The moral sense and the evolution of advertising, self-love (16 January 2007)

More of what precisely no one has been clamoring for: amateur analysis of 18th century moral philosophy. Prompted by the sudden popularity of Adam Smith's brand of morals (and the argument that it provides an ethical foundation for self-interested capitalism), I read An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, by Smith's friend and fellow Scot, David Hume. This volume, a reworking of a portion from Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, appeared in 1751, a dozen years before Smith's own work of moral philosophy, and Smith was almost certainly influenced by it. In the Enquiry, Hume is anxious to do two things: (1) refute the Hobbesan argument than men are motivated entirely by self-love and all behavior can be reduced to selfishness of some sort, and (2) rescue moral behavior from religiosity (which he regarded as a source of human strife and division) and metaphysical notions of the soul (i.e., we are good so we can avoid punishment in the afterlife), and found it in the inherent sociability of humankind. Though he is skeptical of the soul, Hume is no strict empiricist, as he is willing to posit an a priori moral sense akin to the one Hutcheson and Shaftesbury argued for. Hume was adamant that emotions and not reason guided our behavior, and that our untutored emotions were basically benevolent.

Though reason, when fully assisted and improved, be sufficient to instruct us in the pernicious or useful tendency of qualities and actions; it is not alone sufficient to produce any moral blame or approbation. Utility is only a tendency to a certain end; and were the end totally indifferent to us, we should feel the same indifference towards the means. It is requisite a sentiment should here display itself, in order to give a preference to the useful above the pernicious tendencies. This sentiment can be no other than a feeling for the happiness of mankind, and a resentment of their misery; since these are the different ends which virtue and vice have a tendency to promote. Here, therefore, reason instructs us in the several tendencies of actions, and humanity makes a distinction in favour of those which are useful and beneficial.

He then rejects separating reason from emotion, and proclaims emotion to be the source of all morality: "The hypothesis which we embrace is plain. It maintains, that morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary. We then proceed to examine a plain matter of fact, to wit, what actions have this influence: We consider all the circumstances, in which these actions agree: And thence endeavour to extract some general observations with regard to these sentiments." Reason enters this picture later, to rationalize the judgments emotion has already delivered. This sentiment has the bonus of being unmotivated by self-interest and is thus free of the taint of calculation: "Now as virtue is an end, and is desirable on its own account, without fee or reward, merely, for the immediate satisfaction which it conveys; it is requisite that there should be some sentiment, which it touches; some internal taste or feeling, or whatever you please to call it, which distinguishes moral good and evil, and which embraces the one and rejects the other." He presupposes that virtue must be its own reward, and reasons backward from that to come up with a moral sense that transmits its findings to our consciousness without being distorted by our immediate interests; this allows our instinctual concern for a happy society to override our immediate selfish interests in personal pleasure.

For Hume, "sentiment" and "humanity" are basically synonyms, and both refer to that moral sense that makes us feel something about observed behavior, and our own behavior, as though we were observing it from without (which becomes the basis of Smith's program). Because sentiment is so central to our humanity, those who can sharpen our sentiments -- poets and the like -- become crucial to social life. Here's how Hume puts it:

Virtue, placed at such a distance, is like a fixed star, which, though to the eye of reason, it may appear as luminous as the sun in his meridian, is so infinitely removed, as to affect the senses, neither with light nor heat. Bring this virtue nearer, by our acquaintance or connexion with the persons, or even by an eloquent recital of the case; our hearts are immediately caught, our sympathy enlivened, and our cool approbation converted into the warmest sentiments of friendship and regard. These seem necessary and infallible consequences of the general principles of human nature, as discovered in common life and practice.

This is all well and good -- a classic restatement of the humanist position that art is good for us and can illustrate morality. But I wonder whether this notion, were it widely distributed, would make us collectively susceptible to stimulation and excitation for its own sake, i.e. the blandishments that the contemporary entertainment industry provides (this was one pillar of reasoning behind my aborted dissertation). If anything that exercises our emotions and provokes a sentimental reaction makes our moral sense stronger, then the most sensationalistic materials are justified and should be preferred. Anti-intellectual culture is okay then as long as it moves us. Also, advertisements that manipulate our emotions are performing a good service for us as they persuade. Thus, we might accept that retail-friendly notion that it's pleasant to be persuaded (the way P.T. Barnum assumed his customers enjoyed being tricked and duped) and antisocial to resist the emotional manipulation, vicarious indulgence, and fantasy mongering advertisements inspire. (Notably, Adam Smith seems to correct for this, conjuring the notion of an impartial observer whose judgments we should imagine when evaluating our own moral behavior. The vicariousness remains but is subtly shifted to something more panoptic and less pleasurable.) Anything with strong emotional content is good,for its own sake, regardless what other ends it may be trying to serve. Hume might have believed that nothing morally reprehensible could inspire positive feelings in us, but he wasn't subjected to modern media's power and reach, and the incentives that media provides to subverting our emotional reactions.

In his efforts to separate morals from self-interest, Hume rejects what he deems a false slander on the power of imagination, that it can mask from us the true selfishness that motivates our interests in others. (Hume would have no patience for Gary Becker-like arguments about human capital or the irreducible rational self-interest behind all behavior -- for Hume, behavior is emotional and reactive first, then explained later.)

An EPICUREAN or a HOBBIST readily allows, that there is such a thing as friendship in the world, without hypocrisy or disguise; though he may attempt, by a philosophical chymistry, to resolve the elements of this passion, if I may so speak, into those of another, and explain every affection to be self-love, twisted and moulded, by a particular turn of imagination, into a variety of appearances. But as the same turn of imagination prevails not in every man, nor gives the same direction to the original passion; this is sufficient, even according to the selfish system, to make the widest difference in human characters, and denominate one man virtuous and humane, another vicious and meanly interested. I esteem the man, whose self-love, by whatever means, is so directed as to give him a concern for others, and render him serviceable to society: As I hate or despise him, who has no regard to any thing beyond his own gratifications and enjoyments. In vain would you suggest, that these characters, though seemingly opposite, are, at bottom, the same, and that a very inconsiderable turn of thought forms the whole difference between them.

Here Hume seems to suggest that character ("a turn of the imagination") is inborn and immutable, which corresponds to the quasi-Calvinist notion, ironically enough, of some people simply being born with a maladjusted moral sense, of not being among elect. Hume refers to common sense to dismiss the sophistic idea that virtue is really selfish in deep disguise. But he relies on a fairly subtle argument of his own to ultimately reject self-interest as the source of all (the Archimedian point, the transcendental signifier, etc.):

there are mental passions, by which we are impelled immediately to seek particular objects, such as fame, or power, or vengeance, without any regard to interest; and when these objects are attained, a pleasing enjoyment ensues, as the consequence of our indulged affections. Nature must, by the internal frame and constitution of the mind, give an original propensity to fame, ere we can reap any pleasure from that acquisition, or pursue it from motives of self-love, and a desire of happiness. If I have no vanity, I take no delight in praise: If I be void of ambition, power gives me no enjoyment: If I be not angry, the punishment of an adversary is totally indifferent to me. In all these cases, there is a passion, which points immediately to the object, and constitutes it our good or happiness; as there are other secondary passions, which afterwards arise, and pursue it as a part of our happiness, when once it is constituted such by our original affections. Were there no appetite of any kind antecedent to self-love, that propensity could scarcely ever exert itself; because we should, in that case, have felt few and slender pains or pleasures, and have little misery or happiness to avoid or to pursue.

This is like proto-deconstruction: any self-interested motive needs to refer back to some previous source of enjoyment to have any meaning; there needs to be a self first to motivate self-interest, so self-interest can't be at the root of things. There needs to be inborn motives toward fame, reputation, pleasure, etc., that precede self-interest and motivate us to construct the rest of the preferences that build up our character and our motivations. Then Hume suggests benevolence is one of these human inclinations that precede the formation of a self. We have to be able to love before we can be consumed with self-love, and if HUme is right, than we love others first and thereby learn how to love ourselves.

UPDATE:
Brad DeLong links to this article by V.S. Ramachandran offering a neurological basis for our conceiving of others before developing a sense of self:

It is often tacitly assumed that the uniquely human ability to construct a "theory of other minds" or "TOM" (seeing the world from the others point of view; "mind reading", figuring out what someone is up to, etc.) must come after an already pre-existing sense of self. I am arguing that the exact opposite is true; the TOM evolved first in response to social needs and then later, as an unexpected bonus, came the ability to introspect on your own thoughts and intentions.

Ramachandran's explanation for this is, needless to say, complicated, involving analysis of different kinds of neurons and their functions, but it leads him to conclude "that two seemingly contradictory aspects of self — its the individuation and intense privacy vs. its social reciprocity — may complement each other and arise from the same neural mechanism, mirror neurons." Pushing this further, reciprocity enables self-interest, and then selfishness. We need others to teach us how to love ourselves too much.

Adam Smith's moral philosophy (9 January 2007)

There seems to be a movement afoot among conservative thinkers (okay, maybe it's just P.J. O'Rourke and economic journalist David Warsh) to rehabilitate Adam Smith (as if this were necessary), protect him from various accusations of shallow and simplistic thinking about human behavior and present him as more than a mere tool for capitalist ideologues by directing attention at his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, an analysis of what motivates people and organizes social formations. This attempt may be part of a broader initiative to create a body of conservative theory humanities students can draw on to counter the leftist thinkers typically enshrined in English departments with whom one must be familiar to be taken seriously. Latching on to conservative thought (the most sophisticated and interesting of which is perhaps embedded in classical economics texts) may become a new way for post-docs to distinguish themselves and sell themselves on the ever-tightening job market; it makes one stand out in a way that would likely appeal to administrators if not old-guard professors.

I became interested in Moral Sentiments because I was researching sentimentality as spectacle/experential consumer good in 18th-century literature -- Sterne's Sentimental Journey is the most obvious example of this, where the narrator travels around in search of pathetic spectacles that can move him to a pleasing feeling of pity and condescension. It seemed to me that a specialized jargon, learned from reading novels, was necessary for this transformation of human feeling into commodity to happen. People sought these pity parties, perhaps, because of the popularization of one strand of moral philosophy that postulated an inborn "moral sense" akin to touch or smell that responded solely to moral and ethical stimuli. Shaftesbury's Characteristics is perhaps where this notion gets its most definitive expression, though all the "man of feeling" books ultimately borrow from him or his follower, Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson. Since humans are endowed with innate moral sense, we can automatically detect right from wrong instinctually -- thus humankind is basically benevolent, not the malevolent brutes of Hobbesean's scheme. How do we know good? We feel it as a quasi-Platonic form of beauty: Beauty and virtue are inherently aligned, thus one can demonstrate one's virtuousness by becoming a connoisseur of beautiful things. The man of feeling is essentially a connoisseur of beautiful sentiments -- pity, sacrifice, charity, etc. -- instrumentalized to demonstrate an inner worth that justifies either his social position or his right to social mobility. The moral sense also manifests in polite behavior, which is the public, social expression of the moral sense in action -- this transforms the upper class habitus into an elaborate demonstration of inner nobility and the inherent refinement of the aristocratic inner character. The commoner's lack of understanding of morals is not so much a lack of training as a lack of innate moral sense.

Since our instinctual emotions are benevolent, the stronger we feel them (and thus the more ostentatiously we display them) the more virtuous we are. From this point of view morality is a reaction rather than a process of judgment. There is no need for a method of moral reasoning; what's needed instead is practice in responding immediately with one's heart in the proper histrionic way to various highly emotional events -- death, the suffering of the poor, the orphaned children, women in distress, abandoned women, etc. Society life thus became a systematic pursuit of occasions to exhibit one's moral "sensibility" as it soon became known. Sensibility was similar to the Renaissance notion of sprezzatura, an instinctual charisma and propriety, but was more passive, with more emphasis on finely wrought feelings in response to witnessed situations. Sensibility is a matter of spectatorship and reaction -- which is what relates it to modern entertainment industry, which thrives of passive spectatorship and the delectation of contrived emotional experiences for their own sake.

Hence the development of the commercial novel: Novels capitalized on the fantasy of being able to find oneself in situations that called for strong and unrestrained expression on one's emotions and offered many opportunities to demonstrate a "feeling heart" by vicariously identifying with the fictional character's sufferings. Weeping over a book, for a time, served as proof of one's goodness, was seen as a kind of emotional charitableness. Novels became testing devices -- if your heart didn't respond, your moral sense might just be weak and you might not be as moral as you hoped. Of course, the converse always happened -- it was all too easy (and satisfying) to let the novel provoke sympathetic tears and prove your inner worth (a process which in turn provoked much mockery from skeptics -- often dramatists, essayists and reviewers). Every aspiring novelist (and readers too) learned the grammar of emotional prose, the key words and scenarios which were to trigger feelings in the reader.

What permits this whole system was the magical property of sympathy, by which we automatically relate to another person's feelings, feel them ourselves and act accordingly. Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments ties into the story here, because it adopts the property of sympathy (defined as an instinctive, vicarious appreciation for the observed feelings of others -- the natural and irresistible human ability to put oneself in another's shoes) as its fundamental principle. This differs from the innate moral sense in that Smith sees sympathy as a product of reasoning your way into the feelings of others through a comparison with what you yourself would feel in the same situation. And what is good is a matter of consensus -- intimations of what will become "spontaneous order." Following Hutcheson, Smith's innovation was to attempt to fuse the Hobbesan view of man's innate selfishness with Shaftesbury's view of human benevolence and yield enlightened self-interest. Because we can't help but feel what others feel, it becomes part of our selfish interest to make them feel good -- Smith even opens his work with the observation that despite what may be convenient to us, our own feelings are invariably mixed up with what we perceive of others' feelings, so essentially we have an inescapable interest in the emotional lives of our fellow men.

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous or the humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.

This creates a kind of proto-panopticon scenario: Since how we all affect each other by the kind of feelings we display, it behooves us to imagine someone is always watching us, and to act with that cool impartial observer's likely reactions in mind.

The process of continual comparison with others, along with the assumption of a constant observer who embodies our ideal (likely modeled on the sort of person society most praises -- the privileged person with all the manners of polite society) provides a rationale for what will become, in Veblen's terms, invidious comparison, where one measures one's own prosperity against that of peers and yields perpetual dissatisfaction -- the hedonic treadmill. We compare ourselves to those above us (or now, the lifestyle celebrated in ads and entertainment) and ceaselessly strive to catch up to it, but it keeps moving beyond us. In generalMoral Sentiments supplies a guide to the psychological framework necessary to sustain not just a capitalist society but a consumer society; it advocates conformism and a habit of spectatorship as premises of its moral system, and tries to rationalize selfishness as reasonability. It also promotes endless striving for the approval of others on the grounds of material comparisons (once emotions are reified) as the meaning of life. It's not too hard to see the ways these ideas have mutated and survived in our own culture.