You’re Only as Good as You See Your Enemies

Looking for the worst in others will find the worst in you

There’s a brilliant idea in philosophy called “the principle of charity.” Despite how it sounds, it’s not about being compassionate to the poor, although that’s a good idea, too. It’s about given the benefit of the doubt to people you disagree with and understanding their arguments in the most fair and reasonable way.

Why’s that a good idea? Because our natural human tendency is to avoid thinking and being challenged, so we are always (subconsciously) on the lookout for excuses to dismiss other points of view. That’s why strawman arguments and their ilk are so appealing.

If we let ourselves ignore our critics, then we’re doomed to become parochial and intellectually flabby. We’d be like an industry that lobbies for tariffs so that it doesn’t have to compete. We need rivals challenging us to force us to learn and grow.

Intellectual Strength

Anyone can fall for bad ideas. The important thing isn’t to get all our beliefs right the first time (which is impossible), but to be able to figure out when we’re wrong and when we’re right. That’s why we need to take criticism seriously and fairly.

Take, for example, the prohibition of alcohol in America. In retrospect, it seems like an obviously bad idea. Outlawing drinking was just going to drive drinking underground, making a mockery of the law and giving a great deal of power to organized crime. How did prohibitionists miss this problem?

In part because it was easy for them to dismiss criticism. They could describe critics as rum soaked rabble who belonged to unpopular ethnic minorities like German or Spanish. Or they could call them greedy businessmen trying to make a profit off addicts.

Prohibitionists were never forced to take opposing arguments seriously, so they didn’t.

Or think of conspiracy theories. Criticism of these theories can be waved away as being part of a coverup, as being misleading evidence meant to lead people away from the conspiracy, or as the meaningless testimony of brainwashed sheep-people. Whatever contradicts the theory can be dismissed. Its why very, very implausible conspiracy theories can survive and spread.

One of the great advantages of the scientific method is that it has an openness to criticism built into it. If a theory isn’t falsifiable – meaning, if its proponents can wave away all criticism – it’s considered unscientific. A good theory must be open to refutation; if its proponents want to be taken seriously, they must at least pretend to know they’re fallible and could be proven wrong.

This generally isn’t true in our political arguments. Being a successful ideologue means you must make grand statements then find petty reasons to dismiss all criticism. The only acceptable way to admit fallibility is to say that maybe you’re not extreme enough or loud enough.

Moral Strength

It’s not enough to be a good critical thinker, of course. You also should be a good person. If you’re cynical about other people, especially people with different values than you, it’s going to be hard for you to push yourself to be a great person.

There’s a moral version of the “principal of charity.” It’s called the “principle of humanity,” and it basically means putting yourself on someone’s shoes when you’re judging their beliefs. Try to imagine why you would see those beliefs as noble or, at least, justifiable.

Take Richard Nixon. He’s an easy guy to demonize- for good reason! He did a lot of awful things that hurt individual people and undermined American democracy as a whole. That means he’s going to be a challenging test of our ability to apply the principle of humanity.

When would you be willing to break into a hotel to illegally spy on opposing politicians? Well, what if you thought the whole country was in danger of falling apart and being enslaved by the Soviet Union? That’s what Nixon was afraid of. It wasn’t a reasonable fear, so it didn’t justify his massive betrayal of trust (and the law), but now we can understand it as a human failing, not the failure of some cartoonish two-dimensional villain.

If we did things the easy way and simply saw Nixon as a power-hungry tyrant, then we’d never challenge ourselves to be better than that. We’d never learn a lesson from his fall. We’d never understand that our allies and leaders could easily be the next Nixon.

The ultimate example of this is when we see our enemies as Nazis. That’s not rare: every US President I can remember has been compared to Hitler. That’s poisonous for political debate, and even more poisonous to the individuals making the comparison. If they tell themselves they’re literally stopping a genocide and a world war, then they can justify anything. That’s not an exaggeration. There are people out there who justify lying, cheating, and even violence because they claim their enemies are the second coming of the Third Reich.

Disincentivizing Dissent

Dissent is the most important remedy to groupthink and the “madness of crowds.” As the scholar Cass Sunstein wrote, “Institutions that reward conformity are prone to failure to the extent that they do not do that [promote dissent]; institutions are far more likely to prosper if they create a norm of openness and dissent.”

If you try to stigmatize your enemies as Nazi communist racists, try to get them fired, or even physically assault them, then you’re creating a more conformist society. Unlike the other problems with trying to trivialize your opponents, this one doesn’t harm you personally so much as it harms the whole society.

When Josef Stalin was the leader of the USSR, he instituted widespread purges, where he rooted out and destroyed any corrupting, capitalist influences – meaning, anyone who displeased him. That benefited Stalin personally by strengthening his hold on power but destroyed the ranks of the leadership of the USSR. If he had seen his opponents as sharing his good motivations and intelligence, just differing on the details, the Soviet empire would have been better off.

Exceptions

I know we can’t always be charitable and humane. Perhaps we shouldn’t always be so. If your enemies are literally shipping off millions of people to concentration camps and invading and occupying foreign countries, it’s time to stop thinking in terms of common humanity and start treating them as mortal threats. When you go to actual, literal, physical war with other people, you would be foolish to try to empathize with their plight instead of defending yourself.

That’s not the situation we’re facing in the US, though. Not even close. Saying impolite words isn’t the same thing as kidnapping people and sending them to camps; welcoming immigration isn’t the same thing as military occupation. When people conflate disagreement with war, they’re just trying to justify their dumb ideas and bad behavior.

The Dangers of a Science of Morality

Treating values like physics could be a trap

Humanity has advanced tremendously in our understanding and control of the world around us. We’ve created institutions and a methodology that keep this momentum going with no end in sight. Progress has become our default state. This continual advancement sits uneasily with our gradual, stumbling, ambiguous moral development.

There’s a hope that we could science-ify morality and improve our values at the same breakneck speed as we improve our knowledge and technology. Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes is an example of this dream. Sometimes it isn’t expressed as a hope, but as a Jurassic Park-style warning that we must gain wisdom as fast as scientific knowledge or we’ll be destroyed by our own creations.

A scientific approach to morality is more likely to be Frankenstein’s monster that destroys us than our salvation.

We ought to avoid the “is-ought” problem

The Scottish philosopher David Hume warned of the “is-ought” problem. This is when we confuse the way things are with the way things should be. For example, most human cultures through history have had slavery. That doesn’t mean slavery is a morally acceptable institution.

For a more controversial example, take arguments about homosexuality. Some gay rights advocates point to examples of homosexual behavior throughout history as proof that it’s not wrong. There are many fine arguments for gay rights, but this is not one of them.

Granted, scientists could avoid this mistake. Take Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, for example. Haidt simply describes different moral perspectives without endorsing any. Anthropologists are also trained to describe values, rather than prescribe.

There are as many examples of failure as success, though. The field of psychology in general has an extreme problem with the is-ought distinction. The bible of psychology, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), looks at the world of upper middle-class American professionals and considers it the way things ought to be. Deviation is stigmatized as “disorder”, at least until favored activists lobby to change it.

Science is done by scientists

It sounds obvious, but scientific research is done by scientists in that field. There’s not much room for dilletantes and amateurs. That’s a necessary part of advancement: keeping up with research and having access to the latest tools and methods is a full-time job. That means scientists will inevitable create a group identity.

No matter how you educate a group of people, they’ll still have the heart of a primate tribe. They’ll still uncritically absorb a set of shared values that they’ll eventually consider above criticism. They’ll still separate “us” from “them,” and view criticism from “them” as being an attack on “us” that requires rallying together and hiding any weakness. They’ll still ascribe nefarious motives to “them.” They’ll still use motivated reasoning to justify their own values and diminish outsiders’.

That’s a problem for a field like psychology that has a suite of tools to pathologize its critics. Scientific moralists would be even worse. They wouldn’t just imply that critics are crazy, they’d accuse critics of being evil people.

In the Middle Ages, the Church was the center of morality, and when you criticized it you were practically standing against Goodness. Imagine that the Church also claimed to be part of a group that was responsible for all progress in knowledge and technology. Even the most devout Christians during the Middle Ages saw some pre-Christian thinkers (e.g. Plato) as being brilliant, important figures. The Church couldn’t claim a complete monopoly on reason and progress the way a scientific morality institution could.

Think of the late 18^th and early 19^th century. There was a fad for phrenology and ‘scientific racism’ among intellectuals. They were confident that they could scientifically determine the worth of people (by measuring their skulls, for example) then institutionalize or sterilize the unworthy. That would be just the beginning.

Occam’s Razor will cut our heart out

Our sense of right and wrong is complicated. We value competing goods like happiness and justice. We’re sensitive to context. We use morality differently in different situations; for example, how we should react to a friend’s misbehavior versus what kind of legislation we should support. This would all be hurt by a naïve attempt to make morality scientific.

Science involves breaking complicated, poorly understand processes into simple factors that can be understood. Think of Newton’s Laws of Motion or the Periodic Table of the Elements. Occam’s Razor encourages us to eliminate any factors that we don’t think we need.

Human beings, however, resist being broken down into simple factors. The social sciences have had trouble advancing at the pace of the physical sciences, and achieving the same kind of successes, because there’s so much irreducible complexity in the human mind and in human societies. Reductionism hasn’t had much success.

The ne plus ultra reductive approach to humanity is a moral philosophy called utilitarianism. Utilitarians believe that increasing happiness is the only thing that matters. They don’t just think that the ends justify the means, they think that the means don’t matter at all: whatever you do should be judged only by its consequences. Specifically, it should be judged by how it effects the net global amount of happiness. Everything from breaking a promise to murder is fine so long as people like it more than they’re made unhappy by it.

It sounds absurd when you first hear about it. It sounds absurd to most experts on it, too. But there’s a deep psychological appeal, especially to numerate intellectual, to deriving right and wrong from a simple equation.

That makes it appealing to would-be scientific moralists. Even if they didn’t adopt utilitarianism whole-heartedly (though some, such as Joshua Greene, already have) they would be drawn to reductive views for the same psychological reasons. If there isn’t room in their theory for moral concepts like duty or honesty, they could just dismiss them. They’d be the same as the aether or phlogiston. Outdated explanations that no longer serve a purpose.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s a long tunnel

Maybe one day it will be possible to reduce the evils of the world and the human heart through research and engineering. That day has not yet come. In the 19^th century, people believed that humans had nearly completed their understanding of a mechanical, clockwork universe. Then the 20^th century came and blew apart everything we knew about the universe. We can’t afford to have the same hubris about morality as we had about physics.

The Problem of Existence

He didn’t sign up for this. Photo by Mindy Olson P on Unsplash

We didn’t ask to be born. What do we do now?

Our political ideologies fail us as soon as we start to exist. Our ideas about the relationship between individuals and society implicitly rely on those individuals being adults, capable of making reasoned decisions. They gloss over the first two decades of our lives, and ignore a key, strange feature of existence: none of us chose to be here in the first place.

From the moment of our conception we’re parasites. Year after year we’re supported by other people, for no reason greater than their sense of obligation, with no explicit demands made on us in return. We may not be permitted to break most of society’s rules – even though we never agreed to them – but we have very few duties demanded of us. Is it right that we must follow these rules we didn’t create? Is it right that people must support us without getting anything in return? Do we owe them anything for this support, even though we never asked for it?

What we’ve been given

In a sense, we owe everything to our parents. If it weren’t for them we wouldn’t exist at all, so everything – good or bad – that we’ve experienced is because of them. We also owe a great deal to the communities we belong to. Our town or city created the social environment where we were raised, educated, and socialized. All the real-life friends we’ve made and mentors we’ve had are due to our community.

We owe much to our nation, as well. If we were lucky enough to live in a relatively stable, peaceful society, it’s because we happened to be born in the right place. If we were very lucky, we were born somewhere where we were cared for until we reached adulthood (or even longer), received a free education, were guaranteed some rights, and eventually gained some degree of political power. That’s a huge advantage compared to the less fortunate around the world or, especially, compared to our ancestors, who received none of those things.

It’s almost inconceivable how much we owe past generations of humans. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – and his intellectual descendants – liked to imagine pre-historic humanity as “noble savages” who lived in peace with nature and each other. We now know this to be completely incorrect. Humanity had to constantly fight for survival against heartless nature (just like every other animal) and was perfectly happy to murder and enslave each other. We now live in extreme peace, prosperity, and leisure compared to our ancestors, and it’s because of their efforts.

Do we owe anything in exchange?

We didn’t ask for any of this, though. Even if we had, we were in no position to be making deals. In legal terms, we lacked “capacity” to make contracts. What do you owe to people who’ve helped you so much when you could never promise anything in return? It’s not an easy question to answer. Most philosophies don’t even try.

Take the classical liberalism of John Locke and Adam Smith. This has probably been the most influential philosophy shaping modern Western governments. Liberals believed that government was necessary to keep people from a war of all-against-all, or, at least, to defend their natural rights. These thinkers were mostly concerned with limits on the state’s power, though. They thought humans existed as individuals first and then the state was created to serve and protect those individuals.

Classical liberals saw humans as having absolute ownership of our own bodies, and by extension having absolute ownership over the products of our own labor. These products are created by the time we invest in making them, so in essence they’re part of our lives, therefore just as much our property as our arms and legs.

This is no help to understanding the problem of existence. We’re created by the labor of our parents (literally, for our mothers) so by liberal reasoning we’re our parents’ property. Everything we created would be their property, by extension, like we were a factory or livestock that they owned. As property, we would owe nothing to anyone, because property can’t be indebted. All that would change when we became adults, when we would instantly transmute from being property to being an independent adult who’s implicitly consented to a social contract.

Over the last 150 years society has moved away from the classical liberal view. Now children are considered something more than property, more than pets even, but less than independent adults. That feels right to us, but it’s logically difficult. Liberalism was a very rational philosophy. We’ve added duties and privileges to it without complete logical justification (though some thinkers, such as John Rawls, have tried). In part, that’s because it’s hard to rationally define our sense of debt, obligations, and gratitude. It’s also hard to have a consistent philosophy about existence and childhood.

Existence as a plane crash

We can clarify our thinking about existence with an analogy. Imagine you were taking a flight above the Pacific and your plane went down. You nearly died in the crash, and your body washed up on shore. A local tribe saved you from the brink of death and nursed you back to health over months. At first you were delirious and bedridden, but as you healed you learned how to fit in with the natives. You learned their language and how they hunt and forage.

What do you owe the natives? You never asked for their help. In fact, you couldn’t stop them from keeping you alive. They forced this new tribal life on you without your consent. In your new life you’ll face pain and hardship that you could have avoided by simply dying in the crash. You’ll be expected to act in ways you don’t understand or agree with.

On the other hand, they saved you from non-existence. They sacrificed a great deal to take care of you, only hoping that you would join them and be a part of their society. Would it be fair to ignore all that because there was no written contract or explicit consent? Even if you don’t like joining their rituals and observing their taboos, they’ve given you a remarkable opportunity to join them instead of simply ceasing to exist.

Repayment

It’s not possible to really “prove” that we owe anyone anything. We don’t have pre-natal contracts to refer to. Still, I hope I’ve made a compelling argument that we do have unspoken and untallied debts. Even if you’re convinced, though, I haven’t told you exactly what we owe or how we can repay it. I don’t think there is an answer to that question. Someone who saw life as being entirely about material wealth could, in theory, total up the amount of money spent gestating and raising him – by his parents and by the government – then adjust it for a reasonable interest rate and think of that number as his debt. Very few of us have such a reductive view of life, though, which makes things more complicated. Even our imaginary Scrooge would run into problems with the second issue: how do we repay the debt? If you choose to repay governments it’s as easy as cutting them a check for services rendered, assuming they haven’t been overthrown and replaced. Repaying your loved ones and your community is harder,