John Stuart Mill, one of the most prominent British philosophers of the 19^th century, has had a tremendous influence on political philosophy, ethical theory, and much of the liberal thought which has dominated contemporary Western culture. His libertarian viewpoints are espoused in his essay On Liberty, which is an unwavering defense of individual liberty and freedom from limitations imposed by society. A few years later, Mill published his essay Utilitarianism, in which he argues that utility is the fundamental principle of morality. The principle of utility, or the greatest happiness principle, states that right actions are those which produce the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people, and wrong actions are those that produce the greatest unhappiness. Mill’s advocacy of the concepts of happiness, freedom, and individual liberty, serves as the groundwork for his Utilitarian theory of ethics, and the two works Utilitarianism and On Liberty are perhaps the two most important essays which express his viewpoints.

However, when comparing the two texts, one cannot help noticing an inherent tension between them. Mill’s discourse in On Liberty, is supposed to be written in a Utilitarian spirit. Can Mill truly provide an adequate defense of the protection of individual liberty and freedom, while approaching the issue from a Utilitarian standpoint, which emphasizes the promotion of society’s utility at the cost of individual happiness? Mill’s fundamental principle of utility presupposes that happiness is the only thing to be valued as a goal, and for its own sake. In order to remain consistent with Utilitarianism, the notions of individual liberty and freedom can only be valued as vehicles toward that same goal. In other words, freedom can only be valued instrumentally, because it promotes happiness. It cannot be valued in and of itself as a natural right. This apparent tension between the two texts also manifests itself within On Liberty as Mill himself struggles with reconciling the two notions of freedom and utility. It will be necessary first to analyze the tension within On Liberty, before delving into the relation between Utilitarianism and On Liberty. In this paper, I will argue that Mill contradicts the principle of utility through his arguments for the protection of liberty, because he yields to the fact that liberty should be pursued for its own sake.

There are several examples within On Liberty, which portray the concept of liberty[1] as valuable only as a vehicle toward the end goal of promoting happiness. These examples prove Mill’s consistency with Utilitarianism, because only happiness is valued in and of itself. In the first example of the instrumental value of liberty, Mill says, “In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is, therefore, capable of being more valuable to others. There is a greater fullness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass which is composed of them.”(On Liberty 60) In essence, this is an argument based on the principle of utility. According to the quote, individuality is valued because it promotes happiness for the individual, which, in turn, promotes happiness for society as a whole. Later in the text, Mill also points out that “originality is a valuable element in human affairs” and that “it is necessary further to show that these developed human beings[2] are of some use to the undeveloped.”(Ibid., 61) He also supports “mental freedom”(Ibid., 33) on the grounds that it allows for the development of an intellectually active society. These quotes serve to illustrate that part of Mill’s argument for the defense of liberty does seem to include extrinsic value, which is consistent with Utilitarianism. As long as liberty is valued as a means to the end of happiness, the principle of utility is not undermined.

On the other hand, there are also many instances where Mill appears to be accepting the inherent value of liberty as a goal in itself, rather than as a vehicle toward the end goal of happiness. In the first chapter of On Liberty, Mill begins by introducing “one very simple principle.”(Ibid., 9) This is very dangerous for Mill, because according to Utilitarianism, the sole fundamental principle for human beings is the principle of utility. Furthermore, he goes on to describe this principle and states that “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.”⁶ This principle is regarded as the “harm principle” and serves as one of the major arguments within the text. An individual can act with absolute and complete liberty as long he or she does not cause harm to another. With this statement, Mill seems to be placing liberty in a protected position, regardless of whether the recognition of liberty would promote utility. There are several examples in which Mill seems to express liberty as being inherently valuable. For instance, chapter three begins with the title, “Of Individuality, As One of The Elements of Well-Being.”(Ibid., 53) This title is very important, because it does not define individuality as a means to well-being, or happiness, but as part of well-being. If the notion of individuality were included within the principle of utility by definition as part of happiness, then such a statement would not be contradictory. Since the principle of utility is defined as simply pleasure and absence of pain, there is no indication that individuality has any inherent good according to Utilitarianism.

At this point, it is noticeable that there is a clear internal contradiction within Mill’s argument in On Liberty. He seems to be insisting that his “harm principle”, is a protected principle distinct from utility, while at the same time insisting that liberty is only defended because of the principle of utility. The “harm principle” espoused in the text allows the individual to act with absolute freedom as long as no one else is affected by his actions. This seems to imply that the principle of utility has no jurisdiction within the personal sphere of the individual as long has the individual’s actions are “self-regarding.”(Ibid., 74) However, if the individual’s freedom was recognized only instrumentally, then even this personal “self-regarding” sphere could be interfered with in order to promote utility.

Although Utilitarianism and On Liberty are not directly related or in dialogue with each other, Mill’s ideas on “public utility” and “private utility” in his later work help explain the tension in his earlier work. Mill explains this distinction in Utilitarianism. He says private utility is “the interest or happiness of some few persons” (Utilitarianism 19) and public utility means to promote utility “on an extended scale.”⁹ When viewing On Liberty through the lens of private versus public utility, it becomes clear what Mill is actually saying. He is arguing for the protection of liberty, for its own sake, only at the level of private utility. In contrast, liberty is valued instrumentally, in terms of public utility. For instance, Mill says an action “which neither violates any specific duty to the public, nor occasions perceptible hurt to any assignable individual except himself, the inconvenience is one which society can afford to bear, for the sake of the greater good of human freedom.”(On Liberty 80) Mill is saying that in cases where freedom and utility conflict, freedom will be valued regardless of the private utility that would be promoted by stripping away that freedom. However, by valuing freedom for its own sake, regardless of its private utility, the greater public utility will be promoted. In essence, Mill seems to insist on the inherent value of freedom, but uses the promotion of public utility at a larger scale in order to cover this flaw and remain consistent with Utilitarianism. This viewpoint is also made clear at the very beginning of the essay when Mill explains his intentions for On Liberty. In the introduction, he says “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.”(On Liberty 10) Mill must have anticipated the apparent tension that readers would recognize in his work, and with this statement explains that he will protect liberty at the private level, but will also remain faithful to Utilitarianism by valuing liberty as a means of promoting utility on a larger scale.

The reconciliation of the two notions of freedom and utility is so difficult, that Mill’s argument, an attempt to solve this tension, is bound to raise many questions. Is Mill entitled to make such a claim? Is it consistent to accept the principle of utility as fundamental at an extended scale, but place limits on it at the private level? Can liberty be valued intrinsically when viewed through one lens, but extrinsically in another?

The following quote from Mill’s response to an objection in Utilitarianism, may make the answer to this question clearer. The response is to the objection that Utilitarianism is too demanding by asking an individual to promote happiness for an entire society. He says “private utility, the interest or happiness of some few persons, is all he has to attend to.”(Utilitarianism 19) With this statement, Mill is making it clear that cases of public utility are only “exceptional”, and in general, individuals should only be considered with private utility. If each individual is only concerned with private utility, the level at which liberty is protected and valued for its own sake, then the realm of public utility or the “greater good” seems irrelevant at a subjective level. If an individual’s morality is defined strictly in terms of private utility, then it would make no difference whether liberty would be valued intrinsically or extrinsically at a larger scale, because the realm of public utility would not be a factor. In this sense, from the subjective standpoint of individuals, Mill accepts that liberty is inherently valuable, pursued for its own sake, and protected from the influence of utility. The instrumental value of liberty at the level of public utility cannot be argued for on Utilitarian grounds, because it has no practical significance for the individual in Utilitarianism.

In this sense, Mill ends up unintentionally yielding that liberty is inherently valuable in On Liberty. His argument for its value as a vehicle to promote happiness in terms of greater public utility, is inconsistent with Utilitarian principles and results in a principle of liberty that is protected and independent from the principle of utility. As a result, Mill cannot solve the apparent tension between On Liberty and Utilitarianism, because his defense of liberty leads to the undermining of the principle of utility. Furthermore, it would be necessarily impossible for him to reconcile both positions, because a true defense of liberty and freedom cannot rest on extrinsic value in the Utilitarian sense, but only on intrinsic value. If the notion of liberty is valued only as a means to an end, its very nature would be different depending on what the end may require. The very concept of liberty seems to escape this notion, and insists on being defended as a natural right to be recognized in and of itself. This is made evident through Mill’s failure in his argument. Ultimately, Mill is placed in a position where he can either defend liberty while renouncing the principle of utility, or he can maintain the principle of utility at the expense of a defense of true liberty.

Endnotes

[1] It is important to note that the term “liberty” is used by Mill as an umbrella term throughout the essay, and includes the concepts of freedom, individuality, and originality.

[2] The developed human beings Mill refers to are those people who have fully developed their faculties freely and openly through the exercise of their freedom of individuality and originality. These people are regarded as those who have attained a very high level of happiness because they have satisfied their utmost intellectual desires. Through this development, these human beings would be useful to society in countless ways by exercising their faculties for the benefit of society.

Works Cited

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978.

Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001

Raafay Syed (’12) is a Philosophy and Public Health Studies major at The Johns Hopkins University.

Art courtesy of =drezdany.

I. Introduction

The debate on the role of neuroscience in the context of the law has crucial repercussions for the notion of legal responsibility. Legal responsibility and moral responsibility are not necessarily analogous; however, there is a strong correlation. Moral responsibility often informs our sense of legal responsibility, but the latter is best understood as a subset of the former. Legal responsibility is less demanding than moral responsibility mainly due to the context of its function: the courtroom. In the courtroom, evidence is the focus of judgments, whereas moral responsibility adjudicates in cases that are purely internal to an agent and transcend evidence. For example, when dealing with virtuous actions, a person probably upholds their legal responsibility when she works in a soup kitchen to feed those in need. If she would be doing so, only for personal benefit (e.g. to look virtuous or solely for economic gain) we would mostly only judge this act deplorable on moral grounds. Conversely, if a person shoots and kills another person, both legally and morally we are interested in the internal workings of the agent. Exculpatory factors derived from impairment of mental faculties, specifically in the legal domain, suggest that committing an act alone is not adequate for justifying the attribution of guilt and responsibility. These are some common conceptions of legal and moral responsibility, many of which rely on some conception of an intentional moral agent that has a will. In this paper, I first examine the text of Greene & Cohen and their conclusion that a shift to a consequentialist justification of punishment follows from a new understanding gained by neuroscience. After criticising their conclusion, I look at an article by Joel Feinberg where he outlines the differences between legal and moral responsibility. This will prepare the ground for considering Levy & Bayne as well as Ryan & Deci who argue that the will is an essential part of our understanding of responsibility and self-determination respectively. Finally, I consider Levy & Bayne’s characterological account and the plausibility it gains in direct balance to the implausibility of Greene & Cohen’s conclusion.

Greene & Cohen describe the dialectic that neuroscience encroaches on in the field of philosophy of law. There are two recourses, (1) discoveries and understanding gained through neuroscience will transform our legal attitude or (2) such a new understanding would only provide details that the current legal framework is adequately able to accommodate. They advocate the latter and take the position that neuroscience will have a transformative effect, “not by undermining [the law’s] current assumptions, but by transforming people’s moral intuitions about free will and responsibility” (Greene and Cohen 1775). They further state that our current legal principles owe their veracity to our intuitive sense of justice. It is this sense of justice that they believe will be transformed by neuroscientific discoveries. To this effect, they conclude our intuition of justice should shift from the use of punishment for retribution to punishment for consequentialist reasons. I will reject the claim that a change in our sense of justice as they describe it would not also affect current legal principles. I will attempt to expose a fundamental intuition that underlies both the current law and our intuitions of justice such that they are interdependent. Further, the arguments of Levy & Bayne 2004 about the indispensability of the will and its role within legal responsibility will add on to this discussion. I will also evaluate the potential of characterological accounts of “will” to pose a viable alternative to switching to the consequentialist solution Green & Cohen suggest to be necessary.

The interest in neuroscience for questions of law follows naturally from the dual component for legal conviction in criminal cases. The defendant must not only be proved to have committed an illegal act, but mens rea must also be established. Greene & Cohen suggest mens rea can be understood narrowly and loosely: Narrowly, Intention and on the other hand loosely as “all mental states consistent with moral and/or legal blame,” (Greene and Cohen 1775). An interest in mental states is evidence of a main assumption inherent in our legal system. This crucial connection is where our dialogue of will is most important. However, I will first outline Greene & Cohen’s theory in more detail before illustrating this point.

II. Legal Principles and Moral Intuitions

Amongst others, there are two premises that the arguments of Greene & Cohen rely upon. First, that science, specifically neuroscience will undermine the common libertarian convictions of free will and take with it the retributivist justification that depends on these convictions. This appears to be an assumption because such a move assumes we can eliminate the will. This is something Adina Roskies (2006) believes neuroscience alone is unable to do. The second premise is that a rejection of common-sense free will and retributivism “[ensues] a shift towards a consequentialist approach to punishment’ (Greene and Cohen 1776). Is this the only other option? Could the characterological approach of Levy & Bayne be plausible and thereby still preserve a notion of will? If so this would weaken Greene & Cohen‘s argument.

With these questions in mind, I will now explicate Greene & Cohen’s position. The conceptual playing field takes shape by contrasting consequentialist and retributivist justifications for punishment. Retributivist justifications of punishment according to Greene & Cohen suffer from an internal tension: compatibilism and incompatibilism of free will with determinism. They argue incompatibilist libertarian intuitions underlie the current law. This is evident, say Green & Cohen, because there is often a gap between moral intuitions and what the law deems relevant (Greene and Cohen 1776).

Greene & Cohen provide critiques of both justifications. Consequentialist justifications are forward-looking. Their aim is to insure future societal welfare but they are susceptible to objections as are most other utilitarian type theories. For many it may appear that utilitarian type theories allow the justification of anything as long as there is a greater benefit to the whole. In the case of legal responsibility, Greene & Cohen admit that “consequentialist theories fail to capture something central to common-sense intuitions about legitimate punishment” (Greene and Cohen 1776). Retributivist justifications are backward-looking and are less concerned with the welfare of society as a whole. Retributivist punishment functions more to remedy a debt that has been incurred by a criminal whether to society or another individual. Their critique of the retributivist justifications focuses on the scepticism of free will in a deterministic world.

What of this deterministic world? On the subject of determinism, they reference Peter van Inwagan (1982): “determinism is true if the world is such that its current state is completely determined by (i) the laws of physics and (ii) past states of the world” (Greene and Cohen 1777). They admit free will is often conceived as the ability to do otherwise, but note that Frankfurt (1966) questions this assumption. Later in the paper, we will consider those implications, which I believe Greene & Cohen have neglected to do. In the end, say Greene & Cohen, there are three main solutions to the problem of free will: hard determinism, libertarianism and compatibilism. They argue for a consequentialist justification for punishment since it is plausible with all three options, whereas retributivist justifications necessitate a stance on free will. They continue to expand their argument by assuming punishment can reasonably only be carried out for actions that are freely willed. Since hard determinism would undermine justification for any punishment and, according to a previous claim, libertarian views are “scientifically suspect” (Greene and Cohen 1778) they conclude that retributivism requires a compatibilist view. However, Green & Cohen believe that neuroscience will increase the tension between the “compatibilist legal principles and libertarian moral intuitions” beyond its breaking point (Ibid.), ending with an inability to support retributivist claims.

An argument that states neuroscience will not change the law (Green & Cohen refer to Morse 2004), maintains the law only requires “a general capacity for rational behaviour” to deem people legally responsible. This means a neurological explanation may well provide better and more detailed evidence of rationality, but it will not fundamentally change the law “unless it shows that people in general fail to meet the law’s very minimal requirements for rationality” (Greene and Cohen 1778). This point will be instrumental in undermining Greene & Cohen’s argument. Proponents of the fact that neuroscience will change the law, says Morse, are often committing the fundamental psycholegal error. If neuroscience provides us with a neuronal explanation of acts committed then one who commits this fallacy would argue that this fact is exculpatory for legal responsibility. However, under the assumption of physicalism, every action is caused in some way by the brain. Thus, establishing a causal relation between brain states and action is not sufficient to bring into play any legal ramifications except perhaps in the case where some brain state sufficiently impairs minimal rationality.

For this reason, Morse believes neuroscience does not pose a challenge to the law, as we currently know it. Greene & Cohen agree in principle with the subtle notion the psycholegal error elucidates but add a distinctive appeal to the moral intuitions and commitments of society. According to Greene & Cohen, “The legitimacy of the law itself depends on its adequately reflecting the moral intuitions and commitments of society. If neuroscience can change those intuitions, then neuroscience can change the law” (Greene and Cohen 1778). To circumscribe these intuitions they say what really matters for responsibility for most people is evidenced by the kinds of disjunctive questions they ask in these situations. Questions such as “was it him, or was it his genes? … Was it him, or was it his brain?” (Greene and Cohen 1778-9)

The example of Mr. Puppet highlights these intuitions. The example also accentuates the disparity between what the law’s interests are and what we intuitively hold to be true about responsibility. The law is interested in establishing minimal rationality as a prerequisite for legal responsibility, but since we can construct hypothetical situations such as Mr. Puppet, where outside control does not come at the cost of impairing rationality it appears that in the face of a deterministic worldview, which precisely postulates outside control, the law seems inadequate in separating these cases. Greene & Cohen put it this way, “rationality is just a presumed correlate of what most people really care about” (Greene and Cohen 1780). This is what underlies the fundamental psycholegal error. We are intuitively opposed to any outside forces that exert control over us, that we are quick to exculpate in any situation where that is the case. Greene & Cohen conclude that we are all similar to Mr. Puppet since determinism is true at least to some degree because of physical laws. Further, free will seems to require actions that are independent of external forces and thus requires us to reject determinism. Since determinism is true to some degree a libertarian free will is a misunderstanding and incompatible with determinism. In principle, I agree with Greene & Cohen that Mr. Puppet brings forth some vital questions about our intuitions, but I believe they have not gone deep enough in investigating a fundamental assumption that both the law and the case of Mr. Puppet share.

They believe that as we discover more about the mechanistic processes about the brain the plausibility of “dualist and libertarian intuitions” will decrease. In this respect, they compare the brain to a bottleneck through which every influence on our behaviour must flow. Neuroscience will provide us with the tools to discover what is going through this bottleneck. In a reflection on how this may play out in the future Greene & Cohen see a time where the dichotomy between the questions of being truly guilty and simply a victim of neuronal and external forces will become obsolete. For this to happen there must be an intermediate step. We need first accept that being a victim of neuronal and external forces is still sufficient for legal responsibility of any kind. Is it possible to preserve a notion of will (whatever its status) and is this perhaps required to justify any sense of being responsible for ones actions? Greene & Cohen themselves sate that “it is possible that we will never be able to fully talk ourselves out of [our intuitive sense of free will]”. (Greene and Cohen 1781). It seems plausible to say that neuroscience may inform and fine-tune our intuitions to some degree in this area. However, the central question for this paper investigates whether its elimination altogether would leave sufficient grounds for the law’s current assumptions.

III. The Case for the Law’s Dependence on Intuitions About Justice

At this point I present an intermittent argument to challenge Greene & Cohen’s conclusion that neuroscience will change our moral intuition but not change the law’s current assumptions. We pick up on the idea of rationality in a setting such as Mr. Puppet. I believe just because neuroscience may show a one-to-one correlation between brain states and actions this does not mean that our actions can be sufficiently explained at the level of a deterministic world. If the functioning within the brain does adhere to some physical laws and even if the outside world has the same physical laws this is not in principle sufficient to conclude that our environment determines our actions. This detail is putatively dismissed by Green & Cohen with the example of Mr. Puppet, and means that their conclusion makes certain implicit assumptions about the phenomenon of will.

Let us be more concrete with some examples. There are two options both in respect to the world and to our brain/mind. Either the world is (1a) determined (knowing the beginning state and all the physical laws that regulate movement to future states) or (1b) it is indetermined. On the other hand, the will could be (2a) libertarian in nature (the possibility of doing otherwise) or (2b) the will could be an illusion (where we at least appear to have the possibility of choosing otherwise) or (2c) there is no will (no moral responsibility). Greene & Cohen believe a determined world eliminates both 2a and 2b. I believe 2b is still a viable option.

To consider this, let us look at external versus internal factors. Feinberg mentions that an external factor (e.g. dust in the eye) can interfere with internal workings such as intentions, but I propose this “interference” only makes sense if the internal processes are viewed as self-contained and not just an extension of the external (determined or indetermined) world.

Thus, if neuroscience were to reveal that our will can be reduced to determined brain states we would still be interested in one person’s specific brain state for questions of moral or legal responsibility. It would not make sense to ask what the state of the world is in our attempt to discover what this person’s particular role was in the deterministic world and from this make an inference about responsibility. This illuminates a fundamental assumption, precisely, that looking at a particular part of the causal network (e.g. the individual’s brain) has more moral significance than the world at large. I believe this is a fundamental assumption the law makes. However, the kind of justice that Greene & Cohen support when they suggest that consequentialist justifications for punishment are the only plausible ones in face of a deterministic worldview undermines this assumption. Thus, they are presupposing that we would accept such a view of justice to argue that neuroscience will lead us to change our intuitions in precisely that direction. It is also possible that our intuitions about justice and more specifically our intuitions about individuality prevent us from conceiving of ourselves as simply a physical extension of the world, even if this world were to be physically determined.

The fact that the current law is interested in the internal as exemplified in the individual brain precludes such a conception of justice. Specifically, on Greene & Cohen’s account, the law’s assumptions center on the question of rationality. Recall, Morse’s statement about minimal rationality. I propose that this rationality is a question of the internal and individual brain state as opposed to a question about the world at large. Therefore, if Greene & Cohen were to suggest that our sense of justice were to change in the way they propose then this would mean “we all lack minimal rationality.” On the other hand, if we would like to argue that the law’s current assumptions are unaffected, then we must be able to maintain individuality, which has the correlate of will despite an externally determined world.

Rationality in the abstract is behaviour or reasoning that is precisely not just based on external influences. Can nature be rational? Would an earthquake be morally responsible for the deaths it caused? These two questions alone illustrate the intuitions we have about justice. If the law establishes a difference between nature at large and us as people (moral agents, who are rational) this distinction itself is witness that at least in principle there is a separate standard that we apply in the case of assumed intentional agents in both the areas of moral and legal responsibility. Using this terminology, I believe Greene & Cohen wish to say that neuroscience will demonstrate that there are no moral agents therefore we need consequentialist justifications for punishment. Does this then not change the fundamental assumptions underlying current law?

It may be possible that neuroscience reveals that we are just an extension of a determined environment. We can then either continue with an illusion to maintain our intuitions (N.J. Block (1971) makes an argument for the compatibility of mechanistic and teleological explanations of behaviour), or we can change our intuitions, but then we will also affect the law’s current assumptions. More so, because of the interconnectedness of rationality, individuality and moral agency it appears implausible to change our notion of justice without also fundamentally challenging the law’s current assumptions.

IV. Eliminating the Will

To bring forth the complexity that underlies our intuitive sense of free will Greene & Cohen delve into a psychological analysis of our perceptions of inanimate objects versus those that appear to move around at will. To make sense of the behaviour of different objects in the world our minds, say Greene & Cohen have developed two distinct cognitive systems. In this fundamental folk psychological intuition, we find the grounds for the psycholegal error. A moral agent must necessarily be seen as having a mind that acts as its own cause. Determinism would clearly undermine our attribution of such minds and thus challenge our attribution of responsibility. Greene & Cohen themselves on the topic of eliminating the will include this passage:

“many compatibilists sceptically ask what would it mean to give up on free will. Were we to give it up, wouldn’t we have to immediately reinvent it? Does not every decision involve an implicit commitment to the idea of free will? And how else would we distinguish between ordinary rational adults and other individuals, such as young children and the mentally ill, whose will – or whatever you want to call it – is clearly compromised? Free will, compatibilists argue, is here to stay, and the challenge for science is to figure out how exactly it works and not to peddle silly arguments that deny the undeniable (Dennett 2003)” (Greene and Cohen 1777)

For Greene & Cohen, the compromise that allows responsibility despite a lack of free will is exemplified with a consequentialist justification for punishment. They conclude that neuroscience will not change the law, because the law’s concerns lay elsewhere, but that the underlying intuitions or moral responsibility will change by what neuroscience can bring to the table. Free will is an illusion and our intuitions will ultimately have to change from retributivist to consequentialist justifications for punishment.

I have already made a case for a dependency of the law on our moral intuitions. Now that we have analyzed Greene & Cohen’s argument in depth, and argued against a change of intuitions that still preserves the current law, we can address the claims they have made with regard to the will. The heart of their argument depends on challenging the conception of free will. At this point, it is helpful to consider the difference between free will and will proper. Greene & Cohen’s dialectic focuses on free will since they wish to pin this against a deterministic worldview. Do they also mean to eliminate a psychological understanding of action in terms of will? Are free will and will proper synonymous, or can we derive an explanation of action in terms of will that is compatible with determinism? These questions force us to ask what it is about will that is so important in our conception of moral agency. A firm stand on this issue will help us gage the extent of influence neuroscientific discoveries may have. To help in elucidating this issue we must certainly consider the contribution of Harry Frankfurt. I believe it is plausible to take the view of Frankfurt with respect to free will combined with neurological explanations to preserve a sense of will. We shall also consider the option of replacing will with a characterological account.

First, we delineate moral responsibility by considering Feinberg; in Problematic Responsibility in Law and Morals, he provides a detailed discussion. The greatest factor separating legal and moral responsibility according to Feinberg is that “judgments of legal responsibility are strongly influenced by ulterior practical purposes” (Feinberg 341). These practical concerns deal with the inherent vagueness in judging “how … losses can best be distributed and whether certain kinds of risk-taking are to be encouraged or deterred” (Feinberg 343). Punishment and compensation are further practical concerns that a legal system must deal with (Feinberg 343). Moral responsibility according to Feinberg has many unique aspects. At large, it is “liability to charges and credits on some ideal record” (Feinberg 345). The exactness that legal questions demand such as the year and a day rule (to determine if an act contributed to a death) is inappropriate when considering moral responsibility. However moral responsibility is in principal precisely decidable as it must be read off facts and deduced from them. Further, moral judgments are “absolute” in contrast to legal judgments. Legal judgments are not as strong, since they only say the agent had an “‘important’ contribution for the purpose of the law” (Feinberg 345). Finally, moral responsibility must deliver regular and predictable judgments that are not subject to luck (Feinberg 346).

Feinberg asserts that in many situations it may be impossible to make moral judgments, since actions are not the only contributor to the outcome. Being “at fault” and moral responsibility are not identical. “A person can well be morally at fault in what he does without being morally responsible for some given harm” (Feinberg 347). Our intuition about morality is that “moral responsibility for external harm makes no sense, … moral responsibility is therefore restricted to the inner world of the mind, where the agent rules supreme and luck has no place” (Ibid.). He further mentions that this is where volition is undertaken and intentions formed where an agent “govern[s] those inner thoughts and volitions which are completely subject to [her] control” (Ibid.)

Even though moral responsibility primarily looks towards the inner workings Feinberg continues and shows how even moral responsibility can be susceptible to an outside influence (e.g. luck) such as a speck of dust in one’s eye that interrupts someone’s rage from progressing (Feinberg 349). Feinberg notices it is odd to speak of responsibility for one’s intentions, but: “having a character of a certain sort is often a necessary condition for the forming of any particular intention” (Ibid.). By hypothesizing two agents with similar character but different intentions formed (due to external influence), Feinberg concludes that responsibility is not derived from character alone, but rather from how important of a contributor the character was in the particular situation (Feinberg 350). By making a list of possible contributors towards forming a certain intention despite character Feinberg points out that some of these contributing factors are external in nature (ie. Upset stomach, rude remarks, hyperactive adrenal gland). In this sense, we arrive at the same problem as with legal responsibility; (Feinberg 350-1) the problem of exactness and balancing factors that have contributed to the intention. Feinberg’s final and central claim is that it is a “mistake to think that by restricting responsibility to an inner jurisdiction we can thereby make precise its vaguenesses [sic]and eliminate its contingencies [sic]” (Feinberg 351). This illustrates some of the similarities between legal and moral responsibility.

What of the balance between internal and external factors? What Morse calls the fundamental psycholegal error is summed up by “regard[ing] actions only as fully free when those actions are seen as robust against determination by external forces” (Greene and Cohen 1780). This is evidence to their anti-compatibilist tendencies. Most of their discussion looks at the role of free will. They believe libertarian conceptions of free will are in contradiction with neuroscience. (Ibid.) Ryan & Deci hash out what kind of understanding of will can stand in the face of neuroscience. They agree that the understanding of Descartes postulating a force that tilts the mechanical processes in the brain is such a version of the will that cannot stand up to neuroscience (Ryan and Deci 1571). In their discussion on autonomy, Ryan & Deci explore several philosophical notions to define autonomy. Both from a phenomenological perspective and modern analytical approaches we see that independence from external influences or constraints is not necessary to have autonomy. In both cases, assent or consent to these influences is sufficient for autonomy (Ryan and Deci 1560-2). The self-determination theory (SDT) of autonomy is used in discussions of psychological aspects relevant to autonomy. In this context the opposite of autonomy, heteronomy, is defined as “regulation…by forces experienced as alien or pressuring, be they inner impulses or demands, or external contingencies” (Ryan and Deci 1562). Ryan & Deci bring further depth to an understanding of autonomy. Instead of an all or nothing autonomy, they propose that “within SDT, autonomy for any given action is a matter of degree” (Ryan and Deci 1563). If this is the case, it makes the dispute between proponents of will-talk and those that maintain it to be an illusion more complex.

Both the notions that Feinberg and Ryan & Deci bring forth show that despite external influences (even inner workings of the brain) our intuitions still support an investigation of intention. Even though Feinberg admits our character can be influenced by alien forces it is a determination of the degree of influence that has a bearing on responsibility. The term “will” can thus be understood as an overarching term, a mental place holder, that bears testimony to a fundamental assumption underlying our intuitions about responsibility.

V. The Charaterological Account

Levy & Bayne bring to the table examples of pathologies of the will. Since it is our purpose to argue for behaviour with the aid of the notion of will it would be begging the question to speak of pathologies of the “will”. Thus, we will consider the example of Levy & Bayne as pathologies of the common notion of agency. If we succeed in showing that these pathologies indispensably require the notion of will to make them intelligible then we would succeeded in opening the way for the indispensability of the will. Evaluating this claim, however, is not within the scope of this paper, rather, if we can show that the characterological account of the will, which Levy & Bayne provide is sufficient for maintaining a retributivist justification of punishment we have still weakened the claim of Greene & Cohen.

We begin by looking at the argument of Levy & Bayne. A very helpful distinction they make is to separate the notion of will into three senses of the notion: genesis of action, phenomenology of agency and degree of effort. For responsibility Levy & Bayne maintain that an agent must “exercise a certain form (or degree) of control” (Levy and Bayne 465). They then discuss the situation of loss of control. If rational control is required for responsibility there can be two “disorders of control” namely failures of authority and failures of inhibition. Failures of authority: “call[s] into question the ascription of the action to the agent” (Ibid.). Failures of inhibition: the action is ascribed to the agent, but the agent “has lost rational control over their actions” (Ibid.). They also note that there is a parallel between the depletion of rationality in delusional persons and the impaired agency at the root of pathologies of the will.

Since much rests on the ability of control Levy & Bayne, strongly link this capacity with responsibility. They then continue to offer another possibility in the form of a characterological account that maintains a notion of responsibility despite a lack of traditional control over one’s actions. Frankfurt is instrumental in providing an example where this would be desired. Levy & Bayne summarize this contribution of Frankfurt by saying “rather than identify an agent’s character with the mechanisms that underlie the normal control of their actions….agents are fully responsible for their actions only if they are the product of desires that they endorse” (Levy and Bayne 467). On this account, the notion of will could simply correspond to an endorsement of actions. This would be similar to Ryan & Deci’s self-determination theory. Hereby we rescue retributivist justifications by appeal to character. This only leaves the problem of adjudicating between a lack of the capacities of self-control and the degree to which they have been exercised to determine whether an agent endorses an action (Levy and Bayne 468).

VI. Conclusion

I thus conclude that elimination of will may not prevent a model of legal/moral responsibility, but doing so would change the current intuitions about moral responsibility quite extremely. The discoveries of neuroscience will not be sufficient to change our moral intuitions to such a degree, especially because we have other alternative ways of conceiving will that preserve the underlying libertarian intuitions. Even in the case where alien influences on our will challenge our libertarian intuitions, Frankfurt and Levy & Bayne offer responsibility grounded in character. Inclusion of will is a prima facie requirement for legal responsibility, but even if a libertarian will cannot be supported it is not necessary to adopt a consequentialist justification for punishment. Finally, if this strong conclusion is unconvincing I propose that the will is at minimum a critical notion that functions as a mental placeholder to make discussions of legal/moral responsibility intelligible, since moral responsibility conceptually requires an intentional agent. Thus, even in a consequentialist justification we would need to acknowledge moral agents if we want to have a conception of what is best for a society of intentional agents.

References

Feinberg, Joel. “Problematic Responsibility in Law and Morals.” The Philosophical Review July 1962: 340-351.

Frankfurt, Harry G. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” The Journal of Philosophy (1969): 829-839.

Golding, Martin P. “Responsibility.” The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory. Ed. M. Golding and W. Edmunson. 2006. 236-247.

Greene, Joshua and Jonathan Cohen. “For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything.” The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (2004): 1775-1785.

Levy, Neil and Tim Bayne. “A will of one’s own: Consciousness, control, and character.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry (2004): 459-470.

Morse, Stephen J. “Moral and legal responsibility and the new neuroscience.” Neuroethics. Defining the issues in theory, practice and policy. Oxford University Press, 2006. 33-49.

Roskies, Adina. “Neuroscientific Challenges to Free Will and Responsibility.” TRENDS in Cognitive Science 10.9 (2006): 419-423.

Ryan, Richard M. and Edward L. Deci. “Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will?” Journal of Personality (2006): 1557-1585.

Markus Prinz (’09) is a Philosophy Major at McGill University.

Introduction

As secularized accounts of morality’s social origins, the theories of Italian Renaissance political thinker Niccolo Machiavelli and the 19^th century German continental philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche call for a transvaluation of morality. If we analyze their systems of thought through the distorting, reductive lens of conventional modern connotations, we see the repugnancy of Nietzsche’s sexism or anti-Semitism or the cold, calculating, seemingly self-interested tactics of Machiavelli; as a consequence, we fail to delve deeper into the complexity of these works. This dismissive approach needs to be unlearned and replaced with a more detailed examination of how these figures redefine the notions of good and evil as the foundations of their philosophy and political theory, respectively. Over the course of describing their ethical theories and the ways in which they transvalue the moral standards of their times and attempt to show that vice can legitimately constitute virtue, I would like to explore the question: to what degree can Nietzsche and Machiavelli be defined as consequentialists? Finally, I will touch on the relationship between transvaluation and consequentialism.

Transvaluation Defined

One of the reasons that Nietzsche and Machiavelli have been studied for so long is the sense of theoretical novelty and innovation stemming from their transvaluations; both thinkers seem particularly sensitive to the importance of re-evaluating standards and social mores which facilitates philosophical progress. The concept of “transvaluation” is usually attributed to Nietzsche, rather than Machiavelli; however, the term aptly applies to both. In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche explicitly states the project of such a genealogy, or history of morals, and writes about the “need” for a transvaluation, which he defines as a “critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question... (20) Nietzsche’s project involves seeing value from the perspective of a meta-cultural stance. The process of transvaluation is essentially a re-assessment of concepts; one takes a step back from the internal, socially constructed systems of value to look at the larger picture, even if this means tearing down their foundation. There is also a shift from a view of morality as something that has objective, intrinsic worth to a view of it as having a subjective, socially and extrinsically determined worth.

Transvaluation: What is being “Transvalued”?

Nietzsche and Machiavelli, in their renunciation of traditional “popular morality”, criticize the Christian ethics which permeated their respective time periods in order to make way for new secular modes of thinking (On the Genealogy of Morals 45). Christian values are precisely what the two aim to attack and transvalue. Machiavelli draws on his own transvaluation of values for the purposes of providing a blueprint for the success of the state. Just as Nietzsche describes a moral dichotomy (slave morality and noble morality), Machiavelli explores two sets of morality: traditional Christian ethics and a political morality. He rejects the former in lieu of acceptance of the latter. Bernard Crick acknowledges that there are two seemingly incompatible spheres of morality, which he divides into the Christian and the Pagan worlds. There exists a conflict between Christian ethics, or “morality of the soul”, and political Pagan morality, or “morality of the city”, and one is forced to operate within one sphere or the other (Crick 67). Machiavelli points out the often mutually exclusive natures of both spheres and is emphatically anti-Christian. A political thinker more than a systematic philosopher, he never undertakes the task of attempting to reconcile the two spheres. This negative view of Christianity is further promoted in The Discourses, in particular sections 11-15. In these sections, Machiavelli makes an important distinction: he is not anti-religion, although he is opposed to Christian dogma. What makes Christianity so distasteful to him is the underlying element of passivity. Such a biblical command as “Turn the other cheek” is completely at odds with Machiavellian principles. Machiavelli’s play La Mandragola delineates the importance of action with the protagonist Callimaco, who says, “I’ve got to try something, be it great, dangerous, harmful, scandalous” (17). It is of further interest that Machiavelli’s works are grounded in unflinching secular realism. Focusing on the present world, he rejects the Christian view that life on earth functions as a spiritual test for soul-making and developing morally significant characters in order to ultimately gain entry to Paradise in the afterlife. As Mansfield states, Machiavelli is interested in establishing prosperity in the world of the here and now (Machiavelli’s Virtue 48). Let us act, he seems to be saying, as if there is no “next world”, and do our best to work with the present conditions. However, on a more general level, Machiavelli recognizes the social utility of religion; it inspires the armies, gives them courage, and unites the people under a common ideological bond. Religion for Machiavelli is a positive thing if it acts a catalyst for the people to political action, but deleterious if it leads to stasis (as Christianity does, according to Machiavelli’s interpretation).

Nietzsche’s obsession with the flaws of Christianity is concisely and elegantly formulated in the “In Attempt at a Self-Criticism” in The Birth of Tragedy:

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life… Hatred of ‘the world,’ condemnation of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality… For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitable be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral. (23)

For Nietzsche, Christianity is so destructive to the interests of man because it is rooted in a denial of life, and, moreover, constitutes a kind of perversion in that it restrains the instincts of human nature. The Christian religion teaches that natural sexual impulses and human evil are things of which we should be ashamed, and as such, it is necessarily life-negating; life, Nietzsche points out, encapsulates more than simply what human moral constructs deem “good.” To truly be considered life-affirming, we have to recognize that life is intrinsically supramoral, and we must embrace both halves of the whole, the light and the dark. Nietzsche attempts to critique morality; if the so-called purpose of morality is to label and prescribe what is beneficial as good, he advises that we critique the value of values to determine if the good is actually beneficial. Nietzsche tries to tear down the Christian traditional ethical concepts of self-sacrificing, self-denying moral goodness. Nevertheless, there are positive ethical assertions being posited.

Transvaluation: The Ethical Theories of Nietzsche and Machiavelli Explained

The Genealogy of Morals is a historical, psychological, etymological account of the origins of the meaning of morality. Nietzsche’s approach leads him to a documentation of control conflicts between socio-economic classes, a power-fueled process of assertion and retaliation, or competitive desires for supremacy. Moral valuation, according to Nietzsche, actually splits into a dichotomy relative to two social groups: the aristocracy, or the highest order in the social hierarchy, and the lowest rank, which is that of the slave. The aristocratic sense of the good is synonymous with power and centralized in self-affirmation. Using language as an instrument or expression of power, the aristocracy proves their supremacy by identifying and labeling as good the very actions the ruling class takes, notably making no distinction between the action and the executor of the action. From the noble’s self-justifying perspective, he is inherently good, and thus his behavior is but a perceptible manifestation of his good nature, rendered good by the mere fact that it originates from him, the source of goodness. In master “Roman” morality, power equates to goodness. Occupying the opposite end of aristocratic ethical values is “badness”, which is more or less all that is not the aristocracy, namely the lowest social class. The plebian is deemed bad automatically on the grounds that he is by definition deprived of power, and therefore indisputably separate from the aristocracy and their concept of goodness. The noble regards the commoner with indifference, seeing him as being of no consequence. He is actually incapable of feeling enmity towards the lower class, as he is not considered worthy of his attentions.

Slave morality consists of the polarities of “good and evil”, rather than the aristocratic valuations of “good and bad.” Under this reactionary ethical system, the slave despises the aristocrat, who in his eyes possesses the ability to choose weakness, yet remains in power. The weak, resenting the powerful, delude themselves into believing that their weakness is virtue, while the seemingly unattainable power is renamed vice, and thus gain superiority in the only sense they are capable: the transvalution of the pre-existing aristocratic morality. By redefining the aristocratic good as “evil”, the slave himself secures a degree of control over the nobles, the self-validating social tyrants. He linguistically transforms his impotence and subjection into his very sense of worth (On the Genealogy of Morals 56). This moral value generates from hatred, and the slave’s joy consists in the suffering of the nobles. Slave morality is, in contrast with self-affirming aristocratic morality, spiteful, vindictive, and actively negating. Furthermore, the slave’s good is in fact his evil; it is rooted in hate and malicious delight in diminishing the authority of and even inflicting pain upon the oppressive nobles, exemplifying our traditional concept of vice. In Nietzsche’s phrase “beyond good and evil” we see his desire for philosophy to move beyond a slave conception of morality (Ibid., 55).

While Nietzsche criticizes conventional morality and even morality in general by boldly claiming that “every morality is, as opposed to laisser aller, a bit of tyranny against ‘nature’ also against ‘reason’”, he never successfully escapes from the very oppositional thinking which he so adamantly detests (Beyond Good and Evil 100). Nietzsche, although he claims to despise morality, is clearly making a positive moral assertion of his own. The “life-affirming versus life-negating” opposition that is so salient in his writing forms a kind of new morality in its own right. Leila Haaparanta, in her article A Note on Nietzsche’s Argument, attempts to reconstruct Nietzsche’s critique of moral philosophy in strictly logical terms and also offers insight on his positive ethical theory and supports the interpretation that Nietzsche is asserting a life-affirming morality (494). Nietzsche observes that the polytheistic religions of antiquity are superior to Christian monotheism because in that epoch “There was only one norm, man” (The Gay Science 191). Nietzche’s morality, then, may be reduced to a simple and noble calculation: a true morality justifies man as perhaps an intrinsically moral being. It is his very natural instincts which Nietzsche labels as morally good, and the conscious repression of them as amoral. His moral prescription is essentially that vitality and natural impulses are the only ethical standards by which we should live. We have to accept the chaos and the dissonance, i.e. not only what is deemed by Christian values to be “good”, but also the “evil”.

In Book I of The Discourses, Machiavelli promotes his own view of the origins of morality. Like Nietzsche, he identifies the establishment of moral terms with power conflicts and social classes. In the earliest days of human history, people lived in primitive independence of social structure, organization, and law (106). As populations began to increase, so did interactions between people, until eventually more or less isolated individuals or small groups of individuals banded together in the name of the utility-steeped purpose of increasing the chances of survival. They chose a leader, a man of mental and physical distinction, to augment a sense of social cohesiveness and guide them as an early stages executive figure. This figure, not doubt, was a paradigm of the Machiavellian idea of virtu¹; he exemplifies the political role in Machiavellian thought which Pitkin identifies as the Founder, “a male figure of superhuman or mythical proportions, who introduces among men something new, good, and sufficiently powerful so that it continues beyond his lifetime on the course he has set” (The Founder 52). As such, the people felt a sense of obligation and indebtedness to their leader, or Founder, for the prosperity of the collective. After the establishment of governments, Machiavelli explains, people formed a notion of justice based on the way their leader was treated. Thus original concepts of good and evil were rooted in other individuals’ exhibitions of gratitude or ingratitude towards the Founder; when instances of ingratitude arose, men were filled with resentment for the ungrateful, and came to associate ingratitude with evilness and vice, while instances of gratitude shown to their leader induced valuations of goodness and virtue (The Discourses 107). Laws were created to accommodate these vicarious feelings, i.e. to punish the ungrateful and reward the grateful. Justice for Machiavelli is a purely subjective term revolving around the well-being of the leaders of the state. Moral judgments were formulated by the appropriation of gratitude towards the Founder, who had made social success possible, not because of inherent goodness or badness, and it is these relativist foundations of traditional morality which Machiavelli seeks to expose but also manipulate to the advantage of the whole.

Machiavelli’s transvaluation of values is most apparent in the infamous work The Prince. Espousing the ideals of civic duty and the common good, Machiavelli’s notion of virtue is inextricably bound up with classical republicanism. Good and evil are transvalued according to ends, i.e. the noble republican goal of liberty, preservation and expansion of the state, and the overall well-being of the people within the state are re-defined as the good. What society traditionally deems to be “evil” is even, at times, a necessary means to achieve the good. Evil in Machiavellian terms constitutes what is harmful to the republic.

…[A] ruler, and especially a new ruler, cannot always act in ways that are considered good because, in order to maintain his power, he is often forced to act treacherously, ruthlessly or inhumanely, and disregard the precepts of religion. Hence he must be… capable of entering upon the path of wrongdoing when this becomes necessary. ( The Prince 62)

Machiavelli’s concept of good actions and moral behavior is tied to social and political action and a sense of necessity. “Wrongdoing” for Machiavelli should be a term in quotations, since it so-called evil actions are justified and made good by the positive outcomes his actions produce. Bernard Crick articulates this sentiment rather bluntly, but accurately, with his recognition in the introduction to The Discourses that the impetus behind the action of Machiavellian figures is the understanding that “[s]omeone has to take up the dirty work” (64). For example, the people may despise a ruler for raising taxes and call him miserly, but when the state later needs these funds, the stability of the country which his prudence and foresight maintained will outweigh the initial financial inconveniences. Machiavellian virtue utilizes acts that would be classified as Christian evil as instruments to achieving higher goals. Methods of cultivating the collective good vary with one’s position in society; the task of redefining morality falls upon the ruler of a principality or republic. He must exercise virtu and the willingness to take part in such ethical transvaluations as the circumstances demand, while the citizen must demonstrate civic virtue and carry out the deeds which his government requires of him for the betterment of the state. It could even be argued that if there are two spheres are morality, the political and the Christian, the former requires evil and transvaluation, while the latter is concerned solely with goodness in the deontological sense.

Transvaluation of the Concept of Violence: Ethical Behavior Made Compatible with Violence

Machiavelli and Nietzsche’s views on violence clearly stem from their ethical transvaluations, in which they both recognize the need for “evil”. To recapitulate, in Nietzsche’s case, evil is to be embraced simply on the basis that it composes only part of a unity, that is, extramoral life. In Machiavelli’s case, this “evil” is necessary at times to achieve the greater good of the well-being of the republic, and thus “evil” and cruelty become in a sense vindicated, and made good, by the attainment of the ends. Violence is most often viewed as a form of moral evil because it involves humans choosing a wrong action from a set of morally significant actions, and hence it functions as an effective paradigm of Nietzschean and Machiavellian ethical transvaluation theory in application. An expansionist, Machiavelli acknowledges the inevitability of inter-nation conflict, as well as the need for conflict within the state. The former is highlighted in the form of military virtue in The Art of War, in which Machiavelli labels expertise in battle as a necessary evil, but one which even the generals, the executors of that evil, must only resort to it with the utmost reluctance. Furthermore, good generals and soldiers must be first and foremost good citizens. Machiavelli underscores the significance of patriotic necessity-driven motives in warfare. The art of war is not a craft which truly good soldiers will want to pursue in times of peace, and violence is not something which they will actively seek out (The Art of War 18). Additionally, Machiavelli discusses the positive influence of institutionalized conflict on the state’s overall prosperity in The Discourses. He posits that the violence which erupts between the two social groups of the plebian and the Senate actually facilitates legislative progress, and thus leads to the betterment of the republic (113).

Nietzsche views violence as an essential facet of human nature, which is inclined towards cruelty and schadenfreude. In the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, he describes the origins of guilt. This state arises from a financial relationship: the debtor-creditor relationship. Guilt is, in a modern context, largely associated with the failure to meet a responsibility, but initially it simply meant that the debtor needed to pay off his debt. If the debtor failed to make his payment, the creditor would be allowed to torture him as payment. Punishment functions as sharp and vivid memory aid to fulfill our promises (On the Genealogy of Morals 61). However, morality causes us to brand these creditor instincts as wrong. No longer having the ability to take our aggression out on others causes us to turn our cruel tendencies inward, replacing sadism with masochism. This internalization of cruelty is what breeds bad conscience. Nietzsche departs from Machiavelli in the sense that for Machiavelli, violence is a rather unpleasant undertaking, the only means available of attaining a higher, nobler goal. For Nietzsche, suffering takes on another dimension: it is an end in itself and is to be promoted for its own sake (On the Genealogy of Morals 67). It is in this essay that he explores the idea of a cheerful suffering. His concept of an ideal society would be one devoid of traditional morality, where cruel instincts are allowed free reign, under the sole confines of the debtor-creditor contract. Nietzsche calls for us to do away with moral oppositional thinking, implying that it is preferable to live in such a natural state of ritualized physical violence and torture rather than to cope with the bad conscience of the moral era which traditional morality imposes upon us.

Machiavelli and Nietzsche’s recognition of the essential nature of violence is a direct result of their ethics, and has caused many to accuse them of simply being immoralists. While it may appear that both Nietzsche and Machiavelli are not actually positively asserting a moral code of their own, Nietzsche’s is a kind of life-affirming, humanity-affirming morality, and Machiavelli’s is a classical republican morality. While he operates according to reason of state, the concept that different standards of morality apply to the political arena, Machiavelli is clearly not devoid of idealistic motivations, as frequent charges of realpolitik would suggest, and like Nietzsche, who, despite explicitly voiced aversions to moral constructs, he is not calling for a complete abolishment of morality. Machiavelli’s agreement with such extreme instances of violence, particularly the sons of Brutus case, in which he praises the conduct of a man who killed his two sons because they were acting against the state, strikes the modern Western reader as radical (The Discourses 393). To refute immoralist charges, we must take into consideration Machiavelli’s admonition against the employment of excessive violence, or cruelty that does not serve a noble end (The Discourses 132). Machiavelli emphasizes the importance of the ends, and condemns action for the sake of action, or violence merely for the sake of violence. In Machiavelli’s world, everything that is noble serves a greater political purpose, and every action should be justifiable to be considered worthy and good. In the process of maintaining any state, violence is a fundamental component, and Machiavelli does not attempt to sugarcoat its undeniable necessity. The Machiavellian leader maneuvers around the problematic rigidity of traditional morality to live according to the exigencies of the moment (The Discourses 430). Republicanism becomes an epistemological matter; the populace often do not know what is best for them, and it takes a leader equipped with virtu, a preternatural understanding of actions which will bring about the best consequences, to know when to transvalue and resort to violence.

The Problem of Determinism: Evidence against the Formulation of Positive Ethical Theory?

The concept of free will plays an important role in any ethical theory, and has been an object of contention in the philosophical traditions of both modernity and antiquity. The crux of the problem appears to be: if a philosophy relegates the concept of free will to a mere fiction and takes a deterministic approach, then it logically follows that, since we have no control over our actions, we cannot be held morally responsible for them. If this is the case in Machiavelli and Nietzsche’s theories, then what role can any kind of moral code play? I would argue that determinism does not provide an impediment to the formulation of their ethics.

Nietzsche’s views of free will are extremely complex; for the most part, he claims that free will is an empty idea, but other aspects of his work would suggest otherwise. On the one hand, we see Nietzsche’s professed disbelief in free will in On the Genealogy of Morals: “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (45). It is a human prejudice to distinguish an action from the subject, Nietzsche says. However, in reality, there is no causal chain involving two separate entities: a performer of an action and the action itself. There is no free will that enables the subject to choose to act or to refrain from acting in such a way, as with action, there is always necessity. Contrastively, in Aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche presents the idea of eternal recurrence, the concept that life repeats itself over and over again into eternity. Instead of lamenting this “greatest weight” to no end, Nietzsche suggests that we revel in this escape from the unbearable weightlessness of nihilism. The fact that every event and thought inevitably occurs again and again regardless of human actions or attempts to evade it is not in fact a source of anxiety or depression. There seems to be an element of choice here, beyond the overwhelming determinism. Through amor fati, love of fate, we can in a sense choose to transcend the conditions beyond our control, as Nietzsche declares, “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!” (The Gay Science 223).We may not be able to ward off eternal recurrence, but we can freely control our psychological attitudes towards it. In other words, we can choose to fatalistically despair, resigned to Hamlet-like nausea at the futility of human action, or we can laugh like the ubermensch in the face of the eternal recurrence (Beyond Good and Evil 68). Similarly, free will in Machiavelli emerges with restraints, but still intact. Prevalent throughout his works is the figure of Fortuna, a female personification of fortune. Departing from the medieval view of a Fortuna who turns a single wheel that determines the Fate of men, he constructs a worldview marked by a plurality of options. According to Pitkin’s view of Machiavelli, there are multiple wheels “so that it may be possible for men to choose among them, or to jump from one to another… the stress on activism and human choice in Machiavelli’s vision is really new” (Fortune 146 Pitkin). With Machiavelli too, then, there is some wiggle room for free will. Furthermore, in Chapter XXV of The Prince, Fortuna is described as not only a fickle and cruel woman, but also a viciously raging flood. Executing virtu and foresight, as well as carefully preparing for the future, can eliminate some of the woe brought about by Fortuna. Of course, there is always a degree of unpredictability, as there are clearly many variables working against any given person, no matter how much virtu he practices, but Machiavelli stresses in his constant exhortation to action that we can and must do our best to conquer the half of human behavior which is within our power to control (85). We can conclude, then, that in both Machiavelli and Nietzsche’s thought, free will is given some degree of validity, and this enables the development of their particular moral codes.

Nietzsche and Machiavelli’s Consequentialism as Ethical Egoism and Ethical Altruism

Despite the shared basis of transvaluation in their ethical theories, Machiavelli looks beyond the self for the moral justification which he assigns to human behavior, while Nietzsche is primarily concerned with the self. These views of the value of the individual versus the collective lend themselves to a self-oriented form of consequentialism, or ethical egoism, and a common good-oriented consequentialism, or ethical altruism. Consequentialism is a broad category of normative ethics which is based on the idea that the value of an action derives not from any intrinsic value to the action, but from the consequences that arise from it. The value of an action, then, is extrinsic and not intrinsic. Machiavelli’s political ethics would be best characterized as ethical altruism.² The clearest formulation of his consequentialist orientation is in The Discourses: “ It is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their effects, and that when the effect is good… it always justifies the action” (132). This work in particular highlights Machiavelli’s other-regarding love and altruism. In Section 9 of Book I, he presents his concept of the ideal leader: one whose sense of self-interest drops out completely for the attainment of the common good (Discourses 132). This leader must eliminate his sense of self and his own desires, as he exists for the service of the republic.

While Machiavelli’s works are steeped in the classical republican value of the greater good, a kind of ethical altruism, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche presents his ideal of the lonely intellectual immersed in the vita contemplativa, the contemplative life. Furthermore, in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche rejects the judgment that the herd, the majority, should be considered above the interests of the nobles, the minority (56). Placing this kind of noble individual above the relatively ignorant, intellectually unremarkable masses, he values the process of self-development, or self-becoming. Nietzsche refuses to equate the “good” with the “useful” or “expedient”; nevertheless, he certainly is concerned with the consequences of behavior at the level of the individual. How we choose to behave determines whether or not we will, in his terms, become who we really are, that is, come closer to the ideal of a true self. Failing to act on our own impulses and learning the habit of obeying the interests of others above our own results in the breeding of bad conscience. Nietzsche’s morality is one defined by ethical egoism, the view that it is right to always act in our own best interests. We should always say “yes” to ourselves, as to deny our own desires is unnatural, or un-vitalistic, and hence unethical. Whether an action is right or wrong depends on whether or not it is good for the self.

Conclusion: The Relation between Consequentialism and Transvaluation

Having analyzed the ethical theories of Nietzsche and Machiavelli, including their views of the self, free will, and violence, and the anti-Christian sentiments featured therein, as well as Machiavelli and Nietzsche’s ethical transvaluation and versions of consequentialism, I think we can see that there is a relation between transvaluation and consequentialism: consequentialism itself is a form of transvaluation. In Nietzsche and Machiavelli a transvaluation involves the redefinition of moral valuation away from the “intrinsic”, deontological notion of an action’s value. Instead of looking at the actions themselves, they look at whatever causally follows it to determine whether an action is right or wrong. Nietzsche evaluates good in terms of consequences for the self in his ethical egoist picture, while the ethical altruist Machiavelli evaluates good in terms of consequences for others.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, Inc., 1974.

Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. “Fortune.” Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. “The Founder.” Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. “The Passion of Liberty.” Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

2 The term “Machiavellianism” is predicated on a portrayal of Machiavelli as indulging in pure self-interest; however, Felix Gilbert looks into the etymological history of the word, just as Nietzsche researches the history of the concepts of “good and evil.” He illuminates the fact that the negative connotations of the word are based on a misreading of Machiavelli and comments that it simply came to mean “evil” in the twentieth-century (Machiavelli 174). In common usage, we tend to attribute Machiavelli with the term “utilitarianism” and a rational-to-the-point-of-inhuman utilitarian calculus. To say that Machiavelli is a utilitarian is really a misuse of the word; people intend to use it to mean the selfishness of the fox’s wiles and the lion’s machismo as methods to attain personal success in a monarchy. Any act which maximizes utility, i.e. increases total happiness, is moral. To think of the republican consequentialist end of the “public good” as interchangeable with “utility” might be a step in the wrong direction. Firstly, utilitarianism has aims of a universal scope, but the utility of all people everywhere, independent of spatial political boundaries, is not Machiavelli’s concern. Machiavelli’s patriotism, his specifically Florentine nationalist sympathies, highlights this concept; Pitkin acknowledges Machiavelli’s sentiment that we should value our own political state above others, and the domestic above the foreign (The Passion of Liberty 153). According to Machiavelli, your state is your moral obligation, not the happiness of mankind. Secondly, Machiavelli is entirely silent on human happiness, and his political theory is not concerned with achieving it. Civic duty and the practice of virtu do not necessarily increase overall happiness, but they will contribute to long-lasting institutions and a flourishing state. The goal of classical republicanism seems to be the satisfaction of the abstract “good” of the people; not their psychological well-being, but solid socio-political structures and greatness of an Empire. There is the overriding notion in Machiavelli’s works that what is “best” for the republic, the attainment of things like economic prosperity and state longevity, does not always coincide with the happiness of its citizens.

Helen Ciacciarelli (’09) is a Philosophy and English Literature major at Rutgers University.

By Asam Ahmad

ABSTRACT: In April of 2008, Yale University’s Aliza Shvarts was accused of a sort of ‘insanity’ that made her unable to make sound judgements and jeopardize her own body for the sake of her art. This paper aims to explore the nature of Shvarts’ artistic project and understand the hyper-reactionary interventions that followed its appearance. I will argue that what caused this hyper intervention and the disciplinary actions that followed was more than just the project itself – it was the very ambiguity of the Event the project was presenting us with, its very refusal to ‘name’ the meaning of that event, and its threatening status in the (patriarchal) public discourse as a result of this ambivalence. In attempting to explicate the threatening (but emancipatory) potential of Shvarts’ insistence on ambivalence, I hope to demonstrate that the punitive measures incurred by Shvarts for refusing to name that ambivalence ["name that ambivalence" not idiomatic. could replace with "disambiguate" or "explain her performance" MH] and thus contain its disruptive potential reveals the ways in which the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative discourses circumscribe the female body and thus deny the autonomy of the female subject.

…

In April of 2008, Yale University’s Aliza Shvarts was accused of a sort of ‘insanity’ that made her unable to make sound judgements and jeopardize her own body for the sake of her art. As her senior art project, approved and guided by two senior faculty members, was about to be shown at Green Hall (part of the Yale campus), US media felt obliged to intervene, telling us what the project was really about, why and how it was so unbelievably shocking, and making sure to question the ‘mental health’ of the student who was presenting it along the way. What caused this hyper intervention and the disciplinary actions that followed was more than just the project itself – it was the very ambiguity of the Event the project was presenting us with, its very refusal to ‘name’ the meaning of that event, and its threatening status in the (patriarchal) public discourse as a result of this ambivalence. This paper aims to explicate the threatening (but emancipatory) potential of Shvarts’ insistence on ambivalence, and in so doing, to demonstrate that the punitive measures incurred by Shvarts for refusing to name that ambivalence and thus contain its disruptive potential reveals the ways in which the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative discourses circumscribe the female body and thus deny the autonomy of the female subject.

I.                   Discerning the Potential

Shvarts’ (forced) explanation of her project insists on ambivalence as a fundamental component of her artistic project. Here is the first paragraph of her statement:

For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. I created a group of fabricators from volunteers who submitted to periodic STD screenings and agreed to their complete and permanent anonymity. From the 9th to the 15th day of my menstrual cycle, the fabricators would provide me with sperm samples, which I used to privately self-inseminate. Using a needleless syringe, I would inject the sperm near my cervix within 30 minutes of its collection, so as to insure the possibility of fertilization. On the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an abortifacient, after which I would experience cramps and heavy bleeding.

These self-induced miscarriages gain their ambiguous and ambivalent status by Shvarts’ ingestion of the abortifacient near ‘the expected date of [her] menstruation’ cycle. The artistic piece itself consists of a giant cube covered with plastic sheeting onto which Shvart’s blood is plastered with Vaseline so as to stop it from coagulating. Onto this cube are projected images of Shvarts in her bathtub, collecting the blood as it is discharged from her body. As Shvarts herself notes, the ‘performance exists only as I chose to represent it’ – a statement which, unfortunately, will be flatly contradicted by the institutional intervention carried out by Yale’s administrative staff. What is important for now, is the very ambiguity that Shvarts insists upon and its isolation of ‘the locus of ontology to an act of readership.’ The artistic representation forces the reader to name the blood on display – and in so doing, to participate in the normative injunction to ‘literally construct bodies’ through the linguistically and politically ideological and authorial act of naming the blood (as either menstrual discharge or as the result of miscarriage).

Louis Althusser is helpful here in explicating the ways in which the body does not just come into being physically but is already ideologically and linguistically ‘pre-appointed.’ Noting the ‘ideological ritual that surrounds the expectation of a ‘birth,’ Althusser writes: ‘[everyone] knows how much and in what way an unborn child is expected: [...] it is certain in advance that it will bear its Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable.’ Even before its birth, ‘the child is always-already a subject (boy or girl).’ These ideological rituals ‘literally construct bodies’ – which is obviously not the same as saying that the body exists only as an ideological or linguistic construct. Instead, it points towards the ways in which no ‘subject’ is or can be formed outside of the patriarchal and (hetero)normative discourse which demarcates the space the subject will occupy, and that even before it is born, there are ideological, linguistic and even political demands that it must fulfill simply in order to be constituted as a subject. Shvarts’ refusal to name that blood then – as either menstrual or a result of miscarriage – deprives the ‘reader’ of the ideological need to partake in these expectant rituals, and requires the reader to locate the ontology of the act and the blood him/herself – to name it – and thus determine its coordinates within the normative discourse as either ‘just menstrual blood’ or the blood of the pre-appointed, ‘irreplaceable’ subject in Shvart’s womb. [I wonder whether this is a genuine or a false dilemma. It would seem possible to "name" the blood in several ways that the author fails to mention - why must the blood of an abortion be the blood of an 'irreplaceable' subject? Why should we even think that a fetus is a subject / person? MH]

Shvarts’ refusal to name that blood, her refusal to allow us to easily digest the piece by self-ascribing a ‘word to something physical,’ is what gets her into ‘trouble.’ The confinement of the ‘something physical’ outside of the linguistic order (and thus inside Lacan’s Real), gives us an idea of the troubling nature of ambivalence – particularly in relation to the female body – and the dominant discourse’s need to remove that ambivalence in order to stabilize and contain its disruptive elements.

II.                The Insistence on Ambivalence

Coincidentally, Shvarts’ own explanation of her project relies most heavily on Judith Butler’s text entitled ‘Gender Trouble.’ Shvarts’ refusal to assign a word to the blood means that the performance (and the act itself) exists only as ‘copies of copies of which there is no original.’ Besides the obvious invocation of Derrida here, one should also note the analogy with Butler’s argument that gender is performative rather than expressive, that it is learnt (imitated, copied) rather than expressing ‘an internal core or substance.’ When Shvarts’ notes that ‘it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “meant” for penetrative heterosexual sex,’ she is implicitly trying to destabilize the (hetero)normative categorizations of gender and (especially) sex as ontological givens, as somehow tied together by some transcendental moment prior to the ‘sexed’ body. She is, in her own words, asking us to see that ‘normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form’ – a mythology that enables the ‘sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective[s].’

Butler’s reading of Julia Kristeva’s Abjection can help us make sense of this seemingly hyperbolic claim. For Butler, the body is not written upon as a ‘pre-discursive entity’ because the body itself does not exist prior ‘to its cultural inscription.’ Butler argues that we must reconsider the body’s status as a ‘blank page,’ as a ‘void,’ and as ‘the inscribed surface of events’ if we are to ‘truly’ emancipate ourselves from the heteronormative construction of a stable male/female gender binary and ‘the implicit hierarchy’ it maintains. In elucidating her argument, Butler notes that to maintain such discursive and ontological stability, the body as a ‘discrete’ entity must first be stabilized – and it is this very stability which Kristeva’s notion of the abject calls into question. Butler writes: ‘[what] constitutes the limit of the body is never merely material, but [rather] the surface, the skin [of the body] is systemically signified by taboos and anticipated transgressions; indeed, the boundaries of the body become [...] the limits of the social per se.’ In Kristeva’s account, these boundaries through which the discrete body and the discrete subject are constituted require the ‘abjection’ of that ‘which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement,’ and for these abjections to be ‘literally rendered “Other”‘ in order for the body to maintain its status as a discretely demarcated entity and a discretely defined ‘self.’

Shvarts’ blood then, as it exists in the artistic installation, is so ‘threatening’ precisely because it threatens to disrupt the stability of these discretely demarcated entities; precisely because it refuses to abject or to name that which must be abjected for the normatively defined and normatively constructed foundation of the body as a discretely demarcated entity to be maintained. We can begin to see now why Shvarts’ makes the claim that these mythologies (of function) enable the ‘sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective[s].’ If the abject is that which ‘confounds [the "inner" and "outer" worlds of the subject] by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes [the] outer,’ it follows that the repulsion, the disgust one feels in the presence of the abject is more than just a biological impulse or an ‘evolutionary’ function – it effectively locates the ‘mode by which Others become shit’ and ‘I’ retain my purity. Read in this way, Shvarts’ blood in the piece, its ambivalent, unnamed presence and its refusal to become abjected as simply a ‘natural’ biological expulsion, threatens more than just the public discourse and the political and normative conventions that accompany it: it effectively threatens us – threatens our constitution of ourselves as subjects and as discrete selves. It refuses to admit to our authorial intervention by its insistence on its ambiguous and ambivalent status, a status that is unable to be contained by the discursive fields which wish it to be absolved, disappeared, and denied.

III.             Containing the Ambivalence

Thus far, I have tried to limit the discussion of this Event in the public sphere in order to explicate what Shvarts’ was trying to do and why it was so threatening to the public discourse surrounding it. It will be instructive now to bring into focus that (hyper) public reaction and the institutional interventions that ensued. Noting this reaction is instructive in different but interrelated ways: it can help us explicate what it reveals about the status of a woman’s body in our culture today, what the normative injunctions are doing here, and how the disciplinary, punitive measures surrounding the woman’s body function, holding it in place, and making sure it does not cause trouble.

Even a cursory glance at the media’s urgent need to name what Shvarts is doing makes apparent that, where Shvarts insists on ambivalence, the characterizations rush to get rid of it, to name her project as either ‘Abortion Art,’ a ‘Hoax,’ or a ‘Rant against the “Patriarchal Heteronormative.”‘ As I have been arguing all along, this immediately demonstrates that the act of naming is an ideological and political act: by containing the disruptive ambivalence of Shvarts’ project, the incitement to name illustrates the destabilizing potential of Shvarts’ disruption of the “Patriarchal Heteronormative.”

The installation was first brought to the public’s attention by the The Drudge Report website. From there it was picked up by various news outlets and discussed excessively in the blogosphere. This discussion was, alas, quick to follow in the ‘shocked-but-not-awed’ mould of the national US media. One website asked readers the question ‘How messed up is Aliza Shvarts?’ – with the only choices being: a) Very messed up, but about what I’d expect from an artist, b) Very very messed up, or c) Put-her-in-jail-messed-up. Conservative news outlets in particular were quick to emphasize the ‘shock’ of a woman performing ‘repeated self-induced’ miscarriages for the purposes of artistic commentary – but they were quick to transmute ‘miscarriages’ into abortions, the a-word having a particularly insidious tinge in American cultural discourse. Even The New York Times, which claims for itself the status of the ‘paper of record,’ sided with the Yale administrators in a lengthy article explaining how, ‘while freedom of expression is important in the academic world, so is providing guidance and setting limits.’ Mario Lavandeira, the owner of Perez Hilton, the popular gossip website, wrote a lengthy diatribe against the sanity of Miss Shvarts, replete with several adolescent ‘Ew[s]!’ and the mandated ‘humanistic’ interventions to ‘save her from herself!’

With this onslaught of superficial, hyper-reactionary characterizations of Shvarts’ project (and disturbingly, of Shvarts herself), the administrative staff at Yale University decided that ‘something had to give.’ That something, of course, was the questioning of Aliza Shvarts, which concluded with the demand that the project and its attendant concealment of what actually transpired had to be publicly divulged. It was thus revealed that Shvarts’ entire project was a ‘creative fiction,’ the redundant adjective inevitably required to quell even the most patriarchal of institutions. This intervention and the following statement released by the Yale administrators reassured all concerned individuals that they need not worry themselves as the sanctity of the patriarchal discourse had not ‘really’ been violated.

While this revelation is extremely unfortunate, as it takes away the initial force of Shvarts’ project, the hyper reactionary characterizations by the media and the institutional interventions by the Yale administrators unmasks an even more disturbing reality. By reacting so forcefully, by denying Shvarts’ right to her own privacy and her rights as an artist, the consequences which resulted from this public revelation reveal even more clearly the controls which the dominant discourse maintains on the female body and the female subject.

Even apart from the fact that only women can give birth to children, I suspect that, all other things being the same, this piece would not have roused nearly the level of frenzy it did or the incitement to disciplinary action it required had the piece been performed by a man. While we can recognize the real ethical concerns outlined by some in the media, it is important to note that what is at stake is Yale’s public disclosure of what actually transpired in the period leading up to Shvart’s public installation. Yale could have easily verified whether the project crossed any ethical boundaries, but instead they chose to publicly disclose the nature of the entire project. This explicitly tells us that the rights of the dominant culture to not be disturbed are more important than the female subject’s attempt to artistically explore why those disturbances are there as disturbances, and how and why they function in the way that they do.

Further, the normative and institutional interventions answer the question of the female subject’s bodily sovereignty explicitly in the negative: not only is the female subject not an equal subject – the female subject does not even have the right to her own body. As one feminist blogger sarcastically notes,

Ours is a quaint, superstitious culture with strict rules about where and when and why and how male and female reproductive materials may touch. There are different consequences depending on the sex of the parties involved. For example, there are no consequences at all for men (unless they are homos). But women sure have a lot of explaining to do if their genetic material touches someone else’s before they have secured the permission of a bunch of authority figures, such as the ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick, their dad, their boyfriend, or the U.S. Government.

While we can have a laugh at ‘the ghost of [the] dead Nazarene on a stick’ or the characterization of our culture as ‘quaint’ and ‘superstitious,’ we cannot afford to forget that these differential measures and consequences, apart from being soundly unfair, are extremely destructive not only to the female subject but to our claims for being a ‘just’ and ‘fair’ society. Moreover, they reveal the ways in which our culture maintains its patriarchal and heteronormative stability by restricting different punitive measures for different subjects, and by implicitly demanding adherence to its prescribed ontological categories of being by reserving for itself the right to regularly ‘punish those who fail to do their gender right.’

IV.             Conclusion

Through an explication of both Aliza Shvart’s artistic goals and the punitive measures she incurred by refusing to ‘do her gender right,’ I have tried to show how the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative discourse maintain their stability and their inevitably sutured coherence. This dominant discourse maintains for itself the institutional, social, and even linguistic apparatuses which make sure that the female subject does not exercise her full autonomy as an ‘ego-driven’ consciousness or fulfill her rights as an individual subject. Certainly, I have not exhausted all of the ways in which and through which the female subject is interpellated, the ways in which even the right to her own body and its processes are denied, and the multiple ways in which this circumscribed space is continually being reinscribed for her. But I have also tried to show that, even as the dominant discourse shores up its discursive unity, structural cracks and possible openings for future interventions appear. Aliza Shvarts’ project may not be shown at the Green Hall because of her refusal to be denied her autonomy as a female subject and as an artist, but the consequences she has incurred and the singularly unfair judgements that have been passed upon her – by the public, by the media, by the institutions of which she is a part, and, of course, by the dominant patriarchal discourse – show us more clearly than perhaps ever before that the emancipation of the female subject remains an ongoing project, and that it is ‘the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore’ not only the emancipatory potential this project contains for all human beings, but also to explore the ways in which we can, and indeed must, help bring it to fruition.

Footnotes

Edidin, Peter. Controversy Over Abortion Art. The New York Times. April 19, 2008. Accessed April 25, 2008. < http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/arts/design/19arts-CONTROVERSYO_BRF.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Shvarts%2C+Aliza&st=nyt&oref=slogin>.

Nizaa, Mike. Sticking to the Bit? Yale’s Abortion Artist. The New York Times. April 18, 2008. Accessed April 18, 2008. < http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/sticking-to-the-bit-yales-abortion-artist/index.html?hp>

Shvarts, Aliza. Shvarts Explains her ‘Repeated Self-Induced Miscarriages.’ Yale Daily News. April 18, 2008. Accessed April 18, 2008. <http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24559>. Unless other indicated, all quotes are from Shvarts’ statement.

Daum, Meghan. It’s Period Art. Los Angeles Times. April 26, 2008. Accessed April 27, 2008. <http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-daum26apr26,1,2249073.column>.

Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. 1505.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Shvarts notes that her project is meant to be an ‘intervention into our normative understanding of “the Real” and its accompanying politics of convention.’ She is, of course, invoking Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic model here, and it is important to note the importance of ambivalence as a disrupting intervention into the seemingly smooth functioning of the Symbolic and Imaginary Orders. See, for instance, Leitch, Vincent. Jacques Lacan. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. 1278-1284.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Leitch, Vincent. New York: Norton, 2001. 2497.

Ibid, 2492-2497.

Ibid, 2492. This has sometimes been read as if Butler is proposing that there simply is no body. Of course Butler knows that there is – but her account of the dangers of maintaining the body as somehow untouched by the discursive fields through which we access it underlines the problems of denying a ‘precategorical soure of disruption’ in our understanding of the body. Another way of saying this is that we must acknowledge and deal with the fact that we have no access to the body outside of the discursive fields of ‘intelligibility’ and knowledge which structure our thought and form the basis of all our emancipatory ideals (2490-92).

Ibid, 2490-2501.

Ibid, 2493.

Ibid, 2494. See also Kristeva, Julia. Approaching Abjection. The Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia P, 1982. 1-31.

Ibid, 2495.

NA. Aliza Shvarts: Abortion Goo Girl Rants Against the “Patriarchal Heteronormative.” American Digest: Dispatches From the New America. April 17, 2008. Accessed April 25, 2008. <http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/bad_americans/abortion_goo_gi.php>.

Nizaa, Mike. Sticking to the Bit? Yale’s Abortion Artist. The New York Times. April 18, 2008. In the interests of space, I will cite the rest of the news sources in the Works cited page, unless two different articles are from the same source.

NA. How Messed Up is Aliza Shvarts?. Zimbio. April 17, 2008. Accessed April 26, 2008. <http://www.zimbio.com/Aliza+Shvarts/polls/3/How+messed+up+is+Aliza+Shvarts>.

Ibid.

Drucilla Cornell’s reinterpreation of Derrida’s Law for a feminist jurisprudence is extremely instructive here. If the Law does not, and even cannot, ‘see’ the literal and symbolic violence it incurs on the female subject – indeed, if it cannot even recognize her as an equal subject under the law, what obligation does a woman have to follow that civic law when it denies or conflicts with her very subjectivity under the Law and as a human being? See, Cornell, Drucilla. Civil Disobedience and Deconstruction. Feminist Interpretations of Derrida. Ed., Holland, Nancy J. NA.

As the owner of the blog I Blame the Patriarchy writes: ‘Because Art is godly and dudely and should always be literally, unambiguously true, and literally, unambiguously devoid of the artist’s ladyparts (which two conditions are really one and the same); anything less shows a shocking disregard for human life, heterosexuality, the rules, the Lord, the exacting standards of misogyny uniformly and eternally endorsed by our august culture of domination, and those baronial Yale benefactors who happen to be anti-choice’. NA. She Couldn’t Just Sign It “R. Mutt” and Call It a Day? I Blame The Patriarchy. April 22, 2008. Accessed April 24, 2008. <http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2008/04/22/yale-art-hoax/>.

NA. Miscarriage Art Cube Provokes “Outcry.” I Blame The Patriarchy. April 18, 2008. <http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2008/04/18/miscarriage-art-cube-provokes-outcry/>.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Leitch, Vincent. New York: Norton, 2001. 2500.

Cornell, Drucilla. Civil Disobedience and Deconstruction. Feminist Interpretations of Derrida. Ed., Holland, Nancy J. NA.

Yale administrators demanded that, unless she sign a statement that her ‘performance [...] was a fiction that she had concocted,’ her project would not be shown. Shvarts refused. Kennedy, Randy. Yale Demands End to Student’s Performance. The New York Times. April 22, 2008. Accessed April 25, 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/arts/22arts-YALEDEMANDSE_BRF.html?scp=3&sq=Shvarts%2C+Aliza&st=nyt>.

Asam Ahmad (’10) is a Philosophy and Literature specialist at University of Toronto.

Abstract: The death of Socrates has always been a controversial topic in philosophy, particularly the incongruity of his views on civil disobedience. In the Apology, Socrates claims that if acquitted on the condition he refrains from philosophizing, he will nevertheless continue to do so. In the Crito, Socrates argues that disobeying “the judgments the city came to” is wrong. The essay will address the inconsistency by focusing on the purpose of each argument, i.e. on the aim each argument serves. In Crito he argues against civil disobedience in order to convince Crito that escaping the death penalty is morally wrong. Yet, in the Apology, he argues for civil disobedience. In the latter, the objective is unclear. I contend that the argument’s aim is to prevent civil disobedience on his part; it serves the purpose of facilitating his death, thereby, preventing civil disobedience in the case of acquittal on the condition he stops philosophizing.

I.

It is my purpose to expound on the consistency of Socrates’ views in the Apology and Crito regarding civil disobedience and on his motives for presenting them. First, I will present the views and their arguments and distill their supporting principles. Then, I will compare the principles by applying them to one of the views and, thereon, look for inconsistencies. During the investigation, I will interpret a statement key to establishing the authenticity or spuriousness of a possible inconsistency by considering its causes, namely the desire(s) or psychological need(s) that prompted Socrates’ statement. And, finally, I will argue for an interpretation and discuss its implications.

II.

Socrates expressed in the Apology that, even if acquitted on the condition that he would stop philosophizing, he would not comply. However, this seems at odds with Socrates’ argument in the Crito against civil disobedience, i.e. against escaping the death penalty by leaving Athens.

In the Apology, Socrates argues for civil disobedience with the following: 1) when a civilian is ordered to take a position by a superior, that person must assume the position “without a thought for death or anything else,” [28d] but disgrace; 2) the gods’ authority is superior to the authority of elected officials (28e); and 3) the greater the authority, the greater the disgrace that results from disobeying (28d-29a). It follows from all three premises, that when faced with conflicting orders from a god and from a man, the path to follow is the god’s mandate, because when thinking only of disgrace [premise 1], the correct action to follow is the divine order, for the god’s authority is greater [premise 2] and disobeying such an authority would bring further disgrace [premise 3]. This belief is evident in Socrates when he says “[i]t would have been a dreadful way to behave [. . .] , if [. . .] I had [. . .] remained at my post where those you had elected to command had ordered me, and then, when the god ordered me, as I thought and believed, to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others, I had abandoned my post for fear of death or anything else” [28e]. Socrates clearly considers the god’s order superior to, and of greater authority -that is, more disgraceful to disobey- than the official’s because he thought it “dreadful” to follow the latter, whereby, he would violate the god’s injunction.

In the Crito, Socrates, using reductio ad absurdum1, argues against civil disobedience using four premises: 1) “one must never do wrong” [49b], 2) one should fulfill a just agreement (49e), 3) cheating a just agreement harms the other party (50b) and 4) the agreement between Socrates and the state -”to respect the judgments that the city came to”[50c], in particular, his death sentence- is just (48c-51e); whereas, the reductio assumption is fleeing the city to avoid the death penalty is the right course of action, namely civil disobedience is justified. It follows from premise 2, 3 and 4 that by leaving the city, Socrates cheats a just agreement [premise 2 and 4] and, thereby, wrongs the city [premise 3]. It follows from this conjunction and premise 1, that if Socrates flees the city he would do a wrong, which contradicts premise 1; therefore, either premise 1 is false or the assumption is false. Since premise 1 had previously been established to be true; the assumption is necessarily false. Therefore, Socrates should not flee the city; in other words, civil disobedience is not the right course of action.

III.

I will now extract the underlying principles from all of the premises used in the arguments above. Here are the premises again: 1) one should never do wrong, 2) one should fulfill a just agreement, 3) to cheat a just agreement is a wrong, 4) the agreement between Socrates and the state is just, 5) one should follow a superior’s order without thinking of death, or anything else, but disgrace, 6) a god’s authority is superior to the authority of a man and 7) the greater the authority of the superior, the greater the disgrace when deserting the assigned post. Premise 4 is the example of a just agreement pertinent to the argument, i.e. an instance of premise 2′s observance, not a principle. Premise 2, namely that one should not cheat a just agreement, is a part of the normative claim in premise 1, viz. one should never do wrong, given this, I will not distinguish it from premise 1. Premise 3 is an instance of wrongdoing; it is not a principle but an example of one’s violation. For simplicity’s sake, premise 6 and 7 will be compounded into the principle: the disgrace of disobeying a greater authority, e.g. a god, is greater than the disgrace of disobeying a lesser authority, e.g. a man. The remaining premises are the principles active in the arguments. Henceforth, premise 1 is principle 1, premise 5 principle 2, and premise 6/7 principle 3.

IV.

Now, I shall apply all principles to his view in the Apology2. If Socrates is acquitted on the condition that he cease to philosophize, but nevertheless continues to do so, he will follow the order of the god as indicated by principle 2 and 3. However, principle 1 seems to be neglected because he will wrong the city through civil disobedience. This Socrates recognizes when, in the Apology, he says “I do know [. . .] that it is wicked and shameful to do wrong, to disobey one’s superior, be he god or man” [29b]. This statement may be interpreted in two ways: either he considers ‘one’s superior’ the commander with greater authority of the two, by which I mean that when they issue conflicting orders, the only superior that need be followed is the one with the higher authority, for a superior authority nullifies that of the lesser authority; or ‘one’s superior’ is a god (or any man with greater authority than oneself), that is, if two conflicting orders are given only one of the two superiors can be obeyed, and this at the expense of the other. A “shameful and wicked” act is indeed being committed by disobeying the lower authority, but with lesser disgrace attendant upon the agent. Naturally, in the second interpretation, Socrates would serve only the divine commandment because, when sure disgrace would result otherwise [principle 2], one should obey the order from the greater authority because lesser disgrace will result from disobeying the lesser authority [principle 3]; one would in effect select the lesser of the two evils. Both interpretations suggest that a course of action along the lines of the divine order be taken, the action Socrates supports. The former, on the one hand, observes principle 1 because the city’s authority is nullified (and, as such, is not Socrates’ superior); therefore, no civil disobedience has taken place and no harm is done. On the other hand, the latter violates principle 1 because the lesser authority is harmed.

V.

Nonetheless, I believe the interpretation Socrates had in mind was the latter-for three reasons. One, the former would need to postulate a fourth principle, namely that a greater authority invalidates the authority of the lesser superior (something Socrates never says), thereby, preempting principle 2 so as to contradict it, which ordains that only the amount of disgrace — not level of authority — can be used to decide which superior is to be obeyed (something Socrates does say). To those who think that considering the level of authority in determining disgracefulness is an objection, I say that, while the level of authority is needed to determine the orders’ “shameworthiness” (the amount of shame or disgrace one may endure for the achievement of a goal), the deciding factor is the resulting shame or disgrace, i.e., when considering the consequences of following one superior as opposed to the other, the level of authority determines the shameworthiness; but in deciding which superior to follow, disgrace is the one parameter. The decisive role of shameworthiness is completely undermined by this now questionable postulate.

Two, in what way would the higher superior invalidate the authority of the lesser, given that in relation to Socrates both authorities are superiors and, as such, according to Socrates, have the right to command him (29b); it seems exceedingly unlikely that this right vanishes in cases where the commanded, the inferior, thinks and believes two superiors with different levels of authority give conflicting orders, even more so when communication between the superiors has not occurred and may never occur. I believe Socrates is only making a normative claim, namely that one should obey a superior, “be he god or man” [29b], because it is wrong to do otherwise; a normative claim akin to principle 1 since it advises against doing harm. Furthermore, the principles he uses throughout Crito and the Apology support this claim. For instance, in Crito, he argues that disrespecting a judgment the city came to-namely the death penalty-by escaping the city is wrong because he would cheat a just agreement with the city and its laws and, thereby, harm them. This same agreement is still effective if the judgment the city arrived at were acquittal on the condition that he stops philosophizing instead of the death penalty; both the conditional release and the death penalty would be judgments the city came to. Therefore, if he continues to philosophize when commanded to do otherwise he would nevertheless cheat the just agreement he has with the city and its laws, and so harm them.

And, three, Socrates, as you may remember, said, “[T]he god ordered me [. . .] to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others;” [28e] he was ordered, among other things, to examine himself, to turn onto himself the Elenchus, the Socratic Method. Through the Elenchus, Socrates rigorously analyzes the beliefs of others and his own in order to weed out inconsistencies. He believes that through the Elenchus one’s soul is improved because it reveals our ignorance “[a]nd surely,” says Socrates, “it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know” [29b]. This belief is seen again when he says “[i]f you put me to death [. . .] you won’t harm me more than you harm yourselves” [30c-d]; he believes he benefits others through examining them. Therefore, I believe that the desire or psychological need to rid himself and others of inconsistencies suggests that any apparent inconsistency in (or between) the dialogues serves a purpose3. I propose that the purpose for advancing the paradoxical view in the Apology is to prevent what he treasures most, his soul, from being damaged.

VI.

Recall the nature of Socrates’ claim in the Apology, viz. that he would continue his philosophical investigations even if acquitted on the condition that he do otherwise, is a counterfactual; Socrates has, in fact, not committed civil disobedience. He treasures the soul the most. He says that his service to the god is the greatest blessing for the city because it persuades people not to care for their bodies or wealth “in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of [their] soul[s]” (30a-b). In order to protect his soul from damage, he says “you cannot avoid executing me, for if I should be acquitted, your sons would practice the teachings of Socrates and all be thoroughly corrupted” [Apol. 29c]; he argues for the death penalty, calling it necessary, unavoidable. It was indeed necessary because it follows from the principles that a conditional release conflicting with the god’s order would inevitably result in civil disobedience, which would harm the city (which entails the violation of principle 1) and, therefore, damage Socrates’ soul . Given that his soul was in peril, Socrates explicitly sets out to avoid things he knows to be bad, e.g. doing wrong and disobeying his superiors [violating principle 1], rather than things of which he does not know whether they may not be good, e.g. the death penalty (Apol. 29b-c). Moreover, in other parts of the Apology he angers his judges by saying he should get free meals in the Prytaneum (a privilege reserved for Olympic champions), and later sets what he thinks his penalty should be to a measly thirty minae and this amount only because his friend Plato (a person known for his abundant wealth) had offered to help him with the fine (Apol. 36e-37a, 38b). This further supports my claim that Socrates needed the death penalty in order to avoid wronging his city, and, given that he practiced the Elenchus on himself (as ordered by the god), he knew that in order to avoid doing wrong to either of his superiors death was the only way his soul would escape any blemish. This claim is also consistent with his epistemology, i.e. death is not to be feared because nothing is known of it (Apol. 29b-c), and his metaphysics, i.e. the soul is immortal and the body is not (Men. 81b-82a). Moreover, Socrates concludes that the death penalty may indeed be a good thing because his divine sign4 has not opposed him (Apol. 40a-d). Therefore, by articulating his purpose to continue philosophizing regardless of any injunction, he further insured adherence to principle 1. That is to say, Socrates devises the argument for civil disobedience in the Apology to convince the jurors of his determination to obey the divine order at the expense of any court order opposing it, thereby, further securing his death sentence. His death would result in -and from- obeying both the god and the court, since the divine order and the verdict would no longer conflict. Consequently, there are no inconsistencies between his actual view in the Apology, i.e. that disobeying a superior is “wicked and shameful” [29c] and his view in the Crito.

Let us think of it this way: suppose an officer orders a subordinate to pick up a package at the post office. At arrival, there is no parking in sight. In order to carry out the order, the subordinate decides to use a handicap space. When returning to the car a ticket awaits on the windshield. Had he foreseen the ticket by not parking illegally, he would have disobeyed the order but by disobeying a city ordinance, that is, parking illegally, you get a fine. It follow from Socrates’ principles that you ought to violate the law because more disgrace would result from neglecting the officer’s order than from violating a city ordinance. Socrates’ “ticket” is to stop philosophizing. I contend that, in the Apology, Socrates’ purpose in presenting the view that civil disobedience is justified is to bring about a conviction that would prevent the “ticket” (his being directed to not philosophize any more) from being issued, in other words, that would result in the observance of both orders; the conviction is the death penalty. The subordinate would avoid disobeying either superior by running instead of driving to the post office. One may object that assuming such foresight is unwarranted. However, given that Socrates believed a god ordered him to live the life of a philosopher and examine himself and others accordingly, the assumption that in the course of abolishing false and inconsistent beliefs he foretold a possible inconsistency is very much justified. Socrates later took measures to avoid the “ticket” because he knew that it would lead to the degradation of his soul. Ultimately, Socrates devised the argument for civil disobedience in order to prevent his violation of the principles by which he lived his life.

Bibliography

Code, Alan. “Ideas from Aristotle’s Logic.” In The Philosophy of Aristotle. Oxford University Press, Forthcoming

Pappas, Nickolas. Review of Socrates’ Divine Sign: Religion, Practice and Value in Socratic Philosophy, by Pierre Destrée and Nicholas D. Smith, eds., Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: 11 October 2005

Plato. “Apology”, “Crito” and “Meno.” In Readings in Ancient Greek Philosophy: From Thales to Aristotle, by S. Marc Cohen, Patricia Curd and C.D.C. Reeve. Hackett Publishing Company, 2000.

Said Saillant (’11) is a Philosophy and Psychology major at Rutgers University.

What is a Good Life?

When asked, ‘What do you want from life?’, or ‘What is a good life?’, many respond with the slogan, ‘All that really matters is that you’re happy’. Does this slogan capture all that is relevant to a good life?

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Imagine that in the future, scientists and engineers develop an ‘experience machine’. People can program into the machine whatever experiences they want to undergo, and hook themselves up to this machine such that once inside, the experiences are indistinguishable from reality. Subjects can choose to live out their entire lives in the machine, experiencing whatever joys and achievements their hearts desire just like it were really happening.  Once in the machine the person is ignorant of the fact that they are really just lying in a vat or on a table having their brains manipulated according to the plan they had previously invented.

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A machine like this seems sufficient to ensure a person’s happiness, but would a life in the experience machine be a good life?  Assuming that the machine is without flaws, would you agree to be hooked up to the machine and live out your dreams? Why or why not?

Prometheus welcomes the opportunity to publish Garrett’s essay in this issue’s online journal. Enjoy.

By Garrett Lasnier

In this paper I will first and foremost answer the question as it is stated: given the opportunity, would I allow myself to be hooked up to a machine that makes me feel as though I am authentically living out my wildest dreams? If it were actually the case that I were given this choice, considering that I would be basing my decision on personal and psychological factors (essentially telling them that this life was not good enough, how would my family and friends feel if I entered the experience machine? Even if they would be brainwashed after I did it, I could not bring myself to do this in the first place), I would not go into the machine. I am too attached to this life to follow through with this decision, even if I were to coldly reason out that it was in my best interest, even with the knowledge that my decision would be irrelevant once in the machine. However, while my philosophical reasoning would be largely irrelevant in my actual decision-making process, I will argue that, philosophically, based on my conception of the ‘good life’, I would still not enter the machine.

From a solely hedonistic position, it is highly unlikely that one would even be happier in this experience machine. The psychological research overwhelmingly shows, as is the thesis of Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness, that human beings are largely ignorant of what will make them happy in the future. As a 19-year old, the “wildest dreams” that I program into the machine are vastly different from what will make me happy when I am 40, 50, or even 75. I may program the machine so that I find the cure for Aids, I become President, and am the first person to travel to Mars but, as hard as it might be for me to imagine now, perhaps my values will change. Perhaps after the first great achievement I may be more inclined to live a life outside of the spotlight, perhaps I would rather live a simple life with my family. I have no idea what will make me happy in the future; I can only extrapolate from the present state of my 19-year old existence. While in this life I will not be able to control other variables so that I can live out all of my wildest dreams (although I do have a high level of self-efficacy), at least I will be able to make choices that are relevant to my constantly changing attitudes and values. Thus, making me happier in the long-run.

Moreover, happiness is a completely subjective state. Assume that our current relative life satisfaction rating, on a 1-10 scale, is a 7. We are fairly happy. Now, if we were to lose the ability to use our hands and feet, we would assume that our life satisfaction rating would go down to a 2-we imagine that our lives would be miserable by comparison. But, if a quadriplegic claims that his life satisfaction is a 7 out of 10, who are we to claim that what he is experiencing is actually a 2 out of 10? We have this dogma that happiness is directly related to the circumstances of our life. “If I could just accomplish this or do that I would be happy.” The truth is, a person’s relative happiness scale is generally stable over time. If one person were to win the lottery and another person were to lose a loved one, the common knowledge is that the lottery winner would be significantly more happy while the other would be significantly less happy. And while this common knowledge may be true in the short term, the psychological evidence suggests that as early as 2 years after both events, both individuals would revert, with almost no discrepancy, back to their base life satisfaction rating. Therefore, as it relates to the experience machine, there is evidence that living out my wildest dreams would not even make me significantly happier. So, if I were to consider a virtual experience machine from a solely hedonistic perspective, it would be more appropriate to have a machine that would make me a person who would feel happy in any situation in the simulator.

While hedonistic calculations certainly are a factor in deciding whether to enter the experience machine, there are more factors that need to be considered-the good life consists of far more than pleasure and pain. I think that the good life is strongly tied to making authentic choices. I do not understand how I could possibly have a sense of free will in the experience machine if all my life was predetermined beforehand. But, more interestingly, I do not know how I have this sense of free will right now. Neurologically, or even philosophically, there may be no way to prove that we are free agents. After all, can you point to the neuron that constitutes the you that is choosing to do x or not to do x? We are just a compilation of independently acting cells, which are just a bunch of atoms, which are just a bunch of subatomic particles. That we are free agents is an absurd notion. Still, I feel that I have free will and I would not give that up for all the pleasure in the world. So what if there is no way to prove (considering it is ‘indistinguishable from reality’) that I am not in this machine right now? Even if I only think I have free will, I would rather hold on to this sense of authenticity than go into another machine, even if in that machine I would feel the same authenticity. So, considering that this sense of authenticity is at the core of my being, I would be unwilling to part with it, even if it were to be restored once in the machine.

So, if I am currently in an experience machine that is indistinguishable from reality, I have a few things to say to my former self. First and foremost, you must be a heartless jerk for abandoning your previous family and friends. Even if they were to be brainwashed of your existence, how could you ever follow through with such a decision and not feel too much guilt? Second, you must have had a really lame life if you consider this to be your wildest dreams. I am very happy with my life, fortunately enough, but so far the evidence shows that you are a very uncreative person. Thirdly, you must have quite the naïve conception of how human beings account for pleasure; pleasure is a relative phenomenon and is largely irrelevant to life circumstances. And finally, I am utterly disappointed that you gave up your fundamental sense of agency, perhaps you did not deserve it in the first place.

Garrett Lasnier (’12) is a Philosophy and Psychology major at Johns Hopkins University.

Why Impartialists Make Good Friends:
A Defense of The Motivational Structure of Consequentalism.

Utilitarians are often thought to make bad friends and lousy lovers. Philosophical heavyweights such as John Rawls and Bernard Williams argue, respectively, that Utilitarianism destroys the distinction between persons and is an attack on our integrity. Even though, as Rawls and Williams show us, the objections to Utilitarianism vary, a common worry does emerge. This worry is something like: without family and friends our lives would be miserable. Meaningful friendships are impossible for utilitarians because their motivation is exclusively to produce the best consequences. So, if we accept a utilitarian doctrine, we will all lead miserable lives. In this paper, I propose a thesis that responds to this objection. I will argue that utilitarians make good friends because the utilitarian principle of impartiality inspires the motivations we associate with friendship. The essence of my thesis is seen in the conclusion of the poem, “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars” by Richard Lovelace.

“Yet this Inconstancy is such, As you too shall adore

I could not love thee Dear so much, Loved I not honor more.”

The utilitarian commitment to impartiality ‘purifies’ the motives of their friendship in a way that a partialist friendship cannot. In a partial friendship, a friend has value because I decide they are worth my care, for instance, because we have similar interests or experiences. No such discretion is available to utilitarians, and this constancy is an attractive characteristic in a friend. When the poem is mutilated to help explicate my thesis, it reads something like, “I could not love thee Dear so much, loved I not interests other than my own more.”

In an effort to make a compelling case for thesis I will take five steps. First, I will present three warnings to clarify the scope of my project. Second, I will present a working definition of friendship that both critics and proponents of utilitarianism can accept. Third, I will endeavor to show that in influential Utilitarian accounts, such as Peter Singer’s, impartiality is presented as lexically prior to utility maximization. Fourth, I will endeavor to show that this lexical priority creates room in the motivational structure of Utilitarianism for a pure dedication to end-friendships. Fifth, I will end where I began, entertaining objections to my thesis.

My first warning is that while this thesis may seem audacious, its goal is a humble one. The goal of this paper is less about proving that Utiliarians make good friends, and more about suggesting that this is an active possibility we ought to consider. I will be satisfied if my thesis sounds less absurd at the end of my paper than it may have at the beginning.

The second warning is that it might seem in this paper that I use Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics as a paradigm case of Utilitarianism. To clarify, the object of this paper is not to advocate for a Singerian reading of Utilitarianism. What I do want to do is emphasize the importance of impartialism in making the case that Utilitarian intuitions are those we associate with friendship. Practical Ethics is emphasized because it emphasizes impartiality. Philosophers such as Lori Gruen argue that even amongst Utilitarians Singer is particularly committed to impartialism. She writes that, “Singer’s version of utilitarianism, unlike other versions of consequentalism, cannot coherently accommodate partial considerations.” (129) While parts of this argument include a close textual reading of Practical Ethics, these sections are meant to emphasize impartiality, and the inconsistency in the positions of objectors, and not to advocate for Singer’s account of Utilitarianism.

The third and final warning responds to the immediate objection that, “Your whole thesis is a mute point. Singer’s impartiality means we would never get to a point where we could have friendships, because we would be too busy sacrificing everything of comparable moral significance!” This objection is especially problematic in that I can respond to it simply, but may never entirely cast it aside. Elinor Mason put it perfectly when she said that, “If personal relationships are a vital pat of human well-being, then consequentalism will recommend rather than oppose them” (393) and Singer himself argues,

“There are Utilitarian reasons for believing that we ought not to try to calculate these consequences for every ethical decision we make in our daily lives, but only very unusual circumstances, or perhaps when we reflecting on our choice of general principles to guide us in future” (13)

An objector might, very fairly, take issue with the rule utilitarianism being adopted by Mason and Singer. Adopting rule Utilitarianism, says the objector, means that Mason and Singer may be good friends, but they are no longer Utilitarians. While I will return to this objection again at the end of the paper, I present it now as a warning in the hopes that the reader will temporarily set it aside and consider the viability of my thesis prior to raising this objection.

To begin, we require a working definition of the relationship at stake: friendship. “Friendship is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other’s sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy” says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. While no consensus exists in the literature on a definition of friendship, this particular definition is helpful for our purposes because I think even critics of utilitarianism would accept it. What is important to critics of utilitarianism is that, in friendship, a friend is valued as an end in themselves.

One philosopher who argues that friends are necessarily valuable as ends in themselves is Neera Badhwar Kapur. The crux of Kapur’s objection is that the care that we give to a friend, when we love them as an end in themselves, cannot be motivated by utility maximization. The broad scope of Kapur’s objection is important. Kapur takes issue with the teleological conception of consequentalist action: the idea that actions are motivated in terms of their purposes. It is worth noting here, that even though this is not the object of paper, the deontologists are in trouble as well as the consequentalists. Essentially what Kapur is saying to the Deontologists and the Consequentalists is: you cannot care, and caring is what friendship is about.

There are two ways in which a Utilitarian could respond to this objection. First, by denying this definition of friendship as unsound. Second, by showing that they do care. To deny the definition of friendship is not a strong response, and instead turns our discussion into one of semantics. We will attempt the second option available to Utilitarians, to show that they do really care. This is step three, to show that there is space for caring in Utilitarianism and its motives for action.

Objectors to utilitarianism argue that utilitarians are committed to impartiality because they are committed to utility maximization and that utilitarians think that acts should be evaluated based on their consequences. In contrast, Singer begins by refuting this suggestion,

“The way I have thinking differs from Classical Utilitarianism in that ‘best consequences’ is understood as meaning what, on balance, furthers the interests of those affected, rather than what increases pleasure and reduces pain.” (14)

As seen here, Singer does not begin Practical Ethics with utility maximization, but instead by arguing that to be impartial is to be ethical. Singer argues that ethics must be conducted from a universal point of view, and that most everyone agrees with him. From the stoics to the Christians, the existentialists to Habermas, says Singer, almost everyone agrees that acting ethically involves stepping outside ourselves to consider more than what is in our own self-interest.

“One could argue endlessly about the merits of each of these characteristics of the ethics; but what they have in common is more important than their differences. They agree that an ethical principle cannot e justified in relation to any partial or sectional group. Ethics takes a universal point of view” (11)

While Singer’s suggestion that almost everyone is in agreement is certainly audacious, I think his critics help prove him right. While philosophers, such as partialists, object to the impartiality of Singer’s ethics, they do accept Singer’s claim that we all have these things called interests, interests are morally considerable and that acting ethically involves stepping outside myself to consider the interests of others.

While I think it would be a mistake to consider Singer’s principle of equal consideration of interests and ‘The Golden Rule’ as being identical, Singer draws a connection in the text and in the History of Philosophy. “From ancient times, philosophers and moralists have expressed the idea that ethical conduct is acceptable from a point of view that is somehow universal. The ‘Golden Rule’ attributed to Moses… tells us to go beyond our own personal interest and ‘love they neighbor as thyself’ –in other words, give the same weight to the interests of others as one gives to one’s own interest. (Singer, 11)

It would be fair, here, for an objector to accuse me from straying from the topic of this essay, friendship, into the realm of ethics. This objection is an important one. However, what this tangential textual reading of Singer needs to show is that the principle of equal consideration of interests is presented prior to the maximization of utility in the text, not the other way around. When we see Singer say that, “The universal aspect of ethics, I suggest, does provide a persuasive, although not conclusive, reason for taking a broadly utilitarian position.” (14) we have made a space to argue that the motives of Utilitarianism are necessarily concerned with the interests of others in order to be utility maximizing. and for my thesis, we have taken a small step in suggesting that Utilitarianism is commensurate with friendship.

While critics suggest that Utilitarianism is necessarily instrumental, what seems of paramount importance here has nothing to do with instrumentality, and everything to do with making ethics not about me. While Singer thinks that the most compelling ethical theory is utilitarianism, he first argues, and rests his maximization on the ‘Golden Rule Cannon’ of ethics. To be impartial is to be ethical.

Undeterred, utilitarianism’s critics, like Michael Bryon, persist. Byron argesu that what we see in Singer is a filtered, indirect, sophisticated utilitarianism that itself has cast aside and denies, “The logic of the maximizing conception” (25)

What troubles Byron about the logic of the maximizing conception, and what he thinks is totally incommensurate with Utilitarianism, are the terminating conditions for friendships. For Byron, it is in the situations in which utility is the least maximized that friendships matter most. For instance staying by a friend’s bedside through times of great sickness. “It is under such difficult circumstances, when a person is no longer useful or pleasant to be around, that this other kind of friendship is tested” (252) In contrast, if a friend knew that they would be abandoned as soon as utility was not maximized, friendships will be alienating. horrible experiences. “The motivation required for any genuine friendship is not compatible with being prepared to terminate any friendships on the rounds of non-optimality” (390)

Indeed, other Philosopher like Cocking and Oakley agree with Byron that the terminating questions are those upon which the question of friendship rest, “Cocking and Oakley…are prepared to admit that consequentalists can allow their motives for acting on a particular to occasion to be motives of love and friendship.” (387) What they are concerned about is not what moves someone, though, but instead what the relationship is conditional upon.

In response to objections from Byron, Cocking and Oakley, Mason presents a solution by emphasizing the dispositions in which we live our lives. For Mason, “Friendships are contingent on the pro-friendship dispositions maximizing the good…whether this sort of contingency is alienating is an open question.” (391)

The objective of this paper to respond to this open question from Mason and show good reasons for thinking that this contingency is not alienating. When Singer placed equal consideration of interests prior to maximization he made impartiality our justification for maximizing interests. The question here is twofold, why would Singer order impartiality above maximization? Second, why should we accept this order?

Singer’s emphasis on impartiality does more than allow for us to care about others, he demands that we care about others more than we care about ourselves. This Singerian selflessness is evident in a story used by Mason’s to explicate what she means by a pro-friendship disposition.

In Mason’s example, there are two friends named Sam and Polly. In the case, Sam contracts a horrible disease that makes him a pathological liar, angry and verbally abusive. So, in a moment of lucidity, Sam suspends his pro-friendship and, consequently, his friendship with Polly because he knows that while maintaining the friendship is important and would bring him pleasure in his brief moments of lucidity, because he cares about his friend he has no choice but to maximize utility. What is important in this case study is seen more clearly when considered in tandem with another example of my own.

Let us say that you are walking down the street and, all of a sudden, you see your very dearest childhood friend, Tom, whom you have not seen in years. Rather than seeing Tom in a pleasant café, however, he is running into a bank. It is clear that Tom is prepared to rob the bank. You do not know if Tom has lost his mind permanently, or temporarily, or if something more serious is going on. He has always had a difficult life. You see the police running down the street after Tom, and you have two choices. You have an opportunity to throw yourself on top of your friend and prevent him from ruining his own life by robbing the bank, but then you are risking being hurt yourself or being associated with the heist. You know that you have the opportunity to keep your former dear, dear friend out of jail with minimal risk to yourself if you jump on him. What do you do?

In both of these situations, a partial friendship would have the option of allowing you to drag your friend through your chemotherapy treatments or pretend that you never saw your dearest childhood friend throw his life away; but Utilitarianism, with its foundation of impartialism and maximization of utility, would never stand for it; and that is significant. This is the purity of utilitarian motives. If we are really committed to our friendships, we are committed in a utilitarian sense. We are committed to the value of another’s interests irrespective of our own and what we wanted, chemotherapy support or the estrangement of once-cherished friendships. This sort of constancy is associated with the motives we see as commensurate with the deepest of friendships.

The scope of this paper was meager because the argument that Utilitarians make bad friends is as ubiquitous as it is formidable. I am sympathetic to the objections to Utilitarianism insofar as I agree that the burden of proof does remain with Utilitarians to show that the consequences are indeed better, when we maintain friendships. This is by no means a simple endeavor. Complicated questions of sociology, psychology and utility calculation are at stake. The Utilitarian has to show that even if all relationships were not utility maximizing, we would still be better than a life without relationships. Questions of calculation aside, in this paper I hope to have shown that a plausible case exists for seeing the impartialists as potentially being your very best of friends.

Bibliography

Byron, Michael. “Consequentist Friendship and Quasi-Instrumental Goods” Utilitas. Vol. 14, No. 2, July 2002.

Green, Karen. “Distance, Divided Responsibility and Universalizability” The Monist, vol. 86, Peru Illinos, 2003. no.3, pp 501-515.

Gruen, Lori. “Must Utilitarians be Impartial?” in D. Jamieson (ed.). Singer and His Critics (Oxford:Basil Blackwell) pp. 129-149.

Lovelace, Richard. “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 2. P369.

Mason, Elinor. “Can an Indirect Consequentalist Be a Real Friend.? Ethics. January, 1998: 386-393.

Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. New York. Cambridge University Press, 2nd Edition, 1993.

Leah Trueblood (’09) is a Philosophy major at the University of Alberta

In this paper, I discuss Kant’s main argument for free will from morality. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct his argument as found mainly in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. Concisely put, he argues that we can and even must admit free will in order for morality, which we intuitively accept, to be meaningful at all. As preliminaries to the main argument, I begin with a brief introduction to Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, as well as his conception of free will. Following this, I explore his main argument for free will, which relies on the thesis that morality reciprocally implies free will. I break this argument into two steps. First, I discuss how Kant shows that morality implies rationality. Second, I discuss how Kant shows that rationality, in turn, implies free will. Before concluding, I review Kant’s position on the apparent incompatibility between free will and determinism.

I start with a brief introduction to Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology to establish the kind of knowledge about free will Kant thinks we can maintain. He details this-what we can know and how we can know it-in the Critique of Pure Reason. His metaphysics details what we can know by distinguishing between two worlds, the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. While the phenomenal world is the empirical world in which we experience objects as they appear to us, the noumenal world is the rational world in which we conceive of things-in-themselves. In other words, the phenomenal world is concerned with appearances, while the noumenal world is concerned with things as they actually are. Although Kant does not explicitly state how we are to conceive of these worlds, we can conceive of them as either two ontologically distinct worlds (two world interpretation) or two aspects of the same world (two aspect interpretation). As far as this discussion is concerned, I do not adopt one interpretation or another, as each has its merits. Notwithstanding this, an important consequence of Kant’s metaphysics is that whatever knowledge we can claim about the noumenal world is different not only in degree but in kind to whatever knowledge we can claim about the phenomenal world.

In turn, Kant’s epistemology explains how we can know what we know. For the present purpose, the most relevant way we can acquire knowledge is through reason, which can be either pure or practical. While pure reason is primarily concerned with theoretical or speculative claims, practical reason is primarily concerned with moral claims. However, pure reason and practical reason are not, strictly speaking, different kinds of reason, as they “are differentiated solely in their application” (391). Broadly construed, Kant grounds metaphysics on epistemology: that is, he limits what we can consider real to what we can know about what is real. It follows that although we can claim knowledge of the phenomenal world, any claim to knowledge of the noumenal world oversteps the bounds of pure reason. So as a matter of pure reason, we can neither prove nor disprove claims about the noumenal world. Perhaps in a most restrictive manner, pure reason alone forbids us from resolving the three most pressing issues of free will, the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul. So if we are to claim any knowledge of free will at all, it must be as a matter of practical reason. Indeed, Kant suggests that we posit free will as a postulate of pure practical reason, which is simply practical reason that is concerned with the noumenal world. Specifically, we postulate the idea of freedom as a transcendental idea, a “concept of pure reason” that is representative of, but not ultimately grounded in the phenomenal world. As a transcendental idea, the postulate of free will makes a claim about the noumenal world, but is not itself noumenally known or even knowable as a matter of pure reason.

Having briefly introduced Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, I now outline his conception of freedom and its relation to the will. In the most general sense, freedom is a property of the will. The will is a causality that is characteristic of, and therefore presupposed, of any rational being. In particular, the will is the capacity to act in accordance with reason alone, independently of external causes from the phenomenal world. Further, the will acts by acting on the basis of maxims, which have the form “Perform action A in circumstance C for the end E.” In contrast then, a non-rational being, which does not have such a will, is only determined by external causes. On this reading of Kant, a rational being is a rational being insofar as it has a will, which is precisely the capacity to act in accordance with reason alone. Since freedom is a property of the will and a rational being is the only kind of being that has a will, it follows that a rational being is the only kind of being that can have freedom. Of course, Kant allows for the will to be unfree. But the will’s lack of freedom is meaningful insofar as it has the capacity to be free and yet is not actually free.

There are, in particular, several distinct but related types of freedom. Transcendental freedom, for one, corresponds well to our intuitive conception of freedom as the will’s capacity to be a “first” cause. As a “first” or “absolutely spontaneous” cause, the will is transcendentally free insofar as it is free to be a first cause in the noumenal world, the effect of which takes place in the phenomenal world. Crucially, such a cause must be itself uncaused and undetermined by any external cause in the phenomenal world. It is as such transcendentally ideal, not transcendentally real, since it is in principle unverifiable in the phenomenal world. Transcendental freedom means that I act in a certain way because I myself want to. To use a more concrete example, it means that I do my logic homework because I want to, rather than because I act merely in response to an external cause. This relates transcendental freedom with practical freedom in both the negative sense and the positive sense. While negative freedom is the will’s freedom from any external cause such as desire and inclination, positive freedom is the will’s freedom to both determine and obey its own laws. Indeed, positive freedom implies negative freedom, since the will is free to determine and obey its own laws only if it is free from any external cause. In fact, so important is practical freedom that Kant identifies the autonomous will as the will that is determined by reason alone in this way. In contrast then, the heteronomous will is the will that is not determined by reason as such. To sum, the free and autonomous will is transcendentally free in that it is itself an effective cause, and practically free in that it determines and obeys its own laws. I return to this conception of freedom later in the discussion to explore them in more detail.

Now that we have at least a general understanding of Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, as well as his conception of free will, we are ready to tackle Kant’s main argument for free will from morality. To do so, I adopt what Henry Allison calls the Reciprocity Thesis, the thesis that morality reciprocally implies free will. In particular, I adopt the proposition that (1) morality reciprocally implies rationality, and also that (2) rationality reciprocally implies free will. It is this second proposition that I will examine in greater detail. Given these propositions, my reconstruction of Kant’s main argument is as follows:

• (Ax. 1) We accept morality on intuitive grounds.
• (P1) Morality implies rationality.
• (P2) Rationality implies free will.
• (C) From (Ax. 1), (P1), and (P2), we conclude free will.

As this reconstruction of the main argument suggests, the main motivation is to ground morality on a solid foundation. But morality depends on rationality, which in turn depends on free will. So in order to maintain morality, we must maintain free will.

The main argument begins with the axiom of morality, an assumption Kant takes us to intuitively accept as a “fact of… reason” (136). This acceptance of the axiom of morality (Ax. 1) affirms the antecedent of (P1). According to our intuitive conception of morality, morality has several characteristics. First, morality involves a law-a moral law-that commands me to act in a certain way. Second, this moral law is universal in that we conceive of it as binding on everyone without exception. Since the moral law binds everyone, I cannot, or at least ought not to, excuse myself or a friend for any crime. Evidently then, morality as a moral law, and indeed, the moral law, is an imperative in that it demands something of every person, and in particular, each person’s will. But what kind of imperative is the moral law? Based on our reflections on morality, Kant argues that the moral law is a categorical imperative, rather than a hypothetical imperative (106-107). Crucially, our reflections suggest that morality binds the will independently of the will’s desire or inclination. I cannot exempt myself from moral requirements simply because I feel like they do not apply to me. So the moral law cannot be a hypothetical imperative of the form “Do X if Y” (where X is an action and Y is an end that X can help bring about), since such an imperative is dependent upon subjective desire or inclination. Instead, the moral law must be a categorical imperative of the form “Do X” (where X is an action) in that it is absolutely and unconditionally binding on every will, regardless of subjective desire or inclination. But the moral law can only bind the will in such a way because it consists in reason, and the will is precisely the capacity to act in accordance with reason. It is clear then that morality, which consists in the universal moral law expressed as a categorical imperative, and in fact the categorical imperative, depends on reason alone (Preface). This first step of the argument establishes (P1), that morality implies rationality.

Now that Kant has shown that morality implies rationality, he moves onto the second major step of the argument to show that rationality, in turn, implies freedom. In terms of the argument as I have stated it, Kant now turns to (P2), the antecedent of which is affirmed by the consequent of (P1). Rationality, according to Kant, is normative in that it prescribes rules of both reason and morality. That is, thinking reasonably and living morally are the same kind of thing in that they are both prescriptions of rationality. At first, the idea that rationality prescribes morality may be a strange thought. Indeed, some philosophers, such as Hume, argue that morality is based on desire or inclination alone and thus has nothing to do with rationality. Yet let us first consider the relatively uncontroversial claim that rationality prescribes rules of logic as the rules of correct reasoning. Given “P” and “P implies Q,” the logical rule modus ponens persuades me to accept “Q.” Although I may for one reason or another reject the inference of “Q” from the given premises, I would do so in a way that is clearly contrary to rationality. Kant suggests that this violation of rationality means that the will is determined by external causes, whereas reason determines the will internally. Kant’s claim then is that just as rationality prescribes rules of reasoning, it prescribes rules of morality too. So the will that rejects the universal moral law is, in this sense, just as irrational as the will that rejects a valid inference from given premises. For the argument to work, Kant invokes the principle of “ought” implies “can.” He takes it that since the will ought to be rational, the will can be rational. This principle precludes the possibility of having any standard of rationality or morality so high that it is unattainable. In any case, the normative prescriptions of rationality, on both thought and morality, bind the will, which is by definition the capacity to act according to reason and assumed of every rational being.

As I noted earlier, the categorical imperative as an imperative of rationality gives us a command to act in a certain way. More precisely, we can use a priori reason to derive necessary actions or duties, the basis on which we are to act, from one of several formulations of the categorical imperative. Of these formulations, the one that accords best with the conception of freedom is the formula of autonomy. According to this formula, the categorical imperative commands the will to act in a way such that it both legislates laws for itself and at the same time subjects itself to those same laws. But to be sure, not just any law. The laws must conform to reason, which is universal to every rational being. When the will acts according to this formula of autonomy, it is the autonomous will. But the autonomous will is, as I mentioned even before I discussed the main argument, also the free will, in that it is practically free and (presumably) transcendentally free as well. As such, Kant’s conception of free will differs from competing conceptions in that far from being “free” from any constraints, it legislates and subjects itself to certain laws. This then establishes the connection between rationality, and through autonomy, freedom of the will. In any case, the derivation of free will from rationality and rationality from morality is now fairly clear. The good will acts according to reason as expressed in the categorical imperative. In turn, the rational will acts under normative prescriptions of rationality. Since rationality prescribes autonomy of the will, and the autonomous will is identical to the free will, the good will is at the same time both rational and free. Perhaps the only catch here is that strictly speaking, it seems that we can only derive practical freedom from morality, and not quite transcendental freedom. But if we also accept, as Kant insists we should, the postulate of free will as a transcendental idea, then we establish transcendental freedom as well. Accepting free will on this basis means that we have successfully completed the argument. Kant has shown (P2), and so we can validly infer from (Ax. 1), (P1), and (P2) that (C). This concludes Kant’s argument for free will from morality.

As a final word, there is one difficulty I want to mention before concluding. A source of tension lies in that while we are causally determined, we are also a first or spontaneous cause. It is not obvious how we can at once be determined by natural laws, just as rocks and trees are, and at the same time be a first cause whose effect takes place in the phenomenal world. So there seems to a sense in which causal determinism is compatible with freedom, yet Kant explicitly denies this possibility. Kant is an incompatibilist in that he thinks free will and determinism cannot both hold of the same world. Calvin Normore suggests that we can plausibly resolve this tension by postulating free will and determinism as holding at different moments in time in the same world (2008). For example, we can conceivably maintain that free will but not determinism holds from time t₁ to t₅, and also that determinism but not free will holds from time t₆ to t₁₀. Nonetheless, Kant seems to argue for a stronger conclusion that relies crucially on his distinction between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. Simply put, he argues for a dualistic conception of us as being simultaneously present in both worlds. This way, we can maintain that while we are causally determined in the phenomenal world and subject to the laws of nature, we are also at the same time free in the noumenal world and subject to the laws of reason. Accordingly, the recognition of this dual presence in both worlds solves the tension between free will and causal determinism.

To conclude, I have shown Kant’s argument for free will from morality by appealing to the reciprocity thesis. Specifically, I reconstructed Kant’s argument as showing how the intuitive acceptance of morality implies rationality, and how rationality in turn implies free will. Following this, I mentioned the difficulty in conceiving ourselves as being both an effect of external causes and yet ourselves a first cause. Kant holds that while free will and determinism cannot both be true in the same world, the solution is to understand ourselves as being dually present in both the phenomenal world and the noumenal world.

Works Cited

Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Experience of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Johnson, Robert. “Kant’s Moral Philosophy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/ (accessed November 23, 2008).

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

-. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. 3. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993.

-. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Third Edition. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1993.

-. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics. 5. Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898.

Normore, Calvin. “PHIL 301.” Montreal: McGill University, Fall 2008.

Pistorius, Hermann Andreas. “Rezension der Kritik der praktischen Vernunft.” In Materialien zu Kants “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, by Rüdiger Bittner and Konrad Cramer, 175. 1974.

Endnotes

Kant outlines the tension between free will and determinism in the Third Antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason (484-489).

It is helpful to conceive of the postulate of free will as one analogous to the postulate of causality or the postulate of teleology in natural science. Just as the scientist examines the natural world as though causality and teleology were true, rational beings live as though free will were true. In both cases, the rejection of a postulate results in a kind of practical inconceivability: that is, the project in mind (of science or of ethical living) is impossible without first postulating the validity of some law, even if such a law is unknown and even unknowable.

However, the precise nature of this relationship is not entirely clear. Henry Allison takes a closer look at this relationship in chapter 3 of Kant’s Theory of Freedom (54-70).

Kant assumes that we do in fact accept morality on an intuitive basis. So he does not attempt to convince the moral skeptic. He only wants to ground our intuitions.

Kant’s conception of free will is thus similar to the modern conception of freedom in political philosophy. A free state is often conceived of as one that is free from some influences but not others. Most importantly, it is free from external causes, but at the same time free to legislate and subject itself to laws in accordance with its constitution.

One critic notes: “I readily confess that this double character of man, these two I’s in the single subject, are for me, in spite of all the explanations which Kant himself and his students have given it, particularly with the well known antinomy of freedom, the most obscure and incomprehensible in the entire critical philosophy” (Pistorius 1974).

Andy Yu (’11) is a Philosophy and Economics major at McGill University

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Cover image: “Be Free” by Celsojunior

Ethical Subjects, Empowered Subjectivities:
Individuality, Agency and Interpersonality in the late Foucault

ABSTRACT

This essay will focus on the Foucauldian notion of the ‘care of the self’, wherein care is defined as the process undertaken by the self to perpetually regenerate its own unique ‘aesthetics’ that best informs and enriches its everyday life. Foucault’s insistence on a perpetual self-regeneration hinges upon a problematization of the pre-established criteria of normality structuring the context: it involves a mode of thinking that scrutinizes the relation of the self to such yardsticks and resists the passive acceptance of their prescribed normative blinders. In the case of individual subjectivity, such critical thought discovers and highlights a heterogeneous plurality at the very heart of the unified concept of the Subject pervading normative discourses, and encourages a development of various forms of subjectivities from the site of individuality. In the case of politics, Foucault’s account of this individual ‘aesthetics of existence’ – which is also an implicit insistence on the fundamental co-existence of difference(s) – can be productively extended to develop both an ethics of relationality with the Other, as well as a political theory of reciprocity that serves to inform the praxis of social activism. In other words, it is this ethical relationship with the Other – which, in turn, is predicated upon the care of the self – that constitutes the condition of possibility for a reciprocal politics to emerge – a politics involving ‘loci of mutual recognition’ wherein commonalities can emerge between individuals, not subjects; wherein the strategic affinities developed to resist normativity serve as the gateway for rearticulating the categories of intelligibility; and wherein this critical re-articulation gives rise to the radical action that has the potential to unmoor the nodes of hegemonic power and transform the very fabric of everyday sociality.

Replaying the Games of Truth

In contrast to various a priori models of subjectivity that hinge upon a biological, cultural, or historical essence, Foucault’s account reveals no such irreducible core at the heart of subjectivity. His is an analysis that is often (mis)taken as fixating on an immaterial ‘fiction’, a ‘text’ that is ‘stored’ in the various categorical axes of a normative discourse and imposed upon unwilling, imprisoned subjects. Foucault’s claim, however, is more complex. He does contend that the pre-established barometers of meaning and intelligibility are crucial in informing and upholding the (regulated) concepts of normative discourse; he also contends that the play of such discourses of knowledge – be they medical, economic, sexual, or historical – upholds the concept of the unified Subject, normatively regulating its contours and perpetuating this concept as the prescribed model for (all) individual subjectivity. Yet Foucault vehemently insists that this ‘immaterial’ category of the Subject has a material dimension, one that is essential for its sustenance. By regulating the boundaries and criteria of ‘intelligibility’, discursive ‘fictions’ like the Subject continually normalize the material possibilities of the everyday, thereby structuring the very fabric of life by disciplining it to unfold in accordance with a hegemonic criteria of meaning and knowledge. This regulation of everyday life and individual actions is the necessary condition for the perpetuity of the dominant discourse. For it is only via the perpetually reiterative and normative behaviour of the individual – the disciplined exercise of the docile body – that the abstract referent of Subject can be upheld as the discursive universality that all particular individuals must emulate.

Under such a regime of knowledge, the material place of the individual in the social hierarchy and their intelligible ‘value’ in the local discourse is sustained through her numerous ‘correct’ performances of the discursive ideal. Discipline is not imposed upon the individual, but is internalized and performed voluntarily: through her repetitive performances, she willingly seeks to uphold her value as defined by the current hegemony, daring not to risk ‘abnormal’ behaviour that could result in her marginalization from the dominant discourse. As a measure of her intelligible identity under this dominant discourse, an individual’s ‘subjectivity’ therefore emerges through a perpetual, material, and often voluntary subjection to the categorical axes of this hegemony. In other words: individual subjectivity, normatively conceived under the category of the normal ‘Subject’, only materializes out of a daily and perpetual subjection – a subjection into which most individuals enter willingly.

Such subjectivity is akin to the performative role assigned to a player (trapped) in the ‘games of truth(s)’ that grid society, the realm of play that all individuals must participate in by the very dint of their socio-discursive existence. All possible actions in this discursive realm are branded as valid or invalid to reflect their success or failure in embodying a dictated ideal. A game of truth, then, is an arena with its own set of procedures and results, a space wherein a prearranged set of disciplined behaviours are prescribed for pursuing pre-established ideals (Ethics of Self, 445). It is important to note that, more often than not, the ideal(ized) truths that structure these enclosures of play are “produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint” and thus often devoid of any ‘positive’ content; such discursive concepts of Truth are “subject to constant economic and political incitement”, are policed, controlled and transmitted by various institutions and apparatuses – under the guise of a unified, homogeneous Truth, the fragments of heterogeneous truth-concepts pervade the social realm “under diverse forms, continuously undergoing] immense diffusion and consumption” (Truth and Power, 131-2).

The dissemination and imposition of normative knowledge within the boundaries of the truth-games amounts to the regulation of discursive and material spaces of possibilities available to the individual who seeks to embody the Subject through his or her subjectivity. But where exactly are the boundaries of these enclosures, and just how rigid are they? How, where and why are the limits drawn between which acts are possible and which are prohibited, between what is problematic and what is simply unintelligible? (Genealogy of Ethics, 237) More importantly, how does regulating individual action in accordance with a yardstick of ‘Truth’ structure and sustain the status quo? In short, how are games of truth connected with relations of power and/or domination, which in turn, demarcate and restrict possibilities for social agency?

Such are the questions Foucault hopes to address in investigating the relations between Subject and Truth, player and game, exercise and intelligibility (Ethics of Self, 439). By problematizing the narratives of Truth, considering ‘alternative’ ‘stories’ and reviving excluded fragments, his genealogical approach seeks to lay out the historical emergence and intensification of the disciplinary triad of power / knowledge \ discourse: an attempt at (i) explicating the tether between individuals and a (hegemonic) knowledge as the relation through which intelligible subjectivities emerge; (ii) analyzing the paths and possibilities of power between such individuals in given contexts; and (iii) investigating the limits of performative discourses (such as ethics) which are practiced, exercised and upheld by (morally) disciplined agents (Genealogy of Ethics, 237). The modus operandi of his critical historicity is, first and foremost, a creation of possibilities previously thought impossible or unintelligible, accomplished through the recognition of the arbitrary nature of ‘obligatory’ actions and ‘natural’ habits, and the consideration of the particularities repressed or marginalized by hegemonic universality. Foucault’s is not an attempt at a transhistorical or metaphysical transcendence of the lived everyday or an anarchic nihilism that simply, and only, refuses to obey the rules of the game; nor is it some kind of revolution that installs or instills a ‘true’ set of parameters governing play. Rather, his critical historicity is a reflection on, and a creative engagement with, the limits and thresholds of a discursive and material present in light of its sedimented past. In effect, Foucault espouses

an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them (Enlightenment, 50).

Foucault’s “hyper- and pessimistic activism”, then, is firmly situated in its material sphere and discursive context, recognizing that “not everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad” (Genealogy of Ethics, 231-2). It involves a “problematization of something which is real, but that problematization is something which is dependent on our knowledge, ideas, theories, techniques, social relations and economic processes” (Problematics, 418). It encourages present ‘subjects’ to consider the potentialities of agency and the lines of flight that arise from a problematization of the present hegemony. In becoming actively creative, this philosophical attitude constructs, out of its own emergent (and disciplined) conditions, a temporary and strategic universality as a ‘homogenous domain of reference’, forming its own (revisable) rationality that it can deploy to create new possibilities for expanding social agency (Enlightenment, 48). The aim of the Foucauldian critique, then, is to allow for the development of heterogeneous forms of self-reflexive knowledge in order to build an ethico-political framework that is voluntarily upheld and creatively regenerated, not by its disciplined subjects, but by its empowered agents.

Caring (for) Individuals

The Subject is not a substance, Foucault contends, for it is a form that is “not primarily or always identical to itself” (Ethics of Self, 440). Further, “the self is not merely given but is constituted in relationship to itself as subject[ivity]” (Genealogy of Ethics, 252, emphasis added). The un/reflexive relation of self to self – the governmentality of self by self – is of utmost importance in Foucault’s thought. This relation can take the form of either (i) the disciplined self embodying the normative concept of Subject or (ii) the reflexive, creative self that generates its own ethics and aesthetics of self-actualization. Inevitably, both dynamics are situated in, influenced by and made intelligible through their discursive contexts. But just as creativity gets its impetus from the very conditions that seek to normalize it, it is the examination of the first, ‘normal’ relation between disciplined self and normative Subject prevalent in contemporary hegemonic contexts that serves as a productive catalyst for explicating the second relation of a creative individual ethicality.

Caught in the normative matrix of hegemonic discourse, the disciplined self is shuttled between distinct but overlapping discursive spaces, each enclosure demanding the policed performative reiteration of its imposed regimen. These performances are meant to furnish individuals with a definitive subjectivity, but since they strive after an amorphous ideal regenerated from truths whose negative content is born of multiple constraints and transformative diffusion, their performances can never be complete(d): the mechanisms of normativity perpetuate themselves by ensuring that the individuals are never fully ‘normal’, never fully disciplined and are always in need of further normalization and regulation. Herein emerges the formula for the vicious circle of discipline: the perpetuity of exercise is guaranteed by the uninhabitability of the ideal, and vice versa.

Three points are essential here. First, much like Truth, the Subject, as the (abstract) model for individual subjectivity in any given discourse, is not clearly defined. Transgressions and abnormalities are catalogued as unacceptable or unintelligible behaviour, indirectly constituting the vague boundaries of the Subject. As such, the concept of the Subject emerges through a constant negation – being continually re/defined by what it is not – and comes to acquire only a semblance of fixity. In being primarily defined negatively, the abstract category of the Subject remains a nebulous silhouette, its boundaries and its ‘content’ being malleable enough to be exploited or manipulated by various discourses. The desirable ideal, then, is fundamentally unattainable: the void at its very heart means that there is nothing to attain, nothing that can be attained to embody the ideal once and for all. Secondly, and as a consequence of the first point, one’s individual subjectivity arises from performing the prescribed concept of the ‘Subject’ that is purportedly common to all normative discourses: it is a performance through which one approximates the concept ‘Subject’ that resides in the common realm of various intersecting discourses such as those of psychology, biology, sexuality. Yet each of these discourses brings into the mix its own ideal Subject. The prescribed ideal (Subject) to be attained under such a hegemony is not the unified Subject – the purported commonality of all discourses, their point of convergence – but, rather, is the residual flux of the negating play of the Subject-concepts of these various discourses: an inherent plurality of difference that is homogenized into an illusory unity under the archetype called Subject. What follows is that the ‘subjectivity’ of an individual – an individual ‘value’ only intelligible in relation to the Subject-concept – is not the manifestation or reflection of an individual’s ‘true essence’, but is, in fact, the unstable result of a perpetual, schizophrenic performance that tries to approximate a multitude of complementary and contradictory ideals, none of which are attainable. Vitally: a singular, unified, lived subjectivity does not and cannot exist. Thirdly, it is individuality that emerges as the bodily site that grounds the disciplined exercise of multiple, jostling subjectivities, always exceeding the categories of normative discourse with its performance. The paradox here is that this excess serves both as the condition of possibility for the perpetual disciplining of the body and its liberation from hegemonic inscription – an incessant tension always regenerating that moment of possibility which continually oscillates between creative thought and un-reflexive repetition.

By exposing the unattainable ideals inherent in the dead-ended practice of hegemonic normative subjectivity, Foucault seeks to free the self from the enclosures of categorical discourse of institutional discipline and allow it the possibilities for actualizing various models of individualization born of its own choosing. He insists: “the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our day is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state” (Subject & Power, 216). Fittingly, he assigns the individual the responsibility of creativity – to encourage it to develop its own disciplinary paradigm of exercise in accordance with its own ideals. Creativity here is not a kind of relation one has to oneself; rather, Foucault asserts, “the relation one has to oneself is a creative activity” (Genealogy of Ethics, 237, emphasis added). As an analogy to this intrapersonal relation, Foucault points to the hypomnemata that arose in the Greek age, personal notebooks which functioned as a ‘material memory’ of facts and thoughts to be pondered over, reassembled and reassessed. They were not a collection of confessions, but rather texts that contained what had already been said, thought, or heard; their primary function was to recollect the fragments of self to oneself, to attempt to approximate a perfect relation between self and self – to carefully chart and (self)regulate the development of the constitution of self (Genealogy of Ethics, 247). This textual mirror of the self was essential in developing a material exercise unique to oneself, for self-generating the normative universality for one’s idea of ‘subjectivity’, for fueling the transformation of self to “attain a certain mode of being” (Ethics of Self, 433). This practice was not carried out in isolation: acquiring knowledge of the contextual moral framework was a precondition of this self-exercise, but life did not amount to a material existence that simply, and blindly, obeyed legal codes of conduct, or the normative rules of society. Instead, the individual had to creatively interpret, and freely exercise, these recommendations to develop an ‘art of life’.

As Foucault suggests, the discourse governing the self can only be understood if considered in relation to the subjective practices that seek to emulate the Subject, for “there is a technology of the constitution of the self which cuts across symbolic systems while using them” (Genealogy of Ethics, 250, emphasis added). Discursive and/or symbolic performativity is fundamentally intertwined with its discursive and/or symbolic context but is not reducible to it. Taking care of oneself, both then and now, involves an immersion into the context, knowing “the rules of acceptable conduct or of principles that are both truths and prescriptions”, and critically investigating the various possibilities that are marginalized by hegemonic normativity (Ethics of Self, 435). This conscious practice is undertaken by oneself in accordance with one’s own ideals which are informed by, but not reducible to, one’s context – this incessant practice of self-reflexive agency is nothing other than what Foucault calls the ethics of freedom (Ethics of Self, 434-5). Herein, ethics is to be thought of as that critical, interpretative gesture that one must actively undertake in order to actualize one’s universality into the realm of the particular contingencies of the everyday. Foucault’s attempt thus highlights ethicality as a perpetual exercise of interpretation: for “no technique, no professional skill can be acquired without exercise; neither can one learn the art of living without [...] a training of oneself by oneself” (Genealogy of Ethics, 246). Reiterative and performative, this ethical paradigm allows for the cultivation of a skill for re/generating a subjective aesthetics of existence, an evolving universality that becomes manifest via the reflexive actualizations of that individual’s performative agency. Foucauldian individuals qua creative agents, then, do not fixate on the Subject of the categorical axes of hegemonic discourse, nor do they subject their selves to the exercising of such disciplined subjectivities; rather, they wend their way through the complementary and contradictory amalgamation of various S/subjectivities, strategically appropriating and exacerbating the excess of normativity in order to multiply and embody those avenues of reflexive thought and agency that can best serve to empower their creativity.

Power, Agency and Other Ethics

Despite its obvious importance, the status of the social Other in Foucault’s thought is somewhat marginal: to whit, he emphasizes the ‘ontological priority’ of the Self over that of the Other while conceding that the techniques and exercises of the Self are irreducibly intertwined with those of the co-existent Other(s) that co-inhabit the social realm (Genealogy of Ethics, 250; Ethics of Self, 437). For Foucault’s account of the care of the self to be ethically practiced in this fundamentally interdependent realm, one must therefore extend his account to include the social Other. This is a move best accomplished by shifting the emphasis from the ‘freedom’ that informs Foucault’s conception of a self-disciplined aesthetics to the concept of ‘agency’. It is this conceptual re-orientation that can productively extend an intra-personal aesthetic ethics to an inter-personal, socio-political ethics.

The shift from freedom to agency is mainly employed to resist the totalizing bent of the language of absolute freedom, where freedom is taken as the desire to fully transcend (and perhaps dominate?) the network of sociality. One cannot be ‘free’, be ‘free’ of the Other (individual), be ‘free’ to do (to the Other) as one pleases; one can only be ‘free’ relative to the social Other. Self and its co-existent Others are always part of an interdependent realm, perpetually engaged in a reciprocal dialogue with each other and their common discursive and material environment. In effect, one does not ‘possess’ freedom, but rather is ‘free’ to exercise social agency.

It is this interdependence that constitutes the latent backdrop for Foucault’s account of power. Power, according to Foucault, is not a ‘possession’ in a zero-sum game, nor does it get ‘shored up’ in scenarios involving ‘top-down’ or ‘vertical’ domination. Rather, power is a fluid relation which is slowly repeated, sedimented and entrenched in the lateral networks of sociality. Inextricably intertwined in any given power relation is struggle, continually constituting a possibility of escape, a line of flight. Despite being fundamentally interwoven, both forces retain their distinct shapes, for “each constitutes for the other a kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal” (Subject & Power, 225). In this relation of a reciprocal struggle, resistance is constitutive of power, and vice versa; neither is in a “position of exteriority” but incessantly surfaces as ‘permanent provocation’ for the other, thereby continuously destabilizing the relation from within (History of Sexuality I, 95; Subject & Power 222). What is essential to note that this simultaneous resistance that continually reconstitutes the power relation can only be present between two potentially creative individuals (or, in Foucault’s terms: ‘free’ subjects), where both have, at the very least, a degree of agency (Ethics of Self, 441). The reciprocal nature of the power relation means that it does not involve possession but revolves around a “mode of action” wherein one acts upon (and, in most cases, strives to limit) the present and future actions of the Other, who subsequently returns the favour, which, in turn, is answered as well and so on ad infinitum: the inherent reciprocity of the power relation is made possible by the perpetual reversal of a “set of actions upon [O]ther actions” (Subject and Power, 220). Rethinking power along Foucauldian lines therefore means nothing less than realizing that the inherent reciprocity of the power relation involves a fundamental recognition of the active agency of the Other.

It is this recognition that unveils in the power relation the latent potential for interpersonal ethicality. Here, the latter relation echoes the model of reciprocal friendship as developed by the authors of classical antiquity (most notably, by Aristotle), wherein the intra-personal regulation of the Self must be extended to bring about a loss of Self in the face of the Other, where the (included) Other is recognized as a creative agent worthy of respect and friendship, and where the Self is de-prioritized in an attempt to negotiate commonalities and affinities between one-Self and an-Other. This is a properly creative and reciprocal relation of re/generating ideals through the dialogue of its self-reflexive participants. It is this loss of Self and the subsequent dialogue with the Other that constitutes the gateway for interpersonality in Foucault’s work, without which his ‘care of the self’ could easily slide into a purely aesthetic solipsism. Strictly adhering to an intra-personal valorization of the aesthetics and ethics of Self over all Others would repeat the normalizing and normalized structure of the (ideal) Subject. And it is easy to see how this could be extended into a scenario where this ideal becomes the norm for all Others, where the Self obsessively strives to become a Subject that ‘possesses’ the power required to lord over the powerless, the freedom to subject them to its universality. In contrast, the development of an interpersonal relation allows for the emergence of a commonality that fundamentally involves the Other, and is only made possible with the inclusion of the Other. With the recognition of the reciprocal nature of relationality also comes the re-cognition of agency as a capacity cultivated at the site of an individuality that is invested in a lateral network of reciprocal power involving various Others. In terms of hegemony, agency is the capacity to exacerbate the excess of performative exercise and radically exceed the normalized avenues of a given regime of power/knowledge, thereby creatively generating the possibilities for vastly increasing horizontal and lateral movement among the nodes of the social network. Importantly, agency is a capacity best cultivated via an interdependence with the Other: instead of the misguided attempt to extract oneself from the reciprocal relation in order to dominate the Other or ‘free’ oneself, the creative potential for agency is best developed through an intensification of the interpersonal relation, forging affinities with the Other so as to transform an intertwined relation of reciprocal struggle into an interdependent relation of mutual empowerment.

The issue here is not a temporal sequence of different mentalities, where one deals first with the Self and then with the Other, but rather a mutual and reciprocal co-existence of complementary attitudes where both Self and Other are simultaneously considered, where both interpersonal and intrapersonal realms are inhabited. By recognizing the Other as a Self, by incorporating the Other into the realm of the Self (and vice versa), an individual ‘aesthetics of existence’ is interpersonally extended to allow for a creative and reflexive co-inhabitance that can interact with, embrace and embody the plurality of difference. Difference here is not to be taken as the antithesis of a self-same, static essence of the individual, but is instead the recognition of the agency of various Others to develop particular subjectivities, orientations, and interpretations – their own ‘art of life’ – which, in turn, contribute multiple possible avenues for the exercise of agency that exceed the normative channels of hegemonic discourse. For just as the individual agent re-cognizes the multiplicity of possible subjectivities inherent in its lived discursive materiality, the plural re-orientations that emerge from the interaction with and inclusion of the Other amplify the creative potential of thought, allowing for various ways to address, accommodate, and articulate difference in both intrapersonal and interpersonal planes, and generate the conditions of possibility for employing and deploying the creative agency of empowered subjectivities.

Towards Strategic Resistance

Despite its lateral fluidity, the flux of power is not completely alien to domination: in fact, the negative force of oppression in the latter is a ‘terminal form’ of the former (History of Sexuality I, 92). In the hegemonic paradigm of power-knowledge-discourse, there is a “conditioning-conditioned relationship” between meta- and micro-powers: the former “can only take hold and secure its footing where it is rooted in [the latter – ] a whole series of multiple and indefinite power relations … supply the necessary basis for the great negative forms of power” (Truth & Power, 122, emphasis added). To consider the flow of power vertically, the hegemonic normativity of the State finds its roots in the institutional disciplines that permeate society, which, in turn, discipline individuals, whose regulated docility serves to perpetuate the institutional legitimacy of state-domination. Overall hegemonic domination, then, is a generalized effect of the attempts to render static the fluidity of power, to blockade its avenues and choke its flows at local points in the network of sociality. In other words, domination is the hegemonic, vertical normalization of the different/creative possibilities of (exercising) lateral power.

Foucault’s critical work, and its interpersonal extension, is well placed to undercut the normative discursive mechanisms that legitimize and perpetuate the hegemony of power/knowledge. Intra-personal aesthetics, dialogic models of ethicality and a politics of affinity all create productive theoretical vehicles that can help norm the action of socio-political activism(s). They are starting points at an attempt to develop a theory for a micro-political praxis of empowered resistance, wherein creative agency is strategically exercised at the local nexuses of the power/knowledge network in order to disrupt the normalized channels of power and short circuit the feedback mechanisms fueling hegemony. Indeed, as Foucault asserts, it is the “strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible” (History of Sexuality I, 96). Even in the ‘terminal’ form of power that is domination, the possibility of resistance is always present: the very open-ended, shifting, and reiterative nature of hegemonic discourse makes it “both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy” (History and Sexuality I, 101). Resistance, then, is the attempt at subversively rearticulating the categories of normative discourse, an attempt that disavows the Subject as the only discursive ideal that can inscribe material lives and rejects the false dichotomies of Truth and error, ruler and ruled, Subject and abject, and Self and Other. It is the attempt to accelerate the various contradictions inherent in a given regime of truth by actualizing possibilities that were previously thought unintelligible, illegitimate and otherwise impossible. It is the attempt to develop avenues of agency by creating and reinforcing interdependent commonalities and affinities with the multitude of Others who co-inhabit the social. It is the attempt to regenerate loci of mutual recognition as spheres of activity for reflexive agents who choose to participate and negotiate, who acknowledge their distinct particularities while negotiating their commonalities, all the while pursuing the collective universalities of the creative resistance of their activism. In Foucault’s words, it is when actors

participate [both] collectively and as an act of courage to be accomplished personally … [they are] at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that [they] decide to be its voluntary actors. (Enlightenment, 35, emphasis added)

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. (1996) “An Aesthetics of Existence” in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), Columbia U., 1996.

——————– “The Ethic of the Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom” in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), Columbia U., 1996.

——————– “Problematics” in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), Columbia U., 1996.

——————– “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press: W.W. Norton, 1997.

——————– “What is Enlightenment?” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press: W.W. Norton, 1997.

——————– “Truth and Power” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-9777 by Michel Foucault, ed. Colin Gordon. Harvester Press,1980.

——————– “The Subject and Power” Afterword to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. University of Chicago Press, 1982.

——————– The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

1. The use of ‘individual’ in this essay is different from Foucault’s use of the term which he often conflates with self, subject, subjectivity and other such concepts; indeed, at times, he contends that the ‘individual’ does not exist. By the ‘site of individuality’, I simply wish to articulate that phenomenologically felt, materially lived entity-in-flux or bodily site that grounds one’s emotions, thoughts, habits and feelings. The ‘individuality’ used in this essay approximates the notion of ‘oneself’ that Foucault advances as the ‘ontologically prior’ relation one has to oneself.