Abstract
Quassim Cassam (Cassam, Extremism, Routledge, 2022a) and Paul Katsafanas (Katsafanas, Philosopher’s Imprint 19:1–20, 2019) have argued that fanaticism and extremism are morally and epistemically vicious. I suggest an alternative approach that: (i) explains what makes fanaticism and extremism vicious in the very many cases in which they are; but also (ii) allows for cases in which fanaticism and extremism aren’t vices and may even be liberatory-virtues. My hope is that this approach might serve as a resource for those in liberatory struggles.
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Notes
Olson (2007) and DiPaolo (forthcoming) also propose analyses of fanaticism and extremism that are normatively neutral.
Cassam (2022a: p. 161) accounts for Abolitionism by employing a normatively neutral analysis of radicalism.
These claims will need to be qualified, if fanaticism cannot be a character-virtue.
I am indebted to an anonymous referee for pressing this point and making this suggestion.
The behavioral disposition is analyzed more fully below.
Provided that they don’t lose interest in other domains. See Cassam’s (2022a, pp. 108, 137–138) remarks on single-issue extremism.
For this reason, Katsafanas takes fanaticism to involve a “rational defect,” though he demurs in note 21 (2019, p. 11).
At least, it is strongly associated with intolerance (Katsafanas 2019, pp. 9–10).
In imposing one’s own ideals on others, one sacrifices some of the interests of others. But, the converse doesn’t hold: one can sacrifice some of the interests of others in pursuit of one’s own ideals, without being willing to impose one’s own ideals on others. Fanatics of (e.g.) the Yankees can sacrifice the interests of their families by spending an inordinate amount of time watching games (‘I can’t go to your school play because there is a game on’), without forcing their families to watch games with them.
Both Cassam and Katsafanas intend to provide general analyses of fanaticism rather than neat sets of necessary and sufficient conditions. Nevertheless, each seems to treat some of the conditions identified as necessary. Arguably, intolerance and being a true believer are necessary on Katsafanas’s account, and being intolerant and closed-minded (and preoccupied with persecution) are necessary on Cassam’s account. This shouldn’t be surprising, since each is arguing that fanaticism is both epistemically and morally vicious, and it is difficult to see how such a conclusion could be secured without requiring some conditions that delivered epistemic vice and others that delivered moral vice.
See Dolin (2022).
See, e.g., Tietjen and Townsend (2022, p. 7).
Even if fanatics can be akratic, they needn’t be.
Here, open-mindedness is a willingness and ability to engage seriously with relevant intellectual options and a willingness and ability to revise one’s beliefs. This analysis is intended to be normatively neutral.
Fanaticism can also drive them to be hyper-critical, blinding them to the team’s successes. Thanks to Rob Battaly for this point.
Interestingly, Cassam seems to take intolerance to be normatively neutral. On his view, it is normatively negative when: one’s contempt for others’ ideals is unwarranted, and one imposes one’s own perverted ideals on others.
In high degrees of fanaticism, well above the minimum threshold, we can expect the agent’s competing motivations to wane and disappear.
More technically, since it is possible to be a fanatic about more than one object, it would need to be one of very few motivations that consistently beats out nearly all of one’s other strong motivations.
I am grateful to Jessica Brown and Enrico Galvagni for raising this point.
I am indebted to Ahmed Abohamad, Enrico Galvagni, and Quassim Cassam for pointing me toward connections between fanaticism and obsession.
That is, the object toward which one is psychologically disposed must itself be extreme. Here, I part ways with Cassam, who argues that mindset extremism doesn’t entail ideological extremism: Cassam allows for cases in which ideological centrists are mindset extremists, though he thinks mindset extremists are nearly always ideological extremists (2022a, p. 24). On my view, if we don’t build extremism into the object itself, then the resulting account will be of some other disposition and not extremism.
If ideals can be extremist on one spectrum but not another, we have yet another reason to think extremism is a matter of degree. For worries about defining extremist views in terms of their distance from the center of ideological spectra (the positional fallacy), see Chouraqui (2022, p. 299).
Contra de Rooij and de Bruin (2022, p. 193) and DiPaolo (ms), it may not even require extremists to think the world is unjust.
For an argument that bad motives are sufficient, see Baehr (2021).
Granted, in some cases, servility and self-abasement may be needed to survive oppression.
John Brown was not a Garrisonian abolitionist—he was clearly a fanatic, but a violent one.
Their fanaticism disseminated moral knowledge. Their perceptual focus might also have led to insights about oppression that would have been “invisible to moderates” (Cassam 2022b, p. 183, who is stating a view he rejects).
Even if the Garrisonian Abolitionists weren’t closed-minded in their engagement with moderate abolitionists and slaveholders, they were closed-minded in their refusal to revise their beliefs about slavery (albeit virtuously so).
This smacks of the ‘normal worlds’ debate in the literature on reliabilism. Recall that Goldman changes his mind about indexing justification to normal worlds (1992, p. 137).
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Acknowledgements
For comments and discussion, I am grateful to Megha Arora, Ahmed Abohamad, Robert Battaly, Tiana-Marie Blassingale, Jessica Brown, T.J. Broy, Quassim Cassam, Josh DiPaolo, Enrico Galvagni, Paul Katsafanas, Ian Kidd, Yuhan Liang, Tracy Llanera, Bill Lycan, Michael Lynch, Robin McKenna, Katie Peters, Clifford Roth, Nick Smith, Lynne Tirrell, Joanna Teske, Jason Tosta, Cody Turner, Steven Warden, three anonymous referees, and audiences at the Center for Ethics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs at the University of St. Andrews, and at the UCONN chapter of the Vice Squad.
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Battaly, H. Can fanaticism be a liberatory virtue?. Synthese 201, 190 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04174-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04174-7