Toby Svoboda > Quotes

“Fourth and finally, I must point out that any philosophical view is unlikely to gain wide acceptance among either philosophers or the wider public. This is especially true of a view like cognitivist misanthropy.
Human beings excel at ignoring or denying unpleasant ideas, regardless of strong evidence in their favor—climate change, racism, evolution, heliocentrism, and so on. The idea that one’s own species is bad is especially unpleasant, so it is untenable to think that human beings would adopt the misanthropist view at any appreciable scale. To take an analogy, we might consider the epistemic standards of the home crowd at any sporting event. When judging the quality of the officiating, the crowd relies on the standard of whether or not the officials’ calls favor the home team. The crowd approves of calls that are to the benefit of its favored team while disapproving vehemently of calls that are to that team’s detriment. It matters not to the crowd whether the officials’ calls are, in fact, correct. Even if video replay clearly shows that the home team violated one of the rules of the game, the crowd will repudiate the officials’
“unfair” treatment of its team. I suspect that the public’s estimation of cognitivist misanthropy would be similar, in the unlikely event that anyone outside academia learns of it. The view would be rejected because it is unpleasant or perhaps because it does not fit with preconceptions. In that case, there is virtually no chance for cognitivist misanthropy to cause harm, because there is virtually no chance that it will be accepted by more than a few people.
One might object that my analogy is unfair. The behavior of a crowd at a sporting event should not be taken too seriously. It is merely in good fun that the crowd abandons reasonable epistemic standards for a few hours, and surely the individuals who comprise such crowds return to reason when it comes to serious matters. I wish that were true, but the analogy seems apt to me, at least in many arenas of human life. Politics is an obvious example. It is very difficult to look at elections, for example, as involving much in the way of epistemic reasonableness. Support or opposition to some candidate or policy seems to depend on cultural commitments to a far greater extent than considerations of facts, coherence, plausibility, the content of a candidate’s platform, and so on. For instance, when asked by pollsters, a high proportion of supporters of Donald Trump claim to believe many obvious falsehoods. This is puzzling if we assume that the respondents are behaving as genuine epistemic agents who seek to understand reality. How could persons capable of running their own lives believe in absurd conspiracy theories, for example? If we instead assume that the respondents are behaving as supporters of their favored “team,” their behavior makes much more sense. When it comes to politics and social issues, many people simply do not care very much about the truth. Instead, they are invested in promoting the “right” candidate, value, idea, or institution. This is not limited to false views.”
― Toby Svoboda, A Philosophical Defense of Misanthropy

“Finally, we may understand misanthropy as a kind of viewpoint that includes the judgment that humanity is bad. There are various senses of “bad” one might use here, but I focus on moral badness, a concept that I shall explicate below. This viewpoint is distinct from the other types of misanthropy just noted, although it may be compatible with some of them. Someone who sincerely judges that humans are bad, and views them accordingly, need not dislike, hate, or despise humanity. Like misanthropy as contempt, this type essentially involves a belief rather than a non-cognitive attitude, such as disliking or hatred. However, unlike contempt, misanthropy as the judgment that humans are bad does not essentially involve the judgment that others are inferior to oneself. Although it seems possible for one to judge that humans are bad and to hold the rest of humanity in contempt, this requires only that we acknowledge that one might be two types of misanthrope at once. Solely in virtue of judging humanity to be bad, one will not thereby be contemptuous toward others. This opens an important possibility for our final type of misanthropy, namely that one can include oneself among those judged to be bad. Contempt seems unavoidably elitist, as it involves looking down upon other persons. This distinguishes misanthropy as contempt from misanthropy as the judgment that humanity is bad and in a striking way.”
― Toby Svoboda, A Philosophical Defense of Misanthropy

“Schopenhauer’s misanthropic honesty is useful here, not primarily because I think it is correct but more importantly because it is exceptional. The unfounded moral optimism of many persons, including philosophers, deserves to be challenged. It is commonly said that most people are good and that this or that person means well. We often seek to excuse wrongful actions by appealing to extraneous factors that might explain those actions, such as someone’s psychological state or economic conditions. Is this optimism justified? Perhaps there is a good argument to that effect, but I have not encountered it. Instead, moral optimism seems to be a default assumption of many, a position that is held without justification. Is it true that, in general, human beings tend to be morally good and that our vices and misdeeds are exceptions to the rule? When I look to the atrocities of history, the injustices of the present, and the indifference of most persons to all of these, I find the opposite view to be more plausible.
Perhaps I am mistaken, and a more optimistic view is the better one, but this requires a serious justification. As Schopenhauer indicates, there is a strong prima facie case to be made for a kind of moral pessimism, so we cannot simply dismiss that possibility. Because more optimistic views are typically adopted without any argument, I cannot proceed by attempting to refute arguments of that nature—for the most part, they do not exist.”
― Toby Svoboda, A Philosophical Defense of Misanthropy

“Comedy, especially in the form of satire, also specializes in deriding the self-importance of human beings. For instance, the notion that the United States Senate is “the world’s greatest deliberative body” warrants laughter and ridicule, given the absurdity of its proceedings. To take another example, it is no accident that dictators especially dislike being mocked, for they are deserving targets of mockery, given their grandiloquence and pathetic lust for political power. Are figures like Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump, and Jair Bolsonaro not utterly ridiculous, deserving of contempt and laughter? True, they are also dangerous individuals, responsible for the deaths of many innocent persons, but recognizing that fact is compatible with mockery of their absurd personas. Of course, the self-importance of human beings is not limited to politicians and dictators. Fortunately, tenured academics have little in the way of political power beyond their own institutions (and not much there, either), but it would be difficult to find a class of persons whose endeavors are both more trivial and more self-prized. When a full professor publicly excoriates a graduate student for allegedly misunderstanding some arcane point, it is certainly abusive but is also comical when one considers the abuser’s self-seriousness in the face of trivia. In a case like this, the victim deserves sympathy, but the abuser deserves (among other things) contemptuous and dismissive laughter. As with so many other human enterprises, academia deserves to be lampooned, as it is in the novels of David Lodge, for example.”
― Toby Svoboda, A Philosophical Defense of Misanthropy

“Philosophers in the Western tradition have paid little attention to comedy, focusing instead on tragedy. This is unfortunate, as comedy is the more appropriate genre for representing humanity. Ours is a ridiculous species, its members displaying every manner of stupidity, willing to harm ourselves and others in the pursuit of trivial ends, all while pretending to believe obvious falsehoods. This is not the appropriate subject matter for tragedy. It is comedy that specializes in exposing and lampooning the ridiculous. I will argue here that a comic representation of humanity has three primary virtues for the misanthropist. First, it accurately represents humanity. Second, it provides a kind of palliative to the terrible truth about humanity that I have defended in previous chapters. Third, comedic genres are permitted wider latitude than more serious genres when it comes to free expression, allowing for especially incisive and honest critique.”
― Toby Svoboda, A Philosophical Defense of Misanthropy