Identity and conflict

Social Research, Spring, 2007 by Isaac Levi

That is not to say that other Jews do not have stronger networks of value commitments that they associate with their identification as Jews. But that makes the point I mean to emphasize. Identifying with a group does not, in many cases, entail a unique system of value commitments and, indeed, may not entail any or any very significant value commitments at all. Moreover, the identification may remain constant even though the value commitments change over time.

For this reason, I am inclined to engage in what Sen calls "identity disregard." No doubt some groups are defined by the value commitments their members support. An agent who belongs to such a group has an identity that supports fairly substantive value commitments. But this is far from true in every case. I doubt that it is true in the case of embracing a Muslim identity anymore than it is in the case of adopting a Jewish identity. I do not mean to dismiss the importance of having value commitments and even systems of value commitments that are not focused on promoting self-interest or one's own goals. But I submit that identifying with a group is neither necessary nor sufficient for having such value commitments

VALUE COMMITMENTS (2)

Deliberation, whether it concerns the purchase of a grass whip at some hardware store or the decision to marry Betty Jane, to join the Marines, or to vote in the next election, concerns a choice among options as recognized by the deliberating agent. Hence, it inevitably involves a comparison among the options with respect to which are better than which. The decisionmaker may not be in a position to provide a complete ranking of the options recognized as available. And even when a complete ranking can be constructed, the agent may not impute a numerical value or utility to the options.

Sometimes such incompleteness is a feature of the agent's commitment as to how to evaluate the options. Sometimes, however, it reflects a failure on the part of the agent to fulfill his or her commitments. We should not confuse value commitments with the performances that qualify as attempts to fulfill these commitments. Failure to make complete comparisons of the available options may be due to failures of performance even when the agent is committed to such comparisons. Remedy for such failures calls for therapy, moral exhortation, and efforts to elicit the agent's attitudes from assessments as to how the decisionmaker would choose in various hypothetical circumstances as well as how the decisionmaker chooses in empirically observed situations.

But often enough failures to make complete comparisons of the available options are an expression of clearheaded doubt. The agent endorses value commitments that recognize more than one way of evaluating the available options to be permissible to use in making a decision. X may wish to protect American workers by preventing the immigration of individuals willing to work for paltry wages while deploring the xenophobia that suffuses the debate over immigration. Recognition of several different ways of evaluating the available immigration policy grounds a principled doubt concerning what is to be done. When X is in such doubt, X fails to regard ranking policies guided by the concern to protect American workers as impermissible and fails to rule out rankings guided by hostility to xenophobia. Both types of evaluations may be judged to be permissible even though there may be no way to choose from the available options that is optimal according to both. According to X's "all things considered" judgment, there is no best option among those available. There is no complete ranking representing X's all things considered judgment. Yet, X is neither confused nor irrational. X has a "real and living doubt" of the sort that provokes inquiry according to Peirce and Dewey. Therapy is not warranted.