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G.A. Cohen on Community & Equality (Part 2), or, the “hidden hand” of Bernard Mandeville

And now there is among socialist intellectuals an intelligent movement, but also alongside it, an unthinking and fashion-driven rush, in the direction of non-planning or minimally planning market socialist society. Market socialism is socialist because it overcomes the division between capital and labour; there is, in market socialism, no class of capitalists facing workers who own no capital, since workers themselves own the firms. But market socialism is unlike traditionally conceived socialism in that its worker-owned firms confront one another, and consumers, in competitive market-contractual fashion; and market socialism is also, and relatedly, unlike traditionally conceived socialism in that it reduces, even though it does not entirely eliminate, the traditional socialist emphasis on economic equality. Equality is prejudiced because market competition means winners and losers, who end up less well off than the winners do.

I believe that it is good for the political prospects of socialism that market socialism is being brought to the fore as an object of advocacy and policy: these socialist intellectuals, even some of the fashion-driven ones, are performing a useful political service [‘As far as immediate political programmes are concerned, market socialism is probably a good idea.’]. But I also think that market socialism is at best second best, even if it is the best (or more than the best) at which it is now reasonable to aim [hence this is not an instance of ‘the best’ being ‘an enemy of the good’], and that many socialist intellectuals who think otherwise are indulging in Adaptive Preference.

Now, the Adaptive Preference response has some good effects. Like the rational policy of Not Crying Over Spilt Milk, it may prevent fruitless lamentation and wasted effort. But Adaptive Preference also has great destructive potential, since it means losing standards that may be needed to guide criticism of the status quo, and it dissolves the faith to which a future with ampler possibilities may yet be hospitable. If you cannot bear to remember the goodness of the goal that you sought and which is not now attainable, you may fail to pursue it should it come within reach, and you will not try to bring it within reach. When the fox succeeds in convincing himself that the grapes are sour, he does not build the ladder that might enable him to get at them. [Cohen goes on to discuss the reasons why socialists in the past rejected the market, finding two of four such reasons ‘sound:’ (i) it is ‘unjust in its results’ and (ii) ‘mean in its motivational presuppositions.’] – G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge University Press, 1995): 255-265.

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Part 1 is here. While this topic is only in two parts, I hope to have a post on the value (from a socialist vantage point) and several conceptions of community which, as we have seen, Cohen largely (thus not exclusively) discusses in relation to equality and its role as an “anti-market” principle. And if all goes as planned, we’ll have few posts on “equality” as well, beginning with Cohen’s penetrating and wide treatment of same in the context of contemporary political philosophy.

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“I mean here, by ‘community,’ the anti-market [the hyphen is mine, not Cohen’s] principle according to which I serve you not because of what I can get out of doing so but because you need my service. This is anti-market because the market motivates productive contribution not on the basis of commitment to one’s fellow human beings and a desire to serve them while being served by them, but on the basis of impersonal cash award. The immediate motive to productive activity in a market society is typically some mixture of greed and fear [more or less Bernard Mandeville’s ‘private vice:’ capitalist market motivation assumes, with Mandeville, that ‘real virtue would mean the collapse of all the benefits that supervene on private vice,’ for ‘society could be prosperous and based on private vices, or poor and based on private virtues–but not both’], in proportions that vary with the details of a person’s market position and personal character. In greed, other people are seen as threats. These are horrible ways of seeing other people, however much we have become habituated and inured to them, as a result of centuries of capitalist development. [….]

The marketer is willing to serve, but only in order to be served. He does not desire the conjunction (serve-and-be-served) as such, for he would not serve if doing so were not a means to get service [or recompense]. The difference is expressed in the lack of fine tuning that attends non-market motivation. Contrast taking turns in a loose way with respect to who buys the drinks with keeping a record of who has paid what for them. The former procedure is in line with community, the latter with the market.

Now, the history of the twentieth century encourages the thought that the easiest way to generate productivity in a modern society is by nourishing the motives of greed and fear, in a hierarchy of unequal income. That does not make them attractive motives. Who would propose running a society on such motives, and thereby promoting the psychology to which they belong, if they were not known to be effective, did they not have the instrumental value which is the only value they have. In the famous statement in which Adam Smith justified market relations, he pointed out that we place our faith not in the butcher’s generosity but in his self-interest when we rely on him to provision us [‘Mandeville certainly influenced Smith’s economic thought, as Smith picks up the private vice, public benefit paradox in order to claim that one of the original principles in human nature is to barter and trade for private advantage, which then propels commercial society forward resulting in economic advancement and prosperity.’]. Smith thereby propounded a wholly extrinsic justification of market motivation, in face of what he acknowledged to be its unattractive intrinsic character. [….] The genius of the market is that it recruit shabby motives [i.e., private vices] to desirable ends [‘public benefits’], and, in a balanced view, both sides of the proposition must be kept in focus.

Generosity and self-interest exist in everyone.¹ We know how to make an economic system work on the basis of self-interest.² We do not know how to make it work on the basis of generosity. But that does not mean that we should forget generosity: we should still confine the sway of self-interest as much as we can. We do that, for example, when we tax, redistributively, the unequalizing results of market activity. The extent to which we can do that without defeating our aim (of making the badly off better off) varies inversely with the extent to which self-interest has been allowed to triumph in private and public consciousness.³ (To the extent that self-interest has indeed triumphed, heavily progressive taxation drives high earners abroad, or causes them to decide to reduce their labor input, or induces in them a morose attitude which makes their previous input hard or impossible to sustain.)

The market, any market, contradicts the principle which only Marx but his socialist predecessors [e.g., the ‘utopian socialists’] proclaimed for the good of society the principle embodied in the slogan ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ … [T]he unambiguous message of the slogan is that what you get is not a function of what you give, that contribution and benefit are separate matters. [….] [T]he ideal in the primeval socialist slogan constitutes a complete rejection of the logic of the market.

The socialist aspiration was to extend community to the whole of our economic life. We now know that we do not know how to do that, and many think that we now know that it is impossible to do that. But community conquests in certain domains, such as health care and education [and even property!], have sustained viable forms of production and distribution in the past ….”

Notes (mine, not Cohen’s)

1. As Phyllis Vandenberg and Abigail DeHart remark in their IEP entry on Mandeville:

“Mandeville did not claim a paradox of private vice, public virtue. The ‘benefits’ that arose from individually vicious actions were morally compromised due to their being rooted in private self-seeking–one of Mandeville’s starkest challenges to his contemporaries, and a point which makes his fundamental philosophical commitments difficult to interpret. [….] On the one hand, Mandeville wished to imply that common sense views are not as reliant on common sense as they first appear: what looks like virtuous behavior may in fact be disguised selfishness. On the other, those who preach virtue may turn out to be deluded hypocrites: real virtue would mean the collapse of all the benefits that supervene on private vice. [….]

… [T]here was a religious component in Mandeville’s thought. His man was necessarily fallen man: capable only of pleasing himself, the individual human being was a postlapsarian creature, irredeemably selfish and greedy for its own private pleasure, at which it always aimed even if it hid such self-seeking behind more respectable facades (The Fable, Vol. I: 348). Mandeville’s examination showed the ways in which people hid their real thoughts and motives behind a mask in order to fake sociability by not offending the selfish pride of their peers. Ironically, Mandeville’s own honesty led him into trouble: he boldly claimed vice was inevitably the foundation of a thriving society, insofar as all human beings had to act viciously because their status as selfish fallen men ensured that whatever displays they affected, at bottom selfishness always dictated their actions. All social virtues are evolved from self-love, which is at the core irredeemably vicious. Mandeville also challenged conventional moral terminology by taking a term like ‘vice’ and showing that, despite its negative connotations, it was beneficial to society at large.”

2. Cohen appears to have a fairly pejorative understanding of self-interest. In any case, for a discussion of its “rational” properties and comparatively progressive role in the history of Liberal political thought, please see Stephen Holmes’ discussion in Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Hobbesian “self-interest” in particular has, relatedly, not received a fair hearing, as the original and brilliant work of S. A. Lloyd attests. See, in particular, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

3. Cohen here notes “his views on this matter run alongside those of John Stuart Mill, who averred that ‘[e]verybody has selfish and unselfish interests, and a selfish man has cultivated the half of caring for the former, and not caring for the latter.’ And one thing that contributes to the direction in which a person’s habits develop is the ambient social ethos, which is influenced by the stance of political leaders.”

The Origins of Equality in Western Worldviews

“The value of Equality [sic] is, perhaps, a unique contribution of the Jewish religion to the culture of the West. [….] The idea of equality appears in the Jewish Bible [what Christians term the ‘Old Testament’] as the idea that all human beings are created in the image of God. [….] Later, of course, the idea of equality was detached from its specifically religious roots: one effect of this separation, an effect we see right to the present day, is that the idea of equality becomes somewhat mysterious, and for that reason, exposed to scoffing.” — Hilary Putnam in his book, The Many Faces of Realism (Open Court, 1987): 44.

Putnam was wise enough to qualify the proposition in the first sentence with the adverb “perhaps.” Before going further, permit me to share Putnam’s further and somewhat tentative [cf. ‘perhaps,’ ‘vague,’ ‘may,’ ‘seems’] specification of this principle as inherited from the Judaic tradition. He writes, “Perhaps the following two principles, vague as they are, may capture the minimal content of the idea of equality which Western culture took from the Bible seems to have:

(i) There is something about human beings, some aspect of which is of incomparable more significance, with respect to which all human beings are equal, no matter how unequal they may be in talents, achievements, social contributions, etc. [brute luck?].

(ii) Even those who are least talented or whose achievements are the least, or whose contribution is the least, are deserving of respect.”

Putnam adds a third “principle,” which is one implication or conclusion that was much later more or less derived from (i) and (ii): “(iii) Everyone’s happiness or suffering is of equal prima facie moral importance.”

Putnam’s confidence in the claim made in the first paragraph above appears rather stronger when he writes that “Greek ethics, as we know it in Plato and Aristotle, and even in the Hellenistic period, has no notion of universal human equality.”

Comment: Putnam is certainly correct to identify the Judaic contribution to our concept of equality, which can be traced to the fact that human beings were created “in [the] image (and likeness) of God,” and the fact that we are seen as being descendants of Adam and Eve (it’s odd that Eve is often left out of this genealogy). Moreover, we find in the Hebrew Bible the notion of a “universal” covenant that was made with Noah and all of creation (and the Noahide laws that are binding on all of humanity), which is distinguished from the Abrahamic covenant that consecrated the Jews in particular as a holy or “chosen” people. (Daniel Burston terms this a ‘residual tribalism’ that was transcended by the ‘prophetic critique’ of mass illusion or delusion, what we today call ‘false consciousness,’ especially insofar as ‘Israel’s claim to territorial sovereignty became no more than a faint historical recollection.’ Alas, that recollection has been resurrected in our time with a vengeance in the regnant Zionist ideology of Israeli politics.)

But ancient Greek and Hellenistic ethics did, in fact, make a profound and enduring philosophical or intellectual and political contribution to the idea of equality that became one of the tripartite principles of the French Revolution (liberté, égalité, fraternité). As the late Stanley Benn’s entry on “equality, moral and social” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Macmillan, 1967) informs us, “The first generalized egalitarianism was that of Stoics, who stressed the natural equality of all men [used here in an anthropological sense] as rational beings with an equal capacity for virtue.” Ernst Bloch, in Natural Law and Human Dignity (MIT Press, 1986; in German, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1961), likewise reminds us of this contribution, which drew in part from certain Sophist and Cynic thinkers, as they connected their conception of equality to an emergent idea of natural law: physis, in Stoicism, “became the sole criterion of valid nomos”—lex naturae is lex—includes “that which is holy, and even divine,” thus this incipient doctrine of natural law is at once “extremely anthropocentric, yet divinely sublime.” Stoic thought here echoes, according to Bloch, the mythical idea of a golden age in which mankind was ruled by an “unwritten law,” now understood as “natural law,” including the idea of the “innate equality of all people (the abolition of a difference in worth between slaves and masters, barbarians and Greeks)” and the idea of “the unity of members [‘world citizens’ or cosmopolites] of an international community [a cosmopolis] that is the rational empire of love.” Bloch concludes:

“Stoicism is enormously democratic here: its natural law is uniquely philanthropic, its state is a brotherhood. The task of politics is intimately bound to the task of universal humanity, which must be based upon the rational essence of human nature and the rule that results from it. This rule is intrinsically just as much the overcoming of slavish passions as it is extrinsically the overcoming of interests that are egotistical, localized, or national ….”

We bring this brief discussion to a close with a quote from Martha C. Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994), for it shows equal appreciation of the strengths and shortcomings of the Stoic idea of equality, at least insofar as the idea was an ideal to be incarnate in social and political praxis:

“Stoic politics is built, to a great extent, on ideas not of human incompleteness [cf. Christian doctrines and theologies, from the ‘Fall of Man’ and ‘original sin,’ to Anselm’s influential formulation of ‘substitutionary atonement’] but of human dignity and self-government. This emphasis, especially when combined with Stoic universalism about the potential for virtue, puts the Stoics in a position to make a strong contribution to account of human rights and human freedom. Their insistence on the equal humanity of slaves and women is especially striking—even if not combined with any very robust interest in altering the political realities of slaves’ and women’s lives.”

G.A. Cohen on Community & Equality (Part 1)

In the real world we must pay our way before we can start the reconstruction of social life. We must defer to the conditions of economic agency and get them right before we can afford to consider the conditions of moral agency. This is wrong. … [W]e do not need to turn our back on the needs of the economy to effect the changes required for socialism. We need only turn our back on the needs of Capital. And if most political economy fails to see the room for a distinction here, so much the worse for it. There is no reason, only blind habit, for accepting the priority of the conditions of free-market agency over those of moral agency. Of course we must pay our way in the world, but it is our world, and it is for us to decide what counts as paying our way. It is for us, not the bankers and accountants, or the merchants and money lenders, to fix the priorities in favour of Capital. If we so choose we can set the conditions of human life over those of the requirements of Capital.

[….] We can choose to set the agenda, to avoid the economism of the merchants of doom, and to fashion the conditions for individual and social human life to flourish. We do not have to languish before the money pots of Capital. We do not have to accept the agenda which blots out the authority of the good. We can, with nerve and determination, strike a new agenda and cast out the barbarians. If we do so we may well create anew the conditions of civility and virtue within our polity. Nothing is guaranteed. But by whatever name you call it, this Jerusalem, this Albion, this socialism is within our grasp. – Michael Luntley, The Meaning of Socialism (Open Court, 1989): 200-201.

I want to share a bit from G.A. (‘Jerry’) Cohen’s (14 April 1941 – 5 August 2009) essay, “Back to Socialist Basics,” reprinted in part from New Left Review, No. 207 (September-October, 1994), as found in a posthumous collection of pieces (one of three such collections): On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy, Michael Otsuka, ed. (Princeton University Press, 2011). The essay was composed in response to a document circulated in advance of a meeting of Left intellectuals in London in 1993 “under the auspices of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)” (Cohen in fact references two IPPR documents, ‘emanated from the Commission on Social Justice,’ and published by the IPPR in 1993).

I won’t go into the specific reasons (including the surrounding circumstances) for why Cohen understandably felt compelled to respond to the document, although some of those should be transparent in what follows; suffice it to say Cohen does a brilliant job of reminding his interlocutors that back in the day when the Left was “ideologically self-confident,” “when its relationship to its values was forthright rather than furtive,” “the Labour Party affirmed a principle of community and a principle of equality.” Indeed, these two values were distinguishing attributes of the Left, “the only values which the Left affirmed as a matter of principle and which the Center and Right reject[ed] as a matter of principle.” While British party politics does not find its precise equivalent or even rough analogue on our side of the pond, Cohen’s intellectual, moral and political points are, I think, no less germane and urgent to the Left in the U.S.

The values of community and equality, in addition to being “articulated in books and pamphlets,” “were … carried by, and … expressed the sentiments of, a broad movement that no longer exists and that will never be re-created. It will never be created because technological change means that the class base of that movement is gone, forever. Socialist values have lost their mooring in capitalist social structure. Partly because of that, but also partly because of right-wing ideological successes, community and equality have lost the quite extensive ideological hegemony that they once enjoyed. [….]

The struggle for community and equality is perforce more difficult when the calculus of class interests reduces the constituency that would gain from them, in an immediate sense of ‘gain.’ But their remains two reasons for insisting on their authority. The first, which is decisive on its own, is a self-standing moral-cum-intellectual reason. The second, more contingent and debatable, is a reason more related to the identity and survival of the Labour Party, and it is contingent partly because it is not a necessary truth that the Labour Party should continue to exist.

The decisive reason for not abandoning community and equality is that the moral force of those values never depended on the social force supporting that is now disappearing. No one who believed in the values could have said that she believed in them because they expressed the sentiments of a social movement. Anyone who believed in them believed in them because she thought them inherently authoritative, and the withering of the social force that backed them cannot justify ceasing to think them authoritative. And the second reason for not abandoning the values is that, once they are dropped, then there is no reason of principle, as opposed to of history, for Labour not to merge with the Liberal Democrats. [….]

[Cohen proceeds to explain how and why the two IPPR documents ‘bow before the success of pro-market and anti-egalitarian ideology that has helped to precipitate Labour’s present ideological crisis.’] [Furthermore,] failure to secure acceptance of the principles of community and equality is not a reason to modify one’s belief in the principles themselves, even if it is indeed a reason, politics being what it is, not to thrust them forward publicly in unvarnished form. To massage one’s beliefs for the sake of electoral gain can, moreover, be electorally counterproductive. It can be inexpedient to abandon principle for expediency, because it is hard to hide the fact that you are doing so ….” 

[I hope to have Part 2 up in several days.]  

Mueller, Manafort, and Witness Immunity: What's Going On

Newspaper headlines indicate the Mueller wants to grant immunity to five witnesses for the Manafort trial. If you do not get beyond the headlines, this seems overly generous. In fact, no generosity is involved.

Mueller is seeking to compel the testimony of the five witnesses, none of whom need testify if they invoke the Fifth Amendment – unless they are granted immunity. But there are two kinds of immunity. There is transactional immunity which would excuse them from all crimes connected with their testimony, and there is a narrower form of immunity: derivative use immunity. That is the form Mueller has applied for the court  to grant. Under this form of immunity, the witness can be prosecuted for crimes connected to the testimony, and the witness can be prosecuted if the testimony is perjurious, but the testimony (or evidence procured as a result of it) cannot be used against the witness.

The result is that Mueller can force witnesses who do not wish to testify to take the stand and the immunity makes it impossible for them to legally take the Fifth Amendment. Even if the witnesses fully cooperate, they can be prosecuted for any crimes they have committed. Typically, prosecutors will file their evidence before the witness has testified, so that it will be clear that the evidence was not derived from the compelled testimony. Generous, this is not.

I think this use of immunity unfairly diminishes Fifth Amendment rights, but the Supreme Court upheld this kind of tactic in the 1972 case of Kastigar v. United States. One problem for prosecutors in this regime is that unwilling witnesses are frequently not very helpful and sometimes harmful. Mueller may not call any of these witnesses. He has asked that they not be named to protect their reputation if they are not called and to protect them from undue harassment. I am not rooting for Manafort, and I do not blame Mueller for prosecuting in a way that the law permits. But the Fifth Amendment really ought to mean more.  

Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Addiction: An Introductory Bibliography

By Ella Bergmann-Michel 

My latest bibliography, “transdisciplinary perspectives on addiction,” is here. The introduction/abstract:

More than a few titles are not about addiction qua addiction, but deal with subject matter pertaining to the psychological, ethical and cultural questions that surround addiction as self-destructive behavior in the context of variables, causes, and consequences that are, we might say, at once individual or intrapersonal and interpersonal (in an intimate sense) and social. Yet the distinctions serve a purpose, as they are essential in addressing the specific dynamics and dialectics of interaction between these two dimensions or poles so as to better understand the nature of addiction in the contemporary world. 

The following bibliographies contain titles indirectly germane to our topic: (i) Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization; (ii) Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology and Pharmaceutical Reason; (iii) Buddhism and Psychoanalysis; (iv) Emotions; (v) Freudian Psychology; (vi) Health: Law, Ethics & Social Justice; and (vii) Human Nature and Personal Identity.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye! Look, you either support Trump and his politics, or you don’t (in other words, this is about reality, not ‘reality television’)

Trump’s views and policies are, as a preponderance of evidence attest, racist, plain and simple (they’re also nationalist, mercantilist and xenophobic; plutocratic and kleptocratic; in short, neo-fascist, but we’re leaving that aside for the moment), thus it is egregiously implausible and irrational to assert or argue otherwise. Those individuals in this country who refuse to believe this are displaying symptoms of an authoritarian character structure (e.g., ‘tendencies to compliance, to idealization of and identification with authority,’ as well as sadomasochism, all of which is psychologically anchored in if not fueled by states of denial, self-deception, wishful thinking, and so forth), in keeping with their uncritical loyalty to Trump and his political preferences and desires as expressed in a rhetoric further corroded and disfigured by narcissistic megalomania. Trump’s incendiary and grotesque anti-democratic rhetoric, alongside the fact that allies or members of the radical right are part of the White House, has contributed to a social and political climate in which racism, including expressions and acts of hatred as well as rage and violence, find a nation-wide ethos of political and cultural legitimacy, hence headlines like, “self-described Nazis and white supremacists are running as Republicans across the country;” hence statistics citing the growth of white supremacist groups (not identical to those of yesteryear although firmly within the orbit of belief of their racist forebears); hence widespread social media documentation of shameless public acts of callousness, mean-spiritedness and illiberal intolerance.

Any self-described “moderate” or traditional “conservative” among Republicans or “independent” voter who nevertheless continues to support the President, who makes no effort to distance himself or herself from his rhetoric and policies, is morally and politically complicit in the acts of moral wrongdoing traceable in one manner or another back to Trump and his administration: through his rhetoric, personal behavior, or the regressive and reactionary political and economic policies. There are of course different types and degrees of engagement with others who would and in fact do wrong, and our allocation or distribution or assessment of specific responsibility and culpability should reflect those differences. Some individuals and groups are directly engaged in wrongdoing as a result of their political compromises, actual acts of complicity, or simply slavish devotion to The Leader, while others may do wrong indirectly, “through the causal contribution of their action to the wrongdoing of others,” for example, a vote, or refusal to vote, monetary contribution, institutional support, public endorsement, rhetorical encouragement, willful ignorance, deliberate neglect, etc. None of us are “wholly innocent,” as it were, but those actively opposed to the President and his policies have not made the dubious or nefarious political compromises, or engaged in the sundry acts of complicity that together serve to undermine what is left of our democratic values, institutions and processes, that fan the flames of intolerance, hatred, and violence. This is no reason whatsoever for complacency or smugness on the Left, but at least we can be confident that in a dark and apocalyptic-type time and place, we have chosen to fight our battles from a moral high ground, our sights set on what is right and just, leaving Trump and his supporters to act out their aggression and destructiveness from positions firmly entrenched in the (often immoral) muck and mire. This knowledge along should steel us for current and future struggles.

Some thoughts on anger

Some years ago I initiated a series of post “on anger,” only two of which I completed (see here and here), and I’m still not sure when or even if I will get around to completing the series. By way of some rectification, I’ve written the following, which merely skims the surface so to speak, but will have to suffice for now:

Anger is often a vice, and many if not most of us lack self-control when we are angry (e.g., when ‘consumed’ by anger). Spinoza’s conception of anger was a bit different from that of Seneca and the Stoics generally, yet he shared their view that anger is invariably and entirely a negative emotion inherently fraught with danger. And the Buddhist view on anger is virtually identical to that of the Stoics, although they do not have “our” concept of emotion(s) as such, classifying anger as one of the kleśas (‘mental states that cloud the mind and manifest in unwholesome actions’).

But there is another philosophical perspective deserving of consideration, one that goes back to both Plato and Aristotle and to some extent is found in the Hebrew Bible, especially when it comes to God, what we might term “righteous anger,” for example, God’s anger at a person’s sinfulness or the Israelites’ lapses from fidelity to God or the pursuit of justice, these being the more reasonable examples (other instances strike one as irrational and wholly vindictive). In brief, “some form of anger [is] sometimes warranted and often useful.” Plato believed anger (‘as an intrinsic aspect of the spirited part of the tripartite soul’) was capable of being governed by reason. Aristotle’s take was a bit different, for anger can have its reasons: it can be either reasonable or rational to be angry, hence a “good-tempered” man “is angry at the right things and with the right people, as he ought, when he ought, for as long as he ought.” In this case, anger is dictated by reasons, or at least it is in harmony with same. Thus, Aristotle “thought that a man who is angry for the right reason, with the right person, to the right degree, on the right occasion, and in the right manner, is praiseworthy.”

I tend to agree with Aristotle here, although I would add that the “good-tempered” man (or woman) is exceedingly rare, in other words, this dispositional character trait is far from common. A person who does not get angry at Trump’s racist speech and public policies, at his demeaning and degrading rhetoric, at his kleptocratic and plutocratic politics, at his narcissistic megalomania, and so forth and so on, would appear to be cold-hearted, unethical and self-deceiving (perhaps in some state of denial and prone to wishful thinking as well). A person that cannot summon anger in response to the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar is not acting virtuously or ethically. But such anger need not get the better of one, as we say. I think the Aristotelian view is, for most of us, intuitive, and thus at least plausible, although there is much to be learned from both the Buddhists and Stoics about how to deal with our anger when it is likely to trump or eviscerate reason. So I am in agreement with P.M.S. Hacker’s remarkable analysis of anger in The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (John Wiley & Sons, 2018):

“Reason is … needed to apprehend what is offensive, to oneself or others. Indignation or resentment may indeed be appropriate emotional responses to slight and insult, to false accusations or to various forms of offence. That is a proper mark of concern and care. Annoyance and irritation are natural reactions to various forms of disturbance, and natural expressions of frayed nerves. But these natural responses need to be dampened and kept under control lest they feed the flames of fury [or hatred or rage]. Even if anger is warranted, it does not follow that any form or manifestation of anger is warranted. We often have an obligation to control, moderate, or suppress the manifestation of our anger.

Anger is a warranted response to wrong-doing in its manifold forms. It may fuel one’s courage to oppose what is wrong. Nevertheless, to act in anger is never well advised [on this, the Stoics, Buddhists, Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza can all agree]. One may castigate without rage, censure and deplore without fury. The greater one’s wrath, the more likely it is that one’s judgment be led astray, one’s utterances be inappropriate or worse, and one’s action be unjust and harmful. One may rightly seek redress. It is good to endeavor to destroy evil. But reason needs no support from rage or anger in heightened forms in its quest for the right and the good.”

Toward a Psychological & Philosophical Understanding of Anger: A Brief Reading Guide

• Averill, James. Anger and Aggression: An Essay on Emotion (Springer-Verlag, 1982).
• Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron. The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2000).
• Briggs, Jean L. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family (Harvard University Press, 1970).
• (The) Dalai Lama (Geshe Thupten Jinpa, tr.) Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a Buddhist Perspective (Snow Lion Publications, 1997).
• de Silva, Padmasiri. An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology (Rowman & Littlefield, 3^rd ed., 2000).
• de Silva, Padmasiri. Buddhist and Freudian Psychology (Shogam Publications, 4^th ed., 2010).
• Elster, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Fisher, Philip. The Vehement Passions (Princeton University Press, 2002).
• Frijda, Nico H. The Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (John Wiley & Sons, 2018)
• Harris, William V. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 2001).
• Heald, Suzette. Controlling Anger: The Anthropology of Gisu Violence (Ohio University Press, 1998). 
• Kassinove, Howard, ed. Anger Disorders: Definition, Diagnosis, and Treatment (Routledge, 2013 [1995].
• Murphy, Jeffrie G. and Jean Hampton. Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
• Nhât Hanh, Thich. Anger (Riverhead Books, 2001).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (Oxford University Press, 2016).
• Roberts, Robert C. Emotions in the Moral Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• Sarat, Austin and Nasser Hussain, eds. Forgiveness, Mercy, and Clemency (Stanford University Press, 2007).
• Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (Robert A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum, tr.) Anger, Mercy, Revenge (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
• Thurman, Robert A.F. Anger: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).

A Fourth of July inspired reading list for after the holiday

The following books are contemporary works on democratic theory and praxis that have both critical and constructive virtues and often represent radical or at least imaginative approaches to ongoing topics in discussions and debates on democracy. They were chosen in part on this occasion because they also treat—sometimes indirectly or by implication—pressing issues and problems of democratic practice in the United States. I originally wanted to confine the list to ten titles, but found I could not! Of course this small compilation reflects my tastes and values on such matters, so it is in some measure idiosyncratic, but I’m convinced that, objectively or impartially speaking, all of these works are worthy of your consideration if not close reading. You’re of course free to inform me what you think I should have included but did not, keeping in mind that I did not want this list to be very long (i.e., like many of my bibliographies, including the one on democratic theory). I invite you to share this list with others.

• Bilgrami, Akeel. Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Dahl, Robert A. How Democratic is the American Constitution? New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.
• Gilbert, Alan. Democratic Individuality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Goodin, Robert E. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice after the Deliberative Turn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Iyer, Raghavan. Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
• Landemore, Hélène. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
• Phillips, Anne. The Politics of Presence: Issues in Democracy and Group Representation. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995.
• Przeworski, Adam. Capitalism and Social Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
• Rawls, John (Erin Kelly, ed.) Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
• Urbinati, Nadia. Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
• Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
• Young, Iris Marion. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Justice Scalia on “the very nature of a game”

Below is my comment on one of the late Justice Scalia’s remarks in his dissent in PGA TOUR, Inc. v. Martin, 532 U.S. 661 (2001): “But since it is the very nature of a game to have no object except amusement (that is what distinguishes games from productive activity), it is quite impossible to say that any of a game’s arbitrary rules is ‘essential.’”

The essence of games as “amusement” might be true in those instances where “the action begins and ends in itself” (‘it is not the marbles that matter but the game’), where, in the words of Johan Huizinga, “the result of the game is unimportant and a matter of indifference.” But I doubt it’s true that “amusement” is the only object of a game, which would appear to render it the essence of a game. Although such a view is not far from Bernard Suits’ definition of a game as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (a definition that may have some relevance to a conception of art in which work is also play, involving both conventions and constraints that serve, in one sense, as both necessary and unnecessary ‘obstacles’ that, when overcome, enable creativity).

Organized professional sports, as one type of “game,” and all of which, in turn, are more or less a species of play, have several “objects” in view, even if we’re restricting our reference to the class of spectators. We seem to vicariously identify with the various athletic skills of the athletes and, in the case of the World Cup, fans often participate—vicariously or otherwise—in the group identity that takes nationalist form. Perhaps one could place this under amusement in the sense of pleasure or a diversionary interest of some sort, but then how does that account for such things as “football hooliganism” or the range of emotional expressions one sees during these games, or the importance ascribed to more than a few parties in winning, either a particular game, or the World Cup itself (one can make the requisite analogies with the PGA). And of course professional sports are money-making enterprises which makes them one kind of capitalist “productive activity” and thus these types of games are not in the first place distinguishable as games from “productive activity” (moreover, ‘game theory’ and ‘gamesmanship’ in politics remind us, ‘amusement’ does not aptly characterize the ‘very nature of a game’).

And the (‘profane’ or secular) ritual quality of or the ritual elements in sports events, ranging from the fairly serious or dour to the pompous and silly, appear increasingly, in one way or another, to be one of the principal properties of modern, professional sports (which may be amusing to those on the outside-looking-in!). Finally, think of the rhetoric of “war games:” “Ever since words existed for fighting and playing,” writes Huizinga, “man have been want to call war a game.”

That the nature of a game (or games) in our world (in other words, looking at prominent games in our society), at least in professional sports, is not reducible to “amusement,” is crystallized in the conclusion of Huizinga’s class, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1950, first edition in German, 1944): “Now, with the increasing systematization and regimentation of sport, something of the pure-play quality is inevitably lost [this was written before sabermetrics in baseball!]. [….] The spirit of the professional is no longer the true play-spirit; it is lacking in spontaneity and carelessness” (Huizinga notes that this has also affected—‘infected—‘the non-athletic games where calculation is everything, such as chess and some card-games’).

And invoking the distinction (which, as Frederick Schauer reminds us, is not hard and fast) between “constitutive” and “regulative” rules in the case of sports, one might plausibly claim the former are essential while at least some of the latter are not, indeed, at least some of these might be considered “peripheral,” at the very least, they are not essential to the sport in the way its constitutive rules are, hence they are more liable to change: be it through addition, subtraction or elimination, alteration, etc. In brief, there are sports and there are sports; there are games and there are games; and there is play and there is play.

[Thanks to Anthony Gaughan, whose post at The Faculty Lounge, ‘Justice Scalia on Arbitrary Sports Rules,’ first prompted my comment.]