Is Love an Art or a Craft?

Irving Singer was a philosopher whose Times obit (“Irving Singer, M.I.T. Professor Who Wrote ‘The Nature of Love,’ Dies at 89," NYT, 2/15/15) describes how he had written a three volume work devoted to one of the most over used words in the English language, one whose definition has stymied and challenged thinkers throughout history. The Times obit quotes Singer thusly, “This, like so many philosophical works, began as an attempt to understand my own inadequacies. Everyone in my family persuaded me that I ought to be more loving, which troubled me. So like most philosophers, I dealt with the criticism by constructing a theory and a philosophy which enabled me to dismiss their ideas.” Singer who according to the Times taught for many years at M.I.T. seems have had a sensibility that in many respects was closer to that of humanistic psychologists like Erich Fromm who wrote The Art of Loving, who also had a philosophical background (as a product of the Frankfurt school). On the basis of the obit, Singer did not appear to be a utilitarian or consequentialist like Peter Singer or Derek Parfitt. He was not concerned with the kind of ethical problems that bugged trolleyologists like Philippa Foot and the description of his work in the obit with its emphasis on emotion doesn’t seem to tie it to language philosophers or the work of phenomenologists like Husserl or Heidegger. But the very inception of Singer’s project makes one think about how other great works of philosophy might have come into being. Did Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason derive the fact that his family found him to be was unreasonable? Did Heidegger’s Being and Time result from the philosopher’s problems with lateness or in the case of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, a great mind’s inability to deal with varying kinds of absence (God, money, an empty cupboard). Could Sartre’s existentialism and his obsession with nothingness have derived from the fact that when he was was a little boy, he frequently came home to an empty refrigerator?

Broadening Your Event Horizon

Pandora by Jules Joseph Lefebvre (1882)

You go to an otolaryngologist for throat problems, but an ichthyologist if you’re the old man in the Hemingway novel and want to know what fish your wrestling with. Herpetologists are consulted about the representation of snakes in Egyptian mythology and if you want to understand Vladimir Nabokov, who collected butterflies, then you’d better know your lepidoptera. See an arachnologist if you have a question about spiders. If you’re interested in charitable matters then get used to the word eleemosynary and if you’re the kind of person who is always anticipating questions don’t feel bad if you’re accused of prolepsis. It could be worse. You could be rebarbative or morganatic, which is to say that you may be one of the royalty, but you won’t be able to pass on your title. There are so many more quotidian words to describe human aspirations. I’d rather be a quisling than a person who sells out his own country. I’d rather suffer the psychoanalytic condition of après coup than a mere trauma. Bipolarity and borderline disorders are such ubiquitous diagnoses these days that they literal demand bigger words with little tails like casus belli. I would much rather suffer a paraphilia than be a simply pervert. Irredentism is a conversation stopper, but what would you prefer an ugly silence or another boring and destructive civil war since there are always those little breakaways that are not going to happily allow themselves to be reconstituted into the whole. Are you just a utilitarian who’s read his Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill or consequentialist? Getting down and dirty do you follow the Chicago school and supply side economics or do you hearken back to Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism? Call a spade a spade. Don’t settle for being a game theorist when you can, following Philippa Foot, become a prodigy of trolleyology. Why study loss aversion when you can pursue neuro-economics? Tinnitus is annoying, but tintinnabulation can be majestic. Everyone wants a six pack, but an extended word is not a distended stomach. It need not be a Pandora’s Box. It’s a form of prestidigitation that will broaden your event horizon.

Trolleyology in Oklahoma

Phiippa Foot was an Oxford philosopher, who just happened to be the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland. She was famous for the Trolley Problem, a conundrum of moral philosophy. In short five people are tied to a train track. If you simply divert the train to another track only one person will be killed. There is also the attendant Footbridge Problem whereby a fat man is standing on a footbridge. If you push him onto the tracks, his heft will stall the train. What’s interesting is that the question is both utilitarian and moral. Most people would say it’s always better to save five rather than one. Immanuel Kant might not have agreed since he believed that there was a categorical imperative which defined what was right or wrong. In a review of Would You Kill the Fat Man:? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us About Right and Wrong by David Edmonds ( “How Do We Know What’s Moral?” The New York Review of Books, 4/24/14), Cass R. Sunstein uses the term  “trolleyology" to categorize for these kinds of ruminations. But even though Sunstein employs trolleyological thinking when he remarks, “imagine that capital punishment actually deters murder, so that with every execution, we can save two innocent lives, or three, or a dozen," the recent botched execution of Clayton D. Lockett in Oklahoma gives pause to those who would go with a strictly utilitarian view. It’s something that was also dramatized in Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiment at Yale. It might sound like it’s easy to push a fat man off a bridge to save five others, but when you are the one who has to do it, you will or won’t feel some degree of hesitation. Another Yale researcher, Joshua Greene has recently complicated the ethical aspects of the problem by performing brain scans of people as they contemplate it, as a way of testing the emotions that underline a simply rational choice (“Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?  The Uncertain Biological Basis of Morality," Robert Wright, The Atlantic, 10/29/14). Usually the Trolley problem is illustrated without any consideration of the character of those who would or would not be saved. However, by adding this consideration as Sunstein does in his essay/review, trolleyology can be used as an argument for or against capital punishment. Ostensibly you execute a murderer to send a message and prevent further murders. But as is evident in the recent case of the Lockett execution, it’s not so simple. Once you open up the doors of vengeance and say that the ends justify the means, you unleash the prospect of a Pandora’s Box of dehumanizing action, amongst them tortures like the waterboarding of alleged suspects. You take an action predicated on a certain level of expediency. But where does it lead?

Beyond An Unreasonable Doubt

In a review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them in The Atlantic (“Why We Fight—And Can We Stop,” November 2013) Robert Wright deals a unique approach to the Trolley Problem. The famous conundrum posed by the ethical philosopher Philippa Foot deals with the decision to sacrifice one life in order to save many by diverting a runaway trolley. “Greene’s inspiration was to do brain scans of people while they thought about the trolley problem,” Wright says. “The results suggested that people who refused to save five lives by pushing an innocent bystander to his death were swayed by emotional parts of their brains, whereas people who chose the more utilitarian solution—keep as many people alive as possible—showed more activity in parts of the brain associated with logical thought.” In an article in Foreign Affairs (“Never Saw It Coming: Why the Financial Crisis Took Economists By Surprise,” November/December 2013)former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan introduces a similar idea in an economic rather than moral context. Citing “’animal spirits,’ the term Keynes famously coined in l936 to refer to 'a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction,’" Greenspan argues that no understanding of “Homo economicus” can be had unless one understands the irrational emotion underlying seemingly rational choices. “From the perspective of a forecaster, the issue is not whether behavior is rational but whether it is sufficiently repetitive and systematic to be numerically measured and predicted,” he says. "The challenge is to better understand what Daniel Kahneman, a leading behavioral economist, refers to as ‘fast thinking' : the quick reaction judgments on which people tend to base much, if not all, of their day-to-day decisions about financial markets. No one is immune to the emotions of fear and euphoria, which are among the predominant drivers of speculative markets. But people respond to fear and euphoria in different ways, and those responses  create specific, observable patterns of thought and behavior.” So what Wright and Greenspun are doing is in essence placing thought itself under scrutiny. The Iowa Gambling Task, devised by the neuroscientists Antonio Damasio, Antoine Bechara, Steven Anderson and Daniel Tranel, which uses card games and skin respiration tests, to measure the presence of emotions as complex as Schadenfreude is another iteration of a similar idea. Reason, like Newtonian physics in a world of relativity, is again left in the dust.

Lives of Our Leaders: War Games

The prisoner’s dilemma, devised by scientists at the RAND Corporation in the ’50s, and the trolley problem, articulated by the English philosopher Philippa Foot (who also happened to be the grand daughter of Grover Cleveland), are both problems of philosophy frequently used in game theory, a branch of mathematics that attempts to apply abstract thought to moral dilemmas. So take Iraq, with its Sunnis and its Shiites and its ever-dwindling Christian population: let’s say you invent a game called Iraq War. The object of the game is to topple a ruthless tyrant (Saddam Hussein) whose fascist inclinations find their roots in a branch of pan-Arabism that bears some similarity to India’s right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In the trolley problem, one person is sacrificed to save a larger group. Transposing the problem to Iraq, the challenge becomes that in order to save the country’s Shiite majority, a number of Sunnis will have to be killed. In the prisoner’s dilemma, you have two prisoners that are presented with a variety of scenarios in which they either remain silent or rat each other out. As with the prisoner’s dilemma, the two elements in society vying for power, the Sunni and Shiites, can both rat on each other or make mixed choices in which one rats and one doesn’t. If the Shiites play ball with the invading forces, the Sunnis will be extinguished. If the Sunnis play ball with the invading forces, the Shiites may again find themselves on the wrong end of the stick. If both refuse to play ball with the invading forces there may be a state of peace (the equivalent of the simplest possible outcome in the original prisoner’s dilemma). If both “defect,” to use the original nomenclature of the problem, giving up the goods on each other, then there will be some strife, but not nearly as much as there would have been for any one party if one had talked while the other hadn’t. Would that there were a game called Iraq War, which, while not winnable, might still provide some rational explanations. 

The Trolley Problem

Philippa Foot, the English philosopher who put forth the Trolley Problem, recently died (“Philippa Foot, Renowned Philosopher, Dies at 90,” NYT, l0/9/10). The Trolley Problem is one of those conundrums like the Prisoner’s Dilemma that presents ethical decisions in a utilitarian context. In short, a run-away trolley is about to kill five track men, but can be diverted so that it will only kill one worker. What should the driver do? Clearly, by diverting the tram, the driver is playing God, deciding who shall live and who shall die. In addition, implicit in the seemingly rational decision to kill one man over five is the notion that life can be quantitatively valued. Surely five lives are worth more than one. But are they? The United States sentenced many of the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to horrible deaths in which they were literally incinerated in order to force a Japanese surrender. But this nuclear holocaust saved many lives. The firebombing of Dresden is a lesser example. Ironically, the U.S. implementation of similar tactics in later wars—napalming in Vietnam and massive air assaults, most recently in Iraq—proved to be far less successful. It’s as if the tram that mowed down the one track worker became a possessed evil spirit and returned to knock off the other five. However difficult these arguments become, underlying them is a belief in the power or reason, rationality and logic. Significantly, Foot, who was the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, was an activist and obviously a believer in the possibility of making decisions for the Greater Good, as evidenced in her having helped to create Oxfam.