Political Philosophy and Ethics discussion
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JFK had faults, most of them personal in nature. Like many others during the 1960s, I was hardly aware of them at the time. Accordingly, I must be forgiven if I recall with nostalgia his momentous words and deeds during my formative teenage years. As Hamlet said, “He was a man, take him for all in all: / I shall not look upon his like againe.”
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[R]hetoric is the crucial link between philosophy and politics and must take an important place in education if political life and intellectual activity are to be in the best shape possible. While it is easy to denigrate the art of persuasion, most obviously by contrasting its possible deceptiveness with the truth of genuine knowledge, science, or philosophy, one should never forget the fundamental political fact that human beings must coordinate their activities with other human beings in order to live well, and that the two most basic modes of such coordination are through persuasion and by force. Everyone knows the disadvantages of excessive reliance by a political community on force or violence. If the highest intellectual activities—science, philosophy—are to have much efficacy in practical political life, rhetoric must be the key intermediary. (James H. Nichols Jr., preface to Plato, Gorgias, trans. and ed. James H. Nichols Jr. [Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1998], vii–viii)This is a paperback edition. The foregoing is repeated, along with other material, in the subsequent Kindle edition of Nichols’s edition and translation of Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus (here).
(revised May 26, 2022)
For commentary on rhetoric, see post #186 in "Ethics and Free Will: Human Ethics: Basis, Principles, Application," as well as earlier posts to which #186 refers.
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We have discussed the demagoguery that so often permeates public life. This, of course, is nothing new. Plato wrote an entire dialogue on rhetoric called the Gorgias. In that dialogue, rhetoric as it is so often practiced is justly given a bad name. However, Plato’s character Socrates points out in this work that there is a kind of rhetoric his interlocutors have never seen. That is the kind of rhetoric that is based on knowledge and encourages the rational part of the human soul. (citing Gorgias 503a–504e)
"Should we cancel Aristotle?" (ugh). Not sure what to think about this essay in American Conservative. https://www.theamericanconservative.c...
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https://www.theamericanconservative.c..."
I don’t find either this essay by Michael Mattix or the essay it references by Agnes Callard of much help. In the following, I will briefly describe my own views about Aristotle and whether he should be “canceled.”
Aristotle made important contributions to the philosophical understanding of ethics, politics, and human reason that are still relevant and viable today. I discuss some of these contributions in my books Free Will and Human Life and Reason and Human Ethics.
That said, Aristotle wrote some things that, millennia later, we can no longer accept. What he wrote about slavery was ambiguous but, however interpreted, is wrong. I don’t think he was a misogynist, but Plato was certainly more enlightened about women in his Republic, where woman were considered equal to men, including but not limited to service in the highest political offices in Plato’s ideal polity. This was very radical stuff for an ancient Athenian culture that relegated women to the home—literally—and seemed to prefer male homosexuality and male pederasty to heterosexuality. Aristotle’s physical science was, of course, also incorrect, though his biology was on the right track. Again, I discuss the latter at some length in Reason and Human Ethics.
Did Aristotle himself understand such limitations to his philosophy but nevertheless present them as an exoteric accommodation to the society in which he lived? Or did he actually believe everything he wrote on these subjects? I don’t know, and I doubt that anyone can know for sure the answers to these questions. What we can do is appreciate his deep insights on some subjects while setting aside those of his comments with which we disagree. But then, we need to do this with all philosophers—indeed, the great philosophers, Aristotle included, intended their works to make us think, not to follow all their statements as blind dogma. The later dogmatization of Aristotle by the medieval and early modern Church would, I think, have been anathema to him.
So, should Aristotle be “canceled”? No, of course not. Much of what he wrote, especially on ethics, is as applicable today as it was when wrote it. But even on ethics, we need to separate the wheat from the chaff in Aristotle’s work, as I have done in my writings.
Thanks, Alan. Of course you are correct in so far as cancellation of primary Aristotle and Plato tests is a silly rhetorical over-statement meant as a headline only by Micah Mattix. But there is also, I think, a bad argument made in the quoted excerpt from Agnes Callard. If you will permit:
"What makes speech truly free is the possibility of disagreement without enmity, and this is less a matter of what we can say, than how we can say it. ‘Cancel culture’ is merely the logical extension of what we might call ‘messaging culture,’ in which every speech act is classified as friend or foe, in which literal content can barely be communicated, and in which very little faith exists as to the rational faculties of those being spoken to."
First, I posit that whether disagreement can be held without enmity does not bear on "freedom of speech." Disagreement in discourse can be free and still rife with "enmity". Most of the Enlightenment arguments in Europe and certainly the US Federalist debates are cases in point. The point of discourse is to account for enmity and avoid it as a category of "knowledge" in the logical and empirical review of the case at issue. The concept of "cancel culture" is, I think, overblown by the Conservatives (i.e., in an era of unremitting broadsides who yells the loudest is usually a function of money in the marketplace and tenure in school). Youth has always been insufficiently tolerant of "authority" (including scholarship), and any argument that makes a special prerequisite of agreement on one or more "given" propositions which are not settled as a precondition of debate is not argument nor meant to be communicative: it is simply yelling. But the characterization of either "left" or "right" in contemporary US politics as "cancel culture" seems to be a red herring. What is the debate about "black lives matter" or "blue lives matter" or "all lives matter"? Pretending that these admittedly culturally loaded epithets are not worthy of discourse or susceptible to discourse is a dismissal of philosophy no matter the author.
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Civility is, I think, usually conducive to rational thinking and discourse, and, indeed, the rules of this Goodreads group require civility in this context. But to conflate the concept of civility with the concept of freedom of speech, is, of course, erroneous.
And the notion that cancel culture is a preserve of the Left is ridiculous. All one has to do is look at the laws that Governor Ron DeSantis is supporting in Florida that legally discriminate against private corporations for espousing positions that conservatives don’t like. Such laws violate the First Amendment by punishing speech that is out of favor with the government du jour.
“Cancel culture” is one of those highly ambiguous and amorphous terms that politicians like to bandy about as though it really means something. In my view, private individuals and private entities have a perfect right under the First Amendment to “cancel” (meaning: not listen to, pay attention to, or provide a platform for) anyone they dislike. For example, a private school or university can decline to allow anyone they dislike to speak at one of their functions (should Bob Jones University be legally compelled to provide a platform to an atheist?), and Twitter (as much as I, for other reasons, personally dislike Twitter) can refuse to provide a platform for hate speech or any political speech with which that private company disagrees. (Of course, all bets are off now that Elon Musk owns Twitter.)
“Cancel culture” only becomes a problem when it is government that is doing the canceling. Then it can violate the First Amendment. I used the Florida example. There are many others. A special problem arises when a public (governmental) institution of higher learning “cancels” speakers or writers on the basis of viewpoint. That is a very long discussion that I have neither time, space, or desire to elaborate on in the present forum.
Agree on all counts, as is too usual with you good Sir!i am still buried in Jonathan Israel's Democratic Enlightenment at present: an amazing work of scholarship that has deepened my understanding of the development of materialist (Spinozan) Enlightenment (d'holbach, d'Alembert, Diderot, Helveius) as opposed to the "centrist' (pro-monarchical) approach of Voltaire and the "anti-philosophes" before the French Revolution. The deliberate use of the power of the state to suppress opposing viewpoints on many sides in France, Switzerland and Germany makes our current fixation with "cancel culture" seem quite tame by comparison.
We concur also that State funded "schools" have no business proscribing discourse unless the public Peace is directly threatened. This is un-Constitutional and I think would be ruled as such if tested in the courts.
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This precise issue is difficult in the context of public elementary schools. What is appropriate for a teenager or adult may not be appropriate for a child who is six years old. I would allow the public schools some leeway on this issue, though probably not as much as DeSantis would like.
On November 17, 2022, I will be moderating a virtual discussion for the Pittsburgh Freethought Community (https://pghfreethought.org/) on “The Education Culture Wars.” See the topic description at https://www.meetup.com/pittsburgh-fre.... If you or someone else in this group wishes to participate in this discussion, you can sign up at the aforesaid hyperlinked MeetUp page.
I find this a slippery slope. I was involved in the Ocean Hill Brownsville disturbance vs. the teacher's Union (UFT) long ago, and believe whole heartedly that for the most part parents are singularly and collectively the very worst guides for acceptable pedagogic materials, subject matter, word choice, book recommendation or class-room methodology. I honestly think that there is no point in protecting little Tommy and Sally from anything in the age of Pornhub, Fox & Friends, Breitbart, etc., when they have to avoid their siblings cooking meth in the trailer kitchen or drug mules on the corner. If the parents want that kind of control they should avail themselves of private schools for a fee. While this is by no means a whole-hearted endorsement of many state education boards in syllabus selection (Texas is especially opprobrious), this seems clearly both the lesser of evils and far more teachable and enforceable.
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I had to look up the Ocean Hill Brownsville situation, as I had not heard of it before. Looking at the Wikipedia article about it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Yor...), I’m not clear as to how it applies to the point I made.
Similarly, your statement that you “believe whole heartedly that for the most part parents are singularly and collectively the very worst guides for acceptable pedagogic materials, subject matter, word choice, book recommendation or class-room methodology" is not what I was talking about. I would tend, in general, to agree with you about that point, and I’m not suggesting that parents control such detailed aspects of instruction. That is why we have professional teachers and administrators. Constitutional democracy does not mean direct democracy, even at the local school board level.
Peter wrote: " I honestly think that there is no point in protecting little Tommy and Sally from anything in the age of Pornhub, Fox & Friends, Breitbart, etc., when they have to avoid their siblings cooking meth in the trailer kitchen or drug mules on the corner."
Just as I would not try to teach Plato to first graders, so I would not try to teach them about complicated issues regarding sex and gender identity that they could not begin to understand at that age. This, of course, is a difficult issue, since, for example, some first graders have parents who are same-sex couples—thus, the Florida “don’t say gay” law is flawed. Most first graders do not experience “siblings cooking meth in the trailer kitchen or drug mules on the corner.” Those that do have such experience need special counseling. There is an element of common sense in these matters that often gets lost in the culture war between Left and Right.
Peter wrote:" If the parents want that kind of control they should avail themselves of private schools for a fee. While this is by no means a whole-hearted endorsement of many state education boards in syllabus selection (Texas is especially opprobrious), this seems clearly both the lesser of evils and far more teachable and enforceable"
Only a small minority of families can afford to pay for private school education. I am reminded of Mitt Romney’s statement that young people wanting to start a business should just borrow money from their parents (as he did).
In any event, as I mentioned above, I am not talking about direct parental control over the details of educational instruction. That said, I think it was political suicide for Terry McAuliffe to say, as he did in his 2021 campaign for governor in Virginia, that “I'm not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision... I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” As a thinker, McAuliffe was probably correct. As a politician, it was a grave political error that likely was the cause of his losing the election.
re: msg #108, of this thread; (Alan and Peter discussing 'harmful' rhetoric)"Sophistry" and "casuistry" are two related terms --though little used these days --which might aid us in distinguishing the baneful versus the useful, in modern-day rhetoric.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casuistry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophist
'Sophists' (incl. divinators, soothsayers, oracles) in the ancient world, could be claimed close kin by today's political pundits.
Pets of royalty and the wealthy; they were often the enemies of the more rigorous 'Schools' of philosophy.
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"Sophistry" and "casuistry" are two related terms --though little used these days --which might aid us in distinguishin..."
The Wikipedia article on “casuistry” is confusing and poorly written, perhaps because of the input of several people in its creation. As they say, a camel is a horse designed by committee. Many Wikipedia articles are well researched and well written, but this is not one of them.
The Wikipedia article on “sophistry” is somewhat better, though repetitive in spots. Contrary to the article, most scholars think that Protagoras was a relativist ("man is the measure of all things"). See my discussion on page 2 of Reason and Human Ethics (this and other pages from chapters 1 and 2 of this book are reproduced online at https://www.academia.edu/82835731/Exc...).
Feliks, you state that "sophists" include "divinators, soothsayers, oracles." What's your source for this? Your cited Wikipedia articles do not say this, and I've never seen "sophists" defined this way.
Hi Alan, my source for that last remark is E.R. Dodds. He touches on the competition between sophists vs pupils of the Schools.
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I read Dodds's book The Greeks and the Irrational in 2016 and do not recall any association of the sophists to the "divinators, soothsayers, oracles." Since I have the Kindle version, I just did a word search for "sophist" and could find no such association. The sophists were the advocates of extreme rationalism (or "rationalism" as they interpreted it, which was not consistent with the rationalism of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle). Although the ancient Greeks were much taken with the Delphic oracle and other superstitions, the sophists were famous (and infamous) for being what we would now call atheists.
But perhaps you have another writing authored by Dodds that states this. If so, could you reference it? Thanks.
I looked for E.R. Dodds on the subject in The Greeks and the Irrational. So far as I can see, he there discusses, without approval, the theory that diviners were important enemies of Socrates. Unless I missed it in an admittedly quick word search, he does not class them as sophists. It might be in his other writings, to which I don't have access.
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Thanks, Ian. We'll see what Feliks comes up with.
Hello,I don't have my copy anymore so I can't provide the page. I'm trusting my powers of recall and if I overstated the point I will gladly retract.
But I'm referring to a passage where he (Dodds) mentions the rivalry between Schools and sophists. Sophists --I took Dodds to indicate --were more on the order of 'charlatans'. Free-lance 'consultants', in modern-speak.
This is not to contradict (Alan) your item about 'extreme rationalism'. Perhaps Dodds was merely characterizing the sophists with some analogous terms. Perhaps I just conflated two descriptors together.
But the chapter in which I believe I ran across all this was the one concerning medical quackery and superstitious health cures. This irrationalism, I recall Dodds describing, was highly paid for by wealth Greek households. It was commonplace for a rich man or Lord, to retain a 'medico' on staff.
Sophists privileged status was (I distinctly recall Dodds stating) something which could outshine a teacher or pupil from the more rigorous Schools; and something which caused resentment.
But let me fall quiet on this for the rest of the evening, as I'm mulling over the news of Robert W.
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I don't have my copy anymore so I can't provide the page. I'm trusting my powers of recall and if I overstated the point I will gladly retract.
But I'm referring to a passage where he (Dod..."
Thanks, Feliks. I have the book on Kindle, but I don't have time to reread it right now.
It is a solemn moment with Bob Wess's passing. I knew he was seriously ill, so it wasn't a surprise to me. Still, it's a sad day.
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The article discusses the unusual difficulties public officials are having these days with public comment at local council and school board meetings. For decades, as a litigation lawyer, I often represented local governments and officials in constitutional and other public law cases (I retired from law practice more than a decade ago). In the course of such representation, I sometimes was required to attend their public meetings (usually, to give a report on the pending litigation in executive session after the regular meeting), which included a public comment period. Although there were occasional troublemakers, it was not as bad as what is apparently happening these days. Much of the populace today has been radicalized by crazy and evidence-free conspiracy theories. Can democracy survive such irrationality? Is this the new normal? I admit I don’t know the answers to these questions.
I think part of this problem is that, so far as I can see, Roberts' Rules of Order is no longer taught in high schools. Younger people (for me, that means under 65 or so) have no sense of what an orderly meeting means or is for---no knowledge that they were originally drafted b y Jefferson precisely to help the people deliberate.
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Good point. Probably many of the disrupters don't even have a good idea who Jefferson was.
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In an attempt to position himself to the right of Trump, DeSantis is scraping at the bottom of the internet fever swamp. See https://www.politico.com/news/magazin....
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I have downloaded on Kindle the following recently released book: Justin Buckley Dyer and Constantine Christos Vassiliou, eds., Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2023). I have now read the first chapter: Lorraine Smith Pangle, “The Modern Academy and the Ancient Virtue of Phronesis.” The author is (quoting the description in the book’s list of contributors) “Professor of Government and Co-Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin. Her prior publications include Reason and Character: The Moral Foundations of Aristotelian Political Philosophy (2020), Virtue is Knowledge: The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy (2014), The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin (2007), and Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship (2003), alongside numerous academic articles on related topics.”
Lorraine Smith Pangle’s chapter in Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society is a very wise discussion of current academic trends and an alternative approach rooted in Aristotle's concept of phronesis, which she translates as “active wisdom.” I quote here the last few paragraphs of her essay:
As a university, we need a renewed dedication to a common project of pursuing truth, with a working faith that truth can be found and that more open discussions can yield richer understandings, with a willingness to bravely if carefully question anything, and with a shared sense of the importance of this project and the difficulty of getting it right. If Aristotle is right about the close connection between the intellectual and moral virtues, our task involves envisioning together the kind of community of thoughtful discourse we want to create and the virtues and habits we might need to cultivate to make robust free speech work well for us. With a view to advancing that discussion, I would like to suggest a few more virtues and habits to supplement phronesis itself.I couldn’t have said it better myself, though I addressed some of these same themes in my book Reason and Human Ethics.
Perhaps most fundamentally, a university needs a spirit of inquiry, curiosity, and intellectual openness. This means actively welcoming diversity, especially viewpoint diversity, and ensuring that diverse perspectives, including views that we ourselves oppose, are heard and taken seriously in our classrooms. It includes respecting others’ rights to speak and publish their thoughts, whatever they are; to hear any speakers they wish to invite to address them; and to debate any question they wish to raise. Most of all, it means a commitment to depth of inquiry, to asking hard questions, connecting them to more fundamental questions, and helping one another to articulate and test different answers to them.
The second virtue a university needs is intellectual honesty. This virtue, rooted in the love of truthfulness and even more the love of truth, is the essential source of all genuine fair-mindedness. Intellectual honesty begins with the determination to discover and question one’s own prejudices and unexamined assumptions. It continues with the process of continually striving to frame one’s ideas in ways that recognize the merits of alternative views, that invite testing and correction, and that show a willingness to learn from discussion.
Third, we need civility. Civility means not just politeness or tact; civility constitutes the habits of discourse necessary to sustain a free, self-governing community. We often think of civility as primarily a quality of speech, but true civility begins with the way we listen to others before we speak. Civility means hearing the other out, seriously trying to understand the other’s experience and thoughts, looking for common ground, and making certain and evident that one has understood the other before voicing disagreement. Civility means presenting one’s own arguments in such a way as to maximize the chances of their being fairly considered and to minimize the chances of deepening divisions. It means avoiding sweeping generalizations. It means responding to arguments with counterarguments and not by impugning others’ motives. Civility means respect. It means refraining from vilifying, demeaning, or spreading rumors about any individual or group. It means never assuming that another is unable to learn or improve, and never assuming that someone who does not share our experiences or background is incapable of understanding us or of joining in any intellectual inquiry. When problems arise, civility means confronting them honestly and directly, in ways designed to build or restore mutual trust. The American Association of University Professors, in its statement on academic freedom, makes a good case that it is best not to try to legislate civility. The lines between civility and incivility are hard to draw with the blunt instrument of the law, especially when we get so close to vital rights that involve us in passionate disagreements. Except in extreme cases formal sanctions are not well suited to instill the behavior we need on campuses, for at heart civility is a matter not of following rules but of intention, judgment, and good taste. But if civility cannot be legislated, that is all the more reason why it is incumbent on each of us to practice it and to gently, civilly push our friends to practice it too.
Finally, we need to cultivate resilience. It takes resilience to tolerate the rough-and-tumble of free debate. Ideas are powerful and can be powerfully disturbing, and diverse communities can be uncomfortable. But resilience can be learned. It is possible to learn to take pride in being open to learning and in being able to acknowledge what we do not know. Socrates claims it is in fact better to lose an argument than to win it: when we lose, he says, we learn more. Resilience means realizing that someone else’s rudeness or insensitivity is something about them—or indeed merely about their momentary state of mind—and not something about us. Resilience means knowing that we have options: we can get angry if we want to, but we do not have to. Resilience means taking pride in finding the resources we need to solve our own problems and to create the kind of life we want for ourselves and our community.
No citizen can think every important question through independently to the bottom, and most of us can at most hope to find good guides to trust and imitate. But we can all do a better job of listening, suspending judgment, and cultivating open-mindedness and fair-mindedness. We can learn to take pride in becoming more rational and more curious versions of the beings that we are. If we do, we may succeed in bequeathing to the next generation an American academy that can be a blessing to all of us.
I am cross-filing this comment in the “Education,” “Public Discourse and Rhetoric,” and “Reason, Informal Logic, Evidence, and Critical Thinking” topics of this Goodreads group.
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The foregoing is the title of a July 30, 2023 Politico article (https://www.politico.com/news/magazin...) by Marcel Danesi, who is a professor of semiotics and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto and the author of the recent book, Politics, Lies and Conspiracy Theories: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective.
Here are the first two paragraphs of this article:
Why do people believe some politicians’ lies even when they have been proven false? And why do so many of the same people peddle conspiracy theories?Overall, I think Danesi’s analysis is probably correct. I would, however, interject this caveat: Not all “conspiracy theories” are false. History is replete with actual conspiracies. See the section titled “Conspiracies—Actual, Probable, Possible, and Fictional: An Exercise in Critical Thinking” on pages 60–62 of my book Reason and Human Ethics (reproduced at https://www.academia.edu/82835731/Exc...). Danesi should have used the language “baseless conspiracy theories” instead of “conspiracy theories.”
Lying and conspiratorical [sic : should be “conspiratorial”] thinking might seem to be two different problems, but they turn out to be related. I study political rhetoric and have tried to understand how populist politicians use language to develop a cult-like following, divide nations, create culture wars and instill hatred. This pattern goes back to antiquity and is seen today in leaders including former President Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. These leaders are capable of using words and speeches to whip people into such an emotional tempest that they will do things like march on the seat of Congress or invade a neighboring country.
I am cross-filing the present post in the “Reason, Informal Logic, Evidence, and Critical Thinking,” “Public Discourse and Rhetoric,” and “International Populist Authoritarianism” topics of this Goodreads group.
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See Robert C. Bartlett, Against Demagogues: What Aristophanes Can Teach Us about the Perils of Populism and the Fate of Democracy, New Translations of the “Acharnians” and the “Knights” (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020).
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The foregoing is the title of this Washington Post article: https://wapo.st/45snINI (gift article). I think the analysis is correct up to a point. As Confucius said, words are for the purpose of communication, and one should not use scholarly terminology when communicating with nonacademic people. It is also the case that academia has gone way overboard in promoting politically correct terminology and concepts. On the other hand, I don’t give the Right a free pass in attempting to destroy academia for minor sins while, at the same time, electing a president (Trump) who is making every effort to destroy the Constitution and become a dictator.
Dick Nixon's "Checkers" speechhttps://www.americanrhetoric.com/spee...
An early example of a politician masterfully stoking an audience's sympathies. Cunning devil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker...
Political Philosophy and Ethics
Books mentioned in this topic
The Greeks and the Irrational (other topics)The Greeks and the Irrational (other topics)
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure (other topics)
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure (other topics)
Mythologies (other topics)
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We still subsidize the oil industry. People concerned about means-testing should start with means-testing those subsidies. Every news program should take a few seconds each day to tell people how much money they gave to the oil industry that day.
Means-testing is among the topics Joan C. Williams treats in White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness, Harvard Business Review Press, 2017. Williams points out that one difficulty with means-testing is that you end up with families living essentially equivalent lives, imagine them on opposite sides of a street, but they fall on opposite sides of the means-testing line. Both are close to the line but they fall on opposite sides. One gets the benefit; the other gets nothing. That breeds resentment and weakens support for the program.
The best way to means-test is by analogy to progressive taxation. So in the case of the child tax credit, the larger the income, the smaller the credit. Then, the family with $300,000 that gets nothing won't be bothered so much by the family with $290,000 that gets a very small credit.