Hedonism (for reals though)
Jun. 9th, 2019 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonI wanted to do some serious reading on this vacation to go with the fluffy stuff, and chose A Hedonist Manifesto by Michel Onfray because I realized how little I knew about hedonism as a real philosophical system. (People use the slang term all the time, but usually in a derogatory way. If you want to know how far off it is, think about the word "cynical" as generally used, and contrast with the original idea of living a life of virtue in agreement with nature, with just the basics).
Onfray is a serious, active, and famous-in-France philosopher who goes over a lot of the history of hedonist philosophical thought (and philosophers) before getting into his ideas on what constitutes morality. The book is also translated, which made it tough going -- lots of obscure words that the Kindle didn't know, a few words that set my teeth on edge (including "hysterical" to mean, roughly, twitterpated -- but the misogynist overtones were almost certainly not intended), and of course I'm not so big on history in general.
Anyway. I can enjoy a book without 100% recommending it, and I highlighted more passages from this one than probably any other on my Kindle. 45 passages, according to kindle.amazon.com, and all but two were things I liked, so there's that. The book is correct that many moralities and philosophical frameworks are happy to talk about avoiding suffering, but straight talk about pleasure as a potentially moral good is hard to find. People get embarrassed by discussion of pleasure, and there tends to be an assumption that the only kind is of the short-term and physical variety. It was great to read a book that doesn't shy away from the idea of an enjoyable, enjoyed life as a morally good one.
I can't read about ethics/morality/philosophy anymore without thinking of Jonathan Haidt's framework of morality from The Righteous Mind to see how whatever I'm reading fits in. In this case, it's easy. The barest summary is "enjoy and have others enjoy, without doing harm to yourself or anyone else; that is all there is to morality." Which means, in the Haidt framework, pay attention to the Care/Harm axis and leave the other sensibilities out of morality. I am actually not far away from this, and I'm now even more convinced that care/harm/pleasure is one of my own major ethical concerns. But my knowledge of the other axes/pillars tells me that hedonism alone won't sit well with most people in the world, and I have the vocabulary to say why. Alas. :-/
Onfray did disappoint in a couple of places. I was curious what he'd have to say about sex and gender, of course, and he expressed his staunch feminism thusly: "We can talk of real equality once literature produces the equivalent of a female Casanova, a female Don Juan, and this proper name becomes a substantive that gives value to the individual it qualifies. But we seem far from that." Hahaha YES, preach it! He also basically thinks that sex can be very morally good, can involve 2+ beings, and should be rolled into whatever kind of relationship makes sense for those involved. But the way to actually comport oneself while doing this seems a little bit pre-polyamory, in that he thinks the best way to avoid jealousy (which he terms inevitable) is to not give oneself exposure to it; to be discreet and expect others to do the same. This is "don't ask, don't tell" and would seem to essentially disallow multiple relationships that matter, which reads as kind of primitive to my ears. Of course it's also very French. A cultural thing? At any rate, it was just one paragraph in a chapter I essentially agreed with, so I shall try to forgive. And there were a couple of other instances of this, including an overly-blanket statement about antidepressants that prompted me to write "christ what an asshole" in a Kindle note.
More egregiously and confusingly, the book entirely leaves out animal experiences of the world. I was honestly surprised by this. Onfray's hedonism is quite close to utilitarianism, with a large priority on helping others feel pleasure (help them, avoid hurting them) and a tendency to prioritize (probable) future happiness over the momentary. And he used the word "beings" a lot, maybe more than he used "people". It seems difficult to me to discuss the maximizing of total pleasure/pain in the world while overlooking the many instances of animal consciousness around us; I'm thinking both of pets and the fact that we give a lot of animals truly terrible lives before, you know, eating them. I expected him to at least get into how intensely different animals might feel, and how we should measure their pleasure/pain against human pleasure/pain.
I still liked it, and appreciated his point that a lot of atheists still hold suspiciously Judeo-Christian values. His talk of a post-Christian atheism is warranted, because yes it is is good to go back and question our moral stances when our underlying beliefs change. For my part, I'm mentally going back to (my own expanded version of) Haidt's framework, a little. There are other moral pillars that I've already decided I explicitly reject as part of my morality system (even if I may consider them as aesthetic or even pragmatic things), like the Sanctity/Degradation axis. I think I'm about ready to consciously jettison one more, but I have more thinking to do. In the meantime, I'm glad I did the above bit of reading and had time to chew on it sufficiently.
Onfray is a serious, active, and famous-in-France philosopher who goes over a lot of the history of hedonist philosophical thought (and philosophers) before getting into his ideas on what constitutes morality. The book is also translated, which made it tough going -- lots of obscure words that the Kindle didn't know, a few words that set my teeth on edge (including "hysterical" to mean, roughly, twitterpated -- but the misogynist overtones were almost certainly not intended), and of course I'm not so big on history in general.
Anyway. I can enjoy a book without 100% recommending it, and I highlighted more passages from this one than probably any other on my Kindle. 45 passages, according to kindle.amazon.com, and all but two were things I liked, so there's that. The book is correct that many moralities and philosophical frameworks are happy to talk about avoiding suffering, but straight talk about pleasure as a potentially moral good is hard to find. People get embarrassed by discussion of pleasure, and there tends to be an assumption that the only kind is of the short-term and physical variety. It was great to read a book that doesn't shy away from the idea of an enjoyable, enjoyed life as a morally good one.
I can't read about ethics/morality/philosophy anymore without thinking of Jonathan Haidt's framework of morality from The Righteous Mind to see how whatever I'm reading fits in. In this case, it's easy. The barest summary is "enjoy and have others enjoy, without doing harm to yourself or anyone else; that is all there is to morality." Which means, in the Haidt framework, pay attention to the Care/Harm axis and leave the other sensibilities out of morality. I am actually not far away from this, and I'm now even more convinced that care/harm/pleasure is one of my own major ethical concerns. But my knowledge of the other axes/pillars tells me that hedonism alone won't sit well with most people in the world, and I have the vocabulary to say why. Alas. :-/
Onfray did disappoint in a couple of places. I was curious what he'd have to say about sex and gender, of course, and he expressed his staunch feminism thusly: "We can talk of real equality once literature produces the equivalent of a female Casanova, a female Don Juan, and this proper name becomes a substantive that gives value to the individual it qualifies. But we seem far from that." Hahaha YES, preach it! He also basically thinks that sex can be very morally good, can involve 2+ beings, and should be rolled into whatever kind of relationship makes sense for those involved. But the way to actually comport oneself while doing this seems a little bit pre-polyamory, in that he thinks the best way to avoid jealousy (which he terms inevitable) is to not give oneself exposure to it; to be discreet and expect others to do the same. This is "don't ask, don't tell" and would seem to essentially disallow multiple relationships that matter, which reads as kind of primitive to my ears. Of course it's also very French. A cultural thing? At any rate, it was just one paragraph in a chapter I essentially agreed with, so I shall try to forgive. And there were a couple of other instances of this, including an overly-blanket statement about antidepressants that prompted me to write "christ what an asshole" in a Kindle note.
More egregiously and confusingly, the book entirely leaves out animal experiences of the world. I was honestly surprised by this. Onfray's hedonism is quite close to utilitarianism, with a large priority on helping others feel pleasure (help them, avoid hurting them) and a tendency to prioritize (probable) future happiness over the momentary. And he used the word "beings" a lot, maybe more than he used "people". It seems difficult to me to discuss the maximizing of total pleasure/pain in the world while overlooking the many instances of animal consciousness around us; I'm thinking both of pets and the fact that we give a lot of animals truly terrible lives before, you know, eating them. I expected him to at least get into how intensely different animals might feel, and how we should measure their pleasure/pain against human pleasure/pain.
I still liked it, and appreciated his point that a lot of atheists still hold suspiciously Judeo-Christian values. His talk of a post-Christian atheism is warranted, because yes it is is good to go back and question our moral stances when our underlying beliefs change. For my part, I'm mentally going back to (my own expanded version of) Haidt's framework, a little. There are other moral pillars that I've already decided I explicitly reject as part of my morality system (even if I may consider them as aesthetic or even pragmatic things), like the Sanctity/Degradation axis. I think I'm about ready to consciously jettison one more, but I have more thinking to do. In the meantime, I'm glad I did the above bit of reading and had time to chew on it sufficiently.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-10 02:11 pm (UTC)My impression, based on articles like https://behavioralscientist.org/whats-wrong-with-moral-foundations-theory-and-how-to-get-moral-psychology-right/, is that a two-factor model of morality is a better empirical fit than MFT's five-factor model. I also think Robin Hanson is onto something when he identifies those two factors as deriving from Farmer morality and Forager morality (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2017/08/forager-v-farmer-elaborated.html).
no subject
Date: 2019-06-16 01:31 pm (UTC)The MAC article you linked is pretty good, and acknowledges some of the "clumping" that Haidt also found when surveying people about the five MFT factors, but it seems to actually go up to seven moral factors rather than down to two. It also seems a little uppity with its claim to introduce "the four moral domains that were missing from MFT".
I find the MAC factors much harder to think about, in part because I do see Family as just one more kind of Group, and Reciprocity/Fairness are surely things that we express more assiduously within those groups we value and less elsewhere. Or to put this another way: it seems like some of these are actual moral factors, like Fairness, and others are contexts (or direct objects) where these factors are applied to varying degrees,like Group. I totally understand that I've only read one article on the topic, rather than a whole book, and my comparison may thus be unfair, but the intellectual "click" isn't there for me yet with MAC because the factors seem so intertwined.
For the record, the one missing from both -- which I cannot fit into an existing category for either of them -- is simple truth-telling. Call it Honesty/Integrity. A lot of people seem to care about this one and consider it very much a moral thing. Do you have any idea where this could fit in a framework?
(Something like speaking truth to power could fit as part of Heroism/Bravery in MAC, but that begs the question of why it would be considered a moral display to begin with.)
no subject
Date: 2019-06-17 09:01 pm (UTC)I have a long answer to your question re: Honesty/Integrity. I apologize in advance for its length, but here goes:
I think of MFT as a research program that tries to identify mental modules in humans that relate to morality by studying differences in people's immediate reactions to moral-esque questions. When stated in that way, some limitations and surprises of MFT stand out:
1) There is no reason to expect beforehand that variations in moral judgement will resolve into factors with intelligible content. Your raw data is a bunch of vectors that represent answers from different people or different cultures, and you run a principle components analysis or somesuch on the vectors to get factors of variation, and it is really surprising to me that the resulting factors can be well described with words like "Fairness".
(I'm *not* saying that MFT is wrong here, or faked their data, or anything like that. More of the opposite: research programs are good when they produce surprising conclusions, but we should recognize when that happens and think about theories that could explain the surprises.)
2) There is no reason to expect that variations in moral judgement will correspond to cognitive modules. People have variations in height, but that's not because they contain a "height module" that gets switched on or off. There are some situations in language learning where linguists think people might be learning a binary parameter (is my language head-initial or head-final?), but rarely an entire module. So while it is possible that top level moral variation is caused by the brain (responding to its cultural learnings, presumably) saying "module 1, 3, and 4, you are on; modules 2 and 5, you are off", it seems much more likely to me that the variation comes from the internal factors of modules that are entirely "on".
3) There is no reason to believe that variations in moral judgement will reveal any more than a small fraction of the brain's moral infrastructure. For example, your Honesty/Integrity category -- if everyone responded "No" to questions like "Should I lie for no reason?" then there is no variation, and Honesty/Integrity doesn't pop out of the factor analysis.
4) Semi-conversely, the entire enterprise is based on some initial judgements about what sort of questions to include in the surveys. It could be that there is a Music Morality factor, for example, relating to how strongly a culture thinks there are morally good or morally bad pieces of music. But that would never be discovered unless Haidt et al put music related questions on their questionnaires.
5) Finally, I think any theory of human morality that is based solely on people's immediate emotional reactions is almost certainly going to be incomplete. I appreciate that Haidt was reacting against theories like Piaget's that erred in the other direction by over-emphasizing the role of human reasoning, and I'm aware of the Argumentative Theory of Reasoning (https://www.edge.org/conversation/hugo_mercier-the-argumentative-theory) that says rationality was evolved simply to help us win arguments. That said, "people often spend time thinking about their moral decisions" is a cultural universal, and most of the evidence for the Argumentative Theory can be recast to say that human rationality and human morality co-evolved, with each influencing the other.
So, in summary, my guess as to why Honesty/Integrity doesn't pop out of the MFT research program is: a bunch of #3, and very possibly some of #5 and #4 as well.
no subject
Date: 2019-06-22 06:04 pm (UTC)For example, your Honesty/Integrity category -- if everyone responded "No" to questions like "Should I lie for no reason?" then there is no variation, and Honesty/Integrity doesn't pop out of the factor analysis.
Yep. At the same time they did manage to find the Care/Harm axis, even though everyone responded "no" to "Should I kick a puppy for no reason?". I remember that one especially since it was in the section about whether Democrats/Republicans have accurate mental models of each other. Democrats were somewhat on the side of "conservatives don't care about care/harm", but in fact nobody thinks it's fine to kick the puppy when no other benefit could accrue. So if they found Care/Harm it still seems plausible to me that they could have found Honestly. They just... didn't.
So I think 4 is likely to be more of the reason, that they didn't do a (broad enough) survey about what the surveys should cover, and thus they just didn't ask people.