Philosophy Talk: The Blog

Social Reality

posted by Ken Taylor

Our  topic this week is social realities.  I must admit that when I first brought the nature of social reality up as a topic for an episode of Philosophy Talk, the non-philosophers on our team all went  “huh?”   That phrase obviously doesn’t mean much to the person on the street.  But  social realities are all around us.  Think of cocktail parties, football games, bar mitzvahs, political rallies, and even nations.  These are all social realities.  

 And in connection with this sort of thing both parts of that phrase “social reality” are worth focusing on. All the things I just mentioned are things that really and truly exist.  They aren’t figments of anyone’s imagination; they’re real.  Really real.  Objectively real.   But at the same time, they're all made up entities, at least in a sense.   Cocktail parties exist only because a group of people get together and say “we're having a party now.”  People just sort of decide that these things are going to exist.  And so they do exist.  Seems kind of like magic.

It isn’t really magic,  but it is puzzling.  At bottom, social realities are just creations of the human mind.  Not individual human minds, but collections of human minds.   You can’t all by your little lonesome create a social reality.  Try it and you really will end up with something that’s just a figment of your own imagination.  But put a bunch of people together, let them exercise their imaginations together;  let them agree; and presto,  you’ve got a new social reality. 

What could, I suppose, make that sound a little like magic still is the fact that it takes at least two minds to make a social reality. If one mind can’t do it, why are two or more minds any better, you might ask.  Well the answer is that social realities are, by their very natures,  founded on agreement.   If a bunch of humans agree to create a club, then there is a club.  If a bunch of humans agree to form a nation, then there exists a nation.  And although clubs and nations are nothing but products of human agreement, they're not figments of our imagination.  To be sure they are products of our imaginations, but they’re real products, not mere figments.  Once we agree that they exist, they are  as objectively real as rocks and mountains.

Not only are things like clubs and nations real, they are  really important.  They have a huge impact on our lives.   We’re immersed in a universe of ever changing social realities.  And they play an immense role both in determining how we live and how well we live.   Our earliest forbears foraged on the savannah and huddled in caves. Civilizations have risen and fallen and with them, ways of life have come and gone.  Throughout these massive changes in the social world, the biological and physical worlds have changed too -- but not as radically, and mostly in ways that are more or less direct consequences of changes in the human social world. 

So the social world affects not only the way humans relate to one another, but also how we interact with the rest of the biological and physical world.   Science, for example, is really a complex social undertaking by which humans collectively seek to understand the physical, biological, and even the social world itself.

Now scientific understanding of the social world sounds like a good thing.  But it also sounds a bit like sociology or anthropology or maybe social psychology.  We’re philosophers.  Why should we philosophers worry about the social world?

Well for one thing, we want to understand just how the social world arises out the natural world.  

But wait a minute, you’re about to interject. You started out by saying that social realities are a creation of the human mind.  Doesn’t that suggest that the social world doesn’t arise out of the natural world at all?  In one sense yes; in one sense no.   The sense in which the social world is not part of  unaided nature is obvious.  The social world depends entirely on us humans and not on the blind and impersonal forces of nature.  But ultimately human beings are just parts of the natural world.  So the power of the human mind to create social realities must have its roots in human psychology, which must ultimately have its roots in human biology, which must ultimately have its roots in physics.

 This may sound a little reductionist.  Afterall, I  started out talking about the power of the human mind to create, almost out of nothing, all varieties of new social realities.  And now I seem to be suggesting that it all comes down to the chemical processes of the brain.   It’s definitely got to come from somewhere.   It’s not just magic.  And besides, even animals have some limited power to create social realities.  It would certainly be good to understand just what equips the human mind to build social realities of such a wide variety and just how those human capacities evolv ed from lower level capacities of social animals,

There’s obviously a lot to think about here.  Fortunately for us we had an excellent guest for this episode -- Berkeley’s own John Searle, author of Making the Social World. 

I should say that this program was recorded in front of live audience at the Marsh Theater – this time in Berkeley, California.  As a consequence, you won’t be able to join the conversation on air.   But you can join it here.   

Loyalty

posted  by Ken Taylor

Our topic this week is loyalty.  Loyalty binds people together.  Friendships, marriages, even nations are built on loyalty.  Try imagining a person who has no loyalty whatsoever to anything or anyone.   Such a person would be friendless, loveless, nationless.  She would feel no devotion to any higher cause or principle – like truth or justice.   She would not even be a fan of any sports team.   A life like that would be empty, devoid of many of the things that make us fully human.

Of course, loyalties are not all created equal though.   Loyalty to a sports team is a shallow form of loyalty.  Loyalty to a nation can sometimes demand too much.  Or think of the loyalty that some battered wives display to their abusive husbands.   There’s a misplaced loyalty if there ever was one. 

Loyalty goes hand in hand with trustworthiness.   If you can’t trust your spouse not to beat you or cheat on you, then your spouse doesn’t deserve your loyalty.  If you can’t trust your government not to send young men off to fight in fruitless, forlorn wars, then your government doesn’t deserve your loyalty.

That’s connected to something else.  Earlier I  said that loyalty unites and that’s a good thing.  But loyalty also divides. And that’s a bad thing.  For example, soldiers at war are driven to kill each other by their competing loyalties.   Or think of a parent who lavishes more toys on his/her children than they really need, out of a sense of loyalty and devotion, while entirely ignoring the needs of poor, abused, malnourished children around the world.  If he would just spend a little bit of his wealth elsewhere, he could do a tremendous amount of good.  But his loyalty has blinded him to the needs of others.

Loyalties can also divide a person from herself.   Loyalty and devotion to your family, for example, can pull in one direction, while loyalty to  an employer can pull you in an entirely different direction. Managing such conflicting loyalties is no easy task. 

You could think that you just have to decide.  You have to decide where your highest loyalty lies.  Do you most  want to be a better parent or a better philosophy professor and radio host? 

But it doesn’t seem quite right to me that choosing between conflicting loyalties is a brute decision, a matter of simply deciding for yourself to whom or what you owe the higher allegiance.   There must be some principles --  some moral principles --  that tell you who and what you owe loyalty to and to what degree you owe loyalty.  Such moral principles should  help you resolve such conflicts on an objective moral basis. 

Speaking of abstract moral principles, though,  depending on your  moral outlook, the very idea of loyalty can seem morally problematic. Take utilitarianism, for example.   Its highest principle is that you should always act so as to produce the greatest good for the greatest number.    But it’s  actually pretty hard to make sense of the very idea of loyalty if you are a utilitarian – at least if you are a crude act utilitarian. 

To see why think about two people drowning.  You’re in a boat and can save only one of them.  One of them happens to be a Nobel Laureate who has discovered a cure for cancer.  The other happens to be your spouse.  Which one do you save? 

The obvious answer to me is that I’d save my wife.  But you’d have a hard time justifying that answer on utilitarian grounds.  That’s because utilitarian morality has a hard time justifying giving the kind of special weight to one’s wife that loyalty demands.  In deciding what to do, her well-being should count, to be sure, but  no more, and no less, in your calculations than the well being of any arbitrary person. 

That seems wrong to me.  But I have to admit that I have hard time putting my finger on just why.  My wife means a whole lot more to me than just any arbitrary other person.  But does my loyalty and devotion really morally obligate or entitle me to give more weight to her well-being than to the well-being other people? 

Consider a further test of just how much added moral weight loyalty endows my wife’s well being with.  Suppose it was a matter of saving my wife, while letting two other people or three or four other people drown.  Would I still be inclined to save her and let the others drown?

Here I feel something of a quandary – perhaps divided loyalties are tugging at me. On balance loyalty, and the special concern that goes with it, seem to me like very good things.  But loyalty can be taken too far and can demand too much.    And drawing the line is a tricky matter. 

Clearly,  we need some help sorting this all out.   And luckily for us, help is on the way, in the form of our guest, poet and philosopher, Troy Jollimore.  Troy has thought long and hard about loyalty, love, friendship and morality.   So it should be a fun episode.   If you’ve got the time,  give a listen.  Maybe even call in. 

What are Human Rights?

posted by Ken Taylor

Our question this week is  “What are human rights?” The American declaration of independence offers a compelling answer to that question so its the first place one might think to look of for a characterization of human rights.  It says in what I personally find stirring language that  “All men are created equal … they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights … among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

 The Declaration is rooted in the Enlightenment idea that every human being enjoys, just in virtue of being a human being, certain fundamental rights.  Of course, not every enlightenment thinker thought that rights were ‘god given,” as Jefferson seems to suggest.   That, however, raises the question that if fundamental rights are not god-given, where exactly do rights come from.  One could, I suppose think that rights are just “natural”  and intrinsic to what it is to be a human being.  Locke seems to have thought something like that.    No doubt during the episode we will explore alternative views about where rights come from and in virtue of what human enjoy various rights.  But I won’t try to get into that very much here.

 I should say  that not everything that is represented as a right, even a universal right could plausibly thought to be a “natural”  right, whatever exactly those are.   For example, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights  says that “the right to rest and leisure,  including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay” is a universal human right.   Paid holidays are certainly a good thing.  But it is at best debatable that the right to paid holidays is in, any plausible sense,  “universal.”  And it seems plainly false to say that such a right is somehow a natural or intrinsic right. 

 I don’t mean to be suggesting that employers have the right to work their employees to the bone, until they drop from exhaustion.  I’m just saying that we need to distinguish fundamental or intrinsic rights from socially or politically created rights.  Workers don’t have an intrinsic right to paid holidays.  But where certain laws and/or collective bargaining agreements are in place, they do have the right.

It can be a little bit tricky to draw the line between intrinsic rights and socially or politically constituted rights.   One’s first thought might that  intrinsic  or basic rights are rights that we enjoy independently of any laws, agreements or conventions.   Socially or politically created rights depend entirely on laws, agreements or conventions.    

 One problem with this attempt at line drawing,  however, is that  until people get together and empower duly appointed bodies to make laws prohibiting murder or slavery, it’s not even clear what it  would  even mean to say that people have a right to life or a right to liberty.   One wants to say, of course,  that even in an imagined “state of nature”  in which there is not yet a political or social order, it would be plain wrong for anybody or anything to deprive another of liberty or life.  There doesn’t need to be a system of laws or courts or even a system of social sanctions  in order for the deprivation of liberty of life to count as wrong.   Or so one might think. 

Perhaps.  But suppose that there were no society and no force of law to back up such claims about rights.   In such a situation if  someone had the power and desire to enslave you or kill you then they might just do so.  You could scream in foot-stomping protest, but without the backing of law and society and government, your protest would amount to no more than impotent screaming.    At a bare minimum,   without the backing of the state or at least civil society,  talk of rights may be ineffectual, even if not exactly meaningless.   Of course,  that is precisely the reason why Jefferson listed not just life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as fundament rights, but also the right to institute governments to secure such rights and even the right to rebel --  to alter or abolish governments that fail to secure fundamental rights.

But let’s  come at rights from a different angle for a second.  Consider two societies with two different sets of laws.  In one society, the law grants women full autonomy over their own bodies.  In the other, the law treats women as the sexual property of men.   Many of us will have the intuition that the second society has violated the fundamental human rights of its female citizens.  And in good Jeffersonian fashion we may conclude that any government that permits such violations ought to be “altered or abolished.”

But suppose that citizens of the relevant society by and large endorse the relevant laws and practices.  We can imagine that the men do so out of a crude kind of self-interest which they believe to be enhanced by the subjugation of women.  And we can imagine that the women either the lack either the power to change things or the will to change things – perhaps because of the cumulative effect of decades or centuries of  subjugation on their self conception.   What do we do when faced with what strikes us as such an obvious violation of human rights and human dignity?   Do we, as outsiders,  have the right to seek to alter or abolish the social system and/or oppressive government in the name of  protecting fundamental human rights and human dignity?   Or would an outsider’s attempt to alter the government of another society amount to cultural imperialism?

This, I think,  is a delicate question.  It’s one we intend to put to Helen Stacy, this week’s guest.  Helen is the author of Human Rights for the 21^st Century: Sovereignty, Civil Society, Culture.  No doubt, she will have a lot to say about the complicated interaction of our conception of universal or fundamental human rights, and cultural diversity.   

Psychological vs. Biological Altruism

posted by Ken Taylor

There are at least two kinds of altruism.  Psychological altruism means acting out of concern for the well-being of others, without regard to your own self-interest.  Biological altruism refers to behavior that helps the survival of a species without benefiting the particular individual who’s being altruistic.   It may not be obvious what exactly these two forms of altruism have to do with each other and why they should be discussed in the same breath. 

 You could think that the two come together in certain theories about human nature.  Some say that humans are by nature selfish.  But evolutionary biology and psychology are beginning to challenge this idea.   It turns out that evolution has actually hard-wired altruistic behavior into many animals -- including human beings.  Thus the facts of biological altruism might be thought to show the error of those who think that humans are psychologically egoistic.

 But to think that way would put you in danger of mixing “is” and “ought.”  Biological  altruism may have nothing to do with morality.  Even if some animals have evolved to be altruistic, that doesn’t automatically make it morally right.  Biological altruism isn’t a challenge to psychological egoism, but to what used to be called the selfish gene hypothesis. That’s the hypothesis that genes are solely in the business of replicating themselves and that an animal is basically the tool of its genes. Genes make animals behave so those very genes get reproduced as often as possible in subsequent generations.

 Admittedly that’s a peculiar use of the word selfish.  Genes don’t really have a self.  So they can’t really have self-interests.  And that’s  why biological altruism is different from psychological altruism and has nothing to do with morality.  Richard Dawkins coined the phrase "selfish gene", as a metaphor.  He was just trying to say that genes act as if they are totally self-centered.

Of course, that does raise the interesting question of just biological altruism happens, given that genes are so metaphorically selfish.   That’s not the same question as how psychological altruism happens,  but it’s an interesting question in its own right.  It turns out that lots of organisms behave in ways that are detrimental to their own chances of survival, but are beneficial to the reproductive chances of fellow organisms.  For example, a vervet monkey will give alarm calls to warn other monkeys of the presence of predators, even though this attracts attention to itself, increasing its own chance of being attacked and killed.

This isn’t quite the same as saying that genes are metaphorically selfless rather than metaphorically selfish.   The point is rather that selection may not operate on individual genes at all, but on whole groups or populations.  A group that contains some altruists will survive better as a group than a group that contains no altruists.   Evolution, it turns out, can work on whole groups as a unit.   That’s called group selection.  That’s a still controversial thought, but one that seems to be gaining wider acceptance.   

 But let’s get back at least briefly to psychological altruism. Maybe there is a way to tie biological and psychological altruism together, especially if we think of the human psyche as at least in part designed by natural selection, especially if we think of collective human psychology.  Think of a human collectivity like a nation.  We don’t all have to be willing to die for our country.  But maybe some of us had better be.  If some of us are,  we’d all be better off – though maybe those who are willing to die will be worse off individually.   Now I’m not suggesting that nations are directly designed by natural selection on groups.  But I am suggesting that maybe something like the process of group selection has shaped the human psyche for at least a modest degree of psychological altruism by guaranteeing that collectivities of humans contain enough psychological altruists to enhance the groups chances of reproductive success.

In hypothesizing that to some extent human psychological altruism may be a consequence of biological altruism,  I do not mean at all to suggest that  people blindly do what their genes tell them to do.  People act on their beliefs, desires, hopes and fears, on their conceptions of right and wrong.   But in the end people are just biological organisms.  The human brain is just another organ.  It’s highly likely that even our conceptions of right and wrong are a product of evolutionary forces.  So it wouldn’t

be altogether surprising to find a tendency toward altruistic thinking wired into our very neurons by something like the mechanism of group selection.  Would it?  That’s the question we put to our guest, Jeffrey Schloss, who  is an expert on both biological and psychological altruism.  

Does Postmodernism Mean Moral Relativism?

For those not in the KALW Broadcast area, we will be re-airing our episode on Post-Modernism during this coming week. So we're moving an old blog post by our guest Gary Aylesworth, written when this episode originally aired, to the top of the blog.

posted by Gary Aylesworth

Toward the end of last Sunday’s broadcast of Philosophy Talk, a caller asked whether the “moral relativism” supposedly rampant in our time was part of postmodernism. While I would certainly agree that the current hysteria over moral relativism is a postmodern phenomenon, I don’t agree that postmodern thought takes an “anything goes” view of politics or ethics, or that it prevents us from saying that the terrorists of 9/11 committed mass murder. Instead, I see postmodern thought as a kind of moral humility, a humility that prevents us from assuming that the world divides neatly into “us” and “them” or that “others” are simply evil while “we,” by mere opposition, are assured to be in the right. Such absolutism, after all, has the same structure as the ideology of the terrorists. Several figures associated with philosophical postmodernism emphasize our obligation to the other as an other, that is, not as “one of us” but as one who marks the limit of our own identity or community. It is an obligation to receive the other as such and not to silence or eliminate her. We can agree that the 9/11 terrorists violated this obligation and that they are responsible for their actions, but it also forces us to examine our own sense of victimization. Nietzsche warned us against the moral righteousness of the victim; it is dangerous because it seeks to annihilate the other and tolerates no dissent.

The alarms against moral relativism we hear around us are, I think, the latest bellowings of the morality of ressentiment, a morality that looks for someone or something to blame for the insecurities and uncertainties of our age. Postmodern thought did not create this situation, but tries to explore its structures and its limits. It also upholds certain Enlightenment values, such as the freedom to dissent, social and political emancipation, the rights of individuals and minorities, etc., but it does so without claiming to know, once and for all, who individuals are or what ultimately constitutes a right. That these identities must remain open is itself a moral imperative, and one that obliges us to be humble in our judgments. Moral humility, not moral relativism, is the lesson of postmodern thinking.

The Post-Modern Family Values: Open Blog Entry

posted by Ken Taylor

It's pledge week on KALW, our host station.  And we're doing a live pledge show that will only be heard on that station and not on our affiliates  around the country.  But if you'd like to tune it, you can do so at 10am PST time, on KALW's Website  where the show is streamed live.   Join the conversation.   Of course, even if you can't hear a broadcast version of the show,  we will eventually put the streaming version up on our own  website, from which you can also purchase an downloadable version.

A couple of weeks ago, I started an open blog entry on pornography, so I thought I'd do the same for the Post-Modern Family.  Our guest today will be sociologist, Michael Rosenfeld, author of a The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions and the Changing American Family.   I've only read a bit of it,  but what I have read is fascinating.   He argues that increase in  same sex and interracial unions in America is due largely to the occurrence of a relatively new "life-stage"  -- the age of independence, he calls it -- during which young adults are single, co-mingled with one another in colleges, universities, and the work-force,  and, most importantly,  mostly free of their parents.   That's because more and more people go off to college in young adulthood, and go into the workforce at an age when earlier generations of their age cohort were living with or near their parents.  That gave earlier generations of parents more influence over their offsprings mate choices.   But that's been lost with the gradual rise of the age of independence as a distinctive life stage.    

As a sociological, demographic thesis this strikes me as extremely plausible and I doubt either John or I will challenge  Michael on that score.  But my question is what does this mean about the role of the family in society.   One used to think of a family as one of the primary means of transmitting values from generation to generation.   One might have thought, in fact, that that is one of the primary things that family is for.  Of course, it has other functions -- providing for its members daily material and psychological needs prime among them.   It also inculcates a system of binding ties between the old and the young such that the old care for the young in their age of dependency in such a way that the young feel permanently bound to the old and out of love and affection, more than mere "duty"  return the favor when the old are very old.    Families also traditionally provided central ingredients of our self-narratives -- the narratives in the telling of which we constitute ourselves thick identities, as particular people, with particular life stories. 

But can a family structure  which so radically weakens the normative ties between generations really do that identity constituting, value transmitting,  generation binding work? 

That's one of the questions I'd like to discuss with MIchael on the air.  

We'd love to have your input.    Leave a comment on this blog or call in or send us an e-mail.  

gotta run.

Work and the Self

This post was originally published back in January of 2008, when the episode on work -- which was actually recorded in October of 2007 -- first aired. I thought it would be interesting to republish it at the top of the blog as we re-air that episode.

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's episode was on Work. Our guest was Al Gini from Loyola University of Chicago. He's a philosopher by trade, the author of a number of books about work and the self, and the resident philosopher at WBEZ public radio in Chicago.

The episode was recorded a couple of months ago, back in late October, in front of a live, large and lively audience of students and faculty at Centenary College in Shreveport Louisiana. We were at Centenary for the better part of a week. We not only recorded today's episode there, but we also broadcast an episode on Philosophy and Literature live from Centenary's college radio station, KSCL, which has the singular distinction of airing our show twice per week. We also did a couple of other public events in connection with Centenary's First Year experience. Meeting with the students was especially fun. But we were also wined and dined, in very fine style, by many of Centenary's energetic and engaged faculty members. It was a delight getting to know you all.

We thank all the good folks at Centenary, the nation's smallest Division 1 school, for making this all possible. And I hope you enjoyed having us around as much as we enjoyed being around.

We'd like to do more of this sort of thing in the future -- as I think I've mentioned before. So if you'd like to bring us to a college campus near you, including your own, get in touch and let us know.

Since it's been a couple of months since we recorded the show, I have to admit that it's been about that long since I thought hard about the topic of the show. I listened to it as it was broadcast this morning and was reminded of many things that I thought at the time. I think I still think most of them. But in the rest of this post, I'll try out briefly a few follow-up thoughts.

I count myself very lucky in my own work. I mostly love being a professor of philosophy. I love doing philosophy for its own sake. I love teaching philosophy. And I love this public intellectual radio thing that I've stumbled into in the last few years. I enjoy almost everything about working at a top-flight university like Stanford, where I am surrounded by world class colleagues in just about every department and where I get to teach extremely well-prepared, disciplined and often highly creative students. I even admire the intellects and dedication of the people who do the necessary but less intrinsically rewarding task of administering this very fine place. I can sometimes hardly believe my good fortune in finding work to which I am so well suited, in a place where a love living, in a community whose values I mostly share and respect. To be sure, I do work very long hours -- especially in the years since I have been simultaneously chairing my department, trying to make a go of a certain radio show, and trying to keep my teaching and research more or less on track. The long hours aren't always happiness making -- both because some of what I have to do as department chair, for example, I could easily do without. But, more importantly, it's at times hard to keep work confined to its proper proportions. I am deeply committed to being an available and engaged father to my son and a supportive and present husband to my wife. Sometimes the demands of work and the demands of family come into deep conflict. So as much as I love my work, it's not as though I find it "cost free" or that I've found the magical formula for adjudicating the delicate balance between costs and benefits of work vs. non-work.

I said something during the episode that certainly could have been said more clearly about getting the proportions right. On the one hand, there's how much of the time available to one, one's work will take. There are only so many hours in a day, week, or life. How many of the hours of one's day will one allow one's work to consume? Work also consumes the self. And there's only so much of the self to go around too. What occurred to me as the conversation developed during the show was sort of a half-baked formula. Try to let one's work consumes no greater portion of one's available hours -- one's total temporal allotment, as we might call it -- than the proportion of one's self that one is willing to give over to one's work -- one's degree of self investment, as it were. The rough thought was just that, all things being equal, the more of one's self one "invests" in one's work, the more of one's total temporal allotment it will be worth investing in one's work. Correlatively, the less of one's self one invests in one's work, the less of one's total temporal allotment, one should invest in one's work.

Or so the thought went.

Two plus month's later, I'm not sure that I had a fully coherent thought or that the thought provides very much positive guidance as to how to adjust the balance between work and the rest of one's life. Even if the rough thought is right, it's surely only roughly right. Not every minute of one's life counts the same, for one thing. Hours spent doing sheer drudgery or delaying gratification can cost relatively less in terms of "self-investment" than is gained back in the moments in which one finally, if only briefly, reaps the reward.

One could spend one's entire life doing back-breaking, intrinsically unrewarding work, in service of a cause larger than oneself. Imagine a factory worker, with children to feed, clothe and educate, doing work that he finds mind-numbing. But he does it nonetheless, does it with pride and does it in a sense willingly, because he invest himself not so much in his work per se, but in what that work is instrumental to -- providing for his children and his wife. I think generations have taken deep and deserved pride in doing work like that.

Would their lives have been "better" had they been able to provide for their families by means of work they found more intrinsically rewarding, more intrinsically self-defining? In some sense, that certainly seems true. Certainly, all things being equal one would prefer intrinsically rewarding to intrinsically unrewarding work. But a life willingly given over to back-breaking, intrinsically unrewarding, work out of devotion to things larger than oneself seems to have a certain dignity and nobility to it that is not easily matched by a life spent doing only work that naturally "fits" the self, as it were.

Of course, I don't mean to romanticize back-breaking, intrinsically degrading work. Probably, nobody should have to do such things -- at least not without decent compensation. But to acknowledge this is not to deny the quiet dignity that is often displayed by those who find themselves stuck doing such work.

Open Thread on Apologies

Dear Listener:

You probably have notice the lightness of blogging recently. But things are about to change. Today's guest, Nick Smith, has agreed to blog about today's topic of Apologizing. And to get things started, I thought I'd start an open thread and invite listeners to contribute their thoughts.

I thought the episode was quite interesting myself. The one thing that still puzzle me is apologizing for things done accidentally.

It seems to me if I accidentally step on your toe, I do owe you some sort of apology, even though I didn't exactly "wrong" you. It would be odd if I were simply indifferent to your pain, certainly. At the bare minimum, I need to acknowledge your pain, acknowledge my role, however unintended, in causing you pain, and express regret at it having happened the way it did.

That doesn't quite add up to an apology, I admit. But it's something close.

Or so it seems to me.

Anyway, comment away!

Where Does Morality Come From?

posted by Alex Miller

During the program on Sunday July 1st I drew a distinction between two ways in which this question might be taken. First, we could take it as a question about the *causal origin* of morality: how does it originate? (Compare: where did Stonehenge come from? This would be answered by telling a story about how those prehistoric people managed to get those huge stones from the west of Wales to Salisbury Plain). This is an interesting question, but I suspect that it is not quite the question that philosophers have in mind when they discuss the issue. The answer about causal origin is presumably that morality comes from *us*, or from the way we have evolved through history, or something roughly along those lines. However, philosophers are interested less in the empirical-cum-anthropological question about the causal origins of morality (which is not to say that it is uninteresting) and more in the question about the source of the *authority* of morality. Given that morally right actions are the actions that we ought to perform, what grounds this “ought”? One answer would be that the authority of morality stems from the fact that right actions are, by definition, the acts that God approves of. If being kind to Granny Smith is approved of by God, then it is no wonder that I ought to be kind to Granny Smith, no wonder, in other words, that the prescription to be kind to Granny Smith is authoritative. God, the supreme authority, approves of it, so what more could you want by way of a ground for the authority of the claim that you ought to help her?

This is the kind of story about the source of morality’s authority that many philosophers consider to have been destroyed by the argument that Socrates gives in Plato’s dialogue *Euthyphro*. In that dialogue, Euthyphro claims that the rightness of right acts consists in the fact that they are approved by God: by definition, an act is right if and only if it is approved by God. I take it that an updated version of the argument Plato has Socrates deliver against this suggestion goes something like this. God is supposed to be omnibenevolent as well as omniscient and omnipotent: in other words, he’s supposed to be infinitely good in addition to being infinitely knowledgeable and infinitely powerful. But what is it for an agent to be good? An agent is good if they do the right thing *because* it is right: if you are kind to Granny Smith because you want to be left a large sum of money in her will, that is not the action of a good person. A good person, therefore, is a person who performs right acts for the right sorts of reasons. And now for the killer blow against Euthyphro. If being right consists in being approved by God, if being right is by definition a matter of being approved by God, then the claim that e.g.

(*) God approves of kindness because it is right

becomes empty of all content. Since being right consists in being approved by God (*) turns out to be an empty truism along the lines of

(**) God approves of kindness because God approves of kindness.

On Euthyphro’s position we thus lose the capacity to hold on to claims like (*). And if we lose the capacity to hold on to claims like (*) we lose the idea that God is good, because being good is a matter of doing the right things (or at least approving of the right things) because they are right. And if we lose the claim that God is good, we lose the claim that God is omnibenevolent, or infinitely good. So, in conclusion, in order to retain Ethyphro’s theory according to which being good consists in being approved by God, we would have to see God as an essentially *amoral* agent, an agent who may well approve of the tings that are right, but not *because* they are right.

So, God is of no help to us if we are seeking to answer the question “Where Does Morality Come From?” construed as a question about the source of morality’s authority. If we are to make a serious attempt at accounting for the authority of morality we have to jettison God, and for all intents and purposes restrict ourselves to the sorts of materials that would be acceptable to an atheist.

How about this. Right actions are those that tend to promote the well-being of sentient creatures, taking into account values such as integrity, veracity, impartiality, and so on.

Suppose that if I’m kind to Granny Smith her well being will be promoted: she’ll feel less lonely, for example. Suppose also, that my being kind to Granny Smith does not involve my lying to her or to anyone else, does not involve any violation of anyone’s integrity, and is not performed at the expense of anyone else’s well-being, and so on.

So being kind to Granny Smith promotes her well being in an acceptable sort of way. That’s why I ought to be kind to her. No God involved there. So why isn’t this a plausible story about the source of morality’s authority?

Note that the authority of morality doesn’t depend on us, in the sense that whether being kind to Granny promotes her well being and so on is independent of whether I *think* that it promotes her well being (and probably also independent of whether *she* thinks that it promotes her well being).

So, as far as questions of causal origin are concerned, morality at least partially depends on us. As far as questions of authority are concerned, the authority of morality is tied up with the effects things have on us, because the effects things have on us can crucially affect our well being. But this doesn’t mean that it is up to us whether a particular act or course of action is right or wrong, because it isn’t just up to us whether a particular act or course of action affects our well being.

Some good introductory level books on related themes:

Simon Blackburn *Being Good* (Oxford: OUP 1999).

Russ Schafer-Landau *Whatever Happened to Good and Evil?* (New York: OUP 2004).

Michael Parenti *The Culture Struggle* (Seven Stories Press 2006)

Parenti’s book is more on politics than philosophy, but his chapters on cultural relativism and ethnocentrism are excellent. He'd be a great guy to have on Philosophy Talk!

Journalistic Ethics?

posted by Ken Taylor

The topic for today's show is Journalistic Ethics. Our guest will be Dale Jacquette, of Penn State University, who has recently published a book about the topic called, Journalistic Ethics: Moral Responsibility in the Media. I'm sure you can get a copy of the book at Powell's Books -- which is now an official sponsor of Philosophy Talk.

This will be a short post just to get my juices flowing before the show begins today.

The preamble to the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists states that "public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues."

These are certainly admirable sentiments. But it would be pretty hard case to make a case that in our times journalism, at large, lives up to the high ideals articulated in that preamble. Take, for example, propagandistic early coverage of the war in Iraq. That coverage provided precious little enlightenment and was, in my opinion, a complete disservice to our democracy. How has it come to this?

I have to admit to being pretty down on journalists as a class - especially the Washington Press Corp.

When I was very much younger, I thought of journalists as caped crusaders, daring truth seekers, who stood apart from the system and were willing to challenge it, and were even wililng to help facilitate its radical transformation. I thought of journalists as people whose job it was to shed the light of truth on the secrets cracks and crevices of government and society. I even toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist, for awhile, just because it seemed to me like one of the most noble of professions.

That, I think, was because my first stirrings of poltiical and social self-consciousness occurred at the height of the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement. And even as the war waned, there quickly follwed the whole Watergate thing. Journalism was instrumental to ending a disasterous war, to helping bring about a more just social order, and hastening the downfall of an arrogant and corrupt president. What profession could be more noble and more consequential? I think I was not entirely self-deluded in seeing the journalism of that day as powerful counterweight to entrenched and otherwise barely accountable poltiical power.

But it now seems to me that those were pretty singular times in the history of journalism. At any rate, things have certainly changed since then. Now, I look on the journalistic class as a whole with extremely jaundiced eyes -- though there are still a good number of nationally prominent journalists -- especially of the print variety -- for whom I have great admiration. The problem, I suspect, lies in the increasing "corporatization" of the mass media. A great deal of the media is controlled by a few huge and powerful corporations. And I suspect that huge media conglomerates have no more interest in challenging and shaking up entrenched power structures than GM or Exxon or any other corporate giant does.

Moreover, I hate to say this but I fear that many if not most journalist within these huge media conglomerates are more inclined to pursue the path of a corporate careerist than they are to pursue the path of a rabble rousing, truth seeking outsider.

The other day I heard Cokie Roberts make what superficially is a pretty benign statement about what her job, as a journalist, is. She said that her job as a journalist (covering Washington politics) is to explain politics and the political class to the American people. This was in the context of a question about whether she had ever thought about following her father's footsteps and running for political office herself. She answered that she didn't need to run for office to feel like a part of the system, since her job as a journalist was to explain the political class and their doings to the American people at large. That made her feel like she was an important part of the system, without having to take on the burdens of public office.

One can see some point to Roberts description of her job and the jobs of journalists generally. But there's also a trap there. Because ask yourself "In what terms" should the journalist explain the workings of the political class to the people at large. In terms that the politicians themselves would offer? In terms that are maximally revealing of the real dynamics of political life? Some politician is pushing some bill. He or she mounts a bunch of arguments about the good the bill would do. But the politician is also in the thrall of some lobby. Perhaps his or her real agenda is to serve the interest of said lobby. What's the journalist job here? To explain the arguments pro and con, taking at face value the things that politicians explicity say? Or to dig deeper, to ask who the real winner and losers will be if the bill is passed or not passed? Mostly, we get the former out of Washington reporters and hardly any of the latter.

Why? Because reporters these days seem to want, at all cost, to maintain access to the corridors of power. This is partly connected with their culture of corporate careerism. They seem always to be on the look out for that one leak, that one tidbit of information from some anonymous insider, that will lead to a blockbuster possibly career-making story. But if you play ball with insiders, then you have to play by rules that will serve the interest of those insiders. You have to frame issues in ways that will serve their agendas. Otherwise, they won't keep giving you access.

To be sure, inisders do compete with one another. And you never know who's going to be up one day and down the next. So you have to pick and choose your insiders well. Or you have to learn to play both sides of the street, as it were. But that just leads to what you might call more "He said. She said." reporting. Get a Democrat to say one thing, find a Republican who willl say something at odds with what the democrats says. And now you think you've been fair and balanced and objective.

But have you done anything, really, to ferret out the truth? Have you done in independent truth-seeking, fact checking, assessment of the strengths and weakness of arguments?

But perhaps that isn't the journalist's job. Perhaps the journalist's job is merely to let the elites speak and challenge one another. The media provides a platform upon which elites can compete for control of public debate and discourse, not any kind of independent check on the reliability of claims made, etc.

I once heard a journalist who was the Pentagon Correspondent for some major media outlet say in response to the question "Why don't you challenge Rumsfeld more?" that it wasn't her job to challenege Rumsfeld. Her job was to ask him questions and take down his answers. She also had the job, she conceded, of reporting what, say, the Democrats say in response to Rumsfeld's assertions. FInally, she said that she takes what Rumsfeld says and what others say in response and presents it all to her readers adn lets them decide what to make of it.

This is journalism? Seems to me little better than stenography. What if, for example, Rumsfeld is propagandizing, to put it mildly, through his teeth? And what if the Democrats are too cowardly and craven to challenge Rumsfeld's propoganda? What does our intrepid journalist cum stenographer do now? More he said, she said? But who does she turn to?

Perhaps it wouldn't be so troubling if more voices from off the center stage were given more play. I mean the folks shouting from the bleachers "It's a lie! It won't work! The Republicans are deluded! The Democrats are craven and cowardly!" Who are such voices? Often scholars, activists of one sort or another, foreign intellectuals and politicians, etc. But part of the culture of access journalism is precisely that you don't bring the folks sitting in the bleachers onto center stage very often. They are the outs. The outs don't deserve to be listened to in the same way, especially when they challenge, rather than confirm what more entrenched insiders have to say. Even if they have the force of the better reason, argument, and evidence on their side -- heaven forbid. Because, of course, journalists aren't really much in the business anymore of making independent assessments of the arguments offered up by competing elites.

They call this neutrality. But how does such neturality really serve the goal of enlightening the public by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues? I don't really think it does, at least not very much.

As you can see, I've grown pretty cynical and disgusted in my late middle age. Perhaps I over-react. Do I? I'm sure John and Dale will enlighten me if I do.

I gotta go make radio.