Against Moral Mindfulness

More from Janet's post:

Reducing our decisions to dollars and cents keeps us focused on the impacts of our choices to ourselves, financially. It distracts us from the impacts of our choices on other individuals, or on our communities more broadly. Recognizing that those others are of value -- that they have interests that matter, too -- is kind of at the heart of being an ethical human being...

I'd really like to nudge myself, and those around me, to a place where we make more of our choices with a mindfulness about how those choices change the choices available to others (and to ourselves down the road). I don't want it to fall to our water bills to make us be the people we ought to be.

I disagree. Sure, insofar as we are acting qua citizen -- engaging in public debate, political advocacy, voting, etc. -- we should be guided by concern for the general welfare. But we should prefer to avoid needlessly burdening private individuals with additional concerns in their everyday life.

Benign spontaneous order is the ideal: far better to set things up so that ordinary thoughtless actions will tend towards the public good without any special effort or knowledge required on the part of the individual. As I wrote in an old thread:

I'd be delighted if our societal systems were so well-designed that people rarely needed to consider impartial moral reasons at all in their daily living. There is plenty of room for that in the public sphere, and it seems a more personal focus (on one's close relationships, etc.) would do more to enrich the private sphere.

Besides, it strikes me as perverse virtue fetishism to oppose effective institutions (e.g. markets) on the grounds that their good results emerge without requiring private virtue. Policy should be geared towards actually improving the world, not getting people to try to improve the world. (Cf. opposing safe-swimming flags at the beach because they reduce the opportunity for heroic rescues!)

Read More...

Summary only...

Moral Roots and Alienating Aspirations

Morality is made for man, not man for morality
   -- William K. Frankena.

I'm not sure what to make of Frankena's maxim. It's uncontroversial that human welfare is important. So let's interpret the maxim more strongly, as expressing a form of moral conservatism -- a rebuke of the radical and alienating demands of impartial consequentialism (to name just one example). An ethics for living, we may think, must be more firmly rooted in our actual condition, our personal concerns and interests.

There are many complex issues in this vicinity, but one way in is to ask whether there might be irreconcilable but reasonable conflict. I think not: I tend to conceive of the moral point of view as one that everyone can share, and thereby resolve any conflicts equitably, at least in principle. But if normativity must always be rooted in our particular perspectives, there's no reason to expect such compromises to always be possible. I may despise the frat boy as a boor, and he may despise me as an egghead, in a fundamental clash of values that is not susceptible to any common resolution. (The alternative is to think that one or both of us is making a mistake, and really ought to be more sympathetic to the other and their way of life.)

Rooted ethics implies a kind of relativism, since different people lay their roots in different places. But perhaps that's to be expected, and at the end of the day the most we can hope for is that our own values prevail in the culture wars. The metaethical conservative will not think that those who lay their roots elsewhere from his are in any sense mistaken or irrational. There is no shared ideal viewpoint for all to aspire to,* so those who disagree are not confused or misguided, but stalwart enemies.

* = Note that this abandonment of truth is what saves the metaethical conservative from incoherence

Another approach is to ask whether our prior dispositions (or perceived "common sense") place significant constraints on normative guidance. Could it possibly be the case that I ought to give up my most cherished projects and personal values? If my "idealized self" is radically different from me, so different that I can no longer recognize my self in him, what normative authority do his prescriptions really have over me?

If (the best account of) realism about value leads us to such conclusions as that newborns may be killed harmlessly, and that it would have been better if disabled persons (or children of teen mothers) had not been conceived, then some may wonder whether we'd do better to be anti-realists.

Indeed, this seems to be Velleman's position, in response to the apparent conflict between a parent's love for their particular severely disabled child, and their recognition that the creation of a severely disabled child is lamentable. He writes (in the conclusion to 'Love and Non-Existence'):

The parents experience their emotions as assessing the value of the child's existence in itself, apart from how it is conceived [i.e. under what guise or description], and the emotions cannot be simultaneously correct if so interpreted. But their emotions make perfect sense despite there being no consistent distribution of values that they would reflect, because emotions can only project value, and only when appearing to do so enhances their intelligibility.

The parents should therefore forget about evaluating their child's existence and feel the emotions that clearly make sense for them to feel. What's intelligible in their responses may cast an inconsistent set of shadows on the world, but they are, after all, only shadows.

On Velleman's view, what fundamentally matters is making sense to oneself. Making evaluations is one way of going about this, but one's personal narrative is primary, in line with Frankena's maxim.

But is it right? Or should we be realists about value, and think that what fundamentally matters is making the world a better place?

Read More...

Summary only...

Bigoted Moral Intuitions

Some people judge that homosexuality is immoral, because they find it intuitively repugnant. They must also be aware that a few short decades ago people thought that interracial sex was immoral, on the same basis. This suggests that such intuitions provide a very flimsy basis for discrimination. Indeed, I find it completely baffling that homophobic conservatives fail to realize that they are the modern day equivalent of yesterday's racist conservatives. Why are they not humbled by history? What makes them think that their disgust-based moral intuitions are any more reliable than their grandparents' were?

There was some discussion of this on the Missouri philosophy blog a while back. I suggested that actions are "permissible by default", and that constructing a positive argument for the permissibility of homosexual acts is as superfluous as arguing for the permissibility of eating icecream. The onus is on the moral scold. Andrew Moon responded that we may be justified in believing something to be wrong even if we can't immediately produce an argument to support this belief. I clarified my point as follows:

Andrew - I meant the ‘permissible by default’ thesis to be fundamentally metaphysical in nature. That is, an act is permissible unless there is in fact some reason why it’s wrong.

The methodological implication is that we shouldn’t expect any explanation to be given of why permissible acts are permissible (except for the trite “it harms no-one”, etc. — cf. the ice cream case). If we are to engage the moral question philosophically, the only way to do this is to see if there are any arguments for impermissibility that stand up to scrutiny.

As an epistemic point, of course, people don’t always need to do moral philosophy before having justified moral beliefs. But it’s also obviously true that your mere intuition isn’t enough — just look at all the past bigots to whom it “seemed” that interracial marriage was wrong. I’d guess the epistemic question must be settled by factors external to the immediate phenomenology, e.g. whether your moral intuitions are actually reliable, or something along those lines.

That still doesn’t speak to the practical point, of what subjective guidance one can give an agent here. How about this: if it seems to you that X is wrong, then you may tentatively suppose this to be so, BUT if other epistemically responsible agents call this into question, you ought to put aside your mere intuition and see whether there is any actual reason that can ground it. (If, at the end of inquiry, you can find no good arguments for the impermissibility of X, this would seem pretty strong evidence that in fact you are in the same position as the racists of yesterday.)

Unfortunately, no-one ever responded to these suggestions, so I reproduce them here instead. Any thoughts?

Read More...

Summary only...

Is Evaluation Holistic?

Which is basic: our evaluation of the world as a whole, or our evaluation of its individual constituents? Are we to work up from my particular desires to find which total state of the world I should prefer? Or do we instead start with my global preferences (a value function over possible worlds) and abstract away various details to yield my more particular desires?

An example of the latter approach might be Liz Harman's analysis: S desires that P ("all things considered") iff S prefers the nearest P-world to the nearest not P-world. One worry: on this view, it no longer seems that we can assign quantitative "strengths" to desires. (And aren't numbers elegant?)

But perhaps the upshot of the holistic picture is just that individual desires aren't really so important anyway. Utility values may be assigned to whole worlds, and combined with credences to yield expected utilities, etc. So it's still an elegant picture, and one which fits well with formal decision theory. It's just that the value of a whole world-state is not reducible to any simpler description of the values of its parts. (For example, you can't just sum all the pleasure and pain if it turns out that sadistic pleasure detracts from, rather than adds to, the overall value of the state of affairs.)

Read More...

Summary only...

Estlund on Non-Fairness

I've long thought that fairness is overrated, and often brought up in situations where it is completely unnecessary (e.g. the suggestion that one must flip a coin to decide which of two needy strangers to help). Rather, as Estlund argues, it is at most "an occasional value":

It can sometimes seem as if everything should be fair. The hegemony of fairness is partly owed to an unfortunate linguistic habit, in which anything that is not fair, but could have been fair, is called unfair. Since unfairness is, as the language works, so obviously a moral failing, it would follow that everything ought to be fair if it can be. But there seems to be a legitimate questions about this, which we should not let linguisitic habits settle. For example, to defend my choice to save my son from drowning rather than saving the stranger next to him, it is not obvious that I should need to show that doing so conforms to some appropriate standard of fairness. Or consider my giving five dollars to one beggar and nothing to the next. Is it obvious that this is only permissible if it is, in some way, fair? It is obviously not fair, but is it unfair? (We might call this the non/un issue.)

-- D. Estlund, Democratic Authority, p.67.

Read More...

Summary only...

Threats and Offers: Shaping Meaning

Scanlon argues that one's intentions typically don't affect the permissibility of an action. In 'Permissibility and Intent II: The Significance of Intent', he explores some possible exceptions to this rule. One particularly interesting case, I think, is that of threats, or (more broadly) intentionally influencing another's choices. What's interesting here is the way in which this can affect the very nature of the other's choice, by changing the meaning or significance of the options available to them. Scanlon writes:

In the sexual harassment case, for example, in the absence of the threat, the recipient could choose between having sex with the intervener or not. But once the threat has been made what he or she can decide to have or not is coerced sex with the intervener, which is something quite different. In addition, the alternative of taking the job now involves working for someone who has treated one (or tried to treat one) in this way, and declining it can be seen as an assertion of one's dignity. More generally, whatever A may be, the threat to attach a penalty to the recipient's doing A changes the alternative of doing A into the alternative of doing A in defiance of this threat, and adds to B the character of giving in to the intervener and being "pushed around" by him or her. (p.39)

He adds on p.40, "Recipients may have good reason to object to changes of these kinds in the meaning of the actions available to them, and therefore good reason to object to others intervening in their lives in these ways."

This strikes me as an important point, but I don't think that the potential moral objections here depend upon the actual motives or intentions of the intervener. Rather, it seems that what matters is their apparent intention, or what the recipient could reasonably interpret their intention to be. For example, it may be that I have no intention to threaten you at all, but if I carelessly make a remark that is naturally interpreted as a threat, then that seems sufficient to problematically impact the way you perceive the meaning of your subsequent choice. Presumably, the im/permissibility of my causing this is unaffected by whether I did so intentionally or negligently. If I should have known better, then that suffices to settle the question of permissibility; my actual motives don't matter.

Read More...

Summary only...

Edge Question '08: Changing Minds

This year's question from Edge to various scientists is: 'What have you changed your mind about? Why?' I haven't read all the answers, but here are a few that stood out (some for being intrinsically interesting, and others which call out for philosophical attention).

1. Geoffrey Miller has become more optimistic about uncovering human nature, thanks to the realization that there are plenty of 'local experts' already in every walk of life:

Almost all of them know important things about human nature that behavioural scientists have not yet described, much less understood. Marine drill sergeants know a lot about aggression and dominance. Master chess players know a lot about if-then reasoning. Prostitutes know a lot about male sexual psychology. School teachers know a lot about child development. Trial lawyers know a lot about social influence. The dark continent of human nature is already richly populated with autochthonous tribes, but we scientists don't bother to talk to these experts.

2. Helena Cronin explains why she's come to see sex differences as better explained by differences in variance than in averages. (Now a familiar, if still underappreciated, theme.)

3. Jonathan Haidt defends sports and fraternities:

By the time I became a professor I had developed the contempt that I think is widespread in academe for any institution that brings young men together to do groupish things. Primitive tribalism, I thought. Initiation rites, alcohol, sports, sexism, and baseball caps turn decent boys into knuckleheads. I'd have gladly voted to ban fraternities, ROTC, and most sports teams from my university.

But not anymore. Three books convinced me that I had misunderstood such institutions because I had too individualistic a view of human nature.

Haidt sees modern Westerners as "bees without hives", lost in "a world so free that it [leaves] many of us gasping for connection, purpose, and meaning." But can't we find a way to forge meaningful connections without degrading into a knuckleheaded mob? Primitive tribalism might make us happy, or satisfy some urges of human nature, but I don't see that this makes it any less contemptible. (Not that I support "banning" anything, of course. If people want to degrade themselves, that's their prerogative. But I sure wouldn't want to encourage these cultural elements.)

4. Sherry Turkle has grown increasingly suspicious of society's love affair with technology:

A female graduate student came up to me after a lecture and told me that she would gladly trade in her boyfriend for a sophisticated humanoid robot as long as the robot could produce what she called "caring behavior." She told me that "she needed the feeling of civility in the house and I don't want to be alone." She said: "If the robot could provide a civil environment, I would be happy to help produce the illusion that there is somebody really with me." What she was looking for, she told me, was a "no-risk relationship" that would stave off loneliness; a responsive robot, even if it was just exhibiting scripted behavior, seemed better to her than an demanding boyfriend.

Isn't that what pets are for? What new concerns do robotic "friends" raise? (Is it just that the illusion of love may be more compelling, the pretense so satisfying a substitute that one is less motivated to pursue the real thing?)

5. Simon Baron-Cohen has a trite piece on "equality", or rather, the fact that people are not all the same. I can't discern any point to the article once we distinguish between qualitative (descriptive) vs. moral (normative) equality.

6. Finally, Thomas Metzinger offers his thoughts on moral philosophy. First, we have (what looks like) the gratuitous assumption of hedonism:

shouldn’t we have a new ethics of consciousness — one that does not ask what a good action is, but that goes directly to the heart of the matter, asks what we want to do with all this new knowledge and what the moral value of states of subjective experience is?

Why "states of subjective experience", rather than "states of affairs" more generally? (There's nothing new about getting to "the heart of the matter" in this way, of course; it's called 'value theory', and something consequentialists and others have been interested in for some time now!) Maybe Metzinger is making the more modest point that a growing ability to manipulate X-states provides us with reason to work out how to evaluate the various X-states. But that is not such a revolutionary suggestion.

And then the nihilism:

Here is where I have changed my mind. There are no moral facts. Moral sentences have no truth-values. The world itself is silent, it just doesn’t speak to us in normative affairs — nothing in the physical universe tells us what makes an action a good action or a specific brain-state a desirable one. Sure, we all would like to know what a good neurophenomenological configuration really is, and how we should optimize our conscious minds in the future. But it looks like, in a more rigorous and serious sense, there is just no ethical knowledge to be had. We are alone. And if that is true, all we have to go by are the contingent moral intuitions evolution has hard-wired into our emotional self-model.

This is a whopping non-sequitur. "We are alone", therefore no choices are more or less reasonable or worthy than any others. Huh. That's not any kind of logic I'm familiar with. (Though I suppose nihilists can't believe in good reasoning anyway, so maybe he's more consistent than I give him credit for.)

Seriously, though, why would you ever look to "the physical universe" for normative insight in the first place? Obviously that's not going to work. If there are moral truths at all, this will be due to the nature of rationality, not the nature of the world. And Metzinger hasn't offered any reasons at all for doubting that some ethical systems are appreciably more reasonable or coherent than others. He just asserts, without argument, that "all we have to go by are the contingent moral intuitions evolution has hard-wired into" us. Shoddy thinking.

Read More...

Summary only...

Intention and (Im)permissibility

We often think that intentions play a crucial role in explaining the im/permissibility of actions. (Compare 'collateral damage' in strategic bombing vs. intentionally targeting the population. Or buying your neighbour rat poison to help him kill rats vs. to help him kill his wife.) But Scanlon offers a nice general strategy to undermine this position: (1) Consider the impermissible action. (2) Cut out the bad intentions, and suppose the agent is instead simply acting negligently. (3) Notice that the result is still impermissible.

For example, if you have good grounds for believing that your neighbour is trying to kill his wife, it's presumably impermissible to buy him some poison, no matter how empty (of bad intentions or good sense alike) your head is at the time. What matters to the question of permissibility is the expected consequences of the action, and your private intentions make no difference here. We are tempted to think intentions matter in the original cases because they covary with other factors that matter, e.g. what you can reasonably expect your neighbour to do with the poison. But once we separate them out (by appealing to cases of negligence) we see that it's these other factors, and not one's intentions, that typically matter for questions of permissibility.

To reinforce this conclusion, notice how bizarre it would be if perverse motivations could typically render otherwise permissible actions impermissible. Scanlon discusses the case of a doctor justifiably administering painkillers that will foreseeably end the life of a terminally ill patient. Supposing this is permissible in the ordinary case, does it change when the doctor happens to delight in having an excuse to kill his patients? Should he say, "Sorry, I can't deliver the lethal painkillers, because I know that if I did so I would intend not just the cessation of your pain, but also your subsequent death. Not that it would change anything, but you know, it's impermissible to intentionally kill people. Good luck finding a doctor who intends only the former of the two predictable consequences of the procedure!"

This is a second general strategy that can serve to undermine purported links between intention and permissibility: just combine the two contrast cases into one where the agent may have either intention in performing the action, and note that it would be completely bizarre for this to affect its permissibility. In the bombing case, for example, suppose a single potential missile target could serve both military and terrorist objectives. In deliberating about whether to press the launch button, must the general first introspect on her own motives? If she finds that she intends the civilian casualties, should she summon her more pure-of-heart lieutenant to press the button instead? Who could possibly care?

What matters for permissibility are the reasons for action that exist in the world. Once we establish that there is sufficient reason to bomb the target, we've established that the action is permissible. The actor's intentions don't change the moral status of the action. What they should influence is our assessment of the agent. But that is to raise questions of blameworthiness, not permissibility.

Read More...

Summary only...

Assessing Envy

In 'Reasons: Practical and Adaptive', Raz writes (p.13):

[A]ffect-justifying reasons are not value-related. This would explain why there can be adaptive reasons for having emotions which it is always wrong to have. For example, some people believe that there is never a good reason to be envious. They must refer to practical reasons, for surely there are adaptive reasons for envy. If you envy someone his victory then you have no reason to envy him if he did not in fact win, if you are mistaken about his victory. If you continue to envy him after your mistake has been corrected, you are irrational. If he was victorious then you may have an emotion which it is bad or wrong to have, but you are not irrational.

[Note that "Reasons are adaptive if they mark the appropriateness of an attitude in the agent independently of the value of having that attitude, its appropriateness to the way things are." (p.11)]

Doesn't the sentence I put in bold seem to get things exactly backwards? Surely there's no question at all that there can be practical value to envy (or anything else for that matter). Suppose an evil demon will destroy the universe unless we are envious. Whatever. It would be crazy for the opponents of envy to "refer to practical reasons", for that would render their position transparently absurd. Rather, the claim is that envy is never rational (even if it may be practical), never an inherently appropriate response to "the way things are." The claim, in other words, is precisely that there are no adaptive reasons for envy. It is not an emotion that is ever warranted by the situation.

Now, Raz effectively shows that we may also assess an emotional state according to its internal correctness conditions. Envy is internally misguided if its purported basis (the other's victory) does not actually obtain. It would certainly be irrational to retain the emotion even upon recognizing it to be misguided in this way. But it doesn't follow that the emotion is rational if it lacks this flaw. Even if not irrational on internal grounds, it may still be irrational for other reasons.

We may think, for example, that good things generally warrant positive reactions. But envy consists precisely in feeling bad or resentful about the good things that happen to other people. Doesn't that just seem fundamentally misguided? Similarly for schadenfreude, or taking pleasure in others' suffering. It's simply perverse; not an apt response to the normative features of the situation.

If that's right, we need to recognize adaptive reasons as providing a third kind of evaluation, distinct from both practical value and internal correctness conditions. It's one thing to ask how advantageous an emotional state would be, and another to ask whether it is internally misdirected (wrong by its own lights) -- but it's a further question still whether the emotion is apt or objectively warranted.

Read More...

Summary only...

Preferring Pains to be Past

I previously argued that Parfit's affect-based objections to temporal neutrality fail. As Alex pointed out, though, Parfit also offers a more direct objection. As part of the 'bias towards the future', he thinks that we might really prefer to suffer a greater pain in the past rather than a lesser pain in the future. Now, assuming that we cannot affect the past, it is difficult to see what this preference amounts to, at least if it is meant to be distinct from mere affect, e.g. relief upon learning that a painful operation is now past. There is no genuinely possible choice in which the preference could be revealed. But perhaps we can imagine an impossible choice, involving time travel or divine intervention in foreknowledge of one’s backward-looking prayer. Can we then imagine, in this impossible scenario, reasonably choosing to have one’s pains amplified and shifted into the past?

There are two bad reasons why we may be tempted to affirm this. First, we are used to the equivalence between being over and ceasing to extend in time. So a typical preference for a pain’s being over is inseparable from the preference that it become no longer - a preference that the temporal neutralist can clearly endorse. Second, even if we appreciate that in this special case the past pain is no shorter, we may fail to fully appreciate that it is really experienced at all. By the time we are in the present, our past experiences have already been and gone. We did not experience them the first time through, so it may seem that shifting pains into the past is simply a way to make them disappear altogether! Of course, this intuition illicitly reflects our assumption that we cannot really change the past - an assumption that must be rejected in the scenario under consideration (since we are supposed to be introducing pains into the past that would not be there otherwise).

When we take care to avoid these two mistakes, and instead really vividly appreciate the greater pain that our past self really would suffer if we made the relevant choice, does it still seem so obviously preferable?

Read More...

Summary only...

Relative Truth and Disagreement

Consider sophisticated moral relativism. Say Anne's idealized self would conclude that abortion is wrong, whereas Bob's would not. So 'Abortion is wrong' is true for Anne but not for Bob. Do they disagree? They would not if they meant different things by 'abortion is wrong' (e.g. 'abortion is wrong to me'). They would just be talking past each other, as if Anne were to say "I like icecream," and Bob replied "No I don't!"

So, to preserve genuine disagreement, they must be expressing one and the same proposition. That much is shared and universal. What's relative is the truth (not the meaning) of what's said. Anne and Bob are both talking about the proposition that abortion is wrong, but the truth of the matter differs between them. (This seems crazy if truth is meant to correspond to worldly facts - how could facts be relative? But it makes more sense if we see truth as an epistemic construct.)

How are we then to understand the truth predicate? Jack points out to me that problems arise when we ask Bob to assess Anne's assertion that "'Abortion is wrong' is true." If 'true' in Anne's mouth means true-for-Anne, then it hardly seems that Bob can dispute her claim. It really is true-for-Anne that abortion is wrong, after all. But note that the problem again lies in attributing merely semantic relativity. We should instead insist that Anne and Bob mean exactly the same thing by 'true'. They just assess it differently. Bob correctly judges that Anne spoke falsely. Anne correctly judges that she spoke truly. They're both right, and they also genuinely disagree with each other -- a disagreement that will persist even upon semantic ascent. True?

Read More...

Summary only...

Temporal Neutrality: can we still care?

In Reasons and Persons, Parfit invites us to imagine a character called 'Proximus' who cares more about the nearer future. This 'bias towards the near' means that he would wholeheartedly prefer to undergo intense pain later rather than a mild pain now. This seems irrational. We may advocate temporal neutrality in general, and so think that "mere differences in timing... cannot have rational significance." I agree with this, so in this post I want to address a couple of objections Parfit makes to this view.

Parfit's basic strategy is to compare the bias towards the near with two other temporal biases we have. The bias towards the future is seen in our tendency to be relieved when bad things are past. And the bias towards the present is our tendency to care especially about the pain we are now experiencing. Parfit claims that temporal neutrality requires us to denounce both these tendencies, but such denunciation seems crazy. So we should conclude that mere differences in timing can be significant after all. His most compelling example is of "the mounting excitement that we feel as some good event apporaches the present -- as in the moment in the theatre when the house-lights dim." Such excitement seems perfectly reasonable, yet - Parfit claims - it is an instance of the bias towards the near. Shouldn't temporal neutrality require us to be just as excited about distant pleasures?

Well, no. We should be more careful in understanding the scope of the temporal neutralist's claims. Obviously the claim is not that timing never matters for anything: if a bomb is about to explode, better to start running sooner rather than later! For similar reasons, it makes more sense to fear the explosion when the risk is in the future rather than the past. It's perfectly reasonable to attend more to present events, and to be excited about those that will very soon be present, etc. The neutralist need not deny any of this. Their claim is simply that one's preferences should not involve any temporal bias, or time-inconsistency. Note that temporally responsive feelings are perfectly endorsable from a timeless perspective. I do not later regret feeling excitement before the show, but I would regret choosing a lesser nearby good over a greater distant one. That's a revealing difference.

If we recast Parfit's proposed biases in terms of preferences (e.g. for the bias towards the present, say you would forsake greater future benefits in order to obtain a small boost of pleasure right now), they no longer seem any more defensible than Proximus' bias towards the near. So I don't think Parfit has any good objection to temporal neutrality after all.

Read More...

Summary only...

Examples of Irrational Desires

More from Reasons and Persons. I love this one (pp.123-4):

A certain hedonist cares greatly about the quality of his future experiences. With one exception, he cares equally about all the parts of his future. The exception is that he has Future-Tuesday-Indifference. Throughout every Tuesday he cares in the normal way about what is happening to him. But he never cares about possible pains or pleasures on a future Tuesday... This indifference is a bare fact. When he is planning his future, it is simply true that he always prefers the prospect of great suffering on a Tuesday to the mildest pain on any other day.

We can judge such a preference to be irrational because it makes arbitrary discriminations. It is ad hoc, and fails to treat like cases alike. A more coherent desire-set would appreciate pleasure on future Tuesdays as for any other day.

Parfit also discusses "Within-a-Mile-Altruism". Rather than caring about the welfare of others in his general community, the Within-a-Mile Altruist cares only about those who are located within one mile of him. One step further, and he feels indifferent to their suffering.

I've discussed similar arguments from Michael Smith here. This leads to the core argument of my essay, 'Why be moral?':

We have already established that self-interested reasons would force the amoralist to develop an intrinsic appreciation of at least some other people as ends in themselves. But it would seem arbitrary to recognize only some people as having intrinsic worth or even agent-relative worth to him. We can ask the relativistic amoralist why others do not also have worth to him. It seems plausible to hold that his overall desire set could be made more unified and coherent by adding in a more general desire for human well-being. This would contribute to explaining and justifying the more specific values the amoralist holds in valuing himself and his friends. We thus have rational grounds to criticize his desire set, in that it fails to exhibit such a degree of internal coherence. Given the rational pressure towards coherence, we may thus conclude that even the amoralist has reason to care about morality.

Read More...

Summary only...

The Bad Society

One might think that morality is a matter of promoting the good of one's society, understood as an entity in its own right. (I think that Peter may believe something along these lines.) An immediate problem is that we might reasonably doubt whether there really exists any such entity, or whether we can sensibly talk of it having a 'good', or welfare interests. But even if we can ascribe a societal telos -- longevity and power, say -- there's the more fundamental problem that the society might be objectively bad, and so not worth helping at all.

Imagine a dystopia of ruthless efficiency, where individuals are brainwashed from birth and tightly controlled by faceless institutions. Members eat dull, nutritious food; work productively on uninspired projects that increase the power of society's institutions (though never, of course, its private citizens); and reproduce in sufficient numbers to further support this 'purpose'. The society is little more than a virus, propagating itself to no higher end; still, we may suppose that this miserable situation is perfectly sustainable. So there seem no formal grounds to deny that the continued exploitation of the people could in fact be good for the State ("society").

Suppose, by some fluke, you manage to overcome your brainwashing. Are you morally obligated to continue to serve this society? On the contrary, it seems far more plausible that you're obligated to destroy the miserable institutions and start a whole new society in its place -- one that will be better for its inhabitants.

I conclude, then, that people are not universally obliged to serve "their society", i.e. the institutional order they actually happen to find themselves in. At most, we are obligated to serve our collective, which is simply us - a plurality of persons - and not some impersonal entity that exists over and above us. (Perhaps this is all that was meant by 'society' all along?) But even then, it wouldn't do for us to exploit some other group of innocent people, even if it would be to our society's advantage. So we need to expand the collective to all beings with moral status. We might call this the 'universal society', but it's no longer clear that the label is doing any real work.

Read More...

Summary only...

Parity of Value: a formal model

Over at Ethics Etc, S. Matthew Liao presents Ruth Chang's argument for a fourth relation of comparative value - 'on a par' - to supplement the standard 'better than', 'worse than', and 'equal to' relations:

1. Mozart is neither better nor worse than Michelangelo, with respect to Creative Genius (CG).
2. A Mozart who has some small improvement that bears on CG (Mozart+) is better than Mozart, with respect to CG.
3. Mozart+ is not better than Michelangelo, with respect to CG.
4. Therefore, Mozart and Michelangelo are not related by any of the standard trichotomy of relations, with respect to CG. (This is the Small Improvement Argument)

5. Mozart is better than Talentlessi, a very bad music composer, with respect to CG.
6. Michelangelo is also better than Talentlessi, with respect to CG.
7. Therefore, Mozart and Michelangelo are comparable, with respect to CG. (This is the Chaining Argument)

8. Given 4 and 7, there must be a fourth comparative relation; Chang calls it the parity relation. (This is the Parity Conclusion)

The premises all seem intuitively plausible, yet it may be initially puzzling how they could all be true -- at least if we conceive of value as a point on a scale.

The idea seems to be that CG is some kind of holistic value, constructed from a composite of various partly-commensurate dimensions (e.g. music and art). That could explain why Mozart+ beats Mozart (the slight increase is on the same dimension, so Mozart+ strictly dominates Mozart, being better in some ways and worse in none) yet Mozart+ does not beat Michelangelo, being better in some ways but worse in others, with the tradeoff being, in some sense, "too close to call". But note also that the two dimensions are at least comparable at the extremes: Michelangelo's artistic genius outweighs Talentlessi's sorry musical skills. In sum: Mozart and Michelangelo both excel along different dimensions of Creative Genius, which places them 'on a par' in such a way as that a minor improvement to either would not affect their relative standing.

It's an intuitive enough picture, but is it theoretically consistent? Liao expressed doubts. But I think we can construct a formal model which exhibits all the theoretical properties Chang needs here, i.e. showing the premises (1, 2, 3, 5, 6) to be mutually consistent. Here is my model:

(A) Let 'x' and 'y' denote two dimensions of Creative Genius, and let Proto-CG be composite value combining x and y but with some vagueness as to their relative weightings.

Assign base values:
* Mozart = 100x + 0y
* Mozart+ = 101x + 0y
* Michelangelo = 0x + 100y
* Talentlessi = 1x + 0y

Hence, the following facts hold concerning ordering relations with respect to the proto-CG scale:
1-p. It is not determinate whether Mozart is either better or worse than Michelangelo.
2-p. Mozart+ is determinately greater than Mozart.
3-p. It is not determinate that Mozart+ is better than Michelangelo.
5-p. Mozart is determinately greater than Talentlessi.
6-p. Michelangelo is also determinately greater than Talentlessi.

Liao raised an important objection to my model at this point:

If it is vague as to whether Mozart is better or worse than Michaelangelo or equally good, then, it is not true that Mozart is neither better nor worse than Michaelangelo or equally good.

Granting this point, it is important for me to emphasize that the #-p facts hold merely with respect to proto-CG, and do not yet speak to the ultimate CG relations which we are interested in. What we need is some schema to translate these vague Proto-CG relations into the determinate CG relations stated in the original premises. That is the role of the second part of my model.

(B) We may now construct CG orderings from Proto-CG orderings as follows:

For the standard trichotomy of positive ordering relations ('better than', 'worse than', and 'equal to'), let us say that the relation holds with respect to CG iff it is determinate that the relation holds with respect to proto-CG. (I'll call this the "axiom of determination" unless anyone can think of a spiffier name.)

This axiom establishes entailment relations from each #-p to the corresponding original premise #. For example, from the fact (1-p) that it is not determinate whether Mozart is either better or worse than Michelangelo with respect to proto-CG, we can infer from the axiom of determination that (1) Mozart is neither better nor worse than Michelangelo, with respect to CG.

Closing Remarks: My formalization raises some intriguing questions of philosophical methodology. E.g. what philosophical interest can such a formal model have? What does this style of argument really show? It's not as though the process I've described is meant to literally reflect the fundamental metaphysics of values. It's merely a model. (In particular, it seems implausible that my internal 'proto-CG' variable corresponds to any significant value in reality! I employ it as a purely technical 'fix', to get my model to yield the right outputs.)

But I think it has philosophical worth in the following respect: it establishes that Chang's premises about value are mutually consistent. This model shows one possible way that they could all be true. Perhaps reality provides another. But at least we can dispel our initial skepticism about whether they were consistent at all.

Read More...

Summary only...

Flourishing of a Kind

Another common view that puzzles me is the notion that the criteria for a flourishing life are fixed by one's membership in a kind - be it a particular species, gender, or ethnicity - rather than one's individual characteristics. For example, a nurturing housewife might be thought to have lived an excellent life (for a woman), whereas domestic values would count for less when assessing the life success of a man. Success in a cutthroat business environment might be thought the epitome of white male success, whereas a black person might be criticized for not giving enough back to "their community", or a female disparaged for being childless. No matter the individual's own talents and inclinations, a particular identity is ascribed to them, limiting the forms of excellence or norms of success that are open to them to pursue. Why?

Perhaps there is an empirical assumption in play: that the individual's "own talents and inclinations" will always coincide with the ascribed identity. (Every woman really just wants to be a mother, never mind her protestations to the contrary.) But that's plain ridiculous.

Still, the normative claim seems even less plausible. So what's going on here? Why on earth would anyone believe in (e.g.) sex-specific virtues, norms, or forms of excellence? There's no denying that many do believe precisely this - men are told to "be manly" - but why?

A more rational society would surely do away with gender (or ethnic, etc.) roles altogether.

Read More...

Summary only...

Authority

Some people seem to believe in a very strange kind of authority: one that can pull normativity out of a hat (or decide which of two incommensurable values is the greater). I don't get it.

I can understand what we might call "guiding authority", which derives from the utility of the rule of law, but that is clearly a very different matter. We grant guiding authority to legal institutions because we are too biased and ignorant to enforce justice ourselves through vigilante action. But this is a contingent matter; perfected super-humans would have no need of such guides. Note in particular that the kind of authority in play here is merely epistemic, rather than metaphysical. We need the authorities to help us find the truth; not to create it!

Contrast this with the pure authority that Pruss calls for on Right Reason. There are no objective grounds for deciding between vocations, so - he argues - if we want there to be a "right answer" for us to discern here, we require the pure authority of God to decide a vocation for us.

I find the notion absolutely ludicrous. Note that he's not claiming that an omniscient God could guide us towards the independently best option. Rather, the suggestion seems to be that God has the pure authority to just make up the normative fact of which option is best. Other theists seem to share this bizarre view. They hold that a pure authority can just decide stuff for no reason, and these arbitrary decisions would actually matter! The mere act of authoritative command suffices to create reasons ex nihilo.

Am I wrong in thinking that this view is absolutely insane? Can anyone defend it, or at least make it a bit more comprehensible to me...?

Read More...

Summary only...

Freedom and actual/ideal Preferences

Survey time! I have three questions for you, dear reader:

1) Suppose I am weak-willed, and will regretfully fail to do X even though I judge X to be for the best and indeed would prefer to do it (if only I could find the willpower). Does it violate my freedom when you force me to X for this reason?

2) Suppose I am misinformed, and refuse to do X because I fail to appreciate that it is a necessary means to achieving my heart's desire. If I knew better, I would choose to do X. Does it violate my freedom when you force me to X for this reason?

3) Suppose my values lack coherence. I refuse to do X because it isn't something I think I care about. But further reflection would bring me to care non-instrumentally about X after all (say my other values implicitly commit me to this). Does it violate my freedom when you force me to X for this reason?

Further: in each case, is my idealized self rationally bound to endorse your paternalistic intervention? What does the answer to this tell us about the moral status of intervening?

Read More...

Summary only...

Humility and Arrogance

I had an interesting discussion last month with a fellow prospective student, trying to figure out the nature of humility. But it may be easier to start with arrogance. The basic definition might be something like thinking that you're better than other people. But this needs finessing. No doubt you are better than many others at various particular things, and it could hardly be blameworthy to recognize this fact. So I take it that arrogance essentially involves some kind of distorted (read: inflated) self-evaluation.

There are two ways this distortion might go. The most obvious is a simple factual over-estimation, i.e. you think you're more talented than you really are. Alternatively, one might distort the normative significance of their particular talents, perhaps thinking that it makes them an intrinsically superior person. (This must be a distortion if we hold that all people are of equal intrinsic value.)

But I think it's broader than this. Couldn't someone be arrogant in particular respects -- e.g. dismissing the ideas of untrained students in their field (to adapt an example from Siris) -- without any presumption of overall superiority? There seems a close link between arrogance and disrespect, and I assume the latter can be 'particular' in this sense.

Turning it around, then, could we say that humility is simply the disposition to treat others with respect (take them seriously, etc.)? One advantage of this over "self-evaluation"-based analyses is that it doesn't risk conflating humility with low self-esteem. Plus, it doesn't require the humble person to avoid self-knowledge (regarding their talents). Any objections?

Read More...

Summary only...

Guest Blogger: Moral Status of Rats

[By David Hunter]

I've written about the science of this more at the INPAB blog in this post: Rats have metacognition And the implications for medical research, here I want to concentrate on the theoretical issue.

Basically new research seems to have shown that rats are capable of metacognition, in other words rats can think about thinking. Now non-human animals have been shown to have metacognition before, but thus far this has been restricted to what we might think of as the higher mammals, namely apes and dolphins. To have discovered this in rats seems to suggest that many animals may be capable of metacognition, something that we thought was restricted only to the highest of intelligences.

This may present a challenge to common accounts of moral status (ie what ought to be counted morally). On many accounts various mental capacities such as self awareness, memory, a consistent sense of self over time, the ability to feel pain might give something moral status.

Classically on the first 3 accounts, rats would fall outside the moral realm. However if they, and other animals are capable are capable of higher cognition then they would now be included in.

Personally this comes as no great shock to me as my account of moral status is a set of three separately sufficient conditions:
1. Sentience (The ability to feel pain)
2. Self Awareness
3. Being capable of contract forming

I'm curious to see what you think about this theory of moral status, and for that matter what this means for how we should treat rats...

Read More...

Summary only...