Freedom Evolves, I: Extending the Domain of the Self
Jason Kuznicki on Sep 12th 2005 09:58 am |
Some time ago I promised I would write about Daniel C. Dennett’s Freedom Evolves
The following remarkable paragraph comes from page 180:
One tradition would speak… of “selfless” caring, but this creates more problems than it solves: The quest for “true” selflessness is a mission that is guaranteed to fail. It must fail not because we’re no angels (we’re no angels, but that’s not the problem), but because the defining criteria of true selflessness are systematically elusive, as we shall see. It is better to think of the human capacity to rethink one’s summum bonum as the possibility of extending the domain of the self. I can still take my task to be looking out for Number One while including under Number One not just my own living body, but my family, the Chicago Bulls, Oxfam… you name it. Here is one good reason for treating the self this way: Suppose I am an agent in a bargaining situation, or in a Prisoner’s Dilemma, or faced with a coercive offer, or an attempt at extortion. My problem is not resolved, or diminished, or even slightly adjusted, if the “self” I am protecting is other than my proper self, if I am not just trying to save my own skin, so to speak. An extortionist or a benefactor who knows what I care about is in a position to frame the situation to hit me where it matters to me, whatever matters to me.
To be–in the fully human sense–is to value. We are the things that we value, to exactly the degree that we value them, and it does us no good whatsoever to shrink the concept of the self in a way that excludes our values.
Altruism is therefore either incoherent or else it is a direct command to destroy one’s own values in favor of non-values, to destroy the self in favor of the non-self, when the non-self might not be a value at all.
But isn’t it more noble to value something besides your mere self? Ah, this is a loaded question: If you mean that it is more noble to value things beyond your physical desires and pleasures, then yes, absolutely, it is more noble to value something more than mere physical desires and pleasures. It is far more noble to value truth, or beauty, or freedom higher than you might value a case of beer or a really well-done steak.
But if you mean that your own values (that is, the stuff of Dennett’s conception of self) should be given up for the sake of non-values, then absolutely not. Selflessness is not the natural end of valuing truth, or beauty, or freedom; it is the enemy of these things, because the value that we attach to truth, or beauty, or freedom, is itself a part of us.
Thus far, Dennett seems to do brilliantly, refuting altruism as an ethical theory and replacing it with a kind of wide-ranging ethical egoism. Frustratingly, though, he never quite seems content with this formulation. He always seems to expect that as organisms go from mere cause and effect responses, to complex and patterned responses, to an ability to choose among patterned responses by forming pictures of the world encompassing the patterned responses themselves–somewhere at the very end of all of this, these beings will become altruistic, and thereby attain a “true” moral faculty. Noting that the original prime motivation in all biological creatures is to pass on one’s genetic code, and that this motivation may be harnessed in many alternate directions–using sex to reinforce social cohesion, for example–Dennett writes,
[These feelings are] broadly moral, but not purely moral. There is no sign yet of treating the welfare of others as an end in itself, for instance. This is probably as it should be, since we have yet to include anything distinctively human in the models, and one of our fairly comfortable initial intuitions about morality is that although non-human animals may be “good natured,”… they are not yet “the moral animal.”
But one begins to suspect that much of Dennett’s praise of altruism is knowingly misplaced. For example, he sometimes uses the term as a stand-in for “cooperation to mutual advantage,” which properly speaking is not altruism at all. Trade, that greatest of human mutual cooperation strategies, cannot be altruistic by even the most generous uses of the term; traders only act because they expect to draw advantage from their actions; were it otherwise, they would not be traders, but philanthropists (who themselves may or may not be altruistic. For instance, suppose I draw an enormous pleasure from educating the poor. Do I then cease to be an altruist? Must I stop enjoying my philanthropy so that it will become more noble? And why exactly is this a state worth wanting?). Dennett realizes this dilemma, yet he passes over it all too lightly.
Dennett’s default on altruism is disappointing to me, in particular because he is so famous for deflating a parallel bit of mysticism in a closely related area of philosophy: His arguments for compatibilism–the idea that all varieties of free will worth wanting may yet be found in a deterministic universe–rigorously challenges an old idea of free will, arising out of Christianity, namely that some essential part of human beings stands outside the chain of ordinary causes and events, and that that part of us intervenes from time to time in an exercise that we understand as free will.
Dennett finds no such mystical construct necessary to establish free will, or moral responsibility, or human goodness. He ought to do likewise with altruism–a construct that holds, also rather mystically, that one’s highest good must consist in negating the very things that one finds good in the first place. This doctrine too should be abandoned just like the quasi-divine free will that intervenes to change the course of a deterministic universe. Just as all the varieties of free will worth wanting can be found in the clever arrangement of matter, so too all the varieties of goodness worth wanting can be found in concepts of properly enlightened self-interest. If these can encompass the Chicago Bulls and Oxfam, then we have no longer have any need for altruism.
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If your concept of self-interest is so broad as to encompass donating to Oxfam, then I’m not sure it retains much meaning.
In particular, you seem to be conflating the ‘good to’ vs. ‘good for’ distinction. We can value things other than what is good for us. For example, we may value the welfare of other people (even when doing so has no impact whatsoever upon our own welfare). Such other-regarding values are instances of selflessness. They can be contrasted with the selfish values of someone who cares only about their own person. This is a perfectly meaningful (and morally important!) distinction. I don’t think any conceptual clarity – or, for that matter, anything at all – is gained by trying to collapse it.
“For instance, suppose I draw an enormous pleasure from educating the poor. Do I then cease to be an altruist? Must I stop enjoying my philanthropy so that it will become more noble?”
No, on the contrary, part of what it is to be a virtuous person is to have the appropriate affective responses to a situation, i.e. to genuinely enjoy doing good. I defend this view in my old post on inclination vs. duty.
Though if you are acting helpfully solely for the sake of the pleasure it brings you, and with no intrinsic concern for the wellbeing of others, then that is far less admirable — indeed, it is not selfless at all. You would just be using others solely as a means to your own happiness. (Counterfactuals determine your true motive. Would you still value the philanthropy without the pleasure?)
Also, your remarks about “motivation” don’t make sufficiently clear the distinction between biological and psychological “motives”. Selfish genes can build altruistic minds.
Anyway, the core point is that selflessness (or ‘altruism’) is not a matter of “destroy[ing] one’s own values”. Rather, it’s about having the right values. In particular, it involves an intrinsic concern for the welfare of others, valuing them as ends in themselves, rather than being exclusively concerned about your own personal welfare.
P.S. Sorry for the excessive linking, but it allows me to pack several essays’ worth of objections into one brief comment ;)
Richard,
Thank you for a very thought-provoking response. The links are quite welcome, but any coment with more than two links gets sent to the spam moderation queue. Needless to say, I was eager to approve of this comment!
Off the top of my head, the first objection I can think of is that you neglect how values are of necessity a part of the self: If they aren’t a part of the self, then where do they come from? You and I both reject divine command ethics, and I know that I at least regard the dictates of society, or of “history,” or of tradition, as similarly doubtful guides: Often they are correct, but often they are not, and some agent must distinguish between good and bad even here. To me, that agent is the self, the agent that chooses moral and physical values and then incorporates those chosen values into its being.
You write,
I disagree quite strongly. It is possible (and, I think, necessary) to understand an abstract moral value (like the welfare of others) as a component of the self. If this value is not a part of the self, then it has no meaning at all. Using this approach, the question of selfishness versus selflessness makes no sense whatsoever; altruism is incoherent as an ethical position.
Let’s suppose we have a hypothetical selfless person; moreover, he is a Buddha, one who is perfectly indifferent to his own physical desires and passions. He cares only for the peace and enlightenment of others. Let’s further suppose he manages to bring peace and enlightenment to another person.
Uh-oh. Now he’s going to be happy. And why? Because he has achieved one of his values; a part of his self has reached its natural end and fulfillment.
Is it morally important to distinguish between someone who cares only for the desires of the flesh, and someone who cares for abstract questions of justice? Absolutely. Is it morally important to distinguish between someone who steals from others, and someone who returns money that was given to him by mistake? Yes.
But I dispute that this distinction is a sharp one between the selfish and the selfless. In my view, there is a continuum of understandings of the self and of values. On one end, there are the mere sensual pleasures, which seem to be grasped the easiest; on the other, there are the eternal goals like truth, or justice, or the properly examined life. (This is not to say that sensual pleasures are necessarily evil, but only that they should give way when a higher value presents itself.)
The choice of one’s values is a key part of self-fashioning, and to form a truly good self (that is to act in one’s very best self-interest!), it is necessary to find the right balance between the values that focus narrowly upon your own being and those that also benefit the others around you.
All values in some sense aim at self-fulfillment, but not all values are created equal. It is possible to mis-choose ones values and to get nothing but trouble when they are fulfilled. This is one reason why the examined life is a meta-value, a thing that we pursue far above all other values.
On a somewhat different note, you write,
Dennett’s critics often fault him for failing to distinguish betwen biological and psychological motives; his reply is inessence that the one emerged gradually from the other, and that this distinction is indeed a false one. After all, it’s not as though we are anything other than biological–and yet this is not said to our detriment, but on the contrary, it is to the vast credit of biology.
As to whether selfish genes can build altruistic minds, I remain unconvinced. Altruism seems to be the pursuit of one’s own values in your definition, which rescues it from being the pursuit of mere waste or non-value, but which does not rescue it from becoming a species of benevolent selfishness.
[I might also object that while we may care about things other than our well-being (construed grandly, with Oxfam and all), still it does not follow that we should care about those things outside our well-being. Often, yes, it makes sense to expand the horizon of our values. Not always, though. The belief that we must always care more for things outside of our selves that we do not currently care for might in the final analysis be a type of altruism, but it seems a very poor way to live one's life.]
“If [values] aren’t a part of the self, then where do they come from?”
Well, I think a person’s values are their desires, roughly put. So yes, they’re certainly a part of us in that sense. But I think we can identify a meaningful distinction in the content of a desire, as to whether it is self-regarding or other-regarding in nature, and I think that this distinction forms the most fruitful analysis of our intuitive self-interested/selfless distinction. It’s all perfectly meaningful, and doesn’t require any “spooky” metaphysical entities.
Intuitively, our well-being is more restricted than our values generally. I may want starving Africans to get enough food, but if you feed them, you don’t thereby make me any better off, even though something I value has been realized. The way I flesh out this distinction is to suggest that the fulfillment of our other-regarding desires is of value to us (something we consider ‘good’), but it is not necessarily good for us (in the sense of advancing our self-interest). We can value things beyond our own person. I’m not sure whether your account can adequately accomodate this fact.
Aside: Why is it problematic that the Buddha is happy? Of course we feel satisfaction upon knowing that we fulfilled our desires. There’s nothing wrong with that. It doesn’t show that the desire was a self-interested one to begin with. I submit that selflessness simply *is* the having of (and acting upon) other-regarding desires, e.g. a desire that other people be well off.
I’m really annoyed with the Christian tradition for screwing up morality in such a way that people now assume there’s something “unvirtuous” about being happy. It’s absurd. Bloody Puritans! Anyway, I just want to reinforce my previous point that I really couldn’t disagree more with that tradition. I think it is completely wrongheaded.
I should add that I think we actually agree on most of the substantive issues here. Our disagreement seems more about how best to describe and categorize our values and actions. I partly agree with you that ‘altruism’ may be an unhelpful word, just because of the repugnant Puritan connotations. Nevertheless, it’s incredibly unhelpful to say that all values and actions are “selfish” by definition. That’s just a trivial and useless definition, as I explain in more detail here. There’s a genuine distinction to be made between self-regarding and other-regarding desires. So let’s make it clear.
As for whether we *should* have some altruistic values, I refer you to my essay: Why Be Moral?
(Fun discussion though. I don’t mean to come off too polemical here — it was an interesting post, and Dennett is pointing to something significant in that paragraph you excerpt. I just don’t think egoism is the right lesson to take away from it.)
Don’t worry about it… I’d say we had a very good discussion. I had meant to get back to you sometime, but I was still digesting.
To me, it is indeed a meaningful question whether one’s actions give material benefit primarily to oneself or to others. I’m not convinced about how well the question maps onto ethics, though, and it seems at best that there is a continuum between “other-regarding” and “self-regarding” action, with some from each end of the spectrum being supremely virtuous (eg, I resolve to earn an honest living), and some from each being totally vile (eg, I resolve to despise people from other races).
Jason: I’m with Richard on this one. Our desires and values are, well, ours, and so they are a part of us. They are not all desires for our own satisfaction. My values may lead me to throw myself on a hand-grenade to protect the other people in my platoon; in this case, I act on my values, but (unless the grenade is a dud) will not be around to experience any kind of satisfaction.
Moreover, defining altruism not as placing the well-being of others above your own, but as sacrificing something you value for something you don’t, makes altruism either nonexistent or (possibly) equivalent to some forms of weakness of the will (e.g., if I postpone working on an article in order to play freecell, which I don’t value, would that count?) Selfishness, meanwhile, expands so much that either no action or no rational action (depending on your view of weakness of the will) can possibly not be selfish. I don’t think that this is a particularly useful way of using these terms.
fwiw.
[...] This is the third in a series on Daniel C. Dennett’s Freedom Evolves. Here are parts one and two. Each is independent of the others.) [...]
Seems like you’re out to prove Smith’s invisible hand from first principles. But I agree with the others and would say that what we’re talking about is simply an urge. Yes if we indulge our urges we’ll do some societal good. But some of our urges or drives are better than others.
I am struck by the fact most people in general cannot tell the difference between a selfish person and a unselfish person in his rhetoric and character.
There is a frequent poster in my forums and is constantly accused of being Narcissistic. I know for a fact he works for a large group of lawyers (Republicans) and they send him links to daily blogs about the “hottest” “Latest” and “Greatest” and he forwards them to a political forum, we have set aside with a proviso “Enter at your own risk”. Actually, they make for very interesting hemming and hawwing, but are controversial to say the least.
I know he takes no pleasure in a particular post. He only awaits a response and then he forwards a zinger back to the original poster in the offices where he works.
So, he is a Him/Her mimicker and by that definition is selfless. Not any of his ideas are his own.
Selfless people are so misunderstood.