Against Fairness
Page 23
11. Notice here that “encouraging diversity” is often entwined in the fairness debate, but philosophically it seems unrelated. Having diversity in a population is defensible from broader ethical notions of the good society—diversity gives interpersonal perspective, global awareness, greater tolerance, new idea banks of creativity, cross-fertilization of culture, and even biological advantage because of genetic variation in interbreeding. None of this requires or benefits from fairness considerations.
12. A recent Princeton study analyzed the records of more than 100,000 applicants to three highly selective private universities. “They found that being an African American candidate was worth, on average, an additional 230 SAT points on the 1600-point scale and that being Hispanic was worth an additional 185 points, but that being an Asian-American candidate warranted the loss, on average, of 50 SAT points.” Chace, “Affirmative Inaction,” 23.
13. Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study (Yale University Press, 2004).
14. I’m not a fan of Plato’s utopian political philosophy, but Plato raises an important point in the course of his project. In book IV of the Republic, Socrates’ friends stop him in the middle of his utopian construction, noticing that some classes of people have a harder road than others. Warriors, for example, don’t get the nice houses and fattening foods that other groups might enjoy. Plato responds to this by reminding them that the healthy state is totally different than a state in which all people have equal pleasures. “Suppose that we were painting a statue, and some one came up to us and said, Why do you not put the most beautiful colors on the most beautiful parts of the body—the eyes ought to be purple, but you have made them black—to him we might fairly answer, Sir, you would not surely have us beautify the eyes to such a degree that they are no longer eyes; consider rather whether, by giving this and the other features their due proportion, we make the whole beautiful.” Plato, Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Vintage Classic, 1991), bk. IV.
15. See Lance Lochner and Enrico Moretti, “The Effect of Education on Crime: Evidence from Prison Inmates, Arrests, and Self-Reports,” American Economic Review 94, no. 1 (2004): 155–89.
16. See Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (Princeton University Press, 2011), 119.
17. Ibid.
18. See Kwame Anthony Appiah’s excellent critique of Singer in his Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Norton, 2007), chap. 10.
19. Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World of Crisis (Tarcher/Penguin, 2009).
20. Ibid., 616.
21. See Robin Dunbar, How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks (Harvard University Press, 2010).
22. See Isaiah Berlin, “Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Princeton University Press, 1998).
23. See Isaiah Berlin, “My Intellectual Path,” in his The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton University Press, 1998).
24. Ibid., 10.
25. See my discussion of “reasonable favoritism” in chapter 3 as a model of how nuanced ethical judgments can proceed in the absence of fixed absolute rules.
26. I’m indebted to Nicholas Kristof’s use of Deng’s famous quote, in his excellent study of Isaiah Berlin. Kristof, “On Isaiah Berlin,” New York Review of Books, February 25, 2010, 26.
27. Communitarianism is an ideological movement for which I have some sympathy. The communitarians take the Rawlsian notion of fairness as problematic, and they tend to stress community (especially family) over individualism. In all this, I am in agreement. Still, many communitarians are overly optimistic and utopian about harmonizing the competing interests of groups. They often adopt a hopeful view that communities are themselves egalitarian oases of respect and that there will one day be a grand-scale harmony of currently conflicting communities. I’m rather more pessimistic than this.
28. In Practical Wisdom (Riverhead 2010), Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe tell a heartbreaking story about a robbery case, presided over by Philadelphia Judge Lois Forer. The extenuating circumstances of the case led Judge Forer to violate the a priori sentencing rules and dispense a more just punishment to the offender, who had a family that depended on him and had no previous criminal record. The offender had been gainfully employed, paying for his daughter to attend a parochial school, when he was suddenly laid off. In desperation, he used a toy gun to rob fifty dollars. When the prosecutor learned of the lighter sentence, he appealed and forced an uncritical application of the relevant mandatory sentencing rule, effectively ruining the lives of the offender and his family. The punishment, five years in prison, bore no just or proper relation to the unique aspects of the case. If the judge had been allowed to actually judge the case, rather than be bound up by inappropriate rules, then justice might have had a chance. These kinds of cases demonstrate not just the possibility of non-arbitrary reasonable judgments without rules, but the frequent superiority of them.
29. See Evelyn Waugh, Robbery under Law (Akadine Press, 1999), 17.
Chapter Seven
1. The fact that some favorites are freely chosen, rather than given, does not diminish the strength of one’s commitment to them. In some cases, it seems to intensify one’s commitment. Americans, living in a smorgasbord of options, often pick their own religious tribes. They may inherit a religion, but many also go beyond that inheritance and choose a spiritual path later in life. Once they fasten on their new choice (e.g., conversion or becoming born-again, etc.), they can become exceedingly dogmatic and fanatical about it.
2. That’s because favoritism attachment is only partly conscious. It is also a chemical imperative that remains invisible to the conscious mind. Internet dating services are actually trying to use this invisible preference information to find good matches for searching singles. What people “say” they want in a partner and what they really want are not always the same (due to obvious social stigmas and also the less acknowledged but equally important fact that people are often dishonest with themselves about what they like). Add to this problem the new insight that passionate romantic love has a very different set of chemicals associated with it than longterm bonding. The “crush” or infatuation (otherwise known as the lightning bolt) is correlated with high levels of dopamine in the brain, and the “Honey, where’s the remote?” and the “When are the grandchildren coming over?” long-termers have higher levels of oxytocin hormones. Sometimes your chemicals are pushing you for immediate sexual gratification, and sometimes your chemicals are pushing you for longterm stability (for women it’s the “bad boy versus nice guy” scenario, and for men it’s the “femme fatale versus the house frau” scenario).
Now add to this the fact that your genome is trying to reproduce itself with the most “fit” mate possible, because that will ensure a better immune system in your kids. Sometimes it seems that this unconscious genetic agenda is actually playing us like puppets in the realm of romance. For example, Claus Wedekind of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, performed an experiment on forty-nine women. He asked the women to sniff sweaty T-shirts that had been worn by unidentified men and to rank their stank from best to worst (I’m not making this up—see Lauren Slater, “Love,” National Geographic, February 2006, 33–49). The test confirmed that women “preferred” the scent of men whose genotype was most different from their own—and diverse gene mixing is one proven way to make healthier babies. Unfortunately, the best baby-making partner (from the genetic point of view) is not always the best stable partner (from the child-rearing compatibility point of view). Sometimes the intense sparks between lovers produces a child that has a strong élan vital, but then ironically those same sparks make the subsequent child-rearing partnership very difficult.
3. See W. H. Auden, introduction to Henry James’s The American Scene, in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden Prose, Vol. II (Princeton University Press, 2002). Thanks to Rami Gab
riel for calling my attention to Auden’s introduction.
4. As Richard Rorty says, “We need a redescription of liberalism as the hope that culture as a whole can be ‘poeticized’ rather than as the Enlightenment hope that it can be ‘rationalized’ or ‘scientized.’” See Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 53. To my mind, Rorty also gets suckered by the old false dichotomy of self versus group. He describes the modern Westerner as a compromise between the “strong poet” and the “repressed bureaucrat”—the romantic individual versus the state. But he also misses the middle way of fundamental tribal affiliation. The nepotistic tribal value system precedes Rorty’s two categories, I would argue, and offers a real solution to the fractured, alienated value systems of modernity.
5. See Stefan Klein, The Science of Happiness (Marlowe & Co., 2006), for a summary of the neuroscientific bases of human happiness.
6. See Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Harper Perennial, 2005).
7. Ibid., 110.
8. Rensis Likert, The Human Organization: Its Management and Values (McGraw-Hill, 1967), 64.
9. There are limits, of course, to these relaxations of standards, and people are pretty good at judging the limit of their own forbearance. If you’re loyal to someone who consistently fails and never really fulfills expectations (e.g., a drug addict), then you can’t sustain the relationship. Or if you are dutifully applying all loyalty possible to your spouse and then find him/her cheating on you, well, loyalty is not the same as stupidity.
10. Obviously, I’m trying to characterize genuine gratitude here and know full well that some characters are cynically grateful and would love to “get one over on you.” But cases of faux gratitude (and the ubiquity of free riders) don’t negate the kind of virtue analysis I’m doing here.
11. The ethics of “care” needs to be mentioned here. One of the most compelling objections to the egalitarian version of ethics has come from feminism. From Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) to Carol Gilligan (b. 1936), women have noticed that the ideal of utilitarianism and Enlightenment rule-based ethics has been the “autonomous man.” But what about the “communal woman”? See Rosemarie Tong, Feminine and Feminist Ethics (Wadsworth, 1993), for a good contrast of the autonomous man and communal woman paradigms. Carol Gilligan’s important work on care-based ethics arose out of her critique of masculine models of developmental moral psychology. See her In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Harvard University Press, 1982). Feminists noticed that the typical model of the Western ethical man was an utterly detached, impartial self. This autonomous self was supposed to have pulled himself out of the subjective quagmire of emotions and biased attachments, in order to view the objective fair distribution of goods with a disinterested eye. “Bollocks,” said women philosophers, who knew full well that this “autonomous self” was a total fiction (or a twisted pathology). Moreover, women pointed out that social knowledge itself must be particular, not universal; concrete, not abstract; and emotionally valenced, not just mathematical.
Care is an alternative to principle-based fairness because it acknowledges the inextricable intimacies of human social life, and it places emotions at the root of those intimacies. But the intimacies of care also create special obligations and duties that constrain us and act as quasi-laws (more particular than universal, but still binding).
This is the kind of ethical framework that can acknowledge special cases, like Kongzi’s sheep-stealing father or the Euthyphro case. And care-based ethics is poised to make a big comeback in light of increasing data from affective neuroscience about the chemistry of social bonding and the origins of our ethical values. The aspect of care-based ethics that still needs development is how to build a large-scale social justice standard from these perspectival roots. Carol Gilligan and Grant Wiggins address this in “The Origins of Morality in Early Childhood Relationships,” in Mapping the Moral Domain, ed. Carol Gilligan, Janie Victoria Ward, and Jill McLean Taylor (Harvard University Press, 1988), but the full construction remains a promissory note. Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg criticized Gilligan’s care model on the grounds that it could not solve conflicting social justice claims—there was no relevant “moral point of view.” Gilligan responded to Kohlberg, saying her morality of care “represents not merely the sphere of ‘personal decision making,’ as he puts it, but an alternative point of view from which to map the moral domain and reveal ‘the laws of perspective’ (in Piaget’s phrase) which describe a relationally grounded view of morality” (138).
12. Marx argued, in his 1844 Paris Manuscripts, that such institutionalized labor “alienates” human beings from their own creative potential (i.e., such mindless work sucks the life out of us), and that it also estranges us from one another (because we inevitably begin to see each other as “tools”). Such labor also alienates us, Marx contends, from many of the products of our labor, because we don’t personally use the products in some cases.
13. And, of course, all ethics aside, many other kinds of labor and craft skills also need mentors, but we have less and less of this personal education in our culture.
14. Vigen Guroian, Tending the Heart of Virtue (Oxford University Press, 2002), 104.
15. I am thankful to Dr. Barry Schwartz for his careful and critical reading of my arguments and for his many insightful suggestions. This quote is from a personal communication.
16. I am indebted to Barry Schwartz for reminding me of this wonderful line from Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment (Penguin Classics, 2005), 166.
17. See Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Norton, 2005), 63.
18. Kudos to my editor Elizabeth Branch Dyson for coming up with this hilarious social group.
19. David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots (Harper Perennial, 2007).
20. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, vol. 1, the Third Edition Corrected (Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson, Paternoster-Row, London, 1798).
INDEX
Page numbers followed by an f indicate figures.
Adam Bede (Eliot), 176n21
Adler, Felix, 88
Adolphs, Ralph, 179n40
Adventures of Telemachus (Fénelon), 170
Aeneas, 157
affective communities, 44, 146, 166
affective neuroscience, 26, 32, 38, 174n5, 185n6, 195n11
Affective Neuroscience (Panksepp), 174n5
affirmative action: adoption of, 134–35; criticisms of supportive policies, 137–38, 139–41; diversity’s place in the fairness debate, 80, 137, 191–92n11; egalitarian community versus meritocratic excellence and, 138, 191n10; federal mandating of equal employment opportunity, 133–34; health and wellbeing of the social organism versus egalitarianism, 138–39, 192n14; history textbooks’ representation of minorities, 126–27, 190–91n3; preferential policies ability to serve the greater good, 141; public universities and, 135–36, 137; strict scrutiny applied to cases, 135; unfair preference argument, 136–37, 191n8, 192n12; using institutional systems to advantage your own tribe, 137
African Americans, 134–35, 136, 191n8. See also affirmative action
agent-centered ethics, 111, 112–13
Ananda, 4, 6, 86
ancient Greek democracy, 182n15
Andre, C., 118
Annis, David, 183n20
Anthony, Susan B., 84
Anti-bias Persona Doll, 82
apprenticeship model and favoritism, 94, 121, 161, 196n13
Aquinas, Thomas, 87
archbishop and the chambermaid dilemma, 169–70
Aristotle, 17, 45, 61, 87, 112, 173n24
arranged marriages, 180n42
Asian nepotism. See Chinese favoritism
Asma, Stephen, 188n12, 190n28
attachment disorders study in adopted children, 29–30
Auden, W. H., 152
Bellow, Adam, 114, 172n16
Bent
ham, Jeremy, 17, 53–54
Berlin, Isaiah, 147, 148, 158
biological favoritism: Aristotle’s belief that each species has natural predispositions, 45; attachment disorders study in adopted children, 29–30; chemical bases of short-and longterm bonding, 193–94n2; chemical bonding related to feelings of favoritism, 43–44; core emotional affect systems, 27; deciding between competing ethical pulls using impartiality, 23–24, 173n3; dualists’ rejection of brain science with regard to ethics, 175n14; early attachments implications for pro-social behavior, 33; egalitarian fairness within social groups, 42–43; egalitarian moralists’ explanation that proximity contributes to the choice of who to help, 24; egocentric versus allocentric moral framework, 25; emotional bonding in mammals, 26–28; evidence that our brains are biased toward our families, 32, 176n19; fairness instinct demonstrated by mammals, 39–40, 179n39; family as the original tribe, 179n36; favoritism versus social values, 44–46; filial favoritism ethical dilemma, 21–22, 172n28; filial favoritism seen as a mammalian tendency, 38–39; flexibility of biological bias, 35–36, 43–44, 177n27; genesis of nepotistic feelings, 33–34, 177n24; homeostasis from brain-based opiates, 31–32, 175n16, 187n26; homologies in mammal biology, 175n12; kin selection and, 36–38, 177–78nn28–34; neurochemical pathway of mother-child bonding, 27–31, 174n5, 174n9; oxytocin’s role in bonding, 27–31, 174nn7–10, 175–76n17; positive nature of the parent-child bond, 32, 176–77nn22–23; positive social interaction as a trigger of brain-based opiates, 31–32, 175n16; potential benefits of arranged marriages, 180n42; preservation of altruistic traits that benefit the group, 37–38, 178–79nn30–34; puzzle of bonding breakdown between kids and their parents, 34–35, 177n26; response of normal VMPC patients to ethical dilemmas, 41–42, 179–80n40; Seneca’s belief that virtuous giving is its own reward, 68–69, 179n35; social engineering experiments that tried to force egalitarianism, 45–46; train-switch ethical dilemma, 41; utilitarian approach to choosing between family and strangers, 24–25; value of neuroscientific explanations of behavior, 32, 176n18