My overall impression of Helen's advocacy is that she is trying to "salvage the left", and what I mean by this is the centre-leftish social democratic style values within a liberal political structure. That means rolling things back, but not too far - yes it is obvious the (actual) right wing is clearly wanting to use the anti-woke backlash to roll things back way more.
The question that's been building up in me is why is HP so insistent on salvaging leftism within the L-R-spectrum paradigm instead of just letting go of it in favour of some new structure? Its only 200 years old anyway, maybe things have reverted to the classical optimates/populares divide? Many people today claim the true political spectrum is globalism vs nativism, or elites vs the rest - maybe it is time to let go of the L-R model?
I do want to salvage the left because I favour left-wing economic policies, but I also want to salvage the right because a healthy democracy needs ethical conservatives and ethical progressives or it goes insane.See the subtitle of my last piece which says that I think liberal conservatives probably have the most to offer on the issue of immigration. Mostly I want to salvage liberalism which is the set of underlying principles for liberal democracies and what we think of as Western Civilisation and doesn't belong to either the left or the right. .
The reason I don't want to 'let go' of the 'left-right' spectrum despite my overarching aim being to preserve liberalism which is neither (or both depending on how you look at it) is two-fold.
1) Because there will always be people with more of a drive to prioritise change, reform, progress - progressives - and we need them to ensure that we do reform things that need reforming and there will always be people with more of a drive to prioritise conserving traditions, norms and institutions - conservatives - and we need them to ensure that we protect that which is good and has been developed and become a norm for good reason. These two forces (which are not black and white, most people wish both to conserve and progress but they have different weightings) work well as checks and balances for each other in a society. I can't remember who said that progressives want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and conservatives want to keep the baby and the dirty bathwater and it is the interaction between the two that enables keeping the baby and throwing away the dirty water but I thought that got at it well.
2) We live in a democracy where we typically have two types of party and people have to vote for one or the other in order to have policies implemented. Both left or right can be globalist or nationalist, elitist or populist and this is a different spectrum that has to worked out within those groups and influences who people will vote for. But we cannot easily get rid of policies understood as right-wing or left-wing or stop people from favouring one or the other even if people in the parties differ so widely from each other. e.g., libertarians and social conservatives don't have much in common but both typically vote right because of the cluster of policies to be found on that side. They just try to make their party hold more of the values on their side. The same is true on the left where we have such strange variations like conservative socialists, wokeists and liberals.
I am left-wing economically - social democrat as you rightly discern - but conservative culturally - patriotic and protective of history and tradition - but liberal (freedom-orientated) above everything.
This is a place where I seek to bring together those who uphold commitments to liberal democratic values whether they are on the left or the right and build bridges and foster mutual respect among those who typically disagree on matters of policy but are united in that aim.
One of the major causes of the democratic deficit is public perception that whoever they vote for they get the same policies (neoliberalism hostile to the masses, mass immigration driving up housing costs and wages down).
The left cannot be salvaged without them repudiating these and winding "wokeism" back to conventional egalitarianism - the Starmer govt has made it clear it will not do so. The Democrats in the US have also shown a blunt refusal to heed Bernie's conclusions about working class abandonment.
The alternative is just setting up a replacement party just as the right are doing with Reform. Do you see any chances of this?
I wonder if R.D. Laing's concept of ontological insecurity also has a bearing on this? Laing said that people who are ontologically insecure lack a robust sense of self and can perceive opposition as an existential threat. By way of example, he described a disagreement during a group therapy session in which “Suddenly, one of the two protagonists broke off the argument to say, ‘I can’t go on. You are arguing in order to have the pleasure of triumphing over me. At best you win an argument. At worst you lose an argument. I am arguing in order to preserve my existence.’”
Atheist moral philosophy is never easy, and it can arise from surprising sources. I found business ethics literature to be particularly interesting, as well as the socialist conversations I grew up with in a Catholic household. The problem they all face is primal cause - what can you appeal to if “God said” isn’t on the agenda?
I find the anarchist’s approach to be the most convincing, i.e. you’re never going to reach the ends you desire with incompatible means, or more succinctly, the end IS the means.
This is the messiness, isn't it? We simply won't agree on what is and isn't virtuous and there will never be an absolute blanket code for virtue ethics, consequentialist ethics or any kind of ethics that don't run into conflicts and contradictions. This is why we have been arguing about morality for as long as human records exist and will almost certainly be doing for forever. As you can tell by my beginning by saying this is an exploratory piece and my ending by asking if everything must come back to consequences in the end (Even for Christian martyrs who let themselves be tortured to death rather than deny their faith, Heaven and being united with God was the desired consequence), I do not think I can break this issue down into component parts and put into a nice neat model and tie a bow on top. We're a messy, complicated species in a messy, complicated world and we often have to reason morally on a case-by-case basis and sometimes we have to say "I am conflicted on this" or "I don't know." This makes some people extremely uncomfortable, but I think we should try to become more comfortable with it and not the perfect be the enemy of the good. We'll never get it all worked out but things go better when we are trying to be good, reasonable, honest, compassionate people who care about what is true than when we are not.
Agree on messy, but I wonder if consequentialism can help us disentangle it because it makes virtues testable against something real.
So, absolute pacificism fails the consequences test. It works and makes thing better in some scopes - maybe 11th century Iceland - but not others - 1939 Europe.
I'd argue the binary set up of the ethics of virtue and consequentialism collapse in the worlding we do (or at least are more easily mapped mapped in a necker cube of matroyshka onions that another dimension of action allows, powers often restricted by religion to their own shamans & gods)
The worlding is a part of each selfing that acts in the world, we are more than ourselves among others, than we are each alone among others, and less than an organick mechanickal whole. ---- which when worlding is badly done by some number of us (lead by fear often as you describe in the identity politics example) and we get over-run by homunculi narcissists in the thing called society. (There is no such thing as society only me as god-emporer). In particular, certain bad outcomes of worlding are more likely, if we fail (consequentialism) to police (virtue ethics) the pathologies on our side.
(thus the distractions about various outsiders and the failure or decline of order within, pessimism is good for culture leaders to surf and generate narcissistic supply) (that methodological description is from the grid-group of Mary Douglas).
The cynicism that 'X' doesn't work because | human nature, and the bad hope that 'X' has never truly been tried, could actually be tested if we control for the pathologies we refuse to police, or that we police badly. We might find all 'systems' are fine, except where grifters are not policed and set up systems that suit grifting. This currently occurs in all systems so is it human nature? Really? or just bad policing of those on our side.
The difference between virtue and consequentialism as set up in the discussion occludes the world and how we do that effort to world well (we are thrown the titbits of identity, the distractions of fear). In part it is a figure/ground issue (body/landscape/umwelt/social landscape) and the frameworks we use to discuss and thus occlude (especially where we let narcissists deflect and distract with hot-button seeking half-jokes that turn into an invasion of Greenland).
(And no I have't read yet read either Merleau-Ponty on the self and the world, nor Spivak on worlding as a colonial method -- and which I find very annoying on hearing about)
I agree with most of the post, but I'd like to offer two problematic thoughts.
The minor one is that if we -correctly- decry tribalism, maybe we should be careful and aware there are risks and dangers in defining ourselves with labels, INCLUDING "consider[ing] ourselves liberals, empiricists and rationalists": we could be treating these precisely as a tribe we put ourselves in. In fact, here in the comments you say you are also social democratic and culturally conservative (and sometimes there is tension between these). The bottom line, I think, is that ultimately we cannot have a unique primary directive, we have to juggle between different attitudes and schools of thought, and this doesn't necessarily mean being opportunistic but simply trying to employ common sense (which is the most undefinable and unteachable thing, but could be one of the most important ones).
The major observation is about the kind of self-doubts employed to try and deactivate our more primitive intuitive danger responses. (I know I'm pointing to a specific argument, while you were way more nuanced). Your suggestion is that engaging our moral reasoning can help in keeping in check our primal moralistic instincts. I'm not sure this is the most effective way; on the contrary, I'm afraid a "purely logical" approach would be cold, value-free (except for a selfish drive) and so it would be forced to conclude those who are more correct are the psycopaths. An alternative way could be to keep our insticts of loyalty toward our tribe, but recognize that "our tribe" is the whole of humanity (if not all living things). After all, this is the original universalistic approach of the Enlightment (I remember reading something along these lines recently but I forgot if it was in your Cynical Theories, in Andrew Doyle's New Puritans or somewhere else). I believe cultivating this as a habit of thinking could indeed lead to favourable outcomes in the way we react to perceived threats.
Oh, no, I don't think getting rid of labels to describe sets of principles, epistemologies, mindsets will help anything. Firstly, these are descriptors, not groups. There is no group calling itself the authoritarians whom the liberals are at war with. There are ideological groups and individuals who are more authoritarian or more liberal in their outlook. Other liberals could be of any race, religion, nationality, ethnicity or political stance (we need to be able to name political stances too). Secondly we'd just end up having to use more words to convey the same thing and then that sentence would read something like "Those of us who value individual liberty and the school of philosophical thought centred upon it, who believe that evidence is the best way to determine to what is true and that reason is the best way to make arguments that get to the truth...." and readers would lose the will to live and say "There are words for those positions...."
Yes, this is why I say you need all your brain structures to function properly to make good judgements and cite Steven Pinker et al on widening circles of empathy.
I didn't advocate for getting rid of labels as descriptors.
I outlined the paradox of decrying tribalism while actually one can't avoid some aspects of it. There may not be anyone self-describing as authoritarian, but there are indeed some who self describe as liberals, empiricists and rationalists as a group, not simply as a description of their thought. A clear example are atheist communities (self-describing as rationalists) endorsing wokism to the point of rejecting liberalism (see the recent censorship of Coyne's on FFRF). My point is: they identify as liberals but don't act as liberals; maybe we should not just check ourselves to avoid the same error, but also doubt if our liberal-as-a-way-of-thinking identification could lead us to become liberal-as-a-group (=tribe).
I know you spoke of using all the brain function, I said I was picking one specific aspect. The point is maybe the only solution is one can't say they are one thing (liberal) ABOVE ALL THE OTHERS (social democrat, etc; but of course also reversing the order), because they won't be prioritizing THAT in all circumstances; on the contrary, they will be nuanced in a way that doesn't seem to be allowed by your description of "carefully considered and consistently held first principle" and “a constitution of oneself” "intended to be upheld consistently going forward". I think it's more honest to admit one is bound to allow for exceptions.
Your article made me reflect on the balance between our reasoned selves and our primal instincts. Your quote:
"It has been common, particularly in situations of war or tribal conflict for humans with a strong sense of justice and capable of great depths of empathy, compassion and self-sacrifice to kill, torture, rape and maim other humans and seemingly take pleasure in this,"
Inspired this thought: If we have these animal drives for savagery, how well do we think completely starving them is going to go? If we tell our inner wolf to go hungry, he'll eat us. Do you think there's a way to ethically channel these instincts, such as through capital punishment for profoundly evil acts, without feeding into unnecessary cruelty or tribalism?
I don't think we commonly have drives for savagery lurking within us that we are sublimating. I certainly don't have any secret urges to dissect children alive & pin their eyeballs to my wall or slowly roast someone to death and then keep a fragment of his charred skeleton. I think most people's natural instincts on learning of this is horror, incredulity and revulsion. How could a human being do such a thing? I think it takes a combination of social factors to bring out this out this twisted element of human psychology that makes one group regard another as a vile contaminant that must be utterly destroyed and afterwards, people who engaged in it struggle to understand how they could have done it. I saw an interview with a young man who took part in the beating, burning and flattening of Farkhunda Malikzada in which he said that a kind of mob frenzy took him over and a Hutu man who threw a four year old girl back into a fire she had escaped describe the same thing.
I think not setting up situations which facilitate such mob frenzies among one group towards another is entirely achievable and is the norm is most times and places but especially in modern times.
I think the drive for violent retribution against an individual who done something truly evil is a more common instinct and different to mob hatred of another group because of their race, religion, tribe etc. We have achieved enough of a consensus against that to protect against it most of the time although individuals might still feel it. I did when a young family member was raped and there was not enough evidence for a prosecution.
There are also instincts for war-like behaviour of group against group or for risk-taking specifically in men which are typically mediated in healthy ways through things like competitive sports, martial arts, extreme sports and video games.
It is not as though our reasoned selves and our primal instincts are entirely distinct things. They're all in our brains and connected to each other and we need both. People with damage to their amygdala have difficulty feeling fear when it would be healthy to do so or recognising when other people do and people with damage to their frontal lobes can have difficulty with emotional regulation, moral reasoning and impulse control but typically these all work together, but not perfectly, because more primitive brain structures have had to be adapted to more recent environments (which include other reasoning, speaking humans). Jonathan Haidt is good on this. So many of our intuitions are founded in more primitive structures and our reasoning abilities came later. He argues that this is why we are so inclined to act on instinct first and find ways to rationalise it later.
I found it interesting to learn that our brains respond to disconfirming evidence of what we already believe in the same way as to danger and that our frontal cortex can override this enabling us to change our mind, but that it is hard and fundamentally uncomfortable to do so. It is in this sense that I think we should endeavour to learn habits of doing so to make it easier.
Thank you for such a thoughtful response. I appreciate the time you took, and I’m honored to have received it.
I think what I’m trying to ask is this: do you think our sense of justice could originate from the same part of the brain as our primal aggression? I’m no scientist, just speculating.
I agree that retribution for serious crimes differs from mob mentality, but could both stem from the same drive? Could they be manifestations of the same emotion? Punishment for crime might channel aggression productively. A mob, on the other hand, labels the other side as evil unreasonably, while lawful retribution attempts to identify genuine evil through actions. It’s still “othering,” but more ethically sourced.
For example, I have a visceral reaction to neo-Nazis in the woke right. I’m fiercely opposed to their ideas, and because I can tolerate abusive language, I often confront them in kind—holding up a mirror. This approach might not always be the most mature, and it is “othering.” However, I don’t do this out of tribalism, but because they aim to banish or destroy Jewish people—and they have to be defeated. I don’t believe in censorship, as banning thought crimes is wrong no matter how terrible the thoughts. But in your opinion, can vicious language be an ethical response to vicious ideas or does it demonstrate my own lack of virtue?
I don’t condone torture for anyone, but I wouldn’t shed a tear if a torturer endured the same pain they inflicted, particularly when the victim is a child. Ethically, in my higher-minded self, I prefer capital punishment, but that aggressive drive makes me sympathetic to wanting them to feel the suffering they caused. Am I indulging the animal side improperly when I react this way, or am I demonstrating a sense of justice? Do you think it's possible these impulses come from the same place within us—savage reactions to savage behavior, but sometimes for the greater good?
You are speaking more of our sense of fairness, reciprocity and justice towards individuals or ideological groups than tribal hostility to people based on group characteristics and I am explicitly talking about the latter. Arguments about whether the death penalty is justifiable are a different category and can be made from a number of ethical positions. Some would see my opposition to the death penalty as more cruel than the death penalty because it forces people to spend decades in a cage rather than releasing them from suffering. Others would argue that those who have deprived others of life do not deserve to continue to experience life and possibly that the tax payer should not have to pay for their upkeep. Any of these people could be consequentialists or virtue ethicists but they're addressing individual justice and reciprocity and fairness on that level.
See the sentence which asks something like "Is the danger really coming from people with this skin colour or sexuality or from an ideological group within them/who claims to speak for them?" "Is it fair to target those groups or should I oppose adherents to the ideology along with members of those groups."
When you speak of people who want to destroy Jews, you mention Neo-Nazis. That's an ideological group. I'd suggest this is the right target for opposition! If the particular individual identified themselves as a Christian Nationalist and you decided that Christians were the problem including Christians also opposing Christian Nationalists and opposing antisemitism, then you'd be indulging in the kind of tribal territorial thinking I am referring to.
As to your code of conduct when dealing with such people, I don't think returning harsh language about them and their beliefs is a lack of virtue. It's understandable and justifiable. Might it be better and more virtuous to respond differently? Yes, probably. I saw a black Christian lady respond to a white woman who had "Christ first" in her bio posting the most revolting racist tweet by calling her "My sister in Christ" and reminding her that God loved the black man she'd insulted and black people generally as much as he loved her and urging her not to engage in racist abuse and remove her tweet. The contrast between the two Christian women's characters was so clearly defined by this - the black woman had so much dignity and grace and so epitomised what Christians commonly understand as "Christ-like" and the white woman was so vicious and what Christians would commonly call 'unchristian" - that the thread was full of white Christians supporting the black lady and telling the white one than her behaviour was unchristian. This was a perfect example of what I mean by cultivating virtues according to one's own moral code and displaying it in one's character and influencing others with it. Other black people in the thread had responded by insulting the white woman and white people back and this is perfectly understandable and it would be difficult to blame them, but none of them moved other Christians to take a stand for what they saw as the best of Christian virtues like the lady who said, "My sister in Christ..."
You are human. I am human. We get angry. We may respond to vicious words with vicious words from vicious individuals. When you say "I don't condone torture for anyone but wouldn't shed a tear if a torturer endured the same pain they inflicted" you are demonstrating your higher moral reasoning in your principles which do not allow you to condone torture and your human feelings when you cannot sympathise very much with the tortured torturer.
I agree that this is different [from] your usual style. From my reader's standpoint, it's better.
Thank you!
(Today I learn that 'different to' is British, 'different than' is American and 'different from' works everywhere)
writing is mostly about choosing prepositions, even originary pronouns are prepositions of speech acts, my preferred preposition is 'hey you'
My overall impression of Helen's advocacy is that she is trying to "salvage the left", and what I mean by this is the centre-leftish social democratic style values within a liberal political structure. That means rolling things back, but not too far - yes it is obvious the (actual) right wing is clearly wanting to use the anti-woke backlash to roll things back way more.
The question that's been building up in me is why is HP so insistent on salvaging leftism within the L-R-spectrum paradigm instead of just letting go of it in favour of some new structure? Its only 200 years old anyway, maybe things have reverted to the classical optimates/populares divide? Many people today claim the true political spectrum is globalism vs nativism, or elites vs the rest - maybe it is time to let go of the L-R model?
I do want to salvage the left because I favour left-wing economic policies, but I also want to salvage the right because a healthy democracy needs ethical conservatives and ethical progressives or it goes insane.See the subtitle of my last piece which says that I think liberal conservatives probably have the most to offer on the issue of immigration. Mostly I want to salvage liberalism which is the set of underlying principles for liberal democracies and what we think of as Western Civilisation and doesn't belong to either the left or the right. .
The reason I don't want to 'let go' of the 'left-right' spectrum despite my overarching aim being to preserve liberalism which is neither (or both depending on how you look at it) is two-fold.
1) Because there will always be people with more of a drive to prioritise change, reform, progress - progressives - and we need them to ensure that we do reform things that need reforming and there will always be people with more of a drive to prioritise conserving traditions, norms and institutions - conservatives - and we need them to ensure that we protect that which is good and has been developed and become a norm for good reason. These two forces (which are not black and white, most people wish both to conserve and progress but they have different weightings) work well as checks and balances for each other in a society. I can't remember who said that progressives want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and conservatives want to keep the baby and the dirty bathwater and it is the interaction between the two that enables keeping the baby and throwing away the dirty water but I thought that got at it well.
2) We live in a democracy where we typically have two types of party and people have to vote for one or the other in order to have policies implemented. Both left or right can be globalist or nationalist, elitist or populist and this is a different spectrum that has to worked out within those groups and influences who people will vote for. But we cannot easily get rid of policies understood as right-wing or left-wing or stop people from favouring one or the other even if people in the parties differ so widely from each other. e.g., libertarians and social conservatives don't have much in common but both typically vote right because of the cluster of policies to be found on that side. They just try to make their party hold more of the values on their side. The same is true on the left where we have such strange variations like conservative socialists, wokeists and liberals.
I am left-wing economically - social democrat as you rightly discern - but conservative culturally - patriotic and protective of history and tradition - but liberal (freedom-orientated) above everything.
This is a place where I seek to bring together those who uphold commitments to liberal democratic values whether they are on the left or the right and build bridges and foster mutual respect among those who typically disagree on matters of policy but are united in that aim.
One of the major causes of the democratic deficit is public perception that whoever they vote for they get the same policies (neoliberalism hostile to the masses, mass immigration driving up housing costs and wages down).
The left cannot be salvaged without them repudiating these and winding "wokeism" back to conventional egalitarianism - the Starmer govt has made it clear it will not do so. The Democrats in the US have also shown a blunt refusal to heed Bernie's conclusions about working class abandonment.
The alternative is just setting up a replacement party just as the right are doing with Reform. Do you see any chances of this?
“I am left-wing economically - social democrat as you rightly discern - but conservative culturally”
So you’re basically SDP. Want a signup link?
No, not for me. I'm socially liberal,
I wonder if R.D. Laing's concept of ontological insecurity also has a bearing on this? Laing said that people who are ontologically insecure lack a robust sense of self and can perceive opposition as an existential threat. By way of example, he described a disagreement during a group therapy session in which “Suddenly, one of the two protagonists broke off the argument to say, ‘I can’t go on. You are arguing in order to have the pleasure of triumphing over me. At best you win an argument. At worst you lose an argument. I am arguing in order to preserve my existence.’”
Atheist moral philosophy is never easy, and it can arise from surprising sources. I found business ethics literature to be particularly interesting, as well as the socialist conversations I grew up with in a Catholic household. The problem they all face is primal cause - what can you appeal to if “God said” isn’t on the agenda?
I find the anarchist’s approach to be the most convincing, i.e. you’re never going to reach the ends you desire with incompatible means, or more succinctly, the end IS the means.
It seems to me that careful consideration of the distinction drawn by Stephen Covey between objective universal principles/natural laws and subjective, situational ethical values might be useful in developing our thinking in this area. Try this, for example: http://www.franklincoveysouthasia.com/_asp/programfollowup/images/7habitssignature/docs/art_center_on_principles.pdf
This strikes me as a useful way to look at the world. I have questions, if I may?
Do virtues have to be absolute, and if so what if they are incompatible, e.g. justice *and* pacifism.
Are some virtues really "luxury virtues", e.g. (again) pacifism?
Does that last takes us back to consequences?
This is the messiness, isn't it? We simply won't agree on what is and isn't virtuous and there will never be an absolute blanket code for virtue ethics, consequentialist ethics or any kind of ethics that don't run into conflicts and contradictions. This is why we have been arguing about morality for as long as human records exist and will almost certainly be doing for forever. As you can tell by my beginning by saying this is an exploratory piece and my ending by asking if everything must come back to consequences in the end (Even for Christian martyrs who let themselves be tortured to death rather than deny their faith, Heaven and being united with God was the desired consequence), I do not think I can break this issue down into component parts and put into a nice neat model and tie a bow on top. We're a messy, complicated species in a messy, complicated world and we often have to reason morally on a case-by-case basis and sometimes we have to say "I am conflicted on this" or "I don't know." This makes some people extremely uncomfortable, but I think we should try to become more comfortable with it and not the perfect be the enemy of the good. We'll never get it all worked out but things go better when we are trying to be good, reasonable, honest, compassionate people who care about what is true than when we are not.
Agree on messy, but I wonder if consequentialism can help us disentangle it because it makes virtues testable against something real.
So, absolute pacificism fails the consequences test. It works and makes thing better in some scopes - maybe 11th century Iceland - but not others - 1939 Europe.
I'd argue the binary set up of the ethics of virtue and consequentialism collapse in the worlding we do (or at least are more easily mapped mapped in a necker cube of matroyshka onions that another dimension of action allows, powers often restricted by religion to their own shamans & gods)
The worlding is a part of each selfing that acts in the world, we are more than ourselves among others, than we are each alone among others, and less than an organick mechanickal whole. ---- which when worlding is badly done by some number of us (lead by fear often as you describe in the identity politics example) and we get over-run by homunculi narcissists in the thing called society. (There is no such thing as society only me as god-emporer). In particular, certain bad outcomes of worlding are more likely, if we fail (consequentialism) to police (virtue ethics) the pathologies on our side.
(thus the distractions about various outsiders and the failure or decline of order within, pessimism is good for culture leaders to surf and generate narcissistic supply) (that methodological description is from the grid-group of Mary Douglas).
The cynicism that 'X' doesn't work because | human nature, and the bad hope that 'X' has never truly been tried, could actually be tested if we control for the pathologies we refuse to police, or that we police badly. We might find all 'systems' are fine, except where grifters are not policed and set up systems that suit grifting. This currently occurs in all systems so is it human nature? Really? or just bad policing of those on our side.
The difference between virtue and consequentialism as set up in the discussion occludes the world and how we do that effort to world well (we are thrown the titbits of identity, the distractions of fear). In part it is a figure/ground issue (body/landscape/umwelt/social landscape) and the frameworks we use to discuss and thus occlude (especially where we let narcissists deflect and distract with hot-button seeking half-jokes that turn into an invasion of Greenland).
(And no I have't read yet read either Merleau-Ponty on the self and the world, nor Spivak on worlding as a colonial method -- and which I find very annoying on hearing about)
I agree with most of the post, but I'd like to offer two problematic thoughts.
The minor one is that if we -correctly- decry tribalism, maybe we should be careful and aware there are risks and dangers in defining ourselves with labels, INCLUDING "consider[ing] ourselves liberals, empiricists and rationalists": we could be treating these precisely as a tribe we put ourselves in. In fact, here in the comments you say you are also social democratic and culturally conservative (and sometimes there is tension between these). The bottom line, I think, is that ultimately we cannot have a unique primary directive, we have to juggle between different attitudes and schools of thought, and this doesn't necessarily mean being opportunistic but simply trying to employ common sense (which is the most undefinable and unteachable thing, but could be one of the most important ones).
The major observation is about the kind of self-doubts employed to try and deactivate our more primitive intuitive danger responses. (I know I'm pointing to a specific argument, while you were way more nuanced). Your suggestion is that engaging our moral reasoning can help in keeping in check our primal moralistic instincts. I'm not sure this is the most effective way; on the contrary, I'm afraid a "purely logical" approach would be cold, value-free (except for a selfish drive) and so it would be forced to conclude those who are more correct are the psycopaths. An alternative way could be to keep our insticts of loyalty toward our tribe, but recognize that "our tribe" is the whole of humanity (if not all living things). After all, this is the original universalistic approach of the Enlightment (I remember reading something along these lines recently but I forgot if it was in your Cynical Theories, in Andrew Doyle's New Puritans or somewhere else). I believe cultivating this as a habit of thinking could indeed lead to favourable outcomes in the way we react to perceived threats.
Oh, no, I don't think getting rid of labels to describe sets of principles, epistemologies, mindsets will help anything. Firstly, these are descriptors, not groups. There is no group calling itself the authoritarians whom the liberals are at war with. There are ideological groups and individuals who are more authoritarian or more liberal in their outlook. Other liberals could be of any race, religion, nationality, ethnicity or political stance (we need to be able to name political stances too). Secondly we'd just end up having to use more words to convey the same thing and then that sentence would read something like "Those of us who value individual liberty and the school of philosophical thought centred upon it, who believe that evidence is the best way to determine to what is true and that reason is the best way to make arguments that get to the truth...." and readers would lose the will to live and say "There are words for those positions...."
Yes, this is why I say you need all your brain structures to function properly to make good judgements and cite Steven Pinker et al on widening circles of empathy.
I didn't advocate for getting rid of labels as descriptors.
I outlined the paradox of decrying tribalism while actually one can't avoid some aspects of it. There may not be anyone self-describing as authoritarian, but there are indeed some who self describe as liberals, empiricists and rationalists as a group, not simply as a description of their thought. A clear example are atheist communities (self-describing as rationalists) endorsing wokism to the point of rejecting liberalism (see the recent censorship of Coyne's on FFRF). My point is: they identify as liberals but don't act as liberals; maybe we should not just check ourselves to avoid the same error, but also doubt if our liberal-as-a-way-of-thinking identification could lead us to become liberal-as-a-group (=tribe).
I know you spoke of using all the brain function, I said I was picking one specific aspect. The point is maybe the only solution is one can't say they are one thing (liberal) ABOVE ALL THE OTHERS (social democrat, etc; but of course also reversing the order), because they won't be prioritizing THAT in all circumstances; on the contrary, they will be nuanced in a way that doesn't seem to be allowed by your description of "carefully considered and consistently held first principle" and “a constitution of oneself” "intended to be upheld consistently going forward". I think it's more honest to admit one is bound to allow for exceptions.
Thanks Helen. We humans live in a world naturally governed by an arguable balance between utilitarian/consequentialist and virtue ethics.
Your article made me reflect on the balance between our reasoned selves and our primal instincts. Your quote:
"It has been common, particularly in situations of war or tribal conflict for humans with a strong sense of justice and capable of great depths of empathy, compassion and self-sacrifice to kill, torture, rape and maim other humans and seemingly take pleasure in this,"
Inspired this thought: If we have these animal drives for savagery, how well do we think completely starving them is going to go? If we tell our inner wolf to go hungry, he'll eat us. Do you think there's a way to ethically channel these instincts, such as through capital punishment for profoundly evil acts, without feeding into unnecessary cruelty or tribalism?
I don't think we commonly have drives for savagery lurking within us that we are sublimating. I certainly don't have any secret urges to dissect children alive & pin their eyeballs to my wall or slowly roast someone to death and then keep a fragment of his charred skeleton. I think most people's natural instincts on learning of this is horror, incredulity and revulsion. How could a human being do such a thing? I think it takes a combination of social factors to bring out this out this twisted element of human psychology that makes one group regard another as a vile contaminant that must be utterly destroyed and afterwards, people who engaged in it struggle to understand how they could have done it. I saw an interview with a young man who took part in the beating, burning and flattening of Farkhunda Malikzada in which he said that a kind of mob frenzy took him over and a Hutu man who threw a four year old girl back into a fire she had escaped describe the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Farkhunda_Malikzada
I think not setting up situations which facilitate such mob frenzies among one group towards another is entirely achievable and is the norm is most times and places but especially in modern times.
I think the drive for violent retribution against an individual who done something truly evil is a more common instinct and different to mob hatred of another group because of their race, religion, tribe etc. We have achieved enough of a consensus against that to protect against it most of the time although individuals might still feel it. I did when a young family member was raped and there was not enough evidence for a prosecution.
There are also instincts for war-like behaviour of group against group or for risk-taking specifically in men which are typically mediated in healthy ways through things like competitive sports, martial arts, extreme sports and video games.
It is not as though our reasoned selves and our primal instincts are entirely distinct things. They're all in our brains and connected to each other and we need both. People with damage to their amygdala have difficulty feeling fear when it would be healthy to do so or recognising when other people do and people with damage to their frontal lobes can have difficulty with emotional regulation, moral reasoning and impulse control but typically these all work together, but not perfectly, because more primitive brain structures have had to be adapted to more recent environments (which include other reasoning, speaking humans). Jonathan Haidt is good on this. So many of our intuitions are founded in more primitive structures and our reasoning abilities came later. He argues that this is why we are so inclined to act on instinct first and find ways to rationalise it later.
I found it interesting to learn that our brains respond to disconfirming evidence of what we already believe in the same way as to danger and that our frontal cortex can override this enabling us to change our mind, but that it is hard and fundamentally uncomfortable to do so. It is in this sense that I think we should endeavour to learn habits of doing so to make it easier.
Thank you for such a thoughtful response. I appreciate the time you took, and I’m honored to have received it.
I think what I’m trying to ask is this: do you think our sense of justice could originate from the same part of the brain as our primal aggression? I’m no scientist, just speculating.
I agree that retribution for serious crimes differs from mob mentality, but could both stem from the same drive? Could they be manifestations of the same emotion? Punishment for crime might channel aggression productively. A mob, on the other hand, labels the other side as evil unreasonably, while lawful retribution attempts to identify genuine evil through actions. It’s still “othering,” but more ethically sourced.
For example, I have a visceral reaction to neo-Nazis in the woke right. I’m fiercely opposed to their ideas, and because I can tolerate abusive language, I often confront them in kind—holding up a mirror. This approach might not always be the most mature, and it is “othering.” However, I don’t do this out of tribalism, but because they aim to banish or destroy Jewish people—and they have to be defeated. I don’t believe in censorship, as banning thought crimes is wrong no matter how terrible the thoughts. But in your opinion, can vicious language be an ethical response to vicious ideas or does it demonstrate my own lack of virtue?
I don’t condone torture for anyone, but I wouldn’t shed a tear if a torturer endured the same pain they inflicted, particularly when the victim is a child. Ethically, in my higher-minded self, I prefer capital punishment, but that aggressive drive makes me sympathetic to wanting them to feel the suffering they caused. Am I indulging the animal side improperly when I react this way, or am I demonstrating a sense of justice? Do you think it's possible these impulses come from the same place within us—savage reactions to savage behavior, but sometimes for the greater good?
You are speaking more of our sense of fairness, reciprocity and justice towards individuals or ideological groups than tribal hostility to people based on group characteristics and I am explicitly talking about the latter. Arguments about whether the death penalty is justifiable are a different category and can be made from a number of ethical positions. Some would see my opposition to the death penalty as more cruel than the death penalty because it forces people to spend decades in a cage rather than releasing them from suffering. Others would argue that those who have deprived others of life do not deserve to continue to experience life and possibly that the tax payer should not have to pay for their upkeep. Any of these people could be consequentialists or virtue ethicists but they're addressing individual justice and reciprocity and fairness on that level.
See the sentence which asks something like "Is the danger really coming from people with this skin colour or sexuality or from an ideological group within them/who claims to speak for them?" "Is it fair to target those groups or should I oppose adherents to the ideology along with members of those groups."
When you speak of people who want to destroy Jews, you mention Neo-Nazis. That's an ideological group. I'd suggest this is the right target for opposition! If the particular individual identified themselves as a Christian Nationalist and you decided that Christians were the problem including Christians also opposing Christian Nationalists and opposing antisemitism, then you'd be indulging in the kind of tribal territorial thinking I am referring to.
As to your code of conduct when dealing with such people, I don't think returning harsh language about them and their beliefs is a lack of virtue. It's understandable and justifiable. Might it be better and more virtuous to respond differently? Yes, probably. I saw a black Christian lady respond to a white woman who had "Christ first" in her bio posting the most revolting racist tweet by calling her "My sister in Christ" and reminding her that God loved the black man she'd insulted and black people generally as much as he loved her and urging her not to engage in racist abuse and remove her tweet. The contrast between the two Christian women's characters was so clearly defined by this - the black woman had so much dignity and grace and so epitomised what Christians commonly understand as "Christ-like" and the white woman was so vicious and what Christians would commonly call 'unchristian" - that the thread was full of white Christians supporting the black lady and telling the white one than her behaviour was unchristian. This was a perfect example of what I mean by cultivating virtues according to one's own moral code and displaying it in one's character and influencing others with it. Other black people in the thread had responded by insulting the white woman and white people back and this is perfectly understandable and it would be difficult to blame them, but none of them moved other Christians to take a stand for what they saw as the best of Christian virtues like the lady who said, "My sister in Christ..."
You are human. I am human. We get angry. We may respond to vicious words with vicious words from vicious individuals. When you say "I don't condone torture for anyone but wouldn't shed a tear if a torturer endured the same pain they inflicted" you are demonstrating your higher moral reasoning in your principles which do not allow you to condone torture and your human feelings when you cannot sympathise very much with the tortured torturer.
Well put, thank you.