Where Is the High Road?

This sort of stuff can be infuriating. Importantly, I imagine that it's infuriating to folks on both sides of the political lines. Rhetoric tends, perhaps by its very nature, to certain kinds of excess and "flourish," and in the current context, I'm certainly alarmed by what appears to be a growing class of political terrorists in the U.S.--that is, people who believe that killing those with whom they politically disagree (or even discussing it or encouraging it or joking about it) is an acceptable course of action. (At the same time, I realize that a vast majority of people see through this; but a terrorist class does not have to be large to be a problem.) This seems particularly problematic in the context of what is supposed to be a (deliberative) democracy. It belies a terrible ignorance of history and the humanities--Plato's Apology for a start, and Socrates' warning that killing him would not accomplish very much--which reflects something deeply amiss in the American social fabric.

But what I've really been pondering is the question: what is the right response to violent rhetoric and political violence? There seem to be a few options:

1. Find a scapegoat: Blame Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. Which is roughly what's happening, and I can't see this achieving much, except infuriating everyone over and over.

2. Give a warm-hearted, earnest speech: Talk about bipartisanship and working together and tolerance and the point that violence simply can't be the right way to resolve political disagreements in a (supposedly) civil and democratic society. The sort of speech Obama would deliver with typical eloquence. Edifying, but yawn.

3. Fight fire with fire: Buy guns and create counter-balancing violent factions, i.e. in this context, well-armed lefties. Let Obama (and Peolosi, etc.) start carrying unconcealed handguns. Incompatible with #2.

4. Embrace the One's Targethood: Tell the violent rhetoric-mongers and the actual terrorists, "Bring it on." This probably sounds childish, but honestly, I don't think anything else could have any significant chance of speaking to the people who feel so disenfranchised by the society that they need to resort to the language of violence or to violent action. It would also get the attention of the yawning majority in a way that #2 alone can't. So, take away the thing the violent are trying to have for themselves: the status of a sacrificial lamb. Don't blame them (or their alleged order-barkers), don't ask them for a tolerant hug (since that's not what they want): acknowledge this desire and will to advocate and do violence, acknowledge one's vulnerability to it, and one's willingness to be killed if it must come to that. This is hard. (Seriously: it's very easy to talk about dying for one's beliefs and another thing to face that prospect in all seriousness unless you are a very marginalized person without anyone who loves you.) And this is a non-ideal solution, for a non-ideal situation. In an ideal situation, no one has to be in a position where they must be willing to die for what they believe. I don't think that "bring it on" is exactly the right phrasing, although there is a sense in which this is what Socrates was up to in the Apology. And there are worse examples by which to live.

5. Play Deaf: Just ignore the rhetoric; acknowledge the violence that happens, condemn it, and those who would support such acts, and move on. This is what I try to do because otherwise I'll go crazy. But it's not obviously the right response for those who are more directly engaged in political activity. Perhaps merely "vowing to fight on"--insofar as this is a distinct response from #2 (or #4) fits here.

In any event, I think it would be great to hear Obama and others to acknowledge in a more unnerving and less abstract way that some people think that that political rivals should be killed, to openly acknowledge themselves as those rivals, and in this and other ways to personalize themselves as the targets of this violent rhetoric and, in some cases, action. (Maybe they have, and given my relative inattention, I've missed it.) Violence is easier when the enemy isn't a real, concrete person.

Ethics Beyond Sentience

I've mentioned EKU's Chautauqua Lecture Series before. The new director of the series, my colleague Minh Nguyen, is launching a journal, to appear annually, that will complement the theme of each year's series, and contain articles by many or most of the (often big name) speakers and other invited essays, fiction, photography and art on the theme. This year's theme is "Nature's Humans," and I was asked to contribute a piece. With that preface, and with some trepidation, I post here a draft of my essay, "Ethics Beyond Sentience." I've worked through this a few times, enough to have hidden all its most unacceptable flaws from my own view.

In it, I work out, mainly by example, rather than systematically, a critique of the idea that sentience is the foundation of ethics--a claim most obviously associated with Peter Singer (one of this fall's speakers) and reiterated (multiple times) by another speaker in this year's series (science writer Jonathan Balcombe). I focus on two cases where respect and consideration often already are, and where it makes good sense that they are (or should be), extended beyond the limits of sentience: the dead and the mountains.

Part of my trepidation is the concern that my inner hippie gets too much free rein at the end. (And is the distance between the beginning and the end insufferable?) Thoughts about that or other aspects of the essay are much appreciated.

Ethics Beyond Sentience

My Daughter Needs Sensitivity Training

A few weeks ago, we discovered a mushroom growing in the backyard, and went for a mushroom hunt around the house to see what else we could find. A colony of fungi were thriving around a drain pipe in our flower bed. When we discovered these mushrooms, my daughter expressed her intention to smush them. I said, "Why would you want to do that? Just let them be. How would you like to be smushed?"

Then yesterday we saw a remarkable butterfly, and she ordered me to "kill it." What the heck? We've got some work to do.

I've been thinking a lot about animals and the environment and the scope of respect. (I've also been on vacation and preparing for class; hence the slowdown here.) I'm attracted to the view that there is no outward limit on the extension of respect, in one form or another. Like Holmes Rolston III, I think we can, basically, get all the way to something like respecting dirt. Obviously, this will have a different (you might say) grammar than respect for persons, but the basic point would be: don't destroy things (where "destroy" means something like removing something of value without replacing it with something of equal or greater value). Respect--and similarly, love--are relevant here insofar as we come to see the point of such a principle when it is seen through the eyes of respect (and love): we don't destroy the things we love.

Tolerant Engagement

I just read an excellent paper by Barbara Herman, "Pluralism and the Community of Moral Judgment" (in a collection of papers edited by David Heyd Toleration: An Elusive Virtue (1996)). Herman explores the idea--very similar to one I'm working on (and I welcome an ally in thought here!)--that toleration can remain too static, and that the presence of moral conflict or disagreement calls instead for engagement. Working from within the Kantian tradition, Herman notes Kant's argument that "where 'a multitude of persons' live in such a way that they 'affect one another,' they are under moral necessity to enter together into civil society" (p. 75). She goes on to claim:

I think it can be argued that we are similarly obliged to enter and sustain a community of moral judgment not to secure enforceable rights but to bring about the conditions for moral development and colloquy: the conditions necessary to secure what Kant calls 'the public use of reason.'"

The general idea is that moral reflection and development are by their very nature not static, and so the "public use of reason"--where we are engaged with others on moral issues--is a necessary part of our own moral development. She tends to treat toleration and engagement as different possibilities: I can tolerate someone else without "sitting down with them" and so treating toleration as a "first moral response" to moral difference can lead to moral stultification.

I agree very much with the direction of Herman's ideas. I have been working to develop a notion of "tolerant engagement" which is opposed to "bare toleration." Herman's work would seem to raise the question as to why invoking the concept of tolerance is necessary. After all, I might engage with other's whose beliefs or practices which I judge to be (prima facie) deplorable, and that judgment might persist even after some amount of engagement with them.

In my view, the "tolerant" component of tolerant engagement is an essential attitudinal component of what makes genuine engagement possible, with those with whom we have apparently deep moral disagreements. Primarily, such tolerance takes the persons with whom we disagree as its basic object (or subject, as it were). An attitude of tolerance dictates a "softened" response toward these persons, which makes a civil discourse possible. As I hinted in my last post, our judgment that a person is mistaken (or even acting in a morally intolerable way) does not remove the obligation to honor the basic principle of respect for persons. Thus, our default position cannot be exclusionary and maintain this basic respect. (Even in the case where the person has been convicted of a criminal offense, our laws recognize this idea in its prohibition of sentencing in absentia except in specific cases where the person chooses to be absent.)

Thus, the problem with refusing to discuss points of moral difference with those whose beliefs or practices we find intolerable (or bordering on it) is not simply (or essentially) that such an attitude is intolerant. Rather, in doing so, we refuse to honor a moral responsibility we ourselves have to engage. Now, there are limits to engagement, such as when the other party refuses to do so. There, no engagement--which can include discourse and compromise--is possible, and such refusals should be regarded as morally suspect. (I ignore for now problems of power inequality, such as when a more powerful party requests a "discussion" but only if the weaker party first meets various "conditions." For now, it's sufficient to point out that the imposing of conditions, too, can be a morally suspect lording of one's power over a disadvantaged party which, for that, is not necessarily in the wrong...)