Teachers, fascism and forgiveness- miscellaneous reflections

The ethical work pay gap:

Generally speaking, the higher negative externalities your job imposes on others, the higher your pay. Very destructive jobs, like marketing, many kinds of law, etc. pay phenomenally well. Jobs that are constructive in any ordinary way (plumbing, shop assistant, mining, tech support, etc.) tend to fall in the middle. Jobs that explicitly support the poorest and most vulnerable in a way that they often can’t pay for fully (e.g. social work, nursing, teaching, childcare) pay the least, especially relative to the required level of education. Of course, there are exceptions- the most notable of which would be medicine.

The explanation for this- or at least part of the explanation, is simple enough. In general, people want to do work that helps others and don’t want to do work that harms others. Thus to get them to do work that harms others you have to pay them more. Incidentally, this may be part of the explanation for the gender pay gap- women are even more strongly drawn towards doing socially useful work than men.

But this moral pay gap imposes what we might term a moral externality on society. By making the least moral people the highest wage earners, therefore making them high status and influential, the moral pay-gap tends to push society towards kakocracy, a Greek word meaning rule by the evilest. This is, admittedly, put a little overdramatically, but it certainly trends in that direction.

I don’t want to turn this essay into a series of digs at lawyers. I have a lot of sympathy for many types of lawyers including some of the most vilified types: criminal defense lawyers, plaintiff-side torts lawyers, and so on. However law does attract a lot of people who are highly motivated by money, and 40% of congress have law degrees.

Appropriately taxing externalities (including negative taxation on positive externalities) would help deal with this, both by decreasing the number of spots available for evil work, and by reducing the amount of money available to remunerate it.

I think perhaps David Graeber mentioned this somewhere- we see a phenomenon we might term moral envy. This is where workers actually resent those that work in jobs that are especially socially constructive- seeing them as not working a real job. I’ve seen people with corporate jobs, for example, make fun of teachers, psychologists etc. e.g. for just ‘talking to people all day’. The most obvious response would be ‘buddy, you email people for a living’. But I think their broader point is that the work in these jobs isn’t inherently, at its face miserable, thus it isn’t perceived as real work. But when you think about it, this is quite odd. The test of real work shouldn’t be difficulty, it should be productivity. Interestingly, difficulty has a zero point, but productivity can actually go negative. In the most morally relevant sense, your typical corporate lawyer has a negative work ethic.

Reflections on the word fascism

All the time we see debates over whether or not this or that thing is fascism. Is Trump a fascist? Is Meloni a fascist? is Putin a fascist? Is any far-right government fascist, or does it need to come from the fascis region of Italy, or else be mere sparkling authoritarianism?

Partly this is a debate about the custodianship of history and language. The word fascist is, ironically, one of the weapons we have against fascism. Thus a debate about how to use the word fascism is, in part, a debate about how to use that word not to much or not too little, but rather just enough. It is thus a normative debate about how we should use language rather than a descriptive debate about how we do, in fact, use language. It evokes debates like the holocaust uniqueness debate, cultural ownership etc.

What I’m going to be doing though is descriptive- I’m going to try and come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for what an ordinary, decent person would call fascist after a bit of reading. This is futile because words don’t have necessary and sufficient conditions, but nonetheless, I’m going to try. I do think that the most important aspect of this question is the question of moral custodianship of the term, so I hope my investigations will prove useful to those investigating this more important question.

My own hazarded definition is that a fascist state is a state:

1. Controlled by rightwing authoritarian nationalists

2. That has engaged in the intentional mass killing of a section of its own residents, who the state identifies as internal enemies. (EDIT: After a discussion with Metaphysiocrat in the comments, I’m inclined to add “OR mass imprisonment and/or torture.)

And a fascist government is the government of a fascist state.

This isn’t a theoretical approach to fascism, of the type one might see in Marxism, for example, where fascism is often theorized as an authoritarian response to capitalism in crisis. It’s just an attempt to capture, roughly speaking, the conditions under which we typically use the word “fascist”.

But if I’m right about the conditions under which we use the word fascism, there’s an interesting implication. To ask of a rightwinger before he gets into office “is he a fascist” is somewhat meaningless. Fascism is not just an ideological motivation- it requires a political opportunity. A lot of rightwing governments wouldn’t say no to murdering their opponents if they thought they could- could anyone doubt that Bolsonaro, or at the very least many of those who surround him, fall into this category? What divides Bolsonaro from Mussolini is opportunity much more than ideology.

I bring this up because I’ve seen interminable debates about whether or not Trump is ‘really’ a fascist. It’s pointless. Trump’s ideology (or lack thereof) is certainly compatible with right-wing nationalist mass killings of perceived internal enemies- the real question is, if he gets in, will he have the opportunity to kill these ‘internal enemies”?

Indeed I would say that 90% of the time, what separates authoritarian right-wingers from fascism is opportunity. That’s the critical question one must ask if one is assessing whether a right-winger is, or will be, a fascist in the colloquial sense.

The definition I have outlined has some advantages from a normative perspective. It allows us to be aware of the special dangers of fascism as a social process, while recognizing that fascism is not, at the level of the individual politician, a special or particularly rare aberration of ideas. Opportunity is the primary bottleneck factor on the number of cases of fascism.

Total forgiveness

Joshua Miller, a philosopher on Twitter, wrote:

The closer you get to acknowledging the true evil of an act, the harder it is to forgive the perpetrator. Derrida and Arendt made hay out of this, but I doubt this hardest form of forgiveness really happens much. Instead we excuse: you didn’t mean it, it wasn’t you, etc,

I say this as someone who has witnessed truly amazing acts of forgiveness. But even in those moments it was: you’ve done the time, you were a different person then, you didn’t realize what you were doing, etc. I find this tremendously disheartening and wish it were otherwise.

To which I replied:

I think there's a point here, but the intelligent plea for the forgiveness-as-exculpation position is that very few acts of evil, in reality, don't have an exculpatory backstory. Even serial killers have heightened rates of childhood traumatic brain injuries and abuse etc.

To which Miller replied:

I'm less confident that explanation is always exoneration, especially in those cases. Moreover, it doesn't work for ordinary folks' participation in systemic evils--the explanation there is mostly conformity and indifference.

And to that I replied:

Here another strategy might work. Though the acts seem monstrous, a solid majority of us would participate in them under exactly the same conformity/indifference pressures. An act of total forgiveness is thus still required- but at the level of all humanity, not the individuals.

Let me expand on this a bit, in terms of the concept of the original act of forgiveness.

I’ve previously argued for what I call the conservation of moral status under misfortune

An individual’s expected moral status should be the same regardless of whatever misfortunes they face.

Here’s a rough example. If traumatic brain injuries make someone twice as likely to be a killer, then being a killer should judged half as harshly among people with traumatic brain injuries. Why? The intuition is that your expected moral status should not be decreased by misfortunes that you suffer for which you are not liable. I view this as a promising way to argue for exculpation that doesn’t rely taking a position on hard determinism and debates over free will and compatibilism.

But suppose that we take away all potential misfortunes, and we find that, at the bottom, there are still situations in which most people would do horrible things. I am particularly thinking of Miller’s example of people doing horrendous things in conformity with the authorities. Here, I think we are faced with the Derridean/Adrentian choice- to forgive, absolutely, on no basis whatsoever, wholly unmerited, or not to forgive. Except unlike the original Derridean/Adrentian choice, it is made not at the level of the individual, but at the level of the species. Given that you, and most of the people you know, would probably commit horrible crimes under the right circumstances of conformity pressure and enculturation, do you choose to forgive humanity as a whole- to extend them that unmerited, absolute, unrequired grace or not?

Do you engage in that black-hole event horizon act of forgiveness? Forgiveness that contains no exculpation, but only the sheer act of will to forgive? Or to put it a little differently, once all the reasons have been exhausted on both sides and you face a species that would all act monstrously if the circumstances were right, do you choose humanity or not? This is the question of original forgiveness, and when it’s framed this way- at the level of the whole species-, I think forgiving is both aesthetically and ethically irresistible. At the individual level, it might look strange, or arbitrary to forgive without exculpating, but once we realize that the potential for evil in the right circumstances is within the whole species, who would deny forgiveness but the misanthrope?

Given these twin strategies, each plausible- (1) granting (partial) exculpation where the wrong is the result of misfortune, in such a proportion as to keep moral status in expectation constant under misfortune and (2) forgiving all the sins that most people would do under the circumstances on the basis of an original act of forgiveness for humanity, I’d suggest we should be far more forgiving than we are now.