I still read some of the posts on the Freethought blogs, and came across this one on the blog Jonathan’s Musings talking about the Trump vs Clinton, at least, election and about how people were deciding who to vote for on the basis of who they liked or who they disliked instead of on the basis of their policies. Interesting, the post is responding to someone who says that liberals did that when deciding to not vote for Trump. Even more interestingly, he’s going to oppose that not by arguing that it was indeed Trump’s policies that caused him and others to not vote for Trump but instead by arguing that it’s perfectly valid to refuse to vote for someone because you dislike them even if their policies most aligned with your interests, despite the fact that a number of people argued that they were doing that with respect to Hilary Clinton, whom he certainly would have preferred win over Trump.
He says that he’ll have a couple more posts after this one, and as I write this the second one is up already, but I think that in contrast to what I normally do I’m going to deal with each post separately instead of dealing with them all at once, especially since the third post may not be one that I have much interest in addressing. Here, in this post, I’m far more interested in addressing the issues around reason and emotion rather than the specifics of the person he’s replying to or the specific issues around the election.
And the start of the post follows from its title, which talks about the Canadian Gad Saad who wrote a book that talks about how liberals are working on emotion instead of reason which causes a lot of their issues, and very quickly he notes that Saad is a libertarian and pretty much goes after him for that and for having conservative ideas. The first thing that’s of interest to me, though, is this point:
Saad gets it right when he points out that separating rationality from passion gives a false dichotomy. Neuroscience shows that this dichotomy is fiction because we reason with emotion. When it comes to political reasoning, which is moral reasoning, emotions are very pertinent.
I actually came across this a long time ago in one of my philosophy classes. Even at the time, I was Stoic-leaning, and an argument against them followed on from Hume’s ideas of calm passions that are involved in reasoning. The idea was that the Stoics argued for extirpating passions, but when they talked about passions they didn’t mean very strong emotions, but instead simple, every day emotions that we constantly felt, which was indeed a fair interpretation of them. However, the argument went on to not that as per Hume there were calmer emotions involved in all of our reasoning and that formed the basis of our reasoning ability — mostly things like motivation, for example — and so if we extirpated all emotions we’d eliminate them as well, and so would eliminate our ability to reason at all, and so their quest to eliminate all emotions in favour of reason is doomed to fail. As noted in this quote, there is some neurological evidence for this, as it seems like there is a neural pathway associated with emotion that runs through the neural pathway for reasoning. Thus, it would seem like one cannot eliminate emotion from reasoned decisions.
The problem is that while the Stoics definitely included calmer emotions in their view of passions, they didn’t include calm passions in their view of passions. The very basic and calm emotions that are necessary for any reasoning process to get of the ground are not the ones that they wanted to eliminate. Since we can feel the difference between those cases when we are deciding things on cold reasoning rather than heated passion, we can indeed determine what are the calm passions and what are the not-so-calm passions, and work to act only under the influence of calm rather than warm or hot passions. So it is no longer an argument against the Stoics that they must, by necessity, kill reasoning if they get their way and kill emotions. It is at least possible for them to extirpate passions as they seem them while retaining the calm passions needed for reasoning. At worst, the method they would use to extirpate passions would also extirpate calm passions and so that way lose reasoning and rationality, but if that really was the case the Stoics would focus more on reducing the influence of the passions even if they couldn’t extirpate them entirely, as a lot of their focus was already on reducing their influence and conditioning them to their proper use. So this, again, wouldn’t in any way suggest that because we can’t get rid of emotions while retaining reason that we should just give up and let emotions run rampant through our decision-making processes.
The biggest challenge to reason-based views like that of the Stoics — which, it should be obvious, is one I favour as well — is related to the very reason the Stoics distrust emotions: emotions are indeed full judgements that suggest actions to take in response to those judgements. The reason Stoics distrust them is because they often can be wrong, and a rational assessment of the situation would give a proper judgement and suggest a more appropriate action. Think about the stupid judgements people can make out of anger or jealousy and the stupid actions they can take in response to that and that should be sufficient reason to distrust emotions. However, the advantage to emotional judgements is that they tend to be subconscious and fast. When they’re right, it would be stupid to ignore them. They’re just wrong often and disastrously enough that we definitely should at least be suspicious of them and double-check their judgements using reason. So if someone, say, walks into a room and gets a sudden feeling of fear, it might not be rational to run screaming from the room, but it might be rational to take a look around the room and try to figure out what it is about the room that is triggering that, and if they can figure that out decide if the fear is justified or not.
This, then, can filter back into questions about not voting for someone because you have a visceral dislike for them, even if their policies seem to fit with your actual interests, because that dislike might be reflecting something real and relevant or something that is irrelevant. If, say, someone thinks that Trump seems to be like a used-car salesman, then that would be reason to not vote for him, because even if he talks about having policies that make sense you can’t trust him to tell the the truth about that. Or if someone dislikes Hilary Clinton because she seems like an upper-class elitist, that might also be a reason to not vote for her even if her policies align with their interests because as President she wouldn’t have respect for their actual economic class and so, ultimately, wouldn’t understand their concerns and in new situations would probably act in ways that didn’t help them. This is also behind the idea of voting for someone that you’d “have a beer with” on the basis that you think that if the two of you got together you could have a conversation where both of you could understand each other and they could understand your life and concerns, which means that they’ll be more likely to take that into account when making decisions, which means that they are more likely to make better decisions for you. On the other hand, if you dislike someone because they look like an ex-boyfriend or a teacher you disliked that wouldn’t be reasonable because that’s a dislike based on something not at all relevant to that person or their character.
So we don’t need to ignore emotions entirely. If we take an immediate dislike to someone, it might well be that our emotions are subconsciously picking up on cues that we haven’t consciously noted yet, and so might be making a proper assessment. But it’s not good enough to simply presume that it is doing that, and so instead we need to check it with reason to see if that’s valid. So the dichotomy is not one, not because we can’t reason without emotion, but that emotions can be useful if checked, verified and buttressed by reason.
So now we move on the defense of not voting for Trump:
Saad claims that liberals did not support Trump because of their visceral hate and contempt for him. We did not like his brazen disposition and political incorrectness. Instead, we should have been looking at the facts like his experience as a successful businessman or his stance on issues of importance. Well, that would not have been a fruitful avenue to take. Besides people vote based on their gut feelings on whether they like the candidate or not. This means that Trump’s beliefs, personality, mannerisms, and behaviors did not align with our preferences. It can easily be argued that it is rational to not vote for Trump based on those reasons (i)
The problem with trying to defend it this way is that it is indeed far more likely that liberals didn’t like his policies rather than just not liking him. The other problem is that people argued the same thing about Hilary Clinton, and in general most liberals argue that not voting for the superior candidate because they didn’t like her personally was a mistake. Opening up this door means that no one can ever chastise someone for, say, voting Republican because it was against their interests. In the attempt to justify liberals voting a party ticket and against a Republican that they disliked, he ends up justifying conservatives voting a party ticket and against Democrats that they dislike. It seems that there would be no way to break the current impasse in American politics if these arguments hold.
The other issue is that this argument is starting to turn into one based on the naturalistic fallacy. Even if most people vote based on their gut feelings, that doesn’t mean that we ought to vote based on our gut feelings. The only way to make the argument is to instead claim that we can’t vote except on the basis of our gut feelings, which is obviously false, even if, again, people often do. So he can’t make an argument that we ought to do that simply because we, in general, do. Saad’s point would be that yes, we do vote on that basis quite often but that we really shouldn’t, and arguing that we do indeed vote on that basis doesn’t refute the point.
In fact, emotions are so important that voting on values almost always trumps one’s interests [3].
The next post goes into more detail on values, so I’ll talk more about them later. But this is indeed another false dichotomy, and an obviously false one, because one cannot separate one’s interests from one’s values, because one’s values are the things that one cares about. One of the bigger problems with how liberals argue is not that they do so on the basis of facts and figures, but instead that they don’t consider what conservatives and centrists actually care about, or else assume that they most care about the same things that the liberals do. So they either argue on the basis of the things liberals care about — meaning their liberal values — or if/when that fails retreating to simply arguing on the basis of base pragmatics and pragmatic interests, and then get confused when the people give up personal gain to vote for other policies, ignoring that it can be explained when you look at their actual values rather than assuming that they value their own selfish interests above all else. You cannot separate interests from values because in a real sense values determine what someone’s real interests are, as they will not consider something to be in their interest if they don’t care about it.
Now, some decisions are more cognitive-intense than emotional, but we are talking about political reasoning not which mutual funds to purchase. If rationality is about goal-oriented behavior and how we feel towards a candidate is important to us, then it is completely rational to vote based on preferences-values and not our interests. Although our “interests” are usually framed in terms of pecuniary or quantifiable ends, it can be argued that our values become our interests.
If rationality is about goal-directed behaviour, then you have to pick a goal first. And it seems unreasonable to think that choosing a candidate should be based on who you like better rather than on who you think will be the best person for the job. After all, even in a workplace there may be fellow employees that you dislike but it doesn’t make it rational to refuse to give them a job — even a prominent job — that they are the best person for just because you dislike them, or even because you’d hate to see them get ahead from doing that job and getting noticed. If your goal is to get the job done, then you pick the best person for the job whether you like them or not, or else risk being reasonably called being irrational. The same thing applies to politics. I’ve recently read a biography of Winston Churchill, and on reading that there would be plenty of reasons for people to dislike him, but arguably he was the best person to lead Britain through WWII and to deny him that because he wasn’t all that well liked would have been a shame and possibly would have been disastrous. Because politics has serious consequences, the goal has to be the pick the best person for the job, and that means ignoring personal feelings and impressions — except when relevant, as noted above — and voting on the basis of those logical and rational considerations. Prom King and Queen can be a simple popularity contest, but President really should not be.
There is a common misunderstanding about truth and facts. We already unraveled the role of feelings in interpreting facts and reasoning. But what about “it’s all relative”? Conservatives hate this statement. Presumably, it delegitimizes their beliefs which they want to be absolute facts. Saad and scientists want to believe that absolute objective facts exist so they can make predictions. Objective facts exist, but they must be relative to the interpreter. So there are only relative objective facts and not absolute objective facts. Saad is not giving “it’s all relative” the proper treatment. Think about how ideologies frame abortion. Conservatives frame it as “a baby”. Liberals frame it as “a cluster of cells”. Therefore, abortion is immoral for conservatives and moral for liberals within their respective frameworks. Both statements are matters of fact. Both worldviews are right.
The thing is, the only reason he can say that both of these worldviews are right is by eliding the actual context of their statements that highlights what the real disagreement between the sides is. The only reason that he can say that both statements are matters of fact is that, yes, the foetus is a cluster of cells, but also a born baby is technically a cluster of cells and even human adults are a cluster of cells. But the liberal “frame” is that the foetus is only a cluster of cells, as opposed to a real baby or an adult. So they insist that it is not a baby, but is only a cluster of cells, and the conservatives argue that it really is a baby and not merely a cluster of cells. Given this, the worldviews are contradictory because they explicitly deny the conviction of the other side, and from that comes their disagreements. So since the worldviews are contradictory they cannot both be right, not matter how he wants to “frame” it.
Now, there is a consideration here, tying back to values, that facts on and of themselves don’t necessarily mean things but might have to be interpreted based on context. For example, whether or not it is raining outside is a simple fact, but whether that’s desirable or not is not, in fact, a simple fact. If you are a farmer suffering from a drought or someone who wants their garden to grow, it might be quite desirable, but if you want to go hiking it likely isn’t. So facts have implications, and some of those implications depend on human understanding and considerations to suss out. If there is any sense to idea that any truths are relative, this is it. And even this is something that we ought to be able suss out simply by knowing facts and values without having to rely on any gut feelings.
Anyway, that’s the first post. Next time, I’ll look at the second post which does talk more about values.