Nussbaum on Butler

Nussbaum's critique of Judith Butler is available here. Nussbaum's a fantastic writer, and I'd recommend taking the time to read the whole thing.

The opening paragraphs of section V offer the most cogent presentation of the critique. I'll quote at length.

What precisely does Butler offer when she counsels subversion? She tells us to engage in parodic performances, but she warns us that the dream of escaping altogether from the oppressive structures is just a dream: it is within the oppressive structures that we must find little spaces for resistance, and this resistance cannot hope to change the overall situation. And here lies a dangerous quietism.

If Butler means only to warn us against the dangers of fantasizing an idyllic world in which sex raises no serious problems, she is wise to do so. Yet frequently she goes much further. She suggests that the institutional structures that ensure the marginalization of lesbians and gay men in our society, and the continued inequality of women, will never be changed in a deep way; and so our best hope is to thumb our noses at them, and to find pockets of personal freedom within them. "Called by an injurious name, I come into social being, and because I have a certain inevitable attachment to my existence, because a certain narcissism takes hold of any term that confers existence, I am led to embrace the terms that injure me because they constitute me socially." In other words: I cannot escape the humiliating structures without ceasing to be, so the best I can do is mock, and use the language of subordination stingingly. In Butler, resistance is always imagined as personal, more or less private, involving no unironic, organized public action for legal or institutional change.

Isn't this like saying to a slave that the institution of slavery will never change, but you can find ways of mocking it and subverting it, finding your personal freedom within those acts of carefully limited defiance? Yet it is a fact that the institution of slavery can be changed, and was changed--but not by people who took a Butler-like view of the possibilities. It was changed because people did not rest content with parodic performance: they demanded, and to some extent they got, social upheaval. It is also a fact that the institutional structures that shape women's lives have changed. The law of rape, still defective, has at least improved; the law of sexual harassment exists, where it did not exist before; marriage is no longer regarded as giving men monarchical control over women's bodies. These things were changed by feminists who would not take parodic performance as their answer, who thought that power, where bad, should, and would, yield before justice.

Butler not only eschews such a hope, she takes pleasure in its impossibility. She finds it exciting to contemplate the alleged immovability of power, and to envisage the ritual subversions of the slave who is convinced that she must remain such. She tells us--this is the central thesis of The Psychic Life of Power--that we all eroticize the power structures that oppress us, and can thus find sexual pleasure only within their confines. It seems to be for that reason that she prefers the sexy acts of parodic subversion to any lasting material or institutional change. Real change would so uproot our psyches that it would make sexual satisfaction impossible. Our libidos are the creation of the bad enslaving forces, and thus necessarily sadomasochistic in structure.

Well, parodic performance is not so bad when you are a powerful tenured academic in a liberal university. But here is where Butler's focus on the symbolic, her proud neglect of the material side of life, becomes a fatal blindness. For women who are hungry, illiterate, disenfranchised, beaten, raped, it is not sexy or liberating to reenact, however parodically, the conditions of hunger, illiteracy, disenfranchisement, beating, and rape. Such women prefer food, schools, votes, and the integrity of their bodies. I see no reason to believe that they long sadomasochistically for a return to the bad state. If some individuals cannot live without the sexiness of domination, that seems sad, but it is not really our business. But when a major theorist tells women in desperate conditions that life offers them only bondage, she purveys a cruel lie, and a lie that flatters evil by giving it much more power than it actually has.

Towards the very end of the piece, Nussbaum refers to Butler's as `self-involved feminism' and `hip quietism'. It's a sophisticated, trendy veneer for solipsism. And, still worse, Butler actually seems to celebrate, eroticise, and eventually defend oppression. Now, for all I know, Nussbaum has Butler completely wrong. But if Nussbaum's right, then Butler's feminism ought to be rightfully seen as utterly antithetical to genuine feminism.

A taxonomy of normative theories

Over the past eight months or so, I've become extremely intrigued by a number of parallels between normative epistemology and normative ethics, both in terms of the content of particular theories and in terms of philosophical methodology. (In some cases, such as Alasdair MacIntyre and pragmatist philosophers of science, there is no sharp line between these two modes, but never mind that for now.) One way to start studying these parallels is taxonomically: group theories into classes which cut across the epistemic/ethical division, and compare and contrast the classes. I hit upon one such scheme of classification the other day, and I'd like to take a few moments to outline it.

The proposal is to examine theories with respect to the way they treat etiology, that is, the causes -- in this case, either the causes of some particular doxastic state, or the causes of some particular action. Call a judgement that either (a) some doxastic state is warranted or (b) some action is ethically permissible a normative judgement (or normative judgement simpliciter). My particular proposal is that we classify theories in terms of what role etiology plays in the account of normative judgement.

In the first category we have theories which emphasise etiology pretty much exclusively, and have a very narrow understanding of what counts as `the right kind' of etiology. Hence, these are theories in which, for example, an action is permissible if and only if it is actually caused by the right sort of motivations, where this latter is a very narrowly defined class. This includes both classical internalism and Kantian ethical theories which emphasise the deontological and `pure practical reason alone' aspects of Kant's ethics.

In the second category are theories where etiology is irrelevant. That is, according to these theories, it doesn't matter at all why you actually did what you did, so long as what you did had the right sort of end result. Consequentialist and utilitarian theories of ethics obviously fall under this heading. I think externalism in general also often falls under this heading. Goldman's reliablism, in particular, seems to be very, very similar to rule-based consequentialism: in both cases, an action/belief receives a positive normative judgement if and only if it is consistent with a good rule, where a rule is good if and only if it yields more goodness (a real, numerically measurable quantity) than not over a sufficiently large class of cases.

The third category is between the first two. These are theories according to which the right etiology is needed, but not sufficient, for a positive normative judgement. Hence, consider Plantinga's proper functionalism: for a belief to be warranted, it needs to actually be caused in the right sort of way (by a properly functioning truth-oriented cognitive faculty), but also needs to be formed in the right sort of environment. On the ethical side, certain species of virtue ethics work in a similar way (those these often reject the permissible/impermissible dichotomy and prefer to focus on whole lives rather than individual acts).

One problem here is that `etiology' is extremely vague, if not downright meaningless. If I pursue this project, the first thing I need to do is sharpen the principles of division. Using teleology instead of etiology might help, since at least the notion of the right sort of end (ethical goodness/truth) is easier to define than the right sort of cause.

At the other end of the project is spelling out the implications of this scheme. Consider the standard divisions between neo-Aristoteleans and consequentialists. Do these divisions also appear between proper functionalism and reliablism? Could a proper functionalist say, for example, that a reliablist has far too narrow and quantitative an understanding of (epistemic) goodness? And do ethical theories have to go along with their epistemic contaxonics? Or could one be a deontologist when it comes to epistemology and a virtue theorist when it comes to ethics, say?

Finally, I'm not sure whether pragmatist and socialist theories fit well into any of these three categories. (Here I have in mind a large group including Quine, Dewey, MacIntyre, Helen Longino, and Bernard Williams.) Perhaps we'd need a fourth and fifth category. Or maybe just a fourth?

Why I watch the News Hour with Jim Lehrer

The policy debate segments are actual debates. Just like cable news, they're utterly and completely predictable 95% of the time, with one liberal (more or less) and one conservative (more or less), but the two interlocutors actually talk with each other. There are serious, thoughtful objections and serious, thoughtful responses. It's not just brandishing talking points. And there's absolutely no yelling.

I also think the gender ratio of the talking heads is much less skewed than cable news. Women show up quite regularly, and not just when the subject is a `women's issue'. The other night, the pundits talking about the Supreme Court rulings concerning the EPA were both women.

Perfect? No. A head above cable news? Yes.

Who knew Alanis Morissette was such a brilliant satirist?

It's both funny and disturbing.


I haven't listened to Morissette since high school (and Ironic was everywhere then, so don't pretend you don't remember it), though I did like her portrayal of God in Dogma. I wonder whether her more recent recordings have this kind of feminist content?

Darfuri in Indiana

Fellow residents of the SB might be interested to know that we have a burgeoning refugee community:

As many as 300 people originally from Darfur are living in Fort Wayne, with others scattered across smaller Indiana cities like Elkhart, South Bend and Goshen. Together, they form one of the largest concentrations of Darfuri in the United States.

Frankly, I'm surprised, and for almost exactly the reasons the article suggests.

Despite Indiana’s reputation among Americans as a monolithic slice of the country, in parts of Africa it is known — mostly by word of mouth — as diverse, welcoming and affordable.

`Monolithic' isn't the term I would use; `homogeneous' is more appropriate. Northern Indiana is populated primarily working-class practicing Catholics of Polish and Irish descent. Deviation from that norm is much more often denominational than racial. What racial diversity we do have is, unsurprisingly, tied closely into class and geographical divisions. Near where a few of my friends live, for example, the difference between the `good' (upper middle class professionals and students, mostly white) and `bad' (much poorer, mostly black) neighbourhoods is a single street.

The politics here are right-of-centre, with the working class background checking the nasty side of American Christianity. But while there's not much support in the air for welfare or affirmative action programs, I can imagine that there's also little conscious racism. And perhaps Fort Wayne -- about two hours away, according to Google -- actually does diversity better than the SB:

Fort Wayne, for instance, has one of the largest populations of Burmese in the United States, and for a city its size — approximately 250,000 residents — it has a considerable international flair, with many families from Vietnam, Congo and Somalia. Seventy-seven languages are spoken in the Fort Wayne public school system.

I seriously doubt any immigrants will read this post. But I hope they do genuinely feel welcome here. If they're coming from a rural lifestyle in their native country, I think Northern Indiana makes a lot more sense than Chicago or New York. As one of my professors put it last week, compared to rural Iowa, the SB is `high civilization'.

In which I pick up, and drop, a bad habit

`Just in case' does not mean `if and only if'. You bring along an umbrella just in case it rains; two sets are of the same cardinality just in the case that there is a bijection between them. What a difference a definite article makes!

Where did I pick up the habit of using `just in case' when I really meant `just in the case that'? Possibly from one Andrew M. Bailey. Except that I was doing it two years ago, quite a while before I met AB. More likely this nasty little meme has been circulating throughout the Anglophone philosophical community for quite some time, and both AB and I contracted it that way.

What is feminist philosophy?

From a recent review in the NDPR:

I have been puzzled by a tension between feminist critiques and extensions of Western philosophical traditions and the understandings of feminism that appear in counter-critiques by those, like Landau, who identify themselves as feminist-friendly. Landau finishes with a characterization that has helped me see the issue more clearly. He states that "[f]eminist philosophy can be considered as a truth-seeking enterprise, or as a political endeavor." (p. 165) To treat these as mutually exclusive alternatives, as he does, is to reject the premises on which feminist philosophy is based. The investigation of power relations, the role of the political, social, and cultural in the search for truth and understanding, is one of feminist philosophy's key features, one that it shares with a number of other philosophical traditions, including pragmatism. That it is worth investigating how the political can hinder or aid our understanding of the world and our place in it is a presupposition of feminist philosophy. If we believe that truth-seeking and political goals are mutually exclusive, then it is difficult to grasp the nature of core feminist arguments.

Portrait of the web of belief

Like many philosophers of science, I'm a holist. Very loosely, this means that I don't think individual statements or propositions as such are ever shown to be true or false or have a determinate meaning. They get their meaning -- and their truth or falsehood -- from being part (or not) of what Quine called `the web of belief' or `our best theory of the world'. Astrophysics, for example, doesn't stand on its own; it depends on our mathematical theories of abstract geometry and topology (which is not so surprising), but it is also connected with our chemical theories and even biology and sociology (which should be quite surprising).

This image maps these relations between different `paradigms' (a more accurate term would probably be `microdisciplines') within contemporary science. (For a legible or printed version, follow the links here.) Astrophysics is that cluster up at the top; pure mathematics is the cluster below it, with chemistry over on the left, social science on the right, and the biological sciences sweeping out the long C across the bottom. But, as the map makes clear, these disciplines are not sharply defined, and draw on and support each other. It would be impossible to remove and replace one `paradigm' without changes rippling through the entire web.

Something is missing from this picture, however, and that lack is saddening and frustrating. The vast empty space in the middle of this image should house robust and active research programmes in logic, ethics, and philosophy of science. The function of philosophy is to be the theory describing the structure and management of our aggregate best theory of the world. Philosophy is not prior to the web, or above it (there is no prima philosophia); instead, it forms the web into a coherent whole, drawing support from and supporting the other theories just the same way they draw support from and support each other. The absence of philosophy from this map reflects the sad fact that much of contemporary philosophy is irrelevant to, and indifferent towards, contemporary science. Often the best philosophers of science manage to do is squabble over rarefied and ludicrously abstract models; other microdisciplines within philosophy don't even usually get that close.

Via.

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

I've never played a tabletop RPG, but came across this and thought it'd be helpful for those who might consider attempting such a game.

The Show

So, today is the last day of The Show: With Ze Frank. You wouldn't think something like the end of a video blog would effect anybody, but you'd be wrong.

Ultimately I think The Show was about building commuinity, about finding crazy esoteric ways of bringing people together in a world that's increasingly set upon impersonality. Ze found a way to truly make the news personal rather than entertaining. He also found a way to make people interested in and care about a small community of users in a way that I'm not sure has been done before. Now, I'm not saying people haven't found community on the internet before. I've posted on all kinds of blogs before, including on my own, but The Show always seemed special somehow. It brought a zest and excitement to the blogosphere that I haven't felt in a long time. I wish Ze all the best in the world, and may all the old viewers deftly deflect the hard chargers.

As I find myself contemplating the next several weeks I can think of several things that I need to get done. What I do know, however, is that I'm going to miss The Show with Ze Frank. It was great, and like so many great things it's gone. Se te las buenas memorias! I know I'll be watching for Ze to pop up somewhere out here.

So I happened to pick up Season 3 of Buffy today

Watching the first episode, it occurs to me that this isn't just about the necessity of confronting the difficult parts of life head-on. It's also an allegory about capitalism, with the demons forcing poor people to literally work themselves to death.

And then Buffy starts fighting with a hammer and sickle. I laughed and laughed. And then wrote this basically useless blog post.

It's Like Bosch In His Head

Go read this extremely crazy look into Bush's mindset. I'll wait, it's pretty long. Ok, and now we can all understand why we keep getting scandal after scandal, insanity following insanity. This is why the Administration will never turn itself around politically and why January '09 can't come fast enough.

Not Knowing Your Genre

The worst thing a character in any story can do to themselves is fail to recognize what kind of story they're in. The babysitter who's getting scary calls should call the police or get out of the house because staying there is just asking to get stabbed. The space marine who lands on some planet that's quiet, a little too quiet, should pack it in because any second now the crazy worm aliens are going to start offing people you don't know much about. The quarterback should realize his cheerleader girlfriend is going to end up with that quiet guy from the A/V Club because he's special, or something. The Bush Administration obviously doesn't understand that they're a cross between SPECTRE and KAOS.

Although, I suppose the really scary idea is that there might be something they're *actually* getting away with. Still, given their track record I suppose that will probably come out too. Josh Marshall thinks Attorney General Gonzales is going to have to resign over this. Given that this story will take a couple months to reach a full on boil it's going to be nearly impossible for the Administration to get out from under the scandal before full on primary season.

I'll admit it, I'm not an aesthetician

I love art, but sometimes I just get confused:

Even though Stingel's work does not always involve paint on canvas, it continually reflects upon the fundamental questions concerning painting today -- authenticity, hierarchy, meaning, and context.

First, those are individual words, not questions. Second, `authenticity' and `hierarchy'?

Spidey 4?

In a really terrible interview Avi Arad implies the Spiderman series will continue beyond the upcoming third movie. All of the principle actors' contracts as well as Sam Raimi's contract were for three movies. Who would star in or direct any further movies is unknown.

Speaking Of Watchmen

Evidently hidden in the internet trailer for 300 is a test image of Rorshach for the upcoming film adaptation of Alan Moore's masterpiece. Zach Snyder is directing both movies. It's hard to restrain the nerd inside me's excitement when stuff like this is acually being produced and released to the public. I know, I know, it's just a test image and this attempt at filming the comic could be just as doomed as every other verion talked about over the last several years. Still, awesome.

On Terminology

In the last post I mentioned picking up a trade paperback, which reminded me that I've been meaning to post something about comic book terminology for a while now. For the last several years "serious" comics have started to penetrate into a more mainstream audience and with that has a very slight annoyance on my part over the term "graphic novel". First, some straight up definitions. Traditionally comics are published in three primary forms, the strip, a short form booklet, and a longer form. Comic strips are referred to as such. The short form, usually taking the shape of an 8" by 11", 22 page booklet are usually called "comic books" and even though movies based on such books have made several billions of dollars are still considered the domain of children and to consist exclusively of men wearing their underwear on the outside of their pants and punching things a lot. This is, of course, not terribly accurate, but that's not really my concern.

The long form comic is where we run into a bit of confusion and my slight annoyance. Technically, a graphic novel is a comic story written and published in a long form. Companies also, however, bind together several issues of the shorter form "comic books" into a long form book and publish that as what is known as a trade paperback.

My annoyance is simply this, I feel like the term "graphic novel" has been appropriated by mainstream folks to represent "serious" comics which are suitable for adults to read. It's used as a term to justify participation in an activity and a medium which those people still deride as beneath them by removing any mention of "comics" from the name. This becomes all the more apparent when you consider that all of Alan Moore's major works, including the much vaunted V For Vendetta and Watchmen, were originally published as individual comic book issues. Preacher, soon to be made into an HBO Original Series, was published as comic books. I don't call Faulkner's stuff literature in fear that people will think I read Danielle Steel if I call them books.

Now, I said this was a minor annoyance and that's true. A world where people are discovering that comics are more than men-in-tights is better than a world where that 's not happening, even if they're being coy about it through the clever use of labels. There is a useful place in our terminology for graphic novel, but let's agree not to use it as a code word for "cool" or "serious".


Update: Here's an excerpt from Roeper's review of 300 that's exactly what I'm talking about.

"If you thought "Gladiator" was a bit too stingy with the bloodshed, if you
felt "Sin City" could have been more stylized, if you hate it when the masses
refer to graphic novels as "comic books," this is your day.

For today brings about the release of "300," and it is the "Citizen Kane"
of cinematic graphic novels."

Is Singer's principle consequentialist?

Yesterday I had a letter published in the Observer where I gave essentially the same argument from Singer's principle for universal health care that I used in the post from a few days ago. This was in response to a column the previous day by a much less pleasant libertarian than Andrew Bailey.

I had some compliments from an officemate and a few students, which was nice, but several people said they were surprised to see me say something so consequentialist.

But I don't think Singer's principle is consequentialist. To see why, let's first remind ourselves what Singer's principle says.

If we can prevent something very bad from happening by doing X, and if we can do X without sacrificing something of comparable moral worth, then doing X is morally required.

Singer is, of course, a consequentialist, so in the sense of the origin of the principle, it would be fair to call it a consequentialist principle.

But that's kind of a silly reason to call it consequentialist. Just because a consequentialist was the first person to formulate a principle doesn't mean that principle is verboten to ethicists of other theoretical camps. When we say a principle of ethics is consequentialist, we mean only a consequentialist can consistently endorse it. And, since I said Singer's principle was as close to an analytic truth as one would like, if the principle was consequentialist in this sense, it would seem that consequentialism is analytically true.

Which, while many consequentialists would stand up and applaud here, is probably not right. What I want to claim is that any ethical theory, not just consequentialist ones, can endorse Singer's principle.

Let's look at a classical example: suppose we can save the life of a skilled and influential doctor by harvesting the kidneys from a homeless person. Crude consequentialism takes Singer's principle as a major premiss, takes as its minor premiss the claim that the life of the doctor is of more moral worth than the life of the homeless person, and concludes that the sacrifice of the life of the homeless person is morally required to save the life of the doctor.

Now, no-one (at least, not very many ones) thinks this conclusion is acceptable. The problem is in the minor premiss: crude consequentialism gets things wrong when it starts saying that the life of one person is of more moral worth than that of another person. That is, the problem is not with the idea that different goods have different relative moral worth (as in the major premiss, Singer's principle), but instead with the particular assignments of different relative worths made by the theory (the minor premiss).

Every theory of ethics and politics is going to need to give an account of which goods are more valuable than others. This is the concrete difference between different theories, and possibly the only concrete difference. When the Aristotelean says that X is part of our natural function and Y is not, while the consequentialist retorts that Y will promote more aggregate good than X, is the argument really over anything but which of X and Y is of greater moral worth?

Thus, Singer's principle is an absolutely general -- and analytic -- principle of ethics, and one that, in some form or another, will be endorsed by every theory of ethics. (Perhaps communitarians will dislike the language of `sacrifice', and Aristoteleans might not like the language of `requirement', but they will still agree that some goods are to be favoured over others.) What the principle does not tell us is how to do the comparing of goods, how it is to be applied to a given situation. That is where different approaches to ethics will disagree.

Finally, I note that those disagreements do not always come up in every situation. I think universal health care is a good example: pretty much every serious approach to ethics is going to say (at the very least) that maximally unrestricted property rights are less morally important than individual lives. (Non-collectivists should note that I have said `maximally unrestricted property rights', not `all property rights per se'.) The ethical judgements that we take to be obvious and irrefutable serve as data for good theories. For example, if a theory says that organ harvesting is morally required (as in crude consequentialism), then we consider that a reductio ad absurdum of the theory. `Common sense' or pre-theoretical ethical reasoning is useful for getting at these ethical data. Hence, to the extent that there is a substantive domain of obvious and irrefutable ethical judgements, we don't need highly articulated ethical theories to actually do ethics. This is the level at which I generally try to write both on this blog and in my letters to the Observer.

Captain America

Spoilers ahead. This is mainly for Jamie, who may not have picked up or read his comics yet...







Captain America is dead! That's right, one of the most recognizable characters in comics was shot and killed in the recently released Captain America issue #25. For some background for those who might not have followed along, recently a super hero related disaster caused public sentiment to turn against super heroes in the Marvel Universe. The Government responded by passing the Super Hero Registration Act which required all persons possessing super powers to register their identities and the nature of their powers. Any such people wishing to use those powers in public would have to obtain a license after receiving training. These licensees would also be required to participate in missions for the government if the need arose, though the government also established and funded a full time super hero team in every state to deal with most such issues. Captain America and some others objected to the invasion of privacy and infringement on liberty the Act represented and refused to register. The pro and anti registration forces fought several battles which cause increasing amounts of collateral damage and casualties. In the final battle Cap realized the damage they were causing and that escalation had led to the groups losing focus of the argument. The Act was law and popular with Americans. Not willing to cause any more damage fighting for beliefs out-of-step with the American people, Cap surrendered and was arrested. On his way to trial an old enemy, forgotten in the fight between the heroes, arranged to have a sniper and an assassin on the ground fatally shoot Captain America three times.

This event has gotten all kinds of press, including some right wing nutjob ranting. It was last night's Word on The Colbert Report (which I can't seem to link to because it crashed my brower last time I tried, losing the previous version of this post).

The fan reaction has been mixed, as it always is. The cynical reaction is that this will be wiped away through some strained literary maneuver eventually. Superman died with much fanfare in the 90s only to be resurected a year later. Of course, this theory is totally correct. Steve Rogers will come back to life eventually. It's simply the nature of a medium where characters have had stories told about them for sometimes nearly seventy years, and that's fine. Writers keep thinking of stories to tell because the characters are compelling. A good story shouldn't be disregarded because of what some writer might do in the future, and by all accounts this is a *very* good story. I can't wait to pick up the trade paperback.

Update: Found this, which is awesome.

Update 2: Another media piece about Cap, and it's pretty good.

Thermopylae

Here's the first review of 300 that I've come across. Granted, this is a comic site, so it's not a review your your average film goer. Still, I expect to enjoy myself when I eventually see this.

Here's Rotten Tomatoes. 62%. Not great, but then again, I expect a certain percentage of reviewers to dismiss films based on comics out of hand.