Interesting and pertinent reflections! I’m not sure about redefining negligence as a form of malice though. The teenage intern causing damage by visiting a porn site may not be able to plead ignorance, but rather than a subtle form of malice, plain recklessness seems to be a better description here. Gross negligence is a separate legal category that assigns culpability even in the absence of malicious intent, but finding societal solutions to more pernicious instances of dereliction of duty is tough when we don’t have a shared understanding of what constitutes these duties in the first place.
Thanks! I appreciate the prompt to clarify what I meant. I agree that only certain types of negligence are malice in themselves, definitely. Re the example, it might help to picture the situation to know that I was a teenager in that example but the typical virus-downloaders were in their 30s, not fellow teenagers, and they were repeatedly coming in, so not just reckless because they didn’t know better. Yes, gross negligence is a separate category and I’m glad we have it. What I’m arguing is that there’s essentially always an element of malice behind gross negligence that does not make it malicious negligence, but rather “gross negligence as the fruit of an indirect malice.” So for instance, spiteful disrespect of adult rules as a teenager is very common and is malice that naturally leads to teenage gross negligence though without putting that negligence itself into the category of malicious neglect (the malice is further upstream). My example of neglecting an anniversary as malice is more of a stretch and more questionable, and in fact I wouldn’t think that act is always necessarily malicious (e.g., in cases of Alzheimer’s); I was implicitly just talking about the stereotypical cases in which it’s true and gliding over the diversity of cases that complicate it.
And it may be worth reiterating explicitly here that the usual malice isn’t such a terrible, excoriable thing to me: not something I ideally want to purify with fire and sword but rather with care and love.
“Finding societal solutions to more pernicious instances of dereliction of duty” is crucial, and well-said there.
Here I'm perhaps more cynical in that I don't believe pure malice is amenable to care and love, sometimes the best we can hope for is incapacitation (see the Southport Inquiry Report for a synecdoche of how many UK public servants approach their duties).
I do agree that we should do more to respond to foreseeable harms rather than come up with rationalisations for looking away. On a recent episode of Sam Harris’s podcast, Tristan Harris argues that based on the current incentive structure, we can be pretty confident in predicting an increasingly anti-human future, unless we humans intervene to change these incentives, which would require something like a Bretton Woods agreement for AI. I take a dim view of the probability of this happening, which alarms me much more than an op-ed partly written by AI.
Sure, incapacitation has a place. I did say “ideally” for a reason. But I don’t think the factor that matters decisively there is purity of malice; sometimes the purer the malice, the faster to respond to care and love, sometimes the purer the stupidity, the more necessary is a direct physical intervention.
The public political conversations about AI are in terrible shape. The dangers, opportunities, and precedents are all three badly misrepresented.
This is spot on: "finding societal solutions to more pernicious instances of dereliction of duty is tough when we don’t have a shared understanding of what constitutes these duties in the first place."
Probably worth comparing with the āsavas in Buddhism - two of which are sometimes translated "hatred" and "ignorance." (The third sometimes is translated "greed.") These, by my understanding, are the three basic defects of mind that are taken to lead to samsaric existence, and the complete uprooting of which is taken to constitute liberation.
In AN 10.61 (whose title, translated "Ignorance" in all translations I can recall offhand, is from the same root word as the corresponding āsava), the Buddha makes what is at the least a very similar/consonant argument to the one Augustine makes here: that a first point of ignorance is not found. You can just keep going back and back in the chain of cause and effect, and there is never a moment at which ignorance begins, before which it was not, very much like darkness as I read Augustine describing it. And yet, says the Buddha, ignorance is caused - or maintained, or fed - it is "not without nutriment" as I've seen some translations put it. And that nutriment is, again much as Augustine seems to be saying, one that is made up of types of will and actions and circumstances, all in a complex feedback loop.
It is odd (or maybe not, given my own predilections), but offhand I struggle to think of such direct treatment of hatred as such, in such an analytical way. It is easy for me to recall discourses on mettā / maitrī, which one might say is a polar opposite of hatred, or examples of people who had been driven by hatred and then repented, and the harm done by those hateful actions (and the good done by that repentance), but there is not, that I can think of, a "Hate" sutra. (Not to say one doesn't exist; only that I haven't come across it in a way that I can recall.) There are, by contrast, ensemble presentations of the āsavas and how to restrain them, e.g.: https://suttacentral.net/mn2/en/sujato.
In the Christian tradition, it is likewise very easy to think of discourses on love - _Love Alone Is Credible_ has been on my to-read list for now years, plural - but there is also a much clearer to me treatment of hatred; almost the whole tradition is founded on this act of singular, totally focused love totally transmuting a plural, diffuse hate. Striking, as often people, and certainly at times I, do tend to think - as you've alluded to in the mention of the "mastermind fallacy" - that it is love that cannot focus, and hate that can.
Anyway - thank you for the post. I appreciated reading it, and it brought up a lot to chew on. I hope this comment hasn't muddied too much, and look forward to reading more, particularly on Habermas and fascism.
Very interesting and extensive comment, thanks! I don’t think this muddies anything as I see it. The parallels and correspondences are strong and striking, though I can’t properly evaluate them all myself or meet you in the detail you’ve shared since I haven’t done justice to the Buddhist moral or metaphysical traditions yet, personally: I have had a narrowing attachment to my Western background that no doubt is fed by some darker subtle factors.
I don’t think I should prioritize addressing that particular limitation of mine before a few others, but I do hope that I’ll be able to in time. The mutual influences between Greek and Indian philosophy are fascinating, and the old trading system that linked them through the Red Sea is one I plan to investigate in depth after I’m more solid in my understanding of the more contemporary Atlantic and Pacific trade systems. When I do that, I’ll also look deeper into these Buddhist philosophies and how they shaped the region.
Completely agree about the tendency toward black-and-white, either/or. I see this a lot in some of the neurodivergence commentary here, where people will post some variety of: "Your kid doesn't have ADHD they're just poorly behaved!" As if the former were a complete fiction and the latter -- poor behavior -- is always a sign of moral failing (on the kid's part or more impliedly their parents'). I see a connection to the malice/stupidity dichotomy.
So, I really appreciate the insight about avoiding either/or thinking and the observation that motivations or causal factors are typically mixed rather than pure.
What I’m struggling a little with here is definitional. How do you define “ignorance”? If St. Augustine’s approach is taken up, where “ignorance” means “not knowing the good” (i.e., God), then the assertions become somewhat tautological. If “bad acts” all stem from “not knowing what’s good,” then that’s true if “not knowing what’s good” = “acting rightly,” but I think that semantic elision distances us from reality rather than brings us closer to it.
Or maybe what I really mean is that “ignorance” and “good” and therefore “malice” seem quite subjective in this framework. You could say someone does a bad thing because they’re “ignorant,” but who decides what’s ignorant? And what if they think you’re the ignorant one? How can this model be falsified?
To make it more concrete: imagine that someone fully understands Christian morality but rejects it. Is that “ignorance”? Not under a usual sense of the term.
I’d say a more complex model of “bad acts” is needed that accounts for:
(1) Cognitive limitations (can’t understand the stakes or impact)
(2) Factual ignorance (lacks information)
(3) Moral disagreement (different values)
(4) Weakness of will (knows better but fails to act)
And in these dimensions, we are not all equally situated or capable. Maybe the concept of “ignorance” is meant to encompass all these, but I think they’re qualitatively dissimilar enough that they should be parsed separately.
Thank you for the comment, and yes: the neurodivergence conversation is hashed out on top of these other moral underlayers. It’s a major part of why it can’t find resolution. People argue about ADHD in particular in part because they don’t share more fundamental moral premises about agency and blame in the first place. They beat each other over the head asserting arguments based on those contrasting premises without being able to go deeper and resolve the contrast of the premises – I was writing this already in my first letter here, “How to Assert”! It’s “pushing premises” and “forcing a frame.”
Re the struggle you’re describing, I just don’t think it is inappropriate: I think it’s genuinely a struggle to correctly judge others (and so it’s best done humbly and sparingly!). The word for this type of frustrating relativity of judgment is not “subjective,” however, it’s “perspectival.” Perspectives aren’t just arbitrary or just willful, like subjectivity is often taken to imply. There are facts of the matter about how moral perspectives differ predictably, just like in artistic visual perspective.
For a Christian the answer to “who judges” is ultimately God, the one being omniscient so that His perspective encompasses the whole truth of all other perspectives. He’ll judge, not any of us, and it’s our place to be humble and do our best, having faith in grace, while we look forward to that judgment.
For a usual kind of Nietzschean, the answer of “who judges” is everyone, and all their judgments are facts that go into the rough and tumble of being and becoming in a world that can be seen as the will to power and nothing more. That they get things wrong is just part of the dynamic. Various perspectives arise and pass away in an evolutionary sequence, thriving or perishing insofar as their judgments are adaptive or not.
For a pragmatic social person, the answer of “who judges” is practically replaced by “whose judgments do I respect and imitate and how,” and the answer involves track records, speaking skills, social positions, etc.
Personally, I definitely do track those four different categories you suggested and I particularly respect other people who also break things down that way.
Thanks for the push toward "perspectival," a term I wasn't familiar with but the utility of which is readily clear. Is this a fair restatement of the distinction: "subjective" connotes some degree of choice, whereas "perspectival" is upstream of subjectivity and serves to constrain the menu of potential subjectivities (as it were) that an individual consciously selects from?
It's close but it might not be precise enough, depending on how you'd want to use it yourself. "Subjective" focalizes either arbitrariness or inner choice in patterns of appearance, whereas "perspectival" focalizes the non-arbitrary variations in patterns of appearance, and "perspective" operates both upstream and downstream of choice: perspective both shapes the apparent choices available and also shapes how "the same choices" may lead to different apparent experiences. (If two people at different vantage points choose to look at the same thing in the same setting, they'll still see different aspects of the thing against different backgrounds.)
Even the word ignorance, Socrates' notion of evil, puts ignoring at the root. So just putting two and two together, I guess you'd say every human intention ignores something and Augustine would say that what we're ignoring is God. Whether we're willfully looking away or just not willfully enough looking toward, we don't know what we need to know, and yet we intend to act anyway.
An intention is a pull, and a pull has a direction, and it not only ignores the perpendicular dimensions (like the intention to understand God ignores the need to listen to your spouse complaining) but also the qualities of the place pulled away from. Braces tend to pull teeth toward a straight smile, ignoring the qualities of a big gap between the front incisors. Grounding a child ignores the qualities of someone who would talk back to their parents.
I find myself intending to harm (which is what I understand as malice towards) the sources of bad behavior, in order to invite in the good behavior. Let me make you feel bad for this so that next time you'll do that. They poke fun at my frugality so that next time I'll be a little more generous.
So what is God, and what is the supreme good? Is good no harm? Is God the creator and keeper of life? Is being humane godly or is it merely human? If suffering is what we are to flee, then our ancestral inventor of the mechanisms of pain and suffering was a master enslaver, keeping life held in such a coercive grip. Is it wrong to forcefully coerce?
So I agree that all intents seem to include malice towards--intent to damage--the "bad" possibility, ie the one it pulls away from. That possibility is lessened and diminished. And more importantly it often extends to threatening to harm the person: you'll have to think of yourself as stingy, mean, gross, inhumane if you continue acting out the "bad" behavior.
Woe to Israel if they continue with such genocidal intents. Their ignorance won't be easily forgiven.
Thank you, and yes, exactly right that this is the key question for this view: when is ignorance willful? It can be hard to discern, but it often is willful. Augustine is focused on the will to ignore God; the anniversary example brings out a will to ignore love.
The problem of how all the push and pull of self-assertion and retaliation will resolve to good or to ill demands broader context, generally: in the narrow focus of immediate retaliatory logic there are no answers, but once you broaden your view you find ways to make the pushes and pulls lead on net to the better rather than the worse. Fines go to charity, for instance, or rivalry gets channeled into positive-sum competition for socially-valued virtues.
I don’t personally flee suffering or consider all of my own suffering evil. In broader contexts, I often end up quite happy to have suffered now and then, especially when the suffering is a part of a love or a joy. So I don’t have that particular issue in the same way. I do still have problems with theodicy! Just not those particular ones.
On Israel, I’m keeping my fingers off the keys. I’m glad others speak and that you do in particular, but it’s not currently my place here.
I'm afraid most of my points were muddled or lost, or that I didn't understand your reply. Let me be more precise.
First of all, I am understanding malice—definitionally—as "intent to harm"; please let me know if that's not your definition.
Now I don't actually know what harm is, in general, nor do I think that nothing should be harmed. For example, I think braces harm the possibility of a crooked smile, or a society that accepts crooked smiles. I think grounding a kid harms the possibility of a kid acting against the parents' wishes. Omelettes harm eggs. I'm not saying all harm is bad. I'm therefore not saying all malice is bad.
I was following you that harm is baked into every intention. So if good is possible, it can't include total absence of harm. I don't know what good is, and that's kinda left out of your discussion (probably for good reason).
I'm also not saying that suffering is bad (or good); I get that it can be very effective in learning, etc. I'm just saying it's coercive. I would not claim to be impervious to torture: enough inflicted suffering might very well make me do something abhorrent. Torture is coercive through its intent—and demonstrated ability—to harm. I assume you also would worry that you could be coerced by torture? I assume you could thus be coerced by suffering?
This isn't hypothetical: those who are willing to do harm can enslave us. African people would not have done the work they did without the credible threats of harm.
The reason this is relevant goes back to my earlier questions about what harms are good and bad. I claim was that our very ability to avoid death through the pain mechanism was an enslavement by our ancestors who invented the pain mechanism. Doesn't that mean that we have malice to thank for our very lives?
Finally, on Israel, while I do believe that they should be distressed and even suffer if it helps them learn the lesson of humanity (humaneness)—unless they truly are tracking some higher Godly thing above humaneness, which I doubt—my point was that this very sentiment ("woe to israel") was one intended to coerce them into submitting to my values (less wanton killing), and this intention is itself malicious toward them (and toward their malice). The final sentence was intended to be a case in point at multiple levels.
First, I believe we have different definitions of “harm,” so that “intent to harm” will not mean the same thing to both of us. I would not say “braces harm a crooked smile,” for instance, but I might say “braces hurt the charm of a crooked smile,” if the crooked smile had charm. (Not “braces harmed the charm of a crooked smile.”) Braces transform crooked smiles into straight smiles, and that might hurt (not harm) or help some qualities of the smile, but in itself it won’t be a harm of the smile, just a transformation. I would also not say “harms possibility” for any possibility, though I could say it “harms hope in a possibility.” I haven’t entirely explicated my depth grammar of “harm” for myself, and I don’t expect I would find it entirely coherent if I did, but still, whatever semantics I’m using for “harm,” it definitely doesn’t follow the same pattern as yours does, here, so I can say that I have a different meaning for “harm” despite not knowing exactly what my alternative meaning is or the difference is.
Given that different grammar, quite a lot of the rest is muddled! We should probably have a separate personal conversation about coercion some time, since for me that’s a fairly private subject. There is a lot of depth to the psychology and metaphysics of coercion, but it always refers to personal experience some of which is best kept private – I plan this to be one of my more important subtopics in talking about manners and Habermas, in future letters.
I did take the last sentence re Israel as an example on multiple levels, and I hoped my response would make sense as both a reply and another example on multiple levels as well!
Interesting. That makes sense and I'm willing to leave it there—just say the word—even though I wish I had a sense of what harm means to you.
I roughly was treating harm as the same as "disintegration". I sometimes like to think of every thing as an integrated dynamic arrangement of micro things and also as a component of various integrated dynamic arrangements that constitute macro things (e.g. relationships, institutions).
Though X can't be reduced to the components of which it's an integrated dynamic arrangement, one might be able to send X inputs (send the body or psyche something very disturbing) which will lead to X disintegrating into those components. And the bigger things of which X is a part can also be sent inputs that disintegrate it, leaving X more alone than before. These are two ways I can think of harming X, and I haven't thought of more ways than that.
I can keep saying some more about the semantics of "harm," I just probably can't get all the way to the bottom of it!
For me, to harm something requires some interference with one of its essential goods. So braces can harm the charm of a crooked smile, but not the crooked smile, because the crookedness was an essential good in the charm but not a essential good in the smile (it was an accidental good of the smile, by way of the charm, which is a possible (happy) accidental property of a crooked smile). Similarly, it could harm "what a partner loves in the smile," if the crookedness were essential to what the partner loves.
In some contexts, it will actually be alright to elide the difference and say it "harmed the smile," if "the smile" is naturally understood in context as shorthand for something like "what was beautiful about the smile." This isn't that common or uncommon with smiles, but it's very common with property, where "harming someone's property" is understood to stand for "harming the valuable properties of their property." When doing philosophy, it's often tempting to de-contextualize this and either universalize the elision or forbid the elision in the philosophical context, but I find neither really compelling on its own long-term; my speech does depend on the contextuality.
I use disintegration as a less morally-loaded concept than harm, eg in digestion the stomach acid dissolves food without harming it (it's not an essential good of food to be intact; making onion soup does not make the already-harvested onions worse, though harvesting the onions harmed their lives as plants), and I believe there are harmful integrations as well as harmful disintegrations.
Thanks, that helps a lot. Any chance that stupidity = not seeing some relevant essential good, and malice = deliberately destroying essential goods? And then the Encaustum-Solzhenitsyn idea is that no deliberate destruction of essential goods ever sees all relevant essential goods, or something?
Interesting and pertinent reflections! I’m not sure about redefining negligence as a form of malice though. The teenage intern causing damage by visiting a porn site may not be able to plead ignorance, but rather than a subtle form of malice, plain recklessness seems to be a better description here. Gross negligence is a separate legal category that assigns culpability even in the absence of malicious intent, but finding societal solutions to more pernicious instances of dereliction of duty is tough when we don’t have a shared understanding of what constitutes these duties in the first place.
Thanks! I appreciate the prompt to clarify what I meant. I agree that only certain types of negligence are malice in themselves, definitely. Re the example, it might help to picture the situation to know that I was a teenager in that example but the typical virus-downloaders were in their 30s, not fellow teenagers, and they were repeatedly coming in, so not just reckless because they didn’t know better. Yes, gross negligence is a separate category and I’m glad we have it. What I’m arguing is that there’s essentially always an element of malice behind gross negligence that does not make it malicious negligence, but rather “gross negligence as the fruit of an indirect malice.” So for instance, spiteful disrespect of adult rules as a teenager is very common and is malice that naturally leads to teenage gross negligence though without putting that negligence itself into the category of malicious neglect (the malice is further upstream). My example of neglecting an anniversary as malice is more of a stretch and more questionable, and in fact I wouldn’t think that act is always necessarily malicious (e.g., in cases of Alzheimer’s); I was implicitly just talking about the stereotypical cases in which it’s true and gliding over the diversity of cases that complicate it.
And it may be worth reiterating explicitly here that the usual malice isn’t such a terrible, excoriable thing to me: not something I ideally want to purify with fire and sword but rather with care and love.
“Finding societal solutions to more pernicious instances of dereliction of duty” is crucial, and well-said there.
Here I'm perhaps more cynical in that I don't believe pure malice is amenable to care and love, sometimes the best we can hope for is incapacitation (see the Southport Inquiry Report for a synecdoche of how many UK public servants approach their duties).
I do agree that we should do more to respond to foreseeable harms rather than come up with rationalisations for looking away. On a recent episode of Sam Harris’s podcast, Tristan Harris argues that based on the current incentive structure, we can be pretty confident in predicting an increasingly anti-human future, unless we humans intervene to change these incentives, which would require something like a Bretton Woods agreement for AI. I take a dim view of the probability of this happening, which alarms me much more than an op-ed partly written by AI.
Sure, incapacitation has a place. I did say “ideally” for a reason. But I don’t think the factor that matters decisively there is purity of malice; sometimes the purer the malice, the faster to respond to care and love, sometimes the purer the stupidity, the more necessary is a direct physical intervention.
The public political conversations about AI are in terrible shape. The dangers, opportunities, and precedents are all three badly misrepresented.
This is spot on: "finding societal solutions to more pernicious instances of dereliction of duty is tough when we don’t have a shared understanding of what constitutes these duties in the first place."
Shared understanding can be a very useful thing.
Beautifully explained. The rhetorical excess of the "never" undermines what would otherwise be a useful corrective for the adamantly persecuted.
Thank you for reading.
Probably worth comparing with the āsavas in Buddhism - two of which are sometimes translated "hatred" and "ignorance." (The third sometimes is translated "greed.") These, by my understanding, are the three basic defects of mind that are taken to lead to samsaric existence, and the complete uprooting of which is taken to constitute liberation.
In AN 10.61 (whose title, translated "Ignorance" in all translations I can recall offhand, is from the same root word as the corresponding āsava), the Buddha makes what is at the least a very similar/consonant argument to the one Augustine makes here: that a first point of ignorance is not found. You can just keep going back and back in the chain of cause and effect, and there is never a moment at which ignorance begins, before which it was not, very much like darkness as I read Augustine describing it. And yet, says the Buddha, ignorance is caused - or maintained, or fed - it is "not without nutriment" as I've seen some translations put it. And that nutriment is, again much as Augustine seems to be saying, one that is made up of types of will and actions and circumstances, all in a complex feedback loop.
It is odd (or maybe not, given my own predilections), but offhand I struggle to think of such direct treatment of hatred as such, in such an analytical way. It is easy for me to recall discourses on mettā / maitrī, which one might say is a polar opposite of hatred, or examples of people who had been driven by hatred and then repented, and the harm done by those hateful actions (and the good done by that repentance), but there is not, that I can think of, a "Hate" sutra. (Not to say one doesn't exist; only that I haven't come across it in a way that I can recall.) There are, by contrast, ensemble presentations of the āsavas and how to restrain them, e.g.: https://suttacentral.net/mn2/en/sujato.
AN 10.61: https://suttacentral.net/an10.61/en/sujato
In the Christian tradition, it is likewise very easy to think of discourses on love - _Love Alone Is Credible_ has been on my to-read list for now years, plural - but there is also a much clearer to me treatment of hatred; almost the whole tradition is founded on this act of singular, totally focused love totally transmuting a plural, diffuse hate. Striking, as often people, and certainly at times I, do tend to think - as you've alluded to in the mention of the "mastermind fallacy" - that it is love that cannot focus, and hate that can.
Anyway - thank you for the post. I appreciated reading it, and it brought up a lot to chew on. I hope this comment hasn't muddied too much, and look forward to reading more, particularly on Habermas and fascism.
Very interesting and extensive comment, thanks! I don’t think this muddies anything as I see it. The parallels and correspondences are strong and striking, though I can’t properly evaluate them all myself or meet you in the detail you’ve shared since I haven’t done justice to the Buddhist moral or metaphysical traditions yet, personally: I have had a narrowing attachment to my Western background that no doubt is fed by some darker subtle factors.
I don’t think I should prioritize addressing that particular limitation of mine before a few others, but I do hope that I’ll be able to in time. The mutual influences between Greek and Indian philosophy are fascinating, and the old trading system that linked them through the Red Sea is one I plan to investigate in depth after I’m more solid in my understanding of the more contemporary Atlantic and Pacific trade systems. When I do that, I’ll also look deeper into these Buddhist philosophies and how they shaped the region.
Completely agree about the tendency toward black-and-white, either/or. I see this a lot in some of the neurodivergence commentary here, where people will post some variety of: "Your kid doesn't have ADHD they're just poorly behaved!" As if the former were a complete fiction and the latter -- poor behavior -- is always a sign of moral failing (on the kid's part or more impliedly their parents'). I see a connection to the malice/stupidity dichotomy.
So, I really appreciate the insight about avoiding either/or thinking and the observation that motivations or causal factors are typically mixed rather than pure.
What I’m struggling a little with here is definitional. How do you define “ignorance”? If St. Augustine’s approach is taken up, where “ignorance” means “not knowing the good” (i.e., God), then the assertions become somewhat tautological. If “bad acts” all stem from “not knowing what’s good,” then that’s true if “not knowing what’s good” = “acting rightly,” but I think that semantic elision distances us from reality rather than brings us closer to it.
Or maybe what I really mean is that “ignorance” and “good” and therefore “malice” seem quite subjective in this framework. You could say someone does a bad thing because they’re “ignorant,” but who decides what’s ignorant? And what if they think you’re the ignorant one? How can this model be falsified?
To make it more concrete: imagine that someone fully understands Christian morality but rejects it. Is that “ignorance”? Not under a usual sense of the term.
I’d say a more complex model of “bad acts” is needed that accounts for:
(1) Cognitive limitations (can’t understand the stakes or impact)
(2) Factual ignorance (lacks information)
(3) Moral disagreement (different values)
(4) Weakness of will (knows better but fails to act)
And in these dimensions, we are not all equally situated or capable. Maybe the concept of “ignorance” is meant to encompass all these, but I think they’re qualitatively dissimilar enough that they should be parsed separately.
Thank you for the comment, and yes: the neurodivergence conversation is hashed out on top of these other moral underlayers. It’s a major part of why it can’t find resolution. People argue about ADHD in particular in part because they don’t share more fundamental moral premises about agency and blame in the first place. They beat each other over the head asserting arguments based on those contrasting premises without being able to go deeper and resolve the contrast of the premises – I was writing this already in my first letter here, “How to Assert”! It’s “pushing premises” and “forcing a frame.”
Re the struggle you’re describing, I just don’t think it is inappropriate: I think it’s genuinely a struggle to correctly judge others (and so it’s best done humbly and sparingly!). The word for this type of frustrating relativity of judgment is not “subjective,” however, it’s “perspectival.” Perspectives aren’t just arbitrary or just willful, like subjectivity is often taken to imply. There are facts of the matter about how moral perspectives differ predictably, just like in artistic visual perspective.
For a Christian the answer to “who judges” is ultimately God, the one being omniscient so that His perspective encompasses the whole truth of all other perspectives. He’ll judge, not any of us, and it’s our place to be humble and do our best, having faith in grace, while we look forward to that judgment.
For a usual kind of Nietzschean, the answer of “who judges” is everyone, and all their judgments are facts that go into the rough and tumble of being and becoming in a world that can be seen as the will to power and nothing more. That they get things wrong is just part of the dynamic. Various perspectives arise and pass away in an evolutionary sequence, thriving or perishing insofar as their judgments are adaptive or not.
For a pragmatic social person, the answer of “who judges” is practically replaced by “whose judgments do I respect and imitate and how,” and the answer involves track records, speaking skills, social positions, etc.
Personally, I definitely do track those four different categories you suggested and I particularly respect other people who also break things down that way.
Thanks for the push toward "perspectival," a term I wasn't familiar with but the utility of which is readily clear. Is this a fair restatement of the distinction: "subjective" connotes some degree of choice, whereas "perspectival" is upstream of subjectivity and serves to constrain the menu of potential subjectivities (as it were) that an individual consciously selects from?
It's close but it might not be precise enough, depending on how you'd want to use it yourself. "Subjective" focalizes either arbitrariness or inner choice in patterns of appearance, whereas "perspectival" focalizes the non-arbitrary variations in patterns of appearance, and "perspective" operates both upstream and downstream of choice: perspective both shapes the apparent choices available and also shapes how "the same choices" may lead to different apparent experiences. (If two people at different vantage points choose to look at the same thing in the same setting, they'll still see different aspects of the thing against different backgrounds.)
Thanks for responding!
I really appreciated this letter.
Even the word ignorance, Socrates' notion of evil, puts ignoring at the root. So just putting two and two together, I guess you'd say every human intention ignores something and Augustine would say that what we're ignoring is God. Whether we're willfully looking away or just not willfully enough looking toward, we don't know what we need to know, and yet we intend to act anyway.
An intention is a pull, and a pull has a direction, and it not only ignores the perpendicular dimensions (like the intention to understand God ignores the need to listen to your spouse complaining) but also the qualities of the place pulled away from. Braces tend to pull teeth toward a straight smile, ignoring the qualities of a big gap between the front incisors. Grounding a child ignores the qualities of someone who would talk back to their parents.
I find myself intending to harm (which is what I understand as malice towards) the sources of bad behavior, in order to invite in the good behavior. Let me make you feel bad for this so that next time you'll do that. They poke fun at my frugality so that next time I'll be a little more generous.
So what is God, and what is the supreme good? Is good no harm? Is God the creator and keeper of life? Is being humane godly or is it merely human? If suffering is what we are to flee, then our ancestral inventor of the mechanisms of pain and suffering was a master enslaver, keeping life held in such a coercive grip. Is it wrong to forcefully coerce?
So I agree that all intents seem to include malice towards--intent to damage--the "bad" possibility, ie the one it pulls away from. That possibility is lessened and diminished. And more importantly it often extends to threatening to harm the person: you'll have to think of yourself as stingy, mean, gross, inhumane if you continue acting out the "bad" behavior.
Woe to Israel if they continue with such genocidal intents. Their ignorance won't be easily forgiven.
Thank you, and yes, exactly right that this is the key question for this view: when is ignorance willful? It can be hard to discern, but it often is willful. Augustine is focused on the will to ignore God; the anniversary example brings out a will to ignore love.
The problem of how all the push and pull of self-assertion and retaliation will resolve to good or to ill demands broader context, generally: in the narrow focus of immediate retaliatory logic there are no answers, but once you broaden your view you find ways to make the pushes and pulls lead on net to the better rather than the worse. Fines go to charity, for instance, or rivalry gets channeled into positive-sum competition for socially-valued virtues.
I don’t personally flee suffering or consider all of my own suffering evil. In broader contexts, I often end up quite happy to have suffered now and then, especially when the suffering is a part of a love or a joy. So I don’t have that particular issue in the same way. I do still have problems with theodicy! Just not those particular ones.
On Israel, I’m keeping my fingers off the keys. I’m glad others speak and that you do in particular, but it’s not currently my place here.
I'm afraid most of my points were muddled or lost, or that I didn't understand your reply. Let me be more precise.
First of all, I am understanding malice—definitionally—as "intent to harm"; please let me know if that's not your definition.
Now I don't actually know what harm is, in general, nor do I think that nothing should be harmed. For example, I think braces harm the possibility of a crooked smile, or a society that accepts crooked smiles. I think grounding a kid harms the possibility of a kid acting against the parents' wishes. Omelettes harm eggs. I'm not saying all harm is bad. I'm therefore not saying all malice is bad.
I was following you that harm is baked into every intention. So if good is possible, it can't include total absence of harm. I don't know what good is, and that's kinda left out of your discussion (probably for good reason).
I'm also not saying that suffering is bad (or good); I get that it can be very effective in learning, etc. I'm just saying it's coercive. I would not claim to be impervious to torture: enough inflicted suffering might very well make me do something abhorrent. Torture is coercive through its intent—and demonstrated ability—to harm. I assume you also would worry that you could be coerced by torture? I assume you could thus be coerced by suffering?
This isn't hypothetical: those who are willing to do harm can enslave us. African people would not have done the work they did without the credible threats of harm.
The reason this is relevant goes back to my earlier questions about what harms are good and bad. I claim was that our very ability to avoid death through the pain mechanism was an enslavement by our ancestors who invented the pain mechanism. Doesn't that mean that we have malice to thank for our very lives?
Finally, on Israel, while I do believe that they should be distressed and even suffer if it helps them learn the lesson of humanity (humaneness)—unless they truly are tracking some higher Godly thing above humaneness, which I doubt—my point was that this very sentiment ("woe to israel") was one intended to coerce them into submitting to my values (less wanton killing), and this intention is itself malicious toward them (and toward their malice). The final sentence was intended to be a case in point at multiple levels.
No problem, and thanks for clarifying!
First, I believe we have different definitions of “harm,” so that “intent to harm” will not mean the same thing to both of us. I would not say “braces harm a crooked smile,” for instance, but I might say “braces hurt the charm of a crooked smile,” if the crooked smile had charm. (Not “braces harmed the charm of a crooked smile.”) Braces transform crooked smiles into straight smiles, and that might hurt (not harm) or help some qualities of the smile, but in itself it won’t be a harm of the smile, just a transformation. I would also not say “harms possibility” for any possibility, though I could say it “harms hope in a possibility.” I haven’t entirely explicated my depth grammar of “harm” for myself, and I don’t expect I would find it entirely coherent if I did, but still, whatever semantics I’m using for “harm,” it definitely doesn’t follow the same pattern as yours does, here, so I can say that I have a different meaning for “harm” despite not knowing exactly what my alternative meaning is or the difference is.
Given that different grammar, quite a lot of the rest is muddled! We should probably have a separate personal conversation about coercion some time, since for me that’s a fairly private subject. There is a lot of depth to the psychology and metaphysics of coercion, but it always refers to personal experience some of which is best kept private – I plan this to be one of my more important subtopics in talking about manners and Habermas, in future letters.
I did take the last sentence re Israel as an example on multiple levels, and I hoped my response would make sense as both a reply and another example on multiple levels as well!
Interesting. That makes sense and I'm willing to leave it there—just say the word—even though I wish I had a sense of what harm means to you.
I roughly was treating harm as the same as "disintegration". I sometimes like to think of every thing as an integrated dynamic arrangement of micro things and also as a component of various integrated dynamic arrangements that constitute macro things (e.g. relationships, institutions).
Though X can't be reduced to the components of which it's an integrated dynamic arrangement, one might be able to send X inputs (send the body or psyche something very disturbing) which will lead to X disintegrating into those components. And the bigger things of which X is a part can also be sent inputs that disintegrate it, leaving X more alone than before. These are two ways I can think of harming X, and I haven't thought of more ways than that.
I can keep saying some more about the semantics of "harm," I just probably can't get all the way to the bottom of it!
For me, to harm something requires some interference with one of its essential goods. So braces can harm the charm of a crooked smile, but not the crooked smile, because the crookedness was an essential good in the charm but not a essential good in the smile (it was an accidental good of the smile, by way of the charm, which is a possible (happy) accidental property of a crooked smile). Similarly, it could harm "what a partner loves in the smile," if the crookedness were essential to what the partner loves.
In some contexts, it will actually be alright to elide the difference and say it "harmed the smile," if "the smile" is naturally understood in context as shorthand for something like "what was beautiful about the smile." This isn't that common or uncommon with smiles, but it's very common with property, where "harming someone's property" is understood to stand for "harming the valuable properties of their property." When doing philosophy, it's often tempting to de-contextualize this and either universalize the elision or forbid the elision in the philosophical context, but I find neither really compelling on its own long-term; my speech does depend on the contextuality.
I use disintegration as a less morally-loaded concept than harm, eg in digestion the stomach acid dissolves food without harming it (it's not an essential good of food to be intact; making onion soup does not make the already-harvested onions worse, though harvesting the onions harmed their lives as plants), and I believe there are harmful integrations as well as harmful disintegrations.
Thanks, that helps a lot. Any chance that stupidity = not seeing some relevant essential good, and malice = deliberately destroying essential goods? And then the Encaustum-Solzhenitsyn idea is that no deliberate destruction of essential goods ever sees all relevant essential goods, or something?
excellently done
looking forward to more!
Thanks for reading!