Category Archives: philosophy

What was Nietzsche doing?

I enjoyed guest-teaching a course on Leo Strauss last evening that enrolls an extraordinary group of students. Deeply steeped in political philosophy–and especially Nietzsche–they are able to cite Nietzschean texts by heart, with references.

I had assigned a selection from Will to Power for this session because, in my early work (and even in a roman-a-clef), I presented Strauss as thoroughly Nietszchean. As we discussed the earlier philosopher, I asked–without premeditation–what we think he was up to. Was Nietzsche …

A therapist
A political actor
An artist
A philosopher with views
A scholar

Any forced-choice question about a major thinker is reductive, but I recommend this one to provoke conversation.

Students provided some alternatives that were not on my impromptu list, such as “a recruiter of philosophers.” For what it’s worth, I would choose c. (an artist), while recognizing that a. and e. are also true, to a degree. I am not so sure that Nietzsche was political, in even the loosest sense of that word; in other words, I am skeptical that he wrote to change society. And I don’t think he had philosophical views, in the standard way, because his core doctrines were meant to be self-refuting. I think that Nietzsche wrote to create beautiful, original, and formally fascinating works, in which the author is also a character.

applied ethics need not mean applying ethical systems

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Recently, hearing a distinguished technologist talk about the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), I recognized a familiar style. People in a given technical field realize that they face an ethical issue. They turn to the relevant academic discipline (philosophy), and they think that they discern a set of available ethical “systems.” These options include at least utilitarianism and Kantianism/deontology. They apply each system to the issue at hand and explore its apparent conclusions. The various systems seem to disagree about at least some cases, and the analysts conclude that ethical questions are hard and unresolved and that people who happen to start from different premises will probably reach different conclusions. The last slide of the PowerPoint is a head-scratcher about the difficulty of ethical reasoning.

I suspect that these “systems” look authoritative because they have been discussed in vast numbers of peer-reviewed publications. If you want to mention deontology, you can cite Kant (1788) and innumerable subsequent works. For utilitarianism, you have Bentham (1789) and its successors. (See Stahl 2021 as just one example.) In a technocratic world, this form of authority seems weighty. You are not just expressing a personal opinion if you can mention a book that has thousands of citations.

The mental model behind this kind of analysis also resembles technical forms of reasoning. The various philosophical systems are seen as very general and internally consistent premises that generate conclusions algorithmically. Ethics is treated as a Normal Science.

To be fully satisfactory, a system’s premises should apply to all cases. Trolley-problems and similar thought-experiments are fascinating because they suggest that the general premises of different systems conflict in select cases. Different algorithms yield different results. The methodological assumption is that analyzing such exotic thought-experiments should clarify principles that will then apply universally. Since this method doesn’t seem to have succeeded (yet), the analyst is entitled to conclude that ethics is unresolved. Hence the last slide of the presentation is about not knowing what to do.

It is often acknowledged that there are more than two or three ethical views for which we can provide fancy citations. What about Thomism, Stoicism, Marxism (of various flavors), feminism, the Five Precepts of Buddhism, Confucianism, African “Sage Philosophy” as explored by H. Odera Oruka (1990), deep ecology, Nietzsche, Levinas, etc. etc.? The notion that there are two or three available systems has a specific history in secular, 20th-century, Anglophone philosophy departments, and it was always controversial even there.

Then again, when people extend the list of available philosophies, often they reach even more relativist conclusions. If “systems” from distant times and places disagree, then surely there can be no right answers. Now the PowerPoint really ends with a head-scratcher.

But in order to conduct this kind of analysis, one must assume that very general premises should apply across all relevant cases. In other words, the appropriate units of analysis are broad generalizations. It is either right or wrong that we should maximize aggregate welfare or that we should treat people as ends rather than means.

One of the leading systems, deontology, may not purport to generate guidance about specific cases. In the Shadow of God (2022) Michael Rosen gives an up-to-date argument that Kant did not intend for his principles to answer questions of applied ethics. If that’s true, then it’s a bit odd to treat utilitarianism and Kantianism as rival “systems.” Utilitarianism might even be the only available philosophy that can really work like an algorithm, and only in some of its forms.

If you are a particularist, you believe that generalizations are not the appropriate units of analysis. What is right or wrong is the specific act, not the generalization. Most people aren’t true particularists, but many are somewhat leery of pure abstraction. We presume that general ethical statements can have some validity and value but that generalizations rarely settle particular cases.

I like Jonathan Dancy’s aesthetic analogy: the best object of judgment is a painting, not a feature (like a splotch of red paint) that recurs in many paintings. Aesthetic judgment is holistic, and the whole is the work of art. Likewise, ethical judgment is often about a whole ethical situation that has many features, not about each feature taken abstractly.

One irony is that applied ethics derives its authority from the academic discipline of philosophy, yet not very many current philosophy professors apply ethical “systems” to cases. I think that approach comes most naturally to technologists who expect reasoning to be algorithmic, whereas philosophers are often humanists who prefer close readings and thick-description.

The applied ethics that I admire most is much more attentive to the empirical and pragmatic details of specific cases, much more closely engaged with the dilemmas of practitioners, more focused on real situations instead of thought-experiments, and more open to normative insights from a range of sources (literature, history, folklore …). It aims to address problems, not to provoke skepticism. And it accepts responsibility for its own consequences.

My favorite applied ethicists work in the world (almost always with collaborators) and are willing to reflect on whether the outcomes are good or bad. Their final PowerPoint slide says: “This is what we’re building, what we hope to accomplish, and why. What do you think about it?”

An Association as a Belief Network and Social Network

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I will present a paper entitled “An Association as a Belief Network and Social Network” at next week’s Midwestern Political Science Association meeting (remotely). This is the paper.

Abstract:

A social network is composed of individuals who may have various relationships with one another. Each member of such a network may hold relevant beliefs and may connect each belief to other beliefs. A connection between two beliefs is a reason. Each member’s beliefs and reasons form a more-or-less connected network. As members of a group interact, they share some of their respective beliefs and reasons with peers and form a belief-network that represents their common view. However, either the social network or the belief network can be disconnected if the group is divided.

This study mapped both the social network and the belief-network of a Rotary Club in the US Midwest. The Club’s leadership found the results useful for diagnostic and planning purposes. This study also piloted a methodology that may be useful for social scientists who analyze organizations and associations of various kinds.

Two illustrative graphs …

Below is the social network of the organization. A link indicates that someone named another person as a significant influence. The size of each dot reflects the number of people who named that individual. The network is connected, not balkanized. However, there are definitely some insiders, who have lots of connections, and a periphery.

The belief-network is shown above this post. The nodes are beliefs held by members of the group. A link indicates that some members connect one belief to another as a reason, e.g., “I appreciate friendships in the club” and therefore, “I enjoy the meetings” (or vice-versa). Nodes with more connections are larger and placed nearer the center.

One takeaway is that members disagree about certain matters, such as the state of the local economy, but those contested beliefs do not serve as reasons for other beliefs, which prevents the group from fragmenting.

I would be interested in replicating this method with other organizations. I can share practical takeaways with a group while learning more from the additional case.

Cephalus

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I am so lucky: near the finish line
With no tragedies. My three sons are fine.
I may never have to open the door
To wrenching news or the grim stench of war.

I sleep all right these days, now that lust is less
A master, and guilt, that dogged hunter,
Lets me burrow in a secret shelter
Where I tell myself I deserve success.

When I heard Socrates had come down here,
I sent a boy to stop him. My knees are such
I cannot walk uphill to Athens much.
I hate to miss the clever talk, and I fear
The wise and famous will forget Cephalus.

It was like old times; we quoted lovely lines.
But I knew he'd start to press: “What do you mean,
Cephalus? Doesn't that come in different kinds?”
The more we examine hope, the more hope declines.
I left Socrates to my son, exited the scene,
And, wearing my silly wreath, resumed my place,
Performing prayers in the marketplace.

Cf. Plato, Republic 331d: “‘Very well,’ said Cephalus, ‘I will turn the whole argument over to you. For now is the time when I must take charge of the sacrifices.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Aren’t I, Polemarchus, the heir to everything you have?’ ‘Certainly,’ he laughed, and he went at once to the sacrifices.” See also: Pindar on hope; philosophy and self-help; shelter

The Vuslat Foundation and Generous Listening

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The Vuslat Foundation has opened a public website as generouslistening.org. At the Tisch College of Civic Life, we are one of their partners, as you can tell from the description of a conference that we co-organized and held at Tufts last year (a symposium on “Generous Listening in Organizations“); a blog post by my colleague James Fisher about Quaker dialogues in West Africa; and other references on their site.

The Foundation also does much work on their own or with other partners, including remarkable support-groups for women displaced by the earthquakes in Southeast Turkey in 2023.

I come to this partnership as someone who has studied political deliberation–for instance, as a co-editor (with John Gastil) of the Deliberative Democracy Handbook. SInce the late 1900s, public deliberation has been a movement of theorists and practitioners, but it is rooted in much older ideas about politics that have typically emphasized speech, communication, persuasion, and rhetoric–as both virtues and threats.

The Vuslat Foundation has helped me to shift my focus from one side of the exchange to the other–from speaking to listening. Of course, these acts always go together (even when they are metaphors for written speech, signs, or gestures). It is hardly a novel insight that communication requires at least two people. But I have benefitted from thinking more about the listening side.

First, there’s an ethical imperative. Listening well (“generously,” in the language that the Vuslat Foundation has developed) is an important virtue. Using one’s voice well is also virtuous, and sometimes even obligatory, but the need to be a good listener seems especially compelling.

Second, we can think about listening holistically. One aspect is listening to other people in deliberations, but we also listen to ourselves, to animals, waves, or the wind, to human soundscapes, to near-silence, perhaps to the divine, and to those who are long dead. I have found it useful to think of civic listening as just one kind of listening.

Third, I am taken by the “interactionist” theory of Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, which has helped me make sense of some of my own data–in forthcoming articles. To summarize their model crudely, imagine two or more people discussing what to do. When individuals speak, they tend to use motivated reasoning: inventing justifications for what they already want to believe, sometimes for bad reasons, such as self-interested bias. But when they listen to other people offer reasons, they are relatively good at assessing whether these points are valid, and they may change their minds. Mercier and Sperber offer an evolutionary explanation that suggests that highly social and verbal primates would develop the ability to make arguments to advance their own interests, but also the ability to assess others’ arguments in order to make good collective judgments.

Mercier and Sperber never suggest that listening always goes well. We can certainly listen selectively and exhibit bad motives when we select whom and what to listen to. But their theory suggests that we can improve individual skills and conditions for listening–perhaps more easily than we can improve speaking.

Finally, listening has spiritual (or at least psychotherapeutic) benefits that have been recognized and developed in many traditions. Although we can also gain spiritually from communicating well, the listening side is especially relevant to meditative practices of all kinds.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal

Category Archives: philosophy

What was Nietzsche doing?

applied ethics need not mean applying ethical systems

An Association as a Belief Network and Social Network

Cephalus

The Vuslat Foundation and Generous Listening