Assholes Read Online Free PDF Page B

back into their usual ways later that day or week. The asshole is, in contrast, incorrigible in a special, willful, or defensive way.
    But what if someone really believes that
everyone
is entitled to look out for number one? He might live in a defensive crouch or posture of selfish opportunism, and perhaps act a lot like an asshole, but he wouldn’t say that he’s special in any fundamental sense. He’ll say that everyone is acting in his same hypercompetitive way and even regret that this is the way of the world. But, so he says, in getting ahead, he’s acting within his rights.
    Now, if someone really and truly has this cynical view of the world, despite an honest but thwarted desire to cooperate with his fellow moral equals, then he isn’t an asshole, even when he acts like one. But if he really is genuine in his views, he’ll presumably be open to discuss and reconsider whether his take on the world can be reasonably maintained. He won’t then be entrenched and immunized in the asshole’s way. On the other hand, many proper assholes
tell themselves
such universalistic stories without believing them deep down. They might even get themselves to
really believe
them mainly to keep themselves reassured. This species of asshole pays homage to morality by invoking a veneer of impartial universality, in contrast with the supremely smug asshole, who needs little more for his for justification beyond saying, “Well, it is
me
. How could
this
[pointing to himself] not deserve special treatment.” An asshole can’t
simply
take himself as his reason without standing outside morality altogether (making him more like a psychopath). 27 But assholes can vary considerably in the degree to which they require a pretense of universality to keep themselves feeling secure.
    ----
    1 . Michael Hastings, “The Runaway General,”
Rolling Stone
, July 8–22, 2010, www.​rolling​stone.​com/​politics/​news/​17390/​119236 .
    2 . Merle Miller,
Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman
(New York: Berkley, 1974).
    3 . David Brooks all but calls Gibson an asshole in “The Gospel of Mel Gibson,”
New York Times
, July 15, 2010, www.​nytimes.​com/​2010/​07/​16/​opinion/​16brooks.​html .
    4 . Robert I. Sutton,
The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t
, 1st ed. (New York: Warner Business Books, 2007), advises business managers to adopt a policy of zero tolerance of assholes in the workplace, offering helpful suggestions about how to deal with them when they simply cannot be fired. Our initial target is a philosophical account that might support and supplement the good advice already available.
    5 . Our hero Rousseau was unfortunately quite an asshole himself, or maybe something worse. He eventually realized that something was amiss in his repeatedly fathering children with Thérèse Lavasseur and then summarily sending them away to an orphanage. See
The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953).
    6 . By “interpersonal” relations we mean cooperative relations with a more or less socially defined structure, in contrast, say, with individuals interacting in a condition of anarchy such as Thomas Hobbes’s famous state of nature. If one can be an asshole in the state of nature, Hobbes would regard this as fully justified self-defense. In conditions of society, by contrast, assholes are akin to Hobbes’s famous Foole, who joins the social contract but then breaks or cheats the law.
    7 . Translation by Benjamin Jowett, http://​classics.​mit.edu/​Plato/​gorgias.​html .
    8 . The point carries over to other proposals in moral theory. “Experimental philosophy” isn’t fit to establish or refute them, at least not without further, properly controversial assumptions about what a given proposal is trying to do.
    9 . This is probably true of McChrystal, who not only apologized for the disdainful comments mentioned