Why So Serious?

When dealing with theories of literature that are based on the reasoning behind deep philosophical topics, it is difficult to avoid collapsing into philosophical reasoning proper. But the nature of the material is such that these sorts of considerations are inevitable.

In a well-written and enjoyable piece, Mr. Leon confronts the reader with a hypothesis regarding "our" reactions to evil in literature. I don't agree with his claim, but rather than offer a substantial antithesis I think it would be better to offer a different perspective that widens the possibilities of interpretation on these key points. After all, by offering an explanation that makes use of abstract qualities that would classically have had ontological justification derived from some background metaphysical picture, Mr. Leon leaves his explanation open to refutation by anybody that doesn't share that metaphysical picture. I deny, for example, that "humility" plays a role in human action, but is only a folk-psychological substitute for different, far more complex explanations that are brought together under a common system of prudential analysis that offer functional, but not correct, natural synopses of human practical rationality.

In Mr Leon's own words:

"I submit that the power and attractiveness of a character of extraordinary virtue or vice is a function of how nonchalant, how indifferent they are about their vice or virtue. What characterizes both the monster and the saint is how they act as if it were the most natural thing in the world. When asked about the extraordinary nature of their actions, they are simply puzzled. “How could I act any other way?” they ask us. “How could you even ask the question?”

I don't fully understand what could constitute evidence either for or against this claim that would go beyond Mr. Leon's references to the enjoyment he derives from characters he engages with. He certainly doesn't speak for me, in any case; I would offer as a justification for my enjoyment of a character of either positive or negative moral valence the amount I am able to learn from the combination of traits, situations and reactions that boost my understanding of the range of possible social or psychological situations resulting from the character's role in the narrative. There is nothing nonchalant about any of the remarkable characters in the Brothers Karamazov. One of the main focuses of the antagonist Fyodor Pavlovitch is not that he is nonchalant, but that he justifies his own activity in such a way as to be impervious to the sort of scrutiny or attempt at correction that ought to occur in his social life. His nonchalance has nothing to do with it.

Hannibal Lecter may be a rather more friendly example to Mr. Leon's claim - perhaps one could say that nonchalance is an outstanding characteristic of Mr Lecter's behaviour. In fact, this example is quite telling. What Mr. Leon touches on in his analysis is that a character who is emotionally unmoved by committing acts of violence or spite towards which a sympathetic audience generally has strong emotional reactions reveals an underlying disharmony that moves the vote against him, so to speak. This is one of the most basic psychological mechanisms employed in literature for narrative effect.

However: firstly, this sort of emotional detachment is only one way of alienating the audience. Other ways include giving the character substantial and scarily coherent justification, such as Turgenev's Bazarov, providing the character with sufficient back-story to force the audience to assume that they must be morally compromised to occupy the role that they do, such as the hordes of Nazi Stormtroopers in Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, or pushing the boundaries of what the audience believes the character is inclined to do on the basis of their alien nature or incomprehensible (though assumedly coherent) goals, such as McTiernan's Predator. Another example that Mr. Leon may have trouble with would be one of the finest cinematic antagonists, Cameron's T-1000 from the second Terminator movie. To assign "nonchalance" to this character makes no sense. Until the end, this character cannot be assigned motivations on an intelligent viewing of the movie, but must be understood rather more as a force of nature or an inevitability of fate. These examples make no real sense on Mr. Leon's analysis, unless he wants to claim that whatever antagonists we experience must have some level of emotional engagement to be interesting. But I shouldn't think he would want to defend this, as this is a truism, and an uninteresting one at that.

Secondly: the sort of nonchalance that betrays psychopathy or emotional detachment in the face of violence is, statistically, exceedingly rare. Examples thereof are vastly outweighed by antagonists who simply possess a coherent but contrary set of goals, but who are nonetheless rational and intelligent. Where does "nonchalance" fit in with Milton's Satan? Once again, I don't wish to offer a counterargument of any singular character but only wish to stress that any single point that hopes to capture why we like and dislike protagonists and antagonists will fail as hopelessly myopic, as this field extends outwards potentially as far as moral philosophy itself. To give an idea of the breadth of ideas we would have to capture, I can, in conclusion, offer (at least) five alternative "functions" that maintain interest in both fictional and factual antagonism:

1) The depth of justification possible in the face of apparently hopelessly practical irrationality
2) The divergence in character that makes such justification possible
3) The divergence in character that makes alien forms of sensibility possible, such as in the case of psychopathic violence
4) The engagement with standard moral questions pertaining to the "true" end of practical rationality
5) The divergence in situation that challenges the ability of the audience to maintain that they would remain practically rational given the same options.

Some last thoughts on the Joker. I would like to believe that Nolan had created some sort of moral superbeing, one who pursues practically irrational aims with all the force of a categorical imperative, but as much as I love the character and enjoy his screen time, let's not put too fine a point on it, he's just a violent sociopath. An interesting one, and one who possesses the aforementioned coherence and justification that adds depth and interest to an antagonist, but simply a violent sociopath all the same.

1) His multiple backstories are not devised to elude all explanation of his origin, but simply to do two things: (a) to reveal that he has a deep knowledge of the importance of such explanations, but doesn't grant them any weight, probably on the basis of an intelligent cynicism that means that he would reject therapy or any attempt to communicate with him on a personal level, and (b) to cause psychological suffering by tailoring the story itself to each new hearer. In the case of the mob boss, he refers to his childhood to emphasise the childlike dependence in which he now maintains his victim (he is, at that point, holding a knife to the man's mouth). He emphasises his sexual nature by flirting with his second victim, referring to a sexual relationship he had prior to that. By implying that he has been psychologically damaged in regard to women, he threatens and more closely personalises the threat.

2) He consistently takes great pleasure in torture and psychological abuse.

3) His pomp and extraversion reveal that his moral code is NOT derived from a connection with some higher calling, but rather that he is simply extremely self-centered. He talks with great verve about his own beliefs and perspective, leaves calling cards and gloats constantly.

4) Although he claims not to have any sort of forethought, he clearly expends great time and effort in organising large-scale schemes, such as packing hospitals with explosives or rigging bombs to ships and carefully distributing detonators.

I would love to see a character that fits Mr. Leon's description; it would be both philosophically and aesthetically stimulating. But the Joker certainly does not fit such a description.

Observations on Stan van Hooft's Virtue Ethical Account (4)

Reconciling Virtue and Justice

1. Modern societies are simply too large and operate on the basis of interactions which are too impersonal for it to be possible simply to solve the problems of mass social coordination and justice by referring to the concepts of care and responsibility.

2. The hermeneutic approach is preferable to the solution to this problem, as solving it will inevitably involve confronting a host of highly complex normative situations.

3. Paul Ricoeur's theoretical system combines van Hooft's concepts of "self-project" and "caring-about-others" by considering the social/ethical/organic self, along with its four Aristotelian levels, as a whole which has to be interpreted hermeneutically.

4. Ricoeur sees the fundamental human project as that of self-development, care-focused interpersonal relations, and the creation and maintenance of just institutions. For this, a simple and single existential conception of the self is insufficient.

5. The ethical aim is just this tripartite structure: for Ricoeur its importance is paramount, as it provides content for any successful interpretation of human activity.

6. Such a tripartite aim, in classical moral language, reveals the presence of the virtues of integrity, creativity, sympathy and justice.

7. Tolerance is important for Ricoeur as it is necessary in a society where the adoption of different content to the common forms of self-determination will inevitably result in (sometimes radical) disagreement.

8. The image of the just person on Ricoeur's view is that of a driven, open-minded, confident visionary who sympathises with others and has a respect and reverence for institutions that operate on principles of fairness and equality.

Observations on Stan van Hooft's Virtue Ethical Account (3)

A Brief History of Virtue from the Stoics to Levinas

1. Hume was an empiricist, and believed that knowledge could only arise from experience or the creation/analysis of connections between items of that experience. The implication of this is that moral knowledge must rely on the perception of real-world objects and relations, rather than an abstract ontological realm.

2. He posits that reason is unable to provide moral knowledge because it can only deal with ordering experience and activity so that the cognizer can get what it wants (reason is idle if bereft of prior motivation or desire). Moral principles must therefore derive from aspects of the emotional life of the cognizer.

3. For Hume, the virtue requisite to lead a moral life is that of sympathy for others.

4. Nietzsche's concept of the Will to Power can be understood as the doctrine that all organic beings possess the desire to overcome both the self and others. A well-lived life is one in which energy is spent in forcefully creating self-defined values and improving one's situation such that, for example, one would be willing to repeat one's decisions over and over (see his concept of "Eternal Recurrence").

5. The difference between "slave morality" and "master morality" is foundational to Nietzschean thought. The former refers to the ethic of world-denial, self-abnegation, hatred and refusal of personal growth and pride. The latter is the opposite: that of pride, dominance, control and power. Nietzsche claimed that the popular contemporaneous Christian slave morality was a contingent result of a particular moral genealogy.

6. There seem to be multiple ways of construing Nietzsche's main virtue: honesty, freedom, or, perhaps in keeping with the existential tradition he helped to found, "authenticity".

7. On Sartre's view, "hell is other people" is true because the presence of others forces each for-itself (self-conscious entity) to concede that (a) its world is not entirely controlled or constituted by its own being and (b) that it may be the object of another for-itself, which somewhat defines it as an in-itself.

8. Levinas' account regards the Nietzschean account as incomplete as it does not take into sufficient consideration the idea that the infinite existential inaccessibility of the Other always frustrates the self-conception of the for-itself as free and complete in-itself.

9. It is part of the existential constitution of the self that it is essentially (a) unable to subsume the Other, (b) liable to be affected by the presence of the Other. I don't think that van Hooft satisfactorily defends the idea that this means that the self is "primordially" social, as he even concedes that this can be perverted by bad upbringing. How fundamental is something that can be so perverted? As fundamental as it is, it is certainly not essentially or ontologically fundamental.

10. Levinas' argument for the primordiality of social constitution is based on (a) the ubiquitousness of (sometimes non-functional and non-pragmatic) dialogue and (b) the necessity to consider the Other as Other in order to successfully engage in dialogue.

11. That said, Levinas' foundational virtue seems to be responsiveness/responsibility (respecting as far as possible the etymological similarity of those words) or openness.

12. Whether or not this sort of thinking could work nowadays depends on how one conceives of the community. It is true that a vast range of relationships are purely pragmatic, and business and economic connections sometimes have to be severed ruthlessly for certain parties to succeed. If one is willing to be a radical critic of capitalism then Levinas' view is certainly conducive to it.

"Marxism and Methodological Individualism" by Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine and Elliott Sober

This paper builds on previous work to further explore the relationship between Marxism and methodological individualism. It argues that methodological individualism cannot be maintained in a Marxist context, despite the fact that the fundamental point that a macrological theory should always elaborate on its micrological foundations is sound.

Broadly speaking, there are four approaches in sociological analysis: atomistic, methodological individualistic, anti-reductionistic, and holistic:

Atomistic: the only explanatorily relevant facts are those that describe the individuals. Relations between individuals are only to be understood with reference to the effects they have on individuals as isolated from eachother. All institutional or social explanations must necessarily be reduced.

Methodological individualist: similar to atomistic, except that many of the properties to be ascribed to individuals as explanatory are irreducibly relational. Social and institutional explanations, however, can always in principle be reduced to explanations referring only to individuals and relations between them.

Anti-reductionistic: similar to methodological individualistic explanations, except it leaves room for the possibility that some social phenomena may be irreducible.

Holistic: not only are there certain irreducible institutional or social phenomena, but individual explanations are actually epiphenomenal in many cases.

The main difference between the anti-reductionistic and methodological individualistic forms of explanation is their approach to type-explanations as opposed to token-explanations. By employing an analogy with the type/token dichotomy as it occurs in the philosophy of mind, it is made clear in this paper that methodological individualism is in a weaker position by insisting on the necessity of reducing all types of social phenomena to instantiations of equally-frequent token occurrences.

If we consider to concepts as examples: the first being "water", the second being "fitness" (as it occurs in evolutionary biology), it is easy to see how the first can be reduced to "H20" with all predicative truth intact, whereas it is much harder to pin a token instantiation on the second type (with giraffes, "fitness" equates to having a long neck; with "frogs", a sticky tongue is the token). Wright, Levine and Sober claim that methodological individualism fails because social and institutional phenomena are more akin to concepts of the "fitness" type than the "water" type, and their multiple realizability prevents methodological individualism from being a viable option for Marxist sociological analysis.

Observations on Stan van Hooft's Virtue Ethical Account (2)

Aristotle’s Ethics

1. Aristotle understands “ethics” as the results, intentions, reasons and motivations of different sorts of social activity, and how this activity is perceived evaluatively by the community. In the broadest terms, it is the inquiry into how people can live a good life.

2. A “teleological” explanation is one that refers to the final end or purpose of the phenomenon under explanation. For human beings, this involves a reference to their innate capacities and desires.

3. Reacting to a witnessed suicide: 1) the vegetative level will react to the shock on a subconscious level: chemicals and electric process in the brain will fix, associating sights, sounds, locations and other sensory input with trauma and pain. 2) the appetitive level will react consciously, terrified and upset, and seek to escape or reconcile the situation. 3) the deliberative level will order the situation, reflecting on how to explain what has happened, and what activity ought to be carried out in the time after witnessing the event. 4) the contemplative level will reflect on the deeper significance of what has occurred, what can be understood from the real occurrence of such an event.

4. “Virtues of character” are virtues resulting from training the appetitive level by way of habit. As character inheres in activity, only continuously revisiting virtuous activities will result in the successful cultivation of virtues of character.

5. Training to inculcate habits is the key method to training virtues of character.

6. Intellection and sophisticated reflection on beauty and form are considered to be “finer” than indulgence in appetitive pleasure, as the latter is shared with other animals, while the former are the domain of homo sapiens alone.

7. The relation of reason to pleasure is one of control: the ethical role of reason is to moderate indulgence in line with aims set in order to cultivate virtues of character.

8. Phronesis, or practical wisdom, is the natural facility to carry out skilful activities that are adaptive in accordance with the subtle idiosyncrasies of each situation in which the skill is applied. It is important as it is through the practical wisdom of prudence that activity in accordance with the Golden Mean is cultivated.

9. Prudence and wisdom are different in the sense that the former is more concerned with practical choice, whereas wisdom consists in the ability to contemplate the universal and unchanging aspects of life. Prudence finds more of a place in everyday life, but each is indispensable.

10. Whether or not Aristotle conceives of different routes to eudaimonia depends on the level of generality. At a low level of generality, there are many different ways of achieving eudaimonia as it results from the skilful and successful execution of worthwhile activities (so the many different routes that one may take to self-improve, self-educate or self-cultivate offer different routes to eudaimonia, as long as they are executed over a sufficiently long period of time). At a high level of generality, only the successful and continuous practice of virtuous activities will conduce to eudaimonia.

11. The role of intellect is to guide and direct action. It is only through the intellectual application of prudence to activity that a virtuous and happy life is possible.

12. Bad people cannot be happy: they lack the completion and integrity that results from a conscious reflection on the virtue of their activity (though how far egoistic justification will take you seems to have eluded Aristotle entirely).

Observations on Stan van Hooft’s Virtue Ethical Account (1)

Virtue Ethics and the Ethics of Duty

1. It is important to be virtuous, as “virtues” refer to the qualities that provide, on the virtue ethical account, the mental and physical resources for autonomy, success and fruitful interaction with others. These are essential aspects of an inherently good life.

2. “Character” may be conceived as partially the balance of virtues in the individual, the skills and abilities cultivated thus far, and the quirks, neuroses and idiosyncrasies that constitute the totality of their dispositions towards publicly observable events.

3. It is important to create a role model of “the good person”, as this person will exemplify the ideal balance of virtuous traits and the particular way in which those traits are combined.  An affirmative answer suggests itself to the question of the possibility of coming to an agreement on what constitutes a good life on the basis of biology and widespread cross-cultural agreement, at least in broad terms.

4. “Particularism”: the idea that moral situations heavily rely upon ad hoc judgement, and that there exists no code that will provide clear-cut answers in response to general aspects of a situation.

5. The risks in moral judgement include causing unnecessary pain and suffering and contributing to negative character traits. Applying to moral principles can vitiate this risk as certain principles ensure that less pain results from actions. A system such as utilitarianism would generally avoid the risk of causing distress to people if consistently followed, though there are internal problems with this system.

6. Carol Gilligan’s “justice perspective” is based on looking to abstract principles and codified contingency plans to solve moral disputes. The “care perspective” looks to compromise to seek satisfaction by co-ordinating desires between disputant parties. Her research led to the notable conclusion that boys in schoolyards preferred the former, girls the latter.

7. “Externalism” and “Internalism” in reasons refers to how agents are said to relate to the justification or explanation of moral behaviour. The former claims that an objective code or aim exists such that an agent may have a moral reason to do something which is independent of the knowledge or desires of the agent in question. The latter seeks to refer only to the conscious state of the agent, meaning their goals, beliefs and desires and the connection between these and the objective aspects of the situation in determining what it is the agent is supposed to do. Virtue ethics prefers the latter as it places great importance on the voluntary cultivation of attitudes and activities on the part of moral subjects in response to moral situations.

8. The difference between “foundationalism” and “hermeneutics” is partially an epistemological one, but one which pertains to moral psychology. The former refers to undeniable, almost axiomatic aspects of a system. Descartes famously located such foundations in his own existence and the existence of God. The latter refers to the activity of continuous re-adjustment and interpretation of data in the context of larger wholes of which this data is a part. The interpretation of an act by somebody we know illustrates this point intimately: disagreement on the hidden intentions of, say, an act of generosity is an example of hermeneutics. The importance of hermeneutic reasoning may outweigh that of foundations in private moral judgement but this is not to suggest that the broader socio-political problem won’t require an answer of a different sort.

9. Given the disdain for foundations, virtue ethics tends to vitiate the problem of relativism (that of how to attack seemingly evil activities which are consciously justified morally by the parties who commit them) by claiming that some virtues are relative, and some are universal. It is by no means a problem that some cultures may radically differ in their approach to different circumstances or as a result of differing pasts but the more severe the difference (and the greater moral evil perceived by those who do not share the customs of the culture under scrutiny) the less likely they actually are to differ. This is somewhat similar to the contractualist account, which disbars the possibility of certain rules being broken on the basis of the fact that no functional society could accept such transgressions.

10. The ethics of duty tends to employ a dualistic moral psychology as it posits that the individual stands as detached, ontologically and epistemically, from the moral law. It requires that a recognition of and obedience to the moral law derives from a faculty of judgement wholly distinct from those that assist judgement of amoral information. By contrast, virtue ethics is holistic as it relies on a total synthesis of emotion, reason and intuition.

11. Further to this, the ethics of duty focuses on the concept of the “social atom”: that is, an isolated, individual moral decision-maker that confronts the moral law without recourse to the beliefs of other members of the community. Virtue ethics evidently rejects this concept as misguided.

12. Supererogatory action, in being an activity that lies beyond the call of duty, is problematic for the ethics of duty as it seems to operate in a vacuum: it is bereft of any meaning without a way of relating it to the moral law. Virtue ethics, on the other hand, is highly respectful of supererogatory actions as they represent a commitment to personal excellence.

"A Reply to Elster on 'Marxism, Functionalism and Game Theory'" by Gerald Cohen

Cohen was a member of the school of Analytical Marxism, which seeks to explain and defend the views of Marx in a contemporary framework that uses the tools of deductive logic and linear reasoning, rather than polemics and rhetoric. Analytic Marxists are convinced of (a) the fundamental truth of Marxist's explanation of various social phenomena and (b) the possibility of lucidly explaining and indicating the benefits and efficacy of this line of explanation. This paper is an excellent specimen of this school. The aim is to object to Elster's attempts to update Marxism, which he does by making use of game theory and discarding functional explanations altogether.
For Cohen, on the other hand, functional explanations are ineliminable from historical materialism. A functional explanation is an explanation such that the function of a phenomenon explains its presence.

In biological research, Darwinian evolution provides a backdrop to the possibility of explaining the presence of some natural characteristic of an organism by referring to the fact that its beneficial results ensure (and have hitherto ensured) its selection. In sociology, however, these explanations are rather more tricky as there is less possibility of recourse to an "Invisible Hand" concept that might satisfy the terms of the explanation. The example presented is that of the formal relation between the legal code and the relations of production; on Marxist analysis, the former represents an aspect of the "superstructure" and the latter represents an aspect of the "base". Those who defend a dialectical materialist conception of history maintain that the base, that is, the economic conditions of the society under analysis such as the relationship between the machinery of production, the owners of said machinery, the labour force and the social systems of management that moderate these relations, determines the superstructure, which is, broadly speaking, the religion, ideology and social relationships that result from it.

When confronted with the following two complementary pairs of propositions:

1) The level of productive development (i.e. the existence of iron, computers or robotised assembly lines) explains the nature of its economic structure (i.e. autocratic, democratic, theocratic)
2) The economic structure explains the nature of its superstructure (the legal system, media controls, acceptability of certain sexual orientations, existence or non-existence of racism, sexism, bigotry etc.)

3) The economic structure assists and ensures the development of productive forces
4) the superstructure stablises its economic structure

Cohen claims he is obliged to offer functional explanations for 1 and 2 as this is the only way for him to avoid the conclusion that the pairs of propositions contradict eachother.

Cohen doesn't believe that there has yet been a good explanation of the mechanism whereby these phenomena inter-relate and co-determine, but that the functional reliance is open to observation (he compares this with the pre-Darwinist Lamarckian explanation of biological functions). There doesn't seem to me to be a problem with the concession that a functional reliance exists between two propositions without there being a conclusive mechanistic explanation. The problem, I think, lies in Cohen's analysis of that in which he claims a functional explanation to actually consist: rejecting reverse-causal effects, he recourses to what he calls consequence laws: "the only remaining candidate, which I therefore elect, is: e occurred because it would cause f, or, less tersely but more properly, e occurred because the situation was such that an event of type E would cause an event of type F" (Cohen's emphasis. Capitalisation refers to type rather than token events).

It doesn't take much to see that this account is lacking. There is much literature on the subject, and I believe that the work of David Lewis is the sine qua non of causal explanation, but a positivistic bent tempts me to believe that the inclusion of the hypothetical mode in explanation is only acceptable as a reduction or abbreviation of some proposition which refers to actual states of affairs. Dispositional analyses are acceptable as long as they are constructed against a theoretical background such that one is able to complete the analysis by recourse to non-hypothetical facts:

1) This is the sort of thing that Steven would eat.
=
2) This is the sort of thing that in fact matches Steven's actual tastes, preferences and desires under certain conditions and not others (if "conditions" is uncomfortably... conditional, read "situations" instead)

or,

1) This is a material that would dissolve salt.
=
2) This material possesses such actual properties that its conjoining with salt in fact has and does consistently result in the dissolution of the salt.

Cohen must then provide an analysis of the actual properties and relations that obtain. His formulation of a consequence law between types of event E and F: [if (if E then F) then E] is incomplete unless reduced using actual relations. No doubt dispositional analyses are useful in everyday life, but that does not detract from the requirement that they be reduced for an ontologically secure explanation. Ontological security is an absolute requirement for a rigorous, intellectually unproblematic scientific explanation, and if the entities and relations are to hold as Cohen claims they do then this reduction is indispensable. This, I would assume, would only be possible with the arrival of a mechanistic explanation but, as Cohen says, no such explanation is forthcoming, and as such this analysis cannot be anything more than provisional.