Srinivasan and the limits of philosophy

Amia Srinivasan has recently given two very interesting interviews, one to Tyler Cowen (an interview which was the subject of so many comments that Cowen followed up with some post-interview remarks), and one to the Paris Review. I recommend both interviews and also Cowen's follow-up remarks.

Srinivasan is a utopian feminist who believes a lot of things with which I disagree. But this is not about my disagreements with her. Instead, I want to develop a couple of thoughts, prompted by these interviews, about the borders between philosophy and two of its adjacent disciplines, namely economics and psychology. The common theme of my thoughts is that we cannot use these disciplines as short-cuts to avoid properly engaging in the arguments that the philosopher makes. Unfortunately.

First, economics. One point that Srinivasan makes is that we currently live in patriarchal societies (not my lived experience, but then I would say that, wouldn't I?) and our desires are shaped and formed by that fact. Were we to live in a utopian feminist society in which the patriarchy had been overthrown then the shape of male and female desires and interests would be radically different from that which we see in the current world. 

Let me pause here. How might we go about evaluating that kind of claim? What do you think might count as an argument against it? 

Tyler Cowen is an economist and, although fluent in philosophy, he took an economist's line on this point. He pressed Srinivasan with some data from the real world, specifically the fact that as societies in fact become more equal (contrast Scandinavia with Iran), men and women choose to follow more (rather than less) stereotypically male and female directions in life: women towards 'caring' professions and men towards 'working with things' professions. There's lots of data of this kind if you care to look for it.

Srinivasan rejected this line of argument on the basis that even Scandinavian countries are so far from the kind of utopia she is thinking about that we learn nothing from this kind of data. Cowen's follow-up comments included a criticism of Srinivasan for not dealing adequately with empirical matters.

Is that criticism fair? The economist, Cowen, takes the world as it is, with the trade-offs and possibilities that it contains, and says "this is what it tells us about your theories". In effect, Srinivasan says, as the man in the old Irish joke has it, "I wouldn't start from here". Can she do that?

On balance, I think she can. I have a couple of reasons for saying so.

(1) Things really can change. A lot. So much that really quite radically different structures of thought are possible. 

Here's an example. Imagine a first century AD proto-Cowen interviewing some early advocate of Christianity, St Paul say, and the conversation goes as follows: "you say that Christianity means everyone is equal?", "yes", "even slaves?",  "yes", "so you think that, in your utopian Christian polity, slavery [subtext: which we all know is natural and inevitable] would be eliminated?", "yes", and then proto-Cowen hits St Paul with the killer line "but if I look at the current figures for Corinth and the figures for Ephesus then I find that Christianity does not correlate with decreased slavery!" 

We can now say, albeit with the benefit of a huge amount of hindsight, that St Paul was right and proto-Cowen's statistics were nothing to the point. The plain fact is that, largely as a result of Christian thought and teaching, the most powerful empire in the world, the successor to Rome, spent a great deal of time and money trying to eradicate slavery (read more here - recommended). The utopian St Paul would have been entirely within his rights to say "modern day Corinth and Ephesus are so far from what I am talking about that there is nothing to learn from this data" - not only entitled, but completely right. He would have been entitled to insist on a prospective revolution in moral thought changing people's minds at a radical level. I can't see any a priori reason to deny Srinivasan the same argument.

(2) It's not unusual that moral teaching has to be taken as a whole and becomes uninteresting if it isn't. Again, I'll take Christianity as an example, in this case the teaching on indissoluble marriage. The Cowen/economist/"start from here" approach says: "here's a bad marriage - he's a good-for-nothing  unfaithful drunkard, she's unhappy and shrewish, the children are cowed and miserable - why not allow divorce?" To which the Christian has an "I wouldn't start from here"/utopian response along the lines of "in a Christian marriage, the man will be loving and faithful [etc etc] and this marriage misses out on so many Christian virtues". Cowen is entitled to push back by saying "yes, but what about this case...", and ultimately he can get the Christian to say something like "you have to make the best of a bad job" and come up with some second-best solution that seems to undermine the absolutism of the primary position. But that would be an uninteresting answer that misses the full import of Christian teaching about marriage and what that says about the ideal marriage. (I'm equally happy to rely on non-Christian examples here: I wouldn't consider, for example, that the discontents of modern American undergraduate hook-up culture are much of a argument against the Islamic ideal of polygamous marriage.) 

Similarly, Srinivasan has a story about how wholesale changes to society will mean that different moral choices arise; she has a bigger moral picture to paint. Getting her to say that Norwegian childcare is better than US childcare is just missing the point. 

Here I think in particular of Cowen asking Srinivasan about the Dutch use of prostitutes for disabled people: Srinivasan is surely entitled to say "I wouldn't start from here" about the current circumstances of disabled people and prostitutes - think how much has already gone wrong with people's lives, on any view, before we get to the premises of this kind of question - and say that there is very little of interest to be learned about her general views by considering circumstances of that kind.

None of that is to say that Cowen's approach is illegitimate. It's fine to ask St Paul how he knows that things will be better for slaves once Christians take over, or to press Christians who don't believe in divorce with the fact of actually existing unhappy marriages. The facts of the real world (not least biological facts, but also anthropological ones) are plainly not irrelevant to philosophical questions about feminism. But nor is it dodging the point for the person on the other side to say that such questions are so loaded with preconceptions that a strict answer will be uninteresting, or will miss the point, or will demand an empirical back-up which simply cannot be given in the circumstances like the present that are so different from the postulated utopia for which Srinivasan or St Paul contends.

It is worth noting that the economist's approach of starting "from here", or holding many things constant and changing a minimum of variables, is a more obviously useful and practical approach than the philosopher's one. For a notional ethical Caesar, the live policy choices might well have been between "how they do things in Ephesus" and "how they do things in Corinth", and he was entitled to take the choice that leads to less slavery, utopian thinking be damned. But none of that detracts from the fact that the philosopher is not necesssarily squirming, or making a bad point, or being wrong, by rejecting the empirical question as being inapposite as a response to the argument she advances.

Second, psychiatry. This was an interesting exchange in the Paris Review interview:

You mentioned psychoanalysis earlier, and you seem committed to the idea that there are considerable constraints on how much we can know about ourselves. That idea has implications for the politics of desire and of identity, and for politics in general. And it feels in some ways like quite an unfashionable idea now.

SRINIVASAN

It is unfashionable. To think of the self as being obscure to oneself. I think you’re right to point to the phenomenon of identity politics as having something to do with this. It’s very important as people pursue the politics of recognition, to think of themselves as having a sovereign inalienable right to declare themselves to be something, to know themselves, and for their declarations of knowledge to be taken as dispositive.

And yet there are places where we risk overstating our ability to know ourselves. ...

This is delicately put by both the interviewer, Lidija Haas, and Srinivasan, but I am going to put it bluntly. It seems that there are a number of men nowadays who think they are women. If we take the view that people know what they are - that they have an infallible insight into their true essence, so to speak - then we have to concede that they are indeed women. But if we are prepared to take the view that there are constraints on our ability to know ourselves, as Srinivasan tactfully suggests, then we could say "no, you're just wrong, you're a man". Moreover - and here the references to psychoanalysis in the Paris Review and to Freud in Cowen's interview become relevant - we could even say that such people are mentally ill and need medical help. You can now see why Srinivasan describes her view as "unfashionable": indeed it is - it's just what yer basic TERF thinks. 

This is an immediately appealing line of argument for the gender critical. Why can't we simply rule these kinds of transgender thoughts out of the philosophical running by assigning them to the category of mentally illness? 

But I don't think it's as simple as that. Or, rather, I don't think it is necessarily as simple as that: these people might well be mentally ill, but there's no shortcut to proving it.

Let me make my point good by taking a couple of examples from Srinivasan that are less immediately political in nature. In the Cowen interview, she mentions coming into a Yale undergraduate metaphysics class with Hindu ontological beliefs: "I quite literally believed that material reality was Maya, was illusion ...", she says. Or, again, in the Paris Review interview, she brings up a little autobiographical detail: "As a young person, my intense fantasy was to be disembodied entirely. I started feeling that when I was probably five or six, but that fantasy stayed with me throughout my teenage years and into college. It wasn’t that I simply didn’t like looking a particular way. I didn’t want to look any way." I sympathise with the latter anecdote: I also recall being a child and thinking that bodily existence was rather a drag, demeaning to an elevated mind such as my own, and that to be liberated from mere corporeal demands was greatly to be desired.

These beliefs are, from a psychological point of view, rubbish. If someone tells you that the table and chairs in front of you are just an illusion then they are simply wrong: look, I can knock on them with my knuckles! "Knock knock - hear that? You must be mad," we might say (if we were being rude). "You need treatment". Or, similarly, we might say: "you can't be disembodied. If you lose your body then you're dead! Wishing to have no body is basically suicidal ideation".

Of course all of that misses the point. Embracing Hindu ontology, or entertaining the desire for disembodied existence, cannot simply be ruled out as being a sign of mental illness. That would be to make what philosophers sometimes refer to as a category mistake. 

Let me give another example. If someone goes to their doctor saying that they think they are worthless, that life has no meaning, that it would be better never to have lived, that there is no purpose in continuing with their life (and so on) then there is a fair chance that they will be diagnosed with depression and treated by having these thoughts challenged with a view to persuading the patient that they are incorrect beliefs. But from a philosophical point of view, these beliefs are perfectly respectable. In the world of philosophy, if delivered with a genial smile, they will be treated not by vigorous rebuttal but by polite exploration for an hour, followed by a "see you next week - make sure you read those chapters from Spinoza first" and then retiring for a hearty lunch. 

Returning to the question of transgenderism, while it may not be easy to say when someone who says that they are a woman despite in fact being a man is making a philosophical argument and when they are simply suffering from a mental illness, it seems to me that we cannot immediately say that they are always in the latter category, any more than we can say that someone who claims that their life is ultimately meaningless and futile, or who claims that the material objects in the room don't really exist, is always a case for medical treatment. 

This border between psychology and philosophy is different from the border between economics and philosophy that I discuss above: the utopian philosopher and the economist are looking at the same question with different tools, and reaching answers that can't really be compared with each other; the philosopher and the psychiatrist are looking at rather different questions, but ones phrased in exactly the same words. 

On the other hand, as with economics, it is worth noting that psychiatry is more immediately useful than philosophy. If you find that contemplating the potential futility of your existence is getting you down then the philosopher just says, "Well, don't do it. As they say in gambling adverts, when the fun stops, STOP." But the psychiatrist has various tools for encouraging a more helpful set of thoughts and turning the downcast thinker into a useful member of society. But: so what? The fact that the other discipline is more useful does not show that what the philosopher says is wrong. (Well, that's my philosophical position anyway.)

In each case, therefore, what we see is that the adjoining discipline cannot provide us with an shortcut to the problems that the philosopher throws up. If the world can change so significantly that slavery can go from natural to abhorrent, despite there being no data to make such a change prospectively plausible, then why should the overthrow of the patriarchy not have a similarly revolutionary effect on tastes and morals? If the person who doubts the very existence of material reality is not mad, despite the wholesale rejection of the plain and obvious that such a doubt entails, then why should the person who merely quibbles about the far more minor matter of the male/female dividing line be regarded as ill and in need of treatment? 

So, no short cuts. Those of us who want to disagree have to take the high road and meet the likes of Srinivasan on the ground which she has chosen. I'm afraid it won't be pretty, but at least it will be honest.