Consequentialism, compassion and confidence

On a slightly tangential note, this is the thing I found most interesting about Batman: The Dark Knight. It presented several standard ethical thought experiments, but did so in a setting where you really couldn’t be certain that things would work out as described.

A few initial thoughts in response John …

* First, an obvious point, but one difficult to get right: what counts as “sacrificing” is going to depend on your view on acts and omissions. The standard deontological view looks pretty crazy in toy examples like the trolley problem, much less so when applied, say, to decisions on war and peace where the bellicose (I’m thinking Hitchens here) help themselves to all kinds of assumptions about the lives they save (“If Uday and Qusay had ben left in power …” – you know the drill.

* Second, following what “my fellow consequentialists” believe about likely consquences seems overly restrictive. Why limit yourself to the estimates of party members?

* Third, copying what others think, even a majority, is a recipe for bubbles and crashes, isn’t it?

* Fourth, OK so you abandon that in favour of rules (meaning rules of thumb). But where are these rules coming from? Past experience perhaps? That sounds like a sensible answer but I already hear the seducer’s voice telling you that the world has changed, that old rules are no longer relevant (now that China is rich, or Iran has the bomb, or Al Qaeda has anthrax, or whatever) … no time for longer deliberation, emergency, etc etc.

There is another <a href="theory which states that this has already happened.

When I saw this the first time around,

“the very same disregard for, or scepticism about, the rights of individuals, the same willingness to sacrifice individual lives for valuable goals”

I thought that it was just another expression of socialism; ie, the elevation of the collective above the individual.

4- supposing that, I would have every reason to think you’re a dangerous individual &, that much is certain, a very atypical one (although maybe rather typical in the atypical category of blog wanderers).

Anyway, the higher level consequentialism of John is right – both consequentialist and non-consequentialist arguments can be easily bent to fit the worst decisions.

If anyhing the difference is that consequentialism kills by averages whilst most of anti-consequentialism kills in genocides.

The interesting position are those of Kant, Hume, Rawls which give non-consequential reasons why, or better: under which conditions, one should go with consequentialism.

dsquared: steps 1-4 of your argument make a certain amount of sense, but 5 doesn’t follow from them. You can equally well argue that 1-4 imply that the rules can’t have any reasons which make them worth obeying.

1. What Neel said about #9: if you know nothing about the future, you know nothing about what rules it will be best to follow. So “murder everyone” is as good as any alternative.

2. What John proposes isn’t, to be pedantic, rule-consequentialism; it’s indirect consequentialism. And indirect consequentialists have this totally unfounded confidence that the rules following which will have the best consequences are the same as the non-consequentialist rules most of us apply in everyday life and in judging the hypothetical cases.

3. There are lots of perfectly realistic cases where act-consequentialism and deontology come apart. It could be that by weakening the protections for criminal defendants, e.g. by lowering the standard of proof from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to “on the balance of probabilities” we would, while convicting a few more innocent people, convict so many more guilty ones and thereby prevent crimes that the net consequentialist effect would be positive. Yet many of us would reject the change because of its effect on the innocent. (“Better that ten guilty men escape than that one innocent man suffer.”)

4. Most importantly, it isn’t just that consequentialism yields the wrong verdicts about what’s right and wrong; it’s that it gives the wrong reason for them. Indirect consequentialism says the reason we shouldn’t frame and execute an innocent person in order to prevent a race riot is that a rule allowing such an act would have long-run bad consequences, e.g. by spreading fear through the population. But that’s not why the framing and executing is wrong. It’s not because of how it will affect various remote people in the future; it’s because of what it does to this person and his rights now.

Looking back, I see the phrase ‘absolute certainty’ was my invention and not a quotation from your post, but I assume this is what you mean when you complain that you are supposed to believe with 100 per cent confidence

I wondered how John would apply his strictures against ‘ludicrousness’ to economic models but I suppose that if the objection is that ‘ludicrous’ hypothetical situations do not yield reliable intuitive moral judgments then this doesn’t apply to economics models which aren’t used to probe intuitions but as a basis for deductive reasoning.

12: Indirect consequentialism says the reason we shouldn’t frame and execute an innocent person in order to prevent a race riot is that a rule allowing such an act would have long-run bad consequences, e.g. by spreading fear through the population.

In such a case, wouldn’t we say that the rule permits consequences of the form: (some innocent person may be killed and a race riot may be prevented and fear may be spread through the population and … etc.)? As a consequentialist, you might attach great weight to the wrongness of killing an innocent person and so reject the rule, even if my own consequentialist outlook led me to weigh things somewhat differently, or not. I don’t see that we’re inevitably guided to ‘the wrong reason’.

As far as trolley problems go; I agree that they often seem ludicrous. But they do seem to get at a core difficulty; even with perfect information, we might find it very hard to explain or justify certain actions, were we in a position to act. However, there seems to be plenty of ‘moral space’ left over.

Anyhow, from John’s original post:

Given that consequentialists agree on a set of rules, I should follow them, applying my own judgement only where the rules don’t specify a particular course of action.

Wouldn’t we be fairly happy if legislators did in fact take the electorate to be ‘consequentialists who happen to agree on a set of rules’ and hence did their best to follow those rules?

make that: ” to a large extent counterproductive.”

Novakant: your complaint seems to be that moral philosophers aren’t spending their time being policy-wonk political activists instead. Which is fair enough, I guess, but isn’t going to convince us moral philosophers of much. There are legitimately interesting questions in ethics that have nothing to do with the war in Iraq, as hard as that may be to believe.

Again: the purpose of the trolley problem discussion is NOT to say that there IS a distinction between, say, doing and allowing that allows those in political power to wash their hands of the consequences of their actions by saying they’re just ‘allowing.’ After all, signing a law or ordering an invasion would count as pretty clear cases of ‘doing’ here. The point isn’t post-hoc justification for bad policies: Thompson and Foot aren’t anything like John Yoo. The point, among other things, is to figure out how to explain various distinctions–itself a rather difficult problem–and, further, to figure out if those distinctions are morally important.

I find the debate on the trolley problem tiresome, myself, and I think mere intuition pumping is a philosophical vice, but thought experiments and extreme cases are perfectly legitimate philosophical tools that don’t deserve the scorn often heaped on them. They don’t give us clear-cut answers, but properly used, they help us think about the questions, which is often the point in moral philosophy.

Also, what Chris Bertram said.

Re: #13 and 14, I believe the certainty/confidence stipulation is indeed present in the usual trolley cases, the point being to dissociate moral factors from epistemic ones.

The point of the debate is (or was—the debate now has a life of its own) to try to understand the distinction between doing and allowing, and especially to understand what sort of difference that distinction might make in moral contexts.

Those of us who aren’t analytic philosophers tend to doubt that there is such a distinction — the terms are used in by different people in different contexts in a variety of overlapping ways. Exploring how (liberal, educated, English-=speaking, etc.) people react to various hypotheticals might be interesting in various ways but it can’t find the clear line dividing these vague gradations, because there isn’t one to find.

(Of course Wittgenstein said it all a long time ago, didn’t he?)

It is because we are often trying to test our commitment to some principle or other which is alleged to hold universally. A principle wouldn’t even be a prima facie candidate for such universal status if it failed to deliver the right answer in the central cases, so we are bound to seek out more exotic examples

But what makes you think any interesting principle holds universally? Sometimes it seems like the entire project of contemporary moral philosophy is to work out a set of first principles from which the conventional opinions of the late 20th century English-speaking liberal middle class can be derived by logic alone.

29 –

The purpose of measuring “universal” principles against, say, the trolley problem isn’t to prove which principles are actually universal. It’s to prove what you actually believe about principles. That is, these thought experiments tease out people’s actual inuitions – “I’d have said I was for whatever’s best for the most people, but I wouldn’t feel right about throwing the switch in that situation, even if I can’t say why.” From that point, you can perform philosophical analysis on the results, or you can try to change people’s minds, people’s actions, and the world – but either way, it’s useful to begin knowing as much as possible what people value, not what they think or claim they value.

It might be worth remembering here, that for Kant, to be at all considered a rational agent, one must act in accordance with a maxim, i.e. a rule, a kind of mini-policy. Such minimal consistency in action is required for any meaningful attribution of agency, let alone moral status or capacity, (since ” a lawless will is a contradiction in terms”). I don’t want to get into the weeds with Kant’s moral philosophy here, (except to note that his emphasis on the interiority of intention to the exclusion of consequences precludes any evaluation of ends, except in the distantiated and idealized form of a “kingdom of ends”, which makes it weirdly consonant with utilitarianism, considered as a sheer rationalization of means), but I think his intuition of the de-ontic status of moral/ethical norms, which as counterfactuals can’t be derived from any givenness, is basically correct. If the matter of morality/ethics concerns acts and material and symbolic exchanges with respect to relations with others qua other, then the separateness of persons, their otherness, is paramount. (This needn’t imply any primacy to individualism, since there are no individuals outside of social groups, since we are already bound up in relations with others “before” we can become such individuated selves, for whom these questions and matters would arise). Ethical “order”, then is a matter matter of maintaining the ethical status of persons/agents within the social group, regardless of what changes or transformations of ontic conditions might ensue or come about. Utilitarianism, insofar as it can’t supply any criterion for the separateness/otherness of persons, would IMHO not be an “ethical” standpoint, but sub-ethical. No matter how admirable a proposal might be under its auspices, it’s a matter of policy and not ethics, or, in other words, the utilitarian reasons recommending such a proposal would not be the same as the ethical reasons obliging its adoption. There are also other generic flaws with utilitarianism, such as its simplistic/mechanistic binary of pleasure and pain, which has little to do with the ambivalence of moral emotions, nor with the status of notionally self-determining agents; and its confusion of the good with “goods” to enable a rather spurious quantification, with the usual implications that more is necessarily better and that egotistical motivations, “interests”, are the paramount concern and criteria. But it’s in that basic mis-recognition of the matter at issue and its stakes in “ethics” where the damage is already done.

As to the “trolley problem”, it’s curious that the impatience with which some people reject it seems tinged with disgust, which, like, contempt, shame, or admiration, is an evaluative emotion. But I don’t take the problem as concerning the difference between acting and permitting,- (sins of commission vs. sins of omission?),-, but rather the difference between immediate (fat man) and mediated (train switch) action. The latter permits abstraction into a third-person perspective, whereas the former is irremediably mired in a second-person encounter. (And I believe the empirical result is that train switch gains a much higher % of approval than fat man). But it’s been put under MRI, with the claimed empirical result that different parts of the brain are “lit up” between the two versions. Apparently, the relational and the cognitive components or subsystems of behavior are evolutionarily “wired” much differently. And it might be useful to reflect on that difference and why it might be so.

John Q: on the first point – yes you’re right about the leftists who supported the Iraq war being (officially anyway) non-consequentialist. However, I think the pressure to treat the principle-based unwillingness to do unspeakable things as a kind of self-indulgent squeamishness has largely come from consequentialist reasoning about the importance of winning (two world wars, the cold war, etc.),

(Sorry, yawn directed at novakant not at John.)

on various non-realist metaethical views there are no such facts, but the logic of moral discourse presupposes, rightly or wrongly, that there are.

You’ve tucked this into a parenthesis, but in fact it seems like the key point. On one level, we know that moral rules are products of history and contingent in all sorts of ways. But in our own actions and subjective experience, we need to regard moral rules as having objective force.

What I think someone like Rorty is trying to do is suggest that neither of these truths can be reduced to the other. Just because we need to believe, when we are making choices, that there a set of objective moral rules, doesn’t mean there actually are a set of universal rules out there with the same status as mathematical truths.

Do they ever ask physicists to vet their problems?
We tried, but they were stuck on the frictionless ice shelf with the penguin and assumed that morality was a perfect sphere.

@45

No, the quasi-empirical point of the “trolley problem” is that both the train switch and the fat man cases are consequentially identical, whether answered in the binary yes or no. That more people might answer yes in the train switch case than in the fat man case is supposed to reveal some inconsistency in our moral intuitions. That some % might either answer no or yes to both cases indicates some consistency, but neither the reasons for their intuitions, nor the sense of engagement or responsibility involved, i.e why they are consistent when others aren’t and whether it’s because they value consistency or commitment most of all. At any rate, I took @37 to be answering no to the fat man and yes to the train switch, rather than addressing any asymmetry between acting and refraining, with respect to the responsibility involved. If “those making the social rules”,- (and who are they, if not we ourselves?),- are striving to attain a “neutral” position in which no one feels responsibility either way, then we are in the Grand Inquisitor parable, in which those “responsible”, in the utter cynicism of their hold on power, are striving to “dis-emburden” the others of their responsibility.

john c. halasz: I think your description of utilitarianism is pretty one-sided, or rather you make it seem as if people had to choose between either utilitarianism or a Kantian “Gesinnungsethik”, while in fact it is entirely possible to integrate aspects of both within a reasonably coherent position. What I find refreshing about utilitarianism is the fact that it can be used to cut a long story short, so for instance one can debate endlessly awbout the Iraq war, but then one can also simply ask the question: “our actions led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – how can that be a good thing?”. While I certainly don’t “subscribe” to utilitarianism (and generally find the pressure to favor one approach over another, to choose sides, in philosophical discourse very silly) I think viewing things from this point of view can actually be very productive and should be encouraged – I increasingly count the number of avoidable deaths in order to evaluate ethical/political decisions.

Take for example infidelity

Yeah. On the one hand, who does it hurt? On the other, if you’ve ever experienced jealousy, you don’t have to ask. When I went to work for my father, in my late twenties, I discovered his unusual arrangement: Monday, Wednesday and Friday he spent with his girlfriend at work (convertible sofa in the office). My mother mostly tolerated this arrangement, and twenty-odd years after my Dad’s death she’s on civil terms with his former lover (we all go to the same UU approximation of a church) but her resentment still simmers. What I got out of the arrangement was an extra mother, which was about the last thing I needed.

The ethical dilemma I most frequently face is exiting a parking lot after a concert, deciding whether to stop to allow someone in front of me to jump the queue, inconveniencing dozens of drivers behind me who have been in motion longer than the laggards in front of me who depend upon my consideration. [In the worst case this drove me to park in a more distant garage.]

These puzzles suggest that no general solution is possible; there may be (or may well already have been) a broad conclusion to be drawn along the lines of Gödel’s incompleteness or Arrow’s election theorems that no approach can be both general and satisfactory.

“Do unto others” is too strong; “do not to your neighbor” is too weak. In practice it’s probably as much about what you had for breakfast or the last argument you had with your brother, and in principle it might not be possible to do much better than that.

52- it’s beyond me why one would self-inflict the ‘badness of it all’ continuously if one’s quite evidently not oneself tempted at all.

It’s like somebody playing devil’s advocate so much that, even still quite able to tell the devils from the angels, you go for the devil because it’s the only thing really homesy.

There’s nothing petit-bourgois about accepting consensus judgments. There is nothing being demanded for other to ‘subscribe’. The idealist, non-consequentialist, start is in a realization that other’s opinions not only matter but that other’s opinions are really not cleanly divisible from ours (Habermas diskurs Logik for an example attempt at making an argument of this type). That’s the only universal (it’s quite close to Hume actually in a moral point of view); it’s process-related not content related. All of the rest is fallible, and changeable and depends on how societies deal with specific situations (but without room for not integrating other’s opinions in what finally comes out – a Rawlsian thing).

But obviously it is better to do as if nothing has been thought on any of this & jump in a miserabilistic pool of cultural pessimism with respect to one’s own essential absolues & have some fun with strawman Stalinists & thought experiments that abstract away the – even simplest of – processes for pondering other’s opinions.

(experimental psychologists have experimented with these thought experiments, and, the conclusion was that participants found the situations unfair)

I find it a bit hard to undersatnd why, if Anglophone academic philosophy is a system of white, male, English-speaking, liberal oppression, then we are going to liberated from this by Richard Rorty.

#55 De Gaulle and Algeria, Nixon in China … maybe that’s the idea.

Is the question ever posed in the form “should you throw yourself in front of the trolley…”?

All this ever sounds like to me is people sagely repeating that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, while neglecting to note that the particular eggs in question are sentient beings who might have a view on the matter.

I find it a bit hard to undersatnd why, if Anglophone academic philosophy is a system of white, male, English-speaking, liberal oppression, then we are going to liberated from this by Richard Rorty.

Did someone say that? Nope, nobody said anything about Anglophone philosophy being male. Or oppressive. But it’s so much fun to argue with the pc ogres in your head, isn’t it?

(What people did say is that the moral intuitions of people from a particular background are not necessarily authoritative with respect to morality in general — that intuition has social and historical bases. But then I guess it’s only the feminist thought police who insist that not everyone is exactly like us, right, Engels?)

And why should your claims about what ‘those of us who aren’t analytic philsoophers’ be any more authoritative? I actually know quite a lot of people who are not analytic philosophers (some of whom, amazingly, are not liberals and a few don’t even speak English!) who still think there is a moral difference between killing and allowing to die…

An important point — relevant to John Q.’s original post — that trolley car problem obscures is that you can’t have consequentialism without rules, i.e. without deontology. Because in the real world, all our morally consequential actions are mediated through institutions, which are just sets of rules.

So for instance, the only reason you can think about the consequences of a post on your blog is that the folks hosting the blog, running your and your readers’ ISPs, etc., *don’t* think about the consequences, but just fulfill their obligation to to disseminate whatever you write. And so much more so for something like the invasion of Iraq — it’s logically impossible for it to be made on a purely consequentialist basis since the only way such a decision is possible at all is for large numbers of people to be committed to following the relevant rules. Of course George Bush, or we the voters, or whoever you want to think of as the ultimate decision maker, can be consequentialist — but only because other people are not.

It’s profoundly misleading — in a very telling way — that the trolley-car problem situates the individual in a purely mechanical system that is manipulated through direct physical acts. But thinking about a world with only a single moral agent sheds less than no light on any moral question we actually face.

I also think that academic philosophers are mostly fairly right-wing.

What makes you think this, engels, and what’s the reference group you’re measuring against? Academics in the US are, on average, significantly more left-wing than the general population and similar people in class-status and I’ve never seen anything to indicate philosophers don’t fit in this profile. And, of the philosophers whose politics I have a fair idea about, very few are right-wing by American standards, at least. It might well be that many of them have pretty average Democratic party views, and that this makes the “fairly right wing” from a world perspective, but I’m not sure that’s true and at least the reference class would need to be specified. (Some fairly famous philosophers had pretty right-wing views, of course. Quine is an important example. But right-wing views are a distinct minority among, say, political philosophers, at least judging from published work.) I’d (honestly) be quite interested in what makes you think this.

john c halasz: “But then ethics and politics are not the same and it’s a fallacious tendency of liberalism to conflate them.”

You gloss the difference: “political justice is always imperfect and rather compromised, and arguably politics is always more about power than “justice”.”

So, basically, you think that liberals have a tendency to conflate normative ethical theory with descriptive political theory? That is, they tend to be Panglossian. They can’t tell the difference between the best of all possible and the actual world? What is the basis for this suspicion on your part about liberals? Give me a few examples of liberals who commits the conflation in question. Or at least one prominent theoretical example.

I would say that one of the main virtues of (rightly understood) consequentialism is that it helps us understand how ought-ness needs to be expressed rather differently as we move from situations of one-on-one interaction, to small groups and family, to large and heterogenous collectivities; it helps us both understand the fundamental similarity between moral problems at the political and the personal level *and* the enormous difference in their practical resolutions. Only consequentialism lets us see the continuum running from transnational institutional design, to political theory and policy analysis, to interpersonal ethics, and even to practical rationality at the personal level; and it helps us see both this continuity and the appropriate disjunctures, institutional and otherwise, as the upshot of universal principles rather than ad-hoc ones.

Anyhow. I find it sad how often arguments against consequentialism seem to have no basis in what real consequentialists think about their own doctrine. For those interested, you can’t go too wrong reading Pettit or Norcross, and both have a lot of their papers available online. And really, Sidgwick got things more or less right a century ago.

I was aiming for 4, too.

@ 69 & 70:

Well, Holbo, when it comes to thinking about politics and the political, I’m just not a Rawlsian liberal, but rather an Arendtian republican. So I’m not much interested in a normative/descriptive. ideal theory/real theory distinction. After all, real politics is riddled with “normative” elements, however conflicted or confused. (And yes, sometimes one wishes such utter “normative” obtuseness could be stripped away, to allow for an actually functional “solution”, as with the U.S. health care debate). And Arendt’s criticism was directed at all forms of political theorizing and theoretical politics, in the name of a revived notion of Aristotelian practical reason as praxis, in a modernized frame. Her actual topic was not politics as a theorizable realm, but rather what it means to act, speak, think politically. Hence she appeals to the “ideal” of the pre-philosophical Periclean polis, analogous to and probably modeled on Heidegger’s recourse to the Pre-Socratics to get “behind” metaphysical theorizing, as a riddling device to examine and question at cross-grain modern political theories and concepts. So I take “normative political philosophy” as an effort to pre-specify political norms, whether ideally or “really”, in terms of a heuristic-fictive social contract, with a large grain of salt, as having little real efficacy, and being largely just academic. (Since academics like to think that they live in a world that is a four-square grid of mutual respect and equal freedom, instead of in that scholarly war of all against all that Hegel called the “spiritual animal kingdom”). Rawls, at any rate, strikes me as just elaborately specifying the political intuitions of the “madly for Adlai” crowd, which was the last time such liberalism was hegemonically ascendant.

As for liberalism being “panglossian”, well, I’m also a leftie, if not of a “hard” or “extreme” variety, then reasonably industrial strength, so I hardly think so. But the ancient ideal or dream of liberalism was to bring about a harmonization of all interests and values, basically privatistically/individualistically conceived, into a universal consensus governing society, as well as to harmonize political “liberty” with the market mechanism, with its own fallacious marginal product account of distribution. I suppose that could be called “panglossian”. But I’m much more inclined to think of liberalism as functioning to perpetuate inequality in the very name of equality. And to suppress (awareness of) political conflict in the name of the legitimacy of “universal” consensus. (Hence all those routine positioning moves to maintain themselves at the center between the alleged extremes, so as to hive off or exclude dissenters. Though the liberals own emphasis on consensus over conflict often makes them insufficiently attentive to their opposition and undermines their own cause). But most of all, in its preoccupation with normatively reconciling “freedom” and “equality” and thereby rationalizing political power, is rather oblivious to the hard, difficult issues of power. What is power and how is it at all to be conceived, to be grasped in thought and articulated in speech, along side all the other matters it’s concomitant with? How is it generated, gathered, concentrated, exercised, and redistributed or regenerated? What are its modes and how are those modes convertible into one another? I think those are crucial issues for contemporary thought, not easy to resolve, which liberal thinking rather presumes upon. (Arendt made some contribution there, though with considerable weaknesses/avoidances to go together with its strength. I find Foucault’s “micro-physics of power” to be too all-pervasive and too de-differentiated, but also too parodic to be of much direct application, though he has his effects. I also don’t share his libertarianism).

As to the liberal tendency to conflate morality with politics, lots of thinkers have noted it from that nasty reactionary Carl Schmitt to the far more worldly-wise Arendt. Politics concerns public matters of collective impact and import, whereas morality involves private concerns about personal choice and conscientious belief. To conflate the two does harm to them both. If political conflicts are thoroughly moralized, they become all the more “absolute” and irresolvable. (For example, the abortion debate in the U.S., which is essentially irresolvable by public means, but also manipulated as a distraction from other public issues). If morality is tyrannized over by politics, then the capacity for choice is disrupted and beliefs become falsified, lose all “force” of credibility. (Though the private domain, as realm for the formation of intimate relations and spontaneous initiatives, needs to be publicly protected, since it ultimately is what provides the political public domain with its participant citizens/subjects).

So you asked for at least one “name” liberal political theorist who might be given to the aforesaid conflation. I’ll nominate Judith Sklar, whose “liberalism of fear”, for all that it might be motivated by a concern for cruelty and injustice, nonetheless exemplifies the sort of moralizing (anti-)politics involved, which should be avoided, as undermining the confidence in the “amorality” and risk involved in public-political processes, (which, as a passing-over-into-otherness, is also a realm of necessary alienation). I’ll also remark that much abstract concern for “human rights” has a curiously de-politicizing effect. Since it ignores that “rights”, however specified, are always legal-political institutions emerging from the power balances within a political society, and hence are always invested by power, else they are lacking in any coercive power for their enforcement. Notions of “humanitarian war” should be an obvious oxymoron to anyone with two wits of sense to rub together. Ignoring the material and social context and conditions for the application of the concept “rights”, while being thoroughly confused about means and ends, (since presumably “rights” are unconditional), doesn’t advance any cause, nor serve to ameliorate human lives. (Such thinking is also often utterly obtuse about some of the actual “interests” at work in such projections). No one can completely control the outcome of public-political conflicts and processes, nor guarantee the collective ends that emerge de facto or de jure from them, (if only a reproduction of the status quo, as no doubt many devoutly wish). But there’s always at least the off chance, the bare possibility, that some more genuinely normative innovation or some more fruitful arrangement could emerge, than would be pre-specified by a “normative” theory. Such a naked hope is the worldly vocation of politics.

Matt, okay, I shouldn’t have written that academic philosophers are ‘mostly fairly right-wing’. That’s not true. I think there might be some more accurate points to be made about the political idiosyncrasies of academic philosophy, and how they might not reflect the range of political views in the population at large, but rather than dig myself in deeper I’ll leave it there.

Consequentialism is the worst form of ethical theory — except all those other ones.

Its hilarious to listen to all these tiresome, standard-issue, doctrinaire conventional liberals huff and puff about the dangers of consequentialism while they astutely ignore the beam in their own eye.

Natural rights theories are based on absolutely nothing in the real world at all. All you need is a minimally good story and next thing you know you have a right — or you don’t.

@80:

Well, for all that I insist on differentiating/not confusing the moral and the political, I don’t think a complete absence of confusion is an attainable, let alone an entirely desirable, condition. Quiggin had spoken of falling into “moral and political confusion”, which, come to think about it, is a pretty apt characterization of the general and perennial condition of the world: if you’re not at all confused, you just haven’t been paying attention, (since, as is well-known, attention is the natural prayer of the soul). I’ll take it you roughly understand why I insist on the “amorality” of the political, which is not the same as rampant immorality, though, Lord knows, there’s always plenty of that, too, and that I’m not eschewing any consideration of rights, but rather the republican “grounds” for construing them are different from the liberal ones, though there may be some partial overlap.

BTW there’s one point from the last head-butting, locking-of-imaginary-antlers thread that I wanted to clear up. I wasn’t “uncharitably” attributing to you an argument, but rather was making it in my own right, if apparently too implicitly: that there is no prior, call it “reason”, “rationality”, or what you will, that can guarantee one from falling into moral and political confusion, though neither you, nor I, nor any other reasonable person would fall today in the way that Heidegger did. As an example, Habermas, who’s not your bog standard liberal, but might fairly be characterized as a quasi-socialist super-liberal, supported the bombing of Serbia, because modern moral consciousness has been “disemburdened” onto modern legal structures and, of course, such legal injunctions need to be enforced, etc. Another case of a philosopher getting lost amongst the weeds of his own philosophy, rather than exercising the risks of an actual judgment. (One wonders if he’d bothered to call his former student Zoran Djindjic, to find out what he might think).

Also, since someone threw into my face gratuitously a comment of mine, from a 6/25/09 thread, on the Chris Bertram thread complaining about the hoi polloi, I did leave a query as to whether you’d ever fulfilled the promisary note you’d left at the end of that earlier thread.

@82

Not to defend Heidegger exactly, but he didn’t send anyone to the death camps, nor plan the invasion of Poland, etc. Yes, he did collaborate with vicious anti-semites and should have known better about the complexion of the Nazi movement, so naive doesn’t begin to cut it, (though we’re talking about 2 years of active involvement in, er, academic affairs, followed by withdrawal and gradual disillusionment and misgivings). However, though IIRC Hitler didn’t ever win a majority vote and his vote share actually declined, only to be engineered into office by a faction of the traditional right-wing conservatives, the new regime was met with widespread enthusiasm in many quarters of German society. Partly it was a “better dead than red” sort of thing, but also it was perceived as a revolution of national renewal, (as, indeed, e.g., economically speaking, it was at first, with “Keynesian” recovery policies). Hard as it is to put oneself into the historical context, with its pressures and conflicts, and hard as it may be to understand the mentalities and philosophical structures of the German right intellectuals, (especially if one’s never studied any of them), the idea that Nazism could be perceived as an apparent good shouldn’t be dismissed on the basis of hindsight, else one has even less explanatory grasp and insight into a baffling and horrifically unmasterable past. Prominent figures such as Jaspers or Mann, who didn’t fall for it, initially thought that Hitler was just too preposterous and would be a passing phenomenon, (as, indeed, did the very traditionalist conservatives who’d engineered him into power).

So your claims based on hindsight actually resemble the myth of the French resistance, when, in fact, most of the French were passively resigned to the occupation, (as with Sartre), or actively supported the Vichy regime and collaborated with the Nazi occupation, (as with Mitterand). It’s all well and good to appeal for resistance against great political evils, but it’s still better to attempt the effort to be clear-sighted about its possibilities.

The knock on Heidegger is less the public support of the Nazis, (however one reads tendentiously, one way or another, the dug-up facts about that involvement or his duplicitous “explanations”), but that he never apologized or recanted publicly for that episode. (As a piece of hear-say, Marcuse, who was with the O.S.S. at the time, asked Heidegger about the matter, and the latter responded that he wasn’t going to deny what had happened or pretend otherwise, and become a fawning hypocrite like those others. Marcuse, at least, chose to see a shred of “integrity” in that response). Instead, Heidegger just chose to continue on with the “original” intention of his project, with suitable re-arrangements, whether from expediency or because of the conceptual “necessity” of his path of thinking. We don’t know the state of Heidegger’s conscience behind his immense character-armor-, (since how could we?),- but it’s scarcely plausible that he was unaware of or obliviously indifferent to the immense catastrophe that had occurred and the vast suffering involved. What we do know is that, in accordance with his authoritarian-elitist mentality, he regarded the post-war democratic “order” as meretricious, (though in that, too, he was scarcely unique, as a distrust of democracy was widespread among the post-war German population).

So you’re engaging with an historical version of post hoc, propter hoc here. (Those, such as Loewith, who blamed it all on Heidegger’s historicism, are question-begging, since the recognition of the temporal finitude of human existence means or entails that we are living insuperably *within* historical horizons, and what then would be the alternative? A reversion to classical natural law?). What’s more, you’re engaging in the manoeuvre of “putting oneself into the right”, which is a great way to “win” an argument, but remains basically self-manipulative, for all that.

(BTW I regard both complacency and self-righteousness as vices, though hardly the worst sort).