330. How to discriminate

Discrimination happens all the time. Some people get better jobs than others, more reward for the same job, more civil rights, and rewards while not doing anything for it. Discrimination has a bad name, but in some cases it is defensible, even laudable. What is what here?

When defensible it is better called distinction. One gets more according to clear criteria, such as accomplishment, as in winning a prize, or in selection based on talent. How about looks? Why not, if there is selection according to height or strength?

Looks and talent are based on luck, a draw in the lotteries of genes and location of birth. Accomplishment also requires courage, commitment, endurance, sacrifice, resilience, and absorbing pain. Mere looks do not.  

When, then, does distinction switch into discrimination? Looks may not require effort but are at least individual. Discrimination arises, I think, when distinction is based on mere membership of a group, according to race, religion, ideology, gender, or age, regardless of individual characteristics or actions.

Is that always to be condemned? What about membership of the Ku Klux Klan, a fascist or a terrorist group? Usually, discrimination is considered all right when politically correct, in a certain community. Its moral acceptability depends on what form it takes. It is wrong when resulting in unequal civil rights, such as refusing fascists the rights to a fair trial, or freedom of expression short of inciting violence or hatred. It is not necessarily wrong if n those rights are maintained and, again, people are treated as individuals, not merely as members of a group.

Is profiling all right then, according to race, for example, where group membership is not used by itself, for judgement, let alone conviction, but only as a trigger for attention, based on crime statistics, say, for further investigation of individual conduct,?

In this blog I have argued for virtues far beyond economic merits of efficiency or utility, but efficiency is still one of many considerations. There is an argument of efficiency here: given the statistics and scarce resources of control, it is efficient to focus on certain groups. But is that the practice? What if people were profiled as bankers, say, for further investigation of ethical conduct, given the experience of unethical banking? Or are statistics used selectively as an excuse for unethical, discriminatory profiling?     

329. Art and hope

Recently, Rudi Fuchs, curator for a sculpture exhibition in Amsterdam, associated art with hope. For art, things are not necessarily as they are, can be different. Art offers new ways in and new ways out. Liberation, escape from stagnation or despair. That intrigued me.

To hope is to have a goal, with positive and realistic expectations of ways to get there, and confidence in agency, ability to do it. Without the realism hope becomes false, wishful thinking. Hope entails an expectation that ‘things will be all right’, depending in part on one’s own actions, but also on outside forces that one cannot control. This brings the notion of hope close to the notion of trust, as I discussed in item 107 in this blog.

What of that applies to art? The new ways in and new ways out. Escape.

A good illustration is a strophe from a poem by Baudelaire, from the section Spleen et ideal of his bundle Les fleurs du mal (the flowers of evil). Spleen here is heaviness of spirit, existential anguish, disgust, boredom, paralysis. The hope lies in escaping from it into the ideal, perfection. The title of the poem is Elevation. I first give the French text and then my English translation.

Derrière les ennuis et les vastes chagrins
Qui chargent de leur poids l’existence brumeuse,
Heureux celui qui peut d’une aile vigoureux
S’elancer vers les champs lumineux et serains.

Behind the troubles and the vast griefs
That weigh down misty experience,
Happy is the one who with a powerful wing
Can launch himself into fields luminous and serene.

Is this picture of art too pretty? How about the Marquis de Sade, Celine, Dostoyevsky? Do they yield hope? Such art also can be seen as an escape, in liberation from constraints of morality and law. But hope is positive, and how positive are those? How, if at all, can this be seen as escape into an ideal? Dostoyevsky said that without God humanity is irreparably evil. Does art here show hopelessness rather than hope?

Art is creative destruction. Perhaps destruction may need to take place first, to make room and create an incentive for the new. Is that how de Sade may be seen: destroying old morality to make room for a new one?

How about the sublime? Think of a hurricane, thunderstorm, or a forbidding mountain. Those inspire awe, astonishment, respect, fear perhaps, transcend the beautiful, and are beyond human grasp and influence. According to Kant it is beyond art, which would only yield a bad imitation of the sublime in nature. It transcends but cannot be achieved, and then lies beyond hope. Yet it is sometimes applied to art, such as a work of Bach or Beethoven, say.

If hope is required for trust, and art can produce hope, one might expect that art can help trust. However, when producing novelty, new ways in and new ways out, art also yields uncertainty, and can produce broken expectations, yielding broken trust. Given its uncertainty, trust requires courage, and that would seem to apply also to art. Art may be an exercise in courage, and thus may help people in learning to manage trust.

So, apart from the intrinsic value of art, it has value for society in bringing transcendence, Baudelaire’s ‘elevation’, and in developing and exercising hope, courage and trust.

   

328. Aversion to love’s labour loss

Social psychology has discovered ‘loss aversion’: people go to greater length to prevent loss (‘loss frame’) than to achieve gain (‘gain frame’).

This is being used in incentives to perform (‘nudging’). Rather than giving a reward after good performance, according to the logic of loss aversion it is more effective to give the reward in advance, on the condition that it will be revoked in case of bad performance (loss frame). People try harder to prevent loss of the reward than to gain it.

Here, I want to connect this with a previous discussion (items 120/121 in this blog) of forms of love. I discussed the idea that love in the form of eros, passionate love, is needed engage in a love relationship, as a basis for developing into the more robust philia, loving friendship. Why not go straight to the second and avoid the sound and fury of passion?

I speculated that the function of initial eros is to blind one to the risks of dependence, conflict and disappointment that relationships bring. Without the passion we would not so easily take the plunge.

Here I add, as a second possible reason, the effect of loss aversion. Being rewarded at the start, with the bliss of passion, one is more dedicated to the relationship, under the penalty of losing the love when not committing to the relationship and making sacrifices for it, in love’s labour being lost. 

The alternative of gradually building up a loving relationship to attain loving friendship in the longer run, making the necessary sacrifices and compromises, would, according to the principle of loss aversion, yield less commitment.

There is yet a third possible line of argument. Recently, it has been confirmed, what was really known earlier, that scarcity, the limits of some resource, can have a positive motivational effect. For example: To make more effort to save when money is getting short, or to finish a project as the deadline nears. Under the pressure of looming scarcity, people focus on efforts to deal with it, solving the problem.[i]

However, and this is a newer  insight, if scarcity persists, focus can turn into dysfunctional obsession. People then get so absorbed by persistent scarcity that in the panic of not being able to cope, they disregard other things that also matter, or flee into actions that only make matters worse. For example: take out a loan at an exorbitant interest, or disregard family and novel work opportunities to complete the project.   

That may also arise in love. Under a looming loss of love, one can focus on restoring, repairing it, paying more attention, committing to it. But if that does not yield satisfaction, it can degenerate into obsessive demands for attention or forced imposition of attention that are perceived as a cloying, and hinder rather than help the flourishing of love.

To return to the first explanation of eros as blindness to risk, the initial abundance of eros may limit the focus on getting love, which now gushes freely, but that may make the relationship more relaxed, less forced, less obsessed, less stressed for getting love, laying the basis for developing philia.       

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[i] Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir, Scarcity; The true cost of not having enough, 2013, London: Penguin.

327. Truth, nature, culture, and morality

Is morality a matter of absolute, objective, ‘outside’ truth? And if so, is it bestowed by God or by universal reason (as with Kant)?

Or is it contingent, relative, ‘inside’, an outcome from evolution of human nature. Or is it a product of culture, and hence variable across civilizations?

I think that the human being is not made by God, but that the human being has made God, as Feuerbach first said. But that does not mean that the notion of God is nonsensical. He is made with good reason.

Of course, it depends on what one means by ‘God’. It can be as in deism: a label attached by reason to the origins of the world. God as the prime mover, or as the totality of nature, with its laws, as in the philosophy of Spinoza. Or it can be the God of theism, personal, all-knowing, omnipresent, omnipotent, and providential, having designs with humanity and individual people.

Or is God cultural, as an idealization we make of morality, a guideline rather than an objective truth?

A growing body of research indicates that the human being has an instinct for morality, next to other, more self-interested instincts. There appears to be a natural, unreflected, subconscious inclination towards solidarity, equitability, and benevolence, next to an instinct for survival and protecting one’s interests, guarding one’s resources, if necessary at the expense of others. It is part of our constitution, not based on reflection and argument.

Frans de Waal showed that primates have it, in their nature, and some other animals seem to have it as well.

As I discussed earlier in this blog (item 205), there appears to be ‘parochial altruism’: altruism and solidarity within groups one feels oneself to belong to, at the price of suspicion towards outsiders.

That seems to form the basis for feelings and emotions of group identity, and of nationalism and discrimination.

Thus, morality is coloured, or tainted, if you want, by group identity. However, none of this means that there is no room for reason.

One can appreciate rationally that virtues of benevolence, regard for others, empathy, and a good measure of altruism, serve the good life, which is helped by agreeable and fruitful relations of collaboration and give and take.

And with such cultural means one can try to widen the group one identifies with, thus reaching for some form of universality without quite achieving it, and promoting ideas of equal rights.

This may help to sustain and nurture the natural sense of solidarity with the group and limit outside suspicion. This may be supported by an ethic of virtues such as reasonableness, moderation, justice, and the courage to stand up for them.

In sum, morality is a combination of feeling and reason, and does not need to claim to be absolute, which only breeds intolerance that obstructs the virtue of reasonableness.