On thinking about natural law in the shower

I first learned to think and do philosophy as part of a tradition, a fairly conservative Catholic tradition that took both Aristotle and Aquinas seriously. My graduate training was very different, but the effects of that initial training are still in me. I might be a very bad and marginal member of that tradition, but I am still in it in some ways. One way that I remain is in a general respect for virtue theory and—oddly enough for an avowed homosexual—natural law approaches to ethics. I still take Aristotle and Aquinas seriously and I think their approaches to the good life, to flourishing, to what is good for us still speak to us.

If there is something odd about this it is because natural law moralists, in particular, have been at the forefront of objections to the decriminalization of homosexuality and to recognition of same-sex marriages. I'm not interested in debating whether modern advocates of natural law are in the right here. But I do want to note one important thing. Both virtue theory and natural law theory are meant to be empirically grounded theories. They make pronouncements about what is good for beings like us and what would amount to a good life for beings like us based on facts about our biology and psychology.

It is a basic assumption of both sorts of accounts that humans have some immutable nature. I think this is probably right, at least in the medium term; what might happen to that nature over evolutionary time is a different issue. But, many modern proponents of each of these theories seem to assume that our knowledge of this nature is also immutable. What I mean is this: Contemporary natural law theorists operate under the assumption that Aristotle and Aquinas had a complete and completely correct account of human nature, in its biological and psychological aspects. Thus, they believe not only that human nature is immutable, but that we have known all there is to know about it for at least almost a millennium. 

What we have learned about human biology and human psychology and the nature of human interactions since the middle ages is or seems to be of almost no interest to many practitioners of both virtue theory and natural law ethics. You see them quoting Aquinas as authoritative on all such matters.

Now, I think that Aquinas understood quite a bit about human psychology, but I don't think he got it all. And, his biology was pretty bad. Similarly, I think Aristotle understood human motivation and psychological development and society pretty well, but he was missing out on some pretty important pieces, pieces which have partially been supplied by further exploration in the ensuing years. 

Mostly, I think that Aquinas and Aristotle and others in this tradition were right to base an ethic on what we are like and what will lead to happy and fulfilling and flourishing lives for creatures like us. They were also right to think that is largely an empirical question. But this empirical question is an empirical one, not an a priori one or one that was settled in the high middle ages. If we discover new things about ourselves—say about sexuality or human interaction or the family—then our theory has to respond to that.

If virtue theory or natural law is just a constant rehashing of what people thought 900 or 2300 years ago, it isn't philosophy, it isn't even virtue theory or natural law, it's just a dead orthodoxy. And, that's exactly how it should be treated: as dead and irrelevant. 

(I should mention one exception to the immutability of the theory here: Almost all such theorists have discovered that lending at interest is morally acceptable; that we learned something about economics that Aquinas wouldn't have known, since he roundly condemned this practice as usury and a violation of the natural law. This exception may be self-serving or might be a realization that the theory needs to evolve.)

Aut ridenda omnia aut flenda sunt: some thoughts on anger

We live in an age that at least appears to be bathed in outrage. Maybe we are angrier than we used to be. Maybe we are made angrier by the way social media allows us the intimacy of knowing the thoughts of our non-intimates while accelerating the formation of virtual though effective mobs. Maybe nothing has changed but the way we think about these things.

It's not just that we appear to be angrier. To some degree we are expected to be angry. If you enter a discussion about abortion or racism or campus sexual harassment or ISIS or Trump's latest tirade or whatever the issue of the moment is, it isn't sufficient to have the correct opinion. Of course, it won't be accepted if you have a different opinion even if you can mount a reasonable defense of your heresy. But, even when you are on the right side, you have to be sufficiently passionate about it. If you aren't outraged and ready to march, it's suspicious that you even care. 

But this may just give anger too much credit. This week, I've been reviewing Seneca's De Ira. Among the demonstrations of his erudition and theoretical virtue, he speaks to the way we live now. Particularly striking is his questioning of the effectiveness of anger. I think it's common now to think that anger helps to motivate action. Seneca denies this more than he should; in his Stoicism, he believes we should motivated and act wholly on reason. I'm suspicious of this for both Aristotelian and Humean reasons—reason alone will always leave us cold—but I think he's right in the way that anger can at least tend to motivate us in the wrong ways. 

Anger is, after all, an emotion, or a passion in his taxonomy. When we are passionate, we don't think clearly and we act in ways that are not means to the ends we desire. Anger, in particular, takes over. We strike out at people who aren't to blame for the injustices we are angry about; we don't dig deeper into what we are angry about, failing in some cases to see that there was nothing to be angry about in the first place; we harm ourselves and those we care about, metaphorically (and sometimes literally) punching walls and destroying those places and relationships in which we live. We commit injustices small and large to vent our rage. None of this gets us to our goals, at least not in the most direct way. If the machine is unjust, maybe raging against it isn't the best plan. Maybe planning, rationally and coolly, would be more effective.

More importantly, it is easy to lose the humanity of our opponents in our rage. Anger turns our opponents into demons. Demons don't have any goodness left in them, demons don't have reasons, and demons don't deserve our respect. And, if they are demons, we are angels or saints at the worst. Angels are fully good, they have all reason on their side, and deserve full respect. Angels aren't humans; even saints aren't like any humans we know. In anger, we lose the humanity of others and we lose our own. We can no longer see their goodness nor our own failings. And, every disagreement can become an existential fight between Good and Evil. In such fights, no compromise is possible. There is no cooperating with evil. Thus, injustice is likely never to be ameliorated if it can't be erased altogether.

Finally, as Seneca also notes, anger is hard to maintain. You can coldly hate someone for decades, even generations. But, it's hard to maintain the froth of anger for long, at least about the same thing. Online an outrage lasts for no more than a day or two and then another gains our attention. The mob swarms from one to the next. But when we move onto to the next outrage, what happens to the one we've left behind? It's left behind. And, the thing about real problems, real injustices, is that they take time and commitment and anger just won't keep us at that. It takes something else, maybe a passion after all, but not that one. 

Why shouldn't you sit in my front yard to eat your lunch?

In the middle of the summer a contractor for the city began replacing the sewer lines in our neighborhood. Having finished that, the same contractor is now digging up the streets they have just sort-of repaired to replace the water lines. This has meant a summer with the constant sound of heavy machinery and multiple backhoes and bulldozers racing through the street at breakneck pace and parked throughout the neighborhood overnight, through weekends, and during holidays. The work is scheduled to be completed by March 2017; so much for private contractors being more efficient than public workers. 

These are the sorts of first-world problems that people like me like to complain about. Living in San Diego, they combine with the third-world streets—only slightly better than those around my husband's family home in La Matanza in Argentina—to give us some small thing to temper the weather and sun and ocean and mountains and everything. But I'm not going to complain about that now. Instead, I'm going to complain about myself.

Since this is the last week before the academic year picks back up, I am still at home with the dog and my one remaining monarch caterpillar. I spend the day reading and avoiding work and dreading/longing for the beginning of classes. As I ate a piece of leftover pizza today, I noticed that one of the workers had walked from the work-zone, which surrounds us, but isn't within a block of our house in either direction, to sit on our retaining wall to eat his lunch. This irked me, but I figured that he was only sitting on the wall and, after all, he needs somewhere to eat his lunch. After a second piece of pizza, I looked out again and he had been joined by another worker. His companion wasn't sitting on the wall but lying on the stones on our front yard, between two plants. From being irked, I became angry.

When I walked the dog I noticed that they had their coolers and a radio and a whole spread in front of the house. As Mateo and I walked around the block, I thought about what I should do. Should I confront the workers and ask them not to lie on our yard? Should I call the company and complain about their behavior? Should I wait for Fernando to deal with it?

When we got back to the house, I said hello to them and went inside. By this time I had begun to ask myself a different question: What the hell is wrong with me? Here were two people eating their lunch in the middle of a hot day doing relatively unpleasant work. And, I was upset because they were sitting on a wall and lying on some rocks. Of course, that wall and those rocks are mine. But, they were doing no harm and getting a little bit of rest.

The answer to what is wrong with me (in this context) is a fully American, fully Lockean, common, and inhumane conception of property. The harm they were doing was a very minimal trespass, one that did no damage either to the property or its owners. The wall and yard are in the same shape as they were before their lunch. I wasn't going to be using it for something else during that time. But, as my reactions and actions show, I have deeply imbued the notion that property is sacrosanct, that is exists as a right and value in and of itself and before all others.

But that's not what property is like. Property, as Aquinas taught, exists for the good of the community. A right to property exists to help us avoid tragedies of the commons, because people take better care of what is theirs than what is all of ours, because collective farming and cooperatives and group work in classes tends not to be as productive. But property is not some primary value; it can be justified only insofar as it contributes to the commonweal. In a certain, very real way, each of us holds it in trust for the community. And, when the good of the community is threatened by property claims those claims must be reexamined. Sometimes the community will win and sometimes property will. But when it's between two men sitting down for fifteen minutes and my claims on the wall, it's probably the community that wins. 

Truth against truth

A few semesters ago, I had a truly brilliant student. He wasn't one of our majors—not that that matters—but he was the kind of student who has a genuine and deep interest in ideas: exploring them, understanding their motivations and justifications, teasing out their implications.

At one point we were discussing the Republic and Plato's blueprint for the education of the Guardians, including his canons of censorship and the Noble Lie. We began talking about whether it was ever acceptable to lie to children (Santa Claus, family myths, etc.) or whether it was necessary always to tell them the unvarnished, if not complete, truth.

Our conversation continued after class and after several more meetings. As it continued, it expanded into related questions.  In the course of thinking through these questions, we got to fiction. He told me that he never chose to read any fiction, because he just couldn't see the point of reading things that aren't true.

In his case, this preference seemed to come from a a certain type of ethical seriousness, one I can admire even if I find it mistaken in its application.

But, in effect, he shared a preference with many in contemporary society. Consider how A Million Little Pieces was first rejected by publishers when submitted as a piece of fiction, but won acclaim and bestseller status when it was published and marketed as a memoir. (And, how it came to be seen as not just a fraud, but worthless, when it was again seen to be a fiction.) This must mean our standards for nonfiction are vastly lower.

"Well," the prospective reader says to herself, "I wouldn't read that, but since you tell me it is a true story, well, now I'm interested."

Or, consider the plethora of memoirs now published, often by people in their 20s and 30s. There was a time when memoirs were written mostly by people of note at the end of illustrious—interesting—lives. Now, people write them when they are still in college. Of course, this reflects the narcissism of our selfie-culture, but they also sell. Apparently, the reading public wants to read these things.

Not only do we want to read them, but sometimes we want to see them made into movies. For one egregious example, consider Julie & Julia. The part of the movie about Julia Childs is watchable. It has Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci and it's about an interesting person with an interesting life. But what of the other part? And, yet, because it was true-life, it sold as a book and movie. I mean, it actually happened!

Or, consider how a book or television series can add to its appeal by claiming to be "based on a true story" or having tired police procedural plot-lines that are, nevertheless, "ripped from the headlines."

We want truth, even if it's dreck.

This reflects a loss of something of value in our society, one we can regain by thinking about a simple distinction between truth (as positivistic factuality or representation of a state of affairs that obtains in the world) and truth or truths (as something transcendent, both above and below the facts of the matter). Good art often shows us the latter without expressing the former.

Consider Oedipus or The Magic Mountain or Emma or True Stories or the myths of most cultures or so many more. Each of these presents truths about humans, about our lives, our natures, our interactions, our psyches, our ethics. But they do this while being manifestly false. In some cases, they aren't even plausible or life-like.

This is part of the point of Aristotle's suggestion that ethics be learnt from fables or that drama can lead to catharsis, it is what Alasdair MacIntyre was getting at when he said to his students that we should read Austen if we wanted to know how to be, it is how Wittgenstein could deny that there were any ethical propositions even while claiming that Westerns had a moral function.

Of course, there can be art that expresses both types of truth, but it will always be rarer than that type that tells us true stories that tell us nothing about ourselves. If we are honest, most nonfiction is banal, empty, little more than an entertainment masquerading as something profound—and not that good artistically. (And, I am not defending that art that attempts to provide truths while claiming, falsely, to be true.)

What I am declaring is that I am a partisan of fiction and the imaginary and the fantastic. Only in these can we see important truths about ourselves. Without them, we are impoverished, left with only the real. 

A draft of a sketch of an idea for a paper

No alternative

You're fine, how am I?

As I've aged, I've started to function in an almost behavioristic fashion. I mean the behaviorism of the Ryle and Malcolm and (maybe, but probably not) Wittgenstein and not that of Skinner. Obviously, I don't quite take behaviorism to be wholly true; I think I have internal states and I am even sometimes directly aware of them. Often though, my primary access to those internal states isn't through introspection at all. In particular, I find myself knowing my mood not by peering inside, but by noticing what I happen to be doing.

Many is the day I find myself singing one of my stupid songs—about dogs or cheese and crackers or potatoes or someone in the gym or something off-color—or doing one of my signature and quite bad dance moves in the middle of the kitchen or the grocery store or hallway or public restroom, or I begin to skip or gallop down the hallway at the university and I realize that I must be in a good mood. Perhaps because my default mood is a certain funk that I call The Fog, I can be surprised to discover that I'm not in it but actually happy. 

Equally surprising is that I discover this mood the same way my husband does, through my actions and behaviors, and not through some privileged access I have. The internal reflection, often as not, comes from the recognition birthed by action.

Just a minute, I'm checking my phone

We went to one of our semi-regular places this morning for our semi-regular practice of a weekend breakfast out. While I waited for my fully-regular order, I noticed the booth across the aisle. A mother sat there with her two young boys. 

One of the boys was probably around four or five and had brought a toy car to the diner with him. The other boy was young enough to be in a highchair (and the cutest onesie I’ve seen in a long time). Both boys were well-behaved, but the older one went from booth to booth looking for people to talk to and other children to play with, while his younger brother looked around for someone to make eye-contact with. 

While she waited for her food, their mother was fully engrossed with her phone, texting, reading emails, checking various social media platforms, looking at pictures. A few times the older boy called out unsuccessfully for her to notice something. She couldn't be pulled away from the phone.

When the food came, the phone went to a position by her plate, so she could keep looking at it while they ate their food. The phone remained at the center of attention, the very focal point of her time in the diner.

I’m in no position to judge her. I have no reason to believe she is a bad parent or a bad person. And, except when I babysat decades ago, I have never had to sit through a meal shared only with children. I have no kids and the world of the future is probably better off for that. 

I am also no better than she; it is a difficult thing for me to go through a meal without checking my phone. I can’t walk the dog in the morning without it. I check it immediately before sleeping and immediately before rising. I have it with me when I watch a show or a movie in the evening.

Watching her instead called to mind something I have thought about, if not personally addressed, many times before. We live in a time when the virtual too often trumps the real. We’d rather text with someone far away than talk to the person in front of us. We’d rather read about someone else’s life on Facebook than live our own. We would rather edit our experiences for Instagram than fully live them. Hell, much of the time we’d rather sext or use a hookup app than actually have  real, human-contact-involving sex.

Maybe part of the reason some among us dream of achieving immortality through uploading themselves into computers—and are satisfied that this would be a good existence—is that many of us already cannot imagine a life lived any way other than virtually.