In 1964 public opinion surveys indicated that over 75 percent of the American people trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time. The consensus was that the federal government under the leadership of the Democratic Party had ended the Great Depression, won the Second World War, and was managing an economy in which nearly everyone got pay raises every year that beat inflation. By 1980, only 25 percent of the American people trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time. Information can illuminate, transform, or displace reality. Without information about reality, without reports and records, the reach of experience quickly trails off into the shadows of ignorance and forgetfulness. Plato was among those early philosophers who tried to subordinate contingency to structure. In the Timaeus, Plato tried to build up the world of direct experience from the regular solids that in turn, he thought, were constructed from two kinds of triangles. The things and processes of the visible world he explained as compounds and transformations of the elementary particles. The word real has many meanings. In its widest sense, everything that can be thought, perceived, or felt is real. If it were not, it would be nothing to us. But real and reality also convey the more particular meaning of presence and validity. Just as the decline of courage was noticed and mourned early in the modern period and forever after, so the waning of reality as commanding and engaging presence has been documented and was deplored already in post–Civil War America. At times the commodification of reality is so subversive and complete today that actual reality seems to have slipped irretrievably from our grasp. Consider the “reality” television shows. They promise to put us back in touch with reality. But the commodifying eye of the television camera turns every reality into a commodity. What’s left are bursts of hunger for reality.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the face of fascism and communism, called for a Second Bill of Rights to secure such basic dignity for all. But the myth of rugged individualism first and the anesthetic effect of technological comfort later made us the least compassionate among peer societies. If dignity lends or ought to lend substance to equality, what are the grounds of dignity? What entitles us to take a high-minded view of ourselves? Each of us is entitled to self-determination. The new world was seen as the land of freedom and challenge where people could escape the bonds of poverty and oppression and make something of themselves. The classic work of Kant’s moral philosophy is his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals of 1785 revealed the moral skeleton that has given modern ethics its cardinal shape. Here we find the moral norms of equality, dignity, and liberty. Kant articulated them as commands. The norm of equality he spelled out as the celebrated categorical, that is, unconditional, imperative: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can want at the samet ime that it becomes a universal law. Kant was convinced, put scholarly ethics on a solid footing, and thus put an end to “the disgusting mish-mash of cobbled-together observations and semi-intelligent principles” that, as Kant saw it, dominated the popular writings on ethics of his time. Kant, in fact, was inclined to set the ordinary person’s moral sense above that of the philosophers since “it may hope to hit the mark as well as any philosopher may assure himself he will, indeed may here be almost more certain than the latter because he has no other principle than it has; his judgment, however, can be confused and deflected from the right direction by a lot of inappropriate and irrelevant considerations.” And here too he was in agreement with Jefferson: “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.” Jefferson was a statesman, architect, musician, horseman, naturalist, historian, and plantation owner. He was a loving husband, though widowed early, and a devoted father if not such to all his children. He traveled widely in the United States and in Europe. Philosophers like to hold forth on the influence of Kant, but what actual impact he had on German and Western culture is one of the great sociological unknowns. There is no doubt, however, that Jefferson had a strong hand in shaping the beginning of the United States, its geographical extent, its educational system, its architecture,and, to sum it up, its culture. But both were men of the Enlightenment and were profoundly attuned to the rational and egalitarian spirit of their time. Reason was for both of them the source of light. It figured prominently in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and The Critique of Practical Reason (1787). “ ‘Dare to use your own reason!’—that is the motto of the Enlightenment,” Kant said in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784).
In his new book, Samuel Fleischacker delves into the work of Adam Smith to draw out an understanding of empathy that respects both personal difference and shared humanity. David Hume had understood empathy (what he and Smith called “sympathy”—the word “empathy” wasn’t invented until after their time) as my feeling whatever you feel. Smith understands it as my feeling what I think I would feel if I were you, in your situation. Hume’s empathy is a kind of contagious feeling—I “catch” your feelings, whether of sadness or of joy, whether I want to do that or not. Smith’s empathy requires more action on our part and depends on imagination. I try to show that Smith’s kind of empathy is deeper and more important to morality. Smith is extremely famous, but I think he is vastly different from the popular image of Smith—the supposed defender of a ruthless capitalism—and indeed is someone who can help us work against the selfishness that is rampant in our modern world. I also think he is a thoughtful, nuanced theorist of empathy who avoids the simplifications of those who imagine that sharing feelings with other people will solve all our moral problems. He’s a wonderfully sensible figure to bring to our modern moral debates. Samuel Fleischacker is LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Source: pressblog.uchicago.edu
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