Category Archives: philosophy

character understood in network terms

In a random network, like (a) below, each node has an equal chance of being linked to any other, and the number of links per node will show a normal distribution. However, in most real networks (see “b”), a few nodes hog most of the links; the distribution is skewed. A rule of thumb–not a law of nature–is that 20% of the nodes draw 80% of the links in a naturally occurring network.

Two phenomena, among others, explain the tendency for links to cluster. First, some nodes are simply more important than others for reasons independent of the network’s structure. For instance, if an asteroid hit South Dakota, web pages devoted to asteroids would get more incoming links because the topic would be timely.

Second, the rich get richer. A node that already has a lot of links is easy to find and provides short pathways to other nodes, so there are reasons to link to it. In the case of websites, that phenomenon may be artificially exaggerated by Google, which uses the number of links to rank search results. But in a naturally occurring human network, it is smart to connect to people who are already well-connected. Regardless of their intrinsic merits, they draw more attention because they have more attention.

Now, consider one’s worldview as a set of ideas connected in various ways to each other. This network changes constantly. It tends to grow as you learn new things. You also forget or reject things that you once knew, but growth is the main tendency, at least for the first 25 years of life. Every time you are confronted with a new idea (from other people or direct observation), you will be inclined to connect it to existing ideas.

The two phenomena introduced earlier will encourage you to link the new idea to nodes that are already well-linked.

First, you will believe (rightly or wrongly) that some of your existing ideas are important, and you will link your new ideas to those. For instance, if you believe in God, that’s pretty important, and you will be inclined to ask of any new idea whether it connects to God. Perhaps it is evidence of His will or a sign of His glory.

Also, you will prefer ideas that you have already used to support other ideas. In network terms, you will look first to your high-traffic nodes as potential links to the new nodes that you are bringing into your map. They are more salient, and they allow you to connect the new idea to many old ideas.

This tendency to cluster has its dangers. It can be a cognitive bias, limitation, or “heuristic” in the bad sense of that word. It locks people into their current views. A fancy term for one relevant form of bias is asymmetric Bayesianism. Whenever a new idea or observation seems relevant to one of your favorite beliefs, you connect them and make the original belief even more central to your network. Whenever a new idea conflicts with an existing belief, you find reasons to shunt it off to the edge of the network. All your experiences reinforce your original idea.

But although clustering has dangers, I would defend it to a degree. For one thing, some ideas deserve more links than others. Whether a given moral belief deserves a lot of links is an important question. For example, it is true and bad that millions of children are hungry. But it is a different question whether that idea is linked to enough of our other beliefs. Their hunger should be relevant to many other questions, such as what I do with my own surplus income. To take a different example: the Holocaust was unthinkably bad. And it is relevant to the existence of the state of Israel. But I believe that the Holocaust is connected too often to other issues involving the contemporary Middle East, such as Israel’s relationship with Palestinians. It is not that each link is false or illegitimate, but the network is centered in the wrong place.

So your moral network should skew in favor of the right things. That is not question-begging: it rather poses an important question. Which beliefs should be central nodes?

Your moral network will also skew because of the rich-get-richer principle: ideas that you have already linked to many other ideas will attract new connections because of their prominence. I would like to challenge the premise that this is pure bias, a mere limitation.

If morality could be truly rational, then one of its hallmarks would be a lack of bias toward existing beliefs. All your ideas would also be mutually consistent. And there would be a reason for everything. You would not just believe P, you would always be able to give a reason for P.

I am afraid that I see morality differently from that. I think it is a tissue of beliefs and commitments that is relatively hard to construct and sustain. Each piece is easy to reject if we ask “Why?” But if we tear away at the tissue, we have nothing keeping us from just doing what we want. Morality is “faith-based,” whether the faith is in God or in the equality of human beings (a moral assumption not at all suggested by science).

Morality is also a means of building up a common worldview with other people. It is “socially constructed,” and constructing it allows us to live together, not merely in parallel. Again, if we ask “Why?” about each component of morality, we will just weaken the common tissue that we have spun together.

This does not mean that any moral beliefs will do, or that we needn’t be concerned about justification, consistency, logic, and other hallmarks of rationality. An inconsistency should be a source of concern and reflection. Automatically returning to a few well-traveled ideas is not satisfactory; we should strive to broaden our minds. On the other hand, we know that strongly clustered networks are robust. They work better and last longer than random-looking networks. Thus, even if two people endorse the same list of moral beliefs, I would wager that the one whose beliefs cluster will act better. I hope that my moral worldview does not center on false or bad nodes, but I do seek beliefs to which I can frequently turn. Those centers of my network map define my character or moral identity.

the new civic education article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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(Washington, DC) I am proud to announce that a new article on “Civic Education” is online on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is a peer-reviewed, free resource that I use regularly for a wide range of topics. Jack Crittenden originally wrote the article and did a very good job with it. At his request, I have thoroughly revised it, so that it now has two authors. Here are the philosophical questions that the article poses at the outset:

  • Who has the full rights and obligations of a citizen? This question is especially contested with regard to children, immigrant aliens, and individuals who have been convicted of felonies.
  • In what communities ought we see ourselves as citizens? The nation-state is not the only candidate; some people see themselves as citizens of local geographical communities, organizations, movements, loosely-defined groups, or even the world as a whole.
  • What responsibilities does a citizen of each kind of community have? Do all members of each community have the same responsibilities, or ought there be significant differences, for example, between elders and children, or between leaders and other members?
  • What is the relationship between a good regime and good citizenship? Aristotle held that there were several acceptable types of regimes, and each needed different kinds of citizens. That makes the question of good citizenship relative to the regime-type. But other theorists have argued for particular combinations of regime and citizen competence. For example, classical liberals endorsed regimes that would make relatively modest demands on citizens, both because they were skeptical that people could rise to higher demands and because they wanted to safeguard individual liberty against the state. Civic republicans have seen a certain kind of citizenship–highly active and deliberative–as constitutive of a good life, and therefore recommend a republican regime because it permits good citizenship.
  • Who may decide what constitutes good citizenship? If we consider, for example, students enrolled in public schools in the United States, should the decision about what values, habits, and capabilities they should learn belong to their parents, their teachers, the children themselves, the local community, the local or state government, or the nation-state? We may reach different conclusions when thinking about 5-year-olds and adult college students. As Sheldon Wolin warned: “…[T]he inherent danger…is that the identity given to the collectivity by those who exercise power will reflect the needs of power rather than the political possibilities of a complex collectivity” (1989, 13). For some regimes—fascist or communist, for example—this is not perceived as a danger at all but, instead, the very purpose of their forms of civic education. In democracies, the question is more complex because public institutions may have to teach people to be good democratic citizens, but they can decide to do so in ways that reinforce the power of the state and reduce freedom.
  • What means of civic education are ethically appropriate? It might, for example, be effective to punish students who fail to memorize patriotic statements, or to pay students for community service, but the ethics of those approaches would be controversial. An educator might engage students in open discussions of current events because of a commitment to treating them as autonomous agents, regardless of the consequences. As with other topics, the proper relationship between means and ends is contested.

Stanley Cavell: morality as one way of living well

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I have been dipping into the works of Stanley Cavell for 20 years, but my recent reading of Tony Laden’s Reasoning: A Social Picture and my re-reading of Cavell’s The Claim of Reason have given me, I think, an inkling of Cavell’s whole view. He is a dense and difficult author, and I found it rewarding to type the quotes embedded in this post because each word, emphasis, and parenthesis rewards consideration–and you miss a lot if you read too fast.

A standard view of morality might treat it as (ideally) a comprehensive guide to good judgment and good action. It should cover everything that is good or bad, from minor questions to the relations among governments. In fact, everything that we do should be subject to moral evaluation. Morality should be internally coherent, or correspond to some kind of moral truth, or both. If there is actually no moral truth, then morality is not what it purports to be and is really just a set of conventions, biological urges, or subjective opinions.

Cavell instead views morality– “mere morality”–as a particular way of engaging other people at a human scale:

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toward a theory of moral learning

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In a series of , I have been developing the idea that anyone’s moral thinking can be modeled as a network: the nodes are beliefs, and the links are various kinds of connections (implications, generalizations, perceived similarities).

This modeling method would work for a Kantian, a Buddhist, a Marxist, a Thomist–it is morally neutral, not a substantive position. However, I have been arguing that certain formal structures are better than others. By bringing your own network more into line with those standards, you can move from your starting point toward an improved moral position.

This is fundamentally a social process because the nodes in your network are shared with other people, and a good network is one that interacts well with theirs. Thus I am implying a theory of collaborative moral learning. It is not a psychological theory about how people do learn, but a moral theory about how we should learn. I am interested in getting this theory right and avoiding philosophical errors. But my goal is to develop an actual method for moral introspection. That would be a contribution to the long tradition of moral exercises that go back to the ancient Stoics and classical Indian thinkers.

Below are some notes about the learning theory. I think it avoids several significant pitfalls. It does not make learning from experience seem automatically beneficial, because people can learn very bad ideas. It does not imply that better educated people–those who have more formal learning–are more moral, which is clearly false. And it addresses the fact that many important moral issues are “socially constructed,” yet there are real differences between good and evil.

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do fixed beliefs prevent reasonable deliberation?

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In Reasoning: A Social Picture, Anthony Simon Laden (who’s visiting Tufts today) argues that there’s a “standard picture of reasoning” in which the goal is to reach conclusions. You can reason alone, but when people reason together, they assert propositions, back them up with reasons, and strive for assent. Success means reaching a conclusion as reliably and efficiently as possible.

Laden argues that this picture cannot make sense of a valuable and pervasive kind of reasoning that is quite different. Sometimes when we reason, it is not to reach a conclusion but to engage in an activity with someone else that strengthens the relationship, whether that is a civic bond, a friendship, or a romantic or familial tie. I reason with you to learn what you think, to share my views with you, to seek whatever common ground we can, and to see if we can live together rather than in parallel. A characteristic activity of this kind of reasoning is not asserting that P, but inviting a response: What do you think–can we agree that P? Reasoning is “responsive engagement with others as we attune ourselves to one another and the world around us.”

Just as there are good and bad arguments that P, so there are good and bad ways of reasoning together in Laden’s sense. But some of the norms are quite different. A particularly strong argument is one that ends the discussion. But a particularly skillful conversational invitation is one that prolongs the discussion in ways that satisfy both parties. Laden says that his view is anti-foundationalist, because one unhelpful kind of reasoning involves asserting beliefs as bedrock, self-evident, or transcendent. If someone asserts that Jesus is his personal savior, that all history is the history of the class struggle, or that science produces the only truths, that ends the conversation and so makes the individual less reasonable, on Laden’s view.

Here is where I prefer my own account of moral thought as a network of beliefs connected by various kinds of ties (not just logical entailments, but also empirical generalizations, rules-of-thumb, and family resemblances). I don’t think we can declare a person unreasonable because he holds strong commitments. None of the beliefs I listed above happen to persuade me, but I am equally fixed on other beliefs, such as my love for my own family. The fact that I am not really open to discussing that doesn’t render me unreasonable.

But to converse reasonably with others, it does help to have a moral network map with certain features:

1. You shouldn’t keep returning to a few nonnegotiable principles. It’s fine, for example, to hold religious beliefs as a matter of faith. But if you constantly and immediately cite those beliefs, it’s impossible to reason with you. To put the point in network terms, your map can include nodes that are fixed points, but they ought not carry all the traffic. It should be possible to route around them.

2. You should have more beliefs rather than fewer. It is easier to converse with someone who has many interests, commitments, and ideas, because these are points of contact. Such a person is like an organic molecule with lots of surfaces for other molecules to bond to. Yet,

3. Each belief should connect to others in ways that you can explain. That way, to engage me on my belief A provides an entree to discussing my beliefs B and C. If many of my beliefs and commitments are singletons (in network terms), the conversation quickly dies.

Network analysis helps us see what makes a good conversationalist, but it does not show that being a reasonable conversation-partner is morally valuable. Perhaps it is more important to be good and right. That is what people typically say when they have neatly organized and simple mental networks that revolve around a few nodes, whether God, science, liberty, nature, or something else. They say: “It’s all very well to reason civilly and responsively with other people, but what really matters is my belief P.”

Well, it could be true that P. For instance, it could be true that God has laid out all the commandments for how to live, and we’ll see that for certain in the next life. But in this life, I don’t know how we can know that P except by reasoning with other people. Conclusive arguments are scarce in the moral domain; mainly, they are refutations of particular views that turn out to be inconsistent. But although conclusive arguments are scarce,  we come to believe things collectively by discussing them. When the discussion is inclusive, fallibilist, and responsive to everyone’s contributions, the results are better. I am not quite sure whether reasonable conversations increase the odds that we reach the right conclusions, or rather that we create something desirable when we make our moral world by reasoning together. (In other words, I am not sure whether to characterize the activity as discovery or creation.) But the practical conclusion is the same either way. It is most important to be a reasonable interlocutor. That does not rule out holding fixed beliefs, but they must supply just some of the nodes in your moral network, and they cannot be overly central.