Συνήγαγον οὖν οἱ ἀρχιερεῖς καὶ οἱ Φαρισαῖοι συνέδριον καὶ ἔλεγον· τί ποιοῦμεν ὅτι οὗτος ὁ ἄνθρωπος πολλὰ ποιεῖ σημεῖα; ἐαν ἀφῶμεν αὐτὸν οὕτως, πάντες πιστεύσουσιν εἰς αὐτόν, καὶ ἐλεύσονται οἱ Ῥωμαῖοι καὶ ἀροῦσιν ἡμῶν καὶ τὸν τόπον καὶ τὸ ἔθνος. εἷς δὲ τις ἐξ αὐτῶν Καϊάφας, ἀρχιερεὺς ὢν τοῦ ἐνιαυτοῦ ἐκείνου, εἶπεν αὐτοῖς·
ὑμεῖς οὐκ οἴδατε οὐδεν, οὐδε λογίζεσθε ὅτι συμφέρει ὑμῖν
ἵνα εἷς ἄνθρωπος ἀποθάνῃ ὑπὲρ τοῦ λαοῦ καὶ μὴ ὅλον τὸ ἔθνος ἀπόληται.
Collegerunt ergo pontifices et Pharisaei concilium et dicebant, quid facimus quia hic homo multa signa facit? Si dimittimus eum sic, omnes credent in eum, et venient Romani et tollent nostrum et locum et gentem.
Unus autem ex ipsis Caiaphas cum esset pontifex anni illius, dixit eis,
Vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, "What are we to do? For this man does many signs. If we let him thus alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away from us both the Place [τόπος] and the nation [ἔθνος]."
But one of them, Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said to them,
"You know nothing at all, nor do you stop to consider that it is expedient
[συμφέρειν] for you that one man should die for the people [λαός], that the whole nation [ἔθνος] should not perish."John 11:47-50
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein has come into notice in these pages on three occasions. One was because of her excellent philosophical biography of Kurt Gödel, which I have used but not independently reviewed here [Incompleteness, The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, W.W. Norton, 2005]. A philosophy graduate student at Princeton University, Goldstein met Gödel at a reception at the Institute for Advanced Study. She relates a priceless anecdote of her encountering Richard Rorty in Davidson's supermarket, to have him gush that he had just seen the reclusive Gödel in the meat aisle. Gödel was missing by the time Goldstein made it to the meat aisle. Her book includes recognition of how Gödel's Proofs falsify the entire philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Next, unfortunately, we find her endorsing the hatchet job done by M.F. Burnyeat on Socrates ["The Impiety of Socrates," Ancient Philosophy 17, No. 1, 1997]. Burnyeat's accusations and arguments are carefully deconstructed here. Finally, she has been noted as the wife of Steven Pinker, who is an excellent scholar of linguistics and whom I have defended against a Nietzsche Apologist who attacked him in the Wall Street Journal. However, both Goldstein and Pinker seem to be at the margins of the "New Atheism." Goldstein has received awards from the American Humanist Association and the Freedom from Religion Foundation and is on the Adivsory Board for the Secular Coalition for America. This draws little sympathy from me.
Goldstein's article in the present case is about moral dilemmas, at the moment in relation to the Corona Virus epidemic, and with the recommendation that philosophy can be of help in matters that now arise. Goldstein lays out the structure of some philosophical answers to dilemmas plainly, with John Stuart Mill representing a Utilitarian or teleological approach and Immanuel Kant for deontological ethics -- which she does not name but does describe as holding that "certain acts were intrinsically right, others intrinsically wrong, independent of their consequences." She finishes the piece with the virtue ethics of Aristotle, which she seems to endorse as the solution to the others and to any dilemmas described,
| Beginning, Virtues, Character | Middle, Action, Means, Righteous | End, Purpose, Goods, Consequences |
|---|---|---|
| Source of Action, Character Χαρακτήρ | Means, Μέσα | Ends, Τέλη |
| Actions, Means to Ends | Consequences, Ends of Action | |
| Aristotle | Immanuel Kant | John Stuart Mill |
To illustrate these alternatives I have reproduced a version of the table featured under the Value Struture of Action. We see the emphasis of each philosopher, of Aristotle on the source of actions, of Kant on the actions themselves, and of Mill on their consequences.
From Goldstein's treatment, it is actually not evident how "Philosophy can help us navigate" moral dilemmas, when the principles of Mill and Kant clash, or why she is going to leave us with the impression that Aristotle provides the answers. Goldstein says:
The munificent person will give, writes Aristotle, "rightly, for he will give to the right people, and the right amount, and at the right time, and fulfill all the other conditions of right giving." Among all virtuous people, he writes, the munificent "are perhaps the most beloved because they are beneficial to others."
What has always remained unanswered about Aristotle's ethics is what "right" is supposed to mean in these cases. What are the "right people," the "right amount," the "right time," and "right giving"? We have no way of knowing, and Aristotle's only solution, in fact the basis of all his ethics, is that the virtuous learn to do the right things by practice, by custom, and by habit, in immitation of the virtuous individuals they see around them. Similarly, the "mean," of the "golden mean," as between cowardice and rashness, could never be determined except by the example of those recognized by reputation as "brave" in the consensus of others.
This has never been much help; and it is the reason why people looked for rules, like those of Mill or Kant, in Modern Philosophy. But it was what Socrates was already looking for when he asked Euthyphro for a "model," παράδειγμα, parádeigma, that he could use as a guide for what was pious or impious, and what was not. Aristotle dismissed such questions and challenges, even after Socrates had said that those with the greatest (μάλιστα) reputation (οἱ εὐδοκιμοῦντες, "the ones of good repute") for wisdom, whom we now might esteem as "role models," were nearly the most deficient in it. In Modern philosophy, however, following Socrates, most philosophers want to know how you determine what is "right" in each of the cases. We need, as Kant says, something that "serves as a rule." This is alien to Aristotle's philosophy.
Goldstein's treatment provides no more help than any of the other recent enthusiasts for Aristotle's ethics. They get away with it because virtues are, after all, part of ethics. But then Goldstein misses, not only the need for the Socratic "model" and the rule, but the larger point, that actions and consequences count also, and that the dilemma of dilemmas is that Aristotle, Kant, and Mill may all, in their own way, be right. Virtues, actions, and consequences are all ethically significant. So far, I have not come across any academic philosophers who have any appreciation of this, despite the issue presumably being directly addressed in a book like Would You Kill the Fat Man? [David Edmonds, Princeton University Press, 2014], which, like Goldstein, promises more than it ever delivers.
Goldstein begins with an example, a thought experiment, that discredits Utilitarianism, that doctors take a young man, admitted to a hospital for a routine test, and harvest his organs to benefit six patients waiting for life saving transplants. This is the Utilitarian "greatest good for the greatest number." However, most people would regard this as criminal and, indeed, as murder. Regardless of the benefit for others, doctors have no right to kill healthy patients in favor of a number of others, although we have a bad feeling that this is done in China with political prisoners. Dostoyevsky offered the challenge of the classic case of torturing a child if it would somehow produce universal happiness.
Goldstein moves on to the claim that this kind of situation has actually arisen during the Corona Virus epidemic. But that is not quite right. Healthy people are not being killed to benefit virus patients. What Goldstein says is:
Doctors facing a shortage of critical equipment like ventilators are being called upon to make the horrific decision of whose life should be sacrificed in order that others may live.
That's not right. In emergency rooms, "triage" is often required, meaning decisions about who gets treated first. Fortunately, a shortage of ventilators in the present epidemic, if it occurred at all, was brief. And it turns out that ventilators were not always life savers, and often caused harm to patients, anyway. But the point is, no doctor during the epidemic is sacrificing healthy patients to save sick ones. Everyone involved is ill, and the only question is how care is to be rationed, if there are circumstances where it must be. If dilemmas arise, it is only about who gets treated first, and the answer to that is almost always in terms of who is the sickest and in the greatest danger. No one gets "sacrificed." This is not a dilemma of the form considered by Goldstein; and it is not even a moral dilemma when the issue is simply rapid judgments about who is in the greatest need of attention. That happens in emergency rooms every day, as anyone knows who has ever waited in an emergency room (for hours) for a minor complaint.
The next issue that Goldstein raises is that:
[T]he need for ruthless social distancing to curtail the virus's spread is at odds with the need to rescue the economy, with its diffuse benefits in health and well-being. Should the young and fit, who can better survive the virus, be encouraged to go back into the world and resume normal activities, even though that would prolong the virus's circulation, with fatal consequences for the less hardy?
Again, this is not quite right, on more than one point. First, "social distancing" is to slow the spread. This is not to "curtail" the spread, if that means preventing or limiting it. Slowing the spread, "flattening the curve," was meant to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. The virus will ultimately spread anyway, and the data is now in that people seem to be catching the disease despite staying at home. At the same time, Sweden, which has not locked down and did not close businesses, even restaurants, has a somewhat elevated death rate, but has not found its resources overwhelmed, or its economy destroyed.
At the same time, most of the "young and fit," if they catch the virus, have only mild cases. Meanwhile, the economy is not a matter of "diffuse benefits," but of the livelihood of a large part of the population. People who have lost their jobs don't need to be "encouraged" to go back to work. Many are demonstrating against politicians who have put them out of work. The Corona Virus may be the first epidemic in history where the healthy as well as the sick are quanantined, and where healthy people are cited or arrested for exercising, with "social distancing," in the open space of parks. Politicians seem to enjoy dictatorially setting down irrational rules, and then threatening people, or calling them "racists."
Finally, it is the lockdown and quarantine that are themselves intended to "prolong the virus's circulation," to "flatten the curve." The "flattening" itself means prolonging the outbreak. Some politicians now talk as though destoying the economy will allow for the disease to be eradicated. This will not be possible. And the public will not tolerate a Depression caused by such fantasies. A "cure" or even a vaccine for the disease may not happen. There is still no vaccine for the common cold.
Thus, the cases described by Goldstein do not embody quite the dilemmas she thinks. But in epidemics, there have always been methods used to limit individual freedoms in the public interest. Plague victims used to be sealed in their houses (the Chinese were still doing this in Wuhan), at times when hospitals simply didn't exist, the causes of disease were unknown, and treatments were ineffective to harmful. Briefly trying to slow the spread of the Corona Virus made sense when there was fear that a massive outbreak would overwhelm resources. When that did not happen, and parts of the country had few cases, quarantining the healthy made a lot less sense, and skeptics might begin the wonder if damaging the economy was a political strategy for the 2020 election, rather than a sensible epidemiological provision.
The governors and mayors who have been the most dictatorial and even insulting to "working class" and small business protestors typically seem to be in jurisdictions, like New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California, where radical politics has already been damaging the economies, and where people have already been fleeing to more business and liberty friendly States. This is certainly not a coincidence. Other places, like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which switched from Republican to Democrat governors in 2018, now discover similar tyrannical instincts in their new executives. While the Wisconsin Supreme Court reined in the governor there, voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania now face the consequences of their perhaps ill considered choices, just like in New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California.
Goldstein then begins to introduce her philosophers, starting with John Stuart Mill, mentioning that Mill promoted the Utility of "rules" rather than individual actions. This, of course, was arbitrary. Mill was trying to preserve individual rights in a system than would erase them; but a Utilitarian system holds no justification for respecting rules rather than specific acts that contribute "the greatest good for the greatest number." If our rule is that one innocent man ought not be allowed to die "so that the whole nation should not perish," the proper Utilitarian might wonder why we should allow the nation to perish, for the sake of the rights of the one man, when this will violate our foundational "greatest good for the greatest number" principle. Furthermore, it is not at all clear why the rule of "Utility" is a moral duty in the first place, especially when the theory of Jeremy Bentham and Mill is based on maximizing pleasure rather than a "good" that might impose some kind of obligation, as claimed by St. Thomas Aquinas. Nietzsche thought that Utilitarianism and its hedonism were laughable.
But I may be straying from the main argument. Goldstein says:
Yes, worshipers ought to be free to worship, but the contagiousness of the disease means that they would be depriving others of their freedom -- in particular, their choosing to survive in good health.
Again, this is a poor example for Goldstein. Citizens have been threatened for sitting in their cars during church services, listening on their radios, despite the impossiblity of their spreading any contagion thereby. Political authorities have simply decided that religious observance is not an "essential service" and thus could be arbitrarily prohibited, regardless of "social distancing," despite markets and liquor stores remaining open as "essential." This reflected, not rational epidemiology, but hostility to religion, a point that might escape the notice of Rebecca Goldstein the secularist and atheist.
Goldstein then moves on to Kant and considers the terms of the (unamed) Categorical Imperative, first that a moral rule should be "universalizable." Her example is persuasive, that buying up toilet paper produces the very shortages, the fear of which motivated the behavior in the first place. Panic hoarding is, in those terms, irrational. However, Goldstein has no criticism of this principle, even though it would discredit the desire of children to become fire fighters, when it is impossible, and absurd, for everyone to be a fire fighter. When an episode of the "Muppet Show" (1976-1981) had the entire cast successively turn into the Swedish Chef, we see a vivid falsification of the "universalization" rule -- since this does not discredit the right of the original Swedish Chef to be a Swedish chef. The proper universality of a moral rule is that it applies generally, not that every individual Kantian "maxim" ("I think I'll have a doughnut!") can be made universal. Kant was confused.
Kant's next principle is to treat persons as ends-in-themselves and not as means only. Goldstein at least does not make the common error with this, that we can never treat persons as means ever. So she says, "to use someone as a mere means is to involve them in a scheme of action to which they could not in principle consent." This is accurate enough, but then Goldstein resorts to the inappropriate epidemic example that we have already considered:
This may apply to the societal dilemma of prioritizing the economy, with its diffuse benefits to many, at a cost to the first pioneers who return to work. If the young and fit are sent out to jump-start the economy, are they not being treated as mere means rather than as ends in themselves? Would they consent to their own exposure to Covid-19 or to transmitting the disease to their loves ones?
As I have noted, this seriously misrepresents the situation. Closing restaurants means they are not ordering food, ultimately from farmers. The income of farmers plumets, and they begin destroying livestock and crops. This then can produce shortages and price spikes in food markets, which is very far from "diffuse benefits" to people trying to buy food.
At the same time, it is not a matter of the young and the fit being "sent out" to work. At the moment they are beng forcibly prevented, against their will, from returning to work. So Goldstein has this all backwards, and workers are already not being treated as "ends in themselves." Their will and consent are already abridged on the grounds of "flattening the curve," when the reason and purpose for such flattening has generally passed, if it ever reasonably applied in many locations in the first place. At the same time, workers can be protected from "exposure to Covid-19" at work, with precautions, without destroying their livelihood or the production of (often essential) goods for the public. Goldstein does not seem to understand these dynamics.
Goldstein does finish her consideration of Mill and Kant with a sensible observation:
The difference between the utilitarian and Kantian approaches shouldn't hide the similarities. Both see the point of morality as tempering a person's self-interest with recognition of the self-interest of others.
However, others have a right to the consideraton of their self-interest because of, indeed, their rights. This is central to Kant, but it can only be acknowledged by Mill with arbitrary abridgements of the principle of Utility. Goldstein continues with this slightly skewed viewpoint:
Though both maintain that the individual's right to choose is crucial to human dignity, both also hold that morality demands we temper this individualism with a recognition of the common good. Behind both views we find the key moral insight that all humans matter.
Fair enough. But we should note, warily, that the term "common good" has not previously occurred in Goldstein's treatment, and that its indefinite usage should put us on our guard. Treating an individual as a "means only" for the sake of the common good would not be allowed by Kant's principle, while harvesting the organs of the healthy for the "greatest number" cannot logically be prevented by the principle of Utility. "All humans matter" can be erased by the latter, while its recognition in the former precludes the abridgement of the competent will of the innocent. So if Goldstein has something specific in mind about the "common good," behind which may lurk collectivist and Hegelian totalitarianism, newly fasionable among the young and old fools of American politics, we have not learned of it from her article.
At the same time, it is true that morality limits "a person's self-interest." This is the precise, defining feature of morality already recognized by Confucius, but rejected by Nietzsche, to whom the herd-like "weak" are the natural prey of the strong, the predators. That is the law of Nature and the Nietzschean principle of life itself. Respecting the dignity of the weak, the vulnerable, and protecting them, however, is the essence of morality.
Something else slips by here. "Morality demands" certain things for both Mill and Kant. But we do not learn by what right it demands. While Kant actually addressed this issue, although only with a confession that the transcendent status of Reason conceals the ground of moral duty, there is no explanation of it whatsoever in either the act Utilitarianism of Benthan or the rule Utilitarianism of Mill. The only reason for me to surrender my internal organs to the "greatest number" is the presumed authority of the philosophical Law Giver. I concede him no such authority, and the many have no right, by their numbers alone, to feed on my person.
Goldstein's "third alternative" to Mill and Kant is, as we have seen, Aristotle. I have already considered the shortcomings of an Aristotelian virtue ethics, which, of course, provides us no insight about rules for action, the dignity of persons, the meaning of the "common good," or even the source of moral obligation. Goldstein ends her entire treatment with:
Whether the benefit they [medical professonals] confer on us all is the goal of their actions or a happy byproduct of their virtue, their munificence justly wins them our love and respect.
We have not a clue there about what "morality demands." It certainly does not demand that particular individuals become medical workers. Indeed, Goldstein has said:
The reason we ought to nurture these virtues is entirely self-interested: to live the best life we can, a life of flourishing of what he [Aristotle] called eudaimonia. It also happens to be true that the virtuous person benefits his community, and while that may make him loved and respected, these side effects are not what make him virtuous.
Thus, what Goldstein has called the "common good" is no more than what economists call an "externality" of the virtues that the Aristotelian cultivates as a matter of self-interest. Indeed, the goal of life for Aristotle as εὐδαιμονία, "happiness," is defined as, "The human good [ἀνθρώπινον ἀγαθόν] becomes the activity [ἐνέργεια] of the soul according to virtue [ἀρετή]" [Nicomachean Ethics, I, vii, 15]. Nothing there about what "morality demands" or even about morality at all. Aristotelian ethics is largely a matter of self-respect. It is all my dignity, not that of those whom my actions may affect.
How Goldstein can offer this as the solution to the difficulties with Utilitarian or Kants ethics, with the issues she has raised like the "common good" or human dignity, is more than a little mysterious. It seems entirely irrelevant. Medical professionals, dedicated to their jobs and their calling, are praiseworthy, not on general moral terms, but in relation to the ethical responsibilities that they have assumed as part of their profession. It is, in a sense, above and beyond the call of duty and so supererogatory in relation to the rest of us. But we may have our own assumed responsibilities, in our own profession and calling.
The self-respect of the teacher, the carpenter, or the plumber, or Adam Smith's baker, is tied to the quality of their work. Any of them who doesn't much care, who views what they do as "good enough for government work," is owed no respect, regard, or confidence from the rest of us. This is a dimension of ethics that is overlooked by Goldstein, and other ethicists; yet even Sam Spade said, "When a man's partner is killed he's supposed to do something about it" [Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, 1929, Vintage Books, 1992, p.213]. Indeed. When you're a doctor, you take an Oath, an oath attributed to Hippocrates. Many doctors take it seriously.
However, Aristotle might not take it seriously, although his own father was a physician. His idea of virtue and dignity are for the attributes of a man as such, as a "political animal," πολιτικὸν ζῷον, while craftsmen as such do not share in that status. It was Socrates, willing to talk to anyone, who thought that craftmen, χειροτέχναι, had the only real kind of wisdom of those people he examined. In later terms, the Aristotelian ideal is someone honored as a "gentleman," who does not need manual labor for a living. The "better sort" among the Greeks, which included both Plato and Aristotle, had much the same idea.
Modern Aristotelians can try and fix that up, but many of them still themselves have minimal respect for manual labor -- as, for instance, the manual labor of nurses, who, on tired feet all day, in the presence of disease, unruly patients, arrogant doctors, confusing bureaucracy, bodily waste and infection, life and death, are far closer to plumbers than are the bien pensants of academia, literature, the arts, or the press. In New York City, some doctors and nurses have even committed suicide when overwhelmed by their grim work with the dying in the epidemic. This is all a sobering far cry from what Rebecca Goldstein writes about as "munificence." Medical workers are not liberally dispensing the largesse of a Greek, or modern, politician. They are in the trenches, in circumstances just as miserable, nasty, and horrifying as those in many wars. Their virtues are not "munificence," but dedication and compassion.
The Generalized Structure of Moral or Ethical Dilemmas
Machiavelli and the Moral Dilemma of Statecraft
Domnic Green is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and so not an academic philosopher, yet the problems with Rebecca Goldstein's book are pretty clear to him. He introduces the discussion with notes about science and philosophy:
You won't get much out of philosophers, either. I once found myself the only civilian at a dinner party of Harvard philosophers. They were more interested in property prices than the meaning of life. The only way I could get them to talk about their day job was by asking which philosophers they hated the most. Plato and Hegel, in case you were wondering. If Dominic Green came away thinking that academic philosophers didn't like Hegel, he was mixing with the wrong crowd. Hegel leads to Marx; and Marx leads to all modern radical politics, which has infected the universities with a fatal disease of intolerance, tyranny, and dishonesty. These tend to mean a new, or perhaps an old, totalitarianism, which actually ends up being Green's judgment about Goldstein. So, unless the philosophers were dishonest about Hegel, he was not able to get the drift of a lot of contemporary academic philosophy. But Dominic Green should be aware that the foundation of all modern totalitarianism is in Hegel. It is there that the moral and political primacy, if not the very existence, of the individual is erased.
I'm not sure that I see any popular demand for science or philosophy. Both are now deeply corrupted by politics; and what the public tends to demand are fantastic "New Age" or pop psychology versions of religion or philosophy (what is Jordan Peterson?), or the sort of science that condemns disagreement as "deniers," usually for, again, political reasons. For a while, it seems like most of the public philosophers fell into the camp of the "New Atheists," whose grasp of history, and even of philosophy, is often tenuous.
Here we may have the most revealing admission. Saying that we are "creatures of matter" involves denying, of course, that we might also be something else, like a soul. This matters less to them, as it happens, than the naive faith that materialists have in matter, which in physics has become a strange thing whose metaphysics is a question of debate and even alarm: Alarm to all materialists, if, as it happens, the world displays a duality that is really only adequated addressed by a Kantian approach. That is more philosophy than we ever see present in public discourse. Academic philosophers, with any genuine perspective, are missing in action.
Noting the title of Goldstein's book, we might consider her use of the word "matter" as a verb. Green will point out (below) that this doesn't work in French or German; and Goldstein's usage would be both more traditional and perhaps more the point if she said "meaning," "value," or "purpose." If we "long to matter," then we want to live with meaning, value, and purpose. But the difficulty is that there is a need for Goldstein to "place human self-understanding on a new footing" because of her own materialism and atheism (those questionable "divinities"), whose natural reflex is a Nietzschean Nihilism -- whose terms are what effectively dominate academic philosophy, if not the whole modern academy. Like Nietzsche himself, where the answer was simply power (itself appealing to modern academics, who Nietzsche would have dismissed as eunuchs), Goldstein must desperately conjure rabbits of meaning out of hats that are themselves devoid of meaning.
We might have wanted education to spread the scientific worldview, and perhaps for a while it did, but that is not what we see now, at any level of education. What is spread now is the quest for power of Nietzsche and Marx, where we got both nihilism and radical politics. What "matters," in Goldstein's terminology, is power, government, and the state. This creates even more "holes in our hearts" apart from the loss of God -- for which we might say to Goldstein, "Speak for yourself." Green's suggestion of "power, wealth, and fame" are close enough, although the complaint is that the wrong people ("billionaires") have all the wealth, while fame is little more than Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes, on TikTok.
If we gather than Goldstein herself thinks that "power" is offered by society now, but is inadequate, this may be disingenuous. In the end she will appeal to the power of the state to "create enough mattering to go around, providing for all what ought to have been the birthright of having been born." But free, birthright "mattering" from the government is, at least, socialism, if not something worse -- regimes where misery, despair, and suicide, let alone childlessness, come to dominate.
Religion is certainly on decline among certain people, and even certain societies, especially in Europe. It is hard to know what is happening among many Americans. Meanwhile, the Left has sold its soul to Jihadist Terrorists, who are willing to slaughter thousands, if not millions, in the name of God. The irony of that, when the Left is either atheists or religious radicals whose only concern is politics, seems to go unnoticed by Goldstein, or even Dominic Green.
The problem is not entropy; and science is certainly a "crushed reed" as a source of meaning. Behind entropy is the problem of order, which someone like Rebecca Goldstein doesn't want to tackle. Instead, entropy becomes the foundation of Nihilism upon which the materialist wants to build, hopelessly, some kind of structure.
So Goldstein doesn't want to address the paradox of order in nature, but only that "philosophical happiness" is a kind of order, which does not seem like the main point. An orderly life might be a kind of good, but a Fascist or Communist State can be highly ordered. Indeed, they revel in it. Individiualism is always "disordered" to the totalitarian. Many kinds of disorder, however, like crime, can be very bad. So the issue is not so much order or disorder, but good and evil. Something Goldstein seems never to address, or even mention.
We must consider the "sphere of values" because for "well-being and happiness" we must consider what is valuable, not just orderly. Since natural selection only produces survival, we must consider that not all survival, like not all order, is conducive to well-being and happiness. Indeed, Schopenhauer, if not Buddhism, sees survival itself as the source of suffering in life. Goldstein brings in natural selection perhaps just to remind us that we are in a world of blind, natural causes. Not a world of beauty and meaning.
"Forms of life" sound, of course, like Wittgenstein, with all his relativism and nihilism. His "forms of life" are, by the same token, "incommensurable," which might be a war of all against all, unless some common ground is conceded. A feature that may be overlooked here, although would also be a problem for Isaiah Berlin. What we then get, however, is a system of types, which is an intriguing subject in its own right; and the variety of types is more like a subset of the theory of the aesthetic variety of horative value in the Polynomic Theory of Value. Aesthetic variety, however, does not mean that all preferences are good; and hortative value itself must stand on moral imperatives, which mandates the coexistence of preferences that Goldstein and Berlin seem to overlook.
Goldstein's types are intriguing, but perhaps also idiosyncratic. That her illustration is of islands may serve to represent their incommensurable nature. Otherwise, we may gather that the principle here involves the various ways that people find various way to "matter" in their lives. Goldstein's judgment seems to be merely descriptive. The nature of the value featured in each "island" is not otherwise examined; and Goldstein's atheism certainly rules out her taking much of the "transcenders" island very seriously. She cannot say that Christians, Muslims, Hindus, or Jews (who I cannot find on the map) deal with anything real -- while the definition excludes transcendence that is not theistic, like Buddhism or Platonism.
Here Dominic Green begins to move into a critical appraisal. The thrust of his discussion seems to be that Goldstein's approach, through "matter," is trivializing, leaving out all the relevant ethical terms. That looks about right.
Meanwhile, in German, physical matter is Materie, but a field of study is an Angelegenheit, and the noun for mattering is Bedeutung ("meaning"). Ms. Goldstein's punning premise would be meaningless in the languages of Pascal and Kant. Green's point seems to be to emphasize the idiosyncratic nature of Goldstein's focus on "matter." Neither French nor German, nor Greek, use the comparable word in the same way. And since Goldstein seems to use the word to avoid more traditional value terms, like good and evil, or right and wrong, her treatment seems like an evasion. Just the evasion that we might expect an materialist and atheist to make.
So there is actually a contradiction. A Wittensteinian nihilist with "incommensurable" paradigms cannot have an "objective standard."
However, if there are "objective standards" of value, as in Plato or Kant, these will not be "culturally determined," even if around them there is cultural variety, as in the aesthetic variety of hortative value. Kant would not even allow that. The Kantian imperative is universal and necessary. We need Schiller's fix-up of Kant.
There were Greek materialists, but even Epicurus thought that there were gods. "Secular" is a term that applies to no Ancient state, Greek or otherwise. The separation of "church" from state was fought out in the 17th Century, but only adopted in principle in the 18th. And not everywhere even now, as the Iranian mullahs massacre citizens, by the thousands, as I write.
Whatever this stuff is like, it doesn't fit into Goldstein's typology. If "therapudic values" are part of Goldstein's "objective standards," this is different direction for her analysis; and I don't see it fitting on her islands of "mattering."
But one of the types, "heroic strivers," has priority for Goldstein. What it means may require an examination of Goldstein's book, rather than just Green's review. What is curiously missing from the "heroic strivers" island is the political fanaticism that killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th Century and that now drives the anarchist and communist rioters who try and prevent the enforcement of immigration laws, calling Federal officers "Nazis" and "Gestapo" just for doing law enforcement. They are actually fanatics with hatred and murder in their hearts. When a New York jury of fools finds Luigi Magione innocent of murder, which I think is likely, they may as well hand him a list of more people to be assassinated.
Unfortunately, Goldstein cannot "objectively distinguish" when she doesn't acknowledge objective right and wrong. And as for "longing to matter," she seems to have already admitted that the forms of "recalcitrant diversity" are incommensurable. Relgious fanatics in Iran and politican fanatics at home, and all over the place, are not something we can "accomodate" in a peaceful society. Goldstein would need to specify what is tolerable and what is not in the variety of goods that different people are going to value. But apparently we don't see that.
This is an absurd project. "Creating enough mattering" means who know what everyone is going to want, as well as what you don't want to allow, and this is not something that governments have ever been able to do, especially if everyone has a "birthright" to be given what matters to them. This absurd. Before we even notice that Goldstein has provided no foundation for "moral" judgment at all.
Green is probably on target here; but from what he says, it is not clear that Goldstein has a project that is coherent enough even to be totalitarian. Governments can buy votes, hand out freebees, and attempt to protect, or avenge, the innocent; but this is a combination of the corrupt and the aspirational confused.
"Our Search to Feel Significant,"
by Dominic Green
Review of The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us,
by Rebecca Goldstein, Liveright, 2026The Wall Street Journal, January 10-11, 2026, C11
I have no idea how the world works. I used to trust the science, but then I met some scientists. They are like the blind men who try to describe an elephant based only on the parts of it they can touch. The name of their elephant is unified field theory. Until this hypothetical key to the mysteries puts a bow on string theory and reconciles quantum and classical mechanics, don't bother.
Meanwhile, the demand for popular science and philosophy remains insatiable. Either Americans have stumbled into a golden age of self-improvement beyond the wildest lectures of Emerson, or an entire civilization is undergoing an existential crisis. As everyone knows what an "existential crisis" is, it must be that. We are more immersed in words, images and symbols than any society before us, but we cannot agree on why we should eat and pray before we love, or whether it matters at all, now that the AI apocalypse can finally unburden us of responsibility.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's "The Mattering Instinct" is an attempt to place human self-understanding on a new footing. We are, she writes, "creatures of matter who long to matter" -- to ourselves, to each other and to people and divinities whose existence we take on trust.
But mass education, by spreading the "scientific worldview," has "decimated the sense of transcendent mattering previously provided by religion," creating a "vast God-shaped hole in our hearts." Contemporary culture offers "power, wealth, and fame" as substitutes, but there "doesn't seem to be enough mattering to go around" in these forms of "exclusionary salvation," so most people must scramble for crumbs "like children beneath a piñata."
Ms. Goldstein, a philosopher and novelist whose books include "Betraying Spinoza" (2006) and "Plato at the Googleplex" (2014), argues that we can still redeem ourselves by aligning our need for mattering with the science. The mattering instinct "implicates both the most fundamental law of the science of matter, the law of entropy," as well as "the biological imperative to resist it."
"Our very survival," Ms. Goldstein writes, "demands that we are constantly required to pit ourselves against the laws of probability and resist the entropic transformation from within." The good news is that while the states that constitute philosophical happiness are "highly ordered," entropy goes from order to disorder, so sustained happiness is unlikely, and it might not be your fault if you're unhappy.
The bad news is that since "disordered states are far more probable, you have to work for your well-being and happiness." This work includes natural selection, especially if you achieve "reproductive success at an early age," before you're picked off by disease, disaster or the belligerence of your neighbors. Worst of all, this conflict "forces us into the sphere of values without equipping us to see our way through."
As the language instinct results in "the great variety of human languages," so the mattering instinct results, Ms. Goldstein writes, in "the great variety of incommensurable forms of human life." These incommensurables are driven by four "mattering strategies," which sort us into four human types. Socializers find themselves in social relationships. Transcenders believe that they matter to God[!]. Competitors feel good about themselves when they are winning. Finally, and foremost in Ms. Goldstein's estimation, there are the "heroic strivers." They accept that life is a losing proposition, but pursue what the ancient Greek philosophers called the good life and the modern American philosopher Oprah Winfrey calls living your best life. [boldface added]
Ms. Goldstein's step from the physical "science of matter" to psychological and social "mattering" proceeds along the narrowest of linguistic paths. To the Greeks, matter was hyle, "wood." The Latin equivalent was materia, which derives from mater, "mother." Medieval English speakers got matière from the French, then verbed the noun into "to matter." The implication is that mattering's networks of meaning develop like the material roots and branches of a tree. Certainly, Ms. Goldstein writes, "do I matter?" is the "mother of all mattering questions." But the Greek term for matter has no etymological link to the Greek philosophy of mattering, which included still-current terms such as eudaemonia (ethical contentment), sophia (wisdom) and telos (purpose). The intimacy of "matter" and "mattering" is a quirk of the English language.
In French, matière denotes not only physical matter but abstract conceptions such as fields of study and aesthetic phenomena such as the surface of paint. The verbs for mattering, importer and compter, have no etymological link to matière. Compter suggests quantifiable weight, and importer can also suggest metaphorical weightiness, as in "a matter of import."
As philosophy, "The Mattering Instinct" stands on uncertain foundations. Though "incommensurable" means that a common standard of judgment is impossible, Ms. Goldstein eventually argues that an "objective standard" can be applied to the varieties of human conduct.
"Mattering instinct" is used interchangeably with "longing to matter," but they are different: An instinct is innate, but a longing and its value are culturally determined.
In one of several misleading rhetorical sleights, Ms. Goldstein credits the materialist focus of Greek philosophy with inventing the secular, a modern concept.
The therapeutic values are affirmed by pop-psych clichés ("love bombing," "overparenting," "selving," Kobe Bryant's "mamba mentality") and slightly deeper social-science schemata (the Cantril Ladder, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, "actualizing" into the "emerged self of self-reflection").
Ms. Goldstein doesn't reflect on a behavioral driver that Darwin identified: our need for status. "The Mattering Instinct" is the view from atop Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs: assortative mating, "celebrity writer" friends, quips from Nobel laureates ("a smattering of mattering"), "brilliant" grad students having "brilliant" children. All would be well for the heroic striver but for the insolent judgments of "editors, curators, connoisseurs, critics, bosses, talent agents, reviewers, etc." These "mere mortals" are "so often mistaken" about actualized strivers.
Ms. Goldstein imagines a sweet spot that allows us to "objectively distinguish between better and worse ways to satisfy the longing to matter" while being "expansive enough to accommodate us in all our recalcitrant diversity."
It would be easier to argue that the best defense against entropy is to stand athwart any change in taste and manners, as Plato advised in the "Republic" [or, more like it, the Laws]. Perhaps this explains why Ms. Goldstein resorts to Platonic despotism to manage the brawl beneath the piñata: "The most pragmatic, not to say moral, thing that we" -- i.e., the government -- "could do for society is create enough mattering to go around, providing for all what ought to have been the birthright of having been born."
There is no birthright to matter, and this is neither pragmatic nor moral. The word for universal state-mandated mattering is much the same in most languages: totalitarianism.
Copyright (c) 2026 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved