A Hero's Philosophizing

 

I saw re-tweeted the other day the following assessment of President Trump—possibly a fragment as I did not follow up and read the article but merely snipped this section—by former Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, who famously landed his disabled aircraft in the Hudson River, off NYC. Of Trump he said:

He cannot understand selflessness because he is selfish. He cannot conceive of courage because he is a coward. He cannot feel duty because he is disloyal. . .

Before assessing these things I would note that they were re-tweeted, presumably with approbation, by someone I like and whom I think is pleasant and highly intelligent. I would also say that Trump may indeed be all selfish, cowardly, and disloyal, at least enough but perhaps only just enough to say he is mostly so. Finally, I add that Captain Sully's act of landing his aircraft that day was indeed heroic, more specifically he behaved steadfastly and altruistically. 

That said, on philosophical grounds, what he said is gobbledygook. They are statements of the kind which may be true by definition, that is, if you define a term to mean precisely and only what you want it to mean, but logically and technically speaking his statement demonstrates a serious confusion of terms.

Most painfully, notice the layman's mistake of using terms for stylistic variety without regard for differences in meaning. Specifically here, look at the verbs: understand, conceive, feel. We have to ask whether he really means to differentiate between understand (that is, to comprehend) and conceive (i.e. to form a concept of.) We also have to ask why one would understand selflessness but conceive of courage and feel loyalty. Can you conceive of selflessness, or feel courageous?

Worse that this inattention to meaning is the rather obvious fact it is all patently wrong. Whenever one gives, one is aware that he could give more or less, and insofar as giving is unavoidable to some degree, it's hard to imagine a person who could be unable even to understand selflessness. 

Now let's say somehow someone is selfish and so habituated to it and enculturated in it that he is as unware of it as he is of the air he breathes, that lack of awareness still has nothing to do with selfishness ipso facto. For example, if someone were indeed so selfish as we have just proposed, why would he be unable to understand selflessness if he were suddenly to see it. It might very well appear as obvious a contrast as stepping from a dark room into a light one, or from a cold place to a hot one.

Similarly, on courage, if a man knows he is a coward, does he not also know what is courage at least by knowing its opposite? 

Of duty—I won't ask whether he intends duty and loyalty to be opposites—it seems to me that one can indeed feel a sense of duty and simply not act on it, perhaps in the unfortunate case of a moral dilemma in which one feels a higher duty to something else. In such a case it is not the feeling which is in question.

It's not my wish to besmirch the reputation of a hero by picking on his argument, but this pop philosophizing smacks of an attempt not merely to point out the vices of a bad man, but to paint that man as vile on account of it being impossible for him to be good. Worse it's an inept job of slapping terms together into a specious, profound-sounding denunciation that's nothing more than an argument from authority.