Mark D. White

David Brooks' New York Times column this morning, titled "The Quality of Fear," makes a number of claims regarding the source of the panic surrounding the Ebola virus. As usual, he makes useful and insightful points, but he falls a bit flat when he tries to tie this episode into his persistent theme of deference for authority, especially when this episode—as he describes it—reinforces the very skepticism he laments.

His opening point about Ebola points out this dilemma:

In the first place, we’re living in a segmented society. Over the past few decades we’ve seen a pervasive increase in the gaps between different social classes. People are much less likely to marry across social class, or to join a club and befriend people across social class.

That means there are many more people who feel completely alienated from the leadership class of this country, whether it’s the political, cultural or scientific leadership. They don’t know people in authority. They perceive a vast status gap between themselves and people in authority. They may harbor feelings of intellectual inferiority toward people in authority. It becomes easy to wave away the whole lot of them, and that distrust isolates them further. “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust,” George Eliot writes in “Middlemarch.”

So you get the rise of the anti-vaccine parents, who simply distrust the cloud of experts telling them that vaccines are safe for their children. You get the rise of the anti-science folks, who distrust the realm of far-off studies and prefer anecdotes from friends to data about populations. You get more and more people who simply do not believe what the establishment is telling them about the Ebola virus, especially since the establishment doesn’t seem particularly competent anyway.

His point about isolation within social classes is a familiar one (although somewhat redundant, given what social class means), but more troubling is his transition to leadership and authority. Maybe I'm too young, but at what point in our nation's history have people known or felt "one with" those in authority? Aside from the elites in government, business, and the media, I doubt many Americans have ever considered an elected leader or appointed bureaucrat to be "one of us." After all, it is very difficult for people who have no power to connect with people who have power.

(When he writes of the changing perception of authority, perhaps Mr. Brooks is thinking of the increase in distrust in government following Watergate, but this is a separate issue from feeling connected with authority. I would also add that, given what we know how about government operated before Nixon, we would have been wise to be more distrustful back then as well. Trust based on ignorance is hardly a virtue.)

I would have preferred Mr. Brooks to end the piece with his last sentence above: "You get more and more people who simply do not believe what the establishment is telling them about the Ebola virus, especially since the establishment doesn’t seem particularly competent anyway." In my opinion, that's the core issue: incompetence. I'm sure the American people would love to be able to trust their elected leaders to have a handle on crises and a plan to deal with them—and to tell us when a crisis is not in fact a crisis. But we have seen little such competence from government leaders in a long time. Of course, the people behind the scenes, the (mostly) apolitical researchers and scientists and analysts who toil in anonymity for presidents and Congress, are not incompetent. But when their message is filtered through political interests (especially so nakedly and shamelessly) before they get to the people, they become suspect and unreliable. As a result, many people turn to television and the internet to listen to speakers who seem to talk directly to them, with no apparent agenda, even if what they say is hyperbole or simply utter nonsense.

(Brooks touches on the role of the media later in his piece, stressing how they intensify news and cause disproportionate panic. This is true, of course—but this would not have such an impact if people could rely on the true authorities to give them the information they need without having to doubt their motivations almost by reflex.)

Mr. Brooks makes his best point near the end of the article, but again I read it as giving more reason to be skeptical of authority, not less:

The Ebola crisis has aroused its own flavor of fear. It’s not the heart-pounding fear you might feel if you were running away from a bear or some distinct threat. It’s a sour, existential fear. It’s a fear you feel when the whole environment seems hostile, when the things that are supposed to keep you safe, like national borders and national authorities, seem porous and ineffective, when some menace is hard to understand.

In these circumstances, skepticism about authority turns into corrosive cynicism. People seek to build walls, to pull in the circle of trust. They become afraid. Fear, of course, breeds fear. Fear is a fog that alters perception and clouds thought. Fear is, in the novelist Yann Martel’s words, “a wordless darkness.”

Of course people are frightened, and Mr. Brooks is correct to point out that it is an amorphous, "existential" fear. We often make a distinction between risk and uncertainty, in which risk deals with known probabilities (such as the roll of a fair die) while uncertainty deals with unknown probabilities (such as keeping your job). But our current fears reflect another level of uncertainty altogether: not only uncertainty about what is likely to happen, but what can possibly happen at all.

Just think of the things people worry about these days (reasonably or not). Ebola. ISIS. Climate change. Economic inequality. Human trafficking. Civil war. Terrorism. Not as exhaustive list, and obviously skewed by my perspective, but I hope it gets the idea across, which is that these are not risks that can be insured against or "mere" uncertainities that can be planned for. These are perceived threats that, many of them, could not have been imagined before they occurred, have unknown and potentially catastrophic consequences, and have no clear solution. As a result, they all speak to the fragility at the core of human existence—they merit a certain level of fear that is not easily assuaged by political statements from authorities who do not seem to appreciate their gravity or the trepidation they reasonably cause.

As Mr. Brooks wrote, "It’s a fear you feel when the whole environment seems hostile, when the things that are supposed to keep you safe, like national borders and national authorities, seem porous and ineffective, when some menace is hard to understand." In such conditions, I think skepticism about authority is entirely justified, and should not be reversed until authority shows the people it deserves to be trusted. When Mr. Brooks writes that Ebola "exploits the weakness in the fabric of our culture," I think he is spreading the blame too widely. When authority tries to respond to such existential threats but cannot do so outside an explicitly political lens, the message, as valuable as it might be, becomes soiled, and people turn elsewhere for information (and misinformation). But can we blame them?

I fear I will never understand David Brooks' blind appeals to authority and his unshakeable trust in people with power to use that power responsibly. Then again, I was raised to be distrustful of authority (an attitude he would likely attribute to my class upbringing). I have not yet had reason to change my mind, though, and the incompetence he himself identifies this recent episode is hardly going to give me one.

Mark D. White

In today's New York Times, David Brooks comments on libertarian paternalism in "The Nudge Debate." There is not a lot in his article that is surprising or unreasonable, but it does suffer from some vagueness and misunderstandings. For instance, Mr. Brooks conflates interventions of a paternalistic nature (such as nudging people into retirement plans) and those of a nonpaternalistic nature (such as nudging people into registering for organ donation). While the mechanisms in both cases are similar—and raise the same issues of unconscious manipulation and subversion of rational decision-making processes—the purposes and motivations are very different, with only the former involving the policymakers substituting their interests for those of the decision-makers themselves.

Of more concern is Mr. Brooks' contention that libertarian paternalism does not involve value substitution. He writes,

Do we want government stepping in to protect us from our own mistakes? Many people argue no. This kind of soft paternalism will inevitably slide into a hard paternalism, with government elites manipulating us into doing the sorts of things they want us to do.

As I explain in The Manipulation of Choice, there is no way for the government to know what we value well enough to help us make decisions in our own interests. Because they lack this information, policymakers necessarily impose their idea of people's interests on them when they design nudges. Policymakers think that it's in our interests to save more; policymakers think that it's in our interests to drink less soda. These are not unreasonable assumptions, of course, but they are assumptions nonetheless, and it is pure hubris on the part of policymakers to presume that they bear any necessary relationship to people's actual interests.

Because Mr. Brooks apparently doesn't recognize this, he concedes the "theoretical" point but dismisses any real-world concerns:

I’d say the anti-paternalists win the debate in theory but the libertarian paternalists win it empirically. In theory, it is possible that gentle nudges will turn into intrusive diktats and the nanny state will drain individual responsibility.

But, in practice, it is hard to feel that my decision-making powers have been weakened because when I got my driver’s license enrolling in organ donation was the default option. It’s hard to feel that a cafeteria is insulting my liberty if it puts the healthy fruit in a prominent place and the unhealthy junk food in some faraway corner. It’s hard to feel manipulated if I sign up for a program in which I can make commitments today that automatically increase my charitable giving next year. 

This last paragraph is illuminating, because it conflates three different types of nudges. The first, organ donation, is a social issue; such a nudge is not paternalistic and therefore does not raise any issues of value substitution (though, as I said above, the mechanism still subverts rational processes). The third, self-commitment, is vague; there is nothing manipulative in the concept of commitment, but if such commitment is elicited using a nudge that bypasses a person's rational decision-making faculties, then it's a problem. Only the cafeteria example is by definition a paternalistic intervention; Mr. Brooks may not be insulted by the management of the cafeteria putting their idea of his interests above his own and manipulating his actions in those imposed interests, but that does not justify an action which would insult many others.

Finally, I do not see the issue of libertarian paternalism as one of theory versus empirics—in the case of paternalistic interventions, the theory iself discounts any attempts to measure its success. Mr. Brooks finishes the paragraph above with this sentence: "The concrete benefits of these programs, which are empirically verifiable, should trump abstract theoretical objections." In the case of paternalistic interventions, the "theoretical objections" render any "concrete benefits" questionable and inherently unverifiable. How do you measure the "concrete benefits" of an action meant to improve people's choices according to their own interests if you have no way to ascertain those interests? Such knowledge is necessary in order to "verify" any benefits from such a program. With socially-motivated nudges, like automatic enrollment in organ donation programs, this makes some sense, but with measures explicitly intended to "help" people better make decisions in their own interests, the idea of verifying "concrete benefits" makes no sense whatsoever, given the inherent subjectivity of those interests.

Rather than an issue of theory versus evidence, the nudge debate is a matter of autonomy. Each person's right to further his or her own interests, in a way consistent with all others doing the same, is violated by policymakers who impose their own conception of people's interests on them and then design policy tools that subvert people's rational decision-making processes to steer them towards those imposed interests. Given Mr. Brooks' antipathy towards individualism, I am not surprised that he disregards concerns about autonomy as an "abstract theoretical objection." To some, however, the right to pursue their own interests without the government questioning them is a very "concrete benefit" to living in a free society.

Then again, if policymakers really knew our true interests, they'd know that already, wouldn't they?

Mark D. White

In his New York Times column today, David Brooks hails the movement for same-sex marriage as an admirable step away from personal freedom and autonomy:

...last week saw a setback for the forces of maximum freedom. A representative of millions of gays and lesbians went to the Supreme Court and asked the court to help put limits on their own freedom of choice. They asked for marriage.       

Marriage is one of those institutions — along with religion and military service — that restricts freedom. Marriage is about making a commitment that binds you for decades to come. It narrows your options on how you will spend your time, money and attention.

Consistent with his views of individualism (which I've critiqued here and here), Mr. Brooks seems to have an overly simplistic view of freedom and autonomy, such as when he writes that "far from being baffled by this attempt to use state power to restrict individual choice, most Americans seem to be applauding it." Certainly, by marrying, people do give up some basic liberties to each other, but this is a choice freely made—and it is a choice to which gays and lesbians want access just as straights have long enjoyed. In other words, gays and lesbians want the higher-level freedom to restrict their own lower-level freedom (recalling Harry Frankfurt's conception of freedom of the will in which persons constrain their first-order desires based on their second-order ones). Marriage doesn't represent a diminuition of freedom: it is a higher level of it.

He goes on to say, "Americans may no longer have a vocabulary to explain why freedom should sometimes be constricted, but they like it when they see people trying to do it." Perhaps if Mr. Brooks expanded his conception of individual freedom to encompass the choice to constrain yourself, he'd see that Americans understand it extremely well—when that choice is ours. We choose to marry (or form long-lasting relationships), take jobs, enter into contracts, enroll in college, and make all types of commitments to family, friends, and community, all of which restrict our personal freedom. But they are choices that we freely make for any number of reasons, some out of self-interest and others out of a broader morality, and we welcome the opportunity to make these choices—a choice, in the case of marriage, that not all Americans currently enjoy.

The conclusion of Mr. Brooks' column conflates individual choices to make commitments with social pressure to do so:

And, who knows, maybe we’ll see other spheres in life where restraints are placed on maximum personal choice. Maybe there will be sumptuary codes that will make lavish spending and C.E.O. salaries unseemly. Maybe there will be social codes so that people understand that the act of creating a child includes a lifetime commitment to give him or her an organized home. Maybe voters will restrain their appetite for their grandchildren’s money. Maybe more straight people will marry.       

The proponents of same-sex marriage used the language of equality and rights in promoting their cause, because that is the language we have floating around. But, if it wins, same-sex marriage will be a victory for the good life, which is about living in a society that induces you to narrow your choices and embrace your obligations.

My idea of the good life derives from Immanuel Kant's kingdom of ends, a world in which each of us embraces obligations to each other while we pursue our own interests, narrowing our choices as each of us chooses, not as society "induces" us. Mr. Brooks' alternate vision reflects his limited view of individualism as base self-interest in which moral imperatives must be imposed by outside, not necessarily by government but through societal pressure. The question, of course, remains why individuals should trust the wisdom of the crowd for their moral guidance.

Mark D. White

Ever since Nate Silver pulled a Babe Ruth 527 times on election night, the virtues of "big data" have been hailed widely in the press. But David Brooks strikes a cautionary note in today's New York Times, correctly noting that data by itself cannot solve problems and making the point that qualitative judgment is necessary throughout the processes of data collection, interpretation, and implementation.

Though data wasn't "big" in the 1920s, we saw these points illustrated in the third season of Downton Abbey. Matthew Crawley, heir to the Downton estate, urges Lord Grantham to modernize the way the land is farmed, but Grantham is concerned more with the well-being of the tenant farmers and others who live off the estate. Crawley certainly has the data and the analysis to back up his claims that modernization is necessary to save the estate from bankruptcy, but Grantham makes him see the human side of the equation as well. It takes Tom Branson, the Irish revolutionary and former chaffeur who scandalously married Grantham's younger daughter, to broker an agreement between the two that promises to make the estate solvent while ensuring the welfare of the tenants.

Neither Brooks nor Branson would deny that quantitative analysis is a fantastic tool for clarifying some aspects of a problem, but they stress that we can't let its apparent precision and illusory objectiveness blind us to more qualitative concerns. As economists, we must be mindful of what our data captures and—more importantly—what it leaves out, and make sure to supplement our decision-making with these neglected (often nonquantifiable) factors. Material and financial costs and benefits matter, of course, but so do concepts such as dignity, rights, justice, and fairness, which are no more easily captured in a 21st-century spreadsheet than in a 1920s financial statement.

(For more on this point, see my chapter "Value in Economics: Accentuate the Qualitative, but Don’t Eliminate the Quantitative" in Values: Sources and Readings on a Key Concept of the Globalized World, edited by Ivo DeGennaro, Brill, 2012, pp. 331-347.)

Mark D. White

Charles Murray's latest book, Coming Apart, gets reviewed this morning by both David Brooks in The New York Times and W. Bradford Wilcox in The Wall Street Journal. Murray's thesis is that the gaps in income and wealth in America are no more important than the gaps in culture and values between the more and less affluent. To make his point more forceful, he restricts his analysis to white people, in order to prevent critics from arguining that the decline in values he points out is an issue with racial and ethnic minorities only. These trends are certainly apparent across most if not racial and ethnic groups but it is less recognized in whites, the discussion of which may be Murray's greatest contribution to the discussion.

Of course, your opinion of Murray's thesis is going to depend on what values he chooses, and (according to Wilcox) he focuses on "four 'founding virtues'—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion." I doubt many would have issues with the first two, but the last two will turn off a lot of people (including me, to some extent). Personally, I'd prefer that "marriage" be changed to "family" and "religion" be changed to "community" (since the ethical component of religion is already covered by "honesty," or the whole exercise, really). Perhaps Murray puts his virtues in these broader contexts--I have not yet read the book--but I would guess he chose "marriage" and "religion" because participation in them in measurable (social scientist that he is).

Wilcox, the director of the National Marrriage Project, naturally uses Murray's analysis of marriage (which echoes Kay Hymowitz's Marriage and Caste in America) as an example:

The destructive family revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s has gradually eased—at least in the nation's most privileged precincts. In the past 20 years, divorce rates have come down, marital quality (self-reported happiness in marriage) has risen and nonmarital childbearing (out-of-wedlock births) is a rare occurrence among the white upper class. Marriage is not losing ground in America's best neighborhoods.

But it's a very different story in blue-collar America. Since the 1980s, divorce rates have risen, marital quality has fallen and nonmarital childbearing is skyrocketing among the white lower class. Less than 5% of white college-educated women have children outside of marriage, compared with approximately 40% of white women with just a high-school diploma. The bottom line is that a growing marriage divide now runs through the heart of white America.

Brooks also cites the marriage gap alongside other factors (using the word "tribes" rather than "class" to emphasize the "tenuous common culture linking them"), but links them to the gap in behavior that he feels is Murray's chief contribution:

Worse, there are vast behavioral gaps between the educated upper tribe (20 percent of the country) and the lower tribe (30 percent of the country). ...

Roughly 7 percent of the white kids in the upper tribe are born out of wedlock, compared with roughly 45 percent of the kids in the lower tribe. In the upper tribe, nearly every man aged 30 to 49 is in the labor force. In the lower tribe, men in their prime working ages have been steadily dropping out of the labor force, in good times and bad.

People in the lower tribe are much less likely to get married, less likely to go to church, less likely to be active in their communities, more likely to watch TV excessively, more likely to be obese.

Wilcox points where this disparity in values and behavior cashes out:

The economic and political success of the American experiment has depended in large part on the health of these founding virtues. Businesses cannot flourish if ordinary workers are not industrious. The scope and cost of government grows, and liberty withers, when the family breaks down. As James Madison wrote: "To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea."

This is certain to prompt some heated discussion in the coming months. The statement above is too vague to draw significant conclusions, which will come only from a careful reading of Murray's book. Of course, the role of virtue, or ethics in general, among all members of society and its importance to the economy in particular is of great interest to us at this blog. (Start reading, Jonathan!)

Brooks applies Murray's results to the rhetoric from both sides of the political aisle:

Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The cultural elites live more conservative, traditionalist lives than the cultural masses.

Democrats claim America is threatened by the financial elite, who hog society’s resources. But that’s a distraction. The real social gap is between the top 20 percent and the lower 30 percent. The liberal members of the upper tribe latch onto this top 1 percent narrative because it excuses them from the central role they themselves are playing in driving inequality and unfairness.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I think the most fascinating part of this discussion is how income inequality and cultural inequality interact. In particular, I wonder how much of the decline in "virtuous" behavior that Murray observes among the poor is a result of choices driven by poverty (scarcity), and how much have those behaviors perpetuated that poverty. (This is not to excuse this behavior, necessary, but to understand it better.) And by the same token, the wealthy can certainly be applauded for their virtuous behavior, but to a certain extent it is easier to be good when you have the means, and the extent to which this plays a role should be acknowledged as well.

Whether Murray discusses this issue in these exact terms remains to be seen (after I read the book!), but he does make a political statement, summarized by Roger Lowenstein in his review of the book in Businessweek:

One question I wish he had taken up: Are the “new upper class” and the problems of the lower class related? Coming Apart treats them as separate. That gets to my frustration, which arises in the concluding section. Until then, Murray had merely diagnosed the cultural divide. Now he claims to know the causes. He blames the government and the “welfare state.” This section brims with political resentments; the carefully researched facts give way to bitter generalizations such as “only a government could spend so much money so inefficiently.” The author who tactfully, and wryly, demonstrated how little readers know about the lives of working-class whites, writes of “bureaucrats” with no appreciation, or even interest, in what they actually do. He does not explain why social cohesion should be less today when the Great Society experiment peaked in the 1960s. While blaming the debilitating effect on incentives of social programs, he fails to acknowledge the idea that most Americans probably feel less coddled, less protected today than in 1970.

It's interesting that both Brooks and Wilcox left this part out of their reviews, while endorsing more activist policies on the part of the government to shore up the working class. As valuable as Murray's empirical observations are, it is crucial that we understand them, interpret them, and act on them in a way that doesn't make the situation worse--whatever that may mean.

Jonathan B. Wight

David Brooks presents an account of Newt Gingrich's flirtation with government economic policies in "The Gingrich Tragedy." Turns out Gingrich favors interventionist industrial policies, linking them in his own mind to the nationalistic achievements of Alexander Hamilton and Teddy Roosevelt.

Gingrich has an active imagination—too active if that implies thinking up new things for government to do—like setting up a lunar mining colony and building giant mirrors in space to light up the night sky. As Brooks notes, "He has no Hayekian modesty to restrain his faith in statist endeavor."

Nor does Gingrich worry too much about facts. His latest Civil War novel apparently writes out of Virginia's history the massacre of black Union soldiers at the Petersburg Battle of the Crater (see Kevin M. Levin in The Atlantic, "How Newt's New Novel Plays Politics With the Past"). If truth doesn't fit the cliché you're pitching of American exceptionalism, well… make up some new facts! [A writer of historical novels has different moral obligations than a writer of alternative history. Gingrich has apparently blended the genres.]

Newt's boyish enthusiasm and willingness to think grandly can be admired, if these qualities were tempered with other virtues. But Brooks ultimately rejects Gingrich's presidential candidacy not for its policies but for the man who represents them. Brooks concludes:

"But how you believe something is as important as what you believe. It doesn't matter if a person shares your overall philosophy. If that person doesn't have the right temperament and character, stay away."

Mark D. White

David Brooks has a wonderful piece in today's New York Times prompted by the publication of Daniel Kahneman's new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (a review copy of which I saw at Strand last weekend and in my ignorance failed to pick up). Of particular note is this passage of Brooks' referencing the impact of Kahneman's work (particularly that done with the late Amos Tversky):

Kahneman and Tversky were not given to broad claims. But the work they and others did led to the reappreciation of several old big ideas:

We are dual process thinkers. We have two interrelated systems running in our heads. One is slow, deliberate and arduous (our conscious reasoning). The other is fast, associative, automatic and supple (our unconscious pattern recognition). There is now a complex debate over the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two systems. In popular terms, think of it as the debate between “Moneyball” (look at the data) and “Blink” (go with your intuition).

We are not blank slates. All humans seem to share similar sets of biases. There is such a thing as universal human nature. The trick is to understand the universals and how tightly or loosely they tie us down.

We are players in a game we don’t understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness. Fifty years ago, people may have assumed we are captains of our own ships, but, in fact, our behavior is often aroused by context in ways we can’t see. Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought.

I am pleased that Brooks did not venture into normative territory here (for the exception of the word "wrong" in the last paragraph above). All in all, a very nice article by Brooks about a truly groundbreaking thinker.

Mark D. White

In his column in today's New York Times, David Brooks explores "The Limits of Empathy," arguing that empathy may help us feel for other people, but it is not enough to actually spur us to action and help us make tough ethical decisions, and in the end may amount to little more than a self-satisfying crutch:

These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them. It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments. In a culture that is inarticulate about moral categories and touchy about giving offense, teaching empathy is a safe way for schools and other institutions to seem virtuous without risking controversy or hurting anybody’s feelings.

Brooks is right when he says people need something more to actually move them to action, some sense of duty or commitment--a code, in his terms:

Think of anybody you admire. They probably have some talent for fellow-feeling, but it is overshadowed by their sense of obligation to some religious, military, social or philosophic code. They would feel a sense of shame or guilt if they didn’t live up to the code. The code tells them when they deserve public admiration or dishonor. The code helps them evaluate other people’s feelings, not just share them. The code tells them that an adulterer or a drug dealer may feel ecstatic, but the proper response is still contempt.

But that still leaves the question: why should we presume someone is moved to action more reliably by a code than by empathy? Brooks' answer is spot on:

The code isn’t just a set of rules. It’s a source of identity. It’s pursued with joy. It arouses the strongest emotions and attachments. Empathy is a sideshow. If you want to make the world a better place, help people debate, understand, reform, revere and enact their codes. Accept that codes conflict.

A person's code is part of his or her identity, and our interest in maintaining our identity as moral persons can prompt us to moral action and guide us in instances of struggle and temptation. I'm not sure if Brooks was implying this, but while adhering to a code certainly does arouse emotions, those emotions should not be the primary motivating factor behind it. (As Kant wrote, we should feel good because we're moral, but we should not be moral simply because it feels good.)

To be fair, I think empathy is enough to motivate some people to moral action, and it is essential for any moral system to work. But Brooks is right to point out that empathy is at risk of becoming a buzzword, a verbal lapel ribbon for those who wish to appear to care for other people without having to back it up with action.

Mark D. White

In today's New York Times, David Brooks writes in "If It Feels Right" about a recent study of young adults in America that reveals their incapacity to think in moral terms:

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

This is horrible but hardly surprising--anyone who has taught an introductory ethics class knows that most college students enter the class woefully unprepared to discuss ethical issues in anything but the most uninformed and vague terms. This is not to say, however, that they have no moral sense; Intro to Ethics 101 is hardly required to be a good person, even if it does help one to talk about it. But the inability to discusss one's moral beliefs suggests that they may not be well considered or formed, and this is still of much concern.

Brooks chalks this up to moral individualism:

In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.

Unfortunately, Brooks is falling into the false dichotomy between individualism and sociality again. (See my earlier posts here and here for more on Brooks and this issue.) Morality doesn't have to come from society in order to focus on society. As Immanuel Kant wrote, the individual can and should realize, independently of external authority (though never completely separate from it), that he or she has duties and obligations to other people. The ideal source of a person's moral code is her own reason (not her "heart"), but the content of that code is nonetheless eminently social.

(As always, for more on the compatibility of individuality and sociality, see Chapter 3 on my book Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character.)

Mark D. White

Last week, David Brooks' column "It's Not About You" in The New York Times spoke to the challenges that new college graduates face as they enter "the real world," focusing on the change in the imposed structure that has shielded them from life to this point:

More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.

This is true, no doubt. But then he swings towards his anti-individualistic thesis from The Social Animal:

[T]hey are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.

But this is a false dichotomy--as I explain in Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character, drawing on Christine Korsgaard's Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity, a person defines herself in part by the ties and bonds she chooses to make. These activities are as much an expression of her individualism as anything she might do "by herself." As Korsgaard writes:

The task of self-constitution involves finding some roles and fulfilling them with integrity and dedication. It also involves integrating those roles into a single identity, into a coherent life. People are more or less successful at constituting their identities as unified agents, and a good action is one that does this well. It is one that both achieves and springs from the integrity of the person who performs it. (Self-Constitution, p.35, quoted in Kantian Ethics and Economics, p. 99)

A person's identity can be composed of many identities, such as her caeer, family status, community involvements, political affiliations, and so on, each of which implies its own obligations and duties. But, as I write in Kantian Ethics and Economics:

But before these identities can become a part of an agent’s practical identity, her sense of self (or character) from which she acts, she must take an active role in endorsing these roles by choosing what groups to join, what people to associate with, and what social responsibilities to assume. Even the aspects of your social identity you are born into—being a child of your parents, a member of your community, a citizen of your nation—must be endorsed by you before they become part of you and reasons on which you can act autonomously. (p. 102)

Near the end of his article, Brooks wrote:

Finally, graduates are told to be independent-minded and to express their inner spirit. But, of course, doing your job well often means suppressing yourself. As Atul Gawande mentioned during his countercultural address last week at Harvard Medical School, being a good doctor often means being part of a team, following the rules of an institution, going down a regimented checklist.

Of course--through following the rules and fulfulling the role of doctor, Dr. Gawande is expressing his autonomy and his character. One of the key lessons of Kantian ethics is that autonomy is often found in following duty and doing the right thing. Self-control can be seen as the highest expression of autonomy, because it shows that you are not the slave of even your own desires.

Finally, he wrote:

Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.

I agree with the general sentiment, of course, but not with his conclusion. Paradoxicaly (in a Zen sort of way), by losing yourself in a task (or obligation, or role), you not only "find yourself," you define yourself.