NDPR Brian Skyrms, Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-11-13 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Brian Skyrms, Signals: Evolution, Learning, and Information, Oxford University Press, 2010, 199pp., $27.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780199582945.

Reviewed by Cedric Paternotte, University of Bristol

---

Signals are ubiquitous in nature. But what is a signal, and how could the members of so many species end up being able to successfully send and interpret signals -- or alternatively, what is meaning and how can it appear? These are the two questions that Brian Skyrms tackles in his most recent book, mostly focusing on the latter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no complete answer yet. However, Skyrms argues that at least elements of the correct answer now seem within reach. Most of the book consists in a progressive exposition of tools and conceptual ideas (borrowed from a wide palette of theories) which are likely to be part of such an explanation.

The paradigmatic situations that Skyrms analyzes are modeled by Lewisian signaling games, that is, games where senders observe states of the world and can send signals to receivers who in turn must choose an act. The theorist's goal is then to find ways by which either a learning process or an evolutionary one can lead to the appearance of efficient signaling systems -- systems in which receivers choose actions that maximize their payoffs or their fitness depending on the actual state of the world. How could signals, which may only be more or less random sounds in the beginning, end up being well correlated both with states of the world and with actions?

The sheer variety of cases and models that Skyrms considers asks for a rather detailed summary. The book contains fourteen reasonably short, varied chapters, which can be roughly divided up in thematic parts. The first chapter lays out Skyrms' project: to understand natural meaning (that is, meaning which 'depends on associations arising from natural processes', p. 1) by using Lewis' signaling games, evolution theory, information theory, trial-and-error learning and networks. Chapter 2 reviews evidence that every characteristic of natural meaning to be described, or at least some rudimentary form thereof, can already be found among animal species. Signal use is flexible; signals can be interspecific and manifest some syntactic structure. The fact that certain signals are salient -- that they resemble what they signal -- is not a necessary property. Chapter 3 contains Skyrms' naturalistic definition of meaning, or rather information content (to be detailed below). This in turn allows one to measure the efficiency of a signaling system.

Chapters 4-6 adopt an evolutionary point of view, from which signaling games turn out to be structurally unstable: small variations in structure can drastically affect their dynamics. From this point on, Skyrms studies cases of increasing complexity and decreasing degree of idealization, starting with the elementary case of two equiprobable states of the world, two signals and two acts. One can then fiddle with the number of states, signals or acts, as well as considering states with unequal probabilities. Signaling systems can be evolutionary equilibria, but so can 'pooling equilibria': cases in which senders send identical signals whatever the state of the world is and receivers choose the same act regardless of the signal. To evolutionarily justify signaling systems, one must explain how pooling equilibria can be avoided or at least rendered improbable. Introducing correlated encounters, or rates of mutation, partially helps. Skyrms then discusses cases of misinformation and deception, showing that, contrary to intuition, there exist some equilibria in which all signals are deceptive (or 'half-truths', as Skyrms puts it): they do not inform about the actual state of the world.

Chapters 7-10 bring learning theory into the mix, distinguishing between two kinds of learning (differing about the speed with which agents settle upon a strategy). Like evolution, learning processes can explain the stabilization of signaling systems, but here the results are seldom analytical and mostly emerge from simulations. Again, unequal probabilities of states and more complex games lead to difficulties, which most of the time can be overcome by adjusting parameters. Skyrms then studies two extensions of the previous models. First, some signaling systems can contain synonyms (several signals corresponding to the same state) or bottlenecks (one signal for several states). Secondly, by considering invention of new signals, he shows that reinforcement learning can lead to the appearance of signals themselves.

Finally, chapters 11-14 tackle the role played by networks in signal transmissions. After considering the interaction of signals -- giving some hints about how logical combinations of signals can themselves become signals -- the emphasis is put on the interaction of agents. In different cases of teamwork-homeostasis, dialogue-signaling systems can still appear. But the more interesting models are those in which network formations themselves evolve. A ring is the optimal shape for a network; it can appear at the price of some sophistication of the models. When it does not, many mechanisms lead instead to a star-shaped network.

Lewis introduced signaling games in Convention (1969) in order to justify the existence of conventions of language without falling into circularity, that is, without presupposing previously existing conventions. Ironically, even if the use of some of his conceptual tools has become widespread (e.g., his definition of common knowledge or convention, as well as signaling games, of course), Lewis' goal has been rather neglected. Skyrms gives Lewis much more than the customary lip service (ch. 11), and although their approaches are distinct, they are also complementary to a certain extent. Skyrms aims to explain natural meaning (that is to say meaning itself since for him 'all meaning is natural meaning', p. 1), of which conventional meaning is a subspecies. But while Lewis concentrated on a definition of conventions based on rational and epistemic conditions, Skyrms is interested in explaining the appearance of meaning in general and systematically downplays the extent to which rationality and complex epistemic attitudes are needed. Not only does it not matter whether conventions are characterized in a Lewisian way, but the learning processes that lead to them can also be attained by low-rationality agents following simple heuristics (ch. 8).

This stance is by no means unfortunate and mirrors the changes that game theory as a whole has witnessed during the past two decades, clearly shifting from an emphasis on epistemic aspects of equilibria to a focus on evolutionary processes -- this reflects the well-known distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations. The usual snag is that the link between those two accounts of convention is left unanalyzed. If conventions can be a result of processes which are cognitively undemanding, why is it that they are typically defined by complex sets of intertwined epistemic conditions? Skyrms seems to be raising our expectations concerning this issue (see the end of ch. 7) but does not discuss it, which can be judged as a drawback or as an asset of the book depending on one's taste as to whether epistemic issues should be altogether absent from evolutionary explanations.

However, it would be incorrect to imply that Skyrms is content with applying an evolutionary framework to a topic which was originally dealt with by using analytic tools. For he also refuses to take for granted the classical signaling games, however useful, and he ceaselessly wonders about whether any result would be conserved if the games were enriched or if one started being interested in the evolution of the signaling games themselves. Skyrms does certainly look the gift horse in the mouth, and one of the book's strengths is that hardly any model is left unchallenged. A full-fledged evolutionary analysis of signaling should not only use signaling games but should also explain how signals could appear in the first place. Again, this attitude, which is made clear from the outset ('Signaling games themselves evolve', p. 2), is not dissimilar to a recent trend in another part of the literature on evolutionary theory, namely that concerning evolutionary transitions, according to which it is not deemed sufficient to presuppose that evolutionary entities are hierarchically nested -- how such a hierarchy itself arose has to be explained in the first place. In other words, for Skyrms it is not enough to substitute analytical definitions for evolutionary accounts. The latter also have to be as thorough as possible, that is, each of the elements that constitute them has to receive its own evolutionary explanation. This is a praiseworthy attitude.

Now for the solutions themselves. The array of mechanisms that can lead to the emergence of signaling systems turns out to be quite vast. In the case of evolutionary processes, allowing for mutations and correlated interactions can sometimes eliminate pooling equilibria. In the case of learning processes, adjusting the parameters of a learning process (e.g., choosing to consider an 'exponential response', p. 99) helps, as well as introducing signal invention and noisy forgetting. Neural nets, imitation and networks can also be summoned to produce efficient signaling. In some cases, no solutions are available yet. In other words, Skyrms provides nuts and bolts that lead to partial solutions allowing signaling to emerge, or at least to emerge most of the time, but the general picture is lacking.

Far from staying in the abstract, Skyrms practices empirically-informed philosophy and never hesitates to base the models he discusses on multiple examples of signaling, ranging from ape eavesdropping and bird syntax to quorum-sensing bacteria. Sure enough, there is abundant evidence about various explanatory factors, but what the evidence does not tell us much about is how these factors interact. As they are introduced as partial remedies which work in specific contexts, when it comes to explaining signaling in a new situation, one must either combine some previously obtained factors or find a new one. In other words, little is said about how the factors can be combined or about how many of them we should introduce. It is sometimes hard to shake the feeling that since we are exploring many possibilities, the underlying philosophical lesson is lacking. Bring in invention of new signals, the rate of which you can calibrate. If too many signals are created, bring in some noisy forgetting, the degree of which can be adjusted. As mechanisms and parameters multiply, explanatory power decreases and ad hocness looms large.

Note that this is not a criticism of the book's enterprise. If general solutions and satisfying analytic accounts do not exist yet, we have to make do with what is available, in this case simulations, and grope our way along. Skyrms understands this perfectly, and the book is explicitly presented as a work in progress, clarifying the basic issues and suggesting basic models that call on further elaboration: 'We now have a simple, tractable model [that] invites all sorts of interesting variations.' (p. 135) Moreover, that a multitude of partial solutions exist is not specific to signaling, but rather is testimony to the motley aspect of most evolutionary explanations today: most of the factors which can explain a phenomenon appear to be well identified, but the specifics about how they actually interacted or to what extent some of them were purely contingent are not. Have analytic solutions collapsed into simulations and should we mainly look for 'recurrent patterns [to] emerg[e]' (p. 177)? On topics plagued by high complexity, maybe there is no other avenue for philosophy to take.

A small digression here: one virtue according to which a philosopher can assess a model is its robustness. The bigger the range of variation of parameters that preserve a given result, the more acceptable becomes a model that contains many parameters; likewise when a large number of similar models provide similar results. Skyrms makes clear that his exploration of various models, especially in the case of learning processes, is driven by the need for a robust explanation of the emergence of signaling (e.g., p. 93). But the emphasis put on robustness can only be a second-best strategy. For instance, Skyrms mentions at one point favorable results obtained when a model has been calibrated in order to fit experimental data about learning (p. 100; but he notes that different competing models equally fit the data). Surely, once this happens there is no need to care about robustness with respect to the model's parameters. The robustness of a model is to then be understood as correlated to the prior probability that things happened this way, or that the factors involved actually played a role. In other words, robustness supplies a priori, revisable reasons to choose a model before empirical evidence steers us towards a more restricted range of parameters.

Apart from these evolutionary considerations, Skyrms makes several claims pertaining to more classical philosophical issues. However, they are likely to make some philosophers cringe, because they are both deceptively simple and unabashedly provocative. First, his model in which all signals are half-truths is hailed as a counterexample to Kant's claim that universal deception is impossible. Although the model is surely interesting, its sting becomes less acute when one realizes that half-truths are not completely deceptive and that Skyrms adopts a naturalistic definition of deception that strips it of its intentional dimension. It might also have been interesting to see how the degree of shared interests influences how general deception can be. Secondly and more importantly, Skyrms also provides a naturalistic account of meaning as informational content that refines possible-world semantics. To classical meaning, qualitatively defined as a proposition (a set of possible worlds), Skyrms adds a quantitative dimension that conveys the amount by which a signal would affect the objective probabilities of possible states, that is, the list of the quantity of information it would carry in every possible state. However, the extremely brief remainder of the chapter that follows does not discuss the philosophical implications of this claim, which is, disappointingly, never to be touched upon again. Whereas there is virtue in introducing ideas and concepts with a certain levity -- Skyrms' tone is continuously and pleasantly off-hand -- the downside is that one sometimes wishes the meal was heartier.

In a nutshell, the book is reader-friendly, as all basic concepts (evolution, reinforcement learning, networks, etc.) are clearly presented. Skyrms provides the bulk of the explanations, referring to papers for most technical details. The book partly offers a survey of existing literature, on which it adopts a bird's eye-view, and partly presents the author's personal insights. It treads the fine line between non-formal discussion and an exposition of the gist of the main technical results. Overall, this is an extremely stimulating introduction to a fast growing literature, most of which calls upon further contributions. 'How do these results generalize? This is not so much a single question as an invitation to explore an emerging field.' (p. 19) The book is impressively successful in demonstrating the sheer variety of links that signals have to many philosophical themes, as well as the daring scope for future work. One can only hope that this signal is successfully received.

NDPR Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli's God

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-11-12 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Maurizio Viroli, Machiavelli's God, Antony Shugaar (tr.), Princeton University Press, 2010, 310pp., $45.00, ISBN 9780691124148.

Reviewed by Laurie M. Johnson Bagby, Kansas State University

---

Maurizio Viroli, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, is the author of several books about Machiavelli, including, most recently, Niccolo's Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli (2000) and How to Read Machiavelli (2009). This latest book builds on Viroli's considerable scholarship on Machiavelli and the development of republican ideas. In it, Viroli develops the thesis that Machiavelli was not an atheist but a believer in a Christian God who loved virtue, rewarded patriotism, and expected people not to be meek and "turn the other cheek" but to defend their liberty. Aptly entitled Machiavelli's God, this book (nicely translated by Antony Shugaar) not only makes a compelling argument but is a compendium of all that Machiavelli wrote on the subject of religion and all of the most significant primary and secondary literature related to Machiavelli's views on religion. Viroli displays an encyclopedic knowledge of his subject and does so in a way that is not tedious but truly fascinating. His is an indispensible book for anyone who wishes to write about Machiavelli and religion or Machiavelli and republicanism.

There is still, even after reading this book, the nagging question of whether Machiavelli was a true believer, a man of faith, or whether he simply saw the value of religion and its social utility. However, after reading this book, it is difficult to hold the position that Machiavelli was a convinced atheist, or that, if he did see religion as having social utility that he did so cynically and with no real respect for religious beliefs. Viroli's book counters those writers who have viewed Machiavelli as a mere advocate for the use of religion as rhetoric or propaganda. Machiavelli's comments on religion in this volume are enough to cast that cynical view into doubt, and the content of what he says, when considered as a whole, makes such a view of Machiavelli even more doubtful. Viroli himself admits that he does not know exactly what Machiavelli personally thought of God: "I am not entirely sure that I have found that God. I still believe, however, that Machiavelli had a God, and that around this God of his he developed a religion of liberty that played an important historical role in Italian political culture." (ix)

Viroli sets out to show that Machiavelli's preferred religion was a type of Christianity which makes it a duty to love and defend one's liberty. Machiavelli took aim at the interpretation of Christianity as a religion of meekness and acceptance, a religion of fatalism in which everything is left up to God. Machiavelli supported a Christianity like that developed in republican Florence, and of which Fr. Savonarola was emblematic. It was a Christianity that emphasized civic virtue, patriotism, and the willingness to love and defend one's fatherland. According to Viroli, Machiavelli believed in the adage "God helps those who help themselves"

As readers will notice, I claim in this work that Machiavelli not only asserted that republican liberty needs a religion that instills and supports devotion to the common good but also that Christian religion properly interpreted is apt to serve such a civic task. (xi)

Viroli claims that the religion that Machiavelli practiced more than he preached was the religion of working to make "grand ideals" real, to "live for great political and moral ideals in spite of the most disenchanted awareness of the cruelty, misery, and baseness of the human world" (xix). This view of Machiavelli will be surprising enough for some people who see in Machiavelli nothing but a cynical realist. But Viroli is not trying to make him into an idealist, rather, perhaps more of an optimist. Viroli's Machiavelli knew very well the obstacles to virtue posed by human nature and political circumstances, but thought that it was possible to prevail and achieve greatness despite these obstacles. Viroli also claims that the religion that Machiavelli preached was not simply a social tool but something that he thought was of real value to men's souls. If he did not think so, he would not have placed the founders of religion, such as Moses, higher than those who employ religion to achieve particular goals. Though he admired the Romans' use of religion, Machiavelli did not ultimately favor a return to paganism but a renewal of Christianity that promoted the same vigorous love of country found in the ancients. This was, according to Viroli, the same Christianity of virtue -- the civil religion -- that America's founders adopted.

Viroli's extensive use of primary sources brings much credibility to his argument. He thoroughly examines Machiavelli's most important theoretical works and also his letters and diplomatic dispatches. In addition, he carefully explores the religious and political views of Machiavelli's contemporaries, as well as their views about Machiavelli and his writings. Viroli also looks at the reaction to Machiavelli by those political and religious writers who came after him. His examination of Machiavelli's correspondence sheds light on how important the image of God was in his everyday thinking, in a type of writing in which it mattered less how he appeared and where he could be expected to be less careful and more forthright. Viroli shows how Machiavelli's ideas formed in the context of prior philosophers and theologians who had already laid the "foundation for the idea of Christianity as a religion of virtue -- understood, in the manner of the ancients, as strength." (52) He shows how Savonarola's ideas in some ways resonate with Machiavelli's because Savonarola was also preaching a religion of virtue and republicanism. We can see more clearly what Machiavelli intended in his remarks on religion once we really understand the context in which he wrote, not as an isolated individual, but as someone who was refining and redirecting ideas that were already powerful forces behind the events of his time.

Machiavelli does not blame the teachings of Christ for the complacency that threatens republican liberty. He does blame the Church for its interpretation and promotion of a Christianity in which judgment is the responsibility of the Church rather than the people, a Christianity in which earthly glory is incompatible with heavenly glory. On the one hand, the Church is overbearing and wants to rule everything, but on the other it teaches the people to be meek and accepting. Machiavelli claims that the adoption of a virile Christianity is "a return to the true form." (87) Though in some ways Machiavelli's criticisms of the Church would have resonated with adherents of the reformation movement, Machiavelli

knew about Luther and the Lutherans, but that Reformation was different from his approach to reform. He was not interested in indulgences, predestination, divine grace, free will, or the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. He wanted a God who would help the men of his own time, and those of times still to come, to rediscover their love of liberty and the inner strength demanded by a free way of life. (87-88)

If Machiavelli took religion seriously and thought the true Christianity could vigorously support republican liberty, why did he reserve so much praise for someone like Duke Cesare Borgia, whose violence and duplicity Machiavelli made legendary? Viroli shows that Borgia himself thought, and Machiavelli agreed, that God would excuse him. Machiavelli reasoned that God excuses the actions of leaders, taken out of necessity, to secure themselves and their states. (117) If this is true, it is not so much that Machiavelli sequestered political actions from morality, as if politics were in an amoral realm of its own, but rather that he applied the same morality to politics as to every other area of life in which necessity mitigates guilt and justifies otherwise unthinkable actions.

Viroli demonstrates the impact and use of Machiavelli's ideas during the Reformation. Machiavelli's works were a problem for the Catholic Church but sometimes an inspiration for certain reformist elements.

If we are looking for a confirmation of the link in terms of ideas between humanism and the Italian reformation movement, then let us consider the fact that Machiavelli's works, even after they were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, were present in the libraries of victims of the Inquisition. (226)

But though Machiavelli's criticism of the Catholic Church might have attracted some reformers' attention, Viroli points out that his problems with the Church were not the same as the reformers' problems. Machiavelli had no argument with grandeur and ceremony or anything else that tended to keep the common people in awe and reverence. He was not one to rail against superstition as an evil in itself. He simply did not like the way the Church used its power to encourage passivity and acceptance of what he thought was an unacceptable situation. The Church was not, generally speaking, on the side of liberty or for strong government. Also, the Church's corruption was so open that it could not guarantee the respect of the people, further weakening religion's salutary influence.

Viroli shows this difference between Machiavelli and Reformation thinkers by examining Machiavelli's own writings and also contemporary reactions to Machiavelli's ideas. In fact, there were many different interpretations of Machiavelli's ideas which Viroli thoroughly documents. There were those who agreed with Machiavelli that the current state of the Christian religion not only made people too passive and obedient but too soft and forgiving. There were also those who objected to Machiavelli's view that the Christian religion was compatible with strong government and the pursuit of worldly glory. The Jesuits "accused him of dethroning God and Divine Providence from the government of the affairs of the world, putting in their place an impersonal fate and the inexorable influence of the stars." (240) Freethinkers were attracted to Machiavelli because they saw in his writings the same view of nature as operating free of divine providence, without any deeper meaning than what human beings give it. For others, Machiavelli was a prophet who foretold the coming Reformation upheaval and whose writings help explain why reform was unable to plant deep roots in Italy.

Machiavelli's influence was felt even in the rejection of fascism. For those who see in Machiavelli's writings the roots of that ideology, Viroli's observations are surprising:

The awareness that fascism sank its roots into age-old moral ills, and that a liberation from that regime would only be possible through a moral renewal of the Italians, encouraged the birth of the concept of a 'religion of liberty.' This concept, which more than any other encouraged the moral and political resistance to the Fascist regime, emerged in thoughts about Machiavelli or thoughts that took Machiavelli as a specific point of reference and departure. (286)

One question not answered is how exactly Machiavelli could reconcile the teachings of Christ laid out in the Bible with his preferred Christianity, which did not require leaders to be consistently moral and did not ask people to "turn the other cheek." Viroli is thorough enough that we can say, without much doubt, that Machiavelli never did attempt to do any reconciling on his own. That is, Machiavelli did not directly engage the teachings of Christ in the Gospels and explain why they did not mean what they seem to mean. It would be interesting to see if Viroli could find advocates of virile Christianity who did so.

NDPR Stephen Engstrom, The Form of Practical Knowledge: A Study of the Categorical Imperative

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-11-11 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Stephen Engstrom, The Form of Practical Knowledge: A Study of the Categorical Imperative, Harvard University Press, 2009, 260 pp., $49.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780674032873.

Reviewed by Patrick Kain, Purdue University

---

In the preface to the Groundwork, Kant describes the "doctrine of morals" as a type of practical rational cognition, but, according to Stephen Engstrom, most readers have failed to appreciate the significance of this claim. Engstrom argues that if one understands Kant's contention that morality is practical knowledge of intrinsic goodness (pp. 10, 241) or of unconditionally good action, then many of Kant's oft-misunderstood and maligned claims about morality, and about the Universal Law Formulation of the Categorical Imperative in particular, can be clarified and vindicated. Engstrom's general thesis may not be quite as novel as he may think: prominent interpreters such as Henrich, Paton, Beck, and Donagan have stressed, in various ways, the centrality of Kant's conceptions of reason and of knowledge to his practical philosophy and to his conception of the moral law in particular (and they have also noted ways in which Kant's conception can be seen as a distinctive contribution to a cognitivist tradition in ethics that reaches back to Plato and Aristotle). Nonetheless, Engstrom effectively focuses readers' attention on a very important thesis, offers a particular and interesting account of what practical knowledge is, and argues that this account can do some very important work within Kantian ethics. Those interested in Kant and in Kantian approaches in ethics, epistemology, and action theory should pay careful attention to this volume.

The book can be divided into two parts: an "extended" "preliminary examination" of Kant's conception of the will and his conception of cognition and judgment (chapters II-V) is followed by a "direct interpretation" of Kant's account of the categorical imperative which aims to rebut a number of classic objections to Kant's ethics (chapters VI-VII). (p. xi) By Engstrom's own admission, the preliminary examination, while lengthy, is austere and abstract. It is also presented mostly sui generis. Pages will often go by without any citations to Kant's texts or analytic or historical scholarship, and when this literature is selectively engaged, the engagement is often very brief (though often insightful nonetheless). Engstrom's primary emphasis is on his own reconstruction of the concepts and arguments rather than Kant's texts, interpretive disputes, or rival approaches. The second, "interpretive" portion of the book does interact more with Kant's texts, especially the Groundwork, and with a few rival interpretations of it. After outlining four of Engstrom's central contentions, I will offer some critical reactions.

First, in chapter II, Engstrom proposes an interpretation of Kant's conception of the will, which is built upon a robust conception of practical thought. Practical thinking, or "intention," is conceived of as a form of efficacious mental representation, the efficacy of which must be, in principle, self-conscious or transparent to itself. "Practical thinking can make its object actual through and only through its consciousness that it can do so."^[1] (p. 30) Engstrom argues that this account of practical thinking has two significant entailments. First, it implies that all practical thought must be subject to certain rational requirements: an agent is not to intend an end she considers impossible, and she must intend means sufficient to her end.^[2] (pp. 40-41) Second, Engstrom argues that practical thinking is essentially an agent's activity of self-constitution.

To intend to do something is to specify, in an act of practical thought, what one means to do, and this is just to specify one's conception of what one, as a practical subject, means to do, which in turn is to specify one's conception of oneself as an agent, or what we may call one's practical self-conception. And since this self-conception is efficacious, it constitutes the agent, the practical subject, itself. (p. 33, cf. 120)

Second, in chapters IV and V, Engstrom articulates and deploys a rather strict conception of knowledge (and cognition, which he employs synonymously) and of judgment. Cognitions must be "self-consciously self-sustaining," and stand "in relations of necessary agreement, relations of mutual support and confirmation," where the source of such necessary agreement must be "within . . . the cognitive faculty itself." (pp. 104-105, 107) Every "logical" judgment

consists in the essentially self-conscious exercise of the capacity to know and so includes . . . the necessary self-understanding . . . that all judgments, so far as they are proper exercisings of the capacity to know, are cognitions and hence in necessary agreement. (p. 111)

A key to such necessary agreement is "double universality": any proper exercise of the capacity to know must possess both "subjective universal validity" (or validity "for all [judging] subjects" (p. 115)) and "objective universal validity" (or validity "for all objects falling under [the judgment's subject] concept" (p. 116)). In the theoretical domain, for example, this account implies that cognitions from concepts must be "grounded in knowledge concerning objects' law-governed coexistence," (p. 114) and cognitions must possess systematic "coherence . . . standing together in relations of mutual support in one body of knowledge," (p. 113) since "knowledge is essentially a whole, or system, of representations." (p. 105) These conditions of "necessary agreement" in judgment, especially the requirement of "double universality", express the "form of theoretical knowledge" and indicate constitutive norms of judging in the theoretical domain.

Engstrom's conception of practical cognition emerges from the conjunction of his conception of cognitive judgment with the aforementioned conception of practical thought. As practical or efficacious thought, "practical knowledge is always knowledge cognizing subjects have of what they themselves are to do." (p. 121) "As rational" or as cognition, "practical knowledge has a double universal validity; in this regard it is no different from its theoretical sibling." (p. 123) Engstrom proceeds to distinguish two primary types of practical judgment, which are both exercises of the capacity for practical knowledge: wish (or potentially efficacious judgment determining what is "practical" or "simply good") and choice (or efficacious judgment determining what is "practicable" or "good on the whole to do").^[3] (pp. 46, 68) As an exercise of the capacity for practical knowledge, each particular practical judgment (and thus each wish and choice), "contains in its self-consciousness an understanding of itself as in accordance with the form of [practical knowledge]." Engstrom argues that this understanding, built into the concept of practical knowledge, is the basis for the categorical imperative.

Third, in chapter III, Engstrom constructs an intricate explanation of Kant's oft-puzzling "claim that happiness is an end for every human being, an end that belongs to the very being or essence (Wesen) of a finite rational being" (p. 84) In a finite rational being, pleasant sensations give rise to "judgments of the agreeable," (p. 70) judgments which in turn provide "the material condition of the simply good," (p. 71) a condition or criterion on which practical judgment must rely. (p. 69) These judgments arise, Engstrom explains, because of "a primitive act of practical judgment" in which "what one finds agreeable in general is made into an object of one's will . . . through being brought under [the] concept of the simply good." (p. 70, cf. 82) This primitive practical judgment is necessary and

is implicated in the very concept of a person, or a subject with the capacity for practical knowledge. It is implicated as the act in which an individual person first constitutes itself as such, being as much a judgment that makes a person as a judgment a person makes. (pp. 81-82)

Engstrom argues that this primitive "wish for happiness" must have a "two-fold character": it is both a wish for happiness, generically or formally conceived, and it must include a wish for "practical self-sufficiency," i.e., for the powers and means adequate to secure the object of one's wish. (pp. 88-89) This wish plays an important role in Engstrom's interpretation of the application of the categorical imperative.

Fourth, in chapters VI and VII, Engstrom deploys his account of practical knowledge to support an interpretation of the categorical imperative that may rebut many classic objections to Kant's ethics. Engstrom argues that the Groundwork's "formula of universal law" expresses the form of practical knowledge; this may address questions about its "derivation."^[4] On Engstrom's interpretation, what the formula of universal law requires is that each maxim (or, at least, some abstract and basic maxims) can be willed as a universal law. Since what is at issue, according to Engstrom, is a law for all beings with "the capacity for practical knowledge," a maxim must be considered, within "the test," as a "law that all rational beings necessarily follow out of their shared recognition of its validity, its rational necessity" (pp. 161-162). If such consideration reveals that a maxim contains contradictory practical judgments (especially contradictory judgments about what is "simply good"), then the maxim in question lacks "objective universal validity;" it must be intrinsically bad and is prohibited. Drawing on his claim (above) that the necessary "wish for happiness" includes a wish for both happiness, generically conceived, and for practical self-sufficiency, Engstrom argues, contra a familiar criticism, that the "formula of universal law" can generate positive duties to others, including both duties of natural justice and duties of beneficence. Given these two necessary wishes, he explains, the only way to avoid making contradictory judgments about what is "simply good" is to limit one's freedom by justice and to extend one's practical judgments to include the happiness of others as "simply good." Engstrom contends that this interpretation adjudicates Kant's canonical examples well, fits the text, and preserves the concept of intrinsic goodness and badness better than other interpretations, such as Korsgaard's "practical contradiction" interpretation, which, he claims, relies on prudential considerations and on "contingencies lying outside the will." (pp. 225-6, cf. 166)

I hope this sketch allows the reader to appreciate the complexity and the significance of Engstrom's reconstruction of Kant's ethics. In what follows, I will suggest some critical reactions to Engstrom's proposal and its prospects for success.

A first set of critical reflections concerns some of the details of Engstrom's account of intention, self-constitution, and the wish for happiness. Engstrom's arguments for the centrality of self-constitution are quite difficult, and their precise significance is somewhat uncertain. Engstrom seems, at points, to reduce all action and intention to radical self-constitution itself, to some necessarily and transparently efficacious, virtually unconstrained thinking about what to do or how to be. It seems to be part of Engstrom's concept of practical thought, for example, that it is self-consciously efficacious self-constitution, and that one is (at least implicitly) aware, in a sense of "awareness" that includes veridicality, that one has and is exercising such a power. (This suggests the bold thesis that we can be immediately aware that epiphenomenalism is false, for example.) The suggestion that our practical thought is virtually unconstrained self-constitution is somewhat misleading, however. Engstrom also contends that there are several essential or formal elements within the practical self-consciousness of all finite rational beings, elements that necessarily condition their self-conscious self-constitution. For example, Engstrom insists that, for finite rational beings, consciousness of one's finitude and receptivity is essential to one's practical self-conception and must condition even the most primitive act of self-constitution. The "primitive wish for happiness . . . cannot take place in a vacuum, but is possible only in a certain material condition of receptivity." The

act of judgment that first constitutes a person presupposes . . . specifically a self-conception that includes awareness of this sensible condition, distinguishing this particular practical subject from every other . . . an indeterminate, or yet to be determined, conception of oneself as a particular practical subject capable of determining oneself in a practical judgment, and this presupposed conception accordingly belongs to the form of every maxim. (p. 238)

It is not clear to me precisely how or why our practical self-conception (and by extension, each intention or practical thought) must always include awareness of this passive or receptive moment. Engstrom is clear that this piece of practical awareness is not itself an act.^[5] Is it a matter of psychological necessity? Is it, rather, a normative requirement for practical responsiveness to our (theoretical) awareness of how we are, in some sense, already at least partially constituted by nature?^[6] Indeed, on Engstrom's account, some of the "formal" features of our practical self-conception seem to be a response to experience (or, at least, to our experience of practical thought), not an a priori element of practical thought itself. (p. 80) There are difficult questions about the content and coherence of Kant's own views on these matters. Engstrom offers one of the most developed recent attempts to make sense of them, and he need not settle all of these questions here. Yet some of the details of Engstrom's reconstruction and the precise force of his strong "self-constitution" language are elusive, and some of these details may affect the relationship between theoretical and practical knowledge and the relationship between virtue and happiness, which are important to his project.

A second set of critical reflections concerns Engstrom's account of judgment, knowledge, and cognition. In his compact twenty page sketch of a Kantian theory of cognition, Engstrom had to abstract from many difficult textual and systematic questions about Kant's epistemology, shifting quickly between discussions of judgment and reason, and cognition and knowledge, and avoiding explicit treatment of Kant's claims about the variety of "degrees of cognition," "analogies of experience," "antinomies of pure reason," "regulative ideas," and so on. (Though Engstrom does allude to a few of these items, cf. pp. 15, 105, 117.) The upshot of this sketch is the contention that it is a conceptual truth that all cognitions must stand in "necessary agreement" in a very robust, positive sense; but one might register a few reservations here.

First, it is not clear that Kant thought all "logical" judgments are subject to such strong conditions. ("Judgments of perception," in contrast to "judgments of experience," for example, might be one such exception.) Second, fully satisfying Engstrom's positive requirements for cognition may approximate what Kant would call rational "insight" or "comprehension" (a degree of cognition that Kant thought was possible only in certain limited domains). We should also not forget Kant's contentions that the cognitive powers of reason, understanding, and judgment need to be distinguished, and that reason's pursuit of the "unconditioned" may not only enable knowledge, but can also trigger skepticism. So, Engstrom's conception of cognition may be stricter and more controversial than Kant's own (which is controversial in its own right). These points are germane to Engstrom's project because his reconstruction of Kant's moral philosophy rests upon his bold claims about reason and cognition: that practical knowledge has universal scope (that our every practical thought or practical judgment is subject to its norms), it embodies strict standards (including "positive agreement" and "double universality"), and that practical reason does not threaten our knowledge or trigger skepticism. Additional argument may be needed before we could conclude that practical knowledge, so strictly understood, is necessary or even really possible for us (more on the latter below).

A third cluster of critical reactions concerns Engstrom's interpretation of the formula of universal law, which deserves more careful consideration than I can provide here. Many of the details of Engstrom's account are illuminating, such as the brief discussion of "implicit," if "obscure," forms of practical knowledge present in immoral action. Yet, it is not clear to me that Engstrom's approach has the key advantage he claims over the rival "practical contradiction" interpretation. While Engstrom is correct that the practical contradiction interpretation emphasizes questions of "practicability", whereas his own interpretation foregrounds matters of "practicality," this contrast may not be decisive. First, Engstrom's own approach does appeal to some considerations of practicability: in the case of justice, external freedom and self-sufficiency are themselves concerned with all-purpose means rather than ends, and in the case of beneficence, Engstrom's appeal to the immediacy and necessity of "help from practical recognition" is similarly instrumental (212). Second, it seems that both interpretations of "the test" rely upon "material" conditions or things "outside of" the form of pure will to generate their contradictions. Each does or can make use of the universal wish for happiness (and its presuppositions of need and limited power), the norms of mere practical thought, and Engstrom's idea of a shared "practical world," (192) for example. On each account, these elements and considerations are supposed to be reflected within the agent's own practical reflection. These elements are either "formal" elements of practical cognition (even if they are not part of the form of pure will itself) or they are not; either way, each of the rival versions of the test may appeal to them with legitimacy. Engstrom's account of why they are legitimate may be better than alternatives, or perhaps there are other problems with the practical contradiction interpretation which require additional appeals to external contingencies in order to generate acceptable results, but that would be a different point.

A fourth and final set of reflections concerns Kant's doctrines of "the unity of reason" and of the "highest good," a systematic union of virtue and happiness. Although Engstrom mentions these doctrines in a few asides and occasional footnotes, he gives them no sustained attention in this book. But it seems to me, in light of the foregoing reflections, that Engstrom's conception of practical knowledge and self-constitution is difficult to disentangle from such doctrines. If, as Engstrom maintains, it is essential to the concept of knowledge that all judgments are capable of "necessary agreement" and "mutual support" based in the cognitive faculty itself, then this may entail significant claims about the content of practical knowledge and about the relationship between practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge. And if, as Engstrom suggests, the form of self-constitution of finite rational beings implies that any wish be compatible with its pursuit "as a member in a system of elements belonging to a common end" (p. 78) and that happiness is a necessary end for finite agents like us, then the proper object of our practical knowledge must be the "complete good," the union of morality and happiness, not just morality. Now, if all practical knowledge must be mutually supporting and in necessary agreement, then practical knowledge of the intrinsic good ("morality") is possible only if it can stand in harmony and necessary agreement with practical knowledge of the complete good. ("Double universality" in judgments about intrinsic goodness may be necessary, but this does not seem sufficient for genuine practical knowledge, on this account.) Any practical knowledge entails that morality must harmonize with happiness. Conversely, if the complete good seems unattainable by our actions (because of our primitive practical awareness of our finitude and limited power), then "practical knowledge" of the complete good is not possible for us, which seems to entail that practical knowledge per se is not possible (since "knowledge is essentially a whole"), and thus that morality, understood as practical knowledge of the intrinsic good, cannot be possible either. Even if our "original position" is oriented toward "practical knowledge" (p. 245), our practical thinking seems to be led to skepticism about practical knowledge and about the possibility of rational self-constitution.

In short, Engstrom's account may need a "postulate" of the real possibility of the highest good, and perhaps for a postulate of God to support it, and this need may be at least as strong as Kant's own need for such postulates. (It may be a virtue of Engstrom's interpretive proposals that it also seems to point in such a direction, even if this is a direction he does not pursue here.) Perhaps Engstrom would accept some or all of Kant's "postulates." Or perhaps Engstrom can develop grounds for resisting such postulates: perhaps a further refined conception of cognition and/or a further refined account of primitive self-constitution may clarify how this form of Kantian morality may be sustained without such postulates. In any event, the ultimate vindication of Engstrom's distinctive contentions about practical cognition, and the contributions they make to our understanding of the meaning, content, and application of the categorical imperative, may await a more thorough treatment of such questions than could be provided in this book. This book opens up much fertile ground for future work, by Engstrom and others, on many important issues.

---

^[1] "Practical thought" is intended as a reconstruction of Kant's conception of "desire in accord with concepts" or the generic form of Willkür.

^[2] Notably, Engstrom contends that this conception of practical thought or intention does not, by itself, require morality. (pp. 91-94, 243) Thus, it may be that a prudent amoralist could fulfill all of the rational requirements of "mere practical thought;" practical knowledge requires more.

^[3] This is supposed to capture Kant's distinction between "wish" and "will," as two exercises of a freie Willkür, or of a will that is "practical reason."

^[4] While this first formula emphasizes "objective universal validity," Engstrom argues that since practical thought is a self-relation and its object just is its subject, the two forms of universal validity necessarily coincide. Since Kant's "formula of humanity" and "formula of autonomy", in their own way, also express this same presupposition of universality, so understood, Kant's three formulas are equivalent.

^[5] Since this essential element of practical thought is not itself an act, one might also wonder why the primitive wish for happiness must be conceived of as an act, as Engstrom maintains.

^[6] Similar questions might be raised about Engstrom's claims that it is essential to "choice" that one is practically conscious of the limits of one's power of agency. (pp. 67, 80)

NDPR Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-11-10 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Christopher Kaczor, The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice, Routledge, 2011, 246 pp., $39.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780415884693.

Reviewed by Don Marquis, University of Kansas

---

Christopher Kaczor defends the Catholic view, or what is sometimes known as the substantial identity view, of the wrongness of abortion. This is not a religious view. It is a natural law argument. Its core is the syllogism that because all human beings have a serious right to life and because human fetuses are human beings, human fetuses have a serious right to life. A human being is a biological organism that belongs to our species. Judith Thomson's famous defense of abortion does not succeed. Therefore, abortion is wrong. The minor premise of this syllogism is a true claim in biology. With the exception of the discussion of Thomson's view, the major premise is the locus of philosophical interest.

Although I believe that Kaczor's positive defense of the major premise does not succeed, this book contains much of great value. A major portion of Kaczor's book is devoted to critical discussions of views concerning the right to life that are incompatible with the major premise of the above syllogism. Many of these discussions are of great interest and have great merit. Although some of these analyses can be found elsewhere in the extensive literature on the abortion issue, Kaczor's book contains the most complete, the most penetrating and the most up-to-date set of critiques of the arguments for abortion choice presently available. It is required reading for anyone seriously interested in the abortion issue. It is a good introduction for anyone who wishes to read a serious and thoughtful account of all of the various serious philosophical views that support the right to abortion. It deserves careful study. I certainly would not endorse every single argument in the book. Nevertheless, Kaczor's book contains much good material. I highly recommend it.

Two of Kaczor's analyses are especially important. The first concerns accounts of what it is to be a person found in the writings of Michael Tooley, Peter Singer, and Mary Anne Warren. These accounts are given in psychological terms and are intended to include in the class of persons human beings after the time of infancy and to exclude human beings prior to birth. I have been inclined to take these accounts for granted, but to question the arguments for the claim that one has the right to life if and only if one is now a person in one of these psychological senses. However, Kaczor offers a thoughtful discussion in which he questions whether such accounts of being a person succeed in including everyone in the class of human beings after the time of infancy. The difficulty that Kaczor discusses concerns giving an adequate and non-arbitrary account of the capacity to exhibit psychological traits that, on the one hand, excludes fetuses and, on the other hand, includes all of those individuals past infancy who have the right to life. Kaczor shows that this task is harder than it seems. Kaczor's discussion constitutes yet another serious challenge to all those philosophers who wish to defend abortion choice by appealing to the claim that fetuses are not yet persons.

Also of particular interest and merit is Kaczor's discussion of the dualistic views Tooley and Jeff McMahan have defended at great length in recent years. Both defend the claim that, because we are essentially persons, we are essentially brains capable of thought. This brain essentialism implies that we did not come into existence until the last part of pregnancy. Kaczor draws on the writings of David Hershenov, Eric Olson, and Matthew Liao to construct a critique of this brain essentialist view. Kaczor's analysis of brain essentialism is a forceful critique of the Tooley-McMahan view. Furthermore, it is a nice summary of the best of the recent literature critical of brain essentialism. This book is worth reading just for this incisive account.

Kaczor's book is organized in the following way. Kaczor treats 'is a person' as synonymous with 'has a serious right to life'. Kaczor's book is divided into chapters most of which have titles of the form "Does Personhood Begin at X?" Substitution instances of 'at X' are 'after birth' 'at birth' 'during pregnancy' 'at conception' 'when the product of conception is no longer an embryo'. He also discusses Thomson's famous defense of abortion and "hard cases". A final chapter is concerned with artificial wombs.

Of course, it is not at all surprising that a book on abortion written by an author in the Catholic tradition should have this organization, but it is less than optimal. One problem is that the term 'person' has become fixed in the mind of philosophers familiar with the philosophical pro-choice tradition as having roughly the meaning that Mary Anne Warren famously attributed to it. To adopt another use of 'person' for the architecture of one's book appears to build a bias into one's analysis. The other problem is that much of this book is concerned with critical analyses of the views of others, and the views of others often don't fit well into the categories outlined by Kaczor's chapters. However, these complaints are -- in the final analysis -- matters of presentation only and such matters do not need to get in the way of the pleasure one can receive from reading this fine book.

Kaczor's positive defense of the claim that all human beings have the right to life is weaker than the rest of the book. On the one hand, to those not familiar with the philosophical literature on abortion, this proposition seems an obvious, and widely accepted, moral truth. It is, no doubt, difficult to forego the obvious rhetorical advantage obtained by basing one's view on this widely accepted claim. On the other hand, this claim has been subjected to two major criticisms, both set out clearly by Peter Singer over thirty years ago in Practical Ethics, and both discussed by Kaczor. The first can be called 'the speciesism objection'. 'Human being' is a biological concept. The wrongness of racism and sexism is based on the fact that biological properties have, all by themselves, no moral significance whatsoever. If this is so, then it seems to follow that the biological property of being a member of our species has no moral significance whatsoever, unless we equivocate on some notion like 'truly human'.

Kaczor calls the second criticism 'the over-commitment objection'. The claim that all human beings have a serious right to life seems to imply that a human being who is in an irreversibly unconscious state, such as an anencephalic child or someone who has experienced severe trauma to her brain or is totally brain dead, has a serious right to life. It certainly seems counterintuitive to suppose that it would be as wrong to end the life of such a human being as it would be to end the life of you or me. Indeed, perhaps it is not wrong at all. There is a basis for this intuition. Most of you do not believe that, if you were in such a state, an action or an inaction that would end your life would result in a diminution of your life prospects you would ever care about. Any serious defense of Kaczor's major premise requires dealing with these standard objections. Kaczor tries to deal with them. Is he successful?

Kaczor deals with the speciesism objection by offering a number of arguments. First, he appeals to the argument that since there are no other ethically relevant differences between ourselves and younger humans, and since we have the right to life, all human beings have the right to life. However, such an argument by elimination is hardly a firm foundation for a position that flies in the face of the important value of reproductive choice. After all, how can we be sure that we have surveyed all of the other potentially ethically relevant differences? Second, Kaczor treats the speciesism objection as merely linguistic. However, this suggests only that he has not come to grips with its strongest version. Third, Kaczor argues that the right to life must be based upon endowment, not performance. What people are capable of doing comes in degrees. This is incompatible with our commitment to human equality. Therefore, the right to life must be based on our endowment, on the genetics that we have in common with all other human beings. This, I am afraid, looks a good deal like the earlier argument by elimination that is surely insufficient as a basis for the right to life. Furthermore, one wonders why the right to life cannot be an equal right that one obtains by meeting some performance threshold, just as all students who pass their junior year in high school have the equal right to enroll for their senior year, whether they passed their junior year with flying colors or barely eked out passing grades.

Kaczor's strongest argument appeals to what he describes as the orientation of all human beings toward freedom and reason. The virtue of this move is that it gets our values into the account of the basis for our rights. The trouble with this move is that either this orientation is entirely a matter of the genetics that make us members of the human species or it is not. On the one hand, if it is just a matter of our human genetics, then, perhaps, it may yield the equality of all human beings. The trouble is that some individuals who are genetically enough like us to be counted as humans, such as the irreversibly unconscious, are not capable of freedom and reason. Therefore, the human genetics criterion divorces Kaczor's criterion of the right to life from the fact that as humans we (typically) value freedom and reason. On the other hand, if our orientation toward freedom and reason depends upon factors other than our genetic code, then we can retain a value-based criterion for the right to life, but anencephalic human beings, the severely retarded and severely demented, and those who have suffered the fate of being rendered irreversibly unconscious will lack the right to life. Therefore, it will be false that all humans have the right to life. The claim that our species is defined as the class of rational animals only avoids this problem by a shallow linguistic move. Each human who is irreversibly unconscious is, after all, a member of a species, the typical members of which are rational animals, even if she is not herself a rational animal. This point can be put in the following way. We can distinguish between those who are directly and those who are indirectly rational animals. A successful argument will not rest on obscuring this distinction.

Of course, the difficulty to which I am referring is what Kaczor calls 'the over-commitment objection'. (116-119). If all humans have the right to life, then we seem to be committed to too much. Kaczor's responses to this objection are sketchy at best. He suggests that one might want to hold that "the right to life is an alienable right, or that neocortical death should be defined as death or that human beings in permanent comas have a different right to life than human beings in temporary comas." (119) He concludes that the view that all human beings have the right to life does not necessarily lead to the view that it is wrong to end the lives of those who cannot be characterized directly as rational animals.

This is an almost unbelievably weak response to what Kaczor recognizes is one of the major objections to his positive account of the right to life. It certainly will not persuade those who wonder whether Kaczor's appeal to equality considerations to justify the right to life of all human beings is consistent with the view that the permanently comatose may have a different (read 'lesser') right to life than the rest of us. It will certainly not persuade those who agree with the orthodox Vatican view that not to provide ordinary care, such as food and water, to any human being, no matter how profoundly disabled, is intentionally to end an innocent human life and is, therefore, wrong. It will certainly not persuade anyone who is convinced (as I am) by the arguments of Alan Shewmon that the death of the brain is not sufficient for the death of a human being. It will not persuade anyone who recognizes that the arguments for the neocortical definition of death depend on the doctrine of brain essentialism, a doctrine Kaczor so emphatically rejects.

Even if all of these difficulties survive analysis, it does not follow that abortion is morally permissible. Nevertheless, it does imply that the major premise of the syllogism that Kaczor endorses as the basis for his view should be rejected. Kaczor's weak arguments are not a sufficient basis for overriding the important value of reproductive choice.

Even though I believe that the positive arguments for Kaczor's core syllogism do not survive analysis, I also believe that this book is worth careful study by anyone interested in the ethics of abortion. I think that it is the best book-length critique of the many defenses of abortion choice. Its analyses of defenses of abortion choice that have appeared in the last decade make it especially valuable and interesting.

NDPR Simon Skempton, Alienation after Derrida

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-11-09 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Simon Skempton, Alienation after Derrida, Continuum, 2010, 234pp., $120.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781441104748.

Reviewed by Michael Marder, Duquesne University/University of Lisbon

---

It is no secret that contemporary philosophy is under the spell of the Other. A host of rather automatic, ethico-political associations follows the invocations of "otherness" like a comet-tail: hospitality, respect, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism, etc. We are urged to come to terms with that which is alien, to learn to live with foreignness, to recognize the uncanny -- in Freud's vernacular, the "strangely familiar" -- within us, to derive our very sense of identity from alterity. The approaches to alterity, in turn, may be broadly classified into those that are purely formal in their refusal to endow the Other with determinate features or objective characteristics and those that fill it with concrete, infinitely variable content, depending on the Other's race, sex, gender, economic status, and so on. Still, regardless of the elected framework and of the qualifier "radical" often attached to it, "otherness" is domesticated not only as a hegemonic concept that, rather than awakening, brings critical thinking to a halt, but also as a bearer of intransigent humanism, willing to confer this title on no being other than human. Although the current theoretical interest in animal alterities goes a long way toward undoing such domestication, it is ultimately insufficient for the purpose of questioning the hegemonic status of the Other.

What is required, in addition to a thorough de-humanization of the concept, is its historicization thanks to a sound philosophical genealogy, extending all the way back to the ancient Greek heteron and, more recently, to Hegel's dialectics. To understand the current emphasis on alterity, we ought to situate it within the current "trans-valuation of values," as Nietzsche puts it, where the highest -- from the metaphysical standpoint -- values are debased and the lowest elevated, that is to say, where the same, the proper, and the identical cede their privileged place to the other, the alien, and the non-identical. This lopsided dialectic indicates, however, that the Nietzschean trans-valuation is far from being complete: in its second stage, at the threshold of which we find ourselves today, it will necessitate a de-hierarchization of the already inverted values, so that alterity, too, would lose its newly acquired transcendental status, just as sameness and identity did in twentieth-century thought. The promise of deconstruction lies, precisely, in its ability to inspire this post-metaphysical thrust "beyond the same and the other."

Simon Skempton glimpses the promise of deconstruction in the fifth (and final) chapter of his book, dedicated to "Deconstructive De-alienation." Despite a token tribute to alterity, the other and the same trade places so vertiginously in his text that the metaphysical distinction is wholly transformed, if not leveled. For example:

Alienation is the effacement of this instituting activity, of différance, through the latter's objectification . . . This is an alienation of subjectivity insofar as subjectivity is the opening to the other. Thus alienation is a suppression of otherness, and de-alienation is then an opening to and welcoming of the other. This may seem paradoxical, as it means that alienation suppresses alienness and de-alienation welcomes the alien. (170)

The core argument of Alienation after Derrida hinges on aligning différance -- the difference from and the deferral of identity -- with "inalienable alienation" (4), which has been, traditionally, covered over and disavowed by the metaphysical yearning for originary wholeness and purity. This disavowal is the reason why classical critiques of alienation, relying upon the myth of an undisturbed, paradisiacal, originary unity, are read as "the effacement . . . of différance," while deconstructive de-alienation is invested with the positive function of affirming that which has been effaced. But it is also the reason why theories of alienation have become outmoded in the second half of the twentieth century, after the metaphysics of presence and of the proper had been relentlessly debunked, first and foremost by deconstruction itself. The anachronism of a return to alienation in the aftermath of its discrediting as a philosophical fiction is at the heart of this study, which wishes to carve out a niche for the concept already processed by the deconstructive machinery and, thus, purged of metaphysical overtones.

Aside from re-interpreting alienation in the post-deconstructive vein, i.e., circling back to and affirming the object of deconstructive criticism after it has been "deconstructed," Alienation after Derrida implicitly commits to 1) enhancing our understanding of the classical notion of alienation, 2) shedding light on Derrida's engagement with German Idealism, and 3) contributing to the interpretation of Derrida's vast oeuvre. The goal of this review is to assess to what extent the book lives up to its multiple commitments, in staging the encounter between deconstruction and one of the most metaphysically charged concepts in the history of philosophy.

Although in the analyses of Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger composing the three central chapters of his study, Skempton attempts -- often painstakingly -- to distinguish alienation from various related terms, including objectification, reification, or externalization, he erases this very distinction in the discussions of Derrida's critique of this phenomenon. Deconstructive de-alienation that emerges out of the juxtaposition of German philosophy and Derrida's writings is fixated on the singularity and the "whoness" of the de-alienated subject, having dispensed with its generality and "whatness." Skempton, to be sure, suggests that "In Derrida's writings there are two conceptions of singularity, one dependent of the proper and the other radically detached from it" (13), and it is this second, improper kind of singularity that he is going to rescue for the sake of de-alienation. When it comes to embracing "whoness," however, no such qualifications are made; categorically stated, "Derrida conceives the personal on the basis of singularity and thinghood on the basis of generality. . . . The 'who' must always be other." (16) It follows, in keeping with Skempton's logic, that de-alienation entails the liberation of human beings from their objectivating designation as a "what" and a recovery (however impossible) of their singularity, untranslatable into any external and general characteristics. At the very least, then, the author presents deconstruction's approach to the issue of alienation as much more impoverished and reductive than that of the tradition wherein the term first germinated, if, indeed, this approach renders the concept in question synonymous with reification.

Let us note, nonetheless, that Skempton's account of deconstruction is deeply flawed. If the tension of différance is to be maintained, the subject will have to waver between pure singularity and generality, as well as between whatness and whoness, so that each extreme will differ from, defer, be differed, and deferred by the other. Rather than opt for the subject's "whoness," Derrida, in texts ranging from Signsponge and Glas to Specters of Marx, posits it within the disjunction of "who or what," supplementing this move with the description of the thing as the most general and the most singular, as the personal and the impersonal, and as something that, consequently, wreaks havoc in the categorizations of proper and common names. Nor is singularity a simple "dislocating disjuncture in the field of presence," as Skempton asserts, contrasting it to différance, which is "said to dislocate the singular itself in a chain of substitutability" (156); on the contrary, it is the singularity embedded in and emanating from each possibility of repeating the same, which Derrida terms "iterability." What would alienation look like against the background of this deconstructive suspension of the aspiration toward singularity and whoness? What is the place of generality and whatness in the de-alienated condition? Virtually slotting Derrida, who turns out to be indistinguishable from Levinas, into the German philosophical tradition, Skempton loses sight of these questions and, instead, defines de-alienation as "a re-subjectification, a de-objectification that brings the subject back to its non-phenomenal, non-present, undetermined basis." (199)

The predilection for a single pole in a dichotomous opposition marks Alienation after Derrida with remarkable consistency. In addition to his endorsement of the non-phenomenal, indeed noumenal, view of subjectivity as pure indeterminacy, Skempton equates the an-economic exception to the economic order with the logic of ends in themselves (123) and sovereign decisions with the possibility of praxis (168). In each case, de-alienation becomes tantamount to a recovery of a particular pole in the dichotomies of presence and absence, activity and passivity, subjectivity and objectivity, and so on -- the recovery that is not at all at odds with the project of Enlightenment humanism. Needless to say, such a method is not only formal but also inconsistent with the spirit, if not the letter, of deconstruction, which is only possible thanks to an indeterminate oscillation between two (or more) determinate alternatives.

Similarly formal and reductive is the treatment of deconstruction as synonymous with différance, thus transformed into a master-concept, Derrida's first and last word in philosophy. In the brief outline of the intellectual history of alienation presented in Chapter 1, différance functions as the exclusive point of contact between Plotinus, Rousseau, Schiller, the German Romantics, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Stirner, Marx, and Lukács, on the one hand, and deconstruction, on the other. While later Derridian figures and tropes, such as the trace and the specter, are mentioned in passing throughout the book, the term that should have received the most attention in a discussion of alienation -- namely, the gift -- is conspicuously absent. The analysis of the gift would have been especially germane to a re-evaluation of the relationship between Hegel and Derrida, undertaken in Chapter 2. In the scheme of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, the gift is a deficient form of exchange, whereby the alienation of property is not mutual but one-sided, so that the alienating party's loss is the receiving party's gain. But, in Given Time and The Gift of Death, Derrida raises the gift to the level of the absolute and wholly unpredictable generosity, which dispenses the best and the worst outside of the closed circuits of economic calculations and intersubjective recognition. No analysis of the Derridian an-economy can do without a patient consideration of how this break with "restricted economy" freezes the dialectics of exchange or of the mutual alienation of property, and, by the same token, elevates what is but a vanishing moment in the Hegelian system (i.e., the gift) to the dignity of the mode of relating to alterity.

Unbridled formalism also governs Skempton's analysis of Derrida's reading of Marx (Chapter 3). In a telling passage, Skempton writes:

a more apposite inference from what he [Michael Ryan] and Derrida have to say about the infinite excess of exchange and surplus value is that capitalism itself is deconstruction. Indeed, money itself has the emptily formal, insubstantial and excessive quality of différance. (98)

It would be fair to say that, as soon as différance is reduced to nothing but an "emptily formal, insubstantial and excessive" principle, its comparison to money becomes plausible, disregarding the fact that the abstract monetary value is a leveling and homogenizing force, as Marx himself noted in Capital. The excess of surplus value is, actually, the embodiment of economic alienation (of the workers from their labor time not restituted in wages) and, therefore, the element of injustice, around which capitalism is built. There is no place either for singularity, or for justice, or for the incalculable in the machinations of the capitalist "excess of exchange," incompatible with deconstruction.

The repeated accusation that Derrida practices a garden variety of philosophical formalism crops up again in Chapter 4, examining deconstruction's debt to Heidegger. Having established that, according to Derrida, the remnants of metaphysics in Heidegger's corpus revolve around the questions of the proper and the authentic, Skempton wishes to undermine this charge:

Heidegger's philosophy bears a merely formal resemblance to metaphysics . . . It is not a metaphysics, because its fundamental concept is not a primal entity, but simply being as such. Heidegger is compelled to use the language of metaphysics, he has no other language at his disposal [sic], in order to get at something more fundamental than metaphysics. To attack him for being metaphysical, as Derrida does, is to be guilty of formalism. (133-4, emphasis added)

It is, however, advisable not to conflate the reasons behind Derrida's "attack" on Heidegger, which is not due to an interpretation of Being as a variation on the metaphysical "primal entity" (such as the Ideas, God, or even will-to-power) but, rather, due to Dasein's heroic being-toward-death, taking hold of mortality, finitude, and Being as, in each case, mine and not the other's. While Derrida is well aware of Heidegger's departure from the objectivist metaphysics of the past, he still treats the metaphysics of the ownmost, the proper, and the inalienable -- complicated by the inappropriable character of death, which renders Dasein irreplaceable and unique -- with extreme suspicion. The formal analogy with the "primal entities" in the history of philosophy has little bearing upon the Derridian critique of Heidegger, keenly attuned to the fine grain of the latter's text.

As the above brief discussion of formalism indicates, the weakest points of Alienation after Derrida are the oversimplifications and ready-made conceptual molds into which it forces deconstruction and, to a lesser extent, the work of key figures in German philosophy. We should remember, nevertheless, that one of the ongoing tasks for the second stage of the trans-valuation of all values is to re-interpret the previously rejected concepts of metaphysics. Given that "alienation" is a paradigm case of such paleonyms, or "old names," that despite their archaic ring demand to be heard anew after deconstruction, Skempton's endeavor is both laudable and timely.

NDPR Norvin Richards, The Ethics of Parenthood

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-11-08 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Norvin Richards, The Ethics of Parenthood, Oxford University Press, 2010, 295pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199731749.

Reviewed by Michael W. Austin, Eastern Kentucky University

---

Much contemporary work in the philosophy of the family is focused on some particular aspect of parenthood, such as the ethics of reproductive technologies. In contrast to this, Norvin Richards offers a wide-ranging analysis of several important moral aspects of the parent-child relationship from, as the book's inside flap puts it, "slightly before the cradle to slightly before the grave." The Ethics of Parenthood is one of the few more comprehensive treatments of the ethical dimensions of the parent-child relationship. The book's first section, comprising the first four chapters, contains an examination of the significance of biological parenthood and what it is that grounds someone's claim to be a parent of a particular child. The second section, composed of five chapters, focuses on the obligations of parents and includes such topics as the autonomy of children, moral education, and love's import within the parent-child relationship. The final three chapters focus on the relationship between adult children and their parents, and what it means to be a good mother or father and good son or daughter during this phase of the relationship. The conclusion is a précis of the book, and as such would be useful for those looking for a comprehensive overview of the issues considered and the positions defended within its pages.

The Ethics of Parenthood has several virtues. First, it is clearly written and argued. Second, it includes critical reflection upon our commonsense beliefs about the parent-child relationship in a way that is sensitive to the realities of family life. Third, it includes a discussion of a variety of actual cases, some very well-known (Baby Jessica, Kimberly Mays) and some that are less so. Richards explores the theoretical implications of the cases and the implications of his theory for the cases themselves. Finally, for Richards, when there is a conflict concerning the rights and obligations of parents and children, no single person or entity trumps the others. Rather, as he elucidates his theoretical views and explores their practical implications, the interests of all of the relevant parties are taken into consideration, with no single party's interests -- the parent, the child, society, and the state -- necessarily trumping the relevant interests of the others regardless of the context.

In his discussion of parental rights, Richards rightly rejects accounts of parental rights grounded in the view that children are somehow the property of their parents, as well as a version of the best interests of the child account which takes the child's interests to be the only interests in play or to trump the interests of others. On the view defended by Richards, parental rights are grounded in the right to continue with whatever we already have underway, as long as it does no harm to others. While parenthood can bring forms of harm into being, he argues that in normal parenting the harms done are insufficient for the forfeiture of parental rights. What counts as continuing with the project of parenthood? According to Richards, this includes meeting the physical and emotional needs of children, deciding where the child lives and what manner of discipline to employ, providing moral and religious education, providing education and skills beyond a minimum standard, and raising the child to become a particular type of functional adult via parental influence. At least for cultures in which this is what parenthood is, these are the rights of parents.

Richards argues that there are ways to begin the project of parenthood which generate parental rights and ways which do not. First, as long as a person becomes a parent without violating anyone else's rights, then that person has the moral standing of being a parent. This can occur via biological processes, adoption, and other more informal means. A rapist does not acquire such rights, because he has violated the rights of the mother by his actions. Cases of assisted reproduction are also discussed, and Richards claims that the important question with respect to motherhood is which woman has the project of parenthood underway. For him, this depends on who starts the process with respect to biology. This is the question, not who the biological mother properly is. For example, in the case of surrogacy, it is the contracting mother who starts the process that is the child's parent, not the genetic surrogate. Richards also argues that since commercial surrogacy does not violate the rights of the surrogate, it is a suitable way to have a child and acquire parental rights.

However, on this particular subject, Richards is mistaken. It is arguably the case that commercial surrogate motherhood constitutes baby-selling, given the structure of surrogacy contracts with respect to the transfer of parental rights (see Scott Rae, The Ethics of Commercial Surrogate Motherhood, Praeger, 1993). If it is true that commercial surrogacy is the selling of a human being, then the rights of the infant are violated and commercial surrogacy is not a legitimate way to acquire the moral standing of being a parent, if, as Richards argues, the acquisition of such standing is contingent upon not violating the rights of another. This objection does not undermine the general account of parental rights given by Richards, but rather is meant to show that there is a violation of rights in commercial surrogacy which he ought to consider when discussing the implications of his general account for particular cases.

There are two other conditions for possessing parental rights if someone has begun to parent a child, in addition to not violating the rights of anyone else. One must be capable of continuing to be the parent of the child in question, and there must be no compelling evidence that one will not capably function as the parent of that child. These rights are not inalienable, however, and if a parent abuses or neglects a child, his or her parental rights can be suspended or terminated. The state is justified in such actions when parents fail to fulfill the special obligations of parenthood, which include the current and future welfare of the child. More specifically (and somewhat conservatively), Richards argues that

what calls most urgently for rescue by the state is life with a parent who is seriously defective in concern. The compelling signs that this is the life of a particular child . . . are (1) failures to treat the child as well as even a stranger should, where these cannot be dismissed as trivial or as being within parental latitude, (2) convincing evidence of a mental or psychological condition that would render the parent unable to implement the concern that parenthood requires, or (3) sustained and extensive failures in distinctively parental obligations (p. 110).

There is a shortcoming in this first section of the book worth noting. While I find myself largely in agreement with much of what Richards argues, others may not be so inclined. I think his argument could be strengthened by a deeper engagement with some of the philosophical literature that deals with the value of biology for parenthood specifically and the other accounts of parental rights more generally. Those with less conventional views about the basis of parental rights might be skeptical of the significant role biology plays in commonsense views of parenthood. And although Richards does not defend a strictly biological view of parenthood, those who are social constructivists with respect to the family and parental rights might require more in the way of argument for the view that beginning the project of parenthood via sexual reproduction, with the appropriate qualifications, is sufficient for parental rights.

The second section of the book examines what is morally required of parents. In chapter 5, Richards considers the issue of autonomy and the obligations of parents and their children as they relate to it. He argues that children's autonomy ought to be respected, even when they are young, though parents can be justified in protecting them and acting in paternalist ways in order to do so. As a child grows and matures and begins to have a self of his or her own, the range of choices to be honored increases because they express this self.

Chapter 6 includes an examination of what it is that parents are obligated to try to accomplish as they raise a child to become an adult. According to Richards, parents are obligated to raise their child to be morally good and to have a life that he or she is reasonably happy with that serves his or her particular desires reasonably well.

In chapter 7, Richards argues that parents are obligated to ensure that their children develop empathy, a sense of fairness, and a sense of responsibility for their own actions because these are necessary traits for living in society with other people. Parents should also foster a Millian ability of being capable of improvement via free and equal discussion, and an Aristotelian capacity for friendships of mutual value, trust, and loyalty. Beyond these, there are no other virtues which all parents should seek to inculcate in their children, because there are many ways of being more than morally decent, and the child should participate in the process of determining which of these ways to pursue.

Chapter 8 addresses how to deal with the bad behavior of children and includes the claim that good parents will use bad behavior as a way to foster the moral education of the child. Finally, chapter 9 contains a discussion of whether or not parents and children have an obligation to love one another.

In the book's final section, chapters 10-12, Richards examines the moral relationship between parents and children once the children are grown. At this stage in the relationship, grown children are now responsible for their moral character, and there are more restrictions on how parents may seek to influence that character as well as the overall shape of the lives of those children. The commitments to one another that good parents and children have continue into adulthood, but they change in important ways. One question discussed in this final section is this: what special obligations do grown children have to their parents? The answer depends in part on the nature of the relationship before the children were grown. More specifically, Richards argues that grown children are obligated to give their parents a place in their affections that is roughly equivalent to the place those parents gave them when they were young. These duties are not necessarily permanent, but they include such things as spending time with the parent, doing things he or she enjoys occasionally, and being of help in a variety of ways. The final chapter includes an examination of whether and when we should permit a loved one to make a great sacrifice on our behalf. An elderly or seriously ill parent might allow his child to make great sacrifices on his behalf as a way of respecting her autonomy and recognizing the love that exists between them which can impart great value to making such sacrifices for a loved parent.

In conclusion, there are other ethical issues in the parent-child relationship -- both theoretical and practical -- that I wish Richards had either specifically or more deeply addressed. For example, what sort of discipline of children is morally appropriate? Is the religious upbringing of children to be approached in the same way as the moral education of children, or is there something special about the former which requires a revised approach? What moral considerations are in play concerning the educational choices of parents on behalf of their children, including homeschooling? More theoretically, is the family merely a social construct, or does it also have some sort of deeper ontological status? These points are not intended to be criticisms of the book, as no single volume addressing the parent-child relationship could be fully comprehensive. And while it would be interesting to read what Richards believes about these particular issues, one could draw upon the arguments he has offered in the book to develop views on these and other issues in the parent-child relationship. For those interested in considering such issues in particular and the moral dimensions of the parent-child relationship more broadly, I highly recommend a close reading of The Ethics of Parenthood.