bottom up change

This speech reflects one prominent reason why I supported Barack Obama for president even before he announced that he was running in February of 2007. In this speech to the NAACP last week, Obama is articulating a new kind of liberalism, one that incorporates the importance of personal responsibility and individualism explicitly in addition to the notion that government can improve the lives of its citizens if it is administered effectively. If conservatives are correct that America is unique from European nations in its focus on the individual, then Barack Obama represents a melding of the communitarian aspects of liberalism with the emphasis on the individual in conservative political philosophy. I believe that this synthesis of ideals is one reason why many Republicans ended up voting for Obama in 2008. In any case, this is one of President Obama’s best speeches of the year IMHO. I recommend that you watch it.

By the way, as an aside, notice the emphasis on education in this speech. I’ve written here before that I believe that improving education is perhaps Barack Obama’s most important goal in his political life. Despite the current focus on health care reform, I suspect that education is the issue that drives Obama the most. Finally, I didn’t even mention the significance of the first African-American president giving a speech to the NAACP for the first time. I’m glad that Barack Obama was the one to give that speech.

John Rawls

I found this piece in the Guardian almost revelatory.  Ok, I’m exaggerating my reaction, but I was impressed.  For quite a while now, it has seemed to me that we’ve been stuck with the stale leftovers of the political philosophies from the 19th and 20th centuries.  We keep coming back to the old debates about a more purely free market, libertarian system, or a more socialistic system.  But socialism and economic libertarianism are zombies, dead theories that are still on two feet because we keep propping them up.  We can’t seem to think of new categories.

That’s basically the premise of Eric Hobsbawm’s essay in the Guardian.  Now, for the record, I think that he is wrong when he says that capitalism has been shown to be “bankrupt” by the current economic crisis.  A form of capitalism has been revealed to be bankrupt, but so long as we have a free market system of some kind, we will have capitalism.  Maybe I’m splitting hairs.

Hobsbawm builds from the above premise to argue that the left faces an especially difficult problem in this intellectual vacuum because the Labour party in Britain and the Democrats in the US have moved further and further to the economic right since Thatcher and Reagan.  As a result, liberals are trying to figure out what the right balance is in trying to recalibrate government intervention in the market without reverting to the old, familiar, but bankrupt socialism.  Hobsbawm’s proposed starting point for a new liberalism is the following:

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the “capabilities” of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.

I think Hobsbawm is onto something in focusing on the environment, but it needs more spelling out. Where I do agree with him completely is that we need new, fresh ways of thinking about politics and economics.  As President Obama liked to say on the campaign trail, the old ways of thinking “just won’t do.”

There were some important thinkers in the 20th century who can lead the way in helping us break out of the old ways of thinking.  In my view, John Rawls‘ political liberalism is the closest thing we have to a 21st century political philosophy.  Rawls was effective at largely escaping the socialism-libertarianism dead end, and he offered a view of economics that was based largely on democratic institutions and values.  He was open to the free market without trusting it, and he was open to government intervention in the market without trusting it.  It may be wishful thinking on my part, but I often seem to see Rawls’ pragmatic liberalism in some of President Obama’s rhetoric and policies.  There seem to be many parallels between Rawls and Obamanomics, though it would take more time to explain why.  Is Obamanomics and the philosophy behind it the future for liberals?  Who knows.  But since this economic philosophy still seems to be in development, we will just have to wait and see.

"School of Athens" by Raphael

That quote is from the 20th century French Thomistic philosopher, Etienne Gilson.  It is as good a response as any to the title of David Brooks’ op-ed in the New York Times, “The End of Philosophy“.  As someone who has loved philosophy since high school (I wrote my senior paper on Hegel and Marx), I found this title just a little bit annoying.  I hope I don’t sound defensive, but when it comes to philosophy, David Brooks is full of it.  Since I’ve given myself license to write about philosophy in my revised About page, I’m going to kick things off today.

Brooks’ topic in this op-ed is ethics and whether our moral beliefs are merely expressions of emotion or whether reason plays a major role.  This topic is very much relevant to politics.  Lately, there has been a lot of pressure on President Obama to release the “torture memos” from the Bush administration.  The outrage about these memos stems from the widely held belief that torture is wrong.  Philosophers look at this outrage and ask: what are we doing when we say “torture is wrong”?  When we say that, are we simply expressing our dislike of torture, the way we might dislike an abstract painting or a bad joke?  Or are we making a judgment about something that we assume to be an objective fact, such as the distance between the Earth and the Sun?  This is one of the central problems in ethics, and in his op-ed, Brooks defends the view that ethics is based on emotion.  He writes:

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.

As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, “Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second. Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but … what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment.”

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.

In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, “The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and … moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.”

Now, I believe in evolution, and I believe that evolution does play an important role in explaining how humans came to adopt morality.  I also agree with Brooks that psychology and cognitive science are important in helping us understand how our brains process information when we make moral judgments.  But I do not agree that moral judgments like “torture is wrong” are simply expressions of emotions.  Nor do I believe that psychology is relevant to answering this question.  There are several reasons for this:

First, when we disagree about moral questions, we seem to be arguing about facts, not simply criticizing the other person for having the wrong emotional reaction.  If you believe torture is a very serious wrong and you are arguing with someone who believes that torture is just fine, it doesn’t seem accurate to describe your disagreement as matters of taste.

Second, there are many times in life when we face moral dilemmas (both large and small) and it’s not at all clear what we should do.  Brooks’ statement that we make “snap moral judgments” that are comparable to whether food tastes good or whether a landscape is beautiful is too simplistic.

Third, Brooks, like a lot of people in our culture today, places too much weight in science without being adequately acquainted with the philosophy he is declaring dead.  Many philosophers do not believe that “expressivism” versus “realism” can be decided by the experiments that psychologists do.  That is for a simple reason.  Psychology can explain how we form moral judgments–the brain processes that lead us to view some things as right and other things as wrong.  But even if we had a complete explanation of how the brain functions when we make moral judgments, we would still be left with the question, “is torture really wrong”?  Then we would have to engage in philosophy.

Fourth, although it is unquestionably true that emotions guide us in our deliberations and help us make moral decisions, that doesn’t imply that moral judgments simply are expressions of emotions.  That conclusion does not follow.

Finally, one complaint about Brooks’ op-ed that isn’t an argument against expressivism: you can’t just dismiss Socrates in a paragraph or two, no matter how sexy and in vogue cognitive science is.  Brooks starts his essay with two words: “Socrates talked.”  Well, the entire work of Plato is devoted to Socrates “talking.”  Socrates, by the way, was one of the greatest philosophical minds in the history of the subject.

Now, please remind me: why am I trying to refute the philosophical arguments of David Brooks?