On Vice

Philosophy

Lessons, 1982, Paula Rego

Quick Summary: In the first part of this Substack, I set out Judith Shklar’s argument that - in a liberal democracy - we may have to tolerate a degree of hypocrisy, snobbery and other vices. In the second, I look at Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Screwtape Letters’, and how charity to ourselves allows us to fall into vice. In the third, I wrap up with some quick thoughts on Lolita.

We take a ‘Whack-A-Mole’ approach to vice in politics. When we see it, we want to get rid of it. When Cummings hypocritically breaks his own COVID rules, we want to get rid of him. Whack! If we perceive condescension or snobbery in Sunak’s ‘I have friends who are working class... well, not working class’, again - Whack! If we see betrayal in the breaking of manifesto commitments - Whack! And if we see a touch of misanthropy (hatred of the rest of mankind) in Reform, we want to get rid of that too - Whack again!

So it’s an uphill battle if a philosopher is trying to argue that we might need to stop Whacking, and permit a degree of these vices in our political life. But that’s the take of Judith Shklar in ‘Ordinary Vices’. She gives us a ‘tour of perplexities’, pointing out the tensions between our Whack-a-Vice approach and the requirements of liberal democracy.

Shklar’s mainly worried about cruelty. She suggests that cruelty - the infliction of pain on a weaker person by a stronger one - is the worst of all the vices. There’s something revolting about a child with a magnifying glass, frying ants; or tyrannical bullying by an elder sibling; or punitive nastiness by a sadistic boss. And Shklar suggests we put cruelty first - we look to avoid it wherever possible, even if this means we have to tolerate a degree of hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal or misanthropy as a result. We have to avoid whacking those vices if doing so leads us to be cruel.

Often when we Whack, when we try to get rid of vices, we’re trying to be instructive. We’re looking to shape people to be better, by pointing out their flaws, often by subjecting them to ridicule - there’s a hope that this will lead to some kind of self-improvement. But this very easily allows us to slip into a kind of instructive cruelty - the cruelty of the Christians ‘civilising’ natives in the New World. If we put cruelty first, we sometimes have to restrain our impulse to correct the other vices.

Take hypocrisy. Everyone hates hypocrisy, but Shklar argues that there’s always going to be a level of hypocrisy in a liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is based on compromise, on trying to convince other people - and this involves adopting positions that might not be your own. We demand too much if we demand that people are completely open, and in our pursuit of rooting out hypocrisy, we (1) may be cruel (think of the viciousness of a witch hunt) and (2) create the conditions where people are more and more inclined to dissemble and hide their own motives, breeding yet more hypocrisy. So we may be better off tolerating a degree of hypocrisy, and removing our demands for total sincerity and openness at all points - we’ll end up with less cruelty and less hypocrisy overall. We have to resist the impulse to Whack.

Similarly, betrayal. Being betrayed feels awful. We hate feeling like someone has failed to do something we expected of them. And yet - we always betray! We’re constantly stuck between conflicting obligations to our friends, family, principles, religion, state and more - and so we are constantly betraying and being betrayed. If you’re going to tolerate a plurality of religions, the demands of which won’t always line up with the demands of the state, you have to accept that your citizens will at some point have to betray something. So again, we need to accept a degree of betrayal in a liberal state.

Even snobbery has its place. Snobbery can lead to support for the arts, for literature, for orange-wine-and-small-plates and so on. And a degree of snobbery is also inevitable - if you live in a society that permits some people to be excluded from groups, you will always end up with people who feel slighted, and perceive a degree of snobbery. Unless you end up in an enormously class-conscious society - where you’re immediately aware of the social status and background of everyone you speak to - a degree of accidental snobbery is inevitable as a result of confusion or exclusion.

After cruelty, Shklar’s most worried about misanthropy - hatred or perpetual disappointment in your fellow man. She’s conscious that hyper-awareness of cruelty and other vices that surround us can very easily lead to a deep disappointment, and a wish to ‘fix’ everyone else, even if this prompts monstrously cruel behaviour (Shklar’s writing after WW2). But even then - misanthropy can act as a spur to encourage us to find solutions, which is itself can be a good thing - so it can be a ‘vice we ought to cultivate under certain political circumstances’.

Ultimately, Shklar advocates for a ‘liberalism of fear’ - one where we’re very conscious of the opportunity for cruelty that any sort of political power opens up, and where we temper our expectations and behaviour accordingly. The role of the state isn’t to shape us into better people, but to give us the freedom and space to shape our own dispositions if we wish to. Government cannot make us good, but it can leave us the conditions and the freedom where we can make ourselves good. In that type of liberal government, we may have to tolerate a degree of these lesser vices to avoid the greatest evil of cruelty.

It’s a grown-up philosophy - one that recognises ‘liberalism imposes extraordinary ethical difficulties on us: to live with contradictions, unresolvable conflicts, and a balancing between public and private imperatives which are neither opposed to nor at one with each other.’ - and this means accepting some things we might not like. There’s a humility in this type of view - a giving up, a rejection of going for a perfect world where we’ve whacked every vice - substituting it for a recognition we’re imperfect, and we’re better off looking to manage those imperfections realistically and kindly*.

***

Moving from the public to the personal - I had a read of The Screwtape Letters are by CS Lewis (of Narnia fame). They’re the attempt of a Senior Demon Administrator (Screwtape) to instruct his nephew protégée (Wormwood) about how to tempt his charge into vice. It’s basically a morality guide (here’s how you can fall into vice), but far more fun because it includes the phrases ‘casserole of adulterers’, ‘deplorable milk sops’ and ‘scoffers and wordlings’.

You see Screwtape encouraging different beliefs because they allow vice to sneak in by the backdoor - like the idea our time is our own. It’s easy to assume we own 24 hours in a day, we spend as we wish. Screwtape tells his nephew to encourage this belief - because it’s a breeding ground for resentment whenever people ‘intrude’ on our 24 hours, when they ask things of us - because they’re taking what we own. And this is Carroll’s way of gently pointing out the ridiculousness of that belief. Our time is not only our own. It’s not just for us to spend as we wish. We have obligations to others, and that’s simply part of what it is to live in the world - we don’t have our 24 hours, and assuming we do is wrong and simply breeds resentment.

Another thing Screwtape talks a lot about pace. If the nephew keeps his little victim whirring, keeps him churning through thoughts quick enough, makes him ‘become accustomed to holding XYZ philosophies in his head’, it will be far easier for him to fall to vice. This is because it becomes possible for him to pull and select out whichever fragment is most convenient to justify what they wished to do already. We simply pull out whatever beliefs we already think of as right. We’re incredibly charitable towards ourselves, and the more moral models we have in our head, the easier it is to pick the one that allows us to do… whatever we wanted to do already.

***

And this is very obvious in the last of my tour-de-Vice… Lolita. Gahhhhh! Crikey this gives you the heebie-jeebies. Has there ever been a creepier word than ‘nymphet’? Humbert Humbert’s guilty of exactly the moral flexibility that Screwtape describes. We see him mentally flex and tease out models of ancient Greek philosophy, describe different kinds of aesthetic love - any grounding he can give to the fact he’s abducted a twelve year old. We think along with him, and can see him stop thinking just at the point where he may have to reckon with the evil of what he is actually doing.

Reading the book was an interesting experience. I’ve noticed in my book club, I’m guilty of a ‘fallacy of empathy’. If something presented to me as the view of the main character, I presume it is right. In contrast to the other Book Clubbers, I’m almost always nodding along to anything a main character says - if the character is happy, I’m happy, if they’re annoyed, I’m annoyed - and rarely step out of their head to think if their behaviour is warranted. Lolita forces you to do this - you simply can’t uncritically absorb the thoughts and feelings of Humbert Humbert. If you think you’re also guilty of the ‘fallacy of empathy’ (assuming anything in first person must be right), it’s worth taking a look. I’d also recommend ‘A Debt To Pleasure’. Clearly Lawrence owes a debt to Nabokov, and it has the same deranged justification of mad, bad behaviour via aesthetics and art - but without the paedophilic subject matter.

If you’re interested, Shklar’s book is available for free here: https://archive.org/details/ordinaryvices0000shkl/page/2/mode/2up

*I’ve been wondering what this looks like when you apply it to a life. We have a negativity bias - we remember harms much more than helps - and so I wonder if instead of trying to maximise the joy or happiness you bring about, you simply try to avoid cruelty or wrongdoing. But this seems to lead to locking yourself away from everyone and everything, retreating into a tower - leaving people entirely so as not to commit any harms (as Montaigne did)?

(Also - I don’t think Shklar would tolerate e.g. the hypocrisy of Cummings I mention in the beginning. She describes her book as ‘a tour of perplexities, not a guide for the perplexed’ - spotting the tensions between each of the vices, not telling us exactly what we should do).