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Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures Eric Schwitzgebel Schwitzgebel July 24, 2018 Splintered Mind, 1 Dear Reader, What follows are a few dozen blog posts and popular articles, on philosophy, psychology, culture, and technology, updated and revised, selected from eleven hundred I published between 2006 and 2018. Skip the ones you hate. Eric Schwitzgebel July 24, 2018 Splintered Mind, 2 Part One: Moral Psychology 1. A Theory of Jerks 2. Forgetting as an Unwitting Confession of Your Values 3. The Happy Coincidence Defense and The-Most-I-Can-Do Sweet Spot 4. Cheeseburger Ethics (or How Often Do Ethicists Call Their Mothers?) 5. On Not Seeking Pleasure Much 6. How Much Should You Care about How You Feel in Your Dreams? 7. Imagining Yourself in Another’s Shoes vs. Extending Your Love 8. Aiming for Moral Mediocrity 9. A Theory of Hypocrisy 10. On Not Distinguishing Too Finely Among Your Motivations 11. The Mush of Normativity 12. A Moral Dunning-Kruger Effect? 13. The Moral Compass and the Liberal Ideal in Moral Education Part Two: Technology 14. Should Your Driverless Car Kill You So Others May Live? 15. Cute AI and the ASIMO Problem 16. My Daughter’s Rented Eyes 17. Someday, Your Employer Will Technologically Control Your Moods 18. Cheerfully Suicidal AI Slaves 19. We Have Greater Moral Obligations to Robots Than to (Otherwise Similar) Humans 20. Our Moral Duties to Monsters 21. Our Possible Imminent Divinity 22. Skepticism, Godzilla, and the Artificial Computerized Many-Branching You 23. How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot Part Three: Culture 24. Dreidel: A Seemingly Foolish Game That Contains the Moral World in Miniature 25. Does It Matter If the Passover Story Is Literally True? 26. Memories of My Father 27. Flying Free of the Deathbed, with Technological Help 28. Thoughts on Conjugal Love 29. Knowing What You Love 30. The Epistemic Status of Deathbed Regrets Schwitzgebel July 24, 2018 Splintered Mind, 3 31. Competing Perspectives on One’s Final, Dying Thought 32. Profanity Inflation, Profanity Migration, and the Paradox of Prohibition (or I Love You, “Fuck”) 33. The Legend of the Leaning Behaviorist 34. What Happens to Democracy When the Experts Can’t Be Both Factual and Balanced? 35. On the Morality of Hypotenuse Walking 36. Birthday Cake and a Chapel Part Four: Consciousness and Cosmology 37. Possible Psychology of a Matrioshka Brain 38. A Two-Seater Homunculus 39. Is the United States Literally Conscious? 40. Might You Be a Cosmic Freak? 41. Penelope’s Guide to Defeating Time, Space, and Causation 42. Choosing to Be That Fellow Back Then: Voluntarism about Personal Identity 43. How Everything You Do Might Have Huge Cosmic Significance 44. Goldfish-Pool Immortality 45. How Big the Moon Is, According to One Three-Year-Old 46. Tononi’s Exclusion Postulate Would Make Consciousness (Nearly) Irrelevant 47. What’s in People’s Stream of Experience During Philosophy Talks? 48. The Paranoid Jeweler and the Sphere-Eye God 49. The Tyrant’s Headache Part Five: The Psychology and Sociology of Philosophy 50. Truth, Dare, and Wonder 51. Trusting Your Sense of Fun 52. Why Metaphysics Is Always Bizarre 53. The Philosopher of Hair 54. Kant on Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants 55. Obfuscatory Philosophy as Intellectual Authoritarianism and Cowardice 56. Nazi Philosophers, World War I, and the Grand Wisdom Hypothesis 57. Against Charity in the History of Philosophy 58. Invisible Revisions 59. On Being Good at Seeming Smart Schwitzgebel July 24, 2018 Splintered Mind, 4 60. Blogging and Philosophical Cognition, or Why Blogging Is the Ideal Form of Philosophy!!! 61. Will Future Generations Find Us Morally Loathsome? Schwitzgebel July 24, 2018 Splintered Mind, 5 Part One: Moral Psychology Schwitzgebel July 24, 2018 Splintered Mind, 6 1. A Theory of Jerks Picture the world through the eyes of the jerk. The line of people in the post office is a mass of unimportant fools; it’s a felt injustice that you must wait while they bumble with their requests. The flight attendant is not a potentially interesting person with her own cares and struggles but instead the most available face of a corporation that stupidly insists you stow your laptop. Custodians and secretaries are lazy complainers who rightly get the scut work. The person who disagrees with you at the staff meeting is an idiot to be shot down. Entering a subway is an exercise in nudging past the dumb schmoes. We need a theory of jerks. We need such a theory because, first, it can help us achieve a calm, clinical understanding when confronting such a creature in the wild. Imagine the nature-documentary voice-over: “Here we see the jerk in his natural environment. Notice how he subtly adjusts his dominance display to the Italian-restaurant situation….” And second – well, I don’t want to say what the second reason is quite yet. As it happens, I do have such a theory. But before we get into it, I should clarify some terminology. The word “jerk” can refer to two different types of person. (I set aside sexual and physical uses of the term.) The older use of “jerk” designates a chump or ignorant fool, though not a morally odious one. When Weird Al Yankovic sang, in 2006, “I sued Fruit of the Loom ’cause when I wear their tightie-whities on my head I look like a jerk” or when, in 1959, Willard Temple wrote in the Los Angeles Times “He could have married the campus queen…. Instead the poor jerk fell for a snub-nosed, skinny little broad”, it’s clear it’s the chump they have in mind.1 The jerk-as-fool usage seems to have begun among traveling performers as a derisive reference to the unsophisticated people of a “jerkwater town”: that is, a town not rating a full- scale train station, requiring the boilerman to pull on a chain to water his engine. The term expresses the traveling troupe’s disdain.2 Over time, however, “jerk” shifted from being Schwitzgebel July 24, 2018 Splintered Mind, 7 primarily a class-based insult to its second, now dominant, sense as a moral condemnation. Such linguistic drift from class-based contempt to moral deprecation is a common pattern across languages, as observed by Friedrich Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality.3 (In English, consider “rude”, “villain”, and “ignoble”.) It is the immoral jerk who concerns me here. Why, you might be wondering, should a philosopher make it his business to analyze colloquial terms of abuse? Doesn’t the Urban Dictionary cover that kind of thing quite adequately? Shouldn’t I confine myself to truth, or beauty, or knowledge, or why there is something rather than nothing (to which the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser famously retorted “If there was nothing you’d still be complaining”4)? I am, in fact, interested in all those topics. And yet I see a folk wisdom in the term “jerk” that points toward something morally important. I want to extract that morally important thing, isolating the core phenomenon implicit in our usage. Precedents for this type of philosophical work include Harry Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit and, closer to my target, Aaron James’s book Assholes.5 Our taste in vulgarity reveals our values. I submit that the unifying core, the essence of jerkitude in the moral sense, is this: The jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or fools to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers. This failure has both an intellectual dimension and an emotional dimension, and it has these two dimensions on both sides of the relationship. The jerk himself is both intellectually and emotionally defective, and what he defectively fails to appreciate is both the intellectual and emotional perspectives of the people around him. He can’t appreciate how he might be wrong and others right about some matter of fact; and what other people want or value doesn’t register as of interest to him, except derivatively upon his own interests. The Schwitzgebel July 24, 2018 Splintered Mind, 8 bumpkin ignorance captured in the earlier use of “jerk” has become a type of moral ignorance. Some related traits are already well-known in psychology and philosophy – the “dark triad” of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy; low “Agreeableness” on the Big Five personality test; and James’s conception of the asshole, already mentioned. But my conception of the jerk differs from all of these. The asshole, James says, is someone who allows himself to enjoy special advantages out an entrenched sense of entitlement.6 That is one important dimension of jerkitude, but not the whole story. The callous psychopath, though cousin to the jerk, has an impulsivity and love of risk-taking that needn’t belong to the jerk’s character.7 Neither does the jerk have to be as thoroughly self-involved as the narcissist or as self-consciously cynical as the Machiavellian, though narcissism and Machiavellianism are common jerkish attributes.8 People low in Big-5 Agreeableness tend to be unhelpful, mistrusting, and difficult to get along with – again, features related to jerkitude, and perhaps even partly constitutive of it, but not exactly jerkitude as I’ve defined it. Also, my definition of jerkitude has a conceptual unity that is, I think, theoretically appealing in the abstract and fruitful in helping to explain some of the peculiar features of this type of animal, as we will see. The opposite of the jerk is the sweetheart. The sweetheart sees others around him, even strangers, as individually distinctive people with valuable perspectives, whose desires and opinions, interests and goals, are worthy of attention and respect.
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