A brief Senecian reflection on the humble kidney stone

A kidney stone is an affliction. It is a source of pain, it makes sleep impossible, it is a misery that makes thought about anything else impossible. And its treatment is ... dramatic. It is just the kind of life situation we humans are subject to. But we might shrug it off when it's all over -- it was just an illness, an incident in life's long and fascinating series of disasters and joys.

It is worth thinking about the situation of the kidney stone a little more deeply. A kidney stone is often also a manifestation of lifelong habits, ways of daily living. Drinking too much coffee, drinking too little water every day -- the slow invisible accumulation of calcium deep within the body, until it has the mass needed to block the flow of the body's fluids and cause insistent pain. This is a disease (sometimes anyway) that stems from habit; it is not mere fate or inexplicable affliction. Live right and you won't have a kidney stone -- or at least you'll be less likely to do so. 

And yet, for many of us -- even knowing the connection between these simple habits and the possibility of pain and suffering in the future -- we fail to adjust our habits. We continue, perhaps reasoning that each day's 24 ounces of water rather than 64 will, by itself, cause no appreciable harm. It is a bodily tragedy of the commons. We are not very rational when it comes to calibrating everyday risks and longterm suffering. And the microscopic condensate deep in the kidney grows over time. I suppose the 8 mm. stone that suddenly causes blockage and pain and needs treatment took several years of silent accretion to become a risk; but it was forming throughout all that time.

I don't know enough about the history of ancient medicine to be sure, but I doubt there was any effective way of addressing a kidney stone in the time of Seneca. Extended suffering and relatively quick necrosis of the kidney were the path forward; and the consolation of philosophy offered by Seneca is familiar. It is the counsel of courage and endurance: 

Nor am I so mad as to crave illness; but if I must suffer illness, I shall desire that I may do nothing which shows lack of restraint, and nothing that is unmanly. The conclusion is, not that hardships are desirable, but that virtue is desirable, which enables us patiently to endure hardships. (Letters from a Stoic, book 67)

There are two bits of philosophy that the fact of kidney stones in a human being suggests. First is the Seneca observation, that malady and misfortune are inevitable in life, and one must be prepared to face them with a degree of equanimity. "Fate will not spare you." But the other bit is also important, and in my mind is more associated with the ideas about rationality over time offered in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. The happy person is the person who has orchestrated his or her life activities, from day to day, in ways that contribute to longterm wellbeing. Happiness means making choices on a daily basis that are guided by virtue and one's fundamental values and goals. Translating this idea into the current context, a rational person will think carefully about his or her daily habits and the contributions they make to wellbeing or illness in the future. Drink more water, and no more akrasia!

Thinking about evil in history (Kekes)

I am currently grappling with how to bring the horrendous events of the twentieth century into the philosophy of history. After doing a lot of reading about recent thinking about the Holocaust (link), it seems clear that we still have failed to fully comprehend the atrocities of the Nazi period, Stalinist rule before and after World War II, and many other episodes of genocide, mass murder, and enslavement in the past century. Only the idea of radical evil seems to remotely capture these historical atrocities. I've added two sections to my article on the philosophy of history in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to address this set of problems; link. But these lines only serve to introduce the subject; much more remains to be done.

The "problem of evil" has a long history of discussion and debate in theology and in philosophy. However, the perspective I take on atrocities is entirely secular and non-religious, so theological debates are not relevant to my analysis. And much philosophical discussion of the topic of evil occurs at a highly abstract and conceptual level, which is likewise not very helpful to my topic. However, a recent book in philosophy that I have found useful is John Kekes' The Roots of Evil (2007).

Kekes' book is interesting for three primary reasons. First, he provides six case studies of evil events in history, for which he provides fairly extensive historical detail. Second, he focuses the problem on the question of "why" the perpetrators did what they did. And third, he attempts to present and refute a handful of existing theories of evil actions, all of which he finds wanting.

Kekes offers a precise working definition of what he means by "evil", a definition that separates it from a religious or theological context. He argues that the idea comes down to three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions:

The evil of an action, therefore, consists in the combination of three components: the malevolent motivation of evildoers; the serious, excessive harm caused by their actions; and the lack of morally acceptable excuse for the actions. (2)

(Parenthetically -- I'm generally unpersuaded by overly precise definitions offered by philosophers. Most interesting concepts don't have "necessary and sufficient conditions" that define and exhaust their meaning. And that seems true in the case of the concept of evil as well. The working definition that I prefer is less precise: “cruelty on a massive scale, including systematic torture, murder, starvation, and enslavement of ordinary, innocent human beings”.)

The cases of atrocity that Kekes presents make for hard reading, because they involve horrific cruelty and human suffering. But, of course, this is why they represent evil. Here are the cases that he presents:

• The Cathar Crusade (1200)
• The Terror conducted by Robespierre during the French Revolution (1792)
• The actions of Franz Stangl, Kommandant of Treblinka
• The Manson family murders of Sharon Tate and others
• The "dirty war" conducted by the Argentinean army, navy, and air force
• The psychopathic violence of convicted murderer John Allen

These cases give Kekes' discussion a specificity and detail that is often lacking in philosophical discussions of evil.

Kekes focuses on the psychological causes of evil-doing -- psychological propensities and motivations:

My aim is to provide a causal explanation of why evildoers do evil. There are excellent recent works giving historical accounts of past explanations, but they are relevant to my aim only insofar as they contribute to the right explanation or illustrate mistakes. The facts I appeal to are psychological propensities familiar to normally intelligent people, not the fruits of research or deep reflection. Common knowledge of them makes it possible for novelists, playwrights, biographers, and historians to write about the character, motivation, and actions of people at places and times other than their own and feel confident about being understood. I have in mind such propensities as desiring a meaningful life, needing to be loved, having conflicting motives, deceiving oneself, wanting to appear other than one is, being ignorant of some of one’s motives, resenting injustice, embellishing the past, fearing the unknown, minding defeat, caring about the opinion of others, and so forth. These propensities are commonplaces of human psychology, but they also have moral significance. (7-8)

He considers a handful of theories of the psychological basis of evil actions, which he finds inadequate. And he considers the theological and quasi-theological theories that have been offered in the past -- e.g. "the world is an inherently good place" -- which he rejects. In place of these traditional theories he offers his own "mixed and multicausal" theory of evil actions:

The explanation of evil has the following general characteristics: it is

• mixed because it involves the combination of internal-active, internal-passive, external-active, and external-passive conditions;
• multicausal because the conditions that jointly cause it vary with individuals, societies, times, and places;
• particular because it involves the detailed consideration of conditions that differ from case to case. (243)

There are two specific points that I find most useful in The Roots of Evil. First, Kekes rejects the relevance of moral relativism in the discussion of evil (as I do):

Slavery, clitoridectomy, blood feuds, assassination, terrorism, mutilating criminals, persecuting religious dissenters, torturing captives, holding innocent people hostage, dooming children to life as prostitutes or castrati are also culturally conditioned practices, but they are evil. The toleration of such evils, the implausible attempts to excuse them, and the reluctance to condemn them endanger civilized life by countenancing the violation of the physical security of their victims. Morally committed people ought to be intolerant of such evils. Those who mouth the catch-phrases of toleration avert their gaze from evil. (214)

The way I would put the point about relativism goes along these lines: In considering terrible events in the past, it is necessary to acknowledge the two perspectives (participant and observer). As became evident in an earlier discussion of the Athenian massacre of the Melians (link), the authors and perpetrators of horrific acts in the past sometimes choose to perform these acts within a moral worldview that they believe justifies their actions. However, we can dispense altogether with the question of moral relativism. It is perfectly reasonable for us in the present to judge that these practices and actions in the past were wrong and unjust (slavery, genocide, deliberate starvation, mutilation, ...), whether or not participants at the time found these practices morally acceptable. Their moral frameworks were defective and corrigible.

And second, Kekes places "decency" and "moral imagination" at the center of what is needed if we are to learn from the historical experience of evil.

It is reasonable to conclude, then, that if moral imagination had enabled evildoers to understand better their victims and their own motives and to realize that they had attractive alternatives to evildoing, then they would have been less likely to become or to continue as evildoers.... Moderately intelligent people have the capacity of moral imagination, but like other modes of imagination, it has to be cultivated. (237)

We can cultivate moral imagination by paying attention to the realities of the experience of other human beings -- through our personal experience, through literature, and through the horrors of the histories of the Cathar Crusade or the Argentinian "dirty war". Human beings are not fixed in their moral capabilities; rather, we can gain compassion and resist the impulses towards participating in evil actions.

The cultivation of moral imagination in this way provides not only personal enrichment but also a moral force that can help make lives better and cope with evil. By increasing self-knowledge, presenting attractive alternatives to evildoing, and providing a basis for the comparison, contrast, and criticism of one’s own way of being and acting, moral imagination helps to avoid the falsifications involved in unintentional evildoing. (238)

This observation about the cultivation of moral imagination points in the direction of a view of how it is possible to learn from history. Learning and confronting the horrific circumstances of the massacres of the Cathars, the torture of Argentine leftists, or the deliberate starvation of Ukrainian peasants, unavoidably brings us to a more vivid understanding of the moral evil of those events: the pain, suffering, and loss that these actions created for human beings much like ourselves. The strongest impression I took away from Hannah Arendt's account of the trial of Eichmann is the utter lack of sympathy, pity, or compassion he showed for the victims of his activities. Atrocities often depend on the total dehumanization of the victims, and compassion makes it more difficult to accomplish that trick.

Issues of ethics in philosophy of history

Most writings in the philosophy of history have focused on issues of epistemology, method, and explanation. But our history as human beings is thoroughly invested with moral significance, and the philosophy of history needs to reflect on the moral issues raised by historical experience. Historians themselves have moral responsibilities; but perhaps more compellingly, all of us have responsibilities as participants in history to honestly confront our own pasts and the historical events that have influenced us, and acknowledge the often morally repugnant circumstances that this honesty will reveal.

The professional responsibilities of historians have occupied much of the discussion of history and ethics within philosophy in the past few years. Here is Brian Fay’s description of the topic in the special issue of History and Theory devoted to these concerns (Fay 2004):

In proposing the topic for this Theme Issue the editors of History and Theory wished to revisit afresh a question that has periodically been urgent to those who think and care about the discipline of history, namely, the relationship between historians, the practice of history, and questions of ethics. Put succinctly: do historians as historians have an ethical responsibility, and if so to whom? Are there ethical commitments that historians have whether they like it or not? Are there ways that historians can either insulate themselves from ethical commitments (insofar as these commitments infect historical research and render it unable to function as it should), or re-conceive these commitments so as to practice history better and to understand the nature of their endeavor more accurately?

The special issue is worth reading as a whole; each article adds something to the question, in what ways does the practice of history create obligations or responsibilities for the historian? Perhaps the most striking and original of the contributions to the History and Theory volume is the contribution by Andrus Pork, "History, Lying, and Moral Responsibility" (link). Pork's perspective is especially interesting because he was Estonian and intimately familiar with Soviet lies. Pork opens his essay in a very striking way:

Scholars' moral responsibility for truth, for the objective content of the results of their investigations, is a somewhat neglected problem in Western English-speaking critical philosophy of history. Nor has this problem found much theoretical attention in Soviet philosophy of history. At the same time the process of reassessing and rewriting Soviet history in the light of glasnost has helped to reveal the magnitude of distortions, lies, and half-truths in Soviet historiography over a number of years. The process of rediscovering what actually happened in the past has made history (at least for the time being) a very fashionable subject in Soviet intellectual life, and has also raised painful moral questions for many older historians who now face tough moral accusations by their colleagues, the general public, and perhaps by their own conscience. (321)

Crucial to Pork's moral framework is his conviction that historians must accept the idea that there are "approximately true representations" of events and circumstances in the past. He acknowledges that an account is never complete, it is always selective, but it may also be false; and it is the historian's job to try to ensure that the statements and descriptions that he or she brings forward are approximately true and are appropriately supported by relevant evidence. Fundamentally, Pork defends a commonsense conception of historical truth: " I think that it is morally wrong to suggest that it is never possible to show objectively that some historical accounts are closer to truth than others" (326). Pork's central concern in this short essay is the topic of lying about the past. Pork distinguishes between "direct lies" (falsification of facts about the past) and "blank pages" (deliberate omission of important details in a historical account), and suggests that the latter are the more insidious for the field of historical representation. He refers, for example, to Soviet historiography about Soviet behavior in the 1930s: "Many other important historical facts that now surface (like the stories about massacres of thousands of people in 1937 and in the following years near Minsk in Byelorussia) were simply absent from history books of that [Stalinist] period." Pork offers a more detailed and extensive example of Stalinist historiography based on the annexation of Estonia to the USSR in 1940. Stalinist histories that refer to this case use a combination of direct lies and "blank pages" to completely misrepresent and obscure the facts of Soviet coercion of Estonia. For example: "The existence of the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty was usually not explicitly denied; rather it was simply not mentioned" (325). 

So it is a moral responsibility of the historian to refrain from omitting salient facts from her account. We might take this point a bit further and argue that historians have a positive obligation to deliberately and actively seek out those aspects of the past for research that are the most morally troublesome—for example, the origins and experience of slavery during the eighteenth century in the American South, or the role of the Gulag in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. We may reasonably fault the historian of the American South in the nineteenth century who confines her investigation to the economics of the cotton sector but ignores slavery, or the historian of the USSR who studies the institutions of engineering research in the 1950s while ignoring the fact of forced labor camps. Historians have an obligation to squarely confront the hard truths of their subject matter. There are many ways to twist the truth, and leaving out crucial parts of the story is as much of a deception as misrepresenting the facts directly. This is what Pork refers to as “blank page” deception. "For example, if the important fact of who started the war is omitted from the historical account, but detailed descriptions of some particular battles are given (as is the case with many Soviet accounts of the 1939-1940 Soviet-Finnish war), then we clearly have a morally blameworthy selection of facts" (328).

The thread of honesty and truthfulness runs through all of these ethical issues. Tony Judt (1992) argues that a people or nation at a point in time have a collective responsibility to face the facts of its own history honestly and without mythology. Judt's points can be distilled into a few key ideas. Knowledge of the past matters in the present; being truthful about the past is a key responsibility for all of us. Standing in the way of honest recognition is the fact that oppressors and tyrants are invariably interested in concealing their culpability, while “innocent citizens” are likewise inclined to minimize their own involvement in the crimes of their governments. The result is "myth-making", according to Judt. The history of the twentieth century has shown itself to be especially prone to myth-making, whether about resistance to Nazi occupation or refusal to collaborate with Soviet-installed regimes in Poland or Czechoslovakia. Judt (1992) argues that a very pervasive process of myth-making and forgetting has been a deep part of the narrative-making in post-war Europe. But, Judt argues, bad myths give rise eventually to bad collective behavior—more conflict, more tyranny, more violence. So the work of honest history is crucial to humanity's ability to achieve a better future. Judt expresses throughout his work a credo of truth-telling about the past: we have a weighty obligation to discover, represent, and understand the circumstances of our past, even when those facts are deeply unpalatable. Myth-making about the past is not only bad history and bad politics, it is morally deficient. (A more extensive treatment of Judt's argument is provided in an earlier post; link.)

Consider the normative and value challenges created by the need for the historian to confront and honestly present the very repugnant features of the past. Anna Wylegala takes on this kind of project in her recent article "Managing the difficult past: Ukrainian collective memory and public debates on history" (link). Here is the abstract of her article:

This article analyzes the status of difficult historic events in Ukrainian collective memory. Difficult elements of collective memory are defined as those which divide society on basic matters, such as identity and national cohesion, and events which are being actively forgotten because of the role of Ukrainians as perpetrators. Three such issues were analyzed: World War II and the role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Holocaust, and the ethnic purge of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943-1945. Utilizing data from quantitative and qualitative studies, the author showcases the significance of these issues for contemporary Ukrainian identity and Ukraine's relations with its neighbors. In particular, the evaluation of World War II and the role of the UPA in Ukrainian history polarizes Ukrainian society to a great degree. At the same time, this element of national history is used to construct a common, anti-Russian identity. The difficulty of relating to the memory of the Holocaust and the ethnic purge in Volhynia is of a different character. These events are problematic for Ukrainian collective memory because they demand a painful settling of accounts with the past. At present, only Ukrainian elites are willing to work on these subjects, and only to a limited degree, while the common consciousness either denies or ignores them altogether.

What does she mean by "difficult"? I would paraphrase her meaning as unsavory, repugnant, and inconsonant with one's identity as a "decent" people. "It is associated with certain events which refuse to simply become part of history and instead trouble contemporaries, demanding attention and provoking strong emotions." These are events that "demand a painful settling of accounts with the past". This is exactly the kind of issue that Tony Judt addresses in "The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe". And Wylegala makes a compelling case for the idea that Ukrainians must come to grips with this past if they are to move forward as a more just society.

It is indeed the case, then, that the search for historical understanding forces us to consider moral issues. These issues have to do with the moral value of fidelity to truth. But more fundamentally, they have to do with issues about collective identity and integrity. We want to know who we are; and that means knowing honestly what we have done, and attempting to understand these moments of collective cruelty and immorality. This means, in turn, that the philosophy of history must confront these issues.

(A recent post offered a more indirect way of articulating related ideas about history, memory, and moral identity (link). This took the form of an allegory about a forgetful but long-lived individual who wants to make sense of earlier episodes in his life. Perhaps if Max von Sydow were still around it could be the basis of a short existentialist film! Here are two scenes from Ingmar Bergman's allegory about life's meaning and the nature of death in Seventh Seal (clip, clip).)

An existential philosophy of technology

Ours is a technological culture, at least in the quarter of the countries in the world that enjoy a high degree of economic affluence. Cell phones, computers, autonomous vehicles, CT scan machines, communications satellites, nuclear power reactors, artificial DNA, artificial intelligence bots, drone swarms, fiber optic data networks -- we live in an environment that depends unavoidably upon complex, scientifically advanced, and mostly reliable artifacts that go well beyond the comprehension of most consumers and citizens. We often do not understand how they work. But more than that, we do not understand how they affect us in our social, personal, and philosophical lives. We are different kinds of persons than those who came before us, it often seems, because of the sea of technological capabilities in which we swim. We think about our lives differently, and we relate to the social world around us differently.

How can we begin investigating the question of how technology affects the conduct of a "good life"? Is there such a thing as an "existential" philosophy of technology -- that is, having to do with the meaning of the lives of human beings in the concrete historical and technological circumstances in which we now find ourselves? This suggests that we need to consider a particularly deep question: in what ways does advanced technology facilitate the good human life, and in what ways does it frustrate and block the good human life? Does advanced technology facilitate and encourage the development of full human beings, and lives that are lived well, or does it interfere with these outcomes?

We are immediately drawn to a familiar philosophical question, What is a good life, lived well? This has been a central question for philosophers since Aristotle and Epicurus, Kant and Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus. But let's try to answer it in a paragraph. Let's postulate that there are a handful of characteristics that are associated with a genuinely valuable human life. These might include the individual's realization of a capacity for self-rule, creativity, compassion for others, reflectiveness, and an ability to grow and develop. This suggests that we start from the conception of a full life of freedom and development offered by Amartya Sen in Development as Freedom and the list of capabilities offered by Martha Nussbaum in Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach -- capacities for life, health, imagination, emotions, practical reason, affiliation with others, and self-respect. And we might say that a "life lived well" is one in which the person has lived with integrity, justice, and compassion in developing and fulfilling his or her fundamental capacities. Finally, we might say that a society that enables the development of each of these capabilities in all its citizens is a good society.

Now look at the other end of the issue -- what are some of the enhancements to human living that are enabled by modern technologies? There are several obvious candidates. One might say that technology facilitates learning and the acquisition of knowledge; technology can facilitate health (by finding cures and preventions of disease; and by enhancing nutrition, shelter, and other necessities of daily life); technology can facilitate human interaction (through the forms of communication and transportation enabled by modern technology); technology can enhance compassion by acquainting us with the vivid life experiences of others. So technology is sometimes life-enhancing and fulfilling of some of our most fundamental needs and capabilities.

How might Dostoevsky, Dos Passos, Baldwin, or Whitman have adjusted their life plans if confronted by our technological culture? We would hope they would not have been overwhelmed in their imagination and passion for discovering the human in the ordinary by an iPhone, a Twitter feed, and a web browser. We would like to suppose that their insights and talents would have survived and flourished, that poetry, philosophy, and literature would still have emerged, and that compassion and commitment would have found its place even in this alternative world.

But the negative side of technology for human wellbeing is also easy to find. We might say that technology encourages excessive materialism; it draws us away from real interactions with other human beings; it promotes a life consisting of a series of entertaining moments rather than meaningful interactions; and it squelches independence, creativity, and moral focus. So the omnipresence of technologies does not ensure that human beings will live well and fully, by the standards of Aristotle, Epicurus, or Montaigne.

In fact, there is a particularly bleak possibility concerning the lives that advanced everyday technology perhaps encourages: our technological culture encourages us to pursue lives that are primarily oriented towards material satisfaction, entertainment, and toys. This sounds a bit like a form of addiction or substance abuse. We might say that the ambient cultural imperatives of acquiring the latest iPhone, the fastest internet streaming connection, or a Tesla are created by the technological culture that we inhabit, and that these motivations are ultimately unworthy of a fully developed human life. Lucretius, Socrates, and Montaigne would scoff.

It is clear that technology has the power to distort our motives, goals and values. But perhaps with equal justice one might say that this is a life world created by capitalism rather than technology -- a culture that encourages and elicits personal motivations that are "consumerist" and ultimately empty of real human value, a culture that depersonalizes social ties and trivializes human relationships based on trust, loyalty, love, or compassion. This is indeed the critique offered by theorists of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School -- that capitalism depends upon a life world of crass materialism and impoverished social and personal values. And we can say with some exactness how capitalism distorts humanity and culture in its own image: through the machinations of advertising, strategic corporate communications, and the honoring of acquisitiveness and material wealth (link). It is good business to create an environment where people want more and more of the gadgets that technological capitalism can provide.

So what is a solution for people who worry about the shallowness and vapidity of this kind of technological materialism? We might say that an antidote to excessive materialism and technology fetishism is a fairly simple maxim that each person can strive to embrace: aim to identify and pursue the things that genuinely matter in life, not the glittering objects of short-term entertainment and satisfaction. Be temperate, reflective, and purposive in one's life pursuits. Decide what values are of the greatest importance, and make use of technology to further those values, rather than as an end in itself. Let technology be a tool for creativity and commitment, not an end in itself. Be selective and deliberate in one's use of technology, rather than being the hapless consumer of the latest and shiniest. Create a life that matters.

Entertainment as a valuable thing

Quite a bit of the GDP of the United States goes into a broad category we can call "entertainment" -- television, video streaming services, books and newspapers, concerts, theatre, sports events (live and broadcast), and video games. The entertainment industry amounts to $717 billion in the US economy (link), and professional athletics adds another $73.5 billion (link). This category approaches a trillion dollars, and we haven't even taken account of the video gaming sector. US GDP is about $19.4 trillion; so entertainment in all sectors may amount to 5% or more of the total US economy.

It is interesting to take a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey (link) to get an empirical idea of how Americans of varying ages spend their time each day. Table 8A breaks down "time spent in primary activities for the civilian population 18 years and over". Out of a 24-hour day, personal care activities and sleeping amount to 18 hours per day; organizational, civic, and religious activities amount to .27 hours per day; and leisure and sports activities amount to 4.12 hours per day. Work takes 3.94 hours per day (on average; 4.96 hours for men and 3.07 hours for women). (These are averages over a population, which explains the relatively low number of hours spent working.)

Both these observations demonstrate that millions of people value entertainment: they pay for it and the spend their time engaging with it. So entertainment is plainly valued in the lives of most people. But we can still ask a more fundamental question: what is the good of entertainment? Should society be organized in such a way as to facilitate the ability of people to find and consume sources of entertainment? Is more entertainment better than less?

There are a few simple answers to the question.

First, people often want to be entertained and choose to be entertained, and it is a basic principle of liberalism that it is good for people to exercise their liberty by doing what they want to do. (Liberty principle)

Second, people take pleasure in being entertained, pleasure is an important component of happiness, and happiness is a good thing. Therefore entertainment is a good thing, and people should be in a position to be entertained. (Happiness principle)

Third, sometimes "entertainment" is developmental and fulfilling of human capabilities for imagination, empathy, and ethical reasoning. By watching Citizen Kane or reading The Fire Next Time, people gain new insights into their own lives and the lives of others; they extend their capacity for empathy; and they enrichen their ability to think about complex social and moral topics. Martha Nussbaum makes this point in her discussions of the value of literature in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life and Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Nussbaum's views are discussed by Heather McRobie in OpenDemocracy (link). These outcomes too seem intrinsically valuable by the individuals who experience them. This view of the potential value of "entertainment" converges with the capabilities approach to human wellbeing. (Human development principle)

But, of course, not all forms of entertainment are uplifting in an intellectual or moral sense. Six seasons of The Sopranos probably didn't result in much intellectual or moral uplift for the millions of viewers who enjoyed the series, and an earlier generation's interest in Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Car 54 was probably equally unrewarded. So what about "pure entertainment", without moral, intellectual, or aesthetic redeeming value? What about Tetris, Solitaire, Grand Theft Auto, or the Madden NFL franchise? What about Downton Abbey?

J. S. Mill, far-sighted media critic that he was, distinguished between higher and lower pleasures, and argued that the former are inherently preferable to any agent who has experienced both over the latter. His reasoning is based on his view that human beings have higher faculties and lower faculties; the higher pleasures exercise the higher faculties; and anyone who has experienced both will prefer the higher pleasures. Here are a few lines from Utilitarianism.

Now, it is an unquestionable fact that the way of life that employs the higher faculties is strongly preferred to the way of life that caters only to the lower ones· by people who are equally acquainted with both and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying both. Few human creatures would agree to be changed into any of the lower animals in return for a promise of the fullest allowance of animal pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no educated person would prefer to be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would rather be selfish and base, even if they were convinced that the fool, the dunce or the rascal is better satisfied with his life than they are with theirs. . . . If they ever think they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme that to escape from it they would exchange their situation for almost any other, however undesirable they may think the other to be. Someone with higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is probably capable of more acute suffering, and is certainly vulnerable to suffering at more points, than someone of an inferior type; but in spite of these drawbacks he can’t ever really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. .... It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides. (14)

This position is based on Mill's idea that people who have experienced both kinds of pleasures will choose the higher (demanding, challenging, aesthetically and morally complex) pleasures over the lower pleasures. But this view seems to be largely refuted by the current entertainment industry; the audience for bad television certainly includes a proportionate share of Mill's counterparts today (college professors, literary critics, journalists, and pundits). Plainly, there are many millions of people who have indeed experienced both higher and lower pleasures, and continue to enjoy both.

So Mill did not have a very good psychological theory of "entertainment", even if he had a good aspirational philosophy of living. I doubt that Netflix would want JS Mill to serve as programming chief for its upcoming seasons.

There is probably a nugget of truth in the idea that the challenge and complexity of an activity is a dimension of its continuing appeal to the individuals who engage in the activity. Perhaps Go masters and chess masters take greater satisfaction in their games than do checkers players and aficionados of tic-tac-toe, and people who love literature may take more satisfaction from a novel by Boris Pasternak than Nora Roberts because of the relative complexity, unpredictability, and nuance of Pasternak's love story. But it is clear that pleasure in entertainment derives from more than this: humor, suspense, nostalgia, complicated plots, character development, amazing special effects, depictions of human emotions, violence, plots that speak to one's own experience, and so on indefinitely. Why these elements produce pleasure, however, is still unclear.

Perhaps we need to go back to ancient Greek philosophers in our quest for the sources of pleasure in "entertainment". Is Aristotle right that we enjoy tragedy because of the catharsis it provides, and comedy, because of the physical pleasure we take in laughter? Does Epicurus have anything to tell us about why we enjoy watching Breaking Bad and Blazing Saddles? Can the Stoics shed light on why Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) and Heaven's Gate (1980) were so very unpopular with the movie audience? Does Plato have anything to say about whether Waiting for Godot is really entertaining, and whether people can take pleasure in viewing it?

Ethical principles for assessing new technologies

Technologies and technology systems have deep and pervasive effects on the human beings who live within their reach. How do normative principles and principles of social and political justice apply to technology? Is there such a thing as "the ethics of technology"?

There is a reasonably active literature on questions that sound a lot like these. (See, for example, the contributions included in Winston and Edelbach, eds., Society, Ethics, and Technology.) But all too often the focus narrows too quickly to ethical issues raised by a particular example of contemporary technology -- genetic engineering, human cloning, encryption, surveillance, and privacy, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and so forth. These are important questions; but it is also possible to ask more general questions as well, about the normative space within which technology, private activity, government action, and the public live together. What principles allow us to judge the overall justice, fairness, and legitimacy of a given technology or technology system?

There is an overriding fact about technology that needs to be considered in every discussion of the ethics of technology. It is a basic principle of liberal democracy that individual freedom and liberty should be respected. Individuals should have the right to act and create as they choose, subject to something like Mill's harm principle. The harm principle holds that liberty should be restricted only when the activity in question imposes harm on other individuals. Applied to the topic of technology innovation, we can derive a strong principle of "liberty of innovation and creation" -- individuals (and their organizations, such as business firms) should have a presumptive right to create new technologies constrained only by something like the harm principle.

Often we want to go beyond this basic principle of liberty to ask what the good and bad of technology might be. Why is technological innovation a good thing, all things considered? And what considerations should we keep in mind as we consider legitimate regulations or limitations on technology?

Here we can consider three large principles that have emerged in other areas of social and political ethics as a basis for judging the legitimacy and fairness of a given set of social arrangements:

 A. Technologies should contribute to some form of human good, some activity or outcome that is desired by human beings -- health, education, enjoyment, pleasure, sociality, friendship, fitness, spirituality, ...
B. Technologies ought to be consistent with the fullest development of the human capabilities and freedoms of the individuals whom they affect. [Or stronger: “promote the fullest development …”]
C. Technologies ought to have population effects that are fair, equal, and just.

The first principle attempts to address the question, "What is technology good for? What is the substantive moral good that is served by technology development?" The basic idea is that human beings have wants and needs, and contributing to their ability to fulfill these wants is itself a good thing (if in so doing other greater harms are not created as well). This principle captures what is right about utilitarianism and hedonism -- the inherent value of human happiness and satisfaction. This means that entertainment and enjoyment are legitimate goals of technology development.

The second principle links technology to the "highest good" of human wellbeing -- the full development of human capabilities and freedoms. As is evident, the principle offered here derives from Amartya Sen's theory of capabilities and functionings, expressed in Development as Freedom. This principle recalls Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures:

Mill always insisted that the ultimate test of his own doctrine was utility, but for him the idea of the greatest happiness of the greatest number included qualitative judgements about different levels or kinds of human happiness. Pushpin was not as good as poetry; only Pushkin was.... Cultivation of one's own individuality should be the goal of human existence. (J.S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought : 454)

The third principle addresses the question of fairness and equity. Thinking about justice has evolved a great deal in the past fifty years, and one thing that emerges clearly is the intimate connection between injustice and invidious discrimination -- even if unintended. Social institutions that arbitrarily assign significantly different opportunities and life outcomes to individuals based on characteristics such as race, gender, income, neighborhood, or religion are unfair and unjust, and need to be reformed. This approach derives as much from current discussions of racial health disparities as it does from philosophical theories along the lines of Rawls and Sen.

On these principles a given technology can be criticized, first, if it has no positive contribution to make for the things that make people happy or satisfied; second, if it has the effect of stunting the development of human capabilities and freedoms; and third, if it has discriminatory effects on quality of life across the population it effects.

One important puzzle facing the ethics of technology is a question about the intended audience of such a discussion. We are compelled to ask, to whom is a philosophical discussion of the normative principles that ought to govern our thinking about technology aimed? Whose choices, actions, and norms are we attempting to influence? There appear to be several possible answers to this question.

Corporate ethics. Entrepreneurs and corporate boards and executives have an ethical responsibility to consider the impact of the technologies that they introduce into the market. If we believe that codes of corporate ethics have any real effect on corporate decision-making, then we need to have a basis in normative philosophy for a relevant set of principles that should guide business decision-making about the creation and implementation of new technologies by businesses. A current example is the use of facial recognition for the purpose of marketing or store security; does a company have a moral obligation to consider the negative social effects it may be promoting by adopting such a technology?

Governments and regulators. Government has an overriding responsibility of preserving and enhancing the public good and minimizing harmful effects of private activities. This is the fundamental justification for government regulation of industry. Since various technologies have the potential of creating harms for some segments of the public, it is legitimate for government to enact regulatory systems to prevent reckless or unreasonable levels of risk. Government also has a responsibility for ensuring a fair and just environment for all citizens, and enacting policies that serve to eliminate inequalities based on discriminatory social institutions. So here too governments have a role in regulating technologies, and a careful study of the normative principles that should govern our thinking about the fairness and justice of technologies is relevant to this process of government decision-making as well.

Public interest advocacy groups. One way in which important social issues can be debated and sometimes resolved is through the advocacy of well-organized advocacy groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Sierra Club, or Greenpeace. Organizations like these are in a position to argue in favor of or against a variety of social changes, and raising concerns about specific kinds of technologies certainly falls within this scope. There are only a small number of grounds for this kind of advocacy: the innovation will harm the public, the innovation will create unacceptable hidden costs, or the innovation raises unacceptable risks of unjust treatment of various groups. In order to make the latter kind of argument, the advocacy group needs to be able to articulate a clear and justified argument for its position about "unjust treatment".

The public. Citizens themselves have an interest in being able to make normative judgments about new technologies as they arise. "This technology looks as though it will improve life for everyone and should be favored; that technology looks as though it will create invidious and discriminatory sets of winners and losers and should be carefully regulated." But for citizens to have a basis for making judgments like these, they need to have a normative framework within which to think and reason about the social role of technology. Public discussion of the ethical principles underlying the legitimacy and justice of technology innovations will deepen and refine these normative frameworks.

Considered as proposed here, the topic of "ethics of technology" is part of a broad theory of social and political philosophy more generally. It invokes some of our best reasoning about what constitutes the human good (fulfillment of capabilities and freedoms) and about what constitutes a fair social system (elimination of invidious discrimination in the effects of social institutions on segments of population). Only when we have settled these foundational questions are we able to turn to the more specific issues often discussed under the rubric of the ethics of technology.

Kojève on freedom

An earlier post highlighted Alexandre Kojève's presentation of Hegel's rich conception of labor, freedom, and human self-creation. This account is contained in Kojève's analysis of the Master-Slave section of Hegel's Phenomenology in Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the "Phenomenology of Spirit"; link.

Here are the key passages from Hegel's Phenomenology on which Kojève's account depends, from Terry Pinkard's translation in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit:

Hegel on the Master-Slave relation

195. However, the feeling of absolute power as such, and in the particularities of service, is only dissolution in itself, and, although the fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom, in that fear consciousness is what it is that is for it itself , but it is not being-for-itself. However, through work, this servile consciousness comes round to itself. In the moment corresponding to desire in the master’s consciousness, the aspect of the non-essential relation to the thing seemed to fall to the lot of the servant, as the thing there retained its self-sufficiency. Desire has reserved to itself the pure negating of the object, and, as a result, it has reserved to itself that unmixed feeling for its own self. However, for that reason, this satisfaction is itself only a vanishing, for it lacks the objective aspect, or stable existence. In contrast, work is desire held in check, it is vanishing staved off , or: work cultivates and educates. The negative relation to the object becomes the form of the object; it becomes something that endures because it is just for the laborer himself that the object has self-sufficiency. This negative mediating middle, this formative doing, is at the same time singularity, or the pure being-for-itself of consciousness, which in the work external to it now enters into the element of lasting. Thus, by those means, the working consciousness comes to an intuition of self-sufficient being as its own self.

196. However, what the formative activity means is not only that the serving consciousness as pure being-for-itself becomes, to itself, an exist- ing being within that formative activity. It also has the negative mean- ing of the first moment, that of fear. For in forming the thing, his own negativity, or his being-for-itself, only as a result becomes an object to himself in that he sublates the opposed existing form. However, this objective negative is precisely the alien essence before which he trembled, but now he destroys this alien negative and posits himself as such a negative within the element of continuance. He thereby becomes for himself an existing- being-for-itself . Being-for-itself in the master is to the servant an other, or it is only for him. In fear, being-for-itself is in its own self . In culturally formative activity, being-for-itself becomes for him his own being- for-itself, and he attains the consciousness that he himself is in and for himself. As a result, the form, by being posited as external, becomes to him not something other than himself, for his pure being-for-itself is that very form, which to him therein becomes the truth. Therefore, through this retrieval, he comes to acquire through himself a mind of his own, and he does this precisely in the work in which there had seemed to be only some outsider’s mind. – For this reflection, the two moments of fear and service, as well as the moments of culturally formative activity are both necessary, and both are necessary in a universal way. Without the discipline of service and obedience, fear is mired in formality and does not diffuse itself over the conscious actuality of existence. Without culturally formative activity, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness will not become for it [consciousness] itself. If consciousness engages in formative activity without that first, absolute fear, then it has a mind of its own which is only vanity, for its form, or its negativity, is not negativity in itself , and his formative activity thus cannot to himself give him the consciousness of himself as consciousness of the essence. If he has not been tried and tested by absolute fear but only by a few anxieties, then the negative essence will have remained an externality to himself, and his substance will not have been infected all the way through by it. While not each and every one of the ways in which his natural consciousness was brought to fulfillment was shaken to the core, he is still attached in himself to determinate being. His having a mind of his own is then only stubbornness, a freedom that remains bogged down within the bounds of servility. To the servile consciousness, pure form can as little become the essence as can the pure form – when it is taken as extending itself beyond the singular individual – be a universal culturally formative activity, an absolute concept. Rather, the form is a skill which, while it has dominance over some things, has dominance over neither the universal power nor the entire objective essence. (Hegel, Phenomenology, 115-116)

Kojève's interpretation of Hegel

Here are the primary passages that represent the heart of Kojève's interpretation of this section.

Work, on the other hand, is repressed Desire, an arrested passing phase; or, in other words, it forms-and-educates. Work transforms the World and civilizes, educates, Man, the man who wants to work -- or who must work -- must repress the instinct that drives him "to consume" "immediately" the "raw" object. And the Slave can work for the Master -- that is, for another than himself -- only by repressing his own desires. Hence he transcends himself by working -- or perhaps better, he educates himself, he "cultivates" and "sublimates" his instincts by repressing them. On the other hand, he does not destroy the thing as it is given. He postpones the destruction of the thing by first transforming it through work; he prepares it for consumption -- that is to say, he "forms" it. In his work, he transforms things and transforms himself at the same time: he forms things and the World by transforming himself, by educating himself; and he educates himself, he forms himself, by transforming things and the World, Thus, the negative-or-negating relation to the object becomes a form of this object and gains permanence, precisely because, for the worker, the object has autonomy.... The product of work is the worker's production. It is the realization of his project, of his idea; hence, it is he that is realized in and by this product, and consequently he contemplates himself when he contemplates it.... Therefore, it is by work, and only by work, that man realizes himself objectively as man. Only after producing an artificial object is man himself really and objectively more than and different from a natural being; and only in this real and objective product does he become truly conscious of his subjective human reality. Kojève 24-25

The Master can never detach himself from the World in which he lives, and if this World perishes, he perishes with it. Only the Slave can transcend the given world (which is subjugated by the Master) and not perish. Only the Slave can transform the World that forms him and fixes him in slavery and create a World that he has formed in which he will be free. And the Slave achieves this only through forced and terrified work carried out in the Master's service. To be sure, this work by itself does not free him. But in transforming the World by this work, the Slave transforms himself too, and thus creates the new objective conditions that permit him to take up once more the liberating Fight for recognition that he refused in the beginning for fear of death. And thus in the long run, all slavish work realizes not the Master's will, but the will -- at first unconscious -- of the Slave, who -- finally --succeeds where the Master -- necessarily -- fails. Therefore, it is indeed originally dependent, serving, and slavish Consciousness that in the end realizes and reveals the ideal of autonomous Self-Consciousness and is thus its "truth." Kojève 29-30

However, to understand the edifice of universal history and the process of its construction, one must know the materials that were used to construct it. These materials are men. To know what History is, one must therefore know what Man who realizes it is. Most certainly, man is something quite different from a brick. In the first place, if we want to compare universal history to the construction of an edifice, we must point out that men are not only the bricks that are used in the construction; they are also the masons who build it and the architects who conceive the plan for it, a plan, moreover, which is progressively elaborated during the construction itself. Furthermore, even as "brick," man is essentially different from a material brick: even the human brick changes during the construction, just as the human mason and the human architect do. Nevertheless, there is something in Man, in every man, that makes him suited to participate--passively or actively--in the realization of universal history. At the beginning of this History, which ends finally in absolute Knowledge, there are, so to speak, the necessary and sufficient conditions. And Hegel studies these conditions in the first four chapters of the Phenomenology.

Finally, Man is not only the material, the builder, and the architect of the historical edifice.  He is also the one for whom this edifice is constructed: he lives in it, he sees and understands it, he describes and criticizes it. There is a whole category of men who do not actively participate in the historical construction and who are content to live in the constructed edifice and to talk about it. These men, who live somehow "above the battle," who are content to talk about things that they do not create by their Action, are Intellectuals who produce intellectuals' ideologies, which they take for philosophy (and pass off as such). Hegel describes and criticizes these ideologies in Chapter V. (32-33)

The central ideas here are --

• Work transforms and educates the worker.
• Work requires the delay of consumption.
• Work transforms the world and the environment. 
• The self-creation of the human being through work is essential to his or her reality as a human being.

• By merely directing and commanding work, the master fails to engage in self-creation.
• The master cannot be truly free.
• Human beings create history through their creative labor.
• Human beings create and transform themselves through labor.

• History is human-centered. History is "subject" as well as "object".
• Those who merely think and reflect upon history are sterile and contribute nothing to the course of history.

These comments add up to a substantive theory of the human being in the world -- one that emphasizes creativity, transformation, and self-creation. It stands in stark contrast to the liberal utilitarian view of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham of human nature as consumer and rational optimizer of a given set of choices; instead, on Kojève’s (and Hegel's) view, the human being becomes fully human through creative engagement with the natural world, through labor.

It is interesting to realize that Kojève was a philosopher, but he was not primarily an academic professor. Instead, he was a high-placed civil servant and statesman in the French state, a man whose thinking and actions were intended to create a new path for France. He is credited with being one of the early theorists of the European Union.

Kojève's account of labor and freedom is, of course, influenced by his own immersion in the writings of the early Marx; so the philosophy of labor, freedom, and self-creation articulated here is neither pure Hegel nor pure Marx. We might say that it is pure Kojève.

Jeff Love's biography of Kojève is also of interest, emphasizing the Russian roots of Kojève's thought; The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève. Love confirms the importance of the richer theory of human freedom and self-realization that is offered in Kojève’s account, and notes a parallel with themes in nineteenth-century Russian literature.

Kojève’s critique of self-interest merits renewal in a day when consumer capitalism and the reign of self-interest are hardly in question, either implicitly or explicitly, and where the key precincts of critique have been hobbled by their own reliance on elements of the modern conception of the human being as the free historical individual that have not been sufficiently clarified. Kojève’s thought is thus anodyne: far from being “philosophically” mad or the learned jocularity of a jaded, extravagant genius, it expresses a probing inquiry into the nature of human being that returns us to questions that reach down to the roots of the free historical individual. Moreover, it extends a critique of self-interest deeply rooted in Russian thought, and Kojève does so, no doubt with trenchant irony, in the very capital of the modern bourgeoisie decried violently by Dostoevsky in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.

(Here is an interesting reflection on Kojève as philosopher by Stanley Rosen; link.)

Ethical disasters

Many examples of technical disasters have been provided in Understanding Society, along with efforts to understand the systemic dysfunctions that contributed to their occurrence. Frequently those dysfunctions fall within the business organizations that manage large, complex technology systems, and often enough those dysfunctions derive from the imperatives of profit-maximization and cost avoidance. Andrew Hopkins' account of the business decisions contributing to the explosion of the ESSO gas plant in Longford, Australia illustrates this dynamic in Lessons from Longford: The ESSO Gas Plant Explosion. The withdrawal of engineering experts from the plant to a remote corporate headquarters was a cost-saving move that, according to Hopkins, contributed to the eventual disaster.

A topic we have not addressed in detail is the occurrence of ethical disasters -- terrible outcomes that are the result of deliberate choices by decision-makers within an organization that are, upon inspection, clearly and profoundly unethical and immoral. The collapse of Enron is probably one such disaster; the Bernie Madoff scandal is another. But it seems increasingly likely that Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family's business leadership of the corporation represent another major example. Recent reporting by ProPublica, the Atlantic, and the New York Times relies on documents collected in the course of litigation against Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family in Massachusetts and New York. (Here are the unredacted court documents on which much of this reporting depends; link.) These documents make it hard to avoid the ethical conclusion that the Sackler family actively participated in business strategies for their company Purdue Pharma that treated the OxyContin addiction epidemic as an expanding business opportunity. And this seems to be a huge ethical breach.

This set of issues is currently unresolved by the courts, so it rests with the legal system to resolve the facts and the issues of legal culpability. But as citizens we all have the ability to read the documents and make our own decisions about the ethical status of decisions and strategies made by the family and the corporation over the course of this disaster. The point here is simply to ask these key questions: how should we think about the ethical status of decisions and strategies of owners and managers that lead to terrible harms, and harms that could reasonably have been anticipated? How should a company or a set of owners respond to a catastrophe in which several hundred thousand people have died, and which was facilitated in part by deliberate marketing efforts by the company and the owners? How should the company have adjusted its business when it became apparent that its product was creating addiction and widespread death?

First, here are a few details from the current reporting about the case. Here are a few paragraphs from the ProPublica story (January 30, 2019):

Not content with billions of dollars in profits from the potent painkiller OxyContin, its maker explored expanding into an “attractive market” fueled by the drug’s popularity — treatment of opioid addiction, according to previously secret passages in a court document filed by the state of Massachusetts. 

In internal correspondence beginning in 2014, Purdue Pharma executives discussed how the sale of opioids and the treatment of opioid addiction are “naturally linked” and that the company should expand across “the pain and addiction spectrum,” according to redacted sections of the lawsuit by the Massachusetts attorney general. A member of the billionaire Sackler family, which founded and controls the privately held company, joined in those discussions and urged staff in an email to give “immediate attention” to this business opportunity, the complaint alleges. (ProPublica 1/30/2019; link)

The NYT story reproduces a diagram included in the New York court filings that illustrates the company's business strategy of "Project Tango" -- the idea that the company could make money both from sales of its pain medication and from sales of treatments for the addiction it caused.

Further, according to the reporting provided by the NYT and ProPublica, members of the Sackler family used their positions on the Purdue Pharma board to press for more aggressive business exploitation of the opportunities described here:

In 2009, two years after the federal guilty plea, Mortimer D.A. Sackler, a board member, demanded to know why the company wasn't selling more opioids, email traffic cited by Massachusetts prosecutors showed. In 2011, as states looked for ways to curb opioid prescriptions, family members peppered the sales staff with questions about how to expand the market for the drugs.... The family's statement said they were just acting as responsible board members, raising questions about "business issues that were highly relevant to doctors and patients. (NYT 4/1/2019; link)

From the 1/30/2019 ProPublica story, and based on more court documents:

Citing extensive emails and internal company documents, the redacted sections allege that Purdue and the Sackler family went to extreme lengths to boost OxyContin sales and burnish the drug’s reputation in the face of increased regulation and growing public awareness of its addictive nature. Concerns about doctors improperly prescribing the drug, and patients becoming addicted, were swept aside in an aggressive effort to drive OxyContin sales ever higher, the complaint alleges. (link)

And ProPublica underlines the fact that prosecutors believe that family members have personal responsibility for the management of the corporation:

The redacted paragraphs leave little doubt about the dominant role of the Sackler family in Purdue’s management. The five Purdue directors who are not Sacklers always voted with the family, according to the complaint. The family-controlled board approves everything from the number of sales staff to be hired to details of their bonus incentives, which have been tied to sales volume, the complaint says. In May 2017, when longtime employee Craig Landau was seeking to become Purdue’s chief executive, he wrote that the board acted as “de-facto CEO.” He was named CEO a few weeks later. (link)

The courts will resolve the question of legal culpability. The question here is one of the ethical standards that should govern the actions and strategies of owners and managers. Here are several simple ethical observations that seem relevant to this case.

First, it is obvious that pain medication is a good thing when used appropriately under the supervision of expert and well-informed physicians. Pain management enhances quality of life for people experiencing pain.

Second, addiction is plainly a bad thing, and it is worse when it leads to predictable death or disability for its victims. A company has a duty of concern for the quality of life of human beings affected by its product, and this extends to a duty to take all possible precautions to minimize the likelihood that human beings will be harmed by the product.

Third, given that the risks of addiction that were known about this product, the company has a moral obligation to treat its relations with physicians and other health providers as occasions of accurate and truthful education about the product, not opportunities for persuasion, inducement, and marketing. Rather than a sales force of representatives whose incomes are determined by the quantity of the product they sell, the company has a moral obligation to train and incentivize its representatives to function as honest educators providing full information about the risks as well as the benefits of the product. And, of course, it has an obligation not to immerse itself in the dynamics of "conflict of interest" discussed elsewhere (link) -- this means there should be no incentives provided to the physicians who agree to prescribe the product.

Fourth, it might be argued that the profits generated by the business of a given pharmaceutical product should be used proportionally to ameliorate the unavoidable harms it creates. Rather than making billions in profits from the sale of the product, and then additional hundreds of millions on products that offset the addictions and illness created by dissemination of the product (this was the plan advanced as "Project Tango"), the company and its owners should hold themselves accountable for the harms created by their product. (That is, the social and human costs of addiction should not be treated as "externalities" or even additional sources of profit for the company.)

Finally, there is an important question at a more individual scale. How should we think about super-rich owners of a company who seem to lose sight entirely of the human tragedies created by their company's product and simply demand more profits, more timely distribution of the profits, and more control of the management decisions of the company? These are individual human beings, and surely they have a responsibility to think rigorously about their own moral responsibilities. The documents released in these court proceedings seem to display an amazing blindness to moral responsibility on the part of some of these owners.

(There are other important cases illustrating the clash between moral responsibility, corporate profits, and corporate decision-making, having to do with the likelihood of collaboration between American companies, their German and Polish subsidiaries, and the Nazi regime during World War II. Edwin Black argues in IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation-Expanded Edition that the US-based computer company provided important support for Germany's extermination strategy. Here is a 2002 piece from the Guardian on the update of Black's book providing more documentary evidence for this claim; link. And here is a piece from the Washington Post on American car companies in Nazi Germany; link. )

(Stephen Arbogast's Resisting Corporate Corruption: Cases in Practical Ethics From Enron Through The Financial Crisis is an interesting source on corporate ethics.)

Guest post by Dave Elder-Vass

[Dave Elder-Vass accepted my invitation to write a response to my discussion of moral realism (link). Elder-Vass is Reader in sociology at Loughborough University and author of Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy, The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency and The Reality of Social Construction, discussed here, here and here. Dave has emerged as a leading voice in the philosophy of social science, especially in the context of continuing developments in the theory of critical realism. Thanks, Dave!]

Moral realism and explanatory critique
By Dave Elder-Vass

Daniel Little's latest blog post "Moral progress and critical realism" raises some important issues for critical realists and indeed social scientists more generally. I'm sympathetic to the general orientation of his piece, and have made similar arguments elsewhere (summarised in this blog post). I thought it would be useful, though, to add some further discussion of how Daniel's argument relates to critical realism itself.

While critical realists agree that there is a real world that exists independently of what we think about it, they need not - and do not - agree on exactly which classes of things exist within that world. Moral realism is a case in point. Roy Bhaskar explicitly identified himself as a moral realist, and offered several different justifications for this in the course of his work. Some critical realists accept all of those justifications, some are ambivalent or selective about which they accept, and others like Andrew Sayer and myself, for example, reject moral realism outright.

I'd like to focus here on one of Bhaskar's arguments: the theory of explanatory critique. Technically this is an argument for ethical naturalism rather than moral realism (I'll come back to that), although it is sometimes regarded as supporting both. The classic statement of the theory can be found in his book Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation:

Let a belief P, which has some object O, have a source (causal explanation) S. I am going to contend that if we possess: (i) adequate grounds for supposing P is false; and (ii) adequate grounds for supposing that S co-explains P, then we may, and must, pass immediately to (iii) a negative evaluation of S (CP); and (iv) a positive evaluation of action rationally directed at the removal of S (CP). (SRHE, p. 177)

This argument can be read and/or employed in a number of different ways. Let me discuss three. First, it is a variation on the classic Marxist critique of ideology - it suggests that there are social institutions (S) which generate false beliefs (P) about other (or the same) social institutions (O) and that we ought to get rid of them. For example: if capitalist-controlled media sources mislead us about the nature of capitalism then we should replace those media sources (note that Bhaskar is careful to qualify the argument with a ceteris paribus clause (CP), and thus acknowledges that other factors must also be taken into consideration). As a critical ethical claim this seems reasonable and attractive, and it gains some of its appeal by being rather more direct than most versions of ideology critique.

But this is not the point of the theory of explanatory critique, which brings us to the second reading. On this reading, the purpose of Bhaskar's statement is to support his advocacy of ethical naturalism: the claim that we can derive ethical conclusions from purely factual premises. Bhaskar maintains that the premises (i) and (ii) are purely factual, and lead logically ("we may, and must, pass immediately to...") to the ethical conclusions (iii) and (iv). But as a number of people have pointed out, there is a flaw in this argument. The premises are indeed purely factual, and the conclusions are indeed ethical, but the premises are not sufficient to entail the conclusions. To arrive at these conclusions, we need a further premise: we must also believe that it is wrong to generate, advocate, or support false beliefs. Of course, most of us DO believe that, and if so we may well be happy to accept the conclusion in reading one. But that doesn't mean that Bhaskar has shown us how to derive an ethical conclusion from purely factual premises: his argument for ethical naturalism is false.

One also finds critical realists who think that the theory of explanatory critique provides a justification for moral realism: the claim that there are moral facts that are objectively right, good, or true regardless of what people may think about them. As far as I am aware Bhaskar himself does not claim that the theory of explanatory critique entails moral realism, and when he does advocate moral realism explicitly in his later work he offers other arguments to support it. But most critical realists are uncomfortable with those later arguments, and so it is important to establish whether or not the theory of explanatory critique does support moral realism. Let me call this a third reading of the argument, although it also depends on the second. On this reading, the argument for ethical naturalism establishes that we can indeed derive ethical claims from non-ethical facts, and this further implies that those ethical claims must therefore be objectively true. The logic is pretty straightforward: if it is objectively true that there are social institutions (S) which generate false beliefs (P) about other (or the same) social institutions (O), and if we can logically derive an ethical claim from these objective facts, then it would seem to be objectively true that we ought to get rid of those social institutions, irrespective of what any person or social group might believe about the issues. But it is quite clear that this is not a tenable conclusion, because reading two is itself false: the ethical conclusions of Bhaskar's explanatory critique depend on ethical as well as factual premises, so even if the factual premises are objectively true there is no basis to conclude that the ethical conclusions are also objectively true.

While this argument may have been a little technical for a blog post, I think it is important to clarify these distinctions. I regularly encounter (and read) fellow critical realists who cite Bhaskar's theory of explanatory critique as support for ethical naturalism and moral realism. I suspect that some of them have been seduced by the attractiveness of the argument in the first reading discussed above into believing that this justifies the second and third readings as well. It does not!

Moral progress and critical realism

Critical realists share a rejection of the fact-value distinction as a fundamental criterion of scientific rationality -- and rightly so (link). They believe that social research and theorizing involve value commitments all the way down. Further, they commonly believe that good social science should lead to improvement in the world and in our system of moral judgments.

So far, so good. But some critical realists think that this points to "moral realism" as well as scientific realism. Moral realism maintains that there are objective and timeless answers to the questions, what is justice? what should we do? what rights do people have? Moral realists hold that the moral facts are out there and waiting for discovery; there is a domain of "moral facts" that ultimately goes beyond the limits of rational disagreement.

This impulse towards moral realism is a problem. Moral realism and scientific realism are not analogous. There is no philosophical or theological method that will resolve moral questions into an unquestionable foundation or set of universal moral truths. Neither Kantianism, nor Aristotelianism, nor utilitarianism, nor traditional religious systems have the capacity to establish universal and unquestionable moral conclusions. The impulse towards moral realism has the perilous possibility of morphing into a dogmatic view of morality that substitutes one's own convictions for eternal moral truths. In my view, this is farfetched and ultimately implies an unreflective dogmatism about values. Fortunately there is a better and more modest position available that derives from the same pragmatist origins that are inspiring other advances in critical realism.

The better approach is based on a coherence epistemology. This approach is explicitly anti-realist when it comes to moral values. Ethical reasoning always has to do with conversation, disagreement, and sometimes progress. Moral practices have social reality, to be sure; but there are no "moral facts" consisting of moral principles and values that are beyond the possibility of further rational debate. This approach to moral theory emphasizes corrigibility and pragmatic debate about ends, means, and values. It converges with coherence epistemology along the lines of Quine and Rawls; it deliberately replaces a foundationalist approach to moral thinking with a corrigible ongoing series of discussions by moral equals. This allows for an epistemology based on dialogue, and it comes out of the pragmatist tradition.

This is the approach that John Rawls adopted in his theory of reflective equilibrium. Rawls explicitly links his approach to the anti-foundationalist thinking of philosophers like Quine. (Here is a 1985 paper in which I tried to summarize Rawls's moral methodology of reflective equilibrium; link.) Moral reasoning involves a back-and-forth between a set of considered judgments (current moral judgments about concrete issues) and more abstract moral principles. Both considered judgments and abstract principles are adjusted until the system of beliefs is reasonably consistent and coherent. Here is how Rawls describes this process of moral navigation with respect to the idea of the original position in A Theory of Justice 2nd edition:

In searching for the most favored description of this situation [the hypothetical original position] we work from both ends. We begin by describing it so that it represents generally shared and preferably weak conditions. We then see if these conditions are strong enough to yield a significant set of principles. If not, we look for further premises equally reasonable. But if so, and these principles match our considered convictions of justice, then so far well and good. But presumably there will be discrepancies. In this case we have a choice. We can either modify the account of the initial situation or we can revise our existing judgments, for even the judgments we take provisionally as fixed points are liable to revision. By going back and forth, sometimes altering the conditions of the contractual circumstances, at others withdrawing our judgments and conforming them to principle, I assume that eventually we shall find a description of the initial situation that both expresses reasonable conditions and yields principles which match our considered judgments duly pruned and adjusted. This state of affairs I refer to as reflective equilibrium. It is an equilibrium because at last our principles and judgments coincide; and it is reflective since we know to what principles our judgments conform and the premises of their derivation. At the moment everything is in order. But this equilibrium is not necessarily stable. It is liable to be upset by further examination of the conditions which should be imposed on the contractual situation and by particular cases which may lead us to revise our judgments. Yet for the time being we have done what we can to render coherent and to justify our convictions of social justice. We have reached a conception of the original position. (TJ 18)

This approach leads to two important features. (i) There are no fixed and final moral facts; moral facts are not part of the furniture of the world. But (ii) our moral frameworks have the potential of improving over time, as we grope reflectively with our moral responses, sympathies, and principles. There is a bootstrapping kind of progress here.

What Rawls adds is the idea that our efforts to move toward reflective equilibrium permit us to increase the overall adequacy of our system of beliefs and considered judgments. And this ties directly to his treatment of Political Liberalism -- an ongoing discourse allowing us to refine and reform our convictions on the basis of communication with fellow members of our communities and groups. (Habermas and the public communicative process converges here as well.)

It is clear enough that no group is likely ever to reach full unanimity in a discussion like this. This is implied by Rawls's own conception of a liberal society including people with conflicting conceptions of the good. And ultimately a society can be very stable even as it embraces multiple conceptions of the good and other important questions of value.

These considerations suggest that we should abandon the idea of absolute moral truth (moral realism) and embrace instead the goal of securing a respectful, thoughtful dialogue that creates a possibility of moral progress. We may have the optimistic hope that a community or society improves its ability to make moral perceptions and distinctions over time, through the practice of debating and testing the normative ideas that are shared and those that divide the population.

The ongoing work by various theorists on deliberative democracy sheds some light on the concrete ways in which this kind of moral clarification can work within a group of citizens and otherwise unrelated people. (Here is a programatic statement from the Center for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance; link.) Everyone brings a moral and value sensibility to their interactions and reactions to the world, and sometimes those sensibilities can change through interaction with other individuals. Consideration of facts, complications, and alternative ways of stating various value commitment permit the individuals to honestly reflect on their commitments and social reactions and perhaps adjust them. (Here is a discussion of deliberative democracy; link. And here is a recent paper by Archon Fung on deliberative democracy and progressive social change; link.)

(Richmond Campbell's entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on "Moral Epistemology" is excellent as background on this topic; link.)