Haidt's version lands in the same place and is less flattering about it.
In The Righteous Mind the judgment arrives before the reasoning in ordinary cases too, not only emergencies, and what follows is mostly justification. The rescuer who acts without deliberating and the person who condemns without being able to say why are running the same machinery.
So the openness may not be a separate faculty. It is the same pre-reflective response, and whether it is admirable depends on what it was trained on.
A very good piece, and one I found myself agreeing with for much of the way. I do think there is a bridge in the argument that needs a little more support, though.
Ramm establishes convincingly that ethical responsiveness can arise prereflectively. He also makes a plausible case that reflection and self-interest can sometimes inhibit that responsiveness. But I’m not sure he quite establishes that cultivating Harding’s perceptual openness will therefore improve ethical responsiveness.
The more precise problem is that Ramm is asking different kinds of intellectual machinery to mesh. Sartre provides a fairly comprehensive philosophical framework from which an account of prereflective ethical responsiveness can be developed. Harding gives us something rather different: an experiential method for altering, or perhaps more accurately recognizing, our perception of the self/other relationship.
I can accept both without being certain that the second necessarily strengthens the first.
There is also a difficulty that Ramm himself acknowledges. Prereflective responses aren’t necessarily moral responses. Prejudice can be prereflective. Anger can be prereflective. A father’s instantaneous impulse to save his own child rather than two strangers can be prereflective, just as the stranger’s impulse to dive into a river after a drowning child can be. If the same mechanism can produce all of these responses, prereflectivity alone can’t tell us which response deserves moral authority.
That leaves me wanting a little more between Harding’s perceptual openness and the claim that such openness provides grounds for compassion or what Ramm nicely calls “structural kindness.” Sartre gives Ramm considerably more philosophical raw material to work with here than Harding does. There’s nothing wrong with bringing the two together, but I think that places a greater burden on the author to construct the bridge between them.
I liked the piece very much. I’m simply not convinced that the bridge is quite complete.
Thanks for your well-considered comment, David. For me the bridge is the dropping away of the subject–object division between self and other, which allows for more openness to others' needs. In a sense you are the other. Sartre gives us a spontaneous version of this, while Harding shows us how to recognise it intentionally. The idea is that noticing the lack of separation undermines the main source of conflict between myself and others.
This bears on your point about prereflective responses. You're right that prejudice and anger can be prereflective too. So it depends on what is driving these responses. Is it openness to others' needs, or something else? Many of our problematic responses depend on a felt division between myself and the other. Prejudice needs an "us" and a "them". Ego-defensive anger needs a self to defend. Seeing that I'm face-to-no-face with others arguably undercuts exactly that division. So the claim isn't that everything prereflective is good. It's that this recognition weakens a major source of these negative responses. Of course, I agree that we also need moral reasoning to challenge our prejudices and cognitive distortions. Both are important. But if that moral reasoning is coming from a false assumption of separation, it's not going to help us very much.
The most essential point is to test out the claims for yourself in your own life, rather than the 'intellectual machinery' itself. Do you find yourself less defensive, and less stuck in ego-defensive anger, when you practise noticing that you're face-to-no-face with someone? Do others seem more precious? This is an empirical question that I invite you to explore.
Thank you, Brentyn. I think your distinction gets us much closer. My hesitation was never with prereflective experience itself, but with granting it moral significance simply because it precedes reflection. Prejudice can arrive before thought just as readily as compassion can.
But I take your point that this isn't quite what you're arguing. The moral work, on your account, isn't being done by prereflection as such. It's being done by a particular experience: the weakening of the felt division between self and other. Moral reasoning can challenge our prejudices and cognitive distortions, while this recognition may undermine something more basic beneath them.
That leaves me with a different question. How do we get from the phenomenological claim to the moral one? If experiencing less separation between myself and another person makes me less defensive and more responsive to that person's needs, that's psychologically significant. But what gives that experience moral authority? Why should diminished separation itself tell us that we've become morally better rather than simply psychologically different?
I suspect that's where our disagreement, if there is one, actually lies. And it's a much more interesting disagreement than the one I thought we had.
Thank you, David. I'm not sure we're disagreeing as such, but your points do help to clarify my project. What I'm describing is an ethical practice, not an ethical theory. I'm drawing on the ancient Greek idea that philosophy is for living well (e.g., Hadot). My approach is moral phenomenology. So, in the spirit of Wittgenstein, when the metaphysical machinery starts up, I get off the bus. You're welcome to slot in whatever metaethics you like, as long as it takes lived moral experience seriously.
The article is about a practice for living more kindly and compassionately. It isn't about what is objectively right or wrong in the sense of some transcendent fact. That said, the world doesn't present itself as neutral. It has a moral texture. It places demands on us. The drowning child isn't a neutral fact. The child is presented as someone we ought to save. Of course, our moral perception can become distorted, and there may be competing demands. That's where moral training and reasoning come in. One of the main distorting factors, I think, is a distorted self-perception: the assumption that I am a separate thing, set against others. That assumption filters how others' needs show up for me, obscuring them or pushing them into the background. Seeing through this assumption is what the Headless method offers.
If I had to choose a moral framework, it would be virtue ethics, because of its focus on ethical practice and cultivating perception. That would be another topic, of course. The point of the article is that recognising my radical openness to others and their needs can foster greater ethical sensitivity and responsiveness. Again, this is a practice to test out, rather than merely think about.
I think we're considerably closer than I first thought, Brentynn. Once you describe this as an ethical practice rather than an ethical theory, much of my original concern disappears. I'm quite sympathetic to the idea of philosophy as something we practise rather than merely contemplate.
I do still have one reservation. You say the drowning child isn't a neutral fact because the child presents itself as someone we ought to save. Fair enough as phenomenology. That may indeed be how the situation presents itself to me. But you also say that our moral perception can be distorted.
I find the word "distorted" interesting because it seems to require some standard against which the distortion can be recognized. If I experience an obligation to save the child and somebody else doesn't, we certainly have different moral experiences. But if I call his perception distorted rather than simply different from mine, I seem to be saying that one of us is perceiving the situation more appropriately than the other.
Perhaps virtue ethics supplies what is needed there. If so, I suspect ethical theory and ethical practice may be a little harder to separate than your account initially suggests. That's probably where the small difference between us remains.
None of that detracts from the practice you're actually proposing, though. I can quite readily accept that changing my conception of self may change the way the needs of other people appear to me, and I think you've clarified very well what you're trying to accomplish.
Thank you for taking the time to give such a thoughtful reply. I've enjoyed the exchange, and you've given me something useful to think about.
Haidt's version lands in the same place and is less flattering about it.
In The Righteous Mind the judgment arrives before the reasoning in ordinary cases too, not only emergencies, and what follows is mostly justification. The rescuer who acts without deliberating and the person who condemns without being able to say why are running the same machinery.
So the openness may not be a separate faculty. It is the same pre-reflective response, and whether it is admirable depends on what it was trained on.
I have not read Sartre or Harding yet.
A very good piece, and one I found myself agreeing with for much of the way. I do think there is a bridge in the argument that needs a little more support, though.
Ramm establishes convincingly that ethical responsiveness can arise prereflectively. He also makes a plausible case that reflection and self-interest can sometimes inhibit that responsiveness. But I’m not sure he quite establishes that cultivating Harding’s perceptual openness will therefore improve ethical responsiveness.
The more precise problem is that Ramm is asking different kinds of intellectual machinery to mesh. Sartre provides a fairly comprehensive philosophical framework from which an account of prereflective ethical responsiveness can be developed. Harding gives us something rather different: an experiential method for altering, or perhaps more accurately recognizing, our perception of the self/other relationship.
I can accept both without being certain that the second necessarily strengthens the first.
There is also a difficulty that Ramm himself acknowledges. Prereflective responses aren’t necessarily moral responses. Prejudice can be prereflective. Anger can be prereflective. A father’s instantaneous impulse to save his own child rather than two strangers can be prereflective, just as the stranger’s impulse to dive into a river after a drowning child can be. If the same mechanism can produce all of these responses, prereflectivity alone can’t tell us which response deserves moral authority.
That leaves me wanting a little more between Harding’s perceptual openness and the claim that such openness provides grounds for compassion or what Ramm nicely calls “structural kindness.” Sartre gives Ramm considerably more philosophical raw material to work with here than Harding does. There’s nothing wrong with bringing the two together, but I think that places a greater burden on the author to construct the bridge between them.
I liked the piece very much. I’m simply not convinced that the bridge is quite complete.
Thanks for your well-considered comment, David. For me the bridge is the dropping away of the subject–object division between self and other, which allows for more openness to others' needs. In a sense you are the other. Sartre gives us a spontaneous version of this, while Harding shows us how to recognise it intentionally. The idea is that noticing the lack of separation undermines the main source of conflict between myself and others.
This bears on your point about prereflective responses. You're right that prejudice and anger can be prereflective too. So it depends on what is driving these responses. Is it openness to others' needs, or something else? Many of our problematic responses depend on a felt division between myself and the other. Prejudice needs an "us" and a "them". Ego-defensive anger needs a self to defend. Seeing that I'm face-to-no-face with others arguably undercuts exactly that division. So the claim isn't that everything prereflective is good. It's that this recognition weakens a major source of these negative responses. Of course, I agree that we also need moral reasoning to challenge our prejudices and cognitive distortions. Both are important. But if that moral reasoning is coming from a false assumption of separation, it's not going to help us very much.
The most essential point is to test out the claims for yourself in your own life, rather than the 'intellectual machinery' itself. Do you find yourself less defensive, and less stuck in ego-defensive anger, when you practise noticing that you're face-to-no-face with someone? Do others seem more precious? This is an empirical question that I invite you to explore.
Thank you, Brentyn. I think your distinction gets us much closer. My hesitation was never with prereflective experience itself, but with granting it moral significance simply because it precedes reflection. Prejudice can arrive before thought just as readily as compassion can.
But I take your point that this isn't quite what you're arguing. The moral work, on your account, isn't being done by prereflection as such. It's being done by a particular experience: the weakening of the felt division between self and other. Moral reasoning can challenge our prejudices and cognitive distortions, while this recognition may undermine something more basic beneath them.
That leaves me with a different question. How do we get from the phenomenological claim to the moral one? If experiencing less separation between myself and another person makes me less defensive and more responsive to that person's needs, that's psychologically significant. But what gives that experience moral authority? Why should diminished separation itself tell us that we've become morally better rather than simply psychologically different?
I suspect that's where our disagreement, if there is one, actually lies. And it's a much more interesting disagreement than the one I thought we had.
Thank you, David. I'm not sure we're disagreeing as such, but your points do help to clarify my project. What I'm describing is an ethical practice, not an ethical theory. I'm drawing on the ancient Greek idea that philosophy is for living well (e.g., Hadot). My approach is moral phenomenology. So, in the spirit of Wittgenstein, when the metaphysical machinery starts up, I get off the bus. You're welcome to slot in whatever metaethics you like, as long as it takes lived moral experience seriously.
The article is about a practice for living more kindly and compassionately. It isn't about what is objectively right or wrong in the sense of some transcendent fact. That said, the world doesn't present itself as neutral. It has a moral texture. It places demands on us. The drowning child isn't a neutral fact. The child is presented as someone we ought to save. Of course, our moral perception can become distorted, and there may be competing demands. That's where moral training and reasoning come in. One of the main distorting factors, I think, is a distorted self-perception: the assumption that I am a separate thing, set against others. That assumption filters how others' needs show up for me, obscuring them or pushing them into the background. Seeing through this assumption is what the Headless method offers.
If I had to choose a moral framework, it would be virtue ethics, because of its focus on ethical practice and cultivating perception. That would be another topic, of course. The point of the article is that recognising my radical openness to others and their needs can foster greater ethical sensitivity and responsiveness. Again, this is a practice to test out, rather than merely think about.
I think we're considerably closer than I first thought, Brentynn. Once you describe this as an ethical practice rather than an ethical theory, much of my original concern disappears. I'm quite sympathetic to the idea of philosophy as something we practise rather than merely contemplate.
I do still have one reservation. You say the drowning child isn't a neutral fact because the child presents itself as someone we ought to save. Fair enough as phenomenology. That may indeed be how the situation presents itself to me. But you also say that our moral perception can be distorted.
I find the word "distorted" interesting because it seems to require some standard against which the distortion can be recognized. If I experience an obligation to save the child and somebody else doesn't, we certainly have different moral experiences. But if I call his perception distorted rather than simply different from mine, I seem to be saying that one of us is perceiving the situation more appropriately than the other.
Perhaps virtue ethics supplies what is needed there. If so, I suspect ethical theory and ethical practice may be a little harder to separate than your account initially suggests. That's probably where the small difference between us remains.
None of that detracts from the practice you're actually proposing, though. I can quite readily accept that changing my conception of self may change the way the needs of other people appear to me, and I think you've clarified very well what you're trying to accomplish.
Thank you for taking the time to give such a thoughtful reply. I've enjoyed the exchange, and you've given me something useful to think about.