Category Archives: philosophy

Israel/West Bank trip, day 4

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(Tel Aviv) Since I last blogged, we have met with Vice Prime Minister (and Lieutenant General) Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon,* Ethiopian Israeli politician Shlomo Molla (who’s very talented, by the way), human rights attorney Hanny Ben Israel (who painted a fairly horrifying picture of Israeli treatment of African refugees), an entrepreneur named Amir Peleg, at his startup’s office, and two vintners, at their vineyard.

The number of people we have interviewed is now approaching 20. One way in which they vary is their ability to articulate the perspective of opponents or enemies. Some Israelis like to talk about the Israeli and Palestinian “narratives,” and they preface their remarks with empathetic summaries of both sides’ stories. On the other hand, some people just speak for their side and may take pains to dismiss the other perspective. Dr. Abdallah Abdallah of the Palestinian Authority, for example, said that Israelis’ security concerns were “imaginary.” Settler leader Israel Harel said that Palestinians are just Jordanians.

Normally, I would argue that being able to articulate the other side’s views is both a moral and intellectual achievement. It broadens your mind and can constrain your own interests. Once you have explained the beliefs and hopes of your historical enemy with reasonable accuracy and justice, it becomes harder to dismiss their interests. Even if you don’t sincerely care about their “narrative,” expressing it constrains you in the way that la Rouchefoucauld meant when he said that “hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.”

But let me complicate that a bit. Being able to articulate your opponent’s deepest beliefs and values is also a source of power and influence. In bilateral discussions, it makes you more effective, because you know what to offer and what buttons you can push. In dealing with third parties (such as my colleagues and me, on this trip), it makes you far more persuasive. Compared to a person who dismisses his opponents completely, one who begins with a thoughtful and respectful version of their “narrative” comes across as much more reliable and decent. An example would be Colonel Danny Tirzah, the man who designed and built Israel’s security barrier with the West Bank. He expressed great sensitivity for Palestinian concerns and identity, and he ended with a devout wish that the wall may be torn down so that both peoples can live in peace. By the way, he is good-looking, funny, confident, and completely fluent in English. But what if the wall has been placed–as the Palestinians claim–in locations designed to maximize the amount of territory the Israelis can settle before they cede portions of the West Bank in negotiations? Then all Tirzah’s sensitivity and breadth of understanding is irrelevant, and we should be critics of the wall. In advocating for his side, he is far more effective than a Palestinian or an Israeli who comes across as a hard-liner lacking empathy. But that doesn’t mean that he is right. I see variation in sophistication on both sides, but my limited sample suggests that Israel’s official representatives and negotiators are generally more effective communicators than their Palestinian counterparts. Whether that reflects greater moral maturity or sheer PR superiority would be a matter for debate.

By the way, is that thing that Danny Tirzah built a wall, a fence, or a security barrier? Almost every descriptive word in this place is controversial, starting with what to call the place itself. Is the region to my east right now Erez Israel, Judea and Samaria, Zone C of the Palestinian National Authority, a part of Palestine, the Holy Land, the West Bank, or the Occupied Territories? Examples like this are legion. To name one more, are the people moving into Israeli territory from Eritrea migrants, refugees, or infiltrators?

These words combine facts and values in way that Bernard Williams (developing an idea from J. L. Austin) called “thick.” A classic example would be murder. In order for that word to apply, someone has to be killed and the killing must be unjustifiable and deliberate. So moral and empirical considerations combine. We often try to separate the two, but I have long been convinced that they interpenetrate–or, to put it another way, reality is best described by thick terms; propositions that include thick terms most closely approximate the truth. What is true is both accurate/valid and good/just.

To a large extent, the rhetorical contest in this region is about incompatible “thick” concepts. But there are also disagreements about basic facts. I am keeping a list of purely factual claims that are disputed among respectable groups, e.g., between centrist Israelis and the Palestinian Authority. Example: Was the wall/security fence the main or sole reason for the decline in suicide bombings? Answering that question would hardly resolve the larger issues, but I would like to know.

*Actually canceled. I composed this before I that last meeting occurred.

the tree and the rock

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One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

… and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind

                — Wallace Stevens

(Chicago) Imagine a seashore, where a high, wind-sculpted rock is admired for its beauty. Next to it, a pine tree clings to the same cliff, having grown there to a gnarled and twisted shape because of the salty winds. One day, you visit this familiar shoreline and find one of these objects gone, washed away by a storm. Which one’s loss would you regret more?

Perhaps you should miss the rock more, for it is irreplaceable and beautiful. Pine trees are common; new ones grow. But I would miss the tree more, moved by its struggle to survive.

It is not clear this is reasonable. Perhaps I adopt the following argument, which is an example of the “pathetic fallacy“:

  • I will things.
  • When I achieve what I wish, I feel happiness; and when I fail, I suffer.
  • It is right to broaden my concern from my own happiness to others’ happiness or suffering.
  • Therefore, I ought to care about the achievement of others’ wills.
  • Therefore, I ought to care for the tree’s survival and success.

Stevens suggests that it would be a lonely universe if we did not sympathize with nature. But the tree actually feels nothing, and the beauty that we attribute to it because of its struggle is no different (morally) from the beauty we assign to the passive rock.

The tree struggles, and we could call that “will” in the sense of organized striving. But it’s not clear that will without subjective awareness is a matter of concern. An amoeba demonstrates will by engulfing prey, but the amoeba feels nothing more than a drop of water feels as it slides down a window. The amoeba is more complex than the water-drop, but that is not the difference. An elaborate machine is more complex than the amoeba or the tree and yet it makes no claim on us morally.

It’s also not clear that will is a property of organisms alone. I am made up of cells and I belong to several larger entities, such as the Greater Boston area and the United States. My cells seem to want things: consider the blood cells that hunt down and kill bacteria. Greater Boston has operated rather like an organism for three centuries, drawing resources, expanding, absorbing wounds and recovering. I am more complicated than my own leukocytes, but Greater Boston is more complicated than I.

Maybe:

  • Anything that lives has will, and we are right to care morally about life. (But does that include the anthill as well as the ant, the forest as well as the tree, a people as well as a person?)

Or:

  • We should care only about subjective happiness and suffering, which arise when will is connected to inward experience. It is rational to care for the tree in the same way as the rock (both are unusual and attractive), but it is unreasonable to endow the tree with value because it lives.

Rethinking the Humanities

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My chapter entitled “An Ethical Turn for the Humanities” has just been published in Rethinking the Humanities: Paths and Challenges, edited by Ricardo Gil Soeiro and Sofia Tavares. This volume originated in a Lisbon conference at which David Damrosch (Harvard Comp. Lit), Richard Wolin (History, CUNY Graduate Center), Cândido de Oliveira Martins (Catholic University of Portugal), José Pedro Serra (Lisbon), and António Sousa Ribeiro (Coimbra) presented papers that are now chapters. Rounding out the book are reprints of important recent essays by Paul Ricoeur, George Steiner, and Marjorie Perloff. My own chapter begins:

The original and fundamental purpose of the humanities is moral argumentation. Humanists are scholarly contributors to public discourse about matters of value. If there is a “crisis in the humanities” today, it arises from a general reluctance or inability to contribute to public ethical debate. The reasons for this reticence include widespread moral relativism or skepticism, envy of abstract theory, alienation from the public sphere, and a refusal to engage morally with stories, even though ethical interpretation of narrative is the characteristic contribution of the humanities.

Two recent developments are heartening and point to a revival. First, although philosophy in the English-speaking world was preoccupied for a generation with highly abstract and abstruse methodological questions, prominent Anglophone philosophers have lately resumed interpreting narratives and paying close attention to their literary qualities. Recent examples include Richard Rorty on Nabokov and Proust, Bernard Williams on the classical tragedies; Colin McGinn on Shakespeare; and Martha Nussbaum on many texts. Rorty recommended a “general turn against theory and toward narrative.”

Second, an “ethical turn” in literary studies mirrors the literary turn in philosophy. It has never been hard to find implicit moral judgments in literary criticism; and certain important moral topics (such as racism) have been close to the surface of criticism for 30 years. But it is a recent trend for literary critics to embrace the full range of moral issues and to defend explicit moral argumentation as a mode of criticism. In her influential 2006 book, The Way We Argue Now, Amanda Anderson announces: “We must keep in mind that the question. How should I live? is the most basic one.” This bold premise associates her, she says, with the “general turn to ethics.”

The ethical turn in literature and the turn to narrative in ethics converge. These trends are desirable because valid moral reasoning depends upon the telling and interpretation of stories. In turn, stories are necessary because ethical reasoning is largely particularistic, not categorical. It is about particular people in particular situations, not about abstract concepts.

In this respect, ethical judgment is like aesthetic judgment. A large patch of red paint may contribute to the beauty of a painting by de Kooning, but it would utterly ruin a Van Eyck. Patches of red paint are not the right unit of aesthetic judgment; paintings are. Likewise, we can make valid moral judgments about overall situations described in narratives, but not about their qualities or aspects when taken out of context.

In the fifth century BC, the Greek sophists developed a pedagogy based on the telling and interpretation of rich, particularistic stories. In the hands of some Sophists, this style of discourse may have been a mere tool for persuading audiences of the speaker’s goals, reflecting doubt that there was any moral truth or any need to be morally responsible. But for others, notably Protagoras, a method of describing particular circumstances seemed the best way to ascertain the moral truth and to participate responsibly in the public deliberations of a republican city state.

Almost two thousand years later, in the little republics of Renaissance Italy, authors like Lorenzo Valla again defended the telling and interpretation of concrete stories as an alternative to scholastic theoretical philosophy. They again celebrated active engagement in public life (the vita activa) as an alternative to monastic contemplation. They revived the sophists’ pedagogy by emphasizing the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric—ancestors of philology and literary criticism) instead of the abstract, theoretical disciplines of philosophy and theology that had crowned the medieval educational system.

The first people to call themselves “humanists” were independent tutors who provided advanced undergraduates with instruction in grammar and rhetoric. They taught what they called the “studia humanitatis” on the side, while the university’s formal curriculum emphasized logic and theology. Parents paid for this “humanistic” instruction because they wanted their sons to learn eloquence to succeed at court or in the law. Humanist pedagogy consisted of reading and imitating ancient narrative authors, with attention to style and form, plot and character. Humanists like Thomas More, Erasmus, and Machiavelli also wrote books that we rightly classify as “philosophy.” But these texts were not treatises. They were literary works, self-conscious about character, context, voice, irony, and plot and meant for readers who understood such issues.

From the time of the Sophists and the Renaissance humanist to the present, defending the humanities as the best source of moral judgment has always required a critique of ambitious versions of moral theory (whether the theory of the time happens to come from Plato, from scholasticism, or from analytical philosophy). Moral theories are profoundly diverse and they yield a wide range of positions, from moral skepticism to Kantianism and utilitarianism. But all have one feature in common: abstraction. …

moral propositions are true or false; the problem is method

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(Washington, DC) Moral propositions are true or false. For example, “Genocide is evil” is a true statement. If you disagree with it, you’re wrong. So I believe, and so do most moral philosophers. This assumption violates the fact/value distinction that we teach kids as early as elementary school. We teach them that values are opinions, in contrast to facts. But I as little doubt that genocide is wrong as I doubt Newton’s laws of motion or the existence of the chair on which I sit right now. If the chair turned out to be an illusion, I wouldn’t be thoroughly crazy. If I started to favor genocide, I would be.

So what leads people to the theoretical view that moral propositions are mere opinions, neither true nor false? The problem is one of method.

We believe in natural facts because from our earliest days, nature is obdurate. Fire burns, and we form a solid belief that the fire has caused our pain. The same sensory perceptions and logical premises that we use to reach such simple conclusions also underlie scientific method, which extends our knowledge vastly, pays practical dividends, and sometimes generates counter-intuitive findings that turn out to be correct. We are almost all naturalists now, believing that science (broadly defined) yields truth, and that what is true is what science yields.

With morality, we also draw firm impressions about vivid cases. Even if you are skeptical about moral truth (in theory), you will feel with virtual certainty that it is wrong to kill someone in cold blood for one’s own amusement. You may have convinced yourself that “wrong” is just an opinion, or just an instinct inbred by natural selection, but you will oppose cold-blooded murder with as much certainty as you believe in cause-and-effect or the persistence of objects in nature.

But many other cases are more ambiguous. We know that our moral knowledge is unreliable, because we disagree with one another and because our assumptions have changed over time. For many centuries, virtually everyone (female as well as male) believed that men were superior to women in many respects. Now I and many others are sure that was wrong. But if I had been born 200 years ago, I would have been mistaken about gender. If I had been born a gentile German around 1900, I assume that I would have supported Hitler in 1939, because almost everyone did.

When we study nature, we also face ambiguity and commit errors. Like moral views, scientific theories change. It’s just that with morality, we lack an agreed-upon method for addressing uncertainty and correcting error.

That is not to say that we lack methods altogether. Philosophers often propose them. For example, John Rawls proposed developing the rules of a just society while imagining that one does not know one’s own circumstances. Putting oneself behind an imaginary “veil of ignorance,” as Rawls suggested, is a method.

But the reception of Rawls is characteristic of philosophy. Critics quickly said that too many moral assumptions were built into his method. You had to be a liberal individualist, they said, to endorse the method that led Rawls to his liberal conclusions. Moral methodology doesn’t seem separable from substantive moral views.

I acknowledge that problem, and I don’t think we are likely to find a moral method that wins consensus and  solves one controversy after another. But it doesn’t follow that morality is mere opinion. Alas, moral propositions are true or false and yet we have no agreed-upon way to know which is which in a range of ambiguous situations.

Edmund Burke would vote Democratic

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Edmund Burke stands for the proposition that the status quo is likely better than any ambitious reform. Even if current institutions are based on unjust or foolish general principles, they have gradually evolved as a result of many people’s deliberate work, so that they now embody some wisdom. People have accommodated themselves to the existing rules and structures, learned to live with them and plan around them, and have woven more complex wholes around the parts given by laws and theories. Meanwhile, proposed reforms are almost always flawed by limited information, ignorance of context, and downright arrogance. In politics, as in medicine, the chief principle should be: “First, do no harm.”

In any debate, the Burkean conservative position is worth serious consideration. I come down on that side pretty often. And given the alternatives, I almost always vote for the Burkean political party in the United States, which is the Democratic Party.

It is the Democrats, after all, whose main goal is to defend the public institutions built between 1900 and 1960: neighborhood public schools, state universities, regulated capital markets, federal health programs, science funding, affirmative action, and the like, against untested alternatives based in the abstract theories of neoliberalism. Importantly, Democrats defend existing institutions without heartily endorsing them. A typical Democratic position goes something like this: Neighborhood public schools are inequitable and sometimes oppressive, but they need our support because lots of teachers and families have invested in them, they are woven into communities, and the radical critiques of them are overblown.

What about health care reform? The actual reform of act of 2010 is classically Burkean in that it weaves together existing private and public institutions in an effort to prevent change (in the form of cost inflation) and fill a fraying gap in the existing system. To be sure, many grassroots Democrats wanted a more radical reform, a single-payer system. But that was an official plank of the Democratic Party platform starting in1948; it is unfinished business from a time when the party was still “progressive” in the root sense of pushing for progress.

What about gay rights and the redefinition of marriage? First of all, this is one of very few exceptions to the general Burkean inclination of the Democratic Party: a case where the Party does want something new. But the President himself holds an almost perfectly Burkean position on gay marriage: It will be OK when it comes, he doesn’t have a principled objection to it, but he doesn’t want to push it from Washington because society needs time to adjust to it, state by state. Local norms vary and deserve some deference.

The Burkean conservatism of the Democratic Party is not merely tactical, a way of staving off undesired change by playing defense. It has philosophical roots. On the center-left, after all, is where you encounter the strongest endorsements of indigenous cultures and traditions, of deference to community norms and assets. It’s also on the Democratic side where “sustainability” (i.e., preserving something that is) seems most attractive as a guiding principle, and where people are highly sensitive to fragility, unanticipated consequences, human arrogance. Conservation, preservation, and respect for tradition are in tension with the technocratic inclinations of the Party, but they represent a powerful current in center-left thought.

The most reflective and consistent recent American Burkean was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He opposed the War on Poverty in the 1960s because he thought it would destabilize communities and was based on arrogant abstractions dreamed up in academia. He then opposed the Reagan-era cuts in those programs on the same grounds. Another politician might have been blowing in the political winds, but Moynihan wrote rather extensively against both reforms on Burkean grounds. In the 1960s, he was marginal as a Democrat, excoriated by liberals and hired by Nixon. By the time he voted against Clinton’s welfare reform in 1996, he stood right at the heart of a now-Burkean party.

Aren’t the Republicans also conservative, in a Burkean sense? Maybe some are at the grassroots level, but the national party’s leaders seem eager to revolutionize America by adopting libertarian experiments. They often characterize their reforms as a return to the American past, but they mean the relatively distant past and its forgotten principles. The Paul Ryan budget would take us back to before the New Deal. Rick Santorum would move us back to before the sins of the 1960s. Burke never argued in favor of radical backward steps or original principles. It was the messy status quo, not the distant past, that attracted his respect.

I do not mean this post as a critique of the Democratic Party. I am often inclined to support the Burkean side in an argument. I do lament that our two parties are (respectively) Burkean conservative and right-radical. We would be better off if an ambitious, reformist left also existed to press for change. At least, we would be better off if people realized how the current political spectrum is arranged and voted accordingly. The choice is not really between left and right but between Burke/Hayek/Niebuhr conservatism and Milton Friedman/Antonin Scalia/William F. Buckley conservatism.