Just Assholes
I keep coming back to this odd case: the “just asshole” or the “neutral asshole.” This is the person who doesn’t treat himself as worthy of special attention because he’s special. That’s the standard asshole, who, on Aaron James’s account, thinks he’s special and therefore deserves special privileges and also insulates himself from criticism because of this feeling of specialness.
The just or neutral asshole, by contrast, treats everyone equally—which I agree doesn’t sound like an asshole trait—but he’s an asshole because he does so even when he shouldn’t. The person who treats his family and friends as just so many strangers to be included in any calculation about what to do is kind of an asshole: “Why should I come to your soccer game when I could spend that time helping those in need?” The person who views his commitments to friends as revisable if better opportunities come along is similar and also a kind of asshole: “I’d love to come to your dinner party, though I’ll of course have to cancel if a clearly better dinner party comes along.”
These people are interesting to me because they do demand a kind of special treatment, but they’re not asking for special treatment in light of thinking of themselves as special. In fact, these people would presumably be happy to have everyone think and treat each other the same way that they do, to have a world of people who treat each other neutrally, as strangers would, making regular calculations about what would make everyone the happiest and adjusting actions accordingly. Because they want a kind of neutrality, they’re just assholes.
If these people are assholes, albeit just assholes, it must because be because the special treatment that they’re demanding is special only relative to how we ordinarily believe we ought to treat each other. This idea has to be baked into James’s definition of an asshole, though it’s not explicit: the medieval king isn’t an asshole for believing that he is entitled to special privileges because of who he is. That (alone) doesn’t make him an asshole, because he is in fact entitled to special privileges in virtue of being the king. That doesn’t make him an asshole. He could still be an asshole by demanding additional special privileges that the king is not entitled to, or by insisting on his privileges in assholish ways, or arranging things so that he gets to exercise his privileges more often and at the expense of others when he could have demurred. So a king could still be an asshole, but not simply because he’s the king.
Less dramatically, but more relevantly, we think we have special obligations to our family and close friends. Not only do we want to do things for our family and close friends, but we ought to, we would be wrong to treat them as we would a stranger, and they would be right to be offended if we treat them as just one person among others, special only because we happen to be with them more often or know more about them, but otherwise not someone we owe any more or less to than any stranger. Treating a single homeless stranger like family makes you saintlike, but treating your family member like a homeless stranger makes you an asshole.
What’s weird about that is that this is precisely the view held by the simplest utilitarian: we treat everyone equally, calculate what makes for the most happiness, and whatever obligations we have to those closest to us come only from the fact that treating certain people differently leads to the most happiness, not that we have any special obligation to them as family or as friends.
Not all utilitarians have this view, and not only utilitarians that have this view. In its simplest form, many, maybe even most, ethical views think that we should treat all people equally. If we have to treat everyone equally, then we have to explain why there are exceptions, why we shouldn’t treat family and friends the same way we treat strangers, given that it doesn’t make sense to treat everyone as special—if everyone’s special then no one is.
So it’s weird to conclude that people who take these ethical views, especially utilitarianism, so seriously are, as a result, assholes. They’re a different type of asshole to be sure, but I don’t think this is a paradox, exactly: they really are assholes, even if they don’t demand special treatment in the way that a typical asshole does
Except for the following: they demand special treatment precisely in that they think they are exempt from normal moral demands because they know what ought (truly, really, from the “point of view of the universe,” etc.) to be done. They are insulated from criticism not because they think they’re special, but because they think they’re part of the select group who are actually moral. They know that people will criticize them, but they think they are right to keep acting as they act despite knowing how others will criticize them.
Can there be one truly moral person who sees what no one else in society sees and who therefore is in fact entitled to act morally even when everyone else sees him as an asshole? I don’t think, as a general point, that’s coherent, but that’s a complicated topic, one for another day. And what if they’re right? What if they’re at the vanguard of a change that will show, in time, that the rest of us were wrong? Can someone be both a just asshole and the first moral person? But that, too, is for another day, soon.
