Exile the Rich!

Philosophy

The rich have two defining capabilities: independence from and command over others. These make being wealthy very pleasant indeed, but they are also toxic to democracy. First, I analyse the mechanisms by which the presence of very wealthy individuals undermines the two pillars of liberal democracy, equality of citizenship and legitimate social choice. Second, I make a radical proposal. If we value the preservation of democracy we must limit the amount of wealth any individual can have and still be a citizen of our polity.

Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy 19 THOMAS R. WELLS EXILE THE RICH! Krisis 2016, Issue 1 www.krisis.eu These days the rich are very rich indeed. Increasingly, they also seem to be more or less in charge. They negotiate directly with our elected officials about government policies; they own the media companies that set the agenda for our national political conversations; they cultivate private relationships with political candidates dependent on their financial support; they fund 'grass-roots' political movements; they even run as political candidates themselves. They are hailed not only as the 'job-creators' of our economy, but also, in their guise as philanthropists, as our saviours: of our public services, such as education (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg); our politics (the Michael Bloombergs and Silvio Berlusconis); the discipline of economics (George Soros); and so on. George Clooney even has his own spy satellite pointed at Sudan (the Satellite Sentinel Project). The rich have become public figures with the status of celebrities and 'thought leaders' whose lavish lifestyles, minor life-events and superficial opinions on the matters of the day are considered of great public significance. I think there is something very wrong with this situation. In fact I think it may be a crisis, in the technical sense of a stage in a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events is determined, for better or for worse. My concern is well summarised by a famous quotation from the US supreme court justice Louis Brandeis, whose career spanned a previous gilded age. We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both. (Dilliard 1941, 42)1. This essay tries to clarify the nature of the crisis and how it may be addressed by examining the character of the rich and the character of democracy. The rich have two defining capabilities: independence from and command over others. Those two features make being rich very pleasant indeed. But they are also what make the rich bad for democracy, and indeed even for capitalism. Democracies are extended moral communities whose flourishing, and also mere survival, depend on the general interdependence and approximate equality of their members. The rich do not only have no place in this kind of community, their very presence undermines it. This essay is not about social justice. Perhaps it is morally wrong that some people are rich and others are poor, and perhaps it would be morally right to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, and even from wealthy countries to poorer countries, but from this perspective that debate is a distraction. What I'm concerned with here is the sinking ship the threat the rich pose to democracy itself – not the proper (re)arrangement of deck chairs between first and third-class passengers. Hence my modest proposal: if we believe our democracy is worth preserving, we should offer the rich a choice: give up your money or give up your citizenship. A Political Not a Moral Problem The normative definition of the rich is always those who have 'too much'. Yet there are various ways of defining this in the contemporary literature on social justice. Some, egalitarians such as John Rawls (Rawls 1999), take the equal distribution of wealth as the starting point for thinking about Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Thomas R. Wells – Exile the Rich! 20 social justice: inequality is illegitimate unless specifically morally justified. Others criticise the legitimacy of the processes by which the present concentrations of wealth in our society arose (including even libertarians, when they take Robert Nozick's historical account of entitlement seriously2). Yet others focus on the inefficiency of great inequality. The utilitarian Peter Singer (2009), for example, argues that ordinary middle-class people in the west have much more than enough (anyone with annual income over $35,000 is in the global 1%) while a great many (around 2 billion) live in appalling absolute poverty. The richer you are, the less benefit you will derive from having one more dollar to spend because all your most important needs and wants have already been satisfied; for the same reason, the poorer you are the more good that same dollar could do for you. So the relatively rich should give away our money to the poorest people we can find, where it will do the most good. And we should keep giving up to the point that we have to sacrifice something of comparable moral significance (which seems pretty far). These various approaches to thinking about justice problematise wealth in different ways (unfairness, illegitimacy, inefficiency). Although I won't be making direct use of any of them, it is worth noting what they all have in common: identifying the problem of the rich as 'absolutely relative'. In other words, the rich pose an objective problem of justice not because of how wealthy they are in absolute terms (how much they can buy) but because of the problematic relation in which they stand to others. I employ the same foundational idea just as seawater is good for fish but poisonous to humans, so extreme wealth is wonderful for individuals but poisonous to democracy. However, my approach is different from that of the justice theorists because I focus on the political problem of wealth and not its moral problems. So I am not directly concerned with identifying injustices in the distribution of wealth, nor with making its distribution more just, for example by making the rich give their money (back) to the poor. My reasons for focusing on the political dimension rather than the moral are twofold. First, it seems to me that a threat to democracy has a more existential character and thus possesses an urgency that issues of social injustice lack. In particular, while the relationship between social injustice and concentrations of wealth seems relatively linear (on most accounts), the relationship between democracy and individual wealth may include a threshold above which a dramatic failure of democracy becomes very likely. If our society makes mistakes about justice, we can hope to remedy them later. If we make mistakes with our democracy, we may not get a second chance. Second, there is a strategic advantage to politicising wealth-holding rather than moralising its distribution. People with very different moral views can appreciate the importance of democracy, and of saving democracy, precisely because of the scope for pluralism and public reasoning about justice that democracy permits. It seems to me that many people who disagree about exactly how wealth should be distributed in society-including those with egalitarian, libertarian, or utilitarian moral intuitions-can nevertheless come together to condemn extremes of wealth that threaten a polity's capacity to debate justice at all. The Bourgeois Character of Democracy Democracy as we know it is the invention of the American republic, and, as Alexis de Tocqueville analysed, is fundamentally government by and for the middle-classes, the bourgeoisie. Indeed, the flourishing democratic societies of the world are all politically dominated by a middle class; as the political scientist Barrington Moore famously put it, "No bourgeoisie, no democracy". This may not be a feature of many philosophical accounts of democracy, but it is a fact about modern liberal democracies, the only ones that seem to work. For example, the mere possession of formal democratic institutions like parliaments and elections is demonstrably insufficient for the successful practice of democracy, as poor countries such as India demonstrate.3 Successful democracies are bourgeois because middle-class circumstances are particularly amenable to the spirit of democracy. The bourgeoisie live in circumstances of moderate abundance: neither so poor as to be utterly dominated by circumstances or powerful persons, nor so well-off as to be Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Thomas R. Wells – Exile the Rich! 21 free from inter-dependence on the goodwill of other people for success. This is the sweet-spot of sufficient independence to think for oneself, and sufficient inter-dependence to be sensitive to the interests and concerns of other people; the conditions for the thriving of the civic habits and dispsitions on which a democratic polity depends. A democratic society is organic, not a construct of high theory. Its heart is equality of political status, or what some would call 'dignity' the freedom of all from domination, whether by government or other people. A real democracy must pass what the political philosopher Philip Pettit calls the 'eyeball test': is every person free to look any other in the eye, without fear and trembling? The brain of a democracy is its ability to make legitimate collective choices in a way that everyone finds acceptable even when they disagree with the conclusions. That sounds like an abstract adding machine and the terminology of social-choice theorists doesn't help. But actually it's about community and common sense. Democratic procedures for social choice work so long as everyone recognizes that we are all in this together, and that we have a shared interest in and commitment to making things better for everyone even though we may disagree about how to do so. The members of a bourgeois society have an orientation toward co-operation, even with those we disagree with, because we are fixed in relations of interdependence with each other and have no choice but to try to make this society work. So what's the problem with the rich? Their circumstances of life are distinctly different from the bourgeoisie. At the extreme, the combined assets of Walmart's Walton family have been calculated to be equal to that of the bottom 150 million Americans combined. Great wealth changes people and their relationship to society as a whole. As Michael Sandel puts it, "Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share in a common life." (Sandel 2012, 205). The rich are independent of the rest of us. Obviously they are materially independent so long as their property rights remain recognized. They can achieve what they want by themselves, that is by buying it from others or paying someone else to do it for them. But this power of command also generates a social distance from society that allows them to become 'ethically independent'. Since they don't depend on the goodwill of others to succeed for example, few of them have recognisable jobs they may become less concerned in general about whether they deserve goodwill. They are thereby freed from the disciplinary power of bourgeois social norms and standards, and, it often seems, even from the laws that apply to ordinary people. I'm sure that sense of liberty must be quite exhilarating. But it also means that the rich aren't really like the rest of us. There is some worrying social psychology research about what the rich are like, suggesting that society's nobility are not actually very noble (e.g., Piff et al. 2012). The rich appear to have a more positive attitude to greed than the rest of us, and this is expressed, for example, in feeling entitled to opt out of ethical standards to lie and cheat when it suits them and a lack of compassion toward others. Though recent events should teach us not to build castles on the findings of social psychology, such research chimes with what all of us see and hear every day of the self-centredness and self-servingness of the rich, from Donald Trump's use of the US presidential election to promote his business brand, to Warren Buffet's exploitation of his political connections to lobby for public subsidies of his investments in Goldman Sachs and railroads.4 The 'ethical independence' of the rich from the rest of society thus has political implications, since, to put it mildly, it does not suggest that the rule of the rich is to the benefit of all. For the rich the spirit of cooperation on which democracy depends is only an option, not a necessity. When the rich engage in politics they are not under the same constraints as the rest of us to find a mutually agreeable solution, since their fortunes are not fixed to the success of this society as ours are. They can always buy their way around the absence of public goods, or leave for somewhere nicer. That means that the rich don't have the same political interests as the rest of us (Page, Bartels, and Seawright 2013). They aren't worried about crime (their gated communities come with private security) or the quality of public education (their kids go to the fanciest schools money can buy) or Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Thomas R. Wells – Exile the Rich! 22 affordable accessible health care, pensions, job security, public parks, gas prices, environmental quality, or most of the other issues that the rest of us have no choice but to care about, and to care about politically since they are outside of our individual powers to fix. The political concerns of the rich do not lie in the provision of public goods, but in furthering their private interests, whether their personal wealth and power or their political whimsies.5 That is why Adam Smith, the father of economics, warned us so vehemently in The Wealth of Nations to be suspicious of their self-serving rhetoric.6 It is an unfortunately widespread fallacy that democracy is a means to achieve one's interests, rather than a space in which the public interest can be deliberated. Thus some people seem to believe that elections work in the same way as the rest of our modern consumer society: one orders what one wants at the election and then two weeks later it should arrive. Then, if it doesn't arrive, they think democracy must be broken. However, for the rich, politics actually does work somewhat like this, because they have the power to intervene non-democratically in our politics. They can and do use their wealth to command outsize political influence, in the ways I outlined above: bargaining and schmoozing privately with our politicians (Kalla and Broockman 2015); buying a media megaphone to transmit their opinions to voters and drown out counter-speech, and so on. The rich act this way because they believe that their opinion deserves to be heard because it is theirs, and their wealth means that it does indeed receive more attention. This is the logic of the market, of course, and it converts politics from a democratic forum into a market for influence. First, it introduces a principle of political inequality. The rich achieve extraordinary influence over the character and direction of our society, and thus over how our individual lives will go, yet they have no qualification for that political role except their wealth. Like a feudal aristocracy, their special political status derives from a prior asymmetry of power combined with a personal sense of entitlement, rather than democratic selection. Second, it undermines the democratic legitimacy of our political institutions, the perception that even if we don't personally agree with their outcomes they genuinely reflect the will of the people and we should go along with them. Every ideological faction wants to get their own way. Liberal democracy deals with the threat of factionalism not by suppression but by transforming it into a vibrant pluralism that is maintained by a transparently fair social-choice process. Everyone still thinks their own views are right and true and seeks to persuade others of them, but in a democracy everyone agrees that practical legitimacy derives from popular consent. Those ideas that win a democratic mandate have a prima facie legitimacy to govern, subject to the checks and balances that protect opposing (minority) views. The rich are a particularly dangerous faction because of their ability to upset this principled modus vivendi by translating economic command into political influence greatly out of proportion to their numbers (cf Gilens and Page 2014).7 Moreover, while as individuals they may have differing views about what society's political priorities should be, ranging from converting the public education system to independent charter schools to defending Israel, they also have what may reasonably be called a class interest in the institutional arrangements that maintain their personal wealth, such as tax codes that favour income from capital over earned income. A democracy converts to a plutocracy gradually, as more and more of the business of politics is turned over to the rich: their interests, their values, their opinions, their policy proposals. Even though popular elections continue to be held, the link between political success and a democratic mandate to govern will crumble away. Political outcomes will no longer be understood as a reflection of the will of the people, but rather of the machinations of the rich or squabbles between them, as in modern plutocracies such as Ukraine and Moldova. As people come to realise that the system is rigged the legitimacy of the political regime will no longer rest on democratic grounds, but on some other grounds, such as economic prosperity or fear of even worse. Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Thomas R. Wells – Exile the Rich! 23 Why the Economy Doesn't Need the Rich Either At this point I would like to address a common counter-argument to the claims I have been making. This is that there is a trade-off between democracy and material prosperity: it is claimed that even if great concentrations of wealth undermine democratic ideals, this is a price that most people think is worth paying and thus has a certain democratic legitimacy in its own right. As I will show in a moment, this underestimates the threat the rich pose to capitalism as well as democracy. For now, let me focus on the specific assumption that capitalism requires the rich because they have more wealth than they need for their own consumption and so it is their investment of capital that makes the economy spin around and create jobs. That 'job creator' thesis is out of date and back to front. First, while in Adam Smith's time it might have been true that economic development required capitalists to reinvest their profits, this was because everyone else was too poor. But these days the economies of democratic societies are characterized – for now by a broad middle-class whose savings are quite sufficient for funding business expansion and technological innovation, such as through the share-ownership of our pension funds or the bank loans backed by our deposits. Second, the greater the wealth inequality, the worse we may expect the economy to perform. A flourishing economy requires customers as well as investors. If the gains of economic productivity are overwhelmingly transferred to some small group (as profits) it means that they don't go to ordinary people (as wages) - (for example, since 1979 all the productivity gains of America's economy have gone to the richest 1%, median wages have been stagnant). The implications are, firstly, that the more unequally distributed economic growth is the less it increases national prosperity, because it does not increase the economic command of ordinary people to satisfy our wants (which was how Smith defined the wealth of nations). And, secondly, economic growth itself will be less than it would have been because high inequality limits the extent of the market (fewer customers) and thus the scope for innovation. But the biggest problem is the threat the capitalists themselves pose to a free and competitive market economy. As Thomas Piketty notes: "The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier ... capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future." (Piketty 2014, 571). This not only involves the production of economic inequalities that undermine democracy and the substitution of inheritance entitlements for meritocracy, but also, as another economist, Joseph Stiglitz (2012) has argued with particular force and clarity, the outright corruption of democratic politics and capitalism itself. The winners of one round of market competition can readily translate their economic wealth into political influence and thereby change the rules to convert their income from a contingent market outcome into a guaranteed entitlement, for example by converting their businesses into quasi-monopolies that effectively levy a redistributive tax on society as a whole. The interest of the plutocratic elite is to widen the market but limit the competition; to do what Bill Gates did to Netscape and Carlos Slim did to Mexico's telecoms industry. Consider the re-construction of America's financial services industry over the last 30 years. As the number of firms went down, favourable laws went up, converting the industry into a rentier system in which the costs of financial services to the economy as a whole rose, profits rose, and risks were socialized. This rentier capitalism doesn't have the same virtues as the free market kind proposed by Smith and endorsed by most contemporary economists. It undermines the policing required to maintain real – free, fair and rivalrous competition. It misallocates the country's wealth and talent, by funnelling it away from productive enterprises and into rent-seeking enterprises that harvest the productivity of others. It politicises the economy in a way that undermines the conditions for liberal democracy rather than providing the shared prosperity that supports it. What To Do About the rich I have argued that the rich are a burden and a danger to our democratic society as a whole. But that fact doesn't tell us what to do about them. Some, such as Piketty, argue that we should tax the rich back into the Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Thomas R. Wells – Exile the Rich! 24 middle-class with progressive taxes on both their wealth and income. Such tax policies face great difficulty because imposing and then maintaining them would require an overwhelming and sustained political consensus to overcome the resistance of an extraordinarily powerful political constituency, exacerbated by opportunities for international tax competition and evasion. Piketty admits that his proposal for an international wealth tax of 5-10% on the greatest fortunes to unwind the inequality ratchet is "utopian". My own proposal is more radical still, and yet may nevertheless be more effective than Piketty's because it directly challenges the political domination of the class interests of the rich that would thwart his plan. Recall that I am not concerned here with fairness and social justice, but with the somewhat simpler but more urgent existential threat that the presence of the rich poses to a democratic society. I'm against the rich, but I don't care about their money. And that allows me to advance a different kind of proposal than one normally sees in this debate: the simple rule that no-one can be both a member of our democratic society and rich. A good way of thinking about what a democratic society is and should be, and how its members relate to it, is through the idea of the social contract. A social contract is a hypothetical agreement to form a political association for the mutual advantage, security, and justice of all its members. The significance of this idea is that it allows us to scrutinize whether our current social arrangements resemble what we would have deliberately chosen to create if we had had the chance, or whether we would have chosen something better – for instance, John Rawls' project in A Theory of Justice. In Rawls' hands the social contract is a device for generating a unique agreement on the basic institutional arrangements of a just society by making explicit our intuitions about what a fair democratic society requires. But one can also use the social contract device more crudely, to draw our attention to the preconditions for, and legitimate authority of, a democratic society. Though we may not follow Rawls' controversial argument about what an ideally just democratic society would look like (as even Rawls himself accepted in his later work), we may all readily agree that some arrangements are incompatible with the persistence of any democratic society in which such questions of justice might be debated. Plutocracy seems one of those, since it is incompatible with freedom from domination between citizens and political equality in social choice. The idea of the social contract also directs us to think of our democratic society as a kind of private club for the mutual benefit of its members. (Indeed, this is how we often explicitly describe it when thinking about immigration). Such a club has the legitimate authority to enforce its constitutional commitment to democracy and to take preventative action against members whose activities undermine it. Hence my modest proposal. We should first identify with some precision the category of what it seems reasonable to call 'the rich', i.e. those people whose capabilities for independence from and command over the rest of us crosses the threshold between enviable affluence and aristocratic privilege. Then, when anyone in our society falls into the category of the problematic rich they would be offered a choice: give it away hold a potlatch, give it to Oxfam, their favourite art museum foundation, it doesn't matter what or else cash out their winnings and depart the country, leaving their citizenship at the door on their way out. Since the rich are, well, rich, they will have all the means they need to make a new life for themselves elsewhere, and perhaps even inveigle their way into citizenship in a country that is less picky than we are. I'm sure they'll do just fine.8 How much wealth makes someone problematically rich? That seems a political question for society to deliberate about, informed by empirical research from social scientists about the character and effects of large wealth inequalities. It is certainly not something for philosophers to decide! But, for the sake of this discussion let me outline one approach, to show how such deliberation could move from broad and abstract principles to concrete proposals. The general principle is adapted from Rousseau's proposal in The Social Contract that "in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself" ([1762] 2008, II.11). That suggests that the form of the definition of the rich should Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Thomas R. Wells – Exile the Rich! 25 be 'absolutely relative' rather than merely relative (i.e. we shouldn't just target the richest 1%, because there will always be a richest 1%, and this proposal is not founded on envy of the better off). One way to go would be to use some multiple of the wealth of the median citizen (the person who is poorer than 50% of the population and richer than 50%) as a proxy for the distance from, and power over, ordinary citizens that defines problematic wealth. Let me suggest a very generous multiple of 500 to be going on with (surely everyone can agree that someone with more than 500 times the wealth of the middling citizen is in a different class than the merely enviably affluent). What would that mean for a country like America? According to the Credit Suisse's Global Wealth Report (2015) the median adult American's personal wealth is around $50,000, which suggests a cut off of $25 million.9 For context, America's mean average wealth is $350,000 (if the gulf between mean and median figures seems surprising, it reflects the fact that wealth inequality is much more pronounced than income inequality).10 For further context, median wealth in the UK is more than twice as high as America, suggesting a cut-off of $63 million. The UK-US comparison shows that this simple definition has a powerful inbuilt ratchet. The greater the concentration of wealth in a society, the greater, I have argued, the threat to democracy, and the lower the boundary line for the problematic rich that this definition will produce. There are obviously many technical difficulties remaining in this definition (from settling on appropriate accounting standards, to allowing for market volatility in asset values, to distinguishing individual from household wealth). But if it could be made to work, what would happen? Presumably there would be an outpouring of wealth as assets are liquidated and moved abroad. But the immediate consequences of this should not be exaggerated. The mansions and penthouse apartments would still be here, just owned by someone else. The already globalised financial portfolios (most of the assets of the rich) would merely be registered at a foreign address and denominated in a different currency. A relatively small number of the rich own large stakes in national enterprises such as departmentstore chains (those Waltons again), or TV stations, that might be difficult to unwind or internationalise. Aside from some short-term disruption the loss of the wealth of the rich would not make our society poorer. As I noted earlier, developed economies do not lack for capital; what the rich contribute to the economy is not investment but domination. An economy's wealth as opposed to an individual's relates to its efficiency in allocating its resources between competing projects so as to satisfy as many of the wants of its people as is technically possible. In the long term our economy's productivity would be higher without the distorting influence of the rich, and, not coincidentally, the gains from that productivity would be more equally shared than they are now. But I don't think everyone would leave. After all, while tax avoidance is extremely popular among the rich, true tax exiles are somewhat rare. Democratic societies really are great places to live; plutocracies and autocracies really aren't. (Even Russia's oligarchs want to live in New York and London, and send their children to school there). I think that many rich people understand this, and would appreciate the benefits of democratic society even more if they were forced to make an explicit choice between continuing to live there or holding on to their money. Another possible consequence is a decline in innovation and entrepreneurship-vital to the future growth of the economy. If the rewards for winning 'the economic game' became truncated at a few million dollars, would people stop trying so hard? Will there be no future economic revolutionaries like Bill Gates or Peter Thiel? This argument seems to rest on the assumption that innovators are only motivated by the possibility of vast financial rewards. On the one hand, this seems false because innovation is just what free people do in the face of interesting or important problems, whether that be in literature, computer science, or logistics. On the other hand, it is true that many of those, like Bill Gates, who package up the technological breakthroughs of others into economically significant contributions are motivated by the hope of economic windfalls. And yet, how big does the reward have to be to motivate entrepreneurial innovation? Does it really have to be in the billions? Would no one write books anymore if they saw the wealth of (the British) JK Rowling capped at $63 million? Perhaps. Though I am sympaKrisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Thomas R. Wells – Exile the Rich! 26 thetic to Adam Smith's argument that what people are really seeking is the "respect and admiration of mankind" and that a swimming pool full of money is merely one way – a vulgar, inferior way – of achieving that.11 Conclusion My proposal, though quite serious, is obviously politically unfeasible in the face of the opposition of the rich. It is utopian. But utopian principles can nevertheless perform political service by introducing new normative benchmarks into political debate. (Consider the role that Nozickian libertarianism performs in the politics of taxation). Like the idea of the social contract, the idea of exiling the rich is expected to do its work hypothetically, via persuading people to imagine 'What if....?'. It politicises the issue of personal wealth in a new way in terms of democratic citizenship which may appeal to a different and perhaps larger and more ideologically mixed coalition of voters than alternative social-justice accounts such as egalitarianism and libertarianism do. It thereby places a new onus upon the rich to justify their place amongst us, to overcome our suspicions by proving their loyalty to the democratic values of our society, for example by acceding to less radical proposals such as Piketty's progressive tax on wealth, or at least much greater restrictions on the mechanisms, such as political donations, that translate private wealth into public influence. In this political perspective the very advantages of the rich are turned against them. The rich have been used to thinking of themselves as more equal than others in our society. Yet that power of command over others is exactly what puts the legitimacy of their place in our politics in question. They have been used to enjoying their independence from the rest of us, hardly mixing with ordinary people and hardly noticing the national borders they cross. Yet this very feature would legitimate and justify our ostracising them in turn. To the extent that the rich believe all their accomplishments came through their own efforts and they don't need us for anything except property rights, we wouldn't be doing them any harm by exiling them from our politics, or even literally exiling them to another country. By achieving such independence, the rich have brought upon themselves the burden of justifying why they should be allowed to remain amongst us. If you don't need us, we can ask, why do we need you? Thomas Wells lectures in ethics and the philosophy of social science at the Institute for Philosophy at Leiden University, and at the University of Witten/Herdecke. References Campbell, Peter Scott. 2013. "Democracy v. Concentrated Wealth: In Search of a Louis D. Brandeis Quote." The Green Bag 16 (3): 251–56. Credit Suisse. 2015. "Global Wealth Report 2015." Dilliard, Irving. 1941. Mr. Justice Brandeis, Great American: Press Opinion and Public Appraisal. Modern View Press. Drèze, Jean, and Amartya Sen. 2002. India: Development and Participation. Oxford University Press. Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin I. Page. 2014. "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens." Perspectives on Politics 12 (03): 564–81. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595. Kalla, Joshua L., and David E. Broockman. 2015. "Campaign Contributions Facilitate Access to Congressional Officials: A Randomized Field Experiment." American Journal of Political Science, April, n/a – n/a. doi:10.1111/ajps.12180. Page, Benjamin I., Larry M. Bartels, and Jason Seawright. 2013. "Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans." Perspectives on Politics 11 (01): 51–73. doi:10.1017/S153759271200360X. Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Thomas R. Wells – Exile the Rich! 27 Piff, Paul K., Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo MendozaDenton, and Dacher Keltner. 2012. "Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February. doi:10.1073/pnas.1118373109. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press. Rawls, John. 1999. A Theory of Justice (TJ): Revised Edition. Harvard University Press. ---. 2001. Justice as Fairness : A Restatement. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2008. The Social Contract. Translated by G. D. H. Cole. Cosimo, Inc. Sandel, Michael. 2012. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Penguin UK. Schweizer, Peter. 2012. "Warren Buffett: Baptist and Bootlegger." Reason, May. http://reason.com/archives/2012/02/09/warren-buffett-baptist-andbootlegger. Singer, Peter. 2009. The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. Random House. Smith, Adam. 1759. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). Edited by David Daiches Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics. ---. 1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (WN). Edited by Campbell, R. H., Skinner, A. S., and Todd, W. B. Indianapolis Ind.: Liberty Press. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2012. The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. W. W. Norton & Company. 1 See Peter Campbell (2013) for a discussion of the provenance of this quotation. 2 "The entitlement theory of justice in distribution is historical; whether a distribution is just depends upon how it came about", Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Oxford, UK, 1974, p. 153. 3 India has surprised many political theorists by maintaining democratic political institutions and ideals since independence (with one brief interlude in 1975-7). Yet the poverty of the overwhelming majority of India's population translates into political powerlessness, an inability to make practical use of their theoretical democratic opportunities to address gross injustices. Hence the failure of India's politics since independence to deal with problems like mass illiteracy and childhood malnourishment despite universal agreement about their importance. (See further, Drèze and Sen 2002 especially chapter 10). 4 According to reporting by Peter Schweizer (2012). 5 Of course not all the rich are concerned with furthering their own material interests through politics, or with furthering an ideology which rationalises those material interests (such as 'tax libertarians'). Many seem to want to address genuine public interest challenges that regular politics neglects. For example, the Gates Foundation's support for education reform in general and charter schools in particular. Still, these may be called political whimsies to the extent that it is the rich themselves who take it upon themselves to determine and act upon what the public interest requires by making changes to our public institutions. Whether these experiments turn out well or badly, by deliberately bypassing democratic politics they undermine it. 6 At one point Smith goes so far as to describe "those who live by profit" – i.e. capitalists as "an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." (Smith 1776, I.11.264). 7 "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on Krisis Journal for contemporary philosophy Thomas R. Wells – Exile the Rich! 28 U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence." (Gilens and Page 2014, 565). Obviously, this is not an original concern. See, among many others, Rawls' critique of welfare state capitalism in Justice as Fairness (Rawls 2001, 137–8). 8 And if they don't think they would do just fine they are under no compulsion to leave. Their condition may be worse than before under this policy, but it remains greatly superior to their fellow non-rich citizens. The option set that includes a choice between having one hundred million dollars in exile or retaining citizenship and only $25 million remains superior to that of their fellow citizens many might volunteer to be in their place. It is also superior to the choice offered to the rich by a taxation policy, such as Piketty's, that attempts to achieve the same goal more gradually: pay a substantial proportion of your fortune to the government every year or go to jail. 9 The reader should put no great faith in the precision of figures produced by a wealth management firm (cf. Piketty 2014, 437). I resort to them because there is still a dearth of rigorous statistics about wealth (rather than income), especially those that attempt to calculate the median individual's assets rather than that of households. 10 Indeed, many countries with relatively equal income distributions, such as Denmark and The Netherlands, exhibit surprisingly high wealth inequality. 11 See Smith's other great book, the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), e.g., 1.3.29. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License (AttributionNoncommercial 3.0). See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/nl/deed.en for more information.


Review of Deborah Cook, Adorno on Nature

Philosophy

Adorno on Nature // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame file:///C|/...esktop/Adorno%20on%20Nature%20__%20Reviews%20__%20Notre%20Dame%20Philosophical%20Reviews%20__%20University%20of%20Notre%20Dame.html[9/4/2015 5:47:24 PM] DEBORAH COOK, Adorno on Nature Deborah Cook, Adorno on Nature, Acumen, 2011, 198pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781844652624 Author Deborah Cook's Adorno on Nature is a welcome contribution to interpreting Theodor Adorno's philosophy of nature and its contemporary environmental import. In five chapters this book offers a comprehensive and careful analysis of the crucial and often underestimated role of nature in Adorno, tracing Adorno's conception of "natural history" (Naturgeschichte) from the 1930s to the 1960s and articulating its implications for environmental philosophy and activism. This nuanced study also critically unravels the secondary literature surrounding Adorno. It contests the tendency to construe Adorno's project as a pessimistic-utopian augury of Habermas's conception of communicative rationality or to overemphasize its non-cognitive affective and mimetic dimensions by emphasizing the significance of materialism and critical reason in Adorno's works. "Natural history" has been a basic yet contested concept in Marxian and critical social theory since the early Marx's criticism of Feuerbach's ahistorical naturalism. On the one hand, appeals to nature appear to introduce a questionable non-historical and potentially ideological element that misconstrues the transient as permanent. Accordingly, Marx maintains in The German Ideology, Feuerbach does not recognize the social-historical mediation of the nature in which he lives and of which he speaks.[1] On this historically-oriented basis, Adorno was a persistent critic of scientistic naturalism and positivism, with their uncritical commitments to an ideological vision of nature, science, and instrumental rationality that reflect the dialectic of Enlightenment and the logic of advanced capitalist societies. On the other hand, pure historicity appears to subvert the critique of existing society by imprisoning the social critic in one inescapable social horizon and its prejudices and denying the biological and anthropological conditions of human life that allow for the appeal to human needs and interests in defiance of -and that would inform the critique of -existing alienation, domination, and exploitation. It is in this context of bodily suffering and happiness that Adorno focuses on human sensuous existence, the promise of happiness intimated in animal life, and the mimetic capacities that connect humans with their environments and with animals. Cook develops her apt portrait of Adorno's "critical materialism" in relation to this dialectical and non-dual nexus of nature and history. Cook describes in her introduction and first chapter how Adorno developed arguments in the "Idea of 2012.02.23 Search NDPR Reviewed by Eric S. Nelson, University of Massachusetts Lowell Adorno on Nature // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame file:///C|/...esktop/Adorno%20on%20Nature%20__%20Reviews%20__%20Notre%20Dame%20Philosophical%20Reviews%20__%20University%20of%20Notre%20Dame.html[9/4/2015 5:47:24 PM] Natural History" (1932) that would be reconfigured throughout his life, from his joint work with Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), to his late opus Negative Dialectics (1966) and the lecture-courses of the 1960s. In this chapter, Cook contrasts Adorno's use of "natural history" as a thoroughly critical materialist model with interpretations of Adorno as an anti-materialist thinker. Cook addresses this situation by examining Adorno's self-depiction of his materialism as upholding (1) the priority of nature over mind and (2) the reciprocal implication of subject and object. Adorno adopts Marx's claim that "the economic formulation of society is viewed as a process of natural history" (p.8), as Marx simultaneously advocated the priority of nature and the social-historical mystification of that nature. In Adorno's interpretation, Marx's recognition of natural history, as a transient moment of mediation that suggests what Adorno described in 1932 as a critical canon for the double interpretation of nature and history, and the historical metabolism of humans with a nature that is irreducible to spirit or mind. This places in question the "fallacy of constitutive subjectivity"; the human misinterpretation of themselves as outside of and superior to nature. By illustrating how Adorno's position is indebted to Marx's reflections on the mutual formation and non-identity of nature and history, Cook corrects Sebastiano Timpanaro's thesis that the "pessimists" of the Frankfurt school "all have an anti-materialist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-Jacobin orientation; and all end up in, or at least tend towards, more or less explicitly religious positions" (p. 7).[2] Cook demonstrates throughout this work how Adorno's powerful criticisms of historical materialism and revolutionary politics, of Enlightenment, reason, and science, do not signal their abandonment for the sake of an obscurantist reenchantment of the world. Adorno indicated the ambiguous dialectical character of these historically mediated concepts. While their reified mystified forms serve as means of normalization and conformity, Adorno insisted against conservative and anti-modernist cultural criticism that these concepts retained their critical and transformative dimension. In the second chapter, "Nature, red in tooth and claw," Cook clarifies Adorno's critical relation to the reductive materialism that in eliminating consciousness eliminates non-conformist consciousness and that prepares the way for the individual's actual liquidation with its theoretical elimination. In this chapter, Cook elucidates the Kantian moments in Adorno's thinking of nature. We see how Adorno employs Kant's "block" to check the powers of subsumptive identity and totality. Adorno emphasizes the limits of naturalizing and socializing the conditional subjectivity and fragile individuality of the non-identical self. Kant's critical philosophy prefigures the alterity of objects and difference of selves that cannot be reduced to a conceptual framework or historical construction. The problem with modern capitalist society is not that there are strong autonomous responsible egos who respect others as persons, but that society produces easily manipulated weak narcissistic egos fashioned by the culture-industry for anxious consumption. The impulse toward identity and mastery is grounded in biologically based self-preservation. It is a self-preservation that has run amok and threatens and undermines the very creature it was supposed to serve. Reason, born of instincts of self-preservation, becomes the domination of the object and itself. Its instrumental control dissolves external and internal "nature" into easily processed consumable elements. Cook adroitly answers reductive critics of Adorno's materialism who maintain that nature is purely a social construct. Steven Vogel, for instance, does not recognize that both natural and social objects are mediated and that neither nature nor society is an immediate given to which the other can be reduced (p. 41). Likewise, Cook counters J. M. Bernstein's charge that Adorno is anthropomorphizing nature with the argument that non-identical is relational rather than substantive. Adorno consistently challenges the idolatry of nature, as Cook accentuates in her discussion of the problematic mystification of nature in environmental philosophy, while maintaining its non-identity and otherness. This alterity, indicated in Adorno's rereading of the sublimity of nature in Kant's Third Critique, is a check on the spell of socially dominated humanity. It intimates a rationality that does not dominate nature as an adversary out of the anxiety of self-preservation and through subsumptive identity thinking, but reflectively and mindfully listens to and is responsive to its object for its own sake. Contrary to anti-cognitivist interpretations of Adorno, this is not an affective intuitive receptivity toward the object void of conceptualization. Adopting Hegel's notion of a "freedom toward the object," concepts are required that dialectically point beyond themselves and do the object justice. [3] The next chapter, "Thought thinking itself," is a continuation of the theme of the role of reason and the concept in Adorno's thought. Cook aptly dismantles anti-cognitivist readings of Adorno that Adorno on Nature // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame file:///C|/...esktop/Adorno%20on%20Nature%20__%20Reviews%20__%20Notre%20Dame%20Philosophical%20Reviews%20__%20University%20of%20Notre%20Dame.html[9/4/2015 5:47:24 PM] overemphasize the affectivity of mimesis, a concept that Adorno does not deploy as much as these interpretations suppose, and underplay the mediating and liberating power of conceptualization and reflection in Adorno. Cook contrasts critical self-reflection and non-identity thinking, which are conceptual achievements that break the compulsion of identity born of mimesis and open up the concept to that which transcends it, with the conceptual fetishism of identity thinking and the pseudoconcreteness and irrational fetishizing of the non-concept. The felt, the intuited, and the lived are only indicated and come to themselves through the mediation of concepts. Adorno's project of liberating the non-conceptual dimensions of internal human nature and external nature requires the intensified critical use of concepts rather than their abandonment in the ideologically structured immediacy of life. Insofar as the sensuous, mimetic, and material core of rationality is the source of its acknowledgment of the preponderance of the object and the renewal of its creative and critical function, I would argue that Cook takes a step too far in the conceptualist direction and underemphasizes mimesis in resisting readings that overly prioritize the affective, mimetic, and passive identification with the object. In the fourth chapter, '"Adorno's endgame," Cook challenges the tired pessimistic understanding of Adorno while recognizing his awareness of the precariousness of the contemporary situation. How can the individual -with her conditional and fragile subjectivity, autonomy, and capacities for affectivity and critical reflection -survive in the midst of and resist the overpowering impersonal processes of exchange, labor, and consumption in which she is enthralled? Adorno articulates how the spellbound individual remains nonetheless a point of resistance to the degradation and reification of nature and human nature in advanced capitalist societies. This individual is afflicted by the weight of the socially formed objective world and mass-reproduced social pathologies. Adorno's doubts about collective action are, however, checked by prospects for education, solidarity, and equalized exchange. The formation of the critical capacities of the individual, who is betrayed in orthodox Marxism as well as in class society, is a necessary step to check the pathologies of social life that shape movements of resistance in commodified consumerist society. Jon Elster rejected Marx's natural history thesis, claiming that "Marx's emphasis on the extent to which nature is transformed by man is both exaggerated and pointless."[4] In the last chapter, "Adorno and radical ecology," we encounter multiple reasons for taking seriously the human control of nature and the damages humans have done to their environments and animals. The gravity and deep-rootedness of the current environmental crisis demands a different way of interacting with nature. An alternative to the capitalist domination and destruction of natural environments and animal life is disclosed in a critical materialist and socialist response. Prefiguring a thesis of social ecology and eco-feminism, Adorno's "critical materialism" reveals the interconnection between the human domination and exploitation of other humans, and the resulting inequalities of resources, opportunities, and possibilities for flourishing, and the instrumentalization and domination of nature. The damages done to nature reflect the same processes that produce damaged individual human life. There is a radical difference between those who understand the domination of nature as at best a metaphor, since there is no "nature" and -even if there were -it is not capable of suffering domination, and those who maintain that a different way of experiencing nature, environments, and animals as interlinked with human life is needed.[5] In the contemporary context, Adorno's philosophy of nature presents a challenge to both the calculative instrumental pragmatism that reiterates accommodation to the existing state of affairs and mystifying holistic ontologies that dream of reenchanting the world and nostalgically returning to an abandoned identity. Neither is adequate to a crisis that is due to structurally reproduced domination and exploitation. Since individual selftransformation and purely cultural criticism are insufficient, Adorno's alternative can only be conceptualized and acted upon in confrontation with the material moment of the structural reproduction of capitalist society. Adorno's contemporary salience is not in offering an easy way out. His thought does not allow for a tranquilizing escape from the aporias of nature and history, individual personal experience and impersonal social reality, and a more responsive environmental sensibility and the restructuring and transformation of a society that subjugates life under the relentless identity of abstract exchange. There are two additional topics that this work could have incorporated that would have been worthwhile contributions to its overall thesis. The first is the marginalization of the materialist concern for nature in the next generation of the Frankfurt School, particularly Habermas. The second is the rich and varied discourse concerning Marxist and socialist ecology that would provide a fuller context and further strategies for articulating and confronting Adorno on nature. Adorno on Nature // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame file:///C|/...esktop/Adorno%20on%20Nature%20__%20Reviews%20__%20Notre%20Dame%20Philosophical%20Reviews%20__%20University%20of%20Notre%20Dame.html[9/4/2015 5:47:24 PM] [1] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels. 1972. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers, 63. [2] Sebastiano Timpanaro. 1975. On Materialism. London: NLB, 19. [3] In a conversation with Horkheimer, Adorno spoke of the need of dialectically "doing the thing justice" and the dianoetic of "devoting oneself to something for its own sake and doing it justice." Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer. 2011. Towards a New Manifesto. London: Verso Books, 71, 69. [4] Jon Elster. 1985. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 57. [5] On the question of the domination of nature, and how it distinguishes Adorno from Habermas and Honneth who do not admit such domination, see Eric S. Nelson. 2011. "Revisiting the Dialectic of Environment: Nature as Ideology and Ethics in Adorno and the Frankfurt School," Telos 155: 105-126. Copyright © 2015 Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews ISSN: 1538 1617 College of Arts and Letters


Philosophy

Mind, Culture, and Activity. 22 (4) (Oct., 2015): 392-401. AUTHENTICITY: IT SHOULD AND CAN BE NURTURED By Susan T. Gardner and Daniel J. Anderson email@example.com, email@example.com Abstract (100 words) Introduction Philosophy: what is the point? This question is particularly pertinent to those of us who are engaged in the uphill battle of attempting to bring philosophy to all of the world's citizens- children and adults alike. Most often, this question is answered by referring to the potential for increasing reasoning power and expanding cognitive perspectives. Enhancing the capacity for empathy is frequently mentioned as well. Here, we focus on a different potential, namely the potential for solidifying a worthy personal goal. More specifically, we argue that it is imperative that we, who are philosophical educators, have a vision of the goal: "In the service of what do we want to expand thinking power?" Elsewhere, Gardner (2009), a co-author of this article, has argued that the only responsible way to sell the merits of improving thinking skills is to show how, as a result, individuals gain the capacity to become more autonomous, or "free," in the sense of becoming more self-legislating. However, this assertion, if taken superficially, can be misleading. On the one hand, "becoming more free" can be "over-Kantianized" in the sense of being interpreted as enhancing one's capacity for solitary rational thinking free from the input of others. On the other hand, "becoming more free" can be "under-Kantianized" in the sense of being interpreted as either mere license, or the capacity to manipulate others to one's will, i.e., unhinged, or free, from any standards of rationality altogether, i.e., free to do whatever one wants to do.1 In this paper, we attempt to stabilize the notion of autonomy by marrying Kant's notion of "solitary thinking" to a more Habermasian notion of "thinking through dialogue," and then weaving this dialogical perspective into an Existential structure, upheld, in part, by references to Charles Taylor, to psychiatrist R.D. Laing and to neuroscientist Daniel Siegel. As a result of these deliberations, we argue that we ought to overtly counsel our charges of the merits of authenticity, and, thereafter, to develop educational strategies so that we nudge one another toward that goal. Paradoxically, we claim that learning to become authentic-learning to become one's own person-can only be done through interpersonal dialogue, and that educational strategies that focus on enhancing the right kind of "authenticity-producing interchange," along with those that enhance reasoning skills, are the sort that we ought to be gifting to our children. In other words, that though authenticity must be grasped/created/embodied from the inside, authenticity can nonetheless be incubated in an environment in which its pursuit as a genuine possibility is made evident, in which its value is made paramount, and in which individuals become entangled in matrices of interpersonal reasoned interaction that are both engaged and objective. What are the Criteria for Authenticity? We suggest, at a minimum, the following five criteria for an "authenticized" notion of autonomy. 1) An authentic person must recognize that persons are not objects. In ordinary everyday life, the notion of authenticity is most typically used in conjunction with objects, e.g., "this is an authentic diamond." When persons begin to think of authenticity in this vein, they may come to believe that just as an authentic diamond must be the same throughand through, so a sufficient condition for authenticity is being the same through-and-through; that they are authentic if their "outside" matches their "inside." For example, hitting Frankie, then, could be described as an authentic act because I really wanted to hit Frankie. In a similar vein, authenticity might be perceived as a function of some long-term characteristic, e.g., I am authentic when I am angry because I have always had a bad temper. So, whatever else an authentic person must recognize, s/he must recognize that the predicate "authentic" changes its meaning entirely when applied to persons rather than objects-which brings us to the next 4 more positive points. 2) An authentic person must see herself as a future-oriented self-propelling process. Persons, because they are self-conscious language-users and have the capacity to imagine themselves in the future and hence can direct their present behaviour accordingly, are best described as "future-oriented processes." The descriptive "authenticity," then, must capture the fact that no static description can accurately characterize who I am, let alone justify any of my actions. Authentic persons, thus, can only accurately describe themselves in the present by reference to who it is that they are choosing to become. An authentic self-description is thus, in a sense, a promissory note that stands in relation to a person's ideals or values. Hence, the only means of evaluating the authenticity of persons is to ask them questions that will elucidate whether there is a discrepancy between their ideal and their current actions, i.e., whether their present actions align with the life project they are proposing. In "existential analytic" terms, this would be referred to as "inner consent" (Klaassen 2014), i.e., that one quite literally asks oneself whether one consents to do what one is doing or about to do. 3) An authentic person must recognize that s/he is always responsible for what s/he does-a responsibility that becomes evident by a reasoned reference to a temporal dimension. Let's look at the following examples: "I did x because he made me do it. I did x because everyone else is doing x. I did x because I had no choice." Note that the reasoning offered in these examples deflects responsibility away from the self; it is the kind of reasoning that suggests a sort of bystander attitude towards one's own life. By contrast, the reasoning required to signal genuine responsibility must show that, though the actor may have had little control over the circumstance in which s/he found herself, s/he nonetheless had a choice as to how to respond, and her justification for how she responded must show how s/he believes the course of action chosen contributes to the person s/he hopes to become. Authenticity, in other words, requires that we hold one another personally accountable in the sense of seeking justification relative to a future vision, albeit also relative to circumstance and personal context. Who is it that you are consenting to become by doing what you did? 4) An authentic person must recognize that s/he can self-create only relative to given circumstances and personal context. Self-creation is always relative to the circumstance and personal context; a point emphatically stressed by Viktor Frankl in his book, Man's Search for Meaning (1984). Though this point may seem obvious, failure to recognize "freedom's context" can, quite literally, be counterproductive. This is so because, for instance, if students are enthusiastically encouraged to self-create a priori2 and then, subsequently, they find their plans and expectations thwarted (perhaps utterly), such a failure in expectations and aspirations can decimate the plausibility of self-creation, and reinforce the notion that they are merely victims of circumstance-i.e., objects damaged by life. 5) An authentic person must recognize that s/he can self-create only in relation to objective descriptives that must be justified in interpersonal space. The possibility of authentic self-creation is also endangered if the limited degree of control that anyone has over the description of what they do, and consequently, who they are, is also not emphasized. Such, indeed, is the danger of self-help books that market the solipsistic, arrogant notion of the power of positive thinking: "As long as I believe that I am worthy of esteem, I will have self-esteem." Authorship over self-descriptives (or evaluative predicates) is not and cannot be a private affair, any more than a private language is possible, as Wittgenstein (1968) was at such pains to point out some time ago. Evaluative predicates don't stick just because someone says so. Evaluative predicates stick with the glue of reason. Evaluative predicates stick because they are backed by the "least weak" (Gardner, 2009) of the reasoned arguments that support competing alternatives. This leads us to the following conclusion: Who you are, and the degree to which you have power over who it is that you are becoming, is not only a function of what you do, but, as well, your ability to reason through to the best description of what you do-hopefully, before you do it. And reasoning, as argued below, is, at its core, an "inter-" rather than an "intra-"subjective process. Authenticity-Enhancing Education With a description of authenticity in hand-that authenticity requires that we view ourselves as forward-oriented processes actively responsible for responding to ever-changing circumstances which, in turn, will attract descriptives that, if objective, will call for ownership- we are now in a position to outline the sort of educational strategies that might enhance its possibility. Given the above, we articulate three principles. First and foremost, the whole notion of authenticity, and its worth, must be explicated explicitly, i.e., in order to move toward the goal, we need to know what the goal looks like. Second, we argue that becoming alert to the power of one's own self-creation can only happen within interpersonal space, and that we need to create dialogical opportunities in which participants become more skilled in the kind of "interpersonal language of freedom" that is necessary to nurture authenticity, including communicative interchanges that are (i) contingent, (ii) threaded with "liberation-enhancing questions," and (iii) "process" rather than "object" oriented. Third, we argue that we need to insist on developing the sort of reasoning skills that are necessary to recognize when reason's 'glue' is or will be (or is not or will not be) strong enough to keep evaluative predicates in place. We will address these points in turn. 1) Explicating the goal. In his book The Ethics of Authenticity (2003), originally part of the CBC's 1991 Massey lecture series entitled The Malaise of Modernity, Charles Taylor argued that the modern emphasis on self-fulfillment that appears to underwrite the current trend toward relativism, nihilism, and the lack of civic participation, does not deserve the cynical interpretation of a mere back-sliding into biologically-based selfish egoism, as suggested, for instance, in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987). He argued, rather (and perhaps surprisingly), that this apparent epidemic of narcissism is actually a misplaced reaching for an extremely high ideal, namely "authenticity." Like over-confident trapeze artists, we are reaching for the highest bar, but due to the drag of serious conceptual confusion, we are falling short, and, in so doing, potentially tumbling toward our demise. In other words, it is precisely because we are trying to be authentic, but are confused with regard to what authenticity looks like, that we are moving away from, rather than toward, the goal. In supporting this claim, Taylor (2003) explored the emergent roots of the call to authenticity through Rousseau, Locke, Nietzsche, and others, and argued that, unlike earlier societies in which a person's identity was largely fixed by his or her social position, we are required, whether we like it or not, to negotiate our identities with others; a negotiation that, importantly, can succeed or fail. He vehemently criticizes those who deem themselves authentic solely as a function of "self-choice"; it is simply unintelligible, he argues, for me to believe that I could just decide that what is significant or admirable about my life is wiggling my toes in warm mud (p 36). We all, according to Taylor, must make claims with regard to our identity-what we are referring to here as "evaluative predicates"-against what he refers to as "horizons of significance" (p. 37). What Taylor is arguing is that both the "knockers" of society who despair of the new unfettered selfishness, and the "boosters" who celebrate this narcissism as a new form of selffulfillment (p. 72) are blind to the pervasive never-ending and absolutely necessary modern struggle of self-creation. According to Taylor, we ought not to be knocking one another for being so self-centered, nor ought we to simply relax in a celebration of the modern era's materialistic overabundance. What we are called to do, rather, in order to combat the Malaise of Modernity and all the psychological, sociological, and political problems that it brings, is first to see that the struggle for an authentic self-identity is the challenge of the age, and that we must all get involved in formulating a far more precise and hence demanding notion of what that ideal indeed requires of us (p. 72). Such a description is precisely what is being offered here. However, once such a description is in hand, it behooves us to go further and articulate, at least in broad strokes, what sort of educational strategies ought to be employed so that authenticity's possibility can move toward actuality. Since self-creation, whether authentic or not, happens only through interpersonal dialogue (Mead,1965; Taylor, 2003), what is needed is a more precise analysis of what kind of interpersonal dialogue propels us toward, or away from, the goal we seek. We will refer to the kind of dialogue that enhances authenticity as the "language of freedom." 2) Creating Specific Dialogical Opportunities that Offer an Immersion in the "Language of Freedom" In making the argument that the self only emerges through dialogue, Mead, most famously known for his insistence that interpersonal dialogue is a necessary condition for the emergence of self-consciousness per se (1965), has become, to many who promote a dialogical form of education, a standard bearer. Thus, those of us in the Philosophy for Children movement have often assumed that the Community of Inquiry is a likely candidate for being heralded as a significant educational strategy for priming the pump of self-creation. However, as we argue here, such accolades need to be kept at bay until a more precise account of the kind of dialogue that is necessary for self-creation that is authentic is analyzed more fully. If it is the case that in order to reach toward authenticity, self-creating communicative interchange needs to be "contingent," threaded through with "liberating questions," and "process," rather than "object" oriented, then it would seem to follow that facilitators of Communities of Inquiry must be far more actively and genuinely "engaged" than has hitherto been recognized. If, as may be common, the facilitator tries, as it were, to disappear so as not to steal the participants' thunder, if s/he acts almost entirely like a gate keeper, if the facilitator depends too much on dynamics of the community itself to move towards truth (a strategy often promoted in calls for dialogic as opposed to monologic pedagogical approaches (Reznitskaya, 2012), too many contributions will pass into the mix unconfirmed, too many opportunities for agent-recognition will be missed, and too much object-referencing will go uncorrected. We describe each of the subcategories on the language of freedom mentioned above in turn. (i) "Contingent" communication. R.D. Laing (1969) argued that how we communicate with one another can either have a confirming or disconfirming impact on one another's identity, i.e., it can help or stultify the process of self-creation. To illustrate his point, he used the example of a 5-year old boy running to his mother saying "Mummy, look what a big worm I have got" (p. 102). The mother responds in a disconfirming or stultifying way in saying, "You are filthy-away and clean yourself immediately." What is important to note about this example is that Laing is not faulting the mother for not showing delight in being presented with a worm. Laing, rather, is faulting the mother for not seeing the boy by acknowledging the boy's agency. Specifically, Laing says of the mother that she fails "to endorse what the boy is doing from his point of view, namely showing his mummy a worm" (p. 103). Instead of using such "tangential" responses, Laing argues that we ought instead to use confirmatory responses. He describes a confirmatory response as a direct response; it is "to the point," or "on the same wavelength as the initiatory or evocatory action" (p. 99). Laing stresses that a confirmatory response need not (importantly) be in agreement, or gratifying, or satisfying. Rejection can be confirmatory if it is direct, not tangential, and recognizes the evoking action and grants it significance and validity. What Laing referred to as a "confirmatory response," Daniel Siegel, writing from the point of "Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB)," i.e., a field that studies how interpersonal interaction affects the structure of the brain, refers to as "contingent responses." In his book The Developing Mind (2012), Siegel argued that interpersonal communicative interaction-both early in life and throughout adulthood-play a central role in shaping the brain and, along with it, the ever-emerging mind. Siegel stressed that what is important in shaping our identities is not just that we are involved in relationships per se, nor that we engage in interpersonal communication per se. What is important is that we are involved in contingent communication (p. 34) by which he means that we respond to one another in a way that suggests that the other is seen as having an internal centre of subjective life worthy of attention (p. 105); that, in communicating with the other, we are attempting to see the other's minds-what Siegel refers to as "mind-sight" (p. 34). An integrated sense of self, or what Laing (1972) would refer to as a self "undivided," requires, according to Siegel, integrative communication, i.e., communication that integrates us with one another, which, in turn, allows integrative neurophysiological changes to occur throughout life. If the above carries insight, then it seems to follow that if a facilitator of a community of inquiry, or indeed anyone in any kind of interpersonal interchange, does not feel that s/he has either practical or theoretical permission to respond contingently to offerings by members of the community, tangential responses may well become the norm. Contributions by participants will just fall into the mix, and frequently, perhaps more often than not, be unrecognized. For reasons already mentioned, such "opinion tourism" will do more harm than good when it comes to its potential for enhancing authentic self-creation. (ii) "Liberating Questions." Gardner (1996) recommended to those who facilitate Communities of Inquiry to be alert to the possibility of asking a "second why," so that if, for example, the teacher asks Johnny why he hit Frankie, and Johnny responds that he hit Frankie because Frankie hit him, the teacher needs to ask again, but why did you think that hitting Frankie in response to him hitting you was a good idea? This is exactly the sort of language-this is exactly the sort of question-that gives birth to the kind of justificatory reflection that focuses on self-creation. In Truth and Method (2004), Gadamer wrote at length about the importance of asking just the right sort of question in just the right kind of way. He says, for instance, that in order to be able to genuinely ask, one must want to know, and that means knowing that one does not know (p. 157); that "the art of questioning, is the art of questioning ever further-i.e., the art of thinking" (p. 160). Saying that "genuine questioning requires that one must want to know," in turn, gives rise to the provocative question of what precisely, in this instance, the teacher, in questioning Johnny why he thought that hitting Frankie in response to Frankie hitting him was a good idea, wants to know. The only answer that seems to fit here is that the teacher wants to know who it is that Johnny is trying to become; that the teacher wants to know Johnny as a person. If this is true, then again, facilitators of Communities of Inquiry, or again anyone engaged in any interpersonal interchange, needs to become far more engaged than has hitherto been recognized; we need to follow up contributions with the kind of liberating questions that begins to lay bare the unique perspectives of others as the unique individuals they are becoming. (iii) "Process-" versus "Object"-language. "The window broke because it was hit by a stone." "The dog barked because it heard a noise in the backyard." "I hit Frankie because he hit me." What do these three claims have in common? What these statements have in common is the underlying assumption that the event cited in the reason explains the event cited in the conclusion. This language of explanation, in turn, is one that makes sense only on the assumption that there is a stable causal deterministic nexus such that, with foresight, the event cited in the conclusion could have been predicted. The use of the language of explanation, in other words, suggests that the speaker views him/herself more as a product of external forces, than as a person in charge of her own destiny. This viewpoint contrasts sharply with the language of justification, e.g., "I hit him because I wanted to send the message that I refuse to be a victim of his bullying." This language suggests that the speaker believes that he is required to account for his decisions: that he must answer for, and hence is assumed to have had control over his actions, as opposed to explaining that he is this kind of object that has these kinds of definitive properties that are outside of his control. If one is not lucky enough to be in a highly benevolent environment, then viewing oneself as an object like other objects can do double damage. Not only can it extinguish the exhilaration that comes with a robust sense of self-determination, it can solidify injuries into stable predicates. Thus, for instance, if Johnny views himself as he views other ordinary objects, it follows that he believes that, if he is subjected to harsh destructive external forces, like other objects, he can rightly view himself as damaged goods. What is missing in such a situation-what in fact can be redeemed through the language of freedom, is Johnny's recognition that whether or not Johnny as a person is indeed damaged goods, is entirely within Johnny's hands. What is missing here is that Johnny does not understand that he is being called into account; that regardless of external stimuli, Johnny is nonetheless responsible for the evaluative predicates that stick to him as a result of actions that are within his control. And what is missing here, perhaps, most importantly is the potential mitigating impact that a future vision can have on present predicates. Thus, for Johnny to motivationally engage in this process of authentic self-creation, he must first become awake to, and thereafter, constantly vigilant to, its possibility. And this is where the language of freedom comes in. What we are proposing here is that the language we use, and/or allow, in dialogue with one another can either enhance a sense of responsibility and hence activate the goal of autonomy and authenticity, or it can solidify a sense of being a victim of circumstance. What needs to happen in interpersonal interchange, whether one-on-one or in community, is that a description of an event that is offered as an explanation ought to be rejected as inappropriate for persons, and there should follow an insistence that, instead, a justification in terms of motives be offered. 3) Becoming "Tinker-Thinkers." Like the notions of "freedom" and "authenticity," the conceptual confusions that surround the notions of what counts as "thinking" and/or "reasoning" have disastrous consequences. Many, perhaps most, people assume that they are reasoning if they offer a reason-any old reason-after first promulgating a conclusion that they intuitively believe and/or want to be true. Since they believe that they, and their positions, are "reasonable," they squelch utterly any inclination either to doubt their own position or seriously contemplate the merits of opposing views. Following Gardner (2014), this can be described as a "pathological" state. She argued strenuously that we must work hard to sell the "reason game," i.e., that we owe it to our children that they learn that what counts as reasoning is not up to them. That reasoning, rather, is something that is governed by objective norms (Darwell, 2006); and that it must transpire in public space so that the worth of all truth-contenders can be estimated by their ability to survive counterexample and alternative comparison. This approach, outlined in detail by Gardner (2009), echoes the theoretical framework offered by Jurgen Habermas in his book The Theory of Communicative Action (1992). Since then, with colleague Amy Leask, Gardner has worked to create an app and kid's book that invites youngsters to become "Tinker Thinkers" (2014). This initiative aims to teach children: (1) that they can't tell whether or not an act is good or bad until they know the reason behind it: i.e., learn the importance of asking "why?"; (2) that they must see the silent reason that always comes attached with the stated reason; and, thereafter (3) that they can separate good from bad reasons by subjecting them to counterexamples; (4) and, in so doing, become convinced, as a result, that what counts as a good reason is not up to them. This kind of knowledge of specific logical moves, along with "facilitated" exposure to opposing viewpoints- as happens in Communities of Inquiry-will equip youngsters with highly effective skills to genuinely reason their way toward truth. With regard to authenticity, the payoff for being able to reason well is multifaceted. On the one hand, learning how to reason creates a habit of reasoning before acting, speaking and judging, and it is this preamble that, more than anything, will hook into the sense of selfdetermination. Secondly, the security with which evaluative judgments are structured into one's identity will be enhanced as a function of the strength of the reasons that back them. Third, since one comes to appreciate that reasoning is a function of objective rules, if faced with otherwise persuasive pressure from peers, one can appeal to an internal "Kingdom of Ends" for guidance. And finally, since one knows that the strength of any reason is a function of the degree to which it can withstand both counterexample and alternative options, one (hopefully) will be more prone to stay open to opposing views, in the knowledge that such an attitude contributes to stability of one's very self. Conclusion So the take-home message from all the above is that whether we like it or not, we are all in the business of self-creation that can either succeed or fail as function of the degree to which it approaches authenticity. If authenticity is the goal, then what an authentic self actually looks like needs to become common currency. And since a specific kind of dialogue, one we have referred to as the "language of freedom" seems necessary for authentic self-creation, this is the sort of language that we all ought to adopt whether in personal or pedagogical interaction. And finally, since the stability of self-definition is a function of the reasoning that transpires before judging, speaking and acting, and since evaluative self-predicates are only kept in place by reason's glue, then learning how to reason ought to be considered a human right. Taylor (2003) argued that since authenticity is so important, i.e., "it allows us to live (potentially) a fuller and more differentiated life because more fully appropriated as our own" (p.74), and since conceptual confusion can send us in the opposite direction, what we ought to be doing is fighting over the meaning of authenticity. This, along with suggestions as to how to enhance authenticity in our everyday world, as well as in the classroom, has been the goal of the present enterprise. 1 This worry, interestingly, echoes that of Hegel's that he outlines in The Elements of the Philosophy of Right, and discussed in detail by Axel Honneth in his book The Pathologies of Individual Freedom; Hegel's Social Theory. (2010) Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 45. 2 As might happen in a classroom exercise in which students are encouraged to imagine what kind of people they "authentically" want to become. References Bloom, A. (1987). The closing of the American mind. New York: Simon & Schuster. Darwall, S. (2006). The second-person standpoint: Morality, respect, and accountability. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Frankl, V. (1984). Man's search for meaning. New York: Pocket Book. Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.) (2nd ed). New York: Continuum. Gardner, S. T. (1995). "Inquiry is no mere conversation: It is hard work." The Australian Journal for Critical and Creative Thinking, 3(2), 38-49. Gardner, S. T. (2009). Thinking your way to freedom: A guide to owning your own practical reasoning. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Gardner, S. T. & Leask, A. (2014). Tinker thinkers. Milton, On.: Enable Training and Consulting, Inc. Gardner, S. T. (2015). "Selling the reason game." Teaching Ethics, 15(1), 129-136. Habermas J. (1992). The theory of communicative action, Vol. 1. (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. Klaassen, D. (2014) Existential analysis. Lecture on given at Capilano Univeristy, October 24. Laing, R. D. (1969) Self and others. Middlesex, England; Penguin Books. Laing, R.D. (1972) The divided self. London: Pelican Books. Mead, G. H. (1965) On social psychology (A. Strauss, Ed). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Reznitskaya, A. (2012). Dialogic thinking: Rethinking language use during literature discussions. The Reading Teacher, 65(7), 446–456. Siegel, D. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed). New York: The Guilford Press. Taylor, C. (2003). The ethics of authenticity (11th ed). Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.


Philosophy

November-December 2010 HASTINGS CENTER REPORT 41 One of the most intriguing questions in medical ethics is whether individual physicians ought to be able to refuse conscientiously to provide services that patients seek. The issue requires us to delve into difficult problems, such as the extent to which physicians must subordinate their interests to those of their current or prospective patients, and how essential the services physicians object to are as new medical technologies develop. Despite the difficulty that surrounds this issue, many bioethicists-like Dan Brock and Mark Wicclair-have tried to address it in a single journal article. But Holly Fernandez Lynch is an exception. She gives conscientious objection in medicine (hereafter, "conscientious objection") the book-length treatment that it deserves. Lynch opposes a blanket prohibition on conscientious objection. Among her reasons are that patients are not well served by physicians who have serious moral qualms about services that the patients need, and that medical professionalism does not require physicians to take all comers or to accede to all requests-even legitimate ones. She further explains that some refusals-such as a refusal to assist a sixty-year-old woman in conceiving a child-may be appropriate. We should not prevent physicians from making good objections, and we can probably think of some regardless of what our moral commitments are. Lynch concludes that we need to allow some conscientious objection; however, some readers will find that she exaggerates this need. For example, some will object to what she says is the "strongest argument for retaining room for moral refusers": the inability to know the answers to many of the moral questions that create controversy in medicine, such as whether a fetus is a person. Some readers will have more faith than Lynch does in the resources of moral philosophy to provide proofs for such claims. Some may also feel that she overstates the importance of allowing conscientious objection by defining the term too broadly. For her, conscientious objection includes "refusals grounded in values that are widely held within the profession and have been accepted as clinical standards" (p. 34). An example would be a refusal to allow a sick child to decide on his own what his treatment will be. This unusually broad conception allows Lynch to say that taking a strong stand against conscientious objection commits one to the unhappy view that physicians are mere technicians who have no personal autonomy or morality of their own. If the professional standard is no conscientious objection, then physicians can never object to patient requests on grounds of conscience, even when their conscience aligns with what their profession requires of them. But is such absurdity a consequence of refusing to condone conscientious objection? Not if the category refers, as Dan Brock believes it does, only to objections to what is legal and professionally accepted. Even those of us who feel she exaggerates, however, could agree with Lynch that a strict prohibition on conscientious objection is inappropriate. The question then becomes: How are we to make room for conscientious objection without eliminating patients' access to important medical care? Lynch develops an "institutional solution" to this problem, the details of which take up much of her book. The book has three main parts. In part one, Lynch describes the legal situation and the debate about conscientious objection in the United States. She argues in favor of resolving the debate by determining whether physicians have professional obligations that preclude them from exercising freedom of conscience in their capacity as physicians. She favors a model of medical professionalism that she calls the "gatekeeping paradigm." It does not confer such obligations on physicians, but rather gives them significant latitude in which services they offer their patients. This model places the responsibility for ensuring that patients get the care they deserve on the profession, which is the true gatekeeper to medical services and is entrusted with a "legal monopoly" over medical care. Part one and part two both lay the foundation for Lynch's solution to the problem of conscientious objection. In part two, she argues that an institutional solution is better than an individual one, in part because it permits "morals matching": that is, matching physicians with patients based on whether they have similar moral values. In addition, she claims the institution that ought to fulfill the profession's responsibility of ensuring that patients can match themselves with the proper physician is the medical licensing board. Part three-the largest section-describes the details of the institutional solution and defends it against possible criticisms. The details are laid out in a model statute and are roughly as review An Institutional Solution to Conflicts of Conscience in Medicine by Carolyn McLeod Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care: An Institutional Compromise. By Holly Fernandez Lynch. The MIT Press, 2008. 358 pages. Hardcover. $34.00. © 2010 The Hastings Center. Permission is required to reprint. 42 HASTINGS CENTER REPORT November-December 2010 follows. Physicians must register their conscientious objections with their licensing board, which must verify the sincerity of these objections and reject those that are discriminatory. Patients have access to the registries, which facilitates morals matching. If they cannot find a physician to satisfy their needs, they can complain to the board, which will have to compensate them (monetarily, if necessary) unless the board decides that their expectations are unreasonable. Lynch argues that patient requests must be legal and "scientifically proven effective for the patient's desired purpose" for a licensing board to take them seriously (p. 250). A board can develop other restrictions on reasonable demands, but only through a fair process of deliberation that involves "a wide variety of stakeholders" (p. 137). The goal here is to strike a compromise between individual physicians who have reasonable (or not unreasonable) conscientious objections and patients who have reasonable demands for services that some physicians object to. Since a compromise-in Martin Benjamin's words-"splits the difference," each party to a compromise sacrifices something, rather than getting precisely what each wants. Lynch does not always appear to accept this fact about compromises, even though she comes up with what amounts to a compromise. With her institutional solution, patients sacrifice the ability to acquire services from any physician who ought to be qualified to provide them. They also are not guaranteed to get the service they want because the licensing board might fail in remedying shortages of "willing physicians" in their area. (These are among the "hard cases" for her theory that get discussed in chapter eight.) Physicians, regardless of the conscientious objections they may have, are obligated to inform patients of all of their treatment options, to provide care in emergencies, and possibly, though not necessarily, to give patients who make objectionable demands some kind of referral. The idea of this institutional compromise is promising in many respects. By acting on it, we could, for example, substantially improve access to controversial services and enhance trust in physicians by allowing individuals to choose physicians with whom they share basic moral commitments. But Lynch's proposal is also worrisome in many respects. While discussing morals matching, she writes that patients "have a valid claim to avoid providing their support to medical services they find morally objectionable, even if that support involves no more than patronizing a physician who provides those services to others" (p. 91). Will licensing boards have to ensure matches for these patients if matches do not exist? In other words, if in a certain geographical area, there were no unwilling physicians- those who, for moral reasons, will not offer services such as abortions-will the relevant board have to recruit these physicians? Surely that would be a troubling result, for it would conflict with the profession's commitment to certain services being essential. As well, the hard cases in which boards cannot find enough physicians, willing or unwilling, to perform an essential service could become so numerous that the whole system falls apart. Clearly, Lynch's proposal is not designed for places in which there is already a serious shortage of physicians, as is the case with family physicians in many parts of Canada, for example. A further criticism is that licensing boards could engage in moral corruption while doing what the institutional solution requires, in part because there are no objective claims about patient rights that accompany this solution. For example, the outcome of the fair process of deliberation that decides which medical services are essential might be to exclude abortion services. Lynch does add that a board cannot remove "from its responsibility a medical service that has attained the status of standard of care" (p. 251). But this move seems entirely ad hoc-that is, designed to ensure that abortions are among the services that licensing boards must guarantee for patients. Whether Lynch's framework is sound also depends on whether conflicts of conscience in medicine warrant some kind of compromise, which itself depends on how comparable the interests of the relevant parties (physicians and patients) are with one another. But Lynch does not delve deeply into what these interests are. For instance, she says little about what harm physicians would suffer if their appeals to conscience were denied or what harms they ought to be willing to suffer for the sake of their conscience. Moreover, she assumes without sufficient argument that a physician who denies care to a patient who could get it close by from another physician merely inconveniences the patient rather than harms her. I have argued that this last claim is false when directed at cases involving female patients who seek emergency contraception. Lynch does not do enough to counter views like mine on this subject. Obviously, I have concerns about Lynch's institutional compromise, but they do not prevent me from recommending this book, which, as I suggested at the outset, deals more thoroughly with the topic of conscientious objection than any other treatment of it I have seen. Kudos to Lynch for taking on such a complex problem and for responding to it with useful and insightful discussion about why an institutional solution could be both appropriate and viable.