What do we care what other people think?
At first glance, that question doesn’t seem like it could mean the same thing as Why should we care what other people think? The interrogative is a pronoun (“What”) and not an adverb (“Why”), meaning it seems like the question is asking about the quality, nature, or cause of something rather than for what reason. And there’s no modality built into the sentence—that is, there’s no “should,” which would imply a degree of responsibility or necessity. Relying only on grammar and the meaning of the words, you might think that it works sort of like the question What does a stand mixer do?
But that’s not how it works. It really does mean something like Why should we care what other people think? But not quite that either. It comes from a different place altogether than semantics or syntax—the same sweaty place where semantics and syntax themselves are conceived: pragmatics. We’re almost always trying to do things with words and gestures, and it’s on that basis that we should understand the phrase What do we care what other people think? It is motivated by suspicion. When we utter it, we’re putting up a steely front. We’re trying to puff our chests out and gird ourselves from others’ claims of obligation.
And maybe there’s some wisdom in such phrases that emerge from the visceral arena of social interaction, where we aren’t as certain as grammatically codified language would make it seem. To know whether other people’s claims on us are warranted, we need to know about the nature of those claims—or better yet, about the nature of ourselves and our relationships with others.
One way in which people make claims upon us is by putting social pressure on our public standing, and sometimes even on our ability to sell goods or services and keep up our livelihoods. For example, I want this newsletter and the podcast to be interesting and appealing. I’m trying to build an audience. Maybe one day I might even make some money from it. For that reason, even though it’s not my favorite pastime, I have to go out and promote them. For example, I post links to my work on Reddit and start up conversations. I recently did that with the first part of this series, “Best Behavior - Part I.” I posted to a subreddit devoted to Ethical Altruism and included the same criticism I had laid against EA in the essay (to wit: it’s a fancy repackaging of utilitarianism that focuses on improving averages and maximizing pleasure, and—left unchecked—will lead to the same repugnant conclusions).
Posting something so provocative certainly caught people’s attention, and plenty of users engaged with me and read the essay.1 But I wouldn’t say my goal of finding new subscribers was met. The number of new unique readers during that conversation far outweighed the number of new subscriptions. And since Reddit has its own version of the daemons from His Dark Materials in the form of upvote and downvote arrows, it was pretty evident that the social pressure was on! Even though everyone was polite, and I think we all wrote in good faith, negative responses to my posts got up-voted in direct disproportion to my own posts and those supporting my POV.
I wouldn’t change how things worked out, however. There are some pretty clear examples of exactly the sort of repugnant conclusions I fear EA will lead to, such as this paper published by Peter Singer and others that defends policies on utilitarian and cost-benefit grounds, and which—as Branden McEuen of Wayne State University has pointed out—“have historically frequently led to advocating for the prevention of disabilities through eugenics.”2 I’m glad to get my point of view out there, even in spite of the social pressure. Then again, Peter singer and his co-authors would probably say the same!
The philosopher Hrishikesh Joshi has a forthcoming essay devoted to this question of getting countervailing ideas into the public discourse even in the face of immense social pressure. It is often the case that social pressure can help us when we’re confronted with epistemic uncertainty: People can be duped by dubious or fake claims, which can muddle the significance of evidence, and it’s impossible for everyone to have access to and understand the importance of every piece of information. Therefore, sometimes social pressure can help keep people directed toward the ideas we have the best evidence for believing in. Then again, Joshi asserts, sometimes social pressure can work like a force that lets some pieces of evidence emerge and keeps others hidden from sight. That is, social pressure “makes more likely the possibility that the (first-order) evidence that does make its way to us is a lopsided subset of the total.”
Joshi’s argument is in service of the thesis that John Stuart Mill’s defense of open discussion in On Liberty is not so much a defense of free speech as “an essay in social epistemology.” That is, Joshi wants to argue that when we know something, we know it socially. Our knowledge is based on social cooperation. And when social pressure limits the evidence we have access to, the organism of social knowledge-building turns unhealthy. Thus, a decent society is one that wields social pressure wisely.
But (and I hate to have to keep playing this card) that’s already a normative decision, and one logically prior to the question of knowledge formation. The necessity of free and open communication is obvious to us because we conclude that it is better to have a healthy system for socially forming knowledge than not to have one. This demonstrates that we often do indeed care what other people think, but it still doesn’t answer why we should.
What do we care what other people think? It’s a self-interested protest. And self-interest isn’t a very good basis for explaining normativity—at least not one that doesn’t end up explaining away morality as delusional. But ironically one of the earliest people to delineate a clear system of ethics, Aristotle, actually did claim that our morality is born in self-interest—or maybe it would be better to say our morality is born in self-realization.3
The first thing I should mention is that this entire way of understanding normativity is teleological: It’s based in the idea that all things have a particular end, a goal, that they are striving towards; and that that goal is what makes any thing the specific kind of thing it is, or is becoming. If you have no room in your cosmology for this notion, then you’ll just have to stop reading now. (Here’s the link to the EA subreddit.)
When things exist in accordance with their natural end, they achieve Arete (ἀρετή) or virtue. And according to Aristotle, that is the definition of the Good: things achieving Arete. But Arete isn’t the same for everything. Things achieve virtue according to their own nature. Like I said in Part II, in this model, it is virtuous for the roots of a plant to grow healthy and strong. But for humans, virtue works differently. A person is virtuous when she uses reason to understand the truth and when she does the right thing at the right time. That might sound circular: The right is determined by doing what is right. But what is right will differ depending on the time and place and biographical circumstances of any human life. Those are accidents that don’t affect the form of Arete, but give it shades of individuation. And we know the right simply by existing in the world and acting within those circumstances.
When something is right we experience eudaimonia (εὐδαιμονία): the condition of being good. This is Aristotle’s definition of pleasure. And it’s a far cry from the denuded idea of pleasure that is the currency of Benthian utilitarianism. People are good when they follow the light of eudaimonia. So in this Aristotelian model of virtue, a keen sense of morality just is a keen aesthetic sensibility. But it is not an impoverished sense of beauty that puts simple limitations around the beautiful. The beautiful must fit the accidents of its own historical context. There can be no Burkean distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. And judging something as ugly is never an act as superficial as, say, a quick judgement about a person’s face. Ugliness in this deeper sense means a misdirection from the thing’s proper end. When a thing isn’t doing what it should, it is ugly. In humans, that implies moral ugliness. In other words, evil.4
You might have qualms with the notion that human nature is the standard for determining how people should act, since people so often, you know, suck. But to convince you, I offer an argument from the Thomist philosopher and virtue ethicist Jennifer Frey. In Aristotelian and later Scholastic thought, the law of noncontradiction is held as an essential aspect of theoretical reasoning: “it is impossible for a thing to both belong and not belong to the same thing at the same time and in the same respect.” The classic example is It’s impossible for Socrates to exist and not exist at the same time. Artistotle says you can’t demonstrate that law. It is a self-evident first principle.5
In her essay “How to Be an Ethical Naturalist,” Frey argues that just as the law of noncontradiction is a first principle of theoretical reasoning, so too is there a self-evident First Principle of Practical Reasoning: “Good is to be done and pursued and evil is to be avoided”:
“Just as one cannot judge that contradictory states of affairs equally hold at the same time in the same respect, so also one cannot pursue what one considers, at the same time and in the same respect, to be both good and bad. That is, it is impossible that something can both be an object of will and not be an object of will at one and the same time, while considered in the same respect, because one cannot apprehend a goal as something that should be pursued and be avoided at one and the same time.”6
Sure you can have multiple things that might appeal to you. And they’re competing for your attention. You might want to drink beer and also get some work done. And you might even feel conflicted about which to do. But you can’t will to do both of those things at the same time. Once you will to do something, that’s what you do. What you do is a result of your will. And you know what is right by nature of what you are. It is the nature of humans to will that things be in a certain practical order because that is beautiful.
This goes a long way in answering that troubled question that launched the first essay in this series: Why don’t people and cultures always agree about the beautiful and the good? First of all, there’s a lot of overlap among people and cultures, like devotion to family, friends, and fellow humans, and the preservation of knowledge. More importantly, we can say that the accidents of particular social and historical contexts make these generally comparable virtues take on different hues and flavors.
But one troubled question gives way to another. A virtuous individual—one who is principled, and righteous, and lawful—is not yet just. Justice requires another person. As the philosopher Michael Thompson puts it, considerations of justice are always “bipolar.” A sort of nexus exists between an agent and another when the will is involved. I can do right by another person, or not. Another person has a right to expect something of me, and I have the same right over and against them. And here’s the kicker: I believe much of our human nature is made complete and real only in the fertile garden of that bipolar nexus. I will return to it soon, but for now, I can answer the question What do we care what other people think? with only two words: a lot.
The conversations all took pretty much the same predicable turn: the EA enthusiasts said that it didn’t matter what set of norms you start with, you will eventually find yourself making utilitarian calculations. “[I]f you have any moral system whatsoever,” argued user Zonoro14, “you are already motivated to compare charities, identify more and better ways to do good, and put greater amounts of effort towards more important moral considerations.”
But"values" are not like an extension card you plug into a slot in your consciousness, allowing you to start to "perform moral arbitrage,” in Zonoro14’s words. Moral arbitrage is morality. This was Hume's major insight: one of the ways we think is theoretical and the other is practical, and you are always practically thinking.
You can't choose not to make normative decisions. You can decide not to do anything, but that will just be something that you do. You can choose to commit suicide, but that too will be something you do. And commensurate with the queasy, vertiginous fact of freedom (at least as far as we experience it) comes responsibility. Thus, nothing you do is morally neutral.
The important point is that therein—in that inescapable fact of normative practical decision-making, and not in the things that result from your decisions—lies the Good.
The sorts of misguided road-to-hell well-intentioned policies Ayah Nurridin warns us about.
ἦθος (êthos) means “character; custom, or habit,” after all. Sorry for committing the etymological fallacy—if there is such a thing.
Some reading that from a queer perspective might find it offensive. But I would argue that “queerness” is queer because it subverts limited ideas of the beautiful. Any system that finds “queerness” ugly is itself a little bit ugly. Obviously there’s so much more to say here, but it’s outside the scope of this essay.
Here’s another fun video from Aquinas 101 arguing that quantum mechanics don’t violate the law of noncontradiction
Frey, Jennifer. “How to be an Ethical Naturalist” In Micah Lott (ed.), Philippa Foot on Goodness and Virtue. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 47-84 (2018)