Demarcating the Moral

We make various kinds of evaluations. Some of these qualify as specifically moral evaluations, rather than some other kind, but what makes this so? What's the essential difference? Haidt and Bjorklund define the moral as that which is "about the character or actions of a person" (p.188), but that seems too broad. I might have a positive aesthetic response to an evil character and his actions. He might do mean but funny things. Or if his wrongdoing happens to benefit those I care about (at others' expense), I might have some pro-attitude towards those actions, even as I admit them to be morally wrong. So the object of the evaluative judgment does not decide the nature of the judgment. What does?

Presumably, what matters here are the reasons guiding the evaluation, or the standard against which the object is measured. But this simply shifts the question back a step: in virtue of what (we may ask) does a standard count as a peculiarly moral standard, rather than (say) an aesthetic one or an arbitrary personal choice? It is easiest to distinguish the latter; personal preferences make no claim to speak for a perspective larger than our own, whereas moral (and arguably aesthetic) judgments do claim this broader authority. Sidgwick puts it nicely in his Methods of Ethics:

The peculiar emotion of moral approbation is, in my experience, inseparably bound up with the conviction, implicit or explicit, that the conduct approved is 'really' right -- i.e. that it cannot, without error, be disapproved by any other mind. (I.iii.1)

If... I judge any action to be right for myself, I implicitly judge it to be right for any other person whose nature and circumstances do not differ from my own in some important respects. (III.i.3)

Precisely distinguishing the moral and the aesthetic (in a non-circular fashion) seems more difficult. We might say that morality is abstract and impartial,* essentially tied up with notions of universalizability, whereas judgments of beauty aren't beholden to anyone else's perspective, even as they exert a suggestive force (since everyone should appreciate what's truly beautiful). I'm not sure that's entirely adequate though. Any better ideas?

[* Disclaimer: the linked post is from 2005, and I would no longer endorse many of the assumptions found there. I just like the Railton quote.]

Supposing the Impossible

There is often thought to be something special about the Cartesian conclusion 'I exist'. It is, as Descartes says, "necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind." But there are any number of transparently necessary truths, e.g. in logic and mathematics. So why is this one so special? Descartes thinks we can doubt the others, after all:

[J]ust as I consider that others sometimes go astray in cases where they think they have the most perfect knowledge, how do I know that God has not brought it about that I too go wrong every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square...?

How do you know that God has not likewise brought it about that you go wrong every time you reflect on the necessary implications of your own thinking or doubting? It is admittedly nonsensical to seriously entertain one's own non-existence, but it is no less nonsensical to seriously entertain that the second successor of 3 is not 5.

One objection (a friend pointed out to me) is that we often suppose impossible things to be the case, at least for sake of argument. I take it the purpose of this practice is to highlight some important partial truth. But we can do this just as well in case of the cogito. ("Suppose, for sake of argument, that I don't exist. So my parents only have four children!")

So I think the apparent difference is merely psychological. In case of any incoherent supposition, the thought experiment eventually breaks down, if pushed to the point where the contradiction becomes explicit and unavoidable. But some contradictions are better hidden than others. It seems easier to suppose that there are finitely many prime numbers, for example. We can create a rough mental model which seems (prima facie) to accommodate this possibility, and it will take a bit of pushing before it explodes on us. Denying one's own existence, on the other hand, leads to much more obvious and immediate difficulties. We can't even pretend to make sense of this, the way we can when entertaining the denial of some more complicated mathematical thesis. But it's worth noting that even the latter is mere pretense. There's isn't really anything there for us to grasp -- the deep incoherence renders the scenario ultimately unintelligible -- we are merely playing along for the sake of argument; drawing inferences and highlighting partial truths. You can't, strictly speaking, suppose gobbledygook. So logical necessities are on no less firm footing than Descartes' cogito.

Commenting Bug

Huh, Blogger was disappearing my comments rather than posting them (has anyone else had this problem?), so I've temporarily reverted to having a separate 'post a comment' page (which seems to be working more reliably -- though you might want to copy your comment to the clipboard before posting, just in case). It also has the benefit of letting you subscribe by email to follow-up comments.

Update: let's try the embedded comment form again -- they've now added a 'subscribe' link to this too (see bottom right). Please email me if you encounter any problems.

Psychologists Mangle Philosophy

Haidt and Bjorklund ('Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions about Moral Psychology') suggest a model ('SIM') according to which human moral judgments typically result from gut reactions, post-hoc rationalization, and social conformity, rather than good philosophical reasoning (though the latter is also possible; just rare). No great surprise there, I should think. But at the end of the paper they grossly overreach in suggesting alleged "philosophical implications" of this psychological claim.

"1. Moral truths are anthropocentric truths":

On our account, moral facts exist, but not as objective facts which would be true for any rational creature anywhere in the universe. Moral facts are facts only with respect to a community of human beings that have created them...

Most people aren't philosophers, therefore moral realism is false? I'm not seeing the connection here. The core of the paper was talking about moral judgments or beliefs. Now they're suddenly drawing conclusions about the objects of those beliefs -- the "moral facts", not just our thoughts about them. Isn't this a whopping non-sequitur? Is it yet another instance of the lazy conflation of belief and truth (as suggested by their subsequent reference to the "moral truths held by members of [a] society") or is there some more charitable interpretation that I'm missing?

"2. The naturalistic imperative: all ought statements must be grounded, eventually, in an is statement" They offer as an example of a good is-to-ought inference:

Sheila is the mother of a 4-year-old boy, so Sheila ought to keep her guns out of his reach.

But of course even non-naturalists can endorse this (enthymatic) inference. That's because there are further moral premises implicit in the background, e.g. that mothers ought to keep their children safe from harm. This is not an example of empirical grounding of a moral claim, but of the empirical application of a more general moral principle.

This raises a more general worry I have about naturalistically inclined philosophers. When they claim that ethics must be "empirically informed", they could mean one of two things. If they simply mean that empirical contingencies affect how moral principles apply to our actual situation, then that's utterly uncontroversial. (A consequentialist will be interested to learn what would actually bring about the best consequences, for example.) But if they mean something stronger, that empirical findings should influence our first principles -- not just which conditional claims turn out to apply, but what should be conditionally claimed in the first place -- I don't see the faintest reason to believe this.

"3. Monistic theories are likely to be wrong"

If there are many independent sources of moral value [Haidt classifies humans moral intuitions under 5 categories: harm, fairness, authority, purity, and ingroup/outgroup] then moral theories that value only one source and set to zero all others are likely to produce psychologically unrealistic systems that most people will reject.

Note, again, the sloppy conflation of descriptive and normative "value" (belief and truth). Haidt likes to accuse liberals of failing to "understand" anti-gay sentiment, for denouncing it as immoral 'homophobia' rather than "appreciating" that it's a moral judgment which derives from our evolved 'purity' module. We parochial liberals limit ourselves to the first two "sources of value", and "neglect" the latter three. But here's the thing: just because there's a mental module which inclines people to judge yucky things as immoral, doesn't mean they're right. (Duh.) Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

4. Haidt and Bjorklund's fourth "implication" is that a moderate relativism is true:

If relativism is taken as the claim that no one code can be proven superior to all others, then it is correct, for given the variation in human minds and cultures, there can be no one moral code that is right for all people, places, and times.

Says who? Again, nothing in the descriptive theory of SIM implies any such thing; these guys are just making stuff up. (Aside: we should also take care to distinguish situation-sensitivity vs. relativism proper.)

They go on to reject radical relativism, understood as they claim that "no one code can be judged superior to any other code". Apparently a code that "radically violate[s] the values and wants of a large proportion of the people involved" fails to qualify as "well formed". It's nice that they don't want to endorse slavery and the like, but this ad hoc principle reinforces my sense that they're just making stuff up as they go along.

"5. The methods of philosophical inquiry may be tainted":

If the SIM is right and moral reasoning is usually post hoc rationalization, then moral philosophers who think they are reasoning their way impartially to conclusions may often be incorrect. Even if philosophers are better than most people at reasoning, a moment's reflection by practicing philosophers should bring to mind many cases where another philosopher was clearly motivated to reach a conclusion and was just being clever in making up reasons to support hear already-made-up mind... The practice of moral philosophy may be improved by an explicit acknowledgment of the difficulties and biases involved in moral reasoning. As Greene has shown, flashes of emotion followed by post hoc reasoning about rights may be the unrecognized basis of deontological approaches to moral philosophy.

This raises interesting issues about the genetic fallacy, and the extent to which explanatory reasons can debunk normative reasons. In assessing "clever" arguments, I don't usually care what "motivated" the author. Whether deontology is the most rational and systematically defensible approach to ethics seems logically independent from the question of its psychological "basis" in human proponents. I guess a spectator might draw on genetic considerations as a kind of Bayesian meta-evidence. But from within the practice of philosophy itself, I'm not sure these considerations are really all that relevant.

So, there you have it. Five alleged "philosophical implications", of which the first four are blatant non-sequiturs, and the fifth is at least dubious. Whether SIM is true or not doesn't really affect any of these questions. (Would the truth or falsity of SIM really influence your beliefs here, or even shift your credence in the slightest?) We need to do a priori philosophy to determine (1) whether there's a uniquely rational moral system, (2) which empirical contingencies have moral relevance, (3) whether disgust - as well as harm - can ground moral facts, (4) whether some moral codes are better than some or all others, and (5) in what conditions 'genetic' considerations are philosophically relevant.

Those are the fundamental philosophical questions here, and (so far as I can see) empirical psychology in general - and SIM in particular - doesn't have any implications for any of them. Certainly Haidt and Bjorklund haven't shown any. Perhaps other readers might have more luck?

Moral Constraint and Complaint

Will Wilkinson and Saul Smilansky discuss a fascinating 'paradox of complaint', which basically comes down to a conflict between the following two principles:
(1) When you are wronged, you have grounds for complaint.
(2) If someone wrongs you in the same way that you have wronged others, you have no grounds for complaint.

For example, it doesn't seem like a car thief has the moral grounds to complain when someone else steals his car. But that doesn't mean an eye for an eye is really right. It's presumably wrong to torture a torturer, for example, even if they would have no standing to complain about it.

I'm reminded of Johann Frick's counterexamples to Scanlonian contractualism, defined as follows:

Scanlon’s formula: An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some
principle that no-one could reasonably reject, or when any principle permitting such
acts could be reasonably rejected by at least one individual.

Johann (inspired by G.A. Cohen) asks us to imagine that a guy knocks on our door and credibly threatens to blow his own brains out unless we give him $10. He hardly has grounds for complaint if we shut the door in his face, so it can't be wrong according to Scanlon, but we can arguably fill in the details in such a way as to make it intuitive clear that it would be wrong not to appease the guy (since the sacrifice for us is minimal compared to the benefit to him of avoiding his own unreasonable suicide). Between this case and Smilansky's, I think we have pretty compelling grounds for rejecting principle #1, and distinguishing the conditions for moral complaint from those which call for moral constraint (against wronging another). The alternative, I suppose, is to reject what we might call

(3) The Wrong-to-Wrongs Principle: If it is wrong to do X in virtue of its negatively affecting another person, then your doing X wrongs that person.

If we reject this, we might think both that it is wrong of us to steal (even from a car thief), and yet that it doesn't wrong the car thief for us to do this to him. We did wrong, but not 'to him' -- which is why he has no special standing to complain about it -- even though our action was wrong in virtue of its impact on him.

So should we reject #1 or #3? Will Wilkinson suggests that perhaps the real culprit is #2. Perhaps strictly speaking even the car thief has grounds to complain when his car is stolen. The difference is instead that we have no reason to take his complaint seriously. This is an intriguing idea, but I'm not entirely sure how to make sense of it. Legitimate moral complaint emerges from what Darwall calls 'the second person standpoint', and concerns what one may rightly demand of another. If I step on your foot, you have special standing to tell me to get off your foot. If I don't, I've wronged you -- failed to give you your due, or to acquiesce to the demands you may rightly make of me. Suppose you later return the favour by stepping on my foot. Do I have grounds for complaint? Do I have the moral standing to demand that you get off, and perhaps apologize? I'm not sure it makes sense to say 'yes, but you don't have to listen'. If a complaint has moral standing, then the addressee must listen to it. That's just what it is for the complaint to have moral standing.

Global Indeterminacy

Kit Fine gave an interesting talk last Friday on globalism about vagueness, i.e. the claim that indeterminacy occurs in the first place over a range of cases (e.g. men in various stages of balding) rather than in any one intrinsically 'borderline' case. In logical terms: we are not to deny any particular instance of the law of excluded middle ("either the nth guy is bald or not") but we may deny the conjunction of two or more such claims, and so avoid commitment to determinate relations ("both are bald, or neither, or one is and the other isn't") over a range of cases.

Importantly, Fine's account no longer licenses the inference [A, ~(A & ~B), therefore B]. This means that we can accept the intuitive principle that there's no sharp boundary between the bald and the not bald -- that is, ~[BALD(i) & ~BALD(i+1)] -- without licensing the sorites inference ("given that the first guy is bald, so is the next").

Doesn't this commit us to the claim that there's some guy, maybe that latter one we just talked about, who is neither bald nor not bald? Here's where things get tricky. Fine claims that this alleged 'commitment' only follows if we accept a 'transcendental' conception of truth according to which we can look down on the entire sorites sequence from on high and assign truth values all at once (at which point we will find that some particular instance must be neither T nor F). From the 'ground level', we can't do this.

[Fine draws an analogy here to the mistake behind naive set theory. By his diagnosis, the intuitive principle -
∃⁺y ∀x (x∈y ≡ φ(x))
- is just fine. The mistake is to think we can apply it "transcendentally", to quantify over absolutely everything, so the ∃⁺ cannot further extend the ∀ quantifier.]

I'm not sure I really understand how the details of Fine's account are supposed to go. On the ground level, shown a lineup of men in various stages of balding, we might assess the sequence of truth values for the propositions of type "the nth guy is bald" as something like the following -
T, T, T, T, ?, ?, F, F, F, F, F
- where the '?' is not a positive answer of any kind (not even "neither T nor F"!) but simply a gap, a silence, where we are unable to answer the question. Speaking "transcendentally", Fine says, we may say that those cases are neither T nor F, but that's a partial truth of our theoretical modeling, not a strictly accurate description of how things are on the ground.

It's puzzling, but apparently not straightforwardly incoherent. At least, Fine offered a semantics that can support his logical claims. Central to it is the following semantic rule for negation:

~A is true under a given use iff A is not true under any compatible use.

In particular, note that if ~A is false, it doesn't follow that A is true under the given use, but merely that A is true under some compatible use. Fine illustrates the general idea by analogy: let 'p' and 'q' be two men planning a dinner party with their spouses, where they follow the British rule that one is not to sit by one's own spouse. We model this by saying that the 'compatibility' relation is here identical to the 'next to' relation, and that p's spouse, for example, is to sit in the ~p spot (similarly for q and ~q):

Either spot linked by red lines is 'compatible' with (read: 'next to') p, so the only place for ~p (i.e. where 'p is not true under any compatible use') is directly opposite. Similarly for q. Now, we see that the denial of LEM: ~(p v ~p) fails, for every spot on the table has some compatible use where either p or ~p holds. But the denied conjunction ~[(p v ~p) & (q v ~q)] does hold, because there is no spot on the table (or 'compatible use') where both one of p or ~p, and one of q or ~q, positively hold.

Still, confusing.

Sidgwick on the Naturalistic Fallacy

[I]n a sense, as Butler observes, any impulse is natural, but it is manifestly idle to bid us follow Nature in this sense... How then are we to distinguish 'natural impulses'--in the sense in which they are to guide rational choice--from the unnatural? Those who have occupied themselves with this distinction seem generally to have interpreted the Natural to mean either the common as opposed to the rare and exceptional, or the original as opposed to what is later in development; or, negatively, what is not the effect of human volition. But I have never seen any ground for assuming broadly that Nature abhors the exceptional, or prefers the earlier in time to the later; and when we take a retrospective view of the history of the human race, we find that some impulses which all admire, such as the love of knowledge and enthusiastic philanthropy, are both rarer and later in their appearance than others which all judge to be lower...

To an unreflective mind what is customary in social relations usually appears natural; but no reflective person is prepared to lay down "conformity to custom" as a fundamental moral principle...

-- Methods of Ethics (7th ed.) I.vi.2

(See also my old post on 'Human Nature'.)

Compensating Evil

The Practice is not only the greatest television series ever made, it raises so many interesting ethical questions that it would make great fodder for one of those popular 'X and Philosophy' books. For example, in Season 2 Ep.5, one of the lawyers represents an ex-cop seeking disability compensation on the grounds that police work turned him into a racist.

Some background: he once mistakenly shot and killed a black man who was "armed" only with a cigarette lighter. (Cf. Michael Moore.) The police department gave him a slap on the wrist and some sessions of psychiatric counseling, during which time he came to realize that the shooting was due to deeply internalized racist beliefs/fears. Realizing he was unfit to remain on the beat, he informed his superiors of his condition, and they promptly fired him. He doesn't qualify for the pension for a few more years, and so decides to sue for disability pay in the meantime. By the letter of the law, he is owed compensation for any affliction he acquires on the job which subsequently renders him incapable of completing his duties. He wasn't a racist before he became a cop, all those years ago. Now he is unfit for duty because of it. Seems an open-and-shut case, no?

One objection is that the cop must have been 'predisposed' (in some sense) towards racism. It wasn't some purely external affliction forced on him by the job; rather, the job merely drew out his latent racism. I think this draws on an incoherent conceptual scheme. There are various modal facts about how we will end up if exposed to various environments, and no deep distinction to make between the stimuli that 'change' us and those that 'bring out an existing (latent) disposition'. All is change. At most, we might say that some changes are apt to be elicited by a wider range of possible stimuli than others. Thus the only real question here is whether the guy would likely have become a racist anyway if he had chosen a different career -- and we may stipulate that the answer in this case is 'no'.

The main objection, though, seemed a brute insistence that it's abhorrent to reward bigotry in such a way. But I don't see how this is any response to the argument for compensation. (Nobody thinks we should reward acts of bigotry, of course -- if a cop wrongly kills an innocent black man, he should be held accountable, and pay for his mistake. But if our institutions re-shape a cop's character and dispositions in undesirable ways, if we made him a bigot, then we've harmed him and arguably owe recompense. Note the distinction between compensation for adversely affecting one's character or constitution vs. rewarding one for their consequent behaviour.)

On a practical note, it might be worried that this policy creates a moral hazard, creating an incentive for cops to pass themselves off as racist. But there are already other, less stigmatized, afflications one could fake, e.g. PTSD. So I'm not sure this would really create such a problem. Moreover, note that at present there is a significant incentive for racist cops to hide their afflication, so that they can keep their job and paycheck. Having racist cops on the street is a real danger, so if we could reduce the costs for them to recuse themselves like this guy did, that would seem to be a good thing.

Finally, there's a world of difference between malicious, self-identified racists (e.g. Klansmen), and well-meaning folks like the cop in this story who just can't help finding their thoughts distorted due to the excessive salience of race in their perceptions. The latter is still bad, but it's pretty clearly an unwelcome affliction they're suffering from, unlike the Klansman who embraces his racism and thereby qualifies as genuinely evil.

This raises an even tougher question: if our institutions predictably caused people in certain positions to become willing agents of evil in this sense, would they still deserve compensation? I would suggest not, on the grounds that it is instead their earlier (pre-evil) self who is harmed by - and deserves compensation for - the transformation. (I guess I also feel some pull to the idea that nothing good is owed to those who are evil.) In the previous case, though, there is no radical change in personal identity; it is the same person throughout, so the ex-cop may collect the compensation that is due to his earlier self; and he's not so much 'evil' as 'morally unfortunate'.

What do you think?

Values in Everything

Peter Levine makes a nice point about value judgments in testing:

It would be possible to create a valid and reliable test of the 10 greatest virtues of Saddam Hussein. Those virtues could even be facts about him: for example, that he was unafraid to die. Such a test would be morally worse--really worse, not just worse in my opinion--than a test of students' understanding of the First Amendment.

We have limited cognitive resources, so educators must choose which facts or issues warrant raising to salience. I take it the Saddam example is disturbing because it fails on two counts: (1) it is not as important for students to learn about as (say) the First Amendment; and (2) it could leave students with a distorted impression of Saddam's overall moral character -- which is (again) more important than simply learning a few truths about his virtues (such as they were).

Now compare political reporters:

On the one hand, they perceive their role as entirely above the fray – they cover political controversies but aren’t supposed to be embroiled in these controversies themselves. On the other hand (and this is a point that both netroots types and bloggers like Ezra Klein have hammered home again and again), they themselves play a crucial and unacknowledged political role in deciding what is salient news and what isn’t – controversies don’t usually become controversies until they are described as such in the big newspapers and cable tv talkshows.

Once again, "value neutrality" is not really something to aspire to. (That way lies worthlessness -- or worse, naked David Broder [safe link, don't worry].) What we require is normative discernment, an apt appreciation of what matters and what doesn't, or - most simply - good judgment.

That's not to excuse blind partisanship, of course. Party identification seems an incredibly common cause of poor judgment, or moral/intellectual blindness. But it's the blindness that's the problem, not partisan support per se. One should criticize the flaws that most warrant criticism, and it's hardly an a priori truth that these will be equally distributed across all parties and politicians.

Virtue Pills

I'm generally a fan of artificial enhancement (in principle): if you would wish to have been naturally bestowed with some trait, why would an artificial origin make it any less desirable? (Practical concerns aside, of course; those are obvious enough.) But many people balk at the idea of moral enhancement in particular. Jean K. writes:

If they make people automatically do the right thing, then they stop being genuinely moral... Even if they drugs stopped people from murdering people, I think [Kant] would be opposed.

I can imagine, though, a drug that actually enhances morality. Maybe on your mental blackboard the moral law is getting faded and smudged and the drug improves matters. Maybe you’re too hyperactive to read the mental blackboard and it calms you down. I can see how there could be Kant-approved drugs that improve morality. I’m sure that should be included in the drug label…

I call 'bollocks' on this distinction. We automatically do the right thing all the time. It's right not to spit at passersby, not to use babies as footballs, not to stab the person sitting next to you, etc. More positively, it's also right to comfort your partner when she's upset, listen attentively to an interesting lecture, and respond promptly to emails. Many of us happily conform to these requirements "automatically". Some people don't, and are to this extent morally defective (mildly so in the case of lazy communication, more seriously for the spitting and stabbing psychopaths) -- even those who manage, after some internal struggle, to bring themselves into line with the 'moral law'.

Sure, it's better to act rightly than wrongly. But better yet to never suffer the contrary inclination in the first place. Cf. Aristotle on the virtuous vs. the merely continent. [Update: this point may also be used to prove the non-existence of a benevolent God.]

The self-constrained psychopath is not more "genuinely moral" than the rest of us. (Kant got this one wrong. Granted, acting from duty may be better - because more reliable - than acting from whimsical inclination. But compared to acting from well-cultivated virtues of character? You've got to be kidding me.) Quite the opposite. For the same reason, I think it's a mistake to think that we would somehow stop counting as 'genuinely moral' if a drug recalibrated our faulty inclinations so that right action came more naturally to us. That's just what it is to truly be -- and not just act -- virtuous.

Impairment and Enhancement

Everyone approves of curing disease and disability, but many disapprove of what they consider 'enhancement'. Is there really any principled distinction here? It seems to me a kind of naturalistic fallacy: people assuming that there's something morally relevant about the statistical norm. After all, if most people throughout history were as smart as Einstein, the rest of us would be considered 'retards' -- mentally deficient in comparison. There's no reason to think that our actual condition is a metaphysically privileged baseline for such assessments. Really, any imperfection is an impairment. It's just that some are rarer and greater than others -- that's no reason to refuse (on principle) to remedy the rest.

Or am I missing something?

Philosophers' Carnival #77

... is here!

Guest Post: Epistemic Confessional

[The following is a guest post from Jack.]

Here is a fun experiment in philosophy. But first, let me define my terms.

Philosophers speak frequently about justified and unjustified beliefs. What does it take to believe justifiedly? That is a matter of controversy. But it is often supposed that another way of saying that a belief is (un)justified is saying that it is (in)appropriate for you to believe. It may be appropriate for you to believe that God exists, even if He doesn't, if you trust your parents and they told you that He does. It might be appropriate for you to believe both that all doctors are older than 30 and that some physicians are younger than 25, if you have reason to believe each and you have yet to realize that doctors just are physicians. It is, of course, appropriate for you to believe that the Sun is round, that chairs are frequently wooden, and that there were dinosaurs on Earth once upon a time. Justified beliefs are supposed to be fairly easy to come by.

Now for the experiment: Have you ever believed something unjustifiedly? If so when, and what?

I have done this experiment a couple of times before, always with philosophers and always with the same results. After a bit of attempted remembering, the subject says that they cannot remember a single time that they believed something unjustifiedly. (Justified beliefs aren't supposed to be quite that easy to come by!)

Of course, you will have changed your mind about something at some point during your lifetime. Perhaps you even regret believing as you once did. That would presumably make it unjustified for you to believe today what you believed before. That doesn't make your believing when you so believed unjustified.

In any case, I wanted to do a little online survey to see if others have the same reaction to the experiment. Comment either way. If you think that you have, at some point in your life, believed something unjustifiedly, please say what you believed and why you think it was unjustified of you then to believe as you did. If not, what does it take to believe unjustifiedly?

- Jack.

Is it bad for babies to die?

Brandon comments:

[Y]ou find birth a comfortable point [for granting the legal right to life] at least in great measure because you put the point of personation at such a late point in development. Even a lot of pro-choice people would put it at least a bit before birth; and most people would be extremely uncomfortable putting it in 'later infancy'.

Nobody wants to sanction infanticide, of course, and we all agree it's bad to inflict pain on any sentient being; but I wonder whether it's really so unusual to (after reflection) conclude that a baby only becomes a person in later infancy. I will assume, as per my recent post 'Evaluating Life and Death', that personhood tracks whether one is apt to be harmed by an early death. So a newborn is a person iff it is (apt to be) harmed by an early death. Do most people really think babies are harmed by death?

Now, it's a tragedy for the parents when a newborn baby dies. So to prevent this from confounding our intuitions, consider an orphanage. Suppose one day all the newborn babies in an orphanage spontaneously (and painlessly) disintegrate. Assume nobody else cares. Has any harm occurred? Does this make the world a worse place? It doesn't seem so to me. (But maybe I've simply internalized my theory too well. So let me ask: what's your intuition?)

If the example instead involved, say, four year old children, then it would be obvious that their deaths harmed them (assuming they otherwise would have grown up to live decent lives). This is because four year olds are obviously people, who own their futures and may suffer the loss of them. But in the case of newborns, with no self-conception, and no hopes or dreams for the future, it seems equally obvious that the opposite is true. Disintegration makes no difference to them; it doesn't harm them; there's no loss. What this indicates is that they are not yet people with futures of their own.

Of course, that's not to say that infanticide is okay. We've all internalized the rule that extends a right to life at least to the point of birth, and that's for the best. It's a good rule, and so an appropriate component of our practical morality, which determines right and wrong. But that shouldn't stop us from recognizing that the true point of personation is in fact a fair bit later.

(Ir)rational Emotions

In his (independently interesting) post on 'Emotions and Moral Skepticism', Andrew Cullison writes:

It seems that if emotions are going to be rational, then the best explanation of this will have to be that they are rational in virtue of the rationality of the beliefs included in the emotion. Why is it irrational to get angry that there is an odd number of pebbles in the fishbowl? Because it’s irrational to believe that this is a bad states of affairs. Why is it rational to get angry at someone who steals money from you? Because you’re rational in believing that this is a bad state of affairs.

One quick point: the cognitive components of emotions are not properly 'beliefs' -- they might even conflict with our beliefs. But I agree with the broader point that cognitive misjudgment is one common source of irrationality in emotion. Might there also be others, though? Justin Oakley argues that emotions are complexes of cognition, affect, and desire; it seems to me that there may be rational failings in respect of all three.

Consider someone who is disproportionately angry about some minor wrongdoing. Their judgment of wrongdoing seems accurate enough;* the problem is instead an excess of affect. The excessively angry agent obsesses over this one problem, to the detriment of more pressing issues. For another example:

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.

Moreover, jealousy may involve a desire for the target to lose the benefit you so resent them for. But it is generally irrational to desire a Pareto loss -- for someone to be harmed and nobody to benefit. So jealousy and the like are irrational for this reason too.

* Now, it may be claimed that the desirous and affective components of emotions should also be incorporated into their cognitive component, in the form of normative claims. Maybe envy doesn't just consist in judging another to have benefited and feeling negative affect about this; perhaps we could say it also involves an implicit judgment that it is bad that the target benefited so. To the jealous desire we might add a judgment that it would be right to deprive them of this benefit. And so on. But if we build everything into the cognitive component to begin with, then it's trivial that it will suffice for all aspects of rational evaluation. So I think the substantive point to note here is that affect and desire are open to rational assessment too, even if they are ultimately incorporated into the cognitive component of emotion.

Incidentally, this proposed melding of cognitive and non-cognitive components of emotion relates to my earlier comments about 'rich' or interpreted phenomenology. Perhaps the broader lesson is that these enriched "components" are not really distinct and independent components at all, but instead draw our attention to a single (conceptually inextricable) state that may be variously described as a kind of judgment, a kind of desire, or a kind of phenomenal affect or 'feel'. Really what it is is just one thing, an affectively motivating intentional state, i.e., an emotion.

Politics as Popularity Contest

Many voters seem to worry more about the threat of "liberal elites" looking down on them* than about authoritarian elites skewing the economy in favour of the rich, pursuing a reckless foreign policy agenda that is more about macho posturing than ensuring peace, etc.

Now, if this were a high school popularity contest, maybe it would be understandable to vote for the dumb jock over the aloof valedictorian. (I think that would betray poor taste, but of course I would say that, given my cultural sympathies.) But this is a contest with real and significant consequences. So to let petty cultural resentment get in the way of actually making the world -- and one's own life -- better, seems grossly irresponsible to the point of perversity.

We shouldn't want a 'regular Joe', someone who seems "like us", to be president. We should want someone better than us, who might actually do the job well. Yet people talk as though being a member of the 'educated elite' is somehow a disqualification for the presidency. How backward is that?

* For what it's worth, I'm not sure there's actually much evidence that Democratic politicians (as opposed to a small subset of rank-and-file liberals like myself) are actually contemptuous of 'ordinary folks'. Republican politicians, on the other hand, seem happy to lie and manipulate voters into supporting them against all reason, which seems pretty contemptuous to me. (And, when you get right down to it, a major reason some of us subsequently think poorly of republican voters is precisely because they're stupid enough to fall for it.)

But forget the 'elitism' charge. Get over it. At the end of the day, it shouldn't matter who esteems who (and who merely pretends to). What matters is what they'll actually achieve.

Evaluating Life and Death

All this talk of the 'intrinsic badness of death' has gotten me feeling sloppy. It's worth remembering that we can't really evaluate 'death' per se. Rather, we should be assessing the life that got cut short, and in particular the opportunity cost of the death: what other value the person would have gotten out of their remaining lifespan if they had not died right then. Death is typically worse for the young than for the old. For non-persons, it is no harm at all.

We talk a lot about 'saving lives', but we shouldn't -- it's really quite misleading. At best, we may save a few decades of someone's life. Death is never banished; merely postponed. "Reducing" the number of deaths in the world is not a coherent goal: we know there will be exactly one for each life, and there's no changing that (modulo immortality research). What we really mean here is that we aim to extend life. It's worth being clear on this, since not all life-extensions are equal, but a rhetorical focus on 'death' occludes this fact.

So, to ease my philosophical conscience, let my clarify my earlier sloppy remarks: death may be 'bad' in the sense that a person's life has intrinsic value, and their death may cause it to be cut short in such a way that the life is less good than it would otherwise have been. (In other circumstances, of course, death may be a blessing -- if it causes one's life as a whole to be better than it otherwise would have been.)

Spontaneous Abortions and False Beliefs

Colin Farrelly introduces Toby Ord on Spontaneous Abortion:

The embryo has the same moral status as an adult human (the Claim). Medical studies show that more than 60% of all people are killed by spontaneous abortion (a biological fact). Therefore, spontaneous abortion is one of the most serious problems facing humanity, and we must do our utmost to investigate ways of preventing this death — even if this is to the detriment of other pressing issues (the Conclusion).

The Conclusion is clearly false, so we should likewise reject the Claim. (This is effectively just a real-life version of the 'fire in a fertility clinic' case.) Reflection on these cases reminds us that embryonic death is not a significant intrinsic bad, in stark contrast to the deaths of mental persons. So the crudest pro-life positions, which affirm the above quoted 'Claim', cannot survive reflection. I know some abortion opponents are unimpressed by the above considerations though, so I'd like to explore how (or whether) a more sophisticated pro-life position might remain tenable.

In other words: might there be non-value-based reasons to oppose abortion (reasons that do not depend upon the false assumption that embryonic death is a bad thing)? Consider the analogy of lying, or intentionally causing false beliefs, and how the immorality of this is unaffected by the unproblematic ubiquity of 'spontaneous false beliefs'. It is extremely common for people to acquire false beliefs, and while there may be some instrumental reason to remedy this when possible, it's not usually a big deal. Lying, however, may well be -- not because it brings about anything bad or harmful, but because the act itself is disrespectful -- an inappropriate way of interacting with a fellow human being.

I guess one might attempt to make a parallel case against abortion: though embryonic death is harmless in itself, the very act of abortion [typically? occasionally?] expresses an inappropriate disrespect for the sanctity of human life. A virtuous person wouldn't have one. Or something like that. (Personally, I don't see any reason to respect 'human life' as such, rather than the actual people who matter.)

This strikes me as the strongest pro-life position one could reasonably hold. (Any counterarguments?) So it's worth noting just how moderate it is. Hilzoy, in a post exemplifying this view, compares having an abortion to cutting up a corpse. Neither is the sort of thing one should do for frivolous reasons ('just for fun'). But there may well be non-frivolous reasons which could justify such action. Since the moral issue is wholly a matter of respect and symbolism, not actual consequences, it all comes down to the motives of the agent, and how they conceived of their action. As such, it become extremely difficult on this view to insist that all such actions ought to be prohibited as a matter of law.