This is the first in a series of posts about the book 10 Moral Paradoxes, by Saul Smilansky. I’ll wait a couple of weeks before continuing the series so anyone who wants to can get hold of the book. Here’s a nice review from Jeff McMahan of Rutgers–
This is a delightful and engaging little book. With its bite-size chapters, lively exposition, and important subject matter, this is the kind of book that can spark an interest in philosophy among those unfamiliar with it. But its appeal is not limited to neophytes; it poses significant new challenges to moral theory that even hardened professional philosophers will find stimulating and provocative.
The book is available here (US), here (UK), and here (CA)
Smilanksy explains in the introduction that a paradox is not just any very odd fact or assertion. A very strict definition has it that a paradox is a contradiction supported by a seemingly sound argument. Smilanksy goes for something in between: a paradox is “an apparently unacceptable conclusion derived by apparently acceptable reasoning from apparently acceptable premises.”
It’s all those “apparently”s that make paradoxes stimulating and fun. Faced with a paradox, the mind says “that can’t be right” and starts trying to fix things. There must be a sleight of hand somewhere.
The first paradox of the book is the paradox of fortunate misfortune. Happily, this is not an arcane, made-up puzzle, but something we all probably ponder from time to time. Dave Eggers’ book What is the What? made me think of it. The book tells the real-life story of Valentino Achak Deng, who grew up in the middle of heartbreaking violence and neglect in Southern Sudan and then a refugee camp in Kenya. Yet because of that, he winds up in the US, a celebrated speaker and advocate for southern Sudan. Was his wretched childhood fortunate or unfortunate?
I’m not sure what Deng would say, but 7-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong says his bout with testicular cancer was the best thing that ever happened to him, better even than all those wins!. Primo Levi thinks of his deportation to Auschwitz as “all things considered” positive.
Smilanksy resolves the paradox of fortunate misfortune by accepting self-assessments like Armstrong’s and Levi’s. It would be paradoxical in the strict sense to think their ordeals were both fortunate and not fortunate. Smilansky says: just fortunate.
But that leaves things on a more peculiar note than seems necessary. There’s nothing particularly precise about the word “fortunate.” In one sense, a fortunate occurrence is one that is “worth it” for the later benefits. If Armstrong and Levi believe their ordeals were “worth it,” then maybe so. (Or could their judgment just be a result of “adaptive preference”—reframing what can’t be changed? Or maybe the result of fading memory?)
In another sense, a fortunate occurrence is one that is good at the time of its occurrence, and lucky. In other words, its welcome both for what it is at the time, and for its strong chance of leading to a desirable outcome. It was not fortunate, in that sense of the word, for the Sudanese boy to endure over ten years of violence and neglect, or for Armstrong to endure testicular cancer, or for Primo Levi to spend time in Auschwitz.
So—the three men were unfortunate in one clear sense, but fortunate in another. The air of paradox is thus dispelled. It seems as if Smilanksy would rather leave things on a more surprising note by stressing the fortunate aspect of fortunate misfortune. But why? Perhaps I’m missing something.
Next (in about 2 weeks)–the paradox of retirement. If you’re in the bottom half of your profession, should you do everyone a favor and retire?
Yeah, I remember when the book came out, that there was an interesting debate that came about over this “paradox,” and I never seemed to understand the hubbub over it. It seems to me that he’s equivocating the word fortunate here, or that we are applying the fortunate-ness to different things.
Either he’s equivocating… In one sense its unfortunate for someone to have testicular cancer, that is unlucky. But it is fortunate, that is good resulted, from his testicular cancer.
Or he’s simply talking about two different things. It’s unfortunate for him to get cancer… But it is fortunate that his treatment was successful.
Perhaps its a more minor point that he wants to illustrate, which is that later, it seems like we need moral evils in the world to be morally exceptional people. But I don’t find it terribly compelling either, since we can do good things without a corresponding evil to overcome. I can be polite or friendly to others, without overcoming rudeness or being a jerk.
But to be fair, I haven’t read the book either, so I might be mis-interpreting him.
Let me see if I can put my Smilanksy cap on…
He wants to maintain there’s a paradox, but not, of course a contradiction. The paradox is that these horrible things are fortunate. He thinks that’s very strange but true. It’s an apparently unacceptable (yet true) conclusion derived from apparently acceptable (yet true) premises.
Both of us have the feeling–but wait, there’s another sense in which these horrible things are not fortunate. There are simply different meanings of the word “fortunate”. Once you realize that, it’s not so “apparently unacceptable” any more that the horrible things are fortunate. So there’s no paradox.
Maybe what he would say is–no matter what you say about other senses in which the events are not fortunate, it is still “apparently unacceptable” to say the horrible events are fortunate….but they are, he claims. So…a paradox, by his liberal definition.
I THINK that’s what he’s getting at…but I hope other people will read the book so nobody has to rely on my interpretations. It’s fun.
But the same kind of arguments can be seen in the gun control debate. Guns are terrible things, they kill people. Gun’s aren’t terrible things, they protect people. So guns are both terrible and not terrible? A paradox for sure.
It just doesn’t strike me as an accurate portrayal of the situation. In one scenario, its good, in another its bad, even if its the same gun, its how its utilized. Heck I can even say shooting Hitler as a child is a bad thing, since we’re killing an innocent person, but a good thing because we’re preventing the deaths of millions of people. Different aspects of the same thing, are still different things.
Plato in the Republic says, that a person can be waving their hand and standing still. So the person is both moving and not moving. No paradox.
Heh, something about using Plato to show the non-existence of a modern day paradox tickles me.
Just possibly you’re assuming he sees “fortunate misfortune” as a case of “strict paradox”–where apparently acceptable premises support an apparently acceptable contradiction. He doesn’t. There’s no contradiction, says Smilansky. These horrible things are actually just fortunate, he says. They only appear to be unfortunate. What’s paradoxical (in his more liberal sense) is saying that they are fortunate, since that seems at odds with the truth or even absurd. I think that’s the idea.
Hmm… if thats the case, then its almost uninteresting.
But I don’t think thats what he’s saying… I know one of his other paradoxes is the idea that if we live in a perfectly moral society, nobody would be moral people, since they need to overcome moral evil to be good, and this paradox seems to be in the same vein. And fostering moral people is intrinsically good, so it seems that we would either have to settle for morally neutral people (minimially decent people with no morally good people), or put up with some evil, so there can be morally good people.
i.e. the reason Lance is a fortunate person, is because of the trial that he had to go through. If he had not gone through that trial, then maybe he wouldn’t have won the strength of character to win the tour de france so many times, otherwise we settle for a Lance that is in weaker in character, but a world in which we didn’t have to see testicular cancer.
Maybe a kind of Virtue Theory defense of evil in the vein of the ontological defense of evil… good needs evil to exist. We need trials to make good people. So the trials themselves should not be viewed as bad.
Well, yeah, there’s more to it. There’s stuff about how bad things sometimes play a role in making lives overall good.
But what I was responding to is that you seemed to be trying to show how easy it is to avoid a contradiction between saying Lance’s ordeal is fortunate and saying it’s not fortunate. It looked like you thought Smilansky was saying the paradox consists of this apparent contradiction.
But no, the paradox, after he sorts things out, consists of the fact that the ordeal is fortunate. That appears to be false, yet upon reflection, he concludes it’s true.
The question, then is how odd that really is. It’s a funny thing about this book that to make the case for his paradoxes, he has to simultaneously convince us that certain propositions are true and that they’re “apparently false.” It’s hard to do both at the same time.
The paradox you refer to is #6–”On Not Being Sorry about the Morally Bad.” I haven’t read it yet.
And here (Canada), which is important, since the Canadian dollar has recently lost a lot of its value against the American dollar. Besides, Jean, are you shilling for Blackwell’s-Wiley? The amazon.ca site advertises the paperback edition for $16.00 (Cdn), instead of the princely sum of $54.00 (US).
It’s available in paperback from all the amazons. I fixed the links.
I could be wrong, but the it seems the assumption is the fortunate is a direct result of the unfortunate. Kind of like a cause - effect that is presumed, that the unfortunate experiences of these people were the catalysts for their good fortune later. Can this really be assumed? I mean, we could probably show that these are anomalies, that most people that go through unfortunate events in their lives do NOT go on to doing things that are fortunate for them or others.
So, if we assume the opposite, then there is no paradox.
He talks about the example of Primo Levi, and takes him at his word–that his horrible experiences in Auschwitz were a “catalyst,” as you say. He might agree that most of the time terrible things don’t play this positive role. When they do, though, they’re “fortunate misfortunes.” Actually, not really misfortunes at all. Even if that’s so only rarely, it’s bizarre to call them fortunate. That’s “paradoxical” in Smilansky’s sense of the word.
Hmm… If he says that the ordeal itself is the fortunate thing, then I think he just doesn’t know what fortunate means.
I wouldn’t call that a paradox per se, just a weird way of using the word fortunate.
I agree with Wayne. Taking Levi at his word here scarcely makes the point. Looking back, anyone might see misfortune as a prod to greater achievement. However, it would be strange to say of Levi that he would not have done so well in his life, had he not been sent to Auschwitz. We just don’t know that, for a start. And his life would doubtless have looked very different. But how does that turn his real misfortune into fortune? I can’t see this as a paradox at all. All sorts of people overcome great odds and achieve great things.
One of my heroes as a boy was Douglas Bader, a man who lost both his legs in a foolish prank landing (against RAF regulations), learned to fly again, reenlisted in the RAF, and fought in the Battle of Britain. He bailed out over Germany, was made a POW, escaped, was recaptured and liberated at the end of the war. But losing his legs was still a damned bad thing to have happened to him.
That’s actually what Levi says–that his life, as a whole, has been better for the ordeal. I am also skeptical. There are lots of ways to explain that judgment. Memories of awful things tend to fade. Also, there’s the always interesting phenomenon of adaptive preference. We tend to embrace what we can’t change…whether it’s really positive or not.
How about this as a test? We ask Levi if he’d go to Auschwitz again, if he had a chance to live his life a second time? I suspect a lot of talk about how this or that horror was “fortunate” might not hold up under that question!
Yes, these horrors have long-term benefits, but it doesn’t follow they are fortunate, all things considered. (Then again, it’s kind of weird saying Primo Levi was just flat-out wrong about his own life.)
I am (you are, he/she is) what I am because of all the people and experiences I’ve had. If I’m satisfied with myself, I can look at what made such good stuff; not so satisfied I can search the past for blame; mixed bag is most likely, so we are grateful for what likely made our qualities while we would wish away whatever (6 w’s!!!!!!) lead to such faults.
Anecdote: I look back at a childhood of major neglect. Whew! Lucky me to have had the freedom to become my very admirable self. With attentive care, I could have been just like my (gasp) parents.
To achieve such athletic distinction after overcoming his cancer, Armstrong had to apply a discipline that he already possessed, but develop it with much more fervor. Incidentally, before his bicycling fame he did triathlons and we were at the same race. Whenever there is adversity of a magnitude anywhere near Armstrong’s or Levi’s, you either succumb or through heroic effort succeed beyond what a more placid life would have inspired. However, given the choice of waving your finger at death, I have no doubt normal people prefer safer havens. If I thought surviving a train crash with one arm and one leg would make me a better mathematician, I would give up counting altogether. Not even a second thought.
I don’t view this looking back and giving credit to misfortunes that shaped and maybe strengthened us as any kind of paradox.
mistake above: away doesn’t begin with w. A mere 5.
Smilansky has a tricky job–he needs to convince us that these horrible ordeals are sometimes fortunate, but also that this is a strange, “paradoxical” thing to say. The more you warm up to “fortunate” the more it’s hard to maintain a sense of strangeness. Maybe that’s the paradox of moral paradoxes.
I still don’t get it. First off, I don’t think it’s at all weird to say that Levi was just flat-out wrong about his life. Lots of people are. But even if Levi, despite his misfortune of having been sent to Auschwitz, and having suffered there in the way that he describes in his books, went on to achieve great things, the misfortune remains a misfortune. That he was able to use that as a ladder to climb up higher doesn’t change the fact that being sent to a death camp where most of the Jews (and Levi was an Italian Jew) who were sent there died, was a misfortune, plain and simple.
But there’s no paradox to saying that he turned that misfortune to good account. If he looked back later and said, “Hey! Wow! That wasn’t so bad after all!”, I don’t feel weird saying: “Hey, that’s just wrong, man! But I like what you’ve done with your life.”
I think there are really two possibilities. Sometimes awful things happen and they have later benefits, but nobody would call them fortunate. For example, the mother who left her child to die in a hot car (whom we discussed recently)…she went on to dedicate herself to that cause. Her life probably feels more meaningful now. Yet, she would surely not say that the tragedy made her life better as a whole. The tragedy wasn’t “worth it” for the later positives.
But then you’ve got cases like Primo Levi’s experience. He seems to think that his life is better as a whole than it possibly could have been, had he not been sent to Auschwitz. You might say his ordeal was fully redeemed by the way it shaped his life as a whole. He seems to think it was “worth it.”
Presumably there are some awful things that happen to people that really do get redeemed by the way they enhance their life as a whole. I think what stops me from agreeing with Smilanksy is the specific example. I can’t believe anyone is really better off, on the whole, for spending time in a concentration camp.
I also don’t feel inclined to take people at their world. People have lots of psychological strategies for reconciling themselves to bad luck. One is pretending it’s actually good luck!
How can you live with the experience of Auschwitz behind you, still in you actually? Spend your whole life running from your experience, from yourself? Or turn around, face it, as they say these days “embrace” it. Grapple and fight and finally put the horror through the meat grinder and reshape it to positive ends. Then say with 110% acceptance of the transformed terror, I’m glad.
I still see no paradox. Levi never said the camp was good. Armstrong didn’t admire his cancer. They just said they came out ahead. They dealt with overwhelming circumstances, crawled out from under it and stood high and lofty on the pile of misery that swallowed up lesser men. Or I should say normal men because Levi and Armstrong are supermen.
If you take the philosophical paradox e.g. Zeno’s we have what appears to be a sound argument for a conclusion to which we deny assent to. In the everyday ‘folk’ paradox we have events turning out contrary to all rational expectations.
The great good fortunes e.g. mega lotto or the great misfortunes e.g. cancer, that lead to their opposites are clichés and so well noted that they have lost all the frisson of paradox. A salient paradox of our times would be that in an age of science and the decline of religion there has been a rise in the general level of credulity. Why is the notion of 15 minutes of fame intelligible. It seems a self-cancelling paradox. In a sense a ‘fortune’ or a haphazard event does not have the same paradox generating power as a stable state of affairs that have expected consequences. This is a fuzzy intuition of mine, be gentle with it. For instance in time of war the suicide rate is less than in peace time and I have read that in the concentration camps there was a lower than you might expect rate also but that it increased after liberation.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/413195_2
Hmm..I think you’re onto something here.
Aren’t we always gentle at TP?
It’s interesting that as soon as you learn something like that you immediately try to explain it to yourself, and it thus goes quickly from false-surprising to true-unsurprising. It’s hard hanging onto a true/surprising reaction.
I don’t see any great paradox. For example, I went through what used to be called a severe nervous breakdown as a teenager. No fun. Certainly, the most miserable part of my life. I just remember being constantly cold, breaking furniture, crying and seeing lots of doctors. However, that experience liberated me from the suffocating environment in which I grew up in. It cut me off, fortunately, from being the kind of person I was raised to be, since in my anguish I broke all ties, partially just as the result of saying, for the first time, what I saw around me. You can’t go home again, they say, and maybe there was never a home in the first place.
Coincidence. Last night I watched Kill Gil Vol.2. Yes, that’s right, not Bill. It’s Gil Rossellini, son of Roberto and brother of Isabella among other siblings. He’s so dedicated to documentary film making he attaches his camera to a wheelchair, operating table, and all other objects that enable him to film a devastating series of his near death episodes with a staph infection. That’s Vol.1. New horrors of the same illness are filmed in Vol.2. But he manages to get to the Tribeca film festival where Vol. 1 is shown and acclaimed as the best film he’s ever made. He then says everything that’s been written in this blog. But as he talks about the bad fortune that has fed his good fortune, you can sense clearly the grappling he has to do to convince himself. It is a fact that he has drawn Kill Gil from depths that no other subject could reach. Yet he says after that noble speech that if he can not stand again he will make no more movies. That rather puts a lie to the speech. My sense is that we have to construct our gratitude just to be able to live with our particular nightmare, that such a construction does not come naturally and therefore remains a thinking conclusion, but not a feeling one.
“An old Chinese farmer lost his best stallion one day and his neighbor came around to express his regrets, but the farmer just said, “Who knows what is good and what is bad.” The next day the stallion returned bringing with him 3 wild mares. The neighbor rushed back to celebrate with the farmer, but the old farmer simply said, “Who knows what is good and what is bad.” The following day, the farmer’s son fell from one of the wild mares while trying to break her in and broke his arm and injured his leg. The neighbor came by to check on the son and give his condolences, but the old farmer just said, “Who knows what is good and what is bad.” The next day the army came to the farm to conscript the farmer’s son for the war, but found him invalid and left him with his father. The neighbor thought to himself, “Who knows what is good and what is bad.”
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