Category: moral philosophy

Moral Renewal?

I write in response to two provocative short essays that pay attention to figures on the right (intellectual supporters of Trump) who claim that liberalism is morally bankrupt and that contemporary illiberalism offers a pathway to moral renewal.  Here’s the links to the two essays, one by Alexandre Lefebvre, the other by Noah Smith.

From Statecraft To Soulcraft
https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/this-thing-will-fail?r=1jua0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

My response to this talk/hope/dream of moral renewal is not very coherent.  I think a lot of things on the subject.  So this post will try to articulate that variety without concerning itself too much with how what I have to say “hangs together.”

But let’s start by seeing what the critique of liberalism has to say for itself.

Here is N. S. Lyons, as quoted by Noah Smith, on the failure of the liberal project that was put into place after World War II in response to the horrors of fascism and the fear of communism.

“Hugely influential liberal thinkers like Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno helped convince an ideologically amenable post-war establishment that the fundamental source of authoritarianism and conflict in the world was the “closed society.” Such a society is marked by what Reno dubs “strong gods”: strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past – ultimately, all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.”

Now the unifying power of the strong gods came to be seen as dangerous, an infernal wellspring of fanaticism, oppression, hatred, and violence. Meaningful bonds of faith, family, and above all the nation were now seen as suspect, as alarmingly retrograde temptations to fascism…

Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.” (N. S. Lyons)

This is certainly a different understanding of “deaths of despair” than the one offered by Angus Deaton.  More on that later.  For now, I have two preliminary reactions. 1) This kind of diagnosis of the ills of modernity, of plural societies grounded in norms of tolerance and equality, is standard fare from the Romantics of the 1790s through the reactionaries opposing the French Revolution to Gemeinschaft vs. Gesellschaft social thinkers to the high modernist cultural right (Yeats, Pound, T. S. Eliot) up to various theological thinkers (including the soft version offered up by Charles Taylor) and now including intellectuals like Adrian Vermeule and Patrick Deneen.  Hannah Arendt in 1951 identifies “the essential homelessness of the masses” as the conditions in which totalitarianism can take root. “The revolt of the masses against ‘realism,’ common sense, and all ‘the plausibilities of the world’ (Edmund Burke) was the result of their atomization, their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense” (Origins of Totalitarianism, 352, my emphasis).  The whole world has gone crazy.  You, as Arendt’s parenthetic citation indicates, can already find much the same argument in Edmund Burke.

Here’s Talbot Brewer, hardly a radical soul, a sober minded philosopher at the University of Virginia who, nonetheless buys into Alasdair MacIntyre’s sweeping vision of the barren landscape we all now inhabit.  “We are inarticulate in the face of questions that cannot be left to specialists, questions that are basic and unshirkable markers of the human condition, questions such as how we ought to live our lives and what we ought ideally to be like.  MacIntyre’s view . . . is that if we are to recover depth and coherence in our thought about the human good, we must first strive to recover a sense of the cultural and intellectual history whose fragmentary conceptual remains provide us with the only resources for framing a livable conception of the good life” (The Retrieval of Ethics, Oxford University Press, 2009, p.3, my emphasis).

The narrative of modernity is a narrative of loss—and the loss is always of an imagined past when life was full of meaning, when we actually had (according to MacIntyre) the ability to ask questions about meaning, purpose, and “the good.”  Now we are all wanderers in the wilderness, bereft of any meaningful ties to others, or to our history, or to the intellectual resources we would need to live good lives. We can’t even articulate the question of the good life. Ethics needs to be “retrieved”; community needs to be reestablished.

Can we just, for one moment, ask if this portrait of modernity is even slightly plausible?  Should we not be suspicious that the date of the fall into modernity shifts depending on the writer.  For Arendt, apparently, it’s the end of the classical world; for T. S. Eliot it’s the early 17th century (right after Shakespeare’s death); for Macintyre, it’s the end of the Middle Ages. 

Let’s engage full-heartedly in a thoughtful assessment of conditions on the ground for people living in 2025 or 1945 or any other date you want to pick—with full attention to how different those conditions are depending on where on the globe you live. But could we at least stop claiming there was a time in the past when all was hunky-dory, that something vital was once possessed but is now lost?  Any clear eyed view of human history demonstrates there was never a time when humans had it all figured out.  And can’t we dispense with huge generalizations about civilizational despair and a global loss of meaning?  Really?  What evidence is offered that people experience their lives as lacking meaning?  Or that people in modernity are any less or more capable of considering how to live a good life than people in ancient Greece or medieval Europe or, for that matter, various indigenous peoples outside of Europe’s sphere prior to 1492? 

Funny how the people making these condemnatory judgments of modernity always exempt themselves.  They don’t claim their own lives lack meaning.  It’s the other guy they are trying to lift out of the slough of despond.  (How thoughtful of them to offer a helping hand!) 

My second reaction is that I begin to suspect that the critique is really all a matter of taste—and that Nietzsche was the one to understand that.  For starters, the soulless modern societies are always the prosperous ones of the West.  Having for the most part dropped (by the end of the 20th century) benighted ideas about bringing “civilization” to the savages, now the widely differing conditions (material and otherwise) in which different global populations live is just passed over in silence.  What really seems to irk the mandarin critics of modern life (Kierkegaard, Ruskin, Arendt, Eliot, Adorno, MacIntyre all fit this bill) is just how badly the masses use the leisure time that modernity has afforded them.  The underclasses—the unheard and unseen for millennia—emerge from their obscurity and are interested in and pleased by the vulgar, the meretricious.  What “they”(the plebeians) seem to value, how they choose to spend their time and energy, is appalling. Surely such pursuits can only indicate non-serious lives, ones dedicated to things of no lasting value or true meaning. (This contempt for the bourgeois, for shopkeepers, can be accompanied by a romantic view of “the folk,” of peasants and the like who have been uncorrupted by modernity. Hokum of this variety can be found in Wordsworth and Yeats.)

If only people would be content with the station they were born into–and would listen to the exhortations of their betters–all would be well. The career open to talents has just opened the door to the crass, the grasping, the people who lack class (in its sense of a refined set of desires and tastes).

Even J. S. Mill, who hates the paternalistic tenor of all efforts to call the masses to behavior their betters approve of, can’t keep from introducing a hierarchy between worthy pursuits and those not worthy of human beings.  Mill says no person can be a better judge of an individual’s interest than that individual him- or herself.  So butt out!  Yet he can’t keep his disapproval of how some people live their lives to himself.

In short, it’s freedom for me but not for thee for most of these critics of modernity.  The lack of “strong gods” as Lyons puts it means, in practice, I can freely choose to follow such gods, but you are not free to not follow them. Your not following them is (in ways never very clearly explained) screwing up my following them.  It’s the puzzle of the whole gay marriage debate played out again and again.  You are against gay sex and gay marriage.  Great.  Don’t indulge in either.  But what harm is it to you if I practice either one.  You can lament that someone lives a frivolous life, that they have not made it meaningful along the lines that you deem confer meaning, but how does that detract from your meaning?  Why can’t you just let me be?

In his book on liberalism, Lefebvre calls “reciprocity the cardinal virtue of liberal democracy” (146).  I don’t think that’s right—or, at least, reciprocity rests upon a prior virtue: tolerance.  I define tolerance as “cultivated indifference.”  Cultivated because it does not come naturally.  We as human beings just seem prone to being outraged by what someone else is doing, saying, thinking. One man’s meat is another’s poison–and we can’t resist trying to change what that other guy is eating.  We can’t just shrug and just let him go his way.  We have the urge to, at the very least, voice our disapproval and, at the very most, intervene to make him stop doing that.  It’s a cliché that liberalism has its origins in establishing religious tolerance sometime around 1750 as a way to stop over two hundred years of Protestants and Catholics killing each.  (The Irish did not get the memo.)  What an incredible achievement!  One of the true glories of human history.  And those who pine for “strong gods” want to roll back that achievement.

So the real moral challenge is how to cultivate tolerance, how to get people to live in a world that is crowded with other people of whom they disapprove. Learning how to accept how you can’t change others’ behavior to fit your notions of how to live a life–and, crucially, that you shouldn’t want to change their behavior–is the vary basis of a decent society and a moral modus vivendi in a pluralistic world. Liberalism is about trying to extend as far as possible the things any individual is allowed to do without fear of interference from others or from the state. Of course, that desire poses moral dilemmas of its own, most notably the issue of where to draw the line. What behaviors cannot and should not be tolerated. Not an easy call to make–and that decision will constantly be revised and contested.

Still, this is where I believe the rubber hits the road.  It’s either tolerance or violence.  I want no part of a “moral renewal” that it is founded on coercion and violence.  And I refuse to believe that modernity means the loss of a communal unanimity “we” once enjoyed. We never enjoyed the unanimity, the unity, that Lyons bemoans losing. Read Thucydides. Or take the Middle Ages for another example; they were full of internal wars against “heretics” as well as the external wars (the Crusades) against Muslims.  Every creed based on “strong gods” identifies enemies.  And it doesn’t take much or long to justify violence against those enemies.

The existence of enemies serves an additional crucial purpose: it serves to explain why the utopia of a society united in its allegiance to the strong gods is never achieved.  Noah Smith (in the blog post linked above) is especially good in describing this dynamic.

“But anyway, yes, this thing will fail, because nothing is being built. Yes, every ideological movement assures us that after the old order is completely torn down, a utopia will arise in its place. Somehow the utopia never seems to arrive. Instead, the supposedly temporary period of pain and sacrifice stretches on longer and longer, and the ideologues running the show become ever more zealous about blaming their enemies and rooting out the enemies of the revolution. At some point it becomes clear that the promises of utopia were just an excuse for the rooting out of enemies — thumos as an end in and of itself.” (Noah Smith; “thumos” is a term from Harvey Mansfield referring to masculine strength).

Even on a topic as mundane as the economy (not pie-in-the-sky transcendent like “meaning”), the inability of the right to ever admit failure, to always blame various scapegoats, is evident.  Like communism, right wing fantasies can never fail; they can only be failed.  And as anger at failure increases, so does the level of violence against those blamed for those failures.

I want to make three further points, neither of which is very related to what I have said thus far.

First is the puzzle of how these right wing moralists could fixate on Donald Trump, a man without a moral bone in his body or moral thought in his head, as the agent of moral renewal.  The only possible explanation is that they see in him the kind of strength, the kind of contempt for received norms and institutions, and the callous relationship to suffering on the ground required to raze liberal culture and political structures.  They are placing their faith in destruction (since Trump is clearly only capable of that phase), thinking that somehow the work of constructing their illiberal order can than proceed.  If nothing else, they show an astounding lack of imagination in their failure to see what destruction entails.  The same lack of imagination led to the two World Wars of the 20th century.  Somehow we can’t wrap our heads around how destructive humans can be, even with glaring historical examples (or the current wars in Ukraine and Israel) to show us the truth.

Second: in early 2017, I was in a DC restaurant just shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration.  At the next table was a guy from Notre Dame (he could have been Patrick Deneen for all I knew) talking about how Trump’s presidency opened up the path to moral regeneration.  He was talking to three other men, all of whom were obviously Washington politicos of one stripe or another, possibly members of Congress or of Congressional staffs, or functionaries in the federal bureaucracy.  The Notre Dame guy focused, not surprisingly, on abortion and the disintegration of the family as the ills that were to be remedied—with the Catholic Church lighting the way.  Only my wife kicking me under the table kept me from leaning over and asking him about the moral bona fides of a church that enabled and covered up sexual abuse of children. 

I am hardly the only one to have noticed how completely the intellectual right wing (Harvey Mansfield as one prime example, but J. D. Vance has stepped forward as another) associates moral decline with the changes in women’s roles and behavior wrought by feminism.  Yes, there is also deep resentment of non-whites taking up positions in the public sphere and civil society.  (Non-whites are tolerable as entertainers—sports heroes and singers/rappers–but keep them out of board rooms and the classrooms where we credential professionals.) Still, I can’t help but be amazed at how much it comes down to sex.  The Church’s attempt to deny sex (the absurd requirement of chastity for its clergy), along with its refusal to ordain women, and its refusal to countenance sex as anything other than a means to reproduction.  So it refuses to see sexual abuse of children even as it is horrified by the thought of women as sexual creatures with any right to self-determination in matters ranging from sex to how to live their lives. That resentment of women is a red thread throughout much contemporary right wing moralizing. Women, like blacks, should not get “uppity,” should not show any disquiet or discontent with the roles to which white men want to confine them. As many have pointed out, abuse of women seems to have been an essential requirement to being given a position within this second Trump administration.

My third point.  Deaths of despair.  Lyons talks of civilization committing suicide—and apparently the rationale is the lack of meaning, is the “thinness” of liberal life (a time-worn complaint).  But, surely, when it comes to actual suicides (not the abstract one of a society doing itself in), the culprit is economic precarity combined with the necessities of holding a job and keeping it.  People (I would assert—but admittedly without concrete evidence) know where meaning lies in their lives.  They find it in the struggle to maintain a decent life, day to day, for themselves and for their loved one.  A roof over their heads, food to eat, vacations, friends, a way forward for their children.  Sneer if you like, but surviving in our cruel society–where vast numbers don’t have enough to eat, where the minimum wage is not remotely close to a living wage, where one is one medical emergency away from complete bankruptcy, and where one holds a job at the sufferance of an employer who can (and will) lay you off tomorrow—is an achievement worthy of profound respect. 

It constantly amazes me how most people manage to keep on keeping on, that they do not collapse under the burdens and anxieties that are daily life in these United States.  Yes, some people go under (as Deaton has documented), but I am surprised it isn’t more.  And, yes, I know that Deaton’s study has been criticized.  But even if he got some of the exact facts/numbers wrong, there remains the fact that many people in our society live precarious lives.  They cannot afford (quite literally) to relax for a moment; they must keep their noses to the grindstone. That’s meaning enough, wrestling a living and a life out of such harsh conditions. 

No need for strong gods—and wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could get some respite from the powerful humans who keep them at that grindstone, not to mention the scolds who tell them that their lives lack meaning, that they lack the intellectual and spiritual resources to contemplate how to live a good life.  That they are, in short, morally bereft as well as economically burdened. I think their morals are just fine–until they become prey from demagogues just as they live as prey for their economic overlords. Or to put it yet another way, the degradations of modernity which should command out attention–and call for remedy–are material, not spiritual. Somehow, our moral preachers always assume that those they exhort to find meaning are suffering from a soulless material prosperity. If only . . . We have millions on earth (billions, in fact) who would be blessed if burdened with soulless material prosperity.

Alexandre Lefebvre’s Human Rights as a Way of Life: On Bergson’s Political Philosophy

I recently finished Alexandre Lefebvre’s Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford UP, 2013). It was a great read!  Maybe that’s just me in recoil from all the consciousness stuff I’ve been reading—glad to be back in more familiar territory: political philosophy.  Not just that, however.  It is just enthralling to read a closely reasoned, carefully constructed, argument.  There just are too few well-written and well-thought (if I can coin that adjective) books. 

Interestingly, when I think through what Lefebvre has to say in order to offer up the gist in this post, it’s not all that startling.  It is the care with which he makes his case that is exhilarating, not the substance (although it is hardly shabby. Just not all that startling either.)

So here’s the summary.

Bergson is a follower of Darwin. His reliance on evolutionary explanations for human phenomenon (like religion and morality) is quirky because he is a vitalist.  He believes in a fundamental “life force” that drives evolution, so is prone to 1) ascribe intention to evolution and 2) to think evolution has a single, dominating force (instead of resulting from a multitude of random—and unrelated—genetic mutations.)

In addition, Bergson is a dualist.  He believes that there exist spiritual entities that are distinct from material ones—and that the failure to give the spiritual its due is disastrous for human beings.  Bergson quite cheerfully declares himself a “mystic” and asserts that the spiritual is ineffable even as humans have various intimations of its existence (and importance!).

How do these basic commitments on Bergson’s part play into an account of human rights?  It all stems from the paradoxes built into morality.  For Bergson, human morality is a product of evolution.  “The evolutionary function of moral obligation is to hold society together. Its function is to ‘ensure the cohesion of the group.’” (page 25; quoted passage is from Bergson).  Unlike other theorists of morals, Bergson is adamant that morality is “natural,” is produced by evolution, as opposed to something that humans add on top of evolution.  Morality is not a human contrivance that tries to counteract natural impulses; instead, morality itself is a natural impulse.  Humans are social animals, utterly dependent on social relations to stay alive and to reproduce (the Darwinian imperatives).  Morality, insofar as it make sociality possible, is thus produced by evolution as are other human capacities essential to survival and reproduction.

The paradox comes from the fact that morality is exclusive.  Societies are “closed,” non-infinite, groupings.  One of the things essential to a society’s and its members’ survival and flourishing is protection from external threats.  Morality performs its service to life in part by distinguishing between friend (insider, fellow member) and enemy (outside, threat, non-member). 

“Closure is essential to moral obligation because its evolutionary purpose is to ensure the cohesion of the group in the face of an adversary.  It is this feature of exclusivity that Bergson brings to the fore with the concept of the closed society.  The purpose of this concept is not to claim that this or that society is closed.  Instead, it designates a tendency toward closure on the part of all societies” (25).

For this reason, war seems inevitable—and certainly human history appears to demonstrate that war is ineradicable.  Morality is good for the survival of particular societies—but is not conducive to the survival of human beings as a whole (especially once technology has given humans the means to mass annihilation) or to the survival of individuals (even the “winning side” in a war has many of its members killed in the contest).  To put it most bluntly: human morality generates not only cooperation and fellow-feeling with insiders, but also aggression toward outsiders.  For all the sophistication of his argument, Lefebvre ends up in a very familiar place: the claim that exclusion justifies doing harm to those designated as “other,” as beyond the pale.

Human rights, then, are an attempt to counteract the tendency of morality to sanction violence.  “Human rights are . . . an effort . . . that seeks to counteract our evolved moral nature. . . . Bergson [offers] a vision not just of what human rights must protect us from (i.e., morality) but also why (i.e., because of its [morality’s] biological origins” (54, 57). 

The standard way to address this paradox—that we need morality and that we also need something to counteract morality—depends on two planks.  The first recognizes that morality (the closed society) at least in the so-called Western world post 1700 functions most powerfully in the form of the nation-state.  Wars take place between nation-states—and the brutalities inflicted upon “enemies” have only increased since that time.  (The bombing of cities, the murder of refugees.)  Even in times of peace between nation-states, a particular state can identify certain people who live within its boundaries as “enemies within” and treat them differently and harshly in distinction from fully admitted members (citizens).

In response, there have been repeated efforts to create supra-national institutions that could rein in the aggressions of nation-states.  Such institutions have proved mostly ineffective.  When it comes to actually wielding power—and in securing the affective consent of people—the nation-state stands supreme, only minimally beholden to efforts to establish (and enforce) international law.  The institutionalization of human rights has mostly been a failure. Human rights are most fully protected when and where the state’s power has been used to uphold them.  But that’s useless in cases where it is the state itself that is abusing the human rights of some peoples living in its territory, not to mention its abuse of human rights on enemies during wartime.

The second plank is to widen morality in such a way that it is no longer exclusive.  The relevant “in group” would be all human beings—or, as proponents of animal rights desire—all animals.  Lefebvre demonstrates convincingly that the idea of “widening the circle” to be more inclusive is a prevalent call in much of contemporary political and moral philosophy.  Human rights are meant to apply “universally” and thus stand in direct opposition to any and all distinctions that would justify treating some people (or some groups) differently from others. 

Philosophers calling for expanding the circle offer different accounts of how that might be achieved.  Basically, the Humeans call for extending sympathy outwards.  Fellow feeling for those who can suffer—humans and animals—will underwrite our extending our consideration to them.  Kantians rely on reason to bring us to the recognition that only universalism keeps us from self-contradiction.  Utilitarians ask us to admit that suffering is a wrong—and then to avoid all actions that would increase the amount of suffering in the world. 

Levebvre’s most original contribution to such debates is to deny (forcefully) that expanding the circle is possible or adequate.  Morality, he insists, must be exclusive.  That is its whole modus operandi.  It only performs its natural function by being exclusive.  So it’s simply wrong to think it can be transformed into something non-exclusive. 

Human rights, therefore, must be something utterly different from morality, not an extension of it.  Lefebvre expresses this point by contrasting a distinction in quantity from one in quality.  We run into Bergson’s dualism here (although I doubt whether we have to embrace that dualism in order to adopt the distinction between a difference in quantity from a difference in quality.)  In any case, Bergson thinks “intelligence” deals in quantities and that we need another faculty (intuition or insight) to handle qualities.  Here’s Lefebvre’s account of Bergson’s view:

“[I]ntelligence does some things very well but not others.  It has a natural affinity with space and quantity and a natural aversion to time and quality.  More to the point, given its aptitude for quantity and number, intelligence views all forms of change in terms of (quantitative) differences of degree rather than (qualitative) differences in kind.  This includes moral change, of course.  It is no accident or simple error, therefore, which leads us to consider the evolution of morality in terms of expansion, growth, and continuous progress. . . . Intelligence is by its nature driven to picture the evolution of morality as the extension of a selfsame core (i.e., moral obligation) to more and more people” (49-50).

Bergson, then, wants to introduce an entirely different principle, one not based on moral obligation, as the underpinning of a human rights regime. Bergson wants to provide the basis for an “open society” that contrasts with closed societies that standard morality creates.  He strives to point his readers toward “a qualitatively different kind of morality, irreducible to obligation.  It [intelligence] struggles to conceive of a moral tendency that is not object attached.  And it struggles, as Bergson will come to say, to imagine a way to love that does not grow out of exclusive attachments” (50).

Before getting to a description of this “different kind of morality,” a morality of love, one other preliminary point must be made.  Bergson doubts the motivational power of reason.  He does not think that practical reason of the Kantian sort can move people to action.  Instead, he thinks morality must be a matter of habitus, of practice. 

“It is helpful to observe what Bergson has in common with an important strand of practical philosophy—call it antirationalism.  As Carl Power puts it, ‘Bergson might be said to join a counter-tradition that begins with Aristotle and includes more recent names such as Dewey, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, and Taylor.  What these disparate figures share is a propensity to see the human agent . . . as a being who is immediately engaged in the world and whose understanding of self and other is first and foremost expressed in practice.’ Broadly speaking, for these thinkers moral life is not primarily a matter of concepts and principles but of concrete durable practices that integrate moral obligations into the texture of everyday life. On that view, morality is not primarily a matter of weighing the purity of one’s intentions or assessing the partiality of one’s judgments.  Certainly these can be part of moral life; but they are not its backbone.  Instead, most of the time the performance of our moral obligations is prereflexive and embedded in the habits and activities of day-today life” (57-8).

It is precisely this emphasis on “practice” that explains Lefebvre’s title: human rights as a way of life.  Only through practice, through the embedding of human rights into the fabric of daily existence, can they take up a place in our world.  The “love” that Bergson advocates must be habitual for humans, must, in a concrete way, become routine.  It’s worth quoting Lefebvre a bit more on what a reliance of “habit” means.

“With his focus on habit, Bergson . . . wants to shift the attention of moral philosophy away from its preoccupation with the rational self-present agent.  Only on rare occasions does the performance of duty involve a conscious or deliberative process.  By and large, it is automatic, second nature, and unconscious. As he says, we ordinarily ‘conform to our obligations rather than think of them.’ Hence the importance of habits, which for Bergson are the true fabric of moral life.  In fact, moral or social life . . . is nothing other than an interlocking web of habits that connect the individual to a variety of groups.  But they don’t merely join the individual to different groups, as if he or she were pre-formed.  Rather, habits constitute the very stuff of our personalities.  They are what make us into parents, professionals, citizens, and the like” (58-9).

We are in recognizably Aristotelean territory here.  Character (personality, selfhood) is created through what we do—and our doings quickly become habits.  Humans are creatures, mostly, of regularity.  Which is not entirely a good thing.  “Habit seems to favor not only passivity and acquiescence but also conformity and laziness” (59).

The would-be moral reformer, the preacher, must lead the audience to become aware of their habits and to consider whether they are desirable or not.  Bergson “repeatedly characterizes love and openness as an ‘effort.’ Love [of the kind he advocated] does not extend moral obligation and it does not follow the habits of everyday life.  It defies them” (60).

So, Bergson wants to enlist the power of habit by making this open love habitual, but he must first break through the habits that make standard closed morality the default mode for most people.

OK!  Finally, what is this open love?  How to describe it, how to experience it, how to incorporate into one’s way of being in the world, how to make it “a way of life”?

Lefebvre cannot—and does not aim to—offer definitive answers to these questions.  The very idea (better: the very experience) of open love grows out of Bergson’s self-proclaimed “mysticism.”  Intelligence has nothing of use to say on this topic.  What Lefebvre wants to show is that “Human rights are works of love that initiate us into love” (89).  We can only proceed by way of examples—and of practices.  Examples “disclose love; they bring it into the world” (88).

As mostly practiced in contemporary society (the human rights practices and discourse most familiar to us), human rights attempts to regulate our world of closed societies, aiming to prevent or (at least mitigate) the abuses to which closed societies are prone.  Normal human rights strive to protect us from hate.

Open human rights aim not to protect, but to convert.  “Human rights are the best-placed institution for the open tendency to gain traction in the world” (89).  They offer a pathway toward a conversion to love, to taking up love as our way of life.

Lefebvre offers four examples of this way of life.  I don’t think they are meant to convince as much as meant to appeal. The first example is the person who says “yes” to the world and to existence, someone who radically affirms that this life is good and a source of joy. “In this sense, love is a disposition or a mood.  It is a way of being in the world, rather than a direct attachment to any particular thing in it” (93).

The second example is a radical indifference (i.e. making no distinctions, and hence an “open” justice), “according no preference to any of the beings in our path, in giving everyone our entire presence, and responding with precise faithfulness to the call they utter to us. . . . Yet this glance is the opposite of an insensitive glance; it is a loving glance which distinguishes, within each individual being, precisely what he or she needs: the words that touch him, and the treatment he deserves” (94 in Lefebvre; he is quoting Louis Lavelle). 

The third example comes from Deleuze’s description of the moment in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend when the on-looking crowd is deeply invested in Rogue Riderhood’s recovery from an apparent drowning.  That crowd is rooting for the life in Riderhood, not attuned to his specific person, personality, or history.  They extend those good wishes to everything that has life, but attuned to life’s manifestation in this singular instance which provides the specific occasion for this affirmation of life.

Finally, Lefebvre considers Elizabeth Costello, the main character of J. M. Coetzee’s novel of that name.  Elizabeth refuses the “insensibility to the pain of outsiders”(97) that, for her, must accompany the complicity with the slaughter of animals that all eating of meat entails.  She opens herself up to that pain—and in the process offends any number of human beings, to the extent that she doesn’t quite feel herself part of the human race any longer. 

In summary, Lefebvre tells us that “all four portraits are preoccupied with the care of others.  Or more precisely, each presents a mode of care made possible only once love ceases to be dedicated to a specific object. [With the first example] it is radiant joy and welcome; with Lavelle it is the responsiveness of indifference; with Deleuze it is attentiveness to singularity; and with Coetzee is it empathy not bound with the group” (100).

Obviously, just how moving these examples will prove to different readers will vary.  Lefebvre is offering, in a different key admittedly, his version of the argument between where to place one’s political efforts: in reforming laws and institutions or in reforming hearts and minds.  To his credit, he refuses to make this an either/or.  We need to do both; he resists the temptation (familiar in various leftist critiques) to see the discourse and institutions of human rights as corrupt and/or positively harmful. 

But, clearly, his focus is on conversion, on change at the individual level.  He struggles (in my view) to connect his perspective to Foucault’s (and the ancients) idea of “care for the self.”  I find this the least convincing move in his book—and I don’t think he really nails the connection he is trying to establish.  For me, even if I buy the idea of human rights as a “way of life,” that way of life had much more to do with my relation to others than it does to my relation to my self.  The “care” that Lefebvre focuses on in the passage quoted in the previous paragraph is not “care for the self” but “care of others.”  Both morality and love are about relations to what is beyond the self.  So I think it a mistake to try to bring them into the purview of the self.

I have undertaken to write a review of Lefebvre’s follow-up book, Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton UP, 2024).  I haven’t started reading it yet, but am eager to get into it since I enjoyed reading this human rights book so much.  More on Lefebvre once I do finish the new book.

Fact/Value

I noted in my last post that many twentieth-century artists aspired to an “innocent” perception of the world; they wanted to see (and sense) the world’s furniture outside of the “concepts” by which we categorize things.  We don’t know if babies enjoy such innocence in the first few months of life—or if they only perceive an undifferentiated chaos.  It is certainly true that, by six months at the latest, infants have attached names to things.  Asked to reach for the cup, the six month old will grasp the cup, not the plate.

If the modernist artist (I have no idea what 21st century artists are trying to do) wants to sever the tight bond between percept and concept, it has been the scientists who want to disentangle fact from value.  The locus classicus of the fact/value divide is Hume’s insistence that we cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.”  For humanists, that argument appears to doom morality to irreality, to merely being something that humans make up.  So the humanists strive to reconnect fact and value.  But, for many scientists, the firewall between fact and value is exactly what underlies science’s ability to get at the “truth” of the way things are.  Only observations and propositions (assertions) shorn of value have any chance of being “objective.”  Values introduce a “bias” into accounts of what is the case, of what pertains in the world.

Thus, it has been that artists, the humanists, and philosophers friendly to aesthetics and qualia that have argued that fact and value cannot be disentangled.  Pragmatism offers the most aggressive of these philosophical assaults on the fact/value divide.  The tack pragmatism takes in these debates is not to argue against Hume’s logic, his “demonstration” that you can’t deduce an “ought” from an “is.” 

Instead, pragmatism offers a thoroughly Darwinian account of human (and not just human) being in the world.  Every living creature is always and everywhere “evaluating” its environment.  There are no passive perceivers.  Pragmatism denies what James and Dewey both labeled “the spectator view of knowledge.”  Humans (and other animals) are not distanced from the world, looking at it from afar, and making statements about it from that position of non-involvement.  Rather, all organisms are immersed in an environment, acting upon it even as they are being acted upon by it.  The organism is, from the start, engaged in evaluating what in that environment might be of use to it and what might be a threat.  The pursuit of knowledge (“inquiry” in the pragmatist jargon) is 1) driven by this need to evaluate the environment in terms of resource/threat and 2) an active process of doing things (experiments; trial and error) that will better show if what the environment offers will serve or should be avoided.

If, in this Darwinian/pragmatist view, an organism was to encounter anything that was neutral, that had no impact one way or the other on the organism’s purposes, that thing would most likely not be noticed at all, or would quickly disappear as a subject of interest or attention.  As I mentioned in the last post, this seems a flaw in pragmatist psychology.  Humans and other animals display considerable curiosity, prodding at things to learn about them even in the absence of any obvious or direct utility.  There are, I would argue, instances of “pure” research, where the pay-off is not any discernible improvement in an organism’s ability to navigate the world.  Sometimes we just want to know something to satisfy that particular kind of itch.

So maybe the idea is that scientists aspire to that kind of purity, just as so many 20th century artists aspired to the purity of a non-referential, non-thought-laden art.  And that scientific version of the desire for purity gets connected to an epistemological claim that only such purity can guarantee the non-biased truth of the conclusions the scientist reaches.  The pragmatist will respond: 1) there is still the desire for knowledge driving your inquiry, so you have not achieved a purity that removes the human agent and her interests; and 2) the very process of inquiry, which is interactive, means that the human observer has influenced what the world displays to her observations (which is why Heisenberg’s work was so crucial to Dewey—and seemed to Dewey a confirmation of what pragmatism had been saying for thirty years before Heisenberg articulated his axioms about observation and uncertainty.)  The larger point: since action (on the part of humans and for other organisms) is motivated, and because knowledge can only be achieved through action (not passively), there is no grasping of “fact” that has not been driven by some “value” being attached to gaining (seeking out) that knowledge. 

Even if we accept this pragmatist assault on the fact/value divide, we are left with multiple problems. One is linguistic.  Hilary Putnam, in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Harvard UP, 2002), basically argues that there are no neutral words, at least no neutral nouns or verbs.  (I have written about Kenneth Burke’s similar argument in my book, Pragmatist Politics (University of Minnesota P, 2012).  Every statement about the world establishes the relation of the speaker to that world (and to the people to whom the statement is addressed.)  In other words, every speech act is a way of adjusting the speaker’s relation to the content and the audience of that utterance.  Speech acts, like all actions, are motivated—and thus can be linked back to what the speaker values, what the speaker strives to accomplish.  Our words are always shot through and through with values—from the start.  And those values cannot be drained from our words (or from our observations) to leave only a residue of “pure” fact.  Fact and value are intertwined from the get go—and cannot be disentangled. 

Putnam, however, (like James, Dewey, and Kenneth Burke) is a realist.  Even if, as James memorably puts it, “the trail of the human serpent is over all,” the entanglement of human aspirations with observations about the world and others does not mean the non-self must forego its innings.  There is feedback.  Reality does make itself known in the ways that it offers resistance to attempts to manipulate it.  James insists that we don’t know how plastic “reality” is until we have tried to push the boundaries of what we deem possible.  But limits will be reached, will be revealed, at certain points.  Pragmatism’s techno-optimism means that James and Dewey thought that today’s limits might be overcome tomorrow.  That’s what generates the controversial pragmatist “theory of truth.”  Truth is what the experiments, the inquiries, of today have revealed.  But those truths can only be reached as a result of a process of experimentation, not passively observed, and those truths are not “final,” because future experiments may reveal new possibilities in the objects that we currently describe in some particular way.  Science is constantly upending received notions of the way things are.  If the history of science tells us anything, it should be that “certainties” continually yield to new and different accounts.  Truth is “made” through the process of inquiry—and truth is provisional.  Truth is always, in Popper’s formulation, always open to disconfirmation.

In short, pragmatism destabilizes “fact” even as it proclaims “value” is ineliminable.

I have suggested that “fact” is best understood as what in the external world frustrates (or, at least, must be navigated by) desire.  Wishes are not horses.  Work must be done to accomplish some approximation of what one desires.  The point is simply that facts are not stable and that our account of facts will be the product of our interaction with them, an interaction that is driven by the desires that motivate that engagement.

What about “value”?  I have been using the term incredibly loosely.  If we desire something, then we value it.  But we usually want to distinguish between different types of value—and morality usually wants to gain a position from which it can endorse some desires and condemn others.  In short, value is a battleground, where there are constant attempts to identify what is “truly” valuable alongside attempts to banish imposters from the field.  There is economic value, eudemonic value, moral value, and health value.  So, for example, one can desire to smoke tobacco, but in terms of “value for health,” that desire will be deemed destructive. 

Any attempt to put some flesh on the bare bones term “value” will immediately run into the problem of “value for” and “pure” (or intrinsic) value.  Some values are instrumental; they are means toward a specific end.  If you want to be healthy, it is valuable not to smoke.  If you want to become a concert pianist, it is valuable to practice. 

The search for “intrinsic” values can quickly become circular—or lead to infinite regress. Is the desire to become a concert pianist “intrinsic”? It certainly seems to function as an end point, as something desired that motivates and organizes a whole set of actions.  But it is easy to ask “why” do I value becoming a concert pianist so highly?  For fame, for love of music, to develop what I seem to have talent for (since, given my inborn talents, I couldn’t become a professional baseball player)?  Do we—could we ever—reach rock bottom here? 

The Darwinians, of course, think they have hit rock bottom.  Survival to the point of being able to reproduce.  That’s the fundamental value that drives life.  The preservation of life across multiple generations.  When organisms are, from the get go, involved in “evaluation,” in assessing what in the environment is of value to them, that evaluation is in terms of what avails life.  (The phrase “wealth is what avails life” comes from a very different source: John Ruskin’s Unto this Last, his screed against classical liberalism’s utilitarian economics.) 

One problem for the Darwinians is that humans (at least, among animals) so often value things, and act in ways, that thwart or even contradict the Darwinian imperatives.  Daniel Dennett argues that such non-Darwinian desires are “parasites”; they hitch a ride on the capacities that the human organism has developed through natural selection’s overriding goal of making a creature well suited to passing on its genes.  Some parasites, Dennett writes, “surely enhance our fitness, making us more likely to have lots of descendants (e.g. methods of hygiene, child-rearing, food preparation); others are neutral—but may be good for us in other, more important regards (e.g., literacy, music, and art), and some are surely deleterious to our genetic future, but even they may be good for us in other ways that matter more to us (the techniques of birth control are an obvious example)” (Freedom Evolves, p. 177).

Whoa!  I love that Dennett is not a Darwinian fundamentalist. (In particular, it’s good to see him avoid the somersaults other Darwinians perform in their effort to reduce music and art to servants of the need to reproduce.) The Darwinian imperative does not drive all before it.  But surely it is surprising that Dennett would talk of things that “matter more to us” than the need to insure our “genetic future.”  He has introduced a pluralism of values into a Darwinian picture that is more usually deployed to identify an overriding fundamental value.

Other candidates for a bedrock intrinsic value run into similar difficulties.  Too much human behavior simply negates each candidate.  For example, we might, with Kant, want to declare that each individual human life is sacred, an end in itself, not to be used or violated.  But every society has articulated conditions under which the killing of another human being is acceptable.  And if we attempt to find “the” value that underwrites this acceptance of killing nothing emerges.  So it does seem that we are left with a pluralism of values.  Different humans value different things.  And that is true within a single society as well as across cultures.  Values, like facts, are in process—continually being made and re-made.  And, as with facts, there is feedback—in terms of the praise/blame provided by others, but also in terms of the self-satisfaction achieved by acting in accordance with one’s values.  Does becoming a concert pianist satisfy me?  Does it make me happy?  Does it make me respect myself?  Am I full of regrets about the missed opportunities that came with practicing five hours a day?  Would I do it all over again (that ultimate Nietzschean test)?

When it comes to entrenched values, things get even trickier.  Here’s the dilemma: we usually condemn actions that are “interested.”  We don’t trust the word of someone who is trying to sell us something.  We want independent information from that which the seller provides.  The seller has an “interest” in distorting the facts.  Now we are back to the urge to find an “objective” viewpoint.  In cases of lying, the issue is straightforward.  The interested party knows all the relevant information, but withholds some of it in order to deceive.

But what if one’s “interest” distorts one’s view of things?  What if the flaw is epistemological more than it is moral?  I see what I want to see. Confirmation bias.  My “values” dictate how I understand the circumstances within which I dwell.  My very assessment of my environment is to a large extent a product of my predilections.  Feedback is of very limited use here.  Humans seem extraordinarily impervious to feedback, able to doggedly pursue counterproductive actions for long periods of time.  In this scenario, “interest” can look a lot like what some theorists call “ideology.”  The question is how to correct for the distortions that are introduced by the interested viewer.  Isn’t there some “fact” of the matter that can settle disputes?

The despairing conclusion is that, in many instances, there is no settling of such disputes.   What would it take to convince Trumpian partisans that the 2020 election was not stolen?  Or that Covid vaccines do not cause cancer?  All the usual forms of “proof” have been unavailing.  Instead of having “fact” drive “value” out of the world as the humanists feared (that feat motivated Kant’s whole philosophy), here we have “value” driving “fact” to the wall.  A world of pluralistic values creates, it now appears, a world of pluralistic facts.  No wonder that we get a call for bolstering the bulwark of “fact.” 

As I have already made clear, I don’t think we can get back to (or even that we were ever really there) a world of unsullied facts.  Our understandings of the world have always been “interested” in the ways that pragmatism identifies.  The only safeguard against untrammeled fantasy is feedback—and the 2020 stolen election narrative shows how successfully feedback can be avoided.  We have the various rhetorical moves in our toolbox—the presentation of evidence, the making of arguments, the outlining of consequences, emotional appeals to loyalties, sympathies, and indignation—for getting people to change their minds. These techniques are the social forms of feedback that go along with the impersonal feedback provided by the world at large.  But that’s it.  There is no definitive clincher, no knock-down argument or proof that will get everyone to agree.  It’s pluralism all the way down.

Here’s something else that is deeply troubling—and that I don’t know exactly where I stand.  Is there any difference between “interest” and moral value?  Usually the two are portrayed as opposed.  Morality tries to get individuals to view things from a non-personal point of view (Thomas Nagel’s famous “view from nowhere” or Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”).  “Interest” is linked to what would personally benefit me—with nary a care for how it might harm you.  Some philosophers try to bridge this gap with the concept of “enlightened self-interest.”  The idea is that social interactions are an iterative game; I am in a long-term relation with you, so cheating you now may pay off in the short-term, but actually screws up the possibility of a sustained, and mutually beneficial, relationship over the long haul.  So it is not really in my interest to harm you in this moment.  Morality, then, becomes prudential; it is the wisest thing to do given that we must live together.  Humans are social animals and the basic rules of morality (which encode various forms of consideration of the other) make social relations much better for all involved.

In this scenario, then, “interest” and “moral value” are the same if (and only if) the individual takes a sufficiently “long view” of his interest.  The individual’s “interests” are what he values—and among the things he values is acting in ways his society deems “moral.”  There will remain a tension between what seems desirable in the moment and the longer term interest served by adhering to morality’s attempt to instill the “long view,” but that tension does not negate the idea that the individual is acting in his “interest.”

A more stringent view, one that would drive a deeper wedge between morality and interest, would hold that morality always calls for some degree of self-abnegation.  Morality requires altruism or sacrifice, the voluntary surrender of things I desire to others.  I must act against selfishness, against self-interest, in order to become truly moral.  This is the view of morality that says it entails the curbing of desire.  I must renounce some of my desires to be moral.  Thus, morality is not merely prudential, not just the most winning strategy for self-interest in the long run.  Morality introduces a set of values that are in contradiction with the values that characterize self-interest.  Morality brings along with it prohibitions, not just recommendations of the more prudent way to handle relations with one’s fellows.  It’s not simply practice justice if you want peace.  It’s practice justice even if there is no pay-off, even if you are only met with ingratitude and resentment.

To go back to the Darwinian/pragmatist basic scenario.  We have an organism embedded in an environment.  That organism is always involved in evaluating that environment in terms of its own needs and interests.  Thus values are there from the very start and inextricably involved in the perception of facts.  The question is whether we can derive the existence of morality in human societies from the needs that arise from the fact of human sociality.  That’s the Darwinian account of morality offered by Philip Kitcher among others, which understands morality in terms of its beneficial consequences for the preservation and reproduction of human life.  Morality in that account aligns with the fundamental interest identified in Darwinian theory.

Or is morality a Dennett-like parasite?  An intervention into the Darwinian scheme that moves away from a strict pursuit of interest, of what enhances the individual’s survival and ability to reproduce. 

To repeat: I don’t know which alternative I believe.  And am going to leave it there for now.

Philosophy and How One Acts

A friend with whom I have been reading various philosophical attempts to come to terms with what consciousness is and does writes to me about “illusionism,” the claim that we do not have selves. We are simply mistaken in thinking the self exists. The basic argument is the classic empiricist case against “substance.” There are various phenomena (let’s call them “mental states” in this case), but no stuff, no thing, no self, to which those mental states adhere, or in which they are collected. Thomas Metzger is one philosopher who holds this position and in an interview tells us that his position has no experiential consequences. It is not clear to me whether Metzger thinks (in a Nietzschean way) that the self is an unavoidable illusion or if Metzger thinks that ll the phenomena we attribute to the self would just continue to be experienced in exactly the same way even if we dispensed with the notion (illusion) of the self. In either case, accepting or denying Metzger’s position changes nothing. Belief or non-belief in the self is not a “difference that makes a difference” to recall William James’s formula in the first chapter of his book, Pragmatism.

The issue, then, seems to be what motivates a certain kind of intellectual restlessness, a desire to describe the world (the terms of existence) in ways that “get it right”–especially if the motive does not seem to be any effect on actual behavior. It’s “pure” theory, abstracted from any consequences in how one goes about the actualities of daily life.

There does exist, for some people, a certain kind of restless questioning.  I have had a small number of close friends in my life, and what they share is that kind of restlessness.  A desire to come up with coherent accounts of why things are the way they are, especially of why people act the ways they do. People are endlessly surprising and fascinating. Accounting for them leads to speculations that are constantly being revised and restated because each account seems, in one way or another, to fail to “get things right.”  There is always the need for another round of words, of efforts to grasp the “why” and “how” of things.  Most people, in my experience, don’t feel this need to push at things.  I was always trying to get my students to push their thinking on to the next twist—and rarely succeeded in getting them to do so. And for myself this restless, endless inquiry generates a constant stream of words, since each inadequate account means a new effort to try to get it more accurately this time.

Clearly, since I tried to get my students to do this, I think of such relentless questioning as an intellectual virtue. But what is it good for?  I take that to be the core issue of your long email to me.  And I don’t have an answer.  Where id is, ego shall be.  But it seems very clear that being able to articulate one’s habitual ways of (for example) relating to one’s lover, to know what triggers anger or sadness or neediness, does little (if anything) to change the established patterns.  Understanding (even if there were any way to show that the understanding was actually accurate) doesn’t yield much in the way of behavioral results.

This gets to your comment that if people really believed Darwin was right, as many people do, then they wouldn’t eat animals.  William James came to believe that we have our convictions first—and then invent the intellectual accounts/theories that we say justify the convictions.  In other words, we mistake the causal sequence.  We take the cause (our convictions) as the effect (our theory), when it is really the other way around.  Nietzsche was prone to say the very same thing. 

One way to say this: we have Darwin, but will use him to justify exactly opposite behaviors.  You say if we believed Darwin we wouldn’t eat animals.  I assume that the logic is that Darwin reveals animals as our kin, so eating them is a kind of cannibalism.  We don’t eat dogs because they feel “too close” to us; that feeling should be extended to all animals, not just fellow humans and domestic pets.  (The French eat horse meat although Americans won’t).  But many people use Darwin to rationalize just the opposite.  We humans have evolved as protein seeking omnivores and we developed domesticating animals we eat just as we developed agriculture to grow plants we eat.  Even if we argue that domestication and agriculture were disasters, proponents of so-called “paleo diets” include meat eating in their attempt to get back to something thought basic to our evolved requirements.  So even is Darwin is absolutely right about how life—and specifically human life—emerged, people will use the content of his theory to justify completely contradictory behaviors.

This analysis, of course, raises two questions.  1) What is the cause of our convictions if it is not some set of articulable beliefs about how the world is?  James only answer is “temperament,” an in-built sensibility, a predilection to see the world in a certain way.  (Another book I have just finished reading, Kevin Mitchell’s Free Agents [Princeton UP, 2023], says about 50% of our personality is genetically determined and that less than 10% is derived from family environment.  Mitchell has an earlier book, titled Innate [Princeton UP, 2018], where he goes into detail about how such a claim is supported.)  Nietzsche, in some places, posits an in-built will to power.  All the articulations and intellectualisms are just after the fact rationalizations.  In any case, “temperament” is obviously no answer at all.  We do what we do because we are who we are—and how we got to be who we are is a black box.  Try your damndest, it’s just about impossible to make sure your child ends up heterosexual or with some other set of desires. 

2)So why are James and Nietzsche still pursuing an articulated account of “how it really works”?  Is there no consequence at all at “getting it right”?  Shouldn’t their theories also be understood as just another set of “after the fact” rationalization?  In other words, reason is always late to the party—which suggests that consciousness is not essential to behavior, just an after-effect.

That last statement, of course, is the conclusion put forward by the famous Libet tests.  The ones that say we move our hand milli-seconds before we consciously order our hand to move.  Both Dennett [in Freedom Evolves (Penguin, 2003) and Mitchell (in Free Agents) have to claim the Libet experiment is faulty in order to save any causal power for consciousness.  For the two of them, who want to show that humans actually possess free will, consciousness must be given a role in the unfolding of action.  There has to be a moment of deliberation, of choosing between options—and that choosing is guided by reason (by an evaluation of the options and a decision made between those options) and beliefs (some picture of how the world really is.)  I know, from experience, that I have trouble sleeping if I drink coffee after 2pm.  I reason that I should not drink coffee after 2pm if I want to sleep.  So I refrain from doing so.  A belief about a fact that is connected to a reasoned account of a causal sequence and a desire to have one thing happen rather than another: presto! I choose to do one thing rather than another based on that belief and those reasons.  To make that evaluation certainly seems to require consciousness—a consciousness that observes patterns, that remembers singular experiences that can be assembled into those patterns, that can have positive forward-looking desires to have some outcomes rather than others (hence evaluation of various possible bodily and worldly states of affairs), and that can reason about what courses of action are most likely to bring those states of affairs into being.  (In short, the classical account of “rationality” and of “reason-based action.”)

If this kind of feedback loop actually exists, if I can learn that some actions produce desirable results more dependably than others, then the question becomes (it seems to me): at what level of abstraction does “knowledge” no longer connect to action?  Here’s what I am struggling to see.  Learned behavior, directed by experiences that provide concrete feedback, seems fairly easy to describe in terms of very concrete instances.  But what happens when we get to belief in God—or Darwin?  With belief in God, we seem to see that humans can persist in beliefs without getting any positive feedback at all.  I believe in a loving god even as my child dies of cancer and all my prayers for divine intervention yield no result.  (The classic overdramatized example.)  Faced with this fact, many theologians will just say: it’s not reasonable, so your models of reasoned behavior are simply irrelevant at this point.  A form of dualism.  There’s another belief-to-action loop at play.  Another black box.

On Darwin it seems to me a question of intervention.  Natural selection exists entirely apart from human action/intention/desire etc.  It does its thing whether there are humans in the world or not.  That humans can “discover” the fact of natural selection’s existence and give detailed accounts of how it works is neither here nor there to natural selection itself.  This is science (in one idealized version of what science is): an accurate description of how nature works.  The next step seems to be: is there any way for humans to intervene in natural processes to either 1) change them (as when we try to combat cancer) or 2) harness the energies or processes of nature to serve specific human ends. (This is separate from how human actions inadvertently, unintentionally, alter natural processes–as is the case in global warming. I am currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future–and will discuss it in a future post.)

In both cases (i.e intentionally changing a natural process of harnessing the energies of a natural process toward a specifically human-introduced end), what’s driving the human behavior are desires for certain outcomes (health in the case of the cancer patient), or any number of possible desires in the cases of intervention.  I don’t think the scientific explanation has any direct relation to those desires.  In other words, nothing about the Darwinian account of how the world is dictates how one should desire to stand in relation to that world.  Darwin’s theory of evolution, I am saying, has no obvious, necessary, or univocal ethical consequences.  It does not tell us how to live—even if certain Darwinian fundamentalists will bloviate about “survival of the fittest” and gender roles in hunter-gatherer societies. 

I keep trying to avoid it, but I am a dualist when it comes to ethics.  The non-human universe has no values, no meanings, no clues about how humans should live.  Hurricanes are facts, just like evolution is a fact.  As facts, they inform us about the world we inhabit—and mark out certain limits that it is very, very useful for us to know.  But the use we put them to is entirely human generated, just as the uses the mosquito puts his world to are entirely mosquito driven.  To ignore the facts, the limits, can be disastrous, but pushing against them, trying to alter them, is also a possibility.  And the scientific knowledge can be very useful in indicating which kinds of intervention will prove effective.  But it has nothing to say about what kinds of intervention are desirable.

I am deeply uncomfortable in reaching this position.  Like most of the philosophers I read, I do not want to be a dualist.  I want to be a naturalist—where “naturalism” means that everything that exists is a product of natural forces.  Hence all the efforts out there to offer an evolutionary account of “consciousness” (thus avoiding any kind of Cartesian dualism) and the complementary efforts to provide an evolutionary account of morality (for example, Philip Kitcher, The Ethical Project [Harvard UP, 2011.) I am down with the idea that morality is an evolutionary product—i.e. that it develops out of the history and “ecology” of humans as social animals.  But there still seems to me a discontinuity between the morality that humans have developed and the lack of morality of cancer cells, gravity, hurricanes, photosynthesis, and the laws of thermodynamics.  Similarly, there seems to me a gap between the non-consciousness of rocks and the consciousness of living beings.  So I can’t get down with panpsychism even if I am open to evolutionary accounts of the emergence of consciousness from more primitive forms to full-blown self-consciousness.

Of course, some Darwinians don’t see a problem.  Evolution does provide all living creatures with a purpose—to survive—and a meaning—to pass on one’s genes.  Success in life (satisfaction) derives from those two master motives—and morality could be derived from serving those two motives.  Human sociality is a product of those motives (driven in particular by the long immaturity, non-self-sustaining condition, of human children)—and morality is just the set of rules that makes sociality tenable.  So the theory of evolution gives us morality along with an account of how things are.  The fact/value gap overcome.  How to square this picture of evolution with its randomness, its not having any end state in view, is unclear.  The problem of attributing purposes to natural selection, to personifying it, has bedeviled evolutionary theory from the start.

For Dennett, if I am reading him correctly, the cross-over point is “culture,”—and, more specifically, language.  Language provides a storage device, a way of accumulating knowledge of how things work and of successful ways of coping in this world.  Culture is a natural product, but once in place it offers a vantage point for reflection upon and intervention in natural processes.  Humans are the unnatural animal, the ones who can perversely deviate from the two master motives of evolution (survival and procreation) even as they strive to submit nature to their whims.  It’s an old theme: humans appear more free from natural drivers, but even as freedom is a source of their pride and glory, it often is the cause of their downfall. (Hubris anyone?) Humans are not content with the natural order as they find it.  They constantly try to change it—with sometimes marvelous, with other times disastrous, results.

But that only returns us to the mystery of where this restless desire to revise the very terms of existence comes from.  To go back to James and Nietzsche: it doesn’t seem like our theories, our abstract reasonings and philosophies, are what generate the behavior.  Instead, the restlessness comes first—and the philosophizing comes after as a way of explaining the actions.  See, the philosophers say, the world is this particular way, so it makes sense for me to behave in this specific way.  But, says James, the inclination to behave that way came first—and then the philosophy was tailored to match. 

So, to end this overlong wandering, back where I began.  Bertrand Russell (in his A History of Western Philosophy) said that Darwin’s theory is the perfect expression of rapacious capitalism—and thus it is no surprise that it was devised during the heyday of laissez-faire.  That analysis troubles me because it offers a plausible suspicion of Darwin’s theory along the William James line.  The theory just says the “world is this way” in a manner that justifies the British empire and British capitalism in 1860.  But I really do believe Darwin is right, that he has not just transposed a capitalist world view into nature.  I am, however, having trouble squaring this circle.  That is, how much our philosophizing, our theories, just offer abstract versions of our pre-existing predilections—and how much those theories offer us genuine insights about the world we inhabit, insights that will then effect our behavior on the ground.  A very long-winded way of saying I can’t come up with a good answer to the questions your email posed.