Philosophy Talk: The Blog

The Language of Politics

posted by Ken Taylor

We had a fun show last week with Geoff Nunburg about the language of politics.   In a little bit,   I'll ruminate a bit more about the language of politics.

Since we're in the middle of the  pledge drive,   though,   I want a put in a brief   good word for KALW -- the innovative little station that could.   I really meant it  when I said on air that without the risk-taking and innovation that KALW brings to public radio, Philosophy Talk simply would not be happening.   I hate to say it - though it's probably  no secret -- but lots of public radio has turned really staid and highly risk averse.    KALW is an exception.   If you value risk-taking and innovation on the air,  you really should think about  giving  to this gem of a station.  They  really need you.   They  operate on a shoestring.  If you compare KALW's operating budget to a certain other public radio station that broadcasts out of San Francisco -- Bay Area folks,  you know which one I mean -- you'll be really amazed at the difference.   But for my money,  KALW beats that to remain nameless behemoth on the other side of town by a quite considerable margin when it comes to putting fresh and engaging stuff on the air.   Even if you don't live in the Bay Area, and listen to our archive over the Internet, think about giving to the station.   You can do so on-line here. 

By the way,   for a mere $50 pledge to the station,  you can witness Philosophy Talk in action on Sunday, November 6th at an event we're calling Backstage Live with Philosophy Talk.   We're going to put on a episode of Philosophy Talk in front of a live audience.  Instead of taking questions from callers, we'll take them from the audience.   We'll tape the episode and broadcast it on a later date.  We'll also have light food and drink available.  And you'll have a chance to mingle with the whole gang.  Come and be part of the fun.  Again,  all you need to do is  make a $50 donation to the station.

But back to the language of politics.

On the air, we didn't talk much about competing ways of "framing" the same issue.  George Lakoff has recently been arguing that the main reason that Democrats lose elections is that Republicans have been masters at framing the issues, while Democrats have not been.   We didn't get very deeply into this idea on the air.  Too bad, because Nunberg has some pretty interesting things to say  both about Lakoff's claims about framing in general and about Lakoff's particular suggestions about how certain issues might best be framed by the democrats.   

In one way, it seems to me right, maybe even trivially so,   that politics is bound to involve a lot of competition over ways of "framing"  a set of  policy choices.   There are two reasons for this -- one having to do with the nature of politics and the other having to do with just what we're doing when we're "framing" a set of issues.  Politics is about distributing benefits and burdens.  Somebody gets a benefit and somebody, possibly a distinct somebody,  has to bear  a burden.  That doesn't mean that  politics is necessarily a zero-sum game.  Sometimes we all win and sometimes we all lose. 

People  tend  to want to see their  benefits maximized and their  burdens diminished.  Lawrence Mitchell, who was our guest awhile back on our episode about corporations, described corporations as great "externalizing" engines.   I think he meant by that that  corporations are expert at pushing the social costs of what they do onto third parties.   Though corporations may be the most efficient and ruthless externalizers of all,  I don't think they're alone.   Indeed, we all want to push as much social costs as we can onto somebody else, while receiving as much social benefit as we possibly can.   Kant once held that  who "wills the end" necessarily "wills the means."   He seemed to think that willing the end without willing the means involves some kind of incoherence.   There may be something to Kant's thought, if we restrict ourselves just to ends that I must bring about tr

But what does this have to do with the war of the frames?  The answer, I think, is that   "framing" is really a matter of  representing, especially of representing in normatively laden terms.  When we frame the issues in competing ways we are, in effect, offering competing narratives about  who deserves to enjoy what benefits and  bear what burdens.   

I also think that  many of the narratives we tell ourselves are  thoroughly self-serving.  They represent us and ours as the deserving recipients of benefits and the undeserving recipients of burdens, while representing "the other"  as  the undeserving recipients of benefits and the deserving recipients of burdens.   A whole lot of politics involves a competition over normatively laden construals, I think.  And I suspect that often he who wins the battle over normative construal has gone a very long way toward winning the day. 

You might wonder whether there's an objective right and wrong in the battle over construals.   This is a tricky question.  Certainly, one can misconstrue and misrepresent all sorts of matters and one can do in service of some political agenda or other.  Take the so-called controversy over  natural selection vs  intelligent design. Every even marginally scientifically literate person knows,  or should know,  that  intelligent design is not a serious scientific hypothesis that  deserve to be taught in any science class anywhere.  But proponents of intelligent design in order to promote a certain anti-science, religiously inspired political agenda have "brilliantly" sought to "frame" intelligent design as a rival scientific hypothesis that deserves teaching along side natural selection and other naturalist mechanisms of evolution.   In this case,  we have a clear example of an attempt at framing that one might expect or at least may be  debunked merely by steadfastly drawing  public attention to the real scientific facts of the matter.  But even here that thought may be too hopeful.  The forces of darkness are so organized, determined, and entrenched in our political culture that they may win the battle over the construals despite the fact that the frame they seek to impose is a framework of misrepresentation and ignorance rather than truth and knowledge.   It is frightening that men who ought to know better -- Bill Frist, MD, to name just one  -- are now spouting this nonsense.

If it is politically difficult  to combat even an attempt at framing that rests on such  patent and pernicious falsehoods and misrepresentations what hope is there where the objective truth of the matter, if there is one,  is even harder to discern.  Indeed,  I have to admit that I tend to doubt that there are objective  facts of the matter about who  should pay what taxes, about when a fetus becomes a person deserving the protection of the law, and even about who is  entitled to "marry" whom?   What there are instead are competing normative frameworks that construe these matters in different terms and no external authority by which we may adjudicate which normative framework better gets at the truth of the matter.  To be sure,  our competing frameworks do sometimes give way to a more encompassing normative consensus.  This is what has happened at many moments of great social progress and enlightenment.  But there is no simple  recipe for making that happen. Certainly,  there is  no antecedent guarantee that it can be made to happen in every case.

So what does that mean about the language of politics?   Perhaps it means that political discourse will always suffer from a certain fragmentation and division.  Perhaps politics will always involve a battle of competing construals and frames.  We may be destined to often talk past and at each other, rather than to each other.   One can hope for a more deliberative politics in which we reason together about how to live our shared lives.  But that is really only a hope and one far from being realized at this particular moment in history.

 

Saints, Heroes, and Schmucks Like Me.

posted by Ken Taylor

Thanks to Susan Wolf for an interesting discussion of  Saints, Heroes and the Well-lived Life.  The episode certainly  prompted lots of response from listeners.  We must have set a record for questions submitted via e-mail.  There were also more callers than we could get to.

Susan has a point.   There is more to living well than slavishly  and  single-mindedly devoting oneself to moral perfection -- either of oneself or of the world.  I want a life filled with goods of all sorts -- many of them non-moral.  I want  moments in which I contemplate beauty, even if by such contemplation I achieve nothing for the world at large and merely  elevate myself above the mundane demands of the everyday.   I want to perfect my abilities as a philosopher and use them to  plumb the depths of the deepest philosophical mysteries, even if through my exploration the world remains as morally imperfect as can be.   I want to explore the heights of erotic pleasure with my deepest love, to tend my roses, to spend idle hours in the company of those I hold dear  or even merely in solitude. If morality were to ask, but not demand -- since we're talking about supererogation and not "mere" duty -- that I forgo the pursuit of such goods and devote all of my energies to pursuit of  moral perfection, either of myself or the world, I would refuse the offer.

  There are times, of course, when morality demands personal sacrifices, large or small,  of us.   When morality calls in this way,  I hope that I can find it within myself to answer.  There is surely  something to the idea that the demands of morality (purport to)  override any non-moral demands.  Someone who would let another perish  that he could easily save,  just so that he might continue to enjoy even the best imaginable, once in a life time sort of meal,  cares too much for his own pleasure and too little for morality.
 
On the other hand,  the presumed  overridingness of morality is more complicated than many allow.   In particular,  I don't think that the demands or morality are rationally inescapable as, say, Kantians would maintain.  But that's a complicated issue that I don't want to explore in depth here.

But back to supererogation.  As I said,  I agree with Susan Wolf that one needn't as  a general rule give up the pursuit of all non-moral goods for the sake of a single-minded and slavish devotion to morality.  Still, it seems to me that she does inadequate justice to the pull of the supererogatory upon us.  The  supererogatory isn't  something  toward which morality is indifferent.  The supererogatory  isn't a domain of  "take it or leave it"  sorts of matters.  The supererogatory often concerns matters of great moral significance.   These aren't, it  seems to me, the sort of things that one can greet with a shrug of the shoulders.  That's because they have some call on us, even if we aren't obligated or duty-bound to do what is supererogatory.

Suppose, for example, I really and truly could do some great moral deed, perhaps even a heroic deed.  But suppose that I choose not to out of a preference for some non-moral good.  Though I may not have done anything morally wrong,  it seems to me that I am less than fully morally admirable.  It is perhaps not quite right  to say that I can be blamed for not doing what was supererogatory but not required.  But it's also not quite right to say that my failing to do what was merely supererogatory was a matter of moral indifference. The supererogatory exercises some moral pull on us, even if it does not obligate us.  Preferring  non-moral goods  over non-obligatory moral  goods is not quite like the preferring  jazz over opera.   The latter is of no moral significance.  But the former strikes me as  deeply morally significant.

I'm not quite sure, though, exactly how to characterize that moral pull.  It's not quite right to say that we are entitled to blame or punish those who refuse to do supererogatory acts that it is within their power to do.  What seems more appropriate is a kind of disappointment either in ourselves or others when we turn away from the supererogatory.  At a very minimum,   we do not greet such "failures"  with mere shrugs of the shoulder, as if they were of no moral moment.

Some moral theorists reject  the existence of the supererogatory.  One reason for that, I suspect, is that they think there is no way to accommodate the standing pull of the putatively supererogatory with its status as merely optional.    Such approaches give too much weight to some of the requests of morality and too little weight to all non-moral goods.   These approaches elevate morality into something of a despotic and  hegemonic ruler over our lives.   On such approaches, it is as if  our lives are first given over to morality and only after morality has extracted its due from us are our lives given back over to us.   Something like this thought, I think, is behind the idea that at least the commandments of morality are overriding.  But if you add the thought that even the supposedly  supererogatory partakes of  the imperial majesty of morality, you might quickly be led to reject the very idea of the supererogatory.  Morality becomes set of inescapable commandments  (together with a set of "permissions") all the way down.  The "above and beyond" simply disappears.

Though I don't quite no how to articulate it,  there must be a middle ground between the view that morality is hegemonic and the view that the merely morally good but not morally required does not partake of the full  "majesty" of the  morally required.   Two things indicate that our common sense morality at least implicitly recognizes the existence of such a middle ground.   First, there is the very fact that we do esteem heroes and saints as ideals.  Second, there is the fact that our attitude towards "non-heroes" who enjoy both the opportunity and the capacity to step in but, nonetheless, refused to do so  involves more than a  mere shrug of the shoulders.  Though there are many circumstances in which we don't blame or punish such people, there are many circumstances in which our admiration diminishes, in which we think less of the person who "failed" in this way and express various forms of disapprobation toward them.

Of course,  as we said on the show, there may be times when extraordinary acts are indeed morally required.  And one might be tempted to say that the only time we can legitimately  disapprove those who fail to do something heroic is when it is required.  But this just repeats Susan Wolf's mistake, on my view.  The  merely morally good,  but not required does not have the same pull on us as the morally required does.  But it doesn't follow that it has no pull on us, that we need be merely indifferent to its absence.  Depending on the circumstances, when we forgo some moral good in preference for some non-moral good, there is always room for regret or disappointment or shame.   Not only is there room, but to feel no such regret or shame or disappointment strikes me as a form of moral blindness.

What follows.  Not that we are all called to give our all only for morality.   But it does follow that the morally good is always present to us as an outstandingly worthy option, an option that we may rationally prefer to forgo, but always at some costs.  Feelings of regret, shame or disappointment are ways of recognize such a cost as a cost.