Monthly Archives: July 2008

worrying about “love”

What is the meaning of a principle like “causing needless pain is bad” or “lying is wrong”? These principles are not always right–think about the pain of an athletic event or lying to the Gestapo. Various explanations have been proposed for the relationship between such principles and their exceptions. Maybe lying is wrong if certain conditions are met, and those conditions are common. Or maybe lying is really the union of two concepts–“mendacium” (mendacious untruths) and “falsiloquium” (blameless misleading), to use medieval concepts. Or maybe lying and pain-causing are always bad “pro tanto”–as far as that goes. They are always bad but their badness can be outweighed.

Mark Norris Lance and Maggie Little have another theory: “defeasible generalization.”* The following are defeasible generalizations taken from science: Fish eggs turn into fish. A struck match lights. These assertions are certainly not always true. In fact, very few fish eggs actually turn into fish, and I rarely get a match going on the first try. Nevertheless, a fish egg turns into a fish unless something intervenes. Even though the probability of its reaching the fish stage is low, to do so is its nature. The privileged cases are the ones in which the egg turns into a fish and the struck match catches fire. All the other outcomes, even if they are more common, are deviant. To understand that something will normally or naturally turn into a fish is to realize that it is a fish egg.

Lance and Little make a close analogy to moral issues: “Many key moral concepts–indeed, the workhorses of moral theory–are the subjects of defeasible moral generalizations. … Take the example of pain. We believe it is important to any adequate morality to recognize that defeasibly, pain is bad-making.” In other words, it is correct that causing pain is bad, even though there are exceptions that may turn out to be common. “To understand pain’s nature, then, is to understand not just that it is sometimes not-bad, but to understand that there is an explanatory asymmetry between cases in which it is bad and cases in which it is not: it is only because pain is paradigmatically bad-making that athletic challenges come to have the meaning they do, and hence provide a kind of rich backdrop against which instances of pain can emerge as not-bad-making, as not always and everywhere to-be-avoided.” Moral discernment is grasping the difference between paradigm cases and aberrant ones. We learn this skill, but it is not just a matter of applying rules. It may not be codifiable.

This seems plausible to me. But I do not think that every moral issue works this way. Take the absolutely crucial concept of love. We might say, as a defeasible generalization, that love is good. We know that in some cases love is bad. Adultery, obsessive love, and lust are common examples (although each of these bad categories admits counter-examples that happen to be good). But maybe it is true to say that love is good just in the same way that it is true to say that fish eggs turn into fish. This principle (arguably) reveals an understanding of the concept of love even though many cases are exceptional.

Here is my worry. I do believe, as a statistical generalization, that most cases of love are good. However, I also believe that we have a tendency to overlook the bad side of love, especially if we are the subject or object of it. We have biases in favor of love that presumably arise from our biological desires for sex and companionship and from the legacy of a million stories, poems, paintings, movies, and songs in which the protagonists fall in love and are admired for it. So the principle that love is good, if treated as a defeasible generalization, a default position, or a rebuttable presumption, is likely to mislead.

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positioning an academic argument

In free moments, I’m revising what I call my “Dante book,” which is actually an argument about the moral value of literature. The peer reviewer said that I should explain how my project fits in with recent academic debates about philosophy and literature. My readers will be familiar with at least some of these debates and will want to understand where I stand in relation to other authors.

I have usually resisted doing too much of that sort of “positioning.” I don’t like to assume that readers already know a given academic literature; I prefer to assume a broader or more public audience. I don’t like to read mainly or only works that are currently influential. (My Dante book is heavily annotated, with 460 footnotes, but many of my sources are obscure and old.) Sometimes positioning strikes me as an alternative to argument. A writer may say, “My stance is more communitarian than Rawls but more liberal than Sandel.” That makes him or her look reasonable, but it doesn’t add anything to our knowledge or understanding.

Yet, in this case, I have found the reviewer’s advice useful. There is value to engaging with a current discussion, and doing so explicitly. Also, I have had to do more systematic reading on the ethical uses of fiction. Inevitably, I have learned from this reading. Above all, I have realized that there is much more current interest in ethical interpretation than I knew. (See, for instance, Amanda Anderson.) That means that some of my claims in the earlier draft of the manuscript were false. I wrote it as a manifesto for a new kind of criticism, but exactly that kind of criticism is being widely practiced now. In other words, I was already engaging with a current debate, but I had mischaracterized it. If you are going to comment on the state of argument, you should at least do a thorough literature review first.

the ACORN scandal

I was amazed to read that a senior official at ACORN (“the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people”) embezzled nearly $1 million in 1999-2000. Instead of being fired, he was reassigned and asked to pay the money back on a generous installment plan: $30,000/year. No one was told what he had done, not even the board. This man happens to be the brother of the organization’s founder.

I think about the times I gave money to ACORN when canvassers in my neighborhood played on my guilt. I was always reluctant or ambivalent. I didn’t (and still don’t) have the full picture of how ACORN operates. I acknowledge my limited understanding and don’t see myself as an informed critic. But there were times when the organization seemed to make poor people look like sheer victims, instead of developing and celebrating their agency. ACORN seemed to divide the world into the victims, their protectors, and their enemies, which is not a way to learn from other people or build communities.

Now we read that millions of dollars of contributions were actually paying for embezzlement and a cover-up. Founder Wade Rethke “said the decision to keep the matter secret was not made to protect his brother but because word of the embezzlement would have put a ‘weapon’ into the hands of enemies of Acorn …. ‘We thought it best at the time to protect the organization, as well as to get the funds back into the organization, to deal with it in-house,’ said Maude Hurd, president of Acorn.”

This was obviously a mistake. Ethically, it meant putting the interests of the staff and the organization ahead of the donors and people served. Practically, it was foolish because the scandal had to come out, sooner or later. It reflected the division of the world into heroes and enemies that I mentioned above. It also presumed that the heroic ACORN was indispensable, so that any embarrassment to the organization had to be avoided at all costs. No organization is above reproach, none can be allowed to police itself, and none is indispensable.

Even today, the ACORN website makes no mention of the embezzlement. Recent news items highlighted on its home page include: “Landmark ACORN Foreclosure Bill Becomes Law in California” and “ACORN Helps Launch $40 Million Healthcare Campaign Nationwide.” An apology would help, although for me personally, it is too late.

[Update, July 11: ACORN now has a formal apology, which they sent to me.]

talkin’ ’bout generations

Ian Shapira has an article in the Washington Post about how to define today’s younger generations. Are they “Millennials” or “Gen Y”? What year is the cutoff for each generation? What generalizations can we make about today’s youngest group? Are they idealistic, pragmatic, anti-hierarchical?

People are born continuously, so generations are arbitrary constructs. The study of generations began in the 1920s (as far as I know), in response to perhaps the world’s single most traumatic event, WWI. Both men and women who were born between 1884 and 1902 were affected by the war in dramatic ways that permanently distinguished them from those born before 1884. Not only did millions of them die, but the social and political structures that had formed them collapsed, especially if they lived in the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman Empires. They shaved their faces, raised their hemlines, and in every other way they could imagine, differentiated themselves from their Victorian parents.

That was a generation gap. All the other gaps since then have been subtler, and some have been imaginary–mere marketing hype. It’s particularly dubious to define a whole generation on the basis of how its first members act when they are young adults. Conventionally, a generation extends over twenty years of births and then lasts throughout its members’ lives. So it really makes no sense to generalize about the Millennials today when the youngest are four years old and may live as late as 2104. Do we imagine that they will be notably idealistic in 2090 just because their older siblings voted at high rates in 2008?

On the other hand, it is true that we are more malleable when we are young than later on. Therefore, major political events and social conditions that we experience before age 25 affect us and turn us into permanent groups or cohorts. Therefore, the analysis of generations is not mere hype, although one has to be careful about it.