John G. Messerly's Blog, page 116

David Gauthier’s Moral Contractarianism

David Gauthier’s Moral Philosophy

Another contemporary philosopher who follows in the tradition of Hobbes is David Gauthier of the University of Pittsburgh. In his influential text, Morals By Agreement, he argues that voluntary compliance with moral rules, even in the absence of enforcement, is in one’s rational self-interest. Specifically, he contends that one should become a constrained maximizer, a person disposed to cooperate with others on the condition that they expect others to cooperate.  We can all do better by voluntarily cooperating, considering the cost of establishing and maintaining enforcement agencies.

Like Harman, Gauthier contends that bargaining may resolve contract disputes, and he advances an entire bargaining theory to support this claim. Unlike Hobbes and Harman, Gauthier’s moral theory depends less heavily on self-interest. If morality and self-interest coincide, Gauthier claims, then morality would be easy; we would just follow our interests. But this seems to be mistaken since morality and self-interest often conflict. Gauthier believes that morality calls upon us, at least sometime, to constrain ourselves from self-interested pursuits. On the other hand, he admits, if morality is not self-interested then you have no reason to be moral. It is from this paradox that morality derives.

What Gauthier has in mind echoes Hobbes. We must constrain ourselves to be moral, but because constraint allows us to live peacefully, it is ultimately self-interested. In the end, Gauthier agrees with both Harman and Hobbes that morality is grounded in self-interest and that moral constraint is the price we pay for a civilized society. But how exactly does Gauthier say that self-interest leads to morality? 

Gauthier’s Theory of Rationality

Gauthier develops his theory of morality as part of a theory of rational choice; in essence, morality is both self-interested and rational. We might begin by considering the conception of rationality central to his theory. For Gauthier, practical reason is strictly instrumental. This is sometimes called the maximizing notion of rationality. Accordingly, to be rational is to be disposed to act in a way that maximizes the satisfaction of one’s interests, interests here are understood as one’s considered, but nonetheless, subjectively determined preferences. On this conception of rationality, one’s preferential interests need not be exclusively in the self, but preferential interests of the self, which may include interest in others.

The notion of rationality used here derives from that employed by economists in the classical tradition. The individual is the ultimate unit of analysis in this tradition. Individuals are assumed to make choices on the basis of their preferences and beliefs about the world. The choice is rational in this sense when it is consistent with those beliefs and preferences. Effects of human action and interaction are then explained as the intended or unintended outcomes of the individual choices producing them. As we will see, the effect of choices that are economical and, hence, individually rational may be nonetheless collectively harmful but at the same time avoidable. In a nutshell, to avoid collectively harmful outcomes, we must adopt what Gauthier calls “morals by agreement,” those principles we can all agree to for our mutual benefit. This is the essence of morality.

Gilbert Harman’s Moral Contractarianism

Modern theories of contractarian morality derive from the moral and political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1569). Hobbes believed that morality has it roots in the human desire to survive and flourish. To escape a state of nature humans agree to self-interested rules and then find ways to mutually comply with those rules. Perhaps less well-known is how many contemporary moral theories also derive from Hobbes’ insights.

Gilbert Harman’s “Actual” Contract

Following Hobbes, the contemporary Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman has argued that morality consists of the moral conventions to which self-interested persons have actually agreed. (The best source for Harman’s moral theory is his book, The Nature of Morality: An Introduction to Ethics.) To support his thesis, he shows how this view explains many otherwise inexplicable moral puzzles. For example, why do we take the duty not to harm others to be greater than the duty to help them? Harman proposes that this rule results from a real bargaining process between groups of unequal power. No group wants to be harmed, but the duty to help benefits the weakest groups. Since the weak are less powerful and influential in the bargaining process, the rich and powerful dictate that only a weak duty to help others will exist. In that way, the rich and powerful can be protected from harm by a strong duty but not inconvenienced by a strong duty to help others. Or consider that we have virtually no moral duties toward non-human animals. We can explain this easily if our moral relationships with animals arose through a bargaining process in which animals had no say. Thus, Harman contends that morality results from an actual contract between rational bargainers.

But what happens when we reach an impasse in the bargaining process or some moral puzzle appears un-resolvable? Harman suggests that we begin by making explicit the role self-interest plays in moral bargaining. For example, the rich and powerful tend to emphasize freedom and property rights, while the poor and weak tend to emphasize equality. If self-interest was made more explicit, it would lend greater clarity and honesty to moral disputes.

Some more enigmatic moral disputes–say moral vegetarianism—revolve around principles other than self-interest. If moral rules are conventions, then all must accept that they have no privileged moral status when it comes to understanding morality. The vegetarians, as a group, share principles that most others do not. Since we do not violate the self-interest of vegetarians by eating meat, they should be tolerant of our practices.

Similarly, with abortion, if anti-abortionists admit they have no privileged access to moral truth, but accept principles that others do not, they will be inclined to be more tolerant. Of course, Harman admits abortion is a tougher case and that anti-abortion sentiment might survive a convention that dictates otherwise. But eventually we will reach a compromise, one favoring the pro-choice side, since self-interest plays a less significant role, Harman believes, for the pro-lifers. In other words, since morality is grounded ultimately in self-interest, moral rules that oppose people’s interests will defer to more self-interested rules.

Harman’s conclusion here exemplifies contractarian thinking; moral rules must be in an individual’s self-interest and, if they are not, they will not ultimately survive because not enough individuals will be motivated to abide by them. In fact, the fundamental tenet of the contractarian approach to morality is that any rule of social constraint is an arbitrary imposition upon us unless everyone’s compliance can be shown to promote one individual’s preferences, concerns, interests, etc.

Of course there are those “unconditionally cooperative” individuals who will act altruistically whatever the cost and abide by their agreements even when it is not in their self-interest. They could be masochists! However, such individuals are in the minority. And there are other ways to justify non-self-interested actions to people. Religious, political, and familial institutions–as well as a number of philosophical arguments–have tried to convince persons to forego their self-interest for some greater good. Nevertheless, this has always been a difficult if not impossible task and, on the whole, not very successful. Consider how difficult it is—even with an enforcement agency in place—to prevent individuals from pursuing their self-interest. People cheat on their taxes even with enforcement in place! Per-haps morality would have a more firm foundation if one could demonstrate to all individuals that moral rules are in their self-interest. If moral rules cannot satisfy this requirement, then we have no reason to follow them. This emphasis on harnessing, rather than repressing, self-interested behavior is the hallmark of the contractarian approach.

Review of Thaddeus Metz’s: Meaning in Life

Thaddeus Metz is Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He grew up in Des Moines, Iowa and received his PhD from Cornell University in 1997. He is probably the most prolific scholar working today on an analytic approach to the meaning of life.

Metz’s directs his new book, Meaning in Life, primarily toward scholars, although any serious student of the subject can follow along if they are willing to put forth the effort. The book results from ten years of systematic research into what I consider the single most important philosophical question. Metz states on the first page that he believes “the old saying that the meaning of life lies in the search for it.” If meaning is found in the search for it, then Metz has lived a meaningful life.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first part he considers the concept of meaning itself. He argues that both parts of a life and the whole of a life can exhibit meaning, and that meaning is a good distinct from other goods like pleasure or happiness. In the second part he examines supernaturalist theories of the meaning—the idea that a god or soul is the key to the meaning of life. Such theories are motivated by the idea that meaning requires an engagement with some perfect or ideal value. But Metz denies this idea, arguing that life can be meaningful even in the absence of a perfect ideal. Still he does admit that a god or soul would probably enhance life if they indeed exist.

In the final part of the book Metz begins by rejecting subjectivist, naturalistic accounts of meaning. He then proceeds to reject the major objectivist, naturalistic accounts of meaning: 1) attraction to objectively good things; 2) utilitarian actions that make the world a better place; and 3) engagement with mind-independent goods in the physical world.

Metz then offers his own account of meaning in life. He approaches the question by asking what if anything the good, true and the beautiful—classic sources of meaning—have in common.  Is there some single property which makes the moral, the intellectual, and the aesthetic worth admiring or striving for? Is there something that the lives of a Gandhi, Darwin, or Beethoven might share that confer great meaning to their lives?

Metz answers that the good, the true, and the beautiful confer great meaning on life insofar as they are physical properties that have a  final, intrinsic value. In other words, ethical, intellectual, and aesthetic actions are intrinsically worthwhile because they make it possible for individuals to transcend themselves. But how do moral, intellectual, and artistic activities allow for self-transcendence and, simultaneously, give meaning?

To answer this question Metz proposes his own theory of self-transcendence: “The good, the true, and the beautiful confer great meaning on life insofar as we transcend our animal nature by positively orienting our rational nature in a substantial way toward conditions of human existence that are largely responsible for many of its other conditions.”

Metz explains this focus on fundamental conditions by considering the difference between a well-planned crime and moral achievements such as providing medical care or freeing persons from tyranny. Moral actions, unlike immoral ones, respect personal autonomy, support other’s choices, and confer meaning. Intellectual reflection helps explain human nature, as scientific knowledge explains external reality. Similarly, great art illuminates profound human experiences like love, death, war, and peace.

One might object that reading trashy fiction or pondering that 2 + 2 = 4 involve reason and focus on fundamental conditions, but do not confer meaning. Metz replies that substantial effort is necessary to fully meet his standard, and that is missing in the above examples. In addition, progress is also necessary for meaning. Not simply doing, knowing, or making what was done, known, or made before, but the bringing forth something new. Metz concludes that we transcend ourselves and find meaning “by substantially orienting one’s rational nature in a positive way toward fundamental objects and perhaps thereby making an advancement.”

This is a carefully and conscientiously crafted work. It is not an easy read, but it is a substantive and enlightening one which will reward the dutiful reader. It demands a careful read and we commend Professor Metz for this wonderful piece of scholarship.

Essays of the Dying: Laurie Becklund

The former LA Times staff writer Laurie Becklund died on February 8 in Hollywood, CA of breast cancer. Before she died she penned a moving essay about death and dying. (In the past few days I have discussed a number of “essays of the dying.” They can be found here, here, and here.) She also gave a beautiful speech about her experience of dying of cancer in the video below.) She begins her essay:

I am dying, literally, at my home in Hollywood, of metastatic breast cancer, the only kind of breast cancer that kills. For six years I’ve known I was going to die. I just didn’t know when.

Then, a couple of weeks before Christmas, a new, deadly diagnosis gave me a deadline. No doctor would promise me I’d make it to 2015.

Promise me, I told my friends and family, that you’ll never say that I died after “fighting a courageous battle with breast cancer.” This tired, trite line dishonors the dead and the dying by suggesting that we, the victims, are responsible for our deaths or that the fight we were in was ever fair.

Promise me you’ll never wear a pink ribbon in my name or drop a dollar into a bucket that goes to breast cancer “awareness” for “early detection for a cure,” the mantra of fund-raising juggernaut Susan G. Komen, which has propagated a distorted message about breast cancer and how to “cure” it.

I’m proof that early detection doesn’t cure cancer. I had more than 20 mammograms, and none of them caught my disease. In fact, we now have significant studies showing that routine mammogram screening, which may result in misdiagnoses, unnecessary treatment and radiation overexposure, can harm more people than it helps.

I don’t know enough about breast cancer to know if these latter claims are true, but I do know that this essay differs in tone from the other essays of the dying I have recently read. Her tone in defiant, and her defiant plea falls on my receptive ears. After all, I consider death to be a great evil, and I have argued that death should be optional.

Her tone resonates with the spirit of Philip Appleman, a contemporary poet about whom I have written. Appleman says: “Our anger at death is precious, testifying to the value of life; our sorrow for family and friends testifies to our devotion.” Her tone also reminds me of the immortal lines of Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Here is Thomas reciting his famous poem:

Becklund says that dying of the disease has been like “playing Chutes and Ladders, a childhood board game whose outcome is based on rolls of the dice. As for a cure, she says poignantly: “It will come too late for me. But it is possible to end the game: Patients shouldn’t have to climb up ladders and fall down chutes.”

https://youtu.be/BFmb9OL-oq0

Essays of the Dying: Emily Debrayda Phillips

Emily Debrayda Phillips, 69, died on March 25, 2015 of pancreatic cancer. She wrote her own obituary within a few days of her February 24 diagnosis. It begins:

It pains me to admit it, but apparently, I have passed away. Everyone told me it would happen one day but that’s simply not something I wanted to hear, much less experience. Once again I didn’t get things my way! That’s been the story of my life all my life. And while on that subject (the story of my life)…on February 9, 1946 my parents and older sister celebrated my birth and I was introduced to all as Emily DeBrayda Fisher, the daughter of Clyde and Mary Fisher from Hazelwood. I can’t believe that happened in the first half of the last century but there are records on file in the Court House which can corroborate this claim.

I admire people who are brave and funny at the same time. Humor is a wonderful way to deal with the tragedy of death. Emily continues by describing small details from her life. Elementary school teachers who inspired her to become a teacher, playing with her sisters, getting married and having two loving children, and the joy she has had in being “Nana” to her grandchildren. She apologizes for her shortcomings, but displays a proper self-love too. I’ll let her speak for herself:

I’ve been a devoted daughter, an energetic teenager, a WCU graduate (summa cum laude), a loving wife, a comforting mother, a dedicated teacher, a true and loyal friend, and a spoiling grandmother. And if you don’t believe it, just ask me. Oh wait, I’m afraid it’s too late for questions. Sorry.

So…I was born; I blinked; and it was over. No buildings named after me; no monuments erected in my honor.

But I DID have the chance to know and love each and every friend as well as all my family members. How much more blessed can a person be?

So in the end, remember…do your best, follow your arrow, and make something amazing out of your life. Oh, and never stop smiling.

If you want to, you can look for me in the evening sunset or with the earliest spring daffodils or amongst the flitting and fluttering butterflies. You know I’ll be there in one form or another. Of course that will probably comfort some while antagonizing others, but you know me…it’s what I do.

I’ll leave you with this…please don’t cry because I’m gone; instead be happy that I was here. (Or maybe you can cry a little bit. After all, I have passed away).

Today I am happy and I am dancing. Probably naked.

Love you forever.

Emily

Essays of the Dying: Grief Therapist David Malham

The New York Times recently published a moving essay by the grief therapist David Malham. The seventy-three year old Malham has been recently diagnosed with ALS. He begins his essay:

I would not have chosen A.L.S. at the Pick Your Disease store, but there are worse things that can happen and worse ways for a life to end. The very fact that it was happening to me and not to my family was itself a relief. Navigating one’s own pain or fear is much easier than navigating a loved one’s.

Malham says he turned his back on saying “no” and asking “why me?” Instead, he asked “what now?” He found himself comforted by the fact that he had a good life, and a loving family. He doesn’t want to die, he said, but it isn’t fair for a man to cry foul when he has had such a good life. What most worried Malham was that his wife would be alone. A worry he conveys with humor:

I became preoccupied with how she would manage a post-David existence. True, she’s always been the one who handled the bills, balanced the checkbook, managed the investments, addressed maintenance issues (her father introduced her to the mysteries of things mechanical and electrical), kept the house organized (parties and special occasions are planned with the attention to detail Rommel displayed in his desert campaign), and all the while prepared terrific meals. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that not since biblical times has woman had so laudable a husband.

Concerned about his wife, Malham began a “strategy of pre-emptive therapy.” He told his wife stories of widows who thrived. But soon she began to resent the stories, telling her husband, “Stop it. If you die before me, I will grieve and I will survive. If I die before you, you will grieve and you will survive.” This brought about a revelation to Malham: “That’s when I finally accepted that trying to protect her was not only wrong, it was impossible. Grief, after all, is the price we pay for love.”

He now knew that his wife would grieve no matter what, but she would survive because she was resilient. “That’s not to say it’s a quick and easy task. It’s not that grieving suddenly ends and the person forgets and moves on. No, what happens is that a weight that initially feels unbearable becomes, in time, manageable. The grief becomes compact enough, with the hard edges removed, to be gently placed in one’s heart.”

You can read the entire essay here.

Movies About Displaced Persons

I have recently watched two documentaries: Food Chains and Exile Nation: The Plastic People.

The former is about farmworkers who are routinely abused and robbed of wages. The film exposes the human cost in our food supply and the complicity of the supermarket industry. Supermarkets earn $4 trillion globally and have tremendous power over the agricultural system. Over the past 3 decades they have drained revenue from their supply chain leaving farmworkers in poverty and forced to work under subhuman conditions. It is a moving documentary and a worthy follow up to the 1960 classic Harvest of Shame. Here is the trailer for “Food Chains.”

“Exile Nation” is about U.S. deportees in Tijuana who struggle to survive a cartel war zone, and who live in cardboard boxes and sewer pipes, in an ever-expanding underworld of exiles. Most of the deportees have lived in the US since childhood, have extended families in the US, have no relatives in Mexico, and speak no Spanish. Many have waited for citizenship for years but the path to citizenship is filled with multiple roadblocks. Needless to say many of these deportees are the very people doing the migrant farm work without which Americans wouldn’t enjoy low prices for their food. Here is the trailer for “Exile Nation.”

I encourage my readers to watch these moving films and, if possible, work for solutions to human degradation in the US and elsewhere.

Shelley’s “Ozymandias”

Yesterday I wrote about Dr. Kalanithi, a thirty-seven year old Stanford physician who just died of cancer. In the video he recited a poem I had forgotten about—even though I took a class in the Romantic poets forty years ago—Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”  Kalanithi’s use of the poem to express the inevitable decline of our bodies as well as our pretensions to greatness is perfectly placed in his essay. If we really contemplated our impending deaths we might be more humble and wise. Still I hold death to be a tragedy, and long for the time when we defeat it. I thank the late Dr. Kalanithi for reminding me of the poem.

Shelley’s “Ozymandias“

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”[4]

The Younger Memnon statue of Ramesses II in the British Museum. Its imminent arrival in London likely inspired the poem.

Essays of the Dying: Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi

The thirty-seven year old Stanford neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi died from cancer a few weeks ago, but not before he made the beautiful video above and penned a moving essay to his infant daughter. (Here is his obituary from the Stanford Medicine news center.)

What I found most moving was Dr. Kalanithi’s beautiful description about the inexorable passage of time. Its fleeting, ephemeral nature. No wonder the Buddhists think of change as one of the 3 marks of existence. There is something about the knowledge of one’s impending death that reveals something essential about a person’s nature. (I have written about this previously regarding the last words of Roger Ebert and Oliver Sacks and David Hume.) And the video and essay reveal Dr. Kalanithi to have been a wonderful man.

The First Lines of Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby

Yesterday’s post discussed the famous last lines of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I recently came across a version of the book for intermediate (high school) level readers by Margaret Tarner. The full text of her edition begins, “My name is Nick Carraway. I was born in a big city in the Middle West.” This is an abbreviation of:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament.”– it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.

Needless to say something has been lost in translation between the Tarner version and Fitzgerald’s prose. I can only reiterate what the film critic Roger Ebert said about the novel:

There is no purpose in “reading” The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel.

Perhaps, to really suck the marrow from life as Thoreau put it, you have to do some work.