A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures

"This is a completely different sort of book. It’s by Eric Schwitzgebel, an American philosopher, whose blog, The Splintered Mind , consists of thousands of his posts. Some of those are included here. In a sense this book is just the tip of the iceberg of this philosopher’s public working through of ideas that really matter or really interest him. What you get, cumulatively, is a glimpse of an incredibly fertile mind. I first came across Eric Schwitzgebel because he did an empirical study on whether academic philosophers—particularly ones teaching ethics—were morally good. He used criteria like how frequently they return their library books, or how late they are with their marking, things that he could find public data on. He revealed that ethics professors tend to be less morally good than other kinds of professors. So that was a fun bit of empirical research, but that then led him to speculate about why this might be and to reflect on the rationalisations or explanations of why philosophers in particular might behave differently from other people. That’s typical of his strategy. Take the title essay of the book, ‘A Theory of Jerks.’ You think that’s just a joke, but he actually makes the jerk a philosophical category of interest. He’s not worried whether it’s just philosophy or not, he does a bit of psychology as well. Here’s his definition of a jerk (from pages 4-5): “the jerk culpably fails to appreciate the perspectives of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or fools to be dealt with, rather than as moral and epistemic peers.” So he actually comes up with quite a precise notion of what the jerk is. It’s partly a response to Aaron James, who wrote a book called Assholes: A Theory and Harry Frankfurt before that, who wrote a book On Bullshit . This all sounds like it’s just philosophers having a bit of fun writing about these categories, but Schwitzgebel then moves it up a level and says, ‘Look, there is this category of people for whom other people are always inferior.’ There’s been a prime example of this in British politics recently with Jacob Rees Mogg. He’s a politician who claimed that the people who died in the fire at Grenfell Tower were too stupid to realise they should have got out, even though the fire brigade recommended they stay in their apartments. To me, that’s somebody who culpably fails to appreciate the perspective of others around him and treats them as fools to be dealt with. There’s an unwillingness to recognise another’s perspective in its richness and complexity, faced with danger and not knowing precisely the circumstance of that danger. Schwitzgebel also goes into how you might avoid being a jerk. He gives you the reassuring thought that if you start reflecting on whether you’re a jerk, you may not be a complete jerk, or you may have already started not to be a jerk. He talks about discovering one’s ‘degree of jerkitude.’ He has fun. I love his iconoclastic approach. He never gets stuck on anything, he’s always moving on to something else. It’s a particular kind of mind he’s got and he’s selected 58 of these blogposts and edited them, not hugely but to some degree. The range is also interesting. A lot of the entries are about morality, broadly considered. I don’t think he fits into categories very easily, though he certainly writes often on ethics. He’s a philosopher in the sense that Socrates was a philosopher: he’s somebody who challenges assumptions. His reaction to received opinion is to challenge it. So, for instance, Immanuel Kant is held up as one of the greatest philosophers of all time and is revered by many philosophers. Schwitzgebel calls that into question with an essay called ‘Kant on Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants.’ It’s pretty well known that Kant was a racist and he had absolutely obnoxious views in many areas, and Schwitzgebel goes through them at the start of the essay. Kant says masturbation is in some ways “a worse vice than the horror of murdering oneself.” Kant also thought a child that comes into the world outside of marriage is born outside the law and is therefore—and the implication is rightly—outside the protection of the law. It’s a very short essay, but Schwitzgebel goes on to say that it makes him slightly suspicious of Kant’s arguments in his Critique of Pure Reason , which are pored over by scholars and thought to be so brilliant. He’s raising the possibility that they might be quite shoddy arguments. They’re so complicated, perhaps nobody can really follow them all the way through or hold onto them. There’s a sense in which maybe Kant is just giving you the illusion of getting what you want. He makes all kinds of promises, about what he’s going to deliver in terms of blending rationalism and empiricism and finding the rational grounds for morality and so on, but does anybody follow the arguments all the way through? Schwitzgebel is prepared to be the child in the story of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and question that. It’s a really enjoyable book to dip into. I wouldn’t imagine anybody would read it from cover to cover. Yes, the classic trolley problem question. It’s fun, but there’s a serious thought behind most of these pieces. Some of them are very short. What he does—and what the best philosophy does—is he makes you think. You don’t have to agree with him and you won’t agree with him on everything, but he’s provocative. It would be difficult to read one of these pieces and not start thinking about what your own views on a subject are. There’s something about the tone he writes in. I can imagine a bigot writing a book like this and it would be dire. He’s obviously not a bigot. He’s adopting strong, controversial positions, but somehow he does it in a quirky, slightly weird way and I don’t find it irritating. There’s a persona behind it that is attractive, even though he’s sometimes saying some outrageous things. To me, it feels like you’re seeing somebody really thinking and it’s quite exciting to watch. It’s a philosophical personality that’s expressed through this book. Cumulatively there’s an effect. You get the sense that here is something you thought you understood and had a view on and he’s teasing you with it. He has an amazingly fertile imagination in terms of topics to write about. He seems to be able to find philosophically interesting material anywhere."