Archive for the 'Ethics' category

Death, Love and Groundhog Day

Apr 10 2011 Published by under Ethics

Groundhog Day (1993) is a dark comedy co-written and directed by Harold Ramis (Caddyshack, Ghostbusters, Analyze This) about a weatherman named Phil Connors (Bill Murray), based in Pittsburgh, who travels annually — and reluctantly — to Punxsutawney to broadcast live from the Groundhog Day festivities at Gobbler’s Nob, PA. Phil is egotistical, condescending, sarcastic, and terminally bored. With him is a new producer, the attractive and wholesome Rita (model/actress Andie MacDowell, whose breakout role was the repressed housewife in Sex, Lies and Videotape. She’s best known today as the face of L’Oreal), and his long suffering cameraman, Larry (Chris Elliott).

Phil sneers his way through the assignment:

Television really fails to capture the true excitement… of a large squirrel predicting the weather. I, for one, am very grateful to have been here.

But he’s be waylaid on his way out of town by a blizzard which he, a weatherman, failed to forecast. He returns to his quaint b&b in Punxsutawney, and awakens the next morning, eager to get the hell out of dodge.

But a funny thing has happened. As he hears the same radio tune (“I Got You Babe” by Sonny and Cher), and inane DJ banter, and looks out the hotel room window to see the same folks scurrying the same way to Gobbler’s Nob, he realizes it’s February 2 again. At first Phil can’t believe it. But, sure enough, he relives Groundhog Day over and over, and over and over, and over.

Phil’s attitude towards his predicament is at first negative. As the initial days pass, he’s confused, disbelieving, and then panicked. Trapped as he is, none of his goals, from the short term (getting out of podunk Punxsutawney and back to Pittsburgh) to the long term (getting hired by a big TV network) can possibly be realized.

But after a night out drinking with a couple of local guys at a bowling alley, Phil has an epiphany: all of his life he has, more or less, followed the rules. But if the slate is wiped clean every morning, he can do whatever he wants with no consequences. He decides that “I’m not going to live by their rules anymore.” He plays chicken with a freight train, drives into a mailbox, mocks a police officer, punches an annoying acquaintance, and takes up smoking and eating to excess. It doesn’t take him long to get craftier, setting long term plans in motion to steal money and seduce local women (by casually introducing himself one day, and using the information he learns about them to seduce them the next).

We catch the gist of Phil’s attitude by the tail end of his Groundhog Day speech:

…. who, as legend has it, can predict the coming of an early spring. The question we have to ask ourselves today is, “Does Phil feel lucky?”

"Don't drive angry!"

Eventually, the allure unbridled hedonism wears off and Phil becomes depressed. He tries to kill himself in any number of hilarious and ingenious ways, from stealing Punxsutawney Phil and driving into them both into a quarry, to trying to electrocute himself with the b&b’s toaster and his bathroom tub. “I’ve killed myself so many times, I don’t even exist anymore.” he complains. He becomes unkempt and listless. When he raises the microphone to his mouth as groundhog Phil yet again sees his shadow, he intones:

You want a prediction about the weather, you’re asking the wrong Phil. I’ll give you a winter prediction: It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.

When repeated attempts at suicide fail, Phil becomes resigned to his fate. And then, a funny thing happens. He more or less accepts it. He decides to take up piano and ice sculpting. He gets to know the locals. He begins to appreciate Rita, and even Larry, as fellow professionals and people.

In case you are looking for a sure sign that this film is a geek cult classic, check out this post which figures out exactly how many days Phil was stuck, with tables and charts (the answer? 8 years, 8 months, and 16 days). And for the second sign that Groundhog Day is a geek classic, the director actually responded:

Director Harold Ramis responded: “I think the 10-year estimate is too short. It takes at least 10 years to get good at anything, and, allotting for the down time and misguided years he spent, it had to be more like 30 or 40 years…

By the end of the film, Phil has not only become an expert musician, card thrower, and French speaker, but he’s become good at life. He’s kind, caring, and concerned about others. His career is a distant second to other sources of meaning. He acknowledges his own imperfection and is less likely to point out flaws in others. He recognizes the value in human relationships, from close friendship to large community. He’s even heroic, changing flat tires, helping kids down from trees, and saving lives and marriages.

Again, his attitude is reflected in his reporting:

When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn’t imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter.

I screened this film for my students recently, in place of another film I usually show: The Seventh Seal. We had just read some Sartre (Basically, this, but a better translation) and some Camus (the essay, The Myth of Sisyphus). It’s an ethics course, but I don’t teach existentialism as an ethic (after all these years, I am still not sure how one would). It’s easier for me to think of it as a pre-ethical or extra-ethical inquiry. That we have just read Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, which pretty much questions the whole business of morality, helps students understand the much more expansive (or foundational) understanding of an “ethics” that modern French philosophers use.

I’ll focus on Sisyphus here. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus pissed off the gods, and was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down, for all eternity. Sisyphus earned this particular punishment by beating the gods at their own game. He was extremely clever, even getting the better of Zeus on at least one occasion, and Zeus didn’t take kindly to it. After a mortal lifetime of seeing his myriad diabolical plans fulfilled, and his enemies foiled, eternal futility and fruitlessness was a perfect punishment for Sisyphus. As per usual, Zeus wins in the end.

Camus used the myth of Sisyphus as an allegory of the human condition. For Camus, the fundamental philosophical problem was the problem of suicide. That is, given that we don’t have to live, why should we? Sure, philosophers spend lots of time on other problems, like whether God exists, and the question of identity, but for Camus, none of that matters if we can’t get a satisfactory answer to the question of whether life is worth living.

For most people, a serious meditation on whether to continue living might be a cause for concern. But for Camus, it’s actually a sign of good existential health. He describes the feeling of “a universe divested of illusions and lights” as an exile status (a major theme in his fiction, for example, in The Stranger).

For most of us, most of the time, we are just sort of going through the motions of life. Camus called this “everyday sleep”. We tend to focus strongly on the future, without realizing that being on a timeline means we are headed towards death. Phil Connors was in this state, with his refusal to be fully participant in the present, and his focus on the time when he’d be hired by a big network.

But once the alienation occurs — and for Phil it occurred through external, supernatural means of a day actually repeating itself — we are open to a recognition of the absurdity of the world. When existentialists talked about absurdity, it wasn’t to say the world means nothing and everything is a joke. Quite the contrary. They felt that “crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.” We have to recognize that there is no prior meaning to our existence, or to the existence of anything, in order to open the possibility of the creation of meaning. The world is dense and strange. It is gratuitous, extra. There is no reason for any of it. It, and us, may as well not have existed.

Once we have this realization, we have a couple of choices (actually, 3, but I exclude one here). As Rita says in the film,  ”I don’t know, Phil. Maybe it’s not a curse. It just depends on how you look at it.” We can either commit suicide, or we can recover through continuous revolt. To commit suicide is certainly one way of settling the absurd. Phil Connors tries it — several times. But, for Camus, suicide is the total acceptance of the fact that life has no meaning. It’s resignation. It’s the poorer choice.

Instead, Camus recommends a life of revolt. In revolt, one always has in mind the absurdity of life (we don’t go back to sleep), but one never gives in to it. We recognize our fundamental freedom, which releases us from everything unimportant, and helps crystallize our “passionate attention.” So, when Phil realizes he can do whatever he wants with no consequence, he plays around with society’s rules, but doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of his fundamental existential freedom. We think we are free, but our conception of what freedom is is so limited (to choose this or that college, this or that dessert, this or that shirt, this or that job, this or that partner) we really have no idea what freedom means. In the film, Phil Connors’s inability to kill himself is one way to illustrate his lack of freedom. It’s the film’s way of demonstrating how we give control of ourselves up to the habits and customs of daily life.

Passion is the third component of a life of revolt. Someone who embraces the absurd is free to be passionate, to seek rich and diverse experiences. This is what Phil does when he takes up piano, ice sculpting, and card throwing. It’s also what he does when he takes up love over seduction. Sisyphus seems pitiable and tragic, and he is, but he’s also very much like us. On a prosaic level, we do the same thing every day, too. We get up, shower, have coffee, make breakfast, go to work, come home, eat dinner, watch TV or read, sleep, and do it again. But on a deeper level, like us, Sisyphus’s fate is his choice (his punishment fits perfectly the life he chose for himself). He wouldn’t have the punishment if he were not conscious and free — it’s the conscious, temporal piece that makes it so unbearable. But without consciousness, there is no human being. Sisyphus is an absurd hero for Camus. He recognizes how pointless this rolling of the rock up this hill thing is. But he does it anyway, with passion, because he knows “his rock is this thing”:

He concludes that all is well. This universe without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

In the film, the passionate attention Phil finds is love for Rita. Rita is a world that has opened up for him, like the atoms of a stone opened a world for Sisyphus. As Phil says to her:

You like boats, but not the ocean. You go to a mountain lake in the summer with your family. There’s a long, wooden dock and a boathouse… with boards missing from the roof… and a place you used to crawl underneath to be alone. You’re a sucker for French poetry and rhinestones. You’re very generous. You’re kind to strangers and children. And when you stand in the snow, you look like an angel.

As a romance reader, I liked the way Phil’s character transformation is charted by his relationships with women, and with Rita in particular. This movie is yet another example of how the romance is often more than a love story.

As a feminist, I’m not entirely thrilled with the way women are portrayed in this film, and Rita is a too perfect for me to like her (she drinks to world peace, for pete’s sakes) and too passive. Also, Phil’s transformation is a bit too thorough (although, OTOH, (a) it’s a comedy, and (b) actor Murray cannot help but seem a little off, no matter how sincere he tries to be). But I really like this movie, and I enjoyed watching it with my students and exploring existentialist themes. I’ll have a tough choice next year when I have to pick between Bergman and Ramis.

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Review: Bad Case of Loving You, by Laney Cairo

Dec 22 2010 Published by under 8 Nights of Ham/mukah, Ethics, Reviews

Bad Case of Loving You is an erotic m/m romance by Laney Cairo. You can purchase it from Torquere Press or read a sample here. I read it on the recommendation of several romance readers whose opinions I trust, and I’m glad I did, but I have some reservations about the actions of one of the heroes. Here’s the blurb:

Matthew is a medical student, trying to ignore his various roommates’ wild parties and get through his classes. Andrew is his instructor, a doctor at a prestigious British hospital. They’re not supposed to be attracted to each other, but they can’t deny their undeniable chemistry.

They come together with a heat that surprises them both, and through doctor’s strikes, dealing with Andrew’s teenaged son, and hospital red tape, Andrew and Matthew learn to live, and love together. Is their relationship just what the doctor ordered?

Mature readers continue after the jump…
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Sexual Desire

Dec 16 2010 Published by under Ethics, Genre musings

One of the most popular readings I assigned this semester was “Sexual Desire”, by Chistopher Hamilton (“Sexual Desire: Some Philosophical Reflections”, Richmond Journal of Philosophy,Vol 7, Summer 2004). He is a lecturer at King’s College London. Since romances have a little something to do with sexual desire, I thought I would share a bit about it here.

Hamilton, by the way, who has strong research interests in the intersection of philosophy and literature, is also a “philosophy misery memoirist” whose latest book is Middle Age (Guardian review here). Hamilton was profiled last year in the Independent UK.

In this essay, Hamilton starts with what he considers “the most profound philosophical account of sexual desire”,  Jean-Paul Sartre’s.  In L’Être et le néant [Being and Nothingness], Sartre rejects the idea that sexual desire is just about pleasure. Normally sexual desire attaches itself to an object. Otherwise, masturbation would be as fun. Remember the scene in Sex and the City (Hot Child in the City, Season 3, Episode 15) when Charlotte finds husband Trey  — who has had trouble getting aroused — masturbating in the bathroom?

Later during a visit to the therapist…

Charlotte: He said he wasn’t a sexual person!
Trey: It wasn’t sexual! It was tension release. It helps me sleep.
Therapist: I understand. This may be difficult, Trey, but I want you to tell me specifically which magazine you were using.
Trey and Charlotte in unison: Juggs.
Therapist: All right. We can try and see this as a positive thing.
Charlotte: How? How is this a positive thing?
Therapist: Trey was masturbating to Juggs. At least we know he isn’t gay.
Trey: Excuse me, what exactly is the problem here? It was tension release, it had nothing to do with my wife.
Therapist: Interesting choice of words, Trey. Maybe that’s the problem. We have to find a way to integrate your wife into your sexual routine.
Trey: How are we supposed to do that?

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“Unsavory Seduction”

Nov 02 2010 Published by under Ethics

I assigned an article called “Unsavory Seduction” by Eric Cave (Ethic Theory Moral Prac (2009) 12:235–245, quotations protected under Fair Use) to my students in Contemporary Moral Problems. We have a unit on sexual ethics, and I thought it would be interesting to consider the question of problematic seduction.

Cave says that while know that regular seduction is morally ok, and that rape is morally bad, there is a middle category of “provisionally immoral” seduction, which he calls “unsavory seduction”,  the unsavoriness of which is actually hard to explain. He gives some examples of what he means:

Since there is so much discussion among romance readers about forced seduction, which also seems to function as a sort of middle moral category, I thought I would share with readers a synopsis of Cave’s argument. Of course, my interpretation is subject to flaws, so if you are interested in this topic, I encourage you to get a copy of the article. It is not long and does not presuppose much background in philosophy (two of the reasons I assigned it to 100 level students).

Cave begins by defining the genus, seduction, of which forced seduction is a species. He starts with: “Sexual seduction can be minimally characterized as one person’s purposeful attempt to get another, initially unwilling, to have sex.” (236) Unlike rape, a seduction involves bringing a person from unwillingness to willingness, psychologically, without using force. And it has to be sexual willingness. So, for example, if Nate offers Ann a million bucks to have sex, and she finds him repulsive, but does it for the money (let’s assume Ann is not impoverished enough to create a consent problem here. Think of Ann as having a comfortable middle class life.), Nate has gotten willingness, but not sexual willingness. So sexual willingness is, “willingness to have sex based on sexual desire”, which is “a motivation, conscious or unconscious, to experience a certain sort of sui generis pleasure.” (237). (When analytic philosophers use sui generis, it means of its own kind, irreducible, cannot be included in a wider concept.)

Now, the seducer has to do this by some means other than sound arguments, a method we might call, not seduction, but “rational sexual persuasion.” [It's not clear why this restriction is necessary. There are some people in the world who probably could get very turned on by the right kind of elegant argument in favor of sex, philosophers being prime suspects. But this hardly seems "unsavory", so calling it seduction would create a counterexample.]

The author then makes a comment that might be of particular interest to romance readers. In the process of sketching a defense of the claim that this definition of seduction includes a range of things, from garden variety seduction to rape, he notes that “impersonating a target’s lover” would be an example of the latter. I asked folks on Twitter, and it did not take long to come up with a couple of examples. @JanetNorCal wrote that in Mary Balogh’s Truly and Daring Masquerade, the heroines slept with X thinking — thanks to Y’s deliberate misleading –  they are sleeping with Y. And @vi_dao suggested Eloisa James’ The Taming of the Duke.

Ok, so what is manipulative, exactly, about unsavory seduction? Unlike reasoning, which aims at the target’s concerns (concerns being motivations of which she is conscious, and to which she assigns value, whether positive or negative), “motive manipulation …  bypass[es] her existing concerns to engage motives of which she is unaware or towards which she is indifferent, her non-concern motives. … Pulling these strands together, we have it that unsavory seduction is one person’s purposeful attempt to get another to engage in sex by bypassing her concerns to induce changes in her motives sufficient to convert initial sexual unwillingness to willingness to have sex based on sexual desire.” (237-8)

“So described, unsavory seduction includes such things as stoking a latent and unconscious sexual desire and engaging unconscious or unvalued non-sexual motives so as to generate, amplify, or unblock conscious or unconscious sexual desire. It does not include such things as stoking a conscious, valued sexual desire, or engaging an agent’s concerns so as to generate, amplify, or unblock conscious or unconscious sexual desire. Generally speaking, what sets unsavory seducers apart from garden-variety sexual seducers is that they accomplish a conversion to sexual willingness by managing the motives of those they target in a way that bypasses their consciously-held, motivationally-charged valuations.”(238)

Now that we know what it is, what is wrong with unsavory seduction? The author rejects harm, corruption, and nonconsent, because there could be cases in which unsavory seduction neither harms nor corrupts, and cases in which it is consensual, yet we would still want to say it is wrong. He ends up claiming the unsavory seduction undermines the target’s autonomy by doing things which undermine her ability to reflect on and manage her own motivations. Autonomy is very important in moral philosophy, and these days philosophers think of it not in terms of certain substantive decisions a person might make (for example,” a woman with a career is autonomous but a SAHM is not”) but in terms of the procedure used to make that choice, the history of her motives (so a woman who chooses a career might lack autonomy depending on how that choice was made). When a person chooses autonomously, she is at once realizing a key ethical value, and also making decisions for which she can be held responsible, for good or for ill. Autonomy is also closely related to integrity.

Unsavory seduction is only provisionally morally wrong, unlike rape, which is categorically morally wrong. And what’s the provision? That the unsavory seduction does not realize some more important moral goal. The author does not suggest what that more important goal might be.

Some things I will discuss with my students include:

–I wonder, does this boil down in some sense to a consent theory? Except that instead of straight consent, it is higher order consent. The target has to want to want to have sex with the seducer in order for the seduction to be savory, i.e. consented.

–Is there a subtle aligning of conscious/endorsed/morally good motives, and conversely, of unconscious/unendorsed/bad motives, and does it hold up? So, for example, what is wrong with stoking or unblocking an unconscious sexual desire? So much of the romance genre involves doing just that! Suppose I have an unconscious desire to leave philosophy and become a romance writer. Why isn;t it good for me to have someone stoke that desire? It’s only bad if we have already decided there is something wrong with being a romance writer.

–Cave discusses Kierkegaard’s example of Johannes’s seduction of Cordelia in Kierkegaard’s Diary of A Seducer ( published as a novella, it is actually part of the Danish philosopher’s epic Either/Or)Cave claims that what makes Johannes’s seduction of Cordelia morally problematic is that he messes with her psychologically, getting her to reject middle class norms of sexual propriety and want to have sex with him. But in this kind of seduction, as well as in Valmont’s, it seems to me that deception is a large moral issue. After all, there are a lot of social norms that are oppressive of feminine sexuality, and should really be rejected.

But I guess Cave would say the deception is just a tool for the enacting of the moral wrong, which is that Johannes and Valmont have ensured that the way Cordelia and Madame de Tourvel come to reject their values (“good motives” in Cave’s language) — undermines their autonomy.

And that brings me to forced seduction in romance. Maybe one of the reasons it works for many readers is that it is often not “unsavory” in the sense Cave defines. That is, the forced seduction is not, ultimately, autonomy undermining, but autonomy enhancing (although I hasten to add it is often autonomy restricting and worse).

And, even if it is unsavory, it can serve a larger moral good — the development of an everlasting love which is fulfilling and respectful and egalitarian. I always wanted Valmont and de Tourvel to ride off into the sunset. He thought he was lying through his teeth when he asked her to help him be a better person, but he wasn’t, and she did. What do you think?

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What Does The Romance Genre Say About the Good Life?

Aug 10 2010 Published by under Ethics, Genre musings

I haven’t made you work in while, have I? Grab some coffee, gingko biloba, Adderall (kidding!) or do your pranayama cleansing breath, because we are going to do some philosophy today.

I gave a paper recently, the theme of which was “What is the Good?”. My contribution focused on the connection between health and the good. But on the ride home, as I was listening to my audio of Jo Goodman’s Everything I Ever Wanted (a Compass Club book — South’s story, with the actress India Parr. Review coming.) I started to think about whether there is a take or a vision of the good life that pervades the genre.

In part A of this post, I give you some background on philosophical approaches to well-being. In part B, I talk about the view of the good life found in the romance genre. If you’re pressed for time or not feeling very philosophical today, I think skipping to part B will work just fine.

A. In philosophy, there are three basic types of theories about the good life, or well-being:

1. Hedonism — a hedonist thinks there is but one thing that determines how well your life is going, and that’s pleasure. As Jeremy Bentham wrote, in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: ‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do’. Bentham tended to think of pleasure as a kind of sensation that pervades all different kinds of things we enjoy, and believed that the more pleasure we could experience, the better our lives would be.It didn’t matter much what the pleasure was. Or, as Bentham put it, “pushpin is as good as poetry.”

There are a number of problems with this view, the first being that it doesn’t feel the same when we experience different kinds of pleasurable activities. Another problem is that it seems to lead to the conclusion that the beings with the simplest lives will have the best lives, such that if you could change places with a lower life form that  — say, a clam — you should.

One solution is to claim, as John Stuart Mill did, that not all pleasures are equal. The best life is really the one with the most higher pleasures, by which he meant pleasures of the intellect. It is not true, Mill said, that people would consent to be changed into a clam or a swine, even if they knew the clam or swine had a more contented life, because most people prefer a life with the kinds of pleasures only humans an experience, like friendship, love, reading, great food, spirituality, walking, music, fulfilling work, etc. If our pursuit of the higher pleasures means we get frustrated more, or have less overall contentment, so be it. It is still a better life from a hedonist’s point of view because the pleasures we do get outweigh those elementary pleasures a swine enjoys.

Whether Mill’s version is really still hedonism is something philosophers argue about.

2. Desire theories are motivated by a seemingly insurmountable problem with hedonism, which is that if hedonism is true, it looks like you could be put into an “experience machine”, which simulated any of the experiences that give you pleasure (including the higher pleasures of which Mill wrote) and that would have to count as equally good as actually experiencing those things. That is, if your well-being is determined solely by how you feel, inside, and not by the causes of the those feelings (i.e. really writing a great novel, versus being hooked up to a virtual reality machine that makes you feel just the same) then we have no way to say the person who spends her life in an experience machine is worse off than the person who really has all those great experiences. And we want to say that, I think.

So maybe it’s not the pleasure, but the satisfaction of the desire.  And the only thing that will really satisfy your desire to be a great author is writing a great book. Taking a pill or getting into a machine that simulates the feeling will not satisfy the desire.

Desire theories say your life is going well is your desires are satisfied. A really simple version won’t work, though, because we all have desires that should not be satisfied if we really want to be happy. So, for example, satisfying the desire to punch someone in the face, or grab a stranger’s butt, or do something rash or downright tragic — like an adolescent suicide — is not a desire that should be satisfied.

So desire theorists modify the theory to say that your desires should be informed (you wouldn’t really desire that dangerous drug if you knew how addicting/harmful it is, for example, or you wouldn’t desire to go out with that cue guy if you knew he was a serial killer. Still, though, if you really hols this theory about well-being, you have to accept that any informed desire contributes to someone’s well-being, even a really odd one, like a brilliant mathematician who is not mentally ill choosing to count blades of grass all day, every day.

For a desire theory to work, the person has to desire the thing for it to contribute to her well-being. So if the brilliant mathematician is informed, and not mentally ill, and desires the grass counting, then that’s the good life for her, and there’s nothing we can say about it. We might think that her working as a mathematician would better contribute to her well-being than sitting outside the math lab counting blades of grass, buy if SHE doesn’t desire work as a mathematician, then it doesn’t contribute to her well-being, no matter what others might think.

This kind of situation makes many people question “desire theories”. And it points to a seemingly deeper problem: if I want to be a great novelist, what I think is good about that is the great novel, not my desire to write one. My feeling good at having the desire satisfied is a result of the fact that I have created or done something good. What’s “good” isn’t that my desire is satisfied. These theories view the satisfaction of the desire as what’s “good”, but for many people, what’s “good” is independent of our desires … it’s the desired thing or state of affairs itself.

3. Taking off from that insight, we have what are often called “objective list” theories. As the name implies, these theories say that our well-being consists in a list of things, and that these things are independently, objectively good, such that if someone doesn’t desire them, no matter — they still contribute to that person;s well-being.

Parenting involves a lot of objective list making. I know that eating their vegetables and brushing their teeth and limiting their time on the computer is good for my kids, regardless of what they think, prefer, or desire. These things contribute to their good, period, so I enforce them. Think also of loved ones or friends you may have thought of as making a mistake: marrying the wrong person, taking illicit drugs, quitting school, etc.  They are satisfying their own preferences and fulfilling their desires, but you try to convince them that their choices will not be good for them. Maybe you make arguments and give reasons. In such cases, you are acting like a person who believes in an objective list theory of the good.

A lot of people have a very negative reaction to this kind of theory of well-being. they say that everybody decides for themselves what contributes to their own well-being — it’s totally subjective. And besides, how can one theory fit all humans? We are all so different!

One response is that while objective list theories tend to be paint in broad strokes. You might have a list that includes things like health, friendship, justice, and happiness, but individuals can specify for themselves exactly how each good contributes to their own well-being.

Take “health”, for example: what is it? Is a gifted young runner with a progressive disease who will lose her leg eventually, who asks for an early amputation and a prosthetic so she can start training for the Olympics making a healthful decision? We have to figure this out. And autonomy is on most objective lists. So, for example, when my kids become adults, it will be a part of their well-being to feel in control of their lives, free from the undue interference of their meddling mother.  To go back to the health example, respect for autonomy is why we let patients make their own health care decisions, even those that might compromise their health. Yes, health is a value, but so is directing your own life. Finding the balance between respecting your kids’ autonomy and protecting them is one of the challenges in parenting.

Now, what goes on the list? How do we know? Well, there are a few different approaches one might take. One approach I am sympathetic to is championed by Martha Nussbaum. It’s called the capabilities approach, and it begins by asking the kind of question Aristotle would ask:  what activities typically performed by human beings are so central that they seem definitive of a truly human life?

In answer to this question, she ends up with a list that includes: a life of normal human length, bodily health and integrity, senses, imagination and thought, practical reason, affiliation, getting along with living plants and animals, and autonomy (control over your environment, both political and material). The reason she uses the term “capabilities” is to allow that some people might not choose to actualize all of these possibilities, but they should at least have the chance to. So, for example, someone can choose as an adult to never use her imagination, but a society that actively discouraged, or even failed to encourage (for example by cutting all funding for art and literature in schools and elsewhere), citizens to use their imaginations would be thwarting a basic condition of human well-being.

But, in general, the way you come up with an account of the good is via intuition, reflection, and conversation. It’s not written in the stars. And I don’t think anyone can get through life without reflecting at least occasionally on whether their life is going well. To ask yourself if your life is going well is to presuppose some account of the good. I think this asking this question about our lives is a unique and vital human capacity.

B. The vision of the good in romance novels

I’m just going to make some suggestions here, with minimal argument, and I invite you to add to them, or disagree with me.

I think, in general, we get an objective list account of the good in romance novels. Think of all those rakes that need reforming — this is not hedonism. I could be persuaded that a sophisticated desire theory fits, but the commitment to love and marriage is so strong that I can hardly think of a happily single character in romance fiction. It’s never enough that the heroine and hero end up with an HEA: we have secondary romances, and sequel after sequel in which all the brothers and sisters and cousins and friends get married. EVERYONE must be happily in love.

So, I think an objective list account fits, and I think that romance novels portray a world in which romantic love is a necessary condition for the good life. But not just fleeting romantic love: it has to be enduring, part of a very deep emotional, supportive bond. Not only that, but it has to include fantastic sex. So, it’s a very robust conception of romantic love. Love in romance novels is not just a feeling (“I’m in love love loooooove”), but a way of life.

I also think material welfare is a key component of most romance novels. And not just material comfort, but significant wealth. Pretty much the entire subgenre of historical romance is confined to the peerage (and if one partner isn’t, then s/he is either (a) elevated by the end (she was a duchess all along!), or (b) marries up. I’ve never read historical wherein the poor partner drags the rich partner down to the gutter with her. And then there’s those Harlequin Presents with all the sheiks and billionaires.

Of course, you do have the contemps, especially single titles, but also Blazes, Superromance, and other Harlequin lines, that have middle class couples. And urban fantasy tends to be populated with scavenging nothing-but-her-dagger-and-tramp-stamp-to-her-name heroines. (Someone should write a paper on the economic landscape of UF romance). But in the main, middle class (by which I mean salaried, home/condo and car owning, not pay check to paycheck living) and up is where most heroes and heroines end up.

Another key component is physical and mental health. Theoretically, this needs to be distinguished from freedom from disability, because disability can coincide with otherwise excellent health. But in practice, most heroes and heroines live both healthful and disability-free lives. Sometimes, it’s a major part of the story to bring the hero and heroine back to a state of complete health, whether it’s getting over PTSD, addiction, battle wounds, smallpox, a curse, etc. I can think of a few books in which disability persists to the last page, but none in which disease or general ill health do.

While physical beauty is not part of health in my opinion (indeed, the things we do to achieve physical beauty often have deleterious effects on our health), I’ll stick it in here, because the hero and heroine are usually good looking. At worst, they are “plain” at the start and their beauty grows in their lover’s eyes as the book progresses. But even in those cases, the reader is usually cued in to the fact that the character was good looking from the start, but the hero or heroine was unable to see it (for example, the contemporary hero usually prefers statuesque blonds, and the heroine is a curvy redhead. The reader knows that curvy redheads — and this one in particular — are quite attractive, but the hero doesn’t see it at first.

Affiliation is another one. Most heroes and heroines have loved ones, whether they are family or friends or fellow members of the Bortherhood. It’s a key component of many romances that broken relationships, especially with family, such as parents, are repaired.

Autonomy — I think this one is crucial, especially for the heroine. She may end up in quite a traditional feminine role, but it’s always presented as an informed choice — which also happens to be in her best interests.

Integrity — can you think of a hero or heroine who utterly lacks integrity? At worst, they come to have it in the end. Of course, it depends a bit on how you define integrity, but think of it as standing for something, not being a will o the wisp when it comes to your values and sense of self.

Moral virtue — There’s a bit of a debate in philosophy over whether one can have moral integrity without virtue. For example, would a person whose only goal is the accumulation of wealth, who lets no friendship, regard for justice, or anything else to get in his way, really be a person of integrity? Luckily, we don’t have to worry too much about integrity and moral virtue coming apart in romance novels because I think we almost always have both. And by moral virtue, I don’t mean sexual purity (although there is often that with regard to the heroine), but rather a good character, described as honest, just, unselfish, etc.

I can think of a few things, such as spirituality, that would be on many people’s lists of what is necessarily for their well-being which are mostly absent in romance (except the Inspiration romances, of course). And there’s little concern for the environment or nonhuman animals (the occasional domesticated pet nothwithstanding). Also, political autonomy, i.e. active democratic participation, is pretty nonexistent.

So what do you think?

14 responses so far

Ethics and Professionalism and Blogging

Jun 19 2010 Published by under Blogs and blogging, Ethics

Can I write a blog post about a conference I didn’t attend? Watch me.

The first Book Blogger Conference, a one day gig, happened a few weeks ago in New York, just after BookExpoAmerica. I want to start by saying how impressive it is to me that some book bloggers would get together and do what they did.

On the agenda, there were two speakers, in addition to a number of panels. One of those was Ron Hogan, who spoke on Ethics and Professionalism in Blogging. I was really interested in his talk, so I watched the video. I offer a summary and commentary below. Let me say for the record that I love the fact that this talk was invited, that the organizers made room on a crowded schedule for ethics, and that Hogan had a number of things to say that are interesting, important, and worth hearing. I offer disagreements and critical remarks below, because that’s how I engage with things that interest me. That’s what philosophers do. It’s not an indication of lack of respect or appreciation: quite the opposite. If the talk sucked, I wouldn’t bother with this post. I have better things to do, and so do you.

Moving on … according to his bio, Hogan

helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. In 2010, after writing about the business side of publishing as a senior editor for GalleyCat for several years, he briefly served as the director of e-marketing strategy for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

I confess that I had never heard of Hogan prior to checking out the BBC agenda. In case any of you are in a similar boat, this piece is a nice introduction to his interests, skills, and achievements.

Anyway, here is a summary of the talk, with commentary. I did my best to be accurate, but I may have gotten something wrong. If I need to be corrected, feel free to do so.

Hogan starts out by distinguishing what professional literary critics do from what the book bloggers in the audience do:

Of course you don’t live up to the standards it sets for itself because you are doing something completely different and there are so many other ways to talk about a book than an analytical review. And many of you are doing that. You show enthusiasm. You do interviews. You contextualize things through biographical reflection. You do personal reflection, getting very specific about what a book means to you, rather than an attempt an objective analysis of it.

[It's probably true that a lot of bloggers don't strive for objectivity, but I think they achieve it, or come as close to it as any pro. Otherwise, how do we explain the common practice of declining to review certain books, i.e. books written by friends or crit partners, or books for which a reviewer has served a beta reader? How do we explain disclaimers within reviews to the effect that "this is not a type of book I normally read", etc.? To my mind, all of those are objectivity-enhancing practices.

It's true, absolutely, that book bloggers are more likely to talk about personal experiences with a book -- the way it felt to read it, especially. But to my mind, this doesn't detract from the potential of objectivity. It's also something pros do, albeit in a less explicit way. When Larry Doyle reviews Elliot Alagash: A Novel by Simon Rich in the NYTRB, calls it "funny" and recounts the "nasty pleasures" it provides, does anyone think he is measuring the novel against an objective (i.e. has-nothing-to-do-with-Larry-Doyle's-subjective-preferences) standard of "humor" and "pleasure"? Or, to take another random example, when the LRB's Nicholas Spice says of Phillip Roth's Everyman, that it is "disagreeable", or that its formal intricacy is "the most interesting thing about it", I have to ask "disagreeable and interesting to whom"?

Doyle and Spice compare the subjects of their reviews with other books in the author's oeuvre, and with similar books published before or since. So maybe it's their knowledge of their subject that sets them apart? Um, no. In my websurfing, good genre fiction bloggers do the exact same thing ("This Nora Roberts is a bit steamier than her usual"; "I think we have seen this hero before in an earlier Julia Quinn novel; "With this book, J. R. Ward has moved from romance into urban fantasy" etc.). There are differences, but I think they are mainly stylistic, and of degree rather than kind. I also think they have more to do with the self-image and goals of the reviewer than content of the reviews.

Hogan began his talk by saying that the "war between the bloggers and professional reviewers is over, and that the bloggers won." But I wonder how it's a "win" if they are not even playing the same game?]

Hogan then defines what “professional” means for this group:

“Professional” for most of you is not about drawing a paycheck or commission or freelance sort of thing. That’s not what professionalism is to you. It is about living up to a certain standard of excellence or a certain standard of performance.

[I appreciate, from personal experience, how hard it is to talk to a diverse group of people. There is no way anyone could address all of the different interests of the audience in one talk. But I just want to point out -- and I am not saying that Hogan, of all people, doesn't know this --  that many book bloggers are, or hope to be, professionals in the sense of earning money and making a living: some are aspiring authors, editors, publishers, or marketers, and some are aspiring to -- and do -- earn a living directly from their blogs.  So, I think it's worth noting that many of these "amateur" bloggers have complex and intricate relations with commercial interests -- which serve their own economic interests --  from taking ARCs to serving as stops on publicity tours to joining with bookstores to ad revenue, Amazon vine, you name it. Finally, even those who book blog "for fun" are often contributing in some way to their family's finances, even if it's just saving money on purchased books. No, not a profession, but not somehow outside our economic system either. If you can hear the grinding of a feminist axe, you have good ears. I'm a little sensitive about this because economic history is littered with descriptions of the public sphere that describe anything women do as non-public, non-commercial, non-political, etc.]

Hogan then adapts Seth Godin’s techniques for making yourself indispensable to your employer. Godin, also a new name to me, and again from his bio, is the “author of the most popular marketing blog in the world”, and “of the bestselling marketing books of the last decade”.

[I confess I was skeptical right away. How do we get from professionalism to marketing? Hogan has just told us that book bloggers aren't interested in professionalism in the usual (paycheck earning) sense, but rather in the sense of a standard of excellence. So it feels like a bit of a nonsequitur to hand the talk over to a guy known for helping people sell things, especially themselves.]

Hogan relies mainly on Godin’s book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? (Review here). He says,

I am going to jump off from the specific qualities that he talks about and tinker a bit with the qualities that he raises … and we’ll talk about them in our kind of environment.

So, here are the 7 qualities for making yourself indispensable to your employer or — in the case at hand — your blogging audience:

1. Providing a unique interface between members of the organization — what is it that binds you and your readers? What is the passion that you share? The book and authors that you love, and the ways that you love them. Each of you must identify that quality for yourself, for your blog, and for your audience in your own unique way.

2. Delivering a unique creativity — what makes your blog stand out?

3. Managing a situation or organization of deep complexity — there are so many books published, no one can cover it all. “What are you zoomed in on and bringing to people’s attention?”

4. Leading customers — “Where are you pointing your readers? …  You have a mission or point, whatever that is. What is it? What will result from the conversation you are starting?”

5. Inspiring staff — you are inspiring readers simply by being out there. What are you inspiring them to do? It is an ongoing movement. Where is it headed?

6. Possessing Deep Domain Knowledge — Do you know the territory? — You are an expert of some kind, even if it is only in the field of “books I love.”

7. Possessing a unique talent — What perspective do you bring? What do you have to say about those books that will draw people back to your site day after day?

So those are sort of the professional standards, and professionalism meaning standard of performance, the kinds of things that you might want to try to live up to as you are sitting there at the keyboard. Not necessarily in a very conscious way, but simply as things that would inform your actions on a very organic level.

[Contrary to my initial skepticism, I liked the adaptation Godin's qualities to blogging, and Hogan's questions were thought provoking for me, especially #5. On the other hand, I'm not seeing the connection between these 7 qualities and "professionalism". Godin's idea was to provide ways for employees to make themselves  indispensable so they don't lose their jobs. When I think of a "standard of excellence" for book bloggers, I think of different things. Qualities like honesty, diplomacy, sanguinity, and reliability, for example, and specific comprehension, communication, writing, and technological skills. But maybe that's just me.]

Hogan moves from here to the next segment of his talk:

So the ethical part of the conversation is that just as you shouldn’t accept somebody else’s standard of professionalism willy nilly, you shouldn’t necessarily allow book critics or professional journalists to impose their standard of ethics on you because their standard of ethics is not necessarily applicable to what you do. It’s applicable to what they do, and it’s created specifically to respond to their circumstances … but it’s not your set of circumstances and, you know, frankly, why would you need to declare a code of ethics?

Hogan says that bloggers don’t need a code of ethics because either you are trustworthy or you aren’t and no code of ethics will change that reality. You shouldn’t have to say that you are trustworthy — you should just be trustworthy. Citing Godin, Hogan notes that codes of ethics evolved when commerce developed to the point that business associates did not necessarily know each other, and they needed a standardized sign of trustworthiness. Hogan says that we don’t need a code of ethics to trust bloggers we love because we have let them into our hearts already.

[I agree with Hogan here, in principle (heh) as I will explain below, but I have no idea what he meant when he said that last line. I think there are lots of good reasons to develop a code of ethics that go unexplored here. It's more about the effect of the process on the self-understanding of the people to whom the code applies, than about getting readers/customers/clients to trust you. The bigger problem, to my mind, with developing a code of ethics for book bloggers is that it is such a diverse group, with different aims and audiences, that it would be hard to come up with anything not unhelpfully general and superficial.]

Hogan then moves on to define what “ethics” means to him:

Ethics to me are not about the principles that you lay out but about the questions that you are asking from the starting point.

[I like this very much.]

Noting that principles have exceptions, Hogan suggests moral particularism, where it’s

not about the codified principles but rules of thumb by talking about the situation and seeing where people are coming from from a variety of different perspectives and sort of laying out some guidelines but not hard and fast ‘you must do this or you are an unethical person’ sort of rules.’

[Here Hogan is wading into philosophical ethics, with not very satisfying results, to me at least. It's a long way from "principles have exceptions" to "moral particularism" (most principlists recognize the need for context sensitivity and for exceptions), and a long way from "moral particularism" to "we don't need principles" (most particularists think we do), but the bigger problem is that I don't think this detour did any work for him in the talk. That is, the debate between particularism and its opponents is really a metaethical debate about the structure of moral judgment, and isn't really helpful in discerning which moral judgments are right or which ones have a better claim on us. My own rule of thumb is to avoid direct discussion of arguments in ethical theory whenever possible when giving ethics talks, unless there is absolutely no other way to make my point.]

Hogan proceeds to demonstrate this ethical approach by discussing two issues:

1. Do you talk about how you got your books, i.e., the FTC thing.

We get a summary of the issue. Hogan says that disclosure is not something we have to do, but we can choose to do it for any number of personal reasons. Not doing it is a personal choice. So again “it’s not a hard and fast rule one way or the other. It’s this is right for me, this is right for you.”

[I detected no ethics in this discussion whatsoever. In fact, the implicit claim is more or less that disclosure is a matter of personal preference, not a matter of ethics. By definition, an ethical matter is one for which you have to provide public reasons of some form more compelling than "this is what I want to do". It is fine with me if someone doesn't think disclosure is an ethical issue -- that's a legitimate position to take. But let's be clear on what we are doing.]

2. Do you ask people to write for your blog for free?  Hogan makes a reference to the keynote speaker, who said she didn’t like blog tours. His next example is the Huffington Post, which doesn’t pay its writers, yet makes loads of money off of their content.  Hogan notes that this presents a potentially exploitative situation. But

I don’t have an answer for you that would fit every set of circumstances. And I don’t think anybody does. It’s an ethical decision that each of us has to make of our own accord. … You have to look within your heart and ask yourself, ‘is this what I want to accomplish in terms of all those kinds of qualities I talked about before of your professionalism?’ The choices that you make ethically, are they steering you toward the standards that you set for yourself as a blogger and as a writer and as a communicator. And are you doing that in a way that is helpful to everybody rather than harmful to anybody?

[While I see the HuffPo point, I actually had a hard time understanding what the ethical issue is here with book bloggers. Anyway, we get a glimmer of a substantive ethical approach in the last line, a sort of consequentialism (i.e. take the action has the best consequences for everybody affected, however "best (goodest)" is defined. Here, best seems to mean "helpfulness".) But just a glimmer. You know what would have been great here? To move beyond "context counts" to talking about one specific case and working through it. I can understand choosing not to tell other people what they should and should not do, but then how about talking about, as he said earlier, the ethical realm in which he is truly expert --  Beatrice.com?  I would have loved to hear what his standards are for his blog/s, and how his standards dictate a certain response to the disclosure issue, and how that has worked out for him and for those affected by it. Because I can think of a lot of ways to meet the "professional" standards of 1-7 that are pretty darn unethical. So being more specific here could have shown how 1-7 can work as ethical standards, or at least how those professional standards might intersect with ethical concerns to generate a satisfying resolution in a particular case.]

I gather that Hogan, like any good speaker, left a lot of time for Q&A, and I would have loved to hear if some of his points were fleshed out during the less formal part of the presentation. As this talk shows, professionalism, marketing, ethics, community, and reviewing intersect in complex and new ways for book bloggers, and I’m glad knowledgeable people in the book blogosphere are taking the time and creating the space to reflect on these issues.

14 responses so far

HaMPO: Help A Moral Philosopher Out: Live Blogging An Academic Conference, Ethics of

Mar 14 2010 Published by under Academia, Blogs and blogging, Ethics

Welcome to my new feature, HaMPO, in which someone who has a PhD and 10 years professional experience in her field cannot answer what should be a pretty simple question:

Is it ok to blog an academic conference?

We are coming up on the National Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association annual meeting. Last year, I blogged several sessions. I ran into a few “issues”:

1. I got a point in one presenter’s paper wrong. I edited the post. But I only knew this because I had sent her a link to the post. She likely would not have seen it otherwise.
2. One presenter took me to task for not getting her permission. I removed my discussion of her paper from the blog at her request.
3. Some of the blog commenters got a little heated/dismissive in their remarks on papers they disagreed with, not exactly keeping to the tone of academic discourse

Last year there was a big issue at Cold Spring Harbor Lab when bloggers live blogged a conference there. Apparently CSHL has a set of clear rules for journalists, which include getting permission from the speakers in advance, but bloggers kind of went in under the radar. Now the rules are the same for bloggers and journalists (a more detailed discussion here). While I think the worries about live blogging even a restricted conference like the Biology of Genomes are overstated, and the benefits of blogging the presentations understated, the issues with presentations at CSHL might be a little different than issues at PCA. In particular, the CSHL conference is billed as a small forum for researchers to present work in progress in a particular kind of supportive environment. I would think you could attend another conference if you didn’t like the restrictions.

But back to PCA. There are no formal rules, so attendees like me will have to figure out for ourselves what is appropriate and what isn’t. Could a Bloggers’ Code of Ethics help?

Well, there’s this section:

Minimize Harm
Ethical bloggers treat sources and subjects as human beings deserving of respect.
Bloggers should:
• Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of information is not a license for arrogance.
• Recognize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than do public officials and others who seek power, influence or attention. Only an overriding public need can justify intrusion into anyone’s privacy.

Here’s an excerpt on harm from another Code, from Upstart: The Magazine for Aspring Journalists

9. Consider the possible effects of every post you make

Bloggers should not set out to be intentionally hurtful to other individuals in the course of their blogging, in fact the ethical blogger should take steps to minimise harm to others wherever possible. Pro-blogger Jaime McD suggests that bloggers should adhere to the Golden Rule when blogging, namely, treat others as you would be treated yourself.

We can note first that both these codes map blogging ethics onto journalist ethics. I am not sure that is appropriate, especially for blogs like this one. So, for example, I may have special duties as a blogging academic that have nothing to do with journalism, or special duties relating to feminism, or literature as a public good, etc.

Could blogging about conference presentations cause harm? Four possibilities come to mind:

1. Maybe someone reading this blog will scoop the presenter’s WIP, stealing her thesis and getting an article into print first. The presenter loses a publication and time spent on research. This could affect her chances for getting tenure (this would not be an issue for presenters who are presenting published or forthcoming work, of course).

2. Blog commenters are harshly critical of the presenter, in a way no one in an academic audience would be. They write things like, “That is just stupid” or “What a dumbass!”. It is hurtful to the presenter — not a reaction she was prepared for, and she worries it will devalue her work if it is the first thing that shows up in a Google search.

3. It is not the presenter’s best work. In fact, it is really not ready for prime time. She hates the idea that it is online for posterity, when she plans to radically alter or abandon the research post conference.

4. The Golden Rule bit from the second code: suppose I gave a paper that, because of 1, 2, or 3, I did not want blogged. Would I expect any bloggers present to obtain my permission?

Moving away from harm, another way of looking at this is in terms of ownership of the material. The “consent” requirement suggests a kind of ownership. That is, as a blogger, I don’t have the right to do with that material what I want. It’s the presenter’s.

Most of these issues could be resolved by obtaining the speakers’ permission. I don’t think, after my experience last year, that I can assume consent. I also don’t think that sitting in the front row and typing furiously alerts the presenters to my intentions clearly enough that I could be confident they that have given tacit consent by not stopping me.

But then, how would consent be obtained? Hand everyone a business card after the conference, telling them about the blog and assuming they will tell me? Ask them directly? Email them?

I confess I hate the consent idea, mostly because it is time consuming enough to write the blogs, never mind chasing all of these people down, and partly because I do feel I shouldn’t have to obtain consent for reporting on something I experienced in a public forum. How is this different from tweeting about a rock concert (“they just played my favorite song, and they botched it!”). can a rock band really say “I was only playing to Providence. I didn’t want the whole world to know how we played that night!”

If I go ahead without consent, should at least give them a card or email them the URL and invite them to make corrections if necessary?

What about counterbalancing ethical concerns? Are there any ethical arguments in favor of blogging the conference? I tend to be skeptical about this in terms of my little blog, but here goes. Possibly the goods of disseminating information, and any ancillary goods that come from that, like contacts being made (someone reads this blog, finds out Julie Juniper is working on her topic, they get in touch, they collaborate or develop some other mutually beneficial exchange), or academics who were not able to attend the conference (maybe they were ill or couldn’t afford it) getting to stay updated in their field a bit, or nonacademics, i.e. most readers of RRR, benefiting by getting a glimpse into a different way of approaching their favorite books, and enjoying this or learning from it.

One penultimate question: I was slightly dismayed by some of the comments last year. This is a “worlds colliding” thing. No comment was beyond the pale in terms of blogging, but when I put my academic hat on, I was uncomfortable. Should I issue a warning on the post? Wade in and defend the presenter? Close comments? (the last of these would defeat most of the purpose of blogging the conference, though).

And a final one two: does it matter how detailed the blog posts are (maybe I can defuse criticism and reap the benefits if I merely summarize briefly)? And does it matter, ethically speaking, if I offer my own critique (positive and negative) of the paper?

PS. I’ve blogged about this before, but as you can see, I am still unsettled. Also, I was joking about HaMPO being a new feature. It’s not. But I would love your opinions on this!

22 responses so far

Orson Scott Card on the Problem of Evil in Fiction

Dec 08 2009 Published by under Academia, Ethics

The anthology we are using in my ethics and fiction class has an essay by Card called “The Problem of Evil in Fiction”. This essay was originally published in Card’s collection of essays, A Storyteller in Zion (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1993) and has been reprinted with Card’s permission. A quick Google found the article online, under the title, “A Mormon Writer Looks at the Problem of Evil in Fiction“. The basis of the article is Card’s Sesquicentennial Lecture on Mormon Arts, Letters and Sciences, given in 1980.

I have never read Card, but over the years many students have recommended Ender’s Game, his best known science fiction novel, along with Ender’s Shadow. He has won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. He writes scifi (The Memory of Earth; Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus), biblical novels (Stone Tables; Rachel & Leah), fantasy (Magic Street; Enchantment; Lost Boys), reflections on writing (Characters and Viewpoint; How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy).

A conservative political activist, he opposes legalizing same sex marriage and believes that homosexuality is morally and socially unacceptable. This stance made his receipt of an award for young adult fiction in 2008 controversial.

The textbook version of this essay is much shorter omits all of the Mormon stuff. The longer essay is much better.

What follows is a quick summary with some comments.

Card begins with, “Some people regard it as their life’s work to drive pornography, the ultimate artistic expression of evil, completely out of their community.” I think some pornography can be evil, but it depends.

I would also like to know what he means by “evil” and how it differs from, for example “suffering”. he says later that natural disasters cause suffering but it would be boring to only write about that. I personally think people can cause each other suffering without being evil, and that’s an interesting thing to write and read about.

Card then responds to the question of why he writes “such depressing stuff”. He begins his answer by asking, “Well, why indeed? After all, fiction isn’t fact. Fiction is lies.” This is problem #2. A lie implies an intent to deceive. Later Card amends this odd statement, saying a story must “ring true”.

Then he writes,

He who writes about happy people being happy in a happy world ain’t gonna last long as a writer. Nobody cares about that happy stuff. Evil is intrinsically more interesting. More entertaining. Evil sells.

The brisk sales of romance in the recession suggest otherwise. Then again, plenty of bad stuff happens in a romance novel. I agree with Card that a 100% sunshine and puppies novel is not going to work for adults, but not because they want “entertainment” but because such a novel wouldn’t have even the “illusion of truth.”

He writes,

While readers of fiction know perfectly well that what they’re reading is made up, they also insist on the illusion of truth and on truth itself. First, the illusion of truth, because while the reader surrenders himself to the writer’s controlled tour of the life experiences of some interesting characters, the reader insists on some correspondence between the surface details of the story and the reality that the reader knows in his own life. It must ring true. And second, the substance of truth, because no matter how many deliberate lies a writer tells, his own most deeply held beliefs about good and evil will inevitably appear in his work. It is impossible to write a morally neutral work of fiction.

Card says it is impossible for a writer to avoid evil in his book, both because there is evil in the world, and because there is evil in the writer.

He then says there are 3 types of evil in fiction:
Evil depicted in fiction.
Evil advocated in fiction.
Evil enacted in fiction.

All fiction depicts evil, and that’s not morally problematic.

It’s the enacting of evil, as in pornography that is wrong. Why? Because it “teaches the viewer or reader to seek more such instant pleasure, eventually drawing the consumer into a fantasy world where women love to be treated cruelly and where the only good is self-gratification.” Card says this isn’t even really fiction, but “a masquerade of fiction” because its purpose is not aesthetic but orgasmic.

I do think sexual pleasure is a kind of pleasure that, often, the more one has, the more one wants, and the further one pushes for new experiences. This makes it slightly more dangerous than some other things. I sometimes wonder if we can see this happening in erotica. First it’s m/m, then it’s BDSM, then it’s menage, then its sex with beasts. Does this reflect that natural broadening of a subgenre, or a core of readers who keep seeking that new sexual experience?

We all know when we are consuming porn, says Card, but what about explicit material in other books, such as a John Irving novel? Card says, sensibly enough, that some ignorant readers might read these as porn, because they do not understand the author’s point. This is a problem for ignorant readers, not for the books themselves.

What about fiction that advocates evil? It’s hard to figure out what he says here. He doesn’t give any examples of fiction that advocates evil, and I honestly have no idea how he defines it.

Card does say that “It is impossible for a writer to convincingly violate his own conscience in his fiction.” In short, who the writer is will out in the writing, no matter what he or she actually writes.

I have a problem with this. I think we need to distinguish between the person and the writer, and I further think that who we are is not 100% transparent to any of us. Our “conscience” is our conscious image of our best self. But there is a lot more to us, and we can be strangers to ourselves.

Card then says that he must be “a lover of goodness and a student of evil”. He cites Tolkien, who was a decent man yet wrote characters like — not the simplistic Sauron, or the orcs — but Frodo wrestles with temptation, who is overwhelmed by evil at the end. I mentioned in a recent post that it is unusual in an essay or book that treats ethics and fiction to see references to genre fiction, so it is nice to see the Tolkien references.

He adds, in a passage I like,

You’ve all heard of escapist fiction, I’m sure. It’s a myth, and one with little foundation in fact. The standard image is of a twenty-three-year-old housewife, three small children biting at her ankles, ironing with one hand as with the other hand she holds in front of her face a paperback book. On the cover is a picture of a girl about her age, running from a dark and sinister building that has one lighted window, as the sky looms and threatens a storm-and worse. Of course, say the believers in the stereotype. She’s escaping from her humdrum life into a much more interesting fictional existence.

Escaping? I think not. Do you know what goes on in those gothic novels? If you actually identify with the main character, something that I am only occasionally capable of doing, you are put through terrible tension, an ordeal of fear and uncertainty, mistrust, pain, betrayal. The inevitably happy ending comes as a blessed relief, because along the way the poor reader has been through a grueling experience.

Card thinks fiction is cathartic, and he writes approvingly of the various emotions the author can arouse in the reader. But there are limits. He says “I have never written a scene in which I believed either sex or violence was provocative, though I have written scenes in which sex and violence take place.”

romance writers write provocative scenes, as do thriller or mystery or horror writers. these scenes are sometimes meant to bring the reader into the sexually aroused, frightened, or murderous state of the character. One question I have is why it is ok to engage all of the reader’s responses except for those?

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