In this Washington Post editorial on Ezra Klein's Wonkblog by Dylan Matthews, we get an attempt to connect philosophy to current political discourse, with the conclusion "...which is perhaps why, in general, politicians don’t spend a lot of time listening to philosophers."
The issue is desert, as in "do rich people deserve to keep their money?" Matthews characterizes the majority opinion among philosophers on this issue as being that some kind of determinism, whether hard or soft, is true, so the notion of "desert" doesn't make sense, and thus philosophy is so divorced from common sense, i.e. the terms in which ordinary people couch their arguments, that we can presumably just ignore philosophers altogether.
Very relevant to Chapter 17 of MacIntyre's After Virtue, "Justice as a Virtue: Changing Conceptions," Matthews brings up both John Rawls and Robert Nozick, who, as MacIntyre also points out, have opposite views about the directives of social justice but neither of which couches their argument in terms of desert. MacIntyre states (p. 249-250):
Neither of them make any reference to desert in their account of justice, nor could they consistently do so... Rawls allows that common sense views of justice connect it with desert, but argues first that we do not know what anyone deserves until we have already formulated the rules of justice (and hence we cannot base our understanding of justice upon desert), and secondly that when we have formulated the rules of justice it turns out that it is not desert that is in question anyway, but only legitimate expectations... Nozick['s]... scheme of justice being based exclusively on entitlements can allow no place for desert."
MacIntyre is criticizing them on these counts, so Matthews is incorrect when he says in the article that desert is foreign to MacIntyre's view as well. However, it is hard to see how the concept of desert could fit without alteration into any kind of virtue ethics, and MacIntyre's Aristotelian point is difficult to formulate. The problem with Rawls and Nozick, following virtually all Enlightenment-infested political philosophers, is the notion of a social contract: of autonomous individuals coming together to make some deal, and all obligations flowing out of that. We've had several episodes (most notably Hegel) arguing against this model of the self. MacIntyre's version of this is that we're born heaped with obligations, put there by our very nature as beings-with-families, as political animals. Our parents deserve our respect, for instance, insofar as they've done their parental duties, and our fellow citizens deserve quite a lot from us quite apart from any good deeds or services to us in particular that they might have individually have performed.
As Nietzsche understood, most of our everyday moral concepts like "desert" really do require some remaking given Enlightenment advances in science, and Matthews is correct that our political vocabulary is wanting philosophically, but that doesn't mean that a philosopher needs to deny all the intuitions behind everyday moral sentiments, any more than a rejection of theistic morality entails nihilism. Even Stevenson the emotivist thinks that our moral expressions are conveying something that can be fodder for argumentation. Matthews runs hard and soft determinism together, but the latter, also known as compatibilism, I take to be a much more common view among philosophers. So yes, we're determined on some physical level, but that's largely irrelevant to our everyday decision-making practices: we can still talk sensibly about the choices we make. Likewise, though desert need not be taken as a fundamental moral phenomenon, in the manner of sin settling on the soul, and so in these more enlightened times we lose the rationale for retributive punishment, we can still talk coherently about fairness and have today's debate: Is it more fair for a rich person to keep all of his money or to have to put some in the public pot, given that said public pot is a necessary condition (through police, roads, education, defense, the monetary system itself, banking security, etc.) of his having all that money?
Though it's silly to talk about philosophy in general yielding a verdict on this or any other decision, I do think that determinist considerations undermine the strong conception of individual desert. If desert, fairness, and rights are not a matter of God-given assignments, but of ongoing social deliberation (which is only reasonable given how recently in history this moral vocabulary came about; something God-given and basic should have been evident right from the start, right?), then the hard-line conservative doesn't have any philosophical ground (such as a reference to natural property rights a la Locke) to stand on here. Rather, the current debate is exactly part of the process of determining what we as a society want fairness to count as in this context, given our current situation. The resistance to this philosophical point is on par with the common cultural gut reaction against all forms of subtlety when it comes to ethics. Again, people feel like either there must be some hard rock standard (divine or otherwise), or it's all just arbitrary. Getting over this insistence on oversimplification will be a definite sign that our culture is becoming less immature.
-Mark Linsenmayer
http://www.slgardiner.com/courses/A201/MacPheresonOne.pdf
Are we tacitly acknowledging that our modern political ethics have broken down because Hobbes’s project of breaking decisively with the teleological natural law tradition in favor of his contractualist “positive law” ( man-made law) proved in practice to be too arbitrary and illegitimate in the mind of the common man to be obeyed? Don’t contracts assume the sovereign and equal status of both parties entering into the agreement? Did this new horizontal conception of law NECESSITATE reforms in the political order? Abandoning the assumptions of teleological natural law seems to have triggered the gradual dissolution of the European monarchical political order in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. I think further study and contemplation on the natural law/positive law rupture that occurred in the 17th century (Salamanca School vs. Hobbes) would shed some more light on our contemporary situation and the apparent loss of faith in enlightenment law theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca#The_law_of_peoples_and_international_law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law#Hobbes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_law
“The resistance to this philosophical point is on par with the common cultural gut reaction against all forms of subtlety when it comes to ethics.”
Seems to be of a piece with Wes’ post on anti-intellectualism.
“Rather, the current debate is exactly part of the process of determining what we as a society want fairness to count as in this context, given our current situation.” Yes!
I myself am a determinist and could be described as some kind of quasi-realist about desert. While I think that intuitions on desert can roughly be cashed out in terms of our sentiments, I would ultimately like to see desert eliminated from the debate about wealth-redistribution. In the short run, we should certainly acknowledge our utter dependence on our social and physical environments, e.g. no one can survive without help, but I think the anti-realist or quasi-realist about desert would suggest we focus on the real consequences of our economic policies. Do the rich deserve to be wealthy? Rarely. Do they deserve to have their wealth taken away from them? Rarely. Do the poor deserve to be poor? Rarely. Do the poor deserve to be given money? Rarely. So it’s clear that deserts don’t tell us what to do here. I think the relevant question is not deontological but consequential, viz. which policy is better for society? Maybe the poor don’t deserve free healthcare, but society would be better off if they had it. Maybe the rich don’t deserve to be heavily taxed, but the good consequences outweigh the bad.
I wonder how many of those advocating taking wealth from those that produce it to give to those that don’t would apply same principle to the olympic medal winners.
Life isn’t a competition, and in any case, those that are rich have not necessarily produced any wealth- even for themselves.
Matthews’ article struck me as a bait-and-switch maneuver. He opens as if the topic is going to be pitting individualism against collectivism but then, by framing the issue in terms of free-will and desert, individualism takes center stage and the larger social context recedes into the background again.
“You didn’t build that, not all by yourself.” Because this notion is being presented in the context of retail politics – as opposed to philosophy or political science – it is framed in terms of the nation’s physical infrastructure (roads, cops, etc.) and in terms of common human relations (parents, teachers, etc.). But, as Mark points out, the issue could very well be framed around differing concepts of the self, perhaps pitting Hegel’s self against Locke’s. (Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence is basically a paraphrasing of Locke’s philosophy and it was penned at the height of the Enlightenment period.) When this classical liberalism and the autonomous self of the Enlightenment is added to Cold-war politics and Ayn Randian libertarianism (There is no such thing as society, she says, only individuals), the result is a deep and abiding aversion to anything that smells like “collectivism”, i.e. Godless, commie bastards. When you add Emersonian self-reliance, Reagan’s bootstraps, and a thousand Hollywood cowboys, this hyper-individualism is further deepened and mythologized. It has become common sense, and it’s almost unthinkable to challenge this feature of American culture. As we see in the present presidential race, even the idea that individuals get help from other individuals is treated with suspicion, if not scorn.
As I understand it, however, there are all kinds of philosophers and philosophies that profoundly disagree with our common sense notions of the individual self. Some forms of Buddhism are said to entail an outright denial of the self as illusory, for example, but there are deeply challenging counter-currents even within the American tradition. William James (Emerson’s godson) wrote an essay titled, “Does Consciousness Exist?” and answered that question in the negative. He meant to deny the Cartesian self, the idea of consciousness as a substance, as a thing or entity and instead made a case for consciousness as a process, as an ongoing stream of experience. The idea of an autonomous subjective self, he thought, was a kind of residue left over from the belief in an eternal soul. He thought that this notion of an individual self would continue to evaporate until it disappeared altogether.
John Dewey is extremely helpful here, I think. The Stanford Encyclopedia article on “Dewey’s Political Philosophy”, particularly subsection 3.1 on “Individualism and Abstraction”, is just about all one needs to get a sense of the pragmatist’s alternative to the common sense conception of the individual self. Dewey’s perspective was decidedly progressive. If he were active today, I think, he’d be well to the left of anyone in the Democratic party.
As the article notes, “Dewey’s interest in education was embedded in a wider concern about progressive social change. He was a supporter of such causes as women’s suffrage, his political activities included presidency of the teachers’ union, sponsorship of the ACLU, participation in the ‘trial’ of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1938 and he published much commentary on domestic and international politics and spoke on behalf of many causes. The Public and Its Problems (1927) contained a defence of participatory democratic ideals against sceptics such as Walter Lippmann. Perhaps most relevant of all, the article notes, he was a critic of laissez-faire liberalism (what we’d now call free-market conservatism) and its accompanying individualistic view of society from his early writings. This criticism was amplified during the Depression, where he expressed a form of liberal and democratic socialism in his philosophical writings and he was a leading critic from the left of Roosevelt’s New Deal while at the same time opposing Soviet communism and its western apologists. These details can be found in the first subsection, a biographical sketch.
As I mentioned, however, section 3.1 speaks directly to the issue of individualism on a philosophical level. Not unlike the critique of “the myth of the given”, “Dewey criticises classical liberalism for conceiving of the individual as ‘something GIVEN, something already there’, prior to society and for viewing social institutions for coordinating the interests of pre-social individuals. Instead, he argues, social institutions are not ‘means for obtaining something for individuals. They are means for CREATING individuals’.” (Emphasis is Dewey’s.) “In this way, classical liberalism exemplifies ‘the most pervasive fallacy of philosophical thinking’.” The section goes on to explain that the self is an abstraction, a concept and. although this abstraction is quite very often useful in our thinking and for inquiry, Dewey thinks, “this abstraction goes wrong ‘whenever the distinctions or elements that are discriminated are treated as if they were final and self-sufficient’, …as when classical liberalism treats the individual as ‘something given.’ Instead, Dewey argues, ‘liberalism knows that an individual is nothing fixed, given ready-made. It is something achieved, and achieved not in isolation but with the aid and support of conditions, cultural and physical: — including in “cultural”, economic, legal and political institutions as well as science and art’.”
On this view, liberal policies are those aimed at creating the conditions by which individuality can be achieved. This goes along with a positive conception of freedom. As opposed to freedom from external restraints, positive freedom means something like the capacity to be the author of your life, which demands the kind of education wherein the development of critical thinking skills are central. Since sickness and poverty are just as injurious to such positive freedom, liberal policies will also be aimed at minimizing those risks as well. Although the goal is freedom and individuality, such policies would surely be attacked, in the current political climate, as un-American, as socialism and/or as tyranny.
On this view, it’s not just that “you didn’t build that all by yourself”. It’s not just that your achievements are possible only within a social context. The individual capable of enjoying freedom is itself a product of culture and society. You are built, in a very real sense, by many other hands.
“The replacement of liberal laissez-faire policies with what Dewey called intelligent social control or social action is presented as a requirement of positive liberty or individuality… [T]hroughout his life he argued that education to produce undocile, unservile citizens was essential, in the name of individuality. More pointedly, Dewey argued, particularly in the 1930s, that a socialized economy was necessary for individuality.”
Great piece David.
Here in New Zealand we’ve enjoyed the benefits of liberal and democratic socialism coupled with free and compulsory education and universal suffrage since pre-Dewey days.
Don’t let anyone tell you , “It wouldn’t work” It can and does.
I’m not politically active and I’m not trying to make a political point here. It just seems important to mention one example of real-world outcomes from the sort of government proposed by Dewey.
We enjoy individual freedom and opportunity, equal to any, combined with state care that’s second to none. It’s one of the least corrupt societies in the world.
Sweeping statements, I know, but true at their core.
It has been tried and it does work.
Again, thanks David, and I hope this comment doesn’t detract anything from your argument.
Great post David,
“Dewey criticises classical liberalism for conceiving of the individual as ‘something GIVEN, something already there’, prior to society and for viewing social institutions for coordinating the interests of pre-social individuals. Instead, he argues, social institutions are not ‘means for obtaining something for individuals. They are means for CREATING individuals’.”
This is the problem with social contract theories and the various ways in which society and individual are implicitly set against each other as absolute categories.
Dewey is playing games… Classical liberals never claimed that individuals were not formed by their environment. Read Adam Smith’s Theory of moral sentiments. Be very wary of anyone openly saying people are means not ends. And re Dewey’s comments in the 30s re preferences for a socialised economy… Please note as per most of his ilk he was a supporter of the Soviets as incidentally most economic textbooks of the time. It is not without reason many are suspicious of people whose names are attached to support of collapsed actual tyrannies.