The Virtue of Shame

Emily Maynard vs Guarding Your Heart. Another ship lines up a broadside against that rotten barge. Mostly good stuff, though Emily goes too far when she says that "shame and vulnerability are antithetical concepts; they cannot coexist." Shame, far from being destructive of sincere relationships, is crucial to them. It is a capacity to regard and to fear the judgment of others. It's a form of social moral reasoning that operates where the individual fails to reason for himself, and it functions just as much between two lovers as it does between a gathering of neighbors at a bar or a parade of activists at a march.

Emily speaks from a Christian subculture in which shame still operates. The particular moral reasoning of the Guard Your Heart tradition is wrong-headed, as she shows. And yet it is regrettable that outside that subculture, shame, especially sexual shame and the shame surrounding familial piety, has lost most of its power, and to the extent that it is still regarded as a substantial threat to practicing of all kinds of moral perversions, appears only as an object of derision.
Moderation! The dialectic of both...and, rather than either...or.
Roger Scruton is excellent on shame.
Keep in mind the background of Scruton's thinking, which is that personal identity is fulfilled through a pre-political experience of membership in a community:
"Man can set his feet on the ladder of self-realisation only when he has some perception of its reliability, and this cannot be achieve by subjective fiat. He must first find himself at home in the world, with values and ambitions that are shared. We must first be able to perceive the ends of his activity not in himself but outside himself, as proper aims in a public world, endowed with a validity greater than the validity of a mere 'authentic' choice."
(Scruton, but NOT from the essay on stigma, citation unknown)

Bad Apples and False Marketing

I want to arrive at the following conclusion, but I need help with the arguments getting there, and help with appropriately precise language: that there is something unethical in selling a ten-month cold storage apple I can get at the average local supermarket that rots in three days, is half-filled with internal browning, tasteless, and contributes next to nothing for your health, to say nothing of the externalized side-effects of producing that apple.

The problem lies not so much in the condition of the apple and its poor quality, as in the implicit false representation, by the growers and the supermarket, that it is an apple of great quality, as demonstrated by its bright color and its homogenous, robust appearance. Those attractive characteristics did not appear by accident. It's a question, I think, of false marketing.

There is a distinction between lying and deceiving. The concept of a lie we generally reserve to a deception where the good of the other is erased from our calcuations, and frequently where we intend his harm. A deception has a wider scope, and can include a simple trick, or a falsehood that is for the other's benefit (deflecting curiosity about a surprise party, for example), or simply protecting the existence of a secret from an impertinent questioner. Nevertheless it still seems that a righteous deception has to possess an element of truth - a deceiving statement ought to be able to bear the true interpretation even if it isn't the plain sense of the words.

For this reason I'm hesitant to describe false marketing as actually immoral; I don't think it's a lie in the strong sense. Though the plain sense of the colorful shapely apple connotes health and well-being, the marketer can reply that the color does not actually denote anything. It's simply colorful; color is attractive to the eye, and increases sales.

Hence I use the term unethical, by which I'm trying to get at the conditions that underlie successful business relationships, which is a variety of friendship, a simplistic friendship where each party finds the other useful. One of those conditions is veracity - truthfulness, plain speaking. Marketing's proper role is to make a product appealing to the consumer, and to make the activity of shopping pleasant. It goes beyond its role when it conceals imperfections in a product, to offer it for more than it's worth by implying something about the functionality of the product is true when it isn't.

An Austrian will tell you that everything is revealed in the price. If its a crappy apple, it'll sell for a low price. Good apples are expensive, and you'd cheat the world of apples if you insisted that supermarkets only sell great apples. Bad apples are what they are because that's what the market has settled on.

But I'm not going to respond to that argument quite yet, though to dispute the Austrian on his own grounds you might take up the themes of the ethics of information exchange, and the distinction between long-term equilibriums and short-term disequilibriums. And there are other ways to counter the argument.

Prudential Reasoning

If the Millennial Generation is fed up with politics, that is because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that modern politics is divorced from prudential deliberation, slavishly tied to personal success at the expense of the community. The young people are, however, extremely interested in prudential reasoning, and that is the way to talk to them. Apply moral philosophy to their personal problems, and build up to reasoning about community life.

But begin by treating your own problems. This is what I learned from Mark Helprin's novels: aim at beautiful action, and don't be afraid of radical solutions to distressing obstacles.

Don't kid yourself you have properly answered political questions when you have expounded an ideal. Supplement Plato with Aristotle. Roger Scruton does this sort of thing admirably. I recommend his A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism as an example of practical philosophy.

Fees, and Mark Helprin

No matter what the customer service rep on the other end of the line says, fees are always negotiable. I mentally treat a fee merely as a high bid for my custom, and asking them to waive the fee is rejecting that initial bid. The standard line you want to give them is 'this is important for my future business with you', but 'this is my first time using this service' also helps. If the rep can't help or refuses to help, ask nicely to speak to a manager. I saved $50 today this way booking my airline ticket.

Sometimes they are trained to withhold access from managment, and won't initially transfer you; insist on speaking to a manager. If that manager won't help you, and you have the patience, insist on speaking to his manager. Someone somewhere in the chain of command has the authority to help you and the wish to please customers. If literally no one will help you, do business with someone else. And use your story with the next business.

If the manager you spoke to was efficient and helpful, get his or her name. I feel that a brief email to the company expressing your thanks for that person's help is warranted and humane.

----

"So tell me where that other quarter point comes in," Mr. Edgar ordered.

"Asset rental and leasing, prepaid charges not accountable as reimbursements, and fees."

"Fees!" thundered Mr. Edgar. "Fees!"

"Yes sir."

"How many points?" he demanded.

"An eighth of a point, sir."

"Asses! he said. "Fees! No one questions them. They take advantage of people's lifetimes of passivity, their years of education and molding. There are two kinds of creature in the jungle--the tiger and the iguana. The tiger sets the fees, and the iguana pays them. I wantmore fees."

"Arbitrarily, sir?"

"What the hell do you think a fee is, Nichols?" he screamed at Nichols. "Do we have transaction fees?"

"On what?"

"On everything."

"No."

"Levy transaction fees. And maintenance fees. And fees for opening an account, closing an account, having less than three accounts, and having more than two accounts. I want to see late charges, early charges, and surcharges on other charges. I want a fee for foreign accounts, a fee for domestic accounts, and a fee for accounts subject to audits. You get the picture? Gradually double or triple these fees over a period of two or three years, and index them to inflation. Institute a contact fee, a telephone charge, a bookkeeping adjustment charge, a flotation fee, a sinking fee, and, you, Nichols, go to the New York Public Library and--I don't care how long it takes--find five fees that no one has ever heard of. Look especially hard into Babylonia, the Sumerians, Byzantium, and the Holy Roman Empire. Those guys knew what they were doing, and they had balls."

"But Mr. Edgar, we'll drive away our customers."

"No we won't. Just be prepared to drop the fees of any customer who appears to be making good on a threat to leave, and increase those on the ones who stay put. It never fails."

"Yes sir."

When Mr. Edgar left the River Club that evening, he was--although not immediately--several hundred million dollars richer. He returned ten percent of that to charity, and for this he was universally acclaimed. As he said, there are two kind of creature in the jungle: the tiger and the iguana. The tiger sets the fees, and the iguana pays them.

Mark Helprin, Memoir From Antproof Case