Tag Archives: ethics

Some thoughts on Ferguson

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It’s more than a little irritating to spend two weeks in a socialist dictatorship that your own country spent the better part of a decade trying to overthrow, only to come home and find that there’s more tension at home than anything you encountered under the Sandinistas. I spent two weeks in Nicaragua with ten ‘diverse’ American undergraduates—three of them African-Americans, in a country where people of African descent are a miniscule minority—and didn’t encounter a single remotely untoward racial incident in the time I spent there. Then I come home, look at the front page of the newspaper, and discover that St. Louis and environs are exploding in race riots. Either this means that my brief absence from the US is apt to lead to a deterioration of race relations here, or it means that the United States is a seriously fucked-up country which hasn’t, in the two-plus centuries of its existence, been able to come to terms with the fact that some people are darker (or lighter) than others. I’m not about to become a Sandinista or move to Managua over current events in Missouri, but really, this is a bit much.

I count race and racism as among my official academic interests, and I’ll admit that there are days when the topic has an abiding intellectual interest for me, but at some level, I find the specifically American fixation on race and racism infantile, tedious, and boring. As a non-black and non-white person of seasonally-varying complexion, I sometimes wonder whether black and white Americans have any idea how narcissistic and neurotic the whole drama of American race relations looks to an outsider. And I regard myself as an outsider. The only interest it—the contemporary American race drama—has in the year 2014 is the interest that a bizarre and primitive tribe might have to a cultural anthropologist, or that a deeply neurotic person might have to a psychologist or psychiatrist. The pathologies seem interesting at first, but become wearing with time.

I say this as preface to a confession of sorts–namely, that almost everything I have to say about Ferguson is motivated by an unpleasant combination of boredom and contempt. I’m too suspicious of the racism and arrogance of our militarized police departments to want to cut them any slack. But I’m too suspicious of the mindlessness of identity politics to want to sympathize indiscriminately with anyone’s high-decibel list of racial grievances. It sounds self-serving, but I’m inclined to think that my ‘biases’ cancel one another out, and that my ennui gives me a kind of anthropological detachment from current events that approximates objectivity. Call it the doxastic equivalent of the ‘liberty of indifference.’ I recommend the approach to anyone willing to give it a try.

The truth is that there is very little to say about Ferguson, because we know so little about the incident that gave rise to the riots, and because so few of us know anything about the tactics required successfully to deal with a riot, either. Much of what is being said about Ferguson is either irresponsible nonsense or irrelevant filler, or both, and would be better left unsaid.

A bare-bones recap of the facts: The precipitating incident in the Ferguson riots is the shooting death of one Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in as-yet undetermined circumstances for as-yet undetermined reasons. Brown was black, and Wilson is white. There was a small handful of eyewitnesses to the shooting (presumably including Wilson), but it’s not entirely clear what they saw. One prominent story has it that Brown had has hands in the air in surrender when he was shot, and one story I read suggested that the police callously let Brown die without medical assistance. But eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and I so far have not seen a detailed account of exactly what it is that the eyewitnesses even thought they saw. It’s interesting that though “activists” have insisted on the disclosure of Wilson’s name—and the media has published long, pointless pseudo-biographies of both Brown and Wilson—fewer people have insisted on knowing the names and biographical details of the eyewitnesses who claim to have seen the shooting, not that either set of disclosures would help (or has helped) anyone outside of the evidential loop figure out what happened at the scene.

Brown has been accused of robbing a store before Wilson’s having confronted and shot him; Wilson in turn has been accused of having murdered Brown in cold blood. Given the presumption of innocence, neither accusation can be dismissed or taken at face value: both might be true, neither might be true, or one might be true and the other false. So far, no evidence conclusively shows which of these possibilities was the case. In any case, the official police story is that Brown was stopped not on suspicion of robbery but for blocking traffic by jaywalking, so even if he did rob the convenience store, it’s not clear that his doing so played any role in Wilson’s shooting him. (Of course, it’s not clear that it didn’t, either. That’s the thing about unclarity: it leaves things unclear.)

The riots, though catalyzed by the Brown shooting, are (as riots typically are) a response to a long series of prior provocations (or perceived provocations) by the police. The grievances voiced by the community against the police—a history of heavy-handed treatment and racialized harassment—seem plausible to me, given my own experiences with the police in the NY-NJ Metro Area (I’ve never been to St. Louis, much less Ferguson), but they probably contain a mixture of truth and falsity; most of them are anonymous, most of them describe events that took place a long time ago, and no one has any rigorous way of checking the bona fides of anyone making the relevant accusations. Nor do the accusers have any expectation of being checked. In any case, even if the grievances are true, it doesn’t follow, and probably isn’t true, that the rioters are motivated by the desire to respond to or rectify them.

The heavily militarized response to the riots seems at first glance to be disproportionate to the rioting—the rationale for the recent curfew seems particularly feeble—but for all that you or I know, some of it has a plausible rationale. It’s hard for a non-expert to tell exactly what counts as proportionality in response to firebomb-wielding rioters. Of course, it’s also irresistible for a certain kind of military wanna-be to use military hardware that is just sitting there and almost asking to be used, whether or not there is a need to use it. Supply sometimes creates its own demand, in goods as in bads.

It’s understandable why the people directly involved in the events might be overwhelmed by their passions and might be apt to fly off the handle about what’s going on around them. If you’ve been racially harassed by the police, you know that the police are apt to harass people like you, and so, you’ll be particularly angry about what happened to Michael Brown: he could have been you–well, at least if you abstract from the possibility that he was in the middle of a robbery at the time he was shot (you would never rob a convenience store, and the possibility that he did so is just a ‘distraction’ from the ‘fact’ that he was ‘murdered’). So you’ll be apt to take to the streets in protest of his “murder,” and want people to join in your rage.

If your store has just been looted, vandalized, or destroyed, you’ve just lost your livelihood, at least temporarily, and it will be maddening to hear people sympathize with the protesters*, who will all sound to you like a bunch of looting, vandalizing whiners. You’ll want law and order to prevail, and prevail now. It won’t matter to you that protest is a legal activity, that those engaged in it are acting within the law, and that it’s incoherent for law-enforcement officers to arrest people for acting within the law. In that case, what difference would there be between rioters and police officers?

If you’re a police officer trying unsuccessfully to discriminate between rioters and law-abiding protesters, you’ll wonder why the protesters can’t do a better job of steering clear of the rioters, and you’ll wonder why there has suddenly developed a moral imperative for supposedly innocent protesters to be on the streets after, say, midnight to protest alongside bomb-throwers. The only truly innocent protester—you’ll think—watches the riots on TV and writes angry letters to the editor of the local paper after the fact. And so you’ll want a curfew, along with free rein to arrest or shoot anyone who violates the curfew. It might briefly occur to you that this is the kind of thing that is only supposed to happen in distant, primitive places with unpronounceable names like Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and well, France. But that’s a pretty academic thought to have in the middle of a riot, and in my experience, criminal justice majors don’t have many of those, even in college classrooms.

If you put all three of these groups in a small, fraught, racialized space, and throw the press and a bunch of politicians into the mix—along with rogue elements within each group, and a few from some other groups—they will invariably collide with one another on the streets in a tragic-comic, Americanized re-enactment of a lite version of part I of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Which is what’s happening.

What is more difficult to understand is why people at a distance from Ferguson feel the itching need to weigh in on one or the other ‘side’ of the dispute without knowing—or apparently caring about knowing—what actually happened in the particular incidents that supposedly generated the ‘dispute’. Not that anyone, as of August 17, could conceivably know that. Already people are saying (as they said, and still say, about Trayvon Martin) that Michael Brown was “murdered.” But when was the trial? Already people are saying that he “robbed” a convenience store. When was that trial? (How many people have even seen the video?) One side thinks that the cause of justice is promoted by opposing the release of the video that supposedly shows Brown robbing the convenience store, on the grounds that the release of the video would “roil” the community. So facticity is to be sacrificed to communal passion. The other side thinks the cause of justice is promoted by imposing a curfew on Ferguson, then claiming that the curfew is not to be ‘enforced’ but offered as a series of exhortations, albeit by police officers wielding military hardware, and admittedly unable to differentiate between criminals of law-abiding citizens. These are the people who profess to be worried about the credibility of the police (“the world is watching”), find the militarization of civilian police work “unacceptable,” but reluctantly decide that civilian police work has to be militarized after all. So liberty is to be sacrificed to expediency, and expediency is to be upheld by incoherent rationalizations.

It’s said that truth is the first casualty of war, and that Ferguson looks like a war zone. I’m inclined to say that the first casualty of race war is the desire for truth, and that Ferguson is now ground zero in this country’s epistemic decline into a nation of race-based misology. What we need right now is not curfews per se (or the threat of lawsuits), but a curfew on declarations about Ferguson. There is little to say about Ferguson, but a lot to ask. In my next post, I’ll pose a few of the questions that in my view have not generally been asked about Ferguson and related topics, but need asking—and when the evidence comes in, need answering. But not before then.

*I had originally written “rioters,” but I meant to write “protesters.”

Honking “Go” at a Dangerous Intersection (part 2)

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This post, obviously, is a follow-up to part 1, and presupposes what I said there. In post 1, I said I’d discuss some of the philosophical ramifications of the claims I’d made, one set bearing on moral epistemology, one on ethics, one on political philosophy.

This first one is on moral epistemology: I think the ethics of driving, and of traffic generally, is a remarkably fertile and underappreciated source of data for ethical reflection and knowledge. Part of it is that so many of us do so much of it, and anything we spend that much time doing is apt to generate its own ethical issues and reveal something about us. Part of it, though, is that driving is a self-contained mini-universe of activity with its own distinctive aims and norms. Being self-contained, it functions as a kind of naturalistic version of experimental ethics, which is why there’s such a gigantic social scientific literature devoted to it–spanning economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, among other disciplines. Being normatively distinctive, I’m inclined to think that driving is something like a ‘practice’ in the MacIntyrean sense of that term.

By a practice I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. Notre Dame University Press, 1997, p. 187.

Arguably, driving is not ‘cooperative’ in MacIntyre’s intended sense; every driver has his or her own individually-determined route and destination. But we might think of it as cooperative in the sense that good drivers cooperate to maintain a good environment for driving, however individualistic their activities. (So driving has an individualistic ‘common good’.) Again, arguably, driving doesn’t aim exclusively at internal goods–efficiency and safety, I suppose, being “external” to the virtues in MacIntyre’s sense– but it seems to me a defect in MacIntyre’s definition that it lays such weight on that unanalyzed notion (“internal good”). The rest of the definition applies in a fairly straightforward way, however.

One of the distinctive things about driving is the combination of rule-governed and virtue- (or vice-) governed activity it involves. The rules of the road are, in principle, determinate and clear, and the cases in which they’re not are interesting ones for precisely that reason. Further, the rules are an interesting study in defeasibly rigorous norms—Objectivists would say “contextually absolute principles”—that are thoroughly teleological in character. In other words, traffic rules are not typically side-constraints in Nozick’s sense (Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 28-30): pace Nozickian side-constraints, safety, as a goal, is “built into” the constraints. Pace Nozick, however, it doesn’t follow that the goal-oriented character of traffic norms necessarily entails a maximizing structure, or entails some form of utilitarianism (or for that matter, a utilitarianism of rights). I’m not denying that some traffic norms have a maximizing/utilitarian form. It’s possible that many do. My point is that many don’t involve a maximizing/utilitarian structure, or at least need not be interpreted that way, despite not being Nozickian side-constraints.

To continue the original thought: however determinate the rules of the road, however, they leave room for the exercise of the virtues (and vices). There is, in other words, an ethos to good driving that is not reducible to the legal rules of the road. This ethos exhibits a certain degree of cultural relativity, but the relativity is constrained by a conception of moral objectivity that makes it possible to say that certain traffic rules are irrational by any standard, that certain action-types are immoral by any standard, that certain traits are virtues or vices no matter who or where you are, and that certain societies of roads and drivers are just dysfunctional regardless of their self-conception.

Having said that, I’d also say that driving counts as a counterexample to the commonly-held communitarian view that ‘rights’ can be eliminated in favor of, some other norm like the virtues. I would challenge any communitarian (or MacIntyrean, or Hegelian, etc.) to produce a full ethico-politics of driving that omitted reference to individual rights. To make the task more manageable: try coming up with an ethics of driving that does away with the idea of a ‘right of way’.

There’s more to say, but the bottom line is that the normative structure exemplified by (a large proper subset of) traffic rules is not, I think, easily characterizable in contemporary meta-ethical language: unexceptional but within a specified context; unexceptional within a context but defeasible and revisable; rights-oriented but also virtue-oriented and virtue-encouraging; teleological but non-maximizing; culturally relative (within limits) and yet objective. In this way, traffic rules are more like truth-conducive norms of epistemic justification, or the principles of good health, than they are like Nozickian side-constraints or maximizing principles. That fact gives them enormous (but underappreciated) philosophical interest, and makes them a potentially valuable source of moral knowledge (cf. Nozick, Anarchy, footnote to p. 29).

For reasons like the preceding, I’m inclined to think that ‘traffic ethics’ is, or could become, analogous to ‘sports ethics’ in moral philosophy, becoming a kind of sub-topic or -discipline of its own in just the way and for just the reasons that sports ethics has become one. There’s been some discussion of traffic ethics in the professional philosophical literature–mostly, as far as I can tell, involving speed limits, insurance, and issues pertaining to climate change, e.g., the desirability of hybrid or electric cars—but the book that really alerted me to the potential for the idea of an ethics of traffic was Tom Vanderbilt’s 2008 book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), a masterpiece of philosophical journalism that doesn’t, for better or worse (and insofar as I remember), make reference to a single work of philosophy. I highly recommend it, and look forward to the day when what it says can better be integrated with work in moral and political philosophy.

More next time on the selfishness (or not) of traffic assholes, rights, and a framework for traffic utopia.

Honking “Go” at a Dangerous Intersection (part 1)

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I think most people would agree that it’s not just wrong, but a rights violation, falsely to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Both the claim and the slogan that goes with it come from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s opinion in the 1919 Supreme Court case, Schenck vs. United States. Why it’s a rights violation is less obvious than the fact that it is. I’ve seen libertarians try to explain why on the grounds that the person engaged in the yelling violates the property rights of the theater owners: he doesn’t own the theater, and violates the property rights of the owners in effect by speaking out of turn. But that can’t be right. I’d insist that a rights violation takes place even if the theater owner himself does the yelling, even if the ownership of the theater is disputed, and even if the theater’s current owner came to have legal title to the theater through malfeasance. It also takes place if the theater was “publicly owned,” and so, didn’t (in my view, at least) have a clear-cut owner. What’s rights violative is the speech act of falsely inducing a panic, regardless of who owns the place where the speech act takes place.

Someone’s falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater seems so unlikely an occurrence as to make the whole issue seem academic or legalistic. How often (one might ask) do rights violations of this kind really happen? How often do people falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater or some equivalent? Actually, I think rights violations of the “falsely yelling fire” variety happen all the time—every day, thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of times a day. We don’t notice them, I suppose, because we tend to take them for granted, and we take them for granted because they don’t, overtly speaking, look like falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. What I have in mind is the phenomenon that supplies the title of this post. Think about the asshole (and I’m afraid that’s the only word that fits) who honks his horn at you at a merge, or a yield, or a left turn at a traffic light, urging you into danger in order to suit his desire to get to his destination about 30 seconds faster than he might otherwise. Like the person yelling “fire,” the honking asshole wants to induce panic in you at your expense—or pressure or intimidate you into action—not necessarily for fun, but to save time on his commute.

Those of us who drive a lot in north Jersey encounter this phenomenon (and phenomena like it) every day, often twice a day—on the way to work, and back. Consider two examples, which took place at different but similar merges on my way to work last week.

(1) I was about to merge onto a ramp that leads to the Garden State Parkway. I confronted a yield sign, and a car was in fact coming my way, so I yielded to it. But the driver behind me thought I shouldn’t be yielding. Evidently, “yielding” was not part of her ontology. So she honked good and loud at me, urging me onto the ramp, and straight toward the oncoming car. Had I followed her “advice,” I would (with nearly 100% certainty) have hit the oncoming car, not that this seemed to matter to her. What mattered is that I had yielded to oncoming traffic, wasting a good three seconds of her precious time.

(2) I was about to merge onto Route 46 East. It was morning rush hour, and oncoming traffic coming down the highway was heavy. When it comes to merges of this kind (especially on Route 46), it’s often hard to gauge (and easy to miscalculate) how fast oncoming traffic is coming, partly because no one obeys the speed limit, and partly because the sight lines are terrible (you have to crane your head backward in a tortuous manner to be able to see oncoming traffic). I saw a car in the distance coming my way, and figured that it was both too close and coming too fast to permit a safe merge, so I decided to wait for it to go by before I merged onto the highway. Not good enough for the guy behind me, who obviously thought that I ought to adopt his danger- and speed-happy risk calculus, rush into the highway, and risk an accident so that he could get to his all-important destination twelve seconds faster than my driverly pusillanimity permitted.

As I said before, this sort of thing is commonplace in New Jersey.

Here’s my claim: if it’s a rights violation falsely to yell “fire” in a crowded theater, then episodes (1) and (2) above describe rights violations as well. They may not look like yelling fire in a crowded theater, but causally and normatively, they amount to the same thing. The honking of the horn in both cases is analogous to falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. The danger into which the honker is urging me is analogous to the dangers created by a stampede in a crowded theater. (Incidentally, I don’t think it’s central to Holmes’s claim that the theater be crowded. A half-full theater might do just as well.)

There are differences between the cases, but I think the differences are relatively unimportant, normatively speaking. Honking is not literally a speech act, but it’s close enough to one. Honking is probably not as apt to induce a panicked response as falsely yelling “fire,” but it’s close enough. The person yelling “fire” is doing it out of malice or for fun, whereas the honker is honking out of impatience. But part of the motivation for impatience in the context of driving is the sense of pleasure that the impatient person gets at fast and reckless driving (cf. Plato’s Gorgias on this general phenomenon). When he honks at you, it’s not just because you’re taking up his time per se, but because you constitute an impediment to the literal speed rush he gets when he gets to drive without drivers like you around. So there may turn out to be a partial motivational overlap between the theater and traffic cases as well (not that that really matters to the essential issue).

I’m inclined to think that the probability of serious injury is greater in my examples than in the crowded theater. A panicked stampede is dangerous, but if we’re talking about movie theaters rather than stadiums, I don’t think it’s very likely to be fatal (though I’m guessing here; I don’t really know). By contrast, the traffic accidents I have in mind in (1) and (2) would very likely have been seriously injurious to someone, and could very easily have been fatal. In both the theater and traffic cases, we might perhaps want to put a bit more of a burden on the would-be victims than I so far have, demanding that they display a little more grace under pressure, e.g., checking to see whether there really is a fire in the theater case, or resisting the honker regardless of the pressure induced by the honking in the traffic cases. I’m willing to entertain the possibility that the victims’ panic in both cases is mildly culpable—a failure of independence under pressure. But I don’t think a finding of culpability would change the fact that what we have here are bona fide rights violations.

So I’d conclude that the theater and traffic cases are sufficiently similar to justify describing them as the same kind of act, giving them the same normative status, and (to some extent) treating them the same way. In part 2 of this post, I want to discuss some of the philosophical ramifications of this claim. One set has to do with the relation between egoism and asshole behavior. Another set has to do with rights-violations and law enforcement. A third set has to do with traffic as a source of moral knowledge.

Postscript, February 14, 2015: This article offers useful substantiation of the attitude I describe in the text, though in a slightly different context–dangerous railroad crossings in the New York-New Jersey metro area. This brief passage tells the whole tale:

The less expensive safety measures — automatic gates, lights, bells and signs — are largely in place in the New York region. A challenge is creating crossings that can overcome the lesser impulses of human nature in a part of the country where many people do not see patience as a virtue.

In Brentwood, N.Y., on Monday, a couple on foot watched as the safety gate at the Washington Avenue crossing, one of the most dangerous in the region, lowered in front of them, its bells sounding and lights flashing. After one Long Island Rail Road train passed through, heading east, the man and woman ducked underneath the crossing gate. The man glanced toward the train receding in the distance and suddenly jumped back.

“There’s another train coming!” he yelled.

The woman did not break stride as a westbound train barreled through, missing her by a few feet. “I’ve lived here long enough to know when not to do it,” said the woman, who declined to give her name. ….

“I sit there in awe, I hold my breath watching them. I think, ‘Oh my God, these people are risking too much,’ ” said Cecilia Vaughn, 48, a medical assistant who works near the Washington Avenue crossing.

It’s bad enough when they risk too much with their own lives. But the truth is that they have no compunction risking too much with the lives of others. I sometimes wonder whether the very dangerousness of our roads facilitates risk-impulsiveness: like the soldier who hasn’t yet been shot on the battlefield, the driver or pedestrian who hasn’t yet been killed on the road regards herself as invincible exception to the laws of physics–until the laws of physics demonstrate otherwise.

Postscript 2, February 20, 2015: In case you thought I was exaggerating about New Jersey’s roads and traffic, here’s more substantiation of my claims, from an aptly-titled series of articles from the January 2015 issue of New Jersey Monthly: “Why New Jersey’s Roads Suck.” Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall, but a very informative read if you’re willing to plunk the $5 to read it. I highly advise reading it, if you’re from the NY-NJ Metro area: very gratifying to have one’s beliefs validated!