Styles of addiction?

We looked briefly at five questions as listed in the previous post. 

Is the Cyclops a 'wanton'?

The first asked what kind of person is most directly implied in Bentham's version of Utilitarianism. We looked at this question in the light of Harry Frankfurt's model of the will as a sort of amalgam - perhaps only an imperfect amalgam - of what he called first-order and second-order desires. We agreed that someone who simply pursued his desires and aimed at satisfying them would be not a lot different from the barely-human creature that Frankfurt calls a 'wanton'. Such a person would lack those shaping doubts and aspirations that edit the push and directions of our lives. He or she would lack any sense of being in charge or accepting responsibility for one's life and the person one wishes ideally to become. 'Wantons' do not exist, of course, except perhaps in folk tales of djinn or of monsters like the Cyclops that sought to delay Odysseus' return to Ithaca.

When you want something, you really want it.

The second question asked us how we might imagine a person of this simple utilitarian kind progressing? How might he or she change to become a person in that fuller sense of someone who cares about the sort of person he is and wishes to become. How in other words are we to imagine that in Frankfurt's terms a wanton might start to create second-order volitions. This was a much more difficult question. Schooling and other varieties of heavy-handed persuasion were suggested but it seemed doubtful if anything that might count as a second-order desire could be taught directly. You might make life miserable for a child so that he learns to conform to the pattern of expected behaviour, but that would teach pretence and conformism and not anything that was genuinely the child's own volition. It may not be possible to teach such things as honesty or reliability directly  - what would a Grade C in Truthfulness mean, for example, though it might be enough to get into politics or financial services -  but we might and surely we do in fact inspire children to care about such things through a combination of praise, expectations, stories of heroism or other patterns of ideal people. Children and young people learn such patterns of behaviour not by formal teaching but through exhortation and something more akin to contagion. A civilisation without heroes of one kind or another is a civilisation at the end of its days and a society that insists too robustly on the imitation of the approved patterns is probably on its way to becoming a tyranny.

Bentham's moral theory does nothing to explain how people might change to become 'better people' or people who are more their own people. Utilitarianism offers a picture of human behaviour as the serial satisfaction of desires. 'Morality' and 'values' and the like are introduced like a deus ex machina in the shape of an assertion of a universal concern for the good of others. How do we get from being a wanton to being a wanton with a bolted on concern for everyone's well-being? The two do not go together without a lot more explanation that Bentham does not give us. Mill's attempt to solve this overcome this embarrassing impasse was to insist that the desires that matter are those of the educated minority, but this too leads into a logical dead-end canyon. Why should I accept the views of my betters as being better than my own?

The third question was even more wildly speculative. If we assume that we can identify paths of upward moral development, are they all going to end up in the same heaven? Are all the people who become 'good guys' going to be significantly like one another? There was a resounding 'don't know' here, even a 'probably not'. yet surely we ought to be able to say something more about it than this?

Robert Crawley, earl of Grantham

The fourth question brought us into the TV schedules and Downton Abbey. Lord Robert Grantham seems such a admirable fellow, someone who is honest, prudent and concerned for those who work his land or serve his dinner - indeed more for the latter than the former, in the scriptwriter's vision of times gone-bye. the question for us is, does such a person represent the ideal pattern of human behaviour? Is ethics and morality all about being the sort of person who fits well into his role in society and who shows by his thoughts and actions that he is genuinely concerned for others? For a Christian of the medieval or earlier variety this might not seem to be quite enough, but for a post-Christian era it might well seem to be an admirable pattern in a world dominated by shallow politicians and traders 'roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse'. 

The fifth question must be left to our later reading and discussion, but clearly there is some connection with what we have been talking about and Kierkegaard's very broad conception of the 'aesthetic life'. His characterization of this aesthetic life, however, is various and detailed, as I hope we will see.