Category Archives: Ethics

Against philosophy?

Biography, Ethics, Philosophy

This post started out one thing and became another.

I started off thinking about subjective honesty, and how much I value it.

Then something took a wrong turn and I ended up more or less longwindedly paraphrasing Issac Brock:

Everyone’s afraid of their own lives
If you could be anything you want
I bet you’d be disappointed, am I right?
No one really knows the ones they love
If you knew everything they thought
I bet that you would wish that they’d just shut up

I’ve left it raw.

It is much harder to prove subjective dishonesty than objective dishonesty.

And because it is so much harder to prove, it is much easier to justify refusing to prove it.

As with so many matters, the rules of private conduct differ from public conduct. In private life, a mere suspicion that a person is subjectively dishonest is sufficient to cut off discourse.

But in public life, such matters must be rigorously established.

(This is one motivation behind my current revived interest in Habermas.)

Years ago I had a friend who I believed fell into a circular logic and lost contact with concrete reality. He lived a strange life that allowed him to avoid all real participation in any organization. He had no experience of organizational life, of playing an organizational role with defined responsibilities, spheres of authority and obligation, interacting with others with their own defined roles. He had no experience at all negotiating within organizational constraints to find alignment and to make progress toward shared goals.

He was, as far as I could tell, entirely unaware of the kinds of reasoning one must do to succeed in such organizational efforts. So his notions about organizations and how they function was based on fiction and ignorant speculation. This would have been perfectly harmless if he simply lived his life apart from organizations, ignoring them and focusing on what he knew firsthand, which as far as I could tell was made up mostly of carefully compartmentalized individual relationships with no burden of mutual responsibility.

Alas, his worldview was hyperfocused on organizations, nefarioys ones who were doing all kinds of nefarious things, in pursuit of even more nefarious goals.

And even that would have been fine, had he been capable of conversing about other topics. But he was not. I was unable to find any topic of conversation that he would not, within five minutes, redirect directly into a conversation about what nefarious organizations were doing.

Eventually, I told him that I believed he was mentally ill. And not only mentally ill. He mentally ill in a very, well — nefarious way.

He demanded proof. He said this was a serious accusation, and that such accusations demanded justification. And the only way to justify it was to show that his factual assertions were not factual, but delusional. Because if his facts were grounded in reality, it was I, not he, who was deluded. And this was precisely what was at issue. And there was only one way to find this out. It turns out that I was morally obligated to discuss his conspiracy theories even more thoroughly — exhaustively, in fact — examining and disproving the innumerable facts that constituted his theories, and addressing the innumerable finer points, qualifications, epi-explanations and counterarguments.

I could either do that, or I could retract my statement that I believed there was something deeply and darkly wrong with him. Except I didn’t want to discuss those theories at all, let alone exhaustively, and I still believed something had gone horribly wrong with his faith and his thinking.

I can’t, in good faith, retract that statement. What I should have done instead is, in good taste, not shared that belief in the first place. I should have done what most normal, polite, conflict-avoidant people do when they recognize that the person they were pleasantly chatting with is a conspiracy theorist.

But philosophical argument is a deliberate suspension of such discursive etiquette.

Instead of suppressing our beliefs about other people’s beliefs and foregrounding our common ground, we plough up our deepest disagreements, which typically concerns precisely what holds our souls in shape — the integrity of our personal faiths.

Sometimes I suspect philosophy is a terrible fucking idea. Sometimes, today for instance, I believe philosophy is essentially rude.

If we want subjective honesty, maybe we should just leave others out of it and make it an inward practice. Outwardly, we should just settle for a polite objective honesty.

So how in hell can we ever have deliberative democracy? I am terrified that Hobbes might be right, and that deliberative democracy is a leviathan-concealing shell game. Can this game be played without an absolute referee who isn’t each of us, each fighting to be referee?

In this game contestants compete to become the game’s referee. We don’t try to become referee in order to win the game. We win the game in order to become referee.

Confessions of a chicken hawk

Biography, Ethics, Politics

This one is difficult.

I was driving around the Emory campus yesterday and saw a sign for Oxford Road. It made me want to hear Bob Dylan’s song “Oxford Town”. This song was especially relevant to me right now because I am in the middle of a book by Abraham Joshua Heschel, who was a Jewish leader in the civil rights movement. “What do you think of that, my friend?” I think what you do, Bob. All decent people must think that. We fucking know it.

I decided to listen to the “Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan” album from the beginning.

The third song on that album is “Masters of War”. I tried to place myself in 1963, when this song and this attitude was new. It was difficult to do. The countercultural ethos has followed the well-worn path of religious degradation, from the shock of world-transformative revelation, to inspired movement, to new vital establishment, to commonsense conventional wisdom, to the default doctrine for all educated Americans, to ready-made attitude equipped with bromides and logical formulas.

And in this last, most degraded state, any war of any kind is automatically viewed as illegitimate, unnecessary and the manufactured product of masters of war trying to get rich on death.

The response to any war is a “surely there is another way” recited as automatically as a libertarian’s “deregulate it” or progressivist “institutional racism” or “cognitive bias” as all-purpose diagnoses and remedies.

They aren’t even responses. They are strings of words erected as a barrier to engaging the problem. I realize I am paraphrasing Hannah Arendt:

“Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.”

The particular reality that from which counterculture fundamentalists want protection is moral obligation.

We hate the idea — I, personally, hate the idea, and have always hated it — that there are times when people are obligated to kill and risk death to protect our own people from those who want us to suffer and die.

And, like it or not, people really do exist who actively want the suffering and annihilation of other people. This desire for suffering and annihilation of others is what evil is.

Suffering and annihilation are what war is about. But for evil, suffering and annihilation is the whole purpose, and war is its own end. Part of the joy of evil is forcing others to play their war games, and to taste violence, to face seduction of violence, in the effort to stop its spread. And if they can drag their enemies into evil with them, or create such confusion that people lose the ability to see the difference, so much the better.

Of course, masters of war want to paint every conflict as a simple Good versus Evil struggle. They are despicable moral manipulators. But to abuse this truth by using it to claim the opposite — that there is never Good versus Evil conflict — is hardly better. It is the evil of equating defense against evil with evil. It is the evil of denying evil, and relativizing everything so thoroughly that we willfully ignore evil and allow it to flourish.

Most left-leaners want that to not be true, or to treat this problem as one they can evade. They try to complicate the situation, blur it, muddy it, distance themselves from it. “I can’t understand something this complex.” “I cannot do anything about this, so it is not my problem.” “This is the outcome of a long and tragic process, so we cannot assign blame.” Or “Life is simply tragic. It will never not be tragic. So let it be tragic.” As if simply calling life tragic allows us to transcend the tragedy and look at it from above as mystical spectators and not within as participants. This latter is Christian nihilism, and this mystical nihilism can linger on long after Christian doctrine evaporates from the soul. Faith outlives its beliefs.

They all boil down to “I don’t want to care.” We might say “I don’t give a fuck” with punk bluster, as if we are proud of it, as if we are shameless. Hopefully we are lying, because dishonesty is less damning than genuine shameless selfishness.

How do I know any of this? Because I am guilty of it myself. I was even more guilty in the past, when I was young and draft eligible. I have never been brave enough for combat. I have always been mortified of war. That is shameful.

But I am even more ashamed to pretend shirking one’s war duty is not shameful. Most shameful of all is withholding gratitude and admiration of soldiers who do answer the call and risk their lives to defend their families, their people and all they hold sacred.

Of course, if nothing is sacred, there is nothing to admire or despise. There is no cause for pride or shame. Intellectually honesty knows better. We fucking know better, most of all when we refuse to admit it.

Chord: Intellectual Conscience

Chord, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Someday I will collect the passages that reshaped my soul. This one, by you-know-you, would certainly be among them:

The intellectual conscience. — I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lack an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert. Everybody looks at you with strange eyes and goes right on handling his scales, calling this good and that evil. Nobody even blushes when you intimate that their weights are underweight; nor do people feel outraged; they merely laugh at your doubts. I mean: the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward: the most gifted men and the noblest women still belong to this “great majority.” But what is goodheartedness, refinement, or genius to me, when the person who has these virtues tolerates slack feelings in his faith and judgments and when he does not account the desire for certainty as his inmost craving and deepest distress — as that which separates the higher human beings from the lower.

Among some pious people I have found a hatred of reason and was well disposed to them for that; for this at least betrayed their bad intellectual conscience. But to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors {“discordant concord of things”} and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing — that is what I feel to be contemptible, and this is the feeling for which I look first in everybody. Some folly keeps persuading me that every human being has this feeling, simply because he is human. This is my sense of injustice.

Another:

The two principles of the new life. — First principle: life should be ordered on the basis of what is most certain and most demonstrable, not as hitherto on that of what is most remote, indefinite and no more than a cloud on the horizon. Second principle: the order of succession of what is closest and most immediate, less close and less immediate, certain and less certain, should be firmly established before one orders one’s life and gives it a definitive direction.

But then there is this:

The need for little deviant acts. — Sometimes to act against one’s better judgment when it comes to questions of custom; to give way in practice while keeping one’s reservations to oneself; to do as everyone does and thus to show them consideration as it were in compensation for our deviant opinions: — many tolerably free-minded people regard this, not merely as unobjectionable, but as ‘honest’, ‘humane’, ‘tolerant’, ‘not being pedantic’, and whatever else those pretty words may be with which the intellectual conscience is lulled to sleep: and thus this person takes his child for Christian baptism though he is an atheist; and that person serves in the army as all the world does, however much he may execrate hatred between nations; and a third marries his wife in church because her relatives are pious and is not ashamed to repeat vows before a priest. ‘It doesn’t really matter if people like us also do what everyone does and always has done’ — this is the thoughtless prejudice! The thoughtless error! For nothing matters more than that an already mighty, anciently established and irrationally recognised custom should be once more confirmed by a person recognised as rational: it thereby acquires in the eyes of all who come to hear of it the sanction of rationality itself! All respect to your opinions! But little deviant acts are worth more!

Confession: this rabbit hole excursion was inspired by an article by Mary Harrington, “Truth Seeking Is Not a Pathology”. A couple of standout quotes:

Does anyone here remember James Damore? He was fired from Google in 2017 for circulating a memo arguing, with all possible reference to the scientific evidence, that not all sex differences in employment choice are down to discrimination. He was pilloried and punished in essence for telling the truth. Now, just recently I read a Free Press interview with Damore, who lives in Europe now. It was a sympathetic piece; in the course of it the writer suggested Damore may have an autism spectrum disorder.

First: a necessary disclaimer. Lots of people find it helpful to have a label and diagnosis for those ways they feel different. What follows is in no way intended to dispute or invalidate that experience. But it’s also widely accepted that there’s a cultural component to what reads as “normal” or “different” in people’s psychological makeup. So what if another way of looking at at least some individuals who get lumped in with these supposed “disorders” is less as “disordered” than as outlier personalities, more oriented toward truth than social consensus?

Another:

The two World Wars were the climactic frenzy of Europe’s industrial civilisation – and the second of the wars was ended by truth-seekers, who split the atom just to see if it could be done. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists who developed the atom bomb, perfectly expresses the engineering, truth-seeking mindset, when he said in 1954: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”

This is, at its core, the engineer mindset. Engineers want to know: is it technically sweet? And: does it work? The “why” or “what to do about it” as Oppenheimer puts it, is for many a secondary consideration to whether it’s technically sweet, and whether it works.

In the case of the bomb, it did work. The consequences were apocalyptic for the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the cultural ripple effects are still with us.

….

What if our turn away from the world of atoms, to the world of bits, was a civilisation recoiling in terror from the cataclysmic achievements of these truth-seeking engineers? My hypothesis is that in response, we turned our technical skills inward and set about re-engineering ourselves. And this is how, in the 1960s, we arrived at the twin engines of the transhumanist revolution: computing and biotech. But as a consequence, it was also the point at which the engineering mindset turned on itself.

And:

The quintessential character of the long, post-Hiroshima twentieth century has been the application of nominalist science to ourselves, while multiplying institutional power and managerial bureaucracies to cover the resulting concatenating falsehoods. The kind of people who succeed in this managerial culture are those that prioritise social consensus over truth.

…

Think of the HR edict: “Bring your whole self to work”. Anyone who thinks about this for a moment will realise that it isn’t actually an invitation to bring your whole self to work. It’s a trap for truth-seekers.

Most people have enough sense not even to bring their whole self to Christmas dinner with the family, let alone work. The edict is designed, consciously or not, to surface people like James Damore, so they can be offloaded in favour of people who are better at calibrating for social consensus. Over time, then, the aggregate effect of policies like this is to increase the number of consensus-seekers, which is to say those adapted to managerialism, and to decrease the number of truth-seekers.

Unpleasant left-liberal musings

Ethics, Politics

Can we stop pretending that efficiencies ever serve meaning?

The perpetual false promise: X technology will help us do our meaningless tasks more efficiently, and free up time to spend on more meaningful work.

No. When we do meaningless tasks more efficiently it means we can allot less time to the work. And that meaningful work that woven so awkwardly into the meaningless tasks is now squeezed all the way out. Now we can do twice as much work in the same amount of time. And half the workforce can be cut.

That is how things actually go down.

Another unpleasant truth to understand: When there is a need for exploitative labor, people are exploited. When there is no need for exploitative labor, people are eliminated.

This is why equality is a reasonable political goal. Only roughly even distribution of power guarantees general human dignity. Equality is a means to liberal goals, and not an end. When equality becomes an end in itself, we enter a politics of envy and resentment, which is the dark heart of illiberal leftism.

If a free market actually delivers roughly even distribution of wealth, it is a good thing. If it delivers gross inequality, it is a bad thing. A free market is a means to liberal goals, and not an end. When a free market becomes an end in itself, we enter a politics of pure greed, which is the dark heart of — I’ll coin it, now: illibertarianism.

J’accuse

Ethics, History, Judaism

I wrote two long diatribes against supersessionism today, but I’ve thrown them out.

I’m just going to start by saying something simply and bluntly: There are not three religious faiths with equal claims to the Holy Land. There is one faith alone with a legitimate claim, and two with utterly ludicrous claims, based on violence, lies and delusions.

Allow me to explain.

The only reason the Holy Land is considered Holy is because Jewish scripture says so.

The only reason Christians and Muslims also think the Holy Land is holy is because they believe what Jewish scripture says about the holiness of the Holy Land. They believe this scripture because they stole it. They stole their scripture from the Jews, and they tried to steal the whole tradition and deprive the Jews of what Jews developed.

They did not simply say “We, too, see value the wisdom of this tradition, and wish to incorporate it into our new flavors of this faith.” Had they done that, everything would be different.

Of course, some modern Christians and Muslims have come to see things this way, and I respect the religions these two faiths have evolved to become. They are true, good and beautiful, and those of these faith partake of these qualities. None of the true and unflattering things I have to say about supersessionists apply to them.

But it must be said that both of these upstart faiths began as supersessionist. They believed their faith was not some new, improved version of Judaism, but rather its replacement. Supersessionist Christians think Christianity replaces Judaism, that Judaism is null and void as a faith, and Jews who continue practicing it are heretics who deserve the punishments of heretics. Supersessionist Muslims think the same thing.

And central to this doctrine is the belief that whatever belongs to the Jewish people — including scripture and territory — now belongs to them.

No European or Arab cared about the Holy Land until Europeans and Arabs converted en masse to Christianity and Islam. This happened thousands of years after the Jewish faith began its history. They are both late chapters of a much older story.

So Jews built a civilization on a small patch of land over thousands of years. They claim God enabled this to happen. You can get all secular about this and say God had nothing to do with it. Fine. But that only makes it even more the property of the Jewish people, doesn’t it?

Then Christians made up a religion that says the Jewish tradition was magically transferred over to them. If you think it really happened that way, congratulations, I can’t argue against that. But if you are secular, that makes this whole issue the furthest thing from a religious quibble. This makes it an act of political aggression, justified by the most spurious of religious claims.

And Islam is somehow even more spurious, and much more recent. The Muslim hoards were an invading foreign army, using the Jew’s own scripture which they stole for themselves, to justify stealing everything else belonging to the Jews.

And it did not stop there. Since the Jewish diaspora, followers of these supersessionist faiths have persecuted Jews wherever they tried to live. They resented the continued existence and flourishing of Jews. The hatred of Jews found innumerable channels of expression. You can come up with your own theories on why this would happen. Projections of guilt? Unconscious envy of the covenant and unconscious worries about the validity of one’s own status? Who knows? But antisemitism has been a real problem, and it continues to be a real problem. It has continued to break out sporadically wherever Jews have lived, however much they have tried to assimilate.

And this problem necessitated zionism. The outbreaks of antisemitism have always happened with little warning. And they were always accompanied by outbreaks of total indifference among folks who pretended to be friends and allies of Jews. Jews have learned and relearned in the hardest way that they never have friends and allies when they most need them. We have only ourselves.

During the last great outbreak of antisemitism, cowardice and indifference, when Jews needed a place to go, the United States refused. Canada refused. England refused.

And judging from how “friends” have behaved since October 7, 2023, they would refuse us again.

Had Israel existed, they would have been taken in.

And this is why Israel must exist.

And now, somehow, today’s antisemites blame Israel itself for antisemitism. Or Israel’s stubborn insistence on defending itself from constant attacks from these assholes. But how then do you explain Muslim’s 1942 collusion the German Nazis to murder all regional Jews even before Israel even existed? You can’t because you probably don’t know about it. You don’t have a dog in this fight.

So, actually, never mind. Israel doesn’t care what antisemites and indifferent cowards think. Israel will do what it takes to ensure its safe and prosperous existence. We might fail. But we are not counting on your loyalty, nor are we asking your permission, to succeed.

Mutuality, again

Biography, Ethics, Politics

I will say this again, because it is relevant to at least three imploding relationships I am currently witnessing:

When a relationship lacks mutuality, it cannot be repaired in any normal mutual way, nor can it be destroyed by mutual consent.

Trying to reach an agreement with someone with an inert understanding, who lacks motivation to seek the validity of alternative understandings is futile — and the pursuit of mutuality where mutuality is impossible is a participation in the brokenness.

Someone who refuses to listen to what you have to say, will listen even less to what you have to say about their refusal to listen.

It doesn’t matter why they won’t listen. They might believe they already know. They might believe they have a right to not hear you. They might think you are so deluded or stupid that their understanding must replace yours. They might think you are consciously or unconsciously motivated by wicked motivations, called bias or demons based on whether they prefer to express the same concept in secular or religious jargon. They might think they will be harmed by listening. They might use emotion or moral outbursts to make communication impossible. But in all likelihood they’ll just find ways to perpetually delay conversing. They’re very, very busy. An urgent matter requires their attention,right now,at this decisive moment.

Whether they cannot listen or simply will not does not matter. Listening will never happen.

I’ve learned to stop trying.

I learned it with individuals. Now they are no longer my friends.

I am learning to do it with collectivities. Ideologies whose members to refuse to hear dissenting views lose their rights to reason.

I can’t find an old post, so I’ll rewrite it:

A: There is a problem with our friendship.

B: I disagree.

A: And that is the problem.

And while I am repeating myself:

Ethics are the rules of participation in an ethos.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

Peace requires mutual commitment to peace.

That so few people understand this is profoundly telling.

The anti-bias bias

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

It is a certain kind of person who is preoccupied with cognitive bias.

It is a kind of person who seems to have a taste for explicit, formal procedures. It is a kind of person who seems to operate via verbal self-instruction. It is a kind of person who always asks for very detailed clarifications on how things ought to be done, and needs every contingency to be planned out. It is the kind of person who shows up to a new job expecting documentation on how everything ought to be done. This kind of person’s eyes light up when “cognitive bias” is mentioned. (Or “motivated reasoning” or “implicit bias” or “institutional racism”, etc. They are all variations on false consciousness claims. They are always pointed outward at objects of critique, and never back at the ideological subject making them.)

To such people, safeguards against bias are no burden, or maybe even a support. It seems that if formalized anti-bias practices were not available, they would seek some other formalized practice. The question for them is whether the explicit practice we adopt and use has anti-bias features or not.

But some people have a very different relationship to practice. They rely more on intuition, and only occasionally verbally work some problem or another out. Much of what they know is tacit know-how, and muck of their understanding comes to be known only response to concrete situations. If, before engaging a problem, you ask them what they plan to do, they struggle to verbalize it, because, unlike the self-instructors, they don’t code their actions in words before executing them. If you ask them after the fact why they did one action rather than another, they will have to ask themselves the same question.

Yet, these intuitive practitioners are often highly effective at their craft and in solving problems, especially novel problems. Further, they are often pioneers in their fields, and in fact were behind the codification of the very practices executed by the self-instructors.

An intuitive practitioner, after successfully solving a problem, reflects on what they were doing, and tries to explicate principles that intuitively guided them. They move back and forth between practical intuitive interaction with their materials and theoretical formulations of the practice. They tack back and forth between explication of implicit purpose in their own practice, and seeing how well those explications work in guiding practice. Gradually, praxis develops.

But the best practitioners still act intuitively in the moment. If asked why they do what they do, they’ll provide an explanation that conforms closely to their intuitive responses, but this account should not be confused with the explanations given by the verbal self-instructors, which is exposing the code they run when executing an action.

But verbal self-instructor do have one huge advantage over intuitive practitioners. If intuitive practitioners are loaded with self-instructing code and told to execute that code, they lose all grace. They become awkward robots, even more artificial than the self-instructors.

In a world where all people are required to verbalize everything, where intuition and tacit know-how are denied the status of knowing, where one is only regarded as an expert when they can list their source-code on demand, where people are given instructions to execute and templates to format their output, the verbal self-instructors reign supreme.

This is, I believe, why verbal self-instructor’s instinctively love the requirement to neutralize bias. It is why they love bureaucratic rigor. It is why they want everything proceduralized. They can adopt these anti-bias and standardized practices without any impediment, but it encumbers intuitive and reflective practitioners and destroys their ability to — let’s just say it outright — to compete against them.

It tilts the playing field against intuitive and reflective practitioners, so the self-instructors can flourish and dominate.

In the past, I’ve complained about anti-bias meta-bias — the bias in what we regard as biased, versus the biases we neglect to notice at all, versus the biases we regard as virtuous, that is our ethical convictions. But there is also a deeper and worse bias prevalent among the verbal and intuitively-challenged — a procedural, rather than substantive bias — to see intuitive judgment, action and unsupervised perception as inherently more vulnerable to bias than formally codified policies and processes. So the starkest prejudices at all, both substantive and procedural, are coded into institutions, to counter what appear to be biases to the highly-biased minds who implement, support and champion them.

Metaethics

Ethics, Judaism, Philosophy

When contemplating moral action, we seek ethical principles. We do this almost by cognitive reflex. We ask: “By what principle is this action justified?” We expect to find an answer. Is this because we believe that the essence of morality is rules — rules we must follow in order to be good?

In his Star of Redemption, Franz Rosenzweig situates rational ethics within a broader nonrational context, which he calls metaethics. Metaethics still obligates us to act, but not on the basis of something we can codify. We act on the basis of relationship, on intuition of the living reality of another person.

It is tempting for anyone from a Christian conditioning (which emphatically includes progressivists) to assume the metaethical ground of ethics must necessarily be merciful. But doesn’t this just establish another rule to obey — a rule to abolish enforcement of rules? A rule of unconditional kindness, of self-sacrifice for the good of the other, of imitation of the crucified redeemer — of automatic altruism?

My Jewish instincts are inclined to view that as an evasion of moral responsibility. Face to face with being who transcends our own, we are addressed and called to respond with one’s own extra-logical conscience. Hineini.

Perhaps Kabbalists are right, that the balance tilts toward Chesed (mercy and love) and away from Gevurah (severity and law). As a holdover from my old math-mystic days, I like to imagine the balance at approximately 61.8% Chesed to 38.2% Gevurah. This tilt implies that we should err toward mercy or charity, while still exercising our judgment as fully and faithfully as we can. But unless I am deeply mistaken, Kabbalists understand the necessity of Gevurah’s discipline, and that the desire to annihilate Gevurah and leave Chesed entirely unrestrained is a form of evil-enabling evil.

I am urgently interested to see if Rosenzweig develops his concept of metaethics in a direction that holds each person metaethically responsible for his own choice and application of ethical systems.

Of course, but maybe

Ethics, Politics

“I’m against violence…” “I do not condone murder…” “Killing is unacceptable…”

…But maybe…

“…he started a much-needed public conversation.” “…he expressed an anger we all share.” “…he has put sociopath executives on notice.”

In other words, he did a bad thing, but maybe he also did some good.

How much good?

So much good that maybe we won’t regret the murder? So much good that maybe the murder was justified? So much good that maybe the murderer was, in fact, a hero?

And how bad was the murder, really?

Is it really so bad to murder an alleged murderer? How many death did this man cause? Is the world a worse place with one less sociopathic zillionaire?

I met a group of friends for dinner last night. The question of Brian Thompson’s murder came up.

I listened to everyone washed their hands with “of course…” before bloodying them with “but maybe…”

I protested the but-maybes. I insisted that we decouple the condemnation of murder from the obvious need for healthcare reform.

It was assumed that my protest was a protest against murder, and, being both tired and outnumbered, I lacked the clarity at that moment to respond.

Driving home I realized that my problem is not with murder or with violence.

If Brian Thompson had been charged, tried and found guilty of 40,000 deaths and sent to the electric chair, I would not have the reaction I’m having. I’d be saying something like “of course we should never celebrate an execution, but maybe….” And the same will go for whatever punishment Brian Thompson’s murderer receives.

My problem is that one man — an elite among elites, posturing as a victimized marginal figure — extralegally appointed himself prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner. And my even bigger problem is that a great many fellow-elites, who share his outlook, vaguely approve of his vigilanteism, because he is dispensing justice as they see it.

The outlook goes like this: “This system is hopelessly corrupt. The powerful are beyond the reach of justice. Maybe we are past the point of getting justice any other way.”…

…”So maybe… it would be a good thing if CEOs feared for their lives when they do ?harmful things to the public.”

A few points:

1) This is literally advocating terrorism. Terrorism is use fear as a political instrument.

2) What the public perceives as harmful is very easily manipulated through propaganda. The public has believed a great many incorrect things, even in the recent past.

3) Half of this country — albeit a less elite and privileged half — holds completely different theories of corruption. They believe that woke radicals dominate our institutions, including education, media, finance and technology, and that the system is hopelessly rigged to give woke radicals more and more power to do horrible things like persecuting white people, destroying religion and public decency and transing all the kids, and so on. The conspiracy theorist fringe of the right believes even wilder stuff. There’s this universal principle of morality known as the Golden Rule. How do we feel about them sitting around a table saying “Of course, thou shalt not kill, but maybe…”

The problem as I see it is that we have all become so goddamn sure that we are so goddamn smart and well-informed and well-intentioned and self-aware that while of course I believe in liberal democracy, maybe… just maybe, the country would be better off if people like me had dictatorial power.

That is my problem.

Our liberal-democratic institutions are designed to make indulgence in our false omniscience impossible. When they work correctly, they force us to take one another seriously as persons. We must win public support for our preferred leaders and their policies through persuasion. We must win customers by offering them better value. We must make our case before a jury of our peers.

These experiences sometimes show us the limits of our omniscience. We come away less omniscient, but much wiser.

That wisdom advises reforming our institutions when they stop working correctly. It advises against giving up on institutions and going radical, illiberal and antidemocratic. This is especially true when we convince ourselves that only antidemocratic illiberal action can save “our” liberal democracy.

I had a friend who was a full-on QAnon conspiracy theorist. I found his worldview horrifying. The horror had less to do with the falseness of the beliefs than it did the pragmatic consequences of those beliefs: if he truly believed what he professed, he was obligated to respond violently.

My QAnon theorist had no evil intentions. He had no selfish ambitions. He just wanted to protect us from others with evil intentions.

When leftists talk about conservatives, are they really that much different? They have fancier resumes, more reputable authorities underwriting their convictions and more respectable coercive tools backing their wills, but the logic is the same. Conservatives don’t really mean what they say. They are trying to trick you. If you listen to their arguments and find some of them persuasive, you are a sucker. They are motivated solely by greed, but we are motivated only by the public good. Which is why we must fight the greedy, lying people with ruthlessness. We must fight them with every economic and social tool at our disposal. Maybe violence, if it comes down to it.

We learn more about a person by listening to what they have to say about their enemies than from what they say about themselves.

Moral benchmarking

Ethics, Philosophy

Before I dig all the way down into Bernstein’s Radical Evil, I want to benchmark my current views on what is evil, vs immoral, vs unethical.

Evil means active desire to annihilate and inflict suffering on other people.

Immoral means supporting evil, while stopping short of being evil oneself. One accepts, affirms and strengthens the conditions of evil and beliefs of evil-doers, while lacking evil desires.

According to this view, most progressivists are immoral. Only some among them — the ones who support Hamas, chant their slogans and mean it, or the ones who enjoy harming, abusing, terrorizing and humiliating living manifestations of identities they hate — are actively evil to any real degree.

But most progressivists I talk with believe the same things evil progressivists believe, and differ primarily in lacking an appetite to take part in the sadism and destruction. Part of progressivist immorality consists in a stubborn incuriosity to look into who they support and the practical implications of their beliefs. This allows them to water down their immorality with amoral ignorance, and to dissociate themselves from what they passively support, while also enjoying a sense of tribal belonging and security.

Ethics is fidelity to the behavioral rules of an ethos, which includes linguistic behaviors. It is entirely possible to be highly ethical within an amoral ethos. To be truly moral, one must actively choose a moral ethos. But most people are not morally responsible, and do not make such choices. They are merely ethical, and fail to make moral choices of any kind.

Richard J. Bernstein on evil

Ethics, Existentialism, Judaism, Philosophy

I have been observing an uncanny moral blind-spot among many people I know. They are apparently oblivious to an obvious distinction — that between 1) a violent desire to annihilate another people and inflict and savor their suffering, versus 2) an unavoidably violent defense against those who wish to annihilate and inflict suffering.

It is as if they need to skeptically dismiss out of hand making such distinctions.

Or maybe they know how to make this distinction among individual people, but cannot discern these distinctions among groups of people. (I do think an incapacity to understand political bodies plays into this problem, which is tangled up with the compulsively identitarian politics of the illiberal left and right, but I do not think the bizarre amorality I am witnessing is caused by this incapacity.)

These morally-blind people try to see the difference between better and worse strictly quantitatively: How many people have died on each side of the conflict? If the tally on one side is too big, the side with the larger numbers is morally abhorrent.

I am deeply bothered by this seeming incapacity of so many people to see perceive moral truths. I feel pain over it. And I intuitively blame them for their blindness. But I have not clarified this intuition, articulated it, or justified it.

This might be why Richard J. Bernstein’s 2001 book Radical Evil leapt off my shelf and caught my attention a couple of days ago. It opens with this gut punch:

In 1945, when the Nazi death camps were liberated, and the full horrors of what had happened during the war years were just beginning to emerge, Hannah Arendt declared, “The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe.” Later, when Arendt was asked about her first reactions to the rumors about the extermination camps (which she first heard in 1942), she said that it was as if an abyss had opened. “Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. None of us can.” Arendt, like many others — especially the survivors of the camps — felt that what happened in the camps was the most extreme and radical form of evil. “Auschwitz” became a name that epitomized the entire Shoah, and has come to symbolize other evils that have burst forth in the twentieth century. We might also mention Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia — names and sites so very different, yet manifesting horrendous events that we desperately try to understand, but to which we cannot reconcile ourselves. Yet there is something extraordinarily paradoxical about the visibility of evil in our time — a visibility that can be so overwhelming that it numbs us. Andrew Delbanco acutely observes, “a gulf has opened up in our culture between the visibility of evil and the intellectual resources available for coping with it. Never before have images of horror been so widely disseminated and so appalling — from organized death camps to children starving in famines that might have been averted. … The repertoire of evil has never been richer. Yet never have our responses been so weak.” We have been overwhelmed by the most excruciating and detailed descriptions and testimonies; nevertheless the conceptual discourse for dealing with evil has been sparse and inadequate.

What do we really mean when we describe an act, an event, or a person as evil? Many of us would agree with what Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers: “There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all . . . built factories to produce corpses.” But what is this difference? How is it to be characterized? What are we really saying when we speak of radical evil?

Philosophers and political theorists are much more comfortable speaking about injustice, the violation of human rights, what is immoral and unethical, than about evil. … It is almost as if the language of evil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse.

This brings the problem into the heart of my existentialist project.

For many people, what is thinkable limits what they will accept as real.

By “thinkable”, I do not merely mean what can be explicitly spoken about or argued. I mean what their faith can grasp. What exceeds the reach of their faith’s intuition, they regard not only as inconceivable, but unreal, non-existent. “If I cannot conceive the holocaust, it must have been exaggerated or invented.” If I cannot conceive the murderous mindset of Hamas, it must be sneaky Jew-propaganda fiction.”

I’ve noticed that people who approach the world this way resist whatever threatens this obliviousness. It is as if they viscerally need whatever realities transcend their faith to not exist. And they harbor semi-secret contempt for philosophy, so nothing can really challenge the solipsistic omniscience of their gnosis.

As an existentialist, I truly believe that existence precedes essence — “thatness” precedes “whatness” — that reality far exceeds the scope of our actual and potential faiths, which means completeness of truth content is the least of our worries. We lack the mental fingers required to grasp the truth of a great many realities.

And today, some of these realities loom directly before our faces, staring malevolently directly into our eyes, unseen.

By finding ways to conceive and speak about these unspeakable realities, we can detect them and respond to them. This is why philosophy is urgently important, especially right now.

But precisely those who need it most feel superior to philosophy. They see it as irrelevant, idle, speculative, abstract. They see it as a clumsy approximation of their gnostic omniscience. How wrong they are.

Equalities

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

In a liberal-democratic order we are equal as citizens before the law.

In communion we are equal as souls within God.

In society, however we are not equals before one another. We assume roles and perform them within hierarchical systems — and these roles cary varying degrees of responsibility and authority. But in this social inequality, we must always remember our spiritual and political equality.

But those who do not understand the existence of political and spiritual have cannot know spiritual and political equality. So they can only conceive achieving equality in the social domain. Some demand equality from every social order, which is impossible, while others, noting the impossibility of social equality, deny the possibility of any equality. These are the origin of left illiberalism and right illiberalism, respectively.

The ethic and ethos of liberalism

Ethics, Politics

Liberalism is not a morality. Liberalism is an ethic.

The distinction I am making here is this: Morality is unconditional; ethics is contingent upon ethos.

An example of morality is rejection of sadism. There is never a situation where sadism, especially extreme sadism like that of Hamas on October 7th, is justified. Anyone who cannot understand this is a sociopath, or is morally confused to the point of sociopathy. Sadism can be explained, but explanations are not justifications. I am saying here that not only is sadism immoral, but justification of sadism.

The value of a liberal ethic is entirely instrumental. An ethic is a means to the end of supporting a liberal social order — a liberal ethos.

(A point where morality and ethics connect. Morality requires keeping ethical commitments. There are moral ways to renegotiate commitments, and immoral ways to break them. I taught my children that there are no preexistent rules to relationships, but once rules are made, those rules are ethical realities one is morally obligated to honor. And then there is etiquette, which is neither moral nor ethical, but something else of enormous importance.)

For a while now, I have been declaring “mutuality is for the mutual”. When I say this, I refer to ethics, and the ethic I almost always mean is liberalism. But this is not the only ethos. Friendships of various kinds also have their own ethics. Every enduring friendship is its own ethos and has its own ethic and etiquette.

When I make the mutuality declaration what I mean is this. Where there is no liberal ethos, and no reasonable possibility of a liberal ethos, a liberal ethic is not appropriate. Where illiberals are likely to exploit liberalism to undermine a liberal ethos, it is unethical to extend the rights, privileges and courtesies to illiberals.

Yes, this is a very dangerous stance to take. Conditional liberalism is the slipperiest of slopes. But unconditional liberalism is just as slippery, and we have already slipped far from our best liberalism. I meet very few liberals under the age of 40.

And, yes, the line between liberalism and illiberalism is faint, fuzzy and ambiguous. But fuzzy boundaries do not negate the clarity we see at the extremes. We can debate how liberal Winston Churchill or Franklin Delano Roosevelt were, but the fact that Axis leaders were illiberal, and less liberal than Churchill and Roosevelt is beyond reasonable dispute.*

And yes, if illiberalism is presumed, liberalism cannot take root and flourish. Sometimes an intricate and delicate dance must take place between nervous and skeptical liberals to cultivate mutual trust and establish a liberal ethos. It requires both liberals to “go first” and provisionally offer one another liberal courtesies. But there is a point where dancing ends and defensive maneuvers start.

I am still working on this. It does not yet feel complete and flawless. I do think it is fundamental,y right, though, so I’m putting it out there. There will be more.

  • Note: Regarding fuzzy lines and clear extremes, if you have a shred of intellectual and moral decency in you, you will admit that, while we can (and should) debate how moral or immoral Israel’s war conduct has been, there is no room whatsoever to dispute Hamas’s evil. Witness Hamas’s enthusiastic, joyous embrace of sadism on October 7, and its explicit genocidal goals. Israel is undoubtedly morally flawed. Hamas is undoubtedly morally depraved: evil. And anyone, however soft-hearted and well-intentioned, who justifies Hamas’s evil is morally corrupt. I stop short of calling them evil, but they support and enable evil to flourish, and that is immoral.

If you care, I care

Biography, Ethics, Love

Friend, if you care about something, I care about it, too.

I care about it for the sake of its importance to you. I may care solely for that reason and no other.

I may not be able to care about it as energetically or as exhaustively as you do. I may not reach the same conclusions you have reached, and we might never agree on what is true and right on this matter.

But if you care about something, I will do everything I can to understand why you care. I will try to see the validity of your understanding, and in light of that understanding, care with you. I will see how far I can go in sharing your convictions. Where I am unable to share your convictions, I will try to explain why and justify it.

In this way, I will make both my agreement and disagreement with you an expression of our friendship.

I cannot promise to believe what you want me to believe. I cannot promise to feel what you want me to feel. But I can promise you this: I will care as much as I am able about what you care about.

And where one or the other of us refuses to care, there we find the limits of our friendship.

Evil exists, dumbass

Ethics, Judaism, Politics

We can become so idealistic about human nature that we stop believing genuine, active, positive evil is possible. We cannot believe that one person can desire and pursue the goal of inflicting misery or destruction on another person.

Then we drift into seeing evil solely in negative terms — as a refusal to desire and pursue another person’s welfare. Evil is only to be unconcerned or insensitive toward other people, or even insufficiently concerned or sensitive.

Such people can, perversely, fail to understand the necessity of defense against evil, and the unavoidable consequences of such defenses. Perhaps if the defender had been more concerned or sensitive to those who needed it, there would never have been conflict or need for defense.

And blind to the reality of positive evil and consequently the necessity of defense, such people see evil only in the defense, in the form of insufficient concern and sensitivity toward the innocent victims — innocent victims accidentally but inevitably and unavoidably harmed in every war, however carefully and humanely fought.

If you cannot consider the reality of positive evil, your thinking on Israel will be both stupid and callous, however intelligent and empathetic you believe yourself to be.

Continue reading Evil exists, dumbass →

Some dreams are just for you

Ethics

Some things are for us, alone, to do.

We, alone, decide what our identity is or is not, and what that entails. When you decide that for others, that is bigotry.

We, alone, decide if we are to be held to a higher standard, and what that entails. When you decide that for others, that is a double-standard.

We, alone, decide what we must sacrifice to live up to our higher standard. When you do that for others, that is human sacrifice.

You decide these things for yourself, alone; I decide these things for myself alone.

Unsolicited advice, to take or leave. You decide:

Find the people with whom you identify, who accept you as one of them, and participate in that community. Then you will have an identity. Did you know that identity is something you do with others, not a classification of what you are?

Live the ideal that inspires you. Do the inner and outer work your conscience calls you to do. Then you will have an ethic. Did you know that an ethic is a way to inhabit an ethos, not a set of codes and criteria to which one must conform, by which one is judged?

Make the sacrifices you feel compelled to make. Then you will have a greater self. Did you know that nobody makes sacrifices to others? All sacrifices are made to one’s greater self or to one’s petty self.

Dreams are a genre of art for an audience of one.