Category Archives: philosophy

why romantic relationships do not function like markets

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It would be discouraging if humans’ choice of mates and romantic partners operated just like a market. That would violate our idealistic notions of romance, and it would imply a deep source of inequality. Above the level of basic subsistence and safety, many people care about nothing more than their partners. And if the pairing process works like a market, then some people have much more market power than others. That would be a form of inequality that is very hard to address, since we must have the freedom to choose whom we love.

Indeed, much of the previous literature suggests that romantic pairing does work like a market. Everyone has a perceived value. You try to snag the person with the highest value, and what you offer in return is your own value. Thus more highly valued individuals can expect higher ranked partners. As Eastwick and Hunt summarize previous research:

The classic perspective on mate value suggests that people possess romantically desirable qualities to different degrees; that is, some people are more attractive, more intelligent, or more popular than others. …

The most consistent finding in the mate value literature is that people with higher self-reported mate value (i.e., higher self-esteem in the mating domain) report higher standards for the qualities that they desire in romantic partners … . This finding is consistent with both the social exchange and evolutionary predictions that people should pursue the best partner that they can realistically obtain …—that is, people with wonderful traits should expect that their partners will have wonderful traits.

It’s also true that college students converge in rating the same students as most romantically desirable–evidence that they each have a market value:

participants tended to agree on which of their opposite-sex classmates did and did not possess these desirable traits. They also achieved consensus regarding which of their classmates were popular with members of the opposite sex—another classic measure of mate value.

But Eastwick and Hunt offer news to warm the hearts of romantics and idealists. Once college students know a group better, their estimations of who would make the best partner diverge dramatically. After they have interacted, everyone is not drawn to the same target; they diverge substantially in their valuations of the pool:

Participants exhibited considerable uniqueness in their judgments of who was attractive, intelligent, and popular, and they strongly disagreed about who was likely to be a good relationship partner. When the Study 3 participants reported on opposite-sex individuals whom they had known for a considerable period, they reached very little consensus about these qualities and exhibited huge amounts of relationship variance.

That finding could mean at least three different things. First, people could be “settling,” once they can see who is a realistic partner for them:

Participants could be using their self-ratings as a guide to settle for the best partner they could realistically obtain. … For example, participants could rate a target as especially high in vitality/attractiveness to the extent that the participant’s self-assessment and the target’s self-assessment on vitality/attractiveness are similar.

But the study finds little empirical support for this first explanation–in fact, it is empirically refuted.

Second, people could have very diverse tastes. Some like brie; others prefer Velveeta. There is nevertheless a market for cheese, and each brand has a price. It just happens to be a very segmented market. Once you have tried both kinds of cheese, you will realize which fits your tastes.

If the same were true for relationships, it would mean that after we get to know people better, we go beyond superficiality and form more accurate perceptions of them; and once we have that data, we vary more in our assessments. It would be like seeing two pieces of cheese and rating them the same, but deciding after you chew them both that you much prefer one. This would be modestly good news because more people could be fully satisfied by their romantic choices on account of their varied tastes. But brie still costs more than Velveeta because more people (with more money) want to buy the former. In the same way, Molly might have a higher market value than Sally even if some actually prefer Sally. Inequality and disappointment would persist, just not as badly as would happen if everyone liked Sally better.

The third explanation is most idealistic–yet still consistent with the data. Perhaps what matters is not what the other person brings to the pair but what you build together. As Eastwick and Hunt put it, “Given that two people can uniquely inspire the expression of traits and the experience of positive affect in each other, much of the variance in mate value judgments may be a function of the dyad.” We imply that romantic relationships are functions of two inputs when we talk about “chemistry” or “compatibility.” The result would still be beyond the control of the parties if the function were automatic: if Sally plus Barry (or Molly) equals a good result. But it could rather be that Sally and Barry make the relationship, and they can do that either well or badly. They are not consumers of each other but co-producers of a new thing. People change their estimates of the romantic potential of others while they are getting to know one another because they are already starting to construct relationships, and it’s the relationship that matters most.

Although consensus emerges on desirable qualities in initial impression settings, this consensus is weaker than the tendency for participants to see one another as uniquely desirable or undesirable, and over time, relationship variance grows while consensus declines.

This all sounds very dry and clinical, but it’s conceptually interesting because it suggests that the market metaphor is not useful for understanding relationships. That’s actually the cheeriest scientific finding I have heard in a while–unless you prefer to know that mice love to run on wheels and will choose to do so even if they’re free.

(See also: Dickens and the right to be loved.)

Source: Eastwick, Paul W., and Lucy L. Hunt. “Relational Mate Value: Consensus and Uniqueness in Romantic Evaluations.” Journal of personality and social psychology 106.5 (2014): 728-51. ProQuest. Web. 21 May 2014.

are religions comprehensive doctrines?

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John Rawls saw a “plurality of reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines” as a “fact” about the world, or at least about the modern world. He explained: “a reasonable doctrine is an exercise of theoretical reason: it covers the major religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of human life in a more or less consistent and coherent manner. It organizes and characterizes recognized values to that they are compatible with each other and express an intelligible view of the world” (Political Liberalism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. xvii, 59).

Since my first book, I have been criticizing this assumption that the world is divided into separate, internally coherent worldviews. It’s certainly not Rawls’ assumption alone. I would define “modernism” as the premise that there is a plurality of incompatible comprehensive views. And I would assert that modernism is a mistake, driven by certain confusing metaphors: culture as a perspective, culture as a structure built on a foundation, culture as a table of values. I’d prefer a metaphor of overlapping horizons or a model of cultures as interconnected networks of ideas.

If anyone holds a “comprehensive doctrine” that is incompatible with other views, it would be a religious authority in one of the Abrahamic faiths. For instance, in 2011, during the turmoil of the Egyptian revolution, the most senior cleric who had been appointed under the old regime of Hosni Mubarak, the Grand Mufti of al-Azhar University, gave a sermon against political “extremists”:

They preferred to learn in their own beds at home from The Book with neither a methodology nor a master, so they stopped at the outer shell of Islam without realizing its goals and meanings. They stopped at the surface and they failed to realize the truth behind matters and the truth behind rules. They stopped at the partial and failed to see the whole. They favored the specific over the general. They favored their own interest over the interest of the ummah [nation or community].

Here a theologian and jurist asserts that his religion is fully coherent and centralized. This cleric, Ali Gomaa, goes on to address particular issues; for example, he opposes destroying the idols of other faiths, which he calls  an act of extremism. He argues that to make such judgments correctly, one must apprehend the core of the true faith—or else follow a master who possesses such knowledge.

This is a familiar rhetorical move within any faith tradition. For an outsider, it may seem obvious that the faith is a “comprehensive doctrine,” uniting all believers into the same structure of reasoning. But a learned member of the faith always knows that almost every element of it is contested within the tradition. Certainly, Gomaa would be aware that the Islamic Brotherhood and Salafi sheiks were preaching different messages in Egypt at the same time.

Gomaa did not actually specify how the core truths of Islam led to his particular judgments. He wanted his listeners to picture a chain of reasoning that flowed from the core of the faith to the particular cases, but he did not spell it out. That is because his purpose was to assert authority, not to offer reasons. One can offer reasons within a faith tradition, but that will be a matter of picking a path through a complex web. And many of the nodes and connections in that web will be shared with other faiths, so much so that the borders between faith traditions are often blurred.

The problem for liberalism is not that citizens hold strong and controversial metaphysical commitments. Citizens in a liberal regime may believe that Jesus is their personal savior or that science delivers the only valid truths. The problem is a moral network that is overly dependent on a few central ideas. And that is not intrinsic to a religion. To put it a different way: It is not a fact that the world is divided into comprehensive and incompatible doctrines. It is a choice to view it that way.

a different take on coherence in ethics

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There have traditionally been two families of answers to the question: How can a moral belief be justified? Foundationalists think that beliefs are justified if they follow from beliefs that are somehow “foundational.” As Geoffrey Sayre-McCord writes, “traditionally, foundational beliefs have been credited with all sorts of wonderful properties, with being, for instance, infallible, or indubitable, or incorrigible, or certain” (p. 154). Foundational beliefs are also frequently assumed to be big: very general in scope and application. So the belief that all humans are created equal may be considered a worthy candidate to be foundational. Skepticism about foundationalism usually takes the form of asking: How can you tell that such beliefs are true? What justifies them?

Sayre-McCord divides the turf a bit differently, so that a foundationalist is simply someone who holds that some moral beliefs have a special status. They are “privileged.” They may nevertheless be fallible and modest in scope. They may, for example, be concrete judgments that we draw from experience. But they are privileged because their justification is not the support that they receive from other moral reasons. A foundationalist thinks that a given moral belief is justified only if it is foundational or it follows from foundational beliefs.

Coherentists say, instead, that all moral beliefs are on par. There is no privileged class. Any moral belief is justified by the other beliefs that relate to it. The reasons we give for a belief take the form of connections to other beliefs. By the way, the fact that a moral worldview (such as utilitarianism, or Judaism) coheres is not a reason to hold each of its component beliefs. Rather, the reason for each belief just is the support it gets from other beliefs. The more such support exists, the more we say that the whole coheres (p. 170). But we shouldn’t believe something just because it belongs to some coherent system.

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introducing the Capabilities Approach

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(DeLand, Florida) In Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, Martha Nussbaum proposes that human beings have ten “Central Capabilities.” The first one is: “Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length …” The remaining nine all have a similar grammar: an abstract noun or noun phrase followed by a verb in the form “being able to …” The rest of the Capabilities are: bodily health; bodily integrity; senses, imagination, and thought; emotions; practical reason; affiliation; other species; play; and control over one’s environment.

I have criticized Nussbaum for making the state ultimately (and sometimes solely) responsible for the Capabilities. She is explicit about this on p. 64, and throughout the book, she writes sentences in which the government is the subject and people are the object. For instance, immediately before she offers the list of Capabilities on p. 33, she writes, “government has the job of making people able to pursue a dignified and minimally flourishing life.”

She does, of course, support human freedom: the government must enable people to pursue their own Capabilities as they wish. Yet I would assign the government a very different role than she does in her overall theory. I would say that we the people have the obligation to ensure one another’s Capabilities. We may decide to use the government as a tool for that; it has strengths and limitations. In any case, we make the government—not in some imaginary moment of signing a social contract, but every day, in how we vote, advocate, pay taxes, educate future leaders, and generate information. In similar ways, we also make churches, neighborhoods, and families. The government is us: a subgroup of us chosen or tolerated to influence the rest of the population by the means of laws and law-enforcement. I would put the state clearly in a subsidiary position and ask pointed questions about how we are supposed to get good governments in the first place. Those questions vanish in Nussbaum’s account.

That said, there is much to recommend in the Capabilities approach. For my colleagues concerned about youth development and civic education, it provides an impressive normative framework.

Why propose a list? Nussbaum does not imagine that she can dictate policies or that her moral assumptions are necessarily right. But her list starts a conversation that we must have if we are to assess policies and communities. If you disagree with her list, you should be able to respond with objections to the components, or add extra items, and give reasons for those changes. Not making a list just ducks the central moral questions.

Why many Capabilities instead of one ultimate good, such as happiness or freedom? Because there are many dimensions of human life and they cannot be measured on a single scale.

Why Capabilities instead of goods, rights, processes, or outcomes? The argument is complex and multifaceted, but in short, Capabilities recognize individual freedom and diversity while also acknowledging the human need for tangible support. If you have a Capability of imagination, you are not obliged to use it in any particular way–or at all. But you will not develop that Capability just by being left alone: you need education, access to public art and nature, leisure time, and other supports that cost money. And nothing (such as cash or pleasure) will substitute for your using your own imagination. Thus imagination is a Capability rather than a right, a good, or a choice. (A strong argument against the Capabilities Approach would take the form of a defense of one of these other keywords.)

Why one list for every nation and culture? I’d answer  just as I did the question “Why a list?” Like individuals, members of whole cultures may dispute the contents of Nussbaum’s list. If they do, they should speak on behalf of alternatives. The deliberation about what Capabilities humans should have is a global one, and there will be disagreements. But they are disagreements about the human good. It makes no sense to say, “Bodily integrity is a Capability for you, but not for us.” That means it is not a human Capability.

See also: Putting Philosophy Back in Developmental Psychology.

Dewey and the current toward democracy

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Nevertheless, the current has set steadily in one direction: toward democratic forms. That government exists to serve its community, and that this purpose cannot be achieved unless the community itself shares in selecting its governors and determining their policies, are a deposit of fact left, as far as we can see, permanently in the wake of doctrines and forms, however transitory the latter. They are not the whole of the democratic idea, but they express it in its political phase. Belief in this political aspect … marks a well-attested conclusion from historic facts.

— John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, chapter v

This passage connects at least three ideas: 1) a principle: government exists to serve its community; 2) a mechanism: public selection of office-holders; and 3) a factual generalization about history: it is moving toward democracy.

The usual way to connect these would be to say that people have discovered or created the moral principle of equal political power. To make this principle influential in the world, they have invented and advocated certain “doctrines and forms,” such as regular elections. As a result of their efforts, some communities are now governed by means of these mechanisms. We can use the democratic principle to the assess the actual governments of the world and will conclude that some regimes serve their communities, while others do not.

Dewey puts the elements together in a different way. He detects an underlying current, a tide in the affairs of humankind, that throws up both concrete procedures (such as regular elections) and ideals consistent with those procedures. The importance of the procedures and ideals is a fact that we can observe in the world around us. The deeper explanation is some kind of natural process of human development. I think it has a basically Hegelian form: We homo sapiens naturally associate. Because we have language, we can reflect on the forms that our association takes. Because we have huge potential, we strive to reform our associations so that they give us more scope for creativity and flourishing. Our striving makes the current flow steadily toward democratic forms.

Dewey does not want to separate ideals [“mystic faith”] from facts; and, above all, he does not want to attribute causal power to ideas.

[We] must protest against the assumption that the [democratic] idea itself has produced the the governmental practices which obtain in democratic states: General suffrage, elected representatives, majority rule, and so on. … The forms to which we are accustomed in democratic governments represent the cumulative effect of a multitude of events, unpremeditated as far as political effects were concerned and having unpredictable consequences.

Problems with this method:

1. The current is hardly steady. Indeed, when Dewey wrote these passages, most of the world was under colonial domination; and soon thereafter, most of the colonial powers fell under evil tyrannies. Why should we be confident that the current will generally or ultimately flow in a democratic direction?

2. Many ideals are facts, in the sense that they motivate and inspire human beings. That is true not only of democracy and freedom but also of nationalism, greed, and religious fanaticism. We could substitute nationalism for democracy in Dewey’s argument (above) and conclude: “That government exists to lift its own people over all the other peoples of the world, and that this purpose cannot be achieved unless a government builds a powerful and aggressive military, are a deposit of fact.  …” We must be able to use independent reason or judgment to conclude that democratic ideals are desirable, or else they are just some of the ideals that exist in the world.