Sensitivity / Care Ethics III: Rhetoric and Politics

 It is possible, I said, to make a distinction between moral philosophy and rhetoric, which is to say a distinction between the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of politics. Rhetoric is the methodology of politics, at least the happier side of politics. Von Clausewitz was right that war is politics 'by other means,' but rhetoric can be more persuasive than an army with guns. This has been true since at least Aristotle's time.

Of old, the demagogue was also a general, and then democracies changed into tyrannies. Most of the ancient tyrants were originally demagogues. They are not so now, but they were then; and the reason is that they were generals and not orators, for oratory had not yet come into fashion. Whereas in our day, when the art of rhetoric has made such progress, the orators lead the people, but their ignorance of military matters prevents them from usurping power; at any rate instances to the contrary are few and slight. 

What that means is that superior generals were unable to use their skill at war to overthrow a popular leader, and the popular leader was incapable of managing a competent military action. 

This is probably true today. Should the US military decide to overthrow the government by coup the populace would reject it, and they would do so because of the many fine words that they were raised with about the value of democracy. The military would be faced by titanic protests in the street, and even if they responded with force they would only see the population shift to other means of resistance. That is true, I think, even though our great orators are all dead, and our current leaders mouthing slogans that they do not really believe. 

Nor can these people successfully host a coup, being ignorant; their clear attempt to convey their preferred outcome in 2020 has led only to a hapless "January 6th Panel" dragging on forever, while effective systems of response are being derived to prevent such 'fortification of democracy' from occurring again. There was a moment when Washington D.C. looked like an armed encampment, with soldiers and walls drawn up about the Capitol, but they eventually did not understand how to cement their revolution. They just kept tottering on the road they thought they knew.

So, rhetoric is much more powerful than people sometimes believe; and if it often empowers incompetent but persuasive people, at least they are less able to cause harm than a talented general might be.

Thus it is reasonable to look at rhetoric as a way of responding to advocates of Care/Sensitivity Ethics, even if the ethics themselves do not merit great consideration.

Let us begin by moving from Aristotle's Politics V to his Rhetoric I. The first paragraph there is on a subject very important to Aristotle but not to us (to whit, the question of whether there is a well-defined field of study given that rhetoric cannot be inquired into as a science in his terms). We will skip that.

The second paragraph, however, is important.

The modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art: everything else is merely accessory. These writers, however, say nothing about enthymemes, which are the substance of rhetorical persuasion, but deal mainly with non-essentials. The arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case... It is not right to pervert the judge by moving him to anger or envy or pity-one might as well warp a carpenter's rule before using it.

At the very beginning, Aristotle is warning us against pursuing politics by invoking empathy ('pity'), or anger, or similar things. The reason is that these things distort judgment, like warping a ruler and then trying to make good measurements with it. 

So it is possible to talk usefully with advocates of Care Ethics only insofar can persuade them to give up their chosen mode for the purpose of the discussion. Yet there is a way to do it, which is revealed later.

The issue of rhetoric and politics is to try to convince others that your preferred course of action would be the best one. This requires making value judgments. Sometimes this is straightforward: Proposals A and B both achieve the desired end, but A costs twice as much. Because money serves as a unified standard for judgment, these cases are easy. When there is not a unified, objective standard, the cases become harder.

These Care Ethics cases are on the hard side. What is the value of an emotion? How would you value it? Empathy is often pleasant to feel, and you might think that a world in which we were all feeling happy emotions more often would be a better world. Better than one in which no one is feeling hungry? Better than one in which liberty flourishes? Utilitarianism tried and failed to figure out how to put a price that we could use as a standard of judgment for cases like these.  

In order for reason to work on these issues, a standard has to be found that makes them comparable. Aristotle has one.

Since, however, it often happens that people agree that two things are both useful but do not agree about which is the more so, the next step will be to treat of relative goodness and relative utility. [Ar. runs though many common kinds of comparison.] For that which all desire is good, as we have said;' and so, the more a thing is desired, the better it is. Further, that is the better thing which is considered so by competitors or enemies, or, again, by authorized judges or those whom they select to represent them. In the first two cases the decision is virtually that of every one, in the last two that of authorities and experts. And sometimes it may be argued that what all share is the better thing, since it is a dishonour not to share in it; at other times, that what none or few share is better, since it is rarer. The more praiseworthy things are, the nobler and therefore the better they are. So with the things that earn greater honours than others-honour is, as it were, a measure of value[.]

Now 'the good is what all things desire' is meant literally, and it becomes a crucial concept in Medieval philosophy when Avicenna, Averrores, and Aquinas get ahold of it. (Many of you know this story, but it turns out to be God, as discovered through an interesting path with many enlightening turns.) The store of value that you can test disparate kinds of things against is honor, in the sense of 'the honor which people pay to X.' Since the method is rhetoric, this will often be rhetorical honors, and Aristotle here departs into some famous Greek examples (including Pericles' noted Funeral Oration).

By showing honor in the form of respect to one's interlocutor, one is actually meeting their preferred obligation that you should be a nice person who helps people feel good. There is pragmatic, practical-reason ground to do this, because only in this way can a discussion on such emotional matters be useful: on terms of mutual respect. One must insist upon it, pointing out that the usual descent into name calling and accusations of being an unfeeling monster disable any possible progress while violating the basic ethical goal of the system they claim to be defending.

But also then you can, by showing honor to things like liberty, have a standard that is comparable for questions of empathy. It feels nice to feel empathetic, but is it not more honorable to be free than to be empathized with in your suffering? If these ethics end up licensing restrictions on liberty -- such as by violating the liberty of free speech, on the grounds that some speech is hurtful -- they reduce the dignity of every individual. If we do care about people, must we not care about their dignity? Then we must treat them with the respect that comes of showing that we accept their right to make up their own minds on many questions even when we disagree. 

By engaging in this kind of discussion, you are in fact showing that you care about people -- including, crucially, the people right in front of you. That is exactly where all the discussions I was talking about in the first of these posts go wrong. The advocates of empathy invariably treat the people right there with horrible disdain, vicious insult, and the like. It's a feature whose regular occurrence ought to warn them of the incoherence of their project, but they are not involved in thinking: they're involved in feeling good about themselves and putting some bad person in their place.