Anger and Morality

Anger is inseparable from morality: we are naturally angry at what is unjust, unfair, blameworthy, evil. Jesus was angry at the money lenders and pharisees. There is no point in denying it. Emotivism used to say that moral judgement is all about boo and hurrah, but it should have said that moral disapproval is anger and moral approval admiration. You boo a weak artistic performance not a heinous act. A moral person is an angry person, on the assumption of immorality in the world. Indeed, there are few things that make one angrier than unethical actions or people. Not all anger has moral content, to be sure, but most of it does (animals are seldom angry). Anger assigns blame. A person without anger is hardly a moral being at all, even if brimming with love. What does this tell us about the moral life? First, it tells us that morality is bound up with judgment: you have to judge what to be angry about. Some people have poor judgment—they are angry at the wrong things. Anger must be appropriately educated. As the ancients would say, right anger is a form of wisdom. Second, and more disturbing, anger is not a nice emotion to have: it is unpleasant, corrosive, and dangerous. It feels bad; it eats into the soul; and it can lead to violent acts. Anger is hard to handle, causing much immoral action. So, moral emotion, in the form of anger, itself has moral consequences, which can be worse than what it is anger about. The angry man might kill a man who disrespects him. This approaches paradox: morality requires anger, but anger is close to immorality. Anger at the wrongdoing of others can easily lead to further wrongdoing, sometimes serious. Mass murderers are often angry, justifiably, at the wrongdoing of others. Anger is a combustible emotion (perhaps this is partly why Kant distrusted emotion as part of moral psychology). Anger can motivate right action, but it can also trigger wrong action. It can be argued that we would be better off without it. But moral judgment without anger is a pale and insipid thing, and not psychologically realistic. Being serenely detached in the face of cruelty is not a virtue. Righteous anger is proper and correct. But it has to be properly regulated, wisely arrived at. Thus, there is a problem at the heart of our moral psychology: we need anger, but we must beware of its pitfalls. Good people are centers of anger, but the anger must be good anger. And it is also necessary that the anger not be too intense or preoccupying—or else it will corrode the soul. This is the problem of moral anger.

Counterfactual Music

I was discussing my musical history the other day and I reported that in my childhood I didn’t like any of the music I heard on the radio and watched on TV. In fact, I positively disliked it. This was the era of Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Pat Boone, Vera Lynne, Shirley Bassey, and sundry others. I had no interest in music then (I never heard any classical music). But something happened in the 1950s that changed my mind completely: popular music changed dramatically. I knew nothing of why this was so or who was responsible; all I knew was that I liked what I was hearing (I was around 10 at the time). I was particularly struck by Sherry by the Four Seasons and Good Luck Charm by Elvis Presley. Suddenly music interested me—I wanted badly to hear it. This was before the Beatles and the Stones and the Who. Of course, I liked them. Music had come into my life. What I didn’t know, but do now, is the history behind this change in popular music—specifically the contribution of black artists. This is now an oft-told tale that needs no repeating, though it is good to acknowledge it: Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, Arthur Alexander, James Brown, and many others. Now we take all this for granted, but it might not have been. In a close possible world Frank Sinatra and Perry Como still rule the musical roost: no rock and roll, no blues, no soul, no reggae. So, we have the counterfactual: if black musicians had never existed, we would still be listening to the kind of stuff I so disliked in my youth. Or not listening to it, because I would never have had a musical life under those conditions. I have never warmed to Sinatra and company and really can’t bear listening to it. I wonder how anyone could have liked it (but there’s no accounting for taste). We tend to forget that there was a musical revolution beginning in the fifties. Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley—they would never have been if it were not for this revolution. John Lennon hated the music he grew up with (especially Acker Bilk jazz) and created music out of other influences; so did I. Just listen to Bo Diddley’s Mona and compare it to some crooner’s sappy stuff: there’s no comparison. I realize that I have been lucky to be born when I was, musically speaking.

Consciousness, Language, and Mystery

The human intellect is confronted by two great mysteries: the mystery of consciousness and the mystery of language.[1] I am not here concerned to argue for the mysterian position in either area, still less to try to remove the mystery; my aim is to compare the two mysteries. I am engaged in the taxonomic natural science of mysteries: I am in the business of comparing and contrasting, hoping to shed mutual light. What specifically is mysterious about consciousness and language? Their origin and brain implementation. We don’t know when and how consciousness arose in evolutionary history (it leaves no fossils), and we don’t know how the brain contrives to impel it into existence. Similarly, we don’t know when and how language arose in evolutionary history (it too leaves no fossils), and we don’t know how the brain contrives to impel it into existence. The essence of consciousness is subjectivity and we don’t know how subjectivity originated or how it comes to subsist in the brain. The essence of language is its unlimited combinatorial productivity and we don’t know how this originated or how the brain enables it.  So far then, the two problems can be stated analogously: they are origin-and-implementation problems. They aren’t existence problems—we aren’t unable to decide whether these things exist (like dark matter or some such). The two mysteries have the same general shape. We also know the nature of these things, or some of it; we aren’t ignorant of what makes them what they are. In fact, it is our knowledge of their nature that leads us to believe that they present mysteries—how could these things have arisen by mutation and natural selection, and how does the brain support them?

But at that point the similarity wanes. Certainly, the two are not identical or share a common essence; far from it. They could not be more dissimilar. For consider: consciousness (sentience) is extremely widespread in the animal world; it is a primitive adaptation; it is undoubtedly ancient; and it is biologically basic in the sense that it serves basic functions—eating, avoiding being eaten, mating, defecation, etc. But language is unique to humans; it is a sophisticated adaptation; it is of recent origin; and it does not serve basic biological functions. Language is the opposite of consciousness—like a spacecraft and a horse-drawn carriage. Language is “of the mind”, whereas consciousness is “of the body”. In particular, all species above an elementary level are endowed with consciousness, but only one species has true language. Consciousness is as common as dirt, while language is as rare as diamonds. Language is a form of intelligence, while consciousness requires none. Language makes humans special, but consciousness does not. One of the mysteries of language is why only humans have it, but there is no such mystery about consciousness. Consciousness is biology 101, but language is a much more advanced subject. If there were no humans, there would be no language, but plenty of consciousness. Language is exceptional and mysterious, while consciousness is unexceptional and mysterious. Language is impressive and spectacular, but consciousness is humble and humdrum; it belongs to the class of mundane mysteries (like gravity and electricity). This is hard to grasp because we are so far from understanding consciousness. We really ought to understand it, given its biological primitiveness, but we don’t. The mystery is rather mysterious. It has higher-order mystery.

I think this point is hard to get one’s mind around, so let me try to restate it. Primitive consciousness exists at a biologically elementary level, the same level as the correlated bodily traits: they co-evolved. For instance, it exists at the same level as true oxygen-carrying blood.[2] One would think, then, that the two ought to be equally comprehensible from an impartial point of view; but they are not. This is surprising, eyebrow-raising: consciousness and blood should be on an epistemic par. The mystery is unintelligible, contrary to reason. Surely a being with better cognitive faculties than ours could grasp consciousness as readily as blood. We seem to suffer from a cognitive bias, a blind spot. The case is quite unlike language: in this case the mystery seems explicable, because language is not biologically primitive, not a commonplace; it is special, highly advanced, intrinsically complex. Language isn’t correlated with basic biological functions; indeed, it seems biologically de trop, hardly necessary to survival at all. It is clearly something remarkable, involving an impressive creativity, dabbling in the infinite. It seems akin to the divine, a kind of natural miracle. Its mystery is thus perfectly intelligible—of course such a thing is difficult to comprehend! Language is not animalistic but sublime (as Galileo once remarked). We are amazed at language, but not at pain or sight or smell. It is a cut above, biologically speaking. Thus, it is an intelligible mystery—we can easily see why it’s a mystery. But we have to be brought to see that consciousness is a mystery—we have to be argued into it. This is why historically consciousness was not regarded as a mystery but language was. Consciousness comes to seem like a mystery only when mechanistic physicalism enters the scene, but language is obviously a mystery—the mystery is staring us in the face. Thus, we have two types of mystery: type 1, intelligible mystery; and type 2, unintelligible mystery. Language is type 1 mysterious and consciousness is type 2 mysterious. Nature contains both types of mystery, as a function of our cognitive powers (and probably the natural facts). Anyone would find language a mystery, but not so consciousness. Consciousness only strikes us as mysterious because it isn’t physically reducible, but language is mysterious independently of this, just considered in itself. How can finite means generate infinite potential? How could such a power evolve? Why are we its only possessor? Words are amazing things, but feelings are a dime a dozen (even mice have them). The linguistic lexicon is rightly deemed a mystery, but the “lexicon” of consciousness is not—the items composing it are not biologically oddities. The organism has a set of qualia that it brings to the table, each functionally justifiable (pain, seeing color and shape, smelling food). Humans alone bring a set of lexical items whose nature and origin are obscure—they are a biological anomaly. Both are mysterious, but the lexicon is evidently a mystery, while qualia are mysterious in a more theoretical way.

It has been said that human language shows that everyone is a genius, because language is such an impressive cognitive achievement. And genius is inherently mysterious. Other animals might marvel at our linguistic genius, if they were capable of marveling at anything. But mere sentience is not a mark of genius, any more than blood is: it is just part of our animal nature, as brute as brutes. There is nothing genius-like about it. Evolution made both, but they don’t belong together on the same scale. Language is a uniquely human achievement on a par with (genuine) morality, but consciousness is spread far and wide like hair and skin. The two mysteries differ in their ease of recognition and their general form. We appear to have made more progress with the language mystery than the consciousness mystery, though that may be deceptive. There are similarities between them, but there are also significant differences. Imagine inverting the distribution of the two, with language existing in most species and consciousness only in one and recently arrived: would that change our estimate of the two mysteries? I suspect it would.[3]

[1] I will be assuming a broadly Chomskian position on the mystery of language and my own position on the mystery of consciousness. I do not mean to suggest that these are the only two mysteries confronting us, but they do get a lot of attention.

[2] Creatures that lack true blood tend to be the most primitive of organisms—sponges, coral, jellyfish, flatworms, insects, etc. They don’t have consciousness.

[3] Our reactions would not be simple. Suppose you visited a planet on which language was widespread—almost all species speak. However, sentience was extremely rare, only one species being endowed with it. No doubt you would think that language is not so special and sentience rather precious (so the sentient species must have been favored by some powerful deity or other). But I don’t think you would change your estimate of the kind of mystery involved: language would still seem intelligibly mysterious, while consciousness would not lose its unintelligible mysteriousness. Language would still seem almost magical in its fecundity, while consciousness would still be tied mainly to primitive biological functions. This is a good thought experiment on which to test your intuitions.

Gang Deportations

So far, the deportations to El Salvador have scooped up only Latino men (so far as we know). No women gang members or affiliates thereof have been similarly deported, or non-Latino gang members. But what about criminal gangs of other ethnicities and nationalities? Does the current administration intend to deport female (suspected) criminals to prisons in El Salvador, even mothers of young children? What about Italian gangs operating in the US, or Chinese or Russian or British? Is the plan to send them to El Salvador with the others? Or would they be sent back to their country of origin? Would those countries accept them? How much would they charge? Would there be any due process? If some pale sandy-haired Englishman were accused of gang membership, would he be deported to El Salvador or to the British home counties? Or is it that ethnicity makes a difference? And what counts as gang “membership”? What if a young woman had the job of negotiating with other gangs in order to stop inter-gang violence—is that a deportable offence? Come to think of it, what if some foreign country decides it has had enough of American criminals on its soil and wants to send them all back to America? Would we accept them? They would certainly be undesirables from our point of view. I would also like to know how long the current deported prisoners will stay in the prison they now occupy—a few years, twenty years, for life? Has this been decided? What happens if definitive proof is produced that exonerates many or most of them? Will they be released? I have the feeling that none of this has been thought out. Was the whole thing really a stunt for the cameras with no judicial questions raised? Was it endorsed by the Department of Justice? Just asking.