Monday, July 21, 2014

Yes, we should judge people from earlier times

I read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman some years ago, and found it entertaining.  But also, Richard Feynman was a jerk.  He was a practical joker, which I already think is awful.  He was also intentionally mean to women because it got them to sleep with him.  He was basically using "negging" techniques, like a modern pickup artist.

Richard Feynman's sexism was the subject of a recent defense in Scientific American, which prompted several rebuttals.  Among other things, people defend Feynman by saying he was a "product of his time".

I'm skeptical that being a man in the 1950s necessarily meant you were sexist in the way that Feynman was.  If lots of men were "negging" in Feynman's time, then why would he have thought it was an interesting anecdote to tell?  Feynman himself did not depict his pickup practices as products of his time, but rather products of his own cleverness.

I would go further than that.  In general, I believe that even when people truly are products of their time, they should still be judged by today's standards, no matter how anachronistic.  I believe this because I am a moral pragmatist, and also because I don't believe in the afterlife.

As a pragmatist, I believe the function of "moral judgment" is to encourage better behavior.  And yet moral judgment has limited power to change people.  Sometimes there's an powerful underlying "reason" why people do bad things.  In these cases, moral judgment may be unwarranted, since it will just make people feel bad about themselves without doing anything to change the underlying reason for their behavior.  And yes, I consider it an intrinsic evil to make people feel bad about themselves, no matter who they are.

So when people are a "product of their culture", this can be a mitigating factor to their moral responsibility.  We can't expect people to deviate significantly from their surrounding culture, so sweeping moral judgments may be a waste.  (On the other hand, moral judgment is also an excellent tool for changing the culture, so there's that.)

This framework for viewing morality has some odd consequences when we look at past people and past societies, especially when the people are all dead, and the societies gone.  What is the point of judging these people at all, if their behaviors are set in stone?  It doesn't do any of those dead people any good.  Since there's no afterlife, it doesn't even make the dead people feel good or bad about themselves.

Therefore, the function of morally judging people in the past is not to change the past, but to guide the present.  As such, the moral standards of today are the only moral standards that are relevant.

When we say that what Feynman did was morally acceptable, there are two messages we could be sending.  The first message is the direct message: sexism is acceptable.  The second message is more indirect and abstract: we're saying that if we live in a society that has sexism, then it is acceptable to assent to the sexism, and even participate in it.  Since we do live in a society that has sexism in it, the second message also basically amounts to saying sexism is acceptable. Neither of these messages seem appropriate to me.

Another example is that we know Darwin was racist.  My understanding is that Darwin was less racist than many of his contemporaries, but he also lived in a colonial society which thought of other peoples as savages, or somehow lesser.  If we were to defend Darwin's racism, there are two messages we could be sending.  The first message is that racism is acceptable.  The second message is that if we live in a society that has racism, then it is good to reject that racism, even if only in baby steps.  I think the first message here is a bad one, while the second message is a good one.  Therefore, I have more mixed feelings about Darwin than I do about Feynman.

This analysis applies to people and societies in the distant past, but not necessarily to societies in the recent past, nor to foreign societies in the present.

15 comments:

miller said...

Not condemning Darwin as a supposed racist (ie "defending" Darwin's "racism") is not at all the same as saying that racism is acceptable.
This retrospective analysis of long dead people reeks of political correctness. Even singling Darwin out as a racist is, imo, a bizarre
aberration that occurs in folks with much too little to think about and much too much of a propensity to criticize others, particularly ones who can't defend themselves.

miller said...

"Much too much of a propensity to criticize others" is a very judgmental phrase for someone purporting to criticize judgment.

Also, Darwin doesn't care if he can't defend himself; he is dead.

miller said...

But I don't think anyone is really saying that Feynman's sexism is morally acceptable. I think they're saying that we can still admire Feynman (and Darwin) despite their respective sexism and racism, in a way that we cannot, to use an extreme example, admire Dr. Mengele for his contribution to medical science despite his horrific treatment of his subjects.

I think you are correct: there is value to judging people from the past according to today's standards. But the question is, I think, at what point does one switch from being a good person with flaws to being a bad person, a person whose name we should spit after being forced to utter (e.g. Ronald Reagan ).*

*As skilled as I am with grammar, I cannot make that last clause sound good; I hope you get my meaning.

Remember that people from the future will judge us by their standards, and things we consider to be obviously correct or not even moral questions at all will appear to them as grievous moral crimes.

miller said...

One can always criticize live idiots if they are busybodies rooting out pc heresies not only in the present, but also in the past. Perhaps your nic should be Torquemada...

miller said...

"I think there is value to judging people from the past according to today's standards..."

Really? None that I see. You can learn from the past without demonizing the people living in their virtual reality construct at that time. Shall we diss Newton because he did alchemy, or because he did arcane biblical analysis? Alchemy transposed into chemistry. (Well, the biblical stuff is still crap. :)

miller said...

Yes, that's also an interesting question, although I don't have much of an opinion where to draw the line.

miller said...

lol, but I won't be impressed until you troll in rhyme.

miller said...

But this is the point, no? That's the moral question here: Is Feynman worthy of any respect? Again, I don't see anyone saying it Feynman's treatment of women was respectable or morally right. The only controversy, then, is whether his treatment of women was so bad that we should spit when we have to utter his name.

miller said...

Still an idiot.

miller said...

This is kind of a personal controversy to me. Many years ago, I expressed an opinion on race (that white people are not ineluctably racist). A person whom I admired and respected declared my opinion beyond the pale, without substantive criticism, and cut off all contact with me. I've seen the pattern elsewhere. It seems a question of moral purity, the effects of which I've written on befor.

miller said...

Okay, I see where you're coming from. When I read about the Feynman thing, I honestly did not consider the question of whether he was beyond the pale or not, because I felt it was trivial in this case that Feynman was just a man with strengths and flaws. On the other hand, perhaps for other people that was a real point of contention. I can see how this might have resulted in people talking past each other.

miller said...

The more I think about it, this all has to do with my personal attitude towards judgments. That is, I'm really quick to judge, but I don't consider these judgments damning, necessarily. I'm so judgmental that I think everybody does stuff wrong, and therefore doing stuff wrong doesn't make you a particularly bad person in my book. There's also an emotional bias feeding into this attitude: I am really bad at holding grudges.

And therefore, to me, whether Feynman crossed a line was never much of a question, and I didn't put much consideration into whether that's what other people thought the question was. If other people want to hold grudges against Feynman or whatever, I can't emotionally relate to that.

miller said...

Hmm, extol me, or cajole me, nothing rhymes
with troll :)
I used to think that nothing could time travel into the past---until political correctness extended its
Medusa Architeuthidaen tentacles there to mess around with exceptional people, not content with being a modern Mrs. Grundy.

miller said...

Hmm, self-referential statement...

miller said...

It is justifiable for "troll" to be applied at least as liberally as "Torquemada".