about the world by first understanding our own predispositions and limitations.

Hence the early Buddhists went searching for the self and found only the five aggregates (form, sensation, perception, volition, consciousness), Socrates tested various kinds of expertise, Aristotle based his system on logic, the sixth Chan patriarch Huineng found truth in his own original nature once all attachments fell away, Ibn al-Haytham explored optics to understand space and matter, Descartes proposed to ground philosophy on a critical theory of reason, Hegel analyzed the logic of history because he saw reason as cumulative, Husserl turned to pure experience, and Wittgenstein looked to the ordinary language with which we express thoughts.

These are examples of examining the subjective to understand what is objective.

For me, the most basic truth about our thought is that we use brains that evolved for specific needs, leaving us with severely limited cognitive powers and motives that are dubious, even by our own lights.

Indeed, we come into the world knowing almost nothing and hold most of our beliefs because of what other members of our species have told us. We are able to believe many different things, but what we actually believe depends in large part on who has influenced us, which is the result of our surrounding social structure–things like schools and publishers and churches and governments. And all social structures are dubious, even by our own lights.

I would believe very different things if I were a medieval Catholic, let alone a dolphin. Each organism has its own Umwelt (self-centered world), or kyogai (bounded consciousness, in Zen), or “mundo” in Stevens’ idiosyncratic vocabulary.

This relativism is grounds for humility but not an excuse for blanket skepticism. We can make and test specific inferences. Our understanding can accumulate, albeit from many starting points. We are obliged to think as well as we can and not to ignore what we have reason to believe.

Considering the knowledge that has accumulated for me, I think I discern two main pillars.

One is natural science, which assumes and reinforces a picture of nature as impersonal, purposeless. Things happen because things previously happened.

The other is ethics, in the very general sense that what matters is experience, not only my experience. “Without exception, no sufferings belong to anyone. They must be warded off simply because they are suffering” (Shantideva, 8.102-3).

Science and ethics stand separately. Neither lends support to the other. Each can be doubted in a very abstract way. Many human beings have denied each of them, and I could deny them as well. But such doubt is abstract because I have been formed by accumulated thought that supports both pillars.

Further, these two assumptions are responsible. Not to care about others is selfish; not to accept the basic purposelessness of nature is sentimental. We are to address suffering in a world that will not offer respite by itself. To doubt science or ethics is a mere temptation, not a responsible option.

On this planet, the general principles of a purposeless nature have generated the logic of natural selection, which causes increasingly complex organisms to proliferate against the current of entropy. In earth’s animal kingdom, this complexity has yielded sensitivity and, ultimately, experience.

Nothing suggests that evolution would tend toward happiness. On the contrary, a sensitive animal is more likely to survive if it experiences negative emotions, such as fear and aversion. Nor is there any reason to expect that an evolved brain would be able to understand itself. The first-person world–the stream of consciousness–is a slippery thing for us because we are not well designed for meta-cognition. We can describe the Umwelt of a deer-tick but not our own. We resort to crude words like “self” and “world” or “cause” and “effect” that seem inadequate to what we experience.

Recognizing the abstract idea that the world is experienced differently by other kinds of people and species reminds us that it has unplumbed depths. Attending very closely to our own experience offers hints of what we normally miss. Listening to others describe their experience enriches our own and encourages compassion by directing attention to their emotions and the causes of their experiences, something that our evolved brains seem able to do.

Genuine compassion demands action, and action to address suffering keeps one from marinating in one’s own concerns. We should listen not only to homo sapiens but also to other sentient creatures. But it is a mistake to attend only to others, since each of us is usually best placed to hear and respond to our own stream of consciousness, which is easy for us to ignore. If we can find ways to share what we find within, without burdening other people with self-indulgent confessions, then what we share about ourselves may be a gift for them.

Modern philosophers call the very close description of one’s own experience “phenomenology.” This practice has ancient roots. For Husserl, the ancient Buddhist Pali Canon was exemplary of phenomenology. He wrote that understanding its “joyous mastery of the world … means a great adventure” for those who start with different assumptions–in his case, with concepts derived from Protestantism (trans. in Hanna 1995). In other words, the Pali Canon offered both a skillful description of human experience in general and an alternative to Husserl’s local context. Exploring this alternative liberated him from himself.

Not only ancient Buddhist scriptures and dense modern phenomenological treatises but also many literary texts and images offer hints about consciousness as experienced by specific people. Since the mind is constantly attentive to the world and to other minds, a work that describes nature or people is also an account of the one who experiences such things. Thus a poem about a nightingale or a painting of a haystack or a fiction about one day in Dublin is also a kind of phenomenology. As Stevens said (I am on a Stevens kick right now), “Poetry is one of the enlargements of life.”

We have brains designed for survival, which means that they are destined for suffering. But this inheritance has equipped us with the capacity to “enlarge” ourselves by listening generously–listening to others, to nature, and to ourselves.

Again, to listen seriously compels compassionate action. If we act for the sake of a good outcome, we will inevitably be frustrated, so we must act just to be compassionate (which, however, implies thoughtfully choosing the most effective means). And since each of us is cognitively limited and motivationally flawed, we should almost always decide what to do together. This is where the inner life and civic life come together.

Sources: F.J. Hanna, “Husserl on the teachings of the Buddha,” The Humanistic Psychologist, 23(3), (1995) 365–372; Shantideva, The Bodhiicaryacatara, trans. by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (Oxford University Press, 1995). See also: Cuttings version 2.0: a book about happiness; verdant mountains usually walk; Montaigne the bodhisattva?; Wallace Stevens’ idea of order; the fetter; thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition; joys and limitations of phenomenology; and a Husserlian meditation.

The post some basics appeared first on Peter Levine.

We human beings must constantly struggle to understand justice: how society should be organized and what we should do to make it better.

We are cognitively limited and prone to bias, and we come into the world knowing nothing. Our only chance of reaching a satisfactory understanding of justice during the time we have is to join some kind of ongoing conversation.

People participate in many such conversations, including those in religious traditions and all kinds of communities. One venue–among many others–is academic work within political theory and political philosophy.

Like anyone else, an academic who seeks to understand justice must join a conversation. One way to do this–which I endorse–is to engage with significant written works. If such texts are old, they may have generated secondary literatures that include critical responses which are also significant. If they are new, they typically benefit from previous works. Contributing to the secondary literature is one way to advance the conversation about justice.

Another way is to learn from people who are currently striving to advance justice in various settings. We can learn from the writing (and audio and video material) that they produce for public consumption. That approach is like reading books about politics, except that the genres, authors, and audiences are different.

We can also learn from the less formal, less polished, less public discourse (and activity) that occurs within communities, organizations, and movements as they decide what they should do.

This is the approach that Brooke Ackerly and colleagues (2021) call “grounded normative theory.” Please also visit engagedtheory.net to learn more. Today, Ackerly is visiting the Institute for Civically Engaged Research, which I co-lead at Tufts with Samantha Majic and Adriano Udani on behalf of the American Political Science Association.

In my view, grounded normative theory is not descriptive qualitative research, although it often begins with that. Its purpose is not to interpret or explain what people are saying. Its goal is to decide what we should do, and the input or data is the discourse of practical groups. Activists, organizers, and participants in movements provide insights, and the theorist is obliged to respond independently. Ideally, both partners learn from the exchange.

Because a grounded normative theorist is interested in what people are thinking and saying to each other–not necessarily what they have produced for public consumption– the theorist must engage personally with such groups. For instance, Ackerly is a co-founder of the Global Feminisms Collaborative, not just an observer of it.

A lot of engaged normative theory looks to marginalized communities and adversarial social movements. There is an enormous amount to learn from such sources. I would add, however, that we can develop important normative insights from more “bourgeois” practitioners. For example, the Justice in Schools project “helps moral, political, and educational theorists ask the right questions about justice in non-ideal contexts, develops new language to talk about educational ethics, and provides empirically-informed frameworks for developing a philosophically rigorous and pragmatically useful theory of educational justice.” Justice in Schools has produced a large collection of “normative case studies” that are often written by teachers for teachers. The program not only serves an audience of educators but also enriches political philosophy by posing new questions, much as bioethics has done for decades.

Lately, I am being drawn into projects on Artificial Intelligence. I am most interested in deriving questions and insights from developers and computer scientists. At least at this stage in the history of political philosophy, the pre-cooked normative theories seem rather stale; but it is exciting to engage with novel ethical questions that emerge from practice.

See: Ackerly, B., Cabrera, L., Forman, F., Johnson, G. F., Tenove, C., & Wiener, A. (2021). Unearthing grounded normative theory: practices and commitments of empirical research in political theory. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 27(2), 156–182. See also why ambitious ethical theories don’t serve applied ethics; applied ethics need not mean applying ethical systems; bootstrapping value commitments

The post Grounded Normative Theory appeared first on Peter Levine.

[Citta, a lay follower of Buddha, said,] “Suppose there was a black ox and a white ox yoked by a single harness or yoke. Would it be right to say that the black ox is the yoke of the white ox, or the white ox is the yoke of the black ox?”

[Several senior monks said,] “No, householder. The black ox is not the yoke of the white ox, nor is the white ox the yoke of the black ox. The yoke there is the single harness or yoke that they’re yoked by.”

[Citta replied,] “In the same way, the eye is not the fetter of sights, nor are sights the fetter of the eye. The fetter there is the desire and greed that arises from the pair of them.

“The ear … nose … tongue … body … mind is not the fetter of ideas, nor are ideas the fetter of the mind. The fetter there is the desire and greed that arises from the pair of them.”

“You’re fortunate, householder, so very fortunate, to traverse the Buddha’s deep teachings with the eye of wisdom.”

Samyuttanikaya, 41.1

Citta is a rich man, the treasurer of a town and the owner of estates. As a “householder,” he probably has a wife and family. He chooses not to renounce property, power, or intimate love. In several discourses, he receives instruction from monks, people who have renounced all these things. Here–meeting them in a wild mango grove that he has donated to their order–Citta instructs the monks.

Given Citta’s worldly way of life, his main risk is to treat the things of this world as ends and to strive to obtain or retain them. That is no path to happiness, because there is always more to want, and everything is fragile. It is certainly no way to help others.

But the monks face dangers, too, and one of them is to disparage the things that give meaning to human life and to derive pleasure from shunning those things. That is no better path to happiness, for oneself or others. As the story suggests, the monks have as much to learn from a wise layperson as he can learn from them.

Here is a 21st century gloss or response to this very ancient text. …

Evolution has equipped human beings with highly sensitive nervous systems that generate a vast range of feelings that matter to us–not just doses of pleasure and pain, but complex assemblages composed of such feelings as curiosity, concentration, attraction, aversion, fascination, awe, anxiety, distraction, horror, and almost infinitely more. We cannot talk about things mattering except by invoking these affective words.

Feelings differ according to the person and the objective situation, but they are also relative to the design of our species. A dog relishes urine smells that we are simply not designed to appreciate. It is not that sunsets are really beautiful and fire hydrants are actually stinky but that humans have positive reactions to some things, just as other creatures gain satisfaction from other things.

Therefore, beauty is not in the world or in us, but in the interaction. One ox is the world, the other is the mind, and what matters is the fetter.

Natural selection promotes survival, not happiness. Although the variations in people’s dispositions and life circumstances yield a range of results, from happiness to despair, suffering is an inevitable consequence of being designed for sensitivity. Bacteria survive by reproducing rapidly, but that is not why we have proliferated.

Trying to shun the things of the world is no use–the other ox must still be there. What deserves our attention is the way we relate to it.

I would add a point that I don’t think is likely to be found in the Pali Canon. We are not just natural creatures with nervous systems designed in certain ways. We are also profoundly historical creatures. We think in languages that previous human beings have developed over millennia. We assess natural objects using words and concepts that other people have made. And we live surrounded by things that people have fashioned on purpose. There are sunsets to watch but also paintings of sunsets. It’s impossible to watch the sun move behind the rotating earth without having learned how human beings have named and represented and explained and enjoyed “sunsets.”

That means that the yoke is not the relationship between my mind and the world. It is the accumulated history of all the minds and the world, where the world includes the products of all the other minds.

Much suffering and alienation is built into the fetters that we inherit. Improving them cannot be a task for individuals alone but must be accomplished together.

The advice of the Pali Canon would be to form affective communities that conduct rituals together, like the monks in the mango grove that Citta gave them. It’s an important question whether politics can also help–for example, whether making the earth literally more peaceful can create a better environment for our minds. (Citta devotes some of his time to political leadership.) I would also argue that the arts and humanities contribute by giving us new links between mind and world in the form of representations, interpretations, and objects that we can behold and use.

See also the sublime and other people;  the I and the we: the sublime is social; a Hegelian meditation; “Verdant mountains usually walk“; thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition; Montaigne the bodhisattva?; Wallace Stevens’ idea of order; and nature includes our inner lives

The post the fetter appeared first on Peter Levine.

“President Biden’s student loan cancellations will bring relief.” “Retrospectively forgiving loans creates a moral hazard.” “At this college, students study the liberal arts.” “An unexamined life is not worth living for humans.”

These claims are, respectively, about a specific act (a policy announced yesterday), a pattern that applies across many cases, an assessment of an institution, and a universal principle.

These statements may be related. An ambitious defense of Biden’s decision to forgive student loans might connect that act to liberal education and thence to a good life, whereas a critique might tie the loan cancelation to cost increases. A good model of a social issue or question often combines several such components.

In this post, I will contrast two ways of thinking about models and their components.

1. Analytic reasoning

Analytic reasoning seeks characteristics that apply across cases. We can define government aid, moral hazard, and education, defend these definitions against alternatives, and then expect them generally to have the same significance wherever they apply. For example, becoming more self-aware is desirable, all else being equal or as far as that goes (ceteris paribus or pro tanto). We need a definition of self-awareness that allows us to understand what tends to produce it and what good it does. The same goes for loans, loan-forgiveness, and so on.

Methods like controlled field experiments and regression models require analysis, and they demonstrate that it has value. Ethical arguments that depend on sharply defined universals are quintessentially analytic. Qualitative research is often quite analytic, too, particularly when either the researcher or the research subjects employ general concepts.

Analytic reasoning offers the promise of generalizable solutions to social problems. For instance, let’s say you believe that we should spend more money on schools in poor communities. In that case, you are thinking analytically: you view money as an identifiable factor with predictable impact. Note that you might advocate increasing the national education budget while also being sensitive to local differences about things other than money.

2. Holistic reasoning

Holistic reasoning need not been any less rigorous, precise, or tough-minded than analytic reasoning, but it works with different objects: whole things. For example, we can describe a college as an entity. To do that requires saying many specific things about the institution, but each claim is not meant to generalize to other places.

At a given (imaginary) institution, the interplay between a rural setting, an affluent student body, an applied-science curriculum, a modest endowment, and a recent crisis of leadership could produce unexpected results, and those are only some of the factors that would explain the particular ethos that emerges at that college.

Holistic reasoning is wise if each factor is closely related to others in its specific context. For instance, often a statistic about a place is the result of decisions about what and how to measure, which (in turn) depend on who’s in charge and what incentives they face, which depends on prior political decisions, and so on–indefinitely. From a holistic perspective, a statistic lacks meaning except in conjunction with many other facts.

There is a link here to holistic theories of meaning and/or language, e.g., Robert Brandom: “one cannot have any concepts unless one has many concepts. For the content of each concept is articulated by its inferential relations to other concepts. Concepts, then, must come in packages” (Brandom 2000).

Holistic reasoning is also wise if values change their significance depending on the context, a view labeled as “holism” in metaethics. We are familiar with the idea that lying is bad–except in circumstances when it is good, or even courageous and necessary. An ethical holist believes that there are good and bad value-judgments, but they are not about abstract categories (such as lying). They are about wholes.

Finally, holistic reasoning is wise if we can gain insights about meaning that would be lost in analysis. In Clifford Geertz’ classic interpretation of a Balinese cockfight (Geertz 1972), he successively describes that phenomenon as “a chicken hacking another mindless to bits” (p. 84); “deep play” (p. 71), or an activity that has intrinsic interest for those involved; “fundamentally a dramatization of status concerns” (p. 74); an “encompassing structure” that presents a coherent vision of “death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance” (p. 79); and “a kind of sentimental education” from which a Balinese man “learns what his culture’s ethos and his private sensibility (or, anyway, certain aspects of them) look like when spelled out externally in a collective text” (p. 83).

Geertz offers lots of specific empirical data and uses concepts that would apply across cases, including terms like “chickens” and “betting” that arise globally. However, he is not primarily interested in what causes cockfights in Bali or what they cause. His main question is: What is this thing? Since Balinese cockfighting is a human activity, what it is is what it means. And it has meaning as a whole thing, not as a collection of parts.

Conclusion

This discussion may suggest that holistic reasoning is more sensitive and thoughtful than analytic reasoning. But recall that ambitious social reform proposals depend on analytic claims. If everything is contextual, then there is no basis for changing policies or priorities that apply across cases. Holistic reasoning may be conservative, in a Burkean sense–for better or for worse.

Then again, a “whole” need not be something small and local, like a cockfight in Bali or a college in the USA. A nation-state can also be analyzed and interpreted holistically and changed as a result.

It is trite to say that we need both analytic and holistic reasoning about policy, but we do. Instead of jumping to that conclusion, I’ve tried to draw a contrast that suggests some real disadvantages of each.

References: Brandom, Robert B. Articulating reasons: An introduction to inferentialism. Harvard University Press, 2001; Geertz, Clifford. “Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight.” Daedalus 134.4 (2005): 56-86. See also: against methodological individualism; applied ethics need not mean applying ethical systems; what must we believe?, modeling social reality; choosing models that illuminate issues–on the logic of abduction in the social sciences and policy; choosing models that illuminate issues–on the logic of abduction in the social sciences and policy; different kinds of social models etc.

The post analytic and holistic reasoning about social questions appeared first on Peter Levine.

I enjoyed guest-teaching a course on Leo Strauss last evening that enrolls an extraordinary group of students. Deeply steeped in political philosophy–and especially Nietzsche–they are able to cite Nietzschean texts by heart, with references.

I had assigned a selection from Will to Power for this session because, in my early work (and even in a roman-a-clef), I presented Strauss as thoroughly Nietszchean. As we discussed the earlier philosopher, I asked–without premeditation–what we think he was up to. Was Nietzsche …

1. A therapist
2. A political actor
3. An artist
4. A philosopher with views
5. A scholar

Any forced-choice question about a major thinker is reductive, but I recommend this one to provoke conversation.

Students provided some alternatives that were not on my impromptu list, such as “a recruiter of philosophers.” For what it’s worth, I would choose c. (an artist), while recognizing that a. and e. are also true, to a degree. I am not so sure that Nietzsche was political, in even the loosest sense of that word; in other words, I am skeptical that he wrote to change society. And I don’t think he had philosophical views, in the standard way, because his core doctrines were meant to be self-refuting. I think that Nietzsche wrote to create beautiful, original, and formally fascinating works, in which the author is also a character.

See also: Philosophy as a Way of Life (on Pierre Hadot); Cuttings version 2.0: a book about happiness

The post What was Nietzsche doing? appeared first on Peter Levine.

Recently, hearing a distinguished technologist talk about the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), I recognized a familiar style. People in a given technical field realize that they face an ethical issue. They turn to the relevant academic discipline (philosophy), and they think that they discern a set of available ethical “systems.” These options include at least utilitarianism and Kantianism/deontology. They apply each system to the issue at hand and explore its apparent conclusions. The various systems seem to disagree about at least some cases, and the analysts conclude that ethical questions are hard and unresolved and that people who happen to start from different premises will probably reach different conclusions. The last slide of the PowerPoint is a head-scratcher about the difficulty of ethical reasoning.

I suspect that these “systems” look authoritative because they have been discussed in vast numbers of peer-reviewed publications. If you want to mention deontology, you can cite Kant (1788) and innumerable subsequent works. For utilitarianism, you have Bentham (1789) and its successors. (See Stahl 2021 as just one example.) In a technocratic world, this form of authority seems weighty. You are not just expressing a personal opinion if you can mention a book that has thousands of citations.

The mental model behind this kind of analysis also resembles technical forms of reasoning. The various philosophical systems are seen as very general and internally consistent premises that generate conclusions algorithmically. Ethics is treated as a Normal Science.

To be fully satisfactory, a system’s premises should apply to all cases. Trolley-problems and similar thought-experiments are fascinating because they suggest that the general premises of different systems conflict in select cases. Different algorithms yield different results. The methodological assumption is that analyzing such exotic thought-experiments should clarify principles that will then apply universally. Since this method doesn’t seem to have succeeded (yet), the analyst is entitled to conclude that ethics is unresolved. Hence the last slide of the presentation is about not knowing what to do.

It is often acknowledged that there are more than two or three ethical views for which we can provide fancy citations. What about Thomism, Stoicism, Marxism (of various flavors), feminism, the Five Precepts of Buddhism, Confucianism, African “Sage Philosophy” as explored by H. Odera Oruka (1990), deep ecology, Nietzsche, Levinas, etc. etc.? The notion that there are two or three available systems has a specific history in secular, 20th-century, Anglophone philosophy departments, and it was always controversial even there.

Then again, when people extend the list of available philosophies, often they reach even more relativist conclusions. If “systems” from distant times and places disagree, then surely there can be no right answers. Now the PowerPoint really ends with a head-scratcher.

But in order to conduct this kind of analysis, one must assume that very general premises should apply across all relevant cases. In other words, the appropriate units of analysis are broad generalizations. It is either right or wrong that we should maximize aggregate welfare or that we should treat people as ends rather than means.

One of the leading systems, deontology, may not purport to generate guidance about specific cases. In the Shadow of God (2022) Michael Rosen gives an up-to-date argument that Kant did not intend for his principles to answer questions of applied ethics. If that’s true, then it’s a bit odd to treat utilitarianism and Kantianism as rival “systems.” Utilitarianism might even be the only available philosophy that can really work like an algorithm, and only in some of its forms.

If you are a particularist, you believe that generalizations are not the appropriate units of analysis. What is right or wrong is the specific act, not the generalization. Most people aren’t true particularists, but many are somewhat leery of pure abstraction. We presume that general ethical statements can have some validity and value but that generalizations rarely settle particular cases.

I like Jonathan Dancy’s aesthetic analogy: the best object of judgment is a painting, not a feature (like a splotch of red paint) that recurs in many paintings. Aesthetic judgment is holistic, and the whole is the work of art. Likewise, ethical judgment is often about a whole ethical situation that has many features, not about each feature taken abstractly.

One irony is that applied ethics derives its authority from the academic discipline of philosophy, yet not very many current philosophy professors apply ethical “systems” to cases. I think that approach comes most naturally to technologists who expect reasoning to be algorithmic, whereas philosophers are often humanists who prefer close readings and thick-description.

The applied ethics that I admire most is much more attentive to the empirical and pragmatic details of specific cases, much more closely engaged with the dilemmas of practitioners, more focused on real situations instead of thought-experiments, and more open to normative insights from a range of sources (literature, history, folklore …). It aims to address problems, not to provoke skepticism. And it accepts responsibility for its own consequences.

My favorite applied ethicists work in the world (almost always with collaborators) and are willing to reflect on whether the outcomes are good or bad. Their final PowerPoint slide says: “This is what we’re building, what we hope to accomplish, and why. What do you think about it?”

See also why ambitious ethical theories don’t serve applied ethics; how we use Kant today; analytical moral philosophy as a way of life.

The post applied ethics need not mean applying ethical systems appeared first on Peter Levine.