Category Archives: Ethics
A newish political framework
(Updated November 25, 2015, and edited slightly on January 19, 2020.)
No word is more loaded and distorted than the word “liberal”.
No word is more crucial, especially right now. Deprived of language, the very concept of liberalism is slipping away. Liberalism is losing its place in polical discourse, precisely when it is most needed. Each ideology sees liberals as unwitting dupes of its enemy, and happily shoots through liberals to fire on its foes, and tallies fallen liberals into its kill count.
But liberalism differs more from illiberal ideology than strains of illiberalism differ from from one another. Far from being the midpoint, average or muddling of purer ideologies, liberalism represents the cleanest and most radical departure from all ideological extremes, and our best hope for transcending them.
For this reason the word “liberal” needs clarification and revitalization.
For the last several decades the word “liberal” has been casually associated with “left”. And among the right, liberal has also been connected with Political Correctness.
The PC-liberal association, especially, makes it impossible to discuss what liberalism really is, because what makes PC objectionable to those who reject it is not liberalism, but illiberalism: an aggressive prioritization of the interests of particular collectives over individual freedom of speech, with the goal of manually re-balancing the scales of justice to compensate for generations-old collective imbalance.
Of course, this sort of collective oppression is exactly what liberals accuse conservatives of attempting. Some conservatives cheerfully admit to this, because they believe their institutions are backed by some absolute super-human authority. But the libertarian faction of conservatism balks at this. Libertarians want to maximize all liberty — social and economic — and will not tolerate any authoritarian interference in the private sphere, even if the authority claims to be underwritten by God Himself. This commitment to liberty is what makes libertarians true liberals (and why they have been correctly called “classical liberals”).
In theory, left-leaning liberals are sympathetic to the libertarian goal of maximizing social and economic liberty — but they are deeply skeptical of the libertarian favored means of achieving it, deregulation. They suspect that those who favor deregulation (and reduction or elimination of the welfare state) are invested primarily in the interests of those Americans who benefit directly from deregulation and shrinking of the state, and that all talk of the Invisible Hand of the market and Trickle Down is justificatory myth.
I am not interested at this point in the merits of the left and right forms of liberalism. Instead I want to point out the important fact that liberals agree on the end — liberty — and disagree primarily on means of achieving it. My belief is that alliances founded on ends, where the means are contested, make far more sense than alliances founded on means used to pursue divergent ends.
When liberalism is secure, the disagreement between left or right liberal strategies can seem enormous — even the key difference between friend and an adversary. At times when liberalism itself is threatened (and it seems we are approaching that point), liberals of all kinds must close ranks and redraw battle-lines. To join ranks with lesser-of-evil illiberal forces allows liberalism to be divided and conquered.
For this purpose, I am proposing a framework to help liberals of all kinds understand our shared political ideals and to frame discussion of our disagreements.
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The strategy hinges on separating the idea of left versus right from liberal versus illiberal.
The left-right continuum is one of equality. The further left you go, the more importance you assign to actual, achieved equality. The further right you go, the more you believe that some people (for whatever reason) ought to have more power or wealth than others, and that this achievement of inequality is good. In the middle region (where I think most liberals stand) is belief in equality of potential, with the left-middle emphasizing mobility of status and the right-middle emphasizing stability of status.
The liberal-illiberal continuum is one of individual versus collective purpose. At the far end of liberalism is complete disregard for collective purposes. For a pure liberal, collectivities exist solely for the sake of individual purposes. At the far end of illiberalism is the belief that the collectivity is the only thing that gives an individual life purpose. Toward the middle is the belief that individual and collective purposes are at least potentially mutually reinforcing. Those who lean liberal will emphasize the value of individual experience of participation in collective purpose, while those who lean illiberal will emphasize the enduring greatness of institutions while acknowledging the importance of winning the loyalty and faith of those who contribute to its preservation and flourishing.
Having worked far too long in consulting, I’ve made a nice 2×2, so we can link up our understanding to the awesome power of the human mind’s hypertrophied visual intelligence.
Here’s the catch — there is a theory embedded in this diagram, and it is what distinguishes this model from similar frameworks.
In the middle of the diagram is a gray triangle, a region I call the “political gamut“. What falls inside the political gamut is a coherent and practical position. What falls outside of it is impracticable, or requires inconsistency in practice.
According to this model it is impossible to be extreme left or extreme right and also liberal. I think a great many hard-left liberals and hard-right libertarians look at each other and see the impracticability of the other’s position without seeing the impracticability of their own. But this model claims that liberalism is required to be centrist with regard to the left-right spectrum. Or, to put it differently, extreme liberalism requires extreme left-right centrism. I call this position “ambiliberalism“.
Have at it. I’m trying to be a good designer and user testing this conceptual model. Please respond here or on Facebook.
The responsible party
Who did it?
That person.
What is kind of person is he?
That kind of person.
Who else is that kind of person?
They are.
And because they are what he is, they share responsibility for what he did.
But they say they disagree with what he did.
They refuse to take responsibility for what their kind does.
Universal Design Praxis
I find the term Design Thinking inadequate.
First, the term Design Thinking belongs to IDEO. As far as I know, they made the term up, they use it for marketing and it remains closely associated with them. It is uncomfortably too many things at once: a semi-grassroots movement, a (vague) methodology, a bag of tricks, a style, an approach to problem-solving and a trademark.
But second, thinking is only one part of what goes on with Design Thinking. And in fact in Design Thinking thinking is demoted from its usual exalted position. In most situations in most organizations, making and doing activities are preceded by lengthy talking, making of cases, adducing of evidence, modeling, deciding, planning, and other activities of the head. But with Design Thinking, making and doing become more equal partners with thinking in determining what will be thought and done and made. Hands and feet enter the picture and work alongside the head (and heart) to shape what transpires.
For this reason, I am inclined to characterize this way of working more as a practice than a way of thinking.
Even practice fails to go far enough, though, because a practice can still position a practitioner outside of what is being worked on. With design problems one struggles inside them, rather than working on them or puzzling over them. Anyone who has gone through the wringer of a deep design problem can tell you: design immerses, involves, challenges and changes people at an unnervingly fundamental level. This is why talk around design, design thinking and related movements like UX and service design can get a little breathless and zealous and quasi-religious: because it does stimulate — even forces — unexpected and profound self-transformations. Because of this — because the practice of doing/making/thinking iteratively feeds back into and self-modifies the doing/making/thinking and perceiving process, and the practitioners involved in it, it should be called a design praxis.
And since the active domain of design praxis is all systems involving both subjective free-willed, choice-making entities (a.k.a. people) and objective entities — and such systems are ubiquitous — it might even be called Universal Design Praxis. According to this perspective, most problems are actually design problems. When we limit design to traditionally define design areas (graphic, product, digital, architectural, interior, fashion, and so on) we misdiagnose problems as engineering, marketing, management, economic, etc. problems — and usually end up factoring out the crucial element of free-will, and wind up treating people as beings to manipulate, control or coerce.
There is a moral/political dimension to design praxis: it works to engage human beings as free and appeals to free choice, and this also contributes to the whole movement’s quasi-religiosity
So here are the core principles of Universal Design Praxis:
- Any development of systems comprising both objective and subjective (free-willed) components is best approached as a design problem. (This encompasses the vast bulk of human activity.)
- Design problems are resolved through iterative cycles of first-hand immersion, collaborative reflection, collaborative making, testing, revision, etc. Whatever the specific techniques used, they are used with this thrust in this basic framework: go to reality to learn, to make, to relearn, to remake…
- Design praxis changes the practitioner as the problem moves toward resolution — the practioner self-transforms into someone capable of seeing a solution that initially was invisible.
- Design praxis involves reflective collaboration — multiple people working directly with realities (as opposed to speculating or recalling or applying expertise). Abstractions are derived afresh from direct exposure to reality (the reality of people, things, actions, institutions, places — whatever contributes to making a situation what it is).
- Design praxis assumes, affirms, appeals to, and amplifies free-will.
Gorging ouroboros
Every philosophy is a philosophy of some kind of life.
For too many generations philosophers have philosophized about philosophizing to philosophers philosophizing about philosophizing.
This has turned philosophy into something exasperatingly inapplicable to anything important to anyone except a professional academic philosopher.
My belief (or self-interested prejudice) is that being a philosopher who philosophizes a life of human-centered design is a great privilege at this time in our culture.
Human-centered design lives at the intersection of many of our most problematic oppositions: theory-vs-practice, objectivity-vs-subjective, intuitive-vs-methodical, individual-vs-collective, revolution-vs-evolution, symbolic-vs-real, narrative-vs-fact, qualitative-vs-quantitative, holism-vs-atomism, coercion-vs-persuasion, technology-vs-humanities, natural-vs-artificial . . . , etc.
My philosophy feeds on the live problems and anxious perplexities that seize groups of diverse people when they collaborate to improve the lives of other people by changing social situations — physically, practically, symbolically and emotionally — and in this effort become so desperate to succeed that they are willing to stake or sacrifice their own cozy worldviews for the sake of sharing understandings with others.
I am convinced that philosophy can (and will soon) regain its relevance. It just needs a diet of something other than its own self-gorged self.
Human [second] nature
If someday we finally persuade ourselves that free will, souls and individual purposes were inventions, that they are sustained only by our linguistic and pedagogical habits, that they can easily be dis-instituted and explained into non-existence — I hope the insight doesn’t come before an even deeper insight: That the most important elements of humanity are our second-natural ones: what we have made of ourselves in the act of making things for ourselves.
Cultural activity is working to form the second-natural essence of future generations. I want us to have free-will, souls and individual purposes because I like having them, not because I think they have an existence apart from “mere” human ways of being.
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Do not argue with me about what is natural with the expectation that naturalness compels acceptance.
Show me that a thing is good and for whom it is good and which good things must be sacrificed to have it.
Individuality
My liberalism insists (that is, posits passionately) that every human being ought to be taken as an individual, as opposed to an example of a category of person.
With respect to policy I consider this ideal a binding law worthy of coercive action. Publicly, all individuals are obligated to observe the legal right of individuality — at the least within one’s own spheres of citizenship.
With respect to individual attitudes I consider this ideal something worth advocating persuasively, but always respecting the individual’s right to decide. Privately, individuals may regard other individuals as mere examples of categories of person, and liberals must never resort to coercion to change this.
Douche Theory 2×2 Model (R)
I plan to use this diagram to help me explain different approaches to design strategy.
Human-centered design helps Douche organizations become Keepers.
Split loyalties
A persistent thought from the last several months: The best loyalties are dual, with a foreground that is individual, particular and positive, and a background that is transcendent, universal and negative. The foreground is inspirational, but the background requires faith. A person who has only the former will be so full of passionate intensity he will be unable to constrain his violent impulses, and person who has only the latter will lack the convictions to uphold justice.
Somehow we must link the foreground of our loves, inspirations and concrete commitments, to the cool and unlovable universals that sustain our lives together.
Let us not pretend
“We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt… Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” – C. S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities Claimed For Man”
This applies at least as much to ethics as it does epistemology.
Can we really doubt the immorality of the worst atrocities, even if we are unable to explain or account for morality?
This is a real living question, a doubt in my heart about the dubitability of morality.
Damaged tissues
Richard Rorty, from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:
Presumably those who say that the phenomenal is nonphysical are not complaining that being told how the atoms of the bat’s brain are laid out will not help one feel like a bat. Understanding about the physiology of pain does not help us feel pain either, but why should we expect it to, any more than understanding aerodynamics will help us fly? How can we get from the undoubted fact that knowing how to use a physiological term (e.g., “stimulation of C-fibers”) will not necessarily help us use a phenomenological term (e.g., “pain”) to an ontological gap between the referents of the two terms? How can we get from the fact that knowing Martian physiology does not help us translate what the Martian says when we damage his tissues to the claim that he has got something immaterial we haven’t got?
Damaged tissues. I started worrying at this point about what kinds of tissues might constitute a person’s being, and what kinds of pain they produce when damaged. I kept thinking about an episode of On Being, featuring Jonathan Haidt where he discusses the more extensive sense of morality among conservative personalities. Are the tissues of a conservative’s being enmeshed in the customs of their community and the definitions of words?
Free, obligated
We are obligated to take evidence seriously when others make their case. We are free to experiment and produce new evidence. We are obligated to present evidence and make our case. They are free to experiment and produce new evidence.
Intellectual conscience
To be reasonable means one must take evidence seriously, especially evidence that contradicts our convictions. We must answer, but we can and often should answer with questions. But these questions must be real: “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” Our intellectual conscience tells us what we believe and do not believe in our hearts. It prevents us from clinging to dead beliefs, and it forbids us from abandoning our live beliefs, and it demands suffering without resolution when suffering is due.
Intuition
Intuition is a brilliant adviser but a violent judge.
Engineering and design
Engineering develops systems of interacting objects.
Design develops systems of interacting subjects and objects.
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When we engineer systems that ought to be designed, the systems we create demand subjective beings to function as objects. Algorithmic rule-following replaces free choice.
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Social engineering has always been a horror. Social design might be our salvation.
Cat-agoraphobic political statement
I acknowledge only voluntary political identities, and I condemn all involuntary identifications.
Every individual American has the right to make political alliances according to his or her own ideals, and it is on this alone the individual should be judged.
If the political body you’ve chosen to join and identify with imposes political identities on other groups defined by race, sex, class, orientation, or any other non-voluntary classification, for any reason no matter what the justification (including imputed capacities or incapacities, genes, essences, spirits, lineages, legacies, texts, behavioral probabilities, etc.) politically you are not my friend. I don’t care which direction your racism or sexism or chauvinism or xenophobia points, or why you point it in that direction. The problem is not the target — it is the targeting.
I’m prepared to be politically isolated and to suffer the consequences for refusing to treat enemies who resemble me in irrelevant ways as natural allies. I have only artificial allies: people who collaborate with their own natures to overcome mere nature to become super-natural, and who affirm other’s attempts to do the same.
Otherwisdom code
To be know and live on terms with what could be otherwise means:
- To be alert to the permanent possibility of surprise.
- To embrace the anxiety of listening to stark otherness.
- To show hospitality to truths that await invitation to enter.
- To be faithful to mute realities that speak only in experiment.
- To respect every thing as the heart of an everything.
- To remember that every single time “this time is different.”
This practical knowledge of actualizing what might be otherwise can be called otherwisdom.
Five facets of reason
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— William Butler Yeats
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In “The Second Coming” Yeats poses one of the great ethical riddles: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Who are the best and the worst? What defines them as best or worst? How does the question of best and worst connect with questions of belief and will?
What does it looks like when the best rediscovers its convictions?
My own attempts to resolve these questions have more and more revolved around reason. In fact, these attempts have traced a tightening spiraling question: what does it mean to be reasonable?
Below is a first attempt at an answer.
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Reason is not elemental. It is essentially composite and essentially complete.
With reason, the closest approximation to reason is the furthest thing from reason: a facet removed from reason is not reasonable; but reason deprived of one of its facets is unreasonable.
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Reason is fivefold:
Reason is empirical. Reason begins and ends with concrete experience.
Reason is logical. Reason follows the rules of thought, for the sake of civility.
Reason is realist. Reason exists toward a world beyond the realm of knowledge.
Reason is experimental. Reason’s knowledge arises from interaction with reality.
Reason is supple. Reason is ready for surprise, because surprise is the mark of the real.
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An isolated facet of reason is not reasonable.
Empiricism divorced from reason is impressionistic.
Logic divorced from reason is empty.
Realism divorced from reason is helpless.
Experiment divorced from reason is impulsive.
Suppleness divorced from reason is submissive.
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Reason deprived of one of its facets is unreasonable.
Reason without empiricism is delusive.
Reason without logic is arbitrary.
Reason without realism is solipsistic.
Reason without experiment is scholastic.
Reason without suppleness is stagnant.
Law of Reason
To neither lose one’s receptivity nor to lose oneself in it: uncompromising enforcement of the law of reason on all, most of all oneself.
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“Reason? Why?”
Because it is reasonable.
“But that’s circular.”
It is the greatest circle. It is certainly more expansive than the tiny, skull’s-breadth circuit you’ll spin within if you try to move in your own straight line on your own flat terrain.
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Reason is essentially experimental, not logically deductive. To know a thing means interactive fluency. To understand it means to take part, to participate — to become part of an exceeding whole.
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Reason is 90 parts ethics, 4 parts ontology, 3 parts rhetoric, 2 parts epistemology, 1 part logic.
Universal respect
To disrespect the “mundane” obstacles that confront us in our attempts to meet our goals – to indignantly declare that some obstacles have no right to exist – to believe it is degrading to wrangle with them – such attitude are not only unhelpful practically for navigate these obstacles, they’re also unhelpful morally.
To believe one is too great to bother with lowly things is a sure route to manifest pettiness. (Perhaps the only surer route to pettiness is obedience to lowly things.)
Holding obstacles in high regard elevates us and assists our progress. We are not degraded by humble obstacles when they compel us to afford them the respect they deserve.
This is not a vision of humility. It is the opposite of that.