The Problems of Love and Autonomy

I was invited to join others in contributing a post about love to the Daily Nous in honor of Valentine's Day. Mine is cross-posted below, but you can check them all out here. 

It's Valentine's Day, so let's talk about ... death! In the grand tradition of philosophical debate, I'll start with an anecdote:

Kay Sievewright and Ernie Sievewright of British Columbia were married for 55 years, and when their health declined, they hoped to die together. They were each approved for Medical Assistance in Dying, which became legal here in Canada in 2016, but their request to die at the same time was turned down. Instead, they died four days apart, in early 2017.

A spokesperson for the Canadian Medical Protective Association, which provides legal advice to physicians, said they couldn't comment on this case, but they did make a general statement: "The legislation is quite clear that the request has to be voluntary and they are not under any influence ... It may well be that one member of the couple is being influenced by the other member of the couple and the reason why they're agreeing to the pact is not entirely without influence."

You might think this has little to do with Valentine's Day, but I think this case highlights in an interesting way some deep complexities of love and personal autonomy. It's often thought to be in the nature of love that you come to feel the way you do about things partly because of the influence of the other person. In union theories of love, merger can mean curtailing individual decision-making, and in caring concern theories, the fact that something will increase the well-being of the beloved is a reason to do it. Drawing on accounts of shared agency, Andrea Westlund proposes shared egalitarian deliberation, in which each person should be open to guidance by the perspective of the other.

On the face of it, love is thus in tension with autonomy, where there is an emphasis on the importance of doing things for your own reasons, free, as the statement says, even of "influence" from others.

This tension can be resolved in various ways. Some concern theorists point out that if you act for the other person because you love them, this is acting for your own reasons. And as relational theorists of autonomy like have long emphasized, what enables people to be autonomous is not isolation, but relationships. Westlund says that autonomy is about being "answerable" for your commitments, so love means mutual answerability. 

These ways of resolving the tension aptly show how autonomy and love are compatible, but as is often pointed out, they may not fully resolve deeper questions of undue influence from our intimates. What makes influence inappropriate? When one person prioritizes the interests of another, this can be because of love, but it can also be because of pressure, coercion, or socialized deference. How should this distinction be understood?

Even when deference is systematic and gendered, a result of feminine socialization, there is debate over how "autonomy" should be conceptualized. On the one hand, a person who is systematically deferential to another in this way seems paradigmatically non-autonomous, since they are not deciding for their own reasons. On the other hand, if a person chooses deference, that's their choice; who are we to say they are not being themselves?

Anita Ho highlights the relevant complexities in bioethical decision-making. Given the vulnerabilities and stresses of illness and treatment, relational perspectives force us to acknowledge that for whose whose family is central to their existence, consideration of family members' "advice, needs, and mutual interests" is part of being autonomous. Still, she says, exploitation, indoctrination and false consciousness are real possibilities. Clinicians should "listen to the family’s concerns and reasoning process, and then explore with them various options that can best respect the interests of all parties." By default, however, Ho says that health care teams should trust the patient's own final expressed wishes -- not because manipulation is impossible, but rather because family relationships are highly complex and typically opaque to clinicians.

This brief investigation highlights some of the limitations of appealing to autonomy to solve complicated ethical problems, especially where love and intimacy are involved. It seems appealingly simple to say that for important decisions, we should prioritize individual autonomy. But autonomy is complicated and contextual, and may not be able to bear all this theoretical weight.

The Sievewrights may have come to their decisions in a context of mutual respect, or one may have felt obliged to go along with the other out of love, or one may have pressured the other. From the outside, we may never know -- and in a deeper sense, there may be no answer to this question, even if we had the transcript of the Sievewrights's intimate thoughts.

The same is true for any difficult and important decision, no matter when or how it takes place. The presence of people we love has a powerful effect on us. Sometimes that shapes us to make us who we are. Sometimes it shapes us in more disturbing ways. We may not ourselves always know how to tell the difference. 

Gutting The Social Commentary Of Opera: The Case Of The Marriage Of Figaro

From the COC production.

 Over the weekend, I went to see Mozart's Marriage of Figaro at the COC. It is an amazing opera, dealing with sex, love, and the fickle nature of the human heart. It's also about class, gender, power, and the relics of the feudal system in the eighteenth century -- but unfortunately you wouldn't know that from the staging of the COC production.

Do you know the story? It's the eighteenth century,  and the Count's loyal servant Figaro is about to marry the lovely Susanna, the Countess's maid. The Count is bored with his wife the Countess, whom he once loved passionately. He not only flirts with his more attractive female underlings, he also abuses his position of power to badger and coerce them into reciprocating his sexual attentions.

Even though the Count says he is all about abolishing "feudal privilege," in fact he is plotting and scheming to prevent the marriage so he can have Susanna all to himself. Through plotting and scheming of their own, Susanna, the Countess, and Figaro subvert his plans, and make a fool out of him.

Like so many works of artistic genius, the opera works along multiple dimensions. It's a comedy, with ridiculous disguises, mistaken identities, people hiding behind curtains, that sort of thing. It's also a love story, with all the modern rom-com conventions. And, on top of all that, it's a social commentary.

One of the more interesting social commentary aspects is reflection on the "sexual double standard." Why does the Count get to fool around with impunity, while his wife's briefest admiring glance brings censure and rage? Yes -- it turns out that people have actually been thinking about this problem for over two hundred years.

But the main social commentary has to do with power. The Count gets to do whatever he wants, because -- well, because he's the Count. If this includes sex with Susanna -- well, what are Figaro and Susanna going to do? They're servants. They're under his orders and under his protection. It's not like they can up and leave, wander the countryside for other options.

The opera takes you to the brink of horror -- is the Count really going to rape Susanna and prevent Figaro from marrying her, thus ruining both of their lives? -- before bringing you back to a happy ending through antics and absurd plot devices (literally "OMG, that's actually Figaro's long lost mom!").

Of course the Director chose to showcase how relevant a story of class, power, and sex is to our modern era -- Oh, just kidding! In fact the staging was such as to undercut the social justice commentary and to "psychologize" the whole thing.

Infuriatingly, the physical direction showed Susanna sort of willingly going along, as if it's a kind of half-hearted flirtation on her part and not a case of control of the weak from the strong. The Count is presented not as a menace, but just as a kind of bossy and irritable guy. There's a scene where in the story, the Count is going to kill someone out of jealous rage. The way it was in this production, you find yourself thinking, "Well, he'll just shout a lot and then he'll get over it." It changes the whole point of the story.

In the program notes, the Director says that in his interpretation, the characters are "completely torn between morality, desire, and impulse," and that this was why he wanted to "follow the characters into their darkest psychological depths, but at the same time leave space for exploring the utopian moments in Mozart's music."

Could any artistic statement be more of its time? I mean, for all the ridiculous hand-wringing about political correctness, so much art has become de-politicized. Or -- you can make political statements these days, but you can't put politics and entertainment together. Somehow it's like people think the Venn diagram of "entertainment" and that of "thinking about society" should be empty.

There's a trend of focusing on individuals, and what's in their hearts and minds, instead of the social structures and context around them. The forces of of individualism have become so deep and pervasive, it's like people find it hard to even conceptualize the idea of "social justice" as "social." The director thus sees only individual characters, torn between their own sense of morality, dignity and obligation, and their own desire, eros, and impulse.

As longtime readers know, this keeps happening to me with opera. I thought it might be something to do with the COC, but many of the productions with the same problem were created in other places and then brought here. So it's some kind of widespread phenomenon.

With all these productions, you'd think we were all living in a post-class and post-gender paradise, where everyone is equal and no one can exert absurd control over one another, where the idea of coercion and sexual assault through power dynamics was somehow past us.

As if you'd say to yourself, "Well, this opera is partly about power, gender, and class. But we don't have those problems in our society, so ... Wait, I know, I'll make it about the characters' 'darkest psychological depths!'"

Guest Post: Regulating Mobile Dating Apps

This guest post is by Chris Grisdale 
Twitter: @Cgrisdale Instagram: chrisgrisdale

From a certain point of view, mobile dating applications are a kind of trading floor—exchanges where personal profiles, not companies, are listed. And while Stock Exchanges have been with us for a long time, dating applications relatively recent. The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) has provided space for companies to access the public capital markets since 1861. Mobile phone applications like Tinder and Grindr have only provided a meeting point for the “love market” since 2009. 

Tinder and Grindr solve an old relationship problem known as “settling.” You know the scenario: two years ago your friend quietly whispers, “she could have done so much better” referring to you at a cocktail party and now you find yourself sympathizing. While our parents might have to live with the nagging feeling that their partner could have been more physically attractive, better educated or wealthier had they greater exposure in the “love market,” our generation doesn’t have the same problem. Sure, the problem of how long a person should stay on the market remains, but these applications create unprecedented exposure—there are more people to meet.  Better bargains are struck; fewer traders accept below market value.

There are market perils. While securities laws regulate access to public capital markets, it is worth wondering whether public access to the romance markets should also be regulated. And if so, what regulation is appropriate?

The principle means of regulating the public capital markets is through the prospectus, which requires a company to give full and complete disclosure of any matter material of the company, updated through a continuous disclosure regime. A company going public has to take steps to discover all the material information, and once public has to continue to account. Our real estate market, however, is still principally governed by the rule of caveat emptor—buyer be-ware. The rule puts the risk on the buyer. It’s the buyer’s responsibility to inspect the goods, not the seller’s duty to disclose material information. One exception, to the rule is a known latent defect. It’s illegal for a seller that knows of an invisible defect to not disclose it. But the exception does not impose a positive obligation to uncover problems.

Participants in the love markets often provide insufficient or inaccurate information because, in the course of a transaction, it may not be in the interests of a party to provide full or accurate information to the other. In the market for love, an informational failure spans from the banal to the serious. At best a party wastes time on a coffee because the counterparty’s profile inaccurately reflects their true assets and liabilities—the worst version of this is the catfish scenario. At worst there’s risks associated with sexually transmitted infections.

Occasionally a counterparty will purposefully use outdated and inaccurate photographs—be wary of instagram filters. The strategy is simple: entice a potential counterparty to incur a sunk cost, in this case, time. Once you’ve met for coffee, you’re not likely to immediately leave. You’re there for at least 30 minutes to an hour. Once you’re in for a penny, you’re in for a pound. But this strategy is only successful when the inaccuracies don’t deviate too far from the true value.

According to the Urban Dictionary a catfish is a person who pretends to be someone their not to pursue deceptive online romances. MTV capitalized on the catfish phenomenon with the reality show Catfish that films the public exposure of false online identities for all our amusement.

But from the legal point of view, perhaps the most interesting disclosure issue is whether legal liability arises from the failure to accurately disclose the existence of sexually transmitted infections. If we followed the securities regulation approach on this issue, we might impose a positive obligation to get tested and disclose the status to participating in these trading floors. Where we, however, to take a caveat emptor approach liability would only arise when the seller has knowledge of a sexually transmitted infection. Current law errs on the side of caveat emptor.

While the securities approach seems too harsh, the caveat emptor rule seems like bad public policy. People are less inclined to get tested.

Economics Imperialism And Its Discontents: Altruism Edition

Family, by Mary Cassatt [Public domain], via Wikimedia  Commons

 As we've observed before, economists are famous for their calculated pose of mystification when it comes to activities we all recognize as ordinary parts of human life -- you know, like caring, playing fair, voting, etc. etc.

And it's not news that one of our human aspects that doesn't fit obviously into the economic toolbox is altruism. The economic agent is self-interested. Altruist people are other-interested. It's a real poser.


You might think that the differences doesn't matter much because economic modeling is about what we do in marketplaces, and in markets people pretty much are self-interested, or something like that. I'm a little skeptical myself -- but it doesn't even matter, because this easy-going, commonsensical answer isn't even the one people seem to be going with.

No -- instead we have "economics imperialism," which self-consciously attempts to use economic methodology to analyze all aspects of human life -- crime, family life, love, sex, you name it. It's "imperialism" because it's intended to colonize the other social-explanatory disciplines, like sociology. The idea of "economics imperialism" is to use the economic model of human behavior to explain and understand everything. Or, as the NYTimes "Economix blog used to say, "Explaining the Science of Everyday Life."

Before we get to the main point, let me just say briefly that the the epistemic and explanatory difficulties seem to me to be vast. Just for starters, consider this. The economic approach is supposed to be "scientific," relying on human behavior and observables and avoiding analysis of murky subjectives like mental states etc. But how is this supposed to work in explanation? Suppose someone does a surprising thing. How can you know whether a) they were behaving irrationally in trying to satisfy an unsurprising set of preferences or whether b) they were behaving rationally in trying to get to satisfy a surprising set of preferences? You always have one equation and two unknowns.

But whatever. Our theme for today is something different, to do with the massaging of preferences so they can be both self-interested and altruistic. You might think "altruism" means caring for others at your own expense. But in his canonical work on the economics of family life, Gary Becker proposes a definition in terms of utility functions: altruism is when one person is made better off by another person being made better off. E. g., a parent's altruism for a child is understood as the parent having some set of preferences such that when the kid does better the parent is more satisfied and thus better off. So -- as we get to below -- it's not really caring "at you own expense" at all.

You might put it by saying that "self-interested" doesn't mean "selfish": A's preference for B to prosper is "self-interested" in the sense that A will do better when B does, but it's not selfish, because it is, in some sense, other-directed.

So far so good. Becker goes on to derive a huge range of "theorems" based on his approach -- like the "Rotten Kid Theorem," which posits that an altruistic parent will (should?) structure incentives in the family to make selfish kids behave in ways that do not harm the interests of other family members. For example, if you promise to apportion your inheritance to your kids in accordance with their needs, siblings will be incentivized to help one another out  -- lest they get left out of the will because all the money went to the brother who never finished school and lives in a cardboard box or whatever.

Observations:

1) In Becker's approach, every family situation considered consists of one altruist and a bunch of selfish kids. That is, there is no way to model a family with more than one altruist, which means there is no way to even talk about any of the vast number of life contexts in which there are two or more adults who care about one another.

There's a reason for this. As I said, the book is full of theorems. If you have more than one altruist you have multiple interdependent utility functions, and all the cool-looking and intimidating math stops working.

At one point Becker suggests a "wife" could be modeled as one of the "selfish children," but you don't even need this level of ridiculousness to see the problem: the whole thing rests on avoiding the state of affairs many people most desire, of equal persons in a loving and reciprocal home.

2) If an altruist gives something up in order for their target to prosper, you might think the altruist is worse off and the recipient is better off. But in Becker-land, you'd be mistaken! Indeed, since they're both acting in accordance with their preferences, how can you deny they're both better off? That would violate some fundamental economic assumption or other of what economic "well-being" is. 

Becker says the altruist is better off in the sense of receiving "psychic income" for her pains. It's a funny choice, no? You got the car, but I got the "psychic income," so ... we're good, right?

It's weirdest if you imagine it among equal adults who live on intimate terms. If one is altruistic and the other is a selfish bloodsucking vampire, there's no problem with the distribution of goods: they each got what they preferred, after all. According to the model, things are working efficiently and thus well.

3) You know how sometimes when there's a nicer business that tries to do a little altruism or do-gooderism or at least exhibit a bare and basic kind of community spirit, and it's surrounded by bigger and meaner businesses that take a more cut-throat, remorseless attitude, and the nicer business ends up having to take its little business lunchbox and go home?

Well as I reckon, if you use the economic model to analyze interpersonal altruism, you're going to get the same result. Imagine you're the baby bear of altruisism -- just right! -- but you're surrounded by bloodsuckers -- the "ticks" of modern society, if you will. Every time you engage with these people, you'll get a little more psychic income and they'll get a little more ... whatever selfish and self-oriented actual thing they want is. Money -- or food, or attention, health, prestige, etc.

Where will it end?



I'll tell you where it'll end. Eventually you'll be lying there stuffed full of psychic income, but the cupboard will be bare, and you won't be able to afford antibiotics, and you'll die of some easily preventable disease.

Someone may have tried to tell you that economic theories don't have moral implications. Those people were lying.

The Real Problem Of Love And Economics

"The difficult choice (money or love)." After Cornelis van Haarlem [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Obviously, there is no single problem of love and economics. Clearly, the whole area is fraught and complex. As always, I'm not here with any "key to all mythologies."

But what's on my mind -- and perhaps it's been on yours as well -- has to do with the contrast, and the interaction, between the attitude of economics and the attitude of love.

In the attitude of economics, I think it's fair to say, the basic idea is that of an implicit contract or negotiation, with a good outcome being one that maximizes each person's preference satisfaction. If A has X and B wants X and B has Y and A wants Y, then the birds and the bees .. Oh, wait, that's something else. What I meant to say is, these people will make a deal. "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker ... " etc etc etc.

In the attitude of love, if you believe the hype, it's supposed to be different. You're supposed to give and share. It's not all about you. You're supposed to care about the other person and want what's best for them for their own sake.

On one level the problem of love and economics might seem obvious and familiar, in that the attitude of economics is self-oriented and the attitude of love is other oriented. To approach the object of your love with self-oriented preferences would be to misunderstand the nature of love. If that's right, the problem of love and economics, insofar as its a problem, is mostly a problem for lovers, and the problem is that the attitude of economics makes them selfish jerks.


But as I see it, this not actually the real problem of love and economics -- or at least, it's more complicated. The reason I say that is that on closer examination, the distinction between self-oriented and other-oriented is not as simple as this analysis makes out. Even though the attitude of economics requires dealing with preferences, it is well known that there are many ways to understand what a preference is. If we're just talking about what is preferred, of course you can care about the happiness of another person. Nothing prevents you from preferring that your loved one get to have as much happiness and satisfaction as he wants -- indeed, nothing prevents you from preferring the well-being of your loved one to that of yourself.

Since we're doing philosophy, why don't we start with a completely oversimplified toy example using cake? If A and B each prefer cake to no cake, and each prefer the other to have cake rather than no cake, then violà!  A and B make the deal that any loving and consenting adults in their situation would: they agree to share the cake. Their other-oriented cake preferences express their caring and love; A and B both get cake; A and B both get to enjoy the other person's enjoyment of cake. WIN!

However. What this shows is not that there is no problem of love and economics. What this shows is just that when it comes to the problem of love and economics, we're just getting started. Because there are funny things about preferences that concern the preferences of others. One thing that can happen is "double-counting." In the economic approach, a good outcome happens when people's preferences are satisfied. But if A has preferences for B's preferences to be satisfied, it appears that B's preferences get counted twice.

For example, going back to our cake-obsessives, it would appear that the effects of double-counting are most dramatic when one person is in the attitude of love and the other is not. Suppose A loves cake, and A loves B, and because A is in the attitude of love toward B, A wants B to have cake. But now suppose B is just a cold ingrate who wants as much cake as possible, who couldn't care less about others, and who specifically doesn't care much about A. Then it seems that whatever means A and B use to maximize their joint preference satisfaction -- negotiation or an algorithm or whatever -- you know and I know what comes next: B gets all the cake. Dammit!

But wait: if that's correct, then it starts to seem like the real difficulty is less of a problem for the committed lovers and more of a problem for everyone else -- out here interacting with god-knows-what manner of person. Because it's when A is looking out for B and B is looking out for B that things go wrong.

Here is perhaps a more interesting example. In my to Ethics and Values course this past Fall we were talking about whether there are some things for which market norms are inappropriate, and we read this essay by Elizabeth Anderson. Among other things, Anderson says that if a potential surrogate mother has "non-commercial motivations," but are offered only what "the norms of commerce demand in return," then she is open to exploitation. In connection with this I found it striking that the author of this "secret diary of a surrogate," answers her own "would I do it again?" question by appeal to non-commercial motivations, telling her children: "The right thing isn't always the easy thing."

I take it the exploitation possibility arises because in caring you look out for others and in markets you look out for yourself. Any preference maximizing solution to this problem takes into account the purchaser's self-oriented preferences and the potential surrogate's other-oriented preferences. It's the real life equivalent of B getting all the cake. A gets no cake : ( 

Indeed, by developing other-related preferences, A gets less of what she wants for herself than she would have had otherwise.

If these thoughts are on the right track, then the real problem of love and economics is way bigger than the one inside the love relationship -- because it's a problem about how everyone relates to everyone else in the wide wide world. If you adopt a love attitude toward anyone who is not also committed to taking the love attitude back, you're screwing yourself over. You're getting the wrong end of the stick. In fact, if you approach the non-loving with any other-oriented preferences at all, you're putting yourself at a real disadvantage.

The implications of this seem to me vast. Just to start:

1) You have to basically divide the world into separate categories: the love category and the non-love category.

2) You'd better make sure that all the people in your love category have you in theirs, and even with comparable strength and caring, or you're fucked.

3) If you even care about the people in your non-love category you're a chump who's going home with no cake.

So the real problem of love and economics? It's not just for lovers anymore. 

The New "What Do Women Want"?

I was annoyed to see this book shelved only under "Gender Studies." Why not "Health and Well-Being?"

I just finished reading the new book What Do Women Want, by Daniel Bergner.

1. My super-double-extra number one favorite thing in this book is the way it challenges the twin stereotypes of women-want-intimacy-and-love and women-are-naturally-monogamous. Bergner compiles an impressive array of empirical research suggesting a radically different picture: that women want novelty and variety; that desire in a long-term monogamous relationship often wanes; that desire wanes with boredom for women more than for men.

It's true that the book pushes its "naturally promiscuous" alternative without a lot of nuance or in-depth consideration of opposing views. But this didn't bother me, because the twin stereotypes have such a strange crazed grip on people.

2. Indeed, with respect to monogamy, Berger's arguments are particularly effective at challenging the evolutionary argument, you know, that women have to invest a ton of energy in offspring and so are naturally picky whereas men want to spread their seed. Bergner cites a ton of animal studies in which females are sexually aggressive, and sexually promiscuous, and mentions quite astonishing examples of cases where scientists of the past seem to have seen what they wanted to see rather than what was there.

Of course, taking what seems "obvious" to some science guys and cooking up a story to show how it's "adaptive" and thus an essential aspect of our biology instead of the result of social and cultural forces has always been the problematic strategy of evolutionary biology applied to things like sex. And the risk is always high when we're talking about things people want to be true. And a lot of people -- men and women -- seem to want the women-intimacy-monogamy thing to be true.

3.  One of the most interesting -- OK, to me frightening -- parts of the book was the description of how female desire drugs are being consciously interpreted as supports for monogamy, appropriate and approvable only if they don't make women just, you know, really want to have sex. Desire drugs for middle-aged married woman who love their husbands but compare the pleasure of sex with them to the pleasure of returning library books? We are on it! Girls just want to have fun? Not so much. Various people want the drugs to be "good but not too good." You can read more about this part of the story in Bergner's piece in the Times.

4.  Though I get why it had to be this way, I wish the title/argument didn't have to be expressed in terms of What Do Women Want -- in fact, I wish the word "want" wasn't here at all. In addition to the obvious invitation to stupid remarks like the one on the back cover from Gay Talese (it's "a subject that often exceeds our intelligence" -- women, so kooky, so strange, so Other!) it also invites misinterpretation because the word "want" is used in a "desire or interest, conscious or unconcious" sense, in a "this is what I ultimately want to do sense -- i. e., intend, always conscious and reflective, and in a "this is what will satisfy -- ultimately make happy" sense. All very different.

There are women in this book who describe fantasies, sometimes disturbing to themselves, of being forced to have sex, sometimes violently, sometimes with multiple strangers. While it's essential to recognize these as important and genuine parts of these women's sexual lives and desires, connected to "want" in the first sense, fantasies need not be connected to want in the second or third sense, of this being something these women ultimately want to do or have done to them in reality. It's complicated.

Also, saying "What Do Women Want?" makes it sound like women in some obvious way don't know themselves, but I don't think that's an apt description of what is going on.

5. While I admired, and was persuaded by, the frank discussion of the possibility that women are turned on by the desire and interest of others and thus have a sexuality that is to some extent "other-directed," I wish the word "narcissistic" didn't come into play in describing that. As I discussed a bit in this previous post 1) it would be better if both sexes had a mix of self-directed and other-directed desires and 2) other-directed isn't "narcissistic" - why not a nice word like "generous"?

6. Everyone should keep in mind the possibility that women are different. It's wrong to say women really want X or Y or Z -- people vary a lot. It's because the alternative intimacy-monogamy narrative has been so outrageous on this score that I think it's OK that this book does a bit of generalizing in opposition to that narrative.

But do remember, one woman's meat is another woman's poison.

When It Comes To The Moral Problem, You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

Fricka and Wotan during a crucial negotiation, Die Valkyrie, Paris 2013

Warning:  This post discusses moral theory, economics, and Wagner. If your brain has been softened by Mad Men binge watching, wake up! Sharpen your pencils!

I start this train of thought with the seemingly simple question, why ought people to play by the rules they've agreed to? Like, why should you keep your agreements and contracts if you could get away with fraud? Why should you put a stamp on a letter if you knew it would slip through the cracks?

I was prompted to think about this first by the question in The Ethicist about the guy who wanted to hand in one paper for credit in two different college classes. Chuck Klosterman, who seems like a nice guy but who definitely does not deserve to be called even "An Ethicist," never mind "The Ethicist," said there was no problem handing in one paper for more than one course.

This led to the predictable controversy and hand-wringing. OMG won't somebody think of the children?! At one point someone brought up the possibility that doing this was against university policy. And Klosterman said that was irrelevant: if there was a policy against gay sex, that would obviously not make gay sex immoral.

This did not, and does not, strike me as a suitable analogy. What kind of sex you're having is irrelevant to your education. But if the exam policy says "no talking to your fellow students about the questions," then of course talking to your fellow students about the questions is cheating, and wrong. It doesn't matter that talking to your fellow students about the questions is not wrong in itself.

So this got me thinking, what about all the ways you can get away with not playing by the rules? What about in commerce, trade, business? 

It seems to me there are two possible answers to the question of why people ought to play by the rules, and I'm going to say that both of them require reflection on the deep and puzzling question of what is right and wrong.

If that's true, I think it's a pretty dramatic conclusion. Because it seems to entail, among other things, that you can't set up any economic system that doesn't ultimately rest on values  - values which, of course, might be contentious. You can't just legislate order out of chaos.

Before we get to the two answers, we have to set aside an attempt to avoid the question by saying that not playing by the rules is in your own simple self-interest, because if you don't, you'll get caught and you won't be able to reap the benefits of cooperation and exchange. So the answer would be: don't play by the rules, you'll suffer for it, because the rest of us won't let you play.

But this rests on beliefs that seem empirically false. People get away with stuff all the time. I bet that kid got away with handing in one paper for two courses. I remember reading somewhere -- I thought it was the Freakonomics blog, but I can't find it -- about an economist who discovers that he can get away without stamping a letter, who then thinks, well, indeed, if I can do this, why am I buying stamps at all? Often it will be in your self-interest to break the rules.

So this, I set aside.

The first real answer answer is that you could say that since an agreement to play by the rules is like a promise, it's immoral to cheat, just as it's immoral to break a promise.

That's fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far in the absence of moral theory. Economic reasoning uses rational choice theory, and rational choice theory says that people, insofar as they are rational, make choices based on fulfilling their own preferences at the least cost to themselves. So how could something's "being moral" be a good reason to do it?

One thing you hear about this is that because of our feeling and psychology, we get a "ping" of pleasure from doing the right thing. More formally, you might say that our moral feelings are there to shape our preferences toward doing the right thing.

But in the absence of a moral theory, this is question-begging, since the issue isn't whether we have those feelings, it's whether we ought to have to those feelings.

Feelings and preference are things you can act to foster or act to eliminate. For example, suppose you were born in a strict religious home, and you were taught that dancing was a sin, and you grew up to think that was stupid, and that dancing was great. You might have a leftover "feeling" against dancing. But clearly the right thing to do would be to "de-bias" yourself: try to get the feeling to go away.

Now, how would you know whether your inclination or preference for keeping your agreements and playing by the rules is one to foster and keep or one to get rid of? It's not obvious. The idea that morality is just for chumps is thousands of years old. If it is, you'd be better off seeking psychological treatment, drugs, or hypnotism to rid yourself of these irrational feelings of integrity.

Doc! I can't cheat! You gotta help me, doc!

The second answer -- well, it's not an answer so much as a way of thinking about the problem -- is that it's in the nature of rules that there have to be consequences for breaking them, and although such a system might not be perfect, it'll dissuade enough of the people enough of the time.

True enough. But notice how deeply morality is implicated in this answer. Is the punishment only for motivation? Can the punishment be unfair? What makes it unfair?

Worse, how do you make a system with an effective punishment system that isn't also a surveillance state with an all powerful person or institution at the top -- something to impose the order the system relies on?

I was pondering these questions as I went to see the four operas of Wagner's Ring cycle recently. Amazing, incredible; if you think Wagner is about metal breast plates please look again at the picture at the top of this post, depicting a crucial negotiation scene among the gods at Valhalla.

Anyway, in reading around about the operas, I came upon this excellent book review by philosopher Jerry Fodor, who brings up related thoughts about law and contracts. In particular, he argues that the Ring is largely about "a paradox" of law and order: "laws and contracts are obeyed when the cost of breaking them isn’t reckoned to be worth the benefits." It's in moments of passion that laws and contracts are needed, to preserve order. But when passions are intense -- when desire is in ascendance, when passion would "give anything to have its way," law and order must break down, precisely because the costs of compliance are now reckoned as astronomical.

So just when you need law and contracts to keep order, they cannot help but fail. It's related to the morality problem: the full version of the "why" can never be simply the rationality of agreements. 

Fodor puts the conclusion beautifully:  "So if it’s not law and it’s not love, what then, according to the Ring, is the solution of the problem of order? The Ring doesn’t offer one."

There just isn't any answer.

And by the way -- of course it would be unethical to hand in one paper for more than one class without permission. Duh!

The Good Things, They Do Not Always Fit Together

Lia Lee

Recently, Lia Lee died.  In her youth, Lia was a child with severe epilepsy in a family of Hmong refugees, who clashed with the medical professionals assigned to her care.  Her case spawned the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures.

At 4, Lia had a grand-mal seizure, got an infection, and went into septic shock.  She lost all higher brain function.  She lived the rest of her life -- she died at age 30 -- unable to speak or move around or do much of anything, really.

When I read the notice of Lia's death in The Times, I thought to myself, "Wow, I have to read that book."  The book is, in fact, truly brilliant.  The author, Anne Fadiman, spent a huge amount of time getting to know the Lees and becoming their friend and also getting to know the doctors and reading Lia's vast transcribed medical history and so on. 

The story is heartbreaking along several dimensions, the most obvious of which has to do with the early failed efforts to bring Lia's epilepsy under control.  The doctors wrote out prescriptions and gave complex orders, inattentive to the fact that the cultural communication problems went way beyond the translation of words. 

The drugs sometimes seemed to make Lia worse in the short run.  The family not only couldn't read or use a thermometer or anything, they had no experience with Western style medicine at all.  They had their own way of dealing with epilepsy -- the disease whose name in Hmong means something like "the spirit catches you and you fall down."  In their minds, epilepsy was a mixed thing:  bad, because dangerous, but also in some ways good, because you were in touch with the spiritual realm and could, yourself, become a healer.  They didn't always give Lia the drugs. 

The result:  Lia often didn't get what the doctors were prescribing, and relations between the parents and the medical team predictably deteriorated.  When you look at it from the Lee's point of view, it's terrifying the way the doctors have the power of the state behind them to force the family into doing whatever they said.  At one point, even though Lia's parents are about the most loving and attentive parents you can possibly imagine, Lia was forcibly taken from their home and placed in foster care.  On the other hand, when you look at it from the doctors' point of view, Lia deserved the best medical care possible; her parents wishes aren't the only thing that matters.  It is a difficult situation. 

In later years, there was a rapprochement between Lia's mother Foua and her early doctors.  Here is Foua together with Dr. Peggy Philp, at a panel discussion of Fadiman's book in 2002.

One of the themes of the book and the Times notice is the way the Lee family dealt with having Lia in their lives.  She not only lived at home her whole life, she was the center of family life.  Later Fadiman said, "She was never shunted to the periphery ... I remember her most in her mother’s arms. Family life went on around her and in some ways revolved around her."

Lia's parents -- and especially her mother -- never left her side.  They fed her, and bathed her, and talked to her, and listened to her, and watched her, and soothed her skin, and moved her limbs.  Most people in Lia's mental condition live 3 to 5 years.  Lia lived for 26 years.  When the doctors sent Lia home, they told the family that she'd be dead within the week.  Boy did they prove that wrong.

The Times says of this, "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is also the story of the immense benefits of tradition, which can furnish, Ms. Fadiman makes clear, a level of familial devotion less often seen among modern Americans."

Which really got me thinking about Lia's parents and their way of life, and especially about Lia's mom, who had virtually no outside life.  In the book it's not presented as a sacrifice.  According to Fadiman, in Hmong culture it's common to marry young and have lots of children, and life often revolves happily around their care.

And first I thought, "Wow, I am really immersed in the Modern/Western/Cosmopolitan/Whatever way of life."  I mean, on some level I always know that I'm immersed in that way of life.  But it's the kind of thing you don't always stop and think about. 

Because I found the idea of living the way Lia's parents lived almost unbearable to contemplate.  I mean, if you think of one day, it might seem nice:  you wake up, you attend to the children, you play with Lia for a while, you feed everybody lunch, etc etc etc. and sometimes family and friends come by.  But every day?  No going out to the coffee shop, no cocktails, no going to work even?  Wow.


And for all that Lia's familial care is a beautiful and moving thing, I think it's important not to lose sight of the fact that the things in our society that make it impossible, or at least extremely difficult, for most of us to imagine living this way -- those are great things in their own way, too. 

For instance, I'm addicted to getting out and seeing the faces of people I don't know, to doing things that connect me to people beyond my family and friends, to being part of a large world.  And I think of those as basically good qualities to have:  they're part of feeling like a member of the human race, loving diversity and difference, and enjoying the fact that people live in all kinds of different ways.

I'm the first to admit that this way of life we have here -- it really does make us less able to care for the Lias of the world -- I mean, people like Lia as she was after her traumatic brain injury at age 4.  If you're unwell, there really is no replacement for having someone who loves you tend to your needs 24 hours a day.   

To me the moral of that story is just that you can't have all the good things in life all at the same time.  Yes, complete immersion in family life and care for others can be wonderful.  Yes, the world we live in makes this immersion almost impossible for many people.  But that doesn't mean there's something bad about our way of life.  It just means there can be wonderful things that do not all fit together.

There's a contingent out there, I think, that wants to deny this -- perhaps because it can seem like a dark, daunting, or depressing idea.  That contingent tells us:  you can have all the good things.  It just takes compromise.  A little work, a little taking care of Lia, you're good to go.  Then the moral would be: we modern western cosmopolitans need to change, not be so extreme. 


I have no doubt that compromise among good things can be a good way to live.  But it doesn't remove the conceptual problem.  The whole point about Lia's parents is that they weren't just there for her from 5 to 10 pm.  They were there for her 24 hours a day.  I live, to some extent, on the other extreme.  Even making healthy dinners and brushing my own teeth feel like endless chores.  Again?  But I just made dinner yesterday!

If I'm right that the good things in life don't fit together, that compromise doesn't solve the conceptual problems, that shows that living in the extremes can all be good ways to live.  It can be wonderful to be there for Lia for 26 years of breakfasts and bathing and the moving of the limbs.  It can also be wonderful to be the cosmopolitan who needs the faces of strangers, a day of work outside the home every day, a fast internet connection, and cocktails promptly at seven.

Sure, if you live a monochromatic life, you're missing something.  But my idea is that however you set it up, you're missing something.  So if you want to live monochromatically, knock yourself out.

Are Modern Male Novelists Creating Modern Male Losers In Order To Apologize?

Jonathan Franzen, that would be.

My answer:  no.

In this recent New York Review of Books article, Elaine Blair argues that there's a new trend among contemporary male American authors: to make guy characters self-abasing, in order to apologize to women readers for those characters' boorish and sexist obsessions with sex and their tendency to objectify women.  The apology is needed because it's essential for male readers to be loved by female readers, and female readers were getting irritated by male writers' self-obsession and positive views of their own sexuality. 

She traces the framework of the problem back to David Foster Wallace.  Wallace's idea was that back in the day, there were the "Great Male Narcissists" (Wallace's term) -- guys like John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth.  Those GMN's roamed the earth with pride.  They relentlessly and unselfconsciously wrote about themselves, and they wrote with candor about sex:  about their sexual lives, sexual needs, seductions, and obsessions.

The problem was that in novels of the GMNs, as Blair puts it, "the heroes continue, all the way to the end of their lives, to view sex, apart from love, as a solution for extra-sexual problems—as a balm for everything wrong with life, especially the looming fact of death."  The GMNs presented sexual freedom as a cure-all.

This presentation annoyed women, who described Updike in particular with phrases like "penis with a thesaurus."  Women mocked and complained.  Instead of sexual pride they saw narcissistic boasting; instead of candor they saw boorishness.  "So you want to fuck every young thing that comes around?"  they said.  "And you want us to be all fascinated and admiring?  I don't think so."

Blair's idea is that male authors were hurt by this kind of rejection.  So they changed tactics, got new strategies.  Now, instead of GMNs, you have MMLs:  Modern Male Losers (my term).  Modern Male Novelists (MMNs) also write about themselves, and also write about sex a lot.  But they include an implicit apology for their characters' thoughts in the form of making their characters losers (MMLs).  Examples include Gary Shteyngart, Sam Lipsyte, and Jonathan Franzen. 

Blair's argument is that there's an implicit appeal from these guys to Ms. Reader:  if I show the boors as boorish, you'll still love me, right?  Even if the boors can't stop thinking about a woman's breast while she's trying to have a serious conversation? 

I should never read these kinds of essays because they make me feel like I'm from Mars. 

First:   Philip Roth as a "Great Male Narcissists"?  I don't like Updike, and I've never read Mailer, but I've read -- and reread -- many of Roth's novels and I'd have said his view is not only different from but is maybe the opposite from the one attributed to him by the GMN narrative.

Yes, Roth's characters are often obsessed with sexual adventurousness, with sexual promiscuity, and with sexual libertinism, and yes, they're obsessed with their own obsessions.  But to take the moral as the naive belief that these things will bring The Good Life?  As if what makes the Rothians unhappy is their irrational inhibitions?  I'd have said the Rothians are in one of the central binds of modern life:  what you love, what you need, what makes you feel alive, these are also the things that will kill you, or at least ruin your life.  At least if you're not careful.  And being careful is impossible. 

When Roth's male characters get bored with one woman and have to move on to another, when, heartbreakingly, they don't even get involved with a woman because they know they're going to get bored and leave her, it seems to me the moral is not Oh If Only I Could Sleep Around and Enjoy It but rather This Love and Sex Thing Is Impossible.  Ever see a happy lothario in Roth's books?  I didn't think so. 

It always bothers me, actually, when people say Roth's books are "about sex."  Because yeah, on one level sure, they're about sex.  But to me they're about sex as a mere instantiation of this deeper problem, which, if you consider it abstractly, is the problem of death:  it's the problem of feeling alive, and what that does to you.

Second:  It's never been clear to me why the fact of thinking about sex, or having sex a lot, or having it with a lot of different people, is in itself boorish or sexist.  From what I understand, many gay men think about and have sex a lot, often with different people.  If we're talking about men with other men, presumably this isn't instantiating sexism.  Is it instantiating boorishness?  I guess it could.  But it doesn't in general.  It might be boorish only if you were doing something like constantly trying to push someone into having sex with you, or thinking only about sex when someone's trying to talk about something serious and not sexy.  If there's a problem, it doesn't seem like a quantity problem.  It's a context problem. 

Plausibly, context is one of the things people are noticing and complaining about in the GMN and MML narrative.  Blair cites a passage from The Corrections in which an MML writes an awful screenplay and as his girlfriend is breaking up with him she explains that among other things, the screenplay is full of boorish breast references.  "For a woman reading it," she says, "it’s sort of like the poultry department. Breast, breast, breast, thigh, leg."  This MML, Blair says, "has completely failed to understand the female point of view."  "His humiliations will be many."

But this brings me to --

Third:  if a male novelist has a character who fails to understand the female point of view, and who is a loser, isn't a simple explanation that he's describing an experience he finds common, that a man fails to understand a female point of view and THEREFORE loses out on things, becomes a loser? 

There's a scene I love in Sam Lipsyte's novel The Ask in which a man goes to drop off his kid at the day care center and finds that it's closed, and he runs into a woman also trying to drop off her kid. His marriage is falling apart, and he interprets their exchange as intense flirting, fully expecting that after their conversation they'll head back to her place for sex while the kids watch a video or something.  Of course, she has nothing like that in mind.  Of course, she just says goodbye. 

If this guy is thinking about sex, then fails to understand the female point of view, and then is humiliated, isn't it more likely that Lipsyte thought the interconnected thinking, failing, and humiliation are characteristic of life as a modern man than that he was implicitly apologizing to his female reader for presenting a guy obsessed with thinking about sex?

There's some other stuff, but I'll stop here.  Putting it all together, I think the answer to the question of the title is No, Modern Male Novelists Are Not Creating Modern Male Losers In Order To Apologize. 

They're not pursuing a literary tactic.  They're trying to understand something real and important about modern life, about masculinity, about how to live well, about relations between men and women.  And they're succeeding. 

Modernity Boot Camp, Or, When One Lives Among Madmen, One Should Train As A Maniac

Over the weekend I went to see a classic Bollywood movie:  Kal Aaj Aur Kal (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow) from 1971.  It tells the tale of a family, a grandfather, father, and son  -- played by a real life grandfather, father, and son from the famous Kapoor family -- in which the son and the grandfather clash generationally, and the father is caught unhappily in the middle. 

Among other things, it's a movie about modernity.  The son and grandfather fight over food, clothing, music, parties, religion, the caste system, individuality, tradition, sex, love, and marriage.  Are these or are these not the flashpoints of modernity the world over?

In the central battle of wills, the grandfather insists that the son marry the pious daughter of his friend from the village.  The son wants to marry the elegant and super-modern Monica, whom he met, of course, on an airplane.  Here's the young couple getting to know each other:

Cute, huh?  The sixties were so much the sixties the world over.

Anyway, although she's modern, Monica is a good girl.  She comes from a respected family; she gets yelled at by her mom for not being ready for dinner on time; she's shocked when a mutual friend turns up pregnant by her fiance.  The grandfather's only substantive complaint seems to be that she doesn't know how to cook.  So this isn't so much a movie about marrying outside your cultural circle as a movie about marrying a woman you chose yourself.

For most of the movie, I assumed this conflict would resolve itself through mutual recognition of Monica's essential status as a good girl.  There's a touching scene where Monica serves the grandfather some food, and I thought "Oh, surely he'll see now that even though she's not his choice, she's a good girl, and he'll relent and let the grandson marry her."

And that, I figured, would be the lesson about modernity:  that underneath it all, the things we value aren't all that different. 

But no.  I'm not going to spoil the ending for you, but instead of commonsense and compromise, there is drama, self-sacrifice, and secret plotting.  If there's a lesson about modernity in this movie, it's not underneath it all we're much the same but rather modernity:  it's a fight to the death.

And the more I thought about that the more it grew on me.  Individuality and choosing for yourself -- they're just not the kind of thing about which there are compromises.  Either you choose for yourself or you don't.  And we've gotten into a habit of -- of kind of sugarcoating the difference.  Of treating modernity like a kind of increase in common sense rather than a radical experiment in human life. 

Because promising and lovable as it is -- and let's be clear, no one loves modernity more than I -- modernity creates conditions that are destabilizing, dangerous, and wildly unpredictable. 

The idea that we should make decisions for ourselves, in the absence of bowing to tradition, it's an extreme idea for beings like us -- beings that are impulsive, emotional, and fragile.  Think about how dependent we are.  We're easily carried away.  We crave happiness and warmth.  We're so physically delicate we need food and water every few hours.

And now you plonk us down, rudderless, in the middle of consumer culture and expect us to thrive?  We're supposed to figure out how to fight temptation and laziness all day every day?  To walk calmly past a million displays of baked goods, candy, cigarettes, and just say no?  To delete the spam that offers better bods, better sex, instant cash?  To decide how to save for retirement, to select a mortgage, to pick insurance packages?  To decide to go to the gym, day after day, after eight hours at work?

Not easy. 

Given how hard it is, you'd think that there would be some training program for modernity.  Like a modernity boot camp.  They'd teach you how to have massive self-directedness, endless self-control, and an imperviousness to small sufferings.  Maybe you remember this post on ego depletion?  Well modernity boot camp would give you huge muscles of willpower alongside your huge pecs and six-pack abs. 

When I was young I had a daydream of modernity boot camp, and I thought I might satisfy it by joining the actual real life military.  You know, toughness, discipline, getting it together.  That didn't work out for me because of the whole having-to-kill-people aspect, which was a deal-breaker.

Weirdly, not only don't we have modernity boot camp, it's almost like we have anti-training for modernity.  Young people are more left to their own devices than ever; the crime of being "late to dinner" has been erased in a world of sports practice and music lessons; and it's become elitist to go around saying you don't watch Mad Men or whatever because you were busy reading a book.

I don't know what form modernity boot camp should take, exactly, but perhaps we can take as a starting point for reflection the real life story of the actress who played Monica in the movie -- Babita Kapoor.  She and the actor who played the son really did get married in real life.  And what do you think happened next?  Her new family told her she had to quit acting, because women in their family weren't supposed to act. 

I don't know how exactly how Babita Kapoor responded to this, but whatever she did was effective, because her two daughters have become highly successful actresses and stars of Bollywood.  So as far as I'm concerned, Ms. Kapoor can be first headmistress of our new training school.

And for a school motto, we can't do better than to follow the Count of Monte Cristo, who said,

when one lives among madmen, one should train as a maniac.  

The Economic Worldview Is Ruining Our Lives

This post is about the way The Economic Worldview is ruining our lives by making us cold-hearted and alone. 

It's often said that The Economic Worldview is compatible with kindness, love, and altruism, and doesn't entail a selfish view of the world.  My argument here is that even if that is true, the economics of the Economic Worldview make kindness, love, and altruism impossible, because in the world of competition and exchange, they're simply unaffordable.

This post has details, so bear with me. 

Let's say that The Economic Worldview is Rational Choice Theory together with The Individualist Social Contract. 

Rational Choice Theory says that human life is all about the cost-benefit analysis.  To act rationally is to maximize benefits and minimize costs, where what counts as a benefit and cost is determined by a person's preference rankings.  That is, people have a list of things they desire together with some judgments about what those things are worth to them. 

When found alone, Rational Choice Theory often presents himself as Mister Harmless.  "Hey," he says, "I'm just a theory about human behavior!  I'm not telling anyone what to do!  No shenanigans -- honest!"

But the thing is you almost never see him alone.  He used to pal around with Utilitarianism, a somewhat kinder gentler fellow who was all about doing stuff for other people just because, you know, it would help them out.  But Utilitarianism's not out and about much anymore.  In public life these days Rational Choice Theory's got a new sidekick:  The Individualist Social Contract. 

The Individualist Social Contract is the idea that human interactions are generally best understood as episodes of Let's Make A Deal.  Everything is a neo-Hobbesian-tit-for-tat.  Life in the state of nature is nasty brutish and short, The Individualist Social Contract says, but that's OK, because if you refrain from killing, plundering, and walking across my lawn in exchange for me refraining from killing, plundering, and walking across your lawn, we both do better.  It's a  steal of a deal for both of us. 

The Individualist Social Contract is all, "What do you want for that?" "What'll you give me if I do"?

When they're together I call them The Economic Worldview.  Together, these two ideas tell you how to run the world.  Actually, they not only tell you how to run the world, they bully you into running it their way.  They're like the socio-cultural Mafia.

What they'll tell you is to run the world according to The Principle of the Economic Worldview:

The most efficient and fair way to run the world is that everyone should make deals with everyone else based on what they're preferences tell them would function as rational trade-offs. 

Makes sense, right?  Joe has butter and wants bread; he makes a trade.  You want something you gotta pony up.  The Economic Worldview will tell you this is the most efficient way to run the world because everyone gets to directly pursue what they most prefer.  They'll tell you its the fairest way because everyone gets to make whatever deals they want.

Yes, I just made this principle up.  Yes, I know it's possible for preferences to be altruistic, so that the Principle of the Economic Worldview does not immediately entail some kind of crude self-interest -- I'm getting to that. 

The problems and limitations of The Economic Worldview are well-known.  It encourages us to divide everything into costs and benefits, when many things aren't quite one or the other.  It treats altruism, voting, and trust as quirks of human nature.  It takes into account only measurable and exchangeable things.  It treats as stable and unchanging preferences which are contextual, variable, and easy to alter.

I could go on and on.  But my point here is not about how the Economic Worldview gets it right or wrong.  It's about how the Economic Worldview changes us. 

At the basis of the whole scheme are preferences.  But there are some funny things about preferences.  First, many of our best preferences are not for measurable and exchangeable things.  They're for things like love, fairness, and the well-being of other people.  Second, preferences change all the time.  If wanting X makes you feel like a loser then you'll stop wanting X.

And here we are finally at the basic idea of this post:  The Economic Worldview makes losers out of the people with the best preferences and winners out of the people with the worst preferences.  So in a real way it makes us worse human beings.

You can probably see how the mechanism works.  The Economic Worldview allows for simple and effective ways of taking into account and satisfying preferences for exchangeable and measurable things like money and objects.

But not so much for preferences for love, fairness, and the well-being of others.  You can try to satisfy those preference through exchanges, but their satisfaction can't be counted as adding to your success -- because they're not measurable or exchangeable goods. 

To put it bluntly, the more you love others, the more altruistic preferences you have, the more of a loser you are in the preference-satisfaction scheme cooked up by The Economic Worldview.  Because the exchanges you make to try to satisfy them just leave you poorer in every other dimension, and the gains you get in satisfying them aren't for measurable and exchangeable things. 

Think of it this way.  What kind of preferences should you have?  To be successful in the world of The Economic Worldview, you should cultivate preferences for money and material objects and you should suppress cultivation of ties of affection, which will get in the way.

In his astonishing book, Gomorrah, about the Camorra mob in Naples, Roberto Saviano talks often of the mob as the natural logical end of liberal free market ideals.  And at one point he explains why loyalty and friendship can have no place there.  "Every bond, be it affection, law, rights, love, emotion, or religion, is a concession to the competition, a stumbling block to success." 

So those altruistic preferences?  In The Economic Worldview, you just can't afford them. 

Maybe you're thinking, "Well, you're getting carried away.  The problem with The Economic Worldview isn't with the "Economic" part, it's with the "Worldview" part.  Economic principles of exchange are fine in their place, applied in the proper sphere, you just don't want to get carried away.  And everyone knows that."

Nice idea, but no. 

A) We do get carried away.  We use theories of human behavior and interaction to understand and interpret ourselves, and we're doing this now with The Economic Worldview. 

B) Everyone knows that?  Are you kidding me?

What does The New York Times call its "Economix" blog?  "Narrow science applied beyond its scope?"  No.  It calls it "Explaining the science of everyday life."

I rest my case.

Mencken's "Mixed Martial Arts" For And Against Women

H. L. Mencken.  Funny, angry, and good-looking.  Why hasn't there been a major motion picture about this guy?

I knew going into it that reading H. L. Mencken's In Defense of Women was a high risk activity for me.  Not because it was written in 1918, and not because the writer is known for his brutal honesty, but because you just know when there's a "Defense" of that kind there's going to be trouble.  It's going to be "ironic," or it's going to actually be a defense of virginity, or it's going to be horrible in some other way you could never have foreseen.

And it's true: it is a mixed business, though not quite in any of those ways.  It's main good quality is that like all Mencken's writing, it's hilarious.  The main thesis is that women are smart -- really smart, like competent and intelligent and artistically sensitive.  Mencken hated posers, and he gleefully points out all the ways in which women are more realistic and open-eyed judgers of what is going on, unlike men who are blinded by vanity.  He thinks it's hilarious that women's superior judgment is called "women's intuition" instead of just, Hey, women are paying attention and have good practical judgment.

Money quote for this part of the book:

"If the work of the average man required half the mental agility and readiness of resource of the work of the average prostitute, the average man would be constantly on the verge of starvation."  -- Mencken, A Defense of Women.

There are some other good parts, like when he talks about the moronic myth that women don't actually enjoy sex and just submit to it in marriage.  He's merciless about the pretensions that keep the myth alive -- the way in which the myth functions in the pressures for monogamous marriage.  It's admirable the way he tries to provide evidence for his claim -- which, indeed, in 1918 in a book for publication is not easy.

The book is also full of rage and hatred.  Mencken was driven crazy by the ways in which he thought marriage benefited women way more than men, and furious about the fact that a woman who doesn't hold up her end of the marriage contract by cooking good meals and stuff wouldn't get in any trouble. 

Not that he supported any changes to the system.  It was appalling to him that women were so dependent on men and lived off of them like parasites, but it also was appalling to him that ugly,  mannish suffragettes were trying to fight for voting, equality, work and all those sorts of things.  That, for me, was probably the worst part of the book, that sense that sure, a woman could work, and could certainly be good at it, but only if she was going to give up on being attractive.  What a sucky choice that is.  And yet, I feel like you see it all the time, even now, people who think that way.

But the best aspect of this book is that in it, men and women both come off as The Other, both are The Second Sex, and truly, this is something only someone with Mencken's crazy clear-eyed and brutally honest approach can succeed with.  Even now, when you read about the sexes, women are always The Other sex -- always discussed as if men are normal, default, human, and women are somehow interesting in how they diverge from that.

It drives me nuts, and I was thrilled to see Mencken treating both men and women as if they were absurd deviations from anything that would make any sense.  I've already mentioned male vanity, which Mencken found preposterous and relentless.  He is also merciless on the subject of men's inability to govern their concerns with practicality, noting with scorn that any man with a mistress on the side necessarily gets into hot water  -- unless, as the French do, they simply let their wives manage everything.

The most striking example of this is when he talks about male nobility and honor.  He notices the way that men are constantly going on about fair play this and honor that, and acting like this proves their essential superiority to women who naturally just fight tooth and nail.  His theory about the source of this is that men feel manipulated in the marriage chase, in which women come after them with honed techniques, deception, and really, everything they've got.  They express their aversion to this practice in a confused way, by saying that "women have no sense of honor."

But men, he says, also have no sense of honor -- as long as anything real is at stake.  It's only in gambling and such nonsense that men really act honorably.  "The history of all wars is a history of mutual allegations of dishonorable practices, and such allegations are nearly always well-grounded."  As long as anything is really at stake, men fight just as tooth and nail as women.  One sees it in women's social interactions only because it is in social interactions that women's very lives are at stake -- in 1918, indeed, a woman's ability to marry was frequently her means of staying sheltered and fed.

Mencken admires the fighting spirit of women, which he takes as evidence that they're less civilized than men.  Since in true Nietzschean fashion he took civilization to be " a mere device for regimenting men," whose "perfect symbol is the goose-step," this seems to be high praise indeed.  

Mencken was merciless about the idiocy of marriage, saying that no man of any intelligence would ever get caught up in it, and that it represented "the end of hope."  So it is, of course, amusing that he did eventually get married himself:  to a woman named Sara Haardt, who was a writer, a professor of English (at Goucher college), and a gentle and genteel Southern woman.  They were very happy, and wrote lots of letters, and traveled around quite a bit, before she died a few years later at a young age of tuberculosis.

For some reason, Sara Haardt doesn't have her own Wikipedia page.  Surely if the minor characters of Beavis and Butthead can have a page, we can spare a few electrons for Ms. Haardt.  Can't we?

UPDATE, MAY 2012:  Anonymous Reader has solved the Wikipedia problem!

The Real Self Of Love

Image from a 2002 site about combining Viagra and Ecstasy.  Do people still do that?

I don't know if you read that story in The New Yorker the other day, by George Saunders, about the future?  It was called Escape from Spiderhead.

The story is about a guy convicted of a crime who instead of going to prison becomes a kind of designer-drug guinea pig.  The main good thing about the story is the names Saunders comes up with for the drugs and technology that the guy is testing.  "Verbaluce" gets you talking. "VeriTalk" makes you tell the truth. "Darkenfloxx" causes despair.

The drug they're testing makes you feel like you're in love.  Like, whoever you're with when you take it, you feel superconnected to them and also like you really really want to have sex with them.

The testing is meant to feel creepy, and it does.  Our hero takes the drug, sees one woman, falls in love with her, then when the drug wears off, goes completely back to baseline human indifference.  Then he takes the drug again, sees another woman, falls in love with her, then when the drug wears off, goes completely back to baseline human indifference.

The drug makers' plan is to market the drug to people who can't love enough, or who love the wrong person, or who love too much, to make sure they love in just the right way.  That's meant to feel creepy too, and it does.

But what exactly is so creepy about it?  I was pondering this question when I started thinking about certain philosophical theories of autonomy and selfhood.  Some of these theories try to articulate autonomy with reference to what a person endorses when they rationally reflect.  So, for instance, suppose you smoke, but on reflection you decide that it's best to quit.  Autonomy would mean quitting, in line with your rational self.

A person who fails to quit, whose desire overwhelms them, isn't really autonomous.  Part of the intuition is that a desire that comes from something like an addiction comes from "outside you" since it doesn't come from your thinking self -- the self that is you.  Other views dispense with the rationality part of the story but retain the idea that you and your desires can be deeply at odds, and when you are, this is a failure of autonomy.  For instance, on views like Harry Frankfurt's, it is only when your desires are in line with what you want your desires to be that you are a free, autonomous person.

Now the weird thing is this:  if these theories are right, then the Love Drug isn't creepy at all.  Indeed, used properly, it would be an aid to a person's autonomy and well-being.  Think of it this way.  If you decide you ought to love your longtime spouse, and you take the drug, and it works and you love them, then you're good to go:  you're desiring what you want to desire.  If you want to desire one man rather than another, one woman rather than another, you take the drug, and BAM -- you're good to go.  Your emotions are suddenly in line with your thoughts.  A dream of unity between the emotional you, the physical you, and the rational you.  It should be perfect.

So either there's something wrong with these ways of thinking about autonomy, or the creepiness is due to something else, or it's not creepy after all.

Maybe there's something to it's not being creepy after all.  I mean, lots of people have said that drugs like Prozac make them feel more themselves.  Why not a drug that makes you love who you want to love, and lust after who you want to lust after?  Isn't that a way of being, really yourself?  Actually, one might say, if you don't take the drug, you're just letting yourself be dicked around by a bunch of hormones.  Aren't you?

Or maybe it only seems creepy because it happens in a lab?  The love potion in Midsummer Nights Dream doesn't seem creepy in the same way.  It's just sort of funny.  So maybe the creepiness we feel is because we know what pharmaceutical companies are like, and they creep us out?

Or maybe there is something wrong with thinking of autonomy -- or at least well-being -- in ways that value the stable, the rational, the thoughtful, the slow, over the impulsive, the changeable, the emotional, the crazy.  Because those other parts of us are still us -- and they're the real self of love.  Aren't they?  Or is that just an old-fashioned irrational preference for chaos?