Musings on Obama seduction

I have to admit that when I listened to Barack Obama give this speech, I was profoundly moved. Discussion of prejudice really seems to strike my emotions these days; this also happened quite significantly when I recently saw Doubt which dealt with prejudice against both blacks and gays (among other things). I don't typically place overriding faith in my emotions, as I suppose some people do, but I like to think that I listen to them to at least some extent--moreso now than ever before. And if I listen to my emotions it leads me towards Obama as a candidate and away from Clinton. Now, clearly this is largely a moot point given that I cannot vote in the US (and, indeed, have never voted in my life) but I think it raises issues of to what extent emotions should be a factor in decisions of political support. Really, after all, am I not just being seduced by the rhetoric of Obama's speechwriter, rather than anything substantive?

This worry has some grounds: one really ought to be a cynic. But only if this means understanding that self-interest is one, of many, plausible components of oratory motivation. Making the leap from the banal insight that people can be selfish to the blatant claim that we can therefore never trust a word anyone says just doesn't make sense. The confirmed presence of one aspect of humanity does not entail the absence of its polar opposite at all times. This is the central insight of the amateur proponents of my most disliked political philosophy: libertarianism; they argue that because we can point to instances of individuals acting in a fashion that does not accord with the public good, that no individual can ever be trusted to act out of anything other than self-interest and thus an individual should only ever be charged with handling their own affairs since, otherwise, the potential for abuse is too great.

On this model, Obama is rhapsodising purely as a means to an end: namely, getting elected so he can pursue his own policies. I grant this. Is this a problem? It is only a descriptive difficulty since I would claim that Obama's "own policies" are, at least in part, in the nation's best interests. This seems to lead us to something similar to the Kantian dilemma of duty: how can we ever be sure that a person acted purely out of duty and not out of self-interest other than if they do something that duty requires which singularly hurts their own interests? So, since clearly Obama's interests will not be hurt by his being elected, we must doubt his sincerity. If we are to be cynics, which I said we must, we have to conclude that if an individual benefits from something in any way, then this must have been his/her sole motivation. The probability of self-interest if it is anything other than 0, should be treated as 1.

But this hypothesis is just untestable. We can never be sure, except in the overly exacting Kantian scenario, that self-interest is not the dominant force. All we can do is posit counterfactuals that segregate situations by the degrees of self-interest present, and if an individual has not chosen the maximally self-interested course of action, then we can speculate that he/she was not maximally self-interested. It seems to me that this is the best we can do, since the totalising self-interest assumption leaves us with no way to ever disprove it. At the very least, self-interest as the only plausible human motivation would need to be proven independently as this approach cannot do the job. So Obama's speech seems to me to not be maximally self-interested since he could have just taken the politically expedient route and distanced himself from Wright and declined to dig into the murky depths of racist resentment (on all sides). He didn't do this.

So, we've established that we cannot simply define away all activity as self-interested (for the same reason we cannot explain away all things in the universe with the underdetermined hypothesis "God did it") but that doesn't mean that some more sensitive analysis won't yield the conclusion that some particular acts are indeed self-interested. Again, I don't think that is true of Obama's speech but it might be the case that since Obama didn't write it, our cynicism ought to lead us towards doubting its relevance to his candidacy. Lincoln's oratory was treated as a genuine endorsement of certain attitudes towards politics because they were his own words but perhaps an authenticity gap has emerged in in the era of speechwriters. If this is so then we should never trust our emotional reaction to speeches as they are not even the work of the individual who we are directing our emotions towards.

It is a serious worry these days whether the people who typically run for office are talented in-and-of-themselves or if they are really just the facade on a deeper political operation. When you're not writing your own speeches it contributes to this concern since this worry would be extinguished if this were not the case. But this seems like another example of absolutism masquerading as argument. The classic form is: if we cannot positively discount some claim, then we must assume it obtains. Now, of course, this formulation would generate all kinds of absurd theories if it were actually held in this form so the implicit ad hoc discriminating premise seems to be that of existing prejudice, i.e. this argument is used to shore up my existing beliefs but I don't extend its consistency to challenge beliefs that I hold but that it does not support. Clearly we don't want to romanticise the intellectual as commander-in-chief by insisting on certain credentials for our candidates but, at the very least, the fact that Obama has these qualities should shield him from these charges in a way they might not shield the current President. These concerns are not decisive on their own (few are) but we should still get them straight for what they're worth.

We should all be cynics, but we should also be credulous idealists. This may sound like equivocation but its really just a product of the absence of a word to express the dynamic, responsive balance between the two. Just like we should be emotional and rational; sometimes the relationship is one of alternation based on context (rational then emotional then back again) but more often its a synthetic standard which emphases the interplay between our merely analytically separable traits. This kind of complexity may prohibit us from any unqualified endorsement of a belief, stance or political candidate. But I don't see this as necessarily leading to the dilemma of being forced to choose between the lesser of two (or the least of several) evils. Obama and Clinton might be legitimately difficult to choose between, but that doesn't mean that Obama and McCain are. That some comparisons are tough does not mean all are. We might have difficulty allowing the vulnerable idealism to edge out the safe cynicism on occasion but when we seek balance between opposing forces we will always experience internal resistance.

I cannot completely trust my decisive positive emotional response to Obama, but I can begin to reconcile myself to it since I do not have a decisive negative rational response to him. Perhaps our reasons are but rationalisations of our emotions (and their ilk), but I don't think this is right and until the research settles this decisively, if it ever can, I think it makes more sense to treat reason and emotion as potentially complementary but still distinct faculties. I haven't given myself completely to the Obama campaign, for all kinds of reasons: the most prominent being, doubt as to the extent that his policies absolutely match my own, rather than just comparatively, but I can certainly give myself to his speeches. This may not be everything, but it is something.

And so, on another note, is this guy.

Incest may not be best, but it's probably permissible

A friend sent me this story today, and it reminded me of a discussion I got into with my preceptor while taking an undergraduate class at Princeton on "Ethics and Public Policy." The class was co-taught by Professors Philip Pettit (who would later be my thesis advisor) and Stephen Macedo and served as a good academic introduction to a lot of the important issues that still interest me in the field. The class spent a week focusing on the moral and legal status of homosexuality from a philosophical perspective and, somewhat incestuously (and ironically), used Macedo's debate with Robbie George to frame the issue--I was going to link to the relevant articles but they're all behind walls online (I can send them to you if you're interested). In the course of these discussions the topic of incest also came up as a moral norm that we typically see fit to legally enforce. Though I've often equivocated on exactly how liberal Princeton was as a campus, very few students endorsed the view that homosexuality ought to be treated any differently from a moral perspective than heterosexuality is, let alone from a legal perspective. However, the same could not be said of incest. I suppose this won't surprise people, but I think, given the nature of the conversation we were having on the topic, that people should have been more willing to challenge the received opinion on the topic.

[A small aside: the fact that Macedo assigned his own article made me realise, for the first time, that even the most fair minded of professors can potentially fall victim to self-absorption. In fairness, I'm no expert on the literature, and Macedo's essay did receive some acclaim, but it strikes me as odd that he was the first to make these claims in the philosophical community. Including George was also bizarre since he looms so large on campus already, but he, at least, is known as one of the foremost articulators of his system of thought--I don't think that can be said of Macedo, despite my agreeing with him.]

I remember once asking my mother when I was younger why incest was wrong. She replied that sexual abuse was wrong and so, therefore, was incest. I'm not sure how to conceptualise this conflation other than to assume that most examples of incest do fall under the sexual abuse category (which is probably true). However, why would we have a separate name for an offense that we already confidently condemn as wrong?

The above question is rendered moot in cases, like the one featured in the story, where sexual abuse is not obviously taking place. What exactly is thought to be wrong with a relationship between two individuals with such a close genetic relationship? The most often cited issues are mentioned in this piece, among others: social stigma and increased risk of genetic abnormalities. That is, incest should be illegal, firstly, because we wish to spare children conceived in such a manner from the stigma of their peers and, secondly, because we want to avoid conceiving children that have an overly high risk of suffering from genetic abnormalities which lead them to be unhealthy. Let's examine these one at a time.

The social stigma argument seems that it could be approximately circular: incest should be illegal because incest is felt to be morally undesirable by the public at large who will stigmatise those who violate this norm. But surely it is possible (if expressivist theories of law are even partly true) that at least part of this stigma is borne out of the current illegality of the practice. Thus, as a result of this account, all laws of this type must necessarily self-perpetuate, regardless of the independent moral status of the norm being embodied. Once a law has been enacted, the stigma that law creates becomes an independent reason for retaining that law. This cannot be right.

However, let's assume that the stigma is not dependent on the legal status of the norm. Still, it seems like we are unable to support a legal prohibition against incest given the precedents in question. Consider homosexuality again, when it was decriminalised in Britain (well, in England and Wales--Northern Ireland lagged as it always has, though not as much as on the crime (still) of abortion) in 1967, following the findings of the Wolfenden Report, it could hardly be said that homosexuals suffered from an absence of stigma. It's not even clear to me that there is a complete absence of stigma on the topic today (though I am not the type to conclude that if progress has not been satisfactory, it is therefore non-existent), yet we continue to make increased efforts rigorously undermine our prejudices by, for example, equalising the age of consent for homosexual relationships to that of heterosexual relationships. It may be the case that legislatures rely on prior shifts (away from existing stigmas) in public opinion to ensure passage of bills such as these, but the controversial nature of the debates surrounding these parliamentary discussions suggests to me that enacting laws undermines existing social stigma just as much as, if not more than, enacting laws reflect existing social stigma. So, again, it seems those who support prohibitions on incest cannot appeal to this stigmatising worry.

But what of the less malleable role of science in the debate, i.e. the claim that children conceived from an incestuous encounter are intolerably likely to be born suffering from a debilitative genetic disorder? It seems that this provides the strongest case for regulating the sex lives of individuals related to one another in particular ways since it bears on the actual material health of the children which is not suspectible to social change in the way the stigma argument is. No amount of philosophical inquiry will change the facts of the matter here, right?

Yes, in a sense, it is true that there is a clear risk involved in incestuous couplings. The genealogies of European royalty attest to this. But doesn't this have unsettling effects for our thoughts on other relationships if we seek consistency here? Don't we now have to regulate the relationships of any couples who we think are unduly likely to conceive children suffering from such disorders? Much as Macedo argues in his paper Homosexuality and the Conservative Mind (which I didn't link to above), we basically invoke an argument here which stands on its merits in isolation, but not in its proper context. Homosexuality is wrong because it is non-procreative? Then what about sterile couples? Incest is wrong because it may produce "defective" children? Then what about those couples which currently suffer from genetic disorders, are they to be banned from intercourse too? This argument is palpably ad hoc and merely rationalises an existing prejudice.

Yet another point remains to be made against these traditional arguments: namely, incestuous relationships needn't produce children. The claims made above rely on this assumption which seems unnecessary given that plenty of couples are legally permitted to engage in intercourse ,without the intention of conceiving, even if the children that might be produced from such encounters would be "undesirable" as those from incest supposedly are. Clearly, if everyone pursued incestuous encounters this would be problematic, is it would be if everyone pursued homosexual relationships or if everyone became doctors. However, not everyone will do these things so this line of reasoning again seems to mere rationalisation.

So if incest is child abuse, then it is clearly wrong, but why call it incest? And if it's not then it seems that it's no worse than plenty of other "risks" which we have no difficulty with. Perhaps there are stronger arguments out there dealing with the topic, but I'm not familiar with them. It strikes me as merely trying to explain a way a prejudice to respond as we typically do.