Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Why Honor Matters
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1970
WEBSITE: https://www.tamlersommers.com/
CITY: Houston
STATE: TX
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
https://verybadwizards.fireside.fm/hosts/tamler; http://www.uh.edu/class/philosophy/people/sommers/; Phone: (713) 743-3032
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2006085116 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2006085116 |
| HEADING: | Sommers, Tamler, 1970- |
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| 670 | __ |a Beyond freedom and resentment, 2005: |b (Tamler Sommers) vita (b. 1970) |
PERSONAL
Born 1970.
EDUCATION:University of Pennsylvania, B.A. (cum laude), 1992; Duke University, Ph.D., 2005.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, philosopher, podcaster, and educator. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, assistant professor, 2005-08, University of Houston, Houston, TX, assistant professor, 2008-12, associate professor of philosophy with joint appointment in Honors College, 2012—. Very Bad Wizards podcast, cohost.
AWARDS:National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 2009; recipient of grants from the University of Houston.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Distribution Cognition and the Will, edited by David Spurrett, Harold Kincaid, Don Ross, and Lynn Stephens, MIT Press, 2007; Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, edited by David Shoemaker, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2013; Handbook of Neuroethics, edited by Jens Clausen and Neil Levy, Springer, 2014; Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns, edited by K. Timpe and D. Speak, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2016.
Contributor to journals, including Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophia, Biology and Philosophy, Philosophy Compass, Notre Dame Philosophical Review, Philosophers Magazine, Believer, Times Literary Supplement, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
SIDELIGHTS
Tamler Sommers is a writer, philosopher, and educator at the University of Houston. There, he is a tenured associate professor of philosophy with a joint appointment in the university’s Honors College. He has also been an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. As an academic and researcher, “I’m especially interested in issues relating to honor, free will, moral responsibility, punishment, and revenge,” Sommers stated on the Tamler Sommers website. He teaches classes in these subjects as well as ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law. Sommers holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke University.
Sommers is the cohost of the Very Bad Wizards podcast, along with psychologist David Pizarro, which “features discussions about ethics, free will, revenge, neuroscience, psychopaths, relativism, pop culture, and lots more,” Sommers commented on his website.
A Very Bad Wizard
Sommers’s book A Very Bad Wizard: Morality behind the Curtain shares a title with his podcast. The first edition of the book is a “a collection of delightful interviews or conversations” conducted by Sommers, noted Joshua May in a review on the website Metapsychology Online Reviews. “Sommers interviews an array of researchers—from psychologists to primatologists to philosophers—who all have one thing in common: their work has direct implications for the study of morality,” May continued. Interview subjects include Galen Strawson, Philip Zimbardo, Franz De Waal, Michael Ruse, Joseph Henrich, Joshua Greene, Liane Young, Jonathan Haidt, Stephen Stich, and William Ian Miller. Sommers and his interview subjects consider many different topics, but with consistent attention paid to the theme of what happens to morality once it has been examined empirically and dispassionately?
In one interview, Zimbardo discusses one of his social psychology experiments that became a notorious classic in psychological circles: the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this experiment, a “group of ordinary young men assumed either a guard or prisoner role in a simulated prison at Stanford University in 1971. The experiment was shut down after only six days due to the inhumane behavior the guards began to display,” May reported. Green and Young, neuroscientists at Harvard and MIT, discuss the role of the human brain in morality. Haidt reports on experiments in which participants are faced with assessing the morality of acts that don’t cause anyone harm but which are against existing social norms. These acts are usually labeled immoral, although experiment subjects can’t articulate good reasons why.
May concluded that “A Very Bad Wizard is a very good book. It’s an easy read while at the same time informative and amusing.”
The second edition of A Very Bad Wizard, reviewed by Brad Frazier on the website Metapsychology Online Reviews, expands the interviews from nine to seventeen. Like the first volume, it contains “engaging interviews on central issues in ethics and moral psychology with leading thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, anthropology, law, and primatology,” Frazier noted. Frazier concluded that the second edition of the book “is a very successful continuation and expansion of the project Sommers initiates in the first edition.”
Why Honor Matters
In Why Honor Matters, Sommers explores his theory that members of modern society should spend more time developing a sense of honor, a critical element of a good life in a good society that values justice. Sommers seeks to define honor and what it means to possess it and live by it. “To be honorable is to be brave, committed, and self-sacrificing. It means living by a code, and putting the group before the individual. Traditionally, it was warriors who prided themselves on their honor; but as Sommers observes, a sense of honor is crucial to any elite group,” commented Adam Kirsch, writing in the Atlantic. Marines have honor, as do members of honor cultures around the world, despite the fact that the behavior of some of these cultures might seem reprehensible to others (as in, for example, the case of honor killings).
“To Sommers, honor and the struggle to achieve it are important parts of a good life, fostering values like “courage, integrity, solidarity, drama, hospitality, a sense of purpose and meaning.” And it is these very things, he argues, that 21st-century Americans are lacking. Indeed, Sommers finds the decline of honor responsible for many social problems,” Kirsch remarked. The state of the American criminal justice system is also a real-world example of what happens when a population downplays or abandons honor. Sommers acknowledges that groups such as racist organizations, criminal gangs, and religious radicals abide by their own sense of honor, but he still finds the lack of this quality to be a factor in many of the ills that afflict society, and which some of these groups try to address in their own way. “Properly channeled, honor encourages virtues like courage, integrity, and solidarity, and gives a sense of living for something larger than oneself,” remarked Marc O. DriGirolami on the website Law and Religion Forum. DriGirolami concluded that Why Honor Matters “makes a convincing case for honor as a cornerstone of our modern society.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Atlantic, June, 2018, Adam Kirsch, “Does Honor Matter?,” review of Why Honor Matters.
Choice, August, 2012, L. A. Wilkinson, review of Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility, p. 2296.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of Why Honor Matters.
ONLINE
Law and Religion Forum, https://ww/w/.lawandreligionforum.org/ (May 7, 2018), Marc O. Degirolami, review of Why Honor Matters.
Metapsychology Online Reviews, http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/ (December 29, 2009), Joshua May, review of A Very Bad Wizard; (October 23, 2012), Ian deWeese-Boyd, review of Relative Justice; August 15, 2017, Brad Frazier, review of A Very Bad Wizard.
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, https://ndpr.nd.edu (June 11, 2018), Zac Cogley, review of Relative Justice.
Tamler Sommers website, http://www.tamlersommers.com (July 17, 2018).
University of Houston website, http://www.uh.edu/ (July 17, 2018), biography of Tamler Sommers.
Very Bad Wizards website, http://verybadwizards.fireside.fm (July 17, 2018).
Tamler 2 2.jpg
about me
I'm a professor at the University of Houston. I'm especially interested in issues relating to honor, free will, moral responsibility, punishment, and revenge. (You can view a list of my publications here).
I'm the author of several books: Relative Justice (2012 Princeton) on the diversity of norms and attitudes about responsibility across cultures. A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain (McSweeney's 2009, 2nd edition Routledge 2106), a collection of interviews with philosophers and scientists on issues in moral psychology. And my most recent book "Why Honor Matters" (Basic Books) is currently available for pre-order. I also co-host the Very Bad Wizards podcast (along with the psychologist David Pizarro), which features discussions about ethics, free will, revenge, neuroscience, psychopaths, relativism, pop culture, and lots more.
Tamler Sommers
Curriculum Vitae
513 Agnes Arnold Hall Houston, TX 77204-3004 Email: tssommers@uh.edu
2012- Associate Professor of Philosophy with Tenure, University of Houston. Philosophy Department and Honors College (joint appointment)
2008-2012 Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Houston. Philosophy Department and Honors College
2005-2008. Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Minnesota, Morris.
Education
2000-2005 Duke University. Ph.D. in Philosophy. (Dissertation: Beyond Freedom and Resentment: An Error Theory of Free Will and Moral Responsibility.)
Awarded December 31, 2005
1988-1992 University of Pennsylvania. B.A. English. Cum Laude. May 1992.
Research Books
• Why Honor Matters. Basic Books. May 8, 2018
• A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain, 2nd edition. (Features eight new interviews
with Susan Wolf, Peter Singer, Anthony Appiah, Simon Blackburn, Nancy Sherman, Valerie
Tiberius, Paul Bloom, and Alan Fiske and Tage Rai.) Routledge 2016.
• Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility. Princeton
University Press. December, 2012.
• A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain. December, 2009. McSweeney’s Press.
Peer Reviewed Articles:
• “Negotiating Responsibility.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41:44-45 (commentary on John Doris’ Talking to Our Selves:Reflection, Ignorance, and Agency.)
• “The Three Rs: Retribution, Revenge, Reparation.” Philosophia. 44:2 327-342*
• "Relative Responsibility and Theism." in Free Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies,
and Concerns. Timpe, K. and Speak, D. eds. Oxford University Press. 2016*
• “Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: an Intervention.” in Handbook of Neuroethics.
Clausen, Jens; Levy, Neil (Eds.) Springer. December 2014.*
• “Partial Desert.” in Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. David Shoemaker ed. Oxford University Press. July, 2013 *
• “Experimental Philosophy” Knobe, J., Buckwalter, W., Nichols, S., Robbins, P., & Sommers, T. (2011). Experimental Philosophy. Annual Review of Psychology, 63, 81-99.*
• “Experimental Philosophy and Free Will.” Philosophy Compass. 5:199-212, 2010.
• “More Work for Hard Incompatibilism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 79, 3:
511-521. November, 2009.
• “The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor.” Biology and
Philosophy. 24,1 (2009):35-50.
• “The Objective Attitude.” The Philosophical Quarterly. 57, 28 (2007): 321-342
• “The Illusion of Freedom Evolves.” In Distributed Cognition and the Will, David Spurrett,
Harold Kincaid, Don Ross, Lynn Stephens (eds). MIT Press. 2007.
• “Darwin’s Nihilistic Idea: Evolution and the Meaninglessness of Life,” (with Alex
Rosenberg). Biology and Philosophy. 18: 653-668. November 2003.
• “Of Zombies, Color Scientists, and Floating Iron Bars,” Psyche: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Research on Consciousness 8(22). November 2002.
Reviews and Other Publications:
• Review of Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will by Julian Baggini. 800 words, The Philosophers Magazine. April 2016 *
• “Restorative Justice.” 800 words. The Philosophers Magazine. January 2016 *
• Review of Building Better Beings by Manuel Vargas. Notre Dame Philosophical Review.
September 16, 2013 *
• Review of Yuck: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust by Daniel Kelly.
Philosophical Quarterly. 2012 *
• Editor for “Metaethics” unit and author of unit introduction, in Philosophy: Traditional and
Experimental Readings Fritz Allhoff, Ron Mallon, and Shaun Nichols (general eds.) Oxford
University Press. November 2012. *
• “Required Reading: Thoughts on the Ethics of Punishment.” The Philosophers Magazine:
First Quarter 2012. *
• Review of Responsibility and Distributive Justice. Carl Knight and Zofia Stemplowska
(eds.). Notre Dame Philosophical Review. October, 2011. *
• “In Memoriam: The X-Phi Debate” The Philosophers Magazine. First Quarter. 2011
• “Reasonably Disposed: A Review of The Emotional Construction of Morals by Jesse Prinz.”
The Times Literary Supplement. May 8, 2009.
• “A Review of The Self, edited by Galen Strawson.” The Times Literary Supplement
January 6, 2006. P. 26. .
• “A Review of Can God Be Free? by William T. Rowe.” The Times Literary Supplement. January 21, 2005. P. 26
• “Diane Decides: A Review of Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, by S.L. Hurley.” The Times Literary Supplement. May 7, 2004. P. 6.
• “Rightly Determined: A Review of Deontic Morality and Control, by Ishtiyaque Haji.” The Times Literary Supplement. October 17, 2003. P. 8.
Presentations
• “Comments on Avner Baz’s The Crisis of Method in Analytic Philosophy.” American Philosophical Association (Pacific) Meeting, March 2018
• “Handling Your Business: Honor and Conflict” Philosophy and Humanities TwinStar Conference on Global Values. Lone Star Community College. February 2018
• “Honor, Revenge, and Justice.” Center for Practical and Professional Ethics and the Philosophy Department at the California State University, Sacramento. October 2017. (Invited, funded.)
• “Philosophical Busybodies” Moral Responsibility Workshop. Bonn Germany, June 2017
• “Philosophical Busybodies.” Invited (funded) by University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Undergraduate Philosophy Club. Co-sponsored by the Philosophy Department. October
2106
• “Is David Shoemaker Really a Strawsonian? Yes and No.” Comments on David Shoemaker’s
Responsibility from the Margins. Invited (funded) for Gothenburg Responsibility Project
annual conference. Gothenburg Sweden. August 24-27, 2016
• “Philosophical Busybodies.” Presented at the Pacific APA. Invited by the Society of
Philosophy of Agency along with Derk Pereboom and Galen Strawson. Comments by Kelly
McCormick (TCU). April 1, 2016.
• “Is David Shoemaker Really a Strawsonian? Yes and No.” Comments on David Shoemaker’s
Responsibility from the Margins. Invited (funded) for Gothenburg Responsibility Project
annual conference. Gothenburg Sweden. August 24-27, 2016
• “Philosophical Busybodies.” Invited (funded) by University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Undergraduate Philosophy Club. Co-sponsored by the Philosophy Department.
• “Moral Responsibility and Human Diversity” Kyoto Moral Psychology Workshop. July
2014. (invited)
• "How Do They Get Away With That? A "Theory" of Offensive Humor." Workshop on
Jokes, Slurs, and Promises. Lawrence University, Appleton Wisconsin. May 2014 (Invited)
• "The Three Rs: Retribution, Restoration, and Revenge." The Ethics and Forgiveness
Workshop. Union College. Schenectady, NY. May 2014. (Invited)
• "Moral Responsibility and Human Diversity." Workshop on my book Relative Justice, Kyoto
University, Kyoto, Japan. March 2014.
• “Courage: The Forgotten Virtue in the Philosophy of Punishment.” American Philosophical
Association, 2013 Central Division Meeting. (Invited)*
• “Philosophical Busybodies” University of British Columbia, Spring Colloquium. March 15th, 2013 (Invited.)
• “Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: An Intervention.” Society for Experimental Philosophy. American Philosophical Association (Pacific) 2012 meeting. Seattle, Washington. April 4-8, 2012. (invited).
• “The Limits of Moral Argument.” TEDx Talk. Hogeschool Utrecht. Utrecht, Netherlands. November 8, 2011. (Invited)
• “Partial Desert,” New Orleans Workshop on Agency and Responsibility. Intercontinental Hotel. November 3-5, 2011.
• “Old School Retributivism: A Defense of Vigilante Justice” Southern Society of Philosophy and Psychology.” 2011 Meeting. New Orleans, LA. March 10-13. (Invited)
• “Moral Responsibility and Human Diversity.” Society of Philosophy and Psychology, 2010 Meeting. Lewis and Clark University. Portland, OR. June 9-12.
• “Metaskepticism About Moral Responsibility.”
o Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress. University of Colorado, Boulder. Aug 7-10,
2008.
o (Invited) Colloquium Series. University of Haifa. January 8, 2008.
• “The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor.”
o (Invited) Philosophy Research Seminar. School of History, Philosophy, Religion,
and Classics. University of Queensland. Brisbane, Australia. May 17, 2007. o International Society for Research on the Emotions (ISRE) 2006 Conference.
Atlanta, GA. August 6-10, 2006.
o The Society of Philosophy and Psychology.” 2006 Meeting. Washington
University, St. Louis. June 1-4, 2006.
• “The Illusion of Freedom Evolves: How Darwinism Supports an Error Theory of Free Will
and Moral Responsibility.”
o The Society of Philosophy and Psychology.” 2005 Meeting. Wake Forest
University. June 9-12, 2005.
o The Second Conference of the Mind AND World Working Group. Distributed
Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context. University of
Alabama at Birmingham. March 18-21, 2005.
• “Of Zombies, Color Scientists, and Floating Iron Bars.” Fifth Meeting of the Association
for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. Duke University. Durham, North Carolina. May 2001.
Other Projects:
• The Very Bad Wizards Podcast (co-hosted with David Pizarro: Cornell University). Biweekly podcast on issues in moral psychology. 137 episodes. Over 9 million downloads.
Honors and Awards (Since arriving at UH in 2008)
• A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain. (Nine New Interviews). Small Grants Program. University of Houston. 2012-2013*
• Faculty Fellow. Center of Ethics and Public Affairs. Murphy Institute. Tulane University. (Research Project: “Removing the Blindfold from Lady Justice: A Partially Retributive Theory of Punishment.”) Stipend: $61,000. 2011-2012.
• 2010 Texas Book Festival. A Very Bad Wizard selected for inclusion and panel discussion.
• NEH Fellow. National Endowment of Humanities, Summer Institute on Experimental
Philosophy. University of Utah. 2009.
• QEP Grant. University of Houston. Redesigned Phil 3395 (“Punishment”) to emphasize
undergraduate research.
• Small Grants Fund. University of Houston. Travel to Ann Arbor, MI and San Francisco, CA
for interviews with William Ian Miller and Philip Zimbardo.
I'm an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston. I'm the author of Relative Justice (Princeton 2012) and A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain which features interviews with eminent researchers including Peter Singer, Susan Wolf, Philip Zimbardo, Anthony Appiah, Frans de Waal, Jonathan Haidt, along with VBW guests Paul Bloom and Valerie Tiberius. My new book Why Honor Matters comes out in Spring 2018.
Tamler Sommers has hosted 142 episodes.
People
Graduate Students
Teaching Assistants
3687 Cullen Boulevard Room 205
Houston TX 77204-3013
Phone: (713) 743-3004
Fax: (713) 743-3215
Tamler Sommers
Associate Professor
Tamler Sommers
Education
Selected Publications
Online Publications
Courses
View CV
Phone: (713)743-3032
Email: tssommers@uh.edu
Office: 504 Agnes Arnold Hall
I'm an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston and I hold a joint appointment with the Honors College. I'm also co-director of Phronesis: A Program in Politics and Ethics, an interdisciplinary minor here at U of H. I teach primarily in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law, specializing in issues relating to free will, moral responsibility, punishment, and revenge. My second book, entitled Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility has just come out (December 2011).. I also contribute reviews to the Times Literary Supplement and conduct interviews for The Believer. A collection of these interviews, entitled A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain, was published in December 2009 by McSweeney’s Press. Other recent publications include "Experimental Philosophy and Free Will" (Philosophy Compass), “The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor” (Biology and Philosophy), “More Work for Hard Incompatibilism” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research), and “The Objective Attitude” (Philosophical Quarterly).
Click online publications to view my recent articles. And check out the Very Bad Wizards Podcast that I'm doing along with the psychologist David Pizarro, featuring discussions about ethics, free will, revenge, neuroscience, psychopaths, relativism, pop culture, and lots more.
Education
Ph.D. in Philosophy, Duke University (2005)
B.A. in English, University of Pennsylvania (1992)
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Selected Publications
Partial Desert Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. David Shoemaker ed. Oxford University Press. Forthcoming.
Free Will and Experimental Philosophy: An Intervention
Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility. Princeton University Press. 2011.
A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain. McSweeney's Press, 2009.
"Experimental Philosophy." (co-authored) Annual Review of Psychology. 2011.
"In Memoriam: The X-Phi Debate" Philosophers Magazine. First Quarter 2011
“Experimental Philosophy and Free Will.” Philosophy Compass. February, 2010
“More Work for Hard Incompatibilism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
89:3: 511-521. November, 2009.
“The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor.”
Biology and Philosophy. 24,1 (2009):35-50.
“The Objective Attitude.” The Philosophical Quarterly. 57, 28 (2007): 321-342
“The Illusion of Freedom Evolves.” In Distributed Cognition and the Will, David Spurrett, Harold Kincaid, Don Ross, Lynn Stephens (eds). MIT Press. 2007.
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Peer Reviewed Articles
"Partial Desert." Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility.. David Shoemaker ed. Oxford University Press. Forthcoming. 2013.
"In Memoriam: The X-Phi Debate" The Philosophers Magazine. First quarter 2011
"Experimental Philosophy and Free Will." Philosophy Compass. February 2010.
“More Work for Hard Incompatibilism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 89:3: : 511-521. November, 2009.
“The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor." Biology and Philosophy. Forthcoming. (Available OnlineEarly) or see the draft version.
“The Objective Attitude.” The Philosophical Quarterly. 57, 28 (2007): 321-342 or see the draft version.
“The Illusion of Freedom Evolves.” In Distributed Cognition and the Will, David Spurrett, Harold Kincaid, Don Ross, Lynn Stephens (eds). MIT Press. 2007.
“Darwin’s Nihilistic Idea: Evolution and the Meaninglessness of Life,” (with Alex Rosenberg). Biology and Philosophy. 18: 653-668. November 2003.
“Of Zombies, Color Scientists, and Floating Iron Bars,” Psyche: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness 8(22). November 2002.
Interviews for The Believer
Interview with Philip Zimbardo, September 2009.
Interview with Frans de Waal, September 2007
Interview with Jonathan Haidt, August 2005
Interview with Michael Ruse, July 2003
Interview with Galen Strawson, March 2003
Reviews for the Times Literary Supplement
"Reasonably Disposed." A review of The Emotional Construction of Morals by Jesse Prinz. May 8, 2009.
“A Review of The Self , edited by Galen Strawson.” January 6, 2006.
“Thanks be to God: A Review of Can God Be Free? by William T. Rowe.” January 21, 2005.
“Diane Decides: A Review of Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, by S.L. Hurley.” May 7, 2004.
“Rightly Determined: A Review of Deontic Morality and Control, by Ishtiyaque Haji.” October 17, 2003.
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Sommers, Tamler: WHY HONOR MATTERS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018): From General OneFile. COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Sommers, Tamler WHY HONOR MATTERS Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 5, 8 ISBN: 978-0-465-09887-3
A philosopher offers an impassioned, but disturbing, defense of honor cultures.
In a social critique sure to generate controversy, Sommers (Philosophy/Univ. of Houston; Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility, 2012, etc.) argues that honor cultures offer a better ethical model than "Western liberalism," with its insistence on universal dignity. Honor cultures, characterized by "social cohesion and solidarity"--think sports teams, urban gangs, and Navy SEALS--emphasize "courage, integrity, and accountability" and adherence to a "formal and informal" set of codes. Such cultures "take great pride in their exclusivity." Societies guided by liberal values, writes the author, lead to "diminishing personal accountability, increasing social isolation, alienation and a weakening sense of solidarity and community spirit." Responding to the "common objection" that honor cultures mistreat women, Sommers asserts that honor itself does not require "sexist norms and practices." He acknowledges, however, that honor cultures can inflict "systematic violations of the rights of women," as well as incite "long, bloody" family feuds and "trap individuals within rigid social roles, limiting their autonomy as rational agents." To address these concerns, the author argues that honor cultures require constraints; white working-class Southern men, for example, engage in ritualized, circumscribed violence as a form of "active resistance to the domination of others" and a way of gaining respect. Condemning the "depersonalized, excessively rationalistic" legal system, Sommers argues persuasively that "honorable punishment" can be facilitated through the restorative justice movement, which involves mediated encounters between victims and criminals. The violent protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was for Sommers "an eye- opening event" because he "didn't quite realize the extent" of white nationalists' "abhorrent racist ideology." Neofascists, he admits, "do use rhetoric that isn't too far off from the language I've
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employed to describe honor communities," and he belatedly acknowledges "the morality of dignity and its focus on equality and respect for human rights."
A celebration of insular, exclusionary honor culture that does not adequately account for its pernicious effects.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Sommers, Tamler: WHY HONOR MATTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527248214/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=694fd880. Accessed 10 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527248214
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Sommers, Tamler. Relative justice:
cultural diversity, free will, and moral
responsibility
L.A. Wilkinson
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 49.12 (Aug. 2012): p2296. From General OneFile. COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association CHOICE http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text: 49-6821 BJ1451 2011-14067 CIP
Sommers, Tamler. Relative justice: cultural diversity, free will, and moral responsibility. Princeton, 2012. 230p bibl index afp ISBN 9780691139937, $39.50; ISBN 9781400840250 e-book, $39.50
As Sommers (Univ. of Houston) argues, compatibilist and incompatibilist theories of moral responsibility derive their justification from moral intuitions that are taken to be universal. In contrast, Sommers rejects the appeal to universal intuitions and advances a "metaskepticism" about responsibility. Taking cues from contemporary moral psychology, he uses the first half of his book to argue that intuitions about responsibility vary wildly across cultures. Sommers delves into the shame and honor-based intuitions that prevail in collectivist societies, and contrasts these with the emphasis on individual accountability found in institutionalized (i.e., Western) cultures. In turn, these varying intuitions lead to culturally relative theories of moral responsibility. But make no mistake: Sommers is not arguing for relativism about moral facts. His is a meta-ethical project, and he uses the remainder of the book to discuss the implications of metaskepticism for compatibilist, libertarian, and diminativist theories of autonomy and moral desert. Though Sommers tentatively endorses a form of eliminativism about moral responsibility, he leaves the door open for future discussion. Overall, this is a keenly argued yet surprisingly accessible book that presents a provocative thesis that should not be ignored. Summing Up: Highly recommended. *** Upper-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty.--L. A. Wilkinson, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Wilkinson, L.A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
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Wilkinson, L.A. "Sommers, Tamler. Relative justice: cultural diversity, free will, and moral responsibility." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Aug. 2012, p. 2296. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A299989742 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=8497e238. Accessed 10 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A299989742
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Tamler Sommers
Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility
Tamler Sommers, Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility, Princeton University Press, 2012, 230pp., $39.50 (hbk), ISBN 9780691139937.
Reviewed by Zac Cogley, Northern Michigan University
Some philosophers and social scientists have become increasingly worried that selecting research subjects solely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies affects the validity of research that aims to understand general truths about human nature.1 That worry comes to philosophy via the concern that common intuitions about philosophical thought experiments might be similarly WEIRD.2 In his engaging and thought-provoking book, Relative Justice, Tamler Sommers argues that intuitions about moral responsibility are subject to this bias; he uses this claim to defend a position on the free will debate he terms metaskepticism.
Metaskepticism about moral responsibility is the view that no theory of moral responsibility is objectively correct. It is thus importantly different from realist views about responsibility that supply conditions for moral responsibility that are sometimes satisfied, from first-order skeptical views that hold that no one is ever morally responsible for what they do, as well as from relativist views which hold that different standards for responsibility are correct when suitably culturally specific. (It should be noted that Sommers is not a metaskeptic about morality in general, only moral responsibility.) The book is organized into two natural parts: in the introduction and the first four chapters, Sommers argues in favor of metaskepticism. In the last three chapters, he discusses the ramifications of metaskepticism for our thinking about moral responsibility.
Sommers begins his argument for metaskepticism by noting the central role played by appeals to intuition, people's spontaneous judgments about the truth or falsity of some proposition (11), in developing contemporary theories of moral responsibility. Prominent compatibilists (who believe moral responsibility to be compatible with determinism) and incompatibilists (who do not) all support their views via appeals to intuition, and set out conditions that every person (no matter what culture) must satisfy in order to be morally responsible.
The next stage of Sommers' argument for metaskepticism requires demonstrating that there actually is significant cross-cultural and historical disagreement about moral responsibility. His argument for this claim begins in a chapter focused on differences in intuition between so-called "honor cultures" and "institutionalized cultures" and continues in a chapter discussing intuitional differences between "individualist" and "collectivist" societies. In both chapters, Sommers attends to evidence from anthropology, psychology, sociology, and even classical literature, discussing a fascinating variety of examples, both historical and contemporary.
In his discussion of honor and institutionalized cultures, for example, Sommers draws from contemporary Washington, D.C., Montenegro, Albania, the cultures of Bedouins and Inuits, ancient Greece, medieval Iceland, and nineteenth-century Corsica. He characterizes honor cultures as lacking significant cooperation among strangers, having little or no state protection and scarce resources, and in which people are commonly subject to attempts to steal their property (41). Institutionalized cultures, by contrast, have economies that regularly involve anonymous, cooperative interactions between strangers, significant state enforcement of behavioral norms, more significant resources, and relatively infrequent attempts at stealing (42). He incorporates these observations to argue that the social structure of honor cultures produces very different norms for retribution than exist in institutionalized cultures.
Sommers hypothesizes that the difference in norms governing retribution between institutionalized cultures and honor cultures leads to contrasting beliefs about moral responsibility. Western philosophical accounts of moral responsibility -- produced by theorists who are members of institutionalized cultures -- largely take for granted that being appropriately held morally responsible requires that a person exercises significant control over what she is being held responsible for. They also require that being morally responsible for an action requires that a person intended to perform it or at least negligently brought it about. And Western moral responsibility theorists typically balk at attributing moral responsibility to people who have been manipulated (say, by another agent's implantation of motives in them). Strikingly, Sommers presents evidence that all three of these Western norms on attributions of moral responsibility are lacking in particular honor cultures.
In some honor cultures, for example, killing any member of a murderer's family, group, or clan is appropriate punishment for murder. Thus people are held morally responsible who did not commit the murder. In others, women who are raped are killed simply because they are regarded as having had extramarital sex. So women are held responsible for outcomes they did not intend or control. And in Greek dramas, Agamemnon is held responsible for choices he has made while compelled to do so by the gods and when the gods have manipulated him. All these practices seem to involve attributions of moral responsibility or holding people morally responsible in ways that violate what members of institutionalized cultures regard as the correct norms for attributions of moral responsibility.
Sommers is sensitive to the fact that honor and institutionalized cultures exist along a continuum -- our own, largely institutionalized culture, has elements of honor practices, for example, in retribution for beanballs in baseball -- and that there is variation among individuals within cultures. However, it is still true that cultural differences significantly predict different intuitions on appropriate attributions of moral responsibility. If intuition must be appealed to in defending views of moral responsibility, it appears that divergent perspectives on moral responsibility are inevitable. If this is right, what resources does a universalist have with which to respond?
In perhaps the most important chapter of the book, Sommers considers whether the universalist can explain away the dramatic cultural variation in intuitions about the appropriate assignment of moral responsibility. For the universalist might well accept the existence of the variation Sommers catalogs, but argue in reply that the variation exists due to factors like the influence of problematic biases or cultural authorities acting to preserve their own interests. Perhaps competent judges free from these problematic influences would have intuitions that coalesce in common ways. The universalist can thus argue that the variation in intuitions about moral responsibility might be regarded in a way similar to how disagreements regarding astronomy, evolution, or even the rules of logic are regarded. Mere variation of views does not entail metaskepticism about any of these discourses so long as there is (or could be) general agreement among competent, informed judges who are relatively free of problematic bias.
Sommers responds to this line of argument with a two-stage challenge to the universalist. The universalist's position relies on the assumption that once people agree on non-moral facts and conceptual confusion is eliminated, human beings in any social environment will achieve at least rough consensus about the criteria for appropriate assignments of moral responsibility. Sommers points out first that many of the norms of responsibility attribution he has canvassed have been subjected to internal debate and criticism (90). People regarded as competent judges in Saga Iceland, for example, respond to Sam's torture of Hrafnkels by refusing to prosecute Hrafnkels' revenge killing of Sam's brother. The universalist needs to do more than suppose that further reflection would change minds -- the universalist must say what grounds would lead to changing the minds of the Icelandic judges, not simply suppose that there must be some.
The second stage of Sommers' reply is to argue that recent empirical work on the psychological acquisition and transmission of norms suggests that responsibility norms will inevitably vary with certain variances of social structure (95). If this is correct, then we cannot expect fully rational people who come from different cultures to converge on judgments about moral responsibility. Sommers argues that human beings possess a common psychological architecture that allows for norms to be easily internalized as the result of social influence. Different social influences result from different social and environmental circumstances, so we should expect that norms of moral responsibility attribution would vary with differences in environment. Importantly, Sommers claims that this variation is not only well-entrenched against change but is a rational response to differences in environment. Thus, an appeal to what competent judges would say does the universalist no good, as we should expect competent, rational judges from different environments to have very different views on the norms for proper responsibility attributions.
I think universalists can make better replies than Sommers allows. To do so, they should first appeal to the fact that while Sommers is a metaskeptic about moral responsibility, he is not a metaskeptic or relativist about morality. For example, while he uses the example of honor killings to argue that some cultures do not think control is required for properly holding people morally responsible, he condemns honor killings as wrongful (52). A universalist about moral responsibility can demand of Sommers that when we examine societies for variance in intuition, we focus on cases that do not involves the biasing influence of mistaken moral norms.
Next, the universalist can point out that there is an important difference between competent judges in a society finding it rational to hold people responsible versus believing they are responsible. Our own society uses the legal doctrine of strict liability in some contexts where significant practical reasons pull in that direction though we do not think that the propriety of strict liability is equivalent to being morally responsible. Similarly, the Icelandic judges plausibly do not think Sam's brother is responsible for Sam's crime. Instead, they accept norms that permit punishing Sam by killing his brother.
Finally, the universalist may be able to allow for some variation in intuition even after factoring out the influence of problematic moral norms if the variance reflects the use of a shared concept of moral responsibility with cross-culturally similar conditions of application. Sommers' argument focuses on a particular concept of moral responsibility: "to believe that someone is morally responsible for an action in this sense is to believe that the person deserves blame or praise and perhaps punishment or reward" independently of practical or consequentialist benefits that may arise (10). If Sommers is right that different cultures really disagree about assignments of moral responsibility, they must at least agree about the nature of the concept, though they diverge in their thinking about when it is appropriately applied. However, even if Sommers is right that intuitions about exactly when people are morally responsible differ, there appears to be widespread cross-cultural agreement regarding the importance of identification (of people with actions and results, and individuals with groups) and control in attributions of moral responsibility. Persons or groups are typically judged morally responsible for an action or outcome only if they are thought to identify in some way with the result, or had some chance at control over it. Hrafnkels retaliates against Sam by killing Sam's brother, not by killing some unrelated clan member; that this is a more rational retaliation strategy is surely something that can be cross-culturally appreciated.
Most of the literature on the compatibility question that Sommers takes to task for its universalism has been focused on skeptical challenges to the very possibility of agential control or identifying agents as the source of their choices. Thus there is a sense in which the literature might be understood as addressing the universally important issues for moral responsibility. The universalist must grant, however, that the issue of whether it is ever appropriate to attribute moral responsibility to individuals or groups is not the typical concern of people engaged in the day-to-day practice of holding each other responsible.
As the complexity of the argument sketched above suggests, however, Sommers has at least put a significant burden of response on the universalist. Assuming this to be the case, the latter half of the book concerns the "where do we go from here?" question that emerges from this pressure. It assumes the cogency of Sommers' argument in favor of metaskepticism about moral responsibility and examines the implications of the view. Sommers focuses on illuminating the similarities and differences between metaskepticism and other skeptical and nontraditional views about moral responsibility, discussing the social and political implications of his view, and presenting a theory for approaching issues of moral responsibility consistent with metaskepticism. The upshot of the latter is that metaskepticism implies that theories of moral responsibility cannot be evaluated in terms of their truth or falsity, so choosing between them must mean relying on factors like the psychological difficulty of jettisoning them, whether the theory coheres with other well-justified beliefs, and the pragmatic or moral value of the view (132). Sommers then turns to assessing libertarianism, compatibilism, and skepticism about moral responsibility on these grounds.
Sommers' consideration of these issues covers an array of assertions about the benefits, psychological attractiveness, or psychological necessity of these different views from a wide variety of contemporary theorists. To take a few recent examples, Robert Kane claims that objective worth is only compatible with libertarianism, Susan Wolf indicts pessimism about moral responsibility as gruesome and shallow, and Shaun Nichols argues that cooperation would deteriorate if we stopped blaming each other for the wrongs we commit. Sommers convincingly shows that the benefits and harms of these various philosophical positions on moral responsibility have been consistently overblown: it is unclear which position, if any, can claim to be better supported on pragmatic or moral grounds.
Sommers' closing chapter offers a tentative defense of eliminativism about moral responsibility on the modest grounds that it is fairer to not hold people responsible for what they do and that the practical cost of not holding people responsible is not too high. The issues here are partly investigated in an uncommon but welcome manner for a philosophical monograph: Sommers reports his own psychological conflict about these issues, related especially to the birth of his daughter. For some time a committed denier of moral responsibility, as a new parent Sommers imagines someone deliberately and willfully harming his newborn child and then considers how he would react. He muses, "I would feel that the offender deserved to suffer for the act . . . it would be wrong not to feel this way" (196). He admits to being unable to form a wholly coherent view, so his first-order skepticism remains "tortured" (his own words).
The book closes with the suggestion of a philosopher living in and wrestling seriously with the views he considers, not simply reporting on arguments from the safety of the armchair. It thus highlights that moral responsibility is complex, it matters deeply, and it is something we must all wrestle with, no matter our cultural starting points. Sommers' book is essential reading for anyone of similar mind.
1 For the acronym, see Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, "The Weirdest People in the World?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2-3 (2010): 61-83. Significant discussion follows the article.
2 For a representative example, see Shaun Nichols, Stephen Stich, and Jonathan Weinberg, "Metaskepticism: Meditations in Ethno-epistemology," in The Skeptics, ed. S. Luper (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003), 227-247.
Review - Relative Justice
Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility
by Tamler Sommers
Princeton University Press, 2011
Review by Ian DeWeese-Boyd
Oct 23rd 2012 (Volume 16, Issue 43)
Intuitions are the engine of many philosophical arguments, particularly those having to do with moral responsibility. The philosopher typically describes a scenario--say one in which Jack commits some act of horror due to the machinations of a mad neuroscientist who's manipulating him with some mad neuro-technology--and asks whether Jack is to blame. The expectation is that if the scenario has carefully isolated the relevant principle, its truth will be obvious to the reader. In Jack's case, we're meant to see that people can't be blamed for what's outside their control; we know intuitively that Jack can't be blamed if he really is controlled by the mad scientist. But what if significant populations simply do not have this intuition? What if they feel intuitively that Jack remains an appropriate target for blame, even though he had no control over his action? Obviously, the argument will lose its force for those people. But that may not be all.
In his book Relative Justice, Tamler Sommers argues that if such diversity of intuitions regarding the criteria and conditions for the fair assignment of praise and blame is irreducible--not due to irrationality, ignorance, superstition, conceptual ambiguity and the like-- and thus ineradicable by argument or analysis, the possibility of establishing any account of moral responsibility as true for everyone everywhere is vanishingly small. Citing just such diversity across cultures in the first part of his book, Sommers argues that "there is no set of conditions for moral responsibility that applies universally, and therefore no theory of moral responsibility that is objectively correct" (5)--a position he terms metaskepticism. Sommers spends the rest of the book laying out a principled method for arriving at somewhat settled beliefs about moral responsibility given the truth of metaskepticism. Though he offers support for the view that there is no moral responsibility, that Luck swallows everything to use Galen Strawson's phrase, his reflections on his own journey show the path to be a tortured one and the conclusions at best provisional. The arguments here are thought provoking and will challenge the intuitions of most readers, and despite being fairly technical and very closely argued, the book is remarkably accessible.
Sommers begins by carefully establishing that contemporary arguments regarding the nature of moral responsibility and its compatibility with determinism rely heavily upon culturally specific intuitions to establish accounts meant to be universally applicable. He goes on to show how widely intuitions about moral responsibility, in fact, vary from culture to culture and time to time. Citing fascinating examples from contemporary culture to classical and biblical literature and drawing on impressive empirical research in the social sciences, Sommers demonstrates that collectivist societies and cultures that emphasize honor or shame have fundamentally different ideas about the significance agency, control, intent, and publicity have on assessing and assigning moral responsibility. They are apt to find questions regarding the agent's state of mind or ability to control her action relatively less important than questions about the context influencing the action, the relationship between the offender (and her group) and the victim (and her group). They key point Sommers seeks to make is that most of the rock bottom intuitions philosophers have regarding moral responsibility are a product of the guilt emphasizing, individualist, institutionalized society to which they belong. Consequently, these accounts appeal, at most, to those belonging to the relevant intuition group.
One might respond to this evidence, as intriguing as it is, by saying that it only shows that many people have mistaken intuitions about moral responsibility. If they were disabused of their errors of facts and reason, they would all arrive at the intuitions prized by western philosophers. Sommers acknowledges that this is a serious worry for his metaskeptical position, but he argues that the sort of imagined intuitive convergence is unlikely to emerge, because the differing intuitions do not depend upon such errors. Instead, they are grounded in variations in cognitive architecture that are themselves a function of the social and physical environment. The way a society is structured has a great deal to do with what forms of retribution best to enhance cooperation and stability. So, while retributive emotions and beliefs about moral responsibility may be human universals, the content of these beliefs and emotions varies with social ecology. As long as there are different social ecologies, there will be different intuitions about moral responsibility, distinct but equally effective ways of constructing the concept, that are not due to some mistake metaphysical or otherwise. Sommers knows the empirical arguments he offers to support this conjecture are not conclusive, but he hopes that they effectively shift the burden of proof to those who believe there are objective conditions for moral responsibility to show what error or irrationality explains the deep cultural variation he identifies.
"Where do we go from here?" If there are no objectively correct conditions for moral responsibility, is there any principled way to make sense of moral responsibility given our own deeply held and difficult to revise intuitions? Sommers thinks there is and spends the second part of his book explaining how he navigates his way through the philosophical terrain to arrive a reflective equilibrium. Ultimately, the metaskeptic rules out the possibility of universal agreement about some objective set of facts, but this doesn't entail that there cannot be argument within large intuition groups that aims at generating agreement. Sommers own analysis of the major positions in the contemporary discussion of moral responsibility aims to appeal to those who belong to his intuition group. At times this circle seems to include most folks in institutionalized, individualist cultures, but there are moments when Sommers chalks up different reactions to cases to fundamental differences in temperament. While it may seem like a cop out to say, "Well, I guess you just don't have my intuitions" whenever your example doesn't work, the thrust of his argument and metaskepticism in general suggests the need for radically more modest goals in our discussions of moral responsibility. Still, one might worry that this approach would result in a balkanization of the debate into insular intuition groups (libertarians, compatibilists, eliminativists) with little intercommunication.
Sommers' account of his quest for reflective equilibrium, however, suggests that lively debate between these groups will continue. After the birth of his daughter, Sommers realized that he would absolutely blame and find it appropriate to blame someone who intentionally did serious harm to his daughter. Despite his having very strong intuitions that people cannot be responsible for their actions or characters, he nonetheless also felt the pull of intuitions that support competing accounts of moral responsibility. Once felt, he had to weigh them against his other intuitions. The result, in his case, is an uncomfortable endorsement of eliminativism, uncomfortable because it leaves unresolved the way to handle his intuitions about his daughter. Speaking from my own experience, as one who still believes in some variety of moral responsibility, Sommers' stories--not his arguments strictly speaking--revealed some intuitions I hadn't noticed before, ones that I will now have to weave into my own all-things-considered view of moral responsibility. It may be that a large part of the work to be done between intuition groups is just this: to awaken dormant intuitions by means of effective storytelling. Perhaps, this isn't such a bad thing, Sommer's, at least, tells a good story.
By placing before us the madness of Agamemnon, the hardness of Pharoah's heart, the bloody feuds of Montenegro and other tales from legend and life, Sommers' gets us to probe our intuitions, to discriminate differences as well discover unexpected resonances. While Sommers' primary aim is to establish that there are irreducible differences in our intuitions about moral responsibility, this fact--if it is a fact--once realized prompts an interrogation of one's own intuitions--a hallmark of philosophy since the time of Socrates. In the end, whether one is convinced by the metaskeptical hypothesis or Sommers' own vision of a world without moral responsibility, this book opens conceptual space in a discourse that sometimes feels as if every available position has been exhaustingly explored.
© 2012 Ian DeWeese-Boyd
Ian DeWeese-Boyd, Ph.D., Philosophy Dept, Gordon College, MA.
Review - A Very Bad Wizard
Morality Behind the Curtain
by Tamler Sommers
McSweeney's, 2009
Review by Joshua May
Dec 29th 2009 (Volume 13, Issue 53)
A Very Bad Wizard is a collection of delightful interviews or conversations conducted by philosopher Tamler Sommers. Sommers interviews an array of researchers--from psychologists to primatologists to philosophers--who all have one thing in common: their work has direct implications for the study of morality. The distinguished interviewees are Galen Strawson, Philip Zimabrdo, Franz De Waal, Michael Ruse, Joseph Henrich, Joshua Greene, Liane Young, Jonathan Haidt, Stephen Stich, and William Ian Miller. I read the book on my flights back to the West Coast after picking it up a few days prior in Massachusetts. I simply couldn't put it down! It truly is--as Steven Pinker states in his blurb--both thought-provoking and entertaining. It is a lively way into some of the most fascinating interdisciplinary research on ethics--what often now goes under the heading "moral psychology."
As Sommers notes in the acknowledgements, the interview format of the book may seem fairly non-academic. And so it may seem fit for something only the novice should pick up. But while it does provide a rather informal presentation of the thinkers' ideas, there's plenty of material sure to interest even the specialist. In particular, the book's format provides a rare glimpse into these academics' motivations for carrying out their research and their broader views about its implications. Even more than seeing morality behind the curtain, as the book's subtitle promises, the reader sees these researchers behind their respective curtains.
Many topics are discussed in the book's interviews, but some highlights come up in conversations with Zimbardo, Greene and Young, and Haidt. Zimbardo, a social psychologist, talks about his famous Stanford Prison Experiment in which a group of ordinary young men assumed either a guard or prisoner role in a simulated prison at Stanford University in 1971. The experiment was shut down after only six days due to the inhumane behavior the guards began to display. This is one of the many classic experiments indicating that situations can affect our behavior more than we ordinarily think. Simply because of a nasty situation, a generally good person can end up doing quite horrible things.
Greene and Young, neuroscientists at Harvard and MIT respectively, get right down to the human brain. Their work suggests that certain intuitions about some important cases in moral theory (the famous "trolley cases") are influenced by emotional reactions while others aren't, or at least not as much. Scan a person's brain while she's reading the scenario and providing the judgment, and the areas of the brain associated with emotion show much higher levels of activity. Greene in particular uses these results to argue that one moral theory--the utilitarian one not based on the faulty intuitions--is preferable over the other. While the research program is still developing, Greene is certainly pioneering exciting ways in which brain imaging can be quite relevant to ethics.
Haidt, also a social psychologist, talks primarily about his recent work on "moral dumbfounding." Haidt conducted a series of interesting experiments in which subjects read stories involving actions that don't cause anyone harm but violate certain other societal norms, such as protected and consensual incest between adults or eating the family dog after it has been run over. Subjects tend to emphatically label the acts immoral, but they can't come up with a good reason why. Haidt argues that these sorts of findings support a model according to which moral judgments are primarily driven by emotional reactions, as opposed to reasoning, in much the same way judgments of taste (presumably) are.
Though various issues arise throughout the book, one over-arching theme revolves around the question: What is the status of morality once we subject it to empirical scrutiny? While Sommers (p. 3) thinks we "shouldn't be scared about what we'll find" by pulling back morality's curtain, the resulting impression the reader attains is a rather dismal one. Moral realism--roughly the view that there are in some sense objective facts about what's right and wrong--is quickly put off the table by most in the book. This is largely based on empirical evidence indicating that the psychological mechanisms involved in moral judgment and behavior are merely evolutionary adaptations triggered largely by flimsy emotional responses which vary dramatically across cultures and situations. This often leads to a thorough-going cultural relativism. Henrich, for example, says: "My view is that it's wrong to beat your wife, but that there's no objective standard. It's just wrong for me to do it" (p. 119). Others, such as Greene, espouse some version of error theory according to which our moral beliefs are systematically false. Even more extreme perhaps is a full-blown non-cognitivism--the view that moral judgments are not even capable of being true or false (see Stich, p. 188, for example). On such a view, there aren't any moral facts at all, not even culturally relative ones!
There are some representative exceptions to the bleak view, of course. De Waal (a primatologist), Miller (a law professor), and Haidt are notable examples. At one point, De Waal firmly objects to those who argue, for example, that human empathy is "some sort of afterthought of evolution or something contrived" or that "we are never truly empathic and kind" (p. 74). According to De Waal, the apparently moral behavior and emotions of primates provide key "building blocks" or "prerequisites" for human morality. Haidt, also in a more positive vein, is quite attune to the fact that one can deny strong forms of moral realism while still holding that there are important facts of the matter, though they may be in some sense relative to something or other: "[W]ith morality, we build a castle in the air and then we live in it, but it is a real castle. It has no objective foundation, a foundation outside of our fantasy--but that's true about money, that's true about music, that's true about most of the things that we care about" (p. 161). But even here Haidt seems to put an unnecessarily gloomy spin on this picture. Does morality have "no objective foundation" whatsoever even if it's grounded in human nature, for example, in the empathic responses we have to the needs of others? Likewise, though we play a large role in the creation of money and its significance, is its existence really just a "fantasy"?
Of course, Sommers can't be faulted for the arguably excessive and potentially misleading pessimism of some of the interviewees. However, he does sometimes join in on partitioning the space of reasonable views in an overly restrictive way. For example, in his introduction to his conversation with Ruse, Sommers seems to characterize the two main positions here as either realist and anti-scientific or anti-realist and empirically-informed (pp. 85-6). Surely any empirically-informed view must admit that morality is intimately bound up with our own concerns and natures. But the idea that our natural, evolved mechanisms for moral judgment and behavior are doing something more like detection than capricious fabrication could be given some more consideration.
Nevertheless, as one commentator has already put it, A Very Bad Wizard is a very good book. It's an easy read while at the same time informative and amusing. I highly recommend it to anyone, expert or novice, interested in modern research on morality--or in just seeing academics cuss.
© 2009 Joshua May
Joshua May is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of Philosophy, where he received his M.A. His research is primarily in moral psychology, action theory, meta-ethics, and epistemology. His web page is: http://www.joshdmay.com/
Review - A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain
Second Edition
by Tamler Sommers
Routledge, 2016
Review by Brad Frazier
Aug 15th 2017 (Volume 21, Issue 33)
Methodologically and thematically, the first edition of A Very Bad Wizard was a groundbreaking book. The second edition builds on the same interdisciplinary format – Sommers' engaging interviews on central issues in ethics and moral psychology with leading thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, anthropology, law, and primatology. But it significantly widens the conversation, going from nine interviews in the first edition to seventeen in the second.
The second edition is also more user friendly for a college course in ethics or moral psychology. Sommers provides brief but helpful introductions to each section and each interview, and a glossary of terms as well. There are also references to related podcasts at the end of each interview, suggested readings, and questions for discussion. In addition, instructor and student resources related to the text are available on a companion website. I will certainly strongly consider adopting A Very Bad Wizard for an ethics course.
Although one could read the book as a series of discrete conversations on a range of broadly related topics, it hangs together much more cohesively than this suggests. Sommers organizes the various interviews around four themes: Free Will and Moral Responsibility (Part I); the "Big Questions: Virtue, Honor, Meaning, and the Good Life" (Part II); Metaethics (Part III); and "Morality Behind the Curtain" (Part IV). The fourth part is by far the biggest section, with eight interviews pertaining to "the origins of morality and the psychology behind our moral beliefs and behavior" (183). Sommers' segues build the necessary bridges between each part of the book.
The interviews are lively and very accessible. No interview seems oddly chosen, irrelevant, or out of place. There are substantive disagreements that are acknowledged and carefully explored. In this sense, the book is a model for philosophical dialogue, both in form and content.
David Pizarro, Sommers' co-host of the Very Bad Wizards podcast, aptly notes in the foreword to the second edition that A Very Bad Wizard could be described as a "sneaky manifesto of a moral pluralist who believes that ethics are fundamentally messy." That certainly is one lasting impression of the book.
But it never seems like Sommers or the researchers he interviews are needlessly complicating things. Instead they underscore and illustrate Aristotle's point that we shouldn't seek the sort of precision in ethics that is available only in science. The "naturalizing morality" trajectory of the book represents, in my view, a badly needed and long overdue paradigm shift in contemporary moral philosophy. If you are exasperated by trolleyology, this is the book for you.
In The Upright Thinkers, Leonard Mlodinow notes: "the ability to ask the right questions is probably the greatest talent one can have" (22). Sommers clearly has this Socratic knack. Here are some of the questions he and his interlocutors raise and leave us to ponder.
1. Are free will and deep moral responsibility illusory? If so, are they necessary illusions or can we abide letting them go? Is a capacity for self-control adequate to justify lesser forms of responsibility?
2. Do philosophers in general tend to commit the "fundamental attribution error," as described by Philip Zimbardo? (This is the practice in "individualistic societies" of focusing far too much on the internal states of a person – motives, values, beliefs, and genetics –
as the cause of her behavior.)
3. Have moral philosophers taken a wrong turn by trying to rebut the sensible knave, by attempting to show that immorality is inherently irrational and short sighted? Or is morality – specifically norms of moral behavior toward strangers – a "discovery of reason" like the discovery of zero, as Paul Bloom claims (223)? (Ironically, Bloom, a psychologist, offers the strongest defense of the role of reason in ethical reflection in the book.)
4. Is morality a product of evolution, a necessary adaptation? If so, what are the implications of this for morality and moral psychology? Do evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, muck things up here and commit "Beethoven's error," as Frans de Waal claims, by conflating the process of evolution and its outcomes (192)?
5. Is honor an important moral category still or so gendered as to be unworthy of philosophical defense?
6. When one's pursuit of meaning clashes with morality, should morality always outweigh it (a question Susan Wolf raises)?
7. Can standard ethical theories make sense of a character like Deadwood's Al Swearengen? If not, is this a sign of a major defect?
8. Are moral judgments really just deeply felt aesthetic judgments?
9. Stephen Stich claims: "a vast amount of what philosophers have done recently, but also going all the way back to antiquity, belongs in the rubbish bin" (277). Is this true? Do philosophers have a regrettable practice of "intuition mongering," as Stich claims, which we need to abandon?
Speaking of Stich, one of the most striking claims he advances, in the penultimate interview, gave me pause. Stich sharply notes: "the tradition of trying to justify normative claims in a deep and foundational way, the tradition of trying to provide something like philosophical or argumentative justifications for moral judgments—this is an extremelyculturally local phenomenon" (289). All the philosophers and theologians who have argued that morality would collapse in the absence of adequate philosophical or theological foundations should keep this in mind.
In conclusion, the second edition of A Very Bad Wizard is a very successful continuation and expansion of the project Sommers initiates in the first edition. I highly recommend this book.
© 2017 Brad Frazier
Brad Frazier, Dept of Philosophy, Wells College
Does Honor Matter?
A new book argues it’s a virtue that can motivate people to struggle against injustice—but doesn't adequately consider the more pernicious ways it manifests in society.
Adam Kirsch
Jun 3, 2018
A boy salutes at sunset
Tahreer Photography / Getty
What is the virtue we most urgently need more of in America today? A few obvious answers come to mind: honesty, to counteract the corruption at the highest levels of government; compassion, to spur action to help the poor and powerless; patience, to deal with an increasingly toxic public discourse. But in his new book, Tamler Sommers, a philosopher at the University of Houston, argues on behalf of a more unexpected virtue—one that some people don’t consider a virtue at all. What Americans ought to cultivate, he writes, is a sense of honor. “Honor,” he writes in Why Honor Matters, is “indispensable … for living a good life in a good and just society.”
But what exactly is honor? As Sommers acknowledges, it is a slippery word, used in a wide variety of contexts, from honor societies to honor killings. When it appears on its own, it has a quaint sound: Honor is what led aristocrats to fight duels at 10 paces. And there is a robust tradition in modern thought that has nothing but contempt for the idea of honor. Perhaps the most famous description of honor in English literature is the speech Falstaff makes in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, in which he justifies being cowardly—that is, dishonorable—on the battlefield: “What is honor? A word … Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No.” Falstaff knows that it is senseless to throw away your life for a mere word; as the Bible puts it, it’s better to be a live dog than a dead lion.
Yet the very fact that lions seem honorable and dogs do not suggests that there is a stubborn persistence to the concept of honor: We are supposed to know it when we see it. To be honorable is to be brave, committed, and self-sacrificing. It means living by a code, and putting the group before the individual. Traditionally, it was warriors who prided themselves on their honor; but as Sommers observes, a sense of honor is crucial to any elite group. The Marines have it, with their slogan, “The few, the proud, the Marines,” but so do professional hockey players and stand-up comedians. All of these identities are bound up with a sense of pride, commitment, and high standards—the key ingredients of honor. Members of such “honor cultures,” Sommers writes, “regard their reputation, their honor, as their most treasured possession, far more important than money or property.”
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To Sommers, honor and the struggle to achieve it are important parts of a good life, fostering values like “courage, integrity, solidarity, drama, hospitality, a sense of purpose and meaning.” And it is these very things, he argues, that 21st-century Americans are lacking. Indeed, Sommers finds the decline of honor responsible for many social problems. Anti-immigration rhetoric, he writes, plays on selfish fears, trying to portray immigrants as threatening—all members of ISIS or MS-13. Sommers argues that this line of attack could be challenged by an appeal to Americans’ generosity and hospitality, which are central values in any honor-based culture. Why not rally people around the slogan “We’re not cowards; we’re Americans,” Sommers asks, encouraging people to see fearfulness as an insult to the nation’s self-respect?
Again, Sommers sees our dysfunctional criminal-justice system as a casualty of America’s disregard for honor. Because society is motivated by fear instead of pride, Americans tolerate mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline—any amount of injustice, so long as crime statistics go down. Sommers is particularly sensitive to the way that the current justice system ignores the honor of both criminals and victims. In honor-based cultures, he emphasizes, the victim of a crime is responsible for avenging it, because he or she has been personally injured. In American law, on the other hand, a crime is not considered an attack against a person, only against the state and its laws. As a result, victims play little role in the punishment process, and are denied the chance to regain their lost honor. Nor can criminals repair their honor by making amends to those they have injured. As a result, trials rarely satisfy the deepest needs of individuals or of society.
Sommers’s arguments for honor make it sound like an attractive and necessary virtue. But as he acknowledges, you don’t have to look very far before you start finding their weaknesses and downsides. The Marines and the National Hockey League care about honor, but so do street gangs or the Mafia, who feel compelled to defend their honor even when this involves killing their rivals. It is also notable that almost all of Sommers’s examples of honor groups are all-male: Honor is traditionally something that men possess, and that women pay the price for. Honor killings, such as when men murder their daughters or sisters to preserve their family’s reputation, may be the purest expression of what honor means. For an inside group to enjoy the privilege of being honorable, there must be an outside group who are considered dishonorable: Men have honor at the expense of women, aristocrats at the expense of commoners, warriors at the expense of civilians. When you look at it in this way, most of the moral advances of modern society—from the abolition of slavery to the emancipation of women—start to look like victories over an antiquated ideal of honor.
As it happens, the main target of Sommers’s attack in Why Honor Matters is what he calls the dignity-based culture that, starting with the Enlightenment in the 18th century, replaced traditional honor-based cultures in the modern West. Dignity has the moral advantage over honor in that it does not have to be earned: Everyone has equal human dignity simply by being born. But for Sommers, dignity is a cold and abstract ideal, incapable of motivating people to actually struggle against injustice. It “gives us plenty of reasons to refrain from wrongdoing,” he writes, “but provides little to inspire exceptional or heroic behavior.” Honor encourages self-reliance and independent action, where dignity relies on a state apparatus to protect our rights—a protection that it very often fails to provide.
Yet Sommers’s idealized picture of honor ignores many of the ways it actually manifests itself in our society. Take his examples of problems for which honor is the proposed solution—fear of immigrants and fear of crime. Sommers does not adequately consider the possibility that, in fact, it is not fear that motivates these political positions, but hatred—specifically, racial hatred. It is no coincidence that it is black and Latino youth who are the primary victims of mass incarceration, or that it is Latino and Middle Eastern immigrants who are most demonized by immigration opponents.
And American racism, ironically, can be thought of as a classic form of honor-thinking. When white supremacists march in Charlottesville chanting “You will not replace us,” they are uttering a clear defense of what they take to be their racial honor. Indeed, a convincing case could be made that what ails America today is the inflamed honor of groups, from neo-Nazis to incels, who want to preserve their elite status in the face of “dignity-based” democratic challenges. At the end of Why Honor Matters, Sommers writes that he completed his afterword on the weekend of the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville last August, and he acknowledges that the incident tends to undermine his case for honor as against dignity: “The past few years should make us more appreciative of the morality of dignity and its focus on equality and respect for human rights,” he writes in a chastened spirit. Perhaps he is already at work on a sequel about the perils of honor, which are at least as real as its benefits.
Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. He is the author of several books, including The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century.
Sommers, “Why Honor Matters”
May 7, 2018 By Marc O. DeGirolami in Books, Marc O. DeGirolami, Scholarship Roundup Leave a comment
Is honor a Christian virtue? A republican virtue? Certainly some idea of “honor” was Honorvital for the political and moral life of the early American republic, and whether this idea was properly described as of Christian or Enlightenment (or, as is even more likely, of much more ancient) origin is impossible to answer. Some scholars have argued that the constitutional oath (sworn by, for example, the President upon assuming office) reflects a commitment to the virtue of honor in both an official and a personal way. And some founders sometimes spoke of a possible conflict between Christian and republican virtues. For example, John Adams wrote that “it may be well questioned, whether love of the body politic is precisely moral or Christian virtue, which requires justice and benevolence to enemies as well as to friends, and to other nations as well as our own.” Adams, Defence of the Constitutions (1787).
Here is a new book examining the virtue of honor as a civic good. It will be interesting to see whether the author explores some of these issues. The book is Why Honor Matters (Basic Books) by philosopher Tamler Sommers.
To the modern mind, the idea of honor is outdated, sexist, and barbaric. It evokes Hamilton and Burr and pistols at dawn, not visions of a well-organized society. But for philosopher Tamler Sommers, a sense of honor is essential to living moral lives. In Why Honor Matters, Sommers argues that our collective rejection of honor has come at great cost. Reliant only on Enlightenment liberalism, the United States has become the home of the cowardly, the shameless, the selfish, and the alienated. Properly channeled, honor encourages virtues like courage, integrity, and solidarity, and gives a sense of living for something larger than oneself. Sommers shows how honor can help us address some of society’s most challenging problems, including education, policing, and mass incarceration. Counterintuitive and provocative, Why Honor Matters makes a convincing case for honor as a cornerstone of our modern society.