Would you state the difficulty?

My title recalls a passage from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno, which I quote for no particular reason except that it is vaguely relevant and terribly funny:

“Do you really find no logical difficulty in regarding Nature as a process of involution, passing from definite coherent homogeneity to indefinite incoherent heterogeneity?” . . . “No physical difficulty,” she confidently replied: “But I haven’t studied Logic much. Would you state the difficulty?” “Well,” said Arthur, “do you accept it as self-evident? Is it as obvious, for instance, as that ‘things that are greater than the same are greater than one another?” “To my mind,” she modestly replied, “it seems quite as obvious. I grasp both truths by intuition. But other minds may need some logical – I forget the technical terms.”. . . .

Brian Weatherson has taken up the topic of 'imaginative resistance' once again. I wrote some rather rambling posts (here and here) on the subject myself sometime back. Let's see if I can be brief for a change. [UPDATE: nope.]

Tamar Gendler states the problem like so: "The puzzle of imaginative resistance: the puzzle of explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant." (Confused, or you want the reference? Go click on my earlier posts above.)

Weatherson more or less takes for granted there is a difficulty. He attempts to generalize to a difficulty concerning imagining 'assymetric compound impossibilities.' Be that as it may be - and it may be everything I am about to say is consistent with what Brian says - it seems worth noting that it isn't all that hard to imagine morally deviant fictional worlds. Yet no one seems to offering example. So let's.

Beyond Good and Evil
Gendler has her pleasantly whimsical theological fable, "The Tower of Goldbach". (Short version: Mathematicians prove Goldbach’s conjecture: every even is sum of two primes. God gets angry at this lifting of skirts of bashful Creation to peer at her too-private mystery parts. God makes 12 not be sum of two primes anymore, i.e. not the sum of 7 + 5. Folks upset. If they find 12 righteous men, will God relent? Yes. Seven righteous men, and five, are found, but are unable to sum to 12 righteous men (see above.) More pleading. Solomon settles: would be grandest for 12 to be and not the sum of 7 + 5. God agrees. Chorus of 12 and -12 voices hymn God’s immortal glory as curtain falls.)

Gendler says that, despite its impossibility, this story provokes little imaginative resistance. Whereas stories about moral impossibilities - 'So-and-so killed her infant daughter because it was the right thing to do' - are much harder to swallow. Well, what about that old Far Side cartoon with the two lab-coated big-nose scientists at the blackboard? “Yes, Yes, I know that, Sidney. ... everybody knows that! ... But look: Four wrongs squared, minus two wrongs to the fourth power, divided by this formula, do make a right!”

I don't think the Far Side cartoon provokes more imaginative resistance than Gendler's tale. What they both provoke is: a laugh. Take Brian Weatherson's latest short-short foray into the morally deviant fiction field, "Pie": "It had been a quiet day at the APA Pacific until the young guy talking about imagination livened up proceedings by throwing a custard pie in George's face. George seemed momentarily discomforted by the surprise attack, but in the audience most people were laughing. Some of them were doing that nervous "What will he do next" laugh, but most were really amused. Some Kantians started tut-tutting about the use of poor George as a means not an end, but they were wrong to complain. Everyone else was made so happy by the funny surprise, that clearly throwing the pie was the morally right thing to do."

Brian says he thinks it provokes peculiar resistance. I just think the script needs a little massage and a snapper at the end. How about? "It never would have happened if the 'make it morally right to do that' fairy hadn't escaped from her cage at the Pasadena Home For Troubled Morphodeontic Entities. The Kantians were no help at all, waving their arms indignantly as she flew around the room, eventually settling on the ear of the young man with the pie who was talking about things you can't possibly imagine. When it was over George said not to worry, as banana cream was his fourth favorite kind of pie. And everyone agreed it had been the morally right thing to do. Hours later, after that strange electrical discharge from the High Energy Philosophy Lab struck the bar, the ethicists agreed it was twice as good to have two of the nice young man around. But where was the booze? Ethicists need to be able to drown the problems they can't solve, just like everyone else, they grumbled."

I'm not sure it's really such a rich comic vein, but it's pretty clear to me that ethical nonsense is no more difficult to swallow than the ethically neutral variety. Other examples? Maybe we could write a silly sci-fi fable (think Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad) about the far future, after humanity has discovered not only how to travel to alternative possible worlds, even modally alternative worlds, but deontically possible worlds. An intrepid deontonaut sets out in his ship, the U.S.S. Out, Out Damned Spot, trying to find a needle in a haystack: a deontically possible world in which any moral agent who has committed precisely the peculiar mix of good and bad (in the actual world) acts that our hero has is a paragon of moral perfection. When report of his success carries back to earth, the human race is gripped by the sheer glory of this noblest of all possible achievements. The actual world is depopulated - apart from a few sullen saints trying to do it the old-fashioned way - as humanity focuses intently on moral self-improvement.

Again, I'm not sure it would really be all that thigh-slapping, but it seems a not half bad candidate for development into passably entertaining garden variety nonsense of the sort that Gendler obviously finds not terribly resistance-provoking.

At this point, I think Brian would remark that what I have really found a way to do is tell stories about morally deviant worlds that do not contain what he calls compound assymetric impossibilities. Well, that may be; that may be. I haven't really thought it through. I'm just minting examples.

Let me just mention a couple other sorts of cases that seem to me to qualify, then I'll sign off for the night.

Mum, dad! Don't touch it, it's EVIL!
There are lots of stories - fantasy stories, mostly - in which it is stipulated that people, places and things have rather implausibly causally efficacious moral properties. Evil rings and good swords. The Bible qualifies, if you think that's fiction. If we don't want to get into that, Hegel's Phenomenology probably qualifies as a fantasy novel. If we don't want to get into that, Dante qualifies. The cosmos of the Divine Comedy is as weird as anything Vernor Vinge has come up with (to pick my personal fave weirdest sci-fi cosmos inventor.) It's not just the nuns on the moon either. It's the energy-like rocket force of the Good, jetting our hero on his way. (It's a tale as old as time: boy sees girl, boy loses girl, all of creation conspires to get boy his girl back, boy and girl sit in the bleachers ignoring each other and admiring God.) Anyway, to make a long story short, it doesn't seem as though there is much of a problem coming up with metaethically deviant moral worlds. There are tons of them.

By the Power of Genre
My last example is the diciest. It seems to me that conventions of genre fiction allow you to generate deviant moral worlds. Since I am making a point of quoting Empson whenever I can this month, here is a little something from Some Versions of Pastoral. (I'm sort of working on a paper on the subject of Empson's conception of pastoral, so that's why all this stuff is at my fingertips of late.)

One idea essential to a primitive epic style is that the good is not separable (anyway at first level judgments) from a life of straightforward worldly success in which you keep certain rules; the plain satisfactions are good in themselves and make great the men who enjoy them. From this comes the 'sense of glory' and of controlling nature by delight in it. It is absurd to call this a 'pre-moralistic' view, since the rules may demand great sacrifices and it is shameful not to keep them; there is merely a naive view of the nature of good. (Both a limitation of the things that are good and a partial failure to separate the idea of good from the idea of those things.)

I'm not sure how clear you find that. The reference to 'pre-moral views' is, I think, a reference to Arthur Waley's The Way and Its Power, whose opening pages articulate a distinction between 'auguristic-sacrificial' modes of thinking and moral modes. (Think about how Bond always goes to get cool gadgets from Q at the start of the film. It's sort of like that: the Duke of Chou with his discs of jade out on the hill, talking to the ghosts. If you know what I mean.) Waley's terms are not really satisfactory, for exactly the reason Empson points out. From the fact that Bond depends on spiffy gadgets it doesn't follow that he isn't essentially a moral character. Anyway, what Empson is saying is that we know that the action hero is good - because that's what the genre demands. And so whatever the hero does (within certain lmiits, yes, yes) is good, even if it isn't really good in the actual world. This explains a lot of stuff that action heros get away with. They can do stuff that is really ethically bad and not get the blame because somehow the fact of their glorious success and controlling nature by delight and all that fundamentally warps the ethical fabric of their world. And it doesn't just work for Bond and Conan and Dirty Harry and the X-Men. One of the interesting things about genre is the way in which you can take this ability to warp ethical norms and ... play little tricks with it. The simplest is parody, obviously. There are lots of subtler tricks. Anyway, I think there are lots of morally deviant worlds out there in fiction, generated through subtle tricks played on genre conventions. I can't really even scratch the surface tonight.

Comments

[Brian Weatherson]

Excellent! Just a couple of quick comments.

First, I note with some pleasure that you slipped in a reference to George not minding being the receipient of a pie in the face in the cleaned up version of the story. I think it's harder to have the fairy just make it right, without changing any of the underlying facts.

On the more serious point, I think some of the later cases are the kinds of cases that motivated my hesitation in the paper about saying whether there are any rules about fiction that can't be broken. I agree that cases you mention, where it is important to the story and a genre convention that certain things are right, are plausible cases where what I say can't be true in fiction is true in fiction. I don't have many impressive moves to make at this point. In fact, I have only one move: to say repeatedly "It isn't really right in the story, it's only that in the story X believes it is right", where X varies between the main character, and the bulk of characters, and the narrator, and anyone else I might in desperation latch onto. Some days I think this move works, other days I think it's a little pathetic, and shows I don't really understand fiction that well. Some days I think both those things.

Having said all that, I'm much less clear that I can really *imagine* that Bond does the right thing in these cases. What I can do is make my imaginings morally neutral, so I more or less consciously don't raise the question of what's right and wrong here. But if I have to put moral properties into the imagined world, then I find I always put my actual moral judgments in. Maybe this just shows I'm unimaginative.

[T. Gracchus]

Isidore Ducasse's Maldoror is a piece of fiction in which moral values seem to be successfully reversed. One might also consider the novels of D.A.F. de Sade.

[bob mcmanus]

I was immediately reminded of a 60-70's sf writer name R.A. Lafferty, who appeared to be mostly surrealistic or absurdist, but I think was actually dealing with moral questions by posing them in absurd circumstances. I remember a pastiche or parody of Mann's Dr. Faustus, where the composer was either predicting catastrophes in his grandiose symphonies, or perhaps even causing the catastrophes.

[jholbo]

I see what you mean about George, Brian. But I don't think it makes a bit of difference. You could change it to "George sighed that he hated banana cream, while fondling his banana cream-spotted formerly best tie morosely. It had been unquestionably the morally right thing for the young man to do, however - even those present who didn't believe in right and wrong had to agree about that much." It's nonsense, of course. But just the usual sort of Lewis Carroll incomprehensibility. So I don't really have any problem whatsoever with saying it was true in the story (whatever that turns out to mean). In general, once you've got a literary plan - so that your morally deviant offerings can go toe-to-toe with a clever thing like Tower of Goldbach - there just isn't a problem.

As to the action hero/Bond case: I agree there are limits. But it seems to me that it is easy to get powerfully drawn into the morally deviant world of primitive heroic epic (shall we say). I think one of genre fiction's main sources of appeal is the chance of sinking into a morality simpler than our own. But this story I'm telling is itself way too simple, I admit.

Regarding other comments: I don't know the works in question, but I might agree. I think once one admits that morally deviant fiction is not some special sort of obstacle, it becomes easier to admit that often one does not like such fiction because one feels in the presence of a morally disagreeable person, i.e. an author condescending to tell you a nasty parable, to pick the commonest case. This is a source of resistance, but personal not imaginative - unless you want to say that all aesthetic distaste is imaginative resistance, which doesn't seem right. In one of my previous posts I quote an entire Saki story set in a world in which it is right and proper for women to be deprived of the vote. I really don't have a problem understanding the story. It's just not very successful, as Saki stories go, because the author seems to be leering at us tediously and disagreeably.

Another simple consideration: all the little stories utilitiarians tell - thought-experiments and imaginings and so forth - are morally deviant from the point of view of Kantianism. And vice versa. But Kantians and utilitarians understand each other well enough. They aren't imaginatively resistance to each other thought-experiments. They understand exactly what these little, mostly undistinguished literary offerings say and claim. Again, there's more to it than this. But I think a utilitarian does not usually have much trouble entering into the thought-processes of Kantianism, in a hypothetical, imaginative sort of way.

[bob mcmanus]

Lafferty is difficult, obscure, nearly out-of-print and forgotten. He was a devout conservative Roman Catholic from Oklahoma who dispaired of modernity. In his work, I think, he was attempting to describe moral situations, circunstances where ethical decisions *must* be made, and yet all the tools of Reason and utilitarianism and modernism are useless or impossible. These situations, nearly by necessity, looked surrealistic or fantastical.

Think Barthelme as Chesterton, or maybe if Kafka were a committed Catholic. Never mind, really. The man was as idiosyncratic as they come, and possibly irrelevant to our current age.

And probably not pertinent to your post. The situations weren't morally absurd, and so discomfiting. Can you turn off a sentient computer? Kill a talking ape? Much more complex than that, but along those lines.

[Carlos]

Lafferty is not forgotten. Wherever there are two or three Lafferty-philes, there he is, since one will probably have a battered copy of _Nine Hundred Grandmothers_ on his or her person.

He was all that you said -- plus he hated the guitar (and those damn hippies) -- but oh, so much more too. And he couldn't stand Teilhard de Chardin either.

One of only two authors that I know of to explore the concept, "What if the Holy Spirit came in spray form?"

C.

[bob mcmanus]

Mr Holbo, Having received encouragement, May I give short thought experiment in the style of Lafferty? It is not quite what you are discussing, but it is perhaps in the spirit.
Rule: Save for what I write, the world remains normal.
1) You read this post, write your reply, hit post...and a major earthquake hits a US city, killing thousands.
2) You watch the horror on TV, return to your PC t write your impressions, and it happens again, in a different city.
3) We now have a major national tragedy, so it is 24 hours later, write, post, thousands die.
4) You say what the heck. this is impossible, but I will wait a week. And so you do, and return to your PC...earthquake.
5) This is crazy, no rational, heck no religious or supernatural explanation. But I will quit blogging. But it eats at you, you think idee fixe, paranoid delusions, it is imply not possible, what kind of world is it, what kind of person am I that this should be possible.
6) So after 5 years, you overcome mindless superstition and go back to your computer. And thousands die.

Mr Holbo, would you please give me the Kantian or utilitarian frame for this? Without rationality, can I be moral? This is the flavor of Lafferty

[Dan S]

I think the Dirty Harry example works better than the Bond, at least for me. There is that whole genre of films where tough cops try to do their jobs despite all of the know-nothings bothering them about civil rights.

You aren't supposed to take it in a Taxi Driver way, you are simply supposed to admire and sympathize with them. And I don't think that it is exactly about having a simpler morality, as much as a more satisfying one. There is a certain kind of satisfaction in over-the-top masculine virtue. It is part of enjoying the action and the violence.

[bob mcmanus]

Trying to follow tis stuff a little
1) Lafferty may indeed have been writing "...nasty little parables"
2)the Saki example: it is not uncommon for genre fiction to describe a world of somewhat different rules than our own, in order to force us to re-examine our own assumptions;Swift; and maybe the Bond and Dirty Harry movies apply here; or even allow us to vicariously violate our norms.
3) It is quite common in genre fiction to insert someone from "our" world into a world of different rules, in order to make us identify with the dissonance; e.g "North by Northwest"
4) but i think most often the fiction writer leaves us the ability to "map" our own world onto the fictional one, and identify the crrespondences and disagreements

[Lawrence L White]

Stephen Booth, of the English department at Berkeley, gave a talk in the middle-80’s about how the reader of The Great Gatsby enters a world of “moral midgets” & becomes for the duration of the experience a “moral midget” him- or herself. (Booth attributed the avidity for the book to readers who wish they were writers. He noted how selective these readers are in their choice of objects: “Everyone wants to be Fitzgerald. No one wants to be William Makepeace Thackeray.”)

It always struck me that the world of Seinfeld had fundamental moral differences from our own. At least all the inhabitants seemed to resemble not so much humans as bugs.

[Carlos]

It always struck me that the world of Seinfeld had fundamental moral differences from our own. At least all the inhabitants seemed to resemble not so much humans as bugs.

And when the characters were put into a different moral universe in the last episode (one with morals closer to, but still deviant from our own), many but not all viewers felt 'imaginative resistance' to the idea. Though they phrased it as 'jumping the shark'. Hm.

[jholbo]

Hi, Lawrence, welcome to the discussion. As it so happens, I took a Shakespeare class with Booth at Berkeley - the only English class I took in my time there. (Should have taken more.) I really, really enjoyed it. The man taught me a lot. I think he would be astonished to hear me say so. He thought the stuff I wrote for him was absurd and worthless. And I occasionally needled him when he made what I deemed transparently absurd philosophical generalizations - shameless false advertising on behalf of his quirky and very private tastes. But he really, really made me see Shakespeare's poetry in bright, new, interesting ways. He's a great critic, I think.

I'm meaning to post more on this genre and imagination stuff. But I haven't got the time today. Continue chatting among yourselves.

[bob mcmanus]

"Gatsby enters a world of “moral midgets” & becomes for the duration of the experience a “moral midget” him- or herself"

I thought we came out of Gatsby feeling morally superior to all the characters. Even, or especially, the narrator himself. Maybe that judgementalism is one of a "moral midget" But like "This Side of Innocence" it is a pretty dark book.

And again, whatever the book means, the method is one where Fitzgerald's intended 20's audience viewed an alien world and compared themselves to it. Gangsters, flappers, the decadent rich.

[Lawrence]

"I thought we came out of Gatsby feeling morally superior to all the characters. Even, or especially, the narrator himself."

This sounds right to me. Booth was Stanley Fish's teacher and as such a founder of reader-response criticism (though he insisted Fish got it all wrong). One of the weaker aspects of RR theory, esp. in its Is There A Text In This Classroom heyday, was this notion of "consensus," that somehow all these different readers had the same idea of the book.

But even if we feel superior, isn't there also some remnant sense of glamor, even for us post-millennial readers? Who doesn't like a wild party? Rich neighbors who invite you over?

[bob mcmanus]

Enjoy superiority to the sinner while indulging in a vicarious pleasure of the sin? Nah. Never happens. :)

[Alexander Crawford]

I think you're making this more complex than necessary. It isn't clear that moral definitions or valuation should be given as 'standard' without support. Even were I able to provide an objective standard of 'correct' action, how could I have any basis whatsoever to extend that standard as necessary in ALL cases forever?? How do I know what's going to occur in 100,000 years? Will moral x or y be 'bad' in a thousand years? It's logically indeterminable.

In your example about GOD changing math rules... come on! This is silly. Most definitions of "god" depict it as omnipotent... all powerful. What point is there to using God as an example?

As either Tweedle Dee (or Tweedle Dum, I get them mixed up) said to Alice, "He who defines, Rules.".

[novalis]

Hm, what about _The Knight_, by Gene Wolfe? When I read it, one major thing that puzzled me was that Abel does some reasonably thuggish things, but doesn't seem to notice that he was acting thuggishly.

In the Long Sun (and Short Sun) books, Gene Wolfe took up the project of Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov: to write an interesting story about a genuinely good man (Patera Silk). The contrast with The Knight is simply astonishing. This series of articles has caused me to look at The Knight in an entirely different light -- what if this time, Wolfe has an opposite project: to present a genuinely amoral character? Abel has a sense of honor, but this is not the same as morality at all. I should re-read, looking for that.

Of course, nobody can know where Wolfe is headed in The Wizard, the conclusion to The Knight.