Louis CK and Philosophy You Don't Get T
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6 Volume 99 in the series, Popular Culture and Philosophy®, edited by George A. Reisch To find out more about Open Court books, call toll-free 1-800-815-2280, or visit our website at www.opencourtbooks.com. Open Court Publishing Company is a division of Carus Publishing Company, dba Cricket Media. Copyright © 2016 by Carus Publishing Company, dba Cricket Media First printing 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Open Court Publishing Company, 70 East Lake Street, Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois 60601. ISBN: 978-0-8126-9906-7 This book is also available as an e-book. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015959265 7 17 Louis’s Little Believies RYAN JAWETZ Louis C.K. is a failure. This is a strange thing to say about the most successful comedian in America, but it’s true—at least if you take his word for it. In his stand- up specials and TV shows, Louis portrays a character who spends every day being defeated by the vagaries of modern life. His relationships are disastrous; his parenting is suspect; his career is floundering. Worst of all, this version of Louis is a hypocrite. He knows what he should do, and does the opposite anyway. The genius of Louis is that he makes us complicit in his hypocrisy, because he presents us with a person whose moral flaws mirror our own. Every moment of painful recognition bring us closer to realizing that we too have a vast gulf between our beliefs and our actions. Through his art, Louis forces us to confront our own moral failures. We all want to be good people. At the same time, we make decisions that we know to be wrong. Like Louie, we are guilty of treating our deeply held values as nothing more than what he calls “little believies,” to be discarded as soon as they are no longer convenient. Why do we ignore our beliefs about right and wrong? How can we make choices every day that we know to be unethical? What is going through our heads when we decide to be immoral? What Is Moral Failure? In the series premiere of Louie, Louie does a stand-up comedy segment with an excellent example of moral failure: There are people who are starving in the world, and I drive an Infiniti. That’s really evil. There are people who 170 just starve to death. That’s all they ever did. It’s totally my fault, ’cause I could trade my Infiniti for like a really good car, like a nice Ford Focus with no miles on it, and I’d get back like $20,000. And I could save hundreds of people from dying of starvation with that money, and every day I don’t do it. Every day I make them die with my car. (Louie, Season One, Episode 1) Louie’s bit gives us a blueprint for moral failure. First, there must be a particular action that has moral worth. In other words, the activity that Louie describes can be evaluated as good or evil. In this case, the activity is an inaction—Louie’s refusal to trade in his car for a cheaper model. Taken in a vacuum, this inaction might not seem to have moral value. Think about the last time you bought a car. When you considered the cost of various models, did you wonder whether purchasing a cheaper car made you a good person? Or were you simply concerned with getting the best possible deal for the car you wanted? Most of us would agree that our goal would be to get the best deal, and that paying $30,000 instead of $25,000 would have no bearing on whether we are good people. However, this activity does not take place in isolation. By spending more money on a car, we pay what economists call an opportunity cost: the inability to spend that money on something else. As Louie points out, he could have paid less money for a car and used that money to prevent people from starving. Let us agree that, all things being equal, preventing starvation is morally good. Since the goal of preventing starvation has moral value, it stands to reason that actions that advance or hinder this goal can be moral or immoral as well. Since owning a more expensive car hinders Louie’s ability to prevent starvation, his refusal to trade in his car is a morally significant action. Another quality of moral failure is that the person who is acting in a morally significant way—the moral agent—is aware that their actions are immoral. Louie begins the bit by claiming that driving a nice car in a world where people are starving is “evil.” We could say that Louie knows that his behavior is immoral. But now we have a problem: philosophers disagree whether knowledge about morality is even possible. Some philosophers think that it is impossible to know anything about good and evil, and that when we say something like, “Murder is evil,” all we are really expressing is our personal feeling that we don’t like murder. Fortunately, we don’t need to settle this centuries-old argument at this very moment. For our purposes of learning about moral failure the important part is not whether the moral agent knows that their action is moral or immoral, but whether they believe that it is. For example, if you believe that consuming alcohol is morally wrong but you have a drink anyways, we can say that you have suffered a moral failure regardless of whether we agree with you that drinking alcohol is immoral. Your hypocrisy is the key ingredient, not whether your belief corresponds to any objective moral truth. Even if nobody else thinks your action had moral worth, your belief that it is 171 morally significant is self-fulfilling: if you believe that drinking is wrong, any action you take based on that belief is morally significant. Because of your own beliefs about drinking, we can consider your abstaining from alcohol to be a moral success, and any instances of your drinking alcohol to be a moral failure. Whether we agree with your moral principles is irrelevant, what matters is your ability to stick to them. Now we face the difficulty that some people have beliefs about right and wrong that seem to the rest of us to be terribly mistaken. You might believe that it is morally correct to assassinate a politician who disagrees with your views, but you lack the courage to carry out the assassination. Do we really want to call your inaction a moral failure, given that this failure results in someone not being murdered? And we would be forced to say that if you did act on your beliefs by killing the politician, then it would be a moral success. However, we can treat the morality of the action as separate from our capacity to act on our beliefs about the action. It’s possible to condemn moral agents both for the wrongness of their beliefs (if we think that being right or wrong about morality is possible) and also for their hypocrisy in failing to live up to those beliefs. To return to the example of the alcohol-drinking goody-goody, we can both rebuke that person for their prudish insistence on temperance and blame them for being a hypocrite when they drink, even if we believe that their decision to drink should not have moral worth. Making this distinction protects the moral belief criterion from logical absurdity. There is a final component to moral failure, which is that the hypocritical action (or inaction) must be freely chosen. Louie has the option of continuing to drive his expensive car or trading it in for a cheaper model, and he chooses to ignore his better judgment and keep driving the Infiniti. Since nothing agitates philosophers more than talking about free will, we need to keep our definitions narrow. When we say that you act freely, we just mean that you are not under any sort of duress, and you have the ability to act either with or against your beliefs. There is nobody holding a gun to Louie’s head telling him that he is not allowed to trade in his car, and he does not live someplace where only expensive cars are available. Unlike Laurie forcing Louie to go down on her in her truck (Louie, Season Three, Episode 2), no one will smash Louie’s head into a window or threaten to break his finger if he decides to get a less expensive car and donates the profit to charity. Louie believes that owning an expensive car is morally wrong, but he chooses to do so anyways, even though he could easily do the right thing. You may recognize this dilemma from your own life, since most of us have at some point spent money on a luxury item rather than giving the money to charity. You might have felt some guilt about your choice. Louis will not let you brush that feeling 172 away. After all, if Louie driving an Infiniti is “evil,” what does that say about you? Why Does Louie Experience Moral Failure? We now have the three components of a moral failure: an action or inaction that violates the moral beliefs of the agent and is freely chosen.