Against Fairness

by Asma, Stephen T.

  2. Rembrandt is just the most famous of the Dutch Golden Age painters, but group portraiture was ubiquitous during this time. See Frans Hals’s (c. 1581–1666) group portrait from 1641, Regents of the Company of St. Elizabeth (Hals is also noteworthy because of his famous portrait of René Descartes), or Ferdinand Bol’s The Officers of the Guild of Wine Merchants (c. 1659), or the group portraits of Bartholomeus van der Helst (1613–1670).

  3. Competing interpretations of Rembrandt’s famous Night Watch (1642) are discussed in Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduction to Its Methods (Manchester University Press, 2006), chap. 5. Hatt and Klonk assess whether the Dutch group portraits can be accurately said to promote egalitarian values.

  4. See Arthur Lovejoy’s classic book The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Harvard University Press, 1936).

  5. Descartes, in his Principia, discards qualitative differences in natural philosophy. “For I freely acknowledge that I recognize no matter in corporeal things apart from that which the geometers call quantity, and take as the object of their demonstrations, i.e. that to which every kind of division, shape and motion is applicable.” Part II, thesis 64, The Principles of Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Vol. I (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

  6. For an excellent discussion of the various attempts to marry Newtonian universalism to emerging social science and humanities interests in the Enlightenment era, see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 1992).

  7. True emotivist ethics emerges out of the logical positivism movement in the early twentieth century but harkens back to Hume’s view that emotions are not subject to rational dispute or resolution. Positivism saw ethical claims (as well as religious and aesthetic claims) as incapable of logical proof and empirical corroboration, so they deemed ethics to be an expression of subjective emotion. They promptly roped off the whole domain and proceeded to ignore it. The earlier sentiment philosophers, like Hume and Smith, were still optimistic that a systematic and normative management of emotions was attainable and advisable for large-scale social progress.

  8. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 2000), bk. II, part III.

  9. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) (Prometheus Books, 2000) part I, sec. I, chap. V.

  10. Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) (Prometheus Books, 1988), 1.

  11. Utilitarians saw themselves as improving upon the sentiment theories of Hume and Smith, by breaking down the emotions to their atomic elements—pain and pleasure. In this, the utilitarians are early forerunners of the later behaviorism school of psychology. This reductionist utilitarian move may have brought the ethical project closer to the mathematized Newtonian ideal, but at a great cost. My own view is that Hume and Smith were closer to the mark in their consideration of more complex emotions (e.g., sympathy, compassion, revenge, shame, etc.). As my earlier explication of a biological CARE system demonstrates, affective systems can be very sophisticated and irreducibly tied to specific content in the social life of the organism. Pain and pleasure play a role in biological attachment, for example, but they woefully underdetermine the parent-child emotional bond.

  12. Kant offers three different formulations of the categorical imperative. The first formulation is famous, but the others are important too. The second formulation is “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.” And the final formation is “Every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends.” Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James Ellington (Hackett, 1993), 43.

  13. There are many arguments against Kant’s ethics in general and the lying case in particular, including the fact that language only needs partial reliability to function quite well as a communication system. Also, as many philosophers have pointed out, application of the universalizing categorical imperative to most other mundane dilemmas (e.g., should I do my laundry at midnight on Monday?) also leads to weird moral violations. Jean-Paul Sartre also demonstrates the vapid nature of the categorical imperative when applied to concrete dilemmas, in his essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” But I am not interested here in detailing the many counter-arguments to Kant’s philosophy. I am obviously much more sympathetic to the tradition that grounds ethics in emotion.

  14. Hume continues here, “It is sufficient, if the whole plan or scheme be necessary to the support of civil society, and if the balance of good, in the main, do thereby preponderate much above that of evil.” Harold I. Brown analyzes this passage—originally from appendix III of Hume, Enquiries, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford University Press, 1975)—in order to contrast it with the more improvisational techniques of rational “judgment.” I’m in agreement with Brown, who thinks that science itself doesn’t even follow the naively formalist rationality that it officially praises. See his Rationality (Routledge, 1990), 305.

  15. Some have suggested that the grid has been a long time coming, foreshadowed and even given a first draft in ancient Greek democracy. Ideas of democratic equality—one person, one vote—didn’t have to wait for the Enlightenment but already existed in our ancestral Athens. I don’t share this view of history—at the very least, it needs important caveats.

  Ancient Greek democracy is much closer to its tribal parentage than we usually admit. Yes, the people (demos) technically ruled the city-state, but the people had to be citizens in order to vote. Being a citizen was more tribal than we often realize. Women were not allowed to vote, nor were slaves or foreigners. A man could vote if he had already completed military training or if he owned property (although this last criterion was not well enforced). To be a citizen, you had to be the son of an Athenian, and Pericles tightened the criterion to insist that both parents be Athenian (thereby excluding sons of Athenian fathers and foreign mothers).

  It’s true that early democracy widened the parameters of the tribe—giving voice and influence beyond the usual oligarchies and tyrannies, but it was no grid. Even the Enlightenment version was universal in its pretensions but more tribal in practice. Many historians have chronicled the hypocritical exclusivity of eighteenth-century human rights policy. But my objective in this little historical sketch is to show how the promise of egalitarianism was born in this period, and how the subsequent two centuries were attempts to slowly make good on that promise.

  16. Jonathan Haidt has been researching the psychological aspects of moral intuitions and convictions. His empirical data reveal some of the interesting cognitive and affective psychodynamics at work underneath the American liberal and conservative tension. See Haidt and Craig Joseph, “The Moral Mind: How Five Sets of Innate Intuitions Guide the Development of Many Culture-Specific Virtues, and Perhaps Even Modules,” in The Innate Mind: Foundations and the Future, vol. 3, ed. P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, and S. Stich (Oxford University Press, 2008).

  17. I am from Chicago, a city notorious for corruption with a long history of dubious ethics. As I write this, Rahm Emanuel has become the first new mayor after Richard M. Daley’s twenty-two-year reign (one year more than his long-serving father, Richard J. Daley). Nepotism was a way of life for the Daley family, but the often-raised corruption charge never fully stuck on Richard M. Daley. Daley’s brother Michael’s law firm handled many zoning cases involving the city of Chicago, his other brother John sold insurance to city contractors, and his nephew Robert Vanecko signed many high-end city-related service contracts and development deals. Family-based patronage has been a long-standing way of life in my hometown.

  18. The major complaint that we level, regarding violation of public trust, is that the alderman is using public money—not his own money—to pay his brother’s company. This seems like a reasonable complaint, but the alderman is not stealing public
money and giving it to his brother. He is preferentially hiring his brother to do a job for which public funds are earmarked. The money is already going to build a new youth center. And the brother’s company is in fact working hard to build the center—provide the service. Did the alderman bend bidding rules that are designed to ensure the fair chance of unrelated contractors? Yes, he did. But unless he is stealing money somewhere in this scenario (and I can’t see that), then he owes more to his brother than the stranger contractors. Does he owe more to his constituents—being a public servant—than to his brother? That depends on more details. If the brother is an incompetent contractor and might potentially build a youth center that fails to serve the constituents (or worse, injures them), then the safety of strangers outweighs the financial advantage of the inept brother. But most cases do not involve such jeopardy, and the nepotism itself is not intrinsically wrong.

  19. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (Random House, 1941), bk. 8.

  20. Philosopher David Annis has argued that special duties actually make a relationship into a friendship. See his “The Meaning, Value, and Duties of Friendship,” American Philosophical Quarterly 24 (1987): 349–56.

  21. The near worship of mathematical rationality in the Enlightenment was not an arbitrary assumption. The very real advances in physics, astronomy, and chemistry were staggering and inspirational. But the rule-based hypothetico-deductive model failed as a one-size-fits-all methodology.

  22. Bernard Williams famously raised many objections to the theoretical ethics of Kantian and utilitarian philosophies. I am indebted to the spirit of his many critiques. He led the charge that theorists like Kant and Rawls asked something impossible of us. These theorists, Williams argues, ask us to consider the world from no point of view. Contrary to the formalists, the goal of ethics is not that I should become a “servant of the world.” That’s too abstract and irrelevant to my actual idiosyncratic life. But in place of rule-governed theoretical ethics, Williams posits a kind of “methodological intuitionism.” We find our way through moral dilemmas and challenges by intuiting the right thing. This intuitionism is not mystical, but a way of denying the a priori and algorithmic methods of theoretical rationality. While I share Williams’s general dissatisfaction, my own “solution” departs from his. I think Aristotelian notions of practical reason (problem solving without certainty or even first principles) are sufficient to guide us without appeals to mathematical logic or intuitionism. See Bernard Williams, Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Essays, 1982–1993 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  23. This discussion of friendship is drawn from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bks. VIII, IX.

  24. See ibid, bk. VIII, chap. 11.

  25. See Frank Calabrese Jr. with Keith Zimmerman, Kent Zimmerman, and Paul Pompian, Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster’s Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago’s Murderous Crime Family (Broadway Books, 2011).

  26. I am very much indebted to Stephen Toulmin’s career-long indictment that modern philosophy abandoned practical reason in favor of theoretical frames of meaning. And I agree with his call to reintroduce the contextual nature—historical, literary, and even emotional context—of knowledge and meaning (without the typical relativism maneuvers). The quote is taken from his Return to Reason (Harvard University Press, 2001), 111. In addition to Toulmin’s critiques, Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe’s Practical Wisdom (Riverhead, 2010) is an excellent sustained application of Aristotelian judgment to contemporary social issues. They demonstrate the various problems of our modern tendency to use bloodless rule-based rationality in areas like medicine, law, and education.

  27. Toulmin, Return to Reason, 130.

  28. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. I.3.

  29. See Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales vol. 2 (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1962), epistle LXXXI, “On Benefits.”

  30. The actual track record of applied egalitarianism is not very impressive. Toulmin points out, “Despite all the subtlety and depth they display in abstract general terms, the conclusions of a book like John Rawl’s Theory of Justice provide no effective criteria for settling real-life disputes in actual cases.” Toulmin, Return to Reason, 124.

  Chapter Four

  1. See Plato, Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Vintage Classic, 1991), bk. IX.

  2. Hesiod, Works and Days (Hackett, 1993), 32.

  3. Some thoroughly enlightened progressive parents will no doubt scoff at my carrot-and-stick philosophy of early moral training. Some parents try to reason with their toddlers and think that cool-headed talk alone is enough to curb behavior. But a mother who reasons with her child that he’s “hurt her feelings” or done something “unfair” is demonstrating through emotional body language and expressions that she is upset at the child, and the child will reorganize his behavior because he fears the loss of love. His feelings are being manipulated, albeit to good ends, just as in the other more deceptive cases. Many contemporary parents congratulate themselves on the humane wisdom of the “time-out.” But for toddlers, being separated from their loved ones is a strong violation of their affective desire to belong, to be with, to be safe. I’m not interested in debating parenting styles, but only in showing how even the most cerebral parenting persuades kids with affects like fear and love, not with argumentation.

  4. Mirror neurons were first discovered by a team of Italian neurologists in the early 1990s and are commonly believed to be one of the most important recent discoveries in neuroscience. One of the original researchers, Dr. Vittorio Gallese, has written (together with Maxim I. Stamenov) a fairly comprehensive story of the discovery and implications, called Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language (John Benjamins, 2002). I adopt his helpful term “shared manifold,” which he articulates in “The ‘Shared Manifold’ Hypothesis: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001): 33–50.

  5. See Jean Piaget, The Psychology of the Child (Basic Books, 1972), sec. 4.

  6. Limbic values are the kinds of natural emotional responses that we find in our mammal brains, below the neocortical level. “Values,” here, refers more to the positive or negative valence of a stimulus. In psychology this experience of positive (attraction) valence or negative (aversion) valence precedes conscious thought. Recall that in chapter 2, I detailed how one of these limbic based systems works—the CARE system of mammalian bonding (articulated best in Dr. Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience). But CARE is only one of these emotional systems, and art narratives (even kids’ movies) can tap into many other limbic values.

  7. This lesson and the guidelines are taken from a recent Texas elementary school curriculum document at http://schools.cms.k12.nc.us/beverlywoodsES/Documents/Janjustice.pdf. They’ve drawn the egg “experiment” from Jaime Miller’s 10-Minute Life Lessons (Harper Paperbacks, 1998).

  8. The 2004 manual Diversity and Equity in Early Childhood Training in Europe is produced by the DECET Network (www.decet.org) in The Hague, the Netherlands. The principal investigators include Anke van Keulen, Dominique Malleval, Miriam Mony, Colette Murray, and Michel Vendenbroeck.

  9. My argument here draws on the research of psychologists Melanie Killen, Heidi McGlothlin, and Alexandra Hanning. See their “Explicit Judgments and Implicit Bias,” in Intergroup Attitudes and Relations in Childhood through Adulthood, ed. Sheri R. Levy and Melanie Killen (Oxford University Press, 2008). Also see the earlier study by Naomi Struch and Shalom H. Schwartz, “Intergroup Aggression: Its Predictors and Distinctness from InGroup Bias,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 56, no. 3 (1989): 364–73.

  10. Psychologists Killen, McGlothlin, and Henning, “Explicit Judgments and Implicit Bias,” articulate the problems inherent in the forced-choice method. “[A] child who assigns the trait ‘nice’ to the picture card that looks like the self (ingroup) may do so to associate a positive trait with the self; this decisi
on may not reflect anything about the child’s outgroup attitude. Conversely, assigning a negative trait to a picture card reflecting a member of the outgroup may be a result of avoiding associating a negative trait with the ingroup rather than as a reflection of a negative view of the outgroup category” (128). This is just one of the ways that confounds the earlier findings.

  11. This new vision, called the “social domain model,” is articulated in Judith Smetana, “Social Domain Theory: Consistencies and Variations in Children’s Moral and Social Judgments,” in Handbook of Moral Development, ed. M. Killen and J. Smetana (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006).

  12. Killen, McGlothlin, and Henning, “Explicit Judgments and Implicit Bias,” 129.

  13. See Henri Tajfel, Social Identity and Intergroup Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  14. Cicero, De Amicitia (Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1923), chap. 5.

  15. See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge University Press, 2006), part I, “On Chastity.”

  16. See Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1850 letter to Nassau William Senior, “Preference of égalité to liberty,” in Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, vol. 1, ed. M. C. M. Simpson (Henry S. King and Co., 1873), 94.

  17. Aquinas, Summa Theologica (BiblioBazaar, 2009), question 36, “Of Envy.”

  18. See Susan J. Matt, “Children’s Envy and the Emergence of the Modern Consumer Ethic, 1890–1930,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 2 (2002): 297.