“I tell you that the tax-collectors and prostitutes are going before you into the kingdom of God.” Matthew 21:31
The parable in today’s Gospel reading about two brothers, one who says yes and one who says no, reminds me of a famous episode in early 20th century theology, a dispute between Karl Barth and fellow Swiss Reformed theologian Emil Brunner. Brunner had expressed the view that human beings have some sort of natural capacity to know God, independent of God’s self-revelation. Barth, seeing this as a dangerous concession to the dominant liberal theology they were both rebelling against, had emphatically, almost violently, in a fist pounding the table way, responded Nein! (No!). After this public quarrel, these two allies became estranged. But years later, when he heard that Brunner was on his deathbed, Barth, regretful of that ungracious no!, sent him a brief letter in which he wrote ““We all live only by the fact that a great and merciful God speaks his gracious Yes! to all of us.”
A frustrated student once asked me, “Why do you always answer our questions with a question?” Of course, I answered, “Why do you ask?” She went off the find some hemlock. In today’s Gospel, Jesus answers the question the elders and priests ask with a question. A day or so before—the chronology in the text isn’t explicit—Jesus had made a scene, overturning the moneychangers’ tables and throwing them out. Today, he’s back in the Temple, teaching, when the elders and chief priests interrupt him, demanding to know by what authority he does what he’s been doing. What they asked isn’t entirely clear. The primary meaning of the term (ἐξουσία, exousia) our reading translates as “authority” is “power;” that would make sense given that they’re asking him how he is able to do what he’s doing. It would be a request for an explanation: does God empower you to do these things, or is some other power in play here? Jesus does things that are humanly impossible, so if it’s not God at work through him, it’s Satan. On the other hand, the question comes while he is teaching, which suggests it was a demand for justification: what’s your authorization, what gives you the right to say these things? On either reading, it amounts to an indignant “Who do you think you are?” Jesus puts them in a bind with a parallel question about John’s power, or authority: Did his baptism come from God, or was it merely human? It’s a question Jesus knows they can’t answer.
Consider what the story shows but leaves unsaid. Putting the counter question to these religious authorities he implicitly denies their authority over him, saying what they must do to get an answer from him. He sets the terms of the discussion. They are the most religiously and politically powerful men of Israel, yet they defer, letting him get away with this effrontery. He demonstrates his authority over them.
Why doesn’t Jesus want to answer their question? Why won’t he say on what authority he speaks, with what power he acts? In the Gospels, Jesus is reticent about simply saying who he is. He affirms it when others say it, or he says it indirectly, saying things that imply that he is God’s Messiah and God’s Son, but his strategy is to show it, not say it. Actions often speak louder, and more clearly, than words. Jesus is not here, in Jerusalem, for a discussion or an argument. Words can’t prove who he is. The time has come for action. He is about to show, in the most graphic way imaginable, who he is—who God is—the God who speaks his unequivocal Yes! to all of us.
In Matthew’s narrative, enacting the prophecy from Zechariah, Jesus has just ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey—and on its foal; I don’t understand how he rode both at once!—as the crowds proclaimed, “Hosanna to the Son of David; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, hosanna in the highest heaven!” Thus, the elders and chief priests know what the people think: Jesus is their Messiah who comes as king. They want Jesus to say it himself so they can have this threat arrested and eliminated.
Back in verse 16 the Temple authorities have already challenged Jesus. Angry, and afraid, because of what the people are saying about Jesus, they ask him, “Do you hear what they are saying?” Jesus responds with a question, though here it’s rhetorical: “Have you never read, ‘Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise for yourself?’” (21:16). (The quotation is from Psalm 8.) The implication is obvious: the crowd praising Jesus is praising God. But these are cautious guys, too insecure in their power to act against Jesus even with this provocation. I suspect Jesus rubs this in, describing the crowds they fear as harmless babies.
That brings us to today’s reading where they try again, hoping Jesus will brazenly incriminate himself. He avoids their question, asking them one he knows they won’t honestly answer, because of their fear of the people. But he does not let the encounter go to waste. He poses a new question for them: who does the will of the father, the son who says yes but then does not obey, or the son who says no but then changes his mind—repents—and obeys? They supply the plainly correct answer: the son who actually obeyed, not the son who only said he would, did the father’s will. The insulting analogy is overt. The chief priests and elders of the people make a show of doing God’s work, of piously saying yes to God, but it’s the deplorables, the tax collectors and prostitutes, who, even though their lives looked like emphatic no’s to God, heard John’s call to prepare for the coming Messiah, repented, and said yes to God. And this same mob of the disdained recognizes Jesus for who he is, praising him as he rode into Jerusalem as David’s royal son.
This is a stinging rebuke. Those the chief priests and elders despise and fear are, Jesus tells them, the ones who really do the will of God by welcoming Jesus. Those who to the pious and powerful seem at the farthest remove from God are the first to hear his Yes! to them, his great freeing, saving, healing Yes! in Jesus. We should note the two categories of people Jesus says will enter God’s kingdom first: tax-collectors, the oppressors and prostitutes, the oppressed. The majority of people, maybe three quarters of the population, lived a near-subsistence existence. Day laborers, small merchants, farmers, fishermen, artisans—like Jesus’ stepfather the carpenter Joseph—are crushed by a regime of excessive taxation that pushed many down into the underclass of the crippled, beggars, prostitutes, and criminals. The disciples who had fished for their livings in the Sea of Galilee paid a special tax for the privilege, and they were restricted to a specific part of the lake. Farmers, unable to pay the ever-increasing taxes, lost their land to owners of large estates and became landless beggars. Begging, crime, and prostitution were the social safety net in first century Palestine.
The Temple itself had a piece of the action. Why were there moneychangers in the Temple? It wasn’t an international airport. People had to pay their Temple tax, and buy small animals for sacrifice, not with the common currency, but with a special currency they did not normally use. Along with foreigners who came seeking the God of Israel, to participate in worship they had to exchange their coins at exorbitant rates. The access of the poor and of gentile G0d-seekers to Temple worship was impeded, and sometimes prevented, for the enrichment of the people running the operation, the men who questioned Jesus. But who cares? As one of the Pharisees says in John, “they are cursed, because they do not know the Law” (7:49).Who is this disruptive intruder from the hinterland, who overturned the moneychangers’ tables and took a whip to them? Who does this unholy peasant think he is, interfering in God’s business? Jesus was born into that despised rabble; he’s one of their own. The guys in charge fear and loathe the people they are entrusted with shepherding. They say no to the unwashed, unlearned many. But God gets the last word. He says Yes! to them.
That Jesus makes his own the cause of the victimized, the down and out, the prostitutes, the beggars and thieves, the blind and lame, over against the ruling class that despised them, is not, for us, surprising. What is surprising is that Jesus puts them in the same category as the tax-collectors, the linchpins of the system of oppression. Victims and villains all together, hearing the Yes! from God that drowns out all their no’s, go into the Kingdom of Heaven ahead of those whose yes’s to God are really no’s, as empty as the yes of the brother who said he’d obey his father but did not. God’s Yes! to everyone, to the good, bad, and indifferent, is Jesus himself. As St. Paul told the Corinthians, “For the Son of God, Jesus Christ…was not Yes and No, but in him it is always Yes. For in him every one of God’s promises is a Yes!” (2 Cor. 1:19-20). God’s Yes! to us in Jesus is unequivocal. God’s great word of including, healing, saving love overcomes our rejection of God. Our greatest no to God, Jesus nailed to the cross, is answered and overcome by the resounding Yes! of his resurrection. And with it all our lesser no’s. We are defeated in our last refusal (John Crowley, Little, Big, 519).
Amazingly, God’s Yes! includes even the chief priests and elders, scheming to get rid of Jesus. He does not say that the tax-collectors and prostitutes will enter God’s kingdom instead of them, but before them (someone pointed this out last week?). Good news! There’s room in God’s kingdom even for the pious and powerful. As Paul said in Philippians, the God who is in Christ empties himself, accepting abject humiliation, embodying a love that embraces even those who most vociferously deny him.
Most of us are accomplished naysayers, saying no to God in ways small and large: forgetting, ignoring, evading him; fear, pride and indifference overcoming trust and love. And sometimes God seems silent. We hear no Yes! or anything else. In Camus’ The Plague—a story we might find particularly relevant today—the fatalistic Dr. Rieux, exhausted from caring for the dying—asks, “since the order of the world is shaped by death, might it be better…if we refuse to believe in God and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes to where he sits in silence?” (117-118). We feel the pull of that attitude, like the character in another great story, who, changing the sense modality, asks, “If God’s hand is there in the dark, then why doesn’t he reach out and touch us? (Sam Martin, “The Killing Tree”).
Yet God’s Yes! can’t be confined. Whatever our foolishness, ignorance, and weakness, sooner or later it breaks the silence. And what a yes from us in response calls for might be as unexpected and unorthodox as Jesus himself. In Shusaku Endo’s novel Deep River, Otsu is a failed Catholic seminarian, outcast from his order because he can’t help believing that the God who was in Christ is present to everyone, even those far outside the Church. He winds up in India, in the city of Varasani (Benares). For Hindus, this is the most holy of cities. Pilgrims from all over India come there to bathe in, and drink from, the (badly polluted) water of the sacred river, the Ganges. Their conviction is that if one dies there, is cremated at the water’s edge, and his ashes thrown into the river, he will be delivered from the cycle of reincarnation and obtain salvation. The devout poor, sensing that death is approaching, walk hundreds of miles to reach the holy city in hope of achieving salvation by this means. Unfortunately, when they arrive they cannot afford to pay to stay anywhere, and languish on the sidewalks and in the alleys, never making it to the cremation grounds at the river. Ignored and sick, they await death in despair, having come so far yet failing to reach their goal. Otsu dedicates himself to finding these filthy, diseased, hopeless people and carrying them to the cremation grounds. He makes no attempt to witness to Christ in words; he simply acts in a way he believes Jesus would. Otsu provides the dying the grace of a Christ they may have never heard of.
On the day Indira Gandhi is assassinated, a crowd of enraged Hindus attacks a foolish tourist photographing the cremation grounds, which is forbidden. Otsu throws himself between the mob and the tourist, saving his life, but they turn on him, beating him badly. The novel ends with Otsu in the hospital in critical condition; we don’t know if he lives or dies.
Whatever we think of Otsu’s beliefs overall, let alone Hinduism, what Endo portrays is a man utterly committed to the God who says Yes! to everyone, whoever they are. May we, like Otsu, repeat that great, saving affirmation in whatever way we can.
A critical review of PaulBloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (NewYork: Ecco/Harper Collins, 2018), Stephen T. Asma, Against Fairness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013),and Harry Frankfurt, On Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)
These provocative books constitute a three-front assault on some of our culture’s most deeply held moral convictions. Bloom’s attack on empathy and Asma’s attack on fairness stake out opposing positions in the ancient debate about the proper place of reason and emotion (the passions) in human life, and particularly in the pursuit of a morally good life. Bloom argues that in highly valuing empathy we grant emotion too great a role. It is an impediment to the impartiality morality demands. Our empathetic responses must be replaced, or at least constrained, by the rational, impartial consideration of the consequences of our efforts to help those in need. Asma, in contrast, argues that modern, Western culture is in thrall to a rationalist ideology of impartiality that subverts our natural moral sentiments. We should, he argues, embrace, rather than resist, our natural disposition to favor family and friends over strangers. Frankfurt rejects as rationally unjustified the virtually universal assumption that economic inequality is inherently morally objectionable. What should move us to act is not inequality but the absolute poverty often, but not necessarily, connected with it.
After examining the main arguments of these three volumes, I conclude the essay by suggesting that persons of Christian faith have good reason to support the project of bringing our cherished moral values, including justice itself, under critical scrutiny.
Against Empathy
The world, Paul Bloom baldly asserts, would be better without empathy, which he defines as “the act of feeling what you believe other people feel—experiencing what they experience” (3). While acknowledging that empathy moves us to act for the benefit of individuals who are in need, he contends that it “leaves us insensitive to the long-term consequences of our acts and blinds us as well to the suffering of those we do not or cannot empathize with” (9). “It does poorly in a world where there are many people in need and where the effects of one’s actions are diffuse, often delayed, and difficult to compute” (31). Actions induced by our emotional response to the pain and suffering of those familiar, similar, or close to us can lead to more suffering in the long run for those who are out of sight. Empathy is “innumerate and myopic” (31).
Bloom softens his stark claim, in part by narrowing his principal objection to the role of empathy in moral deliberation, in contrast to in our private lives, and in part by distinguishing empathy from compassion. When we see or hear of suffering, empathy is suffering which mirrors that of the other person. The empathetic person says, “I feel your pain!” In contrast, compassion, as he deploys the term, is simply “caring for other people, wanting them to thrive” (50). Compassion is also an emotional response, but not one that mirrors what the sufferer feels. It is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care that motivate one to improve the other’s situation. It is feeling for, not feeling with, others (138). Compassion is preferable to empathy, but both are “spotlights” that bring the particular, the here and now, into sharp focus, leaving much in the dark. What’s best is the intent to help, with or without an emotive dimension, regulated by the rational evaluation of the causes of suffering and of the overall, long-term consequences of efforts to mitigate it.
Human action intended to do good always risks bad, unintended consequences, but Bloom believes that actions grounded in feelings of empathy are particularly risky in this regard. Consider support for minimum wage laws. Beyond the empathy-inducing images and accounts of those laboring at low-wage jobs for less than a “living wage,” there are the many whose labor is not worth the new mandated rate and are put out of work, those who become unemployed because their employers, attempting to cover the new costs, go under, and the many young people who are denied entry to the work force because their lack of skills and experience makes employing them at the required rate an economically losing proposition.[1] A comprehensive examination of the effects of mandating minimum wages might, or might not, reveal that it is the best thing to do, but empathy is necessarily selective, focused on salient need and oblivious to unseen harm.[2]
Further, action grounded in empathy can have results that are morally good overall, but which are much less good than had we proceeded on a rational, objective examination of the needs we could meet. Our empathetic responses to family, friends, those who are nearby, and those with whom we are familiar create “tunnel vision.” Their needs loom large, moving us to care and act, while the much greater needs of those far away, out of sight, or different have little effect on us. A cute local child, showcased in the media suffering a deadly disease, arouses empathy, and donations for the costly, life-saving treatments pour in. We know that many more children in sub-Saharan Africa could be saved from dying of malaria by donating an equivalent sum to purchase mosquito netting, but this knowledge leaves us relatively unmoved.
In an obvious sense, it is worse for a million people to suffer than for one person to, but our innate emotion-driven responses don’t register this. As Bloom says, “we are not capable of feeling a million times worse about the suffering of a million than about the suffering of one” (108). The plight of family, friends, and those familiar and similar to us occupies center stage in moral motivation while that of the unseen many is drastically discounted, if not simply ignored.
Bloom does not endorse the full-fledged utilitarianism of Peter Singer, who argues that we are morally obligated to drastically reduce our standard of living, using our excess funds to save, and improve, the lives of the wretched of the Earth. For Singer, not to do so reveals a selfish partiality that irrationally regards the lives of others as less important than our own. Bloom acknowledges that there are moral considerations other than consequences, but confesses to not knowing how to weigh concern for the many that engender no empathetic feelings in us against the few that do. But he is convinced that empathy is a finger that should be taken off the scale.
Bloom reports that initially he regarded the objection to empathy as narrowly targeted on the public, moral domain. We should not want a president who feels our pain, but that is what we desire in our loved ones. However, to a degree, Bloom’s mind has changed and in Against Empathy he argues that in intimate human relationships, while we rightly hope for kindness, caring, understanding, and compassion, it is a mistake to want those closest to us to feel what we feel. At one level this is common sense. If I break my arm, I want my wife to care, but I don’t want her to feel the pain I am feeling. If I am depressed, I do not want her to be depressed too. Living with a depressed person will just make me more depressed. When someone panics, she should want those close to her to be calm, and when she is gloomy, she should want them to be of cheerful.[3] If someone suffers, it is good when someone else cares and provides aid and comfort. It does no one good when the suffering is contagious, and two people suffer.
Bloom might have achieved greater clarity if he had taken account of the standard analysis of emotions as structured mental states, integrating a “feeling,” which is a sensation or akin to one, a cognitive state, most often a belief, and a behavioral disposition. For example, anger is a feeling engendered by a belief about what someone has done, one that produces a disposition to do something in response. Bloom’s talk of one person’s emotion “mirroring” another’s obscures that fact that when, say, someone is sad because another person is sad, they have the same feeling but not the same cognitive or dispositional states, and in that respect do not experience the same emotion.
Bloom warns that unconstrained empathy leads to what he calls “unmitigated communion.” This is the state of the excessively emphatic person, someone who can’t be happy unless those with whom she personally interacts are happy and is thus incapacitated by their suffering (134). At the extreme, such an individual is afflicted with “emphatic distress.” She is intrusive, overprotective, and so fixed on the emotional state of others that she becomes incapable of helping them or caring for herself. The person in need needs effective help, not others who mirror his suffering. However, Bloom pays no heed to the possibility that this susceptibility is an essential, though inevitably risky, element of truly loving others.
A fundamental objection to Bloom’s denigration of empathy is to claim, as David Hume did, that “reason is the slave of the passions,” meaning, in this instance, that merely knowing what it is morally good to do does not move us to do it; moral knowledge without emotion is inert.[4] Divested of empathy, we would not be moved to act on behalf of the needy and suffering at all. Bloom rejects this, pointing out that, even if Hume is right, we can be motivated to help others without empathy. Passions more amenable to rational regulation, such as compassion, are more likely to result in morally good behavior. He writes that the distinction between empathy and compassion is essential to his argument (138), but this is not convincing. It appears that most of what he says against empathy counts about as much against compassion, and more generally against permitting emotion to play any significant role in moral judgment. Consider the case that could be made, for instance, against moral indignation. It’s easy to suspect that that moral sentiment has more deleterious effects than empathy.
Having argued that “we rely too much on gut feelings and emotional responses to guide our judgments and behaviors,” Bloom concludes with an optimistic account of the prospects for moral improvement if we defer to reason over feeling (213):
While we are influenced by gut feelings such as empathy we are not slaves to them…we can rely on cost-benefit reasoning…and we can recognize that a stranger’s life matters just as much as the life of our child, even though we love our child and don’t feel any particular warmth toward the stranger. (214)
A good deal of recent work in social psychology indicates that we are moved to feel, believe, and act by factors of which we are not conscious. Bloom refers to a study that shows that college students asked to report their political opinions tend to supply more conservative answers when standing near a dispenser of hand sanitizer.[5] Experiment reveals that we are subject to unconscious biases, including racial ones, but this does not mean that, made aware of them, we are incapable of consciously compensating for them. “Findings of [unconscious] racial bias shouldn’t lead us to forget that more rational processes exist as well and are deeply important” (226).
The “heuristics and biases” research project has revealed a variety of systemic defects in human reasoning. For example, we are inept at judgments of probability. Most people, asked which are more common, words ending in “ng,” like “song,” or words ending in “ing,” like “singing,” respond that the “ing” words are more numerous. This is impossible, since words that end with “ing” are a proper subset of words ending with “ng.” Despite such evidence, Bloom contends, “we are not as stupid as many scholars think we are” (216). These failures of rationality, though systemic, are not inevitable or universal. Human beings discovered them and, once alerted to this propensity for error, the rest of us can do better. In Bloom’s view, these “mind bugs” occur against a background of rationality. When we make decisions that affect our actual lives, for example, deciding where to go to dinner, choosing a school in which to enroll one’s child, or deliberating about whether to buy a house, we can, and often do, reason well, with no undue reliance on emotion. The hope, for Bloom, is that we will at least learn to keep empathy in its proper place, in our personal attachments, not infecting our moral judgment.
The slipperiness of the moral terms Bloom deploys can frustrate the reader. His differentiation of empathy and compassion may seem to some an arbitrary stipulation. He risks at least the appearance of incoherence. Although he begins the book by announcing that the world would be better without empathy, at its conclusion he writes, “I worry that I have given the impression that I’m against empathy” (240). One must pay charitable heed to the many qualifications he makes along the way in order obtain a reasonably consistent picture of what Bloom means to say. That effort is worthwhile, for what he has to say is important.
Against Fairness
While Bloom fears that empathy impairs impartiality, Stephen Asma in Against Fairness aims to downgrade the moral significance of impartiality, which he (somewhat misleadingly) calls fairness.[6] “Fairness unfairly dominates our culture and crowds out the virtues of favoritism” (162). Fairness, whether conceived in meritocratic or egalitarian terms, must be dethroned in favor of the virtues of preference: filial devotion and duty, loyalty, and allegiance to, even bias in favor of, family and friends. He does not deny fairness its proper place. Government ought to exercise its legal authority impartiality, umpires ought not to play favorites, and—difficult as it may be—professors ought to evaluate students’ work impartiality. Yet in much of life there is no explicit, and should be no implicit, commitment to impartiality. Often, it is fine to be unfair.[7]
Asma offers the example of someone who owns a tavern that features live entertainment. The owner hires various bands to play, generally selecting them on the basis of their musical abilities. However, his brother, who is hard up, leads a band that is not very accomplished. Normally, the owner would not hire this low-quality ensemble, but he does, because he wants to help his brother out (57). Asma judges that this is unfair to better bands that might have been hired instead, yet not wrong. Indeed, it’s the right thing to do. Brotherly affection rightly trumps fairness.[8]
Pushing the example further, Asma tells us that the owner pays his brother more than he pays the other bands (58). For all he knows, they might be in the same, or greater need, but he favors his brother just because he is his brother. This, says Asma, is also laudable unfairness.
Finally, the tavern owner pays his brother, who distributes the proceeds for the gig equally among the musicians, but only after he holds back $20, which he puts aside to help pay for the braces his daughter needs. Once again, this unfairness is fine with Asma. There is no moral objection to favoring your daughter in these circumstances.
Asma makes a different judgment about an actual case, that of the media magnate Rupert Murdoch who purchased for his publicly owned company a television production company owned by his daughter. The daughter garnered $320 million from the sale, and Murdoch was accused of overpaying so as to benefit his daughter. Asma first asserts:
Murdoch has been entrusted with other people’s investment money, and a such they have claims on him. But he still has to weigh his ‘fatherhood duties’…against his management duties toward non-relations…It’s still no contest, given the disproportionate moral gravity of one’s child. Public be damned, if one’s daughter can profit. This is the legitimate operating principle of favoritism. (68)
However, the scope of this principle is not unbounded. In contrast to the case of the brothers, he concludes that Murdoch’s favoritism was illegitimate: “Murdoch’s daughter is so obscenely advantaged and recklessly compensated…that it seems off the map of decency” (68).
Asma acknowledges that he can offer no more perspicacious rationale for commending the brothers’ favoritism while condemning that of Rupert Murdoch. Reason is not up to the task of discerning when partiality goes too far. We must learn to live with the cognitive dissonance of valuing both fairness and impartiality. “On some things, you will simply have to choose between what is loved and what is fair” (150).
However, Asma’s examples omit crucial detail that determines whether the preferential treatment is morally right. We need to ask whether the nepotism he describes wrongs someone, say by deceiving or cheating him. Did the owner of the tavern lead the bands to believe that his hiring decisions would be made entirely on the basis of musical ability, as though he were a judge in a contest? Most likely, not. A reasonable person, unless advised otherwise, would take it for granted that virtuosity is one criterion among others, and that a musically inferior band might be hired because its members are so attractive, they intersperse their numbers with amusing commentary, they are locally popular despite being musically less accomplished, show up on time, or consume less free beer than the better bands. Or because the owner’s sibling leads them. On reasonable assumptions, the superior band that was not hired has not been deceived, cheated, or otherwise wronged, and Asma is right to say that the owner’s nepotism, his “unfairness,” is morally acceptable. Similarly, unless the other bands that have been hired have taken the gig on the condition that every band will receive the same pay, the brother’s band being paid more is not a moral problem. And, unless the members of the brother’s band have agreed to play on the condition that the proceeds will be distributed equally among them, his taking an unequal share does not wrong them.[9]
In contrast, Rupert Murdoch has an obligation to manage the company in whatever way increases its value and the value of the shareholder’s stock. If he believes that the purchase of his daughter’s firm for a large sum is not the optimal investment for the company, he has cheated his investors.[10] If Murdoch’s nepotism was wrong, it was not in virtue of the amount of money involved but because he cheated the corporation’s shareholders, violating our common assumptions about the fiduciary responsibilities of officers of publicly-owned enterprises. Asma can reasonably say that it is permissible to treat people in ways he describes as unfair, but not that it is permissible to wrong them for the sake of benefiting one’s favorites.
If Asma’s point is that unfairness, i.e., partiality, nepotism, and favoritism are permissible in the absence of wronging, then it is true but trivial. If the point is that what he calls unfairness is permissible even when people are being cheated or defrauded, then he is mistaken. Impartiality is sometimes morally required when explicit agreements are in force, or when individuals fill well-defined roles, while in any number of other cases it is not expected and not required.
The contest between societally expected impartiality and our natural partiality is easier, it seems, to resolve rationally than Asma supposes. Partiality rightly trumps impartiality in any number of cases, but—extreme cases aside—it ought never trump the obligation not to wrong people. Of course, someone might contend that partiality as such is wrong, but if there is a reason to believe so it is not obvious.[11]
Asma goes to some length to show that our partiality to those genetically closely related to us, parents, children, siblings, spouses, cousins, etc., and unrelated people with whom we have chosen to share a common history, i.e., friends, is a biological fact of human nature. We are not, by nature, egoists. “We don’t come into the world as selfish Hobbesian mercenaries” (39). But neither are we naturally inclined to care about other human beings indiscriminately. Beneath the current cultural overlay, we are tribalists, strongly disposed to favor kith and kin. Western culture advertises an official allegiance to fairness, but we exhibit a “cringing willingness to look the other way at minor infractions.” However, as in case of the family-favoring brothers, these infractions are not “tolerable failures” but positive moral goods (58).
On Asma’s account, the demand for impartiality, for equal concern for humanity as such, is an anomaly, an unsustainable conflict with human nature. “Elite, white college-educated people are the only demographic that sees morality primarily as a matter of fairness” (89). Non-western cultures have not lost the virtues of preference the West needs to reclaim. Asma, who has lived in China and Cambodia, describes with approval a different moral universe, one in which all ethical concern originates in the bond between parent and child and from this extends to other family members and to more distant relatives. From this moral center arises concern for friends, neighbors, countrymen and, magnanimously, even for persons with whom one has no connection. “The model of the good person is not the saintly world-savior, but the devoted family member” (102). He sees it as his duty, say, to hire the less than competent nephew rather than the highly competent stranger. What Westerners see as corruption or something close to it the Asian sees as high virtue. In contrast to this natural way of being human, Asma sees our fixation on disinterested impartiality as impoverished. Asma does not assert, and we need not believe, that Asian cultures are overall morally superior to ours to agree that our elevation of impartiality is unwarranted.
An obvious objection is that neuroscientific facts do not imply anything about what’s morally right—‘is’ does not imply ‘ought.’ The evolved human brain is a natural nepotist, but perhaps we ought to constrain our tendencies to partiality and strive for fairness. No doubt, this would be Paul Bloom’s view. Asma’s response is to acknowledge that “favoritism is not good just because it is natural,” but to remind us that it is self-evident that love is part of a good human life and love is inherently preferential (46). Quoting George Orwell, he states the obvious: “love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others (6).[12]
Asma’s main target is the undue weight we accord fairness in private life. What of fairness in the public realm? Asma acknowledges the necessity of formal, legal equality. Government does, or at least ought to, require of each citizen the same compliance with its laws. Thus, it must reciprocally treat all citizens the same way unless there are relevant differences. Presidents who play favorites are no more desirable than ones who feel our pain. The one area where Asma delves into policy matters is education. He excoriates the obsessive egalitarianism that in the schools leads to such absurdities as athletic “contests” in which everyone gets a trophy, so there are no losers, a boy not being permitted to give a Valentine’s day card to the little red-haired girl with whom he is besotted unless he gives one to everyone, and kids not being permitted to have a “best friend.” Losing a game, not getting as many valentines as other classmates, or having a favorite classmate is condemned as unfair. The worthy attempt to instill open mindedness, tolerance, and respect for those who are different runs off the rails when it morphs into the project of stamping out all preferences as unfair. Children indoctrinated against partiality are not prepared for adult life, where some of us are worse than others at some things and less popular than others and treated accordingly. To prefer what is near and dear, one’s family and friends, one’s region, nation, ethnicity, to others is not to be a bigot who treats others unjustly. Nor are they well-prepared for citizenship. “What kids owe one another is respect, not equal affections or equal treatment” (95).
Asma has little else to say about matters of public policy, but it would be interesting to hear his views on the economic nationalism embodied in the current “America first” rhetoric. Is it right, for instance, to enact trade policies that transfer jobs from American to foreign workers? This might be justified on utilitarian grounds; the misery caused by closing factories in America’s “rust belt” might be more than offset by the benefits for impoverished folk in Sri Lanka, but should we nonetheless favor American workers simply because they are our fellow Americans?[13]
In one regard Against Fairness and Against Empathy are mirror images. Bloom’s concern is that our emotional response to individual instances of suffering can make us morally myopic, oblivious to the large and long-term consequences of the actions to which empathy leads. Asma’s concern is that modern Western’s culture ideology of impartiality threatens indispensable moral virtues, e.g., loyalty, devotion, allegiance, and that it is self-undermining, insofar as it denigrates the underlying “tribalism” in which any motivation to care for others is ultimately grounded. Myopia, he says, is necessary for clear moral vision.
Against Equality
Perhaps the most controversial of the three books, Harry Frankfurt’s On Inequality, might well have been titled Against Equality. The three are worth reading together for the challenging encounter with reasoned criticism of deeply entrenched, unquestioned—some would say unquestionable—moral values of contemporary society, but of the three this is the one I’d most recommend for its own sake. It’s the shortest and simplest but most clearly reasoned, although its brevity leaves unanswered many questions it raises.
Frankfurt’s straightforward claim is that equality or inequality of outcomes, particularly economic outcomes, has no moral significance.[14] “What’s morally objectionable in circumstances of inequality is not that some of the individuals in these circumstances have less money than others. Rather, it is the fact that those with less have too little” (41). Thus, we do not find great disparities of wealth among the very rich morally problematic. It is not quantitative discrepancy but absolute deficiency that actually, and rightly, troubles us (42).
The fact that someone is rich and someone else has much less does not morally matter and gives us no moral reason for concern. In an intellectual and political climate in which disparities of wealth are perceived as a pressing moral issue, this sounds like heresy. Frankfurt’s contention is that equality seems significant because it is closely associated with other things that are morally significant. In the obvious case, economic inequality is associated with human need and suffering, which we are morally obligated to care about. Frankfurt does not try to prove that inequality has no inherent moral significance. His fundamental argument is rhetorical: once we distinguish inequality from insufficiency, not having enough, isn’t it clear that it’s not inequality as such that should concern us? One might, of course, acknowledge the distinction but insist that while need—absolute poverty—is distinct from relative poverty—having much less than others—both morally matter. The question, however, is what reasons could be supplied to believe this. Frankfurt plausibly holds that there are none.
A classic thought experiment asks us to imagine two societies, one in which there is a high degree of economic equality: no one earns significantly more or less than the average annual wage, which is $1000. The other is characterized by great inequality: the top ten percent earn $10 billion a year while the least well off get by on a mere $1 million a year, orders of magnitude less. Assuming that a dollar has the same purchasing power in both, which society would a reasonable person prefer to live in, assuming one’s economic station is randomly assigned? The “poor” living in the unequal society are, in absolute terms, vastly better off than those in the egalitarian society. Almost any aim a human has in life, including those that do not require the accumulation of material possessions, can be more successfully pursued in the richer society. That most people would prefer having more, absolutely, even if it means having relatively less than others, does not prove that inequality in itself has no moral importance, but it certainly puts the burden of proof on those who claim otherwise.
As Robert Nozick famously said, maintaining economic equality demands pervasive restrictions on liberty. Without systematic coercive restraints on “capitalist acts between consenting adults,” inequality inevitably ensues.[15] Frankfurt notes this objection to the pursuit of economic equality but does not rely on it as an argument against valuing equality. What Frankfurt instead regards as of fundamental importance is egalitarianism’s effect on persons’ self-identity. He contends that when economic equality is valued for its own sake, people tend to measure their well-being in comparison to what others have, rather than attending to “what is needed for the kind of life a person would most appropriately and sensibly seek for himself” (11). This separation of the individual from his genuine needs and desires is self-alienating. If we want more merely because others have more, our desire is not authentically our own. Perhaps envy, which deserves no moral consideration, is the extreme manifestation of the inauthenticity Frankfurt warns against.
A more prosaic negative feature of economic egalitarianism Frankfurt does not address is that it often arises from, and perpetuates, deleterious economic ignorance. Many implicitly believe that the economy is a “zero-sum” game, i.e., that one gets richer only by making someone else poorer. If it were true that I have so little because someone else has so much, I could rightly feel I am the victim of injustice, one that enforced equality can rectify. There are economic systems in which this belief is true, but it is not true of free-market economies, those in which the only way to get richer than others is to be better at supplying people with what they want or need. Each economic transaction makes both parties better off. Bill Gates got to be much richer than almost everyone else because he provided us with something we decided was worth more to us than the money we paid for it. The real world approximates the thought experiment considered above. A market society in which individuals are permitted to accumulate vast wealth is one in which the least well-off are better off than they would be if equality was enforced.[16]
Frankfurt argues effectively against the view that the equal distribution of wealth reliably maximizes overall utility, the sum of human happiness.[17] Redistributing income makes the small number of rich people unhappy, but it makes the larger number of poor much happier. This argument relies on seemingly obvious facts about diminishing marginal utilities. When a poor person gets an extra $10,000 this will noticeably improve his life, but getting the same amount means little to the millionaire. Thus, better for the poor person to get the $10,000 by transferring it from the rich person. However, Frankfurt points out that while money is essentially worthless in itself, it is valuable as a universal medium of exchange, and thus this reasoning does not apply to it. If I have one pancake for breakfast, I’d be happier if I had a second one, but if I’ve already eaten ten pancakes one more is not likely to be appealing. When I am sated, the eleventh pancake is worth much less than the second was when I was not yet full. However, unlike pancakes, money can easily be exchanged for something new and different, for practical purposes without limit. As the adage says, one can never be too rich; more money is always better.[18]
As Frankfurt notes, threshold effects can undermine utilitarian arguments that invoke the law of diminishing returns. Getting an extra $1000 to put into the account in which you are saving up to buy a yacht makes you happy with anticipation, but you get much more—not less—satisfaction from getting the final $1000 that at last puts the boat within reach.
Further, even if, as utilitarians say, there is a general moral obligation to increase overall utility, there is no guarantee that an equal distribution does so. If 100 sick people will die unless they receive a specified dose of some pharmaceutical, it might be that if each receives an equal dose, no one gets enough, and everyone dies. Some lives can be saved only if some get no medicine and die.[19] Even, indeed especially, in matters of life and death, an equal distribution can be wrong.
These considerations effectively refute the assumption that equal distributions are guaranteed to increase utility, i.e., overall human happiness. However, the egalitarian most likely will acknowledge that equality does not necessarily maximize utility, but contend that in many cases it does, and that in our society an equal, or more equal, distribution of wealth would do so. To oppose this, what’s required are not abstract arguments about utility, but a focus on the economic policies that make the least well-off better off in absolute terms.
Sufficiency, for Frankfurt, is defined in psychological terms. A person has enough when she is content with what she has. She is not disposed to do much of anything to obtain more; she is not, for instance, seeking a higher paying job. She is not dissatisfied with her current economic state. This is not to deny that if she had more, she would not be happier, enjoying a higher level of satisfaction, but she is satisfied with her level of satisfaction; she has no serious interest in trying to become better off economically. Readers familiar with Frankfurt’s influential account of freedom will note a resemblance. In On Inequality, economic sufficiency has a similarly second-order structure. He holds that a person is free just if she can do what she wants and wants to want what she wants. To be free is to have this second-order desire. Contrast the person who wants to smoke but does not want to have the desire to smoke with the person who wants to smoke and wants to continue having this desire; the latter, but not the former, freely chooses to smoke. The unfree smoker, like the individual who wants more merely because others have more, lacks a fully integrated, authentic self.
Many would find Frankfurt’s account of sufficiency insufficient because he does not address the issue of how much is enough in objective, material terms. Suppose someone coming from a long line of impoverished people is entirely satisfied in a state that the rest of us would regard as intolerable. He lives, say, in a shack in an isolated Appalachian valley, cannot afford indoor plumbing, trips to the dentist, or much more than grits and fatback to feed his family; yet he is perfectly content. He has no desire to do anything to improve his economic situation. Does he have enough? Shall we say that he has too little because he ought to be dissatisfied? Suppose someone is already very wealthy, but is discontent with his state, always seeking ways to get richer. Or suppose someone who, while not rich, has a well-paying job, but is dissatisfied with it and tries for one with better pay. Are these cases of insufficiency that should trigger moral concern? Further, although it is absolute, not relative, inequalities that, according to Frankfurt, morally matter, it’s hard not to believe that what others have is not relevant. When only the rich had central heating, air conditioning, a car, a telephone, or a television, these were luxuries the lack of which was not a moral issue. But now that almost everyone takes these things for granted, is not having them a mark of insufficiency? Does someone’s lack of them create an obligation to help? These are questions that must be answered if we are to shift the focus of concern from inequality to insufficiency.
Frankfurt objects not to inequality, but to the need that can accompany it. However, what can also accompany inequality is what he calls “economic gluttony.” The behavior of some who have vastly more than they need to live comfortable lives is a “ridiculous and disgusting spectacle” which is morally offensive, especially when juxtaposed with large numbers of persons suffering economic deprivation (4-5). He does not expiate on what sort of response to this is appropriate. Nor does he clearly differentiate wealth that is excessive in itself, if there is such, from its use in the ways he deplores. Given his sensitivity to the actual effects of economic policies, it seems unlikely that he would recommend coercive government action similar to the intervention many proponents of economic equality propose. There are forms of behavior that are morally offensive but do not justify forcible intervention in contrast to criticism, derision, shunning, shaming, boycott, and other non-coercive sanctions. In this case, the reasonable concern is that the attempt to regulate the lifestyles of the rich and famous could be counterproductive. For hardly anyone, no matter how gluttonous, eats his money, nor does he hide it in his mattress, bury it, or burn it. Instead, he either spends it or invests it in hopes of making even more. If he spends it, even to buy the most absurd luxuries, he employs persons less rich than he is to make, deliver, and service what he buys. His maid judges she is better off being paid to polish his solid gold bathroom fixtures than not doing so. Money he invests is lent to others who use it to buy things, or to create or expand businesses. In either case, the money goes to pay workers whose lives are thereby improved. In a market economy, it is difficult for the rich, no matter their personal moral failings, not to benefit the poor.[20] Possibly, the poor would be better off if the excess wealth, on whatever criterion we can come up with, was simply confiscated and directly redistributed to the poor. But this is far from obvious, at least to those less than sanguine about government efficiency. Also, the economic system that makes great wealth possible, and the legal system in which people are free to use it as they see fit, even foolishly, are the same systems in which some with great wealth live modestly and engage in philanthropy that benefits those in need.
In passing, Frankfurt acknowledges that great inequality of income often translates into unjust disparities of political power, and thus threatens democracy. He judges, “the potentially undemocratic effects of this advantage must be dealt with…by legislation and regulation designed to protect these processes from distortion and abuse,” not by aiming for economic equality. He does not address the question of how such legislation and regulation can be put in place if the rich already exercise undue influence.
Eventually, Frankfurt moves beyond economic inequality to inequality in general, and there devises a parallel argument. We saw earlier that Asma asserts that it is not our duty to treat everyone fairly, but to treat them with respect. Here, Frankfurt claims that we have no duty to seek equality in general, but it is our duty to treat everyone with respect. Persons being treated the same way others are treated has no inherent value and is often morally wrong. What morally matters is treating people with respect, which is to treat them in accord with their morally relevant characteristics. He writes:
The most fundamental difference between equality and respect has to do with focus and intent. With regard to any interesting parameter—whether it pertains to resources, welfare, opportunity, rights, consideration, concern, or whatever—equality is merely a matter of each person’s having the same as others. Respect is more personal. Treating a person with respect means, in the sense that is germane here, dealing with him exclusively on the basis of those aspects of his particular character or circumstances that are actually relevant to the issue at hand. (77-78)
For Frankfurt, to treat persons with respect is to advantage, or disadvantage, them only in light of their relevant personal characteristics, in light of what each deserves. If everyone deserves the same treatment, then they ought to be treated equally. If individuals differ in ways that in the context matter, then they ought not to be treated equally. To treat someone as though her relevant individual characteristics do not matter is to fail to respect her for who she is. It is to say that what’s true of her as an individual, good or bad, is of no consequence. If the state denies me a driver’s license because I fail the exam, even if everyone else passes, this differential treatment is not unjust. But if it denies me the right to drive because it does not approve of the political cause my bumper sticker endorses, the differential treatment is wrong. Blindness is, but deviant political views are not, relevant to whether I should be permitted to drive.
An issue of great practical significance Frankfurt does not address is the perennial difficulty of ascertaining which features of individuals are relevant in particular situations. Moral and policy controversies are disagreements not about whether all people deserve equal respect, but about what differences are relevant. Until its resolution by the United States Supreme Court in 2015 debate raged as to whether the fact that a couple aspiring to marry were of the same sex was a relevant consideration that would justify a state denying them a license. Some factors are plainly relevant, for example, the two seeking the license have the same parents, while others are plainly irrelevant, say they both belong to the Reformed Church in America. But the relevance of the applicants being a same-sex couple was a matter of serious dispute.
On Inequality is the kind of book that makes me wonder why its principal claims were not already obvious before I read it. I think it’s likely others would have the same response.
And JusticeToo?
All three of these books are to some degree open to the criticism that they target straw men. Some may insist that what they call empathy is not the problematic emotion Bloom attacks, but merely a reasonable concern for others. Against Asma some may claim, as I suggest above, that when they reject unfairness, what they have in mind is just deceiving, defrauding, or otherwise treating people unjustly. And egalitarians may contend against Frankfurt that their rhetorical commitment to equality expresses no more than a sober concern for human need and suffering, not a demand for equality for its own sake. Still, to whatever extent these are candid responses, we can at least credit Bloom, Asma, and Frankfurt for requiring us to think more carefully about the shape of our moral commitments.
Beyond that, these authors help us recognize that seemingly inviolable moral commitments can seriously be called into question and, if not abandoned outright, criticized and downgraded, revealed as not having ultimate and unqualified claims on us. Rather than being inevitable and eternal, they may reflect the ideals of our particular place and time. Whatever Christians make of the specific arguments Bloom, Asma, or Frankfurt advance, we rightly endorse the project of bringing our values under critical scrutiny. Our morality, like our religion, can be put to use by the God who condescends to us in our fallen state so as to save us from the power of sin and death, but it always stands under divine judgment.
Nothing occupies so central a role in our repertoire of moral concepts as justice. Concern to discern the actual claims of justice underlies the arguments of our three authors. Bloom aims to show that empathy is at least as likely to impair the quest for justice as to motivate us to achieve it. Asma argues that partiality, favoritism, nepotism—what he calls “unfairness”—is not necessarily unjust. And Frankfurt contends that economic inequality is, in itself, not unjust.
Yet, it is justice above all that the Christian gospel subverts. The Christian gospel is dramatically at odds with our moral conviction that everyone ought to get what she deserves, evil for evil, good for good. Denying justice its due, the Christian faith is a moral scandal. It denies God the role our natural religiosity assigns him. From a human perspective, justice trumps all other considerations.[21] We say, “Fiat justitia ruat caelum—let justice be done though the heavens fall!” Each must receive his just deserts, good or bad. Yet, our faith is that the heavens have fallen, God has come down to earth. In the name of justice he was put to death by the religious and political powers for blasphemy and sedition. The cross of Christ mocks and defeats our justice, and his resurrection reveals its ultimate defeat. For God’s justice—the righteousness of God—is nothing less than his unfailing faithfulness to his beloved creatures, decisively demonstrated in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. It is not a cosmic keeping of accounts that must somehow be reconciled with his love; his justice simply is his unbounded grace and mercy.[22]
A recurring promise of Scripture is that God will set the prisoners free. Yet he does not differentiate between those deservedly, and thus justly, incarcerated, and those unjustly imprisoned. Repudiating the just demand of an “eye for an eye,” Jesus says, “I tell you not to oppose the wicked man by force; rather, whosoever strikes you upon the right cheek, turn to him the other as well” (Matthew 5:38-39). Does this mean that it is really wrong to hit back, that the attacker does not deserve counterattack, or that we should never inflict on him what he deserves? Denying justice its due, shall we throw open the prison doors, freeing the wicked man? Liberated, he walks down the street where he hits you; you don’t stop him, but let him hit you again, harder. While you lay dazed on the ground, he proceeds down the street to assault a grandmother and her grandchildren. God’s ultimate judgment against the justice so dear to us does not call for throwing the innocent to the wolves of this world. [23]
Our vocation is not to make immanent the eschaton, but to bear witness to the coming kingdom to which Jesus calls us, seeking places where God’s mercy and forgiveness can break into this fallen world’s order of moral rigor. As persons of faith, our commitment to justice in this present age cannot be wholehearted. To accord justice—or any other moral value, such as empathy, fairness, equality—an absolute status is to depart from God’s purposes. In light of the Gospel, all else is made relative and denied the final word. Yet in the here and now, “between the times,” when God’s defeat of the power of sin and death is already, and not yet, completed, we cannot live without acting on our moral values. Least of all can we simply dispense with justice. To adhere to the Gospel is to learn to navigate this world with the double vision that neither summarily dismisses justice nor grants it the absolute status we are naturally inclined to give it.
Faint as the voice of faith might be in the public, political domain, we can speak out, according the state merely the mundane power to keep the peace and, when it punishes, denying it the authority to exact justice, carrying out retribution on wrongdoers, and insist that legal punishment always be preventative, deterrent, or rehabilitative, never retributive, never an attempt to enact justice. Such authority belongs to God alone, and he eschews it for the sake of those he loves. Yet we must speak equivocally, denouncing the state when it punishes the innocent, or deals with the guilty more harshly than necessary for public safety.
In our personal and professional lives, we suffer injustices, large or small. Our culture reinforces our passionate innate desire for justice, to stand up for ourselves, to obtain our just desserts, yet in faith lies freedom to forego demanding it. Freely chosen sacrificial forbearance bears witness to the coming kingdom when human justice will be no more, and grace and mercy will be all in all.[24]
[1]As I write this in the summer of 2020 a timely example is the current demand to defund or even abolish police forces, motivated by the brutal killing of an unarmed black man while resisting arrest and the strong empathetic reaction it caused in millions of people. Against the countervailing evidence, this was widely taken as confirming a narrative in which police are systematically killing unarmed Black men. Predictably, curtailment of policing leads to far more deaths of innocent Black persons than have been killed by law enforcement. But for many these are mere statistics, lacking emotional weight.
[2]In keeping with Bloom’s practice in most of the book, here I ignore moral considerations that some see as competing with or even overriding considerations of consequences. For example, some might contend that there is an objectively “just wage,” and that those paid less are being treated unjustly. Others will regard government control of wages as an unjust violation of the rights of employees and employers to reach voluntary contractual arrangements.
[3]So says Bloom, but I suspect the gloomy person often feels worse when surrounded by the cheerful.
[4]A Treatise of Human Nature, Part III, §3. Selby-Bigge, ed. (Oxford: Oxford/Clarendon, 1897 [1739]).
[5]Perhaps this will inspire liberals to demand that such dispensers be removed from polling places.
[6]I find this misleading because I would not describe departures from impartiality as unfair unless they are unjust. In contrast, Asma regards some actions as unfair, yet not unjust. I find the concept of “just unfairness” oxymoronic because to me to describe something as unfair is to make a negative moral judgment, to call it unjust. But what seems to me Asma’s idiosyncratic use of the moral vocabulary does not impair his argument.
[7]Asma points out that the great moral teachers, even Jesus, who had a favorite disciple (presumably John the Evangelist), indulged in partiality (3). And, lest we suppose that impartiality has divine sanction, he reminds us that in the Old Testament God had a chosen people (7). Christians can agree that it was entirely fitting that the incarnate God, who was fully human, had friends, some closer than others. But we will note that God’s partiality toward Israel—“a light to the nations” (Isaiah 49:6)—was always in the service of his grand project of salvation for all humankind.
[8]Anyone who has evaluated candidates for a position realizes that examining the resumes of strangers and conducting interviews are at best fallible ways of discovering the best candidate. The individual responsible for the decision may well take for granted that the applicant pool contains candidates who would do a better job than his relative, and perhaps others who would do worse. Knowing his brother well enough to know he would do a good enough job, he hires him, following the “mimimax” strategy often appropriate for making decisions under uncertainty. He thereby ensures that he avoids the worst case, viz., hiring someone who does a lousy job.
[9]Judgments of right and wrong are not context free, but depend on a society’s vast, intricate, and mostly implicit network of understandings. When, for example, you have dinner at a restaurant, no sign on the door or reminder from the maître d’ informs you that you are expected to pay for your meal before leaving, yet it would be wrong to leave without paying the tab. A student enrolled in a course takes it for granted that the professor ought to assign grades without partiality in light of criteria stated in her syllabus, even though it does not say she will do so.
[10]Here, as in the imagined case of the nepotistic tavern owner, partiality might have been justified. Trust is a significant factor in economic transactions, and knowledge of a company under consideration for acquisition is necessarily incomplete. Generally, we trust family members more than strangers, and it can be reasonable to favor them, even when investing other persons’ money. Murdoch’s nepotistic acquisition might have been the best way for him to discharge his fiduciary responsibilities to his shareholders. In the actual case, Elisabeth Murdoch had a mixed record of success and setbacks in the media business.
[11]One tradition seeks to ground impartiality in rationality: if I advantage one person but not another when there is no relevant difference between them, then I act without good reason. However, relevant differences are so easy to come by that no case can be made for universal impartiality. I might do something good for one person but not for another for the perfectly good reason that I like the one and not the other. It is only in special circumstances, e.g., one is a professor assigning grades, an umpire calling balls and strikes, or a government official, that relevant differences, and thus permissible reasons for differential treatment, are specified in advance.
[12]He takes Orwell’s words from “Reflections on Gandhi” in The Orwell Reader (New York: Mariner Books, 1961), 331.
[13]A book similar in spirit to those reviewed in this essay is Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism (New York: Basic Books, 2018). He does not attack an established moral value but, as the title indicates, praises nationalism, economic and otherwise, which is currently widely regarded as an unmitigated evil.
[14]Although Frankfurt’s focus is on equality of outcomes, e.g., some are rich and some are not, his reasoning can readily be applied to equality of opportunity. We should not be concerned that some people, due to undeserved differences of natural endowment, upbringing, and good luck have opportunities others lack, so long as everyone has sufficient opportunity. If we value the Unites States as a land of equal opportunity, this is not plausibly regarded as more than the absence of arbitrary legal or entrenched social impediments to achieving one’s goals, with the result that everyone has plenty of opportunity.
[15]Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 160-64.
[16]Patterns of immigration suggest that many of the world’s poor judge that their lot would be improved by occupying the lowest economic rungs of a nation with both great wealth and great inequality.
[17]Frankfurt takes on these utilitarian arguments on their own terms, but were any of them to succeed, this would not overturn Frankfurt’s basic claim that equality has no inherent moral value, irrespective of whatever instrumental value it might have.
[18]No doubt, those who reach satiation only with the tenth pancake need not worry about being too thin either.
[19]In such a case, it is morally required to devise some just method for deciding who lives and who dies, and while that might be giving each patient an equal chance to get the drug, some other criterion might be morally superior, e.g., save the youngest, the nicest, or those on some criterion most valuable to society, such as physicians, tavern owners, or philosophers.
[20]John Rawls, in his very influential A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), argued that a just society permits inequalities of wealth only if doing so benefits the least-well off members of society. Critics to his left, realizing how easily this criterion is satisfied in a free market economy, regard Rawls as insufficiently committed to equality. On the right the objection is that the criterion is too strong, and that inequalities of wealth should be permitted so long as they do not harm the least well-off members of society. I do not mean to suggest that any actual society perfectly realizes the ideal of a free market. Many make money the old-fashioned way, such as by colluding with governments to restrain competition, rent seeking, fraud, and outright theft.
[21] Thus, the familiar, but unbelievable, teaching among Christians that the execution of Jesus, the innocent victim in place of the guilty, satisfies divine justice. To punish an innocent person for another’s wrongdoing is not just; it overturns justice.
[22]The Septuagint, the third-century BCE Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, used the Greek term dikaiosynē for what in English translations is the righteousness of God. Because dikaiosynē was defined as a person getting what he deserves, this obscured the crucial fact that God’s “justice” is in reality not a superior version of what we call justice but essentially different from it and ultimately at odds with it.
[23]Even while rejecting a thoroughgoing pacifism as Christian witness, we could nonetheless respect someone who consistently repudiates the use of force because he regards doing so as God’s desire. But what’s called pacifism is almost invariably incoherent, rejecting the use of force in national self-defense while enthusiastically supporting its domestic use by government for purposes deemed worthy, e.g., to secure tax revenue for welfare programs. The closest we can come to a credible pacifism is classical liberalism’s conviction that it is never permissible to initiate violence, but that it is permissible to resort to it in response to those who do initiate it.
[24]Thanks to my colleagues in the Northwestern College reading group, whose insightful discussion of Bloom’s Against Empathy gave me the idea for this essay.
I’ve decided to present short accounts of books I have recently read, enjoyed, and think others might also enjoy. They aren’t full-fledged reviews. I’ve omitted books I did not much like or which I liked, but with which I have disagreements that I could articulate only at length. Occasionally I’ll also report on things other than books.
My grad school professor, David Sanford, prefaced his fine book If P, then Q with the story of the boy who, required to write a report on a book about owls, began, “This book told me more about owls than I wanted to know.” I hope here I tell you enough, but not more than you want to know about the works I report on.
Alex Rosenberg
Reduction and Mechanism
The mid-20th century reductionist project is widely regarded as having foundered on multiple realizability. Despite the fact that the things with which the special sciences, such a biology, psychology, sociology, economics, deal are entirely physical, their laws, and thus their kinds, categories, concepts, cannot be translated into those of physical science, ultimately chemistry and physics. Even though, for example, someone being in a particular mental state, such as pain, is identical to a particular configuration of elementary particles in her brain (token identity), the qualitatively identical pain of that person at another time, or of another person, or of a creature of another sort, need not be the same kind of arrangement of particles (type non-identity). A human and a Martian might be in pain, but they will not be in the same neural, and thus not the same physical, state. A specifiable configuration of elementary particles may be sufficient for being in pain, but not necessary for it. Pain cannot be identified as, and thus cannot be defined as, a particular type of configuration of particles.
The initial debate between reductionism and anti-reductionism is history, but on Rosenberg’s account what was essentially at stake in that debate continues in a contemporary form. Today’s reductionists and anti-reductionists share the assumption of physicalism. All facts are “fixed” by the facts about the items known to physics. Two worlds exactly similar in their physical state are ipso facto exactly similar in every way. (Christians, and other theists, will qualify their physicalism, saying that physics fixes all the natural facts.) What reductionists and anti-reductionists disagree on is whether explanations that involve functional kinds “can be or need to be deepened or improved by, completed, or perhaps replaced” by explanations involving the underlying physical reality (4). Pain, for example, is a functional concept. A mental state is pain just if it is characteristically caused by bodily damage and characteristically causes evasive behavior. Rosenberg’s focus in this little book is biology, which is replete with functional kinds, such as “organism, organ, tissue, cell, organelle, and gene” (4). But this can be generalized to all the sciences, such as psychology, sociology, and economics, that pertain to humankind.
The issue is methodological, not ontological. For example, any given gene just is a particular macromolecular structure, yet the concept gene cannot be defined in molecular biological terms. Does this render functional explanations, which ignore the underlying physical realization, adequate, or should functional biology be grounded in molecular biology?
The early reductionist project envisioned the laws of special sciences such as biology as derivable from the underlying physical laws that govern their constituents. However, Rosenberg sees its inevitable failure as due to the fact that there are no laws in biology or the other special sciences. There are only generalizations about what is contingently now the case. They support no exceptionless counterfactual claims. Contrast, e.g., “If something is a coin in my pocket, it is silver, so if this—a wooden nickel—were in my pocket, it would be made of silver” and “If something is a silver coin, it melts at 961.8° C,” so if this—whatever it is—were a coin made of made silver, then it would melt at 961.8° C.” The former relies on a transient generalization and expresses no law, but the latter expresses a law that supports the prediction. The generalizations of biology involve functional concepts, and all functions are due to natural selection. As it happens, a particular gene’s nature is fixed by the configuration of amino acids that constitute it, but this is what Francis Crick called a “frozen accident.” Genes are things, whatever they are made of, that serve a particular function. In other actual or possible times and places, genes could have quite different physical components.
This might lead someone to conclude that explanation in biology and the other special sciences is autonomous, ultimately independent of what happens to be going on at the level of physical realization. From this one could derive a pluralist conception of the methods appropriate to science, one for the law-governed phenomena of physics and chemistry, others for various other domains, with none taking precedence. However, Rosenberg disputes this. All functions are ultimately due to natural selection, which is a fundamental physical law. Entities of any kind, whether molecules or elephants, that can replicate with variation when the probability of future replication depends on environmental factors, is subject to natural selection and possibly adaptation. It (as a species) adapts to that environment (or goes extinct). It has features whose function is to do things that make its replication more probable. Given the second law of thermodynamics, i.e., increase in order is possible only at the cost of increasing disorder elsewhere, natural selection is the only (natural) way for adaptation, and thus function, to come about. “Forget design—evolution is a mess” (49). It takes nothing more than physics to get from a world in which there is no adaptation, no function, no biological complexity, no persons, and no societies of persons to one where there is a profligacy of such things. For all Rosenberg knows, the initial transition might be highly improbable. But it is the only possibility. Thus, all functional, and thus all special science, explanation is necessarily physical explanation. There is no fundamental pluralism of methods in science.
Rosenberg rejects eliminativism, the idea that we can or should dispense with the functional explanations that characterize the special sciences, replacing them with explanations that utilize only the concepts of physics. No useful explanation of how the tiger got its stripes speaks of quarks and electrons, without which there would be no tigers, striped or otherwise. But the evolutionary history that endowed tigers with stripes can be better understood when we invoke the specific molecular events that make stripes possible and, in the historical circumstances of the evolutionary lineage, necessary. Against a pragmatist construal of explanation in terms of human interests, Rosenberg insists that explanation is an objective, logical relation between what explains and what is explained, but he acknowledges that there are many possible explanations that are useless for human beings. Nonetheless, while there are valuable explanations that prescind from the underlying physical details, all things being equal, more details are always better.
The methodological descendant of reductionism is what Rosenberg labels mechanism, “the demand that biology uncover mechanisms, and ultimately molecular, physical mechanisms, and that biological systems and processes be explained by identifying the mechanisms that compose them” rather than by subsuming them under general causal laws (56). Mechanistic explanations are causal explanations, but they identify causally necessary “difference makers.” Excise a component and things will happen, or not happen. This is the model of biological research in which genes are identified by what phenotypically happens when they are removed; thus, the gene named wingless plays an essential role in building wings in a variety of creatures, for its removal prevents the development of wings. Ultimately, in Rosenberg’s view, the mechanist must take up the task of showing that natural selection itself is a mechanism and thereby substantiating the view that all explanation above the level of physics-chemistry is in terms of physical mechanism.
Reduction and Mechanism is a very short book; at 74 pages, it’s more like a long essay. With great clarity it covers much of the territory of Darwinian Reductionism: Or How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology (2006) a long and challenging book. Readers dubious about Rosenberg thanks to his eccentric popular volume, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality (2011) will find in Reduction and Mechanism an excellent introduction to this philosopher’s serious and important work.
George Papadopoulous,
Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump
I should begin by saying that I was disposed to believe Papadopoulos, having become convinced that Trump’s enemies would do anything, no matter how vile, to bring him down. The author’s candor—he does little to make himself look good—reinforced my supposition that he was the victim of a setup, engineered by the “deep state” and enacted in Europe, beyond the reach of U.S. law, one designed to manufacture evidence that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russians. The story is an admirably frank account of a young, ambitious, and inexperienced, perhaps naïve, specialist in the geopolitics of the Mediterranean oil business becoming ensnared in the Russia hoax. Much of the short book establishes the context of Papadopoulous trying to make a name for himself in the heady world of political consulting where advancement depends crucially upon ‘connections.’ (Those familiar with the Richard Gere film Norman: The Moderate Rise and Moderate Fall of a New York Fixer willrecognize the landscape.) Everyone claims to be close to someone Papadopoulous would benefit by getting to know.
His main aim, besides making a name for himself, is to convince the United States that Ergodan’s increasingly Islamist Turkey is not a reliable ally for the United States. The oil reserves newly discovered off the coast of Israel and in the waters near Cyprus, should not be piped through Turkey to Europe, but through Greece. The United States should strive to make Israel, Greece, and Cyprus its best allies in this part of the world and weaken its reliance on an increasingly hostile Turkey. This angers people in the Obama administration and in Britain who have a stake in the status quo. Papadopoulous becomes subject to suspicion and harassment, which only intensifies when he joins the Trump campaign. He believes that his campaign for this shift in policy made him a target even before the coup against Trump was hatched. I have not come across this claim anywhere else.
Seeing a way to enhance his career prospects, he lands a job with the Ben Carson campaign and, when it folds, he accepts an unpaid position as an advisor to the Trump campaign while continuing to pursue his career in Europe. He aspires to a position in the Trump administration. Understandably, when Papadopoulous was accused, the Trump campaign distanced itself from him, portraying him as very minor figure. In the book, he makes the contrary case that his role was fairly significant.
Papadopoulous has a series of increasingly odd encounters. A remarkable collection of shady characters impose themselves upon him, taking advantage of his desire to make useful contacts, clumsily turning conversations to Russia, which lies outside his expertise, interests and the ostensible subject of the meetings. Most well-known are his meetings with the mysterious Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud and with Alexander Downer. Alexander Downer, for reasons never made clear, meets Papadopoulous in a London wine bar, and later claims—with some inconsistencies—that Papadopoulous told him that the Russians had Clinton’s emails. Papadopoulous insists that he has no memory of this, though acknowledges that it is possible he did. In any event, the leap from passing on such a juicy rumor to being in any way involved with the Russians is extravagant. If someone was conspiring with the Russians on Trump’s behalf, it’s hard to imagine he would pass this information to strangers.
Mifsud’s connections to Western, not Russian, intelligence agencies is now known, while his current whereabouts is unknown. He introduces Papadopoulous to a Russian woman who he falsely purports is Vladimir Putin’s niece.
Papadopoulous finds all this strange, but fixated on pursuing his career aims, pays it little heed. It’s only over time that he begins to wonder if he is the object of some sort of organized operation, though he has no idea what it could be.
What turns out to be the fateful event occurs when, out of the blue, Mifsud tells Papadopoulous that the Russians are in possession of Hilary Clinton emails. Months later, when the FBI interrogates Papadopoulous, permitting him no means to check his notes or saved emails, he apparently mistakes the sequence of events, telling the agents that he did not have contact with Mifsud in April of 2016, when in fact he had sent him one email. (Whether he actually made the false statement is unknown, since the FBI neither made the transcript of the interview available or introduced it as evidence. But Papadopoulous is acknowledges he could well have made the mistake.) There is no discernible reason for him to lie about this, and no apparent reason to doubt it was a mistake of the kind anyone would make under the circumstances. But it was for this “lie” that he was eventually sent to prison, and it was from this perjury trap that the Obama regime interfered with the election and launched its attempted coup.
While he is overall credible, on a few occasions, the incuriosity Papadopoulous ascribes to himself is hard to take at face value. People ask to meet with him in bars and restaurants and then push their phones close to him, obviously recording him, but he never asks them why. Mifsud tells him the Russians have the Clinton emails, yet Papadopoulous says he did not ask how Mifsud knows this, how the Russians got them, or what “dirt” they contained. However, the one time he wisely acted on his suspicions was, surely, the one great thing he did that turned out to be a great service to his country. An Israeli-American, Charles Tarwill, obscurely connected to the world of intelligence, recruits him for work the nature of which is never explained. He presses a briefcase containing $10,000 in cash on Papadopoulous, who is about to return to the United States. Suspecting something is amiss, he leaves the money with a lawyer and flies to the U.S. without it. Upon landing at Dulles Airport, he is intercepted by FBI agents who search his luggage, and are furious that the money is not there. He thwarted the FBI’s attempt to create the damning story that the Trump campaign received the money by Russia.
Two aspects of the story are poignant. As his life is beginning to fall apart, Papadopoulous meets and falls in love with the beautiful, talented Italian—not Russian, as some believe!—woman Simona. They marry days before he goes to prison. While the judge denies him the right to speak publicly about his case, she passionately ably defends him on the news channels. When, with great trepidation, Papadopoulous arrives at the medium security prison, the officials welcome him as the unjustly sentenced man he is, and the other prisoners give him a standing ovation. He is far from alone in seeing himself as an victim of the deep state that operates outside all bounds of decency.
Books like Gregg Jarrett’s The Russia Hoax and Dan Bongino’s Spygate are valuable as carefully researched, objective unraveling of the complex web of conspiracy of which Papadopoulous’ ordeal was just one thread, but Deep State Target provides a victim’s irreplaceable first-person perspective.
David Haig
From Darwin to Derrida: Selfish Genes, Social Selves, and the Meanings of Life
A recurring division among philosophers is between conceptual conservatives and conceptual liberals. Scientific investigation reveals that nothing in reality precisely falls under a familar concept. Conceptual conservatives, assuming that they accept this result, conclude that what we once thought exists in fact does not. Conceptual liberals see the scientific discovery as reason to revise the concept: “X exists, but it’s different than we thought.” Conceptual liberalism can lead to radical results. (Cf. Galen Strawson in the review prior to this one.) For example, some say that the concept of free choice involves agents being the ultimate causal originators of their choices. We cannot have this capacity, being material beings fully enmeshed on the causal order to nature. Thus, nothing corresponds to the concept: there is no free choice. In contrast, conceptual liberals opt for a revision of the concept of free choice, excising ultimate origination, and conclude that we are free, though freedom is not quite what we thought it was. In another context, Daniel Dennett, who wrote this book’s Forward, epitomizes conceptual liberalism on the current scene. He contends that Darwin did not show us that complex, adapted biological organisms merely appear to be designed, but that our concept of design calls for revision: natural selection—or simply nature—designs biological organisms. Design does not require intelligence or foresight. There is no objection to ascribing this intentional characteristic, the sort of thing we have always assumed belongs solely to conscious rationality, to the mechanisms of nature. Haig’s book works out a thoroughgoing program of conceptual revision in application to human life. It is a “partial rehabilitation of final and formal causes” in explaining how we came to exist (269). Meaning and purpose seem mysterious only because we fail to see that in simpler forms they long precede their appearance in human life. Alluding to Ryle’s “ghost in the machine,” Haig says, “there is no ghost in the semantics” (287).
Haig writes, “the main task of this book is to explain how a physical world of matter in motion, or material and efficient causes, gave rise to a living world of purpose and meaning, of final and formal causes” (xxiv). Purpose and meaning are not latecomers, emerging only with human beings, but are discernible from the start, or at least in the biochemistry that gave rise to life. In this physical world, everything at this level, as well as at the level of human individuals and societies, can in principle be explained entirely in terms of mechanism, of efficient and material causation, but in practice, intentional concepts are systemically indispensable. Meaning is the product of the interpretation of information, of differences; this occurs in the mechanisms of biological reproduction: “Life is made meaningful by a multitude of mindless interpreters reinterpreting the molecular metaphors of other mindless interpreters. RNA polymerases transcribe DNA as RNA, tRNAs interpret codons as places to deposit amino acids. Ribosomes translate RNA prose into protein poetry….organisms are self-constructed interpreters of genetic texts in environment contexts” (245-6). Those texts are an account of what has succeeded in the past and a defeasible expectation of what will succeed in the future.
Haig is a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard. Some of his research has focused on “genomic inscription:” some of our genes bear markers that indicate which parent they originated from. His account of how they can conflict within us as in entry into an examination of the way each of us is the result of societies of strategizing, sometimes conflicting, sometimes cooperating, genes. “The genome has aspects of a fractious and poorly informed committee attempting to set policy, but with most decisions on how to implement policy taken elsewhere.” For example, inscribed genes engage in intragenomic conflict striving to implement a reproductive strategy that favors parental, or maternal, genes, but the brain the genes constructed has ideas of its own, and decides to delay childbearing for the sake of graduate school.
Despite the title, there is a great deal of Darwin and just a modicum—one brief chapter—concerning Derrida. Haig sees Derrida’s contention that there is no “original meaning” as parallel to the fact that all adaptation is exaptation. “Primary intentionality is the repetition of causes that worked in the past” (285). Much more of interest goes on in From Darwin to Derrida than can be briefly summarized. One caveat is that there is a great deal of biological science in this book, much that the lay reader (like me) will find daunting
Galen Strawson
Things that Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, etc.
Things that Bother Me consists of nine essays. Eight present philosophical views about the self, the mind, and freedom for which the author is well known. The essays he includes are generally more accessible to the non-professional reader than his other work. Four of the essays report on Strawson’s own sense of self, memory, personal narrative, and death. This Strawsonian phenomenology will strike most readers as unusual. The essays’ value lies not in persuading the reader of theories about the identity through time of a person, but in making the point that there are significant differences among people with respect to the ways they experience their temporal existence. People who think about philosophical matters tend to have either of two dispositions. Conceptual liberals see scientific discovery and philosophical analysis as properly revising our concepts. “X exists, but it’s rather different than we thought.” Others are conceptual conservatives who tend not to welcome conceptual revision, and either reject proposed revisions as tantamount to denials of the existence of X, or, if the scientific or philosophical conclusions cannot be denied, to construe them as revealing that X does not exist. Conceptual conservatism often leads to radical conclusions, which is what we see in Strawson. He is perhaps best known for his argument that human freedom is an illusion, and that both compatibilist and libertarian accounts are at odds with our concept of freedom. Thus, our concept of freedom is the concept of an impossibility. Strawson reaches this radical conclusion rather than recognizing that our concept of freedom is incoherent but that it can be revised, leaving us with an idea of a freedom suitable for human beings. Strawson regards the project of explaining how the configuration of non-conscious physical components in a human brain results in consciousness as a mere evasion that hides an absurd denial of subjective experience. This project leads to the conclusion that consciousness exists, but it’s quite different than we thought. Here, Strawson’s conservatism leads to a radical conclusion panpsychism. Consciousness is just what it seems to be, yet somehow present in all physical things; it’s a fundamental characteristic of reality. Neither saying that none of us are free or that everything is conscious is, for me, a reasonable price to pay to avoid conceptual revision. The final essay is an autobiographical account of Strawson’s adolescent life in the late 1960s, focused on his drug use and quest for spiritual enlightenment. Perhaps, this is meant to illustrate what the earlier essays report about his sense of self, but if so it’s not obvious. It might lead one to suspect that drug use is a precursor to developing bizarre philosophical views.
Leon R. Kass
The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis
This is a very close, fascinating, and profound reading of the book of Genesis, written by Leon Kass, University of Chicago professor and chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics in the first Bush administration. It grew out of an informal reading group in which Kass and his wife worked through Genesis with a group of students, seeking its relevance to contemporary issues. The book is very long with something interesting happening on almost every one of its well over 600 pages. I’ve read it off and on for a few years, and finally finished. In Kass’ own words, “The book of Genesis is mainly concerned with this question: is it possible to find, institute, and preserve a way of life that accords with man’s true standing in the world and that serves to perfect his god-like possibilities?” God’s attempt to inculcate human beings into that way of life, which is life in covenant with him, is described in the rich, complex, and often ambiguous account of the lives of the biblical characters. The Beginning of Wisdom, written by a conservative Jew, considerably deepened my understanding of Genesis.
Amos Towles
A Gentleman in Moscow
The fictional Russian count the novel’s title refers to is put under house arrest by the Bolsheviks in a once-great Moscow hotel. He spends most of the rest of life there. The story’s focus is his relationships with other guests and various employees of the hotel. This, Towles second novel, is beautifully written and an engaging story. The great question is what does it mean to be a gentleman, an honorable man, in a totalitarian society. This is his second novel. I look forward to reading his first novel, Rules of Civility.
David Bentley Hart
That All Shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation
This semester, the faculty reading group in which I have participated for years read this. If you are a Christian disposed to reject the traditional doctrine of everlasting damnation in favor of seeing Christ as the savior of all humankind, you will find this a delightful book, one that advances effective philosophical, theological, and biblical arguments to debunk belief in Hell from a theologically conservative point of view. If you are not so inclined and committed to the view that not all shall be saved, this will make your head explode. Despite offering arguments that belief in eternal damnation depends on denying that God is the Good, on a conception of radical human freedom that has no basis in reality, and on a willfully obtuse reading of the New Testament, Hart’s principal claim is that those who believe God would inflict everlasting punishment on any creature—“infernalists”—are pathological, beyond rational argument, and probably don’t really believe what they purport to believe anyway. The book is a rhetorical tour de force in its denunciations of infernalists, e.g. referring to followers of Augustine and Calvin on the issue, he writes, “if this is one’s religion, then one is simply a diabolist who has gotten the names in the story confused.” The arguments Hart adduces are by and large, compelling, but it is clear that his principal aim is not to persuade, but to express moral outrage at the traditional belief. I found the most valuable part of the book his enumeration of the NT texts that at face value literally teach universal salvation in contrast to the plainly non-literal texts appealed to in defense of Hell. Beyond the fraught issue with which the book deals, it invites reflection on the broader question of our dual responsibility to both respect tradition and to subject it to ongoing criticism in light of Scripture, reason, and the lived experience of the Church.
Tim Maudlin
Truth and Paradox
Maudlin develops an elegant solution to the liar–“This sentence is false”: if it’s true then it’s false and if it’s false then it’s true—and related paradoxes. He develops a three-valued logic: true, false, and groundless, and he distinguishes the idea of a proposition being true and being permissible. His resolution of the paradoxes does have some counterintuitive implications, but he makes it clear that no account can escape them. This lies well outside whatever specialty I have in philosophy, but I found his approach intriguing and convincing. Maudlin’s main interlocutors are Tarski and others who believe that no language can ascribe truth to its own sentences, but to say a statement is true requires a shift to a higher-order metalanguage. Maudlin’s approach avoids this expedient.
Ernest Gordon
Through the Valley of the Kwai
This is a surprising, and undeservedly mostly forgotten, book published in 1962. People of my generation are familiar with the 1957 movie The Bridge Over the River Kwai, based on a novel by Pierre Boule, but Gordon’s memoir of life as a POW building a railroad and bridge in the jungles of Thailand during the second world war is very different. Gordon, a Scot member of the British forces in Burma is captured by the Japanese and imprisoned. The conditions are horrific: sadistic brutality, disease, starvation, and death, and despair all around. The prisoners have lost all hope and are indifferent to the suffering of their fellow-prisoners, doing whatever it takes to prolong one’s survival, e.g., stealing food from their sick and dying fellow prisoners. In this abyss of dehumanization, a few small acts of self-sacrificial kindness start a cascade of goodness that eventually radically transforms the prisoners. A faith in God gradually awakens and it gives them hope that overcomes hate and death. By the war’s end, they are caring for the Japanese guards who cruelly mistreated them. We glibly speak of God bringing good out of evil; Gordon presents a vivid account of this really happening. Thanks to my friend Mike Kugler for recommending this.
Yoram Hazony
The Virtue of Nationalism
This is an important book. Contrary to received opinion, nationalism, the belief that the nation state, dedicated to the interests of its citizens, is the best form of political organization human beings can realize. It is the one feasible alternative to imperialism, the belief that the nation-state should be subordinated to an overriding, universal conception of the good at the expense of national sovereignty. The election of Donald Trump in the United States and the Brexit movement in the U.K. are examples of the re-emergent nationalism that Hazony applauds. He argues that the current denigration of nationalism, which takes the evils of Nazi Germany as the epitome of nationalism that must be avoided at all costs, is fallacious. Nazi Germany’s attempt to force other nations into the Third Reich was an imperialist, not a nationalist, project. Hazony regards the European Union as the most salient current example of imperialism. On Hazony’s account, the rights of individuals and minorities can be reliably safeguarded only in the system of nation states. Hazony is an Israeli; he regards the origins of nationalism and of opposition to empires as originating in ancient Israel. I have read and recommend his earlier book, ThePhilosophy of Hebrew Scripture, where he develops this theme. The Virtue of Nationalism challenges both Americans, who have to ask whether the United States has the will to survive as a nation state, and Christians, who proclaim a universal faith.
Louise Penny
The Long Way Home
This is, I think, the ninth Louise Penny novel I have read. Six more books, which I look forward to reading, remain, and one hopes there are more to come. All these detective fictions feature Chief Inspector Gamache, head of the homicide division of Quebec’s police force. The overwhelming sense one has reading this and all her novels is that she loves her characters and loves writing about them. An interconnected group of superbly developed characters populates the books. They should be read in order because the series is a continuous account of their lives. For example, The Long Way Home is about the search for a secondary character from the earlier novels who has disappeared. Her writing is gentle and lyrical, even as it portrays Gamache hunting down brutal murderers. Gamache succeeds, like his creator, by painstakingly uncovering the emotions that motivate human action. This book, like some others in the series, focuses on artists and their works. She has a remarkable ability to imagine wonderful works of art and almost convince the reader that he is seeing or hearing them. Anglophone Penny, who grew up in Toronto, sets the stories in Quebec. The province, beloved by the characters as well as by the author, is itself a character in these novels.
David Mendelsohn
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic
Mendelsohn teaches classics at Bard College. He is scheduled to teach an undergraduate seminar on Homer’s Odyssey and his father invites himself to sit in on it. Mendelsohn agrees and his father says he will keep quiet and just listen. At the first class meeting, the father, to the students’ amazed delight, and Mendelsohn’s chagrin, declares that Odysseus is no hero. Mendelsohn deftly chronicles his father’s effects on the students over the course of the semester, relating what he learns from and about his father and his relation to him. Intertwined with this are Mendelsohn’s musings on Telemachus, the son in search of his missing father Odysseus, and on Laertes, Odysseus’ despairing father. If, like me, you read Homer as an inattentive undergraduate years ago, this brings the old story to life. I have also read Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, his harrowing account of his attempt to reconstruct the murder of his relatives in the Holocaust. It’s not for the faint of heart but with that warning I highly recommend it.
Maudie
This is a film starring Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke. Directed by Aisling Walsh. It is based on the true story of Maude Lewis, Nova Scotian ‘folk’ painter, her struggle with crippling arthritis. and her eventual wide recognition as an artist. However, the focus is less on her painting than on her relationship with Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke). Lewis, who grew up in an orphanage, is unsocialized, barely articulate, rough, and sometimes cruel. Maudie works as his housekeeper and eventually they marry. Maudie is the suffering servant who humanizes, and with her love, redeems Lewis. Hawkin’s portrayal of the daughty Maudie, undaunted by her crippling condition, the indifference of her family, and Lewis’ initial disdain for her and her art, is simply amazing.
Among the items in the toolkit of the engaging and provocative writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb, probably best known for The Black Swan, is the triad fragile, robust, and anti-fragile. Fragile things are highly vulnerable to being damaged or destroyed by the vicissitudes of time. Things that are robust are largely invulnerable to them. Things that are anti-fragile are strengthened and improved by events that destroy things that are fragile and which have no effect on what is robust.
It is interesting to apply this to systems of belief, such as those presupposed by one’s Christian faith.
One familiar possibility: someone acquires a system of beliefs in virtue of growing up in a particular community, where everyone she knows and trusts has the same beliefs. Naturally, she has them too. When she achieves adulthood and leaves that community, she encounters problems that seem insoluble, questions she cannot answer, and so on. Unsustained by the community, she abandons her faith. The likelihood of this is exacerbated when she makes no distinction between essential and inessential components of the system of beliefs. When one goes, they all go. Her beliefs form a fragile whole and do not survive the encounter with reality.
For others, beliefs are robust. All challenges, objections, questions simply bounce off, often because of an unwillingness to listen or take them seriously. Or, when they are listened to, they are met with ad hoc answers. The believer seeks to make his beliefs unfalsifiable. The belief system is a non-negotiable ideology. Taleb admires Karl Popper’s fallibilism, a view of scientific reasoning that can apply to rational thought in general. The idea is that we should not seek evidence that confirms what we believe, but aim to falsify it. We are never entitled to say that our beliefs have been corroborated, but simply that so far they have resisted serious attempts to falsify them. (This falsificationism as a general account of what scientific reasoning is, or ought to be, is undermined by the Quine-Duhem thesis. It reminds us that nature speaks no more unambiguously in disconfirmation than in confirmation, for the evidence never falsifies an hypothesis on its own, but only in conjunction with a never fully-articulated set of background assumptions. Thus, what we observe never forces us to acknowledge that a beloved belief is false.) People find it difficult to see that what they should want is belief that it easily falsifiable yet not falsified, not belief that cannot be falsified. For those with robust beliefs, their convictions endure but do not change or grow.
The third possibility is that a system of beliefs is anti-fragile. The believer takes questions, challenges, objections and so on seriously. Indeed, she takes the lead in finding challenges and objections. She sometimes modifies her beliefs in light of them. Because of this, the system of belief does not just survive, as if it were merely robust, but it improves. Taleb points out that what makes complex systems anti-fragile is the fragility of their components. Parts of the whole die with the result that the whole flourishes. Thus, for systems of belief to be anti-fragile, the distinction between essential and inessential beliefs is crucial. We need not suppose that this is a categorical distinction, with a sharp line between what is and what it not negotiable. Rather, some beliefs are more deeply entrenched in the system than others, and it takes relatively more to unseat them. Nothing is absolutely immune to falsification.
The aim of an intellectually honest faith is anti-fragility. Hard questions make it better.
Recently, I was denounced anonymously as a heretic in general in virtue of my belief in evolution, and in particular because of my related views on God’s omniscience. This led to some thoughts on what it is to be a heretic.
There are two ways someone’s beliefs might be heretical.
While purporting to confess the Christian faith someone might deny some essential affirmation of the Christian faith. For example, were one to deny that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human, or that he was bodily resurrected, or that he is uniquely the savior of the world, that would be heretical. However, whatever the temptation might be to regard all one’s theological beliefs as coextensive with the set of essential Christian beliefs, with the implication that all those who disagree are heretical, I take it that Scripture is of no private interpretation, and that the articulation of the essentials of Christian faith are spelled out by the Church over the centuries. Thus, the best account of what is necessary and sufficient for orthodox Christian belief is found in the ecumenical creeds.
Less obvious, but perhaps more common, is heresy that arises not from subtracting from the essentials, but attempting to add to them. One might be tempted to assert that something more than what is set out in the ancient creeds of the Church is necessary for salvation. For example, someone might contend that one must have a particular belief about baptism, and that those who do—or those who do not—believe that infants should be baptized are heretics, not orthodox Christians. However, not all theological disagreements are between the orthodox and the heretical; they do not often involve the essentials of the faith. Many Christians have theological beliefs that are false. A modicum of humility calls for us all to acknowledge that some of our own are probably false, although of course we cannot identify which ones! It takes more than false, or even foolish, theological beliefs to achieve heterodoxy. Salvation is by grace, through faith in the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, not a result of having all correct beliefs about theology, morality, or anything else. To deny this is a more serious error than to have mistaken views about inessential matters.
Someone might assert, “You believe in the Triune God who created the world from nothing, called Israel to be his people, revealed his holy will in Scripture, and became incarnate as Jesus Christ who died for us and rose again, offering salvation to all who put their faith in him, but that’s not good enough: you’re a heretic unless you also believe_____________” where the blank is filled in with some view on the best hermeneutical approach to early Genesis, the proper way to regard homosexuality, the nature of omniscience, the use of alcoholic beverages, war and pacifism, marriage, transubstantiation, the ordination of women, and so on and on. I submit that this is heretical, no less than the denial of some essential component of Christian confession.
This is not to say that some of the issues on which Christians disagree are not important, but being important is not the same as being essential. Those who are mistaken about important things are not, for that reason, heretics.
For example, an anonymous writer disagrees with me about what it is for God to be omniscient. I assume that we agree that divine omniscience is a matter of God knowing everything it is possible to know. But we disagree about what it is possible to know. I also believe that God is omnipotent and thus that he can do anything it is possible to do. I believe that God has the power and wisdom to create a world with a future that cannot be fully known. And I believe that he has done so. I assume that the individual who wrote the review of my essay disagrees, believing either that God cannot do this or that although he could, he would not. I regard the author as misconstruing either God’s omnipotence or his revealed intentions in creating, but I have no inclination to call him or her a heretic for that reason. Orthodoxy does not turn on such matters of abstract theology.
To deny a claim is merely to deny it; it is not to refute it, not to show why the person who makes it should change his mind. This is particularly relevant when the false claim has not been made out of the blue, but is the conclusion of a publicly available line of reasoning. If the claim is false, the reasoning must be flawed, and it falls to the critic to show where the fault lies. The biblical model is to approach the erring brother and show him his error, not anonymous denunciation.
It is good to keep in mind that not every deviation from traditional beliefs held by large numbers of Christians is a departure from orthodoxy. The traditional, no more than the important, is not coextensive with the essential. Anyone who adheres to the Reformed understanding of the faith is well aware that long-held beliefs can be erroneous and need to be replaced. This was true in the 16th-century and it can be true today.
1. If someone has good reasons to trust a person, then she can have good reasons to believe that he has good reasons for causing, or permitting, some evil, even when she has no idea what those reasons might be. Thus the person of faith need not experience a conflict between her belief in God and the apparently gratuitous evil she sees in the world. But, of course, evil can at times generate a personal, existential crisis of faith. Scripture contains many instances of this, in the Psalms, in Job, in the Lamentations on the destruction of Jerusalem, and above all in Christ’s cry of dereliction from the cross.
2. Whether or not evil causes doubt in the believer, it poses a serious theoretical challenge to Christian belief. If there is gratuitous evil, then the perfectly wise, all powerful, and perfectly good God of Christian faith does not exist, and our faith is in vain. And there appears to be gratuitous evil. The burden that falls to us is to make the case that we have good reasons to deny that the world’s apparently gratuitous evil is really gratuitous, because God has good reasons for making it possible and for permitting it to continue. (The attempt to show that this is true is a theodicy. To show that it could be true is a defense. Here I don’t pay much attention to the distinction.)
3. The Christian has no stake in defending belief in a generic deity in light of the world’s evil. Our concern is to show that the God of Christian faith is a God that has good reasons for acting in ways that made evil possible, and that he deals with the actuality of evil in the best conceivable way. Our contention is that in the history of Israel, and decisively in the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, and then in the ongoing life of the Christian Church, God has dealt with, is dealing with, and will deal with evil—what we might better call the problem of sin and death#in the best conceivable way.
4. First, we contend that God had good reasons to create a world in which evil is a possibility. If someone acts in a way that makes evil possible, but this is a low-probability event, and he knows that he can deal with any actual evil that ensues in the best possible way, and intends to do so if it does, then the goodness of his ends may justify his action. If, for example, a physician begins a particular course of treatments, knowing that there is a low probability of serious side effects, but intends to deal with them in a good way if they occur, then he may well being acting properly in initiating the treatment. Whether the action would be justified if evil effects were inevitable, or highly probable, is a further question. But I will argue that evil, or at least moral evil, had low probability in God’s creation. I assume that God never intended there to be evil, at least not moral evil.
5. In The Material Image, I argue that the naturalistic implications of science can be reconciled with Christian faith, but only when we pay heed to its particular claims about God’s purposes in creation. The same, I hold, is true when it comes to coping with the problem of evil. We must take account of God’s aims in creation to grasp how he can justifiably permit the evil that now mars it and calls his goodness, and thus his existence, into question. God created with the aim of there being personal creatures, truly distinct from their creator and capable of being called to share in his triune life. The wise pursuit of this aim involves creating a world governed by indeterministic causal laws. The God of Christian faith does not design his creatures. He brings them into existence by natural means that preclude their specific characteristics being intended, or foreknown, by him. These means, e.g., natural selection in a universe governed by the probabilistic laws of quantum theory, necessitate the possibility of low-probability bad events. (It also necessitates high-probability bad events, such as the suffering of many sentient creatures. Natural evil I will discuss in future, my focus here is on moral evil.)
6. The approach I offer rejects the familiar human impulse to envision human beings as the crown of creation, superior to all other creatures. I conjecture the human species consists of creatures close to the boundary of persons and mere non-personal animals. Most of the personal creatures God’s creation has brought forth are further removed from their non-personal origins than we are. (I assume that the creation contains many other kinds of personal creatures, in absolute terms even if they are relatively very rare.) For them, the irrationality of moral evil is obvious and they do not indulge in it. Humans find it more difficult to avoid irrational choices destructive of themselves and others. However, when God is unambiguously empirically present to them, they are capable of doing so, but their not avoiding such choices remains a possibility, one they can freely choose. The likelihood of making evil choices increases as God’s empirical presence becomes ambiguous. (In the Eden story the humans sometimes hear, but never see, God.) On further conjecture, God’s compelling empirical presence would overwhelm them, rendering them incapable of freely rejecting evil and trusting him. I take it that the story in primeval Genesis, portraying the Fall as an historical event in an imagined past, makes the crucial point that our rejection of God, succumbing to the desire to put ourselves in his place, was contingent: not necessitated by human nature, not God’s intent but only a possibility he allowed for. God, regarding his human creatures’ freedom and distinctness from him, gave them time and space to do their worst, creating a world in which he appears not to exist, and where he is replaced with productions of the religious imagination, byproducts of our evolved cognitive architecture. This is how I understand our fallen condition and ‘original sin:’ it is to be born into a world from which God has to all appearances been evicted. But God does not abandon his wayward creatures. He sets out on the long course of saving them in the best possible way: by letting them do their very worst, executing his incarnate self for blasphemy and sedition, and using this very act to save them. It is a means that will finally deliver them from the subjugation to sin and death they have chosen.
7. Because I invoke God’s regard for human freedom in this account, I pause to note that, so far as I can ascertain, the familiar free will theodicy on its own faces fatal objections. First, it is simply false to claim that God cannot create a world in which there are free creatures and no moral evil. God could create a world containing exactly one creature who has just one free choice between good and evil. This creature could, since he is free, choose good and not evil. If he does, then God has created a world in which there is freedom and no evil. Giving the creature more choices, and increasing the number of creatures with such choices, makes no essential change. What is true is not that God cannot create a world with freedom and without evil, but that he cannot create a world with freedom and no possibility of evil. He cannot, of course, force creatures to freely choose good over evil. Perhaps it is also true that he cannot create a world in which he ensures that free creatures never do evil. However, if he knows what possible free creatures would choose if he were to create them, then he could create only those he knows will never choose evil. (A response to this is to float the possibility that all possible free creatures suffer from “transworld depravity,” i.e., there are no possible worlds in which they never freely choose evil. I find this implausible: if a creature is free, then whenever she chooses evil, she could have chosen good instead, and thus there is a possible world in which she chooses good over evil. If she has n choices between good and evil in her life, and she has made n-1 good choices, when she comes to the final, nth, choice either she can choose good one more time, or her choice is not free, and all her choices are free and good. In any event, because I maintain that God created persons by indeterministic natural processes, I believe that he did not foreknow what persons he was creating and did not select either species or individual members of species from the set of possible persons.
Further, we know that human beings are capable of persuading other human beings to choose good over evil, and to do so in ways that involve neither manipulation nor coercion, so that the choice is free. If human beings can sometimes do this to one another, especially when there is a large differential in wisdom, as there is between adults and children, it is not plausible that God cannot always do it. If a human being can freely choose good rather than evil, then there is a possible situation in which she does choose good, and God can put bring that situation about. It’s also worth noting that the bare claim that God permits evil because of the value he places on freedom is not plausible. Sometimes it is right to permit a morally wicked act for the sake of a person’s freedom, but sometimes it is not. One can place too high a value on freedom. It cannot reasonably or rightly be accorded infinite value in its own right. A person having fellowship with God is of infinite valued. It is sometimes said that God values human freedom because it is possibly for a person to have a relationship with him only if she freely chooses to do so. Perhaps this is true, but it is not reasonable to think that if God prevents someone from doing some great evil he thereby renders her incapable of freely choosing him at some later time. Indeed, the opposite seems more likely in many cases.
Finally, we should note that the appeal to free will runs counter to some traditional theological views held by those who make it. If, as some Christians believe, God causes, foreknows, and intends each human choice, then no human choices are free (even on a compatibilist conception of freedom) and divine regard for our freedom can’t be invoked to explain evil. If, as many believe, God foreknows who will freely finally choose to be in relationship with him, it is not clear why he would not prevent those who will not be saved from doing certain evils. And, as my colleague Randy Jensen has pointed out, if God threatens everlasting damnation for those who do evil, this is a paradigmatically coerced choice and thus not free.
On its own, not embedded in a larger context, the appeal to freedom’s value cannot solve the problem of moral evil.
8. We should, of course, ask why God would create a universe likely to bring forth such lowly creatures, given the probability (even if only a low one) of our behaving as we have. God could have created a world containing only superior creatures with no likelihood of rejecting their creator. But God is a community of loving persons, and it is characteristic of him that he freely reaches out to what is other than himself, sharing his love. Thus, while God does not have to create, it is no surprise that he does, aiming for the existence of persons distinct from himself. Nor is it a surprise that this God chooses to create in a way that allows for the possibility of the lowliest personal creatures existing. God has revealed the propensity not only to reach out to those who are other than him, as he does by creating a universe that in due course gives rise to persons, but to reach out as far as—and as far down as—he can. (The great biblical illustration of this is God electing Israel, the least of nations, as his chosen people, his nation of kings and priests to represent him to the world.) I believe that God created this universe with the intent of becoming incarnate as a creature of the lowliest sort. This turned out to be humankind. We are called to serve as the image of God not in virtue of our superiority to other creatures, but quite the contrary. God’s hope was to be welcomed among us as Lord, but in the event comes to us our crucified and resurrected Savior. By this, the best of means, sin and death is defeated. What remains to be seen is the case that this is the best conceivable means for God to deal with evil.
A friend asked me to define, explain, or defend libertarianism—I don’t recall which—and the following is what I wrote in response. My friend is a self-described socialist, but I suspect there is a libertarian inside him, yearning to be free.
Defining/Explaining/Defending Libertarianism
1.Libertarianism, or classical liberalism, has been defended from the perspective of various fundamental ethical theories, e.g., utilitarianism, ethical egoism, social contract theory, Kantianism, etc. As you know from the Material Image my view is that morality has no ultimately objective ground, but is projected upon the social world by human beings who are adapted for social life. Ethical theory does not map a domain independent of human beings, but seeks to systematize our inchoate and perhaps somewhat incoherent innate moral sentiments, concepts, and judgments. Moral theory can never be definitive. There is no hope of a proof of the one best ethical theory, if for no other reason than that the boundaries between morality and other things, such as religion, purity codes, and etiquette are in the nature of things unclear.
Two things I take to be characteristic of morality. One is that moral reasons approach being decisive. If you have a moral reason to do something then, all things considered, that is probably what you have best reasons to do, what you ought to do. But I see no reason to conclude that this is necessarily or always the case. (I take it that only an untenable divine command theory of morality has that implication.) On full analysis moral reasons could be overridden by other concerns. Second, I take it that morality is essentially a matter of interpersonal relations, constraints on how we interact with other human beings (and with relevantly similar creatures.) Broader practical questions such as what sort of person do I have best reasons to try to be, what sort of life is most worth living, or what kind of society is best, on my view fall outside the purview of morality. No doubt, though, there are connections. The ethical theory on offer here, applied to politics, is a theory of the moral constraints on government.
My view, from which my libertarianism derives, is that the best way to articulate and systematize our evolved morality, the way to most effectively achieve a reflective equilibrium of theory and intuition, is to work out the implications of a fundamental principle of moral equality: no one by status or nature has the authority to do things to other persons without having the same done to him in response. This is just one possible route to a libertarian conclusion. However, it has what I regard as the virtue of building the political theory upon a minimalist moral foundation.
We have no right to do, with impunity, things to other persons that they prefer not to have done to them. We are subject to having the same kind of thing done to him in return. For example, people do not like being insulted and this is a good reason not to insult them, but if someone does insult someone then the person he has insulted may insult him in return. If we are competitors in the marketplace you may try to produce better and cheaper products than I can and thus put me out of business, but you cannot reasonably expect me not to try to do the same to you. If I refuse to cooperate with you, share with you, or help you, you may in return refuse to cooperate, share, or help. And so on: the natural moral equality of human beings calls for a regime of reciprocity: whatever you do to others, accept that you have no rational objection when they fail to grant you special privilege and respond in kind. Applied to politics the implication is that no one has the right to initiate violence, but that those who do are subject to violence in return.
2. No society has ever fully realized government in accord with this moral principle. But those of us with libertarian, classical liberal, convictions have a reasonable loyalty to the United States Constitution. It of course falls short of the libertarian ideal, but it is the best approximation that has been put into practice. Thus in American politics the libertarian is in significant ways a conservative, advocating for the Constitution against the relentless statist project of undermining it. Libertarianism places what may be unrealistically rigorous burdens of personal responsibility on individuals with respect to taking care of themselves and of one another, and to being the nonviolent enforcers of the moral law. Thus it is an idealization which grudgingly, but on occasion necessarily, compromises with morally bad behavior.
3. Legitimate government governs only with the consent of the governed. Here this means that a government has no moral authority to do things that individuals would not have on their own, in the absence of any government in a hypothetical state of nature. We have good reasons to avoid the state of nature and to delegate our moral authority to respond with violence to those who initiate violence to professionals, i.e., to public servants who act as our agents. We thus avoid what Locke called the “inconveniences” of the state of nature, i.e., the moral risk of being judges in our own cases. Libertarianism regards government officials as literally servants, not as rulers. It regards us as equal citizens, not subjects.
4. All government action, explicitly or implicitly presupposes the threat of physical violence. There is no government without law and no law without the threat of forcibly imposed punishment. Therefore the question of the moral limits of state power is the question of the moral limits on the use of violence. It is never morally permissible to initiate the use of such force; it is permissible only in response to its initiation. The principle of moral equality implies that no one has the right to introduce violent coercion as a means to influence the behavior of other persons and that whoever does is properly subject to the same in response. Other forms of behavior, however morally deplorable, do not involve the initiation of violent coercion into human relations and thus are not the proper concern of government.
5. The theory construes the morally permitted reciprocity categorically: coercion in response to coercion, failure to help for failure to help, insult for insult, violence only in response to violence, and so on. Why this, rather than calculating the consequences, the amount of harm done? We know, after all, that harm inflicted nonviolently can be greater than harm due to violence. Marvin loves Sally and proposes marriage but he is rejected. This breaks his heart, causing months of sadness and depression. Fred, Sally’s fiancé, learns of Marvin’s proposal and punches him in the nose. In Marvin’s reasonable estimation the violence done him by Fred is nowhere near as bad as the suffering Sally inflicted on him by her refusal. Nonetheless, it is Fred, not Sally, who is properly subject to violent retaliation. Fred, not Sally, ought to be subject to legal sanctions despite her having done the greater harm. Or: businessman Jones, a fierce competitor, puts businessman Smith out of business, offering the market better and cheaper products than Smith’s. This drives Smith to bankruptcy and personal ruin. On the present account, whatever sanctions against Jones are permissible, they include nothing violent; government has no legitimate interest in the matter. Suppose instead that one night Jones breaks into the office of Smith’s firm and steals $100. This is far less harmful than the destructive competition in which he engaged, but it alone warrants a violent response, the involvement of the state.
No formal constraint prevents articulating our innate morality by a weighing of harms done, rather than in categorical terms. The warrant for the categorical scheme is that it is the only one that sustains a framework that can keep the peace and make civil society possible. A world in which violent responses to nonviolently inflicted harms are permitted is an incipient state of nature, where perceived harms readily lead to the initiation of violence, which inspires violence in return, and so on, to escalating cycles of retaliation and war without end. The categorical, in contrast to the consequential, conception of moral equality and reciprocity has the virtue of being a natural, but consciously contrived, extension of the blind operation of natural selection that made peaceable social life, and with it human flourishing, possible. (The reciprocity equality requires is more fine-grained than my examples make explicit: Marvin has no right to kill Fred for punching him in the nose, and so on.)
6. It’s worth noting that among the Left’s prolific evasions and obfuscations is the blurring of the distinction between coercion, understood as violent, and the various other ways in which someone can be “forced” to do something. For example, when an individual, making the best deal he can, accepts a job at low wages and with bad working conditions, he can reasonably report that he was forced by circumstances to accept a less than ideal position, even though it is at the same time his best option. From this those on the Left infer that the employer has forced the individual into the unfavorable situation, and that this in turn justifies using force against him – but now violent coercion in the form of law – to ensure that he provides a higher wage and better working conditions (or, to the prospective employee’s detriment, not to employ him at all.) Even if the prospective employer has taken unfair advantage of him, he has done no violence to the person to whom he offered a lousy job and thus on the current theory is not properly subject to violence for what he is done. He may well be in the wrong, callous and greedy. Perhaps he could easily pay better wages and provide better working conditions. If so he may well be properly subject to any number of nonviolent social sanctions, e.g., boycotts of his products or services, denunciations in the public square, individuals refusing to associate with him, etc. Or [as the friend for whom I wrote this suggests] the exploited workers can form a union and threaten to walk out. The imposition of such sanctions is facilitated by the openness of the liberal society, where information flows freely and helps police antisocial human behavior. (This contrasts with illiberal polities where the scope of government power is expansive and it is worth the rich employer’s money to corrupt the state to protect himself.)
The violence that constitutes the force of law has an efficacy that nonviolent sanctions of bad behavior does not. It is always a possibility that nonviolent social sanctions are not adequate to preventing it. However, it would be a mistake to suppose that the fact that some sanction is necessary to prevent some wrongdoing implies that it is morally permissible. There is no guarantee that there are always morally permissible means to prevent moral wrongdoing. However, libertarians typically believe that non-libertarians mistakenly discount the efficacy of private sanctions in influencing human behavior, especially when government has not broken out of its moral constraints.
7. Libertarianism is diffident toward democracy: There are situations where a group of persons must reach a collective decision about something, and sometimes a majority vote is the best way to do so. However, democratic procedures make nothing morally permissible which would not otherwise be morally permissible. If there are 10 people in a population and nine of them decide to initiate violence against the tenth the fact that this is the majority inclination does not make it right for them to do so. Overall, what makes a government legitimate is whether it is constrained by moral principle, doing nothing other than what individuals would have a right to do on their own, i.e., initiating violence only in response to violence, not its being elected by a majority of those it governs. Better a libertarian hereditary monarch than a democratic government that violates human rights. Better the highly constrained democracy of a constitutional republic, like the United States, than a pure democracy.
8. Liberalism (libertarianism) traditionally regards theft and fraud as forms of coercion properly subject to the force of law, despite the fact that they do not involve overt violence or any explicit threat thereof. If, e.g., a cybercriminal sends someone an email, deceiving him into sending him money for some fictive purpose, unlike the mugger who by threat of violence coerces his victim into handing over the money, he neither does, nor threatens, violence. However, he does something to his victims that, were they aware of it, he could not have done without the threat of violence, a threat to which his victim would have been justified in responding in kind.
The liberal state is limited to protecting the rights of its citizens not to be subject to initiated violence. Nothing beyond this is legitimate. It is not the proper role of government to see to the general well-being of its citizens. They, individually or collectively, can see to their own well-being and safety. The use of violence in response to violence is the unique right we reasonably employ others to enforce because doing so is necessary to exit the state of nature.
9. In contrast to ancient and medieval conceptions of the state, in which good and wise rulers discern the good for human beings and use the force of law to regiment human behavior in accord with it, liberalism conceives the state as properly neutral among competing conceptions of the good and thus indifferent to each individual’s pursuit of the good as he conceives it, so long as in doing so he avoids violating the rights of others. (Total neutrality is not a possibility: if someone’s conception of the good life involves violating others’ rights, then it is his bad luck that his government must interfere in his pursuit of it.)
These rights are, of course, construed negatively. An individual has, e.g., a right to life, but this is a negative right not to be killed by other persons (unless he unjustifiably kills or threatens to kill); it is not a positive right to be supplied with whatever he needs to be alive. If a government recognizes a variety of positive rights, it is a near certainty that it will be impossible to satisfy all of them, and that it will be in the position of adjudicating among competing claims, so that whether one’s (so-called) right is honored depends on the whim of the rulers. If there is a positive right to life, and insufficient resources to keep two citizens alive, government must decide who lives and who dies. Positive rights, in contrast to negative rights, do not constrain the actions of the state. It is possible simultaneously to respect, i.e., not violate, any number of negative rights. The state respects any number of citizens’ negative right not to be unjustly killed simply by not unjustly killing them.
Because the state’s proper function is to protect citizens from having their rights violated by others, no paternalistic legislation is justifiable. Government is one’s employee, not one’s parent, tutor, or custodian. If someone’s conception of the good life involves activities likely to cause self-harm, this is of no concern to his government, although it may well be a proper concern of his fellow citizens who devise morally permissible means to dissuade him. Similarly, as in the case of the stingy employer above, government has no proper concern with forcing individuals to help those in need, but those who fail to may well be subject to nonviolent social sanctions.
10. Finally, we can note that the theory is a form of pacifism. It is always morally wrong to initiate violence. This contrasts with an absolute version of pacifism which proscribes any resort to violence, even to defend the innocent against those who initiate violence. And it contrasts with the incoherent doctrine commonly known as pacifism, i.e., the view that violence against foreigners in war is wrong, but that its use domestically, as in legislating on behalf of favored welfare projects, or to improve society on some criterion, is permissible or even obligatory.
At this point in the General Election campaign (mid-October 2016) many of us are wishing things had gone differently. In an elegiac spirit, I retrieved the speech I gave at my precinct during the Iowa caucuses last winter:
I am speaking for Carly Fiorina.
We are blessed with some truly talented and admirable candidates, genuinely committed to the change this country so desperately needs. It’s humbling, and maybe it seems presumptuous, to stand here and say that one of them is clearly best…
…maybe especially so when the news media, the pundits, and the pollsters—talking to the 8% of Iowans who are still answering their phones—think they already know how things are going to go tonight…
…but this is our decision, our responsibility…
…to decide
Who has the clarity of vision to see what’s gone so badly wrong with our country and to spell it out in terms that will inspire a winning, governing majority to bring us back from the brink…
Not flailing anger but the laser-like focus of wise and righteous indignation…
Not flinging mud at her fellow Republicans, but keeping our sights fixed on our common enemy: the vast, incompetent, corrupt Federal Government and the arrogant, self-righteous ruling class that has formed around it…
Who has the real-world, outside of Washington, outside of politics, experience of real accountability for a huge, bloated, failing enterprise—the once great Hewlett-Packard—and fundamentally transforming it. Saving the company, saving thousands of jobs, by making hard decisions. Even when it came to standing up for employees and shareholders against a self-interested Board of Directors. Fighting the good fight against the crony capitalism and regulatory insanity that’s suffocating the American economy.
Carly Fiorina means what she says and she will do it. When I first heard her speak I thought: Margaret Thatcher lives!
No political evasion. No excuses. No good-old boy deals. The moral discipline of the free market imposed on government. Honest, zero-based budgeting. Obamacare to the dustbin of history. A simple, rational tax code. Living within our means. Control of education returned to local communities and parents. Protecting personal, religious liberty. Fidelity to the Constitution against an out of control government that thinks it knows best, thinks it should manage everything and everyone, yet cannot do the few things it ought to do: secure the borders, control immigration, be faithful to allies, show resolve to adversaries, and decisively defeat Islamic radicalism.
The defense of innocent life is an issue especially dear to Carly. Ten days ago she was the only candidate at the March for Life, in the snow, in Washington, invited because she has so forcibly challenged Planned Parenthood’s horrific and mercenary disregard for the lives of the unborn. A Carly Fiorina presidency is that evil organization’s nightmare.
Carly Fiorina would be the last person to ask you to vote for her because she is a woman. Her vision for America is the great land of opportunity, where someone can start out as a secretary and become CEO of one of the world’s largest corporations. Where each of us is rewarded in accord with our contribution, not for belonging to whatever demographic the ruling elites accord victim status.
A land where citizens take their country back from a self-anointed political class.
But I do like to envision Carly as our nominee, debating, demolishing an (unindicted?) Hillary Clinton, forcing her to run on her record, not on her gender.
She will make us proud. Proud to be Republicans. Proud to be Americans. I urge you to caucus for Carly tonight.
Postscript: There were over 400 people at our caucus. Carly got six votes. Oh well…
I recently read Sean Carroll’s The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016). In my experience Carroll is unsurpassed as a popularizer of contemporary physics and this is on display in this admirable book. It differs from From Eternity to Here, which was, for the non-scientist at least, more challenging, delving more deeply into technical matters. (I imagine the same is true of his The Particle at the End of the Universe, which I haven’t read.) As the title indicates, The Big Picture covers a great deal of territory, necessarily in less depth. (However, a marvelous appendix explains in some detail the “fundamental equation” of quantum field theory.)
Carroll is an atheist, but I find myself agreeing with most of what he has to say here, even though he takes for granted that the naturalism he propounds is at odds with theistic belief. His rejection of theism in favor of the naturalistic view of the world current science unequivocally supports appears to depend on a few dubious suppositions and inferences.
Early in the book (pp. 42ff.) he takes pains to point out that we are not justified in assuming that there must be an answer to every question we can frame. The Principle of Sufficient Reason cannot be proved; it is a useful but not a reliable guide to understanding reality. (I think the proper conclusion is that it is reliable but not, so far as we know, an infallible guide.) “We are not entitled to demand that the universe scratch our explanatory itches” (p. 45). For all we know the fundamental nature and existence of the universe is a brute fact. Lurking in the background here is the low entropy state of the observable universe, something Carroll invokes to explain various significant features of our world, but does not attempt to explain here. However, this is a question he takes up in From Eternity to Here.
However, much later in the book he says things that, if not contradicting this, stand in some tension with it. He writes, “Everything we’ve experienced about the universe suggests that it is intelligible….Mysteries abound, but there’s no reason to worry (or hope) that any of them are unsolvable” There is, he advises, no need “…to take refuge in a conviction that the universe is fundamentally inscrutable” (p. 430)…unless, one might be tempted to suggest, someone is appealing to the PSR to argue for God as the creator, in which case it must be emphasized that for all we know the universe is a brute fact for which there is no ultimate explanation. Ironically, the context for this passage is the need to seek real explanations for what we find in the world rather than calling it a mystery due to inscrutable divine action.
When, midway through the book, Carroll addresses the traditional theistic claim that the contingent universe is intelligible only if it’s the creation of a necessarily existent being, he casually dismisses it: “…God isn’t a necessary being, because there are no such things as necessary beings” (p. 203). The objects of scientific investigation are contingent, but if God exists he is not an object of scientific investigation, so he might not be contingent. (Many, both theists and non-theists, contend that if God exists, he does so as a matter of necessity.) There are philosophical objections to ascribing modal properties like necessity to things (de re) rather than just to language (de dicto) but Carroll does not refer to them. Instead, he makes the irrelevant claim that we ought not to rely on a priori principles when it comes to explaining the universe. This might, or might not, be true, but the theistic claim is offered as an explanation, and thus as a conclusion, not a premise, a priori or otherwise. The fact that the Principle of Sufficient Reason might not be true has no bearing on the fact—if it is a fact—that the best explanation of the universe involves a necessary being. (And if it is a fact, there remains the further question of whether it’s not just best but good enough to be rationally accepted.) Carroll’s question-begging rejection of the theistic conclusion is surprising in light of his commitment to the traditional distinction between necessary and contingent truths, this manifest in the course of contrasting mathematical and scientific reasoning (pp. 123ff.) One might acknowledge that there are propositions that are necessarily true but deny that any of them are existential, claims about what exists. But this may well appear arbitrary once we admit negative existential propositions, statements about necessary non-existence; some things cannot possibly exist, e.g., square circles, cats that are not animals, even primes greater than 2. Having admitted necessarily non-existent things, how plausible is an a priori denial of necessarily existent things?
Carroll poses the important question as to the likelihood of various observed features of the world on theistic, and on non-theistic, assumptions. This is one aspect of his quite charming exposition of reasoning in accord with Bayesian principles, but it is marred by the assumption that the issue is exhausted by ascertaining the likelihood of the physical features of the universe, e.g., how likely is it that God would have created a universe containing 100 billion galaxies? The exception to this is his appeal to the problem of evil: how likely is it that God would have created a universe containing it? Other kinds of evidence, particularly the historical facts that are, or ought to be, of the first importance to Christians, are ignored. Although Carroll points out that there are any number of ideas of God, his consideration of the likelihoods is adversely affected by too narrow a conception of what God’s purposes in creating might be: “Someone will argue that a universe with a hundred billion galaxies is exactly what God would naturally create, while someone else will roll their eyes and ask whether that expectation was actually put forward before we went out and discovered the galaxies in our telescopes” (p. 149).
Those of us, i.e., everyone, who assign high degrees of credence to various things are at risk of telling ourselves “just so stories” when what the evidence really calls for is the reevaluation of one’s estimate of the prior probability of cherished belief. When a hypothesis predicts a hitherto unknown phenomenon, this is more strongly confirming than when it explains something that’s already known but not yet explained. So, e.g., the fact that general relativity explained the already familiar precession of the perihelion of Mercury was not as decisive as the apparent displacement of a distant star when light from it passed near the Sun, yet it was important to general relativity’s confirmation and no one was justified in rolling his eyes at Einstein on this score. What we actually observe can make it reasonable to revise downward the prior probability of one’s theistic belief, but it can also make it reasonable to revise and/or more clearly articulate that belief. Here the crucial consideration seems to be whether we have other, independent reasons for those changes. Does a concept of God and his aims in creation that accords a high likelihood to the kind of universe we actually observe better fit the biblical account and the Church’s experience? No doubt, there’s plenty of room for self-deception here and such claims call for a strenuous defense. But I don’t imagine, for instance, that Carroll would really say that it would have been unreasonable for a Christian in the 1630’s, cognizant of Galileo’s astronomical observations, to change his mind about the likelihood of certain views of celestial bodies, at the cost of revising his presuppositions about how to interpret scripture, rather than simply finding scripture’s reliability and ultimately God’s existence less probable in light of the new evidence. In retrospect it’s obvious that the Church in Galileo’s day relied on hermeneutical methods that are unreasonable in light of considerations independent of the discoveries of early modern science. What Galileo saw with his telescope improved our understanding of God; it did not undermine it.
It’s important to keep in view that whatever the folk-theology of “generic theism” might imply, the biblical, Judeo-Christian tradition has a particular conception of God’s aim in creating, viz., the existence of persons truly distinct from their creator yet capable of fellowship with him. What this idea of God makes likely can be quite different than what generic theistic belief makes likely, and it can be quite similar to what science reveals, including things we couldn’t imagine in earlier times.
I share Carroll’s view that moral theory is the project of “systematizing and rationalizing our [moral] sentiments,” (p. 424) not of discovering an utterly objective moral truth. But agreeing with many atheists and theists, he holds that there can be an ‘absolute’ (i.e., objective) moral standard only if God exists. I don’t see how the existence of God is necessary—or sufficient—for moral truths being objective in some ultimate sense. (I believe, and assume Carroll would agree, that the truths of morality are in important senses objective, even though not finally independent of the human species. Colors make for a useful analogy: properties that thanks to natural selection we spontaneously project on objective reality, but which are “there” independent of what humans think.)
Finally—and this might be a philosopher’s quibble—while I was on board with Carroll’s description of human persons as (weakly) emergent, and thus not fundamental components of the world but complex arrangements of things that are, I found it annoying to read that a human person is a “way of talking” about the world, since this is literally false. Human persons, as ontologically superficial as they are, are things that talk in various ways, but no one is a way of talking. But I take Carroll’s underlying claim about our place in the world to be correct. There are perspectives on reality from which humans, along with most everything we experience in daily life, are simply invisible.
These objections aside, The Big Picture is a wonderful book, beautifully written, often entertaining and even inspiring.
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