Open data, data protection, and group privacy

Philosophy

See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263725968 Open Data, Data Protection, and Group Privacy Article in Philosophy & Technology * March 2014 DOI: 10.1007/s13347-014-0157-8 CITATIONS 87 READS 970 1 author: Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: The Ethics of Digital Well-Being View project PhD thesis View project Luciano Floridi University of Oxford 465 PUBLICATIONS 14,446 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE All content following this page was uploaded by Luciano Floridi on 18 November 2014. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. EDITOR LETTER Open Data, Data Protection, and Group Privacy Luciano Floridi Published online: 18 February 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 The debate on Open Data and Data Protection focuses on individual privacy. How can the latter be protected while taking advantage of the enormous potentialities offered by ever-bigger Open Data and ever-smarter algorithms and applications? The tension is sometimes presented as being asymmetric: between the ethics of privacy and the politics of security. In fact, it is ultimately ethical. Two moral duties need to be reconciled: fostering human rights and improving human welfare. The tension is obvious if one considers medical contexts and biomedical Big Data, for example, where protection of patients' records and cure or prevention of diseases need to go hand in hand (Howe et al. 2008; Groves et al. 2013). Currently, the balance between these two moral duties is implicitly understood within a classic ontological framework. The beneficiaries of the exercise of the two moral duties are the individual vs. the society to which the individual belongs. At first sight, this may seem unproblematic. We work on the assumption that these are the only two "weights" on the two sides of the scale. Such a framework is not mistaken, but it is dangerously reductive, and it should be expanded urgently. For there is a third "weight" that must be taken into account by Data Protection, that of groups and their privacy. Privacy as a group right is a right held by a group as a group rather than by its members severally. It is the group, not its members, that is correctly identified as the right-holder. A typical example is the right of self-determination, which is held by a nation as a whole. The idea that groups may have a right to privacy is not new (see for example Bloustein (1978, 2003)) and it is open to debate (Bisaz 2012). But it has not received the attention it deserves, although it is becoming increasingly important. This because, by far, most people are not targeted by ICTs as individuals but as members of specific groups, where the groups are the really interesting focus, as carriers of rights, values, and potential risks. Think of owners of such and such kind of car, shoppers of such and such kind of food, people who like this kind of music, or people who go to that kind of restaurant, cats owners, dogs owners, people who live at that kind of postal code address, carriers of a specific gene, people affected by a certain disease, ... Open Data is more likely to treat types (of customers, users, citizens, demographic population, etc.) Philos. Technol. (2014) 27:1–3 DOI 10.1007/s13347-014-0157-8 L. Floridi (*) Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3JS, UK e-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com rather than tokens (you, Alice, me...), and hence groups rather than individuals. But reidentifiable groups are ipso facto targetable groups. It is therefore a very dangerous fallacy to think that if we protect personal data that identify individuals, the protection of the groups will take care of itself. Such an "atomistic" ontology-take care of each member separately and the group will automatically be fine too-is at the roots of current European legislation. This defines a "Data Subject" as: An identified or identifiable person to whom specific personal data relates. It is someone who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more specific factors (physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural, social). (European Commission, Justice, Data Protection, Glossary). As a consequence, both the 1995 Directive and the new Directive under discussion focus on individual persons. Here are the two texts for comparison (emphases added): Whereas the principles of protection must apply to any information concerning an identified or identifiable person; whereas, to determine whether a person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means likely reasonably to be used either by the controller or by any other person to identify the said person; whereas the principles of protection shall not apply to data rendered anonymous in such a way that the data subject is no longer identifiable [...].(Art. 26, Directive 95/46/EC) and, even more restrictively (notice the "natural"): The principles of protection should apply to any information concerning an identified or identifiable natural person. To determine whether a natural person is identifiable, account should be taken of all the means likely reasonably to be used either by the controller or by any other person to identify the individual. The principles of data protection should not apply to data rendered anonymous in such a way that the data subject is no longer identifiable. (Art. 16, COM(2012) 10 Final 2012/0010 (COD)). What we should acknowledge is the fact that both friendly and hostile users of Open Data may not care about Alice at all, but only about the fact whether some people, whoever they are, belong to the group that regularly goes to the local church, or mosque, or synagogue, uses Grindr, or has gone to a hospital licensed to carry out abortions, or indeed shares a feature of your choice. In military terminology, Alice is hardly ever a High Value Target, like a special and unique building. She is usually part of a High Pay-off Target, like a tank in a column of tanks. As I have argued elsewhere (Floridi 2013) our current ethical approach is too anthropocentric (only natural persons count) and atomistic (only the single individual count). We need to be more inclusive because we are underestimating the risks involved in opening anonymised personal data to public use, in cases in which groups of people may still be easily identified and targeted. Such inclusiveness should not be 2 L. Floridi too hard to achieve. After all, we already accept as ordinary the fact that groups as agents may infringe on someone's privacy. In the USA, we are used to consider as normal collective lawsuits (class actions) in which a group may sue a person or another group. And in Europe, consumer organisations regularly bring claims on behalf of the groups they represent. Clearly, there are cases in which the protection of a right requires a balance between the agents issuing the action and the patients receiving the action. There are very few Moby-Dicks. Most of us are sardines. The individual sardine may believe that the encircling net is trying to catch it. It is not. It is trying to catch the whole shoal. It is therefore the shoal that needs to be protected, if the sardine is to be saved. An ethics addressing each of us as if we were all special Moby-Dicks may be flattering and it is not mistaken, but needs to be upgraded urgently. Sometimes the only way to protect the individual is to protect the group to which the individual belongs. Preferably before any disaster happens. Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Massimo Durante for his most valuable comments on a previous draft of this article; to Ugo Pagallo and the participants in the panel "Open Data and Data Protection: Problems and Perspectives"-organised at the conference Computers, Privacy and Data Protection 2014 (CPDP 2014) Reforming Data Protection: The Global Perspective-for their feedback; and to Linnet Taylor for some enlightening conversations on the topic of group privacy. Her article (Taylor 2014) makes a strong and convincing case for the protection of group privacy in contexts of geolocated data, especially in Africa. References Bisaz, C. (2012). The concept of group rights in international law : groups as contested right-holders, subjects and legal persons. Leiden: Brill, Nijhoff. Bloustein, E. J. (1978). Individual and group privacy. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. Bloustein, E. J. (2003). Individual & group privacy (2nd ed.). New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. COM(2012) 10 Final 2012/0010 (COD). Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data by competent authorities for the purposes of prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, and the free movement of such data /* COM/2012/010 final 2012/0010 (COD) */ Directive 95/46/EC. Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. European Commission. Justice, Data Protection, Glossary, Data Subject: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/dataprotection/glossary/index_en.htm. Floridi, L. (2013). The ethics of information. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Groves, P., Kayyali, B., Knott, D., & Van Kuiken, S. (2013). "The 'big data' revolution in healthcare." McKinsey Quarterly. Howe, D., Costanzo, M., Fey, P., Gojobori, T., Hannick, L., Hide, W., et al. (2008). Big data: the future of biocuration. Nature, 455(7209), 47–50. Taylor, L. (2014). "No place to hide? The ethics and analytics of tracking mobility using African mobile phone data." online version available at http://www.academia.edu/4785050/No_place_to_hide_The_ethics_and_ analytics_of_tracking_mobility_using_African_mobile_phone_data. (in press) Open Data, Data Protection, and Group Privacy 3 View publication stats


Defending Eugenics: From cryptic choice to conscious selection

Philosophy

Monash Bioeth. Rev. (2018) 35:24–35 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40592-018-0081-2 1 3 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Defending eugenics From cryptic choice to conscious selection Jonathan Anomaly1 Published online: 26 May 2018 © The Author(s) 2018 Abstract For most of human history children have been a byproduct of sex rather than a conscious choice by parents to create people with traits that they care about. As our understanding of genetics advances along with our ability to control reproduction and manipulate genes, prospective parents have stronger moral reasons to consider how their choices are likely to affect their children, and how their children are likely to affect other people. With the advent of cheap and effective contraception, and the emergence of new technologies for in vitro fertilization, embryo selection, and genetic engineering, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify rolling the genetic dice by having children without thinking about the traits they will have. It is time to face up to the awesome responsibilities that accompany our reproductive choices. Keywords Eugenics * Embryo Selection * Genetic Engineering * Liberal Eugenics 1 Introduction The title of this essay is deliberately provocative. Eugenics can be thought of as any attempt to harness the power of reproduction to produce people with traits that enable them to thrive. Nearly everyone agrees that parents should provide an environment that promotes the welfare of their children. Advocates of eugenics add that we should also manipulate biology to promote well-being, provided we can do so without imposing undue risk on our children or on other people with whom they will share the planet. * Jonathan Anomaly firstname.lastname@example.com 1 Duke University, Durham, NC, USA 25 1 3 Defending eugenics In defending eugenics, I want to reclaim the spirit of authors like Francis Galton and Charles Darwin, who believed that our reproductive obligations change with our understanding of biology and our capacity to control it. Defending eugenics does not commit us to endorsing state-sponsored coercion, nor to the parochial views held by some advocates of eugenics in the early twentieth century. Likewise, defending eugenics does not commit us to genetic determinism, according to which genes determine every important aspect of our personality. No credible scientist believes this (Sesardic 2005). Rather, the scientific consensus is that virtually every trait that influences our personality and our likelihood of living a good life-including intelligence, health, empathy, and impulse control-has a substantial genetic component (Bouchard 2004; Polderman et al. 2015; Plomin et al. 2016). I'll begin with an overview of the problem that motivates eugenics, then describe the widely shared moral principles to which eugenicists have appealed. I'll end with tentative policy proposals that aim to reverse current dysgenic trends, and increase the extent to which our reproductive choices produce future people who thrive. 2 Demographic trends Reproductive choices constitute a massive intergenerational collective action problem.1 In nearly every developed country in the world people who are well-suited to have children have relatively low birth rates, yet future people would be better off if people with heritable traits that we value had a greater proportion of children. The collective action problem that reproductive choices create is much harder to solve than anthropogenic climate change, antibiotic resistance, and other problems with a similar structure. It is also much more dangerous to try to solve. Charles Darwin recognized the problem of dysgenic reproductive trends and the perils of possible solutions.2 His cousin Francis Galton, a polymath who founded the eugenics movement, shared Darwin's diagnosis but was more optimistic about solutions.3 Darwin argued that social welfare programs for the poor and sick are a natural expression of our sympathy, but also a danger to future populations if they encourage people with serious congenital diseases and heritable traits like low levels of impulse control, intelligence, or empathy to reproduce at higher rates than other people in the population.4 Darwin feared that in developed nations "the reckless, 1 I elaborate on this claim in an earlier essay (Anomaly 2014). 2 By "dysgenic" I mean the proliferation of people with traits that are detrimental to human welfare. An example would be a trait like sadism, psychopathy, or extremely low intelligence. 3 Though Galton's project was not new. In the Republic, Socrates asks Glaucon "if care was not taken in their breeding, your dogs and birds would greatly deteriorate, right?" Glaucon agrees, and Socrates continues, "the best men must have intercourse with the best women as frequently as possible, and the opposite is true of the very inferior." Republic, 459e, first published around 380 BCE. 4 A similar worry that Darwin could not have understood is the problem of "mutational meltdown" first explored by Hermann Muller, and discussed by evolutionary biologist John Tooby (2016). The problem is that without the brutal checks of natural selection, mutation load tends to increase across generations. 26 J. Anomaly 1 3 degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members" (Darwin 1882, p. 138).5 While Darwin's language is shocking to contemporary readers, we should take him seriously. The eugenics programs implemented in Nazi Germany are probably the main reason most people no longer acknowledge that there might be some truth to Darwin's worries. Indeed, because of the racist direction the eugenics movement took in the United States and Germany, many academics after World War II began to deny that races exist, that genes matter, and that intelligence or impulse control are heritable traits that help predict the relative success of different people or groups (Pinker 2002; Cofnas 2016). As Steven Pinker argues in the context of individual and group differences in intelligence, "in recent decades, the standard response to claims of genetic differences has been to deny the existence of intelligence, to deny the existence of races and other genetic groupings, and to subject proponents to vilification, censorship, and at times physical intimidation" (2006). These are understandable over-reactions to the morally abhorrent policies and pseudo-scientific claims-often couched in the language of eugenics-that led to the Holocaust. It is striking that in addition to being racist and cruel, Nazi policies had dysgenic effects. Hitler's attempt to exterminate Ashkenazi Jews-arguably among the most intelligent and productive people of the twentieth century6-was not only morally outrageous, but contrary to what any reasonable eugenics program would hope to achieve: to produce future people with qualities that we value, including intelligence and creativity. A truly eugenic program might have encouraged Jews to breed more, not less. Hitler's own vision seems to come from the scientifically erroneous view that there is a "struggle for existence" between races (a frequently misused phrase borrowed from Darwin), and that by virtue of their relative success, European Jews threatened the existence or prosperity of Germans. Hitler's rise to power came not because of his scientific acumen, but in part because of his ability to scapegoat an especially successful group, and because of the tragic human tendency to commit the zero-sum fallacy (according to which, if one group has more wealth or success, they must have taken it from other groups, rather than adding to the stock of social 5 Darwin expresses some uncertainty whether this is true in contemporary Britain, but concludes that "If the various checks [of infectious disease, starvation, and involuntary celibacy] do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule" (1882, p. 140). 6 Informal evidence for this claim comes from the success of Jews around the world even in the presence of social and legal discrimination, and from the percentage of Nobel prizes and other scientific accolades Jews were awarded in the twentieth century. More rigorous evidence comes from the heritability of IQ scores (Ashkenazi IQ is the highest in the world, nearly two standard deviations above the global average). For more on the evolution of Ashkenazi intelligence, See Cochran et al. (2006), Cochran and Harpending (2009, ch. 7), and Wade (2014, ch. 8). 27 1 3 Defending eugenics value).7 We should continue to learn from this episode in history, but stop allowing it to silence any discussion of the merits of eugenic thinking. In fact, there is increasingly good evidence that Darwin was right to worry about demographic trends in developed countries. The evidence is sparse because many people who pursue this research have a hard time getting it funded or published, due to common worries that it will resurrect racism, classism, and intolerant forms of eugenics. But evidence exists. For example, a number of authors have found a negative correlation between IQ and fertility,8 between education and fertility, and, independently, between income and fertility-especially in developed countries with robust welfare states and increased opportunities for ambitious and intelligent women.9 The problem is exacerbated by the fact that people with more education and income (correlated with higher intelligence), tend not only to have fewer children but also tend to delay reproduction in the pursuit of other goals. This is consistent with Hermann Muller's observation that "it is not the having of children but the prevention of them which today requires the more active, responsible effort, an effort which makes demands on the participants' prudence, initiative, skill, and conscience" (1963, p. 253). By contrast, Muller maintains, "persons possessed of greater foresight, and those with keener regard for their family, usually aim to have a lower than average number of children, in order that they may obtain higher benefits for those children that they do have, as well as for themselves and those near to them." (1963, p. 254). The demographic pattern Muller identified is partly explained by the high opportunity cost of having children in societies in which successful parents can pursue other goals (Becker 1981). Another explanation is that when especially successful people have fewer children, other ambitious people emulate them (Richerson and Boyd 2005, ch. 5). For example, it is increasingly common for ambitious and compassionate career women to choose to have pets rather than children, or to adopt children in middle age rather than having their own. This trend may have good effects on the adopted children in the short run but bad effects on the gene pool over the long run. Substituting cats for kids, or devoting one's career to caring for other people's kids while foregoing reproduction oneself, may be an example of pathological altruism (Oakley 2012). This occurs when pro-social emotions that were adaptive in 7 As Nicholas Wade points out, "Like Chinese immigrant communities, Jews have brought enormous benefits to the economies in which they worked. Unfortunately their success, like that of the immigrant Chinese, has in many cases elicited not gratitude but envy, followed by discrimination or murderous reprisals, a response that reflects more strongly on the greed than the intelligence of their host populations" (2014, p. 213). 8 Demographers use "fertility" to refer to the number of children people choose to have, not their capacity to have children. 9 See for example Teasdale and Owen (2008), Meisenberg (2009, 2010), and Lynn and Harvey (2008). Intelligence researchers acknowledge the so-called Flynn effect, which refers to the rise in IQ throughout the world due to environmental improvements like clean water and nutrition, but argue that in developed countries these are already exhausted or near exhaustion, so that the genetic component of IQ may be sinking even as the environmental component has risen. I should emphasize that IQ is an imperfect measure of intelligence, and that intelligence is not the only thing that matters. An intelligent sadist makes him more dangerous rather than more admirable. 28 J. Anomaly 1 3 ancestral environments produce behavior that is either counter-adaptive or leads to its own long-run reduction in modern environments. Whatever the evidence for dysgenic trends in developed countries, Francis Galton tried to show in his book Hereditary Genius (1869) that qualities we care about tend to run in families, and that changing the norms surrounding reproduction could dramatically improve the human population in the same way artificial selection can improve domesticated animals.10 Galton's followers included playwright George Bernard Shaw, novelist HG Wells, and the evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane.11 At the turn of the twentieth century, an increasing number of influential intellectuals sought to promote education about heredity and shape social norms so that women would be encouraged to carefully choose the fathers of their children. Some of the more fervent eugenicists, many of whom overestimated their understanding of the relevant science, began to promote statutes that would allow states to involuntarily sterilize citizens deemed unfit for reproduction. The first eugenic sterilization law was passed in Indiana in 1907. By the time Virginia passed a similar law in 1924, it was following the lead of 15 other American states. 3 Moral Principles In 1927 the United States Supreme Court voted by an 8-1 margin to uphold the state of Virginia's right to sterilize "feeble-minded" citizens. While the language of Buck v Bell may seem callous, and the evidence in the case was flimsy, the moral foundations of the decision are defensible. Writing for the majority, Justice Holmes argued that the Virginia statute was premised on the ideas that "the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives...without serious pain or substantial danger to life..."12 Controversial as this statement is, on a charitable reading, the moral principles the court highlights include coercing "mental defectives" (who can't make competent choices) to undergo surgery only if it involves little danger or pain, and if it either makes the person being coerced better off, or prevents them from bearing children who are likely to impose significant harm on future people. In the penultimate paragraph, Holmes compares the sacrifice of someone who is involuntarily sterilized with the sacrifice of soldiers drafted into war: 10 Showing that a trait runs in families was an imperfect way of showing a genetic component in an age before genomics. This method can still yield useful results. For example, economist Gregory Clark (2014) uses more sophisticated data analysis than Galton had available to try to disentangle social and genetic factors in explaining social mobility and success. 11 A character in Bernard Shaw's play Man and Superman lamented that "The day is coming when the great nations will find their numbers dwindling from census to census; when the six-roomed villa will rise in price above the family mansion; when the viciously reckless poor and the stupidly pious rich will delay the extinction of the race only by degrading it; while the boldly prudent, the thriftily selfish and ambitious, the imaginative and poetic, the lovers of money and solid comfort, the worshippers of success, of art, and of love, will all oppose to the Force of Life the device of sterility" (1903, p. 159). 12 Buck v Bell, 274 US 200 (1927). 29 1 3 Defending eugenics We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.11 In the final line of the decision Justice Holmes cites an earlier case (Jacobson v. Massachusetts) in which the Supreme Court upheld a law that required a Swedish immigrant to vaccinate his children against smallpox (despite the father's objections) in order to prevent serious harm to the child, and through the child, other people. While the language of the decision is compatible with a variety of moral theories, the core principle is that a citizen can be required to undergo a procedure if the cost to him is trivial compared to the social benefits. Nearly all moral theories hold this view, though people disagree about the magnitude and certainty of benefits we would need in order to justify the expected costs to the person being vaccinated, sterilized, or otherwise coerced. Compulsory sterilization is far more controversial than compulsory vaccination because of the degree of invasiveness, and the potential for abuse. Nevertheless, the following moral principles seem to be expressed in Buck v Bell: 1. The state may (in some cases) restrict someone's liberty if their mental capacity undermines their ability to make voluntary choices, and if their choices put them at serious risk of causing far-reaching and irreversible harm to themselves. 2. The state may (in some cases) restrict someone's liberty when leaving them free to act as they wish poses serious risks of harm to others. 3. The state may (in some cases) require us to act in ways that promote social welfare when we find ourselves in collective action problems in which each of us has an incentive to act one way, but most of us are better off if most people act in another way. 4. When the state has compelling reasons to coerce its citizens in accordance with one or more of the three principles above, it should do so in a way that restricts liberty least, and involves the least amount of pain or sacrifice. The plausibility of these principles in other contexts strongly suggests that much of the vehement rejection of eugenic policies after the Second World War was about empirical assumptions rather than moral principles. More specifically, people disagree about issues like the extent of our knowledge of genetics, the safety of eugenic procedures, and the ability of government agents to make the right call on whether a particular person or group has heritable characteristics that are likely to be transmitted to children who will live very bad lives, or adversely affect other people. I argue that we can use these moral principles to inform a more cautious approach to 30 J. Anomaly 1 3 eugenics which places more weight on individual liberty and less confidence in the wisdom of state agents than early manifestations of eugenics did.13 Some call this approach liberal eugenics (Agar 2004). 4 Policy proposals Many people distinguish negative from positive eugenics, and coercive from noncoercive eugenics. The idea is that negative eugenics tries to sift out undesirable psychological or physical characteristics (like psychopathy or Tay Sachs disease), while positive eugenics seeks to increase the prevalence of traits that promote individual and social welfare (like creativity or a healthy immune system).14 Coercive eugenics uses force to achieve these ends, while non-coercive eugenics uses education, information, and social norms to achieve them. The distinctions are not sharp, and they do not map onto what is right or wrong in any obvious way (Gyngell and Selgelid 2016). It is best, then, to focus on the justifiability of particular public policy proposals. 4.1 Free contraception The advent of reliable contraception-colloquially called "birth control"-was seen by some of its greatest proponents as a way to liberate women: to give them control over their lives by freeing them from the shackles of continual pregnancy and the consequences of rape. More generally, contraception allows women to invest in education rather than cosmetics, which is good for them, and for society. But some of birth control's most famous proponents also saw the potential for it to have eugenic effects, since it allows women to decide who fathers their children, and when to have children. Contraception, in other words, allows women to have sex for fun, but to carefully decide when and how and with whom to have children. According to Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, "Birth Control... means not merely the limitation of births, but the application of intelligent guidance over the reproductive power. It means the substitution of reason and intelligence for the blind play of instinct" (1922, ch. 2). Without contraception, Sanger feared, civilization "will be faced with the ever-increasing problem of feeble-mindedness, that fertile parent of degeneracy, crime, and pauperism" (1922, ch. 4). While Sanger's 14 Whether we describe an action as "promoting social welfare" or "not reducing social welfare" depends on where we draw the baseline. The baseline problem suggests that we cannot come up with a simple answer in distinguishing "making better" and "not making worse." In thinking about whether we are promoting welfare or preventing harm it is always worth asking, "compared to what?". 13 Versions of these principles can be found in recent work on the ethics of reproduction. See Dan Brock (2005), and David Benatar (2011). Many critics of eugenics have been so concerned with condemning past policies, that they often fail to distinguish moral principles from empirical claims (Buchanan 2007). This has led to moral grandstanding and motivated reasoning among its critics, leading many to minimize the importance of genes in shaping personality traits and capacities. 31 1 3 Defending eugenics language is harsh, her point is plausible.15 Contraception can prevent unwanted pregnancies, the social consequences of which are borne broadly.16 Since each of us has an interest in promoting an environment in which current and future people flourish, there are good reasons to make contraception freely available for all. This is one of the most cost-effective measures governments can take, and it can be justified by its ability to enhance individual autonomy and social welfare. 4.2 Genetic education and counseling The division of cognitive labor that market society occasions allows us to accumulate vast amounts of knowledge, but it also renders people (rationally) ignorant about how most things work, including the universe in general, and the human body in particular (Hayek 1945). Most people apparently do not want to understand cosmology, biology, or genetics. And they don't need to in order to live reasonably successful lives, even if their success depends on other people knowing little bits about how things around them work-like microwave ovens, human kidneys, nuclear power plants, internal combustion engines, etc. All of us depend on these things working well, and on the ability of experts to repair or replace them when they fail, but very few people need to know how any or all of these work. The problem comes when we bear the costs of other people's ignorance. In a democracy we share the undesirable policy consequences of one another's ignorant or irrational votes (Huemer 2015). And in a society that shares at least some of the costs and benefits of productive work, the consequences of people reproducing at random are felt by all of us. This suggests that taxpayers should be willing to finance genetic testing and the provision of genetic information to prospective parents, with the goal of helping them make informed reproductive choices that will benefit their children, and protect other people from harm. Since state provision of education or information always has the potential to turn into propaganda (Mill 1859, ch. 5), there may be reasons to publicly finance its private provision by teachers and doctors in a competitive market. Finally, in addition to education, as genetic engineering becomes safe and affordable, barriers to accessing socially beneficial genetic enhancements should be removed. 15 Sanger's claim about the link between genes and crime, long ignored or repudiated by academics, appears to be borne out to some extent by twin studies. See Barnes et al. (2014). 16 The social consequences of reproductive choices spill across borders and generations. This suggests that citizens in wealthy countries have strong reasons to support subsidizing contraception for those in poor countries. In particular, the population in most African countries is predicted to explode over the next century, and while population growth per se is not a bad thing, it is bad when it occurs in countries that rely on Western technology for food and medicine, but that cannot support their own population through endogenous economic growth within stable political institutions. 32 J. Anomaly 1 3 4.3 Incentives and penalties The current demographics of Western countries are troubling, as people with a higher IQ, more education, and greater income reproduce at relatively low levels. Some have suggested paying people who would make good parents to have children. But this misunderstands the problem of opportunity cost: most people with higher intelligence or more money don't reproduce less because they can't afford children; they do so because they have many other valuable ways of spending their time, including writing books, volunteering, taking exotic vacations, and advancing their careers. States might improve the situation by mandating paid parental leave in the workplace, so there are fewer costs to temporarily leaving work to take care of children. Sweden has among the most generous paid parental leave laws in the world, and it is among the few developed countries with a replacement birthrate. Some studies suggest that strong family leave laws are the primary reason for its demographic stability (Hoem 2005). But the evidence is tainted by the fact that native-born Swedes have below-replacement fertility, and foreign-born immigrants from Somalia have more children, thus bringing Sweden close to replacement levels (Tollebrant 2017). This makes the effect of family leave laws a little unclear. Some authors have suggested paying some people not to reproduce, or instituting a parental licensing scheme. Francis Crick tentatively proposed both ideas at a symposium on eugenics (1963, pp. 276, 284).17 In principle, there are reasons to support policies like these. But they raise real worries about corruption by bureaucrats, black markets for pregnancy, and political legitimacy: in constitutional democracies, controversial policies cannot produce their desired effects over the long run unless there is some degree of transparency and public support. The rationale for any justified licensing scheme is that some activities require competence to safely perform, and those who engage in them without adequate skill or foresight are likely to seriously harm other people (LaFollette 1980). Some parents lack the desire to take care of their children. This is illustrated by the fact that many single mothers sue unwilling fathers for court-mandated child support. Other parents abuse their children, or lack the means to provide food, shelter, medical care, and education to their children. The typical response is for the state to step in and pay for all of these things, and in extreme cases to remove children from their parents and put them in foster care. But it would be more cost-effective to prevent unwanted pregnancies than treating their consequences, especially if we could achieve this goal by subsidizing the voluntary use of contraception. It may also be more desirable from the standpoint of future people. The most compelling reason (though certainly not a decisive reason) for supporting parental licensing is that traits like impulse control, health, intelligence, and 17 The conference was attended by other Nobel laureates like Hermann Muller and JBS Haldane, and public intellectuals like Julian Huxley whose brother Aldous wrote the eugenic dystopia Brave New World. 33 1 3 Defending eugenics empathy have significant genetic components.18 What matters is not just that some parents are unwilling or unable to take care of their children; but that in many cases they are passing along an undesirable genetic endowment. As John Stuart Mill argued: It is not in the matter of education only, that misplaced notions of liberty prevent moral obligations on the part of parents from being recognised, and legal obligations from being imposed... The fact itself, of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life. To undertake this responsibility-to bestow a life which may be either a curse or a blessing-unless the being on whom it is to be bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being (1859, ch. 5). Mill expressed ambivalence about imposing coercive laws on parents, but was clear that policies requiring prospective parents to demonstrate their ability to care for children "are interferences of the State to prohibit a mischievous act-an act injurious to others, which ought to be a subject of reprobation, and social stigma, even when it is not deemed expedient to superadd legal punishment" (1859, ch. 5). For a parental licensing scheme to be fair, we would need to devise criteria that are effective at screening out only parents who impose significant risks of harm on their children or (through their children) on other people. This is hard enough. It would be even more difficult to select appropriate penalties to impose on those who fail a reproductive licensing test, but have children anyway. One way to enforce licensing is to impose fines or other costs on those who have children without a license. Despite its unpopularity in many states around the world, American judges occasionally order "deadbeat dads" who father children they can't support to stop reproducing, though the order is difficult to enforce, especially since most states lack eugenic sterilization provisions. As a rule of thumb, though, states should apply as little coercion as possible to facilitate the emergence of future people with traits that enable them to thrive.19 18 Scientists distinguish the cognitive and affective components of empathy (the first concerns our ability to understand other people, especially their emotions, and the second concerns our ability to react appropriately to someone else's emotional states). Both are strongly influenced by genes, and the absence of either or both is associated with narcissism, psychopathy, or autism (Baron-Cohen 2012). On the other hand, too much empathy can lead to neuroticism and pathological altruism. So there is presumably an optimal range of empathy outside of which children are more likely to develop disorders. 19 To the extent that informal social sanctions work, these are preferable to coercive laws. But informal sanctions often fail to work well in large and anonymous groups, especially when the costs and benefits of our choices are spread thinly, and accrue mainly to future people. This may give us reason to endorse more freedom to move between political communities with different rules and norms (Nozick 1974, ch. 10). But this freedom wouldn't address the demographic worry that the proportion of people in the world making eugenic reproductive choices may be shrinking, which is a problem for distant generations of people who share a single planet, if not a single political community. 34 J. Anomaly 1 3 5 Conclusion Public policies cannot create a eugenic utopia. In fact, passing legal mandates and licensing requirements is often more dangerous and less effective than relying on voluntary choice to achieve the same results. It may be desirable to increase informed consumer choice by subsidizing contraception and improving access to education about genetics and reproductive technology so that people can make conscious choices about the characteristics of their children. Changing reproductive norms can also go some way in encouraging eugenic choices. For example, as it becomes more socially acceptable to use sperm and egg donors, to screen embryos, and to use surrogates, the outcome will likely be collectively beneficial. Many people who have a visceral fear of these procedures are even more apprehensive about genetically modifying embryos. But arguments can change attitudes. In recent years, influential authors have argued that we have a moral obligation to produce children with the best chance of the best life (Savulescu and Kahane 2009), and that many opponents of biomedical technology have a discredited teleological view of human evolution (Buchanan and Powell 2011). I have offered a guardedly optimistic account of how some public policies might increase the extent to which our reproductive choices are both individually rational and collectively desirable. But I concede that I may be wrong about any of the measures I've considered. Sometimes the best policy is not to have one. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. References Agar, N. 2004. Liberal Eugenics: In Defense of Human Enhancement. New York: Blackwell Publishing. Anomaly, J. 2014. Public goods and procreation. Monash Bioethics Review 32 (3): 172–188. Barnes, J.C., et al. 2014. Demonstrating the validity of twin research in criminology. Criminology 52 (4): 588–626. Baron-Cohen, S. 2012. Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness. London: Penguin Press. Benatar, D. 2011. The Limits of Reproductive Freedom. In Procreation and Parenthood: The Ethics of Bearing and Rearing Children, ed. D. Archard, and D. Benatar. 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The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. New York: Basic Books. Cofnas, N. 2016. Science is not always self-correcting: Fact-value conflation and the study of intelligence. Foundations of Science 21 (3): 477–492. Crick, F. 1963. Eugenics and Genetics. In Man and His Future, CIBA Foundation Symposium. Darwin, C. 1882. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. London: John Murray Publishing. Galton, F. 1869. Hereditary Genius. http://galto n.org/books /hered itary -geniu s/text/pdf/geniu s.pdf. Gyngell, C., and M. Selgelid. 2016. Twenty-First Century Eugenics. In The Oxford Handbook of Reproductive Ethics, ed. L. Francis. New York: Oxford University Press. Hayek, F. 1945. The use of knowledge in society. American Economic Review 35 (4): 519–530. Hoem, J.M. 2005. Why does Sweden have such high fertility? Demographic Research 13 (22): 559–572. Huemer, M. 2015. Why people are irrational about politics. In Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, ed. J. Anomaly, et al. New York: Oxford University Press. LaFollette, H. 1980. Licensing parents. Philosophy & Public Affairs 9 (2): 182–197. Lynn, R., and J. Harvey. 2008. The decline of the world's IQ. Intelligence 36 (2): 112–120. Meisenberg, G. 2009. Wealth, intelligence, politics and global fertility differentials. Journal of Biosocial Science 41 (4): 519–535. Meisenberg, G. 2010. The reproduction of intelligence. Intelligence 38: 220–230. Mill, J.S. 1859. On Liberty. http://www.econl ib.org/libra ry/Mill/mlLbt y1.html. Muller, H. 1963. Genetic Progress by Voluntarily Conducted Germinal Choice. In Man and His Future, CIBA Foundation Symposium. Nozick, R. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books. Oakley, B. 2012. Pathological Altruism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Pinker, S. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking Press. Pinker, S. 2006. Groups and Genes: Lessons of the Ashkenazim. The New Republic. https ://newre publi c.com/artic le/77727 /group s-and-genes . Plato. 360 BCE. The Republic. http://class ics.mit.edu/Plato /repub lic.html. Plomin, R., et al. 2016. Top ten replicated findings from behavioral genetics. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 11 (1): 3–23. Polderman, T.J., et al. 2015. Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on 50 years of twin studies. Nature Genetics 47: 702–770. Richerson, P., and R. Boyd. 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sanger, M. 1922. The Pivot of Civilization. http://www.guten berg.org/files /1689/1689-h/1689-h.htm. Savulescu, J., and G. Kahane. 2009. The moral obligation to produce children with the best chance of the best life. Bioethics 23 (5): 274–290. Sesardic, N. 2005. Making Sense of Heritability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaw, G.B. 1903. Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy. https ://www.guten berg.org/files /3328/3328-h/3328-h.htm. Tollebrant, J. 2017. Immigrant Fertility in Sweden. Statistics Sweden. Retrieved March 4, 2018 from https ://iussp .confe x.com/.../Immig rant%20fer tilit y%20in%20Swe den_Tolle brant .pdf. Teasdale, T., and D. Owen. 2008. Secular declines in cognitive test scores: A reversal of the Flynn effect. Intelligence 36 (2): 121–126. Tooby, J. 2016. The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering. https ://www.edge.org/ respo nse-detai l/26714 . Wade, N. 2014. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. New York: Penguin Publishing.


Corruption by Literature

Philosophy

This essay argues not just that literature can corrupt its readersâif literature can improve, it can also corruptâbut that some of that is our fault: by telling people to extract moral lessons from fictions, weâve set them up to be led astray by writers like Ayn Rand. A global attitude of message-mining sets readers up to be misled, confused, or complacent (because they âgave at the officeâ), as well as to reject some excellent books. Ironically, the best way to make sure that literature sometimes corrupts is to pretend that it always improves. So maybe we should be more careful about ascribing universal moral value to literature, whether via empathy, training, or propositional content.
          We should be equally wary of a second kind of aesthetic corruption, one that leads people to judge ideas true merely because they are delightful. Aesthetic Pollyannas subscribe to optimistic theories because they're beautiful (literature always improves! how lovely!); aesthetic Eeyores subscribe to pessimistic theories because they're sublime (literature always fails! how cool!). Our only hope of getting it right about literature depends on us all resisting aestheticized cognition.  As we saw above, there may be real-world consequences if we don't.

Landy, Joshua. "Corruption by Literature." Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 2 (April 30, 2010): http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/49. Corruption by Literature Joshua Landy Stanford University CAN PEOPLE BE CORRUPTED BY MADE-UP STORIES?1 Vocabulary shifts aside, this question has been a heated one ever since the character Socrates, in Plato's Republic, alleged that tragedy makes us soft by accustoming us to giving free rein to our feelings, and since Aristotle wrote- very likely in response-that tragedy actually purifies our emotions, in some vague way that has forever remained unspecified.2 Succeeding centuries have witnessed all kinds of variations on the same basic disagreement, right down to contemporary claims that, on the one side, literature is the one and only mechanism for developing empathy for those not like us and, on the other, that literature is a tool of the oppressive hegemonic régime, an ideological apparatus designed to keep the populace in a catatonic trance. 1 This article was originally delivered as an address to the "Corruption" conference at Stanford in April 2008. I have chosen to preserve the rather casual tone of the piece, at the risk of oversimplification; readers interested in more thorough argumentation and more extensive footnoting may find both in my "A Nation of Madame Bovarys: On the Possibility and Desirability of Moral Improvement through Fiction," in Art and Ethical Criticism, ed. Garry L. Hagberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 63-94, as well as in my "Philosophy to the Rescue," Philosophy and Literature 31 (2007): 405-19, from which articles some of the material in this piece has been borrowed. I am grateful to Jeff Dean and Garry Hagberg for permission so to borrow. In addition to those mentioned here, my thinking has been enriched tremendously thanks to readings of Gregory Currie, Arthur Danto, Daniel Jacobson, Eileen John, Suzanne Keen, Robert Pippin, Richard A. Posner, and Kendall Walton, and I am happy to acknowledge that debt here. 2 Fourth-century Athenians did not, of course, employ the terms "literature" or "fiction," but they clearly knew the difference between stories designed to be taken as true (whether such stories were accurate or error-strewn or even deceptive) and stories not designed to be taken as true. See Aristotle, On Poetics, trans. Seth Benardete and Michael Davis (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2002), 1451b1-6; Margalit Finkelberg, The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 26-27; Andrew Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 230-31; Joshua Landy, "Philosophical Training Grounds: Socratic Sophistry and Platonic Perfection in Symposium and Gorgias," Arion 15, no. 1 (2007): 97n2. 2 REPUBLICS OF LETTERS It's a little hard to find one's way in all this, but I want, here, to say both yes and no. First the no: I want to deny to literature the inherent power to make its readers worse; such power, I'll suggest, is granted only by institutions of reading, and it can easily be taken away by the same institutions. If individual works corrupt individual readers, this is a mark merely of the incompetence of reader, institution, or both. But I want to suggest that there's a potentially troubling corollary to this perhaps comforting thought. Second, the yes: I want to suggest that there is a particular way of being corrupted by fiction, one that we need to be especially wary of, an insidious temptation that comes along with the deep love of literature that, I assume, all literary critics once possessed, and that some are lucky enough to retain. 1. IMAGINATIVE RESISTANCE Some contemporary philosophers strongly imply that no such corruption is possible. There is, they say, a thing called "imaginative resistance": when presented with a fictional world in which, say, murder is good, we find ourselves unable (or at least unwilling) to imagine it. As Tamar Gendler puts it, "I have a much easier time following an author's invitation to imagine that the earth is flat than I do following her invitation to imagine that murder is right."3 And by consequence, I am entirely safe from any debasement at the hands of the work. Is this correct? First of all, we might object that to use the word "murder" is already to stack the deck, since "murder," unlike "killing," is a moral term. What if we called it, say, "taking care of"? What, in other words, if we consider the case of mafia fiction, in which the very worst thing one can do is to report crimes to the police, and the very best thing one can do is, at times, to "take care of" an unarmed human being, someone whose only blemish is, perhaps, to have reported crimes to the police? It is in fact a fascinating feature of certain mafia movies, and virtually all outlaw movies, that they perform an imaginative "revaluation of values" without us resisting in the slightest. Mummy movies, incidentally, have a related effect: when the ultra-rationalist-the one who insists loudly that there is no such thing as mummies-is the first to be strangled to death, we feel no sorrow, since obviously he should have known better. For the duration of the movie, we are people who would rather spend time with believers in the paranormal than with seekers of fact; we are people whose firm conviction it is that to base one's judgments on logic and empirical evidence is to merit extermination. And perhaps this attitude, which we could term "imaginative inertia," is the standard case. Far from resisting the different, sometimes opposite, values of the fictional world, we positively delight in trying them on for an hour or two. 2. SYMMETRY So you might think: fictions can corrupt. If I watch too many mafia movies, I will start to believe that reporting crimes to the police is a dreadful thing, and killing-sorry, "taking care of"-those who do so is a glorious shining virtue. We should be wary of fiction (or I suppose excited about fiction, if you're the kind of person who wants everyone to be corrupted; though I suppose if you want people to be corrupted, it's not clear that this would any longer count as corruption, on your definition). Still, consider again the example of mummy movies. After I watch the 1959 ver- 3 Tamar Gendler, "The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance," Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000): 58. LANDY | CORRUPTION BY LITERATURE 3 sion,4 with its wonderfully caricatural mummy-denier, am I actually shamed into treating mummy-believers with greater respect in future and exhibiting the proper dread at Tutankhamen exhibitions? I don't think so. I became a different person during the viewing experience, but this has had no lasting impact on me-perhaps precisely because I became a different person- in my everyday life. It is far from clear, in other words, that fictions can, by themselves, lead a reasonably sensible reader astray. I'll come back later to these two qualifications-the sensible reader, the fictions acting by themselves-but for now I want to point out an important corollary. The corollary, as I see it, is this: if fictions cannot corrupt, then fictions cannot edify. If I am virtuous, then I will certainly resist the promptings of Sade to rape and torture; but if I am vicious, then I will just as strongly resist the urgings of Dickens to do unto others what I would have done to myself, or to be kind to escaped convicts, or to embrace (heaven forfend) the Christmas spirit. Perhaps I will resist Dickens even if I am good, which is to say even if I share the values his texts appear to be endorsing. After all, there is something about sanctimonious fictions that makes one either burst out laughing, as Oscar Wilde famously claimed to, or respond with indignation. (I like to think of this as the Meg Ryan Syndrome: when you leave an "uplifting" film like Sleepless in Seattle, you may feel like breaking something.) 3. THE ETHICAL TURN I'm claiming, then, that fictions cannot, by themselves, corrupt a reasonably sensible reader, and also that fictions cannot, by themselves, edify a reasonably sensible reader. Now I recognize that this places me rather at odds with an important recent trend in literary criticism. We are living in the age of the ethical turn, and it has become commonplace to claim that literature's defining characteristic is its ability to make people nicer (rather in the way, perhaps, that music used to be said to "soothe the savage breast"). Substantial quantities of time and journal space have been dedicated to assessing the precise ways in which literature contributes to a better society. Some, like Mark William Roche, have suggested that literature makes us better people by apprising us of important moral truths.5 Indeed it often sounds, in Roche, as though a literary work were nothing more than a glorified mechanism for delivering messages, like a horse-drawn UPS truck. Thus literature tells us things about life (p. 82); it communicates something to us (p. 63); it offers insights (pp. 95, 208, 211); it has an idea (p. 65); it has a message (p. 252); it has something to say (p. 63); why, it goes so far as to make arguments (p. 57), and can, as a result, mislead the unwary (p. 64). A second group (headed by Lynn Hunt and Richard Rorty) has argued that literary texts foster empathy with an ever-widening circle of human types, gradually bringing more and more of "them" under the designation "us."6 And a third group, headed by Martha Nussbaum, has 4 The Mummy, dir. Terence Fisher (London: Hammer Film Productions, 1959). 5 Mark William Roche, Why Literature Matters in the Twenty-first Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 6 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 4 REPUBLICS OF LETTERS seen literature as fine-tuning our moral decision-making faculty, so that we are better equipped to notice and respond to subtle claims on our moral attention.7 In almost all cases, the salutary effect on readers is presented as automatic, inevitable, "inescapable"-as though novels were so many bricks with which to hit recalcitrant unbelievers over the head, in hopes of shaking their skepticism loose. Thus Nussbaum writes that "it is impossible to care about the characters and their fate in the way the text invites without having some very definite political and moral interests awakened in oneself."8 4. MESSAGES I want to argue against all three approaches, before talking about what I take to be the real improvement and real corruption available at the hands of fiction. Let's start with the idea that fiction is a mechanism for delivering helpful moral messages. Before I read such and such a story, the argument runs, I didn't know it was good to do X and bad to do Y; but now I see the light. How convincing is this approach? Well, let's take an example. In the Nun's Priest's Tale, Chaucer tells the story of Chauntecleer, a rambunctious rooster who has what he takes to be a prophetic dream, warning him not to go out into the yard. His wife, Dame Pertelote, reassures him that nightmares are not portents but merely the result of a bad diet, and that what he needs is in fact "some laxatyf."9 Chauntecleer wanders out into the yard, and there, sure enough, is the fox that he dreamed about. Slyly, the fox invites Chauntecleer to sing with that beautiful voice of his and to keep his eyes closed as he does so. When the rooster's eyes are closed, the fox snatches him up and carries him off. Chauntecleer is only saved when he tricks the fox into bragging about his victory and thus freeing him from his jaws. What is the moral of the story? Let me tell you: the moral of the story is that dreams are prophetic. This is clearly proven by the fact that the rooster's dream came true after all, in spite of the foolish cynicism of Pertelote. Not convinced? You think perhaps that the moral is something different-that it is good to be prudent and bad to let arrogance get the better of us? Perhaps you even believe that the story teaches us this, because, after all, Chauntecleer's arrogance led to his downfall; we must learn from his example to be more humble and circumspect. If so, then notice that the two claims-that the story teaches us to be prudent, that the story teaches us to believe in oneiromancy-have exactly the same structure and exactly the same evidentiary basis. Both are "proven," quote-unquote, by means of a fictional narrative. (Indeed, a rather ludicrous one: can this story really "prove" anything other than the claim that if you happen to be a talking rooster, you should beware of talking foxes?) And both have the support of the narrator, who chastises Pertelote for not believing in dreams just as much as he chastises Chauntecleer for sauntering into the yard. In fact, the oneiromancy moral has if anything more argument on its side, being supported by the large number of prophetic dreams Chauntecleer cites from the Bible, a book 7 See esp. Martha Nussbaum, "'Finely Aware and Richly Responsible': Literature and the Moral Imagination," in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 167-91. 8 Martha C. Nussbaum, "Invisibility and Recognition: Sophocles' Philoctetes and Ellison's Invisible Man," Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 278. 9 Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: An Interlinear Translation, trans. Vincent F. Hopper (Great Neck, NY: Barron's, 1970), line 177. LANDY | CORRUPTION BY LITERATURE 5 whose authority many, if not most, of Chaucer's listeners could reasonably be expected to take very seriously indeed. Why, then, do we want to believe the prudence moral but not the oneiromancy moral? Because the former scenario is realistic and the latter is not. In real life, people (and not just farm animals) are punished for their hubris, but in real life, dreams do not point to the future. Very well. But the problem is that we have assumed the very thing we set out to prove. We say that the story fails to convince us that dreams are prophetic because it offers, as its only evidence, a series of tales that do not seem likely; but the reason such stories do not seem likely is that dreams are not prophetic. In circular fashion, the Nun's Priest's Tale convinces us only of what we already believed before we began to read it. Which means, strictly speaking, that it convinces us of nothing at all. None of this has deterred Chaucer scholars from finding all kinds of edifying messages in the Nun's Priest's Tale. As one such scholar puts it, "The [Nun's Priest's] Tale could only have been written for a medieval audience which looked at life seriously.... If we turn to the poetry, we can see that it is of a kind which could only proceed from a fine moral concern."10 We're supposed to learn from it not to be like the rooster, or not to be like the Nun's Priest, or to be like the widow who opens the tale, or to read it as an allegory of the Fall, or as an allegory of the Church. I actually see this as a mark of desperation. Critics know they are supposed to draw an edifying lesson, and so they make one up; in a sense it doesn't matter which, as long as the purported piety matches our own. Now this, elegantly enough, is exactly the procedure of the Nun's Priest himself. Just like the Chaucer scholars, he assures us that the story has a moral-indeed, he makes explicit what they leave implicit, viz. the belief that every story has a moral. And just like them, he lavishes upon us a whole heap of morals: it's dangerous to be arrogant; "murder will out"; "destinee ... ma[y] nat been eschewed"; "ever the latter ende of joye is wo"; and even, charmingly enough, "mulier est hominis confusio" ("woman is the ruin of man").11 All of these morals surely cannot be true at once. If it is really true that the world is ruled by divine Providence, such that arrogance is always punished and murder always revealed, then it is not true that joy is always followed by sadness: if God rewards the good, then some joys are surely allowed to endure. Further, if destiny rules the show, then there is not much sense in castigating Chauntecleer for his lack of prudence. The Nun's Priest's Tale is, in fact, a parody of didacticism, a story that reminds us of how extraordinarily easy it is to draw apparently edifying lessons from any narrative. As long as our listeners already subscribe to a particular piety, they will happily take a story to be illustrating it; they will indeed consider it to emerge automatically from the story, as the only possible inference. They will go so far, under certain circumstances, as to consider the story all the evidence it needs. It is not even the case that we learn this from the Nun's Priest's Tale-not even the case, that is, that we learn how ineffectual fictions are as a tool for conversion. The Nun's Priest's Tale is a parody of didacticism, but true to its own implicit principles, it fails to teach even the impotence of literary instruction. Had it done so, then there would surely not exist today that voluminous and intensely earnest bibliography of devout interpretations. The Nun's Priest's Tale is a story that fails to prove even its own futility-and that, in so doing, vindicates itself. 10 David Holbrook, "The Nonne Presstes Tale," in The Age of Chaucer, ed. Boris Ford (London: Penguin, 1969), 119. 11 See lines 286, 572, 439, and 398, respectively. 6 REPUBLICS OF LETTERS One last point about the Nun's Priest's Tale. At one point, the Nun's Priest tells us that we should pay attention to his story because it is true.12 This is a vital moment, a crucial admission: the admission is that fictions lack something that histories possess, namely the ability to prove something possible. This is, incidentally, what explains the James Frey controversy and its recent fellows. Fictions cannot offer any substantiation for their implicit claims, and accordingly it is always open to us to dismiss them as fantastical. This may well be why a group of fifteen conservative scholars and public policy leaders, when asked by the right-wing journal Human Events to name what they considered the "ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries,"13 didn't mention D. H. Lawrence, or Emile Zola, or Bertolt Brecht; they listed Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Comte, Kinsey, Skinner, and Mead. Not a single work of fiction ended up on the list. 5. EMPATHY So much for the message view. What, however, about the empathy view? Is it true that empathy for fictional entities guarantees more charitable treatment of one's neighbors, those at least whose representatives feature in our imaginative reading? Well for one thing, it's not a given that understanding will lead to compassion. For another thing, it's not a given that imaginative identification with those who are not like us is an absolute good, such that its presence automatically enhances, and its absence automatically lowers, the moral status of any given situation. Moral behaviour is not just a matter of making benevolent, broad-minded judgments (for example, "people from a different country may be just as nice as people from my country"). It is also a matter of making the appropriate negative judgments (for example, "murderers are not nice people"). This means that if fictions really do train me to be compassionate toward all others, then I may actually start becoming less moral. If you don't believe me, just imagine someone who reads Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and concludes that abduction and sexual abuse are really not so terrible after all. This person would be a bad reader, made morally worse by excessive identification. For Lolita, in fact, the ideal reader is one who continually stands back from his or her empathy; indeed, the peculiar power of the work derives from the perpetual feeling of unease generated by the oscillation between disgust, connivance, and disgust at our connivance.14 Moralists will of course tell us that this is quite right, since that is how Lolita teaches us that paedophilia is to be avoided and condemned, and that, in general, we should pay attention to the desires of other people before selfishly using those people as mere means. But how many readers do not already think this before picking up the book? We don't learn this from Lolita; on the contrary, a healthy moral compass is the price 12 "Now every wys man, lat him herkne me: / This storie is also [as] trewe, I undertake, / As is the book of Lancelot de Lake, / That wommen holde in ful gret reverence" (lines 444-47). There is heavy irony here, of course, but it is significant, I think, that this is the kind of argument it makes sense to make. 13 "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries," Human Events, May 31 2005, http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?id=7591. 14 Stunningly, there is actually at least one reading of Lolita that presents it as a salutary exercise of our compassion for moral monsters. See Kellie Dawson, "Rare and Unfamiliar Things: Nabokov's 'Monsters,'" Nabokov Studies 9 (2005): 115-31. And see also Francine Prose: "Lolita deepens our well of compassion and sympathy, whether we like it or not" ("Lolita: Eros Between the Covers" http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/reconsiderations/francine-prosereconsideration-lolita.php). LANDY | CORRUPTION BY LITERATURE 7 of admission, the price of entry into that vertiginous affective space.15 And if we did learn that, then this would rather give the lie to the idea that we automatically empathize with novelistic heroes, gradually expanding the category "we" until it encompasses all of "them." We don't, and we shouldn't. It is dangerous to empathize indiscriminately. It is almost as though Nabokov wrote Lolita with no other purpose than to provide a ready example with which to defeat the simplistic view of realist fiction as caritas-based saviour of the world. 6. FINE-TUNING The Nussbaum view-the claim, that is, that literary texts give us practice with morally complicated situations-manages to survive both of these critiques, which is one reason why it is by far the most interesting of the three approaches. Even here, however, there is a problem. Or rather, a pair of problems: the amorality objection and the immorality objection. Nussbaum assumes that when we take an intensive, vigorous, sustained, detailed, painstaking interest in the moral entanglements of other lives, we do so in a moral way and emerge improved as a result. But there is such a thing as an intensive, vigorous, sustained, detailed, painstaking yet detached interest: it is called gossip. And as irony would have it, the very work Nussbaum considers the archetype of morally improving fiction-Henry James's The Golden Bowl-features a gossip of world-class calibre. A clear reductio ad absurdum of Nussbaum's position, the Fanny Assingham case shows, if it shows anything, that a fascination with (or even a fine awareness of) interpersonal niceties need not fuel any concern for our fellow human being. Fine awareness is, to phrase it in Jamesian terms, no guarantee of rich responsibility. Worse yet, it is possible to take an intensive, vigorous, sustained, detailed, painstaking interest in the moral entanglements of other lives for vicious reasons. It is quite true that if we are to acquit ourselves of all our moral obligations toward other people, we must know them very well. But the implication does not work the other way around. On the contrary, intimate knowledge of someone may be the key to effectively torturing him or her. If you want evidence of this, just have a sibling. (I myself have two.) Or consider Room 101 in Orwell's 1984 or, for that matter, the ingeniously sadistic Mlle Vinteuil, whom Proust's narrator describes as an "artist of evil."16 For every Mrs. Dalloway, there is an O'Brien; for every Amélie Poulain, there is an Iago. Nussbaum may well be right that literature is excellent training for the picking up of nuances of personality and behaviour; there is just no guarantee, unfortunately, that this skill will be put to altruistic use. Indeed, if Lisa Zunshine is to be believed, literature presents an evolutionary advantage precisely because detailed knowledge of other minds makes them that much easier to control.17 7. THE CORRUPTION OF MORALISM Literature cannot corrupt, then, any more than it can morally improve. Or rather, literature cannot corrupt on its own. But it can corrupt, ironically enough, when coupled with the belief that it is morally beneficial. For if we believe that fiction is the place to go to receive moral instruction, 15 Cf. Noël Carroll on Crime and Punishment. "Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding," Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 130. 16 Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 162 (translation mine). 17 Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 8 REPUBLICS OF LETTERS we may become deeply confused about what is right and what is wrong. Anyone who can be converted into a view by a fiction can be converted out of it by a fiction. If book XI of the Odyssey is enough to turn me into a pacifist on Monday, then book IX of the Iliad, which I read the following day, will be enough to make me believe in the glory of violence; if the Nun's Priest's Tale makes me prudent in the morning, then The Open Road will make me reckless by nightfall. Our culture is full of competing values and of stories to "prove" any one of them; conversions through fiction are simply not reliable. In our zeal to learn moral lessons from fictions, we may leap to some strange conclusions. We may start to believe, for example, that race relations in Los Angeles really are as they are depicted in the absurdly overblown movie Crash.18 Or we may dismiss Ralph Ellison's masterpiece Invisible Man as a flop-this, believe it or not, is the stated view of Houston Baker-because it "tells" us that the proper response to racism is sitting in a basement draining the city's power and thus "fails" to predict the civil rights movement (as though that were its obvious duty).19 And finally, if we think that literature is morally improving, we may end up feeling that it is enough to read books in order to be virtuous. This, in fact, is the complaint of Rousseau in the Lettre à d'Alembert: "When a man has admired fine actions in fables, and wept over imaginary sufferings, what more can be demanded of him? Is he not pleased with himself? Does he not congratulate himself on his noble soul? Has he not acquitted himself of all he owes virtue by the homage he has just rendered it?" "The most useful effect of the best tragedies," concludes Rousseau, "is to reduce all the duties of man to some passing, sterile, and fruitless emotions, to make us applaud our courage in praising that of others, our humanity in pitying the ills we could have healed."20 Thus too Diderot, in the Paradoxe sur le Comédien, notes that the typical citizen leaves his vices at the door only to "take them up again on the way out.... I have often seen wicked men next to me taking deep umbrage at actions which they would not have failed to commit if they had found themselves in the same circumstances."21 The ironic truth is that the best way to make sure that literature corrupts is to pretend that it improves. Only if it is taken to be morally beneficial will literature do us moral harm. And this is where I return to the qualification that literary texts don't corrupt or improve us on their own. Institutions of reading have some say in how artworks are received, and it is to some extent up to us to protect future readers from the corruption of moralism. Future generations need to be rescued from our well-meaning attempts to save their souls. 18 At the Academy Awards ceremony in March 2006, Jennifer Lopez introduced a performance of one of the songs from Crash by reading a short script that claimed, among other things, the following: "In the opening scene, we are told that people feel so isolated these days that they are not above literally crashing into each other as a way of making human contact." Nobody appeared to notice the patent absurdity of this claim, precisely because it is such an entrenched idea that films are there to deliver information. 19 Houston A. Baker Jr., "Failed Prophet and Falling Stock: Why Ralph Ellison Was Never Avant-Garde," Stanford Humanities Review 7 (1999): 4-11. 20 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre à d'Alembert sur son article "Genève" (1758; Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1967), 78-79 (translation mine). 21 Denis Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien (Paris: Flammarion, 1981), 167 (translation mine). Although the speaker is officially "the first interlocutor," he is clearly identified as Diderot at 147. LANDY | CORRUPTION BY LITERATURE 9 8. OUR CORRUPTION: AESTHETICIZED COGNITION But there is another type of corruption that literature inflicts on us. And this is the corruption of our faculty for judgment. There is, in academia, a phenomenon that I would call the contagion of the object of study. You'll have noticed that people who study Proust tend to end up writing long, extremely convoluted sentences; I know I do. People who study Hemingway, by contrast, keep their prose terse and rugged. Beckettians are massively opaque and anaphoric, while Heideggerians often strike an oracular tone. All of this is perfectly harmless; the harm comes when we become accustomed, through long acquaintance with artworks, to judging everything by its power and not by its cogency. This is the deep contagion of the object of study to which literary critics are exposed, a corruption that results not from contact with a particular text but from sustained engagement with literary texts in general. If we are not careful, we start to judge everything-even our own ideas-on the basis of their beauty. It no longer matters, even to us, whether they are true or false; it only matters if they are interesting, powerful, elegant. Once we are fully infected, we apply to scholarship the evaluative criteria we derive from literature, seek from criticism the same effects as we seek from fiction. One often hears the claim that criticism should take the form of literature, which, to my mind, is rather like saying the instructions for an oven ought to be in the form of a cake. Now this corruption takes two forms, an optimistic and a pessimistic. The optimistic has recently been epitomized by Mark William Roche, who claims any number of virtues for literature. We've already seen him alleging that literature improves us by delivering salutary moral messages. But he also thinks it improves us by presenting positive models (p. 246); and negative models (p. 225); and utopian scenarios (p. 46); and dystopian scenarios (p. 240); and via empathy (p. 60); and by "mak[ing] visible for us the absolute" (p. 18); and by encouraging a contemplative attitude, à la Kant (p. 37). In case this is not enough, Roche adds that "by appealing to our senses, art reawakens in us an awareness of our own being as partly nature, which in turn renders more transparent our dependence on the realm of nature beyond us" (p. 216). Further, since beauty is symmetrical and balanced, our reception of it will cause us to strive for justice.22 And since both literary texts and human beings are inexhaustible, if we come to appreciate a great work, we will automatically come to appreciate our neighbour too (p. 230). Finally, since each literary text is unique and each phenomenon of nature is unique, reading fictions will turn us into environmentalists (p. 232). Somehow he forgot to mention that literature also cures pleurisy, malaria, and the common cold. So much for the optimistic variant of aestheticized cognition, a bout of reverse engineering in which we look around for benefits we might want literature to deliver and attempt to find a mechanism by which that might conceivably happen, rather than inferring from actual properties of art objects to their likely effects on the world. If anything, however, the pessimistic variant is even more common. We like to say, for example, that the author, who was invented in the eighteenth century, is a tyrannical imposition of power structures; that everything is language, which is to say nothing but an endless chain of signifiers; that all binaries are hierarchical and therefore oppressive; that reading serves only to lend us social prestige; and so on. We operate on what I'd call an inverse pragmatism: if it's convenient, it must be false. 22 Roche borrows this idea from Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 10 REPUBLICS OF LETTERS Why do we do this? Partly, to be sure, it's because we think that this skepticism will bring about social change. Unfortunately, however, skepticism can be marshalled in the service of all kinds of positions. Thus, as Bruno Latour recently pointed out, global warming deniers have begun seizing on the purported fallibility of science to advance their own agenda of inaction. "Entire PhD programs," writes Latour rather contritely, "are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always the prisoner of language, that we always speak from one standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said?"23 Political wishful thinking is one reason, then. Another is that it is thrilling to dance near abysses, to feel on one's face the bracing wind of deep, metaphysical, all-encompassing doubt. A third is that it protects us from ever being fooled. (Though as Nietzsche says, doubting everything can be the best way of deceiving ourselves.24) A fourth is that asceticism, paradoxically, carries with it a yield of pleasure, crowning its practitioners with an imaginary halo of virtue.25 The world-weary, hard-bitten stance never goes out of fashion, whereas optimism will always seem tacky, and judiciousness unsexy. But a fifth is surely that it would be beautiful if things were that way. How intoxicating if it turned out that everything we see is a lie-not just some things, but all things! How thrilling if we were the powerless pawns of language and social forces! A belief in malevolent forces ruling the world is just as enchanting, ultimately, as a belief in benevolent forces ruling the world. This is how literature has corrupted us. We've made exaggerated claims in both directions: the wild optimism of Roche and company, the staggering pessimism of de Man and company. And in the process we have lost allies, lost readers, lost students. We need, today, a new kind of daring. We need to dare to be truthful, measured, painstaking, even empirical. We need to dare to be positive without being starry-eyed. We need to take ourselves seriously so that others will take us seriously. We need to understand the value of literature not as moral improver but as agent of clarification, as agent of reenchantment, as formal model, and as training-ground for mental capacities. We need to overcome our corruption, to stop being (as our beloved fictional mafiosi would put it) "on the take." In short, we need to believe for once what we ourselves are saying. 23 Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern," Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 226-27. 24 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche's Werke (Leipzig: C. G. Naumann, 1903), 14:326 (translation mine). The fragment in question is from 1884. 25 For the connection between the will to truth and asceticism, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1882-87; New York: Random House, 1974), sec. 344.