Tag: ethics (page 4 of 4)

February 21, 2015

Code Fetishists vs. Antinomians

Charles Taylor explains many (most?) internet debates — and a great many others from the past two hundred years. If you ever wonder why people on Twitter (serious people, not mere trolls) can get so extreme in their policing of deviations from approved behavior, see “The Perils of Moralism,” in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (emphases mine):

Modern liberal society tends toward a kind of “code fetishism,” or nomolatry. It tends to forget the background which makes sense of any code — the variety of goods which rules and norms are meant to realize — as well as the vertical dimension which arises above all these.

We can see this above in relation to contemporary Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy, as well as in the drive to codification in liberal society. But the sources go back deeper in our culture. I want to argue that it was a turn in Latin Christendom which sent us down this road. This was the drive to reform in its various stages and variants — not just the Protestant Reformation, but a series of moves on both sides of the confessional divide. The attempt was always to make people over as more perfect practicing Christians, through articulating codes and inculcating disciplines. Until the Christian life became more and more identified with these codes and disciplines.

In other words, this code-centrism came about as the by-product of an attempt to make over the lives of Christians, and their social order, so as to make them conform thoroughly to the demands of the Gospel. I am talking not of a particular, revolutionary moment, but of a long, ascending series of attempts to establish a Christian order, of which the Reformation is a key phase…. (351)

Code fetishism means that the entire spiritual dimension of human life is captured in a moral code. Kant proposes perhaps the most moving form of this (but perhaps the capture wasn’t complete in his case). His followers today, be they Rawls or Habermas or others again, carry on this reduction (although Habermas seems to have had recent second thoughts).

Modern culture is marked by a series of revolts against this moralism, in both its Christian and non-Christian forms. Think of the great late nineteenth-century reaction in England against evangelical “puritanism” that we associate with names as diverse as Arnold, Wilde, and later Bloomsbury; or think of Ibsen; or of Nietzsche and all those who follow him, including those rebelling against the various disciplines that have helped constitute this modern moralization, such as our contemporary, Michel Foucault.

But these reactions start earlier. The code-centered notion of order and its attendant disciplines begin to generate negative reactions from the eighteenth century on. These form, for instance, the central themes of the Romantic period. Many people found it hard to believe, even preposterous, that the achievement of this code-bound life should exhaust the significance of human existence. It’s almost as though each form of protest were adding its own verse to the famous Peggy Lee song: “Is that all there is?” (353)

February 23, 2014

I don’t buy this argument, in part because I agree with Furedi that something profound changes at birth: The woman’s bodily autonomy is no longer at stake. But I also think that the value of the unborn human increases throughout its development. Furedi rejects that view, and her rejection doesn’t stop at birth. As she explained in our debate last fall, “There is nothing magical about passing through the birth canal that transforms it from a fetus into a person.” The challenge posed to Furedi and other pro-choice absolutists by “after-birth abortion” is this: How do they answer the argument, advanced by Giubilini and Minerva, that any maternal interest, such as the burden of raising a gravely defective newborn, trumps the value of that freshly delivered nonperson? What value does the newborn have? At what point did it acquire that value? And why should the law step in to protect that value against the judgment of a woman and her doctor?

After-Birth Abortion: The pro-choice case for infanticide. It’s also worth noting that the arguments for infanticide cited here apply equally to anyone who is under the care of others: the gravely ill, the seriously injured, the feebly elderly. The logic of the authors’ position is quite straightforward: if you are so severely limited in your physical or mental abilities that caring for you imposes burdens upon me that I do not wish to take on, then I am free to declare that you are no longer a person and end your life.

February 20, 2014

rights

Rights are normative social relationships; sociality is built into the essence of rights. A right is a right with regard to someone. In the limiting case, that “someone” is oneself; one is other to oneself. Usually, the other is somebody else than oneself. Rights are toward the other, with regard to the other. Rights are normative bonds between oneself and the other….

I will argue that it is on account of her worth that the other comes into my presence bearing legitimate claims against me as to how I treat her. The rights of the other against me are actions and restraints from action that due respect for her worth requires of me. To fail to treat her as she has a right to my treating her is to demean her, to treat her as if she had less worth than she does….

The critics point to the abuses of rights-talk. I concede the abuses. But rather than concluding that we should abolish rights-talk so as to eliminate the abuses, I hold that we should heal rights-talk of the abuses. Something of enormous worth would be lost if we could no longer bring rights, and the violation of rights, to speech. The critics focus entirely on the abuses of rights-talk; they do not ask what would be lost if we threw it all out. What would be lost is our ability to bring to speech one of the two fundamental dimensions of the moral order: the recipient-dimension, the patient-dimension. To the moral status of each of us there are two dimensions, that of moral agent and that of moral patient or recipient. When we speak of duty, obligation, guilt, benevolence, virtue, rational agency, and the like, we focus on the agent-dimension; when we speak of rights and of being wronged, we focus on the recipient-dimension. To eliminate rights-talk would be to make impossible the coming to speech of the recipient-dimension of the moral order.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, from Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Like Ron Belgau, I was largely convinced by Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of “rights-talk” — until I read Wolterstorff’s book. Now I think that MacIntyre’s argument is largely, though not wholly, wrong.

January 20, 2014

sacrifice

‘Sacrifice’ is another word liable to misunderstanding. It is generally held to be noble and loving in proportion as its sacrificial nature is consciously felt by the person who is sacrificing himself. The direct contrary is the truth. To feel sacrifice consciously as self-sacrifice argues a failure in love. When a job is undertaken from necessity, or from a grim sense of disagreeable duty, the worker is self-consciously aware of the toils and pains he undergoes, and will say: ‘I have made such and such sacrifices for this.’ But when the job is a labour of love, the sacrifices will present themselves to the worker—strange as it may seem—in the guise of enjoyment. Moralists, looking on at this, will always judge that the former kind of sacrifice is more admirable than the latter, because the moralist, whatever he may pretend, has far more respect for pride than for love.

— Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

December 15, 2013

GLADWELL: So suppose we channel our inner Nate Silver and come up with a universal celebrity misbehavior metric. We grade each public incident on three dimensions, each measured on a scale of one to 10. First, the stature of the celebrity. Second, the degree of impairment at the time of the accident. And third, the severity of the transgression. Your grade is the sum of those three scores.

SIMMONS: Hold on, hold on — we need to name this thing. And as much as I want to force-feed O.J. into the acronym, I love your “universal celebrity misbehavior” metric because “UCM” is such a strong acronym. I could see Bill James re-releasing Popular Crime just to reassess every famous murder with UCM.

GLADWELL: Why has it taken so long for the Moneyball revolution to come to Hollywood? I don’t get it. Because the UCM finally makes it possible for us to make rational judgments about scandals. So, take Tiger Woods’s run-in with his wife’s 9-iron. As a celebrity, Tiger is a 10. His impairment, a sex addiction, maybe painkillers, and probably alcohol, is also a 10. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that cheating on your Swedish model wife with so many hookers that she may have believed it was in her best interest to smash the back window of your SUV with a golf club is, at the very least, a nine. That’s 29 out of 30. Future generations will now be able to look back on that night and understand that it was the Apollo moon landing of the modern tabloid era. In fact, as much as I like UCM, maybe we should refer to this score as someone’s “Woods Number” in honor of the contemporary champion.

To put that 29 in perspective, I think that in the normal course of affairs, it’s really, really hard for anyone to score above a 20, for the simple reason that as your celebrity score rises your ability and willingness to max out on the transgression and impairment scales fall. I have no doubt, for example, that, say, Lindsay Lohan or Axl Rose are routinely putting up sevens and eights on transgression and impairment. But they just don’t have the stature they used to.

Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell exchange e-mails – Grantland. I’ve often been critical of Malcolm Gladwell, but this is pure genius.

July 17, 2013

The engagement of understanding is, then, a continuous, self-moved, critical enterprise of theorising. Its principle is: Never ask the end. Of the paths it may follow, some (we may suppose) will soon exhaust their promise. It is an engagement of arrivals and departures. Temporary platforms of conditional understanding are always being reached, and the theorist may turn aside to explore them. But each is an arrival, an enlightenment, and a point of departure. The notion of an unconditional or definitive understanding may hover in the background, but it has no part in the adventure…

Here, theorizing has revealed itself to be an unconditional adventure in which every achievement of understanding is an invitation to investigate itself and where the reports a theorist makes to himself are interim triumphs of temerity over scruple. And for a theorist not to respond to this invitation cannot be on account of his never having received it. It does not reach him from afar and by special messenger; it is implicit in every engagement to understand and is delivered to him whenever he reflects. The irony of all theorizing is its propensity to generate, not an understanding, but a not-yet-understood.

— Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (1975); cited here as a possible, rare instance of an ‘absolute secularity’, incorruptible by revelation, only for a commenter to point out at once how similar it is to both some kinds of reading and some kinds of religious belief. (via unapologetic-book)

June 11, 2013

Rereading Krakauer’s Into Thin Air after finishing Hansen’s book, I was once again struck by the brutal selfishness and callous disregard for one’s fellow humans that characterizes contemporary mountain tourism. In 1996, Japanese climber Eisuke Shigekawa and his partner had walked past three dying men from another party on their way to the summit of Everest; they offered no aid on their way to claim glory, and none on the way down, despite the fact that the three men were alive and not yet past hope. Partly this is due, of course, to the harsh conditions up there, which make it hard to keep oneself alive, let alone help another in danger. (“Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality,” Shigekawa later said.) But then, Everest is not a battlefield, nor a suddenly occurring natural disaster area — and you have to wonder about individuals who have knowingly and freely put themselves in a situation where they’ll have no choice but to turn their back on those dying all around them. That these people risk their lives is a well-worn cliché; what’s less acknowledged is the degree to which they risk — and lose — their humanity for the sake of a thrill, or a little glory.

— Colin Dickey

May 6, 2013

The Code of the Streets, a term popularized by the hip-hop duo Gang Starr and the sociologist Elijah Anderson, is the code of men who have come to feel that they have nothing to lose. Much of the struggle with young black boys and teenagers today lies in getting them to see all that violence endangers. At 13, I could imagine not going to jail, not getting shot, being a responsible father. I could not envision much more. I could name careers and other paths, but I had no real sense that it was possible for me to get there, or how. Somehow I got there. And on arrival, I found myself in the company of others like me: an entire fraternity founded on the need to comprehend the folkways of a world we had never been sure we’d see.

Some people come up expecting to win. We came up hoping not to lose. Even in victory, the distance between expectation and results is dizzying for both. The old code remains a part of you, and with it comes a particular strain of impostor syndrome. You have learned another language, but your accent betrays you. And there are times when you wonder if the real you is not here among the professionals, but out there in the streets.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

May 5, 2013

Along with all of the other rising inequalities we’ve become so familiar with – in income, in wealth, in access to politicians – we confront now a fundamental inequality of accountability. We can have a just society whose guiding ethos is accountability and punishment, where both black kids dealing weed in Harlem and investment bankers peddling fraudulent securities on Wall Street are forced to pay for their crimes, or we can have a just society whose guiding ethos is forgiveness and second chances, one in which both Wall Street banks and foreclosed households are bailed out, in which both inside traders and street felons are allowed to rejoin polite society with the full privileges of citizenship intact. But we cannot have a just society that applies the principle of accountability to the powerless and the principle of forgiveness to the powerful. This is the America in which we currently reside.

— Chris Hayes, quoted by Ta-Nehisi Coates

April 29, 2013

What’s curious is that of all the ethical commitments that liberal-leaning consumers with discretionary income try to maintain today (dolphin-safe tuna! locally-sourced food! environmentally-safe detergents!) the circumstances of workers rarely if ever figure into the imagination, and yet, it’s not been so long since the treatment of workers did have a place at that somewhat trendy table. Now? You can see the banners at Whole Foods that mark off the company’s ethical commitments and not expect to see anything about its laborers or even about the labor conditions at the point of supply. That’s not just that the owner of the company is something of an infamous asshole about labor and regulation, it’s par for the course. Apple moved to deal with rumbles about labor conditions among its Chinese suppliers before they became a major issue, but it’s hard to imagine consumers making this a major part of their brand preferences or even foregoing certain products entirely. I don’t say that as an accusation against others: I can’t imagine myself not having a mobile device or desktop computer out of scruples about the workplace ethics of the producers.

— Tim Burke

November 10, 2012

A woman who has sex with multiple partners (maybe hooking up a lot if she’s at a more elite college), contracepting throughout and having at least one abortion, then cohabits, then marries in her early 30s if at all, might be a hedonist or a relativist. In my experience she’s much more likely to be trying to do everything right, finish her education and start climbing the economic ladder and make good rather than hasty choices in her men. Her mother usually supports or even pressures her in her decision to abort, and many of the decisions I’ve described are made not in the service of personal sexual liberation but as a means to preserve her relationships. A lot of the time it doesn’t work – the marriage or cohabitation she really hoped would be “the one” still breaks up – but she sees all the alternative choices as even riskier, and therefore irresponsible.

I don’t know that I have “solutions” really. You can’t solve somebody’s heart. I would suggest that explicitly naming the new rules and explaining how and why they fail may help. We need to offer a broader array of vocations, rather than capitulating to a culture which upholds marriage and motherhood as the only two paths to adulthood. (Motherhood, not fatherhood – a man can stay a boy as long as he wants, and often much, much longer than that.) Perhaps both Christians and social conservatives should focus more on beauty (here’s a suggestion directed to Christians on college campuses) and much, much less on mere statistical stability. And we need to stop acting like hedonism is our biggest problem. If only!

— Eve Tushnet

April 30, 2012

In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb is the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.

— W. H. Auden, “The Joker in the Pack” (in The Dyer’s Hand)

December 21, 2010

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before.You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

It is from this ‘unending conversation’ that the materials of your drama arise.

— Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)

November 7, 2010

against humanism

The language that has been developed over the centuries for talking about the mental and spiritual side of life is not some feeble, amateurish ‘folk-psychology’. It is a highly sophisticated toolbox adapted for just that difficult purpose. The vocabularies of the sciences are also well adapted for their own purposes, but this means they cannot be used anywhere else. Physical truths can only be answers to physical questions. Indeed, the great achievement of Galileo, Newton and their friends consisted in narrowing the scope of those sciences to concentrate them on topics where their methods were wholly suitable. People who are now led by that success to treat them as a panacea for other kinds of problem are being naive.

The moral of all this is, I think, that Hitchens is simply wrong. The poison does not come from religion itself but from political misuses of it. The kinds of idea that we class as religious actually range from the excellent to the awful, from the poisonous to the most nourishing. But there is a general tendency for new imaginative ways of understanding life to emerge from religious thinking – that is, from thoughts which go beyond current human horizons. This is bound to happen simply because they have quite new kinds of truth to convey. Thus the Greeks, when they came to grasp the idea that the earth as a whole bountifully supplied all their needs, worshipped it under the name of Gaia, mother of gods and men. And thus Pythagoras, when he discovered a new mathematical order pervading phenomena from the heavens to the laws of sound, naturally conceived that order as something greater than humanity; something therefore that should be deeply venerated.

In this way many of the moral insights we value highly today – for instance, the coherence of the cosmos and the value of the individual soul, as well as the conviction that All is Number – have originally been shaped in religious contexts. If we decide to drop those contexts as obsolete we lose half the meaning of the ideas themselves.

— Mary Midgley