To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I’ve been repeating that slogan to my new boss over the last few weeks.
Although I appreciate the value of a specialized education — this whole reflection is prompted by research into pursuing either an M.S. Biostats or a Ph.D. Interdisciplinary Evaluation degree — I think that in the wrong hands, deep knowledge in one domain of knowledge but a superficial grasp of other, cognate domains seems risky.
The real value of a philosophy education is that we understand the difference between hammers and toolboxes, such that we can look at problems from a 50,000-foot level to see what’s really going on. We might not have the best tools to fix the problem, but we’re better equipped to understand the problem in its totality.
A real-life case in point occurred recently in a workplace setting. Having been given a somewhat complex project that didn’t have a lot of antecedent wisdom to inform execution, I asked a few co-workers for suggestions on how to proceed. The results were really quite useful, but they also put my larger point into elegant context. Colleagues who had deep knowledge of database administration and SQL querying framed the project in terms of a data pull. Clinicians focused on variation in performance by licensed providers. Statisticians distilled the whole thing into an experiment-design question, looking for ways to shape the data to support specific statistical procedures.
You know what’s missing? Integration of all these useful domains of expertise.
A philosopher is trained in logic, taxonomy and metaphysics. We seek the assumption behind the question, and we try to both distill individual points into autonomous data points, and then reintegrate them into a coherent whole. We understand which conclusions are valid and which aren’t by virtue of experience in both formal and informal logic. In short: A philosopher knows how to think. We’re the masters of conceptual strategy, even if we lack the in-depth expertise of a specialist who operates on a more tactical level.
Almost no employer advertises for jobs that require a philosophy degree. What a shame. A philosopher is probably better equipped to handle certain kinds of work — information analysis, project management, etc. — than people who may have special training that acts, in some ways, like a worldview blinder. Unfortunately, for the higher-paying jobs, a philosophy degree is counterproductive; employers simply don’t value them, especially at the postgrad level.
For my part, I’m glad I studied philosophy. Makes me a generalist capable of integrating domain-level wisdom into a rich narrative tapestry. Couple a bachelor’s degree in philosophy with a master’s degree in a specialized field, though — and you might just find yourself with real advantage.
Wilson, Haidt & Moral Psychology
A trek through the landscape of moral philosophy reveals an interesting bifurcation within the discipline. Undergrads learn about the history and traditional scope and methods of ethics — Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Smith, Nietzsche, Rawls — but at the graduate level, the positivist/continental dispute rears its head and in many programs, a holistic approach to the discipline collapses into academic factionalism or intellectual solipsism.
As such, contemporary moral philosophy remains bedeviled by its own internal hobgoblins such that applied moral philosophy exists as little more than an offshoot of some other discipline. The philosophers fight increasingly irrelevant battles — the positivists, about linguistic theory or higher-order mathematical logic; the continentals, about principles too abstract to apply to real-world problems — while “ethicists” in other disciplines merely dress up their ideology in moral terms. The bioethicists are notorious for this; they’re biologists first, and cloak their policy preferences in terms like “autonomy” or “justice” or “quality of life” that have astonishingly little relationship to the moral universe from which they purportedly originate.
As an ethicist, then, I’ve held a pessimistic outlook on the discipline. I agree with some prominent philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre, that part of the problem is that philosophy needs to get over positivism before it again will become relevant to ordinary people. Philosophers have boxed themselves into a series of dead ends; everyone knows it but too many have invested too much into their sub-sub-subspecialties for meaningful reform to occur anytime soon.
One possible exit strategery flows from … applied moral philosophy. Or rather, the import of some aspects of evolutionary biology into the realm of philosophy proper.
Consider the fascinating developments in evolutionary biology. I recall first encountering the subject with Jared Diamond’s Why Is Sex Fun? This short tome — assigned reading in an undergrad philosophy-of-science class — demonstrated the evolution in behavior related to advances in the biology of sexual reproduction. Following that, Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel identified causal factors in why some social groups dominated and others declined.
More recently, I’ve worked through E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. These books, as I read them, are correlated; Wilson outlines the long-term evolution of social behavior in humans and Haidt covers the territory of moral intuition and how pre-rational intuition leads to the group identities that function as partisanship’s precursor.
The upshot is this: While academic moral philosophy still follows trendy theories down various empty bunny holes, the social psychologists and evolutionary biologists have plausibly claimed that human moral behavior derives from the competition/altruism dynamic within groups and between groups.
Look at it this way: Our first sphere of interest is the local group — family, circle of friends, tribe, affinity group. Within this sphere, we compete for prominence and sometimes sacrifice personal goals for the good of the group. But when that sphere comes under attack, we band together to challenge the aggressor: Sometimes through overt conflict, but sometimes through engagement and compromise. By default, we identify with the local group and because of evolutionary pressure, we’re less likely to express sympathy for or understanding of The Other. The intellectual schema of inter-group disputes falls into the “me good, you bad” mindset that’s very difficult to eradicate even among otherwise educated folks.
People operate in overlapping spheres of group loyalties. We are members of families, clubs, cities, nation-states, religions, self-selected tribes (e.g., of minority groups), political affiliations, socioeconomic strata, etc. All of these memberships influence us; their overlaps force us to make choices among competing and contradictory expectations.
One logical outcome from this chaos of conflicting loyalties comes the sovereign self — the radical individual, common in Western European civilization, who selects and rank-orders his loyalties in a deliberate way. You see this trend clearly with people who self-identify first as a member of a specific group. When you meet someone new and ask, “So, tell me about yourself?” one clear hint comes from the first sentence. Does the person tell you his job? That she’s married? That he’s gay? That she’s a Christian? This ranking of competing group claims helps a person demonstrate a self-consistent personal ethics.
But cognates matter. Some identities conflict in fundamental ways; it’s hard to be a faithful Catholic, a center/right Republican, a practicing bisexual, a writer and a son of a socially conservative family … simultaneously. These identities conflict. Many elect to pick among these identities and downplay or shed others, often with a sense of viciousness for what’s downplayed. Just think of how many “recovering Catholics” or “former liberals” you’ve met. They haven’t “evolved” — they’ve merely rank-ordered their affiliations in a manner that produces the least psychic violence. (Others, myself included, maintain these affiliations but retreat to a form of relativism in which we acknowledge the conflicts but pretend that we’re above the fray.)
Thus does Haidt’s moral psychology bring a semblance of order from the theoretical chaos spawned by 20th-century philosophy. He seems to concur with Hume’s theory of moral sentiments; the interplay of Wilson’s and Diamond’s insights flesh out the how and the why of the evolutionary context.
When you see Republicans and Democrats unable to compromise, it’s not necessarily because they’re all just big fat meanie heads unwilling to share. The core beliefs in each group mean something to them, and just tossing group pieties aside to find compromise seems odd. If one party favors high taxes on the rich and the other party favors low taxes on the rich, a “solution” of medium taxes for the rich is incoherent for both sides. Similarly, people who support or oppose gay marriage want an absolute resolution; no one wants a scenario where half the gays can get married.
Politics used to be somewhat immune to this, inasmuch as the traditional passions in American life rarely affected party politics directly at the national level and across the board like they do now. But the divisions we see have always been there, just expressed in other forms (like religious bigotry, overt racism, and intolerance for gays, immigrants, etc.). As America moves ever-closer to a federal society instead of a federalist society, the pressures that used to vent along a hierarchy now can only vent from the top, with results as likely disastrous as they are eminently predictable.
The question for America, then, isn’t “what can we do to reduce partisan gridlock” but rather, “what can we do to manage gridlock more effectively.”
We could start by recognizing the import of moral psychology — in particular, by setting aside the psuedointellectual nonsense about “ideological echo chambers” or “false equivalence” and instead recognizing that group conflicts are the result of a successful society. We should embrace gridlock as a sign of healthy competition among various factions. The most dangerous societies are those with only one voice declaiming from the public square.
Some things do need resolution. (The Fiscal Cliff, for one.) This means that we need more skilled cat herders in politics and the media instead of elites whining that the cats refuse to be herded.
More than anything, though, we need to ensure that there are effective safety valves for intragroup disagreements at various social levels. This means more federalism, capitalism and diversity of thought. It means we need to resist the authoritarian tendencies of Right and Left and to accept that compromise isn’t always a virtue but squelching others is always a vice.
Human moral psychology evolved the way it did because it conferred real survival benefits. Although society is significantly more complex than it was in the days of hunter-gatherer tribes, those pre-rational skills we learned millennia ago remain relevant. If we try to suppress them for the sake of some golden ideal, we risk throwing the whole system into chaos.
[N.B. — Attributions or ellipical statements about any particular author are my reaction to that author’s work, and not necessarily that author’s explicit sentiment.]
Wilson, Haidt & Moral Psychology
A trek through the landscape of moral philosophy reveals an interesting bifurcation within the discipline. Undergrads learn about the history and traditional scope and methods of ethics — Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Smith, Nietzsche, Rawls — but at the graduate level, the positivist/continental dispute rears its head and in many programs, a holistic approach to the discipline collapses into academic factionalism or intellectual solipsism.
As such, contemporary moral philosophy remains bedeviled by its own internal hobgoblins such that applied moral philosophy exists as little more than an offshoot of some other discipline. The philosophers fight increasingly irrelevant battles — the positivists, about linguistic theory or higher-order mathematical logic; the continentals, about principles too abstract to apply to real-world problems — while “ethicists” in other disciplines merely dress up their ideology in moral terms. The bioethicists are notorious for this; they’re biologists first, and cloak their policy preferences in terms like “autonomy” or “justice” or “quality of life” that have astonishingly little relationship to the moral universe from which they purportedly originate.
As an ethicist, then, I’ve held a pessimistic outlook on the discipline. I agree with some prominent philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre, that part of the problem is that philosophy needs to get over positivism before it again will become relevant to ordinary people. Philosophers have boxed themselves into a series of dead ends; everyone knows it but too many have invested too much into their sub-sub-subspecialties for meaningful reform to occur anytime soon.
One possible exit strategery flows from … applied moral philosophy. Or rather, the import of some aspects of evolutionary biology into the realm of philosophy proper.
Consider the fascinating developments in evolutionary biology. I recall first encountering the subject with Jared Diamond’s Why Is Sex Fun? This short tome — assigned reading in an undergrad philosophy-of-science class — demonstrated the evolution in behavior related to advances in the biology of sexual reproduction. Following that, Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel identified causal factors in why some social groups dominated and others declined.
More recently, I’ve worked through E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. These books, as I read them, are correlated; Wilson outlines the long-term evolution of social behavior in humans and Haidt covers the territory of moral intuition and how pre-rational intuition leads to the group identities that function as partisanship’s precursor.
The upshot is this: While academic moral philosophy still follows trendy theories down various empty bunny holes, the social psychologists and evolutionary biologists have plausibly claimed that human moral behavior derives from the competition/altruism dynamic within groups and between groups.
Look at it this way: Our first sphere of interest is the local group — family, circle of friends, tribe, affinity group. Within this sphere, we compete for prominence and sometimes sacrifice personal goals for the good of the group. But when that sphere comes under attack, we band together to challenge the aggressor: Sometimes through overt conflict, but sometimes through engagement and compromise. By default, we identify with the local group and because of evolutionary pressure, we’re less likely to express sympathy for or understanding of The Other. The intellectual schema of inter-group disputes falls into the “me good, you bad” mindset that’s very difficult to eradicate even among otherwise educated folks.
People operate in overlapping spheres of group loyalties. We are members of families, clubs, cities, nation-states, religions, self-selected tribes (e.g., of minority groups), political affiliations, socioeconomic strata, etc. All of these memberships influence us; their overlaps force us to make choices among competing and contradictory expectations.
One logical outcome from this chaos of conflicting loyalties comes the sovereign self — the radical individual, common in Western European civilization, who selects and rank-orders his loyalties in a deliberate way. You see this trend clearly with people who self-identify first as a member of a specific group. When you meet someone new and ask, “So, tell me about yourself?” one clear hint comes from the first sentence. Does the person tell you his job? That she’s married? That he’s gay? That she’s a Christian? This ranking of competing group claims helps a person demonstrate a self-consistent personal ethics.
But cognates matter. Some identities conflict in fundamental ways; it’s hard to be a faithful Catholic, a center/right Republican, a practicing bisexual, a writer and a son of a socially conservative family … simultaneously. These identities conflict. Many elect to pick among these identities and downplay or shed others, often with a sense of viciousness for what’s downplayed. Just think of how many “recovering Catholics” or “former liberals” you’ve met. They haven’t “evolved” — they’ve merely rank-ordered their affiliations in a manner that produces the least psychic violence. (Others, myself included, maintain these affiliations but retreat to a form of relativism in which we acknowledge the conflicts but pretend that we’re above the fray.)
Thus does Haidt’s moral psychology bring a semblance of order from the theoretical chaos spawned by 20th-century philosophy. He seems to concur with Hume’s theory of moral sentiments; the interplay of Wilson’s and Diamond’s insights flesh out the how and the why of the evolutionary context.
When you see Republicans and Democrats unable to compromise, it’s not necessarily because they’re all just big fat meanie heads unwilling to share. The core beliefs in each group mean something to them, and just tossing group pieties aside to find compromise seems odd. If one party favors high taxes on the rich and the other party favors low taxes on the rich, a “solution” of medium taxes for the rich is incoherent for both sides. Similarly, people who support or oppose gay marriage want an absolute resolution; no one wants a scenario where half the gays can get married.
Politics used to be somewhat immune to this, inasmuch as the traditional passions in American life rarely affected party politics directly at the national level and across the board like they do now. But the divisions we see have always been there, just expressed in other forms (like religious bigotry, overt racism, and intolerance for gays, immigrants, etc.). As America moves ever-closer to a federal society instead of a federalist society, the pressures that used to vent along a hierarchy now can only vent from the top, with results as likely disastrous as they are eminently predictable.
The question for America, then, isn’t “what can we do to reduce partisan gridlock” but rather, “what can we do to manage gridlock more effectively.”
We could start by recognizing the import of moral psychology — in particular, by setting aside the psuedointellectual nonsense about “ideological echo chambers” or “false equivalence” and instead recognizing that group conflicts are the result of a successful society. We should embrace gridlock as a sign of healthy competition among various factions. The most dangerous societies are those with only one voice declaiming from the public square.
Some things do need resolution. (The Fiscal Cliff, for one.) This means that we need more skilled cat herders in politics and the media instead of elites whining that the cats refuse to be herded.
More than anything, though, we need to ensure that there are effective safety valves for intragroup disagreements at various social levels. This means more federalism, capitalism and diversity of thought. It means we need to resist the authoritarian tendencies of Right and Left and to accept that compromise isn’t always a virtue but squelching others is always a vice.
Human moral psychology evolved the way it did because it conferred real survival benefits. Although society is significantly more complex than it was in the days of hunter-gatherer tribes, those pre-rational skills we learned millennia ago remain relevant. If we try to suppress them for the sake of some golden ideal, we risk throwing the whole system into chaos.
[N.B. — Attributions or ellipical statements about any particular author are my reaction to that author’s work, and not necessarily that author’s explicit sentiment.]
Civility in Modern Discourse: A Brief Reflection
In the foreword to her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman offers what at first blush feels like an out-of-place observation: Evils like domestic violence or child sexual assault persist because people are too polite to confront it. Thus, witnesses’ eyes avert and people adopt a not-my-business demeanor to rationalize their lack of courage to stand up for the helpless.
In a book about complex post-traumatic stress disorder, an introduction about evil — and how civility enables evil — represents a curious rhetorical strategy. Yet it fits. Stories abound about how no one intervened to help a battered wife or molested kid, but after the news became public friends and neighbors said there was something they coudn’t quite pin down that felt amiss.
Yeah. That something was their own moral cowardice, conveniently obscured under the color of civility.
Civility as a civic virtue has taken something of an odd turn in the last half-century. Whereas once it represented the mutual respect of citizens and the observance of polite manners, now it’s morphing into something less coherent. Consider:
- The new civility says we shouldn’t judge others, for anything, at any time. If you disapprove of the behavior of another, you’re socially obligated to keep your own counsel, even when you believe that the other person’s behavior is wrong or harmful. Civility and nonjudgmentalism are becoming increasingly synonymous.
- Civility applies only to people within the in-crowd. Social demonstration that you’re not in the in-crowd means you’re no longer worthy of civil treatment. This strategy of moral isolationism is particularly effective on the Left; if you don’t support certain policy goals like “marriage equality” or “environmental protection” then you’re not just wrong, you’re outside the scope of respectability and may therefore be treated cruelly, dismissively or unfairly as punishment for holding a contrary opinion. In a sense, civility is the social mark of tribalism: You extend it to fellow travelers and withhold it from the tribe’s enemies.
- Civility has become something of a scare word for political moderates, who seem to think “civility” requires everyone to accept half a loaf for comity’s sake. A good No Labels kind of moderate would look at an NRA member and a Brady Campaign member and decide that virtue meant banning only half the country’s guns. Perhaps those with an odd-numbered serial number. Whether the half-a-loaf strategy is even coherent never seems to matter; what matters is that the Civil Moderate gets to feel smug for playing a modern-day King Solomon.
The ties that bind us in community have been fraying for a long time. The idea that neighbors have a responsibility for each other, or that everyone deserves to be treated decently even when you disagree, seem to be derogating in favor of a civility-as-nonjudgmentalism that undermines the power of public expectation to maintain public morals.
Once upon a time, if a man backhanded his wife in public, everyone would know and he’d either have to reform or be ostracized. Now, people simply avert their gaze when they witness domestic violence — or at the least, decide it’s solely a police matter.
Thus does the new civility undermine the old community.
Moral Relativism = Moral Nihilism. QED.
Irrational is the fear that impels otherwise reasonable people to shun arguments that could admit, even in the extreme, to a dreaded “slippery slope.” You know the types: The ones who invoke a rhetorically ice-strewn incline in much the same way that bomb throwers on Teh Interwebz cite Hitler as a reason that someone else is an evil idiot.
Slippery slopes aren’t inherently bad — at least, not in the non-technical sense of the phrase that most people understand. “Slippery slope” remains a loaded way of acknowledging that some arguments, primarily moral ones, almost never lead to a black-or-white conclusion; what’s “slippery” is the grey area between the moral poles. Gillikinism #1: “The rhetorical volume of one’s opinion is inversely proportional to the wisdom contained therein.” The more strident the claim to a moral absolute, or lack thereof, the less likely that the claimant understands his own argument.
But there’s a problem here.
Moral philosophy admits to several equally respectable approaches that nevertheless lead to different conclusions. A Kantian, for example, tends to favor duty over most other motivations and follows the universal maxims, like the Golden Rule, for dealing with others. Consequentialists care less about duty and more about creating the best long-term outcome for the greatest number, even if sometimes you have to crack a few eggs to get the omelet. Divine-command theorists — usually the ones who preach about God’s Will — use the Bible (or Koran) as a definitive rulebook, although it’s interesting to note in passing that relatively few ethicists accept non-religious imperatives (e.g., environmentalism or socialism or whatever) as valid sources of the “divine command” even though they should. Care ethicists strive to preserve the relationships of those involved in a dispute even if the final resolution gets creative. In all, there are roughly a dozen major ethical paradigms, each of which has a high degree of internal coherence and each of which can lead to a very different answer based on the same set of inputs.
Given this diversity of ethical opinion, some people conclude that there’s no such thing as objective moral truth. As such, a genteel pluralism ought to reign; non-judgmentalism and a well-meaning but pervasive relativism become the putative hallmarks of enlightened thought.
It’s hard to escape the relativism trap, mostly because except for the other person employing genuinely atrocious logic, the only way you can successfully fight against the ethical judgment of another is to impose your own moral framework upon his moral framework. Forcing one man’s ethical standards on another smacks of imperialism, racism, sexism, heterosexualism or whatever -ism gets your goat. To the extent that we have “shared moral values,” we’re merely acknowledging the happy accident that most ethical paradigms share certain principles. But when those principles diverge, we retreat to our own private judgments and a good relativist will refrain from arguing with the judgments of others.
Except, of course, when they won’t; it’s a hallmark of contemporary relativism that what happens in the bedroom is privileged but other things, like disbelieving in anthropogenic global warming, warrants public castigation. Ideology often trumps ethics, and the language of the ethical becomes merely a convenient weapon in what is essentially an ideological battle. Indeed, because many people don’t follow an ethical paradigm with perfect fidelity, it’s not uncommon for people to deploy duty-based principles in one context, communitarian principles in another and even to rely on religious precepts for still other contexts. When people unconsciously pick-and-choose their ethical framework depending on the circumstances of the moment, outside influences like ideology have the chance to more strongly influence the final judgment.
Relativism fails us, though, in one major respect: If we concede that what’s ethically appropriate remains in the eye of the beholder, then we cannot draw a meaningful public line over what’s permissible and what isn’t.
Contemporary debate about marriage bears this failure out. For millennia, marriage was the legal and sexual union of one man and one woman. In the late 20th century, gay-rights activists began fighting for the law to recognize marriage as including same-sex pairs. Their argument was a moral one: “Marriage equality” is a right, and people who oppose the right are homophobic bigots. And no one wants to be a bigot, right? Yet when people pushed back, public discourse slowly grow to accept the pro-gay-marriage position while castigating those who opposed it as trying to impose their religious values on gays who didn’t accept them. Which was true. And it was also true that the activists were imposting their own values on those who didn’t accept them. Two-way street.
A good relativist would say, “Well, I’m not gay and I wouldn’t marry a (wo)man, but if others really love their partners, then who am I to judge?” (Unspoken cognate: “Well, I’m gay, but I recognize that marriage has had a stable definition over thousands of years so I’ll find a way to express my love using institutions that don’t conflict with majoritarian preferences until such time that the majority sees it the same way and the transition is uncontroversial.”)
When a person retreats to relativism as a default position within a moral dispute, what we really have is moral nihilism — the denial that there’s a shared moral understanding at all, or that some judgments are intrinsically more valuable than others. Nihilism doesn’t need to be explicit to be effective; to adopt the position that we each have our private morality and there cannot be an reconciliation or accommodation without someone being the “victim” is to deny that ethics as a concept remains viable.
When the choice is between relativism or absolutism, relativism usually wins. And by extension, then, nihilism wins as well.
In complicated ethical disputes, the real virtue lies not in asserting or withdrawing an ethical perspective, but in engaging with another to reconcile the discrepancies between their value systems. In short, the only way to avoid nihilism is to embrace the slippery slope — to accept the shades of grey, and to never retreat into a world where one’s core convictions lose their force to guide action in the world.
Just be sure to put on your crampons.