living is a risky business, part two

part one

I think that Christine Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity is actually a particularly good example of what I talked about in the previous post. In her account of ethical living, Korsgaard places foundational importance on (in other words, she attempts to make into an Archimedean point) this notion of reflectivity: the idea that we can (or must; it's unclear) bring any of our values / impulses to action (again, unclear) into question. But as her account progresses, she systematically obscures the fact that we can question (in a certain sense) the value of being reflective. Or, put another way, she seems to offer a perfectly correct account of how to reflect on one's values.

(I will here skip some technical bits).

The upshot is that while reflection, I believe, is a key component of the good life, there's no way to be sure that you're doing it right. There is one extreme of total unreflectivity, of never wondering about the rightness of one's actions; besides being dangerous, this is a little inhuman, and perhaps even lax. There is the other extreme of spending all one's time on reflection and none on action, of holing up in one's room until you get the answer exactly perfect.* This is equally pathological: reflection that's lost its point: right action.

Unfortunately, striking a balance between reflection on action and action is a tricky business.** They are each demanding occupations, liable to take up a good amount of time. In other words, deciding how much time to allocate to each is yet another decision which we can screw up, or not. We can do our best, of course; there are cases where reflection is pretty clearly the wrong decision (e.g. when we have a drowning baby on our hands), and to do otherwise would be to clearly make a mistake. But in the end, we can't be certain ahead of time that we've done it right: the problem of allocation recurses endlessly. So we might, despite the best of intentions, screw things up rather badly. Living is a risky business.



* http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html
"Shutting Themselves In"
by Maggie Jones
January 15, 2006
The New York Times

"Hiroshi didn't say why working would have been better or why it was too late at age 26 to start a career. He said only that he wouldn't leave the house "until I know exactly what I want to do." It was typical hikikomori thinking: better to stay in your room than risk venturing into the world and failing."

** To get back to Korsgaard, her work solves (avoids) this problem by making it seem as if reflection can be done in an instant, as if it were something that took no time at all. If that's the case, striking a balance between the two is not even a problem. The reason that this is symptomatic of a split between philosophy and the good life is that, if it were clear that the same sort of reflection that Korsgaard thinks is so central to the good life were exactly the sort of reflection her book engages in (or that she engaged in when she wrote the book), it would be fairly obvious that reflection takes time. After all, I could spend my time reading Korsgaard, studying Korsgaard (I personally find her works intelligible at the level of sentences but exceedingly difficult at higher levels), or out canvassing for Obama, etc.