We can't really tell what's going on in other people's heads. And there's a (basically useless) sense in which all voluntary actions are done out of self-interest. Nevertheless, I perceive instances in which I do a better or a worse job of controlling my urges to do things I regard as bad. It's possible that my perception of self-control variation is an illusion and that what's really going on is that the urges win out when they're sufficiently strong and/or when my capacity for self-control is sufficiently low. But I just don't think that's how it is with me. I think I rarely actually "lose it" and instead in some sense choose to go apeshit by giving into perverse desires (a combination of self-pity and attention-seeking being a particularly gross example). Now who knows if this is what goes on with other people (though maybe we could increase our confidence through neuroscience and psychology). But I'm pretty sure my internal mental experiences aren't fundamentally idiosyncratic. Of course, people do have different capacities, temperaments, and inclinations, so the point at which someone's being a dick -- i.e., being weak-willed about behaving properly -- varies; external behavior alone isn't sufficient to confidently judge someone. But if I know what it's like to be a dick and also what it's like to resist the urge, then presumably we're all fighting the same internal battle, just on different battlefields. And I doubt we all have the same win percentage. So some of us are worse people than others.
Do some of us get away with it more than others? Absolutely. Such is life. But the closer you get to someone, the easier it is to look into her heart, and the harder it is for her to get away with it.
***
Suppose everyone who comes off as a good person is really motivated ultimately by something selfish (such as wanting to be praised or feeling better about himself because he's doing good), just like everyone who comes off as a bad person. What then? At least there's a real difference, and the more you engage with someone, the better you can tell how they're going to behave and whether you like them. Practically, in the words of Bill Munny, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."
In other words, the universe may have no moral arc, but we have moral compasses. Your concern is analogous to one's decision whether or not to eat meat even though he "knows" it's wrong. Some rationalize, some say "fuck it," and some stop (to some extent). With questions like this, there's no issue of "hiding" one's badness. It's simply a question of caring enough about doing the right thing, for whatever reason. So yeah, maybe the guy who gets his caring/willpower from a selfish wellspring is no better, in some sense, than the guy who says, "fuck it, meat's too tasty and my friends would give me shit if I gave it up." But in a real sense he is a better person.
In sum:
1. Some people seem to care about being good people; others seem to embrace selfishness.
2. Perhaps, either way, we all ultimately care about feeling good about ourselves, about being able to live with ourselves.
3. One who does good because he feels good about being a good person is still a good person.
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8 comments:
Didn't realize this blog had sputtered back to life; I just added it to my feed so I don't miss future eruptions. I don't understand what you mean by "a real sense." If you mean because the consequences of "being a good person" are superior to those of not, then your argument doesn't distinguish between doing the right thing out of a desire to feel good and, say, cowardice. If not, I can't tell what you mean.
It seems to me that your main argument contradicts your preamble. I disagree with the notion that being a dick is being "weak-willed" about behaving well; it is also about what's on the other side of the balance -- for instance, how much you care about feeling like a good person, or how desperately you want to get off a plane. People's interests are in varying degrees of tension with what it's right for them to do. Sure it's possible to define good as "wanting to do what it would be utility-maximizing for one to do" but this is unknowable and often very arbitrary.
Re: your first paragraph, good point. I don't really know what I mean, either. Like most of my emails, this was indeed an eruption. Unfortunately, in my ardency to end with a bang, I incontinently concluded with incoherence. I definitely want to distinguish cowardice. But I also don't want to insist that we're all basically bad people, the primary difference being how well we hide it -- as my sighing interlocutor asserted -- because so few of us do good for goodness' sake (whatever that entails). Perhaps I'm in a bind because I cling bitterly to this akrasia-based notion of good behavior. But I don't see, practically, what else there is, and I don't want to end up like Othello, unmoored.
I'm not sure I get your argument against my "weak-willed" account. I think my account accounts for the "other side" of the balance in that one is only weak-willed about behaving well if one has already come to a conclusion about what behaving well entails -- a conclusion that one reaches through weighing both sides (e.g., impatient desperation to get off a plane doesn't justify cutting, but a genuine emergency cuts it).
Basically, it seems that everyone who does the right thing when it feels inconvenient probably feels good about doing so -- especially if others know -- and sometimes the good feeling outweighs the inconvenience. But I want to distinguish between those who feel good because they want to be good people and those who feel good because they'll look good (or whatnot).
I didn't realize you _were_ trying to make the last distinction, which I think is w/o a deferens. But never mind that. The contradiction that I was talking about arises only on a reading (I think the natural one) of your 1st para in which cowardice is a legit reason for being a good person. And yes, I do think you're tying yourself into knots b'se you want an akrasia-based notion of good behavior. I don't fully understand what you think you need a theory of good behavior _for_ -- re judging other people, one could use Grob's notion of hating-the-torturer, re criminal justice, there's rule utilitarianism plus social choice. But I suppose it's just a given that you want a unified account of morality. (See Dworkin's recent NYRB essay on this, btw?) I think the biggest way in which math colored my thinking -- though innate tendencies helped here -- was to make me extremely willing to give up lost causes as lost. I think most philosophers have the opposite reaction.
I don't think I realized what I was trying to do, either. I have spewy tendencies, particularly when emailing. I just wanted to refute my interlocutor's sentimental worry that we're all more or less bad people because we're all selfish and some of us just hide it better.
Anyway, the issue for me is that practically, judging people as good or bad is inevitable; it's something we do, and we do it by sort of looking into others' hearts (no one really thinks actions alone are a sufficient basis). Perhaps there's nothing worth saying about how we should do it -- even when confronted with someone who professes to maintain that actions are a sufficient basis -- but some things seem intuitively wrong to me, and I want to push back even if I only have a pegleg to stand on.
Hopping back to the big picture, I realize that this is all sort of sentimental and silly -- in my email I wasn't making enough of an effort to be rigorous, which is basically game over.
P.S. I contain multitudes.
Yeah I think my position is that there's a sort of Arrow's theorem for ways of morally judging people -- all of them fail some intuitively reasonable criteria -- and therefore there is nothing generally true that one can say about how to do it.
Here's another way of looking at this: it's hard to come up with a coherent conception of selfishness that's not essentially vacuous.
The one that comes up a lot holds that (e.g.) any seemingly altruistic act can be expressed as fulfilling a notional private desire of the agent, which means it was "really" selfish rather than altruistic. As a consequence of this view, every act is selfish.
This is just a metaphysical stance, though -- a self-consistent but not exclusive way of conceiving of how people act. The mere existence of a metaphysical framework that characterizes us as selfish doesn't (it seems to me) mean that we are selfish. There is also a self-consistent metaphysical framework that explains our actions without acknowledging that we exist (physics). Few people think this proves we don't exist.
I suppose you might think the argument proves we're selfish if there is no systematic way of analyzing us as other than selfish, but I would not accept that hypothesis.
Meanwhile it might be interesting to have a notion of selfishness that did not tautologically hold every action taken by a self to be selfish.
I agree -- hence my reference to the "essentially vacuous" conception of selfishness you outline as "basically useless."
But, like Sarang, I worry whether a more appealing notion is, ultimately, irredeemably fraught. I know basically nothing about this, but it seems that an alternative notion would have to rely on a conception of ethics in order to distinguish selfish actions from merely self-interested ones (or whatever we'd call them). For instance, perhaps we'd deem an action unselfish when the actor sufficiently accounted for the utility of others he foresaw to be affected by the action. Or maybe we'd limit this further by restricting unselfishness to cases where the actor accounts for others' utility because he feels obligated to do so as opposed to because he likes it when they're better off. Of course, these frameworks raise issues, and maybe they're the same issues that Sarang persuasively maintains are lost causes, analytic-philosophically speaking.
Who knows; just spewculating.
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