The narcissism of rights, freedom, equality

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022

Freedom, equality and individual rights are not three distinct values. They entail one another — can’t have one without the other. That raises the question, is one of them the goal, the others just necessary conditions, or is there an underlying motivation driving the whole package? Here’s one way to think about these:

Equality is a necessary condition for individual freedom. If someone can wield greater power than you, then you can’t be entirely free.

In a world of inequalities, socially enforced individual rights are a necessary condition for individual freedom. The collective — the law — will ensure the equality of rights regardless of any other socio-economic inequalities.

So if we want freedom, say, to own what we want, we’ll have to accept some inequalities, and in our world of inequalities, equal rights will be necessary for freedom, everybody compromising a bit to maintain a fair distribution of as much freedom as possible. Equality, rights, fairness and freedom are a single package. Can’t have one with out the others and in particular, equality and rights are the necessary conditions for freedom, which implies that freedom is the motivation for the whole package. But why do we want freedom?

Jon Haidt’s answer here is that we in the West are narcissists. We want the freedom to pursue consumption and sex and willfulness, and the deal we’ve made with the collective is to respect other consumers of willfulness as long as they don’t interfere with our desires. The whole edifice of liberal democracy, freedom, equality and rights, is just a bargain each of us contracts with the collective so I can do whatever I want regardless of someone else’s sensibilities, as long as I don’t encroach on anyone else’s freedoms. 

He also thinks that this narcissism has turned sick. Our protection of the individual has given us a society of identities without any civic or collective anchor. Identity is all self-aggrandizing showing off. Social media showing off has turned identity toxic. 

Here’s a comic (imagine the drawings)

Jon Haidt: Americans have been so coddled that they can’t function. Social media is killing them. They’re suicidal. We need to help them!

Robin Hanson: “Help them”? You mean coddle them more? You’re overcome with your liberal bias. What we need is not to help them at all. If they kill themselves the next generation will be better selected to their social media destiny.

Haidt: Wait, who’s “we”? And what’s this destiny?

Hanson: We, me, of course. What are you thinking? Why think about someone else, silly liberal? As for destiny, if social media exists, it must be an optimal selection. That’s destiny.

Haidt: So’s extinction.

[Final frame, empty desert landscape.]

Selection does not guarantee against extinction. Whole species go extinct all the time. Besides, not every regulation is limiting. Hanson underestimates human spirit and flexibility. Some regulations encourage growth. Pruning. Art forms. Irrigation. Should I stop? A world of weeds produces — … a lot of stifling weeds and few fruit.

Free will and responsibility don’t distinguish between non-deterministic religions and secularism

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, April 18, 2013

Believers in deities often claim that because secularism is deterministic, it has no room for free will and therefore has no concept of personal responsibility or morality. But I don’t see how free will entails moral responsibility, and I don’t see that responsibiltiy entails free will.

To take the first implication direction: free will is an incoherent notion. If there is no motive or source of a decision, then the decisions are not tied to an integral self — they’re just random decisions, that don’t belong to anyone. If a decision is motivated by some determinant, then the decision isn’t free. To put it in a theological context: either god made you who you are, and she is responsible for every decision thereafter, or your decisions are random and not anchored is a self. So free will doesn’t entail responsibility. It entails no responsibility, because it entails no self. End of story.

From the other direction of entailment: the individual can hold herself responsible just to flatter herself for believing she’s an integral self. And what do you know, that’s exactly how we all feel. Responsibility is an illusion that works. You don’t need free will, only the illusion of self.

Sam Harris and the middle class virtue

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, May 3, 2012

Sam Harris has been pushing human well-being as a universal goal of morality, without seeing the glaring weaknesses of that assumption. First, he’d have to bite the bullet that human ignorance and illusion might serve our happiness and well-being better than knowledge and understanding.

Does anyone really want to sacrifice awareness and knowledge? It’s a basic affront to human dignity. Even in the western religious tradition, knowledge is the ground zero of human nature — it’s the original sin; it’s who we are; it’s constitutive of human nature; it’s what distinguishes us as a species (or so we think). It’s the central myth: we pay for knowing, whether it be knowing good from evil, which is just knowing the link between our selfish motives and their consequences and shame of understanding that link, or knowing our naked selves literally or figuratively or knowing that life has an end (presumably the other animals don’t know that). Knowing is essentially what it is to be, in the deepest and most pervasive sense, human, no?

Happiness or well-being as the be-all and end-all is the morality of the drugged and drunk. Harris acts as if he has the moral depth of a dedicated, professional physician: do no harm — meaning strictly physical harm. Well, prescription weed would be nice for the profession, but hardly an answer to human aspirations.

If well-being is the goal of morality, kill me now.

A friend quoted to me Nietzsche’s familiar “There are things I don’t want to know. Wisdom sets a limit to knowledge.” There’s an important truth there, but it applies to internal motives, not to outward understanding. Patients who’ve lost their motivations, their personal drive or passion, find that they can’t reason well. Reason, after all, is a tool to navigate the world. If you’ve got no goal, all the minutiae of the world overwhelm your consciousness, all claiming equal attention. So if knowledge of your motives undermines your motives, you’re left in the Hamlet quandary: inaction.

But given your motives, the last thing you want to curtail is outward knowledge. To put it differently, if you have no goals, you don’t need knowledge (of any kind). You need knowledge only if you have goals.

No goals, no morality either. If there were no human interests, there’d be no reason to violate them, or mediate them, balance them with fairness, or prevent any mutual interference. There is a fallacy inherited from religion — one that Nietzsche complained of regularly — that morality is about mere altruism, the inclination towards saintliness and selflessness. It’s a commonality between Christian and Buddhist virtue. But those are mere sentiments of self-overcoming,  and can be equally accomplished in isolation. The moral quality, whether of Christianity or secular morality, is tinged with utilitarianism: selflessness in the pursuit of benefiting others. Even the Christian virtue of “love” implies a sympathy towards others interests. If the other has no interests, there’s no good you can offer. The entire edifice of morality rests on recognizing human interests, personal goals, selfish desires. If the world were populated with saints all trying to help each other, they’d have nothing more to do than help each other help each other help each other. That is, they’d do nothing.

So it’s not so easy to get away from well-being in the consideration of morality.

But well-being is not the only basis of human, personal interests. Of notions of universal morality, well-being is only one. Fairness, a far more abstract and mathematical notion, can encompass more than just well-being, and has much stronger rational claims.  I don’t see why morality shouldn’t be a constraint against our own preferences. I see morality as a balance between old Aristotle’s virtue and the constraints of conscience. If your goal here in this brief temporal gift of awareness is to learn all about this place — Aristotle’s highest virtue of contemplation — why can’t that be factored into the fairness of human interests?

If some people don’t feel the edge of conscience, the law is designed to to constraint them from social harm. I don’t see that social welfare — fairness in the promotion of human well-being — should be assumed into morality. Why conflate social planning with personal morality? Well-being ought to be the responsibility of the society as a whole,  allowing for the maximal expression of human inspiration within its limits to sustain it.

Dramatizing morality

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, April 13, 2011

At the start of MIkhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun, the Great Hero of the Stalinist army appears to a platoon of soldiers as himself, barely clothed — he’s just run naked out of his bath, throwing on his pants to save the local peasants from some Stalinist ukase-from-afar. The soldiers don’t recognize him until he grabs a soldier’s army cap and mugs his famous profile for him. It’s the adorable hero as genuine and authentic as well as modest, courageous and good-humored, saving everyone from disaster through his simple honest speech borne of his unalloyed dedication to his country, his people and his army that he believes defends them.

In a moment, the villain of the piece will appear not as himself, but in disguise, lying, playing, charming, insinuating, seducing  — he’s an artist, a musician, a far cry from an honest, simple soldier of simple skills and simple sentiments. He saves nothing and no one. He comes to serve himself regardless of its harm.

Yet who can resist his art? He has them all dancing, like a marionette master. And always dressed, even when swimming, the devlish dandy, even in the bath! His past is riddled with all sorts of whoring jobs, serving any local master, and always playing a double role — a triple role: his local boss, the Stalinist government as an agent, and, of course, himself. No integrity, no authentic public self, no honor, no dignity; all show, all artifice.

This portrayal of villain as brilliant, manipulative artist appealed to me most in this movie. The indictment of the artist is close to my heart. The artist seems to me exactly that: a manipulator, a charlatan, a self-promoter who seduces you to love and adore him, despite your not at all knowing who he really is.

And that is, perhaps, all he is. From the 19th century notion of the artist bringing gifts of the gods, redeeming vile reality, justifying it and comprehending it, here is discovered the vilest motives: seduction, deceit, distraction and distortion.

The artist appears here like a Shakespearean or Commedia dell’Arte villain: Edmund gets up in front of the stage and explains exactly why he’s going to be a villain, with full intent. Of course, evil isn’t like that at all — it’s the paltry acts of selfishness and the little lies one tells oneself, or the rage of anger, Schiller’s bastard Franz in a fury of bitter jealousy that he can’t escape from. Evil, as a friend once joked, doesn’t wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and, stroking his mustaches, say to his image, what evil shall I do today?

Except the artist. He wakes in the morning and wonders, how shall I manipulate the world today? The artist as criminal. One needn’t look as far as an Eric Gill, a Gesualdo, a Caravaggio or a Jack Abbott. The art itself is the crime.

Towards the end of the film, the artist salutes the colossal image of Stalin — the evil which has enabled his plans and in which he has thrived and succeeded. The film wants to blame it all on Stalin. I wonder if the drama would have been more effective without the convenient blame. Blame leads to an anodyne of self-satisfaction in the audience and is more suited to melodrama than tragedy, where blame is fixed squarely on the hero himself.

This movie was poised between tragedy and a melodrama sanctioned by its anti-Stalinism (as Uncle Tom’s Cabin‘s melodrama is sanctioned by the evil of the plantation), but for this presentation of the artist I can forgive much. There’s also a wonderful depiction of the comfortable Russian household (very much more Russian than Soviet), and a priceless subplot — like one of those tiny little folk parables that Dostoevsky occasionally would insert — prefiguring the entire story in low comic relief: The ludicrous house servant is devoted to taking imported (like socialism and communism?) herbal remedies, scarcely knowing herself what they (like socialism and communism?) will do for her. A couple of meddling babushki dump her herbs into the river — for her own good, so they think. When she discovers it, the poor thing lies on her bed crying. So much for grand tragedy, how the great have fallen!

I mention this here on the blog because I am continually puzzled by my own inability to keep apart the art from the artist. In the rest of life, we can judge action and agent on the same moral grounds of the various notions of justice. And I have no problem responding to immorality in the arts — we judge or value art on its effectiveness, not its justice. But I am inclined to admire and love the artist, regardless of the artist’s moral mettle, and that’s a double standard that I’ve never resolved. It’s a moral challenge and then some.

Fear of fatalism

Originally published on Language and Philosophy April 8, 2011

Apparently the literature on Taylor’s fatalist argument — the motivation for Wallace’s book (see immediately previous post) — does not include the anepistemic solution I sketched. I’m guessing it’s because everyone is afraid to admit fatalism; everyone wants to believe in free will, and so insists on it. (Believing it and insisting on it are distinct: I insist you have no freedom, but I bet you believe you have. I’ll make a big deal out of that in a moment.)

Having no freedom does not entail making no choices. Freedom ranges over your choices, and your choices depend on your knowledge. If you don’t know the underlying determinations of your choices, those choices will appear to be determined by whatever you do know about. You seem to be making free choices, even though they are not in fact free.

This is not eliminativism, btw. It’s possible to insist that there is no autonomous self and no free will, and still insist that you have a mind and an awareness and your mind contains knowledge of which your mind is aware — or maybe your mind is that awareness of, among other things, that knowledge. Just because I think free will and autonomous self are fictions I am not compelled to give up the mind, knowledge and awareness. Just don’t ask me what awareness is or what role it plays in choice. I’m sure it plays a role, but how, I’m not sure, and having an account is not required for insisting that there is one.

Once you accept determinism, the response to Taylor’s argument is quite simple: the assertion under the modality of real time and its denial in a modality of knowledge don’t contradict. You can know that you are not free and also not know the conditions under which you will choose. So you can insist that no one is free, but still, not knowing the determinations of your choices, you can believe in the fiction of your will. Since you can’t know the sources of your choices, you may believe in any source, including yourself. You can attribute your choices to the devil or the demi-urge or a deity. If you have a sense of personal integrity, you’ll believe that the source is you, because believing in the fiction of you is all you have to be proud of. And those feelings like pride are sui generis. They may be determined by your genetic nature or your cultivated nurture, and you may question them and doubt them, but it’s always you questioning, doubting and feeling. The self has a dual nature: it’s a real melange of sensibilities and thoughts, yet not autonomous. No one has given a good account of it. That’s the appeal of the eliminativists and logical behaviorists and the Wittgensteinian behaviorists. They get on without one.

The formulation in the previous post might be amended to

~K(T) =>

K~K(T)

Not only do we not know the future, but we know that we don’t know. That Rumsfeldian modality suffices to absolves us from fatalism. However deterministic the world is, we, with our limited knowledge, know that we can’t know its determinations. That leaves us with our limited knowledge, so regardless of the facts of the future, we are not in a position to assert anything about it with certainty: the contradictory of K~K(T) is not ~T, but ~K~K(T); the contradictory of ~K(T) is K(T), and there is no entailment from ~K(T) in the present to K(T) or ~K(T) in the future — people change their minds or forget from time to time.

Social illusions, freedom, autonomy, authenticity

 Originally published on Language and Philosophy, March 25, 2011

The Times the other day had an interesting piece about free will: When people are persuaded that their actions are deterministic, they give reign to their desires irrespective of ethics. People who believe themselves to be free agents tend to curb their selfish inclinations in consideration of the consequences for others.

It’s a wonderful support for the notion of moral realism and moral universalism: as soon as people believe they are moral agents, they incline towards the universal principles (see below a couple of posts ago “Jesse Prinz at Philosophy Now”). It’s not conclusive — there might be cultural pressures — but it makes a great test for other cultures. It turns morality into an empirical question, which really is kind of wonderful.

The piece goes on to wonder whether people actually are moral agents — are we free? It seems odd to me that this is still a question. On the one hand, if you reject determinism, you still can’t give an account of freedom. Suppose your choices originate from yourself. So what is that self? If there’s a motivation behind it, then it’s not free. If it has no motivation, then it’s just mere randomness, not a coherent self.

On the other hand, if you accept determinism, there’s no reason to reject selfhood and responsibility. Just because it’s an illusion doesn’t mean you can’t believe it and hold to it, and allow yourself to be treated as if it were real — for the simple reason that you believe it and insist that others believe it too.

Surely we all by now know that the self is an illusion. It isn’t integral, it is moved by unconscious motives, it shifts according to context and emotion, it is deceived by motives that are hidden from itself.

But it’s a useful illusion. The question of agency is one of personal dignity. We accept responsibility in order to maintain the fiction that we have integrity and dignity. Otherwise how would we take credit for our accomplishments? I helped that family — I get to congratulate myself. I wrote that book — I’m proud of myself. I fixed up that chair — how clever I am! My friends like me — me for me, not for some robot. It’s all foolishness, but a very pleasant foolishness.

It’s a sham but one we cherish. And it seems to be determined for us. We all have it as individuals. But it’s also convenient socially. It’s the basis of criminal law and punishment and an integument of social, business, academic, interpersonal interaction.

We don’t hold to it categorically. The criminally insane are not held responsible. We fudge on our own self identity. We are always in a twilight between the illusion of integrity and succumbing to selfish interests, aware or unaware. The whole point of the illusion of free will and agency is a kind of self flattering. It is itself a selfish interest, but with a difference. It’s about human dignity, which is well beyond mere selfishness. It’s noble, even if completely false. And its nobility only emerges in traditional, universalist morality.

The selfhood that brags about its great accomplishments, however delightful to ourselves, is, after all, repulsive to everyone else.

More on universal morality

 Originally published on Language and Philosophy, February 18, 2011

Again, if the question for moral universalism were, “where do all peoples agree on values” we’d have an empirical answer, but still not a philosophical answer. In any case, the empirical answer would still be forthcoming. All peoples do recognize certain principles of fairness, among other notions that motivate them. Most (all?) global religions hold to principles that stand in stark contrast to purely selfish interests. Morality is universal and is universally of a kind, even when it isn’t exactly alike.

Overall, notions of both morality and mores contrast pure self interest, which is odd, since our species nature includes both selfishness and altruism. Yet mores and morality do not try to contradict altruism. The basic notion of morality seems always and everywhere a negotiation with selfish interest where self interests might lead to conflict.

One way to define morality is that contrast: morality is not just a consideration of agent action, but consists of precepts beyond the natural, instinctive desires of self-interest. Agentive actions motivated by self interest need no precepts; they take care of themselves. Morality — and mores — concern the agent beyond the agent’s own natural compulsion.

That’s why morality always seems so anti-Nietzschean and anti-power. But Nietzsche misperceived and exaggerated. No doubt morals will appeal to the slavish spirit, but they do not originate from it. It is the nature of morality to promote something else besides natural inclinations, because a) natural inclinations need no such promotion and b) altruistic inclinations don’t conflict with other interests directly. That leaves the self-interests that do conflict with others’.

Here’s an empirical test: strip away all the mores and see what’s left in morality. I think you’ll find that there is still a variety of notions that might be described as moral. There’d be the sentiment expressed, for example, in “You did x, so why shouldn’t I?” (“Everybody does it, why shouldn’t I?”) There’d be a notion of fairness deriving from our species ability to see ourselves in others’ situation — empathy, a basic character of humans. There’d be a bunch of general precepts beyond mores: haste makes waste, bird in hand’s better than two nearby…all sorts of modulations and tempering of immediate selfishness.

That’s the stuff of morality. That’s where it begins. While it’s true that there is no universal agreement on a complete and consistent set of moral precepts, it’s also true that wherever you look, peoples, religions, cultures, laws, all regard this tempering morality as fundamental.

There’s no question that morality is universal, empirically. You can see it in the exception that ‘proves the rule’, the sociopath. The sociopath is identified as abnormal and psychologically exceptional primarily on account of not having a moral sense at all. Sociopathy defines the normal human as moral — moral and not just following local mores. Sociopaths follow the local mores. They dress well, talk well, behave better than well — they are notably expert at sociableness. The sociopath is the most beguiling person at a party, and will charm your pants off. They’re not defective in mores. It’s their moral character that is distinctive. It’s missing, and apparently not by choice, but by some strange character of their minds. (I’ve known at least two well, and they are the most fascinating people — exciting because they will do all the things you and I won’t.)

Jesse Prinz article at Philosophy Now

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, February 18, 2011 

I see Jesse Prinz regularly at the Grad Center colloquia where he always asks interesting and articulate questions. So I read a recent article of his on moral relativism “Morality is a Culturally Conditioned Response.” It begins with an exposition exemplifying the variety of human moral values, and asking how there could be such variety if morality is universal.

Odd question. Moral theory is not and never has been an empirical science. It’s prescriptive, not descriptive. Kant wasn’t trying figure out a way to describe morality. He wanted to find a rational basis for action. That his conclusion was consonant with much (though not all) of his local cultural mores, might be a reason to suspect his objectivity, but not enough to stand as an argument against his rational program.

Seems to me the JP’s question mistakes mores for morals. Does any universalist care what strange rites and social conventions hold across the world? If there’s a universal moral law, and they don’t follow it, the worse for them. They ought to get with it and shape up. That’s the essence of universalism, after all. No more clitorectomies! No more hanging queers! No more sex slaves! JP’s question is a sort of question-begging. The answer to “Is there a universal morality that all people should follow” can’t be “No, because not all people follow the same mores.”

JP promotes ‘experimental philosophy’, something I, as an empirical linguist, support thoroughly…in matters of fact, but not in matters of value. He wants to claim that humans show a variety of mores, and that variety is incorrigible, so leave them be.  But that’s not yet an argument for justifying those mores against universal morality. It’s just repeating the fact that there is variety that may be inconsistent with universal morality. One answer is his — let ’em. Another is, convince them they are wrong. JP hasn’t yet argued for the former or against the latter except maybe to indicate that the former is easy, the latter, hard.

He, like all those who distrust the modernist program, point out just how hard it is: we “enlightened” modernists have exploded nuclear bombs on civilian targets, we’ve polluted our environment maybe permanently — there’s a long, long list of our shocking behaviors that fail our own moral bar.

But how does that impugn our moral bar? What difference does it matter to a universalist whether we follow our own moral precepts. She’s there to tell us just how wrong we are. Jesse is careful to describe our failings as viewed from other people’s, the past and the future. But in fact, those are viewed as failings to his audience and to him himself. There’s a hint there towards a universalist, modern morality. And he finds it is his final conclusion.

But first he notes that mores are inculcated in youth as part of our developmental process. Again, that’s just to say that if universal morality conflicts with mores, do not expect humans everywhere to conform. But the constant, harping of the universalist is the exhortation to give over sin and be moral, stop behaving like a selfish beast and be a mensch, stop persecuting others and see that, but for luck, you’d be the victim; get over your developmental blindness and open your eyes. If everywhere everyone behaved alike and in ways that made everyone alike happy, moral theory would have no more interest that whether humans breathe. The question of morality is “How should we behave” not “How do we behave.”

At the end JP reassures the universalist that relativism is not the end of the world. We’ve all got to get along together, so we all behave in ways that get along together, no matter how relative and different we are.

But that is universalist morality.

To me there’s an even stronger claim of universalism, and I think everyone recognizes it. Everyone, regardless of mores, develops in childhood the ability to recognize the notion of fairness. We don’t often apply fairness against our mores. No surprise. We fail to apply our notion of fairness all the time. That doesn’t mean we don’t recognize it.

The argument for universal morality is not that everyone behaves morally, but that everyone can recognize some one notion of how to behave, even if they don’t follow it or object that it conflicts with their mores.

I find that there are several notion of morality. ‘Treat others as they treat you’ is one. It leads often to brutishness. ‘Treat others as you would have them treat you’ is another. It leads usually to kindness and thoughtfulness. The question for universalism is, which is more compelling?

Believers often argue against secular morality on the grounds that our modern world has seen shocking violence. Our morality has not succeeded. Weird claim. Religion succeeded? Of course, if every believer in a kind deity followed kind precepts of the religion, many people would be kind, even sacrificing themselves for others (who in turn would sacrifice themselves for each other). But most members of most religions don’t. So I don’t see a contest here.

The real contest is academic: if people would follow their precepts, would non believers seek justice or mere selfish ‘getting along to get along’? In my experience, some are more brutish than others, some want money, some want fame, some just want to write philosophy, some want to be smart, some want to be considered smart, some just want to get laid. None of them are so stupid as not to understand fairness.

Just don’t expect them to be fair. Either they want something from you, or they don’t care about you. At best, you can win any argument with a claim of fairness. Usually when you win an argument, the beaten is resentful. So morality is not always a winning game.