World Beyond Your Head : On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (9780374708443) by Crawford Matthew B

Author:Crawford, Matthew B. [Crawford, Matthew B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374708443
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

JUSTIFICATION THROUGH CONFRONTATION

Consider the case of a motorcycle mechanic. In handing a labor bill to a customer, I make a claim for the value of what I have done, and put it to him in the most direct way possible. I have to steel myself for this moment; it feels like a confrontation. The point of having a posted labor rate, and hours billed in tenths on the service ticket, is to create the impression of calculation, and to appeal to the authority of an institution with established rules. But this is a thin and fragile pretense observed by me and my customer (it is hard to pose as an institution when you run a one-man operation), and in fact the bill I present is never a straightforward account of hours worked. It always involves a reflection in which I try to put myself in the shoes of the other and imagine what he might find reasonable.

This lack of straightforwardness in valuing the work is due to the fact that the work is subject to chance and mishap, as well as many diagnostic obscurities. Like medicine, it is what Aristotle calls a “stochastic” art. Especially when working on older bikes, in trying to solve one problem, I may create another. How should I bill for work done to solve a problem of my own making? Should I attribute this new problem to chance, or to a culpable lack of foresight on my part? This question has to be answered when I write the service ticket, and in doing so I find that I compose little justificatory narratives.

When a customer comes to pick up his bike, I usually go over the work with him in detail, and I often find myself delaying the presentation of the dollar amount, because I fear that my valuation isn’t justified. But all my fretting about the bill has to get condensed into a definite assertion on my own behalf. Whatever conversation may ensue, in the end the work achieves a valuation that is determinate: a certain amount of money changes hands. As he loads his bike onto the back of a pickup truck, I want to feel that the customer feels he has gotten a square deal; I want to come away feeling justified in the claim I made for the value of what I did.

Here, in a microeconomic exchange, lies the kernel of ethics altogether, perhaps. In presenting the labor bill, I am owning my actions. I am standing behind them retrospectively. And this requires making my actions intelligible to the customer. The Hegelian suggestion seems true to me—namely, that it is in the confrontation between the self and the world beyond one’s head that one acquires a sharpened picture of each, under the sign of responsibility.

As Pippin explains, what distinguishes human acts from mere events, and from animal doings, is that we are concerned with justification. Our deeds don’t simply enact our desires. Rather, in acting we make a tacit normative claim for ourselves—for the legitimacy of the act, and indeed the worthiness of its end.

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