Aaron James is an associate professor of philosophy at UC
Irvine.
If being a person with basic moral status means anything, it
at very least means that one is owed respect and consideration as being endowed
with capacity to reason. In particular, people are endowed with powers that
enable them to consider and evaluate how someone has acted. The community of
persons is, in this way special. I, as an ordinary person, have special powers
of self-consciousness, reasoning and judgment. I can observe someone acting, as
a mere event in the order of things, but also ask (if only to myself) certain
questions of justification. Why, I might ask, should an act such as that be
acceptable? In particular, is such an act justifiable to me if it was done in my
direction, given how it might effect me?
Likewise, any one of us, so endowed, can ask what would be
justifiable to another person, from
his or her particular point of view. Is that something she can reasonably find acceptable, given the consequences for her?
Or could she reasonably complaint of how she is in effect being treated? In
that case, what we think another could or could not accept should have special
significance for us and how we act. It
will influence our choices, at least if we are at all morally concerned. Each
of us, in acting, has to consider not only what might make the world better
rather than worse from an impersonal point of view – factoring in the fate of
mountains, whales and trees – but also what could be acceptable to each and every one of us, for reasons
arising from the different, distinctive
personal standpoint of each separate person in our common world.
This is not to say that just any complaint someone voices in
a conversation should carry the day, as though one always needed explicit or
implicit permission from everyone who could be affected by one’s choices, no
matter how unreasonable those people might be. The objections or complaints we
actually voice sometimes reflect ignorance of crucial facts or lack concern
with what is reasonably acceptable from everyone’s point of view. We can be
ignorant or selfish, or both.
Neither are our complaints and objections always or
inevitably ill- founded in these ways, however. So when someone does object to a
particular act, with a quizzical glare or loud words. There is usually some
reason to think that the person may have a reasonable complaint. Even if the objection is ultimately
unreasonable, it might also have a element of truth. Accordingly, one of our basic moral
responsibilities is to hear people out, to at least take seriously the reasons
they give for wanting to be treated differently, even if we ultimately object.
The expectation, in other words, is for us to recognize the person objecting,
in something like the way a deliberative body grants someone in the room the
right to speak before the group. This is, as we might put it, part and parcel
of basic moral respect –that is, respect not simply for the person’s complaint
but for the person who makes it.
The Asshole,by contrast, is wholly
immunized against the complaints of others.
Whether or not the complaint is ultimately reasonable, the person is not
registered, from the asshole’s point of view, as worthy of consideration. The person who complains is not seen as a
potential source of reasonable
complaint but is simply walled out. If the person complaining is “standing up
for herself” in order to be recognized, it is as though she were physically
present but morally nonexistent in the asshole’s view of the world.
This is why otherwise coolheaded people fall into a fit of
rage or lash out at an asshole: they are fighting to be recognized. They are not
fighting for the small benefit of having the asshole move to the back of the
line or, more generally, for a slightly more fair distribution of the benefits
and burdens of cooperation. The person taking a stand against an asshole is
fighting to be registered in the asshole’s point of view as morally real.
The fight can become extraordinarily frustrating because the
asshole usually wins: his sense of entitlement is entrenched, so there is
usually no way of getting through. (Hence one may spontaneously desire to give
the man a sound beating, as though that would help.) The fully cooperative
person is accustomed to listening when people complain, and used to be heard
when even a suggestion of complaint is made. That is how cooperative people
normally work out what is acceptable to all, what the moral equity of each
person requires. This comes to feel natural, expected, a matter of course. The
asshole, by contrast, is equally accustomed to walling others out. He does it
all the time. This is comfortable for him. He is exceptionally good at it: when
others complain, he easily dismisses the objection, or quickly finds convincing
arguments that rationalize the objection away, and moves on. He compliments
himself on how good he is at this because he is very good at it indeed. . .
. . .
Certain styles of capitalism are inherently prone to decline
or, more specifically, to degrade,
due to the proliferation of assholes.
Asshole capitalism, as we hereby define the term, is the name of this kind
of unstable social system.
Every kind of society requires a reliable asshole-dampening
system – that is, a set of social institutions, such as the family, religion,
public education, or the rule of law –that keeps the asshole population from
getting out of hand. For if the proportion of assholes in the population
becomes too large (i.e. the non-asshole to asshole ratio takes a dive)
cooperative people will become increasingly unable or unwilling or just too few
in number to uphold the practices and institutions need for society to stave
off decline. Asshole capitalism is especially prone to undoing itself in this
way.
The asshole feels entitled to special advantages in cooperative
life to which in fact he has no moral claim. The culture of an asshole capitalism
sends just this kind of strong
entitlement message. Roughly, the
message is that you can rightly get something for nothing or get rich without
having to worry about the cost to others. This message creates powerful
incentives for asshole-style reasoning and action, not just among those who are
already assholes but among many who would otherwise be content to cooperate as
equals in society. The result is a profusion of assholery throughout social and
economic life that overwhelms the dampening systems that might otherwise keep
the asshole population from exploding out of control. As assholes grow in
numbers, or are simply perceived to grow in numbers, cooperative people
gradually withdraw from upholding the practices and institutions needed for
capitalism to function by its own
standard of value.
A helpful way to think about how this works is to start by
imagining a capitalist society that more or less fulfills capitalism’s social
promises. This means that cooperative people, despite the usual assholes,
mostly uphold the various practices and institutions needed for almost
everyone to have things like real freedom, real opportunity, a goodly share in general prosperity: advance
in the general welfare, a rising tide (standard of living) in which all boats
are lifted, the yacht and dinghy alike. Capitalism we are told, advances these
values as well as or better than alternative social forms.
Assuming for the sake of argument that this is right, it is
extremely important to recognize that
those grand promises can’t be fulfilled without supportive social practices and
institutions. The idea of a large-scale,
self-sustaining, self-organizing “perfectly competitive” and “efficient” market
is an intellectual fiction, it bears little relation to any real markets. Large-scale
exchange is possible, for example, only within a system of property that
demarcates different things as “mine” and “thine.” That will in turn require
any institutions of security, law, contract, adjudication, taxation and politics
to generally not fall apart (because rampant theft or corruption or constant
endemic conflict and so forth).
But now suppose the society switches to
the entitlement system (perhaps the Entitlement Party rises to power). The
system is now sending a powerful entitlement message, for instance, that having
ever more is one’s moral right, even when it comes at a cost to others. As
asshole thinking and culture spread and hold, the asshole-dampening systems
that used to keep assholery in check become overwhelmed. Parents start
preparing their kids for an asshole economy, the law is increasingly
compromised, the political system is increasingly controlled through systems of
bribery and so on. As some switch sides while others mainly withdraw, cooperative
people ( who recognize each other as ‘morally real’) find it more difficult to
uphold the practices and institutions needed for capitalism to do right by its
on values. What happens?
Probably living standards increasing rise only for the
fortunate few,” the rising tide of capitalism” lifts the yacht but swamps the
dinghy. The growth of gross domestic product year after year may increasingly
become like everyone in a bar getting “richer”, on average, because Bill Gates
just walked in; average per capita wealth spikes, but most aren’t personally
richer for it. In more concrete terms, this may show up in various ways: maybe
people become increasingly uncertain about their prospects for stable
employment and eventual retirement, even though they have “worked hard and
played by the rules” their whole lives; or perhaps people are increasingly
unable to stay in school, try as they may, because their increasingly
vulnerable family can’t support their debts or need them to work to pay urgent
bills; or it could be that average people are increasingly unable to get the
basic protections of the law in an increasingly cash-strapped police or
judicial system, even as assholes get the best justice money can buy; and maybe
any or all of these trends result from political power being increasingly
concentrated in the hands of an influential few, who steadily change the rules
to further entrench that influence which, in asshole culture, become
increasingly impervious to complaint, In short, in one way or another, people
increasingly see “liberty”, “opportunity”, or “prosperity” in name only, in a
form that isn’t especially valuable to them, that doesn’t make good on the
promise of capitalism in their eyes.
Now, as we understand entitlement capitalism, the encouraged
sense of entitlement is not limited to proper assholes. They readily take to
the message, since it confirms what they already believe about themselves. More
important is that others who would not otherwise think like assholes are also
swayed, especially as the entitlement messages catches on and the practices and
institutions designed to hold assholery in check weaken. They, too, begin to aggressively
and indignantly defend so-called reforms that give them an ever-greater slice
of the pie, regardless of its social rationale and even the great cost to
others. That doesn’t necessarily mean that assholery pervades all areas of life.
The thinking may be limited to work or to politics, or generally to the economic
system. Ordinary persons have no need or compulsion to be particularly “entrenched”
in the mentality of entitlement capitalism. When the winds of culture blow in a
different, perhaps more cooperative direction, many will go with the flow and
perhaps later feel puzzled about how they could have previously thought so much
like an asshole. And even asshole reasoning per se will have some sense of
limit. Even proper assholes will not knowingly push things into complete
collapse. After all, where cooperation doesn’t exist, as in Hobbes’s state of
nature, there are no special advantages for the asshole to take.
[Which is perhaps not an unduly optimist note upon which to
end this blog entry.]
