Harmonizing with the Dao: Sketch of an Evaluative Framework

Increasingly, I find myself drawn to an ethics of harmonizing with the Dao. Invoking "the Dao" might sound mystical, non-Western, ancient, religious -- alien to mainstream secular 21st-century Anglophone metaphysics and ethics. But I don't think it needs to be. It just needs some clarification and secularization. As a first approximation, think of harmonizing with the Dao as akin to harmonizing with nature. Then broaden "nature" to include human patterns as well as non-human, and you're close to the ideal. Maybe we could equally call it an ethics of "harmonizing with the world" or simply an "ethics of harmony". But explicit reference to "the Dao" helps locate the idea's origins and its Daoist flavor.

[image source]

The Metaphysics of Dao

In the intended sense -- inspired by ancient Daoism and Confucianism, but adapted for a 21st century Anglophone context -- the "Dao" the world as a whole. However, it is not the world conceptualized as a collection of objects, but rather as a system of processes and patterns. The Dao is the spinning of Earth; the rise and fall of mountains and species; the rise and fall of cities and nations; human birth, childhood, adulthood, and death; people discovering and losing love; the way strangers greet each other; the growth of your fingernails; the falling of a leaf.

The Axiology of Dao

Some strands in the Daoist tradition hold that all manifestations of the Dao are equally good. But the more dominant strand holds that things can go better or worse. And certainly the Confucians, who also sought harmony with the Dao, held that things could go better or worse.

What constitutes things going better? I favor value pluralism: More than one type of thing has fundamental value. Happiness is valuable, of course. But so also is knowledge (even when it doesn't lead to happiness), beauty, human relationships, and even (I'd argue) the existence of stones.

One way to clarify our thoughts about value is the "distant planet thought experiment". Consider a planet on the far side of the galaxy, forever blocked by the galactic core, with which we will never interact. What would you hope for, for the sake of this planet? Most of us would not hope for a sterile rock, but rather for a planet rich with life -- and not just microbes, not just jungles of plants and animals, but a diverse range of entities capable of forming societies, capable of love and cooperation, art and science, engineering and sports, entities capable of generations-long endeavors and of philosophical wonder as they gaze up at the stars or down through their microscopes.

We might say that a planet, or a region of spacetime, is flourishing when it instantiates, or is on the path toward instantiating, such excellent patterns.

Conceptual Frameworks

Philosophers typically ask two questions when I propose harmonizing with the Dao as an ethical ideal. First, how does it differ from the more familiar (to them) ethics of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics? Second, what specifically does it recommend?

To the first question: Unlike consequentialism, there is no single good or bundle of goods that you should maximize; unlike deontology, there is no one rule or set of rules you should follow (unless we interpret "harmonize with the Dao" as the rule); unlike virtue ethics, there is no canonical set of virtues the cultivation and instantiation of which is the foremost imperative. Instead, the animating idea is to flow harmoniously along with the Dao and participate in, rather than strain against, its flourishing.

That's vague, of course. What specifically should you do, if your aim is to harmonize with the Dao?

I have some thoughts. But first, notice that consequentialism as a general ethical perspective is compatible with a wide range of possible concrete actions, depending on how it is developed and on the details of your situation. So also can deontological and virtue ethical perspectives be made compatible with a wide range of specific actions. What these broad ethical perspectives offer, primarily, is not specific advice but rather conceptual frameworks for ethical thinking -- in terms of consequences and expectations, or in terms of rules of different types, or in terms of a range of virtues and vices. So let's consider what broad concepts an ethics of harmony might employ, with the specific advice as an illustration of how those concepts might work.

Harmony and Disharmony, Illustrated in a University Context

Harmonizing with the flourishing patterns of the Dao involves participating in those patterns, enriching them, and enabling others to participate in and enrich those patterns. Suppose you think that one of the great processes worth preserving in the world is university education. You can participate in that process by being a good teacher, by being an administrator who helps things run smoothly, by being a custodian who helps keep the grounds clean, and so on. You can enrich it by helping to make it even more awesome than it already is -- for example by being an unusually inspiring teacher or by being not just an ordinary custodian but one who adds a bright smile to a student's day. You can enable others to participate in and enrich those patterns by helping hire a terrific teacher or custodian or by providing the type of environment that brings out the best in others.

We can see the university as a place where many lives converge either briefly or for decades. This convergence is valuable not just for what it yields but in itself. The processes constituting university life also participate in and enable other valuable processes, whether those are individual human lives, or other institutions that partly overlap with or depend on the university, or projects and events that happen within the university, or simply the natural and architectural beauty of an appealing campus.

Compare this way of thinking about the ethics of participation in a university with consequentialism (emphasizing the various goods that university education is expected to deliver), deontology (emphasizing the rules one ought to follow within a university), or virtue ethics (emphasizing the manifestation and cultivation of virtues such as curiosity and compassion). While I don't object to any of those ways of thinking about the ethics of university life, the Daoist perspective is, I hope, a valuable alternative lens.

Disharmony could involve cutting short, or attempting to cut short, an axiologically valuable pattern (rather than letting it come to its natural end), working against that pattern, or preventing others from harmonizing. Continuing the university example, cutting funding for valuable research, firing an excellent teacher, disrupting classes, littering, or flying a noisy helicopter overhead might all count as disharmonious. Other examples can include preventing access or undermining the conditions that allow students, faculty, or staff to flourish in their roles.

Comparisons with Music

You are not the melody-maker. "Harmony" suggests a contrast with "melody". You are not the melody-maker, the director, the first violinist, the lead singer, the lead guitarist -- at least not usually. Your typical role is to support an already-happening good thing.

Diversity and pluralism. There is more than one way to harmonize. A piece is richer when not everyone plays the same note.

Improvisation. Zhuangzi emphasized flowing along with things in an improvisational manner, rather than adhering to fixed rules. Often, the best music has improvisational elements, or at least room to allow one's mood of the moment to influence how one plays the notes. Spontaneous improvisation manifests harmony within the improviser, among the various unarticulated inclinations that arise without explicit cognitive control.

Aesthetic value. The boundary between aesthetic and ethical value (and other types of value) might not be as sharp as philosophers often suppose.

Conflicts of Harmony

A tree is a wondrous thing. Cutting it down cuts short an axiologically valuable pattern, and is normally out of harmony with the tree, the forest, and the lives it supports. But if the tree becomes lumber for a beautiful home, then that act belongs to another axiologically valuable pattern and is in harmony with the Dao of human cultural life.

Your wife wants one thing from you; your mother, another. Harmony with one might involve dissonance with the other. You might consider how sharp the dissonance is in each case. You might consider what patterns are being enacted in these relationships, and which are the more valuable patterns to sustain.

Like any ethical approach, harmonizing with the Dao must allow for conflicts and tradeoffs. The world makes competing demands and offers incompatible opportunities. There needn't be a formula for how to deal with all such cases. In some cases, creative thinking might allow one to support or integrate multiple patterns or integrate them into a whole: Removing a tree is sometimes overall good for a forest; occasional tension with a spouse may sustain a healthier relationship than shallow peace.

Sometimes the conflict is the harmony. Chess masters seek incompatible goals as part of the larger pattern of a competition. Predators consume prey in a healthy ecosystem. Law and politics require adversaries in a (hopefully) well-functioning social system.

My main overall thought is that we can build a fruitful framework for ethical thinking by taking the root project to be one of harmonizing with the awesome patterns and processes of the world.

Imagining Yourself in Another's Shoes vs Extending Your Concern

I have a new article out today, "Imagining Yourself in Another's Shoes vs. Extending Your Concern: Empirical and Ethical Differences". It's my case against the "Golden Rule" and against attempts to ground moral psychology in "imagining yourself in another's shoes", in favor of an alternative idea, inspired by the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi, that involves extending one's concern for nearby others to more distant others.

My thought is not that Golden Rule / others' shoes thinking is bad, exactly, but that both empirically and ethically, Mengzian extension is better. The key difference is: In Golden Rule / others' shoes thinking, moral expansion involves extending self-concern to other people, while in Mengzian extension, moral expansion involves extending concern for nearby others to more distant others.

We might model Others' Shoes / Golden Rule thinking as follows:

* If I were in the situation of Person X, I would want to be treated in manner M.
* Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
* Thus, I will treat Person X in manner M.

We might model Mengzian Extension as follows:

* I care about Person Y and want W for them.
* Person X, though more distant, is relevantly similar to Person Y.
* Thus, I want W for Person X.

Alternative and more complex formulations are possible, but this sketch captures the core difference. Mengzian Extension grounds general moral concern on the natural concern we already have for others close to us, whether spatially close, like a nearby suffering animal or child in danger, or relationally close, like a close relative. In contrast, the Golden Rule grounds general moral concern on concern for oneself.

[Mengzi; image source, cropped]

An Ethical Objection:

While there's something ethically admirable about seeing others as like oneself and thus as deserving the types of treatment one would want for oneself, there's also something a bit... self-centered? egoistic?... about habitually grounding moral action through the lens of hypothetical self-interest. It's ethically purer and more admirable, I suggest, to ground our moral thinking from the beginning in concern for others.

A Developmental/Cognitive Objection:

Others' Shoes thinking introduces needless cognitive challenges: To use it correctly, you must determine what you would want if you were in the other's position and if you had such-and-such different beliefs and desires. But how do you assess which desires (and beliefs, and emotions, and personality traits, and so on) to change and which to hold constant for this thought experiment? Moreover, how do you know how you would react in such a hypothetical case? By routing the epistemic task through a hypothetical self-transformation, it potentially becomes harder to know or justify a choice than if the choice is based directly on knowledge of the other's beliefs, desires, or emotions. In extreme cases, there might not even be facts to track: What treat would you want if you were a prize-winning show poodle?

Mengzian Extension presents a different range of cognitive challenges. It requires recognizing what one wants for nearby others, and then reaching a judgment about whether more distant others are relevantly similar. This requires generalizing beyond nearby cases based on an assessment of what do and do not constitute differences that are relevant to the generalization. Although this is potentially complex and demanding, it avoids the convoluted hypothetical situational and motivational perspective-taking required by Others' Shoes thinking.

A Practical Objection:

Which approach more effectively expands moral concern to appropriate targets? If you want to convince a vicious king to be kinder to his people, is it more effective to encourage him to imagine being a peasant, or is it more effective to highlight the similarities between people he already cares about and those who are farther away? If you want to encourage donations to famine relief, is it better to ask people how they would feel if they were starving, or to compare distant starving people to nearby others the potential donor already cares about?

Armchair reflections and some limited empirical evidence (e.g., from my recent study with Kirstan Brodie, Jason Nemirow, and Fiery Cushman) suggest that across an important range of cases, Mengzian extension might be more effective -- though the question has not been systematically studied.

More details, of course, in the full paper.

Diversity, Disability, Death, and the Dao

Over the past year, I've been working through Chris Fraser's recent books on later classical Chinese thought and Zhuangzi, and I've been increasingly struck by how harmonizing with the Dao constitutes an attractive ethical norm. This norm differs from the standard trio of consequentialism (act to maximize good consequences), deontology (follow specific rules), and virtue ethics (act generously, kindly, courageously, etc.).

From a 21st-century perspective, what does "harmonizing with the Dao" amount to? And why should it be an ethical ideal? In an October post, I articulated a version of "harmonizing with the Dao" that combines elements of the ancient Confucian Xunzi and the ancient Daoist Zhuangzi. Today, I'll articulate the ideal less historically and contrast it with an Aristotelian ethical ideal that shares some common features.

So here's an ahistorical first pass at the ideal of harmonizing with the Dao:

Participate harmoniously in the awesome flourishing of things.

Unpacking a bit: This ideal depends upon a prior axiological vision of "awesome flourishing". My own view is that everything is valuable, but life is especially valuable, especially diverse and complex life, and most especially diverse and complex life-forms that thrive intellectually, artistically, socially, emotionally, and through hard-won achievement. (See my recent piece in Aeon magazine.)

[traditional yin-yang symbol, black and white; source]

Participating harmoniously in the awesome flourishing of things can include personal flourishing, helping others to flourish, or even simply appreciating a bit of the awesomeness. (Appreciation is the necessary receptive side of artistry: See my post on making the world better by watching reruns of I Love Lucy.)

Thinking in terms of harmony has several attractive features, including:

1. It decenters the self (you're not the melody).
2. There are many ways to harmonize.
3. Melody and harmony together generate beauty and structure absent from either alone.

Is this is a form of deontology with one rule: "participate harmoniously in the awesome flourishing of things"? No, it's "deontological" only in the same almost-vacuous sense that the consequentialists' "maximize good consequences" is deontological. The idea isn't that following the rule is what makes an action good. Harmonizing with the Dao is good in itself, and it's only incidental that we can (inadequately) abbreviate what's good about it in a rule-like slogan.

Although helping others flourish is normally part of harmonizing, there is no intended consequentialist framework that ranks actions by their tendency to maximize flourishing. Simply improvising a melody on a musical instrument at home, with no one else to hear, can be a way of harmonizing with the Dao, and the decision to do so needn't be weighed systematically against spending that time fighting world hunger. (It's arguably a weakness of Daoism that it tends not to urge effective social action.)

Perhaps the closest neighbor to the Daoist ideal is the Aristotelian ideal of leading a flourishing, "eudaimonic" life and recent Aristotelian-inspired views of welfare, such as Sen's and Nussbaum's capabilities approach.

We can best see the difference between Aristotelian or capabilities approaches and the Daoist ideal by considering Zhuangzi's treatment of diversity, disability, and death. Aristotelian ethics often paints an ideal of the well-rounded person: wise, generous, artistic, athletic, socially engaged -- the more virtues the better -- a standard of excellence we inevitably fall short of. While capabilities theorists acknowledge that people can flourish with disabilities or in unconventional ways, these acknowledgements can feel like afterthoughts.

Zhuangzi, in contrast, centers and celebrates diversity, difference, disability, and even death as part of the cycle of coming and going, the workings of the mysterious and wonderful Dao. From an Aristotelian or capabilities perspective, death is the ultimate loss of flourishing and capabilities. From Zhuangzi's perspective, death -- at the right time and in the right way -- is as much to be celebrated, harmonized with, welcomed, as life. From Zhuangzi's perspective, peculiar animals and plants, and peculiar people with folded-up bodies, or missing feet, or skin like ice, or entirely lacking facial features, are not deficient, but examples of the wondrous diversity of life.

To frame it provocatively (and a bit unfairly): Aristotle's ideal suggests that everyone should strive to play the same note, aiming for a shared standard of human excellence. Zhuangzi, in contrast, celebrates radically diverse forms of flourishing, with the most wondrous entities being those least like the rest of us. Harmony arises not from sameness but from how these diverse notes join together into a whole, each taking their turn coming and going. A Daoist ethic is not conformity to rules or maximization of virtue or good consequences but participating well in, and relishing, the magnificent symphony of the world.

The Ethics of Harmonizing with the Dao

Reading the ancient Chinese philosophers Xunzi and Zhuangzi, I am inspired to articulate an ethics of harmonizing with the dao (the "way"). This ethics doesn't quite map onto any of the three conceptualizations of ethics that are standard in Western philosophy (consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics), nor is it exactly a "role ethics" of the sort sometimes attributed to ancient Confucians.

Xunzi

The ancient Confucian Xunzi articulates a vision of the world in which Heaven, Earth, and humanity operate in harmony:

Heaven has its proper seasons,
Earth has its proper resources,
And humankind has its proper order,
-- this is called being able to form a triad
(Ch 17, l. 34-37; Hutton trans. 2014, p. 176).

Heaven (tian, literally the sky, but with strong religious associations) and Earth are jointly responsible for what we might now call the "laws of nature" and all "natural" phenomena -- including, for example, the turning of the seasons, the patterns of wind and rain, the tendency for plants and animals to thrive under certain conditions and wither under other conditions. Also belonging to these natural phenomena are the raw materials with which humans work: not only the raw materials of wood, metal, and fiber, but also the raw material of natural human inclinations: our tendency to enjoy delicious tastes, our tendency to react angrily to provocations, our general preference for kin over strangers.

Xunzi views humanity's task as creating the third corner of a triad with Heaven and Earth by inventing customs and standards of proper behavior that allow us to harmonize with Heaven and Earth, and with each other. For example, through trial and error, our ancestors learned the proper times and methods for sowing and reaping, how to regulate flooding rivers, how to sharpen steel and straighten wood, how to make pots that won't leak, how to make houses that won't fall over, and so on. Our ancestors also -- again through trial and error -- learned the proper rituals and customs and standards of behavior that permit people to coexist harmoniously with each other without chaotic conflict, without excessive or inappropriate emotions, and with an allocation of goods that allow all to flourish according to their status and social role.

Following the dao can be conceptualized for Xunzi, then, as aligning harmoniously into this triad. Abide by the customs and standards of behavior that contribute to the harmonious whole, in which crops are properly planted, towns are properly constructed, the crafts flourish, and humans thrive in an orderly society.

Each of us has a different role, in accord with the proper customs of a well-ordered society: the barley farmer has one role, the soldier another role, the noblewoman yet another, the traveling merchant yet another. It's not unreasonable to view Xunzi's ethics as a kind of role ethics, according to which the fundamental moral principle is that one adheres to one's proper role in society. It's also not unreasonable to think of the customs and standards of proper behavior as a set of rules to which one ought to adhere (those rules applying in different ways according to one's position in society), and thus to view Xunzi's ethics as a kind of deontological (rule-based) ethics. However, there might also be room to interpret harmonious alignment with the dao as the most fundamental feature of ethical behavior. Adherence to one's role and to the proper traditional customs and practices, on this interpretation of Xunzi, would be only derivatively good, because doing so typically constitutes harmonious alignment.

A test case is to imagine, through Xunzi's eyes, whether a morally well-developed sage might be ethically correct sometimes to act contrary to their role and to the best traditional standards of good behavior, if they correctly see that by doing so they contribute better to the overall harmony of Heaven, Earth, and humankind. I'm tempted to think that Xunzi would indeed permit this -- though only very cautiously, since he is pessimistic about the moral wisdom of ordinary people -- and thus that for him harmonious alignment with the dao is more fundamental than roles and rules. However, I'm not sure I can find direct textual support in favor of this interpretation; it's possible I'm being overly "charitable".

[image source]

A Zhuangzian Correction

A Xunzian ethics of this sort is, I think, somewhat attractive. But it is also deeply traditionalist and conformist in a way I find unappealing. It could use a Zhuangzian twist -- and the idea of "harmonizing with the dao" is at least as Zhuangzian (and "Daoist") as it is Confucian.

Zhuangzi imagines a wilder, more wondrous cosmos than Xunzi's neatly ordered triad of Heaven, Earth, and humankind -- symbolized (though it's disputable how literally) by people so enlightened that they can walk without touching the ground; trees that count 8000 years as a single autumn; gracious emperors with no eyes, ears, nose, or mouth; people with skin like frost who live by drinking dew; enormous, useless trees who speak to us in dreams; and more. This is the dao, wild beyond human comprehension, with which Zhuangzi aims to harmonize.

There are, I think, in Zhuangzi's picture -- though he would resist any effort to fully capture it in words -- ways of flowing harmoniously along with this wondrous and incomprehensible dao and ways of straining unproductively against it. One can be easygoing and open-minded, welcome surprise and difference, not insist on jamming everything into preconceived frames and plans; and one can contribute to the delightful weirdness of the world in one's own unique way. This is Zhuangzian harmony. You become a part of a world that is richer and more wondrous because it contains you, while allowing other wonderful things to also naturally unfold.

In a radical reading of Zhuangzi, ethical obligations and social roles fall away completely. There is little talk in Zhuangzi's Inner Chapters, for example, of our obligation to support others. I don't know that we have to read Zhuangzi radically; but regardless of that question of interpretation, I suggest that there's an attractive middle between Xunzi's conventionalism and Zhuangzi's wildness. Each can serve as a corrective to the other.

In the ethical picture that emerges from this compromise, we each contribute uniquely to a semi-ordered cosmos, participating in social harmony, but not rigidly -- also transcending that harmony, breaking rules and traditions for the better, making the world richer and more wondrous, each in our diverse ways, while also supporting others who contribute in their different ways, whether those others are human, animal, plant, or natural phenomena.

Contrasts

This is not a consequentialist ethics: It is not that our actions are evaluated in terms of the good or bad consequences they have (and still less that the actions are evaluated by a summation of the good minus the bad consequences). Instead, harmonizing with the dao is to participate in something grand, without need of a further objective. Like the deontologist, Xunzi and Zhuangzi and my imagined compromise philosopher needn't think that right or harmonious action will always have good long-term results. Nor is it a deontological or role ethics: There is no set of rules one must always follow or some role one must always adhere to. Nor is it a virtue ethics: There is no set of virtues to which we all must aspire or a distinctive pattern of human flourishing that constitutes the highest attainment. We each contribute in different ways -- and if some virtues often prove to be important, they are derivatively important in the same way that rules and roles can be derivatively important. They are important only because, and to the extent, having those virtues enables or constitutes one's contribution to the magnificent web of being.

So although there are resonances with the more pluralistic forms of consequentialism, and virtue ethics, and role ethics, and even deontology (trivially or degenerately, if the rule is just "harmonize with the dao"), the classical Chinese ethical ideal of harmonizing with the dao differs somewhat from all of these familiar (to professional philosophers) Western ethical approaches.

Many of these other approaches also contain an implicit intellectualism or elitism, in which ideal ethical goodness requires intellectual attainment: wisdom, or a sophisticated ability to weigh consequences or evaluate and apply rules -- far beyond, for example, the capacities of someone with severe cognitive disabilities. With enough Zhuangzi in the mix, such elitism evaporates. A severely cognitively disabled person, or a magnificently weird nonhuman animal, might far exceed any ordinary adult philosopher in their capacity to harmonize with the dao and might contribute more to the rich tapestry of the world.

Perhaps an ethics of harmonizing with the dao can resonate with some 21st-century Anglophone readers, despite its origins in ancient China. It is not, I think, as alien as it might seem from its reliance on the concept of dao and its failure to fit into the standard ethical triumvirate of consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. The fundamental idea should be attractive to some: We each contribute by instantiating a unique piece of a magnificent world, a world which would be less magnificent without us.

Swallows and Moles in Philosophy

In his review (in the journal Science -- cool!) of my recently released book, The Weirdness of the World, Edouard Machery writes:

There are two kinds of philosophers: swallows and moles. Swallows love to soar and to entertain philosophical hypotheses at best loosely connected with empirical knowledge. Plato and Gottfried Leibniz are paradigmatic swallows. Moles, on the contrary, rummage through mundane facts about our world and aim at better understanding it. Aristotle, William James, and Hans Reichenbach are paradigmatic moles. Eric Schwitzgebel is unabashedly a swallow.

Machery admits to having a mole's-eye view of the swallows. He praises the book, but he is frustrated by my admittedly wild speculations about radical skepticism, group consciousness, an infinite future, etc.

Machery's goal in his own recent book Philosophy Within Its Proper Bounds was, he says, "to curtail the flights of fancy with which contemporary philosophers are enamored". The Weirdness of the World celebrates such flights of fancy -- so naturally, Machery and I are going to disagree about the value of wild philosophical speculation.

Reading Machery's contrast of swallows and moles, I was immediately reminded of how the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi opens his Inner Chapters:

There is a fish in the Northern Oblivion named Kun, and this Kun is quite huge, spanning who knows how many thousands of miles. He transforms into a bird named Peng, and this Peng has quite a back on him, stretching who knows how many thousands of miles. When he rouses himself and soars into the air, his wings are like clouds draped across the heavens. The oceans start to churn, and this bird begins his journey toward the Southern Oblivion....

The quail laughs at him, saying, "Where does he think he's going? I leap into the air with all my might, but before I get farther than a few yards I drop to the ground. My twittering and fluttering between the branches is the utmost form of flying! So where does he think he's going? (Ziporyn trans., p. 3-4).

Zhuangzi is the swallowiest of swallows, soaring far beyond mundane empirical facts, wondering if life might be a dream, speculating about trees who measure eight thousand years as a single autumn, and celebrating "spirit men" with skin like ice and snow who eat only wind and dew, riding upon the air and clouds.

Zhuangzi's quail, however, raises a good point: It's much clearer where you're going if you confine yourself to small hops between familiar branches. The Peng is neither practical nor grounded, and Zhuangzi's philosophy is arguably the same. Zhuangzi's friend Huizi scolds him: "Your words are... big and useless, which is why they are rejected by everyone who hears them" (Ziporyn trans., p. 8).

In defense against Machery and the quail critique, I offer three thoughts:

First, if anyone is going to speculate about wild possibilities concerning the fundamental nature of things, philosophers should be among them.

It would be a sad, gray world if our reasoning was always confined to "proper bounds" and we couldn't reflect on issues like dream skepticism, group consciousness, and infinitude. Shouldn't it be part of the job description of philosophy to explore such ideas, considering what can or should be made of them?

Such speculations needn't be entirely unconstrained by empirical facts, even if empirical science fails to deliver decisive answers. In The Weirdness of the World my speculations always start from empirical observation. My discussion of dream skepticism engages with the science of dreams; my discussion of group consciousness engages with the science of consciousness; my chapter on the possible infinite future -- collaborative with physicist and philosopher of physics Jacob Barandes -- is grounded in the standard working assumptions of mainstream physics. Scientifically informed philosophers are as well-positioned as anyone to speculate about wild hypotheticals that naturally intrigue us (at least some of us). To stand athwart such speculations, saying "Thou shalt not enter this epistemic wilderness!" is to reject an intrinsically valuable form of human philosophical curiosity.

Second, we can distinguish two types of swallow: those confident that their wild hypotheses are correct and those who merely entertain and explore such hypotheses.

Maybe Plato was convinced of the reality of Forms and the recollection theory of memory. Maybe Leibniz was convinced that the world was composed of monads in pre-established harmony. But Zhuangzi was a self-undermining skeptic who appears to have taken none of his wild speculations as established fact.

I don't argue that the United States definitely has conscious experiences; I argue that if we accept standard materialist approaches to consciousness, they seem to imply that it does and that therefore we should take the idea seriously as a possibility. I don't argue that this is a dream or a short-term simulation; I argue that our ordinary culturally-given understanding of the world and mainstream scientific assumptions combine to justify assigning a non-trivial (maybe about 0.1%) credence to both of those possibilities. Barandes and I don't argue that there definitely is an infinite future in which future counterparts of you enact almost every possible action, but only that it follows from "certain not wholly implausible assumptions".

When soaring in speculation far beyond the mundane local tree branches, doubt is appropriate. The most natural critique of swallows is that they appear to believe wild things on thin evidence. That critique is harder to sustain when the swallow explicitly treats the speculations as speculations only, rather than as established facts.

Third, the swallow and the mole can collaborate -- even in the work of a single philosopher. As Jonathan Birch comments in my Facebook post linking to Machery's book review, two of Edouard's paradigmatic examples of moles -- Aristotle and William James -- are probably not best thought of as pure moles, but rather as swallow-moles. They dug around quite a bit in mundane empirical facts, yes. But they sometimes also soared with the swallows. Aristotle speculated on the existence of a supraphysical unmoved mover responsible for the existence of the physical world. James speculated about metaphysical "neutral monism" concerning mind and matter and celebrated religious belief beyond the evidence.

I too have done a fair bit of mundane empirical work -- for example, on the moral behavior of ethics professors (e.g., here and here), on introspective method (e.g., here and here), and on the consequences of exposure to ethical argumentation (e.g., here and here). Even when I am not myself running the empirical studies, much of my work engages with nitty-gritty empirical detail (e.g., on the history of reports of coloration in dreams, on the cognitive capacites of garden snails, on the accuracy of visual imagery reports, and on psychological measures of well-being).

Often, I think, deep empirical mole-digging is valuable for one's subsequent speculative soaring. Digging into the details of cosmological models enables better informed speculation about the distant future. Digging into the details of the behavior of ethics students and professors enables better informed speculation about the general relation between ethical reflection and ethical behavior. Digging into the details of dream reports enables better informed speculation about dream skepticism. As Zhuangzi imagines, a low-lying fish can transform into a soaring phoenix.

No single researcher needs to do both the digging and the soaring, even if some of us enjoy both types of task. But it's valuable to have a whole ecosystem of moles and swallows, foxes and hedgehogs, ants and anteaters, truth philosophers and dare philosophers, and so on.

I'm honored that Machery counts me among the swallows. I celebrate his moleishness. Let's dig and soar!

Imagining Yourself in Another's Shoes vs. Extending Your Concern: Empirical and Ethical Differences

[new paper in draft]

The Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have others do unto you) isn't bad, exactly -- it can serve a valuable role -- but I think there's something more empirically and ethically attractive about the relatively underappreciated idea of "extension" found in the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi.

The fundamental idea of extension, as I interpret it, is to notice the concern one naturally has for nearby others -- whether they are relationally near (like close family members) or spatially near (like Mengzi's child about to fall into a well or Peter Singer's child you see drowning in a shallow pond) -- and, attending to relevant similarities between those nearby cases and more distant cases, to extend your concern to the more distant cases.

I see three primary advantages to extension over the Golden Rule (not that these constitute an exhaustive list of means of moral expansion!).

(1.) Developmentally and cognitively, extension is less complex. The Golden Rule, properly implemented, involves imagining yourself in another's shoes, then considering what you would want if you were them. This involves a non-trivial amount of "theory of mind" and hypothetical reasoning. You must notice how others' beliefs, desires, and other mental states relevantly differ from yours, then you must imagine yourself hypothetically having those different mental states, and then you must assess what you would want in that hypothetical case. In some cases, there might not even be a fact of the matter about what you would want. (As an extreme example, imagine applying the Golden Rule to an award-winning show poodle. Is there a fact of the matter about what you would want if you were an award winning show poodle?) Mengzian extension seems cognitively simpler: Notice that you are concerned about nearby person X and want W for them, notice that more distant person Y is relevantly similar, and come to want W for them also. This resembles ordinary generalization between relevant cases: This wine should be treated this way, therefore other similar wines should be treated similarly; such-and-such is a good way to treat this person, so such-and-such is probably also a good way to treat this other similar person.

(2.) Empirically, extension is a more promising method for expanding one's moral concern. Plausibly, it's more of a motivational leap to go from concern about self to concern about distant others (Golden Rule) than to go from concern from nearby others to similar more distant others (Mengzian Extension). When aid agencies appeal for charitable donations, they don't typically ask people to imagine what they would want if they were living in poverty. Instead, they tend to show pictures of children, drawing upon our natural concern for children and inviting us to extend that concern to the target group. Also -- as I plan to discuss in more detail in a post next month -- in the "argument contest" Fiery Cushman and I ran back in 2020, the arguments most successful in inspiring charitable donation employed Mengzian extension techniques, while appeals to "other's shoes" style reasoning did not tend to predict higher levels of donation than did the average argument.

(3.) Ethically, it's more attractive to ground concern for distant others in the extension of concern for nearby others than in hypothetical self-interest. Although there's something attractive about caring for others because you can imagine what you would want if you were them, there's also something a bit... self-centered? egoistic? ... about grounding other-concern in hypothetical self-concern. Rousseau writes: "love of men derived from love of self is the principle of human justice" (Emile, Bloom trans., p. 235). Mengzi or Confucius would never say this! In Mengzian extension, it is ethically admirable concern for nearby others that is the root of concern for more distant others. Appealingly, I think, the focus is on broadening one's admirable ethical impulses, rather than hypothetical self-interest.

[ChatGPT4's rendering of Mengzi's example of a child about to fall into a well, with a concerned onlooker; I prefer Helen De Cruz's version]

My new paper on this -- forthcoming in Daedalus -- is circulating today. As always, comments, objections, corrections, connections welcome, either as comments on this post, on social media, or by email.

Abstract:

According to the Golden Rule, you should do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Similarly, people are often exhorted to "imagine themselves in another's shoes." A related but contrasting approach to moral expansion traces back to the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi, who urges us to "extend" our concern for those nearby to more distant people. Other approaches to moral expansion involve: attending to the good consequences for oneself of caring for others, expanding one's sense of self, expanding one's sense of community, attending to others' morally relevant properties, and learning by doing. About all such approaches, we can ask three types of question: To what extent do people in fact (e.g., developmentally) broaden and deepen their care for others by these different methods? To what extent do these different methods differ in ethical merit? And how effectively do these different methods produce appropriate care?

The Value of Self-Contradiction in Zhuangzi

The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (4th c. BCE) often contradicted himself, or at least made statements whose superficial readings stood in tension with each other.  This self-contradiction, I contend, is not sloppy, nor does it necessarily reflect different authorship of different parts of the text or different stages in the development of Zhuangzi's thought.  Rather, his self-contradiction is purposive and crucial to the power of the text, serving two distinctively Zhuangzian functions.

For example, in multiple passages, Zhuangzi seems to state or assume that it's better to "live out your years" than to die young (1:14-15; 3:1-3, 3:5-6, 4:17; 6:3-4).  However, in multiple other passages, Zhuangzi seems to state or assume that dying young is no worse, or at least no more to be regretted if one is wise, than living a long life (2:38-40; 6: 9-11; 6:25-28; 6:40-47).  In one other passage, Zhuangzi seems to embrace still a third option: We don't know whether or not death is better than life (2:41-42).  (See my 2018 paper "Death, Self, and Oneness in the Incomprehensible Zhuangzi" for a detailed discussion of these passages.)

Similarly, Zhuangzi doesn't appear to have a consistent view concerning skepticism.  In multiple passages, Zhuangzi seems to embrace seemingly extremely radical forms of skepticism according to which we know nothing or at least very little, including dream skepticism (2:41-42; 2:48-49), skepticism about resolving disagreements (2:43-44), and skepticism about whether words and labels and ever be accurately and meaningfully used (ch 2 throughout, esp. 2:29-32).  He appears to admire a sagely character who declines to say he knows anything (2:38) and another who considers no one wrong and sometimes thinks he's a horse or an ox (7:1).  Most of this is in Book 2.  However, in the remainder of the Inner Chapters (generally regarded as the authentic core of the book), Zhuangzi appears to endorse and criticize philosophical views, with little seeming residue of the radical skepticisms of Book 2.  In some places, he appears to explicitly state that philosophical knowledge is attainable (5:9-11, 6:1-6).  (For more on Zhuangzi's contradictions concerning skepticism, see my 1996 paper "Zhuangzi's Attitude Toward Language and His Skepticism".)

In a text this short (52 pages in Ziporyn's English translation), this is a striking amount of contradiction.  It's not like I've been trolling through Kant's gigantic corpus to find scattered passages that don't quite fit together.  The self-contradiction is frequent, blatant, unmissable once you start looking for it -- seemingly intentional.

Of course, we could deny that Zhuangzi is really so self-contradictory.  We could attribute the passages to different authors, or to different periods in his thinking.  Or we could argue that the passages fit together in some subtle way, so that, properly interpreted, they don't really contradict each other.  "Charitable" readings of historical philosophers typically try to find a coherent, sensible view beneath what might seem on a casual read to be contradictions or implausibilities in the text.  Most interpreters of Zhuangzi are charitable in this way, looking to find a reasonable Zhuangzian view beneath the surface of the text -- Zhuangzi's single, coherent opinion about death, skepticism, the use of uselessness, the limits of language and logic, the value of morality, etc.

I reject this conventional interpretive approach.  The most charitable way to read Zhuangzi involves rejecting the principle of charity as it is conventionally applied.  Zhuangzi need not have a single, coherent worldview.  It is uncharitable -- in a broader sense of interpretive charity -- to think that Zhuangzi did have a single, coherent worldview that he could have stated in a plain, self-consistent manner but did not.  That renders him either inept (if he wanted to be clear and self-consistent but failed) or intentionally misleading (if he sought to disguise his real view under a mass of contradictions).

I propose, instead, that Zhuangzi's self-contradictions serve two broadly Zhuangzian purposes.

First, self-contradiction allows Zhuangzi to express alternative points of view that he might regard as each having some merit, without having to decide where the truth lies.  Although we tend to think of great philosophers as having settled opinions on all the topics they address, the normal human condition might more commonly be not to have settled philosophical opinions on many matters, but rather to feel the pull of alternative positions.  Zhuangzi might be a normal human in this respect.

Indeed, it would be Zhuangzian for him not to have a settled opinion on many philosophical issues (perhaps even including the issue of how much one should have settled philosophical opinions).  One theme that shines through the text is that deep philosophical understanding of the world might be beyond the comprehension of most ordinary people, and Zhuangzi might regard himself as an ordinary person in this respect.  Another theme, central to Chapter 2, is that words and doctrines often fail us, since they require us to draw sharp and stable lines across a reality that might not be so neatly divided, a reality that regularly defies human categories.  For good Zhuangzian philosophical reasons, Zhuangzi might be uneasy about going all-in on particular philosophical doctrines, preferring to present more than one side of an issue without definitely settling the question.

Second, self-contradiction is anti-authoritarian and anti-dogmatic in a way that fits nicely with the general spirit of Zhuangzi.  Zhuangzi employs many tools to undercut his own philosophical authority, including making claims and then calling those claims into doubt, putting much of the text in quotation from various dubious sources (seeming sages with funny names, ex-criminals, people who are devalued and at the margins of society, a mock "Confucius" who sometimes admits he has messed things up), and telling absurd parables that the reader will not take literally.  Self-contradiction is another tool in this arsenal -- a means of jostling sympathetic readers out of whatever default tendency they might have to treat Zhuangzi's words as authoritative.  Readers inclined to agree with one of Zhuangzi's positions are likely to find another conflicting passage later, knocking them out of their confidence that they understand Zhuangzi's view and agree with it.

Also through self-contradiction, Zhuangzi parodies the confidence and self-seriousness of other philosophers.  He engages in logical puzzle-making or moral pontificating that superficially reads like what a more self-serious philosopher might say; but then his humor, absurdity, and self-contradiction helps make it clear that this confident self-seriousness is a humorous pose.  After a sympathetic reading of Zhuangzi, it's harder to go back to reading the Mohist logicians, or the Daodejing, or the Confucian moralists, with quite the same reverence.

Zhuangzi is in this way an exceptional philosopher -- one untroubled by, and maybe even seeking, self-contradiction, as an acknowledgement of the complexity of the world and the incompleteness of his own understanding, and in rebellion against the idea of philosophy as the construction of coherent systems of philosophical truth.  Other historical philosophers who embrace self-contradiction for similar reasons might include Montaigne, Nietzsche, and/or the later Wittgenstein -- though none as baldly and pervasively as China's original self-undermining sage.

[image modified from a Dall-E output for "ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi speaking"]

------------------------------------------

Related:

"The Humor of Zhuangzi, the Self-Seriousness of Laozi" (Apr 8, 2013).

"Against Charity in the History of Philosophy" (Jan 8, 2017).

"Zhuangzi Might Prefer the Passive Knife to the Skillful Cook" (Jan 11, 2019)

Does the Heart Revolt at Evil? The Case of Racial Atrocities

Below is a short piece I just published at The Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture, on the ancient debate between Mengzi and Xunzi about whether human nature is good and the light that 20th century racial atrocities might cast on the question.  It's short and simple enough that blog readers might think of it as a long blog post.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of the most ancient disputes in Confucian philosophy concerns the relationship between morality and human nature (xìng 性). Mengzi held that human nature is good (shàn 善). Xunzi held that human nature is bad (è 惡). What exactly Mengzi and Xunzi meant by the mottos xìng shàn and xìng è, respectively, is a matter of scholarly dispute. However, I think this is near the core: If human nature is good then some part of us is bound to be revolted by acts of great evil, if we reflect on those acts carefully. This natural revulsion is a universal part of the human condition. It requires no special cultural learning, nor can it ordinarily be eliminated through cultural learning. If human nature is good, as Mengzi holds, people have an innate moral compass. Everyone has the “sprouts” of morality – not full-grown moral goodness, but the beginnings of moral goodness, which moral education can nourish into mature moral excellence.

In contrast, if human nature is bad, as Xunzi holds, we have no such innate compass, no natural aversion to evil. Morality is an artificial construction, a cultural invention. Morality was created by our ancestors to solve a certain set of social problems. We no more have an innate guide to solving those problems than we have an innate guide to the correct manner by which to fire pottery. What’s morally good does not correlate with what we naturally desire, and there are no culturally universal moral inclinations to be discovered, independent of what we learn from cultural experience and the teaching of our elders.

One crucial point of disagreement between these approaches – not particularly highlighted by Mengzi or Xunzi, but following from their disagreement as I have just characterized it – concerns the ability of people to rise above their cultural circumstances. Consider people raised in the racist U.S. South in the early 20th century. Consider people raised in anti-Semitic Germany in the mid-20th century. If Mengzi is right, then those ordinary people, despite the bigotry of their upbringing, ought nonetheless to have an innate inclination to be revolted by at least the most heartless and terrible acts committed against Blacks and Jews. As Mengzi famously suggests, anyone who suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well would feel alarm and compassion (Mengzi 2A6). Even the callous King Xuan, upon seeing the suffering of an ox, was moved to pity that ox (Mengzi 1A7). Mengzi urges King Xuan to “measure” (dù 度) his heart and extend his compassion for the ox to the people suffering under his reign. If a Mengzian perspective is correct, then we might expect that post-Reconstruction racists in the U.S. South and ardent German Nazis under Hitler should likewise be able to measure their hearts and find a compassionate part of themselves revolted by the wrongness of gross racial injustice. On the other hand, if Xunzi is right, we might expect that people surrounded by moral authorities who support extreme forms of cruel bigotry would have no separate, internal, culture-independent urging of their heart that might guide them to a better moral vision.

I am, perhaps, oversimplifying a bit. As is generally the case with great philosophers like Mengzi and Xunzi, there are nuances in their views and resources to accommodate diverse possibilities. Nonetheless, I would suggest that it sits more easily with the Mengzian view to suppose that everyone, regardless of cultural background, would find the cruelest bigoted behavior at least a little morally revolting; and it sits more easily with the Xunzian view to suppose that people raised in a sufficiently bigoted culture might find their consciences entirely untroubled by acts that the rest of the world would see as plainly evil. In this way, we can think of the dispute between Mengzi and Xunzi partly as an empirical dispute. How much variation is there in our moral psychology? Is it always the case that ordinary people are revolted by gross evil – at least a little bit, at least in some corner of their hearts, discoverable with the right kind of reflection or introspection? Or alternatively, when that evil is grounded in, for example, a deep, toxic bigotry in their culture, will ordinary people participate gladly, with no discoverable qualms and no innate sense of moral right and wrong that might lead them to a better vision?

Consider two specific historical acts that I hope everyone can agree are profoundly evil.

On July 16, 1935, a Black man appeared at the doorstep of Marion Jones, a thirty-year-old mother of three in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, asking for water. Accounts differ about what happened next. On some accounts, Jones screamed upon seeing the man’s face. On other accounts, the man cut Jones with a penknife and she fought him off (in one picture, Jones has a bandaged hand). Either way, the man soon fled. Rumors spread that the man had attempted to rape Jones. Fort Lauderdale citizens were in a “lynching mood” and a manhunt began.

Three days later and twenty-five miles away, a motorist informed the police that he had seen a Black man – Rubin Stacey, an agricultural laborer – ducking into some bushes. When deputies approached, Stacey attempted to flee. After apprehending him, instead of putting Stacey in a lineup according to standard eyewitness identification procedure, the deputies drove him to Jones’ house. Jones claimed Stacey had assaulted her and both she and the deputies were given a $25 identification reward ($475 in today’s U.S. dollars). Stacey denied involvement, and nothing was ever reported that connected him with the alleged crime apart from the dubious identification procedure. As Stacey was being driven to jail, a mob seized him and, using Jones’ clothesline, hung him from a tree near Jones’ home. A gun was passed around and spectators were invited to take shots at Stacey, who might or might not have already been dead from hanging. Many of the shots missed, but 17 shots hit. White newspaper coverage accepted the deputies’ claim that they had involuntarily released Stacey to the mob after being run off the road. However, doubts about the story were raised in 1988 when one participant in the lynching revealed that the mob had been led by the sheriff’s brother, who was himself a deputy and who later became notorious for killing Black detainees for minor acts of disrespect.

Stacey’s corpse hung for hours while thousands of White Floridians came to view it and celebrate. They brought their families, posed for photos with Stacey’s corpse, and cut off pieces of his clothing to keep as souvenirs. One famous photo shows four young White girls in casual summer dresses gazing at the corpse from only a few feet away, with men – presumably their fathers – standing behind them. One of the girls appears to be positively beaming with delight.[1] 

[See here for the full photo.]

Stacey’s lynching was typical of the era, which saw dozens or hundreds of lynchings every year. Only about one-third of victims were even accused of capital crimes, and some were accused of no crime at all, but instead were associates of the accused or were “troublemakers” who complained about racial oppression. Rarely was any serious attempt made to accurately identify the accused. In perhaps the majority of cases, the accused was already held by police, thus posing no immediate threat and likely to face a criminal justice system already biased against them. Spectators often arrived from miles around, sometimes renting excursion trains and bringing picnics. As mementos, they collected pieces of the victim’s clothes, or even pieces of the victim’s body. White men took turns shooting, torturing, or abusing the living victim or the corpse, often bringing women and children with them. Lynch mobs posed politely for photos, which were often printed on postcards that quickly sold for a dollar or so. In 2003, James Allen and colleagues published a collection of these postcards along with historical details, including the photo of Stacey’s corpse with the smiling girl.[2] In picture after picture, you can see the proud faces of the murderers, standing near shot, charred, tortured, whipped, skinned, and/or castrated corpses, apparently happy to have their deeds memorialized, printed, and shared via postcard around the country, with handwritten comments on the back like “this is the barbeque we had last night”.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

In July 1942, the German men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were ordered to kill about 1500 Jews in the small village of Józefów, Poland. Jewish men capable of work were to be trucked off to slave camps, but all of the women, children, elderly, and disabled were to be killed – on the spot, if they could not walk, or after a brief march side by side with their killer into the forest, if they were capable of walking. This reserve police battalion might have seemed an unpromising group for such a murderous task: They were draftees into a reserve force, not volunteers. They had no special training or dedication to the cause. Only a minority belonged to the Nazi party. They had families and careers at home, from which the draft had plucked them. Nor were they impressionable youngsters: Their average age was over 36 years old. These men were essentially a sample of ordinary men from around Hamburg, excluding the most dedicated Nazis and military men, who would have volunteered rather than have been drafted.

These men were given little ideological training and little preparation for their task. They were simply driven to the village and told what to do. The commander of the battalion called the men together to announce their mission, saying that it was not especially to his liking and that men who wished not to be involved could choose other duties instead. Of the approximately 500 men, a dozen or so did in fact choose to refrain from the genocide, and they were in no way punished. The remaining men proceeded, apparently voluntarily, to shoot the elderly in their beds and to grab babies from the arms of their presumably screaming mothers, shooting those babies on the spot. Most of the victims walked side by side with their killers, one at a time, into the forest. The men then demanded that the victims lay down, or they forced them down, and shot them in the back of the head. When the victim was dead, they returned to the village to repeat the act. Ordinary men – electricians, merchants, desk-workers, and drivers from Hamburg – were politely asked to kill a village full of Jews, and 98% did so, with no serious protest.

Over the next several months, these men killed repeatedly, occasionally exterminating whole villages, more frequently hunting small groups of Jews in hiding, as well as doing regular policing of the occupied region. They made Jewish men dig their own graves, then lie down in those graves to be shot, then they had the next set of men lie atop the corpses of the previous set. They demanded that Jews squat for hours in the sun, not permitted to sit or to stand, shooting those who broke these arbitrary rules. They mocked the Jews’ beards and religious clothing as they marched them through the streets to their deaths. Sometimes, as with the lynchers, they took proud and happy photos of their exploits, which they then shared afterward and displayed in common rooms.

Of the 500 men, only one man consistently refused to kill. This man, a lieutenant named Buchmann, far from being punished for his refusal, was transferred back to Hamburg and promoted. The men had opportunities to transfer, if they found their genocidal task too unpleasant. For example, at one point there was a call for volunteers to transfer to a communications unit elsewhere in Poland – not difficult work, and not near the front lines. Only two of the five hundred men apparently applied. Some of the men found the genocidal activities gruesome, while others seemed to relish the killing, but overall the men seemed to enjoy their mostly easy duty in the beautiful countryside of Poland, where they bonded with their comrades.[3]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

I love Mengzi. I want Mengzi to be right, and I believe that he is right. But cases like these trouble me.

Mengzi of course knew evil. He lived in a violent time, the Period of the Warring States, and he advised violent kings. In Mengzi 1B11, we learn that King Xuan – the king who pitied the ox – invaded the neighboring state of Yan. The people of Yan welcomed King Xuan’s troops with baskets of food, thinking that Xuan would be a better ruler than their previous king. King Xuan returned this kindness by killing the old, binding the young, and destroying the ancestral temples. After this episode, Mengzi left King Xuan’s court.

If Mengzi is right, or if my interpretation of him is right, then had King Xuan reflected on the natural inclinations of his heart as they manifested in his pity for the ox, he would have seen the wrong of killing the old people of Yan who welcomed his troops, and he would have felt a moral impulse not to have them killed – an impulse he could have listened to, and which it would have pleased his heart to follow. If King Xuan saw an old man of Yan about to be killed after having offered food to his troops, or if he learned news of such a case, and if he really stopped to reflect on the matter, “measuring his heart”, he would have been revolted. He would have known it was wrong to kill the man.

We cannot of course know much about King Xuan’s heart at this historical distance. But unfortunately the lynchers of Rubin Stacey and the men of Police Battalion 101 did not seem to be troubled by their atrocious deeds.

Is it simply that they did not reflect? That seems hard to imagine. The lynchers potentially had hours to reflect on their way to the lynching celebrations, and they knew that the Northern U.S. press condemned lynching on moral grounds. The men in Police Battalion 101 had months to reflect, including during furloughs back home. For many of these men, this was probably the first time in their lives that they killed a human being. For all but the most shallow and callous among them, it’s hard to imagine that wouldn’t be an occasion for moral reflection. A man rips a baby from a woman’s arms and kills it in front of her. That night, won’t he think about the deed? Won’t he worry that maybe it was a wrong and terrible thing to do? Did the perpetrators reflect, then, but always only badly, rationalizing their evil actions rather than properly weighing their hearts? Was the prompting of the heart there, but always drowned out by noise?

Xunzi has an easier time with these cases than Mengzi. On a Xunzian view, the lynchers and the men of Police Battalion 101 might be entirely untroubled. Maybe they would feel some visceral bodily disgust at the gore, like the disgust of a medical student first witnessing a surgery, but we ought not expect them to feel moral disgust. With no innate moral compass and only cultural learning of morality, people from such toxically bigoted cultures as the U.S. South in the 1930s and Germany in the 1940s should on a Xunzian view be expected to conform to the morality of their local culture, a morality that says that Blacks should be lynched if suspected of crimes and Jews are the poison virus destroying Germany. Ordinary non-sages have no reliable resource by which to learn otherwise, at least not unless they have the opportunity to seriously engage with liberal, humanitarian values or philosophical ethics from a radically different point of view.

I want to travel back in time. I want to sit down, not with the worst lyncher – not with the murderous, mob-leading deputy – but with just an ordinary member of the mob. I want to find a quiet space with one of the middling men of Police Battalion 101, and I want to think through the case with them. Does Rubin Stacey really deserve to die, right now, in this way, with no trial and no assurance of guilt, based on a rumor, for an act which is not even a capital offense? Do you really want to hang him from a tree with a clothesline and pass around a gun taking shots at him? This ten-year-old Jewish girl that you’re walking beside in the forest, who cannot have done anything wrong – do you really feel okay shooting her in the back of the head? Is there really no part of you that knows this is wrong and screams against it?

When I imagine sitting with the perpetrators like this, I find myself pulled toward the Mengzian view. I can’t help but feel that most ordinary people, if they paused in this way to think through the situation and measure their hearts, would see past the horrible bigotry of their culture, feel the pull of sympathy and humanity, and be morally revolted by such deeds. I imagine, and I hope, and I believe, that they could find their moral compass. But I confess that this opinion is more a matter of faith than a conclusion rationally compelled by the historical evidence.

Notes

[1] For accounts of Stacey’s lynching, see Fort Lauderdale Daily News and Evening Sentinel 1935; New York Times 1935; Reading Eagle 1935; Brooks 1988; Allen et al. 2003, plate 57 and page 185; Florida Lynchings Files 2014; Bryan 2020.

[2] For general overviews of the history of lynching, see Dray 2002; Allen et al. 2003; Wood 2009; and for the personal recollections of a survivor, Cameron 1982/1994.

[3] For in-depth portrayals of the activities of Police Battalion 101, see Browning 1992 and Goldhagen 1996.

References

Allen, James, Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack (2003). Without Sanctuary. Twin Palms Publishers. 

Brooks, Brian (1988). The day they lynched Reuben Stacey. Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale) (Jul. 17), p. 10.

Browning, Christopher (1992). Ordinary men. HarperCollins. 

Bryan, Susannah (2020). A lynch mob killed a Black man in Fort Lauderdale in 1935. His name was Rubin Stacy. South Florida Sun Sentinel (Sep. 11). https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fort-lauderdale/fl-ne-rubin-stacy-lynching-memorial-20200911-u3f6jg26izerllal7vva6nz3wi-story.html [accessed Sep. 17, 2021].

Cameron, James (1982/1994). A time of terror. Baltimore: Black Classics Press. 

Dray, Philip (2002). At the hands of persons unknown. New York: Random House. 

Florida Lynchings Files (2014). The lynching of Reuban Stacey. https://floridalynchings.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/the-lynching-of-reuban-stacey.pdf [accessed Sep. 17, 2021]. 

Fort Lauderdale Daily News and Evening Sentinel (1935). Coroner’s inquest clears sheriff’s office of blame in lynching of negro here. Fort Lauderdale Daily News and Evening Sentinel (Jul. 20), p. 1.

Goldhagen, Daniel J. (1996). Hitler’s willing executioners. New York: Random House. 

New York Times (1935). Negro is lynched by mob in Florida. New York Times (Jul. 20), p. 28. 

Reading Eagle (1935). Negro hanged by mob in sight of home of woman he slashed with knife. Reading Eagle (Jul. 20), p. 2. 

Wood, Amy Louise (2009). Lynching and spectacle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Everything Is Valuable

A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a talk by Henry Shevlin titled "Which Animals Matter?" The apparent assumption behind the title is that some animals don't matter -- not intrinsically, at least. Not in their own right. Maybe jellyfish (with neurons but no brains) or sponges (without even neurons) matter to some extent, but if so it is only derivatively, for example because of what they contribute to ecosystems on which we rely. You have no direct moral obligation to a sponge.

Hearing this, I was reminded of a contrasting view expressed in a famous passage by the 16th century Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming:

[W]hen they see a child [about to] fall into a well, they cannot avoid having a mind of alarm and compassion for the child. This is because their benevolence forms one body with the child. Someone might object that this response is because the child belongs to the same species. But when they hear the anguished cries or see the frightened appearance of birds or beasts, they cannot avoid a sense of being unable to bear it. This is because their benevolence forms one body with birds and beasts. Someone might object that this response is because birds and beasts are sentient creatures. But when they see grass or trees uprooted and torn apart, they cannot avoid feeling a sense of sympathy and distress. This is because their benevolence forms one body with grass and trees. Someone might object that this response because grass and trees have life and vitality. But when they see tiles and stones broken and destroyed, they cannot avoid feeling a sense of concern and regret. This is because their benevolence forms one body with tiles and stones (in Tiwald and Van Norden, eds., 2014, p. 241-242).

My aim here isn't to discuss Wang Yangming interpretation, nor to critique Shevlin (whose view is more subtle than his title suggests), but rather to express a thought broadly in line with Wang Yangming and with which I find myself sympathetic: Everything is valuable. Nothing exists to which we don't owe some sort of moral consideration.

When thinking about value, one of my favorite exercises is to consider what I would hope for on a distant planet -- one on the far side of the galaxy, for example, blocked by the galactic core, which we will never see and never have any interaction with. What would be good to have going on over there?

What I'd hope for, and what I'd invite you to join me in hoping for, is that it not just be a sterile rock. I'd hope that it has life. That would be, in my view, a better planet -- richer, more interesting, more valuable. Microbial life would be cool, but even better would be multicellular life, weird little worms swimming in oceans. And even better than that would be social life -- honeybees and wolves and apes. And even better would be linguistic, technological, philosophical, artistic life, societies full of alien poets and singers, scientists and athletes, philosophers and cosmologists. Awesome!

This is part of my case for thinking that human beings are pretty special. We're central to what makes Earth an amazing planet, a planet as amazing as that other one I've just imagined. The world would be missing something important, something that makes it rich and wonderful, if we suddenly vanished.

Usually I build the thought experiment up to us at the pinnacle (that is, the pinnacle so far; maybe we'll have even more awesome descendants); but also I can strip it down, in the pattern of Wang Yangming. A distant planet without us but with wolves and honeybees would still be valuable. Without the wolves and honeybees but with the worms, it also would still be valuable. With only microbes, it would still have substantial value -- after all, it would have life. Let's not forget how intricately amazing life is.

But even if there's no life -- even if it's a sterile rock after all -- well, in my mind, that's better than pure vacuum. A rock can be beautiful, and beauty has value even if there's no one to see it. Alternatively, even if we're stingy about beauty and regard the rock as a neutral or even ugly thing, well, mere existence is something. It's better that there's something rather than nothing. A universe of things is better than mere void. Or so I'd say, and so I invite you also to think. (It's hard to know how to argue for this other than simply to state it with the right garden path of other ideas around it, hoping that some sympathetic readers agree.)

I now bring this thinking back to Earth. Looking at the pebbles on the roof below my office window, I find myself feeling that they matter. Earth is richer for their existence. The universe is richer for their existence. If they were replaced with vacuum, that would be a loss. (Not that there isn't something cool about vacuums, too, in their place.) Stones aren't high on my list of valuable things that I must treat with care, but neither do I feel that I should be utterly indifferent to their destruction. I'm not sure my "benevolence forms one body" with the stones, but I can get into the mood.

[image source]

Uncle Iroh Is Discernibly Wise from the Beginning (with David Schwitzgebel)

My son David and I have been working on an essay about the wisdom of Uncle Iroh in Avatar: The Last Airbender. (David is a graduate student at Institut Jean Nicod in Paris.)

If you know the series, you'll know that Uncle Iroh's wisdom is hidden beneath a veneer of foolishness. He is a classic Daoist / Zhuangzian wise fool, who uses apparent stupidity and shortsightedness as a guise to achieve noble ends (in particular the end of steering his nephew Zuko onto a more humane path as future ruler of the Fire Nation). See our discussion of this in last week's post.

Since Iroh disguises his wisdom with foolishness, we thought it possible that ordinary viewers of Avatar: The Last Airbender would tend to initially regard Iroh as actually foolish, while more knowledgeable viewers would better understand the wisdom beneath the guise.

For example, in Iroh's very first appearance in the series, Zuko sees a supernatural beam of light signaling the release of the Avatar, and Iroh reacts by dismissing it as probably just celestial lights, expressing disappointment that chasing after the light would interrupt a game he was playing with tiles. It would be easy to interpret Iroh in this scene as self-absorbed, lazy, and undiscerning, and we thought that naive viewers of the series, but not knowledgeable viewers, would tend to do so. We decided to test this empirically.

Our approach fits within the general framework of "experimental aesthetics." A central aesthetic property of a work of art is how people respond psychologically to it. Those responses can be measured empirically, and in measuring them, we gain understanding of the underlying mechanisms by which we are affected by a work of art. If Iroh is perceived differently by naive versus knowledgeable viewers, then the experience of Avatar: The Last Airbender changes with repeated viewing: In the first view, people read Iroh's actions as foolish and lazy; in the second view, they appreciate the wisdom behind them. If, in contrast, Iroh is perceived as similarly wise by naive and knowledgeable viewers, then the series operates differently: It portrays Iroh in such a manner that ordinary viewers can discern from the beginning that a deeper wisdom drives his apparent foolishness.

We recruited 200 participants from Prolific, an online source of research participants commonly used in psychological research. All participants were U.S. residents aged 18-25, since we wanted an approximately equal mix of participants who knew and who did not know Avatar: The Last Airbender and we speculated that most older adults would be unfamiliar with the series. We asked participants to indicate their familiarity with Avatar: The Last Airbender on a 1-7 scale from "not at all familiar" to "very familiar." We also asked six multiple-choice knowledge questions about the series (e.g., "What was the anticipated effect of Sozin's Comet?"). In accordance with our preregistration, participants were classified as "knowledgeable" if their self-rated knowledge was four or higher and if they answered four or more of the six knowledge questions correctly. Full methodological details, raw data, and supplementary analyses are available in the online appendix.

Somewhat to our surprise, the majority of respondents -- 63% -- were knowledgeable by these criteria, and almost none were completely naive: 95% correctly answered the first (easiest) knowledge question, identifying "Aang" as the name of the main character of the series. Perhaps this was because our online recruitment language explicitly mentioned Avatar: The Last Airbender. It is thus possible that we disproportionately recruited Avatar fans or those with at least a passing knowledge of the series.

Participants viewed three short clips (about 60-90 seconds) featuring Iroh and another three short clips featuring Katara (another character in the series), in random order, with half of participants seeing all the Iroh clips first and the other half seeing all the Katara clips first. The Iroh clips were scenes from Book One in which Iroh is superficially foolish: the opening scene described above; a scene in which Iroh falls asleep in a hot spring instead of boarding Zuko's ship at the appointed time ("Winter Solstice, Part 1: The Spirit World", Episode 7, Book 1); and a scene in which Iroh "wastes time" redirecting Zuko's ship in search of gaming tile ("The Waterbending Scroll", Episode 9, Book 1). The Katara clips were similar in length; they were clips from Book One, featuring some of her relatively wiser moments.

After each scene, participants rated the character's (Iroh's or Katara's) actions on six seven-point scales: from lazy to hard-working, kind to unkind, foolish to clever, peaceful to angry, helpful to unhelpful, and most crucially for our analysis wise to unwise. After watching all three scenes for each character, participants were asked to provide a qualitative (open-ended, written) description of whether the character seemed to be wise or unwise in the three scenes.

As expected, participants rated Katara as wise in the selected scenes, with a mean response of 1.85 on our 1 (wise) to 7 (unwise) scale, with no statistically detectable difference between the naive (1.95) and knowledgeable (1.80) groups (t(192) = 1.35, p = .18). (Note that wisdom here is indicated by a relatively low number on the scale.) However, contrary to our expectations, we also found no statistically significant difference between naive and knowledgeable participants' ratings of Iroh's wisdom. Overall, participants rated him as somewhat wise in these scenes: 3.04 on the 1-7 scale (3.08 among naive participants, 3.02 among knowledgeable participants, t(192) = -0.35, p = .73).

For example, 81% of naive participants rated Iroh as wise (3 or less on the 7-point scale) in the scene described near the beginning of this post, where Iroh superficially appears to be more concerned about his tile game than about the supernatural sign of the Avatar. (Virtually the same percentage of knowledgeable participants describe him as wise in this scene: 83%.) The naive participants' written responses suggest that they tend to see Iroh's calm attitude as wise, and several naive participants appear already to discern that his superficial foolishness hides a deeper wisdom. For example, one writes:

I actually believe that though he appears to be childish and foolish that he is probably very wise. He comes off as having been through a lot and understanding how life works out. I think he hides his intelligence.

And another writes:

I am not familiar with the character, but from a brief glance he seems to be somewhat foolish and unwise. For some reason however, it seems like he might be putting on a facade and acting this way on purpose for some alterier [sic] motive, which would mean that he actually is very wise. I do not have any evidence for this though, it's just a feeling.

Although not all naive participants were this insightful into Iroh's character, the similarity in mean scores between the naive and knowledgeable participants speaks against our hypothesis that knowledgeable participants would view Iroh as overall wiser in these scenes. Nor did naive participants detectably differ from knowledgeable participants in their ratings of how lazy, kind, foolish, peaceful, or helpful Iroh or Katara are.

Although these data tended to disconfirm our hypothesis, we wondered whether it was because the "naive" participants in this study were not truly naive. Recall that 95% correctly identified the main character's name as "Aang". Many, perhaps, had already seen a few episodes or already knew about Iroh from other sources. Perhaps knowledge of Avatar: The Last Airbender is a cultural touchstone for this age group, similar to Star Wars for the older generation, so that few respondents were truly naive?

To address this possibility, we recruited 80 additional participants, ages 40-99 (mean age 51), using more general recruitment language that did not mention Avatar: The Last Airbender. In sharp contrast with our first recruitment group, few of the participants -- 7% -- were "knowledgeable" by our standards, and only 28% identified "Aang" as the main character in a multiple-choice knowledge question.

Overall, the naive participants in this older group gave Iroh a mean wisdom rating of 3.00, not significantly different from the mean of 3.08 for the naive younger participants (t(139) = -0.43, p = .67). ("Hyper-naive" participants who failed even to recognize "Aang" as the name of the main character similarly gave a mean Iroh wisdom rating of 2.89.) Qualitatively, their answers are also similar to those of the younger participants, emphasizing Iroh's calmness as his source of wisdom. As with the younger participants, some explicitly guessed that Iroh's superficial foolishness was strategic. For example:

I'm not familiar with these characters, but I think Iroh is (wisely) trying to stop his nephew from going down "the path of evil." He knows that playing the bumbling fool is the best way to give his nephew time to realize that he's on a dangerous path.

And

He comes off a as [sic] very foolish and lazy old man. But i have a feeling he is probably a lot wiser than these scenes show.

We conclude that ordinary viewers -- at least viewers in the United States that can be accessed through Prolific -- can see Iroh's foolish wisdom from the start, contrary to our initial hypothesis.

#

In Book One, Iroh behaves in ways that are superficially foolish, despite acting in obviously wise ways later in the series. There are three possible aesthetic interpretations. One is that Iroh begins the series unwise and learns wisdom along the way. Another is that Iroh is acting wise, but in a subtle way that is not visible to most viewers until later in the series, only becoming evident on a second watch. A third is that, even from the beginning, it is evident to most intended viewers that Iroh's seeming foolishness conceals a deeper wisdom. On a combination of interpretive and empirical grounds, explored in this blog post and last week's, the third interpretation is the best supported.

To understand Iroh's wisdom, it is useful to look to the ancient Daoist Zhuangzi, specifically Zhuangzi's advice for dealing with incompetent rulers by following peacefully along with them, unthreateningly modeling disregard for fame and accomplishment while not being too useful for their ends. Since Zhuangzi provides no concrete examples of how this is supposed to work, we can look to Iroh's character as an illustration of the Zhuangzian approach to political advising. In this way, Avatar: The Last Airbender -- and the beloved uncle Iroh -- can help us better understand Zhuangzi in particular and the Daoist tradition in general.

-----------------------------------

Full draft essay available here. Comments and suggestions welcome! It's under revise and resubmit, and we hope to submit the revised version by the end of the month.

[image source]