The Ophelia Paradox

An Inquiry into the Conduct of Our Lives

Mortimer R. Kadish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351294140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, when Ophelia tells King Claudius, "Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be, " she implies more than that we can never know what will happen next, that we have no grounds on which to make significant decisions in the conduct of our lives. She herself had done little or nothing to bring about her present state. Now she is quite mad. Claudius, too, could never have guessed where he would end. Yet the rest of us, although not significantly more knowing than they, profess to think we can actually make Me decisions which genuinely good reasons will support.Experience seems to have convinced us that, deficient in self-knowledge though we may be, sometimes the arrow of decision reaches its mark. Kadish examines how decisions hi the conduct of our lives are possible, how they may be justified, and what the limits of that justification might be for a self that defines itself in a context of social change. Although the need for self-justification tends to be regarded as a weakness, this book suggests that it may also be regarded as the inevitable outcome of the desire to make justifiable decisions, those for which on reflection one can approve oneself.The prime problem of the conduct of life, according to Kadish, is to say when one can and when one cannot justify oneself for one's conduct not to others but to oneself. He proposes that through self judgment individuals develop that very self-interest in virtue of which they endeavor to choose one course of action rather than another. He proposes also that they justify and form themselves through their self-identification as members of communities in conflict and in process of transformation. From this difficult social and human condition the basic problems of ethical and social theory, together with the possibility of a theory of good reasons, are held to arise.In the present time of discontent and emphasis on change hi social, economic, and political life, The Ophelia Paradox has a particular pertinence to the prospects for resolving the basic issues of conduct. It should be of interest to philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists, and of special relevance to anyone concerned with the interrelationships of ethics, art, and law.

1
The Problem of Conduct

Human beings, by and large, live their lives as they come, making the customary choices. Putting on the right shoe before the left, taking dinner here rather than there, greeting her, ignoring him, working this way, working that, might, any of them, for all we know, have the most extraordinary consequences. Still, having no reason to think so, or preferring not to, rather than conduct our lives, we live them without deciding anything—and for this we may perhaps be thankful since, if decisions imply the examination of life and if the unexamined life is not worth living, that holds at least as true of the overexamined, overdecisioned life.

Fortunately, decisions in the conduct of our lives are called for only when we find ourselves on a spot. Lord knows how we came to be on it. Perhaps some casual word, some unthinking, unexpected choice, some sudden intervention from outside—Hamlet’s ghost appearing on the parapet!—brought us there. Not many have had the ghost of their father demand vengeance for his murder in so many words. But we have our equivalents. Up to our necks in quite justifiable indecision, just like Hamlet, even so we are required to reach a decision on penalty of surrendering control over our lives. What am I to do, we ask ourselves, have I done what I ought? The note of distraction is very much to the point. Undistracted, one merely goes on living one’s life in conformity with more or less established patterns. The question of conduct never arises.

We may, of course, say of those living a relatively coherent existence that they conduct their lives according to a certain pattern. Still, when merely thinking of anyone as running a business, a class, or a lathe, we do not necessarily think of the party as then conducting her life. Only the performance of the vocation holds our attention, not the decision to engage in it. If, on the other hand, we think of someone asking herself whether to go into business or teaching or carpentry, at that point we see her engaged in a process of conducting her life. Also, we think of her as conducting her life when, although she is already engaged in business, carpentry, or pedantry, we conceive the life she lives under the aspect of choice and ask whether that sort of life was justified for her.

The problem of conduct asks how more or less reasonable people, whatever their particular interests, would go about distinguishing between their justified and unjustified choices—if the conduct is their own, how they themselves are justified in their decisions and, if the conduct is another’s, how that person would be justified in hers. To understand the requirements of self-justification where that justification amounts not to the judgment of a bought jury but to the evidence that constitutes good reasons for the self’s own self-condemnation, self-approval, or failure to reach a judgment is our aim.

The First Requirements of Conduct

To conduct one’s life requires an occasion of a certain sort, a certain point of view, a certain assumption of the nature of one’s self’s interest, and a certain way of dealing with the claims of ethics.

The Occasion

Asking “What am I to do?” calls for making up an unmade mind on the occasion of what John Dewey called a “problematic situation.” We “make up” our minds, but not as though one looked through a store window wondering which life to buy. No one is already there to do the buying. How would no one know what would fit? Those called upon to conduct their lives find themselves already in the midst of a life. There they are, their most sweeping plans subject to distortion and conversion, alteration and abandonment. They must do something with themselves and with the world, and what they must do is change themselves or their world or both. They must, that is, reach policy decisions for the living of their lives, seize the principle in seizing the moment. Their decisions inevitably become moral or political or professional or purely personal and aimed at their own futures. Even if they cannot go shopping for a life and solve all questions with one great decision, the decisions of conduct never meet merely the instant case; they reach out beyond it. Only the testing of a policy decision goes case by case.

One’s Point of View

Others may diagnose the causes of one’s conduct under the particular circumstances. What made the fellow do it? There are, of course, always quite specific causes. One may even find it helpful in deliberating a question of conduct to ask what “really” impelled one to answer the question in a certain way. Asking that may make decisions less “prejudiced” or blind, leave less of a gap between judgment and behavior. Still, even when one does take advantage of an external point of view, one does so only if one then goes on to decide for oneself from one’s own point of view. That is to say, one decides as agent for oneself and, consequently, decides as best one can in the interest of one’s self. Either one so decides or one does not act in the conduct of one’s own life.

Not all choose among the alternatives as agents for themselves. Some deliberate as agents for others, asking themselves what those others would have them do. In their dialogue with themselves, those who conduct their own lives do not speak for others; they speak/or themselves, act as good agents for themselves, as they distinguish and advance their own interest and resist the overt demands of the represented party—themselves—when those demands are not to that party’s interest. So the self asks itself, “Why should I?” Even if it chose to be the agent for another, that choice would still constitute a justifiable or unjustifiable decision in the conduct of life. The self has still raised the question of the self’s interests. Self-interest is what we are unclear about in the conduct of our lives. With that interest in mind, we ask of ourselves, why should I?

As agents for ourselves, of course, we are not selves within selves; we are ourselves regarding ourselves and approving or disapproving an actual or contemplated decision in the light of our own self-interest. That is why the self-judgments we pass on ourselves for our decisions can hurt. They cannot be set aside as objective facts about the world, like those judgments made of us by others that we do not share. We are the ones who, estimating the conduct of our lives, condemn or approve, are our own judges of what we have taken upon ourselves. If we were not, any judgments that we made of ourselves for our decisions would be no more than further facts to be considered.

No extraordinary meaning for “self” is therefore required even though sometimes I shall use “soul,” “person,” “individual,” or “psyche” to indicate the self. The self is my self, your self, their selves. The meaning in the context is clear; we know how to use the expressions. These “selves,” and nothing else, possess objects, rights, relatives, grievances; that, one says, is mine, hers, yours, theirs. They are what one engages when one talks to others; I myself am the self others talk to. Engaging others in my pleas, my poems, my appeals, my demands, my questions, my answers, I do not deal with them as external objects. I am not pleading with their bodies. I am not addressing those bodies even if writing poems about some of them. I see selves as other subjects, my self as an other self to them. Seeing myself from the standpoint of an other, I see myself as an other to myself.

Self-interest

People tend to identify the interest of such ordinary selves with some specific interest or list of interests. They in effect presume the question of self-interest solved because they think, for the most part with considerable reason, that they have interests in health, wealth, sex, being top-dog, or what not. These things, they believe, are to their advantage. Presumably, however, they do not think it merely analytic that they are to their advantage. This being so, they ought not think their advantage identical with having them, even if having them is in every case to their advantage. They need to say what makes these things objects of their self-interest and therefore true rather than mistaken interests.

Many assume that the “true” interests of the self are whatever motivates its behavior, whatever it is sufficiently interested in pursuing. Interests no doubt motivate; but from the fact that they cause us to act as they do it hardly follows that their satisfaction is an interest of the self. As commonly recognized, people’s motivations often lead them to act against their own interest. Any moderately coherent self picks and chooses among its own motivations in the particular circumstances. It has to or, as we say, it loses control of itself.

What an individual’s self-interest may be, therefore, in the conduct of that individual’s life constitutes the individual’s problem, not the solution to that problem. Self-interest is no psychic litmus paper to be applied to states of affairs. For the purposes of an inquiry into the conduct of life, I shall propose that self-interest in any domain or set of domains is the interest or interests delimited by the set of relevant decisions for which the self may justify itself to itself. Reaching for a decision in one’s own self-interest or anyone else’s, one asks whether a self of a certain sort would justifiably want to choose one rather than another among a set of alternatives or, possibly, be right in accepting a condition of justifiable indecision. Justifying oneself according to one’s self-interest, one essays to meet a condition of legitimacy, and one does so by locating what one is in a relevant class.

The dog in heat responds; it does not decide to respond. A rabbit runs across the line of sight and the same dog runs in circles, not as the result of a decision to run in circles but as the resultant of a kind of parallelogram of instinct. Suppose, however, a human male says to anyone advising him to leave the woman he covets alone, “I want what I want!” Either he does not recognize the charge of illegitimacy implicit in the advice or he implicitly proposes as the relevant rule for legitimacy that if anyone (or anyone of a certain class) wants anything of a certain sort, that party may properly go after it. In the latter case, he has answered as agent for himself, in his own self-interest as he conceives it. He has proposed not a causal study of his behavior but a justification, however miserable, for harassing the woman.

Always, then, one justifies oneself to oneself as a “one.” That holds even when, in a degenerate case, “one” represents the set of unique individuals; the self as its own agent then speaks for itself as a member of that set. This fact of the essential impersonality of self-justification explains at least in part the effort to locate the grounds for conduct in “human nature” and also the Kantian recourse to the pure practical reason to justify conduct. Both explain how a decision might be one that “one” might or might not make.

The Claims of Ethics

Consider now ethically relevant choices in the conduct of life. Suppose I am informed of the rightness, justice, virtue, of such and such a course. If concerned to conduct my life rather than simply live it, must I not then go on to ask, what is that to me? Any one will have the right to ask it; any answer will have to hold for that one. What’s Hecuba to me or me to Hecuba that I should give a damn? To play my personal part as a one, I need a justification. Why should one be moral, or aesthetic, or cultivated, or law-abiding? Why even be prudent, if one doesn’t feel like it? (Young people resent a tax on their youth for the sake of the old dodderers they may someday become. Show them their interest!) Principles are knock-down reasons for a choice only on the assumption that conducting a life as they allegedly require stands to one’s interest.

Those who split into two separate tasks the justification of their ethical standards and the reason for deferring to them raise insoluble puzzles for themselves in understanding anyone conducting his or her own life. First they justify the standards; then they offer reasons for compliance. But standards for the conduct of a life provide no reasons for complying unless they are for-me reasons and if they are that, they are standards for my conduct of life. In the interest of the self, in the self’s own welfare, lies the ground for justifying any standard in conduct.

Hence, the question why I ought to do what is right when it is to my advantage not to do so misses the point of an attempt to induce people to be moral. Of course morality must be shown to be to my advantage. The question is, what is to my advantage? To answer that, it is essential never to permit a particular version of self-interest to masquerade as the meaning of self-interest or a particular version of advantage to masquerade as what it means to have an advantage.

Accordingly, when Socrates accepted the Sophists’ assumption that self-interest was the criterion for the conduct of life, he merely drew the obvious conclusion from the Delphic oracle’s “Know thyself!” He merely argued—though it was a very large “merely”—that the unjust man would be the most miserable of men, the just man the happiest, and quite apart from any rewards or penalties that might be set up. He did not think that he and the Sophists “differed only on one point: whether the currently accepted morality was in fact advantageous to the moral agent.”¹ He was not, as I read him, arguing that “if we wish to persuade rational men to be moral, we must offer them incentives. We must show that doing right will be advantageous to them”.² Despite the references to happiness and misery, this was no simple difference of opinion about the best means to the same destination but about the destination self-interest required. Rightly or wrongly, Socrates thought that the nature of the human soul required justice and not the pleasures and pains that served to induce most people to conform to justice.

For those embracing a naturalistic outlook the problem still remains to say how in the light of the best knowledge available human beings might find in themselves the grounds for discriminating the better from the worse. They must say how to construe the self-interest of beings that have good reason to ask themselves what that self-interest might be, that need to distinguish between a bribe of fortune and their own good. In the traditional, Socratic language, the justification for an action in the conduct of one’s life rests upon determining the good of the soul.

The Varieties of Decision

Decisions of any sort, taken as decisions and not just as opting for one alternative or another, raise the question of their justification. One does not merely act; one makes a judgment on whether one is justified in undertaking some course of action in business, profession, public life, personal relations, or conduct in general. One reaches that judgment by reference to rules, principles, policies, standards, values, ends—to “norms,” the exact nature of which is, for the present, not at issue.³

Not all our decisions, as I have indicated, represent decisions in the conduct of our lives. We may speak of a decision when in a game of poker one considers which cards to discard, especially if one risks losing one’s shirt. But we don’t call that a decision in the conduct of life— a life decision—even though one may have agonized over it. That is a decision in the conduct of poker—although the decision to get into the game might well have amounted to a life decision depending on the consequences of losing, the advantages of winning, and one’s tendency to draw toward an inside straight. Or suppose one presumes to make decisions in the conduct of other people’s lives; that decision is a decision in the conduct of one’s own life only insofar as meddling is.

However we may distinguish the logic of life decisions from that of others, it is commonly recognized that decisions generally either implement the satisfaction of a norm, determine compliance with one, establish the relevant norm and its weight, or fix on the appropriate criteria for judging the norms. In organizations like businesses or legal systems, such technical, compliance, rule, and ground decisions, as I shall call them, tend to be distributed among persons in different roles. Individuals conducting their lives assume responsibility for them all in reaching their judgments. They may fairly perceive all as aspects of one decision.

Technical Decisions

One frequently calls those decisions “technical” that require for their justification estimating whatever course of thought or action will best satisfy the norms pertinent to the choice. In a technical decision, one does not simply assume the usual routines for satisfying the relevant norms. The issue is rational implementation, the determination of that course of action which most effectively satisfies what may be a highly complex set of preferred standards and priorities.

Frequently, of course, implementing standards and priorities may prove impossible either because they make incompatible demands, or because not enough is known or, if enough is known, we are unable to do anything about it. At such points decision suffers a sea change. Other norms than the one we initially attempted to implement may now be called for; decision moves to another level in the case of an individual, to another functionary in a bureaucracy. In this way technical decisions, so-called, may lead to nontechnical ones. The “same” initial set of alternatives has ceased to frame simply a problem in rational implementation.

All decisions face the problem of rational implementation; that problem faced brings on the other problems of decision. Technical decisions in themselves imply no “separation” of ends and means ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue The Ophelia Paradox
• 1. The Problem of Conduct
• 2. What the Psyche Wants
• 3. Predicaments of Self-Justification
• 4. The Sociality of Selves
• 5. Human Being: Individuality
• 6. Self-Models and Individual Selves
• 7. The Trial
• 8. The Establishment of the Law
• 9. The Limits of Decidability
• 10. Ethical Principles and the Law of the Self
• Epilogue: Back to Ophelia
• Index