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Nagel on sexual perversion (part 3 of 3): phenomenology, normativity, and verification

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How’s that for a sexy title?

Here’s part 3 of my series on Nagel on sexual perversion—just in time for Valentine’s Day, and the long-awaited opening of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” In the first part of the series, I laid out the argument of Nagel’s 1969 paper, “Sexual Perversion.” In the second part, I raised some methodological objections. In this part, I start with a basic methodological problem and use it to diagnose the problems in Nagel’s more substantive argument. Some of what I say here overlaps with stuff I said in the combox discussion of part 2 with my friend Michael Young.

In the first part of the series, I pointed out that Nagel’s paper is a phenomenological account modeled in part on Sartre’s in Part III of Being and Nothingness. It is, we might say, analytic Sartreanism (by analogy with analytic Thomism or Marxism)—Sartreanism detached from Sartre’s existentialist metaphysics, and cleaned up for consumption by the clarity-loving readers of the Journal of Philosophy. (Incidentally, Nagel’s paper is obviously influenced by Freud as well; in some ways, it reads like a modernized version of Freud’s “Three Essays on Sexuality.”)

The basic problem with Nagel’s account is that at the end of the day, it’s a phenomenological account of the only sexual phenomenology accessible to Nagel—his own, and perhaps indirectly that of his partner or partners. Problem: how do you get from one man’s phenomenology to an account that’s supposed to be normative for human beings as such? No matter how much backpedaling Nagel does at the end of the paper, if his claims about perversion have any content, they face some version of this problem. They’re intended as an account of human sexual perversion, not of Thomas Nagel’s likes and dislikes. But they read like the latter.

Phenomenology in this context consists of introspective investigation on the nature of one’s own sexual desires (or one’s own desires, considered under idealized conditions). Putting aside the question of whether Nagel’s introspective account is correct, it is unclear why such an investigation would yield any information about the ideal structure of other peoples’ sexual desires. I’m the first to admit that this is not just a problem for Nagel, but for anyone engaged in an inquiry of this sort, and not just a problem for a philosopher of sex, but a problem for anyone whose subject-matter concerns the mind. But it’s a problem, and problems aren’t resolved by saying that other people face them.

I make heavy weather of this because whether you call it “phenomenology” or “analytic philosophy,” the fact remains that Nagel’s account is an account of the psychology of sexual desire—moral psychology, I suppose. But moral psychology is at the end of the day answerable in part to empirical study of human psychology: if claims in moral psychology have no hope of being confirmed by empirical psychology, we have no hope of being epistemically justified in believing them. Philosophers tend to be resistant to this, partly because the use of psychology (and social science generally) has become a kind of problematic fad in certain precincts of (what used to be) analytic philosophy. What used to be physics envy has now become social science envy. The problem with Nagel’s account is just the reverse of that fad: he proceeds as though questions of empirical verification were entirely beside the point in an account of sexual perversion.

But that can’t be right. Nagel is making claims about ideal sexual development, and is saying that deviations from the developmental structure he describes are, if distant enough, perversions. At a bare minimum, we need a way of measuring “distance from the developmental ideal.” But we also need some way of verifying that exemplification of the ideal is somehow correlated with sexual satisfaction and that deviation from it is somehow correlated with dissatisfaction. It makes no sense to produce an account of sexual perversion that entails that a person can lead a joyous, healthy, sexually satisfied life that is completely perverted, or that he might well be reduced to misery by exemplifying the developmental ideal.

Nagel plays with the preceding thought near the end of the paper, but it reduces the claims of his paper to nonsense. The suggestion seems to be that deviation from a developmental ideal can be better for you than exemplification of it. That strikes me as a blatant self-contradiction. A developmental ideal just is an ideal such that exemplification of it is better for you than deviation from it. If an ideal doesn’t satisfy that platitudinous description, I would say that it’s misformulated. Contrary to Nagel, then, it really makes no sense to say that perverted sex can be better “as sex” than non-perverted sex. If we found that that was the case, we’d have to revise our conception of perversion and normality. We couldn’t just proceed by saying, “hey, let’s all be perverts.”

As I’m sure he knows (being an active participant in some famous debates about Freud), Nagel faces an analogue of the problem faced by Freudian psychoanalysis: how are Freud’s hypotheses about development to be confirmed? It’s a cop-out to say that they can’t be confirmed. If they can’t be confirmed in any sense at all, then they have the status ascribed to them by a psychiatrist I once met, who called them “the activity of magic forces in Freud’s spiritual shadow world.” (This psychiatrist had all twenty-four volumes of the Standard Edition on the shelves of his waiting room, so it’s not as though he was speaking from ignorance.) If they have a more elevated status, we need evidence to believe in them. At some level, it’s that simple.

Nagel’s anti-empirical handwaving creates a natural tendency to go to the other extreme and reject the very idea of phenomenology or introspection. That tendency explains the rise of behaviorism in psychology: behaviorism was a supposedly empiricist response to the anti-empiricism of Freudian (and post-Freudian) psychodynamics. From what I gather*, some form of behaviorism (or behaviorism lite) still seems to dominate academic psychology to this day. A graduate student in, say, a master’s program in counseling psychology will unconsciously imbibe behaviorist dogmas from the very first day of her time in the program—whether from her professors, or her textbooks, or the journal articles she reads. On this account, “empirical” means “directly observable” by third parties, and that, in turn, means “testable under laboratory conditions.” Obviously, no part of Nagel’s account satisfies this conception of “the empirical,” which means that much of it would, in the current climate of psychology, be dismissed as non-empirical—i.e., as Nagel’s “subjective opinion.” The difficulty is that as written, Nagel’s account deserves precisely that criticism. The danger is that in rejecting Nagel’s version of phenomenology, we might go to the behaviorist extreme of rejecting the empirical credentials of introspection altogether.

That said, let me offer some hit-and-run attacks on specific claims Nagel makes about sexuality. One problem throughout is that Nagel’s claims are hand-wavingly anti-empirical. Another problem is one of question-begging. And a third is one of localized but cumulative incoherence.

(1) For one thing, Nagel basically gives the game away when he comes out and tells us that while his account posits a conception of ideal sexual development, he has no non-circular way of articulating the normative standard on which the ideal is based:

The concept of perversion implies that normal sexual development has been turned aside by distorting influences. I have little to say about this causal condition. But if perversions are in some sense unnatural, they must result from interference with the development of a capacity that is there potentially….We appear to need an independent criterion for a distorting influence [from the ideal], and we do not have one (pp. 48, 50).

We do not. It follows that Nagel does not, and that the argument of the paper begs the question. The first three sentences in the excerpt highlight the basic flaw or omission in Nagel’s analysis, and highlight the need for an empirical component to any further inquiry on the subject.

(2) Second, Nagel’s argument involves some very large and consequential non-sequiturs. After telling us that there is such a thing as a gastronomic perversion, he infers that that proves (or makes plausible) the claim that there are sexual ones. There are sexual ones, he continues, because sexual desire is complex. The complexity of sexual desire implies (or makes plausible) that sex is inherently interpersonal, and its interpersonal character implies (or makes plausible) that ideal sexual activity involves a form of reciprocity and mutuality that rules out the use of sex toys and pornography, and also rules out (voluntary) sadism and masochism.

These claims involve some very large inferential leaps, and they are much less plausible to people today than they appear to have been to Nagel’s readership in 1969. Nagel’s discussion of food is not particularly plausible or well-developed, and even if it were both, it might not have any particular implications for sex. Further, sexual desire need not always be complex. When it’s complex, it need not be interpersonal. When it’s interpersonal, it need not involve reciprocity or mutuality of the sort that Nagel envisions. The Romeo and Juliet thought-experiment that Nagel offers to explicate his analysis is very interesting (pp. 45-46), but he himself concedes that it’s “somewhat artificial” (p. 45), and that admission limits the scope of its application to less artificial cases. (Roger Scruton has some useful comments on this aspect of Nagel’s view in Sexual Desire, pp. 24-25.)

(3) Third, what Nagel says about reciprocal sexual interaction is not entirely consistent. On the one hand, he says that “The object of sexual attraction is a particular individual, who transcends the properties that make him attractive” (p. 42). One obvious objection—which rose like a chorus from my CO 350 students—is: what about three-somes or four-somes or n-somes? Read carefully, Nagel’s formulation doesn’t quite pass judgment on such arrangements; what I think it implies is that sexual multitasking is impossible, not that three-somes or four-somes are perversions.

A few pages later, however (pp. 49-50), Nagel seems to be saying that within consensual, monogamous heterosexual relations, “it would appear that any bodily contact between a man and a woman that gives them sexual pleasure is a possible vehicle for the system of multi-level interpersonal awareness that I have claimed is the basic psychological content of sexual interaction” (pp. 49-50). The two claims don’t seem consistent with one another. If the object of sexual attraction is the individual, then unperverted sexual desire ought always to be focused on the object—on the person qua person. In that case, sexual desire ought always to transcend the properties that make the individual attractive. If so, how can any bodily contact that gives them sexual pleasure be assumed a priori to be a possible vehicle for interpersonal awareness? Perhaps it is; perhaps it isn’t. But it can’t be assumed a priori.

Suppose X is focused on a certain body part of his partner Y and is attracted to that. Suppose that sexual relations involving that body part gives X pleasure without necessarily putting Y off. Suppose that sex aside, X loves Y. In this case, the object of sexual attraction is a body part, not the person. But activity involving that part can produce pleasure. Shouldn’t Nagel be saying that the pleasure in question is perverted? I think so. But he doesn’t. (Thanks to my student Caitlin Baard for pointing out the inconsistency in Nagel that give rise to my objection.)

(4) Finally, in the spirit of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” consider Nagel’s critique of (voluntary) sadism and masochism. His claim is that the sadism impedes “awareness of [the sadist himself] as a bodily subject of passion in the required sense” (p. 50). Masochism impedes awareness of agency (p. 50). Personally, I find these claims plausible, but they presuppose the claim that our sexuality ought to exemplify some proper balance in the awareness of ourselves as subjects of passivity and as agents. They also require a lot more empirical work than Nagel himself has done; he himself concedes that his “descriptions may not be generally accurate” (p. 50).

The problem is that Nagel’s critique of S&M sits in tension with his defense of the non-perverted nature of homosexuality. The rejection of S&M implies that there is some fixed balance in the proper awareness of self as active and passive. The implicit model here is a rather stereotyped account of heterosexual relations (p. 51).** On this model, the man is more active than passive; the woman is more passive than active. Hence, a man ought ideally to be aware of his passivity in the sexual act, but more aware (than that) of his agency; the reverse is true of a woman. This suggests that for Nagel, ideal heterosexual sex, while not quite sado-masochistic, still exemplifies an ideal of (relative) aggression and passivity. Nagel’s first-line defense of homosexuality is to suggest that gay couples can in principle exemplify the same ideal: because gay couples can be like straight ones, and straight ones aren’t perverted, gay ones need not be perverted. His second-line defense is to suggest that perhaps the ideal isn’t quite as fixed as he first suggested. Maybe people can vary in the degree of activity and passivity they enjoy in sexual relations, and the degree of visibility of each thing they ought to pursue.

This is not a consistent set of claims. If there is a fixed active/passive balance whose paradigm is a certain conception of heterosexual relations, then if gay couples don’t exemplify that balance, they are perverted. If there is no fixed active/passive balance constituting the ideal, then many combinations of aggression and passivity are possible, and the combination involved in S&M relations could, for all that he’s said, be*** one of them. Though what Nagel says about S&M is suggestive, at the end of the day, his claims about it are too entangled in problematic claims about other things to constitute a plausible critique.

So I don’t think Nagel’s account succeeds. Nor do I think that an improved account could really build on what Nagel does. A better account would simply have to remedy what he gets wrong. The basic task would be to get clear on the criterion of “normality” that Nagel fails or declines to articulate. A secondary but important task would be to formulate one’s claims so as to be amenable in principle to empirical verification of some kind, while avoiding a head-long fall into the positivism, behaviorism, determinism, and relativism that one finds in contemporary psychology. A tall order.

*Freudian slip? When I first wrote this sentence, I typed: “From what I father….”

**I couldn’t help thinking here of Ayn Rand’s notoriously reactionary essay, “About a Woman President,” in The Voice of Reason, which makes similar sorts of claims.

***I revised this last phrase after posting.

Thanks to Caitlin Baard, Kate Herrick, David Riesbeck, and Michael Young for helpful discussion on the material discussed in this series.

Gratuitous video add-on:

“I exercise control in all things, Miss Steele. I realize that my retention of deliberate control may impede awareness of myself as a bodily subject of desire in the required sense, as Nagel suggests. But with a cutie like you right here in front of me, and this Beyonce song blaring in the background, I find I can’t quite focus on Nagel right now….”

Postscript, February 15, 2015: I haven’t read or watched “Fifty Shades of Grey,” but this column by Ross Douthat, “The Caligulan Thrill,” rings true. I was amused by this passage:

But the essential dream of our age isn’t conflict; it’s a synthesis, in which the aristocratic thrills of libertinism are somehow preserved but their most exploitative elements are rendered egalitarian and safe.

The hope, in other words, is that we can eventually have the fun of Rome without all the nasty bits: Contraception and abortion will pre-empt the inconvenient infant, age-of-consent laws will make sure that young people’s initiation doesn’t start too early, and with enough carefully drawn up regulations for initiating intercourse we can all experience the courts of Tiberius and Heliogabalus without anybody getting hurt.

Well yeah. He says that like it’s a bad thing, but the whole point of middle class life is to have the fun of Rome–or medieval feudalism–without the nasty bits. Has Douthat ever considered the Plantagenetic thrills of home ownership? “A man’s home is his castle,” as they say, and his lawn is his estate. What is that but an attempt to preserve the aristocratic gratifications of medieval serfdom while rendering its most exploitative elements egalitarian and safe? Instead of serfs, we employ undocumented Central American landscapers; instead of wheat, barley, or oats, we grow green, weed-free grass, non-GMO tomatoes, and arugula. Perhaps it doesn’t entirely work–the inevitable frictions arise–but if you attack lawns and gardens wholesale, you’re basically attacking the foundations of bourgeois existence.

The same thing is true, mutatis mutandis, of safely transgressive sex. (One hell of a mutatis mutandis, I realize.) Once you reject the conservative Catholic dogma that sex aims at unity and procreation, sex comes to aim, in part, at fun. Fun is a serious business, and aristocrats are the world’s experts at that business. Obviously, we can’t literally emulate them; they were in many respects moral cretins. But they got something right, so we emulate or appreciate them at-a-safe-distance. Couldn’t the same be said of the writings of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas? Or the aesthetic wonders of Chartres Cathedral, Hagia Sofia, and the Louvre? Or the joys of Bach and Handel? We learn from them, and enjoy them, without inculcating, wholesale, the cultural values that gave rise to them. If it weren’t for aristocracy, after all, we wouldn’t have culture: it’s not so easy to throw aristocracy out with the bath-water.

Incidentally, my not having read/watched “Fifty Shades” is not a matter of moral scruple or aesthetic snobbery, but sheer lack of time. If I had the time to watch it on the big screen, I would. But I don’t. Of course, by the time it comes out on DVD, it’ll be old hat.  One of these days, I’ll get around to seeing  9 1/2 Weeks and Last Tango in Paris, too. All on my bucket list. So much arty smut, so little time.

Postscript 2, February 16, 2015: My friend Ole Martin Moen, a philosopher who splits his time between Oslo and Oxford, has a commentary on “Fifty Shades of Grey” at Oxford’s Practical Ethics blog (ht: Kate Herrick). He doesn’t just spoil, but gives away the whole plot, so don’t read the piece if you want to retain the element of surprise.

Handguns are made for killing: Tyeshia Obie, RIP

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I was shocked and sickened today to discover that one of my students from last term had been murdered–shot to death this past January while sitting in her car on a street in East Orange, New Jersey. Her name was Tyeshia Obie, and she’s the third student of mine to have been murdered in the last decade. The other two were Stepha Henry and Imette St. Guillen, whom I taught (horribly and ironically enough) at John Jay College of Criminal Justice; both Stepha and Imette were murdered, in separate incidents, in the mid-2000s. All three–Tyeshia, Stepha, and Imette–were young women in their early 20s.

Here’s a video tribute to Tyeshia:

I only managed to hear the news today, and am having some trouble processing it: I still have her emails in my inbox, and can see her sitting in my Phil 100 critical reasoning class–334 Kirby Hall, second row, second seat on the left. I didn’t know her well. I just remember that she was quiet and smiled a lot.

I know it’s quixotic, but these lines from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Saturday Night Special” keep going obsessively through my head:

Handguns are made for killin’
They ain’t no good for nothing else
And if you like to drink your whiskey
You might even shoot yourself
So why don’t we dump em, people
To the bottom of the sea?
Before some old fool come around here
Wanna shoot either you or me?

I’m clutching at straws here. I know it’s all more complicated than a Lynyrd Skynyrd song: I’ve said so myself. But sometimes I shake my head at the violence around me–the ease with which fools acquire firearms and prove their “manhood” by putting a bullet through another person’s life–and wish it were as simple as dumping em all “to the bottom of the sea.”

There don’t seem words adequate to capture the waste of of human potential involved, except perhaps Goya’s: el sueno de razon produce monstruos–“the sleep of reason produces monsters.” To which, I suppose, the only fitting response is Freud’s, from the Future of an Illusion:

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little.

He was talking about organized religion, but it applies to the worship of violence as well.

Rest in peace, Tyeshia.

Postscript, February 12, 2015: No sooner do I mention one senseless shooting, but another one materializes. I’m referring to the shooting of three Muslims in an apartment complex near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In reflecting on the facts that have been made public so far in this case, I find it remarkable that so many people have jumped to the conclusion that the shooting must be a “hate crime” in the current, narrowly skewed understanding of that phrase: a murder motivated by specifically ethnic or religious or ethno-religious bigotry. Perhaps it was, but as of this writing, there’s no evidence in the public domain to suggest that it was, over and above the fact that the victims were Muslims, and the alleged shooter was not.

Why not, for a change, take the available facts at face value and pursue them? At face value, what we have here is a dispute over noise and parking. The shooter alleges that the victims repeatedly made noise and parked in his parking spaces. He had in the past threatened them over this with a gun. We’re told that they, the victims, didn’t report his threats to the police; we’re not told whether he ever reported them to the police before threatening them (a crucial omission, as I see it). Why exactly is it so implausible to imagine that Craig Stephen Hicks shot his neighbors because (a) they kept parking in what he regarded as his spots, (b) they kept making noise when he didn’t want them to, and (c) he had a gun and they didn’t?

That he hated religion and that they were conspicuously Muslim doesn’t necessarily enter–or have to be factored into–the explanatory equation. Maybe this former-auto-parts-salesman- studying-to-be-a-paralegal-at-a-technical-college was just really disaffected, maladjusted, and full of hatred of the ordinary, non-legal-element-of-a-hate-crimes-statute variety. Maybe what enters the explanatory equation is not ethno-national bigotry but competing conceptions of entitlement and/or envy. Or maybe Hicks, the atheist hater-of-God, had trouble understanding why he, the brave atheist in touch with reality, was more gripped by inner turmoil than those young, slim, cheerful sartorially conspicuous submitters-to-Allah across the way who seemed to be so well-liked and well-adjusted to the world. Envy, provocation, and a gun: why isn’t that enough to motivate murder? Religion might well enter the equation, not as Islamophobia but in a different and more subtle guise.

I don’t know, of course; I’m just speculating out loud. But so is everyone else. What I find remarkable about our discourse is the impoverished character of our explanatory speculations. Three Muslims die at the hands of a non-Muslim, and we immediately default to a dialogue of the deaf between partisans of “#muslimlivesmatter” on the one side, and “let’s talk about Kayla Mueller, ISIS, and Obama’s offending Christians by bringing up the Crusades instead” on the other. The father of one of the victims is quoted as questioning the premise that a parking dispute could lead to a shooting. With all due respect, that premise itself is what needs to be questioned. If there’s such a thing as road rage, or people going “postal” in a bureaucratic office, why is it so hard to imagine one deranged person shooting someone over a parking space?

Some commentators on the right have had relatively sensible things to say, but even so, a diluted version of the underlying problem remains. To grasp the nature of the specifically right-wing version of that problem, go back and consider the now-forgotten Armanious family killings in Jersey City in 2005. For years, anti-Islamist ideologues like Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer insisted that the case was a sharia-inspired murder. The case was brought to trial, and resulted in one ordinary felony murder conviction (of a non-Muslim named Edward McDonald). The obvious problem with the case was the paucity of evidence involved. Rational people are reticient  or at least cautious when the evidence is sparse. Not our right-wing ideologues: lack of evidence hasn’t stopped Daniel Pipes, author of the 1997 book Conspiracy,  from exploiting anti-Islamic sentiment to generate a conspiracy theory about the case (a decade after the fact) to “demonstrate” the power of sharia in America. He does it because he knows, cynically, that there’s a hunger for it on the part of people willing to believe what they want to believe regardless of how the evidence sits. We have William James to thank for the legitimization of willing to believe, but we have years of debased discourse on religion and ethnicity to blame for the hunger that motivates it. It’s time to try something else.

Nagel on sexual perversion (Part 2 of 3): methodological issues

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In a previous post, I laid out the argument of Nagel’s 1969 paper, “Sexual Perversion.” In this post, I want to offer up some criticisms and some general observations on the argument I laid out. As I indicated last time, I find Nagel’s paper a mixed bag. Some of what it says is astute and provocative, but on the whole, I don’t think it offers a successful analysis of “sexual perversion.”

Contrary to my initial expectations, I’ve had to divide my commentary on Nagel’s piece into two separate posts. This is the first of two, focused on the first few pages of Nagel’s paper. My comments here are mostly methodological.  The first set concerns the presuppositions of conceptual analysis as an activity, and how it (adversely) affects Nagel’s analysis of “sexual perversion.” The second set concerns the substance of Nagel’s opening moves, and in particular the claims that he takes to be obvious starting points of the analysis. A third set concerns Nagel’s hunger-sex analogy.

Conceptual analysis and the analysis of ‘sexual perversion’

Nagel starts out by telling us that that there’s “something to be learned from the fact that we possess a concept of sexual perversion” (p. 39). This platitude-like claim strikes me as highly ambiguous and highly problematic. For one thing, it’s not clear who “we” are: Nagel pays no attention at all to cultural or any other significant sort of demographic variation. In any case, he doesn’t seem fazed by the fact that his findings often diverge from what “we” might plausibly be said to think. In other words, he ignores the fact that even if we have the same concept, we might have radically different conceptions of it—radically different from what he takes to have learned by our “possessing” the concept. At some point, this radical variation might well entail that we don’t possess a univocal concept of sexual perversion at all, in which case, the whole exercise seems to collapse like a conceptual house of cards.

Second, he doesn’t tell us what is to be learned by the sheer fact of concept-possession, and it obviously doesn’t follow that if ‘we’ have a concept, then unpacking the concept gives us a truth-tracking account of the phenomenon to which the concept refers.  Once we ‘unpack’ a concept, we need a further argument to show that the content we’ve unpacked tracks the truth. Nagel gives us nothing of the sort, but writes as though what he’s saying does track the truth—except when, on an ad hoc basis, he wants to express tentativeness about a given claim.

Third, Nagel pays virtually no attention to the fact that sexual perversion is part of a network of related concepts, and that analysis of the analysandum requires analysis of some of those other concepts. Back in the day, conceptual analysis required the identification of the genus and differentia of the analysandum. That approach may no longer be au courant (and may not have been in 1969), but it has the merit of clarifying how concepts relate to one another (and identifying the ones that do). Nagel makes a gesture at analyzing sexual perversion as a species of perversion–that’s the point of the hunger-sex analogy discussed below—but it’s only a gesture, and not a particularly successful of informative one. More importantly, Nagel tries to offer an analysis of “sexual perversion” that leans heavily on the assumption that fetishes are perversions but offers no analysis of a fetish (cf. what he says about shoe fetishes, p. 39). That turns out to be a vexed issue.

Nagel’s platitudes about perversion

Now, to the second set of methodological issues—what Nagel takes for granted.

First, it’s both interesting and relevant that Nagel’s platitudes are no longer platitudinous. That they’re not suggests that they were never platitudes in the first place, and suggests, as well, that it won’t do simply to lay out a list of platitudes and insist that that’s what they are. Nagel fails to grant the possibility of disagreement about his platitudes, and in so doing, practically guarantees that his analysis will end up begging the question. A list of platitudes either has to be argued for or described as stipulative. If it’s argued-for, and the arguments are disputable (as they will likely be), the list can’t be that platitudinous. On the other hand, if the list is stipulative, the analysis that follows will lack normative force against those who reject the stipulations. Nagel’s platitudes are purely stipulative, but he (problematically) treats them as though they were self-evidently true. They may be true, but they’re not self-evident.

My hunch is that Nagel’s list of candidate perversions is taken almost verbatim from a textbook of abnormal psychology– omitting homosexuality, which would have appeared as a “paraphilia” in most textbooks of abnormal psychology circa 1969. Though he cites no such textbook, I find it striking that Nagel’s list of perversions corresponds almost verbatim to the list of paraphilias one typically finds in such textbooks, down to the use of the same textbook terminology, along with philosophically souped-up accounts of the paraphilias themselves. I noticed this because I happen, coincidentally, to be taking a course on psychopathology, and reading the second edition of Beidel, Bulik, and Stanley’s textbook, Abnormal Psychology: the similarities between Nagel’s list and the textbook one are obvious. The same thing is true of the section on paraphilias in DSM 5: Nagel’s list of perversions parallels the list there. (I’m assuming that the language of abnormal psychology has been relevantly consistent since 1969.)

The interesting (and somewhat absurd) thing here concerns the treatment of inanimate objects as objects of sexual desire. In 1969, Nagel was willing to treat all sexual interaction with inanimate objects as fetishistic and perverted, and was willing to regard that judgment as a foundational platitude for the analysis. Fast-forward to the present, and DSM 5’s “diagnostic criteria” for “fetishistic disorder (302.81)” make an ad hoc exception for “devices specifically designed for the purposes of tactile genital stimulation (e.g., vibrator)” (DSM 5, p. 700). Strictly speaking, this implies that if you use a vibrator for six months, you’re normal, but if you hump a pillow for six months, you have a “pillow-specified fetishistic disorder.” (Six months is the DSM-approved cut-off for a fetish.)

To state the obvious: DSM 5’s so-called “diagnostic criteria” fail to come to grips with the fact that in the current socio-economic environment, you can “specifically design” anything “for purposes of tactile genital stimulation,” and thereby evade the diagnostic criteria for having a fetishistic disorder essentially by fiat. As long as the inanimate object that you’re having sex with has specifically been designed for that purpose, commmodified, marketed, and consumed by lots of other people—you’re OK. If not, you’re a sexual weirdo. I’m not a Marxist, but I find it amusing that under American capitalism, something ceases to be a psychiatric disorder once you commodify it and develop a market for it; if there’s no market for it, you’re on your own, and it becomes a fetish. So Lenin was wrong: it’s ad hocracy, not imperialism, that’s the highest stage of capitalism.

It’s also worth noting that Nagel arguably omits some platitudes, so that he ends up with an analysis of ‘sexual perversion’ that seems to flout what many people would regard as platitudes about the concept’s relation to preference and judgment. For one thing, we don’t learn until the very end of the paper that he doesn’t take all sexual perversions to be immoral when voluntarily acted on. In fact, he thinks that when faced between the option of acting on a perversion or abstaining from sex, perversion can be preferable to abstinence. This is to treat abstinence itself as a kind of Super Perversion. Since Nagel seems to regard masturbation as perhaps a mild perversion, perhaps he means that masturbation, though perverse, is to be preferred to abstinence, which is really perverse. But he doesn’t argue for that, and doesn’t say it, either. It’s entirely consistent with his view to say that if your choices are bestiality or abstinence, you should choose bestiality. More charitably, it’s consistent with his view to say that if your choices are casual sex or abstinence, it’s obvious that you should opt for casual sex. But what’s obvious is that that preference-ordering is not obvious—a platitude that never makes it into the analysis.

If we’re going to make stipulations at the outset, wouldn’t it make sense to stipulate that if x is a perversion, then either pro tanto x ought not to be indulged in, or x ought not to be indulged in, full stop? The convoluted coda with which Nagel ends the paper flouts any intelligible idea of an analysis that intends to explicate sexual perversion by way of moral or psychological platitudes about it. If anything is a platitude about “sexual perversion,” it’s that a person with an inclination for one ought to do what he or she can to avoid indulging it.

The hunger-sex analogy

To show that sexuality has a complex psychological structure, Nagel offers an interesting analysis of the structure of hunger. His main point is that if we can identify clear cases of gastronomical perversions, that shows that hunger is more than a simple biological drive, and something similar applies, mutatis mutandis, to sexuality. On the whole, I agree with his claims, but some of what he says misfires, and he seems to underestimate how much work is being done by the “mutatis mutandis” in the previous sentence. Consider this claim, offered in passing:

Hunger and eating, like sex, serve a biological function and also play a significant role in our inner lives. Note that there is little temptation to describe as perverted an appetite for substances that are not nourishing: we should probably not consider someone appetites perverted if he liked to eat paper, sand, wood, or cotton. Those are merely rather odd and very unhealthy tastes; they lack the psychological complexity that we expect of perversions. (Coprophilia, being already a sexual perversion, may be disregarded.) (p. 41)

This passage isn’t central to Nagel’s analysis, but the obvious handwaving involved draws attention to Nagel’s propensity for authoritative-sounding handwaving, and doesn’t inspire confidence in the claims he tosses off in a similarly authoritative tone of voice.

Contrary to Nagel, there is a strong temptation to describe as perverted an appetite for substances that are not nourishing. At Nicomachean Ethics VII.5, Aristotle famously pairs sexual and gastronomical perversions, describing them both as “bestial,” and acknowledging (presciently) that many such conditions are psychiatric diseases with a biological etiology.  More recently, in her book Falling into the Fire, the psychiatrist Caroline Montross discusses the case of a woman who commits self-injury by swallowing sharp-edged household objects (e.g., nails, light bulbs, a steak knife). It’s obvious that the compulsion in question is both perverted and psychologically complex. Puzzlingly, Nagel brings up gastronomical perversions, but doesn’t discuss the most obvious cases—anorexia, bulimia, etc. I get the sense that he doesn’t discuss them because they seem too “biological” to fit his account. But that, in turn, suggests that the account is itself defective.

Nagel asserts in passing that “we” tend to prefer that our food be passive and controllable, claiming that “the only animals we eat live are helpless mollusks” (p. 41). But an obvious competing explanation for the general tendency may be biological rather than psychological: it’s not that we want (for psychological reasons) that our food be passive in our mouths, but that (for biological reasons) we don’t want a living thing to injure us while it’s inside us. It’s true that we can’t eat cows, chicken, or sheep while they’ve alive, but that commonsense fact doesn’t really support the psychological point Nagel is making. Anyway, mollusks aside, people do eat insects, frogs, octupi, and fish that are alive; those facts don’t easily fit his analysis, but he doesn’t mention them.

I don’t understand the parenthetical at the end of the quoted passage. Nagel is discussing gastronomical perversions. Coprophilia is not a gastronomical perversion, so it’s unclear why it would come up. Coprophagia is a gastronomical perversion, but it seems an obvious counter-example to what Nagel is saying about gastronomical perversions. Is Nagel conflating coprophilia with coprophagia? Or is he suggesting that coprophagia is just an instance of coprophilia, so that an analysis of coprophagia can be given via an analysis of coprophagia? In the first case, Nagel’s claim would just rest on a simple error, but I doubt that’s the right explanation. In the second case, Nagel’s claim is both under-argued and ad hoc. Why is every instance of coprophagia coprophilic in the sexual sense? It’s not obvious. In any case, why can’t corophagia be simultaneously a gastronomic and a sexual perversion? No matter how we slice it (so to speak), it seems to me that coprophagia is an obvious, straightforward counter-example to Nagel’s claim that gastronomical perversions are not essentially related to the biological function of eating.

The underlying issue here is that Nagel wants to decouple sex from its biological basis, partly because he wants to distinguish his view of sexuality from the orthodox Catholic one that makes procreation central. He doesn’t offer much of an argument against the Catholic-type view, but more importantly, he doesn’t see the non sequitur involved in decoupling sex from procreation, and then concluding that it ought to be decoupled from biology altogether. Sex may be a complex psychological appetite, but if so, it’s a bio-psychological one, and we need to keep both the biological and the psychological features of the appetite in mind. Incidentally, despite my own rejection of the Catholic view, I find what Nagel (elliptically) says against it irritatingly obtuse and tendentious:

The fact that sexual desire is a feeling about other persons may encourage a pious view of its psychological content—that it is properly the expression of some other attitude, like love, and that when it occurs by itself it is incomplete or subhuman….But sexual desire is complicated enough without having to be linked to anything else as a condition for phenomenological analysis. Sex may serve various functions—economic, social, altruistic—but it also has its own content as a relation between persons. (p. 42)

Nagel’s ironic use of the word “pious” poisons the well. Though his real target is sex-as-aiming-at-procreation, he manages to make sex-as-expressive-of-love a collateral damage of his clumsy attack on it. It’s obviously a non-sequitur to say that because sex is complicated, it cannot possibly be more complicated than the complications Nagel intends to discuss in a single journal article. The last sentence begs the question: Nagel dismisses without argument the possibility that love is a privileged part of “the psychological content” of sexual desire.

In my next post, I’ll discuss Nagel’s claims regarding “the psychological content” of sexual desire.

Nagel on sexual perversion (part 1 of 3): the argument

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After a brief interlude on identity politics, I’m back to a far more savory topic–sexual perversion. I mentioned two posts ago that I was going to be discussing Nagel’s 1969 Journal of Philosophy paper, “Sexual Perversion” in my ethics classes. (By chance, I happen to be covering the same paper with a student who’s doing a senior thesis on BDSM. You really have to wonder whether the people who pay the tuition bills for these students bargained on their studying any of this at a nice, respectable Catholic institution like Felician, The Franciscan College of New Jersey. “How will any of this help my son or daughter find remunerative work?” Hmm.) Anyway, having pored over Nagel’s paper, I thought I’d discuss a bit here. This first post of two just lays out Nagel’s argument. The next post will offer my criticisms, and draw some lessons. (And yes, the second post is already written, so this isn’t one of my perennially broken promises about multi-part postings.)

Here’s the structure of the argument. It’s meant as a pointillistic summary of Nagel’s claims, not as representing the steps of a formally deductive argument. (Incidentally, I’m using the version of Nagel’s article that’s reprinted in the 1979 British edition of his book, Mortal Questions.)

The ground-setting argument: uncontroversial preliminaries

  1. We have a concept of ‘sexual perversion’; by unpacking it, we come to understand the nature of sexual perversion.
  2. There are three platitudes about sexual perversion that structure the inquiry from the outset, so it’s justifiable in this context to adopt them without argument. (a) First, what is sexually perverse is in some sense “unnatural,” though this is precisely the controversial concept in need of explication and defense. (b) We’re entitled to start with a list of uncontroversially perverse activities, and use them as fixed points for the rest of the inquiry, e.g., shoe fetishism, bestiality, sadism. (c) Perversions are in essence inclinations, or structured forms of desire. They are not best understood as particular actions divorced from some appetitive etiology.
  3. In addition to the platitudes in (2), there are two fundamental assumptions that also structure the inquiry, not quite as basic as the platitudes, but still essential to the inquiry. They require some argument, but not much. (a) Sexual perversion has a complex psychological structure. That’s because sexual desire isn’t a simple biological drive (like, e.g., digestion or circulation), something we can more easily come to see by reflection on hunger (which is itself not a simple biological drive). (b) Sexual desire is desire for the particularity of a particular individual. Or as Nagel himself puts it, “The object of sexual attraction is a particular individual, who transcends the properties that make him attractive” (p. 42).

The quasi-Sartrean appeal to phenomenology

  1. A good point of entry into the concept of sexual perversion is Sartre’s account of sexuality in Part III of Being and Nothingness. Unfortunately, taken at face value, Sartre’s account is—though insightful—somewhat obscure and leads to absurd results. It also makes very large presuppositions that can’t be defended or even explicated) in a journal article, so for present purposes (meaning Nagel’s purposes in the original article) our point of entry has to be Sartre-inspired view rather than a textually-faithful adoption of Sartre’s own. The essential Sartre-inspired view is as follows:
  2. Sexuality is an embodied reciprocal interaction that affords a specific form of mutual visibility to both partners.
  3. The interaction mentioned in (2) involves a complex interplay of voluntary and involuntary factors: arousal is involuntary, the choice to express it is voluntary, but the actual expression is a complex combination of voluntary and involuntary. In one sense, it’s controlled by the agent; in another sense, the agent allows himself or herself to act spontaneously, controlled by desire itself. So the aim of sexual activity is to make visible the complex interplay of voluntary and involuntary forces at work in oneself to the other (and vice versa).
  4. Nagel repeatedly insists that sexual desire is experienced, phenomenologically, as an ‘assault’—language later taken up by Korsgaard in The Sources of Normativity to suggest that desire as such is experienced, phenomenologically, as an ‘assault’. It’s not clear whether this claim is essential to Nagel’s thesis, and if so, how: I’m inclined to think that it’s an idiosyncratic add-on, but I’m not totally sure. (The language of “desire-as-assault” is essential to Korsgaard’s thesis, and Raymond Geuss correctly takes her to task for it in the discussion section of Sources of Normativity. I think Geuss’s criticism of Korsgaard probably applies to Nagel as well, but again, I don’t know what, if anything, that ultimately implies for Nagel’s thesis.)
  5. The preceding phenomenological account–especially the “visibility-affording” conception discussed in [3]–is the sexual ‘norm’ against which desires that don’t conform to it are deviations. The extreme deviations are perversions.
  6. Among the (to Nagel) more obvious perversions are “narcissistic practices and intercourse with animals, infants, and inanimate objects” (p. 49). Nagel doesn’t explicitly discuss masturbation, so it’s not clear whether “narcissistic practices” is a euphemism for masturbation or denotes a broader category of pathologically narcissistic activities that overlaps with narcissistic instances of masturbation. (In Sexual Desire, Roger Scruton distinguishes between masturbation conceived as relief for “a period of sexual isolation…guided by a fantasy of copulation” and masturbation conceived as a replacement for sexual encounter itself [p. 317]. Arguably, Nagel’s “narcissistic practices” refers to the latter, not the former, but he doesn’t explicitly say.)  Though Nagel doesn’t explicitly discuss pornography, he regards voyeurism and exhibitionism as perversions; since pornography is arguably an instance of both, I think it follows that Nagel’s view entails that (the use of) pornography is a perversion. But that’s my inference, not Nagel’s claim.

The difficult cases

  1. The cases discussed in the preceding section are ones that Nagel regards as relatively obvious. Near the end of the article, he turns briefly to discussion of the difficult cases: sadism, masochism, and homosexuality. Nagel clearly means to be discussing voluntary cases of sadism and masochism, but I wonder whether what he says about voluntary sadism is also meant to apply to cases of sexual assault. If so, sexual assault–or at least cases of sexual assault where the infliction of pain was intended and/or involved–would be cases of sexual perversion.
  2. Sadism and masochism turn out to be perversions “because they fall short of interpersonal reciprocity” (p. 50).
  3. “Sadism concentrates on the evocation of passive self-awareness in others, but the sadist’s engagement is itself active and requires a retention of deliberate control which may impede awareness of himself as a bodily subject of passion in the required sense” (p. 50). In other words, if visibility is the aim of sexual relations, sadism serves to render one’s passive nature invisible.
  4. “A masochist on the other hand imposes the same disability on his partner as the sadist imposes on himself. The masochist cannot find a satisfactory embodiment as the object of another’s sexual desire, but only as the object of his control” (p. 50). At some level, masochism is a failure in the “awareness of oneself as an object of desire.” (Though I think he’s on to something, I find Nagel’s discussion of masochism obscure and hard to gloss.)
  5. Meanwhile, Nagel regards it as “doubtful” that homosexuality is a perversion. Nagel’s judgment about homosexuality will strike twenty-first century readers as overly hedged, but in mitigation, recall that the paper was written in 1969, four years* before the American Psychiatric Association changed its collective mind about homosexuality. At the time, I think that Nagel was taking a somewhat unpopular minority position (but I’m a little hazy on the sociology).
  6. Having said that, Nagel suggests uneasily that what makes the issue unclear is that homosexuality seems as though it could be a case of arrested heterosexual development. “There is much support for an aggressive-passive distinction between male and female sexuality” (p. 51) which Nagel thinks is missing from homosexual activity. I think what Nagel is really gesturing at here is the idea that in heterosexual relations, men and women are in some sense sexually complementary, male aggression and female passivity being a (stereotypical?) proxy for that. So he finds himself wondering out loud whether there is any such counterpart in homosexual relations. He concludes that there probably is (or easily can be) and thereby concludes that homosexual activity is not a perversion

The convoluted coda: perversion and all-in moral judgment (or: what does it all mean?) 

  1. Nagel ends with a somewhat contorted discussion about the relationship between perversion, sexuality, and all-things-considered moral judgments. It turns out that when we say that X is a perversion, the claim we’re making about it is a very weak and equivocal one about what to say or do about it.
  2. If X is a perversion, then non-X sex is “better as sex” than perverted sex.
  3. But (according to Nagel), X can be a perversion and yet be preferable to unperverted sex, even if it’s not better “as sex.”
  4. X’s being perverted sex doesn’t necessarily mean that acting on X is morally wrong; faced with a choice between perverted sex and no sex, there are cases in which perverted sex is preferable to no sex, hence morally justified.

I know I’m supposed to leave the criticisms for the next post, but I can’t resist a general comment right here before I get to it. Then as now, Nagel’s paper strikes me in the way that so much of Nagel’s work strikes me—a mixed bag, but more worth reading than most work in analytic philosophy, despite lacking the “rigor” of a lot of analytic philosophy, and despite being relatively unintegrated with “the literature.”  On the plus side, the paper is (like just about everything Nagel writes) clear, profound, learned, original, insightful, fruitful, provocative, and right about a lot of things. On the negative side, the paper is also maddeningly hand-waving, question-begging, and glib, while managing simultaneously to be simplistic, ambiguous, and convoluted.

To its credit, “Sexual Perversion” reads more like an old-fashioned essay than a standard-issue “peer reviewed journal article,” but that very fact leads one to wonder how it got published in JPhil in the first place, i.e., what “peer review” meant in New York philosophical circles in 1969, and whether its meaning one thing in 1969 and another thing in 2015 has any bearing on what counts as good and bad philosophy from one decade to the next. Anyway, ambiguities aside, suffice it to say that there’s enough in the article to make getting through it well worth the trip.

Feel free to comment on Nagel’s argument or my rendition of it in the combox. I’ll offer some criticisms and other observations in my next post.

*I corrected an error in this sentence: I originally misstated the date of the APA’s decision as 1970. It was 1973.

Postscript, February 7, 2015: My friend Michael Young, who’s been lurking in this discussion, sends along this piece, “Guys and Plastic Dolls” from the online magazine Narratively. It’s about–you guessed it–guys who have romantic relationships with plastic dolls. I take it that the behavior described in the piece counts as a Nagelian perversion, since it satisfies both the “narcissistic practices” and “inanimate objects” provisos. I can’t wait to bring this one to the attention of my ethics students at Felician. I think I already know what they’re going to say, if they can manage to articulate their response in words. I guess the Narratively piece gives new meaning to a line from Lady Gaga’s song, “Paparazzi“: “We’re plastic, but we still have fun!”

Feel the love: theocratic dust-up at the Austin corral (or: Public Reason comes to Texas)

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It takes a lot to make me proud to be from New Jersey, but after watching this video, all I can say is that I’m glad I’m not from Texas:

Here’s a companion piece. The gist:

AUSTIN–Rep. Molly White, R-Belton, directed her staffers to ask Muslim visitors–in town for Texas Muslim Capitol Day–to pledge allegiance to the U.S.

“I did leave an Israeli flag on the reception desk in my office with instructions to staff to ask representatives from the Muslim community to renounce Islamic terrorist groups and publicly announce allegiance to America and our laws,” she said on Facebook. “We will see how long they stay in my office.”

The Texas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations on Thursday hosted the annual Texas Muslim Capitol Day as “an opportunity for community members to learn about the democratic political process and how to be an advocate for important issues.”

One obvious puzzle here: why would a state legislator put an Israeli flag on her desk, and demand respect for it from American citizens?

Second puzzle, less obvious: why do Muslims need a special designated day to visit the state’s capitol? And why must they visit as Muslims, in specifically sectarian guise? Doesn’t that suggest that they intend to vote strategically, as a bloc–i.e., that they’re lobbying? Of course, the presence of the Israeli flag on Molly White’s desk suggests that they have company.

Third (set of) puzzle(s): Is there a Texas Jewish Capitol Day? A Christian one? A Buddhist one? How about an atheist one, or one for Marxists, Aristotelians, or Petit-influenced small-r republicans? And if not, why not?

Fourth puzzle, yet subtler: how long before the Republican Party implodes under the influence of people like Molly White and Co.?

Fifth puzzle, the subtlest of all: what would Rawls say?

(ht: Minaret of Freedom blog)

Adultery, strip clubs, flirting, and virtue

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I’m talking about sexuality in my CORE 350 ethics class at Felician. It’s a minefield. The subject is hard to talk about anywhere, but especially in a classroom–and especially in a classroom at a Catholic college. There’s the simultaneous danger of being so candid that you offend someone, or so anodyne that you sound out-of-touch and irrelevant. Never mind that the professor is himself a walking stereotype of some sort–a divorced middle-aged academic who manages to make everything he says on the subject either sound dreadfully abstract or else really dirty. But of course, that’s what makes the topic so much fun.

Our first text has been the Commentary on the Sixth Commandment (against adultery) from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I’ve tried to impress upon my students the fact that I’m neither hoping to inculcate Catholic moral doctrine in them, nor discussing the Catechism simply to tear it down, but just using it a source of authoritative moral teachings on the subject so as to figure out what to make of what it says. Teaching it is a good exercise for me because I find so much of what it says so ridiculously implausible: I have to work a bit to make it plausible to them. But I’ve been surprised to find some scattered agreement as well. Of course, the same thing might be said about my students’ beliefs about sexuality, as the following conversation illustrates.

Today’s in-class discussion focused on lots of things–marriage, procreation, homosexuality, etc.–but ended with a free-wheeling discussion of adultery. Here’s what the Catechism says about it:

Adultery

2380 Adultery refers to marital infidelity. When two partners, of whom at least one is married to another party, have sexual relations – even transient ones – they commit adultery. Christ condemns even adultery of mere desire.170 The sixth commandment and the New Testament forbid adultery absolutely.171 The prophets denounce the gravity of adultery; they see it as an image of the sin of idolatry.172

2381 Adultery is an injustice. He who commits adultery fails in his commitment. He does injury to the sign of the covenant which the marriage bond is, transgresses the rights of the other spouse, and undermines the institution of marriage by breaking the contract on which it is based. He compromises the good of human generation and the welfare of children who need their parents’ stable union.

I was in a casuistic mood, so I decided to ask my students what counts as a case of adultery. I found their answers bizarre, but then, I find most people’s views on sexuality bizarre (except my own). The question was intended to elicit their views, not to to tease out the official view of the Church. Incidentally, some demographics: The class has 30 students in it, and consists predominantly of women aged 18-21, a few men of the same age, a few women in their 30s and 40s, and a few nuns in their 30s, I would guess. Since we’d discussed homosexuality earlier, and the Church’s definition of adultery presupposes heterosexual marriage, the conversation was about heterosexual marriage.

Here are their answers:

1. Is sexual intercourse with someone outside of the marriage an instance of adultery? –Yes.

2. Is oral sex….? –Yes.

3. Is phone sex….? –Yes.

4. Kissing on the lips…? –Yes.

5. Flirting without physical contact…?–Yes.

6. Ogling a member of the opposite sex…? –Yes (though there was dissension on this one).

7. Going to a strip club…?–No (?!)

I don’t know about you, but these answers make no sense to me. Or perhaps I mean that I can make sense of them–in the sense of figuring out the underlying rationale–but that they strike me as incoherent.

The most glaring incoherence seems to me the one between (7) on the one hand, and (5) and (6) on the other. Let me ignore the apparent incoherence between (6) and (7), since it’s not entirely clear to me that the people asserting (7) were also asserting (6). But the people (young women) most vehemently asserting (5) were also vehement about asserting (7), and that really does strike me as incoherent, or least as wildly mistaken. The claim here seems to be that if you flirt with someone, you are cheating on your marriage because it involves “thoughts or feelings” of an adulterous nature, thereby (I suppose) falling under Christ’s condemnation of the “adultery of mere desire.”

That seems to me an implausible conception both of marriage and of adultery, but let it go for now. I can see the rationale for it, assuming that one adopts implausible conceptions of both marriage and adultery–very rigoristic ones. What is hard to see is why the very person who adopted such a conception of flirting would then turn around to insist that strip clubs didn’t involve adultery.

But that is explicitly what they said. They believed that men go to strip clubs to “admire female beauty,” and that doing so is sexually innocuous, whereas flirting involves something like emotional attachment and lust, which is clearly adulterous. In other words, the average patron of a strip club patronizes, say, The Harem or Satin Dolls in the detached way that a hifallutin aesthete might go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to “admire the beauty” to be found in the paintings of J.M.W. Turner–or, maybe more precisely, in the portraits of John Singer Sargent. Put yet another way, the average patron of the average Jersey strip club is going there for an experience no different from the guy who goes to the Frick Collection to gorge his lustful eyes on Lady Agnew of Lochnaw:

Somehow, I doubt it. I have a sneaking suspicion that my female students have been fooled by their boyfriends into thinking that the strip club experience is more of an exercise in aesthetic formalism than it really is. Who knew that there were so many budding Nick Zangwills in the strip clubs of north Jersey? Let’s hope that the ASA is on the case.

Anyway, the dispute in question turns on a straightforwardly factual matter. If flirting is adultery because it involves the wrong thoughts and desires, then if going to a strip club either involves the same thoughts and desires (or more intense versions of the same ones), on this conception going to a strip club is (even) more obviously a case of adultery than flirting. I leave the rest as an exercise for the social psychologists or strip club enthusiasts out there.

Personally, I take the answers to questions (1)-(3) to be fairly obvious, though I’ve met people who would contest (3), and I suppose Bill Clinton in his own way famously contested (2), as did many of his defenders. It’s an interesting question what exactly ties (1)-(3) together, though I suppose the general answer is obvious: sexual activity (involving contact) by one married person with someone outside of the marriage.*

I don’t think (4) is obvious. I agree that kissing someone who isn’t your spouse is wrong, but personally, I don’t think it’s a case of adultery. (A small minority of my students agreed, but most disagreed.) Part of the issue here turns on turpitude, and part on–for lack of a better term–phenotypic dissimilarity. I think “adultery” should be reserved for serious offenses, and though I think kissing is an offense, it isn’t nearly as serious as having sex with someone. So it ought to be separated somehow. Further, though kissing is obviously sexual I think there’s an obvious phenotypic difference between an act that can in principle lead to orgasm and one that can’t. So I think the concept of “adultery” ought to reflect that. One student pointed out (correctly, I think) that there are cultures or contexts in which kissing on the lips is not thought to be a sexual act at all. There’s another reason for thinking that kissing and adultery are distinct.

I don’t think that (5) is either wrong or a case of adultery. This claim of mine set off a minor firestorm in class. But there’s a bit of an ambiguity here: you may not have realized this before (and neither, I think, did W.B Gallie), but “flirting” is an essentially contested concept. In other words, there’s flirting and then there’s flirting. Here is a standard definition of the term:

flirt

flərt/
verb
gerund or present participle: flirting
  1. 1.
    behave as though attracted to or trying to attract someone, but for amusement rather than with serious intentions.

The last clause is the key to the definition. X flirts with Y if and only if X has no serious intention of being romantically involved with Y and (I would add) knows that the same is true of Y.

It’s a serious and interesting question whether people are psychologically capable of pulling off flirtation in this sense, and can have knowledge in the requisite sense under the relevant conditions. Maybe so, maybe not. It’s also a serious and interesting question whether, regardless of that, the activity of flirting has any justifiable rationale. Maybe so, maybe not. But if we assume that people can flirt in the defined sense, I think it’s obvious that flirting is not a case of adultery. I happen to think that flirtation has a justifiable rationale: it has essentially the same rationale that joking around has in non-sexual contexts. Flirting is a safe, and I would add, necessary way of acknowledging the presence of sexual tension in relationships that are (or ought) otherwise to be non-sexual, and a safe means of catharsis of the relevant tension. Done properly, flirtation is harmless. It’s just hard to do properly, and harder still in a milieu where no one understands what it’s about, and where it’s equated with adultery. Ultimately, it’s probably safer not to flirt, but better to learn how to do it right.

I won’t belabor the point, but “ogling,” like “flirting” is an essentially contested concept. But it would take a whole new post to get that issue right.

It’s unfortunate that we didn’t discuss so-called “emotional affairs” in class, but alas, we didn’t. The moral status of emotional affairs is increasingly one that we Americans have farmed out to mental health care practitioners, so that the most authoritative answers to questions about them come from sources like WebMD. This makes me wonder whether philosophers should be in the business of competing with rival websites of our own–WebPhD, WebPhil, something like that. But no matter what we say, we’ll never be able to compete with the MDs on reimbursement.

The underlying philosophical issue here is one common to Christianity and Aristotelian virtue ethics, but that involves more psychological complexity than one finds either in the Gospels or the Nicomachean Ethics. Every significant sphere of life, including sexuality, has to be governed in some way by the virtues. But the virtues can’t be understood in a superficially behavioristic or legalistic fashion as demanding conformity with a series of pat prescriptions. They involve acting for the right object, in the right way, at the right time, from the right cognitive, affective, and behavioral dispositions, etc. It’s an enormously difficult job to explicate the latter idea in an informative, non-banal way that’s fully responsive to moral complexity.

Contrary to the Catholic Church, I don’t happen to think that “chastity” is a virtue, and don’t think that “lust” is an offense against it. But some virtues–honesty, integrity, justice, pride–do govern sexuality, and when they do, they require the agent to adopt some beliefs and not others, and by implication, to have some attitudes and not others, and some forms of affect and not others, etc. So one danger is to think that sexual ethics is a matter of mere conformity with a list of behavioral-legal prohibitions. But there’s another danger lurking here: of thinking that full Aristotelian virtue requires suppression of anything that seems like it’s incompatible with observing obvious behavioral-legal prohibitions. In other words, if full virtue proscribes adultery (as I’m sure it does), there’s a tendency to think that full virtue requires the agent to suppress any thought or desire that is, in a vague sense, adultery-positive or adultery-proximate.

In other words, if adultery is wrong, there’s a tendency to think that if a stray thought of adultery floats through my head, that thought is wrong and must be suppressed in the name of virtue. I think that’s a mistake that derives from a mistaken understanding of the way the mind works, and a mistaken account of the nature of virtue. From suppression of that sort it’s a short hop, skip, and leap to repression in the psychoanalytic sense. But repression is a defense mechanism–an offense against honesty, and a subversion of self-knowledge. At a minimum, virtue ethicists have to be more alive then they seem to be to the possibility that virtues can be a means of repression.

Anyway, there’s a lot more to say on this, but I can’t say it all now. I’ve said a bit on the website for my class. I hope to say more in the near future. Our next reading is Thomas Nagel’s famous paper, “Sexual Perversion.” Should be interesting.

Postscript: I edited this post for clarity after the initial submission.

*I rewrote this whole clause for clarity after the original post.

“King Abdullah–he dead.”

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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died last Friday. He’s to be succeeded by the new king, Salman. Like all Saudi monarchs, Abdullah was a despicable, repressive reactionary. Like all Saudi monarchs, Salman’s accession to the throne promises to be a classic case of “meet the new king, same as the old king.”

Here’s a link to Human Rights Watch’s page on Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. Here is Amnesty’s. Here is the State Department’s 2013 Human Rights Report on Saudi Arabia. Here’s more. Here’s an article on the Raif Badawi case. Let’s never forget this case, by the way. Together, what the two preceding articles show is that Saudi Arabia is a country where people get flogged for defending human rights, but where government officials go unpunished when they deliberately cause mass death. The late Pakistani journalist Tashbih Sayyid, editor of Pakistan Today, put the point to me in this way: “Muslims complain so loudly about the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bank. What about the Saudi occupation of Mecca and Medina?” It sounds like a joke, but it really isn’t one. He might well have added: What about the Saudi occupation of the Arabian peninsula?

Here’s an article on Saudi Arabia’s criticizing Norway’s human rights record. This criticism comes from a country where it’s illegal for women to drive. Of course, to be fair, Saudi Arabia is making progress. It abolished slavery in 1962.

I don’t agree with defenders of Israel who insist that the movement to divest from Israel is “anti-Semitic,” but I do think there is a double standard in the way activists think about and deal with Israel by contrast with Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has all the features that members of BDS find objectionable in Israel. Like Israel, Saudi Arabia is guilty of systematic human rights abuses. Like Israel, Saudi Arabia gets massive and systematic U.S. support. Like Israel, Saudi Arabia exerts enormous influence over the U.S. government. The difference is just that Saudi Arabia is a lot worse than Israel on every relevant dimension.

Unfortunately, there is no BDS-like movement to push back on Saudi policy in the way that there is in the Israeli case. There really ought to be: an anti-Saudi BDS would probably command more widespread popular support than does BDS against Israel. (Apparently, the Hillel organization at U Cal Riverside promoted an anti-Saudi divestment policy at one time, but I can’t seem to find it.) At a bare minimum, the time has come to start questioning the corrupting role of Saudi money in American universities. This phenomenon deserves scrutiny and challenge as well.

Though it’s now a bit dated, and I have some disagreements with it, I would highly recommend the late Said K. Aburish’s The Rise, Corruption, and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (Bloomsbury, 1995) as relief from the (cautious) accolades that are now being showered on Abdullah. A choice excerpt:

Like a rotting carcass, the House of Saud is beginning to decompose. This reality is ignored by its members and, except for perfunctory and infrequent mentions of their human rights record, by their friends. As usual, the people who have precipitated the decay are the last to admit their inability to halt it. In the case of the House of Saud’s Western friends, the creeping awareness that a crisis is approaching is balanced by a selfish desire in the governments concerned to conceal it and in the process shirk responsibility for it. (p. 303)

I would just add the proviso that the “selfish desire” flouts our actual interests. Though I don’t agree with the letter of his proposals, as long as we find ourselves involved with the Saudis, I have to agree with the spirit of this passage:

Enforcing these measures is a tall order. Above all, it calls for massive interference in Saudi internal affairs. But this is not as novel as it sounds: the West is already telling Saddam Hussein how to behave towards Shias and Kurds and it tells Egypt and other countries how to manage their financial affairs. In addition, it is totally manageable, for the House of Saud cannot survive without help. Furthermore, it cannot punish the West by withholding its oil because that would hasten the financial crisis and expedite the royal family’s demise. Last but not least, taking a chance with a corrective programme is a better long-term defence of the supply of oil than the present policy of securing it through a regime which threatens to self-destruct, and the prospect of having to fight the Arab and Muslim worlds for it. (p. 314).

The book opens with this dedication:

In memory of my friend Saud Ibrahim Al Muammer, who was tortured to death by the House of Saud, and of my mother, who mourned him as much as I did.

That one sentence conveys the bare essence of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As an allegory, so does the trailer below for the film “Syriana.”

We ought to be able and willing to assert the truth out loud: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has no right to exist. If any regime should be “erased from the pages of time,” Saudi Arabia is it. It’s good news that the King is dead. It will be better news when the Kingdom follows him.

Postscript: More multi-media dancing on the monarch’s grave:

And more!

Postscript 2, February 6, 2015: I guess this article proves that Saudi malfeasance can elicit the attention of our legislators and government, but only if packaged within an implausible conspiracy theory that links the Saudis to 9/11. Memo to our political representatives: it doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to prove that the Saudi regime is repressive, and that our support for the Saudis is abetting that repression. (President Obama may not have gone to Paris after the Charlie Hebdo affair, but he made sure to to go Riyadh after Salman’s accession to the throne.) The work of Said Aburish and Robert Baer (among others) has been out there for decades, but doesn’t seem to have gotten commensurate attention or changed anything–not our gas-guzzling habits, not our support for the Saudis, and not our wide-eyed amazement when people from the regime complain about our baleful influence on it. I’d like to think that if we can get exercised about the implausible, the patently obvious should have its day.

On (Not) Avoiding Giving Offense

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Irfan’s recent discussions about the Charlie Hebdo affair and Islamic debates about iconoclasm have brought me back to a question that I’ve wondered about in the past and not come up with any satisfying general answer to: when and why should the fact that something I do will offend someone give me sufficient reason not to do it? When I was an undergraduate studying in Greece, the conventional wisdom among our group was that it was considered very offensive in Greece, and in many other parts of Europe, to recline with your feet up on a chair. I don’t know if that’s actually true, but everybody in the group believed it simply because a few apparently informed people insisted on it so strongly and seemed so stressed out whenever anybody put their feet up on a chair that we all assumed it must be true. Late one night in a hotel lobby, I was sitting with the one member of the group who was pretty universally loathed for a number of reasons, both good and bad. We were talking about something or other when he decided to get comfortable and put his feet up on the chair in front of him. I quickly tried to stop him, reminding him that people in Greece considered it very rude. He then treated me to a lecture on why cultural relativism was false, and how he used to be a cultural relativist when he was an anthropology major, but that realizing the falsity of cultural relativism was one of the reasons he’d decided to become a classicist and study the ancient Greeks, who were so much wiser about these things. Since cultural relativism is false, he reasoned, there was nothing whatsoever wrong with putting his feet up on the chair; the Greeks have their fussy conventions, but by nature there is nothing wrong with treating a chair as a stool.

Now, I was even less philosophically astute then than I am now, so I didn’t make what I would now think of as the obvious rejoinder: the thought that you should avoid offending and upsetting people for no good reason does not presuppose or entail “cultural relativism” or any such thing, and the fellow was just weaving a sophomoric, pseudo-sophisticated rationalization for being insensitive and lazy (I don’t remember what I said in response, but it was probably something likewise sophomoric and pseudo-sophisticated, though of course more true). I take it to be fairly apparent that, ceteris paribus, the fact that some action of mine will offend people tells against my doing that action. But of course, cetera are often not paria, and while I’m pretty certain that the marginally greater comfort of resting my feet on a chair does not defeat the reason I have to avoid offending and upsetting people who are showing me great hospitality, I’m likewise pretty certain that in a vast range of cases the sheer fact that someone will find my words or actions offensive by itself gives me no reason to speak or act otherwise. Since I loathe the tendency of some purportedly neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists to simply wave their hands at points like these and talk about the importance of judgment and the fine discernment of practical salience by the virtuous person, I’d like to be able to say something more. What can we say?

One thing I think we can say is that when we can accomplish the same goals by means of one action that offends and another that doesn’t, and the non-offensive alternative isn’t significantly more costly, inefficient, burdensome, or the like, we have a pretty decisive reason to prefer the non-offensive alternative (I’m ignoring cases in which another person is being disrespectful or otherwise provocative, in which case we might even have reason to prefer the offensive alternative). That’s just another way of saying that, ceteris paribus, we should avoid offending people. To take an easy case, if I can say “excuse me, I’m sorry” when rushing past someone in an unavoidably obtrusive way, I should do that rather than simply being obtrusive and obnoxious. Less straightforward, but still sensible, I think: if a textbook can educate students about Islam just as well without depicting Muhammad, then the offense that the images would cause gives its authors and editors good reason to refrain from depicting him. But these cases are easy, at least to my mind, because as I see these scenarios there is nothing at all at stake; the only significant difference is that one alternative offends and the other does not. But when it comes to, say, kissing my girlfriend in public or uttering the sentence “Islam is false” during a conversation in a public space, I frankly don’t care whether anyone is offended (I’m tempted to say: that’s their problem, not mine). If the alternatives are withholding my displays of affection and the straightforward expression of my opinions to a wholly private sphere, then it seems to me that the cost of avoiding offense is too high. But I’m not sure I can say anything satisfying about how to assess those costs in a non-arbitrary way beyond appealing to my intuitive judgments.

On the one hand, I’ve sometimes wondered how far the difference between cases in which I have reason to avoid offense and those in which I don’t can be understood in terms of whether my action leaves the would-be offended people the opportunity to ignore me, so that I am not in effect forcing them to be faced with what they find offensive. To say “Islam is false” while walking down the street or sitting in a restaurant does not intrude on anyone; to run around town with a megaphone shouting “Islam is false!” intrudes upon people (again, I’m assuming that the people in question are themselves not intrusive or otherwise disrespectful or provocative). But the more I think about this sort of account, the more implausible it seems, and it seems implausible for just the same reason that certain sorts of libertarian appeals to the non-aggression principle seem implausible: it tries to bracket out the question of whether people have good reason to be offended by what I say or do, just as the simplest versions of the non-aggression principle try to bracket out questions about whether people’s consent or lack of consent is reasonable. This bracketing strategy leads to all manner of wildly counter-intuitive conclusions in both cases, and yet the principles seem to be defensible, if at all, only by their ability to explain a wide range of intuitively obvious judgments as well as to help settle more contentious cases (if there is some other, more foundationalist style argument for the non-aggression principle or its narrower, offense-centered version, I haven’t seen it; certainly the sort of thing that Rasmussen and Den Uyl offer, and that I think I have sometimes heard from Randians, comes nowhere close to justifying any principle nearly so strong as these) . So I’m led to wonder whether the better route would be to think simply in terms of whether people are reasonably offended or not, and whether my actions and words are actually disrespectful.

I don’t think it’s disrespectful to anybody to kiss my girlfriend in public, or to say that Islam is false. If someone is offended by those things, the real reason I don’t much care isn’t that I think I’m giving them the opportunity to ignore me, it’s that I don’t think they have any good reason to be offended. There is nothing offensive about me kissing my girlfriend (does this even require argument?), and even if Muslims shouldn’t be offended by my view because my view is right and theirs is wrong (after all, if Islam is false, nobody has good reason to be offended by someone saying so), they certainly shouldn’t be offended by my expression of my belief (I’m certainly not offended when Muslims say that Islam is true; though you wouldn’t know it from watching cable news, to disagree is not ipso facto to be offended!). But this puts me in a position uncomfortably like that of my obnoxious companion in Greece; there’s no good reason to be offended by people putting their feet up on chairs, so we should just put our feet up if we feel like it. And yet I still tend to think that there are cases where it isn’t reasonable for someone to be offended, and yet the fact that I will offend them gives me good reason to avoid acting in a way that I might otherwise prefer. I don’t think Muslims have any good reason to be offended by depictions of their prophet, and I don’t think that Greek hotel keepers have any good reason to be offended by somebody putting his feet up on a chair late at night when nobody is around. But while I might simply be indifferent to whether the history book depicts Muhammad, I would still tell that obnoxious kid to get his feet off that chair.

So am I just harboring incoherent beliefs and attitudes, or is there some way to maintain that what matters most in thinking about whether I should do something that others find offensive is whether those people have good reason to be offended, and yet also to allow that, even if they don’t, I might still have good reason to avoid giving offense?

The institutional hegemony of least-common-denominator Islam

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In the postscripts to an earlier post on the Charlie Hebdo crisis, I mentioned that the widely-held proscription against images of the Prophet Muhammad lacks clear Islamic credentials. In saying that, I don’t mean to insist that we ought to lay great emphasis on what has or lacks such credentials. The fundamental principle at stake in the Charlie Hebdo affair is the right of free speech, which deserves protection regardless of the sensibilities of Muslims. As an atheist, the simplest description of my own beliefs contradicts Islam at its core–there is no God and Muhammad is not his prophet–and might well offend the sensibilities of many Muslims (and in my experience, often has). That said, I think it’s telling that the version of Islam that so often gets currency in the media is the lowest-common-denominator version–the version common to the most simple-minded Islamist and the most demogogic Islamophobe.

In the earlier post, I linked to essays by Hussein Ibish and Omid Safi, pointing out the obvious–that Muslims have often created and revered images of the Prophet Muhammad. It’s worth noting that there is also within the Islamic tradition (e.g., in Urdu poetry) a tradition of directing complaints to and accusations at God, and even of ridiculing Him for his essential unintelligibility. Here’s one example. Here’s another. (The latter is in Urdu. I’ll try to find serviceable online English translations of both at some point.)

The debate between iconoclasts and iconophiles is an intra-Muslim debate, not one that has obviously been settled in favor of the iconoclasts. In fact, iconoclasm has no clear scriptural warrant; it involves a sort of quasi-Platonic or neo-Platonic inference from the Qur’an’s strictures against idolatry to the putatively idolatrous implications of mimetic representation. Insofar as there is an argument for this view, I think it has its roots in Plato’s argument against mimetic art in Republic X. I haven’t studied the subject in great detail, but there’s a plausible Islamic argument against mimetic art (with Platonic overtones) in Ismail Faruqi’s little primer, Islam. Here’s another version of it. (The book version is, I think, a little more pointed in its iconoclasm.)

That said, I found the following bit of news outrageous. It’s from this article in today’s New York Times.

Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington civil liberties advocacy group, said that the prevailing view among Muslims was that all imagery of the prophets, regardless of their religion, is offensive because it promotes the idolatry discouraged by the Quran.

“It’s an established cultural and religious norm,” he said. “You don’t do visual depictions of religious figures, whether that’s a positive or negative portrayal.”

Western sensitivity to the Muslim objections has a mixed history at best, particularly concerning images that portray Muhammad favorably.

In New York, for example, an eight-foot marble statue of the prophet, created by the Mexican sculptor Charles Albert Lopez, adorned the roof of a courthouse adjoining Madison Square Park for more than 50 years until it was quietly removed in 1955. But a coalition of Muslim advocacy groups failed in a 1997 effort to seek the removal or alteration of a frieze containing a likeness of Muhammad on the north wall of the Supreme Court’s main chamber. The prophet is among 18 revered lawgivers decorating the court’s interior.

“It was a respectful presentation, and nobody doubts that, even though it had the stereotypical image of the Quran in one hand and a sword in the other,” said Mr. Hooper, recalling the episode. “We just felt duty-bound to raise it.”

More recently, in 2008, the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations asked the publisher Houghton Mifflin to remove an image of Muhammad from “Western Civilizations: Ideas, Politics and Society,” a textbook. The company did so in the next printing.

“Civil liberties” advocates like Ibrahim Hooper need some push-back, from thinking Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Muslims need to ask themselves: can self-appointed “leaders” like Hooper simply put their fingers in the air, detect the “consensus” (ijma) of Muslims, and dictate to Muslims what can and can’t be done? It doesn’t seem to matter to Hooper that the supposedly prevailing view of Muslim prevails in places where people conspicuously lack rights of free speech and free expression. How can anyone detect the consensus of Muslims in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Gaza? If you say the wrong thing in places like that, you get shot or have acid thrown in your face.  You Tube is banned in Pakistan. Saudi Arabia and Iran are totalitarian states. Egypt is a police state. Gaza is a virtual anarchy. What realistic chance of discussion or debate on iconoclasm versus iconophilia could reasonably be expected under such conditions?

Hooper knows this. He simply doesn’t care that debate is impossible and dissent is crushed. He thrives on it. And so, the prevailing view of Muslims–the ijma of the umma–is reduced to the least common denominator of thought, the unreflective prejudices of people under censorship. Amercan Muslims, in particular, need to ask whether they regard such dogmatism and authoritarianism as acceptable. It isn’t.

But non-Muslims have a stake in this, too. The Albert Lopez statue of Muhammad was taken down to pre-empt objections like Hooper’s. As for the surviving frieze of Muhammad, Hooper feels “duty bound” to raze it. He sniffles that the surviving frieze* depicts Muhammad in “stereotypical” fashion, with “an image of the Quran in one hand and a sword in the other.” Excuse me: so what? Is it Hooper’s contention that Muhammad had nothing to do with the Qur’an? Is it his contention that Muhammad never wielded the sword? The Qur’an was dictated to Muhammad, and he conquered Arabia. How can it conceivably be an objection that a work of art depicts him for the two accomplishments that Muslims themselves attribute to him?

I wonder what Ibrahim Hooper would say if I told him that I was “duty bound” to raise such questions with him. But I actually don’t merely intend to wonder. I intend to ask him and reprint his response here at PoT.

And I think the decision-makers at Houghton Mifflin could use a similar letter.

*I’ve corrected a few sentences in this paragraph before the asterisk. The original version confused the Lopez statue with the surviving frieze. The image above depicts the frieze, not the statue.

Postscript: Can anything be expressed any more without eliciting threats from someone? (The question sounds like a textbook exercise in the logic of quantification. Of course, any day now, someone will start threatening the authors of logic textbooks.)

A new semester and a new blog project

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The spring semester has just started up for me at Felician, and as usual, it’s going to be a busy one–five sections and two senior theses, for a total of five preps and 69 students. (Last semester was five sections and one tutorial, for a total of five preps and 120 students.) So I’ll be blogging less than I have for the last six weeks or so, and when I do, I’ll probably be staying away from topical/journalistic stuff and focusing more on stuff related to my teaching and research interests in philosophy and psychology. It’s also likely that PoT will be getting another blogger or two in the near future.

On the teaching end of things, I’ve decided to bring blogging into the classroom. So I’ve set up three Word Press sites–one for my ethics class (two sections of CO 350), one for my aesthetics class (PHIL 260), and one for my international relations class (PSCI 303). The ethics class focuses on five topics: sex, drugs, money, race/crime, and honesty/the virtues. My rather idiosyncratic aesthetics class starts by discussing the Charlie Hebdo controversy (and related ones), moves to a discussion (via Susan Sontag) of the depiction of others in photography, then moves to a reading of Lolita, followed by units on beauty,  “everyday aesthetics,” and the aesthetics of popular music. The focus in the last case is Adorno’s critique of popular music. The international relations class is basically historical in focus, but trots students through the World Wars, aspects of the Cold War, 9/11, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Gulf Wars. All of the sites are still works in progress, and I’ve described the rationale for doing the project on each site itself. Feel free to take a look.

For obvious reasons, Felician students will have top priority at these sites, but I’ve decided not to make the sites password protected or exclusive to Felician students. I think my students would profit from doing their work “out in the open,” subject to the gaze and scrutiny of the outside world, and perhaps non-Felician readers would profit from following along and seeing what we’re doing. Subject to that “students first” or “pedagogy first” proviso, I’ve decided to experiment with accepting comments from non-Felician readers. Obviously, I’ll have to use my discretion as to how non-Felician people interact with my students, but if you’re burning to make a point, feel free to send it along.

To all my academic readers: best wishes on the new term. Hope you’re as excited as I am to start mine. Just be grateful that you’re (probably) not teaching a 5+:5+ load–though I recently met someone who was teaching a 6:7.