Monday, May 24, 2010

Me vs. US Air: a multiplicity of force relations

What does it mean to have power? I think of the power that a strong person has over a weak person. The power to compel someone to behave in the way that you want them to. I usually think of power as the ability to use physical force to get what you want.

In his, The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault goes to great lengths to argue that power is not something that you have, that you can use to subjugate people. He spends significant time articulating his definition of “power:”

“It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate...as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system.” You shouldn't look for one central source of power. “Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything but because it comes from everywhere” (92-93).

It is hard to know what Foucault is talking about here. He makes three main points:

1.Power is a “multiplicity of force relations.” To understand what Foucault means by this, picture a piece of paper blowing in the wind. The paper is acted upon by many forces in many different directions at one time. How this applies to power will become clearer in a little bit.

2.These force relations support each other to form a system. Picture the feather at the beginning of Forrest Gump. It is blown back and forth in the wind, and comes to rest at Forrest Gump's feet. It is almost as if the multiplicity of forces were acting together to bring the feather to him. Foucault is pointing out that different forces can often act together such that there action seems systematic.

3.Power is everywhere. All you have to do is step outside and you are immediately feeling the wind's pressure upon you.

To explore Foucault's definition of power, I want to apply it to a recent experience I had. Notice the omnipresent, (seemingly) systematic multiplicity of force relations acting upon me.

Yesterday morning, while on a trip in Michigan, I received an automated call from USAir informing me that my flight home that evening had been canceled. I called the number provided and was told that an error had generated the call and that the flight was still on schedule.

The flight was scheduled to take off at 6:05, and boarded on time, but an hour later, we were still sitting on the runway. There was no communication from the captain or crew regarding the delay.

The flight was scheduled to land in Philadelphia at 7:50 (just enough time to catch my 8:30 connection to Boston), but at 8:10, we were still thousands of feet above the airport flying in circles. The anxiety level among the passengers rose as time passed and people began to wonder whether they would make their connections. The passengers around me presumed that we were simply waiting for clearance to land, but again, there was no communication from the captain or crew regarding the delay.

After the plane landed and taxied to the gate, a passenger asked a flight attendant if she could deplane first to make her connection. The flight attendant replied that she had no control over the order in which people deplaned.

I arrived at the connecting gate at 8:25 only to be told that I had missed my flight and should report to customer service to try to get on the next flight.

The customer service rep placed me on the 10:45 and when I pressed her for some explanation for why a delay in of one USAir flight had led me to miss my connecting USAir flight she angrily replied, “We can't control air traffic. You should be happy you're getting out tonight.”

Throughout the day, I was time and again denied access to information. Why was my flight cancelled? Why was it reinstated? Why were waiting on the runway? Why did we have to wait to land? Why did the plane leave when someone had to know that a group of people waiting for the connection were literally minutes away? Why does USAir allow you to book connections that someone must know will be difficult to make? Why do we all accept this state of affairs? If I wanted to talk to someone about this, who could I talk to? How long would I have to wait on hold?

I would fly only when USAir said I could. My flight could be cancelled at anytime for any reason. The pilot and crew have no responsibility to transmit information which they presumably have. The flight attendant is under no obligation to help passengers make their connections. The customer service rep is under no obligation to explain anything to me. The only means I found to strike back was to fill out a form on USAir's website. Pathetic.

The multiplicity of force relations acted on me to render me powerless, to increase USAir's power at my expense. Of course, there is no “USAir” at least no USAir that cares at all about me. It is not the case that USAir (or any other airline) is systematically conspiring to deprive its consumers of power and information. There is no central point. Each person I interacted with (or failed to interact with) was making a personal and independent decision. They only seemed to be acting systematically. Power is everywhere because it comes from everywhere.

Think of Foucault the next time you are wading through an automated phone menu, or trying to understand an overly complicated form, willing to give anything just to talk to someone with the power to help you.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

The Moral Life of Babies

In my last post, I raised some questions about Paul Bloom's article in today's Times Magazine entitled, “The Moral Life of Babies.” In it, Bloom summarizes some of his findings about the “naive morality” that babies possess from the moment they are born. From this finding, Bloom concludes not only that there is a universal morality, but that morality has a biological basis.

In my last post, I tried to argue that it is not necessarily obvious that there is a universal morality. It is far from clear that we could discover any single moral principle that all societies share. If we can't, then there is no universally shared morality, how could morality have a biological basis?

Today, I would like to question Bloom's conclusions from a slightly different angle. Let's stipulate that all societies value compassion (just for the record, this seems unlikely to me). Bloom wants to argue, on the basis of his research, that this value is biologically based. He hypothesizes that if babies exhibit this value, then presumably it is encoded in their biology rather than coming about by socialization.

However, there is a problem. How are can we know what a baby is thinking? Not only are babies unable to speak, but newborns can barely move. However we investigate babies moral values, it will have to be indirectly. Bloom has a solution. For some time, infant psychologists have believed that “the eyes are a window to the baby’s soul. As adults do, when babies see something that they find interesting or surprising, they tend to look at it longer than they would at something they find uninteresting or expected. And when given a choice between two things to look at, babies usually opt to look at the more pleasing thing. You can use 'looking time,' then, as a rough but reliable proxy for what captures babies’ attention: what babies are surprised by or what babies like.”

According to infant cognition specialists, if a baby looks at one thing longer than another, the baby either prefers it or is surprised by it. For example, an infant will look at his or her mother's face longer than an unfamiliar face presumably because the baby prefers his or her mother's face to the stranger's.

Similarly, a baby who witnesses an impossible event (like one animated object passing through another) and a possible event (two animated objects bumping to each other), the baby will look longer at the impossible event presumably because the baby is surprised.

Here is an example of one of Bloom's experiments that shows how he used “look time” to deduce babies' moral values:
“Our experiments involved having children watch animated movies of geometrical characters with faces. In one, a red ball would try to go up a hill. On some attempts, a yellow square got behind the ball and gently nudged it upward; in others, a green triangle got in front of it and pushed it down. We were interested in babies’ expectations about the ball’s attitudes — what would the baby expect the ball to make of the character who helped it and the one who hindered it? To find out, we then showed the babies additional movies in which the ball either approached the square or the triangle. When the ball approached the triangle (the hinderer), both 9- and 12-month-olds looked longer than they did when the ball approached the square (the helper). This was consistent with the interpretation that the former action surprised them; they expected the ball to approach the helper.”
Bloom interprets his observations as follows: Because the yellow square helped the ball, the babies expected the ball to approach the square. When they saw an animation in which the ball approached the triangle, who had hindered the ball, the babies were surprised, which the babies indicated by looking at this animation longer.

Recall that longer look time can either indicate preference or surprise. How did Bloom know whether the baby was surprised that the ball approached the triangle, or whether the baby preferred to see the ball approach the triangle?

Perhaps babies looked longer at the ball approaching the triangle because they liked that animation better. Maybe babies are totally immoral. They desire the opposite of what we would call moral behavior. They wanted the ball to approach the triangle that had mistreated it, and therefore, they looked longer at this preferable outcome.

Here's another: perhaps babies share adult morality, but they believed that the ball was approaching the triangle to attack it. Again, this outcome seemed preferable and so the babies looked at it longer.

Bloom seems to interpret the babies' increased look time as expressing surprise because an Bloom (and those who share his moral outlook) would be surprised to see a person react in a friendly way to someone who had hindered them. The point is that Bloom is reading his own morality onto the baby.

It seems like no matter what the baby does, the researcher can interpret that baby either as saying “I like what I see,” or “I am surprised by what I see.” One of these two statements probably applies in almost any situation. Imagine a baby who watches a video of a person hitting another person. And then watches a video of a person hugging another person. The baby looks longer at the hugging video than the hitting video. This could either mean that the baby finds hugging surprising, or that the baby prefers hugging over hitting. What conclusion can be drawn from this experiment?

Can we even assume that the baby understands the animation of the ball, square and triangle, maybe the baby sees the triangle as trying to pull the ball up the hill, while the square is trying to drag it back down. The researcher needs to supply a great deal of information to be able to make sense of the baby's reactions. Basically, Bloom assumes that the baby interprets the events similar to the way the Bloom interprets the events.

How much of the moral lives of babies is in the heads of the baby and how much is in the mind of the theoretician? Is it possible that we so badly want babies to possess rudimentary morality that we will interpret any observations such that they prove what we want them to prove?

Friday, May 7, 2010

This coming Sunday's York Times magazine includes an article titled “The Moral Life of Babies.” In it, Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, summarizes some his findings, which suggest that babies are born with an innate “naïve morality.” For example, babies’ morality includes compassion, that is, babies prefer people who help others achieve their goals over those that hinder them.

The first question which Bloom addresses is, “Why would anyone even entertain the thought of babies as moral beings?” His answer is that empirical evidence suggests that babies seem to respond in ways that we would characterize as moral, and therefore, “some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.”

In other words, the fact that even babies are moral implies that there is a universal, objective morality, and second, that this universal morality has a biological basis. He recognizes that “the existence of a universal moral code is a highly controversial claim; there is considerable evidence for wide variation from society to society.” But, he continues, “People everywhere have some sense of right and wrong. You won’t find a society where people don’t have some notion of fairness, don’t put some value on loyalty and kindness, don’t distinguish between acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes, don’t categorize people as nasty or nice.”

Bloom argues that these universals “make evolutionary sense.” That is, having compassion for your family will help them survive, and therefore, compassion will evolve.

But wait a second. Bloom's conclusions rely on the assumption that it is actually the case that there are universally shared moral norms. Is it really true that every society puts “some value on loyalty and kindness” or distinguishes between “acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes?”

In her groundbreaking book, Patterns of Culture, Ruth Benedict writes,
“We might suppose that in the matter of taking a life, all peoples would agree in condemnation. On the contrary, in a matter of homicide, it may be held that one is blameless if diplomatic relations have been severed between neighboring countries, or that one kills by custom his first two children, or that a husband has the right of life and death over his wife, or that it is the duty of a child to kill his parents before they are old… among some peoples a person suffers torments at having caused an accidental death; in others, it is a matter of no consequence” (45-46).
A society that punishes someone for something done accidentally seems precisely not to distinguish between “acts of cruelty and innocent mistakes.” It is at least an overstatement to argue that the intention of the criminal plays a role in every moral system. Benedict might even argue that it is false.

Of course, Bloom could respond by following John Rawls and distinguishing between a conception of morality and the concept of morality (Rawls distinguishes between the concept of justice and conceptions of justice in his, "A Theory of Justice" (5). A society that has the concept of morality is one that distinguishes between right actions and wrong actions. It seems plausible that every society makes this distinction. One might even argue that such a distinction is a necessary condition for a society existing at all. A society’s conception of morality is the particular way that a society distinguishes between right and wrong, the particular list of actions that a society counts as right or wrong.

It is probably the case that in every society, you could find something that looks like what we would call categorizing people as “nasty or nice,” that is, the concept of morality, but if one society categorizes action A as nasty and another society categorizes action A as nice, to what extent can the nasty/nice distinction be considered universal? Given a wide enough range of meanings for “nasty,” could we even say that it is, in every case, the same category?

Paul Bloom does not clearly distinguish between the concept of morality, which presumably all societies share, and conceptions of morality, which, according to Ruth Benedict, vary enormously. In the Times article, Paul Bloom describes an experiment in which a baby views an animated square helping a red circle roll up a hill, while a yellow triangle hinders the circle. He argues that the babies prefer the helpful square to the hindering triangle, thus proving that helping someone achieve a goal is part of an innate conception of morality.

It seems easy to imagine a society that would not find the square’s helpful behavior particularly moral. Does that mean that that society is wrong about morality? Maybe the baby is wrong. Baby’s have a lot of preferences that we would not necessarily characterize as moral. Ruth Benedict’s argument raises questions with the whole idea of an innate morality. Whose society gets to judge the whether or not the baby’s conception of morality is correct?

If societies have conceptions of morality that don’t overlap, to what extent can we talk about a universal morality? Perhaps you could argue that there one correct conception of morality, but that not every society shares it. That is, there are right conceptions of morality and wrong conceptions of morality. But if Bloom believes that the sense of morality “seems to be bred in the bone,” that is, universal morality is biologically innate, how could different cultures have such radically different moralities?