The Philosophy Club

Sun, Nov 16 · 2:00 PM PST

Philm Series: "Birth" (2004) | Jonathan Glazer

Location not specified yet

"– just a little boy in my bath tub."

"A film about belief and conviction and fragile purity of feeling, Birth is nonetheless built on a frank absurdity. – the film can sound sillier the more you try to describe or explain it." – Guy Lodge

Trailer

Reviews:

• Deep Focus Review – Brian Eggert
• The Guardian – Guy Lodge

I think the entire film can be seen here. If you have trouble seeing it at that link, let me know. I will send you another.

Is this a film about belief in reincarnation or something perhaps equally suspect -- everlasting love? Whichever, it is a beautifully crafted psychological exploration of the need to believe things that transcend the merely sensible.

When it first came out in 2004 it was largely panned by critics as a "bizarre combination of distinguished talent and inane ideas," both "oddly unforgettable" and "hooey" – but now some call it a "magnificent, misunderstood masterpiece." The film stars Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Danny Huston, and Cameron Bright.

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On the subject of the hold absurdities can exert on our psychologies, a future topic will address immortality – why many would even consider it were it an option...

Sun, Dec 14 · 2:00 PM PST

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Online

Are corporate bodies psychopathic?

Online

We owe a cornfield respect, not because of itself, but because it is food for mankind.
In the same way, we owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind – country, family, or any other – not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls.1
– Simone Weil

By “corporate body,” I mean associations, profit or non-profit, public or private, nations and their governments, clubs, teams, political parties, groups on any scale held together by some shared history or purpose, not to exclude consortiums, cartels comprised of any number of smaller corporate bodies, from the United Nations to groups of groups... in short, collectives organized to serve any goal. For purposes of this discussion, I include any group with legal or moral power – even, as Weil suggests, a family. In short, a collective that, because of its size, exceeds the influence of a given individual. I am not addressing the prevalence of psychopaths high up in corporate hierarchies which is more of a psychosocial problem than a conceptual one, and has gotten more attention. It is on the psychopathy emerging from collectives in which the collectives themselves are psychopathic agents that we focus here, a phenomenon less recognized as such.

An argument for why these collectives have psychopathic traits goes like this:

Psychopathy is defined by a lack of internal moral qualms when engaging in activity that negatively affects others. Psychopaths consider their own interests first, and the interests of others, outsiders, only to the extent the latter may serve their own. A psychopathic agent’s epistemic efforts at determining whether the interests of others serve their own will be limited by their rational capabilities. Otherwise, their epistemic carelessness would hobble or defeat their intended goals. Effective psychopaths will have strong rational capabilities. Success at achieving their goals – their interests – is the bottom line for a psychopathic entity. Moral considerations are not among their cardinal interests except insofar as keeping up moral appearances can be conducive to their proprietary interests... This understanding is usually thought to apply to psychopathic individuals, but the traits can apply to corporate bodies.

It is a well documented fact that corporate bodies do not have anything resembling a “conscience” to aid in regulating their behavior. There can be sufficient external constraints on the corporate body that may compensate for the lack of internal ones, but, having to exert pressure from one direction, external, where the non-psychopathic individual is subject from two, the external constraints must be especially stringent on the collective to be as effective at curbing abuse as the combined internal and external constraints are in the case of a typical non-psychopathic individual.

Among the explanations for this lack of conscience or internal constraint is the bystander effect: a group or corporate body is a moral abstraction devoid of sentience or a natural claim to dignity based on integrity while the individual constituents of the group have a tendency to fob off responsibility to others or ignore it altogether when in a group. In effect, when things go wrong no entity assumes responsibility, not the constituent members (it can’t be the fault any one of them) nor the group (the group is an abstraction without the concrete internal constraints that may curb self-interest). It’s almost as if collectives can do no wrong because they are pro-social by design. Responsibility either gets assigned elsewhere, even to amoral natural causes (such as “this is how the world is”), and no single individual can be blamed, or responsibility gets diffused so thinly that any given individual’s portion is negligible. Individual members become acclimated to seeing their liability progressively delimited as the size of the group with which they are affiliated enlarges. This can be institutionalized in group norms, i.e., in law. The larger it is, the more self-legitimated, the more shielded from blame the collective becomes.1 This, combined with the natural tendency of any party, individual or collective, to accept credit before blame, will conduce to making corporate behavior easier to justify.

The net effect is that a corporate body acts like a psychopath. It clearly sees only its own interests. Other interests are vague and require external forces or conditions, if they exist, to be attended. In the typical non-psychopathic individual’s case, moral constraints operate from both internal and external directions, from internalized norms and from attunement to social consequences, making responsibility more difficult to evade, dismiss, or rationalize away, while corporate bodies are better empowered to do these very things.

There are likely evolutionary explanations why corporate bodies are not psychologically equipped with the necessary empathetic imagination for non-psychopathic agency. One of the obvious ones is that “there is strength in numbers,” as they say, including, strength to act with impunity. That, together with diffusion of agency, probably explain the tendency. Super-organisms, which include corporate bodies, may be less evolved because less vulnerable.

Certainly, in a corporate body, there is also strength to do good on a scale impossible for an individual. All the beneficial accomplishments of civilization driven by communities are testament to this… But our history of mass murder and mayhem can also be attributed to an insufficiency of group circumspection and constraint – even, especially, when the group self-construes its behavior as constructive. Groups may not only act with relative impunity, they are empowered to judge themselves with greater authority and less scrutiny. The forces to channel strength and maintain focus in a moral direction are weaker. “Prosocial” in not equivalent to “moral.”

Thus, rule-based moral theories exist to supplement more natural empathetic impulses when these are absent or insufficient. It is why consequentialist and deontological imperatives evolved. Our “better angels” are too easily distracted, the more as we act in concert with others. Both of these theories ask that moral identity be rooted in something more universal than the happenstance of an artificially or naturally constructed community3: whether the identity is, in the end, biological, sentience – or a cognitive singularity: the ability to identify with a rational ability that sorts us out from the rest of the natural world.

We do have "better angels," right?
The Eighteenth Century Scottish School of “moral sense” theorists thought so. Contemporary moral theories such as feminist Care Ethics follow in this tradition, as do communitarian and Marxist theories. These view human nature as, at least where the impulse is not oppressed, predisposed to benevolence. People, left to their own devises, care about each other. We are social beings, after all. Dog-eat-dog social conditions can’t fully explain our evolutionary success up to now. We have moved away from Hobbes’ state of nature where it is everyone for himself – and God against all.1 According to the moral sense theorists, we possess an innate measure of cooperation and trust, not just because it makes rational sense, but because we like and want to help each other – until, at least, we have reason not to. But fellow-feeling is the natural starting impulse. We would have become extinct long ago were this not true – so the moral sense theorists reason.

Moral sense theories, in contrast to the rule-based theories, give people the benefit of the doubt. Thus, Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations, the “capitalist manifesto,” thought societies benefit by allowing individuals as much liberty as possible to exert their self-interested efforts as they see fit, with the least possible interference from government or social pressure. Individuals will be more productive and generate more wealth this way precisely because of more potent self-interested motives. But – and many miss this critical assumption made by Smith and fellow moral sense theorists – because humans are fundamentally concerned for the well-being of others, they will, having amassed wealth, voluntarily wish to share it with others. That’s what motivates the amassing of wealth in the first place, Smith generously wanted to believe: because it facilitates being in a position of service to others. Poor people can’t help other poor people as much. Ergo, seek wealth.

The moral sense theorist need not deny we are inclined to look out for ourselves first. We must do that or we won’t be in the best position to help anyone else. (“Put on your oxygen mask first before you help others with theirs,” flight attendants remind us.) But moral sense theorists also believe that, ultimately, we want to and will help others, given the chance. We do both – look out for number one and for other numbers – because we want to and because it makes self-interested sense. We are not, by and large, psychopathic or stupid, not typically utterly devoid of empathy, nor so shortsighted that we don’t see advantages accruing to ourselves in seeking to help others.

Hume and the "sensible knave"
David Hume6 is probably the most interesting moral sense theorist because he conjured up and addressed a major challenge to his own version of moral sense theory: the “sensible knave.” He meant by this 18th Century phrase what we today pathologize as a “psychopath.” We will specify the concept this way, the psychopath is an affront to the moral sense vision because they

• lack genuine feelings of benevolence toward others, and
• are, at least, above, if not far above, average in intelligence.

Combine these traits in an individual or entity, and you get an agent who does not mean well by others, except incidentally, and is competent at disguising this deficiency. The more extreme cases are proportionately dangerous. These are expert manipulators, but do not get caught being such. In fact, being detected is an indication of failure at being a true psychopath. Competency is a mark of psychopathy. If you suspect someone is a jerk, they are not psychopaths, maybe wannabes, but a true psychopath leaves no sure evidence – at least none most may act upon. They, by definition, get away with moral criminality and almost always with the legal sort. They will be highly respected by most in the community for their accomplishments, and those few that don’t respect them will be themselves subject to suspicion precisely for not recognizing what most do. A psychopath will effectively isolate and incriminate their critics.

Also, because they lack natural feelings of benevolence, they also lack those to do with malice.7 They cannot experience feelings the capacity for which they don’t have. They are, in a sense, forces of nature, adiaphorous, i.e, amoral or immune to normal moral judgment, as perhaps, very young children and animals are.

An interesting philosophical question is, however, “are psychopaths really bad or evil people?” Remember, they don’t naturally come equipped with the fellow-feeling which often hobbles the average person’s capacity for maleficence. They are born that way. We don’t ordinarily hold people responsible for characteristics they had no part in creating, for not seeing well because they were born blind, for example. If some capacity for empathy is the basis for genuine moral behavior, and psychopaths lack it congenitally, they can’t be blamed for the lack or the consequences that follow from the lack. Moreover, being exceptionally competent, they may be productive people in many of the ways we value, extra-morally or amorally. Some of that competency may even be due to their ability to act with fewer scruples.

One could even view them as victims of exploitation by larger psychopathic corporate bodies that benefit from using them as effective means for their ends. If their facility for ruthlessly amassing wealth is seen as beneficial to the community, and they are tended and nurtured for that very reason, then we can say a morally hapless psychopath can be a victim, even an unknowing one. (Can one be an unknowing victim? From which perspective?)

These larger corporate bodies or organisms we might even characterize as super-psychopathic, since no constituent of the body escapes being used, not those with, or without, any set of feelings. Again, because these bodies are abstract entities and know nothing of feelings. These bodies exploit publicly scrutable behaviors, not private subjectivites where feelings reside.

The term “psychopath” retains negative connotations, though. Hume’s “sensible knave,” no matter how competent and rational, was still a knave. We will explore why...

Resources

• On Psychological egoism: “‘We’re All Selfish’ | Philosophy’s Darkest Idea,” Joe Folly’s addressees the philosophical implications.
• “The Influence of Psychopaths: Why Humans Are Better Than We Think | Frankly 108,” Nate Hagens. “...Nate reflects on intraspecies predation (ours) and the impact psychopathic actors have on the mean and median of human behavior – in the past all the way up to our modern society. Human evolution was shaped by both cooperative, pro-social behavior and a competitive, predatory approach for survival – resulting in a balanced distribution for most of humanity’s existence.

“But, as agriculture, surplus, and other factors propelled more hierarchical social structure, aggregate human behavior and culture has slowly shifted over time to express more psychopathic traits. This thread of behavior continues to run through our modern society, where a relatively small (but disproportionately powerful) segment of the human population can pull societal behavior towards anti-social and individualistic values – even if the majority of people still inherently operate from a place of reciprocity.

“Why might our modern society provide a more fruitful breeding ground for psychopathy than past societies did? What do chickens and eggs have to do with psychopathy and the economic superorganism? And ultimately, what strategies could we begin to think about in order to shift mean and median human behavior back towards a more cooperative, prosocial middle?”

1. From Weil’s essay, “The Human Soul.”
2. For purposes of this discussion, we include any group with legal or moral power – even, as Weil suggests, a family. In short, a collective, that because of its size, exceeds the influence of an individual.
3. The excuse “too big to fail” is rooted here.
4. Naturally, as the moral sense theorists would have it; anthropogenically, as the virtue theorists would.
5. To paraphrase film maker Werner Herzog’s line from Stroszek (1977) and the title of his memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. The line may be a tweaked version of “Each man for himself, there is no other (way)” which appears in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, (1386), or “Everyman for himselfe and God for us all” as it appears in, The proverbs of John Heywood. Being the “Proverbes” of that author printed 1546. Ed., with notes and introduction by Heywood, John, 1497?-1580?, (published in 1874).
6. The Earl of Shaftesbury and Frances Hutcheson preceded David Hume and Adam Smith in the moral sense school. Hume, with his characteristic empiricist rigor, introduced the “knave” monkey wrench into the theory, thus inadvertently setting the stage for others (e.g., Kant) to point out the theory’s inadequacy as a full explanation of the human moral landscape.
7. A malicious person, a sadist, is capable of being moved by other-regarding sentiments, the wrong, but still human, ones. A psychopath is not a sadist. He or she (more often he) does not hate you. You don’t count, that’s all.

Wed, Dec 31 · 7:00 PM PST

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Online

Philm series

Online

This is not a post for a specific future event but a follow up to suggestions about scheduling film discussions. Here is a list of proposals from me and others. Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments. The idea is to settle on a film, each of us watch it independently, then come together online to discuss it. The film should be engaging and provocative. Of course, each of us may have different ideas of what that means. And pretty much all great films can be that...

I think another requirement is that it be freely accessible online. The ones listed below, I think, are. (If they are not where you are, let us know. We may find another way to make them accessible.)

You are invited to vote for or give a rating (say, 1 to 10) on any of these films in the comments to help us choose. This could be a regular ongoing series, depending on interest, so it might not be either/or, we may do all of them eventually. (This is not the first time we have had a film discussion. A number of years ago, just before the pandemic, when the club was still meeting in person is Seattle, we did Dogville, Lars von Trier's cinematic provocation.)

Herzog's Nosferatu

Koyaanisqatsi

Wise Blood

Seventh Seal

My Dinner with Andre

Waking Life

The Last Man on Earth (1964) with Vincent Price [interesting in light of the recent pandemic]

Russian Ark [a cinematic tour de force]

Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark [Bjork's performance is legendary in this musical tragedy]

Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light [I think this is one of the most powerful and sublime films I have ever seen but I am still looking for a free version with English subtitles]

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton show how to do dysfunctional relationships right]