One should accept the advice of those who are able to direct others, who offer unsolicited aid. One should be the pupil of everyone all the time.

– Shantideva, The Bodhicaryavatara 5:74, translated by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (ca. 700 CE)

The fifth book of this major work is devoted to “The Guarding of Awareness.” Here Shantideva offers many precepts, of which this is just one. For instance, in the previous verse, he recommends moving quietly: like a crane, a cat, or a thief.

No one could fully follow all these instructions all the time. That is a problem of which Shantideva is fully aware. Chapter 4, “Vigilance Regarding the Awakening Mind,” addresses the inevitable backsliding that comes after an oath to attain Buddhahood. “Swinging back and forth like this in a cyclic existence, now under the sway of errors, now under the sway of the Awakening Mind, it takes a long time to gain ground” (4:11). The best we can do is try. “If I make no effort today I shall sink to lower and lower levels (4:12).

Therefore, the question is not whether it is possible to be the pupil of everyone all the time (it is not), but whether that is a valid aspiration. It isn’t obviously so. After all, many people communicate false and even wicked ideas. Why listen to them? We are also very repetitious. I offer virtually nothing that hasn’t already been said better by others. Why should everyone be my pupil; and I, theirs? And if we are always listening to everyone, when are we acting to improve the world?

The first quoted sentence recommends taking advice from “those who are able to direct others”–presumably those who have something valuable to offer. It doesn’t imply the striking second sentence, which tells us always to be learning from everyone. Why?

Maybe it is hyperbole: an exaggerated reminder to be more open to other people (and other animals) than we would otherwise tend to be, but not a rule that the wise would apply literally.

Or maybe it connects to Shantideva’s core recommendation: compassion for all. The argument would go: Each of us knows the most about our own situation and context. We each have a world of our own, which is a portion of the whole world viewed from our particular spot. The best life is a life of compassion for all those individuals. To be compassionate toward them requires understanding their situation as much as possible. And that implies being their pupil, all of the time.

Is this right? How does it relate to the virtue of justice? And what should we think about scientific methods of discernment? For instance, is surveying a representative sample of Americans a way of being a pupil of them all? If not, why not?

See also: how to think about other people’s interests: Rawls, Buddhism, and empathy; “Empathy” is a new word. Do we need it?; Empathy and Justice; etc.

Most applied ethicists are skeptical that we can resolve significant problems by applying ambitious moral philosophies or theories of justice.

I report this skepticism anecdotally, but it comes from 15 years working in an applied ethics center and my peripheral involvement with educational ethics, media ethics, political campaign ethics, and related fields. People who teach ethics in college sometimes require students to apply the big moral theories to practical problems. (“What would Kant say about blockchain?” “What does utilitarianism imply about health reform?”) But these assignments are meant to convey the theories, not to resolve the problems. Professional ethicists rarely write their own “What would Kant say about …?” papers.

Why not? I think the following explanations are plausible. Some are mutually compatible, but they push in different directions:

1. Stalemate: There are several academically respectable moral theories: utilitarianism, deontology, virtue-ethics, and maybe others. Some individuals are drawn to one theory over the rest, but that is a matter of intuition or sheer preference. Arguments have not resolved the disputes among them. To invoke one theory in relation to a concrete ethical problem just neglects the other theories. Invoking more than one often yields a dilemma.
2. Pluralism (in Isaiah Berlin’s sense): Maybe the truth about the human world is that it involves many different kinds of good thing: various negative and positive rights, welfare outcomes, equity and other relations among people, procedural fairness, etc. These good things conflict, and one must choose among them. Each moral theory tends to illuminate and justify one kind of a good, yet practical wisdom is about balancing them.
3. Particularism: The appropriate focus for moral assessment is not an abstraction, such as freedom, but a concrete particular, like the school in my neighborhood. In a parallel way, the most important focus for aesthetic evaluation is a whole painting, not all the instances of yellow ochre that appear in different paintings. You can believe that yellow ochre is a nice color, but that doesn’t tell you much about whether or why Vermeer’s “View of Delft” is beautiful, even though that painting does incorporate some yellow ochre. Likewise, you can’t tell much about a given situation in which there is some freedom just from knowing that freedom is generally good. If the appropriate focus of ethical evaluation is a concrete, particular, whole thing, then theorizing about abstractions doesn’t help much. (See Schwind on Jonathan Dancy, p. 36 or Blackburn, “Securing the Nots,” p. 97.)
4. Complexity: Ethical problems often involve many people who have divergent interests, beliefs, rights, goals, etc., and who continuously affect each other. Their choices and responses are unpredictable. Given the resulting complexity, it is usually hard to model the situation empirically–regardless of whether one is more interested in consequences, rights, procedures, comparisons among people, or all of the above. Once you’ve modeled the situation reasonably well and you think you know what would happen if A did B to C, then a Pareto-optimal choice may become clear. For instance, reducing imprisonment in the USA would (I think) enhance individual rights, equity, utility, non-domination, rule of law, and practically every other value I can think of. However, agreement about Pareto-optimal choices is fairly rare, and the most common reason is persistent debate about the empirics. Moral theory really doesn’t help much.
5. Narrowness of philosophy: To “apply moral philosophy” often means to apply Kantianism, utilitarianism, 20th-century virtue ethics, social contract theory, or perhaps one or two other idea systems. (Maybe some Levinas; maybe some Marx.) These systems have great value, but also limitations. They usually focus either on individual choices at given moment (Is it OK to lie?), or else on what Rawls called the “basic structure of society,” but not on the overall shape of a single human life, practices for enhancing virtues, deeply ingrained forms of oppression, institutions other than governments, or group processes other than lawmaking. Some of these matters are better explored in Hellenistic and classical Indian and Chinese philosophy or in applied social science fields; some have never received adequate attention. It’s not that abstract theory is irrelevant to concrete choices, but that the most widely respected philosophical theories are too narrow.

I think that large concepts or themes can help us think about what to do. Among the useful concepts for practical reason are the major concerns of modern Anglophone philosophy, such as rights and forms of equity. These concepts or themes do arise in concrete cases. But many other concepts are also useful. Depending on the circumstances, you might get as much value out of Albert Hirschman’s scheme of exit, voice, and loyalty as from Rawls’ account of justice, even though Hirschman’s theory is not explicitly normative. And examples, narratives, and concrete proposals also provide insights.

A reporter supposedly asked Earl Long, “Governor, should you use ethics in politics?” Long said, “Hell yes, use anything you can get your hands on!” I am inclined to agree with the governor–use whatever ideas help you to reason about what to do.

In turn, studying and discussing concrete problems can generate questions and insights that enrich abstract philosophy and social theory. If we must call pure philosophy the “top,” and practical reasoning the “bottom,” then influence should flow from bottom-up as well as from top-down.

(I am inspired here by a fine conference paper by Julian Müller, but I think these are my own established views rather than his. See also: structured moral pluralism (a proposal); Philosophy as a Way of Life (on Pierre Hadot); the importance of the inner life to moral philosophy; modus vivendi theory; consequences of particularism; etc.

A study by Roland G. Fryer, Jr. provoked controversy because of its conclusion that Black and Hispanic people are not more likely than whites to be shot to death by police, although they are more likely to experience non-lethal force at the hands of police. In “Race, Policing, and The Limits of Social Science,” Lily Hu uses this study and the resulting controversy to explore important questions about the persuasiveness of social science. Her questions are not merely academic–they have existential significance as we each decide how to interpret and improve the world.

Speaking for myself (but in a similar vein to Hu), I would draw attention to the results in the tables near the end of Fryer’s piece (pp. 39ff). You’ll see familiar-looking columns of numbers, many of which are means or coefficients. They are labeled with text, including such words or phrases as “High-crime Area,” “Carrying Suspicious Obj,” “Incident type: Street Stop,” “Officer Unit Majority White,” “Pinellas County,” and “Hispanic.”

Why are we reading these tables? For one thing, Roland Fryer has captured our attention and a baseline level of trust. This is not a given. I crunched some numbers on police discrimination last year and drew modest traffic. I am not complaining: Fryer genuinely deserves much more attention because of the ambitiousness and originality of his paper (even if one criticizes it). Yet it is worth noting that we read his paper as a consequence of many causal factors, including Fryer’s talent and hard work but also his status and position.

In short, knowledge results–like everything else–from causes. The factors that cause us to know and to trust any given claim include power and social status.

Fryer’s specific findings are the result of methods that social scientists have developed and that he chose to use. Methods are always contestable, and, in this case, they have been challenged. I do not have anything valuable to add about his methods, but their contestability is important.

As for the data that Fryer uses, they result from social processes. He analyzed five million records from New York City’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program, which mandated a great deal of data-collection as part of its approach to enforcement/social control. He also used the Police-Public Contact Survey, which is a federally funded survey conducted by the US Census Bureau for the Justice Dept. Finally, he and a team coded reports from the files of the police in LA County, Houston, Austin, Dallas, Houston and six large Florida counties.

Thousands of people generate these data: randomly selected residents who complete surveys and police officers who file required reports. Many hundreds of people design these instruments and make sure that they are completed. A police officer files a report about an incident with a civilian because of other required reports: a personnel file on the officer, an evaluation of the unit commander, etc. Deeper in the background are previous efforts to measure our social world. For instance, racial categories come from thousands of previous surveys designed and fielded for other purposes. We code and analyze stored bodies of text (such as police files) thanks to techniques previously developed for other research.

Different phenomena could be measured, and different measures could be used. The government of France does not record race and literally does not know how many French residents are people of color. In contrast, the US has always categorized our population by race, albeit with changing categories and purposes. Already in the Census of 1800, Americans were categorized as free whites, other free persons, or slaves.

One way to think about such differences is in terms of choices. We could choose not to measure race, to measure it in a different way, or to measure things that we do not measure now. But this “we” is misleading. We citizens are not convened like a committee to review discrete choices. Instead, the practice of measuring any given thing often results from concerted efforts by specific people or groups. Some people develop and revise concepts and organize and advocate; other people then spend money or apply power to cause data to be collected. I have been involved in such efforts–for instance, helping to write the federal assessment of civics, and playing a role in generating voter turnout data for most US colleges and universities. These are purposive efforts, undertaken to change the world for specific reasons. They reflect people’s values and strategies.

People also undertake concerted efforts to build up social institutions. It is not natural or inevitable that we have police at all–meaning uniformed, armed, bureaucratically organized public-sector employees with unique rights and responsibilities. Having police is a choice, but again, it is not an item on a menu that was set before the public. Instead, policing is an institution with its own inertia, constituencies, and political influence. The choice that each of us faces is whether to support policing, assent to it, subvert it, or help to build up an alternative.

The same is true of the political jurisdictions listed in Roland Fryer’s tables. It is not inevitable that Houston and Pinellas County, FL are organized as entities with police forces and other state powers. Indeed, Elinor Ostrom showed that much smaller jurisdictions produced better policing, and she found especially good results in small Black-majority communities that had their own police forces. So it is a choice to have a Houston police force–but again, this choice reflects many decades of concerted efforts by many people with many agendas.

Particular facts are the results of power deployed through social institutions. Power is not necessarily bad: it is nearly synonymous with “capacity,” and we want capacity. Nor is power necessarily zero-sum: we can measure and value more than one thing at a time. Therefore, to say that knowledge emerges from power is not cynical. Whether knowledge is good or bad depends on the motives, the means, and the consequences that relate to it.

This implies that to assess knowledge is always partly a matter of values–it is a normative as well as an empirical matter. You can’t assess the crime rate unless you know which activities are deemed illegal and how the law is enforced. You can’t assess the employment rate until you know what counts as employment, which jobs are consistent with a good life, and what happens to the people who are labeled unemployed. The crime rate or the employment rate is not a simple fact: it is a result of social institutions that cause people to behave in various ways and that cause their behaviors to be measured and classified in various ways.

The next question (for me) is: What should we evaluate? I resist evaluating very broad and vague phenomena, such as capitalism or modernity or even the USA. That is a path to ideology, in the bad sense of that word: broad assessments prevent careful thought and nuance.

On the other hand, each social phenomenon is linked tightly with many others. A claim cannot be assessed all by itself. For instance, to accept that a city block is a “high crime area” (as in one of the datasets in Fryer’s paper) is to accept a whole system of social monitoring and control that gives some places that label.

We assess one thing at a time, yet each assessment is related to many previous ones. In this way, we gradually build up a worldview that combines normative judgments, empirical generalizations, causal inferences, and many other components. Hu cites “what philosopher W. V. O. Quine so charmingly called our ‘web of belief.'”

As she points out, a particular piece of information may come along that conflicts with some existing components of our web. For instance, Fryer’s specific statistics about police-involved shootings contradict what I had believed. In such cases, we must consider “what must be sacrificed so that other beliefs might be saved. And since our webs are not all identical, what rational belief revision demands of us will also vary. One man’s happily drawn conclusion (p, therefore q!) is another’s proof by contradiction (surely not q, therefore not p!). Or as the saying goes, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.“

Her rather startling conclusion: “Rejecting a study’s methods or its starting assumptions on the basis of disagreement with its results is a completely legitimate inferential move.”

Confronted by Fryer’s original paper, someone who is very concerned about police shootings of unarmed Black civilians might:

• Doubt the sources of the statistics (although the paper uses several different kinds of sources);
• Doubt the mathematics, either because of specific methodological concerns or because of a low threshold of trust in the author (who could, in theory, have made basic errors);
• Doubt the conclusions because they conflict with other sources of information;
• Acknowledge the specific conclusions but accentuate the part of the study that reinforces prior views: police use non-lethal force in a racially discriminatory way;
• Modify strategies for police reform to focus more on the non-lethal uses of force; or
• Revise basic beliefs, including beliefs about other sources of knowledge, such as news coverage of police homicides.

Hu implies that any of these responses might be rational, depending on one’s overall web of belief. For instance, it would be irrational for me to distrust Fryer’s basic mathematics, because I have accumulated trust in institutions like Harvard and the NBER. They have served me well on many prior occasions. However, other people might have no such basis for trust and might have very well-grounded reasons to doubt a result that contradicts their vivid accumulated experiences. Hu writes:

For those whose beliefs, empirical and ethical, are forged in participation in radical sociopolitical movements from below, to be ill-inclined to accept certain findings about race and policing is to remain steadfast in a commitment to a certain thick set of empirical and ethical propositions in their webs of beliefs: that systems of policing and prisons are instruments of racial terror and that any theory of causation, theory of race, and statistical methods worth their salt will see race to be a significant causal factor affecting disparate policing and prison outcomes. This just is the first test of “fitting the data.” It is not a flight from rationality but an exercise of it.

Bertrand Russell summarized a significant tradition when he wrote his Liberal Decalogue (ten commandments) for educators. He included these points:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

 5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

 6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
 
 7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

 8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent that in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

 9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

This list is “liberal” in the sense that it prizes autonomy, freedom of conscience and speech for all, a marketplace of ideas, and the individual’s exercise of reason. It is a version of Kant’s “enlightenment.” It has merit–perhaps slightly underplayed in Hu’s excellent article. We suffer from motivated reasoning, intellectual conformity, and polarization, and it takes work to keep our minds open. Russell’s advice is valuable for that reason. In this spirit, we might do well to wrestle with the specific claims in an article like Fryer’s–to see what insights we can get from them.

But Russell’s list is incomplete, for the reasons that Hu presents. Basically, he treats each “truth” and each observer as independent, when they actually belong to Quinian webs of belief and social institutions. Therefore, we should also remember to:

1. Recognize the consequences or what we choose to say, including arguments and findings that we choose to repeat from other people’s work. In making these choices, strive to do no harm.
2. When encountering new and troubling findings, don’t forget what we already know or neglect our debt to our existing sources.
3. When encountering a new argument or study, be open to all of it, not just the headlines. (For instance, don’t forget Fryer’s finding that police discriminate in using non-lethal force.)
4. Cultivate our whole webs of belief, which ought to be internally diverse and complex but also reasonably coherent.
5. Value a range of sources of knowledge, including personal experience and testimony as well as statistics and models.
6. Ask whether it is beneficial–or not–for each of us to speak publicly on any given topic.
7. Critically assess the institutions that generate knowledge.
8. Critically assess our own roles in such institutions.
9. Never neglect the normative aspect of knowledge.
10. Don’t take the questions for granted, but ask what we could be asking about.

See also: police discrimination, race, and community poverty; more data on police interactions by race; on the phrase: Abolish the police!; some remarks on Elinor Ostrom and police reform; what gives some research methods legitimacy?; six types of claim: descriptive, causal, conceptual, classificatory, interpretive, and normative; we should be debating the big social and political paradigms; judgment in a world of power and institutions: outline of a view; teaching about institutions, in a prison; a template for analyzing an institution; what does a Balinese cockfight have to do with public policy analysis?, etc.

Quentin Gausset, Justin Kenrick, and Robert Gibb note that there are two separate conversations within their own discipline (anthropology) that involve different scholars and different families of examples.

In one conversation, the keyword is “indigenous,” and it applies either to “hunter-gatherers and nomads whose livelihood and culture is threatened by encroachment from their neighbours and state … or to groups who occupied a territory before it was forcibly settled by colonising powers and have struggled ever since to maintain some control over what was left of their resources.”

For instance, I am sitting on land where the Wampanoag are indigenous, a few miles from the offices of a federally recognized Wampanoag tribe.

In the other conversation, the keyword is “autochthonous” (born in the place) and it refers to large populations–often the majority in a given country–who “believe that their resources, culture or power are threatened by ‘migrants’.”

Anthropologists have had opposite reactions to these two families of cases:

[They] have tended to display sympathy and support for indigenous peoples (such as marginalised nomads) while often being highly critical of those advancing autochthonous claims (for example, extreme right-wing parties in European countries…). While indigenous movements are often idealised as innocent victims, or even as globally concerned and ecologically sound, autochthonous movements are, on the contrary, demonised and their agenda is reduced to ‘the exclusion of supposed “strangers” and the unmasking of “fake” autochthonous, who are often citizens of the same nation-state.’

As these authors note, a dictionary treats the two words as synonyms. Thus the existence of parallel discourses is noteworthy. We could add a third conversation about “irredentism,” a belief that a given nation should regain control over all of its former territory. Irredentist claims are usually seen as bellicose and nationalistic. Fascism is often autochthonous and irredentist. We don’t typically describe fascists as the “indigenous” populations of their countries–although they may see themselves that way.

Given the availability of these three terms–with overlapping meanings but different ethical valences–all kinds of intriguing uses emerge.

Erich Fox Tree observes that migrants to the USA from Central America increasingly identify as indigenous within the United States. Their claim is “somewhat irredentist, by asserting a super-territorial homeland” that spans the continent. However, in my view, they are expressing an understandable Latino/Native solidarity and opening possibilities for powerful coalitions within the USA.

According to Cheryl L. Daytec-Yañgot, “Tribal Peoples in Africa, such as the San or Maasai, self identify as indigenous to participate in indigenous discourses in the UN, even though their occupation of the region they inhabit does not predate those of other groups.” Meanwhile, “white Afrikaners from South Africa claimed indigeneity and attempted to forward their agenda to the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations.”

Daytec-Yañgot notes that the discourse of indigeneity is “Eurocentric.” To put it a slightly different way, I would say that concerns about the oppression of indigenous minorities arise in settler countries–places, like the USA, Australia, or Argentina, where European conquerors came in very large numbers and numerically overwhelmed the original inhabitants. This model does not fit well in much of Asia and Africa, where imperialism was also devastating but the imperialists were limited in number and have mostly gone back home. It also doesn’t fit contexts like the Caribbean, where the majority population was transported against their will to replace the older inhabitants. In at least some important cases, the most threatened groups are minorities who migrated in and are accused of being interlopers. For instance, Hindu Nationalism often presents adherents of the dharmic religions as indigenous, and Muslims (as well as Christians) as the legacy of imperialism. But Muslims are now the threatened group in India.

There is nothing wrong with the mixed affective responses of anthropologists and others. It seems right to sympathize with indigenous groups in places like Massachusetts and to criticize autochthonous majorities who want migrants to “go home” (even though the words indigenous and autochthonous are synonyms). These judgments can be consistent with appropriate theories of justice, ones that take account of past injustices, current patterns of inequality and domination, the intrinsic value of cultures, the equal rights of all human beings, and ecological considerations.

It is a curiosity that we have two sets of vocabulary for different categories, but the ethical variation is not surprising. As always, the empirical study of human beings is inseparable from value-judgments, and the objective is to get our judgments (as well as our facts) right. Being explicit about the basis of our judgments helps: it allows us to test them in dialogue with other people. But explicitness is not sufficient: the point is to improve our judgments.

See also these posts about ethical judgments embedded in social science: when is cultural appropriation good or bad? and what is cultural appropriation?; social justice should not be a cliché; science, law, and microagressions; morality in psychotherapy; insanity and evil: two paradigms; protecting authentic human interaction;  is all truth scientific truth?; and don’t confuse bias and judgment.

I’m teaching a course on the thought of Martin Luther King, who obtained two graduate degrees in theology and contributed substantially to that discipline. I happen not to be a Christian, and I am teaching in a predominantly secular context with students who have diverse faith commitments that they rarely bring explicitly into the conversation.

It’s easy to say why we should read theology if we want to understand the thought of MLK, which is a historian’s task. But why should we want to understand the theological aspects of his thought if we are in a secular context and our interests are politics and justice?

Of course, I welcome all responses to these questions from my students, including opposition to religion (although I have not actually heard that lately). These are my own, personal thoughts.

First, it is not self-evident how to distinguish religious beliefs from other beliefs. MLK believed that all human beings are created by God in God’s image. I believe that all human beings have infinite intrinsic moral worth. What is the basis for saying that he is religious and I am not?

Second, we all think with the materials we find at hand. We cannot view the world completely anew. But we can make better or worse selections and enhance (or spoil) the things we select. Christian thinkers will start with Christian materials. We can learn from how they use those ideas and add to them. It’s as if you don’t want to be a biologist but you can improve your thinking by learning some biology. (Or change the analogy to ceramics if a craft seems more apt than a science.)

Third, it is illuminating to think in a hypothetical vein. Two Christian thinkers are on my mind this week. One is Howard Washington Thurman (1899 – 1981), whom I assigned. The other is Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham, who shows up in my social media feed denouncing homosexuality on biblical grounds.

Thurman notes that God could have expressed the divine in any form–for instance, as a Roman. “But the fact is he did not.” God chose instead that the only-begotten Son would be a poor Jew “in a sad and desolate time for the people”; “a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group”; and a non-citizen, someone lacking “that quiet sense of security which comes from knowing you belong and the general climate of confidence which it inspires. If a Roman soldier pushed Jesus into the ditch, he could not appeal to Caesar; he would be just another Jew in the ditch.” The Son of God was then tortured to death for nonviolently resisting the state.

I happen not to be able to think, “So it was,” but I can think: “If there is/were a God, this is how that God would act and feel.” And I can gain ethical insight–as well as inspiration–from this reasoning. At the same time, I am sure that if there is/were a God, God would not command and act the way that Laura Ingraham assumes.

I happen not to agree with the whole story that either Thurman or Ingraham believes. However, when I move into a hypothetical mode, I am confident that Thurman is right and that Ingraham is badly wrong. And making this distinction feels like a valid way to explore ethical and political issues.

Moving further away from specific authors, I can find specific value (and pitfalls) in each of the great world religions without happening to agree with some of the core metaphysics of any of them. For instance, I can compare Christianity to Judaism or Islam, or to Buddhism and Hinduism, without ever leaving the hypothetical level.

Source: Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949), pp. 17, 18, 33. See also: Martin Luther King’s philosophy of time; Martin Luther King as a philosopher; Martin Luther and Martin Luther King; notes on the metaphysics of Gandhi and King; and Jesus was a person of color.

In a famous paper,* Harry Frankfurt argued that we have freedom of action if our desires match our behavior. I want a chocolate chip cookie; I eat the cookie; thus I demonstrate free action.

But we have freedom of the will insofar as we can control the desires we have. I want the chocolate chip cookie, but I wish that I did not. If I can influence my own desire for cookies, I demonstrate freedom of the will.

Thus the ability to have second-order volitions (desires about desires) is the trait that we value as moral freedom–it is what people have tried to express by describing human beings as metaphysically free. “A person enjoys freedom of the will [if] he is free to want what he wants to want.”

For Frankfurt, the difference between free, morally responsible agents (“persons”) and all other actors (“wantons”) is not that persons can control their desires; it is that they can form desires about those desires. In contrast, “The essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care about his will.”

Although Frankfurt does not use the language of identity in this paper, he offers an implicit theory of it. We are the coherent structure of our own desires, and if our desires fail to cohere, our identity is at risk. He imagines a person who has conflicting second-order desires that prevent him from preferring some of his first-order desires over others. Frankfurt doesn’t offer a concrete example, but perhaps this person wishes that he were more conservative and also wishes that he were more radical, and he cannot resolve that difference. In that case, the person would be torn every time he saw a tweet by AOC. “This condition, if it is so severe that it prevents him from identifying himself in a sufficiently decisive way with any of his conflicting first-order desires, destroys him as a person.” He becomes a “helpless bystander to the forces that move him.”

This is strong language, and I’m inclined to interpret Frankfurt’s theory as a matter of degree. We are more or less free to the degree that our first-, second- (and even third- and fourth-) degree volitions cohere and are consistent with our actions. Nobody has 100% freedom of the will.

Frankfurt says his position is compatible with determinism. That is, even if our minds are caused in the same way that other complex objects (computers, forests, stock market prices) are caused, we have free will to the extent that we form effective second-order desires. He even entertains the possibility that whether we have free will or not is determined. For instance, some kinds of parenting develop a capacity for second-order volitions and some don’t, but we don’t chose our parents. (This is my illustration, not his).

Now consider a certain tradition in Buddhism, which I derive mainly from US academics like Owen Flanagan, Mark Siderits, Bryan Van Norden, and Emily McRae and the classical Asian texts they quote.

Buddhism is a deterministic philosophy: all of our thoughts result from ordinary causes, just like the causes of the weather. (That is the doctrine of Dependent Origination.) We have desires without wanting them. Some of these desires are undesirable, and we can use mental techniques to marginalize or neutralize them.

So far, the view seems similar to Frankfurt’s. But in Buddhism, all desire is problematic. It has an intrinsic connection to suffering. That means that even if some desires are worse than others, we are wise to reduce desire per se.

Furthermore, we have no identity. (That is the doctrine of No Self). We are only a stream of specific feelings and beliefs. Wisdom comes from recognizing that there is no stable entity beneath that stream, and certainly nothing there that should concern us.

Frankfurt does not spell out practical or spiritual implications. To apply a distinction from Pierre Hadot, he is an academic or a scholastic philosopher, not a practitioner of Philosophy as a Way of Life. But his theory could imply that we should reflect as self-consciously as we can about our own desires. When we experience a bad desire, we should acknowledge that it partly defines our identity, so we had better get rid of it. A good way to counter bad desires is to give oneself reasons against them. Reasoning is also our way of knowing which desires are bad in the first place. For instance, if you feel a sexual desire, that partly defines you unless you decide that it is immoral and renounce it. A moral exemplar is someone who looks deeply and uncompromisingly into herself for the purpose of self-improvement.

In contrast, the advice from Buddhism is not to dwell on the desires that arise for us. Do not embrace them or cling to them, but also do invest emotion in denouncing or shunning them. Name them, acknowledge them, and try to set them aside, recognizing that their origins are natural (for everything that happens = nature), and we are not responsible for them (because we don’t cause anything), but we are better off without them.

Compassion functions differently from other first-order volitions in Buddhism. Because compassion is the desire for others to suffer less, it is not strictly a form of will. Spending more time and affect on compassion thus reduces our will, overall.

You could say that Buddhism recommends a second-order volition to be a more compassionate person. But Buddhism does not see us as persons. Therefore, an alternative interpretation is that Buddhism simply recommends compassion. Buddhism encourages you to practice or habituate yourself to compassion rather than reflecting abstractly on whether your identity is compassionate.

As long as we consider examples like wanting to eat chocolate chip cookies, this issue feels harmless or even amusing. But once we start thinking about serious personal vices, like envy and lust–or real social injustices, like sexism or racism–the stakes rise. Then it becomes a compelling question whether we should exercise freedom of the will by relentlessly critiquing our own desires or else freedom from the will by putting all our desires (apart from compassion) to the side.

*Frankfurt H.G. (1971). Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person. The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Jan. 14, 1971), pp. 5-20. See also Philosophy as a Way of Life (on Pierre Hadot); Foucault’s spiritual exercises; how to think about other people’s interests: Rawls, Buddhism, and empathy; empathy, sympathy, compassion, justice; the grammar of the four Noble Truths; Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized; how to think about the self (Buddhist and Kantian perspectives), how do we perceive an identity?, etc.

If you’re spending all your time nervously checking the election forecast on FiveThirtyEight.com, your mental health may suffer. You can stop checking and do something productive to improve the world. Or you can become intrigued about what a forecast means, read Alan Hájek’s “Interpretations of Probability” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), and write some rambling reflections. That is the Path I have chosen.

Four years ago, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gave Hilary Clinton about a 75% chance of winning the 2016 election. The fact that she lost did not invalidate this prediction–outcomes with probabilities of 25% happen often. Looking retrospectively, it seems right that Trump’s chances were small. He had to win narrowly in just the right combination of states.

Of course, we now know that he did win. In October 2016, an omniscient deity would have known that already. The deity could have known it in either of two ways: by looking into the future, or by understanding the complete present situation with one week still left to go in the election. Presumably, if you could know exactly what every American was thinking about politics, the precise distance to their nearest polling place, whose contact lists everyone was on, what Putin was up to, how heat and humidity were distributed on the face of the globe, and everything else about the situation with one week to go in the election, you would know what would happen with the vote. (I leave aside the possibility that that the universe incorporates physical randomness at the quantum level that affects things like the outcome of an election a week away.)

Applying that theory to our present circumstances, we would say that either Biden has a 100% chance of winning the 2020 election or Trump has a 100% chance. These are falsifiable claims, and a maximum of one of them will turn out to be true. Every other probability estimate will turn out to be false, because either Biden or Trump will actually win.

Yet is seems rational to say that Biden has almost a 90% chance of winning right now, and wrong to say that he has a 100% chance–and even more wrong to say that Trump has a 90% chance. A lot of data and experience go into a plausible prediction. Even if Trump will win in 2020, he doesn’t have a 90% chance right now. Another Trump victory would be a second improbable event. But again, the actual vote won’t invalidate either a 10% or a 90% estimate of Trump’s chances, because either one is compatible with him winning or losing.

A different way to make sense of this is to say: If the election were held 100 times, Biden would win almost 90% of them. But that is weird in several ways. The election cannot be held 100 times in a row, and if we repeated it at all, the repetition would affect the outcomes. If we imagine 100 identical universes that all unfold separately from now until next week, perhaps Biden would win in 90 of them. Or perhaps the future is determined by the current situation, which must the same in all of the 100 identical universes. Then they must all turn out the same way. We just don’t know which way.

Forecasters like Nate Silver use simulations with random (or pseudo-random) numbers built in. Those are meant to model the actual world. But they are not replicas of the real world, which–leaving aside quantum physics–seems to have just one future that is determined by the state of things now.

Another interpretation is that giving Biden a 90% chance today is simply an assessment of our knowledge level. It’s as much about us as it’s about the world. Biden actually has a 100% or a 0% chance, but we (unlike an omniscient deity) don’t know which of those is right. However, the tools of forecasting allow us to estimate how much knowledge we have–with precision. In fact, Nate Silver’s estimate rises and falls by the hour.

According to this subjective interpretation of probability, when Silver’s estimate moves from 85%-86%, he has not invalidated his previous prediction but has updated his assessment of the best possible level of knowledge at the present time. Once the election is over, our knowledge will become complete, and we will rightly say that the odds are 100% in favor of what actually happened.

Two problems occur to me about this interpretation. First, a prediction is not falsifiable in the usual way (and falsifiability is a hallmark of science).

Second, how much knowledge is “possible” is relative to circumstances. Anyone who could see all the current, private, survey data at the congressional-district level would have more knowledge than Nate Silver has. But he knows a whole lot more than I do. His estimates seem to be measures of how much certainty he is entitled to, based on the work he has done and money he has spent. If I say that Biden has an 87% chance because that’s what I read on FiveThirtyEight, I am really saying that I believe Nate Silver’s claim that he has an 87% level of confidence. But how could I test whether that estimate is correct? How can we know that he is right to raise or lower the estimate by a point? Certainly not by waiting to find out what happens next week.

Any serious (non-fiction) thinker makes claims, supports them with warrants, expects each claim to be challenged, and will withdraw a claim if the challenge proves valid.

However, people make many types of claims, with many kinds of warrant.

Here is a chart that suggests six different kinds of claim (descriptive, causal, conceptual, classificatory, interpretive, and normative) with examples of how a humanist, a social or behavioral scientist, and a natural scientist might make each of them.

Every one of these claims (including the normative ones) is testable and falsifiable. Each one requires some kind of reason–but not the same kind of reason.

Each kind of researcher or scholar makes more than one kind of claim. It is not true that natural scientists rely exclusively on experiments and are only interested in causal claims. They also describe, classify, and build conceptual models.

It is not clear, however, that natural scientists truly make interpretive claims. They certainly interpret data, but I think their interpretations are actually descriptive, causal, conceptual, or classificatory claims. In the humanities, “interpretation” means understanding the subjective meaning of an action for the actors, and that is not possible for most of the natural world–excepting people and perhaps some other animals. In a phrase like “the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics,” I don’t think that the word “interpretation” means what it does for a scholar of human beings. It’s more like a model.

It is also not clear that science–natural or social–provides reasons for normative claims. It is true that we should cut carbon consumption, but not directly because of what science finds. Science describes and explains the situation; to decide that we should do something requires a different kind of reason.

People can provide good normative reasons (or bad ones, which can be rejected), but these reasons do not arise from science. That is why scientists often claim to be value-neutral. In contrast, humanists’ claims often have strong normative implications. To explain, classify, describe, conceptualize, or interpret a human action often provides the grounds for judging it.

See also: navigating the disciplines; what the humanities contribute to interdisciplinary research projects; what are the humanities? (basic points for non-humanists); what does a Balinese cockfight have to do with public policy analysis?; notes on the social role of science: 1. the example of fetal ultrasounds.