Abandon Text! - Morality & Ethics

Self-serving Simplification

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:13:00 -0700

Kenny pointed out to me another example of people feeling a yearning for a simpler existence: "What Could You Live Without?" a New York Times op-ed about a family who, at their daughter's urging, downgraded to a smaller home and donated the proceeds to charity. The family experienced a double benefit: not only did they get the warm-and-fuzzies for making an enormous gift to the needy, they also discovered that a smaller house gave them more time together.

The benefits of cutting back are getting renewed attention these days. The recession certainly removed a lot of excess buying power, forcing people to look for happiness that couldn't be bought. The environmentalists, as we had discussed before, consider overconsumption to be a moral issue, since consumption of energy and other resources is what ultimately drives pollution, deforestation, and (is widely believed) global climate change. Kim John Payne, a therapist who recently spoke at our school, published a book called Simplicity Parenting that urged parents to jettison substantial amounts of both material possessions and scheduled activities as a means of making their kids happier and more well-adjusted.

I'm glad that people are rediscovering these truths. But I put the emphasis on re-disovering, since these are hardly new. While some forms of evangelical Christianity have occasionally gotten sidetracked down the doctrine of wealth, the mainstream Christian message has always advised people to "lay up their treasure in heaven" – moral action, not material accumulation, is the secret to happiness. It used to be that thrift – only buying what you needed – was a common-sense virtue, not a startling epiphany.

The Salwens, the family that sold their house, did so because their daughter observed, ""Dad, if that man [in the Mercedes next to us] had a less nice car, that man there [begging for food on the other side of us] could have a meal." While I admire the moral bravery of such a statement, I shudder at its economic naiveté. It's such a small step, intellectually, from wanting to help those in need, to believing that poverty can be "fixed" through a simple redistribution of wealth. It reinforces the massively mistaken notion that economics is a zero-sum game – that someone having more is somehow taking away from those who have less. My ethical heroes are not the sackcloth-and-ashes folks that make "sacrifices," but rather the mega-philanthropists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who generate enormous value and wealth by doing what they love, and who then use that wealth for something better than mere conspicuous consumption. You never know – that guy in the Mercedes might have already fed more hungry people than you could even dream of helping with your modest means.

Education = ethics

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:53:51 -0700

Paul Lockhart's "Lament" repeatedly questions the purpose of education as well as its methods. He doesn't just grieve that true mathematics isn't being taught, but rather that it is not recognized as an art, something that ennobles the spirit and gives joy, something loved for its own sake and not any sort of utility that it brings. He wants math to be lumped in with the liberal arts – literature, music, painting, etc. – things that the education establishment teaches without regard to vocational preparation. This sort of thinking runs counter to the "3 R" crowd just who want their kids to get jobs and balance their checkbooks.

Anyone who would divide education into "the useful" and "the beautiful" is bound to run into trouble, because they are not separate. The useful is beautiful – ask any engineer, businessman, homemaker or child who set about to solve a practical problem and found an elegant solution. The beautiful is also useful – if nothing else, by giving pleasure to its consumers and creators. Any attempt to divide them invariably leads to people running to unhealthy extremes in either direction. On the one hand, you get college professors determined to magnify their greatness by emphasizing their uselessness. On the other hand, you get No Child Left Behind, in which anything that's not part of a pathetically low standard of usefulness is jettisoned. Either way, both utility and joy get destroyed.

What neither side seems to realize is that they are arguing about ethics – in the classic Greek sense of answering the question: "What is a worthwhile life?" Education is just the practical implementation of a notion of ethics. Once you've decided what a good life looks like, you try to prepare your citizens to have that sort of life. Everyone educator and politician starts by saying, "We all agree that we want what's best for the child" – without acknowledging that we have vastly different notions of what "best" really is. You can't say what's a good curriculum until you decide what kind of life you want your children to have . . . and you can't decide that without determining what life is, ultimately, all about. Is life about Work? Is life about Experience? Is life about Happiness?

Last year I went to a workshop for directors of independent schools, a crash-course for new board members. One of the duties of a board of directors is to define the mission statement of the school and to make sure all policies are serving the mission. In talking about mission statements, the facilitator explicitly made the connection to ethics: "Your mission is really about what you want your kids to be. In general, every parent and every school has the same three goals for their kids. We want them to be Successful. We want them to be Happy. And we want them to be Good. The priority you assign to each of those goals will determine the character of your school."

I thought that was a pretty good analysis. Most public schools emphasize Success as the primary goal, with Happiness a distant second and Goodness not even on the radar. Many parochial schools put their notion of Goodness at the top, and then Success, and then Happiness. Waldorf schools explicitly put Goodness (i.e. spiritual capacity) at the top of the list. Happiness probably comes next; Waldorf schools are the few I've ever seen that took Happiness seriously as an important part of human development. No one wants to say that Success comes last – it's hard to be happy without some measure of success – but it is correctly recognized as a means, and not an end in itself.

Marital Duties

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:16:57 -0700

I got some comments off-line on yesterday's post regarding Sandra Tsing-Loh's affair and subsequent divorce, which have prodded me into clarifying my position on sex within marriage. Discussions of sexual morality always seem to get people worked up – yet another clue that it's something important, and worth discussing.

I thought I was pretty safe, in terms of political correctness, because nine-tenths of my arguments were just citations of things women had written about sexuality within marriage. However, I because I said something directly about marriage partners being obligated to "put out on a regular basis," I crossed some mysterious line that men are not allowed to cross. If a woman like Sandra Tsing-Loh writes about a man who refuses to have sex with his wife for two years, she's allowed to say "that's a raw deal." If a man says it's unreasonable for a spouse to refuse to have sex for two years, then suddenly everyone thinks I'm talking about the sexual enslavement of women, the subjugation and humiliation of half the human race. In other words, I'm the Taliban.

There were multiple levels of rights and responsibilities that are involved in all sexual activity, and it's easy to get them confused:

One's legal and basic human rights
One's moral responsibilities to their spouse
Strongly recommended advice for having a happy and stable marriage

When I spoke about "putting out on a regular basis," I'm definitely not talking about #1. All human beings have a right to the sanctity and integrity of their own bodies. Everybody has a right to freely choose when and with whom to have sex. Using physical force to coerce sex from another is rape, even in marriage, and is a crime in all civilized nations. Nobody's forcin' nobody to do nothin', ok? And, to be 100% clear, everything I'm writing here applies equally to woman and men, so there's no double standard going on.

So, that being said . . . I do think a married person has a moral obligation to have sex with their spouses. There are very few conditions in the typical, traditional marriage contract that are spelled out in detail. All that "love, honor, cherish" stuff is pretty vague on the details and open to lots of interpretation. There are a couple things that are extremely explicit, though:

The couple is "forsaking all others" – and we all know what that's supposed to mean: sexual exclusivity.
This is a permanent commitment.

If an arrangement between two people lacked these principles, I don't think we would call it "marriage." (We could argue about that, but let's not. I think we can agree that this is the traditional understanding of the meaning of marriage.) Because sexual exclusivity is explicitly stipulated as a core principle of the arrangement, I think it deserves very special consideration. It wouldn't be spelled out that way unless it was important. I think it's also clear that this is something going against the grain of human nature: if it were perfectly natural and normal and expected to be monogamous for our entire lives, we wouldn't have to make solemn promises about it.

If you make a commitment to lifelong sexual exclusivity, it seems to me that the conscious, prolonged attempt to withhold sex from a spouse, contrary to their desires, is clearly breaking faith with that commitment. People don't get married to become celibate. They have a reasonable expectation to reasonable access to sex.

Ahh, but what's "reasonable"? That's where all the marriage counselors and sex therapists get involved. I'm sure the answer is dependent on lots of personal factors of health, opportunity, and desire. I've already said that "never" is not reasonable. Usually, "reasonable" is whatever the couple can mutually agree upon as reasonable, or at least acceptable.

This is the point at which I move from "moral obligation" to "strongly recommended advice." And that advice is just a rehash from a dozen pop psychologists, which is this: you should have sex whenever either spouse wants it.

Mostly, this comes out of my functional extension of the Golden Rule, strongly recommended for good working relationships of all kinds, which states: All reasonable requests made in good faith should be met in good faith. If your spouse asks you to do something, and it's reasonable, then you should do it. Or, to put it another way, the default answer to spousal requests should be Yes. If your wife asks you to move the junk off the porch because company is coming over, you should do it. Maybe you have a perfectly good reason not to move the junk right this moment, because you're busy or tired or whatever – that also is a reasonable request. Of course, this principle would be quickly subverted if it wasn't coupled with another principle, which is: Don't make unreasonable requests. Ask for what you need, with the understanding that everyone will work in good faith to meet everyone's needs.

Usually, when I spell out this philosophy, people think it's silly – either because they agree with me and think it's so obvious that it isn't worth saying, or because they totally disagree and think such an rule would result in someone, at some point, being totally taken advantage of. For my money, it is an essential part to any good working relationship. All kinds of interpersonal friction are minimized if you trust that the other person has a good reason for their requests. It restricts arguments to things that are worth arguing about. It communicates trust and respect.

If it works for putting the cap on the tube of toothpaste or taking out the trash, it also works for sex. Make your best effort to meet the needs of your spouse, and you will maximize everyone's peace and contentment. If you ignore their needs and desires, you will pay a price for it.

Privacy Rights and Children

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 04:38:00 -0700

Kenny wrote an excellent defense of the rights of minors in his essay "Of Strip-Searches and Students," in which he commented on the recent Supreme Court case of Safford Unified School District v. Reading. 13-year-old Savana Reading was strip-searched by school administrators on suspicion that she was carrying ibuprofen. (Yes, you read that right -- an OTC drug available in every household in the country is contraband in a government-run school.) The High Court found (thank God) that Savana's 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure were violated. But Kenny is looking for a larger legal precedent. He wonders: why shouldn't minors enjoy the same legal rights as adults, when it comes to respecting their basic human dignity?

Read Kenny's essay if you haven't already. Then come back here, because I want to propose another angle from which one could construct a theory of the legal privacy rights of minors.

^ ^ ^

It's hard to talk about the legal rights of minors without also talking about the legal rights of parents. In general, the law provides parents with absolute power and authority over their children. Children do require a lot of governing, relatively speaking, and our culture trusts that the parents are the ones most likely to have the child's best interests at heart when using that authority. A parent's powers are pretty broad – they can search, seize, and physically restrain the freedom of their children as they see fit. Most people see that arrangement as appropriate; so long as the children are not physically endangered and adequately provided for, parents should have that right to exercise those powers. (As a matter of good parenting, I think parents are well advised to restrain their use of those powers. You should, in general, treat children with all the respect and autonomy you would accord to any adult, within the bounds of the child's ability to hold up their end of an adult relationship. But I still think it is appropriate that parents have the legal right to those powers.)

The only problem with that arrangement is that it gets us used to thinking of children as entities without rights. We wouldn't think it wrong to search our own children's rooms if we suspected wrongdoing, so we generalize that out to "children have no privacy rights at all." I think parents have rights that may trump the child's right to privacy (or association, or religion, or speech, or many other constitutional rights) but that doesn't mean the children don't have those rights at all.

Things get especially murky with schools, in which the teachers and administrators are acting in loco parentis – that is, they are delegated some of the powers of the parents while the children are in their care. They are permitted to control where the children go, what they are allowed to say, and can even apply certain punishments. The question is: do teachers and administrators have the same powers as parents when it comes to privacy, or not?

My feeling is no. I think the only parental powers over children that are given to other adults are those that are explicitly delegated from the parents. If a school wants the right to search a child's backpack or locker, they need the explicit consent of the parent. If a parent does not delegate those parental powers, then a child has exactly the same constitutional rights as an adult. (You may find, by the way, that adults don't have as many rights as you might think. There is no legal expectation of privacy in most workplaces, for instance – your email can be read, your desk searched, etc.)

This model isn't perfect. Savana could still be strip-searched for ibuprofen under this legal theory, had her parents signed some consent form that gave administrators the power to do so. As long as there are bad parents, there would be bad outcomes. But this, at least, would start us from the correct basis: children have the same rights as adults, unless some other parental power prevails.

One White Glove

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:18:58 -0700

Ethics, in the classical Greek sense, is an attempt to answer the question, "How should we live?" Or, to put it another way, "What would be a good life?" If you develop a system of ethics, you should be able to apply it to your own life, or any other life for that matter, and answer the question: "Was that a good life?"

Which brings us to Michael Jackson.

Yes, sirree, that's a real stumper.

People find meaningfulness in all kinds of things: success, fame, power, impact, uniqueness, love, happiness, virtue. On some of those measures, Michael was off the charts. He was enormously talented, enjoying the kind of fame and fortune and cultural influence that was shared by few, and not likely to be repeated again in our hyper-fragmented culture. Thriller not only holds the record for most albums sold, it's actually still a really good album; popular music doesn't often have that much staying power. The economic productivity of this one life is staggering -- Jackson's annual residuals alone are about 100 times greater than my entire lifetime output. He generously supported lots of charities, which almost lets you forgive the new levels of personal extravagance he reached with his Neverland. And man, could he dance. It must have been fun, to be able to dance like that. So, yeah . . . a lot to admire. Who could say it wasn't Good?

And yet . . . there is the other side. It's hard to gauge whether he was happy, since he was so far withdrawn from reality, but the smart money would guess he was miserable in his freakishness. Lots of people withdraw from reality, but few have hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal to propel their weirdness. We accept that great artists sometimes suffer for the sake of their creative powers, and even behave badly. We are not used to them becoming barely recognizable as human. Robbed of a real childhood, he spent the rest of his life trying to get it back, and becoming more and more grotesque in the process. (The Onion, as always, nailed it with their headline: "King of Pop dead at 12." I doubt that he molested those children, but I do think he lusted after their innocence in a manner that was disturbing. None of this was immoral, exactly, though it was repulsive.

So how do you add all that up? Was it worth it? Had a 12-year-old Michael been offered a vision of his future life, would have accepted the whole deal? Unparalleled fame and accomplishment, along with misery, isolation, suspicion, and disgust? Some people would, but I know I would not and, I suspect, neither would Michael. Achievement is pretty empty when you find yourself cut off from the rest of world. It's not the sort of life one would choose. That, I think, is the source of the international mourning – people recognize the tragedy of someone being so poor while being so rich. Now that the awkward man-child is gone, everyone is free to embrace the good things of his life and try to forget, or at least forgive, the shadows. I like to remember him playing the Scarecrow in The Wiz, when he was at the peak of his powers, still recognizable as a black male with magnificent talent and vitality, and not yet transformed into mythological figure, the fey creature with the one white glove.

Effort, Free Will, and Destiny

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 23 May 2009 07:37:30 -0700

In response to Kenny's comments on the primacy of effort:

If social scientists can accurately predict whether someone will drop out of high school on the day they are born, does that necessarily mean that effort is not the primary factor in their success or failure? Maybe the social scientists have merely learned how to predict who will make the effort (e.g. people in a cultural context that values education and economic advancement) and those who will not (e.g. those who lack those forms of support). And, even if their predictions are 80% right, we could still look at the 20% who defy those predictions, and I'm fairly certain we would find greater effort as a common characteristic of those who beat the odds.
Along those same lines, consider the results of the KIPP schools (mentioned both in the New Yorker article and in Gladwell's book Outliers). 80% of the eighth graders in the KIPP program in the South Bronx scored at or above grade level in reading or math – nearly twice the New York City average. The core difference of KIPP schools: effort. Between extended school calendars and piles of homework, they make students spend 100% of their time working on academic success. The differences are dramatic. Again, nothing is a guarantee (there are still the other 20% who are not performing at grade level) but that still a huge difference.
Kenny is correct that an individual's success is vastly dependent on the context in which they are born, and that effort is insufficient without opportunity. If you pull back and consider a family's success over several generations, you will see the correlation between effort and success become much stronger. If one or more generations are willing to make the effort and sacrifices necessary to create the environment of opportunity (e.g. coming to America, working two jobs to save for kids' college, etc.) then families can readily advance from poverty to the middle class, or from the middle class to the outright wealthy. One can argue whether it is morally just that the virtues or the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children . . . but most humans would agree that it is just (to the extent anything is just in this world), and that we have a right and a responsibility to work for the advancement of our children.
All of this is tying back to our earlier (and ongoing) discussion about our moral obligations to the poor. Yes, we have vastly more than most other people in the world . . . but that's not an accident. Our wealth is the result of a particular context of opportunity, which was primarily created out of the effort, sacrifice, and risk-taking of our forebears. I think we need to pay as much attention to the virtues that created this wealth in the first place, as well as the impulse to share it with others. (More on this later.)
I agree that intelligence and willpower are strongly correlated. Notice the kind of intelligence, though. The article explicitly points out that willpower is a feat of imagination – the ability to create a mental vision of the future rewards, or to mentally erase the prospect of immediate gratification. And yet most of our schools (at least, the schools I grew up in) do very little to stimulate our capacity to imagine. Imagination and creativity were usually regarded as something extra-curricular, something beyond the pale of standard education. If you look at the report cards from the Chapel Hill/Carrboro City Schools, you will see that for grades one through five, "imagination" and "creativity" are never mentioned.

Standards of Evidence

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 07:26:54 -0700

So, how do we make decisions, especially moral decisions, in the absence of absolute knowledge?

There is one field of human knowledge that spends almost all its time on this question – the law. In civil and criminal cases, judges and juries are routinely asked to suss out the truth in the face of conflicting claims, and make weighty decisions on the basis of their findings. The court system is designed to be as fair and true as possible while still being pragmatic. What can the law tell us about practical epistemology?

For one, courts use different standards of evidence for different kinds of cases. Thanks to Law & Order and other such courtroom dramas, we're all familiar with the standard of evidence for murder trials: the defendant must be found guilty beyond all reasonable doubt in order to be convicted, and twelve different people must all agree. Lesser standards prevail in most other cases. Many legal principles use the "reasonable man" test: what would any reasonable person conclude, given certain evidence? The important point here is that our standards for evidence vary with the case, and extraordinary measures (e.g. executing someone) must be justified with extraordinary proof (i.e. beyond all reasonable doubt).

The other important concept outlined in the law is burden of proof. The law recognizes that epistemological confusion can justify anything or nothing, depending on your inclination, so it determines ahead of time what course should be taken when insurmountable doubts arise. In nearly all criminal proceedings in the United States, the burden of proof is on the prosecution: if reasonable doubts about a particular case exist, criminal law presumes the person is innocent. (Note that in lots of other non-legal proceedings, the burden of proof is quite different; when a salesman is trying to convince us to buy a used car, the burden of proof is upon the salesman to prove the car is not a lemon, and even the slightest suspicion of problems can be sufficient grounds not to buy the car.) The important point here is that we need to decide what's the reasonable "default" to take with certain kinds of cases.

Does any of this help with our ethical questions of helping the poor? The standard of evidence required is going to vary with just how big a claim you make about our moral responsibilities to alleviate poverty. If you say everyone should give a little bit to help the poor, then you can probably get away with the simple "fed people are better than starving people" argument. If you are going to claim (as Kenny did) that everyone has an infinite duty to help the poor, to the extent that they should give away everything until they live in poverty themselves . . . well, that's going to demand a pretty high standard of evidence. It almost certainly flunks the "reasonable man" test; a grand jury would probably approve of pressing murder charges against a man who stands by and watches a girl drown in a pond, but would never dream of prosecuting someone for not giving to Oxfam. The prevailing "reasonable" position is that giving to the poor is good, but superogatory. And, I believe, the burden of proof is upon Kenny to prove that it's otherwise.

Again, none of this proves that Kenny is wrong about helping the poor. Principles of law are often not the same as principles of ethics, nor should they be. I just want to make it clear that I'm not hiding behind an epistemological fog. Reasonable standards of practical evidence do not demand the ethical standard that Kenny is proposing, at least with the rationale he has presented so far.

Epistemology and Morals

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 07:24:55 -0700

In his comments, Kenny writes:

Descartes made a very strong distinction between the kind of truth you look for in philosophy--the truth of absolute certainly beyond a doubt--and the kind of truth that you have to use as a basis for action, which is more probabalistic, based on the best evidence you have at the moment. Both are important, but don't get them confused. That's the big distinction I see here. I want moral truth on the level of absolute certainty--this is, in fact, the very heart of my own justification for the life of the mystic (shameless plug for another of my own essays, I know, but really, it's all based on the necessity of finding some absolute basis for morality, and the impossibility of doing so through reason).

At the same time, there is the practical level that you have to act on. From all I can tell, right now, well-fed people are better than starving people. That unjustified assumption gives enough basis for making decisions.

Ok, all philosophic discussions have to run up against the questions of epistemology: "How do you know what you know?" Absolutely everything gets harder to talk about once you recognize the fact that you have incomplete and incorrect knowledge. In college my twin brother and I took a seminar class called "Personal and Disciplinary Approaches to Truth," in which a bunch of different professors from various departments discussed how their particular field (science, engineering, design, etc.) thought about truth. For our final exam we had to write papers about what we had learned from the class, and then in the last class meeting the instructors asked us to pick out the one most important sentence from our papers to share with the class. I don't remember what I wrote, but I do remember my brother's: "You could be wrong."

The problem with epistemology, of course, is that it has no end. There are an infinite number of explanations that can be made to explain our observed phenomena. Maybe the world was made by an omnipotent God. Maybe it was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Out of the millions of potential models for the world, which one do we pick to guide our actions?

Epistemology can be used to forestall action forever. We are all familiar with government agencies and officials who, when pressured to implement a policy they don't like, will declare that "further studies are needed." I call it the "epistemological punt" – "We don't know enough yet to know if it's the right thing to do, so let's do nothing." Cowards and couch-potatoes delight in the realm of epistemology, since it gives a never-ending reason to put off doing absolutely anything, forever, for no particular reason. Intuitively, most of us realize that "how-do-you-know-that-you-know-that-you-know-that-you-know" is a trap, a recipe for inaction not unlike death. We need some other mechanism or standard for operating in the realm of partial or conditional truth.

One can, however, make the exact opposite mistake about epistemology. "Oh, since we can't know anything for sure, all models are equally valid." I call this the "epistemological push" – "you can't really prove anything, so I'm going to go right on believing that homeopathy really works." While the Punters would have you do nothing in the absence of sure knowledge, the Pushers believe that anything goes. This form was mastered by the Postmodernists, who declared nothing was true and therefore anything was valid and therefore we have to believe anything they say. Pushing can be used in moderation, too, to justify whatever we happen to uncritically believe, because "that's just the way I see it."

So, getting back to our original discussion about the moral demands of helping the poor . . . Kenny seems to think that I'm Punting. I started questioning the logic and assumptions that he used in his assertions, essentially raising epistemological doubts to the degree that I could say, "You don't know that for sure, therefore your case is flawed and I don't have an infinity moral responsibility to alleviate poverty." And, for my money, I think Kenny is Pushing: he's making claims without sufficient proof, and claiming that the necessity of immediate action is sufficient to overcome any deficits in our absolute knowledge.

What to do?

The Taboo against Meaninglessness

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 06:40:10 -0700

Some good comments from Gary and Kenny; let me return to those in a moment.

Pinker had another point in The Stuff of Thought (another of his books that I just finished and am still digesting) that seemed relevant to the discussion, about the nature of taboos. A taboo is a cultural norm, but it's not just that a certain action is proscribed, but rather that even directly thinking about something is forbidden. You can violate a taboo just by mentioning it in conversation, or otherwise inviting other people to think thoughts that should not be thought. Taboos are kinda weird, because it's not that the taboo subject is completely unknown to the people who respect the taboo – it's just that they don't want to think about it directly, or behave as if it's a subject for rational contemplation.

Sex used to be a taboo subject in our culture. You could offend someone just by mentioning its existence. Everyone, of course, knew all about sex and certainly engaged in it – it was just not a subject for conversation or contemplation. Over the last fifty years or so that taboo has faded considerably, given what you see on TV, but you will still see some boundaries in what most people will comfortably talk about in public. Religion was also a great taboo that has faded over time; there is more talk now about the "religious marketplace" in which people freely mix and match religious traditions and beliefs. But with religion, too, we become conscious of certain taboos when we see them violated. Recently, the atheists started crossing a taboo line by boldly, publically declaring the non-existence of God. Lots of thinkers declined to believe in divine personage over the centuries, but their opinions tended to be quiet and oblique. It is still largely considered rude to announce one's atheism loudly in a dinner party.

Why do we have taboos, if everyone knows about what we're not talking about? In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker suggests some taboos are related to the terms on which we define our relationships. The anthropologist Alan Fiske categorized all human relationships into three broad categories: Communality (freely sharing among kin and community), Authority (using power to claim resources), and Exchange (trading resources for mutual gain). Each kind of relationship has its own rules and logic, and if you mismatch the rules to the situation, the result is a faux pax. A man who gets up from his mother's Thanksgiving feast (Communality) and offers to pay her $200 for it (Exchange) will certainly offend her and everyone present. Likewise, if a waiter in a restaurant provides good service in hopes of receiving a big tip (Exchange) and instead gets a hearty "thanks!" from the patron (Communality), the waiter will be offended.

Some topics, then, are taboo because they frame the relationship with the wrong set of instinctive relationship-logic. Pinker gives the example of the pre-nuptial contract. Since half of all marriages in our country now end in divorce, you might logically think everyone ought to get a pre-nuptial contract spelling out how a divorce would be handled. Yet most couples strenuously resist even discussing prenuptials, because it engages Exchange mentality ("I'll give you this if you give me that") at precisely the time they want to be emphasizing Communality ("what's mine is yours and what's yours is mine") to ensure a committed marriage. Even thinking the thoughts can bring about the outcome they are trying to avoid in the first place.

I think religious taboos follow a similar sort of logic. People don't want to discuss religion because it undermines the intuitive logic of Communality ("we are all children of God") and Authority ("He alone is the Lord") which defines the nature of our relationships with each other. Whether there actually is a God is not the point – we just want to keep treating each other as if there is a God. And while specific religious traditions have blurred into one another in the multicultural melting pot, the most basic common elements of religion as a definer of our relationships persists: a belief in God (though barely defined), and a vague consensus on a moral reality.

Which brings us up to the current conversation about the genesis of morals. Whenever I pursue moral arguments out to their logical ends (as Singer does), I wind up standing at the precipice of this final taboo: no one wants to admit that our morals are hanging in space with no visible support. Even atheists such as Pinker, who are perfectly comfortable declaring God to be "palpably unreal," are unwilling to say that "there is no moral law." Even after demonstrating that the emotions that support morality and ethics are evolved mechanisms, he will still vehemently insist there really is such a thing as right and wrong. Pinker suggests that maybe morality is the necessary result of logical truth: it always stands to reason that everyone is better off if everyone helps everyone else. Maybe our brains evolved the moral emotions to perceive an objective truth, just like we evolved the mechanism to understand mathematics. These explanations are hardly explanations; to define morality as merely enlightened self-interest is just to say, once again, that we only have self-interest and all we do is look out for ourselves. To say that morality is character of the universe simply begs the question: morality is real because it's real. I have to suspect that Pinker is holding back for reasons other than logic. Perhaps even he can't override the programming in his brain that says right and wrong are real. Or perhaps he just knows it's taboo: to declare morality to be non-rational is social suicide. Nobody trusts the man who has no law.

Deferred Meaning

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:39:43 -0700

One part of the whole "helping the poor" thing that bothers me is that it seems to leave unanswered the whole question of why we are alive to begin with. I have dialogues with myself that run something like this:

Noble Me: "What is my purpose in life? I know – I'll be a saint. I will dedicate myself to alleviating the suffering of the poor."

Skeptical Me: "So . . . the purpose of your life is to help those poor people."

NM: "Yes."

SM: "And the meaning of your life will be manifested in the sorts of lives they have, because of you."

NM: "Yes."

SM: "And . . . what's the purpose of their lives?"

NM: "Well, um . . . to be happy, I guess."

SM: "Happy how, exactly?"

NM: "Well, that's for them to figure out, isn't it?"

SM: "Yes, but what do you imagine they will do with their lives?"

NM: "Well, they'll work. They'll make things. They'll do things. They'll have families, and love their children. They'll live."

SM: "So the purpose of living is . . . being alive?"

NM: (hesitating) ". . . Yessss"

SM: "Sounds kind of tautological, doesn't it?"

NM: "Well, being alive beats the alternative, doesn't it?"

SM: "Well, yeah . . . probably. But if being alive is the point, why worry about having a purpose at all? Why don't you just live?"

NM: "Well, that would just be selfish, wouldn't it? There's much more to life than just enjoying yourself. What's the point of just living for yourself?"

SM: "So, what about the people you help? What if they're selfish? Does that mean their lives have no purpose? And, since you said the meaning of your life is tied up in their lives, does that mean by extension your life would be meaningless?"

NM: "Well, no . . . they'll find their own ways to have a meaningful life."

SM: "How? By helping someone else? Does that mean you have to have someone less fortunately than yourself to give to, to make your life meaningful? Do we need the poor in order to make life meaningful?"

NM: "No, not necessarily helping other people. They'll find other ways."

SM: "So helping others is just a way to pass the buck – to make someone else figure out what a meaningful life is supposed to be?"

NM: "No . . . they'll find other ways to make people happy."

SM: "So happiness is the purpose of life?"

NM: "Yes."

SM: "Sounds kind of selfish."

I could go on with this sort of thing, but it tends to bite its own tail, repeat itself, and generally gets boring long before any kind of conclusion is reached. I come away with the same conclusion: I must be missing something, because none of this fits together quite right. If happiness is the point, then why bother with helping other people? Why bother helping other people, if happiness is not the point?

Unraveling Utilitarianism

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:51:25 -0700

I'm going to keep chiseling away at the utilitarian ethic represented by Kenny's essay on poverty and Peter Singer's essay, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality." I want emphasize, again, that I am not out to prove them wrong. If I did that, I doubt anyone would hear me out, because they would just assume I'm one of those ethically-challenged people who don't want to admit that he should chip in to Oxfam. I wouldn't be bugged by the whole thing, unless I thought they were at least partially right. It's the paradox that bugs me – the fact that it seems like we should care more than we do, but don't. I am led by Harry's Law (in honor of my boss, Harry Shaughnessy): "If what you're doing seems to be really, really hard, you're probably not doing it right."

So, I did some homework on Singer. It turns out there is a name for this reluctance to accept his conclusions: the Demandingness Objection. Various philosophers have taken a crack at explaining why Singer is wrong. Some do little more than restate the observed intuition: we don't feel like it's a profound moral obligation, so we shouldn't treat it as such. Or that it's simply too demanding to be considered reasonable. Those approaches just beg the question: why is it unreasonable? A few others, such as Thomas Nagel and Philip Pettit, dig into the intuition that most people feel: that an infinite demand of the world's needy upon our resources somehow compromises our own interests too much. "What about me? Doesn't my happiness and suffering matter?" is the usual, sometimes explicit response. It defies our sensibilities to have our own interests swamped and made insubstantial by the demands of millions of others.

Even Singer, it seems, doesn't take his own prescriptions to that length. He claims to give 25% of his income to overseas relief, which is certainly generous, and yet still far short of the full-on sacrifices his ethics seem to demand. Even Singer, at some undetermined point, seems to think his own interests trump those of the little girl drowning from hunger right in front of him in far-away Namibia.

Of all the approaches to the Demandingness Objection, Pettit's seemed the most sensible: we are not responsible for ALL world suffering, merely our fair share of the world suffering. If everyone in the First World nations chipped in a little for the Third, then the problems could really be solved without anyone having to make superhuman sacrifices. At least that approach allows us to accept some responsibility for our fellow human beings, without turning ourselves into victims.

But even that approach has a certain cold, number-crunching aspect that doesn't sit well . . . not mention that it opens up a whole new set of questions: how much is "my fair share"? Which needs are the ones that exert a moral demand? Is it enough to keep people from dying, or do I need to bring them up to an identical standard of living as my own? What constitutes suffering, or happiness, and are they completely correlated with material wealth? And how do we measure it?

In fact, the whole utilitarian project, once you truly start to implement it, runs into lots of problems with measurement. There is another well-known objection called the Mere Addition Paradox, which tries to run with the assumptions of utilitarianism and finds itself in some weird conclusions. If we add people to the world who are somewhat less happy than everyone else, is the world diminished? If you say yes, then you might be lead to conclude the solution to inequality is to kill all the sad people (a la Monty Python's King Otto). If you say no, then through a series of calculations you might ultimately conclude that having an enormous number of marginally happy people is better than a smaller number of quite happy people, and the goal of our ethical manipulations becomes the multiplication of misery. The paradoxes suggest what I had outlined in the beginning of our discussion: rather than the moral intuition being right, or the ethical rule being right, perhaps neither is right, and we're trying to rationalize something that is not altogether rational.

The Price of Truth

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 06:32:44 -0700

In his comments to yesterday's post, Kenny writes:

I love what you're doing with this. I love the careful analysis of the basis of the moral instinct which I exploited, but did not examine at all, in my essay.

But where I feel like you are headed, or at least where my brain heads once I start down this path, is to the ultimate question: why, in fact, is it a bad thing to boil babies? If Pinker is right--if "Boiling babies is bad" is just a convenient shorthand for "Humans have a hard-coded instinctive aversion to boiling babies"--then, as Bergman's knight says, life is an outrageous horror. Nothing really matters at all. Pinker can't even say to me "You should face the truth," because any sentence that contains the word "should" is fundamentally meaningless in his world.

Believe me, I understand dangers of nihilism when asking these questions. These posts have taken me a very long time to write, because I keep alternating between the excitement of knowing I'm asking the right question, and the stark depression of realizing I don't like the answers I'm finding.

Pinker devoted an entire book – The Blank Slate – to showing the awful mistakes that come from rejecting a truth when it threatens to overturn your world view. Pinker was just trying to state what he thought was obvious: that there is such a thing as human nature, and that certain things about our nature are built-in, hard-wired capacities of our organism. But lots of forces lined up against him – progressive liberal academia as well as right-wing fundamentalists – because they couldn't comprehend how there could be human nature and still preserve the things they held most dear: moral responsibility, free will, self-determination, or an immortal soul. The result is that otherwise rational beings twist themselves into knots trying to sustain their world-view, trapped in self-contradictions and sometimes spinning out disastrous policies as a result.

We've all seen this sort of conceptual evolution in others, and even in ourselves. In this week's Independent I saw an interview with Bart Ehrman, author of Misquoting Jesus and Jesus, Interrupted. Ehrman was an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian who wanted to learn as much as possible about the scriptures, and who found himself inexorably dragged into questioning his faith as he learned of historical critiques of the Bible. It's relatively easy for someone like me or Kenny to look a fundamentalist in the eye and say: "Look, I know you think that everything hinges on the Bible being absolutely true. It feels like if the Bible is taken away, everything is going to crumble and you'll be left in total darkness in a meaningless universe. But I'm telling you, it's not like that. You will not become a bad person by doubting. You might even become a better person. It takes some getting used to, living in the doubt. But eventually you'll realize that dealing with the doubt is better than caging yourself in a lie. And you might even find the real truth, the thing you were hoping to find in the scriptures to begin with."

We are no better, though. When the evolutionary biologists come along, telling us that our morals are evolved mechanisms for reciprocal altruism, we plug our ears and say, "LALALALALA -- I'm not listening! I know you're probably right, but if I start believing that, I will live in a meaningless universe, and I don't want to live in a meaningless universe." And Pinker say, "Look, I know it feels that way right now, but . . ."

I'm not saying anything Kenny doesn't already know. Kenny wrote that essay on poverty because he believes in trying to face the truth, even if it's a truth he can't handle. He put his moral conviction out for all to see, in spite of the fact that he couldn't live by it himself, because he trusts that facing the truth will ultimately lead to the best possible outcome. I agree with him . . . which is why I'm going to keep going down this rabbit hole.

The ethics of charity

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:03:31 -0700

In his comments yesterday, Kenny cited his essay on poverty as part of his response to Ayn Rand. I want to dig into the arguments of this essay, because I think it actually does shed light both on why Rand appeals, and also where she goes wrong. So go read it, and then come back to my comments.

I am very familiar with Kenny's basic argument. In fact, I had used essentially the same arguments in a couple SKS meetings and class his mother taught at Raleigh Charter High, based on a book review in The New Yorker. The essential argument is: if you would expend a tiny bit of effort to save the life of someone right in front of you, why won't you expend the same tiny amount of effort to save impoverished people overseas? If we think we are good people, why don't we give to Oxfam?

Let's look at Kenny's version of the thought experiment in detail, looking at each step in the reasoning:

You learn that a person in the movie line is dying, and that your fruit juice will save them.
You have a complex set of feelings about the situation. Even though you feel hot and thirsty, you feel like giving the person your fruit juice. If you contemplate NOT giving the person your fruit juice, you feel a sense of revulsion, a sense that you wouldn't like yourself. (Where did that feeling come from? Cultural conditioning? Some innate sense of timeless moral truths? A rational understanding of God's laws? We'll get back to that.)
Based primarily on the feeling, you give the person your fruit juice.
After the fact, you might observe your feelings and thoughts and try to formulate a rational explanation for why you felt the way you did, and why you acted the way you did. You are not in the habit of giving fruit juice to total strangers, so there must be some special reason you did in this instance. The roughest shape you could give your feeling is, "It's good to help other people." You might sense that this is not really a complete explanation; after all, most folks like fruit juice on a hot day, and if you had given your juice to someone else they might have appreciated it . . . but you don't normally go around handing out fruit juice to total strangers. If you're an ethicist, you might run lots of thought experiments, checking different situations against your moral feelings, and come up with a more refined rule: "Helping other people, when the benefit to them is exceedingly high, and the loss to you is relatively low, is a good thing." No matter how you formulate the rule, the important thing to notice is the order of operations: first you have the moral feeling or intuition, then you formulate a rule to codify or explain it.
Now equipped with an ethical rule, a seemingly rational principle to explain what you felt to be right, you apply that rule to another situation. "There's a kid in Africa who's going to die without help I could easily give him. According to my rule, I should help him."
Now, here's where things get interesting. The ethical principle we derived from our initial moral feeling or intuition tells us we should help those starving and diseased kids overseas. And yet . . . we just don't feel the same compulsion to do so. There's some feeling, but it's relatively tiny. There are a few possible ways we can resolve this contradiction:

The ethical principle is correct: you should help the kids overseas. If you don't feel like doing it, it's because your moral intuition is defective, or it's being overpowered by your selfish desires. (This is Kenny's conclusion.)
Your moral intuition is correct: you do not have an overwhelming obligation to help those people overseas. The ethical principle must somehow be incorrectly defined.
The whole operation is flawed. Moral principles are not rationally consistent, and any attempt to make them perfectly rational is doomed to failure.

Each of these approaches has potential. We all know of people who are ethically challenged (certain Wall Street investment bankers come to mind), who do the wrong thing and feel no remorse about it. So option A is certainly plausible, though we'd rather not contemplate the thought that we are the ones who are ethically challenged.

On the other hand, it does seem slightly fishy to me that Kenny's argument is deeply trusting of the moral intuition to help the person in the movie line, but then deeply distrusting of the disinclination of othewise good and upstanding people to help the starving kids overseas. If the strong moral feeling is the crux of the argument, why shouldn't the lack of a strong moral feeling about the kids overseas be sufficient argument to overturn Kenny's case? That line of reasoning carries its own frustrations, because it points toward a complete moral relativism: right is whatever I feel is right. That doesn't quite feel right either (see the previous paragraph about the ethically challenged), so ethicists try to re-jigger the statement of moral principle to somehow account for the fact that the average person doesn't give 50% of his earnings to Oxfam, and doesn't even feel like he should. One solution that Peter Singer proposed: instead of feeling crushed under the burden of the world's need, a good person is only obliged to do their fair share of the giving -- to give whatever would be sufficient to meet the need, if everyone in the country and the world did the same.

Confronted with all these contradictions, we come to the third option: maybe we're just thinking about this all wrong. The fruit-juice argument treats a moral intuition like it was identical to an axiom of geometry. It assumes the sense that "saving this woman with my fruit juice is good" is an intellectual intuition of a real truth, just like "two parallel lines will never intersect" is an intuition of a real truth. It assumes that the ethical principle we derive from our moral feelings can be infinitely extended by logic, and potentially lead us to non-intuitive truths by the power of reason. That's an assumption most ethicists seem willing to make, but it is an assumption, and it seems like it does not "save the appearances" of our moral intuitions. We are cheerfully irrational about our moral behavior.

To answer this question, we have to get to the bottom of where these moral intuitions come from, and what they mean, and what we can conclude from them. (to be continued…)

What Rand Got Wrong

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:00:40 -0700

Before anyone accuses me of being an Objectivist, I guess I better make some quick, pointed critiques of Rand's philosophy. Nothing is quite so off-putting as someone who is too enthusiastic about a new philosophy. Every philosophy has its problematic parts; even Jesus got some 'splainin' to do. Anytime someone preaches a gospel that doesn't seem to have a downside, the audience suspects they have not lived with it long enough to hit the catch. As C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed: "Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I will listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."

Part of the appeal of Atlas Shrugged is how clear it makes everything. One senses that with the light of reason, you could plot a clear and unambiguous course through life, freed from messy emotions and bothersome moral imperatives and liberated to pursue one's "happiness as the moral purpose of one's life." Of course, the reason it all seems so clear in the book is because (duh) it's a story. Rand's characters are black-or-white cut-outs, unambiguous manifestations of good or evil. In Rand's imagination, every self-interested industrialist is a paragon of action and intention who just loves to create; meanwhile, every altruist is a worthless, sponging bastard who uses political intrigue to steal what they want. Nobody is quite so simple as that; if they were, we wouldn't need moral philosophies at all. I understand that Atlas Shrugged was deliberately written to be overstated and unambiguous; however, the real test of a philosophy is how well it holds up in the face of ambiguity.

The biggest problem I have with Rand's "virtue of selfishness" is that it does not completely "save the appearances," as they say in philosophy: it doesn't fully explain things that we can plainly see in the everyday world. Sure, some calls for altruism are just smarmy ploys to win mercy for oneself and excuse weakness . . . but it I have also seen 100% bona fide altruism, where strong and capable people help others, just because they can and should. Nor does rational self-interest inevitably lead to moral perfection – Rand doesn't even begin to contemplate the possibility of repressive economic regimes, true robber-barons and such. I agree with her that talk of "selflessness" inevitably runs afoul of some "performative contradictions," as Ken Wilber would say; you can't negate the self without negating life. But glorifying the self just makes the opposite mistake. Something fishy is going on . . . and I think it all hinges on how we define the self.

Fairness and Human Nature

nospam@example.com (Georg Buehler) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 08:39:00 -0700

Most theories of human nature (especially those that inform people's politics) boil down to two simplistic notions:

Human beings are basically bad. People are intrinsically selfish, violent, impulsive, and destructive. Their natural state is evil. Only by virtue of some external constraint (by the social system, by the law, by God) can people be pulled out of their natural evil into a state of good.
Human beings are basically good. People are naturally cooperative, loving, empathetic and altruistic. Left to their own devices, people are "noble savages." Only the corrupting forces of bad parents, bad societies, and bad states can thwart people's inherent goodness.

Generally speaking, conservatives believe people are naturally bad, and liberals think people are naturally good. Conservatives focus their attention on controlling and directing the individual with rules in order to preserve the common good (e.g. "law and order" campaigns, big defense budgets, etc.). Liberals focus their attention on controlling collective organizations (governments, businesses, families) in order to preserve the individual good (e.g. government mandates for worker safety, "safety nets," etc.)

I think most people are moderates, since they find the first position too cynical and the second too naïve. The truth is that human beings are naturally selfish and naturally cooperative. Things would be a whole lot easier if it was one way or the other; then we wouldn't have to spend so much time trying to figure out which response was the right one.

This poses some problems for anyone trying to construct a consistent model of fairness . . . since fairness is only consistent with about half of human nature.