So, Rebecca Watson, a guest speaker at a "Skeptics" conference was propositioned in an elevator just after giving a talk about how she and other women are objectified by the skeptical/atheist community. She calmly registered a standard complaint about this sexist behaviour on her blog, and the entire online "skeptic" community exploded in frenzied debate. Some agreed with the complaint, whereas some thought she was being totally unreasonable. Like, for example, none other than Richard Dawkins:
Ask yourself: what evidence did Dawkins (or the man in the elevator) ignore? What law of reason did these two men supposedly violate? Dawkins is a very intelligent man and is surely aware of the relevant facts of the particular case. What is his failure?
Put simply, his failure is the same and the elevator-man's failure: one of imaginative empathy. In order to see why the propositioning was ethically problematic, you have to put yourself in the woman's perspective. You have to think first about the lifetime of sexualization and objectification she has endured. You have to think about the fact that she is trying to operate in a field that is vastly male-dominated. You have to consider what her state of mind was immediately after giving a talk on sexism and objectification. And, then, you have to consider what it's like to live in a world where fear of sexual assault constantly hangs over you like a sword you can't see.
And then, (this is the really tricky part), you have to care. You have to be moved by all of these things. Here's the meta-ethical punchline: no piece of evidence or law of reason can force anyone, even Dawkins, to care about Rebecca Watson's particular situation. In short, one can still be a perfectly rational douchebag. Which is what Dawkins, in this case, is.
I will not stoop to speculation about the kind of rampant social ineptness and austistic psychological tendencies in the male atheist/skeptical community that produce this shared blind spot of imaginative empathy. Though I certainly could go on about that for some time. Rather, it's important to see this case for what it really is: a reductio of the very foundational beliefs of the skeptical community. Given the choice between a world in which people know more and a world in which people care more, the latter is almost certainly the better world. This is because it is possible to be a rational douchebag but not a caring douchebag. Evidence and reason cannot make people care. Therefore, (*ahem*HUME*ahem*) evidence and reason are at best limited or secondary forces for positive change in our world.
That the skeptical community was so dramatically paralyzed by this incident simply substantiates my claim, here. Their methodology simply doesn't have the resources to resolve ethical problems.
The man in the elevator didn't physically touch her, didn't attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn't even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that....Rebecca's feeling that the man's proposition was 'creepy' was her own interpretation of his behavior, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum.I was mostly uninterested in the affair until I read what liberal-skeptic David Allen Green wrote about Dawkins:
Can Richard Dawkins still credibly pose as a champion of rational thinking and an evidence-based approach? In my opinion, he certainly cannot...This, this right here, illustrates a profound limitation of this so-called "skeptical" movement, which loudly proclaims that "rational, evidence-based thinking" can be such a powerful source of change in our world.
Ask yourself: what evidence did Dawkins (or the man in the elevator) ignore? What law of reason did these two men supposedly violate? Dawkins is a very intelligent man and is surely aware of the relevant facts of the particular case. What is his failure?
Put simply, his failure is the same and the elevator-man's failure: one of imaginative empathy. In order to see why the propositioning was ethically problematic, you have to put yourself in the woman's perspective. You have to think first about the lifetime of sexualization and objectification she has endured. You have to think about the fact that she is trying to operate in a field that is vastly male-dominated. You have to consider what her state of mind was immediately after giving a talk on sexism and objectification. And, then, you have to consider what it's like to live in a world where fear of sexual assault constantly hangs over you like a sword you can't see.
And then, (this is the really tricky part), you have to care. You have to be moved by all of these things. Here's the meta-ethical punchline: no piece of evidence or law of reason can force anyone, even Dawkins, to care about Rebecca Watson's particular situation. In short, one can still be a perfectly rational douchebag. Which is what Dawkins, in this case, is.
I will not stoop to speculation about the kind of rampant social ineptness and austistic psychological tendencies in the male atheist/skeptical community that produce this shared blind spot of imaginative empathy. Though I certainly could go on about that for some time. Rather, it's important to see this case for what it really is: a reductio of the very foundational beliefs of the skeptical community. Given the choice between a world in which people know more and a world in which people care more, the latter is almost certainly the better world. This is because it is possible to be a rational douchebag but not a caring douchebag. Evidence and reason cannot make people care. Therefore, (*ahem*HUME*ahem*) evidence and reason are at best limited or secondary forces for positive change in our world.
That the skeptical community was so dramatically paralyzed by this incident simply substantiates my claim, here. Their methodology simply doesn't have the resources to resolve ethical problems.
10 comments:
It's true that you can't be a caring douchbag, but that's not a fair comparison. Your claim is that, given a choice between more knowledge and more caring, we should choose more caring.
You chose as your example of the first kind of world "the rational douchebag", which is certainly a bad thing. But we should compare it with an appropriate character from your second world, the irrational carer (or, perhaps, the caring idiot).
I don't think it's actually very easy to see which one we should prefer. If we really do have to make a choice between being reasonable and being empathetic, that is a hard choice to have to make. Hopefully, we can try to move to having both.
So if I take your ultimate thesis here to be: "The question then is which is a better Given the choice between a world in which people know more and a world in which people care more, the latter is almost certainly the better world", then I think that I have to disagree; I would definitely choose the rational douchebag over the caring idiot.
I take it that the reason that you prefer the caring idiot to the rational douchebag is because "no piece of evidence or law of reason can force anyone, even Dawkins, to care about Rebecca Watson's particular situation." This in turn is evidence that: "This, this right here, illustrates a profound limitation of this so-called "skeptical" movement, which loudly proclaims that "rational, evidence-based thinking" can be such a powerful source of change in our world."
The more I think about it, the more I think that if you are rational and have the relevant facts, you will not be a douchebag; I absolutely disagree that we cannot find evidence to rationally force somebody like Dawkins to care about Watson's situation. I think that you have a good start with: "You have to think first about the lifetime of sexualization and objectification she has endured. You have to think about the fact that she is trying to operate in a field that is vastly male-dominated. You have to consider what her state of mind was immediately after giving a talk on sexism and objectification. And, then, you have to consider what it's like to live in a world where fear of sexual assault constantly hangs over you like a sword you can't see." What you have described here I think is part of the relevant facts that Dawkins isn't taking into account in a full enough way. I don't think that we need to expect somebody to be empathetically moved in any way to rationally take the hardships of a woman's life into account (I hope that we are not sitting at butting intuitions at this point). It definitely seems that the evidence of Watson's lifetime of sexualization is enough to force somebody like Dawkins to care about Watson's situation; in this particular case Dawkins is just missing something important about living a lifetime of sexualization etc. What Dawkins is missing is not empathetic movement, but rather just rational weighing of the evidence.
So I guess that I'm cheating because I am ultimately choosing the rational, non-douchebag over the caring idiot, but do really think that if you are rational and have the relevant facts, you will not be a douchebag.
Thom Dennett
PS Thus missing "imaginative empathy" is not a profound limitation of the skeptical movement. Richard Dawkins doesn't have all of the relevant information (and doesn't seem to be working very hard to get it, like a douche).
This misrepresents my New Statesman post.
"Ask yourself: what evidence did Dawkins (or the man in the elevator) ignore? What law of reason did these two men supposedly violate? Dawkins is a very intelligent man and is surely aware of the relevant facts of the particular case. What is his failure?"
Please see my post for how I answer these questions, and do not rely on this post as a good summary of my view.
Jon, Thom:
This is an interesting point, but I would dispute that the kind of "facts" I mentioned in the post are the kinds of "facts" that skeptics are referring to when they use the term "evidence-based". Imagining yourself into another's perspective is not the same things as observing perceptual or scientific data. It is an essentially first-personal and not publicly shareable experience. There is no way to log, measure or record such an experience with any kind of scientific rigor. IF the skeptics were to broaden their usual definition of "evidence", this problem might be lessened...
BUT that still doesn't solve the problem of caring, which is kind of the main meta-ethical point, here. A person can easily imagine what it's like to be an other without being moved by that experience. That's not something that any evidence or deduction can produce.
I was indeed speculating about which of two possible worlds (more caring or more rational) we ought to prefer. I still believe that a more caring world is better, but I'm willing to concede that a more detailed argument is required for that conclusion. My main thesis here does not rely on it: I am trying to trace out the essential limitations of a movement that has become, in some circles, almost evangelical in its insistence that it can improve the world.
Jack of Kent:
I was aware that you think that Dawkins' primary failure was to make a bad analogy (the chewing gum analogy). I maintain that Dawkins could have not made this analogy and still been a sexist douchebag (in his first comment no the issue, for example). It seems to follow that this minor failure of reason is not the problem. The problem is caring and imagination. I repeat that the "evidence and reason" mantra of the skeptical movement is utterly unable to make sense of this basic reality. I am sorry if I didn't trace all of this out in my post, but the point still stands if you'd care to try to refute it.
Sorry, if you cannot be troubled to represent my position correctly before adversely commenting on it, then there is no reason for me to engage with you.
The only reason I have commented here is to warn people not to take your summary of my view at face value. Readers should instead check against source.
Cheers,
David Allen Green
There are three ways of taking the skeptic claim about changing the world for the better.
1. Reason and science are all we need, and if we just got those right the world would be a much better place.
2. Increasing reason and science is the best way of improving the world.
3. Increasing reason and science is one way of improving the world.
The skeptics surely believe 3. I think you might be representing them as also believing 1; if so, I think that's a straw man. Nobody really thinks that Pure Reason is enough (although maybe Kant did).
The interesting claim is 2. Actually, there might be another claim that says "Increasing reason and science is, on balance, a good thing", which might be logically equivalent to 3.
If your view is simply "Reason and science are not enough", fine, but that's not interesting. If your view is, instead, that increasing reason and science are not the best way of improving the world, or even stronger, that on balance it's not a good thing to try to increase reason/science because of some counter balance (for example, maybe it decreases empathy), then that is a much more interesting claim.
I would think that increasing reason/science is a good thing on balance, and I might even be willing to defend the view that this is the best way of improving the world. Which claim are you really attacking?
Nick I think I have to disagree with you about there being even a theoretical disconnect between reason and caring. It seems like you're just accepting the underlying premise that (some of) the sceptic community relies on in being unapologetic douchebags and social retards.
How reasonable it is to be thought a douchebag? A reasonable person recognises that not everybody is equally reasonable, that most people have feelings potentially affected by one's own behaviour, and attempts to adjust their conduct accordingly.
As for the deeper meta-ethical question, what is inherently admirable? You seem to suggest that reason is unsuitable because powerless to produce caring, because evidence and reason cannot force a person to care. But that's not how reason operates, it operates by argumentation rather than brute force. The problem you observe is not limited to reason, either, what CAN force someone to care? How is this a shortcoming of reason specifically?
It's all well and good to consider a world of caring vs a world of reasoning, but how would you actually go about creating a more caring world? Maoism?
Caring/rational need not be presented as a dichotomy. It is rational to seek an understanding of what people care about. If I HAD to choose between the two alternatives, however, I would have to side with a more rational world simply because emotions are far more susceptible to manipulation, and I'm ultimately a cynic. A more caring world would yield far more conflict because there are as many different interests are their are individuals, but there is only one reality which reason as applied through scientific methods can illuminate.
As an aside, it's curious how Watson's own imaginative empathy is simply taken for granted. What about the feelings of this poor fellow who has to cope with the rejection of his inept courtship attempt? What about his constant and desperate feeling of loneliness and worthlessness as a man? His unending toil for the approval of some woman? Isn't it possible that neither of them acted reasonably?
And Dawkins response is truly sad. "Just words"? Well that's good, we've established that this guy is not actually rapist. It's especially ironic given what a great living Dawkins has made using "just words". Still, I fail to see what is sexist about a man propositioning a woman in an elevator.
I really sometimes wonder about a dichotomy between the motivation to abide by a moral reason and reason as a source of knowledge independent of how we might wish the world to be. Simply put, Nick is right. Reason in the guise of robust evidentialism, which is the thesis that all knowledge about the world requires evidential justification and that this justification should be scientific is too stringent to let things in like philosophical concepts, let alone something like the motivation to care for another individual. This is because science is regarded in skeptical movements as
1. The only way to describe reality and therefore all events that occur in the natural world ought to be understood scientifically.
However, 1 is itself a normative belief. It cannot be corroborated by empirical means. This is an old critique of positivism avoidance of the normative when it is itself based on normative principles.
This has been the mantra of the skeptical movement for a long time. Anything like art, religion or even moral concepts are not entirely reducible to the physical things science is really good at studying is thrown out and avoided, or you put someone viewing subjective things like beauty or moral distribution judgements in an fMRI and that's supposedly more scientific than just philosophizing about it. If I were speaking to another audience, I'd say 1 is phenomenologically inadequate to how we live out our lives as caring individuals (Besorgen, go figure!).
Things are a little more complicated than skeptics like to admit and this proves worrisome for more ontological reasons. Admittedly, the complication might be that many of the concepts we think are simply descriptive about the world are not only descriptive but they include within their practice a normative component. Thus, the world isn't thin, physical and wholly accessible to experimentation, especially when it comes to the promise of reason as that which supplies the structure of the world, but not the theoretical reflection about the suppositions behind the structure. This is why philosophy is more fundamental than science. It asks the questions that are taken for granted within a worldview, and that is the function Nick has decidedly provided in his own blog space. He has given us a reason why the mantra supplied by skeptics having faith in reason cannot explain away the rational-douchebag's motivation to do the right thing.
Of course, I am excited. Imaginative empathy, or Einfuhlung is what we need to understand the Other. I'll go with that for completely different reasons than Nick. However, the point under discussion is an explanation as to why Dennett and others cannot appreciate the woman's criticism of the Elevator Douchebag. One possible explanation is their inability to see that the motivation to abide by morality has nothing to do with the rational promises of skepticism itself. So, what is it? The philosophical posit is a perspective-taking ability to represent the viewpoint of another. That is what is missing, and I happen to agree. But that is a philosophical problem, a problem about practical reasoning and metaethics, which is a distinctive field of inquiry within philosophy.
I think you are spot on about Dawkins' empathy problem. I actually tend to think he has a mild case of sociopathy. I won't make the case for it here; I've written about it often enough on Underverse. But I think it is a huge impediment to his intellectual integrity.
I do wonder about this, though:
"A person can easily imagine what it's like to be an other without being moved by that experience. "
What would be the extra ingredient that turns looking through another person's eye into caring about what you see? I would propose that to the extend we can accurately look through someone else's eyes, we automatically empathize with her as a matter of course. I think Dawkins' failure, in the case of the gum-chewing analogy, is in his lack of dedication to actually imagining what it would be like to be in Rebecca's shoes. He imagines his privilege and security is transferable to her, which is probably what Elevator Guy imagined too. But that's not really imagining what it's like to be her. (I just read that Jeremy Irons has suggested that grabbing a woman's ass is just a "form of communication." Which is true in a way he doesn't intend).
I take your larger point, that empathy relies upon a transferable subjectivity, and can't be replicated by the normal laws of deduction and induction--a common failing of the rationalist-autistic mindset. But I think that "imagining what it's like to be an other" all by itself requires an abandonment of the empirical level playing field,
"I will not stoop to speculation about the kind of rampant social ineptness and austistic psychological tendencies in the male atheist/skeptical community that produce this shared blind spot of imaginative empathy."
Could you not abuse the word "austistic" [sic], please? The term has a clinical meaning, and one that has more to do with a failure to read social cues than with a failure to care about others' well-being. As someone who actually is high-functioning autistic, that sort of misunderstanding is particularly annoying.
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