Ralph D. Ellis

Quantifying distributive justice: An approach to environmental and risk-related public policy

The most fundamental philosophical objection to cost-benefit analysis is that it fails to account for the distinction between more-necessary and less-necessary benefits. For example, it provides no way to avoid trading off a few cancer deaths in exchange for a more cost-effective but also more hazardous technology which provides cheaper paper or plastic products for the many. Since unjust distribution of benefits and burdens results primarily from the failure to prefer more-necessary goods (such as health and safety) over less-necessary ones (such as cheaper plastic razors), we shall see that a correct calculation of the rate at which marginal utilities diminish in value (as they become less necessary to their users) can determine ‘degrees of necessity’ and thus the most just possible distribution of benefits and burdens. One way to measure the rate of diminishing marginal utility is provided by the ‘wealth effect’ in occupational risk studies. Wealthier workers will not assume the same risk in exchange for a given salary increment (which to them is not very necessary) as poorer workers would assume for that same salary increment (which to them is more necessary). It is therefore possible to construct a mathematical model for the effect of necessity/non-necessity on quantitative decision principles for environmental and risk-related public policy, thus making such decisions more distributively just than traditional cost-benefit analysis would allow.

Tragedy, Finitude, and the Value-Expressive Dimension

Philosophers since the time of Aristotle have tried to explain what is sometimes called the “tragic paradox” — the fact that in watching a tragedy we positively want to experience the gut-wrenching feelings of grief and pain that we hope will be so intense as to move us to tears. A similar phenomenon also extends beyond drama to real life: We want to look at the picture of a deceased loved one so that we can grieve, to revisit the park where we spent time with a lost love, so that we can weep, to get the pianist to play the sad song again so that we can again reflect on how much sadness inevitably pervades life. Some might wish merely to write off such tendencies as symptoms of “clinical depression,” but labelling a phenomenon does not ensure that we have understood it. Labelling the desire for the tragic experience in this way would serve the same purpose that it serves for those introductory philosophy students who insist that we all seek only our own happiness; when confronted with counter-examples, they simply assert that people who do not seek only their own happiness are “abnormal,” as though this designation somehow blunted the force of the counter-examples.

Sexuality and Infatuation

We have postponed up to this point any detailed discussion of sexuality per se because, in order to lay the groundwork for understanding sexuality as expressive and not merely consummatory, it was first necessary to develop the larger context in terms of which physical sexuality plays its role for erotic love in the sense we are considering. But it has also been apparent at each step in the analysis that eros is distinguished from close, empathie friendships primarily because sexuality is involved. The intensity of physicality is central to the entrapment in the involuntary, ‘fateful’ and predetermined qualities — the mental obsession, the inability to substitute one object for another, the inability to forget the other or give up hope in chagrin d’amour, and the compulsion to pursue a particular object even if at the expense of one’s own happiness. The way in which sexuality develops also, in many instances, leads somewhat naturally to the establishment of a space of empathy and thus, if the space is well-established, to erotic love. I shall also suggest later that, even if the space of empathy is utterly destroyed by the eros-destructive factors alluded to in the previous chapter, sexual attraction in some ‘physical’ sense may well remain.

Eros and the Value of Being

The remarkable fact that erotic love has survived even under the most various and sundry adverse sociocultural conditions (though it has not always thrived) shows that the need for the kind of transformation offered by eros is a very fundamental one for human beings. Under such conditions, the meaning of the experience becomes like the faint signal of a beautiful piece of music, surrounded by a great deal of static. If we know the piece well, we can appreciate it in spite of the static, because we know what it is we are listening for. In this case, we can hope to block out the irrelevant noises without also blocking out aspects of the signal we are trying to preserve. Similarly, if we understand the ultimate meaning of eros in its authenticity, we can then hear its faint signal amidst the static of both the sociocultural and the intrapsychic problems we have been discussing. In the case of eros, understanding the nature of the static that is masking this signal also helps us to focus more clearly on the signal itself.

Fear of Eros and the Fragmentation of Consciousness

Individual differences in the way eros develops, or fails to develop, reflect both personality differences and differences in the structure of the social community which provides a fertile or barren soil to nourish and sustain eros. These two factors are not completely separable. When we consider the various ways in which a stream of experiences can be organized to form a self, we find that eros is an experience that cannot thrive if there is too much fragmentation in the long-term motivational continuity of this organization. Yet some forms of society by their very nature fragment the stream of consciousness in such ways as to transform eros into almost unrecognizable (were they not so familiar) contortions. Typical examples of a partial or equivocal ability to love may manifest themselves as coquetry, insensitive reductivism, sado-masochism, and ‘non-voluptuous’ or ‘non-physical’ eros (which may be manifested in some cases as a form of ‘impotence’ or ‘frigidity’). Under the surface of these recognizable syndromes are structures of self-disorganization which also tend to permeate in varying degrees the ‘normal’ self in modern forms of culture. ‘Typical’ or ‘average’ love relationships thus show many of the same problems as the ‘dysfunctional’ types just listed.

The Destruction of Eros

In Part I we explored the dynamics of the way eros unfolds, the nature of the motivational values which call it into being, and some of the ways in which it relates to the structure of the transcendental ego, to the strength of the ego, and to self-deception through fragmentation of the stream of consciousness in a disunified ego. But there is a major enigma on which we have hardly even touched. Given the power of eros to transform a person’s being into a more intense and existentially alive pattern of consciousness, and thus to contribute to the sense of existential meaning in life and to facilitate the approximate actualization of people’s potential as conscious beings — given all these benefits, why is eros so frequently such a difficult problem for so many people, especially those who live in economically and technologically ‘advanced’ cultures?

Eros as Transformation

If conscious beings are sometimes motivated to intensify their consciousness through expressive activity, rather than merely to reduce homeostatic drives, then the prevalent assumption that erotic love is ultimately derivative from a reductive sexual drive is far from self-evident. For this reason, our inquiry here will begin not with sexuality per se, but with a question that has proven much more difficult to even formulate, let alone answer, in terms of traditional psychological theories: Why do people experience the intense, turbulent, and all-consuming passion which I designated above as a feeling of ‘erotic love,’ or ‘eros in the full sense,’ rather than merely feeling sexually attracted to each other?

The Obsession with Eros as Pointing beyond Itself

An obvious manifestation of the problematic nature of eros for modern people which lends itself to phenomenological reflection is the way contemporary culture is increasingly ‘obsessed with sex.’ Problems of sexuality almost always present themselves as embedded in the larger and more earthshaking problems of eros. As we have already seen in the chapter on ‘Sexuality and Infatuation,’ sexuality originarily intends not merely the reduction of a physiological deficit, but rather that I become an object of sexual attention and admiration for the other’s subjectivity. Thus the sexual urge ultimately intends that infatuation feelings develop, which in the case of beings whose consciousness is well-developed also tends to lead toward a space of empathy. And the space of empathy, when combined with sexual and infatuation feelings, will lead at times of existential need to the full feeling of eros.

After the Awakening

After the awakening, after the lovers supposedly have ‘gone off into the sunset,’ a crucial new question arises: Toward what is the process of eros ‘transforming’ the consciousness of the lovers? If eros is to heighten consciousness by pulling it out of a plodding sameness and complacence, it cannot do so if the awakening phenomenon itself is allowed to continue long enough to become its own stasis and lethargy. The motivation for eros derives from the fact that consciousness seeks not only happiness, contentment and the reduction of drives, but also complexity, value-expressive activity, symbolization of these values through effective work, life-affirming adventure, and existentially meaningful transformation. It is not enough to be transformed into a permanent state of hypnotic pining and daydreaming.