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Individual & Shared Responsibility: a preliminary syllabus

A preliminary syllabus for exploring and perhaps delineating the contours of individual and shared (or ‘collective’) responsibility:

• Baehr, Jason. The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues & Virtue Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Baier, Annette C. Reflections on How We Live. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Cane, Peter and John Gardner, eds. Relating to Responsibility (Essays for Tony Honoré on his Eightieth Birthday) Oxford, UK: Hart Publishing, 2001.
• Bilgrami, Akeel. Self-Knowledge and Resentment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
• Chatterjee, Deen K., ed. The Ethics of Assistance: Morality and the Distant Needy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Coady, C.A.J. Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Cullity, Garrett. The Moral Demands of Affluence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
• Dalrymple, Theodore. Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy. New York: Encounter Books, 2006.
• DeNicholas, Daniel R. Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.
• Düwell, Marcus, et al., eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Human Dignity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
• Elster, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Elster, Jon. Strong Feelings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
• Elster, Jon, ed. Addiction: Entries and Exits. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999.
• Elster, Jon and Ole-Jørgen Skog, eds. Getting Hooked: Rationality and Addiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Fingarette, Herbert. Mapping Responsibility: Explorations in Mind, Law, Myth, and Culture. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2004.
• Fischer, John Martin and Mark Ravizza, S.J. Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• French, Peter A. and Howard K. Wettstein, eds. Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility. Boston, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
• Gillett, Grant. Subjectivity and Being Somebody: Human Identity and Neuroethics. Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic/Philosophy Documentation Center, 2008.
• Goodin, Robert E. Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
• Goodin, Robert E. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Hacker, P.M.S. Human Nature: The Categorial Framework. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2013.
• Heath, Joseph. Following the Rules: Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Isaacs, Tracy and Richard Vernon, eds. Accountability for Collective Wrongdoing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
• Kateb, George. Human Dignity. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Lepora, Chiara and Robert E. Goodin. On Complicity and Compromise. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• List, Christian and Philip Pettit. Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Lucas, J.R. Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
• Martin, Mike W. From Morality to Mental Health: Virtue and Vice in a Therapeutic Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• May, Larry. Sharing Responsibility. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• Mayerfield, Jamie. Suffering and Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• McCrudden, Christopher, ed. Understanding Human Dignity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Moore, Michael S. Placing Blame: A Theory of the Criminal Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Moore, Michael S. Causation and Responsibility: An Essay in Law, Morals, and Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Poland, Jeffrey and George Graham, eds. Addiction and Responsibility. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
• Roberts, Robert C. and W. Jay Wood. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007,
• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988.
• Rosen, Michael. Dignity: Its History and Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• Tadros, Victor. Criminal Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Unger, Peter. Living High & Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Velleman, J. David. Self to Self: Selected Essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Yaffe, Gideon. Attempts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Image: El Lissitzky, Globetrotter (in Time), 1923

Christmas, again

This is the time of year when I typically draw attention to my short, unpublished, essay about the legal and cultural complications of Christmas.  It's available here.  

The piece speaks for itself.  But I do have a few more thoughts in the light of the most recent kerfuffles about the so-called "War on Christmas" and Donald Trump's belligerent crusade on behalf of "Merry Christmas."  It's tempting to dismiss the whole business as just a load of silliness.  There is no "War on Christmas."  And like most folks, I am quite indifferent this time of year to how I am greeted, or whether I am greeted, by casual strangers.  That said, though....,

(1) My point in the original essay was not to deny or minimize the "secular" side of Christmas, either culturally or historically, but rather to emphasize that the "religious" and "secular" dimensions of the holiday are not easily separated or compartmentalized.  They are intermeshed.  And they are also, and have long been, engaged in a complex dance that often verges into active competition. 

(2) We should therefore be sympathetic to the plea of many Christians to "keep Christ in Christmas," not because there ever was a pure Golden Age of Christmas, but because the present era seems particularly intent on appropriating Christmas for un-Christmasy ends.

(3) Trump's campaign, however, along with much of the nonsense about the alleged "War on Christmas," has nothing to do with "keeping Christ in Christmas."  It is just another instance of the worst of identity politics -- a demand for symbolic affirmation and an exercise in self-gratification.

(4) In fact, it's worse than that.  I've said that the "religious" and "secular" dimensions of Christmas are intermeshed.  But the "secular" side itself has two distinct elements -- one emphasizing humility, goodwill, peace, and hearth, and the other emphasizing bluster, glitz, and public spectacle.  The trick, which much of the best of what we call the "commercialized Christmas" actually strives for, is to keep those elements in creative tension or equipoise.  But Trumps's Christmas is just an extension of Trump himself -- narcissistic and aggressive.  So sad.

(5) Nevertheless, folks on the cultural or political left should not feel too smug about their own embrace of "Happy Holidays," "Holiday Season," or the like.  Culturally-laden language, of whatever sort, is inevitably fraught and complex. 

"Merry Christmas" itself might have any of the following meanings, or more:

(a) "Blessed birthday of Jesus."

(b) "Merry secular Christmas."

(c) "Merry complicated Christmas."

(d) "I'm celebrating Christmas, no imposition intended on you."

or (e) Ahem, "Happy Holidays." 

More to the point, terms such as "Happy Holidays" can mean any of the following, or more: 

(a) Genuine and well-informed gestures toward religious and cultural pluralism.  But this is both more rare and more difficult than we might think.   For example, by now my significant holiday this time of year -- Hanukkah -- is over.  Finished.  In the past.  And there is no such thing as a "Hanukkah season."  So anyone saying "Happy Holidays" right now and intending to include Hanukkah should think twice.

(b) Well-meaning but naive or ill-informed gestures toward religious and cultural pluralism.

(c) A reference to an ill-defined "holiday season" with Christmas at its heart.

(d) A more specific reference to the period between Christmas and New Years Day.

(e)  Just a synonym for, ahem, "Merry Christmas."  This seems to be a regional thing, at least in part.  See here.

(f) A euphemism for "Merry Christmas."  The difference between a synonym and a euphemism is that euphemisms make a pretense of being what they are not.  And euphemisms, though sometimes useful or even vital, should not be source of excessive self-congratulation.

So what's the solution?  If my little essay is to be believed, there is none.  Christmas presents intractable dilemmas, both legal and cultural.  And we shouldn't pretend otherwise.

But that's OK.  

So, in this season of darkness giving way to light, I wish all who celebrate a Merry Christmas and all who do not a fine day and a Happy New Year.

Perry Dane

A Prayer by Theologian Walter Rauschenbush, circa 1910 Speaks to the Greed of Our Time

Shared from Taryn Mattice
Prayer by American theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, circa 1910.

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"We cry to thee for justice, O Lord, for our soul is weary with the iniquity of greed. Behold the servants of Mammon, who defy thee and drain their fellow men for gain; who grind down the strength of the workers by merciless toil and fling them aside when they are mangled and worn; who rack-rent the poor and make dear the space and air which thou hast made free; who paralyze the hand of justice by corruption and blind the eyes of the people by lies; who nullify by their craft the merciful laws which nobler men have devised for the protection of the weak; who have made us ashamed of our dear country by their defilements and have turned our holy freedom into a hollow name; who have brought upon thy Church the contempt of men and have cloaked their extortion with the gospel of thy Christ.

"For the oppression of the poor and the sighing of the needy now do thou arise, O Lord; for because thou art love, and tender as a mother to the weak, therefore thou art the great hater of iniquity and thy doom is upon those who grow rich on the poverty of the people."

 

 

 

Evangelicals, Trump, and Christmas

Donald Trump, of course, was trying to curry favor with white evangelicals when he recently criticized the so-called war on Christmas. Those evangelicals have given Christianity a bad name, but the evangelicals who write for Sojourners are quite different. Benjamin Perry in Sojourners eloquently shows just how hypocritical it is for Trump to claim any affiliation with genuine Christianity.  He argues that Trump "doesn’t seem to get what Jesus is all about. And, after all, why should he? A man pathologically dedicated to 'winning' cannot understand why God would choose to enter the world as a 'loser.' Someone who conflates wealth with moral authority is unlikely to grasp why God is born into an impoverished body. When one adorns every surface of one’s home in gold, it’s hard to grasp the meaning of the manger. .... President Trump’s Christmas is a spiteful imitation. It revels in commercial excess and gaudy lights, while beneath its shiny façade lurks an ideology of blight and corruption. His Christmas is the very inverse message from the prophet who was anointed to proclaim good news to the poor." See his argument here.

How Did We Get a Congress so Blatantly Unconcerned with the Common Good?

When the Republicans try to throw millions of citizens off health care, when they support a tax bill offering crumbs to the middle class and massive dollars to the rich exacerbating already serious economic inequality, when they seek to punish those living in states that do not vote Republican, and when they support an incompetent, mentally impoverished, mean-spirited President who blatantly seeks to help those who voted for him and no one else, we have to ask how things could have gone so wrong. The answer is complicated. Here is a partial answer.

We can begin by recognizing that this was not the plan. The Framers sought to assure that members of Congress would be people who sought the common good and could be thought of as virtuous persons. They for the most part recognized that the People would have to possess sufficient virtue to assure quality representation. The citizenry would have to be concerned about the common good, not merely their own interests.

They worried, however, about corruption. They believed that corruption had many sources including luxury and economic inequality. As to luxury, we live in a society in which the top hundred advertisers spent $137.8 billion or more per year, advertising which creates a nation of consumers instead of citizens. It is no wonder that our materialistic society is permeated with political ignorance. Our “citizens” are focused on more goods, not the common good.

As to economic equality, the Framers worried that a concentration of wealth would undermine checks on political power and lead to corruption at the top. But the United States has become a country of massive economic inequality. In 2012, the top 10% of earners took home 50% of the Nation’s income, the highest percentage in a hundred years! The top 1% took home 20% of the Nations income. See here. Compounding this problem, our campaign finance system encourages politicians to take positions that will attract dollars from wealthy donors even when that comes at the expense of the common good (which it so frequently does).

In light of the concerns leading to our Constitution, it is stunning that the multi-billion dollar deluge of commercial advertising is protected under the First Amendment; it is even more shocking that the wealthy have a First Amendment right to buy influence, showering billions of dollars to drown out our democracy.

The Framers were concerned about corruption. Regrettably, we have it.

Human Nature

Wassily Kandinsky, “Bustling Aquarelle” (1923)

Even creatures immersed in and obsessed by amour-propre, or constitutionally prone to self-deception and the deception of others, to chronic wishful thinking and prolonged states of denial, to bouts of anger and despair, even we need small victories, however episodic and evanescent … along with symbols or portents of change and hope, however ambiguous or fragile; tokens and symbols of possibility and progress, however obscure or tentative; beacons on the horizon, however faint and distant; models of emulation, however contingent or imperfect; dreams and wishes, however surreal and unreal; desires and expectations, however inchoate or presumptuous; all surrounded by and interrupted and suffused with moments of pure silence, with occasional if not assiduous observing and witnessing, with daily chores and tasks, with attentive acts of loving and helping, sharing and caring, with spontaneous acts of performing and playing; all the while striving to think and feel with indissolubly conjoined minds and bodies, heads and hearts, with souls and spirits willing to consciously confront uncertainty or danger, to risk some things or everything.

Alchemy of the Mind: deliberate misrepresentation leading to unconscious but motivated transmutation

Background Fact: The recent GOP tax bill “rammed through the Senate” in the middle of the night (technically, early morning) is “filled with perks for America’s wealthiest individuals and largest corporations, many of them paid for by closing loopholes that benefit middle-class people. By 2027, the top one-fifth of earners would receive 90 percent of the tax bill’s benefits, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.”

Repeat a lie enough in public, and you (the liar) may come to believe it (whether recipient members of the public come to believe it as well may be an open question, but it appears that at least some of them do). This possibility has been discussed and explained by Jon Elster as exemplifying the wider psychological phenomenon of “deliberate misrepresentation and unconscious but motivated transmutation” and assumes that “people are capable of keeping their private beliefs and their publicly professed ones in separate compartments” [weak mental modularity].

Yesterday evening, I serendipitously came upon the following passage from Jon Elster’s Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (1999):

“In a society with progressive taxation, those with higher incomes have a strong interest in low taxes. In defending this system, however, they cannot simply appeal to their interest. They cannot say, publicly, ‘Taxes should be low because that’s good for me’ [or in the case of Republicans and the very rich interests they represent, ‘good for us’]. By appealing to trickle-down effects and supply-side considerations they can claim that everybody will be better off if the rich get a tax break [In our case, the Republicans keep calling their overhaul of the tax code a ‘middle class tax cut,’ as well as making the general argument, in spite most economists believing otherwise, that dramatically cutting the corporate tax rate will result in increased economic growth (akin to the post-war decades) that, in turn, provides far more jobs and higher wages.] If they make this argument repeatedly, they may end up believing it themselves. Most people do not like to think of themselves as liars or cynics. To say one thing and think another is a source of tension and discomfort [e.g., cognitive dissonance] that can be removed by aligning one’s thoughts on one’s utterances. In fact, that tension need not even arise. Most people do not like to think of themselves as motivated only by self-interest. They will, therefore, gravitate spontaneously towards a world-view that suggests a coincidence between their special interest and the public interest. This example suggests not only that people have the options both of misrepresentation and of transmutation, but if the former is chosen it may induce the latter.”

So it seems we might conclude that it is likely more than a few Republicans have arrived at the belief—perhaps by way of reducing cognitive dissonance—that their tax bill will in fact benefit the middle classes (they won’t, however, pretend that it will benefit the poor).

As Elster points out in a footnote, “Marx asserted that ideology could be understood as the tendency to assert the special interest of one class as the general interest of society.”

Trump’s “re-tweeting” of inflammatory and unverified anti-Muslim videos and “incitement to genocide” in international criminal law

It happened this way in Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda, and countless other sites of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass persecution. The pamphlets, megaphones, and radio broadcasts came before the pogroms, murders, and forced relocations. And today, we have even more effective ways to reach millions of people at a time, as the president’s more than 43 million followers on Twitter can attest; the established media only magnify his reach.—Daniel Altman*

As Larry May explains in his book, Genocide: A Normative Account (Cambridge University Press, 2010), “[i]n international law, genocide has a specialized meaning that is not necessarily consonant with that of the public’s understanding of genocide, because it includes acts that do not involve mass killing.” To wit:

Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. 

Article III lists the following acts as punishable:

(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide. 

For our purposes, that is, in examining the possible criminal character of Trump’s “re-tweeting” of inflammatory and unverified anti-Muslim videos, (c) immediately above is germane. Incitement means “encouraging or persuading another to commit an offence.” May cites the Akayesu Trial Chamber for the two principal ways such incitement is understood in criminal law: “’Under common law systems, incitement tends to be viewed as a particular form of criminal participation, punishable as such,’ whereas ‘in most civil law systems, incitement is most often treated as a form of complicity.’ If incitement is treated merely as a form of complicity, then it may not be charge and punished in its own right.” Both the Genocide Convention and the more recent Rwanda Tribunal Statute favor the common law view. As May reminds us, “the hardest element to establish for the crime of incitement to genocide is mens rea [‘guilty mind,’ i.e., either the intention to commit a crime or knowledge that one’s commissive act or omissive act will result in a crime].” In our case, this means “[t]here is a desire to create in others a desire to commit a crime.” This rather stringent and somewhat awkward requirement is, as May says, “especially hard to prove, because in effect we must peer into the mind of two different people, or infer from their behavior what the mental states of two different people are [it also implicates a causal connection so as to be logically sufficient].” The ICTR’s [International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda] Akayesu Trial states: “The prosecution must prove a definite causation between the act characterized as incitement … and a specific offence.” May points out that the Media Case Trial Chamber expressed a somewhat less stringent requirement, for “[T]he Chamber is of the opinion that the direct element of incitement should be viewed in light of its cultural and linguistic element,” thereby allowing what May terms “indirect forms of proof.” And here’s the most significant part as it applies to our—i.e. Trump’s—case: The Media Case Trial Chamber stated that “[i]t is the potential of the communication to cause genocide that makes it incitement.” This seems not to effectively eliminate the direct causation element, in that, in May’s words, “the crime does not require a successful instigation for prosecution.” The Appeals Chamber of the ICTR later more or less reinstated the “direct incitement” element in causal terms as such speech must “directly call for the commission of genocide.” As some have correctly noted, this still does not mean that incitement is necessarily tied to a commissive act as such, thus incitement need not result in genocidal acts for prosecution!

As May’s analysis proceeds to inform us, the above legal elements for incitement to genocide bring it within the class of “inchoate crimes,” “such as attempted murder, that do not require the completion of a harmful act in order form criminal liability to be assigned. [It just so happens that there are two books on one of these categories, “attempts:” R.A. Duff’s Criminal Attempts (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Gideon Yaffe’s Attempts (in the philosophy of action and criminal law) (Oxford University Press, 2010); May cites material from the former book.] The standard list of inchoate crimes includes attempt, conspiracy, solicitation, and incitement.” In all such cases, there may be sufficient warrant for punishment, but at a minimum, “[t]here has to be an anticipated harm that is foreseen.” May, after Duff, thinks incitement should entail a “causal element closely related to the intent element” as well as a notion of “explicit endangerment” that falls short of the actual commission or occurrence of the “primary harm.” This leaves incitement looking something like “recklessness rather than like a straightforward intent crime.”

One of May’s conclusions is that “on both deterrence and retributive grounds, the inchoate crime should be punished severely only when there [is] a high likelihood that harm might result from the act of incitement.” He furthermore notes the lag time that often exists “between when the racist hate speech is broadcast or printed and when the violence ensues,” which is a conceptual problem insofar as incitement “derives from the Latin word citare, which means to set in rapid motion.” I now quote in full a paragraph of May’s that completes much of his argument for clarifying the notion of incitement to genocide in international law:

“In my view, incitement makes the most conceptual sense when it is linked with its Latin root, namely, where a person’s actions begin a causal chain, and soon thereafter there is, or would normally be, a certain harmful result. In the case of incitement to genocide, the result, of course, is a series of genocidal harms. Incitement is not best understood as preparing the ground for harm, but rather as initiating a causal process. It is also to do so intentionally, although … the intention is only to take a risk, not to do that which is risked. And here is where the inchoate nature of the crime arises, for if one were to start such a causal chain by one’s words, spoken or written, and to intend that these words would have a certain result, then this is enough for incitement, as long as the so-called proximity condition is met, namely, the condition that states that the act must involve causation that is more than mere preparation.”

It seems confusing to highlight the “proximity condition” of this inchoate crime in as much as it need not “lead to completion in a harmful outcome.” May attempts to clarify this, however, in his final summary of the principal elements in the incitement to commit genocide:

“Incitement involves the intention to take certain actions that initiate a causal chain that is known to risk serious harm, but where the harm need not be intended, and in addition the harm need not be effected. Incitement is thus an inchoate crime in that harm need not result from the inciter’s action, but incitement is not like most other inchoate crimes in how the proximity test is to be met. There is a very limited sense in which preparation must be taken, in that the inciter must in fact do those things that, by strongly affecting others, risks causing these others to engage in harms. But this is not best thought of in terms of preparation because it is not as if the inciter need be planning to do things that those who are likely to be affected by his or her actions may cause, nor that he or she intends there to be a plan to produce these harms.

There will be degrees of incitement [….] [and thus the severity of punishment will hinge] on a secondary element, namely, whether the specific harm is intended or merely the result of recklessness or negligence. Incitement is thus what is often called a crime of specific or special mens rea. Incitement to genocide is thus to be understood as the kind of crime where there must be both the intent to do an act of broadcasting or publishing or public speaking in a highly prejudicial way about a group’s members, and where the risk of harm so created is at least known by the inciter.”

* Please see Daniel Altman’s article in Foreign Policy, “This Is How Every Genocide Begins,” November 30, 2017.