— On Assholes

The title of an excerpt of my book (at salon.com, here) suggests that the good folks at Fox News are “idiots.”  Perhaps the editors wanted to avoid using “asshole” in the title, but I’d say assholes and idiots are pretty different, even worlds apart.

There is indeed a general similarity between idiocy and assholery, at least when we are stuck

Thomas Hobbes’s “Foole” says in his heart that there is no justice: he sees no reason to keep his coventants with others when breaking faith “conduces to his benefit.”  Hobbes’s reply to the Foole is famously wanting, but he at least gives an argument: the Foole would be foolish to take his chances on risky benefits when his security and very life depends on keeping the trust of his

Probably not, though there is a case to be made.

Perhaps the plainest evidence yet is the infamous “47 percent” comment: “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Making that comment *would* have been a major asshole move if it were made in public.  He’d be publicly asking for the job of representing everyone and yet feeling somehow entitled to disregard almost

These words make philosophical trouble for my definition of “asshole.”  Here’s the problem–and why I’m sticking to my guns.

My definition (in Assholes, ch. 1) implies that clams about who is or is not an asshole can be *true or false*, quite aside from what sorts of people we *approve or disapprove of*.  Thus you can correctly think someone is

Many foul terms–especially the foulest of the foul–can at first seem to be little more than expressions of ugly attitudes.  Terms such as “shit” and “fucking” can seem, at first blush, to be nothing more than a way of venting or spouting one’s unpleasant feelings, in an ejaculatory or cathartic burst conveyed though inherently emotive words.

That picture can seem so natural that it is interesting to see if we can think about foul language in a radically different way.  We get help in this from David Kaplan, the eminent philosopher of language (UCLA), and his analysis of the meaning of “oops” and “ouch.”  (In a great and famous unpublished paper,

Romney repeated that familiar idea in the Oct. 3 debate, suggesting that Obama once said so as well.   Here (in this previous post) is how assholes show this to be wrong, or at best “conventional wisdom” in the bad sense: an oft-repeated saying that is dubious or at best true in narrow circumstances.  (Unless of course you