Author: Ophelia Benson

In a N&C (Circumstances) a few days ago I asked a lot of questions about the relation (if any) between ethical commitments and autonomy. About whether it’s possible to have ethical commitments (as opposed to rules) at all without autonomy. I don’t know the answer. But I am skeptical about the possibility, and I think that problem (if it is one) gets overlooked too easily, when people think about religion as a source of ethical commitments and ideas.

I happened on some relevant remarks this morning, so thought I would add them to the mix. They’re by Susan Moller Okin in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? pp. 129-130.

Even the most prominent ‘political liberal’ of all, John Rawls, who rejects the imposition on religious sects that ‘oppose the modern world’ of the requirement that their children be educated so as to value autonomy and individuality , also argues that the liberal state should require that all children be eudcated so as to be self-supporting and be informed of their rights as citizens, including freedom of conscience…Nussbaum, who also endorses political liberalism, says that, while it respects nonautonomous lives, it ‘insists that every citizen have a wide range of liberties and opportunities; so it agrees…that a nonautonomous life should not be thrust upon someone by the luck of birth…Many parents belonging to religions or cultures that do not respect autonomy would (and do) very strongly resist their children’s being exposed to any religious or cultural views but their own. But, like Nussbaum (and to a lesser degree Rawls) I do not think that liberal states should allow this to happen. I believe that a certain amount of nonautonomy should be available as an option to a mature adult with extensive knowledge of other options, but not thrust on a person by his or her parents or group, through indoctrination – including sexist socialization – and lack of exposure to alternatives.

There. Exactly what I was thinking. ‘Lack of exposure to alternatives.’ The argument that religion should be treated with special consideration because ethical commitments are an especially valued and valuable part of individual identity seems dubious to me not only because religion is not the only source of such commitments, but also because for many people ethical commitments can be a kind of closed loop. They can be a closed loop and still be a valued part of identity…but does that matter? Or at least does it matter more than other considerations that come to mind? Like considerations about the merit of the ethical commitments in question (maybe the children of Mafiosi, of white supremacists, of warlords, grow up with strong ethical commitments to extortion and murder and genocide), and about whether the people who hold them have ever actually thought about them, and whether this question relates to the previous one. In other words, does it make any difference whether an ethical commitment is something you’re just born to, or whether it’s something you’ve consciously made? Surely it does. If we never think about ethical commitments, how do we separate the decent ones from the disastrous ones? Ethical commitments are not just adornments for our identities, they’re motivations to treat people well or badly; so they’re not just personal private concerns, they’re also public ones.

Speaking of radio (there’s a deft transition for you), I keep meaning to recommend this In Our Time from last month. It’s on the Mind-Body Problem, and the contestants are – no, that’s not right – the people doing the talking are Sue James, Anthony Grayling and Julian Baggini. It gets very amusing toward the end when Julian and Anthony Grayling get in a punch-up. No, I’m only joking. But Grayling says a rude word to Julian in Latin, and Julian laughs – rough stuff for philosophy! No not really, philosophy is actually very aggressive; it’s more aggressive than squash. No, not really, nothing is more aggressive than squash. They were talking about how aggressive the squash game in Ian McEwan’s new novel is, on Saturday Review the other day – and Tom Sutcliffe was also talking about how boring it is (the squash game, not the novel, which they all liked a lot) (apart from Tom Sutcliffe and the squash game – he didn’t like that part). Anyway this Latin punch-up is all the more amusing because the rude word Grayling calls Julian just happens to be the title of one of Julian’s Bad Moves. Is that a staggering coincidence or what! Well maybe it’s not a coincidence. Maybe Grayling carefully studied the B&W page that has the most recent Bad Moves listed by title, and memorized a few so that he could inject one into the discussion. Anyway, you should give it a listen, it’s very interesting as well as amusing.

Speaking of Julian (another deft transition for you), I tripped over this article of his in the Guardian a couple of days ago. What I was doing was, I was looking (via Google) for that review of the Dictionary I’d been told about, just in case it had smuggled itself online somewhere after all – and I found this article. It’s about internet interaction, a subject which has interested me for awhile – ever since I started internet interacting, I suppose. Before that it bored me senseless. The three of us talked about it over dinner that time – you remember: last October, when I was over there. I told you all about it at the time.

This is the part that interests me:

Leading philosophers who have written on the web, such as Hubert Dreyfus and Gordon Graham, have argued that this is largely because face-to-face we interact with the whole person, whereas in virtual environments we only have access to a small part of what they choose to reveal. Therefore a purely online relationship can never be with a whole human being. It’s an intuitively plausible argument, but even if the most intimate of relationships require physical contact, in our working lives, we do not and need not deal with the whole person. For example, many people behave very differently at work to how they do at home. Personal identity is extremely malleable, and people play different roles at different times of the same day. That means it is simply not necessary to know “the whole person” in order to have a good working relationship with them.

And there’s a little more to it than that, I think. It may be that some people actually reveal less of ‘the whole person’ in the real world than they do in virtual or written interactions. It may be that real world interactions bring out hostility, aggressiveness, shyness, inhibition, suspicion, awkwardness, inarticulacy and similar qualities that are not helpful to social interaction, that are not really particularly central or important to the ‘real’ nature of the person who shows them. John Carey says something to this effect in his introduction to the Everyman edition of Orwell’s essays. After a few sentences about how prickly, and ill at ease friends remember Blair as being, he says:

George Orwell the writer, by contrast, is confident, relaxed, open, democratic. This is not to claim that his writing misrepresents his ‘true’ self. You could just as easily argue that the true self was masked by shyness or awkwardness in life and came out in the writing.

Just so. It’s an interesting question. Is the person that other people see more real than the one we experience from inside? In some ways, it seems reasonable to say yes. Some of those ways are related to recent studies on self-esteem that indicate people tend to over-estimate many of their abilities. It’s possible that we all think we’re kinder, pleasanter, more considerate, less rude and selfish and me-firsty, than we in fact are. (It’s also possible that a lot of us think we’re less boring than we are. I’m pretty sure of that. I have only to think of various people who have bored me into near-comatose states to realize that. They surely didn’t know how boring they were, did they? If they had surely they would have shut up, somewhere along the way.) In that sense, and no doubt many similar ones, people who can see us from the outside do know us better than we know ourselves. But in others…they don’t, at least not necessarily. There is always at least the possibility of a gap between appearance and reality, between what shows externally and what is going on internally. It’s the other minds problem. We think we know; especially in very close, intimate relationships, we think we know. And maybe we do. But, then again…

Update – I decided to move this one too, since the discussion is still going on. Chris M supplied this link and this one.

Oh, jeezis. I saw a reference to Terry Eagleton’s piece in the Guardian at Normblog earlier today, but didn’t read it. I saw another reference just now at Harry’s place, and this time I did read it. It was – very horrible. Way more horrible than I expected. I’m not sure why. There’s just something about the preening, lit-critty, self-admiring tone of it all, of the aesthetic approach to mass murder, that just made my gorge rise. It’s as if he’s, I don’t know, admiring his reflection in a pool of blood, or combing his hair with someone’s blown-off hand. He’s not really making a political argument, that’s what’s weird – he’s doing some sort of languid, semi-ironic literary criticism. Literary criticism of suicide bombing – just what the world needs. What can he think he’s playing at?

Like hunger strikers, suicide bombers are not necessarily in love with death. They kill themselves because they can see no other way of attaining justice; and the fact that they have to do so is part of the injustice…People like Rosa Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more valuable cause. They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a more abundant life all round. Suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others; it is just that, unlike martyrs, they take others with them in the process. The martyr bets his life on a future of justice and freedom; the suicide bomber bets your life on it. But both believe that a life is only worth living if it contains something worth dying for. On this theory, what makes existence meaningful is what you are prepared to relinquish it for. This used to be known as God; in modern times it is mostly known as the nation. For Islamic radicals it is both inseparably.

How about that ‘just’ in ‘it is just that, unlike martyrs, they take others with them’? That’s quite a ‘just’! Oh is that all – well silly me then not to think of the suicide bombers as just like Steve Biko and Rosa Luxemburg. And then notice how quickly he forgets the thing about taking others – ‘But both believe that a life is only worth living if it contains something worth dying for.’ Not just dying for, Bub: killing for. Making other people die for. Imagine a fiery-eyed student popping into your office and locking the door and telling you he was about to give you the glory of dying along with him for something that makes life worth living. Would you take quite such an aesthetic view of the matter then? And he does it again – ‘what you are prepared to relinquish it for’. No! Pay attention, dammit. What you are prepared to make others relinquish it for. It’s not about you, it’s about them. Can’t you get that? Are you so caught up in this stupid dandyish word-spinning that you can’t hang on to such an obvious thought for two sentences?

See, this is what I’m saying about the ethical commitments thing, the identity thing. It’s not just about the damn ego, it’s about what you do to people.

And there are three more paragraphs of really disgusting verbal pirouetting, just as if he were droning about Henry James or Dostoevsky (oh yes, so he is), about the meaning of suicide bombing – ending up at this rich mess:

Blowing himself to pieces in a packed marketplace is likely to prove by far the most historic event of the bomber’s life. Nothing in his life, to quote Macbeth, becomes him like the leaving of it. This is both his triumph and his defeat. However miserable or impoverished, most men and women have one formidable power at their disposal: the power to die as devastatingly as possible. And not only devastatingly, but surreally. There is a smack of avant garde theatre about this horrific act. In a social order that seems progressively more depthless, transparent, rationalised and instantly communicable, the brutal slaughter of the innocent, like some Dadaist happening, warps the mind as well as the body. It is an assault on meaning as well as on the flesh – an ultimate act of defamiliarisation, which transforms the everyday into the monstrously unrecognisable.

Honest to fucking Christ. Is that cute or what? Can cultural theorists spin a metaphor or can they not. If that doesn’t make you sick, you have a stronger stomach than I do.

There are a lot of bizarre remarks in this piece in the LRB.

Within the limits he sets himself, Sharpe’s book is admirable…He takes pride in bringing to his task the skills of a professional historian, determined to ‘get history right’. He sets out to expose the stories told about Turpin since his death as factually incorrect…Sharpe is uncomfortable with myths.

Um…why should Sharpe not be ‘uncomfortable’ with myths? (That sentence is a good example of why ‘comfortable’ is one of the first words that was defined in the Fashionable Dictionary – the original one, the one on B&W. ‘Comfortable’ is such a weasel word. What’s comfort got to do with anything? It’s not about bums on seats, or even about elevated heart rate and sweaty palms. It’s about critical thinking, epistemology, rational inquiry. Thinking that myths are out of place in ‘professional’ history is not a giveaway of pathetic nerdy insecurities, it’s simply a reasonable idea of what history is supposed to be: to wit, evidence-based and logically sound.) Why should he not be ‘determined’ to ‘get history right’? What should he be determined to do, get it wrong?

What interests Sharpe about this story (which he has read in the much abbreviated fifth edition) is that it is false: what should have interested him is that Ainsworth’s readers (and the book was an enormous bestseller) thought it was true.

I beg your pardon? Why is that what should have interested him? If that’s not the book he’s writing, then why should it interest him? It may well be a highly interesting question, why Ainsworth’s readers thought the Black Bess story (that Turpin rode a horse 200 miles in 12 hours) was true, but it’s not the only possible subject. David Wootton does go on to say some interesting things on this question, but it doesn’t follow that Sharpe ought to have written them instead of what he did write.

This doesn’t occur to Sharpe. His idea of the historian as someone who gets at the facts means that he can give a fine account of the activities of Turpin and the Essex gang, but it makes him quite unfitted to be a reader of Rookwood.

Um…so? So on earth what? You read Rookwood if you want to, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to. And what is with this absurd scorn for the idea of ‘ the historian as someone who gets at the facts’? Well we know what’s with it. Alas.

Sharpe could have been provoked by his subject into reinventing the idea of what history is: instead, his conclusion, ‘Dick Turpin and the Meaning of History’, retreats to the old cliché that the business of the historian is to deal in facts…The language of fact and fiction, critical and uncritical thinking, is useful if one wants to address the question of whether Turpin was a thug. But it hardly helps one address the question of why Rookwood appealed to the imagination of its readers.

The old cliché – it’s a shame, isn’t it, the way historians will go on thinking that they ought to deal in facts rather than myths. Unless, of course, they are in fact doing histories of myth, which some historians do. But they don’t all do that, and why should they? (And if they do, one hopes they do it with some reference to facts somewhere along the way, lest they tell us about Navajo myths that actually belonged to the Chinese, and Egyptian myths that in fact originated with the people of Tierra del Fuego.) And some historians inquire into the history of literary taste; but, again, not all of them. If the question of why Rookwood appealed to the imagination of its readers was not Sharpe’s subject, it’s not clear why he should have addressed it.

Guess what David Wootton is writing about. It made me snort with laughter when I saw it. Can you guess? I’ll tell you. ‘He is writing a history of the body from Hippocrates to Foucault.’ Attaboy! No chance of any old clichés there! That’s some fresh untilled cliché-free ground, all right. I think I’ll review it when it comes out, and keep asking why he didn’t write a history of underwear from Nefertiti to Adorno instead.

I heard a classic example of the journalistic habit of translation that I have pointed out a few times in the past, earlier today on the BBC World Service. It was a discussion of creationism and the pressure to get it taught in US schools, between Peter Atkins and creationist Donald DeYoung. At one point DeYoung (or else the journalist) mentioned ‘design’ and Atkins said ‘There is no design in nature.’ DeYoung didn’t hear, and Atkins repeated with great distinctness and emphasis, ‘There. is. no. design. in. nature.’ DeYoung, a physicist, disagreed and talked about the weight of the proton: if it had been just a tiny amount heavier, etc (the anthropic principle, in short). The journalist cut that off, as being too far afield, and said ‘You [meaning Atkins] say there is no order in nature – ‘ ‘That’s not what he said,’ I shouted at the radio. ‘That’s not what I said,’ Atkins said without shouting (well he was nearby). ‘I said there is no design in nature.’ ‘Same thing,’ said the journalist. ‘It’s not the same thing!!’ I shouted even louder. ‘It’s not the same thing,’ said Atkins.

I mean. Come on. The guy thinks order and design are the same thing?! And all [I mean many – not all – I haven’t checked them all, have I!] journalists, apparently, think ‘no evidence that’ is the same thing as ‘proof that not,’ and so they use the two interchangeably with gay abandon. It’s an outrage.

Really. Journalists ought to be licensed, or something. And they ought to learn some basic vocabulary and concepts before they get that license. I mean that literally – well except of course that if they did, Julian would run out of Bad Moves. As it is the supply seems to be infinite.