In the comments to last week's post, Tom raises a concern that the discussion did not point to a way forward. I thought it had; my sense was that we already have several ethical systems that insist on the supremacy of morality, all of which include some way of handling the issue of caring or sensitivity. I think the logic of reducing a moral concern like 'speak the truth' to a level playing field with social concerns about expressing feelings of care is sufficiently deadly that no further consideration should be given to the proposition that Care Ethics be taken to be a serous alternative to existing moral philosophies.
Tom says that he thinks that you have to find a way to give them something in order to be persuasive. It is possible to distinguish between the work of moral philosophy (on the one hand) and rhetoric (on the other). Moral philosophy can dispose of views that prove to be incoherent or unworkable, at least a philosopher can do so. Utilitarianism, one of the three major schools of moral philosophy in the West, somehow continues to have a certain number of proponents who keep trying to find ways to make it work even though it is expressly incoherent (i.e., it requires you to judge actions by their results, which in fact you can't know at the time you have to take the actions). I don't feel the need to take it seriously or consider that it might prove to be workable if you kept fiddling with it, but I do like J.S. Mill all the same.
This one is also incoherent: its stated goal is to increase social harmony and general caring/empathy, but by dethroning the practical reason that we all share in common they remove the only standard of judgment that is the same for everyone. By shifting these conflicts to the irrational areas of feeling, conflict is assured because feelings differ (and often strongly): the social harmony they take as their goal dissolves into the kinds of endless disputes we were talking about last time; the appeal to empathy for 'others' leads to people saying the worst sort of offensive things to the person they are actually talking with right now.
This is a general problem with empathy, by the way. There's quite a literature developing on the dark side of it. It seems like a good emotion; it feels good to express and experience, and it is experienced often when we are actively trying to be helpful and good to others. Yet it turns out that feeling empathy for X person or group has a mirror effect in moral conflicts, one that elevates what might have been a pragmatic dispute into an emotional war of people feeling waves of self-righteousness and outrage against their opponents. Fritz Breithaupt argues from his work that atrocities are importantly linked to empathy -- revenge attacks, lynchings, even genocide turns out often to be felt by their perpetrators as acts of love. It's easy to get swept away. On 9/11, we as a nation were so outraged by the scenes and images we saw that we started two wars. The Falling Man images in particular sparked powerful expressions of empathy. The rage that accompanied that empathy killed at least thousands of Iraqis, none of whom had anything to do with the event that provoked our decision to go to war. One protects the beloved or avenges her with terror and slaughter.
(That is the worst problem by far, but not the only one. Apparently empathy is also associated with depression in meta-studies, which is another potential downside to encouraging people to try to experience empathy more often; and it can lead to more effective and unethical manipulation. As I said, it's getting to be quite a body of literature.)
So philosophically, the answer seems to me to be to reject Care Ethics in favor of one of the other schools -- I am myself an advocate of Virtue ethics -- and retaining the throne of practical reason. That does not, please note, mean that politeness and sensitivity are not concerns. Of course it is good to be polite to people, and if guided by practical reason (phronesis in the Greek) all of this can be part of virtuous, ethical behavior. These emotions just cannot be elevated to the same level as reason, nor placed above them. We need our reason to keep us from being swept away.
5 comments:
In the comments to last week's post, Tom raises a concern that the discussion did not point to a way forward.
It wasn't so much that it lacked a way forward as that it lacked a way to present the conclusions to the opposition, but thank you for addressing my concerns so thoroughly.
It's true, though, that I think to be persuasive you have to give your interlocutor something they will recognize as valid, even though they don't agree with it. The reason I think about rhetoric a lot is that my career field is dominated by the left, so, in my situation the proper completion of philosophical reasoning is its presentation in the form of a rhetorical argument.
Moving on to the OP, you say that 'practical reason' is the only standard of judgement we all share, and you say 'practical reason' is 'phronesis.' You link the Wikipedia article on the topic.
If phronesis is practical reason, practical wisdom, good sense, prudence, I wonder if we all do share it. Surely, it requires experience to build, doesn't it? And if two people's life experiences are quite different, might they not develop different phronesis (-ses?)? For example, someone who has lived their life in business might have developed a very different phronesis from someone who has lived a soldier's life.
What do you think about this?
What Kant might say (and which Sebastian Rödl does say) is that what we all share is access to the Order of Reason. Indeed, Rödl makes the point that the only way you can recognize that someone is acting in a rational way is by recognizing the sense behind a series of actions they are undertaking from being your own access to reason. It's only because you can think it through and see that it's a rational process pointed at an end that you can recognize that they are a rational being as well.
(Rödl made this argument in support of Kant's position, but ends up undermining Kant on the subject of animals: because a crow can work out a system human beings set up to grant access to a treat, and a dog can, and an ape can, they must all have access to the Order of Reason as well -- and thus be entitled to dignity on Kant's terms. Kant thought animals were more like machines, which we could program using our own reason but possessed of none of their own. That is clearly wrong, as Rödl's argument shows.)
So we do, and must, all have access to the same Order of Reason (to use Rödl's phrase). We do not all have access in the same degree; some people are barely rational. And we do not have the ability to apply reason pragmatically in the same degree (i.e. phronesis); that is a virtue that, like all Aristotelian virtues, has to be habituated through practice (and, as Plato might have pointed out since he does so in the Republic, some people have more capacity to be guided by reason than others anyway).
So in a way it is and must be the same; and in another way, our ability to realize it may be of greater or smaller potential, and that potential of greater or smaller realization.
That makes sense. I'm not sure phronesis is shared because it depends on experience, but I can see how phronesis gives one an improved ability to reason.
I think I would have said reason is shared, along with a base of human commonalities like a need for food, and stopped there.
Thanks for opening this up for me. I'll have to ponder it.
I kind of like this area of 'practical reason.' The SEP has several articles on the topic. At a glance, these look interesting:
Practical Reason
Medieval Theories of Practical Reason
Practical Reason and the Structure of Actions
“I think I would have said reason is shared, along with a base of human commonalities like a need for food, and stopped there.”
You can say it that way if you want to, but no one is excluded from phronesis. Even the crackhead has worked out practical principles according to his reason for obtaining what he wants. We differ in potential and actuality, but not in nature. They don’t attain the heights of capacity we might call the virtue, but they are doing the same sort of thing (just less well).
Perhaps another word. With Aristotle especially, things are ‘in one way / but in another way.’ I used the phrase above. In a way, phronesis proper — like courage proper — is the ideal position on a range between vices. In that way you could say that a man lacks phronesis as you might say a man lacks courage.
But in another way, we are all by nature operating on these ranges of courage and self-mastery, practical reason well or badly exercised. They are things we share in common by human nature, even though some are better than others.
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