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A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures
A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists. Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on these and other burning questions. In a series of quirky and accessible short pieces that cover a mind-boggling variety of philosophical topics, Schwitzgebel offers incisive takes on matters both small (the consciousness of garden snails) and large (time, space, and causation). A common theme might be the ragged edge of the human intellect, where moral or philosophical reflection begins to turn against itself, lost among doubts and improbable conclusions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence. (See, for example, “Kant on Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants.”) Some of the texts resist thematic categorization—thoughts on the philosophical implications of dreidels, the diminishing offensiveness of the most profane profanity, and fatherly optimism—but are no less interesting. Schwitzgebel has selected these pieces from the more than one thousand that have appeared since 2006 in various publications and on his popular blog, The Splintered Mind , revising and updating them for this book. Philosophy has never been this much fun.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published November 5, 2019
60 people are currently reading
376 people want to read
About the author
Eric Schwitzgebel
22 books29 followersEric Schwitzgebel is an American philosopher and professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. His main interests include connections between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind and the nature of belief.[1][2] he received his PhD from University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Alison Gopnik, and John Searle.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
December 2, 2019
Fifty or so very short essays about philosophical topics. Liked most of them, although a few I found less interesting. Great sense of humor and also I like his sense of humility & fallibility. He has a bit of the scientist in him as well, as he’s frequently interested in analyzing data about philosophers themselves.
December 19, 2020
"On the day we discuss the minds of nonhuman animals, I normally bring a large, cute stuffed teddy bear to class. I treat it affectionally at the start, stroking its head and calling it by endearing names.
Then, about halfway through the class I suddenly punch it in the face."
"A Theory of Jerks" is a book of dilemmas. It starts with philosophical and moral ones and later veers into technology, always staying wonderfully diverse, always challenging one's perception of the world and oneself. Is avoiding displeasure more motivating for you than gaining pleasure? Who should get priority in a driverless car accident, the passengers or three kids in a crosswalk? Is it perfectly fine to aim for moral mediocrity? Are we on our way to becoming gods?
Keep in mind Schwitzgebel is an acclaimed sci-fi writer. In accordance with the 'show don't tell' principle, each chapter begins with a vivid example to draw the reader in—so the problems presented, no matter how far-fetched they may appear at the start, never feel abstract. And anyway, if you think some of the scenarios are far-fetched, you haven't been paying attention.
A delightful work, clever, thought-invoking, unmistakably humane, and, above all, entertaining.
The book contains two sections which will be of particular interest to sci-fi fans, "Cute AI and Zombie Robots" and "Cosmic Freaks," both basically a guide to thinking about the future for the Elon Musk generation. "My Daughter's Rented Eyes," "A Two-Seater Homunculus," and "Penelope's Guide to Defeating Time, Space, and Causation" are all previously unpublished genre stories, all excellent, scary, and thought-provoking in equal measures.
Then, about halfway through the class I suddenly punch it in the face."
"A Theory of Jerks" is a book of dilemmas. It starts with philosophical and moral ones and later veers into technology, always staying wonderfully diverse, always challenging one's perception of the world and oneself. Is avoiding displeasure more motivating for you than gaining pleasure? Who should get priority in a driverless car accident, the passengers or three kids in a crosswalk? Is it perfectly fine to aim for moral mediocrity? Are we on our way to becoming gods?
Keep in mind Schwitzgebel is an acclaimed sci-fi writer. In accordance with the 'show don't tell' principle, each chapter begins with a vivid example to draw the reader in—so the problems presented, no matter how far-fetched they may appear at the start, never feel abstract. And anyway, if you think some of the scenarios are far-fetched, you haven't been paying attention.
A delightful work, clever, thought-invoking, unmistakably humane, and, above all, entertaining.
The book contains two sections which will be of particular interest to sci-fi fans, "Cute AI and Zombie Robots" and "Cosmic Freaks," both basically a guide to thinking about the future for the Elon Musk generation. "My Daughter's Rented Eyes," "A Two-Seater Homunculus," and "Penelope's Guide to Defeating Time, Space, and Causation" are all previously unpublished genre stories, all excellent, scary, and thought-provoking in equal measures.
May 10, 2021
A delightful collection of playful philosophical musings. I was more engaged by some sections than others, but what I like most is Schwitzgebel's approach. He's immanently approachable. I'll let him say more.
From "Will Future Generations Find Us Morally Loathsome?"
I find myself, as I write this final chapter, rereading the epilogue of Moody-Adams's 1997 book, Fieldwork in Familiar Places. Moody-Adams suggests that we can begin to rise beyond our cultural and historical moral boundaries through moral reflection of the right sort: moral reflection that involves . . . well, I'm going to bullet-point the list to slow down the presentation of it, since the list is so good:
- self-scrutiny
- vivid imagination
- a wide-ranging contact with other disciplines and traditions
- a recognition of minority voices
- serious engagement with the concrete details of everyday moral inquiry
(This list, I should clarify, is what I extract from Moody-Adams's remarks, which are not presented in exactly these words or in a list format.)
Instead of a narrow or papier-mâché seminar-room rationalism, we should treasure insight from the entire range of lived experience and from perspectives as different as possible from our own, in a spirit of open-mindedness and self-doubt. Here lies our best chance of repairing our probable moral myopia.
If I have an agenda in this book, it's less to defend any specific philosophical thesis than to philosophize in a manner that manifests these virtues.
There's one thing missing from Moody-Adams's lovely list, though, or maybe it's a cluster of related things. It's wonder, fun, and a sense of the incomprehensible bizarreness of the world. We should have those in our vision of good philosophy too! Moral open-mindedness is not, I think, entirely distinct from epistemic and metaphysical open-mindedness. They mix (I hope) in this book. I think I see them mixing, too, in two of my favorite philosophers, the great humane skeptics Zhuangzi and Montaigne.
Uncomfortably self-critical reflections on excuses and jerkitude--they're apt to wear us down, and too much thinking of that sort might reinforce the exact type of moral rationalization we hope to avoid. When we need a break from moral self doubt, and some fun, we can cast ourselves into a different sort of doubt. We can spend some time--you and me together if you like--dreaming of cute Al and zombie robots.
July 14, 2022
Muy buenos algunos blogs, pero algunos repetitivos y otros meh.
January 1, 2020
Many thought-provoking essays that I can share with my 6th grade gifted/talented classes! Maybe not the essay about the value of the F word...but the essays Schwitzgebel writes that recognize Immanuel Kant's ironically twisted ethics are definitely going to be shocking to the childrens!
November 12, 2019
I saw the title of this book and thought it would be funny, and it is, but it's also very well argued, well-written and frankly, rather delightful. In very accessible language, Schwitzgebel examines some of the big questions of our time, and also some of the marvelous small ones too (Do garden snails have consciousness?) The introduction suggests reading the book out of order and as it pleases you, and this worked for me. Other bonuses - he has a blog where you can read more great essays; the bibliography is full of excellent reads; academic writing receives a kick in the teeth every time you crack open the cover.
Read
July 16, 2020#1bookaweek (15 of 53) Even with Covid, our ad agency’s book club meeting persists. The theme that’s been picked for the month: that book you judged by the cover. Sakto! Because I distinctly remember buying this particular book precisely because natuwa ako sa title. ‘A Theory of Jerks’ how cool is that di ba?!
Published by MIT, it’s a collection of philosophical essays written by University of California Professor of Philosophy Eric Shwitzgebel. Fifty-eight short forms to be exact. But he encourages the reader to “not start reading on page 1,” read “in any order you like,” and “skip anything you find boring.” Shwitzgebel believes philosophy should be fun.
So while the collection is paced into five chapters, I’ll randomly gorge those essays with super fun titles. And those who intimately know me know that I enjoy coffee that’s as dark as my sense of humor. So of the 58 essays, let’s start with:
- A Theory of Jerks
- Is It Perfectly Fine To Aim For Moral Mediocrity
- A Theory of Hypocrisy
- Cheerfully Suicidal AI Slaves
- Skepticism, Godzilla, and the Artificially Computerized Many-Branching You
- How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot
- Competing Perspectives on One’s Final Dying Thought
- Profanity Inflation, Profanity Migration, and the Paradox of Prohibition (or I Love You, “Fuck”)
- Might You Be A Cosmic Freak?
- Penelope’s Guide to Defeating Time, Space, and Causation
- Are Garden Snails Conscious? Yes, No, or *Gong*?
- Kant of Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants
- Will Future Generations Find Us Morally Loathsome?
- Trusting Your Sense of Fun
An excerpt from the essay no. 1, Theory of Jerks:
“The essence of ‘jerktitude’ in the moral sense, is this: the jerk culpability fails to appreciate the perspective of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or fools to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers […] Some related traits are already well known in psychology and philosophy—the ‘dark triad’ of Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy; low “Agreeableness” on the Big Five personality test; and Aaron James’s conception of the asshole, already mentioned. But my conception of the jerk differs from all these. The asshole, James says, is someone who allows himself to enjoy special advantages out of an entrenched sense of entitlement. This is one dimension of jerktitude, but not the whole story. The callous psychopath, though cousin of the jerk, has an impulsivity and love of risk taking that needn’t belong to the jerk’s character. Neither does the jerk have to be as thoroughly self-involved as the narcissist of as self-consciously cynical as the Machiavellian, though narcissism and Machiavellian are common jerkish attributes. People low in Big Five Agreeableness tend to be unhelpful, mistrusting, and difficult to get along with –again, features related to jerkitude, and perhaps even partly constitutive of it, but not exactly jerkitude as I’ve defined it. Also, my definition of jerkitude has a conceptual unity that is, I think, theoretically appealing in the abstract and fruitful in helping to explain some of the peculiar features of this type of animal, as we will see.”
(In Tagalog, mga kupal. Like the ones in government?)
So funny, so clever, soooo divorcing Brooklyn Nine-Nine for a week for this.
----
Week 15 of 53
A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures
by Eric Shwitzgebel
From Amazon:
"One of the Best Philosophy Books of 2019.
A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists.
Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on these and other burning questions. In a series of quirky and accessible short pieces that cover a mind-boggling variety of philosophical topics, Schwitzgebel offers incisive takes on matters both small (the consciousness of garden snails) and large (time, space, and causation).
A common theme might be the ragged edge of the human intellect, where moral or philosophical reflection begins to turn against itself, lost among doubts and improbable conclusions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence. (See, for example, “Kant on Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants.”) Some of the texts resist thematic categorization—thoughts on the philosophical implications of dreidels, the diminishing offensiveness of the most profane profanity, and fatherly optimism—but are no less interesting.
Schwitzgebel has selected these pieces from the more than one thousand that have appeared since 2006 in various publications and on his popular blog, The Splintered Mind, revising and updating them for this book. Philosophy has never been this much fun."
See Five Books review at the comments section.
-----
MY NOTES (This section keeps getting updated)
*
*
*
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#1bookaweek
#bookofthemonth
#ATheoryofJerks
#EricShwitzgebel
#AmazonBooks
Published by MIT, it’s a collection of philosophical essays written by University of California Professor of Philosophy Eric Shwitzgebel. Fifty-eight short forms to be exact. But he encourages the reader to “not start reading on page 1,” read “in any order you like,” and “skip anything you find boring.” Shwitzgebel believes philosophy should be fun.
So while the collection is paced into five chapters, I’ll randomly gorge those essays with super fun titles. And those who intimately know me know that I enjoy coffee that’s as dark as my sense of humor. So of the 58 essays, let’s start with:
- A Theory of Jerks
- Is It Perfectly Fine To Aim For Moral Mediocrity
- A Theory of Hypocrisy
- Cheerfully Suicidal AI Slaves
- Skepticism, Godzilla, and the Artificially Computerized Many-Branching You
- How to Accidentally Become a Zombie Robot
- Competing Perspectives on One’s Final Dying Thought
- Profanity Inflation, Profanity Migration, and the Paradox of Prohibition (or I Love You, “Fuck”)
- Might You Be A Cosmic Freak?
- Penelope’s Guide to Defeating Time, Space, and Causation
- Are Garden Snails Conscious? Yes, No, or *Gong*?
- Kant of Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants
- Will Future Generations Find Us Morally Loathsome?
- Trusting Your Sense of Fun
An excerpt from the essay no. 1, Theory of Jerks:
“The essence of ‘jerktitude’ in the moral sense, is this: the jerk culpability fails to appreciate the perspective of others around him, treating them as tools to be manipulated or fools to be dealt with rather than as moral and epistemic peers […] Some related traits are already well known in psychology and philosophy—the ‘dark triad’ of Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy; low “Agreeableness” on the Big Five personality test; and Aaron James’s conception of the asshole, already mentioned. But my conception of the jerk differs from all these. The asshole, James says, is someone who allows himself to enjoy special advantages out of an entrenched sense of entitlement. This is one dimension of jerktitude, but not the whole story. The callous psychopath, though cousin of the jerk, has an impulsivity and love of risk taking that needn’t belong to the jerk’s character. Neither does the jerk have to be as thoroughly self-involved as the narcissist of as self-consciously cynical as the Machiavellian, though narcissism and Machiavellian are common jerkish attributes. People low in Big Five Agreeableness tend to be unhelpful, mistrusting, and difficult to get along with –again, features related to jerkitude, and perhaps even partly constitutive of it, but not exactly jerkitude as I’ve defined it. Also, my definition of jerkitude has a conceptual unity that is, I think, theoretically appealing in the abstract and fruitful in helping to explain some of the peculiar features of this type of animal, as we will see.”
(In Tagalog, mga kupal. Like the ones in government?)
So funny, so clever, soooo divorcing Brooklyn Nine-Nine for a week for this.
----
Week 15 of 53
A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures
by Eric Shwitzgebel
From Amazon:
"One of the Best Philosophy Books of 2019.
A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists.
Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on these and other burning questions. In a series of quirky and accessible short pieces that cover a mind-boggling variety of philosophical topics, Schwitzgebel offers incisive takes on matters both small (the consciousness of garden snails) and large (time, space, and causation).
A common theme might be the ragged edge of the human intellect, where moral or philosophical reflection begins to turn against itself, lost among doubts and improbable conclusions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence. (See, for example, “Kant on Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants.”) Some of the texts resist thematic categorization—thoughts on the philosophical implications of dreidels, the diminishing offensiveness of the most profane profanity, and fatherly optimism—but are no less interesting.
Schwitzgebel has selected these pieces from the more than one thousand that have appeared since 2006 in various publications and on his popular blog, The Splintered Mind, revising and updating them for this book. Philosophy has never been this much fun."
See Five Books review at the comments section.
-----
MY NOTES (This section keeps getting updated)
*
*
*
-----
#1bookaweek
#bookofthemonth
#ATheoryofJerks
#EricShwitzgebel
#AmazonBooks
Want to read
December 12, 2020"In my view, then, we’re prone to gross error, even in favorable circumstances of extended reflection, about our ongoing emotional, visual, and cognitive phenomenology"
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com...
August 2, 2020
Self-admittedly a collection of Schwitzgebel's blog posts, not arranged chronologically or even all that topically. Not only can you basically read this book for free online (as with most books you're likely to have heard of), but the version of it online is much larger and more interactive. So while I would recommend this book as light, fun, futurist moral philosophy, I guess really that's just a secondhand way of recommending you read Schwitzgebel's blog.
The essays in the book are predominantly moral philosophy, approaching ethics in a pragmatic manner that draws from established systems where appropriate but mostly just follows ethical intuitions until they stop making sense. There is a secondary theme of what you might consider epistemology, which intersects with this moral horizon. There is a dominant tertiary theme of just looking for interesting ideas. Topics I found particularly interesting:
- what does the ability of morally-significant AIs to split and merge mean for our concept of individual rights?
- ethicists are, empirically, not more moral than other people
- 'group intelligences' may well already be said to exist and act consciously, with their own stream of experience and the other properties we consider significant in differentiating e.g., animals from rocks.
Schwitzgebel is fun to read, evidently attracted to the sort of weird limits I also like, such as where materialist premises take you to conclusions about reality that are very far removed from 'common sense'. As a philosopher engaging with the public, he puts up a good fight for making his subject not just the weird and abstract, but also the sort of musing that everyone should be able to relate to. I didn't come away with any great moral shift from reading Schwitzgebel, but that's neither what I wanted or really what I think he intended. He wanted to show off some wondrous, weird ideas and, while I have seen some of them before, he definitely managed that.
The essays in the book are predominantly moral philosophy, approaching ethics in a pragmatic manner that draws from established systems where appropriate but mostly just follows ethical intuitions until they stop making sense. There is a secondary theme of what you might consider epistemology, which intersects with this moral horizon. There is a dominant tertiary theme of just looking for interesting ideas. Topics I found particularly interesting:
- what does the ability of morally-significant AIs to split and merge mean for our concept of individual rights?
- ethicists are, empirically, not more moral than other people
- 'group intelligences' may well already be said to exist and act consciously, with their own stream of experience and the other properties we consider significant in differentiating e.g., animals from rocks.
Schwitzgebel is fun to read, evidently attracted to the sort of weird limits I also like, such as where materialist premises take you to conclusions about reality that are very far removed from 'common sense'. As a philosopher engaging with the public, he puts up a good fight for making his subject not just the weird and abstract, but also the sort of musing that everyone should be able to relate to. I didn't come away with any great moral shift from reading Schwitzgebel, but that's neither what I wanted or really what I think he intended. He wanted to show off some wondrous, weird ideas and, while I have seen some of them before, he definitely managed that.
January 25, 2021
In my "review" of Arguing with Zombies I said something along the lines of the author making you feel smart by dumbing down a complicated subject but not so far dumb that he's being patronizing. Or something to that effect. Well, here you go, same thing again, but with philosophy this time instead of economics.
Not the subject of philosophy, I should say, but particular thought experiments and exercises. I suppose one could say that all of philosophy is thought experiments and exercises. But if talking about philosophy is theoretical physics, then Schwitzgebel is letting you watch as he plays around with a cloud chamber.
There was one concept that he described which was one of the most terrifying things I had ever read. Have you ever been burnt by something that was so hot it actually felt cold for an instant? It was that kind of terrifying, a terrifying that instilled a kind of peace in me-- until I started sharing the idea with other people, scaring the crap out of them too.
I won't bother going on at length about it- Schwitzgebel does a much better job doing to anyway. But here's a hint: Boltzmann brains. If anyone says to me, he man, you're good with the bull and the malarky, why didn't you study philosophy? I will replay: read Schwitzgebel, and let me play this video game in peace.
Not the subject of philosophy, I should say, but particular thought experiments and exercises. I suppose one could say that all of philosophy is thought experiments and exercises. But if talking about philosophy is theoretical physics, then Schwitzgebel is letting you watch as he plays around with a cloud chamber.
There was one concept that he described which was one of the most terrifying things I had ever read. Have you ever been burnt by something that was so hot it actually felt cold for an instant? It was that kind of terrifying, a terrifying that instilled a kind of peace in me-- until I started sharing the idea with other people, scaring the crap out of them too.
I won't bother going on at length about it- Schwitzgebel does a much better job doing to anyway. But here's a hint: Boltzmann brains. If anyone says to me, he man, you're good with the bull and the malarky, why didn't you study philosophy? I will replay: read Schwitzgebel, and let me play this video game in peace.
July 9, 2022
I liked essay #3 which exposes two ways we might rationalise balancing one area of our lives (say work) with another area (say family). Essay #11 struck me as the most important in claiming normative judgements are inherently messy: it is difficult (as a matter of fact not just a limitation of psychological methods) to disentangle moral from aesthetic judgements. Some of the other essays were reaffirming: the author doesn’t have much tolerance for obscure philosophers like Kant and Hegel. But many others I found rather dull.
December 24, 2024
If you are interested in thinking of things on a non-superficial level Schwitzgebel explores all sorts of ideas and situations. It's a dense read - I think it took me 6 weeks to finish it, reading a chapter or two a day.
Anyone who actually ponders the world in a very slightly serious way will find something worth reading here.
Anyone who actually ponders the world in a very slightly serious way will find something worth reading here.
September 13, 2020
Like a social guide book that everyone should have, made by themselves to carouse through life more easily with hefty thinking and experiences. Much the same thoughts and then a little boring. I may come back to it one day.
Want to read
February 7, 2022Prompted to look this book up after reading the Atlantic's op-ed on
The COVID Jerk
by this author.
May 7, 2022
Si te gusta la filosofía aplicada a la vida cotidiana, este libro es para vos. Si te gustan las reflexiones bien cortitas que te cambian la perspectiva sobre un tema, este libro es para vos. Si te gusta Kant, este libro no es para vos.
September 14, 2020
Finally finally done after a year of reading.
February 22, 2021
This book is delightful in parts. The essays are wide-ranging and cover a lot of fun thought-exercises.
January 25, 2023
The most fun I've had reading a work of philosophy in quite a while.
March 26, 2024
A jar of candy that I savored over almost a month. Almost the ideal book for twelve year old me, but the middle-aged version has no complaints either.
January 29, 2025
Interesting approach to philosophy, but sometimes rambling. I guess it comes with the territory.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews