Category Archives: philosophy

Vaclav Havel

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I think my fondness for the late Vaclav Havel (1936-2011) can be explained partly in generational terms. He became world-famous when I was young–the Velvet Revolution occurred the year I graduated from college as a student of political philosophy–and Prague turned into the European destination for young Americans, supplanting Paris. Images of the president of Czechoslovakia walking to his office in the Prague Castle in jeans, leather jacket, and backpack were icons matched only by photographs of Nelson Mandela from the same years.

Havel in 1990, visiting the prison where he had been incarcerated, via Columbia Journalism Review

I was going to write some substantive comments about Havel’s political thought, but I find that I’ve already noted the main points here. In short, his genius was to understand that politics need not be about trying to reach some kind of outcome that matches your values or interests and that can be codified in laws and politics. (He called that a “technological” understanding of politics, taking the terminology from Heidegger.) The alternative is politics as open-ended dialogue and caring interaction with other people, moving not toward a known goal but rather embodying an authentic community.

The limit of Havel’s thought was his inability to bring that kind of “antipolitics” with him into power. The dissidents who opted out of Communist society constructed an authentic community–because they had no ability to make decisions binding on others. Once Havel was thrust, like some fairy-tale character, into the Castle made famous by Kafka, regular politics took over and the magic was gone. His country literally split in half against his wishes, and the “other Vaclav,” Vaclav Klaus, steered the rump Czech Republic in a neoliberal direction. But Havel never lost his personal compass nor his sense of irony, humor, and compassion.

If we could learn how to preserve the ethic of a dissident movement after it achieves power, we would find the key to the deepest afflictions of modernity. Meanwhile, we should salute Havel as one of the few who courageously and skilfully tried.

(By the way: Vaclav is pronounced VATZ-lav. It sounds better that way and it’s correct. Fittingly, it means Wenceslas: the Good King and the quasi-legendary father of the Czech people.)

teaching evolution, creationism, Intelligent Design

At yesterday’s Berkman Center forum on Civic Education in a Connected World, Jonathan Zittrain proposed that we should teach the controversy about evolution in science classes as a form of civic education–to teach kids to deal with disagreements.

That’s actually a proposal that I have made on the blog. It means introducing students to the perspectives held by their fellow American citizens: evolution, creationism, and Intelligent Design. It is a controversial suggestion from several angles. It implies teaching students that something is a controversy when it’s not controversial among academic scientists. It means subjecting all three theories to critical review, which could be detrimental to Intelligent Design. (I presume that creationism is somewhat immune because it can rest on faith and revelation.) Finally, it means introducing two theories whose basis is theological into public school classrooms, notwithstanding the First Amendment.

But I think the alternatives are worse. We can restrict all discussion in schools to evolution, implying that the state is committed to a scientific way of thinking about the world, and the state’s agent (the teacher) is unable to respond to arguments in favor of alternatives. Or we can legally require the schools to teach that evolution is correct and creationism and Intelligent Design are false, thus taking a side in a basic debate about faith. Among the other unfortunate consequences of that strategy would be alienate large numbers of people from the public schools.

Yet another alternative is to keep creationism and Intelligent Design out of science classes but introduce them in social studies/civics. Indeed, that is a trend.* I don’t think it solves any problems (because the distinction would be lost on most students) and it creates the problem that social studies teachers would have to deal with yet another hot button topic for which many are are not well prepared.

One colleague at the Berkman event said that to teach creationism as a controversial theory would be like teaching astrology as an option for students to consider. I’d offer a different analogy. If you start with the assumption that schools should teach science and deprecate all supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, then you should conclude that schools ought to teach atheism.

Hardly anyone cares about astrology, whereas large majorities are committed to theistic religions. Clearly, large majorities can be wrong, and students should learn the truth. But if people have moral standing as fellow members of our community, then the fact that many of them hold a given view is a reason to discuss it with some respect. To say that students should only study and discuss the truth in public schools is all very well–if you are certain you have the truth. Fundamentalists are prone to think in those terms, and we denounce them as uncivil.

One could develop a curriculum that was entirely scientific, meaning that everything to be discussed had or could have strong naturalistic evidence. In that kind of curriculum, we would not teach creationism or Intelligent Design (or theism). Nor would we teach that human beings have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–for what evidence do those rights rest on?

I am not a moral relativist or moral skeptic: the ethics of the Declaration of Independence are far superior to the ethics of the Fascist Party. But I am also not a naturalist who believes that everything true can be based on observation and experiment. Moral worldviews seem to me complex networks of commitments, emotions, traditions, and beliefs. Some of the worthy worldviews are theistic: a story about God plays an important role. The ones that are not theistic have their own faith commitments. We ought to teach ethics and we certainly ought to encourage the discussion of ethics in schools. But if that’s true, we cannot have a curriculum reduced to science.

In a subtle and thoughtful essay on the same topic, the University of Virginia biologist Douglas Taylor recalls an episode from one of his college classes. He had just presented very strong empirical evidence for evolution and remarked:

I found it difficult to understand how given such clear narrative evidence, anyone could doubt the existence of the evolutionary process. “Of course,” I reassured the students, “I am not insulting those among you who don’t believe in evolution,” But then I paused and said, “Wait, what am I saying, yes I am!”*

Taylor thinks scientists should boldly teach evolution as superior to the alternatives. That implies open discussion of the issue, but no neutrality on the teacher’s part. He rejects stereotypes of rational, intellectual academics versus the ignorant public, noting that universities act badly, and in any case, stereotypes would violate the scientific spirit. He tries to steer a course between two false ways of teaching about evolution and other important issues: “I have the answer” and “There is no answer.” The former is a misconception of science, which is about creativity, skepticism, and change. The latter emerges “from within the intellectual establishment,” which has supported various invidious forms of relativism and skepticism.

Taylor writes, “It is neither plausible nor desirable to make everything and everyone scientific, but an appreciation of reason and evidence as means to arrive at one’s convictions is part of the basic skill set for an enlightened culture.”  Right, but “skill sets” can be used for good or evil. Knowing the good is not itself a scientific achievement; and therefore not everything we teach can be science. That doesn’t imply that we should introduce creationism into high school biology classes, but it suggests that the issue is at least complicated. And therefore maybe we should let our kids wrestle with the complications.

*Hess, Diana, “Should Intelligent Design Be Taught in Social Studies Courses?” Social Education 70, no. 1 (January/February 2006).

**Douglas Taylor, “Science, Enlightenment, and Intellectual Tensions in Higher Education,” in Ellen Condliffe Lagemann and Harry Lewis, What is College For? The Public Purpose of Higher Education (Teacher’s College Press, 2012)

three truths and a question about happiness

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I am a cheerful guy, happy with my work and family life, able to enjoy mundane events and relish extraordinary experiences. But for me, as for virtually everyone, an undercurrent of sorrow and fear is never completely absent. The sorrow is for pain and loss; the fear is anticipation of more. The individuals who are suffering or who will inevitably suffer include the billions of strangers whose pain is superficially noted in the  newspaper; the hundreds of strangers whose tragedies are vividly described every day; one’s close friends and family (including the ones who happen to be healthy, safe, young, and happy today); and oneself. The Buddha was right that the First Noble Truth is suffering.

I respect, and perhaps envy, people who believe that suffering is limited or illusory because a reward follows death. I may envy, but I do not respect, people who simply don’t care, who live for themselves or in the moment and push suffering out of their minds. Even if not caring were possible, it seems dishonorable.

I can imagine a state that requires neither supernatural intervention nor moral oblivion. This state would be difficult to attain, and in fact I do not expect to see it. But it violates no laws of nature. I take some consolation merely in envisioning it.

In the state that I imagine, I would live a life partly devoted to improving or repairing the world. Here is why: Complex and intricate systems are more likely to survive and reproduce if they have an inner drive. That is true of trees, cities, and anthills: they strive to grow, which is why they are prevalent. But they don’t know that they are striving, hence they do not suffer. Sentience is a particular kind of will that is useful for promoting survival. We happen to have it and it explains why we have grown to number seven billion. Because every sentient system is vulnerable and ultimately dies, sentience introduces fear and suffering into the universe. That is a version of the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth.

At the same time—and on this point I think the Buddha might disagree—the existence of animals and other complex, fragile, sentient systems creates opportunities to reduce suffering and to promote at least a transient security and happiness. If one envisions, helps to create, enhances, or preserves a garden, a city, an institution, or a life, it does not become immortal, but one’s work reduces the suffering and enhances the flourishing of sentient beings, including oneself.

Note that “service” will not quite capture what it takes to improve the world. It is not about acting for others, but participating in the development and maintenance of complex systems that include oneself. Much evidence suggests that people who work in that way are happier: not liberated from the fundamental reality of suffering, but absorbed pleasurably in their activity while it lasts.

To devote oneself with perfect efficiency and relentless focus to public work would be excessive. If everyone did that, there would be no point to any of it: we would be taking in each other’s laundry. Or (to use another analogy) it would be like envisioning and building a great cathedral which no one ever visited for prayer or pleasure. So, in the state that I imagine, I would place work in balance with two other activities. One is intimacy, time with family and friends, whom I would treat with partiality and loyalty regardless of their needs. The other is pleasurable appreciation of the complex systems around me, especially people and animals, society, nature, and art.

Co-construction, intimacy, and appreciation are already components of my life, and of most other lives. But I don’t manage them with what could be called equanimity. Here is a little fable about how life could be lived better.

One day, I would go to my doctor’s office for a checkup. I would chose to do that because my life, although fragile and limited, has value, and it is my duty to preserve it if the means are reasonable. On the way to the doctor’s office, I would not be able to work or to spend time with the people I love, so I would appreciate the world. Instead of fruitlessly fretting about the tasks ahead, or even about more important causes and issues, I would be absorbed appreciatively in physical things. They could be evidently beautiful objects: the changing leaves glimpsed through a bus window. Or they could be objects whose beauty is easily overlooked: the impasto of scraps on the wet floor of the bus. One can always turn inside– to the reality of one’s own breath, the feel of one’s weight–or to language and imagination.

On this occasion, the doctor would have news for me: a brain tumor, giving me at most three months to live. As I left her office, I would have different thoughts from when I had entered. I would have to change priorities, giving more attention to planning an orderly succession and documenting my work than to launching new projects. I might be in a bit of a hurry after the appointment, because there would be a lot to do. Yet I wouldn’t feel fundamentally different. I knew my life was limited that morning; it is still limited now. It always promised suffering, but it also offered opportunities for absorption and construction. I would still have those opportunities.

On my way to the next activity–since once more I could neither accomplish work nor spend time with beloved people–I would again become thoroughly absorbed in the contemplation of physical objects, present or imagined. My immanent death would not be on my mind. I would heed the Buddha’s Third Noble Truth: suffering ceases with the abandonment of excessive attachment. Another way to put this point is that we are constantly being reborn, so the moments of biological birth and death are less important than we presume.

This fable illustrates a state that violates no laws of nature or of reason. In fact, perfectly rational people would never regret facts they cannot control. The obstacles to attaining equanimity are not external: rules, forces, or demands from outside. They are my own emotions. The Fourth (and final) Noble Truth is something like this: freedom of suffering is possible if one exercises the correct discipline, which is not merely a matter of managing emotions and thoughts but also of living right with other people. (It is what Owen Flanagan helpfully calls “equanimity-in-community.”) If that Truth is true, it offers me just as much consolation as I would derive from news of an afterlife. It represents a perfect solution: suffering would have no sting. Death would be like a wall bordering a field: visible, significant, but in no sense spoiling the space it surrounds.

This Fourth Truth could, however, be false if our physical constitutions simply preclude our attaining equanimity. But one thing is clear: we can envision that state. The question is whether dwelling with that thought and pursuing its actual attainment can take us on the right path.

must you be good to be happy?

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He who would live rightly should let his desires be as strong as possible and not chasten them, and should be able to minister to them when they are at their height by reason of his manliness and intelligence, and satisfy each appetite in turn with what it desires. … No, in good truth, Socrates—which you claim to be seeking—the fact is this: luxury and licentiousness and liberty, if they have the support of force, are virtue and happiness, and the rest of these embellishments—the unnatural covenants of mankind—are all mere stuff and nonsense.

— Callicles, in Plato’s Gorgias 492, trans. W.R. Lamb, via Project Perseus

Socrates responds that to be happy, you must be virtuous. That would be a good news, because then we would have self-interested reasons to be altruistic and just; everything would hang together nicely. At roughly the same time, far to the east, the Buddha was saying much the same thing.

But pure philosophical arguments probably don’t support their view. Unless one defines happiness as virtue in a way that stretches ordinary language, it is possible to be bad and happy. There are people like Callicles among us. They do not have selfish reasons to be good, because being bad works fine for them. For them, happiness is pleasure, the satisfaction of preferences, or the sheer wielding of will, and they are lucky enough to succeed.

But it is true–and important–that for most people, being good is the best path to being happy. Several different streams of empirical research flow in this direction, but I am thinking of the work of Corey Keyes. Keyes is challenging the assumption that our most serious mental-health problem is mental illness, and we can cure it. Actually, we only treat symptoms of mental illness, and not very successfully. More to the point, mental illness is not our only problem.

Keyes analyzes large national surveys that ask numerous questions about mental and emotional states. He treats each question as a “symptom” of underlying conditions that cannot be directly measured with single survey items. The standard way to find underlying conditions is factor analysis. If our major problem were mental disorders, then factor analysis would detect one underlying issue: mental illness, whose absence would be mental health. Everyone could be placed on a single continuum from mentally ill to free of illness.

But factor analysis actually finds two independent continua. One runs from mental illness to its absence. The other runs from “flourishing” to its opposite, “languishing.”

From the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand

“Flourishing,” in turn, turns out to encompass three major elements: 1) positive emotions; 2) positive psychological functioning (such as believing that your life has purpose, or having warm and trusting relations); and 3) positive social functioning (which includes positive beliefs about other people, confidence that one’s own daily activities are useful for others, and belonging to a community). “Languishing” is basically the absence of flourishing.

As someone trained in moral philosophy, I immediately want to ask whether the elements of “flourishing” are the true virtues, the elements of a good life. But for our purposes here, that is not the primary question. The question is whether you have self-interested reasons to want to flourish (as Keyes defines that state) .

Keyes has assembled powerful evidence that you should want to flourish even if you are only concerned about yourself. Flourishing predicts physical health later on, to a powerful degree. For example, not flourishing boosts the risk of cardiovascular disease to roughly the same degree as smoking does. Although languishing is different from mental illness, the two correlate. In fact, your odds of having a diagnosed mental illness later on are just as bad if you are languishing now as if you have a mental illness now. If you would like to be free of mental illness in a few years, it’s just as important to start doing purposeful good work for others as it is to treat your depression or anxiety.

Several very significant conclusions follow:

  1. For most people, virtue is a condition of happiness. There may be some modern-day Callicles who are happy and bad. Keyes’ research is statistical; statistics have variance. There are outliers. But by far the best bet is that you will be better off mentally and physically if you feel that you regularly help other people, see valuable potential in other people, hold positive attitudes toward diversity, and belong to a caring community.
  2. Languishing is a big problem. Only 17% of American adults are both flourishing and free of mental illness. Many people do not feel they are helping others or belong to caring communities, and they are tangibly worse off as a result.
  3. Languishing remains a prevalent problem for highly advantaged people, such as average White North American male adults. (In fact, African Americans are less likely to languish.) That reinforces the point I made recently that social justice is not sufficient. Even if we doubled our prosperity and distributed the wealth equitably, we might all languish.
  4. If we do want to make people happy, we must make them socially virtuous. Classical liberalism and all of its philosophical offshoots rightly argue that governments should not make people good. That would violate their freedom; it wouldn’t work; it would degenerate into tyranny; and it implies a contradiction, because virtue that is coerced does not have the inner significance of virtue freely chosen. I agree with all of that. But if governments cannot make people virtuous, perhaps culture and civil society can. Or perhaps governments can remove barriers and disincentives to virtue, such as public schools that teach children to compete instead of cooperate. In any case, merely ignoring the problem will leave us with only 17% of adults fully mentally healthy.

Sources: Corey L.M. Keyes, “Promoting and Protecting Mental health as Flourishing,” American Psychologist, vol. 62, no. 2 (2007), pp. 95-108; Keyes, “The Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing in Life,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, vol. 43, no. 2, (2002), pp. 207-222; conversations with Keyes.

the importance of the inner life to moral philosophy

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It can be seen that there a huge gap, at present unfillable as far as we are concerned, which needs to be filled by an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human ‘flourishing.’

— Elizabeth Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 1958

The dominant question in modern moral philosophy is “How should we get along?” I am increasingly interested in a different question: “What is a good (enough) life?”

I wrote, “How should we get along?” a little flippantly, but it is actually a very serious question that provokes huge follow-up questions, such as “What kind of government should we have?” “Who deserves what?” and “May I, under any circumstances, lie/break a promise/harm another?” These examples merely hint at a long agenda.

But the agenda isn’t long enough unless it also addresses the question of how we should live our own lives, including our inner lives of thought and emotion. One can see this by observing the limits of the main philosophical schools:

Utilitarianism teaches that we must maximize the happiness, welfare, or satisfaction of all people (including ourselves; but each of us is outnumbered about 7 billion-to-one by the rest of the species and therefore hardly counts). Anscombe said, “it is a bit much to swallow that that a man in pain and hunger and poor and friendless is ‘flourishing.'” True, and plenty of people are needlessly in such condition because of my sins of omission and commission. So I ought to do or give much more. But the links that connect my potential acts of welfare, other people’s material conditions, and other people’s flourishing are hardly certain or straightforward. Some people who know no physical pain and have plenty of money and friends are nevertheless miserable to the point of suicide; others are stupidly happy but not are living worthy lives. Material welfare may be a necessary condition of a good life, but it is not a sufficient condition. If the question is whether we are living well, then how we get along (our duties and rights vis-a-vis others) is only part of the story. We could make the distribution of rights and goods perfectly just and yet all fail miserably as human beings.

Kantianism teaches that we must develop our own rational autonomy and that of others. Everyone must live his or her own life, but we have a duty to enhance other people’s ability to do so. The emphasis now is more on freedom than on welfare, but I can’t just stand by while 3.5 billion people live on less than $2/day, because destitution and illiteracy interfere with living autonomous lives governed by choice and reflection. I mention the problem of global poverty for a second time not only because it is hugely important, but also because I want to explore the same problem in relation to both Kantianism and to utilitarianism. The practical conclusions of the two theories are not necessarily different even though the premises are. In any event, the limits of the two theories are similar. It’s all very well to say that I must honor and defend other people’s rights to live autonomously and support them in doing so. But what is the point of an autonomous life–for them or for me? Or (if we take autonomy to be self-evidently good), then what makes a life autonomous? Unless we can say something about the content of an autonomous life–what the autonomous person thinks, feels, and does–the theory is radically incomplete.

Virtue ethics, which Anscombe helped to revive in the essay quoted above, might offer a much richer account of the good life. A good life could be one in which certain desirable traits are habitual, becoming virtues. However, despite Anscombe’s hopes, my sense is that actual virtue ethics is mostly concerned with “How should we get along?” The virtues of greatest interest involve our relations with other people and are understood in terms of effects on them. Besides, even though virtue ethics may have value for illuminating the good life, it doesn’t seem obvious that a good life just is a virtuous one.

“Perfectionism” is a word for any ethical theory that is primarily concerned with what make a life good. It seems to me a somewhat unfortunate title, evoking competitive striving, super-human standards, “achievement of human excellence in art, science and culture” (Rawls), or even disdain for other people. Perhaps a good inner life is primarily oriented to promoting the welfare and/or autonomy or others. Perhaps a good inner life requires modesty: acceptance or even embrace of limits. Conceivably, not being a “perfectionist” (in the ordinary sense of that word) is a necessary condition of being a fully good person. Leaving aside the unfortunate terminology, I think we need to ask “How should a person live?” and “What duties to we have to ourselves?” if we want to know how people should get along.