Category: moral philosophy

Gaita (5): Seriously?

“Socrates called his partners in conversation to a kind of seriousness. They could respond to that call only if they spoke in an effort of disciplined lucidity out of what they had made of themselves. That does not mean that he wanted them to voice their sincere personal opinion. Their sincere personal opinion was worthless unless constrained by the discipline of thought and character which conditions the proper contrast between what is personal and what is impersonal in moral thought and discussion” (Raimond Gaita, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, 2^nd edition, 2004, p. 275; my italics).

Lots to unpack here. At a minimum, an effort to attain “lucidity”—and “disciplined thought”—are required to be accorded the accolade of “serious” for Gaita. And one hallmark of seriousness is attention to one’s character, to the integrity and unity of that character, to the way it develops over time, and is instantiated in one’s actions, especially the way one treats others. Furthermore, morality attains “impersonality,” a kind of validity that transcends a merely personal sense of right and wrong, when one approaches moral questions with disciplined thought. Only that way could a moral claim actually carry any obligation for someone beyond the self. Socrates in the dialogues is working to establish articulations of morality that carry weight (may even ascend to a right to be called “true”) for everyone.

Gaita, in fact, seems utterly incapable of presenting the most central planks of his thought without the word “serious” slipped in. Here’s two examples:

“When we ask what makes a principle a moral principle, a rule a moral rule, an obligation a moral obligation—then I think we should seek a least some part of the answer in the kind of elaboration we give when we express most seriously our sense of what it means to wrong someone. Nowhere is that sense more sober than in lucid remorse” (xxi.)

“The concept of goodness is closely tied to need, to being responsive to the needs of others. Simone Weil went so far as to say that all obligation is tied to need. That is to link two notions of necessity—moral necessity and the necessity of need. Whether one wishes to go so far, it seems to me that she is clearly right in thinking that moral necessity is (conceptually) tied (not always directly) to what is inescapably serious in life” (90).

You always know a philosopher is at ground zero of his thinking when the term “necessity” is trotted out. There’s the hard stuff: the inescapable. That to which you must pay heed. If you ignore it, you are not serious. (Please hear John McEnroe ringing in your head at this point.)

I am on record as hating the way philosophers deploy the terms “necessity” and “serious.” I think 95% of such uses are question-begging. Those terms simply plant a flag where the philosopher has run out of arguments against some opposing position. That other position will be dismissed as “not serious.” Gaita devotes the whole last chapter of his book to denouncing various philosophical positions (including moral skepticism) as non-serious and corrupt. I wish some wise editor had told him that this chapter is a terrible way to end his superb—and often inspiring—book. Here’s a good sample of the sputtering that characterizes that final chapter:

“It seems that we cannot take seriously the idea that people could reject or even question the reality of evil . . . merely because they have thought themselves to such a position—no more than we can take seriously the idea that genuine despair could issue merely from an argument that concluded that life is meaningless. There are many different kinds of propositions that cannot be seriously asserted, or seriously asserted as the conclusions of a process of reasoning. I have called them, disparagingly, ‘blackboard conclusions,’ because a proposition which cannot seriously be asserted, or one which we take to be asserted seriously only when we see that it was not and could not be the outcome only of thought, is a conclusion in a secondary sense” (316-317). Six uses of the word “serious” in three sentences! I think he protests too much.

Certainly, you can offer reasons why you will not engage with someone else’s thoughts and beliefs. They may prove uninteresting to you or offer you no point of entry for engagement. But trotting out the charge that they are not “serious” does no work at all. To say Sidney Powell was not “serious” when she proffered her claims about the election of 2020 being “stolen” adds nothing. It’s just another way of saying you think she is wrong—with perhaps the additional claim that she is insincere when advancing those claims. But you need to provide evidence and reasons for the conclusion that the election was not stolen—and for the conclusion that she, in fact, knows that her claims otherwise are false. Throwing around the term “not serious” is not part of that work. In fact, the “not serious” charge absolves you from doing that work. As I have said, one is not obliged to respond to every position someone out there is taking. But dismissing such positions as “not serious,” while a convenient short cut, is simply a refusal to engage, not an actual (dare I say not a “serious”) refutation of a position.

Similarly, as I have written in the past, philosophers repeatedly in my view appeal to “false” necessities. It is one of the professional deformations of philosophy that its work is oriented to identifying a bedrock of necessity. (That’s why it is pretty comical that Gaita claims his position in “non-foundational,” but then can go on to talk of “moral necessity,” and the “necessity of needs,” and the “absolute” obligation that the preciousness of every human individual imposes on us. And can insist we are “not serious” when we don’t pay attention to what is “inescapably serious” in a human life.) Wherever a philosopher identifies a “necessity” is exactly where we should begin any examination of his thought and the ways in which it is warranted.

More globally, I suspect that “necessities” tend to over-simplify, to work to gather within a single framework what is a diverse range of phenomena that don’t actually all boil down to being rooted in the same overarching necessity. I have always taken Wittgenstein’s attack on essentialism, on the idea that everything we call a “game” shares some essential quality in common, to advocate for a pluralism that finds appeals to necessity suspect. J. L. Austin makes the same point in his usual wry way:

“And is it complicated? Well, it is complicated a bit; but life and truth and things do tend to be complicated. It’s not things, it’s philosophers that are simple. You will have heard it said, I expect, that over-simplification is the occupational disease of philosophers, and in a way one might agree with that. But for a sneaking suspicion that it’s their occupation” (“Performative Utterances,” last paragraph of that essay).

Ruling certain positions out of bounds as “not serious” is just a way of narrowing down the complexities of human behavior, reasoning, and beliefs.

OK. My antipathy to the habitual use of “serious” as a gate keeper for many philosophers is clear enough. But now I want to shift ground and consider how Gaita makes me wonder if the term “serious” points me toward something I want to (for lack of a better phrase) take seriously.

Here’s the issue for me. I went to grad school with a number of people whose lives seemed to me to be adrift. I was very focused: I wanted to get my degree and I wanted to have a career as a college teacher. Similarly, I was in a committed relationship which I thought of as having no end point (turns out I was wrong about that.) In short, I was very earnest, very goal directed, very invested in what I was doing. I could be characterized as “serious.” I also, I think it is fair to say, had a fairly strong sense of “integrity.” There were things I would not allow myself to do because I believed not just that they were wrong, but that they besmirched my sense of myself, would undermine my self-respect. I would have called such things shabby, or beneath me, or unworthy of the kind of person I took myself to be. Was I a prig? No doubt, but what I am trying to express here was that I had a strong sense of self, of who I was and who I wanted to be—and that sense of self governed a lot of my choices and actions. In short, I aspired to the kind of “unity” of character and faithfulness to that character that Gaita associates with Socrates. (More on Socrates in a bit.)

It is this kind of “seriousness” to which Gaita appeals when trying to flesh out his sense that every individual is precious—and thus obliges us to care for them (with the full resonance of what “care” means, i.e. an object of concern that calls for our active work to promote its well-being.) “We must not only see that someone has ‘projects and categorical desires with which that person is identified.’ [The quote is from Bernard Williams.] We must be able to take those desires and projects, and so him, seriously. This is a condition of his having the kind of individuality that we mark by speaking of his irreplaceability” (153).

Within these terms, some of my fellow grad students, I think it fair to say, did not take life seriously. They were not bound to projects and desires that were the cornerstones of their identities. They had no strong sense of identity at all—and thus had only the most nebulous of “projects.” They vaguely wanted to get their PhD, but were not making any progress toward that goal. There was a kind of magical thinking here. I am standing at point A and say to myself that some day I will be standing at point D. I may firmly believe that point D will be my position sometime in the future—and claim to be deeply committed to getting there. But I am doing nothing that will actually get me from point A to point D. I am adrift. Similarly, I am sleeping with E, F, or G, but only casually, with no sense that my life is entangled with theirs, or that we have some kind of partnership.

I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I am not saying that monogamy, some form of committed and open-ended relationship, is the only kind to be considered “proper” or “morally” acceptable. What I am trying to get at is living a life in which one does things (goes to classes, has friends and sexual partners, works as a barista in order to pay the rent) that are not expected to “add up” to anything in particular, that are done in relation to immediate imperatives, but are not seen as having any long-term consequences (or only in the most vague way)—and are certainly not viewed in relation to some notion of one’s character, of one’s selfhood, of one’s considered way of being-in-the-world and with others.

Again, I want to do justice to the full diversity of human desires and needs. It would be absurd to say that everyone wants a committed relationship or a PhD. What I am trying to get at are lives lived without any kind of attention to desires one is committed to. I am tempted to say: my “unserious” friends were handicapped by having learned (no matter how) that they were unworthy of having desires—or of straight-forwardly pursuing them. Another version: you could say they simply didn’t know what they wanted, and were just trying things out. In either of these two cases, what they lacked was a strong sense of self, an idea of who they were and of how that identity could then be expressed through their actions. They weren’t acting seriously because they didn’t take themselves seriously.

Lots of possible reasons for not taking oneself seriously. Having imbibed the notion that self-assertion is wrong. Fearing failure; feeling like one wasn’t capable to achieving things that looked attractive from afar, but which one had no idea of how to actually achieve; feeling out of place in an environment where the expectations and unwritten rules were an almost complete mystery; diffidence of all kinds; lack of self confidence etc. etc.

What I want to emphasize, however, is the way that such “unseriousness” goes along with a disbelief in the consequences of action. Since I am pretty much a non-entity, then the things that I do make little to no impact on the world, on others, and (perhaps most importantly) on myself. Nothing comes of my actions. Nothing connects up. I am just going from day to day, dealing with what is throws in my path. This has the superficial attraction of the grasshopper life in Aesop’s fable, but is really underwritten by a failure to take myself seriously, a failure to believe I am anything of account. I am adrift—and nothing I do matters.

I think Gaita’s reflections on Socrates push in this direction. Recall his announced “strong commitment to a version of the Socratic claim that an unexamined life—a life that does not rise to a requirement to be lucid about its meaning(s)—is unworthy of a human life” (xxii). Unless we are “serious” in this sense, we have done less with our life than we should have. We have not risen to the occasion that life affords us, we have fallen short of being “worthy” or admirable.

No matter how much I bristle as such moralism, at its arrogant scolding tone, I do have to admit that some lives are more admirable than others, more worthy of emulation. Are those lives characterized by “lucid” reflection, by an ever-vigilant examination of “its meaning(s)?” I am not sure. Temperament, forbearance, kindness all seem crucial here—and I am not sure any of those things are products of reflection, or even require reflection for their presence.

But I do think Gaita may well be right that some kind of image of self that cannot be violated without a strong sense of disquiet is important here. An investment in a certain form of integrity, an investment underwritten by a strong sense of self (both the self I am and the self I aspire to be), if not a sine non qua of an admirable life does seem to offer a strong support of efforts to live that life. Gaita turns to Socrates’s “point . . . that there are things which are impossible to do even though no obstacles of the kind which may be overcome with force, efforts of will or ingenious strategies stand in the way” (292). Rather, the impossibility comes from the fact that doing that action would utterly devastate the agent, completely dissolve his lived understanding of who he is, leave him being nothing at all—or with the despair of self-contempt.

Within these terms, Gaita spends a long time trying to defend Socrates’ claim that “it is better to suffer evil than to do it.” His exposition of his reasoning here is meandering and often (at least for me) hard to follow. But the core is that to do evil would be to violate an identity on which one’s whole sense of one’s life (its significance, its integrity, its unity, its worthiness) is based. If I cannot respect myself, I have no place to stand. I will be devastated. And it seems that if I am not someone who could be devastated in that way, then I am someone who is not taking his life “seriously.” I neither have a sense of an identity in which I am invested, nor a sense of actions being possible violations of that identity. I am (it is only a slight exaggeration to say) no one.

I don’t know what to do with this line of thinking. It seems harsh to me, using “seriousness,” and “lucidity,” and “integrity,” and “the examined life” as clubs to beat the vast unwashed unworthies. Yet I suspect that some sense of integrity, some sensibility that responds to some possible actions as things “it is impossible for me to do” simply because of “who I am,” is central to ethics, to my distinctive answer to what is the best way for me to live my life. And it does seem “unserious” to simply never consider the question of “how I should live my life,” to simply drift through life, taking it as it comes.

I am going to end my engagement with Gaita here. Certainly, we can say that my “unserious” fellow grad students did little harm in the world. They may have heedlessly hurt others or themselves, but the extent of the harm they did was very limited. The harms being done currently by Russia, Israel, and Hamas encompass evils that Gaita’s account seems woefully inadequate to even contemplate, no less explain or ameliorate. Killings that do not generate an ounce of remorse are way outside his ken. It is one thing to be careless and/or thoughtless about the hurt one inflicts on others. It is quite another thing to actively and deliberately act to harm others. Such acts of harm are not heedless, nor the product of a lack of reflection. They are chosen quite self-consciously.

Gaita 4: A Meaningful Life

Raimund Gaita is, by his own account, an absolutist. “Good” is to show any human being, with no nonsense about worthiness or any other measure, a basic level of care, consideration, and respect. Love is the best term for encapsulating the ways of goodness. Those ways are multiple; there is no formula for goodness; what goodness calls us to do in any particular circumstances cannot be predicted ahead of time, or prescribed by some sort of rational decision procedure that relies on principles.

Evil is to disregard the reality of the other, our obligation to her as a human being.

But what does it mean to be a human being? Turns out that Gaita is an absolutist when it comes to that question as well. The line between humans and other sentient creatures is bright and uncrossable. In fact, what he writes strongly implies that some human creatures don’t measure up to “full” humanhood. Basically, Gaita is a hard-ass when it comes to describing a worthy human life. Yes, even the most unworthy human deserves good treatment at the hands of other humans. But (and here is one place his favorite word “serious” comes into play) living an admirable human life is a task it would seem not many are up to.

The leap from considering good and evil as exhibited by human actions to a discussion of how to live a worthy and admirable life is not obvious—but it basically occurs in two steps. First, as we have seen, “moral understanding” is the focus of much of Gaita’s book. That means he is not very interested in good and evil actions per se. Instead, he is interested in how a person acquires the “lucidity” (another favorite term) to understand what is good and what is evil. (The previous posts considered the means toward reaching such an understanding.) So it is the moral status of the agent that occupies much of his attention. The second step follows: what kind of person, what type of character, is developed (produced?) when someone incorporates a lucid (enlightened?) moral understanding as a fundamental commitment of her self?

“[T]he ethical is constitutive of what it is to be a human being and what it means to live a human life. . . . It also gives sense to the concept of destiny, that is, to the idea that we must discover what, in our circumstances, must be our way of being true to the task of living a properly human life” (135; my italics). “A morality must claim (though we may judge that it fails) to deepen rather than cheapen our understanding of what we care for. That fact argues for a deeper integration of morality into a concern for the meaning of our lives than is usually acknowledged by philosophy” (38).

This is where Gaita goes full-scale Socratic. Basically, he insists that the “unexamined life” is less than fully human. For that reason, he does not think a capacity to suffer marks a life as worth respecting (and treating well) as a human life. Beyond the animal’s capacity to feel pain, human life also evidences a capacity to shape itself deliberately according to a vision of what it would take to live a meaningful life. To be blunt about it: humans are concerned with meaning and can try to live a live answerable to meaning’s demands. Animals have no such similar concern.

“Much (perhaps most) of our reflections on life and morality occurs in a conceptual space of the kind I have been trying to delineate as . . . ‘the realm of meaning’”(338-9; Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception; 2^nd. Edition, 2004).

“The lives of animals have no meaning, or they have meaning only in an attenuated sense. I mean that as a grammatical remark [in the Wittgensteinian sense of “grammar”]—partly on the idea of an animal (as when we speak of human beings and animals) and partly on the idea of meaning. It is what lies behind the contrast between animals and human beings . . . . The sense of ‘meaning’ to which I am appealing is sometimes expressed in the contrast between a concern for the meaning of our lives as opposed to a pursuit of happiness” (116).

“A biography is a story of a life that tries to reveal its meaning, and that is connected to the way it reveals the individuality of its subject. It would be absurd to write the biography of an animal, except anthropomorphically as is done in children’s stories. . . . An animal’s life does not have meaning because an animal cannot live its life deeply or shallowly, lucidly of opaquely, honestly or dishonestly, worthily or unworthily” (118).

OK. So what does one need to do, what kind of way of being-in-the-world counts as living a worthy life?

It is not all that easy to pull out the answer from Gaita’s book. But certain things come clear. First, one must be concerned with the meaning of one’s life, with the “significance” of one’s actions. (See pg. 44). Their significance is not exactly tied to consequences—either for ourselves or upon others (although I think Gaita is squishy on this point). He definitely wants to avoid being a consequentialist, but he does think—along with Aristotle—that our actions not only reveal character (i.e. show what we care most deeply about), but also develop character. The key thing for Gaita is awareness (lucidity). That is, we should always attend to what it is we care about, what we think is significant, and consider how our actions promote or betray those deep commitments. “The idea that a requirement to lucidity is internal to a certain understanding of life and its meaning is at least as old as Socrates” (211). A certain kind of attentiveness to the circumstances, to others, and to oneself is a sine non qua of a worthy life.

The second requirement for a meaningful life is more obscure. Gaita struggles to describe it; he keeps telling us what it isn’t. Here’s my attempt at reconstructing his view. With a certain kind of serpent eating its own tale feel, the key seems to be making the quest to lead a meaningful life central to oneself. In other words, if we take living a meaningful life as our primary task, then we will orient ourselves in the world and toward others in a distinctive way. The hallmarks of that way are (it would seem) an ongoing and overarching concern with the “significance” of our actions and dispositions, where “significance” (unfortunately) remains rather vague, but seems to be tied to our enacting our love of the things we care most deeply about. And with a kind of circularity (that, perhaps, Gaita might say is unavoidable) the reason for caring deeply about something is either its meaningfulness (because the goal is to live a meaningful life) or its “preciousness” (as in the ungrounded assertion that every single human life is precious).

More concretely, the focus on living a meaningful life entails a certain kind of integrity, even of unity. The hedonist (Gaita tells us) can have the unity of single-minded purpose: the pursuit of pleasure. But the hedonist cannot have the unity of aligning his past actions with his present or future ones. He is opportunistic, and will do today what promises pleasure, irrespective of its connection to and implications for past commitments. With Socrates as his example, Gaita describes how “we may betray our past or make a mockery of it. One of the reasons Socrates gave for not fleeing from prison was that to do so would betray his past. Judgments like that reveal a concern for the past which is not merely prudential, which is not only a concern to learn from it for the sake of the future. Someone who takes such judgments seriously sees her life as having a distinctive kind of unity, or as aspiring to such unity” (128).

Gaita moves on to speculate that we might best understand Aristotle’s notion of eudaimonia in terms of such “unity” (rejecting common translations of the Aristotelean term as “happiness” or “flourishing” on the way to his own proposed understanding). “Human beings are distinguished from animals by the fact that their life has meaning. That distinguishes them more radically from animals than reference to their capacities and properties does. Our ergon (taken now as our task, our work, or as McDowell suggests, ‘what it is the business of man to do’) is to be understood according to the claims that meaning makes upon us. Responsiveness to those claims is the responsive recognition of our ergon. Eudaimonia is predicated of a complete life (a unity conditioned by meaning) which has been faithful (true) to the distinctive character of our ergon. If it is distinctive of human beings to lead a life which has meaning that bestows on that life a distinctive unity, then it is perfectly intelligible that the recognition of that should claim us in fidelity to it” (131).

Of course, Gaita acknowledges that many do not live their lives as if the fact of meaningfulness laid a claim (maybe the most important claim) upon them. If you do not live a life oriented toward meaning, or one that aims to achieve some kind of unity that reflects ongoing commitments, does that mean your life is less than human? Gaita doesn’t go there. He is more interested in what morality calls us to be than in chastising those who do not hear or do not heed its call. But this is where “serious” comes in (as I will discuss in my next post). Some people are just not serious. It remains unclear what response Gaita thinks appropriate when encountering such people. Chiding them for being unserious? Consoling oneself, Pharisee-like, that such people lead “shallow” lives and thus miss out on what a life can be? Or more direct forms of punishment?

There is one further point to be made about what characterizes a “meaningful life.” This point must be drawn out from Gaita because it comes up in the context of his considering why the slave owner cannot recognize the humanity of the slave. Basically, Gaita seems to be saying (in a tortuous six pages—158-163–that don’t yield any clear passages to quote) that we see someone as fully human when we can ascribe to them the intention and the ability to lead a meaningful life. That capacity is evidenced by the individual’s making plans (i.e. making choices and then carrying them out; the individual is an initiator of actions), but (even more crucially) evidencing a commitment to an identity. Individuals want to insert themselves into the world as presences that matter and tie that presence to a certain coherent sense of who they are. The investment in identity (another way of talking about a commitment to integrity) shows that the individual cares about the meaning of her life. Again, it is not as if Gaita naively believes that everyone has such a commitment. Only the “serious” do. But he thinks we must posit the universal capacity for such a serious investment if we are to accept and act upon the infinite preciousness of every single human life.

It is typical of Gaita that these pages are more focused on the slave owner and what it would take for him to recognize the slave’s humanity than on what constitutes the slave’s human-ness. But I think we can infer that a meaningful human life for Gaita reveals itself in an orientation that is not directed to happiness, pleasure, or acquiring prestige, power, or material wealth. Rather, the meaningful life is directed toward the creation of a self (the subject of biography) who deems certain persons and things worth caring for—and finds her meaning in doing that work of care, thus giving her a life she can affirm as well worth living.

Detour: Hatred, Fear, and Violence

“What was most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself, which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of public progress; that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world. And this meant, not only that I thus gave the world an altogether murderous power over me, but also that in such self-destroying limbo I could never hope to write” (James Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes,” p. 8, Library of America edition of Baldwin’s Collected Essays).

It is notable in Baldwin’s case—and to a large extent in the case of African-Americans more generally—that the stimulus to violence that we assume hatred and fear to provide is turned inward. Black on black violence is much more prevalent than black on white violence. Baldwin’s work circles around this fact, even though he approaches it obliquely because violence is only very rarely an explicit topic for him. His topic, rather, is self-hatred, the warping of soul, the alienation from (or fear of) one’s emotional self, that is the result of self-hatred.

More usually, we think of the effects of hatred and fear as directed outwards—toward the object of those emotions. In my short thoughts about hatred two posts back, I think I got it wrong, which is why I want to return to the topic today (detouring for the moment away from Raimond Gaita’s work).

I said that hatred is spurred by impotence in the face of ongoing injury. We hate the one who is inflicting that injury. But I was wrong to stress “ongoing.” It is perfectly ordinary to hate someone for a past injury that is no longer being inflicted. The politics of grievance and the pleasures of revenge do not depend on current injury. Another way to say this is that hatred is retrospective—it is always generated by something that has already been done. (Note that it makes little difference if the injury is a real one or an imagined one. More accurate perhaps to say that most descriptions of injury done combine fact and fantasy. Grievance doesn’t do understatement. Inflation is its more characteristic mode.) The injury may be ongoing, but it also may be over and done with, but not forgotten or forgiven, still a potent source of hate.

I think there are two particularly characteristic forms of grievance (which fosters hate). The first is a response to injuries done. The second, however, is closer to what social psychologists characterize as envy, shading into resentment. This form of hate is directed to those who are deemed to enjoy undeserved benefits (fame, acclaim, respect, money, among other possibilities). Self-righteous indignation is a keynote of this form of hatred. The other is accused of any number of sins (hypocrisy almost always on that list since the wool is being pulled over most of the world’s eyes). The worldly success of whatever form the hated one enjoys is based on fraud, on a covering up of his true unworthiness. Hence the resentment—and the proclivity of this kind of hatred for conspiracy theories. The truth is being hidden by nefarious means. Everyone except the hater—and his fellow truth-sayers—is in on the cover-up, on the refusal to see and/or speak the truth.

Envy, resentment, suspicion, hatred. Plus a sense of grievance. The world is against me and stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the truth that the hated one enjoys benefits he does not deserve. In fact, this person who is living high off the hog should be punished for his misdeeds.

It should be obvious that a certain kind of politics can follow from this form of hatred. And that the alleged injuries this politics claims to address need not be connected to an injury done personally to oneself. Rather, this politics can present itself as civic-minded, as working to clear society of corruption, of the rot that leads to the wrong people sitting on top of the heap.

As is well documented, ambitious politicians can find appealing to such grievances (and identifying specific targets for those grievances) a good way to build a group of supporters. It doesn’t matter if the politician is cynically using the fact of grievance or actually himself shares that sense. Either way, once in power only a punitive approach to the designated unworthies will satisfy his followers and allow him to retain their support. Grievance politics leads to evil in Gaita’s sense—to treating other human beings in ways that one would never treat oneself. All in the name of what is “deserved.”

This is why punishment is always queasy making. It has too deep an entanglement in hatred to not exceed (no matter what the effort to make the punishment “proportionate” to the crime) the attempts to place bounds upon it. (The legal guardrails I discussed in my first post on Gaita are an attempt to keep the reins on punishment.) Underneath that apparent rationalism of putting the rapist in prison is the physical abuse that prison entails. We have never extirpated corporeal punishment from our criminal justice system. That system, instead, gives license to hatred and violence at certain specific sites within it—even if those sites are usually hidden from view. The cell phone camera has made police violence on the streets more visible; what goes on in jails and prisons remains almost entirely out of sight.

In sum: hatred focuses on what has already happened, on the status that some people enjoy or the injury some people have done, and it justifies violence. It can even lend a kind of righteousness to violence, a sense of “righting” wrongs.

A very common idea these days is that violence is enabled by rendering another human being “other”—putting him in a different category by virtue of his race, his religion, his sexual orientation. What I am saying is that such “othering” does not (in my view) enable violence unless that other is deemed a reprobate, an offender against some moral code. Hatred goes hand in hand with moral condemnation. Not in every case, but more often than not—or such is my suspicion.

This is a way of saying that violence is so terrible, is such a strong taboo, that some notion of self-righteousness is need to lead someone to kill or to torture.

Hamas does seem motivated by hatred—and by a hatred so pure in its desire to inflict injury on the hated ones that all consequences be damned. Their attack looks to me like the kind of murder/suicide we get in some of the mass shootings in the US, and even more frequently in domestic violence cases. There is, it seems to me, no notion that violence could be a solution in Hamas’ case (unlike the delusional notion that violence could actually accomplish something, a notion the US indulged to its and others’ cost both in Vietnam and Iraq). Hamas is just striking out in fury because it has no better ideas about how to improve things—and has decided instead to just destroy things and take as many of the “enemy” with them as they proceed to doom.

Is that evil? Certainly inflicting pain just for the sake of inflicting pain, killing others just for the sake (pleasure?) of killing them, would seem to fit the bill as at one of the forms evil takes. (Here, as elsewhere, human ingenuity and perversity leads to diversity. It would be a mistake to believe evil does not come in myriad forms.)

To pivot to fear. If hatred is retrospective, fear is anticipatory. You can’t fear something that has already happened. You can only fear what is still coming down the pike. I can fear the consequences (still to come) of what I did, but it makes no sense to say that I now fear what I did yesterday. Fear of the other can certainly be used to justify violence—the “preemptive strike” doctrine that the George W. Bush administration promulgated.

Fear can often go hand in hand with a politics of grievance. That undeserving group is also a threat because of what it will do in the future if left unchecked. More generally, a politics of fear can be used to declare certain groups in a society outside the bounds of inclusion. “They” are not to be tolerated, or given a voice in decision-making, or (most dramatically) allowed to assume power because they will destroy the society if given the opportunity. So fear, like hatred, can be a great “justifier.” It can offer a reason for violence—in order to preempt the harm (the injury) “those people” will do if given the chance.

And, of course, hatred/grievance and fear can co-exist–often in ways that reinforce one another.

I don’t think we can reach any easy conclusions about whether a politics of grievance and/or of fear is more characteristic of what we call the “right” as contrasted to the “left.” Much of that would depend on how willing proponents of either wing are to act violently against those they hate or fear. I do think it true that politicians of the right over the past 100 years have been more likely to try to ride the wave of grievance than politicians of the left—and much less reluctant to use violence. But why FDR’s outright demonization of “economic royalists” has mostly disappeared from the rhetoric of left-leaning politicians is a mystery (one that conspiracy theories about leftist politicians having been “bought out” by Wall Street and corporate money claims to explain.)

In sum, what interests me is how people permit themselves to be violent, to treat other human beings as much less than precious (to use Gaita’s understanding of “evil.”) Hatred and fear, which gravitate toward seeing others as either morally condemnable or as a threat, play a huge role in such justifications of violence.

Gaita 3: Examples and Conversation

I want now to discuss the other two ways that Gaita thinks one might achieve “moral understanding,” i.e. move from blindness concerning the infinite worth of each individual human being to an intense awareness of that “absolute” fact. That awareness would then be the most fundamental determinant of how one acts in the world, in how one orients one’s being-in-the-world (to use Heideggerian language that Gaita does not deploy).

What we might call Gaita “a-rationalism” when it comes to “moral understanding” underwrites his turn to examples. “[D]eepened moral understanding is a movement towards necessity, of the world becoming, as Iris Murdoch puts it, ‘compulsively present to the will.’ The example reveals that a deepened understanding of the nature and reality of evil is not always a deepened understanding of the reasons for not doing it, and why it is a mistake to believe that reflection on the nature of good and evil is always, or even most importantly, reflection on a certain class of reasons for action, of considerations which may have a legitimate speaking-voice in a piece of practical reasoning” (234). (I will want to contest the appeal to “necessity” here in a future post.)

I assume the hedge of “not always” in the passage just quoted is to guard against “performative contradiction.” After all, Gaita’s book is an extensive, very reason dependent, argument about the limits of reason. So he has to acknowledge some role reason might play in moral deliberation.

Still, he wants to claim that examples—seeing someone act in ways that display their care for another human being in ways that inspire admiration and emulation–are central to developing moral understanding. What it means to care for someone, to enact one’s valuing of them qua human being, has more to teach us about, to lead us to, goodness than all the generalizing treatises of the intellectuals. “We do not discover the full humanity of a racially denigrated people in books by social scientists, not, at any rate, if those books merely contain knowledge of the kind that might be included in encyclopedias. If we discover it by reading, then it is in plays, novels, and poetry—not in science but in art” (335). [The touching faith of certain philosophers—Cavell, Nussbaum—in the efficacy of art stands in stark contrast to the despair so many artists feel as they accept Auden’s resigned conclusion that “poetry makes nothing happen.”]

The example is concrete, individual, and has a real presence in the world in ways that generalized statements do not. There is a kind of ontological nominalism here; only the particular is real, is actually instantiated—and thus it has the potential to impact us in ways that mere words (or mere reasons made up of words) cannot.

Like many others, Gaita follws Kant here—and suggests that the Critique of Judgment, ostensibly about aesthetic judgments, actually also offers a better account of morality than Kant’s rationalist account of practical reason does. When it comes to ethical judgment:

“[T]here is . . . discussion and argument, but it should be argument informed by the realization that it cannot, discursively, yield a standard, or set of standards, in the light of which all examples are to be judged. No example is self-authenticating, but it does not follow that their place in our judgments is merely to guide us to discursively established principles of which they are intuited instances. Nor can any example play a role akin to that of the standard metre, for that would distort the necessarily provisional place they have for those whose judgments they have inspired and shaped. That is reasonably evident in aesthetic cases, and I think it is the same in ethical ones. When I speak of examples, I am thinking primarily of what has moved us in the speech and actions of others and because of which we stand in certain judgments and reject others. Philosophy has been suspicious of the fact that we learn by being moved because of a mistaken conception of thought that judges this [i.e. being moved] as its [i.e. thought’s] desertion” (270, Gaita’s italics). “I acknowledge that [the} acceptance of [such] judgments as judgments depends upon a richer conception of critical thinking and of the relation between thought and feeling than is presently available in the mainstream philosophical tradition” (41).

It is but a small step from this claim that we are more likely to be moved, to learn, from examples (presumably both positive and negative ones) to coming down on the Humean side of viewing “sensibility” as more crucial to one’s ethical posture in the world than any kind of Kantian rational procedure. “The corruptions of Raskolnikov’s [main character in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment] remorse were not merely a result of his failure to understand properly what he had done, nor were they merely in self-deceiving service to such a failure of understanding. They were a form of his failure to understand [i.e. his reflections and remorse did not focus on the humanity of his victim]. Such interdependence of understanding and response is what I want to stress . . . It is sometime conveyed by the word ‘sensibility.’ Most forms of moral corruption are corruptions of sensibility” (35). I take it that this claim means that it is not reasoning poorly or in faulty ways that makes one morally corrupt, but by having the wrong dispositions, the wrong orientation to the “condition” of being a human who occupies a world with other humans.

And it is in shaping such a sensibility that Gaita places the efficacy of examples. The love displayed by “saints” in their actions in the world “has a revelatory role. Sometimes we see that something is precious only in the light of someone’s love for it. Love’s capacity to reveal is, in part, a function of the authority of the lover. It also depends on our openness to this kind of authority. . . . The love of saints depends on, builds on and transforms, [a] sense of individuality. It deepens the language of love, which nourishes and is nourished by our sense that human beings are irreplaceable and, because of that transformation, it compels some people to affirm that even those who suffer affliction so severe that they have irrecoverably lost everything that gives sense to our lives, and even the most radical of evildoers, are fully our fellow human beings. As with the love it transforms, the love of saints plays a constitutive and revelatory role” (xxiv).

The educative role of the example—and its relation to “feeling and character”—is stressed when Gaita writes (again, the italics are his): “Aristotle was closer to the truth when he said if we want to know what justice is then we should turn to the example of the just man—but we must have eyes to see. For Aristotle, the education of feeling and character was an epistemic condition of right judgment on what could only be discussed as authoritative example” (46). From Wittgenstein, Gaita derives the conviction that “[k]knowledge that another person is in pain is not an achievement that can be characterized independently of certain affective dispositions” (176).

To place such a strong emphasis on “sensibility” and “affective dispositions” and “feeling and character” is to end up with 1) fairly bald assertions when it comes to trying the see why some people have “moral understanding” while others do not and 2) trying to find the mechanisms (remorse, examples) for moving people toward moral understanding (i.e. the topic of this post and my previous one).

Here’s the bald assertion: “Moral understanding requires that those who would claim to have it should be serious respondents to morality’s demands. Someone who cannot be responsive to morality’s demands is one for whom morality has no reality. The ‘reality” of moral values is inseparable from the reality of it as a claim on us, and serious responsiveness to that claim is internal to the recognition of its reality” (59). [I will have much to say about the ways “seriousness” is deployed by Gaita in his book in subsequent posts. The term is close to a tic in his writing, trotted out every time his argument hits a nodal point where sheer assertion is offered.]

The example does something reason, as the philosophers understand it, cannot do. It inspires emulation. I think in fact, that Gaita often verges on saying that the example compels emulation. Certainly, that explains his concern with “authoritative” examples. But he hasn’t much to offer as to what would actually lead someone to be properly “responsive” to the example, to accept (through its offices) the “authority,” the “reality,” of “moral values” and their “claims” upon him. It seems obviously, trivially, true that a moral person takes moral values seriously. And it seems at least plausible to say that examples can work to move a person toward taking moral values seriously. But there is still the mystery of why examples “move” some people, but fail to move others.

The final means toward moving someone to moral understanding that Gaita offers is “conversation.” The transformation conversation offers is not (emphatically) our “need to learn from others only because of our limited epistemic and logical powers” (275). Rather, what conversation can open our eyes to is “the reality of other human beings” (277),–that is, to the fundamental truth that Gaita has hammered on as the most important plank for a human morality. Here is the full description of how conversation is to effect this realization. (Thus, conversation like love, and the examples of saintly and dastardly action, is revelatory.)

“Conversation promises and threatens surprise. Martin Buber said that ‘talking to oneself’ is utterly different from talking to someone else, and that the difference is marked by the fact that one cannot be a surprise to oneself in the way that another can be. [Here we get a long passage of Buber’s.] The surprise Buber speaks of is not conditional upon routine or ignorance. It is a kind of shock at the realization of how other than, and other to, oneself another human being can be. It is the shock of the reality of other human beings, and the strange and unique kind of individuality of their presence. . . . It is in connection with such as sense of reality that we should understand Socrates’ insistence on conversation and the kind of presence he required of himself and his partners” (277).

Conversation, then, stands for a full encounter with the other, the kind of encounter which brings home forcefully the other’s reality as other. That, of course, does not guarantee that I will then value that other (although Gaita seems to assume some kind of equivalence between recognition of otherness and valuing the other’s irreplaceable individuality.)

But I don’t mean to sneer here. One of the dilemmas in current day America is how to communicate across divides that have become entrenched, how to even have any communication take place at all when everyone is locked into their own echo chambers. The inefficacy of general (broadcast) media to shift hearts and minds is all too obvious (even accepting the influence of Fox News). Gaita’s discussion of conversation is still too abstract—we want the dialogue to lead to more nuanced, particular, convictions than some general affirmation of the other’s otherness. On the other hand, even getting that far would be very welcome. And it certainly does seem that face-to-face encounters are more likely to “move” people from entrenched stances than anything they are going to get from the non-face-to-face flows of opinion and information from the news media or from social media. How to enable potentially transformative conversations does seem to me a vital question for our times. To pooh-poo in advance the possible effectiveness of such interactions is to throw in the towel before even making any attempt at betterment.

Enough for today. I want to make a detour into talking more directly about hatred and violence in the next post—before returning to Gaita’s Socrates-inspired understanding of a meaningful life.