Posted on Friday, March 2, 2018

The Invulnerability Pill

Civil American, Volume 3, Article 3 (March 2, 2018).

| By William Irwin |

In A Fragile Life: Accepting our Vulnerability, Todd May asks whether invulnerability is desirable. Identifying Stoicism, Epicureanism, Buddhism, and Taoism as philosophies of invulnerability, May rejects what he says is their ultimate goal. His reasoning is that big things like loss, death, politics, and failure matter too much. He would not want to become invulnerable to their emotional impact.

Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Moreno and Adobe Stock photos.

The stoic, Epictetus.

To be clear, the invulnerability May refers to is emotional invulnerability, not physical or actual invulnerability. Even the most accomplished Stoic, for example, is still subject to the occurrence of loss, death, and failure. It is just that the perfect Stoic would no longer be emotionally vulnerable to such occurrences. Rather, such a person would notice these occurrences, account for them, but not be disturbed by them. The perfect Stoic would not lack feeling but would integrate that feeling within a properly ordered self. Granted, there are different conceptions and interpretations of Stoicism, but in general it is a philosophy that counsels self-control, detachment, and acceptance of one’s fate. Likewise, Epicureanism aims at acceptance of a life of simple pleasures taken in moderation, and Taoism aims to go with the flow, the Tao or way.

May finds much to admire and emulate in philosophies of invulnerability. Indeed, when it comes to small matters, May wishes he were more invulnerable. For example, it would be better not to be so disturbed when, due to circumstances beyond control, one runs late for an appointment. Likewise, it would be better to be less upset, or not upset at all, by one’s malfunctioning computer. In the words of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, it would be ideal to accept the things that one cannot change—especially the small things.

For May, though, part of what makes life worth living is emotional investment. If we derive meaning from our emotional investments in people, projects, and our own lives then we must pay the price of emotional vulnerability that comes with their fragility and uncertainty. If I spend my life committed to the cause of free speech, then fittingly I would be devastated if a tyrannical government seized power and deprived the citizenry of that right. As May sees it, a reaction of stoical indifference would be inappropriate and undesirable. Such a reaction might force me to wonder if I had ever really been deeply committed to championing free speech in the first place. Likewise, if I learned that my life was about to be cut short by cancer, a reaction of stoic indifference might throw into doubt how much I ever valued my life and its projects. Perhaps all the more so, a reaction of stoic indifference to the death of one’s child might seem to suggest that one never really loved the child. No, the people and things that make life worth living deserve deep emotional investment such that one is vulnerable. A life worth living is a life of vulnerability.

To a large extent I agree with May’s conclusion. Where I disagree is with his conception of the philosophies of invulnerability and with the desirability of invulnerability as an ultimate goal. May considers philosophies of invulnerability in such a way as to overestimate their potential success. The truth is that the perfect Stoic is a fiction. Also in the realm of fiction we can find the Buddhist, Taoist, and Epicurean who have achieved invulnerability. The philosophies of invulnerability aim at a goal that they never reach. So, contra May, we need to reformulate the question. Should we pursue the trajectory that asymptotically approaches invulnerability without ever reaching it? For myself I answer yes.

If there were a single pill that I could take one time to achieve emotional invulnerability I would decline the pill. I would not want to become invulnerable immediately, once and for all, even though the invulnerability is still worth wanting. Of course, Stoicism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Epicureanism offer no such pill. Rather, what each offers is a philosophy and a training program for approaching invulnerability. The training takes time; even life-long practitioners do not often claim to have reached the desired outcome. One way to think of the training is in terms of setting an aspirational goal. For example, a runner might set an aspirational goal of running a mile in under five minutes. That goal, that aspiration, might not be realistic but it could still be worth striving towards. Likewise, I could choose to strive for emotional invulnerability. As a middle-aged man who can barely run a mile in eight minutes, a sub-five-minute mile would likely be beyond my reach. Even further beyond my reach would be complete emotional invulnerability. But, in each case, training to reach the goal could itself be transformational, and it could help me to reach desirable levels that are short of the goal. The real value of the goal is in a sense already present in the striving towards it. Even if I never get to the point of running a sub-five-minute mile, I may get to the point of running a six-and-a-half-minute mile, which may help me to lose twenty pounds, improve my cardiovascular health, and finish near the top of my age bracket in the local three-mile race. I might also be the kind of person who is better motivated by grandiose goals than by more modest goals—like those actual achievements that result. Similarly, if I aim at emotional invulnerability as an aspirational goal, I will likely never get there, but the shining example of the perfect Stoic or the perfect Buddhist may motivate me to work harder than would the more modest goal of becoming less easily disturbed by life’s everyday vicissitudes. By following the training program to become the perfect Stoic or the perfect Buddhist, I may as a result reach a state of being undisturbed by traffic jams and malfunctioning computers. I may not reach the state of being undisturbed when my long-term project of protecting free speech crumbles, but I may be able to accept it and move on. I might even be able to accept the premature death of a loved one with a degree of equanimity such that my life is not destroyed by it.

Photo courtesy of Hermann via Pixabay, creative commons license.

Like most people, I enjoy earning rewards. I would much rather make a million dollars by the sweat of my brow than by the purchase of a lottery ticket. For that matter, I would rather earn a million dollars than win ten million dollars. Along similar lines, I would rather make modest progress towards the goal of invulnerability through hard work than take a single pill to arrive there instantly. The suddenness of the pill would be part of the problem. Complete emotional invulnerability seems undesirable to some people because it is a strange and far-off reality. But as I see it, such invulnerability can become more comfortable and desirable as we inch toward it. This has to do with the usual trajectory of a life.

Mr. Spock, a character from the original series of Star Trek.

Photo courtesy of NBC, public domain.

In my experience, young people rarely find stoicism attractive; they do not want to be like Mr. Spock. Humans, unlike Vulcans, are motivated by emotion. Passion pushes us to pursue our dreams and to be loving friends, spouses, and family members. Indeed, vulnerability seems to be an important teacher as we learn how to love. As young people, we may wish we were less bothered by little things, but we are willing to pay the price for the benefits that emotional investment yields. There are many things for which we want “the courage to change the things I can.” But moving through life, the invulnerability of stoicism can become more attractive as more in life seems to fall into the category of “the things that I cannot change.” Ultimately, to be like Mr. Spock, who is only half Vulcan, on one’s death bed might be more attractive than “raging against the dying of the light.”

Although I would not take the pill as I have imagined it, I would be tempted to take it if its effects were temporary. It might be nice to have a box of such temporary-invulnerability pills available for the next time I am stuck in traffic or stuck with a malfunctioning computer. Of course, many people do take pills (and drinks) to calm them in response to such circumstances, but those remedies are imperfect and come with other consequences. Stoic or Buddhist training is not fool-proof; it certainly is not as reliable as our imaginary pill. Yet it does work remarkably well when one practices it consistently. The problem is that we tend to want temporary or situational invulnerability. But if we do not practice invulnerability it will not be there when we need it. The runner who does not continue training will find herself cramping up. Likewise, the would-be Stoic who allows himself to get upset when his favorite football team loses, will likely be upset the next time he gets stuck in traffic. Training for invulnerability does not require perfection but it does require consistency to be most effective.

Photo of a path, to symbolize the journey over the destination.

Photo by Ian Sane, CCO license.

An invulnerability pill might be tempting, but we should be in no rush to reach the goal. It is not the destination but the slow transformation of the journey that draws us forward.

William Irwin is the Herve A. LeBlanc Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, PA, williamirwin@kings.edu. He is also a member of the editorial board for Civil American and a member of The Society of Philosophers in America (SOPHIA). He is the author of The Free Market Existentialist: Capitalism without Consumerism (2015) and Intentionalist Interpretation: A Philosophical Explanation and Defense (1999), as well as of the novel, Free Dakota (2016). He has edited a number of volumes of philosophy and popular culture for Wiley-Blackwell and Open Court, such as The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002) and The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer (2001).

Posted on Friday, February 23, 2018

Dehumanization

Civil American, Volume 3, Article 2 (February 23, 2018).

| By Bertha Alvarez Manninen |

Theodor Seuss Geisel, known simply as Dr. Seuss, remains one of the most widely beloved children’s authors of all time. Yet not many know that his contributions consisted of far more than fun or educational bedtime stories. During World War II, Seuss drew many cartoon editorials targeting the Germans and the Japanese. One pervasive theme throughout these cartoons was the display of “our enemies” as animals. Seuss often illustrated the Germans as alligators, piranhas, sea monsters, dogs, and snakes; the Japanese were drawn as monkeys doing Hitler’s bidding, or as sly cats infiltrating the United States.^[1] In other words, our enemies were subhuman. This kind of sentiment permeated our culture at the time. In 1942, an editorial published in the Los Angeles Times argued in favor of the forced internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry, stating that “a viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched — so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents — grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.”^[2]

The Granada Internment camp for Japanese Americans.

Photo credit: colorado.gov.

The tendency to describe “enemies” as animals is part of the process of dehumanization. According to social ethicist Herbert Kelman, in order to understand how dehumanization functions, it is important to first “ask what it means to perceive another person as fully human, in the sense of being included in the moral compact that governs human relationships” (Kelman, 48).^[3] Kelman notes that in order to perceive others as full members of our moral community, it is necessary to recognize them both as autonomous individuals who are “capable of making choices, and entitled to live his own life on the basis of his own goals and values” (Kelman, 48) and also as “part of an interconnected network of individuals who care for each other, who recognize each other’s individuality, and who respect each other’s rights” (Kelman, 48-49). In this sense, dehumanizing another person isn’t about literally denying their humanity (perpetrators of dehumanization would likely still view their victims as members of the species Homo sapiens); it is about denying their moral significance.

In this paper, I want to explore a more interdisciplinary approach to studying the problem of dehumanization. While existing literature on this issue typically focuses on the psychology of dehumanization, and the historical acts of violence often correlated with it, I am further interested in what ways philosophy can be used to combat the human tendency to rationalize causing suffering to others through the removal of their moral worth. More specifically, I want to explore how the ethical writings of Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, and Emmanuel Levinas can help us re-humanize those who have been dehumanized.

From NPR, by photographer Ernest Withers, March 28, 1968.

A Brief Overview of Dehumanization

Immanuel Kant, who we shall discuss below, made it a cornerstone of his ethical imperative to respect all rational creatures. We are not permitted, Kant tells us, to treat rational, autonomous agents as mere instruments for our own ends. Because human beings can set their own end in accordance with the moral law, human nature commands respect. We are to treat all humans not as mere instruments, but as ends in themselves.

And yet, even Kant did not follow his own moral imperatives as well as he should have. He argued that women were incapable of acting according to rational moral principles; that when they did act in accordance with the moral law, it was solely due to aesthetic reasons (because “the wicked… is ugly… nothing of duty, nothing of compulsion, nothing of obligation!). Because Kant associated moral value and worth with the capacity for rationality, women’s alleged compromised capacity for rational agency entailed that their moral status is equally compromised. Women only have access to full moral worth via their relationship to the men in their lives (fathers or husbands), and, in marriage, men are to control their wives and tell her “what [her] will is.”^[4] In addition to his attitude against women, Kant also harbored incredibly racist views. He argued that Native Americans were not capable of being educated, and that persons of African descent were only capable of being educated as servants or slaves.

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Posted on Friday, January 19, 2018

Waking from the Dream of Total Victory in the Contests for Public Truth

Civil American, Volume 3, Article 1 (January 19, 2018).

| By Paul Croce |

Can academics support the democratic struggle not just to critique fake news, but also to engage the public in the stories that make those false facts appealing?

The Oxford English Dictionary named “Post-Truth” its Word of the Year for 2016. The dictionary cites “appeals to emotion or personal belief,” which have gained more influence than “objective facts … in shaping public opinion.” The sober scholars of the OED spotlighted this word not to glorify this way of thinking, but to call attention to a disturbing trend. In 2005, Stephen Colbert had already identified “truthiness” as the posture of public figures who “feel the truth” even in the face of contrasting facts and reasons. The particular items of recent history are new, such as the claim that Democrats have been managing a ring of pedophiles out of the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in Washington, DC, but fabricated news has always been the exaggerating cousin of political spin. The multiplication of media outlets appealing to diverse clusters of people has made it particularly difficult to sort out corrupted truths from authentic stories.

Intellectual responses surely help identify the really true stories, but the problem of fakery runs deeper because of the way fake stories can seem plausible, at least to segments of the population, as a way to explain what’s happening around them. The political problem with “post-truth” is that, in its tendencies toward exaggerations of the truth, it reinforces already sharp suspicions about contrasting points of view. And it gets worse: people convinced by the fake stories, especially ones with lurid depictions of contrasting positions, tend to believe that the other side should not even get a hearing. At the righteous extreme of these extreme reports, fake news encourages the assumption that one side will simply need to defeat the other.

Making a Case for Listening to the Stories that Make Fake News Appealing

Post-truth statements are not hidden in dark corners gaining no attention. The kindred label, “Alt.Truth,” is in wide enough circulation to be the name of a popular Homeland episode. The wide appeal of these distortions, not their merits, makes them an issue. And it is our democratic culture and commitments that makes popular appeal significant. Respect for the voice of the people calls for attempting to understand how stories stripped of truth gain support. That suggests a special role for academics and teachers, as long as they do not get so caught up in their learned ways that they come to believe that they can’t learn anything from the thinking of the average citizen. One of our most intellectual of presidents, Thomas Jefferson, even believed that the tangible experiences of “a ploughman” would foster a better decision on “a moral case” than the abstract reasoning of “a professor.” Even when not learned, citizens can shed light on the lived experience of democracy, and those lessons travel on the wings of stories instead of the highways of scholarship.

In The Death of Expertise, professor of comparative politics Thomas Nichols honors the “specialization and expertise” that have produced the marvels of the modern world, and he laments the squandering of those achievements by the “unfounded arrogance” of citizens with “stubborn ignorance.” Philosopher Zach has issued a call to action for philosophers to help the public “recognize incompetence and poor argument.” Investigative journalists gamely try to bridge the gap between knowledgeable professionals and citizen indifference about expert insights. The organization Snopes evaluates public statements from True to Mostly False to downright Legends that circulate despite their lack of factual support. These experts do great work and deserve wide support. This approach shows great faith in the power of knowledge, with the tacit assumption that people just need to learn objective facts to correct the appeal of false facts.

William James.

Accuracy of facts is surely important, and they can sometimes be persuasive, but the appeal of misinformation persists. American psychologist William James offers helpful insights for addressing this challenge. He formed his thoughts in the late nineteenth century, just as the age of information abundance and expertise was taking on its modern shape. His psychology both helps to explain the appeal of false facts and suggests ways to respond to them. Without understanding the appeal of fakery, the responses won’t get very far. His insights can actually support the goals of the experts and fact checkers.

First, James points to the formative role of selective attention in the establishment of sharply different views. In the vastness of experience, there is not only room for different interpretations of facts, but also for selection of different facts. To make sense of situations, James observes, we select portions of the abundant facts to construct likely stories, which provide guidance within the complexities of experience based on prior assumptions. The most basic elements of false information can generally be corrected rather directly with true information. But the false is often not simple; more complex settings call for deeper inquiry into the sources of those likely stories.

Second, when facing the resulting cacophony of different points of view, James acknowledges the complexity, and suggests the humbling effect that awareness of this range of interpretations can have for coping with this diversity. In reminding that “to no one type … whatsoever is the total fullness of truth … revealed,” his point is not that there is no truth, but that truth is immense and complicated. Even with his awareness of human limitations in the face of the vastness of experience, he firmly critiques those ready to use the elusiveness of truth as a cover for active promotion of untruths. In recognizing the rich complexity of truth, he points to the need for constant inquiry and cooperation among us mere mortals who each have portions of truth in degrees. Attention to the truths of others can even shed light on one’s own truths.

James’s insights about selective attention and the overarching complexity of experience suggest the importance of looking at problems of fabricated news not just as reported (false) information, but also as storytelling, people’s efforts to find meaningful truth in their experiences. Every claim to fact is embedded in a story, which enables that fact to be accepted or not based on the plausibility of the story surrounding it. Awareness of the power of stories is not an endorsement of the sometimes false facts within them, but an acknowledgement of their significance in the human mind, and this awareness can also serve as a resource for addressing their unsavory power. This is especially important when the well-informed voices of experts are not enough to persuade citizens. And this is most especially important in a democracy that values the voice of the people.

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Posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Humanizing Monsters

Civil American, Volume 2, Article 5 (October 31, 2017), https://goo.gl/KRo5bY.

| By Casey Dorman |

I was listening to NPR recently and an interviewer was talking to Thomas Hegghammer, a Norwegian professor of political science, who had just published an edited collection of essays/research studies called Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists. One of the interviewer’s questions was “Aren’t you afraid that your book will humanize jihadists?” This struck me as strange. Could seeing anyone as human, even someone who engaged in systematic killing, be harmful? We often describe the most horrific crimes, such as genocide in terms of one group viewing the other as less than human. We are all aware of Hitler’s genocidal actions against Jews, whom he believed were biologically inferior to what he called the Aryan race. When Hutus in Rwanda killed nearly a million of their Tutsi neighbors, they described them as “cockroaches.” Even the American founding fathers were only willing to count each African American slave as worth 3/5 of a White person. These are instances, not uncommon in history, when embracing an ideology that involved viewing others as less than full human beings led to systematic mistreatment, killing or enslavement of people. But should we then turn around and view those who subscribe to such ideologies as also less then human?

Image by Kellepics, CC0 License.

What does it mean to regard another person as a human being? Although many racist ideologies have based their prejudices on notions of “inferiority,” most of us reject such views. Some individuals are stronger, taller, smarter, slower, fatter, etc. than others, but it does not lessen their humanity in most people’s eyes. We tend to see others as less human when we see the trait they express as “evil”—when they show themselves as capable of cruelty that we do not regard ourselves, or any “normal” person, as capable of producing. To many Westerners and also to many from other parts of the world, including mainstream Muslims, jihadists such as al Qaeda or ISIS are seen as “evil.” They rape women, chop off heads, and they conduct deadly terror attacks on civilians. After recent White Supremacy demonstrations in places such as Charlottesville, VA, many Americans view those who espouse neo-Nazi or KKK-like racist views as evil enough that they have become unrecognizable as fellow human beings. They have crossed a line beyond which normal human beings never tread. We view all or most members of such groups as, in the words of Chloe Valdary, “hateful monsters.”

Dr. Philip Zimbardo. CC0 license.

There are two broad theories of how people can embrace actions we typically regard as “evil” as a way of behaving toward their fellow men: One theory, embodied by the work of British psychologist, Simon Baron-Cohen (2011), is that some people lack or suffer from a reduction in empathy, and those people are not sensitive to how others feel. At this extreme of the distribution of empathy, along with some people with relatively rare developmental disabilities, are psychopaths. The other theory, embodied by the work of American psychologist, Philip Zimbardo (2007), famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment, is that anyone can be coaxed into behaving evilly toward his fellow man, using the proper social techniques. Baron-Cohen’s theory is a dispositional one; Zimbardo’s is a situational one.

Baron-Cohen defines empathy as “our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion.” He claims that, “we all lie somewhere on the empathy spectrum (from high to low). People said to be evil or cruel are simply at one extreme of the empathy spectrum.” Despite describing empathy as “more like a dimmer switch than an all-or-none switch,” he also describes people with “zero degrees of empathy,” who may be “Zero-Negative.” Those who are Zero-Negative include psychopaths, those with borderline personality disorder and narcissists. Their lives, and the lives of those around them, are affected negatively by their lack of empathy combined with impairment in their experience of emotions. Although Baron-Cohen does not dismiss the role of social pressures, such as conformity, in producing cruel acts, he insists that “when cruel acts occur, it is because of malfunctioning of the empathy circuit.” This may be only temporary, but in those who are truly evil and capable of long-term, systematic cruelty, he says the empathy system is “permanently down,” due to a variety of biological and environmental factors and their interaction. In other words, the truly evil are not like the rest of us.

Stanley Milgram. Photo by Jewish Currents.

Philip Zimbardo describes what he calls, “The Lucifer Effect,” or “How Good People Turn Evil.” His point is that evil behavior, as demonstrated in examples such as the behavior of Nazis killing Jews or the inhumane treatment of prisoners by the American guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, is something of which we are all capable, and he tries to show the social forces that contribute to it. He uses many examples, but three are particularly telling: his own 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanley Milgram’s 1960’s experiments on obedience, and psychologist Christopher Browning’s 1992 account of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.

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Posted on Friday, October 20, 2017

John Stuart Mill and Charlottesville

Civil American, Volume 2, Article 4 (October 20, 2017), https://goo.gl/zs3TDn.

| By Dale E. Miller |

I consider myself a Millian—that is, a follower of the Victorian philosopher of morals, social life, and politics (and much else besides) John Stuart Mill (1806–73). Usually I’m a fairly confident Millian; some might even say smug. Mill’s work has, like the work of all important philosophers, been subjected to numerous serious objections. But I believe that many of these objections have already been adequately answered and that the prospects of our finding satisfactory answers to the rest are at least as good as the prospects of our finding satisfactory answers to the equally serious objections that have been pressed against the work of Aristotle, Kant, etc. Still, today my confidence is beginning to show some cracks. Recent events in the U.S. are casting serious doubts on one of the most celebrated and influential elements of Mill’s thought, his defense of the freedom of expression.

CC0 license, New York Public Library, Emmet Collection.

Mill’s defense of the liberties of speech and the press appears in the second chapter of his 1859 essay On Liberty.[1] His case is grounded not on something like a “natural” right but rather on the social benefits of freedom of expression. This doesn’t mean that Mill believes that every use that people make of this freedom—every published article, every sign, every utterance—makes the world better off. But what he does believe is that there is great value in a vigorous marketplace of ideas, for which thoroughgoing freedom of expression is a prerequisite. According to Mill, the marketplace of ideas is a powerful engine not only for correcting intellectual errors and discovering truths of all sorts but also for motivating individuals who hold true ethical beliefs to base their lives on these beliefs. And the greater the extent to which people do this, Mill maintains (albeit without much argument), the happier that human life will be. This, for Mill, is the ultimate standard for moral rightness.[2]

Mill’s case for freedom of expression unfolds in three stages; he asks first what society loses when it suppresses the expression of true ideas, next what it loses when it suppresses false ideas, and finally what it loses when it suppresses ideas that are both true and false in parts. I’m primarily interested in his answer to the second of these questions. It might seem surprising that Mill would believe that society loses anything of value when it censors ideas that genuinely are entirely false, as opposed to ideas that are thought to be entirely false but are in fact at least partly true. Yet he takes there to be several sources of loss in such cases.

One way in which society loses when it suppresses false ideas is that when these ideas cannot receive “any fair and thorough discussion … such of them as could not stand such a discussion, though they may be prevented from spreading, do not disappear.”[3] In other words, when false ideas cannot be brought into the light and openly confronted in fair and free debate, because defending them or perhaps even discussing them is proscribed, they fester. One of the benefits that Mill therefore claims for the liberties of speech and the press is that they enable us to (eventually) extinguish false doctrines, in the sense of bringing it about that they aren’t believed.

A second way in which society loses from restricting the expression of false ideas concerns how ethical beliefs are held. Suppose that society has made it impossible to challenge some widely accepted moral doctrine, so that contrary doctrines cannot be “fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed.” In this case, Mill says, even if the widely accepted doctrine is completely correct it will be “held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.”[4] When we know that we’re likely at some point to be called upon to defend our creed against an opponent, he writes, we’re more likely both to ensure that we understand the considerations that favor that creed and to give the creed an important place in our thoughts and actions. On the other hand, “as soon as there is no enemy in the field,” we tend to lapse into giving our beliefs little more than lip service.[5] As evidence Mill points to the many “Sunday-morning” Christians in countries in which Christianity is the dominant faith. If such Christians are animated by anything in their religion through the rest of the week, he maintains, it is only by those parts of it that are distinctive to their particular sect and that they might need to defend against other sectarians. Thus another respect in which the liberties of speech and the press are beneficial is that they make it more likely that people who hold true moral doctrines will be “penetrated” by them, in the sense of holding them as more than dead dogmas.

Airforce commandos extinguishing an aircraft fire.

U.S. Department of Defense photos.

There is some tension between these two claims of Mill’s. After all, if false moral doctrines are extinguished, then no one will need to worry about debating their adherents. It therefore appears that freedom of expression can at most yield only one of these benefits with respect to any particular false moral doctrine, not both. The tension between these claims doesn’t rise to the level of contradiction, however. It can be true both that the long-run tendency of protecting the marketplace of ideas is to extinguish false views and that until a particular false ethical view is extinguished the fact that some people hold it will give those who hold the true view, or at least a truer one, a livelier appreciation of their own commitments. This is Mill’s stance; he observes that while it’s desirable for false moral doctrines to be extinguished, when this happens something of value is lost that society ought to try to replace to the extent possible. For instance, teachers may need to learn to defend certain false doctrines forcefully, to approximate for students the experience of debating someone who holds them.[6]

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