Şerife Tekin is an assistant professor of philosophy at Daemen College in Buffalo, NY. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. She completed her PhD at York University in Canada, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Dalhousie University and the University of Pittsburgh. Her work is at the cusp of feminist approaches to philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and medical ethics. Her co-edited book, Extraordinary Science and Psychiatry: Responding to the Current Crisis in Mental Health Research, has recently been published by MIT University Press. Her work has appeared in journals such as Synthese; Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology; Public Affairs Quarterly; Journal of Medical Ethics; Philosophical Psychology; The American Journal of Bioethics, and in books such as Classifying Psychopathology: Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds (MIT Press); The Psychiatric Babel: Assessing the DSM-5 (Springer’s Press); Philosophical Issues in Pharmaceutics (Springer’s Press). She is the Executive Coordinator of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry. A native of Denizli, Turkey, she spent her childhood and adolescence on the Aegean coast, wandering around the ruins of Ancient Greek civilization, contemplating the meaning of life. The Olympic torch she has been carrying around since her early childhood days have helped her happily make home in North America.

The Missing Self in Scientific Psychiatry

Şerife Tekin

Thank you, Meena, for giving me the opportunity to say a few things about my research. Before I do, let me say how much I enjoy your blog – it has been a joy getting acquainted with the work of philosophers working in such a wide range of areas. I am honored to be included in such an impressive group. I am taking this opportunity to talk about the main arguments in my article “The Missing Self in Scientific Psychiatry,” which is recently published in Syhthese: An International Journal for Epistemology, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. 

Most mental disorders are expressed as anomalies in such self-related capacities and attitudes as self-control, self-conceptualization, self-respect, and self-esteem, and, as such, they cause an individual’s relationship with herself and others to deteriorate. In this regard, most mental disorders directly affect the self – the dynamic, complex, relational, multi-aspectual, and multitudinous configuration of capacities, processes, states, and traits that support agency (Tekin 2017b, 2014b; Bechtel 2008; Jopling 2000; Neisser 1988).

Starting with Socrates’ admonition to know oneself and his claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, the self has occupied a central place in philosophical and scientific inquiry. Debates about the self include metaphysical questions on the nature and reality of selfhood, empirical questions about the developmental and historical trajectory of the human selves, and ethical questions about agency, responsibility, and autonomy. The answers to these metaphysical, empirical, and ethical questions are intertwined, as the nature of selfhood both constrains and enables the range of moral and political actions of an individual in a social world.

In psychiatry, the concept of the self has a complex history. While it was a popular clinical and scientific notion in the early days of psychoanalytic approaches to mental disorders, starting in the 1980s, scientific psychiatry began to sidestep the concept, even though it remains central to clinical contexts (for further discussion see Tekin 2015, 2014a; Tekin and Mosko 2015). In fact, as I argue in the article, there is a misalignment between the scientific research and clinical work on mental disorders with respect to the concept of the self.

Various traditions in mental health care, such as humanistic, psychoanalytic, phenomenological, existential and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, implicitly or explicitly acknowledge that a disruption of the self, or the person, or the agent (often using these three concepts synonymously) is a common denominator of different mental disorders. They emphasize the importance of understanding patients as reasons-responsive, in their full mental health relevant complexity, if their mental disorder is to be treated successfully. Self-related phenomena, such as personal identity (e.g., age, gender, race, socio-economic status, employment status, interpersonal relationships) and self-regarding attitudes and capacities, such as self-conceptualization, self-esteem, self-respect and self-control, are important constituents of mental health. In these clinical traditions, the concept of self is used to do the explanatory work of mental disorders, e.g., when the clinician explains the condition to the patient and the family members, and it reappears in subsequently prescribed therapies. For instance, the betterment of the self, e.g., increasing self-esteem, improving self-concepts, enriching self-control capacities, and enhancing self-respect, is set as the goal of the therapeutic encounter and achieved by engaging with various properties of the self, such as reason-responsiveness, self-interpretation and self-assessment.

The centrality of the concept of the self is not mirrored in the mainstream scientific approaches in psychiatry, however. In fact, the self has rarely been the object of scientific research, the empirical investigation of which might yield successful explanations of and interventions in mental disorders. Thus, even though self-related phenomena are clinically relevant insofar as they give important information about a mental disorder to the clinician and help the development of effective interventions, they are not considered among the scientifically relevant properties of mental disorders.

To cite only one example, the tradition of psychiatric research driven by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a classification manual of mental disorders created by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to guide research, clinical, and policy related inquiries, does not take the concept of the self as an explicit object of scientific inquiry (APA 1994, 2013). Instead, it opts for a mental disorder construct, e.g., major depression, individuated through observable behaviors such as signs and symptoms, not the plethora of self-related phenomena that are compromised in the presence of a mental disorder.

In other words, the properties of mental disorders targeted by clinicians and those targeted by researchers are misaligned. Among the former group, self-related phenomena are considered relevant properties of mental disorders, while among the latter, they are neglected.

The fact that self-related phenomena are missing from scientific research on mental disorders can arguably be attributed to the presupposition that the self is not empirically tractable and its use will hinder psychiatry’s goal to be scientific. Researchers might want to exclude the self from scientific psychiatry because, as a folk concept, it does not sit well with the kind of concepts studied in sciences with the promise of unpacking the etiology of mental disorders, such as neuroscience or genetics. In the near future, the concept of the self might be fractured into different components, some related to memory (auto-biographical memory), others to high-level action control, and so on.

In the paper, I take issue with these connected challenges. I argue the self is empirically tractable, and its use as a target of research will not hinder psychiatry’s scientific commitments. The concept of the self offers rich scientific resources to investigate and intervene in mental disorders; available resources include not only neuroscientific and genetic research but also those areas of study considering the role of interpersonal relationships, environment, culture and epidemiological factors in the development of illness. Though I do not focus on the topic in the paper, the concept of the self can be a rich resource for contemplating the nature of agency, free will, and responsibility, especially in the context of mental illness, thus explicitly connecting psychiatry to other fields in the humanities such as anthropology, law, and politics – if we are to fathom the complexity of mental disorders in the lives of individuals, communities, and the cultures, we must use the resources offered in these fields of study.

In the paper, I raise and respond to two challenges inherent in the presupposition that the self is not empirically tractable and its use will hinder psychiatry’s goal to be scientific.

The first is the question of how psychiatry can meet its aspirations to be a scientific discipline. I respond by proposing that psychiatry, very much like other special sciences, such as economics or biology, should be considered a model-building science. Different objects of inquiry, including the self, the mental disorder construct, or the brain, can be represented and studied using scientific models, thus making complex real-world phenomena empirically tractable. These models can be used to accomplish scientific goals, such as explanations of and interventions in mental disorders.

The second challenge is whether the self is fit for empirical investigation. In response, I offer an empirically tractable model of the self, i.e., the multitudinous self, and explain how it can provide insight into and contribute to our understanding of mental disorders. While a fractured engagement with different parts of the self, e.g., auto-biographical memory, is fruitful, there is virtue in researching the self as a whole, because what happens in one component affects another component – and the entire self-system. In other words, an integrated understanding of the different parts of the self is necessary to fathom the complexity of mental disorders. To illustrate this, I focus on addiction (for a detailed account of my approach to addiction see Tekin 2017a; Tekin, Flanagan, Graham 2017).

The overall goal of my research is to illustrate that we cannot theorize psychopathology by sidestepping the self that is the subject of mental disorders, and a philosophical account of the self is incomplete without including psychopathology. I call for methodological alterations in psychiatric research on and treatment of mental disorders; there is much to be learned from the multidisciplinary sciences of the mind, feminist philosophy, and the memoirs of psychopathology. My hope is that my research program will influence philosophers, bioethicists, psychiatrists, psychologists and neuroscientists, facilitating the development of valuable inquiry into mental disorders.

Works cited:

Bechtel, W. 2008. Mental mechanisms: Philosophical perspectives on cognitive neuroscience. London: Routledge.

Jopling, D. 2000. Self-knowledge and the self. New York: Routledge University Press.

Neisser, U. 1988. Five kinds of self-knowledge. Philosophical Psychology, 1, 35–59.

Tekin, Ş. 2017a (In press). Brain Mechanisms and the Disease Model of Addiction: Is it Really the Whole Story of the Addicted Self? A philosophical-skeptical perspective. In The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Science of Addiction, Pickard, H. and Ahmed, S. eds. Routledge University Press.

Tekin, Ş. 2017b. The Missing Self in Scientific Psychiatry. Synthese. DOI.10.1007/s11229-017- 1324-0.

Tekin, Ş., and Mosko, M. 2015. Hyponarrativity and Context-Specific Limitations of the DSM-5. Public Affairs Quarterly, Volume 29, No: 1, 111-136.

Tekin, Ş. 2015. Against Hyponarrating Grief: Incompatible Research and Treatment Interests in the DSM-5. The DSM-5 in Perspective: Philosophical Reflections on the Psychiatric Babel, P. Singy and S. Demazeux, eds., History, Philosophy and the Theory of the Life Sciences Series, Volume 10, Springer Press, 179-197.

Tekin, Ş. 2014b. The Missing Self in Hacking’s Looping Effects. Classifying Psychopathology: Mental Kinds and Natural Kinds, H. Kincaid and J. A. Sullivan, eds., MIT Press, 227–256.

Tekin, Ş. 2014a. Self-insight in the Time of Mood Disorders: After the Diagnosis, Beyond the Treatment. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 21 (2), 139-155.

Tekin, Ş., Flanagan, O.J., Graham, G. 2017. Against the Drug Cure Model: Addiction, Identity, Pharmaceuticals. In Anthology on Pharmaceuticals, Ho, D., ed., Springer Press.

Meena Krishnamurthy, the editor of Philosopher, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and in the Program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the University of Michigan. She works in political philosophy on a variety of issues. The underlying theme that runs through her work is a concern with equality (political, economic, and social). She is currently writing a series of related papers on the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi.

Race Talk, Justice, and Self-Respect: A Brief Analysis of Rachel Dolezal

Meena Krishnamurthy

Rachel Dolezal was president of her local NAACP and chair of a municipal police oversight commission. She went to Howard University, a historically black University, and was given a scholarship to do an MFA in fine arts based on her portraits of African Americans. She is also married to an African-American man and has an African-American son. She has adopted “black” cultural practices such as wearing her hair in box braids. As a college instructor, she also educated people about African-American history and contemporary political matters. Dolezal has long referred to herself as “black”. However, according to her family, she should be referred to as “white”. Dolezal’s parents told local media outlets that their daughter’s ancestry was, largely, Czech, Swedish, and German. Their revelation came soon after Dolezal reported a racially motivated hate crime.

Dolezal’s case is philosophically fascinating. It raises questions about the racial terms that we should use to talk about Dolezal; in particular, should we refer to her as “black”? As the current popular discussion of her case and philosophical discussions of race illustrate, ordinary language makes use of a variety of concepts of race. Some are based on objective (mind-independent) facts and others are based on subjective (mind-dependent) facts.

One objective concept of race that is implicitly appealed to in many of the current discussions is ancestral. To be black Dolezal must have (recent) sub-Saharan African ancestry. On this view, Dolezal ought not be referred to as “black” because her recent ancestors are not from sub-Saharan Africa.[1]

Another objective concept of race is behavioural. On this view, an individual’s race depends on whether she engages in certain behavior, behavior that is typically associated with a specific ancestry. Some, including Dolezal herself, have suggested that Dolezal is “black” because she engages in “black” behavior. For example, she wears certain hairstyles and clothing, behaviour that is typically associated with people who have sub-Saharan African ancestry. She is also an instructor of African American studies and has shown a deep commitment to promoting “black” causes through her teaching and participation in the NAACP. On this view, Dolezal ought to be referred to as “black”.

On a first-person subjective concept of race, race depends on first-person mind dependent facts. This concept depends on facts about an individual’s feelings and views about her own race. On this view, self-identification is what matters. Dolezal states explicitly that she perceives herself as being “black” (largely because of the cultural practices that she engages in) so she ought to be referred to as “black”.

There is also the third-person subjective concept of race. On this concept, an individuals’ race depends on facts about whether other individuals perceive or identify her as being of a particular race. We can refer to Dolezal as “black” so long as she is “perceived” by others as having sub-Saharan African ancestry, “perceived” as having the visible features of black individuals, and/or as engaging in the relevant behaviour. What matters most is the perceptions of “insiders”, that is, the perceptions of those who are already perceived as being members of the “black” community. Initially, many people in the black community – including members of the NAACP – perceived Dolezal as being black. This changed, however, after her parents’ revelation. She is no longer perceived as being black by many members of the black community, including members of the NAACP. She ought not be referred to as “black”, on this view.

As this brief overview demonstrates, there are many concepts of race that are available to us and that have been appealed to in current discussions of Dolezal. This raises the question, which, if any, of these concepts of race should we use or appeal to when we refer to Dolezal? I will argue that, in contexts where such considerations are relevant, such as the public sphere, political considerations of justice ought to be given priority. They trump, so to speak, when it comes to concept selection in the public realm. Dolezal, as the president of her local NAACP, chairwoman of a municipal police oversight committee, and now celebrity of the moment, is a public figure and political factors are of central importance. So, in asking whether we ought to refer to Dolezal as “black”, we have to ask ourselves, would doing so be consistent with and express a commitment to justice in the United States?

As John Rawls argues, a just society is one that ensures that each individual, black or white, can participate in that society while also maintaining a secure sense of self-respect, that is, a secure sense of her equal worth. Referring to Dolezal as “black” is not consistent with the demands of self-respect or a just society.

If society broadly accepts the practice of referring to Dolezal as “black,” this would work to socially erase or make invisible the racial privilege that Dolezal experiences as someone who does not suffer from the downstream and long lasting effects of slavery. It would express the shared public sentiment that the national political history of racial oppression and the resulting differences in power can simply be cast away whenever a person of racial privilege desires to do so, for personal benefit or otherwise. Referring to Dolezal as “black”, would fail to publicly express respect for properly “black” people by failing to express an equal valuing and acknowledgment of the lived experiences and realities that properly “black” people experience. It would suggest that they and their experiences do not matter. Because of this, it is difficult for other properly “black” individuals to participate in a society that refers to Dolezal as “black” while also maintaining a secure sense of self-respect. In short, referring to Dolezal as “black” is inconsistent with political values of self-respect and, in turn, is inconsistent with the demands of justice. We ought not refer to Professor Dolezal as “black”.

On what basis should we refer to people as “black”? When political considerations of self-respect and justice are taken into consideration, the ancestral concept of race ought to take linguistic priority in the public sphere. People who have sub-Saharan African ancestry are properly referred to as “black”. Ancestry is the appropriate basis for referring to people as “black” because it tracks politically relevant considerations such as oppression and slavery (historical political injustices), which are considerations that ought to be given weight to and taken into consideration when interacting with others in the public sphere. This is what self-respect and a just society require.

However, a just society requires that we respect not only black people, but white people too. If Dolezal self-identifies as “black” isn’t that at least some reason to refer to her as “black”? Wouldn’t not referring her to as “black” suggest that her own views and feelings about herself are unimportant, that they lack value? Wouldn’t it suggest that her own views about her history and participation in black culture and social movements, over the last ten years, are insignificant? Wouldn’t it, in turn, be difficult for Dolezal to participate in a society that refers to her as “white” while also maintaining a secure sense of self-respect? The potentially surprising answer is that yes, it would be difficult for Dolezal and those like her to participate in such a society.

This suggests that, for reasons of justice, we may need to accommodate, in ordinary language, concepts of race that place emphasis on self-identification. For reasons of self-respect, the term “black” ought to be reserved for those who have sub-Saharan African ancestry. However, a new or different set of terms could be used to refer to those who merely self-identify as black. For example, some of have suggested the use of the term “trans-black.” Indeed, Dolezal herself uses this term to describe herself. Use of these types of terms would express that even those, who lack the relevant ancestry, but still self-identify as “black” are “black” in some sense. This would allow people such as Dolezal to participate in society while also maintaining a sense of self-respect.

There is some precedent for the use of these types of terms in regards to race. In India, the term “anglo-Indian” was historically used to refer to people who were not ancestrally Indian. They were typically of British ancestry, but were born in India, lived in and worked in India for many years (during the time of the British Raj), and often engaged in Indian cultural practices, such as language, dress, and food habits, among other things. We could similarly use a new and different set of terms to describe those who are not ancestrally black but self-identify as black. [2]

However, in order for “black” individuals to maintain a secure sense of self-respect, it must also be the case that similar terms exist for “black” individuals who self-identify as “white.” Historical precedence does exist. Consider the terms “oreo” and “coconut.” It is important to note that these are pejorative terms. They are insults that are used to refer to people who are, respectively, perceived as being black or brown in appearance and as having the relevant ancestral heritage but as acting in ways that are typically attributed to white people. The fact that there are terms to describe black and brown people who are identified as “white” or who self-identify as “white” but are used as insults is telling. It suggests that, even if black and brown people (in the ancestral sense) are identified – by themselves or others – as “white”, it is not considered morally acceptable to be identified in such a way.

In short, if white people like Dolezal are the only ones who can have access to morally neutral terms (or morally estimable terms) to talk about their chosen racial identity, then justice would not be served. The practice would be undermining of the self-respect of those who are excluded, namely, of black and brown individuals. Ultimately, as the episode “B.A.N.” from the FX show Atlanta highlights (see below), racial equity on this matter is simply not possible now and may never be. And, until it is possible, the Rachel Dolezals of the world may be stuck with the term “white” to talk about them themselves.

[1] Note that one this view race is also a third-person subjective concept. The fact that certain phenomena (physical, biological, and geographical) are conceived of as being of significance is a matter of social practice – it is a social fact – which, in turn, depends on the collective mental states or intentions of those who participate in the practice.

[2] In a similar, vein, Nell Irvin Painter has recently suggested that we need new terms for white allies, that is, ancestrally white people who wish to abolish white privilege. He suggested that we use the term “abolitionists” for such individuals, referencing “black” and “white” individuals “who joined together as ‘abolitionists’ to bring down American slavery in the 19th century.” See Nell Irwin Painter, “What is Whitness?”, New York Times, June 21, 2015. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/sunday/what-is-whiteness.html?_r=0

Elizabeth Scarbrough is a lecturer at Florida International University. She received her BA from Oberlin College, MA from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and PhD from the University of Washington (2015). Her research interests revolve around the intersection of ethics and aesthetics. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Applied Philosophy (“Visiting the Ruins of Detroit: Exploitation or Cultural Tourism”) and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism ( “Unimagined Beauty”). More information about her can be found at elizabethscarbrough.com.

War and Ruins

Elizabeth Scarbrough

I would like to first thank Meena for curating this blog and for inviting me to share some of my work. I hope to provide a few informal reflections about the importance of architectural ruins. I welcome all comments and thoughts.

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As a kid, I was an unabashed American tourist. I remember climbing the largest pyramid of Chichen Itza when I was 12 years’ old (called “El Castillo” by the Spanish, and “the Pyramid of Kukulcan” by the Mayans), admiring the view at the top and wondering what it must have been like to see a similar view a thousand years before. Thus began my fascination with ruins. I visited Chichen Itza before it became a UNESCO World Heritage site, and well before it was roped off to climbers. The effect of roughly a million tourists per year climbing the structure eventually took its toll, and the decision to close the pyramid to climbing was made both to preserve the structure and to protect visitors from (sometimes fatal) accidents.

Ruins, like Chichen Itza, are popular tourist sites for numerous reasons. Ruins are evocative structures, and we value them in different ways for the various things they mean to us. Ruins can be aesthetically appreciated, but they are also valued for their historical importance, what they symbolize to different cultures and communities, and as lucrative objects, i.e., for tourism.

My research has focused on how we aesthetically engage with ruins and how this aesthetic engagement might buttress ethical arguments for historic preservation. I’ve also written on how ruin tourism (especially photographic tours of ‘ruin porn’) can exploit local populations. I believe that ruins are important objects of aesthetic appreciation due in part to the variety of modes of appreciation one might employ in engaging with them: one might use them as props to help imagine long-ago people, as beautiful architectural marvels, as parts of a picturesque landscape, or as potent elicitors of the sublime and memento mori. We best appreciate ruins when we address a ruin’s tripartite nature—i.e., ruins are windows into the past, they display unplanned beauty in the present, and they help us imagine the future. Ruins simultaneously help us think about our human ancestors, our current experience, and what will be. In my view, the tripartite nature of ruins should inform how we appreciate and conserve ruins. I argue for a pluralist model for the aesthetic appreciation of ruins, one that respects multiple narratives. All of these ways of engaging with ruins (e.g., imaginative reconstruction, as elicitors of the sublime, and as memento mori) can be ampliative, though they might be incompatible in a particular moment.

Tourists marvel at structures like Chichen Itza in part because they stand the test of time, outlasting the rise and fall of civilizations. However, today an increasing number of ancient ruins have been damaged or completely destroyed by acts of war. In 2001 the Taliban struck a major blow to cultural heritage by blasting the Bamiyan Buddhas out of existence. These gigantic likenesses of the Buddha had been carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley of Afghanistan in the 4^th and 5^th century. They were not easy to destroy (as evidenced by video evidence of the destruction). This direct targeting of cultural property might change our attitudes toward conservation practices. Francesco Bandarin, the UNESCO assistant director-general for culture, states, “Deliberate destruction has created a new context. At the time, Bamiyan was an exceptional case.”[1] Unfortunately, since then, ISIL has continued the Taliban’s destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Particularly heart wrenching were images showing the destruction of the Temple of Bel in Palmyra on August 30th, 2015. The Syrian Army recently retook the area on March 2, 2017, and hope remains for a 2016 plan to resurrect the Temple of Bel.

Bandarin’s comments notwithstanding, the destruction of cultural property in times of war is not new. For example, the Mỹ Sơn Archaeological Sanctuary, in the Socialist Republic of Việt Nam was irreparably damaged by the American War in the 1960s. Mỹ Sơn is the foremost Champa archaeological site, and the largest archaeological site in Việt Nam. At the time of its ‘rediscovery’ in 1898, the site had 71 relics comprising 14 architectural grouping built successively from the late fourth/fifth centuries until the thirteenth/fourteenth centuries. Unlike similar temple structures in Indochina (such as Angkor Wat), Mỹ Sơn’s iconography remained distinctly Hindu. The Champa ruins at Mỹ Sơn primarily consist of brick temple towers called kalans; a kalan is a corbel structure composed of bricks that are stacked in a slightly offset manner.

In August of 1969, a bomb dropped by an American B52 bomber struck Mỹ Sơn, reducing its largest kalan (A1) to heaps of unrecognizable rubble. In 1970, under intense international pressure, President Nixon agreed to spare Mỹ Sơn from further attacks. After the war, the Vietnamese government de-mined Mỹ Sơn so that restoration work could commence. This effort took the lives of nine workers and inflicted serious injury on eleven others. In 1999 UNESCO deemed Mỹ Sơn a World Heritage Site.[2] Ultimately, while other temples at Mỹ Sơn were reconstructed, A1 was left alone. What remains of the A1 kalan is part of an altar and the bomb crater. A1 thus serves as a powerful reminder of the destructiveness of modern war.

The conservation of ruins requires tough decisions. Even with those ruins that have not been touched by war (such as Chichen Itza) conservationists have to balance competing interests of access and preservation. The balance is even more difficult to strike for ruins whose architectural integrity has been altered by war. When ancient ruins are reduced to rubble, either as collateral damage (e.g., the A1 temple at Mỹ Sơn) or as direct targets of warfare (e.g., the Temple of Bel in Palmyra and the Bamiyan Buddhas), local communities have to decide whether or not to reconstruct the ruin, and how to frame the destruction.

Ruins are objects in flux – they are objects in the process of decay and as such, their aesthetic foci can be moving targets. Their changing characters (and characteristics) can lead to shifting valuation practices. The conservation community decided not to reconstruct the A1 kalan at Mỹ Sơn, and I believe this was the right decision. What remains is the bomb crater – a ghost of a ruin.[3] An important question conservationist ought to ask themselves is what story does this site tell? Ruins are valued in part because they evoke the importance of age-value, the endurance of human effort through time. This is no longer true for A1, which stood inviolate for a thousand years only to be inexorably changed in a matter of seconds. The crater at A1 speaks to the wanton destruction of historic sites like these to make some political point. This is just one story A1 tells, but it is an important one in my view.

Many ruins have a mournful quality and A1 is no exception. We might mourn the loss of the complete architectural structure, we might grieve and wax nostalgic for the loss of a culture (i.e., the Champa culture), or we might lament the loss of time. Confronted by the majesty and tragedy of A1, we mourn the myriad costs of war. I believe this narrative must be preserved and should be foregrounded.^[4] Figuring out what narratives to tell and which ones should be foregrounded is difficult work that must include input from disparate stakeholders.

We bring our knowledge to bear on our aesthetic experiences. Ruins have a life span. The A1 kalan became a ruin, not because of damage caused naturally by the passage of time, erosion, or overgrowth of plants and trees, but rather because of damage caused by my nation’s government in an arguably unjust act of war. If A1 looked perceptually identical, yet had decayed due to “natural” forces, such as time and water damage, our aesthetic engagement with the kalan could be altered. The fact that it was destroyed by war is relevant to our aesthetic interpretation and appraisal. Allowing it to remain unreconstructed speaks to this mournful quality and foregrounds a narrative about war and destruction of cultural property. If there were no other kalans like A1, perhaps we would have good reasons to reconstruct it. The fact that is one kalan among many in the archaeological sanctuary gives us permission to allow it to ruinate and enjoy the aesthetic qualities ruination brings.

Unlike A1, there are no duplicate/similar Bamiyan Buddhas or Temple of Bel. Those losses are thus arguably far more tragic.

While there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for conservation of ruins impacted by war, I believe there are good aesthetic and political reasons to allow such sites to remain in their post-bombed state. The empty niches where the Bamiyan Buddhas once stood are aesthetically powerful. As columnist Roger Cohen wrote, “Absence speaks, shames, reminds.”[5] The bombed A1 also speaks, shames, and reminds, and unfortunately so, too, will the Temple of Bel. While acts of war might have turned these ruins (and their tripartite aesthetic foci) into memorials, and thereby change how we engage with them, we should not abandon war-torn ruins as a complete loss.

[1] Luke, Ben. “Ruin or Rebuild? Conserving Heritage in An Age of Terrorism.” The Art Newspaper (January 2017: Accessed January 28, 2017: http://theartnewspaper.com/features/ruin-or-rebuild-conserving-heritage-in-an-age-of-terrorism/

[2] UNESCO determined that the Mỹ Sơn temple complex satisfies two criteria for world heritage status (out of ten), specifically criterion two and criterion three: 

Criterion (ii): The Mỹ Sơn Sanctuary is an exceptional example of cultural interchange, with an indigenous society adapting to external cultural influences, notably the Hindu art and architecture of the Indian sub-continent.

Criterion (iii): The Champa Kingdom was an important phenomenon in the political and cultural history of South – East Asia, vividly illustrated by the ruins of Mỹ Sơn.

[3] ‘Architectural Ghost” is a term coined by Jeanette Bicknell. See: Bicknell, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72 (4): 435-441 (2014).

[4] For recent work on the narrative element of cultural heritage, see Mattes, Erich Hatala, “The Ethics of Historic Preservation,” Philosophy Compass, 11 (12): 786-794 (December 2016).

[5] Cohen, Roger. “Bamiyan’s Buddhas revisited,” New York Times, October 28, 2007.

Shen-yi Liao is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Puget Sound. He was a Marie Curie Fellow at University of Leeds, an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Kansas State University, a PhD student at University of Michigan, and a BA student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. He is Taiwanese. He has published on the cognitive science of imagination, experimental methods in philosophy, and relationships between morality and aesthetics. His other research and teaching interests include philosophy of race and classical Chinese philosophy. His website is liao.shen-yi.org.

Oppressive Statues

Shen-yi Liao

In this picture, a Chiang Kai-shek statue is dressed up as Jason Voorhees, the serial killer from Friday the 13th movies: like Jason, it is wearing a mask and wielding a (handmade) machete. Just in case you missed the reference, the installation artists have helpfully hung a big sign over the statue that said “serial killer Chiang Jason”.

Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正) was a murderous dictator. He ordered the February 28 Massacre, in which 10000-50000 Taiwanese people were killed by the colonial Republic of China forces. In the White Terror period that followed, from 1949 to 1987, many more Taiwanese people were imprisoned, executed, or disappeared. Yet today, statues of Chiang Kai-shek remain pervasive in Taiwan. You can find them in parks, in schools, and in major tourist sites like the memorial hall that bears his name.

In recent years, there is a nascent movement to turn Chiang Kai-shek statues into installation artworks around February 28th. (The photo above, and many others, can be found at this Facebook group.) Some installations are serious, and others are whimsical. Some involve splashes of paint, some involves papers of victims’ names, and others involve even more elaborate props. By some measures, the movement is successful. Some municipalities have chosen to remove Chiang Kai-shek statues. And there is now increased police protection of prominent statues around historically significant dates.

There continues to be controversy about what should be done with Chiang Kai-shek statues in Taiwan. In this respect, they are not unique. Similar controversies remain regarding the John C. Calhoun monument in Charleston and Cecil Rhodes statues in South Africa and Oxford. In each case, the controversy has centered on the question of whether the statues should be removed or preserved. In Taiwan, the removalists argue that the statues must go because they are symbols of authoritarianism and the preservationists argue that the statues must stay because they are markers of history. Analogous arguments have been made with the other statues too.

I think the wrong question is being asked. The options of removal or preservation are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive. To really understand what we might do with these statues, we need to ask more fundamental questions about what they are and what they do. My answer, to preview, is that these statues are oppressive things that structure our thoughts and behaviors, and in doing so, they set forth norms about which responses to the statues are permissible and which responses are not.

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To think about what oppressive things are, we need to take a small detour. Around this time last year, I traveled to Miami to give a talk and stayed at a little bungalow that I rented via Airbnb. After a long flight, I wanted to take a warm shower before exploring the town for the evening. So I turned the shower on, but it was cold. I turned the left-hand knob all the way up and the right-hand knob all the way down, but it was still cold. I never got my warm shower that evening. The next day, only by accident did I figure out why: against the norm, whoever built this little bungalow had connected the hot water to the right-hand knob and the cold water to the left-hand knob.

This is a mundane example, but it also illustrates the ways in which material things in our lived environments can structure our patterns of thoughts and behaviors. In this case, the shower knobs structured my thoughts and behaviors in (at least) three ways. First, it served as a prompt for associative thinking. Unconsciously and automatically, I associated the left-hand knob with hot water and the right-hand knob with cold water. Second, it served as a guide for elaborative and imaginative thinking. When the shower came out cold, I thought to change that by turning the left-hand knob up even more. In fact, I did not even imagine the possibility that the left-hand knob could be connected to cold water. Third, it served as a motivator for behavior. I took the actions that naturally followed my automatic and deliberate thoughts.

There is an especially interesting class of material things that structure our patterns of thoughts and behaviors in congruence with systems of oppression. Call them oppressive things. Chiang Kai-shek statues are good examples.

Signs of their oppressive nature can be found in the guidelines for their construction. Like other such statues, they are not intended to be neutral historical representations of a person. Instead, as the guideline states, they are sculpted to show Chiang Kai-shek’s “spirit of compassion, wisdom, courage, determination, and optimism”. They are also more than statues of a person. Given the social and historical context in which the “mainland Chinese” (waishengren) exerted violent domination over the “Taiwanese” (benshengren), these statues also function as physical anchors of that oppression.

These oppressive things demand people in their presence to associate Chiang Kai-shek and his oppression with compassion and courage. In turn, the statues also function as guides for mandated re-imaginings of Chiang Kai-shek and of Taiwanese history. And, of course, these ways of thinking are intended to encourage behaviors of honor and respect. The official authorization of these statues’ physical presence adds another dimension to their impact: they do not merely structure particular patterns of thoughts and behaviors, they are meant to normalize them.

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We can also think about what oppressive things do by exploring an analogy between language and art. A central insight of speech act theory is that words do not merely represent, they also do things. As mentioned, oppressive things such as Chiang Kai-shek statues also do more than just represent. In particular, qua public statues, they not only encourage some behaviors like honor and respect, they also prohibit other behaviors.

In a series of papers, Mary Kate McGowan has honed in on a kind of speech act called the exercitive, which enacts permissibility facts. Consider one of her examples. A restaurant owner in the segregated South puts up a sign in his restaurant that says “Whites Only”. In doing so, he does not merely represent the racial composition of his clientele, he also makes it the case that non-whites are not permitted to enter his restaurant. In this example, the sign has this force partly because the permissibility facts it enacts are in congruence with racial oppression in the US.

Oppressive things also enact permissibility facts. Even if you do not judge Chiang Kai-shek to be worthy of honor and respect, in the statues’ presence you must behave as if you do. You are not permitted to act disrespectfully toward the statue. For example, you cannot place a mask over its face, put a machete in its hand, and label it “serial killer Chiang Jason”. Indeed, as mentioned, Chiang Kai-shek statues demand so much honor and respect that police protections are necessary to preempt such behaviors.

People do things with words, even if the words are not their own. By letting the “Whites Only” sign stand, the patrons of the racist restaurant are consenting to, and perhaps socially sanctioning, the permissibility facts that the “Whites Only” sign enacts. Similarly, by letting oppressive things stand, we also seem to be consenting to, and perhaps socially sanctioning, the permissibility facts that they enact.

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Despite some differences, there are obvious similarities between the oppressive statues and institutions named after dead racists. In writing about the latter, Regina Rini has argued that to answer the question of should we rename institutions that honor dead racists, we need not ask for comprehensive judgments of the dead racists’ moral character; rather, we need to only ask ourselves whether the continuing uses of the dead racists’ names reflect our values.

I think Rini’s insight applies to oppressive things too. We need not be asked to make comprehensive judgments about the moral characters of the people represented. Instead, we need to only ask ourselves whether we want to continue to encourage particular patterns of thoughts and behaviors, and to continue to enact particular permissibility facts.

Suppose we decide that we do not, removal is not the only option. There are other ways of changing the thoughts and behaviors that Chiang Kai-shek statues encourage and the permissibility facts that they enact. For example, we as a democracy might open them up as materials for installation artworks that critically examine Chiang Kai-shek or his oppression. In doing so, the statues can remain markers of history—not only of the past, but also of our present.

Jason D’Cruz is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University at Albany, State University of New York. During Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 he is a visiting scholar (chercheur invité) at the Centre de recherche en éthique (CRE) at Université de Montréal, where he is writing a book on trust and distrust. He is giving a colloquium paper entitled “The Moral Stakes of Distrust” at the upcoming APA Pacific Meeting in Seattle on April 14.

His work in ethics and moral psychology focuses on the topics of trust, promising, rationalization, and self-deception. His recent work appears in Ethics, Philosophical Psychology, Ratio, the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

You can find links to his work at his website.

Reasons to Renounce Distrust

Jason D’Cruz

What are good epistemic reasons to distrust a person? How do these reasons square with moral reasons to give someone the benefit of the doubt? When do we have moral reason to renounce distrust, and what does renouncing distrust amount to if feelings of distrust are not under a person’s control? These are the issues that guide my present research and that keep me up at night. Rather than attempt to canvass answers in this blog post, my aim is to convince you of the moral urgency and of the philosophical interest of the questions.

Here’s a real-life case that has stuck with me.

When Dr. Cross boarded Delta flight 945 from Detroit to Minneapolis last October, she confronted a situation where her skills as a physician would be of vital use, but where her offer of assistance would be declined. A Washington Post story on the incident describes the circumstance with economy: “Unconscious man on plane. Wife screaming. Doctor is two rows away. What happens next? Emergency care is delayed because flight attendant doesn’t believe black woman is a doctor. True story.” In a Facebook post that subsequently went viral, Cross relates how her offer of help was met with the patronizing response, ‘Oh no, sweetie put ur hand down; we are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some type of medical personnel. We don’t have time to talk to you.”

Cross’s story is an object lesson in the power of distrust to insult. Several features of the story explain the fittingness of Cross’s feelings of insult: the condescending tone of the flight attendant (“sweetie”); the assumption that Cross couldn’t be a “real” doctor; the further the presumption that either Cross was not speaking honestly when she described her credentials, or else, perhaps worse, that she was not competent to discern her own status as a physician.

I propose that this kind of interaction, and many others like it, are of normative consequence that is presently under-appreciated by moral philosophers. Unwarranted distrust that is predicated on prejudice is pervasive phenomenon whose moral complexity theorists have yet to reckon fully with. If we reflect as deeply as we should, cases like this call on us to consider the high moral stakes of distrust, and in particular, to pay attention to the consequence of typically non-deliberative and spontaneous behavior that is expressive of attitudes and emotions constitutive of fearful distrust.

Here’s another case that has stuck with me. In a 1990 NYTimes op-ed, later re-written for Ebony, the philosopher Laurence Thomas relates with bitter irony that, “At times, I have looked over my shoulder expecting to see the danger to which a White was reacting, only to have it dawn on me that I was the menace.” Thomas argues that black men rarely enjoy the “public trust […] no matter how much their deportment or attire conform to the traditional standards of well-off White males.” To enjoy the public trust means “to have strangers regard one as a morally decent person in a variety of contexts.” Distrust of black men is rooted in a fear that “goes well beyond the pale of rationality” and eats away at a person’s capacity for trustworthiness:

Thus the sear of distrust festers and becomes the fountainhead of low self- esteem and self-hate. Indeed, to paraphrase the venerable Apostle Paul, those who would do right find that they cannot. This should come as no surprise, however. For it is rare for anyone to live morally without the right sort of moral and social affirmation. And to ask this of Blacks is to ask what is very nearly psychologically impossible.

Thomas picks out a feature of unjust distrust that is particularly troubling: distrust, irrational or not, has a tendency to be self-confirming. Much recent empirically-informed work in virtue ethics has come around to Thomas’s view that in order for virtue to take root and thrive, it must find social support. (Ryan Preston-Roedder’s “Faith in Humanity” (2013) give a good overview). Maria Merritt (2009) points out that even Aristotle himself thought that virtuous character needs support from social relationships. Virtues such as justice, liberality, magnificence, pride, due ambition, friendliness, and good temper all require for their practice “a social world inhabited by a community of peers.” (32) Aristotle’s own conception of virtue is highly sensitive to concerns of honor. As Thomas shows, acts that signal distrust can be deeply dishonoring. My view is that we sometimes have reason to abjure distrust because we have reason to mitigate the risk of dishonoring a person unjustly.

Contemporary philosophers working on trust have focused their attention on hazards of mislaid trust, which they rightly point out can be confidence shaking, demeaning, and even humiliating. To be let down in one’s expectations is bad enough. To be made a fool of adds insult to injury, and can damage a person’s ability to trust in the future. Trust without due caution is reckless. On the other hand, distrust without warrant (distrust that fails to target incompetence or ill will or dishonesty) is liable to insult, demean, and disempower, planting the seeds of alienation expressed in behavior that does warrant distrust. As a result, distrusting others exposes us to a kind of moral risk.

To arrive at an understanding of what it might mean to disavow distrust I draw attention in my work to distrust’s practical aspect. In my view, distrust is essentially a protective stance that responds to the perceived threat of another person’s ill will, lack of integrity, or incompetence. I think it’s useful to model distrust as having a structure that is isomorphic to that of entrusting rather than to that of trust.

Entrusting is a three-place relation: X entrusts g to Y, where g is some good. Entrusting does not involve the expectation of any particular action on the part of Y. Rather, X puts some cared-for object in Y’s hands, on the assumption that Y will not do it harm. Distrust is best understood as a refusal to entrust or a withdrawal from reliance. My working model is that distrust is an affectively-loaded withdrawal from or wished-for withdrawal from exposure to the vulnerability of reliance, on the basis of a belief or construal of the distrusted party as malevolent and/or as incompetent and/or as lacking integrity.

One upshot of thinking about distrust in this way is that distrusting a person does not require the expectation that they will act in a particular way or fail at a particular task. Rather, it consists in the refusal to expose oneself to the hazard of reliance. The refusal to entrust need not be grounded in any confident belief; mere skepticism or suspicion is sufficient.

Attention to the practical aspect of distrust helps to uncover what it might mean to renounce trust, and how it might be possible to renounce distrust while still withholding trust. My proposal is that, when we have moral reason to renounce distrust, such renunciation takes the form of entrusting others with things that are valuable to us. To be sure, when we entrust in this way we may continue to feel fear and to continue to harbor suspicion. And, needless to say, risk is unavoidable when we entrust in the face of incomplete information. But by entrusting we give others the opportunity to respond in ways that show trustworthiness. And it is the experience of this response that enables those who renounce distrust also to overcome it.