tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24717279947494450652024-02-08T06:13:44.939+00:00Becoming PicturesSenthuran Bhuvanendrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09609508959502641152noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2471727994749445065.post-60461289401298633902022-08-23T08:11:00.001+01:002022-08-23T08:33:33.371+01:00Hopeless feelings<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih2fn1oQIqWPzYFhHg51zLXdiyHz4peU7OPGOzTjalKFIWOKXrMopXyihoY6F_VcQ9U7w0PSq3P7LrivFU5cewj-APHgJ9iQo63dlIngeQLrEpK5JBzdjNurVEq8HhtJmfpYoxo8EBkdy_4m1cYajyqdEgh0H3YX1G56tRiS3Ur6CjfLO6RFVvDfuF/s949/Landscape_painting_(Fort_Tryon_Park,_New_York_City,_with_grey_underpainting)_by_Christopher_Willard.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="781" data-original-width="949" height="329" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih2fn1oQIqWPzYFhHg51zLXdiyHz4peU7OPGOzTjalKFIWOKXrMopXyihoY6F_VcQ9U7w0PSq3P7LrivFU5cewj-APHgJ9iQo63dlIngeQLrEpK5JBzdjNurVEq8HhtJmfpYoxo8EBkdy_4m1cYajyqdEgh0H3YX1G56tRiS3Ur6CjfLO6RFVvDfuF/w400-h329/Landscape_painting_(Fort_Tryon_Park,_New_York_City,_with_grey_underpainting)_by_Christopher_Willard.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Landscape painting (Fort Tryon Park, New York City, with grey underpainting) by Christopher Willard visual artist and author, via Wikimedia Commons
</td></tr></tbody></table>Yesterday afternoon I was trying to write. When I'm facing a deadline I often find myself thinking of the last person I was in love with. There are various possible reasons for this—some less complimentary to me—but one theory I have is prompted by <a href="https://expressiveegg.org/2017/01/07/postcard-from-the-void/" target="_blank">this piece by Darren Allen</a>. Perhaps there is something about writing that brings up the fear of death: out of all the possibilities that have been swirling inside myself, I am putting something together which is small and imperfect. This perhaps awakens a desire to, well let's not be too narrow, to co-create something that can take up those possibilities. Perhaps falling in love is finding someone you can trust to be a co-creator. Since this March my response to this mood has been to put on some Ben Howard, but though I'll never get tired of his playing or lyrics, I'm beginning to worry that this is locking me into a kind of madness. <a name='more'></a>Yesterday I thought of an alternative solution, to replace that drive to co-create with a sense of solidarity. Schopenhauer apparently says—I've never read Schopenhauer, I saw this in a conference ad—that at a certain point <i>eros </i>makes way for <i>agape</i>. I didn't like this, because the two shouldn't be opposed like that, but there is obviously a problem to be be solved if you're continuing to be drawn towards someone who is not there in your life any more. In this context, I think solidarity can stand in for <i>agape</i>. That awareness of a particular someone out there somewhere being herself in the face of struggles might be enough to make sense of things. And that is a stiller awareness, not an energy that needs to be kept in harmony by the constant flow of music.<br /><p></p><p>On my way home I walked through a churchyard. Suddenly I saw ahead an odd-looking little bird: red-brown, tail and head both turned upwards. It started hopping away, and then hopped through a gap in the fence. I hoped it might stay there, having got me out of sight, but when I reached the gap it had disappeared completely. The pit of my stomach fell away. A long time ago, I sang a song by Schumann called <i>Happiness</i>, in which the poet writes that if you stay still for long enough, the bird might land in your hand for a short while, but then it will go. Looking back at the gravestones, I was hit by bitterness. These had been the reason why I chose to go through the churchyard in the first place: I'd been thinking about the names, and how I feel a sense of identity in English graveyards despite them not including names like mine, and why this might be, maybe something to do with language being something you live inside and names being a part of language. But now it seemed to me that you can only keep hold of something if it's dead. Then I raised my head and saw the trees.</p><p>In the evening I wrote. I found a playlist of songs from movements centred on the working class in India. I don't know Hindi or Bengali so I couldn't understand the lyrics, but you can look at the images and search for the lyricists and the others involved and get an idea. You've probably heard the story of how, when he was interning over at <i>Counterpunch</i>, Ed Miliband was asked by Alexander Cockburn how pure his hate was, to which Miliband replied that he didn't hate anyone. I'm afraid I'm probably with Miliband here. But I think there's something purer than hate. When I went dancing in my early to mid-20s, at some point I would usually think of death. I would imagine my heels knocking death in the teeth. But that isn't hatred—dancing is still itself, still joyful—more like a marking of a boundary, Camus' <i>non</i>. At a certain point, listening last night, my ideas started flowing and I had to turn the music off to formulate my thoughts precisely. Then they stopped again, and by then I was sad and tired, so I put on some Ben Howard.<br /></p>Senthuran Bhuvanendrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09609508959502641152noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2471727994749445065.post-70472508497178233912018-02-25T09:00:00.002+00:002018-02-25T09:00:50.617+00:00The meaning of meaning<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APath_among_Pines_by_Emily_Carr%2C_c._1930.jpg" title="By Emily Carr (Vancouver Art Gallery) [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons"><img alt="Path among Pines by Emily Carr, c. 1930" height="267" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Path_among_Pines_by_Emily_Carr%2C_c._1930.jpg/512px-Path_among_Pines_by_Emily_Carr%2C_c._1930.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Path among Pines, c.1930, by Emily Carr (Vancouver Art Gallery) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I once had to write an essay about the meaning of meaning. More precisely, we were asked whether the meaning of a sentence was the same as the conditions in which it would be true. But I thought of it as the meaning of meaning, and decided that I had had just about enough of philosophy, and of studying in general. This "philosophy of language" nonsense was the last straw. I don't think this any morein fact, I think all social scientists should know some, just as they should know some maths. But that isn't what this post is about. Not yet anyway.<br />
<br />
I'm going to write instead about the other meaning of "meaning"the wishy-washy one we apply to events, actions, situations etc. when we ask whether they are meaningful to us, and how. I'm going to be summarising part of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's 1971 article "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man". Taylor is explaining why we need the right-hand column in the matrix I included in <a href="http://www.becomingpictures.org/2017/02/some-thoughts-about-thinking-about.html" target="_blank">my last post</a>:<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Explanation</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(naturalistic,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">(interpretative,</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">interested in meanings)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">e.g. classical and Marxian political
economy</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">e.g. Wittgensteinian language games</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Individualism</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">e.g. rational choice theory, game
theory</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">e.g. dramaturgical models</span></div>
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<br />
That matrix was philosopher of science Martin Hollis' window, a set of four approaches in social science he sees as jointly needed to understand society, but difficult to put together.<br />
<br />
I hope it's fairly intuitive why the left-hand column matters: one thing we'd like from social scientists is good explanations of what makes things happen the way they do. But it might not be clear what exactly the right-hand column is about, and why it should be roughly equal in importance (or even more fundamental, as Hollis suggests). I think Taylor offers a good starting-point for thinking about this, and I'd be keen to hear from readers whether what I'm presenting here makes sense, what might be missing, and where might be a good place to find it.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Taylor starts by discussing why we would think the human sciences would have an interpretative, or hermeneutical, component. (For reasons of space, I'll have to skip some of the detail of how interpretation in the social sciences overlaps with hermeneutic approaches in literature, theology and elsewhere, but it's a nice article if you have time and access. It also includes some highly relevant discussion of politics and social conflict.) For Taylor, interpreting an object of study is trying to make it clear, to make sense of it.<br />
<br />
He identifies three features of an interpretative science:<br />
<ol style="list-style-type: lower-alpha;">
<li>We must be able to apply this idea of <i>coherence</i> or incoherence to the thing we are studying. It has to be something that can make sense, or fail to. </li>
<br />
<li>There has to be some difference between the sense made by the thingthe meaningand the way we express that sense. Otherwise there couldn't be such a thing as clarifying the sense: we must be able to say, this was unclear before, but now we've expressed it more clearly.</li>
<br />
<li>There must be someone (or a group) who this sense <i>is for</i>. A cloud formation might have a "coherent" pattern, it might fit together in some way, but it doesn't have a meaning, unless it has a sense for someone. </li>
</ol>
Why would we be skeptical of such a science? Taylor thinks this comes down to the question of how we judge whether or not a claim is true, or correct. Suppose we are interpreting a text. We do this correctly when we make sense of it. But how do we <i>know </i>that we have made sense of it? We rely on our understanding of the language the text is expressed in, which tells us that we have moved from an unclear expression to a clearer one.<br />
<br />
But what if someone does not share this assessment? At this point, we must refer her to interpretations of other related texts, and show that they fit with this one. We might appeal to a part-whole relationship: the part we are interpreting now fits into the whole that we are interpreting overall. But what if they don't share any of these interpretations at all, because they don't share our understanding of the language?<br />
<br />
At this point, we seem to be stuck, and at this point, a skeptic might say: this isn't a science at all. Here's a real science. There are data, which we can all agree on and don't need interpreting. Taylor calls these "brute data". To these we apply the laws of logical and mathematical inference. This is clear and solid stuff. This is science.<br />
<br />
But, argues Taylor, we need to keep hold of interpretation to study people and society. "Meaning" is necessary to characterise human behaviour adequately, and we know this from our experience and from the way we talk. We can't really convey how Lata is acting without some reference (at least implicit) to what the relevant situation, action, demand or prospect means to her. These meanings help explain her purposes, desires, feelings and emotions. <br />
<br />
This kind of "meaning" has three features:<br />
<ol>
<li>The meaning is <i>for a subject</i>: here, Lata. (This matches feature (c) of an interpretative science.)</li>
<br />
<li>The meaning is <i>of </i>something, e.g. Lata's situation, and we can distinguish that thing and its meaning. That means we can characterise the thing without reference to its meaning for the subject, and with such reference. We can talk about something that happens to Lata, and what it means to her, and discuss the connection. (This corresponds to (a) and (b) above.)</li>
<br />
<li>Things have meaning <i>in a field </i>of meanings, i.e. in relation to other things' meanings. </li>
</ol>
This last feature is crucial to the logic of an interpretative science. Suppose Lata meets someone for a coffee and finds the experience refreshing. The meaning "refreshing" can't exist in isolation. She must have some grasp of other, related meanings: both contrasting kinds of meetings (say, tedious ones), and analogous experiences (like refreshing drinks). <br />
<br />
Underlying all this are social practices. Obviously, Lata can't find her coffee meeting refreshing unless she can participate in a practice of meeting for coffee. Less obviously, the coffee-meeting practice involves distinctions that can shape how participants act and relate to each other, distinctions which ideas like "refreshing" and "tedious" point to. In fact, Lata needs quite a rich field of meanings indeed to find her away around the task of being a good coffee partnersome of which aren't specific to the coffee-meeting practice at all, such as those meanings which apply more generally to being a good conversational partner.<br />
<br />
Lata does not necessarily have language to articulate this all. This is why there is <i>work </i>to be done here, of the sort that Taylor is talking about. Art and literature can help us see these things more clearly, but there are also scientific ways of going about these things, as exercised by anthropologists and sociologists.<br />
<br />
Wait, cries our hard-nosed skeptic. There may be <i>work </i>to be done here, but this isn't <i>science</i>. All thiswhat we are investigating, and the way we are investigating itis subjective. The best
we can do is record publicly observable behaviour, which can include whether
people agree to certain statements about that behaviour: why they act as they
do whilst drinking coffee, or why they voted in that unpredictable manner, or
what they want from the economy. But we can’t actually get inside their heads.<br />
<br />
What Taylor is warning us, as Wittgenstein does
before him, is that this distinction between inside and outside is false. The meanings are not just inside people's heads. They are in the social practices. Getting at those social practices most certainly presents challenges. Taylor has more to say about this, as, of course, do anthropologists, sociologists and others. So do philosophers across a range of fields and traditions, including philosophy of language. These are all things I hope to dig into in coming posts. But I'd welcome directions!<br />
<br />
Finally, I'll just raise one query about Taylor's discussion. As we've seen, he talks about meaning being for a subject. This seems to be the central idea. Very quickly though, we have shifted to talking about that meaning in terms of language and the social practices they're entangled with. Here, the subject is a social group, and individuals <i>qua </i>members of that social group. But it might be quite important to us what meanings are for individuals as individuals, whether we are social scientists interested in variation within a group, or power imbalances, or as policymakers trying to incorporate this all into objectives and policy tools. So we need to stick a question mark over the thought that language, that very social thing, is as central here as we might have first thought.<br />
<br />Senthuran Bhuvanendrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09609508959502641152noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2471727994749445065.post-31581147548148804542017-02-21T08:22:00.001+00:002017-08-17T01:24:12.648+01:00Some Thoughts About Thinking About Political Economy<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAncient_Agora_of_Athens_5.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" title="By DerHexer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons"><img alt="Ancient Agora of Athens 5" height="300" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a7/Ancient_Agora_of_Athens_5.jpg/512px-Ancient_Agora_of_Athens_5.jpg" title="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAncient_Agora_of_Athens_5.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">By DerHexer (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAncient_Agora_of_Athens_5.jpg</td></tr>
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<br />
I am a couple of chapters into Dimitris Milonakis and Ben Fine's <a href="https://www.routledge.com/From-Political-Economy-to-Economics-Method-the-social-and-the-historical/Milonakis-Fine/p/book/9780415423212" target="_blank">From Political Economy to Economics</a>. So far, it has been a clear introduction to the history of economic thought and the change of methods which, as the title suggests, led to the disappearance of the political economy tradition. (If you're not so keen to dive straight into discussion of inductive vs. deductive reasoning, abstract vs. historical enquiry, etc, then an engaging starting-point is Robert Heilbroner's <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vIxtW9cw-DQC&lpg=PP1&dq=heilbroner%20worldly%20philosophers&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=heilbroner%20worldly%20philosophers&f=false" target="_blank">The Worldly Philosophers</a>, telling the story of thinkers from Adam Smith to Joseph Schumpeter.)<br />
<br />
I thought this would be a good time for me to note down what I'm after in thinking about political economy. So far, I've been writing blogposts without giving an overall framework for how the different strands tie together. One way of framing my reading and writing is as an effort to think about how ethics, social thought and politics should be merged into a political economy approach: a wider perspective on how we shape and maintain "the economy".<br />
<br />
From what I've absorbed so far, it seems that "political economy" should be characterised by a number of aspects. Firstly, it should pull together what are usually thought of as different social sciences, for instance economics, anthropology, sociology and geography (and, importantly, a borderline humanity, history). Secondly, it should recognise that this kind of enquiry has a moral dimension. Thirdly, it should recognise that this kind of enquiry has a political dimension. <br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>These three aspects all refer to the way political economy should be done. If you like, they're about what <i>form </i>the activity should take: it should be social, moral and political. But what about the content of that activity? Shouldn't be political economy be <i>about </i>something rather specific, namely "the economy", or if that's a term of too recent an origin, about "economic" things like "production", "consumption", "wealth" and "resources"?<br />
<br />
I want to resist this for the time being, because I'm suspicious of all these terms. I'm suspicious that they involve metaphors, and what's more, that they're a set of interlinked metaphors which play a purpose that isn't entirely clear. (Do you really <i>consume </i>clothes? Is a nation's "human capital" really part of its wealth? If your mind is a resource, is it renewable? These don't seem merely neutral descriptions. Why do we say things like this?)<br />
<br />
There's not anything inherently wrong with using metaphors, but if my suspicion is correct, we'll need to proceed carefully, and working out <i>how </i>we proceed<i> </i>is what I'd like to concentrate in this post. I also think we share a rough idea of what direction we need to proceed in, and that will do for now. <br />
<br />
So I'm going to run through those three aspects here: social, moral and political. I'm not going to argue for them in fullthat might happen in later postsbut I'll outline how I understand them, that is, what the kind of enquiry or activity is that we need to be doing. <br />
<br />
I said that I don't want to be too specific about what political economy is about. But we do need some kind of unifying idea to tie together the different types of social thought that go on in different social science departments (and elsewheremore on that in a moment). What we are ultimately interested in, when we think about society, is how we live together. To put it more formally, we're enquiring into the kind of social relations, practices and structures we have.<br />
<br />
But we also need a practical dimension to this. We're not just interested in these things for curiosity's sake, but because we (might) want to change them, or preserve them. So let's say, what we are ultimately interested in is determining how we live together: both "determining" as in "getting a clearer understanding of", and "determining" as in "shaping".<br />
<br />
This might seem a far cry from interest rate rules and carbon emission trading schemes. But, speaking very generally, these things do shape how we live together, and, ultimately, they are composed of social relations, practices and structures. So is the financial system as a whole (of course, it is dependent on a physical infrastructure, but that's true of any social system). This is also true of our energy and ecological systems, insofar as we are part of them (though obviously here the non-human side is becoming more and more significant). But it is also true of our cultural system, however we're going to spell out what that is (a system of meanings? interpretations? symbols? knowledge? mental structures? behaviours?).<br />
<br />
That last point just emphasises that we need a variety of tools to understand these social things. It would be odd if one particular approach could do the whole job. I like the following two-by-two matrix (adapted) <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1JcsHEm9CLgC&lpg=PP1&dq=martin%20hollis%20introduction%20philosophy%20social%20science&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=martin%20hollis%20introduction%20philosophy%20social%20science&f=false" target="_blank">from philosopher Martin Hollis.</a> He actually calls it a window, which I think is rather
nice, given that he is trying to work out how these four approaches (panes?) might be reconciled with each other. I hope to write about this soon. In particular, I have a hunch that the top-left box and the bottom-right one might turn out to be more fundamental than the other two.<br />
<br />
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<br />
One reason I have that hunch is because of the moral and political dimensions. But before I move on to those two features, there's one more point about the tools that we need. I initially referred above to "social thought", not "social sciences". I see the social sciences as a subset of a wider activity which mainly goes on <i>outside </i>academia. (Also, not all social thought inside academia is "scientific": for a start, some happens in humanities departments.) Of course, academic enquiry is crucial as a professional and disciplined activity which holds itself to standards of precision and rigour. And, at least in my part of the world, that activity is under attack at the moment. But part of the problem might be a failure to see clearly how this activity is interconnected with where the bulk of "determining about how we live together" <i>has </i>to go on: in the media, in homes, in workplaces, in pubs, in bus queues, and in the corridors of political power.<br />
<br />
This last point is connected to both the moral and political aspects of political economy. "It is not a trivial question, Socrates said: what we are talking about is how one should live." This (wonderfully) is how Bernard Williams' opens <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=doxKfg6gR1AC&lpg=PP1&dq=ethics%20and%20limits%20of%20philosophy&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=ethics%20and%20limits%20of%20philosophy&f=false" target="_blank">Ethics and Limits of Philosophy</a>, quoting from The Republic. If you replace "one" in Socrates' quote with "we", you end up, pretty much, with the question I set out above. Seen from another angle, determining how we live together is a moral activity.<br />
<br />
How we characterise this other angle is tricky. (The social scientist Andrew Sayer has a very clear, and to me convincing, discussion <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jjYt1QL2uDYC&lpg=PP1&dq=andrew%20sayer%20why%20things%20matter%20to%20people&pg=PR7#v=onepage&q=andrew%20sayer%20why%20things%20matter%20to%20people&f=false" target="_blank">here</a>: a lot of the important work happens in chapter 2.) We could say it is about determining how we live together "in the light of our values", but applying our values is an activity we can also empirically observe, the kind of thing social scientists (and not just moral philosophers) can enquire into. So it can be seen from two angles, itself. <br />
<br />
Nor will the economists' "normative vs. positive" distinction help us. What are normative structures and activities, things like "justifying" or using terms like "good" or "courageous" or "worthwhile", if they aren't social relations, practices and structures? (Social relations, practices and structures we sometimes use, as individuals, on ourselves.) And this cuts the other way: the doing of economics, whether economists are conscious of this or not, is moral activity.<br />
<br />
I suspect what ultimately makes this kind of thought "moral thought" (instead of unconsciously moral activity) is <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dRvSFWUh3HgC&lpg=PP1&pg=PT2#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">some kind of connection with metaphysics</a>, with working out what really exists and what it is like. But I don't have much more to say, right now, about what metaphysics is, and what that connection is like, and of course, that still doesn't distinguish social thought from moral thought, as social thought also has its metaphysics...and I suspect that that is precisely because we really have one interconnected body of thought, but some of that thinking is more obviously "directed" "towards" "something"...and just to make things more mystical, I don't even think we should be restricting ourselves to "thought", but should be considering conscious activity in general...<br />
<br />
But let's step away from morals. The third aspect of this enquiry was its political dimension. Again, this is something which is there, whether it is recognised or not by social scientists (and by practitioners of social thoughtthat is, all of us). A political economy approach should recognise it.<br />
<br />
I'm going to use a slightly unusual idea of the political here, namely that it has something to do with taking a stand in an arena of shared decision-making. (This has osmoted into my mind from secondary literature on Hannah Arendt, who also will need to appear on this blog soon.) The arena of shared decision-making here is, again, this process of determining how we live together. <br />
<br />
Mainstream neoclassical economists, again, take a stand in this process without always realising the full extent to which they're doing it. I'm not sure the stand they're often accused of taking (one in favour of capitalism, or markets, swallowing up our shared lives) is the one they actually take. That strikes me as a stand for something more admirable: the individual, capable of choice and reason. But if we could be more precise about how this stand threads into their work, and about how taking a stand can co-exist with a commitment to objectivity, to precision and to rigour and to professionalism, then we'd be in a better position to stop capitalism, or markets, swallowing up our shared lives. <br />
<br />
I've taken a number of stands there, which I'll need to back up, again, in later posts. But to sum up, political economy is, for me, primarily something that we do: determining how we live together. But we do this guided by our thought, and given the nature of that thought, it is helpful to have specialists of various kinds (including social scientists) working on bits of it. That thought, and this activity that we do, has three aspects: social, moral and political. But that's not to say there are actually three separate areas of activity which interlink: in fact it might be more like the same activity, seen from three angles. Working out exactly how this can be will be tricky. More soon.<br />
<br />
<br />Senthuran Bhuvanendrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09609508959502641152noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2471727994749445065.post-37153613821365675372016-12-22T15:24:00.001+00:002017-02-22T20:37:57.557+00:00Beauteous Markets That Have Such Morals In Them<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsrGkbZbQFyZNygoHZ7UcqgRfqHbqtdiWLHfGHWP06SFgfNjSq0dHAng3nk3xmNeIuEHN6y-vWZpOanjwNq324CyzgunxZMR-MzqTHtpuPjDouP27QdaMhYOp-gqOptTeVAE1llaYOTEE/s1600/William_Hogarth_017.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="325" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsrGkbZbQFyZNygoHZ7UcqgRfqHbqtdiWLHfGHWP06SFgfNjSq0dHAng3nk3xmNeIuEHN6y-vWZpOanjwNq324CyzgunxZMR-MzqTHtpuPjDouP27QdaMhYOp-gqOptTeVAE1llaYOTEE/s400/William_Hogarth_017.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">By <a class="extiw" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hogarth" title="en:William Hogarth">William Hogarth</a> - 1. The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. <a class="internal mw-magiclink-isbn" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/3936122202">ISBN 3936122202</a>. Distributed by <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:10,000_paintings_from_Directmedia" title="Commons:10,000 paintings from Directmedia">DIRECTMEDIA</a> Publishing GmbH.2. <a class="external text" href="http://frankzumbach.wordpress.com/2011/02/page/157/" rel="nofollow">frankzumbach.wordpress.com</a>, Public Domain, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=152823">Link</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The crash of 2007-8 strengthened an old critique about the troubled relationship between markets and morals. This critique found its way into the discussion during the Bank of England's Open Session <a href="http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/Pages/openforum/index.aspx" target="_blank">a year ago</a>, which is (<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dan_Awrey/publication/254928062_Between_Law_and_Markets_Is_There_a_Role_for_Culture_and_Ethics_in_Financial_Regulation/links/53db5e970cf2631430cb42dd.pdf" target="_blank">indirectly</a>) how I came across the paper I am going to write about, Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy's "Moral Views of Market Society". You can find it <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marion_Fourcade/publication/228122527_Moral_Views_of_Market_Society/links/004635174e55d59133000000.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
<br />
Fourcade and Healy guide us through economic sociologists' (and others') investigation of this question, and point us to one approach in particular, which I will focus on. But my interest in their review goes wider than the question of markets. <a href="http://www.becomingpictures.org/2016/12/prison-break.html" target="_blank">My initial post</a> about Owen Flanagan's recent book noted that he brings together cross-cultural philosophy, anthropology and psychology, but doesn't have the space to add consideration of "macro-structures" which might affect ethics, through disciplines like sociology, political science and macroeconomics. So I wanted to pause my blogging of The Geography of Morals, and get at least part of this picture in view.<br />
<br />
Fourcade and Healy frame the paper as a revisiting of Albert Hirschman's classic 1982 paper "Rival Interpretations of Market Society". They use Hirschman's history of interpretationsthe <i>doux-commerce</i> thesis that markets soften and civilise morals, the self-destruction thesis that they undermine them, and a combination of the "feudal shackles" and "feudal blessings" thesis that existing moral customs either help or hinder the marketas a map of the more recent work they review. They label their categories the "liberal dream", the "commodified nightmare", and the "feeble markets" views (the last being dominant in economic sociology). But they then look at a fourth emerging literature which sees markets and morals as more closely intertwined, the "moralized markets" view.<br />
<br />
The paper is a wonderful and clear guide to the literature. If I try to review a review paper like this one, I'll end up having to reproduce most of it. Instead, at the end of this post I will include a quick signposting of what happens in those first three sections. I will use the rest of my post to talk about the moralized markets view, which struck me (as it does the authors) as particularly creative and promising.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
The overall idea is that markets themselves are cultural and moral projects which involve making sense of our lives and guiding our behaviour. Fourcade and Healy break down their consideration of this (and the literature) into three parts. First, we can analyse markets and the exchange relations they involve, to understand how they shape the moral categories we live by. "Moral categories" should be understood here widely and in Emile Durkheim's sense, as covering a social group's ideas of goodness, badness, appropriateness, legitimacy, etc.<br />
<br />
So, for instance, <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6171.html" target="_blank">there is work</a> by Viviana Zelizer looking at how systems of moral classification reinforce, and are reinforced by, the earmarking of money for different social uses. Richard Biernacki <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fabrication-Labor-Germany-Britain-1640-1914/dp/0520208781" target="_blank">investigates how</a> different kinds of payment act as status signals and cultural representations. There have also been many studiesagain Zelizer is a key figure hereon particular markets. Through the interactions and exchange of various goods in markets, these categories and behavioural rules are formed, fought over and reformed.<br />
<br />
Fourcade and Healy remind us that we need to look at exchange generally. Gift exchange may be non-monetary, but also brings up questions of power and exploitation, as in Nancy Folbre and Julie Nelson's <a href="http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ321/rosburg/Folbre%20and%20Nelson%20-%20For%20love%20or%20money%20--%20or%20both.pdf" target="_blank">study of care work</a>. Also, these processes of exchange do not happen in a vacuum, but are influenced by technological change, the mobilisation of interest groups, and the actions of moral entrepreneurs.<br />
<br />
However, the authors also remind us that social scientists themselves are involved in these processes and battles through their study of markets, and cannot avoid using moral concepts, supporting different interests and furthering particular justificatory principles. This brings us to our second part of this approach.<br />
<br />
This literature naturally focuses on the role of economists. Central here is Thomas Callon's notion of <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-954X.1998.tb03468.x/abstract" target="_blank">the performativity of economics</a>: intellectual tools can also reshape the world. As economic thinking spreads, it reshapes people in particular into calculative agencies, actors who behave in the way that models describe them. Fourcade and Healy discuss weaker and stronger versions of this claim (is it just that we increasingly use economic concepts and language?).<br />
<br />
The literature investigating this has been primarily European (and includes studies of particular markets). The authors review the parallel literature by American sociologists on how consistency and comparability of categories are put into practice. There have been several studies of techniques of quantification and commensuration (comparing things according to a common metric), as well as Harrison White's <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8672.html" target="_blank">work on decoupling</a>, whereby people simplify their social settings to make their identities and products comparable. The moral dimension is this: these techniques build moral categories, which make certain social statuses legitimate, and allow people to be regulated according to these categories.<br />
<br />
Fourcade and Healy see the third area of the literature as combining these two types of analysisthe analysis of the morality inherent in markets on the one hand, and the analysis of the implicit moral activity of market-shaping economists (and other experts) on the otherto show that markets are actively moralised. Market exchange, and the activity of policymakers and activists, put moral concepts into practice in society.<br />
<br />
Here we need to bring in government: agencies which monitor and regulate individuals, corporation and nations act, in Foucault's terms, as surveillance organisations which apply technical methods to govern, but also to encourage these agents to monitor and regulate themselves. Here they cite studies on a range of areas: credit reporting, transparency, corruption, accounting, financial analysis and bond rating.<br />
<br />
The word "neoliberalism" is overused and has been criticised for lacking content, but the picture Fourcade and Healy present here of the neoliberal economy as a governmentalised economy, a moral order put into practice through social and political means, is an interesting one and deserves further exploration through the sources they mention. They are also careful to point out that the forces that shape "the economy" include non-economic ones like social movements, though social movements' engagement with the economy is itself shaped by the processes we've seen above.<br />
<br />
I'll leave things there, though there's much in the paper I've had to miss out. There were many promising avenues mapped out herefor instance, I'd like to read and write about Zelizer's work soon to understand how exactly exchange relations and interactions shape moral categories. As I mentioned at the outset, I'd like to know more about how to understand moral meanings through a sociological lens. Similarly, I found the Foucauldian picture of the macrogovernance of morality quite convincing, and would like to see whether we can fit together with the cleaner and sunnier picture of liberal and democratic processes we would like to think that we live under, and which we perhaps still need to guide our relationships with our fellow citizens.<br />
<br />
Finally, I'd reiterate my earlier implication: all this work (including the other approaches I'm about to summarise) seems crucial if we are going to use moral-philosophical work and ethical considerations in an effective way to bring about social change. We need sociological realism too.<br />
<br />
I'll finish, for those interested, with the summary of the other three approaches discussed by Fourcade and Healy:<br />
<ul>
<li>The "liberal dream" view includes but goes beyond the idea that markets are useful tools. Here the authors discuss work arguing that, and how, participation in markets helps the development of certain virtues (pp.286-8), and cooperative social relations (pp.288-9). They then look at views linking markets to freedom, both through satisfying and empowering people, and through protecting them from others' power (pp.289-90). Finally, they consider the effects on creativity and innovation, and cultural goods in particular (pp.290-1).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The "commodified nightmare" view aims to rebut the "liberal dream" claims in each of these three areas, i.e. the effects on civil society, politics and culture. So there is work arguing that the markets provide or interact with indivdual-level or macro-level mechanisms to undermine certain virtues (pp.291-2). There are literatures on markets damaging social relations through allowing commodification or coercion, on which Fourcade and Healy provide helpful evaluation (pp.292-3). There are critics and critiques of markets' supposed democratic nature (p.294). And there is work attacking standardisation and illusory diversity in culture (pp.294-5).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The "feeble markets" view reverses the direction of explanation. Here, it is a society's ethics and cultural practices which explain how markets emerge and economic development occurs. "Realist" views hold, roughly speaking, that certain cultures are just better suited to support markets, and use a range of explanations ranging from comparative religion to game theory to the stickiness of past institutions (pp.296-7). "Voluntarist" views argue instead that the correct supporting institutions can be introduced anywhere, though there are sophisticated studies exploring how exactly to do so (pp.297-8). Finally, the main, "differentiated", view in sociology is that different cultures will lead to different types of market arrangements, though opinions vary on how direct the relationship is (pp.298-9).</li>
</ul>
Senthuran Bhuvanendrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09609508959502641152noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2471727994749445065.post-16170266049451323862016-12-15T14:22:00.001+00:002016-12-22T11:17:11.620+00:00Escape Route<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>This is the second in a series of 12 posts going through the chapters of Owen Flanagan's book The Geography of Morals.</i><br />
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In <a href="http://www.becomingpictures.org/2016/12/prison-break.html" target="_blank">my last post</a>, I wrote about the first chapter of Flanagan's book, where he argued that moral philosophers should break out of standard ways of thinking by engaging with anthropology and cross-cultural philosophy. In his second introductory chapter, "Moral Psychologies and Moral Ecologies", he lays out a few foundations for the path ahead.<br />
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Flanagan does three things in this chapter. He sets out a general framework for fitting psychology, anthropology and ethics together in a scientific picture. He then describes and assesses a few stages in the history of moral psychology, which clarifies how it will help set our direction. Finally, he discusses whether science leaves anything left for ethics to do: once we have explained actual moral thought and practice, is that it, is there any space for "oughts", or have we reached a dead end?<br />
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Flanagan is a committed naturalist: humans are animals, and our account of human nature must be consistent with evolutionary theory. There should be two sides to the account. On the one side, there is the human being, an organism with an evolutionary lineage, a long natural history. On the other, there is the ecology, the setting in which the organism lives.<br />
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An important feature of this picture is that there is variation on both sides. Strictly speaking, no two individuals share an exact ecology. The circumstances faced by individuals will vary, within a country, because they live in different towns; within a town, because they live on different streets; within a family, because at each stage of its life, each child faces differently aged parents and a different set of sibling interactions to the ones its siblings did; and so on. (Flanagan talks of ecologies, microecologies, and micro-microecologies.) As is hopefully clear, there is a social dimension to ecologies.<br />
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Flanagan illustrates all of this using C.H. Waddington's image of an epigenetic landscapeyou can see one of the original drawings <a href="http://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/towardsdolly/2012/08/10/waddingtons-epigenetic-landscape/" target="_blank">here</a> at the University of Edinburgh's "Towards Dolly" site. Applied to the case of moral psychology, the ball rolling down the landscape is the human organism developing morally. Flanagan says the ball should be imagined with variegated dimples, the result of individual and social histories. Presumably social history includes interaction with the landscape up until this point. The landscape itselfthe ecology these individuals shareshould be imagined as much more complicated and variegated than in Waddington's illustration. Individuals start at different points on the landscape, and the moral psychology they develop is a result of the trajectory they take.<br />
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A final point is that Flanagan's naturalist framework is non-teleological. Nature doesn't aim at the success of individuals, nor does it specify what should happen to them or what their aims should be. Dominant features of our livesagricultural food production, living in cities, tradeare not biologically selected for, but produced through our coevolution with ecologies. This framework could, but doesn't have to, include the idea that social and cultural structures are selected by how successful they are at solving problems of contributing to flourishing (of powerful groups, say). One kind of social and cultural structure that humans (but also some other animals) can build is a normative ordera structure of what is right, wrong, better, and all the rest of it. This is made up of individual dispositions (tendencies) to respond to such ideas or aspects of a situation, and public institutions to regulate individual behaviour.<br />
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Flanagan's history of recent moral psychology runs through Hartshorne and May's <i>Studies in the Nature of Character </i>(1929-30), which drew attention to the lack of stability of character and personality; Kohlberg's moral stage theory (1958, 1971), which build on Piaget's work on child development, but which was criticised by Gilligan and others for problems like gender bias, narrowness of focus, and lack of realism about decision-making; and E.O. Wilson's sociobiology, which used the idea of genetic fitness to explain the development of moral-psychological dispositions like selfishness, altruism towards relatives and reciprocal altruism between those who interact regularly.<br />
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There is more to say (or discuss in the comments below) about the detail here, but I will skip to Flanagan's conclusions from this history. One is about <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=8cMPAAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=edmonds+would+you+kill+the+fat+man&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjoi-v6qPbQAhXDBBoKHUGQCC0Q6AEIJTAA" target="_blank">experimental</a> <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=xIeAAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=greene+moral+tribes&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi177SXqfbQAhUDPBoKHTsNBaEQ6AEIGjAA" target="_blank">moral</a> <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qRvLKCIdxLUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=mikhail+elements+of+moral+cognition&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=mikhail%20elements%20of%20moral%20cognition&f=false" target="_blank">psychology</a> work, gathering responses to moral problems to test theories like Kohlberg's. This has produced at least some data on how moral judgements are made, in certain ecologies, given certain tasks. We have to beware possible criticisms of how such studies are framedthat they often focus on judgements about third parties' decisions (rather than one's own emotions or actions), that the tasks are unrepresentative of moral life, that they frame moral decision-making as individualisticbut they still provide information.<br />
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The second conclusion is that evolutionary theory can tell us something about our moral psychology, but not everything. There is quite a lot of space to work to overcome our biologically or socially given characteristics, a theme that Flanagan will return to throughout the book. But this brings us to the final section of the chapter.<br />
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This is on whether we explain morality away through science (and social science). Suppose the aspects of normative order I referred to earlierthe virtues, the values, the norms and the practicescan all ultimately be given a natural explanation and description. You might then think there is nothing left for philosophy to do, no way to say things "ought" to be this way or thatthere's just the way things are, and the things that we do (one of which is using words like "ought" to influence, persuade or even coerce each other).<br />
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This is known as the problem of normativity in philosophy, and is the subject of a huge literature. I'm not going to get into the argument that Flanagan presents here, as it didn't fully answer my questions. I suspect I will need to read <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/542d9c0ae4b06d87160d3d22/t/543c9261e4b0dc74d0f1c71f/1413255777685/Flanagan%2C+Sarkissian%2C+and+Wong+-+Naturalizing+Ethics.pdf" target="_blank">this article</a> by him and co-authors to understand his position fully. But also, as Flanagan says, the book as a whole is intended as a demonstration of how philosophical thinking can indeed make us better. So perhaps we should consider this more as a practical question, and see at the end whether it has worked. (To make this concrete: the book uses anger as a case study. Will I be less angry by the time I finish writing this series of posts?)<br />
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Still, it will be helpful, before we set out, to sketch out the naturalised picture of normativity that Flanagan finishes the chapter with. In this picture, ethics works on existing human characteristics and capacities which have developed through evolution. These are developed into norms, virtues, values and practices, not by a process of deduction, but by inductive and abductive reasoning, about what ways of feeling, living and being are good for us or worth aspiring to, given the ecological niches we are in. The evidence we use in this reasoning process is drawn from any sources of knowledge about what is good and what it is to be human. In particular, Flanagan emphasises the importance of imagination: being able to explore the possibility space for how we can be and live.<br />
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I'll leave things there, though again, those words "good", "worth" and "aspiring" in the previous paragraph are bothering me. I'm not a sceptic about their meaningfulness, I'm not asking Flanagan to prove what they are deductively, but I'll be watching out for more detail about the role they play in our lives. Another question is about the role that imagination is playing in Flanagan's account: helping us consider different alternatives, look into possible futures, and consider impacts we have on others which we will never experience directly. This may turn out to be crucial.<br />
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And finally, my four sources from Flanagan which looked particularly interesting to follow up:<br />
<ul>
<li>Robert Boyd and Peter Richardson's <i>The Origin and Evolution of Cultures </i>(2005) is a collection of essays offering a biologically grounded notion of culture to bridge gaps in the social sciences (for instance, aiming to dissolve the distinction between methodological holism and methodological individualism). A nice review is <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24826/" target="_blank">here</a>.</li>
<li>Since Carol Gilligan's criticism of Kohlberg's moral stage theory from a gender perspective, there has been a lot of work to try to develop an alternative ethics of care (which has itself been critiqued for narrowness of focus). I'm going to pick a recent work, Eva Feder Kittay's <i>Love's Labor </i>(1999), partly because it was also recommended by my cousin.</li>
<li>The point raised about Hartshorne and May about stability of character has also evolved into a sophisticated discussion about the role of situations. Flanagan's colleague Hagop Sarkissian has an interesting (and publicly available) 2010 paper <a href="http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/phimp/3521354.0010.009/1" target="_blank">here</a> on how "situationism" is ultimately about the interconnectedness of social behaviour. (From the look of it, fans of behavioural economics will like this paper.)</li>
<li>Finally, philosopher of science Philip Kitcher offers a critical discussion of sociobiology in his 1985 book <i>Vaulting Ambition.</i></li>
</ul>
Senthuran Bhuvanendrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09609508959502641152noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2471727994749445065.post-21699277769977871652016-12-10T11:47:00.000+00:002016-12-15T14:36:30.642+00:00Prison Break<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>This is the first in a series of 12 posts going through the chapters of Owen Flanagan's book The Geography of Morals, published in late November. The first chapter is available to read <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JgU1DQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=owen+flanagan+geography+of+morals&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=owen%20flanagan%20geography%20of%20morals&f=false" target="_blank">here</a>.</i> <br />
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There have been some exciting moves recently to bring the resources of moral philosophy to bear on some of the shared challenges we face as a society and planet. In its 2014 Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) included <a href="http://ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_ar5_chapter3.pdf" target="_blank">a chapter on ethical, social and economic concepts and methods</a>, with two moral philosophers amongst the authors. 2014 also saw the publication of <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/capital-failure-9780198712220?cc=gb&lang=en&#" target="_blank">this book</a> edited by Nicholas Morris and David Vines, bringing together academics from different disciplines (including philosophy) to discuss how to restore an ethic of responsibilty and trust in financial services.<br />
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Both of these are very important pieces of work and I'm not going to do them any justice herethey deserve full discussion in their own right. But I wanted to mention an uneasiness they both brought up, a sense that the full potential of moral philosophythe potential to help reshape our institutions and customs and the way we think, see and imaginewas being undersold. We are being held back in bringing philosophy, social science and policy together by certain worn out ways of phrasing the problems and questionsmaximising good outcomes, how to perform right actions, what it is to be a virtuous agent.<br />
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To steal a phrase from Elizabeth Anscombe in a slightly different context, "the teeth don't come together in a proper bite": if the intellectual energy of moral philosophy had set in a slightly different shape, then it would line up better with what the social scientists and policymakers are trying to do. But I don't know how much to blame the philosophers for this. Sometimes we can be trapped by the teeth we have.<br />
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Owen Flanagan, <a href="https://philosophy.duke.edu/people/owen-flanagan" target="_blank">a philosopher of ethics and psychology</a>, does want to blame the philosophersor to put it more positively, to show that we are not trapped. The opening chapter of <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-geography-of-morals-9780190212155?cc=gb&lang=en&" target="_blank">his new book</a> takes its title, "On Being 'Imprisoned By One's Upbringing'", from a criticism by Alasdair MacIntyre of the direction in which moral philosophers channel that intellectual energy. Why, asks MacIntyre, are philosophers of physics expected to learn some physics, and philosophers of law some law, but moral philosophers are not expected to study actual moralities, the practices of morality (and their variety) we find out there in the world, using the work done by empirical disciplines such as social and cultural anthropology, history, sociology and psychology, as well as literature?<br />
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One of the themes of Flanagan's book is encouraging philosophers (and others) to engage with anthropology, in the way they have been doing with psychology, and to explore the variety of moral traditions that can be found across the world and across history. Three broad purposes of this engagement emerge from the chapter.<br />
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One is to help us face the fact that we are living in an interconnected world, and often in multicultural and multiethnic societies. I am glad that the IPCC mentions ethical traditions outside the West, but we (rather urgently) need more than thishow exactly should the existence of these traditions shape how we live (and decide) together? Can anthropology, the structured investigation of different ways of living in the world, help? And how, as Flanagan raises, do we address issues around disagreement, oppression and exclusion? All of this applies too to differences in moral outlook arising from class, gender and social role.<br />
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Second, this is an opportunity. Flanagan repeatedly uses the phrase "possibility space" through the chapterbeing aware of different moral outlooks expands the ways we, here and now, can reshape our lives. Over the course of the book, Flanagan will spend time discussing Buddhism, the Chinese philosophers Mencius and Xunxi, Korean neo-Confucian thought, Stoicism and Daoism, as well as considering the moral outlook of the Crow Indians of the northwest United States, moral vocabularies in Egypt and amongst the Ifaluk of the Caroline Islands in the Pacific, the approach to truth and reconciliation in South Africa, and many other examples.<br />
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The final purpose is to help us understand human nature and the nature of 'goods', the things we value, properly. To think that we can understand these things without considering history and culture is "transcendentally pretentious". Echoing a similar criticism of economics, Flanagan attacks the idea of the moral agent as a singleton who examines and evaluates moral situations alone, and one by onelife just isn't like that. Psychological realism means recognising that our inner lives are complex, deep and rich, not just a matter of weighing up beliefs, desires and reasons. Social realism means recognising that we are part of social worlds which have long histories and traditions.<br />
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We cannot do ethics without a proper picture of human nature, and we also need a proper picture of goods. Goods are often internal to people's practices and traditions, and need to be understood in this contexta context which is itself complicated, given how these practices and traditions are interlinked.<br />
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All of this points to a different picture of ethics and what matters for human excellence. The emphasis should not be on how to solve moral dilemmas, which rarely arise; are atypical of moral life; and are often matters of public policy, law and politics and hence raise their own special issues. Instead, the main task of moral philosophy is helping us fit into our "relational ecologies", the network of practices and traditions and relationships we are embedded in. Moral philosophy should help us be more loving, attentive, honest, conscientious; help us stop projecting onto others, control our reactive emotions, deflate our egos, and cultivate ourselves. This will do a lot of work needed for preparing us for those dilemmas when they do arise.<br />
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Flanagan finishes the chapter by responding to possible objections from those worried about an emphasis on anthropology. For reasons of space, I won't go through all these, though would be happy to discuss in comments.<br />
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I'll just raise one question of my own for now. Flanagan's emphasis here is clearly on how moral philosophy can help us live better lives, including how we interact with those we interact with day to day. But I started this post bringing up big problems of public policy and politics. And many of are living, now in 2016, in a time when there seem to be other big problems of public policy and politics. How relevant is Flanagan's approach here?<br />
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My feeling is that there is more promise here than perhaps Flanagan indicates (though, as mentioned above, he does indicate some). The ecologies we are embedded inthose practices and traditions and networksscale up. Culture matters, and our moral agency matters, for the big problems too. But the scaling up is not straightforwardit is not that national and global politics are just superpractices composed out of the everyday practices which compose our lives. Only so much can be done in a book, and Flanagan does not have space to discuss macro-structures using sociology, political science and macroeconomics. Still, these questions will be in my mind as we proceed through the rest of the book.<br />
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Finally, one of the lovely features of the book is that it has bibliographical essays every few chapters, explaining how Flanagan discovered new literatures and suggesting further sources for readers to effect their own prison breaks out of standard ways of thinking. (Incidentally, "prison breaks" is my term, not Flanagan's.) There are also good footnotes. So I thought, at the end of each post, I would aim to suggest 4 sources or so that looked particularly interesting (though it is hard to choose!). Here are my four for today:<br />
<ul>
<li>Clifford Geertz's <i>The Interpretation of Cultures </i>(1973) introduced the idea of thick description from philosophy to anthropology as a method of understanding others' ways of life. The opening essay is a nice introduction to what Geertz sees as anthropology's task, and can be read <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BZ1BmKEHti0C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">here</a>.</li>
<li>Kwame Anthony Appiah's 2006 book <i>Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers </i>argues for a global ethics and tackles the challenges of finding commonalities across different cultures.</li>
<li>Richard Shweder's <i>Thinking Through Cultures </i>(1991) is a defence of cultural psychology (that thinking is partly constituted by culture) and also a comparative moral psychology using the examples of India and the US. (Philosophers use the term 'moral psychology' to refer to the philosophical study of psychology to draw implications for ethics.)</li>
<li>Michelle Moody-Adams' 1997 <i>Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy </i>might be the one that caught my eye most vividly. It challenges the idea of moral relativism by exploring how cultures interact with each other, and also argues that moral enquiry is really a kind of interpretative ethnography, which emphasises how closely moral philosophy and anthropology are intertwined (or should be).</li>
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Senthuran Bhuvanendrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09609508959502641152noreply@blogger.com0