“Even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most extraordinary fear about making judgments. The confusion about judgment can go hand in hand with fine and strong intelligence, just as good judgment can be found in those not remarkable for their intelligence.” — Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, Dec. 29, 1963, translated by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
–W. B. Yeats

(Dayton, OH) A bias is a manifestation of cognitive limitations or weaknesses. It reveals that a person has failed to see the whole picture, to weigh evidence appropriately, to revise prior assumptions, to counter the influence of self-interest, or to grasp other perspectives. We are all subject to bias, constantly. It is wise to scrutinize our own and other people’s positions and opinions for signs of it. Certain professionals–reporters, researchers, teachers–are taught to acknowledge bias and to counter it. They are held accountable for any bias they appear to show. Anyone who writes in a public forum and purports to be a scholar or a teacher will sooner or later see the comment: “You’re biased!” (Or, just as likely, “Your bias!”, since grammar is not always the strong suit of the affronted.)

At the same time, each of us must make good judgments. Faced with almost any situation of any consequence, we can judge wisely and well, or judge badly, or fail to judge at all and thereby display negligence. Even journalists, scholars, and educators who advertise themselves as minimally biased must make constant judgments: what to cover, study, and teach, how to present information, whom to address, whom to take seriously, what counts as a legitimate position in a debate, and so on.

It’s essential to separate the language of bias from the language of judgment. They have different grammars: for instance, we say “good judgment” but not “good bias.” We accuse people of bias but not of judgment. A person can make the right judgment despite being biased; in fact, her bias may alert her to what really is the right conclusion. Or a person can somehow counter his own biases and yet make poor judgments. A typical example of the latter is a person who decides that taking a position would evidence bias and therefore fails to act–e.g., in response to a presidential candidate who is violating fundamental norms. Bias is empirically demonstrable, but demonstrating it does not prove that the speaker has reached the wrong conclusion. Judgment is wise or poor, but the difference is not empirically demonstrable in a straightforward way.

I think confusion between bias and judgment is one of the reasons that “even good and, at bottom, worthy people have, in our time, the most extraordinary fear about making judgments.” And that leaves the worst of us to display the most passionate intensity.

It’s valuable to model the development of phenomena like altruism and spite (harming someone else at a cost to oneself) by combining game theory with evolutionary theory. The results should be seen as predictions to be tested against empirical evidence about actual organisms. My question is what this combination tells us about our situation as human beings in historical time.

The basic assumptions are:

1. Organisms interact with each other so that each one can win or lose. For instance, a parent feeds its child, a predator eats its prey, a mite hitches a ride on an insect. These interactions can be modeled as games in which each player makes a choice (e.g., kill or don’t kill), and positive or negative outcomes result for each as a joint result of their decisions. (“Choice” is a metaphor, because completely non-sentient organisms can be modeled as players in a game. For instance, a plant can release a chemical or not.)
2. Changes in how organisms interact in game-like situations arise more or less randomly. As a result of a genetic mutation, an organism may begin to mimic another species. Or, as a result of a change in climate, an organism’s prey may become scarce.
3. If playing a game in a particular way increases the odds that a species will reproduce, that behavior will become more common. For instance, if mimicking works, it will spread.
4. This means that the payoffs that matter from game-like interactions among organisms are best measured in terms of evolutionary fitness. Whatever an organism may want or think or feel, what matters is whether its chances of reproducing increase or decrease.
5. Given the first four assumptions, under certain conditions, behaviors that we might consider proto-moral, such as helping offspring, helping others outside the family lineage, or even sacrificing oneself to punish another for violating a norm, predictably arise. By being altruistic (or punitive) in game-like interactions, an organism may gain evolutionary fitness.
6. Thus we can explain proto-moral behavior through a combination of game theory and evolutionary theory. The behavior is a consequence of background conditions. This form of explanation applies to homo sapiens, who have cognitive capacities and instinctive drives for things like fairness and punishment because of the conditions that pertained before historical time when we evolved into our current form.

Game theory is part of my own toolkit. I believe it clarifies many situations that confront human beings as we interact with each other and helps us to devise solutions to collective problems. I also acknowledge that we are a biological species that evolved with certain capacities and drives, and that inheritance must be taken into consideration as we diagnose and try to address our problems as a species. However, I tend to believe that Darwinian evolution gave us certain capacities that now fundamentally change the premises described above (points 1-6):

7. We can design games. The original Prisoner’s Dilemma, for example, is a situation intentionally created by a prosecutor within a legal system. The prosecutor could change the game, or he could be required to change it by a legal reform. A shared pasture is a very different game from a Prisoner’s Dilemma, but it’s also intentionally designed.
8. We can choose goals. If natural selection determines change in a whole population, then it doesn’t matter what each organism wants; it matters what promotes survival and reproduction. But human beings can choose what we want in specific interactions. Sometimes we want things that reduce our chances to survive and reproduce, but we compensate with other strategies.
9. We can change our identities. If a person’s main identity is a parent, his impact on his own offspring is central. But he could instead choose to identify primarily with a church, a community, a nation, or other grouping.
10. We can design and change the groups within which our interactions occur. As an example, the size of a group influences how organisms interact. But we human beings can merge small groups to form vast nations, decentralize governance to small groups, nest communities within states, or place people in multiple overlapping groups. We can intentionally vary not only the size of groups but also their internal diversity, spatial extension, equality of influence, and cost of entry and exit.
11. We can influence individuals’ predilections to play games in various ways, e.g., to be altruistic, trusting, selfish, spiteful, or punitive. We can influence children in lasting ways by raising and educating them to have certain character traits. We can also influence behavior in local and temporary ways by changing messages and contexts to encourage desired behaviors.
12. We are influenced in all the above choices by norms, but we disagree about the best ones, and the available norms are the results of deliberate human creativity. In short, we invent and choose norms.

Game theory remains relevant–in fact, it is an especially useful toolkit for a creature that is capable of designing and redesigning its own interactions. I am less sure that evolutionary theory is relevant, except insofar as it explains certain proto-moral tendencies and limitations that now contribute to our challenges.

Notes: Points 1-6 are guided by my Tufts colleague Patrick Farber and specifically his excellent paper “Reciprocal Spite” (with Rory Smead). Points 7-12 are heavily influenced by Elinor Ostrom, who emphasized the diverse outcomes that result when people face collective action problems and the importance of their intentional choices about groups, rules, and norms.

I sometimes envy my fellow academics in the humanities who regularly renew their acquaintance with fundamental works that have slipped pretty deep into the well of my own memory because my job is to conduct and administer empirical research about current politics. For just that reason, I am thoroughly enjoying reencountering some major works as I teach first-year undergraduates this semester.

For instance, I now see Mill’s Utilitarianism in an entirely new way thanks to re-reading it with students after our extensive discussions of authors like Epicurus, Buddha, and Emerson. It seems much less an explanation of the utilitarian principle of justice (maximize everyone’s happiness) than I had remembered, and more an exploration of how an individual should pursue happiness. It thus belongs to a genre that Mill knew very well, the tradition of therapeutic philosophy inaugurated by the Hellenistic schools and revived by Montaigne.

In the text of Utiliarianism, Mill refers several times to Epicureanism and Stoicism. For instance: “I do not, indeed, consider the Epicureans to have been by any means faultless in drawing out their scheme of consequences from the utilitarian principle. To do this in any sufficient manner, many Stoic, as well as Christian elements require to be included.” This passage suggests that Mill is interested in constructing the kind of “eclectic” view (drawing from multiple Hellenistic schools) that was popular from the time of Cicero and continued in early Christianity.

Of course, one should expect as much based on the author’s Autobiography. In the chapter on the “Crisis in My Mental History,” Mill recalls how reading Jeremy Bentham in 1821 gave him “an object in life; to be a reformer of the world.” He would apply the classical utilitarian principle of justice to improve the general welfare. “My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object.” He says he was open to experiencing his own pleasures–“I endeavoured to pick up as many flowers as I could by the way”–but the purpose of his life was to achieve social justice, defined in a utilitarian way.

“This did very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence.” (Note that his personal satisfaction derived from two contingencies: political success and a supportive community.) But at one moment during the autumn of 1826, his satisfaction ended as suddenly as if he had awakened from a dream. He asked himself this question:

“Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

Mill fell into a deep depression that ended only with his father’s death. A Freudian diagnosis is plausible (young John Stuart found momentary relief while his overbearing father still lived by reading a tragedy in which the fictional father died); but more interesting is Mill’s own explanation. He says that he recovered when he saw that happiness requires special strategies and techniques of mind. For instance, he came to believe that you can’t achieve happiness by pursuing it, only by aiming for some other end and becoming absorbed in that. He also learned that his own “passing susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as [his] active capacities, and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided.” With that in mind, he paid more attention to poetry (especially Wordsworth) and music; “and the maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to be of primary importance.”

Above all, “I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the human being for speculation and for action.”

With that background in mind, it is striking how little his book Utilitarianism says about the “ordering of outward circumstances.” It doesn’t explain what policies would maximize aggregate happiness, how happiness relates to values like liberty and equality in a theory of social justice, or even how individuals should maximize their benefits to others. (No trolley problems at all.) Instead, Mill delves deeply into a theory of individual happiness.

For instance, he thinks that anyone who has achieved a higher grade of existence will prefer it to a lower grade, even though the higher grade permits “more acute suffering.” Evidently, we are not striving to avoid suffering, because then we would prefer a simpler or narrower mental life, less sensitive to pain. Something else must explain our preference for refined experiences, and Mill thinks the right word for that is “dignity.” (He notes that the Stoics called the same impulse “love of liberty,” implying that for them, “liberty” really meant pursuing higher interests rather than being free from constraints.) Thus, according to Mill, we seek at least two different things: happiness and dignity. 

Mill is not very specific about what constitutes a higher grade of experience, and I think the text is compatible with two theories. First, it might be possible to make an objective rank-ordering of experiences, so that not only is poetry better than pushpin, but Wordsworth is better than Leigh Hunt because the former’s verse is superior. Alternatively, the quality of experience might mean the degree to which the individual happens to be stretched, engaged, inspired, etc. It would then be possible that playing an elaborate video game is a higher experience for a particular individual than hearing Beethoven, if the player engages more of his mind and soul in the game. We could objectively rank experiences by assessing the mental state of the participants rather than the activities themselves. Pushpin could beat poetry for champion pushpin-players.

In any case, Mill states that mental experiences are better than bodily experiences, and that active pleasures are higher than passive ones.

He also acknowledges that a person can abandon higher forms of experience due to indolence and selfishness. That scenario poses a challenge for him, because he has defended a distinction between higher and lower pleasures on the basis that anyone who has experienced both will prefer the higher. That argument preserves a thread between Mill’s position and classical utilitarianism (which is all about maximizing subjective preferences), but the thread would break if Mill favored higher pleasures even though some people renounce them voluntarily. He has an answer:

But I do not believe that those who undergo this very common change, voluntarily choose the lower description of pleasures in preference to the higher. I believe that before they devote themselves exclusively to the one, they have already become incapable of the other. Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying. It may be questioned whether any one who has remained equally susceptible to both classes of pleasures, ever knowingly and calmly preferred the lower; though many, in all ages, have broken down in an ineffectual attempt to combine both.

Another key point is that sacrificing one’s own interests can be good for the individual because it gives her a valuable and absorbing objective. The classical utilitarian would regard sacrifice as a cost, required only if the benefit to others outweighs it. Mill continues to reject the view that “the sacrifice is itself [is] a good.” But sees that some forms of self-sacrifice may constitute happiness for the person who experiences them. In fact, “nothing except [an ability to sacrifice oneself for other] can raise a person above the chances of life … and enables him, like many a Stoic in the worst times of the Roman Empire, to cultivate in tranquillity the sources of satisfaction accessible to him, without concerning himself about the uncertainty of their duration, any more than about their inevitable end.” Mill observes that people who have privileges and yet remain unhappy tend to be those who don’t care for others. Contribution to a community is thus one path to happiness, as Mill himself had found in his early years. But another path is aesthetic experience, and Mill presumably advocates a balance of the two.

Mill also observes that a “continuity of highly pleasurable excitement” is impossible for us. A better objective is tranquility and acceptance, plus occasional excitement. “The happiness which [“the philosophers”] meant was not a life of rapture; but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing.”

See also: you have a right and a responsibility to attend to your own happiness; must you be good to be happy?; on philosophy as a way of life

We discussed the following questions in my first-year philosophy seminar last week, after having read selections from Plato, Nietzsche, Epicurus, Buddha, and Emerson, and before turning to J.S. Mill. They seem valuable prompts for personal reflection, too.

1. Do we have a right to pay much attention to our own happiness? (Twenty-one children under the age of five die every minute because of preventable causes. Why are we spending 75 minutes talking about happiness in class while 1,575 kids die?) Do we have a duty to pay attention to our own happiness?
2. To what extent can we affect others’ happiness? Which others? How?
3. Does happiness require autonomy, or community, or both? (Can you be happy alone?)
4. Is it best to aim for a high state of well-being (bliss, satisfaction, etc.) or rather strive to avoid bad mental states (suffering, despair)?
5. Are there other outcomes for ourselves that we should seek instead of, or as well as, happiness? E.g., excellence, authenticity, dignity? (I leave aside justice to others as a whole topic unto itself.)
6. Do we know whether we are happy? What kind of knowledge is that? Can we be wrong about it?
7. Can you tell whether someone else is happy? What evidence is relevant? Could you be right and they be wrong?
8. Is it possible to compare two people’s happiness on one scale?
9. Should someone else’s happiness affect my happiness? Under what circumstances?
10. For an individual, is there one scale from suffering to bliss, or are there many different continua?
11. What are the behavioral consequences of happiness? Does happiness necessarily produce observable outcomes at all? Is happiness that does not produce any good outcomes nevertheless desirable?
12. Are there beliefs about the world that promote happiness? (E.g., only the present is real; or everything happens for a reason.) Are these beliefs true? Does that matter?
13. To answer, “What is happiness?” must we answer metaphysical and epistemological questions? (E.g., your view of happiness might be very different if a benign creator has created your immortal soul, as opposed to living in a universe in which life is suffering.) The answer might also be different if I can–or cannot–know whether I am happy.
14. What is the relationship between truth and happiness? Let’s disaggregate the virtue of truth into sincerity, integrity (truth to who one is), and responsible inquiry. Let’s break down happiness into pleasure, peace, satisfaction, etc. What are the relationships among these things?
15. Could being good (or just) to others be a path to happiness for ourselves? Is that a reason to be good? Is that the only reason to be good?

John Stewart Mill was the son of a great classical utilitarian. He was taught that happiness could be measured on a one-dimensional scale from pain to pleasure. Since he was only one of many millions of human beings, he should focus on helping others to be happy by serving them directly and by reforming laws and policies to maximize happiness. Happiness was a simple quantity determined by circumstances beyond the individual.

As a young man, Mill became deeply depressed. He asked himself:

“Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

Mill realized that other people could not make him happy, and the same was true of everyone else. Each person had to pay attention to her own wellbeing or everyone would be miserable. One reason is that we do not fall on a single spectrum from agony to ecstasy. Instead, we experience a heterogeneous batch of emotions (joy, peace, pain, acceptance, delight, equanimity, and many more) that may be in tension with each other. Mill’s ultimate response was to develop a richer philosophy in which the inner life regained its independent standing and was no longer a mere outcome of justice. “The important change which my opinions at this time underwent, was that I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances.”

This kind of reflection recalls the intrinsic value–the beauty, complexity, and richness–of inner life itself. Introspection counters an avoidable modern tendency to disenchant the self.

Many centuries ago, the world seemed thoroughly enchanted. There were spirits, angels, or demons in the air, the forest, the water, and everywhere else. It seemed natural that there should also be a spirit inside each of us that was similarly invisible, unpredictable, powerful, and precious.

Natural science has not demonstrated that the only real things are visible and predictable. On the contrary, natural science has discovered quarks and bosons, forces and dimensions. It had yielded a world full of strange and heterogeneous objects. But natural science does presume (rather than discover) that every true statement is about something that one can demonstrate experimentally. As natural science has progressed, the enchanted world has shrunk: we now know that hot and cold fronts rather than demons cause storms, and bacteria and viruses rather than witches cause disease.

An object inside us that we might call a soul, a self, or a will seems likely to disappear for the same reasons. After all, a soul can never be observed or experimentally verified. And science is building an alternative story about networks of neurons that fire (because of forces acting on them) and cause mental states such as desire and will. In turn, these networks of neurons evolved over many millions of years to make species like ours more fit to survive. The implication is that human beings are ultimately just complicated machines, and an experience like freedom of the will is an illusion. Our thinking belongs to the same network of cause-and-effect that explains why a computer opens an application when you push a button, or a tree sprouts a leaf when the sun shines on it.

The premises seem correct, but the conclusion does not follow. Natural science may explain why mental states occur. It cannot not explain what those states are. By analogy: biology explains why most leaves look green, but it wouldn’t convey to a truly color-blind person what green looks like. Likewise, a conscious person actually experiences will, choice, and a host of other complex mental states. To say what will is, one must describe it closely and insightfully from the perspective of the person who wills something. Under close inspection, a simple thing like “will” refracts into many related emotions and beliefs. One must address questions like these: What does it feel like to want something? Can you want it and not want it at the same time? Does wanting an object feel the same as wanting a person? How does will relate to love? To happiness? What thoughts and mental practices enhance and constrain will? What forms of willing are good and which are bad?

Such introspective questions are appropriate even in a world in which natural science works just as well as advertised. If you want to know why human beings think, it’s appropriate to turn to neuroscience and evolutionary biology. But if you want to know what thought is, you must attend to thinking. Even more so, if you want to decide which thoughts are good, you must evaluate the complex, subtle, mysterious world of your own consciousness.

Both the Talmud and the Qur’an propose that to murder one person is to destroy a whole world, and to save a life is to save a whole world. Perhaps those passages reflect a recognition that each human consciousness is an immense accumulation of experience. The whole universe of which I am aware (from distant galaxies to microscopic organisms swimming in a drop of water) is all in my head. My mind contains not one thing but many things connected by a whole network of relations. And each of these things carries value. Consciousness thus requires and rewards exploration. Montaigne wrote: 

For, as Pliny says, each person is a very good lesson to himself, provided he has the audacity to look from up close. This [the book of Essays] is not my teaching, it is my studying; it is not a lesson for anyone else, but for myself. What helps me just might help another. … It is a tricky business, and harder than it seems, to follow such a wandering quarry as our own spirit, to penetrate its deep darknesses and inner folds. …This is a new and extraordinary pastime that withdraws us from the typical occupations of the world, indeed, even from the most commendable activities. For many years now, my thoughts have had no object but myself; I investigate and study nothing but me, and if I study something else, I immediately apply it to myself–or (better put) within myself. … My vocation and my art is to live (ii.6).

We’re reading about Buddhist ethics in my Introduction to Philosophy course, and the Four Noble Truths are our focus. Here is how the first Truth is presented in the Sermon at Benares (attributed to the Buddha himself):

“Now, this, O bhikkhus [monks], is the noble truth concerning suffering: Birth is attended with pain, decay is painful, disease is painful, death is painful. Union with the unpleasant is painful, painful is separation from the pleasant; and any craving that is unsatisfied, that too is painful. In brief, bodily conditions which spring from attachment are painful. This, then, O bhikkhus, is the noble truth concerning suffering.”

The remaining three Truths take similar forms. First comes a headline or name for the Truth (respectively: suffering, the origins of suffering, the destruction of suffering, and the way to the destruction of suffering). Then–at least for the first two Truths–comes a list of factual claims, e.g., “Birth is attended with pain.” The paragraph ends, “This is the noble truth concerning [the topic of the truth].”

Presumably “this” does not refer simply to the preceding factual claims. The Truth is broader than that; the claims are illustrative or supportive. My instinct is to translate the final sentence into a proposition, a statement or assertion that expresses a judgment or opinion. I don’t think my instinct is uniquely “Western” (whatever that means) or philosophical. Buddhist thinkers have been debating the propositional content of the Truths for two millennia. This debate persists because it’s not self-evident how to restate the Truths as propositions. Should we say: “All life is intrinsically suffering”? “All human (or sentient) life is intrinsically suffering?” “All life includes some suffering, even if there are also happy moments”? “All life begins and terminates in suffering”? Etc.

This choice seems worth debating; the resulting conversation is fruitful. But there is also a good reason for the final sentence to take the form that it does. To assent to a proposition about suffering will not change your life. Your life may change if you really internalize the significance of suffering. In that case, you will understand the “truth of suffering.”

It’s like saying that social injustice in the US is not just a list of injustices. It is an overall condition of the society that you can absorb until it influences your whole stance toward politics. Whether you should take that stance depends on all the separate propositions about particular injustices, so you should evaluate those propositions critically. The (ostensible) Truth of Social Injustice is debatable among reasonable Americans. But the question is whether you should–and whether you have–absorbed that truth.

The Buddha’s way of thinking reminds me of Epicurus and the other founders of Hellenistic schools. Epicurus’ Letter to Menoeceus includes a formal argument that we should not fear death. Death is a lack of sensation, so we will feel nothing bad once we’re dead. To have a distressing feeling of fear now, when we are not yet dead, is irrational. The famous conclusion follows logically enough: “Death is nothing to us.” (Note that this is a proposition.) But Epicurus knows that such conclusions will not alone counteract the ingrained mental habit of fearing death. So he ends his letter by advising Menoeceus “to practice the thought of this and similar things day and night, both alone and with someone who is like you” (my translation). The main verb here could be translated as “exercise,” “practice,” or “meditate on.” You will be better off if you internalize the truth concerning death; but that takes practice, and it requires a community of people devoted to the same end. The same is true, it seems to me, of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.

See also: three truths and a question about happiness; Philosophy as a Way of Life (on Pierre Hadot); and on philosophy as a way of life; and when East and West were one.

Justin McBrayer, a philosophy professor, wrote not long ago in The New York Times, “philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.” McBrayer attributes this situation to the Common Core, which recommends teaching young children a distinction between facts and opinions. Because values aren’t viewed as facts, they get put into the opinion basket. So the same basket that contains “I prefer vanilla ice cream” also contains “genocide is bad.”

I happen to be teaching a whole class of first year undergraduates in a philosophy course, and I asked them whether they shared the relativism attributed to their demographic group by McBrayer. About one third agreed that moral claims are “mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.” Roughly the same number disagreed. Many were uncertain. After about an hour’s discussion, it was evident that most students held quite complicated or nuanced views. Everyone’s position sounded different, but I think many would like to hold onto: 1) moral seriousness and the assumption that it makes a big difference what we conclude about moral issues, 2) an ability to decry certain horrible acts as evil, 3) a recognition of ideological diversity, 4) a distinction between moral claims and empirical claims, 5) falliblism and an acknowledgement that context affects, or even determines, everyone’s thought, including our own, and 6) tolerance, which they recognize as a value, not as an absence of values. Those assumptions are in some tension, but it’s possible to pull them together into a complex position.

I don’t want to generalize based on an “n” of 15 people at one college, but if anyone asks me for evidence that Kids Today are amoral relativists–or that they have turned into censorious absolutists–I offer this counter-evidence.