Philosophy and life, p.26
Philosophy and Life, page 26
In the gun case, the moral status of the first man is determined by an unintended consequence. In the criminal youth case, his moral status is determined by his circumstances. There are even broader circumstances of relevance: factors such as genes and upbringing, over which an individual has no control at all, undoubtedly make their contribution. This has been described by Thomas Nagel as ‘constitutive’ moral luck, which differs from the ‘circumstantial’ case because in the latter the individual has at least some degree of choice – the youth could quit the circle of thieves he finds himself in once he realizes the implications of belonging to it; but he cannot alter the constitutive element of his genes or his upbringing in early life.
The ‘moral luck’ dilemma arises in cases where it is thought to be correct to hold someone accountable despite the fact that he had no control over what he did, as in the first gunman’s case. There seems to be something both right and wrong about this. On the one hand, the very idea of luck is the idea of what an agent did not intend, did not bring about, had no influence over: ‘luck’ and ‘chance’ are concepts that go naturally together. On the other hand we feel justified in punishing a murderer more harshly than someone who attempted murder but failed. We can specify that everything the murderer and would-be murderer did was identical; they planned to kill someone, put the plan into action, took aim and fired; but in the second case the intended victim, unaware of her danger, moved at the last moment and the bullet flew past her. The would-be murderer’s failure is his lucky chance as regards consequences.
The extreme case of scepticism about moral accountability arises in the ‘free will’ debate, for there a hard determinist position entails that no one is responsible for anything, and the very idea of morality – which depends on agency, responsibility, the validity of praise and blame – vanishes. Trying to make sense of our intuitions – that the first gunman should be held accountable for the death of the child; that the criminal youth should be granted some leniency given his circumstances – swings the pendulum way over in the opposite direction, making people accountable for what they are not responsible for. This is very like the iron Greek view that even if you are fated to commit a crime, you will be punished for doing it.
Having subjected the problem of moral luck to an exhaustive examination, Nagel concluded, ‘I believe that in a sense the problem has no solution.’ This is because the idea of agency is incompatible with treating human actions as mere events, or people as mere things. Yet as the factors prompting a person’s actions are brought fully into the light, it looks more and more as if actions are indeed events and people are things. ‘Eventually nothing remains which can be ascribed to the responsible self, and we are left with nothing but a portion of the larger sequence of events, which can be deplored or celebrated, but not blamed or praised.’14
Before agreeing with Nagel’s pessimistic conclusion, consider further the fact that in practice both our ordinary moral judgments and our systems of justice base themselves on the inconsistent ideas that circumstances make a difference to culpability (you and your friend’s guns go off accidentally but only your bullet kills someone, so only you go to prison), and at the same time that inequalities that arise from circumstances just have to be accepted (you are adopted by a poor family, and your twin by a rich family, with all that follows; but that’s just ‘luck of the draw’).
It is when we dig into the examples used to illustrate how we treat cases of moral luck that significant distinctions appear. Consider the first gunman; suppose it transpires in court that he is a man of sterling character – a philanthropist, loved and admired by the community. Or suppose it transpires that he is a careless and inconsiderate layabout. It would be unsurprising to find the court meting out very different treatments accordingly. So his character, not just what he did, enters the reckoning; a consequentialist approach gets him into court, a ‘virtue ethics’ approach might get him out of it – or alternatively, further in. ‘A good person who does a bad thing’, ‘a bad person who does something bad accidentally’; in reflecting on the difference in the way we treat these two cases, we are led to ask: can one be a good person accidentally – as a result of luck?
The biggest problem with the idea of moral luck is that it seems to threaten the idea of morality itself, in that judgments about the moral status of agents bring in considerations that the agents themselves have nothing to do with, and that seems unjust. But what in fact it does is to say that there are often bigger issues at stake than a particular act. The first gunman’s carelessness resulted in a death; the victim’s whole family was harmed by their loss; society has an interest in not tolerating carelessness with outcomes of such gravity, and therefore must put those consequences into the judgment about how to respond. This thought is a reiteration of the fact that ethics – relating to the character of a person and of a society – is a larger matter than morals, a narrower matter of what governs aspects of interpersonal relationships within society.
This is to acknowledge that ethical considerations trump moral ones when important questions are at stake; it is to acknowledge that a society’s self-management requires, as a pragmatic matter, that sometimes individuals have to be held accountable for what they are not responsible for. And it is also to accept the fact – as implied by the twins example above – that the prospects of good and worthwhile lives to a significant extent lie in the laps of the gods. It is easier to be good when you are not beset by struggles; long ago Mencius wrote that the natural goodness of human beings is perverted by poverty and hunger, which makes them turn to crime or unkindness because difficulties ‘sink and drown their hearts’. That is a point Aristotle also conceded, and it is why Martha Nussbaum called her book on the subject The Fragility of Goodness, to mark the idea that the possibility of having a good life is vulnerable to things outside an agent’s control. And that is precisely why the Stoics argued that what is outside one’s control should count among the ‘indifferents’ – to remove ourselves from the tyranny of moral luck.
All this said, it remains that good, worthwhile, even meaningful lives can be lived even in the direst of circumstances: Auschwitz proves it. Morally relevant luck plays its part here, but so also does will, though the thought of an individual’s determination to survive in those circumstances cannot be divorced from why he or she wills to overcome them; as Nietzsche said, ‘He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.’15 Frankl took this as a motto for logotherapy, the psychotherapy premised on the idea that discovery of meaning is the cure for neurosis.
Literature offers examinations of responses to circumstances of moral ill-luck. Alexandre Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo relates how Edmond Dantès, unjustly imprisoned in the island fortress of the Château d’If, is educated by – and after eight years escapes with the help of – the ingenious Abbé Faria. The Abbé, too frail to accompany Dantès, has revealed to him the whereabouts of a treasure trove on the island of Monte Cristo; with his education by Faria in literature, history, science and politics, and this wealth, Dantès reinvents himself as a count and takes revenge on those who had contrived his imprisonment and deprived him of his beloved Mercédès. The intelligence, will and ingenuity of Faria’s life in the Château d’If is detailed in an extraordinary act of imagination by Dumas, who might have acquired some of the ideas from prisoners whose long incarceration had likewise taught them necessity’s inventions. Perhaps, too, some of the inspiration came from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the eponymous castaway dependent on resourcefulness and will for survival on a desert island. The determination of Dantès and Crusoe is a contrast to the embittered railings of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens and King Lear, both characters who – the worse for having brought it on themselves – cannot rise above their misfortune.
Shakespeare’s ‘negative capability’ – Keats’ phrase for the ability to accept, in human nature, ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ – allows him to present Edgar and Kent in King Lear as good men, Iago in Othello as malicious, Lear as weak, and their characters as catalysts for events around them. In some cases explanation is given: Claudius in Hamlet commits fratricide and Macbeth commits regicide, each to get a crown, but Iago has no obvious motivation for destroying Desdemona and Othello. Shakespeare relies on the fact that ‘that is how things are’ with some people. So, both in fiction in the Château d’If and in terrible reality in the concentration camps, facts about human character – incorporating at its centre moral luck, good and bad – enter the picture essentially.
From these considerations one can draw many thoughts about ‘ordinary’ life and its philosophy. Answers to questions about moral luck, will, reasons to live, and whether a life is worth living given its circumstances, can be enriched by learning from the devastating lessons of the concentration camps, and from imaginative evaluation of what is explored in literature – literature being one of our best resources for delving into the complexities and nuances of human experience. This is a paradigm of how reflection on Socrates’ question benefits from assembling materials to inform one’s answer. For everything taught by such reflection is as relevant to ordinary life as to extreme circumstances; indeed, the philosophers teach that without making that reflection relevant to ordinary life, it will not be available if needed in harder times.
Nothing in the laws of statistics tells us that there could not be a person who, born with intelligence, beauty, wealth and health, could live actively until the age of ninety in a peaceful and civilized country without so much as a toothache or a stubbed toe to trouble her days. Happy in her relationships, contented with the state of affairs in the world around her, feeling permanently satisfied with everything in her life, she would be the personification of eudaimonia. Something like this might have happened at times, statistically speaking. But if so we can be sure that it is exceedingly rare, because plain general knowledge of the human body and the human condition tells us so. Physically, we are born to age and die, and in the process are vulnerable to many insults from microbes and viruses, falling rocks, abuse of our own organs by alcohol, nicotine and other drugs, radiation from natural sources, accidents, and many other things besides. Psychologically, we are born to anxiety, conflict, desire and stress more than we are born to happiness. This is because we are social animals and life among others is, psychologically, to jostle in the crowd, to have to compete sometimes, to experience uncertainty, to suffer setbacks and injustices small and large. ‘Life isn’t fair’ we say, and like almost all clichés this is true.
From these familiar observations we can conclude that the song is right: there is trouble ahead. There is always going to be trouble ahead. This stark fact, which most people spend most of their time ignoring, is what made the philosophers advise us to think about how to live, because to have a plan is to be prepared. Indeed there is a good sense in which philosophy is preparation – for the next minute, day, year; for life itself, because all our thought and action is directed at the future, which breaks over us from moment to moment like the waves of the sea.
Of course it is not wholly right to say that we do not prepare for life’s exigencies. We take out insurance policies and sign on to a pension scheme, we go jogging, we unwind with a glass of wine but not too much, we have savings. We make plans: for a garden shed, a holiday by the sea, a baby. In this sense we are not living blind to the future, nor are we naively assuming that everything will always be all right. But this is not what the philosophers meant. They were thinking of the near-inevitability, if the ‘near’ is not redundant, that we will experience illness, worry, even despair and defeat; that we will suffer loss, grief and anguish; that we will probably have to compromise – at very least – over the hopes and ambitions we nourished at the outset of life. In many cases, lives are smashed apart by an accident, a moment of bad timing, a mistake. In a trice, circumstances can change: the fit young athlete whose neck is broken in a clash on the sports field and is left paralysed; the child who darts out into the traffic and is run over. In less than a second, entire lives can be lost, ruined or permanently distorted.
These are grim reflections. But now contrast the following pairs of questions: ‘How would you react if such a thing happened? What do you think the consequences would be for what you are doing, or the plans you have?’ and ‘How should you react? What should you try to ensure about the effect of the consequences on your plans?’ This is where, taking advantage of the opportunity to reflect against the vast backdrop of human experience distilled in history, literature and our own lives, we face the challenge to formulate our response.
‘We’: that pronoun obtrudes again. But it is not clear that the demand here is deflected by considerations of intersectionality, ethnicity, inequalities, social and economic injustice, historical pressures, culture, tradition, religion, inherent personal qualities, talents, endowments and disabilities, general health, or all the other circumstances and conditions whose webs cling round each human being in his or her particularity. On the contrary, these factors sharpen the demand. To think otherwise is to think one is a victim of these factors rather than the subject of them, this latter setting the terms in which the answers to Socrates’ question have to be individually framed.
This point is succinctly made by saying that if Socrates’ question could be answered in Auschwitz, it can be answered anywhere. Even if the answer does no more than encapsulate an aspiration, provided one authentically wishes to realize it and authentically tries to do so – for how many of us would have survived in Auschwitz, still less been one of its ‘saints’? – it comes close to being enough for the life worth living.
10. Duties
It is a vexation to some to reflect that, having not asked to come into the world, nevertheless upon arrival in it – at least, upon arrival at the stage in life when they become aware of the following facts – they discover that they have obligations and duties, that there are expectations, that like a fly stuck in a spider’s web they are entangled in the net of prevailing social sentiment, opinion, custom, tradition and expectation, not least relating to other people’s rights and demands, and to what they themselves are obliged to do in order to get by. In Chapter 1 the word ‘normativity’ was introduced to describe this net. A significant aspect of the acculturation of children – their ‘upbringing’ – is to educate them in the behaviour and sentiments appropriate to inhabiting normativity’s net. The conventional philosophy of life they are equipped with in this way is fitted to the net, even if the net is not reciprocally fitted to people; as is obvious enough, for practical reasons the net’s nodes and interstices gather up the awkward diversity of human individuals into a small number of categories, and demand overall conformity from them.
But although the entanglement in normativity is a vexation to some, it is in fact a convenience, and even a relief, to others – perhaps most others. Many people like having normativity’s obligations because they provide a sense of purpose, and endow life’s standard activities with a sense of significance which, again to the satisfaction or relief of many, is shared with most others – for few like to be at odds with society, or to stand out as abnormal. Cleaving to normativity makes people feel that there is shape to their days and years – indeed, to their lives. What is asked of them by their place in the net constitutes the terms of life, and therefore the challenge to answer Socrates’ question does not arise; the duties defined by normativity stand before them, generally quite simple and clear, giving instructions about what to do in the family, at work, in the street, among other people in shops, buses and bars. To the question ‘What sort of person should I be?’ normativity gives the answer: ‘Someone who fits in and gets by.’
Although there are shades of difference in the meanings of ‘duty’ and ‘obligation’, they are, in the present connection, the same thing: if you have an obligation, you have a duty to fulfil it. The family of other concepts with which both are associated includes ‘bond’, ‘agreement’, ‘promise’, ‘contract’, ‘commitment’, ‘requirement’ and even ‘liability’, and all of them connote ideas about trust and accountability. They all also imply constraint, and sanction for failure, whether legal or in the form of social disapprobation.
The obligations of normativity come in two broad types, voluntary and involuntary. The former are those we self-impose by signing a contract, getting married or booking a holiday. The latter are those imposed by the mere fact of membership of society. The distinction does not align with the kinds of sanctions that failing in the relevant duties invites. You can be sued for breach of contract, imprisoned for breaking a law, disdained by family and friends for marital infidelity. In general, society expects us to observe the requirements of normativity, on the perfectly rational grounds that too much rebellion against them would make society – and all the many benefits it offers – impossible.
In fact, too much rebellion against normativity makes one’s individual life nigh impossible too. In the quest for freedom, for example, a person might kick so hard against the constraints of normativity that as a result he ends up in prison, or socially ostracized, in a worse situation than the one he sought to escape. The prudent individual chooses his battles.
From a practical point of view, given these thoughts, normativity considerations seem to imply that an intervening question has to be answered before trying to answer – perhaps, before wasting time trying to answer – Socrates’ question. It is: ‘Is it realistic to think that I am in a position to answer Socrates’ question for myself? Was it not already answered by the sheer fact of where and when I was born, and the tight limits to my options that this imposes?’ Interestingly, in one stretch of the history of philosophy an assumption was widely made that where and when you were born indeed settles the question of how you should live, because it defines your duties, and duties must be carried out – this ‘must’ being part of the very definition of ‘duty’. The assumption is embedded in the concept of ‘my station and its duties’, a concept which, following Hegel, was extensively discussed by the idealist philosophers T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley and Henry Sidgwick.1 It is not surprising that in this nineteenth-century debate the idea of a station in life – a specific location in the net – might carry a set of obligations particular to that location, where the ‘station’ is not just an office as a policeman or schoolteacher, or a role as a husband or son, but by implication a social position as a peasant or a lord. Few in this version of the debate would deny that a peasant could rise to be a lord in exceptional circumstances, but such circumstances would indeed be exceptional, so it was taken for granted that people found themselves not only in a job or a role but in a social class which presumably had at least as much influence in shaping their prospects, and therefore the associated expectations, as their intelligence or talent and the range of choices permitted them.
