In her article, “On not sleeping with your students,” philosopher Amia Srinivasan writes that she was struck by “how limited philosophers’ thinking was”:
How could the same people who were used to wrestling with the ethics of eugenics and torture (issues you might have imagined were more clear-cut) think that all there was to say about professor-student sex was that it was fine if consensual?
Many philosophers prefer to see complexity only where it suits them.
This was interesting, and it gave me two thoughts.
First there’s the whole asshole angle: a philosopher being proudly bold and transgressive by considering the virtues of torture while not reflecting on issues closer to home, which reminds me of our quick rule of thumb is that when someone seems to be acting like a jerk, an economist will defend the behavior as being the essence of morality, but when someone seems to be doing something nice, an economist will raise the bar and argue that he’s not being nice at all. The point is that in some areas of academia it’s considered a positive to be counterintuitive and unpredictable. One thing I like about Srinivasan is that she’s not doing that. Like Bertrand Russell, she’s direct. Don’t get me wrong, Bertrand Russell had lots of problems in his philosophy as well as in his life—just take a look at Ray Monk’s biography of him—, but I appreciate the clarity and directness of his popular philosophical writing. Indeed, the clarity and directness can make it easier to see problems in what he wrote, and that’s good too.
The bit that really caught me in the above excerpt, though, was that last sentence, which got me thinking that one way you can understand people is to look at where they prefer to see complexity. I’m not quite sure what to do with this; I’m still chewing on it. It reminds me of the principle that you can understand people by looking at what bothers them. I wrote a post on that, many years ago, but now I can’t find it.
I think it is interesting that the two counterexamples she gives — eugenics and torture — are fundamentally non-consensual. I can’t tell if that is a coincident or not. I also find it interesting that eugenics and torture are considered archaic relics of a less civilized past, whereas the power of consent is a more modern idea that is still struggling to gain traction in some areas (e.g. gay marriage). I am not sure Amia’s diagnosis is sufficiently inward-looking.
Eugenics is not “fundamentally non-consensual”. It was invented by Francis Galton who proposed giving monetary prizes to young married couples rather than anything coercive. This approach has been dubbed “positive eugenics”, while acting to discourage other people from having children would then be “negative eugenics”. But even the latter can be consensual if it’s done by paying people to behave as one wants. Consider also the examples of couples doing IVF and detecting that certain fertilized eggs have a genetic predisposition for a trait they dislike (and noting the reality that most parents told their fetus will have Down syndrome don’t keep it), while others eggs are likely to have traits they prefer, and choose the latter. Is that “fundamentally non-consensual”? It’s certainly an active topic of debate.
I really disliked Ray Monk’s biography of Russell, having loved his biography of Wittgenstein, and couldn’t see why he’d spend so long doing a hatchet job on someone he clearly hated. I was glad to see this review by AC Grayling later on, which provides some balance. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/oct/28/biography.philosophy
You may find the cognitive science literature on the “selective laziness of reasoning” relevant: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cogs.12303.
From a social and cognitive psych POV, it’s fundamental work and not too surprising given related literature on cognitive biases.
I suppose an economist would say that looking at something closely enough to see all of its complexity is an investment of time. Why invest the time if you already have the answer you want?
Most people see complexity only where it suits them.
ffty