Several Essays in One Enquiry

A side issue arose in a thread at "Feminist Philosophers" over the best way to look at Hume's Enquiries. I made the point that they were collections of essays; and it was argued by Katy Abramson that they should not be read as essays:

Hume’s Enquiries are not properly read as a collection of essays, in the way, say, his essays are. He changed the title, we should take him seriously (and his final chosen title for the entire shmeer was Essays and Treatises on several subjects).

I think it's a little more complicated than this. I agree entirely that we should take Hume's re-titling seriously. But I think we should also take seriously the fact that this re-titling occurs late in the game -- very late in the game for the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

The first edition of the ECHU was published under the title, Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding. Likewise, Hume initially referred to the Enquiry Concerning Principles of Morals as essays (although under that title); this is how he refers to them in letters, and in the actual first edition that is what they are called within the body of the text itself -- it is only in the errata that he starts changing this. That is to say, if we take 'Enquiry' to indicate that the works should not be read as collections of essays, in both cases this comes out late: they were both mostly written, and the ECHU wholly written, published, and reprinted, as essays. It is only after the ECPM that he changes the title to Enquiry. Likewise, it's true that he eventually calls the whole group Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, and obviously the Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, are essays, but it's not clear that ECHU and ECPM fit into the 'Treatise' part, or even that 'Essays' and 'Treatises' are mutually exclusive categories.

Thus ECHU owes nothing of its structure to any conception of it as anything other than a special set of essays. Now, obviously these essays are obviously interrelated, and there is obviously at least some progression among them. They all contribute to one theme. And there's no question that these essays are all contributions to one philosophical investigation. 'Enquiry' is quite a good name for the set. But as Beauchamp points out somewhere, there's no reason to think that in changing the title from 'Philosophical Essays' to 'Enquiry' and calling the various parts of it 'Sections' rather than 'Essays' that he's saying that the Sections don't fall into the genre of essays; 'Enquiry' is a function-term not a genre-term. It doesn't identify the literary character of the pieces, but merely establishes what philosophical task they are being used to perform.

So, practically speaking, what effect does this have on interpretation of ECHU? I think our practice should be to read it as both a collection of essays and as an integrated investigation, because it manifestly is both. We should take seriously that Hume eventually re-titled it as 'An Enquiry', but we also have to take seriously that he wrote them as essays, and published them as essays, and only later re-titled them. (The argument for ECPM is a bit more complicated, since the presentation of it as a single Enquiry is so much earlier in its history, but I think a similar argument can be presented for it.) Therefore:

(1) We should recognize that the Sections both have an order and don't depend on that order -- every single one is capable of standing alone (in some sense), and, in fact, Sections X and XI are very difficult not to read exactly as if they stood alone. Because of this there is somewhat more license to dip into the ECHU and simply pick out a Section to consider on its own. Interpretation has to take into account what the other Sections say, but this is true of any collection of essays. This contrasts sharply with, say, the Treatise; Book I, Part 4 of the Treatise is not written so that it could be considered on its own, and who does not recognize the overall structure of Book I, and each Part of it, has radically failed to grasp some of the important features of Hume's argument. ECHU has a structure, but it is necessarily a looser structure. It's arguably designed so that the reader can take it entirely in more manageable bites, without having to hold massive amounts of the book in mind, which is the sort of feature that makes the Treatise much harder to read.

To be sure, Sections IV and V are not strictly stand-alone, but they weren't (strictly) stand-alone when they were explicitly called essays, either. One has only to look at typical essays of the period to see that sometimes we get not strictly stand-alone essays but essay-pairs and essay-series; likewise, one can have meta-essays that deal with points raised by several other essays. Taking it as a collection of essays doesn't mean the group has no structure -- it is also a unified Enquiry -- but that the contribution of the structure itself to the argument is relatively light.

(2) We should approach ECHU in terms of the literary features and style of the essayist. Section X is not a rigorous and grave treatise on miracles, for instance; it is an indirectly (but deliberately) humorous essay that uses Humean principles to turn tropes from Protestant anti-Catholic polemics ironically against Protestants as well as Catholics and practically blares in neon lights that it is doing so. It does raise serious and important points, but it deliberately does so with humor and elegance typical of the early modern essay. Section XI doesn't give us a rigorously philosophical discussion of particular providence; it gives us a literarily light essay of the sort you might have found in The Spectator, but uses this approach to give some discussion of serious philosophical arguments. And so forth.

These two features don't give us a radically different Hume -- people tend to approach several of the Sections in ways consistent with (1) already, they just don't usually do so for principled reasons -- although (2) does give us a lighter and friendlier David who is not trying in the ECHU to give a rigorous account of things (although this doesn't, of course, mean that he's necessarily sloppy) nor to give a fully serious discussion (although this doesn't, of course, mean that he doesn't raise a lot of serious points) but is instead putting serious philosophical ideas in a more popular and familiar form to make them accessible to the literate public. And that is very much in line with the way Hume describes his own project.

So in other words: I think the Enquiry is indeed properly read as a collection of essays, just like his other essays; although we should read this collection of essays as having a special unity of theme, purpose, and principle that is missing in the others. This latter point means we should in a sense take these essays more seriously than most of Hume's other essays because together they form a more strongly coherent philosophical project. And it's even possible that this is behind the re-titling, i.e., that Hume change the title to 'An Enquiry' in the hopes that it would lead people to take it as a substantive rather than merely occasional philosophical contribution the way most of his other essays are. In any case, that's how we should read it. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't see it as a collection of essays; it means we should see it as a philosophically substantive collection of essays (on one topic).

Chesterton for March III

There are three ways in which a statement, especially a disputable statement, can be placed before mankind. The first is to assert it by avowed authority; this is done by deities, the priests of deities, oracles, minor poets, parents and guardians, and men who have “a message to their age”. The second way is to prove it by reason; this was done by the mediaeval schoolmen, and by some of the early and comparatively forgotten men of science. It is now quite abandoned. The third method is this: when you have neither the courage to assert a thing nor the capacity to prove it, you allude to it in a light and airy style, as if somebody else had asserted and proved it already.

Source: The Illustrated London News (7 Aug 1909)

Ethics is Public

The general opinion of mankind has some authority in all cases; but in this of morals it is perfectly infallible. Nor is it less infallible, because men cannot distinctly explain the principles, on which it is founded.

Hume, Treatise 3.2.9.

I thought of this when thinking of the recent controversy over the Giubilini-Minerva paper on infanticide. This is a dispute that goes well beyond two authors of a paper. Both authors are fairly young, and they were just doing what they were trained to do, and had no real thought for public or practical implications of their work. And one of the things that Francesca Minerva, in particular, has repeatedly said is that they were only writing for academics and that academics wouldn't have taken offense at the paper. I think she has unconsciously put her finger on the problem with modern bioethics: it's a relatively closed world, a bubble whose membrane is only semipermeable, in which people feel that they have the right to discuss ethical matters of profound public concern without any regard for the actual public whose concern it is. In the academic bubble you can chat in a seminar room about how killing disabled babies is permissible as an abstract principle; in the public arena no one can evade the notion that abstract principles have concrete effects, and in the public arena making the same argument is to classify yourself with some really nasty people as an enemy of humanity. And to some extent it really doesn't matter whether you think the public is right about this; you don't have to go all the way with Hume (I don't) to see that he has a key point here, which is that ethics cannot be discussed in a bubble shielded away from the general opinion of mankind, and that the Savulescus of the world, continually lecturing the public at large (as Savulescu, clueless as ever, is still lecturing everyone by means of Twitter) on the superiority of reasoned argument over abuse (despite being abusive himself and not putting forward much reasoned argument himself), have missed the point with their illiberal attempts to put the peasants in their proper place. Reasoned argument is generally superior to abusive rhetoric as a means of opposition, although it is worth noting that nobody, and I mean nobody, actually acts in such a way as to treat it as always superior. But setting aside the fact that the two can overlap, it is still true that when, in talking about ethical matters, you have touched the sort of nerve that leads to widespread abusive rhetoric, you should sit up and pay attention, because the mere fact that people are giving no distinct explanations, no precise articulations, no arguments laid out according to academic conventions, doesn't mean that they don't have a genuine point. It is too strong to say, with Hume, that such things are infallible; but it is certainly true that they should be taken seriously. And, more than that, that you can't discuss ethical matters as if they didn't have to be taken seriously. Ethics is not exclusively public, but it is public; you have to take into account the concerns of the public; if nothing else, this is the only way in which you can discuss matters of serious public interest while respecting the autonomy of all the people who stand any remote chance of being affected by the sort of thinking you are putting forward. This is a fault with the ethics community at large, and with the bioethics community in particular: professing to speak on matters of general interest to mankind, they shut out the general opinion of mankind as if it were something to be looked down on or ignored. One problem with this, of course, which we see here, is that the public doesn't actually have to put up with this behavior.

ADDED LATER: There's some discussion of this going on at Google's Australian version of this site (http://branemrys.blogspot.com.au). Comments there don't show up at the primary site (http://branemrys.blogspot.com).

Chesterton for March II

If a miracle is not exceptional, it is not even miraculous. Nobody was ever taught by any sane creed to count upon or expect anything but the natural. To put the point briefly, we are commanded to put our faith in miracles, but not to put our trust in them.

Source: The Illustrated London News (7 Nov 1908)

Some Links

* The diocesan phase of the cause of canonization for Jérôme Lejeune is nearly completed. Lejeune, who died in 1994, was one of the twentieth century's greatest geneticists and discovered the cause of Down syndrome. Now that the diocesan phase is completed, the investigation for beatification begins in earnest as it is handed off to Rome. The official completion will be in April. Bl. Jérôme Lejeune, patron of geneticists, sounds rather nice, and he was by all accounts an amazing man; I hope something comes of it.

* waggish had an interesting post on ambiguities in Euripides' Bacchae.

* Robert Paul Wolff has a series of posts on Plato's Gorgias:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Conclusion

* Dingo tool use.

* The NYPD has been spying on Muslims in Newark. This is rather disturbing.

* Two interviews, one by Francesca Minerva (one of the authors) and one by Matthew Flanagan, on the recent abortion and infanticide paper that made the big controversy.

* Download the Universe is a new science ebook review blog, and looks pretty good. (ht)

* A paper I intend to read when I get the time, on the famous anecdote about Kurt Godel's worries about a logical flaw in the U.S. Constitution: Godel's Loophole (Guerra-Pujol)

* Henry Karlson has a good meditation on Lent

Chesterton for March I

Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.

Source: Manalive

On Savulescu's Response in the JME Controversy

There has been a recent dust-up over this article in the Journal of Medical Ethics arguing that infanticide is acceptable, and, indeed, is acceptable under any circumstances under which abortion would be acceptable. Since people in general, and possibly especially Americans, don't like the idea of medical ethicists advocating the killing of babies, and the abstract for the paper is actually pretty blunt about it, as soon as people started becoming aware of it they began to make their displeasure felt.

The JME then published on its blog a response by Julian Savulescu, which I find remarkable for its utter weakness. Savulescu says:

The Journal does not specifically support substantive moral views, ideologies, theories, dogmas or moral outlooks, over others. It supports sound rational argument. Moreover, it supports freedom of ethical expression. The Journal welcomes reasoned coherent responses to After-Birth Abortion. Or indeed on any topic relevant to medical ethics.

This is not even a coherent claim. If the Journal doesn't "specifically support substantive moral views, ideologies, theories, dogmas or moral outlooks, over others" it can't "support" freedom of ethical expression, because the support of freedom of ethical expression a substantive moral view. And, indeed, the argument with which Savulescu ends his comment, in which he tries to suggest that all the critics are really the ones at moral fault, gives away the store by making the Journal's decision depend on some rather substantive moral assumptions. But more than that, this is not a claim that could even be made coherent. It is true that publishing an article advocating infanticide does not mean that the Journal is saying that infanticide is morally permissible; but it does mean that the Journal is saying that advocacy of infanticide is morally permissible, and that arguments advocating infanticide, if they meet certain criteria incidental to actual content, may permissibly be given the additional credibility that comes with being published in an academic journal. This is one of the things that gets people's hackles up, though.

When he gets to the end, though, his argument turns from weak defense to near self-parody. It's not the implicature of the Journal's publishing such an article that is the problem, Savulescu says, it's everybody taking offense at the idea that killing babies is a morally acceptable topic for medical ethicists to treat seriously. Those people are "fanatics," those are the people who are indicative of a deep moral disorder in the world. Why? Because opposing the legitimacy of infanticide as a topic for a medical ethics journal is opposed to the values of a liberal society. One has to wonder who Savulescu thinks such an argument could possibly persuade; surely he sees that he has just conceded what many of the hate-mailers had been saying, that the Journal gives arguments a higher moral value than the morally protected status of babies?

And no one is going to be taken in by it, anyway. What Savulescu has just assured us -- quite explicitly -- is that as far as the JME is concerned every topic is up for grabs as long as it meets certain criteria that don't address content. The JME, in the interests of "rational engagement", would, Savulescu has just assured us, gladly publish arguments for the mass euthanizing of Jews or the sterilization of blacks as long as they were clever arguments based on "widely shared premises." Surely he has to have seen that this sort of argument isn't helping his case, nor does it actually put him and the other editors on the moral high ground, nor does it obviously make them champions of liberal values -- which Savulescu has, again, already said that the Journal does not support anyway, since it supports no substantive moral outlooks over any others.

I don't have a huge problem with the article itself; one has to put up with a lot of such nonsense masquerading as reasoned argument if you're an academic, and the discernment and prudence of editors are, while not completely missing, very, very fallible. But I do find myself rather annoyed that the editor of a major ethics journal could think he could get away with such a tin-eared and poorly reasoned defense. This argument is a genuinely incompetent patchwork.

(I actually kind of wonder if Savulescu is simply going out on his own in the defense, or if the editors for the JME actually selected him to speak for them, because with his background -- he has argued in other contexts that killing is justified as long as potential victims are more likely to receive certain kinds of benefits because of it, and also argued that some laws preventing eugenics are too liberal and that the human race needs to practice eugenics more assertively to survive -- he is simply not the right person to be the public face of the Journal of Medical Ethics on this particular topic, and his being so raises the real risk of this blowing up even bigger than it is.)

Another of the editors, the one actually responsible for the decision, shows up in the comments and gives a less objectionable -- certainly a more competent response. He also manages to punt on every single ethical issue that could be raised about the legitimacy of topics, though, by simply appealing to peer review; and as some of the commenters go on to point out, "peer review" is not really an ethical justification at all, nor does it shield the Journal from any ethical criticisms about the decision to publish, nor does it give the Journal any immunity from ethical blowback from the community at large.