the passive voice. (or, how not to say yr sorry.)

active voice: 'i have eaten the plums that were in the ice box'.
passive voice: 'the plums that were in the ice box were eaten'.

using the passive voice is generally considered bad form. it's obfuscatory-- sometimes lazily imprecise, sometimes downright equivocal. it often indicates a lack of confidence-- not just uncertainty about who the actor is, but a lack of confidence in one's own authority to say so. students notoriously write this way: "it might be argued that...", "it is often said...", so that whatever claim is being made, having issued from nowhere in particular, seems to issue from everywhere, from the vast universe itself. but when we use the passive voice we often fail to communicate all of the relevant information, or to acknowledge the weakness of our own claims (is it often said? who says it? is it credible?), and even when we've just moved all of the information around ('the plums that were in the ice box were eaten by me'), we've shifted the meaning all around, made the object the subject and the subject an afterthought.

the passive voice leaves us with an actor-less act, a mover-less move, a claimant-less claim. no one is particular seems to be responsible for the act, the move, the claim. when we want to know or say more about it, where should we look? who can we ask? inspect? praise? blame? the plums that were in the icebox have been eaten, and you were probably saving them for breakfast! now you can no more have them for breakfast if i ate them than you could if the man in the moon ate them, and that's a fact. if what you're concerned about is your relationship to the plums, then the passive construction might give you all the information worth having. but if you're concerned with our relationship (you and me-- friend and friend, guest and host, narrator and reader), you might care very much whether it was me or the man and the moon, and where i acknowledge i ate them, you might rightly discern some difference in meaning between my saying so in a way that highlights my involvement as opposed to downplaying my involvement.

i'm reading a book right now (which i quote from in my last post) by a philosopher named nick smith, and it's about apologies. as it turns out, the passive voice has a sordid history in the realm of apology. it's the difference between "i'm sorry i hurt you" and "i'm sorry you were hurt" (coming from the injurer in question). i'm sorry i. i'm sorry you. as you might guess, smith argues that apologies in the passive voice are bad apologies. passive apologies may amount, smith explains, to thin and self-serving expressions of sympathy, meant to do the relationship-repairing work of an admission of wrong doing without the wrong-doer actually having to admit any such thing. these apologies have the same general problem that all passive constructions have-- they aren't specific enough, and according to smith one of the keys to apologies is being very clear about just who is apologizing and what that person or entity is apologizing for. and in the case of apologies the passive voice has the particularly devastating effect of failing to assign or emphasize responsibility in a case where the whole point of the phrase is to so assign and emphasize. this all makes good sense-- everyone has felt the maddening insult of the passive apology-- the feeling of wanting her to be sorry she did it, sorry because it was wrong of her, when all she's sorry for is that you were somehow hurt, sorry that you feel that way.

yes. totally. i more than agree. but, listen, i decided a long time ago that praise and blame and Moral Responsibility are a shady business in this vast world of causes. and this is the part where i'm suppose to explain and talk about metaphysical commitments. meh. the idea, roughly, is that to keep the idea of a clearly delineated individuals buck-stops-here-responsible for clearly delineated acts, you're going to have to commit yourself to the existence of entities like Souls and external Values and Unmoved Movers-- all manner of simultaneously powerful and unverifiable stuff that does the explaining-- and even that probably won't get you what you want. if you don't want to have to argue for the existence of stuff like that, then what you're likely to have instead is a hard time thinking of people or acts as discrete units and moral responsibility as so easy to define and assign. blah, blah, you've heard it all before, dear readers. anyway, by metaphysical commitments (ontological commitments, more specifically), i just mean the foundational commitments that we are or aren't willing to make about what kinds of things exist (we've almost come full circle, see, we're almost there). it's important when i make a claim about the world that i'm not half-consciously helping myself to belief in some entity that, if i thought about it, i wouldn't actually say i believe in.

ok, i haven't finished. i just inched a little further. someday soon i'm going to bring it all home, tie it all together. i do have some idea how. just not all idea how, or time.

april fools.

contested facts often lie at the heart of moral injuries. from the outset, apologies stand a better chance of bearing significant meaning if the offender and the offended share an understanding of the facts relevant to the transgression at issue. although our interpretations of events may evolve over our lifetimes, much of our understanding of our selves and our world results from piecing together ambiguous fragments of information into a moral narrative. not only do we want to understand what happened after a confusing or traumatic event, but we also want the offender to share our understanding.

nick smith
[i was wrong: the meaning of moral apologies]


a lot of traumatic events are two-way traumatic. she feels hurt, and so does she. you feel wronged, and so do i. we stay busy telling ourselves the story of what happened, rehearsing our own monologues. i wish we tended to rehearse each other's, instead. wouldn't it be a miracle? you could tell yourself her story instead-- her story from her perspective, and then (fairly, unguardedly) from yours-- and she could tell herself your story, too, like you might tell it, and then like she (this new, better version) herself might. and you could both feel just what you've inflicted as if you had inflicted it immediately on your own self. if i could tell your story, instead, and you could tell mine, it might be energy better spent. defensiveness is the worst sort of laziness this side of passive-aggression-- don't do it, and don't stand for it, and don't wait on someone else to give in first. don't get trapped in the moment. take a deep breath and do a perfect handspring right out of yourself, right in to yourself.

xoxo.ra

goodbye and hello. hello and goodbye.

winter is over, and so are my glasses. i'm going to miss them both. the glasses were the best i ever had, and the winter...well, it was cursed, but it included some truly fine moments, and has the special status of being the one and only 26th winter that i'm going to live. the glasses, i should mention, went the way all glasses should go-- as collateral damage done in the course of giving a righteous, an uncommonly angled, an impetuous and enthusiastically received hug! i have glued and reglued them many times over the last few weeks, but their day is done.

each is being replaced by another (another pair, another season), and each is being replaced spectacularly. i don't know what's more luxuriant, more luxurious, more casually effortlessly abundant, showy, than spring (the ultimate ingenue). oh, wait, maybe...buying not one but two pair of new glasses from a shmancy glasses shop in harvard square! was the sweet discount any excuse? what about my propensity to break and lose things? doesn't that make having a backup pair sensible? not decadent at all? i don't think so-- i think that i just fell in love with pretty expensive things and indulged my desire to own them under the pretext of being sensible-- frugal, even! but, listen, i forgive myself. and just wait until you see my sweet new frames! just wait until the tips of tree branches explode live, and we 're all on bikes again!

goodbye glasses. goodbye winter.

decisions, decisions.

i saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because i couldn't make up my mind which of the figs i would choose. i wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as i sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

sylvia plath
the bell jar

a couple of weeks ago the new york times published this account of dan ariely's new book predictably irrational. it's on one of my all-time favorite subjects-- how people who think of themselves as rational choosers actually make decisions based on impulse-- impulses neither grounded in rational processes nor resulting in rational behavior. i'm inclined to agree with the claim that people rationalize what they do more than do what they rationally ought.^[1]

the article focuses on one of the handful of irrational impulses that ariely shows us to be consistently motivated by-- namely, the impulse to keep our options open. we will deplete our energies to keep many or a particular option(s) open even when there is no chance of pay off, and the costs are great.

ariely begins with a maximizing or means/end notion of rationality, like the one economists use: to behave rationally is to behave in such a way as to maximally attain your desired ends, whatever they may be. there are philosophers who think that desires themselves can be irrational-- that rationality should dictate not only how we attain our desired ends, but dictate their content. but putting that aside, i will assume that when ariely says a behavior is irrational he means only to say that we fail to behave in the sort of ways that would maximize our most general desires to be successful and satisfied. so the problem is that we're inefficient. we can recognize a good deal when we see it, but we can't seem to dismiss the other options from our mind and focus our energies, though that would be the rational thing to do. indecision!

we do this, according to ariely, because we are avoiding the immediate pain of loss.² we hate to give up opportunities. problem is, every opportunity we take is a thousand we leave (or one, at least). so when we choose, there's always loss. the fear of that loss can keep us standing there, trying to hold all of the doors open, even when the best option is clear, or when any option would be equally worthy (and every single one of them better than havering). we want to live maximally satisfying lives, so we hate to give up a chance that might lead us that way-- we experience every chance given up as a loss, and our unwillingness to experience loss then motivates the very indecision that keeps us from making the choices that would, in turn, lead to our maximal satisfaction.

that, to the best of my understanding, is ariely's view. and i think that the first thing to be said is how astoundingly insightful it is. reading it, i was struck by what might best be described as an uncomfortable sense of recognition. i imagine that many others were similarly struck. and i will sit with that discomfort, and think on it, and i hope that they will, too. but i also have some problems.

first, he (or the nyt writer, at least) wants to distinguish between the desire to keep one's options open, and the desire to avoid the pain of loss. the importance of this distinction, i surmise, is that it might seem rational to sacrifice now in order to keep one's future fluid, but not rational that we should be unwilling to suffer a little loss now to minimize our losses, overall. but this is a trick distinction! to begin, i don't see how anyone could look within themselves and discover a true fact of the matter about which desire was the motivating one. the conscious desire to keep options open could be all tangled in a less conscious desire to avoid pain, or vice versa. more deeply, avoidance of pain never tells the whole story about anything-- the reason that people experience pain at all is because they evolved to, because avoiding those pain-causing things has some independent survival value. so even if people could pinpoint their own motives or the motives of others in these situations as explicitly pain-avoiding, there will be deeper explanations. and i imagine that ariely, in his book, takes a good shot at offering some of those deeper explanations. but i'm skeptical of over-confident assumptions about what psychological data (and the speculations of evolutionary psychologists) "means" about us. it's clear that we don't like letting doors close-- it's less clear to me why this is, or what it means.

i'm even more skeptical of tidy, fatherly conclusions about what it is we should do, given who we are. probably this unwillingness of mine to accept a clear answer only proves ariely's point-- but then, if it does, that's fine, because if that's what it means to be right, i'm not interested. anyway, i don't quite know how to formulate my discomfort with ariely's conclusions (as reported by the times), but i think there are two levels-- the first is a surface sort of discomfort with the fact that all of his advice seems to amount to "settle down. commit to one woman. don't take on too much." although i have been known, on occasion, to find this kind of advice tolerable, charming³ even, i do have an abiding skepticism of seemingly deep advice that merely reinscribes the status quo.

my second level of worry is more conceptual, and even less well formed. i once told LP that i don't understand when people say that they regret the things they didn't do rather than the things they did-- or, rather, that i didn't (and don't) understand how that's suppose to help me out in deciding what i should do in a given situation. because everything i do entails a mess of things i didn't do. no matter what i do, it will in hindsight be "what i did do", and the rest will be "what i didn't do", and maybe a regret. what seems clear in retrospect will not seem that way at the moment one is confronted with a choice, and what i'm suggesting is that this isn't just a matter of our epistemic limitation at the moment of choice confrontation-- not just a matter of being blinded in the moment to what will later (or from some other perspective) be visible. how we are blinded in the moment is certainly an important thing to consider-- centrally important-- but it may also be our retrospective view which is skewed-- projecting a certainty or fact of that matter onto a situation in which, at the time, there was no fact of the matter.



^{[1] i'm actually sympathetic to the idea that rationality alone has no content-- that there is nothing (or nothing much) that we can conclude we "ought" to do without figuring in a couple of basic sentiments and desires which are not themselves proper objects of rational scrutiny. but, still, it's one position that you could take}

^{[2] the loss of a possibility! i promised myself that this post would have nothing whatsoever to do with possible worlds, but i will allow myself one footnote: lewis talks of learning about our world in terms of locating, among all of the logically possible worlds, which world is our own. given that we aren't laplacean demons, we can't be sure which possible world we live in-- there are a large number of possible worlds which, for all we know, might be our own. there are many possible people who, for all i know, i might be. there are many possible people who, for all i know, might be you. and as you and i go on being ourselves and events unfold and i learn more about us both, i learn that you and i aren't some of the people that it was possible we might be-- and sometimes i learn that you (or i!) might be someone that i hadn't imagined was possible. but, anyway, the point is that ariely seems to be saying that there is a real sense of loss that comes with eliminating possibilities, and yet eliminating (relevant) possibilities might be the best way of describing what it is we're doing when we learn the facts about who we are and the world we inhabit.}

^{[3] see richard russo's 2004 commencement address.}

footnote, expanded. with footnotes.

so, listen, it's spring break, and whatever arrangement of hours i'm sleeping in can hardly be called a "pattern", and i'm working on the kind of paper that i have to take a lot of breaks from writing, and i noticed that it's almost impossible to read the second footnote and it all adds up to a second post, made discretely, at least, below the first.

the loss of a possibility! i promised myself that this post would have nothing whatsoever to do with possible worlds, but i will allow myself one footnote: lewis talks of learning about our world in terms of locating, among all of the logically possible worlds, which world is our own. given that we aren't la placean demons, we can't be sure which possible world we live in-- there are a large number of possible worlds which, for all we know, might be our own. there are many possible people who, for all i know, might be me. there are many possible people who, for all i know, might be you. and as you and i go on being ourselves and events unfold and i learn more about us both, i learn that you and i aren't some of the people that it was possible we might be-- and sometimes i learn that you (or i!) might be someone that i hadn't considered possible.¹

but, anyway, the point is that ariely seems to be saying that there is a real sense of loss that comes with eliminating possibilities, and yet eliminating (relevant) possibilities might be, according to lewis, the best way of describing what it is we're doing when we learn the facts about who we are and the world we inhabit-- shutting doors to possible worlds. not really, of course, because what we choose or don't choose or haver endlessly among is determined-- theres only one world that we're in, and it touches no other. but it's true that we don't know what world we're in, what possible me i am, until we see which it will be.

it sometimes happens to each of us that we stand choosing between doors that each pull so hard it feels like we're tearing. i'm a hard-hearted naturalist with no sympathy for so much as a horoscope, let alone accounts of souls and the supernatural, but among the infinite me's that it's turned out i'm not, there are one or two that were so near to my heart that it feels like part of my heart must be with them somewhere, living those lives i don't live. so for all lewis's theory depends on and underwrites unwarm unliving things like logical systems, i think it also appeals, like religion appeals, to our inescapable sense that there is something more than what is-- that there is more of us than what we are-- only it doesn't demand any nonsensical belief in the supernatural.

^{[1] he reverses everything, you see: the world isn't first-- the thing from which we abstract possibilities-- it's the space of logical possibility that comes first, and we locate ourselves in it. our knowledge of the world we live in is contingent (if the world were different, our knowledge of it would be correspondingly different). but the space of logical possibility is necessary-- contingent on nothing-- no matter what the world we live in were like, it would be the same.}

follow-up.

the bit below from sarah ruhl (which is only one little bit of a larger article in this week's new yorker on her fine plays, which mostly have nothing whatever to do with technology) probably struck me so forcibly because i had just consulted my cell phone bill, and in the 29 days of february i sent and received a total of 587 text messages. that's far less than what some of my acquaintances manage, far less, even, than what i pay to be allowed, BUT!: holy shit, am i being irrevocably sucked into the device paradigm?

some of my friends are aware that i have rules about text messaging-- or, rather, ideas about what constitutes appropriate content. technically, there are two categories that are allowed: (a) making and confirming plans, and (b) mild flirtation, with occasional forays into sexy. but the "rules" aren't actually that strict-- they're just meant as general guidelines to keep me as far as possible from what i think of as inappropriate content-- namely, anything difficult, complicated, or passive aggressive-- nothing critical, or meant to explain my feelings in some way. if i'm going to say something critical or something about my feelings, then all of the following things are probably true:

(a) saying it by text is likely to foster misunderstanding. it's a complex matter, and it will take some degree of effort and subtly to be correctly understood even with the added benefit of body language, vocal nuance, and real-time exchange.

(b) saying it by text is probably cowardly and/or lazy. communicating feelings and criticism is hard. it's hard hard hard, and it should be. any technology that makes it easier to say hard things by putting distance (physical, emotional, or any other kind) between the speaker and the spoken to is a heady and dangerous thing. we can kid ourselves into thinking that the effort we're saving by texting is just a matter of mundane convenience, when what we are really (or also) avoiding is experiencing the full weight of the things we say, and feeling directly accountable for them.

(c) if i say it by text, it's more likely to be something i regret having said. these rules aren't just for the sake of my friends, they are totally self-protecting. some things are hard to say because it's a mistake to say them, and you know it. is there anything worse than having to live with what you said and shouldn't have? oh yeah-- when it's recorded somewhere for someone to read over and over again! and texts are the worse, because most people have their phone with them all the time-- when they're drunk, when they're sad, when they're angry-- all sorts of compromised states in which one is likely to say what one will regret. oof. terrifying.

technology abridges effort-- saves us work. that's what it does. that's why we like it. work builds muscles, and it builds calluses. there's no one thing that this means, it's just that there are some muscles and calluses (literal and metaphorical) that i don't want to wake up one day and realize that i've lost or never built up. there are things that i owe to myself, and things that i owe to others, and most of it's played out in small ways on the daily-- if i have rules, they're rules of thumb, devices (!) that i hope will help me navigate.

ruhl's.

"cell phones, ipods, wireless computers will change people in ways we don't even understand. we're less connected to the present. no one is where they are. there's absolutely no reason to talk to a stranger anymore-- you connect to people you already know. but how well do you know them? because you never see them-- you just talk to them. i find that terrifying."

sarah ruhl, discussing her new play, "dead man's cell phone"
(which is playing at playwrights horizons, in nyc)
(if you're in nyc, and you go see it, i will be insanely jealous)

skepticism.

one comes to philosophy already endowed with a stock of opinions. it is not the business of philosophy either to undermine or to justify these preexisting opinions, to any great extent, but only to try to discover ways of expanding them into an orderly system...among my common opinions that philosophy must respect (if it is to deserve credence) are not only my naive beliefs in tables and chairs, but also my naive belief that these tables and chairs might have been otherwise arranged. realism about possible worlds is an attempt, the only successful attempt i know, to systematize these preexisting modal opinions.

david lewis
'possible worlds'

i am going to try to restate this as sensibly and as generously as i can: modal realism is not a way of interrogating or justifying my prephilosophic beliefs about possibility, but of systematizing them. and, more broadly, systematization (not critical analysis or justification) of my most fundamental beliefs is the proper goal of philosophy in general.

this is the part where i would generally turn to capitol letters and exclamation points to get across my emphatic disagreement. because, at the outset, i really couldn't disagree more strongly. but in the past few weeks david lewis-- with his whimsical analogies, warm talent for clear explication, and disarming willingness to concede uncertainty-- has totally won me over. won me over to the degree that despite my disagreement (did i mention that it is emphatic?) with these sentiments-- which underwrite his entire theory-- i feel, when i read them, something which could better be captured by a question mark than an exclamation point-- albeit a deeply consternated question mark.

i agree with lewis about the existence of tables and chairs-- there they are, and after a few usefully invigorating and challenging arguments with the skeptic about brains in vats and evil demons, there they still are, and i have no more use for philosophical theories that aim to cast doubt on the matter. but our claims about what's possible, while pervasive-- as essential to our daily talk as regular old claims about what just is-- are not, as lewis claims, improper objects of (potentially undermining) critical reflection.

i do believe that a sense of the possible is as centrally useful to human beings as our sense of sight or touch-- but it's also (and i don't know how to state this gravely enough) a trickier sort of sense-- a sense not anchored to things in the actual world, by which we reach both the highest highs of imagination, and the lowest lows of self-righteous cruelty. it seems to me that we have every reason to ruthlessly examine a sense like that.

(also i'm working slowly on and off on a post about this bit of analysis, which i'm both drawn to and skeptical of.)

what i'm studying this semester.

i'm taking a seminar on modal realism, a theory devised by the great analytic metaphysician david lewis. i don't know that much about metaphysics-- my primary goal this semester, school-wise, is to learn a heck of a lot more-- so while i'm about to take a crack at explaining what i've been reading, and, more ambitiously, why it might be relevant and interesting to you, i want to preface it by saying that i only have a vague idea of what i'm talking about, and i'm a little skeptical of it myself-- of the whole metaphysical project, actually. but it's more fun than i anticipated-- warmer. anyway, let me abruptly begin:

formal logic is a way of looking at the structure of arguments-- of stripping away the content to assess whether or not the thing is structurally sound. arguments transcribed or written out formally look a lot like algebra problems, but with mysterious looking symbols instead of numbers, and instead of solving for the value of variables, you assess validity. it's clear enough, i guess, why this is a useful thing to do, even if it is difficult and nerdy and seemingly removed from daily concerns-- we're not built to think so systematically on the regular, and so we are liable to be persuaded by some invalid arguments from time to time. frequently, prehaps. anyway, the point is that while we needn't all spend our lives reinventing the wheel-- justifying our systems for assessing the validity of arguments, or the nature of our methods for attaching meanings to words to objects, i do tend to hope that when and if i decide to turn my attention to the matter that it turns out our systems and methods for communicating ideas are solid enough that i can justify my sense that particular arguments and definitions can be true or false, and that there's a way of working out which it is.

modal logic is the branch of logic that deals with claims like "it is possible that..." or "it is necessary that...", or "it should be the case that...", or "he believes that...". these are truth-claims, but they're funny ones. it's pretty clear, at least in principle, how a statement like "i forgot my hat" could be assessed for truth or falsity, but what about "it's possible that i forgot my hat"? we could resolve the ambiguity by looking to see if i have the damn thing or not, but that doesn't go any distance toward proving or disproving my claim, which was that something, namely me forgetting my hat, is possible. and then there are the even tougher cases of counterfactual-- if/then claims in which the antecedent is false-- to wit: i say to my companion, "if i hadn't forgotten my hat, i wouldn't be so cold right now". she thinks (though she's too nice to say so) that if i were a little more organized, I wouldn't have forgotten my hat. now i take it that both of these claims (the spoke and the tactfully unspoken) are debatable-- maybe i think that, in fact, even if i were extremely well organized i would still, in this instance, have forgotten my hat. we seem to be disagreeing about something like which hypothetical case is more plausible or something. how in the sam hill are we suppose to establish the criterion for establishing the truth of the matter in an argument about hypotheticals?

and these sort of claims saturate our language-- everything from our most idle conversations to our most august intellectual efforts are loaded with claims about what is possible, what is probable, what is necessary. they're not about how the world is or was or will be, but how it might be or might have been, could be or could have been, must be or must have been. but how do we prove these kinds of claims true or false? they're not, in any clear way, claims about the world that we can verify.

so if you stare at them for long enough, if you relax your eyes and let them go all alien and unfamiliar-- ultra literal-- it starts to look like modal claims are not claims about the actual world at all, but claims about possible worlds. think of it this way: modal claims are claims that “there is a way things could have been” (or should have been, or might be), distinct from the way things are. note the 'is' in that claim: if we take ourselves literally, we seem to be gesturing toward the existence of something that answers the description “way things could have been”.

enter, modal realism: the theory that we really mean it when we say there is/exists a way things could have been. david lewis's theory, which is taken quite seriously by many very smart dudes is basically that all possible worlds exist. according to lewis, our world is one of an infinite number of concrete worlds, one for every possibility, and when i claim that if i hadn't forgotten my hat, i wouldn't be cold, i'm claiming that there is a possible world in which i didn't forget my hat, and in that world, i'm not cold.

stunningly bizarre: yes. but what's funny is that no one has yet come up with a clearly superior way of explaining what the fuck we're talking about when we we talk about the world as it never did and never will exist. but if you believe, even in the face of the ceaseless singularity of the world as it is, that there are many ways that it could be, it turns out that you have quite a bit of explaining to do, and you might have to make some pretty nutty claims to get the job done.

full moon. lunar eclipse.

tonight, 10pm eastern standard time.
[soon i'll be done with some school work, and i'll be around again.]

i'm probably going to delete this tomorrow.

there must be people who pay their bills on time, take vitamins, tend carefully to their possessions, floss daily and remember what day the trash is picked up. there's no question that i am not one of those people, but there is the perennial question of whether i'd like to be one of those people, or more like them. the fact is that i can be astoundingly irresponsible when it comes to the managing my own health and finances and taking care of things i own, even the few things i love the best or need the most. i like to think that i make up for these shortcomings in other departments, that i don't attend to some things because i'm busy attending to more important things, but everyone always thinks that-- egos must preserve themselves. are my flaws a mutable and contingent matter, or do they flow from the same deep source as my talents, such as they are?

it's snowing in boston, and i can't sleep.

blame, revised.

please excuse, if you happen to have read it, the horrible/interminable whining that was formerly in this very spot. i hope, if you did read it, it didn't cause you to adjust your (attitudes toward)/(expectations of) me too much, but i'm getting ahead of myself. the following is t.m. scanlon's theory of blame.

to blame someone for something is to revise our attitudes and intentions toward them, to revise our expectations in light of something they've done-- in light of who, as it turns out, they are.

to begin with, we're in all different sorts of relationships, and each sort of relationship has different ground rules. there's the most basic of all, which is the relationship that every human being has to every other, which comes with certain moral responsibilities-- to keep promises, avoid inflicting harm, to help out when it's easy enough. and then there are friendships and brotherhoods and marriages and businesspartnerships, and a bazillion others in which some person is a part of our lives in a particular way. from this person i expect loyalty, from this person i expect discression, from this person i expect affection. often the expectations are built into the very definition of our term for the relationship. if 'friendship' is a word with any real meaning, then there must be certain things that being a friend consists in, though each may have some unique features.

it may turn out that someone who we relate to as a friend proves to be unable or unwilling or unlikely to meet some shared or reasonable standard of what a friend is. or maybe they just fail to meet the that standard on some particular occasion for some particular reason. well then it may be appropriate that we should revise our expectation of them-- it may be understandable if we revise our attitudes toward them. we can change the relationship, or even terminate it.

the failure to live up to the reasonable expectations of others is blameworthiness, and the revisions of attitude, expectation and intention that they precipitate are blame. blame, defined this way, might come along with feelings like anger and resentment, but it needn't. and not only can blame of this sort come apart from the strong emotional experience that we generally associate it with, it can come apart from the punishment practices which we also sometimes think of as blame itself. you may hurt someone by changing your idea of who they are and how you will relate to them, but, unlike cases of retributive punishment, you don't blame them to harm them-- you "blame" them because it is the appropriate thing to do, in light of changing circumstance.

though this view doesn't (on the one hand) justify punishment practices or tie itself irrevocably to emotions, it presents our emotional responses to the actions of others (and their consequences for us) as an appropriate starting point for moral assessment-- something which cognitivist ethicists often reject (unfortunately, to my mind), and which accounts of 'moral luck' sometimes undermine. philosophers writing about moral luck often point to the fact that much of the actual behavior that we're blamed for is no different from the behavior that others engage in, but there is some unluckiness in the particular circumstance. in scanlon's example an inattentive driver kills a friend's child. the driver did no more than drive in the same distracted way that most drivers do on occasion, but he may blame himself, and others may blame him, in the harshest terms. but isn't this deeply unfair? personally, when i think hard on moral luck, i tend to get really skeptical of blame. but scanlon just says, look, luck or not, something has happened which causes great pain to others-- it is appropriate (understandable-- inevitable) that this should bring those others (and him) to examine his character and their relationship to him. blame here doesn't exist in a universe of cold logic. although one might hope that meditating on things like moral luck might, in time, calm our most violent angers and resentments.

the view has what i think is the best possible starting point for an ethical view: the given fact of human relationships, and what they mean to us. it needn't (i think) begin with some account of the autonomous will of the individual, which is where accounts of blame usually begin, and which is a non-starter for me. (this is probably a controversial statement as scanlon is, i believe, a neo-kantian, and probably does, in his more extended philosophical picture, want to say something about the autonomous will-- i'll be thinking about this a lot throughout the semester: how scanlon's view of blame and blameworthiness do or do not come apart from a kantian view of selfhood).

anyway, this is a funny idea, but i'm totally in love with it. so in love that i'm going to invent some more hours in my day for a reading group on it-- by which i mean spend fewer hours doing practical things like cutting my hair and paying my bills on time. no doubt some utility company somewhere is going to revise the living shit out of their expectations of me in the form of some increased interest rates.

g.mitten

so i have these red mittens, and i've had them for something like five years, which is the longest that i've ever kept any mittens, ever (i think that the second runner up would probably come out at something like six weeks), and the reason is that they're on a long string that goes all the way through one coat sleeve across my back and through the other coat sleeve. i can leave them in my coat all winter long. it blows my mind that all mittens don't have this feature. it easily makes my top ten favorite things in the technology category.

in this my fifth long winter with mittens on a string it occurred to me that when my hands aren't in my mittens, i can put other things in them. my phone. money. small food items. i realized this one day when i absent-mindedly put my hand in my mitten with my phone in my hand, and then left it there (the phone, in the mitten, in my lap, on the bus, while i was staring out the window) when i absent-mindedly removed my hand. then i had to jump off of the bus in a hurry. and rather than my phone (or my mitten) (or them both) being left on the bus-- a fate that has befallen many of my mittens, one phone, and two wallets-- they both came swingingly with me off the bus, across the street, and to work (without a minute to spare, p.s.).

these little miracle mittens are a gift from my friend liza. liza is getting married, and i have to get her a gift, back. it has be something really wonderful. i can't imagine how it'll even begin to compare, but i have to try. she gave me the gift that keeps on getting better, keeps on saving me from myself, year after year. and also, i'll probably wear something stupid to her wedding and ruin all the pictures. i have past debts and future indiscretions to repay. please send me your best idea.

[thank to steve, for taking a picture of my mitten and sending it to me.]

[of] note.

i'm trying to figure out the relationship, conceptually and etymologically, between 'space' and 'capacity' (spacious. capacious. spacacity? capace?) and it's slow slow slow going as always, but i just found this: "space isn't remote at all. it's only an hours drive away if your car could go straight upwards." it reminded me about something else i'd read-- about how (sort of obviously, i guess) the oxygen is richer just around leaves, so there's this little sliver of biota that makes its whole life in these thin bands of superoxygenated air, little flat earths with their own atmosphere. all roads lead to fractals.

love.JDV

here's my attempt at recounting a little argument by j.d. velleman that i think is very beautiful:

love doesn't essentially consist in desiring someone, but in valuing them. love is not itself the desire to be near a person, or to make them happy, or to be requited, although these desires are the common biproduct of most kinds of love. we may, in fact, love someone very much (a troubled relative, say) who we don't wish to be near. but what all sorts of love consist in is the awareness of value in another. we might think of a friend or a mentor without experiencing a burning desire to go to them, or to spend our time aiding them in their various projects, but what we will experience, what the experience of love amounts to, is something like wonderment. we stand in a sort of awe at that person's incomparable value.

velleman's moral veiws are largely deontological, or kantian, meaning that he believes the moral worth of a decision is not determined by its consequences, but by its adherence to certain principles-- by the integrity of the process that produced it. on this moral model, we must never use another human being as a means to an end (as perhaps we must if we want to ensure the best consequences). velleman says, along with kant, that human beings have an autonomous will (the power to examine our own thoughts and desires and then to endorse or reject them) and that we should (and do) contemplate that will, in ourselves and others, with reverence-- we value it for its own sake. the special force of this act-- the act of reverence, or valuing, inspired by the autonomous will-- is that it arrests self-love, freeing us up, making a little space for us to act morally, as opposed to acting always under the hypnotic influence of our own self-interest.

by a deontological moral standard like kant's, love has moral worth, because it just is a special case of that most morally necessary of practices-- the appreciation of intrinsic value in another human being. and in the case of love, specifically, the special force of this appreciation is that it arrests our impulse to self-protect. when we love someone, velleman says, we value them, and in that act of valuing we are disarmed, making for ourselves a little space in which we can let someone know us. "all that is essential to love," velleman says, "is that it disarms our emotional defenses toward an object in response to its incomparable value as a self-existent end."

now, listen, i'm no kantian. i just can't buy a moral theory that doesn't draw a direct connection between the effects of an action and the morality of an action. i want my moral theories rooted firmly in some account of human flourishing or the greater good. but there's something to it.

[velleman, j.d. "love as a moral emotion". ethics. volume 109, number 2. (january, 1999), pp. 338-374]

[all of the words that i italicized in the body of this post are jdv's words, which i particularly liked.]

love.LG

[update: i spent most of the last couple of weeks studying (if you can call the nearly aimless reading and wildly wondering note-taking that i do studying) for this ethics comp, which i'm totally certain that i failed. and that's alright. i get three tries, and what i really need to work on are my test-taking strategies (snooze). fine, fine. anyway, the way the test works is that you get a list of twelve questions to study, and only nine will be on the test, and you only have to answer three of those nine, but you don't know which nine, or which three, so you have to make all of these uninteresting/strategic choices about how many you want to study and which, and for how long. i make bad choices, and i know that i'm doing it, but i feel compelled to follow my unstrategic interests. here is the question that i spent the longest time preparing for, which i knew wouldn't be on the test, and wasn't:]

does love for another have moral worth?
now that's a fine fucking question.
and brings me back to philosophy, which (sorry!) i've wondered away from these last few posts.

the problem (as laid out in one particularly nice paper on the subject) is that most moral theories, though wildly different in other respects, demand some sort of impartiality of us. to behave morally may mean acting in a way that maximizes aggregate utility, or some far-seeing enlightened self-interest; it may mean acting in accordance with universalizable principles, or principles that we would endorse if we were to carefully reflect on them. there are an array of theories to choose from, but there is a common sense that an ethical person will be fair and level-headed, fully considerate of the immediate and long-term rights and interests of herself and others.

but love! partiality is love's essence. love enthralls and arrests. love comes all tangled up with our most ethically suspect desires. love is the most notorious skew-er of sound judgment this side of blind rage. was anything ever less responsive to fairness than love? more imprudent? if anything ever was, i can't think of it. anyway, i won't bother cataloging the problems of perception and judgment that are the beginning and end of romantic love-- if you can't think of examples from your own life, please consult any song, poem, book, or piece art created by anyone, ever. the whole of pop music is particularly enlightening on this subject.

but even strong romantic love is not always violent (hume reminds us of the distinction between strong passions and violent ones)^*, and we use the word 'love' to describe quite a varied range of emotions and ways of relating to other people, animals, objects, and even ourselves, which aren't romantic at all. there are other ways of getting into love besides falling. often enough we're born into it, or find it generated quietly in the friendly friction of mutual and varied interests, or the camaraderie of shared circumstance. but can any of these kinds of love-- can any love other than an indiscriminant philanthropy-- embody the moral ideal, or even meet the most basic moral standards, of any meaningful and coherent moral picture?

like a whole mess of questions in philosophy, if you define the terms of this question well enough, you've come about as close to answering the question as you're likely to get. does love have moral worth? well, what do you mean by love? and what do you mean by moral? i haven't managed to answer either question, and it's time to stop. but i read a couple of compelling ideas on the this topic, which i'll try to write a little bit about very soon.

^*by "passion" hume means something very broad-- not just a subset of our more violent feelings, but all of our feelings-- he means "desires" or "passions" to include all of the bit of human psychology that aren't strictly beliefs on matters of fact. so by this definition a passion may be strong in the sense that it consistently guides my behavior even if it isn't violent (meaning that it doesn't rise and fall suddenly, or that i may not even experience it as an emotion).

[p.s. the photograph is by richard barnes. jared says that my spirit animal is a brown bear, and i say that his is. anyway, i like pictures better than titles, because it's less weird when i change them all the time, which i inevitably do.]

hey babies.

it's a new year, and speaking of years, i'm just about to embark on my 26th. oo. it just hit me. right then, just after i typed it. twenty six! but that's not what i want to type about. i'm just typing to say happy new year. and while i won't spend the next hour formulating a perfect tirade against new years resolutions (they get us thinking, after all) i do want to ask you a favor, friends: riot, don't diet, for fucksake. having thought about agency and selfhood from a hundred directions i've found that concepts like restraint and willpower-- concepts about what and why we aren't, we don't, we could have but didn't-- dissipate to incoherence under the microscope of my attention. what holds up and turns out to be interesting is substance, identity-- what actually happens. i don't know. i just mean that if you're determined to be resolved, resolve to be more yourself, not less. or to come see me more often!

love,
LG

wintery mix/winter remix

i cleaned my closet, and when i got all the way down to the floor i was rewarded with almost three dollars in change and about a teaspoon's worth of sand, which, in late may, must have dried to my skin and then fallen away into some shoe or bag or the lining of some swimsuit.

tonight it's wintery-mixing, but i remember summer.

[i'm still working on my paper. i've come to a sort of impasse. i'm thinking about akrasia. soon i'll have to put it aside and start studying for the ethics comp.]

(good luck.)

23.
you sea! i resign myself to you also-- i guess what you mean,
i behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
i believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me.

we must have a turn together, i undress,
hurry me out of sight of the land,
cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
dash me with amorous wet, i can repay you.

sea of stretch'd ground swells,
sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,
sea of the brine of life and of unshovell'd yet always-ready graves,
howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,
i am integral with you, i too am of one phase and of all phases.

partaker of the influx and efflux i, extoller of hate and conciliation,
extoller of amies and those that sleep in each others' arms.

i am he attesting sympathy,
(shall i make my list of the things in the house and skip the house that supports them?)
i am not the poet of goodness only, i do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.

what blurt is this about vitue and about vice?
evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, i stand indifferent,
my gait is no fault-finder's or rejecter's gait,
i moisten the roots of all that has grown.

did you fear some scrofula out of the unflagging pregnancy?
did you guess the celestial laws are yet to be worked over and rectified?

i find one side a balance and the antipodal side a balance,
soft doctrine as steady help as stable doctrine,
thoughts and deeds of the present our rouse and early start.

this minute that comes to me over the past decillions,
there is no better than it and now.

what behaved well in the past or behaves well to-day is not such a wonder,
the wonder is always and always how there can be a mean man or an infidel.

walt whitman
song of myself


[the holidays combine two difficult and strange/beautiful things: family and winter. the latter sometimes makes me sad, the former, cranky. in the context of either i sometimes become a version of myself that i don't particularly like. i forget, when i'm this person, to live by the meager list of conclusions that i've arrived at-- to note causes and withhold judgments, most especially regarding others.]

boston/winter.

boston is an adventure these days. walking anywhere feels just a little risky. it requires preparations! boot laces must be solemnly secured, mitten holes mended. you can daily spot the fallen, done in by some bit of black ice or an aborted attempt to hop a snow bank. the streets echo with the disappointed groans of those who have miscalculated the depth of one of the slush puddle that can be found at the base point of every lowered curb. only about half of the sidewalks were plowed or shovelled, and the rest have been trampled to varying degrees-- ranging from wide swaths of mightily compacted slush to tortuous foot-narrow dotted lines. you have to move carefully. and it's marvelously quiet. oh! that pleasantly slight air of danger. i glance at my bike every time i leave my office where it sits, propped safely up, more, in all honesty for it's own protection than for mine.

and where i'm always going is where i think i can write the most and best. all i want to do is recount a particular little philosophical conversation with insight and precision, to make some modest and incisive contribution to it, and then just run right up the center and spring effortlessly into everything above and beyond it. that's all. what i'm going to settle for is an earnest if slightly muddled interpretation of what someone said and a couple of earnest if slightly muddled suggestion for saying something more usefully specific.

i'm going to post my paper here when i'm done with it.

something.

hi. it's finals time, and i haven't even gotten my ideas ordered enough to make a blog post of them, let alone a polished version of a final paper. i'm going to be writing about what it means to have a reason to do something, and what it means to have a capacity to do something, and how they're related (but mostly how they're not related). but until i can get things straight, here's something unrelated but provocative by susan blackmore, from the anthology What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty.



‘i believe that it is possible to live happily and morally without believing in free will. as samuel johnson said, ‘all theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it.’ with recent developments in neuroscience and theories of consciousness, theory is even more against it than it was in his time. so i long ago set about systematically changing the experience. i now have no feeling of acting with free will, although the feeling took many years to ebb away.

but what happens? people say i’m lying! they say that it’s impossible and so i must be deluding myself in order to preserve my theory. and what can i do or say to challenge them? i have no idea- other than to suggest that other people try the exercise, demanding as it is.

when the feeling is gone, decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them, but then a new question arises- will the decisions be morally acceptable? here i have made a great leap of faith (or, more accurately, this body and it’s genes and memes and the whole universe it lives in have done so). it seems that when people discard the illusion of an inner self who merely acts, as many mystics and buddhist practitioners have done, they generally do behave in ways that we think of as moral or good. so perhaps giving up free will is not as dangerous as it sounds- but this too i cannot prove.

as for giving up the sense of an inner conscious self altogether- this is very much harder. i just keep on seeming to exist. but though i cannot prove it, i think it is true that i don’t.’




[in addition to thinking about capacities, i also talk to people. in fact, i talked to people this very weekend. and danced with them, too! for photographic evidence please see the set called 'monochrome party' (or any set, really) here.]

critique of pure reason.

it's snowing. i'm trying to read kant. it's difficult.
this is a poem by jane hirschfeld about it, sort of:

'Like one man milking a billy goat
another holding a sieve beneath it,'
Kant wrote, quoting an unnamed ancient.
It takes a moment to notice the sieve doesn’t matter.
In her nineties, a woman begins to sleepwalk.
One morning finding pudding and a washed pot,
another the opened drawers of her late husband’s dresser.
After a while, anything becomes familiar,
though the Yiddish jokes of Auschwitz
stumbled and failed outside the barbed wire.
Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,
as wit increases distance and compassion erodes it.
Let reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains.
A dog catching a tennis ball lobbed into darkness
holds her breath silent, to keep the descent in her ears.
The goat stands patient for two millennia,
watching without judgment from behind his strange eyes.

jane hirschfeld
critique of pure reason

halloween.

a complicated day, but it ended with a very fun party.
this is me with my favorite snail ever.

val(you), too.

it's been my experience that a person's best talents and worst flaws are often impossible for me to untangle, and the more extraordinary the person, the more true i've found it to be: her innovativeness and her inconsistency, his generosity and his imprudence, her wit and her cruelty . our greatest virtues and vices ultimately the same quality, played out in different circumstances, or maybe distinct qualities underwritten by some common or undisentagleable set of motives. it makes everything complicated, takes us in circles-- we break who we try to fix, or we come to be repulsed by just what initially attracted us.

some of the most brilliant philosophers have argued (are still arguing) that values must be like thoughts, not like feelings- beliefs, not desires- because we can value all sorts of things that we may fail to pursue or realize. i value equality, for example, even as i half-consciously participate in systems that generate inequality. i may value discression highly, but fail to behave discreetly, or make no effort to behave discreetly at all. the examples are practically infinite-- if we were always motivated to behave in strict accordance with our values, it would be a very different world. feelings, on the other hand, are the sorts of things that make a difference in the world-- they necessarily motivate our behavior in a host of ways, ranging from hardly discernable to painfully obvious [or, at least, those things we call "feelings" are our experience of certain brain processes-- the sorts of brain processes that move us around in the world]- not sometimes, but always. so if feelings provide motives, and we can be unmotivated to pursue what we value, then values can't be feelings. that's the general idea.

despite the arguments of some of the most brilliant philosophers, i think that values are like feelings. i don't think that you can value what you don't desire, what you are unmotivated to pursue. but as long as the best and the worst of us remain so shatteringly difficult to tease apart there'll be a clash of motives- of values- that result in some motives being thwarted. we may behave cruelly or imprudently or inconsistently even as we value kindness, prudence and integrity, and not just because we lack the time or resources to improve, but because while we are motivated to pursue those virtues, we are more strongly motivated to preserve ourselves-- and not merely out of some perverse attachment to our vices (although that is a common enough motive), but in an effort to preserve what is best or most satisfying in ourselves.

a take away show.

yesterday after breakfast steve and i gave each other little musical gifts, gifts of the internet, and this is what he gave me:

#64.2 - Beirut - The Penalty
Video sent by lablogotheque

it's beirut playing 'the penalty', which i just learned on my ukulele! one of a hundred little shows (one song, or two) filmed on the fly, all over paris, by the kinds of artists that you probably like, or would like. you should watch every one of them @ www.blogotheque.net/cae_tous_les_concerts.php3
[watch the first menomena song to the end for dancing babies.]

aiming at it.

twenty years ago derek parfit wrote a book, and one of the things that he said in it is: it's sometimes true that "if someone tries to achieve [certain] aims, those aims will be, on the whole, worse achieved". he says that if you play tennis to have fun, you'll have less fun than you will if you play to win, and that's a stupid example, but there are others. there is the larger contention that our self-interest, on the whole, may be worse served by those who go around consciously serving their own best interest. and even that, one the whole, the interest of our families may be better served when we choose to act in the interest of some larger community.

there are endless examples of this-- how in aiming at something too directly we defeat our own aims. i think it happens two ways-- one is a matter of the limitations of our practical reason-- how we aren't able incorporate enough information to be good conscious calculators of how to serve some particular interest, as in the above examples. the second class of examples come up when people relate to one another in groups- maneuvering socially, pursuing and spurning one another's advances. how uncool x proves himself in his efforts to be cool-- how y, acting out of a desire for z's attention, looses it. there's something about us. we want all kinds of power-- knowledge, beauty, notoriety, social status-- and we like other people who have it, but we save a special kind of disgust for those we catch pursuing power directly. we respect those who achieve it indirectly, as the bi-product of some other aim. i've thought about this phenomenon before, felt badly that i'm so repulsed by people who aren't so good at masking their aims. they're seams are showing, i say. and i know that other people have seams, too, whether they're showing or not, and i wonder why i should like someone better just because they're more adept at coving their tracks.

there's a mess more to say-- especially about how this is bound up with the idea of non-maximizing dispositions (which i think may also be a concept propounded by parfit) and how both concepts hinge on game theory (the classic prisoner's dilemma v. the iterated prisoner's dilemma). and also something about the problems of escaping this-- what if trying not to care about one's own self-interest- or about one's social position- or about the object of one's affection- is itself the sort of aim which is self-defeating?

[yoko ono, 1968. thanks to ms. molly oh for it. ]

val(you).

i just turned in my first paper of the semester, and i want to sleep for a three days. i'm so sick of it i could spit, but the question i was writing about was basically this: are values beliefs or are values desires? the problem is that beliefs respresent and desires motivate, but we sort of want values to represent (some standard of good behavior) AND motivate (us to behave according to those standards). so lots of conceptual analysis ensues.

i think that values are desires-- one small subset of them, anyway. and i don't think that what we believe can change what we desire, at least not on it's own. what can change or overrule our desires are our other desires. and luckily most of us have these broad desires to do things like behave in ways that we can justify to each other, and thats what i think values are. and these broad desires, these values, are sometimes strong, and sometimes a check on those desires that are most certainly not values. and sometimes they aren't. and if we're lucky things turn out alright anyway.

how to exploit a conspiracy of douche bags.

today in class we learned about non-maximizing dispositions, and their ironic advantages. the idea goes something like this: we have some beliefs and desires that cause us to act against our own best interest-- dispositions that don't stand up under rational reflection-- but that are, in some larger strategic sense, in our interest to have. anger was the example: when we're angry, we are more likely to do harm to others, but we're also far more likely to subvert-- or at least fail to maximally achieve-- our own aims and interests. but even still, there's a serious strategic advantage in being disposed to get angry: it deters others from fucking with you. so anger, when triggered, may cause you to act irrationally (that is, against your own interests), but a well-known disposition to react angrily when fucked with does so much work, even when rarely triggered, to prevent those situations from ever arising, that it is still, over-all, in our interest to be creatures with dispositions to get angry under certain unfavorable circumstances.

the interesting implication is meant to be that having the disposition to keep a cool head and always think of one's own best interest might not actually be in one's own best interest.

but suppose that our inclination to avoid angering others whenever possible is (in well-socialized adults) general, and not just aimed at those who we specifically know can be angered. wouldn't it be to my advantage if i could keep a kind and cool head and stay focussed on best achieving my goals, while still enjoying the advantage of other people's general concern not to anger others, including myself? i'd be a sort of free-rider¹, but opposite, in some sense, of the sorts of free-riders that evolutionary theorists like to nag about²-- the dove who games the hawks.<sup>3


[1]</sup> the problem of the free-rider is an important (and often discussed) one in evolutionary theory, and in ethics. the idea, in simplistic human terms, is that if we were all unfailingly kind and honest, we might all be better off, but that a society in which every member is unfailingly kind and honest is a system destined to be gamed. it's a society vulnerable to free-riders-- those individuals who would gain the advantage of living among the unfailingly kind and honest while also reaping the benefits of being themselves self-serving and dishonest. because (when it comes to surviving and passing on your genes, at least) there's only one thing better for the individual than being good and honest among the good and honest, and that's being bad and dishonest among the good and honest. so while, collectively, we maximize utility by cooperating, our individual utility is maximized by defecting, and so individuals will defect.

^[2]dawkins does discuss something like this idea of free-riding peacenik when he talks, in 'the selfish gene' about how we arrive at an evolutionary stable strategy, but it's the concept of a 'conspiracy of doves', not a conspiracy of hawks (see next footnote), that's usually harped on as the niave notion of the uninformed.

^[3]hawks and doves, in the rhetoric of evolutionary theorists, are a sort of short-hand for aggressive/defecting/obviously self-serving sorts of creatures and peaceful/cooperative/apparently altruistic sorts of creatures. the impossible society of the unfailingly kind and honest that i mentioned in the first footnote is often referred to as a "conspiracy of doves".

these are all of the things that i've bought since last wednesday, one and one half weeks ago:

-a pot of tea [i didn't actually pay for it, but i left the cost as tip]
-spackle
-ten bic mechanical pencils
-superglue
-one third of a bottle of rum [maybe more like 40%]
-one gin&tonic.
-one long island iced tea
-one superfood smoothie
-a cup of coffee (for andrew, who took me to brunch)
-two veggie dogs w/ honey mustard
-a hot chocolate (for my roommate, post-spikes)
-a thermos
-two tickets to see 'the darjeeling limited'
-two vegetable samosas
-one arabic coffee + one mint tea
-two books (one was a gift.)
-two more books.
-a t-pass
-underpants
-a red hat
-cup of tea
-one spinach scramble
-small decaf coffee
-dental floss
-mints
-one gin&tonic

[if you don't read the kircher society blog from time to time, you should: http://www.kirchersociety.org/blog/]
[thanks to who showed me it.]

ANNOUNCEMENT:

today i brushed my hair for what i think may have been the first time in three and a half years. it was just lying there, the brush, with all of my roommate's toiletries, and then it was just happening. it felt pretty good. i feel pretty good about it. i found four gray hairs.

hey! i'm in a comic strip! drawn by the charmingest comic artist of them all, liz prince:

[if you haven't seen her comics, you should: http://comicnrrd.livejournal.com/]

every time he read or wrote
or heard or spoke the word
suffering, he paused. it wasn't
the solemn way some people pause
to give thanks before a meal,
nor the sudden mid-sentence pause after the name
of someone you loved so much you lose
your breath every time--
nor was it the ceremonious
moment of silence
sitting on all the bowed heads in a room,
nor the silence that fills a room when a room
empties, the door snapping to.
it was more like smelling, a listening
for the aftertaste of something in the mouth, something
not in the mouth anymore but
in the body now. in the pause,
he would listen the way you listen
at the mouth of a well
for a dropped stone, waiting for it to tell you something.

paul hostovsky
caesura

[i've started classes: ethics & meta-ethics & causation.]

moving on.

i've been packing to move, throwing out as much as i can. my new room will be just larger than my bed, and all of this paper's been weighing me down, anyway, and i don't need so many clothes, either.

i've been carrying a broken murano glass vase around with me for three years now (broken in an earlier move), thinking i might fix it or fashion the pieces into something else, as beautiful or as useful, but it's time to concede that i can't or won't. it's become an empty gesture, keeping it around like this, doing nothing with it, and i'd started to forget what the fucking thing actually looked like for all of the time that i've spent staring at the broken pieces. so i tossed it. it's done.

i found an old letter, too, and it quoted this to me:

'one or two things are all you need
to travel over the blue pond, over the deep
roughage of the trees and through the stiff
flowers of lightning- some deep
memory of pleasure, some cutting
knowledge of pain.'

gossip.

as it turns out i've been thinking lately with some very different friends for some very different reasons on meta-level question about gossip and about discression. these questions keep coming up: how much discression do we owe to others, and how much can they expect? why do they? and how bad is it to gossip, anyway, and how admirable is discression, really? everyone's always telling someone else what they know, and then getting angry at someone for having told, in turn, someone else: we admire discression and expect it of our confidantes, but it's really really hard to do it one's self.

i want to start by saying that i think that discression is overrated-- or, rather, over-expected. i don't think that we should expect people to tell absolutely no one something if we ourselves couldn't manage to tell absolutely no one-- and, sadly, one person telling one person telling one person can become everyone knowing in record time-- meaning: the absolute worst case can come about without any one person having done anything worse than anyone else.

one of the strongest theories these days about how and why humans developed language capacities is that it was so we could gossip. the idea is that as the groups our anscestors lived in got larger (as compared to other primate groups), grooming (which is the social glue that holds those other primate groups together) so many others got to be too time consuming. so the evolution of lanuage/language capacities, used to share social information (about birth and love and sex and death and feuds and on and on), was driven by the tension between the need for social adhesive and constraints on time in these new and larger social units. [this is pathetically oversimplified. for the whole story see dunbar's 'grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language'.] but the point is that we may be built to gossip: the itch is in us, like the itch to sneeze, to fuck, to consume. and, like these other human drives, i think that we can and should make moral judgements regarding gossip, but i tend to cut people a lot of slack where any of these things are concerned. i've experienced the inexorable magnetic pull of each, ethical or not.

another reason that i think discression is sometimes overrated is that i think that it can be motivated by different things, some less admirable than others. it seems to me that, like anything else in the world, it can be motivated by love or it can be motivated by fear. withholding information can be just as effective a strategy for posturing and pretense-- two things that i dislike very much-- as the sharing of skewed or exaggerated information.

that being said, there's something so fucking admirable about discression. i know maybe a handful of people who I would single out as particularly discreet, who are often silent when it comes to the personal details of their lives and the lives of others, without ever drawing anyone's attention to the fact. despite all of my qualifications, i find this at minimum seriously intriguing and impressive. i admire it the way i admire anything i imagine requiring restraint, the same way some people admire feats of physical strength. but what i really respect about discression is how/when it secures the necessary conditions for some relationship. this takes me back to my earlier post on the topic of privacy, but the idea is that privacy (a) gives people a space in which they can behave more freely or less self-consciously than they otherwise might and (b) gives people the ability to choose who they will relate to and how by giving them control over how much personal information different individuals have about them (so i can choose you as a friend, you as an acquaintance, you as a business partner, and cement those choices by the sorts of things about myself that i choose to share). so when someone secures the privacy of another person by not gossiping about them, despite strong incentives to do it anyway, i'm impressed. that person has given someone the chance to relieve themselves of information without succumbing to the desire for relief themselves. it seems a lot like taking a hit for someone. they've helped to secure a space for someone in which they can be themselves, and make mistakes, and learn from them, free of certain kinds of harsh scrutiny. it's the foundation for a particular and important sort of trust.

but while discression can play an important role in securing a solid friendship, gossip, as i mentioned, is itself a means of securing meaningful social bonds. and talking about one's own life with someone is an especially big part of what i means to be friends. so to expect someone to keep quiet about the details of their own life and relationships seems wrong to me-- it's isolating, hampering to friendships, and just too much to ask of someone.

but then there's how in this tangled mess of a world, we're never just talking about ourselves. when we talk about ourselves, we necessarily talk about others, and often those others that we're closest to-- who've let us in to those private spaces that i've argued should be protected. so do i tell you the fucked up thing my best friend did, knowing that you won't have all of the rich contextual details that keep me from judging him too harshly or for too long? this shit is hard. i don't think that there's a clear ethical answer. but i do think that human beings need their comforts, and talking is one way that we get it, and we should at least understand, and at best forgive, when people choose the comfort that we're built for gossip to bring us.

this is only the beginning, really, but i'll lay off for awhile.

a new name for this silly thing.

my gram was a difficult woman by the time i knew her-- critical, and often disappointed. she was the daughter of a similarly difficult woman, and the mother of two difficult women (my paternal aunts)-- although differently difficult-- not a hard protestant kind of difficult, but (and it could be equally cruel, really) given to whims and addictions. one died of a whim, the other is irrevocably fried by addiction. so, you know, i understand her disappointment. but she knew some things about art and she knew some things about about music, and she knew some things about discipline and how we learn things, and some of it she imparted to me. she told me: you can only learn things, even history book facts, by using all of your senses. she told me: you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want-- and this was late in the game, when no one can say that she didn't know the full of weight of what it is we don't get in the pursuit of what we do. she got some things she passionately wanted at a hard heavy price.

you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want: it reads like a lot of white protestant middle-america bullshit about what you can attain if only you work hard enough, sacrifice enough. it's not true that we can have anything we want-- there are those somethings that we can't have no matter what we're willing to pay for them-- requital where there's unrequital, for someone dead not to be dead, for something that happened not to have happened-- all hard things lodged immovably in time or in the unchangeable fact of someone else. and there are other structures in the world-- structures of power & privilege -- that can prevent the most disciplined and earnest among us from achieving even their clearest and first aims (let alone the rest of us-- undisciplined and vague on just what it is we're after).

but it's still the most solid piece of advice i've gotten yet. not because i can have anything i want, but because anything i can get (and it sometimes turns out to be more than i think) turns out to necessitate my not getting other things that i also want, and my life goes better when i'm looking that fact happily in the face. it's not a grim diagnoses-- everything might as well be nothing, and if i'm going to be something (and i aspire to be) it'll have to be to the exclusion of other somethings, which is how we can all be up to something different, and all good. i love this.

so 'we'll see' was what i wrote for a title when i started this blog business, meaning 'we'll see if i even use this, or how i will', but it's time for an official acknowledgment that i DO use it (and how), and a new title is it. and you now have a semi-account of it's origins and significance.

intimacy & privacy.

here's an idea that i read about today: privacy is so important because without privacy there can't be intimacy. there are two ways of being aware of something-- intimacy is one and observation is the other. when we observe something we examine or attend to it. but being intimate just is to give up our role as an observer and experience the damn thing. intimacy is when we cease to observe and are totally present with someone or something, agenda-less, and we're not aware of what we might look like to anybody else, or even to ourselves. we're consumed by the experience. he [r. gerstein, ethics 89] is talking about passionate love, of course, about how sex can be sometimes, but he also cites prayer and religious ecstacy, or being lost in our work. but intimacy is fragile, he says. any awareness that we're being observed, and we become observers ourselves, attending to the surface of things, how we might be percieved, and we begin to consciously behave in the sorts of ways that we behave when we're aware of an audience. intimacy is over. so, he says, we have to fight to protect private spaces or we forfeit this really meaningful way of experiencing.

it gets a little nutty, a little natural-law-ish, a little tediously transcendent at the end, but i liked it. and it's all been said before, about the internet and privacy, but this paper helped me to clarify a worry i have: if i participate in these internet communities where i'm constantly telling people, or constantly making information available, about what i'm listening to, what i'm reading, what i'm thinking and working on, do i then listen and read and work and think on the surface of things? am i making it more difficult for myself to know things intimately? impossible? what about people?

today i bought a new bike.

you know when you're dating someone way cooler or prettier than you, and psh/whatever of course, but sometimes you look at them and just laugh, bemused, thinking: what? what is going on here? how did this happen? that's what my new bike is like.

III. rational agency is a bullshit foundation for anything

christ, i've been rattling on now forever and i haven't gotten anywhere near to the point of my paper yet, which is that if morality is anything that matters, then it's not the sort of thing that depends on our being rational agents. because whatever rational agency is, not everyone has it, and no one has it all the times-- and guess when we're least likely to have it? when it counts. when things are tough. when it hits the fan.

rational agency isn't some obscure philosophical idea, it's a way of viewing other people that pretty much everyone uses to get through the day. people do stuff that makes you mad or makes you happy, and that is translated almost immediately into being angry at them or pleased with them, liking them or disliking them, and we don't really bother justifying the connection, but if someone asked you to, you wouldn't have to think that hard: jane did x. she could have done y (steve, sal & danni were all in same sitch and THEY did y.). but she did x. and x fucking stung. so jane is a douche. she's not a child. she's not a sociopath. she's not a dog. she should know better.

when philosophers go to justify moral standards and the penalties for breaking them, they usually say the same sorts of things: human beings are rational agents. human beings have the the capacity to grasp moral reasons and the capacity to act according to them. children, the mentally ill, and those under extreme stress may be permanently or temporarily exempt from moral scrutiny precisely because they are NOT rational agents. dogs just are what they are. dogs just do what they do. human beings can reflect on what they do, and when their desires conflict with their moral beliefs, they can, by force of will, behave morally despite their desire to do otherwise.

it is my studied opinion that this is bullshit. it is true, as i will personally attest, that most persons tend to reflect (and reflect and reflect and reflect) on their behavior. most persons analyze, to one degree or another, what it is they should do, and what it is that they want to do, and why they should do it, and why they should want it, and so on. it may be the case that thinking rationally-- consciously reflecting on our behavior or analyzing our options-- we tend to be better behaved. (or it might not be the case. thinking things through hasn't always led me to behave in ways that i'm proud of.) but whatever it means to think rationally, it's clearly not something that everyone does, and it's clearly not something that anyone does all (i would even say most) of the time. we we do hurtful things (which is when the question of morality generally comes into play) we're so often under stress, or feeling some strong distracting thing, or we lack some relevant information.

(a small break from explaining myself.)

we know some things, and one of the things we know is that we have brains in which knowledge must somehow be instantiated. and we detect activity there-- we can talk, for example, about neurons and how they fire. but we don't know how knowledge is instantiated in brains-- what the physical state is that equals knowing your childhood address during all of that time you spend not consciously saying it to yourself. and we can calculate the energy of the entire universe, but what we find is that: seventy percent of the universe is something that isn't matter. we don't know what it is. we call it dark energy, or quintessence or the cosmological constant, but we might as well call it 'other people's hearts' for all we know about it. and of the thirtyish percent of the universe composed of matter, the vast majority is dark matter. what is dark matter? well, it's the kind of matter that we can neither observe nor know the composition of. another term we use to bracket off the inexplicable in our mathematical models. and the matter that we know, that small percentage of a percentage that we've got a handle on (minus brain matter), when we look at it down as far as we can look, is a matter of quantum mechanics, of which the physicist richard feynman said "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." [as a small taste: if you are interested in making sense of quatum theory you'll have to get used to assuming that we live in one of many possible worlds existing in four dimensions.]

i look in and i look up and i see what i sort of know and i'm in awe, but it's a thin film on the surface of what i don't know, which is almost everything.

II. the relevant facts.

so as a conscientious society we need a consistent set of principles that we all understand and agree on-- morality or ethics or whatever you want to call it-- and they should jibe with the facts that we've managed somehow to know about people in the world. here are the relevant facts as i understand them:

(1) we live in a deterministic universe. whether we're formed by god or darwinian algorithms it all amounts to the same thing: effect has followed cause has followed effect from long before us, and they continue to follow each other right through us, and every belief or desire that you have must ultimately be the effect of some cause that existed before you did. which is just to say: you might behave that way because you're clever or selfish or wonderful, but you're clever or selfish or wonderful because you were un/lucky enough to have acquired that characteristic from somewhere. even those qualities that we cultivate in ourselves must be the result of some preceding beliefs and desires-- the desire to cultivate and the right equipment to do the job-- which we can also explain, and back and back and back until conscious you gives way to unconscious you gives way to not you at all with no break in the causal chain.

(2) some things feel good, and other things hurt. we have nervous systems calibrated to sense the lightest touches, insults disguised as compliments, even the weight of a gaze. we're on a hair trigger when it comes to feeling things, oh man can we feel them. so you may not have chosen to be clever or selfish or wonderful, but it is nonetheless the fate of the people near you, for better or for worse, to feel the force of your wit or self-involvement or wondrousness. we can't escape the fact of our nervous systems-- our sensitivity to pleasure and pain in their myriad and nuanced forms.

I. the motivation

what i've been thinking and writing about for the last month or so is rational agency and how morality does and doesn't depend on it. it matters, and i'll tell you why: we have social institutions, and through our social institutions we do things to people. we tell people where they can and can't go, what they can and can't do. sometimes we put people in a building and hold them there while years of their lives pass, or until they die. sometimes we cause people to die. we strap people down and kill them. we have to say why. with stakes like that we can't just say "this is for the greater good", or "you deserve this", we have to say what "good" means, where "deserve" comes from, and who decided and why they get to. if we can't, then we're just burying people alive, consigning them to the nightmare of being unjustifiably restrained. it's no small matter to take away a person's life, or some part of their life. no matter what they've done we've got to explain to them, and to ourselves, in a meaningful way what we're doing, why, and what gives us the right to. and it's got to square with what we know about the world and about people. and what we know about the world, and about people especially, is changing.

there are, of course, philosophical principles at the foundation of our justice system. this is a liberal democracy, founded on social contract theory, which has been profoundly successful in some ways. but this theory is itself built on a particular conception of human beings as rational agents-- as persons whose actions are best explained in terms of free and measured deliberation. it was all worked out a few hundred years ago, before we even knew the chemical make-up of water, let alone our own bodies, our own brains. before freud, before darwin, before watson & crick.

and the story that is both larger and more intimate is how we treat each other, not as citizens, but as friends and colleagues and hook-ups and competitors. we cause a lot of harm to each other with our jealousy and anger and righteous indignation, and i think that these intimate harms should be attended to as well. if my feelings and the behaviors that they prompt can cause harm, i have to think about what justifies them, or if anything does, or if there the sorts of things that can be justified.

i'm tired and i haven't gotten anywhere near my point yet. i think that i'll have to do this in installments. but i'd like to explain what i've been working on, and why it's relevant and accesible, and interesting, and urgent. how it changes me, and how i hope it can be used as a lever to change things larger than me.