Hold the Irony
Michael Lynch has a terrific article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed – about liberalism and passion and communitarianism, and truth, commitment, relativism, Rawls and comprehensive liberalism, and the fact that liberals do in fact have actual commitments, that they can argue and defend with passion.
Social conservatives have long argued that progressive liberals, in trumpeting individual rights, ignore traditional communities as a source of value…But as the neocons are well aware, traditional family values frequently clash with liberal values…Some traditional communities are rife with intolerant oppression — precisely the sort of thing that enlightenment liberalism is presumably meant to combat. Surely liberals needn’t tolerate intolerance.
Walzer valiantly attempts to deal with that concern. But in the end, his principle argument is resistible. Consider a hypothetical local religious community that does not value equal education for boys and girls. According to Walzer, if we are to compel our traditional community to educate its girls, we shouldn’t appeal to individual rights; we should appeal to the pragmatic demands of citizenship.
No thanks. I don’t want to defend my right to read any books that men read on the basis that I’m more useful to the state that way, I want to defend it precisely on the basis of individual equal rights. I want to defend it on the same basis I used to defend my rights as the youngest of three children: ‘It’s not fair!’ Fairness, and the sense of it and of its lack, is not some kind of gilding or cake frosting; it’s central to having a reasonably healthy sense of how we fit in the world. If we’re systematically and formally given inferior treatment, we either think we deserve it, or become twisted with rage, or both.*
In my view, the reason that liberals are sometimes perceived as passionless isn’t because liberal values are in need of a communitarian correction. The reason is that some liberals misunderstand, and therefore misrepresent, their own values. In particular, they misunderstand their values in a way that has made them wary of describing their own moral position as true. And that is bad. For once you cease thinking of your values — your fundamental moral beliefs — as objectively true, it is hard to even think of them as values at all. And without political values, there simply is no place for political passion.
The worry is that if you think your values are true you immediately turn into Bob Jones III, or perhaps Pope Rottweiler.
In recoiling from that position, some left-leaning thinkers have argued that liberals need to adopt what the philosopher Richard Rorty calls an “ironic” attitude toward our own liberal principles. If we want to be truly tolerant, the thought goes, we need to stop seeing liberal views about equality and tolerance as objective moral truths. Instead, we should see them as morally neutral. Otherwise, we risk being intolerant about tolerance.
Yeah. I don’t want to be truly tolerant. I have no desire to be tolerant of people who throw petrol bombs at marathons because women are allowed to run in them. I want them to stop doing that, and go away and stop telling women what to do. Sometimes tolerance just isn’t the right tool for the job in hand.
As philosophers like Joseph Raz have argued, liberalism isn’t value-neutral, nor should it be. Liberal values like tolerance and equality are just that — liberal values, neither merely “true for us” nor ethically inert. Rather, they are part of a particularly liberal ideal of the good life — an abstract ideal but an ideal nonetheless.
Yup. Ideals are good things. Funny, I just dug up a quotation a couple of hours ago in which Franz Boas called himself (in a letter to his sister) an ‘unregenerate idealist.’ I like unregenerate idealists. Boas’ idealism led to some unfortunate epistemic consequences in anthropology, but he was a mensch. Not an ironic mensch, just a mensch.
*This doesn’t apply to the treatment I received as the youngest of three children. Such gross injustices as not being allowed to put my feet on the sofa, and not getting to sit in the front seat of the car, when my brother and sister were and did, were gradually rectified over the years. I got over it.
In my view – and I am ready to be told what a dangerous and unprincipled view that is – tolerance is not a value, it’s a behaviour. It can be informed by values but is not one of them.
I am always a bit suspicious of people using tolerance to justify their actions – or inaction, Most of the time it’s just laziness or intellectual cowardice. Passing judgement is after all a dangerous and messy business.
“Tolerance,” whether a value or a behaviour, is never without limits. Even the soggiest non-judgemental person would hardly tolerate someone stealing her car or kidnapping her children, etc. It doesn’t take much convincing to get most people to agree that the rights to property and child custody, etc. are worth enforcing. With other rights, which some people but not others would like to see in place and enforced, a political process is necessary. Rights are born from the messy and dirty game of politics, not from any metaphysical or theological source. When they are born, it is usually in response to some profoundly traumatic historical situation. Thus, the Thirty Years War made religious tolerance – the right to freedom of religion (at least between Protestants and Catholics) a politically viable concern. In that instance, religious intolerance was simply too costly in terms of human suffering to be tolerated. When will individual rights to property, education and free marriage, etc. for women and girls in Muslim cultures be legally guaranteed? It will happen when the social and political situation demands it, when it becomes too costly to ignore the autonomy of women. Tolerance and intolerance are limited by their various costs in terms of what people value, and rights emerge when it proves too costly to tolerate treating people in some way or other.
But Gene, aren’t you just falling into the same relativistic trap by saying rights always necessarily reduce to merely POLITICAL rights, that there is no such critter as a genuine MORAL right?
To be more specific, in the last sentence of your post you talk about what people value (and by implication what they do not value) as if that settles it. But the important claim being made here is that there are some things which OUGHT TO BE VALUED! The liberal tradition is NOT value-neutral. Whether or not some particular person *believes* something as valuable – say, educating girls, or women’s autonomy more generally – does not determine whether or not that something *is* valuable. There is a moral truth claim at stake, and as in any case where there is some truth at stake, simply believing doesn’t make it so.
A basic principle of any genuine liberal tradition is that individual humans’ autonomy, their freedom to determine for themselves how to live, is valuable in its own right. That does not mean that it has ABSOLUTE value that cannot be trumped by any other value, but it is nevertheless a vital and central value claim.
I do not know whether we really disagree on this or not. There is a difference between IS and OUGHT. Sure, I think that there ought to be many rights that don’t actually exist at present. In addition, some rights that people have had they ought not to have had. I am a legal positivist of sorts. Back in the early nineteenth century in the U.S. some people had a right to own slaves. They ought not to have had that right, but the legal system gave it to them – enforced by legal remedies and police powers. In time, politics and a war changed that and African American men and later women were given the right to be free, to vote, and to have equal protection under the law (and the judicial and police enforcement of these rights is an ongoing project). That this or that right OUGHT to be established is a moral issue. Whether it will be so established is a political issue. There is no actual right without coercive force to back it up – without coercive force, “right” is a rhetorical strategy or a philanthropic suggestion. Whether the OUGHT is absolute or relative to something or other is a complicated matter – it is at least relative to basic features and constraints of human life, but maybe tethered rather securely in those features and constraints as they currently are (bio-technology may change those features and constraints). In any event, these philosophical issues have limited rhetorical value in the political arena where people tolerate what doesn’t cost them much and refuse to tolerate what does cost them something (and not necessarily financially). Making people (especially Muslim men) see the costs of refusing autonomy to Muslim women is the political task.
G:
I would be somewhat with Gene Zapo in taking a “conflict” view of ethical/political rights. It might be correct to say that individual “autonomy” is the core value of liberalism. And certainly, “self-determination” is a matter of some considerable force, if nothing else, as a matter of “authentic” self-relation that makes ethical responsiveness possible. But such self-determination only ever occurs in concert and conflict with others. And it is by no means clear that it is definable solely in terms of “negative liberty”. The rule that one may pursue one’s goals and interests freely, provided one does no harm to others implicitly takes up a third-person stance. From a second person stance, that boundary of harm is not clear. A glance at Kant, in whom the juridical metaphor predominates, might be relevant. There is that oddity that one is compelled to strictly obey the law that one gives oneself, the very definition of “autonomy” = freedom = the moral law itself, a peculiar bifurcation, equivalence and identity of self. But the other, whom respect for the moral law enjoins respect for, is a purely intellectual postulation, and is only to be respected as himself the “author” of the moral law, effectively identical with the identical self. In other words, the other is only accorded respect in terms of his active agency, not as an actual, passive, i.e. suffering, being, as the basis of moral responsiveness. Furthermore, freedom qua autonomy is never phenomenally manifest, is purely noumenal, the only sign of it being the compulsion of the moral law. But then autonomy turns out to be subtlely compensatory, the “reward” for moral conduct, whereas, if it is never actually known in the self, a forteriori, it is never known in the other. The whole basis for morality is not only intellectualized, but sollipsistic. And the moral law then is rationally systematized on the basis of an ultimate “kingdom of ends”, which is never actual society, is purely an imaginary projection-construction, but is always conflated with actually existing society. Doesn’t it make more sense to regard the source of ethics, the felt imperative to ethical responsiveness, in the conflict with and violability of others, and to view ethical norms as anchored in struggles for recognition between actual persons? Liberals may indeed regard individual autonomy as the “foundation” for the objective validity of ethical norms, but they also might be living in transcendental la-la-land.
“Liberals favor reason and evenhandedness; they are tolerant; they believe in autonomy, individual rights, and equality. But they can and should be fervent in defending the truth of those ideals.”
No, they should not, because ideals are not doxastic entities. They are ethical commitments. They should be fervently advocated because there is a posteriori evidence that they are integral to the project of satisfaction maximising utilitarianism for humanity as a whole, which is itself an ethical commitment which I think appeals to most liberals and conservatives; but not repressive special interest groups or self-serving evil people.
John Halasz seems to argue that from the point of view of the liberal …
The whole basis for morality is not only intellectualized, but sollipsistic. And the moral law then is rationally systematized on the basis of an ultimate “kingdom of ends”, which is never actual society, is purely an imaginary projection-construction, but is always conflated with actually existing society.
I disagree. For me at least, and perhaps for many other people, our ethics are founded in the empirical evidence from psychology, anthropology, archeology and our everyday experiences that the human organism has a predilection for societies which embody reason, evenhandedness and the highest degree of autonomy concomitant with securing the necessities of life. That these predilections are sometimes subverted or thwarted by the temporary prevalence of rigid, hierarchical and/or repressive social institutions is no reason to suppose that the predilection does not offer a rational basis for liberal ethics. Anyway, what is this ‘actual society’ he writes of? Are there not many different human societies? Do these human societies have much in common? Of course they do, because they are composed of individual human beings, and those human beings generally have little difficulty understanding the rules of other societies because the underlying facts of physiology and developmental psychology and the Earth we live on determine a degree of homogeneity. We easily notice differences but take this homogeneity for granted. And liberal ideals exist in an actually existing society, unless the reality in which I believe myself to be currently embedded really is a transcendental la-la-land.
“Doesn’t it make more sense to regard the source of ethics, the felt imperative to ethical responsiveness, in the conflict with and violability of others, and to view ethical norms as anchored in struggles for recognition between actual persons? Liberals may indeed regard individual autonomy as the “foundation” for the objective validity of ethical norms, but they also might be living in transcendental la-la-land.”
No it doesn’t. It doesn’t because some actual persons are happy to abuse other actual persons, and the abusive actual persons sometimes determine the ethical norms. The setting of ethical norms can be done in different ways. It can be done by imposition by a ruling elite of actual persons, or it can be done by the consensus of a sufficiently large group of actual persons in a democracy. Liberals regard the latter as a better way of doing things, and they can, if they choose, argue that their ethical commitments are founded on the evidence of observation and scholarship concerning humanity as a whole.
“Of course they do, because they are composed of individual human beings, and those human beings generally have little difficulty understanding the rules of other societies because the underlying facts of physiology and developmental psychology and the Earth we live on determine a degree of homogeneity. We easily notice differences but take this homogeneity for granted.”
Just so. I made a parallel argument on that other thread, before reading this.
Gene,
I see what you mean more clearly now, but I still think we disagree at this level: I don’t think moral claims have such limited rhetorical power. I think it is generally pretty easy to get someone to agree to a proposition like, “on the whole, no one else is in a better position to determine what is good for me than I am” – and from there to persuade them of the moral value in universalizing that basic idea. Moral claims can be extremely persuasive in their own right, because they frequently align with people’s already-established ethical intuitions. Admittedly, this sort of claim is not going to convince a Muslim man of the worth of women – but neither is any other reasoned argument nor bit of rhetoric. But persuading citizens and governments of Western democracies that concrete costs ought to be imposed on nations which deny basic women’s rights is a more plausible goal – a goal which I think is concretely advanced by relying on substantial value claims.
John,
The phrase “Let us turn to Kant” is a phrase equal to “Let us turn away from the concrete world of people, bodies, needs and suffering to the realm of pure abstraction.” Whether or not that is actually fair to Kant is irrelevant, since that is how you treat him here. So I agree wholly with MikeS and simply say: Let us NOT turn to Kant. Mill and Aristotle, certainly, but not Kant. The liberal principle I was articulating was not the least bit abstact or formal, and you could only make it seem so by over-interpreting (to put it generously) my use of the word “autonomy.” Frankly, the only liberal theorist I’ve ever read who takes deontological ethics at all seriously is Rawls – whose “political, not metaphysical” conception of morally neutral liberalism is exactly the sort of thing my post opposed, as did Michael Lynch’s essay/review.
G:
And you call youself a philosopher? Gene is, at least, a far better shyster. I’ll pass over Mike S.’s Hemingwayesque Sturm und Drang diatribe- (though I can’t help but remark that bit about archeology being “empirical’ evidence for morality)-, but I’ll admit I don’t think much about utilitartianism, since I regard it as a sub-ethical view. I don’t put much stock in neo-classical economics, but they were right in criticizing “interpersonal comparisons of utility” as an unworkable concept, even if they did arrive at an equally untenable “subjective” concept of “utility”. But I’d thought- foolish me- that ethics concerned actions in the context of relations with others. And in that respect, Kant was right about the deontic status of ethical norms, since they wouldn’t be norms, if they were guaranteed by actions or actualities, right? (Actually, I wouldn’t much mind living in a Rawlsian Republic. I imagine it would be like Canada in its best aspects, ruled by an emperor named Tommy Douglas.) The point about “suffering bodies” was precisely the point I was making, provided one understood that it was not continuous with empirical egos, nor empirical knowledge, and is intricated in a larger social context, which makes its claims upon the latter, without guaranteeing their hold on the former.And that is the limitation of the liberal ideal of “autonomy”,its oversight, -(together with some other implausibilites that I tried to indicate),- from a communitarian perspective, which might indicate something of the reasons for its relative failure.
Yes, I call myself a philosopher. Not every philosopher worships at the alter of Kant. Moreover, I express myself clearly and succinctly – yet another trait that sets me apart from most philosophers, and from you.
And I never said I wouldn’t like to live in a Rawlsian republic: I said that liberalism is not and should not be conceived as purely political, as Rawls maintained.
Anthropologists who maintain that Franz Boas was a moral relativist, as were his students Ruth Benedict and Melville Herkovits, are mistaken. Their mistake arises from a misunderstanding of what Boaz taught regarding a methodological principle in anthropology. For a detailed exposition of this matter, and for a general critique of relativism and absolutism alike, see my “Morality and Cultural Differences” (Oxford University Press, 1999). On Boas see in especially Chapters 5-8. Moral relativism is no friend of liberalism.
Doesn’t Mr. Halasz know that the word “shyster” is an ethnic slur against Jews? By the way, I happen to be Jewish, although that shouldn’t matter. Even if I wasn’t Jewish, the word is still a slur. I just think this is a strange word choice on his part in a conversation about tolerance! Does this word choice place him, perhaps unconsciously, within the long history of anti-semitic intolerance? Or his he just an ignoramus, whom we should tolerate as such?
No, Gene, you’ve got it all wrong. John’s use of an ethnic slur is just more of his postmodern “ironic” “playfulness”. Signifiers and subversion and all that. Don’t be stiff, get hip!
Karl, you’re right. Now that I think about it, “shyster” must be taken as an ironic allusion to a (his)tory of trans-textualized deferrals, wherein the symbolic order never ceases to fail at de/re-textualizing what can only be the (quasi)-reality of the terminality of (sub)(versive)-alterities. Sorry, that sounds better in French, I’m sure.
Gene Zapo:
I’m utterly unaware of any anti-semetic connotation to the term “shyster”. I’ve been taken to task before for using the word on the internet, but in the name of the august dignity and integrity of lawyers. As far as I know, the word is a common demotic usage, (nothing post-modern about it), which I hear all the time, without any antisemtic overtones, in my (blue-collar) neck of the woods. It is no different than calling psychiatrists “shrinks”.
John:
Just to stick to the “blue collar” neighbourhood, check out:
http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/ethnic_slur
They note that word “shyster” is a slur towards Jews. They also note, in line with your intended meaning, the reference to lawyers as a secondary meaning of the slur. I don’t doubt that some dictionaries may not mention its meaning as an ethnic slur. I also do not doubt that among some groups of language users, it is not considered impolite. I once heard a tenured professor of philosophy, who should have known better, use the word “jew” as a verb! “Shyster” is a word I would never use, knowing as I do that it is widely taken to be a slur. To put it technically, pragmatics affects semantics. You can choose your words and you can intend what you will with them, but you cannot control their meaning for other language users. Once you know their potential meanings for others, lexical obstinacy is no longer innocence.
Gene Zapo:
I did look up the word in several on-line dictionaries and googled it, as well as, together with “antisemitism”, and found no definition of the word as meaning “Jew”, nor after several google pages any significant association with antisemitism. I also asked several people at work tonight and none thought the word was associated with Jews, nor antisemitism. The word is thought to derived fron the German “Scheisser”, literally “shitter”, connotatively “son of a bitch” and to have entered the English language in the early to mid 19th century. It means “shady dealer, especially with reference to lawyers”. Now I can understand how antisemites might latch on to that word, given the malignant stereotypes that they operate with, and I can understand also how the term might also be associated with Jews, given a prevalent stereotype that law is a predominantly Jewish profession, which even a moment’s reflection tells one is untrue. But that’s never the way that I’ve heard the word used and its popular usage is quite common. I doubt the vast majority of people who use the word either intend or understand any antisemetic connotation. On the other hand, the use of the word to designate lawyers is readily understandable. On the one hand, there are more lawyers than postal workers in this country and to laymen they seem to be involved in and required for an uncommon amount of business, with a finger in every pie. (This is a peculiar feature of arrangements in American society that goes all the way back to colonial times, when complaints about it were already rife.) On the other hand, legal ethics require an abstraction from ordinary ethics, arguing arbitrarily any side of a case and manipulating formal procedures and arguments that seem to laymen far removed from the substantive matter. Hence ordinary people use the word to designate a pejorative/ironical attitude toward lawyers, as in, e.g., “You need to get yourself a good shyster.” I certainly intended no offense, let alone any antisemetic connotation. I was simply inferring that you were a lawyer by the style and content of your argument.
You did take the trouble to present a piece of evidence. But I will be “lexically obstinate” enough to remark that it was not from a general philological source, but from one with its own particular angle. The list consisted of a broad range of terms that *could* be used as an ethnic slur, many of which I’d never heard of, (e.g. “elbow” for Albanian), and others, such as “goy” or “gringo” or “hick”, whose usage is so common as to scarcely amount to “fightin’ words”.
John – Obviously there is a range of acceptability or unacceptability of slurs, depending upon one’s audience. If you know there’s a decent chance that there are those in your audience who will take some term as a slur, you can choose to take that into account or not, as you please, but you cannot credibly maintain innocence at that point. You might be able to predict, but you cannot control, how your addressees will respond to what you say. Use whatever words you want, but now that you know that “elbow” is taken as an insult by Albanians, you cannot innocently refer to your addressees as “elbows” when there’s a good chance Albanians who will recognize the slur might be among those addressees. Or, am I arguing in a too lawyer-like fashion, here?
Gene Zapo:
I’m no big fan of claims to innocence; nor am I a big fan of linguistic purism/political correctness. But the latter (dis)inclination is not on grounds of unbridled “free speech” absolutism, but rather on grounds of maintaining substantive intent and the contact of speech with experience. If some portion of the history and connotation of a word carries an excess of derogatory implication, while the overwhelming majority of cases of current usage do not carry any such implication, then I don’t think the word should be banned in the name of all decency and respectability, (though I’m a fan of the former, if so not much of the latter), since it is not language that is ever guilty, but only the uses to which it is put. Since you did bring up the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, it is the illocutionary force of a usage that codetermines any semantic meaning, by which “intentions” can be construed or interpreted, (except perhaps for cases where the taboo-breaking derogatory semantics of a word sunder linguistic relatedness, as with swear-words, but even there processes of banalization and distantiation from origins effect the evolution and alteration of meanings). Your complaint is actually about a perlocutionary effect, for which you presented scant and highly mediated associational evidence. It doesn’t seem as if there’s any “necessity” to the association, nor any sufficiency in so taking it. (And if the etymology of the word and its dating are correct, there is no reason for associating the origin of the usage with antisemitism.) At any rate, there is no reason to impute to me any antisemetic connotation, as I’ve sought to make plain in elaborating my understanding of the word, and I couldn’t and wouldn’t make any assumptions about your ethnicity, (though if forced to hazard a guess, I would have taken your surname as Italian.)
I might add, just to cue you in to how restricted and impoverished my experience is, I don’t recall ever hearing any expression of antisemitism from acquaintances or associates, though I have often enough heard expressions of other forms of bigotry, sometimes with an unwanted air of conspiratorial intimacy. (The exception would be my dear old Hungarian, RC pater family-ass, who bore traces of attitudes from his origins, which in an Anglo-Saxon context would be qualified as “country club”.)
At any rate, this matter is a diversion from the origin topic, which concerned a weak article, blindly reaffirming liberal “values”, without any reflection on their limitations and plight, (whereas it is the very notion of “values” that is problematical and needs elucidation, having long since turned into a predominant usage as an empty meme), and a rather poor set of comments, in which my own comment was misconstrued and subject to caricature in the name of triumphant liberal “affirmation”. I suppose I could thank you for the further caricature.
John c, you sure as hell can turn a phrase.
Gene, I think your point about being unable to plead innocence after being told is valid, but to an extent trivial when the link is so arguable. Where I live, we do not use or think the N-word about melanocratically heritaged individuals, to the extent that a reference to an unexpected problem as ‘the n-er in the woodpile’ might innocently slip out. After you are told, you cannot plead ignorance (innocence, like ignorance of the law, is not an excuse?).
Nevertheless, I will not be checking my Jewish contacts as to whether they object to shyster – unless they are lawyers. It appears the the word is getting some ‘halo effect’ from the term ‘Shylock’ which is clearly derogatory to Jews.
Wikipedia, by the way, notes shyster as having a Yiddish root.