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Title: Interpersonal violence and self-concept: A virtue ethics approach Author contact: Andrew Oberg Department of Regional Development Studies Toyo University
[email protected] [email protected] Author bio: Andrew Oberg is a lecturer at Toyo University. His academic interests include definitions of self and social morality, nonreligious ethics, language and its role in shaping thought.
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Abstract: Violence and the threat of violence remains a major concern for people all over the planet, and not simply for those who live in areas that are currently involved in major or minor ongoing conflicts. While massive outbreaks of physical violence and destruction — such as those that occur in war — have received much attention in a number of fields the acts of violence that are perpetrated in personal settings have not. The following attempts to partially fill in that void through an investigation of the roots of our inclination to use interpersonal violence. The study begins by establishing definitional parameters and examining angles by which violence’s instrumentality has been considered, noting that interpersonal violence is typically employed for the purposes of demonstrating dominance by an individual or group over another or as a means of coercion. Two case studies then follow in which the group-centered nature of the willingness to use interpersonal violence becomes clear: football hooliganism and the Khmer Rouge. Although an in-group/out-group orientation based on identity and/or belief is found to be at the core of perpetrators’ inclination to the instrumental use of violence, group formation and membership themselves are not negative characteristics; rather, the empirical sciences have established that such are naturally occurring and highly advantageous human traits. Therefore, the place of the self within the group is the level at which change should be sought in order to reduce individuals’ willingness to engage in interpersonal violence. Four representative views of the self are analyzed and an alternative self-concept is outlined which may, if included in a broader ethical setting, be efficacious in lessening the tendency towards our use of interpersonal violence. Finally, some broad suggestions for ethical educational programs are offered in the hopes of minimizing future occurrences of interpersonal violence. Keywords: groupism (tribalism); instrumentality; self-concept; violence; virtue ethics
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I. How could they do it? The Choeung Ek killing fields located about thirty minutes from central Phnom Penh are a somber testament to a land and people still struggling with recovery but also demonstrating a vibrancy that gives reason for optimism. Were the grounds not fenced off and were you able to enter them from the rear or side you would first be struck by the beauty of the Cambodian countryside, with its green fields stretching off into the distance and the sound of buzzing, chirping, and singing insects filling the heavy air. Entering from the front, you instead take note of the tall stupa that rises before you and houses some of the remains of over five thousand of those victims killed and buried in the mass graves that fill the enclosure; cleaned bones, mostly skulls, separated by type and displayed in large glass containers that stretch all the way up. There is a small museum to your right that has permanent and rotating exhibition rooms as well as an area to watch a short film about the events of the Khmer Rouge era, but you decide to save that for later and follow the other visitors to receive a pair of headphones with an audio guide that will accompany you on your walking tour of the site. The areas you pass and the information and stories you hear are heart-breaking, perhaps none more so than the large and lone Killing Tree bearing a sign that tells you it was used to beat children to death, with babies held by their ankles and swung into the massive trunk to break their tiny bodies. It is an experience you will take with you for the rest of your life. As you finish your tour and head back towards the city you cannot help wondering, like so many before you, how it is that we are able to commit these atrocities that we do, how we are able to visit such horrors upon each other, and how we who do them can rise out of the same ranks of neighbors, family, friends, as we who are the horrified witnesses. Interpersonal violence can be incomprehensible. Yet that same interpersonal violence can be mundane and wholly ordinary when it comes not on the scale of genocide but simply as a brief report amidst the daily news. It is at this level, that of one person being willing to use and then actually using violence on another that the present study will focus in an attempt to help ascertain why we are so ready to do terrible harm to each other and what can perhaps be done to assist in alleviating this all too common tendency. We will begin by refining our focus with some definitions of violence and its use as a tool for dominance and coercion, and see that our tendency to employ violence for goal attainment can be found to have its roots in group-oriented identity and group-oriented beliefs. We will then move on to examine issues of the self and what it is thought to contain, probing to find if our views of what constitutes the self matches our biological structure: what our sense of ‘I’ may be and if we are in fact built the way we think we are. Is our need to belong to a group, with its attendant issues of identity and
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beliefs, harmful or helpful to us? Finally, we will consider some methods by which we may be able to shift our views of self and identity in subtle ways that will allow us to broaden the positives of our groupishness while reducing our willingness to apply violence against those with whom we do not relate, those who are not ‘us’ — for we will find that ‘they’ are not quite so separated from ‘us’ as we might think. II. ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ A. Definitions and instrumentality Before an analysis of the roots of our willingness to use interpersonal violence, and some thoughts on how to reduce this willingness, can be offered we will need to limit the scope of what it is that we are attempting to look at, for violence can encompass topics as diverse as war and genocide to contact sports to verbally abusive strangers, and categories as ‘phenomenologically elusive…as psychological, symbolic, structural, epistemic, hermeneutical, and aesthetic’.1 The present study will therefore limit itself to physical violence perpetrated by one person on another, whether in a group setting or individually, with the intention of causing bodily harm to the other in order to either demonstrate dominance or to coerce a desired outcome. While the intersoldier violence of war and other large-scale acts (e.g. genocide, ethnic cleansing, religious conflict, etc.) could also arguably fall under this rubric, such will not be considered due to their difference of setting; similarly, instances of self-defense also fall outside of our range of interest as such cases do not typically involve dominance or coercion, simply preservation. Our focus is rather on one individual deciding to (although perhaps unconsciously so) inflict harm on another individual and then following through on that decision. It is true that the case of the Khmer Rouge killings, which opened this paper, will be considered as a case study of violence born from group-orientation based primarily on belief (the other case study will examine football hooliganism as violence stemming from group-orientation based primarily on identity), but the focus there will also be on individual Khmer Rouge soldiers who were able to do what they did, rather than on the movement as a whole. In many ways it is impossible to fully extract the individual from the context in which the violence took place — and, indeed, to do so would lead to analytical folly, a point to be much discussed below — but if we are to help ourselves overcome our tendencies towards using violent means then limiting our study to this interpersonal aspect of it may be a beneficial starting point. It may also be of assistance for us to differentiate between terms commonly used in association with 1
Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 9.
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violence, and sometimes even used as synonyms, words like ‘power’, ‘aggression’, or ‘force’, in a manner that allows for a deeper analysis than a typical dictionary entry would.2 In this Hannah Arendt has helpfully paved the way, and with a few caveats and alterations we will follow her lead. Arendt defines ‘violence’ as instruments used to augment natural strength, ‘power’ as the ability to act in concert, and ‘force’ as the energy released by physical or social movements.3 The distinction between ‘violence’ and ‘power’ here is particularly important, I think, in allowing us to realize that violence is not always effective in garnering power or in attaining its ends more generally, and those ends themselves are not always clear, even to those employing the violent means. Moreover, distinguishing ‘power’ from ‘force’ maintains those two terms as operating on different levels and therefore having their associated abilities separated by a matter of degree as well. We will take these points from Arendt and add to them the following, restricting our definitions beyond common usage to provide greater clarity and focus for the proceeding inquiry (as well as defining ‘aggression’, which Arendt does not, and shifting aspects of her ‘strength’ and ‘authority’ into our usage of ‘power’):
Violence: An act of harm used instrumentally to increase one’s ability to cause or control another into performing, allowing the performance, or establishing the desired ends to which this is applied as a means. Such an act could be aimed at harming its object mentally, emotionally, or physically; for present purposes only the physical aspect will be considered. Power: A trait by which its holder is able to obtain its desires from others without the need for instrumental acts to persuade or coerce. The obedience involved here could be motivated by respect or awe of the holder or by a fear of possible consequences for disobedience. Force: The cumulative effects of a number of individuals working in tandem towards an objective or set of objectives, by which (greater) power is created for and/or vested in select persons themselves and the institution(s) those persons come to represent. This is both an emergent property of numerous cells
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The Oxford English Dictionary online, for example, defines violence as: ‘Behaviour involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something’ and Dictionary.com has: ‘1. swift and intense force, 2. rough or injurious physical force, action, or treatment, 3. an unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power, as against rights or laws, 4. a violent act or proceeding’. These and similar entries use either or both ‘force’ and ‘power’ in their definitions thus slightly confusing the matter; for our purposes more clarity is necessary. On the former, see: ‘Violence’, Oxford Dictionaries.
; and on the latter: ‘Violence’, Dictionary.com. . Both sites accessed 11 March 2014. 3 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1969), pp. 44-46.
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of power and a generator of further power. Aggression: The demonstration, or attempted demonstration, of superiority over another, usually linked to a desire to establish a relationship in which the aggressor has power over the aggressed. Violent means are often used towards this end.
From the above we can see that violence is frequently used as a tool; and that typically in the establishment or demonstration of power over one party by another. Those who would use violence — and we should remind ourselves that all of us are potential users — see it as a means by which they may achieve power, a method to induce obedience or to exhibit superiority (thus also implying a position of power). Violence has also been considered instrumentally useful in a number of other ways, however, and we will briefly consider a few of these before turning to some of the roots of the interpersonal violence that we are here discussing. Frantz Fanon famously considered violence to not only be an effective tool for achieving and keeping power but also for the psychological and spiritual cleansing of people over whom power had been exercised in a victimizing fashion.4 Writing on the context of colonialization as he was, Fanon proposed that the colonized are consumed with violence and that therefore when directed against their proper opponent (the colonizers) it could have a healing and rehabilitative effect, both by subjecting their aggressors to the same fear they have felt and by demonstrating their deep yearning for freedom and their ability to see themselves as having a status other than the ‘lower race’ or ‘manual laborer’ assigned to them by those opponents.5 Walter Benjamin wrote that violence should be categorized as either having or not having an historical acknowledgement of its ends: those with such an acknowledgement being legal ends, those without natural ends. Violence categorized as having natural ends therefore stands outside the law and threatens it, either seeking to change the existing law in some manner or to establish a new law (e.g. industrial strike actions).6 That legal subjects sanction this use of violence for natural ends (and not for legal, law-preserving, ends) Benjamin considers to be a contradiction, one that indicates that there is in ‘violence 4
Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, ‘On Politics and Violence: Arendt Contra Fanon’, Contemporary Political Theory, 7 (2008), 90-108. 5 Messay Kebede, ‘The Rehabilitation of Violence and the Violence of Rehabilitation: Fanon and Colonialism’, Journal of Black Studies, 31:5 (2001), 539-562. 6 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, ed. by Peter Demetz, pref. by Leon Wieseltier (New York: Schocken Books, 2007 (translation copyright 1978)), pp. 277-300.
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used for natural ends…a lawmaking character.’7 This is then contrasted with divine violence that is neither law-preserving nor lawmaking but law-dissolving: violence that is not a means nor an end but only an expression,8 and as such has been considered to have a socio-historical liberating quality (a kind of breaking through, or historical rupture in the Badiouan sense). Benjamin’s divine violence could thus technically be considered a noninstrumental violence, though it may have an instrumental function as a default consequence of its being, namely, its hypothesized liberating function.9 Slavoj Žižek also sees violence as being instrumentally efficacious, but in a primarily unseen way. He divides violence into that which is objective and that which is subjective, with objective violence being the sustaining level that underlies our typically nonviolent lives, broken only by the occurrence of subjective violence.10 (Žižek describes our daily experience as having a ‘background of a non-violent zero level’,11 presumably meaning ‘violence’ in a physical sense.) What he means by this is that objective violence is the violence that supports the structures and institutions of capitalism, it is ‘the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence’,12 whereas subjective violence is of the type defined above, acts by one individual directly onto another with the intention of inflicting harm. This appears to draw on, and Žižek references, Étienne Balibar’s two excessive types of violence: ultra-objective (the systemic violence in social conditions of world capitalism), and ultra-subjective (the violence of new ethnic/religious fundamentalisms).13 The sought ends of this last violence (that of fundamentalisms) is almost entirely for certain desired political or social effects, often brought about through long campaigns of small-scale but disruptive military or terrorist actions meant to exhaust the enemy into abandoning their position. As Ronaldo Munck notes, ‘When normalization of the abnormal occurs, violence has begun to achieve its objectives.’14 Where does our definition of ‘violence’ stand in relation to these thinkers’ ideas regarding its utility? What can we take from the above that will apply to our concern with interpersonal violence? We previously defined violence as: 7
ibid., p. 283. ibid. 9 Slavoj Žižek’s take on the concept may be instructive here, at least in the instrumentality it is given; see chapter six, ‘Divine Violence’ in his Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), pp. 178-205. 10 Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008). 11 ibid., p. 2. 12 ibid., p. 9. 13 ibid., p. 14. 14 Ronaldo Munck, ‘Deconstructing Violence: Power, Force, and Social Transformation’, Latin American Perspectives, 35 (2008), 3-19 (p. 11). 8
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An act of harm used instrumentally to increase one’s ability to cause or control another into performing, allowing the performance, or establishing the desired ends to which this is applied as a means. Under this definition would fall Fanon’s violence as a tool for achieving and keeping power, Benjamin’s violence of both natural ends and legal ends, and Žižek’s (/Balibar’s) subjective violence. What of the rest? Fanon’s rehabilitative aspect we reject on empirical and theoretical grounds: Fanon himself lists the ongoing effects of violence as being not only physical but also psychological, emotional, and social,15 and Singer notes how those inured to violence can and often do continue it, that seeking social justice through violence does not immune one to its corrupting effects. 16 Although there may be an initial period co-occurring with feelings of victorious euphoria in which the users of violence consider it to have been healing, the long-term negative psychosocial effects of violence have been well established and do not need to be repeated here. Benjamin’s divine violence poses an interesting tangent as it does not appear to be goal-directed, though as noted above it has been given a historically instrumental function (liberation/rupture). Perhaps more to the point though is its description as an expression; of what? To whom? That such is not focused on or directed at anyone or anything in particular seems to be its most salient attribute, indeed calling for a separate category altogether. Nevertheless, an act of harm whose sole intent is personal expression and which appears to be without a target does not fall into our concern with interpersonal violence (though some interpersonal violence may be the result of divine violence); note too that we are not considering violence done against inanimate objects for the same reason. Also outside the scope of our present concern with interpersonal violence is the (ultra)objective violence described by Žižek and Balibar. That systemic violence exists and is the cause of much socioeconomic harm is a controversial tenet but one that is not without a great deal of supporters, and while the evils of capitalism will not be discussed below this aspect of violence does remind us of the very important role that context plays in the actions we take and in how we interpret the situations we find ourselves in. Our definition of violence can therefore stand as is, though we will need to keep in mind that no act occurs in a vacuum, and although the distinctions between ‘violence’, ‘power’, ‘force’, and ‘aggression’ are important ones, 15 16
Frazer and Hutchings, op. cit. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 3rd edn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
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all four will often be a part of any given social setting. We now turn to the group-centered roots of our willingness to use these acts of harm, and to the two case studies that I hope will help to illustrate them. B. The groupish roots of our tendency towards interpersonal violence: Two illustrative examples and some conclusions 1. Case study: Football hooliganism Fan on fan violence surrounding professional football has been receiving increasing attention both from the media and from successive British governments since the 1960s. While the policies enacted to help deal with the issue have varied depending on the party in power (with Labour governments tending towards safety/preventative measures and Conservative governments towards punitive/exclusionary measures),17 the violence itself does not seem to be going away.18 One of the worst incidents occurred on 29 May 1985 at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels. Liverpool fans were given two seating sections next to a nominally neutral area but which ended up containing many rival Juventus fans who were able to obtain tickets from agencies or by other means. After a period of mutual antagonism in which both sides threw missiles at each other over a temporary fence that had been set up to segregate the sections, a group of Liverpool fans broke through. Thirty-nine deaths, two of whom were minors, and 600 injured resulted as the Juventus fans tried to escape from the Liverpool fans and ran back towards a retaining wall, crushing the fans already there and eventually causing the wall itself to collapse.19 That such acrimony could exist between supporters of two teams from different countries and different domestic leagues, teams that would hardly ever have the opportunity to face each other and whose fans were surely strangers, strikes many observers as shocking and difficult to believe. Yet the severity of this incidence aside, interfan violence of the type illustrated here is now and has been a major part of the game for at least five decades. In this case study and the next we will first examine some of the explanations for instances of interpersonal violence offered by social scientists in light of philosophical analyses before then proposing general conclusions that can be drawn from both. 17
Richard Giulianotti, ‘Social identity and public order: political and academic discourses on football violence’, in Fooball, Violence and Social Identity, ed. by Richard Giulianotti, Norman Bonney and Mike Hepworth (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 9-36. 18 Both the Mirror and The Guardian have pages for recent news coverage on football violence, see: ‘Football violence’, Mirror: Sport. ; and ‘Football violence’, The Guardian: Sport. . Both sites accessed 15 March 2014. 19 For more details on the tragedy, see ‘Heysel Stadium Disaster’, Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. . Accessed 15 March 2014.
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The emotional bonds tying a person to his or her birth area can be quite strong, and to be sure, a sense of local identity is one of the most potent that a modern, secularized person holds, symbolizing their community and with it their place of belonging.20 For many, ‘Local football teams have for a long time represented and crystallized that sense of community, which has added to the emotional significance invested in the local football club.’21 People care about where they are from and see their city’s (or, more likely in the US, their state’s) successes and failures as reflecting on them personally. In the context of football, the local club has come to significantly represent the community for some supporters, and hence its ‘affairs…[are] seen as a crucial determinant of the vibrancy of the local community itself’; these fans’ identities are tied in so closely with their club that it ‘symbolically becomes part of their own identity’,22 and because the association between self and the group to which one’s self belongs is so closely intertwined an affront to one can be an affront to the other. Commenting on committed supporters as default participators in an act of aggression — the desire to witness their team dominating, and perhaps even humiliating, the other — Gerry Finn points out that ‘Supporting one team means opposing another team, whose own supporters identify just as closely with their own team’s efforts. The contest between supporters is aggressive, in both senses of the term [pejorative and nonpejorative]: sometimes that can be transformed into violence.’23 It will be noted that this usage of ‘aggression’ also matches our definition from the discussion above, though here the desire is not to establish a relationship involving power, only superiority. This is violence used to demonstrate dominance over one group by another, to either match or outdo the performance on the pitch with the performance on the street, to gain victory by whatever means necessary to vindicate one’s group and thus oneself. The identification of self with group, the emotional investment in the ‘us’ that this entails, creates a highly charged environment that can quickly lead to affective behavior which in turn can all too easily escalate, resulting in tragic outcomes like the Heysel Disaster. Offering a class-based account of the interfan violence seen in football, Eric Dunning instead hypothesizes that its roots lie in the participation of unincorporated lower 20
Ken Worpole, Towns for People (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1992), cited in Gerry P. T. Finn, ‘Football violence: a societal psychological perspective’, in Fooball, Violence and Social Identity, ed. by Richard Giulianotti, Norman Bonney and Mike Hepworth (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 90-127. 21 Finn, op. cit., pp. 100-101. 22 ibid., p. 101. 23 ibid., p. 96.
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working class members and their differing values. He argues that prior to World War I football violence was a result of the presence of large numbers of working class individuals, who had not been incorporated into the dominant culture’s ‘civilizing process’ that increasingly shunned violence. Between the wars members of this group came more and more to be incorporated, and correspondingly violence at matches fell; nevertheless, the emergence from the middle of the 1960s onwards of the ‘new hooliganism’ resulted from the still unincorporated young working class males being attracted to the game, citing evidence from his own and his colleagues’ work at the University of Leicester that indicates that roughly 70-80% of football hooligans in England since the mid-60s have been in unskilled work, semi-skilled work, or unemployed.24 This account fits in with a more systemic-focused account of violence such as that described by Žižek and Balibar’s (ultra)objective violence, with Dunning also stating that ‘they [the unincorporated] regularly experience violence at the hands of agents of the state and, in this way, their tendencies towards violent behaviour are reinforced.’25 The argument here is still a groupish one, however, as it will be seen to contain many elements of identity and belonging: to class, occupation, and of course club. Whether or not the linkage here between the working class — including its purported differing values and sanctioned oppression — and the readiness to use violence is accurate (and the so-called ‘Leicester School’ that this argument represents has had many critics26), the operating factor involved is still a mentality of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, with Dunning concluding that future ‘disorders will be contoured and fuelled, ceteris paribus [all other things being equal], by the major “fault-lines” of particular countries’: class in England, religious sects in Scotland and Northern Ireland, linguistic subnationalities in Spain, and the north-south axis in Italy. All of these groupings involve or are likely to develop ‘intense “we-group” bonds and correspondingly intense antagonisms towards “they-groups”’.27 Class may be a factor in the violence we see between rival teams’ supporters, and again it is always necessary to consider the wider context involved in human behavior, but the bottom psychological layer here still 24
Eric Dunning, ‘The social roots of football hooliganism: a reply to the critics of the “Leicester School”’, in Fooball, Violence and Social Identity, ed. by Richard Giulianotti, Norman Bonney and Mike Hepworth (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 128-157. 25 ibid., p. 152. 26 Dunning notes that the term ‘Leicester School’ is a misleading one as even among the Leicester researchers divisions exist, particularly over the acceptance or rejection of Norbert Elias’ ‘civilizing process’ dynamic; for a critique of Dunning’s argument by a Leicester researcher who rejects Elias’ theory, see John Williams, ‘Having an Away Day: English spectators and the hooligan debate’, in British Football and Social Change: Getting into Europe, ed. by John Williams and Stephen Wagg (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991), pp. 160-184. 27 ibid., p. 154.
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appears to be that of group-orientation based on identity, the linking of self and others into a common ‘we’. Finally, one other factor involved in the disposition of some fans to engage in football related interpersonal violence that needs to be considered is the sheer joy that a minority of participants take in their violent actions. Finn discusses the occurrence of ‘flow experiences’ in which a person becomes absorbed in their current actions and in the process transcends their individual sense of self, writing that such can be reached either by participating in violence or simply by viewing it.28 Many sports fans will be able to relate to this remark, and I can attest to having experienced such thrills when watching ice hockey, itself a very physical sport and a popular one where I am from (and which includes a normative approach to fighting). The moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has explored the idea of a physiological basis to this type of experience through his theorized ‘hive switch’: Haidt contends that we may have evolved a psychological mechanism related to experiences like these at least partly in order to help promote bonding among group members.29 When this mechanism is engaged, we feel that we have merged with something beyond our individual selves, involving a sense of transcendence, emotional expansiveness, and bliss. For some fans who participate in street fights with rival fans the process becomes a self-reinforcing one, a means to achieve the flow or flip the hive switch. Citing Jay Allan, an Aberdeen ‘casual’ who wrote about his experiences,30 Finn states that ‘what Allan reports is that fighting leads to a peak experience that can be equated with little else in most people’s lives…fighting is really only the excuse for achieving a flow experience. It is not all pleasurable, but it is highly enjoyable.’31 This is something slightly different from what we have so far been considering in this case study; it is not quite Benjamin’s divine violence but is near it. Yet it is also still violence used instrumentally, and it stems from a group-orientation based on identity. Allan fought with other Aberdeen supporters against rival teams’ supporters with the goal in mind of demonstrating their collective superiority, of dominating their opponents, and not merely for the sake of fighting in and of itself. Seeking the kind of transcendent experience described above may have been a motivating factor for members of that group or other groups (as it may be at present in some people’s willingness to use violence), but the resultant violence was still 28
Finn, op. cit. See especially chapter ten in Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012). 30 Mr Allan’s book is Bloody Casuals (Ellon, Aberdeenshire: Famedram Publishers, Ltd, 1989). 31 Finn, op. cit., p. 116. 29
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performed in an identity-centered in/out group setting that used violence to achieve its aggression. Moreover, other supporters, notably those at Scottish national team matches, have obtained flow experiences through the socially and physically healthier method of the carnivalesque atmosphere generated at their parties, events that are marked by amicable relations not only between their Scottish participants but those from rival countries as well.32 2. Case study: The Khmer Rouge Moving on now to consider the Khmer Rouge, we again find that groupishness was at the root of people’s willingness to use violence instrumentally, but that in this case the group-orientation involved was based primarily on the common beliefs held by the group’s members, although those were also supported by a sense of personal identification with the group. Interpersonal violence by cadres of the Khmer Rouge was used to establish and maintain a relationship of power, to dominate and to coerce, and the numbers of their victims are staggering. As many as two million people, out of a total population of fewer than eight million, were killed by the Khmer Rouge in the roughly three and three-quarters years’ duration of their Democratic Kampuchea regime. 33 In their efforts to completely remake society, anyone deemed to be a troublemaker (or to have the potential for such), to have the wrong familial background or occupation, to lack sufficient class consciousness, to be too ill or otherwise unable to perform the agrarian tasks suddenly required of them, to have been a member of the old regime or to have had too much contact with its members, to have a connection or suspected connection with Vietnam, or simply to have said, done, or even thought the wrong thing, was quickly ‘discarded’. The expendability of people in Khmer Rouge ideology was expressed through such slogans as ‘To keep you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss’34 and ‘One or two million young people are enough to make the new Kampuchea!’35 as well as through the speaking of those deemed to be undesirables in the nomenclature of illnesses that had to be removed, exemplified by leaders’ exhortations such as ‘in order to save the country, it [is] essential to destroy all the contaminated parts…It [is] essential to cut deep, even to destroy a few good people 32
ibid. The exact total killed may never be known with complete confidence, this figure comes from Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century, 2nd edn (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2012) and may include non-Cambodians; Alexander Laban Hinton in Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2005) places the number at ‘well over one and a half million Cambodians’ (p. 169). 34 Hinton, ibid., p. 19. 35 Glover, op. cit., p. 306. 33
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rather than chance one “diseased” person escaping eradication.’36 Such messages were taken to heart by the cadres to a degree that resulted in actions too horrific to contemplate without being overwhelmed by their brutality. I will only relate one example from a Khmer Rouge killing field, the account given by Bunheang Ung, a villager living in the Eastern Zone (the southeast section of Cambodia that borders Vietnam in the general area where the Mekong begins to branch into its delta) and who witnessed the execution of hundreds of other Eastern Zone villagers that had been judged to be ‘impure’: The smell of death hung in the air. Nearby [large] rectangular pits had been dug, and in some half-covered bodies
could be seen…Loudspeakers blared
revolutionary songs and music at full volume. A young girl was seized and raped. Others were led to the pits where they were slaughtered like animals by striking the backs of their skulls with hoes or lengths of bamboo. Young children and babies were held by the legs, their heads smashed against palm trees and their broken bodies flung beside their dying mothers in the death pits. Some children were thrown in the air and bayoneted while music drowned their screams…At the place of execution nothing was hidden. The bodies lay in open pits, rotting under the sun and monsoon rain.
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How could anyone have done something like this? A number of both political and cultural factors combined in a unique way to equip Khmer Rouge soldiers with an outlook that strongly differentiated between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and that encouraged hatred of and ruthless behavior towards those determined to be in the out-group. New recruits were slow to join the movement but when they did join they were largely in an already highly agitated state, seeking revenge and justice for wrongs endured. Despite the economic conditions of Cambodia during the 1950s and 1960s, and the struggle for independence from France that had spanned both sides of WWII, the Khmer Rouge only had about four thousand members by as late as 1969.38 From the early 1970s onwards until their seizure of government in April 1975, however, recruits streamed into the organization primarily as a result of the US bombing of the countryside in its escalating conflict with Vietnam. Just between 1972-1973 over three times the amount 36
Hinton, op. cit., p. 155. Taken from Martin Stuart-Fox, The Murderous Revolution: Life and Death in Pol Pot’s Kampuchea Based on the Personal Experiences of Bunheang Ung (Chippendale, Australia: Alternative Publishing Cooperative, 1985) in Hinton, ibid., pp. 167-168. 38 Glover, op. cit. 37
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of bombs that were dropped on Japan during the entirety of WWII were dropped on Cambodia, causing between 100,000 to 600,000 deaths, tens of thousands of displacements, and widespread economic destabilization.39 Not only those who wanted vengeance against the Americans would join the Khmer Rouge, but also those who were simply terrified and willing to believe the recruiters’ easy answers and strong promises, joined by a smaller number who were attracted to Khmer Rouge ideals and those who were incensed at Prince Sihanouk’s military deposition by then Prime Minister Marshal Lon Nol and followed the prince in allying with the Khmer Rouge, heeding his call to his rural ‘children’ to join him against the ‘traitorous’ coup leaders.40 These new recruits were politically trained to give them ‘a common ideological focus (class struggle) and target (the oppressor classes)…an enemy that abstractly included “imperialists”, “feudalists”, and “capitalists”, and more concretely comprised the Lon Nol regime, the urban population it controlled, and the capitalists and imperialists with which it was allied.’ 41 In this the Khmer Rouge were able to take traditional Cambodian distinctions between those who are ‘rich’, those who ‘have enough’, and those who are ‘poor’ and align them with the class-based distinctions they were now promoting, marking out urbanites as immoral and decadent exploiters of the rural population and lackeys of the US, labeling them ‘new people’ versus the rural ‘old people’.42 The Khmer Rouge were thereby able to establish a somewhat vague dyad of ‘us’ and ‘them’, definitionally clear enough for most occasions but with room for manipulation should the need arise (e.g. in the case of a cadre leader whose own background was more urban). Against these ‘others’ the Khmer Rouge sought as a central part of their training the maintenance of constant feelings of rage and revolutionary violence, treated ‘new people’ in many dehumanizing ways which further marked them off and made it easier for moral inhibitions against harming and/or killing them to be dropped,43 and drilled their recruits in cruelty to remove any naturally occurring sympathy, particularly in the case of children, who were separated and conditioned from as young an age as possible. 44 Against this backdrop was the Cambodian cultural belief in disproportionate revenge, by which those who have caused one shame may justifiably be dealt much harsher punishments than their original actions entailed, and the recognized Cambodian system of patronage, which, in the context of 39
Glover, ibid. and Hinton, op. cit. The range of deaths caused here is from Glover (p. 301), Hinton has the figure at 150,000 (p. 58). 40 Glover, ibid. and Hinton, ibid. 41 Hinton, ibid., p. 59. 42 ibid. 43 ibid. 44 Glover, op. cit.
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defeating an enemy, meant not only acting against the person in question but also everyone in their ‘string’ of interdependent personal relationships, both those to whom the person was a client and those to whom the person was a patron, including their client’s clients and their patron’s patrons.45 Finally, a number of Buddhist concepts were involved in Khmer Rouge ways of thinking as well, though not overtly; despite being officially banned by the organization and its monks disrobed and persecuted, Buddhist beliefs were nevertheless so ingrained in Cambodian modes of living that their influence can be detected in Khmer Rouge ideology. 46 Specifically, the Buddhist beliefs in impermanence, dependent origination (or dependent arising: the interconnectivity of all current conditions with each other and previously existing causal conditions), and the shifting hierarchy that results from the store of good or bad karma that each person carries over from previous lives, generates during this life, and marks their current state of existence, all combined with high modernist ideals of social engineering and Marxist-Leninist concepts to create a heady mix offering any number of ways cadres could — consciously or unconsciously — justify their use of violence, overcome hesitations, and make sense of their deeds.47 The manner in which these elements combined would necessarily have differed with each individual, but some broad trends may be deduced. At the core of the Khmer Rouge ideology that enabled its cadres to behave in the manner described by Bunheang Ung was the separation of the population along two axes: ‘old people’ versus ‘new people’ and ‘class enemy’ versus ‘class ally’. The latter category was quite fluid, however, and so it may be helpful to imagine a Cartesian grid here, with the ‘old/new people’ category being the Y axis and any given person’s position along it fixed, and the ‘class enemy/ally’ category being the X axis, with any given person’s position on it changing over time and fluid enough to allow even the staunchest revolutionary to suddenly become a ‘class enemy’. This way of thinking was supported by the Buddhist concept of impermanence: since everything and every person was subject to change one’s comrade of today could well be one’s enemy of tomorrow, a combination that led to a great deal of suspicion and paranoia. Added to this was the supreme confidence in the system the Khmer Rouge were advocating, their belief, taken from Marxism-Leninism, that their theories were infallible and the resultant analyses beyond doubt, leading to the extremely unfortunate result that anyone suspected of being an 45 46 47
Hinton, op. cit. ibid. ibid.
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enemy was an enemy and ‘in order to save the country, it was essential to destroy all the contaminated parts’. 48 An ‘old person’ who shifted into the enemy category was thereby removed from moral consideration; ‘new people’, however, were already outside moral consideration by default, and could only go from bad to worse in the eyes of the Khmer Rouge. A ‘new person’ who was determined to have acted contrary to the revolution could therefore very easily be killed as a contaminant for the sake of the health of the whole they were trying to build. This included the way a person thought, demonstrated by such actions as working hard enough or not, the level of deference paid to cadres through the linguistic and nonverbal registers used, 49 and the readiness to make the revolution one’s highest priority, superseding all other ties of loyalty. Like other twentieth century Marxist movements, the Khmer Rouge were not only concerned with people’s behavior but also with their beliefs, and attempted to share their faith with the populace following the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea through community education outreaches.50 Those who failed to come on board were therefore also enemies, and potential corrupters of others. To murder these class enemies served a double purpose: not only were their deaths helping to increase the overall health of the nation, they were also acting preventively by stopping the spread or formation of other social illnesses. A parallel here may be found in Nazi Germany, where similar medical metaphors were used and where SS soldiers were taught to consider their actions as unpleasant but necessary; they were the heroes of the new order helping to build a brighter future for those people within the recognized moral sphere by eliminating those outside it.51 There is, though, an element of play and enjoyment visible in some of the executions that needs to be accounted for, such as the way some children were thrown into the air before being bayoneted. The cultural belief in disproportionate revenge and the high level of rage against enemies that cadres were taught to maintain may have been responsible for that, where even children were considered by some to have deserved their fate and gotten their just comeuppances (there may be tinges of Fanon’s rehabilitative violence here too, with revenge against the ‘oppressor class’ unconsciously sought as a means to alleviate the pains of one’s own perceived or real victimization). The Buddhist belief in karma may also have been a factor as the 48
ibid., p. 155. On the multi-layered hierarchical structure of Cambodian vocabulary and behavior see chapter four in Hinton, op. cit. As in other Asian cultures, the language of address used reflects respective social positions and is closely linked to the concept of ‘face’. Although the Khmer Rouge officially attempted to alter the traditional markers in keeping with their views on equality, in practice many continued in altered form, both among the populace and among the cadres themselves. 50 ibid., and Glover, op. cit. 51 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2003). 49
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condemned’s present suffering could be explained as the result of past misdeeds, and in delivering punishment cadres were merely acting as instruments of judgment. In short, the Khmer Rouge adopted a group-orientation that was fueled by the beliefs that anything could be done to those who were not identified as being in-group members, that even those who were currently in-group members may not remain that way, and that all out-group members formed potential threats that needed to be eliminated. This belief system was marked by social engineering practices on an attempted total scale, an unshakeable faith in the rightness of their ideology that ignored any feedback to the contrary,52 and cultural and religious ways of thinking that exacerbated their already existing tendencies towards suspicion, violence, and revenge. There nevertheless were other motivations at work in the willingness displayed by Khmer Rouge cadres to engage in forms of interpersonal violence that were often extremely cruel. One of the foremost of these was the desire for social approval and to rise in status. Many of the most loyal cadres came from ‘impoverished backgrounds…were young, idealistic, and impressionable, searching for social approval and rewards.’53 In the context in which they found themselves, executing declared enemies or brutalizing prisoners were expedient ways for cadres to gain face among their peers and be promoted in rank by their superiors. 54 Cadres could also, and frequently would, invoke the authority of the party to deflect responsibility for what they were about to do or had just done, implying that they were merely following orders and could not be personally faulted.55 Fear of the consequences for a lack of zeal was also a real factor in motivating behavior; ‘Khmer Rouge cadres loyal to Sihanouk, sympathetic to the Vietnamese, or overly lenient on the populace were also eliminated in the pre-DK [Democratic Kampuchea] period.’56 That such took place prior to the seizure of governmental power is significant for the strong precedence that would have been set — if a cadre could not expect his life to be seen as more valuable than the correctness of his political dedication at the time when manpower was needed the most then surely he would be even more expendable after the struggle had been won. Yet these alternative motivations too can be seen at root to be based on the same groupishness we have heretofore encountered; approval, status, and face being sought 52
On the dangers of belief, overconfidence in a theory, and the dismissal of feedback, see especially chapter thirty-two, ‘Utopia and Belief’ in Glover, op. cit., pp. 310-314. 53 Hinton, op. cit., p. 131. 54 ibid. 55 ibid. 56 ibid., p. 135.
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after, instructions being carried out, and loyalty being demonstrated are all actions that also serve to reinforce a cadre’s membership in the in-group, that he is ‘one of us’ carrying the fight against ‘our common enemies’. Some individuals no doubt felt a great deal of pressure to conform in their use of interpersonal violence, and the context in which they acted must be taken into account, but as Alexander Laban Hinton notes ‘even if perpetrators are highly constrained in some circumstances, they remain active subjects who construct meaning and assert their self-identity through their violent practices.’57 We will return to the themes of context, interpretation, and the choices available to social actors in the second half of our study, but first we will try to arrive at some conclusions regarding what we have learned about our tendency towards the use of interpersonal violence. 3. General conclusions The primary lesson to be drawn from the two representative case studies above is the fundamental role that the group-orientation of individual members plays in the willingness to commit acts of violence. Our evolution as social animals has equipped us with a number of psychological systems that motivate and facilitate group formation and that then reward competition between groups through positive results like increased resources/resource access, an impression of having purpose and direction, being part of something beyond our individual selves, the affirmation associated with success, and the deepening of intergroup bonding.58 We enjoy being members of groups and the sense of belonging that we take from them informs to a great extent how we see ourselves. The danger in this is that by associating so strongly with a particular ‘us’ the opposing ‘them’ can appear to be not a mere class of rivals but enemies. This is the groupish root of our tendency towards the instrumental use of violence. A person who correlates over much of their own identity with a specific group — be it a football club’s supporters or a political movement — can end up warping their perception of others, seeing ‘them’ only in the terms set by their own ‘us’. Moreover, in-group solidarity can itself be a source of conflict with other groups, 59 as each tries to demonstrate its merit through the domination of another. Aggression that takes violence as the means to its end, as we saw in the case of football hooliganism, is one way to establish a group’s superiority, and this will naturally further incline its members towards a willingness to employ those means. Groups that seek not only domination but 57
ibid., p. 31. Haidt, op. cit. On the biological basis of our groupishness, see also Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes (New York: Penguin Press, 2013). 59 Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (London: Penguin Books, 2006). 58
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also coercion in order to establish a relationship of power in which superiority is a given and coercive acts no longer necessary will also commonly adopt violent means, and if successful in their efforts may attain to the level of a force and thus generate more profound degrees of power for their members and the group as a whole. This was the case with the Khmer Rouge, whose internal dynamics generated by the beliefs that its members held also resulted in a constant flux between the in/out distinctions that in turn furthered the cycle of violence in terrifying ways. In both cases it was group-orientation, based primarily on identity or on common beliefs supported by identity, which lay behind the willingness to use violence. The human condition in this regard is a very difficult one. We seek belonging and membership, we want to have allies and struggle for a common goal, but we risk as much by investing ourselves in a single group-orientation as we gain from it. The example of Buddhism is instructive in this regard. Due to its reputation for peacefulness, some readers may be quite surprised to learn of the role that it played in adding to the horrors that the Khmer Rouge inflicted on Cambodia through its part in their thinking, and although it should be stressed that the Buddhist concepts referred to were clearly misused, they were perhaps no more misused than other religions’ teachings have been in the justification of violence. The crux of the problem is not the beliefs themselves but the singular identity that is taken from being ‘Buddhist’; witness the rioting last year by Buddhists against Muslim communities in both Sri Lanka and Myanmar that resulted in property destruction, forced relocations, injuries, and even deaths.60 It may be that personal identity with a group and the resultant ‘us/them’ labeling trumps even that group’s own teaching, despite the fact that that very teaching forms part of the parameters that go into establishing the identity. The perils of group-orientation in this regard seem clear, as does the need for identities that stretch beyond the singular and sectarian if we are to reduce the level of violence currently being seen.61 Groupishness does not, of course, account for all interpersonal violence (e.g. spousal abuse would be one exception), but those instances where it does not typically remain occasions of violence used instrumentally and for aggression or for attaining power. Nevertheless, such exceptions do still relate to one’s perception of self and relations with others, as do 60
For summaries of the events along with some thoughtful analysis, see Alan Strathern, ‘Why are Buddhist monks attacking Muslims?’ BBC News: Magazine, 01 May 2013. ; and Thomas Fuller, ‘Extremism Rises Among Myanmar Buddhists’, The New York Times: Asia Pacific, 20 June 2013. . Both articles accessed 18 March 2014. 61 Sen, op. cit.
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the cases of group-orientation covered above, and there may be a compelling psychological reason for this. In a study where subjects performed violent but harmless acts on one another (e.g. hitting with a hammer a false leg that someone is wearing under their clothes so that it appears to be a real leg), Joshua Greene reports that his colleagues Fiery Cushman, Wendy Mendes, and others found that participants’ peripheral blood vessels constricted dramatically, despite knowing that what they were doing was not actually causing any harm. The researchers concluded that we are typically highly reluctant to harm strangers, hypothesizing the existence of an action plan monitoring cognitive module that acts as a type of alarm, triggered when we are thinking of doing something violent to another as a way to guard against later retaliation, thus preserving oneself, and also to promote in-group cooperation. The module may shut itself down when self-defense or actions against enemies (however such are defined) are called for,62 indicating once again that the out-group categorizing of others is a significant factor in our use of interpersonal violence. If, as appears to be the case, moving away from the negative aspects of groupism and giving our identities more breadth can assist us in reducing the occurrence of violence, then issues of the self and its place amongst others are centrally important and hence will form the core of the following section. What is the self? What are some conceptions of it and of how we fit in with other selves? Is there a self-concept that can help limit our willingness to use interpersonal violence, and if so, what is it? These are the questions that will concern us in the last half of this paper. III. The ‘Me’ in ‘Us’ As discussed immediately above, our practice of group formation and preference for group membership are naturally occurring traits that are biologically programmed into us.63 These are human attributes that are not going to go away, and for that we should be grateful. Our groupishness is one of the major contributing factors to our success as a species, allowing a degree of cooperation amongst us that is unparalleled in the nonhuman world (save for the eusocial insects) and facilitating the group competition that has honed our social skills and advanced our societies through generations of experimentation and innovation. How we arrived at the extremely high degree of sociality that we exhibit today is an ongoing debate within scientific circles, but Haidt presents one compelling explanation by the environmental scientist Peter Richerson and the anthropologist Robert Boyd, who argue that gene-culture coevolution (also known 62 63
Greene, op. cit. Haidt, op. cit., and Greene, ibid.
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as dual inheritance theory, in which each process of evolution — genetic and cultural — interacts with and influences the other) ‘helped to move humanity up from the small-group sociability of other primates to the tribal ultrasociality that is found today in all human societies...human groups have always been in competition to some degree with neighboring groups. The groups that figured out (or stumbled upon) cultural innovations that helped them cooperate and cohere in groups larger than the family tended to win those competitions.’ 64 Haidt goes on to note that the social and psychological changes that took place in prototribal societies began a process of ‘self domestication’ as those unable or unwilling to adopt the group’s moral matrix would not be favored as foraging/hunting partners or mates, and may even have been shunned, exiled or killed.65 Whether or not this particular origins account proves to be fully accurate, the fact of the matter is that we are social creatures who create and benefit from groups, and we moreover care deeply about our own standing within those groups, and this too is the result of natural processes. In addition to our penchant for forming and participating in groups, natural selection has also wired us to guard our reputations very closely and to strive to get others to support us or our points of view (or our groups’) far more than we desire to find out what the objective truth of any particular matter may be.66 How then do we fit into our groups? What are we — what is the ‘self’ — whose membership in a group is of such paramount importance and over whom the group and its perspectives exercise such an enormous influence? This section will focus on exploring four theoretical accounts of the self, examining each for robustness and correspondence to cognitive and psychological lessons on how we as biological entities are inclined to behave. The four accounts to be considered have been chosen for their representational qualities and the following subsections are not meant to be an exhaustive description of the work on the self done heretofore. Largely following Kristján Kristjánsson’s descriptive categories in The Self and Its Emotions,67 the first account will consider the soft anti-realist position, the second will cover the hard anti-realist position, and the third the soft realist position. Our final account will be of the contextualized (or conditioned) soft realist position, a category that Kristjánsson did not consider and whose title I have had to create. The hard realist position, that of a separately existing and (usually) eternal Cartesian ego or soul comprising the self and temporarily housed in the body, will not be examined due to its tendency to preempt 64
Haidt, ibid., p. 210; Richerson and Boyd’s book on gene-culture coevolution is Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 65 Haidt, ibid. 66 ibid. 67 Kristján Kristjánsson, The Self and Its Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
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further debate on the topic and its general rejection by the academic community save for historical or religious discussions. Our study will then conclude with a proposed self-concept that may assist in reducing our propensity for engaging in interpersonal violence and offer some suggestions about how such a self-concept could be furthered through an ethical educational program.
A. Four accounts of the self 1. The soft anti-realist position, or The liberal/libertarian atomistic self This is the account of the self that most of us hold without really thinking about it and upon which the majority (if not entirety) of present Western legal charters are based, and so it is from this angle — the political — that we are best able to tease out what it entails since the position is generally taken for granted and not explicitly argued for. Legal structures such as bills of rights bestow certain privileges and offer certain protections from the perspective of an individual living within a society but not as a part of that society. The self here is fully separated from others, a consideration that may have been inaugurated by Hobbes’ idea of ‘civil society’ being agreed upon as a good idea by a number of people in order to defend themselves and their property from others who would prey upon them, and which they then created completely out of the ‘state of nature’ that they had been living in — out of thin air, as it were. This conception of society as something wholly other than the citizens and residents who compose it, and the sovereign who directs and transcends it, may well be political modernity’s starting point,68 at least in the West. Focused only on the individual, and her relationship with society only in so far as she needs shielding from it and liberties to operate as she pleases in defined ways within it, this account takes form through the liberal policies and governance it enacts. Thus it is that Ronald Dworkin takes the essence of liberalism to be equal consideration of and respect for each individual, whose civil liberties are needed to guard them against the preferences of others concerning how they should act.69 Similarly, Jan Narveson takes his ‘liberty rule’ to be of paramount importance, by which one may do whatever one fancies granting that such doesn’t harm another or interfere with another’s affairs. This attention to a person’s actions and how the actions of others may affect said person fundamentally rests upon the extension of ownership between that owning and that owned; this is the self, understood as one’s will or one’s 68 69
Jeremy Valentine, ‘The Political’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23 (2006), 505-511. Gerald F. Gaus, Political Concepts and Political Theories (Oxford: Westview Press, 2000).
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mind, owning one’s body and behavior in the way a material object is owned.70 Responsibility for what is done and the resultant consequences therefore rests with each free floating mind and the ramifications of any one person’s acts extend only out to one degree of separation from their source. This is an atomistic self, and legal concern for it is not of the order individual first and society second, but rather the individual (and those individuals directly affected by her) only. The self here is that which owns the actions meant to be protected from incursion upon or held responsible for the effects of, depending on the situation, and since bodies are owned by minds and are the means by which actions are executed, the chain of ownership-responsibility is clear: action ⇒ physical body that committed action ⇒ mind that directed physical body. The self, to put it crudely, is that point where the buck stops. A primary problem with this line of reasoning is that we still don’t know what the self is. Is it an ‘individual’ — a collection of organic materials animated by a directing mind? Is it that directing mind itself? What exactly is a mind? Philosophers and neurologists have long discussed what a mind, as opposed to a brain, can be said to be and have still not arrived at a satisfactory definition, though it can be hoped that research into consciousness may one day settle the matter. Narveson, however, only adds to our confusion in his argument on body ownership, claiming that ‘Everyone is “boss” over his own mind’;71 if I’m myself and the self is my mind, and I’m boss over my own mind, then all we’ve done is to come back to our original query of what the self is. That there is nothing that can be pinned down, but there’s still something there, is what makes this the soft anti-realist position rather than its hard variant (to be discussed in the next subsection). A number of ideas have been proposed to fill in the gap here, notably Daniel Dennett’s and similar narrative accounts of the self as the central character (or ‘center of narrative gravity’) in descriptions of what happened to a given brain-body aggregate.72 This is still a something foisted onto a nothing, but does take into account the brain’s parallel and distributed structure; we have no ‘central command center’ but instead have a number of systems that are specialized and locally processing, bound together in a network out of which the mind arises as an emergent property. Although we think that our consciousness is unified, it is in fact a ‘constellation’ of specialized consciousness systems whose products are thought to be integrated and interpreted by a
70
Jan Narveson, ‘Libertarianism vs. Marxism: Reflections on G. A. Cohen’s “Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality”’, The Journal of Ethics, 2:1 (1998), 1-26. 71 ibid., note 35 on p. 18. 72 Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 1991).
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cognitive module that evolved for that purpose.73 (It may be tempting here to label the interpreting module as being what the self really is, but even if that module is definitively proven and its location — if it has one — discovered in our neural mass, its function would remain descriptive and not generative.) Nevertheless, as Kristjánsson points out, soft anti-realist positions, be they of the narrative or another variety, cannot differentiate between self-knowledge and self-deception:74 I may think that something happened to me only to later be told that that actually happened to my brother and I was misremembering what he had told me; before being informed of my error I was convinced that what happened to my brain-body was the contents of the story in question, and its central character was me. After learning my mistake, what is the identity of the central character in the erroneous section of my narrative? While I held the false memory were my self and my brother’s self somehow the same, had his self entered my narrative? And where was my true self during the lost time in which my memory has deceived me into narrating falsely? Who was the ‘me’ of the events that really occurred? Without a self that can be tracked in any real sense we are left to wonder. Finally, this account, with its viewpoint of sealed off and atomized individuals, egregiously fails to notice that none of us exist in a vacuum and that each self is highly contextual based not only on current situation, but also local culture, historical time period, geographic location, and a host of other details.75 The self cannot be defined in the absence of such because the self will never exist in the absence of such, nor will the self ever be fully free from outside influences that affect its behavior and decision making, a point we will return to after our fourth account of the self has been conducted. For now, we turn our attention to the other anti-realist account, that of the hard version. 2. The hard anti-realist position, or The reductionist nonself The hard anti-realist position endeavors to rectify one of the central errors of its soft cousin: that of attempting to be a something with nothing underneath defended by those ‘who confuse the masks with the face’, as Kristjánsson memorably puts it.76 This account is laid out in great detail by Derek Parfit in his Reasons and Persons,77 there called the reductionist view. Parfit uses a series of imagined scenarios of varying degrees of likelihood (such as a false memory about a day in Venice or a teleportation to 73
Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who’s In Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain (New York: Ecco Press, 2011). 74 Kristjánsson, op. cit. 75 Heidi M. Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself: An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will (New York: The New Press, 2013). 76 Kristjánsson, op. cit., p. 44. 77 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
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Mars gone wrong) to arrive at and then expand on the conclusions he uses to define the hard anti-realist viewpoint: 1) we do not exist separately from brain/body, physical/mental events, 2) identity is not always determinate, 3) unity of consciousness and the unity of a whole life can’t be explained by claiming many ‘different experiences are had by the same person’ but must describe the relations between the experiences and the person’s brain and can be fully described without claiming the ‘experiences are had by a person’, and 4) personal identity doesn’t matter and what does matter is psychological connectedness and/or continuity with my cause for such.78 This final conclusion — ‘what does matter’ — is labeled relation R, which Parfit defines succinctly as: ‘psychological connectedness and/or psychological continuity, with the right kind of cause’, adding ‘in an account of what matters, the right kind of cause could be any cause’.79 It may be helpful at this point to introduce an example of what Parfit means, and so we will look at one that he himself uses, namely, teleportation gone wrong. Imagine that you have been sent to Mars by your employer on an assignment, but due to the limitations of space travel the fastest way to get there is not to be physically transported but instead to use a teleportation device,80 a machine that doesn’t actually move anything but rather reads it and reproduces it elsewhere. The way the teleporter works is that it scans the current state of every cell in your body and then fully reconstructs an exact replica of your body at its sister location on Mars. (Parfit considers both cases of the machine destroying your body on Earth in the process of replication and also that of your Earth body not being destroyed; his discussion of the two body scenario is interesting but beyond our current scope.) In such a case all that you are left with in your brand new body, but still exactly like your old body, is relation R, but this does not mean that the self is relation R because, again, there is nothing there of substance post-teleportation that has remained. There is no self, and we deceive ourselves into thinking that there is only because we typically have both relation R and physical continuity; what Parfit means to demonstrate is that there are cases (albeit at present imaginary ones) that challenge these presumptions but still force us to admit that I am my Mars ‘me’ without there being anything of ‘me’ on Mars at all. Parfit finds this very liberating, proclaiming ‘On my view, what fundamentally matters, in our concern about our own future, is the holding of relation R, with any cause. This would be what matters even when it does not coincide with personal identity.’81 Instances where relation R does not coincide with personal identity would be like that just discussed, a 78 79 80 81
Parfit also allows that physical continuity and similarity may be important too; ibid., pp. 216-217. ibid., p. 262. Parfit actually calls it a ‘teletransportation’ device; I have shortened it for simplicity’s sake. ibid., p. 289.
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‘branch-line case’ where your Earth body stops but your Mars body begins, or a ‘division case’, where your Mars body begins even while your Earth body goes on, making both bodies ‘you’; and since there is no self, both bodies can simultaneously be ‘you’. This potentially takes the sting out of death — it evidently does for Parfit, anyway — and allows us to view our own mortality as just one more blip in the long stretch of the natural world’s cycle. There is nothing that is essentially me, so when I die nothing will be lost. Indeed, by this view, we may ‘die’ any number of times during our lives as relation R is lost and taken up again (e.g. your early childhood years of which you have no recollection when shown photographs of the time, or even blacking out what happened after your staff party the night before). Parfit tells us, ‘If we are Reductionists, we regard the rough subdivisions within lives as, in certain ways, like the divisions between lives. We may therefore come to treat alike two kinds of distribution: within lives, and between lives.’82 In its full denial of any self the hard anti-realist account may be counterintuitive yet it still appears to be clear and convincing. It is not, however, without its problems. To begin with, there is the matter of personal identity and Parfit’s claim that relation R matters more than it. In considering what we think we are, that is, what our personal identities are, Parfit examines both physical and psychological criteria and declares both to actually be reductionist. The physical case is that a person is the same person if enough of the brain, and not the whole body, has continued (without branching) between the past and the present; the psychological case is that a person is the same person if there is overlapping psychological connectedness that forms a psychological continuity between the past and present, also without having branched. These both boil down to Parfit’s view, he writes, because: 1) ‘the fact of a person’s identity over time just consists in the holding of certain more particular facts’ and maybe also 2) ‘these facts can be described without either presupposing the identity of this person, or explicitly claiming that the experiences in this person’s life are had by this person, or even explicitly claiming that this person exists. These facts can be described in an impersonal way.’83 We must therefore reject both of these to be a non-hard anti-realist regarding the self, Parfit claims, and instead take personal identity as involving something beyond what the physical and psychological cases are propounding: a further fact of the soft anti-realist or realist kind. We can grant Parfit the point that the physical and psychological arguments reduce to his reductionist position without agreeing that relation R (‘psychological connectedness and/or psychological 82 83
ibid., pp. 333-334. ibid., p. 210, italics in the original.
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continuity, with the right kind of cause’) has more value than personal identity because what each of us takes our identity to be is singular and resonates with deep personal — and only personal, it cannot be transferred — meaning for us. This meaning is the ‘something beyond’; this is the ‘further fact’ connecting the present person with their future version beyond how R is defined. Parfit tries to preempt this uniqueness objection by the following: He concedes that when R is held uniquely (U) in a one-one form (i.e. nontransferable (and nonbranching in teleportation or other imaginary cases)), then personal identity (PI) is equal to relation R plus uniqueness, thus: PI=R+U. Parfit then reduces U by stating that if I am R related to a person ‘the presence or absence of U makes no difference to the intrinsic nature of my relation to this person’, and hence adds very little to R, although it ‘can be plausibly claimed to make a small difference’. But this ‘small difference’, Parfit then states, ‘would be much less than the intrinsic value of R. The value of PI is much less than the value that R would have in the absence of PI, when U fails to hold.’84 This is technical and slippery writing, but if looked at closely it reveals a large hole in the logic of the argument that is clear when we substitute in some whole numbers. We will follow Parfit’s estimation of the unimportance of U and make that a 1, and we will also follow Parfit’s estimation of the importance and high intrinsic value of R and make that a 4. There is no way that PI’s value would be ‘much less than the value that R would have in the absence of PI, when U fails to hold’ because all of these elements are related and R in the absence of PI is the same as R on its own, i.e. R before U has been added to it to make PI. In our numeric substitution we have U=1, R=4 and therefore PI=5 (PI=R+U). Take U away from that so now we have R on its own and we still have R=4, but PI is not less than R and nor is it equal to R, it is nothing at all because we need to add U to R to arrive at PI. (PI does not equal 4 here since if U had no value then PI=R+0, which is the same as PI=R and we have already established that PI=R+U.) Even if R is not held uniquely, say, in the branching case where Earth you and Mars you both exist, each version of you would still have a personal identity that meant a great deal to each and that would diverge from the other-planetary double’s personal identity with each passing second as their lives moved on and experiences added up.85 We now have a strong claim contrary to Parfit’s assertions that relation R matters more than personal identity and that
84
ibid., p. 263. Relation R would also diverge as time went on, of course, eventually leaving each double with potentially no connection to their original singular being (as in the case of the nonrecollection of childhood events). The personhood of each is in question here, and that issue is debatable (note though that in both the physical and psychological criteria there is a ‘no branching’ rule), but the point that I am trying to make is not about personhood, only that relation R does not matter more than personal identity. 85
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personal identity does not matter at all (recall his initial conclusion 4 above: ‘personal identity doesn’t matter and what does matter is psychological connectedness and/or continuity with my cause for such’) that we can add to the more commonsense objections to the hard anti-realist position of which Parfit’s account is representative. Foremost among these, as the preceding has endeavored to show, is that by this view things simply don’t work. Kristjánsson writes that hard anti-realists ‘take pot shots at the notion of truth as correspondence with reality. There is a basic difficulty with rejecting this notion: Almost all human actions, communications, interactions and investigations seem to presuppose its truth.’ 86 (That Parfit’s arguments rely on scenarios that themselves have no correspondence with reality may be instructive in this regard, but their usefulness as analytic tools could belie that.) Furthermore, without a sense of persisting internal sameness that lasts over time, moral responsibility becomes increasingly difficult to pin down.87 If we can indeed treat subdivisions within lives as being like different lives in some ways then we may find ourselves embarking on a path that results in entirely undesired reforms to our justice systems (also a possible outcome of the contextualized soft realist account to be discussed below). On the whole, the hard anti-realist viewpoint ‘makes travesty of everyday moral experience’,88 and it is also unclear how the ubiquitous situational and contextual pressures that we all face would affect us on this account, or indeed, if they would be thought to affect us at all. Finally, as we noted above, emergent properties can and do exist physiologically: the sense of a unified conscious mind is a primary example of such. Could the self not therefore also be an emergent property of our natural biological functioning, even if it cannot be pinned down in a hard sense? The next two subsections will consider the self from that and related perspectives. 3. The soft realist position, or The Humean emotional self What will perhaps strike many readers as being most remarkable about the soft realist account of the self is that it is realist — that it claims that there is in fact a substantive nature to selfhood without making the further Cartesian ego or soul claims that we tend to associate with the realist stance. While admitting that there is no consensus on the definitive way to interpret Book II of Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, Kristjánsson suggests that Hume ‘seems to be arguing that, whereas the self as a succession of related ideas and impressions cannot be a direct object for the understanding, the self of 86 87 88
Kristjánsson, op. cit., p. 38. ibid. ibid., p. 46.
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whose moral actions each of us is intimately conscious can be a direct object for our emotions’, making the self’s realism, its actuality, consisting of emotional activity and generating a self-concept that is dependent on reinforcement from others via social interactions and societal rules and conventions regarding emotions.89 The self here is each person’s moral being, the day-to-day psychological unit of reference we go by, akin to ‘the voter’ or ‘the citizen’ or ‘the taxpayer’; it is seeing oneself from an affective and morally related point of view.90 Kristjánsson summarizes his soft realist self as being composed of three sets of self-related emotions: 1) Self-constituting emotions: those that define us, our ‘core commitments, traits, aspirations or ideals’, 2) Self-comparative emotions: those that take the self as ‘an indirect object’ or ‘a reference point’ for ‘comparison with a baseline of expectations’, and 3) Self-conscious emotions: those that are in the self they’re about, that take the self as ‘their direct attentional and intentional object’.91 The self here is that which we carry around with us and that more or less matches what we mean when we speak of ourselves, it is the culmination of the creature performing the actions, thinking the thoughts, and having the feelings that we internally associate with those actions, thoughts, and feelings, and that others associate with them too. This is the self that we’re used to in the hard realist sense but without any notion of an element that is eternally existing or inhabiting from the outside. There is no mental ‘pure ego’ here that takes up residence in the physical body, rather the physical body, along with our unique sense of personal identity, is all that the self is and part of that body’s normal functioning is to have the emotion-based ongoing characteristics that make up Kristjánsson’s first emotive set above and the self-referencing features that make up his second and third sets. This view of the self, like the narrative variety of the soft anti-realist position, matches with the multivariate and highly specialized modular functioning of our physical brains,92 but unlike the narrative account Kristjánsson’s soft realist self posits a substantive object (the day-to-day psychological unit) that can differentiate between self-knowledge and self-deception, even if it cannot be said to exist physically. Our self-concept as a moral being, moreover, means that it can correspond to reality or fail to correspond, it can be judged objectively through the lens of its quality as other-dependent in the social realm. Our daily interactions will either reinforce the way in which we see ourselves as being or they will show us where we have been in error.
89 90 91 92
ibid., pp. 47-48. ibid. ibid., pp. 75-77. Gazzaniga, op. cit.
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Of the accounts of the self examined so far, this one is the strongest in both the theoretical and neurologically accurate (as regards functioning) senses, yet it still leaves something to be desired, we are not quite there yet, and this has to do with how Kristjánsson handles agency and decision making in his soft realist self. In a discussion of the ‘gappiness problem’ taken from psychological research,93 where it has been found that moral reasoning either fails to motivate moral action or does so only slightly, Kristjánsson refers to his ‘unified moral self of rationally grounded emotion’ as a means of repairing the disconnect — or rather, showing that there isn’t a disconnect and that the root of the problem of failed moral action lies elsewhere.94 Kristjánsson takes the soft realist self as showing that there is no difference between the ‘moral-self’ (having moral concerns as part of one’s identity95) and having moral emotions, and thus motivating moral action, because those emotions are the foundations of the self. Moral emotion can join together moral cognition and moral action through the training, in an Aristotelean sense, of a (soft realist) self to be a moral self because there is a difference between episodic emotions and dispositional emotions, with the moral (soft realist) self having its grounding in the latter. Emotional reactions show the internalization and integration of ‘a certain emotional disposition into his or her moral self.’96 In a sense, I think that Kristjánsson’s account here is accurate, yet it fails to note the evolutionary grounding that our emotions have and gives rationality a more central role than it appears capable of taking, stating that a reflective decision is required to make moral concerns part of one’s self-identity and that, again, the baseline of a moral self is ‘rationally grounded emotion’.97 There is a large amount of empirical research that demonstrates that most of our decisions are in fact made unconsciously, based on intuitions that have been honed by natural pressures over millennia, and only after a decision has been made and acted upon (or thought or feeling generated) does our rationality step in and provide an internal reason for the action/thought/feeling.98 The intuitive rules that drive our decisions seem to be both prima facie and reflexive, biologically useful for their efficiency even if not always correct.99 Michael Gazzaniga 93
Augusto Blasi, ‘Bridging moral cognition and moral action: A critical review of the literature’, Psychological Bulletin, 88:1 (1980), 1-45. 94 Kristjánsson, op. cit., p. 97. 95 This was Blasi’s suggestion for how to solve the gappiness problem; Blasi, op. cit. 96 Kristjánsson, op. cit., p. 94. 97 ibid. 98 Jonathan Haidt, ‘The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment’, Psychological Review, 108:4 (2001), 814-834; see also Haidt, op. cit. Both sources summarize the evidence and present Haidt’s Social Intuitionist model in detail. 99 Magda Osman and Ruth Stavy, ‘Development of intuitive rules: Evaluating the application of the dual-system framework to understanding children’s intuitive reasoning’, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,
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summarizes the brain’s functioning in this way with ‘Many moral intuitions are rapid automatic judgments of behavior associated with strong feelings of rightness or appropriateness…not usually arrived at by a deliberate conscious evaluative process that has been influenced by reason’.100 Some of our decisions can nevertheless be swayed by reason, particularly when coming from others and thereby having a social affect on us,101 and our intuitive evaluations can change during our lives, but for the most part by the time we have gotten to the point where we are rationally deciding what to do, we are not — contra Hare — coolly considering our now-for-now and now-for-then preferences and then weighing them against logic and the facts,102 we are instead attempting to explain to ourselves the decisions that our unconscious minds have already come to and put into play. Kristjánsson’s account is not the fully rational one that Hare’s is; it is, after all, based on emotion and seeks to promote individuals who will thoughtfully decide what kind of emotional dispositions they seek to have and will then set about inculcating them through the chosen or designated method. In many ways this is quite similar to Haidt’s model, and it is in Kristjánsson’s rejection of that model that we can see the Achilles’ heel in his own. Kristjánsson dismisses Haidt’s and similar systems, as well as the opposing rationality-centered systems, as being two-tiered (emotion on one level and reason on another), where ‘emotion is distinct from — if complementary to — reason’103 and thus as not having placed one within the other, one as the other: his ‘rationally grounded emotion’, as above. Yet if the research revealing the timing of our decision making (intuitions first, reasoning later) is correct, and at this point it certainly seems to be, then perhaps Kristjánsson’s order should be reversed, giving us a soft realist self of emotionally grounded reason. That would, however, still leave Kristjánsson’s concern with the emotional training of a moral self intact, and that is a point we will return to when we consider how to promote a particular self-concept as a means of reducing our willingness to use violence. 4. The contextualized soft realist position, or The embedded and determined self The final self account that we will examine is similar to Kristjánsson’s in being a soft realist position, but is more inclusive of scientific research into cognitive functioning in its theoretical framework and far more radical in its conclusions. This is the 13:6 (2006), 935-953. 100 Gazzaniga, op. cit., p. 166. 101 Haidt, ‘The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail’, op. cit. 102 R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). 103 Kristjánsson, op. cit., p. 98.
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contextualized soft realist position of Heidi Ravven, applying a label that neither Ravven nor Kristjánsson has given to her work and one that I hope will not be misleading. This account also posits a substantive self that is grounded in emotion but stretches that foundation to layers far below where Kristjánsson has them. Ravven cites the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp’s work which argues that the self emerged evolutionarily as an affective system to facilitate survival, that it stems from very early sections of the mammalian brain, and that it is something that is shared across all species of mammal.104 As such, the self here is our (and nonhuman mammals’) ‘point of view of survival’ and ‘first emerges in the precognitive ability of most organisms to operate from an ego-centric point of view.’105 Although this is an emotionally-based self, it is not a Humean reflective self composed of the three sets of self-related emotions that Kristjánsson detailed; rather, it is more of a primal urgency, a voice from deep within that guides and directs. It is here that this view’s highly contextualized nature can be most clearly seen, for not only is Ravven’s version of the soft realist self a substantive one, it is a highly situationist and mostly deterministic one. Ravven stresses the embedded nature of the composition of our sense of self, stating that it is constructed by its current relation to another; that is, that we all have multiple selves each of which corresponds to a significant relationship and is partially formed by that very relationship and its object (other) through the carrying over of the sense of self involved. Despite this position’s status as a soft realist view, none of us have a singular ‘me’, but instead ‘the feeling of self is a mental capacity that can be projected inward or even outward onto the world…we make parts of the world feel like self, and we fill our feeling of self with our engagements in the world.’106 This notion of a malleable, distributed self that twists and turns with the forces around it also leads Ravven to write that our actions and fate ‘are determined…by who our parents were, what world and situation we were born into, and who we became as a result of our early experience, our genetic inheritance, and on and on’.107 Accordingly, the agency we assign ourselves mistakenly infers causal ownership of our actions when in fact there lays behind each act a multitudinous number of causes and conditions, that we ignore contributing factors 104
Jaak Panksepp, ‘The Basic Emotional Circuits of Mammalian Brains: Do Animals Have Affective Lives?’, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 35:9 (2011), doi10.1016/j.neubiorev.2011.08.003, in Ravven, op. cit. 105 Stephen T. Asma and Thomas Greif, ‘Affective Neuroscience and the Philosophy of Self’, Journal of Consciousness Studies (forthcoming), in Ravven, op. cit.; Asma and Greif’s work may be found at: . Accessed 22 March 2014. 106 107
Ravven, op. cit., p. 372. ibid., p. 348.
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and falsely imagine our behavior to spring from an unbiased free will.108 Ravven does nonetheless try to assign moral responsibility by following Jonathan Lear’s lead in his analysis of Oedipus: that, despite all that may have been ordained by outside forces, what matters in the end is that it was done by us. Ravven writes that ‘This given “me” is that by which I am constituted. It is the “me” I find, and I resign myself to accepting it. In so doing, Lear says, I become transformed from being passively acted upon into a morally responsible agent.’109 There is much that is good in the socially minded and contextualized aspect that informs this position of a soft realist self, taking into account as it does the lessons we have learned of the overwhelming influence of group and setting from such famous psychological experiments as Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment and the electric shock experiments studying the tendency for obedience to authority figures by Stanley Milgram, both of which Ravven refers to on numerous occasions. Moreover, factors such as our upbringing, historical time and place, socioeconomic background, and the capriciousness of the genetic lottery all certainly play large parts in our lives. However, to assign full determinism is a step that many will see as going much too far, and Ravven does more or less do so, if not in so many words. Her version of agency and moral responsibility, for instance, amounts to little more than an admission along the lines of ‘This thing that I did was generated by uncountable and interrelated background causes over which I had no control, culminating in the performance of the act by my physical body, but I’ll accept the consequences of the action anyway.’ Very few of us would consent to taking on responsibility in this way if we held such a view, particularly in legal contexts, and if this account is true then our legal systems themselves would need an overhaul of a proportion that is difficult to even imagine. Gazzaniga, in his consideration of social influences and the brain’s highly programmed and often unreachable workings that occur automatically and unconsciously, still concludes that ‘ultimately responsibility is a contract between two people rather than a property of a brain, and determinism has no meaning in this context…Brakes can be put on unconscious intentions’; ultimately ‘we have to look at the whole picture, a brain in the midst of and interacting with other brains, not just one brain in isolation.’110 Despite the long arm of our genetic inheritance, and all of the factors outside our grasp, we are creatures with agency who do have at least some degree of control over what we do, 108
ibid. ibid., pp. 348-349; Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1998). 110 Gazzaniga, op. cit., p. 215. 109
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although that degree may vary widely from person to person and even from time to time within one person’s life. Ravven replies to Gazzaniga’s position on this by citing his lack of consideration of neuroplasticity — that our brains’ neocortical pathways are rewired by experience — and that because of that neural characteristic the influence of culture, meaning, and language are not voluntary but are flexible; we cannot change our patterns of thought through will but ‘only by training and re-training’.111 This appears to leave the door of choice open a crack, at least as far as our situational interpretations go, which would surely play a large part in subsequent behavior. But Ravven on the whole appears to be uncomfortable with that stance, preferring instead the more robust near-determinism that marks her discussions of the changing self, the contexts in which we move, and the primacy of the ego-centeredness that is an ancient evolutionary heritage fueling our affective systems which in turn drive our behavior. This is Haidt’s social intuitionism, which Ravven also references, as well as Joshua Greene’s work,112 with little or no hope for a self-reflective feedback loop — a position that I would be very surprised to find either researcher holding. In her book’s concluding section, ‘A Final Word on Moral Responsibility’, Ravven even goes so far as to state that ‘If free will is relinquished, we come to recognize that what must be must indeed be, and that what must have been could not have been otherwise.’113 This is a very comforting thought to all of us who have regrets, but if true then it would take us into a realm of unalterable fate that not a few would find abhorrent and it would also wreak havoc on the meaning and purpose in life that many people have discovered for themselves. There is a final problem with this account as well, and that is that Ravven appears to take what are still controversial findings as conclusive. For example, she cites António Damásio’s position that the self defines itself by its relations to the environment and its relationships with others114 as being a fundamental and crucial point, yet she also states that the data is at present inconclusive. Panksepp’s work is also controversial, as is the extent to which Ravven embraces neuroplasticity. When drawing our conclusions from the research being done into the brain we must remember that the field of neuroscience, along with its revelations about cognitive functioning, is a rapidly changing one and this
111
Ravven, op. cit., pp. 470-471, note 96. Haidt, ‘The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail’, op. cit. and The Righteous Mind, op. cit., and Greene, op. cit. Both Haidt and Greene present the brain’s functioning as being prewired and specialized by area — the modular view that is at present generally accepted but which Ravven rejects in favor of a more plastic view. 113 ibid, p. 419; italics in the original. 114 Damásio’s referenced works are Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1994) and The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999). 112
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is something that Ravven does not seem to keep in mind. Although her ideas are exciting and, if they withstand the test of time, would potentially mean a radical reorientation of human life, it seems to me that Ravven’s contextualized soft realist self would be far stronger and more applicable at present if it were tempered down by a large margin. Nevertheless, in what follows we will take much from this account, as well as from Kristjánsson’s soft realist self, in our offering of a self-concept that seeks to accurately reflect the conclusions about our natural functioning that are widely accepted, while also aiming to equip us with a view of the self that will help limit our tendency to the instrumental use of interpersonal violence. B. Towards a self-concept promoting violence reduction: The limited choice soft realist self As we saw when considering our two case studies and the general lessons that could be taken from them, a major contributing factor to the willingness to use interpersonal violence is the ‘us/them’, in-group/out-group divide. In many instances this could even be said to be the contributing factor to our use of violence. We also noted, however, that this groupish tendency is a species-wide and naturally occurring one that has brought with it a great many advantages to us as biological creatures. The point of a self-concept that has as its aim the reduction of the tendency to use violence, therefore, is not to eliminate our groupism but to lessen the severity of the divisions that it generates and the resulting negative view of the ‘other’. Ravven insightfully states that ‘the central problem of human beings is not how to get individuals to care about each other and about the common welfare…but rather the human tendency to fanatic belonging and loyalty to the group (whether family, tribe, political party, church, ideological comrades, etc.) and its unfortunate concomitant, the disavowal of personal responsibility for the group’s actions.’115 As this remark notes, groupishness alone is not the central issue, but rather what that groupishness allows to occur; here it is the diverting of responsibility for acts taken, elsewhere it is the dehumanizing of out-group others, the caricaturization of out-group member traits, the abstraction of relative places in the community, the scapegoating of social and/or economic ills, and the list goes on. Hinton summarizes the factors involved in the facilitation of violence: ‘The exclusion and devaluation of a group of individuals sets them outside a given community. Dehumanization morally justifies harming them. By using euphemisms and deflecting responsibility onto authority figures any remaining culpability can be diffused. As victims are harmed, the perpetrators become acclimated to violence. Desensitization 115
Ravven, op. cit., p. 383.
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makes the dehumanization of victims seem more normal.’116 The root of this terrible chain is that setting outside of the moral community, that marking off of the other as not simply a differing group or individual group member but as that which is entirely disconnected from oneself and one’s own group, and thus creating the psychic architecture in which that other can be seen as a dangerous rival, an enemy that needs to be contained or defeated in order to protect and further the interests of the in-group. All of this is highly circumstantially dependent and will therefore vary from case to case, and as such Ravven is right to highlight the deep web of situational factors that lie behind every action committed, as is Žižek to note the relationship between what he calls subjective and systemic violence when he writes that violence is ‘distributed between acts and their contexts, between activity and inactivity.’ 117 Entire social settings can’t be immediately controlled and remade (something that previously victorious revolutionary movements have surely taught us), and nor can we reach into the past and adjust what took place in order to provide ourselves with a better network of influencing components, but the viewpoints that we bring into our existing social settings and the place we give ourselves in our groups and in our societies can be adjusted, and it is at that level that our self-concepts can be most effective in nudging us towards a mentality that minimizes the tendency for the instrumental use of violence. We need to start at the internal and recognize that that is where our behavior is springing from. The final message that will inform our alternative self-concept is the one we take from the work done on the intuitive and affective basis of nearly all of our actions. This is a hard lesson to come to grips with because we tend to approach what we see others doing the same way we think about our own conduct: by providing ex post facto rational reasons for observed performances. What Haidt’s and others’ research has shown, however, is that the evidence points in the opposite direction, that in fact our unconscious minds predispose us towards certain interpretations of our settings and then decide and initiate our actions before our conscious, rational, thought processes can step in. Hinton provides a good example of this common analytical error in the manner in which he assigns fault for the design of the infamous Khmer Rouge prison and interrogation/torture center, Tuol Sleng (also known by its Khmer Rouge designation of S-21). He writes that the center was designed in order to dehumanize its prisoners and categorize them as enemy others;118 my argument, based on Haidt’s model, is that this is seeing things in reverse. Those who made Tuol Sleng into what it 116 117 118
Hinton, op. cit., p. 237. Žižek, op. cit., p. 213. Hinton, op. cit.
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was had already mentally marked off its future victims as a dehumanized out-group and their construction of the prison naturally followed from there: by and large their affective judgments intuitively influenced and guided their design behavior, with consciously planned ostracizing elements comprising the minority. In thinking about my visit to the actual center, preserved as it was at the time of the Khmer Rouge fall and now called the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, I am reminded of being struck by the utilitarianism of what I encountered there; the prison was a converted high school whose remodeling was minimally done and clearly focused on the practical concerns of the uses to which it was to be put. Its design, if it can be said to have had one, was most marked by the maximal use of available space for prisoner confinement, a concern that would have resulted from the view taken by its overseers of those who would later be incarcerated and tortured there and not from a categorizing intent on their part. Classrooms were divided into very narrow cells made up of wooden walls or concrete blocks with metal bars attached to the floor inside each to which prisoners were shackled; no regard appears to have been given for structural thoughts beyond maintaining a standardized size, as many cells as could be made to fit into the existing room were simply installed. The areas where the torture took place were similarly shifted to their new usage apparently by merely carrying in the necessary equipment. Other issues, such as regulations for prisoner behavior and how the guards were to perform their duties, were no doubt thought about in advance and actively designed to further the dehumanizing process, but again this would have followed the ‘us/them’ distinction first having been made. With all of this in mind, therefore, what type of self-concept could be adopted that incorporates the research we have discussed and that results in a point of view less likely to accept and implement instrumental practices of violence? There does seem to be good reason for accepting the commonsense view that there is substance to the self although that substance is almost certainly not in a physical or definitive form; even the soft anti-realist account is based on this assumption — with its something that is supported by nothing — despite being an anti-realist position (though the hard anti-realist position is an exception here). Ravven’s account of an emotional self made up only or primarily by a biological drive to survival and that exists as a multiplicity which transforms depending on current relational statuses seems excessively shallow, however, and it may be noted that its foundational survival drive can be included in Kristjánsson’s fuller three sets of self-related emotions, fitting into the third category of ‘self-conscious emotions’. It is Kristjánsson’s account generally, in
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fact, that seems to be the most robust of the four that were examined, and its deficiencies can be made up for by supplementing the position rather than by having to start over again from scratch. To his affective and self-reflective account we may add the growing psychological evidence in favor of an intuition first, reasoning second model of decision making and behavior initiation which is augmented by Ravven’s emphasis on background causal factors and social pressures playing an important role in shaping the parameters that influence our intuitions. As Richard Rorty has put it, ‘the central flaw in much traditional moral philosophy has been the myth of the self as nonrelational, as capable of existing independently of any concern for others’,119 and to this relational aspect may be added the historically, geographically, and epochal embedded nature of the self that Ravven highlights. The place in which we find ourselves, in which our selves exist, is one that is marked by many outside pressures and unconscious leanings, our selves are interdependent with each other and with the environments which we inhabit. Our selves may not define themselves this way, as Ravven cites Damásio as arguing, or they may indeed do so, more research on that point will be telling, but it seems reasonable to hold the lesser position that how others see us does play into how we come to see ourselves, as per Kristjánsson’s Humean model. What we can state with a good degree of confidence at the present juncture, though, is that the many layers of mutually dependent and interlocking social fabrics and influencing factors that form our world do point to a limiting of potential actions and options, and the more so when we consider that in most cases our unconscious minds will be the deciding element, with their own internal influences of current affective aspects, personal values held, life experiences, and the like. We are not fully free to do absolutely anything at any time because what we will be able to do, and more to the point, what we will consider ourselves able to do, will be limited by factors over which we have no control. The fact that everyone else is in this same situation should give us pause when starting to judge others as we recognize the limiting external and internal restrictions that we all face. This is not a universalist ethics, but it does acknowledge that the broad generative processes that affect our choices as individuals are shared across our species, differing by regional, cultural, and linguistic inputs but still affecting us in similar ways. That our choices are limited does not, however, mean that they don’t exist, and it is because of their existence that we retain agency and moral responsibility. As Gazzaniga points out, criminals don’t usually commit crimes in front of police
119
Richard Rorty, ‘Ethics Without Principles’, in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 72-90.
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officers,120 and everyday experience confirms both that we have self control and are able to exercise it to varying degrees, unless one is willing to accept the full determinist position and consider our perceived self control to be an illusion; some problems with hard determinism have been mentioned above and are discussed at length elsewhere. Our intuitions and social pressures may be pushing us in a certain direction but we still have the ability to choose within those parameters that we confront, and more importantly, we also have the option of partially choosing how we will intuitively react by working to foster positive immediate unconscious reactions and minimize negative ones, a topic that will be discussed more in the following, final section. This limited choice soft realist self-concept, if adopted, would have a number of advantages in helping to limit the willingness to use violent means to achieving sought ends, and might help in reducing some of the common desires towards dominance and coercion to which instrumental violence is often put. To begin with, by focusing on the embedded and interconnected nature that all of our selves have it would be easier to see in others commonalities with oneself, thus reducing the strength of the divisive labeling of the groupish drive. We could more readily put ourselves in others’ shoes when interacting with them by recognizing that those others are affected by similar social and related pressures and that their actions and outlooks towards us stem from a limited range of options. This would also inform our views of out-group others with whom we have little or no direct contact by placing their groups within their respective wider spheres vis-à-vis our own, and understanding that there are many generational pressures culminating in current practices by both in-groups and out-groups and that simplistic explanations such as ‘They think X because of Y religion/creed/ideology’ or ‘They hate us for Z reason’ and the like are neither helpful nor instructive in any situation. This would be particularly advantageous if applied to current debates on multiculturalism and the struggle for recognition that minority groups often undergo.121 If we can foster a deeper awareness of and respect for the interdependent links that we share with each other both within our own groups and between ours and others’ groups then we may be able to move towards a weakening of the impulse to demonstrate our (or our group’s) superiority and/or to establish relationships of power. Rorty writes that ‘Moral development in the individual, and moral progress in the human species as a whole, is a matter of re-marking human selves so as to enlarge the variety of the relationships which constitute those selves.’122 We are unlikely to arrive at a fully unified conception 120 121 122
Gazzaniga, op. cit. On those debates see especially chapter six, ‘Ethics of the Other’, in Hanssen, op. cit. Rorty, op. cit., p. 79.
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of the self that sees all humanity as being essentially one anytime soon, or indeed ever, and there are compelling biological reasons for being very grateful for our groupish nature and the position that it has helped us to attain. Nor are we likely to fully erase violence from the human repertoire, though recent work by Steven Pinker suggests that we may at least be heading towards an increasingly less violent future.123 Nevertheless, the limited choice soft realist self-concept could help us to see others in ourselves, and ourselves in others, and thereby assist in the reduction of our willingness to use interpersonal violence through a fundamental altering in how we approach the ‘us/them’ divide and the conclusions that we draw from it. Although we are formed, and our behavior is influenced by, a great many contributory elements both of a genetic and historically bound sociocultural nature, we can make efforts to change ourselves and those efforts can be effective. Some proposals for educational methods that we may be able to use to go about this change will follow a consideration of possible objections to the self-concept outlined here and will conclude our study. Although some arguments against a soft realist view of the self have already been discussed above in our consideration of the representative anti-realist accounts, perhaps the most direct objection that could be made would be that it is simply one more theorized account among many, with no hard evidence that would cause us to consider it more accurate than its rivals. While Kristjánsson’s three sets of self-related emotions that compose the soft realist self may be difficult to ascertain empirically rather than experientially, our shifted foundation to that of an emotionally grounded reason — instead of the other way around — that we gave to his self-concept in light of the research on how our decision making tends to happen (intuitive reactions primary, rational thinking secondary) does have a sound basis in the experimental sciences. Greene notes that ‘From a neural and evolutionary perspective, our reasoning systems are not independent logic machines. They are outgrowths of more primitive mammalian systems for selecting rewarding behaviors — cognitive prostheses for enterprising mammals. In other words, Hume seems to have gotten it right.’124 Since our ability to reason, and likewise all that we take to be quintessentially human about that, has at its core an affective network of action promotion, similarly grounding our internally held view of self in the emotions would appear to be far more valid than any of the alternatives, and unless a hard realist self (a Cartesian ego or type of soul) were to 123
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking Books, 2011). 124 Greene, op. cit., note to text on p. 137, p. 368.
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somehow be discovered this seems to be our best bet. Another objection that could be made to the limited choice soft realist self-concept is that it is little more than a reworking of constitutive and circumstantial moral luck. This is an interesting problem and its relation to the present discussion deserves some attention. The concept of moral luck was first introduced by Bernard Williams, but it is in Thomas Nagel’s reply to that article that we find the categorizations from which we can make the noted applications to the self.125 Constitutive moral luck involves ‘the kind of person you are…your inclinations, capacities, and temperament’ while circumstantial moral luck is ‘the kind of problems and situations one faces’;126 both of these are elements of the embedded nature of the self covered above in Ravven’s account and thus we will consider them together here. What this problem highlights is the fact that we tend to judge our own and others’ praiseworthiness or blameworthiness depending on the outcomes of actions taken and not simply by the actions themselves, outcomes that in many cases depend on situational factors beyond the acting agent’s control, despite our being generally committed to the idea that a person can only be morally responsible for what is actually under their control.127 A common illustrative example used is that of a traffic accident, such as the following: Two drivers both inattentively run red lights while crossing an intersection. In the case of Driver A a small boy happened to be crossing the street at the time and, despite Driver A’s hitting the brakes, swerving, doing all that he could to avoid the child, was struck by his car and died as a result. In the case of Driver B no one was in the intersection and the only result was a traffic ticket.128 Our natural inclination is to consider Driver A as having done something much worse than Driver B despite the fact that what they both did — run a red light — was the same, and Driver A will also of course be burdened with a far heavier emotional toll than Driver B will because of the tragic end he experienced. Nagel writes that just as we cannot take a fully external view of ourselves (still feeling agency as well as pride, shame, regret, etc. about whatever outcomes occur), we similarly take that internalized self and extend it to others, applying feelings of 125
Williams’ article originally appeared as ‘Moral Luck’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. L (1976), 115-135; Nagel’s reply of the same title also appeared in that volume but the below is taken from his version of the article in Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 24-38. 126 Nagel, ibid., p. 28. 127 Dana K. Nelkin, ‘Moral Luck’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition), ed. by Edward N. Zalta. . Accessed 13 May 2014. 128 This example is taken from ‘Moral Luck’, Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. . Accessed 13 May 2014.
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admiration, contempt, or indignation towards them.129 While the limited choice soft realist self view incorporates the embedded nature of the self, admitting the circumstantial facets involved in outcomes and the way that one’s constitutive nature will affect how and to what degree one emotionally reacts to the results that could not be controlled, it also encourages the recognition of those situational factors and at which point choice was an active element involved. The problem of moral luck is essentially one of judgment, whereas the self-concept under consideration here is a step removed, informing that judgment. In the above traffic accident example, at what point were the drivers actually making decisions and acting with moral agency? In the case of Driver A this only began when he noticed the boy and took the resulting actions of forcefully hitting his brakes and swerving, his initial inattentiveness that caused him to run the red light in the first place was the result of background issues; in the case of Driver B agency begins when the police pull her over and she decides to comply with them, receiving her ticket; her inattention too was caused by earlier occurring factors. It should be noted, and stressed, that both drivers’ inattentiveness was the result of a general failure to focus on their driving; however this was not a decision that was actively made and for which they can be assigned direct culpability (although both can be judged to be lacking in an important way, more on that below). While we are conventionally held responsible for the unforeseen effects of what we do — the issue at the heart of moral luck — we are only typically thought to be at fault for actions we fail to take when aware of such as being options and then consciously not doing them. (We may feel regret for not having known better but that is a separate issue.) In this case, that would amount to Driver A considering his choices of driving attentively and inattentively and then deciding that today he will not drive attentively, he will instead drive inattentively. Since no one does this we admit that accidents can happen, and then, as Williams points out, we nevertheless judge people based on those accidental outcomes. This is erroneous, and leads to judgments like those that consider Driver A to have killed the boy when in fact what he did was all that he could do to avoid striking the boy with his car. What killed the boy was not so much an action as an inaction: Driver A didn’t stop his car when he should have because he wasn’t paying attention to the signal and then, due to the confluence of uncontrollable events, the boy sadly died. If Driver A takes the limited choice soft realist view of what happened he will quite naturally, and rightly, feel terrible about the boy’s death even as he realizes that it was the result of any number of factors that came together just so and for which he is not personally responsible. On the other hand, he will also acknowledge his place in the 129
Nagel, op. cit.
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wider community, and the interconnectedness he shares with its other members, and consider his failure to drive attentively to be a grave wrong and for which he is personally responsible. Driver B, if she too has adopted this self-concept, while likewise consider her own poor driving to be as equally blameworthy as Driver A’s, and it is only her good circumstantial luck that has saved her from having to experience a far more negative result of her actions. We as bystanders can similarly judge both drivers to be equally at fault and for an equal wrong: inattentive driving. If Driver A and Driver B are like the rest of us, which they must be thought of as being as they are used for the purpose of a generally illustrative example, then they got into their cars that day with their heads full of all of the tasks they had before them and further distracted by a good many other issues. We are all in Driver A’s position but for our own good circumstantial luck, and the embedded nature of the limited choice soft realist self informs us that we should judge ourselves and others for not cultivating an alertness to the task at hand when operating a potentially very dangerous tool because of the consequences that could ensue. What the problem of moral luck shows us is that it is wrong to deem Driver A’s action as being morally worse than Driver B’s same action despite their very different outcomes, and the self-concept being explored here helps us understand why that is.130 Applying this to our central consideration of interpersonal violence, we can see that its use is always something that is actively done, even in cases where the violent act stems from a flare of emotion, and as such involves moral agency. Similarly with Driver A, we therefore judge ourselves and others for having failed to become the type of person that would not act or react with violence even given the same background factors and pressures that cause others to resort to its use or to actively choose its use for its assumed efficacy. The limited choice soft realist self-concept attempts to ascertain at what point in the deep network of causes and effects in which we all live agency starts and stops and starts again, and because of its focus on the enmeshed nature of our lives and the intuitive and affective foundation that most of our decisions rest on, it also points to the need for the development of socially positive intuitions and personal traits — regarding interpersonal violence, a reforming of the ‘us/them’ distinction is particularly important here. In all of those ways it is much more than another version of constitutive and circumstantial moral luck. A final objection that could be brought against this view of the self would be to question its ‘limited choice’ aspect either by asserting a fully free will in which we are all 130
These conclusions could potentially have far-reaching implications for the punitive measures assigned in such cases, but such considerations are beyond the scope of the present study.
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capable of doing whatever we want whenever we want, or the opposite determined view that states that none of our actions can be deemed to be freely chosen. Both of these positions have been discussed in the above, the former particularly so, and it is therefore perhaps enough to simply repeat that although each of us stands at the center of a sociological, historical, biological web, we are not automatons and are able to exercise choice within the range of what we consider possible. All of those preceding elements will also have influenced our intuitive reactions, and they will in turn further reduce what we deem ourselves capable of, often subconsciously and in conjunction with our internally held values. Yet all of that notwithstanding, there still remains within that framework a large array of decisions open to us at each moment of each day, extending from the mundane to the life-changing, and which includes choosing how we wish to shape those intuitive reactions and accepted values that play such a large part in our decision making and the affective base out of which they spring. IV. Suggestions for ethical educational programs The alternative self-concept that has been outlined here is something that would need to be actively taught. As discussed above, a great many of us, at least in the secular West, now hold the default position of the soft anti-realist account: we think of ourselves most of the time as having some type of personally distinctive me-ness but when pushed probably wouldn’t go so far as to posit a Cartesian ego or eternal soul. Our examination of this account has shown its limits, however, and we have also noted some of the demerits of other common accounts of the self along with what can be taken from the best of them. A soft realist account appears to most closely match with not only our own everyday lived experiences but also with what current research in psychology and the functioning of the brain has been revealing. This is important, and as our educational institutions are aimed at producing socialized and socially contributing individuals, we need to equip our students with this self knowledge in order to better allow them to develop themselves and their potential in ways that will encourage self-reflection and self/other relational reflection. Many educators and educational administrators and planners today demonstrate a hesitancy to engage in ethical education, likely due to multicultural concerns and the desire to show respect for any number of particularist communities inhabiting a common space, but we should not shy away from teaching what can be taught from the standpoint of common human needs and values and rooting our moral education in those concerns.131 Educational measures aimed at reducing the 131
Glover, op. cit. Glover suggests humanizing morality in the absence of an external moral law; while I largely agree with his concerns I do not think it necessary, nor wise, to actively teach such an absence in
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occurrence of violence and imparting students with a reluctance to engage in violent behavior are already underway, these should be continued and to them can be added training in self composition and awareness. Contrary to some assumptions about the impossibility of imparting through instruction new self-concepts to others, Kristjánsson points out that moral education and consciousness raising can be effective in this regard, and that the currently prevalent Western conception of the self is a historically recent one.132 Having laid the basis for what constitutes the self, we would then need to continue with an ethical course or courses that highlights the development of socially and internally positive emotional traits, for as we have seen, it is from the affective and unconscious realm that many of our decisions and behaviors originate. We can, and do, make some of our choices after rational deliberation, and our reasoning can at times override our initial intuitive reactions,133 but in circumstances that are less predictable and that afford us less time to think our emotional responses will be the more stable and more influential element.134 Moreover, our affective and intuitive reactions, despite being rooted unconsciously, can be changed through the processes that an educational setting affords: outside influence from the social realm and personal deliberation directed at a desired endpoint.135 The shape, duration, and focus that such an ethical educational program takes would have to be tailored to a greater or lesser degree based on local needs, but the (re)developing field of virtue ethics has the potential to be of beneficial guidance here. A program of virtue ethics would seek to expound on the virtues that, in light of our human requirements and (generally) shared values, we wish to see developed in our youth during their socialization process. We could, for example, teach them that honesty, charity, justice, etc. are virtues that they should endeavor to hold, and that these can be applied in the real world through the knowledge of what a virtuous person would do in the present circumstances (which would then become a positive intuitive influencing factor), even if we then fail to fully live up to the ideal in question.136 On this point, it is the school system, issues of the presence or absence of an external moral law are best left to parents and families, in my opinion. This does not, however, mean that a human-centered morality cannot be taught in our schools. 132 Kristjánsson, op. cit. 133 For one explanation of the process thought to be involved in this overriding, see Haidt, ‘The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail’, op. cit. and The Righteous Mind, op. cit. 134 Kristjánsson, op. cit. 135 Haidt, ‘The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail’, op. cit. and The Righteous Mind, op. cit., Gazzaniga, op. cit., Ravven, op. cit., Kristjánsson, op. cit. 136 Rosalind Hursthouse, ‘Normative Virtue Ethics’, in Ethics: The Big Questions, 2nd edn, ed. by James P. Sterba (Chicester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 389-400.
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worth remembering that all normative ethic types provide rough guidelines, and even in the case of a list of hard moral rules decisions on application still need to be made;137 the virtue ethics account is not an excessively vague one in this regard. Nor is this type of education merely a listing of positive traits, but, as Rosalind Hursthouse explains, ‘Virtue ethicists want to emphasize the fact that, if children are to be taught to be honest, they must be taught to prize the truth, and that merely teaching them not to lie [i.e. a moral rule for action guidance] will not achieve this end. But they [virtue ethicists] need not deny that to achieve this end teaching them not to lie is useful, even indispensible.’138 This sort of ethical program would also need to be flexible and able to adapt to current necessities and sociocultural settings. Whatever virtues and vices are already present in a given place would first have to be examined before the type of well-being possible is determined and program objectives are decided on. 139 In multicultural settings this may require surveying a plurality of such values and hard choices may need to be made on what could be considered common ground or even give-and-take compromises, but a curriculum that satisfied all parties involved could likely be arrived at, although such would also have to remain even more adjustable than a similar program in a less diverse area. This potential highlights another advantage that virtue ethics could yield an ethical educational program: unlike more traditional theories that typically establish a right/wrong dichotomy, virtue ethics instead ‘allows for a range of actions that lie somewhere on the continuum between right (characteristic of the virtuous) and wrong (characteristic of the vicious).’140 Any given program need not consist of concrete directives that favor the practices of the majority community in a geographic region, favor those of the majority and one or two large minority groups, or even favor those of all groups by taking elements from each in a hodgepodge, rather the virtue ethics approach enables learners to chart their own course towards the moral exemplar being taught. Learners would moreover be able to set their own pace on that course, as virtue ethics ‘is about the development of virtuous agents over time.’141 By experiencing the choices before them in the real world through the affective and cognitive lens of what they are learning in their ethics classroom and how they observe their role models behaving, students can gradually establish positive emotional dispositions, and, as their experience grows, reflect back on the decisions they made and 137
ibid. ibid., p. 395; italics in the original. 139 Timothy Chappell, ‘Virtue ethics in the twentieth century’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics, ed. by Daniel C. Russell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 149-171. 140 Liezl van Zyl, ‘Virtue ethics and right action’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics, ed. by Daniel C. Russell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 172-196 (p. 178). 141 ibid., p. 180. 138
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the actions they took with a mind directed towards exploring what it means to act virtuously, thus further reinforcing constructive intuitive responses. The pragmatic rejection of a practical approach with only one way to do things and its singular complementary theory142 is helpful to keep in mind here. Adopting the limited choice soft realist self-concept or a view of self similar to it, learning to apply that account in one’s daily practice and approach to others, and learning to exhibit the virtues in one’s life need not consist of an ‘education’ phase followed by a ‘practice’ phase, but would be an ongoing process of trial and error, perception, action, examining the result, and adjusting as necessary,143 with changes being made and considered acceptable in both the practices undertaken and the self-concept and aimed at virtues underpinning them. What is of most significance is not the holding onto of any one view of self or specific set of virtues but the movement in the direction of ethical outlooks and behavior that will help us get beyond seeing each other in the dangerous in-group/out-group manner to which we are accustomed. In our study of the instrumental use of interpersonal violence for domination and coercion and the two case studies that exemplified that use, we saw that the fundamental trait feeding our tendency towards violence was the group-oriented viewpoint that marks a clear line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and which makes it all too easy to cast ‘them’ outside of our moral spheres. We then considered four representative accounts of the self for theoretical robustness and accuracy against recent scientific research and offered an adjusted account of Kristjánsson’s emotionally based soft realist position as a self-concept that could be potentially useful in allowing us to reduce our willingness to use violence. We concluded by briefly looking at how developments in virtue ethics could be applied to ethical education programs that would seek to teach a soft realist self-concept and the types of behavior deemed most personally and socially beneficial for our shared human needs and locally relevant contexts. In the end, we may only find these suggestions to have been a good start, but they will have been that.
142
Robert B. Brandom, Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011). 143 ibid.
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