Browsing by Author "Wong, David B"

My dissertation aims to show that sympathy, when well-cultivated, is adequate to motivate and produce altruistic behavior in a consistent and reliable manner. I do so by creating a dialogue between the Chinese and Western philosophical traditions. I define sympathy as a four-dimensional emotion—including perceptive, visceral, motivational and cognitive aspects. I argue that sympathy in its mature stage is capable of motivating people in a consistent manner, and its role in morality cannot be replaced by other emotions. In addition, I argue that the leap from an unstable reaction to a mature, consistent and reliable emotion is made through proper cultivation. Cultivational methods such as ritual practice, rational persuasion, self-cultivation, etc. are discussed and evaluated. I also discuss the limitations of sympathy and its cultivation towards the end of the dissertation.

According to everyday folk psychology, our deliberate goals and intentions, together with our character traits, explain much of our overt behavior. These ways of explaining behavior are pervasive. According to many social psychologists, they are also typically false. Instead, much human behavior is controlled by psychological processes prompted through external triggers that we do not recognize and over which we have little control. Once triggered, these processes shape our behavior in profound ways. Experiments demonstrating these effects are legion, suggesting that any number of elements can have determining sway on our behavior, whether it's a simple smile (which can make cooperation among players in strategic games more likely), or the chance finding of a dime in a payphone (which can temporarily increase the probability of the finder acting altruistically), or the presence of unappealing, half-eaten foodstuffs in an experimenter's room (which makes subjects behave moralistically when responding to unrelated experimental questions). Minor details can have major impact on our behavior, and our ignorance of this phenomenon should be of moral concern. This is the focus of my dissertation.

In particular, I argue that individuals can often agree or disagree on moral issues not because of the content of their respective beliefs, but rather because of their unawareness of (and thus inattentiveness to) the subtle impact of their immediate environments--and their own mannerisms--on moral reasoning and conduct. The effects can be considerable: How long we are willing to engage in dialogue; the degree to which we find accommodation to others acceptable; the creativity we deploy in finding mutually agreeable outcomes to problems; the significance we attach to any problems we may have--each of these crucial factors in moral deliberation can be affected profoundly by minor variations in our conduct and our situations. Take any social encounter: Even before we share our opinions and engage in serious discussion, we are already signaling various attitudes and even content-rich information about ourselves through cues arising from our facial expressions, posture, tone of voice, forms of address, and other seemingly minor details of our comportment. These cues automatically bias how others interpret our subsequent behavior, and thereby influence how our interactions with others enfold. Attending to such minor details may seem antiquated--even priggish--from a modern perspective. Yet the influence they exert should caution us against discounting their importance.

So I throw my hat in with a philosopher who did not overlook the impact of these variables, and who viewed minding them as a vital source of moral power: Confucius (fl. ca. 6th century BCE). In the Analects, we find Confucius preoccupied by very minor details of one's mannerisms and their impact on others. This led Confucius to motivate norms of conduct aimed at structuring social exchanges in ways conducive to achieving interpersonal agreement or accommodation. I argue that, for our purposes today, we can reduce his various norms to just two. The first is to 'mind manners'--in other words, to be attentive to details of one's own behavior out of consideration of its impact on others; the second is to 'give the benefit of a doubt'--to discount the impact of negative first impressions in order to allow for healthy moral relationships to develop.

Abiding by these norms can foster a form of ethical bootstrapping--that is, lifting or prompting one another towards our joint moral ends. If the social psychological literature is true, then whether or not any individual will be able to meet her ethical aims on any particular occasion will hinge on the actions and manners of her immediate interlocutors, which in turn will hinge on her own. In being mindful of the interconnectedness of our behavior, we not only affect how others react to us, but we also thereby affect the kinds of reactions we face in turn. The bootstrapping is mutual.

The deep interconnectedness of our behavior as reflected in experimental social psychology should lead us away from thinking of individuals as trapped by aspects of their psychology and determined to act in fixed ways, come what may. Instead, individuals' behavior is highly malleable; with the right prompts, even the most recalcitrant individuals can be moved in new directions. After all, people can have flourishing or accommodating moral relationships in spite of real differences in their avowed moral commitments, and deleterious or rancorous moral relationships in spite of substantive agreement on big ticket moral items. In pluralistic societies where we expect clashes of norms to occur, it is vital to uncover the conditions propitious to agreement or accommodation not just at a theoretical level but a practical level as well. This begins with what we have most control over: our manners.

Heightened awareness of the evolutionary, socio-cultural, and psychological origins of our moral judgments pushes many of us in the direction of moral skepticism, in the direction of doubting the objective truth of our moral judgments. But should awareness of the origins of our moral judgments shake our confidence in them? Are there good moral debunking challenges or debunking arguments from premises concerning the accessible origins of our moral judgments to skeptical conclusions regarding them? In vigorous pursuit of these questions, this dissertation sifts three promising moral debunking challenges to moral realism, namely Richard Joyce's (2001) evolutionary debunking argument from epistemic insensitivity, Sharon Street's (2006) "Darwinian Dilemma," and David Enoch's (2010) "Epistemological Challenge." It is argued that each challenge faces cogent objections that not only demonstrate the inadequacy of the best debunking challenges available but also instructively guide us to the development of new and more forceful debunking challenges to moral realism. This dissertation develops two new and forceful debunking challenges, both of which target the epistemic reliability and justification of our moral judgments on realist views of the moral facts. The first new debunking challenge starts from the premise that the best explanation of our moral judgments does not appeal to their truth and invokes a new species of epistemic insensitivity to secure the conclusion that our moral belief-forming processes are epistemically unreliable. The second new debunking challenge reasons that the best explanation of the fact that moral realists have no good explanation of the reliability of our moral belief-forming processes is that there is no such reliability.

A classic question in moral philosophy asks "Why be moral?" In other words, what reason or motive do people have to act in accordance with the requirements of morality? In the tradition of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, this project defends the thesis that nearly all people have reason to be moral nearly all of the time, because moral conduct generally serves individuals' desires and needs. It's argued, first, that a reason for action must be capable of motivating an agent to act, and second, that reasons for action motivate through the desires of the agent. This view is defended against the objection that reasons for action are not contingent on any particular agent's desires. Turning to morality, the case is made that the desires of an individual can be consonant with the demands of morality in any of three possible ways: (1) moral action serves one's other-regarding desires to help others; (2) moral action serves one's moral desires, which are formed when one internalizes the moral norms of his or her community; and (3) moral action serves one's self-regarding desires to avoid punishments that one incurs by violating moral norms. In the final chapter, it is acknowledged that the moral norms which happen to prevail in a society sometimes conflict with the moral convictions of individuals. Under certain conditions, however, it can be rational for nearly all members of a society to collectively change existing moral norms. Furthermore, it is within the power of individuals to foment the conditions for collective transitions to alternative moral norms.

Although the notion of dispassion has played an important role in many different traditions, such as Stoicism, Buddhism, Daoism, and eastern Christianity, it does not seem to hold much appeal to people today. To the modern ear, dispassion is often associated with apathy, which refers to a lack of feeling, motivation, or concern. Because of this association, dispassion carries a negative connotation and is frowned upon by many. In this dissertation, I hope to do justice to the notion of dispassion and identify a version of it that can be attractive as an ethical ideal. To do so, I focus on Stoicism and Zhuangism, the traditions of dispassion with which I am most familiar. After discussing Stoic dispassion and Zhuangist dispassion respectively, I argue that dispassion as they conceive it bears little resemblance to apathy. That is, dispassion does not extirpate all emotions, but simply takes us away from emotional upheavals in search of emotional peace. I also argue that Zhuangist dispassion is more plausible than Stoic dispassion through a comparison of their notions of the self. In particular, the Stoics in identifying the self with the self-sufficient virtue or reason not only fails to do justice to our patiency but also renders the self formalized and empty. By contrast, the Zhuangists in identifying the self with the plurality of daos makes possible a kind of self-sufficiency that is more appropriate to our embodied and relational existence.

This dissertation investigates the role of empathy in mitigating the harms that fraught moral and political conflicts can cause. While critics of empathy have argued that it is unnecessary for morality at best and morally harmful at worst, I maintain that empathy is often needed to promote positive relationships between moral and political opponents. It is especially well suited to this task by virtue of the role it can play in helping such opponents find common ground. As I show, doing so is morally important in its own right and is also a crucial first step to avoiding a host of additional moral, epistemic, and practical pitfalls, including the tendency to dismiss the testimony of outgroup members and the inability to cooperate toward shared goals. While philosophers and social scientists have paid a great deal of attention to questions regarding the moral importance of empathy for those in need, relatively little attention has been paid to the potential moral benefits of empathy for opponents. This dissertation fills this gap while addressing the pressing problem of increased polarization, hostility, and aggression between those who are sharply opposed on issues of moral and political importance.

We admire those who know themselves, are appropriately open and receptive to feedback, and appropriately ignore or reject inaccurate feedback. Thus self-knowledge is a virtue that helps us to act justly toward these sources as well as enables us to acquire other virtues through helping us come to know our strengths and weaknesses. To better conceptualize self-knowledge as a virtue, I look at the role of epistemic injustice when it comes to receiving and evaluating feedback. Epistemic injustice involves harming a person by diminishing their ability to share or gain knowledge. Acknowledging the existence of epistemic injustice is to recognize the duty to act justly toward possible sources of self-knowledge. To achieve virtuous self-knowledge, one must act appropriately towards one’s sources of feedback in terms of receptivity as well as resistance.

I investigate how Baruch de Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche conceive of difference as bearing a distinctive normative significance for modern social and political life. Both Spinoza and Nietzsche ascribe special importance to the difference embodied by exceptional individuals, and to the attitudes towards difference that such individuals avow when they interact or cooperate with other individuals in society. I then reanimate this neglected aspect of their writings in my own constructive proposal. In particular, I argue that by inhabiting and harnessing our differences, we can realise new yet unknown possibilities that make for deep and meaningful social change.

According to Spinoza, exceptional individuals--namely, free men or those who live solely by the guidance of reason--avow the attitude of generosity towards individuals they engage. That is to say, the free man actively seeks to establish close friendships with other individuals in society, so that he may increase their power of acting through direct and dynamic interactions. In such interactions, the free man initiates others to the life of reason by getting them to directly experience what it is like to exercise their own powers of thinking, feeling, and acting. Nietzsche criticises Spinoza for diluting the depth and richness of human experience with the formulas and categories of logic, reason, or conscious thought. For instance, Spinoza credits his own affirmative stance towards all things to logical necessity, thus eliding what Nietzsche takes joyful affirmation to involve, namely, experiencing every moment of one's own existence "as good, as valuable, with pleasure." For Nietzsche, we modern individuals have come to develop ways of thinking and feeling that preclude us from harnessing our own lived experiences, and thus the expanse of difference between any one self and another. We have instead become inclined to affects like envy, pity, vanity, or ressentiment, whereby we gain our sense of well-being or power by placing ourselves on par with the persons with whom we associate. To these affects, he contrasts the pathos of distance, in which the lure or influence of one's value perspectives derives from the depth of one's immersion in one's own lived experiences and from the expanse of the difference between oneself and others. Nietzsche nonetheless believes that the pathos of distance can only thrive in an aristocratic social order, with its living hierarchy of rank and value distinctions.

I argue that we need not follow Nietzsche in this. I develop an alternative account of the pathos of distance as an affect whereby the difference one embodies engenders neither opposition nor exclusion, but rather triggers the drive for self-overcoming in those who are receptive to it. On my account, exceptional individuals cultivate and embody a way of life that wields a nourishing and life-transfiguring effect on other individuals, albeit only to the extent that they also value one another's singularities or differences. Exceptional individuals still play a distinctive role in society but not through "living structures of domination."

To illustrate this account, I present and analyse a specific kind of social change, in which people who are disadvantaged and oppressed harness their own lived experiences, with the help of exceptional individuals, to drive deep and creative forms of social change. I call this `organic social change.' Through this analysis, I inaugurate an attitude towards difference that I call `inhabiting difference.' In relation to our own specificity, we inhabit our own difference when we harness the hitherto latent powers and inchoate possibilities that our own lived experiences afford. In relation to the specificity of others, we inhabit their difference to the extent that we avow an attitude of open and abiding patience towards the singularity of their lived experiences, and cultivate direct and dynamic relationships in which they may harness powers and possibilities out of their own lived experiences. To establish the distinctive importance of inhabiting difference, I show how it facilitates empowering modes of social cooperation, and thus helps us realise new yet unknown social and political possibilities.

While both intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva) and reason (ratio) are adequate ways of knowing for Spinoza, they are not equal. "The greatest virtue of the mind" and "the greatest human perfection" consist in understanding things by intuitive knowledge, which Spinoza regards as superior to reason. Understanding why on Spinoza's account intuition is superior to reason is crucial for understanding his epistemological and ethical theories. Yet, the nature of this superiority has been the subject of some controversy due to Spinoza's parsimonious treatment of the distinction between reason and intuitive knowledge in the Ethics. In my dissertation, I explore this fundamental but relatively unexplored issue in Spinoza scholarship by investigating the nature of this distinction and its ethical implications. I suggest that these two kinds of adequate knowledge differ not only in terms of their method, but also with respect to their representative content. More specifically, I hold that unlike reason, which is a universal knowledge, intuitive knowledge descends to a level of particularity, including an adequate knowledge of one's own essence as it follows directly from God, which represents a superior form of self-knowledge. Attaining this superior self-knowledge makes intuitive knowledge the culmination of not only understanding but also happiness. Since, for Spinoza, there is an intrinsic relationship between the pursuit of knowledge and how we live our lives, I argue that these two ways of knowing are at the same time two ways of living.

In this dissertation, I attempt to answer the question of how people can come to behave in accordance with their moral standards. To answer this question, I argue for and then apply a naturalistic approach to ethical philosophy that includes an attempt to construct both an empirically adequate account of human psychology and an account of moral cultivation that accords with that account of our psychology. I then present a part of that picture of human psychology, focused on what I call "impediments to virtue", which are the elements of human psychology that make it difficult for us to behave in ways that consistently accord with our moral standards; this picture also serves to show why we need moral cultivation methods and helps to clarify what we need them to do for us. I then argue in favor of an interpretation of the Analects of Confucius on which it is primarily focused on discussions of a method of moral cultivation, and I lay out a detailed account of what that method is and how it works. Turning once again to literature in empirical psychology, I present an argument that we have good reason to think that the Confucian method of moral cultivation as presented in the Analects will be effective in the ways intended. I then discuss the relative strengths of the Confucian method over other methods of moral cultivation that exist in the philosophical literature, including Aristotle's method of cultivating virtue in the Nichomachean Ethics, Mark Alfano's factitious virtue theory, and biotechnological moral enhancement.

There are various theories in the philosophy of mind/cognitive science of what kinds of knowledge, or information carrying mental states, constitute our mental concepts. Such knowledge is used in higher acts of cognition such as in categorization, induction, deduction, and analogical reasoning when we think or reason about the extension of the concept. While most concept theories have primarily focused on concrete concepts such as `chair,' `table,' and `dog,' I take such modern theories and apply them to abstract moral concepts such as `virtue,' `right action,' and `just.' I argue for a new overall pluralistic theory of moral concepts, combining several theories of concepts. This pluralistic view differs from, for example, Ayer's non-cognitivist theory that contends that our moral concepts are constituted by or just are emotions and desires. Finally, I draw further philosophical implications my conclusion may have for applied ethics, normative ethical theory, political philosophy and meta-ethics.