Ethics
This is a long, rambling post about ethics! (sort of)
I spent Sunday at a six hour meditation retreat run by Sharon Salzberg. The kind of practice that she taught and is known for is called metta in Pali, the language that old Buddhist texts are written in. This is sometimes translated as "love," although that's problematic due to that word meaning about twenty different things now. It's also sometimes translated as "friendship." That's kind of appropriate, except you don't really have to be friends with somebody for them to be involved in your metta practice. It seems to most often be translated as "lovingkindess," which is dumb, because that's not a real word. "Loving kindness" is better, but sounds like a Hallmark card. I'll stick with metta.
Anyway, in metta practice, one is supposed to cultivate this--attitude? emotion? disposition? It's not quite clear--metta in a way that's directed toward living beings, starting with yourself and moving on to everybody. That way, you love everybody. Sweet. You do this by imagining people (say X) and saying to yourself things like "May X be happy. May X be peaceful."
The theory behind this is that this allows one to relate in a more habitual way in a compassionate, lovingly kind way. Salzberg says (and says that neuroscientists at conferences she's been at say, and I'll believe her) that compassion is a kind of skill. So the idea is that this metta practice allows one to train one's skill of compassion towards others.
Hard-nosed skeptic that I am, this makes sense to me. I mean, you're reinforcing the neural connections that are the substrate of compassion, right? There's no reason I can think of why it shouldn't have just the effects attributed to it.
Franscisco Varela has a short book called Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition which is just three lectures put together in a book. I think the first two were quite good; the last one spun out a bit into nonsense every once in a while.
Varela, just like everybody else, is hating on Cartesianism. One of the ways he hates on Cartesianism is by declaring there to be an overemphasis in Western thought (due to Descartes) on passive, reflective, linguistic (people in the know would say "declarative") knowledge--"what I ate for lunch yesterday"--as opposed to procedural knowledge--how to ride a bicycle.
He argues that in what he calls in a perhaps overly adulatory way the "the three wisdom traditions of the East" (emphasis his) Buddhism, Taoism, and especially Confucianism, the reverse is true. The study of ethics isn't about what is ethical, but how to be ethical, and how to cultivate the skill of being ethical, or what he calls "ethical expertise."
The idea is that following ethical rules isn't really what it takes to be ethical. Mencius, a Confucian that Varela cites extensively, thinks this is merely second-best, in the order of excellence. Acting on brute desire or out of mere behavioral habit are worse. But the truly excellently ethical are those who are fully aware of their sensation and then do this thing Varela calls "extension," whereby they act in the right way by extending the knowledge of how to act in analogous cases to the preset one, then executing it. That last sentence probably didn't do justice to Varela's account, since it frames it in terms of declarative knowledge. But what's clear from Varela's reading of Mencius is that "extension" is almost like a kind of motor skill, like playing an instrument: one learns how to play some simple songs, do scales, etc. But then when one is thrown into a jam session and has to improvise, in order to play expertly one has to be acutely aware of the situation and know how, in a procedural way, where to put in those riffs that you learned how to play when you were learning from reading from a score.
My mainstream philosophical background has been very light on the ethics, so this may not be new to any of you who are better read in this sort of thing. But I really liked this formulation because it added some extra beef to the "virtue" part of virtue ethics. Here, a virtue is not merely a disposition to act in a certain way. It is a skill, a kind of expertise or knowledge, which can be cultivated over time. This is comforting to me as one of these people who are willing to make blasphemous cross-disciplinary connections, because procedural memory--the kind of memory that would have to be involved here--is something that psychology and neuroscience have a lot to say about. There seems to be some room for naturalistic input here: for example, what kinds of things can be virtues?
It also opens up some room for nuance, perhaps, in the moral internalism questions. Perhaps I can believe that such-and-such is the right way to act, but not have the skill to execute that action. I think there's room here for epictetus_rex's thing on one ought to be doing what one thinks they ought to be doing here by fleshing out the nature of the first ought. On can claim moral internalism and say that one is motivated to act ethically by virtue of their belief, but say that people are sometimes not capable of acting on this motivation due to their sucking at being ethical.
One place this can be brought to beat is so-called Humeanism about motivation. According to Dreier's recent in-class paraphrase of Michael Smith's The Moral Problem (didn't one of you recommend that to me?), Humeanism is the claim that:
(H) An agent is motivated to act in a certain way just in case she has an appropriate desire and means-end belief.
Depending on whether "just in case" is read as a single conditional (=>) or biconditional (<=>), and depending on what you mean by "motivated," this claim can be either augmented or refuted by introducing the idea that one could be motivated to perform an action (like playing a particular sick guitar solo) not in virtue of the belief that that solo will get you ends E, but because that sick guitar solo is something you perform out of your desire and means-ends belief about wanting to play a sick guitar solo, combined with your sick guitar playing skills.
Actually, this section might be garbage.
Of course, this tells us nothing (and here is where I think Varela has failed to acknowledge the justified plight of mainstream ethicists) about which skills are virtues.
Here, all these Buddhists brought in by/cited/participating in this contemplative studies class keep flaking out on me. They keep throwing this line around about how such and such practice will help end ones suffering, but then equivocate about what suffering means. And they don't every get the balls to address the real ethical question, "What's so bad about suffering anyway?" ("One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. ... In the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering." WP§1052)
It is unclear from the testimony of these people whether contemplative practice like metta practice actually prevents one from having, for the lack of a better word, "tragic" emotions, or whether it just puts one in a different relation to them. In general, they seems to want to please everybody: declaring that practice brings about a substantial change in one's mental life until somebody questions whether that change is really worthwhile, at which point they declare themselves to be advocating only a heightened state of awareness. But the question, asked by Daedalus during class on Monday, is left open:
"Does this practice mean the end of opera and the novel?"
It was over a lot of people's heads, I think.
The other way the Buddhists get around this is by declaring that one's true essential nature is full of metta, so....
So what? I'm not sure this gets them anywhere. It's also somewhat in conflict with the claims that they also sometimes make about there being no true essential nature, etc. In general, the metaphysical stories have gotten very tangled by the time they've reached me. My understanding is that these were rigorously disputed back in the Old Country. Varela might be the most consistent and clear person so far--I think he thinks that metta is what the agent gets filled with upon realizing that they are actually only a "virtual self," which one accomplishes by, guess what, more meditation.
But suppose we pick something unconventional for our ethics: living our life in order to meet a personal sense of aesthetics, for example. The notion of virtue as skill might still be appropriate here, perhaps more so.
To be honest, one thing that really turns me on to this sort of thinking is the idea of a kind of creative virtuosity in ethics. Being ethical may not be about following (either automotically, deliberately, or as a skilled performer) rules which dictate proper action in every circumstances, but rather by developing, perhaps creatively, artistically even, responses to new situations based on ones expertise. Certain moments in history could then be considered masterpieces of ethics; perhaps they are trend-setting, opening up a whole new way people can perform ethically; ethical history progressing on the model of art history.
what am I saying
But one could still say that, for the purpose of some discussion or other, discovering which skills count as virtue or, more realistically, discovering why the skills one considers to be virtuous are actually virtuous can be kicked over onto somebody else's desk, because, dammit, we should talk about the cultivation of ethical expertise.
Here, I think there's room for a substantive but pretty rare kind of social criticism. People like to talk about nihilism in the modern world, or how kids these days don't know right from wrong.
How about this take: actually, people know right from wrong, but haven't developed the ethical expertise needed to act on those moral beliefs and desires or whatever. The solution, then, wouldn't be to try to hammer sloganistic moral maxims into the heads of children, but rather to make sure that the institutions people are brought up and trained in teach ethics as a skill.
What would count as this sort of training? Well, metta practice. Why not?
But something surprised me at the retreat on Sunday. Phenomenologically, metta practice felt very familiar. Eventually it hit me: it feels a lot like it felt when I used to ardently prayer for the welfare of others.
This interested me. Somebody at the retreat raised the question (incredulously) about whether Buddhist doctrine teaches that metta practice in which one says "May X be happy" actually does anything for X, directly. Salzberg waffled: different traditions disagree. The earliest Buddhist texts were adamantly against this kind of thinking, believing the purpose of metta practice was entirely to cultivate virtuous intentions. Others started to add stories about how metta could have more direct causal efficacy. So the answer to the question is "culturally laden" within Buddhism.
I found this striking, since in my experience a lot of time is spent praying for people in Christianity--praying for friends, praying for the suffering, praying for one's enemy, etc. Perhaps this isn't as much of a waste of time as one might think, if in fact it cultivates ethical expertise or the propensity to feel compassion toward others.
Maybe this signals some sort of cultural adaptivity. But more importantly, maybe it indicates that we really are missing something in secular society. Religion collapses for intellectual reasons, but as a result institutions and practices that instilled ethical skill in people no longer function. As a result, community ties dismantle. 80's materialism sets in. Etc.
Food for thought, anyway.
I spent Sunday at a six hour meditation retreat run by Sharon Salzberg. The kind of practice that she taught and is known for is called metta in Pali, the language that old Buddhist texts are written in. This is sometimes translated as "love," although that's problematic due to that word meaning about twenty different things now. It's also sometimes translated as "friendship." That's kind of appropriate, except you don't really have to be friends with somebody for them to be involved in your metta practice. It seems to most often be translated as "lovingkindess," which is dumb, because that's not a real word. "Loving kindness" is better, but sounds like a Hallmark card. I'll stick with metta.
Anyway, in metta practice, one is supposed to cultivate this--attitude? emotion? disposition? It's not quite clear--metta in a way that's directed toward living beings, starting with yourself and moving on to everybody. That way, you love everybody. Sweet. You do this by imagining people (say X) and saying to yourself things like "May X be happy. May X be peaceful."
The theory behind this is that this allows one to relate in a more habitual way in a compassionate, lovingly kind way. Salzberg says (and says that neuroscientists at conferences she's been at say, and I'll believe her) that compassion is a kind of skill. So the idea is that this metta practice allows one to train one's skill of compassion towards others.
Hard-nosed skeptic that I am, this makes sense to me. I mean, you're reinforcing the neural connections that are the substrate of compassion, right? There's no reason I can think of why it shouldn't have just the effects attributed to it.
Franscisco Varela has a short book called Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition which is just three lectures put together in a book. I think the first two were quite good; the last one spun out a bit into nonsense every once in a while.
Varela, just like everybody else, is hating on Cartesianism. One of the ways he hates on Cartesianism is by declaring there to be an overemphasis in Western thought (due to Descartes) on passive, reflective, linguistic (people in the know would say "declarative") knowledge--"what I ate for lunch yesterday"--as opposed to procedural knowledge--how to ride a bicycle.
He argues that in what he calls in a perhaps overly adulatory way the "the three wisdom traditions of the East" (emphasis his) Buddhism, Taoism, and especially Confucianism, the reverse is true. The study of ethics isn't about what is ethical, but how to be ethical, and how to cultivate the skill of being ethical, or what he calls "ethical expertise."
The idea is that following ethical rules isn't really what it takes to be ethical. Mencius, a Confucian that Varela cites extensively, thinks this is merely second-best, in the order of excellence. Acting on brute desire or out of mere behavioral habit are worse. But the truly excellently ethical are those who are fully aware of their sensation and then do this thing Varela calls "extension," whereby they act in the right way by extending the knowledge of how to act in analogous cases to the preset one, then executing it. That last sentence probably didn't do justice to Varela's account, since it frames it in terms of declarative knowledge. But what's clear from Varela's reading of Mencius is that "extension" is almost like a kind of motor skill, like playing an instrument: one learns how to play some simple songs, do scales, etc. But then when one is thrown into a jam session and has to improvise, in order to play expertly one has to be acutely aware of the situation and know how, in a procedural way, where to put in those riffs that you learned how to play when you were learning from reading from a score.
My mainstream philosophical background has been very light on the ethics, so this may not be new to any of you who are better read in this sort of thing. But I really liked this formulation because it added some extra beef to the "virtue" part of virtue ethics. Here, a virtue is not merely a disposition to act in a certain way. It is a skill, a kind of expertise or knowledge, which can be cultivated over time. This is comforting to me as one of these people who are willing to make blasphemous cross-disciplinary connections, because procedural memory--the kind of memory that would have to be involved here--is something that psychology and neuroscience have a lot to say about. There seems to be some room for naturalistic input here: for example, what kinds of things can be virtues?
It also opens up some room for nuance, perhaps, in the moral internalism questions. Perhaps I can believe that such-and-such is the right way to act, but not have the skill to execute that action. I think there's room here for epictetus_rex's thing on one ought to be doing what one thinks they ought to be doing here by fleshing out the nature of the first ought. On can claim moral internalism and say that one is motivated to act ethically by virtue of their belief, but say that people are sometimes not capable of acting on this motivation due to their sucking at being ethical.
One place this can be brought to beat is so-called Humeanism about motivation. According to Dreier's recent in-class paraphrase of Michael Smith's The Moral Problem (didn't one of you recommend that to me?), Humeanism is the claim that:
(H) An agent is motivated to act in a certain way just in case she has an appropriate desire and means-end belief.
Depending on whether "just in case" is read as a single conditional (=>) or biconditional (<=>), and depending on what you mean by "motivated," this claim can be either augmented or refuted by introducing the idea that one could be motivated to perform an action (like playing a particular sick guitar solo) not in virtue of the belief that that solo will get you ends E, but because that sick guitar solo is something you perform out of your desire and means-ends belief about wanting to play a sick guitar solo, combined with your sick guitar playing skills.
Actually, this section might be garbage.
Of course, this tells us nothing (and here is where I think Varela has failed to acknowledge the justified plight of mainstream ethicists) about which skills are virtues.
Here, all these Buddhists brought in by/cited/participating in this contemplative studies class keep flaking out on me. They keep throwing this line around about how such and such practice will help end ones suffering, but then equivocate about what suffering means. And they don't every get the balls to address the real ethical question, "What's so bad about suffering anyway?" ("One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. ... In the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering." WP§1052)
It is unclear from the testimony of these people whether contemplative practice like metta practice actually prevents one from having, for the lack of a better word, "tragic" emotions, or whether it just puts one in a different relation to them. In general, they seems to want to please everybody: declaring that practice brings about a substantial change in one's mental life until somebody questions whether that change is really worthwhile, at which point they declare themselves to be advocating only a heightened state of awareness. But the question, asked by Daedalus during class on Monday, is left open:
"Does this practice mean the end of opera and the novel?"
It was over a lot of people's heads, I think.
The other way the Buddhists get around this is by declaring that one's true essential nature is full of metta, so....
So what? I'm not sure this gets them anywhere. It's also somewhat in conflict with the claims that they also sometimes make about there being no true essential nature, etc. In general, the metaphysical stories have gotten very tangled by the time they've reached me. My understanding is that these were rigorously disputed back in the Old Country. Varela might be the most consistent and clear person so far--I think he thinks that metta is what the agent gets filled with upon realizing that they are actually only a "virtual self," which one accomplishes by, guess what, more meditation.
But suppose we pick something unconventional for our ethics: living our life in order to meet a personal sense of aesthetics, for example. The notion of virtue as skill might still be appropriate here, perhaps more so.
To be honest, one thing that really turns me on to this sort of thinking is the idea of a kind of creative virtuosity in ethics. Being ethical may not be about following (either automotically, deliberately, or as a skilled performer) rules which dictate proper action in every circumstances, but rather by developing, perhaps creatively, artistically even, responses to new situations based on ones expertise. Certain moments in history could then be considered masterpieces of ethics; perhaps they are trend-setting, opening up a whole new way people can perform ethically; ethical history progressing on the model of art history.
what am I saying
But one could still say that, for the purpose of some discussion or other, discovering which skills count as virtue or, more realistically, discovering why the skills one considers to be virtuous are actually virtuous can be kicked over onto somebody else's desk, because, dammit, we should talk about the cultivation of ethical expertise.
Here, I think there's room for a substantive but pretty rare kind of social criticism. People like to talk about nihilism in the modern world, or how kids these days don't know right from wrong.
How about this take: actually, people know right from wrong, but haven't developed the ethical expertise needed to act on those moral beliefs and desires or whatever. The solution, then, wouldn't be to try to hammer sloganistic moral maxims into the heads of children, but rather to make sure that the institutions people are brought up and trained in teach ethics as a skill.
What would count as this sort of training? Well, metta practice. Why not?
But something surprised me at the retreat on Sunday. Phenomenologically, metta practice felt very familiar. Eventually it hit me: it feels a lot like it felt when I used to ardently prayer for the welfare of others.
This interested me. Somebody at the retreat raised the question (incredulously) about whether Buddhist doctrine teaches that metta practice in which one says "May X be happy" actually does anything for X, directly. Salzberg waffled: different traditions disagree. The earliest Buddhist texts were adamantly against this kind of thinking, believing the purpose of metta practice was entirely to cultivate virtuous intentions. Others started to add stories about how metta could have more direct causal efficacy. So the answer to the question is "culturally laden" within Buddhism.
I found this striking, since in my experience a lot of time is spent praying for people in Christianity--praying for friends, praying for the suffering, praying for one's enemy, etc. Perhaps this isn't as much of a waste of time as one might think, if in fact it cultivates ethical expertise or the propensity to feel compassion toward others.
Maybe this signals some sort of cultural adaptivity. But more importantly, maybe it indicates that we really are missing something in secular society. Religion collapses for intellectual reasons, but as a result institutions and practices that instilled ethical skill in people no longer function. As a result, community ties dismantle. 80's materialism sets in. Etc.
Food for thought, anyway.