I was at first going to call this post “And So It Begins,” except that nothing’s begun. What’s happening right now in America is just a continuation of what’s been happening all along. President Biden’s true-believing Democratic boosters keep reminding us that a Trump presidency betokens fascism, but someone needs to tell these people that fascism is already here, care of their favorite cantankerous, incoherent, amnesiac president. Biden has recently taken to bragging about the draconian, quasi-Trumpian quality of his “border enforcement” policies. I don’t doubt that Trump’s policies will be worse, or even much worse. What I doubt is that the difference matters enough to be worth a vote for Biden. What I don’t doubt is that he’s not getting one, at least from me. Continue reading
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Greeks 4 Geeks! Geeks 4 Greeks!
Announcing a virtual reading group on Greek philosophy that Cory Massimino and I will be starting up later this month:
For more details, and an application form, see:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1RcOJ5pkvsOaKQKQ1e36F75T8_XinSGLr-zM824pK4OM/viewform?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3Vp6gGE9ikCUK9D4cpfq3fl6CvPaUdnyJZW6R_7YbuaPCRzKuhLa8tK7U_aem_ZmFrZWR1bW15MTZieXRlcw&edit_requested=true
REPUBLICAN FREEDOM WITHOUT NON-DOMINATION?
How much of republicanism can we get without making any essential reference to domination? Maybe quite a lot.
First, whatever job the government has, if carrying out this job requires substantial power that is liable to abuse, then part of your political ideal should be republican democracy (and you should be very leery of even putatively ideally benevolent dictators). In particular, you might want a high level of assurance, born in part through moral recognition, that the government or government officials will not behave like the criminals that they are supposed to protect us against (supposing that this, at least, is part of the job that governments have). Just say no to a charter city run by Elon Musk or whatever.
something that domination might be
Here’s a way to think of domination that might accord with our intuitions about the paradigm or unambiguous cases (and help us explain the borderline, extended or special cases). The core idea is that, when X’s governing consideration in deliberating about what to do is what Y wants X to do, X is in a certain objectionable submissive relationship with Y. But perhaps in order for Y to dominate X, something like this must be true: Y intentionally (and successfully) cultivates the submissive relationship with X – or at least cultivates it with some knowledge of what she is doing or of what is happening. Arguably, this is something objectionable (and hence something that one is required not to do, that one has usually-dispositive, requirement-style reason not to do, something like that).
Is this characterization any good at covering the paradigm cases and shedding light on the borderline cases?
(This is not a pure capacity view like Pettit’s. If one is to dominate, one has to do things – though not necessarily actions that are instances of interfering with the patient’s actions. But: interest-threatening power, including the power to interfere, could, it seems, do quite a bit of work in generating the submissive mindset – and this might be one of the more common mechanisms for generating submission/domination. And: it would seem that the levers of social expectations, norms and institutions could be more or less intentionally used to cultivate submission/domination relationships between groups of people, yielding the institutional-injustice-y sorts of domination. It seems that this kind of characterization of domination is well-positioned to do a lot of the work that an adequate account should do.)
domination, non-domination and (republican) freedom
The following two thoughts are prompted by reading the first chapter of Pettit’s Republican Freedom, Talisse’s criticism of Pettit (“Impunity and Domination: A Puzzle for Republicanism”), and (the first two sections of) an unpublished essay by Derek Bowman on Pettit’s ideas about republican freedom and non-domination (“The Modality of (Republican) Freedom: Non-Domination As Effective Rights Recognition”). And by discussing Pettit’s ideas of domination and republican freedom with Derek.
(1) I take republican-style freedom to be something like this (and thus probably not what Pettit takes it to be on a consistent basis):
the social condition of custom and law providing reliable assurance that one will not be dominated by private parties or by the government (or by other inescapable customary or institutional elements in society).
This is not merely the absence of domination (which might occur by happenstance or through some different means). It is not clear to me that Pettit’s account has it that republican freedom is specifically the (desirable) assurance condition not just the (desirable) basal condition. But I think we should go with the assurance condition (and I think Pettit does sometimes).
Where Ignorant Armies
I was once parodied on a YouTube video (by whom I don’t recall) as holding that “people who are right and people who are wrong are basically saying the same thing.” While I obviously wouldn’t endorse the claim in the form stated, the line does insightfully capture something about my approach – a suspicion of stark oppositions. Suspicion, not invariable rejection: sometimes one side of an opposition is just completely and uninterestingly wrong. But I’m regularly finding my way to angles from which supposedly stark oppositions can be seen as complicated or subverted by unexpected affinities – which is why, e.g., I was never fully satisfied, even at the height of my Randian period, with the cops-and-robbers approach to intellectual history that prevails in Randian (and not only Randian) circles, consigning all of e.g. Plato’s or Augustine’s or Hume’s or Kant’s or Hegel’s or Marx’s or Heidegger’s or Rawls’s writings to the Dustbin of Total and Irredeemable Worthlessness, rather than approaching them with the expectation that they might have something valuable to teach.
Hence my tendency to question such oppositions as libertarianism versus social justice, analytic versus continental, social anarchism versus anarcho-capitalism, deontology versus teleology, eastern versus western thought, theism versus atheism, Hayekianism versus Rothbardianism, and most recently, Randian discipline versus Kerouacian spontaneity. (And no, it’s not a rejection of the law of non-contradiction to question whether positions presented as mutually contradictory really are so.)
One of the most important pieces of advice I would give to young scholars beginning their intellectual journeys is not to structure their conceptual landscape so as to close themselves off from the opportunity to learn from both sides of supposedly unbridgeable gaps.
good-for, well-being and agent-relative value
Is a kind of value associated specifically with there being reason (not shared with others) for one to desire/value and promote/secure one’s well-being (or particular elements of it)? If so, how should we characterize it?
One natural suggestion is this: X’s well-being is valuable to X. The value here would be agent-relative, as distinct from value simpliciter (or agent-neutral value).
Against this suggestion, it is pointed out that the value language we generally use here is the language of good-for. For example, there is reason (not shared by others) for X to secure that-P because that-P is good for X. And we don’t generally use the language of valuable-to or valuable-relative-to. Of course, this does not preclude the concept (and property) of agent-relative value being required for philosophical theory, for descriptive and explanatory virtue or adequacy. The point, I think, is meant to set up a kind of burden of proof.
fitting attitudes and the (non-instrumental, agent-relative) value in pleasure itself
Pleasure itself is good. In particular, (a) if X has a pleasant or enjoyable experience, this is inherently good for X in that it is part of (not just something that promotes) X’s well-being and (b) X’s pleasant or enjoyable experience is inherently or non-instrumentally good or valuable to X (the experience is non-instrumentally agent-relatively valuable). Though we do not typically make the distinction between [a] and [b] clear, it can be teased out from a competent language-user.
Continue readinggenuinely non-comparative goodness
If I say that a state of affairs, S, is good (good simpliciter or agent-neutrally valuable or good), I usually mean something like this: S is better than some implied comparison class of other states of affairs. And so, in this usage, ‘good’ is like ‘tall’: it is a disguised comparative feature, not a non-comparative feature. This kind of value, then, is properly analyzed in terms of better-than. It is for this kind of reason that many theorists take value simpliciter (or other sorts of value or all sorts of value) to be properly analyzed in terms of better-than. Here’s why that seems wrong to me.
when things ought to be this or that way and when it is required that things be this or that way
According to my suggested analysis of O[that P] – see my immediately previous post, “Person-Directed Anger…” – it is appropriate for one to have negative, person-directed attitudes toward a person (i) failing to have positive attitudes toward that-P obtaining (or failing to have negative attitudes toward P not obtaining).
Policy of Truth 