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Love as a (Kantian-like) Moral Emotion

I first read J. David Velleman’s Self to Self: Selected Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2006) when it came out over ten years ago; reading it afresh leaves me far more impressed and moved by its arguments and insights. I used to discuss the chapter, “The Genesis of Shame” in my class on comparative world religions. It’s a moral and philosophical meditation on the Adam and Eve story in Genesis, which I thought gave the students a taste of what it means to look at religious narratives as (possibly) containing “interpretations” and “meanings” that stretch beyond those emphasized by adherents to a tradition or subscribers to a specific worldview (it was not intended to belittle or deny what those believers thought about this same material), much as we understand good literature to be “speaking” in some manner to all of us (of course we need not agree on what it is saying, but its qualities appeal to our nature as persons, as human animals with all their powers, capacities and possibilities).

I was motivated to post something on the book upon reading the following passage:

“ … [Iris] Murdoch’s ethic of attending to particulars is not necessarily at odds with the ethics of impartiality. On the contrary, Murdoch emphasized that the attention required is ‘impersonal’ and ‘an exercise of detachment.’ To be sure, Murdoch equates attending to individuals with a form of love for them, and a morality based on love might naturally be assumed to differ from any morality that is impartial. Yet the attention that embodies love, in Murdoch’s view, is strictly objective and fair-minded:

‘Should a retarded child be kept at home or sent to an institution? Should an elderly relation who is a trouble-maker be cared for or asked to go away? Should an unhappy marriage be continued for the sake of the children? [….] The love which brings the right answer is an exercise of justice and realism and really looking.’

In Murdoch’s language of impersonality, detachment, realism, and justice, there is no suggestion that particularity entails partiality.”—From the chapter, “Love as a Moral Emotion”

As for what precisely is meant by “Kantian-like” in the title of the post, one should read the essay in its entirety.

Mohandas K. Gandhi (2 October 1869 – 30 January 1948)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, affectionately christened by his devotees and admirers “Mahātmā” Gandhi, was assassinated 70 years ago on this date in 1948.

Please see Vinay Lal’s blog post, “Gandhi and His Assassins–Then and Now,” as well as the embedded link to his excellent article, “The Gandhi Everyone Loves to Hate,”* a snippet from which follows:

[….] “My contention is that Gandhi furnishes no solace or anchor to those who are accustomed or inclined to view the world in Manichaean categories, and that one of the many reasons why Gandhi creates a profound uneasiness among the many constituencies which had to deal with him – Brahmins and Sudras, Sanatanists and Dalits, Indians and the English, Hindus and Muslims, liberals and Marxists, feminists and patriarchs, communalists and secularists, modernisers and traditionalists, developmentalists and ecologists, even militarists and pacifists – is that he came to embrace the idea of an open-ended conversation even as he stood unequivocally for certain moral, political, and epistemological positions. [….]

There is, needless to say, no singular Gandhi that everyone loved to hate, and the advocates of many critical worldviews on Gandhi have all authored their own Gandhi. This is far from being as unreasonable as it sounds, for if environmentalists, pacifists, conscientious objectors, non-violent activists, nudists, naturopaths, vegetarians, prohibitionists, social reformers, internationalists, moralists, trade union leaders, political dissidents, hunger strikers, anarchists,  luddites, celibates, anti-globalisation activists, pluralists, ecumenists, walkers, and many others  have at one time or a not her claimed Gandhi as their patron saint, or at least drawn inspiration from him, then one is also free to choose the Gandhi that one dislikes. It may even come as a surprise to many, who know of Gandhi only as a prophet of non-violence, a beacon light to a beleaguered humanity, and an instigator of change through peaceful means, three among other sentiments which have ceaselessly circulated about him, to discover that Gandhi provoked, and continues to provoke, considerable resentment, and often sharper reactions, among a wide swathe of his and our contemporaries.” [….]

* Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 43, No. 40 (October 4, 2008): 55-64.

My basic bibliography for the life, work, and legacy of Gandhi is here.

Dreaming (lucidly) a Dream

On rare occasions I disagree with something written by P.M.S. Hacker (a philosopher who frequently swims against the current or is decidedly out of fashion). Here is one such instance. First, he notes correctly that “philosophers [this invariably refers to Western philosophers, but his observation is equally apt for those of Asian provenance as well] since antiquity have been plagued by the thought that illusions, hallucinations and dreams are (or can be) indistinguishable from veridical perception,” a fact that accounts for one of the roots of skepticism. But in his brief discussion of dreams, he claims that, “When one has a lucid dream, one dreams that one is dreaming.” I doubt things are so simple and clear-cut if only because of my own dream experiences (I’ll not here attempt to discuss supporting evidence from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition). For example, when on occasion I am in a dream that is (or borders on) a nightmare, usually one in which I seem to have no way out in confronting some imminent harm or even death, I’ve on occasion been able to say something like the following to my (dreaming) “self:” “OK, this is just a dream, and you need only wake up to escape the danger or banish your fears,” whereupon I wake up, thinking to myself, “Ah, it’s nice to have been rid of that awful dream.” I tend not to engage in any further dream analysis, having put the dream behind me, thus not believing—perhaps wrongly, in an act of self-deception or state of denial—that the contents of the dream are a potential source of psychological insight into something troubling me or some aspect of my character or something eluding my everyday awareness, what have you. Is this merely another instance of “dreaming (albeit lucidly!) that one is dreaming?” Is the “self” speaking to the dreaming “self” one and the same?

In case you missed it, my transdisciplinary bibliography on dreams and dreaming is here.

Happy Birthday to Herbert Fingarette (b. January 20, 1921), emeritus professor of philosophy

Today is the birthday (97 yrs!) of Herbert Fingarette. The late Robert C. Solomon wrote that “Herbert Fingarette has long been one of the most original and provocative philosophers in America.” As a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, I was a Teaching Assistant (TA) for Fingarette’s introductory course on Asian philosophies (with Mary I. Bockover, now a philosophy professor at Humboldt State University in norther California), the first graduate student from outside the Philosophy Dept. chosen to be a TA (I was downstairs in Religious Studies), owing to a recommendation (solicited by Fingarette) from Ninian Smart (whom I miss dearly), a fact I remain perversely proud of.

Fingarette has penned philosophical works on a wide variety of subjects with remarkable clarity and insight, some of them now “classics” in their respective areas of inquiry (e.g., the books on self-deception, Confucius, and alcoholism). He struck me as uncommonly kind, at least for a professional philosopher. I’ll cite just two instances of this kindness that came quickly to mind (after many years!): offering me a ride into town on more than one occasion upon learning I commuted by bicycle and bus to the university, and answering a late night phone call (as if we were having a convivial conversation in his office at school) about analogical reasoning and correlative thinking I had after reading A.C. Graham’s Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China (Open Court, 1989). Happy birthday Professor Fingarette!

Books by Herbert Fingarette (one title with co-author Ann Fingarette Hasse, his daughter, an attorney):

• The Self in Transformation: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and the Life of the Spirit (Basic Books, 1963).
• Self-Deception (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969; 2nd ed., University of California Press, 2000).
• Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (HarperSanFrancisco, 1972).
• The Meaning of Criminal Insanity (University of California Press, 1972).
• Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (University of California Press, 1988).
• Death: Philosophical Soundings (Open Court, 1999).
• Mapping Responsibility: Explorations in Mind, Law, Myth, and Culture (Open Court, 2004).
• (co-author, Ann Fingarette Hasse) Mental Disabilities and Criminal Responsibility (University of California Press, 1979).

See too: Mary I. Bockover, ed. Rituals, Rules and Responsibility: Essays Dedicated to Herbert Fingarette (Open Court, 1991).

From his Wikipedia entry:

“Herbert Fingarette [b. January 20, 1921 (age 97)] is an American philosopher and emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. [….] Fingarette’s work deals with issues in philosophy of mind, psychology, ethics, law, and Chinese philosophy.

In his 1969 [Routledge & Kegan Paul; 2^nd edition, University of California Press, 2000] monograph Self-Deception, Fingarette presents an account of the titular concept influenced by the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Sören Kierkegaard and Sigmund Freud, as well as contemporary work in physiology and analytic philosophy. Fingarette argues that traditional accounts of self-deception fall invariably into paradox because these accounts see self-deception in terms of perception or knowledge. Such paradoxes may be resolved, Fingarette claims, by re-framing self-deception as a problem of volition and action. On these new terms, he defines self-deception as an agent’s persistent refusal to ‘spell out’ (explicitly acknowledge) and to avow some aspect of her engagement in the world.

Fingarette’s 1972 monograph Confucius: The Secular as Sacred was described in a peer-reviewed academic journal as ‘one of the most significant philosophical books on the subject to be published in a long time.’

Fingarette has also influentially applied his work in moral psychology to pressing social and legal issues, particularly those surrounding addiction. In his 1988 book Heavy Drinking, Fingarette gainsays the disease theory of alcoholism popularized by groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous.” [embedded hyperlinks courtesy of yours truly]

The Principles of Charity and Humane Sensibility in Philosophy

The following from the “Overture” to Raymond Tallis’s The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness (St. Martin’s Press, 1999; first edition, 1991) strikes me as an insufficiently recognized example of one dimension of the “principle of charity” in philosophy. As such, it is a more “globalized” conception of the principle, which is usually in reference to a “localized” application entailing the “maximization” of coherence, rationality, or truth of the specific arguments of one’s interlocutors (and of course the ‘global’ and ‘local’ dimensions are complementary), particularly if they are ambiguous, vague, or open to interpretation; thus one formulates the “best” or most generous construal of the argument” of one’s interlocutor before criticizing it or assessing its plausibility, soundness, or persuasiveness:

“In the pages that follow, several books are subjected to repeated criticism. They include The Computer and the Mind by P.N. Johnson-Laird, Mindwaves edited by Colin Blakemore and Susan Greenfield, and Paul Churchland’s Matter and Consciousness. They have been singled out for their merits, not their deficiencies: they seem to me to provide the clearest, the most lucid, the most comprehensive and the most honest accounts of the current state of play in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neurobiology presently available.* I have found them immensely helpful and am grateful to their progenitors. My enormous debt to these books is in no wise diminished by my disagreement with pretty well everything of theoretical substance that is contained in them.”

Tallis (in the Preface to the 1999 edition of The Explicit Animal), an intellectual polymath, also exemplifies what we might term the principle of humane sensibility in philosophical discussion and debate when he praises the prominent philosophers and psychologists bewitched by neurophilosophy for being exemplary prose stylists well-versed in the rhetorical arts of exposition and persuasion, despite the conclusion that their “ingenious” arguments contain “daft ideas” rife with “deceptions and self-deceptions:”

“Materialist, computational, Darwinian [used here primarily in reference to the field of ‘evolutionary psychology’] accounts of mind seem to attract the most gifted and witty expositors resourceful in their use of metaphor and are extremely skilled at assuming the appropriate linguistic register to communicate their ideas in a user-friendly and non-patronising manner [this is quite rare in the halls of professional philosophy, although increased acknowledgment of this from both inside and outside the profession, as well as an apparent uptick in the literary styles and modes of exposition in philosophy, may indicate welcome changes are afoot]. It is always a pleasure to read Daniel Dennett; and, even when his in the throes of conceptual confusion concealed by the most cunning use of transferred epithets, the impression is always one of lucidity. And the same is true of Pinker, the Churchlands [Patricia and Paul] and many other expositors of what has (to expropriate the term used by Gilbert Ryle of Cartesian dualism) become The Official Doctrine.”

 * This was written in 1991, hence the books cited were published prior to that (in 1987 and 1988).

Image: Ella Bergmann-Michel, Untitled, 1918

Raymond Tallis on the sterility of neuroaesthetics

“An extreme expression of the faith of neuroscientism is the emergence of a so-called neuroaesthetics that looks to neuroscience to explain aesthetic experience. Neuroaesthetics has attracted adherents from many disciplines. Certain literary critics, musicologists, and art critics are excited by the idea that examination of the brain of a person enjoying a work of art will throw light on what art does, is, and means. Artists, they believe, are unconscious manipulators of our nervous systems, awakening particular regions of the cortex, or particular types of neurons, singly or in combination.

I first became aware of neurological approaches to literature when I read a Commentary in the Times Literary Supplement by the novelist A.S. Byatt (TLS, Sept. 22, 2006). She argued, on the basis of theories advanced by the neuroscientist Pierre Changeux, that the particular pleasure associated with John Donne’s poems was due to syntactic structures which made them especially effective in stimulating certain kinds of neurons; especially those associated with ‘reinforced link ages of memory, concepts, and learned formal structures like geometry, algebra, and language.’ When I researched the background to her article, I realised that Byatt was speaking for a vast congregation of practitioners of “neuroliterary criticism.” There is an equally thriving academic industry using neuroscience to explain why certain paintings give us pleasure. Many art critics have been inspired by the eminent neuroscientist Semir Zeki who, in Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (1999), attributed the distinctive effects of the paintings of Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, and the Fauves to their acting on different kinds of neurons in the visual pathways. Mondrian, apparently, speaks preferentially to cells in regions V1 and V4, whereas the Fauves stimulate V4 plus the middle frontal convolutions.

John Onians in Neuroarthistory takes neuroaesthetics further. He explains the propensity of art historians to espouse certain theories on the basis of the kinds of experiences they themselves may have had. These, he argues, will have shaped their ‘neural formations’ during their period of development. John Ruskin’s skill as an art critic and his emphasis on the relation of art to its environment is connected with his being driven around England in a specially adapted cart by his father who was a wine merchant: as a result ‘his neural networks will have increasingly predisposed him to reflect on the relation between art and the environment.’ The self-observation that made Ernst Gombrich’s art criticism so thoughtful was triggered by ‘the amount of time he would have spent in London waiting for and traveling on buses and underground trains’ during the Second World War ‘while the city was being destroyed around him,’ which would have reinforced certain connections in his brain. Onians grades art theorists of the past according to the extent to which they anticipate the theories that he and his fellow neuro aestheticians espouse. Aristotle, for example, is praised for seeing the importance of neural plasticity induced by repeated similar experiences. Appollonius of Tyana gets a pat on the back for ‘acknowledging the way in which the imagination, the emotions and the body are all linked’ which is, apparently, a discovery of modern neuroscience. The 19th-century German professor of architecture Adolf Goller is admired because Onians can link Goller’s observations on the effect of new styles of architecture with more recent research on the reinforcement of behaviour in pigeons and rats. Rarely can the past have been condescended to so comprehensively. It is disturbing that these often ludicrously tendentious ideas—the reductio ad absurdum of neuroscientism—are being advanced not by some mad autodidact on a park bench but by a serious academic. [….]—From a short article by Raymond Tallis, “The limitations of a neurological approach to art,” The Lancet, Vol. 372, No. 9632 (July 5, 2008): 19-20. The full article is here.

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I have the temerity (or perhaps it’s impertinence) to suggest that neuroaesthetics (including neuro-art history and neuro-evolutionary aesthetics) is a field of study (a ‘relatively recent sub-discipline of empirical aesthetics’) that should disappear, as it has virtually nothing of significance or value to teach us should we have an abiding interest in or passion for (the) art(s), aesthetics, or the psychology and philosophy of art. This view is supported, in part, by examples from its literature alongside supporting arguments proffered by Raymond Tallis which starkly illustrate the “findings,” crudity, and faddish hype that render neuroaesthetics, in the beginning and end, a “sterile exercise.” Please see, in addition to the above, the material in his chapter, “Defending the Humanities” (the section, ‘Repairing the Canvas: Art on the Brain’), in Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Acumen, 2011): 284-396.

Lest the reader unfamiliar with Tallis’s book be tempted to draw premature inferences from the title as to his general views on either the neurosciences or Darwin’s theory of evolution, I should note that Tallis was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research on clinical neuroscience, describing the knowledge gained and the “panoply of techniques that go under the name of ‘neuroscience’ … [as] some of the greatest intellectual achievements of mankind.” As for Charles Darwin and his scientific accomplishments, he has “no quarrel with Darwinism,” indeed, he writes that Darwin ”is the Newton and Einstein of biology rolled into one,” and while it is “astonishing” that Darwin was able to “arrive[] at his theory on the basis of comparatively little evidence,” “[t]he mass of information [in the natural sciences] that has been gathered since 1859 justifies [Richard] Dawkins’s assertion that Darwin’s theory should now be upgraded to a ‘theorum.’”                                                                                                              

E-mail to Senator Lindsey Graham about Christopher Steele

I sent an e-mail to Senator Graham this morning along with a different version to Senator Grassley

Dear Senator Graham:

As new evidence emerges about the scope of Donald Trump's attempts to obstruct justice and about his lack of competence, you seek to change the subject by making public your request for the Justice Department potentially to prosecute the author of a memorandum containing accusations against Donald Trump - the most serious of which have been verified. You did this without consulting any Democrat on your committee. This appears to be a cynical attempt to change the subject. In its groundless presentation, it creates an appearance of retaliation against a political enemy in violation of the rule of law. You have moved from being a Republican with some integrity to the status of lapdog. You should be ashamed.

Mental illness is, in the first instance, a disturbance of the mind (and thus not the brain)

Apologia:

“It has in recent years become fashionable to conceive of ourselves as the helpless products of our genes; free will and responsibility are commonly thought an illusion, to be displaced by genetic and neural determinism; and the theory of evolution in invoked to explain morality and altruism in terms of natural selection. Our affinity with other hominidae has become a subject of extensive research, often aimed at cutting us down to size. The prowess of the great apes is exaggerated, often in order to narrow the perceived gap between animals and us. This development in the Zeitgeist is sadly understandable, but unwarranted [Lest somebody is tempted to draw the wrong inference: this is not, however, the principal motivation of animal ethicists or those hoping to widen and extend our sense of care and concern for our animal brothers and sisters … or cousins. There need be no necessary connection between the extension of our moral compass to embrace nonhuman animals (which may include highlighting aspects of our animal nature we hold in common: like consciousness, the capacity for suffering, proto- and basic emotions, etc.) and the project of diminishing or failing to distinguish the distinctive features, attributes, and powers of human beings or persons.]. We are, to be sure, hominidae—but the only language using ones. No other creature has eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. We are animals, but the only animals who can aspire to live under the rule of law [or simply, and especially, moral norms], and who can achieve happiness [or eudaimonia, flourishing, or self-fulfillment as defined by philosophers and sages] (as opposed to mere contentment). It is well that we should bear in mind our rational nature and what is distinctive about us—what makes us ‘darkly wise and rudely great,’ ‘a pendulum between smile and tear,’ ‘the glory and the shame of the universe.’ … [In distinguishing and comparing man and beast we must bring to the fore] the applicability and reasons for the applicability of many cognitive and cogitative concepts to human beings, and to all other animals that are neither blessed with, nor cursed by possession of, the powers of reason, thought and understanding.”—P.M.S. Hacker, from the Introduction to The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature (Wiley Blackwell, 2013)

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And now a snippet from Olivia Goldhill’s brilliant essay, “In the Dark: 30 years after Prozac arrived, we still buy the lie that chemical imbalances cause depression,” Quartz, December 29, 2017

“ … [T]he idea of chemical imbalances has remained stubbornly embedded in the public understanding of depression.

Prozac, approved by the US Food and Drug Administration 30 years ago today, on Dec. 29, 1987, marked the first in a wave of widely prescribed antidepressants that built on and capitalized off this theory. No wonder: Taking a drug to tweak the biological chemical imbalances in the brain makes intuitive sense. But depression isn’t caused by a chemical imbalance, we don’t know how Prozac works, and we don’t even know for sure if it’s an effective treatment for the majority of people with depression.

One reason the theory of chemical imbalances won’t die is that it fits in with psychiatry’s attempt, over the past half century, to portray depression as a disease of the brain, instead of an illness of the mind. This narrative, which depicts depression as a biological condition that afflicts the material substance of the body, much like cancer, divorces depression from the self. It also casts aside the social factors that contribute to depression, such as isolation, poverty, or tragic events, as secondary concerns. Non-pharmaceutical treatments, such as therapy and exercise, often play second fiddle to drugs.

In the three decades since Prozac went on the market, antidepressants have propagated, which has further fed into the myths and false narratives we tell about mental illnesses. In that time, these trends have shifted not just our understanding, but our actual experiences of depression.”

The complete essay which is, as we say, spot-on, is here.

Update: I’ve just learned of a recent piece in the Guardian that provides us with a similar, albeit more personal argument that nicely complements Goldhill’s article: “Is everything you think you know about depression wrong?”

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One of the underlying problems (or presuppositions, essential assumptions, animating premises) here is the failure to conceptually—and properly—distinguish the mind from the brain and, correlatively, to understand what it means to be a human animal and/or person (the latter in a metaphysical sense; thus one might advocate for a conception of legal personhood by way of granting a small cluster of legal and thus proper moral recognition to—some class of—nonhuman animals, while denying that these animals are persons in a metaphysical sense, or in the terms of a philosophical anthropology, which is based on a concept of a distinctively human nature). Furthermore, what Raymond Tallis describes as “Neuromania” (an uncritical and philosophically indefensible understanding of the various neurosciences) and “Darwinitis” (e.g., in the form of evolutionary psychology) has contributed to and exacerbated this failure. What follows are titles that help us understand why we should adamantly refuse to conflate the mind with, or reduce it to, the brain, or to believe that the mind simply arises or emerges from the brain (it might rather be understood as a necessary yet not sufficient condition of mind).

• Bennett, M.R. and P.M.S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
• Bennett, Maxwell, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. (I prefer the arguments of Bennett, Hacker, and Robinson over Dennett and Searle.)
• Bilgrami, Akeel. Self-Knowledge and Resentment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
• Descombes, Vincent (Stephen Adam Schwartz, tr.). The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
• Finkelstein, David H. Expression and the Inner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
• Gillett, Grant. Subjectivity and Being Somebody: Human Identity and Neuroethics. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2008.
• Gillett, Grant. The Mind and Its Discontents. New York: Oxford University Press, 2^nd ed., 2009.
• Hacker, P.M.S. Human Nature: The Categorial Framework. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
• Hodgson, David. The Mind Matters: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991
• Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Hutto, Daniel D. The Presence of Mind. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Beyond Physicalism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
• Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson. Minds, Brains, and Law: The Conceptual Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Patterson, Dennis and Michael S. Pardo, eds. Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Smith, Christian. What Is a Person? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999 ed.
• Tallis, Raymond. I Am: An Inquiry into First-Person Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Tallis, Raymond. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham, England: Acumen, 2011.

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Finally, I happen to have three bibliographies that are directly relevant to the topics broached in Goldhill’s piece:

• Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason
• Freudian & Post-Freudian Psychology
• Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice

Images:

(i) Ella Bergmann-Michel (20 October 1896 – 8 August 1971) I don’t know the title or date of this painting (ii) Elizabeth Catlett, “Pensive” (1963)

Donald Trump and the First Amendment

I specialize in the First Amendment, and friends observe that, in these times, I must be awfully busy. The assumption is that the First Amendment is in trouble during these horrible times. For the most part, I think this assumption is misplaced. Of course, it is proper to think that President Trump is an autocrat, has threatened the rule of law, and has little regard for the First Amendment. For the most part, however, I believe this has helped the First Amendment rather than harmed it.

We are witnessing a time in which people are demonstrating and otherwise protesting government actions. We are witnessing a time in which the press is playing a critical role in exposing corruption and misconduct. Taken together the mass of citizens and the press are playing a more vital role than I have seen in my lifetime.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a lot wrong with the First Amendment, particularly its protection of the wealthy’s spending in election campaigns at the expense of democracy, but that preceded the election of Trump. Nonetheless, there is one recurrent and significant violation of the First Amendment in Trump times. A conspicuous example is the recent tax legislation. Obviously, it would be unconstitutional for Congress to tax Democrats in ways that are different from Republicans. But that is what the tax legislation does, albeit in a ham-handed way. By limiting the deductions for state taxes and capping mortgage deductions, the Republicans knowingly and intentionally hit the citizens of blue states harder than red states precisely because they voted for Democrats.

In my view, Donald Trump has a First Amendment right to criticize the press. But he has no right to take actions against the Washington Post or its owner and companion company because he does not like the Post’s reporting or fail to take action because the Mayor of San Juan criticizes the federal response to the crisis there.

Finally, it is unmistakably clear that the Framers intended a President to act on behalf of all the people. It is also unmistakably clear that Trump is not acting on behalf of all the people, but on behalf of his base including his wealthy donors (preferring the latter in contrast to his populist rhetoric). In other words, the majority of voters are not represented by Donald Trump precisely because of how they voted. To some extent, all Presidents do this to a degree, and that is why a court would not find Trump’s governing to be a First Amendment violation. Nonetheless, prior Presidents have exhibited concern for all the people in much of what they have done.  Not so with Donald Trump. Governing to mirror the wishes of a minority (and to a large extent a deplorable minority at that) is the antithesis of the constitutional plan and an approach that crosses a First Amendment line.

Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law

Last week at the blog of the European Journal of International Law, EJIL: Talk!, there was—for yours truly at any rate—an intriguing and inspiring roundtable on the second edition of Professor B.S. Chimni’s International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed., 2017). Below I’ve provided brief excerpts from the posts of the four contributors (I’ve not included my comments to a couple of the posts), although one should read Professor Chimni’s concluding response in full as well by way of a taste of the book and its overarching argument, which might be called, “Toward an Integrated Marxist Approach to International Law.”

Duly inspired and motivated by the roundtable, and having read a bit in the relevant literature (which means I’m far from a mastery of same), I decided to put together a bibliography related to Chimni’s work as well as the theoretical and practical Marxist and scholarly legal orientation (as far as I could ascertain) of the contributors to the roundtable: Umut Özsu, Robert Knox, Akbar Rasulov, and Konstantina Tzouvala. This latest compilation, “Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law: an introductory bibliography,” has garnered a comparatively fair amount of attention for something posted during the holiday season: since posting several days ago, I’ve received 141 views from the following countries: Portugal, Spain, Jordan, Canada, the United Kingdom, Colombia, Austria, Serbia, Israel, Italy, Germany, Poland, Sweden, India, Slovenia, Australia, France, Albania, South Africa, Argentina, Lebanon, the Republic of Korea, Finland, Greece, the United States, Romania, Ukraine, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, and Malaysia. [It’s also posted at ResearchGate, but I’ve not checked the statistics there.]

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“The first edition of B. S. Chimni’s International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches appeared in 1993, only a couple of years after the Soviet Union’s collapse and at a time when critical and feminist approaches to international law had only just begun to make their presence felt. This was a period when only a small handful of prominent international legal theorists self-identified as Marxists—and when few jurists from the “Third World” aside from Georges Abi-Saab and Mohammed Bedjaoui were read consistently in the West. Published in New Delhi and armed with a preface from Richard Falk, International Law and World Order was no ordinary contribution to international legal scholarship. Chimni’s aim was nothing less than the reconstruction of international legal theory, a project he undertook by way of sustained examination of a number of competing perspectives, from that of Hans Morgenthau to that of Grigory Tunkin.

The second edition offers the most detailed and systematic analysis of international law from a Marxist standpoint that is currently available. Enormously ambitious in scale and reach, it updates, revises, and enlarges the first edition, sweeping across a range of substantive topics and discussing a variety of different approaches to international law and international legal theory. While the first edition had its roots in Chimni’s early engagement with the ‘New Haven School’ (hence the title of the book, which alludes to both Falk’s work and the ‘world public order’ models espoused by Myres McDougal, Harold Lasswell, and Michael Reisman), the second edition deals at length with feminist international legal scholarship and the work of David Kennedy and Martti Koskenniemi as part of a broader effort to outline a new Marxist theory of international law, one that integrates insights from socialist feminism and postcolonial studies while absorbing the lessons of the indeterminacy debates of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

Given the breadth of this new edition, there are a number of different means of assessing Chimni’s ‘integrated Marxist approach to international law’ [IMAIL]. Arguably the most useful is by attending to Chimni’s discussion of classic debates about the relationship between what some Marxists (and enemies of Marxism) have characterized as the economic ‘base’ and ideological ‘superstructure.’ Rejecting all interpretations of the ‘base’/’superstructure’ relation premised upon the notion that the economic is strictly determinative of all social relations, Chimni argues that Marx and Engels subscribed to a more nuanced view of economic and extra-economic dynamics, pointing in particular to a key passage in an 1890 letter by Engels. In that letter, which has long been regarded as a key piece of evidence that Marxism need not entail crude economic determinism, Engels writes as follows:

‘According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.’

Chimni refers explicitly to this passage (alongside a number of others from Marx and Engels) at a key juncture in the book, using it to make a number of points, the most fundamental of which is that ‘law is not simply a reflection of the economic structure of society but is also in many instances constitutive of relations of production’ (p. 450). Rather than adhering to a stark, hard-and-fast distinction between the economic ‘base’ and ideological ‘superstructure,’ with the latter functioning purely as a means of mystifying and legitimating the former, Chimni (like others) argues that law is endowed with significant constitutive power, inhering within and contributing directly to the contradictions and transformations of the economic relations that comprise the core of the capitalist mode of production.

It is on the basis of this appreciation of the constitutive power of law that Chimni develops his ‘integrated Marxist approach to international law’ [IMAIL]. Chimni claims that Marx and Engels, committed though they unquestionably were to the view that legal rights are insufficient to secure full human emancipation, recognized the value of legal reform initiatives, particularly for improving the conditions of the working class. While certainly not uncontroversial, this is an interpretation that finds significant support in classical Marxist texts, especially Marx’s famous discussion of the struggle around factory legislation in nineteenth-century Britain in chapter 10 of the first volume of Capital. It is also a view that has been shared, albeit in different ways and to different degrees, by a host of key Marxist thinkers, from Karl Renner, who attempted to demonstrate that legal forms do not always track socio-economic relations, through E. P. Thompson, who wrote hyperbolically of the ‘rule of law’ as an ‘unqualified human good’ to Nicos Poulantzas, who theorized the state as the material ‘condensate’ of ongoing struggles between different classes and class fractions. Chimni relies extensively upon these and other thinkers, arguing that Marx and Engels did not press their critique of formal equality in order to repudiate law, but simply in order to demonstrate the limits of an exclusively rights-based strategy of effecting social change, which could not help but remain within the juridico-political framework of capitalism. [emphasis added]

It is not hard to see how this stance would yield a more generous conception of international law than the kind that is typically found in many other critical (and Marxist) theories.”—Umut Özsu

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      “B.S. Chimni’s work sits at an important intersection of international legal theory. It is most readily identifiable as falling within the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) movement: adopting the perspective of the Global South, and foregrounding the role of imperialism. Simultaneously, with its focus on class, production and global capitalism, his work is explicitly Marxist. This combination harkens back to an older Marxist Third Worldism—exemplified by Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral and Walter Rodney.

For Chimni, his position is not exceptional. He goes so far to say that his “integrated Marxist approach” to international law, is TWAIL [Third World Approaches to International Law]. Whilst this is true to a degree—TWAIL is a broad church—it underplays the degree to which Chimni’s Marxism is distinctive within TWAIL.”—Robert Knox

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“In 1993, Professor B.S. Chimni published what Richard Falk described as the ‘persuasive rehabilitation of Marxist thought as the foundation for a progressive theory of international law.’ Almost twenty-five years later, the second edition of International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches offers us valuable insights not only into the evolution of Chimni’s thought, but also into the evolution of the discipline. Indeed, the structure and the sheer size of the second edition is telling of the flourishing state of heterodox approaches to international law. It is no coincidence that Chimni felt the need to add two new, lengthy chapters on the New Approaches to International Law (NAIL), which he sees as exemplified in the writings of David Kennedy and Martti Koskenniemi, and on Feminist Approaches to International Law (FtAIL), where he focuses primarily on the work of Christine Chinkin and Hilary Charlesworth, and particularly their co-authored, ground-breaking book, The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis. Perhaps more fundamentally, when articulating his own Integrated Marxist Approach to International Law (IMAIL), the author gestures toward the need to integrate class, gender and race for a critical project in international law. In this respect, the book at hand does not simply offer an overview of the field, but it also registers and responds to relevant discussions (see here and here) about race, gender and class that are taking place in leftist movements and parties around the world. This is a refreshing development in its own right, since for the best part of the last twenty years references to civil society in international law revolved around Western(ised) and professionalised NGOs (see here and here).

The book at hand is rich and stimulating, not least because of Chimni’s choice to structure it around a diverse range of theories: from classical realism to the transformations of Koskenniemi’s thought and from the writings of Richard Falk to Gadamer’s theory on interpretation.”—Konstantina Tzouvala

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“By explicit declaration as well as numerous “practical” illustrations, International Law and World Order: A Critique of Contemporary Approaches (ILWO) proves over and over again that far from having nothing more to say about international law other than that it is a cynical cover-up for imperialistic violence, the Marxist tradition can, in fact, make a very complex, nuanced, and rich contribution to the discipline of international legal studies, that it can teach us something valuable not only as moral agents or as ideological actors but also as international lawyers and legal scholars. And the significance of this cannot be underestimated.”—Akbar Rasulov

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For those wanting to further explore a Marxist approach to law in general and international law in particular, please see the Legal Form blog (‘a forum for Marxist analysis of law’), which has an excellent online “collection of documents contain[ing] texts that (a) are widely recognized as ‘canonical’ within the Marxist tradition, (b) grapple with legal questions from a standpoint informed by Marxist methods, (c) scrutinize a specifically Marxist approach to law in the context of a particular debate, and/or (d) examine the historical conditions under which a given account of Marxism and law was initially discussed.”

Some readers may also be interested in the London-based Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers.