There is a dogma that is operative in many social discourses. We take personal preferences to be unassailable. We take them to be beyond good and evil. We tend to think that Sam can like sushi, sunrises and Schubert while Allison hates all of those things, and neither of them be the worse for it. Ethical or moral evaluation of Sam and Allison, questions about how good they are, how well their life is lived, about their virtue, it is thought, surely must look elsewhere.
I think this is one of our most uncomfortable dogmas. Not only are we inconsistent in living by it, we are perverse in our multifarious invocations of this norm. We are not offended if someone declines a meal because they hate its ingredients, but we are offended (not all of us of course) if they're motivated to turn us down for more laudable reasons (such as an ethical or religious objection to consuming a particular product). Some preferences can't be criticized ("I like girls with blonde hair") some preferences we're split on whether they can be criticized ("I like girls that don't say much, that aren't too assertive") and some we're more than comfortable criticizing ("You don't like coffee/beer/scotch?! Just wait. You'll grow into it. Have another.")
Maybe you think this domain of discourse is not doomed to inconsistency. Maybe you think that we can justify our current practices, in part due to the sorts of things being preferred. It's ok to have whatever preferences you want with respect to inconsequential things, but not with respect to consequential things. But what of this distinction? And in virtue of what is something more or less consequential? Musical and aesthetical taste is supposed to unassailable; are songs and artworks less consequential than the cleanliness of a house, preferences concerning which we criticize all of the time? And are people (such as the blondes dispreferred above) of less consequence then coffee?? Maybe we can judge whether or not a preference is open to criticism based on what it is caused by, whether it's caused by open-minded engagement with the entity in question and an introspect assessment of one's own enjoyment level, or whether it's based on prejudice or fear. For instance, I know that my friend has said racist things about Asians. I also know he doesn't like pho. Conventional wisdom says I should leave such things where they lie (some like pho, some don't like pho) but surely we are right to wonder whether this purportedly unassailable preference is any more than a manifestation of a preference that we all agree my friend shouldn't have (a preference that the people he's around not be Asian).
I think that preferences are non-neutrally related with how well a life is lived. I don't pretend to know wherein these correlations lie, but I regard them as open to full-blown criticism. I think that preferences should be defended. If they are indefensible, they should be discarded. If they are indefensible and retained, they should be regarded as a fault. An ethical fault. A demerit in one's "well-lived-life" score. This is a heinous conclusion to many. But I insist that the very people who find such a conclusion unstomachable are constantly living by such an assumption. We are judging people for what they like and dislike all of the time. Sometimes we so judge them on the grounds of class membership. Someone's disliking red wine or Brahms indicates that she is 'not one of us'. Enjoying Phish or Brittany Spears makes someone 'one of them'. Sometimes we judge them because we fear one of our own shortcomings are being emphasized; I'll criticize Smith's preference for larger women because I fear that my own superficiality is brought into a glaring spotlight by his open-mindedness. Finally, we might judge someone's preferences as good preferences or bad because we have made our best go at a rational, reason-responsive assessment of the value that inheres (or fails to inhere) in x's and we judge people for failing to prefer (or disprefer) x's accordingly. This is not importantly different from our having made a best go at a rational, reason-responsive assessment of the evidence for God's existence, and subsequently judging people for failing to believe (or disbelieve) in God, accordingly.
When we live under the banner or preference-non-interference, we judge people's preference nonetheless, but since such judgement is morally reprobate according to our dogma we fail to distinguish what kind of judgment we're engaged in. If we open the floodgates, and allow that preferences belong in the space of reasons and should be accepted or rejected according to the verdicts of rationality, then we free ourselves to scrutinize the preference-criticism language games that we're engaged in, and to separate out the acceptable (the third kind that i articulated) from the unacceptable (the first two kinds, and those in the vicinity). If we then come to believe that some domain of preference-discourse is actually one where there is radical choice (Radical choice is when there are no reasons for or against ɸing) then we withhold judgment accordingly.
Justifying this worldview and exercising this sort of discourse will be one of the projects of this blog. It is one of my most dear, and least scholarly, intellectual pursuits. And, since one of the areas where I think people's preferences need serious engineering is food, this blog is a particularly appropriate place to discuss such topics.
Here is a valid worry: by endorsing preference-criticism of this sort we are bound to encourage discourse in which ethically irrelevant facts (for instance, that a sort of food or music is popular with certain socio-economic classes) are now wheeled in in order to confer ethically good status upon preferences that are endorsed for ethically irrelevant reasons, and (far worse) ethically bad status is conferred upon preferences that are disclaimed for ethically irrelevant reasons. To this worthy concern, I have three responses.
First, what is described here is a failure of rational discourse. That such discourse could fail in such a way is not a reason to be dismissive of rationality from the start (though it is a perfectly good reason to scrutinize its verdicts). The exact same problem arises in theoretical discourse (discourse about what we should take as true). We could respond to this problem by taking the truth to be relative to existent power structures and normative paradigms, and I have some sympathies for those schools of thought that would encourage such a response. Nonetheless, I feel it would be an overreaction. We respond to such traps by simply walking more carefully, by improving our methodologies in order to correct for any unexpected, unendorsed, and unacceptable factors (factors that are irrelevant to what is true) that are leading us to believe one thing rather than another. This caution should follow us into discourse about what to prefer.
Second, and purely anecdotally, I have come to the conclusion that one is very rarely (though not never) on solid rational grounds in inculcating a dispreference for something. Though I do think one should work to prune oneself of one's preference for inactivity, schadenfreude or bloodlust, I don't think that any harm is done by working to actually see what is preferable about Pho, sushi, Brittany Spears or Bach. To the contrary, i think one is the better for any such effort. So i don't anticipate the further marginalization of (might I say?) nondominant preferences. Rather I see the paradigm shift i am recommending as normatively binding dominant groups to seek to understand what is valuable in those things preferred by the nondominant groups. Having attempted to live by such norms myself, I nearly always begin my inquiry by saying something like this:
Community X has found it appropriate to encourage this kind of activity or consumption. I find it inappropriate. Therefore, either I am failing to see what is valuable about the activity, or else community X is failing to see what is disvaluable about it.
The latter option, while not impossible...is simply a strange thing to say. And one does oneself no service by saying it. So the result of such a paradigm shift (I, at least, feel comfortable speculating) would be an expansion of the endorsed preferences and a contraction of the endorsed dispreferences. This, it seems to me, would be quite the opposite of what the proto-Marxist criticism articulated above would predict.
Finally, it's important that we remind ourselves that such preference-criticism already exists. It simple exists in a certain rational no-man's land. People engage in it, but they don't know what norms to honor. People object to others engagement, but they don't know how to do so effectively and respectfully (except to retreat to the anti-preference-criticism dogma that I am suggesting ought to be dismantled in toto). So I would argue our current dogmas are far more conducive to the marginalization of non-dominant preference sets (and resulting marginalizaiton of non-dominant persons) than what I am recommending.
Thus I walk around the world with a systematic eye to preference talk, and a rampant skepticism concerning (most especially) dispreference talk. I seek to clean my own desiderative profile of anything that amounts to an "i don't like x's" unless I come to the rational conclusion that x's are an ethically bad thing to like, a conclusion I rarely come to. Far more often I think that x's are an ethically bad thing to dislike. My reasons, of course, vary from object to object, but in general I think that most of the world's manifestations have the potential to contribute to the well-livedness of one's life, and that wholesale rejection of any class of such manifestations is simply not-conducive to the well-livedness of one's life accordingly. I know that I make (or, at least, seem to make) a slew of assumptions that many will reject, especially those with particular views about the inherence of value. I have not really written this to persuade, although I have adopted a persuasive tone (perhaps I'll nab a few fence-sitters). Rather, I just wanted to articulate the view, because it is the backdrop against which a great many of my ruminations concerning value proceed, and will accordingly be the ground upon which much of the writing I do at The Critique will be premised (though I hope not so fully that anyone who raises exception with the above (and that will be most) cannot find anything worth agreeing with in my other writing on the subject). A full articulation was, thus, called for.
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