Grounding
It’s always interesting, unsettling, and difficult to try to figure out if we can ground our moral and political commitments. I read a sentence about James Fitzjames Stephen’s criticism of Mill’s On the Subjection of Women this morning that caught my attention – ‘His [Stephen’s] own position was that equality was like liberty: it was not an absolute good but sometimes good and sometimes not.’ Not that that’s a startling idea, of course. It’s not a news flash that equality has not always been thought an absolute good or even a good at all, and that for instance the famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence struck most contemporary observers as downright absurd rather than self-evident. And Leslie Stephen’s brother was notoriously a hard guy, fond of saying harshly unsentimental things to dewy-eyed Victorians. No, it’s just that for whatever reason it made me ask myself if I thought it was an absolute good, or a quasi-absolute good, or at any rate a general good, and if so, if I could ground the thought, or if I just thought it because I thought it because I thought it.
Well (you won’t be surprised to hear), I do think it’s a general good, though also one that’s often in tension with other goods. (Can I get away with saying general instead of absolute?) But I would think that – I was born into a time and place in which the thought is taken for granted. So why do I think it apart from that.
Because I think it’s not good for people to think they are by birth somehow globally (not in particular attributes but all over and overall) subordinate, inferior, low. Born to obey, born to serve. Why? I find it hard to go farther than that. Because it’s limiting, narrowing, stunting. It closes off hopes, dreams, possibilities, ambitions. It makes people feel bad, i.e. inferior, and that seems to be a bad thing by definition. Not desirable, not what we want, not what we like. Do people say ‘I’m inferior and that makes me happy, I don’t want to be told that I’m not inferior’? Not that I’m aware of. They change it to ‘different,’ as in ‘Women are not inferior but different’ from anti-feminist women.
The subject links with the ‘What’s so great about nature?’ articles by Paula Bourges Waldegg and Edmund Standing we’ve published lately. Subordination is natural enough, certainly. Many animal species have elaborate hierarchies, enforced with sharp teeth and heavy bodies. Bully for them. We don’t like it. Or rather, those of us on the bottom don’t like it, and after of millions of years some of us have come to the conclusion that the bottom view is the better one, that the happiness and well-being and flourishing and ability to carry out life projects of the people on the bottom, should trump the happiness that the people on top derive from having a pool of born subordinates to use as they like. That the first is worth more than the second, and causes things to go better overall. At least we seem to have; and in some places we have, at least formally and legally; hence the arguments.
It certainly is difficult to work out if we can ground moral and political commitments. While opposing antifoundationalism when it spills over absurdly into denying the reality of any foundations (for example, the anti-science ‘everything is subjective’ rubbish put out by some ‘theorists’), when it comes to morality I feel that the antifoundationalism of, for example, Rorty, has much to be said for it. After all, the two traditional foundations for a moral outlook – God and nature – are wholly inadequate; the first because gods are human constructs, and the second because we are, as I have argued, already so far from nature that attempting to ground arguments on it are hypocritical and actually dangerous. Looking to nature for moral clues is strange as we by and large reject ‘natural’ living (which for humans is presumably living as hunter-gatherers, not as people who can order their food on the internet, in the comfort of their electronically lit, artificially heated homes), and it is dangerous because nature, as you note, often contains elaborate hierarchies, and to try to make a moral or political system on this basis can lead in its extreme form to ideologies such as Nazism (note that Hitler placed great emphasis on the supposed hierarchy of races, and on ‘nature’ in general, which he set up in opposition to the allegedly ‘unhealthy’ world of modernity – as with all ‘nature’ hypocrits however, he was also a big fan of all too human creations such as bombs and tanks). That the ‘anti-natural’ morality we base our Western societies on is essentially simply that which ’causes things to go better overall’ is enough. We don’t need to go looking for foundations beyond that. It may be a ‘weak’ position, but it ultimately leads to wider happiness than moral and political outlooks claiming to be grounded in something more.
I always took it that the basic “natural” idea of equality is grounded in the fact that the positions of the speaker and listener of a linguistic utterance are intrinsically reversible and the situation is always implicitly open-ended. As such, egalitarianism is like honesty: it’s not always the best policy, but the elaborations of other possible policies are far worse.
“the happiness that the people on top derive from having a pool of born subordinates to use as they like”
Is it not also true that, in some places, some of the people on top have come to see that using people does not lead to happiness? Indeed, I would contend that the enlightenment was largely a top down process, not a bottom up process.
By the way, is that John’s way of secularising ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I’?
“We don’t need to go looking for foundations beyond that.”
Maybe not. I suppose I’m just curious, for one thing, and then it’s a kind of exercise, for another, and a thought experiment, for another. And then there is the matter of argument and disagreement – one feels the want of grounding when talking with people like Stephen, or people even less convinced of the value of equality than Stephen.
“Is it not also true that, in some places, some of the people on top have come to see that using people does not lead to happiness?”
Yes, I think so. But I also think that’s not as pervasively the case as we would like to think. For instance, you can hear the other view in slightly occluded forms in discussions of immigration and labour policy, and it lurks, even more occluded, behind discussions of welfare policy. Even a lot of leftists and liberals, whether they realize it or not (they often don’t realize it, I think), want to keep a pool of cheap labour around. They still want people around to mow their lawns and tend their children and clean their houses. Not to mention cook food for them and make clothes for them and fix their cars. The cheaper and more readily available all that kind of thing is, the better. So…using people is pretty basic, even though a smoothly functioning market economy mostly disguises that fact.
The points about grounding are great. I particularly enjoy grounding the idea of equality in the intrinsic reversibility of the ‘I-you’ difference.
However, the ideas of resentment of your position on the bottom is quite amusing. Let’s face it, few of us are exactly scrounging rubbish tips outside Mexico City.
Bottom is perceived by each of us as relative to the ubermensch, ‘bosses’, power elite etc. It includes not even noticing that we are in similar relationship, to someone else. For instance the little Zimbabwean girl who tries to get us just to fund another day’s existence.
Of course, there is the problem of reference groups. One counts as capable of speech only those to whom one is willing to listen. That is perhaps a reductive synopsis of the history of the world. Aristocrats and plutocrats have been among the most refined of egalitarians.
“However, the ideas of resentment of your position on the bottom is quite amusing. Let’s face it, few of us are exactly scrounging rubbish tips outside Mexico City.”
Few of whom? Who’s ‘us’? Few of us who read B&W? Probably true. But few of us humans? Not true, if one takes ‘rubbish tips outside Mexico City’ to be synechdoche for rubbish tips everywhere.
And then, that’s part of my point. The idea that subordination is bad in itself, is bad by itself, even if the people subordinated are comfortable, safe, prosperous, privileged, etc. My question is whether that idea can be grounded or not…
Of course, there are many kinds of good and bad, so if the point is that few rich but subordinated women would prefer to be unsubordinated but scrounging a rubbish tip, I don’t disagree. But if the point is that because one bad is worse than another bad, therefore the second bad is trivial – well, that depends.
“It includes not even noticing that we are in similar relationship, to someone else.”
That, on the other hand, is exactly my point about the pool of cheap labour. We’re all in that relationship to literally thousands (or is it millions) of people – the ones who provide our food, make our clothes, pave our roads, etc etc. So we’re not as egalitarian as we might like to think we are.
All good OB.