Category Archives: philosophy

on philosophy as a way of life

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(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. Continue reading →

why social scientists should pay attention to metaphysics

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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?

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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

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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.

latest thoughts on animal rights and welfare

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

  1. The creature’s suffering or distress versus its happiness, contentment, or satisfaction.
  2. The creature’s sense of meaning, purpose, and agency.
  3. The creature’s ability to live in its natural way or to be itself. And …
  4. 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.

See also my evolving thoughts on animal rights and welfare.