Sympathy and Self-interest
(a
talk given at Virginia Tech, March 28, 2012)
I
– Introduction
I want to discuss what might be
called the psychological foundations of ethics, or perhaps of ethical
systems. It’s not really a question of
what goes on inside us when we act ethically, but rather of what it is about us
that underlies having ethical rules at all.
When you or I act morally, do the
right thing, any number of things may be going on in our minds. Perhaps, when I help you collect the papers
you dropped, nothing much is going on in my mind; I’m just acting from habit in
accordance with a vague system of moral imperatives that I’ve
internalized. It’s tempting to call such
acts ‘instinctive’ but these dispositions are in large part learned.
Sometimes a lot more is going
on. Perhaps Homer Hokie finds himself tempted
to try to appropriate his friend’s beer, or his date, at a party, and he has to
resist the temptation either by giving himself an internal talking-to about
right and wrong, or about the obligations of friendship, or by more complicated
reflection to reconcile his conflicting motivations.
And of course sometimes when one
does the right thing one isn’t acting ethically at all. If I refrain from misbehavior only because
someone is watching or because I fear some sort of punishment, then even though
I’m doing the right thing, I’m not doing it for the right reason.
Action in accordance with the
ethical rules because they are the ethical rules is right action. So is action flowing, more or less
automatically, from good character. What
I am interested in right now are the psychological motivators of the rules,
that is, about the foundations of morality in the sense of those aspects of our
nature that make it possible for us to have systems that restrain our behavior
in light of the interests of others.
Moral theory, of the nature of
the good, of the organization of society, of life well conducted and life well
led, can become quite complicated and controversial, but it has to start with
our capacities for caring. Just as
physical science has to start with our capacities for perception even though it
obviously goes far, far beyond them, so in ethics we can only start with who we
are.
We have no sense organ for
perceiving goodness, and even if we did, it would not follow that we would care
about it one way or the other.
Pure reason cannot by itself
motivate us to do anything, and this is true both when motivation is taken to
be giving a reason to act and when it means actually moving us to act.
As Hume puts it in his
delightfully subversive way:
“Reason is, and
ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to
any other office
than to serve and obey them.”
And, a little later:
“’Tis not
contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching
of my little
finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to
prevent the
least uneasiness of an Indian or
person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as
little contrary
to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my
greater, and
have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter.”[1]
Hume’s point is that reason alone
can never motivate us. We must care, one
way or another, about something to begin with.
Hume and his friend Adam Smith
and most of the whole tradition recognize two basic motivators, self-interest
and sympathy.
Some things are pleasant and some
are unpleasant and we are drawn to the pleasant and repelled by the
unpleasant. This is really a tautology,
since the pleasant is just the attractive and the unpleasant the aversive. Maximizing the pleasant and minimizing the
unpleasant is in (or just is) our self-interest. That’s one motivator.
The second motivator is the
interests of others with whom we sympathize.
I would in fact go further than
saying that positive and negative feelings are the available motivators of
action. They are the sources, and the
only ultimate sources, of moral values.
The only things that are intrinsically good or bad are the mental states
of conscious beings. As my friend Steve
Sapontzis likes to put it, values require feelings. More on this later. At present I want to
address the motivators for doing the right thing, however the right thing is
determined.
II
Self-interest and Sympathy
Every conscious being is subject
to pain and ipso facto has an interest in avoiding or minimizing it, and thus
has at least rudimentary self-interest.
This is nearly a logical truth. It is false if there can be a conscious
being without the possibility of aversion or attraction. I suppose that is logically possible although
it is difficult to see what the point would be of having such
consciousness.
In any event we know that (at
least) all vertebrates can experience pain, and therefore all humans, past a
very early stage of development, can do so.
So we all have self-interest.
The evidence is very strong that
all primates have some degree of sympathy, at least for their kin, and this is
probably true of all mammals and many other animals.
Thus both sympathy and
self-interest are natural for us.
It does not follow that they are
therefore desirable, or that we are better off with both. Contrary to the suppositions of many
advertisements for foods, medicines, and cosmetics, being natural is not automatically
being good. Love, sunshine, and flowers
are natural, but so are hate, smallpox, and old age. My presbyopia is a natural condition of my
advanced years, but it’s not a good thing, and there is nothing wrong with the
quite unnatural bifocals that help correct for it.
Self-interest and sympathy are
both natural and effectively inescapable, but both can be modified by conscious
or unconscious factors.
Of course in most of us, and in
all of us originally, sympathy is more or less limited, to our family or tribe
or nation or race or species. Similarly
self-interest is originally crude and short-sighted. But both individuals and
societies have seen the circle of concern broaden more and more. So even though we start with the sympathy and
self-interest we are born with, education and experience and reflection, and
even the systematic development of moral theory can extend are modify them. We can, and usually do, learn to share. We can, and usually do, learn to delay
gratification in order to improve future satisfaction.
Here is the place to consider a
couple of objections. Some claim that
all our acts, even those that appear to be altruistic, are actually
selfish. This is preposterous on its
face. People run into fires to save
strangers, soldiers throw themselves on grenades, cabbies turn in fortunes left
in their cabs. Life is full of much less dramatic altruistic acts. We buy
life insurance, pay taxes more or less cheerfully to support schools that neither
we nor ours will attend, contribute to causes that cannot benefit us
directly. Can all these acts be selfish?
The sympathy-denier has to say
that I buy life insurance, which will pay only once I’m dead, for some selfish
reason. Could it be that I will be
shunned and shamed if I don’t? No,
because almost no one knows whether I have life insurance or not, and almost no
one cares. My wife knows, but I could
have deceived her with phony insurance, and maybe I wouldn’t have to. Love is blind after all. Isn’t it interesting that, as far as I know,
there is no phony life insurance. There
must be no market for it.
Perhaps the denier will suggest
that I buy life insurance because I will
be pleased to look down from Heaven (or, more likely, up from Hell) and see my
wife and daughter flourishing? But I
don’t expect to survive death in any form or any place. Much more to the point, I would gain pleasure
from my family’s flourishing, only because I care about them, not just about
myself.
When I do something that I think
I should do, or act from generosity or love, I may get a feeling of
satisfaction or at least avoid remorse.
To think that I act in order to get the satisfaction or avoid the
remorse is just a muddle. I get the
satisfaction or the remorse because of my judgment of the act. If I do in fact feel good about contributing
to the food bank, that is because I think that the food bank should be
supported. I certainly don’t contribute
in order to increase my own pleasure. If
that were my goal several cases of good dark beer would be much more
cost-effective.
When I act deliberately, my
choice is what I think best to do.
That’s a truism. But what I think
best to do is generally not just what I think
is in my selfish interest.
Almost all of us, almost all of
the time, are guided at least in part by sympathy. It is unfortunately true that some humans
seem totally devoid of any consideration whatever for the good of others. There are not many of them. We call them sociopaths and do what we can to
restrain their actions.
There are others, most clearly
Ayn Rand and her devotees, who admit that there is such a thing as sympathy,
but claim that we should resist it and try to suppress it entirely. Don’t be a sucker. Look out for number one. You should never let concern for anyone else
get in the way of your only duty, pursuing your own self-interest. The weak may call that selfishness, but for
the truly heroic it’s a virtue, not a vice.
There is no ironclad logical
refutation of this view, but it is exceptionally poor advice. Of course if one never really cares about
another human or animal then one’s heart will never be broken. But a life without risk of heartbreak is a
life without love, a life hardly worth living at all.
Adam Smith claimed that sympathy
is universal. “The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of
society, is not altogether without it”.[2] Society is formed by human connections of
both sympathy and self-interest, and perfected by the “invisible hand,”
primarily a product of self-interest.
And Hume, too:
“No quality of
human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than
that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by
communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or
even contrary to our own.”[3]
III
Contract Theories
Even though sympathy was long
recognized as powerful, essentially universal, and capable of great extension
through education, very few have concluded that it alone is a sufficient basis
for morality or the organization of society.
We need more, so we need to draw on that other basic motivator,
self-interest.
Theories basing all or some of
the moral rules on self-interest are, broadly speaking, contract theories. The rules are those we all agree upon. We do
unto others just as they agree to do unto us.
Historically there have been a few real contracts, or approximations to
them. The Mayflower Compact is often
cited as an example.
Still, I never agreed to any universal
contract to obey the law, tell the truth, refrain from theft, etc. Did you? So almost always the contract is a
theoretical construct. It’s a matter of
what we would agree to, or to which we be taken to have implicitly agreed.
There is vague form of implicit
contract theory that has some, but not much, plausibility. I’m sure most of you have encountered it. On this view by living in society and
receiving its benefits you have you have incurred an obligation to comply with
the rules. You have benefitted from
police protection, public education, clean water, transportation, the
enforceability of contracts and so on, and in return society has the right to
expect that you will behave yourself.
This is not a ridiculous theory
but it’s not a persuasive one, either.
As a child one does of course benefit from society, but children can’t
make contracts. We can imagine a society
in which at a certain age, maybe 16 or 18, one takes an oath to obey the rules
in return for the benefits one has received and will continue to receive. Those who declined would be expelled from the
society. That might be an interesting
society, but it isn’t ours.
Another position that looks
something like a contract is this. We
(whoever ‘we’ are, perhaps a sovereign to whom we all submit) lay out the rules
and we set up severe punishments for
violators of those rules. But this isn’t
a contract theory because it isn’t really a moral theory at all, just a variety
of the appeal to fear.
The plausible forms of contract theories
argue that the proper rules of justice are those we would all agree to if were
weren’t biased or ignorant or short-sighted.
It’s clear that as we are we could not come to an agreement about, say,
justice in taxation. Mitt Romney and I
are just not going to agree about marginal tax rates for the very wealthy.
The proper rules, on this theory,
are not those to which we, as we are, would
agree. Rather they are the rules
to which we would agree if we were free of our limitations of knowledge and rationality. They those to which we, if purified of the
relevant imperfections, would agree.
John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, imagines us coming
to agreement behind a “veil of ignorance.”
Behind the veil we have a lot of general information, but lack some
important specifics. We know very much
about human nature, but we do not know who we are or our age or gender. We know a lot of social science, we
understand how societies and economies work, but we do not know our place in
society or our economic status. We all
have the same, very extensive, information and we are all at least reasonably
rational. There are many more
complications, some of which I will mention later.
Behind such a veil, Rawls argues,
we would agree to a democratic society with hefty protection of individual
rights. In this society economic
inequality, even fairly substantial inequality, would be permitted as long it
made the whole society better off and no one worse off. We would have a free market economy with a
substantial and fairly high safety net, moderately progressive taxation, and
equal opportunity for all ethnic groups, genders, religions, and orientations
A Theory of Justice is a very impressive work, but naturally not
everyone was convinced. To the objection
that the conclusion’s correspondence to the ideals of 20th Century
American liberals showed that it could hardly be taken as an eternal ideal,
Rawls replied that his goal was not a theory of justice for all time, but one
for us here and now.
The literature on A Theory of Justice is enormous, and I have read only a tiny
fraction of it. As you would expect,
much of the controversy is about whether or not our agreement behind the veil
would be as Rawls describes. Those of us
with a high tolerance for risk might prefer a society in which some are much
worse off and some extremely better off,
given our chances of being in the preferred group. Both libertarians and socialists think that
Rawls has cooked the books.
I am arguing not that Rawls has
gotten it wrong, but that the whole idealized contract project is
misguided. Ideal contracts just aren’t
what we need.
IV
Problems with contracts
Any theory or justice or any
other good that rests on mutual agreement between self-interested agents
necessarily leaves out those who are not party to the agreement, the
non-contractors.
For Hume justice and property
rights rest on contract, and he draws the conclusion that any being too weak to
harm us would not be a party to that contract, since we have nothing to fear
from them and they have no bargaining power.
“Were there a species of creatures, intermingled with
men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of
body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never,
upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment; the
necessary consequence, I think, is that we should be bound, by the laws of
humanity, to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly
speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them, nor could
they possess any right of property, exclusive of such arbitrary lords.[4]”
Here Hume recognizes the limits
of contract-based justice and invokes “the laws of humanity” resting, I take
it, on sympathy, beyond those limits.
Rawls also explicitly recognizes that justice is not the whole of
morality, but he wants to bring at least children and the senile within the
scope of justice. He does this by
stipulating that the contractors behind the veil see themselves as heads of
families. They will, presumably, agree
to rules that protect both the rights (of property, etc.) and the persons of
these pre- or post-contracting family members.
This gives young children, for
example, only derivative standing in the justice community. They matter, but only because full-fledged
contractors care for them. Of course for
Rawls children in the real world have standing in accordance with the rules of
justice. It is the rules that are
derived from the agreement of the contractors behind the veil, and those (that
is, us purified) care about children and thus set up appropriate rules.
There are two important questions
about Rawls’s theory. that I am not
going to pursue. First, how can he prove
that the imaginary contractors would make the decisions he attributes to them? For
example, might not less risk-adverse contractors agree to a less equal society?
And second, even if we did know what these veiled and purified beings would
conclude, can it be shown that we should care?
I’m not after Rawls here, I’m
after the reliance on contracts, real or imagined, to determine all or most of
the moral rules.
Any contract-based theory of
justice (or anything else) must divide the moral universe into two exclusive
classes, those who are party to the
contract and those who are not. There is
the moral community of those who agree, and then there is everything else. Full-fledged contractors are persons, with
inherent value. Everything else, young
children, fetuses, chimpanzees, dogs, fish, dandelions, gravel is inherently
valueless. If, but only if, some person
cares about a rock, or a dog, or a child, that rock, dog, or child, has
derivative value.
There are problems here both in
what is inside and what is outside the charmed circle.
Consider the assumption that all
the contractors have equal status, i.e. that all persons should have the same
rights and responsibilities. We see this
in the recent ‘personhood’ legislation in the Virginia General Assembly. The goal is to assign to fetuses, even as
very early zygotes, the same legal status as adult humans.
But there are degrees and
varieties of personhood. A number of
years ago, when my daughter was 10, she asked how old one had to be to
drive. I told her the minimum age was 16.
“I think you ought to be able to drive at 10,” she said. Knowing her judgment of some of her
classmates, I asked “Do you think all the boys in your class should be able to
drive?” “Well, girls should be able to
drive at 10.”
That conversation was probably a
tactical draw, which is doing pretty well for a parent, but it demonstrates
that a 10-year-old is perfectly well aware that not all people of the same age
are equally responsible, or intelligent, or mature. Some people are more responsible at 10 or 12
than others are at 20 or 30 or ever. Often
one can reason fairly well with very young children, and sometimes reasonable
beings cease to be reasonable.
There are excellent reasons for
using arbitrary boundaries such as the nearly magic age of 18. Such cut-offs are imperfect, of course, but
the alternative would be some system of
judging individual cases. Any
such system would be open to drastic abuse.
We all know how literacy tests were used. So if you’re 18, you’re in, unless you’re
very, very seriously impaired.
Legally minor children have
rights, but not the same ones as adults, and not the same ones at all
ages. Less egalitarian societies may
have a much larger variety of
‘persons’ Until fairly recently
in our society, women had important
legal rights, but not the same as men. This did not mean that women were not
considered persons. They were, to be
blunt, lesser persons. Of course this
is true today in Saudi Arabia and other places.
Within the boundaries
established, let us assume, by contract, the parties in fact almost never have
the same bargaining power, wit, or predictive skill.
In the fully abstract bargaining
theories historically popular in economics and political theory, all the
parties are assumed to have the same, complete, knowledge, the same mastery of
probability, the same foresight, and each to have a fixed initial set of
preferences. These stipulations are, of
course, recognized by all to be false of the real world. Still I think it is very easily overlooked
how very false they are.
In fact some of us are quite
ignorant most of the time, and very rarely do both parties have the same
understanding of the facts relevant to their situation. We’re lazy, or in a hurry, or just out of our
depth. We don’t read the fine print, or
don’t understand it, or rely on professional advice about what we don’t
understand. That professional advice may
or may not be competent and may or may not be honest. Eager to install the new software update, I
click to accept the agreement without reading it to be sure it doesn’t provide
for seizure of my home or sexual services on demand. I’m sure you’re much more careful and always
read those licenses.
Contracts are often invalidated
in courts, but probably not as often as they should be. Some sorts of contracts are just
illegal. You cannot, in the United
States, sell yourself into slavery. Bad
contacts, starting with insane and often fraudulent mortgages and moving on to
the deceptive sales of securities based
on those mortgages, triggered the financial misfortunes from which we are only
now starting to recover. In this case a
mix of greed, stupidity, and deception, impossible in the pure theory of
contracts, had results that were all too actual.
No true believer in the value of
contract theory would deny any of the defects of actual contracts I have just
rehearsed. Still, she or he would
insist, abstract contract theory is a valuable theoretical tool. Of course abstract contractors aren’t just
like us, but they are importantly similar.
This I deny. The abstract contractors just pop into
existence on a desert island or uninhabited planet as rational adults with a
set of likes and dislikes. They have no
parents, and their personalities are simply given. We’re certainly not like that at all.
We are social animals, social not
just in our lives but in our selves. How
we see the world, and just what world we see, is very largely determined by how
we grow up, who we know, how we are treated and how we are perceived. Our most basic wants and needs are doubtless
built in. We need and want food and
drink and shelter from heat and cold, and companionship and, in due time,
sex. But even here the forms these basic
wants take are shaped by our surroundings and by the actions and opinions and
desires of others.
Beyond the basics our desires are
profoundly shaped, and sometimes wholly created, by the people and systems with
which we live. In many cases, in fact,
our desires are quite indeterminate, and we don’t know what we want. We follow the incentives and disincentives,
the pats on the head and the disappointing grades, and we end up somewhere,
somewhere comfortable if we’re lucky.
Not often, but every now and
then, there is a very satisfactory committee meeting. The participants begin with conflicting
views, some determinate and others quite vague, and at the end a genuinely
unanimous conclusion is reached that corresponds to none of the starting positions. Of course the conclusion may turn out to be
disastrous, that’s the way of the
world. Unanimity is never a guarantee of
wisdom. But the meeting was a success in
an important way that demonstrates the connection between sympathy and
individual preferences. Everyone’s
preferences have changed and the new shared preference is importantly that of
the group as a whole.
It’s not just that we are always
more or less ignorant, more or less irrational, often distracted – these of our
defects everyone admits. But the
implicit requirement of fixed preferences independent of social interaction is
a fatal flaw in contract-based theory.
We just aren’t like that.
A few of us, some of the time,
are rational contractors, but most of us, most of the time, and the vast majority
of conscious beings all of the time, are not.
I’ve been arguing that we are too unlike the idealized contractors for
conclusions about them to be of much use.
And for infants, fetuses, nonhuman animals, the severely impaired and
the demented, the contract game can’t even get started.
Smith and Hume insist that there
is more to morality than contract-based justice, and Rawls concurs, though not
as prominently. But whatever that ‘more’
is we hear rather little of it. Much of
common, educated talk about morality, seems to take the self-interested
rational bargainer as the standard. The
insistence on the primacy of self-interest is so widespread that I would term
it the dogma of selfishness.
V
The Dogma of Selfishness
There is an ideal I can only call
macho, to see oneself and be seen as cool, tough, rational, but not soft, a
Clint Eastwood character, perhaps. This
is not new in our society. There is a
tale that Abraham Lincoln once muddied a new suit rescuing a pig trapped in the
mud. He later claimed that he did it not
out of concern for the pig, but because if he hadn’t it would have bothered him
all day. There’s a muddle here, but it’s
not the one in which the pig is stuck.
Why would it have bothered him?
Why, to Lincoln or the teller of this tale, would it be embarrassing to
admit sympathy with the pig?
Quite often our judgments and explanations are distorted by
the need to appear tough. We pretend to
be concerned about the boy who set fire to a cat because animal abuse is a very
good predictor of future abuse of humans.
In reality what’s wrong with setting a cat on fire is what happens to
the cat. That’s straightforward enough,
but we have to disguise it rather than be a softie.
It is unstylish to try to teach a
child to restrain their appetites, but perfectly all right to encourage them to
defer gratification. Defer, but don’t
share or give away.
It is as if there were something
shameful in admitting to any motive other than self-interest. Sympathy with animals or the poor is
weakness. Love is embarrassing. Caring for one’s community at any cost to
oneself is either stupid or fraudulent.
Why would anyone want to take
such positions, or even pretend to do so?
What’s missing?
VI
Sympathy and its limits
Both Hume and Smith, as I
mentioned earlier, hold that every human naturally has some degree of sympathy
for others. Perhaps they are a little
too optimistic. Or perhaps 18th
Century Edinburgh lacked sociopaths. In
any event, I want now to focus on a particular sort of sympathy, the sympathetic
identification with a group, including all members of the group.
One of the minor costs of the
creation of the euro is that one no longer sees those great French coins with
the ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’
inscription. Liberty, equality,
brotherhood: In our political discourse
we are perfectly comfortable with talk of liberty and equality, but what’s this
brotherhood business? I’ll use the less
familiar word ‘solidarity’ which is free of the tiny whiff of sexism in
‘brotherhood.’
Solidarity in the strongest ‘all
for one and one for all’ form is rare, but family loyalty, team spirit,
patriotism and humanism aren’t. The
point is that one more or less identifies with a group and wishes well all its
members. Solidarity is what makes
community. All of us are members, in
highly variable degrees, of many communities.
I belong to family in at least three senses: the so-called ‘nuclear’
family of my partner, our child, and myself; my birth family, now a small
group, and the extended family of in-laws, nieces and nephews, cousins,
etc. I’m an American, a Virginian, a
resident of Montgomery County and of the Town of Blacksburg, I’m a member of the Virginia Tech community
and of its Department of Philosophy subset.
I belong to the U.S. Navy and to the Democratic Party. I’m an alumnus of four schools, one of which
no longer exists.
It’s worth noticing that most of
these community memberships are not really voluntary and that the obligations
of many of them are very slight. But
each one of them is some sort of tie to other people. We may well come to identify ourselves with
groups whose existence we had not previously considered. I’m a primate, and a member of the 99%.
Usually the smaller the group the
stronger the bonds and the more weighty the obligations. That is, if the group has some sort of
genuine unity. I am a member of the
group of several thousand people with whom I share the last 5 digits of my
Social Security number. But there is no reason that I feel any bond to the rest
of the members, since this grouping is so artificial.
But that a group is artificial
does not mean that it cannot be a significant community. It is an artifact of the Virginia
Constitution that counties are responsible for public education, and there is
nothing natural about the boundaries of counties. But as it is Montgomery County is the unit I
happen to be in, and the level concerned with some important community matters,
most especially the schools. That makes
it my community and brings with it rights to vote and speak, and obligations
to, especially, pay taxes. I care about
those schools, even though I never went to them and no one of mine will go to
them in the future. I care because they
are central to my community. I certainly
care enough to pay my share for teachers and students. They weren’t my teachers and they won’t be my
students, but they are our teachers and our students. That is what it is to belong to a community.
Community solidarity is a
powerful force in our history and in our lives, despite the common reluctance
to talk about it. It is most powerful,
as a rule, when it is limited by contrast.
That is, the most strongly motivating versions of “us” are the ones in
opposition to “them.” Us versus them,
Hokies versus Wahoos, liberals versus conservatives, our nation versus the
enemy, humans versus alien invaders or machines from the future. It’s no accident that this theme is so common
in history and in fiction.
Love thy neighbor. But who is my neighbor? Much of moral progress consists in extending
the limits of the neighborhood, the limits of sympathy. Jesus, on some readings, wants the
neighborhood to include all humanity.
Others would go even farther. Still it is a real question how far it is
psychologically possible for the majority of people to extend the philia, the caritas, the brotherly love called for in the Gospels, how far
solidarity can reach.
VII
Perils of Sympathy
In fact the greatest threat to
solidarity is not selfishness but solidarity.
The moral catastrophe of Germany in the 1930s wasn’t caused by the atomization
of society by people withdrawing into a self-centered insistence on their
individual rights. Rather it was the
subversion and finally destruction of the precarious solidarity of the German
Republic by a narrower solidarity of resentment, aggression, and
rejection. Us Aryan Germans versus a
them compounded of Jews, Slavs, Bolshevists, and so on.
Ours is much stronger, much healthier
community than that of Weimar Germany. Part
of its strength, and an important part of our political ideal is diversity of
opinion and respect for differing views.
But it does seem to me that our social solidarity is under strain. The politically active are largely polarized,
each side reading its own magazines and watching its own television. Part, just part, of the home-school movement
seems motivated by a rejection of the community values exemplified in the
public schools. Much of the vocal
derision of government is effectively a rejection of community. A very few crazies have declared themselves
sovereign citizens, independent of our laws.
Presumably they would be happier in Somalia. At the other end of the scariness scale, the
U. S. Post Office, a vital agent of community in the early days of our country
and still the identifying center of many villages, faces dismantling.
Some level of this fragmenting
tension is to be expected in any healthy liberal society; only effective
dictatorship can drive it underground.
And perhaps I’m over-interpreting things. It seems to me that some of those who
strongly oppose raising local taxes are rejecting our community responsibility
to our schools. But perhaps I’m wrong
and they are just as committed as I to the school system. Perhaps the difference is that they really do
believe that our property taxes and teacher salaries are too high, despite
being near the bottom in the state.
Perhaps.
Sympathy either for individuals
or in its community form of solidarity is an essential complement to rules
derived from contemplation of self-interested bargainers. Yet sympathy in itself is hardly enough. What justice talk protects is our autonomy as
agents, the respect to which we are entitled as, ultimately, masters of our own
lives. Sympathy and love,
inappropriately given complete precedence, lead at least to paternalism, and at
worst to totalitarianism. The
dictatorship of the proletariat was for the good of the whole, or at least so
it was said. No doubt by some it was
sincerely believed. The same is true of
American Prohibition, except that probably a higher percentage of the
supporters were sincere. It is certainly
possible to have any one or two of liberty, equality, and fraternity without
the others.
Grownups and near-grownups have
the right, within arguable limits, to make choices of which others may
disapprove; choices which may well be against the best interests of the
chooser. That’s just what it is to respect autonomy. In their classic work Yellow Submarine the Beatles proclaim that “ all you need is love,
love, love is all you need.”. I hesitate
to go against such great moral teachers, and love may indeed be all you need if
you only deal with bunnies or infants.
But if you live among adult or near-adult persons, love alone is not
enough.
VIII
Trying to get it right
In the end, both as a society and
as individuals, we need both respect and compassion, with compassion having the
wider scope, since it applies to all.
The scope of justice is narrower.
Balancing concern with the good
of all and respect for the autonomy of persons is very difficult. It is even more complex once we recognize
that autonomy and the commensurate moral responsibility are matters of
degree. It is the basic challenge of
being a parent, a job that none of us ever gets completely right. Being a citizen is easier, but tempering
justice with mercy is almost never a snap.
It won’t have escaped the notice
of some of you that much of what I’ve been saying, about the importance of
care, of recognizing that what we can ask and what can be asked of us varies
through our lives, seeing child-rearing as at least as important a moral model
as macho bargaining, echoes the points many feminists are making. I don’t deny it. Most of the thinkers to whom I have referred
are dead white males, and I’m a pretty old white male myself.
Hume and Smith both knew that
satisfactory lives rested on both sympathy and self-interest. More recently much theory seems to have lost
sight of that. We are all indebted to
feminism for bringing this back to the fore.
IX
Does any of this matter?
On most days most of us get along
just fine without a bit of moral theory.
Most of us (but, alas, not all) habitually tell the truth. It’s not that we never lie or at least fib a
little, but that telling the truth is what we automatically do, other things
being equal. (Or ceteris paribus, as
we like to say, demonstrating that we know two words of Latin.) And most of us (but again, unfortunately not
all) do not steal unattended valuables.
It’s really a matter of being more or less properly brought up. Just as social pressures and both formal and
informal education can expand or contract our sympathies, so these forces shape
us and gradually we internalize a set of moral rules fairly well fitting the
standards of our group. As Aristotle
puts it, we become just by acting justly.
Most of our ordinary moral behavior is not a matter of resisting
temptation but rather of not being tempted in the first place.
There is nothing wrong or
defective about acting the right way without thinking about it, either by habit
or by spontaneous sympathy or love. Such
actions may not be moral actions in a strict Kantian sense, but so much the
worse for strict reading of Kant. They are good actions and reflect good
character. A mother who had to reflect
in order to decide to care for her child wouldn’t be a virtuous being, but
rather a monster.
But we do need to put on our moral thinking caps when
other things aren’t equal If I find a
wallet in the street I just take it to the police station without a second
thought. But then I’m not starving, nor
do I have a loved one near death from lack of medical care. I’m not in a concentration camp or terrified
of torture or of humiliation. I am fortunate enough to live in a fairly
well-regulated society where I don’t have to worry about the honesty of the
police. But for other people or other
situations moral reflection, sometimes very difficult, may be required. And for us, too, in our fairly comfortable
worlds, loyalty and friendship can conflict with honesty, or, for that matter,
loyalty with loyalty, or promise-keeping and truth-telling. Then moral reflection is inescapable.
The other sort of situation
requiring moral reflection is when the moral standards of our group are being
challenged. Thousands and thousands of
intelligent and basically decent people, for thousands of years, accepted human
slavery as a reasonable, perhaps even necessary, part of their society. Changing that took a long time, and a lot of
argument, both public and internal, and, here in Virginia, war followed by
decades of transformation.
Many of the matters that need
serious thinking about here and now concern the boundaries of the moral
community or communities. Who counts, and how much? Are fetuses and grown women really moral
equals? Can it really be permissible to
kill a pig just for the pleasure of eating its flesh, but forbidden to kill a
vastly less conscious zygote to maintain a woman’s control of her life?
Some of our challenges, on the
other hand, involve the contrast I’ve made throughout this talk between
benevolence and respect. Paternalism is
basically the right policy toward the very young and at least some
animals. But not toward informed and
consenting adults.
If we are to do more than shout at
one another about these things we need factually informed moral reasoning
without blinders.
