When Blogging Makes a Fine Albatross Necklace, Composing, 19/07/2013

Not every experiment works. Not every idea pans out. Sometimes an inventive thought is a dead end. That’s basically how I feel after getting some feedback from yesterday’s post. 

I made George Zimmerman a central focus of an idea I had about the importance of empathy in moral philosophy. The general philosophical goal of that post was to express my feeling, after several years working in moral philosophy, that matters like empathy don’t always get a fair shake in many of its major theoretical camps. And I briefly wondered what kind of principles a moral philosophy for whom empathy and remorse was paramount would produce. 

But I got burned. I had a dedicated follower of the Zimmerman trial call me out on my oversimplifications, stereotypes of Zimmerman himself, mistakes in analysis of the court’s judgment, and presumptions about Zimmerman’s thoughts. I had a medical doctor tell me that if he wasn’t able to tune down his remorse when he loses patients, he’d collapse and be unable to do his genuinely beneficial work. This last point is an especially egregious ball-drop for me, because I've taught medical ethics on and off since 2010, but I didn't think of this angle when I was just thinking in the context of street crime and state-administered executions.

I wrote a bad post. I departed from the facts of a real-world case in a way that I thought would be philosophically interesting, but wasn’t. I thought of an idea that I myself don’t actually have any time to pursue in detail. It was a post that discussed part of how I’ve engaged with moral philosophy over the last few years. I chose a notable example that I had been paying attention to in my real life, but used it in such a way that I did a disservice to the facts of a very sensitive matter.

It’s dangerous for me to put these little thoughts, semi-random conjectures, and ideas I come up with in my research or my memory on the internet. I’m going to apply for a spate of tenure track jobs over this Fall, and every one of those hiring committees will be able to find this blog. And if they happen to read it in a week where my posts include a higher frequency of dead ends or a couple of conceptual duds, I will likely be passed over and face another year as an unemployed academic. If someone on that hypothetical hiring committee reads a post he doesn’t like, or that is a dead end, or that considers a point that he finds easy to refute, then I don’t get any work. 

This is why many young academics are tempted keep their mouth shut and don’t publicize their publications, stay off the internet, and never risk saying anything philosophically controversial. At risk of upsetting someone who may be in charge of hiring them, they never say anything at all. It’s for this reason that on Thursday afternoon, I seriously considered deleting this blog, all the tweets and facebook posts that linked to it, and forgetting that the entire thing happened. 

But even the peer-reviewed publications, which we have to write if we want to secure a permanent position, will contain ideas that a hiring committee doesn’t agree with. Someone on the hiring committee might read an article included with my application as a writing sample and absolutely hate it. And enough academics today are familiar enough with personal and professional blogging that they know not every post will be conceptual manna raining from Wordpress. 

One danger of a blog with daily updates about philosophical ideas will be posting ideas that are, at the time, little more than suggestions and brief speculations. Not all of them will work. Some of them might turn out to be a little silly. But I’d ask you to turn to my July 17 post, and remember that while a new idea has some problems, that doesn’t mean that it consists only of problems and that the idea has nothing of value. 

I’ve seen professors who talk down to students and belittle them for a speculation that isn’t of the best quality in a discussion. In contrast, I’ve seen good professors tactfully point out the limitations of a mediocre expression, knowing that not everything said in an improvised discussion or a brief daily blog is going to be meticulously researched, impeccably defended against every possible counter-argument. And the student might just have made a mistake. Anyone can make a mistake. I did in Thursday morning’s post.

The Consequences of Intention, A History Boy, 18/07/2013

In writing news, I finished my edits of the first chapter of my ecophilosophy manuscript, and it didn’t require quite the radical changes that I worried I’d have to make this summer. I still couldn’t find a place to put that orphaned paragraph, but maybe I can find one for the idea elsewhere in this book, or in another project.

One of the typical divisions in contemporary moral philosophy is between deontological or duty-based and consequentialist moralities. These are often held (at least in mediocre undergraduate introductory courses) as the two pillars of moral thinking. Evaluating the goodness of an act will depend on what benefits or pains it produces as a consequence, or as well as it follows some moral duty arrived at through reasoning on moral intuitions or principles. In duty-based thinking, one’s intentions play a key role in determining the rightness of an action. If you did a beneficial or morally right act, and you intended to do so or you intended to follow a moral duty, then that counts as more upstanding than if you’d done it by accident. You can see how our legal systems work as combinations of intentions and consequences. Accidental harms engender lesser punishments than intentional harms. 

But I’ve always thought there was more to morality than this. It makes me something of a virtue ethicist, but I’m hesitant to identify as a virtue ethicist either. See, most of the discourse in virtue ethics today is on trying to figure out what the true virtues are. The discussions try to isolate the virtues in the same way, in deontological moral philosophy, thinkers try to isolate what the true moral duties are. And the expectation is that the virtues, like the duties, will be simple character traits that are unerringly and universally virtuous. 

My own thinking about moral virtue is more complicated. (Do you see why I don’t usually write straight articles about moral philosophy?) Because I don’t think virtues are necessarily universal across all situations of action, or that the virtuousness of particular character features can be considered in isolation of the biological and psychological nature of humans. And when it comes to considering individual acts, I still think the psycho-biological context of human nature is important to consider ethically.

George Zimmerman, smiling
ambiguously

This murky ground between intention and consequent was floating in the back of many of my own reactions to the Zimmerman trial. Because ultimately, I can’t judge how ridiculous Florida’s self-defense and stand-your-ground laws are. Law isn’t my area of expertise. The case was decided on the matter of who provoked the fight, and what constitutes provoking a fight. Throwing a punch? Or stalking someone down a dark, alienating suburban street? And some key jurors seemed to live in a state of reasonable doubt about reality, let alone the malicious intent of Zimmerman’s actions.

What enrages me about Zimmerman is even more horrifying than the fact that he killed a 17-year-old young man, and that his racial prejudices probably motivated his suspicions of him. It’s that he never seemed to feel bad about what he did. His brother’s nonchalant dismissal of Trayvon’s life in his Piers Morgan interview was a key sign. Killing someone shocks you; it’s a destabilizing, terrifying, traumatizing event. It’s a sign of your emotional health that if you kill someone, whether or not in self-defense, the event haunts you. Or at least upsets you. 

Fred Allen, former supervisor of executions for the state of
Texas, and in many ways a broken person.

Zimmerman seemed calm. The act of killing never upset him or made him sad. In Werner Herzog’s documentary Into the Abyss, one of the most powerful interviews is with Fred Allen, a former officer in charge of executions in Texas. He would strap down inmates and supervise the doctors administering lethal injections. He dealt every day with death that was entirely legitimated by his country’s laws and his society’s morality. One day, playing a part in so many deaths weighed too much, and he snapped. He had a nervous breakdown and had to leave his job, giving up his pension and financial security because he couldn’t take part in killing anymore. I contrast Fred Allen with George Zimmerman, and I see something missing in Zimmerman. There’s an obliviousness to the gravity of his actions. Leaving aside questions of legal accountability, killing a human is a weighty act. 

And I think this aspect of human ethical life isn't considered by a lot of contemporary philosophy. The question always seems to be a matter of conformity to a moral principle to determine rightness, investigating the effects of an action to determine its benefits and harms, or whether it was motivated by virtuous or vicious character. The ethical weight of trauma does not seem to be widely considered, at least by the moral philosophy in which I've been educated over the last decade. Trauma ethics I think can be far more insightful than the tried-and-believed-to-be-true conceptual frameworks of the rest of moral philosophy. While I'm not yet sure where to start such an inquiry, I think it could be very intriguing for some philosopher out there to consider.

Zimmerman seems to have no personal remorse, no sense that he did anything wrong or even out of the ordinary. Philosophically and personally, that disturbs me.