#radicalsobriety

[soberhiphopmixtape-blog]

Food & Drugz

Provided to YouTube by CDBaby Food & Drugz · D-Ex Good Mournin' Amerikkka ℗ 2007 Deep Krate Recordingz Released on: 2007-01-01 Auto-generated by YouTube.

“The FDA has America strung out!”

[oneunaccountedfor]

Sobriety, Accidental or Virtuous

My good friend Rebecca recently asked me if it would be better for a person to pursue sobriety and still end up inebriated some times, or for a person never to be drunk because of an allergy to alcohol rather than a conscious pursuit of sobriety.

It seems to me that there are a couple of things worth saying in response. First, I’d say that I don’t think the relationship between virtue and goodness is coincidental. I don’t think anyone could be “accidentally” flourishing, because—while there are undoubtedly elements of luck in flourishing—part of our flourishing just is living intelligently, and intentionally. Put another way, it’s not right to imagine that one could accidentally reason through a situation; reasoning through or about a situation seems to be definitively not accidental.

So what does that have to do with virtue? Well, in truth, the “virtues” are ultimately just different domains of intelligent (or rational, or reasoned) living. For instance: “courage” is intelligence with regard to managing one’s fears in the context of action, “frugality” is intelligence with regard to managing one’s finances, and so on. Thus, you might have good fortune, and you might happen upon making the right decision, but you couldn’t happen upon a virtue—you couldn’t accidentally embody right-reasoning and its requisite habits.

Now, we don’t just take the virtues to be good means toward some other ends, we take them to be part of our ultimate good—constitutive of our human flourishing. To return to the original question, I think it depends a lot on particular details about a person and their circumstances. It’s hard to say, in general, which is better. I do think that without the intentional cultivation of virtue, one will not be living well (Side note: I don’t think that cultivation necessarily has to take a form that is fully articulable and explicit using the language of ethical theory, but it must be directed and reasoned). Maybe you are so thoroughly captive to inebriation, and it is so self-destructive, that you just need to drastically change your lifestyle and it’s not as immediately important that you have a solid, explicable sense of the right reasons. I do think, ultimately, only decisions made for the right reasons will be sustainable. I also think, as I said before, that right-reasoning is good in itself—so maybe you struggle with drinking, but it’s not so immediately dire that escaping it is more important than carefully reasoning that you shouldn’t drink and developing the right habits over time. It depends on your starting inclinations, your circumstances, etc.

In short, it seems to me that the ideal is that you cultivate good character and, as part of that project, do not seek out inebriation. There are different obstacles to that end, including ‘ignorance’ and ‘weakness of the will,’ and it’s not really good for us to try to separate those issues with too hard a line. Our project specifically is to bring our will in line with right-reasoning through good habits and practices. 

Thus, sobriety is not just about avoiding mind-alteration per se, it’s about cultivating habits proper to a reasoning being, orienting oneself around good intellectual practices and so on. Whichever substances or actions end up helping you engage in right-reasoning and right-habituation are just fine by this account. In other words, we’re not anti-drug, we’re anti-inebriation—where “inebriation” involves acting in such a way that inhibits right-reasoning and treats rationality not as a good. 

My inclination is always to bring it back to the bigger project of cultivating good character. We can really only isolate sobriety from the other virtues for momentary convenience, in order to begin to understand what kind of an anchoring point it is; in the real world, we can’t define sobriety independently of the other virtues, and we can’t effectively cultivate it without engaging with the larger project of becoming good people.

[oneunaccountedfor]

Sobriety is a guardian of the spirit.  It stands on guard day and night at the gates of the heart, to sort out the thoughts that present themselves, to listen to their suggestions and to observe their intrigues.

Hesychius of Sinai

[oneunaccountedfor]

A Short Critique of Radical Sobriety

I’d like to explore an interesting concept currently being expounded upon in anarchist circles – Radical Sobriety. It is not without merit, but on the whole I cannot agree with it, and I hope to explain in detail why.

This seems mostly directed at Wade Craig's post on sobriety. Consequently, I think many of the objections raised by the author are addressed in my initial argument and subsequent clarification. There is at least one point that I believe warrants a response:

While it is indeed important to be aware of ones position in society, and to use our intellects to try to understand and alter that society and our relation to it for the better, I don’t believe anyone would seriously argue, at least explicitly, that we therefore must do so at all times.

I don't have time to offer a full response at this moment, I will say that I have a couple of misgivings about the way it is framed.

1. Rationality, in the morally relevant and particular sense in which we are using it, is more than just an "aware[ness] of one's position in society, and... [the use of our intellects] to try to understand and alter that society and our relation to it for the better." For one, radical sobriety has more to do with one's personal well-being or flourishing than it does our ability to make society better (although that is no doubt also relevant to one's flourishing).

2. I think basically calling our position extreme (and not worth taking seriously) is unfair, but I also think there is a misunderstanding at play here. The author implies there is no difference between "The man spacing out on his television and the man nodding on heroin." This is precisely what we mean to dispute, not that we don't "all need a break, sometimes" (whatever that's supposed to mean). There are morally relevant differences between the two—perhaps most obvious of which is that the hypothetical man could turn off the television, but to my knowledge it is not possible to turn off the perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral effects of heroin.

There's more to be said, and I'll write up a longer response later.

[oneunaccountedfor]

"This post is my return to some of the thoughts I pointed out to Grayson, specifically what kind of being has totally lost the capacity for rational thought, and what the content of sobriety might look like." —Wade Craig

[oneunaccountedfor]

I think an easy objection might be that marginal humans don't even meaningfully have the capacity for the exercise of MRR [Morally Relevant Rationality]. We can certainly imagine someone with sufficient brain damage to make them permanently lack even the capacity for it, regardless of whether they try. I think the proper response might be to say that, (1) Those marginal cases people usually have in mind when discussing such objections are not anywhere near handicapped enough to lose MRR, and (2) If there were such a being born we could just bite the bullet and say it's not human in the MRR-relevant sense. I also think it might be interesting to explore what sobriety looks like under different circumstances. For example, in one situation if there were a drug that massively increased logical thought capacity while somewhat decreasing emotional competence, we might be able to say that used in the proper way that drug could be sobriety-inducing while in another situation it might be inebriating. When, precisely, it was acceptable to use could be a rather complicated matter.

Wade Craig

[oneunaccountedfor]

Radical Sobriety: A Clarification

Recently, my friend Max LaFave brought to my attention a very dangerous equivocation in my case for Radical Sobriety. His response concerns my use of Wade Craig's idea that drugs "strip their users of their humanity." This is problematic, according to LaFave, because it seems to follow that inebriation strips people of their rights (since rights are contingent upon one's humanity, or rather, the defining feature of humanity, moral agency). 

If drug use strips or even weakens us of our rights and responsibilities, then a lot of the most prevalent kind of abuse is justified. I could see a person argue that because he was sufficiently drunk, he wasn’t really responsible for his abusive actions in the moment. On the flip side, I could see that same person argue that if a girl they took advantage of was inebriated, she didn’t really have the same rights as if she were sober. 

This is certainly concerning, but I don't think it actually follows from the argument for Radical Sobriety. I think, rather, it stems from an unfortunate equivocation on my part. There are two conceptions of humanity at play in my article. I will attempt to clarify what this means, and why the trouble that LaFave identified is actually due to a confusion about our argument.

The Meaning of Humanity

One the one hand, we are distinctly human largely by virtue of our capacity for rationality (and, therefore, moral agency). On the other hand, our telos is intimately connected with exercising and cultivating this rationality. Teleologically, cultivating rationality is fulfilling one's humanity. This is the sense in which choosing recreational drug use and inebriation is the less-than-human choice, or the vicious choice. It is not fulfilling one's humanity.

One might think that failing to fulfill one's human telos, or in this case, failing to cultivate one's rational capacity, means that one loses the rights that are grounded in one's humanity. This is the trouble that LaFave is calling to our attention.

So there are two senses of humanity at play in our argument: humanity as a category, or humanity by virtue of rational capacity, and humanity as the fulfillment of the human telos, or humanity by virtue of cultivating rationality. There is one sense in which acting rationally makes one more human, and there is another sense in which simply having the capacity to be rational makes one human. It is this latter sense that grants one one's rights.

Charles W. Johnson has a bit on this idea of species normality with regard to the moral standing of non-human animals, but I think it is relevant and I will quote him at length:

...choose some mental property that paradigmatic humans have but animals don't. It's true that not all humans have that property. But there is another, closely related property that all and only humans (including all "marginal cases") do have: each and every one is human. This may seem trifling or crude, but suppose that Quo goes on to point out that being human means (among other things) being a member of a species whose paradigm cases have MRR [Morally Relevant Rationality], that is, one of the kind of creature for whom it is normal to have MRR. So even though there will be humans who individually lack MRR, Quo contends that enjoying the human form of life -- even if, in a particular case, the mental faculties that are involved in that form of life are undeveloped or frustrated or damaged (perhaps irreparably) you are obligated to treat them differently from the way you would treat an animal; for animals the place occupied by MRR isn't empty or inaccessible; it just doesn't exist.

This is the way in which we are humans by virtue of our rational capacity. It is this capacity that grants us our right of self-sovereignty, not our use of that capacity at any given moment. To quote Johnson again:

The point of the appeal to normality isn't relational or statistical; the point is to show how all human beings, each and every one of them, individually has a particular intrinsic property. That property isn't just sharing a species with other humans who do have MRR. It's having, individually, a faculty for MRR (whatever that may be), and we're supposed to be able to exercise it, even if in particular cases that faculty is not yet developed, or inactive, or frustrated, or irreparably damaged. A human being that can't comprehend language or engage in reflective reasoning has a something wrong with her (that's what calling it a "disability" or a "defect" means); a pig that can't comprehend language or engage in reflective reasoning is just living how the pig lives.

 Self-sovereignty necessarily follows from our rational capacity, but there's more to be said about why others should respect our self-sovereignty and autonomy. I won't attempt to make that case here, but I'll note that my friend Jason Lee Byas has written on the subject, and he grounds respect for others' self-sovereignty partly in our nature as political animals.

Nonetheless, choosing inebriation over sobriety is still choosing not to fulfill one's human telos, and is still (in that sense) a betrayal of one's humanity. It doesn't literally strip one of one's humanity, or make one not-human, but it does in an important sense constitute a failure or weakness as a human qua human.

[animalarchy]

Not so much Courage but an Excuse

I am 24 years old

And I'm just trying to figure out where I belong

I look out into the world and I do not see my own reflection

I look out into the world and I do not see the sliver of the horizon that my eyes are meant to see

That space that is the early 20’s 

While everyone else is trying to grow up, I'm just trying to grow

Because what I was taught about being an adult is not what I see as suitable

Because what does it mean? 

What are the privileges we receive?

The privileges I received as an official adult... 

I either never took or I soon gave up

Because I realized they weren't any fun

Because I realized they would eventually destroy my body 

and sooner destroy my mind 

Because I realized they were meant to numb me and dumb me down

Like they do for so many others 

But goodness… the process of giving them up or not taking them up in the first place 

In this culture of intoxication

Who are you if you do not consume alcohol?

Where can you hang out if you do not consume alcohol?

How do you meet other folks as an adult if you do not consume alcohol?

Everything revolves around it. 

“Want to go grab a drink?” 

“I’m heading to the bar, want to come?” 

“Want to go out dancing tonight?” 

All the invites are for places I don’t feel safe. 

All of the activities are things I don’t feel safe doing. 

All of the people are people I do not feel safe around. 

Because alcohol destroys the mind

Liquid courage is not so much courage but an excuse 

A reason to act poorly. 

Something to blame. 

Something else that is responsible for every bad decision we make 

Or if you’re a female bodied individual… 

Something else to blame for all the things we “let happen to ourselves” 

Because it’s our fault for being there

It’s our fault for being drunk 

But what if we just stopped? 

What if we had a clear frame of mind? 

What if we were always in control? 

What if we could always fight back? 

Oh, they wouldn’t like that. 

Oh, how we would ruin all their plans. 

Oh, how beautifully dangerous we could be.