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As a child, Amartya Sen, Nobel prize winning economist and philosopher of social justice, witnessed the Hindu-Muslim riots that accompanied Pakistan’s partition from India. His analysis of identity and violence is based on this formative experience and identity-based conflicts around the world including 9/11 and the war of terrorism of recent decades. At least since the Obama error, the rhetoric of identity-based violence and the tactics of terror have become endemic within the US. We see the dynamics Sen discusses play out in our contemporary culture war and tribal political divisions. With experts now warning of social upheaval and even civil war looming on the horizon, now is an apt time to revisit Sen’s analysis. I highly recommend Sen’s book length treatment: Identity and Violence: The Illusion of… book by Amartya Sen (thriftbooks.com)

Individuals have many identities. I am all at once an, American, husband, father, cat lover, philosopher, handyman, cook, gardener, cyclist, and a white male. Individuals are complex and multifaceted. We each contain multitudes. Our various identities can be the basis of affinities that bind us together. They can also divide. As Sen puts it, “The adversity of exclusion can go hand in hand with the gifts of inclusion”

Division, enmity and ultimately violence are fomented by prioritizing singular identities to the exclusion of all others. When people are categorized according to just one of their many identities, that identity binds group members together even as it divides complex individuals from members of other groups. So, for instance, white supremacists in the US currently foment division and violence by categorizing fellow citizens exclusively by race (perhaps also immigration status), to the exclusion of identities that are shared across racial categories. Aside from being Black or white, Asian or indigenous, we are also parents, fellow citizens, hikers or basketball players, teachers or nurses, etc. In the fomenting of identity-based divisions, assorted shared identities among individuals are incrementally dismissed as irrelevant while a singular facet of identity grows all consuming. Individuals can only be thought of as white, Black, or brown in the rhetoric of the white supremacist. Individuals are reduced to narrow categories, their complexity is diminished, and the bases for shared understanding, appreciation, and respect that transcends the singular dividing identity is narrowed, ultimately choked off.

This is not the only example worth exploring in the current American cultural landscape. Ultimately it is our shared humanity that is undermined. The denigration and diminishment of our complex and multifaceted identities into singular categories is dehumanizing.

Locke wrote at a time when it would have been easy to miss the role of social systems and how unfair these can be. But aside from issues of fairness in our social systems, it’s worth noting how big a job it is to secure individual rights and liberties.

Part of our current political dysfunction is driven by people who see no threats to liberty except from the government. And from that point of view, any government rule or regulation is likely to look like an infringement of liberty.

So, we need to talk about vaccine mandates in connection with this. People who go around unvaccinated undermine the liberty of others by making their own physical presence a threat to the health and safety of others. Vaccine mandates are there to prevent some people from undermining the liberty of others by taking risks with the health and safety of others. Sometimes rules and regulations are there to advance and secure liberty.

This seems to be a difficult idea for many people to grasp firmly. I suspect this is because many people think of liberty in terms of getting to choose whatever they like instead of in Locke’s terms of self-ownership and non-domination. But political freedom is not the same thing as consumerism.

So, here’s another example we all get the point of. You are not free to run red lights, drive on the left side of the road, or go 90 MPH through the middle of town. The rules of the road we are all expected to follow don’t infringe on our liberty, they secure and enhance it. We are all more free to get where we want to go safely when everybody abides by traffic laws. Same idea with vaccine mandates.

If we, in the land of the free, could get a little clarity on how freedom works, I’d once again feel free to go to a bar, have a beer, and talk politics with someone who disagrees with me in at least marginally more reasonable ways.

Sounds like an interesting family life. First off, the issue of whether there is or isn’t a God is not a subjective issue. Either God exists or God doesn’t exist, but either way, it doesn’t depend on how anyone feels or what anyone believes. That said, it’s an objective matter that nobody has settled entirely conclusively. It remains a live philosophical issue, at least in some corners, among some pretty thoughtful and well informed thinkers. 

The goal of persuading an atheist there is a God or persuading a believer there is none sounds pretty intrusive. It sounds a bit like trying to take charge of another’s mind and shape it to your own will. But you just can’t change another person’s mind for them. That sounds like trying to cancel a person’s autonomy or delete their free will. Being able to make up your own mind is part of what it is to have a mind. What you can do is present the reasons you find compelling. If they really are good reason and you are talking to a reasonable person, they may find those reasons compelling as well.

But bear in mind that people usually have their own reasons for believing what they believe and they probably find them compelling as well. People usually get stuck here because we are generally not as reasonable as we like to suppose. Chances are that your reasons and the other person’s reason are not equally good. But chances are also good that neither of you is well positioned to make that determination, at least in a way the other will find compelling. 

Now, there are other goals you can achieve in this conversation across differences of belief and these are quite worthy goals in themselves. In exploring each other’s reasons for believing different things, you come to understand each other better. And understanding is its own form of intimacy. It provides a foundation for mutual appreciation and caring. So your family members are doing good stuff if they are engaging in dialectic for the sake of better understanding of each other. Maybe not such good stuff if their goal is to make somebody change their mind.

When someone else offers you reasons to change your mind, you should be convinced by those reasons if they are good reasons. That’s not exactly the same thing is being convinced by the person. Nobody likes to be bullied or coerced and we often resist the reasoning others offer because of this. It can feel like a personal violation or an assault when we feel like some person is trying to change our minds.

However, we are now so much in the habit of personalizing ideas and reasons that we leave ourselves little room to consider ideas and reasons on their own merits. Framing everything in terms of “this person’s opinion” or “that person’s reasons” leaves no space for open minded critical thinking. Discourse across different ways of thinking comes to feel like a mine field of personal intrusions and attacks. I’m afraid this is now our national intellectual pandemic. We have become an unreasonable people, literally. We are not amenable to reasons because we’ve largely lost the ability to consider ideas and arguments on their own merits, independent of the willfulness of the people who offer them. When mere persuasion reigns, reasonableness dies.

Opinion | How to Destroy Truth – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

But this is not what I’d hoped for. You exaggerate the gulf between fact and value here. The stories that animate our lives are mere propaganda when they are not based in fact. Critical thinking and propositional knowledge are relevant here. Critical thinking is also crucial to getting conceptual clarity about the values that animate us. Absent this, our values are hollow and easily co-opted by demagogues (witness the conflation of liberty with self indulgence on the right).

Would that we did emphasize critical thinking in our educational system. We don’t, we emphasize algebra. We do give lip service to critical thinking as an “infused outcome” across the curriculum. Imagine if we did this with math, or reasoning with numbers. We could have English teachers handle geometry and Sociologists comment on the factoring of polynomials (it’s divide and conquer, just like colonialism).

The result of our neglect of critical thinking beyond applications in math and the hard sciences is a population of people who think reasoning is irrelevant outside these realms. And now we know what politics looks like for such a miseducated population.

Let’s start with the modest metaphysical assumption that we all live on planet Earth. This means we have a shared reality. One that is populated with various and sundry objects (or better, containing stuff that can be divided in to objects in any number of ways). This is the realm of objects, or the objective world. As embodied creatures, we are among the objects populating the objective realm. But in addition to being objects we are also subjects. As subjects, we have some limited experience of the world. Our experience is the one thing we are directly aware of, so no additional assumptions are invoked here. But there is one further small metaphysical leap of faith in presuming that we have experience of our shared reality. We could all live on planet Earth and yet be irrevocably plugged in to virtual reality machines, lacking any experience of the reality we share. But let us take that additional leap as well and assume that we have limited and fallible experience of a shared reality. Absent this step, we can not hope to communicate, understand each other, or interact at all.

As subjects, our experience of the world is limited by our perspectives. Further our impressions and beliefs are liable to be distorted by biases and other intellectual bad habits. So, one thing we can all recognize about being subjects is that our impressions, beliefs and opinions are fallible. We are limited and imperfect in ways that make error quite possible. That’s just life as a subject, having subjective impressions and beliefs means being fallible. Fortunately, we can always expand the basis of evidence we reason from by sharing our impressions and beliefs with each other. And we can improve the reliability of our reasoning by cultivating the intellectual habits that steer us away from biased and distorted beliefs. This is the point of critical thinking.

To say our impressions and beliefs are subjective is not to say they are always biased, distorted or false. Belief is always in the subjective realm because beliefs belong to subjects. And this is all it means to say that belief is subjective. But our beliefs are representations of our shared reality and it remains possible for many of our beliefs to accurately reflect what is going on in the world of objects. That is, our subjective beliefs can be objectively true. All it is for a belief to be true is for it to represent some aspect of the objective world the way it is.

Note that we as subjects are part of the objective world. So, my beliefs about your beliefs are beliefs about an aspect of the objective world and they can be true or false, accurate or inaccurate. No subject can ever completely understand another simply because the nature of being a subject doesn’t allow for one person to fully occupy the mind of another. But we can share quite a bit of our subjectivity through human communication, at least if we are clear in our expression and charitable in our listening.

As subjects, it is generally good for us to have true beliefs and avoid false beliefs. When we have true beliefs, we are more capable of acting effectively, achieving goals, avoiding hazards, and generally having a good time. I suppose this is a value statement, but not the sort of value statements anyone is likely to dispute. This much of the value of having true beliefs comes along with being subjects who have needs and goals in a world full of objects (and subjects) than can be helpful or harmful to us. So, special cases aside, it’s good to have true beliefs.

For your beliefs to be rational, or reasonable, is just for them to be held on the basis of the best reasons. Good reasons are reasons that that are truth oriented. This much is just definitional. All it means for your belief to be rational or reasonable is for it to be oriented towards truth, or held for the most truth-oriented reasons. This much should make it clear why it is good to be rational. Being rational is more likely to get you true beliefs and true beliefs are good because they help you act effectively, achieve your goals, avoid hazards and such. To be reasonable, in the literal sense of the word, is to be amenable to reason. That is, the reasonable person is the person who forms or revises beliefs by yielding to the best reasons. To be a rational believer is pretty much the same thing.

[It’s worth noting that the words “rational” and “reasonable” can also refer to choosing or acting in ways that maximize your values and interests generally, not just towards true belief. Words are often ambiguous. The way to be comfortable with ambiguity is to get clear on how words are being used and track the various usages. Talk of rational or reasonable belief can reliably be understood as truth oriented simply because to believe something is to take it to be true].

Rationality is not a kind of human imposed authority over what is true or what we should believe. Rationality does not dictate such things. The only thing that is authoritative concerning what we should believe is how things are in our shared reality. To believe something is to take it to be true. To believe rationally is just to believe in a way that targets the truth well. To believe irrationally is a way of missing the target of belief. Rational belief isn’t guaranteed to hit the target of truth. But irrational belief involves a kind of unforced error.

What is true doesn’t belong to anyone. No subject gets to dictate or decide what is objectively the case, except in the very limited respect where a person decides what to do, how to understand things, and who to be. As a subject, I have this much power over our shared reality and no more. So there is no “my truth” or “your truth.” There is just the truth, which includes what we do, how we understand things, who we are, our willingness or reluctance to appreciate the truth, and whatever consequences follow from this.

We’ve made two assumptions here. Namely that we have a shared reality and that we each have limited and fallible experience of that reality. To this we’ve added a few definitional remarks about truth, rationality, reason, belief, subjectivity and objectivity. And we’ve reasoned a bit on the basis of these things. In the definitional remarks I’ve tried to lay out standard philosophical usage clearly and straightforwardly.

Confusions about truth, rationality, subjectivity and objectivity abound in our culture at the moment. Many will be tempted to object to what I’ve laid out here on the grounds that people are free to define these notions as they please. In a sense, people are free to do so. Nobody has the power to prevent it. But to insist on defining things as we like amounts to the privatization and commodification of language, with the primary result of undermining our capacity to communicate with one another and understand each other in the limited ways that are open to us. I am no fan of such hyper-individualism. We already have capitalism run amuck even without such linguistic intellectual property. While we could quibble about how to define truth and rationality, the only result of this would be to talk about something else instead. Something other than how we stand as subjects to each other and our shared reality.

The reason it is good to understand truth, rationality etc. in the manner I’ve laid out here is that it facilitates clearer communication and understanding of our diverse experiences and diverse ways of thinking. This allows us to cooperatively improve our ways of thinking and our limited grasp of the truth. And as a result of this, we are empowered to act more effectively, avoid hazards in our interactions, and appreciate each other more significantly.

One of the hazards of teaching philosophers like Descartes and Hume is that some students are too willing to embrace the skeptical claims and sit content with not being able to know. The idea that “It’s all just a matter of the individual’s subjective opinion” can be powerfully appealing to people who haven’t yet figured many things out and feel a bit overwhelmed with competing claims to truth. It also feeds into our society’s hyper-individualism and distorted conceptions of liberty. Many people feel they are in familiar and comfortable territory when what to believe can be reduced to nothing more than a consumer choice, a matter of personal taste, 

But this uncritical skepticism or subjectivism is not reasonable. That is, it serves as a way of not taking reasons seriously. It amounts to rejecting the project of inquiry, which unavoidably comes with the perilous risk of getting things wrong and finding reasons to change your mind. 

If we are going to take inquiry seriously, we might start by noting that while we have some clever arguments for skeptical claims from Hume, we also have some very impressive examples of successfully figuring things out in the recent history of science and technology. This means we have problems. And this is exactly how most philosophers regard skeptical arguments in epistemology. Hume gives us the problem of induction, that is, the problem of figuring out why and how empirical inquiry works (in a way that is responsive to the worries Hume raises). Problems are not points where we give up, they are points where we look for new ways to frame issues, new arguments to consider, or previously unnoticed problems in arguments we’ve found persuasive. Problems in philosophy are data points, not resting places.

So at the outset of this chapter I offer one way of approaching philosophy of science: Let’s look at our most successful knowledge producing practices and see just how we gain knowledge using these practices. This has the potential to explain how we can know in a way that isn’t as vulnerable to our prior skeptical worries. So, in this chapter, we’ll see Carl Popper answering Hume in just such a manner. And then Kuhn offering a more sophisticated development of Popper’s approach in a way that is sensitive to the historical development of science.

One of the joys of having an open-source text out there is occasionally getting pleasantly surprised with who it reaches. Glad you’re finding my Intro worthwhile. In an introduction to philosophy I’d rather hope to raise more interesting issues than I settle. It’s very gratifying to see you’ve latched on to some good questions here. Wish more of my students would read this closely.

So, you’re raising a question concerning the epistemology of value. How can we know what is good, or in the case of works of art, what is beautiful or has aesthetic value (let’s not assume these are the same thing). It might look like things are easier in the case of knowing what is good for your friend. You can ask your friend. But that might just be a starting point. Most of us don’t have perfect self-knowledge. Often enough, we are masters of self-deception. To take a pretty clear case, if your friend is a drug addict, he might tell you quite earnestly that what is good for him is a bag of dope. And he’d probably be wrong. So, there are challenging “how do you know?” questions concerning what is best for the people we love as well.

Before we get to the “how do you know?” question, though, let’s consider some data points. In both the case of your friends and works of art, it does seem we can inquire into what is best and come to have a decent appreciation of what is best. I think the text had a link to Khatia Buniatishvili playing Rachmaninov.

Khatia Buniatishvili plays Piano Concerto No. 2 by S. Rachmaninov – YouTu

Even if you are not a fan of classical music, you can probably appreciate the artistry of her playing. If you are a fan, you may have a more refined appreciation of what counts as great musicianship in this tradition. This isn’t something Buniatishvili gets to decide for herself (any more than the drug addict gets to decide for himself that another dose of herion is what’s best for him). 

Classical music is a good case to consider because it seems pretty clear that what is good is not totally subjective but determined in good measure by standards of excellence adopted in that musical tradition. Still, a great interpreter of Rachmaninov like Buniatishvili isn’t just slavishly adhering to those aesthetic standards. Rather she is articulating, refining and shaping those standards of excellence. She is adding something new of her own that complements and further develops the aesthetic values of the tradition. So perhaps, this is one view anyway, aesthetic value is created, but not arbitrary or subjective. We might have a hard time resolving our disagreements about who is the greatest blues guitarist, but it is clearly and objectively not me.

We have similar data points in loving relationships between people. Granted lots of relationships are dysfunctional and won’t be so helpful here. Frankfurt argues that self-love is loving what you love. This view is based on the idea that what is good for you is a function of what you love. But then we aren’t infallible judges of what we love. Sometimes your friend or mate knows better than you what is best for you. So, I might fancy the idea of owning another motorcycle at the ripe age of 57, but my wife sees better that this doesn’t cohere so well overall with the things I love (including her, of course). 

So, what I’m submitting as data points here are cases where people do have a pretty good appreciation for what is good or best, and these look like cases where our standards of excellence aren’t entirely subjective. And yet, as you astutely point out, our standard methods of rational inquiry into what is true don’t appear to be all that helpful. I don’t arrive at the “true” view of what is a great classical music performance, or whether it would be good for me to buy a Harley, through any process of inductive or deductive reasoning. This is beginning to look like a serious epistemic quandary.

So here is one suggestion. Perhaps we when are looking into what is best (in ethics, meaning in life or aesthetics) we aren’t looking into what is true. We are just looking into what is best. There may be kinds of understanding we can aspire to that aren’t exactly knowledge (since knowledge aims at truth). It may be that we can grasp, aspire to, or appreciate standards of excellence that aren’t merely subjective or totally up to us, but at the same time aren’t real entities in the world where we can have knowledge of truths. 

[Note here that having knowledge of truths itself looks to depend on standards of excellence that can’t be easily captured in terms of inquiring into truths. We can say quite a bit about what it is to have a good justifying reason for holding a belief. But here epistemology is just as normative as ethics or aesthetics. It’s not like our standards of excellence in inquiry are objectively existing things in the world about which we can have true beliefs. And yet we can pretty clearly get things wrong when it comes to justifying our beliefs (witness QAnon).]

So, the suggestion here is that there is space to explore between things being subjective, or up to us, and things being real, out there in the world where we can inquire into truths about them. I’d point you to Christine Korsgaard as one scholarly source to explore along these lines.

Finally, here’s another suggestion. Perhaps values are real, including moral values, the good life, and aesthetic values. Perhaps there are truths to discover here, but reasoning (deductive or inductive) is just one of the tools at our disposal for getting at these truths. There is also evidence. Sometimes your best and only reason for believing something is that you’ve witnessed it. In the case of Buniatishvili’s musicianship, she has, through the course of her training, been shown what excellent classical piano playing sounds like and she has developed a keen ear for this kind of excellence. In the case of typical moral maturation, we are shown some evidence when as children we are asked how we’d feel if someone treated us like that (or even more vividly when someone does treat us like that).

Hope you weren’t looking for an easy answer here Jack. When you get past the introduction, things only get more, well, complicated or interesting, depending on your sensibility.

Best,Russ

A popular view in our culture is that people who do wrong should be punished as a matter of retribution. Retribution is holding a person responsible by treating them according to the standard they set for themselves in their wrong action. But then we don’t steal the car thief’s car, we sent him to prison. Prison seems like the more humane alternative to raping the rapist and you generally can’t defraud the fraudster who would be broke without his ill gotten gains. But prison is still pretty severe punishment since it not only costs the wrong doer a significant chunk of their life, but given the way we have set things up, a prison sentence grants the convicted very few realistic paths back into the social order.

I worry about retributive punishment. It frequently functions as a thin morally righteous veil over vengeful motives. In principle, retribution is treating the wrong doer the way he deserves to be treated. Retribution, in principle, is entirely about what is just for the wrongdoer. Revenge differs in that it is about the victims and evening the score. But in practice we get these things mixed up. And punishment is often enough about satisfying our sense of righteousness when we identify with the victims of crime. The desire for revenge, I think, is best understood as a fight or flight response after the fact. We are horrified at the evil act of the wrong doer and feel a powerful emotional impulse to hit back, even though there is no longer any ongoing fight.

The Russian/Armenian tile setter that did my bathroom several years ago commented in conversation that “When the fight is over, you stop swinging your arms.” Wise words, I think. My worry about retribution/revenge is that it mainly serves as an indulgence of our own cruel impulses. We have a whole media machinery set up to whip up our outrage at the wrong doings of fellow citizens (it’s called the local TV news). And politicians are quick to capitalize on our fear of crime with get tough on crime measures. But getting tough on crime doesn’t bring crime down, it only sates our lust for vengeance. Crime statistics since the crime ridden 70s show clearly that dramatic reductions in crime are not correlated with “get tough” measures. Crime has fallen years ahead of “get tough” measures in many places and crime has remained intransigent in other places that have gotten tough. One of the leading hypotheses in the ongoing mystery concerning why crime has fallen so dramatically since the 70s it that it’s a salutary effect of removing lead from paint. 

We have an immediate sense of our freedom to make choices and a deep sense that people should be held accountable for these. But we also know full well that our choices are influenced in ways we don’t always appreciate. The choices we make, for instance, are heavily influenced by the options we see as open to us. Consider that crime rates overall among black men are higher than among white men, but crime rates among employed black men are about the same as crime rates among employed white men. Unemployment does predispose people towards crime. Race doesn’t. Among the most significant aspects of systemic racism in America is racial disparity in pay and employment opportunities.

People with decent characters sometimes make bad choices. Punishing them won’t often make them into better people. Though it might make them into worse people. The cruel impulses that lay beneath the veils of retribution and “personal responsibility” do a great deal of damage in our society, and most often to people who have very little power to begin with.

My caution about the cruel impulse to punish is not an argument for letting dangerous evil doers go free with no consequences. There are other models for criminal justice that would be more effective at protecting society and cultivating more peaceable, responsible and productive citizens. One is the public health model. Society should be protected from dangerous individuals. But we can do this by treating dangerous criminals in the same manner we treat people with dangerous infectious diseases. Prison should be like quarantine, unpleasant when necessary, but making it unpleasant isn’t the point. There are ways to protect society from criminal danger that aren’t cruel. But indulging cruel impulses doesn’t do anyone any good.