on philosophy as a way of life

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Peter

(San Antonio, TX) Here I briefly introduce schools of thought–Indian and European–that have combined introspective mental exercises with reasoning about moral principles and critical analysis of social systems. I contrast their integrated approach to forms of philosophy that construct comprehensive models of ethics by using reasons alone. This essay will be the introduction to a book on mapping moral networks, which is a new introspective exercise.

–“I should have given that man some change. He looked hungry.”
–“He would have used it for drugs or alcohol.”
–“Maybe he has that right—it’s his life!”
–“If you’re going to try to help the homeless, you should donate to the Downtown Shelter. They spend the money on real needs. Plus, it’s tax-deductible.”
–“That’s not realistic advice. While I am talking to a homeless person, I have homelessness on my mind. Once I get back home, the thought is gone. I’d never remember to mail off a check.”
–“Perhaps we should set aside some time every day to practice compassion and remember people who are suffering.”
–“Yes, I guess I’m for compassion—but handing someone money seems to create the wrong kind of relationship. What did Emerson write? ‘Though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.’”
–“Maybe we should think about why some people are homeless in the first place and what policies would end that situation.”

This little dialog shows a pair of human beings doing several valuable things. They display emotions, some expressed with enthusiasm and some with regret. They exchange reasons. But they know that their reasons may not actually influence them deeply because they have habits that they would have to counteract by altering their regular routines. They cite rules—such as the tax deduction for charity and the shelter’s ban on alcohol—that are meant to improve and regulate people’s behavior. Finally, one speaker (perhaps showing off) cites an influential thinker from the past whose argument seems relevant.

Each of these modes of thought can be practiced at a high level. Instead of quickly asserting moral beliefs, we can develop whole arguments: chains of reasons that carry from a premise to a conclusion. If the argument persuades, it joins the list of things you believe, and you have been changed. Anyone who is serious about being a good person must struggle to get the reasons right and then act according to the conclusions.

But because our wills are weak, we also need enforced rules that guide or constrain us. And just as we can reason about our own choices (“Should I give a dollar to this homeless person?”), so we can reason about laws, regulations, social norms, and institutions. We can ask whether the rules that are in place are acceptable and, if not, how they should change. As Alexander Hamilton wrote on the first page of the Federalist Papers, laws are meant to arise from “reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force.” Political thinkers have often offered elaborate arguments about how institutions should be designed to improve people’s behavior.

Meanwhile, we can learn reflective practices such as confession, memorization, visualization, meditation, autobiographical reflection, and prayer. These methods are more personal than arguments, for they work directly on an individual’s beliefs, emotions, and habits. They are less coercive but more individualized than rules and laws, for we enforce these practices on ourselves. They tend to require practice and repetition to achieve their goals. You can read an argument once in order to evaluate it, but you must repeat a mental exercise for it to affect your psychology. In the 1500s, Michel de Montaigne observed, “Even when we apply our minds willingly to reason and instruction, they are rarely powerful enough to carry us all the way to action, unless we also exercise and train the soul by experience for the path on which we would send it” (II.6). But self-discipline without reason is blind, potentially turning us into worse rather than better people. Think of terrorists who have overcome their habits of peacefulness and tolerance to make themselves into killers; their fault is not a lack of discipline but a poor choice of means and (often) ends.

Finally, we can take the interpretation of other people’s thoughts to high levels of sophistication and rigor. Instead of just quoting a snippet of Emerson, we can make a full study of his ideas in their context. Cultural critique and intellectual history help us understand where we come from and what influences us. After all, we believe what we do in large measure because other people have formed and shaped our thoughts. No one invents her whole worldview from scratch. Since we begin with the traditions that have developed so far, it is important to understand them. Reasoning or self-discipline requires a critical understanding of the materials with which we construct our thoughts, which are ideas that our predecessors have invented.

It makes sense to put these modes together because we are reasonable creatures (capable of offering and sharing reasons for what we do), but we are also emotional and habitual creatures (requiring either external rules or mental discipline and practice to improve ourselves), political creatures (living in communities structured by laws and norms that people make and change), and historical creatures (shaped by the heritage of past thought).

In some periods, it has been common to combine argumentation about personal choices and social institutions, mental exercises, and the critical study of past thinkers. In other times–including our own–these elements have come apart. Here I will offer a very short and suggestive review of that history to support the thesis that now is a time to put the pieces back together.

Plato and Aristotle, the preeminent philosophers of the Greek classical era, each offered a whole system of thought. Think of an argument as a persuasive connection among two or more ideas. Plato and Aristotle offered arguments, but not just a few disconnected ones. They tried to build whole structures of arguments that would cover most of the important topics for human beings and lead the reader from self-evident premises to sometimes unexpected conclusions. The most ambitious goal for that kind of systematic thought is that it can really settle matters of importance and change people’s lives by giving them whole integrated worldviews that are genuinely persuasive. One source of persuasiveness is coherence; the whole system impresses us by hanging together so well.

Platonism and Aristotelianism are “designed” systems in the sense that the authors try to build complete and self-reliant structures with as few assumptions as possible. A systematic philosopher is like an engineer or architect responsible for the blueprints of a whole structure, not like a gardener who prunes and tends the plants that have already grown on a plot of land– nor like a traveler, observing and assessing the ways of diverse people. To endorse a systematic philosophy is to adopt the whole blueprint as the structure of one’s own thought. Of course, systematic philosophers do not view themselves as creating ideas but rather as discovering truths: their models are meant to represent the way the world actually is. They see themselves less as engineers than as physicists, creating models of truth. And one of them could be right–but only one, for the rest would have to be in error. If you doubt that a given philosophy is an accurate representation of truth, then it seems rather to be a carefully and intentionally designed structure, a human product.

The followers of Plato and Aristotle organized “schools,” known respectively as the Lyceum and the Academy, that maintained their founders’ traditions of systematic philosophy. But after Aristotle’s death, philosophy in the Mediterranean region tended to retreat from those ambitions. New schools arose called Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Epicurianism that had a different character. Sextus Empiricus was a member of the Skeptical school who lived in the Roman period. He explained that Skeptics did not offer a whole set of beliefs that were consistent with each other, consistent with what we observe about the world, and leading to counterintuitive conclusions. (He didn’t name Plato or Aristotle in this passage but must have had them in mind.) However, Sextus continued, a Skeptic did offer a method that helped people to live rightly. (Outlines of Pyrrhonnism, 1.8.16). The main practice of the Skeptical school consisted of going over examples that would shake a person’s confidence in general truths. For instance, recognizing that people from different nations believed different things would prevent a Skeptic from fruitlessly searching for truths beyond human ken. “Consideration of our differences leads to suspension of judgment,” Sextus wrote; and suspending judgment was a path to inner peace and good treatment of others.

Sextus believed he was offering a persuasive argument: if human beings believe radically different things, none is likely correct. But this was not part of an elaborate system of arguments linking many ideas together. Instead, it was a fairly simple thought meant to change our mental habits so that we would live better. Such thoughts had to be repeated as a daily practice to change people’s psychologies. For instance, you could gain mental peace or equanimity by reflecting daily on the impossibility of attaining certain knowledge of a wide range of topics.

Epicurus (341–270 BCE) founded the school that bore his name. His “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.” But Epicurus knows that such arguments 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.” The main verb here could be translated as “exercise,” “practice,” or “meditate on.” It is a mental practice that anyone can use, regardless of her other beliefs and assumptions. Importantly, it should be pursued both singly and as part of a community. (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, 10: 134. The verb is meletao, translated into Latin as meditatio.)

The late French historian Pierre Hadot argued that members of the Hellenistic schools were most interested in these reflective practices. Hadot called their style “Philosophy as a Way of Life.” Hadot claimed that we misread a work like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations if we assume that it is a set of conclusions backed by reasons. Instead, we should find there a record of the Stoic emperor’s mental exercises, beginning with his daily thanks to each of his moral teachers. Marcus Aurelius listed these exemplary men by name because he would actually visualize each one every day. The Meditations shows us how a Stoic went about meditating.

Although Hadot emphasized the reflective practices of the Hellenistic schools, Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics and and others also took formal reasoning very seriously⁽Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 353) and they rigorously studied older works, including those of Plato and Aristotle, from which they borrowed specific ideas, if not the overall structures. In short, they combined at least three of the four modes of thought that seem essential to moral improvement. Their weakest contribution was in the area of political and legal critique. They did contribute some political ideas, but on the whole, they were alienated from politics and pessimistic about improving institutions. For many of them, the only truly satisfactory regime had been the self-governing city-state of classical Greece, which was now obsolete.

The same Greek word that we translate as “school” was also used for the Jewish sects of the same time, the Pharisees and Sadducees. And the Greco-Roman schools of this time were roughly similar to Asian traditions, which also produced organized bodies of living teachers and students who studied their own communities’ foundational texts. One could join the Skeptics or Stoics almost as one could join a Hindu philosophical tradition or a Buddhist sangha. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says:

Simpletons separate philosophy [sankhya, or organized theoretical inquiry]
from discipline [yoga], but the learned do not;
applying one correctly, a man finds the fruit of both.

(Fifth Teaching, 4-5, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller and slightly edited)

The man whom we call the Buddha also mixed philosophical argument with reflective practices. Our evidence of his own thought is so indirect that many interpretations are plausible. One view is that the Buddha was educated in a culture that had developed elaborate, systematic moral philosophies in the form of the Vedic texts. But the Buddha was not convinced that these systems were helpful for the sole purpose that mattered to him: improving human life. His apparent skepticism is captured in anecdotes like the one in which he is asked whether gods cause suffering, and he says that that’s like asking who shot a poisoned arrow during a battle: the point is to get the arrow out of the victim. In lieu of a systematic philosophy, the Buddha proposed four main conclusions, each of which he supported by reasons and experience: the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. These four ideas were not meant to be comprehensive, nor would assenting to them at a theoretical level improve one’s life; to accomplish that would require repeated mental practices.

The Buddha’s world was not unlike the milieu of Plato and Aristotle, but the two intellectual traditions were still fairly remote while these men lived. That situation changed when Aristotle’s pupil, Alexander the Great, conquered northern India and left an empire to Greek successors. For instance, Strato I ruled territories around Punjab; his coins showed Athena (the goddess of wisdom) with Greek text on one side, and “King Strato, Savior and of the Dharma” in an Indian script on the reverse. It was in this Greco-Indian context that the early Buddhists developed their ideas, not only offering mental exercises–such as yoga–but also practicing formal argumentation and textual criticism. As this example illustrates, any distinction between Western (or European) and Eastern (or Asian) philosophy is largely confusing; both traditions have encompassed enormous diversity, and the two have often overlapped, as in the centuries after the deaths of Aristotle and Buddha.

Hadot claimed, however, that medieval Christianity ruptured the combination of argument and mental exercise that had been common in both the Mediterranean and in Northern India before the Christian Era. Medieval Christians adopted all the major ideas of the classical moral thinkers but parceled them out. Abstract reasoning and the interpretation of ancient texts went to the university, where knowledge became the end. Meanwhile, reflective practices were taught to monks and laypeople to be used without elaborate argumentation. A typical monk fasted, sang, and recited prayers but was not expected to reason about theological or moral principles. Hadot argued that this split was fateful and still predominates today, “In modern university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a way of life or form of life unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy.”

The best illustration of Hadot’s thesis is the High Middle Ages of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Western Europe. That period generated Scholastic theology, an impressive effort to explain everything in terms of organized and coherent principles that derived from scripture and Aristotle’s philosophy. The mode of Scholastic philosophy was abstract argumentation illustrated with examples and authoritative quotes. Its origin was in universities, and its leading lights were university teachers. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, taught at the University of Paris. At the very beginning of his multi-volume book aimed at non-Christians, Aquinas defined the “wise person” as “one whose consideration is directed at the end [or ultimate purpose] of the universe, which is identical to the origin of the universe; that is why, according to The Philosopher [Aristotle], it is the job of the wise one to consider the highest causes” (Summa Contra Gentiles, I.i). From that start, Aquinas developed a whole theory of everything important. He assumed that if we could only answer the most general and abstract questions correctly, we could derive every important truth and law from those answers, and thereby persuade even heretics and atheists by force of reason alone. This project had relatively little to do with prayer, confession, meditation, pilgrimage, and penance, although those activities were also raised to high arts in the same era.

Although “philosophy as a way of life” was marginal in the high middle ages, the Renaissance thinkers whom we call humanists rediscovered the Hellenistic schools and their approach to improving concrete human thought and behavior. Montaigne, a great representative of Renaissance humanism and a man deeply immersed in the Hellenistic schools, relished listing the enormous diversity of human customs and beliefs–just as the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus had recommended. This diversity led Montaigne to doubt all elaborately designed theories about good and evil. He wrote that “the laws of conscience” (which tell us what is right and wrong) are not actually natural and universal, as we assume. They are rather born of “custom.” We “inwardly venerate” the manners and opinions approved by the people immediately around us, thinking they are true even though they merely reflect our community’s customs (1.23). The same must be true of abstract philosophical reasons; they are not universal or certain but rather derive from local mores. We believe what we happen to believe because of where we were born and who educated us.

But we can look critically within. Montaigne wrote introspective prose texts that he called “attempts” (in French, essais), from which we derive the word “essay.” His “essays” were not arguments about what is right and good for all people, but records of his struggle to understand and improve himself:

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).

Montaigne said that he studied only himself, but he was evidently fascinated by other people’s individual personalities and characters as well. The aspect of his work that I want to bring out here is not so much its inward turn as its particularity. Montaigne tried to improve a specific person (who happened to be himself), and he assumed that this effort would require concentrated inspection and reflection. He did not propose a unified theory of the self, comparable to theories that explain all of human psychology in terms of self-interest, or reason struggling to master passion, or some other small set of principles. He rather saw his own personality as a somewhat miscellaneous assemblage of beliefs and mental habits that he had accumulated over a lifetime. He turned to one belief or emotion at a time, identifying and describing it and sometimes seeking to change it. He doubted that large abstract principles would be much help in this ongoing effort. He was less like an engineer or architect than a gardener working on an old and somewhat untidy plot of land.

Montaigne was relatively secular, but a similar shift can also be found in deeply religious authors of the same period, such as St. Francis Xavier and St. Teresa of Ávila, each of whom reunited reasoning and argumentation with continuous introspection and techniques of mental discipline. Thus–to be clear–the split between abstract reasoning and mental self-discipline is not intrinsic to Christianity; it is just one trend in Christian history that has waxed and waned over two millennia.

Systematic philosophy was rekindled when Immanuel Kant awoke from what he called his “slumbers” to produce an impressively organized worldview that influenced and inspired efforts by Schiller, Hegel, and Marx, among others. Despite their vast differences, the great German philosophers of 1750-1850 all hoped to construct coherent theories that would yield guidance for all human beings. They were intensely concerned with politics, law, and institutions as well as personal choices. In these respects, at least, they were comparable to Plato and Aristotle. But once that moment of confidence ended, intellectual leadership again passed to essayists who were most interested in individual characters (their own or other people’s) and who tried idiosyncratic “experiments in living”–people like Nietzsche, Thoreau, and Emerson. All three of these writers admired the ancient Stoics and classical Indian thinkers, and like them, tended to withdraw from politics, pessimistic that they could change it for the better.

Somewhat later, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) exemplified a new combination of argumentation, self-discipline, and cultural critique–and she added a strong dimension of political activism. When she was a young woman, Arendt had studied with the most distinguished representative of academic German philosophy then alive, Martin Heidegger. Many years later, she recalled:

The rumor about Heidegger put it quite simply: Thinking has come to life again. … People followed the rumor about Heidegger in order to learn thinking. What was experienced was that thinking as pure activity–and this means impelled neither by the thirst for knowledge, nor the drive for cognition–can become a passion which not so much rules and oppresses all other capacities and gifts, as it orders them and prevails through them. We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of passionate thinking, in which thinking and aliveness become one, takes us somewhat aback.

What did her phrase “Thinking has come to life again” mean? Because Heidegger wrote a book (Being and Time) that seems comparable to the grand systematic, theoretical works of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, one might assume that Arendt was merely acknowledging her former teacher’s importance. Perhaps she meant that Heidegger was famous and impressive, and it was exciting to be able to study with him.

But I think she meant something different. Reading classical works in Heidegger’s seminar (or in a reading group, called a Graecae) was a creative and spiritual exercise. The point was not only to construct arguments but to live a new kind of life in a community of fellow seekers. Once Arendt broke off her intellectual (and romantic) relationship with Heidegger, she moved to the seminar of Karl Jaspers. Jaspers had been a brilliant psychiatrist, and he saw philosophy as a different kind of therapy, better than psychiatry because it aimed at moral improvement instead of mere mental health. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl cites this sentence of Jaspers’ as exemplary: “Philosophizing is real as it pervades an individual life at a given moment.” Young-Bruehl adds: “For Hannah Arendt, this concrete approach was a revelation; and Jaspers living his philosophy was an example to her: ‘I perceived his Reason in praxis, so to speak,’ she remembered.”(Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 63-4.)

At the very beginning of her career, Arendt was not particularly interested in politics–but politics was interested in her, a Jewish woman from a leftist family who lived a bohemian life. Already subject to discrimination, she became an enemy of the state with the Nazi takeover of 1933. By then she had decided that pure introspection was self-indulgent and that Heidegger’s philosophy was selfishly egoistic. She found deep satisfaction in what she called “action,” assisting enemies of the regime to escape and then escaping herself. From then on, she sought to combine “thinking” (disciplined inquiry) with political action in ways that were meant to pervade her whole life. But like the other skeptical authors I have cited so far, she offered no system; rather a set of practices that would improve the women and men of her own time.

By the time of Arendt’s death in 1975, systematic moral philosophy was being revived in the English-speaking world. The Harvard philosopher John Rawls proposed an ambitious new theory of justice that triggered valuable responses from libertarians and others. Kant and Aristotle were among Rawls’ explicit influences and models. But skepticism about such grand theories seems to have returned since the 1990s; indeed, Rawls’ own late work was more modest than his A Theory of Justice (1971).

I have suggested a rough pattern of oscillation between periods when leading thinkers are confident about philosophy as systematic reasoning–and times when influential writers turn instead to concrete exercises of reflection. During moments of maximum confidence about pure and self-sufficient reasoning, the two classical Greek theorists, Plato and Aristotle, typically become inspirations, even for philosophers who disagree with their actual views. In the periods of greater skepticism, authors frequently turn back to the Hellenistic Schools of the Mediterranean, to their analogues in India, or to the subsequent movements that they have inspired.

In these skeptical moments, authors begin by identifying what specific individuals happen to believe and reflect on these emotions and ideas, one at a time. The results are often admirable. However, when mental exercises come unmoored from reasoning and from political engagement, the risk of self-indulgence arises. Thus I am not proposing that we renounce argumentation in favor of introspection and mental hygiene, but rather than we combine them again–and add a strong element of cultural and political critique. This combination seems essential if are to avoid giving up altogether on improving ourselves and the world around us.

The situation is not immediately promising. The academic discipline of moral philosophy is again dominated by an argumentative mode that doesn’t take seriously mental exercises and practices. Academic philosophers analyze and sometimes develop reasons; they do not offer or even study practices. Thoreau’s exclamation in Walden rings true today, “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.” He explained, “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates. … It is to solve some of the problems of live, not only theoretically, but practically.”

Outside the academy, mental exercises are common, given the continued importance of prayer and the rising popularity of meditation in the West. The self-help section of a bookstore is full of works on these topics and memoirs of individuals who have tried radical experiments in living, from renouncing all their worldly goods to moving to Tuscany. But for many people, meditation and other forms of mental discipline are separate from formal argumentation and moral justification, not to mention social critique. In fact, we are sometimes told that meditation is an opportunity to leave moral judgment behind for a time.

Meanwhile, “therapy”—the Greek word for what Hellenistic philosophers offered–has been taken over by clinical psychology. That discipline does good but misses the ancient objectives of philosophy. Modern therapy defines its goals in terms of health, normality, or happiness (as reported by the patient). Therapy is successful if the patient lacks any identifiable pathologies, such as depression or anxiety; behaves and thinks in ways that are statistically typical for people of her age and situation; and feels OK. Gone is a restless quest for truth and rightness that can upset one’s equilibrium, make one behave unusually, and even bring about mental anguish.

It would be false as well as arrogant to recommend present this book as a momentous new beginning. There have in fact been many examples of efforts to unite reasoning about moral choices and about institutions, mental discipline, and the interpretation of past thought. I have already mentioned Epicurus and Sextus, the Buddha, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Emerson, and Arendt as models and will add more as the book proceeds. These authors vary enormously, not only in their actual beliefs but in their genres and styles of writing. Montaigne invented the introspective essay, which was also Emerson’s main form; but Nietzsche wrote aphorisms, Thoreau reported on his radical experiment with a new form of life, and we attribute to the Buddha texts that we call “sermons.” I intend homage to these authors both when I quote them and when I propose a new experiment.

The experiment begins with a few modest assumptions. You already have many beliefs relevant to moral judgment that you have derived from forebears and peers or invented or discovered yourself. At least some of these beliefs seem to you to be connected to other beliefs by reasons. Thus you could view your whole moral mentality as a network. A network is a contemporary model for thinking about the “deep darknesses and inner folds” that Montaigne found as he explored his self. Thinking in terms of networks is useful because we now have illuminating methods for network-analysis.

A systematic moral philosophy proposes one organized network composed of ideas linked by reasons. Its organization is typically hierarchical, with one of a few big ideas implying all the others. The systematic approach suggests that you should adopt this ideal network, wholesale, to replace whatever ideas you have accumulated. I would reply: if there is one ideal, complete, and valid network of moral ideas, we have no way of knowing what it looks like. Instead, we each have a different structure of ideas and connections in our own heads. But we can improve what we happen to believe so far. If we all work on self-improvement, we may converge on similar views; our networks will increasingly resemble each other. Indeed, that convergence may have already happened to large regions of our moral thinking. But the point is not agreement, it is the improvement of the network with which each of us begins.

By the way, improvement does not necessarily mean tidying up or removing inconsistencies, for a complex and rich network may be better than a beautifully organized one that misses the complexities and tensions of actual life. What shape a network should take is a major question for this book.

Given these premises, I propose that you actually diagram your moral beliefs as a network and then refine and reshape the diagram in response to questions that I suggest. I first explain how to generate a network and then offer eight exercises for improving it, each requiring a chapter to explain and justify.

If you are primarily concerned about methodology–about the general, philosophical question of how people do or should think morally–then it will be sufficient to spend a few minutes diagramming your own moral network to get a feel for the method I propose. You can then turn to my justification of the method in the pages that follow and consider the “meta-ethical” issues that arise. But I am at least as interested in a different audience, one that includes people who may never have heard the phrase “meta-ethics” and who don’t find methodological disputes in philosophy especially intriguing. They want to understand and improve their own moral views so that they can live better. That process will inevitably take more than one quick experiment with mapping. The initial analysis of your moral ideas is a start; but you must then contemplate, revisit, and revise the map over time for it to have any value. This is the aspect of the method that involves practice and self-discipline as well as abstract argumentation.

The map is a model, not the reality; it is a tool, and not the only one worth using. Making and revising the moral network map is therefore not the only activity you should use for moral reflection and self-discipline. An example of another valuable method, not emphasized here, is to construct autobiographical narratives that make meaning of one’s life so far. A narrative is quite a different model from a network. Still, I claim that moral network analysis is a valuable tool and also one that illuminates certain general truths about moral thinking that we should take into account even when we use different tools and methods.

Like Epicurus’ practice of reflecting on death, moral network mapping can be done both alone and with others. It will not immediately generate a new worldview, nor do I offer an argument for a whole network that you should adopt instead of your current one. (That would be the mode of systematic philosophy.) Rather, you can gradually improve your own structure of ideas by reflecting on the pieces and the overall shape in a continuous, disciplined way and sharing the results with friends. The result should be a richer, more thoughtful, more defensible structure of moral ideas that will more seriously influence your emotions, your habits, and your actions.

Mr. Bryant, Take Down the Flag

Posted on September 20, 2015 by Eric Thomas Weber

or "Governor, Take Down This Flag," in The Clarion Ledger, September 20, 2015, 2C.

My piece, “Mr. Bryant, Take Down the Flag,” came out in The Clarion Ledger this morning. In the printed version, the title is “Governor, Take Down this Flag.” For the next week or two, please head to the electronic version of the piece on the newspaper’s site. You can download and print a PDF of the article by clicking on the image of the printed version.

I’ll soon post the full article on my site. For now, be sure to check out my blogpost arguing that “Racism Defies the Greatest Commandment.”

Philosophy Lies at the Heart of Mississippi Education Debate

Posted on September 6, 2015 by Eric Thomas Weber

Originally published in The Clarion Ledger, September 6, 2015, 2C

Click here for a full-sized Adobe PDF scan of the artile.

Click for a printable PDF scan.

Mississippians have been entangled in a deep philosophical debate about education funding for months, though attention has focused largely on technical details. Ballot initiative 42 that will be decided this November asks: “Should the state be required to provide for the support of an adequate and efficient system of free public schools?” If voters pass the initiative, they would be demanding an amendment to the state Constitution making that requirement explicit.

People who want voters to choose “yes” explain that such a requirement should be enforceable in the courts. Without that, a parent would have no recourse when his or her child must attend a chronically underfunded and failing school.

In their involvement of the courts, the proponents of 42 have made a crucial move for taking Mississippians’ educational obligation seriously. As the Legislature has continually failed to fund education even to the level of basic adequacy, the proponents of 42 are right to demand a check on that negligence.

The Legislature proposed an alternate initiative, 42A, which asks: “Shall the Legislature be required to provide for the establishment and support of an effective system of free public schools?” On the surface, that sounds sensible, as it is the Legislature’s responsibility to allocate proper funding. If we obligate the state instead, however, then it makes sense that the courts would be able to protect citizens’ rights, forcing the state to fulfill its obligations. 42A omits reference to the courts and calls for an “effective system of free public schools upon such conditions and limitations as the Legislature may prescribe.”

The problem people have is with the Legislature. We have had budget surpluses and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to a rainy day fund. Officials have additionally been proposing tax cuts. At the same time, the Legislature continues to severely underfund public education.

The critics of 42A are on to something when they point out that the Legislature already has the control that the alternate initiative has in mind.* 42A amounts to a rejection of the idea that the Legislature should be checked and held accountable in the courts when it fails to fully fund education. In that sense, it denies that the people of Mississippi have a real obligation to provide access to an adequate education for all our citizens.

Given the confusing technical details of the two proposals, it is vital that we consider seriously whether and why we have the obligation that 42 suggests. That philosophical question is crucial, since if we have such an obligation, it cannot be optional and contingent on the Legislature’s fluctuating will.

When the state has an obligation, citizens have corresponding rights. If we believe we have an obligation to provide access to an adequate education, we must give people a meaningful mechanism for recourse when the state fails to fulfill its obligation.

No one has seriously denied the idea implicit in initiative 42 — that the citizens of Mississippi should support and provide access to a free and adequate public education for all of our young people. We should consider the question for the sake of argument, however, because it illustrates why 42A falls short of meaningful reform. What reasons can we give to an imagined skeptic of our obligation to provide adequate, if not good or excellent, public education?

There are many reasons, but four stand out:

• Self-governance requires education. According to Thomas Jefferson, education is essential for democracy. It is necessary for wise governance, for peace, and for political legitimacy.

• Education for all is a requirement of equal citizenship. Mississippi has a troubled history. Today, reasonable and responsible officials rightly explain that those parts of our history are not what Mississippi values anymore. After James Craig Anderson was killed in a racially motivated murder in Jackson, U.S. Attorney John Downy argued that “the actions of these defendants who have pled guilty… do not represent the values of Mississippi in 2012.” I agree. At the same time, in the 44 Mississippi school districts that were labeled “dropout factories” in 2007, only a small portion of the students we were failing were white. Overwhelmingly those schools are made up student bodies 75-100 percent of which are minority kids.

• Inadequate education is one of the most powerful forms of oppression. Eighty percent of people incarcerated in the U.S. have not graduated from high school. As so many of our schools have been failing or at-risk of failing, we have been perpetuating the history that we say we want to leave behind. Republicans and Democrats from all over Mississippi are sick and tired of these impediments to the state’s progress. Educational failure is one of our most obstructive problems. To redress our history of injustice and our present challenges, we must stop accepting gross inadequacy that systematically holds our citizens back and reaps division, rather than unity.

• Expectations of responsibility depend upon personal development. In America and especially in Mississippi, we value personal responsibility. At the same time, we don’t demand rent from babies. We know that personal responsibility and self-respect are developed over time and through education. If we expect people to prize freedom and independence, we cannot assume that citizens are born as responsible adults. In youth, we are all dependent and in need of an education.

Education is both a necessity for democracy and a value in itself. If our government is intended to protect the pursuit of happiness, that protection must be extended to everyone. If we are obligated to ensure that all Mississippians are afforded at least an adequate education, furthermore, then we must provide the people with a mechanism for recourse when the state fails to fulfill its obligations. Rights and obligations are not optional, which is why we need the courts for their enforcement. That is also why 42 could lead to real progress in education and why we must choose it instead of more of the same failure.

Eric Thomas Weber is associate professor of Public Policy Leadership at the University of Mississippi and author of “Uniting Mississippi: Democracy and Leadership in the South” (Sept. 2015). He is representing only his own point of view. Follow him on Twitter @EricTWeber.

For a week or two, The Clarion Ledger will have the text version of the article on their Web site here.

* The original article included a next sentence here that was edited in such a way that did not capture what was intended. I have omitted the new version from the text here. You can still see it in the scan, however.

The Newspaper Test for Twitter and Gyges’s Ring

Posted on September 4, 2015 by Eric Thomas Weber

This week, while my Philosophy of Leadership class has been covering Plato’s Republic & the story of Gyges’s ring, I was presented with a Twitter-style version of the story. In the Republic, Plato’s Socrates is talking with people about justice. People only act justly if they can’t get away with injustice, say Socrates’s friends. Well, in today’s world, it turns out that if you can get away with breaking the rules, you can get a lot of Twitter followers quickly. Some high profile people break those rules and get away with it. And, some don’t get away with it.

I am convinced of the need for more public philosophy and feel compelled to contribute as best I can. I’d like to reach more people with the messages that I think need to be said and heard. Apparently you can reach more folks and more will follow you if you first pay a service to generate 10,000 fake followers for you over a few weeks’ time. Why? People with lots of followers are more likely to get followed in return. They’re also more likely to be proposed to other people as good candidates for following, speeding the cycle. What’s the catch? It goes against Twitter policy to pay for fake activity, including following or posting.

I’ve been told that Twitter does not police that, however. They don’t want spammers who sell stuff by automatic “fake” activity of messaging, and they clamp down on that. If that’s true — if they don’t police fake follower-buying — then it’s ok to do, right?

Highway sign reading "Speed Limit 55," with next to it a "Your Speed" sign reading "118." Yes, I faked this on purpose.

Yes, I photoshopped this.

Imagine that a stretch of highway is to be policed by an office that is underfunded. It can only police that stretch of highway from January to September. Does that mean that for three months it’s ok to drive 60 miles over the speed limit? There’s no policing, so what’s wrong with driving over 100 mph? My point is that the fact that something isn’t policed doesn’t mean that it’s thereby ok to do. Also, Plato’s Socrates would say that the policing factor only gets at the extrinsic value of just action, not the intrinsic.

Extrinsic consequences can tell you something, though, or so it seems, according to the modern-day idea of a newspaper test. The question is whether it would still be ok to do what you’re planning if it were to be featured on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow. That is an extrinsic test. It asks what would happen as a consequence if someone were to find you out. Your reputation could be damaged. You could go to jail. Other bad consequences could ensue from doing the wrong thing. BUT, what if you knew it couldn’t end up in the newspaper tomorrow?

Plato tells us the story of Gyges’s ring. The story says that a man goes into a chasm in the ground and finds a hollow bronze horse in the chasm. In it, there is a dead man wearing nothing but a jeweled ring. That’s right, nothing but that. Philosophers I know have forgotten that there’s a naked guy in the story. A dead naked guy.

Anyway, the explorer, now a ring richer from taking from a corpse, finds out accidentally that when he turns the ring around, he becomes invisible and can do whatever he wants. He can get away with anything. In that case, the Devil’s advocates in Plato’s story tell Socrates that the invisible man would do whatever he wanted, whether just or not, if he could certainly get away with it.

Socrates argues that justice is not only good for the extrinsic rewards that it brings when it does, but also for its intrinsic value. So, even if you had that ring, you should act justly if you want to be happy and live a good life. Your soul is healthy when you would act justly even if you could have gotten away with injustice.

The newspaper test today is partly about the threat that you will get caught, but it can also help to convince us about what is right and wrong even if you got away with it. If what you are planning to do would look terrible when detailed for the public in the newspaper tomorrow, that’s an indication that it’s the wrong thing to do. There are some unique exceptions to that, which I think deserve their own post, but for the most part, I think that the test is helpful. If you are looking to benefit personally and in a way that is unjust, don’t do it! If to do what is just comes with a cost to reputation, that’s a different story.

Sometimes people’s right to privacy means you can’t disclose information that would explain your actions or decisions. Or, revealing information might put one’s troops in danger. In those cases, you take the insults to your character because it’s the right thing to do, when necessary for justice.

What’s wrong with the Twitter story? At least three things, if not more: 1) If you are buying Twitter followers, you are violating Twitter’s policy, going against the stated norms of a social medium. 2) You are creating a deception, making yourself look like you have a reputation that you lack. 3) As there are legitimate and non-deceptive ways of growing your following quickly, through honest and open paid promotions, you are depriving Twitter of one of the few things that earn the company money.

Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista Gingrich.

Photo by Gage Skidmore (Creative Commons), 2012.

Buying Twitter followers is cheap, it turns out. $70 can buy you 10,000 “followers.” Why not do it? One answer is the newspaper test. What would it look like if people found out that’s what you did? What if it were on the front page?

Newt Gingrich knows the answer to that question. It’s not good.

In this case, I think we can safely say that if it would look terrible to do something that is a deception, it’s probably intrinsically a bad thing to do also — whether or not you can get away with it.

Oh, and by the way, follow me on Twitter and “like” my Facebook author page!

why social scientists should pay attention to metaphysics

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Peter

Yesterday, I introduced the substance of Brian Epstein’s book The Ant Trap. Epstein analyzes the metaphysics of social phenomena, such as groups. Here I want to argue that social scientists should be more attuned to metaphysical issues in general.

In social science, we think naturally of certain relationships, such as correlation and causation, and of certain kinds of objects, such as individuals and groups. But other relationships are present although less explicit in our work. For instance, the members of the US Congress do not cause the Congress; they compose it. Composition is a relationship that is named (but rarely explored) in standard social science.

One can ask, more generally, what kinds of relationships exist and what kinds of things are related to each other. Constitution and causality are two different relationships. Groups, moments in time, and ethical qualities are three different kinds of things. These types and relationships can go together in many ways. We can ask about their logic or their epistemology, but when we ask specifically, “What kinds of things are there and how do they go together?” we are putting the question in terms of metaphysics.

Social scientists should be concerned with metaphysics for two big reasons. First, in our actual writing and modeling, we often use some metaphysical terms (e.g., object, composition, causation), but only a few of those get explicit critical attention. In my experience, most of the meta-discussion is about what constitutes causality and how you can prove it—but there are equally important questions about the other relationships used in social science.

Second, professional philosophers have developed a whole set of other types and relationships that are typically not mentioned in social science but that can be powerful analytical tools if one is aware of them: supervenience, grounding, and anchoring being three that play important roles in The Ant Trap.

Since metaphysics is a subfield of philosophy, and since philosophers are probably outnumbered 50-to-one by social and behavioral scientists, it’s easy for the latter to overlook metaphysics. In fact, I suspect that the word “metaphysics” (as modern academic philosophers use it) is not well known. If you Google “metaphysical relationships,” you will see New Age dating tips. But all scientific programs involve metaphysics, and it is important to understand that discourse–not only to be more critical of the science but also to develop more powerful models.

is social science too anthropocentric?

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Peter

Consider these statements: “A group just is the people who make it up.” “If a group can be said to have intentions at all, its intentions must somehow be the intentions of its members.” Or: “When a convention arises, such as the convention that a dollar has value, it must exist because the people who use dollars have imposed some meaning on material reality.”

In The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences, Brian Epstein criticizes an assumption that is implicit in these statements (which are mine, not his): that social phenomena can be fully explained by talking about people. It’s obvious that non-human phenomena–from evolution to climate change–influence or shape human beings. But the thesis that people fully determine social phenomena is worth critical scrutiny.

Epstein’s book is methodical and not subject to a short paraphrase, but some examples may give a flavor of the argument. For instance, is Starbucks composed of the people who work for it? Clearly not, because the coffee beans and water, the physical buildings, the company’s stock value, the customers and vendors, the rival coffee shops in the same markets, and many other factors make it the company that we know, just as much as its own people do. Indeed, its personnel could all turn over through an orderly process and it would still be Starbucks.

Likewise, if the Supreme Court intended to overturn the ban on corporate campaign contributions, was its intention a function of the preferences of the nine individual justices? No, because in order for them to intend to overturn the ban, they had to be legitimate Supreme Court justices within a legal system that presented them with this decision at a given moment. I could form an opinion of the Citizens United case, but I could not “intend” to rule for the government in that case, because I am not a justice. And what makes someone a justice at the moment when the Citizens United case comes before the court is a whole series of decisions by people not on the court, going back to founding era.

In general, Epstein writes, “facts about a group are not determined just by facts about its members.” And it’s not just other people who get involved. Non-human phenomena can be implicated in complicated ways. For instance, the Supreme Court is in session on certain days, and on all other days, a “vote” by a justice would not really be a vote. What makes us say that a certain day has arrived is the movement of the earth around the sun. So the motion of a heavenly body is implicated in the existence and the intentions of the Supreme Court. That is an apt example, because Epstein calls for a Copernican Revolution in which we stop seeing the social world as “anthropocentric.”

Note that we are talking here about grounding relations, not causation. Public opinion may influence the composition of the Supreme Court and its decisions. The movement of the earth does not influence or affect the Court, and you wouldn’t model it that way (with the earth as an independent variable). Rather, the court is in session on certain dates, and the calendar is grounded in facts about the solar system. Likewise, a president can influence the court, and you could model the president’s ideology as an independent variable. But the composition of the court is grounded in decisions by presidents and senates in a more fundamental way than causation. To be a justice is (in part) to have been nominated and confirmed.

When people criticize anthropocentrism, usually they mean to take human beings down a peg. But in this case, the critique is a testament to our creativity and agency. Human beings can create groups in limitless ways. We can intentionally ground facts about groups in circumstances beyond the control of their members, or indeed in facts that are under no human’s control (like the motion of the earth). It can be wise to limit the power of group members in just these ways. Epstein writes, “Our ability to anchor social facts to have nearly arbitrary grounds is the very thing that makes the social world so flexible and powerful. Why would we deprive ourselves of that flexibility?” But the same flexibility that empowers the human beings who design and operate groups also creates headaches for the analysts who try to model their work. “Compared to the social sciences, the ontology of natural science is a walk in the park.”

The Ant Trap does not offer one model as an alternative to the standard anthropocentric ones, because social phenomena are diverse as well as complex. But if we narrow the focus a bit from the whole social world and look at groups, they tend to require (in Epstein’s analysis), a two-level model. Various facts about each group are grounded in other facts. For instance, the fact that the Supreme Court is in session is grounded in facts about the calendar (as well as many other kinds of facts). In turn, these grounding relationships are anchored in different facts–for instance, facts about how US Constitution organized the judiciary system.

My day job involves very conventional social science. We study various groups, from Millennials and voters to Members of Congress. After reading The Ant Trap, I won’t think of groups in the same way again. I am not yet sure what specific methodological implications follow, but that seems an important question to pursue.

See also Brian Epstein’s TedX Standford talk, which captures some of the book.

on the proper use of moral clichés

Posted on August 24, 2015 by Peter

In Joseph Roth’s finely wrought novel The Redetsky March (1932), a simple and good-hearted peasant orderly tries to make a huge financial sacrifice to help his boss, Lieutenant Trotta. The feckless Trotta is badly in debt, and the orderly, Onufrij, has buried some savings under a willow tree. Onufrij has already appeared in the novel many times by this point, but always as a cipher. Now suddenly we see things from his perspective as he walks home (fearfully and yet excitedly), tried to remember which one is his left hand so that he can identify the location where he buried his money, digs it up, and uses it as collateral to obtain a loan from the local Jewish lender.

Apparently, cheap novels that were popular among Austro-Hungarian officers in Trotta’s day “teamed with poignant orderlies, peasant boys with hearts of gold.” Because his actual servant is acting like a literary cliché, Trotta disbelieves and callously rejects the help. He tells Onufrij that it is forbidden to accept a loan from a subordinate and dismisses him curtly. Trotta “had no literary taste, and whenever he heard the word literature he could think of nothing but Theodor Körner’s drama Zriny and that was all, but he had always felt a dull resentment toward the melancholy gentleness of those booklets and their golden characters.” Thus he understands the offer from Onufrij as a fake episode from an unbelievable book. Trotta “wasn’t experienced enough to know that uncouth peasant boys with noble hearts exist in real life and that a lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written.”

Trotta can be compared to two other characters who have problematic relationships with clichés. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, Francesca da Rimini utters a speech that consists almost entirely of slightly garbled quotations from popular medieval romantic literature. She justifies her actions with these clichés and avoids any mention of her own sin. It becomes evident that she never really loved her lover, Paolo, but was only in love with the cliché of being a doomed adulteress. Like The Redetsky March, the Inferno is a beautiful and original construction in which clichés have a deliberate place.

Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (living more than five centuries after Francesca) also quotes incessantly from popular romantic literature and thereby avoids having to see things from the perspective of her victims, notably her husband and children. Flaubert italicizes her clichés to draw attention to them. He uses his own brilliant and acidly original prose to describe a person who can only think in clichés.

Even though Francesca and Emma Bovary quote statements that are literally true, they rely on stock phrases instead of seriously thinking for themselves. They love what they would call “literature,” but they reduce it to a string of clichés.

Trotta is in some ways their opposite and in some ways similar. He despises “literature” but knows some clichés that popular books contain and uses them to avoid reality. His method of avoidance is to doubt anything that is a literary cliché, whereas Emma Bovary and Francesca da Rimini believe them all.

Although Dante and Flaubert were making different points from Roth about clichés, I think both perspectives have some value. Certain cultural movements—notably, the Romanticism of ca. 1800 and the High Modernism of ca. 1900—have prized originality and have scorned cliché as one of the worst aesthetic failings. Indeed, they have defined “literature” as writing free of cliché at the level of style, plot and character, or theme. These movements have enriched our store of ideals, but they have been overly dismissive of the wisdom embodied in tradition. If you respect the accumulated experience of people who have come before you, you may reasonably assume that many truths are clichés and that many clichés are true. To scorn cliché can mean treating one’s own aesthetic originality as more important than the pursuit of moral truth.

Thus I would not try to delete statements from my list of moral beliefs because they have been made many times before or have been expressed in a simple and unoriginal fashion. I would even be inclined to consider our culture’s store of moral clichés as a set of likely truths. Roth was right: “a lot of truths about the living world are … just badly written.” Situations repeat, and what needs to be said has often been said many times before.

But the risk is that a stock phrase can prevent a person from grasping the concrete reality of the situation at hand. I’d propose two remedies for that problem. First, it is worth recognizing which of our moral commitments, even if they are fully persuasive and valid, are also clichés in the sense that they are standardized and prefabricated phrases. Those commitments deserve special scrutiny.

Second, it is worth attending to the ways that all of our various moral commitments fit together. Each cliché may be true, but when it is juxtaposed with other general statements, it always turns out to be only partly true. Life is full of tradeoffs and tensions. Even if the components of my overall worldview are mostly clichés, the whole structure of moral ideas that emerges from my best thinking about my own circumstances is original–just because I am my own person.

Sources: Joseph Roth, The Radetsky March, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, Part II, chapter 17; my article “Why Dante Damned Francesca da Rimini,” Philosophy & Literature, vol. 23 (October, 1999), pp. 334-350. See also on the moral peril of cliché and what to do about it; and on the moral dangers of cliché.

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latest thoughts on animal rights and welfare

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Peter

When we stand to affect another person or animal, at least four moral considerations seem potentially relevant:

The creature’s suffering or distress versus its happiness, contentment, or satisfaction.
The creature’s sense of meaning, purpose, and agency.
The creature’s ability to live in its natural way or to be itself. And …
The impact on other creatures that know and care about the creature that we are directly affecting.

The first consideration is relevant to all sentient beings in proportion to their capacity for sensation and experience. Perhaps a clam cannot suffer appreciably. But there is no reason to think that we human beings are the most sensitive of all creatures–or at least, not by much. And since the first consideration applies to most other animals, it is wrong to reduce their happiness or increase their suffering.

A more difficult question is whether a sudden and painless death reduces happiness. On one account, the net of a creature’s happiness accumulates like a running tally over the life-course. In that case, a painless death freezes the score permanently in place, which can make the total higher than it would have been if the future would have been less happy than the past was. A different views is that a creature has no happiness or suffering at all after death, and therefore death has no impact on happiness. In Epicurus’ phrase, “Death is nothing to us.” I am dissatisfied with both views but not sure that I have a better proposal. Certainly, happiness has a temporal aspect, because suffering on one day lingers on the next. But I struggle to say what impact ending a life has on the creature’s happiness.

The second consideration depends on an ability to make meaning or sense of one’s life and to make consequential choices according to one’s sense of purpose: in a word, “agency.” I am not committed to the premise that agency is a capacity of human beings alone, but we certainly have a very advanced version of it. Note that this capacity is temporal: we make meaning by putting our present state and our current choices in a longer narrative that includes a past and a future. One reason that killing a human being is badly wrong is that it ends the narrative that the person is constructing and thereby destroys her agency. I don’t think the same argument applies to the instantaneous and painless termination of the life of a chicken.

The third consideration–naturalness–seems to apply most to creatures that are not human beings. If possible, a bear should be left alone to live as a bear. Our family dog would not be better off if he were left in the woods to fend for himself like coyote, but he should be able to live the life natural to a domesticated dog, with activities like walks and cuddles. And as for a cow–I am inclined to think that its natural state must include time grazing in a field and nursing a calf. I am not sure that suddenly being slaughtered violates its ability to live a natural life. That means that factory farming is unacceptable but family farming may be consistent with respecting the natural states of farm animals.

As for human beings, we are also natural creatures in the sense that we are an evolved species with many innate limitations and tendencies. But we are capable of reflecting on the whole range of our inherited traits and distinguish the better from the worse. We have a natural proclivity to altruism but also to aggression, even to rape and murder. For us to live according to nature is not nearly good enough. We build institutions and norms to change our inherited natures for the better. That forfeits a right to live naturally and makes the third consideration irrelevant to us.

The fourth consideration applies to any animal that cares for another. In the old Disney cartoon, the death of Bambi’s mother deeply hurt Bambi. Although the cartoon anthropomorphized its animal characters, Bambi’s emotional reaction seems plausible enough for a deer. Still, people may be unique in that our relationships with other people are mediated by language and other forms of communication. We can suffer–or have our sense of purpose and agency frustrated–by learning of the death of someone we have never even met. In contrast, if Bambi had not directly experienced his mother’s death, he wouldn’t have suffered from it.

Freedom is certainly a moral consideration as well, but for human beings, it has a lot to do with #2 (purpose and agency), whereas for animals, it is related to #4 (naturalness). For a person, to be free is to be able to live according to her own sense of purpose. But a bear is free if it’s left alone to be a bear.

What all this means: Intentionally causing the suffering of another creature is always wrong, albeit a wrong that should be balanced against other considerations. Reducing the ability of a non-human creature to live naturally is also a wrong, at least ceteris paribus. But that is a complex question when it comes to farm animals. Killing a person is a special evil because it not only causes suffering but it ruins the purpose and agency that came from that person’s ability to plan and foresee the future. Furthermore, the impact on other human beings of killing a given person is particularly deep and widespread. This is one reason that it is badly wrong to kill even a human being who does not have much agency, such as a neonate. Killing an advanced animal painlessly and suddenly (beyond the sight of its kin) does not necessarily violate considerations #3 or #4. It may violate #1, depending on how we understand the temporal dimension of happiness and suffering. And it may violate #2, but only to the degree that other advanced species have capacities for long-term planning.

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right and true are deeply connected

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Peter

Beliefs about “is” and “ought” are so deeply interrelated that it is often better to think of truth and rightness as two dimensions of the same thought than as separable concepts.* That means that it is almost always important to analyze whether a moral belief you hold is true (as opposed to false or uncertain) and also whether any factual claim you make is good (as opposed to bad or unethical).

Consider these examples:

1. “It is wrong to discriminate on the basis of race.” That sounds like a pure value-judgment. It may be an excellent or even an obligatory value judgment, but it doesn’t sound like a truth, like “2 plus 3 equal 5,” or “Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.”

However, someone who believes this statement and takes it seriously almost certainly holds a set of other beliefs that are factual. For instance: There has been, and continues to be, a lot of discrimination on the basis of race. Racial discrimination has caused (and seems likely to continue to cause) suffering, injustice, and pain. And people of different races are not actually different in ways that should matter. These statements are true and based on information.

So now the claim is starting to look very factual again. It’s starting to sound like a testable hypothesis that isn’t a matter of moral judgment. But the stance against racial discrimination is also inextricably moral, at several levels.

First, it isn’t a logical or scientific fact that it it wrong to cause suffering, injustice, or pain. when animals cause pain, we don’t blame them morally. Implicit in the idea that we should not discriminate is some account of how we should behave toward other human beings.

Second, how do we know that racial discrimination has been common? People have experienced it personally and have taken the trouble to share their own experiences with others who have chosen to listen to them; or they have collected evidence of other people’s suffering from libraries and archives. In other words, people have accumulated and shared an understanding of racial oppression in the United States. That process takes intentional effort. Whether you are a professional historian who uncovers original documents about slavery or a parent who shares family memories with your toddlers, you are creating knowledge because of your moral commitments.

So now the statement “It is wrong to discriminate on the basis of race” is again beginning to seem highly moral and not factual at all. It is built on moral concepts like “injustice,” and an understanding of our history and present circumstances that we have created because of our values. But again, we cannot ignore the factual element. Yes, people create an understanding of history. But they cannot make just anything up. Racial discrimination has been all too real. That is why it appears in books of history and not just in fiction. We make the books of history, but it is “history” because it is real.

To add another layer: race itself is not a scientific concept. No biologist from another planet would classify human beings into races. But race is a social construct of enormous power. As such, it has really existed, and its existence has mostly been bad, although certainly some have made good of it through their effort and their art.

In short, a statement against racism, like very many other statements, combines evaluations and facts in ways that are impossible fully to disentangle. And so one question that you can ask about a statement like this is: “Is it true?”

2. Every child has a right to a good education. The invocation of a right in this sentence makes it a moral claim. Rights cannot be detected or vindicated by scientific methods. To say that someone has a right is to assert what is just, fair, or good.

At the same time, education is something that we observe and experience. Although education occurs in many settings (beginning with the home), usually a right to education is interpreted as a right to free or affordable schooling of a certain quality. Schools and colleges were founded at particular points in human history and have evolved and diversified until they reflect a range of purposes, as well as a wide range of quality. It only makes sense to favor a right to education (translated as a right to a certain quality and extent of schooling) if one observes that schools are, or could be, good for children.

That is partly an empirical claim, informed by evidence about their actual impact. But it is not a purely empirical assertion, because what is good for children is a moral question. (Should children become free and autonomous? Obedient and productive? Smart? Happy?)

Moral judgment enters the analysis in another way as well. To say, “Every child has a right to a good education” does not imply that a satisfactory education is what we actually offer in schools today. We can develop a vision of better schools in the future. But that vision should be vivid and detailed, not just a rote invocation of a better time. And it should be a plausible vision, given what we know (or think we know) about how human beings learn, about how institutions function, about what laws can achieve, and about what money can buy.

Once again, the factual and the moral interpenetrate deeply, so that teasing one strand from the other does not seem productive, even if it were possible.

3. “A good and omnipotent God exists”: This is a claim about how the universe actually is. It is phrased so that it is literally true or false, just like the claim that 2 plus 3 equals five or the earth is round. But God is different. God could exist and yet be completely immune from being empirically proven by living human beings during the regular course of history. (Only souls after death or at the end of time would have direct empirical evidence of God.)

I think people are entitled to believe in God if that genuinely feels true to them. I would not advocate deleting that belief from one’s set of ideas because it isn’t a scientific hypotheses, subject to being tested. But you can ask whether your own religious beliefs feel secure and sincere. The question is whether you really believe in God. That is a different question from whether you wish that God exists or whether you belong to a community that traditionally believes in God. Nothing is true just because it would be better if it were true or just because people have believed it.

Again, this is not an argument against the existence of God. It is merely a reminder that one is responsible for reflecting on the truth of one’s religious beliefs, quite apart from their consequences. God belongs in your store of beliefs if subjective experience or reason leads you to believe that there is a God. If not, perhaps that idea should go.

4. “Everything happens for a good reason.” That statement could be true if God or Providence or some other supernatural force makes everything come out well, either on earth or in heaven. In other words, this statement could be true if it is connected to a religious claim that is true. But the statement seems flatly false if it is not sustained in that way. UNICEF estimates that 21 children under the age of five die every minute because of preventable causes, most of which could be removed with modest amounts of money. If those children die for a good reason, I fail to see it. To believe that everything happens for the best without citing a religious justification seems to me a classic example of bad faith. It is an error, a falsehood, motivated by the hope of evading upsetting thoughts. It is an example of the kind of belief that we should delete as we look for falsehoods in our own beliefs (unless, again, you choose to retain it because of a religious belief that truly justifies it).

*Cf. Bernard Williams on “thick” moral concepts in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, pp. 140-1.

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to whom do the ancient Greeks belong?

Posted on June 23, 2015 by Peter

There has been some valuable debate about the diversity of the authors on the syllabus of the Summer Institute of Civic Studies. A participant noted, in particular, that Aristotle is mentioned over and over again in the readings. Is that a sign that the scope of the authors is too narrow for the 21st century world?

It could be. My own views on that question are complex and unsettled. But I think it is worth thinking seriously about the identity of a person like Aristotle.

On one hand, he was (to use our terms) a white man. He spoke an Indo-European language and lived in a country that currently belongs to the EU; in fact, his countrymen invented the idea of “Europe” as distinct from “Asia.” He was the tutor of another white man, Alexander, who conquered Egypt, Mesopotamia, and northern India. Aristotle’s thought deeply influenced Greco-Roman civilization and then was grafted onto Western Christian thought (especially after 1100) so that he now provides core ideas for Catholicism and some of its Protestant offshoots. So he is quintessentially Western.

On the other hand, Aristotle lived in a culture strikingly remote from our own. If we are individualistic, materialistic, technocratic, and used to mass societies, he came from a world of tightly integrated, deeply pious, zealously communitarian city-states. He lived in the eastern Mediterranean, influencing and studying cultures in countries that we now call the “Middle East.” The idea of whiteness had yet to be invented in his era. His thought arrived in the Christian world via Islamic authors who had made heavy use of him while hardly anyone in what we now call “the West” knew anything about him. The main entry point for his thought into the Catholic world was the Spain of the “tres culturas” (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism). Today, he is more likely to be studied deeply in Shiite Iran or in a Catholic seminary in Bolivia than in the United States.

I do not dismiss the argument that a syllabus in which most of the authors refer to Aristotle is too narrow. But I do dispute the idea that Aristotle is somehow “ours” (where “we” are Westerners) and doesn’t also belong to the rest of the world.

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