One Straw Man Leads To Another
I quite admire Ramesh Ponnuru and am not especially inclined to get into a blog spat with him, but there is much in in his take on my take on Julie Gunlock’s take on Alice Waters (got all that?) that I have trouble understanding. He complains that I’m setting up a “strawman parade”, and that comparing Ms. Gunlock to my “putatively dimwitted and shallow students” is “unparodiably condescending”. But of course my students aren’t dimwitted or shallow at all, and I never implied otherwise: they’re perfectly intelligent and often hard-thinking Berkeley undergraduates whose convictions about the nature of value happen to find some parallels in some of Gunlock’s phrasing. Similarly, the claim that I was arguing that “only members of [my] crunchy-con club are allowed to venture criticisms of foodie celebrities” is as straw-mannish as they come: my point had only to do with the fairness of the criticisms, not with the imaginary club-memberships of the people who might want to offer them. And when Ponnuru objects that “Gunlock didn’t say […] that we shouldn’t pay ‘attention to taste’ or have ‘respect for the wisdom of the past’ with respect to eating”, I can’t help but feel that the parade is just continuing: for I never said that she said that, but only suggested that such considerations were being given unduly short shrift, and being set into an unnecessarily stark contrast with issues of cost, in her essay. As Ponnuru puts it about one of my alleged misrepresentations, “that’s just not the same thing”.
Was some of my phrasing snarky and condescending? (The tone of much of Gunlock’s essay – see for instance her second paragraph – strongly suggests to me that it simply could not have been unparodiably so.) Well, perhaps, and given that my central complaints had to do with Gunlock’s tone I’ll humbly apologize for my own. And if Gunlock really would agree, as Ponnuru says she would, that some foods are better than others, that “culinary excellence” is important, and so on, then I’ll happily second her on all of that. But then the problem is that if Gunlock agrees with me on those things then on most of the crucial issues at stake she will be agreeing with Alice Waters – or at least, with the flesh-and-blood Alice Waters whom I occasionally see at the grocery store, in contrast to the straw-stuffed figure who shows up in Gunlock’s essay. Does Waters – like, apparently, all the rest of us – have a way of putting things that can sometimes be clumsy, grating, even condescending? Surely. And can her take on what ails this world reasonably be judged a bit naive? Again, no doubt. But it’s possible to make these complaints while also acknowledging that much of what Waters is saying is quite important, that we do need to take more seriously the questions of what we eat, where it comes from, where we buy it, how we cook it, and whom we eat it with. And absent such an explicit acknowledgment of shared conviction, Gunlock’s combination of snark, condescension (I should know!), and paeans to the cost-cutting power of industrial agriculture reads like little more than an attempt to score a few rhetorical points by belittling those from the other side of the political aisle.
And that, perhaps more than anything else, is something that my prior experience with the politics of food – not to mention the politics of a whole host of other things – has left me with very little patience for.
What does Alice Waters think of your conservative defense of her and the delicious revolution? If you don’t know, will you ask her next time you see her at the grocery story?
— Phil · Apr 24, 11:55 AM · #
Phil: Sure thing. I do know that Michael Pollan thinks it’s a welcome development: http://www.amconmag.com/article/2008/jun/30/00009/.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 24, 01:55 PM · #
“Her condescension is typical of a food culture that is increasingly withdrawn from mainstream America”
I think she means “Real America”, that place out on the strip mall. As far as I can tell, in our neck of the woods, sustainable local food is a conservative issue and not at all out of the main stream of thought. Though more true of Oregon and Washington than California, our region traditionally has been concerned with self sustaining farming. Tom McCall, a Republican Governor of Oregon, was an early supporter of local farmers, though the tradion dates to the first settlers. I’d argue, that for my community, it is Mss. Gunlock who is out of step.
— Cascadian · Apr 24, 03:00 PM · #
I think it’s time to retire the “cannot be parodied” insult.
I also read your CV, John. Good stuff, didn’t know you were an initiate.
Of particular interest to me is, how do you assimilate your knowledge of cognitive science — i.e., we’re all naturalized epistemologists now — into your moral framework (Kant’s second question).
It gives me pause when you write stuff like, “I think that torture is absolutely wrong in every single case,” as you did here. Even if I grant the disassociation of doxastic truth from doxastic utility, to me that language is indefensible. You’re not a foundationalist, are you?
— Sargent · Apr 24, 04:58 PM · #
Sargent:
Wow, heavy stuff. I suppose I am a foundationalist, at least of a sort; I’m quite comfortable with a descriptive naturalism that recognizes that our perceptual, intellectual and practical capacities, and so also our capacity to grasp whatever foundations there might be, are strongly constrained by cultural contingencies and the limits of our animal natures, but moving from there to the idea that naturalistic investigation reveals all that there is to reveal strikes me as a massively unjustified – and indeed, potentially self-undermining – leap that philosophers and philosophically-inclined cognitive scientists should try their best to resist.
Did that make any sense?
— John Schwenkler · Apr 24, 05:12 PM · #
Yeah, perfect sense. And I agree with most of it. I certainly don’t think naturalistic investigations can reveal all there is (though I wonder what other methods can reliably “reveal that which can be revealed”, i.e., aletheia, the unconcealable).
Here’s my problem. Morality is a cognitive module, a processing grammar that keys on certain stimuli, and outputs, what? — emotionally accented intuitions, motivation toward communicative utterances of approval or disapproval, and, if pressed, post hoc rationalizations. This module can be faulty in myriad ways. When working properly it leads to pluralism (because of the parameters you mention); moral languages are as diverse as real languages; they can go through the same type of progression, from pidgin to creole, that spoken languages experience; both progressions are equally automatic. Further, objects and behavior classes can be moralized and demoralized, including discreet adultery, premarital sex, female sexual autonomy, torture, public executions, honor killings and wife rape. Saying which moral framework is the “right one” is akin to saying which spoken language is the “right one” (unless we find some external standard, which, if it exists, will be a naturalized one like ‘performance’).
What’s universal is not any particular output judgment, but rather the kind of theory-laden information that activates the moral instinct: moral judgments are always about agents — their character, the consequences of their conduct, whether the consequences were intended, accepted, or unforeseen (a rock naturally falling on a person has no moral salience; rock pushed onto a person does), etc. This in turn suggests the reason why we have a moral instinct: as individual organisms we are dependent on others to survive until reproduction, so a quickfire judging mechanism, which gives you a rough estimate of which agents and associations might have a deleterious or positive effect on your chances, could come in pretty handy (and this module is “quickfire” — moral judgments happen in System 1, which means they are fast, automatic, and uninterruptible once activated).
What this establishes is that morality is useful to our genes. It suggests there may be some moral “truths” about our particular species, about what kind of do’s and don’ts are advantageous when constructing a society of homo sapiens (or, at the very least, that a framework of do’s and don’ts — any framework at all — is advantageous when compared to none, “Depart from me ye who are lawless”, etc.) It even suggests a kind of necessary normative development if you want to go from a small tribe of hundreds to a complex modern society of billions. What it doesn’t suggest, what it can’t suggest, is that our genes, during their struggle to harmonize vehicle behavior just enough to keep them alive and reproducing (principle of parsimony), stumbled upon universal, non-anthropocentric moral truths. That’s like saying army ants stumbled upon fundamental moral truths (which I’m sure they would claim if you could ask them).
I guess my point it: can foundationalism be reliably distinguished from moral delusion? If not, how can we appeal to it with confidence?
Finally, should we appeal to it anyway, because of the advantages it bestows (a kind of fictionalism)?
Sorry for long post.
— Sargent · Apr 24, 06:41 PM · #
Whoa, boy. I mean, yeah, this is the kind of thing that keeps me up nights.
But look: as I wrote in my post on that David Brooks column (link), the recognition that our moral judgments are rooted in instincts doesn’t itself show that they’re not truth-tracking, or that reflecting on and – perhaps – systematizing those intuitions can’t lead us to understandings of morality that are. After all, our ordinary judgments about e.g. physical objects are also rooted in similarly rudimentary, theory-laden, uninterruptible, naturalistically selected-for perceptual capacities, and this doesn’t stop us – or at least, most of us – from thinking that we know things about the world. The difference, of course, is that there’s every reason to think that our perceptual capacities were selected to track the truth*, while on a certain picture our capacities for moral intuition may well not have been. So like I said, that keeps me up nights.
Do I, then, appeal to foundationalism “with confidence”? No, but I do think that there are some plausible metaphysical pictures according to which at least a watered-down version of foundationalism is true, i.e. according to which we are able, by beginning with our intuitive moral judgments and then reflecting carefully on them, to get at the way things really are. And so while I think that foundationalism at least useful or advantageous, there’s really more going on than that, since I also think that it’s the best way to make sense of ourselves and our place in the world while still acknowledging what science teaches us about our biases and limits.
All of which will be developed in much more detail in my book. :)
P.S. It’s not “our genes“ that are supposed to have “stumbled upon universal, non-anthropocentric moral truths”, but rather us (with, perhaps, God’s help). And I’m pretty sure that army ants wouldn’t say anything if we were to ask them whether they’ve got things right; indeed, I’m pretty sure that ants don’t have any moral convictions at all.
* Not that I want to minimize the problems with baldly naturalistic understandings of perception, reason, etc.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 24, 07:14 PM · #
It’s interesting that you bring up our other perceptual faculties. As you say, they were selected to track “true” information about the world. But there’s an important qualification here that I think is relevant to any discussion of the moral instinct: the inaccuracies latent in our sensory perceptions of the world loom larger the farther you move from the human scale, until, say, you get to the quantum level, where everything is counterintuitive.
What was selected for with eyes, ears, etc., was the capture of relevant signals — relevant to us. Our moral instinct evolved for the same reason: the capture and interpretation of relevant signals. Where our senses capture physical facts from our environment, our moral instinct captures characterizing signals from humans behavior and its consequences. Where the senses give us some clues about the nature of objects, our moral instinct gives us clues about the nature of humans.
The “truth” our moral instinct keys on is anthropocentric (like human-scale physical truths, but more specific). We don’t seem to have any reason to suppose universal moral facts exist independent of human nature, and we have every reason, in this modern age, to set aside an automatic and inscrutable mechanism that leads to intragroup stability at the expense of intergroup (domestic and international) conflict.
— Sargent · Apr 24, 08:38 PM · #
So I agree with everything you say in the first two paragraphs, but then …
For one thing, “human-scale physical truths” aren’t anthropocentric, they’re just inaccurate (hence not really truths, to that extent). But we have the capacity, through reasoning and more careful observation, to correct for those inaccuracies and distortions and so arrive at a more truthful picture. Why, then, can’t we do the same for the domain of the ethical? Well, I suppose that assuming that in such a domain “universal facts [don’t] exist independent of human nature” would be one such reason, though of course it could be that all of the moral facts (that matter to us, anyway) are ones that have to do with human nature, and so the relevant notion of independence would have to be different from this one. But anyway, why assume that? Why assume that moral facts can’t be rather like physical facts: objective, occasionally universal, and in any case at least partially reachable through careful reflection that begins with, but ultimately transcends, the deliverances of automatic and inscrutable mechanisms designed to promote self-preservation, reproduction, and intragroup stability?
(And by the way, sorry for anyone looking for discussion of the politics of food. That ship has LONG since sailed …)
— John Schwenkler · Apr 25, 03:30 AM · #
Why assume that moral facts can’t be rather like physical facts: objective, occasionally universal, and in any case at least partially reachable through careful reflection that begins with, but ultimately transcends, the deliverances of automatic and inscrutable mechanisms designed to promote self-preservation, reproduction, and intragroup stability?
That’s exactly what I think, and have been working on (I suppose you’ll have to wait for my book, too, or more likely, film essays — :) After several years of mindnumbing work, I’m pretty certain this standard lies at the crossroads of metalogic and metaphysics, i.e., the fundamental notions that 1) information = distinguishability, that 2) Nothing or Something (Rosenzweig’s distinction of Nought and Aught), of 0 or 1.
However. Implied in this “transcendent standard” is an error rate in our moral faculty. Just like we have an error rate in our “folk physics” and “folk psychology,” there’s going to be some blindnesses and inaccuracies in folk morality. And until we figure out the external standard, we aren’t going to know where and how these errors pop up.
Anyway, glad as always for the back and forth. Sorry for hijacking the thread. Since I quit the Ph.D route, and became a lawyer, I have few opportunities to rap moral philosophy at someone who can volley it back. Happy Saturday.
— Sargent · Apr 25, 05:08 PM · #
I’d just like to say that I really—really—enjoyed this discussion, and hope that y’all will continue volleys like this in the future.
— Brendan · Apr 25, 05:46 PM · #
Brendan: Always glad to please.
And Sargent:
Yes.
— John Schwenkler · Apr 25, 08:02 PM · #