Digressions&Impressions

A note on Le Guin and Fanon, and Carl Schmitt

"You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous division that doesn't exist. What I don't understand is how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is. I don't mean economically!"

"In the war," he said, and then there was a very long pause; though Solly had a lot more to say, she waited, curious. "I was on Yeowe," he said, "you know, in the civil war."

That's where you got all those scars and dents, she thought; for however scrupulously she averted her eyes, it was impossible not to be familiar with his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in aiji he had to favor his left arm, which had a considerable chunk out of it just above the bicep.

“The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know, some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So we Army men there were all owners. We couldn’t send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all veots and volunteers. Owners fighting assets. I was fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later on I learned I was fighting my superiors. They defeated us.”

“But that—” Solly said, and stopped; she did not know what to say.

“They defeated us from beginning to end,” he said. “Partly because my government didn’t understand that they could. That they fought better and harder and more intelligently and more bravely than we did.”

“Because they were fighting for their freedom!”

“Maybe so,” he said in his polite way.

"So ..."

"I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."--Ursula K Le Guin (1994) "Forgiveness Day" in The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin, p. 287.

Because I am about to teach The Dispossessed (recall) again, I am trying to read all the books in the so-called Hainish cycle. "Forgiveness Day" is part of a series of interlocking stories (also collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness) about two planets, Werel and Yeowe. As the quoted passage suggests, Werel is a slave-owning society that treated Yeowe as a colony. In fact, Werel is an extremely patriarchical society, too, which treats its women in the way Athens treats theirs. 

The nameless 'he' is Rega Teyeo, a scion of a rural soldiering elite; conservative and stoic in his ways. He discovers that after the lost war on Yeowe his own people, who are modernizing and shifting toward commerce, have little use for him. So, he ends up a bodyguard to Solly, the alien (female) ambassador to his planet. In many ways it's a humiliating end to his public service. 

The quoted exchange takes place in the turning point in the relationship between Rega and Solly, which itself occurs when they think they are in mortal danger. I am not a big fan of "Forgiveness Day" because the writing is relatively clunky and the characters are relatively stereotypical. Because it's Le Guin, there is still plenty of food for thought about the nature of patriarchy and the interlocking forms of oppression and resistance it generates.

The quoted passage illustrates my complaint about the writing in the novella; that Teyeo respects the people he fought is already abundantly clear before Le Guin makes it explicit ("I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought."). 

Having said that, the passage did remind me (no surprise we are in the ambit of Hegel's master-slave dialectic) of a kind of symmetrical point in the famous first chapter of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth that in the Manichean world colonialism, "At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence." (p. 51)

Le Guin invites us into thinking that when you have been defeated on the battle-field it is difficult to deny the fundamental equality of your victor. She published "Forgiveness Day" when the Vietnam war was living memory. As Le Guin's novella shows, that individual experience on the battle-field need not transform wider social attitudes toward those thought inferior if that society can insulate itself, to some respect, from the military defeat. As a cursory glance at history shows, for every Rega Teyeo whose attitudes are transformed, there may be a lance corporal who prefers a dagger-stab legend. And in her story Le Guin, who is not naïve about such matters, suggests that individual character matters a lot to when a potentially existential experience becomes transformative.

Earlier in the story, after Rega has requested a discharge from his duty to protect Solly, his request is declined by his (and her) employer as follows:

"Love of god and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. I don't like the situation. There's nobody here I can replace either of you with. Will you hang on a while longer?"

What's striking about the response is that it is couched in terms familiar from Schmitt (with its friend-enemy distinction) [recall here and here mediated via Popper]. This is interesting because the employer I have just quoted represents in Le Guin's story, and in the wider Hainish cycle, the Kantian federative ideal of the aspiration toward perpetual peace founded in human equality. And what Le Guin recognizes is that one can accept that in some circumstances the friend-enemy distinction is empirically adequate of people's ('childish') behavior even though one is oneself committed to a different ideal that is supposed to abolish or overcome it.

Now, in light of "Forgiveness Day" it is tempting to suggest that the friend-enemy distinction itself rests, if not conceptually then at least on the battle-field, in a kind of symmetry between the two foes. And this symmetry is itself ground in a kind of equality or mutual recognition. And so, one may be tempted to see in this observation a refutation of Schmitt.

As an aside, this is why 'wars' on cancer, drugs, and on poverty are such strange ways of speaking. (This is extended to the "courageous battle" one wages against a fatal disease.) They do not have the latent possibility of such mutual recognition. Norman MacDonald (who died of cancer) makes the point in a sketch here. His punchline is that, if you die, the cancer dies at exactly the same time in your body. “That, to me, is not a loss. That’s a draw.”

Be that as it may, of course, Schmitt anticipates the point and suggests that the political distinction is orthogonal to any moral interpretation of such mutual symmetry.  It is entirely compatible with his view that one can find one's enemies moral, even beautiful. (I doubt he would grant that they are superior, but it seems logically consistent.)

Now, it is important to Schmitt's analysis that these judgments involve collectivities not individuals (as it is in Le Guin and Fanon). And so there is an important sense that Schmitt can accommodate the point about symmetry or the transformative experience of the battle-field, as long as (and I find this ironic) it is understood in, and limited to, individual terms. 

And, in fact, one of the psychological, perhaps, social conditions for Rega's judgment, or maybe it's an effect of it, is his disenchantment with his own society. And while this turns out to be a pre-condition for his political understanding (he starts to see through slogans) it also leads him to withdraw from it emotionally, politically, and eventually physically. Part of the closing line of the story with him going into a kind of exile is (also) explicit about this: "he had lost his world." And so, while one can read the Hainish cycle as resting on a kind of faith that Schmittianism can be overcome, Le Guin recognizes that there are circumstances in which its logic is impeccable. 

 

 

 

On Cancel Culture and the Implosion of The Civic Religion of Freedom of Speech

Debates about free speech on American campuses today suggest that the rival concepts of isegoria and parrhesia are alive and well. When student protesters claim that they are silencing certain voices—via no-platforming, social pressure, or outright censorship—in the name of free speech itself, it may be tempting to dismiss them as insincere, or at best confused. As I witnessed at an event at Kenyon College in September, when confronted with such arguments the response from gray-bearded free-speech fundamentalists like myself is to continue to preach to the converted about the First Amendment, but with an undercurrent of solidaristic despair about “kids these days” and their failure to understand the fundamentals of liberal democracy.

No wonder the “kids” are unpersuaded. While trigger warnings, safe spaces, and no-platforming grab headlines, poll after poll suggests that a more subtle, shift in mores is afoot. To a generation convinced that hateful speech is itself a form of violence or “silencing,” pleading the First Amendment is to miss the point. Most of these students do not see themselves as standing against free speech at all. What they care about is the equal right to speech, and equal access to a public forum in which the historically marginalized and excluded can be heard and count equally with the privileged. This is a claim to isegoria, and once one recognizes it as such, much else becomes clear—including the contrasting appeal to parrhesia by their opponents, who sometimes seem determined to reduce “free speech” to a license to offend.--Teresa Bejan "The Two Clashing Meanings of 'Free Speech" (2017) The Atlantic,

The present critics and defenders of cancel culture are the children of a relatively recent civic religion that valorized an expansive conception of freedom of speech under the first amendment Stateside. A century ago (e.g., Timlan Act of 1907), the US banned all monetary campaign contributions. About half a century ago, campaign contributions were normalized, and in a string of legislation and judicial rulings, corporations gained the right of pretty much unlimited political spending under the first amendment. Until about thirty years ago, using Texas vs Johnson (1989) as baseline, flag burning (or desecrating) was illegal in nearly all US states. Until about half a century ago, using Miller vs California (1973) as a landmark, much pornography was de facto illegal. 

One of the gravest political right under a regime devoted to liberty, to speak against war, was denied by the Espionage Act of 1917, and was upheld by the Supreme Court after the war had finished. (The ruling -- applying a "clear and present danger" doctrine to an argument against the use of force! -- was penned by Oliver Wendell Holmes.) Thankfully it was repealed. For every era in which the pentagon papers can be published there are many more where each and every war brings a new curtailment of speech.

Eighty years ago Bertrand Russell never got to teach at CUNY; he was prevented from doing so by a court, in part, because he was taken to hold immoral views regarding sexuality. This is a good reminder that the relatively robust, but at times quite fragile, defense of academic freedom in the US itself is a relatively recent phenomenon dating back to that era, in part a consequence of changing views promoted by Dewey as a response to this case. 

Undoubtedly the expansive understanding of the first amendment was a consequence of the experience of the McCarthy era, increasing religious diversity, the needs of modern capitalism with proliferating technologies and platforms, and a better educated and increasingly heterogeneous population. Feel free to offer other intellectual and sociological explanations.

I believe the expansive understanding of the first amendment only developed in the 1960s. Since it became a kind of civic religion taught in schools and presumably sincerely believed and promoted by its own high priests (lawyers, judges, professors, etc.), including crucially businesses. It provides a social glue in a country that has a dynamic form of capitalism and many latent political conflicts. This civic religion also become, itself, a steady source of profit and influence.

As a depressing aside, arguably the Supreme Court started to develop a more expansive conception of freedom of speech in 1969 not to protect civil rights protestors, or Vietnam protestors, but when it allowed that the Klan's advocacy of violence was protected speech (under the first amendment) because the speech did not call for “imminent lawless action” (Brandenburg v. Ohio.; see also Virginia v. Black (2003)) Perhaps, it is smart politics to protect everybody's rights by protecting the racists first.

But despite this expansive understanding of freedom of speech, there is negligible freedom of speech in the workplace to this day. And, in fact, even during the golden age of expansive freedom of speech, there was considerable restraint and self-censorship not to mention regulated speech in the mass media. One reason to watch Public-access television channels on cable back in the day (1980s), before the rise of the internet, was that it was one of the few places one could encounter genuine viewpoint diversity in the mass media (in addition to assorted goofballs, etc.). Bernie Sanders' recent political campaign renewed interest in that era.

Unfortunately, the cumulative effect of the golden age of freedom of speech is not only a marvelous diversity of speech, but also the empowerment of corporate, rent-seeking interests; and with the growth of the internet menacing racists/supremacists and would-be-fascists have found ways to circumvent all the self-censorship and gate-keeping of the mass media. After the implosion of the local newspaper/radio/tv monopolies, the racists and fascists, and the anger they provoke (cf. the rise of Breitbart, the dark web) are inevitably copied by the rest of corporate media. Feeding on anger is the prevailing business model.

With the rise of President Trump, it is no surprise that the myths that support the expansive free speech civic religion receive new scrutiny and in some cases have become perceived to be rank superstition. It is not unusual to hear advocates of freedom of speech claim that only exposure and argument can defeat evil ideas--no empirical evidence is ever offered for that. There is a persistent tendency among free speech defenders to minimize or belittle the whole range of harms that come from spreading of incitement, political propaganda, as well as microaggression, political gaslighting, testimonial injustice, etc. 

It is no surprise at all that people of good will come to think that (a) if they are not protected by freedom of speech in the workplace, and (b) if those with concentrated economic power and those with malicious intent are protected to spread their lies and hatred, then freedom of speech merely stacks the decks against all kinds of other important political ends. It is no surprise at all that the internet is being used as a means to mobilize and generate countervailing powers that restrict the range of speech (from many political ends).

Contemporary  freedom of speech fundamentalists may well lament most of the restrictions I have mentioned, and perhaps even the outcomes that have strengthened corporations and would-be-fascists. But that they personally welcome caustic counter-speech from all quarters makes them folk of high integrity. It does not address the crumbling of the ramshackle edifice that is today's liberalism.

That we're in the realm of a decaying civic religion is clear from the fact that those among the high priests of our intellectual elite that defend it can't recognize the emptiness of their own incantations and their refusal to engage with their critics with minimal good faith: they claim sincerely and without evidence that any restriction on debate is supposed to end up in harming the most vulnerable; yet no restrictions may also (and does) harm the most vulnerable.* One can hold in equally good faith, even find empirical support for, the idea that some restrictions on speech may well be the condition of possibility of reasoned debate. As Teresa Bejan, who has anticipated much of my claims here, taught me: one way to understand cancel culture is, in fact, as an imperfect mechanism for equal speech.

One may well misinterpret me as defending cancel culture (this happened to me to my surprise after a recent post) or that I somehow willfully miss all the bad effects of cancel culture (these are very real). In fact, our civic and educational institutions have an obligation to defend scholars' and artists' ability to think and speak freely and to experiment in all kinds of forms of creative lives. 

Let me close: defenders of the decaying civic religion often accuse its critics of illiberalism. And undoubtedly there are illiberal critics of freedom of speech who cheer on cancel culture. But it is not illiberal to learn from experience and to worry about the political and civil harms that follow from experiments in freedom. We have had a half-century trial in relatively expansive freedom of speech. I lament the demise of that culture's assumptions. But it is not illiberal to take stock of the effects of policy, and to wish to correct for known harms.

The great political insight of liberalism as a creed is that our destiny is uncertain and surprising. And that as our great project unfolds we emphasize different means and different ends to face the political problems of the moment. What's urgently needed is that the eloquent and creative defenders of the old civic religion set their minds to the task of helping the young devise new norms and institutions that can promote human emancipation, equality, justice, and, yes, a bit wiser freedom for the next half century. 

 

 

On Philosophy Being Political

The elimination of conscious fraud is seldom mentioned in formal discussions of the reasons for repetition in science. The quasi-mythological view that scientists are uniformly of higher moral standards than ordinary mortals is maintained, and subconscious bias is usually depended upon to explain the importance of independent repetition. To repeat, scientists are not much better than other men, and there certainly are at least a few among them who would fake experiments if there was something to be gained therefrom. The induced researcher has something to gain if he can get away with such a fraud. His income depends largely on the reputation he can develop, and this, in turn, depends on his “discoveries.” It is obviously easier to produce an important and exciting article if one simply invents the facts reported than if one is confined to reality. This being so, the prevention of fraud depends on a detection apparatus. Part of the detection apparatus involves repetition (Tullock The organization of inquiry [1966] 2005: 124).

Tullock considers economics, as we have seen, to be a discipline in which the possibility of concealment is greater than in what he calls science. Now, we consider what differential auditing possibilities do to Polanyi’s argument that scientific opinion is uniform. Long before Polanyi the uniformity of opinion had been viewed as a necessary condition for scientific status....

[In his 1962 “Republic of Science”] Polanyi asked what scientists believe and proposed that everyone believes the same thing. How could this be? With the division of labor, scientists in one specialization have no competence in another so why the unanimity? Polanyi appealed to an overlapping neighborhood of competence by which all problems in science is connected....All Polanyi needs is transparency.
Characterizing Polanyi’s argument as a special case of Longfield’s argument shows that we can use one principle to analyze the intra-community connections. This will be enormously helpful because the machinery which has been set in motion for one community can be applied to the other. Thus, [Adam] Smith himself discussed how monopolies form and create inequality within the labor market. A group keeping others out can enrich themselves. If we can move the argument across communities, what does monopolization look like among experts? We are using “experts” because following Tullock, we do not know whether they are “scientists” until we know something about the institutional structure in which they function.
Tullock, when he rehearses Polanyi’s argument, silently provides the missing step and thus fails to impress his delightful cleverness on the reader. To make the overlapping competence argument work, there must be data audits, results must be checked. He says this over and over again. This distinguishes economics and science. As Tullock writes, economics allows concealment. Therefore economics allows factions and it doesn’t have the Polanyi efficiency properties. Sandra J. Peart & David M. Levy (2012) "Tullock on motivated inquiry: expert-induced uncertainty disguised as risk," Public Choice, 171-3

The quoted paragraphs is from a paper, even research program, methodological analytic egalitarianism, that (as regular readers know) has long influenced me. I was inspired to go back to it by Liam Kofi Bright's recent, interesting argument that "all philosophy is political is a trivial consequence of the more interesting fact that all inquiry is...united." [HT Dailynous] Drawing on Neurath, Bright argues this unity is a regulative or normative ideal, "it is an achievement to be won, not a fact to be granted." Neurath's argument is also a bit self-interested because within the division of scientific labor, it gives philosophers, a new kind of philosopher, a special role, of (linguistic/conceptual) orchestration. (See here; I link to this piece because Neurath is especially clear about the anti-totalitarian political significance of the program.) Uncharacterstically, Bright does not quite mention this, but the general gist is clear from his presentation:

The unity of science consists in the fact that we may potentially bring the results, methods, and fruits of inquiry in one field to bear on all others, providing we take the time to formulate our claims in a way that can be mutually understood, and are sufficiently clear in stating logical or evidential relations. The unity of science is thus a kind of consequence of the attitude of seeking to be clear and assist one another.*

If it is remembered that 'We' here is 'we [new] philosophers' Bright's position is echt Neurathian. If the 'we' here is all of of us engaged in science, Bright has subtly added a set of virtues some epistemic some social to the practice of all science. Notice, and Bright is very good on this, that even if one rejects some such normative unity program, the attitude is useful because "we cannot ever rule out the potential relevance of any one field of inquiry to another." Bright gives some cute historical examples. I would just add that anybody who is engaged in debates in contemporary climate science will be struck how many different,and different kinds of sciences are brought to bear on each other all the time. So far so good.

Now, here's my observation, if we think of different sciences also as reflecting different interests, then we should not automatically assume that when two sciences are brought in communication/trade with each other they will automatically agree. As Max Weber pointed out, pluralism is a consequence of the division of labor and differentiated interests. It is, thus, to be expected that when two sciences or sub-fields within a discipline/science are made to communicate some disagreement is to be expected. (Obviously, it does not follow there will always be disagreement or even most of the time.) The claim in this paragraph is strengthened, perhaps a trivial consequence, of the idea that not all sciences rely solely on epistemic commitments (see Heather Douglas' now classic book). 

Of course, if we think of the ways in which sciences are brought to bear on each other, it is quite possible to come to agreement either by creating a third new science (which may well has its task of figuring out the discrepancies between the two sciences) or by transformation of one of the sciences (in dialogue with each other). [If you think not all disciplines are science, then follow Peart/Levy and substitute expert-disciplines where necessary!] This sounds abstract, but actually happens quite a bit in the history of science. 

I put the Tullock in, in part, to show that Tullock anticipates the debates over the replication crisis (in some bits of the academy) by several decades. And that is I want to strengthen Bright's argument (in his spirit, see here) by suggesting that even if one is doubtful of the desirability or feasibility of general unity of science that he (and I, with slightly different sensibility) embraces, there are additional reasons to embrace the idea of leaving room to keeping open, '"the potential relevance of any one field of inquiry to another." It reduces the incentives and possibilities for fraud and rents for members of autonomous disciplines. As we have seen, that is not just a hypothetical possibility.

But, and here I close, the idea of intellectual even disciplinary autonomy is very much part of the DNA of philosophy, perhaps uniquely so (with exception of 'pure' math) [recall this old post on Williamson]. To be an intellectual self-legislator, to have autonomous/foundational or self-sufficient reason, is an ideal that is a permanent temptation for philosophers (in ways not so for other disciplines within the division of intellectual labor)--go read Descartes, or even Kant. I think it is some such ideal that makes some philosophers also uneasy about the very idea of (what I call) a philosophical politics within philosophy or in its relationships with other disciplines. The Neurathian offers orchestration (and its modern successors) as a consolation prize to them (if orchestration seems like the wrong way to go, then see the program of synthetic philosophy!)

Of course, the would be autonomous philosopher can refuse to allow his philosophy to be scrutinized by outsiders. (Just as not all offers to trade are accepted.) The risk of such hermeticisms, of thinking philosophy pure and untainted by politics, is, in fact, to make philosophy a hiding place for charlatans and cultists.  It is amusing to see my own ilk, analytic philosophers embracing that risk.

 

 

Chiang on metahumans (and the great chain of being)

The question is, are these worthwhile undertakings for scientists? Some call them a waste of time, likening them to a Native American research effort into bronze smelting when steel tools of European manufacture are readily available. This comparison might be more apt if humans were in competition with metahumans, but in today's economy of abundance there is no evidence of such competition. In fact, it is important to recognize that — unlike most previous low-technology cultures confronted with a high-technology one — humans are in no danger of assimilation or extinction.

There is still no way to augment a human brain into a metahuman one; the Sugimoto gene therapy must be performed before the embryo begins neurogenesis in order for a brain to be compatible with DNT. This lack of an assimilation mechanism means that human parents of a metahuman child face a difficult choice: to allow their child DNT interaction with metahuman culture, and watch him or her grow incomprehensible to them; or else restrict access to DNT during the child's formative years, which to a metahuman is deprivation like that suffered by Kaspar Hauser. It is not surprising that the percentage of human parents choosing the Sugimoto gene therapy for their children has dropped almost to zero in recent years.

As a result, human culture is likely to survive well into the future, and the scientific tradition is a vital part of that culture. Hermeneutics is a legitimate method of scientific inquiry and increases the body of human knowledge just as original research did. Moreover, human researchers may discern applications overlooked by metahumans, whose advantages tend to make them unaware of our concerns.

For example, imagine if research offered hope of a different intelligence-enhancing therapy, one that would allow individuals to gradually ‘upgrade’ their minds to a level equivalent to that of a metahuman. Such a therapy would offer a bridge across what has become the greatest cultural divide in our species' history, yet it might not even occur to metahumans to explore it; that possibility alone justifies the continuation of human research.

We need not be intimidated by the accomplishments of metahuman science. We should always remember that the technologies that made metahumans possible were originally invented by humans, and they were no smarter than we. Ted Chiang (2000) "Catching crumbs from the table," in Nature.*

The existence of metahumans (or enhanced, human cyborgs) reminds us that developments in technologies generate violations of Descartes' causal principle: what is more perfect can arise from what is less perfect. Technologies change how we conceive of what is humanly possible.+ In addition, technology helps generate violations of the great chain of being; there are  in-commensurable gaps between humans and metahumans.

Whether any technology can remove scarcity may well be doubted unless the metahumans can practice moral checks on themselves and nudge the humans into breeding at a replacement rate. Of course, if the metahumans did so, it's possible the humans would not know about it ([recall] in the way the machines/artificial intelligence nudge humans in Iain Banks' The Culture series).

The narration assumes that scarcity is the main motive for genocide. It also implies that being capable of developing science and technology, including presumably meta weapons of meta mass destruction, would generate an ethics of their proper use. Since metahumans were initially invented by humans no smarter than us, this is to be doubted. Perhaps the thought is that the ability to dominate nature (abundance, etc.) removes the desire to dominate (destroy/exploit, etc.) lesser beings. But let's leave that aside.

When I was reflecting on the story, I was initially unsure parents would indeed choose to be able to communicate with their children, and so continue their traditions even form of life, rather than choosing for their kids to be among the cognitive elite (the metahumans). Often today, it seems, designer babies represent not just the desire for healthy kids, but parents' status and economic aspirations for their children. Such parents appear to act for their childrens' good. 

But, upon second thought, Chiang's moral psychology seems persuasive. Because despite the emphasis on 'choice' in selling human enhancement technologies, our contemporary parents of designer babies are not really showing much respect for the (let's call it) autonomy of their children. Rather what they de facto do is lengthen the odds that the structure of their (parental/social) values/traditions are passed on and reproduced. 

Part of the joke of the story -- which first appeared in Nature -- is that academic journals have stopped being the vehicle for publishing original research. They are now mostly in the business of hermeneutics trying and trailing to understand metahuman science. For us the joke may be less funny because with the opacity of machine learning this possibility may well be shading into reality. Even so, it would indeed be funny if the success of an all-knowing data science would regenerate the felt need for a kind of science of interpretation that could help decode the revelations of a hidden intelligence. When computer science departments start hiring big-data-hermeneuticists, the heirs of Gadamer or Davidson can laugh at our analytic philosophers.++ Of course, with machine algorithms, there may simply be no there, there. And so this hermeneutics may well have to rely on an intentional stance.

Not unlike AL-Farabi's God (at least this is Al-Ghazali's charge), the metahumans may be t uninterested in the physical going-ons of mere mortals. One's position reflects one's choices of research topic. Chiang suggests that faced with the existence of scientifically superior metahumans, scientific humans would embrace if not standpoint epistemology, then the argument from epistemic diversity, from self-interest. If these human scientists are right, then the great chain of being would be restored.

 

On Eileen O'Neill, The Scandal of Philosophy, and the Angel of History

Let me begin with the latter model, which I shall term the “pure history” model. According to this historiographical method, evaluations of philosophical arguments and projects, while crucial to philosophy, are irrelevant to the history of philosophy. Scholars who use this model, like the nineteenth-century historian of ancient philosophy Eduard Zeller, see the history of philosophy as a dispassionate chronicling of every move in the dialectic of philosophy. Of course, for all their attempts at writing the “pure history” of philosophy, even the followers of Zeller omitted the women, who were seen as significant contributors to the field in their own time. This suggests that the particular interests and blind spots of the historian, and of the era in which the historian lives, will come into play—come what may. But, of course, the real issue is not what the history of philosophy is like, come what may, but which methodology we ought to take as our ideal—even if this ideal is never achieved. Still, it is not entirely clear what the point would be of chronicling every position in the endless dialectic (per impossible), in accordance with this first method. For this model might be characterized, as Walter Benjamin noted, as one “which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness.” Eileen O'Neill (1997) Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History, pp. 39-40

It is uninformative to say that David Lewis was an excellent philosopher. After all he dominates our thinking. It is less often noticed that he was excellent at philosophical politics (in addition to his theoretical reflections on it, see the evidence that Graham Priests bequeathed to us). Within institutional life such politics are as inevitable as the Spinozistic necessity that governed Cavaillès' life and death. As the previous sentence suggests, perhaps too obliquely for some and too crassly for others, the connection between the philosophical politics within a profession and politics in the more ordinary sense can, while often obscured by inattention, be intense. 

To be able to write simultaneously with assurance about the history of philosophy, its philosophical politics, and their connection to politics is the sure sign of being in the presence of a philosophical magister or magistra. Magister/magistra is the latin for teacher, but its etymological origins is from 'more' or 'great.'' (To be a magister/magistra, then, is to overflow with philosophy.) There are different styles of doing so. For example, Lewis often disguised his learning and his chess-playing on multiple boards at once. 

The late Eileen O'Neill (recall here and here) is such a magistra. Her (1997) "Disappearing Ink" succeeds at all three tasks of rewriting the history of philosophy, its philosophical politics, and their connection to politics (even if the contents of the history of philosophy are served up as tempting morsels to be chewed over) without disguising her enormous learning. It is something of a scandal that the work's significance has been confined to those of us dedicated to rewriting the narrative of early modern women philosophers (recall also this post; and, especially, this one). For, at the heart of her argument is the politically explosive thought that rebirth of democracy in the fulcrum we call the French Revolution was a disaster for women philosophers. As she shows, in its long aftermath philosophy was re-institutionalized in universities and literally gendered male.*

It is explosive because the very period and political organization that prides itself on progress and emancipation, was de facto simultaneously an enormous silencing operation. To question progress is to invite hatred. O'Neill's point is not mere historical reconstruction; it was fully anticipated by Olympe de Gouges (recall), who lost her head by (recall) bravely warning against the unfolding disaster, and then was forgotten for several centuries. To put one of her points in familiar jargon, and so perhaps to domesticate it, there was a huge Kuhn loss for philosophy, when due to the ideal of philosophical progress, it became unable to see much of the richness of the preceding centuries as philosophy at all (and for democratic feminists to miss their less egalitarian, but platonic feminism, etc.).** It is most dispiriting to have to mark the conformist lack of curiosity about such matters by our own teachers and, for those with a semblance of democratic faith, to confront democracies' lack of generosity. 

It is no argument against the primarily aristocratic and mystical women (or both) that their philosophizing was made possible by an unjust political order and so -- sotte voce -- had their obliteration coming. One injustice does not get canceled out by the next one. 

In re-reading Disappearing Ink ahead of a memorial, my train of thought was interrupted by the presence of the quote from Walter Benjamin. His presence should not surprise because (recall) Benjamin has, not unlike O'Neill, a keen sense that official history tends to be history as told by the victor, that the narrative of progress creates the recurring astonishment that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible; and that the historian's task is, in part, to make alternative futures possible. 

The passage she quotes (in my quote above) is from Benjamin's diagnosis that many historicist historians suffer (without acknowledgment) from empathy with the victor; a future historicizing, philosophical historian of sympathy may well wish to trace the connections and Abkunft between Manne's himpathy and Benjamin's analysis.

In the passage quoted by O'Neill, Benjamin contrasts the reformed historical materialism he favors with those historians who through great acts of sympathy and attention to detail wish "to relive an era" without the pretense of knowing what follows.  O'Neill's contrast is with a heroic, almost Borgesian, historian who chronicles every position,  This kind of chronicle is, in fact, coming within greedy, technological reach thanks to cheap computer power and data mining.+ 

There is another explicit reference to Benjamin at the end of an important passage:

Influential historians, like Tiedemann and Tennemann, each rewrote the history of philosophy, raising up certain figures and quickly passing over others. And typically they constructed their histories so that they conveniently “led up to” their pet philosophical projects, be it “Lockean sensualism,” “Kantian idealism,” or some other view. Indeed, most of the great philosophers themselves included elements of Geistesgeschichte in their own philosophical works, as a method of tying their arguments to the philosophical past. Consider Descartes’s treatment of the Scholastics or Kant’s depiction of himself as the synthesis of what is true in Leibniz’s “noologism” (or, to transform the Greek into Latin, “rationalism”) and in Locke’s “empiricism.” Philosophers sometimes called for a new Geistesgeschichte to be written, as a justification for a newly emerging philosophical canon. The historian Victor Cousin, in his 1828 Paris lectures to a crowd of two thousand gentlemen, said:

Let us hope that France, . . . which has already produced Descartes, will enter in her turn upon . . . the history of philosophy. . . . Every great speculative movement contains in itself, and sooner or later produces necessarily, its history of philosophy, and even a history of philosophy which is conformed to it; for it is only under the point of view of our ideas that we represent to ourselves the ideas of others.

This passage is interesting in what it suggests about the role that gender, class, ethnicity, and nationalism may have played in the actual constructions of modern histories of philosophy. But it may also lead us to wonder why we should not just abandon sweeping narratives that lead up to a particular set of contemporary interests. Critics have argued that it is misguided to turn to the philosophy of the past as a way of justifying one’s present philosophical concerns, since past philosophers cannot do a better job than we at solving our current problems. And they argue that it is a mistake to construct history with an eye to the present, since this simply distorts the history of philosophy. To borrow the beautiful image from Walter Benjamin, the Angel of History is propelled backward into the future, ever keeping its gaze on the past.

It is tempting, in the face of the self-serving grand narratives or even the more modest (albeit shameless) legitimation projects of our own time,++  to rewrite the history of philosophy in the service of a new, unknown victor. I plead guilty to having giving in to temptation at times. The much harder task -- one that O'Neill invites us to -- is to write and rewrite with a roving eye on philosophical politics (she calls it "internal dialectics") and politics, in such a way that philosophical possibilities are constantly revived and re-opened. In part this is strategy against being enlisted in, and facilitate, new forms of subordination; in part, this is doing justice to truth that is abundant, and overflowing.  

Martin Luther King, Imperfect Human Beings, The Rule of Law, and (Paul Bloom on) the defense of Empathy

The ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable. Court orders and federal enforcement agencies are of inestimable value in achieving desegregation, but desegregation is only a partial, though necessary, step towards the final goal which we seek to realize, genuine inter-group and interpersonal living. Desegregation will break down the legal barriers and bring men together physically, but something must touch the hearts and souls of men so that they will come together spiritually because it is natural and right. A vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws will bring an end to segregated public facilities which are barriers to a truly desegregated society, but it cannot bring an end to fears, prejudice, pride, and irrationality, which are the barriers to a truly integrated society. These dark and demonic responses will be removed only as men are possessed by the invisible, inner law which etches on their hearts the conviction that all men are brothers and that love in mankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation. True integration will be achieved by true neighbors who are willingly obedient to unenforceable obligations....

What is needed today on the part of white America is a committed altruism which recognizes this truth. True altruism is more than the capacity to pity; it is the capacity to empathize. Pity is feeling sorry for someone; empathy is feeling sorry with someone. Empathy is fellow feeling for the person in need — his pain, agony, and burdens. I doubt if the problems of our teeming ghettos will have a great chance to be solved until the white majority, through genuine empathy, comes to feel the ache and anguish of the Negroes’ daily life.---Martin Luther King, Jr. "Racism and the White Backlash" in (1967) Where Do We Go From Here. 106-7. [HT: Lionel McPherson]+

One central problem for those, like me, who defend the impartial rule of law is that the rule of law is often too partial. There are two central ways in which this becomes so: first, the law is itself the product of politics and, more often than not, promotes some partial interest or another. This is so because politics itself expresses the wishes of the more politically powerful. Second, even when the law itself is appropriately impartial, law enforcement, juries, and judges may well apply it partially or (recall MLK, Jr) simply abuse -- "the  license...our society allows to unjust officials who implement their authority in the name of justice to practice injustice against minorities" -- their authority. On the other hand, the removal of discretion from police and judges altogether seems to result in barbarous law (as exemplified by the role of misdemeanors in California's Three Strikes Law). Such discretion is often also a judicious, countervailing force against the partiality and lack of expertise of politics.

In addition to often involving racial prejudice against the politically weak, the two central ways involve the problem of faction or in-group bias. In group-bias is often the product of too limited sympathy, or in modern terms, empathy. Empathy with all is generally thought impossible. As Paul Bloom puts it in a famous essay [HT L.A. Paul], "Empathy is biased...[and it] is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. " And one may well think that the solution to this problem is blocking the deployment of empathy.  Here's Bloom:

Our public decisions will be fairer and more moral once we put empathy aside. Our policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than one, even if we know the name of the one, and when we acknowledge that the life of someone in a faraway country is worth as much as the life a neighbor, even if our emotions pull us in a different direction. Without empathy, we are better able to grasp the importance of vaccinating children and responding to climate change. These acts impose costs on real people in the here and now for the sake of abstract future benefits, so tackling them may require overriding empathetic responses that favor the comfort and well being of individuals today. We can rethink humanitarian aid and the criminal justice system, choosing to draw on a reasoned, even counter-empathetic, analysis of moral obligation and likely consequences.

Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that Bloom is right about this and that his (perhaps utilitarian) impartial consequentialism is indeed the morality worth having. Yet, Bloom's position also seems to beg the question: it simply assumes that the way we frame our challenges, the solutions we articulate, and the institutions which we are meant to tackle them are not populated by imperfect beings. Bloom is here like the advocate for the impartial rule of law while forgetting the role of faction/bias and politics in the framing and execution of laws. The very solution he offers presupposes that the underlying problem has been wished away. Moreover, while empathy may be biased, at least it is motivating.  As Leslie Jameson puts it (in her response to Bloom), "Specificity is what makes empathy so powerful."

Bloom recognizes that he needs something in between impartiality and the bias of empathy. He calls it "non-empathetic compassion—a more distanced love and kindness and concern for others." The terminology is revealing of the conceptual problem: when the Romans had to invent technical terminology for philosophy, compassio was a literal translation of sympathy (συμπάθεια); both (can) mean fellow-feeling.* Leaving aside this awkwardness, Bloom wants a form of action-guiding "kindness or altruism" without the biased feelings for particulars. As he writes, "recognizing the misery caused by starvation, [and] be motivated to act accordingly." One can recognize this is possible, but there is no reason to think it is very likely. Bloom here is like the Kantian who wants us to be like an angel with a pure will acting from principle or duty, but can't really explain why we should expect this given the human nature we have.

The critics of empathy are right in their criticism, but there solution tends to assumes that the problem of faction/bias/empathy has been solved (and somehow disassociated from it). Lynn E. O'Connor and Jack W. Berry see all this clearly, and note that "The wiring for empathic reactions that allow us to form attachments is the foundation of compassion extended to both in- and out-group members." The problem is, and they are frank about it, that getting it extended to out-groups is costly and slow: it "may take years of practice."

In the essay I quoted above, King confronts such problems head-on without shrinking from articulating the extent of their tenacity. (The essay connects these with many relevant issues, including reflection on the enduring significance of the genocide of native Americans, and the role of intellectuals in promoting a racist ethos, etc.) At the end (partially quoted) King draws a distinction between an enforceable obligation -- roughly the public law-code and norms -- and unenforceable obligations, which concern "inner attitudes" and "expressions of compassion." As King's examples in context make clear (a father's love for child or affection of wife), the unenforceable obligations are both partial and (in a certain  sense) non-material/spiritual (King draws a contrast with providing bread for the family). Not to put too fine a point on it, King believes that the problem of too much faction and institutions inhabited by the imperfect++ requires a spiritual transformation: we must become true Christians.**

In the passage, King's emphasis is primarily on brotherly love. And one may well think that King's solution fares no better than Bloom's. But that's not the extent of his prescription. Earlier in the essay, King had noted that a "sound resolution of the race problem will rest with those white men and women who consider themselves generous and decent human beings." That is to say, that before one can have the right sort of compassion, King thinks one needs the right sort of self-conception and this self-conception must have motivational efficacy. King goes on to argue that love provides such a motivation, but that it is a love that "must satisfy justice."+++ It is tempting to resist King on this point. Thinking of oneself as generous and decent is too often an act of self-delusion which covers over our complicity with and reinforces our inaction in the face of injustice(s). So, it is peculiar for him to advocate it precisely when he is most radical in his economic and policy prescriptions and un-blinkered about white opposition to his program.

Even so, I am reminded of one of the strangest passages in Adam Smith, which in the first instance may be thought to deviate from King's position, but I think illuminates it: "It is not the love of our neighbour, it is not the love of mankind, which upon many occasions prompts us to the practice of those divine virtues. It is a stronger love, a more powerful affection, which generally takes place upon such occasions; the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own characters." (The Theory of Moral Sentiments.)  Smith, who is very concerned with sympathy-induced biases, here makes clear that neither duty nor (the injunction to) love (of) one's neighbor is sufficient; rather we need an elevated self-image to do the right thing for others.*** Rather than being a critic of this from the perspective of self-interest or efficiency, Smith is an advocate of developing incentives and social institutions/education that can cultivate such properly self-regarding selves. Selves, who are willing to uphold unenforceable obligations, can be trusted to uphold impartial law and do what is 'natural and right' and fight the inner demons which make each of us indifferent to the effects of our ordinary partiality. Paradoxically, in order to battle our too partial feelings for others we should become more partial to a transformed version of ourselves.****

 

 

Should Policy Relevant Researchers Stay Out of Politics?

To lock yourself up in an ivory tower is impossible and undesirable. To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is.--Orwell (1948) "Writers and Leviathan."

Liam Kofi Bright ignited discussion on Facebook of a (fairly) recent paper by (BHLer) Bas van der Vossen. This paper argues for a normative conception of the division of labor, between "consumers," that is, "activists," and producers, that is, political philosophers (19), of political philosophy such that pure specialization between them should be maintained:

for precisely those academics that work on politically relevant topics, most prominently among them political philosophers. For them, the university should become more like an Ivory Tower, not less.... the problem with these [political] activities is that they encourage us to think about ourselves in partisan terms. And this is incompatible with our academic professional responsibilities.--Bas van der Vossen (2015) "In Defense of the Ivory Tower: Why Philosophers Should Stay Out of Politics" (1-2)

Before I get to his main argument, I want to note, first, that throughout his paper Van der Vossen equivocates among (i) 'working on politically relevant topics' and (ii) "those who are serious about thinking through political issues" and (iii) being "paid to think about politics." (On (iii) he notes that political philosophers do not have a monopoly and he also lists "sociology, political science,  economics, gender studies, psychology." (2)) By this I do not mean that (i-iii) are not synonymous in the strict sense (they are not). Rather, there are quite a few sciences (genetics, climate-science, epidemiology, civil engineering, IT, etc.) that are politically extremely relevant, but that are not, in the first instance, about thinking about political issues (although, interestingly enough, it does happen).  Because Van der Vossen ignores those latter sciences he can escape having to think about difficult, hybrid contexts where the distinction between consumer/producer is not so easy to draw. In what follows, where necessary, I distinguish between policy relevant research and research about politics and political issues.

Second, Van der Vossen's paper presupposes non-trivial commitments about the good life: "Many people stay out of political activism and they do just fine. Activism is not a necessary ingredient of a good life." (18) One need not be an elitist, a Republican-thinker, or a follower of Hannah Arendt to see that appealing to what "many people" do and that they are doing fine is an odd standard. The paper is also oddly complacent about the status quo (b) "many people in even the healthiest democracies around the world are not politically active and, in the grand scheme of things, these democracies seem to do just fine." (19) Even if this were true (when the paper was published in 2015 [i would reject this]) a cosmopolitan, political philosopher may take an interest in the health of transnational political subjects and promote these via transnational activism.

Third, and this is more important, Van der Vossen takes for granted that the bridge between consumers and producers of political philosophy can be bridged without the producers being politically active. His is a magical theory of dissemination; if you produce it, it will be  consumed. This may be true for (lots of) highways, but it is rarely true otherwise. While there are many different ways in which the gap can be bridged between policy relevant research and politics, a key way is by way of what Merel Lefevere and I call aggregators. Aggregators are distinguished researchers, whose professional function is, in part, to act as an interface between research and policy. There are many different kinds of aggregators (journal editors, science policy-advisors, science-journalists, etc.) and not all of them maintain active research profile or need to do so. But because cutting edge research is often extremely complex/subtle it is important that some of the  best researchers are also aggregators. In practice, these researchers-aggregators often have high prestige within the field (think of Singer, Pogge [sic], Nussbaum, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve, Norman Daniels, etc.). (This is not the place to explore all the tricky issues pertaining to this class of researcher-aggregator, especially if they deviate from professional consensus and advocate their own views, but recall this post.) In some grant-driven environments, researchers are, in fact, expected by the grant agency to play some role as an aggregator or actively disseminate their research.

That he misses the very issue becomes clear when we turn to his argument (which he has helpfully summarized):

(1) People who take up a certain role or profession thereby acquire a prima facie moral duty to  make a reasonable effort to avoid those things that predictably make them worse at their tasks

(2) The task of political philosophers is to seek the truth about political issues

(3) Therefore, political philosophers have a prima facie moral duty to make a reasonable effort to avoid those things that predictably make them worse at seeking the truth about political  issues

(4) Being politically active predictably makes us worse at seeking the truth about political issues

(5) Therefore, political philosophers have a prima facie moral duty to avoid being politically active (17-18)

Aggregators clearly violate the  conclusion of the argument, But one could accept all the premises of the argument, even its conclusions, and still see a need for aggregators in practice. That is, (5) is at best a defeasible duty. It becomes defeasible for two interesting, interdependent reasons: (a) research is esoteric, and so requires expertise to navigate; (b) political activists lack time to explore and master an esoteric realm.

In addition, it is, of course, also an empirical question if aggregators really become worse at their research. (This is not to deny that Van der Vossen draws on rich empirical research on the effects of partisanship and also about motivated reasoning and rationalization--including work by Dan Sperber that I happen to be reading this week, too.) I bet the most admired 20th century professional economists -- by other economists -- were Samuelson, Arrow, Friedman, and Keynes.* While the first two cultivated a decidedly technocratic image, it's hard to say they stayed out of politics--they certainly functioned as aggregators in the sense I use the word. Would they have been better at their craft if they stayed clear of policy relevance? That's hard to imagine. Their biases animate their research. Would they have been even better researchers if they stayed clear of policy and the role of aggregator? That's a tricky counterfactual. I am not confident it can be answered.

So, far I have pretended to accept  all his premises. Regular readers, who may discern a skeptical strain in these Digressions, may suspect that I would hesitate at (2). But, for the sake of argument, I accept it. As it happens, I think there are also aesthetic goals of research that are not properly captured by 'truth.' (Not unlike Marcus Arvan I think there are also excellent reasons to think that there are other very respectable, epistemic and moral goals of research that may have  to be balanced.)

But I close with a final objection that is directed at the way Van der Vossen cashes out premises (3-4). For, he thinks that biased research is incompatible with the pursued of truth. That is, he conflates unbiased (and partisan) research with truth-apt research.**  As the previous paragraphs make clear individual researchers are part of a larger epistemic process in which motivated reasoning may well have some use. In fact, this theme is a feature, not a bug, of the law, which is an adversarial process in which the conflict between motivated reasoning, advocacy, helps uncover the truth. Obviously, academic research is not fully analogous with that (and being lawyer-ly is, in an important sense, inimical to a proper, collaborative research ethos). But if we think of research as a community-activity, then we can immediate see that's compatible with individual bias--as long as these individual biases contribute to a social, epistemic process that is truth-conducive. (Regular readers will recognize in the previous sentence my interest in combating biases -- purportedly truth-apt status quo and hierarchy biases -- with other biases in research.) That is, the process requires mechanisms and filters that help to transform the biases in truth-conducive activity. There is a nice formal (see here for useful discussion) and empirical literature on the role of diversity in  research, when it is or is not apt. [So, I am certainly not saying that all individual biases are good!] So, for (4) needs to be rewritten as follows:

(4+)Being politically active predictably makes us worse at seeking the truth about political issues unless the research institutions in which we operate are designed to prevent our biases from undermining the epistemic process.

 

I started this post with a quote from Orwell. Throughout his writings, Orwell discusses the problems of partisanship and its relationship to (artistic) integrity (recall, for example, this post; and here). And he discerned that we should not conflate partisanship and group-think with all political activism. That is to say, he recognizes that party-politics and group-enforced ideology do corrupt (he was primarily interested in writing, but his arguments carry over easily to research). But the answer to this need not be political quietism or withdrawal into the ivory tower. The problem is party-politics and ideologies.

For, there are lots of ways one can be politically active in which one's research (artistic vision) need not be undermined at all. Sometimes this is due to functional role (e.g., recall the stuff above aggregators above). But sometimes is due to the fact that corrupting elements can be avoided. This is most clear in advocacy work on single issues (death penalty, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, basic income, human rights, racism, etc.). The researcher can be uncompromising in her single-issue advocacy and maintain her integrity. (Grant me the distinction between single-issue and systemic ideology.) Often this generates a kind of lack of moderation, even fanaticism in the name of truth. While there are problems with that, these are political problems not research problems.

 

 

On Wanting To Be A Public Philosopher

• Do you actually want to? 

  • ...nobody should have to be a public philosopher. Although it can be valuable, it can also be risky, and it isn't suitable for every kind of philosopher or for every kind of philosophical work.
  • If you are only here in response to external pressure in this direction, and this is not something you're motivated to do for your own reasons, or for its own sake, IMO you're within your rights to resist that pressure citing the risks and/or the inappropriateness of this kind of work for your situation.

• Be aware of the risks.

  • Online hate and abuse are disproportionately directed at women, POC, LGBTQ people and other groups who experience discrimination, but anyone can be targeted. There are psychological, emotional, legal, financial, and other risks involved in public-facing work. They are often unpredictable.
  • Hate and abuse do not only occur online, even if they begin there. If you become a public figure your personal safety may be put at risk through e.g. doxxing, stalking, and dangerous physical mail. Academics are typically easy to target as our work addresses and phone numbers are posted freely online by our universities and our physical office spaces are often accessible to anyone.
  • If you belong to a university or other institution, find out what support and protections they provide. If nothing (or too little) is available, you might want to suggest/request/demand that they do better. Especially if your institution, department, or funding agency is actively encouraging you to engage in the risky business of public scholarship, they should support and help you when you do.
  • Some colleagues, in philosophy and elsewhere in the academy, do not respect public-facing scholarship. Some will even view it as evidence that you've lost interest in—or failed at—"real" philosophy. This can be an issue in securing employment as well as for promotion, tenure, and other forms of assessment.
  • Even positive experiences in the public arena can be exhausting and unpredictable. For example, media interest tends to come in viral waves, the timing of which can depend on all kinds of factors beyond your control and won't respect your teaching schedule.

• Have something to say.

  • It should be something you care enough about, and that enough people will want to hear, to make your efforts worthwhile. If you are going to make a serious investment of time, emotional energy, research funding, and other things into public work, you need to believe in your project and your message.
  • I started to do public-facing work in earnest when I started to research the philosophy of love. My work on the epistemology of arithmetic is no less important to me, but it isn't suitable for the same kind of public audience, and that's OK (see above).

• Consider who you want to be in the public arena.

  • If you develop a public profile, you will almost certainly be judged both positively and negatively for pretty much anything you do. Under these circumstances, integrity is challenging but essential. I recommend thinking carefully in advance about your intended public image, persona, personal brand, or whatever you like to call it.
  • I created a list of features I would aim to embody in my public-facing self. You don't need to be that explicit about it, but it helps to have a sense of direction and personal ethics to maintain consistency as you build a platform and audience.
  • Think ahead about your preferences with respect to privacy, as well as those of people around you (such as family members, collaborators, and colleagues). Keep these conversations current—people and situations change.

• Know that you will need different skill sets.

  • Philosophers trained in a typical contemporary philosophy PhD program are not trained to be public philosophers. Don't expect it to be easy to transfer what you already know into the public sphere. Although often ignored, trivialized, or disparaged, everything listed in Part 2 below is an achievement.

  • I've found learning to write and speak for public audiences very challenging. I experienced a steep learning curve. I'm still learning rapidly...--Carrie Jenkins " So You Want To Be A Public Philosopher?" [HT DailyNous; all emphases in original]

I warmly recommend Carrie Jenkins's post to would-be-public philosophers, their would-be-peers and evaluators, and people that love public philosophers (for whatever reason). The piece is full of important insights and suggestions (there is a lot more than I quoted above), and I would echo her focus on integrity (recall). In particular, I really like how she calls attention to the significance of advance planning. Importantly, Jenkins calls attention to the responsibilities of institutions, not the least universities and grant agencies, that encourage public philosophy, but often provide shamefully few resources to support colleagues that are being threatened or abused/harassed from various angles or become targets of political campaigns. (The previous sentence draws on my experiences of my departmental colleagues and myself.) In addition, Jenkins is right to call attention to the reputational risks of doing public philosophy. We do have a lot of colleagues who fail to respect public-facing scholarship, but use it, as she suggests, as a proxy for lack of philosophical ability.

I like how Jenkins speaks of "public-facing" work/scholarship. It is clear that she tries to make it symmetrical with, let's call it, peer-facing scholarship. She is right to emphasize that they draw on different skill sets, and that our professional training does not really prepare us for public-facing work. (Having said that, European universities and grant agencies are increasingly offering seminars to address some of the required skill set as part of graduate training.) Her underlying (tacit) model, however, is that of publicizing insights she developed through her peer-facing expertise.  That is, for Jenkins some peer-facing expertise is suitable for development to a public audience (and some not). That is, this is really a matter of (to use European technocratic-speek) disseminating peer-evaluated research findings to a wide audience.

To be sure, Jenkins's model is compatible with skipping publication in peer-facing outlets (journals) and hybrid versions (publishing some material for fellow experts and other material only in public venues, but with expert-quality documentation available--Piketty did a version of this and, perhaps, also Jenkins in her work on love). But my point is that public philosophy so conceived has an implied directionally from peer-facing expertise to public-facing exposure. There is nothing wrong with this conception. But it is not the only possible conception of the genre (for more of my views on public philosophy, recall here, here on Dotson's service philosophy, and here on some blogging as public philosophy).

Before I get to to that, it is worth noting that even in Jenkins's model of public philosophy, the person, who is a philosopher, and who faces the public, may well change. Jenkins hints at this by calling attention to the many skills and new dispositions one acquires by doing public philosophy. Even leaving aside (due to opportunity costs) that one may not be able to participate with the same dedication and attention to peer-facing philosophy, one may become a different kind of philosopher entirely. Here the metaphor of face is not innocent; by professionally facing others, one also becomes -- go read your Levinas - part of their community. A public-facing orientation generates duties, loyalties, and obligations and these when taken serious, in turn, transform the person. I don't mean the previous sentence to be my last word on it (it's not the first), but as the Hypatia debacle revealed (recall), research ethics are not fully developed within professional philosophy yet.

And this gets me to another possible conception of the genre. It is quite possible for public-facing philosophy to influence or displace peer-facing philosophy. (To give a standard example: Socrates undoubtedly talked quite a bit to Plato, one hopes, but quite possibly spent a lot more time talking to non-philosophers.) By this I mean that public-philosophy entails a receptivity toward the risk that one's peer-facing philosophy is not just influenced by one's engagements with public others, but, more importantly, shaped by one's public-facing activities. For example, and it's not my area of expertise, but it is my sense from reading Judith Butler that gender theory was shaped by (no doubt, theory-mediated) encounters with lived experience that in certain respects ran well in advance of gender theory. (Some such analogous transformative experience occurred to me through my engagements with professional economists--I didn't go native [despite being employed in a social science department], but I look very differently at my own profession and its history now. I am confident plenty of philosophers of mind, say, were changed by their immersion in some of the cognitive sciences.)

The way such public-facing work can shape peer-faced work is unpredictable. Some will start muttering about lowered standards and lack of seriousness--and, indeed, there are genuine risks. But the would-be-shaping of peer-faced scholarship is, in fact, a central argument in favor of public-facing work. As I have noted before, analytical philosophy has low barriers to entry and little in the way of doctrinal or even (much) methodological expertise. At its best, it has a sponge-like capacity to constantly rejuvenate itself -- some would say be disciplined -- by way of outward engagement with mathematics, the other sciences, history, and even the arts, etc. There is no reason to end rejuvenation by way of facing-other-expert-areas. But, in addition, if we are being encouraged to face and transform the public, we should not be afraid to be transformed by it.

Adaptive Preference(s) and Status Quo Bias

A diagnosis of adaptive preferences is licensed only when preferences are directed toward something suboptimal. We don't, however, make decisions about what is subotimal from Plato's heaven (or from our armchair). We observe, we evaluate, and -- crucially -- we listen to testimony. The problem with the adaptive preference model is that it allows us to dismiss certain kinds of testimony as irrational or misleading. And so the adaptive preference model can quickly become a way of defending the moral status quo. (135)

Insofar as it justifies in discounting first-person testimony, the adaptive preference model can be a way of preventing this kind of progress. Misapplied, the adaptive preference model can simply entrench pre-existing biases. Elizabeth Barnes (2016) The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (137)

Yesterday's Impression (recall) was inspired by passages in which Barnes criticizes certain applications of an adaptive preference model to discount testimony. But that post otherwise ignored her account of adaptive preferences which is the subject of today's Digression. As the quoted passages reveal, Barnes appeals to a notion of moral progress. This appeal to moral progress (and an accompanying presupposed moral community between Barnes and her sympathetic reader) is quite important in her overall argument, and in a future post I will be critical of the role it plays in her treatment.

But I don't think the idea of moral progress is central to her critique of certain uses of adaptive preferences model. Nothing substantial (as opposed to rhetorical) is lost if we rewrite the last quoted sentence from p. 135 as follows, And so the adaptive preference model can quickly become a way of defending the status quo as understood by expert. And the first sentence from p. 137 can be rewritten as follows, Insofar as it justifies in discounting first-person testimony, the adaptive preference model can be a way of preventing moral understanding of victims of testimonial injustice. This is not to deny that moral progress plays an important role in Barnes's presentation--to motivate some of her arguments, she appeals to her readers willingness to grant that prior discounting of the testimony and preferences of women and gays as adaptive was obviously wrong (134-6).+

For, in fact, Barnes cleverly applies the growing insights of the literature on (Fricker's) testimonial injustice and (Dotson's) testimonial smothering to undermine over-reliance of adaptive preference model (especially in the capability literature inspired by Nussbaum and Sen) to ignore first person testimony of disabled people.* (I am assuming here some familiarity with these concepts.) As she writes, "whether being disabled is somehow bad or suboptimal is precisely what's up for debate." (133)+  To be sure, Barnes allows that there are occasions one can still diagnose adaptive preferences in others, especially when there are fundamental conflicts between what a person says about herself and other factors of her well-being (but the discussion is a bit brief, see 140-1).

To understand the historical significance of Barnes's critical treatment of the misapplication of the adaptive preferences model it is worth briefly reminding ourselves of the rule it played in Elster's (1983) Sour Grapes, which formulated the modern conceptual apparatus of adaptive preferences (recall). (Barnes also mentions Sour Grapes.) He did so, in part, to combat certain perverse implications of utilitarianism (see chapters III.3-4 especially). What interests me here is that in Elster's account, one role for the invocation of adaptive preferences is to combat a certain form of status quo bias when one takes (historically conditioned) given wants or subjective preferences for granted (say in one's utility calculations in evaluating some policy or another). By giving a principled justification for discounting (some) existing preferences, the theorist who relies on the adaptive preferences model can propose normative improvements.

As an aside, this is not to deny that there is not some status quo bias built in Elster's approach. Elster takes political orders and regimes largely for granted and, while he allows changing of wants by “rational and public discussions,” (140 referring back to I.5 and its discussion of the political “transformation of preferences rather than aggregation” of preferences, (35)) his notion of “collective rationality” (42) has no space for the radical, even violent, transformation of institutions. Moreover, he embraces a further status quo bias by insisting that, while acknowledging that intuitions may be “culturally relative,” we “must require of a theory of justice that it does not strongly violate our ethical intuitions in particular cases” (137—emphasis added; to be sure, Elster is less optimistic than Rawls about possibility of consensus). As Michael Della Rocca taught me, this reliance on the method of reflective equilibrium has considerable status quo bias built into it.

By contrast, Barnes shows that there are two predictable risk of (moral and economic) experts relying on an adaptive preference models. First, and this is the one she emphasizes, is that (a) they put themselves in a situation of defending an imperfect status quo (that they themselves understand as moral) while, simultaneously, (b) discounting evidence that could correct the status quo. That is to say, the adaptive preference model does not generate methodological and conceptual incentives to self-correct. Second, and this is strongly implied by her treatment, the down-side risks of (let's stipulate, well-intentioned) application of the adaptive preference model is primarily born by often vulnerable member of society.

Given that the research ethics that I propose in light of methodological analytical egalitarianism is especially critical of approaches where the down-side risk of use/application by non-expert vulnerable, one might expect me to be very critical of the adaptive preferences model (as another danger of expert over-confidence in their own model [justness, etc.]). Strikingly, the adaptive preference model was, in part, designed to address the needs of the most vulnerable in the context of the history of oppression.

Not unlike Barnes, I don't think experts should never rely on an adaptive preference model. But experts and policymakers that rely on it should also be alert for the two foreseeable risks in the approach. As noted above, Barnes supplies us with a further test in application: do the preferences expressed by particular subjects cohere with other features of  the subjects' lives. (For example, if a victim of abuse says they're flourishing, but otherwise has lots of symptoms of depression.) This is an empirical question and requires considerable and careful contextual judgment(s). I would add, in addition, corrections to the very theory of adaptive preferences to account for the foreseeable and known cognitive and status quo biases of experts and policymakers alike. But that's for another time.

 

 

Science will not save analytical Philosophy

To make a long story short, I think the lesson of Dorsey's problem of "intuitive bedrock" is that--whenever possible--philosophy needs to move beyond contested intuitions and find real bedrock: observational facts, establishable through common experience, that support one philosophical theory over another. Such bedrock may of course be very hard to find--but, as I think the above examples suggest, science can often point us in a more promising direction, if only we choose to pay attention to it. I've suggested before that analytic philosophy has often been too a prior-istic, and that the future of philosophy is natural philosophy: philosophy firmly enmeshed with the sciences. This, in brief, is why. Without science, all we have are intuitions--and intuitions just aren't good enough.--Marcus Arvan "Dorsey on intuitive bedrock and the philosophical enterprise" The Philosophers's Cocoon

Arvan responded to Dorsey's post about the same time I did (recall). On Dorsey's account (i) arguments are characteristic (or the tools) of analytical philosophy. The (ii) division of intellectual labor allows (iii) sets of systematic entailment relations are explored; and this generates (iv) philosophical progress, that, is we understand our theories. (v) Consensus is impossible because (v*) philosophy does not offer  substantive grounds for the fundamental premises or posits in theories. As I noted, Dorsey's diagnosis of (v) is that there is an insolvable clash of intuitions. This generates a kind of spirit of tolerance in which philosophy is a kind of neutral tool to be used by people to navigate the world. So far my quick summary of Dorsey. 

 I offered two reasons to think that Dorsey's account is unsatisfactory: I noted, first, that the clash cannot be resolved is a consequence of a tacit democratic or individualist (moral) principle in Dorsey's account: each person's intuition is as good as another. Dorsey has not earned the right to this intuition given his own conception of philosophy. Second, because ends are eschewed on Dorsey's account of philosophy, such philosophy cannot justify its own practice in the way that the Athenian artisans Socrates around the marketplace cannot account for their practice. In addition, I also hinted that, third, that a focus on arguments i) may be too limited a way of understanding philosophy (leaving aside that there may be very different kinds of argument patterns).

As it happens, Arvan's response to Dorsey takes on these first two problems in Dorsey's account. First, Arvan addresses the inability to generate consensus by offering hope that substantive grounds for fundamental posits -- which he claims will be observational facts, establishable through common experience --,can be found by empirical science. The hope that this is possible follows from the example of the history of the sciences (he mentions astronomy and empirical psychology). In fact, Arvan relies on a Kuhnian picture of science, in which "mature" sciences are characterised by consensus over what counts as a phenomenon: "you don't get to assert something as a fact or observation unless it is widely--indeed, virtually universally--replicable." So, the idea is to find ways to put philosophy in position to become mature. Second, for Arvan the proper end of philosophy is truth. I discuss  these in reverse order.

Arvan does not note that Dorsey had also allowed that truth is the proper end that each theory within philosophy aims at. Dorsey just doubts that this can be achieved with the tools we have. That is to say, Arvan is in no better position to justify his appeal to (another democratic principle) common experience than Dorsey was in order to justify his individualist (moral) principle. (We might say, that Arvan and Dorsey both represent different stands within a democratic ethos.) For, common experience ignores the deviant, the excessive, the rare, etc. (Arvan recognizes this because he speaks of an experience shared by 'virtually all.') In addition, and we know this from the philosophy of social science, the way the common is constituted by an empirical practice, finds it very difficult to maintain neutrality among competing values. Arvan's normal human subject is a construct in which various values are imported under the guise of science. Sure, this construct allows for means-end analysis in the same way deploying homo economicus does, but it can't tell you which values are worth having.

And this gets me to the main problem with such Kuhnian scientism (which aims at consensus) that has become characteristic of contemporary naturalism: in human affairs truth is not sufficient to vindicate a position. And that's because a theory may be true or sincere yet still be ideological or propaganda (recall this piece on Jason Stanley; and this piece on economics). For example, a theory can have a tacit status quo bias. So, you can study a normal human subject within given institutional (or cultural, political, etc.) constraints and arrive at a great deal of knowledge about it. But if you deny yourself the means to question these constraints, you may well contribute to maintaining an ideology. A sure way to do so, is, as standpoint epistemologists have taught us, to rule out evidence that fails to confirm to the normal or what is common. So, much as I love learning from science, if given the choice, I much prefer Dorsey's spirit of tolerance and collaboration over Arvan's purported progress.

 

"you don't get to assert something as a fact or observation unless it is widely--indeed, virtually universally--replicable." - See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2016/06/dorsey-on-intuitive-bedrock-and-the-philosophical-enterprise.html#commentsSecond, Arvan also insists that truth is the proper end of philosophy. 

piece of teasing entertainment.