proceedings of the aristotelian society
Literature and Disagreement
eileen john (warwick)
D r a f t P a p e r
2013 - 2014 | issue no. 111 | volume cxiv
proceedings of the aristotelian society 135th session
issue no. 111 volume cxiv 2013 - 2014
literature and disagreement
eileen john u n i v e rs i t y o f wa rw i c k
m o n d a y, 2 8 a p r i l 2 0 1 4 17.30 - 19.15
the woburn suite senate house university of london malet street london wc1e 7hu united kingdom
This event is catered, free of charge, & open to the general public
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Š 2014 the aristotelian society
biography Eileen John is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Her research is in aesthetics and philosophy of literature, with particular interests in literature and knowledge, and some broader interests in personal autonomy, moral psychology, and conditions for ethical life. Recent papers are on second-personal constraints on love, the nature of our concern for fictional characters, and expressive thought in poetry. She directs Warwick’s Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts. editorial note The following paper is a draft version that can only be cited or quoted with the author’s permission. The final paper will be published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Issue No. 3, Volume CXIV (2014). Please visit the Society’s website for subscription information: www.aristoteliansociety.org.uk.
literature and disagreement eileen john In thinking about rational response to ethical disagreement, it is important to consider how epistemic and ethical factors interact. The association of conciliatory response to disagreement with the recognition of an epistemic peer is considered in light of some literary examples (short stories by Melville, O’Connor and Paley) that involve different patterns. The stories are presented as supporting the view that conciliation may be called for in relation to an ethical peer, even if that peer is an epistemic inferior.
WHEN we disagree with each other about something of ethical significance, how should we respond? One thing we do is argue with each other, each trying to convince the other to change views. If the arguments have run their course and disagreement remains, we can also ask about responses that make sense in the aftermath—should we relatively contentedly agree to disagree? Or suspend judgement? Would it ever make sense for one of us to adjust our view despite not being convinced by the other’s argument? Some of what matters to how we should handle disagreement is the stuff of epistemology or the basics of rational belief-formation: we should gather the most relevant evidence and reason with it cogently. We should consider an opponent’s evidence and reasoning in an impartial light and see whether they tell against our own in any way. With respect to the aftermath, we may need to wrestle with issues of testimony and how to acknowledge the epistemic authority of a disagreeing speaker. My concern here is with how, in cases of ethical disagreement, the epistemic and the ethical come into contact. The question of how to respond to ethical disagreement will rarely be settled using the standard resources of epistemology—evidence, reasoning, authoritative testimony—or at least, not using the standard resources understood in the most familiar terms. I will bring into the discussion a few works of literature that dwell on argument and its aftermath, in order to show how they engage with debates about disagreement and, I think helpfully, expose epistemic-ethical relations in ethical disagreement.
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i. My route into this discussion will start with the debate on how to respond to disagreement among ‘epistemic peers’. This is a debate about the aftermath of argument, in the sense that disagreeing epistemic peers are taken to be people who have already proven themselves as peers in argument. When disagreement continues to divide such peers, the question arises as to how they should respond to the fact of disagreement. I will only pick up on a few issues from this detailed, branching debate. One of the positions in the debate involves justifying conciliatory responses to disagreement by appeal to epistemic peerhood, and that position relates in a confusing way to patterns of conciliation and peerhood in the literary works. I want to set up that position and some of the issues that it brings to the surface, in order to make salient and compare the patterns and issues that emerge as important in the literary cases. The overall aim is to understand the rationality of conciliatory response to ethical peers who are, or are in part, epistemic inferiors. Status as an epistemic peer depends on being assessed with respect to one’s state of information, or in Jennifer Lackey and David Christensen’s gloss, one’s ‘familiarity with the evidence and arguments bearing on the disputed issue’, and also one’s dispositions and abilities as a reasoner, one’s ‘competence at correctly evaluating evidence and arguments of the relevant sort’. People who are ‘roughly equal along both dimensions […] are said to be epistemic peers’ (Christensen and Lackey 2013, pp. 1-2). It seems that, when the peer relation fails, ‘it’s much less clear that interesting epistemological issues arise’ (Christensen and Lackey , 2). It is in the context of a stand-off , as it were, with a person one believes to have equal epistemic credentials, that it seems one would have grounds for adjusting one’s view, and possibly for abstaining from belief on the matter altogether. Why take one’s own view to be sufficiently well supported, if an equally competent peer holds a competing view? In contrast, if one party to the disagreement had superior epistemic standing, it does not seem that he or she would have reason to revise beliefs in response to the disagreement. As Kornblith puts it, ‘my belief will not be threatened when you disagree with me if I know that your contrary opinion is unreasonable’ (Kornblith 2010, p. 36). I belabour this point (that response to non-peers is relatively straightforward), because the literary cases will bring it back into view. So again, the big picture is that I think you can read these stories as portraying epistemic non-peer relations in which the epistemic inferior, someone who forms !
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beliefs in an irrational or less rationally adequate way, nonetheless puts pressure on the beliefs of an epistemic superior. I will work my way gradually back to this claim. Contributors to the debate on peer disagreement are commonly sorted into ‘conciliatory’ and ‘steadfast’ camps.1 The issues dividing them will not always show up in the response each camp would call for in a given case of disagreement; the distinction involves how they construe the relation between the first-order reasoning about the issue and the higher-order facts about disagreement. The conciliatory views take facts about peer disagreement to be able in some cases to override one’s firstorder reasoning about and confidence in a proposition; the fact of disagreement can make a demand on your beliefs from a perspective in some sense external to the reasoning perspective one adopted in formulating the belief in the first place. The steadfast views, on the other hand, allow facts about disagreement to affect one’s degree of confidence in a belief, but they do so by incorporating those facts into one’s evidential base along with everything else. So often the impact of including such a fact would be relatively minor: I might become somewhat less confident in my belief, having noted that a peer who has looked at the same evidence has reached a different conclusion. To flesh this out slightly, one of the examples used to motivate conciliatory accounts of peer disagreement involves people who are equally competent in mental arithmetic. When such peers arrive at different calculations of, for instance, what each diner at a restaurant owes for a shared meal, it seems obvious that the disagreeing peer calculators should withhold confidence from the results they arrived at (as well as proceeding to go over the calculations again).2 In Adam Elga’s version of a conciliatory position, the ‘equal weight’ view, ‘one should give the same weight to one’s own assessments as one gives to the assessments of those whom one counts as one’s epistemic peers’ (Elga 2007, p. 484). If there is peer disagreement, giving equal weight is likely to lead to a very different assessment of a claim’s likelihood than was reached through one’s original reasoning. The steadfast position, on the other hand, is roughly that the fact of disagreement, while reasonably affecting one’s confidence to some degree, normally would not be sufficient to override or significantly demote one’s degree of belief. If one !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ! 1
See the Introduction to Christensen and Lackey 2013, and Christensen 2009, for overviews of the debate. 2 This example seems to originate in Christensen 2007.
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has done one’s best with the relevant accessible evidence, factoring in awareness of disagreement, there is no further responsibility to adjust one’s beliefs or withhold belief in light of the disagreement. Thomas Kelly, arguing for a relatively steadfast ‘total evidence’ view, says, ‘what it is reasonable to believe depends on both the original, first‐order evidence as well as on the higher‐order evidence that is afforded by the fact that one's peers believe as they do’ (Kelly 2010, p. 142). But ‘how one is rationally required to respond to a disagreement is not typically something that is fixed independently of substantive normative facts about how well-supported one's original view is’ (Kelly 2013, p. 51). Kelly imagines extreme cases in which the total evidence includes such a high number of disagreeing peers that the facts of disagreement would ‘swamp the first-order evidence’, but ‘This is so not because the higher‐ order evidence trumps the first‐order evidence in general’ (Kelly 2010, p. 144). The divide between the conciliatory and steadfast camps has been traced to divergence on a principle of ‘independence’ that concerns how to assess epistemic peerhood. The advocates of conciliation hold that it is problematic to take into account one’s own way of handling the evidence on the issue at hand when assessing whether a disagreeing thinker is an epistemic peer. As Ernest Sosa puts it (while himself arguing for a steadfast position), ‘To demote your opponent based just on your disagreement is likened to declaring someone else's watch inaccurate because it disagrees with your own, in the absence of any independent basis to prefer either watch over the other’ (Sosa 2010, p. 282). Christensen formulates, and endorses, the following principle of ‘Independence’: ‘In evaluating the epistemic credentials of another person’s belief about P, to determine how (if at all) to modify one’s own belief about P, one should do so in a way that is independent of the reasoning behind one’s own initial belief about P’ (Christensen 2009, p. 758). For present purposes, the discussion of this principle is of interest because it engages with the question of how epistemic peers can be identified when matters of substantial controversy are at stake. The thought is that we might be able to isolate our reasoning about P, and generate an independent assessment of another’s epistemic competence, when we are dealing with a relatively simple, trivial matter such as calculating a restaurant bill. In such cases, as Kelly says, it is plausible that ‘there really is some identifiable, relatively discrete piece of reasoning that leads one to a particular belief. But […] the kinds of extremely controversial beliefs that people hold about history, politics, !
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religion, and philosophy […] are often not easily understood as the output of some discrete process of reasoning’ (Kelly 2013, p. 39). If one’s views on a controversial matter emerge from a broad and deep enough basis, it will not obviously be possible to assess whether someone is an epistemic peer while setting that basis aside. It might require leaving out too much of what helps make one a knowledgeable and competent thinker on the subject. Kornblith and Elga take up this problem, both from a conciliationist perspective, and respond to it in interestingly different ways. For Elga, because ‘in the messy cases, one’s reasoning about the disputed issue is tangled up with one’s reasoning about many other matters […] one tends not to count one’s dissenting associates—however smart and wellinformed—as epistemic peers’ (Elga 2007, p. 492). He takes the entangled nature of the reasoning on messy issues to allow one, not to judge the dissenting thinker to be a non-peer, but to withhold judgement on peerhood: ‘there is no fact of the matter’ about my opinion of a dissenting thinker’s epistemic standing in a substantial enough disagreement (Elga 2007, pp. 495-6). Elga is seeking here to avoid the charge of ‘spinelessness’, namely, the objection that conciliation would require that we suspend judgement on nearly all controversial matters.3 If in fact we are rarely in a position to count people who disagree with us on substantial matters as epistemic peers, the conciliating (and objectionably spineless) response will rarely be called for. Kornblith, however, thinks Elga too conveniently dismisses the possibility of epistemic peerhood in controversial contexts such as disagreement about abortion. The thinkers whom Elga imagines disagreeing about this moral issue are, in Kornblith’s view, likely to ‘regard each other as basically decent, caring, thoughtful individuals […] in respectful agreement about a very wide range of moral issues. […] Given that they do, justifiably, regard each other as moral epistemic peers, their grounds for withholding belief on the cluster of issues on which they disagree is thereby restored’ (Kornblith 2010, p. 50). For Kornblith, then, the independent assessment of peer status can be adequately carried out in matters of moral controversy, and he bites the bullet in accepting that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ! 3
‘It would be objectionably self-abasing to revise your belief on matters like intelligent design or the wrongness of abortion just in virtue of finding that others whom you respect take a different view. … To migrate towards the views of others … would seem to be an abdication of epistemic responsibility: a failure to take seriously the evidence as it presents itself to your own mind’ (Pettit 2006, p. 181).
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the requirement for withholding of belief will thus make a very substantial demand on us.4
ii. When one turns to literary works that depict disagreement — and of course they do so a lot, conflict of belief being one of the great drivers of literary projects — there is no hope of generalising safely about how they treat response to disagreement. However, I will rashly claim that the independence principle has at least a very low profile. The demand to acknowledge and integrate different kinds of evidence simultaneously, very broadly in sympathy with a ‘total evidence’ approach, seems at home in literature. The way in which different kinds of considerations impinge on and inflect each other, rather than the ability of a certain kind of evidence to dominate others, often seems built into both the predicaments of depicted believers and the reflective activity of reading. Furthermore, the dramatic potential of disagreement seems to lie, at least in part, in what Kelly refers to as the ‘burdens of judgement’: ‘Faced with a peer who disagrees, knowing how one is rationally required to respond will typically require an extremely substantive judgment about one's overall epistemic situation, as opposed to the straightforward application of a general norm that dictates agnosticism in all such cases’ (Kelly 2013, p. 52). We want to understand what characters are disagreeing about and why, and also, certainly, whether they are well matched in their conflict, but that will typically not remove us from what each specifically contributes to the disagreement at hand. We enter into depicted disagreement with the sense that paying attention to what got the participants there matters, and that the participants somehow need to draw on what got them there in order to participate as themselves. The idea that their relation as peers or non-peers could be established independently of how they comport themselves in the disagreement at hand would seem to be an unmotivated neglect of centrally relevant evidence. That their belief revision could and should hang on setting aside what has actually moved them in forming their
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Kornblith and others are particularly concerned with how conciliatory withholding of belief seems called for in response to philosophical disagreement, where it seems commonplace for competent epistemic peers to examine the issues carefully and continue to disagree.
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beliefs would need specific explanation. 5 So this is some rash speculation about what to expect in literary treatments of disagreement: I posit that the assessment of epistemic standing, and the approach to belief revision in the face of disagreement, will insist on the relevance of the reasoning the disagreeing parties bring to the table. Broadly, the literary context seems sympathetic to some form of ‘total evidence’ approach, and to a rejection of the independence principle, these sympathies both being characteristic of the steadfast camp. However, while I take the literary examples I will discuss to have that kind of affiliation with ‘steadfastness’, I also take them either to promote or at least to show as reasonable what seem to be surprisingly conciliatory responses to disagreement. My diagnosis of how this makes sense within these works has to do with the demands of ethical disagreement. Although the three stories I will mention cannot be lumped together too easily, I think they all depict situations in which the fact of disagreement with an ethical peer helps to make some form of conciliatory response reasonable, even though the conciliating party’s original reasoning is not obviously exposed as inadequate, and the conciliator in fact appears to be dealing with some type of epistemic inferior. These conciliating responses are reasonable, very roughly, because epistemic non-peers will generally still be ethical peers, and the fact of disagreement on an ethical issue, with an ethical peer, can be relevant in various ways to how adequately one’s ethical reasoning meets one’s actual ethical context. Let me now try to give more substance to this notion of meeting one’s ethical context adequately.
iii. A kind of limit case of disagreement is portrayed in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’. The story portrays an immensely irritating and unsettling disagreement between an employer and his employee, Bartleby. The employer, also the narrator, reports on his attempts to convince Bartleby to do the legal copying work he was hired to do. Bartleby responds to his employer’s requests and demands by saying merely that he prefers not to. This triggers a series of stand-offs between !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ! 5
I think this view of expectations for literary conflict stands in some suggestive relation to Wedgwood’s claim that an asymmetry in trusting my own epistemic position over that of others is rational because only my own beliefs and intuitions are capable of ‘directly guiding’ my belief revision (Wedgwood 2010, p. 240).
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them, leading eventually to the employer abandoning his chambers, leaving Bartleby in the hands of the landlord, who sends him to prison, where Bartleby dies. Here’s a sample of their dispute: ‘The copies, the copies’, said I, hurriedly. ‘We are going to examine them. There’—and I held towards him the fourth quadruplicate. ‘I would prefer not to’, he said, and gently disappeared behind the screen. For a few moments I was turned into a pillar of salt, standing at the head of my seated column of clerks. Recovering myself, I advanced towards the screen, and demanded the reason for such extraordinary conduct. ‘Why do you refuse?’ ‘I would prefer not to.’ […] ‘These are your own copies we are about to examine. It is labor saving to you […]. It is common usage. Every copyist is bound to help examine his copy. Is it not so? Will you not speak? Answer!’ ‘I prefer not to’, he replied in a flute-like tone. It seemed to me that, while I had been addressing him, he carefully revolved every statement that I made; fully comprehended the meaning; could not gainsay the irresistible conclusion; but, at the same time, some paramount consideration prevailed with him to reply as he did. (Melville 1969, pp. 48-9) The employer works through various stances toward Bartleby: the authoritative employer, the prudential reasoner, the defender of social convention, the Christian benefactor and martyr, the legally entitled citizen, and the mystified fellow being. None of the corresponding arguments, considerations and pleas gets any traction. The employer instead develops a sense that he has let Bartleby down—that he has failed Bartleby. He makes a few futile efforts to make Bartleby’s imprisonment more comfortable; telling Bartleby’s story, such as it is, seems to be his way of recognising what is due to Bartleby. The fact that none of the employer’s arguments has any traction with Bartleby is not surprising, since preferring not to is, after all, what Bartleby is given to be as a character. The story portrays a limit case of disagreement since it is not obvious that we can take Bartleby to be reasoning at all. Is the bare statement of a preference the reason par excellence or an avoidance of reasoning? Taking the employer’s original !
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point to be that he ought to do his work, because employees generally ought to do their work, Bartleby does not seem to dispute that point so much as give it no uptake. With our epistemic-standards hats on, it seems, at least, that we can assess Bartleby as an epistemic inferior. He may have a kind of ur-reasoning in play, but his assertions do not engage constructively with the controversy surrounding his behaviour. He does not address his interlocutor’s arguments and does not come up with competing reasons that make sense to the interlocutor. The surprising impact, then, is on the interlocutor and, I would say, the reader. Despite the fact that Bartleby fails to reason adequately or at all, the employer’s own sensible arguments seem more and more inadequate. We experience his attempts to reach and make a difference to Bartleby as urgent, but inept and doomed. Why is his good reasoning not adequate? It seems to be because he faces an ethically ill-defined context. He has to treat Bartleby as an ethical peer, someone who merits ethical respect and concern, yet he needs Bartleby to do his share of the ethical-contextrealising work, roughly, the work of marking that something counts as good. To the extent that Bartleby fails to do that or does it too obscurely, the interlocutor’s reasoning will not be able to assume the network of assumptions that help ethical reasoning get off the ground (that we can share reasons, that we are not utter mysteries to each other). It is touch and go whether Bartleby and his employer have enough of a shared life to form ethical beliefs about and on which to disagree. In this situation, conciliation of a kind toward an epistemic inferior, but ethical peer, seems appropriate. It is in some sense reasonable for the employer to try to connect with an unreasonable epistemic peer, and to feel in the end that he, the good reasoner, has not come to an adequate account of the situation. In part this conciliating response is appropriate because he has learned something from his stand-offs with Bartleby about the limitations of his normal reasoning— not that he is wrong in general to draw on this reasoning and its ordinary expectations (of law, citizenship, the in fact demanding commonplaces of morality), but that he cannot himself sustain and control the viability of that reasoning. The ethical peer, no matter how unreasonable, is needed to make ethical reasoning viable, and if you cannot reach that peer by reasoning, a kind of conciliating recognition of one’s inadequacy is appropriate. Flannery O’Connor’s story ‘The Barber’ returns us to the realm of better-functioning ethical disagreement, albeit still problematic. Here the disagreement concerns which candidate for governor to vote for, and the context is 1940’s, small-town Georgia, U.S. politics, hence a social !
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setting of racial segregation, prior to the emergence of a large-scale civil rights movement. Rayber, an academic teaching at the local college and the hapless protagonist, is identified as a ‘liberal’, and he is provoked into trying to convince his barber that the anti-segregation candidate is the right choice. The barber is wonderfully enthusiastic about the segregationist candidate and has by heart some of the candidate’s speeches, which seem mainly to involve name-calling, more elaborate ad hominems, and repetition. So O’Connor sets up the barber and his candidate as paradigmatic flawed reasoners. They revel in the cheap shot and the shallow address or avoidance of issues. Rayber works very earnestly on an argument that will prove the barber wrong, and he shows it to his colleague, Jacobs, who teaches philosophy. He was disgusted with himself for saying he would give them reasons. Reasons would have to be worked out—systematically. […] What was the matter with him? Why not work them out? He could make everything in that shop squirm if he put his mind to it. […] He thought it was blunt enough. It began, ‘For two reasons, men elect other men to power’, and it ended, ‘Men who use ideas without measuring them are walking on wind.’ He thought the last sentence was pretty effective. […] ‘Well,’ Jacobs said, ‘so what? What do you call yourself doing?’ […] ‘Defending myself against barbers,’ he said. ‘You ever tried to argue with a barber?’ ‘I never argue,’ Jacobs said. (O’Connor 2000, pp. 20-1) The reader is not privy to anything beyond Rayber’s opening and closing statements. But we do get an account of how it goes when Rayber delivers the argument in the barbershop, including the way he makes George, the barber’s black employee, part of the audience. ‘If you’re calling everybody else, why don’t you call your boy, George. You afraid to have him listen?’ The barber looked at Rayber for a second without saying anything. Rayber felt as if he had made himself too much at home. […] ‘He can hear,’ the barber repeated. ‘He can hear what he hears and he can hear two times that much. He can hear what you don’t say as well as what you do.’ […]
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Rayber felt as if he were fighting his way out of a net. They were over him with their red faces grinning. He heard the words drag out—‘Well, the way I see it, men elect …’ He felt them pull out of his mouth like freight cars, jangling, backing up on each other, grating to a halt, sliding, clinching back, jarring, and then suddenly stopping as roughly as they had begun. It was over. (O’Connor 2000, p. 24) I will assume here that for the reader, and for O’Connor, the liberal’s conclusion is correct, and that Rayber’s reasoning, whatever it is, is either good or at least far better than the barber’s. There should, it seems, be no question of taking the barber seriously as an epistemic peer. We could say that Rayber fails miserably in terms of rhetorical effect, since he lacks psychological insight into how to have an impact on his barber, but there is probably nothing much wrong with his epistemically relevant practice. Let me briefly give a different account, because I think the rhetorical critique of Rayber, though deserved, is not the point of the story. The barber is for the most part an epistemic inferior, but not in all respects. He is also a disagreeing ethical peer, and in that way, somewhat like Bartleby though in a less unsettling way, has a claim on Rayber’s consideration. Rayber and his barber need to attempt to form a shared ethical world, and the barber has the standing to cast ethical judgement on Rayber. What emerges in the story is that the barber understands something about Rayber that Rayber does not. In particular, the barber can tell that Rayber’s commitment to a racially integrated society is only a distant promissory note, a vision of the future that Rayber is completely unprepared to live in. The barber, meanwhile, has a daily working relation with George, his employee, so, as inequitable as that relation may be, the barber lives the more integrated life. George is a real person for the barber, but not fully for Rayber. The fact that the barber misuses his experience with George, not following it out consistently to treat George as an equal citizen, counts heavily against the barber as an ethical reasoner, but it does not allow the barber to be dismissed as having no standing to critique Rayber’s reasoning. I take this story to bear out a point made by Ernest Sosa that shows the difficulty of identifying epistemic peers. A belief forms in us over time through the subtle influence of diverse sources. […] The belief might owe importantly to the !
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believer's upbringing, or to later influence by his community. We are social beings and do well, socially and intellectually, to rely on such influence by our social and intellectual communities. But this means that The idea that we can always or even often spot our operative “evidence” for examination is a myth. If we can't even spot our operative evidence—so much of which lies in the past and is no longer operative except indirectly through retained beliefs—then we cannot disclose it, so as to share it. (Sosa 2010, pp. 290, 291). Sosa uses this claim, that we do not have ready access to the full bases of our beliefs, to make a relatively ‘steadfast’ point: that normally it is rational to trust one’s competence in the face of disagreement, as long as one has no independent grounds for taking the disagreeing party to be a peer (Sosa 2010, pp. 293-5). But if we recognise that neither party has full access to the evidence used by the other, the grounds for not treating the other as a peer remain deeply provisional. And this lack of full access allows for the kind of unwelcome surprise that Rayber undergoes. It seems that the exchange between Rayber and the barber ought to interfere with Rayber’s provisional confidence. In part he acquires direct evidence that the barber is a poor reasoner, an epistemic inferior. But it also seems that the barber has better access to the roots of Rayber’s views, and in that way, within the ‘total evidence’ of their very awkward exchange, Rayber acquires evidence both for the barber’s epistemic superiority in at least one respect and for the ethical ground that they share. Rayber can learn something from the barber about the ethically inadequate bases of his own beliefs.6 In part the upshot of this is the fairly obvious point that if the bases for belief are complex enough we can stand in different epistemic relations to our disagreeing others concerning the very same disagreement—a mixture of conciliation and steadfastness may be called for. But perhaps the more interesting point is that a conciliatory response to the wrong side on ethical matters, at least in the sense of finding that one agrees in an unexpected way (e.g., agreeing that one’s black peers are not people one knows how to live with) can be a crucial ethical advance. Rayber needs to know this about !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ! 6
The inadequacy might be formulated as follows: Rayber believes we ought to live in a racially egalitarian society, but ‘racially egalitarian society’ is a kind of incomplete term as he uses it and he has a racist resistance to what is claimed if it is given complete meaning.
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himself in order to have a full and fully competent disagreement with the barber. Finally, with respect to disagreement, one of the things that a literary work can portray — something quite ordinary in real life — is the way in which one’s being in the right, and others being wrong, can quickly lose significance. Choices and events keep moving beyond the circumstances in which one affirmed an ethical truth; we may quickly find ourselves implicated in the ethically wrong-headed views we rejected, and some form of conciliation may be rational. Again, I would say that the literary view of this would tend to assume a ‘total evidence’ approach rather than relying on assessment of the epistemic peerhood of those one disagreed with. A story along these lines is Grace Paley’s ‘The Loudest Voice’. Shirley, a Jewish girl in a 1950’s New York City primary school, is asked to be the voice of Jesus in the school Christmas pageant (which will, unusually and rather hilariously, cover the whole life of Jesus including the crucifixion). Shirley notes how happily the school throws itself into preparations, but then reports on her parents’ disagreement over her participation. … [The teachers] weren’t ashamed and we weren’t embarrassed. Oh, but when my mother heard about it all, she said to my father: ‘Misha, you don’t know what’s going on there. Cramer is the head of the Tickets Committee.’ ‘Who?’ asked my father. ‘Cramer? Oh yes, an active woman.’ ‘Active? Active has to have a reason. Listen,’ she said sadly, ‘I’m surprised to see my neighbors making tra-la-la for Christmas.’ My father couldn’t think of what to say to that. Then he decided: ‘You’re in America! Clara, you wanted to come here. In Palestine the Arabs would be eating you alive. Europe you had pogroms. Argentina is full of Indians. Here you got Christmas … Some joke, ha?’ ‘Very funny, Misha. What is becoming of you? If we came to a new country a long time ago to run away from tyrants, and instead we fall into a creeping pogrom, that our children learn a lot of lies, so what’s the joke? Ach, Misha, your idealism is going away.’ ‘So is your sense of humour.’ (Paley 1994, p. 36)
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The parents here count, I would say, as epistemic peers. They are equally well-informed, neither is set up as a superior reasoner, and they share their reasoning with each other in direct conversational argument. In Paley’s rather peculiar, compressed style, it is all put on the table. I will furthermore assert that, given the social, political and legal context in which the school exists, the mother is right. A Jewish child in a state school should not be asked to promote Christianity, and the parents have a responsibility to object to and protect the child from such institutional demands. I do not think anything in the story really undermines her reasoning, except that it loses relevance as events roll along—her reasoning becomes unsuited to meeting her ethical context. It appears that Shirley has already agreed to play the role, and the parents do not intervene. My sense of the story is that the view of an epistemic inferior, the child who does not grasp the historical and ethical stakes as her parents do, is allowed to ‘win the day’. She and her father are basically on the same side, so one could say that his view wins, but it seems that it is more the child’s view of the meaning of her actions that takes over. What playing Jesus means to Shirley is allowed to take centre stage, as it were. Her groaning ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ becomes a display of her theatrical triumph inside the story and a moment of comic pleasure for the reader — it is somehow brilliant that this character gets to say this in this setting. Shirley’s experience as depicted, which perhaps makes this story something of a fantasy, simply does not turn out to be one of coercion and indoctrination (except into the discipline of the theatre). The mother meanwhile adapts to the context in which her daughter is in fact the loudest, most powerful presence in the Christmas pageant. At the end Shirley overhears her mother defending the casting of Jewish children for the key roles: ‘Ach,’ explained my mother, ‘what could Mr. Hilton do? They got very small voices; after all, why should they holler? …You think it’s so important they should get in the play? Christmas … the whole piece of goods … they own it.’ […] I was happy. I fell asleep at once. I had prayed for everybody: my talking family, cousins far away, passersby, and all the lonesome Christians. I expected to be heard. My voice was certainly the loudest. (Paley 1994, p. 40)
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eileen john
literature and disagreement
draft paper
What is the conciliatory move that the mother makes? Again, I do not think that the mother, or the story, gives up on the initial argument that this should not be happening in the first place. However, the mother is conciliatory in the sense that she realises she does not determine the meaning of her daughter’s actions and experiences, and she is open to events turning out to have both the ethical flaw she attributed to them and forms of ethical value she could not have envisioned. In this case the child who knows less is a more free and fearless guide to how to live in an ethically imperfect situation. The mother’s conciliation is rational because she has not insisted on fixing the ethical value of a situation that is not simply hers to fix, and she shows a kind of confidence in the daughter that lets the younger person take shape as an ethical peer.
iv. The contribution that a few literary examples can make to a debate is itself a matter of philosophical disagreement. I have not done much here to acknowledge the complexity of what these works offer and of how we experience them; I think that even at a fairly flat-footed level of description they can be seen as exploring the possibilities for conciliatory and rational response to ethical disagreement. I hope that there is a kind of implicit justification for putting them in this context, if the stories in fact get us to think about their patterns of disagreement and conciliation in a philosophically substantial way. Let me close by acknowledging a quite different way of reading the stories. Should the phenomena that I have identified in the terms of conciliation rather be understood as showing, perhaps, the stories’ ridicule of reasoned argument or their despair for its ethical role? Are the supposedly conciliating moves better captured as anti-rational adaptations to circumstances, as showing what people happen to do when evidence and standards of reasoning are of no use? One might think that literary depictions of disagreement would more commonly challenge or undermine standards of rationality in belief-formation. I am not able to fend off this view adequately here. I will note first that I take the big idea, roughly that rationality eludes us or fails to help with what we most need, to be absolutely central as a problematic in many or most decent works of literature, including these stories. It is not allowed to be obvious that there is a rational route to take, as is most clearly manifested in the Melville story. However, I take these particular stories to be working very sympathetically with the fact that we are reasoners. Despite scathingly depicting failures of epistemic competence, the stories appreciate the fact that we turn to each other !
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eileen john
literature and disagreement
draft paper
with argument, in the hope of sharing reasons, when encountering uncertainty and conflict. This is part of what these stories show to be compelling about human life. So I read them not as sceptical texts, but as exposing the deep difficulty of being an adequate ethical reasoner. The literary examples show that ethical disagreement has to be lived with somehow, and they go some way to recognising the forms of ‘total evidence’ and conciliating response that are appropriate in a social context. Department of Philosophy University of Warwick Coventry CV4 7AL United Kingdom eileen.john@warwick.ac.uk
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eileen john
literature and disagreement
draft paper
references Christensen, David 2009: ‘Disagreement as Evidence: The Epistemology of Controversy’. Philosophy Compass 4(5), pp. 756-67. _____ 2007: ‘Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News’. Philosophical Review 116, pp. 187-217. Elga, Adam 2007: ‘Reflection and Disagreement’. Noûs 41(3), pp. 478502. Gover, Trudy 1999: The Philosophy of Argument. Newport News, VA: Vale Press. Kelly, Thomas 2013: ‘Disagreement and the Burdens of Judgment’. In David Christensen and Jennifer Lackey (eds), The Epistemology of Disagreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 31-52. _____ 2010: ‘Peer Disagreement and Higher-Order Evidence’. In Richard Feldman and Ted Warfield (eds), Disagreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 111-74. Kornblith, Hilary 2010: ‘Belief in the Face of Controversy’. In Richard Feldman and Ted Warfield (eds), Disagreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 29-52. Melville, Herman 1969 [1853]: ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’. In Great Short Works of Herman Melville. New York: Harper & Row, pp. 3974. O’Connor, Flannery 2000 [1947]: ‘The Barber’. In The Complete Stories. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 15-25. Paley, Grace 1994 [1959]: ‘The Loudest Voice’. In The Collected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pp. 34-40. Pettit, Philip 2006: ‘When to Defer to Majority Testimony—And When Not’. Analysis 66(3), pp. 179-87. Sosa, Ernest 2010: ‘The Epistemology of Disagreement’. In Adrian Haddock, Allan Millar and Duncan Pritchard (ed.), Social Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 278-97. Wedgwood, Ralph 2010: ‘The Moral Evil Demons’. In Richard Feldman and Ted Warfield (eds), Disagreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 216-44.
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