This started out as a comment to Jim’s entry "For Philosophy Lovers Only" in which he links to Andrew Sullivan’s “The Geist Of Credit Default Swaps,” which in turn links to J.M. Bernstein’s “Hegel on Wall Street” in the New York Times. But the comment got away from me and ended up being a new entry.
I recommend going back and reading the entire Bernstein piece. It’s a pretty unusual and thoughtful read, applying principles from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit to banking regulation. Hegel rarely makes his way into mainstream media these days and, as a die-hard philosophy major, I feel compelled to encourage this sort of thing at every opportunity.
In the interest of complete disclosure, let me say that I took a course in college on the Phenomenology of Spirit. As proof of this, I still have the book, all 800 plus pages of it. And, I remember this much from the course: I understood exactly none of it. I found the book to be absolutely impenetrable. In my defense, some of it had to do with a rather mediocre professor. The New York Times article, while still difficult, left me with perhaps a better understanding of Hegel than my entire course.
I liked what Bernstein had to say about the double failure of the knight of virtue and the purely self-interested individualist. Both err because they focus on motive rather than the action and its consequences. The knight of virtue seeks only to have a pure motive and, consequently, accomplishes little in this complex world where almost any serious achievement requires innumerable compromises with principle. The self-interested individualist simply doesn’t know where his interests lie.
The focus on motive by so many today puzzles me. I have conservative friends who object to government welfare programs because they claim these programs rob ordinary people of opportunities to be virtuous. If you think about this contention for more than just a few seconds, you begin to reel at its level of insensitivity and bizarre self-absorption. It argues that it’s better to have poor people suffer than to have the well-off lose any opportunity to feel good about their own virtue. (Leave aside the fact that any even a slight working knowledge of the world would tell you that, no matter how many safety nets the government casts, people will always have needs and problems – which will present many opportunities for acts of virtue. All the social security benefits in the world won’t eliminate the need or opportunity for you to call your mother. )
The other troubling conservative argument concerning motive I hear is that we in this country are morally superior to our enemies, particularly al-Qaeda – despite inflicting a civilian death toll in Iraq of some 100 to 600 thousand (depending on which estimate you buy into) compared to the 3000 American terrorist victims – because we have purer motives. Bin Laden targeted civilians, the argument goes, but for us, civilians were just an unfortunate bit of collateral damage to a higher “military” purpose (which we would have avoided if possible). Again, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the danger in that sort of thinking. Hitler no doubt believed that he had pure motives for the extermination camps. Mao and Pol Pot similarly thought they were pursuing a higher purpose. I just hope to God that King Leopold of Belgium had no similar delusion about his enslaving, beating, mutilating and eventually killing half the population of the Congo just to make a few francs in the rubber business. I think we are on safer moral ground by judging actions by their effect rather than the motivation (which are pretty elusive in any event).
The self-interested individualist simply suffers from myopia. When people complain about big government always getting in the way of their ability to pursue their own happiness, I like to suggest that they go try to make money someplace where there is no government around and see how well that works out. We all know how prosperous things are in Somalia where entrepreneurs don’t have to contend with a killjoy central government bringing everybody down.
A rule of laws and regulations makes things predictable. Without that predictability, it is not possible to pursue your self interest. You need to know, for example, that the terms of a contract will be followed, or you’ll get compensated for your trouble. You can’t even get to your next business meeting without a whole bunch of roads, traffic signals, traffic laws and a law enforcement system which allows traffic to flow. This, I think was the point of Sir Thomas Moore’s line in a Man for All Seasons: “This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!” Even generous government benefits to the down-and-out rebound to help the individualist pursue his own self-interest. An educated and employed populace is much less likely to be stealing inventory from your warehouse or robbing your banks.
Finally, general prosperity creates customers. It you’re really interested in pursuing your own self-interest, you’ll want to help in the effort to raise the income levels of everyone not only in your own country but the world. The better off others are, the more opportunity there is to sell your own product.
Sure, we can disagree about what regulations are good and bad, and we can argue over which government programs work and which don’t. But the argument put forth by everyone from Milton Friedman to the tea party people that less government is always and everywhere better just goes to show that they don’t know what they’re talking about.
13 comments:
Yes, I was, in truth, awed by Bernstein's "Hegel on Wall Street." (which is why I posted the link). Not only is it extremely knowledgeable, extremely well thought out, and extremely educating, but it also presents undeniable evidence for the not-so-well-respected-notion that philosophy is important and practical. We not only learn about humanity, society, and banking, but also are inspired, as Myk was, to re-delve more earnestly into the study of philosophy for explanations of life's problems.
Science helps us uncover the mysteries of the world, philosophy helps us understand them. As the Bernstein piece so adeptly illustrates, it offers us frameworks to think about problems.
From your paragraph on al-Queda, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot, perhaps it's time we supplement the drug, traffic axiom of "Speed Kills" with "Ideology Kills".
Come to think of it, we could supplement it further per your posts on religion to "Ideology and Idolatry Kill"
A better line from above could be: Science helps us understand the world, philosophy helps us live in it.
Myk, I think that tallying up deaths isn't as useful as it seems when making moral distinctions between two very different ideologies. I'll grant you that in terms of body count, the supposed "virtuous American" side looks as terrible - if not more so-- than the worst actions of Al-Qaeda. But the fact that Al-Qaeda killed 3000 people compared to the six-figures killed as a result of the invasion (if we're making moral distinctions, most innocent Iraqis were killed by Sunni/Shai attacks and reprisals, as well as large numbers of suicide murder attacks) really doesn't tell us a whole lot, morally. Intent, for however difficult it may be to tease out, could not be more important here.
Allow me to quote Sam Harris about intent, specifically w/r/t killings during war:
'What we euphemistically describe as "collateral damage" in times of war is the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology. To see that this is so, we need only imagine how any of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had possessed perfect weapons-- weapons that allowed us either to temporarily impair or to kill a particular person, or group, at any distance, without harming others or their properyty. What would we do with such technology? ....
Consider the all too facile comparisons that have recently been made between George Bush and Saddam Hussein (or Osama bin Laden, or Hitler, etc.) in the pages of writers like Roy and Chomsky, in the Arab press, and in the classrooms throught the free world. How would George Bush have prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with perfect weapons? Would he have targeted the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were maimed or killed by our bombs? Would he have put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers? Whether or not you admire the man's politics-- or the man-- there is no reason to think that he would have sanctioned the injury or death of even a single innocent person. What would Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons? What would Hitler have done? They would have used them rather differently.'
Cont'd...
Hitchens made this same point in a rebuttal to Noam Chomsky about the (criminal) American bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmacutical plant in Sudan:
'How exact is this comparison? Chomsky is obviously right when he says that one must count "collateral" casualties, though it isn't possible to compute the Sudanese ones with any certainty... But must one not also measure intention and motive? The clear intention of the September 11 death squads was to maximize civilian deaths in an area renowned for its cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic character. (The New York Yemeni community alone is "missing" some 200 members, mainly push-cart vendors in the nearby streets.) The malicious premeditation is very evident and manifest: The toll was intended to be very much higher than it was... I do not therefore think it can be argued that the hasty, politicized and wicked decision to hit the Al-Shifa plant can be characterized as directly homicidal in quite the same way.'
And later:
'To mention this banana-republic degradation of the United States in the same breath as a plan, deliberated for months, to inflict maximum horror upon the innocent is to abandon every standard that makes intellectual and moral discrimination possible. To put it at its very lowest, and most elementary, at least the missiles launched by Clinton were not full of passengers.'
I think the distinciton is as follows: we're not more morally righteous by virture of having been born in the United States. Believing in one's own innerrancy is not only foolish, it's dangerous. But it does not follow that we cannot make reasonable judgement calls on good and bad ideas. In between the extremes of unabashed American patriotism and militant Islamism is a view that acknowledges the intellectual laziness of exceptionalism, but still maintains that the principles of a modern liberal democracy, with its (mostly) equal treatment of women and gays, its laws against child-brides, its protection of religious pluralism and art and expression and music and satire, is morally superior to the tenets of Al-Qaeda.
Well stated as have these arguments been in the past. I don't want to minimize their truthfulness, but to offer some additional perspective.
Harris makes a beautiful thought experiment about a perfect weapon, but he dismisses ours and our enemies motivations casually. Would we subdue communism? Non capitalistic states? Oil rich states? Non democracies? We have quite a big political agenda as we have seen over the past decades. I'm not sure anyone knows what Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein's agendas are (or were), but few would say they are as grand as ours.
I think we would be surprised how our enemies would use a perfect weapon. I also think we would be surprised by what weapons we would use if our enemies had us targeted with multiple nuclear weapons, smart missiles, a formidable defense system, and the economic resources to invade us economically and culturally. Would Hitchens still believe we wouldn't use missiles full of passengers?
While I agree that a modern liberal democracy is beneficial in climbing to higher moral ground, it by no means is sufficient. We still must be on our guard. You can't discount the actions (the body counts, the deception (we will leave Iraq), the suspension of justice, etc.). One's actions can't be dismissed even though you treat women and gays better and have laws against child-brides. There is a great tendency to believe that the "ends justify the means" when you believe you are morally better.
So I'm not saying you, or Harris or Hitchens are wrong in believing we are morally superior, I'm saying, like a scientist, don't avoid looking at the empirical evidence. Intentions can be a very tricky thing.
Let me end on a more Hegelian note. I'll let Berstein do the talking:
"…finally, it is not motives but actions that matter, and how those actions hang together to make a practical world. What makes the propounding of virtue illusory — just so much rhetoric — is that there is no world, no interlocking set of practices into which its actions could fit and have traction: propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue."
Again, I'm not discounting Harris' and Hitchens' and your view that we are morally superior. You are properly coming to that conclusion based on actions—the less than humane actions of some other cultures and the better practices of ours. It is when we leave the actions of the real world and enter the illusionary world of virtue or intention that we lose our footing.
Very valuable point Jim- ethical standards are easy to maintain when the stakes are so low. However, I don't think the type of person who flies planes into buildings, or mails bombs to synagogues, or gleefully suicide-bombs a disco in Tel Aviv is making a statement about his oppression.
It's useful to remember this fact about the backgrounds of the types of terrorists attacking the US.
Hardly backgrounds of the oppressed and downtrodden, with no other option but to kidnap and commit mass-murder.
When discussing this point with other people, I make sure to ask whether or not they believe that a deeply-felt irrational religious conviction could be responsible for otherwise immoral attacks, as opposed to it being a rational/tactical response. To me, the former seems far more convincing, and I'll give two very brief examples why.
Take Hamas, whose charter references the widely condemned anti-Semitic hoax "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Despite international condemnation, Hamas will not remove it from its charter. What does this tell us? Well, it tells us that they must believe it very strongly, because if they were to excise from their charter all mentions of Jewish world domination conspiracies and their supposed shadowy control of banks, Hamas would instantly gain a large amount of political capital. But they won't do it. These racist, paranoid ravings are quite important to them. In other words, this action cannot be explained rationally. It's dumb. It's a dumb, dumb political move for a government to make. Looked at through the lens of fundamentalist Islam, however, and its inclusion makes perfect sense.
The other example is a bit simpler. Those who contend that Islamic terror is a rational response to oppressive Neo-colonial powers must explain how stoning a woman for being raped speaks to Israel's occupation of the Gaza strip, or the United States' presence in Saudi Arabia. Again this is not the desperate action of an oppressed minority against a colonial power-- it is the influence of exalted religious confidence.
As for no one being really able to glean the intentions of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, we only need to read what they say in their own words, or, even better, examine what they've actually done. I don't want to bore everyone with this, but very quickly-- besides being responsible for 9/11, bin Laden states he wants the reestablishment of a world-wide ruling Islamic Caliphate (how's that for grand imperial aspirations?). Most recently, he claimed the right to slit the throats of all French citizens for banning the Burqa. Saddam, of course, committed genocide against the Kurds, and put any American invasion body count to shame when he invaded Iran, in which 1.5 million (!) were killed in a pointless, WW1-style war with poison gas and human wave attacks. Saddam also paid 25,000 dollars to the families of any Palestinian who suicide-bombed civilian targets in Israel. So we actually do know what they would do with perfect weapons, at least if we take them at their own word and actions.
This is all pretty tedious, but again, I think it's important that in being equally critical to all sides, we must avoid making false equivalences.
Let's see, we invaded a country for no very good reason -- indeed, as it turns out, it posed zero security threat to us -- and then destroyed its government and a lot of its infrastructure, unleashing a bitter civil war which claimed lives somewhere in the six figures. The hubris and cynical use of 9/11 to undertake a project long-advocated by the neo-cons, along with the shocking disregard of human life hardly strikes me as particularly moral. As Randy Newman said in a different context: "Wait a minute, that’s not a very good example is it?"
The Iraq invasion was chest-thumping, pure and simple, and not a good reaon to kill a lot of civilians.
And, quite honestly, both Hitchens and Harris have lost pretty much all their credibility with me on any issue involving Muslims. For as smart as they are, they have a blind spot with religion in general and Islam in particular.
When Hitchens starts saying things like this, it's time to stop listening:
Islamic belief, however simply or modestly it may be stated, is an extreme position to begin with. No human being can possibly claim to know that there is a God at all, or that there are, or were, any other gods to be repudiated.... it is even further beyond the cognitive capacity of any person to claim without embarrassment that the lord of creation spoke his ultimate words to an unlettered merchant in seventh-century Arabia. Those who utter such fantastic braggings, however many times a day they do so, can by definition have no idea what they are talking about....
"Why, then, should we be commanded to 'respect' those who insist that they alone know something that is both unknowable and unfalsifiable? Something, furthermore, that can turn in an instant into a license for murder and rape?"
Sure and, while we're at it, we'll just repeal the First Amendment.
Myk--
I'm definitely no apologist for the Iraq invasion. I think you make clear the distinction between a government's actions and the will of the many people in a democracy who disagree; that for a great many, neo-conservative politicians were spectacularly wrong.
As I've said, being American does not in any way confer some sort of special moral status, at all.
And though Hitchens has harsh words for those who claim to know what cannot possibly be known, no one has more forcefully insisted on the importance of distinguishing between Muslims and radical jihadists (unlike, say, Juan Williams), or advocated more strongly on behalf of oppressed Muslims in theocratic societies.
He is criticizing an ideology, not an ethnic group.
He's also is a free-speech absolutist, and holds the first amendment so dearly that he routinely argues against hate-speech laws.
My main point, and I think, Hegel's, is that it's a dangerous thing to hide behind a claim of "pure motives." It's particularly dangerous to think that your belief in your own pure motive gives you permission to do anything you want. Consequences count. In fact, my brother Bob was fond of saying that as a matter of objective fact one intends the consequences of his actions (particularly those which are foreseeable). Since we knew civilians would die in Iraq by our invasion, we intended those deaths. We might well say that those deaths served a greater goal, but we surely intended them as much as Bin Laden intended the deaths of 9/11.
As long as we hold onto ideas of American exceptionalism -- that we are simply morally superior to others, there's no telling what evil we might be capable of doing.
As for Hitchens and the First Amendment, what does he say about the clause that immediately precedes the free speech clause: Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]?
Hegel's point is well taken, and it's one of those admonishments that should be routinely remembered. I absolutely agree with you that "collateral damage" is the responsibility of the one waging war, as it's well known beforehand that civilian deaths will certainly result. That said, if the consequences of an action count, so too should the consequences of inaction, as both are deliberate choices that have potential negative results. Again, not to keep harping on Iraq as I'm not really a proponent of the war, but if we hadn't invaded and a civil war were to happen 15 years down the line after Saddam died, and Iraq became a Middle-Eastern version of the Congo, one may argue that deliberate inaction by the international community would have resulted in a larger number of deaths over time. I think this is why the consequentialist body count argument doesn't necessarily speak completely to the morality or immorality of an action, though it certainly is a large variable in the equation.
But my point was not to debate the morality of the war, or to hijack your post which has a bunch of other great points to discuss. It's simply this: we make moral judgments every day, in just about every facet of our lives. We shake our heads at people we consider dishonest, arrest and sentence to prison those who violate laws upon which we (mostly) agree. And our courts are set up to distinguish intent: involuntary mansluaghter, second degree murder, first degree murder, etc.
I completely, whole-heartedly, 110-percentedly, agree with you that simply annointing yourself morally superior is silly. One's morality should be constantly open to criticism and revision. But I do think it is possible to confidently make moral judgments about certain human rights (a woman's testimony in court should be equal to that of a man, not 1/3, chopping off thief's hands is worse than probation, preventing women from going to school is worse than allowing them education etc, etc, etc.)
As for Hitchens and just how strongly he feels about the establishment clause... He wrote a biography on Thomas Jefferson, largely because Jefferson wrote what Hitches considers the one of the most revolutionary laws ever passed, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (Jefferson considered it one of his greatest accomplishments, insisting that it be enshrined on his gravestone). He drafted it after a group of persecuted Virginia Baptists asked for protection to practice their religion freely, and the statute became the basis for both the Establishment Clause and the Free Excercise clause of the First Amendment. So Hitchens vociferously supports the freedom to exercise of whatever personal belief you may hold, and is a defender of one's right to shout it to whomever you please. It's why the Cordoba House controversy was a no-brainer for him.
Paradoxically, secular societies with church/state separation typically experience low levels of religious conflict. It's also why America became one of the most religious countries in the world, as a veritiable marketplace of beliefs sprung up to compete with each other in the absence of a state-mandated religion.
James -- You've made a point with which I totally agree: the consequences of inaction are equally as important as the consequences of action. In the Confiteor we ask forgiveness "for what I have done, and what I have failed to do...." One of Pop's great lines was "generally my sins of omission are greater than my sins of comission." We all know about Chamberlain and Munich. Although, I'm not all that convinced of your Iraq as Congo scenario. The fact is: there are many perils both in acting and not acting.
Iraq is actually faring well beyond my wildest dreams, but it's fair to say that the jury is still out.
But I read an article not too long ago about a study by political scientists Andrew Enterline and J. Michael Greig. See Against All Odds? Historical Trends in Imposed Democracy & the Future of Iraq & Afghanistan. They made a detailed examination of 41 cases where one nation has tried to impose democracy on another.
Strong democracies, such as the ones set up in Germany and Japan, turned out to be outliers. Half failed before their 30th year. Only 30 percent experience a long-term strengthening of their democratic institutions. And where there was failure, that failure reduced the likelihood and durability of any subsequent democratic experience. These figures should at least give one pause before any invasion. If democracy does not take hold in Iraq, what is the value of all those civilian lives.
But, nevertheless, I think we agree on the basics. Good intentions do not excuse bad action, and inaction doesn't get you off the hook, either.
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