Akeel Bilgrami shitting on Subjective Identity

Two things are identical if they are interchangeable for a particular purpose. Identity is 'substitutability'.  It is only when we know that we aren't really substitutable for another in our identity class that we feel anxiety about this issue. This is why pedants teaching useless shite in foreign countries are likely to get obsessed with 'multiple identities'. At least that is the case with Amartya Sen and Akeel Bilgrami.

 Frontline published this interview with the latter. 

Last time, we discussed the distinction you made in some early articles of yours between objective and subjective identity, and we spoke mostly about objective identity. Can we speak now more on the nature of subjective identity? You have described it as a kind of identification more than an identity, saying that when one identifies oneself with something, one’s subjectivity is involved, whereas in objective identity, one has a certain identity whether or not one identifies oneself with that thing. So, what exactly is it to identify oneself as something, thereby forming a subjective identity. Is it an act of choosing an identity?

This is foolish. Objective properties are directly measurable or observable. Subjective properties are not. However there may be a way to make valid inferences about subjective states- e.g. getting an erection when you look at naked dudes suggests that you are objectively homosexual however subjectively hetero your Mom thinks you are on the basis that you have a poster of Lady Ga Ga on your bedroom wall.

After I wrote those early pieces long ago about subjective identity as identification,

which it isn't. One may identify as x without having that subjective or objective identity. I'm not actually a member of the British Royal Family though I frequently claim to be Meghan Markel when of strong drink taken.  

some people did use just your term “choose” to describe what subjective identity or identifying with something is, though I myself have avoided using that word. 

Why would you want to avoid it?

Coz he didn't choose to be Gay. Unless he isn't gay at all. However, it is my firm belief that all them posh bastids be as queer as fuck. That's why the girls like them.  

I think the rhetoric of choosing is quite misleading. It is not as if it isn’t sometimes apt, but it is mostly not apt, and so it should not be the rhetoric we adopt as a general or generic description of subjective identity.

In general something more than choice is involved in achieving 'substitutability' within an identity class. I may choose to be a Doctor but if I can't get into Medical School or end up sticking the ear pieces of the stethoscope up my nostrils, then my choice is not effectual. 

What is misleading about saying we choose our identity?

I think, if you give that as a general description of subjective identity, it makes subjective identity come off as too voluntaristic . A subject can be involved in identity-formation without it being a matter of sheer will, sheer subjective decision, as to what the identity is. As I said, though it can happen sometimes, of course, that I choose my identity de novo , usually when my subjectivity is active, it takes the form of endorsing something I already have objectively.

There are aspects of my identity which are purely 'voluntaristic'- e.g. my choice, under advisement, of a less hackable computer password or PIN code. If I had to choose a new identity under a Witness protection program, I'd be advised not to repeat any familiar pattern. But somethings would be difficult to change. I could show myself as an Anglican not a Hindu. But I couldn't show myself as an Anglo-Saxon, not a South Indian. 

 To go deeper into the matter, Brouwer's notion of a choice-sequence is helpful. A 'law-less' sequence must be purely 'voluntaristic'. This is an open question in maths. Bilgrami, of course, is blissfully ignorant of this. 

Can you give an example of how it can be misleading to talk of choosing?

Yes, it would be misleading for me to say I choose my Indian identity.

Actually, from the legal point of view, Bilgrami has chosen to remain Indian. He could have taken an American passport.  

I endorse the fact of my being Indian and make it in some way central to my life.

By living in America. In somewhat the same way, I endorse the fact of my being British and make it central to my life-project of becoming a member of the Royal Family and doing indecent things with horses.  

That is, I endorse and make central something ongoing, some relatively objective fact, something given to me by my birth and biography. I need not have endorsed it, nor made it central in my life. I might have instead identified myself as an American, endorsing a different fact of my biography, my having been domiciled there for over four decades now, but I don’t. (As it happens, by the way, I don’t even have an objective American identity in any formal sense since I don’t have an American passport; I am still an Indian citizen.)

I don’t think we should confuse the fact that my endorsing of some given facts about me (rather than other given facts about me) is something I choose to do with the fact that I choose my identity . To say I choose my identity gives the impression that I go around choosing to be anything I like even if it is not an endorsing of anything that is already given to me in some more objective sense. If I can choose any identity in that way, then it would seem to follow that I can just choose the identity, say, of being an African American. Now, under some very unusual circumstances, we can imagine that happening.

Kamala Harris pretends to be African American though she was actually Afro-Caribbean and South Indian. Is anybody actually fooled? Obama wasn't African American. His father was African period. His mother was American period. So was he.  

But, by and large, the question of choice is only over which given facts about me I should endorse and not directly choice over one’s identity.

Technology is changing this. Identity is becoming more 'voluntaristic'. Political and Legal changes also play a part. There was a time when a person was interchangeable with others of his clan for the purpose of vendetta.

So you are saying “choosing” identity happens only exceptionally. When does it happen?

Sometimes choosing is done somewhat flamboyantly and, as it were, metaphorically, however seriously intended. I remember someone writing to me from Paris after September 11 [2001] “We are all New Yorkers now” as a way of expressing sympathy for what New York had just been through.

In which case no 'choosing' was involved. The lady was saying that all Western countries felt the same way and would come together to fulfil their treaty obligations under NATO. The fact that she was French was particularly meaningful because of France's complicated relationship with that Alliance.  

Well, OK, so obviously that is a kind of highly contextualised identification, and it is not endorsing any objective facts about the person. (She was a Frenchwoman who had never been to New York.) More real cases of choosing one’s identity de novo that do not go via endorsing objective facts about oneself are conversion to another religion on the basis of finding its doctrine attractive, say, or the transgender phenomenon.

This is not generally the case. Converts feel they have returned to their natural, Divinely ordained, religion. Gender reassignment is about getting the type of body you know is right for you. 

Here, we repudiate objective facts about oneself and seek to adopt altogether new facts. But most subjective identities are not like that, which is why I prefer to speak of forming one’s subjective identity not by choosing it (directly), as in these cases, but rather by choosing to endorse some given facts about myself. These cases (transgender, religious conversion) should be seen as somewhat exceptional cases.

Subjective facts are things like 'I feel happy'. They are not observable. What Bilgrami means by 'subjective identity' is feelings about identities. While watching a Bond movie I have the subjective identity of a secret agent. While watching a Satyajit Ray movie I have the subjective identity of a White Racist expressing impatience that the emaciated brown folk on the screen aren't just starving to death already.  

But did you not choose your identity of being a professor or an academic?

Yes, I chose to be an academic, but not everything of that kind that I choose constitutes what I mean by subjective identity. Having chosen it, I may not identify with it. As a result of my choosing to be an academic, it is a fact about me now that I am an academic and I chose to make it a fact. But it is only if I go on to endorse that fact about me and make it central in some way that I can be said to have that identity in the subjective sense.

This is nonsense. Nothing subjective needs further 'endorsement'. Will you really stop feeling happy if you don't notarize a document to that effect? 

And I may not endorse it, I may not identify with it because I may feel quite alienated from the academic profession.

Fair point. Subjectively one may want an identity as a super-hero or a great inventor. Teaching worthless shite to retards isn't how one hoped one's life would work out even if one was oneself a retard who could only get a credential in worthless shite.  

And when that happens, I think we cannot say that it is my subjective identity. So, when it comes to the issue of identity, my having chosen to be an academic is neither here nor there.
‘Who am I?’


Yes, that makes sense. In the last interview, you spoke about how objective identity relates to society and politics.

Objectively, I aint the Queen of Engyland. Sad.  

How does subjective identity relate to them?

Subjectively I am the biggest fattest queen in Engyland even tho' I iz straight.  

The most general way of describing subjective identity is to say that it emerges as an answer we give to a question that we pose to ourselves: Who am I?

Not in Hinduism. The answer turns out to be You is God but not, sadly, one of the cool deities with lots of arms and heads. 

It is doubtful that people go around asking 'Who am I?' unless they have amnesia or like talking bollocks.  

Now, it is often said that one only asks the question of identity, the question “Who am I?”, when one has been dislocated from one’s moorings in one’s own locality in some way.

Nonsense! People may ask 'where am I' if they get 'unmoored' but that's about the size of it. I never asked myself whether I was Indian or British because it was obvious that I am a South Indian living in London. No doubt, if I wanted to write a shite series for the BBC about an elderly Tamil man's sexual self-awakening in the Sado-Masochistic dungeons of the Women's Institute, then I'd have to pretend to ask such asinine questions. Come to think of it, if pressed I'd chose to have a Welsh identity instead of a Tamil one. This is because my rectum might be able to accommodate a leek as opposed to a coconut. 

The question does not arise for us if we unselfconsciously feel a sense of belonging in a place and among a community of people. I think there is something right about this. I think what this view is resisting is an overly philosophical understanding of identity such as those of the existentialists. Someone like [Jean-Paul] Sartre, for instance, especially in his early pre-Marxist and pre-Maoist phase, used to say that we are in some sense always stuck with the question of identity.

But only in the same sense that we have a coconut up our pooper. . 

It is the human condition to ask “Who am I?”,

No. It is the human condition to ask 'What should I eat?'  

the condition of being “thrown” (a favourite term among existentialists) by one’s birth as an individual into the world, having to form one’s identity through one’s life decisions, and struggling to preserve it against the various opportunities for bad faith.

Is bullshit. Babies say 'ba ba!' and 'ga ga'. They don't complain of being 'thrown' up in the air. They think it is a fine game.  

That idea of identity seems to me to be unhelpfully general, and I think it is an advance on it to say that the question of identity tends to arise in our minds only under specific conditions when there is some dislocation.

Not really. On the other hand, some people may simply have a weak sense of personal identity or suffer some sort of psychiatric malady. Sadly, those psychiatrists who dabbled in Existential shite became crazier than their patients. 

You mean dislocation as in the case of refugees?

Some refugees miss home. They miss their old life. They find that being a refugee is horrible. Others make the best of their new opportunities. But this has nothing to do with identity. Oikeiosis maybe. But that's not identity.  

The most obvious cases of dislocation are physical or geographical, yes. Refugees are the most dramatic case, though, of course, you will find the question arising more generally and very frequently among immigrants of all kinds (whether across countries or even within one’s own country [when one moves] from one place where one was culturally tethered to another). I assure you that it takes a lot of moral shrewdness and cunning to navigate one’s life as an immigrant. Many immigrants, though not all, understandably struggle with issues such as how much should one assimilate without losing self-respect; how much should one adapt to the mores, the customs and values of one’s new setting; and when should one resist it…. These are all issues relevant to subjective identity.

Actually, they turn out to be completely irrelevant. During a war or other emergency, people come together. They have a common identity which leads them to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Even the stupidest existentialist understood that the French needed to kill the Nazi occupiers. Sadly, they then went too far and gave women the vote. This meant the end of licensed brothels. French men had to start competing for nookie. The soon stopped smelling bad and some even began to look quite handsome. 

But I think we should not interpret “dislocation” too narrowly, restricting it to such cases of geographical dislocation. One can be socially dislocated even while sedentary . This could happen because of large alterations in one’s environment, especially alterations in the economy or political changes of one kind or another. And one can be psychologically dislocated by various forms of social and political trauma…. All of these dislocations prompt questions such as “Who am I?”. And more particularly, they prompt “quests” for identity, of seeking and finding an appeal in one or other source of belonging as a response to the dislocation.

So this is about belonging- oikeiosis- not identity per se. One can feel one belongs to a family or locality or nation or religion without having the ability to contribute to it in anyway. Identity is what one gains once this ceases to be true. One has become interchangeable with those who allowed that oikos or ethne or nation or religion to thrive.  

But does not someone who asks the question Who am I? give very different answers to it in different situations and contexts? Is this not what is sometimes called “hybridity”?

It is called meaningless chatter.  

Well, first of all, “hybridity” is a very inappropriate conceptualisation for this phenomenon because hybridity is an organic idea, but the trouble is that the theorists who use that term are all convinced that they are talking about constructed subjects and identities. So that is an elementary mistake in their conceptualisation.

Homi Babha sucks donkey bollocks. You go girl! Sadly, Bilgrami is wrong. Hybridity could be an architectural term. It could refer to something constructed.  

But even if one just speaks of the old and familiar idea of multiple identities

which only means multiple predicates, not identities unless you are actually Batman.  

without this confused rhetoric of “hybridity”, it would be glib to say that the fact of each one of us possessing multiple identities is a reason to be sceptical about the very notion of identity or to be sceptical about the topic of identity. The plain fact is that though one may have many identities (someone is a professor, a father, a cricketer, an Indian, a Muslim, …) for one or another reason (such as what we just were discussing, one or other kind of dislocation), we often and in a sustained way endorse a particular identity in our self-understanding and often give it a far greater centrality in public life and in politics than the other identities we have.

This is not generally the case. In public life and politics you need to be, if not all things to all men, then a sufficient number of things to some particular coalition. On the other hand, you have just one single physical identity which is linked to your body. Don't do stuff which might get you shot or incarcerated.  

That’s what gives rise to the significance of the subject of identity, something you cannot dismiss by pointing out that each one of us is many things.

No. We are one thing- a body. That body may have diverse properties. But predication is not identity.  

Now, of course, it may be that many of the vexing problems that arise in identity politics may require one to explore the relations between these particular identities we make central in our lives and the other identities we have or potentially have, and that is a complex negotiative process involving the exploration of relations between a person’s moral psychology and the political context he or she finds herself in and has to navigate.

This is seldom 'complex'. The fact is people with shit for brains teaching worthless shite don't have any fucking political influence. It really doesn't matter what shitty 'negotiation' they engage in with themselves.  

But that does not mean that subjective identity is endlessly and infinitely malleable.

It means nothing at all.  

It is malleable, it is subject to negotiations in changing circumstances, but often we also resist malleability for one or another reason. That’s when identity becomes an important subject for politics.

Power and Money and coalition stability and public opinion are important subjects for politics. Stupid pedants talking bollocks are not.

Muslim identity


Was that not one of the main themes of your essay “What is a Muslim?” ?: How Muslims began to identify with Islam and make it central to their lives when they experienced the dislocations of their lives by colonialism and felt powerless under colonial rule and then, even after decolonisation, continued to experience dislocation because of post-colonial forms of subjugation and exploitation of Muslim-populated areas of the world by Western powers.

But Muslims had been great colonizers prior to that. Muslim identity was that of a conquering- not a subject- people. Some urban professionals may have felt dislocated under the Raj, but in the villages things remained much as they always had been.  

That’s right. I was trying to analyse the appeal of Islamist politics in West Asia today

if the alternative was tin-pot 'Socialist' dictators in army uniforms, the appeal was obvious.  Islam encourages thrift, enterprise and promotes family values and a strong sense of personal morality of a type favourable to commercial flourishing. 

and in the past along those lines. But also its appeal among immigrants (from erstwhile Muslim-populated colonised regions of the world such as the Maghreb, South Asia, etc.) in European nations, which had invited them there after the Second World War to deal with the labour shortages due to the loss of manpower as a result of deaths and casualties during the war.

In France, those Algerian 'harkis' who had sided with the French had to emigrate. In Germany, however, there were 'guest workers'.  

You might say that those feelings of powerlessness and humiliation felt by Muslims in the colonised lands that motivated [their] turning to Islam as a source of dignity and autonomy

But the Algerians- who suffered most- first went in a Socialist direction. Islamism was a reaction to the corruption, incompetence and brutality of the regime. Egypt and Libya and Iraq went from Monarchy to Socialism of one type or another. People turned to Islam as a source of dignity and autonomy because the torture chambers of the secret police had precious little of either commodity. 

was being replicated after decolonisation in immigrant Muslim populations in the metropolitan countries, now having to cope with the humiliation of racialist attitudes towards them and the economically exploitative relations that they found themselves in.

But there were plenty of Hindus and Buddhists and so forth in exactly the same situation. How come they didn't start clamouring for their own equivalent of Sharia and Hijab and Jihad? The answer is that Islamists believe the whole world will convert or else be killed for such is the will of God.  There may be hyper-orthodox Jews and Hindus and Buddhists but that is a case of gaining a reputational benefit through 'costly signalling' which gives rise to a 'separating equilibrium'. But this is also a feature of Christianity. 

Bilgrami's thesis is false because religious identity pre-existed colonialism or economic exploitation. 

That is an example of religious identity. What about other identities such as gender, race, caste and class?

All were invented by evil Capitalist bastards. Why don't chicks have dicks? It is because of Wall Street and Madison Avenue and the Lizard People who control the PTA.  

You discussed some of these identities when you were discussing objective identity in the last interview, but how do these relate to subjective identity and identity politics?

One should proceed carefully here, if one doesn’t want to run together different things. The term “identity politics” is multiply ambiguous.

Nope. It refers to a situation where a political grouping comes apart because of internecine conflict of an increasingly paranoid sort. The Indian Freedom Struggle is a good example. It fell apart because Muslims voted overwhelmingly for the League which wanted a separate country of its own.

Not only does it result from these different forms of identity that you have listed in your question, but the way in which some of them are invoked is different from others. Let me mention one extremely important difference or distinction.

Sometimes, one can endorse something about oneself and form a subjective identity only instrumentally and not as an end in itself . This is typically true of subjective identity in the case of caste, that is, in the case of underprivileged castes.

This is nonsense. A caste is an endogamous group. It may want to rise up while retaining endogamy. That is an end in itself. Members of the group will be more closely related to each other and, because of the Price equation, their bonds would be stronger in which case they may act more cohesively and thus rise to the very top and keep themselves there. Incidentally, no caste is not prepared to claim 'underprivileged' status if affirmative action is available.  

In these cases, one tends to identify oneself with one’s caste only to the extent that doing so gives [one]... some benefits or only so as to make claims on the state. If one belongs to an underprivileged caste, it is not usual to identify with the caste as an end in itself.

This is false and foolish. Endogamous groups are likely to care greatly for other group members. One feels towards people of one's caste as one feels towards Mummy or Daddy- i.e. one would rather die in a ditch rather than not identify with them because loving them is an end in itself.  

So, identity politics, when it mobilises people for some sort of demand on the state, only appeals to identity to the extent that it is a source of mobilisation for that demand.

No. Making that demand may increase solidarity whatever the outcome. Even if the Farmer's agitation had failed, Jat pride and solidarity increased because of it. I can well imagine that some marriages where arranged during it. It is likely that they will be good marriages because exorbitant dowry demands would be out of place. The two families will respect and care for each other because they recognize that both were willing to sacrifice for the common cause.  

Independent of the demand and the mobilisation, there is no identification with the caste. (Of course, others may nevertheless identify you as belonging to that caste even if you don’t. That is what I mean by “objective” identity. But we are talking about subjective identity now.)

I think people who 'objectively' have such and such identity but who don't make sacrifices for the common good of that identity class, become subjectively detached from it. They may still, for some mercenary reason, wish to be considered part of that group but they will feel conflicted. Liars end up lying to themselves. Then they babble nonsense. I might respect and like Brahmin culture. But I'm not a Brahmin. At best I'm an acharabrasht Brahminbandhu.  But that's cool because Hinduism has made a more ample provision for me- more particularly coz I iz as stupid as shit. Also my special talent is farting. Not farting in an amusing way. Just farting. 

Even class identity, when it comes to underprivileged classes, is like this. It is instrumental.

Something which is instrumentalizable is not itself an instrument. First a specific type of functioning must be created. If a class of people can be marked out as 'underprivileged', it does not follow that they will have some previous common identity. However a lawyer or politician might create such an identity and then instrumentalize it for some further purpose. Thus Annie Beasant might have got her start organizing the Byrant & May Match girls who, coming from villages, may have had little solidarity. But their success gave them a new identity and a place within the 'new Unionism' which allied with Suffragettes and Free Thinkers and Socialists and so on. Beasant then came to India and became the head of the Home Rule League. 

I don’t deny that a working-class person might be proud of his working-class culture and ways of life,

for the excellent reason that it involves producing and distributing good and useful things. 

but the point of Left politics has always been to aim eventually for a classless society, so even that prideful identification is presumably something working people will eventually want to transcend.

Why? One is welcome to take pride in the good qualities of one's ancestors. The Duke may become a dustman but there is no reason he should 'transcend' a perfectly natural and salutary filial piety. Equally, the dustman's daughter may become Prime Minister. If she loved her daddy, she is likely to take pride in the fact that he served the community in a vital manner.  

In that sense, caste and class subjective identities of underprivileged castes and classes are only instrumental. And being instrumental, it is temporary, an identification that is intended to last only till such time as one has effectively gained what one wishes from that instrumental identification.

Bilgrami forgets that we have parents and grandparents who had parents and grand parents. You take pride in that which you love and adore.  

Actually, Anagha Ingole, a scholar from the University of Hyderabad, has recently written an interesting book on caste panchayats, and she discusses how though the affirmative action benefits political culture for caste (what is sometimes called the “Mandalisation” of politics) has undoubtedly democratised politics and brought gains to underprivileged castes, it can also tend to perpetuate identification with one’s caste seemingly indefinitely.

Because of endogamy.  

She demonstrates how caste panchayats have played a certain traditional, oppressive role in this perpetuation despite the highly modernist instrumental context of seeking benefits.

This is not exactly a head scratcher. If you can make money by oppression as well as by begging, do both.  Nehru & Co oppressed the fuck out of Indian industry in the name of Socialism while begging for 'free money' from Uncle Sam. 

I think her work reveals a rather fascinating tension between [B.R.] Ambedkar’s two goals, one of “empowerment” of castes through affirmative action and his other goal of the “annihilation” of caste.

Ambedkar broke endogamy by marrying a Brahmin. Needless to say, his caste fellows rejected his widow who thus gained nothing by her marriage. Still, at least the dude denied affirmative action to Dalit Muslims so as to concentrate all benefits on his own peeps. Incidentally, he is now a Boddhisattva- which is one up on being a Mahatma. 

Ambedkar’s idea was to seek empowerment via a wide range of affirmative action legal arrangements and through such empowerment to be in a position to eventually transcend caste altogether, to annihilate the caste system, which they could not do while they were powerless.

Bullshit! The guy was a politician doing the same sort of stupid shit all the other politicians were doing. The sad thing is that he could have been doing Fiscal and Monetary policy instead. Still, the fact is, Ambedkarite politics is nothing without caste. If caste disappears, Ambedkar loses all relevance. 

This was a very worthy pair of goals. But I think her work reveals—through an excellent scholarly study of various networks of political relations formed between caste panchayats, political parties, electoral politics, the protocols of state welfare and affirmative action policies, etc.—how, in fact, in the exigencies forced upon castes in this politics around empowerment via benefits, the goal of being in a position of eventually transcending and annihilating caste seems to get indefinitely abandoned.

No one has any such goal. There was a time when young high caste men would ask for money so as to marry low caste girls. Then India became independent and politicians told such men to just have a wank for free. 

Endogamous jatis or biradaris solve 'the stable marriage problem'. They may also participate in collective actions of various types. Pakistan has caste panchayats just like much of India however its quota system is based on region not caste. Incidentally, a test case regarding 'caste discrimination' was brought before the British tribunal by a Pakistani 'Arain' chef who claimed he had been dismissed because his 'Arain' style of cooking was considered lower class by his employer who, he alleged, was a Chaudhry and thus higher caste. However, it turned out that the Chaudhry too was Arain. Because of his family's wealth and influence his family held a higher title. Thus the case was dismissed. 

I myself think that the deeper reason for this is that the political culture of affirmative action benefits for caste got consolidated in India in the context of a neoliberal political economy from the 1990s.

This is foolish. First there was Mandal and then there was Manmohan. The political culture of quotas got consolidated in India and Pakistan under dirigiste Socialism.  

I think this can be demonstrated in detail,

It can't. The facts contradict it.  

and I hope she will do that in her future work.

Her work is nonsense. Gassing on about how Dalits and Muslims will unite with transgender hijras to overthrow Modi and Patriarchy and Neo-Liberalism is pointless.  

All these are complexities of identity politics when it comes to caste. But the complexities don’t undermine the basic distinction I am making between instrumental and end-in-itself versions of subjective identity.

But noting can be 'instrumentalized' until there is an 'end-in-itself' version of it. You can't use a spade as a spade until there is an actual spade which self-subsists.  

Moral psychology


So, in what sense and when is subjective identity in politics not instrumental in this sense?

Right, so when subjective identity is an end in itself rather than instrumental, the identification one makes takes a quite different form in the “moral psychology” of the person.


You have used the expression moral psychology more than once. Can you clarify what you mean by it?

Ah sorry, I gave into a bit of jargon there. I mean the term “moral” psychology to contrast with “empirical” psychology. Moral psychological phenomena are not predictive. They are normative.

But we can predict when they will occur. You will feel like shit if you realize you just ran over your mummy while off your head on drink. Empirical psychology may add details about elevated heart-rate and a tendency to cry your little eyes out as you wail. 

Can you say a little more what that means?

OK. Take the concept of “character”’. It is not a predictive notion.

Yes it is. A person of good character will do good things.  

If it was a predictive notion, there would be no such thing as character.

Yes there would. That's why candidates for jobs sometimes give a 'character reference'. If their Head Master or College Professor says they are of good character and pleasant personality then chances are that's how they will behave.  

As many psychologists have pointed out, each time you attribute a character to someone with a view to predicting what they will do, you will find that sooner or later they will do something that refutes the attribution of that character to them.

Or which confirms a different, more detailed, attribution.  

So, if you predict behaviour on the basis of someone’s character, the prediction will sometimes be wrong and the attribution of that character to that person will have to be withdrawn.

Character means much the same thing as 'nature'. We may say this person has good character or is good natured. Then we find out they stole your pension fund. You now say they have a bad character or were evil natured. They still have a character or nature but the predicate applied to it has changed.  

But we don’t withdraw it because character is not really a predictive notion.

Character and nature are 'predictive notions' because things are expected to continue to behave in the same way they did before. Conatus is the Latin term for this. However we may be mistaken in the predicate we apply to a particular thing.  

It is not a notion in empirical psychology, it is a notion in moral psychology. So, we don’t withdraw the attribution of that character to him; rather, we say what they did on those occasions was not “in character”, it was “out of character”.

We may do or we may not. If we are psychologists we may say 'the subject displayed aberrant behaviour because he had taken drugs or was suffering from PTSD or had suffered a psychotic break brought on by bereavement etc, etc.' The meaning is there were some special circumstances which explain why the prediction failed.  

What gives us the right to say that? I would say two things. First, I suppose, is the obvious point that the person must to a perceptible extent act in character and not out of character. I don’t mean countably more often than not. Character is not a statistically frequentist notion.

It could be. A murderous character will frequently murder people.  

I mean something much less precise and codified than that. But, more crucially, we also feel that some things are more important for us (and for him or her) than other things, more normatively and more morally important. Thus, for instance, we might say she has a courageous character because, even though she does sometimes fail to act courageously, when it comes to a crisis, she shows courage—even if on other occasions, which are more routine, she did not.

Why not say- 'she shows courage in a crisis but not otherwise'? That would be accurate.  

So, we stress the normative importance of the courage she has shown in crisis situations,

No we don't. We'd have to add some further statement- e.g. courage is a virtue and courage in a crisis even more so- for that to follow.  

and it is through that stress that we filter out the behaviour on the more routine occasions as anomalous, something out of character.

That is a forced reading. The fact is 'routine occasions' don't require the display of courage. True there may be some people who tense up their muscles and strike a valorous pose before doing the washing up. Still, one may say of a mousy looking lady that she is courageous. Everybody immediately understands that she will rise to the occasion- should an occasion actually arise. Otherwise, she'll be perfectly content to go around looking like she couldn't say boo to a goose.  

And this stress on a normative prior , through which we filter our perception of her behaviour, allows us to see her in soft focus, as it were, something we cannot do if “character” is intended as a predictive notion.

This is crazy shit. What is the point of saying a woman is courageous if she is no such thing? Why not say she is the Pope instead? Bilgrami mistakes 'soft focus' for being soft in the head.  

That is what makes the notion of “character” a notion in moral psychology, not empirical psychology.

There have been papers written on 'empirical studies of character' for almost a hundred years. It makes little difference if we speak of personality rather than character.  

You have said in some of your writing that moral psychology is highly relevant to politics. Is that widely thought to be so?

No. The appearance of morality is important to politicians just as it is important in any other well paid field. You don't want a surgeon who looks like he might carve you up and sell your kidneys if that will pay better.  

Yes, yes, very much so. All through intellectual history. In the Western tradition of political thought,

which has seldom had anything to do with politics because pedants got shit for brains. 

in the ancient period and also through the mediaeval period and later, there was constant talk of virtue and its relation to politics.

Parents won't shell out good money for tutors who tell their kids to lie, cheat and poison mummy and daddy so as to inherit their property.  

In the early modern period, if you remember, Machiavelli famously compared the moral emotion of love with that of fear while advising “the Prince”, saying it was better to generate in the populace a fear of the ruler rather than love for the ruler, and his very interesting ground for saying this is that love (love of this sort, anyway) is freely given (unlike fear, which wells up helplessly) and that means the ruler would be granting a quite powerful form of agency to the populace, something he considered dangerous.

But generating fear costs more than being cute and lovable. Also, if people fear you enough, they may get together and kill you before you can get round to torturing and killing them.  

This relation between agency and politics is central to the moral psychology of politics,

which however is central to nothing at all.  

and it is one of the aspects of political philosophy that most interests me. [Thomas] Hobbes based his entire conception of the state as a kind of counter-force to our aggressive psychological nature.

But States require resources to remain States. Thus only economic and military factors matters. Moral psychology is useless.  

[John] Locke situated political principles in an assumed background of moral education.

But moral education was better done by the Church.  

Adam Smith thought moral sentiments were the foundation of politics.

But everybody decided that only his economic theory was worthy of consideration.  

[Jean-Jacques] Rousseau’s idea of a general will was basically asserting the moral psychology of group agency .

But the fellow was a lunatic. 

[Karl] Marx’s focus on alienation (there throughout his corpus, though interpreters like [Louis] Althusser tried to restrict it to the early work only) had everything to do with moral psychology because removing alienation enabled our free agency and that was the deep underlying motivation in the goal of a classless society,

Hilarious! Marxism turned out to be about Gulags not everybody getting gay with each other regardless of class or color.  

without which that achievement would be considered by him to be merely a kind of social engineering.

Nothing wrong with 'mechanism design' which is 'piecemeal social engineering'.  

[John] Ruskin insisted that

he wasn't impotent. Like Rousseau, he was a great wanker who went mad.  

exploitation was a moral failing of a society because it reflected not just what he called “heartlessness” but also a failure to see that beauty goes missing in the lives of people when it is characterised by heartlessness and exploitation.

The wanker couldn't even sexually exploit his own wife. Fuck heartlessness. Being a dickless wonder is worse. 

And, of course, [Mahatma] Gandhi was obsessively concerned with

stupid shite 

the moral emotions around non-violence and tried to found a whole conception of politics on that basis and on the agency of human subjects rather than the power of the state,

because sleeping naked with your great-niece will give superhuman Satyagraha power- innit?  

which he thought, by its very nature, was not the sort of institution one could reason with or persuade in moral terms but must, therefore, resist with one’s morally motivated human agency in a mass politics.

by doing stupid shite. Still, the old coot got money out of fellow Bania's for his crackpot schemes. He served them well enough. His nuttiness was a good investment for Bajajs and Birlas and Dalmias.  

Thank you for giving that intellectual history of the relation between politics and moral psychology. Coming back to your idea of identifying with something non-instrumentally, please explain it.

Why? Does this guy not have a Mummy and Daddy whom he loves? We identify with our families non-instrumentally.  

The non-instrumental identifications we form yield the deepest sense of subjective identity. I have argued that it is based on the idea of a subject’s most fundamental commitments.

What fucking 'commitments' does a baby have? Yet it loves Mummy and soon comes to become quite fond of Daddy provided he does not object to the use of his tummy as a trampoline.  

In my paper “What is a Muslim?”, I basically characterised subjective identity as the identity of a subject who has some very fundamental commitments (to a religion, to a political position or to one or other set of values quite generally, such as, say, to friendship or to one’s family or to one’s vocation—let’s say the life of the theatre, for example, or even to a sport such as cricket …) and such a fundamental commitment constitutes his or her identity, and it is on the basis of that identity that someone then allows himself or herself to be mobilised in her actions, including sometimes political action.

This is silly. Identity exists irrespective of 'commitment'. I'm not committed to being an elderly Tamil cretin. But such is my identity. I'd like to think that I'd pick up a gun if Putin invades but I'm more likely to be given a broom instead. I don't inspire confidence as a soldier though I'd make a perfectly decent janitor in a field hospital or something of that sort. In an emergency, it is a case of from each according to his ability.  

Fundamental commitment


What do you mean by “fundamental” commitment?

A really committed commitment unlike the everyday, garden, variety which fucks off the moment its friends text it inviting it to a rave.  

It requires some intellectual spadework to answer that.

No. It requires stupidity and ignorance.  

It is tempting to avoid that work and just say [that] what makes a commitment fundamental is that it is held more intensely than the other preferences or desires that the subject has, it is a stronger preference or desire than her other desires and preferences. But “intensity” and “strength” are not helpful notions. It is not clear what would measure strength or intensity except seemingly tautological criteria, such as: “of all the preferences she has, the strongest ones are the ones she acts on”. But if that is the criterion for strength of commitment, then strength of commitment cannot be a way of characterising what I have in mind by “fundamental” commitments because we often act irrationally, from our own subjective point of view . To act irrationally in this sense is to go against one’s commitments. So, our actions can’t be reliable indicators of our most fundamental commitments.

Unless they are. If they aren't we may be lying about our fundamental commitments or else we are not fundamentally committed to being committed to our fundamental commitments.  

Can you give an example of acting irrationally in this sense?

Sure. It happens all the time. Consider someone who has a serious and deep commitment to be a responsible teacher with all that that entails: concern to give a good lecture in one’s classes, concern for one’s students’ education, concern for one’s reputation in the academy, etc., etc. And suppose such a person has to teach a class at 9 a.m. the next day. He is sitting with some friends the night before in a pub. He knows that he should not have that fourth Scotch, that if he does, he will not feel well the next morning, [and will] give a bad lecture, disappoint his students, perhaps even undermine his reputation, etc. Yet he drinks that fourth Scotch. From his own point of view , he does something irrational.

No. He is discovering something about his tolerance for alcohol. There may have been a time when three Scotches weren't enough to undermine his volition and character. But, that time has gone. The dude probably understands that alcohol is addictive. The more you drink the more you try to drink till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. 

The solution is not far to seek. Make a clean breast of it. Say, 'look, in the past I've never had trouble stopping after three or four scotches. But, I guess I've gotten old. Last night I had a fourth scotch and thus woke up today in no shape to take my classes. I apologize for this. I will make it up to all concerned. I'm also going to get some help to stay on the wagon.'  

He acts on his strongest or most intense preference, for the Scotch.

But Alcohol and drugs alter your preferences in a predictable way. There may be some people who for biological reasons are more at risk in this matter. Alcoholism may be an illness like any other.  

But it is an irrational action, by his own lights.

No. It is an action 'under the influence' of alcohol. That is the rational explanation.  

So that action, though it is an indicator of his strongest and most intense preference, cannot be an indicator of his commitments.

No. His strongest preference remains what it was save 'under the influence'. There is an economic theory of things which change your preferences as you consume them. For most things, there are 'diminishing returns'. Alcohol looks as though it has increasing returns- people will pay more for their tenth drink than their first. But there is a perfectly rational, medically sound, explanation for this.  

Strength of preference cannot thus be a criterion for commitments.

Yes it can after 'discovery'. We expect to see this guy avoiding alcohol under any circumstances where its use would impair his  ability to carry out his 'fundamental commitment'. Nobody blinks an eye at a surgeon or airline pilot who refuses a drink because he has to work tomorrow. 

This is a rather trivial example. There can of course be much more interesting examples. But the point is that we need another criterion for defining fundamental commitments than such notions as strength or intensity of preference because we ourselves are sometimes alienated from our strongest preferences.

Not our 'revealed preferences'. But that is the only sort of preference which exist objectively.  

Alienated from?

By “alienated from”, I just mean they are preferences that we ourselves consider irrational, as going against our commitments, as being in tension with our commitments. So the point is that if we can be alienated from our strongest preferences sometimes, if we can find them to be irrational, we need another criterion to define our most fundamental commitments, not strength of preference but those preferences we consider to be in some sense more central to our moral psychologies.

Our commitments may, to our own mind's, be irrational. Why do you love your mummy or this girl as opposed to that? Why would you rather die for your country in a questionable war rather than for some other country in a just cause? Moreover, why have commitments if rationality reconciles preferences to the desired course of action? Rawls was not an economist. He came up with some cockeyed theory that people who knew Econ would agree to a crazy Social Contract of his. When utility theory let him down he started babbling about 'commitment'. But contracts are about nothing else! The fact is nobody will commit to shit without the passing of consideration. It is quite useless pretending that 'moral psychology' or some Kantian shite forces everybody to have commitments or judgments or anything else. 

OK, so you are saying that one therefore needs to spell out what this idea of centrality is and that is the harder intellectual work that needs to be done to explain what a fundamental commitment is?

Exactly. My thought has been that if we can characterise what makes some among all the preferences one has central in our psychological economies then we can say that these preferences are our fundamental commitments, which constitute our (subjective) identities because they capture how we conceive of ourselves in some fundamental way, (and not just for an instrumental purpose). So a lot depends on how we characterise “centrality” here.

Centrality has to do with being at the center of something. How else can we characterize it?  

A first stab at saying which of our preferences or desires have a centrality for us is this. Of all the preferences and desires we have there are some which even if they are not the strongest or most intense are preferences which if we should fail to act on them and instead act in a way that went against them, we would in some real sense fail to recognise ourselves in that action .

Do we recognize ourselves in our flatulence? Interestingly, we have a sort of 'pre-fart' warning system. So our 'psychological economies' give centrality to farting. This is why it is unusual to hear newscasters breaking wind. On the other hand we don't have as much control over sneezing. Thus the Queen may sneeze but not fart when receiving a Head of State. My own fundamental commitment goes the other way. Sad. 

This is not to be confused with just feeling very bad or guilty should one act that way. It is rather to literally wonder for a moment “Would it even be me , who does that?”

This suggests some deeper problem- e.g. a person who has had to suppress their sexual or gender identity and may not even be aware that such suppression has taken place. I suppose people of that sort may well talk a lot about commitment and 'centrality' and so forth.  

The initial example I give in my essay “What is a Muslim?” was a personal, not political, one about how one may feel that even if one thought that one’s close friend was a very immoral person and openly disagreed with him on some behaviour of his which was, let us say, illegal, and if some policemen who were suspicious of him came to ask one whether one’s friend was up to something illegal, one would deny knowledge of any such activity.

If you have knowledge of illegal activity and lie to the police about it, then you are guilty of an illegal act.  

Why? Because among all one’s preferences and values and desires, including even one’s valuing moral and legal behaviour, the value of friendship was central in this self-defining way . One’s moral values may make one feel bad or guilty for not having turned in to the police an immoral person indulging in illegal activities, but if one had turned one’s friend in, one would not just feel bad or guilty, one would not even feel more bad or guilty, but rather one would have felt something qualitatively different. One would have felt: that’s just not me, I wouldn’t recognise myself if I had turned him in . (You might think of this particular example as being a sort of British schoolboy identity, as exemplified in E.M. Forster’s remark: “I’d rather I betrayed my country than betray my friends.”)

This is indeed a school boy view. Life is more complicated. Sometimes you must not tell the police anything because they are evil bastards. Other times you should tell them about illegal activities by a friend because that is the first step to his getting the help he needs. In no case should you have a self-conception that is wholly detached from reality. I'm not constantly astonishing myself by the virulence of my farts. I don't clutch my pearls and say 'That's not my fart at all! It must be one of Narendra Modi's farts which somehow snuck into my rectum. All is the fault of neo-liberalism. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.'  

The main point is that my identity in the subjective sense is defined by values when those values are held with this kind of self-defining centrality.

This simply isn't true. Bilgrami's identity in the subjective sense is defined by a subjectivity which is alive and conscious not dead or asleep. Values don't feature in it at all save in a manner of speaking. They are predicates applied more or less aptly but that is all they are. On the other hand if 'karma binding particles' exist then we might say Bilgrami is full of virtue or vice or whatever. But such particles don't exist. 

Now there may be one or two people of whom we might say- such and such value was what mattered most in their life. But this is for an instrumental reason. If we are Catholic, we may say Mother Theresa's central value was care for the Poor. If we are Economists, we may say her central value was obedience to the Church and ability to raise money for it. What is certain is that she stood out from the common run of humanity. 

These are the values I call fundamental commitments.

Which, fundamentally, very very few people could be said to have. Bilgrami may be a nice enough chap but he is not outstanding in any way. Whatever he might claim to be his fundamental commitment if fundamentally doesn't matter a tinker's fart.  

Most of one’s values are not held in this way. Holding it with such centrality is what I called having a fundamental commitment. It may not even be my strongest commitment. In the example I gave, my moral commitments to prevent a gravely illegal activity may even have been stronger

it was non-existent. You didn't stop your friend doing illegal stuff and you didn't help the police stop him either. You simply aint a moral person.  

and I may even have turned my friend in, acting on my strongest preference or value, but then (like drinking that fourth Scotch) to do so would have been to go against my fundamental commitments since strength of preference or value is not what makes for fundamental commitments. It is this self-defining idea of centrality that makes for them.

It is self-defeating because things at the center themselves have centers and so on. Thus nothing that is central isn't also peripheral to its own center's center's center.  

Now when it comes to politics, people sometimes have a commitment like this, to a nation, to socialism, to Islamic values, to one or another such cause. And when they do, they are not like the identitarian commitments one forms instrumentally for a cause, such as when someone might identify with something only to the extent that that identity is a basis for one mobilising people towards a cause and a struggle to eventually overcome such an identification.

They are exactly the same. People who are committed to the nation are also committed to getting other fellow citizens to commit to the nation. The same goes for Socialism and Islam. You try to convert others to your cause and may even think the thing should be imposed coercively.  This does not mean that Nationalists or Socialists or Islamists don't get that this Earth and the Human Race will be annihilated sooner or later. Everything is instrumental till the Day of Wrath. 

And, of course, there are complicated cases, when one can identify both instrumentally but also as an end in itself, as sometimes might happen when women identify with their gender in this dual way.

 I think most people like other people and start identifying in a dual way even if their relationship started of as 'instrumental'. 

Ulysses’ ‘fidelity’


Can you give some political examples of what you call fundamental commitments that characterise subjective identity.

Yes, but before I do, let me just say one last thing about this idea of identity based on such commitments. So far, I’ve talked rather loosely about how a fundamental commitment is a commitment that, if I violated it by some action of mine, I would not recognise it as my action.

This is only a manner of speaking. Amnesia or some other psychiatric condition would have to supervene for this to literally be the case.  

That is an intuitive way of bringing out the connection of such commitments with one’s subjective identity or identifications. But I actually think that the intuition that I am gesturing at can be more rigorously characterised. And in some of my work, I’ve tried to do that. Consider Ulysses and his motivations for tying himself to the mast.

He wants to hear the Sirens without jumping into the Sea and meeting his doom.  

We can see this as owing to a fundamental commitment in the sense I have in mind.

He has a fundamental commitment to not dying. Big whoop.  

One can read the myth as follows: Ulysses had a fundamental commitment to fidelity (to his wife, Penelope).

Fuck off! The dude had to put out to Calypso. But he did want to get home to see his wife and son and Dad and the dog Argos.  

He also knew that in his travels, the sirens would sing their seductive songs and he might very well be seduced by them. So he ties himself to the mast with the idea that even if he were seduced, he could do nothing about it and would thus remain faithful to his wife.

He didn't want to die. That's what happened to other sailors seduced by the Sirens' song.  

That means at time t1, he values fidelity in such a way that even if at some future time tN, he ceases to value fidelity and gets seduced, he nevertheless is living at tN by his values at t1. That is how deep and fundamental his commitment to fidelity is at t1.

But not wanting to die horribly is a stronger motive than wanting to be faithful to wifey. All the other sailors sealed up their ears with wax. Why? They didn't want to die.  

I think all of us very likely hold at least a few of our values in this deep way that Ulysses does.

We don't want to die horribly. Neither do animals or sociopaths. Why speak of values and commitments in this context? Does Bilgrami say 'I have a fundamental commitment to not pooping my pants because this is central to my moral psychology. Kindly point me to a toilet where I can do the needful.' You reply 'I have a fundamental commitment to fundamentally committing to whatever is central to the centrality of the centrality of my moral psychology....OMG! You just shat your pants! Thank you i-phone for recording this. Now to post it on Tik-Tok.' 

In fact, I think we would be rather shallow moral beings if we held no values in this way. The idea is that one would see oneself at the later time tN as a kind of weakening of commitment, and a departure from what one most deeply values, from what one most deeply is . And so such commitments define one’s identity at t1.

This is 'backward induction'. But we don't have to have any values or commitments to use it. Interestingly, the story of Barbarik, in the Mahabharata, shows why backward induction can get rid of certain impredicative or 'intensional' commitments. But this is also true of stupid commitments. However this has nothing to do with identity.  

I think this is a particularly good way of characterising subjective identity because it shows that one’s fundamental commitments and identities are not immutable or essentialist.

or meaningful in any way.  

They are not primordial. They can change.

They can be anything you want them to be except useful.  

At tN, Ulysses has given up the subjective identity he had at t1.

Coz that's how mythological figures pass the time- right? 

I’ve only defined what his subjective identity is at t1. At t1, his identity is constituted by his fundamental commitment to fidelity.

No it isn't. This is a guy sailing a ship through dangerous waters. Also, he does not want to die horribly. The last thing on his mind is wifey.  

He defines himself by it. How so? By entrenching that value in a way that he lives in accord with it in the future (at tN) even if in the future he does not hold that value. That’s how deeply he is committed to it at t1.

He is committed to not dying. Everybody is. That's why we look both ways before crossing the road. It isn't because of our fundamental commitment to observe Road Safety regulations.  

So my more intuitive and loose talk of “not recognising oneself” in an action that violates one’s fundamental commitment can be captured more rigorously in this way. I hope I am being clear.

You are being stupid.  

Yes. But can you now give a more political example of it than the Ulysses example.

Yes, in an essay of mine I extensively discuss the example of certain kinds of Islamic identity. Ayatollah Khomeini once said something like this: “Modernity is very pernicious and it is bound to infect everyone, even us Ayatollahs. We should therefore entrench Islamic values in such a way that even if we are infected by the spread of modernity and are tempted by godless and degenerate ways of life, we will not be able to live that kind of life and we will be living by Islamic values.” That is as good an analysis of what goes into Islamic identity as any. It is exactly the thinking that is exemplified by the Ulysses example. You may not share Khomeini’s particular fundamental commitment, but what I am pointing to is the structural feature of the commitment that makes it constitutive of identity. You don’t have to share Khomeini’s substantive views to see the structural point I am making. Many of our deepest social and political commitments, which may be very different from his, nevertheless have this Ulysses-like structure and they constitute our subjective identities.

There is a big difference between what the Imam was saying and what Bilgrami imputes to Ulysses. In the former case, eternity is in Paradise. This world is evil and teeming with contagious sinfulness. Islam has provided a safe path trough it. Stick to the path. This may involve becoming a basiji and putting on a martyr's shroud and going off to confront Iraqi tanks and machine guns. But it is a quick and blessed path to eternal felicity. Ulysses has a temporal end. The Imam speaks of an end outside time. It takes the genius of a Bilgrami to confuse the most humanistic of Greek heroes with one of the most important religious leaders of the Twentieth Century.  

Liberalism and free speech


In one or two essays in your book “Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment”, you say that identity formed on such fundamental commitments is something that liberalism cannot cope with.

Sure it can. If the person with that identity commits a crime, that person is jailed or executed. Mill was totes about 'punishability'. A night-watchman state can beat the fuck out of you and then kill you if you break enough laws.  

You even point out that the difference between Gandhi’s views and John Stuart Mill’s liberal views brings out this fact.

Mill and Gandhi agreed that Indians were shit. But since Gandhi was actually Indian he expressed this view in a shittier way coz otherwise he'd be no better than a Brit and Brits are no better than whores coz they've got a parliament which is nothing but a brothel because every few years the House gives itself to a new master- a Prime Minister who also has a Black Rod at his disposal.  

That’s right. Liberalism’s continuing failure to cope with identity politics owes to its doctrinal inability to grasp the nature of deep and fundamental commitments.

Liberalism isn't concerned with shit you have in your head. It looks only at your actions in so far as they have legal consequences.  

And such a failure surfaces not just in its responses to identitarian politics (such, as for instance, Islamist politics)

No failure arises. Islamists only have qualified immunity to express themselves. If they are deemed a threat to public safety they are killed or incarcerated. Obama, a Law Professor, found it easy to have Osama killed after which his body was dumped in the sea. 

but also in its response to radical Left politics.

Which voters turn against because it is stupid shit.  

By the very nature of its doctrinal commitments, liberalism does not have a place for what I call fundamental commitments of this kind.

Of what kind? Ulysses not wanting to die? The Imam encouraging young people to die in the Holy War? Fundamental commitments don't matter very much once the killing starts. Then the guys with better guns and more money win unless ordinary people- as in Ukraine- show extraordinary valour. Liberalism is cool with that coz Liberalism is about having more wealth and better tech.  

Can you explain that?

The entire classical liberal tradition from Mill to [John] Rawls emphasises fallibility and revisability of human beliefs and convictions and leaves no room for commitments of this kind.

Either commitments keep you alive or you die and cease to matter. Fallibility and revisability then becoming macroscopic qualities. The crazier leaders are killed off or packed off to the UN and more pragmatic folk take over. 

Thus, for instance, Mill bases his chief argument for liberty of speech on the fact that our opinions, however certain we are of them, however committed we are to them, can be wrong. That is his “fallibilist” ground for free speech, for tolerating dissent from our views, because the dissenting view may be right and our view, however convinced we are of it, may be wrong. I think this argument for free speech is numbingly fallacious. I cherish free speech as much as anyone but not on the basis of an argument such as Mill’s.


Why do you think it is fallacious?

I’ll need to spell out the argument a little more before I can answer that. Mill’s argument basically has two premises and a conclusion.

The first premise is that “We have been absolutely convinced of various things in the past which have turned out to be false.”

But we only know these things were false for empirical reasons. Free speech does not matter. Evidence does.  

The second premise is actually derived by induction from that first premise and it says: “Therefore, our current convictions may be false, however much we are convinced of them.”

It is obvious that a proposition of any sort may be false. Why drag 'induction' into it?  

And the conclusion derived from both these premises is: “Therefore, we should adopt free speech and tolerate opinions dissenting from our current opinions, in case they are true and our current opinions are false.”

This is stupid shit but not for the reason Bilgrami believes. The only thing which matters is evidence and structural causal models consistent with them. Babbling freely is irrelevant.  

This is a tremendously influential argument in the history of liberalism and is still cited as having foundational importance, even in the law and in constitutions. Just notice how ambitious it is. All you need to be able to do is induction (generalise from observation about the past to conclusions about the present) to grasp its force. In fact, it is known, as Mill’s meta-inductive argument.

Did Bilgrami give it this name? Meta-induction refers to prediction methods. But it is obvious that free speech didn't generate anything but noise. Evidence- which costs money to collect- yields better Science and thus better tech which means we can get better evidence. Protocol bound discourse is useful. Nutters talking nonsense aren't useful at all.  

Why is this argument wrong?

I think there are two things that are unconvincing about it.

For one thing, the first premise that our past opinions have turned out to be false is a judgement we make from the point of view of our current opinions .

No. It is based on current evidence which was not previously available.  

But the second premise is saying that our current opinions might be false,

because we know there is much more evidence that can and will be recovered as technology progresses 

however much we are convinced of them. Now, if our current opinions might be false and our first premise is based on them,

it isn't 

then, to that extent, our first premise might be false. How can we believe in any conclusion based on shaky grounds such as this?

Because we know that evidence has gotten better and will get even better.  There's nothing 'shaky' about this at all. It is a fact that in every STEM subject there are guys who are saying 'we've almost got the tech for such and such crucial experiment which will confirm such and such model and give us a better estimator of such and such parameter. 

For another, the conclusion, which says we should adopt free speech because dissenting opinions may be true, presupposes that we have the goal of seeking and arriving at the truth. But the second premise, which says what we currently are convinced is the truth might be false, presupposes that even if we arrive at the truth, we can never know that we have arrived at it. (For all we know, it could be false.) I think there is something very strange about the goal of seeking the truth, in that case.

Unless tech improves or prosperity rises. There's nothing strange about that at all.  

What sort of peculiar goal is it that we can never know that we have achieved it,

but we can know that we have better tech. My smartphone has a hundred times the computing power of my first desktop computer. Even Mill had lived to see railway trains replace the canal boat or horse and carriage. Some people thought the railway train travelled at too high a speed for the human body to tolerate. They were proved wrong. How? Through free speech? No. Through practical experience. If elderly ladies experienced no ill effect from a train journey, the learned Professor who had proved otherwise was rendered a laughing stock.  

when and if we achieve it. If we achieve it, it is some sort of bonus or fluke that we have no control over and can never know we have attained it. It makes it sound as if all of inquiry into the truth is like sending a message in a bottle out at sea when we are lost on the sea, with no idea about whether it is going to be found. That’s not a sensible way of thinking of inquiry.

But 'Pragmatism' is. Does a type of inquiry make our life better over the course of decades? Yes, in the case of STEM subjects. No in the case of the sort of vacuous shite this vacuous shithead teaches.  

The whole idea (the whole epistemology) underlying Mill’s argument is based on a modal incoherence, whereby one has a current opinion that some proposition is true and yet one thinks that it may be false.

Because we know more evidence will soon be forthcoming and that a rival structural causal model may be confirmed. There can be no modal incoherence where modal (as opposed to inductive, or probabilistic) logic is not deployed.  

It makes no sense to assert our current belief that the earth is not flat and then add (from the corner of one’s mouth), “but, for all we know, it may be flat.”

It may do. It depends on who says it and in what context. If Leonard Susskind says it, the meaning is the actual world is a 2 dimensional disc. This is the holographic principle. Why does Bilgrami not know this? Under which rock has he been living?  

What about Rawls? He is such a major figure in political thought; would you tell us about his liberalism.

The guy was useful back in the early Seventies because he enabled the US to move from a rules based anti-Trust policy to something more, much more, permissive. The Left were foolish enough to think he was perpetuating the spirit of the Warren Court or paving the way for Nixon to come to Marx or some such shite.  

Rawls’ argument reflects essentially the same outlook as Mill’s. It’s interesting to note the similarities and how important their shared outlook is to liberalism.

But liberalism isn't important.  

In his major work, A Theory of Justice , Rawls presented a contractualist argument for two principles of justice: what he called the “principle of equal liberties for all” (which included the liberty of speech) and “the difference principle”.

However, no contract is valid without the passing of consideration. What inducement does Rawls offer the participants in this thought experiment? Nothing at all. They already live in a society which they know works. Why take the chance of agreeing to some Professor's crackpot scheme? Show us a country where that shite works and then maybe we'll consider it. Otherwise, fuck off.  

The similarity with Mill is in his argument for the first principle. So, let’s ask what is the argument for the first principle, which includes free speech? To put it in summary form, his idea is roughly this.

Rawls’ whole point in writing that great book is to provide a method for arriving at (for contracting into) principles to live by such that if you followed that method, it would be impossible to choose principles that would be biased in your own favour.

Unless Darwin was right. In that case genetic and epigenetic factors will bias us anyway. I don't want to be penetrated by a penis. Thus if I don't know whether or not I'll be a woman, I'll chose that no penile penetration should occur. So what if the race dies out? I just don't one of them nasty things anywhere near any orifice of mine. True, if I were a woman, I might feel differently. But I'd be busy playing with my own boobies with a vibrator between my thighs.  

This is why he says his conception of justice is “justice as fairness”.

So what is this method? He says each person in such a social contract must choose

who will force us to do so? Rawls and his chums? We'd beat the fuck out of them.  

the principles to live by in a scenario in which nobody is allowed to know who they, in particular, are (their place in society, their commitments, their values,… all this is screened off from them). As he puts it, the principles should be chosen behind a “veil of ignorance”. This is his famous “original position”, his version of what earlier social contract theorists called “a state of nature”. It is, of course, a stipulated state, a state of artifice, not a state of nature. But it is his starting point , just like the state of nature is the “original position” or starting point of earlier contractualist accounts such as in Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau.

Who didn't know about incomplete contract theory. Law & Econ have moved a lot since then because of ... much much better evidence and computational tools. 

So, Rawls’ idea is that if you chose the principles behind such a veil of ignorance (i.e. without knowing what your position in life is, what your preferences and values are), it would be impossible to choose something that is biased in your own favour. And he claims that, among other things, a rational person would in this scenario of the original position choose liberty of speech.


Why does he think one would choose that?

It’s an interesting, slightly complex argument. One thing he insists on is that when you choose principles behind the veil of ignorance without knowing who you are and what you value and want, you can’t gamble. So, for instance, you can’t say: “It’s not very likely that when the veil of ignorance is lifted, I will find out that I am a socialist, so let me choose the principle of private property.” He doesn’t allow gambling of this kind because he, understandably, wants each social contractor to be wholeheartedly committed to the principles he or she has chosen behind the veil of ignorance, once the veil is lifted. But if we gamble like this, we won’t be wholehearted if we lose the gamble; we will be regretful, we will say: “Dammit, I shouldn’t have chosen the principle of private property.” So, basically, Rawls wants the contractors to be risk-aversive. But now, if gambling is not permitted when one is choosing, what we are basically being told is that behind the veil of ignorance we should be choosing something, no matter what we imagine we will turn out to be when the veil is lifted. So the claim has to be that, whatever we imagine ourselves to be behind the veil of ignorance, we will choose liberty of speech.

Rawls was too stupid to understand that what we all choose when facing 'Knightian uncertainty' is 'regret minimization' which involves 'hedging' or 'risk pooling'- i.e. some sort of insurance scheme with moral hazard safeguards. The 'veil of ignorance' was irrelevant. Anyway the thing gets cancelled by the 'difference principle' because one can justify any sort of gender or racial or 'costly to disguise' public signal based price, wage or service provision discrimination. 

Well, when he made this argument, a whole infantry of philosophers calling themselves “communitarians” said this is simply wrong. They said if I imagine myself, for example, to be a devout Muslim, I would certainly not choose free speech because that would mean I would have to tolerate the publication of a book like The Satanic Verses .

No. The devout Muslim knows that some are foredoomed to damnation and others are foredoomed to kill the blasphemers and gain Paradise thereby. Whether it is Allah's will that you participate in Rawls's experiment is a different matter. It may be that God wishes you to do so. On the other hand if you find you have slit that nutter's throat and are sentenced to be hanged for the crime then you may have an intimation of the Gates of Paradise opening for you.  

Why would I choose free speech, then, if I imagined myself to be a devout Muslim?

You may do so because that it God's will.  

(And remember gambling is not allowed and I can’t say: “Oh, it’s not very likely I will turn out to be a devout Muslim when the veil is lifted, so I’ll choose free speech.”)

It is interesting that Bilgrami thinks being a devout Muslim means you can't cherish free speech. I have known many Muslims who place a higher value on free speech than I do. Some even thought there might be something worthwhile in Rushdie's silly book. The truth is, people who read Satanic Verses and then saw the explanation given in standard Islamic texts for that particular episode, felt that Islam was a merciful and sensible religion. Lots of non-Muslims have found great spiritual and moral guidance in the Quran and the Hadith and the ijma of the jurists. Western Philosophy and Western Law owe much to Islam though the West would try to pretend that the devout Muslim scholars they quoted were actually Platonists or Atheists or Antinomians of some foul description.   

When there was this outcry from the communitarians, Rawls gave what I think is a typically liberal response, very much along the lines of Mill. He said to the communitarians that they had basically misunderstood his argument. He pointed out that behind the veil of ignorance, you are prohibited only particularistic knowledge of who you are and what you value, etc. You are not prohibited general knowledge of human nature and psychology.

How about Scripture? Is it not a fact of human nature that every advanced civilization has a Holy Book? The Chinese Communist Party may be atheistic. Yet they spend money on Confucius Institutes.  

And so each contractor behind the veil of ignorance has such general knowledge, and if she does, then she knows, for instance, that people change their minds, they revise their opinions and values . And so even if you imagined yourself to be a devout Muslim, you would do so with the general knowledge that you might one day change your mind and cease to be a devout Muslim,

but every devout Muslim or Christian or Hindu knows that he may be tempted away from the true path.  

you may revise your values. And so, you would still choose free speech. This is very close to Mill, who stresses the fallibility of our opinions. Mill’s “fallibility” of our beliefs, in the slightly different contractualist setting of Rawls’s argument, becomes the “revisability” of our opinions. The basic idea is that since we never know what our future values are going to be (since values are always revisable) nor which are the right values and beliefs (since we are fallible), free speech is the best policy to adopt. This is the heart of the liberal outlook.

It may also be the heart of the Muslim outlook. The problem of course is that different people may draw the line differently as regards what types of speech are illegal by reason of obscenity, offensiveness, libel, sedition etc, etc.  

And so why do you think this outlook cannot deal with the concept of identity?

Precisely because identity, in the subjective sense, is, as I said, defined upon the idea of fundamental commitments. Remember, fundamental commitments are commitments which if we think we are going to revise them we will (as Ulysses and Khomeini did) consider ourselves to be surrendering to a kind of weakness. So, we tie ourselves to the mast with our fundamental commitment. They define us, our (subjective) identity.

This is crazy shit. Ulysses didn't remain tied to the mast till his sailors had safely delivered him to his wife. The Imam wasn't saying 'stay away from modern or Western cities.' The Imam himself had to move to France which is plenty modern. But he was preaching a religion which has a very well developed and elaborated plan for how you can spend every moment on your day in a manner which offers you maximum protection. True, you can incur minor sins for specific purposes- you may have to pass by a pornographic display on your way to work- but you can seek forgiveness for these trespasses every night before going to bed. 

There is nothing 'subjective' about the Imam being a devout Muslim. If there is any evidence that he omitted any prayer or other duty or that he was drinking champagne in Paris then his enemies would have published and circulated it long before now. The worst thing that SAVAK could say about him was that he wasn't really Persian. He was Indian. One cretin repeated this argument to me. He didn't get that I'm Indian and would naturally think more highly of the Imam if I discovered he was from my country. As a matter of fact, the Imam was Persian though he had used the 'takhallus' of 'the Indian' for mystical verses (including praise of al-Hallaj!)

Ghalib may have drunk a little wine but he was a devout Muslim who has written heart felt religious poetry. I don't suppose he'd have had any objection to free speech- provided he wasn't forced to read my Urdu poetry.  

So, the situation is this: Rawls asks social contractors to adopt free speech even if one imagines oneself to be a devout Muslim because free speech is an insurance policy that will protect our future , possibly revised, states of mind. Whereas identity (say, of Ulysses, Khomeini) is defined upon fundamental commitments (fidelity, Islamic values), which tie oneself to their mast and thereby provide an insurance policy for our current values against future possibly revised values.

This simply isn't true. One reason the Imam was so respected was because he was a great jurist. He understood that evidence is required for determinations of facts. Iran was ahead of the West when it came to transgender rights because the Shia jurists were prepared to accept evidence that gender dysphoria is real. It is not the case that a guy who dresses like a girl is trying to trick his way into the zenana. Indeed, such a person may have zero sexual interest in women. God alone knows why Bilgrami has such a bigoted attitude towards Islam. It is not what is taught in India. But elite universities in the US are a different matter. 

That’s the impasse. So if I imagined myself to be like Ulysses or Khomeini, I would not choose free speech.

The reason the Imam was an exile was because SAVAK did not want free speech. The BBC external service helped the Imam because the BBC believes in free speech- unless it comes from British peeps wot object to wogs like me stinking up the place with curries.  

That is why liberalism cannot cope with identity politics.

Nonsense! We are welcome to have a smarter conception of Liberalism than a cretin like Bilgrami. Consider the Condorcet Jury theorem which is entailed by the Law of Large Numbers. A corollary is that as Identity politics or wokeness flourishes, it fractionalizes and cancels out as noise. In other words everybody hoards up grievances and 'wedge issues' and play their own Identity political card to neutralize every other Identity political card. Then everybody calls everybody else a Fascist till Putin decides he has to invade any place which looks weak so as to de-Nazify it.  

This I think is the deepest conflict between liberalism and identity politics.

But, because of the Law of Large numbers, liberalism prevails unless you are talking about a shithole country which, lets face it, could never be liberal coz the people are too prone to chop bits off with each other.  

It is not just individualism versus communitarianism. Liberalism cannot cope with the moral psychology of commitment .

But only nutters and freaks are afflicted with it. Let the Law of Large Numbers prevail and they cancel each other out.  

That is the theoretically deeper point that I don’t think the communitarians really understood. That is why I focus on the notion of identity in my work and not on the notion of community, when I am critical of liberalism.

Guy with Muslim name is against Liberalism. Shocker! 

Would you not say that liberalism is a better position than Khomeini’s, though, even if there is an impasse and liberalism [cannot argue against him? 

You have to understand that when I am making philosophical criticisms of liberalism and of Rawls or Mill, I am not denying free speech is a very good thing. (Few things matter to me more than freedom of expression.) I am merely saying that if one is going to seek out the best justification of free expression, their justifications are not the best place to look. And I think the underlying reason why their arguments fail is that you cannot seek to justify free speech as they do, trying to find an argument that will convince everyone, no matter what their values are, no matter what their commitments are.

Why find an argument critiquing anything under the Sun. You aren't going to convince everybody. Also, there is a knockdown argument anybody can use against him.  

That’s what Mill and Rawls are trying to do. Mill is trying to give an argument that any rational person is supposed to accept, any person capable of induction. So, the argument is intended to carry universal conviction.

It's an okay argument for matters of fact. New evidence should be given a hearing even if it goes against ideological or other shibboleths.  

It’s the same with Rawls: the veil of ignorance in the original position is supposed to arrange it so that no matter what your own values or commitments are you are supposed to rationally contract into his first principle of liberty.

Nobody is so ignorant that they don't know that no consideration (e.g. money or a b.j or some other inducement) then no contract. What inducement was Rawls offering us to get behind his veil? I bet it was oral. But would you really want an elderly Professor to suck you off? You would? Well, different strokes. 

I don’t think you can argue that way in politics. It’s too ambitious. It can’t work, and I’ve tried to say exactly why it doesn’t work in this case by introducing the notion of identity in my counterargument. That’s all I am doing. I am merely trying to point out that when you justify free speech, you can only make justifications of a more modest sort, appealing to some other value that is promoted by free speech and justifying it that way. In other arguments that he gives, Mill, in fact, does that. One argument he gives is that we should embrace free speech because it encourages diversity in society.

Nobody wants yet more diversity. There's only so many transgender organic cuisines from shithole countries you can pack into a food court. 

Now that is a much more modest argument. It will only convince those who value diversity .

People may pretend to. Then I move in next door and suddenly they think that maybe Herr Hitler had a point. 

If someone does not value diversity, he or she may not find the argument compelling. I think that is the best that philosophical argument can do in politics.

i.e. be shite without insulting any particular religion- except, in Bilgrami's case, Islam.  

It cannot really provide a universal form of compellingness that will knock down all human beings with conviction. But it is Mill’s more ambitious argument that has been of great influence in shaping liberalism (not just among philosophers and political theorists, but, as I said, in the law as well), not the more modest argument(s).


Are you, then, attacking liberal universalism?

I am not attacking the idea that a value or a principle (like free speech) can be or should be thought to apply to everyone. I think the term “universalism” should be restricted to that idea. Something with universal application. I am only doubtful that you can give an argument justifying principles or values like free speech that everyone will find convincing, no matter what other values and principles they hold. That is what Mill is trying to do with his meta-inductive argument for free speech and that is what Rawls is explicitly seeking in his argument that stresses the “original” position’ with its veil of ignorance as a starting point.

This is silly. Everybody can agree that for specific purposes new evidence should be admissible. The meta-meta-induction here is pragmatism. If you don't admit certain types of evidence for certain purposes you will fucking die or your regime will fucking collapse. Rawls's was shit at econ. The fact is Knightian uncertainty means we are always behind a veil of ignorance. We don't know all possible future states of the world. So, regret minimization or Hannan consistency is important. There's some backward induction but there is also some ontologically dysphoric hedging. This involves 'values' not at home in this world. This is a context in which one can speak of 'commitments' or 'moral psychology'. But its scope is limited. Having an economic theory of ontological dysphoria yields a structural causal model for Muth rational Liberalism free of antagonomic conflict or wokeness or wedge issues. But only if Liberalism is otherwise delivering the goods. That's where evidence comes in. 

Now, of course, this means that a principle with claims to universal application, like free speech, may not be accepted by everyone since there is no argument for it that is guaranteed to be accepted by everyone through the sheer force of logic and reason independent of any other values that people hold. But that’s life. We have to accept that. We can’t do better in philosophy, in political philosophy, anyway.

But we all do better when we tell political philosophy to go fuck itself.  

Would you say, then, that liberalism’s weakness is that it does not believe in commitments of that deep and fundamental kind and, therefore, has no place for the notion of identity?

That is a more far-reaching question than it seems. Yes, you are right that that is the upshot of what I’ve been saying so far.

Confine commitments to ontologically dysphoric values and this objection is disposed off.  

Officially (that is to say, doctrinally), liberalism is committed to the fallibility and revisability of our commitments and, therefore, to saying that attitudes that you find in Ulysses and Khomeini are irrational.

But they weren't irrational. Khomeini represents an ontologically dysphoric value- viz gaining heaven for eternity. This value is 'not at home in this world'. But, based on evidence, Khomeini's Iran did make progress on transgender issues. Much more may have been possible if Saddam hadn't launched a war. Shias are good people. But picking a fight with the strongest and richest power has consequences. But this is a lose lose situation. Obama sacrificed a lot of political capital to get a deal with Teheran. It may be he was deluded. But we can't be sure yet. The evidence isn't in.  

It actually says commitments and identity of that kind are irrational?

Yes, I think that is implied by their arguments that I’ve briefly outlined. Just look at Rawls’ argument: the pivotal point in the argument is that even for people like Ulysses and Khomeini it would be rational to take out an insurance policy for their possibly revised future preferences rather than their present commitments.

The Imam and the wily Greek had no problem with insurance. But Rawls wasn't saying 'collective insurance is Muth rational'. He was talking pseudo-Lefty bollocks about how economic inequality is 'unfair'. Fuck that! What's unfair is that I've got a needle dick not that I am lazy and thus as poor as shit.  

That strictly implies that the identitarian in Ulysses and Khomeini is irrational.

Fuck's irrational about getting to Heaven for eternity while killing (or being killed) by brutal invaders? Shia Islam is magnificent as is Sunni Islam or the Ba'hai Faith or Zoroastrianism or Judaism or various other religions of which I know little. But I've met people from those Faiths. They are good people. That's all that matters to me. 

But I just simply don’t understand why it is any more rational to take out an insurance policy for one’s future (possibly revised) commitments as against one’s present commitments than it is to tie oneself to the mast with one’s present commitments as against one’s future (possibly revised) commitments. It seems to me neither is more rational than the other.

You can only get insurance for possible states of the world not possible states of your mind. Your family can get a pay out if you die or get locked up in a padded cell. But you can't be shielded from either possibility.  

But, as I was saying, this is the official liberal doctrine, stressing fallibility and revisability.

No. It is based on new evidence and the Law of Large numbers.  

However, there is a strain in liberalism itself that seems to concede what I am saying about fundamental commitments and (subjective) identity being perfectly rational. So, in the end, I think there is something schizophrenic, something internally inconsistent, about liberalism.

As a political philosophy- sure. But Liberalism is primarily a school of 'Law & Econ' concerned with Hohfeldian incidents and Mechanism Design. Throw in the Condorcet Jury theorem and you get Liberalism's cash value. Gassing on about respect and inclusivity and diversity is a public fucking nuisance.

How so?

Liberalism is committed to rights .

No. It is committed to incentive compatible remedies for rights created under a vinculum juris.  

And I think the very idea of rights is basically the idea of a fundamental commitment, in my sense.

Fuck off. You can have a 'fundamental commitment' without having access to a remedy for its violation.  

So, in my view, liberals have a subjective identity despite the official position finding such identities irrational.

If Liberals forget about Law & Econ and just go in for virtue signalling and wokeness then they be as irrational as fuck. Also they are a nuisance. Vomit on them regularly. They will soon give you a wide berth.  

Why do you say rights are a kind of fundamental commitment in your sense?

Ask yourself what rights, at bottom, are. Or more specifically, ask yourself what makes rights different from other more ordinary values we have. Take the value of free speech, which we have been discussing and which is so fundamental to liberalism. Why does liberalism elevate this value above so many other values and erect into a right, with a very special place in the constitution? Well, one reason is this. Suppose tomorrow someone goes about propagating something in public that we find very wrong and offensive. Many of us may instinctively want to censor him. But if we have made free speech into a right, then we will be prevented from doing so even if we want to do so.

But, Liberalism permits various public interest limits on free speech. There may be an absolute right to expression in a private context but only a qualified immunity in the public sphere. This means that you can make a complaint and a Judge and Jury will decide on the basis of statue law and stare decisis judgments.  

Now, this is to do with the value of free speech exactly what Khomeini wanted to do with Islamic values and Ulysses with the value of fidelity.

No it isn't. Ulysses wasn't fighting for the rights of hubbies everywhere to be with wifey and not have to put out to crazy broads named Calypso. Nor was the Imam trying to save Jews and Hindus from Satan's snares.  

In liberal societies, we see our instinctive desire to censor the offending opinion which has emerged in our midst as a weakening and that is why we tied ourselves to the mast with the commitment to free speech, and made it into a right.

In which case it is justiciable.  

As a result, just like with Ulysses and Khomeini, even if we want to censor, we can’t.

Sure we can. Liberal regimes can have strict anti-obscenity and other laws which are in the public interest. A particular Liberal may sue a particular journalist for libel who may argue that this is  a mala fide 'SLAPP' action. Let judges and juries evaluate relevant evidence. Legal Judgments are protocol bound and buck stopped. Philosophical arguments aren't. You can't expect the latter to do the job of the former. That would be like saying the guy who draws Batman for the comic-books can actually go running around Gotham putting super-villains in prison. 

So this aspect of rights gives the liberal himself a subjective identity.

All rights vest in a personal identity or legal personality. It is a subjective matter if such an identity or personality feels that it has been subject to a right's violation. If the matter is justiciable, the Courts can make an objective judgment one way or another which is defeasible but 'buck stopped'. One may be 'committed' to free speech while still bringing a libel action though the Court may decide that this is 'SLAPP'. No contradiction is involved though, I suppose, the doctrine of estoppel may arise in equitable matters. 

It contradicts his official doctrine’s outlook that stresses fallibility and revisability.

But that 'official doctrine' does not say there shouldn't be an independent Judiciary with a 'buck stopping' mechanism. We still need 'tie breaking' judgments to solve coordination problems. But such judgments are themselves defeasible. But that comes under the purview of the quite separate discipline of jurisprudence. Political philosophy is not required be in conformity with advances in jurisprudence or chemistry or astrophysics.  

OK, it is coming out now that you have a critique of liberalism from many different angles.

all of them stoooooopid. 

In your interview on populism a couple of years ago (“Capitalism, populism & crisis of liberalism”, Frontline, June 21, 2019), you were critical of its political economy,

You should hear what Capitalism says about Bilgrami. Actually, it isn't anything really snarky. Capitalism says Bilgrami obeyed the invisible hand of the Globalized market for talking bollocks so as to do well for himself. Pretending to be a bit Lefty won't harm political economy any.  

and here through the notion of identity, you are critical of its politics.

Yes, I am critical of its politics, but that was mostly when I was criticising Isaiah Berlin in the last interview on objective identity. Here, while we are discussing subjective identity, what I am really criticising is not its politics but the moral psychology that underlies its politics, the inadequacy of its arguments for its political conclusions (rather than the conclusions themselves), and the inconsistencies within its overall doctrine.

So Bilgrami thinks politics is supervenient on 'moral psychology'. Yet, it is commonly observed, people think Britain should carry on as a Constitutional monarchy while America should stick with being a Republic. Indeed, it is best that countries gradually change by building on what went before and which worked well. Politics, it is clear, is wholly autonomous of 'moral psychology' for almost everybody. There may be a few nutters who start screaming and shitting themselves as the cross the border of a Republic into a Monarchy but they are mercifully few and far between.  

You see, I don’t think that even when it comes to ideals such as liberty, we should allow liberalism to corner the market on liberty.

But there are plenty of illiberal Libertarian schools of thought. 

Its arguments for liberty, as I’ve tried to argue, just don’t convince. So even liberty is something we will need to argue for outside of liberalism.

But, you'd feel silly if you did this arguing outside a University campus or in between giving blow jobs at a truck stop.  

Now, of course, liberals will say that they can recover liberty within liberalism despite these criticisms of Mill and Rawls; they will even say that Rawls himself gave up on some of these arguments that I’ve been criticising in his later work, but he never gave up liberalism. I don’t myself think that those are entirely intellectually honest responses.

And we don't think Bilgrami understands what 'honesty' means. 

Rawls’ later work, even his very last work, was committed to the idea of what he called the “original position” and the “veil of ignorance” method that I briefly expounded. Well, if Rawls’ liberalism can really embrace the direction of the criticisms I’ve been making, then the original position and veil of ignorance method should be completely redundant. But, as I said, he retained it, unto the last. He never thought it was redundant.

He was ignorant. I suppose you could say 'Justice as fairness is what would obtain if no uncorrelated asymmetries obtain'. However, Evolutionary game theory explains why they are eusocial and must feature in co-evolutionary processes. So we can conclude that 'Justice as Fairness is stooooooopid.' On the other hand, Rawls could be quoted by jurists arguing particular cases. But the refutation too could be quoted. Still, that's how legal arguments work. Rawls may have helped move Courts in the direction of discretionary or 'consequentialist' calculi as opposed to applying rigid 'deontological' rules.  

In general, what makes liberalism such an interesting doctrine is that it is ambitious in the way that Mill and Rawls are. I actually think that there is something noble about Rawls’ project even though I have been critical of it. Now, if liberalism gives up on his (and Mill’s) ambitious arguments and waters down its ambitions, it loses much of its interest.

Being interesting to cretinous wankers aint a fate anybody would want.  

It becomes continuous with doctrines that are quite different and is completely vulnerable to being taken in directions that leave it unrecognisable. It would be seeking to justify liberty outside of liberalism.

I suppose the guy means it would go back to being Classical Liberalism. Mill wanted poor people to just fucking starve to death already. The State should be nothing more than a night-watchman.  On the other hand Mill agreed with Bertrand Russell that 'savages'- Indians, Africans etc.- should be conquered and killed if Whites could replace them or else rendered a subject race if their native climate was too unhealthy for Europeans. 

To return to where we started in the interview, you said in your essay “What is a Muslim?” that subjective identities based on fundamental commitments were often formed in conditions of dislocation and to overcome feelings of powerlessness. Does this mean that in these cases it is an instrumental version of subjective identity rather than an end in itself because it is there to deal with dislocation and feelings of powerlessness?

My memory is that Rushdie claimed to have re-converted to Islam after the fatwa before deciding that wouldn't help him at all. His plight was like that of an Ahmadiya author who wrote a book attacking Rushdie though he himself would be put in prison in Pakistan if he claimed to be Muslim!

There is some truth in the notion that dislocation makes for powerlessness which in turn makes for doing crazy shite- e.g. pretending you are the Grand Poo-Bah of the Golden Pagoda with the secret power of levitation and shitting invisibly on the heads of your enemies. But boredom and drugs could have the same effect. 

That is a very shrewd and sharp question. But before I respond to it, let me just say that subjective identities can also be formed under conditions of triumphalism. The historian Linda Colley writes of how the Scots conceived of themselves as having a British identity for the first time out of a pride in the British Empire overseas.

Pride or opportunity to profit? It was clear that Scotland could not go it alone in the race for colonies. The puzzle is why Scottish nationalism has been rising since the 1920s. An economist's answer may invoke subsidiarity and Tiebout models. Others might blame Thatcher or Gordon Brown.  The truth is, Scots are very talented people but for some reason think that Southerners can't understand their accent. Since they speak clearly and always have something sensible to say, the reverse is the case. Why then do Southerners keep doing stupid shit? The answer, I'm afraid, is a lot of us just enjoy being stupid. I mean, what if your best friend- upon whom you gaze with a fond and welcoming eye- suddenly starts talking about a subject other than the weather? Worse still, what if he asks your name and invites you to dinner? That sort of behavior is all right when it comes to foreigners or lunatics or clergy people. But if your best friend suddenly does it to you, you may have to sell up and move back to... Neasden. 

[Noam] Chomsky points out that many Jews in the United States identified with Israel and came to make central their Jewish identity after Israel’s smashing victory in [the] 1967 [Arab-Israeli War].

But many Americans of Arab ancestry began identifying with the Palestinians thenceforth.  

And I think some identification with jehadi Islamism grew out of the Mujahideen sense of triumphalism after the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But the West identified with the mujahideen back then. Art Malik, a Briton of Pakistani heritage, plays Kamran Shah, James Bond's ally in the 1987 film 'The Living Daylights'. By 1994 he was playing the Islamic terrorist in Schwarznegger's 'True Lies'. That was just a year after the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers.  

So, subjective identity can grow both out of the soil of triumph as well as of defeat and powerlessness.

Or, as with Scottish Nationalism, it can simply grow out of subjectivity in an organic manner. The Scots are very talented people. It is natural that they will have a very sophisticated sense of subjective identity. We pity them for it. That sort of thing is bound to end in high falutin' talk and tears before bedtime.  

But to return to your excellent question about the cases when it does grow out of dislocation and helplessness, I think, perhaps it is closer in these cases to functionalism than to instrumentalism. What I mean is that we don’t consciously form these subjective identities in order to cope with dislocation and powerlessness in the way that instrumentalism would suggest. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that it is the function of subjective identity, in these cases, to deal with the conditions of dislocation and powerlessness. That is a subtle difference.

Any function can be instrumentalized but that instrument may not serve any useful function.  There is no difference between two equally useless things more particularly if they are one and the same. 

But it is a real difference. I don’t think instrumentalism and functionalism are the same thing.

Spotting and using a functioning is instrumentalization. Instrumentalism without functioning is useless.  

But, you know, the fact is that, in the end, I don’t even think what I had in mind to say was functionalist either.

It was wholly useless and therefore meaningless.  

It’s a quite different framework I tried to provide in moral psychology from either instrumentalism or functionalism. I can’t possibly elaborate that now, in an interview that is already too long. I would need to present a lot of background, and it would just make the discussion too academic.

The background is easily presented. Bilgrami says that individuals have a 'moral psychology'. In it 'fundamental commitments' are made which, by some magic, bind the individual such that they are impervious to reason or rationality or 'self-scrutiny' or anything else political philosophers gas on about. Why this should be the case is a mystery.  

But, let me close, by saying something about this very point you have made which is more straightforward and accessible but also more important in the moral psychology of politics. One of the things that had worried me in that essay is how one’s own understanding of one’s sense of dislocation and powerlessness as the basis for forming subjective identities can have a very bad moral-psychological effect. It can come in the way of one’s agency, it can come in the way of one being capable of self-criticism, which is central to having agency.

Very true. Shaitan is lurking everywhere. Shaitan could be entering your moral-psychology because you were stupid enough to take that job in Manhattan rather than Mumbai. Now Shaitan is totally destroying your ability to scrutinize and correct yourself! You think you have more 'agency' coz you now have lots more money and a fancy title and a nice office at work. But you are living in a Satanic fantasy! Don't you understand you are being sodomized by neo-liberalism?! Tobah! Tobah! Rawls and Mill are jizzing in your face and laughing at you!  

One’s self-understanding goes against one’s own agency?

Arre, baba, don't you understand, you can't have your own travel agency or dating agency because your self-understanding has been totes ass-raped by Shaitan?! Kindly read my next book about moral psychology while chanting 'Boo to Neo-liberalism!' very very loudly in your sleep. That's what works for me. Verb sap.  

Well, yes, it doesn’t sound intuitive, but it is a real problem, and a deep problem. Look, take first a less political or public case and then we can return to the Muslim identity example. Suppose you say of me, “He is who he is, he is the way he is, because he had a rather traumatic childhood…”. And suppose you are quite right in saying so. Now, suppose I say the same thing, “I am who I am, I am the way I am, because I had a rather traumatic upbringing as a child…”.

There is an obvious difference here- an uncorrelated asymmetry. You and your pal can avoid the fuck out of that head case whose Mum made him wear her bra to school. But you can't avoid yourself and obviously don't want your interlocutor to avoid you. So you are offering a deal- give me stuff and I'll continue not to reciprocate coz of my shitty childhood. You get to feel good about yourself and go around telling everyone that you are nice to me coz I told you all about all those times my Uncle used to finger me till my Mum made him stop because he wasn't my Uncle and also she thought I should try to get my old job back rather than go around getting fingered by homeless dudes while depleting my parent's retirement savings.  

I think your saying it is fine. But, by comparison, there is something off about my saying it even if it is completely true .... When I say it, I am sort of abdicating my agency, by going into this mode of self-understanding.

No. You are making a claim for compassionate treatment in return for which the other guy gets boasting rights. Do you really think he is going to keep shtum about your getting fingered by homeless dudes all through your forties? That's a story he can dine out on for years.  

Now, somebody like Sartre saw this, but he made too much of it and called the whole regime of psychoanalysis which seeks self-understanding a kind of systematic form of bad faith.

Though, back then, you could make money off that shit. Sartre got paid big bucks to do a Hollywood screenplay for a Freud biopic.  

But, in that essay, I was rather concerned that Muslims were increasingly far too prone to asserting: “Don’t you see, we are like this, we have formed this subjective identity and have landed in this fundamentalist, Islamist outlook and behaviour to cope with our colonial past and present.”

That is Bilgrami's claim. Everybody else was pretending that some Oil Sheikh was ready to finance their Islamic NGO or Social Media platform or whatever. I recall a posh Pakistani friend loading me into the back of his BMW and driving me off to a 5 star hotel. Why? I was wearing kurta pajama and had a long beard and looked like I might have been killing kaffirs in some jungle. Also, back then, I was thin. The other guys he'd rounded up were fat Punjabis who worked in his Uncle's kitchens. Say what you like, Punjabis clean up nice. They could have been Members of Parliament or wealthy landlords. For all I know that is what they are now. I alone looked 'dislocated'. Also, without my glasses, I have a ferocious squint. I forget what the event was supposed to raise funds for but stuffed myself at the buffet table. Clearly I was the genuine article. Meanwhile the rotund but smooth tongued Punjabis were making assignations with all the blonde P.R or journalistic types at the venue.  

And what I was pointing out was that what was wrong with it was not that it was false. In fact, in that essay, I was saying that it was true, as you yourself observed. What was wrong with Muslims themselves saying it rather was that it was abdicating their agency to say it.

So if you tell the truth about yourself you abdicate the agency to the tell the truth about yourself because all cats are necessarily dogs which is why they say 'woof woof'.  

It was making them uncritical of their own jehadi Islamist tendencies.

Why should it do so? It is obvious that if the other guy converts and hands over all his cash then there is no need for jihad. Just displaying the tendency is enough. You can be critical of this tendency of yours to further this desirable end. Just say 'you know, I really feel I want to be a better person- not one who has the undesirable tendency to chop your fucking head off unless you convert and hand over all your cash'. Of course, there's another way to play it. You could say 'I try to be a devout jihadi and to take pleasure in chopping off kuffar heads. Sadly I prefer to take money and skip the decapitation. I often criticize myself for this moral lapse. Alas, my traumatic childhood is to blame'. Being critical of certain tendencies you may claim to have can enhance your agency like nobody's business. Sadly my tendency to take my clients to the Moon and other planets has not helped my Travel Agency any. This may be due to Shaitan sodomized my moral psychology while my secret identity was taking a piss.  

This is the curious asymmetry between a truth being said from different locations carrying a quite different moral psychology. Others saying that truth about Muslims is fine; for them to say it of themselves is what is problematic.

Lord Krishna says that to utter condign self-praise is to kill yourself. This is symmetric to causing 'social death' to another by berating them, truthfully, for their faults and crimes. 

In this particular case, non-Muslims saying 'Muslims be all like burqa burqa jihad' shows bad psychology and, frankly, the thing isn't true at all. It is inflicting 'social death' on a community in a manner which harms the whole economy and geopolitical situation. By contrast a particular Muslim saying 'we Muslims have such and such tendency' is good moral psychology because the moment we hear this statement we know we too have that tendency. Our empathy for Muslims increases. Sure, their names sound funny to us, but our names sound funny to them. The Muslim may go on to say 'We Muslims must follow the Quranic injunction to be self-critical and the Prophet's hadith to show compassion etc, etc.' 

There have been plenty of movies and TV shows where the Muslim hero or heroine or other wise person makes a speech of this type. This is good moral psychology. 

I suppose Bilgrami may be more narrowly reflecting on the problem of the deracinated 'Muslim by birth' who wants to gain a rent by pretending to be the 'self-critical Muslim' the Media needs to have on tap. But there's no big problem. Grow out your beard or put on a great big karakul cap. Learn a couple of Quranic quotations by heart. Claim to be engaged to Brittney Spears. Appear on C-list Celebrity Big Brother. Finally, reveal your heartbreaking tale of child abuse- the kids at the local school used to call you filthy names while you were lying a pool of your own vomit being fingered by homeless dudes. On the other hand, you must blame Neo-Liberalism and budget cuts for your having had to quit teaching. I'm not saying any of this happened to me. But it is the sort of thing which could happen to anybody. What we must focus on is that it is Neo-Liberalism which is the real enemy here. No one cares who finger banged who. We've got to get our priorities right. Rawls and Mills are jizzing in our faces and laughing at us! Wake up sheeple! How long are you going to let Shaitan sodomize the centrality of the centrality of the centrality of the center of your fundamental commitment to a moral psychology which won't just abdicate your agency but also pay for it to go to Pope Skool? 

It is this general sort of point that also makes me uneasy about all this recent philosophical talk about “recognition”. The term recognition goes quite far back in political philosophy, but in earlier philosophers like Rousseau and [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel, it has a rather abstract point: the very idea of self is formed by the recognition of and by the other.

Hegel had some scientific successors and we can recast much of his logic in terms of category theory. This means you can have a 'Hegelian' cognitive science, theory of mind, etc. Stuff like that gets down to nitty gritty pretty quickly- stuff like why puppies have different 'recognition' mechanism than wolf cubs. This translates into better Structural Causal Models which can soon pay for themselves in terms of improving outcomes. That's 'cash value' right there.

Meanwhile, political philosophers have to be content with this sort of puerile puke- 

That is a very abstract notion of recognition. It is not a psychologised notion of recognition.

Coz the psychologized notion would be based on experiments involving retinal scans of kittens or other such ikky sciencey stuff.  

In Rousseau and Hegel, recognition is a condition for the possibility of having a self at all.

Just as studying stupid shite is both a necessary and sufficient condition for talking about the possibility of not having a self at all.  

But in the more psychologised idea of recognition as you find it in the politics of recognition, it comes across as : “Please recognise us.”

as what we want to be recognized as. I want to be recognized as Queen Bey's younger more talented sister. I don't want to be recognized as the weird geezer who used to teach you calculus till he was sacked for being a hopeless drunk. 

And that, I think, is a surrender of one’s agency.

Only if things stop with the plea. But, if I lost 20 kg and learned dancing and singing and invested a lot money in dental work and cosmetic surgery somebody might say 'hey! that guy is shaking his booty like he could be Queen Bey's backup dancer from 20 years ago'  

I think there is not a trace of this bleating form of the politics of recognition in Marx’s framework for politics.

Marx said build up your own strength. Don't wait till Providence arranges some Messiah- like Napoleon III- for you. 

Marx was completely focussed on agency, on praxis, on mobilisations of solidarities, and so on.

No. He was focused on writing stupid shite. But that kept him too busy to fuck up the rise of Socialist Parties in Europe 

So this politics of recognition is a very un-Marxist development in political philosophy.

Self-recognition as equals in constituting a revolutionary class is perfectly Marxist. You don't need a Lasalle to broker a deal with Bismark.  

And it has the same fault line as the focus on self-understanding of the conditions that give rise to subjective identity as a turning away from one’s own agency.

Bilgrami, foolishly thinks subjectivity must (for the Left) be deterministic. This is not so. As a student he must have read Ilya Prigogine and Jacques Monod. He must have had some intimation of chaos theory if not P=NP and so forth. Why then, at this late hour, is he babbling such nonsense?

 Put it this way, to have subjectivity means to devote cognitive resources to a type of mental modelling featuring ipseity and alterity and oikeiosis and antidosis. But that model can't be a resource hog. It must robustly return to ergodicity at least at the macro level. Otherwise hysteresis loops will predominate and the organism will go extinct. It follows that subjectivity can't fetter agency by any 'commitment' in a robust, macro, manner. On the other hand you can get 'bounded rationality'- which is what the relevant econ theory predicts. This has some empirical confirmation. But considerations such as these militate against every premise in Bilgrami's argument. It's like he's spent the last fifty years living under a rock. He can't possibly have been this ignorant back in the Seventies.  

Subjective identity is of interest to politicians. They have objective info about what we want or ought to want. But we have cognitive biases and bounded rationality obtains and there are mimetic effects and so on. Thus, politicians will hire a smart guy like Prashant Kishore- not a stupid nutcase like Bilgrami- to probe 'subjective identity' through focus groups or whatever. Kishore gets paid a lot of money and has been called the 'King-maker' of India. He has certainly helped refocus Indian politics on 'deliverables'. That's a good thing. We think well of Kishore. We think ill of Bilgrami and Sen and Spivak and other such tossers. They advertised the stupidity of the Indian pseudo-intellectual to the World. They have shat on their own disciplines and wasted the time of their students. Shame on them.