I will meet with a group of doctoral students at Western Michigan University to talk about academic careers, strategies for success, and primarily the task of “Building and Sustaining a...
The post “Building and Sustaining a Research Program,” Doctoral Student Workshop @ Western Michigan University first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.
I will meet with a group of doctoral students at Western Michigan University to talk about academic careers, strategies for success, and primarily the task of “Building and Sustaining a...
The post “Building and Sustaining a Research Program,” Doctoral Student Workshop @ Western Michigan University first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.
On Thursday, October 15th, I’ll be meeting with the Student Council for Exceptional Children at Western Michigan University to talk about my paper and experience, “Stoic Pragmatism for Parenting a...
The post “Stoic Pragmatism for Parenting a Child with Disabilities” @ Western Michigan University first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.
On Thursday, October 15th, I’ll be meeting with the Student Council for Exceptional Children at Western Michigan University to talk about my paper and experience, “Stoic Pragmatism for Parenting a...
The post “Stoic Pragmatism for Parenting a Child with Disabilities” @ Western Michigan University first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.
I will be delivering a talk on Zoom for the Anhui Institute of Information Technology in China on “Challenges for a Culture of Justice in the Age of A.I.”
The post “Challenges for a Culture of Justice in the Age of A.I.” @Anhui Institute of Information Technology first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.
I will be delivering a talk on Zoom for the Anhui Institute of Information Technology in China on “Challenges for a Culture of Justice in the Age of A.I.”
The post “Challenges for a Culture of Justice in the Age of A.I.” @Anhui Institute of Information Technology first appeared on Eric Thomas Weber.
In The Politics of Individualism (Oxford University Press, 2025), Christopher F. Karpowitz and Kelly D. Patterson make an important contribution by defining a new construct, moral individualism. They show that it is prevalent in the USA and may help explain various concerning outcomes, from resistance to public health measures to low voter turnout.
This post is a short review. Anyone who is attending this year’s Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association is welcome to an authors-meet-critics session about the book on September 6 from 8:00 to 9:30 am (early on a Sunday morning!) with comments by Michigan’s Yanna Krupnikov, Stanford’s Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, North Carolina’s Marc J. Hetherington, and me.
Karpowitz and Patterson define moral individualism as the conjunction of two beliefs: 1) any “authorities external to the self’ must curtail or abridge a person’s liberty, and 2) “only moral choices that are self-authorized are legitimate” (p. 32).
They measure this construct in nationally representative samples using an ingenious survey design. In part, they ask respondents to name who is most important when they’re deciding how to live their lives or what is best for society. The ten response options include a religious leader, a scientist or expert, and a family member, among others.
Respondents are then asked to evaluate ten statements about how to treat their chosen source, e.g., “Nobody, not even [the favored source] can decide what is right and wrong, except for me” and “The world has many truths, and whatever I learned from [the favored source] is just one of them.”
A moral individualist is someone who does not feel bound by what their own most important sources may say.
Scores on this scale do not correlate strongly with measures of economic individualism, such as “Any person who is willing to work hard has a good chance of succeeding.” Thus economic and moral individualism are not the same construct. Likewise, moral individualism does not have a partisan valence: it is found on both sides of the aisle. It does not correlate strongly with attitudes toward Donald Trump or MAGA.
Moral individualism does, however, correlate with important outcomes, even when other factors are controlled. It predicts lower odds of voting and serving other people, less commitment to family, less religious attendance, weaker sense of efficacy (confidence that one can make a difference), less support for patriotism, much less support for public health measures during COVID, and more suspicion that other people were violating COVID restrictions. Controlling for party, ideology and support for Donald Trump, moral individualism correlated with less opposition to the riot on January 6.
Traditionally, governments have tried to counteract moral individualism. For example, public schools and colleges (as well as private and parochial ones) not only instruct students to honor various external authorities–from the Constitution to science–but they also present the school itself as something that should be honored. Military recruitment campaigns often emphasize one’s duty to country. In WWI, Uncle Sam said, “I want you for U.S. Army!” Karpowitz and Patterson trace the evolution of the all-volunteer Army’s slogans from the communitarian “Join the People Who Have Joined the Army” (1973-1980) through “Be All You Can Be” (1980-2000) to the individualistic “Army of One” (2001-6).
State-supported efforts to combat moral individualism may not work today and could provoke a backlash. Indeed, there may be legitimate debates about whether and in what ways moral individualism is a public problem. Moral individualism correlates with outcomes like religious attendance and patriotism–but also voting and political confidence–which may concern some of us but not others.
In any case, institutions apart from the government have stakes. For example, the statements that measure moral individualism are explicit rejections of the various kinds of authority that religions tend to claim, and (as noted) the construct correlates with lower church attendance. So religions might want to work against moral individualism.
I couldn’t improve on the authors’ analysis of the American population (by way of large samples). But I am curious about distinctions that might emerge in more intensive qualitative studies, particularly if the samples included relatively thoughtful and self-conscious subjects. I think that people who are moral individualists could differ on dimensions captured by three broad questions:
1. To what extent are you concerned about other people’s moral autonomy?
You can believe that your life is your own business and that no one should interfere with it. That belief can be the basis for not feeling compelled to do anything for anyone else. Or you can believe that you and all other humans have the right to be the authors of their own lives and that this principle is worth fighting for.
Let’s say you are an American who believes that every human being has a right to moral autonomy. You should probably conclude that your own moral autonomy is pretty extensive and safe but that other people (from those incarcerated in US prisons to all citizens of North Korea) are not able to decide for themselves what is right. This is a reason to work and even sacrifice to enhance all people’s moral autonomy.
Karpowitz and Patterson ask people to respond to the statement, “Only I can decide what is right. I cannot even trust [my preferred source] to help me decide.” I am curious whether respondents would say that other people should also be allowed to decide what is right for them (most Americans would probably agree so far) and that they have an obligation to defend other people’s freedom (which would probably be rarer). This distinction would divide selfish or egoistic moral individualists from altruistic ones.
2. How demanding is it to decide for yourself what is right?
Karpowitz and Patterson ask for responses to this prompt: “My own judgment is more important than [my favorite source’s] judgment.” Moral individualists agree with that statement.
But what must an individual do to make a judgment? Some people may think of judgment as synonymous with “preference” or even “desire.” Nothing should be binding on me except what I happen to want. But at least some people may think that the burden to decide what is right falls on the individual and is a heavy one.
In breaking with the Catholic Church, Martin Luther upheld the individual obligation of each sinner to discern the actual truth. He was not relativistic or morally permissive (at all) but was a kind of moral individualist.
Michael Foucault defined spirituality as “the search, practice, and experience with which the subject carries out the transformations on himself that are necessary to have access to the truth” (Foucault 1982). According to practitioners of spirituality, to know the truth, one must make oneself deserving of it, which may require intensive study, prayer, meditation, confession, direct engagement with the original Word, or even fasting and self-mortification.
To be sure, spiritual practices can be collective, but they can also be individual or even solitary. Science, on the other hand, presumes that truth arises from organized, transparent, cumulative work that does not require any particular kind of spiritual preparation. Thus we might imagine that some serious practitioners of spirituality are moral individualists, whereas scientists should not be.
We could divide moral individualists between those who think that deciding what is right is hard and those who think it comes automatically. Emerson, cited several times in the book as a moral individualist, may also be a serious spiritual striver, in the way that Foucault means.
3. What is the role of other people in supporting your moral individuality?
Reformation theologians offered a particular kind of moral individualism when they preached the Priesthood of All Believers and the doctrines of Faith Alone and Scripture Alone. They removed the mediation of the organized Church, claiming that each believer stands alone before God.
The question then arose: Why should there be Protestant churches at all? The dominant answer was that although each person is ultimately responsible, we need other people’s support. Someone who holds this view might agree with this item in Karpowitz and Patterson, “My own judgment is more important than [my favorite authority’s] judgment,” even if they’ve chosen their pastor as their authority. God judges you as an individual, weighing your personal faith; you get no points from the clergy’s behavior. Nevertheless, most Protestants have assumed that they are more likely to find their way to truth and good behavior if they belong to an organized community whose congregants and leaders can give them reminders and encouragement.
In sum, I think that moral individualism could be compatible with some altruistic, introspective, and communitarian values. I suspect that those combinations are rare and that most Americans who score high on Karpowitz’ and Patterson’s scale are also selfish, unreflective, and isolated. But the exceptions might be important.
Source: Michel Foucault, L’herméneutique du suject: cours au Collège de France (1981-2) (Gallimard, 2001), pp. 16-18. See also: the classical liberals versus the “egoists”; bootstrapping value commitments; Foucault’s spiritual exercises; why be introspective? etc.
“The feeling that the world is a bounded whole–that is the mystical.” — Wittgenstein
The Spanish word quedar can be translated as to remain, to stay, to meet, to fit, to suit (as in Ese color te queda bien), to be located, to end up, to agree, or to be left with (as in Me quedan 20 euros).
One of those meanings is “to agree.” That English verb can be translated back into Spanish as estar de acuerdo, acordar, convenir, coincidir, aceptar, or, again, quedar.
One of those meanings is acordar. Rendered back in English, that verb can mean to agree, decide, or make an arrangement, or–if it’s in a reflexive form–to remember. In turn, “to decide” could be conveyed in Spanish by decidir (or decidirse), resolver, acordar or determinar.
I chose quedar because it has a famously wide range of meanings, a bit like rendre or tenir in French. But notice that each of the words that I’ve mentioned connects to a unique list of words in the other language. This is typical. Putting two languages together creates a pattern of intertwined connections, like an arabesque design.
When you study a language, you memorize foreign words as sets of distinct words in your home language. In a given context, quedar means one thing, such as “to stay” or else “to agree.” A translator should know–or look up–the full list of meanings for each word and must pick the best one for each sentence. Sometimes there is no single best choice.
But once you know the language reasonably well, a word no longer decomposes into several words in a different language. Now it covers its own space. Presumably (I don’t have good enough Spanish to know) each use of quedar carries an implicit trace of its whole range of meanings.
Todo pasa y todo queda,
pero lo nuestro es pasar,
pasar haciendo caminos,
caminos sobre el mar.
Everything passes and everything stays,
But ours is to cease to be.
As we go, we make a highway,
A highway on the sea.
Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares (1912): XLIV
Here I’ve rendered the first line with the verbs “to pass” and “to stay,” but I had other choices. Pasar could mean to go through, to happen (¿que pasa?), to spend time, etc. And we have already seen the range of meanings for quedar. Its other senses are missing in the English word “stay,” but that verb has its own range of meanings, including to visit and to prevent something from happening. Those are absent in Machado’s original.
I chose “to pass” for several reasons, including the sonic resemblance to pasar as well as some vague sense of English allusions, such as “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” (Ecclesiastes). I chose “to stay” as a single syllable that was a near-rhyme for “ways.” Translation is not only about matching words but also about syntax, rhythm, and sound.
Artificial Intelligence is good at translating prose. It generally chooses an appropriate equivalent for each word. Thanks to AI tools, I have been able to read articles in languages, such as Japanese, of which I know nothing. I have also developed a careful practice of asking Claude to list all the dictionary definitions of words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Pali, that interest me. I hope that viewing these lists gives me some sense of how the words work in their original languages, although I must look through that glass darkly.
What AI cannot do is give a person the experience of parsing the whole world a bit differently by beginning to think in a different language. In turn, that experience teaches us that anyone’s model of the world is limited and contingent, and much always remains beyond anyone’s grasp.
A language is a whole system of meanings. It allows us to work with the world, yet it coexists with other systems that present the world differently. Those other systems include not only human languages (which are, after all, rather similar and interconnected), but also other consciousnesses. To glimpse this plurality is to see our own world as if from beyond it.
In the detail from a 13th-century Persian mihrab that accompanies this post, each arabesque field could stand for a pair of intertwined human languages, but there are also fields across the boundaries formed by the Quranic calligraphy. And the whole mihrab is a threshold to the beyond.
Wittgenstein writes, “Das Gefühl der Welt als begrenztes Ganzes ist das mystische” (Tractatus 6:45). Acknowledging that this sentence could be translated in many ways, I will render it: “The feeling that the world is a bounded whole–that is the mystical.”
It’s another way of saying that we make our highways on the sea.
See also: Machado’s Glory is Never What I’ve Sought and Highways on the Sea; paradigms of attention; why the humanities could never be automated; and thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition. Photo credit: detail of a mihrab from Kashan (1226) in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons.
When are we responsible for what we do, or for what we think and feel?
Some connect responsibility to the will and ask whether the will is free. In any given situation, a person (or a group, a non-human animal, or a machine) either has a will that is free or does not; this is a binary distinction.
Applying this distinction, we might think that some of our thoughts and actions reflect our free will, while others do not. Or we might decide that the free will is a myth, because it would be a magical exception to natural laws. Or we might think that everything we do represents our will. That is one way (but not the only way) to interpret Matthew 5:27-28: “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”*
Here is an alternative that avoids discussing a will at all. It is not original, but I have come to it by my own winding path.
We attend to things to greater or lesser degrees. Our attention represents more or less effort. We are morally responsible for how we allocate our effortful attention.
To continue the example from the Sermon on the Mount, if you happen to feel a private sexual response to someone, that is not your responsibility. Your mind is not under your control. But if you continue to think about the person in a lustful fashion, this sustained or repeated attention is your responsibility. And if you commit adultery, that reflects even more attention as well as more responsibility.
There is no binary here; the degree of effortful attention is a continuum. This also implies that there is no binary distinction between human persons and other creatures. I can hold my dog somewhat accountable (with appropriate allowances, and in a forgiving mode) for how he allocates his attention. When he is distracted by the sight of a passing squirrel, that just happens. But when he gives a lot of thought to stealing and ingesting a sock, that is on him.
Just as we can be held increasingly accountable for thoughts and actions as they consume more of our effortful attention, so we can be blamed for failing to attend to things that we should care about, such as others’ sufferings and injustices.
The advice that follows from this theory is familiar but, in my opinion, valid. When you have a thought or feeling that is morally wrong (aggressive, jealous, spiteful, lustful, or otherwise), let it go. Do not interpret it as a sign that something is wrong with you. That is just a way of giving unwarranted attention to the thought that happened to arise in your mind. As Gerard Manley Hopkins advises himself, “call off thoughts awhile.” But also — don’t fan the embers. If you dwell on a bad thought, your responsibility for it will begin to rise.
*Believers in predestination interpret such passages differently, saying that free will is incompatible with divine omnipotence, yet we are sinful by nature. I suspect the Gospels predate such concepts entirely.
See also: people as clusters of attention; freedom of the will or freedom from the will? (comparing Harry Frankfurt and Buddhism). The latter is from 2020, and I would not write the same now.
I recommend do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenology. It is good for mental health to attend closely to our own experience, especially the ambiguous aspects of our inner lives, such as how we experience the will, the past, or our relationship to our own bodies. We should think about what we find when we introspect.
The goal is not to discover truths that will make us happy. Instead, we want to reveal complexities and depths that we can appreciate. By seeing ourselves as much more than suffering machines, we can increase how much we can enjoy being ourselves.
Here is an example of a phenomenological question that might attract your curiosity: Is your consciousness (or, you might say, your attention) a single “stream”?
William James coined the phrase “stream of consciousness” in 1890 as part of an argument that consciousness “does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as ‘chain’ or ‘train’ do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A ‘river’ or a ‘stream’ are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life” (James 1890, p. 239, italics in the original).
James acknowledges that we can be interrupted, but he thinks that interruptions are always absorbed into the stream. For example, “what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure, but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it” (p. 241). He also acknowledges that our consciousness has an uneven pace. He says,
As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period (p. 243).
However, other close observers of themselves do not find anything that looks like a “stream.” The philosopher Galen Strawson finds this metaphor “inapt.” For him, “Thought has very little natural continuity or experiential flow—if mine is anything to go by. It keeps slipping from mere consciousness into self-consciousness and out again” (Strawson 2018, p. 350). Strawson observes that his own consciousness seems to launch repeatedly from “prior state[s] of complete, if momentary, nonconsciousness. …. It’s as if consciousness is continually restarting. It keeps banging out of nothingness. It’s a series of comings-to.” (p. 380)
I do not think this dispute has been resolved, which is good news if you want an open question to whet your curiosity about your inner life.
It could be (as Strawson thinks) that people vary. Some of us have streams of consciousness, while for others, experience comes in disconnected blocs. If that is the case, an interesting question arises about what consciousness is, if it is subject to such variation. (This question is relevant to debates about whether a computer can be conscious.) Or it could be that either James or Strawson is right about consciousness, and the other one is interpreting his own inner life wrong.
Meanwhile, you are free to decide for yourself.
Sources: William James The Principles of Psychology, 1918 (first edition 1890); Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. (New York Review Books, 2018). See also: joys and limitations of phenomenology; some basics; people as clusters of attention
