Philosophy That You Can Use

We just had a useful description of the essential aspects of an asshole from 2015.

We all know an asshole when we see one, I see one when I look in the mirror every day, but it is nice to have the characteristics defined, if just because it provides a warning when one is headed in that direction:

If you asked me what it means to call someone an "asshole" before I really thought about it, I probably would have suggested an “expressivist” analysis. The word, I might have elaborated, is just another term of abuse, a way of simply expressing one’s disapproval. Much as if one had said “Boo on you!”, one isn’t trying to say something that can be true or false, correct or incorrect. The job of foul language like “asshole” isn’t to describe the world, but simply to express one’s disapproving feelings, in an ejaculatory or cathartic burst facilitated by inherently emotive words.

I decided this was completely wrong one day in the summer of 2008, while surfing in a crowded line up. I was watching a guy brazenly break the rules of right of way and thought “Gosh, what an asshole”. That wasn’t a new thought, but I then noticed, for the first time, that this thought has what philosophers call “cognitive content”. I was trying to say that the guy in question was properly classified in a certain way. Other law-abiding surfers weren’t properly classified under that term, and so it could be true or false, correct or incorrect, to say that this guy was, in fact, an asshole.

That got me thinking about what it would be for someone to qualify as an asshole. Harry Frankfurt partly inspired this. I thought: Frankfurt put his finger on “bullsh%$”, and I am a philosopher, so I should define “asshole”. After considerable tinkering and with the help friends, I settled on this definition: the asshole is the guy who systematically allows himself special advantages in cooperative life out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunises him against the complaints of other people.

(%$# mine)

And there you have it.

He goes further into some other turns of phrase, how, "Oops," is va rather neutral and fact based statement when something small goes wrong, but largely ironic when something big, and then proceeds to go onto other, more Anglo-Saxon, terms.

He goes onto explain that these are not just epithets, they are rather precise definitions of objective reality.