the retributivist instinct, revisited.

last year i wrote a little about jared diamond's article in the new yorker, "vengeance is ours". the new yorker is now being sued by the papua new guinean tribe for making false accusations, and the media ethics project at the art science research lab (stinkyjournalism.com) is about to release a 40,000 study entitled "jared diamond's factual collapse: the new yorker's papua new guinea revenge tale untrue". it was diamond's analysis of the facts that i found objectionable, which no factual expose can disprove, and i'm sure that it's very complicated and diamond could probably explain things in a way that made sense of his choices. but in as much as he even finessed the facts it begins to look like he used them to illustrate a conclusion that he had reached independant of particulars. its the worst kind of anthrolopogy and the worst kind of philosophy that begins with an assumed conclusion and chooses the evidence to suit it.

the truth is very different from what we are inclined to believe. even if we are not aware of this, most of us are non-reductionists. we [are] strongly inclined to believe that our existence is a deep further fact, distinct from physical and psychological continuity, and a fact that must be all-or-nothing. this is not true.

is the truth depressing? some may find it so. but i find it liberating, and consoling. when i believed that my existence was such a further fact, i seemed imprisoned in myself. my life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which i was moving faster ever year, and at the end of which there was darkness. when i changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. i now live in the open air. there is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. but the difference is less. other people are closer. i am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

when i believed the non-reductionist view, i also cared more about my inevitable death. after my death, there will be no one living who will be me. i can now redescribe this fact. though there will later be many experiences, none of these experiences will be connected to my present experiences by chains of such direct connection as those involved in experience-memory, or in the carrying out of an earlier intention. some of these future experiences may be related to my present experiences in less direct ways. there will later be some memories about my life. and there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. my death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. this is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. now that i have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.

after hume thought hard about his arguments, we was thrown into 'the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness'. the cure was to dine and play backgammon with his friends. hume's arguments supported total scepticism. this is why they brought darkness and utter loneliness. the arguments for reductionism have on me the opposite effect. thinking hard about these arguments removes the glass wall between me and others. and, as i have said, i care less about my death. this is merely the fact that, after a certain time, none of the experiences that will occur will be related, in certain ways, to my present experiences. can this matter all that much?

derek parfit
reasons & persons

enforcers., or, vigilante outting!

several weeks ago, i was privileged enough to be eating dinner with some really wonderful philosophers- my fellow philosophy students, my professors lionel mcpherson and erin kelly, and two guests, tommie shelby and derrick darby. it was maybe the least socially awkward philosophical dinner party that i've ever been lucky enough to be a part of. the conversation, which i've recounted a number of times since (if i've recounted it to you, bear with me-- or, conversely, don't bother), turned, to my delight, to the moral status of vigilante outing! the gist is this:

(1) within the gay community there is an general belief that a closeted person could rightfully object to being outed by another person in the community.

(2) then there is the more radical view that a closeted person has no right to object to being outed, though it may cause them some harm. it might, in other words, be ethically permissible (or even obligatory) to out them on a number of grounds. first (this is the seemingly easier case), the person in question may be doing some direct harm to the community from their closet-- a closeted conservative politician, or evangelical religious leader, say. but the more interesting argument applies to people that we all know, closeted at work, or at home, in most cases to avoid harms and efforts ranging from the tedious to the down-right dangerous. the idea is that by being closeted, they harm the community by failing to bear their part of the burden in the larger struggle to secure benefits that they themselves enjoy, or could enjoy. it's the old free rider problem.

i have lots of thoughts about this! but i'm not going to talk about them here, directly. my view, in short, is that no one is ever, even in the extreme case, morally obligated to out someone, and that outing anyone under any circumstances is probably the wrong thing to do. but my reasons for holding this view are not, i think, conservative. i fully recognize the very real problem that the radical proponent of (2) is openly confronting:

in any community, and particularly within some solidarity group engaged in a struggle for survival, it is essential that the group find some way to protect themselves, both from external threats, and from the internal threat of free riders. the survival of the community itself depends on defending certain borders (literal, ideological, or otherwise), and on each member within those borders doing his or her part to abide by community standards. and yet, each individual within the group must grapple constantly with the temptation to minimize or avoid altogether the burdens of citizenship. if a group is large and its members have a reasonable measure of privacy, there will always be opportunities for this kind of exploitation. so keep it all together-- to maintain the good thing you've got going-- you've got to find a way to police against free riders, and ensure solidarity.

but even if all communities require policing, it might still be the case that the individual acts that policing consists in are not the sorts of things that, in and of themselves, anyone ought to do. going back, for example, to the case of the vigilante outer: it might be the case that if we had this sort of community policing, we'd all be more honest, or that we'd all be forced to join the fight and stay in it or something like that-- if no one had the option of being closeted, it seems reasonable to assume that we'd have more people fighting harder for gay rights-- fighting for their lives, bearing some of the cost of some collective struggle. but it still strikes me as obviously true that the sorts of people inclined to do this sort of outing are going to be morally insensitive dicks. and if they're not-- if they're just good people who decide that it's a job that must be done, despite it's distastefulness, by someone, for the sake of the group-- then they're going pay a high price, selling their souls, so to speak, in the supposed interest of the rest of us. this is not something that i would either do myself, or council anyone else to.

the problem, i think, is this: it's one thing to ask someone to do what's right, despite the cost to oneself-- it's another to ask someone to do something that's wrong as the means to some better end. i don't want to be a free rider-- it doesn't even sound fun or satisfying to me. which is why i try (with occasional success) to do what's right despite the cost to myself, and why i would encourage anyone who asked me to do the same (for their own sake, as well as everyone else's). but i don't think that i can endorse (or even fully make sense of) the notion that it's right to do something that's wrong in the interest of survival. and in this case, it's the survival of a group whose own principles may very well conflict with the actions that must be taken in order for the group to survive.

people sometimes assume or imply that an act that preserves a person or community that is itself good, is a good or at least acceptable act. i don't see why this should be true. it strikes me as obvious that being a good person is going to come into conflict with self- (or group-) preservation. but it's not at all obvious what, when that conflict arises, one ought to do about it.

¹ an exception: i don't think that anyone is ever obligated to closet themselves for someone else-- it's unreasonable for someone closeted to expect another person to keep their actual behavior a secret. while it's lame, i think, to out someone for the sake of outing them, it's better when we can live our lives openly, and it's unreasonable for someone who fails to live openly to ask someone they've slept with to fail along with them. though outing someone for the sake of outing them and outing someone just in the course of living one's own life honestly might have the same impact on the person who is closeted, it seems to me that each act has a different moral status.

how it's not fair.

i'm a little drunk¹, but there's some things i need to write down right now before i forget them. this past week filing² we found a diary entry from a woman³, a radical, a member of the symbionese liberation army who was shot by police probably a year later, and she was sad and cynical over the death of a revolutionary also gunned down, turned against by someone he was fighting with, and she said (sad and cynically and better than i will) that the revolutionary spirit is so rare and beautiful, so rare and beautiful that she just didn't know anymore if a single drop of it was worth losing to save spiritless others.

i bet that the man she was talking about was so luminous. i bet he bristled with imagination and love for the people and a sensitivity to injustice like an exposed nerve. i bet he was so beautiful and so rare. but but but but but! what does a revolutionary fight for if not people? and what are people but just themselves? and if you fight for them, you'd better be fighting for them and not your idea of them that's wrong. that's what i thought when i read it. i thought, first, 'there's something wrong here-- something amiss at the very center of this moving idea'. revolutionaries fight to free people. maybe people need revolutionaries to free them. but revolutionaries need people just for there to be such a thing as a revolutionary. what can it mean, then, to say that people aren't worth revolutionary blood? what beauty can the revolutionary spirit have independent of these others who fight to free? even if they fucking crucify you. even if it's a thing about people that they will always crucify you. that's people. that's what you're fighting for, and i think part of what that woman meant by the beauty of the revolutionary spirit is that when you have it, you have it consummately. you are the fight. and the fight is (ostensibly) for the people. but could you keep fighting if you didn't harbor the illusion that they'd all rise up like an army behind you? could you keep fighting if you didn't believe falsely that they'd love you for it? if you can't, then the revolutionary's very identity, their sense of self and purpose, depends on maintaining this illusion.

have you ever been loved as someone that you aren't? someone that you aren't as good as? and then disappointed someone as bigly as an ocean? have you ever thought that you might prefer to be loved as the big risk that you actually are?

the people never said they'd rise up. the people never gave anyone any reason to think that they'd ever love anything and not turn on it. people will say what they say, but over and above what what they say stands who they are, and it's right there for you to see. and if you love people you've got to see it and love them anyway. love them just because every once in awhile, though you have no right to expect it, they'll make art or keep a promise or smile at you like an arrow through the heart.

sorry for all the rhetorical questions. i've had a few.



1 i've since made some sober editorial decisions. i haven't edited for grammar or anything like that, just minorly, for clarity. i've also removed a quoted song lyric, because quoting song lyrics is embarrassing, but i do urge you all to get neko case's new album and listen to it repeatedly. i particularly like 'vengeance is sleeping', 'i'm an animal', and 'middle cyclone' (the title track).

2 some of you probably know that i work as a research assistant to a radical feminist theorist, attempting to organize an archive of her personal papers (lectures, correspondence, etc.). we're still working on a first sift of the (seventy-odd boxes of) papers, so it involves a lot of one-page-at-a-time sifting and filing.

3 nancy ling perry, known also as fahizah.

it's been a somewhat difficult and totally wonderful february. march!

i've just completed, after two weeks of toil, a prospectus for what will be my writing sample. i will no doubt tinker with it in the coming days:

Despite the foundational role that capacities play in so many analyses of moral responsibility, capacities are not, as far as I can tell, entities¹ of which there is some common or uncontroversial understanding. Nearly any theory in which moral responsibility or membership in a moral community is predicated on some notion of freedom or agency will in turn explain freedom or agency in terms of capacities, either rational or sympathetic. The risk philosophers run when they don’t state plainly some preferred analysis of the term—and even, it turns out, when they do—is packing that which is at issue into an unanalyzed or amorphous conception of a capacity, rather than directly claiming or arguing for it.² It is essential, I think, that those philosophers who invoke capacities and claim for them some power, explanatory or otherwise, should state their analysis plainly and in a way that gives us some reason to think that capacities are rightly thought to have the powers claimed for them.

In Ethics and the A Priori Michael Smith does provide an explicit analysis of capacities, which he offers in service of his own account of moral agency and responsibility. Here Smith, in his explicitness about capacities and their role in his larger project, models what I think is a useful and forthright approach to moral theory. And, further, I find his analysis of capacities itself to be both plausible and illuminating. Where I disagree with Smith is in thinking that capacities, as he ably explains them, are adequate to the task of supporting his larger views on agency and responsibility. Far from shoring up his larger view, his analysis of capacities gives us an excruciatingly clear view of why rational capacities will fail to provide an adequate justification of our attributions of moral responsibility. [In this paper I will present Smith’s view, offer a criticism of it, and then evaluate two potential rebuttals.]

A capacity, as Smith analyzes it, is an essentially metaphysical entity. While a rational capacity is underwritten by some actual psychological state constituted, perhaps, by some state of the brain, of the individual in possession of said capacity, the capacity itself is, over and above the actual state, a host of true counterfactual claims about that agent in relevantly similar circumstances. So when confronted with the question “could X have done otherwise?” we are to understand this as a question of whether or not X had the capacity to do otherwise, and this, in turn, depends on whether, in a certain number of relevantly similar possible worlds, it is true of X that she does otherwise. Smith has aggregated the would haves into a could have, which is yours (you could have), and which is therefore you. In the case of someone who has one drink too many, for example, we might ask, “would she have chosen to have that drink if a different friend had been there with her?”; “would she have chosen to have that drink if she had considered for a moment longer her commitments the next morning?” If the answer to enough of these sorts counterfactual questions is yes, then it can be truly said of the agent in question that she had the capacity to do otherwise—that her failure to do the right thing is, in these sorts of cases, best explained as a failure of her capacity to act rationally (which, for Smith, is synonymous with acting rightly). She had the capacity to act well, and she is therefore rightly thought answerable for her poor choice.

Claims about capacities are claims about possibility-- about what we could have done, what we can do. Anyone committed to a moral system in which responsibility depends on capacities, either directly or by way of agency, will therefore have to predicate their system on certain metaphysical commitments, some way of making sense of modal claims. Smith offers a possible worlds analysis of capacities, and possible worlds analyses provide, if I understand correctly, our clearest and best analyses of modal claims. It’s hard to see what we could mean by claims about capacities other than something along the lines of what Smith suggests. What this analysis reveals, I will argue, is that our assumptions about what capacities justify are, according to our best metaphysical theories, misinformed. More specifically, I will argue that Smith’s analysis of capacities makes clear that he, along with others who claim that the possession of rational capacities justifies attributions of moral responsibility, begs the question against his opponents. Far from demonstrating that capacities provide an adequate basis for attributions of moral responsibility, Smith's analysis lays bare their inadequacy to the task.

To see why this is so, we need only look to Smith’s analysis of dispositions. Though the disposition he analyzes is the property of a non-human animal (a chameleon), his analysis of a disposition is otherwise identical to his analysis of a capacity—both are analyzed in terms of hosts of true and relevant counterfactual claims. In his example case, we have a shy but powerfully intuitive chameleon who, though disposed to be green under normal viewing conditions, blushes red when he knows he is being watched—and always knows when he is being watched. He has, in other words, the disposition to be green when viewed though, when actually viewed, he is red without fail. His disposition to be green under normal viewing conditions is constituted in part by properties of his skin, and in part counterfactually—in all of the many nearby possible worlds in which the chameleon is a little less shy or a little less intuitive, he will be green when viewed. As in the case of capacities, dispositions are a kind of aggregate—the collection of relevant would haves—underwritten by the actual constitution of the one to whom it is attributed.

A disposition, when present, does not engender responsibility in the way that Smith takes a capacity to. If I have the capacity to resist the temptation to have another drink (if, in many relevantly similar circumstances I do resist it), then, Smith says, my failure to resist is best explained as a failure of my capacity to resist, and it is therefore right to hold me responsible. I have failed to do what I could have done. But imagine substituting the term “disposition” for “capacity”. Would anyone ever be inclined to attribute my having an ill-advised third drink to a failure of my general disposition to refrain? I think not. This seems, in fact, to get things exactly backwards: my general disposition to refrain is, for once, not the explanation for my behavior. We must look elsewhere.³ Smith himself, when speaking of dispositions (never in terms of human beings, but in terms of animals), describes these sorts of situations as cases of masked dispositions (i.e. cases in which the disposition is masked by some other disposition, which, I assume, is the better candidate if you’re looking to attribute my behavior to something).

What all of this amounts to is that dispositions and capacities, understood in this way, are both similarly constituted and metaphysically indistinguishable, and yet there is no indication that the attribution of a disposition engenders responsibility, while it is taken for granted that a capacity does. No argument is offered for why capacities engender responsibility while dispositions don’t, or even, for that matter, why some notion over and above dispositions is necessary for adequately explaining human behavior.⁴ The application of the term “capacity” to certain modal properties of human beings and “disposition” to the modal properties of other things seems merely to name the fact that we just do hold human beings (and not inanimate objects, weather patterns, plants or non-human animals) morally responsible. Smith thus assumes what is at issue.

Smith might reply that the difference between dispositions and capacities is that capacities are constituted in the actual world by brain states giving rise to psychological states, while dispositions are constituted by other sorts of bodily properties—of the skin, for example, or of muscles. Perhaps it is even some particular subset of psychological states that merit the modal status “capacity”. I haven’t fully thought this objection through yet, but I don’t see what (non-question begging) difference this distinction could make.

Smith might also reply that his explanation of capacities need not be justificatory. Indeed, he actually suggests this, on the grounds that not only our moral theory and practices, but all thought and discourse presuppose capacities. It is therefore deemed inappropriate to demand a justificatory explanation on the grounds that that which thought and discourse must presuppose is beyond the reach of valid skepticism. On this view, the job of the moral theorist is just to delineate the role that capacities necessarily play our moral systems and theories, and give the best possible descriptive account of them (which Smith certainly does). And yet Smith’s analysis is rife with justificatory aspirations, and, I will argue, rightly so. Neither thought nor discourse presuppose capacities (though many moral theories, I gladly concede, most certainly do). Our thought and discourse do certainly presuppose some modal truths and entities, but nothing that can’t be adequately explained in terms of dispositions. Again, Smith has provided no reason why we should think in terms of responsibility engendering capacities rather than the similarly constituted and metaphysically identical dispositions which, though they may license certain expectations, do not engender responsibility. We appeal to capacities (over and above dispositions) not because we need to, but because we want to.

Smith, finally, doesn’t succeed in providing an adequate “basis of an account of freedom and responsibility”. He doesn’t make sense of freedom and responsibility by making sense of capacities. The descriptive project—the project of sketching out an analysis of capacities—never gets adequate prescriptive traction. And while his descriptive project accomplishes quite a lot (as I hope to have time to spell out a little)⁵, capacities, so described, will not serve as an adequate basis for an account of moral responsibility. Which is not to say that nothing could, but only that capacities (or dispositions if you prefer) are not the right sorts of things.


[footnotes]
¹If capacities can even be said to be “entities”.

²I think that this happens in all sorts of philosophical exchanges, and the “it” therefore varies some from case to case, but I’m thinking most particularly about arguments over free will, practical rationality, and internalism versus externalism.

³In many cases, it will, admittedly, be hard to know just where we ought to look. This, I think, is part of what motivates our reliance on the notion of capacities—it sort of absorbs the impact of all the things we don’t and can’t know about what explains human behavior.

⁴I don’t think that there is any sound argument for why capacities, given their nature, engender responsibility while dispositions don’t. I don’t think that capacities can offer licit explanatory power over and above dispositions. I think, in fact, that we assign

⁵Smith’s analysis of capacities/dispositions helps us to see their importance in a number of ways, particularly around issues of personal identity. Who you are, on Smith’s view, is partly constituted by who you might be, who you could have been. There’s something right about this, and that Smith’s view captures it seems to me to be one of its great virtues. Further, a capacity, like a disposition, licenses the making of all sorts of interesting and important distinctions between objects (in this case people). Think again of the shy and intuitive green chameleon: employing Smith’s analysis, we carefully capture a real difference between it and the really red chameleon. Similarly, it seems plausible to think that there is a real distinction to be made among all of those people who have never gone skydiving between those who would go, given the chance, and those who wouldn’t. Smith’s careful analysis structures these distinctions—which are, I think, morally relevant, and generally crucial— setting truth conditions for them, etc. Overall, Smith’s analysis of capacities succeed in making sense of them in a way that allows for a vastly enriched (theoretical) view of the world—and agents in particular.

waking up.

i dreamed that i blogged, and now i feel the need to really do it so that my feeling that i did can attach itself to something in the world-- can have an actual object. here is a prompt from my schoolmate anthony diclaudio and my given response:

anthony: ...the only logically consistent ending to Lost is ______.

laura: i have a theory (by which i mean a cruel hope) that it's an extended mindfuck experiment in how long people will spend trying to make sense of a bunch of random and ever increasing information. it'd be like a cross between the experiment where you show toddlers three pictures of shapes in different places on the page, and they (the toddlers) attribute intentions to them (the shapes) and tell a story about what the shapes "doing" to each other, and that other experiment where you see how many pennies you can drop in a cup full of water before the surface tension breaks and the cup runs over.

on my current subject of choice:

'we’re in trouble — deeper trouble, i think, than most people realize even now.' p.krugman, in yesterday's new york times.

the following is from holland cotter's excellent ' the boom is over. long live the art!', featured in last week's new york times. it begins with a totally worthwhile analysis of american art in the american economy of the past fifty years.

"....Students who entered art school a few years ago will probably have to emerge with drastically altered expectations. They will have to consider themselves lucky to get career breaks now taken for granted: the out-of-the-gate solo show, the early sales, the possibility of being able to live on the their art.

"It’s day-job time again in America, and that’s O.K. Artists have always had them — van Gogh the preacher, Pollock the busboy, Henry Darger the janitor — and will again. The trick is to try to make them an energy source, not a chore.

"At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again...

"Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff’s, a party supply shop for the Love Boat crew? Or will artists — and teachers, and critics — jump ship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace?

"I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense.

"Right. Exactly. Crazy"

sometimes i wish that philosophers were more like artists-- sometimes and partially supporting themselves and educating others through work in the academy, but with the larger and more vibrant world of philosophy happening out in the cities and in the minds of anonymous farm kids on their way to cities, as compelled as any young painters to keep "imagining the unknown and unknowable".

[and also, this.]

there are more than a million. there are more even than an infinity.

it sounds simple, i know. but it’s not. listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. everyone you know has a completely different one - the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. they convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds’ creations and continuations. some make their worlds without knowing it. their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed soufflés and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. but you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. a theater for your life, if I could put it like that. don’t live an accident. don’t call a knife a knife. live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. make accidents on purpose. call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. now i’m not a very smart man, but i’m not a dumb one, either. so listen: if you can manage what i’ve told you, as i was never able to, you will give your life meaning.

jonathan safran foer
a convergence of birds

(i'm reading about possible worlds again, and i'm always reading about agency of course, so i like to read this. but then it made me uncomfortable, too: i'm more and more skeptical all the time of what people call personal truths. i suspect that anything not common and available to us all might be something really good, but it isn't the truth.)

butterfly magic!

my little tucson visit has been so nice. it began raining at almost the exact moment that my plane touched down, and the sun hasn't showed its face since, which is just fine with me. i know it's some kind of travesty, but i like winter and was feeling unprepared to abandon my winter layers, which has turned out to be unnecessary. i'd like to write little portraits of my friends here, but i need to do a little metaphysics reading before my host is up. maybe tomorrow. in the meantime, i'll say this: j.s. knows just the kinds of adventure that i like, and also the kinds of adventures of which i will be skeptical/petrified of but then love so much. here are some little videos from the butterfly magic exhibit at the tucson botanical gardens:

;

[NOTE: i am not under the influence of any drugs in these videos, but dumb with wonderment! jerk.]

self-interest.

"OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest."

the end of the financial world as we know it
michael lewis & david einhorn


why does it have to be forced? this is just exactly what's been so hard for me to understand about nearly every aspect of this economic wreck, and every corrupt corporate meltdown that led up to it, and all the ones that just keep coming: where is enlightened self-interest? how the fuck (b.madoff is just one clear example) did all of these people think things would end? were they hoping that they'd just die before anyone noticed that there was no substance to their claims?

it's not that i trusted corporations and financial advisers to be virtuous-- to the contrary, i "trusted" them (wryly, implicitly) to look out for their own interests with a machiavellian precision. i thought they were self-interest experts, and they've turned out to be a bunch of fucking amatuers-- their "self-interest" so stupidly managed that they couldn't so much as sustain themselves-- their decisions based, apparently, on a conception of self-interest so simultaneously hollow and overblown that to call it sophomoric is to give it too much credit. (bah-dum, ching.)

all i can conclude about this bewildering mess, finally, is what i generally conclude on nearly every topic: pretense is so tempting, but it will fuck you in the end.

something, continued.

it's sometimes something more sinister (sinister?) than superstition or even solipsism that leads us to attribute ill-will and bad intentions to other people or the universe at large: we posit external enemies as a way of avoiding the seemingly unface-able truth that the problem is in us-- that the enemy is inside. and it must take elaborate psychological mechanisms to prop up this belief in external enemies, because isn't it obvious that we ourselves are the only common factor in all of our experiences and changing circumstances?

i don't mean to sound like some kind of republican or motivational speaker or anything like that. who we are is itself a part of the world, and a product of it, and our demons are so often an unfair fact of bodies and circumstances into which were brought without consent. and it's a nightmare-- a reoccurring human nightmare, told and retold in all our scariest stories: the alien is on our own ship; the parasite is in your own guts; they're not the ghosts-- we are. it's a powerful fear we carry. it's a powerful shame. and maybe it takes a kind of power to confront it that's greater than what we can reasonably expect of another person. that might be so.

and sometimes it really does work the other way around-- in the case of oppression, say-- and then, of course, the members of the oppressed group are made to feel (to deeply feel) that the problem is in them, written into their genetic code, when in fact they really are systematically confronting other people's bullshit. and they wonder 'am i crazy?'

note to self.

for further thought and attention post-metaphysics comp: religion! (as a moral motive)
i've added the two linked journal articles to my moral motivation-themed summer reading list.

and another thing.

the same actions which are responsible for and instrumental in the origin and development of the virtues are also the means of their destruction.

aristotle
the nichomachean ethics
book ii, part 3

aristotle famously posits the golden mean as the way to understand virtue-- courage, for instance, as the virtue standing midway between cowardice (a vice of deficit) and recklessness (a vice of excess). virtue is the target, standing at the balanced dead center of all manner of vice and moral compromise.

i wrote a little about virtue ethics over the summer-- not so much about the golden mean, but what the actual exercise of a virtue consist in. what i mean is, i was addressing not so much the question of how, in theory, we understand what courage is, but what it is to be courageous (or to be patient-- the example i used at the time). to actually be virtuous is to be someone whose behavior conforms to virtue time and time again. it has to do with a consistency that is the result of each action springing from the same firm character. and just as consistency depends on firmness of character, firmness of character depends on authenticity. if it's not really you, you can't sustain it. beyond that, the virtuous person explicitly takes herself to be striving for virtue, undertakes virtuous acts for their own sake (that is, for the sake of the ultimate end-- the good life) and not in pursuit of some extrinsic end (like money or something like that), and, in turn, gets a certain pleasure from acting in the way according with virtue.

so, i'm trying to finish a paper on all this. in the paper i try to come to some understanding of how we can make sense of extremists-- radicals, visionaries, ascetics-- in these terms. a lot of our moral heroes (religious saints in particular, but also secular figures like ghandi or john brown) fall into this category, and there are lots of other people (particularly artists) who make valuable contributions to society, although their value isn't explicitly moral, which seems to be generated by certain extreme or ultimately self-defeating character traits. on the surface, at least, it looks like these sorts of extreme characters are not conforming to any sort of "happy medium", and yet we revere them, either for their moral integrity, or some quasi-moral aesthetic integrity.

are creative highs and principled stands the elevated end of a seesaw-- dependent upon, caused by, or one part of a whole that necessarily includes a lowered end? does the golden mean leave us perfectly balanced at the fulcrum, the low end raised, and the raised end lowered? what do we lose, if anything, and is it worth it?

i seriously have to finish this paper.

something i've been thinking about.

attributing good faith to all other human beings-- particularly those who have done some harm to us-- is often considered naive. but it seems to me, given all of the complexities of circumstance, cognitive biases toward attending to our own interests rather than those of others, and the myriad ways in which people makes sense of (rationalize, perhaps) their own behavior, that the real naivete lies in attributions of bad faith or, more precisely, ill will. it strikes me as almost superstitious-- naive in the way that it's naive to attribute weather that scares or injures us to angry gods. we're harmed in some way by some movement in the world, and, in our pain and ignorance and self-absorption, we make sense of it by attributing some ill intention. this is not a new idea. but i don't mean to say that it's naive to attribute intentions to people in general-- i mean bad intentions in particular. i'm suggesting that bad intentions, despite all the wrenching harm that people manage to do, are relatively rare, and that making adequate sense of all that harm, even in terms of human agency, will require a more sophisticated analysis.

this sounds a little funny. on the one hand i'm trying to correct a certain misanthropic world view. on the other hand, my criticism is built on an understanding of human beings as vulnerable and ignorant and self-absorbed. but i don't mean these terms pejoratively. we're relatively small things with a lot of nerve endings (literal and metaphorical) and limited resources and just two eyes to see out of. to have contempt for a thing because it's that sort of thing strikes me as being ungenerous to the point of its being a kind of misapprehension. what's naive (though forgivably so) is to have ever believed that things were otherwise-- to have been operating on the assumption that we are more, or that our being good or worthy depends on such a thing.

more cut and pasted email.

(this one's from elissa j. do your part, creeps.)

Subject: the suburban needs your help

Hello all,

The Peter Coffin Studio and The Suburban Gallery, Chicago are working on a project called; "How to Sneak into Art Museums Without Paying". We'd like you to share any techniques you have acquired through your life/work experience to submit to this project. These instructions (of "How to...") from you should be hand drawn and scanned to reproduced in a booklet/zine that will be distributed for an exhibition at the Suburban and to participants.

These illustrated techniques should actually work and must be relatively current. The instructions you provide should not require doctored documents such as fake passes etc or fake uniforms/badges and should be relatively easy to understand so that someone on the street can enter without paying using the instructions you submit.

If you would like to submit a plan, please hand draw it on 8 1/2 x 11 white paper in black pen/or pencli and scan in on gray scale @ 200 DPI and send to; assistant.petercoffinstudio@gmail.com

Include your name/pseudonym separate from the drawing in the email, to be included in the credits of the booklet. All accepted participants will of course receive a copy of the booklet/zine. And remember to include in the drawing the museum's name and city.

These are plans that should actually work so stick to keeping them as clear as possible....including street entrances, descriptive markers or "what to say to a guard"... anything to make the drawing effective. I have included a sample of a plan to sneak into the KW museum in Berlin to show generally what we are looking for. Feel free to forward this to any sneaky pals you know anywhere, especially outside the US as this is for any major museum/institution across the globe.

Best,

-Jory

BEST EMAIL EVER.

from: matthew allen
to: me

i searched for "agency philosophy" in google images - hoping to find some obfuscatory diagram to wave at architects to my rhetorical advantage - and i came across an image of you! brightened my day! but no diagram...

M

(it's true! i'm on page 3!)
(also, soon i'll post real blogs again-- as opposed to cutting and pasting self-promotional materials.)

huh.

i want to read this ten times and say a hundred things about it, but i can't right now.

i'm all twisted up this semester-- contorted with work!  one result of this is that i've been sadly neglecting this blog, and probably you.  in the meantime i've taken to "micro-blogging"-- text-length blog posts-- which is probably just about as creepy as it sounds.  nonetheless, i share brief updates on my whereabouts and the direction of my thoughts via a service called twitter, which i can (and do) update via the web and (more often) my cellular telephone.  if the whole thing doesn't freak you out too much, if you aren't too fretful of your status as dasein, you might consider joining.  heidegger is dead, and won't feel a thing.

(note: spellcheck just tried to make 'heidegger' 'headgear'.  and by 'dasein', it suggests, perhaps i meant 'casein'.  god help us all.  no, wait, he's dead too.)  

despite all the ways there are to be human, the variegated range of culture, there's a lot we all have in common-- every culture on earth.  we're all tool-makers, gossips-- we all read each others faces, read for intention, and are consequently adept at making, masking and mimicking them.  we all have a word that means 'one' and a word that means 'two' (although not always a word for zero, or numbers more than several); we all tell stories, and we all pause in our storytelling for effect.  we all live, and we all die, and we all have rituals to honor and mourn the dead.  

my aunt died this morning, unexpectedly.  she died in her sleep-- complications from diabetes-- in the sort of voluntary mental health facility she'd lived in for as long as i can remember, the kind she'd been in and out of for most of her life.  in and out.  not just in and out of institutions, but of everything.  she'd be gone for days or weeks or months and come back with a man or a long coat or empty eyes.  my early memories are punctuated by her comings and goings.  she did a lot drugs, she made plenty of mistakes, and her life for the last twenty years seemed to me to consist primarily in smoking cigarettes on patios and some occasional crafting.  but you could fill a hundred books with all of the things that aren't what they seem to me.  she may have thought thoughts as deep as space, but i never knew them.  i have this sense, though, a common sense, that a special kind of thoughtful regard is due.  so while leah's at home signing all the papers, i wrote a brief obituary as an alternative to the antiseptic form announcements that the paper runs otherwise.  it's not revelatory or illuminating, but i hope it's not sentimental either, and i think it's true.

jill gillespie, 55, was born in january of 1953 to nancy and calvin gillespie, the third of three.  she was curious, artless, gentle on the whole, and utterly without malice.  she was interested to know what was out there.  jill passed away in her sleep early monday morning.  she is survived by her brother, sister-in-law, and two neices.

 

the most self-defeating post ever.

this is my second ever blog (that i can recall) about contemporary politics. it won't take very long: WILL EVERYONE PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT SARAH PALIN!

seriously, when i heard that john mccain had chosen her as his running mate, the only thing i felt was embarrassed for him. a guy whose only hope seems to hang on some vague perception of him as a maverick-- a man of integrity, who does what he thinks is right while everyone else is doing what's merely expediant-- has chosen a running mate whose only creditial seems to be that some political strategist of unsubtle mind thinks that choosing her would be tactical. there didn't seem to me to be any real risk that hordes of women would mccain over obama on the grounds that sarah palin was his running mate. no need for political analysts to explain anything-- the move could not have been more pathetically obvious, ineffective, and self-defeating. i still hold this to be true.

what i failed to anticipate was that reasonable left-leaning people-- particular women-- would flip the fuck out, start groups, fill my inbox with forwards and my mini-feed with their sarah-palin-related feelings! and in this, perhaps the mccain campaign was actually a step ahead of me. because the outrage amongst people who would never support mccain anyway has made this into an issue that actually MIGHT rally hordes of women to the mccain campaign. in a race between mccain-palin and obama-biden, mccain-palin doesn't have a shot in hell. but make this a race between palin and "women against palin", and those soccer moms that everyone's so fucking concerned about might pick palin. and i might not blame them! because in amidst the the valid criticism of her qualifications and policy positions, people in groups like "women against palin" will likely also say things that reflect a certain conscious or unconsious disdain, a certain tone of contempt which those soccer moms, whoever they are, might reasonably take to heart.

it's true that mccain's choice of a running mate is an insult to women who work hard, women who are qualified for the jobs they hold-- women who are overqualified-- and it's an (embarrassingly obvious) insult to our intelligence, and to everyone's, to think that anyone will vote for her on her initial merits. this, i'll admit, didn't immediately occur to me as noteworthy, because every one of mccain's stances on every issue is an insult to women (and to everyone else). but, frankly, i find it almost equally insulting that other progressive people think that i need mccain's move explained to me, or that anyone else does. and in the meantime we're just creating the thing that we feared.

[another thing: in a couple of months i'm going to have to make this blog private for awhile-- meaning you can only read it if your email address is on a list of email addresses that i submit. it's a bummer, but i'm going to be paying a lot of money to send applications out to various graduate schools, and i don't really want any investigative application reviewers to be able to read my extremely informal musings, philosophical or otherwise. if you're on my blogroll, i'll add you automatically-- if you're not, and you ever check this and might want to continue to, please please let me know and i'll add you.]