I recently read Jay Wallace’s The View From Here, in which he discusses the tensions which arise in our moral psychology when trying to affirm anything in our lives unconditionally. In this post, I’ll try to resist some of Wallace’s claims which, he thinks, require us to have a very ambivalent attitude about our own lives and our place in world history.
For Wallace, unconditional affirmation is a way of saying that one affirms the attachments one has for any particular project which one so affirms. As I read him, he considers all of the primary projects from which we derive our identity to be the sort of things which we would wish to affirm unconditionally. Wallace argues, however, that in order to affirm these projects unconditionally, one must also affirm all the antecedent conditions necessary for the project to have occurred.
The first example he gives is of a mother, who chooses to conceive and bear a child at the age of 14. Presumably, the young mother will have a deep attachment to her child. Yet as she matures, she will also be able to look back on her life and realize that she did something wrong: she ought not to have conceived a child so young, when she was unprepared and not sufficiently mature for motherhood. (For the sake of argument, we will assume that she considers her decision foolish, even though some mothers undoubtedly would not.) The loving mother has many reasons to affirm the existence of, and her relationship with, her child. These reasons are so strong that she will affirm this relationship unconditionally. Yet this affirmation requires her to affirm all of the antecedent causes of her child’s life, including her decision to conceive at an age far too young — an age when she wronged her child by conceiving her.
Here is where the tension is felt: the mother has reasons to affirm her child’s life, yet also has very strong reasons to regret her decision and wish that it had been otherwise: she can look at the decision and see that it was the wrong thing to do, and that she had most reason to do something different. This sort of regret, which Wallace terms “all-in” regret, is an on-balance preference that things should have been otherwise: more than that, it’s an intention-like preference wherein one would change what happened, if one had the power. The tension, then, is that in order to affirm her relationship with her child unconditionally, the other must also affirm her early decision, which she rationally must regret. So what’s a mother to do?
Wallace finishes the argument, toward the end of the book, with what he calls the “bourgeois predicament.” This predicament is the realization that most us who “do” philosophy, i.e. most of the book’s audience, have lived extraordinarily privileged lives which depend for their existence on social and economic structures which are fundamentally unjust. The projects which give our lives meaning can only be affirmed if we affirm also the injustice which made them possible — injustice which we must, on balance, prefer to have been otherwise.
How do we resolve this tension? The first possibility which may occur to you is simply to deny that the crappy things you regret are necessary antecedents of the things you love: perhaps you regret the circumstances of your daughter’s birth, and wish she had been born ten years later; perhaps you wish that the world had been such that it might have given rise to big research universities justly. Wallace moves to block this, however, with a “realism” constraint: one cannot simply imagine a new world; one must take the world as it really is. Thus, one cannot wish one’s daughter to have been born later because it would have been a completely different child. One cannot wish for a different set of circumstances for the university, because such circumstances are extremely unlikely.* Instead, one must cope with the absurdity of unconditional affirmation for one’s life projects, and all-in regret for the circumstances which make them possible.
I think this realism constraint is a bit artificial. I simply do not feel its pressure at all. But let us concede it. Where does it get us? Well, we are supposed to “all-in” regret certain circumstances, which means that we would go back and change them if we could because we have an on-balance preference that they would have been otherwise. But it’s not clear to me how meaningful this is. After all, for all we know, every other possible world is much worse. Further, we can just hit this with a whole bunch of fine-grained arguments: to dodge the injustice, how much do you have to change? Exactly how do you change it? How close is this possible world? All these questions must be answered for our “intention-like” on-balance preference that thing had been otherwise to be meaningful. How can we wish for things to have been otherwise if we do not know the other options? This does not seem a potent problem to me: for all we know, things would have been much worse if they were different.
And if we give up the realism requirement which Wallace places upon us, then we are free to imagine wholly different background conditions which miraculously lead to the desired outcomes.
Either way — with or without realism — the tension evaporates.
As a final note, some will find their intuitions pushed in directions quite different from my own, as we imagine being able to go back and change things. Such thought experiments, like Thompson’s “people seeds”, seem unprofitable to me: the experiment requires us to imagine circumstances so vastly different from those which are real (in this case, an ability to change the past) that we simply do not have moral machinery which can reliably handle them.
* Yes, I know that’s controversial. Wallace is clearly on the left, and generally seems to assume that it’s obvious that society would have less general prosperity if it were more just. He’s quite dismissive of this escape, which I find odd. Perhaps he anticipates (likely correctly) that only those who lean left will even be troubled by this sort of “tension”?