Bow ties are cool

by Massimo Pigliucci

If you follow the British scifi series Doctor Who you’ll know where the title of this post comes from. As it turns out, bow ties are indeed making a come back, just visit the appropriate isle at the main Macy’s store in Manhattan and prepare to be bewildered by the huge variety of colors and patterns!

So, naturally, I bought a bow tie (actually, several) some time ago. Which immediately led to the problem of how to, well, tie them! I have known how to deal with regular ties since I was a, ahem, significantly younger man, but I’d never dealt with the bow variety before.

So the first thing I did was to head toYouTube and search for a video that would teach me how to accomplish the trick. Sure enough, a quick search brought up exactly what I was looking for. After a bit of practice, I got pretty good at it (see accompanying photo). Still, it often takes more than one attempt, and it doesn’t always come out perfectly.

Which is why I became intrigued when I discovered that there is a short cut. Hey, this is America! We like immediate gratification, and in the easiest way possible (and if it’s cheap, better yet, though there are often trade-offs among those requirements — think fast food, for instance). Enter the pre-tied bow tie!

Now, here comes the interesting part: while I was tempted to switch to pre-tied bows, I also felt like that would be cheating, suddenly transforming a mere issue of fashion into one of ethics. Sure enough, my girlfriend immediately registered her disapproval for the easy path, an attitude that store owner Ben Silver summarized in the New York Times thus: “A bow tie makes a statement of individuality, and nothing contradicts that statement more readily than having it pre-tied.”

Of course, there are counterpoints to Mr. Silver’s position (read the above-linked article for an amusing sampler), but I think he has a point. Wearing a pre-tied bow tie would be like having someone else tie your shoes. Or driving an automatic transmission car (an absolute no-no for any self-respecting Italian!).

But I could, if I wanted to, get away with it. From the outside, you can’t really tell that easily whether a bow tie is pre-tied or of the “T.I.Y.” (tie your own) variety. But even if I could negotiate tolerance from my girlfriend, the problem is that I would know it’s a fake, and that would make me uncomfortable.

The reason I’m bringing all this up, of course, is not to bother you with my fashion-related issues, but because of the parallel between the bow tie problem and ethical decision making. (No, I’m not saying that the bow tie in itself presents an ethical dilemma, only that there is a parallel!). After all, the same two mechanisms I described above are the ones that make ethics work: pressure from without (my girlfriend, the opinion of fashionistas like Mr. Silver) and pressure from within (my conscience).

Of course, the two sources of pressure shape each other. As a virtue ethicist I recognize that a nurturing family and social environment are crucial for one’s eudaimonic development, so that clearly, and to a large extent, what we come to think of as moral (or, even more so, fashionable) is the result of whatever society we live in. Aristotle, for instance, had some pretty sophisticated ideas about ethics (so much so that we still take them seriously 24 centuries later), but he also had a low opinion of women and accepted slavery — just like most of his compatriots did in ancient Athens.

Then again, society itself is shaped — over the long run — by the novel ideas of some of its most influential members. Plato, for instance, even though he grew up in the same society that Aristotle experienced, made the leap forward to take women's equality seriously (in Book V of The Republic). That idea, of course, was still far from being implemented when John Stuart Mill wrote about it more than two millennia later, and it hasn’t reached full maturity even today, especially in many non-Western societies. Cultural evolution, it seems, can be painfully slow despite its multiple, very efficient, mechanisms of transmission of information!

The big difference between my bow tie (or any other fashion-related) problem and ethics is that the first one is ruled by arbitrary conventions, while the latter is not. I am not arguing that there are cosmic moral laws “out there” for us to discover. Ethics is a human invention, and it serves human, not cosmic purposes. But it isn’t arbitrary in the sense that ethics is a way of thinking about societal problems that helps us to live cooperatively together (qua intelligent, self-reflecting social primates) and at the same time pursue our own goals and ways to flourish. It is in this sense that, say, wearing or not wearing a bow tie is an entirely capricious decision, while granting or not granting equal rights to gay couples isn’t. Though gay marriage is cool too.