Objections to Consequentialism

What do you think are the strongest objections to Consequentialism? (By 'Consequentialism' I roughly mean the unconstrained pursuit of the good -- which might be agent-relative, but shouldn't build in intrinsic concern for traditional "side constraints" like promises, fairness, etc.)

* Counterexamples: I've previously explained why I'm not impressed by the standard "counterexamples" to consequentialism (transplant, bridge, etc.).  In short, they involve situations where the supposedly "consequentialist" act seems morally reckless, and merely stipulating that it "really is" for the best predictably doesn't undo our intuitive aversion to such irresponsible behaviour.  I think it's a lot harder than most people realize to come up with a real case where an act both (i) maximizes rationally-expectable value, and yet (ii) seems morally repugnant on reflection.  So I wish it weren't so common for people to breezily dismiss Act Consequentialism with a mere hand-wave towards the "familiar counterexamples".

Exception: cases of sadistic mobs, etc., which instead call for axiological refinements (reject hedonism!).

* The Separateness of Persons: This venerable objection is vulnerable to the observation that it erroneously assumes that commensurability entails fungibility. (That is, assuming we understand normative 'separateness' as a matter of being non-fungible, distinct values or desirable ends.  Sometimes it is instead used in a contentless way to merely emote disapproval of consequentialist aggregation, or to reassert using new words the trivial observation that consequentialism is incompatible with non-derivative rights.)

Why Consequentialism?

People sometimes ask me why I'm a consequentialist. This is a difficult question to answer productively, since direct introspection merely reveals my deep-rooted sense that non-consequentialist views just don't make sense. There's probably no single argument that's responsible for this intuitive response. But it might at least be fun to brainstorm a few considerations that could plausibly lead one to favour consequentialism...

Abortion Review

Is it wrong to kill embryos -- do they have (morally significant) interests that would be violated by their untimely death? I think that reflecting on spontaneous abortion strongly suggests that embryonic death is not an intrinsic bad (though it might be bad for the would-be parents, if they dearly wanted a child). The central challenge for the pro-lifer is to explain how it is that non-sentient embryos have greater moral status than other non-sentient entities like plants and bacteria. There are two basic strategies they can offer in response, but I think that both ultimately fail.

Personal Identity Review

Here I want to motivate and defend two Parfitian theses. The first is anti-haecceitism or 'reductionism' about identity: the qualitative facts exhaust the facts, and in particular, there remains no "further fact" about the identities of things. We could give a complete description of the world without using identity-talk at all. Talk of identity over time is just a convenient shorthand for talking about various kinds of continuity and counterfactual dependence. The second thesis, then, is that when it comes to the persistence or identity of persons across time, the kind of continuity worth caring about is psychological continuity.

Utilitarian Policy

I think the world would be a much better place if public policy debates were more focused on cost-benefit analysis. Too often, people refuse to acknowledge trade-offs or opportunity costs (health and military spending are obvious candidates here). Other times, people seem more interested in harming out-groups or "looking tough" than in actually securing better outcomes for everyone (think immigration, prisons, torture). And then there are the obvious cases of legislative capture by special interests (farm subsidies, retroactive copyright extensions). It seems like there's a lot of scope for "no brainer" policy improvements that every reasonable person should be able to agree on. But maybe I'm missing something. So let me take a stab at outlining some of the issues where the answer seems to me completely obvious -- and I hope that others will add more suggestions in the comments, and/or explain where you think I'm going wrong.

Hedonism Review

Now to summarize my thoughts on hedonistic theories of welfare (understood broadly, to include qualia preferentism and other views on which your welfare depends only on your subjective mental states)...

(1) Some people are drawn to welfare hedonism for largely linguistic reasons: it just sounds wrong to their ears to say that a person is 'harmed' by an event that doesn't impact their experiences. In at least some cases this is the result of demonstrable conceptual and metaphysical confusions -- e.g. conflating different senses in which one might be "affected" by an event. But in any case, there is little point getting hung up on terminology. As I argue in 'The Importance of Implications', we should instead focus on the substantive normative questions in the vicinity, e.g., what we should want for the people we care about.

(2) When we reflect on the things that really matter to us in life, most of us find that we care about much more than just the quality of our subjective experiences. We also want, among other things, to form meaningful connections with other people, and to make actual progress towards accomplishing our goals. A life of pleasant delusion does not seem nearly so appealing. The hedonist may suggest that this is just because we care about more than our own well-being: for example, we want others to be well-off even when this doesn't benefit us personally. But even bracketing such moral concerns, departing your current life for the superficial thrills of Nozick's experience machine doesn't even seem like something worth doing for your own sake. (For another example: nor does plugging Morpheus back into the Matrix against his will seem like a particularly benevolent thing to do.) For many of us, at least, a life of appealing experiences is not sufficient for an appealing life.

[Update: this post argues that loving relationships also have non-instrumental value, for example.  Hedonism denies this, which strikes me as a decisive counterexample to the view.]

(3) Some hedonists try to debunk all such preferences as having been 'corrupted' by our mentally 'perceiving' what were meant to be unperceived events. I address this objection in my recent post, 'Imagining the Unseen'.

(4) Ben Bradley argues for hedonism on the grounds that other views run into problems specifying the 'timing' of certain harms. 'Must harms be temporally located?' explains why this is unconvincing.

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As noted in #2 above, hedonism makes some incredibly implausible claims. For any hedonists out there: what do you think should motivate us to accept them nonetheless? (Even if you find that you personally only care about the experiential aspect of your life, what's the motivation for overriding others' self-regarding preferences regarding the sort of life they want - on reflection - to live?)

Zombie Review

Bring out your [un]dead! After all my narrowly focused posts on the topic, it's time for a "big picture" review of the zombie argument against physicalism. Recall: Physicalists think that the physical facts exhaust the base facts: just as the arrangement of particles suffices to settle whether there are tables, so it suffices to settle whether there is conscious experience. So let 'P' denote their complete microphysical description of the world, which makes no explicit reference to phenomenal experience or qualia. Let 'Q' be a statement explicitly about my qualia. The classic argument for dualism thus follows:

1. (P & ~Q) is ideally conceivable [can't be ruled out a priori]
2. If (P & ~Q) is ideally conceivable then (P & ~Q) is possible.
3. If (P & ~Q) is possible then physicalism is false.
Therefore, physicalism is false.

(3) is analytic: if you can have P without Q, then P does not suffice for Q, contrary to the physicalist's claims.

(2) is the premise most philosophers [as "type B materialists"] have traditionally questioned. It raises complicated issues in the metaphysics of modality and philosophy of language which I addressed in depth for my ANU honours thesis: 'Modal Rationalism'. (But you can get the short version here.) The upshot is that denying this step is ad hoc and ultimately commits you to the unmotivated claim that there are coherent scenarios which do not correspond to any possible world. I won't address it further here.

The blogospheric discussion has instead focused on premise (1). I think the intuitive force of the premise is made especially vivid by the zombie thought-experiment, whereby we imagine a world physically like ours but lacking in consciousness. That sure seems conceivable, but type-A materialists are committed to denying this, and claiming instead that there is some implicit contradiction which renders the zombie scenario incoherent. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have any idea what this elusive contradiction might be. (Unless you count Eliezer's suggestion, but that was based on a demonstrably false premise in the philosophy of language.)

Brandon made the reasonable point that we're not in a position to assess (1) with total confidence because we don't yet know what the statement P of completed microphysics says. That's a fair point; I certainly don't think this is a knock-down argument. But we do the best we can from our position of uncertainty, and it seems to me that we have more reason to believe (1) than its negation. So we should lean more towards property dualism, pending further evidence.

Some of the other objections that have been raised are, I think, simply confused. For example, Tanasije worries that epiphenomenalists will have no high-level explanation of our 'consciousness'-related behaviour (e.g. my writing this blog post). But we have no fewer resources than the physicalist, we just use different words to describe them. So while I would deny that zombies have beliefs about consciousness, there is a functionalist analogue (or physical component) of belief, which we may call 'z-belief', which can be cited by third parties and will do all the same scientific/explanatory work. (This raises more interesting worries about whether zombie brains are somehow 'malfunctioning' by z-believing in consciousness, which I address in my post: Zombie Rationality.)

Then there's Richard Brown's attempt at constructing an analogous "non-physical zombie" argument (replacing 'P' with 'NP' above) against dualism. But that won't work for the following reason: (i) Either 'NP' explicitly states the qualia facts Q, or it does not. (ii) If it does, then (NP & ~Q) is straightforwardly contradictory, so the first premise fails. (iii) Otherwise, the third premise fails. The possibility of (NP & ~Q) is compatible with dualism, because the dualist never claimed that those other non-physical facts NP suffice for consciousness. So, either way, it's a terrible argument.

Conclusion

As noted in my original post on the current blogospheric dispute, there are some bullets to bite either way.

The [type-A] materialist must simply have faith that there is an implicit contradiction somewhere in the zombie scenario, even though it shows no sign of such incoherence. They must also trust that third-personal scientific inquiry into non-experiential facts will somehow turn out to imply first-personal experiential facts in the same way that it implies the facts about ordinary macro objects like tables and chairs.

The epiphenomenalist, on the other hand, must explain how we can know that we're conscious if it has no causal effect. This will naturally lead to certain views about belief content and epistemology that others might balk at.

I don't think it's obvious how to weigh these various considerations. Personally, I lean towards epiphenomenalism -- the implications don't strike me as particularly worrisome. But your mileage may vary.

[There are also other views [PDF] on the table, e.g. interactionist dualism and panprotopsychism, but I won't address them here.]

P.S. Don't miss the zombie song - 're: your brains' [ht: Chris].

Arguing with Eliezer: Part I

I had the pleasure yesterday of meeting Carl Shulman and Eliezer Yudkowsky (of Overcoming Bias fame) while they were in town, and hashing out some of our philosophical disagreements. It was interesting, because they're both very smart, and Eliezer's starkly materialist/reductionist ideology was shared by my past self. So I'm not entirely unsympathetic. But it was also frustrating in some respects, since he seemed to assume that any disagreement was simply due to a failure to appreciate his basic arguments, rather than a considered judgment that they aren't wholly compelling. So let me discuss a couple of issues in more detail, and attempt to lay out some of the reasons why I've shifted away from his blanket reductionism over the years.

(A) Fundamental Normativity. Eliezer holds that normative terms (e.g. 'should') are reducible to a particular framework of assessment -- roughly, the ultimate norms endorsed by the speaker. He calls this 'objective subjectivism', and it bears some similarity to the 'Objective Moral Relativism' I endorsed back in 2005.

I now find this unsatisfying, for several reasons. (1) The most obvious is that there's nothing really normative here, in the sense of an ideal that potentially outstrips any purely descriptive facts (incl. my current preferences and accepted norms). Though Eliezer wouldn't like to admit it, this is less a reduction than an elimination. Anti-realist maneuvers can save many of the appearances of normative practice, but its deepest aspirations are ultimately rejected. (2) His view implies that many normative disagreements are simply terminological; different people mean different things by the term 'ought', so they're simply talking past each other. This is a popular stance to take, especially among non-philosophers, but it is terribly superficial. See my 'Is Normativity Just Semantics?' for more detail. (3) We can go beyond the impoverished instrumental conception of rationality on which this view depends. Ultimate ends may themselves be assessed as more or less irrational. (I first realized this here.)

(B) Fundamental Mentality. My post on 'Dualist Explanations' outlines the case for property dualism, and defuses typical worries of the scientifically minded. Now, Eliezer seems to think that the causal inefficacy of non-physical phenomenal properties ("irreducible consciousness") is a knock-down argument against them. I once agreed, but again, have since changed my mind. My post, 'Why do you think you're conscious?' addresses this challenge in some detail.

There are some bullets to bite either way. I admit it's a bit odd to think that the words I type are not causally related to the facts I purport to describe. (That's an extreme way of putting it; do follow my above link to put this in perspective.) But, upon reflection, I find this commitment less absurd than denying the manifest reality of first-personal conscious experience (as reductive materialists like Dennett and Eliezer do), or engaging in the metaphysical contortions that non-reductive materialists must (see my 'dualist explanations' post).

(C) Epistemology. Eliezer writes:

When "pure thought" tells you that 1 + 1 = 2, "independently of any experience or observation", you are, in effect, observing your own brain as evidence.

I responded:

It's just fundamentally mistaken to conflate reasoning with "observing your own brain as evidence". For one thing, no amount of mere observation will suffice to bring us to a conclusion, as Lewis Carroll's tortoise taught us. Further, it mistakes content and vehicle. When I judge that p, and subsequently infer q, the basis for my inference is simply p - the proposition itself - and not the psychological fact that I judge that p. I could infer some things from the latter fact too, of course, but that's a very different matter.

In discussion, Eliezer emphasized the demands of (what I call) 'meta-coherence' between our first-order and higher-order beliefs. If you reason from p to q, but further believe that your reasoning in this instance was faulty or unreliable, then this should undermine your belief in q. I agree that reasoning presupposes that one's thought processes are reliable, and a subjectively convincing line of thought may be undermined by showing that the thinker was rationally incapacitated at the time (due to a deceptive drug, say). But presuppositions are not premises. So it simply doesn't follow that the following are equally good arguments:
(1) P, therefore Q
(2) If I were to think about it, I would conclude that Q. Therefore Q.

(Related issues are raised in my post on 'Meta-Evidence'. See also my argument for the inescapability of a priori justification.)

Concluding Remarks. Oops, this is too long already -- I've shifted my concluding thoughts to a new post.