Perfectionism?

I have been thoroughly enjoying all the unfamiliar detail of Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy. His next major section I found even more interesting. But as is common with this kind of history, generalizing abstractions can be problematic. Schneewind wants to characterize a counter-trend to natural law in the moral philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries. In so doing, he moves back and forth between two different models that have very different implications.

When he states the top-level thesis of the book, he does so in terms of an ethics of self-governance that stands in contrast to the reduction of morality to obedience. This I find provocative and insightful. But the section immediately following the one on natural law is presented in terms of a model of “perfectionism”. Fortunately, he seems to use this only as a shallow grouping mechanism that does not significantly affect either the excellent detail or his main thesis about self-governance. But the connotations of the term “perfectionism” are nonetheless troublesome.

It seems that the term “perfectionism” was introduced into contemporary discourse by the political philosopher John Rawls in the later 20th century. Rawls uses the term to primarily name an elitist view of justice, that the state should accord special treatment to certain kinds of high achievers, rather than emphasizing equality before the law. He cites Nietzsche as a primary example, and contrasts this with his own view of justice as fairness. But Nietzsche does not like the state at all, and does not concern himself with matters of state policy.

Rawls attributes a more moderate version of this elitism to Aristotle, while also giving positive mention to a benign Aristotelian principle that people naturally enjoy the exercise of more developed capabilities, both by themselves and by others. Some latter-day conservatives have certainly tried to appeal to Aristotle in order to justify views based on presumptions of natural inequality.

Aristotle does along the way make incidental comments about observable differences in achievement. In these contexts, he does not always clearly distinguish between accidental, localized social facts and more general facts of nature. But at the level of principles, Aristotle is the historical source of the notion of justice as fairness that Rawls defends. Aristotle recommends extending the inherently reciprocal model of friendship to politics. He defines constitutional rule as one in which the same people both rule and are ruled. Moreover, Aristotle is in general highly sensitive to the accidental character of accidental facts. Anecdotal reports of accidental facts do not justify generalization about what is natural. In spite of his emphasis on particular cases, Aristotle is far more committed to these matters of principle than to any particular generalization from accidental facts.

Many discussions in contemporary philosophy are conducted at the level of broad generalizations about kinds of positions. In itself there is nothing wrong with this, but people are not always careful about the fit of particular cases to the generalizations. The outcome is that generalizations about kinds of positions are often applied in a sweeping, ahistorical manner.

Many of Rawls’s sympathizers have ended up relaxing his strictures against perfectionism. Stanley Cavell has argued for a concept of “moral perfectionism”, based on the transcendentalist Emerson, that has nothing to do with elitism. But this is even more recent.

In the present case, without really justifying it, Schneewind applies the term “perfectionism” to the whole early modern “rationalist” tradition, which is itself often the subject of overly broad generalizations. Implicitly, scholastic philosophy and ancient philosophy would be perfectionist as well. (He does not mention Rawls at all, though he does in passing mention elitism.) However, Schneewind also discusses the roots of “modern” natural law in scholasticism and Stoicism.

Schneewind includes valuable data on voluntarism and/or anti-voluntarism in many of the figures he discusses, but does not generalize much about it. Across the whole span of material that he discusses, I think a better contrast could be made between voluntarism and obedience theories on the one hand, and self-governance on the other.

Self-governance provides a far more sound and useful notion of freedom than strong metaphysical notions of absolutely unconditional free will. The great value of Schneewind’s book comes from his documentation of a long tradition of thought about practical self-governance, as background for the distinctively Kantian notion of autonomy.

Objective Ambiguity

Objective ambiguity is not only possible but common. Indeed its denial is responsible for much of what is wrong with the world.

This is what I would call an interpretive principle. I think it is characteristic of facts as well.

We only make judgments about ambiguity in contrast with things more definite. But perhaps the converse could be said as well, and we only make judgments about definiteness in contrast with things more ambiguous. I am inclined to think that the absolute poles on this spectrum — absolute definiteness and absolute indefiniteness — are never found in what I still want to call the real world.

What we want to say objectivity is seems to be one of the things that could always be more pondered. But I want to say that there are quite meaningful things we can say about it, and one of these is that objectivity properly said must include an appropriate recognition of objective ambiguity.

There is a human-sized definiteness that is not absolute, but remains morally compelling. Definiteness itself does not have razor-sharp edges. We adhere to it in a broad way and not in an absolutist way, and that is for the better. Broad adherence to anything is better than absolutist adherence, which overdoes things and is not responsive to nuance.

Sensitivity to nuance is a delicate thing, but it is the better thing. When I recently wrote about “kindly objectivity”, one thing that slipped out spontaneously was that the ethical sense of objectivity is characterized not only from an angle of fairness, or objectivity as fairness and lack of bias in interpreting things and people, but also as a kind of magnanimity. As the word “magnanimity” wrote itself into the text, I paused and wondered where that came from? But the more I think about it, the more I think it is true. To be magnanimous is to be more than fair, whereas normal biases as well as extraordinary ones cause people to be less than fair. It is to display the “wise charity” by which Leibniz characterized justice.

As we reach toward our best judgments of things and people, we display magnanimity and wise charity. When we get to the level of nuance, we get closer to reality. Hard edges become fractally ramified, but at the same time substantiality, “thickness”, conditional definiteness, reality begin to emerge of themselves out of the shimmering. Reciprocity lifts itself by the bootstraps. We and the other can find coexistence and emergent truth together.

Poetically speaking, this has great relevance to the kind of second-order historical interpretation I call “historiographical”.

Kindly Objectivity

I am accustomed to thinking of objectivity in ethical terms, as a kind of fairness and magnanimity. Thus it was a little shocking to learn that the original meaning of “to regard objectively” was “to regard as an object“. Etymologically it fits of course, but I am also used to the idea that we should not treat people as objects. I have pushed this further, and said in effect that we should not even treat inanimate objects as mere objects.

But it seems that the positive moral connotations of objectivity may in fact have arisen from a valorization of seeing things as objects, even though objective being was called a diminished being. Henry of Ghent, for example, apparently held that a pure intelligence would see everything purely as an object.

The pure object is something that is implicitly mastered in every respect. That is why we should not treat people as objects, and why we should not even treat objects purely as objects.

Facts and Incomplete Information

A modern notion of hard-nosed common sense is to appeal exclusively to positive facts. This is also a major basis of simplistic notions of empirical science. Serious scientific methodologies are more indirect, and quite a bit more involved.

From a broadly Kantian point of view that I think Plato and Aristotle would also endorse, all putative facts are really just assertions of facts, made by people. The validity of the corresponding assertions depends on the soundness of the reasons that lead us to believe them. Thus, regardless of whether our concern is ethical or scientific, it is always the quality of reasons that matters in assessing the validity of assertions.

The notion of a fair and objective weighing of evidence for or against an assertion presupposes that we symmetrically consider the pro and con, as Plato emphasized in his discussions of “dialectic”. But the simplistic bias for positive facts results in an inherently asymmetrical treatment any time we have to deal with incomplete information, because what putative facts we currently have in our possession is in part a matter of sheer chance.

In a fact-biased approach, if there happen to be insufficient facts in our possession to adequately support a hypothesis, the hypothesis is likely to be be dismissed out of hand as “speculation”, regardless of how inherently plausible it might otherwise be. We end up assuming something is not true merely because we cannot empirically prove it is true. This is independent of any other prejudice that may also enter into situations involving human judgment.

Once again, I want to recommend a prudent suspension or qualification of belief in cases of incomplete information, rather than active disbelief. (See also Debate on Prehistory.)

Concept of Law

When Kant distinguishes free beings as acting in accordance with concepts of law rather than merely in accordance with law, he makes a vital point that deserves to be expanded upon. Even inanimate objects exhibit rule-governed behavior, and mere obedience is at best a low degree of virtue. To act in accordance with concepts of laws is to act in a principled and thoughtful way, exercising judgment on how best to realize the high-level ends behind a body of law, charitably interpreted in a spirit of universal fairness. It is to take our place as co-legislators in the universal community of rational beings.

Ricoeur on Justice

Among Paul Ricoeur’s last publications were two small volumes of lectures on justice, The Just and Reflections on the Just. These apply the ethics he had formulated in Oneself As Another (see also Solicitude; Ricoeurian Ethics). As in Oneself As Another, he combines Aristotelian and Kantian elements (see also Aristotle and Kant).

Ricoeur notes that Plato and Aristotle often mentioned “the unjust and the just” in that order, and suggests that the initial impulse for justice is a sense of indignation against things like unequal shares, broken promises, and excessive retributions.

He identifies justice fundamentally with equity or fairness, as mediated through institutions and Kantian obligation by universals. In contrast with the I-Thou of friendship, it involves relations of distance with others conceived in the third person. “The other for friendship is the ‘you’; the other for justice is ‘anyone’…. In fact, we have already encountered this ‘anyone’ in those exemplary situations in which our youthful indignation lashes out against injustice: unequal shares, failure to keep one’s word as given, unfair retributions — all institutional circumstances, in the broadest sense of the term, where justice presents itself as a just distribution” (The Just, p. xiii). “An important equation, whereby the just begins to be distinguished from the unjust, presents itself here: the equation between justice and impartiality” (p. xi). It is “under the condition of impartiality that indignation can free itself of the desire for vengeance” (p. xvii; emphasis in original).

He will consider the interaction of two axes: a “horizontal” one of the “dialogical constitution of the self” (p. xii), and a “vertical” one with three levels — an initial Aristotelian one concerned with ends and the good life; an intermediate Kantian one concerned with formal elaborations of procedural justice and universality; and a final one concerned with Aristotelian practical wisdom that also draws on Kant’s Critique of Judgment. He suggests that the Critique of Judgment has more to tell us about justice than the Critique of Practical Reason. Procedural justice, Kantian universality, and deontological obligation here do not supersede or conflict with Aristotelian practical judgment about concrete particulars, but rather mediate its relations to ends. This seems like a very nice way of expressing a harmonization of Aristotelian and Kantian ethics.

Relating justice to Aristotelian ends, Ricoeur wants to defend “the primacy of the teleological approach in the determination of the idea of the just” (p.xvi). “Justice… is an integral part of the wish to live well” (p. xv). “It begins as a wish before it becomes an imperative” (ibid).

According to Ricoeur, the very import of the claim to universality ensures that procedural justice cannot entirely separate itself from a substantive idea of the good in terms of ends. Provisionally adopting John Rawls’ abstraction of equitable distribution of goods as including procedural considerations, he argues that overall equity cannot be realized without “taking into account the real heterogeneity of the goods to be distributed. In other words, the deontological level, rightly taken as the privileged level of reference for the idea of the just, cannot make itself autonomous to the point of constituting the exclusive level of reference” (p. xix; emphasis in original). Ricoeur accepts Rawls’ claim that a pure theory of procedural justice can be developed autonomously, but argues that its real-world applications still require Aristotelian practical judgment.

All people, Ricoeur suggests, have a kind of “power over” others, as a result of the capacity to act. This “offers the permanent occasion for violence in all its forms…. What do we get indignant about, in the case of shares, exchanges, retributions, if not the wrong that human beings inflict upon one another on the occasion of the power-over one will exercises in the encounter with another will?” (p. xvii; emphasis in original). The kind of impartiality that frees indignation from the desire for vengeance, Ricoeur suggests, is embodied in the idea of universally valid law and deontological obligation to avoid harming others.

Ricoeur says actually the most serious issue about justice has to do with what he calls the “tragic dimension of action. It is at this stage that the moral conscience, as an inner forum, one’s heart of hearts, is summoned to make unique decisions, taken in a climate of incertitude and of serious conflicts” (p. xxi; emphasis in original).

The ultimate need for open-ended Aristotelian practical wisdom above and beyond the best discipline of the abstract application of rules, Ricoeur says, is a kind of correlate of the irreducibility of a consideration of ends. This will be the most important thing in the practice of jurisprudence. (Leibniz also suggested something like this with his idea of justice as “wise charity”.) Ricoeur relates such practical wisdom to Aristotle’s notion of (non-sophistical) rhetoric as speaking well in the sense of saying things that are persuasive because rightly said; to hermeneutics; and to poetics. (See also Ricoeur on Practical Reason.)

Justice’s “privileged moment” of mediation through formal universality, while neither self-sufficient nor ultimately decisive, is nonetheless essential to the process. The same kind of mediation appears in Ricoeur’s works in numerous contexts. Freedom is mediated by necessity; our understanding of the self is mediated by a “long detour” through cultural objectifications; open-ended interpretation is mediated by disciplined explanation. Similarly, here an ultimately open-ended approach to justice that begins and ends with Aristotle is enriched and made more rigorous by the additional mediation of Kantian universality.

These examples help clarify the main sense of Ricoeurian (and Hegelian) “mediation”, which is very different from the sort of theologically perfect, transparent mediation invoked, e.g., by Aquinas. Ricoeurian and Hegelian mediation are always bumpy, and the last word is never said.

Trust as a Principle

Trust as a principle does not mean blind trust. It means trust as a default attitude. Trust as a universal default is perfectly compatible with every kind of critical thinking.

When we trust someone, we grant them a kind of authority, but authority must always be balanced by symmetrical responsibility. To make any assertion at all is enter the space of reasons. To make an assertion is to make oneself responsible for it, along with its consequences and incompatibilities. No one has privileged access to what is right, which depends upon shareable criteria. Generalized trust does not mean naivete or credulity, just a kind of fairness. It could not mean an abdication of our responsibilities as rational beings. In the context of what Brandom would call deontic scorekeeping, generalized trust means a level playing field, not an absence of standards.