Tag Archives: ethics

Psychology, Psychiatry, and Moral Philosophy: An Open Thread

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I’ve been working on and thinking about issues at the intersection of psychology, psychiatry, and moral philosophy lately, so this (partly but not entirely edifying) discussion-thread at BHL caught my eye. I thought I’d reproduce it here, comment on it, and then just leave the comments open indefinitely for thoughts on the matter.

The discussion arises in the context of a post by Jason Brennan on whether one should go to grad school. I don’t particularly like the self-congratulatory tone of the post, but don’t disagree with the advice he gives. Early on in the post, he addresses a frequently-asked question and offers up an answer:

I like reading and discussing economics or political philosophy. It‘s my hobby. Should I go to grad school? You can do all these things without getting a Ph.D. You won’t be as good at it, but you can read and discuss economics while holding down a job as an insurance agent, a lawyer, or a consultant. You might be able to maintain your hobby while making a lot more money.

It’s not very adeptly or tactfully put, but on the whole, I agree with Brennan. His point is not that a non-PhD. cannot in principle be as good as PhDs at philosophy. His point is that the generalization holds as a rule: generally speaking, and given current economic and institutional realities, you need a PhD to excel at philosophy. There are some notable exceptions to that rule, of course. Some of the most brilliant and successful academic philosophers got into the profession back in the day when a PhD was considered unnecessary (e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre, Colin McGinn, Saul Kripke), but no one holds not having a PhD against them. Coming the other way around, I know  non-academics out there (without PhDs) who can hold their own–and then some–with many PhD philosophers. But I think such people are the exception, not the rule. Ultimately, one has to commit the fallacy of accident to deny the truth of what Brennan is saying. We can recognize that exceptional cases exist while acknowledging the truth of the rule he’s identified.

Perhaps Brennan should have qualified what he said to accommodate the exceptional cases, but I also think it’s clear he had a very different sort of case in mind–e.g., the middle manager who wants to do philosophy on the side.  I think Brennan is correct to think that such a person will tend not to be as good at philosophy as the PhD philosopher from a top-20 school (Arizona, Princeton, Rutgers, Oxford, Pittsburgh, etc.) who is herself working at an R1 school and (therefore) doing philosophy all day. (And most would come out and admit it.)  The more invested you are in your day job, the heavier its demands. But the heavier its demands, the fewer resources you have to devote to philosophy. Given the (very) heavy demands of doing good philosophy, having fewer resources means, all things equal, you won’t do it as well as someone with more resources at her disposal. As someone who spent nine years temping and adjuncting before finding a full-time academic position, that doesn’t seem controversial to me.

It’s not much different than the situation of the guy who spends eight hours a day working assiduously on his guitar chops versus the guy who noodles a bit on his prized Gibson SG after a long day at work. The first guy might make it in the music business, if he’s lucky and other things come together; the second guy may do a gig of AC/DC covers at the local bar (if they let him in), but can’t expect to headline Met Life Stadium (capacity: 88,000), or for that matter, headline the local equivalent of the Wellmont Theater (capacity: 1,200). (Again, I should know.)

The conversation took a different (and actually, more interesting) direction after an intervention by someone named Val, a psychiatrist, who jumped in with this comment just below. Responding to the Brennan passage quoted above, he or she had this to say (sorry for the pronoun ambiguity, but “Val” could be either male or female):

Rubbish and simple minded navel-gazing. Except for the unique subspecialty of a Ph.D tenured research professor (“I’m the foremost expert on La Rochefoucauld’s writing of the year 1678!”), anyone who puts in the time and is clever can speak on intellectual issues with equal footing. You can certainly be “as good at it” in whatever interests you.

I’m a psychiatrist attached to a large research university and spend most of my day as a clinician. The philosophy professors who have careers focusing on ethics, political philosophy, or Scholasticism are barely on equal footing with the well-read clinicians who have been reading the epistemology of science for the last 25 years.

I think Val’s comment talks somewhat past Brennan’s. Yes, “anyone who puts in time” can speak with equal footing, but Brennan’s point is that if you have a day job, the better the job, the less time you’ll have to put in. The worse the job, the less sense it makes to do philosophy rather than get yourself a better job (and then do philosophy, in which case, it’s back to the first option). There are exceptions to this rule, too, but as a rule, it holds. Val’s situation is unique, and escapes Brennan’s point, but doesn’t generalize to the cases Brennan is discussing–the majority of cases.

Unfortunately, Brennan, given an opportunity to re-direct the conversation, only had this to say:

Val, I bet you just think you’re smart because of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Clinical psych is easy as pie. It’s what people with bad GRE or MCAT scores do.

It’s a somewhat cryptic–and actually pretty stupid–response. The first sentence is just a particularly abusive instance of poisoning the well. The second sentence suggests that Brennan is under the impression that Val is a clinical psych(ologist). In other words, his implicit reasoning is:

You must be one of those dumb people who’ve opted to work in clinical psychology. Your GRE scores were probably too low to work in a difficult field, like philosophy, economics, or cognitive psychology. Your MCAT scores were probably too low to get you into a good medical school, or to get you in at all. So you opted for the easy way out–clinical psychology. And given that, you must think you’re particularly smart because you’re operating under the Dunning-Kruger effect. Being a victim of that effect, you’ve taken umbrage at my suggestions, but that’s because the effect has deluded you.

One problem here is that Val is a psychiatrist with an MD. So the GRE is irrelevant to his/her situation, and he/she obviously did well enough on the MCATs to get into med school, get an MD, go into practice, and get attached to a research university.

A second problem is that even if there was a documented correlation between low GRE/MCAT scores and the choice of clinical psychology as a profession, it wouldn’t follow that clinical psychology was “easy.” The more obvious inference would be that neither the GRE nor the MCAT was designed to test skill or aptitude in clinical psychology. A little Howard Gardner might have gone a long way here.

Personal experience might help, too. Brennan often likes to talk about his, so here’s a bit of mine. I spent part of grad school writing GRE questions for the Educational Testing Service (ETS), so I have a fairly good sense of what’s involved in designing them, including what they test and what they don’t test. There’s a lot that they don’t test, and a lot in them, methodologically and substantively, that is highly debatable, regardless of what ETS’s in-house psychometricians will tell you. Keith Stanovich’s work is relevant here.

It’s a great irony, by the way, that a large number of the item writers for the GRE (and personnel at ETS generally) are people who, by Brennan’s standards, are academic failures–i.e., grad students, often at Rutgers, Princeton, Temple, or Penn, who’ll never get a tenure track R1 job, or grad students (Rutgers, Princeton, Temple, Penn) who never finished their programs. So lots of Brennanite “failures” end up being the gate-keepers for the Brennanite “winners.” Something similar is true of the PRAXIS exam: I wrote items for PRAXIS at a time when, as a doctoral student without a teaching certificate, I was writing exam questions for a profession I wasn’t permitted to enter–and the questions I wrote were for an exam involving the very credential I lacked for purposes of entry!

A bit of advice, then: Brennan tells people who might want to go to grad school, but shouldn’t, to get a job at GEICO. I would say, instead: get a job at ETS. I worked there as a part-timer for almost six years before I got a full time academic position. It was a good place to work. Not my first preference, but still.

Incidentally, if I were Jerry Springer, at this point I would say that one important lesson we learn here is not to accuse someone of being a victim of the Dunning Kruger effect, accuse him/her of bombing the GRE, and misread what he/she wrote all in the same comment.

Anyway, back to Val’s comment. I sort of agreed, sort of disagreed. So here’s what I said:

I’m a PhD philosopher working on a master’s degree in counseling psych. I spend a fair bit of time discussing philosophy vs clinical psychology and/or psychiatry with people in those fields. I see where you’re coming from, but don’t agree with you (not that I agree with Brennan’s comment below*).

An enormous amount of the literature in both clinical psychology and psychiatry strikes me as methodologically weak and substantively trivial. (Much of it also makes huge, unwitting assumptions about difficult issues in the philosophy of mind.) The clinical work that (good) psychiatrists do gives them practical experience that philosophers don’t typically have (fair enough), but it’s very narrow and doesn’t equip them with the resources to think about bread-and-butter philosophical issues. In any case, for many psychiatrists, “clinical work” nowadays means “medication management,” not therapy. I don’t see how expertise at managing a dosing schedule gives a person insight into the foundations of ethics. I’m willing to hear the argument, but off hand, I don’t see it.

That’s not to say that there aren’t brilliant philosopher-psychiatrists out there (e.g., Jonathan Lear, Richard Chessick…Sigmund Freud), i.e., people with excellent philosophical skills who have capitalized on their clinical work. I’d also be willing to say that they have insight and understanding that most philosophers in the field lack. But that’s a far cry from the claims you’re making.

One look at Brennan’s derisive comment below* should tell you that if you were looking for intelligent engagement with your arguments, you’ve come to the wrong place. If you’re interested in discussing the issues, feel free to come by my blog or contact me privately (contact info at the blog). I sometimes blog on issues at the intersection of philosophy and psychology in the broad sense (that includes psychiatry), and wouldn’t mind batting this one around. We’re mostly philosophers, but there are some psychologists and psychiatrists lurking in the “audience.” You might find it fruitful to have a conversation with us. And rest assured, we won’t ask you about your MCAT score or reduce your arguments to a diagnosis.

Val saw what I wrote and had this to say:

Irfan – I agree with a good deal of what you have said. An enormous amount of psychology and psychiatry research is indeed methodologically weak. As the saying goes, nearly of all of psychology research is trivial if true, and if attempting to show something non-trivial, is impossible to convincingly demonstrate. My experience as well has been that most psychologists and psychiatrists are grossly ignorant of the surrounding philosophical issues.  However, there are plenty of psychiatrists that I work with who are keenly aware of the epistemic problems of the assumptions inherent in modern psychiatry and are well read in the psychiatrist-philosophers, (Jung, Jaspers, Freud…Popper is also popular. Human Action was recently under discussion in the geriatrics department). …

I agree with that, of course. I also think it goes the other way. Most philosophers are grossly ignorant of psychology and psychiatry, but it’s unclear to me (one year into a psychology program) how much of a debility that turns out to be. If so much psychology research is trivial, what leverage does one get out of relying on it to do moral or political philosophy? Some, I think, but it’s difficult to articulate what it is.

Same issue from a different direction: as a journal editor and conference organizer, I read dozens of manuscripts in ethics and political philosophy from authors who are trying (sometimes trying too hard) to showcase their familiarity with cutting edge work and cutting edge ways of doing philosophy. A large proportion of this work showcases the latest work in psychology. Decades ago, Robert Nozick told us that either we work within Rawls’s system, or explain why not. Now the same is implicitly being said of Jonathan Haidt. It is, one might say, a haidtful state of affairs.

Much of this psycho-philosophical experiment-mongering strikes me, frankly, as trivial, and if you dig hard enough, you find in many cases that philosophers tend, subtly (or not so subtly) to overstate, distort, and cherry pick research findings from psychology to make them less trivial than they are.

The truth is, by comparison with the intuition-mongering philosophy literature, the psychological literature tends to be very, very equivocal. Here’s a random example that I just happened to read yesterday, Daniel Wegner and Sophia Zanakos, “Chronic Thought Suppression” Journal of Personality, 62:4 (December 1994). The abstract says:

We conducted several tests of the idea that an inclination toward thought suppression is associated with obsessive thinking and emotional reactivity….[Our measure of thought suppression] was found to correlate with measures of obsessional thinking and depressive and anxious affect, to predict signs of clinical obsession among individuals prone toward obsessional thinking, to predict failure of electrodermal responses to habituate among people having emotional thoughts.

Then you read the article and the qualifications start coming: “Throughout this article, we have tried to caution that our intepretations of these results are not the only possible interpretations at this time” (p. 636).

It’s one of dozens of examples I could have used, from cognitive to clinical to political psychology. I’m not faulting the authors. My point is: psychology findings do not easily lend themselves for use as “inductive backing” for some controversial claim in ethics or political philosophy. They just aren’t written that way, or with that purpose in mind. But that’s the way philosophers often use them, at least in my experience. The psychology research of the philosophers is a lot like the God of the philosophers: not the original article. Philosophers seem wedded to the psychology of journal abstracts, not journal text–to unqualified thesis statements, not to the thesis-death-by-a-thousand-qualifications-followed-by-recommendations-for-more-grant-funding-and-research that one typically finds in the text. The jury is still out for me, but I often find myself wondering how useful all this psychology-mongering really is for philosophy.

Of course, then I read hand-waving, flat-footed philosophy that resolutely ignores the empirical literature, and I swing the other way. It also helps to read classic texts–Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Freud–and see how much they got wrong, empirically speaking. (Just think of what passes for biology or cultural anthropology in any one of these writers.) I just got finished reading Calvin Hall’s Primer of Freudian Psychology, published in 1954. One doesn’t think of 1954 as being that long ago–the Eisenhower Administration wasn’t ancient history–but the author has the nerve (so to speak) to assert that asthma, arthritis, and ulcers are psycho-somatic effects of ego defense mechanisms (pp. 85-87). Primal repressions, we’re told, arise in Lamarckian fashion via the “racial history of mankind” (p. 85). I guess sometimes pseudo-science is just pseudo-science. So I’d be the last to trash appeals to hard fact as a constraint on normative theorizing.

Val again:

I’ve often thought that psychiatry rewards the philosophically minded more than any other specialty. General medicine, for instance, largely reduces to this model: is the blood sugar >6%? If yes, implement algorithm given to you by the Joint Commission. Pattern recognition and memorization required, but not a lot of analysis.

In psychiatry, if a patient complains of depression, you have to say, what does depression mean to this patient? Is depression even real? How can I judge this patient as having depression when there are no absolute standards? How will I know if his depression is responding to treatment? Why is the treatment even working? What caused the depression? Why do some develop depression in similar circumstances but not others? Good clinicians conceptualize patients in such a manner, and this is how they are discussed at conferences. Poor psychiatrists uncritically push pills.

MIT press released a very good collection last year, Classifying Psychopathology, for sale on the shelves in the medical school book shop. I doubt very much a well read psychiatrist wouldn’t be “as good” (to use Brennan’s silly words) at discussing the contents as a Ph.D philosopher who specialized in ethics.

I agree with most (or a lot) of that, but notice that the context of Val’s comment is psychopathology. Yes, within that context, psychiatrists have a lot of challenging, important philosophical work to do. But the context is itself very narrow. You can master all that there is to know about psychopathology, whether psychiatrically or philosophically (or both), and still be light-years away from dealing with issues that are central to ethics.

Anyway, there’s a lot to think about and respond to there. To keep this post within reasonable length, I’ll post any further thoughts I have in the combox. But I figure that some of PoT’s lurking readers may have things to say–there are some psychologists and at least one psychiatrist out there, along with a few non-psychiatrist MDs–so I’ll just leave this open for comment.

*Brennan’s comment was below mine when I first wrote. As of March 9, 2015, Brennan’s response to Val no longer bears his name, and is attributed instead to an anonymous “Guest.” The same is true of a few other comments of his in that discussion.

Conference Announcements

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Just a reminder: the due date for submissions for the Ninth Annual Felician Institute Conference on Ethics and Public Affairs is this coming Sunday, March 1. We’ve got some great submissions already, but there’s still room for more. For more information, here’s a link to the Institute’s website. The conference itself is to take place Saturday, April 25, 2015 at Felician’s Rutherford campus. The plenary speaker is James Stacey Taylor of The College of New Jersey, defending the idea of markets in political votes.

My friend Graham Parsons is organizing what promises to be a great conference on the Ethics of War at West Point Military Academy (WPMA), to take place at WPMA on Friday, March 27, and Saturday, March 28, 2015.  Nigel Biggar, Richard Miller, Fiona Robinson, and Jeremy Waldron will each address plenary sessions; Michael Walzer will provide the keynote address. I’ll be there for Walzer’s address as well as the Saturday sessions, so if there are any PoT readers at the conference, let’s meet up.

An afterthought: I’ll be giving a paper (really, a mini-paper) at the 21st annual meeting of the Association for Core Texts and Courses at the Radisson Hotel in Plymouth, Massachusetts (April 9-12, 2015), so if there are any PoT readers at that conference, let’s make sure to meet up there.  My paper is called “From Nicomachean Ethics to the Grant Study: Virtue Ethics Meets Behavioral Science” (slightly modified from what I submitted). Here’s my four-sentence abstract:

George Vaillant’s Adaptation to Life (1977) is a classic of contemporary behavioral science; meanwhile, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is one of the founding texts of ancient Greek moral philosophy. Both texts implicitly address the same topic, but each does so in ways that fundamentally contradict the claims of the other. Given this, it’s a useful (and entirely Aristotelian) exercise to read the two books in tandem, using the one to challenge and correct the claims of its rival. The resulting inquiry leaves us with a better sense of the strengths and weaknesses of both behavioral science and moral philosophy, and leaves us with some difficult questions as well.

I’ll post parts of the paper here, as well as the exact date/time I’m giving it, in a few weeks. A recent article on the Grant Study (ht: Kate Herrick).

Addictions, Cravings, and Compulsions: Challenging the Frankfurtian Model (with two postscripts)

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Readers of this blog know, or may remember, that yours truly was, briefly, a drug addict. It was actually a rather interesting experience to undergo, philosophically speaking, and one of the things I did while going through it was to read up on the philosophical and psychological literature on addiction, and to compare what I read there with my own six-month experience of addiction. I have a folder full of journal entries on the subject–at least a hundred pages or so–and some day I’d like to get some of that material out there into “the literature.”

A basic problem with the literature, as I see it, is that very few of the people writing in it either are, or have ever been addicts, and their lack of first-hand experience distorts much of what they write on the subject.* Their definitions of “addiction” are far too narrow to cover the varieties of addiction (even to cover the varieties of specifically pharmacological addiction, setting aside the supposed behavioral varieties, e.g. sex addiction, shopping addiction, etc.). And by my lights, they’re far too timid about considering the possibility that addicts are responsible for having becoming addicts, and are capable of choice as addicts.

But one particularly problematic assumption, ubiquitous in both the philosophical and psychological literature, is the claim that addiction necessarily involves a craving for the addictive substance. The paradigm example of this assumption is the celebrated discussion of addiction in Harry Frankfurt’s famous paper, “Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person” (originally published in the Journal of Philosophy, 68:1 [Jan. 1971], reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About [1988]). It’s in many ways a very insightful paper, and like a lot of people, I’ve been heavily influenced by it. Reading Frankfurt while I was an addict, however, I couldn’t help thinking that he’d generated a conception of “addiction” designed specifically to clarify the thought-experiments in the essay, regardless of whether any of it bore any relation to the real-world phenomenon of addiction.

Whether it’s explicitly cited or not, the Frankfurtian conception of addiction plays an outsize role in the literature on addiction. And it’s not hard to see why. Suppose that you’ve never been an addict, but are interested in the topic. Suppose that you don’t know any addicts, either. How do you know what it’s like to be one? As it happens, you can’t really get a visualizable “picture” of addiction by reading social scientific or psychiatric studies of addiction in peer reviewed journals, by reading the “substance abuse” chapter of a textbook of abnormal psychology, by consulting the newest version of DSM, or by reading either the philosophical or psychological literature on “addiction science.” Nor will it help to attend lectures of this sort. The preceding sources will give you important facts about addiction, and teach you how to logic-chop some important distinctions. They’ll give you some important vocabulary, as well, and introduce you to the various “models” of addiction. But they won’t tell you what it’s like to be an addict, and like it or not (so to speak), the first-person perspective is crucial for understanding what it is to be one.

Enter Frankfurt: Frankfurt gives his readers a vivid “picture” of what it’s like to be an addict. Though it’s a third-personal account, it’s vivid and detailed enough to enable a non-addict to imagine what it would be like to be a (Frankfurtian) addict from the first-person perspective. And clearly, it would suck: a Frankfurtian addict is someone with an irresistible first-order craving for a pharmacologically-addictive substance. Either he resists this first-order craving at the second-order level, or not, and different implications follow in each case. Frankfurt never mentions by name what addictive substance he has in mind, but I get the impression that he’s discussing a stereotypical case of either heroin or cocaine addiction (or perhaps alcoholism).

As I say, it’s an interesting discussion, but I find the picture it paints of the addict very misleading. In particular, I don’t think there’s good reason to think that cravings are either necessary or sufficient for addiction.

To see this, consider a somewhat stylized, thought-experimental version of my own case of addiction. Imagine a very strict Kantian who goes to the doctor with some medical complaint. Our Kantian takes his doctor to be a reliable authority on medical matters, and regards following his doctor’s orders as a matter of duty to self. Further, our Kantian discharges his duties to self from the motive of duty. In other words, if the doctor tells him to do something, he does it because it’s his duty (to self), whether or not he wants to.

So our Kantian goes to the doctor with some medical complaint, and the doctor gives him strict orders to take a certain medication, X. As it happens, X is an addictive, psychotropic medication. Suppose that our patient has a temperamental hostility to the idea of taking any drug for any reason. So he really doesn’t want to take X. But he feels duty-bound to do so, under the doctor’s orders. So he grudgingly fills out the prescription and grudgingly takes X. Within a few weeks, he becomes addicted to it, but doesn’t know that he is. He might in principle continue like this for years, never grasping that every dose he takes pushes him further and further into addiction.

So here is the situation:

  • Our Kantian is ex hypothesi addicted to X;
  • He keeps taking X, thereby reinforcing his addiction to X;
  • He would suffer intense withdrawal if he stopped taking X;
  • Despite not wanting to take X, he continues to take X, but only from the motive of duty.

I take it to be obvious that you cannot have a craving for a substance that you do not want to take, and you cannot have a craving for a substance that you only take from the motive of duty. And yet you can clearly be addicted to such a substance, at least in the pharmacological sense of being physically dependent on it. If that’s right, craving for X is not a necessary condition of addiction to X. You can be addicted to X and not know it, hence not crave it. You can be addicted to X and not want to take it, but take it from the motive of duty–hence not crave it.

Reflecting a bit on my own experience, I’m willing to admit that there’s a slight complication here. (The phenomenology of addiction defies neat philosophical claims.) Even in the case of the Kantian addict, I think it’s possible that though our Kantian doesn’t want to take X, and takes it from the motive of duty, the pharmacological/physiological effects of addiction can alter one’s personality so that he’s in some sense psychologically compelled to take X without craving it.

This is an odd thought (and phenomenon), and I would have dismissed the possibility out of hand had I not experienced it myself. Think of it like this. Suppose that our Kantian takes X from the motive of duty and only for that reason. He doesn’t like taking X, wishes he didn’t have to, doesn’t want to. But dutiful Kantian that he is, he takes it. Suppose he takes it every night at precisely 10 pm. As 10 pm approaches, he might find himself in the grips of some very odd internal states. He might, for instance, develop an anxious compulsion to take X, or an uneasily anxious feeling about the idea of not taking X. He would thus find himself in the odd state of taking X from the motive of duty, not wanting to take it, but anxiously feeling compelled to take it, and averse to the idea of not taking it–all at the same time. I actually felt like that fairly often.

Related is the possibility that if our addict fails to take X promptly at 10 (and is sufficiently addicted to it), he either senses or subconsciously anticipates the onset of withdrawal symptoms, and develops a vague (but powerful) psychological compulsion to hurry up and take it. (“Hurry up, please, it’s time….”) Remember, ex hypothesi  that our Kantian neither knows that he’s addicted nor knows that withdrawal is an issue. My point is that the physiology of withdrawal can to make its presence felt in his appetitive states despite his ignorance.

Some might be tempted to call this physiologically-induced appetitive presence a “craving,” but it doesn’t feel, phenomenologically, like anything I would call a craving. In retrospect, I think of it as a classic case of chronic, pharmacologically-induced anxiety.  I’m inclined to think that in a Kantian, this anxiety would manifest itself as a specifically deontic compulsion: the compulsion to take the drug would not be experienced, phenomenologically, as a “craving” for it, but as a very urgent, anxious imperative to the effect that X must be taken. (“Hurry up, please, it’s time….”) But an imperative or an anxiety is not a craving in the ordinary understanding of that term, even if it produces a compulsion to do something. (I’m not a Kantian, but the picture of the Kantian agent I’ve painted here approximates my own experience of addiction. One feature of addiction is that it alters your personality so that you find yourself doing things that would otherwise be “out of character,” and yet weren’t produced ex nihilo, either.)

I suppose you could reintroduce the idea of craving here by claiming that our Kantian has a craving for the substance under the guise of a “craving” for doing his duty from the motive of duty, but even if that is a coherent thought (I’m not sure it is), it’s so distant either from Frankfurt or from what the literature describes as a “craving” that we’d have to revise our understanding of “craving” to be able to use it this way.

So while I want to insist that cravings are not a necessary condition for addiction, I’m willing to accommodate some version of the phenomenon that the Frankfurtian picture ascribes to addiction: addictions involve compulsive or anxious behavior, but compulsions are not accurately described as “cravings.” (It’s essential to my account that in large part, the compulsion or anxiety has a pharmacological etiology. Of course the pharmacological etiology could itself have a psychological one.)

I think it’s obvious that cravings are not sufficient for addictions. We crave many things, but it’s an abuse of language to say that we’re addicted to them. I crave knowledge, but I can’t be said to be addicted to it in the way that I was addicted to Ambien. I once had a three-year-long craving to listen to a single album (AC/DC’s Black Ice): I listened to it several times a week for three solid years. But that wasn’t an addiction in the relevant sense, either. I’m very skeptical of the extension of the concept of “addiction” to behavioral contexts without a pharmacological component, e.g., sex addiction, porn addiction, shopping addiction, etc. In my view, “addiction” is a specifically pharmacological concept involving the ingestion of a physical substance and a neurobiological mechanism that produces physical dependence on the substance.

A final observation: I get the sense that the addiction literature has not fully taken on board the possibility that prescription drugs are, like “illicit” drugs, highly addictive, psychotropic substances.** The literature, then, seems fixated on addictions to alcohol, heroin, cocaine, cigarettes, and the like, and has much less to say about FDA-approved drugs–neuroleptics, anti-depressants, stimulants (including caffeine), benzodiazepines, SSRIs, and so on. That seems to me a massive omission. If anything, it’s the latter category that needs more sustained philosophical attention than the former. I hope to give it some more attention in future posts here.

*A notable exception to this rule is Owen Flanagan of Duke University. See Flanagan’s “What Is It Like to be an Addict?” in Jeffrey Poland and George Graham, Addiction and Responsibility.

**Flanagan is, once again, an exception to the general rule. See the preceding note.

Postscript, March 2, 2015: A simpler and more obvious counter-example to the “craving conception” of addiction just hit me. Suppose that X is addicted to a psychotropic medication, and simply forgets to take it at the appointed time. Surely forgetting to take X is incompatible with craving X. QED.

Anyone who doubts the supposition (that psychotropic medications are addictive) can either check the Physicians’ Desk Reference or Peter Breggin’s Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal for clinical information, or Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic for narrative/anecdotal accounts.

Obviously, an even simpler counter-example to the craving conception of addiction is the (to me, obvious) phenomenological fact that people can be addicted to psychotropic drugs, experience no craving for the drug whatsoever, and willfully “go off their meds” when they decide for whatever reason to do so. The example in the post is, after all, just an elaborate way of saying that.

According to Jon Elster, “All addictive behaviors seem to go together with some form of craving. The idea of craving–the most important explanatory concept in the study of addiction–is complex” (Jon Elster, Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior, p. 62). I agree that the concept of craving is complex, but the rest of Elster’s claim–an axiom of the literature on addiction–seems hopelessly wrong to me. It either ignores the possibility (and reality) of iatrogenically-induced addiction to psychotropic medication, or else consigns it to a different, and ultimately marginal conception of addiction that plays almost no role in the sexiest, most prestigious books and journals. The literature doesn’t yet seem to have taken seriously the possibility that doctors can impose addictions on unwilling and unwitting patients.  The very definition of “addiction” manages to get doctors off the hook, so to speak, and manages to blame the victims.

For another couple of examples of the craving assumption, check out Merle Spriggs’s “Autonomy and Addiction,” (PDF) especially pp. 6-7, along with the reference to Morse (n.42).

Postscript, September 28, 2015: I’ve been in the market for a therapist lately. To find the right one, I made an initial list of seven who seemed suitable, drawn mostly from the overlap between the Psychology Today “Find a Therapist” listing and the one for my insurance carrier. One turned out not to be available, one never responded (not the first time), and the conduct and demeanor of a third struck me as off-putting and unprofessional.

So I made appointments with the remaining four, three of whom turned out to be excellent, but one of whom, a PsyD (for whatever that’s worth), struck me, frankly, as a hack. Within short order, Dr. Hack had driven the intake session down (what seemed to me) an irrelevant byroad, and had decided to conduct an aggressive interrogation designed to uncover my flaws as a person. The “flaws” tumbled out, one after another, all based on inferences that no human being could legitimately have made about a stranger within twenty or thirty minutes of meeting him.

It didn’t take Dr. Hack long to conclude that I was clinically depressed and needed to go on an anti-depressant. My affect, Dr. Hack informed me, was “flat,” and that flatness was an infallible indication of depression. It hadn’t occurred to Dr. Hack that perhaps the “flatness” of my affect was a response to the flatness of his personality. When I protested that I didn’t think I was depressed (at all)–didn’t feel depressed, didn’t meet the clinical criteria of depression–I was abruptly told that that was precisely how depression manifested itself in men (as opposed to women): men denied their depression in bouts of irritation and rage; women “stayed in bed all day.” The latter had become the societal stereotype of depression, Dr. Hack informed me, but since atypical depression is still depression, I’d have to accept a diagnosis of depression, whether I liked it or not. And that meant going on an anti-depressant as a condition of working with Dr. Hack, too. Dr. Hack magnanimously allowed that he wasn’t qualified to tell me precisely which anti-depressant at which dose; that was a job for a psychiatrist. But the bottom line was: no anti-depressant, no therapy.

That made things easy, since I had no intention either of going on an anti-depressant or of working with Dr. Hack. Bottom line: I unloaded my co-pay and got the hell out of there.

I tell the story because I think it tells us something about the therapy profession today as well as about its relationship to psychotropic medications.

For one thing, I think therapists suffer from a real problem of professionalism. Even when they get PsyD’s, a supposedly practical doctorate, some of them don’t seem to learn the basics of professional etiquette. Going back to one of the therapists I called before I met Dr. Hack: it’s not kosher to ignore a legitimate query regarding professional services you’ve advertised. You may not want a certain client, even based on the message they leave on your voice mail, but it’s not legitimate to ignore them as though they’d never called you at all.

Therapists like to think of themselves as “health care practitioners,” but don’t seem to have grasped that behavior like that is flatly unacceptable in a health care profession. Incidentally, for a profession so eager to regulate the rest of the world, it’s amazing how proprietary they can be about their supposed right to refuse service (or refuse to contact potential clients) on the basis of whims and hunches about X’s “sounding like” the proverbial “problem client.” In conversation outside of clinical contexts, I’ve heard therapists tell me, sotto voce, “Oh, I stay the hell away from clients like those.” Fine: you have the right to stay away from a certain kind of client. You don’t have the moral right to delete a legitimate query from an unwanted client without further ado.

A second aspect of the same problem: the rush to clinical judgment. As a rule, no therapist can (legitimately) give a DSM-5 diagnosis within thirty minutes of the first intake session. Maybe there are clinical geniuses out there–and/or sufficiently simple cases–that are exceptions to that rule, but otherwise, it seems to me a pretty clear rule.

A corollary of the rule is that you shouldn’t be reaching for the prescription pad half-way before the first session is done. Yes, there are some obvious exceptions to that rule, but the exceptions don’t find their way that often to the average therapy office.

Further implication: prescription is a medical judgment. That means that if you’re going to prescribe a psychotropic medication, you’d better have done a history and physical on your client/patient in the medical sense. If you don’t know how to do a history/physical–and most therapists don’t–then you have no business talking about prescriptions. By “talking about prescriptions,” I mean: saying anything that asserts or implies that the client needs a prescription for some psychotropic medication. At best, a non-MD has the professional right to refer the client out to an MD, but that’s it. Otherwise, my view is that they should keep their mouths shut on the subject.

One more implication: Given the way graduate programs in psychology are currently structured, no PsyD (qua PsyD) ever has any business talking about prescriptions.  Maybe some day, PsyD’s and Ph.D’s will be educated so as to know what they’re doing when it comes to psycho-pharmacology–my friend Ray Raad has made some interesting arguments for that–but that day hasn’t arrived yet, and won’t arrive anytime soon. Until then, I’d prescribe silence.

The mental health professions have expanded the concepts of “mental illness” and “addiction” far beyond what those terms mean in ordinary discourse. Maybe we ought to consider medicalizing the overprescription of psychotropic medications by mental health care practitioners. I’d be interested to see the profession’s reaction to the proposal that overprescription is itself a mental illness or an addiction. At that point, it seems to me, the old adage “physician heal thyself” would come to have new and revolutionary meaning. A thought for DSM 6.

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.

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!”

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.

CFP: Ninth Annual Felician Conference on Ethics and Political Philosophy

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CALL FOR PAPERS

 The ninth annual Felician Conference on Ethics and Political Philosophy will be held at the Rutherford Campus of Felician College
223 Montross Ave
Rutherford, NJ 07070
on Saturday, April 25, 2015, 9 am – 6 pm

 Plenary Speaker:

James Stacey Taylor (The College of New Jersey)

“Markets in Political Votes: A Moral Defense”

 Submissions on any topic in moral and political philosophy are welcome, not exceeding 25 minutes’ presentation time (approximately 3,000 words). Please send submissions via email in format suitable for blind review by March 1, 2015 to: felicianethicsconference at gmail.com

Submissions are invited for a special session on topics at the intersection of ethics, counseling psychology, and psychiatry.

If you have any questions, please contact Irfan Khawaja, khawajai at felician dot edu. For more information, go to the website of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs.

Roderick Long on “Reverse Racism”

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For obvious reasons, racism and reverse racism are very much on everyone’s minds nowadays. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to blog on those topics right now (or blog on Ferguson); I’m too much in the thick of end-of-semester grading and the like. But Roderick Long has an interesting post on the topic at his blog, to which I’ve offered a bunch of typo-laden comments.

Having thought about the issue over the past few days, I really do disagree with Roderick in some fundamental ways. I don’t think “reverse racism” is a useful or even entirely coherent concept, and don’t think his thought-experiments prove what he takes them to prove. In fact, I don’t think thought-experiments are a particularly helpful way to think about racism in the first place: in my view, something about the subject demands an “ecological” or “in vivo” rather than thought-experimental approach. In other words, the topic demands engagement with the living, breathing complexity of real-live experiences of racism, not with thought-experiments that abstract away from them. I also think that if the topic is racism, as it should be, Roderick’s focus on black-white relations in the U.S. is overly narrow, and problematically distortive of our thinking. It doesn’t even capture race relations in the U.S., much less race relations beyond American borders.

In particular, Roderick’s discussion ignores anti-Semitism altogether, a topic on my mind because I’m at work on a review of Neil Kressel’s “Sons of Pigs and Apes”: Muslim Antisemitism and the Conspiracy of Silence (forthcoming in Reason Papers, February 2015). I agree with parts, and disagree with other parts, of Kressel’s argument, but I think his book does a good job of exposing the defects of what he calls “antisemitism minimization strategies.” Unfortunately, though he doesn’t explicitly discuss antisemitism (because he doesn’t discuss it) I think Roderick’s minimizations of the moral wrongness of “reverse racism” amount, whether wittingly or not, to something like the minimization strategies that Kressel criticizes. Insofar as Roderick can be read as disagreeing with Kressel, I agree with Kressel.

But this all pretty telegraphic, I realize. Blame my day job for that. Back to grading some intensely mediocre papers on aesthetics.

Crime and emergencies (part 2): reconciling self-defense and gun control

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For obvious reasons, people are talking a lot about guns nowadays. I’m a big fan of gun control, and make no bones about being one. It’s always seemed to me that gun control follows from a commitment to the idea of government as having a legitimate monopoly on the use of force, and not being an anarchist, I endorse the relevant commitment. I’m also committed to a right of self-defense, which in my view entails a right to the most efficacious means of self-defense compatible with the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force. As far as life in the U.S. is concerned, as I see it, that entails a circumscribed (hence regulated) right to acquire firearms for purposes of self-defense. In other countries where guns are themselves scarce, I would have no objection to an outright ban on the acquisition of firearms by private citizens. But guns aren’t scarce in the United States, and there is no justified or realistic way of banning them outright. (For a discussion of the perils and problematics of weapons control, check out my inadvertently timely Reason Papers piece, “The Contested Legacies of Waco.” For an excellent discussion of the empirical issues regarding gun control, see James Jacobs, Can Gun Control Work?)

In a democracy, a political position is only as strong as the weakest link in the constituency that supports it. Put another way, a political position is only as strong as its supporters’ ability to deal with the strongest objection to it. One of the reasons why gun control has done so poorly in the U.S. (in the sense of not commanding adequate political support) is undoubtedly that the NRA has too much power. But another reason is the sheer cluelessness of so many of those who defend it.

The cluelessness concerns a relatively obvious question. Suppose you believe in the justifiability of gun control. Still, people have a right to self-defense. If there are lots of guns out there, and lots of criminals with the desire to use them against the innocent, how do we ensure that our justifiable desire to regulate the sale and acquisition of firearms doesn’t subvert the equally justifiable desire to sell or acquire them in the exercise of a right of self-defense? That’s a problem that requires a solution. It’s not a rhetorical question that one can evade or dismiss as having been manufactured by the NRA or Smith & Wesson.

I realize that the desire for self-defense can be abused or exaggerated via grandiose superhero fantasies, errors of probabilistic reasoning, confirmation bias, hasty generalization and so on, but so can the desire for regulation. When all is said and done, it is just patently obvious that if we have a right of self-defense, we need access to the means of its exercise, and if criminals have firearms, non-criminals need (regulated) access to them as well in order to defend themselves against armed criminals. But no. Defenders of gun control have decided that what we’re to do when faced with armed and dangerous criminals is to reach for our phones and call 911. Presumably, the criminals will give us the time to do this, and all will go well as we wait for the police to arrive. If we cannot manage to call 911, well then, we’re out of luck. We must acquiesce in whatever the criminals want and let them have their way. Even Hobbes doesn’t go as far as that in Leviathan, but that hasn’t stopped defenders of gun control from recommending subservience to the commands of those who wield force against the rest of us. The resort to quixotic, primitive denial of obvious facts about crime has, in certain quarters, become the epitome of “liberal” sophistication.

Consider a column in this morning’s New York Times by Gail Collins, easily the most clueless of the Times’s columnists. I happen to agree with much of what she says in defense of gun control. Then, predictably, we reach this set of claims:

And while we have many, many, many things to worry about these days, the prospect of an armed stranger breaking through the front door and murdering the family is not high on the list. Unless the intruder was actually a former abusive spouse or boyfriend, in which case a background check would have been extremely helpful in keeping him unarmed.

Really? How about an armed stranger breaking in through the back door? Or a window? Doesn’t it matter where one lives? Maybe Gail Collins feels safe in her neighborhood, but does that mean that everyone should feel equally safe in theirs?

As it happens, an intruder tried to break into my apartment this past Sunday night or Monday morning through the living room window. I was asleep in my unlocked bedroom a few yards away. He or they didn’t manage to break all the way in, and didn’t ever get inside; they just managed to cut the screen of the window with a box cutter, and then to discover that it probably wasn’t worth breaking into this particular apartment, possibly because there was so little in it worth stealing. That didn’t stop them (I’m assuming it was the same people) from successfully breaking into a number of other dwellings in my neighborhood that same night.

Since the local police blotter hasn’t yet come out, I don’t know whether the intruders in question were armed, and don’t know whether anyone managed to confront them or get injured in the process. But people are regularly robbed in my neighborhood, and occasionally those robberies go wrong; when they do, the victims are sometimes shot. Rapes take place here with alarming frequency. The cars in the parking lot of my apartment complex have regularly been broken into during the year that I’ve lived here. On a more trivial but rather annoying note, my New York Times (like the Luddite I am, I still get the paper version) is stolen at least once every two weeks. Lesson: crime is real.

Though this Monday’s incident was my first break in in this particular neighborhood, it’s not the first time I’ve had to deal with a break-in. It’s the third. On one occasion, someone tried to break into my bedroom via the window as I was sleeping: the window in question was maybe a yard away from me, and it was unnerving to be awakened by the sound of someone forcing the window so close to my ear. I wasn’t armed, but I had no choice but to confront him. There really wasn’t time to find the phone and call the police. I guess I was threatening enough to scare him away—I must have been reading Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or something–but I’d rather have been armed. On another occasion, I happened on someone in the process of breaking into my car (luckily, he was too busy trying to steal it to notice me). In that case, I was able to call the police, and they happened to get there in less than a minute, but as they apprehended the suspect, he made it clear to everyone that he meant me harm beyond the theft of my car (he came out and said so). I’ve never been carjacked myself, but I’ve seen a carjacking take place at a hundred yards’ distance, and a good friend of mine has been carjacked. A distant friend of mine was put in the hospital after being robbed, and the spouse of someone I know was murdered in a robbery. (P.S., on a different note: I’ve also faced a menacing individual wielding a gun in a park–to this day I’m not sure whether the gun was real or fake–so I know what it’s like to be on the terror-laden receiving end of what seemed like imminent gun violence. Having a gun of my own would not have helped in that instance, and using one would probably have led to a blood bath.)

None of this (I think) is particularly remarkable as far as suburban New Jersey experience is concerned; I don’t think I’m some kind of wild statistical crime-experience outlier. What I don’t understand is why such experiences are so distant from people like Gail Collins as to be unreal to them. But alas, they’re not unreal. They happen, and they have to figure into the discussion about gun control with a degree of respect for the victims that liberals like Gail Collins conspicuously seem to lack.

Here is another example, also from The New York Times, admittedly at a higher level of sophistication and respect for facts than Collins’s column. It’s by Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, and (at least indirectly) an erstwhile graduate school mentor of mine.

Our discussions typically start from the right to own a gun, go on to ask how, if at all, that right should be limited, and wind up with intractable disputes about the balance between the right and the harm that can come from exercising it. I suggest that we could make more progress if each of us asked a more direct and personal question: Should I own a gun?

A gun is a tool, and we choose tools based on their function. The primary function of a gun is to kill or injure people or animals. In the case of people, the only reason I might have to shoot them — or threaten to do so — is that they are immediately threatening serious harm. So a first question about owning a gun is whether I’m likely to be in a position to need one to protect human life. A closely related question is whether, if I were in such a position, the gun would be available and I would be able to use it effectively.

Unless you live in (or frequent) dangerous neighborhoods or have family or friends likely to threaten you, it’s very unlikely that you’ll need a gun for self-defense. Further, counterbalancing any such need is the fact that guns are dangerous. If I have one loaded and readily accessible in an emergency (and what good is it if I don’t?), then there’s a non-negligible chance that it will lead to great harm. A gun at hand can easily push a family quarrel, a wave of depression or a child’s curiosity in a fatal direction.

Gutting at least recognizes the possibility that those who live in dangerous neighborhoods may need a gun for self-defense. But he makes the point in passing, with grudging reluctance, and without feeling the need to ask some obvious questions about the implications of his own admission.

Gutting’s claim implies that if you do live in a “dangerous neighborhood” there is some likelihood that you might need a gun for self-defense (assuming that you get the training to use it, etc.) At least, it’s rational in some contexts to think you do. But what exactly is a “dangerous neighborhood”? A “dangerous neighborhood” is presumably where the armed criminals are. So where is that? And how does one figure it out?

One could look at published rates of crime or look at crime blotters. But crime rates change and crime blotters are statistically unreliable snapshots of reported crimes during a given week. (And reported crime is not crime.) Further, criminals are not universally stupid or lacking in means of transportation: they have an entrepreneurial attitude toward criminality. No entrepreneur worth her salt would open a small business based on the kind of information that determines conventional attitudes toward “dangerous” or “safe” neighborhoods. Decisions of that kind require refined and intensive local knowledge and a measure of sheer guesswork. They’re also highly fallible. Given that, putting aside obvious mistakes or errors of judgment, there is no way to get on some epistemic high horse and proclaim that one ought only to open a psychotherapy office in a “psychotherapy-heavy neighborhood,” or a restaurant in a “dining-out neighborhood,” or a grocery store in a “grocery neighborhood.” Judgments about where to open a business are highly tentative and fluid, mostly vindicated by the results of the experiment rather than by some antecedent facts obviously available to everyone at t.

The same is true of crime. There is no such thing as a neighborhood that is “dangerous” now and forever. Danger fluctuates. Criminals migrate.  Yesterday’s dangerous neighborhood becomes safe. Yesterday’s safe neighborhood becomes dangerous. I am not sure where Gutting gets his armchair sociologist’s picture of “dangerous neighborhoods” sporting banners that say “Dangerous Neighborhood” above them. In my experience, such banners do not exist. If you want to insist on the concept of “dangerous neighborhood,” you’d have to say that the whole of the New York/New Jersey Metro Area is a “dangerous neighborhood.” I can’t think of any location in New Jersey that I would regard as somehow immune to criminal violence. If that’s so, Gutting’s “dangerous neighborhood” advice is a pious gun control vacuity. It gives no clear advice about where one can legitimately own a gun because it appeals to a concept that has no clear criteria of application.

I’ve visited neighborhoods in southwestern Vermont where people leave their doors unlocked at night or when they leave their homes because they regard themselves as living in “safe neighborhoods.” But their safe neighborhoods would become dangerous the moment it occurred to criminals that their inhabitants were complacent enough to regard their neighborhoods as “safe.” No one would be naïve enough to believe that Vermont is a crime-free zone. Crime takes place there. That it takes place more in some areas of the state than others doesn’t mean that those statistical distributions are facts of nature. They can change without warning. Most people would encourage people who don’t lock their doors to rethink their complacency. I’d do the same for those who think that guns are obviously superfluous in supposedly “safe” neighborhoods.

No neighborhood is so safe that you can, without further thought, leave yourself totally vulnerable to criminal depredation in one. Any neighborhood could be a dangerous one the day the right criminal shows up in it. So whether one “needs” a gun or not for self-defense is far more complicated a matter than Gutting admits. He himself piles up the complications for his view without seeing that they undercut the supposedly clear-cut claim he makes that most of us do not need guns.

Until defenders of gun control wise up and deal with the problem of crime as an unpredictable emergency that could strike anyone, gun control has no chance of success in this country. In this respect, its defenders are almost as much to blame for its political failure as its opponents.

Postscript, April 25, 2016: This article about crime in San Francisco is a nice confirmation of the point I make in the preceding few paragraphs, not that I’m suggesting that the criminals described in it should necessarily be shot.